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IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE POETS
C/nº/orm zwiſh “An the Footsteps of the Poets.”
OUR ENGLISH MINSTERS.
With Ninety Illustrations by Herbert Railton
and Others.
Westminster Abbey. Ry the Venerable ARch-
DeAcon FARRAR, D.D.
Canterbury Cathedral. By the Hon. and
Rev. Canon FREMANTLE, M.A.
Durham Cathedral. By the Rev. Canon TALBot,
M.A.
Wells Cathedral. By S. M. S. PeFEIRA.
Lincoln Cathedral. By the Rev. PRecentoR
VENABLEs, M.A.
Winchester Cathedral. By the Rev. Canon
BENHAM, B.D.
Gloucester Cathedral. By the Very Rev. the
DeAN of GLOUCBSTER.
（181 ažu, uj|-（qv）. Isaei wyłIYI HOEIRI "GIOV TIH LEI, ȘI S.H™L&LAA00

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE
- POETS jº,
PROFESSOR DAVID MASSON LL.D.
And Oéhey's
ji’ſ TAI A/UlſA2A’OUS //, / USTRATIO/VS
LONDON
ISBISTER & COMPANY LIMITED
I5 & 16 TAV1STOCK STREET COVENT GARDEN

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PRINTED BY J. S. VIRTUE AND CO., LIMITED,
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CONTENTS.
I. MILTON.
PAGE
By PROFESSOR DAVID MASSON, LL.D. . . I 3
II. HERBERT.
By JOHN BROWN, D.D. (Bedſord) . e . IC5
III, CowPER.
By the REv. CANoN BENHAM, B.D. . g . I 25
IV. THOMSO.'.
By HUGH HALIBURTON * * e g . ICO
v. WORDSWORTH.
By HENRY C. EwART . * wº & * . 2C) 3





























8 COAVTEAV7.S.
VI. SCOTT.
By John DENNIs
VII. MRS. BROWNING.
By the LoRD BISHOP of RIPON
VIII. ROBERT BROWNING.
By R. H. HUTTON
PAGE
235
279
297
IX, TENNYSON.
By WILLIAM CANTON .
33 I

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
MILTON. w PAGE
CHRIST'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGF . - * tº . I9
OLD MULBERRY TREE IN THE GROUNDS OF CHRIST'S
COLLEGE . e e tº º e e - . 2 I
BY THE THAMES, A MII.E FROM HORTON e - . 25
ENTRANCE TO THE VILLAGE OF HORTON e - . 27
HORTON CHURCH . e º º - • - . 29
MAP OF OLD ALDERSGATE STREET e g - . 36
PLAN SHOWING MILTON'S HOUSE . º e º . 39
MILTON'S HOUSF, BARBI CAN . º º e º • 49
M1LT ON'S HOUSE IN PETTY FRANCE . & - . 69
MILTON'S SIGNATURE . & - e e - ... 7
OLD HOUSES IN BUNHILL ROW . o & - . 79
MILTON'S COT TAGE, CHALFONT-ST.-GILES . º . 83
3 y VIEW FROM HILLS1D1: . * . 87
Room IN COTTAGE AT CHALFONT e . . . 88
THE JORDANS e º e © e e º . 90
ENTRANCE TO ST. GILES’S CHURCH, CRIPPLEGAT 1. . 93
THE CHANCEL OF ST. GILES’S CHURCH e º . 99
MEMORIAL T O MILTON IN ST. GILES’s CHURCH . . IO3
HERBERT.
IN GEORGE HERBERT'S MEADOWS . - e º . I I I
C11 URCH AND VI CARAGE, BEMERTC) N - º - . I IQ

I O J. WSZ" OA' ZZZ US 7/8A 7TWOAWS.
COWPER. PAGE
BIRTHPLACE, BERKHAMPSTEAD . . . Frontispiece
THE HOUSE OF THE UNWINS, HUNTINGDoN g . 133
COWPER'S HOUSE IN THE MARKET-PLACE, OLNEY . I37
THE SUMMER HOUSE . º e te te te . I4 I
INTERIOR OF SUMMER HOUSE e e ſº e . I43
“COME EVENING, ONCE AGAIN, SEASON OF PEACE '' . I47
OLNEY FROM THE MEADOWS e º º e ... I 57
TO WIESTON UNDERWOOD ſº * º * te . I6 I
COWPER's House, weston UNDERwooD . * . 163
MONUMENT AND GRAVE OF COWPER, EAST DEREHAM
CHURCH ſº tº te e te e te e . 167
THOMSON.
PORTRAIT º tº º tº sº e • • ... I 75
THE WALE OF SYLVAN JED . º - º e . I 79
SOUTHDEAN MANSE - e * e e e . I 83
SOUTHIDEAN PARISH CHURCH e • - e . I 85
A RELIC OF JED WOOD . e g © e º . 187
THE THAMES WALLEY FROM RICHMON () HILL tº . I 93
POPE'S VILLA, TWICKENHAM, AND THE THAMES . . I 96
VIEW FROM THE LAWN e e - º & . I 97
RICHMOND CHURCH º -> º º . 200
WORDSWORTH.
GRASMERE . e - º e e - e . 207
“A HOST OF GOLDEN DAFFODILS ’’ º - e . 2 II
WINDERMERE * e -> g e º e . 2 IS
THE LANGDALE PIKES . wº e © - e . 2 IQ
THE DUDDON WALLEY FROM BILEAN SLEY BANK . . 222
BRATHAY BRIDGE . e tº º © tº tº . 225.
“THY waters, DUDDoN 'MID THESE FLOWERY
PLAINS ’’ . e e Q e e e e . 229
GRAVE OF WORDSWORTH . . . . º . 233
SCOTT.
INORFHAM CASTLE . º e e e - e. e . 239
NORHAM WILLAGE . e e e º & e . 245
ST. MARY'S LOCH . e ſº & e º e . 249
BEN VENUE AND LOCH ACH RAY . & º e . 253
MELROSE ABBEY . © e º º º g . 257
TWISEL BRIDGE e º & e e & g . 260
J. WST OF ZZZ US7RATIONS.
I I
WHITBY ABBEY º •
- ABBOTSFORD . tº . e
MRS. BROWNING.
PORTRAIT FROM THE PAINTING BY RUDOLF LEHMANN
ROBERT BROWNING.
PORTRAIT e
THE ADRIATIC FROM THE CAMPANILE . g '•
SALA IN THE PALAZZO REZZONICO, VENICE .
BALL ROOM IN THE PALAZZO REZZONICO, VENICE
FACSIMILE OF POEM º
TENNYSON.
somſ ERSBY RECTORY, TENNYSON’s
SOMERSBY CHURCH e
FONT IN SOMERSBY CHURCH
VILLAGE OF BA Gº-ENDERIBY
IHOLY WELL GLEN, SOMERSBY
WALTHAMI ABBEY . º
SHIPLAIKE CHURCH . e
TENNYSON'S DOWN . e
FARRING FORD . º º
A LDWORTH, SUSSEX ©
FACSIMI LE OF POEM
º g g
BIRTHPLACE
PAGE
269
277
287
305
3 II
317
326
335
379

MILTON.
30|ºt jilíſiſ,
Born December 9, 1608; died November 8, 1674.
“O mighty-mouth’d inventor of harmonies,
O skill'd to sing of Time or Eternity
God-gifted organ-voice of England.”
TENNYSON.
MILTON.
R.E.M.A.R. KABLE difference between
Shakespeare's life and Milton's lies
in the fact that, while the materials
for a topography of Shakespeare's
life are so vague and scanty, those
for a topography of Milton's are so exact and abun-
dant. All that we can tell of Shakespeare's movements
from place to place during the two-and-fifty years of
his existence in the world is that he was born at Strat-
ford-on-Avon in Warwickshire and spent his youth
there or thereabouts, removed to London and resided
there mainly for about twenty years, but returned to
Stratford when he was a little over forty, spent his
last years there, and died there. Respecting Milton,
on the other hand, the records are so precise that we
can tell, almost with certainty, and often with positive
certainty, where he was, and what he was doing in


I 6 Al/ZZ TOM.
any particular month or week, or even occasionally
on any particular day, that may be selected for
inquiry out of the sixty-six years of his earthly ex-
istence. The difference depends partly on the differ-
ence of the external circumstances and settings of
the two lives, and partly on the difference of the
character and temperaments of the men themselves.
No need here, however, to dwell on the causes of the
difference. It is with the fact that we are concerned.
In what follows we are to see how Milton may be
tracked through his successive places of residence, or
of more brief abode, from his youth to his death.
AT CAMBRIDGE.
1625–1632.
It was in February 1625, the month before the
death of James I. and the accession of Charles I. to
the throne, that Milton, till then resident in his
father's house in Bread Street, Cheapside, in the very
heart of Old London, went to Cambridge for the com-
pletion of his education ; and he continued in resi-
dence there, save for runs up to London or other
absences, for seven years and five months, bringing
him from the seventeenth year of his age to the
twenty-fourth.
The Miltonic associations left in Cambridge by
those seven years and five months of Milton's student-
life are numerous and important. Indeed, though
Cambridge University has had the honour of having
MIL TOM. 17
educated a far larger number of the chief English
poets than Oxford, counting as she does among her
alumni Chaucer presumably, and certainly Spenser,
Marlowe, Milton, Cowley, Dryden, Gray, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Byron, and Tennyson, it is Milton among
all these of whose student-life in Cambridge visitors
to the town, or even the residents, are most forcibly
reminded by still-preserved objects and traditions,
The town, it is true, is much larger than it was
between 1625 and 1632, when it may have num-
bered, townspeople and gownsmen together, about
10,000 inhabitants; but the aspects of the main
streets, and of their appendages, have hardly altered.
The Cam flows past, peacefully sluggish, now as then,
with its netting of water-plants, and the “reed-beds.”
of which Milton speaks, though hardly with what, in
an angry moment, he called its “sedge-swamps”;
and the changing seasons pass over its banks, and
over all the flat English scenery that stretches away
from them, effecting the same alternations in the
landscape now as then;–from its face in winter, when
fields and meadows are white with the snow-crust, to
the return of rich green spring and summer, with
those wonderful May evenings in especial when all
the tree-fringed country lanes about Cambridge are
resonant, more plentifully than any other tract of
English ground known to me, with the full-throated
Songs of nightingales. The sixteen Cambridge Col=
leges of Milton's time, with every one of which he
must have been familiar both outside and inside, are
l,
IS MIC ZON.
still extant, each with its extended history of the
many years that have elapsed since he looked upon
them, but each with its older history still bedded in
its fabric and remembered. Above all, his own Col-
lege of Christ's survives, and much as it was. “Many
daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest
them all,” said the historian Fuller of this particular
College of the sixteen in his History of the University
of Cambridge, published in 1655. This was said
with reference to the “many divines,” of excellence
in Fuller's opinion, whom the College had recently
bred, and not at all with reference to the fact that his
contemporary, Mr. John Milton, had also belonged to
the College. If the eulogy were to be repeated now,
however, that fact would certainly come into the
account. Not that all Cantabs would even then admit
the historical supremacy among the Cambridge Col-
leges which the eulogy claims for Christ's, but only
those who, choosing to make a great poet, rather
than a great philosopher or a great mathematician,
the representative genius of Cambridge all in all,
should forget that Bacon and Newton were also Cam-
bridge men, and that it is Trinity College that owns:
both of these.
At all events, whatever honour the possession of
Milton does reflect upon Cambridge is best realised
when we station him at Christ's. You may stand in
the street now, and look at that College along its
whole exterior front. You may enter the gateway
and see the quadrangle and the cloisters where young.
MILZ.O.W. I 9
sº |li,
Fº
º º
º º º º
~~~- - - - -
--------~~~~~ *---
CHRIST's COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.
(Milton's rooms to the left of first doorway.)
Milton moved about in gown and cap among the
scores of his fellow-collegians,—unpopular among
them at first, as he himself tells us, because of his
feminine appearance and fastidious tastes and morals,
so that they nicknamed him “The Lady,” and the
rougher men among them would call out “Domina, l’”
after him insultingly as he passed ; but ere long
respected and admired as the discovered supreme
among them all, the leader in their Latin debates
and declamations within the College, and the cham-
pion of their College when it was pitted in such
things against the other Colleges on any great field-
day in the public schools. You can see the hall
and the chapel of Christ's where some of those ex-






2 O MZZ TOM.
hibitions took place; and, standing in the hall, you
can imagine Milton, in his undergraduate days,
seated somewhere at one of the lower dinner-tables
with the other undergraduates, the future satirist
Cleveland and the Irish-born Edward King the two
best-remembered of them,--while Dr. Thomas Bain-
brigge, the master of the College, presided at the
upper table, with Messrs. Chappell, Meade, Tovey,
Sandilands, and the other fellows and dons at his
right and left. But you can see more. They show
you, up one of the staircases on the left of the quad-
rangle, the very rooms, consisting of a small sitting-
room and a smaller bedroom, which Milton occu-
pied,—not alone, however, but in partnership, as was
then the fashion, with one or two chums, during
his undergraduateship, and possibly through the
whole of his time at Christ's. It may add to your
interest in inspecting them to know that it was in
these rooms that Wordsworth, present at a festive
party in them one night during his studentship at
St. John's between 1786 and 1789, so far forgot him-
self in the excitement of drinking toasts to Milton's
memory as to have got tipsy, he tells us, for the first
and only time in his life. Further, in the grounds
behind the College, they show you the gnarled, but
still branching, remains of an old mulberry-tree,
called now usually “Milton's Mulberry,” from a fancy
that Milton in particular must have often sat under
it and eaten of its fruit. &
Better, however, than any mulberry-tree, or any
Aſ/A, TOW. 2 I
remains of stone and lime, in authentication of Milton's
SOVéIn years and five months of residence in Christ's
and connection with Cambridge generally, are the
relics from his own pen which those Cambridge years
have left us. They distribute themselves into those
T
or D MULBERRY-TREE IN THE GROUNDS OF CHRIST's COLLEGE,
CAMIBIRIDGE,
written in his undergraduateship between 1625 and
1629, and those written between his taking his B.A.
degree in January 1629 and his admission to the full
M.A. degree in July 1632. They consist of seven aca-
demic Latin prose-essays, four Latin familiar epistles,
Seventeen pieces of Latin verse in hexameters,
elegiacs, and other metres, and, in English, eleven of

22 MIC ZON.
his minor poems, mostly short, but including his
Elegy on the Death of a Fair Infant, his noble ode
Om the Morning of Christ's Nativity, and his Epitaph
on the Marchiomess of Winchester. They all breathe
the atmosphere of Cambridge, some of them indeed
having been expressly occasioned by incidents in
the history of the University or of the town; and,
together, they constitute a kind of autobiography of
Milton through his Cambridge course. Among the
most significant of them all for its autobiographical
purportis the little piece to Shakespeare's memory. Is
there even yet in our language a burst of Shakespeare-
worship more absolutely satisfying in its enthusiasm,
or more profoundly exact in its expression, than that
which was penned by the young Cambridge scholar
some day in 1630, only fourteen years after Shake-
speare was dead, and when, had he been alive, he
would have been but in the sixty-seventh year of his
age 7–
“What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones
The labour of an age in pilèd stones,
Or that his hallowed reliques should be hid
Under a star-ypointing pyramid P
Dear Son of Memory, great heir of Fame,
What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name *
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thyself a livelong monument;
For whilst, to the shame of slow-endeavouring art,
Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,
Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,
MZZ 7'OW. 23
iDost make us marble with too much conceiving,
And so sepulchred in such pomp dost lie
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.”
AT HORTON, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE.
1632–1638.
On leaving Cambridge, a fully-fledged M.A., Milton
went to reside at Horton, a quiet country village in
Buckinghamshire, about twenty miles from London
and four from Windsor, to which his father, now ap-
proaching his seventieth year, had retired, with ample
acquired means, for rest and leisure after the cares of
his London business. To both father and mother it
may have been somewhat of a disappointment to know
that the son of whom they were so proud had by this
time abandoned all thoughts of the Church or of any
other profession ; but their deference to him was
boundless, and they acquiesced in what he himself
proposed. This was that he should lead thence-
forward, in his rustic seclusion with them, a purely
intellectual life, the life of a student and man of
letters. Accordingly, through the five years and nine
months from July 1632 to April 1638, or from
Milton's twenty-fourth year to his thirtieth, we have
to imagine him domiciled with his parents at Horton,
with books in all languages for his steady occupation
within doors, and music for his favourite recreation,
but with walks or rides over the surrounding country
for his habitual exercise, and sometimes a visit to
London for a special purpose. It was the calmest
24 Al///, 7 OAV.
and most idyllic portion of his whole life, and is of
especial interest in his literary history.
To the Horton time belong three of his preserved
Latin letters, his fine Latin poem Ad Pathem, and,
besides some more casual things in English verse, the
exquisite companion poems L'Allegro and Il Pem-
Seroso, the little fragment of a pastoral masque called
Arcades, the larger and more perfect masque of Comus,
and the beautiful pastoral monody of Lycidas, this
last a tribute to the memory of his former fellow-col-
legian at Christ's, Edward King, who had been
drowned by shipwreck in the Irish Sea in August
1637. On account of these poems, and on Milton's
account generally, a pilgrimage to Horton any sum-
mer's day is peculiarly worth while for any one who
may have the opportunity. The village itself, indeed,
is but a small straggling of houses amid trees at the
meeting of three lazy cross-roads ; and the country
round, though well wooded, is prevailingly flat, and in
the sleepiest style of flat English verdure, —the slow
and blackish Colne for its main stream, with pollards
along its banks, and runnels of water from it and to
it, minnows visible in them, at the sides of the roads
and intersecting the meadows. It is vain to try, as
some have done, to identify the scenery of L’Allegro
and Il PemSeroso with that of Horton. Nowhere in
that neighbourhood is there even a suggestion of the
“mountains" with “barren breast ’’ and the “labour-
ing clouds” resting upon them of the one poem,
or of the “wide-watered " sea-shore required in the
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MIZZON. 27
ENTRANCE TO THE VILLAGE OF HORTON.
(The gateway on the right leads to the modern house built on the site
where the house of Milton's father stood.)
other ; and these and other incongruities suffice
to show (what might have been inferred indepen-
dently) that the scenery in both poems is eclectic
and visionary, scenery invented to suit the two
contrasted moods of cheerfulness and melancholy.
Still, as the poems were written at Horton, local
influences may have crept in. The early morning
scene in L’Allegro, where the cheerful youth walks
out at dawn to hear the sky-lark high in the air, and
the horns of the hunters out with their hounds,
may have been from actual Horton experience, while
almost certainly the “towers and battlements bosomed

28 A/ZZZOAV.
y
high in tufted trees” in the same poem are a glimpse
of Royal Windsor from the Horton vicinity. Simi-
larly, the night scene in Il Pemseroso, where the
pensive youth, walking on and on over “the dry
smooth-shaven green,” watches the full moon pondent
over a well-known Oak, and sometimes “stooping
through a fleecy cloud,” may also be credited to Horton.
Who knows, and what does it matter? The visitor to
Horton, as he walks through the village, or anywhere
round it, feels that, at all events, he is on the ground
with which Milton's footsteps were familiar through
more than five most interesting years of his youth and
early manhood. That was the ground which once knew
his figure and his voice, and sustained, and partly
prompted, his daily musings. But the impression
need not remain thus vague. It may be made keener
by the sight of actual objects reminding one more
definitely of Milton's residence in the place. The
house in which he lived with his parents and his
younger brother, and at the window of which “through
the sweet-briar or the vine, or the twisted eglantine,”
one might fancy him, as in L’Allegro, bidding “good-
5
morrow,” on his return from those early morning
walks of his, to the later-risen members of the family,
is no longer extant. It was pulled down in 1798.
They still, however, point out its site, occupied now
by a modern mansion, within a gateway, in the road
through the village, and near the old parish church.
And then that old parish church itself! It is a most
venerable-looking piece of English ecclesiastical anti-
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MILTON. 31
quity, dating in the main from the thirteenth century,
with walls still strong, a solid square tower, and a
fine old Norman arch in the entrance porch. It
stands just off the road; and in the cemetery which
separates it from the road are two very old yew-trees.
Between those yew-trees, and up the path through
the cemetery leading to the porch, Milton must have
walked on many Sundays, to attend service and
listen to the discourses of Mr. Goodal, then rector of
Horton Parish. Up the same path he must have
walked,—he on one side of his aged father and his
brother Christopher on the other, at the head of
the little procession of mourners, on that sad April
day in 1637 when there was the funeral of his mother.
..She was buried within the church ; on the chancel
floor of which one may still see the plain blue stone
that covers her grave, and read the inscription on
it : “Here lyeth the body of Sara Milton, the wife of
John Milton, who died the 3rd of April 1637.” That
plain blue stone, were there nothing else, would suffice
3 to consecrate Horton.
Although the connexion of the Milton family with
Horton was to last till 1640, Milton's own connexion
with the place came to an end in April 1638. In
"that month, leaving his widowed father at Horton,
with his younger brother Christopher, and that
brother's newly-wedded wife, to take charge of the
old gentleman and the household, he himself set out,
with an English man-servant for his valet, on the
32 MIL 7'OAV.
Continental tour on which his heart had long been
fixed.
Passing through France and Paris, he spent about
a year in Italy, chiefly in Florence, Rome, and Naples,
and returned to England, by way of Geneva and Paris
again, in August 1639, having been absent about
sixteen months in all. The recollections of those
sixteen months of his foreign travel, and especially
of the Italian cities he had visited, and the eminent
and interesting men he had met in them, and with
Some of whom he had formed friendships, were to
abide with Milton through all his future life. Some
of them are embalmed in the few pieces of Latin or
Italian verse, written abroad, which he had brought
home with him, or in autobiographical passages in
his subsequent writings. While Rome and Naples
dwelt strongly in his memory, Florence had won his
affections most —
“O, how mighty was I, when, stretched by the stream of the Arno,
Murmuring cool, and where the poplar-grove softens the herbage,
Violets now I would pluck, and now the sprigs of the myrtle,
Hearing Menalcas and Lycidas l’’
The days of violets and myrtles were nearly over
for Milton when he wrote these lines, though he did
not yet foresee the fact. Harsher employment was
in front of him than that of culling wild-flowers and
listening to pastoral or other poetic ditties.
Al/ZZ TOW. 33
IN ALDERSGATE STREET, LONDON.
1640–1645.
After Milton's return from his Italian tour he
hovered for a while between resumed residence with
his father at Horton and a modest town-lodging in a
tradesman's house in St. Bride's Churchyard, Fleet
Street, i.e. as nearly as the locality can be now iden-
tified, in that part of the present Farringdon Street
where it bends off from the foot of Fleet Street, and
one is within sight of Ludgate Hill and St. Paul's.
It was in the first weeks of this hovering between
country and town that he wrote his Epitaphium
Damonis, the most beautiful of all his Latin poems,
and the most intense of them all in autobiographical
interest, commemorating as it does his grief over the
death, during his absence abroad, of the half-Italian
Charles Diodati, his bosom-friend since the days of
their boyhood together at St. Paul's School. The
experiment of mere lodgings in London, however,
was but temporary. “He made no long stay in his
lodgings in St. Bride's Churchyard,” we are informed
by his nephew Edward Phillips; “necessity of having
a place to dispose his books in, and other goods fit
for the furnishing of a good handsome house, hasten-
ing him to take one; and, accordingly, a pretty
garden-house he took in Aldersgate Street, at the
end of an entry, and therefore the fitter for his turn,
besides that there are few streets in London more
C
34. M/L7'OW.
free from noise than that.” The removal must have
been early in 1640; from which date onwards till
late in 1645 Milton, as tenant of the “pretty garden-
house ’’ in Aldersgate Street, was for the first time a
London householder on his own account. One guesses
that it was still his father that mainly supplied the
means, though there may have been some contribu-
tion to the expenses by a family arrangement in
another quarter. Milton's elder and only surviving
sister, Anne Milton, who had married in 1624 a Mr.
Edward Phillips, but had been left a widow by the
death of this husband in 1631, had married for her
second husband a certain highly respectable Mr.
Thomas Agar ; and the arrangement now was that
her two young boys by the first marriage, Edward
Phillips, about ten years of age, and John Phillips,
about nine,—should board with their uncle in the
Aldersgate Street house for their education under
him.
The Aldersgate Street of 1640 had the reputation
of being one of the “genteelest” suburbs of London.
Among Milton's neighbours in the street, or close to
it, were several knights and official gentlemen of dis-
tinction; and two or three noblemen had their town
mansions in the same suburb. All is woefully
changed in the Aldersgate Street of the present day.
No longer a suburb “free from noise,” it is a dingy
thoroughfare of roaring traffic, leading from the core
of London, at the General Post Office in St. Martin’s-
le-Grand, northwards to Goswell Street, and so,
MZZZOAV. 35
through that continuation, to further still populous
densities of street and road about Islington and
beyond. Although one or two antique houses Sur-
vive in the present Aldersgate Street, they are welded
now into the continuous frontage of shops, ware-
houses, distillery-yards, &c., on both sides, through
which the traffic passes; and the open garden-spaces
that were once behind on both sides have long disap-
peared, built over now with blocks of poor tenements
that seem jammed together anyhow, and are accessible
only by labyrinths of alleys. Not a vestige of Mil-
ton’s “pretty garden-house,” of course, is to be looked
for now among these labyrinths, and the only question
is whether the site of the house can be identified in
the present range of the longish street. I believe
that this can be done.
Let the reader look first at the sketch on page
36 of old Aldersgate Street as a whole, constructed
mainly from the map of Aldersgate Street Ward
given in Strype's enlarged edition of Stow's Londom,
published in 1720, but with reference to a facsimile
reprint of the older large-scale map of London in
1658, engraved by Faithorne, and edited by New-
court. Between these two maps one ought to be able
to re-imagine Aldersgate Street very much as it was
when Milton was a householder in it.
A peculiarity of the street, it will be seen (or hardly
a peculiarity, inasmuch as it was a feature common
to many of the streets of Old London), was the number
of little breaks in it by the courts which it sent off
F.
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A/ZZZOAV. 37
on both sides. The names of most of those courts
are still preserved, or were preserved till very recently.
We need concern ourselves only with the succession
of the courts on the east side, i.e. on one's right hand
in walking from St. Martin's-le-Grand. First on that
side, just after one had entered the street by Alders-
gate, was a pretty extensive court, called Castle Inn
Court, from the name of the inn to which it led ;
next on the same side was a little court called Cook's
Hall Court; next, another little court called Grey-
hound Court ; after which, in succession, still on the
same side of the street, came Cock and Bottle Court,
Bell Alley, Golden Lion Court, Rose and Rainbow
Court, Nettleton Court, and Maidenhead Court. Just
beyond Maidenhead Court one came to an arched
passage by steps through one of the houses of the
main street, leading to a longish inner court, left
nameless in Strype's map, but known since the end
of the last century as Shaftesbury Place. Then came
White Hart Inn Court; and then an interruption in
the shape of Thanet House, the fine mansion of the
Earls of Thanet, standing within its own grounds, but
with one of its faces to the street, and several accesses
to it from the street. This passed, and also two
more courts, called Angel Alley and Horn Alley, you
came to Jewin Street, the single opening out of
Aldersgate Street on the east side of consequence
enough to be named a “street.” Crossing Jewin
Street, you had still six or seven more courts to note
in the rest of Aldersgate Street on the same side,-
Cradle Court, Crown Court, Hare Court, &c., before
you came to the broader cross street called Barbican,
marking the actual termination of Aldersgate Street
on that side, as Long Lane did on the other.
Altogether there were, and perhaps still are, more
than twenty courts, alleys, or passages, larger or
Smaller, out of Aldersgate Street on the right hand
from its commencement at St. Martin's-le-Grand to
its termination at Barbican. Now, as Milton's house
was “at the end of an entry,” one or other of those
still existing, or recently existing, courts or alleys
must have been the “entry” in question if the house
was on that side of Aldersgate Street. But the house
was on that side of Aldersgate Street, and the tradi-
tion of its whereabouts on that side of the street
Survived in the neighbourhood till within recent
memory. From a communication with which I was
favoured in 1871 by a correspondent whose recollec-
tions of the neighbourhood, and family connexions
with it, extended back to between 1810 and 1820, I
am able to say that the undisputed local tradition
then was that the house which Milton had occupied
and the garden attached to it were in that particular
oblong at the back of Aldersgate Street which lies
between Maidenhead Court (marked 9 in the map)
and what is now Shaftesbury Place (marked 10),
and that, while the main entry to the garden and
house from Aldersgate Street was by the passage
leading to what is now Shaftesbury Place, there was
also a door from the house into Maidenhead Court
i
D / ...dº?scarr sraser,
itself. The above ground-plan, adapted from one
sent me by my informant of 1871, will make the
description clearer. A is Milton's house, secluded in
the south-east corner of the oblong; the space B, B, B,
now choked up by three parallel rows or blocks of
crowded tenements, was the garden belonging to the
house; C, C, C represents the line of houses fronting
Aldersgate Street and shutting in the garden-space
behind from the view of that thoroughfare; D marks
the arched passage or “entry” through one of these


40 M/Z 7 OAV.
which was the main access from Aldersgate Street to
Milton's garden and house ; e is the probable position
of the main door of Milton's house; and f marks
the side exit from Milton's house into Maidenhead
Court.
My informant's recollection of the house itself was
that it was substantially built of “wood and brick”;
but I have seen an independent and later account of
it, describing the walls as of “lath plastered with
clay and straw.” Either description of the house in
its comparatively decayed condition in the present
century would suggest that Phillips's description of it
during his uncle's tenancy of it from 1640 to 1645,
when Phillips himself lived with him in it, was per-
fectly accurate. By the standard of that time the
“pretty garden-house” at the end of an entry from
Aldersgate Street must have been reputed “a good
handsome house,” fit in every way for a gentleman-
scholar and his collection of books. Phillips's stress
on the phrase “at the end of an entry” may imply
that the access to the house with which he was most
familiar in his boyhood, and which he recollected
best, was the long one by Maidenhead Court. The
court, however, does not seem to have been so named
in Milton's time. An older name for it, I learn, and
probably the name in Milton's time, was Lamb
Alley.
The reason for being so circumstantial as to the
site and appearance of this one of Milton's many
residences is that the five years, or five years and a
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that the King's army had come within seven or eight
miles of the city, and there was a universal panic
among the Londoners in the expectation of an im-
mediate attack, the tramp of Prince Rupert's cavalry
in among them, the sack and pillage of their houses,
and some massacre of revenge. What was he doing
in the house that day ? Writing a sonnet to be
nailed or pasted up on the door of the house (door 6 %)
in case things should come to the worst—
“Captain or Colonel, or Knight in arms,
Whcs2 chance on these defenceless doors may seize,
If deed of honour did thee ever please,
Guard thcm, and him within protect from harms:
IIe can requite thee; for he knows the charms
That call fame on such gentle deeds as these.”
The whole sonnet is worth reading at this point.
Whether written in calm seriousness, or in a freak of
grim humour, it might not have been very efficacious
if one of Prince Rupert's captains had led a sacking
party up either entry from Aldersgate Street : but
fortunately its officacy was never tried. A march of
the London Trained Bands and Volunteers to Turnham
Green warded off the threatened assault ; the King's
army wheeled back northwards; and London was
Saved.
Not till seven months later have we another glimpse
of the interior of the Aldersgate Street house; and it
is of a very different character. It was in June 1643
that there was that extraordinary flutter of silks and
MILTON. 43
muslins in the house which was caused by the return
of Milton from a brief holiday in the country, bring-
ing with him his young bride, Mary Powell, and a
bevy of her sisters and bridesmaids. The two boy-
nephews, who had known nothing of their uncle's
purpose in his holiday-jaunt, were greatly surprised
by the incident, and by the “feasting held for some
days in celebration of the nuptials”; and the surprise
was more general when it came to be known that the
bride was of a strongly Royalist family, living close
to the King's headquarters at Oxford, and that Milton
had actually fetched her from that focus of Royalism.
But the wonder was not yet over. The bevy of
sisters and bridesmaids having departed, the young
wife had not been much more than a month without
them when, accustomed as she had been to “a great
house and much company and jollity,” she found the
“philosophical life” she was leading with her husband
in the Aldersgate Street house very dull and irksome.
Would he give her leave to have a few more weeks
with her family in their Oxfordshire home of Forest-
hill before settling down definitely to the duties of
her new home in London ? To this request, sent
from the family, but contrived apparently by herself,
Milton yielded—and with very unfortunate result.
When the time for her promised return came, not
only did she not return, but the correspondence on
the subject ended with an insulting message from
Forest-hill to the effect that she would never return.
The King having about this time had some successes
44 Al/ZZ TOW.
in the war, the Powells had begun to “repent them
of having matched the eldest daughter of the family
to a person so contrary to them in opinion”; and
Mrs. Powell, the mother, a very resolute woman, had
taken the matter into her own hands.
Thus deserted in July or August 1643, Milton
lived on in the Aldersgate Street house for two years
more, adjusting himself to his new circumstances as
well as he could. Hardly had his wife gone when
the house received a new inmate in the person of his
aged father. On the breaking up of the Horton
household in 1640, the old gentleman had gone to
reside at Reading with his younger son Christopher,
then just called to the bar and in some local employ-
ment there on the King's side ; but, having been
driven from Reading by the stress of the war in that
neighbourhood, he had now come to reside perma-
nently with his elder son in London. As about the
same time there was some accession to the number
of Milton's pupils, in consequence of applications from
friends for the admission of their sons as day-scholars
to the privilege of sharing the lessons he was giving
to his two nephews, the house was by no means
empty, Nor was Milton's sole occupation in it that
of teaching his pupils. It was here that, without any
open reference to his own case, but converting his
own case into a reason for re-questioning one of the
fundamental institutions of English law, he penned in
succession, between August 1643 and March 1645,
his four terrible Divorce pamphlets, the essential doc-
A/V/, 7'OW. as
trime of which was that the mutual incompatibility of
any two married persons from any irremovable cause
whatsoever ought to entitle either or both to divorce
and to liberty to marry again. Into this special series
of pamphlets on the Divorce subject there were inter-
jected in 1644 two others, one the small Tract on
Education, addressed to Samuel Hartlib, the other
the immortal Areopagitica, or Speech for the Liberty
of Unlicemsed Primtimg, addressed to the Parliament.
The effects of the six new Aldersgate Street pam-
phlets on Milton's reputation, especially of the Divorce
pamphlets, were immediate and disastrous. If he had
been unpopular already with many on account of his
Anti-Episcopal pamphlets, he was now an object of
execration for the Orthodox of all denominations.
The Westminster Assembly of Divines being then in
session, with some Scottish divines in it, and a Scot-
tish auxiliary army having come into England to
assist the English Parliamentarian army against the
King, and to forward that endeavour after a uni-
formity of religion and of Church-government to
which both nations were pledged by the Solemn
League and Covenant enacted between them in Sep-
tember 1643, the ascendancy of Presbyterianism in
England seemed secure. The only question now in
debate was whether the Presbyterian system to be set
up in England should be the absolute Presbyterianism,
with no toleration of anything else and with unlimited
powers of discipline against sectaries and heretics, for
which the Scots and the Presbyterians generally con-
46 - A/ZZZO/W.
tended, or whether there should be some amount of
liberty, outside the Presbyterian Establishment, for
dissenters and nonconformists. The Presbyterians
longed to make an example of Milton, pointing to
him publicly as a heretic and sectary of the most
abominable sort, and a choice specimen of the excesses
to which the principle of toleration would lead ; and
few even among the Independents, of whom there
were five or six in the Westminster Assembly, with a
growing number in the community at large—would
have extended the toleration for which they argued so
energetically to such an extreme case as Milton's.
Was not his Divorce speculation more than a religious
heresy; was it not a moral heresy, Sapping the very
foundations of human society In fact this was what
was said almost universally round about him in
London. He was denounced in pulpits, attacked in
pamphlets, complained of to Parliament itself; he
found himself, to use his own striking expression,
“in a world of disesteem.” One consequence was
that he snapped his connexion with the Presbyterians
for ever, favouring rather the Independents thence-
forward, though really going beyond the mass of the
Independents too, and ranking himself consciously
with the Sectaries and Free Opinionists. Hence-
forward he was in the mood of his famous line—
“New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large.”
A/ZZ 7'OAV. 47
IN BARBICAN.
1645–1647.
Three or four months before the close of 1645
Milton's personal interest in his Divorce speculation
had ceased. The King's cause having been shattered
by the Battle of Naseby, the Powells, whose fortunes
had already suffered and were at a low ebb, had found
it advisable to send back their daughter to her hus-
band as a suppliant for reconciliation. This having
been accorded in an interview furtively arranged, she
resumed her place in Milton's household. Not, how-
ever, it would appear, in the house in Aldersgate
Street. That house being no longer roomy enough
for all the pupils that offered themselves, a larger
house had been taken close by in Barbican. Turn
the corner out of Aldersgate into Barbican in our
previous cut, and a little way down Barbican you will
be at the spot.
Barbican (so-called, according to Stow, “because
sometime there stood in the north side thereof a
burgh-kenim or watch-tower of the city, called in
Some language a barbicam. ”) was a very superior
suburban street of London in Milton's time, as were
most of the streets in the Aldersgate Street neigh-
bourhood. The Earl of Bridgewater, remembered as
the Earl of Milton's Comus, had his town house in
this street ; and there were other inhabitants of rank
and distinction. Milton's house in the street must
48 A/V/, 7 OAV.
have been one of the best in it after these more
aristocratic residences ; and it survived all the in-
evitable changes and deteriorations of the street
through the next two centuries, and was visible in a
tolerably complete state, as No. 17 Barbican, a brick
house with bay windows, and with similar houses to
the right and left of it, to as late as 1865. It was
then occupied by a dyer of the peculiar name of
“Heaven,” and was marked for demolition in the
interest of an extension of one of the city railways
which had been projected and was then in progress.
The annexed cut, taken from the Illustrated Lomdom
News of 16th July, 1864, represents the house
exactly as it then looked, and as I remember it. The
frontage may seem narrow ; but the accommodation
swelled out considerably at the back, where, it was
recollected, there had, till as late as about 1825,
been a large open garden-space, containing some fine
trees.
Modify this sketch back for the deterioration ima-
ginable in the course of two centuries, and you will
have an idea of the once large and handsome house
in Barbican which was known as Mr. Milton's private
academy for young gentlemen. He may have had
about a score of such for day-scholars in it, with per-
haps a boarder or two besides his nephews ; for,
though still “in a world of disesteem ’’ with the
orthodox, he had many ardent and trustful admirers
in the circle of those who really knew him. The two
years he spent in the house at Barbican, at all events,
A///, /OAV.
49
were his busiest
in t e a ching-
work. In the
shape of literary
Occupation dur-
ing those years
there is nothing
more to record
than that, just
at the time of
his entering the
house, he pub-
lished, or al-
lowed a booksel-
ler to publish,
the tiny volume
of his collected
poems in En-
glish and Latin,
original copies
of which now
fetch such a
high price, and
that to three
English sonnets
written in Al-
dersgate Street
and included in
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more sonnets and a scrap or two of Latin verse.
D


50 M/Z 7'OW.
The two years in the Barbican house, however, were
not destitute of incidents of another kind. There,
in July 1646, his first child, a daughter named
Anne, was born. There, when the surrender of
Oxford to the Parliament had virtually ended the
First Civil War, and had dispossessed the Powell
family from their Forest-hill home, their affairs in
sad confusion, and with further penalties for delin-
quency hanging over them, it was with their son-in-law
Milton that Mr. and Mrs. Powell, and some of their
children, sought and found refuge. They had lived
with him some months when, on the 1st of January
1647, Mr. Powell died. In March of the same year
there was the funeral from the same house in Bar-
bican of Milton’s own father, after he had lived to be
eighty-three or eighty-four years of age. Meanwhile
the First Civil War had actually ended, and long and
futile negotiation had been going on with the King,
first at Newcastle, in his captive condition there with
the auxiliary Scottish army, and then, after that
army had withdrawn into Scotland in January 1647,
in his less strict, but still effective, captivity in the
English midlands. Intermingled with these negotia-
tions, and vitally affecting them, was the continued
controversy between the Presbyterians and the Inde-
pendents, assuming every day more and more omi-
mously the form of the final question whether it
should be the Parliament, mainly Presbyterian as it
was, that should conduct the negotiations and dictate
the terms of restoration to his prostrate Majesty, or
A/ZZ 7OAV. 5 I
whether the mastery, in this matter as in others,
should not belong to the army, now mainly an army
of Independents and Sectaries, and with Cromwell
for its head.
IN LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS, HOLBORN.
1647–1649.
In September 1647, Milton having had enough of
the drudgery of schoolmastering, and desiring more
time for himself, there was a removal from the large
house in Barbican, and out of the Aldersgate Street
neighbourhood altogether. It was to a smallish
house in that part of Holborn which bordered, and
still borders, the spacious area of Lincoln's Inn
Fields. All that we know further of the house is
that it was one of several that then opened at the
back into this area. He remained about eighteen
months in the house ; and they are about the ob-
scurest portion of his life. He was busy, we are
told, over three great prose-compilations which he
had projected and had made some progress in already.
One was the collection of materials for a Latin Dic-
tionary ; another was the compilation in Latin of a
System of Divinity drawn directly from the Bible ;
and the third was the compilation in English of a
General History of Great Britain. In the way of
poetic product we have nothing from him during the
eighteen months but a few scraps of Psalm-translation
and a single English Sonnet. The sonnet, however,
52 MILTON.
is one of historical mark. In November 1647 the
King had escaped to the Isle of Wight. Pursued
thither by the Parliamentarian leaders and agents,
and confined in Carisbrooke Castle, he was again in
an imbroglio of negotiations from which there seemed
to be no outlet, when he clutched desperately at an
offered chance of relief. The Scots had been nego-
tiating with him separately; and before January
1648 there had been a secret treaty between him
and the Scots, by which, in return for his consent to
recognise Presbytery as the established form of
Church-government in England, and to suppress the
Independents and the Sectaries, they undertook to
send an invading army into England for the renewal
of the Civil War in his interest and his restoration to
kingly power. In May 1648, when the news of this
secret treaty had got about, the Civil War was
renewed by Royalist risings in various parts of
England ; and in July the invading Scottish army
was within England, and on its march Southwards,
under the Duke of Hamilton. This Second Civil
War, as it is called, lasted, however, but about three
months. Hamilton's invading Scottish army was
routed disastrously by Cromwell in the three days'
Battle of Preston, August 17–19.; and on the 28th
of the same month Colchester, where the English
Royalists of the South had cooped themselves up,
was taken, after six weeks of siege, by Fairfax.
Milton's sonnet, written in September 1648, was in
the form of an address of congratulation to Fairfax
MIC ZOAV. 53
on this closing feat of the Civil War. But there was
fresh rousing for Milton in the events that followed.
The army being now Supreme, Cromwell and the
other army-chiefs had made up their minds what was
next to be done, and took their measures accordingly.
The Parliament having been shaped to their liking
by the ejection from it of the Presbyterians and other
resisting elements, Charles was brought from the Isle
of Wight for his public trial by a Court of High
Commission ; and, on the 30th of January 1649, he
was beheaded in front of Whitehall. Kingship and
the House of Peers were then declared defunct ; and
England became a Republic, to be governed by the
Residue or Rump of the Commons House, with a
Council of State of forty-one members of that house,
to be annually elected, as Ministry and Executive.
It was just at this moment, i.e. on the 13th of Feb-
ruary 1649, that Milton sent forth from his house in
Holborn a pamphlet on which he had been engaged
while the King was on his trial. It bore the por-
tentous title : Temware of Kings amd Magistrates :
proving that it is lawful, and hath been held so through
all ages, for any who have the power, to call to ac-
count a Tyrant on Wicked Kimg, and, after due com-
viction, to depose and put him to death, if the ordimary
Magistrate have meglected or demied to do it. It was,
in fact, a daring defence of the Regicide in all its
circumstances, and the first manifesto by an English
citizen of adhesion to the new Republic. The con-
sequence was natural enough. In March 1649,
54. M/Z 7'OAV.
Milton, then in his forty-first year, was offered, and
accepted, the appointment of Latin Secretary, or
Secretary for Foreign Tongues, to the new Common-
wealth Government. His salary was to be £288
13s.6d. a year, worth about or somewhat over £1,000
a year now. The appointment necessarily involved
another change of residence.
IN OFFICIAL RESIDENCE AT WHITEHALL.
1649–1652.
For the first few months after Milton's appointment
to the Foreign Secretaryship to the Commonwealth
and its Council of State, he lived in lodgings “at one
Thomson's, next door to the Bull Head Tavern at
Charing Cross, opening into the Spring Garden.”
You pass the spot on your right hand as you round
the corner at Charing Cross towards the Horse
Guards and Whitehall. As soon as possible, however,
he crossed from the Spring Garden side of the street
to the other, and took possession of official rooms
which had been provided for him in Whitehall itself.
All that now remains of Old Whitehall is the Ban-
queting House, designed by Inigo Jones and finished
in 1622, out of one of the windows of which King
Charles had stept to the scaffold; and one has to
consult old engravings to be able to re-imagine the
extent of the original Palace on both sides of that
recently erected portion. It was a long straggle of
buildings, with courts, galleries, gardens, &c., Occupy-
MVZ 7'OAV. 55
ing, for its front towards St. James's Park, all the
ground between Scotland Yard and Canon Row, but
with intricate detachments backward to the Thames,
and uniting there in a reverse and imposing river-
front. Aſ the time with which we are concerned the
whole had been converted into a range of governmen,
offices, with chambers of residence for the more
important officials, and suites of apartments for the
families of such chiefs of the Council of State and the
Parliament as required or desired that accommoda-
tion. The rooms assigned to Milton were in a building
at the Scotland Yard end of the long range, famous
afterwards as the central station of the London
Police. For the better furnishing of the rooms, there
was voted to him, after a while, the use of some of
the curtains and other hangings which had belonged
to the late King.
To write the history of that portion of Milton's
Secretaryship which connects itself with his residence
at Whitehall would be little less than to write the
history of the first three years of the English Com-
monwealth. Suffice it here to note rapidly the chief
personal associations of Milton with the people at
Whitehall and the ongoings there during those three
years. It must have been now, and probably in
Derby House, Canon Row, where the Council of State
was holding its meetings when Milton entered on the
duties of his secretaryship, that he first shook hands
with Cromwell. In July 1649,-by which time the
place of meeting had been transferred to Whitehall
56 Áſ/L7'OW.
itself—the great soldier was off for his command-in-
chief in Ireland and the recovery of that island to
English rule after her eight years of rebellion ; from
which service he did not return to London till May
1650, and then only for a month in preparation for
his next service. The scene of that next service was
Scotland, where young Charles II., brought over from
his exile on the Continent, had been proclaimed King
of the Scots, after having satisfied them by swearing
to Presbyterianism and the Covenants, and whence
they threatened an invasion of England for the Sup-
pression of the Commonwealth and the extension of
his sovereignty into that realm. While Cromwell
was thus absent, the management of the ordinary
affairs of the Commonwealth was in the hands of
those colleagues of his whom he had left in the
Parliament and the Council of State in Westminster;
and it was among these that Milton moved about. It
was necessarily with the members of the Council of
State that he was thrown into the closest relations.
There were partial changes in the composition of the
Council from year to year ; but among the more
permanent members were President Bradshaw, Fair-
fax, Sir Harry Vane, St. John, Hasilrig, Whitlocke,
Ludlow, Fleetwood, and Sir Gilbert Pickering. With
these, and with a score or two more of the Common-
wealth politicians, Milton must have become person-
ally familiar in the exercise of his secretaryship.
While the acting official for the main business of the
Council of State was Mr. Walter Frost, their general
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58 M/Z 7 OMV,
martyr's own dying testimony to his subjects, and had
been in circulation among the Royalists, with raptures
of admiring belief in its genuineness, in tens of thou-
Sands of copies. Then, in April 1651, after many
months of laborious preparation, came the prodigious
Latin Defensio pro Populo Amglicamo, intended to
be read over all Europe as the reply of the English
People and Commonwealth to the vilification of them
that had been published, at the expense of Charles
II., by the great Leyden scholar, Salmasius. This
last, by which Milton, as the conqueror of the great
Salmasius, became at once a European celebrity, was
certainly written in his official residence at the Scotland
Yard end of Whitehall. Nor did his literary services
to the Commonwealth cease with that performance.
A fact not generally known is that through the whole
year 1651 Milton, living in that residence, was the
editor of a London newspaper. Through that whole
year he was the licenser, and therefore the superin-
tending and responsible editor,0f the government news-
paper called Mercurius Politicus, with Marchamont
Needham under him as sub-editor. Not only did he
license through that year every number of the paper
as it appeared ; but his own hand, I believe, may be
traced throughout the year in the more important of
the leading articles. One leading article, I feel sure,
must have been wholly his. The occasion was worthy
of his pen. Cromwell, victorious in Scotland by his
great Battle of Dunbar, fought on the 3rd of Sep-
tember 1650, had been in possession since then of
MIL 7'OAV. 59
Edinburgh and of the whole of the southern Scottish
shires, and was groping his way towards Stirling in
Order to crush the relics of the Scottish army encir-
cling Charles II. there, when Charles and the Scottish
forces gave him the slip by suddenly decamping from
Stirling, pushing themselves southwards to the Border,
and marching into England. Cromwell, leaving Monk
in charge of Scotland, marched after them; and on
the 3rd of September 1651, the anniversary of his
victory at Dunbar, there was his still more momen-
tous victory at Worcester, shattering the combined
forces of the Scots and the English Royalists who had
joined them, and trampling out, as it seemed, the
cause of the Stuarts for ever. Milton's leading article
in the Mercurius Politcus was a paean of religious
fervour and exultation over this great Battle of
Worcester. It appeared in the number for September
4–11; and the Londoners were still reading it when
Cromwell was back among them, hailed with shouts
of acclamation as the hero and saviour of the Com-
monwealth. From the 16th of September onwards
his portly figure was to be seen once more about
Whitehall, and Mr. Secretary Milton had new oppor-
tunities of studying him and becoming acquainted
with him. The result, in May 1652, was this ever-
famous Sonnet —
“Cromwell, our chief of men, who through a cloud
Not of war only, but detractions rude,
Guided by faith and matchless fortitude,
To peace and truth thy glorious way hast ploughed,
6o AMILTON.
And on the neck of crowned Fortune proud
IHast reared God’s trophies and His work pursued :
While Darwen stream, with blood of Scots imbrued,
And Dunbar field, resounds thy praises loud,
And Worcester's laureate wreath: yet much remains
To conquer still ; Peace hath her victories,
No less renowned than War.”
IN PETTY FRANCE, WESTMINSTER.
1652–1660.
When the Sonnet to Cromwell was written, Milton
was no longer resident in Whitehall. His health,
never robust, had been giving Way, and his eyesight,
weak for a good many years past, had of late been
failing more rapidly and alarmingly ; and, whether on
this account, or because, after Cromwell's return and
resumed residence in the part of Whitehall called
“The Cockpit,” it became necessary to dislodge some
of the occupants of the rest of the Whitehall range
of buildings, the official rooms in Scotland Yard had
been left, early in 1652, for a more private dwelling-
house in the neighbourhood. It is described as “a
pretty garden-house in Petty France, Westminster,
next door to the Lord Scudamore's, and opening into
St. James's Park.” The skirt of St. James's Park
once known as “Petty France” is now “York Street,”
—the change of name dating from the early part of
the eighteenth century, when an Archbishop of York
set up his town-house in the street. Go, therefore,
into the present York Street, Westminster; and at a
spot on the right hand of that now mean-looking
street, if you have entered it by its Queen-Anne-
A/V/, 7'OAV. 6 I
Square end, you will be where Milton's house stood,
with Lord Scudamore's next to it. The entrance to
the house, as to the other houses in the row, was
from the street; but at the backs of the houses there
were gardens leading straight into the Park. In fact,
the chief windows of the houses being at those backs,
and looking over the gardens into the Park, and the
access to the Park being by doors from the gardens,
the houses may be said to have been in the Park, or
to have had their superior front towards the Park.
The better to realise this, go round to the Park, and
stand in that part of Birdcage Walk which is now
lined by Wellington Barracks. Imagine those bar-
racks removed, and you will see whereabouts the
gardens of Milton's house and Lord Scudamore's came
down into the Park.
Milton occupied the house in Petty France for no
less than eight years. The associations of the house
with his biography through those years are very
memorable. Here it was that, about the middle of
1652, when the house had hardly become familiar to
him, there fell upon him the calamity of his complete
and incurable blindness. His Sonnet to Cromwell of
May 1652 and his Sonnet to Vane in July of the
same year mark between them the exact date of that
calamity, and must have been dictated to an amanu-
ensis. His blindness, however, by no means put an
end to his Foreign Secretaryship, but only altered
the conditions of it. Mr. Walter Frost having died
and been succeeded in the main Secretaryship by
62 M/Z 7'OM.
Thurloe, and a subordinate having been brought into
Thurloe's office for routine portions of the work that
had belonged to Milton, it was still Milton himself
that was the responsible Foreign Secretary. Led
across the Park to Whitehall to attend any Council
meeting when foreign business was on hand, or re-
ceiving in his house in Petty France instructions
from Thurloe as to what was wanted, he continued to
draft, although now by the method of dictation, all
the chief Latin despatches to foreign powers. So
through the whole of 1652, when the Fourth Council
of State held office ; and so for the Fifth Council of
State, till April 1653, when that Council of State
was dissolved by Cromwell, along with the Rump
Parliament itself, and Cromwell, as Lord General of
the Commonwealth, assumed the Dictatorship. Not
even then were the services of the blind man dis-
pensed with. Approving as he did of Cromwell's
dissolution of the Rump, he retained the secretaryship
through the rest of 1653, doing some work for Crom-
well's military council and for Cromwell's Assembly
of Notables, called afterwards “'The Barebones Parlia-
ment ’’; and, after Cromwell's Dictatorship had been
converted, in December 1653, into his formal Protec-
torate, it was still the blind Milton, though now with
an assistant ranking almost as his colleague, that
Cromwell depended upon for all foreign despatches of
special importance. Wanquished Scotland having by
this time been incorporated with the Commonwealth,
the series of those Latin despatches of Milton's drafting
M/Z 7'OAV. 63
for Cromwell figure thenceforth as Cromwell’s own, by
bearing his now semi-royal signature, “OLIVERIUS,
ANGLIAE, SCOTIAE, HIBERNLE, &c., PROTECTOR.”
An incident in the house in Petty France just
about the time when this series began was the death
of Milton's wife, leaving him, in his forty-fifth year, a
widower with three young daughters, the oldest not
eight years of age, the youngest an infant. With
these little ones pattering about the house in the
charge of a servant, we see the blind man struggling
on through three years of widowerhood, mostly in
solitude, though visited by admiring foreigners and
other friends, and summoned now and then to White-
hall for a colloquy with the Protector. His occupa-
tions through those three years were various enough.
Besides the dictation of the state-letters required from
him by the Protector, most famous among which
are those of 1655 in which Oliver rolled over Europe
his detestation of the massacre of the Vaudois Protes-
tants, and his resolution, if necessary, to let the
avenging thunders of an English fleet be heard in the
Mediterranean,—one notes, as marking the same years,
the publication of his Latin Pro Populo Anglicamo
Defensio Secwmda, containing his splendid panegyric
on Cromwell, the publication of its sequel entitled
Joannis Miltomi Amgli pro Se Defensio comtra Alea:-
amdrum Morwm, and the dictation of five more of
his Sonnets and of some of his Latin Familiar Epistles.
In November 1656 he married his second wife,
Catherine Woodcock; and in February 1658, after
64 M///, 7'OAV.
she had been in the house in Petty France with him
for but fifteen months, he was again a widower by the
death of this wife also, the “late espoused saint’
of the last of all his Sonnets. In the same year, 1658,
there is reason to believe, he began in earnest the
dictation of his Paradise Lost, thus reverting at last
to the great subject on which he had projected a
poem as early as 1640, before he had been whirled
into the turmoil of prose-polemics. That fact also is
to be remembered as one of the distinctions of the
house in Petty France.
Milton can have made but small progress in the
poom when his leisure was again interrupted. On
the 3rd of September 1658 Cromwell died ; then fol.
lowed the brief Protectorate of his son Richard ; and,
after Richard's abdication in April 1659, the Com-
monwealth entered on that year of anarchy and agony,
caused by the struggle for Supremacy between the
pure Republicans of the Restored Rump Parliament
and the surviving Cromwellians or Army-chiefs, from
which there was no possible issue Save by voting the
continuance of the Commonwealth in any form to be
hopeless, and restoring the Stuart kingship.
Through this miserable time the polemical spirit
was again so roused in Milton that he spoke start-
lingly to his countrymen several times out of his
blindness. In 1659, while still officiating a little in
the Foreign Secretaryship, but conjoined now in that
post with Andrew Marvell, he sent forth two English
pamphlets, expounding and advocating a doctrine
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66 MIL 7'O/V.
Monk, who had come from Scotland to steer the
London confusion, though with no distinct precon-
ception then in what direction it was to be steered,
had obtained all the light necessary; communications
had been opened with Charles II. in Holland; on the
1st of May 1660 the Commonwealth was declared at
an end; on the 25th Charles landed at Dover; and
on the 29th he was in London, accepted as sovereign,
and amid tumults of enthusiastic welcome. Mean-
while all the chief Commonwealth men, and especially
all who had been in any way concerned with the trial
and execution of Charles I., were fugitives hither
and thither for their lives, those of them happiest
who had escaped beyond the bounds of Britain
altogether, whether to the Continent or to America.
Blind Milton was fugitive with the rest. They had
taken him out of his house in Petty France, and
concealed him in a friend's house in Bartholomew
Close.
It is surely matter for regret that a house in which
Milton had thus lived for eight years, and which he
had invested during those eight years with so many
interesting associations, no longer exists. It might
easily have been preserved ; for it existed entire till
about seventeen years ago, known then as No. 19,
York Street, Westminster, and familiar to all the
neighbours as “Milton's House.” There had, of
course, by that time been a degradation of the cha-
racter and look of the whole street from the lightsome-
elegance for which it must have been reputed among:
Al///, /TOM. 67
the Westminster people of the days when it bore the
name of Petty France ; and the house that was Mil-
ton's had suffered with the rest. But the degeneracy
had been gradual, and as far back as the beginning
of the present century the house must have been
still of Some respectability. It was then the property
of Jeremy Bentham, whose own town residence was
in the immediately adjacent Queen Anne Square ;
and in 1810 Bentham made a present of the tenancy
of it io his friend and disciple, James Mill. Actually
for some months in that year the Mill family lived in
it, and John Stuart Mill, then a child of four years,
must have toddled about its rooms. The Mills having
left it because they found it unhealthy, it received
in the following year another distinguished tenant in
William Hazlitt. He lived in it for some years, pay-
ing rent to Bentham, and having a quarrel with that
philosopher eventually on account of an alteration
affecting the convenience of the house. Proud of
being its proprietor, Bentham had caused a tablet to
be set up high on its back wall bearing the inscrip-
tion, “SACRED TO MILTON, PRINCE OF POETS.” This
had been done apparently before Hazlitt's tenancy of
the house, and it was not to this that Hazlitt ob-
jected, but to an encroachment on the back-garden
made in or about 1813, Bentham, Mill, and some
associates of theirs having about this time formed
themselves into a propagandist brotherhood called
The Chrestomathic School, it was thought desirable
that the members of the brotherhood should have a
68 Al/ZZ TOW.
piece of garden ground on which to meet and hold
peripatetic consultations, and Bentham not only
offered the garden of his own house in Queen Anne
Square for the purpose, but enlarged that garden by
annexing to it the garden of Milton's house. This
he did by building a high wall across what had been
Milton's garden, so as to leave no garden at all at the
back of the house, but only a small bit of stone-
flagged area. In this docked condition, and with the
further deteriorations of aspect inevitable in a crowded
and decaying London neighbourhood in the course of
another half century, the house remained till 1866,
when I first became acquainted with it. It was diffi-
cult to realise that what one then saw as No. 19,
York Street, Westminster, the lower portion turned
into a poor shop, and the upper floors let out to
separate poor tenants, could ever have been the
pretty garden-house next door to Lord Scudamore's
which Milton inhabited, or could have been thought
suitable a hundred and fifty years afterwards for men
in the circumstances of James Mill and Hazlitt. One
noted, however, that the front towards York Street
was hardly in its original state; and the total im-
pression was considerably improved when, entering
by a small door at the side of the shop and ascending
a dark and narrow staircase, one came to the upper
apartments. The chief room in the first floor in
particular (which must have been the chief room of
the house in Milton's time) was a large enough and
still rather handsome room to the back, looking over
A/ZZ TOM. - 69
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MILTON's HOUSE IN PETTY FRANCE.
Bentham's brutal wall to the other obstructions be-
yond it, Wellington Barracks the last and most recent
of them, intervening between the house and St.
James's Park. Over Bentham's Wall hung the top
branches of a cotton-willow tree, which may have

































































































*7 O. A/ZZ 7'OW.
f
been a relic from Milton's garden, and was said, of
course, to have been of Milton's planting. The im-
pression gained in antiqueness when, descending the
stairs again, one stepped out into the small bit of
stone-flagged area which Bentham’s wall had left
attached to the house at the back. There, by cran-
ing the neck and looking up, one could see Bentham's
tablet to Milton; and, observing the general appear-
ance of the house on that side,-the back from
modern York Street, but once the true front towards
the Park, one could be pretty Sure that there had
been no essential or structural change there since
Milton's time. What one saw was a three-storeyed
old house of red brick, narrowish but still meat, and
each storey sufficiently windowed.
For ten years more the house still remained extant.
My last inspection of it was, I think, in 1875. Next
year, in spite of some remonstrances, with sugges-
tions of a form in which it might have been pre-
served, it went down under the pickaxe. The huge
pile of modern buildings known as the Queen Anne
Mansions, and let out as residences, flat above flat, at
great rents, for families of rank and fashion and very
wealthy bachelors, had then been erected close to the
house; and a projected extension of this pile over the
ground occupied by the house was too profitable a
speculation to be stopped by sentimental or historical
considerations. Milton's house was demolished utterly;
and all that one can do now, standing in York Street,
is to imagine the ghost of its fabric as built irrecover-
M/Z 7OAV. 71
ably somehow into the last-raised portion of the huge
Queen Anne Mansions.
IN JEWIN STREET.
1661–1664.
How it happened that Milton, a prominent official
of the Commonwealth Government, the most notorious
defender of the trial and execution of Charles I., the
most ferocious pamphleteer to the last against the
recall of the Stuarts, escaped at the Restoration from
the vengeance that fell upon most of the chiefs of the
Commonwealth and upon all the Regicides within
reach, is too intricate a story to be told here. Enough
to say that, though he was specially named for prose-
cution and punishment, and though some of his most
offensive pamphlets were burnt by the hands of the
hangman, he did, by very dexterous management in
his behalf, escape with life and liberty. In August or
September 1660, having left the friend's house in
Bartholomew Close, Smithfield, where he had been in
hiding for four or five months, he did not return to
his house in Westminster, but quartered himself in
some much more obscure house which had been
taken for him in the part of Holborn where there is
now Red Lion Square. Here, hardly venturing to go
out, he passed those later months of 1660 during which
there were the hangings and quarterings of so many
of the condemned Regicides, recently his associates.
Possibly he remained in the same house till as late as
the 30th of January 1661, when, to mark that anni-
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A/ZZ TOM. 73
in such cases arises from the fact that, even in such a
great city as London, it was not till about the middle
of the eighteenth century that the practice of num-
bering houses in streets came into use. Till then
the occasional letters and parcels intended for private
persons living in any particular street reached them
easily enough if addressed by the mere name of the
street, while for people carrying on any kind of busi-
ness there was the obvious device—now surviving
only for hostelries—of distinguishing their houses
and shops by sign-boards. Tenacious local tradition,
as we have seen, has triumphed over this difficulty
by keeping in memory the exact spots of some of
Milton's London residences; but in the case of the
Jewin Street house we have no such help. Some-
where in that short street we know it to have
been ; but of what size or shape it was, or even
on which side of the street it stood, one inquires in
vain.
With allowance for that defect we have the means
of imagining, vividly enough, the years of Milton's
life which the house enclosed. Now and here it was
that, an outcast from the Restoration world of men
and things, and thought of throughout that world,
and especially among the courtiers of Charles II., so
far as he was thought of at all, only as the infamous
blind man who had served the Republic, blasphemed
Charles I., and been Oliver's secretary, and whom it
had been an overstretch of mercy to leave unhanged,
he found himself, as he tells us, -
74 M/Z 7'OAV.
* On evil days now fallen, and evil tongues,
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round,
And solitude.”
Still more poignant is that lamentation over his
blindness which he put afterwards into the mouth of
his Samson :-
“Blind among enemies O worse than chains,
Dungeon, or beggary, or decrepit age
Light, the prime work of God, to me is oxtinct,
And all her various objects of delight
Annulled, which might in part my grief have eased.
Inferior to the vilest now become
Of man or worm, the vilest here exoel me :
They creep, yet see; I, dark in light, exposed
To daily fraud, contempt, abuse and wrong, f
Within doors or without.”
In the last lines we have an indubitable glimpse of
the interior of the house in Jewin Street, as far at
least as to February 1663, when the eldest of Mil-
ton's daughters was in her seventeenth year, the next
in her fifteenth, and the youngest, Deborah, in her
eleventh. The three poor girls, so long motherless,
had been growing up but ill looked after ; and the
results had become too manifest. They were “very
undutiful” to their blind father, making nothing of
deserting him when they could, and rebelling against
the drudgery which he exacted from them,--or, at all
events, from the two eldest,-of reading to him daily
from books in various languages which they did not
themselves understand. But that was not the worst.
“They did combine together and counsel his maid-
A/ZZZTOW. 75
servant to cheat him in her marketings”; they were
pilfering his books, and selling them to the dust-
women that came round in the mornings. Things
had come to such a pass that neighbours took notice ;
and, one of these having interposed judiciously with
the suggestion of the only possible remedy, Milton con-
sented to a third marriage. The wife recommended
to him by this friend was an Elizabeth Minshull, a
native of Cheshire, not yet quite twenty-five years of

£ 4xis.
age, of excellent and pious character, some education,
a placid and kindly temper, and very prudent house-
keeping ways. The marriage was in February 1663 ;
and, for lack of any other illustration to the eye of
the incidents of Milton's life in the Jewin Street
house, we give a fac-simile of his signature, on the
11th of that month, to his application for the neces-
sary marriage-license.
This fac-simile, which is the only known piece of
Milton's handwriting of later date than 1652, when his
total blindness began, speaks volumes, especially for
76 A/ZZ 7'OW.
those who are familiar with specimens of his peculiarly
meat and strong handwriting in his youth and early
manhood, as to the shocking state of manual help-
lessness to which he had been reduced by the eleven
intermediate years of his absolute disuse of the pen,
and by the stiffening of his fingers all that while from
the effects of confirmed and painful gout. In looking
at it, one can see that the alleviation even of this par-
ticular form of his helplessness must count for some-
thing among the various benefits which Elizabeth
Minshull brought into his household. Not only were
the daughters brought under better control by their
young step-mother, though resenting her introduction
into the house, and not only was there greater com-
fort generally in the domestic management, but there
was now at hand a competent reader for Milton
independently of the daughters, and a competent
amanuensis also for his ordinary dictations. But, in
fact, whether before the marriage or after, Milton's
requirements for help for his readings and dictations
were largely supplied by other services than the in-
mates of the house in Jewin Street could themselves
render. Though he describes his condition after the
Restoration as having been one mainly of “Solitude,”
one is not to suppose that all his former friends had
forsaken him. On the contrary, we learn that not a
few of them, Andrew Marvell for One, were still faith-
ful, and visited him now and then with undiminished
admiration and respect. Then, his two nephews,
Edward and John Phillips, both of them now making
M/Z 7'OM. 77
their living by literature in combination with school-
mastering or private tutorship, dropped in occasion-
ally to assist him in whatever might be going on.
All round Jewin Street, too, there were families whose
religious and political principles accorded with Mil-
ton's, and who thought of him, with all the more
reverence on that account, as the resident celebrity of
their neighbourhood, the great gentleman-Scholar now
in eclipse. From among these families there were
never wanting young men who were glad to volunteer
as readers or amanuenses for Mr. Milton for an hour
or two every day as often as he wanted them. There
was even a competition for the privilege of such ser-
vice, so that a succession of young men had to share
it by turns.
What were the employments of the blind man for
which so much help was needed ? The answer to
that question completes our view of Milton in Jewin
Street. There, as before, his blindness notwithstand-
ing, he was surrounded with books, and his commerce
with books was incessant. Hence the necessity of
readers, and even of a staff of readers. But the
readings and consultations of books, though in part
for mere miscellaneous pastime and recreation, were
not wholly of that kind. A large proportion of them
were for the specific purposes of the two great literary
labours of his own which he had brought with him
into Jewin Street, and in which he had been perse-
vering there indefatigably. One was his Latin Sys-
item of Divinity, compiled directly and entirely from
78 A/ZZ TOM.
the Bible, though with reference, for agreement or
for refutation, to the works of commentators. The
other, and it is for this that some recollection of
the unascertained house in Jewin Street ought to be
imperishable in the history of English literature,
was the continuation of his Paradise Lost. Begun,
as we have seen, in 1658, in the house in Petty
France, but little more than begun there, the poem
was resumed in 1661 in Jewin Street, and was carried
on so effectively there, by the method of the mental
composition of pieces of from twenty to forty lines
at a time, and dictations of these pieces to whatever
amanuensis chanced to be available, that within a
year from the date of Milton's third marriage, as I
calculate, or say about the spring of 1664, the first
seven or eight books of the text as we now have it
were safe in manuscript.
IN ARTILLERY WALK, BUNHILL.
1664–1665.
The honour of the completion of Paradise Lost
does not belong to the house in Jewin Street, but to
another house, to which Milton, with his wife and
daughters, removed early in 1664, if not late in 1663.
It is described by his nephew as having been “in
Artillery Walk, leading to Bunhill Fields,” and by
another contemporary as having been “in Bunhill,
opposite the Artillery Garden wall ”; and the two
designations mean the same thing. The removal
was to no great distance, for it kept Milton still
MVZ ZOAV. 79
within the same parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate, in
which his Jewin Street house was included ; but it
took him into a part of the parish somewhat aside
from that street and from the whole of the Alders-
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SOME OLD HOUSES IN BUNHILL ROW, OVERLOOKING THE SOUTH-WEST
CORNER OF BUNHILL FIELDS BURIAL GIROUND.
(Artill ry Walk was to the left.)
gate Street purlieu which he had hitherto favoured,
and more in contact with the open country north of
London.
Bunhill or Bunhill Fields was then the name for a
large space of vacant ground or park, with trees and
Windmills on it, biting into the built London on that























8O Al/ZZ TOW.
skirt, and connecting itself with a similar but nar-
rower vacancy farther inwards called Moorfields. Since
1622 the portion of Bunhill Fields nearest Moorfields
had been walled in, under the name of the “Artillery
Ground” or “Artillery Garden,” to serve as an
exercise-ground for the London trained bands and
other soldiery; after which the name of Bunhill
Fields had been reserved more particularly for the
unenclosed space left beyond the Artillery Ground.
The subduction, however, hardly affected the airiness
of the situation of Milton's house. Though not
directly opposite the “Fields,” it was in a lane lead-
ing to the “Fields” along the wall of the Artillery
Ground, and called therefore “Artillery Walk.”
It was, in fact, one of a single row of small
houses looking over the wall into the spacious Artil-
lery Ground, and having small gardens of their own
behind. Let any one go now from the present Jewin
Street to the nearly adjacent street called Chiswell
Street, and then turn out of Chiswell Street into
what is still called Bunhill Row ; and a little way up
this Bunhill Row on the left hand he will pass the
site of Milton's house in what was once “Artillery
Walk.” No longer now, however, at that point will
he see the wall of the Artillery Ground which Milton's
house and the others in the old “Walk” overlooked.
The Artillery Ground still exists, but it is shut out
from the view of the present dense row of houses
forming the left side of Bunhill Row by an equally
dense row of houses that has arisen on the right or
MILTON. 8 I
opposite side, converting the once single-rowed and
semi-rural “Walk” into a double-rowed and populous
street. Behind the concealing houses on the right
hand of Bunhill Row is still the old Artillery Ground;
and access to it is easy enough for those who may
inquire after it. Indeed, it is hardly the quest of
the site of Milton's house that now brings visitors
into that remote London neighbourhood, but partly
the celebrity of this old Artillery Ground in the
annals of London, and partly the celebrity of another
piece of ground of later enclosure close by. While
much of the open space that once lay beyond the
Artillery Garden, still retaining its old name of
“Bunhill Fields,” has been covered irredeemably by
the brick and mortar of the ever-outstretching maze
of London streets in that direction, a portion of it
has been preserved in what is now known as “Bunhill
Fields Burial Ground.” Not when Milton began his
residence in Artillery Walk, but while he was resident
in it, this portion of the Fields, just at the end of
the Artillery Walk and of the Artillery Garden, was
bricked in to serve as a burial-ground for Dissenters
of those numerous sects who objected to the burial
Service of the Church of England, and were, on that
and other accounts, under the ban of the Restoration
powers. It continued to be used for the purpose,
and is sacred now as containing the tombs or graves
of the Independent divines Dr. Thomas Goodwin and
Dr. John Owen, the Baptist John Bunyan, the Quaker
George Fox, Daniel Defoe, Dr. Isaac Watts, and other
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M/ZZON. 85
collectively and indiscriminately; and one of the
places chosen for these “plague-pits” was Bunhill
Fields,--the first hint and origin, in fact, of the
subsequent appropriation of a larger space of the
same vacant ground to be the regular cemetery for
Dissenters. Whether urged by the vicinity of this
special horror or not, Milton was one of the thousands
whom the Plague drove from London. He had asked
a young Quaker pupil and admirer of his, named
Thomas Ellwood, who had made his acquaintance in
Jewin Street, and who was now living in Bucking-
liamshire, to find a cottage somewhere for him in that
county; and, Ellwood having accordingly taken “a
pretty box” for him in the village of Chalfont-St.-
Giles, there was a hasty removal of the Milton family
thither. The date, as I reckon, must have been in
or about July 1665.
AT CHALFONT-ST. - GILES.
July 1665–March 1666.
Chalfont-St-Giles is a small and very secluded
village in the south of Buckinghamshire, about five
miles from Amersham and four from the now famous
Beaconsfield. It is thirteen miles farther north in
the county than Milton's former residence at Horton,
and is distant from London about twenty-three miles
in all. Coming upon it by the usual route from London
wiá Rickmansworth, you descend steeply into a quiet
and sleepy hollow, containing a straggling street of old
houses, with an old inn or two among them, and the
86 MZZZON.
old parish church just off on the left hand; and,
having gone through this street, you ascend again
till the village and the hollow end, and you are once
more on an elevated country road. The “pretty
box” which Ellwood had taken for Milton was a
cottage on the left hand exactly at the terminus
of the village on this its upward slope out of the
hollow.
It is by a kind of caprice that so much has been
made of the recollection of the particular seven or
eight months of Milton's life which he passed in his
rustic retreat at Chalfont-St.-Giles. Not only was
his stay there short and casual; but there is no certain
record of any occupation of his at Chalfont com-
parable in importance with what is known of his
occupations in all or most of his many other resi-
dences. Nor is there the compensation of being able
to connect what one might imagine of his restful
thoughts and musings while at Chalfont with the
visible aspects of things, then as now, in and about that
quiet Buckinghamshire village. The external world for
Milton, wherever they took him, had been for the last
thirteen years but one and the same surrounding
sphere of impenetrable opaque ; and, unless he had
become acquainted with Chalfont in the days pre-
ceding his blindness, all that he could now know of
it, as they led him about in it or on the roads near it,
was that it was a hollow somewhere in the country,
with houses in it whence one heard human voices
and other sounds.
M77, 7 OAW. 87
It is easy, nevertheless, to account for the dispro-
portionate recollection of Chalfont-St.-Giles in the
biographies of Milton, and for the fascination of that
village now for pilgrims on Milton's account. In the
first place, the cottage at Chalfont-St.-Giles is the sole
tenement once inhabited by Milton that is now cer-
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MILTON'S COTTAGE, FROM THE FIELD AND HILLSIDE ADJOINING IT, .
CHALFONT-ST,-GILES.
tainly extant. While all his other houses have dis-
appeared one after another, the house in Petty
France the last of them,--this humble cottage has
survived, and is under such care now that it will, one
hopes, be long preserved. One can see it on its old
site at the end of the village, a small fabric of brick
and wood, its flank to the road, but its front, with
the attached little bit of paled-in garden, at right

88 MZZ 7'OW.
angles to the road, and looking to the open fields
beyond ; one can enter the tiny rooms, and examine
the old latticed windows, and the other relics of the
antique cottage-furnishing of Milton's time which
still remain in them ; one can sit at the front door,
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where once there was the porch in which the blind
man sat in the autumn months of 1665, inhaling the
garden scents, and listening to the songs of birds and
the lowings of the fielded cattle. This mere continued
existence of the cottage, were there nothing more,
would suffice to account for the peculiarly strong
recollection now of the few months of Milton's life

A/ZZ TOM. 89
which were passed at Chalfont-St.-Giles. But much
of the interest of the cottage is due to the record by
the young Quaker Ellwood of one incident in it during
Milton's brief tenancy. Ellwood, whose own residence
at the time was in the adjacent village of Chalfont-
St.-Peter's, where he lived as a make-shift Latin tutor
in the family of Isaac Pennington, the chief Quaker
gentleman of those parts, had been prevented, by an
accident to which Quakers were then constantly liable,
from waiting on Milton on his first arrival, Penning-
ton and he, with eight other Quakers, had been
thrown into Aylesbury Jail for assisting at the at-
tempted burial of one of their persuasion without
Church rites and in unconsecrated ground; and not
till after a month's imprisonment had they been
released. Then Ellwood made haste to see Milton in
the Chalfont-St.-Giles cottage, with the result, as he
tells us, that Milton lent him the manuscript of
Paradise Lost to read at his leisure, and that, when
he returned the manuscript on a second visit, he ven-
tured, after due thanks, to remark, “Thou hast said
much here of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to
say of Paradise Found 2’-whereupon, continues Ell-
Wood, Milton “made no answer, but sat some time in
a muse.” But for Ellwood's record of this incident,
it would perhaps have hardly been remembered that
Milton was ever in Chalfont-St-Giles at all; but the
record is valuable on other grounds. It is a distinct
proof that Milton had finished his Paradise Lost in
Bunhill, and had brought the complete manuscript
QO A/VI, 7 OAV.
copy of it, or indeed more than one such, with him
to Chalfont; and it disposes therefore of the suppo-
sition of some that the poem was finished at Chalfont.
But what of the further supposition that Paradise
Regained was begun at Chalfont ? All the evidence
is against the claim of Chalfont to that credit either.
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JORDANS.— THE OLD QUARER MEETING-FIOUSE AND BIJIRIAL-GROUND
NEAR, CFIALFONT-ST. - GILES,
At the utmost we may imagine that the silent
“muse” into which Milton fell on Ellwood's sugges-
tion of the new subject did not end when Ellwood
had gone, but continued. Paradise Regained may
lave been thought of at Chalfont, but there was
hardly time there for more.
5

















































AM/Z 7'OAV. 9 I
The interest with which Chalfont-St.-Giles and its
neighbourhood have been invested by Milton's tem-
porary abode there blends naturally with the indepen-
dent interest which the locality possesses as a seat and
refuge of Early English Quakerism. At Jordans, in the
vicinity, may be seen the old Quaker meeting-house
of those Buckinghamshire parts, with the attached
burial-ground which contains the graves of many of
the worthies of the Quaker community. Isaac Pen-
nington was buried there in 1679, honest Ellwood
himself in 1713, and the more celebrated William
Penn in 1718. Milton's connexions with the Quakers
were so numerous, and his sympathies with them in
their persecution so marked, that one recognises a
certain propriety in the fact that the custody and
care of his cottage at Chalfont-St.-Giles has been
undertaken at last by the Society of Friends.
BACK IN ARTILLERY WALK, BUNHILL.
March 1666–November 1674.
The Plague having nearly ceased in March 1666,
Milton was back by that time in his house in
Artillery Walk, and it might have been expected that
his Paradise Lost would be out in the course of the
next few months. There may have been negotiations
for the purpose, but the publication of the poem was
not to be an event of the year 1666. In the Sep-
tember of that year, when the Londoners had hardly
recovered from the panic of the Great Plague, they
Were staggering again under a second immense cala-
92 M/7, 7'OM.
mity. By the “Great Fire” of that month, which
raged for four days, all that had been the densest and
most populated heart of Old London, from the Tower
to Temple Bar, measuring 436 Square acres in extent,
was left a mere chaos of heaps of charred and black-
ened ruins, whence smoke could be seen rising for
months afterwards. Business of all kinds was para-
lysed, the publishing houses with the rest. Not till
the following year, when the first shock of the cala-
mity was over, and the Londoners had begun to
address themselves energetically to the work of re-
edifying the burnt city, resuming business meanwhile
as well as they could in the unburnt fringe of suburbs,
could Milton begin the printing of his epic. His own
heighbourhood of Bunhill had escaped the conflag-
ration, as had also, though narrowly, the whole of
the adjoining Barbican, Aldersgate Street, and Jewin
Street neighbourhood; and it was with a printer
“next door to the Golden Lion in Aldersgate Street”
that Milton made his bargain for the printing. This
was in April 1667; and in August 1667 the first
copies of Paradise Lost were out.
What a book to make its appearance in the Resto-
ration world of Charles II., and amid the productions
of the Restoration wits' So we reflect now ; and the
sensation was correspondingly powerful then. Not
immediately, perhaps, but gradually as copies of the
poem got about, and the opinions of it by the most
competent of the Restoration wits themselves found
expression, the effect was to turn all eyes once more
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TEIE OLD CATEWAY,





































MVZ 7'OW. 95
upon the extraordinary blind Republican who had
been living for so many years, outcast and generally
infamous, under the cloud of his political antecedents.
Here, after long silence, the blind man, whose early
poetry had been all but forgotten, Swamped as the
recollection of that had been by the detested series of
his Revolutionary and Regicide prose pamphlets, had
stepped forth again in his first and all but forgotten
character, and that in no ordinary fashion, but as the
author of a poem to which there was indubitably
nothing comparable of its kind in the whole previous
range of English Literature | Why, in such a case,
not be generous; why let Mr. Milton's antecedents
interfere with the recognition due to so splendid a
reappearance 2 Of this reaction of feeling in Milton's
favour, even among the chiefs of the Restoration
World itself, in consequence of his Paradise Lost,-
gradual since the publication of the poem in August
1667, but in full tide, as we may reckon, in April
1669, when all the copies of the first edition had
been sold out, he was himself aware. One detects
a noble expression of his consciousness of the reaction
in his description afterwards of the resuscitation of
the fame of Samson by the crowning exhibition of
that Hebrew's prowess among the Philistines —
“But he, though blind of sight,
Despised, and thought extinguished quite,
With inward eyes illuminated,
His fiery virtue roused
From under ashes into sudden flame;
96 A/ZZ TOAV.
And as an evening dragon came
Assailant on the perchéd roosts
And nests in order ranged
Of tame villatic fowl, but as an eagle
His cloudless thunder bolted on their heads.”
Whether intended or not to express Milton's consci-
ousness of his own sudden transmutation in the
regards of the Restoration world, when he was in
his sixtieth or sixty-first year, out of his previous
character of loathsome prose-monster into that of the
supreme living poet of England, compared with whom
the contemporary men of letters of the Restoration.
were but as so many “tame villatic fowl” overtowered.
by an eagle, the passage is not too strong for that.
historical application.
The fact appears more prosaically in the accounts.
that have come down to us of the changed state of
matters in and around the house in Bunhill through:
the last four or five years of Milton's life. Hitherto
the visitors that found their way to that house had
been few, and chiefly from among Milton's old ac-
quaintances of the Commonwealth connexion, or from
among the various and more extreme sects of the
London Nonconformists, with now and then a foreign
scholar, French, German, or Dutch, caring nothing,
about the ups and downs of English politics in his
curiosity to see the man still so much talked of all.
over the Continent as the Latin antagonist and!
slaughterer of Salmasius. From about 1668 or
1669, however, there was a marked difference. Then,
MIZ, TOM" 97
began that concourse of all sorts of persons round
Milton for the honour of his acquaintance,—“much
more than he did desire,” we are told,—which was
to go on increasingly as long as he lived. Among
those who now came about him were not only
foreigners and Nonconformists as before, but many of
the most eminent persons, for rank or literature, in
the courtly world itself. The generous Dryden was
one ; Dryden's literary brother-in-law Sir Robert
Howard was another. The Earl of Anglesey, one of
the statesmen of Charles II., and the man who had
been Monk's chief coadjutor in managing the Restor.
ation, liked nothing better than to visit Milton and
converse with him freely ; and there were “others
of the nobility” in sufficient number. It is to the
painter Richardson, a mere child at that time, but
the collector afterwards of all the information he
could obtain about Milton at first hand, that we owe
the most vivid picture of Milton's receptions of those
visitors. “I have heard many years since,” says
Richardson, “that he used to sit in a grey coarse
cloth coat at the door of his house near Bunhill
Fields without Moorgate in warm Sunny weather, to
enjoy the fresh air, and so, as well as in his room,
received the visits of people of distinguished parts,
as well as quality.” Such reception at the door of
the house might simplify procedure in most cases,
but would not suit in all weathers, or when the
visitors were of a select sort. We hear, accordingly,
of little musical parties sometimes in the chief room,
G
98 M77, 7 OAW.
when Milton would pay a gallant compliment to some
lady on her singing, or of rarer small supper-parties,
when he would be “delightful company,” the most
urbane of hosts, and, though “no joker,” full of
cheerful and affable talk, often or generally with a
flavour of the sarcastic. On such occasions he was
much more abstemious than he required his guests
to be from the liquors that were on the table, reserv-
ing himself for the invariable pipe of tobacco and
glass of water with which he closed the day at nine
o'clock after visitors were gone. We have a glimpse
or two of these small hospitalities, musical or other,
in the house in Artillery Walk even before 1670,
while the three daughters were still in the house to
share in them ; but they seem to have been more
frequent after 1670, when the daughters had been
boarded out “to learn some curious and ingenious
sorts of manufacture that are proper for women to
learn, particularly embroideries in gold and silver,”
and Milton and his careful wife were left peacefully
together. The occasional hospitalities and receptions
within doors, however, were without prejudice, it is to
be understood, to the chances which Milton’s admirers
and acquaintances had of meeting him in his out-of-
door walks in the vicinity of Bunhill or even further
inwards in the London streets. Then the vision we
have of him is that of a blind, fresh-complexioned,
and lightish-haired man, of middle stature or some-
what less, and of slender figure, dressed still usually
in a grey suit, and with a small silver-hilted sword
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I OO MIL 7'OAV.
by his side, piloted about by some boy or more
mature companion, partly for exercise and partly for
calls at favourite book-shops. Blind though he was,
it was only by his gait that you knew it, for his eyes
were clear and without speck or blemish, Nor,
though the face was sad and careworn, did it tell the
age at which he had arrived. From the still lightish
hair and a tinge of colour still in the fair complexion,
you would have judged him younger than he was.
The calls at bookshops are not a mere guess.
Since the publication of Paradise Lost anything else
that might come from Milton's pen was welcome
enough to the book-buying public, and his dealings
with publishers in the course of the four or five
years through which we have been tracing him had
consequently been pretty numerous. First in 1669
came a trifle in the shape of an English compendium
of Latin Grammar, fished out, doubtless, from among
his old papers; then, in 1670, he published, in a
handsome volume, his History of Britain to the Con-
quest,-all that he had written of his once projected
larger History of Britain; next, in 1671, came the
small and precious volume containing his Paradise
Regained and his Sam.80m. Agonistes together; next,
in 1672, a Latin compendium of Logic,+another
salvage, doubtless, from old manuscript stock; and
in 1673, besides a second and enlarged edition of
the collection of his Minor Poems in 1645, there
appeared a new English pamphlet of his dictation,
entitled Of True Religion, Heresy, Schism, and
M/ZZOAV. I O I
Toleration, consisting of a mild dilution of some of
the principles of his earlier and greater pamphlets by
Way of adaptation of them to a passing crisis of some
anxiety in the Restoration politics. All these issued
from the house in Artillery Walk, and have to be
added to our associations with that vanished tene-
ment in Bunhill. The prose publications of the set
can have been but of moderate interest at the time,
even with Milton's name to them ; but, among all
contemporary books, were there any that can have
been received at once as of such mark and value as
the Paradise Regained, the Samson Agonistes, and
the new edition of the Minor Poems ? They com-
pleted, for estimate by Milton's contemporaries, the
list and varied array of his productions in verse
through his total literary life of nearly fifty years;
and they must have swelled and intensified the chorus
of applause still rising round his great epic.
We have thus reached the year 1674, the last of
Milton's life. To this year, I think, must belong one
more glimpse of him, for which we are again indebted
to the accurate Richardson. Among persons still
alive to as late as about 1730 who had seen and
talked with Milton in his house in Artillery Walk
was a certain Dr. Wright, an aged clergyman of
Dorsetshire; and Richardson, having been fortunate
enough to meet this Dr. Wright, had obtained from
him a recollection of the interview. “He found
him,” reports Richardson, “in a small house—he
thinks but one room on a floor. In that up one
iO2 MVZ TOW.
pair of stairs, which was hung with a rusty green, he
found John Milton, sitting in an elbow-chair, black
clothes and meat enough, pale but not cadaverous,
his hands and fingers gouty and with chalk-stones.
Among other discourse, he expressed himself to this
purpose, that, was he free from the pain this gave
him, his blindness would be tolerable.”
It cannot have been long after this interview when
all Milton's pains were over. Industrious to the last, he
had sent to the press that year the second and revised
edition of his Paradise Lost, and also a small volume
containing a selection of his Latin Familiar Letters,
together with his juvenile Academic Essays at Cam-
bridge; and among manuscripts still lying about him,
to wait for publication at some time, were preserved
copies of his Latin State-letters for the Common.
wealth and Cromwell, and (what he was specially
anxious about) a complete copy, in the hands of
various amanuenses, of his Latin System of JDivinity
direct from the Bible. With this last Work his
thoughts were still occupied when he was seized with
his final ailment, “gout struck in,” the physicians
called it ; and of this he died on Sunday the 8th of
November 1674, at the age of sixty-five years and
eleven months. i
As he had avowedly in the last years of his life
belonged to no ecclesiastical denomination, and as
his wife was a devout Baptist, to be known as
such through her long subsequent widowhood of
fifty-three years, the expectation must have been
A/V/, 7'OM. 1 03
that his burial would be in the Finsbury Fields
Cemetery close at hand, already for several years the
customary burial-ground for Dissenters. He was not
buried there, however, but in the parish church of
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MEMORIAL TO MILTON IN ST. GILES's CHURCH.
St. Giles, Cripplegate, where his father had been
buried nearly twenty-eight years before. It was
thither that, on the 12th of November, there was the
funeral procession from the house in Artillery Walk,










I O4. MILTON.
and through the few intervening streets, that con-
veyed the body of Milton for sepulture with all the
rites of the Church of England burial service at his
grave. The funeral was attended, we are told, by
“all his learned and great friends in London, not
without a friendly concourse of the vulgar.” The
people of Bunhill and its purlieus, it appears, had
turned out in considerable numbers to see the last of
their famous blind man.
T)AVID MASSON.
HERBERT.
(5tſ rſt jetlitti,
Born April 3, 1593; died March 3, 1633.
*=º
“Jſnow you, faire, on what you looke 3
JDivinest love lyes in this booke.
When your hands untie these strings,
Thinke yo' have an angel by the wings.”
RICHARD CRASHAW.
“On Mr. George Herbert's Booke.”
HERBERT.
GEORGE HERBERT, in
character one of the
most Saintly of men, was,
in his biographer, one of
the most fortunate.
For his life-story
has been told for
us by good old
Izaak Walton, most
delightful of anglers
and most genial of
men. The work
is worthy of the
worker. There is
in it such sweetness of spirit and grace, and about it
such breath of old-world fragrance, that, as Words-
Worth says, the feather whence the writer's pen was
shaped might have dropped from an angel's wing.
% ºfCw :
§;§º
§§D:º
ºº
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...”
Our poets, as a rule, are not found in king's houses,






Io9 HERBERT.
or clothed with soft raiment. They have usually
learnt in suffering what they taught in song. George
Herbert, however, was an exception to the rule, for
he sprang of a knightly house on the Welsh borders,
and was born in Montgomery Castle on the 3rd of
April 1593. The Herberts enjoyed a plentiful estate,
which they dispensed with liberal hand. The first
shadow that fell on the life of George was the death
of his father, which happened when he was quite a
youth. He was thus left to the care of his mother,
who fortunately for him was a sort of ideal type of
gracious womanhood. She was the daughter of Sir
Richard Newport, of High Arkall, in the shire of
Salop, and was one of those gifted women such as
men of genius have often had for mothers, who with
strong individuality of character rise to the occasion
when the strain of heavy responsibility is unexpectedly
devolved upon them. Of ready wit, yet cheerful
gravity, of gracious sweetness blended with high
intellectual power, she was the centre of a circle
which included some of the most distinguished men
of her time. She had seven sons and three daugh-
ters, which she used to say was Job's number, and
Job’s distribution. Two of her sons, Herbert and
George, presented in the seventeenth century such
contrast of character and career as we find repeated
in our own time in the case of the two brothers,
IFrancis William and John Henry Newman. George
Herbert was the devout, almost passionate worshipper
of the Church and the faith of Christ, while his
AERBERT. Io9
brother Edward, better known as Lord Herbert of
Cherbury, of cold, sceptical temperament, has been
claimed as the father of English Deism, his book,
“De Veritate,” being an argument against revealed
religion. Strange, indeed is the mystery, as Keble
says, that
“ Brothers in blood and nurture too,
Aliens in heart so oft should prove.”
Educated at home till he was twelve years old,
George was sent to Westminster School, from whence,
in 1608, he was, as King's scholar, elected to Trinity
College, Cambridge, his life for the next sixteen or
seventeen years centering in the University town.
Having been made Master of Arts in 1615, and being
blessed with a high fancy, a civil and sharp wit, and
with a natural elegance both in his behaviour, tongue,
and pen, he was, four years later, chosen Public Orator
to the University. At this stage of his life this dis-
tinction chimed in with his humour. In one of the
letters he says: “The Orator's place is the finest in
the University, though not the gainfullest. But the
commodiousness is beyond the revenue, for he writes
all the University letters, makes all the orations,
be it to king, prince, or whatever comes to the Uni-
versity. To requite these pains he takes place next
the doctors, is at all their assemblies and meetings,
and sits above the proctors; is regent or non-regent at
his pleasure, and suchlike gaynesses, which will please
a young man well.” In this his public capacity it
became his duty to say civil things to James I, when
I IO I/ERRER7.
he honoured the University with his presence. The
King, who had great capacity for believing civil
things when they were spoken concerning himself,
took a liking to the young Orator, and called him to
be in attendance on his person when he went that,
way to hunt at Newmarket, or fly the falcon at Roy-
ston. George's hopes began to rise ; why should
they not ? He was high in the King's favour; he
was often in company with Sir Francis Bacon, the
“great secretary of nature and all learning”; and
he was not meanly valued and loved by the most
eminent and powerful of the court and the nobility.
What if he should come to be Secretary of State
Meantime the King gave him the sinecure of £120
a-year, which had been held by Sir Philip Sidney;
with this and his annuity, and the advantage of
his college and his Oratorship, he was able to enjoy
“his genteel humour for clothes and court-like com-
pany.” - * -
The world went very gaily with the young orator
then, and he was not without hopes that it might
go more gaily still. But He who trains our lives,
and leads us by a way that we know not, had other
thoughts for him than he had for himself. The
world in the Sunshine of which he was now basking
was not the one in which his noblest work was to
be done or his truest glory won. He must therefore
arise and depart. His good friends the Duke of
Richmond and the Marquis of Hamilton were laid low
by death, and what was more significant still, within

AERBERT. I 13
a brief space of time the King himself died too; then
came new people, making a new world, in which there
proved to be a scanty place for him.
Enforced retirement brought enforced reflection.
He woke up as from a dream, coming to his own
true self. It was a time of great struggle, “for
ambitious desires and the outward glory of this world
are not easily laid aside,” but a man must sometimes
lose his life in order to find it, and George Herbert
came out of that time of sternest discipline a new-
born man, born from above. An altered life followed
upon the altered feeling, and in process of time we find
him carrying out a long-cherished wish of his mother's,
and giving himself to the service of the Church.
His first parish was that of Leighton Bromswold,
in Huntingdonshire. The prospect was not brilliant,
for the roof of the church had fallen in, and the
building had been in a ruinous plight for twenty
years and more. In those old days churches were
Sometimes roughly handled. In the same diocese in
Which Herbert began his clerical career inquiry had to
be made about morrice-dancers, hawks and hounds
being brought into the church; in the next county a
curate had amused himself by baiting a bear in the
church at Christmas, and a rector and his church-
Wardens signalised Shrovetide by having cock-fights
in the chancel at which crowds were gathered and
Wagers laid; while in one parish, a few miles to the
West, the lord of the manor pulled down the church,
sold the lead and the bells, and turned the chancel
H
II 4. AAERAEPER7.
into a kennel for his hounds, and the steeple into a
dovehouse for his pigeons. So that while Herbert
found his church in pitiable plight, he was no worse
off than some of his neighbours. But he soon set
about reform, and with funds from his own family and
many noble friends, he left the long-dilapidated build-
ing, as Walton says, for workmanship a costly mosaic,
for the form an exact cross, and for decency and
beauty one of the fairest churches in the land.
But it is with a charge in the south-west, and not
with this parish in the Midlands, that the fairest,
memories of Herbert's life are associated. As the
wayfarer goes from Salisbury to Wilton, the pleasant.
seat of the Earls of Pembroke, some two miles on the
road he finds himself in the peaceful little hamlet of
Bemerton, where, if he have but the least spark of
poetry in his soul, he will be sure to linger and look
round. For the interest of this tranquil spot is not
to be measured by the extent of its acres or the num-
ber of its people. Three rectors at least have made
the place memorable. In the old parsonage, over the
way from the church, lived Norris, the poet and
divine, and Coxe, the traveller and historian, and if
they are not remembered in its associations it is
because a greater name still has overshadowed theirs
with saintly memories and poetic fame. Beyond all
others George Herbert is and ever will be the parson.
of Bemerton. The people will tell you that his hands
planted the aged fig-tree still spreading its broad
leaves over the rectory wall, and the medlar-tree still
HERE ERT. f f 5
putting forth its fruit in the rectory garden. It was
he who restored from decay both church and parson-
age; and the meadows near, made beautiful with
spreading trees, and fragrant with flowers and the
sweet breath of kine, are called his meadows still.
“I have now brought you,” says gentle Izaak, “to
the parsonage of Bemerton, and to the thirty-sixth
year of Herbert's age, and must now stop and bespeak
you to prepare for an almost incredible story of the
great sanctity of the short remainder of his holy life
—a life so full of charity, humility, and all Christian
virtues that it deserves the eloquence of St. Chrysos-
tom to commend and declare it.”
For the details of that Saintly life we must refer
our readers to Walton himself, for if they seek for
them elsewhere they will be in danger of losing the
aroma of the wine. It is enough to say that in
prayerful spirit Herbert resolved to be true to his
vocation in an age when men stood quite as much in
need of good examples as of good precepts, and he
tried so to live as by his humble and charitable life
to win upon others and bring glory to Him whom he
had taken for Master and Lord. Pleasant stories
linger about the country-side suggestive of his loving
'spirit and kindly helpfulness to burdened men. As,
for example, this ; On his way to Salisbury he came
upon a poor man with a poorer horse, which had
fallen under its load. It was a case for sympathy, but
for sympathy of practical sort, so he flung off his coat
and fell to helping the man first to unload and lift
1 i 6 HER/3 ER7.
up, and then after that to load his horse. His town
friends when he reached them were surprised to see
him, usually so trim and meat, now so soiled and dis-
composed, and one of them ventured to suggest that
he had rather disparaged himself by employment so
undignified; to which he replied that what he had
done “would prove music to him at midnight,”
whereas the omission would have made discord in his
conscience every time he passed the place where the
poor man needed help.
A poetical soul, the one delight of his life in the
way of recreation was music, setting and singing his
own hymns and anthems to viol and lute. They
were as the days of heaven upon earth to him when
he could go over to Salisbury and hear the organ-
roll in the cathedral there. The building itself rising
in simple majesty from luxurious lawn and girdled
with noble trees; its exquisite symmetry and fair
proportions, its windows as many as the days of the
year, its marble pillars counting as many as the year
counts hours, and its gates as numerous as the moons
of the year—all this stately pile gave him pleasure,
as it has given to men in every generation since ; but
the billowy majesty of the music within stirred him
more deeply still, lifting his soul heavenwards till he
seemed to hear “church bells beyond the stars” and
there came “the Sound of glory ringing in his ears.”
After three brief but memorable years of Christ-like
Service this saintly soul passed to that higher sphere
whither his thoughts had so often gone before him.
AAEA'A' ER7. 117
As the time drew near for him to go, he took from
beneath his pillow and handed to a friend the manu-
script of a book which from that day to this has had
enduring place in good men's hearts. It was his wish,
he said, that it should be taken to his old friend
and former neighbour in Huntingdonshire, Nicholas
Ferrar, of Little Gidding, “ and if he can think it.
may turn to the advantage of any dejected soul, let
it be made public ; if not, let him burn it, for I and
it are less than the least of God’s mercies.” The
book thus modestly ushered into life had for its title,
“The Temple; or, Sacred Poems and Private Ejacula-
tions.” It has been described as the enigmatical
history of a difficult resignation. It would be easy to
point out blemishes in the book, such as its verbal
conceits, its grotesque puns, its odd metres and Occa-
sional obscurities, and it would not be difficult to
show that its churchiness is extreme and its sacerdo-
talism unscriptural. But, somehow, one has no heart
to find fault with it. It is a book to be taken as a
friend to be loved, rather than as a performance to be
criticised. As a manual of devotion it is as though
a Seraph covered his face with his wings in rapturous
adoration ; as a poem it is full of that subtle percep-
tion of analogies to be found only in works of genius;
while the passage on “Man” shows how the poets in
their loftiest moods may sometimes anticipate some
of the most wonderful discoveries of science and some
of the sublimest speculations of philosophy.
The book may be described as a psalter in verse, an
I I 8 Aſ ERAE EA’7.
anticipation, in the manner of the seventeenth cen-
tury, of Keble’s “Christian Year.” The conception
is that of an Ideal Church. It begins, as the actual
building does, with the church porch, in other words,
the moralities of life ; the sound, sober utterances of
common sense precede what has to be said of the
struggles and aspirations of the life within. Putting
his counsels into rhyme—for a verse may find him
whom a sermon flies—he would have men be sober,
chaste, and diligent ; to live by rule, for houses and
commonwealths are built by rule, and the trusty Sun
is not to be enticed from his ecliptic line; who lives
by rule is, therefore, in good company, while he who
l:eeps no guard upon himself is slack, and rots to
nothing at the next great thaw. Bringing us past
the church porch itself, he shows us there is much to
See and learn. There is an altar—“a broken altar,
Lord, thy servant rears, made of a heart and cemented
with tears”; there is a sacrifice, the crucified Christ,
central to all things, His face pale, His eyes full of a
far-off look of love and sorrow, and His lips uttering
the awful question of desertion, asking of heaven,
earth, and hell alike, “Was ever grief like mine . "
It is as we look on that sorrowful face of His that we
solve otherwise inscrutable mysteries. Philosophers
have measured mountains, fathomed the depths of
Seas, and states, and kings—
“But there are two vast spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove :
Yet few there are that sound them—Sin and Love,”

Aſ ERAE EA’7. 121
As to the first of these, how much has been done
to guard us from it 7 Lord, with what care hast
Thou begirt us round !
“IPulpits and Sundays, sorrow dogging sin,
Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes,
Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in,
Dibles laid open, millions of surprises,
“Blessings beforehand, ties of gratefulness,
The sound of glory ringing in our ears;
Without, our shame; within, our consciences;
Angels and grace, eternal hopes and fears.”
Having thus taken us into the Temple, everything
there is turned to pious use, the church monuments
and music, the church floor and windows, the very
lock and key. But Sunday, when the church has its
reverent worshippers, stirs him to the most exquisite
thought of all. To him it is—
“The day most calm, most bright,
The first of this, the next World’s bud,
The couch of time; care's balm and bay:
The week were dark, but for thy light:
Thy torch doth show the way.
“The Sundays of man’s life,
Threaded together on time's string,
Make bracelets to adorn the wife
Of the eternal glorious king.
On Sunday Heaven's gate stands ope;
J31essings are plentiful and rife,
More plentiful than hope.”
Some of the other poems also, which go to make
up the unity of the Temple, are exquisite with a
fragrance all their own. That on Virtue, for example,
in which the poet tells us that sweet day, the bridal
I 2.2 AZZA'A' EA-7.
of the earth and sky, must die, and the dew weep its
fall to-night; the sweet rose in colour rich and brave,
whose root is ever in its grave, must also die; SO must
sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses :
“Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
Iike seasoned timber, never gives;
IBut though the whole world turn to coal
Then chiefly lives.”
The poem with the quaint title of “The Pulley”
has been often quoted. It tells how, when God at
first made man, He, from a glass of blessings standing
by, poured on him all he could. Strength first made
a way, then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honour,
pleasure, everything but rest, there God made a stay :
rest in the bottom lay :
“For if I should (said He)
Destow this jewel also on my creature,
IHe would adore my gifts instead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature :
So both should losers be.
“Yet let him keep the rest,
J3ut keep them with repining restlessness:
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast.”
Even more quaintly named is the beautiful lyric,
“The Quip”:
“The merry world did on a day
With his train-bands and mates agree
To meet together where I lay,
And all in sport to jeer at me.
AERPERT. I 23
“First, Beauty crept into a rose,
Which when I pluck'd not, ‘Sir,’ said she,
‘Tell me, I pray, whose hands are those P’
But Thou shalt answer, Lord, for me.
“Then Money came, and chinking still,
‘What tune is this, poor man P’ said he
‘I heard in music you had skill.’ *
IBut Thou shalt answer, Lord, for me.
“Then came brave Glory puffing by
In silks that whistled, who but he P
IHe scarce allow'd me half an eye.
Dut Thou shalt answer, Lord, for me.
“Then came quick Wit and Conversation,
And he would needs a comfort be,
And, to be short, make an oration.
But Thou shalt answer, Lord, for me.
“Yet when the hour of Thy design
To answer these fine things shall come,
Speak not at large, say I am Thine;
And then they have their answer home.”
Space will not allow us to do more than indicate
“The British Church,” “The Collar,” “The Flower,”
“Aaron,” and “The Elixir' as taking place with those
among the gems of the book. But the very crown
and flower of all is the poem on “Man,” which is
Miltonic in its sublimity and conception :
“Tor us the winds do blow;
The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow.
Nothing we see, but means our good,
As our delight, or as our treasure :
The whole is either our cupboard of food,
Or cabinet of pleasure.
I 24. AIEA’APAEA’7.
“The stars have us to bed ;
Night draws the curtain, which the sun withdraws:
Music and light attend our head.
All things unto our flesh are kind
In their descent and being ; to our mind
In their ascent and cause.
“More servants wait on man
Than he'll take notice of : in every path
JHe treads down that which doth befriend him,
When sickness makes him pale and wan.
Oh, mighty love man is one world and hath
Another to attend him.”
JOHN BROWN.
COWPER.
iſſilliam (iſſuytr,
Born November 26, 1731 ; died April 25, 1800.
gºmºsºmºsºsºmº
“ 0 poets, from a maniac's tongue was poured the deathless singing !
O Christians, at your cross of hope a hopeless hand was clinging 1
0 men, this man in brotherhood your weary paths beguiling,
Groaned inly while he taught you peace and died while ye are smiling.”
MRS. BROWNING.
“Cowper's Grave.”
COWPER.
# E have all of us probably gazed with
eager interest on spots visited by
us for the first time, but previously
made familiar after a fashion
through some favourite passage in
literature. To me, I confess, it seems to matter
little whether that literature be fact or fiction. If it
be the latter the imagination of the writer has all
but created it into a reality for me. I have on
‘Several occasions, for example, explored the battle-
fields of Towton and Waterloo. The marks of the
latter conflict are visible to all men still, but in the
former it is also easy to make out all the main
features of the battle. Traditions lingering among
the villagers show the scenes of particular episodes;
ithe blended red and white roses grow over the two
great mounds which cover the dead, and a broken
tomb in the churchyard marks the burial-place of
one of them. The wind blows gently over the hill;


128 CO WPEA’.
there is no one in sight; you give full play to your
imagination concerning that terrible Palm Sunday
four hundred and twenty odd years ago, and are
assured that your imagination cannot be very unlike
the reality.
I turn to another reminiscence—that of a visit to
Lesmahagow, in Lanarkshire, and the old castle hard
by, which Sir Walter Scott has made known to us by
the name of Tillietudlem. In Lesmahagow churchyard
you may see the graves of the brave Covenanters, and
at Tillietudlem the window out of which Cuddie
Headrigg's sweetheart poured the scalding broth on
his head. What reader of “Old Mortality,” visiting
either spot, would not think it infidelity to question
the details which the great magician has woven before
the eyes of his imagination ? I have many a time,
walking on the Great North Road of our forefathers,
imagined the lumbering Waggon bringing up Roderick
Random and Strap from Edinburgh, have seen in
fancy Daniel Quilp shambling down Bevis Marks to
visit Sampson Brass, and Falstaff running away in
the dark down Gadshill. It requires a vigorous
effort of the will to distinguish these scenes from
those of actual history, concerning which I have
wistfully asked myself before now, standing on the
respective scenes, “What was the exact position of
Charles I.’s scaffold, and of Louis XVI.'s 7 Which
way did they look 2 Which way did the old woman
come who brought the faggot to burn Huss, when he
made his comment, O Samcta simplicitas 2."
CO WPER. I 29
It is somewhat different when you visit localities
which poets have made famous without attaching
fictitious scenes to them. Rydal and Ulleswater were
beautiful before Wordsworth ever saw them, but he
has taught us to seek out and appreciate their beau-
ties. Nobody, probably, would have discovered the
loveliness of the flat lands of Tincolnshire and Bucks,
if Tennyson and Cowper had not made them ground
as sacred and dear to English hearts as the poets of
old made Parnassus and Tempe, and shown us how
to rejoice in them.
Strangely different are the destinies of the poets'
haunts according to their respective localities.
Dickens's London will have almost entirely disap-
peared by the end of the nineteenth century. Two
scenes only of Milton's life can in the least be iden-
tified. The landscape which inspired “L’Allegro,” at
Horton, cannot be very different from what it was ;
the house at Chalfont is the only habitation of his
which has not been pulled down. He never saw it,
for he was blind when he went there ; but it was a
righteous action of the people to preserve it as he left
it. There was pathos in the word addressed to me
by an inhabitant of the village, as I walked down the
street : “That was an old butcher's shop, sir; you
can see where the window was ; you may depend
upon it that it was there that Milton used to buy his
meat.” It was pleasant to hear any word of reverence
for the memorials of a great man, though in this case
it was certainly of the slightest character, Gray's
I
I 30 COWAEER.
“Elegy” is so beautiful that it is no wonder that
half-a-dozen churchyards contend for the honour of
being that of the poem. But the interest of this
poem is not that of locality. The slight touches of
description would apply to half the village church-
yards in England.
But when you come to memories of Cowper, you
find them manifold, unmistakable, and in many cases
exactly the things as he saw them. Far from the
busy world, the greater portion of his localities have
remained unaltered. It is my purpose to show this,
and to ask the reader to accompany me over the
ground which I have visited because of love and
reverence for the amiable and gentle man.
Our first scene, indeed, has one disqualification,
such as I have noted in the case of some of our other
writers. At Berkhampstead he was born on the 26th
of November 1731. The Rectory as seen in the
picture is not the home of his birth, which was pulled
down about fifty years ago, to be replaced by a new
house on the same site. The noble church is that of
which his father was rector, and the landscape around
it lived in Cowper's memory vividly all his life, though
he never, I believe, visited it after his father's death.
In a Latin poem, Votum, written at Olney, he ex-
presses his longing to end his days and be buried at
his native place:
“Fata modo dederint quas olim in rure paterno
Delicias, procul arte, procul formidine novi,
Quam vellem ignotus, quod mens mea. Semper avebat,
Ante larem proprium placidam expectare Senectam,
CO WPAEA’. I 3 I
Tum demum, exactis non infeliciter annis,
Sortiri tacitum lapidem, aut sub cespite condi.”
The relic which will most attract the visitor of to-
day is the grave of his mother within the altar-rails.
She died when he was only six years old, poor child !
and fifty-three years later, Mrs. Bodham, her great-
niece, gave Cowper her portrait. The poem which
he wrote upon it, probably the most beautiful elegy
in the language, is hardly more touching than the
letter which he wrote acknowledging the gift. The
picture is now in the National Portrait Gallery, pre-
sented, if I mistake not, by the late Mr. Bodham
Donne, a great-grand-nephew of Mrs. Cowper. It
shows a singularly sweet and gentle face; light flaxen
hair, without any band or comb, streaming down upon
the shoulders. A few years after her death, Mr.
Cowper married again, but their son had left home.
His intercourse with his step-mother was always
slight, friendly but not affectionate.
The next few years of the boy's life can be rapidly
summarized. He was sent first to a village school in
Hertfordshire, within a year of his mother's death,
where he was cruelly bullied; at ten years of age he
went to Westminster school, where he became an
excellent scholar, and he was fond of writing verses
even in those days. On leaving school he went into
a solicitor's office for three years, then to the Temple,
and was called to the Bar in 1754, but never prac-
tised. Through family influence he was made a
Commissioner of Bankrupts, with an income of £60
I 32 CO WPER.
a year, and he wrote a few magazine papers. But his
career was suddenly checked by the terrible calamity
of madness, and he was sent to a lunatic asylum for
two years. Being discharged cured in 1765 he
resolved to live in London no more, and retired to
Huntingdon so as to be within reach of his brother,
who lived at Cambridge. His relatives agreed to
Subscribe an annual allowance for him, but he soon
got into difficulties of ways and means through inex-
perience, and was in rather a bad way, when a young
man who had just returned home to Huntingdon,
after taking his degree, noticed him in church, and
after a few days spoke to him. This young man,
William Cawthorne Unwin, was the son of Morley
and Mary Unwin. Morley Unwin was the non-
resident rector of Grimston, in Norfolk, who made an
income at Huntingdon by taking pupils, and Cowper
describes him as a very excellent and pious man,
though the records of his parish contain several com-
plaints of his neglect of duty there. After a few
weeks' intercourse, Cowper became an inmate of their
home (shown on the extreme right of the cut on the
opposite page), and so began a connexion which was
only terminated by death. -
Cowper is pronounced by Southey “the best letter-
writer in the English language,” and this is no extra-
vagant praise. A few of those letters which have
been preserved date from before his insanity, but now
that he settled down with the Unwins the series be-
comes full and regular, Not a dream of their ever
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CO WPER. I 35
being published entered his head, but his friends felt
that there was a wonderful charm about these letters,
and preserved them. From them we gather a very
interesting account of his daily life at Huntingdon.
After breakfast they read the Bible or a sermon,
at eleven went to church, where there was daily
service; then each went his or her own way till
dinner-time at three. Cowper varied his occupations,
reading, walking, riding, gardening. After dinner
they sat conversing in the garden in fine weather;
when it was otherwise they stayed indoors and Sang
hymns. In summer-time, after tea a long walk, then
Supper, a hymn, and family prayers.
It was no doubt a pleasant life for the shy, retiring
man, and nothing disturbed their tranquillity until,
without warning, it was suddenly destroyed. Mr.
Unwin was thrown from his horse and killed in June,
1767. His son had recently left home on his ordi-
nation to a curacy, and his daughter, the only other
child, was about to be married. Mrs. Unwin and
Cowper were thus left alone ; just at that moment
John Newton, the curate of Olney, called on Mrs.
Unwin at the request of a friend, and hearing of their
perplexity concerning the future, agreed to look out
for a house where they could live together. He found
one at Olney, to which they moved in September,
1767, and here they lived a curious, Platonic kind of
life for more than nineteen years. It is with Olney,
therefore, that the poet's name is most closely asso-
ciated, and the visitor thither to-day will find no
I 36 CO WPER.
difficulty in identifying almost every scene which
Cowper describes, whether in his poems or in his
letters. To make this clear it will be necessary to
enter into some details.
A wide, almost deserted street, from which narrow
footways on each side lead to two other parallel
streets, makes up one moiety of the little town. Let
us follow the street down. It widens out as we pass
along into a large open space—the market-place.
Facing you at the end of the street, in this market-
place, is Cowper's house.
Now I beg the reader's attention to the picture
representing that spot. The fine elm (now protected
by a circular iron railing) was there in Cowper's time;
the front of the house, too, is much as he left it,
but it had imitation battlements, and the interior
has undergone a few alterations. Two roads pass
on from this market-place, past the house. Let
us first follow that to the left. The reader will
See a row of cottages; they are covered with
thatch, and have a somewhat squalid appearance,
and are still known, as they were to the poet, as
“Silver End.” Following the road down you soon
come to the slow-winding Ouse. You cross it by a
foot-bridge, ascend a gentle hill, and are in less than
a mile at the village of Clifton Reynes, with a pleasant
parsonage, and a quaint and interesting church. In
those days the incumbent thereof was a Mr. Jones,
with whom Cowper soon formed a slight acquaint-
ance. Mrs. Jones had a pretty, graceful sister—Lady
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CO WAEER. I 39
Austen—who used occasionally to visit her; but
Some years elapsed before this lady and the poet
met. The two villages, though so near, were abso-
lutely separated, when, as was very frequently the
case, the river was swollen and the mud in the roads
knee-deep. Now let us return to the market-place.
To the right, a few yards from our sight in this pic-
ture, is a road which almost immediately branches
into two ; one ascends a hill to the right, and goes
up to the village of Weston Underwood, two miles
off; the other winds round to the left towards the
river. Pursuing that, we pass the church on our
right and the vicarage on our left, and soon reach the
long bridge which leads to the village of Emberton,
on the same ridge as Clifton Reynes. I feel confident
that the reader will have no difficulty in following
this detail; it will enable him to understand the pic-
tures, and also the allusions which we have to make
to the poet's writings.
First, take the vicarage. It stands back to back
with Cowper's house. The gardens behind the two
houses adjoin, and are separated by a wall. In that
vicarage in those days, lived John Newton, who was
the curate in charge ; the eccentric, disreputable
vicar, Moses Browne, being non-resident. Newton
was a man of remarkable physical power, five years
older than Cowper, vigorous and burly, too, in his
strenuous preaching of the theology which he had
imbibed from Whitefield. He had come into a most
difficult charge : the people had been neglected for
140 CO WAE/E/e.
years; they were poor, improvident, degraded, and
there were no resident gentry. He was a good
preacher, and the people (Olney had a population of
2,500) crowded the church. It has been altered
since his days, but they have wisely left the gallery
which he caused to be built in 1765, to accommodate
his many hearers. Still he was deeply disappointed,
and his journals are full of complaints of the un-
profitableness of his labour. Unfortunately, with the
most excellent intention towards Cowper, he in-
judiciously employed him not only to visit the sick
indefatigably, but to take part in the fervid, excited
prayer-meetings which he had established. It was
too much for the shy, nervous man; he became
gloomy and despondent. The proposal that they
should jointly produce a volume of “Olney Hymns”
was a happier idea. It gave Cowper congenial
occupation, and was the cause of his first appearing
in print as a poet. The volume was not published,
however, until 1779.
Here, then, we have the conditions of the poet's
first years at Olney : a population poor and half
heathen ; a spiritual guide whose theology was of the
narrowest Calvinistic type, a companion kind and
gentle, but ill-educated, and himself well-read, though
with few opportunities of getting books; tremulous
and nervous, but with a rich fund of humour, and
keen powers of observation. With his companion,
Mrs. Unwin, he soon entered into a marriage engage-
ment; the fact is explicitly stated both by Newton,
CO WPAEA’. 14 I
who more than any one in the world was in their
confidence, and by Bull, an Independent minister of
Newport Pagnell, one of their most constant visitors.
But a second attack of madness in January, 1773,
caused the engagement to be first postponed, and
finally abandoned. There used to be a fair held
every May in the market-place, in front of Cowper's
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windows. To be out of the sight and hearing of it,
Cowper went, in 1773, to the vicarage, and once there,
entreated not to be sent back. Newton had not the
heart to refuse him, and there he remained for a
whole year. It was during this attack that he again
took up the occupation of gardening, and when he
returned home in May, 1774, he threw himself into








I42 CO WPER.
it vigorously, as well as into carpentering. And then
it was that a little classic spot took its origin, which
will always be dear to pilgrims to Cowper-land. -
It is very seldom that you find a place, known only
to you by reading, answer to the ideas which you had
formed of it when you come to visit it. For definite
ideas you do form beforehand, if you have been
interested by your book. I had read Cowper's Poems
and Letters with great care, and had seen pictures of
many of the localities, and in nearly every case the
reality answered wonderfully to the conception. But,
somehow, I had thought of Cowper's garden as rather
sloping upward from the house, and the summer-
house as at the top of the slope under the wall; this
was a mistake. The garden at the back is quite level,
and the little summer-house is in the middle of it.
The poet had first built himself a green-house, but he
Soon turned it into a sitting-room, lining it with
matting, and making a new floor. There are many
amusing notes about this green-house, but it has now
disappeared. But the summer-house is still as he left
it, and the spectator looks on his very workmanship.
And in this little spot the greater part of his poems
were subsequently written. He slowly recovered,
though a deep melancholy still frequently oppressed
him ; resumed correspondence in 1776, after a four
years' interval, and in his letters began to enclose
poems, which he was now constantly composing, to
whosoever his correspondent happened to be. It
was not till 1780 that, at Mrs. Unwin's suggestion,
CO WPER. I 43
he began his larger compositions, and in 1782 he
published his first volume. There is hardly anything
in that volume of local description. The series of
longer poems are inspired by what he has read in the
newspapers, or remembers of his former London days.
The smaller pieces are fables, translations, medita-
tions over his books. It was a happy expression of
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INTERIOR OF THE SUMMER-FIOUSE,
the late J. R. Green, that the recluse in an out-of-
the-way village set himself in this first volume the
task of becoming a Christian Juvenal. One amusing
note concerning these satires comes opportunely here ;
it is thoroughly characteristic of Cowper. He was
unsparing in his denunciations of customs and habits
to which he himself was not addicted, such as ora-




I 44 CO WAEEA’.
torios, whist-playing, fox-hunting. In his poem
“Conversation’’ he is quite fierce against smoking,
calls tobacco a “pernicious weed,” and says it is
“unfriendly to society's chief joys.” But our picture
of the interior of this summer-house shows a movable
board on the floor. It covered a recess which the
satirist constructed to contain Mr. Bull's pipes. In
other words, after he had written his verses he formed
his friendship with Bull, who was an inveterate
smoker, and whose visit to the little spot was the
signal for lifting the board and taking out the pipe.
A more important instance of charity prevailing
over prejudice is seen in this. Whilst the poems
were in the press he became a warm friend of a gentle-
man who had recently come to reside at Weston Under-
wood, Sir John Throckmorton, a Roman Catholic.
Cowper had written some fierce lines against the
Roman Church in his “Expostulation.” He now
sent to the printer and had the leaf cancelled, substi-
tuting for them lines 390—413. In my own copy
of the first edition the cancel is quite visible. It is
certainly a gross wrong to his memory that a few
modern editions, issuing from firms devoted to theo-
logical party, should restore the rejected lines without
a hint that he had withdrawn them.
I must return once more to the market-place. On
my visit there I went into a shop opposite Cowper's
front windows, to make a trifling purchase. The
vendor said: “Famous shop this, sir; this is the shop
where Cowper first saw Lady Austen.” It is quite
CowPER. 145
true. She had become a widow, and was now spend-
ing much of her time with her sister, Mrs. Jones, at
Clifton. One day Cowper saw from his window the
two ladies shopping opposite, was much struck with
Lady Austen's appearance, and with a little difficulty
persuaded Mrs. Unwin to invite her to tea. And thus
a friendship began which had an important influence
on the poet's life. She was lively and amusing as
well as pretty, and she was as much attracted towards
Cowper as he towards her. Before very long, on
Newton's removal to the rectory of St. Mary Wool-
noth, in London, she took up her residence in
the vicarage, and a doorway was made through the
wall which divided the gardens, so that a continual
intercourse might go on. For a good while only
pleasantness resulted from the new state of things.
It was the most sunny period in Cowper's life.
One evening she told him, doubtless in a delightful
manner, the story of John Gilpin. He lay in bed
laughing the whole night, and next morning pro-
ceeded to versify it. The biographers imply that
he produced this ballad at breakfast-time next
jmorning, which certainly is not probable. I met
at Olney with an old man who told me that he
was the nephew of the barber who used to dress
Cowper's wig (by the way, the block which he
used is now preserved in the summer-house), and
that the poet wrote the ballad piecemeal, and used
to give the successive portions to the barber to read,
written on odd bits of paper. Neither Lady Austen
K
146 CO WPER.
nor Cowper ever dreamt that this was the poem which
was to make him famous, but it was so. The pub-
lished volume had hung fire, though the reviews had
mostly been civil to it. Lady Austen now begged
him to try his hand at blank verse, and gave him a
subject. “The Task” was the result. That, too,
might have fallen as flat as its predecessor but for
“John Gilpin,” which had been published by William
Unwin anonymously in the Public Advertiser, and
had already attracted some notice when Henderson, a
well-known actor, read it with some other things to a
public audience, among whom was Mrs. Siddons, at
Freemasons' Hall. It “brought down the house" so
effectually that scores of editions were printed, besides
continuations and parodies; and pictures of the
famous horseman were seen in all the print-shop
windows. The Library of the British Museum has
quite a “John Gilpin” collection of literature. And
when Cowper proceeded to publish “The Task,” and
found that he had not quite matter enough for a
volume, he added this and two other poems. “John
Gilpin” was even named on the title-page at the
instance of the publisher, who rightly judged that it
would add to the popularity of the book. People
bought it expecting to find much racy matter ; and
were surprised, but not disappointed, to receive a
volume of serious but delightful verse.
It was received with enthusiastic favour, and com-
mon consent at once placed the author at the head of
the poets of the age. It is sad to have to tell that
|
:
“Come, Evening, Once again, Season of peace :
Return, sweet Evening, and continue long '''
The Task.

CowPER. I 49
before the book was published the friendship with
Lady Austen had ceased, and the causes are not
obscure. A tender feeling had grown up and in-
creased in her heart towards the refined and gentle
poet; she was conscious that she had brought much
sunlight into his life, and she would fain have married
him. His friend and biographer, Hayley, who writes
with studied obscurity about it all, says that Cowper
“returned her tenderness with innocent gallantry.”
That is hardly the expression to use of the following
lines, which he addressed to her on learning that she
wore a lock of his hair in a diamond star on her
breast. She gave them to a nephew years afterwards.
Hayley never saw them, nor knew of their exist-
€In C6 :—
“The star that beams on Anna's breast
Conceals her William's hair ;
'Twas lately severed from the rest
To be promoted there.
“The heart that beats beneath that breast
Is William’s well I know, -
A nobler prize and richer far
Than India could bestow.
“She thus his favoured lock prefers,
To make her William shine ;
The ornament indeed is hers,
But all the honour mine.”
Her tender feeling was reciprocated, but there were
insurmountable obstacles. No doubt the marriage
engagement with Mrs. Unwin was at an end, but
it would hardly be possible for human nature not
to feel jealous, after their many years together, to find
ISO CO WPER.
the chief place in his heart usurped by a recent
acquaintance. And Cowper in honour felt that, and
sacrificed his affection to his gratitude. But it was
a serious loss to him, and from that day onward
melancholy again began to grow upon him.
I have already said that Cowper's first volume of
poems is altogether devoid of any local descrip-
tions. The second, consisting principally of “The
Task,” is full of them. Perhaps it is hardly neces-
sary to remind the reader of the origin of that work.
Lady Austen begged him to write something in
blank verse. He replied that he lacked a subject.
“Subject | Nonsense " was the reply. “You can
write on anything. Take this sofa for a subject.”
And so he did. Hence the general name, “The
Task "; and hence the first book of it, “The Sofa.”
The opening lines indicate at once the haphazard
origin. He begins with a comic historical introduc-
tion; the progress from benches to three-legged stools,
then to chairs, settees, sofas. Then he hopes that he
may not be compelled to lie on a sofa because of
gout, and this leads him to tell us that he is very
fond of Walking. And so at length he is under way,
and from this moment “The Task” is a description
of his Olney life; and it is wonderful to observe how
descriptions written more than a hundred years ago
answer to the present aspect of the country. Let us
start with the first poem in the volume by way of
illustration. (For convenience' sake I may mention
that I am using the Globe edition.) He says (lines
CO WPEA’. I 5 I
140-3) that he finds, though he is no longer young,
that his love of walking has not diminished, nor yet
his power; that the scenes that soothed or charmed
him when young are still soothing and of power to
charm him now. And in his first draft he then went
on immediately to describe his walks. But he after-
wards inserted lines 144-153, addressed to Mrs.
Unwin. This interpolation is a curious and touching
morsel of literary skill. As I have already noted,
though he began the poem to gratify Lady Austen,
he broke off communication with her before finish-
ing it, though not long before. Then it was that
whilst preparing it for the press he inserted those
tender lines to the old companion that he feared he
had slighted.
But let us follow him in his walk with his “dear
companion.” They are on an eminence, looking down
on the “slow-winding Ouse.” The eminence, so re-
ferred to, is the road from Olney market-place up to
Weston Underwood. The Ouse flows through the
vale on the left, and there is an extensive view as
you ascend. But our poet soon gets off the high road,
moves away into the footpaths on his right, and so
arrives at the cottage which he calls the “Peasant's
Nest.” The cottage is as he saw it, but the “ring of
branching elms” that almost hid it is gone, and the
place is tolerably conspicuous in the landscape. The
“colonnade” (line 252), the “rustic bridge” (line 267),
the “proud alcove” (line 278), the “little naiad” (line
328), the “wilderness” (line 351), the “grove” (line
152 CO WPEZ'.
354), all are there, and the descriptions might have
been written yesterday. One change there is, unfor-
tunately; the mansion which formed the centre of
this estate was pulled down in 1828.
“The folded gates would bar my progress now
But that the lord of this enclosed demesne
Admits me to a share.”
So does the poet thank Sir John Throckmorton for
allowing him a key of the gates leading into his
gardens and private grounds. The gates are there
still, but the space within is blank.
Of Sir John Throckmorton I have already said a
few words. He came to reside at Weston in 1782.
on his brother George's death, though he did not
succeed to the baronetcy till 1791, when his father
died, at the age of ninety-two. Cowper and he
became the closest of friends. The poet's descriptions
in his letters of the kindness and sweetness of Mr.
Throckmorton and his wife are quite enthusiastic.
In that most delightful book of Dean Burgon, the
“Lives of Twelve Good Men,” he chooses as his
“good layman” his brother-in-law, Charles Longuet
Higgins. It was impossible to have made a better
Selection or to have treated the subject in a more
graceful and beautiful manner. I have two reasons
for alluding to this life. When I visited Olney in
1884 a kind lady, to whom I carried letters of intro-
duction, offered to drive me over to Turvey, a village
four or five miles distant, of which Mr. Higgins was
the Squire. She assured me that he would be glad
CO WPER. I 53
to welcome me, and that he had some relics of the
poet. I gladly accepted her kind offer, and though I
saw these with much interest, there were two things
which delighted me yet more that day. The first
was the picturesque old Squire, with his antique
black garments, his beautiful long white hair, and
snowy collar turned over on his shoulders, and withal
his exquisite courtesy ; and the second was his
brother-in-law and future biographer, Burgon—of
manners and address as sweet and winning as his
own—who happened to be staying in the house
when I visited it. He told us two stories of Cowper,
of which more presently; let me fall back upon his
biography of Mr. Higgins just now. Mr. Higgins's
father was a lad of eighteen when Cowper emerged
into fame on the publication of “The Task,” and the
poet on hearing that the young man was able to repeat
many of his poems by heart, invited him to “a dish
of tea.” (All readers of last century literature will
recognise the strict orthodoxy of that expression.) It
was the beginning of a permanent and close friend-
ship. Dean Burgon says he heard Mr. Higgins in his
old age pour out most entertaining reminiscences of
the Olney circle. I must quote one paragraph :—
“It is evident from many a hint in Cowper's
letters, and especially from what I used to pick up
from Mr. Higgins, that the great charm of these
social gatherings was the table-talk; to which—what
need to say it —Cowper was ever the chief contri-
butor. “We dined yesterday at the hall,” he writes,
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st ‘plus . Todayoſ) IIW , qpqal (Ionuſ OS jou. SuM qi quul
uſuldxe on pasm suſ33 H IIW 'uoſhusto Auoo Ioſ ojiu
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CO WAEEA’. iss
persons and the localities discoursed of; but above
all, it resulted from the playful humour—call it,
rather, wit—which was at all times prepared to con-
struct out of the slenderest materials an amusing
incident. So ready and so graceful, in fact, was the
poet's fancy, that he knew how to make an amusing
story out of mothing. Did there exist any way of
writing down the buzzing of a gnat—-so as to distin-
guish the droning noise he makes at the distance from
the stridulous sound by which he announces that he
has at last found you out on your sleepless pillow—
I would convincingly illustrate what I have just been
saying. But it is mot possible; and so the story must
remain unwritten, and at last depart with me.”
I am afraid it is a daring proceeding on my part if
I endeavour here to revive the good Dean's story,
that it may not die. At the interview of which I
have spoken he told the story, and certainly suc-
ceeded in making us laugh heartily. He prefaced it
with the remark, “You have written a ‘Life of Cow-
per.' I will tell you a story of him which I defy you
to put into your next edition, or to Write down at
all.” But it seems a pity not to try. Cowper is in
bed ; one of those heavy-curtained affairs which in
lis days were held to be indispensable. Enter a gnat
by the window, who begins to sing (pp),
“Bz-z-z-z, I've come to see Mr. Cowper; I know
he's here, bz-z-z-z-z.”
All this the Dean imitated with great skill, keeping
to his piamissimo, and all in monotone.
I 56 CO WPER.
Slightly crescemdo, a tome higher. “Bz-z-z-z-z,
here's the bed, which is where he is, I know, bz-z-z-Z,
—ah all right (forte), I have got inside the curtains,
bz-z-z-z (fortissimo); hooray bz-z-z-z, here he is,
here's his nose, bz-z.” Silence. -
Well! as the Dean said, there was not much in the
story, but it was very droll to hear him imitate the
buzz, and the change of intonation. You seemed to
hear the beast gradually drawing nearer, waxing
triumphant, and finally silent when he alighted on
the object sought. The poet told it to amuse the
Throckmorton children.
The relics which I saw at Turvey were, the poet's
shoe-buckles, which Mr. Higgins used to wear at his
dinner-parties, a letter or two of Cowper's, and the
chest of drawers in which his cat was lost for two or
three days. She had got into one of the drawers in
his bedroom, and gone to sleep, and a maid shut the
drawer without observing her. (Poem, “The Retired
Cat,” p. 378. The epitaph on the same page is to
Mr. Higgins's grandmother.) There is also a three-
wheeled chair, which formerly belonged to the
Throckmortons. On one occasion the youngsters,
having carefully set all the doors of the passages
open, coaxed Cowper to get into it, and then, paying
no heed to his entreaties, ran him in triumph and
laughter all over and over the place.
One relic of the poet, the hutch which he built
for his hares, and of which he wrote a charming
account in the Gentleman's Magazine, June, 1784,
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COWAEER. 1.59
was bought by an enterprising speculator for £5 a.
few years ago. I am told it is at present in Liver-
pool. Two other reminiscences of the poet are con-
nected with that visit which I made to Turvey.
The one is the Poplars at Lavendon, which you
pass on the way from Olney. It will be remem-
bered that the poet laments their having been
cut down, and so his being deprived of a grateful
shade which he often sought on summer days:—
(“The poplars are felled; farewell to the shade,”
p. 323). From their roots another race has since
sprung up, and there it is to-day. The other was
Yardley Oak, to which my kind guide drove me after
leaving Turvey. The poet, it will be remembered,
began a poem upon it, one of his best though it
is but a fragment, in 1791. He speaks of it as
evidently in its last days :
“IEmbowelled now, and of thy ancient self
Possessing nought but the scooped rind.”
Even so; yet there it is still, just a hundred years
after he wrote, and it still exhibits a noble appearance
in its magnificent decay. They have railed it round
now, and put props under the heaviest boughs. I
took a couple of acorns from it. Its leaves were of
goodly beauty. - -
It would be endless work were I to recount the
various scenes recognisable at Olney, which he has
made as classic as Horace his Sabine farm, and the
fountain of Bandusia, the Sacred Way, and the Temple
of Vesta. It is hardly too much to say that you my
16o CO WAEER.
fix on the scene of every little incident with which he
has enriched our literature, such as “The Dog and
the Water-lily.” I could show the reader the very
spot. There are two localities, however, on which I
must say a word. The first is the bridge leading from
Olney to Emberton, with the delightful description of
which he begins Book IV. of the “Task,” “The
Winter Evening.” The post was coming in from
Newport Pagnell; the poet's residence is just beyond
the poplar-tree in the centre, very near as the bird
flies, and the “twanging horn” would, therefore, be
quite audible as he sat in his little parlour; and he
describes himself as settling down cosily for the
evening with the newspaper which the postboy has
brought him. In the picture before us the left path
goes up to Weston; in the distance, on the right, is
Clifton. But there is another spot, absolutely fixed,
which to me was most interesting, moving to pity
and sympathy when I lighted on it, I have to go
back for a minute before coming to it.
The “Task " was published in June, 1785, and
one of the joys connected with it was the renewal of
his intimacy with his relations. Lady Hesketh was
his first cousin, and the sister of his youthful love,
Theodora Cowper. The breaking of his engagement
with her had been followed by the cessation of all
intercourse. Tady Hesketh had gone abroad in 1767,
and had become a widow in 1782. She had retained
a friendly feeling for him, and had contributed to
make him an annual allowance ; but no letter passed
CO WPER. 1 6 1
between them for nineteen years, and he did not send
her, or indeed any of his relations, his poems as they
appeared. Soon after the publication of the “Task"
he was delighted one morning to receive from her a
letter of congratulation ; he answered it with en-
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from that time
for several
years the cor-
respondence
was carried on
busily. His
delight cul-
minated when
she wrote proposing to pay him a visit in the fol-
lowing June (1786). “June,” he replied, “has
never been so wished for since June was made.”
Anl this brings me to the second locality to which
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162 CO JIPEA’.
I have made reference. On the 12th of June
he was expecting her ; she was to reside at the
vicarage, and her servant, Mrs. Eaton, was to stay
with Cowper, and he wrote to give her some direc-
tions about her journey. She was coming through
Newport Pagnel, therefore over the long bridge. The
road passes round to the right into the market-place.
The traveller would in the ordinary course of things
enter that way, and so drive to our poet's front door.
But he entreats that Mrs. Eaton shall not come this
way. -
“Soon after you shall have entered Olney, you will
find an opening on your right hand. It is a lane that
leads to our dwelling. There your coach may stop
and set down Mrs. Eaton ; when she has walked about
forty yards she will spy a green gate and rails on her
left hand; and when she has opened the gate and
reached the house door she will find herself at home.”
There is the lane just as described ; he is right
about his distance; Mrs. Eaton would pass his garden
and summer-house at the end of her forty yards' walk.
But if instead of setting her down at the end of this
lane the coach had simply turned into the market-
place it would have pulled up at the very front door.
Why should it not ? Because the poor poet was so
sensitive that he would fain have no observers of any
visitors to him.
Lady Hesketh—though at the first moment of
meeting his courage failed him, and he would not even
speak—soon brightened him up, and he wrote to a
CO WPEZQ. 163
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friend that he had never been so happy since he came
to Olney. The clouds, indeed, soon returned after
the rain ; but not until his cousin had persuaded him
that Olney was a dull place to live in. It was muddy
and often flooded, and in winter months he was
sometimes a prisoner for days together. The Throck-
mortons had a house to let at Weston Underwood, and
offered it to them. Lady Hesketh furnished the
money for the removal, and thither they went after
nineteen years' residence at Olney.
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again we sce it now as it was then, It is on the
high road, a little beyond the gates which led to the


















































164: CO WPER.
Throckmortons' mansion. Here he and his com-
panion lived from November 1786, till July 30,
1795. There were some Sunny days during that
period, but they were fewer than at Olney. He had
only been a fortnight at Weston when his friend
William Unwin, making a tour through the southern
counties, was seized with fever, and died at Win-
chester. He is buried in the Cathedral; I found the
stone which covers him in the nave a few weeks ago.
The loss told upon Cowper heavily, and he had a
paroxysm of furious madness. He slowly recovered,
and made some new friends. The first was a young
student from Glasgow, named Rose, who was deputed
by that University to deliver him a congratulatory
message, and came thither on his way to London to
do it in person. The visit is noticeable because Rose
gave him a copy of Burns's first published volume,
and he expressed to a friend his sense of its re-
markable merit. The friendship with Rose proved
lasting ; next came to him John Johnson, his “first-
cousin once removed” on his mother's side. This
proved a most valuable acquisition. The young man
brought some poetry for his judgment, which was
unfavourable; but, nevertheless, “Johnny,” as he
soon came to be called, was delighted with his genial
relative, and soon after brought him the famous
portrait of his mother, of which we have already
spoken. At Weston, Cowper made his translation
of Homer, and undertook, though he was never
able to carry it out, a sumptuous edition of Milton's
COWAEER. 165
Works for Boydell, as a companion to his well-known
Shakespeare. But this Milton engagement was the
occasion of his translating the Latin poems of the
latter, and also of his contracting yet another valuable
friendship, that of Hayley. It began with some
correspondence about the Milton, and resulted in
Hayley afterwards becoming his biographer.
A neighbouring clergyman—John Buchanan, vicar
of Ravenstone—conversing with him, after the Homer
was finished, about a new subject, proposed to him
the “Four Ages of Man,” and elaborated his ideas,
“Infancy—Youth—Manhood—Old Age,” in a really
thoughtful and suggestive essay, which interested
Cowper so much that he set to work upon it. The
manuscript of this essay, with two lines in Cowper's
handwriting, is in my possession, through the kindness
of Mr. Greatheed, the grandson of another of the poet's
friends. .
It was quite an event in Cowper's life when he
came out of his retirement for six weeks to visit
Hayley at his home on the Sussex coast. But
now the heavy clouds had developed into storm.
Mrs. Unwin was stricken with paralysis, and round
and round the little garden at the back of the house
at Weston the poor querulous, stricken woman, unable
to walk or to read, insisted on his dragging her day
after day in a Bath chair. Within doors she sat
silently by the fire. Lady Hesketh might have
wrought some deliverance for him, but she was ill and
had been ordered to Bath. Hayley gives a graphic
I 65 CO WAEER.
and terrible description of the couple when he visited
them in 1794. Cowper was now again a raging
lunatic, refusing to eat, and insisting from hour to
hour that the devil was coming to fetch him. Lady
IHesketh returned, but the case was now past treat-
ment. The only hope was in change of scene, and
Johnny Johnson came and fetched them away to
Norfolk. The poor poet, unseen by any one, wrote
on a window shutter, in a bedroom looking into the
garden, these two lines :—
“Farewell, dear scenes, for ever closed to me;
Oh for what sorrows must I now exchange ye.”
They were not even noticed until some years had
passed, when Mr. Higgins discovered them. There is
no doubt of their being in Cowper's handwriting, and
they are carefully preserved.
The two invalids were moved two or three times
by their affectionate friend Johnson, in the vain hope
of finding some relief for them. The final settlement
was at East Dereham, in Norfolk, and here, in Decem-
ber 1796, Mrs. Unwin died. Mr. Buchanan was
anxious for him to return with Johnson to Weston.
Some very interesting and considerate letters from
him are in my possession appended to the document
to which I just now referred.
But Cowper was past moving any more. He lived
three years longer, lovingly tended by Johnson, gentle,
and, on the whole, more cheerful, than he had been
when he left Weston. He was sad and gloomy, no
doubt, but yet was able to shake off his misery when
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MONUMENT AND GRAVE OF COWPER IN THE CHAPEL OF ST. EDMUND,
IEAST DEREEIAM CEIURCEI.
occupied in revising his poems, a work which Johnson
found the best occupation for him. Now and then
he would even write a new piece ; his “Montes Gla-

168 CO WAEER.
ciales,” the English translation of it, and “The Cast-
away” were all written the year before he died. The
last, suggested by an incident which he had read in
“Anson's Voyage,” is one of the most finished, and
the most powerful, of all his productions. -
He died on St. Mark's Day, 1800, and is buried
in St. Edmund's Chapel, East Dereham Church. The
touching inscription on his monument was written by
Hayley. It runs thus:—-
‘‘ IN MEMORY OF
WILLIAM COWIPER, ES Q.,
Born IN HEREFORDSHIRE, 1731,
BURIED IN THIS CHURCH, 1800.
“Ye who with warmth the public triumph feel
Of talents dignified by sacred zeal,
Here, to Devotion's bard devoutly just,
Pay your fond tribute due to Cowper's dust.
England, exulting in his spotless fame,
Ranks with her dearest sons his favourite name :
Sense, fancy, wit, suffice not all to raise
So clear a title to affection's praise.
His highest honours to the heart belong ;
His virtues formed the magic of his song.”
WILLIAM BENHAM.
THOMSON.
§amt; Jººm:01,
Born September 11, 1700; died August 27, 1748.
‘‘ Jonſ, long thy stone and pointed clay
Shall melt the musing Briton’s eyes ;
Oh, vales and wild woods, shall he say,
In yonder grave your Druid lies.”
WILLIAM CoIIINs.
“On the death of Mr. Thomson.”
THOMSON.
tº N any list of the English classics Thom-
º son's name has an assured and
honoured place. A monument in
Westminster Abbey beside Shake-
speare's, a chapter in Johnson’s “Lives
of the Poets,” innumerable editions of “The Seasons,”
and a page in every school collection of literary speci-
mens, are obvious proofs of this assurance. His
merits, however, have not been exempt from the
usual experience of standard authors. They have
had their day of full recognition, and they have had
their intervals of partial neglect. He was one of
those happy poets on whom Fame calls in their life-
time; but the springtide of his power was probably
attained towards the close of the eighteenth century,
when he had already been fifty years in his grave.
New influences then began to play, which partly
absorbed his own, and partly carried the popular
imagination into new channels. And just at present


172 7A7OMSOAV.
Thomson's reputation is a pious tradition rather than
a visibly potential reality. -
It seems strange that this should be so, in an age
which gives unmistakable and increasing welcome to
the apostles of the new naturalism ; for it is no
exaggeration to say that the discoveries of Jefferies
and of Burroughs were well-known to Thomson, and
that Thomson presented his transcripts of nature with
perfect truth, freedom, and beauty, and sublimity of
effect. One of the secrets of Thomson's power our
new naturalists possess, namely, fulness of knowledge,
acquired by careful sympathetic study; but for the
felicity of his expression of the phenomena of nature
he stands to this day unmatched. His pages are
broadcast with these felicities of phrase. Such are
his castled clouds, for ever flashing round a summer
sky; the sleepy horror of his waving pines; the still
song of his harvests, breathed into the reaper's heart;
his sturdy boy grasping the indignant ram by the
twisted horns; his lively-shining leopard, the beauty
of the waste; his ruddy maid, full as the summer
rose blown by prevailing suns; the slender feet of
his red-breast, attracted by the table crumbs; his
light-footed dews ; his isles amid the melancholy
main. One does not need to pick and choose ; they
start from the opened leaves. -
How often since Thomson wrote have our prose
writers brought their descriptions to a climax by a
loan from “The Seasons” | No one who has read
Hugh Miller's marvellous realisation of unwitnessed
7"HOMSOAV. I 73
aspects of the earth in geological time can forget the
telling effect with which one grand scene is flashed
and for ever fixed upon the imagination by Thom-
son's magnificent line—
“A shoreless ocean tumbles round the globe.”
Thomson's verbal felicities have all the appearance
of spontaneity. They sprang from the peculiar cha-
racter of his relation to nature. This relationship
was unique. No poet, no writer, ever so completely
and healthily identified himself with nature. Nature
absorbed him, if one may use the word. In nature
he lived, and knew no other life. It was not the
mystic union into which Wordsworth sought from
time to time to enter, nor that in which Shelley
dreamed away his few mortal years. There was more,
much more, of the frank enjoyment of the schoolboy
wandering in the woods in Thomson's intercourse
with nature than the rapt enthusiasm of mystic or
metaphysician. - -
Neither was his attitude that of the teacher.
Natural science he liked : it was his favourite study
at Edinburgh University; and often in his poetry he
gave his mind free range in speculation of the causes
by which nature works her effects, and of the opera-
tions by which her effects are accomplished. But
science was as completely subordinated to poetry in
Thomson as it was in. Milton. Everybody knows
why Milton, with good knowledge of the Copernican
theory of the build of the universe, yet preferred the
174 TH, OMSOAV.
Ptolemaic system of sphere-within-sphere. And if
Thomson, by an amusing transition, altered his ex-
planation of the origin of fountains in a later edition
of “Autumn,” it was probably done, less for the
purpose of bringing it into accord with scientific
truth, than for the pleasure of indulging his imagina-
tion in a congenial freedom of range which the true
theory so amply presented. The result was a noble
effort of poetry conceived and executed with some-
thing approaching to Miltonic grandeur.
But he was no spy upon nature, eager to make
discoveries and, like the new naturalists, finding his
reward in being first to make report of them to the
dwellers in towns. The wealth of boon nature was
at his command, but he did not seek to trade in it.
To him to know nature was its own inexpressible
reward. Almost as little was his attitude that of the
preacher. He did not greatly care to pose as the
religious interpreter of natural emblems and the
expounder of natural mysteries. He assumed, indeed,
the rôle, but with a reluctance which his elaborate
rhetorical flourishes fail to hide. -
At those times he did not speak as one moved by
genuine inspiration, but as he was forced by a sense
of conventional duty. Too often, indeed, with his
splendid abilities for higher work, did he take up the
tone of the preacher, but only when he had reflected
that the inculcation of some moral would in this or
that connection be expected from him. It did not
come spontaneously; it was merely assumed, mostly
THOMSON.
(From the painting in the National Tortrait Gallery.)

THOMSOAV. 177
in deference to the usage of an age which was nothing
if it was not didactic, but partly also in a fancied
appropriateness to his professional status as a divinity
student who had not yet quite given up hopes of
licence. Hence the occurrence of those passages in
“Winter’’ and in “Spring” which expose him to
the charges of prolixity and tumidity. The charges
are manifestly unfair when brought, as they too often
are, against his style as a whole. In fact he is never
prolix except when he suffers himself to be forced
into the preaching strain. When he has free choice
of his theme, and more especially when the subject is
exceptionally familiar and congenial to him, he loses
all suspicion of self-consciousness, and is at once
natural and original, picturesque always, and often
melodious. Is there, for example, a single word or
turn of phrase to which exception could be justly
taken to-day in his picture of the winter robin
And what can match in melody the few numbers—
to take an instance, not often quoted, among many
that offer—with which the poet heralds the visionary
advent of summer ?
“From brightening fields of ether fair disclosed,
Child of the sun, refulgent Summer comes ''
Thomson is at his best when obeying the gentle
impulses of his own genius, and then he conveys the
idea of one who is careless or rather unconscious of
an audience, and sings only for his own delight. A
story, probably apocryphal, is told of him which
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THO/l/SOAV. I 81
Wordsworth is regarded by his admirers. Yet Words-
worth has conceived his character: the lines descrip-
tive of the Wanderer will fit Thomson—
“By the native vigour of his mind,
By his habitual wanderings out of doors,
By loneliness, and goodness, and kind works,
Whate'er in docile childhood or in youth
IHe had imbibed of fear or darker thought
Was melted all away; so true was this
That sometimes his religion seemed to be
Self-taught, as of a dreamer in the woods,
Who to the model of his own pure heart
Framed his belief, as grace divine inspired
Or human reason dictated with awe.
And surely never did there live on earth
A man of kindlier nature.”
Thomson's religion puzzled Lord Lyttelton, who
was the most considerate of his friends and the kind-
liest of patrons, and who is said to have written a
book to Christianise him. “The Seasons” reveal him
as a healthy pagan whose religion was of the woods,
and this, coupled with his love of nature, was what
Collins doubtless meant when he called him a Druid.
It is probable that the designation was suggested to
Collins by Thomson himself. At least Philomelus, in
“The Castle of Indolence,” whom one has little diffi-
culty in identifying with the bard of the First Canto
reformed of his one vice, is significantly presented as
a Druid wight. Of all modern critics Campbell alone
has caught up the metaphor, making charming use of
it in his apology for Thomson's redundancy of style,
which he compares to the flowing vesture of an ancient
Druid moving Serenely among his venerated oaks,
I 82 7A/OA/SOAV.
If we give up to Byron the sea as his congenial
element, to Shelley the sky, and to Scott the freedom
of dale and glen, not less appropriately may we claim
for Thomson the grandeur of the dim woodlands.
While nature at large was his range, nature in all her
shows and forms, as made or modified by the proces-
sion of Suns and seasons, and not merely the trim
gardens of Pope and the well-tilled farms of Cowper,
the woods were in a special sense his haunt, his daily
walk and ancient neighbourhood. Again and again
in his poetry, his earliest and his latest, we come
across passages sympathetically descriptive of the
glories of sylvan scenery and the joys of woodland
life. There are, without exaggeration, dozens of
references to the phenomena of woods in each of the
“Seasons,” and the preference for a home in the
woods as the acme of earthly happiness is repeatedly
expressed. His walk in Spring is under lofty elms
where the rook builds his airy city, and “ceaseless
caws amusive.” In Summer he found the shelter
among bowery shades of pines, and oaks, and “ashes
wild resounding o'er the steep,” as delicious to his
soul— g
“As to the hunted hart the Sallying spring
Or stream full-flowing, that his swelling sides
Laves as he floats along the herbaged brink.”
Autumn found him inhaling “ the breath of orchard
big with bending fruit.” His Winter retreat was the
edge of the groaning forest. In imagination he was
equally at home among tropical forests and Scottish
7 HOMSOAV. 183
SOUTEIDEAN MAN SEe
woods. Before Scott he sang the land of brown
heath and shaggy wood ; he saw in romantic view
Caledonia's
“forests huge,
Incult, robust, and tall, by Nature's hand
Planted of old.”
Nor was the solitude of congregated trees only a
visionary repose for his imagination. It was the
experienced pleasure of his life. His youth from
earliest infancy was spent in the vale of sylvan Jed.
He was born indeed, it is believed, at Ednam, a pas-
toral hamlet in the north-eastern nook of Roxburgh,
but his connection with this part of his native county

184 7A/OA/SOAV.
is merely nominal; and a tradition, by no means
undeserving of notice, refuses even the nominal con-
nection of his fame with Ednam, asserting that at
the time of his birth his mother had gone to live in
her father's house at Widehope, in a different though
not far distant parish. Be that as it may, he was an
infant of just two months old to a day when his
father, the Rev. Thomas Thomson, was inducted into
the parish of Southdean, and the household, of which
he was the fourth child, was transferred from the
manse of Ednam to another manse of the Scottish
Church at the opposite end of the same county. A
monument in the form of a pyramid, locally known as
“The Pin,” has been erected in the neighbourhood of
Ednam, to “point the musing Briton's eye ’’ to the
birthplace of Thomson, but it cannot be too strongly
emphasised that Southdean and its surroundings
awoke the infant powers of the young poet, and was
beyond all question the place of his poetical birth.
Thither, and not as is customary to Ednam, the pil-
grim to the land of Thomson must go who would
make acquaintance with the rural Scenes and rustic
manners with which the observation and imagination
of Nature's own poet were at the first and at their
freshest happily exercised.
From November 1700 to February 1716, that is,
for the whole period of his infancy and boyhood, the
initial two months of his life only excepted, Thom-
son's home and continuous abode was the manse of
Southdean; and there undoubtedly the foundations of
TAZOA/SOAV. 185
his mind were laid. No more agreeable task—if task
it should be called—could be undertaken by the
student of Thomson than to roam this region with
the book of “The Seasons” in his hand and allocate
SOUTFIDEAN PARISEI CHURCEI.
(Erected in 1609; dismantled 1876.)
the idealised descriptions of that delightful series of
poems to their original and abiding source in the
local landscapes. In all essential particulars of
natural scenery the country in and around Southdean
is the same to-day as it was in Thomson's youth

I 86 THOMSON.
time, and Justic manners and traditionary modes of
life have not greatly altered in the interval of almost
two centuries. “Winter” is especially rich in remi-
miscences of Southdean. The whole region from
Southdean down the Jed to Jedburgh, which may be
regarded as the range of Thomson's happy boyhood,
is, it will be acknowledged, singularly well qualified
to nurse a poetic childhood.
Amidst such variety of landscape as the region
presents, varied infinitely by the “seasons' differ-
ence,” the mingled seclusion and freedom of the
woods, with their endless diversity of form and hue,
and light and shade effects, entered and occupied his
mind with pre-eminent charm. His daily walk to
and from school for several years was through part of
the ancient forest of Jedwood. One noble specimen
of that ancient forest, a venerable and vast-spreading
oak, now clamped and supported in its extreme age
against hastening decay, still stands by the roadside
about a mile above Jedburgh, looking probably
scarcely older than it showed to the eyes of the
schoolboy, Jemmy Thomson. On holidays, and
especially during the Summer school vacations, young
Thomson was an occasional visitor at Marléfield, the
estate of Sir William Bennet, situate a couple of
miles from the village of Morebattle. Bennet encou-
raged learning and poetry, dabbled in verse himself,
and was never happier than when entertaining the
wits and humorists of the Scottish capital—Allan
Ramsay among the rest—at his country seat on Kale
THOMSOW. - 187
A RELIC OF JED WOOD.
Water. It was probably through his mother's family,
the Trotters of Widehope, that young Thomson was
brought under the notice of the hospitable Bennet ;
it is certain that no inconsiderable part of the educa-
tion of his senses was continued at Marléfield, and it
is significant that the theme of his best juvenile effort
at rhyming was the woodland scenery in the grounds
of Marléfield :—
“O what delight and pleasure 'tis to rove
Thro' all the walks and alleys of this grove,
Where spreading trees a checkered scene display,
Partly admitting and excluding day;
Where little birds employ their narrow throats
To sing its praises in unlaboured notes.”

I 88 7 HOMSON.
Another woodland haunt of his youth, but on the
opposite bank of the Tweed, in the valley of the Ale
near Ancram, long remained the familiar possession
of his memory. Writing from England to his early
friend Cranstoun, the village doctor at Ancram—“I
see you,” he says, “in the well-known cleuch, beneath
the solemn arch of tall, thick-embowering trees, while
deep, divine Contemplation, the genius of the place,
prompts each swelling, awful thought. There I walk
in spirit, and disport in its beloved gloom.” It is no
exaggeration to say that every minute he could spare
—and he managed to spare many—during that part
of his life which he spent in Scotland, comprising the
first twenty-four and a half years of it, he devoted
with frank delight to the freedom of country air, and,
for choice, the seclusion of sequestered woods. Was
it an angling excursion in the college vacation? The
rod, and the creel, and all the preparation of “slender
watery stores” are rather a pretext for surprising
Nature than a serious proposal to make a big basket.
Even the pocket-copy of his favourite Virgil is only
for silent companionship. The poet-angler is soon
reclining at full length under some spreading ash,
watching the wood-pigeon, as, after much preliminary
flapping, it shoots the air on liquid wing ; by-and-by,
lulled by the vocal woods and waters, he is lost for
the solid day in lonely musing.
There was little of academic culture about Thomson.
With the warmth of living suns in his heart, the cold
criticisms of college class-rooms had no effect upon
THOMSOAV. 189
him. Studious he was, but it was the curriculum of
Nature he followed. Her exuberance was his, her
riches, her careless redundancy. Her perfume, too,
and not the smell of the midnight lamp, breathed
through his studies. At the outset of his career at
Edinburgh University, it is worth remembering, a
single day's trial of the strict discipline and confine-
ment of college and town was as much as he could
endure. He turned up at the manse door, vainly
daring to convince his father “that he could study as
well or better on the haughs of Soudam.” Not till
he went to England did he become familiar with the
midnight oil. Then it was that the necessity of
composition brought on him the habit of late hours. It
was in Scotland he saw the dawns and Sunrises which
he described so gloriously in England. The poet
precedes the poem, and Thomson was none the less a
poet in Scotland that he wrote nothing sufficiently
valuable for publication till he went to live in Eng-
land. His attempts at versification before he was
twenty-four were merely exercises, and as such he
had the good sense to regard them, dooming them
ruthlessly to the flames when they were numerous
enough to make a bonfire. It was his annual prac-
tice, possible only to a robust though as yet un-
developed genius, and it augured well for future
achievement. All the pretty stories about the manu-
Script of “Winter” being in Thomson's pocket when
he came up to London in March 1725 must be
abandoned.
I 90 ZHOMSON.
In Scotland he only lived the poet-life ; it was in
England that he wrote his poems. He enjoyed a
poet's life in Scotland with a zest which was not
exceeded even in the experience of John Wilson ; in
England, without quite losing the joy of a poet's life,
he enjoyed a poet's reputation. The business of his
life, if one may use the word in speaking of a poet
of nature, began in England. He had come up, fired
by a noble resolution: “I will do all that is in my
power, act, hope, and So either make something out,
or be buried in obscurity.” He was neither over-
fearful of his fate, nor was he inclined to rate his
deserts as small. What he did bring to England with
him in the absence of any accomplished work fit for
publication, was a consciousness of poetical power, and
a steady determination to prove it. It may further
be conceded that the bent of his genius lay towards
some great and serious subject involving some des-
cription of the phenomena of nature. The daring
character of his plan, deliberately laid, and with full
perception of the prevailing taste, to which he opposed
the hostility of a revolution, was only equalled by the
industry with which he carried it through.
Thomson latterly sank into a somewhat lazy and
Slovenly man ; but he was never either a lazy or
slovenly poet. The mere amount of his verse,
applying to it the measurement of arithmetic, is
astounding : it is perfectly sufficient to establish his
reputation as a voluminous poet. A simple calcula-
tion raveals the fact that for the twenty-two years of
THOMSON. I 9 I
his active poetical life—that is, the period during
which he was engaged in the composition of verse—he
wrote on an average six hundred lines per year, inde-
pendent of the five dramas—Sophonisba, Agamem-
'mom, Edwim and Eleanora, Tancred and Sigism wavda,
and Coriolamus—and a few compositions in prose.
His industry was still further displayed in the in-
numerable, certainly the unnumbered, alterations
which he was incessantly making in the text of
“The Seasons.” A variorum edition of this poem
has been often spoken about, and sometimes attempted;
but the Hercules for the laborious task has not yet
appeared. The changes made in the text of each
‘successive edition were of every possible kind; the
author added and expanded, withdrew and condensed,
distributed and divided. Single words and isolated
phrases were abstracted from every quarter of the
poem, and the surplus of new matter, beyond what
was necessary to balance the matter withdrawn,
amounted to many hundreds of lines. The edition
of 1746, the last to be issued in the poet's lifetime,
was, when compared with the original edition of “The
Seasons,” published sixteen years before, substantially
a new poem. The alterations were perhaps, on the
whole, an improvement; they free him at least from
the charge of Slovenliness, though, as Johnson pointed
out, the gain they effected in respect of refinement
was accompanied by a loss in respect of vigour of
-style.
During a large part of the time taken up in these
1 92 7A/OA/SOAV.
varied activities Thomson had few opportunities of
indulging his passion for the solitude of woods; but
when they offered they were accepted with avidity.
At one time we find him the guest of the Queens-
bury family among the shades of “Ham's embower-
ing walks.” At another, he is finding repose with
Pelham in “the sweetest solitude of Esher's groves.”
One has a suspicion that he paid his court to Doding-
ton for the privilege of enjoying “the secret bowers
and winding walks”—not to mention the “downy
peaches” and “shining plums” of the orchard—at
Eastbury. And even his affection for Lyttelton
seems to have been heightened by his recollection of
Hagley Park—the British Tempe—where “the scene
was not inferior to the Society,” where indeed he was
“most charmed with its sweet embowered retirements,
and particularly with a winding dale that runs through
the middle of it.”
He was eleven years in England before he could
venture on a Snug garden-house of his own at Rich-
mond, and sit in Some degree of comfort under the
shade of his own trees. His means did not admit of
the purchase and enjoyment of an ampler shade.
Even the unpretentious villa in Kew-foot Lane began
to be insufferably like a residence in town. After
seven years’ occupancy of it he wrote: “I have lived
so long in the noise of the town (or at least its distant
din) that I begin to forget what retirement is.” The
real or imagined seclusion of a wood was a necessary
condition of his poetising. Dodington expected
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THOMSOAV. I 95
great things in the way of poetry when Thomson set
out on a tour of Europe; the poet was scarcely
across the Channel when he naïvely wrote to his big
patron that he had left his Muse behind him, and
that probably she would remain in the woods of East-
bury till his return. His inspiration was in the
woods: “The Muses,” he wrote to Lord Lyttelton,
“whom you obligingly say I shall bring along with
me, I shall find with you—
“In the Worcestershire dale with woods o'erhung'—
the Muses of the great simple country, not the little
fine-lady Muses of Richmond Hill.”
Fond of solitude, and finding genuine satisfaction
in the enjoyment of it, Thomson was by no means
averse to society. He was, indeed, an eminently
Sociable man. Iſis power of making friendships was
remarkable, and, what is still more remarkable, he
made none which he did not retain. Constancy in
his attachments was an essential feature of his con-
duct. Men of all dispositions—even the frivolous,
the jealous, and the irritable—felt at home in his
Company. He did not make a single enemy, even
among his poetic brethren. He was “that right
friendly bard ” to every one of them. Even at Twick-
enham there was a standing rule for the servants that
Mr. Pope was always at home to Mr. Thomson. He
can hardly be said to have chosen his friends; they
were rather attracted to him, and, though in his heart
he had special favourites, he was of too genial a dis-
1 96 7"HO//SOAV.
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position not to make all welcome. He was especially
true to his early friends, to those who had known
him before he became known to the world, the Crans-
touns and Mass Johns of his native Teviotdale, the
Mallochs and Armstrongs who accompanied him to
England. To the members of his family he was the
kindest of brothers. His friendship did not take the
form of letters or visits, but his silence or absence was
no proof of any decay of affection. “Do not imagine,”
he wrote, “that because I am a bad correspondent
that I can ever prove an unkind friend or brother.”
It is to be regretted, for the sake of his own repu-
tation, that he did not maintain a more active corres-
pondence with Scotland. A few visits to his native
land, after English recognition of his genius, would
have awakened in his countrymen that personal affec-
tion which was the one thing wanting to make him
as dear to the national heart of Scotland as ever was
Scott or perhaps even Burns. Once only, a few
months before his death in August 1748, he seri-






7THOMSOAV. 197
ously meditated a return to Scotland. The visit
might have given him a new lease of life, new hopes,
new themes for poetical treatment ; but the despon-
dency into which he had sunk when Amanda, or
rather Amanda's family, threw him over, was too
deep for the exertion, and the visit remained unpaid.
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The rejection of his suit by the family of the
Youngs, with which he sought a connection by mar-
riage, was the great, indeed the only, disappointment
of Thomson's life. A new light has recently been
cast upon the circumstance by the publication of
Mr. Allardyce's “Scotland and Scotsmen in the

















198 7A/OMSOAV.
Eighteenth Century.” “It was Mrs. Young, a coarse,
vulgar woman, who constantly opposed the poet's
pretensions to her daughter, saying to her one day,
‘What you would marry Thomson 2 He will make
ballads, and you will sing them.’” The quotation
is the testimony of John Ramsay, of Auchtertyre.
Thomson, however, had other sources of income,
actual and potential, than the precarious means of
“a metre balladmonger.” He had influential political
friends, and he had already filled one or two com-
fortable offices under Government. It was the ex-
pectation of a post in the service of the Government,
sufficient to secure him an independency and give
him an opportunity of cultivating his poetical talents,
that first brought him to London; he had written
his “ Britannia’’ with that object in view ; and he
had expressed his ambition in “Autumn,” in his
address to Speaker Onslow, as a “panting for public
virtue, and a desire fondly of trying to mix the
patriot's with the poet's flame.” The sale catalogue
of his effects showed that he was living in easy and
even luxurious circumstances when he proposed to
Miss Young; besides the plate and valuable paint-
ings with which his house was well provided, his
cellar was stocked with a rich variety of wines and
ales.
Any sketch of Thomson, however brief, would be
incomplete without some reference to his patriotism.
In England, where he made many friends, he was the
centre of a Scottish colony of literary adventurers,
THOMSOAV. I 99
whom he encouraged and aided, and of whose nation-
ality he was never ashamed. His kinsmen took ad-
vantage of the soft side of his nature and Sormed
upon him—that is, lived at his expense. He ad-
mired the manhood of England—he was as ready to
admit as the Irish poet that the English were “the
lords of humankind.” But his systematic use of the
word “British ’’ and “Britannia”, was significant:
the Scots were in no way inferior. “The English
people are not a little vain,” he wrote, “of them-
selves and their country; but Britannia too includes
our native country Scotland.” He became no petit-
maître, like the renegade Malloch ; it was rather the
other way with him.
A Unstudied and Slovenly in his dress and address,
he seemed to the finical Shenstone to have nothing
of the gentleman in his appearance—“he crept along,
unpromising of mien "-though Shenstone allows
that “he made amends for this deficiency by his
refined sense.” His countryman, Dr. Robertson, of
Kew, judged him better : “he had simplicity without
rudeness, and a cultivated manner without being
courtly.” In speech he preserved the northern
accent unsoftened to the last. His barber at Rich-
mond used to tell how the poet addressed him as
“Wull.” Oratorial Dodington, the man of postures
and pomposity, was offended at his broad accent, and
striking the manuscript from his hand told him he
could not read his own verses.
His love for Caledonia was no less genuine and
2 OO ZHOl/SOW.
deep than Scott's : it was less catholic, being, like
his poetical genius, what one may be allowed to call
geographical. Scott's imagination, as everybody
knows, was mainly historical. Scotland was to
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RICHMOND CIIURCII—THOMSON’s BURIAL PLACE.
Scott, first and foremost, the “land of my sires.”
The clan feeling was a-wanting in Thomson. Fos-
tered at the gate of Reedsdale, reared at the very
point of the Border which was most frequently
touched by marauders and moss-troopers, with its











THOM/SOAV. 2 O I
memories of hunts and fights and Otterburns—
chronicled and unchronicled—innumerable, he turned
from legend and history to the charm of rural nature
as he saw it, and the toils and circumstance of rustic
life as it surrounded him. “The Seasons” are a
series of geographical rather than topographical
poems—notably “Summer.” Once or twice he
essayed the domain of historical poetry. “Liberty”
was one of those essays, and with all its beauties—
so much neglected—it can hardly be called a success.
Space, rather than time, was the element in which
the imagination of Thomson disported. And yet one
of the greatest honours of Thomson's achievement
was the service he did in helping forward—perhaps
even of inaugurating—the movement of a true union
between Scotland and England. He burned to do
his country a real service which history might acknow-
ledge. He did it when he wrote “Rule Britannia.”
HUGII HALIBURTON.
WWORDSWORTH.
iſſilliam ūlūtūšū0tly,
Born April 7th, 1770; died April 23rd, 1850.
“ The complaining millions of men,
JDarken in labour and pain ;
But he was a priest to us all
Of the wonder and bloom of the world,
JF hich we saw with his eyes, and were glad.”
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
WORDSWORTH.
HE century now drawing towards its
close has been remarkable for certain
very distinctive developments both
of poetry and of painting. In both
there has been a recurrence to
nature as the true source of inspiration. The “pre-
Raphaelites” followed the Lake poets at a long
interval, but not too long to exclude the possibility
of a real connection between the revolution in poetry
wrought by the latter and the tentative revolution in
painting suggested, but not worked out, by the
former. Apart, however, from “pre-Raphaelite”
controversies, Mr. Ruskin has familiarised us with
the fact that whatever may be the superiority of old
masters in idealising the human form, modern
painters have left nearly all their predecessors far
behind them in landscape painting. Poussin,
Claude, and Rubens left some wonderful pictures
of natural scenes. The easy grace of nature,


2O6 WORDS WORTH.
her repose, or her vigour was suggested on their
canvases with a power that “finds” us, as Coleridge
used to say of certain books. But the observation
and knowledge of modern painters are more detailed,
and their sense of nature's life far more close and
real. It is not merely the freshness, or the vivacity,
or the restfulness of nature that we get from them,
but almost the murmur of the trees, and the whis-
pering of the sedges, and even the fragrance of
new-mown hay. Now Surely it is more than a co-
incidence that the same century which, in its begin-
ning, saw a new school of poets drawn to the romantic
wilderness of the Lakes by their love of nature, saw
also in its mid-course the growth of a style of land-
scape painting unrivalled in the records of art.
If, instead of the Lake school of poets generally,
we consider only their high priest, William Words-
worth, the impression becomes still stronger that the
painting of the mid-century found its inspiration in
the poetry of the first decades. Or if that is not the
case, then at any rate the worship of nature has been
“in the air.” It has laid a spell on the last three
generations of Englishmen, and Wordsworth was the
founder of the religion. Except in the case of
Shelley, this adoration of nature was not found
inconsistent with Christian belief. But there can
be little doubt that to Wordsworth truths spoken by
“fountains, meadows, hills, and groves,” or revealed
by a “splendour in the grass, a glory in the flower,”
came home with a convincing and compelling force,
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WOAZO.S WOR7"H. 2O Q
such as by most people is expected only from the
Bible.
“Wisdom and Spirit of the universe !
Thou Soul, that art the Eternity of thought,
And givest to forms and images a breath
And everlasting motion, not in vain
JBy day or starlight thus from my first dawn
Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me
The passions that build up our human Soul;
Not with the mean and vulgar works of man,
But with high objects, with enduring things—
With life and nature—purifying thus
The elements of feeling and of thought,
And sanctifying by such discipline
Both pain and fear, until we recognise
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.”
This is not an isolated nor an exaggerated description
of the poet's attitude toward the world and man.
The “Prelude ’’ and the “Excursion,” which, if
length determined the matter, were his chief works,
are throughout their nearly twice ten thousand lines
an expansion of the above verses.
So intense was this poet's devotion to “fountains,
meadows, hills, and groves” that he reversed the
relations usually occupied in poetry by landscape and
figures. The interest of poetry is usually centred
round some human passion, and the circumstances
of scenery are introduced only to heighten that ;
somewhat as a photographer will throw in a back-
ground of balustrade or curtain to set out the civic
dignity of his aldermen or churchwardens. But
Wordsworth reverses all this, and proceeds, like the
landscape painter, to whom the Wood, or the mere,
or the mountain is everything, and the shepherd
O
2 I O WORDSWORTH,
with his sheep merely an enlivening incident. There
are, of course, exceptions. A poet who wrote so
much did not always write in precisely the same
mood. But his dealings with human passion, his
sketches of character are slight and superficial, com-
pared with his searching sense of nature's charms
and his spirited insight into her meaning.
Take, for instance, “Peter Bell,” one of his best-
known narrative poems. The author tells us it was
written with the deliberate design of proving that
“the imagination not only does not require for its exer-
cise the intervention of supernatural agency, but that,
though such agency be excluded, the faculty may be
called forth as imperiously, and for kindred results of
pleasure, by incidents within the compass of proba-
bility, in the humblest departments of daily life.”
“Supernatural agency’ is replaced by weird scenes
of nature under the ghostly light of the moon. There
is a long prologue describing a flight of fancy among
the stars. The first part, almost as long, is wholly
taken up with the misguided Peter Bell's indifference
to landscape scenery. The poor wretch's callous
depravity is summed up in the words—-
‘‘ He roved among the vales and streams,
In the green wood and hollow dell ;
They were his dwellings night and day,+
But Nature ne'er could find the way
Into the heart of Peter Bell.
‘‘ In vain, through every changeful year,
Did Nature lead him as before ;
A primrose by a river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.”
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Heside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.”
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WORDS WOAZTAZ. 2 I 3
It is true that the incident which awakens the ruffian
to a sense of his sins is a human tragedy. But the
story is of so slight a character that the appearance
of the drowned man's face in the pool seems intro-
duced to heighten the effect of an eerie night scene
among woods and rocks, rather than to form the real
motive of the poem. An old man had fallen off his
ass and been drowned. The animal waits for its dead
master. Peter finds it and tries to steal it, but can-
not make it budge until he has recovered the body,
and then the faithful brute carries the horrified
“ potter” to the widow's home. This incident is
expanded into about a thousand lines, in addition to
the prologue. And the enlargement is effected by a
diligent, loving, and powerful portrayal of the
scenery amidst which it happens. We think, there-
fore, that we are justified in Saying that Peter, the
corpse, and the ass are accessories to a great land-
Scape painting, and that the landscape is not a mere
background for them.
Even in Wordsworth's masterpiece, the “Ode on
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of
Early Childhood,” where we might expect that
human nature would be the sole subject, it is not so.
On the contrary, the main topic is the rose of dawn
that brightens the aspect of nature for infancy and
early youth—
“There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dieam.”
2 I 4. JWOAZ),SJVOR7A/.
This is the theme of which all the melodious lines
that follow are only so many variations. To the clear
eyes and open heart of the child, the rainbow and the
rose, the moon, “looking round her when the heavens
are bare,” the “waters on a starry night,” and the
daily resurrection of the dawn, had a freshness of
fascination which use and wont have lost. With fine
poetic idealism Wordsworth interprets this early
Sense of nature's mysticism as a gleam from a for-
gotten world, where the unborn soul inhabited eternal
light. But the motive of the beautiful speculation is
not metaphysical, still less theological ; it is the high
spirituality of the ideas cherished by the poet con-
cerning the communion of nature and man. He is
not content to explain the vividness of the child's
ecstasy at primrose-time by the new vitality of its
blood and nerves. No. “Heaven lies about us in
our infancy”; and this delight is the “trailing cloud
of glory” with which we “come from God, who is
our home.”
Full of the music of this passage, memory naturally
recurs to the picture drawn by the poet of himself as
a naked infant sporting by Derwent's banks, now
racing over the Sunny grass, now plurging in the
Cull'rCl) t—
“Oh, many a time have I, a five years' child,
In a small mill race severed from his stream,
Made one long bathing of a summer's day ;
Dasked in the Sun, and plunged, and basked again
Alternate, all a summer’s day, or scoured
The Sandy fields, leaping through flowery groves
Of yellow ragwort; or, when rock and hill,
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WORDS WOATA/. 217
The woods, and distant Skiddaw's lofty height,
Were bronzed with deepest radiance, stood alone
Beneath the sky, as if I had been born
On Indian plains, and from my mother's hut
IHad run abroad in wantonness, to sport,
A naked Savage, in the thunder shower.”
The man who wrote these lines said truly, “The child
is father of the man.” He had proved it in his own
experience. The infant that so luxuriated in a state
of nature on the banks of the Derwent retained
through boyhood, youth, manhood, and old age a
preference for mountain solitudes, rather than the
whirl of society, and a marked tendency to see more
of God in nature than in man. His mother died
when he was eight years old, and before he was four-
teen he lost his father. Neither he nor his brother,
the future Master of Trinity, knew much of home-life
in their early days. They were both sent to school
at Hawkshead, near the Esthwaite Lake. Neither
here nor at college did the young poet win any re-
nown by progress in scholarship. At school he
learned much more from fell and waterfall, from cloud
and Sun and star, and from the creatures of the
woods, than he did from masters. As a healthy,
stalwart lad he enjoyed climbing, rowing, running,
and skating, as much as the most carnally-minded
animals among his peers. But he had clear pre-
monitions of his destiny to serve nature as a prophet
and bard. The discipline of the school was easy,
and the boys had so much freedom that, in times of
frost, when the lights began to glimmer in their
2 I 8 WORDS WORTH.
cottage homes, he and his companions would skate
into the darkness of the lake, and rush on “like a
pack loud chiming,” “not a voice idle,” while “smit-
ten with the din, the precipices rang aloud.” Then
touched with a melancholy whose meaning he could
not know, the unconscious poet would hide himself
from the uproar in some silent bay, or swerve aside
“to cut across the reflex of a star.” Or, in spring
and Summer days, he would be up amongst the hills,
babbling with the brooks, whistling and calling to the
birds, or, suddenly arrested by the vision that burst
upon him as he topped a commanding height, he
would stand and gaze, all faculties absorbed in
contemplation. Then did he experience the first
movements of the inspiration which gave the key-note
of his highest strains—
“Those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Tallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised.”
At Cambridge, to which university he proceeded,
he accomplished no such success as is usually
expected from youths of genius. “Such glory was
but little sought by me,” he says, “and little won.”
In the carlier months of his residence at the university
he charges himself with “ loose indifference, casy
likings, aims of a low pitch.” But his vacation visits
to his beloved Lakes revived him ; and though he
gained no honours, he made good use of his later

WORDS WORTH. 22 I
terms at college. During his third summer vacation
he visited Switzerland and crossed the Alps; but, if
we may judge by the effect upon his poetic reminis-
cences in “The Prelude,” he certainly did not find so
much inspiration amongst the Snow-clad mountains
as among the green or craggy vales of his native land.
Returning to England he resided in London for a
time, and then, attracted by the absorbing interest of
the French Revolution, he visited France, and spent
about a year upon the edge or in the very vortex of
the storm. But the impression made upon us by his
recollections is that, though inclined at that time to
Republicanism, his sympathy with the human emotions
of the age never had the intensity of his mystic
communion with nature—
“Where silent zephyrs sported with the dust
Of the Bastile, I sate in the open sun,
And from the rubbish gathered up a stone,
And pocketed the relic, in the guise
Of an enthusiast ; yet, in honest truth,
I looked for something that I could not find,
Affecting more emotion than I felt.”
After sojourning for the greater part of a year at
different places on the Loire, he returned through
Paris about a month after the September massacres of
1792. Here he was half tempted to plunge into the
social strife, and do what he could to lead it to better
issues. It was a mad thought, if, indeed, anything
entertained by so moderate and sober a mind could
rightly be called so. But there was no danger of its
coming to fruition ; and happily the only result was
22 2 jīWORDS WOR7A/.
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the elaboration in his own fancy of an ideal dema-
gogue, for whose portrait we may be grateful—
“Nor did the inexperience of my youth
I’reclude conviction that a spirit strong
In hope, and trained to noble aspirations,
A spirit thoroughly faithful to itself,
Is for Society’s unreasoning herd
A domineering instinct, serves at once
Tor way and guide, a fluent receptacle
That gathers up each petty straggling rill
And vein of water, glad to be rolled on
In safe obedience.”
It must be obvious to the most hasty reader how well
these lines describe a conspicuous figure of an age
that had scarcely dawned when Wordsworth died. In










































































JJ OR/DS WOAZ 7"H. 223
particular, the notion of a “fluent receptacle” that
gathers up into itself the desires and emotions of a
multitude, would go far to justify the poet's com-
parison of his own foresight to that of the ancient
prophets.
This sketch of Wordsworth's training for his mis-
sion may perhaps help some of his readers to under-
stand how it was that his thoughts became so much
abstracted from mankind, and so much concentrated
on nature. From his earliest hours personal gifts
and circumstances united to consecrate him nature's
bard. His disinciination to the intellectual rivalries
of Cambridge threw him back upon himself at the
very gates of Society. The French Revolution
awakoned in him a mild interest, due more to classic
dreams about Harmodius and Aristogiton than to any
really democratic temperament. The wild excesses
and unpardonable cruelties of that human tornado
disappointed his hopes of man. But nature never
failed him. For him the life of God was more mani-
fest in the sweeping heavens and the foaming flood
and the marching shadows, than in the fretful fever
of human passion. And so he sought his rest by a
secluded lake, singing to himself—
“It is beautiful;
And if a man should plant his cottage near,
Should sleep beneath the shelter of its trees,
And blend its waters with his daily meal,
He would so love it that in his death-hour
Its message would survive among his thoughts.”
As Professor Knight has well remarked, “no poet.
2 24- WORD,SWORTH.
in English literature—none in any literature—is so
intimately identified with place as Wordsworth is.
He has both consecrated and interpreted the whole
district of the English Lakes. There is scarcely a
rock or mountain-summit, a stream or tarn, or even
a well, or grove, or forest-side in all that region
which is not imperishably associated * with him. But
it is not solely within the circuit of his beloved hills
that we can follow him. At Racedown, at Alfoxden,
at Coleorton; over Salisbury Plain with its weird
monoliths and gibbet-chains, up the Wye to Tintern
and Goodrich Castle ; by Loch Tomond side and
through the Trossachs to Melrose—nearly every foot-
print is marked by some flower of verse, some exqui-
site poem or memorable line.
Nor would it be difficult to trace him in his
wanderings abroad ; but interesting as such an excur-
sion might be—and Surely it would be pleasant to
watch the solitary poet wooing to companionship the
kingfisher at Goslar, or to surprise him napping before
the Venus de Medici at Florence—it would occupy
more space than we have at disposal.
Of all books that might be commended for such a
pilgrimage the best is the poems themselves with the
numerous characteristic notes in which Wordsworth
has recorded his impressions and recollections. In
the matter of detail, much, doubtless, has been
altered since the poet's days, but the broad features
of the landscape remain the same, and, indeed, many
imperishable memorials—like the stone still known to
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WOAZOS JPORTH. 227
a few on which “dear Mary's name’’ was inscribed at
the foot of Grasmere Lake—still exist to gladden the
eyes of his admirers.
The first “home'' of Wordsworth’s manhood was
at Racedown, in Dorsetshire. In 1794 a legacy of
f{}00, bequeathed by a munificent friend, released
the poet from immediate monetary care, and he and
his sister Dorothy settled down on £70 or £80 a
year in “the old farm-house ’’ set amid daffodil
meadows and lames hung with honeysuckle and wild
roses, within sight of the sea from the neighbouring
heights of Lambert's Castle and Goldencap. Thus
began that life-long companionship to which Words-
worth owed so much of his inspiration, of his achieve-
ment, of his happiness—
“She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,
And humble cares and delicate fears;
A heart—the fountain of sweet tears—
And love, and thought, and joy.”
Here the unsuccCessful tragedy, The Borderers,
was composed ; here they were visited by Coleridge
and Mary Hutchinson, the poet’s future wife. In
1797 the little household migrated to the fine old
manor of Alfoxden, near Nether Stowey, in Somerset-
shire. In the famous holly grove and among the
green walks of this romantic spot were experienced
those “happy moments” which inspired the best of
his early lyrics. It was in the course of a walk from
Alfoxden along the Quantock Hills one spring after-
anoon in 1798 that “The Aneient, Mariner'’ was
228 WORDS WOR7A/.
sketched out by Coleridge and Wordsworth. To
those who remember the line in “Christabel”—
“The one red leaf, the last of its clan,”
one trifling entry in Dorothy's journal for this year
may be of interest—
“William and Idrank tea at Coleridge's. A cloudy sky. Observed
nothing particularly interesting—the distant prospect obscured. One
only leaf upon the top of a tree—the sole remaining leaf-danced
round and round like a rag blown by the wind.”
The winter of 1798-9 was spent in Germany; and
Goslar, the dreary town on the edge of the Hartz
Forest, is memorable as the birthplace not only of the
“Lucy’’ cycle of poems, but of “The Prelude.” After
a sojourn of nine months at Sockburn-on-Tees, the
home of Mary Hutchinson, Wordsworth and his sister
arrived at their “hermitage,” Dove Cottage, Grasmere,
on the 21st December, 1799. This “lovely cottage
in the guardian nook ’’ was their home for the next
eight years—the most fruitful and inspired years in
Wordsworth's long life. Its little rooms, its small
garden and orchard are haunted by memories which
will endure as long as English literature lasts.
Happily, in spite of all the changes that have taken
place, the building once more wears the appearance
familiar to the poet and his friends; and, thanks to
the enthusiastic energy of the Rev. Stopford Brooke,
it has been purchased and vested in trustees as a
precious public monument.
It is impossible to move a step in this region, or,
indeed, for miles around, without thinking of Words-
WORDS WORTH. 229
worth, of Coleridge, of Scott, Southey, De Quincey,
Christopher North. Like the aged Leech-gatherer,
they seem in our mind's eye to pace about the hills
continually ; like Joanna's laughter, tossed from peak
to peak over half a county, their voices come to
us from Silver How, Loughrigg and Fairfield. And
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“THY WATERS, DUDDON 'MID THESE FLOWERY PLAINS.”
curiously enough, too, notwithstanding the Supreme
haunting presence of the poet himself, it is somehow
mostly of Dorothy and Coleridge that one goes dream-
ing when one thinks of the early years at Grasmere.
Passages in her journal keep rising in the memory :
“William tired himself with seeking an epithet for
the cuckoo’”; “William read Spenser now and then

2 30 JPOAA) S WOAZ 7/7.
aloud to us (Dorothy and Mary Hutchinson). We
were making his waistcoat"; “William worked at
‘The Pedlar' all the morning. He kept the dinner
waiting till four o'clock”; “William went to look at
Langdale Pikes. We had a most invigorating walk.
The hips were very beautiful, and so good and,
dear Coleridge I ate twenty for thee when I was by
myself.”
In October, 1802, Wordsworth married Mary
Hutchinson, whom he had known from childhood.
Dorothy, who accoompanied her brother to the
Hutchinsons and returned with the newly married
couple, records the event in her diary in a manner
which Professor Knight seems to have singularly
misunderstood. He refers to the “commonplaceness
of the note,” the “extreme matter-of-factness and
brevity of the entry recording an event so momen-
tous to her brother.” Tet the reader judge for him-
Self whether the few lines in which the event is
mentioned can be more inadequately described than
by the words “matter-of-factness” and “common-
blaceness”—
“On Monday, 4th October, 1802, my brother William was married
to Mary Hutchinson. I slept a good deal of the night, and rose
fresh and well in the morning. At a little after eight o’clock, I saw
them go down the avenue towards the church. William had parted
from me upstairs. When they were absent, my dear little Sara pre-
pared the breakfast. I kept myselſ as quiet as I could, but when I saw
the two men running up the walk, coming to tell us it was over, I
could stand it no longer, and threw myself on the bed, where I lay in still-
ness, neither hearing or seeing anything till Sara came upstairs to me,
and said, ‘Thry are coming.” This forced me from the bed where I
JVOA’ DS ſy'OA 7/7. 23 I
lay, and I moved, I know not how, straight forward, faster than my
strength could carry me, till I met my beloved William, and fell upon
his bosom.”
The marriage added another worshipper, Muse, and
amanuensis to the Grasmere household—
“A perfect woman, nobly planned
To warn, to comfort, and command ;
And yet a spirit still, and bright
With something of angelic light.”
Years afterwards, when De Quincey was publishing
his indiscreet disclosures in the Edinburgh Magazime,
and Henry Crabb Robinson told Wordsworth that
De Quincey had written “that Mrs. W. is a better wife
than you deserve,” the poet replied vehemently,
“Did he say that ? That is so true that I can forgive
him almost everything else he says.”
Whether at Dove Cottage, the Parsonage, Allan
Bank, or Rydal Mount—whither the Wordsworths
went in 1813—the poet's footsteps traversed still
the same familiar region ; the peasants saw him “go
bumming, and muffling, and talking to his sen; but
whiles he's as sensible as you or I.” “Did you ever
see Mr. Wordsworth 2 '' the present writer once asked
an old man at Grasmere. “Mr. Wudsworth / Ay,
did I.” Pressed to give some of his recollections, the
worthy soul described how the poet would stop and
stare at a tree or would stand gazing at a boulder “as
if he saw something in it.”
Did space allow it would be interesting to note the
growth of the poet's popularity, the tardy arrival of
fame, the influx of visitors who came in increasing
232 WORDSWORTH,
numbers as the thirty-seven years of the residence at
Rydal Mount slipped away. But we must pass briefly
even over the bereavements, sorrows, and cares which
also fell to his portion. Dorothy, the helpful, in-
spiring sister, became a confirmed invalid about 1830.
She was then in her fifty-seventh year, but one is
slow to associate age or decay with so blithe and
bright “a spirit of the grassy hills.”
In a letter to the Lambs in the January of the
year just mentioned, she writes—
“My brother and sister are both in excellent health. In him there
is no failure except the tendency to inflammation in his eyes, which
disables him from reading much. . . . However he has a most com-
petent and willing amanuensis in his daughter, who takes all labour
from mother's and aged aunt’s hands. His muscular powers are in
no degree diminished. . . . He is still the crack skater on Royal
Lake, and, as to climbing mountains, the hardiest and the youngest
are yet hardly a match for him. In composition I can perceive no
failure, and his imagination seems as vigorous as in youth.”
Wordsworth was then sixty, with twenty years of
life still before him. With this last glimpse of him,
through his sister's proud eyes, let us close.
Through the influence of Mr. Gladstone a pension
of £300 from the Civil List was conferred on the
aged poet in 1842. In the following year he was
appointed Laureate in succession to Robert Southey ;
of other honours and recognitions it is unnecessary to
speak. Seven years later, on the 23rd April—the
day on which Shakespeare was born and on which he
died—“just when the cuckoo clock was singing noon,”
Wordsworth passed away “very, very quietly.”
WOR/DS WOAZ 7A/.
233
He was buried on the 27th in Grasmere church-
yard under the shadow of one of the yews which he
had himself planted.
Beside him lay his daughter
Dora, and the children who had died in infancy.
HENRY C. EWART.
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SCOTT.
Šít Šālfti Stoff.
Born August 15, 1771; died September 21, 1832.
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“Blessings and prayers in nobler retinue
Than sceptred king or laurelled conqueror knows
Follow this wondrous potentate.”
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SCOTT.
IR WALTER SCOTT, “the whole
world's darling,” and the “beloved
writer who has made a chief part in
the happiness of many young lives,”
died more than fifty years ago. No
author probably has given more pleasure to old as
well as to young, but he has done far more than
this, and for elevation of purpose, for purity of tone,
and for the sweet humane spirit that breathes through
all he wrote, deserves to rank with the benefactors of
the race.
And Sir Walter merits our love and admiration
not as an author only, but as a man. Indeed, his
works and his character are so closely linked together
that it is impossible to view them apart. The charm
of Scott's nature pervades every page of his writings,
and there we see, as in a mirror, his contempt for
what is ignoble, his love of nature and of country,
his moral purity and that gentleness which, as one of


238 SCO77.
Shakespeare's shepherds tells us, is the mark of a
gentleman. * ,
Walter Scott's ancestors won the reputation they
possessed in Border forays, and he delighted in trac-
ing his relationship to Auld Wat of Harden, of whom,
as of other mosstroopers, his grandmother had many
a story to tell. His father, a Writer to the Signet in
Edinburgh, or, as we say in England, a solicitor, was
a shrewd, serious man of business of the best Scottish
type ; to his mother, a good, affectionate woman, the
daughter of a physician, Scott used to say he was
indebted for many a striking story of the past that
was stored up in her memory. Walter, one of a
large family, was born in Edinburgh, August 15th,
1771. An infantile complaint made the boy lame,
and this lameness was his companion for life. In
some ways it was an advantage. The child was sent
into the country, and “when the day was fine,” he
writes, “I was usually carried out and laid down
beside an old shepherd among the crags and rocks
round which he fed his sheep. Here I delighted to
roll about all day long in the midst of the flock, and
the sort of fellowship I thus formed with the sheep
and lambs impressed my mind with a degree of affec-
tionate feeling towards them which lasted throughout
life. The impatience of a child soon inclined me to
struggle with my infirmity, and I began by degrees
to stand, to walk, and to run.” The happiness of
these baby days at Sandy-knowe is recalled in some
beautiful lines in the introduction to the third canto
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SCOT'/'. 24 f
of “Marmion.” After saying that poetic impulse
was given “by the green hill and clear blue heaven,”
the poet adds—
“It was a barren scene, and wild,
Where naked cliffs were rudely piled;
But ever and anon between
Lay velvet tufts of loveliest green;
And well the lonely infant knew
Recesses where the wallflower grew,
And honeysuckle loved to crawl
TJp the low crag and ruined wall.
I deemed such nooks the sweetest shade
The sun in all its round surveyed.”
There he gained an early love of nature and of the
ballads recited by the country people. Even in early
boyhood he read immensely and forgot nothing.
Gradually he became strong, and was sent to school,
where, despite his lameness, he showed great physical
energy, and also gained his first laurels as a story-
teller. At thirteen, while staying with his aunt at
Kelso, a place very dear to him afterwards, not only
for its beauty, but from these youthful memories, he
became acquainted with “Percy's Reliques of Ancient
Poetry,” and from that hour ballad poetry had for
Scott an irresistible fascination. “I remember well,”
he says, “the spot where I read these volumes for
the first time. It was beneath a large platanus-tree
in the ruins of what had been intended for an old-
fashioned arbour in the garden. The Summer day
sped onward so fast that, notwithstanding the sharp
appetite of thirteen, I forgot the hour of dinner, was
sought for with anxiety, and was found still entranced
Q
24.2 SCO77.
in my intellectual banquet. To read and to remember
was in this instance the same thing, and henceforth I
overwhelmed my school-fellows and all who would
hearken to me with tragical recitations from the
ballads of Bishop Percy. The first time too I could
scrape a few shillings together, which were not
common occurrences with me, I bought unto myself
a copy of these beloved volumes; nor do I believe I
ever read a book half so frequently, or with half the
enthusiasm. To this period also I can trace dis-
tinctly the awaking of that delightful feeling for the
beauties of natural objects which has never since
deserted me.”
Then followed an apprenticeship to his father, but
Scott's work as lawyer's clerk was suspended in the
second year by a severe attack of illness. The youth,
as he lay in bed, was not allowed to talk, but he
plunged into romantic literature with the utmost
ardour and delight. Once more in Sound health he
returned to his desk, and spent his days of leisure
in roaming over the country, so that his father said.
he was better fitted for a pedlar than a lawyer. This, .
however, was not just. Scott was never an idler, and .
showed already in those young days of what sterling
stuff he was made. Whatever he did was done with
his might, and fond though he was of enterprise and
l,
of an out-of-door life, he was never afraid of drudgery.
“Labour,” he said in after years, “is absolutely the
charter by which we hold existence,” and it will
be seen how nobly he acted on this principle. A.
SCO77. . 24-3
delightful companion Scott must have proved in
those young days, for his good-humour was inex-
haustible, and so were his stories; he was full of
courage too, and in spite of his lameness was ever
foremost in enterprises that involved danger and
great physical exertion.
“Eh me !” said a companion in one of Scott's wild
rambles, “sic an endless fund o' humour and drollery
as he then had wi' him. Never ten yards but we
were either laughing or roaring and singing. Wher-
ever we stopped how brawlie he suited himself to
everybody He aye did as the lave did; never made
himsel’ the great man or took ony airs in the com-
pany.” Modesty, indeed, was conspicuous in Scott
throughout life, and the most popular writer of the
century displayed perhaps the least consciousness of
genius. After a time he left his father's branch of
the profession, and was called to the bar. He was
not successful as a barrister ; but ultimately gained
a good legal appointment, and his knowledge of law,
which was by no means slight, was turned to admira-
ble account in the novels. To the shrewd sagacity
with which his countrymen are credited, Scott united
an ardent imagination and a depth of feeling which,
though kept under stern restraint, was at times over-
powering. There were moments when his best friends
felt that his world was not theirs, and that he needed
to fight his own battle in solitude and silence. An
early disappointment in love left its mark upon the
poet for life; but his marriage, not long after, proved
244. SCOTT.
on the whole a happy one, and at the age of twenty-
six a man with Scott's love of literature and of nature,
and with a capacity for work only to be matched by
that of his friend Southey, was not likely to indulge
too much in vain regrets. Meanwhile, by his long
and frequent rambles through the Border country he
loved so warmly, as well as by his studies in German
and in the ballad literature of Scotland, he was, as a
friend said, “making himself,” and preparing, though
apparently without knowing it, for the real work of his
life. His first appearance in print was as a translator
of Bürger’s “Lenore” and “Wild Huntsman,” and
he afterwards translated Goethe's early drama, Goetz.
This, too, was the period of his original ballads, which
show some of the fire and energy with which the poet
was soon to electrify the world in the “Lay ” and
“Marmion.” None but a true poet could have written
lines like these— -
“Through the huge oaks of Evandalo,
Whose limbs a thousand years havo worn,
What sullen roar comes down the gale
And drowns the hunter's pealing horn ?
* Mightiest of all the beasts of chase
That roam in woody Caledon,
Crashing the forest in his race,
The mountain bull comes thundering on.
‘‘Tidrce on the hunter's quivered band
IIe rolls his eyes of Swarthy glow,
Spurns with black hoof and horn, the sand,
And tosses high his mane of snow.”
Writing of these verses the poet Campbell said, “I
have repeated them so often on the North Bridge (of
SCOTT. 2.45
Edinburgh) that the whole fraternity of coachmen
know me by tongue as I pass.” Scott's poetry, in-
deed, abounds in the vigorous, rushing lines which no
one familiar with them in youth is likely to forget in
after-years. In 1802 appeared “The Minstrelsy of
the Scottish Border,” the fruit of many a hunt for
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NOR! I AMI WILLAGE.
ballads in the wild Border country. It was the poet's
first great literary success, and it is still more inter-
esting because it showed unmistakably the bent of
his genius. Those volumes are, as it were, the
blossoms from which came the rich and abundant
fruit of later life.
Three years after the “Minstrelsy " the “Lay of
the Last Minstrel” was published ; and this brilliant
and picturesque poem made Scott's name familiar all



246 SCOZ’7.
Over England. How well he deserved his fame I shall
afterwards try to show. The sale of the “Lay ”
was immense, that of “Marmion,” which followed in
three years, still larger, and this, followed by the
“Lady of the Lake,” raised Scott's reputation to the
highest point as a writer of verse. He took the
reading World captive, obtained such sums for his
Work as no poet had ever before received, and yet
showed no sign of elation at this unbounded popu-
larity. Literary vanity is the foible of weak men.
Scott was one of the manliest, and, indeed, so far
from being proud of his verse was inclined to under-
estimate it. When his little girl was asked how she
liked the “Lady of the Lake,” she replied with per-
fect simplicity, “Oh, I have not read it ; papa says
there is nothing so bad for young people as reading
bad poetry.” The story is told also of his eldest boy
coming home from the High School at Edinburgh
with blood upon his cheeks. He had been fighting
with a boy who had called him a lassie. On inquiry
it turned out that he had been called the Lady of the
Lake, which he thought an imputation on his manli-
ness—for he had never heard of the poem.
Scott was about forty years old when the “Lady
of the Lake” appeared. Three years later “Rokeby”
was published, and two years after that the “Lord of
the Isles.” Before this, however, he felt that his reign
as the “Monarch of Parnassus’’ was approaching its
close, and that Lord Byron, who gave him this title,
was taking his place in public opinion. And Scott
SCOTT. 247
never doubted that the public had chosen rightly.
They may have done so in this case, but poetry is far
too fine a thing to be estimated by the popularity it
attains, and Sir Walter, who received thousands of
pounds for his verses, knew well that Wordsworth,
who gained nothing, was his superior in this divine
art. It is not to be supposed that poetry was Scott's
only work at this time. He was Sheriff of Selkirk-
shire, he was a clerk of Session, an appointment that
Occupied him four to six hours daily for six months
Out of the twelve, he wrote for the Qwanterly Review,
he edited an edition of Dryden's works in eighteen
volumes, and was preparing an edition of the works
of Swift in nineteen. Unfortunately, too, he had
entered into partnership with his printers, and this,
the one great blunder of Scott's life which affected
him till its close, involved constant labour and
anxiety.
In his early married days he had a pretty cottage
at Lasswade, six miles from Edinburgh, to which
in after-days he looked back with delight. After-
wards he removed to Ashestiel, near Selkirk, and “a
more beautiful residence for a poet could not be con-
ceived.” His biographer gives a pleasant picture of
an old-fashioned garden, with holly hedges and broad
green terrace walks, and a deep ravine close under
the windows, down which ran through thick foliage
a mountain rivulet on its way to the Tweed. Around
were the green hills, and the whole scene was one of
pastoral repose. Two boys and two girls formed the
248 SCO 77.
family circle, unless to the children we add the dogs,
which seemed a part of the household.
Scott was in the habit of rising at five in the
morning and beginning work at six, so that between
nine and ten, when the family met for breakfast, he
had done enough, as he said, “to break the neck of
the day's work.” Two hours' more labour after the
morning meal left him free for the day, and it was
his rule to be on horseback by one o'clock. To
visitors he seemed like a man of leisure, but this was
because he knew how to make the best use of his
time. His maxim was “never to be doing nothing.”
Scott's horse, Brown Adam, was perfectly quiet
with his master, but would not allow any one else to
mount him, and broke the arm of one groom and the
leg of another when they tried to do so. “Camp
was at this time the constant parlour dog. He was
very handsome, very intelligent, and naturally very
fierce, but gentle as a lamb among the children. As
for the more locomotive Douglas and Percy he kept
one window of his study open whatever might be the
state of the weather, that they might leap out and in
as the fancy moved them.” “He seemed,” Lockhart
adds, “to consult not only their bodily welfare, but
their feelings in the human sense. He was a gentle-
man even to his dogs.” Camp died at his master's
house in Edinburgh, and Scott excused himself from
dining out that day on account of “the death of a
dear old friend.” Like their playmates, Camp and the
greyhounds, the children had at all times free access
SCO 77. - 2 9
to their father's study ; he never considered their
prattle as any disturbance, and would break off in
his work at their request to repeat a ballad or a
legend. He taught them to think nothing of danger,
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and as they grew older accustomed them to his reck-
less delight in fording dangerous streams. “Without
courage,” he said, “there cannot be truth ; and with-
out truth there can be no other virtue.” “No man,”
says Scott's biographer, “cared less about popular



250 e SCO77.
admiration and applause, but for the least chill on
the affection of any near and dear to him, he had the
sensitiveness of a maiden.”
“He considered it as the highest study, as well as
the sweetest pleasure of a parent, to be the companion
of his children; he shared in their little joys and
sorrows, and made his kind, informal instructions to
blend so easily and playfully with the current of their
own sayings and doings, that so far from regarding
him with any distant awe, it was never thought that
any sport or diversion could go on in the right
way unless papa were of the party, or that the
rainiest day could be dull so he were at home.”
And not only his own children but all children
were dear to Scott, and learnt to love him ; so too
did their four-footed “fellow-mortals.” Dogs and
horses readily attach themselves to the masters who
love them, but Scott had still humbler friends and
followers. One day upon starting from Abbotsford
with a number of guests for a grand coursing match,
his daughter Anne, Screaming with laughter, ex-
claimed, “Papa, papa, I knew you could never think
of going without your pet.” The pet was a little pig
that had formed a strong attachment to Scott, and
was constantly eager to follow him when he rode out
with his dogs. He was troubled also with a similar
proof of regard on the part of an affectionate hen.
When at Ashestiel, as there was no church within
seven miles, Scott read the prayers and lessons of the
day to his household and to neighbours who liked to
SCOTT. 25 I
attend, and then in fine weather he would walk with
his family to some favourite spot and have a cold
dinner in the open air. He had his Bible by heart,
and on these occasions would give biblical lessons to
his children in a way they could understand and
enjoy. -
He was forty-one years old when he removed from
Ashestiel, and bought the estate of Abbotsford, with
its small farmhouse and one hundred acres of land.
How the acres increased by constant purchases, and
how the cottage was changed by the magician's art
into a castle, or as he preferred to call it, “an old
Scottish manor-house,” which is now visited by pil-
grims from all parts of the world, I must not stay
here to tell. The most brilliant memories of Scott
are associated with Abbotsford, and so also are the
saddest. He wished to found a family, and yet within
sixty years after his death he had but one direct
descendant living. It would be unjust, however, to
accuse Scott of a mere vulgar ambition. With all
his worldly sagacity, he was ruled by his imagination,
and this, as has been pointed out, is the clue to what
seem like the contradictions of his character. Any-
thing like pretension or purse-pride was utterly alien
to his nature. He honoured worth in the poor as
much as in the rich, and, as one of his dependants
said, treated them all as if they were blood relations.
The removal from Ashestiel to Abbotsford, five
miles lower down the Tweed, opens a new era in Sir
Walter’s life. He never ceased to be a poet, for,
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SCOTT. 253
sweetness and pathos of our Elizabethan poets, his
pictures of nature are always accurate, and he has
abundant invention. These are splendid gifts, and to
them I may add the healthy, out-of-door freshness of
his verse, and the way in which it clings to the
IBEN VENUE AND LOCEI ACEIRAY.
(“Lady of the Lake.”)
memory. There is no poet perhaps whose lines are
more easy to remember, few poets whose best passages
are more worthy of remembrance. Much of “Mar-
mion,” his finest poem, was composed in the open
air, and in the saddle, and the impetuosity of the
verse expresses the mood of the writer. He said in


254. SCOTT.
after years that he had many a grand gallop amongst
the braes when thinking of “Marmion.” At that
time the invasion of the French was expected, and
Scott worked with his usual energy as a cavalry
volunteer. “In the intervals of drilling he used to
delight in walking his powerful black steed up and
down by himself upon the Portobello sands within
the beating of the surge ; and now and then he
would plunge in his spurs, and go off as if at a charge,
with the spray dashing about him. As they returned
to town, he often placed himself beside a friend, and
repeated the verses that he had been composing
during these pauses of their exercises.”
This passage from the biography is very significant,
and will help us to understand and appreciate the
characteristics of Scott's poetry. Wordsworth’s study,
too, as his maidservant truly said, was in the open
air. He was “always booing about,” a silent, medi-
tative man, who “talked a deal to hissel’,”
“And murmured to the running brooks
A music sweeter than their own.”
With great depth of feeling Wordsworth was shy
and cold in manner, seldom speaking to the children
or country folk that crossed him in his walks, and
seldom seen to smile. He was, as he said, one of the
happiest of men, but he did not circulate his happi-
ness. “He was not,” said a Cumberland farmer, “a,
man as folks could crack wi', nor not a man as could
crack wi' folks.” “Many a time,” he added, “I’ve
SCO77. 255
seed him a-takin' his family out in a string and niver
geein’ the deariest bit of notice to 'em ; standin' by
hissel', and stoppin' behind agapin', wi' his jaws
workin' the whoal time; but niver no cracking wi'
them nor no pleasure in 'em—a desolate-minded man,
ye kna.” And the good man added that it was
“poetry that did it—a queer thing that would like
enough cause him to be desolate.”
In character no two good men could be more
opposed than Wordsworth and Scott, and as poets
the contrast between them is as striking. Words-
worth's finest work was done in lonely rambles among
the hills where, “with an eye made quiet by the
power of harmony and the deep power of joy,” he
saw “into the life of things.” Scott, with more
blood in his veins, did not so much contemplate
Nature as delight in her. Enough for him that he
could rejoice in the sight of her beauty, feel her breath
upon his cheeks, listen to her manifold voices, and
gain, not a new faculty of interpretation, but a fuller
sense of enjoyment. His genius was fed less upon
imeditation than on action, and there is a strength
and swiftness of movement in his verse which carries
the reader with it. His poetry has faults which will
inot be found in poets who brood over their lines with
loving anxiety and care, but in spite of carelessness
and of a flow of verse too little under restraint, it has
merits which the more artful poetry of our day seems
ito lack, and which no English poet can be said to
‘share with Scott. The greatness of his fame as a
256 SCOTZ.
novelist has done much to lessen his reputation as a
poet, for readers and critics are unwilling to believe
that an author can be highly distinguished in two
departments of art; and Sir Walter's general dis-
paragement of his poems has, perhaps, increased the
disposition to estimate them too lightly.
In July 1814, appeared Scott's edition of “Swift,”
and in the same month “Waverley,” a novel in three
volumes, was announced. The excitement and in-
terest excited by this tale cannot easily be exagge-
rated. It opened up a new world, and a beautiful
and varied world it was. Goethe said it might be
placed beside the best works that have ever been
written, and he thought Scott never surpassed or even
equalled it ; but this is not the general opinion, and
indeed such is the versatility of his genius as a
romance writer, that it is seldom two or three people
talk together about the novels and agree in preferring
the same tale. Wonderful was the rapidity with
which a part of the story was written, the second and
third volumes having been begun and finished between
June 4th and July 1st, during which time Scott was
in Edinburgh attending his duty in court for some
hours daily. A number of years passed before Scott
admitted that he was the author of “Waverley” and
of its successors, but many readers suspected that
there was but one man living who could have written
them. In 1815 “Guy Mannering ” appeared and
was received with the hcartiest welcome. The price
was one guinea, and two thousand copies were sold
SCOTT. 257
the day after publication. Then came a visit to
London, where Scott and Byron were the literary lions
of the season. Scott's next novel was “The Anti-
quary,” one of his most artistic works, and of this
delightful story six thousand copies were sold in six
days. No sooner was it finished than two more
romances were started, “Old Mortality " and “The
Black Dwarf,” and published before the end of the
MELROSE ABBEY.
(“Lay of the Last Minstrel.”)
year. On the publisher asking Lord Holland's
opinion of these stories he exclaimed, “Opinion we
did not one of us get to bed last night—nothing
slept but my gout.” A severe illness troubled Scott
for some time in the following spring, yet he did
much laborious literary work in the course of the
R

258 SCOTZ.
year, and by the end of it had also finished “Rob
Roy.” Six months later came “The Heart of Mid-
lothian,” which, had it not been unwisely lengthened
out, might perhaps be called the author's greatest
achievement. In none is the interest of the narrative
more vivid, and in none are the characters drawn with
a more masterly hand. The painful illness occurred
again in the spring of 1819. Yet in the midst of pain,
which often forced him to cry out, he is said to have
dictated the greater portion of “The Bride of Lammer-
moor,” all “The Legend of Montrose,” and almost the
whole of “Ivanhoe.” In the annals of literature there
has perhaps been no achievement more wonderful
than this, for there is no failure of power in these
romances. “Ivanhoe " has always ranked among the
most popular of the series, and “The Bride” is
assuredly one of Scott's supreme efforts. Yet strange
to say, upon his recovery, he did not recollect a single
incident, character, or conversation the book contained,
nothing, that is, to which he had himself given life.
The facts on which the story was grounded he re-
membered perfectly, but had entirely forgotten the
way in which he had used them. So ill was he one
night that he thought himself dying, and took a
solemn farewell of his children. After saying that he
relied on the merits and intercession of our Redeemer,
he laid his hands on their heads and added, “God
bless you ! live so that we may all hope to see each
other in a better place hereafter. And now leave me
that I may turn my face to the wall.” Happily Scott
SCOTT. 259
fell into a deep sleep, and when he awoke after many
hours his physician said that the crisis was over. He
was but forty-eight, but the illness made him look like
an old man, and his hair, which had been but slightly
sprinkled with grey, became snow white. *
The next fact of importance in Scott's life is his
baronetcy, an honour which for his son's sake he was
glad to receive. And although titles do not confer
distinction upon men of letters, yet as a recognition
of genius they are surely not unwelcome, and if ever
man merited this mark of favour it was Walter Scott.
In 1821, at the age of fifty, Sir Walter was at the
height of his prosperity. He was the observed of all
observers, the best-known and the best-loved man in
Great Britain. How full of vigorous life he was in
those days . During the season Abbotsford was
crowded with guests. Noblemen, men of letters and
of Science, politicians, foreigners, and country neigh-
bours, all flocked to the poet's hospitable roof, and the
poorest relation found as warm a welcome there as
the most distinguished visitor. Never was there a
more genial host, and the most timid person felt at
home when Scott had clasped his hand. It has been
said that the busiest men have the largest leisure,
and the saying was true in Sir Walter's case. His
biographer says that at this brilliant period of his
career he was living three or four lives in one. He
was bargaining for land, superintending workmen in-
doors and out, keeping up a large correspondence,
attending daily for a good portion of the year to his
26o SCOTT.
official duties, and visiting friends or receiving them
with the apparent leisure of a country gentleman.
And in addition to this full life he was all the time
engaged in literary labours which may be justly called
stupendous. One of his chief refreshments was to
escape from books and guests into the Woods which
he had planted. He said he could work at the wood-
man's craft from morning to might. “There is no
art or occupation,” he wrote, “ comparable to this; it
is full of past, present, and future enjoyment. I look
back to the time when there was not a tree here, only
bare heath ; I look round and see thousands of trees
growing up, all of which, I may say almost each of
which, have received my personal attention.” And
all the time Sir Walter was in the woods his imagina-
tion was creating scenes for a new romance, or, as he
said, “running its aim riggs in some other world.”
As yet that imagination showed no signs of exhaus-
tion. Certainly there was no falling off in “Renil-
worth,” in “The Pirate,” or in “The Fortunes of
Nigel,” each so unlike the others, and in its own way
so great. Within two years four more tales appeared.
“Peveril of the Peak’ is, I think, in large measure
a failure, but “Quentin Durward,” “ St. Ronan’s
Well,” and “Redgauntlet” are works of art worthy
of the author. “Redgauntlet” has indeed a special
interest, since Scott, to Some extent, reveals himself
in it.
If I were to follow step by step Sir Walter's won-
derful career my story would grow too long. It must
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SCOTT. 263
suffice to point out some of its interesting features. It
was a Saying of Swift that if Addison had proposed
himself for king he would, hardly have been refused,
and Sir Walter's popularity among all classes was
rather that of a well-beloved sovereign than of a pri-
vate person. In 1822 George IV. visited Edinburgh,
and the poet took an active part in the arrangements
for his reception. Sir Robert Peel relates how Sir
Walter proposed that they should go together up the
High Street of Edinburgh before the king passed
through it. “I said to him, ‘You are trying a
dangerous experiment. You will never get through
in privacy.’ He said, ‘They are entirely absorbed in
loyalty.' But I was the better prophet ; he was recog-
nised from the one extremity of the street to the
other, and never did I See such an instance of national
devotion expressed.” Two or three years later Sir
Walter's eldest son, Captain Scott, was married, and
his father went to Ireland to see the young couple
under their own roof. There the same honours
awaited him which he had received in his own dearly-
loved city.
“If his carriage was recognised at the door of any
public establishment, the street was sure to be crowded
before he came out again, so as to make his departure
as slow as a procession. When he entered a street, the
watchword was passed down both sides like lightning,
and the shopkeepers and their wives stood bowing and
curtseying all the way down, while the host of boys
huzzaed as at the chariot-wheels of a conqueror.”
26 # SCOTZ.
Rogers, too, relates that when Scott dined at a
gentleman's house in London, all the servant-maids
asked leave to stand in the passage to see him pass.
Applause like this would have injured a weaker man,
but Scott was unaffected by it, and in the height of
his popularity he was just as simple-minded, as lov-
ing, and as fond of lowly things and persons, as in
the days of his youth. There never was a more
thorough gentleman in the best sense of the word.
“My love,” he said once to his daughter, who had
expressed her dislike of something because it was
vulgar, “you speak like a very young lady; do you
know, after all, the meaning of this word “vulgar’?
'Tis only common. Nothing that is common, except
wickedness, can deserve to be spoken of in a tone of
contempt ; and when you have lived to my years, you
will be disposed to agree with me in thanking God
that nothing really worth having or caring about in
this world is wºmcommon.”
At fifty-three, with his eldest daughter married to
Lockhart, who was destined to be his biographer, with
his eldest son happily married also, with Abbotsford
completed, and linked to a thousand associations, sur-
rounded by affectionate friends, loved by every one
on his estate, in possession of a large income, and
blessed with good health and a wonderful serenity of
spirit, Sir Walter seemed to possess every earthly
felicity. And not yet was his flow of fancy dried up,
as the “Talisman,” and “Woodstock,” “Anne of Geier-
stein,” and the “Fair Maid of Perth,” were to prove.
SCOTT. 265
But now the clouds began to gather, and sorrows
came to Scott, as they come to all of us. Good and
happy in his extraordinary prosperity, it remained for
him to show how nobly and with what invincible
courage he could face the fall of his fortune. No man
probably ever combined such practical sagacity and
such business-like application with an imagination so
fertile ; but imagination was Sir Walter's dominant
faculty, and even when engaged in every-day drudgery,
he was seeing visions and dreaming dreams. Shake-
speare says that when sorrows come, they come not
single-file but in battalions, and so it proved in
Scott's case. The failure of his publisher, and of the
printing-house in which he was a partner, left him
with a debt of £117,000; Lady Scott's health had
been long declining, and she died soon after the
failure. Scott manfully resolved, by dint of hard
work, to pay off the entire debt. The resolution was
a noble one, but he died a martyr to it. In two
years he gained for his creditors nearly £40,000, in
five years he reduced the debt to £54,000, and there
can be little doubt that had a few more years of
strength been given, Scott would have cleared the
whole sum. The task he laid upon his strength, how-
ever, was too great, and he was seized with paralysis.
Even then his heroic determination still chained him
to his desk, and his last novel, “Count Robert of
Paris,” was written after more than one paralytic
stroke told him that the end was near. It was in
these latter years, but before his first seizure, that he
266 - SCO77.
J
wrote the “Tales of a Grandfather ” for Johnny
Lockhart, a child he dearly loved, who died not long
afterwards. The best portion of the Tales relates the
history of Scotland, and a later portion treats of
French history. It is said that the reception of the
first tales was more rapturous than that of any one of
Scott's works since “Ivanhoe,” and I cannot imagine
any person reading these beautifully-told stories
without the keenest pleasure.
I ought to have mentioned that Sir Walter's
creditors generously resolved that he should keep pos-
session of Abbotsford; and the sympathy he received
from every quarter must have been very cheering.
From one anonymous admirer he had an offer of
fº O,000. And other offers of help were made ; but
he was too proud and too independent to accept any
of them. There are few pages in literary biography
more affecting than the Journal which Scott kept in
these last sad years. His friends saw how bravely he
held his head above the waves, but they did not know
until the Diary revealed it, how deeply he had suffered
from the storm. Yet in this time of sorrow he could
Write, “Our hope, heavenly and earthly, is poorly
anchored if the cable parts upon the stream. I believe
in God, who can change evil into good, and I am con-
fident that what befalls us is always ultimately for the
best.”
At length it became evident to the “Great Magi-
cian * himself that his wand had lost its power, and
that the large brain and heart with which he had
SCOTT. - 267
achieved his conquests were exhausted. It was re-
solved that he should try the effect of a voyage to
Italy, and the Government placed a vessel at his
disposal. Before he sailed, Wordsworth came to
Abbotsford to say farewell, and it was then he wrote
the sonnet which ends with these noble lines:–
“Lift up your hearts, ye mourners for the might
Of the whole world’s good wishes with him goes;
Blessings and prayers in nobler retinue
Than sceptred king or laurelled conqueror knows
Follow this wondrous potentate. Be true,
Ye winds of ocean and the midland sea,
Wafting your charge to soft Parthenope ”
In Italy he was received with enthusiasm ; but
worldly honours were of no avail to cheer Sir Walter,
and the death of the great poet Goethe, the news of
which reached him at Naples, increased his desire for
home, that he might die among his own people.
Reaching London, he lay for some days at an hotel
in Jermyn Street in a half-conscious state. There it
was that Allan Cunningham, on walking home one
night, found a group of working-men at the corner of
the street, who stopped him and asked, as if there
were but one death-bed in London, “Do you know,
sir, if this is the street where he is lying 2 ° Scott's
one desire now was to reach Abbotsford, and when
reaching it he was greatly affected. He asked to be
wheeled through his rooms, saying frequently, “I
have seen much, but nothing like my ain house; give
me one turn more.” The next day he was drawn to
a window in the library, that he might gaze upon the
268 SCOTT,
Tweed, and desired his son-in-law to read to him.
When 85-ed from what book, he said, “Need you
ask? There is but one.” And when Lockhart had
read the fourteenth chapter of St. John's Gospel, he
said, “Well, this is a great comfort. I have followed
you distinctly, and I feel as if I were yet to be myself
again.”
It is remarkable that, while listening as if it were
new to poetry he had known all his life, his recollec-
tion of what was read from the Bible appeared to be
lively; and when his grandson, a child of six years
old, repeated some of Dr. Watts's hymns by his
chair, he seemed also to remember them perfectly.
It was in July that Scott reached Abbotsford, and
he lingered on until the middle of September. “At
half-past one P.M., on the 21st, Sir Walter breathed
his last in the presence of all his children. It was a
beautiful day, so warm that every window was wide
open, and so perfectly still that the sound of all others
most delicious to his ear—the gentle ripple of the
Tweed over its pebbles—was distinctly audible as the
family knelt around the bed and his eldest son kissed
and closed his eyes.” -
And now I have reached the most difficult part of
my pleasant task; most difficult, because there is so
much that might be said about Scott as an author,
while the space in which to say it is necessarily
limited. Glancing over the shelves that hold the
twelve volumes of his poetry, the forty-eight volumes
of the Waverley novels, and the miscellaneous prose
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SCOTZ. 27.
works in twenty-eight volumes, the reader familiar
with what Sir Walter has done will be reminded of the
wealth and originality, the variety and high moral
purity of all that he has left us.
No man of letters ever did so much for his country
as Sir Walter has done for his native land. By the
force and sweetness of his genius—for in a great poet
the heart and the imagination workin concert—Scott,
as Mr. Palgrave has pointed out, removed the antagon-
ism that had always existed between the Lowlander
and the Highlander. Indeed, the Scotland we know
may be almost called Scott's creation, so dear and so
familiar has he made it to us. And in doing this he
gave utterance to the patriotic spirit which is the
source of all social and political virtue. Our first and
warmest affections must be given to home and
country, and if a man professes to love the human
race as much as his own family, we may be pretty sure
that he does not greatly care about either. The love
of country animated Scott's life, and inspired all his
finest work. So, too, did the spirit of Christianity,
although the poet's religious views are rarely expressed
in any definite form. And then, through all his
works, there will be found, as already hinted, what, for
want of a better term, I may call an out-of-door
atmosphere. The reader feels the breeze upon his
face, scents the mountain air, enjoys the beauty of
mountain Scenery, and engages, while sitting in his
arm-chair, in the vigorous sports and occupations of
the country. Novel-reading generally, unless in-
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SCO77. - 273
wholesome food, is dieted on richly-spiced cake and
cayenne pepper, the moderation and sobriety of Scott
may not always be appreciated. Even the tranquil
beauty of the stars will fail to charm when the sky is
illuminated with fireworks. Taste, however, can be
cultivated, and the love of good literature, if it be
acquired early, is one of the most lasting enjoyments
of life. I do not know a better or more trustworthy
indication of this love of what is Sane and wholesome
in fiction than an affection for Scott's works. Let
me point out some of their characteristics, and why
I think Sir Walter Scott the most delightful of all
Writers of romance.
It is one of the first requisites of the novelist that
he should have a good story to tell and know how to
tell it, and in this respect there are several master-
pieces among the Waverley novels. Nothing can be
more admirable than the choice of subject and the
management of the plot in “Old Mortality,” “The
Bride of Lammermoor,” “The Fortunes of Nigel,”
“Quentin Durward,” “Kenilworth,” and I might add
“The Heart of Midlothian,” were it not, as I have
said already, that Scott has injured this splendid fic-
tion by prolonging the story after the interest is over.
Another prominent mark of these tales is their won-
derful variety, their richness in incident and life.
The reader becomes acquainted with public men and
public affairs, with the homeliest domestic details,
and the humblest people. He is brought into the
company of kings and queens, of beggars and clowns,
S
274 SCOTZ.
of mercenary soldiers and chivalrous gentlemen, of
eccentric wits and humorous pedants, of magistrates
and lawyers, of servant girls and high-born ladies;
and whether the plot is laid in the twelfth century,
as in “Ivanhoe,” or in the eighteenth, as in “Guy
Mannering ” and the “Antiquary,” there is the one
touch of nature which makes the reader feel as if all
these people were something more than creatures of
the imagination and must have played their parts on
the stage of life. Naturally Scott is most at home
on his native soil, and in picturing scenes and people
familiar to him all his life. Yet I think there is as
much truth to nature and to history in the wonderful
portraits of Louis XI. and Charles the Bold in
“Quentin Durward,” of King James in the “For-
tunes of Nigel,” and of Mary Queen of Scots in the
“Abbot,” as in the characters which he may be said
to have drawn from living persons. We cannot say,
of course, that the historical personages that figure in
Scott's pages talked as he makes them talk, but the
reader feels sure that if they did not they ought to
have done so. And the homelier characters, like
Maggie Mucklebackit in the “Antiquary,” or Meg
Dods in “St. Roman's Well,” or Dandy Dinmont in
“Guy Mannering,” are to the reader as much alive
as if they were in the flesh.
For readers who care less for vivid portraiture of
character than for exciting incident, there is assuredly
no lack of the latter in the Waverley novels. Turn,
for instance, to the description in the “Legend of
SCO 77. 275
Montrose ’’ of Dalgetty in the dungeon, to the inter-
view between Morton and Burley in the cave in “Old
Mortality,” to the midnight murder of the miser
Trapbois in the “Fortunes of Nigel,” to the trial by
combat in the “Fair Maid of Perth,” to the picture
of Jeanie Deans in the barn with ruffians, to the
startling scenes with De la Marck in “Quentin Dur-
ward,” to the escape of Rob Roy from his captors,
and to such novels as “Ivanhoe,” the “Talisman,”
“ Kenilworth,” and “Waverley,” which abound in
the most spirit-stirring action. The author of “Mar-
mion’’ never fails for want of vigour, and never
loiters by the way when the plot requires that he
should move over the ground swiftly. Where Scott
does loiter is in the playful introductions to his novels,
which, delightful as they are to many, may be found
tedious by readers who are in haste for amusement.
Dean Stanley, in an address to students many years
ago, spoke of “the profound reverence, the lofty sense
of Christian honour, purity, and justice that breathe
through every volume of the romances of Walter
Scott.” This is most true. True virtue and true
religion are always reverently treated by him, and if
he laughs at the eccentricities and quaint expressions
of Puritan or Covenanter, he never despises a man,
however fanatical he may be, whose faith is genuinely
sincere. David Deans, in the “Heart of Midlothian,”
for instance, is a narrow-minded and fanatical Came-
ronian, who when his poor daughter Effie was accused
of child-murder, would not have a lawyer to defend
276 - SCO 77.
her whose views were not what he considered sound.
Yet in spite of the absurd intolerance that would have
risked a daughter's life, Scott makes us respect Douce
Davie, not of course for his prejudices, but for his
honesty and fidelity. And David's eldest daughter
Jeanie, a homely-looking peasant girl, as faithful to
her convictions as her father was, and with little to
recommend her beyond her nobility of character, is
the heroine of the novel, and is, I think, one of the
finest heroines in fiction. She will not say an untrue
word to save her sister, but she who had hitherto
rarely been beyond her father's cottage, will venture
to go alone on foot from Edinburgh to London in
order to appeal to the Queen for the pardon of poor
Effie. The difficulties and dangers she meets with on
the road only serve to add to our respect for the
faithful maiden, and when through the Duke of Argyle,
Jeanie gains access to the Queen, she wins her cause
by a burst of natural eloquence quite in keeping with
the simplicity of her nature.
Sir Walter acknowledged, and justly, that he was
a bad hand at depicting a hero. I do not think he
has invented one who has much to recommend him
beyond courage, fidelity, and good looks; and, with
the exception of Diana Vernon, Jeanie Deans, and
Rebecca the Jewess, the same may be said of his
heroines. He is deficient also, and this is Scott's
most prominent defect, in his love passages; but
though weak in this respect, he is strong in deline-
ating the other great passions which sway human
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278 SCO 77.
shop, of rustic lovers, of gipsies or fish-wives, of jus-
tices of the peace “dressed in a little brief authority,”
and of people partially insane, is given with a truth
to nature which even Shakespeare has not surpassed.
I should like, had space permitted, to give some
illustrations of Sir Walter's delightful humour; of
his profound pathos, often called forth, as in the
“Antiquary,” by the Sorrows of the humblest people;
of his great tragic power, which probably reaches its
height in the “Bride of Lammermoor,” and of the
love with which he describes the different aspects of
nature. It has been said that of all the great names
of literature none was so dear to Dean Stanley as
that of Walter Scott ; and Hawthorne, the American
novelist, after saying how much Scott had done for
his happiness when young, added, “I still cherish
him in a warm place, and I do not know that I have
any pleasanter anticipation as regards books than that
of reading all the novels over again.”
JOHN DENNIS.
MRS. BROWNING.
(Élizabet, jatrºtt #100millſ,
Born March 4, 1809; died June 29, 1861.
“You my moon of poets.”
ToBERT BROWNING.
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MLRS. BROWNING.
i § LIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
&\} . was born in 1809. Her birthplace was
, º Burn Hall, Durham. She was chris-
tened Elizabeth Barrett, and her full
name was for a time Elizabeth Barrett
Moulton. But soon after her birth her father, Mr.
Edward Moulton, took the name of Barrett on Suc-
ceeding to some property; and the family removed
into Herefordshire. The early years of the poetess
were spent in her beautiful home near Ledbury. The
house is described as delightfully situated on sloping
park-like land, well timbered, and with the prospect
of pleasant hills, white over with sheep.
“Green the land is where my daily
Steps in jocund childhood played,
Dimpled close with hill and valley,
Dappled very close with shade;
Summer Snow of apple-blossoms running up from glade to glade.”




282 MA’.S. BA’O WAV/AVG.
The house itself was built by Mr. Barrett, and bore
witness to his tastes. An organ stood in the hall.
The windows were Moorish in form. Turrets broke
the line of elevation. In the room occupied by Eliza-
beth Barrett there was a stained-glass window. The
child was fond of flowers. She was pleased with her
success in growing some white roses. She had a
bower of her own. It was sheltered by trees, a linden
and a hawthorn, both clad with ivy.
‘‘’Twas a bower for garden fitter
Than for any woodland wide;
Though a fresh and dewy glitter
Struck it through from side to side,
Shaped and shaven was the freshness, as by garden-cunning plied.
“IRose-trees either side the door were
Growing lithe and growing tall,
Each one set a summer warder,
Eor the keeping of the hall,
With a red rose and a white rose, leaning, nodding at the wall.”
In this happy home, named Hope End, she had
kindly companions. “Papa was bent on spoiling
me.” He encouraged her early literary efforts. He
was her “public and her critic.” Besides her father,
there was her blind tutor, Hugh Stuart Boyd. “This
excellent and learned man, enthusiastic for the good
and the beautiful, and one of the most simple and
upright of human beings, passed out of his long dark-
mess through death in the summer of 1848.” He
bequeathed to her two books, AEschylus and Gregory
Nazianzen, and a clock.
MA’.S. BRO WAV/AWG. 283
. . “These books were those I used to read from, thus
Assisting my dear teacher's soul to unlock
The darkness of his eyes; now, mine they mock,
Blinded in those by tears.
“. . . Books, lie down
In silence on the shelf, there, within gaze;
And thou, clock, striking the hour's pulses on,
Chime in the day which ends these parting days.”
She began her studies early. Her aptitude for
learning was remarkable. At eight she could read
Homer in the original. Her mind was soon Saturated
with the influence of Greek writers. She possessed a
rare and deep knowledge of Greek literature. As a
child she lived among Greek heroes. “She dreamed
more of Agamemnon than of Moses, her black pony.”
She took deep draughts of poetry, Greek and English ;
but she drank also from nature's fountain. Her pony
carried her about the country, and she delighted in
the fair, calm English scenery which surrounded her
home.
“The tangled hedgerows, where the cows push out
Impatient horns and tolerant churning mouths—
Hills, vales, woods, melted in a silver mist,
Farms, granges, doubled up among the hills;
And cattle grazing in the watered vales,
And cottage-chimneys smoking from the woods,
And cottage-gardens Smelling everywhere.”
In the house, too, nature had other smiles and
other company for her. She had brothers and sisters.
The joyousness of child society, with its interchange
of hopes and fears and strange imaginings, with its
284. MRS, BAO WAV/AWG.
little quarrels, its unwritten code of quaint honour,
and its unconscious discipline.
The shadows fell soon on this bright and happy
life. The first blow robbed her of healthful activity.
She was not a strong child. “She had,” writes Miss
Mitford, “a slight, delicate figure’’; but there was
no insignificance about her. “A shower of dark
curls” fell “on each side of a most expressive face.”
She had “large tender eyes richly fringed by dark
eye-lashes, and a smile like a sunbeam.” But when
she was fifteen an accident so seriously injured her
that she was compelled to live an inactive life. She
attempted to saddle her own pony in the field. She
fell with the saddle upon her and injured her spine.
Five years later other shadows darkened her life.
Her mother was taken ill with the illness which at
length proved fatal. Heavy money troubles came at
the same time. Mr. Barrett, through the fault and
misconduct of others, lost a sum of money, which left
him a comparatively poor man. With courageous
affection he kept the knowledge of his losses from his
sick wife, and made such arrangements that no change
should give her any hint of his difficulties or deprive
her of her happy home. But when Mrs. Barrett died
the changes came. The bright, glad house had to be
abandoned, and, after two years spent at Sidmouth,
Mr. Barrett established his household at 74, Glouces-
ter Place, in London. But there were more shadows
to come. At the age of twenty-eight Miss Barrett
broke a blood-vessel in the lungs, and was compelled
MA’S. AA’O WAV/AWG, 285
to go to Torquay. There a further trouble fell upon
her. She was still an invalid when her favourite
brother, who came to see her, was drowned by acci-
dent, and she had the agony and suspense of being a
witness of the catastrophe. The shock to her weak
and fragile system imperilled her life, and for seven
years she was confined to her couch. She had reached
her thirty-seventh year. -
And now over the middle arch of her life the
shadows melted away. The lingering May came at
last, and with it the singing of the birds. Miss
Barrett had for some time been recognised as a
poetess. The Quarterly Review, in 1840, had spoken
of “her extraordinary acquaintance with ancient
classic literature,” and “the boldness of her poetic
attempts.” The article had criticised her mannerism,
and her tendency to the over-strained, which was
attributed to her enthusiasm for AEschylus ; but her
merits were clearly acknowledged. The poem on Cow-
per's grave had been pronounced a beautiful one;
and in conclusion Miss Barrett was declared “to be
a woman of undoubted genius and most unusual
learning.” This was high praise from an influential
quarter. It must be remembered the poems under
review were “The Seraphim and other Poems”
(1838); “Prometheus Bound and Miscellaneous
Poems” (1833); and “The Romaunt of the Page”
(1839). At that date “Casa Guidi Windows,”
“Poems before Congress,” “Aurora Leigh,” and the
“Portuguese Sonnets,” had not been written, and
286 MA’S. AA’OW/V/AVG.
was rewritten. Thus the
5
later the “Prometheus'
smile of the critic had come ; and the sunshine of
love was coming.
Mr. Browning had recently become a visitor at
Mr. Barrett’s house. He was the author of “Sor-
dello and Paracelsus,” “Pippa Passes,” and “Straf-
ford.” He was then engaged in writing “A Soul's
Tragedy.” To him the soul of man was of the
deepest interest. “The historical decoration was
purposely of no more importance than a background
requires.” His “stress lay on the incidents in the
development of a soul; little else,” he said, “is worth
study.” There was literary and ethical sympathy
between Miss Barrett and Mr. Browning. Deep and
strong attachment quickly followed. In the autumn
of 1846 they were married, and the sunshine which
had so long vanished returned when she became Mrs.
Browning. The shadows, which had for twenty years
more or less darkly overhung her life, departed, and
the fifteen years which still remained to her were full
of brightness, for they were spent under the clear
Italian sky and in the Sweet and appreciative com-
panionship of her husband, whose tender and chival-
rous love for her outlived her life. In Florence, in
the large drawing-room of Casa Guidi, which “opened
on a balcony filled with plants,” and looking out upon
the iron-grey church of Santa Felice, she can be
recalled by those who knew her there. It is difficult,
says Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, to realise her save as a
wife and a mother, “so vivid and complete is the
MRS. BROWNING.
(From the painting by Rudolf Lehmann. By permission of the artist.)

A/ACS. AA’O WAV/AVG. 280
image of her peaceful home, of its fireside where the
logs are burning, and the mistress established on her
sofa, with her little boy curled up by her side, the
door opening and shutting meanwhile to the quick
step of the master of the house, and to the life of the
world without, coming to find her in her quiet
corner.” Such was her home till the midsummer of
1861, when the end came. In that drawing-room of
Casa Guidi she received her friends, English and
Italian. Its kindly doors were open to the poor
exile, Walter Savage Tandor. In the same room,
with the sound of the music from the church oppo-
site, or of the flowing life of Florence in the street
below, she wrote, thinking how Wallombrosa had
charmed the eye of Milton, who had first made its
leafy beauties known in England :—
“Your beauty and your glory helped to fill
The cup of Milton's soul so to the brink,
He never more was thirsty when God’s will
Eſad shattered to his sense the last chain-link,
by which he had drawn from Nature's visible
The fresh well-water. Satisfied by this,
He sang of Adam’s paradise, and Smiled,
Remembering Wallombrosa.”
But her heart was with the men who were striving
for Italian liberty, and with those who had fallen in
the struggle. She gave tongue to hope even in des-
pair —
“The world shows nothing lost, ,
Therefore, not blood. Above or underneath,
What matters, brothers, if we keep our post
On duty’s side P As sword returns to sheath,
So dust to grave, but souls find place in Heaven.
Heroic daring is the true success.”
T
290 A/A’.S. BACO WAV/AWG.
She looked forth from Casa Guidi windows and saw
the changing fortunes of that prolonged struggle.
She felt with the hopes and the fears of a great
people. She saw -
“annihilated Poland, stifled Rome,
Dazed Naples, Hungary fainting 'neath the thong,
And Austria wearing a smooth olive-leaf
On her brute forehead, while her hoofs outpress
The life from these Italians' souls in brief.”
And seeing this, she broke into passionate prayer: —
“O Lord of Peace, who art Lord of Righteousness,
Constrain the anguished world from sin and grief,
Pierce them with conscience, purge them with redress,
And give us peace which is no counterfeit.”
From Casa Guidi windows she noted how the
world was busy. It had “grown a fair-going world.”
England was drawing to the Crystal Palace the
flowing ends of the earth from Fez, Canton, Delhi,
Athens, and Madrid. Rich and rare commodities
of splendour and of price were being sent for exhibi-
tion from all quarters of the world, but men were
too busy with commerce to think of right, or of the
souls that were groaning in slavery — -
“What gifts for Christ, then, bring ye with the rest?
Your, hands have worked well: is your courage spent
In hand-work only P Have you nothing best,
Which generous Souls may perfect and present,
And He shall thank the givers for P no light
Of teaching, liberal nations, for the poor
Who sit in darkness when it is not might?”
A/RS. AEA’O WAV/AWG. 2.91
Had England no remedy for the wrongs of women
and children 3 Could not Austria release the bound,
and restore the exiles 2 Could not Russia give repose
to hunted Poles, and gentle ladies bleached among
the snows Had America no mercy for the slave
“Alas! great mations have great shames, I say.”
But however man disappointed our hopes, God was
above all, and hope for the golden age could not
die —
‘‘We will thank God. The blank interstices
Man takes for ruins, He will build into
With pillared marbles rare, or knit across
With generous arches, till the fame's complete.
The world has no perdition, if some loss.”
At Casa Guidi she wrote also “Aurora Leigh,”
though the last pages were finished under the roof of
her friend Mr. Kenyon. To him she dedicated the
poem, and in his hands she left the completed work,
which she considered “the most mature of my works,
and the one into which my highest convictions upon
Life and Art have entered.” In this work the same
breath of hope fills the close which inspired the con-
cluding lines of “Casa Guidi Windows”:-
“The world’s old,
But the old world waits to be renewed,
Towards which, new hearts in individual growth
Must quicken, and increase by multitude
In new dynasties of the race of man;
Developed whence, shall grow spontaneously
New churches, new economies, new laws,
Admitting freedom, new societies,
Excluding falsehood: He shall make all new.”
2 Q2 Al//e,S. AA’O WAV/AWG.
She seemed to see the dawn of better things:–
“The first foundation of that new, near day,
Which should be builded out of heaven to God.”
The rank which Mrs. Browning occupies among
English poets is a matter of dispute, but she has
fairly earned a right to sit among them. Her right
is established if we appeal to the multitude who have
read her works by thousands, and to whom at least
her minor poems have yielded unfeigned delight.
There are few selections of shorter English poems
which would exclude “Cowper's Grave,” or “The Cry
of the Children.” There are few selections of Sacred
verses which do not include “He giveth His beloved
sleep.” But her right to a place among the throned
ones does not depend on the suffrages of the multi-
tude, but on the reverent admiration of cultured and
thoughtful men. The writer in the Emcyclopædia
Britannica goes so far as to say—and though I
cannot agree with his views I quote them—“Her
lyrical capabilities were of the highest order ; she
was greater, probably, in this particular, than either
Campbell or Tennyson. . . . . The heart which has
always given our lyric poets their greatest power was
the strength of Mrs. Browning ; her song was a living
voice, eloquent with passion.” George Eliot spoke of
the delight which the “Casa Guidi Windows” gave
her, and of the noble expression the poem contained
of the true relation of the religious mind of the past
to that of the present. George MacDonald called
MA’.S. AA’O WAV/AWG, 293
her the princess of poets. Professor Dowden says,
“The violin's fulness and the violin's intensity are in
the ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese.’” Professor
Bayne declares that “in melodiousness and splendour
of poetic gifts Mrs. Browning stands, to the best of
my knowledge, first among women.”
To such recognitions of her powers did the child
who rejoiced in her rose-bower at Ledbury finally
attain. Like so many who have achieved greatness,
she was weak and delicate ; and to the last she seemed
to those who knew her a fragile creature. “She was
a pale, small person, scarcely embodied at all.” She
had “slender fingers,” and when she spoke she did so
“with a shrill, yet sweet tenuity of voice.” Mrs.
Ritchie can “recall the slight figure in its black silk
dress, the writing apparatus by the sofa, the tiny
inkstand, the quill-nibbed penholder, the unpreten-
tious implements of her work. “She was a little
woman ; she liked little things.’” But in this frail
frame there lived a glowing spirit which could feel
keenly and aspire nobly. It is quite true, as Pro-
fessor Dowden says, that “the poems of Mrs. Brown-
ing which we remember with gratitude are not those
that were derived from her learned studies, nor those
that show her ineffectually straining after a vague
sublimity of thought, but those that come to us
straight from ‘the red-ripe of the heart.’” It is this
intensity of loving, generous, and noble feeling which
is seen everywhere in her writings that attracts us.
We recognise that we are listening to one who thinks
2.94. MFS, APA’O WWZVG.
no base thought and scorns all wrong, and who desires
to lift all life everywhere into purer and healthier
heights. She longs to see social life purged from
wrong, and national life everywhere from all taint
of tyranny. She desires to see literature inspired
after some noble fashion. “We want,” she wrote,
“the touch of Christ upon our literature, as it
touched other dead things; we want the sense of the
Saturation of Christ's blood upon the souls of our
poets, that it may cry through them in answer to the
ceaseless wail of the sphinx of our humanity, expand-
ing agony into restoration. Something of this has
been perceived in art when its glory was at the fullest.
Something of a yearning after this may be seen among
the Greek Christian poets, something which would
have been much with a stronger faculty.” This para-
graph expresses the passionate desire for the conse-
cration of all gifts to worthy ends, and the ennobling
of the minds of men thereby. The elevation of aim
governs the range of flight in human lives: a lofty
design goes far to secure some noble achievement.
Behind Mrs. Browning's success we trace a generous
and exalted purpose. But great as was her success as
a poetess, there are some, perhaps, who will account
it even a greater success to have won the tender and
worshipful love of so noble a genius as her husband.
In a London drawing-room one day a lady asked Mr.
3rowning for his autograph. He did not reply, and
the lady imagined that he had disliked being asked.
A few days afterwards Mr. Browning called again, and
MA’.S. BA&O WAV/AVG. 295
outstayed all other visitors. When all had left, he
drew out of his pocket a manuscript, and handed it
to the lady, saying that he had brought for her
acceptance something which was more worthy than
anything he could write. It was the MS. of one of
Mrs. Browning's shorter poems. We seem to hear
the echo of the words we know so well:—
“I love thee freely as men strive for Right :
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith,
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears of all my life and if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.”
W. B. RIPON.
ROBERT BROWNING.
§ſhtri ºtoluming,
Born, May 7, 1812; died, December 12, 1889.
- *-*.
“A great poet in spite of some of the worst defects that ever stood
between a poet and popularity.”
JUSTIN McCARTHY.
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ROBERT BROWNING.
§IOBERT BROWNING is the modern
English poet who more conspicuously
than any other of our day has imi-
tated Wagner in the use of discords.
Indeed, much as he loved music, the
last thing one could say of the great mass of his
verse, is that it is musical. There are great excep-
tions of course. There is a fine rhythmical passion
in “How they brought the good news from Ghent to
Aix.” I have heard “A Toccata of Galuppi's "so read
as to live in the memory by virtue of its music alone,
though it requires great art so to read it, for there are
plenty of rough places which it needs a genuine poet's
feeling to make plain. But as a rule Browning's
poetry, even when most musical, is full of uneven-
ness, and jolts the reader quite as much as it delights
him. Even as a poet he loved ejaculation and all
forms of abrupt speech, or, indeed, of abrupt feeling.
As a child he burnt a Brussels lace veil of his
















300 A’OAP/CA’7” AA&O WAV/AWG.
mother's, to see the “pitty baze” (pretty blaze) which
it made. That sudden outbursting of light had a
great charm for him in later life.
Mr. Buchanan has noticed the resemblance be-
tween Browning's bearing and that of the skipper of
a small sailing brig–the keen penetrating eyes and
rough and abrupt manner that had trained itself
to deal peremptorily with all sorts of men. And
it may be questioned whether verse ever pleased
him half as much by its harmonies as it did by its
surprises, by the unexpectedness to which rhyme
lends itself—the sudden falls and sudden rises in the
mood and attitude of thought and feeling which it
contrives to express. Such poems as “The Gram-
marian's Funeral ” and “Soliloquy in the Spanish
Cloister” show the kind of charm which verse had
for Browning, far more characteristically than the
long roll of “A Lost Leader,” or the stately rhythm
of “Saul.” Here, for instance, is the series of suc-
cessive thunderclaps in which Browning delights:—
“This low man goes on adding one to one,
Fſis humdred’s soon hit :
This high man, aiming at a million,
Misses an unit.
That, has the world here, should he need the next,
Let the world mind him
This, throws himself on God, and unperplexed
Seeking shall find Him.
So, with the throttling hands of Death at strife
Ground he at grammar ;
Still through the rattle, parts of speech were rife:
While he could stammer
He settled Hoti's business—let it be 1–
Properly based Own—
A&O BERT BA&O WAV/AWG. 3O 1
Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,
Dead from the waist down.”
And he used with admirable effect the discords to
which verse lends itself, to express bursts of the most
malignant passion. Take, for instance, the following
from the “Soliloquy in the Spanish Cloister” —
“There’s a great text in Galatians,
Once you trip on it, entails
Twenty-nine distinct damnations,
One sure, if another fails ;
If I trip him, just a-dying,
Sure of Heaven as sure can be,
Spin him round and send him flying
Off to Hell, a Manichee?”
This is the remarkable poem which concludes with—
“Or, there’s Satan –one might venture
Pledge one’s soul to him, yet leave
Such a flaw in the indenture
As he'd miss till past retrieve ;
Blasted lay that rose-acacia.
We're so proud of ; Hy, Zy, Hine,
'St there's Vespers . Plena gratié
Ave Virgo 1 Gr-r-r—you swine !”
It is evident that verse treated after this fashion is
used rather to startle and produce surprise, than to fill
with the sense of melody and concord. And in a very
large proportion of Browning's poetry, verse is certainly
used more for the sake of the amusement and slight in-
tellectual fillip which great ingenuity in the produc-
tion of rhyme affords, than for the purpose of pleasing
the ear or softening the heart. Beauty was never
3O2 A&O BERT BRO WAV/AVG.
Browning's chief object in his poetic work. Rather
did he love to perpetuate and explain the more or less
grotesque forms of human inconsistency and para-
doxical passion. Probably no poet ever had a larger
command of what I may call the abrupt gestures of im-
patient minds. He delighted, too, in studying the
Sophistry of technical skill, and was a most acute
observer of the fury of baffled spite. In “The Ring
and the Book,” for instance, he takes almost as much
pleasure in displaying the cut-and-dried pleadings of
the ecclesiastical lawyers, and the mean cowardice and
cunning shifts of the murderous villain, Count Guido,
as in painting the passionate purity of Pompilia, and
the wise and wistful musings of the aged Pope.
Browning's biographer, Mrs. Sutherland Orr, has
given him credit for possessing a great mastery of
words. And that no doubt he had, but not of the
Words which we are most accustomed to associate
with the imaginations of a poet. He had very
little mastery of Miltonic words, words which fill the
Soul with the impression of grand organ tones, and no
command of words which melt and subdue it to the
pathetic humility and tenderness of Tennyson. Brown-
ing's mastery of words was almost entirely in the
region in which words startle us by the shock of their
Sudden and unexpected impact—by the jaggedness of
their incisive bite, or the quaintness of their gro-
tesque combinations. His words often affect us like
showers of pebbles projected from a sling singularly
well handled by an adroit marksman who cares much
AZOA ERZ" AA’O WAV/AWG. 3O3
more to bring down the Philistines who oppose him
than to cheer on the children of light with whom he
allies himself. No one could pelt with words like
Browning. He had a keen eye, too, for brusque
turns of thought which converted circumstances that
would have silenced anyone else into positive advan-
tages for his own case. Mrs. Orr relates that as a child
he clad himself in something that would look like a
surplice or Geneva gown, climbed into an arm-chair
and preached to his little sister with so much vehe-
mence that she was frightened and began to cry, upon
which he turned to an imaginary sacristan and said
with all the sternness of an offended ecclesiastic,
“Pew-opener, remove that child.” One sees in his
poetry just that kind of nimbleness in turning un-
favourable accidents to his own advantage in his use
of rhyme and rhythm. For example, take the poem
called “Old Pictures in Florence,” and notice how it
delights Browning to set himself apparently impossible
rhyme-problems, and then to solve them in some
unexpected fashion —
“I, that have haunted the dim San Spirito,
(Or was it rather the Ognissanti P)
Patient on altar-step planting a weary toe
Nay, I shall have it yet ! Detur amanti |
My Koh-i-noor—or (if that's a platitude)
Jewel of Giamschid, the Persian Sofi's eye;
So, in anticipative gratitude,
What if I take up my hope and prophesy " ''
Nothing could be more remarkable for ingenuity
3O4. A’OAAA’ 7' AA’O WAV/AWG.
and resource than these rhymes, but nothing also
more remarkable for oddity of gesticulation. Hudi-
bras rather than Milton seems to have been Brown-
ing's model in the department of rhyme. He did not
love to fuse his verse into an expression of a single
mood or attitude of mind, but rather to leave it
bristling with the quips and cranks of an eager and
impatient intelligence. There is a letter to Miss
Haworth, written in 1838, in Mrs. Sutherland Orr's
“Life of Browning ” (p. 96) which seems to me
most characteristic of the poet's inner style and
method. It runs thus :-
“Twesday evening.—Dear Miss Haworth, Do
look at a fuchsia in full bloom and notice the clear
little honey-drop depending from every flower. I have
just found it out to my no small satisfaction,-a bee's
breakfast. I only answer for the long-blossomed
sort, though, -indeed, for this plant in my room.
Taste and be Titania; you can, that is. All this
while I forget that you will perhaps never guess the
good of the discovery: I have, you are to know, such
a love for flowers and leaves—some leaves—that I
every now and then, in an impatience at not being
able to possess myself of them thoroughly, to see them
quite, Satiate myself with their scent, -bite them to
bits—so there will be some sense in that. How I
remember the flowers-—even grasses—of places I have
seen | Some one flower or weed, I should say, that
gets Some strangehow connected with them. Snow-
drops and Tilsit in Prussia go together ; cowslips and
±
|-
.
§§©\\\|
----
ROBERT BROWNING.
(From a photo by Elliott & Fry.)

A’OAPAEA’ 7' AA&O WAV/AWG. 307
Windsor Park, for instance ; flowering palm and some
place or other in Holland.” - . .
That remark of Browning's, that in order to possess
himself thoroughly of the flowers he most cares for,
he is apt “to bite them to bits,” is very characteristic.
How often, in one of his rougher poems, does he not
seem to be biting his subject to bits, in order to
possess himself of its very soul!
Browning was himself perfectly sensible of the
deficiency in the fusing power of his own genius—of
which, however, he greatly underrated the singularity
and freshness. In assuring his friends that his wife's
genius was greatly superior to his own—which it cer- .
tainly was not except in this one respect that she was
far more sensitive to the various aspects and effects of
sentiment, and that she suffused all her language
more completely with the glow of individual emotion
than ever he himself did—he used this remarkable
expression :-" She has genius ; I am only a pains-
taking fellow. Can't you imagine a clever sort of
angel who plots and plans and tries to build up some-
thing, -he wants to make you see it as he sees it, L
shows you one point of view—carries you off to
another, hammering into your head the thing he
wants, you to understand ; and while this bother is
going on, God Almighty turns you off a little star.
That's the difference between us. The true creative
power is hers, not mine.” “ That is most unjust to
* “Mrs. Sutherland Orr's “Life and Letters of Robert Browning,”
p. 244. Smith, Elder & Co.
308 A’OA; ER7' BA&O WAV/AWG.
himself. He had a profusion of originality to which
Mrs. Browning could not even pretend, but it is true
that he rarely indeed imparted to his poems the pas-
sion and thrill of any over-mastering emotion. Nor,
indeed, did he impart this effect to his letters. Even
in the letters which he wrote after his wife's death,
an event which broke him down completely for the
time, there is the same manner of showing his corre-
spondent “one point of view,” “carrying him off
to another,” and “hammering at him the thing he
wants him to understand,” which he found so prosaic
as compared with his wife's singleness and glow of
feeling. In the majority of his poems the freshness
of his ingenuities is astounding, but his work is more
or less of mosaic work, and bas not the softness and
richness of a great painting. That, too, is why his
letters are so disappointing. They are letters of fact,
not letters of sentiment or passion, seldom even of
wit or humour. His tendency was to multiply facets,
not to produce single and complete wholes.
But artist or no artist, he was a great spiritual
teacher, disguised as a man of the World ; and a very
shrewd, and sometimes shrill, man of the world like
Lord Jeffrey, though with access to imaginative and
moral depths that Lord Jeffrey knew nothing about.
No one could by any possibility have mistaken Mr.
Browning for one of the consecrated order ; he had
not even the consciousness of nature's consecration in
his manner, as many poets have had. On the contrary
he wished to take every opportunity of proclaiming
ROBERT BROWNZVG. 3C9
himself unconsecrated and unconventional to the last
extreme ; indeed he was determined to pitch his voice
exactly at the note that suited his own immediate
humour, whether that derogated from his dignity or
not. He was like some of the minor prophets in his
roughness, but he had none of their solemnity. His
manner was that of a shrewd citizen of the world,
and, though he adopted verse as his medium of
speech, he did so rather to show how familiar
he could make it than how much it added to the
depth or compass of his utterance. And yet though
his manner was thus familiar, and sometimes
one might say almost rude, he scarcely ever spoke
without bringing home to the listener matter of the
most deep and solemn import. He was the true lay
preacher, and so much of a layman that it was diffi-
cult to catch the idea that he was preaching after all.
He did not intend to catch the temper of the preacher,
and never did ; but he cried aloud, and spared not to
tell men, in his own peculiar fashion, of their gross-
ness and of their transgressions, and of the only
source of hope.
But he did it in his own way, and a very singular
way it was. The first lesson he is always insisting on
is the curious irreligiousness of a great many religious
people. Indeed, a very superficial acquaintance with
Browning might give the impression that he was a
cynic. What can be more cynical in effect than that
wonderful picture, from which I have already quoted,
of the monk of the Spanish cloister, who detests his
3 I O /*O/3 ER 7" BA&O WAV/AWG.
Superior and the meek, innocent tastes of that supe-
rior, with a malignity, of which it seems impossible
to sound the depth, and who yet blends that malig-
nity with a fierce self-approving orthodoxy which
enables him to feel the self-satisfaction of Superior
piety 2 The virus of deadly hatred pervades the
soliloquy from beginning to end, and yet it is as full
as it can hold of superstitious faith. The reader who
reads that soliloquy for the first time with its climax
of scornful malediction, “G-r-r-r, you swine,” would
think that the drift of the poet was to paint conven-
tual life as one long hypocrisy. But if he goes deeper
he sees that it is nothing of the sort; that Browning
frequently discerns as much ardent piety under the
cowl as he does at times superstitious malice. Again,
if one takes up carelessly “Christmas Eve and Easter
Day,” and reads the marvellous description—seldom
equalled for vigour in any poem of any age or country
—of the few Methodists who come into the little
Bethel where the supposed writer of the poem takes
shelter from the December storm, one imagines at
first that Browning was doing his best to expose the
utter hollowness of this particular form of fanaticism.
Yet no one who reads the poem through can doubt
for a moment that while he puts the ugliness, and the
weakness, and the narrowness of this kind of faith
in the front of the battle, he depicts the feeble
spiritual flame that is struggling upwards through
this confused and smothering and smoky mass
of combustibles, quite as vividly as he suggests the
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TEIE ADRIATIC FROM TEIE CAMPANILE.

A’OAP EA 77 BROWAV/AWG. 313
“wood, hay, and stubble,” which has to be burned
away :—
“Well, from the road, the lanes or the common,
In came the flock: the fat weary woman,
Panting and bewildered, down-clapping
Her umbrella with a mighty report,
Grounded it by me, wry and flapping,
A wreck of whalebones; then, with a snort,
Like a startled horse, at the interloper
(Who humbly knew himself improper,
But could not shrink up small enough)
—Round to the door, and in, the gruff
Hinge's invariable scold
Making my very blood run cold.
Prompt in the wake of her, up-pattered
On broken clogs, the many-tattered
Little old-faced, peaking, sister-turned-mother
Of the sickly babe she tried to smother
Somehow up, with its spotted face,
From the cold, on her breast, the one warm place ;
She too must stop, wring the poor ends dry
Of a draggled shawl, and add thereby
Eſer tribute to the door-mat, sopping
Already from my own clothes' dropping,
Which yet she seemed to grudge I should stand on :
Then stooping down to take off her pattens,
She bore them defiantly, in each hand one,
Planted, together before her breast
And its babe, as good as a lance in rest.
Close on her heels the dingy satins
Of a female something, past me flitted,
With lips as much too white, as a streak
Lay far too red on each hollow cheek;
And it seemed the very door-hinge pitied
All that was left of a woman once,
Eſolding at least its tongue for the nonce.
Then a tall yellow man like the Penitent Thief,
With his jaw bound up in a handkerchief,
And eyelids screwed together tight,
Led himself in by some inner light.
And, except from him, from each that entered,
I got the same interrogation—
3I4.
A’OAPE/87 AEA’O WAV/AWG.
‘What you, the alien, you have ventured,
“To take with us, the elect, your station?
‘A carer for none of it, a Gallio !’
Thus plain as print I read the glance
At a common prey, in each countenance,
As of huntsman, giving his hounds the tally-ho.
I very soon had enough of it.
The hot smell and the human noises,
And my neighbour's coat, the greasy cuff of it,
Were a pebble-stone that a child’s hand poises,
Compared with the pig-of-lead-like pressure
Of the preaching man’s immense stupidity,
As he poured his doctrine forth, full measure,
Ta meet his audience's avidity.
You needed not the wit of the Sibyl
To guess the cause of all, in a twinkling :
No sooner got our friend an inklin
Of treasure hid in the Holy Bible,
(Whene'er 'twas the thought first struck him,
IHow death, at unawares, might duck him
Deeper than the grave, and quench
The gin-shop's light in hell’s grim drench),
Than he handled it so, in fine irreverence,
As to hug the book of books to pieces;
And a patchwork of chapters and texts in severance,
Not improved by the private dog's-ears and creases,
Having clothed his own Soul with, he’d fain see equipt yours,
So tossed you again your Holy Scriptures.
And you picked them up in a sense, no doubt:
Nay, had but a single face of my neighbours
Appeared to suspect that the preacher’s labours
Were help which the world could be saved without,
'Tis odds but I might have borne in quiet
A qualm or two at my spiritual diet,
Or (who can tell?) perchance even mustered
Somewhat to urge in behalf of the sermon :
But the flock sat on, divinely flustered,
Sniffing, methought, its dew of Hermon
With such content in every snuffle,
As the devil inside us loves to ruffle.
My old fat woman purred with pleasure,
And thumb round thumb went twirling faster,
A&O/3/CA’7” AA&O WAV/AWG. 3 I 5
While she, to his periods keeping measure,
Maternally devoured the pastor.
The man with the handkerchief untied it,
Showed us a horrible wen inside it,
Gave his eyelids yet another screwing,
And rocked himself as the woman was doing.
The shoemaker’s lad, discreetly choking,
JKept down his cough. 'Twas too provoking !
My gorge rose at the nonsense and stuff of it,
So, saying like Eve when she plucked the apple,
“I wanted a taste, and now there’s enough of it,'
I flung out of the little chapel.”
There we have the very essence of Browning's
genius—his marvellous vision, his brusque familiarity
of style, his hatred of convention, his power of com-
bining words and using rhythm and inventing rhyme,
So as to wake the reader up and make him stare,
rather than so as to fascinate him ; and his power to
preach, even while expressing his utter disbelief in
preaching. Nor do any of his poems insist more
graphically than this one, though many insist more
powerfully, on the frequent irreligiousness of religious
people. The bishop who “ orders his tomb at St.
Praxed's Church " is much more really irreligious
than these good Methodists; nay, so is Bishop Blou-
gram ; and so, too, in his lighter, license-loving way,
is Fra Lippo Lippi. But it would be hard to give
the irreligious side of any genuine religion a more
repulsive garb than Browning gave it here, for in the
case of the monk of the Spanish cloister, a yet more
revolting picture, there was no genuine religion at all;
while here it is clear that Browning intended to paint
a heart of religious fervour. Indeed, in the same
3 6 A&O/3 ER 7" EPA’O WAV/AWG.
poem he goes on in his singularly brilliant delineation
of the Göttingen professor, who explains away Christ
as a human being glorified by myth, to draw a con-
trast as sharp as possible to the Methodist heat
without light, by giving his readers the best example
he could find of light without heat, of faith dissolved
away by Super-subtle analysis into a rationalistic
superstition, as really misleading as Superstitions of
the gloomier and more sensual kinds.
But Browning, though he likes nothing better than
to teach us the irreligiousness so commonly found in
religious people, is equally eager to impress upon us
what he is always impressing, the kernel of religious-
ness in irreligious people. There is nothing he enjoys
so much as to make us see what a queer miscellaneous
world we live in, how full it is of discouraging per-
plexities of all sorts, how full of rough, common,
coarse evil, blended with rough, common, coarse
good. He is strangely cosmopolitan in his range.
He gives us powerful etchings of subjects chosen from
all times, from many centuries before Christ to the
nineteenth century after him ; from all races, Jewish,
Arabian, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Russian,
English ; from all churches, Heathen, Jewish, Chris-
tian, Catholic and Protestant of all sects and types;
from all literary schools, classical, mediaeval, modern ;
from men and women of all callings, clerical, legal,
medical, philological, artistic, poetical, Orthodox,
sceptic, indifferentist ; from all kinds of characters,
Saintly, good, commonplace, bad, devilish ; and in all
A’O/9/E/e7" /> /*O WAV/AWG. 317
SALA IN THE PALAZZO REZZONICO, VENICE,
this wonderful mass of humanity, which seems to be
taken from every odd corner of the earth's history,
Browning delights to show us how there is to be
found somewhere a token of spiritual life, either
waxing or waning, either growing into power or
flickering into extinction. Whether he paints a saint
or a murderer, a passionate, sinful woman or a cold
and scheming ecclesiastic, a spiteful monk or a devotee

3 ſ 8 A’O/3/7/8 Z' AA’O WAV/AVG.
of the most technical philology, a Methodist preacher
or an Arab physician, a mediaeval painter or an im-
postor who trades on the desire to open communica-
tion with the dead, the spiritual aspect of the man’s
character, the conscience, or the excess of conscience,
or the want of conscience, the thing that comes
nearest to spiritual desire, or that most emphatically
signals the moral void where such a desire flickers
and dies away, is the characteristic feature which
remains in the reader's memory. Familiar in his
manner, but exceptionally wide in his range of sub-
jects, and constitutionally averse to “morals” as
Browning always is, you cannot study one of his
pictures without the conviction that it is a photo-
graph printed on the mind of a man who, though
understanding fully the common and generally coarse
clay of which man is compounded, always cares
most of all to discern the tongue of flame which is
somewhere to be found imbedded within it, either
struggling upwards to the God who is a “consuming
fire" for all evil, or struggling downwards to that
Tophet which is a consuming fire for all good. That
is what makes Browning so great a lay preacher. He
is careless of the conventional moral. His pictures
at times appear to contain almost unrelieved gloom,
at other times unrelieved paradox. He paints a devil
like Count Guido Franceschini almost as willingly, I
was going to say as blithely, as he paints a noble
ruler of the Church like Pope Innocent, or a hero like.
David, yearning to give his life for Saul. He is as
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with Browning's eye for common things, can always
find the secret sign of the working, past or present, of
Some nobler passion, amidst the din and confusion of
incoherent wants and interests. And wherever you
find this, there you really find the kernel of life or
death, that which gives character and meaning to
everything else. What Browning seems to teach so
impressively is that only to an eye that looks straight
into the world with a wish to see things as they are,
not as a preacher would like to find them, is the full
significance of the spiritual working of the world
visible, Without recognising the singular variety of
human passion and action—here its apparent caprices,
there its slow persistency and half-petrified habits ;
here its disheartening coarseness, there its still more
disheartening refinements of evil; here the dreary
years through which the conflict of good with evil
remains undecided, and seems even to make no pro-
gress, there the abruptness with which a sudden
change takes place, referable, apparently, to no intel-
ligible principle—it is impossible to take the measure
of human nature as Browning has taken it, and fail to
attain the confidence which he has attained, that at
the heart of all this unintelligible universe, “the
Lord's controversy " is still going on, though it looks
as if in one nature it might remain undecided for a
century, while in another the battle rages fiercely and
yields its issue in an hour. To Browning's eye the
huge miscellaneousness of the world is one of its
chief interests. In one great lump of slow vitality he
BALL ROOM IN THE PALAZZO REZZONICO, VENICE.

ROBER7 BROWNYWG. 323
finds just the faint sign of a little leaven, which will
end, Sooner or later, in a transformation of the whole ;
in another slender and vivid life he finds all flame ;
in another intellectual nature, again, he finds reason
and will pre-eminent, and it is hardly possible with
merely human tests to say how the strife has turned,
yet Browning can see that it has been waged, and
that sooner or later the issue, to him still doubtful,
will come to light ; in another all penetrated by deep
ruts of habit, like Browning’s “Halbert and Hob,” it
is easy to see that the day has been fought, and per-
haps won, though the victory has been gained at the
cost of a general wreck of the man's physical organiza-
tion, which renders any further progress in this world
all but impossible. But no student of Browning can
doubt that the world he paints is real, that, as in the
real world, his heart busies itself with chaos as well
as order, and yet that the true significance even of all
this chaos, and of all this sometimes incipient and
Sometimes degenerating and decaying order, is the
spark of spiritual life within it, that here is the focus
in which the creative purpose centres, and the chief
end even of all the physical and intellectual and emo-
tional scaffolding, within which the spirit of devout
faith is guarded and reared to its full growth. I will
give as the briefest illustration of what I mean the
close of the dramatic idyl-certainly no idyl, if idyl
carry with it any association with the adjective
“idyllic,”—painting the fierce Yorkshire father and
son, “old Halbert and young Hob.” A deadly
324. A&O BERT BA&O WAV/AVG.
struggle has ended in the father's recalling how he
had nearly turned his father out of doors into the
bleak winter weather, and how he had recoiled from
his evil intention at the last moment, and the grim
story closes thus :-
“Straightway the son relaxed his hold of the father's throat,
They mounted side by side to the room again: no note
Took either of each, no sign made each to either; last
As first, in absolute silence, their Christmas might they
passed.
At dawn the father sate on dead in the self-same place,
With an outburst blackening still the old bad fighting face :
But the son crouched all-a-tremble, like any lamb new
yearmed. -
When he went to the burial someone's staff he borrowed—
tottered and leaned,
But his lips were loose, not locked, kept muttering, mumb-
ling. ‘There !
At his cursing and swearing,” the youngsters cried; but the
elders thought ‘In prayer.’
A boy threw stones; he picked them up and stored them in
his vest.
So tottered, mumbled, muttered he, till he died, perhaps
found rest,
‘Is there a reason in nature for these hard hearts?’ O Lear,
That a reason out of nature must turn them soft, seems
clear ! ”
That is a story of grim hereditary brutality, ending
in tragedy, dreary retribution, and a long twilight of
something that looked like penitence. And then
comes the poet's asseveration that if there be areason in
nature, in the law of heredity, for these hard hearts, or
at all events for Some of them, the softening influence
which melts the stony heart in them is to be found
in the “reason out of nature,” which bids that
ROBERT BROWNING. 32.5
brutality swell into a passion that brings remorse,
while remorse brings first humiliation, and then its
fruit, humility. That is what I mean by saying that,
however chaotic, however discouraging may be the
material of Browning's pictures, there is always some-
thing in them which gives us the true relation be-
tween the spiritual and the intellectual or bodily life
of man, and makes us feel that the heart of the mys-
tery is, after all, to be found hidden within the folds
of some inscrutable but divine purpose, and not in
the mischance of a chaotic origin.
And this leads me to observe that there is none of
the feeble optimism of his age in Browning. He is
no poet who exults in the enormous preponderance
of good over evil in human life. He does not appear
to know whether there is such a preponderance. So
far as he is a theologian, he is no universalist. He
paints the petty, intense, and overflowing malignity
of the monk in the Spanish cloister with as calm
and steady a hand as he paints the loyal passion of
David and his visions of a loyalty deeper and purer
than any which even Saul could excite in him.
Moreover, Browning shows us no glimpse of any
escape from that petty malignity into a larger and
less suffocating life. He paints the cruel and mur-
derous vindictiveness of Count Guido towards Pom-
pilia, of whose goodness this devil in human form yet
feels so instinctively certain that his confidence in her
rises higher than his confidence in God himself-and
he paints it with as sure an eye and as firm a hand as
326 A&O/3/ER 7' B/&O WAV/AWG.
he paints Pompilia's maternal loveliness and the old
Pope's justice. Here again he never gives us a hint
that for Count Guido's utterly unrepentant vileness
there is any visible escape from the hell of cowardice
and villainy to which he seems to have doomed himself.
In Browning's world men make their own future, and
while Ned Bratts and his wife just contrive tardily
to snatch themselves out of a life of violence and
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JUIBILEE WINDOW IN ST. MARGARET's, WESTMINSTER.
crime, by gratefully welcoming the exalting influence
of Bunyan's faith, he gives us visions enough of
natures which have chosen the downward path, and
have plodded in it so steadily and so far that their
prospect of finding any hand to Snatch them out of
it is faint indeed. The feeble optimism and univer-
Salism of his day found no echo in Browning.
On the other hand, no one has taught more posi-
tively than Browning that life, if confined to this
A&O/P/7/07" A/CO WAV/AWG. 327
earth and without any infinite love in it, is not the
life which has filled the noblest minds with exultation,
nor, indeed, any shadow of exultation. “Christmas
Eve '' is a much more characteristic poem in many
ways than “Easter Day.” It has more of the raw
material of Browning's genius in it, and more of that
vigorous etching in which he has never had a
superior, hardly even a rival. But “Easter Day” is
fuller in its indications of Browning's own spiritual
convictions than even “Christmas Eve.” It contains
in more explicit form than any other of Browning's
poems the confession that unless the beauty of nature
is a mere foretaste of something durable and even
eternal, it is not a source of peace but of perpetual
pain; that unless art can promise itself an endless
vista beyond anything which it accomplishes in this
world, art gnaws for ever at the soul which it possesses.
Michael Angelo's greatness, for instance, lay in his
artistic insatiableness, in the inadequacy of such
visions as he had on earth to satisfy him —
“Think, now,
What pomp in Buonarroti's brow,
With its new palace-brain where dwells
Superb the soul, unvexed by cells
That crumbled with the transient clay !
What visions will his right hand’s sway
Still turn to form, as still they burst
Upon him? How will he quench thirst
Titanically infantine
Laid at the breast of the Divine P’’
And if art is a mere worm that gnaws at the heart
unless it has faith in an immortal future, still more is
328 A&O BERT BROWN/AWG.
human love an unutterable anguish without the
eternal horizons of divine love on which to gaze.
And on this Browning insists, intimating his own be-
lief in the Christian story of the incarnation which
was meant to show at once the origin and the infini-
tude of that love of which we have in our hearts but
a faint echo, or at best a slowly-expanding outflow.
“Thy soul
Still shrunk from Him who made the whole,
Still set deliberate aside
|His love —Now take love | Well betide
Thy tardy conscience Haste to take
The show of love for the name's sake,
Remembering every moment Who
Deside creating thee unto
These ends, and these for thee, was said
To undergo death in thy stead
In flesh like thine : so ran the tale,
What doubt in thee could countervail
Belief in it P. Upon the ground
‘That in the story had been found
‘Too much love . How could God love so ''
He who in all his works below
Adapted to the needs of man
Made love the basis of the plan,—
Did love, as was demonstrated:
While man, who was.so fit instead
To hate, as every day gives proof,
Man thought man, for his kind’s behoof,
Both could and did invent that scheme
Of perfect love : 'twould well beseem
Cain's nature, thou wast wont to praise,
Not tally with God’s usual ways . "
With that deep theological criticism—that it is
hardly reasonable to think man's dwarfish imagina-
tion the source of a nobler gospel than any authorised
A’OA ERT B RO WAV/AVG. 329
by God—I may leave Mr. Browning’s claim to be
regarded as one of our truest religious teachers.
Surely no theological conviction can go deeper than
his, that if the Christian revelation opens out a love
which is “too good to be true,” that is only another
way of saying that we, in spite of all our pettiness
and evil, can surpass God in the conception of im-
measurable love — without which, nevertheless, we
could never have known either the meaning of the
word, or the reality of the thing.
R. H. HuTTON.
TENNYSON.
3Iſtº ºth Öſtlutpºſit.
Born August 6, 1809; died October 6, 1892.
“None sang of Love more nobly : few as well;
Of Friendship none with pathos so profound ;
Of Duty sternliest-proved when myrtle-crowned ;
Of English grove and rivulet, mead and dell ;
Great Arthur's Legend he alone dared tell ;
Milton and Dryden feared to tread that ground ;
I'or him alone o'er Camelot's faery bound,
The ‘horns of Elſland’ blew their magic spell.”
AUBREY DE VERE.
|
º
º
TENNYSON.
"jº HEN William Howitt devoted a brief
tº grºw" is chapter in his “Homes and Haunts”
to Alfred Tennyson, some five-and-
forty years ago, the information at
his disposal was of the most scanty
and unsatisfying description. The poet was born at
Somersby, a sleepy Lincolnshire hamlet ; he was sent
to school at Louth from his seventh till his ninth or
tenth year, and then after a course of parental educa-
tion he went up to Cambridge. That was practically
all the biographical straw it was possible to gather
for the tale of bricks. *
“Of the subsequent haunts,” William Howitt
writes, “we can give no very distinct account. I
believe he has spent some years in London, and he
may be traced to Hastings, Eastbourne, Cheltenham,
and the Isle of Wight.”
The poet was to him, as in the main he has since
been to the public at large, a “wandering voice”; a


J
334 7"/º/V/VPSOAV.
personality as picturesque but as elusive as that of
the Scholar-Gipsy of Arnold's elegy and Glanvil’s
book— - i
“Seen by rare glimpses, pensive and tongue-tied,
In hat of antique shape and cloak of grey.”
“It is very possible,” Howitt concludes, “you may
come across him in a country inn, with a foot on each
hob of the fire-place, a volume of Greek in one hand,
his meerschaum in the other, so far advanced towards
the seventh heaven that he would not thank you to
call him back into this mether world.”
With what avidity and relish one read those enthu-
siastic sketches in the “Homes and Haunts”; and,
in particular, how delightfully that last sentence
piqued the imagination of certain juvenile worship-
pers of the poet ! What romantic possibilities it
suggested of wandering down green lanes and through
old-world villages, and of meeting by some happy
chance the visible owner of that magical “wandering
voice” Of course one felt irritated by the reticence,
the meagreness of the biographical details; but then
how genuinely poetic seemed the life of this silent
dreamer as he flitted beneath the “talking oaks” of
the ancient forest, and lingered by moated grange and
old mill-dam |
The meagre details of forty years ago have now
been supplemented by various biographical sketches
and reminiscences, and the lovers of the poet, who
note with interest every sight and Sound—
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TEAVAVPSOAV. 337
“Which, from the outward to the inward brought,
Moulded the baby thought,”
and who take pleasure in visiting the scenes in
which he mused and wrote, will find nearly all they
could desire if they will but take the trouble to seek
for it. -
Too much, however, should not be expected from
the poetic topographer. The sources whence sugges-
tions spring are often quickly forgotten even by the
poet himself; and nothing can be more delusive occa-
sionally than the evidence on which the reader thinks
it safe to localise certain passages or poems. For
instance, it is stated that the Laureate himself could
not, in his later years, say what Christmas bells he
referred to in the stanza :-
‘‘IFour voices of four hamlets round,
From far and near, on mead and moor,
Swell out and fail, as if a door
Were shut between me and the sound.”
Then again, who would have anticipated that “Break,
break,” was composed not in sight of “the illimitable
Sorrow of the sea,” but in the early morning in a
Lincolnshire lane; or that “Tears, idle tears,” was
suggested by the ruined beauty of Tintern Abbey;
though, indeed, nowhere more keenly than among
the ruthlessly demolished arches and cloisters of great
religious houses does one grow aware of the lacrymae
Terwm, the sense of tears in earthly things 2
That the poet's first home and the landscapes of
Y
338 T/EAVAWP SOAV.
his early years produced a deep impression on his
imagination is easily demonstrated. Nor is it strange
that this should have been so, for the place of his
birth was embosomed in one of the Sweetest pastoral
scenes in the county. From the ridge to which the
road from Horncastle rises, the traveller, looking south-
ward, perceives the old church of St. Botolph's Town
(Boston) and catches a glimpse of the historical Wash,
with its legend of lost baggage and royal treasure ;
he sees, massed together by distance, the minster-
towers of Lincoln which crown the northern heights
of the Witham Valley and form a landmark visible
for forty miles; while, beneath him, in a tranquil
region of grassy swell and leafy hollow emerge from
high evergreen hedgerows and muffling clusters of elm
and beech the brick-patched grey tower of Somersby
Church, with its two melodious bells, and the red-
tiled roof of the Manor-house. *
At the Manor-house, then used as the Rectory,
Alfred Tennyson was born on the 6th of August 1809,
the fourth anniversary of his parents' wedding-day.
In that early part of the century there were scarcely
seventy inhabitants in the hamlet. The church was
roofed with thatch ; and so remote was the spot from
the beaten ways of traffic and trade that the old Nor-
man cross, with its image of the Saviour on one side
and that of the Virgin Mother on the other, escaped
the fury of the Puritan iconoclasts, and indeed still
survives to carry us back in fancy to pre-Reformation
times.
7'E/WAVI SOA. 339
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under the shadow of the elms and poplars, across the
road to the little wicket which opens on the narrow
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path to the churchyard, and so to the church, where
he was baptized in the old octagonal font of freestone
which had served so many generations. Alfred was
&





















340 TEAVAWP SOAV.
the fourth child, but his eldest brother had died in
babyhood. During the next five years two sisters
and two more brothers helped to make a lively family
circle at the Rectory. By the time he had completed
his tenth year the Tennyson children numbered seven
boys and four girls.
Ten years in the young poet's life were, however,
a vast and eventful epoch. At the mature age of five,
as he let the wind blow him along the garden-path,
he “heard a voice that was speaking in the wind”;
before he was ten he had imbued himself with Thom-
son’s “Seasons,” for we find him at Louth on a cer-
tain Sunday, when the rest of the household were at
church, composing his first verses “on the flowers in
the garden,” and doing it “after the manner of that
poet.” “Yes, you can write,” brother Charles ac-
knowledged with the Serene patronage of a year's
seniority, and during the next half dozen years or
so they stimulated each other by a generous poetic
rivalry.
That no rumour of the great fight at Waterloo
reached the Somersby children is a striking evidence
of the seclusion of their home, for after all the hamlet
was near enough to the sea to have been infected by
the “I’rench scare,” and Mary Sewell tells how when
she was a little girl her father brought one Saturday
night from Norwich a piece of Scarlet bunting which
she made into a flag to be hoisted on Felthorpe
Steeple as a signal the moment Bonaparte landed.
Still if Somersby was excited by no murmur of
7'EWAVPSOAV.
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“The great wave that echoed round the world,”
the neighbourhood was alive with other sounds of, it
may have been, even graver import to the future
Laureate —
“The livelong bleat
Of the thick-fleeced sheep from wattled folds
Upon the ridged wolds;”
the noisy babblement and the lulling lapse of the
brook that loved—
































342 7'/'AWAVPSOAV.
“To purl o'er matted cress and ribbed sand
Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves;”
the voice of the wind as it blew through
“The woods that belt the gray hill-side,
The seven elms, the poplars four
That stand beside my father's door.”
The four poplars have disappeared; only in the “Ode
to Memory” do their green spires spring skyward.
The brook, however, still runs by the foot of the
garden,
“Prattling the primrose fancies of the boy’”
as it winds in and out by lawn and grassy plot till it
brims into -
“The sleepy pool above the dam.”
The Somersby stream turns three mills. In the poet's
boyhood a fourth stood close to the Rectory, but
whether this or Stockworth mill, two miles away, or
yet another suggested “The Miller's Daughter,” is a
point no one can decide.
In the same volume as “The Ode to Memory”
(1830) appeared “Mariana.” Moated granges, Mr.
Napier tells us in his attractive little volume, “The
Homes and Haunts of Alfred, Lord Tennyson,” still
exist in the fenny portions of Lincolnshire, but there
are none near Tennyson's birthplace. Three or four
miles from Mablethorpe, however, in a bleak treeless
expanse near Maltby-le-Marsh, stood a dreary red-
brick house with a few trees which the poet's sisters
used to call “The Moated Grange.”
TENAWPSOAV. 34-3
Doubtful as these identifications are, of one locality
at least we may be sure, the great hall in the Rectory,”
with groined roof and high ecclesiastical windows,
designed by the Rector himself, which is mentioned
in the “In Memoriam ” —
“With trembling fingers did we weave
The holly round the Christmas hearth ;
A rainy cloud possess'd the earth,
And sadly fell our Christmas-eve.
“At our old pastimes in the hall
We gambol’d, making vain pretence
Of gladness, with an awful sense
Of one mute shadow watching all.
“We paused: the winds were in the beech ;
We heard them sweep the winter land;
And in a circle hand-in-hand
Sat silent, looking each at each.”
It is a little curious that no legend has associated the
poet with the picturesque old elm at Bag-Enderby,
half a mile away. His sisters swung on one of its
* The Somersby estate was offered for sale at the City of London
Auction Mart on the 18th August, 1892. It was mentioned that the
estate extended to upwards of 1,200 acres and produced a net rental of
£1,600 a year. As to the sentimental value of the estate, the auctioneer
pointed out that as it was the birthplace of England’s greatest modern
poet, it should be highly prized by every Englishman of culture and
patriotic feelings. The opening bid was £25,000, and this was quickly
followed by offers of £500 until the sum of £29,000 was called. The
first pause here occurred, and the two next succeeding bids brought
the figures up to £31,000. Tenders of £500 were then resumed up to
£35,000, which, after a somewhat lengthened interval, was further
increased by £250, and a little later augmented by a similar amount.
Two more bids of £500 apiece, and £36,500 was reached. This was
the last offer made, and, after a short consultation with the legal
agents of the property, the auctioneer announced its withdrawal.
344- Z'EZWZVYSO/V.
great boughs, which has now grown so long that it is
said the whole parish can perch on it side by side—a
delightful picture of rustics in council which would
have rejoiced the soul of the late Mr. Caldecott. Yet
who knows but we are indebted for some pregnant
epithet or broadcast line to this venerable tree ? More
than once it seems possible to trace the ideal scenery
of the poet's imagination to the early observation of
actual localities. Thus, for example, the melodious
sonnet, which appeared in “Friendship's Offering” in
1833, and which has been excluded from the collected
works, reads singularly like a real experience, of which
imaginative use was speedily made in one of the most
exquisite of his classical poems. Read these lines:–
“Check every outflash, every ruder Sally
Of thought and speech ; speak low and give up wholly
Thy spirit to mild-minded melancholy ;
This is the place. Through yonder poplar valley
Below, the blue-green river windeth slowly,
Dut in the middle of the sombre valley
The crispèd waters whisper musically,
And all the haunted place is dark and holy,”
and compare them with these lines in strophes v. and
vii. of the Choric Song in “The Lotos-Eaters”:
“To hear each other’s whisper’d speech;
To lend our hearts and spirits wholly
To the influence of mild-minded melancholy;
“Beneath a heaven dark and holy,
To watch the long, bright river drawing slowly
His waters from the purple hill.”
A slim volume, “Poems by Two Brothers,” which
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Z'EVAVP'SOAV. 34-7
contained the best of the youthful efforts of Charles
and Alfred, was published in Louth in 1827. The
little book has since been made accessible to the
general public, but it is a curiosity of greater interest
to the biographer than to the lover of poetry.
Glancing through its pages one can understand
the emotion under which Alfred laboured when
he inscribed on a stone in the “Holywell Glen,”
at Somersby, the words, “Byron is dead”; and, by
a natural association, one recollects how for many
days Charles Lamb kept repeating aloud, “Coleridge
is dead | *
In 1828 Tennyson and his brother Charles went
up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where their eldest
brother Frederick had already preceded them ; and
here the poet met Arthur Hallam. Tennyson did not
reside within the college precincts, but after a brief
residence in the Rose Crescent took rooms at No. 54,
Corpus Buildings, the last house in the terrace, over-
looking at that time the great quadrangle of King's
College and within sound of the organ in the college
chapel. As one passes along the street trying to
conjure up the youthful figures of those days one
thinks of the poet's brilliant associates—Brookfield,
Thackeray's friend, the “Old Brooks,” who became a
celebrated London preacher ; John Mitchell Kemble,
the latter “Luther and soldier-priest”; Trench, Sped-
ding, Milnes (Lord Houghton), Henry Alford, after-
wards Dean of Canterbury; and the lines well up in
the memory :—
348 ZTEAVAVPSOAV.
“Old Brooks, who loved so well to mouth my rhymes,
IHow oft we two have heard St. Mary’s chimes
How oft the Cantab supper, host and guest,
Would echo helpless laughter to your jest
How oft with him we paced that walk of limes,
IHim, the lost light of those dawn-golden times,
Who loved you well ”
Without usurping the functions of the biographer it
may be mentioned here that had it not been for the
urging of his father, Tennyson would in all likelihood
have refrained from competing for the Chancellor's
medal for English verse in 1829. In compliance
with the old Rector's wishes he modified and put some
finishing touches to a poem he had written some
years before on the Battle of Armageddon, and, giving
it the prescribed title “Timbuctoo,” sent it in. In
spite of its enormous success it finds no place in the
Laureate’s works, though it has happily been included
in the recent edition of the “Poems by Two Brothers.”
Three lines, however— -
‘‘I have raised thee nigher to the spheres of heaven,
Man’s first, last home ; and thou with ravished sense
Listenest the lordly music flowing from
The illimitable years”—
have been re-cast and preserved in the “Ode to
Memory” —
“Sure she was nigher to heaven’s spheres,
Listening the lordly music flowing from
The illimitable years.”
Wordsworth visited Cambridge in 1830. He was
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TEAVAWPSOAV. 35 I
then sixty, and had yet to wait a dozen years for the
laureate's wreath, but his name was cherished and lis
influence deeply felt among the youthful generation
at the University. Whether he ever met the young
Medallist who was to be his successor twenty years
later, I have not been able to discover, but in all
probability he then read the famous prize-poem and
other verses, for in a letter written during his visit
he observed: “We have a respectable show of blossom
in poetry—two brothers of the name of Tennyson,
one in particular not a little promising.” His appre-
ciation cannot be regarded as excessive if he had
seen the volume of “Poems, chiefly Lyrical,” published
in this year, though it must be admitted that it bore
ample evidence of the youth of the author. Among
the poems which appeared in that volume, and which
were afterwards suppressed, it is interesting to observe
a “chorus" from “an unpublished drama written
very early.” The dramatic form is equally the
characteristic of the infantine and of the mature
intellect. What was done, what was said—action
and speech without the interposition of the personality
of a narrator—childhood delights in that. Manhood
in the maturity of its power finds that, too, the
highest and most direct mode of expression. Every
great poet and many who never became poets at all
have begun with tragedy. In this particular instance
the juvenile dramatist appears to have been under
the spell of the marvellous “prologue in heaven”
with which “Faust’ opens, and one cannot help
352 TEAVAVPSOAV.
thinking he had read Shelley's translation which was
published in 1824.
No criticism, it has always seemed to me, is more
utterly trivial and mistaken than that which has well
been branded as “genealogical”—which at Once
ascribes every similarity of thought and expression to
plagiarism or assimilation. The industrious plodders
who imagine that every happy phrase, every beautiful
thought found in the works of two writers must be of
necessity derived by the one from the other forget,
first, that most men and women, being men and
women, think and feel and speak pretty much alike
—how else should we have common sense ?—and,
next, that they credit the plagiarist or imitator with
a range of reading, a memory, an aptitude for adapta-
tion which would be more astonishing than even the
genius which they are at pains to discredit. While,
therefore, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred I
should assign similarity in any two men worthy of the
name of poet to coincidence, or rather to the common
inheritance of the age in which they live, and not to
deliberate or to unconscious appropriation, in the
case of a very young writer there may frequently be a
sound justification for taking a course the exact oppo-
site. Tennyson was no doubt a widely read man,
and it may have been that, like Byron, he had always
a note-book ready to receive any suggestion of thought
or phrase which he came across in his reading; but,
for my own part, I should imagine that when he was
indebted at all, it was to the scientific prose writers
TEAVAVPSOAV. 353
of our own day, not to earlier poets—except in So far
as he assimilated the felicities, common to all, of
Greek and Latin literature.
In this connection it is well to remember the
letter—the only published letter, so far as I know—
which the poet himself wrote to a correspondent, and
in which he told how, lying among the Pyrenees
before a waterfall that came down some ten or twelve
hundred feet, he embodied the vision in the striking
phrase,
‘‘Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn.”
The critic—shrewd rogue—pointed out that lawn was
the material used in theatres to imitate a waterfall,
and advised the poor rhymester “to go to nature for
his suggestions.” Biography, however, is full of
instances of this omniscient fallibility. Who has not
read how when Southey was advising Wordsworth
that if he wished to be considered a faithful painter
of rural manners he ought not to have let his Idle
Shepherd Boys trim their rustic hats with stag-horn
or fox-tail, “just as the words had passed his lips
two boys appeared with the very plant entwined
round their hats”? In the letter to which I have
referred it is mentioned that a Chinese scholar told
Tennyson that in an unknown and untranslated
Chinese poem there are two whole lines of his almost
word for word. To which startling information, the
Laureate quietly responded, “Why not ?”
After Dr. Tennyson's death in 1831 the poet did
not return to Cambridge. Hallam remained and took
Z
3.54 TEAVAVP'SOAV.
his degree, and in the spring of the following year
visited Somersby as the fiancé of Emilia, the second
sister. In the autumn of 1833, requiring rest and
change after an attack of illness, he visited Germany
and Austria. On the 15th of September the end
came with terrible suddenness :-
“In Vienna's fatal walls,
God’s finger touched him and he slept.”
It was in the winter of 1832–3 that Tennyson
published what may be regarded as his second volume,
under the title “Poems.” It contained “OEnone,”
“The Lotos-Eaters,” “The Palace of Art,” “The
Dream of Fair Women,” “Mariana in the South,”
“The May Queen,” and “The Miller's Daughter,”
which last, it is said, received the recognition of
the Queen, and so brought the volume into some
measure of popularity. However that may be, we
have here, at the age of twenty-three, the authentic
voice of the Laureate. Constant revision, the delicate
taste which was ever intolerant of what fell short of
perfection, has, it is true, modified these early utter-
ances in an astonishing manner, but they were from
the first the true Tennyson, notwithstanding their
blemishes and shortcomings. Among the poems
afterwards withdrawn were “O darling room, my
heart's delight "-an appalling instance of how even
genius may lapse—the sonnets “Bonaparte” and
“As when with downcast eyes we muse and brood,”
which have been restored, as they well deserved to
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TEAVAVPSOAV. 357
be, in the collected works, and “The Hesperides,”
which, despite the noticeable lines, *
“The hoary promontory of Soloë
Past Thymeaterion, in calmèd bays,
Between the Southern and the western horn,”
has been judiciously left to oblivion.
During the next seventeen years the poet's life
appears to have been pretty much as William Howitt
described it in the passage which has already been
quoted. Once at least during that period he seems
to have revisited Cambridge —
‘‘I past beside the reverend walls
In which of old I wore the gown;
I roved at random thro’ the town,
And saw the tumult of the halls;
“And heard once more in college fanes
The storm their high-built organs make,
And thunder-music, rolling, shake
The prophet blazoned on the panes;
“And caught once more the distant shout,
The measured pulse of racing oars
Among the Willows; paced the shores
And many a bridge, and all about
“The same gray flats again, and felt
The same, but not the same ; and last
Up that long walk of limes I past
To see the rooms in which he dwelt.”
Early in 1837 the Tennysons left Somersby for
Beech Hill House, near High Beech, on the skirts of
Epping Forest. Down in the hollow, a couple of
miles, or so away, stood the old Norman pile of
358 TEAWAVP.S.O.V.
Waltham Abbey, with its memories of Harold, the
last of the Saxon kings, and its famous old peal of
bells. As the time drew near the birth of Christ
the poet heard them chiming through the mist—
Strange voices, unlike the music of the four Lincoln-
shire hamlets. A week later they bore him a hap-
pier message, as the old year passed away :—
“Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky
‘‘ Ring out the grief that saps the Inind
For those that here we see no more l
“Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Bing out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.”
Pleasant it is to know that while we owe “Tears,
idle tears” to Tintern Abbey, we are indebted to the
old tower of Waltham Holy Cross for this jubilant
anthem of the bells. In 1840 the family removed
to Tunbridge Wells, and in the following year to
Boxley, near Maidstone, a locality associated with the
closing section, the splendid epithalamium, of the
“In Memoriam.” For here, in October 1842, the
poet's youngest sister, Cecilia, was married to Edmund
Law Lushington, Professor of Greek in Glasgow
University. Glimpses of Park House, the seat of
the Lushingtons, are preserved, too, in the prologue
to the “Princess.”
In these latter years the poet seems to have been
a frequent visitor in London. We hear of him
TEAMAVPSOAV. 359
sitting up till two and three in the morning, “at
which good hour we would get Alfred to give us
some of his magic music, which he does between
growling and smoking”; and we learn something of
his comings and goings through the Carlyles. “Alfred
is one of the few British and foreign figures (a not
increasing number, I think () who are and remain
beautiful to me —a true human Soul, or some authen-
tic approximation thereto, to whom your own soul
can say, Brother l’” “He often skips me in these
brief visits to town ; skips everybody, indeed; being
a man Solitary and sad, as certain men are, dwelling
in an element of gloom—carrying a bit of chaos
about him, in short, which he is manufacturing into
cosmos " — such cosmos, peradventure, as “The
Princess,” which saw the light among “the fogs and
Smuts of Lincoln's Inn.” “One of the finest-looking
men in the world. A great shock of rough, dusty-
dark hair; bright, laughing, hazel eyes; massive
aquiline face, most massive yet most delicate; of
sallow-brown complexion, almost Indian-looking ;
clothes cynically loose, free-and-easy; Smokes infinite
tobacco. . . . I do not meet, in these late decades,
such company over a pipe.” “Alfred is the son of a
Lincolnshire gentleman farrier, I think”; in which
thought the smoking philosopher was wrong, as we
know. Indeed, one would like to hear what Carlyle
would have said to the Tennyson pedigree, stretch-
ing back as it does to Edward III. and Philippa of
Hainault in a curiously interesting way; for the
360 TEAVAVPSOAV.
poet's great-grandfather married Elizabeth Clayton,
and in her mother, Dorothy, the wife of George
Clayton of Grimsby, were united two streams of
royal descent, one from Lionel, Duke of Clarence, the
other from John of Gaunt, both sons of Edward III.,
and brothers of the Black Prince. These, however,
are matters for the biographer.
From 1844 to 1850 Tennyson seems to have
lived chiefly at Cheltenham. Possibly it was during
this interval that he visited the resting-place of his
friend, Arthur Hallam, to whose memory he was
slowly building up the most magnificent monument
of song that poet ever reared.
During these years he apparently led a wander-
ing existence, studying landscape and picking up
those unconsidered trifles of nature which give his
poems such an atmosphere of freshness and veracity.
He was a frequent visitor at the Howitts’ at Lower
Clapton, on the edge of Epping Forest. “The re-
tiring and meditative young poet, Alfred Tennyson,
visited us,” writes Mary Howitt, “ and charmed our
seclusion by the recitation of his exquisite poetry.
. . He wished that we Englanders could dress up
our affections in a little more poetical costume ; real
warmth of heart would lose nothing, rather gain by
it ; as it was, our manners were as cold as the walls
of our churches.” “We have had Tennyson with us
a good deal lately. We quite love him.”
It was as well, perhaps, that in those days he
should, to . Some slight. degree. at least, have experi-
TEAVAVPSOAV. 36 I
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enced that “want of pence ’’ which vexes private as
well as public men. Though he was never in actual
need, his poems brought him no material reward, and
it must have been with a feeling of Satisfaction that
in 1845 he received the intimation that he had been

7/7/V/VPSOAV. 363
granted a pension of £200 a year by Sir Robert Peel.
It is pleasant to know that this handsome public
recognition of his genius was in the main due to the
hearty good-will of Carlyle, seconded by Monckton
Milnes.
It must have been either then or earlier that he
stayed at the charming little Oxfordshire village of
Shiplake, on the Thames. There he wrote the ex-
quisite section in “In Memoriam,” beginning:—
“Sad Hesper o’er the buried sun
And ready, thou, to die with him,
Thou watchest all things ever dim
And dimmer, and a glory done ;
“The team is loosen’d from the wain,
The boat is drawn upon the shore;
Thou listenest to the closing door,
And life is darken'd in the brain.”
And there, on the 13th of June 1850, a week or
two after the publication of “In Memoriam,” and a
month or two before he received the
“laurel greener from the brows
Of him that uttered nothing base,”
he was married to Emily Sarah, eldest daughter of
Henry Sellwood of Horncastle, and niece of the
“heroic sailor-soul,” Sir John Franklin. Fourteen
years previously his elder brother Charles had married
the youngest daughter.
Twickenham, already famous in poetic annals, was
364 7"EAVAWPSOAV.
the Laureate’s home for the next two years or more,
and there he composed the superb ode on the death
of the great Duke. In 1853 he discovered the old
house of Farringford, at Freshwater, in the Isle of
Wight ; and in the seclusion of its green woodlands
at the back of the downs, he took up his permanent
abode, “far from noise and smoke of town.” He
lived on legendary soil, for the summer-house stands
in the “Maiden's croft,” a field of the old priory
dedicated to the Virgin Mary; and in these priory
grounds, Saith greybeard memory, is concealed the
entrance to a submarine passage between England
and France—a passage choked up with hoards of
treasure guarded by a griffon whose vigilance no man
may evade. Hard by, too, are more authentic, if
less romantic, traces of an ancient people—prehis-
toric Phoenicians we are assured—whose homes or
sepulchres have been brought to light within the last
year or two.
The bracing freshness of the downs, one of which
was soon called after the Laureate, the rustic beauty
of the leafy lanes, the floral wealth of the woods
and fields, the various pictures of Sea and clouds,
were all that a poet could desire; but if one would
wish to see the influence which the island has
had on the great minstrel let him read “Maud,”
where its magic has been most profusely translated
into speech. As one returns home late, lantern in
hand, through the gloom of Farringford Lane after
a day of storm, one remembers, in the pauses of the

7'EAVAVPSOAV. 367
wind, how the poet arose from the vision of that
luminous, ghostlike, star-sweet face—
“And all by myself in my own dark garden ground,
Listening now to the tide in its broad-flung ship-wrecking roar,
Now to the scream of a madden’d beach dragged down by the wave,
Walk’d in a wintry wind by a ghastly glimmer, and found
The shining daffodil dead, and Orion low in his grave.”
Here, too, surely is the “little grove’ where he
used to sit while
“A million emeralds broke from the ruby-budded lime,”
and here in a gap of the trees one catches a gleam of
White, where
‘‘the far-off sail is blown by the breeze of a softer clime,
IHalf-lost in the liquid azure bloom of a crescent of sea,
The silent Sapphire-spangled marriage-ring of the land.”
One might almost fancy, too, that the poet’s eyes.
were directed to the roof-ridges and chimneys of
Weston, when he composed the verse :—
“Birds in the high Hall-garden
When twilight was falling,
Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud
They were crying and calling.”
An amusing story, apocryphal or otherwise, is told
in conriection with these lines. The Laureate, it is
said, as he was once reciting them, paused Sud-
denly, and turning to a lady listener, asked, “What
birds are those 2" “Nightingales, sir!” faltered the
lady, too much overwhelmed by surprise to be quite
368 TEAAVPSOAV.
aware of what she was saying, “Nightingales . "
cried the poet, “what a cockney you are They
were rooks. Caw, caw, caw Maud, Maud, Maud ’’
“Maud,” it may be of interest to observe, was the
result of a remark of his friend, Sir John Simeon,
who thought the little lyric—
“O that 'twere possible
After long grief and pain,”
published in the Tribute seventeen years before,
needed some explanation of the situation. It is this
same friend whose memory, as “the prince of cour-
tesy,” is embalmed in the stanzas, “In the Garden at
5
Swainston ’’—
“Nightingales warbled without,
Within was weeping for thee,
Shadows of three dead men
Walked in the walks with me,
Shadows of three dead men, and thou wast one of the three.”
It is not in “Maud '' alone, however, that the
influence of the scenery of the island can be traced
with some feeling of certainty. The reader can
hardly doubt that in the “Idylls of the King” also
there are innumerable glimpses of landscape, wig-
nettes of exquisite colour and suggestiveness, which
have been reproduced from the poet's daily walks in
woodland ways, along the shore where
“The sharp wind ruffles all day long
A little bitter pool about a stone
On the bare coast,”
and
“Far o'er the long backs of the bushless downs.”
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Z'EVAVPSOAV. 371
For many years the Laureate lived at Farringford a
life of reverie and seclusion, “making poets for the
Queen,” as the Freshwater boys thought, for did not
the “p'liceman often see him walking about a-making
of 'em under the stars ” 2 Here he wrote the Arthu-
rian cycle. Here he was visited by the most distin-
guished men of his time—Prince Albert, Maurice,
Kingsley, Dean Stanley, Garibaldi, Darwin, Herschel,
Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes—and here, too,
the crowd of curious and vulgar excursionists became
so constant and pertinacious that in 1867 he was
practically driven from the island during the summer
months.
He found another place of refuge in a wooded
hollow in Blackdown—Green Hill, as it is called—
near Haslemere. On the spot, high yet sheltered,
inaccessible yet not remote, overlooking aspects of
three counties, besides
“Green Sussex fading into blue,
With one gray glimpse of sea,”
Aldworth was built, and from 1869 it was the poet’s
custom to leave Freshwater about June for this safe
retreat till the last weeks in autumn, when he re-
turned once more to “plain life and lettered peace”
under the shelter of the “noble down.”
As far back as 1865 the poet had declined the
honour of a baronetcy—an honour which was again
set aside three years later. In 1883, at a cost of
what he himself regarded as a “great sacrifice ’’ of
372 ZEWAVPSOAV.
personal feeling, he accepted a peerage, and in the
March of the following year he took his seat in the
House of Lords under the title of Baron Tennyson of
Aldworth and Freshwater. Though he had now
attained the ripe age of seventy-five, the fountain of
Song still played with the energy and splendour of
earlier decades. “Becket ’’ and “Tiresias,” and the
second “Locksley Hall,” were yet to come. In his
eightieth year he published “Demeter ; ” and in 1892
“The Foresters” and the “Death of OEnone " came
as farewell gifts to the generation which he had
enriched with the treasures of his genius.
Lord Tennyson's health began to fail in 1890, and
though he recovered a severe attack of illness in that
year he never regained his old vigour. In the last
days of September 1892 he was prostrated by in-
fluenza and gout, and on the 3rd of October it
became known that the illustrious patient was sinking,
slowly, but without any hope of restoration. On the
afternoon of the 5th he asked for a volume of Shake-
speare, and appeared to read for a few moments in
“Cymbeline.” What passage it was that attracted
his interest is not known, but it is conjectured that
he paused over the beautiful dirge—
“Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”
He fell shortly afterwards into slumber, and a little
Z'EAVAVPSOAV. 373
after half-past one o'clock on Thursday morning,
October the 6th—the full moon shining on his bed,
and his family watching round it in that heavenly
light—his spirit passed peacefully away.
He was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, and few
pageants in that venerable pile have been more im-
pressive than his funeral. As the workmen hewed
out his grave far into the night, amid showers of
sparks from the flint and stone of the foundations of
the old church, they laid bare the leaden coffin of
Dryden. Hard by Browning lay beneath his simple
slab. The grave was afterwards thickly strewn with
white roses, and the pall on the coffin was the
English Union Jack. Within the gray walls were
gathered, in sympathy and homage, representatives
of all that is noblest, worthiest, most influential in
English life, and so the remains of the most illus-
trious poet of our time were committed to the bosom
of the great mother.
On looking backward, it may safely be asserted
that in 1850—the year of Wordsworth's death and
of the publication of “In Memoriam ”—no English
poet had a more valid claim than Tennyson to suc-
ceed to the Laureateship, and no encomium can be
more fittingly bestowed upon Tennyson himself than
the characteristic praise which he bestowed on his
predecessor, whose long lease of poetic years is curi-
ously comparable with his own. From that date
onward he produced a volume and variety of work,
the excellence of which placed him far beyond com-
374 /
TEAVAVPSOAV.
parison with any other poet of his epoch except
Browning. Without attempting a comparison be-
tween these two “mighty masters of minstrelsy,” the
estimate of Mr. Justin M'Carthy in his “History of
our Times” seems to be fairly accurate—“Browning's
is surely the higher aim in poetic art ; but of the
art which he essays, Tennyson is by far the greater
master. In passion, pathos, humour, keenness, and
breadth of intellect, the Laureate, if he equalled, did
not surpass his sole rival ; in the balance of poetic
powers he excelled him.”
An adept in poetic form, he was pre-eminently
Sane, and never Sacrificed thought to technique.
Intense love of beauty, profound reverence for the
principle of order, and faultless taste were the domi-
mant and pervading characteristics of his genius; and
here we recognise the accuracy of Walt Whitman's
perception of Tennyson's feudalism—“the old Nor-
man lordhood quality, crossed with that Saxon fibre
from which twain the best current stock of England
springs.” He was an aristocrat, with apparently
little trust that the influence of the democracy of
these days could make either for beauty or for the
principle of order.
The keen interest taken at the time of his death
in all that could be revealed as to his own religious
beliefs, the general tendency to regard him as a great
moral teacher and to take account of his influence in
the matter of lofty aims and ideal living, seem to
justify the suspicion that the poet owed his wide-
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Z'EAVAVPSOAV. 377
spread popularity less to his essential poetic qualities
than to the fact that he satisfied a large public
craving for some melodious utterance on the mys-
teries, doubts, and sorrows which visit most sensitive
natures in these days of invaded faith and spiritual per-
plexity. This need was chiefly satisfied by that noble
Requiem, in the presence of which we forget Shake-
speare's sonnets, Milton’s “Lycidas,” Shelley’s “Adon-
ais,” and to which we can find nothing comparable in
literature since the heart-broken lamentation of David
at Ziklag—“Thy love to me was wonderful, passing
the love of women.” Whatever fate, through the
vagaries of literary fashion, the development of culture,
the obliviousness of time, may be in store for the bulk
of the late Laureate's work, the poem of his great sorrow
will assuredly survive. Dr. George Macdonald has
not inaptly described it as “the poem of our age, the
poem of the hoping doubters ”; and as the world
will probably never be without its hoping doubters—
though there be those who believe that agnosticism
will be Supreme in another quarter of a century —
the appeal of “In Memoriam ” will be as certainly
felt in the future as it has been in the past and is at
the present.
In those inspired pages the poet has dwelt on the
most inscrutable problems of existence, and has
exhausted both philosophy and science with such
impassioned art that few are really aware how com-
pletely this single poem has crystallised the research
and speculation of the Victorian Age. Never have
378 - TENNPSON.
human hands been held out in more earnest impe-
tration “to the further shore,” and surely if it could
have been given to the immortals to answer the cry
of mortality, the grief and the questionings of “In
Memoriam ” would have elicited a response from the
silence that lies “beyond these voices.”
One naturally turns from the “In Memoriam ”
to the Arthurian Epic. How far the “Idylls” were
deliberately intended from the outset as portions of a
complex and magnificent allegory, it would be difficult
to say. Noble work, especially of this sort, lends
itself to allegorical interpretation, and while in the
glow and flower of his inspiration the poet often
“builds better than he knows,” he can perceive in
his moments of lucid after-thought how happy be-
yond his hopes his inspiration has been, and discern
the order and design of which he was unaware at the
moment of achievement. Whether or not this was
the case in the “Idylls of the King,” there seems
little reason to doubt that for one who delights in
the allegory, thousands have enjoyed and will enjoy
them as simple and beautiful transcripts of the old
legends without after-thought or intention.
In these poems, perhaps, more strikingly than in
any other portion of Lord Tennyson's work, the
ordinary reader is fascinated by that marvellous and
inseparably intimate union of what Mr. Traill calls
“the charm of the thought and the magic of its
utterance.” Line after line clings to the memory
with a persistency similar to that of a catching tune.
TEAVAWPSOAV. • . 379.
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* * * * * * * * *
* 14.4- “… a 4, 4tº a 4”

***
Facsimile of lines written for the Caxton window in St. Margaret's,
Westminster, presented by the Printers of London, in honour ºf
Caxton, who was connected with the church, and lies buried
near the Holy Table. - -
Indeed, the poet's faculty of musical expression is so
exquisite that his blank verse lyrics not only simulate
but even appear to excel the perfection of rhyme.
If the limits of this slight sketch permitted, it
might be interesting to make some inquiry into the
method by which Lord Tennyson accomplished these
delightful results, and to attempt to mark the dif-
ference between his method and that of Milton or
Wordsworth. / Mechanical and partial as is the
process, it is not unworthy of note that the modu-
lation of Milton's verse, as Professor Masson has
pointed out, depends largely on the pause after the
sixth and fourth syllables, and, much less frequently,
on pauses after the fifth and seventh./ In this
respect alone Tennyson will be found to show an
unmistakable distinction from Milton and Words-
38o Z'EAVAWPSOAV.
worth, and the student of metrical technique might
do worse than examine the nature of the difference.
Though the word “Idyll” is one which, so to
speak, the poet appropriated to himself, it is not
merely that term which recalls a comparison Sug-
gested many years ago between Tennyson and
Theocritus. In each we find a kindred gift of vision,
a love of colour and form which seems rather to
belong to the sister art, and an exquisite faculty of
melodious phrasing. The magic of Tennyson's style
has permeated the intellect of his generation. As
Palgrave has said, to quote him is to name him ; and
no modern poet has added so copiously to the stock
of felicitous quotation.
The dramatic faculty suggested by the “Grand-
mother,” the “Northern Farmer,” “Rizpah,” and
other monologues, proved, when it was applied to
the large and crowded stage of tragedy, to be by no
means of the first order. If not strictly limited to
the interpretation of moods, it was successfully
applied only in that restricted area. The ponderous
complexity of a great play was, one would imagine,
undertaken too late in life—when the habit of the
“Idyll” and the brief blank verse narrative, packed
with thought and emotion, had become a sort of
Second nature.
By no more crucial a test can a man be judged than
by his ideal of woman, or a poet than by his capacity
to write a song. How admirably the Laureate stood
either test it is not necessary here to point out. To
TENAWPSOAV. 38
few poets has it been given to enjoy so protracted a
period of literary activity; fewer still have begun
with a “pre-poetic period of Orianas, Owls, and Mer-
mans,” and closed with such work as “The Ancient
Sage,” “Sixty Years After,” “The Death of QEnone”
and “Akbar's Dream.” His last poems were not
unworthy of association with his best, though the
poet suffered by that cruelest of ordeals—comparison
with himself.
If, as Mr. Eugene Parsons, an American writer,
asserts, Tennyson “cannot be ranked among the
world-poets,” it is at least satisfactory to be able to
add, on the authority of the same author, that he is
more read on the Continent than many others of our
great singers. In 1867 alone five thousand copies of
his poems in English were sold in France, Spain and
Portugal. Translations of his most popular works
began in German as far back as 1846, in Norwegian
and Danish in 1855, in Dutch in 1859, in French in
1869, in Bohemian and Spanish in 1875, in Hun-
garian in 1881, and in Italian in 1887. Scarcely
less indicative of the intense interest felt in the new
work of one who “cannot be ranked as a world-poet”
is the fact that “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After ’’
was flashed across the Atlantic by cable on its pub-
lication, and scattered broadcast in all the leading
papers.
WILLIAM CANTON.
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