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 ^ESSAYS 
 
 BIOGEAPHICAL AND CUITICAL 
 
 CHIEFLY ON 
 
 ENGLISH POETS 
 
 DAVID -MASSON, A.M. 
 ii 
 
 PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, 
 
 LONDON. 
 
 .IRK. 
 
 UNIYERSfT.y 
 
 RSfT.y J 
 
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 M A CM ILLAN AND CO. 
 
 ^ 1856. 
 
GENERAL 
 
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 PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 This Volume consists, for the most part, of a selection 
 from Essays, on very various topics, contributed, during the 
 last ten or twelve years, to Reviews and other periodicals. 
 Had the selection been large enough to represent the entire 
 series of compositions from which it is taken, the Author 
 would have preferred arranging the papers included in it 
 in the exact order in which tliey were written. The Essays 
 chosen, however, having been such as, from their character, 
 might most aptly go together in the same volume, it has 
 been deemed best to arrange them in the historical order 
 of the matters to which they refer. After a certain slight 
 and rapid fashion, indeed, the Essays, as they here stand, 
 will be found to present a series of views of the History of 
 English Literature, as illustrated in the lives and writings of 
 some of its most remarkable men, from the age of Elizabeth 
 to our own time. 
 
 Allowing for an occasional verbal correction, and one 
 or two omissions, the Papers, with one exception, are 
 printed as they originally appeared. The exception is in 
 the case of the Sketch of the Life of Chatterton ; a consider- 
 able portion of which is here published for the first time. 
 
 h 
 
VI PREFACE. 
 
 A certain dilfference, also, will be observed between this 
 paper and tbe others, both as regards the extent of space 
 allotted to it, and as regards the manner of the literary treat- 
 ment. In some respects, this portion of the Volume departs 
 from the typical character of the Essay, and approaches that 
 of a miniature Biography. 
 
 University College, London, 
 April, 1856. 
 
VIU CONTENTS. 
 
 VII. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 WORDSWORTH 346 
 
 VIII. . , 
 
 SCOTTISH INPLUKNOB IN BRITISH LITERATURE .... 391 
 
 IX. ■ \ 
 
 THEORIES OF POETRY 409 ]/^ 
 
 PROSE AND VERSE: DE QUINCEY . 447 V 
 
or 
 
 ESSAYS 
 
 lOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL. 
 
 SHAKESPEAKE AND GOETHE.* 
 
 If there are any two portraits whicli we all expect to find 
 hung up in the rooms of those whose tastes are regulated by 
 the highest literary culture, they are the portraits of Shake- 
 speare and Goethe. There are, indeed, many and various 
 gods in our modern Pantheon of genius. It contains rough 
 gods and smooth gods, gods of symmetry and gods of strength, 
 gods great and terrible, gods middling and respectable, and 
 little cupids and toy-gods. Out of this variety each master 
 of a household will select his own Penates, the appropriate 
 gods of his own mantelpiece. The roughest will find some to 
 worship them, and the smallest shall not want domestic 
 adoration. But we suppose a dilettante of the first class ; 
 one who, besides excluding from his range of choice the 
 deities of war, and cold thought, and civic action, shall 
 further exclude from it all those even of the gods of modern 
 literature who, whether by reason of their inferior rank, or by 
 
 P* British Quarterly Review : November 1852. l.—ShaJcspeare and His 
 imes. By M. QvizoT. 1852. 2. — Shakspeare's Dramatic Art; and his Rela- 
 tion to Calderon and Ooethe. Translated from the German of Dr. Hermann 
 Ulrici. 1846. 3. — Conversations of Goethe with EcTcermami' and Soret. Trans 
 lated from the German by Jou^if OxENFOB.T>. 2 Vols. 1850. 
 
Z SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 
 
 reason of their peculiar attributes, fail as models of universal 
 stateliness. What we should expect to see over the mantel- 
 piece of such a rigorous person would be the images of the 
 English Shakespeare and the German Goethe. On the one 
 side, we will suppose, fixed with due elegance against the 
 luxurious crimson of the wall, would be a slab of black marble 
 exhibiting in relief a white plaster-cast of the face of Shake- 
 speare as modelled from the Stratford bust ; on the other, in a 
 similar setting, would be a copy, if possible, of the mask of 
 Goethe taken at Weimar after the poet's death. This would 
 suffice ; and the considerate beholder could find no fault with 
 such an arrangement. It is true, reasons might be assigned 
 why a third mask should have been added — that of the Italian 
 Dante ; in which case Dante and Goethe should have occupied 
 the sides, and Shakespeare should have been placed higher up 
 between. But the master of the house would point out how, 
 in that case, a fine taste would have been pained by the in- 
 evitable sense of contrast between the genial mildness of the 
 two Teutonic faces, and the severe and scornful melancholy of 
 the poet of the Inferno. The face of the Italian poet, as being 
 so different in kind, must either be reluctantly omitted, he 
 would say, or transferred by itself to the other side of the 
 room. Unless, indeed, with a view to satisfy the claims both 
 of degree and of kind, Shakespeare were to be placed alone 
 over the mantelpiece, and Dante and Goethe in company on 
 the opposite wall, where, there being but two, the contrast 
 would be rather agreeable than otherwise! On the whole, 
 however, and without prejudice to new arrangements in the 
 course of future decorations, he is content that it should be 
 as it is. 
 
 And so, reader, for the present are we. Let us enter to- 
 gether, then, if it seems worth while, the room of this imagi- 
 nary dilettante during his absence ; let us turn the key in the 
 lock, so that he may not come in to interrupt us ; and let us 
 look for a little time at the two masks he has provided for us 
 over the mantelpiece, receiving such reflections as they may 
 suggest. Doubtless we have often looked at the two masks 
 before ; but that matters little. 
 
I 
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 
 
 As we gaze at the first of the two masks, what is it that we 
 see ? A face full in contour, of good oval sliape, the individual 
 features small in proportion to the entire countenance, the 
 greater part of which is made up of an ample and rounded 
 forehead, and a somewhat abundant moutli and chin. The 
 general impression is that rather of rich, fine, and very mobile 
 tissue, than of large or decided bone. This, together with the 
 length of the upper lip, and the absence of any set expression, 
 imparts to the face an air of lax and luxurious calmness. It 
 is clearly a passive face rather than an active face ; a face 
 across which moods may pass and repass, rather than a face 
 grooved and charactered into any one permanent show of 
 relation towards the outer world. Placed beside the mask 
 of Cromwell, it would fail to impress, not only as being less 
 massive and energetic, but also as being in every way less 
 marked and determinate. It is the face, we repeat, of a lite- 
 rary man ; one of those faces which depend for their power to 
 impress less on the sculptor's favourite circumstance of distinct 
 osseous form, than on the changing hue and aspect of the living 
 flesli. And yet it is, even in form, quite a peculiar face. In- 
 stead of being, as in the ordinary thousand and one portraits 
 of Shakespeare, a mere general face which anybody or nobody 
 might have had, the face in the mask (and the singular por- 
 trait in the first folio edition of the poet's works corroborates 
 it) is a face which every call-boy about the Globe theatre 
 must have carried about with him in his imagination, without 
 any trouble, as specifically Mr. Shakespeare's face. In com- 
 plexion, as we imagine it, it was rather fair than dark ; and 
 yet not very fair either, if we are to believe Shakespeare 
 himself — 
 
 " But "when my glass shows me myself indeed, 
 Beated and chopped with tanned antiquity." — Sonnet 62. 
 
 a passage, however, in which, from the nature of the mood in 
 which it was written, we are to suppose exaggeration for the 
 worse. In short, the face of Shakespeare, so far as we can 
 infer what it was from the homely Stratford bust, was a ge- 
 nuine and even comely, but still unusual English face, distin- 
 guished by a kind of ripe intellectual fulness in the general 
 
 b2 
 
4 SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 
 
 outline, comparative smallness in the individual features, and 
 a look of gentle and humane repose. 
 
 Goethe's face is different. The whole size of the head is 
 perhaps less, but the proportion of the face to the head is 
 greater, and there is more of that determinate form which 
 arises from prominence and strength in the bony structure. 
 The features are individually larger, and present in their com- 
 bination more of that deliberate beauty of outline which can 
 be conveyed with effect in sculpture. The expression, how- 
 ever, is also that of calm intellectual repose ; and in the absence 
 of harshness or undue concentration of the parts, one is at 
 liberty to discover the proof that this also was the face of a man 
 whose life was spent rather in a career of thought and literary 
 effort than in a career of active and laborious strife. Yet the 
 face, with all its power of fine susceptibility, is not so passive 
 as that of Shakespeare. Its passiveness is more the passiveness 
 of self-control, and less that of natural constitution ; the sus- 
 ceptibilities pass and repass over a firmer basis of permanent 
 character ; the tremors among the nervous tissues do not reach 
 to such depths of sheer nervous dissolution, but sooner make 
 impact against the solid bone. The calm in the one face is 
 more that of habitual softness and ease of humour ; the calm 
 in the other, more that of dignified, though tolerant self- 
 composure. It would have been more easy, we think, to have 
 taken liberties with Shakespeare in his presence, than to have 
 attempted a similar thing in the presence of Goethe. The one 
 carried himself with the air of a man often diffident of himself, 
 and whom, therefore, a foolish or impudent stranger might 
 very well mistake till he saw him roused ; the other wore, with 
 all his kindness and blandness, a fixed stateliness of mien and 
 look that would have checked undue familiarity from the first. 
 Add to all this that the face of Goethe, at least in later life, 
 was browner and more wrinkled ; his hair more dark ; his eye 
 also, as we think, nearer the black and lustrous in species, if 
 less mysteriously vague and deep ; and his person perhaps the 
 taller and more symmetrically made."^ 
 
 * According to Mr. Lewes, in his " Life of Goethe," it is a mistake to fancy 
 that Goethe was tall. He seemed taller than he really was. 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 5 
 
 But a truce to these guesses ! What do we actually know 
 respecting these two men whose masks, the preserved simili- 
 tudes of the living features with which thej once fronted the 
 world, are now before us ? Let us turn first to the one and 
 then to the other, till, as we gaze at tliese poor eyeless images, 
 which are all we now have, some vision of the lives and minds 
 they typify shall swim into our ken. 
 
 Shakespeare, this Englisliman who died two hundred and 
 thirty years ago, what is he now to us his countr3niien, who 
 ought to know him best? A great name, in the first place, of 
 which we are proud ! That this little foggy island of England 
 should have given birth to such a man is of itself a moiety of 
 our acquittance among the nations. By Frenchmen, Shake- 
 speare is accepted as at least equal to their own first ; Italians 
 waver between him and Dante ; Germans, by race more our 
 brethren, worship him as their own highest product too, 
 though born by chance amongst us. All confess him to have 
 been one of those great spirits, occasionally created, in whom 
 the human faculties seem to have reached that extreme of 
 expansion, on the slightest increase beyond which man would 
 burst away into some other mode of being, and leave this 
 behind. And why all this? What are the special claims of 
 Shakespeare to this high worship ? Through what mode of 
 activity, practised while alive, has he won this immortality 
 after he is dead? The answer is simple. He was an artist, 
 a poet, a dramatist. Having, during some five-and-twenty 
 years of a life not very long, written about forty dramatic 
 pieces, which, after being acted in several London theatres, 
 were printed either by himself or by his executors, he has, 
 by this means, bequeathed to the memory of the human race 
 an immense number of verses, and to its imagination a great 
 variety of ideal characters and creations — Lears, Othellos, 
 Hamlets, Falstaffs, Shallows, Imogens, Mirandas, Ariels, 
 Calibans. This, understood in its fullest extent, is what 
 Shakespeare has done. Whatever blank in human affairs, as 
 they now are, would be produced by the immediate withdrawal 
 of all this intellectual capital, together with all the interest 
 
b SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 
 
 that has been accumulated on it — that is the measure of what 
 the world owes to Shakespeare. 
 
 This conception, however, while it serves vaguely to indi- 
 cate to us the greatness of the man, assists us very little in the 
 task of defining his character. In our attempts to do this, to 
 ascend, as it were, to the living spring from which have flowed 
 those rich poetic streams, we unavoidably rely upon two kinds 
 of authority — the records which inform us of the leading events 
 of his life ; and the casual allusions to his person and habits 
 left us by his contemporaries. To enumerate the ascertained 
 events of Shakespeare's life is surely unnecessary here. How 
 he was born at Stratford-on-Avon, in Warwickshire, in April, 
 1564, the son of a respectable burgess who afterwards became 
 poor ; how, having been educated with some care in his native 
 town, he married there, at the age of eighteen, a farmer's 
 daughter eight years older than himself; how, after employing 
 himself as scrivener or schoolmaster, or something of that 
 kind, in his native county for a few years more, he at length 
 quitted it in his twenty-fourth year, and came up to London, 
 leaving his wife and three children at Stratford; how, con- 
 necting himself with the Blackfriars theatre, he commenced 
 the career of a poet and play-writer ; how he succeeded so 
 well in this, that, after having been a flourishing actor and 
 theatre-proprietor, and a most popular man of genius about 
 town for some seventeen years, he was able to leave the stage 
 while still under forty, and return to Stratford with property 
 sufficient to make him the most considerable man of the place ; 
 how he lived here for some twelve years more in the midst of 
 his family, sending up occasionally a new play to town, and 
 otherwise leading the even and tranquil existence of a country 
 gentlemaix; and how, after having buried his old mother, 
 married his daughters, and seen himself a grandfather at the 
 age of forty-three, he was cut off rather suddenly on his fifty- 
 third birthday, in the year 1616 — all this, with a good many 
 supplementary details for which we have to thank Mr. Collier, 
 is, or ought to be, as familiar to educated Englishmen of the 
 present day as the letters of the English alphabet. M. Guizot, 
 with a little inaccuracy, has made these leading facts in the 
 
 Vl£ 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 
 
 of the English poet tolerably familiar even to our French 
 neighbours. But while such facts, if conceived with sufficient 
 distinctness, serve to mark out the life of the poet in general 
 outline, it is rather from the few notices of him that have 
 come down to us from his contemporaries that we derive the 
 more special impressions regarding his character and ways 
 with which we are accustomed to fill up this outline. These 
 notices are various ; there may, perhaps, be about a dozen of 
 them in all ; but the only ones that take a very decided hold 
 on the imagination are the three following : — 
 
 Fuller's fancy -'picture of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson at the Mermaid 
 Tavern. — " Many were the wit-combats betwixt him and Ben Jonaon ; which 
 two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war. Master 
 Jonson, like the former, was built far higher in learning ; solid, but slow in 
 performance. Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but 
 lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of 
 all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention."— Wi-itten about 1650, by 
 Thomas Fuller, born in 1608. 
 
 Aubreys Sketch of Shakespeare at second hand. — " This William, being in- 
 clined naturally to poetry and acting, came to London, I guess, about 18; 
 and was an actor at one of the play-houses, and did act exceedingly well. (Now 
 B. Jonson was never a good actor, but an excellent instructor.) He began 
 early to make essays at dramatic poetry, which at that time was very low ; 
 and his plays took well. He was a handsome, well-shaped man ; very good 
 company, and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit. The humour of the 
 constable in ' A Midsummer Night's Dream,* he happened to take at Grendon, 
 in Bucks, which is the road from London to Stratford ; and there was living 
 that constable about 1642, when I first came to Oxon. Mr. Jos. Howe is of 
 that parish ; and knew him. Ben Jonson and he did gather humours of men 
 
 daily wherever they came He was wont to go to his native country once 
 
 a year. I think I have been told that he left 2001. or 300^. per annum, there 
 and thereabout, to a sister. I have heard Sir William Davenant and Mr. 
 Thomas Shadwell, who is accounted the best comedian we have now, say that 
 he had a most prodigious wit, and did admire his natural parts beyond all 
 other dramatical writers. He was wont to say that he never blotted out a 
 line in his life. Said Ben Jonson * I wish he had a blotted out a thousand.' " — 
 WHtteji about 1670, by Aubrey, born 1625. 
 
 Ben Jonson's own Sketch of Shakespeare. — " I remember the players have 
 often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatso - 
 ever he penned), he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, * Would 
 he had blotted a thousand !* ; which they thought a malevolent speech. I had 
 not told posterity this but for their ignorance, who chose that circumstance 
 to commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted ; and to justify mine 
 own candour : for I loved the man, and do honour his memory, on this side 
 idolatry, as much as any. He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free 
 nature; had an excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, 
 wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should 
 be stopped : ' Sufflaminandus erati as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit 
 was in his own power ; would the rule of it had been so too ! Many times he 
 fell into those things could not escape laughter; as when he said, in the 
 person of Caesar, one speaking to him, * Csosar, thou dost me wrong,' he 
 replied, * Caesar did never wrong but with just cause,' and such like ; which 
 were ridiculous. But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever 
 more in him to be praised than to be pardoned." — Ben Jonson's " Discoveries." 
 
8 SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE, 
 
 It is sheer nonsense, with these and other such passages 
 accessible to anybody, to go on repeating, as people seem 
 determined to do, the hackneyed saying of the commentator 
 Steevens, that " all that we know of Shakespeare is, that he 
 was born at Stratford -on- Avon ; married and had children 
 there; went to London, where he commenced actor, and 
 wrote plays and poems ; returned to Stratford, made his will, 
 died, and was buried."* It is our own fault, and not the 
 fault of the materials, if we do not know a great deal more 
 about Shakespeare than that ; if we do not realize, for example, 
 these distinct and indubitable facts about him — his special 
 reputation among the critics of his time, as a man not so much 
 of erudition as of prodigious natural genius ; his gentleness 
 and openness of disposition ; his popular and sociable habits ; 
 his extreme ease, and, as some thought, negligence in compo- 
 sition; and, above all, and most characteristic of all, his 
 excessive fluency in speech. " He sometimes required stop- 
 ping," is Ben Jonson's expression; and whoever does not see 
 a whole volume of revelation respecting Shakespeare in that 
 single trait, has no eye for seeing anything. Let no one ever 
 lose sight of that phrase in trying to imagine Shakespeare. 
 
 Still, after all, we cannot be content thus. With regard to 
 such a man we cannot rest satisfied with a mere picture of his 
 exterior in its aspect of repose, or in a few of its common 
 attitudes. We seek, as the phrase is, to penetrate into his 
 heart — to detect and to ^:s. in everlasting portraiture that 
 mood of his soul which was ultimate and characteristic ; in 
 which, so to speak, he came ready-fashioned from the Creator's 
 hands ; towards which he always sank when alone ; and on 
 the ground-melody of which all his thoughts and actions were 
 but voluntary variations. As far short of such a result as would 
 be any notion we could form of the poet Burns from a mere 
 chronological outline of his life, together with a few stories 
 
 * This saying of Steevens, though still repeated in books, has lost its force 
 with the public. The Lives of Shakespeare by Mr. Halliwell and Mr. Charles 
 Knight, written on such different principles, have effectually dissipated the old 
 impression. Mr. Knight, by his use of the principle of synchronism, and his 
 accumulation of picturesque details, in his Biography of Shakespeare, has left 
 the public without excuse, if they still believe in Steevens, 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 9 
 
 such as are current about his moral irregularities ; so far short 
 of a true appreciation of Shakespeare would be that idea of him 
 which we could derive from the scanty fund of the external 
 evidence. 
 
 And here it is, that, in proceeding to make up the deficiency 
 of the external evidence by going to the only other available 
 source of light on the subject, namely the bequeathed writings 
 of the man himself, we find ourselves obstructed at the outset 
 by an obvious difficulty, which does not exist to the same 
 extent in most other cases. We can, with comparative ease, 
 recognise Burns himself in his works ; for Burns is a lyrist, 
 pouring out his own feelings in song, often alluding to himself, 
 and generally under personal agitation when he writes. Shake- 
 speare, on the other hand, is a dramatist, whose function it 
 was not to communicate, but to create. Had he been a drama- 
 tist of the same school as Ben Jonson, indeed, using the 
 drama as a means of spreading, or, at all events, as a medium 
 through which to insinuate, his opinions ; and often indicating 
 his purposes by the very names of his dramatis personce (as 
 Downright, Merecraft, Eitherside, and the like) — then the 
 task would have been easier. But it is not so with Shake- 
 speare. Less than almost any man that ever wrote, does he 
 inculcate or dogmatise. He is the very t3rpe of the poet. 
 He paints, represents, creates, holds the mirror up to nature ; 
 but from opinion, doctrine, controversy, theory, he holds 
 instinctively aloof. In each of his plays there is a " central 
 idea," to use the favourite term of the German critics — that 
 is, a single thought round which all may be exhibited as con- 
 sciously or unconsciously crystallized; but there is no pervading 
 maxim, no point set forth to be argued or proved. Of none 
 of all the plays can it be said that it is more than any other 
 a vehicle for fixed articles in the creed of Shakespeare. 
 
 One quality or attribute of Shakespeare's genius, we do, 
 indeed, contrive to seize out of this very difficulty of seizing 
 anything — that quality or attribute oi many-sidedness ^ of which 
 we have heard so much for the last century and a half. The 
 immense variety of his characters and conceptions, embrac- 
 ing as it does Hamlets and Falstaffs, Kings and Clowns, 
 
10 SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 
 
 Prosperos and Dogberrjs, and his apparently equal ease in 
 handling them all, are matters that have been noted by one 
 and all of the critics. And thus, while his own] character is 
 lost in his incessant shiftings through such a succession of 
 masks, we yet manage, as it were in revenge, to extract from 
 the very impossibility of describing him an adjective which 
 does possess a kind of quasi-descriptive value. It is as if of 
 some one that had baffled all our attempts to investigate him, 
 we were to console ourselves by saying that he was a perfect 
 Proteus. We call Shakespeare " many-sided ;" not a maga- 
 zine, nor a lady at a literary party, but tells you that ; and in 
 adding this to our list of adjectives concerning him, we find a 
 certain satisfaction, and even an increase of light. 
 
 But it would be cowardice to stop here. The old sea-god 
 Proteus himself, despite his subtlety and versatility, had a 
 real form and character of his own, into which he could be 
 compelled, if one only knew the way. Hear how they served 
 this old gentleman in the Odyssey. 
 
 " We at once, 
 Loud shouting, flew on him, and in our arms 
 Constrained him fast ; nor the sea-prophet old 
 Called not incontinent his shifts to mind. 
 First he became a long-maned lion grim ; 
 A dragon then, a panther, a huge boar, 
 A limpid stream, and an o'ershadowing tree. 
 We, persevering, held him ; till, at length. 
 The subtle sage, his ineffectual arts 
 Resigning weary, questioned me and spoke." 
 
 And so with our Proteus. The many-sidedness of the drama- 
 tist, let it be well believed and pondered, is but the versatility 
 in form of a certain personal and substantial being, which 
 constitutes the specific mind of the dramatist himself. Pre- 
 cisely as we have insisted that Shakespeare's face, as the best 
 portraits represent it to us, is no mere general face or face to 
 let, but a good, decided, and even rather singular face ; so, we 
 would insist, he had as specific a character, as thoroughly a 
 way of his own in thinking about things and going through 
 his morning and evening hours, as any of ourselves. " Man is 
 only many-sided," says Goethe, "when he strives after the 
 highest because he must, and descends to the lesser because he 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 
 
 wm;''' that is, as we interpret, when he is borne on in a 
 certain noble direction in all that he does by the very struc- 
 ture of his mind, while, at his option, he may keep planting 
 this fixed path or not with a sportive and flowery border. By 
 the necessity of his nature, Shakespeare was compelled .in a 
 certain earnest direction in all that he did ; and it is our part 
 to search through the thickets of imagery and gratuitous fiction 
 amid which he spent his life, that this path may be discovered. 
 As the lion, or the limpid stream, or the overshadowing tree, 
 into which Proteus turned himself, was not a real lion, or a 
 real stream, or a real tree, but only Proteus as the one or as 
 the other ; so, involved in each of Shakespeare's characters, — 
 in Hamlet, in Falstafi", or in Eomeo, — involved in some deep 
 manner in each of these diverse characters, is Shakespeare's 
 own nature. If Shakespeare had not been precisely and 
 wholly Shakespeare, and not any other man actual or con- 
 ceivable, could Hamlet or Falstaff, or any other of his crea- 
 tions, have been what they are ? 
 
 But h^w^t^ pvnivff iSl^nV^gpnorp Cy^yn l ^jg wprk s, how to 
 compel this Proteus into his proper and native form, is still 
 the question. It is a problem of the highest difficulty. Some- 
 thing, indeed, of the poet's personal character and views we 
 cannot help gathering, as we read his dramas. Passages 
 again and again occur there, of which, from their peculiar 
 eifect upon ourselves, from their conceivable reference to what 
 we know of the poet's circumstances, or from their evident 
 superfluousness and warmth, we do not hesitate to aver, 
 " There speaks the poet's own heart." But to show generally 
 how much of the man has passed into the poet, and h ^w it. is 
 t hat his personal bent and peculiarities are fn "hp. anrply f|p,- 
 tected inhering in writinp^s whose -essential character it is to 
 be arbitrary and universal, is a task from which a critic might 
 weir shrink, Were he le ft merely to the ordinary resource s of 
 criticaTin^enuity, without any positive and ascertaine d oh^(^-- 
 
 In this case, however, all the world ought to know, there is 
 a positive and ascertained clue. Shakespeare has left to us 
 not merely a collection of dramas, the exercises of his creative 
 phantasy in a world of ideal matter, but also certain poems 
 
12 SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 
 
 which are assuredly and expressly autobiographic. Criticism 
 seems now pretty conclusively to have determined, what it 
 ought to h ave determined long ago, that the Sonnets o f 
 
 Shflk-psppqrp avpj nrirl r^n png?iV.1j "hp^ nnfliir>or pTcp f^i^Ti q 
 
 poetical record of his own feelings and ex p^TJf^ri rr ■ i ^n 
 nected series of entries, as it were, in his own diary — during 
 a certain period of his London life. This, we say, is con- 
 clusively determined and agreed upon ; and whoever does not, 
 to some extent, hold this view, knows nothing about the sub- 
 ject. Ulrici, who is a genuine investigator, as well as a pro- 
 found critic, is, of course, right on this point. So, also, in the 
 main, is M. Guizot, although he mars the worth of the con- 
 clusion by adducing the foolish theory of Eujphuism — that is, 
 of the adoption of an affected style of expression in vogue in 
 Shakespeare's age — in order to explain away that which is 
 precisely the most important thing about the sonnets, and the 
 very thing wo^ to be explained away ; namely, the depth and 
 strangeness of their pervading sentiment, and the curious 
 hyperbolism of their style. In truth, it is the very closeness 
 of the contact into which the right view of the sonnets brings 
 us with Shakespeare, the very value of the information 
 respecting him to which it opens the way, that operates 
 against it. Where we have so eager a desire to know, there 
 we fear to believe, lest what we have once cherished on so 
 gTcat a subject we should be obliged again to give up ; or 
 lest, if our imaginations should dare to figure aught too exact 
 and familiar regarding the traits and motions of so royal a 
 spirit, the question should be put to us, what we can know of 
 the halls of a palace, or the mantled tread of a king? Still 
 the fact is as it is ; these Sonnets of Shakespeare are auto- 
 biographic — distinctly, intensely, painfully autobiographic, 
 although i^ a style and after a fashion of autobiography so 
 peculiar, that we can cite only Dante in his Vita Nuova, and 
 Tennyson in his In Memoriarrij as having furnished precisely 
 similar examples of it. 
 
 We are not going to examine the Sonnets in detail here, 
 nor to tell the story which they involve as a whole. We will 
 indicate generally, however, th e^ impres ^j nn whi^l^ we think, 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 13 
 
 a close investigation of t hem w i ll- inf allibly leave on any W- 
 t hougHtfiil reader, as to the characteristic personal qualities o f tt 
 
 that mind, the la^ -g^^ »r^(] innrP fnptitinna pmnnnfiona frnm €Kj 
 which still cov er and astonish the world., ^/^ 
 
 J, aJ, 
 
 le general and aggTegate effect, then, of these sonnets, asi '^ 
 contributing to our knowledge of Shakespeare as a man, is to 
 antiquate, or at least to reduce very much in value, the com- 1 
 mon idea of him implied in such phrases as William the . 
 Calm, William the Cheerful, and the like. These phrases are '^ 
 true, when understood in a certain very obvious sense ; but if 
 we were to select that designation which would, as we think, 
 express Shakespeare in his most intimate and private rela- 
 tions to man and nature, we should rather say, William the 
 Meditative, William the Metaphysical, or William the Melan- 
 choly. Let not the reader who is full of the just idea of 
 Shakespeare's wonderful concreteness as a poet, be staggered 
 by the second of these phrases. The phrase is a good 
 phrase; etymologically, it is perhaps the best phrase we 
 could here use ; and whatever of inappropriateness there may 
 seem to be in it, proceeds from false associations, and will 
 vanish, we hope, before we have done with it. Nor let it be 
 supposed that, in using, as nearly synonymous, the word 
 Melancholy, we mean anything so absurd as that the author 
 of Falstaff was a Werther. W^hat we mean is, that there is 
 evidence in the sonnets, corroborated by other proof on all 
 hands, that the mind of Shakespeare, when left to itself, was 
 apt to sink into that state in which thoughts of what is sad 
 and mysterious in the universe most easily come and go. 
 
 At no time, except during sleep, is the mind of any human 
 being completely idle. All men have some natural and con- 
 genial mood into which they fall when they are left to talk 
 with themselves. One man recounts the follies of the past 
 day, renewing the relish of them by the recollection ; another 
 uses his leisure to hate his enemy and to scheme his dis- 
 comfiture ; a third rehearses in imagination, in order to be 
 prepared, the part which he is to perform on the morrow. 
 Now, at such moments, as we believe, it was the habit of 
 Shakespeare's mind, obliged thereto by the necessity of its 
 
14 SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 
 
 structure, to ponder ceaselessly those questions relating to 
 man, his origin, and his destiny, in familiarity with which con- 
 sists what is called the spiritual element in human nature. It 
 was Shakespeare^s use, as it seems to us, to revert often, when 
 alone, to that ultimate mood of the soul, in which one hovers 
 wistfully on the borders of the finite, vainly pressing against 
 the barriers that separate it from the unknown ; that mood in 
 which even what is common and under foot seems part of a 
 vast current mystery, and in which, like Arabian Job of 
 old, one looks by turns at the heaven above, the earth be- 
 neath, and one's own moving body between, interrogating 
 whence it all is, why it all is, and whither it all tends. And 
 this, we say, is Melancholy. It is more. It is that mood of 
 man, which, most of all moods, is thoroughly, grandly, spe- 
 cifically human. That which is the essence of all worth, all 
 beauty, all humour, all genius, is open or secret reference to 
 the supernatural ; and this is sorrow. The attitude of a 
 finite creature, contemplating the infinite, can only be that of 
 an exile — grief and wonder blending in a wistful longing for 
 an unknown home. 
 
 As we consider this frame of mind to have been charac- 
 teristic of Shakespeare, so we find that he has not forgotten 
 to represent it as a poet. We have always fancied Hamlet to 
 be a closer translation of Shakespeare's own character than 
 any other of his personations. The same meditativeness, 
 the same morbid reference at all times to the supernatural, 
 the same inordinate development of the speculative faculty, 
 the same intellectual melancholy, that are seen in the Prince 
 of Denmark, seem to have distinguished Shakespeare. Nor 
 is it possible here to forget that minor and lower form of the 
 same fancy — the ornament of As you like it, the melancholy 
 Jaques. 
 
 " Jaques. More, more, I pr'ythee, more ! 
 Amiens. It will make you melancholy, Monsieur Jaques. 
 Jaques. I thank it. More, I pr'ythee, more ! I can suck melancholy out 
 of a song, as a weasel sucks Qgg^. More, I pr'ythee, more ! 
 Amiens. My voice is rugged ; I know 1 cannot please you. 
 Jaques. I do not desire you to please me ; I desire you to sing. 
 
 * * * * * 
 
 Rosalind. They say you a,re a melancholy fellow. 
 Jaques. I am so; I do love it better. than laughing. 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 15 
 
 Rosalind. Those that are in extremity of ^ither are abominable fellows, 
 and betray themselves to every modem censure, worse than drunkards. 
 
 Jaques. Why, 'tis good to be sad, and say nothing. 
 
 Rosalind. Why, then, 'tis good to be a post. 
 
 Jaques. I have neither the scholar's melancholy, which is emulation ; nor 
 the musician's, which is fantastical ; nor the courtier's, which is proud ; nor 
 the soldier's, which is ambitious ; nor the la^vyer's, which is politic ; nor the 
 lady's, which is nice ; nor the lover's, which is all these : but it is a melancholy 
 of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects; 
 and, indeed, the sundry 'contemplation of my travels, in which my often 
 rumination wraps me, is a most humorous sadness." 
 
 Jaques is not Shakespeare ; but in writing tliis description 
 of Jaques, Shakespeare drew from his knowledge of himself. 
 His also was a " melancholy of his own," a '* humorous sad- 
 ness in which his often rumination wrapt him." In that 
 declared power of Jaques of '' sucking melancholy out of a 
 song,' the reference of Shakespeare to himself seems almost 
 direct. Nay, more, as Rosalind, in rating poor Jaques, tells 
 him on one occasion, that he is so abject a fellow, that she 
 verily believes he is *'out of love with his nativity, and 
 almost chides God^or making Mm of that countenance that he 
 is;'* so Shakespeare's melancholy, in one of his sonnets, 
 takes exactly the same form of self-dissatisfaction. 
 
 "When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, 
 I all alone beweep my outcast state. 
 And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries. 
 And look upon myself, and curse my fate. 
 Wishing me like to one more rich in hope. 
 Featured like him, like him with friends possessed. 
 Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope, 
 With what I most enjoy contented least; 
 Yet, in these thoughts myself almost despising, 
 Haply I think on thee," &;c. 
 
 Think of that, reader ! That mask of Shakespeare's face, 
 which we have been discussing, Shakespeare himself did not 
 like; and there were moments in which he was so abject 
 as actually to wish that he had received from Nature another 
 man's physical features ! 
 
 If Shakespeare's melancholy was, like that of Jaques, a 
 complex melancholy — a melancholy " compounded of many 
 simples," extracted perhaps at first from some root of bitter 
 experience in his own life, and then fed, as his sonnets clearly 
 state, by a habitual sense of his own ^'outcast" condition in 
 society, and by the sight of a hundred social wrongs around 
 
16 SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 
 
 him, into a kind of abject dissatisfaction with himself and his 
 fate ; yet, in the end, and in its highest form, it was rather, as 
 we have already hinted, the melancholy of Hamlet — a medi- 
 tative, contemplative melancholy, embracing human life as a 
 whole ; the melancholy of a mind incessantly tending from 
 the real (ra (jivatKa) to the metaphysical {ra fiera ra (j)V(nKa)y 
 and only brought back by external occasion from the meta- 
 physical to the real. 
 
 Do not let us quarrel about the words, if we can agree 
 about the thing. Let any competent person whatever read 
 the Sonnets, and then, with their impression on him, pass to 
 the plays, and he will inevitably become aware of Shake- 
 speare's personal fondness for certain themes or trains of 
 thought, particularly that of the speed and destructiveness of 
 time. Death, vicissitude, the march and tramp of generations 
 across life's stage, the rotting of human bodies in the earth — 
 these and all the other forms of the same thought were 
 familiar to Shakespeare to a degTce beyond what is to be 
 seen in the case of any other poet. It seems to have been a 
 habit of his mind, when left to its o^vn tendency, ever to 
 indulge by preference in that oldest of human meditations, 
 which is not yet trite — " Man that is born of a woman is of 
 few days, and full of trouble ; he cometh forth as a flower, 
 and is cut down : he fleeth as a shadow, and continueth not." 
 Let us cite a few examples from the sonnets : — 
 
 " When I consider everything tliat grows 
 Holds in perfection but a little moment ; 
 That this huge state presenteth nought but shows, 
 Whereon the stars in secret influence comment." — Sonnet 15. 
 
 " If thou survive my well-contented clay, 
 When that churl, Death, my bones with dust shall cover." — Sonnet 32. 
 
 *' No longer mourn for me, when I am dead. 
 Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell 
 Give warning to the world that I am fled 
 From this vile world, with viler worms to dwell."— Sonnet 71. 
 
 " The wrinkles, which thy glass will truly show, 
 Of mouthed graves will give thee memory ; 
 Thou, by thy dial's shady stealth, may'st know 
 Time's thievish progress to eternity." — Sonnet 77. 
 
 " Or shall I live your epitaph to make. 
 Or you survive when I in earth am rotten ?" — Sonnet 81. 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 17 
 
 These are but one or two out of many such passages, oc- 
 curring in the sonnets. Indeed, it may be said, that wherever 
 Shakespeare pronounces the words time, age, death, &c., it is 
 with a deep and cutting personal emphasis, quite different 
 from the usual manner of poets in their stereotyped allusions 
 to mortality. Time, in particular, seems to have tenanted his 
 imagination as a kind of grim and hideous personal existence, 
 cruel out of mere malevolence of nature. Death, too, had 
 become to him a kind of actual being or fury, morally un- 
 amiable, and deserving of reproach, — *' that churl. Death." 
 
 If we turn to the plays of Shakespeare, we shall find that 
 in them, too, the same morbid sensitiveness to all associations 
 with mortality is continually breaking out. The vividness, 
 for example, with which Juliet describes the interior of a char- 
 nel-house, partakes of a spirit of revenge, as if Shakespeare 
 were retaliating, through her, upon an object horrible to 
 himself. 
 
 " Or hide me nightly in a charnel-house, 
 O'ercovered quite with dead men's rattling bones, 
 With reeky shanks, and yellow chapless sktills." 
 
 More distinctly revengeful is Romeo's ejaculation at the 
 tomb. 
 
 I 
 
 Thou detestable maw, thou womb of Death, 
 Gorged with the dearest morsel of the earth. 
 Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open ! " 
 
 And who does not remember the famous passage in Measure 
 for Measure ? — 
 
 I 
 
 ** Claudio. Death is a fearful thing. 
 Isabella. And shamed life is hateful. 
 Claudio. Ay, but to die, and go we know not where — 
 To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot ! 
 This sensible warm motion to become 
 A kneaded clod ; and the delighted spirit 
 To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside 
 In thrilling regions of thick-ribbdd ice ; 
 To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, 
 And blown with restless violence round about 
 The pendent world ; or to be worse than worst 
 Of those that lawless and uncertain thoughts 
 Imagine howling ! 'Tis too horrible. 
 The weariest and most loathed worldly life 
 That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment. 
 Can lay on nature, is a paradise 
 To what we fear of Death." 
 C 
 
18 SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 
 
 Again, in the grave-digging scene in Hamlet, we see the 
 same fascinated familiarity of the imagination with all that 
 pertains to churchyards, coffins, and the corruption within 
 them. 
 
 " Eamlet. Pr'ythee, Horatio, tell me one thing. 
 
 Horatio. "What's that, my lord ? 
 
 Hamlet. Dost thou think Alexander looked o' this fashion i' the earth ? 
 
 Horatio. E'en so. 
 
 Hamlet. And smelt so ? Pah ! {Throws dovm the skuU.) 
 
 Horatio. E'en so, my lord ! 
 
 Hamlet. To what base uses we may return, Horatio ! Why may not 
 imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bung- 
 hole ? 
 
 Horatio. 'Twere to reason too curiously to consider so. 
 
 Hamlet. No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with modesty 
 enough, and likelihood to lead it. As thus : — Alexander died ; Alexander 
 was buried ; Alexander returned to dust ; the dust is earth ; of earth we make 
 loam ; and why of that loam whereto he was converted might we not stop a 
 beer-barrel ? 
 
 Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay, 
 May stop a hole to keep the wind away ; 
 O that that flesh that kept the world in awe 
 Should stop a hole to expel the winter's flaw ! " 
 
 Observe how Shakespeare here defends, through Hamlet, 
 his own tendency '' too curiously " to consider death. To sum 
 np all, however, let us turn to that unparalleled burst of lan- 
 guage in the Temjpest, in which the poet has defeated time 
 itself by chivalrously proclaiming to all time what time 
 can do : — 
 
 " And, like the baseless fabric of a vision, 
 The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
 The solemn temples, the great globe itself — 
 Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve. 
 And, like this unsubstantial pageant, faded, 
 Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff 
 As dreams are made of; and our little life 
 Is rounded with a sleep." 
 
 This, we contend, is no mere poetic phrensy, inserted because 
 it was dramatically suitable that Prospero should so express 
 himself at that place ; it is the explosion into words of a feel- 
 ing during which Prospero was forgotten, and Shakespeare 
 swooned into himself. And what is the continuation of the 
 passage but a kind of postscript, describing, under the guise 
 of Prospero, Shakespeare's own agitation with what he had 
 just written ? 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 10 
 
 Sir, I am vexed ; 
 
 Bear with my weakness ; my old brain is troubled ; 
 Be not disturbed with my infirmity. 
 If you be pleased, retire into my cell, 
 And there repose. A turn or two I'll walk, 
 To still my beating mind." 
 
 'o our imagination the surmise is that Shakespeare here laid 
 down his pen, and began to pace his chamber, too agitated to 
 write more that night 
 
 In this extreme familiarity with the conception of mortality 
 in general, and perhaps also in this extreme sensitiveness to 
 the thought of death as a matter of personal import, all great 
 poets, and possibly all great men whatever, have to some 
 extent resembled Shakespeare. For these are the feelings of 
 our common nature on which religion and all solemn activity 
 have founded and maintained themselves. Space and Time 
 are the largest and the outermost of all human conceptions ; to 
 stand, therefore, incessantly upon these extreme conceptions, 
 as upon the perimeter of a figure, and to view all inwards from 
 them, is the highest exercise of thought to which a human 
 being can attain. Accordingly, in all great poets there may 
 be discerned this familiarity of the imagination with the world, 
 figured as a poor little ball pendent in space, and moving for- 
 ward out of a dark past to a future of light or gloom. But in 
 this respect Shakespeare exceeds them all ; and in this respect, 
 therefore, no poet is more religious, more spiritual, more pro- 
 foundly metaphysical than he. Into an inordinate amount of- 
 that outward pressure of the soul against the perimeter of 
 sensible things, infuse the peculiar moral germ of Christianity, 
 and you have the religion of Shakespeare. Thus : — 
 
 " And our little life ^ 
 Is roimded with a sleep." — Tempest. 
 
 Here the poetic imagination sweeps boldly round the universe, 
 severing it as by a soft cloud-line from the infinite Unknown. 
 
 " Poor soul \ the centre of my sinful earth, 
 Fooled by those rebel powers that lead thee 'stray ! "—^owwe* 146, 
 
 Here the soul, retracting its thoughts from the far and physical, 
 dwells disgustedly on itself. 
 
 " The dread of something after death — 
 The undiscovered coimtry, from whose bourne 
 No traveller returns." — Hamlet. 
 
 C2 
 
20 SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 
 
 Here the soul, pierced with the new and awful thought of sin, 
 wings out again towards the Infinite, and finds all dark. 
 
 " How would you be, 
 If He whiclL is the top of judgment should 
 But judge you as you are ?" — Measure for Measv/re. 
 
 Here the silver lamp of hope is hung up within the gloomy 
 sphere, to burn softly and faintly for ever ! 
 
 And so it is throughout Shakespeare's writings. Whatever 
 is special or doctrinal is avoided ; all that intellectual tackling, 
 so to speak, is struck away that would afibrd the soul any 
 relief whatever from the whole sensation of the supernatural. 
 Although we cannot, therefore, in honest keeping with popular 
 language, call Shakespeare, as Ulrici does, the most Christian 
 of poets, we believe him to have been the man in modern 
 times, who, breathing an atmosphere full of Christian concep- 
 tions, and walking amid a civilization studded with Chris- 
 tian institutions, had his whole being tied by the closest 
 personal links to those highest generalities of the universe 
 which the greatest minds in all ages have ever pondered and 
 meditated, and round which Christianity has thrown its clasp 
 of gold. 
 
 Shakespeare, then, we hold to have been essentially a medi- 
 tative, speculative, and even, in his solitary hours, an abject 
 and melancholy man, rather than a man of active, firm, and 
 worldly disposition. Instead of being a calm, stony observer 
 of life and nature, as he has been sometimes represented, we 
 believe him to. have been a man of the gentlest and most 
 troublesome affections; of sensibility abnormally keen and 
 deep ; full of metaphysical longings ; liable above most men 
 to self-distrust, despondency, and mental agitation from causes 
 internal and external ; and a prey to many secret and severe 
 experiences which he did not discuss at the Mermaid tavern. 
 This, we say, is no guess ; it is a thing certified under his own 
 hand and seal. But this being allowed, we are willing to 
 agree with all that is said of him, by way of indicating the 
 immense variety of faculties, dispositions, and acquirements of 
 which his character was built up. Vast intellectual inquisi- 
 tiveness, the readiest and most universal humour, the truest 
 
 J 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 21 
 
 sagacity and knowledge of the world, the richest and deepest 
 capacity of enjoying all that life presented — all this, as applied 
 to Shakespeare, is a mere string of undeniable commonplaces. 
 The man, as we fancy him, who of all others trod the oftenest 
 the extreme metaphysic walk which bounds our universe in, 
 he was also the man of all others who was related most keenly 
 by every fibre of his being to all the world of the real and the 
 concrete. Better than any man he knew life to be a dream ; 
 with as vivid a relish as any man he did his part as one of 
 the dreamers. If at one moment life stood before his mental 
 gaze, an illuminated little speck or disc, softly rounded with 
 mysterious sleep, the next moment this mere span shot out 
 into an illimitable plain, whereon he himself stood — a plain 
 covered with forests, parted by seas, studded with cities and 
 huge concourses of men, mapped out into civilizations, over- 
 canopied by stars. Nay, it was precisely because he came and 
 went with such instant transition between the two extremes, 
 that he behaved so genially and sympathetically in the latter. 
 It was precisely because he had done the metaphysic feat so 
 completely once for all, and did not bungle on metaphysicizing 
 bit by bit amid the real, that he stood forth in the character of 
 the most concrete of poets. Life is an illusion, a show, a 
 phantasm ; well then, that is settled, and I belong to that 
 section of the illusion called London, the seventeenth century, 
 and woody Warwickshire ! So he may have said ; and he 
 acted accordingly. He walked amid the woods of Warwick- 
 shire, and listened to the birds singing in their leafy retreats ; 
 he entered the Mermaid tavern with Ben Jonson, after the 
 theatre was over, and found himself quite properly related, as 
 one item in the illusion, to that other item in it, a good supper 
 and a cup of canary. He accepted the world as it was ; 
 rejoiced in its joys, was pained by its sorrows, reverenced its 
 dignities, respected its laws, and laughed at its whimsies. It 
 was this very strength, and intimacy, and universality of his 
 relations to the concrete world of nature and life, that caused 
 in him that spirit of acquiescence in things as they were, that 
 evident consei-vatism of temper, that indifference, or perhaps 
 more, to the specific contemporary forms of social and intellec- 
 
22 SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE, 
 
 tual movement with which he has sometimes been charged as 
 a fault. The habit of attaching weight to what are called 
 abstractions, of metaphysicizing bit by bit amid the real, is 
 almost an essential feature in the constitution of men who are 
 remarkable for their faith in social progress. It was precisely, 
 therefore, because Shakespeare was such a votary of the 
 concrete, because he walked so firmly on the green and 
 solid sward of that island of life which he knew to be sur- 
 rounded by a metaphysic sea, that this or that metaphysical 
 proposal with respect to the island itself occupied him but 
 little. 
 
 How, then, did Shakespeare relate himself to this concrete 
 world of nature and life in which his lot had been cast ? What 
 precise function with regard to it, if not that of an active par- 
 tisan of progress, did he accept as devolving naturally on liimf 
 The answer is easy. Marked out by circumstances, and by 
 his own bent and inclination, from the vast majority of men, 
 who, with greater or less faculty, sometimes perhaps with the 
 greatest, pass their lives in silence, appearing in the world at 
 their time, enjoying it for a season, and returning to the earth 
 again ; marked out from among these, and appointed to be 
 one of those whom the whole earth should remember and 
 think of; yet precluded, as we have seen, by his constitution 
 and fortune, from certain modes of attaining to this honour — 
 the special function which, in this high place, he saw himself 
 called upon to discharge, and by the discharge of which he 
 has ensured his place in perpetuity, was simply that of ex- 
 pressing what he felt and saw. In other words, Shakespeare 
 was specifically and transcendently a literary man. To say 
 that he was the greatest man that ever lived is to provoke 
 a useless controversy and comparisons that lead to nothing, 
 between Shakespeare and Caesar, Shakespeare and Charle- 
 magne, Shakespeare and Cromwell ; to say that he was the 
 greatest intellect that ever lived, is to bring the shades of 
 Aristotle and Plato, and Bacon and Newton, and all the other 
 systematic thinkers grumbling about us, with demands for a 
 definition of intellect, which we are by no means in a position 
 to give ; nay, finally, to say that he is the greatest poet that 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 23 
 
 the world has produced (a thing which we would certainly 
 say, were we provoked to it,) would be unnecessarily to hurt 
 the feelings of Homer and Sophocles, Dante and Milton. 
 What we will say, then, and what we will challenge the world 
 to gainsay, is, that he was the greatest expresser that ever 
 lived. This is glory enough, and it leaves the other questions 
 open. Other men may have led, on the whole, greater and 
 more impressive lives than he ; other men, acting on their 
 fellows through the same medium of speech that he used, may 
 have expended a greater power of thought, and achieved a 
 gTeater intellectual effect, in one consistent direction; other 
 men, too (though this is very questionable), may have con- 
 trived to issue the matter which they did address to the world, 
 in more compact and perfect artistic shapes. But no man that 
 ever lived said such splendid things on all subjects universally; 
 no man that ever lived had the faculty of pouring out on all 
 occasions such a flood of the richest and deepest language. 
 He may have had rivals in the art of imagining situations ; 
 he had no rival in the power of sending a gush of the appro- 
 priate intellectual effusion over the image and body of a situa- 
 tion once conceived. From a jewelled ring on an alderman's 
 finger to the most mountainous thought or deed of man or 
 demon, nothing suggested itself that his speech could not 
 envelope and enfold with ease. That excessive fluency which 
 astonished Ben Jonson when he listened to Shakespeare in 
 person, astonishes the world yet. Abundance, ease, redun- 
 dance, a plenitude of word, sound, and imagery, which, were 
 the intellect at work only a little less magnificent, would 
 sometimes end in sheer braggardism and bombast, are the 
 characteristics of Shakespeare's style. Nothing is suppressed, 
 nothing omitted, nothing cancelled. On and on the poet 
 flows ; words, thoughts, and fancies crowding on him as fast 
 as he can write, all related to the matter on hand, and all 
 poured forth together, to rise and fall on the waves of an esta- 
 blished cadence. Such lightness and ease in the manner, and 
 such prodigious wealth and depth in the matter, are combined 
 in no other writer. How the matter was first accumulated, 
 what proportion of it was the acquired capital of former efforts, 
 
24 SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 
 
 and what proportion of it welled up in the poet's mind during 
 and in virtue of the very act of speech, it is impossible to say ; 
 but this at least may be affirmed without fear of contradiction, 
 that there never was a mind in the world from which, when 
 it was pricked by any occasion whatever, there poured forth 
 on the instant such a stream of precious substance intellectually 
 related to it. By his powers of expression, in fact, Shake- 
 speare has beggared all his posterity, and left mere practition- 
 ers of expression nothing possible to do. There is perhaps 
 not a thought, or feeling, or situation, really common and 
 generic to human life, on which he has not exercised his pre- 
 rogative ; and, wherever he has once been, woe to the man 
 that comes after him ! He has overgrown the whole system 
 and face of things like a universal ivy, which has left no wall 
 uncovered, no pinnacle unclimbed, no chink unpenetrated. 
 Since he lived, the concrete world has worn a richer surface. 
 He found it great and beautiful, with stripes here and there of 
 the rough old coat seen through the leafy labours of his prede- 
 cessors; he left it clothed throughout with the wealth and 
 autumnal luxuriance of his own unparalleled language. 
 
 This brings us, by a very natural connexion, to what we 
 have to say of Goethe. For, if, with the foregoing impressions 
 on our mind respecting the character and the function of the 
 great English poet, we turn to the mask of his German 
 successor and admirer, which has been so long waiting our 
 notice, the first question must infallibly be, What recognition 
 is it possible that, in such circumstances, we can have left for 
 him f In other words, the first consideration that must be 
 taken into account in any attempt to appreciate Goethe is, 
 that he came into a w^rldjn^jffiliicJi_iil^^ 
 before h im. Jbor a man who, in the main, was to pursue 
 a course so similar to that which Shakespeare had pursued, 
 this was a matter of incalculable importance. Either, on the 
 one hand, the value of all that the second man could do, if he 
 adhered to a course precisely similar, must sufier from the fact 
 that he was following in the footsteps of a predecessor of such 
 unapproachable excellence ; or, on the other hand, the con- 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 25 
 
 sciousness of this, if it came in time, would be likely to prevent 
 too close a resemblance between the lives of the two men, by- 
 giving a special direction and character to the efforts of the 
 second. Hear Goethe himself on this very point : — 
 
 " We discoursed upon English literature, on the greatness of Shakespeare, 
 and on the unfavourable position held by all English dramatic authors who 
 had appeared after that poetical giant. * A dramatic talent of any importance,' 
 said Goethe, * could not forbear to notice Shakespeare's works ; nay, could not 
 forbear to study them. Having studied them, he must be aware that Shake- 
 speare has already exhausted the whole of human nature in all its tendencies, 
 in all its heights and depths, and that, in fact, there remains for him, the 
 aftercomer, nothing more to do. And how could one get courage to put pen 
 to paper, if one were conscious, in an earnest appreciating spirit, that such un- 
 fathomable and unattainable excellences were already in existence ? It fared 
 better with me fifty years ago in my own dear Germany. I could soon come 
 to an end with all that then existed ; it could not long awe me, or occupy my 
 attention. I soon left behind me German literature, and the study of it, and 
 turned my thoughts to life and to production. So on and on I went, in my 
 own natural development, and on and on I fashioned the productions of epoch 
 after epoch. And, at every step of life and development, my standard of 
 excellence was not much higher than what at such a step I was able to attain. 
 But had I been bom an Englishman, and had all those numerous master- 
 pieces been brought before me in all their power, at my first dawn of youthful, 
 consciousness, they would have overpowered me, and I should not have 
 known what to do. I could not have gone on with such fresh light-hearted- 
 ness, but should have had to bethink myself, and look about for a long time 
 to find some new outlet.' " — EckermawrCs Conversations of Goethe, i. pp. 114, 115. 
 
 All this is very clear and happily expressed. Most English- 
 men that have written since Shakespeare have been overawed 
 by the sense of his vast superiority ; and Goethe, if he had 
 been an Englishman, would have partaken of the same feeling, 
 and would have been obliged, as he says, to look about for 
 some path in which competition with such a predecessor would 
 have been avoided. Being, however, a German, and coming 
 at a time when German literature had nothing so great to 
 boast of but that an ardent young man could hope to produce 
 something as good or better, the way was certainly open to 
 him to the attainment, in his own nation, of a position analog- 
 ous to that which Shakespeare had occupied in his. Goethe 
 might, if he had chosen, have aspired to be the Shakespeare 
 of Germany. Had his tastes and faculties pointed in that 
 direction, there was no reason, special to his own nation, that 
 would have made it very incumbent on him to thwart the 
 tendency of his genius and seek about for a new outlet in 
 order to escape injurious comparisons. But, even under such 
 circumstances, to have pursued a course very similar to that 
 
26 SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 
 
 of Shakespeare^ and to have been animated by a mere ambi- 
 tion to tread in the footsteps of that master, would have been 
 death to all chance of a reputation among the highest. Great 
 writers do not exclusively belong to the country of their birth ; 
 the greatest of all are grouped together on a kind of central 
 platform, in the view of all peoples and tongues ; and, as in 
 this select assemblage no duplicates are permitted, the man 
 who does never so well a second time that which the world has 
 already canonized a man for doing once, has little chance of 
 being admitted to coequal honours. More especially, too, in 
 the present case, would too close a resemblance to the original, 
 whether in manner or in purpose, have been regarded in the 
 end as a reason for inferiority in place. As the poet of one 
 branch of the great Germanic family of mankind, Shakespeare 
 belonged indirectly to the Germans, even before they recog- 
 nised him ; in him all the genuine qualities of Teutonic human 
 nature, as well as the more special characteristics of English 
 genius, were embodied once for all in the particular form which 
 had chanced to be his ; and had Goethe been, in any marked 
 sense, only a repetition of the same form, he might have held 
 his place for some time as the wonder of Germany, but, as 
 soon as the course of events had opened up the communication 
 which was sure to take place at some time between the German 
 and the English literatures, and so made his countrymen 
 acquainted with Shakespeare, he would have lost his extreme 
 brilliance, and become but a star of the second magnitude. 
 In order, then, that Goethe might hold permanently a first 
 rank even among his own countrymen, it was necessary that 
 he should be a man of a genius quite distinct from that of 
 Shakespeare ; a man who, having or not having certain 
 Shakespearian qualities, should at all events signalize such 
 qualities as he had by a marked character and function of his 
 own. And if this was necessary to secure to Goethe a first 
 rank in the literature of Germany, much more was it necessary 
 to ensure his place as one of the intellectual potentates of the 
 whole modern world. If Goethe was to be admitted into this 
 select company at all, it could not be as a mere younger 
 brother of Shakespeare, but as a man whom Shakespeare 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 27 
 
 himself, when he took him by the hand, would look at with 
 curiosity, as something new in species, produced in the earth 
 since his own time. 
 
 Was this, then, the case? Was Goethe, with all his 
 external resemblance in some respects to Shakespeare, a man 
 of such truly individual character, and of so new and marked 
 a function, as to deserve a place among the highest, not in 
 German literature alone, but in the literature of the world as 
 a whole ? We do not think that any one competent to give 
 an opinion will reply in the negative. 
 
 ST^lance at the externa l circumstances of G(7f.f:hp■^ct lifp 
 alone (and what a contrast there is between the abundance of 
 biogTaphic material respecting Goethe and the scantiness of 
 our information respecting Shakespeare !) will beget the im- 
 pression that the man who led such a life must have had 
 opportunities for developing a very unusual character. The 
 main facts in the life of Goethe, as all know, are these : — that 
 he was bom at Frankfort-on-the-Main, in 1749, the only 
 surviving son of parents who ranked among the wealthiest in 
 the town; that, having been educated with extreme care, 
 and having received whatever experience could be acquired 
 by an impetuous student-life, free from all ordinary forms of 
 hardship, first at one German town and then at another, he 
 devoted himself, in accordance with his tastes, to a career of 
 literary activity ; that, after unwinding himself from several 
 love-afiiairs, and travelling for the sake of farther culture in 
 Italy and other parts of Europe, he settled in early manhood 
 at Weimar, as the intimate friend and counsellor of the 
 reigning duke of that state ; that there, during a long and 
 honoured life, in the course of which he married an inferior 
 house-keeper kind of person, of whom we do not hear much, 
 he prosecuted his literary enterprise with unwearied industry, 
 not only producing poems, novels, dramas, essays, treatises, 
 and criticisms in great profusion from his own pen, but also 
 acting, along with Schiller and others, as a director and guide 
 of the whole contemporary intellectual movement of his native 
 land ; and that finally, having outlived all his famous asso- 
 ciates, become a widower and a grandfather, and attained the 
 
28 SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 
 
 position not only of the acknowledged king and patriarcli of 
 German literature, but also, as some thought, of the wisest 
 and most serene intellect of Europe, he died so late as 1832, 
 in the eighty-third year of his age. All this, it will be 
 observed, is very different from the life of the prosperous 
 Warwickshire player, whose existence had illustrated the early 
 part of the seventeenth century in England ; and necessarily 
 denoted, at the same time, a very different cast of mind and 
 temper. 
 
 Accordingly, such descriptions as we have of Goethe from 
 those who knew him best convey the idea of a characte r 
 notably different from that of the English poet. OiShake^ 
 speare personally we have but one uniform account —that he 
 was a man of gentle presence and disposition, very good 
 company, and of such boundless fluency and intellectual 
 inventiveness in talk, that his hearers could not always stand 
 it, but had sometimes to whistle him down in his flights. In 
 Goethe's case we have two distinct pictures. In youth, as all 
 accounts agree in stating, he was one of the most impetuous, 
 bounding, ennui-dispelling natures that ever broke in upon 
 a society of ordinary mortals assembled to kill time. " He 
 came upon you," said one who knew him well at this period, 
 " like a wolf in the night." The simile is a splendid one, and 
 it agrees wonderfully with the more subdued representations 
 of his early years given by Goethe himself in his Autobiography. 
 Handsome as an Apollo and welcome everywhere, he bore all 
 before him wherever he went ; not only by his talent, but also 
 by an exuberance of animal spirits which swept dulness itself 
 along, took away the breath of those who relied on sarcasm 
 and their cool heads, inspired life and animation into the whole 
 circle, and most especially delighted the ladies. This vivacity 
 became even, at times, a reckless humour, prolific in all kinds 
 of mad freaks and extravagances. Whether this impetuosity 
 kept always within the bounds of mere innocent frolic is a 
 question which we need not here raise. Traditions are 
 certainly afloat of terrible domestic incidents connected with 
 Goethe\s youth, both in Frankfort and in Weimar ; but to 
 what extent these traditions are founded on fact is a matter 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 29 
 
 which we have never yet seen any attempt to decide upon 
 evidence. More authentic for us, and equally significant, if 
 we could be sure of our ability to appreciate- them rightly, are 
 the stories which Goethe himself tells of his various youthful 
 attachments, and the various ways in which they were con- 
 cluded. In Goethe's own narratives of these afiairs, there is 
 a confession of error, arising out of his disposition passionately 
 to abandon himself to the feelings of the moment, without 
 looking forward to the consequences ; but whether this con- 
 fession is to be converted by his critics into the harsher accu- 
 sation of heartlessness and want of principle, is a thing not to 
 be decided by any general rule as to the matter of inconstancy, 
 but by accurate knowledge in each case of the whole circum- 
 stances of that case. One thing these love-romances of 
 Goethe's early life make clear— namely, that for a being of 
 such extreme sensibility as he was, he had a very strong 
 element of self-control. When he gave up Rica or Lilli, it 
 was with tears, and no end of sleepless nights ; and yet he gave 
 them up. Shakespeare, we believe (and there is an instance 
 exactly in point in the story of his sonnets), had no such power 
 of breaking clear from connexions which his judgment disap- 
 proved. Remorse and return, self-reproaches for his weakness 
 at one moment, followed the next by weakness more abject 
 than before — such, by his own confession, was the conduct, in 
 one such case, of our more passive and gentle-hearted poet. 
 Where Shakespeare was "past cure," and "frantic-mad with 
 evermore unrest," Goethe but fell into " hypochondria," which 
 reason and resolution enabled him to overcome. Goethe at 
 twenty-five gave up a young, beautiful and innocent girl, from 
 the conviction that it was better to do so. Shakespeare at 
 thirty-five was the abject slave of a dark-complexioned woman, 
 who was faithless to him, and whom he cursed in his heart. 
 The sensibilities in the German poet moved from the first, as 
 we have already said, over a firmer basis of permanent 
 character. 
 
 It is chiefly, however, the Goethe of later life that the world 
 remembers and thinks of. The bounding impetuosity is then 
 gone ; or rather it is kept back and restrained, so as to form a 
 
30 SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 
 
 calm and steady fund of internal energy, capable sometimes 
 of a flash and outbreak, but generally revealing itself only in 
 labour and its fruits. What was formerly the beauty of an 
 Apollo, graceful, light, and full of motion, is now the beauty 
 of a Jupiter, composed, stately, serene. " What a sublime 
 form ! " says Eckermann, describing his first interview with 
 him. " I forgot to speak for looking at him : I could not 
 *' look enough. His face is so powerful and brown ! full of 
 " wrinkles, and each wrinkle full of expression ! And every- 
 " where there is such nobleness and firmness, such repose and 
 " greatness ! He spoke in a slow composed manner, such as you 
 " would expect from an aged monarch." Such is Goethe, as 
 he lasts now in the imagination of the world. Living among 
 statues and books and pictures ; daily doing something for 
 his own culture and for that of the world ; daily receiving 
 guests and visitors, whom he entertained and instructed with 
 his wise and deep, yet charming and simple converse ; daily 
 corresponding with friends and strangers, and giving advice 
 or doing a good turn to some young talent or other — never 
 was such a mind consecrated so perseveringly and exclusively 
 to the service of Kunst and Literatur. One almost begins to 
 wonder if it was altogether right that an old man should go 
 on, morning after morning, and evening after evening, in such 
 a fashion, talking about art and science and literature, as if 
 they were the only interests in the world ; taking his guests 
 into corners to have quiet discussions with them on these 
 subjects ; and always finding something new and nice to be 
 said about them. Possibly, indeed, this is the fault of those 
 who have reported him, and who only took notes when the 
 discourse turned on what they considered the proper Goethean 
 themes. But that Goethe far outdid Shakespeare in this con- 
 scious dedication of himself to a life of the intellect, we hold 
 to be as certain as the testimony of likelihood can make it. 
 Shakespeare did enjoy his art ; it was what, in his pensive 
 hours, as he himself hints, he enjoyed. most ; and whatever of 
 intellectual ecstasy literary production can bring, must surely 
 have been his in those hours when he composed Hamlet and 
 the Tempest. But Shakespeare's was precisely one of those 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 31 
 
 minds whose strength is a revelation to themselves during 
 the moment of its exercise, rather than a chronic ascertained 
 possession ; and from this circumstance, as well as from the 
 attested fact of his carelessness as to the fate of his composi- 
 tions, we can very well conceive that literature and culture 
 and all that formed but a small part of the general system of 
 things in Shakespeare's daily thoughts, and that he would 
 have been absolutely ashamed of himself if, when anything 
 else, from the state of the weather to the quality of the wine, 
 was within the circle of possible allusion, he had said a word 
 about his own plays. If he had not Sir Walter Scott's 
 positive conviction that every man ought to be either a laird or 
 a lawyer, casting in authorship as a mere addition, if it were 
 to be practised at all — he at least led so full and keen a life, 
 and was drawn forth on so many sides by nature, society, 
 and the unseen, that Literature, out of the actual moments in 
 which he was engaged in it, must have seemed to him a mere 
 bagatelle, a mere fantastic echo of not a tithe of life. In his 
 home in London, or his retirement at Stratford, he wrote on 
 and on, because he could not help doing so, and because it 
 was his business and his solace ; but no play seemed to him 
 worth a day of the contemporary actions of men, no descrip- 
 tion worth a single glance at the Thames or at the deer 
 feeding in the forest, no sonnet worth the tear it was made to 
 embalm. Literature was by no means to him, as it was to 
 Goethe, the main interest of life; nor was he a man so 
 far master of himself as ever to be able to behave as if it were 
 so, and to accept, as Goethe did, all that occurred as so much 
 culture. Yet Shakespeare would have understood Goethe; 
 and would have regarded him, almost with envy, as one of 
 those men who, as being " lords and owners of their faces," and 
 not mere " stewards," know how to husband Nature's gifts 
 best. 
 
 " They that have power to hurt and will do none. 
 That do not do the thing they most do show, 
 Who, moving others, are themselves as stone. 
 Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow ; 
 They rightly do inherit Heaven's graces. 
 And husband nature's riches from expense ; 
 They are the lords and owners of their faces, 
 Others but stewards of their excellence." — Sonnet 94. 
 
32 SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 
 
 If Goethe attained this character, however, it was not because, 
 as it is the fashion to say, he was by nature cold, heartless, 
 and impassive, but because, uniting will and wisdom to his 
 wealth of sensibilities, he had disciplined himself into what 
 he was. A heartless man does not diffuse geniality and kind- 
 liness around him, as Goethe did ; and a statue is not seized, 
 as Goethe once was, with haemorrhage in the night, the result 
 of suppressed grief. 
 
 That which made Goethe what he was — namely, his philo- 
 sophy of life — is to be gathered, in the form of hints, from 
 his various writings and conversations. We present a few 
 important passages here, in what seems th^ir philosophic con- 
 nexion, as well as the order most suitable for bringing out 
 Goethe's mode of thought in contrast with that of Shakespeare. 
 
 Go€the*s Thoughts of Death. — '* We had gone round the thicket, and had 
 turned by Tiefurt into the Weimar road, where we had a view of the setting 
 sun. Goethe was for a while lost in thought; he then said to me, in the 
 words of one of the ancients, 
 
 * Untergehend sogar ist's immer dieselbige Sonne.' 
 (Still it continues the self-same sun, even while it is sinking.) 
 
 • At the age of seventy-five,' continued he, with much cheerfulness, ' one must, 
 of course, think sometimes of death. But this thought never gives me the 
 least uneasiness, for I am fully convinced that our spirit is a being of a nature 
 quite indestructible, and that its activity continues from eternity to eternity. 
 It is like the sun, which seems to set only to otir earthly eyes, but which, in 
 reality, never sets, but shines on unceasingly.' " — EckermanrCs Conversations of 
 Qoethe, vol. i. p. 1 61. 
 
 Goethe's maodrn with respect to Metajphysics. — " Man is bom not to solve the 
 problem of the universe, but to find out where the problem begins, and then 
 to restrain himself within the limits of the comprehensible." — Ihid. vol. i. 
 p. 272. 
 
 Goethe's theory of the intention of the Supernatural with regard to the Visible. — 
 " After all, what does it all come to ? God did not retire to rest after the 
 well-known six days of creation ; but, on the contrary, is constantly active as 
 on the first. It would have been for Him a poor occupation to compose this 
 heavy world out of simple elements, and to keep it rolling in the sunbeams 
 from year to year, if He had not had the plan of founding a nursery for a 
 world of spirits upon this material basis. So He is now constantly active in 
 higher natures to attract the lower ones." — Ibid. vol. ii. p. 426. 
 
 Goethe's doctrine of Immortality. — " Kant has unquestionably done the best 
 service, by drawing the limits beyond which human intellect is not able to 
 penetrate, and leaving at rest the insoluble problems. What a deal have 
 people philosophized about immortality ! and how far have they got ? I doubt 
 not of our immortality, for nature cannot dispense with the entdecheia. But 
 we are not all, in like manner, immortal ; and he who would manifest himself 
 
 in future as a great entelecheia must be one now To me the eternal 
 
 existence of my soul is proved from my idea of activity. If I work on in- 
 cessantly till my death, nature is bound to give me another form of existence 
 when the present one can no longer sustain my spirit." — Ibid. vol. ii. pp. 193, 
 194, and p. 122. 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 33 
 
 Ooefhe' 3 image of Life.— '* Child, child, no more! The coursers of Time 
 lashed, as it were, by invisible spirits, hurry on the light car of our destiny ; 
 and all that we can do is, in cool self-possession, to hold the reins with a fii m 
 hand, and to guide the wheels, now to the left, now to the right, avoiding a 
 stone here, or a precipice there. Whither it is hurrying, who can tell ? and 
 who, indeed, can remember the point from which it started ? ' — Egmont. 
 
 Man's proper business. — " It has at all times been said and repeated, that 
 man should strive to know himself. This is a singular requisition, with which 
 no one complies, or indeed ever will comply. Man is by all his senses and 
 efforts ^directed to externals — to the world around him; and he has to know 
 this so far, and to make it so far serviceable, as he requires for his own ends. 
 It is only when he feels joy or sorrow that he knows anything about himself, 
 and only by joy or sorrow is he instructed what to seek and what to shun."-— 
 JSckermann's Conversations of Goethe, vol. ii. p. 180. 
 
 The Abstract and the Concrete, the Subjective and the Objective Tendencies. — 
 " The Germans are certainly strange people. By their deep thoughts and 
 ideas, which they seek in everything, and fix upon everything, they make life 
 much more burdensome than is necessary. Only have the courage to give 
 yourself up to your impressions; allow yourself to be delighted, moved, 
 elevated — nay, instructed and inspired by something great; but do not 
 
 imagine all is vanity, if it is not abstract thought and idea It was not 
 
 in my line, as a poet, to strive to embody anything abstract. I received in my 
 mind impressions, and those of a sensual, animated, charming, varied, hundred- 
 fold kind, just as a lively imagination presented them ; and I had, as a poet, 
 nothing more to do than artistically to round oflF and elaborate such views and 
 impressions, and by means of a Hvely representation so to bring them forward 
 that others might receive the same impression in hearing or reading my re- 
 presentation of them A poet deserves not the name while he only 
 
 speaks out his few subjective feelings ; but as soon as he can appropriate to 
 himself and express the world, he is a poet. Then he is inexhaustible, and 
 can be always new; while a subjective nature has soon talked out his little 
 internal material, and is at last ruined by mannerism. People always talk of 
 the study of the ancients ; but what does that mean, except that it says, 
 * Turn your attention to the real world, and try to express it, for that is what 
 the ancients did when they were alive ?' Goethe arose and walked to and fro, 
 while I remained seated at the table, as he likes to see me. He stood a 
 moment at the stove, and then, like one who has reflected, came to me, and, 
 with his finger on his lips, said to me, * I will now tell you something which you 
 will often find confirmed in your own experience. All eras in a state of 
 decline and dissolution are subjective; on the other hand, all progressive eras 
 have an objective tendency. Our present time is retrograde, for it is subjec- 
 tive ; we see this not merely in poetry, but also in painting, and much besides. 
 Every healthy efibrt, on the contrary, is directed from the inward to the out- 
 ward world, as you will see in all gi'eat eras, which have been really in a 
 state of progression, and all of an objective nature,"' — Ibid. vol. i. pp. 415, 
 416, and pp. 283, 284. 
 
 Hule of Individual Activity. — " The most reasonable way is for every man 
 to follow his own vocation to which he has been born, and which he has 
 learned, and to avoid hindering others fr6m folloAving theirs. Let the shoe- 
 maker abide by his last, the peasant by his plough, and let the king know how 
 to govern ; for this is also a business which must be learned, and with which 
 no one should meddle who does not understand it." — I^ id. vol. i. p. 134. 
 
 Eight and Wrong : the habit of Controversy.— "■ The '^ad of all opposition is ne- 
 gation, and negation is nothing. If I call bad >id. ■ hf t ' i^aiu ? But if I call 
 
 'I bad, I do a great deal of mipchief. He v'hn wil' iright must never 
 
 .. must not trouble hii^i^vii^ a all abuat .vhat is . '.ue, but only do well 
 
 ..self, ^or the great .■• i^-. .o, not to pull down, out to b' il^ up, and in this 
 
 • :anity firds ou.e.iny."--/6/(i. vol. '. p 208. 
 
 loethes on-. I F lation to the Dispi^'ts of his time. — "*\ou have been re- 
 :xhed,' reri^arked I r?' h^r inconoidorptely, 'for not taking ap arras at that 
 
 ■\t periovl ^the war with Napolo:-u), or at least cooperating as a poet. 
 
 B 
 
34 SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 
 
 * Let us leave that point alone, my good friend,' returned Goethe. * It is an 
 absurd world, whioh knows not what it wants, and which one must allow to 
 have its own way. How could I take up arms without hatred, and how could 
 I hate without youth ? If such an emergency had befallen me when twenty 
 years old, I should certainly not have been the last ; but it found me as one 
 who had already passed the first sixties. Besides, we cannot all serve our 
 country in the same way, but each does his best, according as God has endowed 
 him. I have toiled hard enough during half a century. I can say that, in 
 those things which nature has appointed for my daily work, I have permitted 
 myself no relaxation night or day, but have always striven, investigated, and 
 done as much, and that as well, as I coxild. If every one can say the same of 
 
 himself, it will prove well with all I will not say what I think. There 
 
 is more ill-will towards me, hidden beneath that remark, than you ai-e aware 
 of. I feel therein a new form of the aid hatred with which people have per- 
 secuted me, and endeavoured quietly to wound me for years. I know very 
 well that I am an eyesore to many ; that they would all willingly get rid of 
 me; and that, since they cannot touch my talent, they aim at my character. 
 Now, it is said that I am proud; now, egotistical; now, immersed in sen- 
 suality; now, without Christianity; and now, without love for my native 
 country, and my own dear Germans. You have now known me sufficiently 
 
 for years, and you feel what all that talk is worth The poet, as a man 
 
 and citizen, will love his native land ; but the native land of his poetic powers 
 and poetic action is the good, noble, and beautiful, which is confined to no 
 particular province or country, and which he seizes upon and forms, wher- 
 ever he finds them. Therein he is like the eagle, who hovers with free gaze 
 over whole countries, and to whom it is of no consequence whether the hare 
 on which he pounces is running in Prussia or in Saxony.' " — Ibid. vol. ii, 
 pp. 257, 258, and p. 427. 
 
 Whoever has read these sentences attentively, and pene- 
 trated their meaning in connexion, will see that they reveal 
 a mode of thought somewhat resembling that which we have 
 attributed to Shakespeare, and yet essentially different from it. 
 Both poets are dis tin guished by this , that they abstained 
 systematically during their lives from the abstract, the dialec- 
 tical and the controversial, and devoted themselves, with true 
 feeling and enjoyment, to the concrete, the real and the 
 unquestioned; and so far there is an obvious resemblance 
 between them. But the manner in which this characteristic 
 was attained, was by no means the same in both cases. In 
 Shakespeare, as we have seen, there was a metaphysic longing, 
 a tendency towards the supersensible and invisible, absolutely 
 morbid, if we take ordinary constitutions as the standard of 
 health in this respect ; and if, with all this, he revelled with 
 delight and moved with ease and firmness in the sensuous 
 and actual, it was because the very same soul which pressed 
 with such energy and wailing against the bounds of this life 
 of man, was also related with inordinate keenness and intimacy 
 to all that this life spheres in. In Goethe, on the other hand, 
 the tendency to the real existed under easier constitutional 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 35 
 
 conditions, and in a state of such natural preponderance over 
 any concomitant craving for the metaphysical, that it neces- 
 sarily took, German as he was, a higher place in his estimate 
 of what is desirable in a human character. That world of the 
 real in which Shakespeare delighted, and which he knew so 
 well, seemed to him, all this knowledge and delight notwith- 
 standing, far more evanescent, far more a mere filmy show, 
 far less considerable a shred of all that is, than it did to 
 Goethe. To Shakespeare, as we have already said, life was 
 but as a little island on the bosom of a boundless sea : men 
 must needs know what the island contains, and act as those 
 who have to till and rule it ; still, with that expanse of waters 
 all round in view, and that roar of waters ever in the ear, 
 what can men call themselves or pretend their realm to be ? 
 *' Poor fools of nature," is the poet's own phrase — the realm 
 so small that it is pitiful to belong to it ! Not so with Goethe. 
 To him also, of course, the thought was familiar of a vast 
 region of the supersensible outlying nature and life ; but a 
 higher value on the whole was reserved for nature and life, 
 even on the universal scale, by his peculiar habit of conceiving 
 them, not as distinct from the supersensible, and contempo- 
 raneously begirt by it, but rather, if we may so speak, as a 
 considerable portion, or even duration, of the quondam-suiper- 
 sensible in the new form of the sensible. In other words, 
 Goethe was full of the notion of progress or evolution ; the 
 world was to him not a mere spectacle and dominion for the 
 supernatural, but an actual manifestation of the substance of 
 the supernatural itself, on its way through time to new issues. 
 Hence his peculiar notion of immortality ; hence his view as 
 to the mere relativeness of the terms right and wrong, good 
 and bad, and the like ; and hence also his resolute inculcation 
 of the doctrine, so unpalatable to his countrymen, that men 
 ought to direct their thoughts and efforts to the actual and the 
 outward. Life being the current phase of the universal 
 mystery, the true duty of men could be but to contribute in 
 their various ways to the furtherance of life. 
 
 And what then, finally, was Goethe's own mode of activity 
 in a life thus defined in his general philosophy ? Like Shake- 
 
 d2 
 
36 SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE. 
 
 speare, lie was a literary man ; his function was literature. 
 Yes, b ut in what resp ects otherwise than Shakespeare had 
 done before him, d id he fulfil this literary function in referen ce 
 to the world he lived in and enjoyed? In the first place, as 
 an know, he ditt'ered trom Shakespeare in this, that he did not 
 address the world exclusively in the character of a poet. 
 Besides his poetry, properly so called, Goethe has left behind 
 him numerous prose-writings, ranking under very different 
 heads, abounding with such deep and wise maxims and per- 
 ceptions, in reference to all things under the sun, as would 
 have entitled him, even had he been no poet, to rank as a sage. 
 So great, indeed, is Goethe as a thinker and a critic, that it 
 may very well be disputed whether his prose-writings, as a 
 whole, are not more precious than his poems. But even 
 setting apart this difference, and regarding the two men in 
 their special character as poets or artists, a marked difference 
 is still discernible. Hear Goethe's own definition of his 
 poetical career and aim. 
 
 " Thus began that tendency from which I could not deviate my whole life 
 through ; namely, the tendency to turn into an image, into a poem, everything 
 that delighted or troubled me, or otherwise occupied me, and to come to some 
 certain understanding with myself upon it, that I might both rectify my 
 conceptions of external things, and set my mind at rest about them. The 
 faculty of doing this was necessary to no one more than to me, for my natural 
 dioposition whirled me constantly from one extreme to the other. All, there- 
 fore, that has been put forth by me, consists of fragments of a great confes- 
 sion." — Autobiography, vol. i. p. 240. 
 
 Shakespeare's genius we defined to be the genius of uni- 
 versal expression; of clothing objects, circumstances, and 
 feelings with magnificent language ; of pouring over the image 
 of any given situation, whether suggested from within or fi*om 
 without, an effusion of the richest intellectual matter that 
 could possibly be related to it. Goethe's genius, as here 
 defined by himself, was something different and narrower. 
 It was the genius of translation from the subjective into the 
 objective ; of clothing real feelings with fictitious circumstance; 
 of giving happy intellectual form to states of mind, so as to 
 dismiss and throw them off*. Let this distinction be sufficiently 
 conceived and developed, and a full idea will be obtained of 
 the exact difference between the literary many-sidedness 
 attributed to Shakespeare and that also attributed to Goethe. 
 
MILTOFS YOUTH/ 
 
 Never surely did a youth leave the academic halls of 
 England more full of fair promise than Milton, when, at the 
 age of twenty-three, he quitted Cambridge to reside at his 
 father's house, amid the quiet beauties of a rural neighbour- 
 hood some twenty miles distant from London. Fair in person, 
 with a clear fresh complexion, light brown hair which parted 
 in the middle and fell in curls to his shoulders, clear grey 
 eyes, and a well-knit frame of moderate proportions — there 
 could not have been found a finer picture of pure and ingen- 
 uous English youth. And that health and beauty which 
 distinguished his outward appearance, and the effect of which 
 was increased by a voice surpassingly sweet and musical, 
 indicated with perfect truth the qualities of the mind within. 
 Seriousness, studiousness, fondness for flowers and music, 
 fondness also for manly exercises in the open air, courage and 
 resolution of character, combined with the most maiden purity 
 and innocence of life — these were the traits conspicuous in 
 Milton in his early years. Of his accomplishments it is 
 hardly necessary to take particular note. Whatever of learning, 
 of science, or of discipline in logic or philosophy the University 
 at that time could give, he had duly and in the largest measure 
 acquired. (No better Greek or Latin scholar probably had 
 the University in that age sent forth ; he was proficient in the 
 Hebrew tongue, and in all the other customary aids to a 
 biblical theology;^ and he could speak and write well in 
 French and Italian. His acquaintance, obtained by inde- 
 pendent reading, with the history and with the whole body 
 
 * North British Review: February, 1852— The Works of John Milton. 
 8 vols. London, Pickering, 1851. 
 
38 
 
 of the literature of ancient and modern nations, was extensive 
 and various. And, as nature had endowed him in no ordinary 
 degree with that most exquisite of her gifts, the ear and the 
 passion for harmony, he had studied music as an art, and had 
 taught himself not only to sing in the society of others, but 
 also to touch the keys for his solitary pleasure. 
 
 The instruments which Milton preferred as a musician, 
 were, his biographers tells us, the organ and the bass-viol. 
 This fact seems to us to be not without its significance. Were 
 we to define in one word our impression of the prevailing 
 tone, the characteristic mood and disposition of Milton's mind, 
 even in his early youth, we should say that it consisted in a 
 deep and habitual seriousness. We use the word in no-^e of 
 those special and restricted senses that are sometimes given 
 to it. We do not mean that Milton, at the period of his early 
 youth with which we are now concerned, was, or accounted 
 himself as being, a confessed member of that noble party of 
 English Puritans with which he afterwards became allied, and 
 to which he rendered such vast services. True, he himself 
 tells us, in his account of his education, that " care had ever 
 been had of him, with his earliest capacity, not to be negli- 
 gently trained in the precepts of the Christian religion ;" and 
 in the fact that his first tutor, selected for him by his father, 
 was one " Thomas Young, a Puritan of Essex who cut his 
 hair short," there is enough to prove that the formation of his 
 character in youth was aided expressly and purposely by 
 Puritanical influences. But Milton, if ever, in a denomina- 
 tional sense, he could be called a Puritan, (he always wore his 
 hair long,' and in other respects did not conform to the usages 
 of the Puritan party,) could hardly, with any propriety, be 
 designated as a Puritan in this sense, at the time when he left 
 college. There is evidence that at this time he had not given 
 so much attention, on his own personal account, to matters 
 of religious doctrine, as he afterwards bestowed. That serious- 
 ness of which we speak was, therefore, rather a constitutional 
 seriousness ratified and nourished by rational reflection, than 
 the assumed temper of a sect. " A certain reservedness of 
 natural disposition, and a moral discipline learnt out of the 
 
Milton's youth. 39 
 
 noblest philosophy" — such, in Milton's own words, were the 
 causes which, apart from his Christian training, would have 
 always kept him, as he believed, above the vices that debase 
 youth. And herein the example of Milton contradicts much 
 that is commonly advanced by way of a theory of the poetical 
 character. 
 
 Poets and artists generally, it is held, are and ought to be 
 distinguished by a predominance of sensibility over principle, 
 an excess of what Coleridge called the spiritual over what he 
 called the moral part of man. A nature built on quicksands, 
 an organization of nerve languid or tempestuous with occasion, 
 a soul falling and soaring, now subject to ecstasies and now 
 to^riemorses — such, it is supposed, and on no small induction 
 of actual instances, is the appropriate constitution of the poet. 
 Mobility, absolute and entire destitution of principle properly 
 so called, capacity for varying the mood indefinitely rather 
 than for retaining and keeping up one moral gesture or reso- 
 lution through all moods — this, say the theorists, is the essen- 
 tial thing in the structure of the artist. Against the truth of 
 this, however, as a maxim of universal application, the cha- 
 racter of Milton, as well as that of Wordsworth after him, is 
 a remarkable protest. "Were it possible to place before the 
 theorists all the materials which exist for judging of Milton's 
 personal disposition as a young man, without exhibiting to 
 them at the same time the actual and early proofs of his 
 poetical genius, their conclusion, were they true to their 
 theory, would necessarily be, that the basis of his nature was 
 too solid and immovable, the platform of personal aims and 
 aspirations over which his thoughts moved and had footing, 
 too fixed and firm, to permit that he should have been a poet. 
 Nay, whosoever, even appreciating Milton as a poet, shall 
 come to the investigation of his writings, armed with that 
 preconception of the poetical character which is sure to be 
 derived from an intimacy with the character of Shakespeare, 
 will hardly escape some feeling of the same kind. Seriousness, 
 we repeat, a solemn and even austere demeanour of mind, was 
 the characteristic of Milton even in his youth. And the 
 outward manifestation of this was a life of pure and devout 
 
40 Milton's youth. 
 
 observance. This is a point that ought not to be avoided or 
 dismissed in mere general language ; for he who does not lay 
 stress on this, knows not and loves not Mifton. Accept, then, 
 bj way of more particular statement, his own remarkable 
 words in justifying himself against an inuendo of one of his 
 adversaries in later life, reflecting on the tenor of his juvenile 
 pursuits and behaviour. " A certain niceness of nature," he 
 says, *' an honest haughtiness and self-esteem either of what 
 I was, or what I might be, (which let envy call pride,) and 
 lastly that modesty whereof, though not in the title-page, yet 
 here I may be excused to make some beseeming profession ; 
 all these, uniting the supply of their natural aid together, kept 
 me still above those low descents of mind, beneath which he 
 must deject and plunge himself that can agree to saleable and 
 unlawful prostitutions." Fancy, ye to whom the moral frailty 
 of genius is a consolation, or to whom the association of virtue 
 with youth and Cambridge is a jest — fancy Milton, as this 
 passage from his own pen describes him at the age of twenty- 
 three, returning to his father's house from the university, full of 
 its accomplishments and its honours, an auburn-haired youth 
 beautiful as the Apollo of a northern clime, and that beautiful 
 body the temple of a soul pure and unsoiled ! Truly, a son 
 for a mother to take to her arms with joy and pride ! 
 
 Connected with this austerity of character, discernible in 
 Milton even in his youth, may be noted also, as indeed it is 
 noted in the passage just cited, a haughty yet modest self- 
 esteem, and consciousness of his own powers. Throughout 
 all Milton's works there may be discerned a vein of this noble 
 egotism, this unbashful self-assertion. Frequently, in arguing 
 with an opponent, or in petting forth his own views on any 
 subject of discussion, he passes, by a very slight topical 
 connexion, into an account of himself, his education, his 
 designs, and his relations to the matter in question ; and this 
 sometimes so elaborately and at such length, that the impres- 
 sion is as if he said to his readers, — " Besides all my other 
 arguments, take this also as the chief and conclusive argument, 
 that it is /, a man of such and such antecedents, and with such 
 and such powers to perform far higher work than you see me 
 
MILTON S YOUTH. 41 
 
 now engaged in, who affirm and maintain this." In his later 
 years Milton evidently believed himself to be, if not the 
 greatest man in England, at least the greatest writer, and one 
 whose egomet dixi was entitled to as much force in the intel- 
 lectual Commonwealth as the decree of a civil magistrate is 
 invested with in the order of civil life. All that he said or 
 wrote was backed in his own consciousness by a sense of the 
 independent importance of the fact, that it was he, Milton, 
 who said or wrote it ; and often, after arguing a point for 
 some time on a footing of ostensible equality with his readers, 
 he seems suddenly to stop, retire to the vantage-ground of his 
 own thoughts, and bid his readers follow him thither, if they 
 would see the whole of that authority which his words had 
 failed to express. 
 
 Such, we say, is Milton's habit in his later writings. In 
 his early life, of course, the feeling which it shows existed 
 rather as an undefined consciousness of superior power, a 
 tendency silently and with satisfaction to compare his own 
 intellectual measure with that of others, a resolute ambition 
 to be and to do something great. Now we cannot help think- 
 ing that it will be found that this particular form of self-esteem 
 goes along with that moral austerity of character which we 
 have alleged to be discernible in Milton even in his youth, 
 rather than with that temperament of varying sensibility which 
 is, according to the general theory, regarded as characteristic 
 of the poet. Men of this latter type, as they vary in the 
 entire mood of their mind, vary also in their estimate of them- 
 selves. No permanent consciousness of their own destiny, 
 or of their own worth in comparison with others, belongs to 
 them. In their moods of elevation they are powers to move 
 the world ; but while the impulse that has gone forth from 
 them in one of these moods, may be still thrilling its way 
 onward in wider and wider circles through the hearts of 
 myriads they have never seen, they, the fountains of the 
 impulse, the spirit being gone from them, may be sitting 
 alone in the very spot and amid the ashes of their triumph, 
 sunken and dead, despondent and self-accusing. It requires 
 the evidence of positive results, the assurance of other men^s 
 
42 MILTON'S YOUTH. 
 
 praises, the visible presentation of effects whicli they cannot 
 but trace to themselves, to convince such men that they are 
 or can do anything. Whatever manifestations of egotism, 
 whatever strokes of self-assertion come from such men, come 
 in the very burst and phrensy of their passing resistlessness. 
 The calm, deliberate, and unshaken knowledge of their own 
 superiority is not theirs. True, Shakespeare, the very type, 
 if rightly understood, of this class of minds, is supposed in 
 his sonnets to have predicted, in the strongest and most deli- 
 berate terms, his own immortality as a poet. It could be 
 proved, however, were this the place for such an investigation, 
 that the common interpretation of those passages of the sonnets 
 which are supposed to supply this trait in the character of 
 Shakespeare, is nothing more nor less than a false reading of 
 a very subtle meaning which the critics have missed. Tliose 
 other passages of the sonnets which breathe an abject melan- 
 choly and discontentment with self, which exhibit the poet as 
 " cursing his fate," as " bewailing his outcast state," as looking 
 about abasedly among his literary contemporaries, envying 
 the " art " of one, and the " scope " of another, and even 
 wishing sometimes that the very features of his face had been 
 different from what they were and like those of some he knew, 
 are, in our opinion, of far greater autobiographic value. 
 
 Nothing of this kind is to be found in Milton. As a Chris- 
 tian, indeed, humiliation before God was a duty the meaning 
 of which he knew full well ; but as a man moving among 
 other men, he possessed in that moral seriousness and stoic 
 scorn of temptation which characterized him, a spring of ever- 
 present pride, dignifying his whole bearing among his fellows, 
 and at times arousing him to a kingly intolerance. In short, 
 instead of that dissatisfaction with self which we trace as a not 
 unfrequeut feeling with Shakespeare, we find in Milton, even 
 in his early youth, a recollection firm and habitual, that he 
 was one of those servants to whom God had entrusted the 
 stewardship of ten talents. In that very sonnet, for example, 
 written on his twenty-third birthday, in which he laments 
 that he had as yet achieved so little, his consolation is, that 
 the power of achievement was still indubitably within him — 
 
MILTON'S YOUTH. 43 
 
 " All is, if I have grace to use it so, 
 As ever, in my great Task-Master's eye." 
 
 And what was that special mode of activity to which 
 Milton, still in the bloom and seed-time of his years, had 
 chosen to dedicate the powers of which he was so conscious ? 
 He had been destined by his parents for the Church ; but this 
 opening into life he had definitively and deliberately aban- 
 doned. With equal decision he renounced the profession of 
 the law ; and it does not seem to have been long after the 
 conclusion of his career at the university, when he renounced 
 the prospects of professional life altogether. His reasons for 
 this, which are to be gathered from various passages of his 
 writings, seem to have resolved themselves into a jealous con- 
 cern for his own absolute intellectual freedom. He had 
 determined, as he says, '' to lay up, as the best treasure and 
 solace of a good old age, the honest liberty of free speech 
 from his youth;" and neither the Church nor the Bar of 
 England, at the time when he formed that resolution, was 
 a place where he could hope to keep it. For a man so 
 situated, the alternative, then as now, was the practice or pro- 
 fession of literature. To this, therefore, as soon as he was 
 able to come to a decision on the subject, Milton had impli- 
 citly, if not avowedly, dedicated himself. To become a great 
 writer, and, above all, a great poet ; to teach the English lan- 
 guage a new strain and modulation ; to elaborate and sur- 
 render over to the English nation works that would make it 
 more potent and wise in the age that was passing, and more 
 memorable and lordly in the ages to come — such was the 
 form which Milton's ambition had assumed when, laying 
 aside his student's garb, he went to reside under his father's 
 roof. 
 
 Nor was this merely a choice of necessity, the reluctant 
 determination of a young soul, " Church-outed by the pre- 
 lates," and disgusted with the chances of the law. Milton, in 
 the Church, would certainly have been such an archbishop, 
 mitred or unmitred, as England has never seen ; and the very 
 passage of such a man across the sacred floor would have 
 trampled into timely extinction much that has since sprung 
 
44 Milton's youth. 
 
 up amongst us to trouble and perplex, and would have 
 modelled the ecclesiasticism of England into a shape that the 
 world might have gazed at, with no truant glance backward 
 to the splendours of the Seven Hills. And, doubtless, even 
 amid the traditions of the law, such a man would have per- 
 formed the feats of a Samson, albeit of a Samson in chains. 
 An inward prompting, therefore, a love secretly plighted to 
 the Muse, and a sweet comfort and delight in her sole society, 
 which no other allurement, whether of profit or pastime, could 
 equal or diminish, — this, less formally perhaps, but as really 
 as care for his intellectual liberty, or distaste for the esta- 
 blished professions of his time, determined Milton^s early 
 resolution as to his future way of life. On this point it will 
 be best to quote his own words. " After I had," he says, 
 " for my first years, by the ceaseless diligence and care of my 
 father (whom God recompense !) been exercised to the tongues 
 and some sciences, as my age would sufier, by sundry masters 
 and teachers both at home and at the schools, it was found 
 that, whether ought was imposed upon me by them that had 
 the overlooking, or betaken to of mine own choice, in English 
 or other tongue, prosing or versing, but chiefly this latter, the 
 style, by certain vital signs it had, was likely to live." The 
 meaning of which sentence to a biographer of Milton, is, that 
 Milton, before his three-and-twentieth year, knew himself to 
 be a poet. 
 
 He knew this, he says, by '' certain vital signs," discernible 
 in what he had already written. What were these " vital 
 signs,^^ these proofs indubitable to Milton that he had the art 
 and faculty of a poet ? We need but refer the reader for the 
 answer to those smaller poetical compositions of Milton, both 
 in English and in Latin, which survive as specimens of his 
 earliest muse. Of these, some three or four which happen 
 to be specially dated — such as the Elegy on the Death of 
 a Fair Infant, written in 1624, or in the author's seventeenth 
 year; the well-known Hymn on the Morning of Christ's 
 Nativity, written in 1629, when the author was just twenty- 
 one ; and the often-quoted Sonnet on Shakespeare, written not 
 much later— may be cited as convenient materials from which, 
 
45 
 
 whoever would convince himself minutely of Milton's youthful 
 vocation to poetry rather than to anything else, may derive 
 proofs on that head. Here will be found power of the most 
 rare and beautiful conception, choice of words the most exact 
 and exquisite, the most perfect music and charm of verse. 
 Above all, here will be found that ineffable something — call 
 it imagination or what we will — wherein lies the intimate and 
 ineradicable peculiarity of the poet ; the art to work on and 
 on for ever in a purely ideal element, to chase and marshal 
 airy nothings according to a law totally unlike that of rational 
 association, never hastening to a logical end like the school- 
 boy when on errand, but still lingering within the wood like 
 the schoolboy during holiday. This peculiar mental habit, 
 nowhere better described than by Milton himself when he 
 speaks of verse — 
 
 *' Such as the meeting soul may pierce 
 In notes, with many a winding bout 
 Of linked sweetness long di*awn out, 
 With wanton heed and giddy cunning," 
 
 is so characteristic of the poetical disposition, that, though in 
 most of the greatest poets, as, for example, Dante, Goethe, 
 Shakespeare in his dramas, Chaucer, and almost all the ancient 
 Greek poets, it is not observable in any extraordinary degree, 
 chiefly because in them the element of direct reference to 
 human life and its interests had fitting preponderance, yet it 
 may be affirmed that he who, tolerating or admiring these 
 poets, does not relish also such poetry as that of Spenser, 
 Keats, and Shakespeare in his minor pieces, but complains of 
 it as wearisome and sensuous, is wanting in a portion of the 
 genuine poetic taste. 
 
 There was but one " vital sign," the absence of which in 
 Milton could, according to any theory of the poetical cha- 
 racter, have begotten doubts in his own mind, or in the 
 minds of his friends, whether poetry was his peculiar and 
 appropriate function. The single source of possible doubt on 
 this head could have been no other than that native austerity 
 of feeling and temper, that real though not formal Puritanism 
 of heart and intellect, which we have noticed as distinguish- 
 
46 MILTON'S YOUTH. 
 
 ing Milton from his youth upward. The poet, it is said in 
 these days, when, by psychologizing a man, it is supposed we 
 can tell what course of life he is fit for — the poet ought to be 
 universally sympathetic ; he ought to hate nothing, despise 
 nothing. And a notion equivalent to this, though by no 
 means so articulately expressed, was undoubtedly prevalent 
 in Milton's own time. As the Puritans, on the one hand, had 
 set their faces against all those practices of profane singing, 
 dancing, masquing, theatre-going, and the like, in which the 
 preservation of the spirit of the arts was supposed to be 
 involved, so the last party in the world from which the 
 reputed devotees of the arts in those days would have ex- 
 pected a poet to arise, was that of the Puritans. Even in 
 "Shakespeare, and much more in Ben Jenson, Beaumont and 
 Fletcher, and other poets of the Elizabethan age, may be 
 traced evidences of an instinctive enmity to that Puritanical 
 mode of thinking which was then on the increase in English 
 society, and in the triumph of which these great minds fore- 
 saw the proscription of their craft and their pleasures. When 
 Sir Toby says to Malvolio, " Dost thou think, because thou 
 art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale ? " and 
 when the Clown adds, **Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger 
 shall be hot i' the mouth too," it is the Knight and the 
 Clown on the one side, against Malvolio the Puritan on the 
 other. That the defence of the festive in this passage is not 
 borne by more respectable personages than the two who 
 speak, is indeed a kind of indication that Shakespeare's per- 
 sonal feelings with regard to the austere movement which he 
 saw gathering around him, were by no means so deep or 
 bitter as to discompose him ; but if his profounder soul could 
 behold such things with serenity, and even pronounce them 
 good, they assuredly met with enough of virulence and in- 
 vective among his lesser contemporaries. That literary cru- 
 sade against the Puritans, as canting, sour-visaged, mirth- 
 forbidding, art-abhorring religionists, which came to its height 
 at the time when Butler wrote his Hudibras, and Wycherley 
 his plays, was already hot when the wits of King James's 
 days used to assemble, after the theatre, in their favourite 
 
Milton's youth. 47 
 
 taverns ; and if, sallying out after one of their merry evenings 
 in their most favourite tavern of all, the Mermaid in Bread 
 Street, these assembled poets and dramatists had gone in 
 search of the youth who was likeliest to be the poet of the 
 age then beginning, they certainly would not have gone to 
 that modest residence in the same street where the son of the 
 Puritanic scrivener, then preparing for college, was busy over 
 his books. Nay, if Ben Jonson, the last twenty-nine years 
 of whose life coincided with the first twenty-nine of Milton's, 
 had followed the young student from the house where he was 
 born in Bread Street to his rooms at Cambridge, and had 
 there become acquainted with him and looked over his early 
 poetical exercises, it is probable enough that, while praising 
 them so far, he would have constituted himself the organ of 
 that very opinion as to the requisites of the poetical character 
 which we are now discussing, and declared, in some strong 
 phrase or other, that the youth would have been all the more 
 hopeful as a poet if he had had a little more of the hon vivant 
 in his constitution. 
 
 This, then, is a point of no little importance ; involving, as 
 it does, the relations of Milton as a poet to the age in which 
 he lived — that splendid age of Puritan mastery in England, 
 which came between the age of Shakespeare and Elizabeth, 
 and the age of Dry den and the second Charles. Milton was 
 the poet of that intermediate era ; that his character was such 
 as we have described it, made him only the more truly a 
 representative of all that was then deepest in English society ; 
 and, in inquiring, therefore, in what manner Milton's austerity 
 as a man affected his art as a poet, we are, at the same time, 
 investigating the rationale of that remarkable fact in the his- 
 tory of English literature, the interpolation of so original and 
 isolated a development as the Miltonic poems between the 
 inventive luxuriousness of the Elizabethan epoch, and the 
 witty licentiousness that followed the Restoration. 
 
 First, then, it was not humour that came to the rescue, in 
 Milton's case, to help him out in those respects wherein, ac- 
 cording to the theory in question, the strictness and austerity 
 of his own disposition would have injured his capacity to be 
 
48 Milton's youth. 
 
 a poet. There are and have been men as strict and austere 
 as he, who yet, by means of this quality of humour, have been 
 able to reconcile themselves to much in human life lying far 
 away from, and even far beneath, the sphere of their own 
 practice and conscientious liking. As Pantagruel, the noble 
 and meditative, endured and even loved those immortal com- 
 panions of his, the boisterous and profane Friar John, and 
 the cowardly and impish Panurge, so these men, remaining 
 themselves with all rigour and punctuality within the limits of 
 sober and exemplary life, are seen extending their regards to 
 the persons and the doings of a whole circle of reprobate 
 Falstaifs, Pistols, Clowns, and Sir Toby Belches. They cannot 
 help it. They may and often do blame themselves for it; 
 they wish that, in their intercourse with the world, they could 
 more habitually turn the austere and judicial side of their cha- 
 racter to the scenes and incidents that there present themselves, 
 simply saying of each, " That is right and worthy ,^^ or, " That 
 is wrong and unworthy," and treating it accordingly. But 
 they break down in the trial. Suddenly some incident presents 
 itself which is not only right but clumsy, or not only wrong 
 but comic, and straightway the austere side of their character 
 wheels round to the back, and judge, jury, and witnesses are 
 convulsed with untimely laughter. It was by no means so 
 with Milton. As his critics have generally remarked, he had 
 little of humour, properly so called, in his composition. His 
 laughter is the laughter of scorn. With one unvarying judicial 
 look, he confronted the actions of men, and, if ever his tone 
 altered as lie uttered his judgments, it was only because some- 
 thing roused him to a pitch of higher passion. Take, as 
 characteristic, the following passage, in which he replies to 
 the taunt of an opponent who had asked where Ae, the an- 
 tagonist of profane amusements, had procured that knowledge 
 of theatres and their furniture, which certain allusions in one 
 of his books showed him to possess : — 
 
 " Since there is such necessity to the hearsay of a tire, a periwig, or a 
 vizard, that plays must have been seen, what difficulty was there in that, 
 when in the colleges so many of the young divines, and those in next aptitude 
 to divinity, have been seen so often upon the stage, writhing and unboning 
 their clergy limbs to all the antic and dishonest gestures of Trinculoes, 
 
MILTON S YOUTH. 49 
 
 buffoons, and bawds ; prostituting tlie Bbame of that ministry which either 
 they had or were nigh having, to the eyes of courtiers and court ladies, with 
 their grooms and mademoiselles ? There, whilst they acted and overacted, 
 among other young scholars, I was a sj^ectator : — they thought themselves 
 gallant men, and I thought them fools; they made sport, and I laughed; 
 they mispronounced, and I misliked ; and, to make up the atticism, they were 
 out, and I hissed." — Apology foi' Smectymnuus. 
 
 Who can doubt that to a man, to whom such a scene as 
 this presented itself in a light so different from that in which 
 a Sliakespeare would have viewed it, Friar John himself, if 
 encountered in the real world, would have been simply the 
 profane and unendurable wearer of the sacred garb, Falstaif 
 only a foul and grey-haired iniquity. Pistol but a braggart 
 and coward, and Sir Toby Belch but a beastly sot ? 
 
 That office, however, which humour did not perform for 
 Milton, in his intercourse with the world of past and present 
 things, was in part performed by what he did in large measure 
 possess — intellectual inquisitweness ; respect for intellect, its 
 accomplishments, and its rights. If any quality in the actions 
 or writings of other men could have won Milton's favourable 
 regards, even where his moral sense condemned, that quality, 
 we believe, was intellectual gi*eatness, and especially greatness 
 of his own stamp, or marked by any of his own features. 
 Hence that tone of almost pitying admiration which pervades 
 his representation of the ruined Archangel ; hence his uni- 
 formly respectful references to the great intellects of Paganism 
 and of the Catholic world; and hence, we think, his un- 
 bounded, and, so far as we can see, unqualified reverence for 
 Shakespeare. As by the direct exercise of his own intellect, 
 on the one hand, applied to the rational discrimination for 
 himself of what was really wrong from what was only igno- 
 rantly reputed to be so, he had kept his mind clear, as 
 Cromwell also did, from many of those sectarian prejudices in 
 the matter of moral observance which were current in his time 
 — justified, for example, his love of music, his liking for 
 natural beauty, his habits of cheerful recreation, his devotion 
 to various literature, and even, most questionable of all, as 
 would then have been thought, his affection for the massy 
 pillars and storied windows of ecclesiastical architecture ; so, 
 reflexly, by a recognition of the intellectual liberty of others, 
 
50 
 
 he seems to have distinctly apprehended the fact that there 
 might be legitimate manifestations of intellect of a kind very- 
 different from his own. A Falstaff in real life, for example, 
 might have been to Milton the most unendurable of horrors, 
 just as, according to his own confession, a play-acting clergy- 
 man Tvas his abomination; and yet, in the pages of his 
 honoured Shakespeare, Sir John as mentor to the Prince, and 
 Parson Hugh Evans as the Welch fairy among the mummers, 
 may have been creations he would con over and very dearly 
 appreciate. And this accounts for the multifarious and unre- 
 stricted character of his literary studies. Milton, we believe, 
 was a man whose intellectual inquisitiveness and respect for 
 talent would have led him, in other instances than that of 
 the College theatricals, to see and hear much that his heart 
 derided, to study and know what he would not strictly have 
 wished to imitate. Ovid and Tibullus, for example, contain 
 much that is far from Miltonic ; and yet that he read poets of 
 this class with particular pleasure, let the following quotation 
 prove : — 
 
 *' I had my time, readers, as others have who have good learning bestowed 
 upon them, to be sent to those places where, the opinion was, it might be 
 soonest attained ; and, as the manner is, was not unstudied in those authors 
 which are most commended : — whereof some were grave orators and histo- 
 rians, whose matter methought I loved indeed, but, as my age was, so I under- 
 stood them; others were the smooth elegiac poets whereof the schools are 
 not scarce, whom, both for the pleasing sound of their numerous writing 
 (which, in imitation, I found most easy, and most agreeable to nature's part 
 in me) and for their matter (which, what it is, there be few who know not), 
 I was so allured to read that no recreation came to me more welcome — for, 
 that it was then those years with me which are excused, though they be least 
 Bevere, I maybe saved the labour to remember ye." — Apology for Smectymnuus. 
 
 That Milton, then, notwithstanding his natural austerity 
 and seriousness even in youth, was led by his keen apprecia- 
 tion of literary beauty and finish, and especially by his 
 delight in sweet and melodious verse, to read and enjoy the 
 poetry of those writers who are usually quoted as examples of 
 the lusciousness and sensuousness of the poetic nature, and 
 even to prefer them to all others — is specially stated by 
 himself. But let the reader, who may think he sees in this a 
 ground for suspecting that we have assigned too much impor- 
 tance to Milton's personal seriousness of disposition as a cause 
 
Milton's youth. 51 
 
 affecting his aims and art as a poet, distinctly mark the 
 continuation. 
 
 " Whence, having observed them " (the elegiac and love poets) ** to 
 account it the chief glory of their wit, in that they were ablest to judge, to 
 praise, and by that could esteem themselves worthiest to love, those high per- 
 fections which, under one or other name, they took to celebrate, I thought 
 with myself, by every instinct and presage of nature, (which is not wont to be 
 false,) that what emboldened them to this task might, with such diligence as 
 they vised, embolden me, and that what judgment, wit, or elegance was my 
 share would herein best appear, and best value itself, by how much more 
 wisely, and with more love of virtue I should choose (let rude ears be absent !) 
 the object of not unlike praises. For, albeit these thoughts to some will 
 seem virtuous and commendable, to others only pardonable, to a third sort 
 perhaps idle, yet the mentioning of them now will end in serious, Nor blame 
 it, readers, in those years to propose to themselves such a reward as the 
 noblest dispositions above other things in this life have sometimes preferred ; 
 whereof not to be sensible, when good and fair in one person meet, argues 
 both a gross and shallow judgment, and withal an ungentle and swainish 
 breast. For, by the firm settling of these persuasions, I became, to my best 
 memory, so much a proficient, that, if I found these authors anywhere speak- 
 ing unworthy things of themselves, or unchaste of those names which before 
 they had extolled, this effect it wrought in me : — From that time forward, 
 their art I still applauded, but the men I deplored ; and, above them all, pre- 
 ferred the two famous renowners of Beatrice and Laura, who never wrote but 
 honour of them to whom they devote their verse, displaying sublime and 
 pure thoughts, without transgression. And long it was not after when I was 
 confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to 
 write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem — 
 that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honourablest things ; not 
 presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities, unless he have 
 in himself the experience and the practice of all that which is praiseworthy." — 
 Apology for Smectymnmis. 
 
 Here, at last, therefore, we have Milton's own judgment on 
 the matter of our inquiry. He had speculated himself on that 
 subject ; he had made it a matter of conscious investigation what 
 kind of moral tone and career would best fit a man to be a poet, 
 on the one hand, or would be most likely to frustrate his hopes 
 of writing well, on the other ; and his conclusion, as we see, 
 was dead against the '' wild oats " theory. Had Ben Jonson, 
 according to our previous fancy, proffered him, out of kindly 
 interest, a touch of that theory, while criticising his juvenile 
 poems, and telling him how he might learn to write better, 
 there would have descended on the lecturer, as sure as fate, a 
 rebuke, though from young lips, that would have made his 
 old face blush. " He who would not he frustrate of Ms hope to 
 write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to he a true 
 poem:'^ — fancy that sentence — an early and often pronounced 
 formula of Milton's, as we may be sure it was —hurled, some 
 
 e2 
 
52 MILTON'S YOUTH. 
 
 evening, could time and chance have permitted it, into the midst 
 of the assembled Elizabethan wits at the Mermaid ! What 
 interruption of the jollity, what mingled uneasiness and resent- 
 ment, what turning of faces towards the new speaker, what 
 forced laughter to conceal consternation ! Only Shakespeare, 
 one thinks, had he been present, would have fixed on the bold 
 youth a mild and approving eye, would have looked round the 
 room thoroughly to observe the whole scene, and, remem- 
 bering some passages in his own life, would mayhap have 
 had his own thoughts ! Certainly, at least, the essence of 
 that wonderful and special development of the literary genius 
 of England, which came between the Elizabethan epoch and 
 the epoch of the Restoration, and which was represented and 
 consummated in Milton himself, consisted in the fact that 
 then there was a temporary protest, and by a man able to 
 make it good, against the theory of " wild oats," as current 
 before and current since. The nearest poet to Milton in this 
 respect, since Milton's time, has undoubtedly been Words- 
 worth. 
 
THE THEEE DEYILS: 
 LUTHER'S, MILTON'S, AND GOETHE'S/ 
 
 Luther, Milton, and Goetlie : these are three strange 
 names to bring together. It strikes us, however, that the 
 effect will be interesting if we connect these three great 
 names, as having each represented to us the Principle of 
 Evil, and each represented him in a different way. Each of 
 the three has left on record his conception of a great accursed 
 being, incessantly working in human affairs, and whose func- 
 tion it is to produce evil. There is nothing more striking 
 about Luther than the amazing sincerity of his belief in the 
 existence of such an evil being, the great general enemy of 
 mankind, and whose specific object, at that time, it was to 
 resist Luther's movement, and, if possible, " cut his soul 
 out of God's mercy." What Luther's exact conception of 
 this being was, is to be gathered from his life and writings. 
 Again, we have Milton's Satan. And, lastly, we have Goethe's 
 Mephistopheles. Nor is it possible to confound the three, or, 
 for a moment, to mistake the one for the other. They are as 
 unlike as it is possible for three grand conceptions of the 
 same thing to be. It cannot, therefore, but be interesting 
 and profitable to make their peculiarities and their differences 
 a subject of study. Milton's Satan, and Goethe's Mephisto- 
 pheles, have indeed been frequently contrasted in a vague, 
 antithetic way; for no writer could possibly go through a 
 description of Goethe's Mephistopheles without saying some- 
 thing or other about Milton's Satan. The exposition, how- 
 ever, of the difference between the two has never been 
 sufficiently elaborate ; and, besides, it appears to us, that it 
 will have the effect of giving the whole speculation greater 
 
 * Feasee's Magazine. Dec. 1844. 
 
54 THE THREE DEVILS: 
 
 value and interest if, in addition to Milton's Satan and 
 Goethe's Mepliistopheles, we take in Luther's Devil. In 
 this paper, therefore, we shall attempt to expound the differ- 
 ence between Luther's Devil, Milton^s Satan, and Goethe's 
 Mephistopheles ; and, of course, the way to do this effectively 
 is to expound the three in succession. It is scarcely necessary 
 to premise that here there is to be no theological discussion. 
 All that we propose is, to compare, as we find them, three 
 very striking delineations of the Evil Principle, one of them 
 experimental, the other two poetical. 
 
 These last words indicate one respect, in which, it will be 
 perceived, at the outset, that Luther's conception of the Evil 
 Principle on the one hand, and Milton^s and Goethe's on the 
 other, are fundamentally distinguishable. All the three, of 
 course, are founded on the Scriptural proposition of the 
 existence of a being whose express function it is to produce 
 evil. Luther, firmly believing every jot and tittle of Scrip- 
 ture, believed the proposition about the Devil also, and so the 
 whole of his experience of evil in himself and others was 
 cast into the shape of a verification of that proposition. Had 
 he started without such a preliminary conception, his expe- 
 rience would have had to encounter the difficulty of expressing 
 itself in some other way ; which, it is likely, would not have 
 been nearly so effective, or so Luther-like. Milton, too, 
 borrows the elements of his conception of Satan from Scrip- 
 ture. The Fallen Angel of the Bible is the hero of Paradise 
 Lost ; and one of the most striking things about this poem 
 is, that in it we see the grand imagination of the poet blazing 
 in the very track of the propositions of the theologian. And, 
 though there can be no doubt that Goethe's Mephistopheles 
 is conceived less in the spirit of Scripture than either Milton's 
 Satan or Luther's Devil, still, even in Mephistopheles we 
 discern the lineaments of the same traditional being. All 
 the three, then, have this in common — that they are founded 
 on the Scriptural proposition of the existence of an accursed 
 being, whose function it is to produce evil, and that, more or 
 less, they adopt the Scriptural account of that being. Still, 
 as we have said, Luther's conception of this being belongs to 
 
Luther's, milton's, and goethe's. 55 
 
 one category ; Milton's and Goethe's to another. Luther's is a 
 biographical phenomenon ; Milton's and Goethe's are literary 
 performances. Luther illustrated the Evil Being of Scripture 
 to himself, by means of his personal experience. Whatever re- 
 sistance he met with ; whatever obstacle to Divine grace he 
 found in his own heart or in external circumstances ; whatever 
 event he saw plainly cast in the way of the progress of the 
 Gospel; whatever outbreak of a bad or unamiable spirit occurred 
 in the Church ; whatever strange phenomenon of nature wore a 
 malevolent aspect, — out of that he obtained a clearer notion 
 of the Devil. In this way, it might be said, that Luther was 
 all his life gaining a deeper insight into the Devil's character. 
 On the other hand, Milton's Satan and Goethe's Mephisto- 
 pheles are poetical creations — the one epic, the other dramatic. 
 Borrowing the elements of his conception from Scripture, 
 Milton set himself to the task of describing the ruined arch- 
 angel as he may be supposed to ha,ve existed at that epoch of 
 the creation when he had hardly decided his own function ; 
 as yet warring with the Almighty, or, in pursuit of a gigantic 
 scheme of revenge, travelling from star to star. Poetically 
 assuming the device of the same Scriptural proposition, Goethe 
 set himself to the task of representing the Spirit of Evil as he 
 existed six thousand years later ; no longer gifted with the 
 same powers of locomotion, or struggling for admission into 
 this part of the universe, but plying his understood function 
 in crowded cities and on the minds of individuals. 
 
 So far as the mere fact of Milton's making Satan the hero 
 of his epic, or of Goethe's making Mephistopheles a character 
 in his drama, qualifies us to speak of the theological opinions 
 of the one or of the other, we are not entitled to say that either 
 Milton or Goethe believed in a Devil at all, as Luther did. 
 Or, again, it is quite conceivable that Milton might have 
 believed in a Devil as sincerely as Luther did, and that 
 Goethe might have believed in a Devil as sincerely as Luther 
 did, also ; and yet, that, in that case, the Devil which Milton 
 believed in might not have been the Satan of the Paradise 
 Lost, and the Devil which Goethe believed in might not have 
 been the Mephistopheles of Faust, Of course, we have other 
 
56 THE THREE DEVILS: 
 
 means of knowing whether Milton did actually believe in the 
 existence of the great accursed being whose fall he sings. It 
 is also plain that Goethe's Mephistopheles resembles Luther's 
 Devil more than Milton's Satan does, in this respect — that 
 Mephistopheles is the expression of a great deal of Goethe's 
 actual observation of life and experience in human affairs. 
 Still, neither the fact, on the one hand, that Milton did believe 
 in the existence of the Evil Spirit, nor the fact, on the other, 
 that Mephistopheles is an expression for the aggregate of 
 much profound thinking on the part of Goethe, is of force 
 to obliterate the fundamental distinction between Luther's 
 Devil, as a biographical reality, and Milton's Satan and 
 Goethe's Mephistopheles as two literary performances. If we 
 might risk summing up under the light of this preliminary 
 distinction, perhaps the following would be near the truth : — 
 Luther had as strong a faith as ever man had in tlie existence 
 and activity of the Evil Spirit of Scripture ; he used to re- 
 cognise the operation of this Spirit in every individual 
 instance of evil as it occurred ; ha used, moreover, to con- 
 ceive that this Spirit and he were personal antagonists, and 
 so, just as one man forms to himself a distinct idea of the 
 character of another man to whom he stands in an important 
 relation, Luther came to form to himself a distinct idea of the 
 Devil ; and what this idea was it seems possible to find out by 
 examining his writings. Milton, again, chose the Scripture 
 personage, as the hero of an epic poem, and employed his 
 grand imagination in realising the Scripture narrative: we 
 have reason also to know that he did actually believe in the 
 Devil's existence; and it agrees with what we know of 
 Milton's character to suppose that the Devil thus believed in 
 would be pretty much the same magnificent being he has 
 described in his poem — though, on the whole, we should not 
 say that Milton was a man likely to carry about with him, in 
 daily affairs, any constant recognition of the Devil's presence. 
 Lastly, Goethe, adapting, for a different literary effect, the 
 Scriptural and traditional account of the same being, conceived 
 liis Mephistopheles. This Mephistopheles, there is no doubt, 
 had a real allegoric meaning with Goethe; he meant him 
 
Luther's, milton's, and goethe's. 57 
 
 to typify the Evil Spirit in modern civilization ; but wlietlier 
 Goethe did actually believe in the existence of a supernatural 
 intelligence, whose function it is to produce evil, is a question 
 which no one will take it upon himself to answer, although, 
 if he did, it may be unhesitatingly asserted that this super- 
 natural intelligence cannot have been Mephistopheles. 
 
 From all this it appears, that Luther's conception of the 
 Evil Being belongs to one category, Milton's and Goethe's to 
 another. Let us consider, first, Milton's Satan, secondly, 
 " )ethe's Mephistopheles, and thirdly, Luther's Devil. 
 
 The difficulties which Milton had to overcome in writing 
 liis Paradise Lost were immense. The gist of these difficulties 
 may be defined as consisting in this, that the poet had at once 
 to represent a supernatural condition of being, and to construct 
 a story. He had to describe the ongoings of angels, and, at 
 the same time, to make on^ event naturally follow another. 
 It was comparatively easy for Milton to sustain his conception 
 of these superhuman beings as mere objects or phenomena — 
 to represent them flying singly through space like huge black 
 shadows, or standing opposite to each other in hostile battal- 
 ions ; but to construct a story in which these beings should 
 be the agents, to exhibit these beings thinking, scheming, 
 blundering, in such a way as to produce a likely succession of 
 events, was enormously difficult. The difficulty was to make the 
 course of events correspond with the reputation of the objects. 
 To do this perfectly was literally impossible. It is possible for 
 the human mind to conceive twenty -four great supernatural 
 beings existing together at any given moment in space ; but 
 it is utterly impossible to conceive what would occur among 
 these twenty-four beings during twenty-four hours. The 
 value of time, the amount of history that can be transacted in 
 a given period, depends on the nature and prowess of the 
 beings whose volitions make the chain of events ; and so a 
 lower order of beings can have no idea at what rate things 
 happen in a higher. The mode of causation will be different 
 from that with which they are acquainted. 
 
 This is the difficulty with which Milton had to struggle ; 
 
58 THE THREE DEVILS: 
 
 or rather, tins is the diiSSculty with which he did not 
 struggle. He had to construct a narrative ; and so, while he 
 represents to us the full stature of his superhuman beings as 
 mere objects or phenomena, he does not attempt to make 
 events follow each other at a higher rate among these beings 
 than thej do amongst ourselves, except in the single respect 
 of their being infinitely more powerful physical agents than 
 we are. Whatever feeling of inconsistency is experienced in 
 reading the Paradise Lost may be traced, we think, to the 
 fact that the necessities of the story obliged the poet not to 
 attempt to make the rate of causation among these beings as 
 extraordinary as his description of them as phenomena. Such 
 a feeling of inconsistency there is ; and yet Milton sustains 
 his flight as nobly as mortal could have done. Throughout 
 the whole poem we see him recollecting his original conception 
 of Satan as an object: — 
 
 ** Thus Satan, talking to his nearest mate, 
 With head uplift above the waves, and eyes 
 That sparkling blazed ; his other parts besides, 
 Prone on the flood, extended long and large. 
 Lay floating many a rood." 
 
 And this is a great thing to have done. If the poet ever 
 flags in his conception of these superhuman beings as objects, 
 it is when he finds it necessary to describe a multitude of them 
 asssembled together in some place ; and his usual device then 
 is to reduce the bulk of the greatest number. This, too, is for 
 the behoof of the story. If it is necessary, for instance, to 
 assemble the angels to deliberate, this must be done in an 
 audience-hall, and the human mind refuses to go beyond 
 certain limits in its conception of what an audience-hall is. 
 Again, the gate of Hell is described, although the Hell of 
 Milton is a mere vague extent of fiery element, which, in strict 
 keeping, could not be described as having a gate. The narra- 
 tive, however, requires the conception. And so in other cases. 
 Still, consistency of description is well sustained. 
 
 Nor is it merely as objects or phenomena that Milton sus- 
 tains throughout his whole poem a consistent conception of the 
 Angels. He is likewise consistent in his description of them 
 as physical agents. Lofty stature and appearance carry with 
 
Luther's, milton's, and goethe's. 
 
 them a promise of so much physical power ; and hence, in 
 Milton's case, the necessity of finding words and figures capable 
 of expressing modes and powers of mechanical action, on the 
 part of the Angels, as superhuman as the stature and appear- 
 ance he has given to them. This complicated his difficulties 
 very much. It is quite conceivable that a man should be able 
 to describe the mere appearance of a gigantic being, standing 
 up, as it were, with his back to a wall, and yet utterly break 
 down, and not be able to find words, when he tried to describe 
 this gigantic being stepping forth into colossal activity, and 
 doing some characteristic thing. Milton has overcome the 
 difficulty. His conception of the Angels as physical agents 
 does not fall beneath his conception of them as mere objects. 
 In his description, for instance, in the sixth book, of the Angels 
 tearing up mountains by the roots, and flinging them upon 
 each other, we have strength suggested corresponding to the 
 reputed stature of the beings. In extension of the same remark, 
 we may observe how skilfully Milton has aggrandised and 
 eked out his conception of the superhuman beings he is 
 describing, by endowing them with the power of infinitely 
 swift motion through space. On this point, we ofier our readers 
 an observation which they may verify for themselves : — Milton, 
 we are persuaded, had it vaguely in his mind, throughout 
 Paradise Lost, that the bounding peculiarity between the 
 human condition of being and the angelic one he is describing 
 is the la,s5c-ef-gnn4taiiiiiJ«^ We, and all that is cognisable by 
 us, are subject to this law ; but creation may be peopled with 
 beings who are not subject to it, and to us these beings are as 
 if they were not. But, whenever one of these beings becomes 
 cognisable by us, he instantly becomes subject to gravitation ; 
 and he must resume his own mode of being ere he can be free 
 from its consequences. The Angels were not subject to gravi- 
 tation ; that is to say, they had the means of moving in any 
 direction at will. When they rebelled, and were punished by 
 expulsion from heaven, they did not fall out ; for, in fact, so 
 far as the description intimates, there existed no planet, no 
 distinct material element towards which they could gravitate. 
 They were driven out by a pursuing fire. Then, after their 
 
60 THE THEEE DEVILS: 
 
 fall, they had the power of rising upward, of navigating space, 
 of quitting Hell, directing their flight to one glittering planet, 
 alighting on its rotund surface, and then bounding off again, 
 and away to another. A corollary of this fundamental differ- 
 ence between the human condition of being and the angelic 
 would be, that angels are capable of direct vertical action, 
 whereas men are capable mainly of horizontal. An army of 
 men can exist only as a square, or other plane figure, whereas 
 an army of angels can exist as a cube or parallelopiped. 
 
 Now, in every thing relating to the physical action of the 
 Angels, even in carrying out this notion of their mode of being, 
 Milton is most consistent. But it was impossible to follow 
 out the superiority of these beings to its whole length. The 
 attempt to do so would have made a narrative impossible. 
 Exalting our conception of these beings as mere objects, or as 
 mere physical agents, as much as he could, it would have 
 been suicidal in the poet to attempt to realise history as it 
 really must be among these beings. No human mind could 
 do it. He had, therefore, except where the notion of physical 
 superiority assisted him, to make events follow each other 
 just as they would in a human narrative. The motives, the 
 reasonings, the misconceptions of these beings, — all that deter- 
 mined the succession of events — he had to make substantially 
 human. The whole narrative, for instance, proceeds on the 
 supposition of these supernatural beings having no higher 
 degree of knowledge than human beings, with equal physical 
 advantages, would have had under similar circumstances. 
 Credit the spirits with a greater degree of insight — credit them 
 even with such a strong conviction of the Divine omnipotence 
 as, in their reputed condition of being, we can hardly conceive 
 them not attaining — and the whole of Milton's story is ren- 
 dered impossible. The crushing conviction of the Divine 
 omnipotence would have prevented them from rebelling with 
 the alleged motive ; or, after having rebelled, it would have 
 prevented them from struggling with the alleged hope. In 
 Paradise Lost, the working notion which the devils have 
 about God is exactly that which human beings have when 
 they hope to succeed in a bad enterprise. Otherwise, the poem 
 
Luther's, milton's, and goethe's. 61 
 
 could not have been written. Supposing the fallen angels to 
 liave had a working notion of the Deity as superhuman as 
 their reputed appearance and physical greatness, the events of 
 the Paradise Lost might have happened nevertheless; but 
 the chain of volitions would not have been the same, and it 
 would have been impossible for any human poet to realise the 
 narrative. 
 
 These remarks are necessary to prepare us for conceiving 
 the Satan of Milton. Except, as we have said, for an occa- 
 sional feeling during a perusal of the poem that the style of 
 thinking and speculating about the issue of their enterprise is 
 too meagre and human for a race of beings physically so 
 superhuman, one's astonishment at the consistency of the 
 poet's conceptions is unmitigated throughout. Such keeping 
 is there between one conception and another, such a distinct 
 material grasp had the poet of his whole subject, so little is 
 there of the mystic or the hazy in his descriptions from begin- 
 ning to end, that it would be quite possible to prefix to the 
 Paradise Lost an illustrative diagram exhibiting the uni- 
 versal space in which Milton conceived his beings moving to 
 and fro, divided, as he conceived it, at first into two or three, 
 and afterwards into four tropics or regions.' Then his narra- 
 tive is so clear, that a brief prose version of it' would be a 
 history of Satan in the interval "between his own fall and the 
 fall of man. -^ 
 
 It is to be noted that Milton as a poet proceeds on the 
 Homericjaetlwd, and not on the Shakespearian ; devoting the 
 whole strength of his genius to the object, not of being discur- 
 sive and original, not of making profound remarks on every 
 thing as he goes along, but of carrying on a sublime and 
 stately narrative. We should hardly be led to assert, how- 
 ever, that the difference between the epic and the drama lies 
 in this, that the latter may be discursive and reflective, 
 while the former cannot. We can conceive an epic written 
 after the Shakespearian method ; that is, one which, while 
 strictly sustaining a narrative, should be profoundly expo- 
 sitory in its spirit. Certain it is, however, that Milton wrote 
 after the Homeric method, and did not aim at strewing his 
 
62 THE THREE DEVILS: 
 
 text with luminous original propositions. One consequence 
 of this is, that the way to obtain an idea of Milton's Satan is 
 not to lay hold of specific sayings that fall from his mouth, 
 but to go through his history. Goethe's Mephistopheles, we 
 shall find, on the other hand, reveals himself in the charac- 
 teristic propositions which he utters. Satan is to be studied 
 by following his progress ; Mephistopheles, by attending to 
 his remarks. 
 
 In the history of Milton's Satan, it is important to begin 
 at the time of his being an archangel. Before the creation of 
 our world, there existed, according to Milton, a grand race of 
 bsings altogether different from what we are. These beings 
 were spirits. They did not lead a planetary existence ; they 
 tenanted space, in some strange, and, to us, inconceivable 
 way. Or, rather, they did not tenant all space, but only that 
 upper and illuminated part of infinity called Heaven. For 
 Heaven, in Milton, is not to be considered as a locality, but 
 as a region stretching infinitely out on all sides — an immense 
 extent of continent and kingdom. The infinite darkness, 
 howling and blustering underneath heaven, was Chaos, or 
 Night. What was the exact mode of being of the spirits 
 who lived disseminated through Heaven is unknown to us ; 
 but it was social. Moreover, there subsisted, between the 
 multitudinous, far-extending population of spirits, and the 
 Almighty Creator, a relation closer, or, at least, more sensible 
 and immediate, than that which exists between human beings 
 and Him. The best way of expressing this relation in human 
 language is, by the idea of physical nearness. They were 
 God's angels. Pursuing, each individual among them, a life 
 of his own, agreeable to his wishes and his character, yet 
 they all recognised themselves as the Almighty's ministering 
 spirits. At times they were summoned, from following their 
 difierent occupations in all the ends of Heaven, to assemble 
 near the Divine presence. Among these angels there were 
 degrees and differences. Some were in their very essence 
 and constitution grander and more sublime intelligences than 
 the rest; others, in the course of their long existence, had 
 become noted for their zeal and assiduity. Tims, although 
 
LUTHER'S, Milton's, and goethe's. 63 
 
 really a race of beings living on their own account as men do, 
 they constituted a hierarchy, and were called Angels. 
 
 Among all the vast angelic population, three or four indi- 
 viduals stood pre-eminent and unapproachable. These were 
 the Archangels. Satan was one of these : if not the highest 
 archangel in heaven, he was one of the four highest. After 
 God, he could feel conscious of being the greatest being in 
 the universe. But although the relation between the Deity 
 and the angelic population was so close, that we can only 
 express it by having recourse to the conception of physical 
 nearness, yet, even to the angels the Deity was so shrouded 
 in clouds and mystery, that the highest archangel might pro- 
 ceed on a wrong notion of his character ; and, just as human 
 beings do, might believe the Divine omnipotence as a 
 theological proposition, and yet, in going about his enter- 
 prises, might not carry a working consciousness of it along 
 with him. There is something in the exercise of power, in 
 the mere feeling of existence, in the stretching out of a limb, 
 in the resisting of an obstacle, in being active in any way, 
 which generates a conviction that our powers are self- 
 contained, hostile to the recollection of inferiority or account- 
 ability. A messenger, employed on his master's business, 
 becomes, in the very act of serving him, forgetful of him. 
 As the feeling of enjoyment in action grows strong, the 
 feeling of a dependent state of being, the feeling of being a 
 messenger, grows weak. Repose and physical weakness are 
 favourable to the recognition of a derived existence ; hence 
 the beauty of the feebleness of old age preceding the approach 
 of death. The feebleness of the body weakens the self- 
 sufficient feeling, and disposes to piety. The young man, 
 rejoicing in his strength, cannot believe that his breath is in 
 his nostrils. In some such way the Archangel fell. Rejoicing 
 in his strength, walking colossal through heaven, gigantic in 
 his conceptions, incessant in his working, ever scheming, 
 ever imagining new enterprises, Satan was in his very nature 
 the most active of God's archangels. He was ever doing some 
 great thing, and ever thirsting for some greater thing to do. 
 And, alas ! his very wisdom became his folly. His notion of 
 
64 THE THREE DEVILS: 
 
 the Deity was higher and grander than that of any other 
 angel : but, then, he was not a contemplative spirit ; and his 
 feeling of derived existence grew weak in the glow and 
 excitement of constant occupation. As the feeling of enjoy- 
 ment in action grew strong, the feeling of being an angel 
 grew weak. Thus the mere duration of his existence had 
 undermined his strength and prepared him for sin. Although 
 the greatest angel in heaven, nay, just because he was such, 
 he was the readiest to fall. 
 
 At last an occasion came. "When the intimation was made 
 by the Almighty in the congregation of the angels that he 
 had anointed his only-begotten Son King on the holy hill of 
 Zion, the Archangel frowned and became a rebel ; not because 
 he had weighed the enterprise to which he was committing 
 himself, but because he was hurried on by the impetus of 
 an overwrought nature. Even had he weighed the enter- 
 prise, and found it wanting, he would have been a rebel 
 nevertheless ; he would have rushed into ruin on the wheels 
 of his old impulses. He could not have said to himself, 
 '* It is useless to rebel, and I will not f and> if he could, what 
 a hypocrite to have stayed in heaven ! No, his revolt was 
 the natural issue of the thoughts to which he had accustomed 
 himself; and his crime lay in having acquired a rebellious 
 constitution, in having pursued action too much, and spm-ned 
 worship and contemplation. Herein lay the difference 
 between him and the other archangels, Eaphael, Gabriel, and 
 Michael. 
 
 Satan in his revolt carried a third part of the angels along 
 with him. He had accustomed many of the angels to his 
 mode of thinking. One of the ways in which he gratified his 
 desire for activity had been that of exerting a moral and 
 intellectual influence over the inferior angels. A few of these 
 he had liked to associate with, discoursing with them, and 
 observing how they drank in his ideas. His chief associate, 
 almost his bosom-companion, had been Beelzebub, a princely 
 angel. Moloch, Belial, Mammon, had likewise been admitted 
 to his confidence. These five had constituted a kind of clique 
 in heaven, giving the word to a whole multitude of inferior 
 
 I 
 
I 
 
 Luther's, milton's, and goethe's. 65 
 
 angels, all of them resembling their leader, in being fonder of 
 — action than of contemplation. Thus, in addition to the mere 
 hankering after action, there had grown up in Satan's mind a 
 love of power. This feeling of its being a glorious thing to 
 ^ be a leader seems to have had much to do with his voluntary 
 sacrifice of happiness. We conceive it to have been volun- 
 tary. Foreseeing ever so much misery would not have 
 prevented such a spirit from rebelling. Having a third of the 
 angels away with him in some dark, howling region, where 
 he might rule over them alone, would have seemed, even if he 
 had foreseen it, infinitely preferable to the puny sovereignty 
 of an Archangel in that world of gold and emerald — " Better 
 to reign in hell than serve in heaven." Thus we conceive 
 him to have faced the anticipation of the future. It required 
 little persuasion to gain over the kindred spirit of Beelzebub. 
 These two appear to have conceived the enterprise from the 
 beginning in a different light from that in which they repre- 
 sented it to their followers. Happiness witli the inferior 
 spirits was a more important consideration than with such 
 spirits as Satan and Beelzebub ; and to have hinted the 
 possibility of losing happiness in the enterprise, would have 
 been to terrify them away. Satan and Beelzebub were losing 
 happiness to gain something which they thought better ; to 
 the inferior angels nothing could be mentioned that would 
 appear better. Again, the inferior angels, judging from 
 narrower premises, might indulge in enthusiastic expectations, 
 which the greater knowledge of the leaders would prevent 
 them from entertaining. At all events, the effect of the inter- 
 course with the angels was, that a third of their number 
 joined the standard of Satan. Then began the wars in 
 heaven related in the sixth book of the poem. 
 
 We have to remark, that Satan's carrying on these wars 
 with the hope of victory is not inconsistent with what we have 
 said, as to the possibility of Satan's not having proceeded 
 on a false calculation. We are apt to imagine these wars as 
 wars between the rebel angels and the armies of God. Now 
 this is true ; but it is scarcely the proper idea in the circum- 
 j stances. How could Satan have hoped for victory in that 
 
 i F 
 
66 THE THREE DEVILS : 
 
 case ? You can only suppose that he did so by lessening his 
 intellect, by making him a mere blundering Fury, and not a 
 keen, far-seeing Intelligence. But in warring with Michael 
 and his followers he was, until the contrary should be proved, 
 warring merely against his fellow-beings of the same heaven, 
 whose strength he knew and feared not. The idea of physical 
 nearness between the Almighty and the angels confuses us 
 here. Satan had heard the threat which had accompanied the 
 proclamation of the Messiah's sovereignty ; but it may 
 have been problematical in his mind whether the way in 
 which God would fulfil the threat would be to make Michael 
 conquer him. So he made war against Michael and his 
 angels. At last, when all Heaven was in confusion, the 
 Divine omnipotence interfered. On the third day the Messiah 
 rode forth in his strength to end the wars, and expel the rebel 
 host from heaven. They fled, driven before his thunder. 
 The crystal wall of heaven opened wide, and the two lips, 
 rolling inward, disclosed a spacious gap yawning into the 
 wasteful deep ; the reeling angels saw down, and hung back 
 affrighted ; but the terror of the Lord was behind them ; 
 headlong they threw themselves from the verge of Heaven 
 into the fathomless abyss, eternal wrath burning after them 
 down through the blackness like a hissing fiery funnel. 
 
 And now the Almighty determined to create a new kind of 
 world, and to people it with a race of beings different from 
 that already existing ; inferior in the meantime to the angels, 
 but with the power of working themselves up into the angelic 
 mode of being. The Messiah, girt with omnipotence, rode 
 out on this creating errand. Heaven opened her everlasting 
 gates, moving on their golden hinges, and the King of 
 Glory, uplifted on the wings of cherubim, rode on and on 
 into Chaos. At last he stayed his fervid wheels and took 
 the golden compasses in his hand. Centering one point where 
 he stood, he turned the other silently and slowly round 
 through the profound obscurity. Thus were the limits of our 
 Universe marked out — that azure region in which the stars 
 were to shine, and the planets were to wheel. On the huge 
 fragment of Chaos thus marked out, the creating spirit 
 
 ii 
 
Luther's, milton's, and goethe's. 67 
 
 brooded, and the light gushed down. In six days the work 
 of creation was completed. In the centre of the azure 
 universe hung a silvery star. That was the Earth. Thereon 
 in a paradise of trees and flowers walked Adam and Eve, the 
 last and the fairest of all God's creatures. 
 
 Meanwhile the rebel host lay rolling in the fiery gulf under- 
 neath Chaos. The bottom of Chaos was Hell. Above it was 
 Chaos proper, a thick, black, sweltering element. Above it 
 again was the new experimental world, cut out of it like a 
 mine, and brilliant with stars and galaxies. And high over 
 all, behind the stars and galaxies, was Heaven itself. Satan 
 and his crew lay rolling in Hell, the fiery element underneath 
 Chaos. Chaos lay between them and the new world. Satan 
 was the first to awake out of stupor and realise the whole state 
 of the case ; what had occurred, what was to be their future 
 condition of being, and what remained to be attempted. In 
 the first dialogue between him and Beelzebub we see that, 
 even thus early, he had ascertained what his function was to 
 be for the future, and decided in what precise mode of being 
 he could make his existence most pungent and perceptible. 
 
 " Of this be sure, 
 To do aught good never will be our task, 
 But ever to do evil our sole delight, 
 As being the contmry to His high will 
 Whom we resist." 
 
 Here the ruined Archangel first strikes out the idea of existing 
 for ever after as the Devil. It is important to observe that his 
 becoming a devil was not the mere inevitable consequence of 
 his being a ruined archangel. Beelzebub, for instance, could 
 see in the future nothing but a prospect of continued suffering, 
 until Satan communicated to him his conception of a way of 
 enjoying action in the midst of suffering. Again, some of 
 the angels appear to have been ruminating the possibility of 
 retrieving their former condition by patient enduring. The 
 gigantic scheme of becoming aL_devil w§,s Satan's. At first it 
 existed in his mind only as a vague perception, that the way 
 in which he would be most likely to get the worth out of his 
 existence, was to employ himself thenceforward in doing evil. 
 The idea afterwards became more definite. After glancing 
 
 f2 -^ 
 
68 THE THKEE DEVILS: 
 
 round their new domain, Beelzebub and he aroused tlieir 
 abject followers. In the speech which Satan addresses to 
 them after they had all mustered in order, we find him hint 
 an opening into a new career, as if the idea had just occurred 
 to him : — 
 
 " Space may produce new worlds ; whereof so rife 
 There went a fame in heaven that He ere long 
 Intended to create, and therein plant 
 A generation whom His choice regard 
 Should favour equal to the sons of heaven. 
 Thither, if but to pry, shall be perhaps 
 Our first eruption." 
 
 Here is an advance in definiteness upon the first proposal ; 
 that, namely, of determining to spend the rest of existence in 
 doing evil. Casting about in his mind, as it were, for some 
 specific opening, Satan had recollected the talk they used to 
 have in Heaven about the new world that was to be cut out of 
 Chaos, and the new race of beings that was to be created to 
 inhabit it; and it instantly struck his scheming fancy that 
 this would be the weak point of the universe. If he could but 
 insert the wedge here ! He did not, however, announce the 
 scheme fully at the moment, but went on thinking. In the 
 council of gods which was summoned, some advised one thing, 
 some another. Moloch was for open war ; Belial had great 
 faith in the force of circumstances ; and Mammon was for 
 organising their new kingdom, so as to make it as comfort- 
 able as possible. No one, however, could say the exact thing 
 that was wanted. At last Beelzebub, prompted by Satan, 
 rose and detailed the project of their great leader: — 
 
 " There is a place 
 (If ancient and prophetic fame in heaven 
 Err not), another world, the happy seat 
 Of some new race call'd Man, about this time 
 To be created like 'co us, though less 
 In power and excellence, but favour'd more 
 Of Him who rules above. So was His will 
 Pronounced among the gods, and by an oath 
 That shook heaven's whole circumference confirm'd. 
 Thither let us bend all our thoughts and learn 
 What creatures there inhabit, of what mould, 
 Or substance, how endued, and what their power 
 And where their weakness : how attempted best ; 
 By force or subtlety." 
 
 This was Satan's scheme. The more he had thought on ifr^ 
 the more did it recommend itself to him. It was more feasible 
 
Luther's, milton's, and goethe's. 69 
 
 than any other. It held out an indefinite prospect of action. 
 Moreover, it would be adding another fragment of the universe 
 to Satan's kingdom, mingling and confounding the new world 
 with Hell, and di'agging down the new race of beings to share 
 the perdition of the old. The scheme was universally ap- 
 plauded by the angels; who seem to have differed from 
 tlieir leaders in this, that they were sanguine of being able to 
 better their condition, whereas their leaders sought only the 
 gratification of their desire of action. 
 
 The question next was, Who would venture out of Hell to 
 explore the way to the new world ? Satan volunteered the 
 perilous excursion. Immediately putting on his swiftest wings, 
 he directs his solitary flight towards Hell-gate, where sat Sin 
 and Death. When, at length, the gate was opened to give 
 him exit, it was like a huge furnace-mouth, vomiting forth 
 smoke and flames into the womb of Chaos. Issuing thence, 
 Satan spread his sail-broad wings for flight, and began his 
 toilsome way upward, half on foot, half on wing, swimming, 
 sinking, wading, climbing, flying, through the thick and 
 turbid element. At last he emerged out of Chaos into the 
 light of the new Universe. Winging leisurely now through 
 the balmy ether, he looked upward to the deep soft azure 
 powdered with stars. Upward and upward still he flew, till, 
 high in the distance, he discerned his former home with its 
 opal towers and sapphire battlements, and, hanging thence by 
 a golden chain, our little world, with the moon by her side. 
 
 When Satan arrived in the new creation, the whole phe- 
 nomenon was strange to him, and he had no idea what kind 
 of a being Man was. He asked Uriel, whom he found there 
 fulfilling some Divine errand, in which of all the shining orbs 
 round him Man had his fixed seat ; or whether he had a fixed 
 seat at all, and was not at liberty to shift his residence, and 
 dwell now in one star, now in another. Uriel, deceived by 
 the appearance which Satan had assumed, points out the way 
 to Paradise. 
 V^' Alighting on the surface of the new world, Satan walks 
 /about immersed in thought. Heaven's gate was in view. 
 Overhead and round him were the quiet hills and the green 
 
70 THE THREE DEVILS: 
 
 fields. Oh, what an errand he had come upon ! His thoughts 
 were sad and noble. Fallen as he was, all the Archangel 
 stirred within him. Oh, had he not been made so high, he 
 should never have fallen so low ! Is there no hope even now, 
 no room for repentance ? Such were his first thoughts. But 
 he roused himself and shook them off. ^' The past is gone 
 and away ; it is to the future that I must look. Perish the 
 days of my Archangelship ! perish the name of Archangel ! 
 Such is my name no longer. My future, if less happy, shall 
 be more glorious. Ah, and this is the world I have singled 
 out for my experiment ! Formerly, in the days of my arch- 
 angelship, I ranged at will through infinity, doing one thing 
 here and another there. Now I mustjiontract the sphere of 
 my activity, and labour nowhere but here. But it is better 
 to apply myself to the task of thoroughly impregnating one 
 point of space with my presence than to go flapping my wings 
 vaguely all through the universe. Ah, but may not my nature 
 suffer by the change? In thus selecting a specific aim, in 
 thus concerning myself exclusively with one point of space, 
 and forswearing all interest in the innumerable glorious things 
 that may be happening out of it, shall I not run the risk of 
 degenerating into a smaller and meaner being ? In the course 
 of ages of dealing with the puny offspring of these new beings, 
 may I not dwindle down into a mere pungent, pettifogging- 
 spirit? What would Raphael, Gabriel, and Michael say, 
 were they to see their old co-mate changed into such a being ? 
 But be it so. If I cannot cope with the Almighty on the 
 grand scale of infinity, I shall, at least, make my existence 
 felt by opposing his plans respecting this new race of beings. 
 Besides, by beginning with this, I may w^orm my way to a 
 more effective position in the universe. At all events, I shall 
 have a scheme on hand, and be incessantly occupied. And, 
 as time makes the occupation more congenial, if I do become less 
 magnanimous, I shall, at the same time, become happier. And, 
 whether my fears on this point are visionary or not, it will, at 
 least, be a noble thing to have it to say that I have raised a 
 whirlpool that shall suck down generation after generation of 
 these new beings, before their Maker's eyes, into the same 
 
 I 
 
lutheb's, Milton's, and goethe's. 71 
 
 wretched condition of being to whicli He has doomed us. It 
 will be something so to vitiate the universe, that, let Him 
 create, create on as he chooses, it may be like pouring water 
 into a broken vessel." 
 
 In the very course of this train of thinking, Satan begins to 
 degenerate into a meaner being. He is on the very threshold 
 of that career, on which having fully entered, he will cease 
 for ever to be the Archangel and become irrevocably the 
 Devil. The very manner in which he tempts our first parents 
 is devil-like. It is in the shape of a cormorant on a tree that 
 he sits watching his victims. He sat at the ear of Eve, 
 " squat like a toad." It was in the shape of a serpent that 
 he tempted her. And when the evil was done, he slunk away 
 through the brushwood. In the very act of ruining man he 
 committed himself to a life of ignominious activity, — he was 
 to go on his belly and eat dust all his days. 
 
 Such is the story of Milton's Satan. It will be easy to 
 express more precisely the idea which we have acquired of 
 him, when we come to contrast him with Goethe's Mephis- 
 topheles. Meanwhile, with regard to Goethe's Mephisto- 
 pheles, we shall be much assisted in our efforts to conceive 
 him by keeping in mind what we have been saying about Satan. 
 
 We do not think it possible to sum up, in a single ex- 
 pression, all that Goethe meant to signify by his Mephisto- 
 pheles. For one thing, it is questionable whether Goethe 
 kept strictly working out one specific meaning, and making it 
 clearer all through Mephistopheles's gambols and devilries; 
 or whether, having, once for all, allegorised the Spirit of Evil 
 into a living personage, he did not treat him just as he would 
 liave any other of his characters, making him always consis- 
 tent, always diabolic, but nowise intent upon making his 
 actions run parallel to any under-current of exposition. The 
 way to proceed, therefore, is to treat Mephistopheles as a cha- 
 racter in a drama, which we wish to study. Now it strikes 
 us that we shall be on the right track if, in the first place, we 
 establish a relation between Satan and Mephistopheles, by 
 adopting the notion which we have imagined Satan himself 
 
72 THE THREE DEVILS: 
 
 entertained when engaged in scheming out his future life, and 
 supposing Mephistopheles to be what Satan has become in 
 six thousand years. Milton's Satan, then, is the ruined Arch- 
 angel deciding his future function, and forswearing all interest 
 in other regions of the universe, in order that he might more 
 thoroughly possess and impregnate this. Goethe's Mephisto- 
 pheles is this same being after the toils and vicissitudes of six 
 thousand years in his new vocation ; smaller, meaner, ignobler, 
 but a million times sharper and cleverer. As a kind of cor- 
 roboration of this view, we may refer, in passing, to the Satan 
 of the Paradise Regained; who, though still a sublime and 
 Miltonic being, dealing in high thoughts and high arguments, 
 yet seems to betray, in his demeanour, tie effects of four 
 thousand years spent in a new walk. Is there not something 
 Mephistopheles-like, - for instance, in the description of the 
 fiend's appearance when he approached Christ to begin his 
 temptation? Christ was walking alone and thoughtful one 
 evening in the thick of the forest where he had lived fasting 
 forty days, when he heard the dry twigs behind him snapping 
 beneath approaching footsteps. He turned round, and 
 
 " An aged man in rural weeds, 
 Following as seem'd the quest of some stray ewe, 
 Or wither'd sticks to gather, which might serve 
 Against a winter's day when winds blow keen 
 To warm him, wet return'd from field at eve. 
 He saw approach ; who first with curious eye 
 Perused him, then with words thus utter'd spake." 
 
 Observe how all the particulars of this description are drawn, 
 as it were, out of the very thick of the civilization of the past 
 four thousand years, and how the whole effect of the picture is 
 to suggest a Mephistophelic-looking man, whom it would be 
 disagreeable to meet alone. In fact, if we had space, we 
 could make more use of the Paradise Regained^ as exhibiting 
 the transition of Satan into Mephistopheles. But we must 
 pass at once to Goethe. 
 
 Viewing Mephistopheles in the proposed light (of course we 
 do not pretend that Goethe himself had any such idea about his 
 Mephistopheles), a great deal of insight is to be derived from 
 the *' Prologue in Heaven." For here we have Mephistopheles 
 out of his element, and contrasted with his old co-equals. The 
 
Luther's, milton's, and goethe's. 73 
 
 scene is Miltonic. The lieavenly hosts are assembled round 
 the throne, and the tliree Archangels, Eaphael, Gabriel, and 
 Michael, come forward to praise the Lord. The theme of 
 their song is Creation ; not, as it would have been in Milton, 
 as an event about to take place, and which would vary the 
 monotony of the universe, but as a thing existing and grandly 
 going on. It is to be noted, too, that while Milton appeals 
 chiefly to the sight, and is clear and coherent in his imagery, 
 Goethe produces a similar effect in his own manner by ap- 
 pealing to sight and hearing simultaneously, making sounds 
 and metaphors dance and whirl througli each other as in a 
 wild, indistinct, but overpowering dream. Eaphael describes 
 the Sun rolling on in thunder through the heavens, singing in 
 chorus with the kindred stars. Gabriel describes the Earth 
 revolving on its axis, one hemisphere glittering in the light, 
 the other dipped in shadow. Michael in continuation sings 
 of the ensphering atmosphere and the storms that rage in it, 
 darting forth tongues of lightning, and howling in gusts over 
 land and sea. And then the three burst forth in symphony, 
 exulting in their nature as beings deriving strength from 
 serene contemplation, and proclaiming all God's works to be 
 as bright and glorious as on the day they were created. 
 Suddenly, while Heaven is still thrilling to the grand undu- 
 lation, another voice breaks in : 
 
 " Da du, Herr, dich einmal wieder nahst, 
 Und fragst wie alles sich bei uns befinde, 
 Und du mich sonst gewohnlich gerne sahst ; 
 So siebst du mich aucb unter dem Gesinde," 
 
 Ugh ! what a discord ! The tone, the voice, the words, the 
 very metre, so horribly out of tune with what had gone before ! 
 Mephistopheles is the speaker. He has been standing behind, 
 looking about him and listening with a sarcastic air to the 
 song of the Archangels ; and when they have done he thinks 
 it his turn to speak, and immediately begins. (We give the 
 passage in translation). 
 
 " Since thou, Lord, approachest us once more. 
 And askest how affairs with us are going, 
 And commonly hast seen me here before, 
 
 To this my presence 'mid these Gents is owing. 
 
74 THE THREE DEVILS: 
 
 Excuse my plainness ; I'm no hand at chaffing ; 
 
 I canH talk fine, though all around should scorn ; 
 My pathos certainly would set thee laughing. 
 
 Hadst thou not laughter long ago forborne. 
 Of suns and worlds deuce one word can / gabble, 
 I only know how men grow miserable, 
 The little God of Earth is still the same old clay, 
 And is as odd this hour as on Creation's day. 
 Better somewhat his situation 
 
 Hadst thou not given him that same light of inspiration, 
 Reason he calls 't and uses 't so that he 
 Grows but more beastly than the beasts to be ; 
 He seems to me, begging your Grace's pardon, 
 Like one of those long-legg'd things in a garden, 
 That fly about and hop and spring 
 And in the grass the same old chirrup sing. 
 Would I could say that here the story closes ! 
 But in each filthy mess they thrust their noses." 
 
 And so shameless, and at the same time so voluble is he, 
 that he would go on longer in the same strain did not the 
 Lord interrupt him. 
 
 Now this speech both announces and exhibits Mephisto- 
 pheles's nature. Without even knowing German, one could 
 hardly hear the original read as Mephistopheles's without 
 seeing in it shamelessness, impudence, volubility, cleverness ; 
 a sneering, sarcastic disposition ; want of heart, want of senti- 
 ment, want of earnestness, want of purpose ; complete, con- 
 firmed, irrevocable devilishness. And besides, Mephistopheles 
 candidly describes himself in it. When, in sly and sarcastic 
 allusion to the song of the Archangel, he tells that he has not 
 the gift of talking fine, he announces in effect that he is not 
 going to be Miltonic. He is not going to speak of suns and 
 universes, he says. Kaphael, Gabriel, and Michael, are at 
 home in that sort of thing ; but he is not. Leaving >them, 
 therefore, to tell how the universe is flourishing on the grand 
 scale, and how the suns and the planets are going on as beau- 
 tifully as ever, he will just say a word or two as to how 
 human nature is getting on down yonder ; and, to be sure, if 
 comparison be the order of the day, the little godkin, Man, is 
 quite as odd as on the day he was made. And forthwith, 
 with astounding impudence, he launches into a train of 
 remark, the purport of which is that every thing down below 
 is at sixes and sevens, and that in his opinion human nature 
 has turned out a failure. And, heedless of the disgust of his 
 
LUTHER'S, Milton's, and goethe's. 
 
 75 
 
 audience, he would go on talking for ever, were lie not 
 interrupted. 
 
 And is this the Satan of the Paradise Lost ? Is this the 
 Archangel ruined ? Is this the being who warred against the 
 Almighty, who lay floating many a rood, who shot upwards 
 like a pyramid of fire, who navigated space wherever he 
 chose, speeding on his errands from star to star, and who 
 finally conceived the gigantic scheme of assaulting the uni- 
 verse where it was weakest, and impregnating the new crea- 
 tion with the venom of his spirit? Yes, it is he; but oh, 
 how changed ! For six thousand years he has been pursuing 
 the walk he struck out at the beginning, plying his self- 
 selected function, dabbling devilishly in human nature, and 
 abjuring all interest in the grander physics ; and the conse- 
 quence is, as he himself anticipated, that his nature, once 
 great and magnificent, has become small, virulent, and 
 shrunken, 
 
 " Subdued 
 To what it works in, like the dyer's hand." 
 
 As if he had been journeying through "a wilderness of scorch- 
 ing sand, all that was left of the Archangel has long since 
 evaporated. He is now a dry, cold, shrivelled-up, scoffing 
 spirit. "When, at the moment of scheming out his future 
 existence and determining to become a Devil, he anticipated 
 the ruin of his nature, he could not help thinking with what 
 a strange feeling he should then appear before his old co-equals, 
 Raphael, Gabriel, and Michael. But now he stands before 
 them disgustingly unabashed, almost ostentatious of not being 
 any longer an Archangel. Even in the days of his glory he 
 was different from them. They luxuriated in contemplation ; 
 he in the feeling of innate all-sufficient vigour. And lo, now ! 
 They are unchanged, the servants of the Lord, revering the 
 day's gentle going. He, the scheming, enthusiastic Arch- 
 
 ;n soured and civilised into the clever cold- 
 
 >topheles. 
 )pheles is the Spirit of JEvil'in modern society, 
 illustrationof this spirit's workingju^the' 
 The case selectedr4s'anoble one 
 
76 THE THREE DEVILS: 
 
 Faust, a man of grand and restless nature, is aspiring after 
 universality of feeling. Utterly dissatisfied and disgusted 
 with all human method and all human acquisition, nay, 
 fretting at the constitution of human nature itself, he longs 
 to spill out his soul, so that, mingling with the winds, it may 
 become a part of the ever-thrilling spirit of the universe and 
 know the essence of everything. He has been contemplating 
 suicide. To this grand nature struggling with itself Mephis- 
 topheles is linked. It is to be noted that throughout the 
 whole drama there is no evidence of its being an object of 
 very earnest solicitude with Mephistopheles to gain possession 
 of the soul of Faust. Of course, he desired this, and had it 
 in view. Thus, he exacted a bond from Faust ; and we find 
 him also now and then chuckling when alone in anticipation 
 of Faust's ultimate ruin. But on the whole he is constant to 
 no earnest plan for efiecting it. In fact, he is constant to no 
 single purpose whatever. The desire of doing devilry is his 
 motive all through. Going about with Faust was just being 
 in the way of business, and having a companion at the 
 same time. He studies his own gratification, not Faust's, in 
 all that he does. Faust never gets what he had a right to 
 expect from him. He is dragged hither and thither through 
 scenes he has no anxiety to be in, merely that Mephistopheles 
 may enjoy some new and piquant piece of devilry. The 
 moment he and Faust enter any place, he quits Faust's side 
 and mixes with the persons present, to do some mischief or 
 other ; and, when it is done, he comes back to Faust, who has 
 been standing, with his arms folded, gloomily looking on, 
 and asks him if he could desire any better amusement than 
 this. Now this is not the conduct of a devil intent upon 
 nothing so much as gaining possession, of the soul of his 
 victim. A Mil tonic devil would have pressed on to the mark 
 more. He would have been more self-denying, and would 
 have kept his victim in better humour. But Mephistopheles 
 is a devil to the very core. He is a .devil in his conduct to 
 Faust. What he studies is not to gratify Faust, but to find 
 plenty of congenial occupation for himself; to perpetrate as 
 great a quantity of evil as possible in as short a time as 
 
Luther's, milton's, and goethe's. 77 
 
 possible. It seems capable of being inferred from this pecu- 
 liarity in the character of Mephistopheles, that Goethe had 
 in his mind all through the poem a certain under-current of 
 allegoric meaning. One sees that Mephistopheles, though 
 acting as a dramatic personage, represents an abstract some- 
 thing or other. 
 
 The character of Mephistopheles is brought out all through 
 the drama. In the first and- second parts we have Faust and 
 him brought into a great variety of situations and into 
 contact with a gi'eat variety of individuals ; and in watching 
 how Mephistopheles conducts himself in these we obtain 
 more and more insight into his devilish nature. He mani- 
 tests himself in two ways — by his style of speaking, and 
 by his style of acting. That is to say, Mephistopheles, in the 
 first place, has a habit of making observations upon all sub- 
 jects, and throwing out all kinds of general propositions in 
 the course of his conversation, and by attending to the spirit 
 of these one can perceive very distinctly his mode of looking 
 at things; and, in the second place, he acts a part in the 
 drama, and this part, is, of course, characteristic. 
 
 The distinguishing feature in Mephistopheles 's conversation 
 is the amazing intimacy which it displays with all the con- 
 ceivable ways in which crime can be perpetrated. There is 
 positively not a wrong thing that people are in the habit of 
 doing that he does not seem to be aware of. He is profound 
 in his acquaintance with iniquity. If there is a pin loose 
 anywhere in society, he knows of it ; if the afikirs of the State 
 are going into confusion, owing to some blockhead's misma- 
 nagement, he knows of it. He is versed in all the forms of 
 professional quackery. He knows how pedants hoodwink 
 people, how priests act the hypocrite, how physicians act the 
 rake, how lawyers peculate. In all sorts of police information 
 he is a perfect Fouch^. He has gone deep enough into the 
 subject to be able to write a book equal to Duchatelet's. And 
 not only has he accumulated a mass of observations, but he 
 has generalised those observations, and marked evil in its 
 grand educational sources. If the human mind be going out 
 into a hopeless track of speculation, he has observed and 
 
78 THE THREE DEVILS: 
 
 knows it. If the universities be frittering away the intellect 
 of the youth of a country in useless and barren studies, he 
 knows it. If atheistic politicians are vehemently defending 
 the religious institutions of a country, he has marked the 
 prognostication. Whatever promises to inflict misery, to lead 
 people astray, to break up beneficial alliances, to make men 
 flounder on in error, to cause them to die blaspheming at the 
 last, he is thoroughly cognisant of it all. He could draw up 
 a catalogue of social vices. He could point out the specific 
 existing grievances to which the disorganisation of a people is 
 owing, and lay his finger on the exact parent evils which the 
 philanthropist ought to exert himself in exposing and making 
 away with. But here lies the diabolical peculiarity of his 
 knowledge. It is not in the spirit of a philanthropist that he 
 has accumulated his information ; it is in the spirit of a devil. 
 It is not with the benevolent motive of a Duchatelet that he 
 has descended into the lurking-places of iniquity ; it is because 
 he delights in knowing the whole extent of human misery. 
 The doing of evil being his fmiction, it is but natural that he 
 should have a taste for going into the details of his own pro- 
 fession. Nay more, as the Spirit of all evil, who had been 
 working from the beginnin-g, how could he fail to be acquainted 
 with all the existing varieties of criminal occupation ? It is 
 but as if he kept a diary. Now, in this combination of the 
 knowledge of evil, with the desire of producing it, lies the 
 very essence of his character. The combination is horrible, 
 unnatural, unhuman. Generally the motive to investigate 
 deeply into what is wrong is the desire to rectify it ; and it 
 is rarely that profligates possess very valuable information. 
 But in every one of Mephistopheles's speeches there is some 
 profound glimpse into the rottenness of society, some masterly 
 specification of an evil that ought to be rooted out ; and yet 
 there is not one of those speeches in which the language is 
 not flippant and sarcastic, not one in which the tone is sor- 
 rowful or philanthropic. Everything is going wrong in the 
 world ; twaddle and quackery everywhere abounding ; nothing 
 to be seen under the sun but hypocritical priests, sharking 
 attorneys, unfaithful wives, children crying for bread to eat, 
 
Luther's, milton's, and goethe's. 79 
 
 men and women cheating, robbing, murdering eacli other ! 
 Hurrah ! This is exactly a burst of Mephistophelic feeling. 
 In fact it is an intellectual defect in Mephistopheles, that his 
 having such an eye for evil and his taking such an interest in 
 it, prevent his allowing anything for good in his calculations. 
 To Mephistopheles the world seems going to perdition as fast 
 as it can ; while in the same universal confusion, beings like 
 the Archangels recognise the good struggling with the evil. 
 
 Respecting the part which Mephistopheles performs in the 
 drama we have already said something. Going about the 
 world, linked to Faust, is to him only a racy way of acting 
 the devil. Having as his companion a man so flighty in his 
 notions would increase the flavour of whatever he engaged in. 
 All through he is laughing in his sleeve at Faust, and deriving 
 a keen enjoyment from his transcendental style of thinking. 
 Faust's noble qualities are all Greek and Gaelic to his cold 
 and devilish nature. He has a contempt for all strong feeling, 
 all sentiment, all evangelism. He enjoys the Mil tonic vastly. 
 Thus in the " Prologue in Heaven" he quizzes the archangels 
 about the grandiloquence of their song. Not that he does not 
 understand that sort of thing intellectually, but that it is not 
 in his natm'e to sympathise with anything like sentiment. 
 Hence, when he assumes the sentimental himself and mimicks 
 any lofty strain, although he does it full justice in as far as 
 giving the whole intellectual extent of meaning is concerned, 
 yet he always does so in words so inappropriate emotionally 
 that the effect is a parody. He must have found amusement 
 enough in Faust's company to have reconciled him in some 
 
 ^rfaeasure to losing him Anally. 
 
 ^f But to go on. Mephistopheles acts the devil all through. 
 In the first place he acts the devil to Faust himself, for he is 
 continually taking his own way and starting difficulties 
 whenever Faust proposes anything. Then again in his con- 
 duct towards the other principal personages of the drama it is 
 the same. In the murder of poor Margaret, her mother, her 
 child, and her brother, we have as fiendish a series of acts as 
 devil could be supposed capable of perpetrating. And lastly, 
 in the mere filling up and side play, it is the same. He is 
 
80 THE THREE DEVILS: 
 
 constantly doing unnecessary mischief. If lie enters Auer- 
 bach's wine-cellar and introduces himself to the four drinking 
 companions, it is to set the poor brutes fighting and make 
 them cut off each other's noses. If he spends a few minutes 
 in talk with Martha, it is to make the silly old woman expose 
 her foibles. The second part of Faust is devilry all through, 
 a tissue of bewilderments and devilries. And while doing all 
 this Mephistopheles is still the same cold, self-possessed, 
 sarcastic being. If he exhibit any emotion at all, it is a kind 
 of devilish anger. Perhaps, too, once or twice we recognise 
 something like terror or flurry. But on the whole he is a 
 spirit bereft of feeling. What could indicate the heart of a 
 devil more than his words to Faust in the harrowing prison- 
 
 scene 
 
 9 
 
 " Komm, komm, ich lasse dich mit ihr im Stich." 
 
 And now for a word or two cdescribing Milton's Satan and 
 Goethe's Mephistopheles by each other : — Satan is a colossal 1 
 figure ; Mephistopheles an elaborated portrait. Satan is an ^ 
 Archangel scheming his future existence ; Mephistopheles is 
 the modern Spirit of evil. Mephistopheles has a distinctly 
 marked physiognomy ; Satan has not. Satan has a sympa- i 
 tlietic knowledge of good ; Mephistopheles knows good only 
 as a phenomenon. Much of what Satan says might be spoken / 
 by Raphael ; a devilish spirit runs through all that Mephi- 
 stopheles says. Satan's bad actions are preceded by noble// 
 reasonings ; Mephistopheles does not reason. Satan^s bad f; 
 actions are followed by compunctious visitings; Mephisto- 
 pheles never repents. Satan is often "inly racked ;" Mephi- /' 
 stopheles can feel nothing more noble than disappointment. 
 ! Satan conducts an enterprise; Mephistopheles enjoys an 
 / occupation. Satan has strength of purpose ; Mephistopheles 
 J is volatile. Satan feels anxiety ; Mephistopheles lets things 
 ( happen. Satan's greatness lies in the vastness of his motives ; 
 Mephistopheles' s in his intimate acquaintance with everything. 
 J Satan has a few sublime conceptions ; Mephistopheles has 
 accumulated a mass of observations. Satan declaims ; Mephi- 
 stopheles puts in remarks. Satan is conversant with the 
 moral aspects of things and uses adjectives ; Mephistopheles 
 
LUTHER'S, MILTON'S, AND GOETHE'S. 8l 
 
 has a preference for nouns, and uses adjectives only to convey 
 significations which he knows to exist. Satan may end in 
 being a devil ; Mephistopheles is a devil irrecoverably. 
 
 Milton's Satan and Goethe's Mephistopheles are literary 
 performances ; and, for what they prove, neither Milton nor 
 Goethe need have believed in a Devil at all. Luther's Devil, 
 on the other hand, was a being recognised by him as actually 
 existing ; as existing, we might say, with a vengeance. The 
 strong conviction which Luther had on this point is a feature 
 in his character. The narrative of his life abounds in anec- 
 dotes, showing that the Devil with him was no chimera, no 
 mere orthodoxy, no fiction. In every page of his writings 
 we have the word Teufel, Teufel, repeated again and again. 
 Occasionally there occurs an express dissertation upon the 
 nature and function of the Evil Spirit ; and one of the longest 
 chapters in his Table Talk is that entitled " The Devil and 
 his Works " — indicating that his conversation with his friends 
 often turned on the subject of Satanic agency. Teufel was 
 actually the strongest signification he had ; and whenever he 
 was excited to his highest emotional pitch, it came in to assist 
 his utterance at its climax, and give him a correspondingly 
 powerful expression. " This thing I will do," it was common 
 for him to say, " in spite of all who may oppose me ; be it 
 duke, emperor, priest, bishop, cardinal, pope, or Devil." 
 Man's heart, he says, is a " Stock, Stein, Eisen, Teufel, hart 
 Herz," (" a stock, stone, iron, Devil, hard heart.") And it was 
 not a mere vague conception he had of this being, such as 
 theology might oblige. On the contrary, he had observed 
 him as a man would his personal enemy ; and, in so doing, 
 had formed a great many conclusions respecting his powers 
 and his character. In general, Luther's Devil may be defined 
 as a personification, in the spirit of Scripture, of the resisting 
 medium which Luther had to toil his way through — spiritual 
 fears, passionate uprisings, fainting resolutions within himself; 
 error, weakness, envy in those around him ; and without, a whole 
 world howling for his destruction. It is in effect as if Luther 
 had said, '' Scripture reveals to me the existence of a great 
 
 a 
 
82 THE THREE DEVILS: 
 
 accursed being, whose function it is to produce evil. It is for 
 me to ascertain the character of this Being whom I, of all men, 
 iiave to deal with. And how am I to do so except by observ- 
 ing him working ? God knows I have not far to go in search 
 of his manifestations." And thus Luther went on filling up 
 the Scriptural proposition with his daily experience. He was 
 constantly gaining a clearer conception of his great personal 
 antagonist, constantly stumbling upon some more concealed 
 trait in the Spirit's character. The Being himself was invi- 
 sible ; but he was walking in the midst of his manifestations. 
 It was as if there were some Being whom we could not see, 
 nor directly in the ordinary way have any intercourse with ; 
 but who every morning, before it was light, came and left at 
 our door some exquisite specimen of his workmanship. It 
 would, of course, be difficult under such disadvantages to 
 become acquainted with the character of our invisible corre- 
 spondent and morning visitant ; still we could arrive at a few 
 conclusions respecting him, and the more of his workmanship 
 we saw, the more insight we should come to have. Or again, 
 in striving to realize to himself the Scriptural proposition 
 about the Devil, Luther, to speak in the language of the 
 *' Positive Philosophy," was but striving to ascertain the laws 
 according to which evil happens. Only the Positive Philo- 
 sophy would lay a veto on any such speculation, and pro- 
 nounce it fundamentally vicious in this respect — that there 
 are not two courses of events, separable from each other, in 
 history, the one good and the other evil, but that evil comes 
 of good and good of evil ; so that if we are to have a science 
 of history at all, the least we can have is a science of the laws 
 according to which, not evil follows evil, but events follow 
 each other. Bat History to Luther was not a physical course 
 of events. It was God acting, and the Devil opposing. 
 
 In so far, Luther did not differ from his age. Belief in 
 Satanic agency was universal at that period. We have 
 no idea now how powerful this belief was. We realize 
 something of the truth when we read the depositions in 
 an old book of trials for witchcraft. But it is sufficient to 
 glance over any writings of the period to see what a real 
 
Luther's, milton's, and goethe's. 83 
 
 meaning was then attached to the words *' Hell " and " Devil." 
 The spirit of these words has become obsolete, chased away 
 by the spirit of exposition. That was what M. Comte calls 
 the Theological Period, when all the phenomena of mind and 
 matter were referred to the agency of Spirits. The going out 
 of the belief in Satanic agency (for even those who retain it 
 in profession allow it no force in practice), M. Comte would 
 attribute to the progress of the spirit of that philosophy of 
 which he is the apostle. We do not think, however, that the 
 mere progress of the scientific spirit — that is, the mere dispo- 
 sition of men to pursue one mode of thinking with respect to 
 all classes of phenomena — could have been sufficient of itself 
 to work such an alteration in the general mind. We are fond 
 of accounting for it, in part at least, by the going out, in the 
 progress of civilization, of those sensations which seem na^ 
 tm-ally fitted to nourish the belief in supernatural beings. 
 The tendency of civilization has been to diminish our oppor- 
 tunities of feeling terror, of feeling strongly at all. The horrific 
 plays a much less important part in human experience than 
 it once did. To mention but a single instance, we are ex- 
 empted now, by mechanical contrivances for locomotion, (fee, 
 from the necessity of being much in darkness or wild physical 
 solitude. This is especially the case with those who dwell in 
 cities, and therefore exert most conspicuously an intellectual 
 influence. The moaning of the wind at night in winter is 
 about their highest experience of the kind ; and is it not a 
 corroboration of the view we are taking, that the belief in the 
 supernatural is always strongest at the moment of this expe- 
 rience ? Scenes and situations our ancestors were in every 
 day, are strange to us. We have not now to travel through 
 forests at the dead of night, nor to pass a lonely spot on a 
 moor where a murderer's body is swinging from a gibbet. 
 Tam o' Shanter, even before he came to Allowa' Kirk, saw 
 more than many of us see in a lifetime. 
 
 *' By this time he was 'cross the ford 
 Whaur in the snaw the chapman smoor'd, 
 And past the birks and muckle stane 
 Whaur dnmken Charlie brak's neck bane, 
 
 a2 
 
 ^TB«A*r>^ 
 
84 THE THliEE DEVILS: 
 
 And through the whins and by the cairn 
 Whaur hunters fand the murder'd bairn, 
 And near the thorn aboon the well 
 Whaur Mungo's mither hang'd hersel." 
 
 This effect of civilization in reducing all our sensations to 
 those of comfort, we conceive to be really an alarming circum- 
 stance, in the point of view under consideration. It is neces- 
 sary for many a reason to resist the universal application of 
 the '' Positive Philosophy," even if we adopt and adore it as an 
 instrument of explication. The " Positive Philosophy " com- 
 mands us to forbear all speculation into the inexplicable. For 
 the sake of many things this order must be disregarded. Specu- 
 lation into the essence of things is the invariable accompani- 
 ment of strong feeling ; and the moral nature of man would 
 starve upon such chopped straw as the mere intellectual rela- 
 tions of similitude and succession. Nor does it meet the 
 demands of the case to say that the " Positive Philosophy" 
 would be always far in arrears of the known phenomena, 
 and that here would be mystery enough. No ! the " Positive 
 Philosophy " would require to strike a chasm in itself, under 
 the title of the Liberty of Hypothesis. We do not mean 
 the liberty of hypothesis merely as a means of anticipating 
 theory, but for emotional and imaginative purposes. It is in 
 this light that we would welcome Animal Magnetism, or any 
 thing else whatever that would but knock a hole through the 
 paper wall that encloses our mode of being, snub the self- 
 conceit of our senses, and give us other and more difficult 
 phenomena to explain. 
 
 But though Luther and his age were not at variance in the 
 belief in Satanic agency, Luther, of course, did this as he did 
 every thing else, gigantically. Tlie Devil, as Luther conceived 
 him, was not the Satan of Milton ; although, had Luther set 
 himself to realize the Miltonic narrative, his conception might 
 not have been dissimilar. But it was as the enemy of 
 mankind, working in human affairs, that Luther conceived the 
 Devil. We should expect his conception therefore to tally 
 with Goethe's in some respects, but only as a conception 
 of Luther^s would tally with one of Goethe's. Luther's con- 
 ception was far truer to the grand Scriptural definition than 
 
LUTHER'S, MILTON'S, AND GOETHE's. 85 
 
 either Milton's or Goethe's. Mephistopheles being a charac- 
 ter in a drama, and apparently fully occupied in his capacity 
 as such, we cannot bring ourselves to recognise in him that 
 virtually omnipotent being to whom all evil is owing, who is 
 leavening the human mind everywhere, as if the atmosphere 
 round the globe were charged with the venom of his spirit. 
 In the case of Milton's Satan we have no such difficulty, 
 because in his case a whole planet is at stake, and there are 
 only two individuals on it. But Luther's conception met the 
 whole exigency of Scripture. His conception was distinctly 
 that of a being to whose operation all the evil of all times and 
 all places ia owing ; a veritable jrvevfia diffused through the 
 earth's atmosphere. Hence his mind had to entertain the notion 
 of a plurality of devils ; for he could only conceive the Arch- 
 spirit acting corporeally through imps or emanations. Goethe's 
 Mephistopheles might pass for one of these. 
 
 It would be possible farther to illustrate Luther's concep- 
 tion of the Evil Principle by presenting a great many of his 
 specific sayings respecting him. It would be found from these 
 that his conception was that of a being to whom evil of all 
 kinds was dear. The Devil with him was a meteorological 
 agent. Devils, he said, are in woods, and waters, and dark 
 poolly places, ready to hurt passers-by ; there are devils also 
 in the thick black clouds, who cause hail and thunders and 
 lightnings, and poison the air and the fields and the pas- 
 tures. " When such things happen, philosophers say they 
 are natural, and ascribe them to the planets, and I know 
 not what all." The Devil he believed also to be the 
 patron of witchcraft. The Devil, he said, had the power 
 of deceiving the senses, so that one should swear he heard 
 or saw something, while really the whole was an illusion. 
 The Devil also was at the bottom of dreaming and som- 
 nambulism. He was likewise the author of diseases. " I 
 hold," said Luther, *' that the Devil sendeth all heavy diseases 
 and sicknesses upon people." Diseases are, as it were, the 
 Devil striking people; only, in striking, he must use some 
 natural instrument, as a murderer uses a sword. When our 
 sins get the upper hand, and all is going wrong, then the 
 
86 THE THREE DEVILS: 
 
 Devil must be God's hangman, to clear away obstructions and 
 to blast the earth with famines and pestilences. Whatsoever 
 procures death, that is the Devil's trade. All sadness and 
 melancholy come of the Devil. So does insanity; but the 
 Devil has no farther power over the soul of a maniac. The 
 Devil works in the affairs of nations. He looks always upward, 
 taking an interest in what is high and pompous ; he does not 
 look downward, taking little interest in what is insignificant 
 and lowly. He likes to work on the great scale ; to establish 
 an influence, as it were, over the central minds which manage 
 affairs. The Devil is also a spiritual tempter. He is the 
 opponent of the Divine grace in the hearts of individuals. 
 This was the aspect of the doctrine of Satanic agency which 
 would be most used in preaching ; and accordingly Luther's 
 propositions on the point are very specific. He had, as it 
 were, ascertained the laws of Satanic operation upon the 
 human spirit. The Devil, he said, knows Scripture well, and 
 uses it in argument. He shoots fearful thoughts, which are 
 his fiery darts, into the hearts of the godly. The Devil is ac- 
 quainted even with those mysterious enjoyments, those spi- 
 ritual excitements, which the Christian would suppose a being 
 like him must be ignorant of. "What gross inexperienced 
 fellows," he says, " are these Papist commentators ! They are 
 for interpreting Paul's 'thorn in the flesh' to be merely 
 fleshly lust ; because they know no other kind of tribulation 
 than that." But though the Devil has great power over the 
 human mind, he is limited in some respects. He has no means, 
 for instance, of knowing the thoughts of the faithful until they 
 give them utterance. Again, if the Devil be once foiled in 
 argument, he cannot tempt that soul again on the same tack. 
 The Papacy being with Luther the grand existing form of 
 evil, he of course recognised the Devil in it. If the Papacy 
 were once overthrown, Satan would lose his stronghold. 
 Never on earth again would he be able to pile up such another 
 edifice. No wonder, then, that at that moment all the energies 
 of the enraged and despairing Spirit were employed to prop 
 up the reeling and tottering fabric. Necessarily, therefore, 
 Luther and Satan were personal antagonists. Satan saw that 
 
LUTHER'S, MILTON'S, AND GOETHE'S. 87 
 
 the grand struggle was with Luther. If he could but crush 
 him bj physical violence, or make him forget God, then the 
 world would be his own again. So, often did he wrestle with 
 Luther's spirit ; often in nightly heart-agonies did he try to 
 shake his faith in Christ. But he was never victorious. " All 
 tlie Duke Georges in the universe,'^ said Luther, "are not 
 equal to a single devil ; and I do not fear the Devil." " I 
 should wish," he said, " to die rather by the Devil's hands 
 tlian by the hands of Pope or Emperor ; for then I should die 
 at all events by the hands of a great and mighty prince of the 
 world ; but if I die through him, he shall eat such a bit of me 
 as will be his suffocation ; he shall spew me out again ; and at 
 the last day, I, in requital, shall devour him.'^ When all 
 other means were unavailing, Luther found that the Devil 
 could not stand against humour. In his hours of spiritual 
 agony, he tells us, when the Devil was heaping up his sins 
 before him, so as to make him doubt if he should be saved, 
 and when he could not drive him away by uttering sentences 
 of Holy Writ, or by prayer, he used to address him thus : 
 " Devil, if, as you say, Christ's blood, which was shed for my 
 sins, be not sufficient to cnsui-e my salvation, can't you pray 
 for me yourself, Devil?" At tliis, the Devil invariably fled, 
 " quia est superbus spiritus, et non potest ferre contemptum 
 sui." 
 
 What with Luther was " wrestling with the Devil," we at 
 this day would call " low spirits." Life must be a much more 
 insipid thing now than it was then. O what a soul that man 
 must have had ; under what a weight of feeling, that would 
 liave crushed a million of us, he must have trod the earth ! 
 
DRYDEN, AND THE LITERATUEE OF THE 
 RESTORATION. * 
 
 It is a common remark that literature flourislies hest in times 
 of social order and leism-e, and suffers immediate depression 
 whenever the puhlic mind is agitated by violent civil contro- 
 versies. The remark is more true than such popular induc- 
 tions usually are. It is confirmed, on the small scale, by 
 what every one finds in his own experience. When a family 
 is agitated by any matter affecting its interests, there is an 
 immediate cessation from all the lighter luxuries of books and 
 music wherewith it used to beguile its leisure. All the mem- 
 bers of the family are intent for the time being on the matter 
 in hand ; if books are consulted it is for some purpose of prac- 
 tical reference ; and if pens are active, it is in writing letters 
 of business. Not till the matter is fairly concluded are the 
 recreations of music and literature resumed ; though then, pos- 
 sibly, with a keener zest and a mind more full and fresh than 
 before. Precisely so it is on the larger scale. If everything 
 that is spoken or written be called literature, there is probably 
 always about the same amount of literature going on in a 
 community ; or, if there is any increase or decrease, it is but 
 in proportion to the increase of the population. But, if by 
 literature we mean a certain peculiar kind and quality of 
 spoken or written matter, recognisable by its likeness to certain 
 known precedents, then, undoubtedly literature flourishes in 
 times of quiet and security, and wanes in times of convulsion 
 and disorder. When the storm of some great civil contest is 
 blowing, it is impossible for even the serenest man to shut 
 
 * British Quakterlt Keview, July 1854. The Annotated Edition of the 
 English Poets : Edited by Robert Bell, " Poetical Works of John Diyden." 
 3 vols. London, 1854, 
 
THE LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION. 89 
 
 himself quite in from the noise, and turn over the leaves of 
 his Horace, or practise his violin, as undistractedly as hefore. 
 Great is the power of pococurantism ; and it is a noble sight 
 to see, in the midst of some Whig and Tory excitement which 
 is throwing the general community into sixes and sevens, and 
 sending mobs along the streets, the calm devotee of hard 
 science, or the impassioned lover of the ideal, going on his 
 way, aloof from it all, and smiling at it all. But there are 
 times when even these obdurate gentlemen will be touched, in 
 spite of themselves, to the tune of what is going on ; when the 
 shouts of the mob will penetrate to the closets of the most 
 studious ; and when, as Archimedes of old had to leave his 
 darling diagrams and trudge along the Syracusan streets to 
 superintend the construction of rough cranes and catapults, so 
 philosophers and poets alike will have 4;o quit their favomite 
 occupations, and be whirled along in the common agitation. 
 These are times when whatever literature there is assumes a 
 character of immediate and practical interest. Just as, in the 
 supposed case, the literary activity of the family is consumed 
 in mere letters of business, so, in this, the literary activity 
 of the community exhausts itself in newspaper-articles, public 
 speeches, and pamphlets, more or less elaborate, on the present 
 crisis. There may be a vast amount of mind at work, and as 
 much, on the whole, may be written as before ; but the very 
 excess of what may be called the pamphlet-literature, which 
 is perishable in its nature, will leave a deficiency in the various 
 departments of literature more strictly so called — philosophical 
 or expository literature, historical literature, and the literature 
 of pure imagination. Not till the turmoil is over, not till the 
 battle has been fairly fought out, and the mental activity in- 
 volved in it has been let loose for more scattered work, will 
 the calmer muses resume their sway, and the press send forth 
 treatises and histories and poems and romances as well as 
 pamphlets. Then, however, men may return to literature 
 with a new zest, and the very storm which has interrupted 
 the course of pure literature for a time may infuse into such 
 literature wlien it begins again, a fresher and stronger spirit. 
 If the battle has ended in a victory, there will be a tone of 
 
90 DRYDEN, AND THE 
 
 joy, of exultation, and of scorn, in what men think and write 
 after it ; if it has ended in a defeat, all that is thought and 
 written will be tinged by a deeper and finer sorrow. 
 
 The history of English literature affords some curious illus- 
 trations of this law. It has always puzzled historians, for 
 example, to account for such a great unoccupied gap in our 
 literary progress as occurs between the death of Chaucer and 
 the middle of the reign of Elizabeth. From the year 1250, 
 when the English language first makes its appearance in 
 anything like its present form, to the year 1400, when Chaucer 
 died, forms, as all know, the infant age of our literature. It was 
 an age of gi*eat literary activity ; and how much was achieved 
 in it remains apparent in the fact that it culminated in a man 
 like Chaucer — a man whom, without any drawback for the 
 early epoch at which he lived, we still regard as one of our 
 literary princes. Nor was Chaucer the solitary name of his 
 age. He had some notable contemporaries, both in verse and 
 in prose. When we pass from Chaucer's age, however, we have 
 to overleap nearly a hundred and eighty years before we alight 
 upon a period presenting anything like an adequate show of 
 literary continuation. A few smaller names, like those of Lyd- 
 gate, Surrey, and Skelton, are all that can be cited as poetical 
 representatives of this sterile interval in the literary history 
 of England ; whatever of Chaucer's genius still lingered in the 
 island seeming to have travelled northward, and taken refuge 
 in a series of Scottish poets, far excelling any of their English 
 contemporaries. How is this to be accounted for ? Is it that 
 really, during this period, there was less of available mind than 
 before in England ; that the quality of the English nerve, so 
 to speak, had degenerated? By no means necessarily so. 
 Englishmen, during this period, were engaged in enterprises 
 requiring no small amount of intellectual and moral vigour ; 
 and there remain to us, from the same period, specimens of 
 grave and serious prose, which, if we do not place them among 
 the gems of our literature, we at least regard as evidence that 
 our ancestors of those days were men of heart and wit and 
 solid sense. In short, we are driven to suppose that there was 
 something in the social circumstances- of England during the 
 
LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION. 91 
 
 long period in question, wliicTi prevented such talent as there 
 was from assuming the particular form of literature. Fully 
 to make out what this " something '^ was, may baffle us ; but 
 when we remember that this was the period of the civil wars 
 of the Koses, and also of the great Anglican Eeformation, we 
 have reason enough to conclude that the dearth of pure litera- 
 ture may have been owing, in part, to the engrossing nature 
 of those practical questions which then disturbed English 
 society. When Chaucer wrote, England, under the splendid 
 rule of the third Edward, was potent and triumphant abroad, 
 but large and leisurely at home ; but scarcely had that monarch 
 vacated the throne when a series of civil jars began, which 
 tore the nation into factions, and was speedily followed by 
 a religious movement as powerful in its eiFects. Accordingly, 
 though printing was introduced during this period, and thus 
 Englishmen had greater temptations to write, what they did 
 write was almost exclusively plain grave prose, intended for 
 practical or polemical occasions, and making no figure in a 
 historical retrospect. How different when, passing the con- 
 troversial reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Mary, we 
 come upon the golden days of Queen Bess ! Controversy 
 enough remained to give occasion to plenty of polemical 
 prose ; but about the middle of her reign, when England, 
 once more great and powerful abroad as in the time of the 
 Edwards, settled down within herself into a new lease of 
 social order and leisure under an ascertained government, 
 there began an outburst of literary genius such as no age or 
 country had ever before witnessed. The literary fecundity of 
 that period of English history which embraces the latter half 
 of the reign of Elizabeth, and the whole of the reign of 
 James I. (1580-1625), is a perpetual astonishment to us all. 
 In the entire preceding three centuries and a half, reckoning 
 from the first use of the English tongue, we can with dif- 
 ficulty name six men that can, by any charity of judgment, 
 be regarded as stars in our literature, and of these only one 
 that is a star of the first magnitude : whereas, in this brief 
 period of forty-five or fifty years, we can reckon up a host of 
 poets and prose- writers all noticeable on high literary grounds, 
 
92 DRYDEN, AND THE 
 
 and of whom at least thirty were men of extraordinary 
 dimensions. Indeed, in the contemplation of the intellectual 
 abundance and variety of this age — the age of Spenser, and 
 Shakespeare, and Bacon, and Kaleigh, and Hooker, and Ben 
 Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher, and Donne, and Herbert, 
 and Massinger, and their illustrious contemporaries — we feel 
 ourselves driven from the theory that so rich a literary crop 
 could have resulted from that mere access of social leisure 
 after a long series of national broils to which we do in part 
 attribute it, and are obliged to suppose that there must have 
 been, along with this, an actually finer substance and con- 
 dition, for the time being, of the national nerve. The very 
 brain of England must have become more " quick, nimble, 
 and forgetive," before the time of leisure came. 
 
 We have spoken of this great age of English literature as 
 terminating with the reign of James I., in 1625. In point of 
 fact, however, it extended some way into the reign of his son, 
 Charles I. Spenser had died in 1599, before James had 
 ascended the English throne ; Shakespeare and Beaumont 
 had died in 1616, while James still reigned ; Fletcher died in 
 1625 ; Bacon died in 1626, when the crown had been but a 
 year on Charles's head. But while these great men and many 
 of their contemporaries had vanished from the scene before 
 England had any experience of the first Charles, some of 
 their peers survived to tell what kind of men they had been. 
 Ben Jonson lived till 1637, and was poet-laureate to 
 Charles I. ; Donne and Drayton lived till 1631 ; Herbert, 
 till 1632 ; Chapman, till 1634; Dekker, till 1638 ; Ford, till 
 1639; and Hey wood and Massinger, till 1640. 
 
 There is one point in the reign of Charles, however, where 
 a clear line may be drawn separating the last of the Eliza- 
 bethan giants from their literary successors. This is the 
 point at which the Civil War commences. The whole of 
 the earlier part of Charles's reign was a preparation for this 
 war; but it cannot be said to have fairly begun till the 
 meeting of the Long Parliament in 1640, when Charles had 
 been fifteen years on the throne. If we select this year as the 
 commencement of the great Puritan and Republican Revolu- 
 
LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION. 93 
 
 tlon in England, and the year 1660, when Charles II. was 
 restored, as the close of the same Kevolution, we shall have 
 a period of twenty years to which, if there is any truth in 
 the notion that the muses shun strife, this notion should be 
 found peculiarly applicable. Is it so ? We think it is. In 
 the first place, as we have just said, the last of the Elizabethan 
 giants died off before this period began, as if killed by the 
 mere approach to an atmosphere so lurid and tempestuous. 
 In the second place, in the case of such writers as were old 
 enough to have learnt in the school of these giants and yet 
 young enough to survive them and enter on the period of 
 struggle — as, for example, Herrick (1591-1660), Shirley 
 (1596-1666), Waller (1605-1687), Davenant (1605-1668), 
 Suckling (1608-1643), Milton (1608-1674), Butler (1612- 
 1680), Cleveland (1613-1658), Denham (1615-1668), and 
 Cowley (1618-1667), — it will be found, on examination, 
 either that the time of their literary activity did not coincide 
 with the period of struggle, but came before it, or after it, or 
 lay on both sides of it; or that what they did write of 
 a purely literary character during this period was written in 
 exile; or, lastly, that what they did write at home of a 
 genuine literary character during this period is inconsiderable 
 in quantity, and dashed with a vein of polemical allusion, 
 rendering it hardly an exception to the rule. The literary 
 career of Milton illustrates very strikingly this fact of the all 
 but entire cessation of pure literature in England between 
 1640 and 1660. Milton's life consists of three distinctly 
 marked periods — the first ending with 1640, during which he 
 composed his exquisite minor poems ; the second extending 
 precisely from 1640 to 1660, during which he wrote no poetry 
 at all, except a few sonnets, but produced his various polemical 
 prose treatises or pamphlets, and served the state as a public 
 functionary ; and the third, which may be called the period of 
 his later muse, extending from 1660 to his death in 1674, and 
 famous for the composition of his greater poems. Thus 
 Milton's prose-period, if we may so term it, coincided exactly 
 with the period of civil strife and Cromwellian rule. And if 
 this was the case with Milton ; if he, who was essentially 
 
94 DRYDEN, AND THE 
 
 the poet of Puritanism, with his whole heart and soul in the 
 struggle which Cromwell led, was obliged, during the process 
 of that struggle, to lay aside his singing robes, postpone his 
 plans of a great immortal poem, and in the meanwhile drudge 
 laboriously as a prose pamphleteer ; how much more'must those 
 have been reduced to silence or brought down into practical 
 prose, who found no such inspiration in the movement as it 
 gave to the soul of Milton, but regarded it all as desola- 
 tion and disaster I Indeed, one large department of the 
 national literature at this period was proscribed by civil 
 enactment. Stage-plays were prohibited in 1642, and it 
 was not till after the Eestoration that the theatres were re- 
 opened. Such a prohibition, though it left the sublime muse 
 of Milton at liberty, had it cared to sing, was a virtual ex- 
 tinction for the time of all the customary literature. In fine, 
 if all the literary produce of England in the interval between 
 1640 and 1660 is examined, it will be found to consist in the 
 main of a huge mass of controversial prose, by far the greater 
 proportion of which, though effective at the time, is little 
 better now than antiquarian rubbish, astonishing from its 
 bulk, though some small percentage, including all that came 
 from the terrible pen of Milton, is saved, by reason of its 
 strength and grandeur. The intellect of England was as 
 active and as abundant as ever, but it was all required for the 
 current service of the time. The only exception of any con- 
 sequence was in the case of that singular personage. Sir 
 Thomas Browne, the author of the Religio Medici, While 
 all England was in throes and confusion, this mystical, and, 
 with all due respect, somewhat priggish and overrated man, 
 was pottering along his garden at Norwich, pursuing his 
 meditations about sepulchral urns and his inquiries respecting 
 the Quincuncial Lozenge. His views of things would have 
 been considerably improved by a kick, during one of his 
 meditative walks, from the boot of an Ironside. 
 
 Had Cromwell lived longer, or had he established a dynasty 
 capable of maintaining itself, there can be little doubt that there 
 would have come a time of leisure during which, even under 
 a Puritan rule, there would have been a new outburst of 
 
 
LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION. 95 
 
 English Literature. There were symptoms, towards the close 
 of the Protectorate, that Cromwell, having now " reasonable 
 good leisure," was willing and even anxious that the nation 
 should resume its old literary industry and all its innocent 
 liberties and pleasures. He allowed Cowley, Waller, Denham, 
 Davenant, and other Eoyalists, to come over from France, and 
 was glad to see them employed in writing verses. Waller 
 became one of his courtiers, and composed panegyrics on him. 
 He released Cleveland from prison in a very handsome man- 
 ner, considering what hard things the witty roysterer had 
 written about '' O.P.^' and his " copper nose." He appears 
 even to have winked at Davenant, when, in violation of the 
 act against stage-plays, that gentlemanly poet began to give 
 private theatrical entertainments under the name of operas. 
 Davenant's heretical friend, Hobbes, too, already obnoxious by 
 his opinions even to his own political party, availed himself 
 of the liberty of the press to issue, some fresh metaphysical 
 essays, which the Protector may have read. In fact, had 
 Cromwell survived a few years, there would, in all probability, 
 have arisen, under his auspices, a new literature, of which his 
 admirer and secretary, Milton, would have been the laureate. 
 What might have been the characteristics of this literature of 
 the Commonwealth, had it developed itself to its full form and 
 proportions, we can but guess. That, in some respects it 
 would not have been so broad and various as the literature 
 which took its rise from the Restoration, is very likely ; for, 
 as long as the Puritan element had remained dominant in 
 English society, it is impossible that, with any amount of 
 liberty of the press, there could have been such an outbreak of 
 the merely comic spirit as did occur when that element suc- 
 cumbed to its antagonist, and genius had official licence to be 
 as profligate as it chose. But if less gay and riotous, it 
 might have been more earnest, powerful, and impressive. For 
 its masterpiece it would still have had Paradise Lost, — 
 a work which, as it is, we must regard as its peculiar offspring, 
 though posthumously born ; nor can we doubt that, if borne 
 up by the example and the recognised supremacy of such a 
 laureate as Milton, the younger literary men of the time would 
 
96 DRTDEN, AND THE 
 
 have found themselves capable of other things than epigrams 
 and farces. 
 
 It was fated, however, that the national leisure requisite for 
 a new development of English literary genius, should com- 
 mence only with the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660 ; and 
 then it was a leisure secured under very different circum- 
 stances from those which would have attended a perpetuation 
 of Cromwell's rule. With Charles II. there came back into 
 the island, after many years of banishment, all the excesses of 
 the cavalier spirit, more reckless than before, and considerably 
 changed by long residence in continental cities, and especially 
 in the French capital. Cavalier noblemen and gentlemen 
 came back, bringing with them French tastes, French 
 fashions, and foreign ladies of pleasure. As Charles II. was 
 a different man from his father, so the courtiers that gathered 
 round him at Whitehall were very different from those who 
 had fought with Charles I. against the Parliamentarians. 
 Their political principles and prejudices were nominally the 
 same, but they were for the most part men of a younger gene- 
 ration, less stiff and English in their demeanour, and more 
 openly dissolute in their morals. Such was the court the 
 restoration of which England virtually confessed to be neces- 
 sary to prevent a new era of anarchy. It was inaugurated 
 amid the shouts of the multitude ; and Puritanism, already 
 much weakened by defections before the event, hastened to 
 disappear from the public stage, diffusing itself once more as 
 a mere element of secret efficacy through the veins of the 
 community, and purchasing even this favour by the sacrifice 
 of its most notorious leaders. 
 
 Miserable in some respects as was this change for England, 
 it offered, by reason of the very unanimity with which it was 
 effected, all the conditions necessary for the forthcoming of a 
 new literature. But where were the materials for the com- 
 mencement of this new literature ? 
 
 First, as regards persons fit to initiate it, there were all 
 those who had been left over from the Protectorate, together 
 with such wits as the Kestoration itself had brought back, or 
 called into being. There was the old dramatist, Shirley, now 
 
 I 
 
LITERATUEE OF THE RESTORATION. 97 
 
 in his sixty-fifth year, very glad, no doubt, to come back to 
 town, after his hard fare as a country-schoolmaster during the 
 eclipse of the stage, and to resume his former occupation as a 
 writer of plays in the style that had been in fashion thirty 
 years before. There was Hobbes, older still than Shirley, a 
 tough old soul of seventy-three, but with twenty more years 
 of life in him, and, though not exactly a literary man, yet 
 sturdy enough to be whatever he liked within certain limits. 
 There was mild Izaak Walton, of Chancery-lane, only five 
 years younger than Hobbes, but destined to live as long, and 
 capable of writing very nicely if he could have been kept 
 from sauntering into the fields to fish. There was the gen- 
 tlemanly Waller, now fifty-six years of age, quite ready to be 
 a poet about the court of Charles, and to write panegyrics on 
 the new side to atone for that on Cromwell. There was the 
 no less gentlemanly Davenant, also fifty-six years of age, 
 steady to his royalist principles, as became a man who had 
 received the honour of knighthood from the royal martyr, 
 and enjoying a wide reputation partly from his poetical 
 talents, and partly from his want of nose. There was Milton, 
 in his fifty-third year, blind, desolate, and stern, hiding in 
 obscure lodgings till his defences of regicide should be suf- 
 ficiently forgotten to save him from molestation, and building 
 up in imagination the scheme of his promised epic. There 
 was Butler, four years younger, brimful of hatred to the 
 Puritans, and already engaged in his poem of Hudibras, 
 which was to lash them so much to the popular taste. There 
 was Denham, known as a versifier little inferior to Waller, 
 and with such superior claims on the score of loyalty as to be 
 considered worthy of knighthood and the first vacant post. 
 There was Cowley, still only in his forty-third year, and with 
 a ready-made reputation, both as a poet and a prose-writer, 
 such as none of his contemporaries possessed, and such indeed 
 as no English writer had acquired since the days of Ben 
 Jonson and Donne. Younger still, and with his fame as a 
 satirist not yet made, there was Milton's friend, honest 
 Andrew Marvel, whom the people of Hull had chosen as their 
 representative in Parliament. Had the search been extended 
 
 H 
 
98 DRYDEN, AND THE 
 
 to theologians, and such of them selected as were capable of 
 influencing the literature by the form of their writings, as 
 distinct from their matter, Jeremy Taylor was still alive, 
 though his work was nearly over ; Richard Baxter, with a 
 longer life before him, was in the prime of his strength ; and 
 there was in Bedford, an eccentric Baptist preacher, once a 
 tinker, who was to be the author, though no one supposed it, 
 of the greatest prose allegory in the language. Close about 
 the person of the king, too, there were able men and wits, 
 capable of writing themselves, or of criticising what was 
 written by others — from the famous counsellor Clarendon, 
 down to such younger and lighter men as Dillon, Earl of 
 Roscommon, Sackville, Earl of Dorset, and Sir Charles Sed- 
 ley. Lastly, not to extend the list farther, there was then in 
 London, aged twenty-nine, and going about in a stout plain 
 dress of grey drugget, a Northamptonshire squire^ s son, 
 named John Dryden, who, after having been educated at 
 Cambridge, had come up to town in the last year of the Pro- 
 tectorate to push his fortune under a Puritan relative then in 
 office, and who had already once or twice tried his hand at 
 poetry. Like "Waller, he had written and published a series 
 of panegyrical stanzas on Cromwell after his death ; and like 
 Waller, also, he had attempted to atone for this miscalculation 
 by writing another poem, called Astraa Bedux, to celebrate 
 the return of Charles. As a taste of what this poet, in par- 
 ticular, could do, take the last of his stanzas on Cromwell : — 
 
 " His ashes in a peaceful urn shall rest ; 
 
 His name a great example stands to show, 
 How strangely high endeavours may be blessed, 
 Where piety and valour jointly go." 
 
 or, in another metre and another strain of politics, the conclu- 
 sion of the poem addressed to Charles : — 
 
 " The discontented now are only they ^ 
 
 Whose crimes before did your just cause betray : 
 Of those your edicts some reclaim from sin, 
 But most your life and blest example win. 
 Oh happy prince ! whom Heaven hath taught the way, 
 By paying vows to have more vows to pay ! 
 Oh happy age ! Oh times like those alone, 
 By fate reserved for great Augustus' throne ! 
 When the joint growth of arms and arts foreshow 
 The world a monarch, and that monarch you." 
 
 \. 
 
LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION. 99 
 
 Such were the personal elements, if we may so call them, 
 available at the beginning of the reign of Charles II., for the 
 commencement of a new era in English literature. Let us 
 see next, what were the more pronounced tendencies visible 
 amid these personal elements ; in other words, what tone of 
 moral sentiment, and what peculiarities of literary style and 
 method were then in the ascendant, and likely to determine 
 the character of the budding authorship. 
 
 It was pre-eminently clear that the forthcoming literature 
 would be Royalist and anti-Puritan. With the exception of 
 Milton, there was not one man of known literary power, 
 whose heart still beat as it did when Cromwell sat on the 
 throne, and whose muse magnanimously disdained the change 
 that had befallen the nation. Puritanism, as a whole, was 
 driven back into the concealed vitals of the community, to 
 sustain itself meanwhile as a sectarian theology lurking in 
 chapels and conventicles, and only to re-appear after a lapse 
 of years as an ingredient in the philosophy of Locke and his 
 contemporaries. The literary men who stepped forward to 
 lead the literature of the Restoration were royalists and cour- 
 tiers — some of them honest cavaliers rejoicing at being let 
 loose from the restraints of the Commonwealth ; others, time- 
 servers, making up for delay by the fulsome excess of their 
 zeal for the new state of things. It was part of this change 
 that there should be an affectation, even where there was not 
 the reality, of lax morals. According to the sarcasm of the 
 time, it was necessary now for those who would escape the 
 risk of being thought Puritans, to contract a habit of swear- 
 ing, and pretend to be great rakes. And this increase, both 
 in the practice and in the profession of profligacy, at once 
 connected itself with that institution of English society, 
 which, from the very fact that it had been suppressed by the 
 Puritans, now became doubly attractive and popular. The 
 same revolution which restored royalty in England re-opened 
 the play-houses ; and in them, as the established organs of 
 popular sentiment, all the anti-Puritanic tendencies of the 
 time hastened to find vent. The custom of having female 
 actors on the stage for female parts, instead of boys as hereto- 
 
 h2 
 
100 DRYDEN, AND THE 
 
 fore, was now permanently introduced, and brought many 
 scandals along with it. Whether, as some surmise, the very 
 suppression of the theatres during the reign of Puritanism 
 contributed to tlieir unusual corruptness when they were 
 again allowed by law, by damming up, as it were, a quantity 
 of social pruriency which had afterwards to be let loose in 
 a mass, it is not easy to say ; it is certain, however, that at no 
 time in this country did impurity run so openly at riot in any 
 literary guise as in the Drama of the Eestoration. It seemed 
 as if the national cranium of England, to use a phrenological 
 figure, had suddenly been contracted in every other direction 
 so as to permit an inordinate protuberance of that particular 
 region which is situated above the nape of the neck. This 
 enormous preponderance of the back of the head in literature 
 was most conspicuously exhibited in Comedy. Every comedy 
 that was produced represented life as a meagre action of per- 
 sons and interests on a slight proscenium of streets and bits of 
 green field, behind which lay the real business, transacted in 
 stews. To set against this, it is true, there was a so-called 
 Tragic Drama. The tragedy that was now in favour, how- 
 ever, was no longer the old English tragedy of rich and com- 
 plex materials, but the French tragedy of heroic declamation. 
 Familiarized by their stay in France with the tragic style of 
 Corneille and other dramatists of the court of Louis XIV., the 
 royalists brought back the taste with them into England ; and 
 the poets who catered for them hastened to abandon the 
 Shakespearian tragedy with its large range of time and action 
 and its blank verse, and to put on the stage tragedies of sus- 
 tained and decorous declamation in the heroic or rhymed 
 couplet, conceived, as much as possible, after the model of 
 Corneille. Natural to the French, this classic or regular 
 style accorded ill with English faculties and habits; and 
 Corneille himself would have been horrified at the slovenly 
 and laborious attempts of the English in imitation of his 
 masterpieces. The efiect of French influence at this time, 
 however, on English literary taste, did not consist merely in 
 the introduction of the heroic or rhymed drama. The same 
 influence extended, and, in some respects, beneficially, to all 
 
 \. 
 
LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION. 101 
 
 departments of English literature. It helped, for example, to 
 correct that peculiar style of so-called "wit," which, originating 
 with the dregs of the Elizabethan age, had during a whole 
 generation, infected English prose and poetry, but more 
 especially the latter. The characteristic of the metaphysical 
 school of poetry, as it is called, which took its rise in a literary 
 vice perceptible even in the great works of the Elizabethan 
 age, and of which Donne and Cowley were the most cele- 
 brated representatives, consisted in the identification of mere 
 intellectual subtlety with poetic genius. To spin out a fan- 
 tastic conceit, to pursue a thread of quaint thought as long as 
 it could be held between the fingers of the metre without 
 snapping, and, in doing so, to wind it about as many odd allu- 
 sions to the real world as possible, and introduce as many 
 verbal quibbles as possible, was the aim of the " metaphysical 
 poets." Some of them, like Donne and Cowley, were men of 
 independent merit ; but the style of poetry itself, as all mo- 
 dern readers confess by the alacrity with which they shy out 
 of the way of reprinted specimens of it, was as unprofitable 
 an investment of liuman ingenuity as ever was attempted. At 
 the period of the Restoration, and partly in consequence of 
 French influence, this kind of wit was falling into disrepute. 
 There were still practitioners of it ; but, on the whole, a more 
 direct, clear, and light manner of writing was coming into 
 fashion. Discourse became less stiff and pedantic; or, as 
 Dryden himself has expressed it, " the fire of English wit, 
 which was before stifled under a constrained melancholy way 
 of breeding, began to display its force by mixing the solidity 
 of our nation with the air and gaiety of our neighbours." 
 And the change in discourse passed without difficulty into 
 literature, calling into being a nimbler style of wit, a more 
 direct, rapid, and decisive manner of thought and expression, 
 than had beseemed authorship before. In particular, and 
 apart from the tendency to greater directness and concision of 
 thought, there was an increased attention to correctness of ex- 
 pression. The younger literary men began to object to what 
 they called the involved and incorrect syntax of the writers of 
 the previous age, and to pretend themselves to greater neatness 
 
102 DRYDEN, AND THE 
 
 and accuracy in the construction of their sentences. It was at 
 this time, for example, that the rule of not ending a sentence 
 with a preposition or other little word began to be attended 
 to. Whether the notion of correctness, implied in this, and 
 other such rules, was a true notion, and whether the writers of 
 the Restoration excelled their Elizabethan predecessors in this 
 quality of correctness, admits of being doubted. Certain it 
 is, however, that a change in the mechanism of writing — this 
 change being on the whole towards increased neatness — did 
 become apparent about this time. The change was visible in 
 prose ; but far more so in verse. For, to conclude this enume- 
 ration of the literary signs or tendencies of the age of the 
 Restoration, it was a firm belief of the writers of the period 
 that then, for the first time, was the art of correct English 
 versification exemplified and appreciated. It was, we say, a 
 firm belief of the time, and, indeed, it has been a common- 
 place of criticism ever since, that Edmund Waller was the 
 first poet who wrote smooth and accurate verse ; that in this 
 he was followed by Sir John Denham ; and that these two 
 men were, so to speak, reformers of English metre. " Well- 
 placing of words, for the sweetness of pronunciation, w^as not 
 known till Mr. Waller introduced it," is a deliberate state- 
 ment of Dryden himself, meant to apply especially to verse. 
 Now, here, again, we have to separate a matter of fact from a 
 matter of doctrine. To aver, with such specimens of older 
 English verse before us as the works of Chaucer and Spenser, 
 and the minor poems of Milton, that it was Waller or any 
 other petty writer of the Restoration that first taught us 
 sweetness, or smoothness, or even correctness of verse, is so 
 ridiculous, that the currency of such a notion can only be 
 accounted for by the servility with which small critics go on 
 repeating whatever any one big critic has said. That Waller 
 and Denham, however, did set the example of something new 
 in the manner of English versification — which "something" 
 Dryden, Pope, and other poets who afterwards adopted it, re- 
 garded as an improvement, — needs not be doubted. For 
 us, it IS sufficient in the meantime to recognise the change 
 as an attempt after greater neatness of mechanical structure, 
 
LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION. 103 
 
 leaving open the question whether it was a change for 
 the better. 
 
 It was natural that the tendencies of English literature thus 
 enumerated should be represented in the poet-laureate for the 
 time being. Who was the fit man to be appointed laureate 
 at the Restoration ? Milton was out of the question, having 
 none of the requisites. Butler, the man of greatest natural 
 power of a different order, and possessing certainly as much of 
 the anti-Puritan sentiment as Charles and his corn-tiers could 
 have desired in their laureate, was not yet sufficiently known, 
 and was, besides, neither a dramatist nor a fine gentleman. 
 Cowley, whom public opinion would have pointed out as best 
 entitled to the honour, was somehow not in much favour at 
 court, and was spending the remainder of his days on a little 
 property near Chertsey. Waller and Denham were wealthy 
 men, with whom literature was but an amusement. On the 
 whole, Sir William Davenant was felt to be the proper man 
 for the office. He was an approved royalist; had, in fact, 
 been laureate to Charles I., after Ben Jonson's death in 1637 ; 
 and had sufiered personally in the cause of the king. He was, 
 moreover, a literary man by profession. He had been an actor 
 and a theatre-manager before the Commonwealth; he had 
 been the first to start a theatre after the relaxed rule of Crom- 
 well made it possible ; and he was one of the first to attempt 
 heroic or rhymed tragedies after the French model. He was 
 also, far more than Cowley, a wit of the new school ; and, as 
 a versifier, he practised, with no small reputation, the neat, 
 lucid style introduced by Denham and Waller. He was the 
 author of an epic called Gondihert^ written in rhymed stanzas 
 of four lines each, and which Hobbes praised as showing 
 " more shape of art, health of morality, and vigour and beauty 
 of expression," than any poem he had ever read. We defy 
 any one to read the poem now ; but there have been worse 
 things written ; and it has the merit of being a careful and 
 rather serious composition by a man who had industry, educa- 
 tion, and taste, but no genius. The only awkwardness in 
 having such a man for a laureate was, that he had no nose. 
 This awkwardness, however, had existed at the time of his 
 
104 DEYDEN, AND THE 
 
 first appointment in the preceding reign. At least, Suckling 
 adverts to it in his Session of the Poets, where he makes the 
 wits of that time contend for the bays— 
 
 " Will Davenant, ashamed of a foolish miscliance, 
 That he had got lately, travelling in France, 
 Modestly hoped the handsomeness of 's muse 
 Might any deformity about him excuse. 
 
 " And surely the company would have been content, 
 If they could have found any precedent ; 
 But in all their records, either in verse or prose, 
 There was not one laureate without a nose." 
 
 If the more decorous court of Charles I., however, overlooked 
 this facial deficiencj, it w^as not for that of Charles II. to take 
 objection to it ; the more especially as it might be regarded, if 
 Suckling's insinuation is true, as entitling the poet to addi- 
 tional sympathy from Charles and his companions. After all, 
 Davenant, notwithstanding his misfortune, seems to have been 
 not the worst gentleman about Charles's court, either in morals 
 or manners. Milton is said to have known and liked him. 
 
 Davenant's laureateship extended over the first eight years 
 of the Restoration, or from 1660 to 1668. Much was done in 
 these eight years both by himself and others. Heroic plays 
 and comedies were produced in sufficient abundance to supply 
 the two theatres then open in London — one of them called the 
 Duke's company, under Davenant's management; the other, 
 the King's company, under the management of an actor named 
 Killigrew. The number of writers for the stage was very 
 great, including not only those whose names have been men- 
 tioned, but others new to fame. The literature of the stage 
 formed by far the largest proportion of what was written, or 
 even of what was published. Literary efforts of other kinds, 
 however, were not wanting. Of satires, and small poems in 
 the witty or amatory style, there was no end. The publica- 
 tion of the first part of his Hudibras in 1663, and of the second 
 in 1664, drew public attention, for the first time, to a man, 
 already past his fiftieth year, who had more true wit in him 
 than all the aristocratic poets put together. The poem was 
 received by the king and the courtiers with roars of laughter ; 
 quotations from it were in everybody's mouth ; but notwith- 
 
LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION. 105 
 
 standing large promises, nothing substantial was done for the 
 author. Meanwhile Milton, blind and gouty, and living in his 
 house near Bunhill Fields, where his visitors were hardly of 
 the kind that admired Butler's poem, was calmly proceeding 
 with his Paradise Lost. The poem was finished and published 
 in 1667, leaving Milton free for other work. Cowley, who 
 would have welcomed such a poem, and whose praise Milton 
 would have valued more than that of any other contemporary, 
 died in the year of its publication. Davenant may have read 
 it before his deatli in the following year ; but perhaps the only 
 poet of the time who hailed its appearance with enthusiasm 
 adequate to the occasion, was Milton's personal friend, Marvel. 
 Gradually, however, copies of the poem found their way about 
 town, and drew public attention once more to Cromwell's old 
 secretary. 
 
 The laureateship remained vacant two years after Dave- 
 nan t's death ; and then it was conferred — on whom ? There 
 can be little doubt that, of those eligible to it, Butler had, in 
 some respects, the best title. The author of Hudihras, how- 
 ever, seems to have been one of those ill-conditioned sarcastic 
 men whom patronage never comes near, and who are left, as 
 a matter of necessity, to the bitter enjoyment of their own 
 humours. There does not seem to have been even a question 
 of appointing him ; and the office, the income of which would 
 have been a competence to him, was conferred on a man twenty 
 years his junior, and whose circumstances required it less — 
 John Dry den. The appointment, which was made in August, 
 1670, conferred on Dryden not only the laureateship, but also 
 the office of " historiographer royal," which chanced to be 
 vacant at the same time. The income accruing from the two 
 offices thus conjoined was 200 Z. a-year, which was about as 
 valuable then as 600^. a-year would be now ; and it was 
 expressly stated in the deed of appointment that these emolu- 
 ments were conferred on Dryden " in consideration of his 
 many acceptable services done to his majesty, and from an 
 observation of his learning and eminent abilities, and his 
 great skill and elegant style both in verse and prose." At 
 the time of the Restoration, or even for a year or two after it, 
 
106 DRYDEN, AND THE 
 
 such language could, by no stretch of courtesy, have been 
 applied to Dryden. At that time, as we have seen, Dryden, 
 though aheady past his thirtieth year, was certainly about the 
 least distinguished person in the little band of wits that were 
 looking forward to the good time coming. He was a stout, 
 li-esh-complexioned man, in grey drugget, who had w^ritten 
 some robust stanzas on Cromwell's death, and a short poem, 
 also robust, but rather wooden, on Charles's return. That was 
 about all that was then known about him. What had he 
 done, in the interval, to raise him so high, and to make it 
 natural for the court to prefer him to what was in fact the 
 titular supremacy of English literature, over the heads of 
 others who might be supposed to have claims, and especially 
 over poor battered old Butler? A glance at Dryden's life, 
 during Davenant's laureateship, or between 1660 and 1670, 
 will answer this question. 
 
 Dryden's connexion with the politics of the Protectorate 
 had not been such as to make his immediate and cordial 
 attachment to the cause of restored royalty either very 
 strange or very unhandsome. Not committed either by 
 strong personal convictions, or by acts, to the Puritan side, 
 he hastened to show that, whatever the older Northampton- 
 shire Drydens and their relatives might think of the matter, 
 he, for one, was willing to be a loyal subject of Charles, both 
 in church and in state. This main point being settled, he 
 had only farther to consider into what particular walk of 
 industry, now that official employment under government was 
 cut off, he should carry his loyalty and his powers. The 
 choice was not difficult. There was but one career open for 
 him, or suitable to his tastes and qualifications — that of 
 general authorship. We say " general authorship ; " for it is 
 important to remark that Dryden was by no means nice in his 
 choice of work. He was ready for anything of a literary kind 
 to which he was, or could make himself, competent. He had 
 probably a preference for verse ; but he had no disinclination 
 to prose, if that article was in demand in the market. He had 
 a store of acquirements, academic and other, that fitted him 
 for an intelligent apprehension of whatever was going on in 
 
 I 
 
LITERATUEE OF THE RESTOEATION. 107 
 
 any of the London circles of that day — the circle of the 
 scholars, that of the amateurs of natural science, or that of 
 the mere wits and men of letters. He was, in fact, a man of 
 general intellectual strength, which he was willing to let out 
 in any kind of tolerably honest intellectual service that might 
 be in fashion. This being the case, he set the right way to 
 work to make himself known in quarters where such service 
 was going on. He had about 40?. a-year of inherited fortune ; 
 which means something equivalent to 120?. a-year with us. 
 With this income to supply his immediate wants, he went to 
 live with Herringman, a bookseller and publisher in the New 
 Exchange. What was the precise nature of his agreement 
 with Herringman, cannot be ascertained. His literary enemies 
 used afterwards to say that he was Herringman's hack, and 
 wrote prefaces for him. However this may be, there were 
 higher conveniences in being connected with Heri'ingman. 
 He was one of the best known of the London publishers of 
 the day, was a personal friend of Davenant, and had almost 
 all the wits of the day as his customers and occasional visitors. 
 Tlu'ough him, in all probability. Dry den first became ac- 
 quainted with some of these men, including Davenant himself, 
 Cowley, and a third person of considerable note at that time 
 as an aristocratic dabbler in literature — Sir Eobert Howard, 
 son of the Earl of Berkshire. That the impression he made 
 on these men and others, in or out of the Herringman circle, 
 was no mean one, is proved by the fact that, in 1663, we find 
 him a member of the Koyal Society, the foundation of which 
 by royal charter had taken place in the previous year. The 
 number of members was then one hundred and fifteen, in- 
 cluding such scientific celebrities of the time as Boyle, Wallis, 
 Wilkins, Christopher Wren, Dr. Isaac Barrow, Evelyn, and 
 Hooke, besides such titled amateurs of experimental science 
 as the Duke of Buckingham, the Marquis of Dorchester, the 
 Earls of Devonshire, Crawford, and Northampton, and Lords 
 Brouncker, Cavendish, and Berkeley. Among the more 
 purely literary members were Waller, Denham, Cowley, and 
 Sprat, afterwards Bishop of Kochester. The admission of 
 Dryden into such company is a proof that already he was 
 
108 DRYDEN, AND THE 
 
 socially a man of mark. As we have Diyden's own confession 
 that he was somewhat dull and sluggish in conversation, and 
 the testimony of others that he was the very reverse of a 
 "bustling or pushing man, and rather avoided society than 
 sought it, we must suppose that he had been found out. as it 
 were, in spite of himself. We can fancy him at Herring- 
 man's, or elsewhere, sitting as one of a group with Davenant, 
 Howard, and others, taking snuff and listening, rather than 
 speaking ; yet, when he did speak, doing so with such judg- 
 ment, as to make his chair one of the most important in the 
 room, and impress all with the conviction that that Dryden 
 was a solid fellow. He seems also to have taken an interest 
 in the scientific gossip of the day about magnetism, the 
 circulation of the blood, and the prospects of the Baconian 
 system of philosophy ; and this may have helped to bring 
 him in contact with men like Boyle, Wren, and Wallis. At 
 all events, if the Society elected him on trust, he soon justi- 
 fied their choice by taking his place among the best known 
 members of what was then the most important class of literary 
 men — the writers for the stage. His first drama, a lumbering 
 prose-comedy, entitled The Wild Gallant, was produced at 
 Killigrew's Theatre in February, 1662-3; and, though its 
 success was very indifierent_, he was not discouraged from a 
 second venture in a tragi-comedy, entitled The Rival Ladies, 
 written partly in blank verse, partly in heroic rhyme, and 
 produced at the same theatre. This attempt was more suc- 
 cessful ; and, in 1664, there was produced, as the joint com- 
 position of Dryden and Sir Robert Howard, an attempt in 
 the style of the regular heroic or rhymed tragedy, called 
 The Indian Queen. The date of this effort of literary co- 
 partnership between Dryden and his aristocratic friend, 
 coincides with the formation of a more intimate connexion 
 between them, by Dryden's marriage with Sir Eobert's sister. 
 Lady Elizabeth Howard. The marriage, the result, it would 
 seem, of a visit of the poet, in the company of Sir Robert, to 
 the Earl of Berkshire's seat in Wilts, took place in November, 
 1663 ; so that when The Indian Queen was written, the two 
 authors were already brothers-in-law. The marriage of a man 
 
LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION. 109 
 
 in the poet's circumstances with an earVs daughter, was 
 neither altogether strange nor altogether such as to preclude 
 remark. The earl was poor, and able to afford his daughter 
 but a small settlement ; and Drjden was a man of sufficiently 
 good family, his grandfather having been a baronet, and some 
 of his living relations having landed property in Northamp- 
 tonshire. The property remaining for the support of Dryden's 
 brothers and sisters, however, after the subduction of his own 
 share as the eldest son, had been too scanty to keep them all 
 in their original station ; and some of them had fallen a little 
 lower in the world. One sister, in particular, had married a 
 tobacconist in London — a connexion not likely to be agreeable 
 to the Earl of Berkshire and his sons, if they took the 
 trouble to become cognisant of it. Dryden himself probably 
 moved conveniently enough between the one relationship and 
 the other. If his aristocratic brother-in-law, Sir Robert, could 
 write plays with him and the like, his other brother-in-law, 
 the tobacconist of Newgate-street, may have administered to 
 his comfort in other ways. It is known that the poet, in his 
 later life at least, was peculiarly fastidious in the article of 
 snuff, abhorring all ordinary snuffs, and satisfied only with 
 a mixture which he prepared himself ; and it is not unlikely 
 that the foundation of this fastidiousness may have been laid 
 in the facilities afforded him originally in his brother-in-law's 
 shop. The tobacconist's wife, of course, would be pleased 
 now and then to have a visit from her brother John; but 
 whether Lady Elizabeth ever went to see her, is rather 
 doubtful. According to all accounts, Dryden's experience of 
 this lady was not such as to improve his ideas of the matri- 
 monial state, or to give encouragement to future poets to 
 marry earls' daughters. 
 
 In consequence of the ravages of the Great Plague in 1665, 
 and the subsequent disaster of the Great Fire in 1666, there 
 was for some time a total cessation in London of theatrical 
 performances and all other amusements. Dryden, like most 
 other persons who were not tied to town by business, spent 
 the greater part of this gloomy period in the country. He 
 availed himself of the interruption thus given to his dramatic 
 
110 DRYDEN, AND THE 
 
 labours, to produce his first writings of any moment out of 
 that field, his Annus Mirabilis, and his Essay on Dramatic 
 Poesy. The first, an attempt to invest with heroic interest, 
 and celebrate in sonorous stanzas, the events of the famous 
 year 1QQ6-Q>, including not only the Great Fire, but also the 
 incidents of a naval war then going on against the Dutch, 
 must have done more to bring Dryden into the favourable 
 notice of the King, the Duke of York, and other high person- 
 ages eulogized in it, than anything he had yet written. It 
 was, in fact, a kind of short epic on the topics of the year, 
 such as Dryden might have been expected to write, if he had 
 been already doing laureate's duty ; and unless Sir William 
 Davenant was of very easy temper, he must have been rather 
 annoyed at so obvious an invasion of his province, notwith- 
 standing the compliment the poet had paid him by adopting 
 the stanza of his Gondihert, and imitating his manner. 
 Scarcely * less effective in another way must have been the 
 prose " Essay on Dramatic Poesy " — a vigorous treatise on 
 various matters of poetry and criticism then much discussed. 
 It contained, among other things, a defence of the Heroic or 
 Rhymed Tragedy against those who preferred the older 
 Elizabethan Tragedy of blank verse ; and so powerful a con- 
 tribution was it to this great controversy of the day, that it 
 produced an immediate sensation in all literary circles. Sir 
 Robert Howard, who now ranked himself among the partisans 
 of blank verse, took occasion to express his dissent from some 
 of the opinions expounded in it ; and, as Dryden replied rather 
 tartly, a temporary quarrel ensued between the two brothers- 
 in-law. 
 
 On the re-opening of the theatres in 1667, Dryden, his 
 reputation increased by the two performances just mentioned, 
 stepped forward again as' a dramatist. A heroic tragedy 
 called The Indian Emperor, which he had prepared before the 
 recess, and which, indeed, had then been acted, was repro- 
 duced with great success, and established Dryden's position 
 as a practitioner of heroic and rhymed tragedy. This was 
 followed by a comedy, in mixed blank verse and prose, 
 called The Maiden Queen; this by a prose-comedy called 
 
LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION. Ill 
 
 Sir Martin Mar-all; and tliis again, by an adaptation, in 
 conjunction with Sir William Davenant, of Shakespeare's 
 Tempest. The two last were produced at Davenant's theatre, 
 whereas all Dryden's former pieces had been written for 
 Killigrew's, or the King's company. About this time, how- 
 ever, an arrangement was made which secured Dryden's 
 services exclusively for Killigrew's house. By the terms of 
 the agreement, Dryden engaged to supply the house with 
 three plays every year, in return for which, he was admitted 
 a shareholder in the profits of the theatre to the extent of one 
 share and a-half. The first fruits of the bargain were a 
 prose-comedy called TJie Mock Astrologer, and two heroic 
 tragedies under the titles Tyrannic Love, and The Conquest of 
 Granada, the latter being in two parts. These were all pro- 
 duced between 1668 and 1670, and the tragedies, in particular, 
 seem to have taken the town by storm, and placed Dryden, 
 beyond dispute, at the head of all the heroic playwrights of 
 the day. 
 
 The extent and nature of Dryden's popularity as a dramatist 
 about this time may be judged by the following extract from 
 the diary of the omnipresent Pepys, referring to the first per- 
 formance of the Maiden Queen : — " After dinner, with my 
 wife to see the Maiden Queene, a new play by Dryden, 
 mightily commended for the regularity of it, and the strain 
 and wit; and the truth is, the comical part done by Nell 
 (Nell Gwyn), which is Florimell, that I never can hope to 
 see the like done again by man or woman. The King and 
 Duke of York were at the play. But so great a performance 
 of a comical part was never, I believe, in the world before as 
 Nell do this, both as a mad girle, then most and best of all 
 when she comes in like a young gallant, and hath the motions 
 and carriage of a spark the most that ever I saw any man 
 have. It makes me, I confess, admire her." But even Nell's 
 performance in this comedy was nothing compared to one 
 part of her performance afterwards in the tragedy of Tyrannic 
 Love. Probably there was never such a scene of ecstasy in 
 a theatre, as when Nell, after acting the character of a tragic 
 princess in this play, and killing herself at the close in a 
 
112 DRYDEN, AND THE 
 
 grand passage of heroism and supernatural virtue, had to 
 start up as she was being borne off the stage dead, and 
 resume her natural character, first addressing her bearer in 
 these words : — 
 
 " Hold ! are you mad ? you d d confounded dog ; 
 
 I am to rise, and speak the epilogue." 
 
 and then running to the footlights, and beginning her speech 
 to the audience : — 
 
 " I come, kind gentlemen, strange news to tell ye, 
 I am the ghost of poor departed Nelly. 
 Sweet ladies, be not frighted ; I'll be civil : 
 I'm what I was — a little harmless devil." &c. &c. 
 
 It is a tradition that it was this epilogue that effected Nell's 
 conquest of the king, and that he was so fascinated with her 
 manner of delivering it, that he went behind the scenes after 
 the play was over, and carried her off that very night. Ah ! 
 and it is a hundred and eighty-four years since that fasci- 
 nating run to the footlights took place, and the swarthy face 
 of the monarch was seen laughing, and the audience shrieked 
 and clapped with delight, and Pepys bustled about the boxes, 
 and Dryden sat looking placidly on, contented with his 
 success, and wondering how much of it was owing to Nelly! 
 
 One can see how, even if the choice had been made strictly 
 with a reference to the claims of the candidates, it would have 
 been felt that Dryden, and not Butler, was the proper man to 
 succeed Davenant in the laureateship. If Butler had shewn 
 the more original vein of talent in one peculiar walk, Dryden 
 had proved himself the man of greatest general strength, 
 in whom were more broadly represented the various literary 
 tendencies of his time. The author of ten plays, four of which 
 were stately rhymed tragedies, and the rest comedies in prose 
 and blank verse ; the author, also, of various occasional poems, 
 one of which, the Annus Mirahilis, was noticeable on its own 
 account as the best poem of current history; the author, 
 moreover, of one express prose-treatise and of various shorter 
 prose dissertations in the shape of prefaces and the like, pre- 
 fixed to his separate plays and poems, in which the principles 
 of literature were discussed in a manner at once masterly and 
 adapted to the prevailing taste— Dryden was, on the whole. 
 
LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION. 113^ 
 
 far more likely to perform well that part of a laureate's duties 
 which consisted in supervising and leading the general litera- 
 ture of his age, than a man whose reputation, though justlj 
 great, had been acquired by one continuous effort in the 
 single department of burlesque. Accordingly, Dryden was 
 promoted to the post, and Butler was left to finish, on his 
 own scanty resources, the remaining portion of his Hudihras, 
 varying the occupation by jotting down those scraps of cynical 
 thought which were found among his posthumous papers, and 
 which show that towards the end of his days there were other 
 things that he hated and would have lashed besides Puri- 
 tanism. Thus : — 
 
 'Tis a strange age we've lived in, and a lewd 
 As e'er the sun in all his travels viewed." 
 
 Again : 
 
 ** The greatest saints and sinners have been made 
 Of proselytes of one another's trade." 
 
 Again : 
 
 " Authority is a disease and a cure, 
 Which men can neither want nor well endure." 
 
 And again, with an obvious reference to his own case : — 
 
 " Dame Fortune, some men's titular, 
 Takes charge of them without their care, 
 Does all their drudgery and work, 
 Like fairies, for them in the dark ; 
 Conducts them blindfold, and advances 
 The naturals by blinder chances ; 
 While others by desert and wit 
 Could never make the matter hit ; 
 But still, the better they deserve, 
 Are but the abler thought to starve." 
 
 Dryden, at the time of his appointment to the laureateship, 
 was in his fortieth year, — a circumstance worth noting, if we 
 would realize his position, as laureate, among his literary 
 contemporaries. Of these contemporaries there were some 
 who, as being his seniors, would feel themselves free from all 
 obligations to pay him respect. To octogenarians like 
 Hobbes and Izaak Walton, he was but a boy ; and even from 
 Waller, Milton, Butler, and Marvel, all of whom lived to see 
 him in the laureate's chair, he could only look for that ap- 
 proving recognition, totally distinct from reverence, which 
 
 I 
 
114 DRYDEN, AND THE 
 
 men of sixty-five, sixty, and fifty-five bestow on their full- 
 grown juniors. Such an amount of recognition he seems to 
 have received from all of them. Butler indeed, does not seem 
 to have taken very kindly to him : and it stands on record, as 
 Milton's opinion of Dryden's powers about this period, that 
 he thought him '' a rhymer but no poet." But Butler, who 
 went about snarling at most things, and was irreverent 
 enough to think the Royal Society itself little better than 
 a humbug, was not the man from whom a laudatory estimate 
 of anybody was to be expected ; and, though Milton's criticism 
 is too precious to be thrown away, and will even be found on 
 investigation to be not so far amiss, if the moment at wliich it 
 was given is duly borne in mind, yet it is, after all, not 
 Milton's opinion of Dryden's general literary capacity, but 
 only his opinion of his claims to be called a poet. Dryden, 
 on his part, to whose charge any want of veneration for his 
 great literary predecessors cannot be imputed, and whose 
 faculty of appreciating the most various kinds of excellence 
 was conspicuously large, would probably have been more 
 grieved than indignant at this indifference of men like Butler 
 and Milton to his rising fame. He had an unfeigned admira- 
 tion for the author of Hudihras ; and there was not a man in 
 England who more profoundly revered the poet of Paradise 
 Lost, and more dutifully testified this reverence both by acts 
 of personal attention and by written expressions of allegiance 
 to him while he was yet alive. It would have pained Dryden 
 much, we believe, to know that the great Puritan poet, whom 
 he made it a point of duty to go and see now and then in his 
 solitude, and of whom he is reported to have said, on reading 
 the Paradise Lost, " This man cuts us all out, and the 
 ancients, too," thought no better of him than that he was 
 a rhymer. But, however he may have felt himself related to 
 those seniors who were vanishing from the stage, or whose 
 literary era was in the past, it was in a conscious spirit of 
 superiority that he confronted the generation of his coevals 
 and juniors, the natural subjects of his laureateship. Setting 
 aside such men as Locke and Barrow, belonging more to 
 other departments than that of literature proper, there were 
 
LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION. 115 
 
 lione of these coevals or juniors who were entitled to dispute 
 liis authority. There was the Duke of Buckingham, a year 
 or two older than Dry den, at once the greatest wit and the 
 gTeatest profligate about Charles's court, but whose attempts as 
 a comic dramatist were little more than occasional eccentrici- 
 ties. There were the Earls of Dorset and Eoscommon, both 
 about Dry den's age, and both cultivated men and respectable 
 versifiers. There was Thomas Sprat, afterwards Bishop of 
 Rochester, and now chaplain to his grace of Buckingham, 
 five years younger than Dry den, his fellow-member in the 
 Royal Society, and with considerable pretensions to literary 
 excellence. There was the witty rake. Sir Charles Sedley, 
 a man of frolic, like Buckingham, some seven years Dryden's 
 junior, and the author of at least three comedies and three 
 tragedies. There was the still more witty rake. Sir George 
 Etherege, of about the same age, the author of two comedies, 
 produced between 1660 and 1670, which, for ease and sprightly 
 fluency, surpassed anything that Dry den had done in the comic 
 style. But " gentle George," as he was called, was incor- 
 rigibly lazy ; and it did not seem as if the public would get 
 anything more from him. In his place had come another 
 gentleman-writer, young William Wycherley, whose first 
 comedy had been written before Dryden's laureateship, 
 though it was not acted till 1672, and who was already 
 famous as a wit. Of precisely the same age as Wycherley, 
 and with a far greater quantity of comic writing in him, 
 whatever might be thought of the quality, was Thomas 
 Shadwell, whose bulky body was a perpetual source of jest 
 against him, though he himself vaunted it as one of his many 
 resemblances to Ben Jonson. The contemporary opinion of 
 these two last-named comic poets, Wycherley and Shadwell, 
 after they came to be better known, is expressed in these 
 lines from a poem of Rochester's : — 
 
 " Of all our modern wits, none seem to me 
 Once to have touched upon true comedy, 
 But hasty Shadwell and slow "Wycherley. 
 Shadwell's unfinished works do yet impart 
 Great proofs of force of Nature, none of Art. 
 With just bold strokes he dashes here and there, 
 Showing great mastery with little care ; 
 
 I 2 
 
116 DRYDEN, AND THE 
 
 Scorning to varaish his good touches o'er, 
 To make the fools and women praise the more. 
 But Wycherley earns hard whate'er he gains ; 
 He wants no judgment, and he spares no pains; 
 He frequently excels, and, at the least, 
 Makes fewer faults than any of the rest." 
 
 The author of these lines, the notorious Wilmot, Earl of 
 Rochester, was also one of Dryden's literary subjects. He 
 was but twenty-two years of age when Dryden became 
 laureate; but bsfore ten years of that laureateship were over 
 he had blazed out, in rapid debauchery, his wretchedly- spent 
 life. Younger by three years than Rochester, and also 
 destined to a short life, though more of misery than of crime, 
 was Thomas Otway, of whose six tragedies and four comedies, 
 all produced during the laureateship of Dryden, one at least 
 has taken a place in our dramatic literature, and is read still 
 for its power and pathos. Associated with Otway's name is 
 that of Nat. Lee, more than Otway's match in fury, and who, 
 after a brief career as a tragic dramatist and drunkard, 
 became an inmate of Bedlam. Another writer of tragedy, 
 whose career began with Dryden's laureateship, was John 
 Crowne, " little starched Johnny Crowne," as Rochester calls 
 him, but whom so good a judge as Charles Lamb has 
 thought worthy of commemoration as having written some 
 really fine things. Finally, a few Nahum Tates, Elkanah 
 Settles, Tom D'Urfeys and other small celebrities, in whose 
 company we may place Aphra Behn, the poetess, close the 
 list. 
 
 Doing our best to fancy this cluster of wits and playwriters, 
 in the midst of which, from his appointment to the laureate- 
 ship in 1670, at the age of forty, to his deposition from that 
 office in 1688, at the age of fifty-eight, Dryden is historically 
 the principal figure, we can very well see that not one of 
 them all could wrest the dictatorship from him. With an 
 income from various sources, including his salary as laureate 
 and historiographer, and his receipts from his engagement 
 with Killigrew's company, amounting in all to about 600/. 
 a-year, which, according to Sir Walter Scott's computation, 
 means about 1,800/. in our value, he had, during a portion of 
 this time at least, all the means of external respectability in 
 
he 
 
 LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION. 117 
 
 sufficient abundance. His reputation as the first dramatic 
 author of the day, was already made ; and if, as yet, there 
 were others who had done as well or better as poets out of the 
 dramatic walk, he more than made up for this by the excel- 
 lence of his prologues and epilogues, and by his readiness and 
 power as a prose-critic of general literature. No one could 
 deny that, though a rather heavy man in private society, and 
 so slow and silent among the wits of the coffee-house that, 
 but for the pleasure of seeing his placid face, the deeply 
 indented leather chair on which he sat would have done as 
 well to represent literature there as his own presence in it, 
 John Dryden was, all in all, the first wit of the age. There 
 was not a Buckingham, nor an Etherege, nor a Shadwell, nor 
 a starched Johnny Crowne, of them all, that singly would 
 have dared to dispute his supremacy. And yet, as will 
 happen, what his subjects would not dare to do singly, or 
 ostensibly, some of them tried to compass by cabal and syste- 
 matic depreciation on particular points. In fact, Dryden had 
 to fight pretty hard to maintain his place, and had to make an 
 example or two of a rebel subject before the rest were terrified 
 into submission. 
 
 He was first attacked in the very field of his greatest 
 triumphs — the drama. The attack was partly directed against 
 himself personally, partly against that style of the heroic or 
 rhymed tragedy, of which he was the advocate and repre- 
 sentative. There had always been dissenters from this new 
 fashion ; and among these was the Duke of Buckingham, who 
 had a natural genius for making fun of anything. Assisted, 
 it is said, by his chaplain, Sprat, and by Butler, who had 
 
 Iready satirized this style of tragedy by writing a dialogue, 
 which two cats are made to caterwaul to each other in 
 
 eroics, the duke had amused his leisure by preparing a farce, 
 in which heroic plays were held up to ridicule. In the original 
 draft of the farce, Davenant was made the butt under the 
 name of Bilboa ; but, after Davenant' s death, the farce was 
 recast, and Dryden substituted under the name of Bayes. 
 The plot of this famous farce, the Rehearsal, is much the 
 same as that of Sheridan's Critic. The poet Bayes invites 
 
118 DRYDEN, AND THE 
 
 two friends, Smith and Johnson, to be present at the rehearsal 
 of a lieroic play which he is on the point of bringing out, and 
 the humour consists in the supposed representation - of this 
 heroic play, while Bayes alternately directs the actors, and 
 expounds the drift of the play and its beauties to Smith and 
 Johnson, who all the while are laughing at him, and thinking 
 it monstrous rubbish. Conceive a farce like this, written with 
 amazing cleverness, and full of absurdities, produced in 
 the very theatre where the echoes of Dryden's last sonorous 
 heroics were still lingering, and acted by the same actors; 
 conceive it interspersed with parodies of well-known passages 
 from Dryden's plays, and with allusions to characters in these 
 plays; conceive the actor who played the part of Bayes, 
 dressed to look as like Dryden as possible, instructed by the 
 duke to mimic Dryden's voice, and using phrases like " i'gad," 
 and " i'fackins," which Dryden was in the habit of using in 
 familiar conversation ; and an idea may be formed of the 
 sensation made by the Rehearsal in all theatrical circles on its 
 first performance in the winter of 1671. Its effect, though not 
 immediate, was decisive. From that time the heroic or 
 rhymed tragedy was felt to be doomed. Dryden, indeed, did 
 not at once recant his opinion in favour of rhymed tragedies, 
 but he yielded so far to the sentence pronounced against 
 them, as to write only one more of the kind. 
 
 Though thus driven out of his favourite style of the rhymed 
 tragedy, however, he was not driven from the stage. Bound 
 by his agreement with the king's company to furnish three 
 plays a-year, he continued to make dramatic writing his chief 
 occupation ; and almost his sole productions during the first 
 ten years of his laureateship, were ten plays. Three of these 
 were prose-comedies ; one, a tragi-comedy, in blank verse and 
 prose ; one, an opera in rhyme; ^y^,, tragedies in blank verse ; 
 and one, the rhymed tragedy above referred to. It will be 
 observed that this was at the rate of only one play a-year ; 
 •whereas, by his engagement, he was to furnish three. The 
 fact was, however, that the company were very indulgent to 
 him, and let him have his full share of the receipts, averaging 
 300/. a-year, in return for but a third of the stipulated work. 
 
LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION. 119 
 
 Notwithstanding this, we find them complaining, in 1679, 
 that Dryden had behaved unhandsomely to them in carrying 
 one of his plays to the other theatre, and so injuring their 
 interests. As, from that year, none of Dryden's plays were 
 produced at the King^s Theatre, but all at the Duke's, till 
 1682, when the two companies were united, it is probable 
 that, in that year, the bargain made with Killigrew termi- 
 nated. It deserves notice, by the way, that the so-called 
 " opera" was one entitled The State of Innocence, or the Fall 
 of Man, founded on Milton's Paradise Lost, and brought out 
 in 1674-5, immediately after Milton's death. That this was 
 an equivocal compliment to Milton's memory, Dryden himself 
 lived to acknowledge. He confessed to Dennis, twenty years 
 afterwards, that at the time when he wrote that opera *' he 
 knew not half the extent of Milton's excellence." A striking 
 proof of Dryden's immense veneration for Milton, considering 
 how high his admiration of Milton had been even while he 
 was alive! 
 
 Of these dramatic productions of Dryden during the first 
 ten years of his laureateship, some were very carefully written. 
 Thus Marria^e-a-la-^node, performed in 1672, is esteemed one 
 of his best comedies ; and of the rhymed tragedy, Aurung-Zebe, 
 performed in 1675, he himself says, in the Prologue — 
 
 " What verse can do he has performed in this, 
 Which he presumes the most correct of his." 
 
 The tragedy oi All for Love, which followed Aurung-Zebe, in 
 1678, and in which he falls back on blank verse, is pronounced 
 by many critics to be the very best of all his dramas ; and per- 
 haps none of his plays have been more read than the Spanish 
 Friar, written in 1680. Yet it may be doubted if in any of 
 these plays Dryden achieved a degree of immediate success 
 equal to that which had attended his Tyrannic Love, and his 
 Conquest of Granada, written before his laureateship. This was 
 not owing so much to the single blow struck at his fame by 
 Buckingham's Rehearsal, as to the growth of that general 
 spirit of criticism and disaffection which pursues every author 
 
120 DRYDEN, AND THE 
 
 after the public liave become sufficiently acquainted with his 
 style to expect the good, and look rather for the bad, in what 
 he writes. Thus, we find one critic of the day, Martin Clifford, 
 who was a man of some note, addressing Dry den, a year or 
 two after his laureateship, in this polite fashion : " You do 
 live in as much ignorance and darkness as you did in the 
 womb ; your writings are like a Jack-of-all-trades^ shop ; they 
 have a variety, but nothing of value ; and if thou art not the 
 dullest plant-animal that ever the earth produced, all that I 
 have conversed with are strangely mistaken in thee." This 
 onslaught of Mr. Clifford's is clearly to be regarded as only 
 that gentleman's ; but what young Rochester said and 
 thought about Dryden at this time is more likely to have been 
 what was said and thought generally by the critical part of 
 the town. 
 
 '* Well sir, 'tis granted : I said Dryden's rhymes 
 Were stolen, unequal — nay, dull, many times. ' 
 What foolish patron is there found of his, 
 So blindly partial to deny me this ? 
 But that his plays, embroidered up and down 
 With wit and learning, justly pleased the town, 
 In the same paper I as freely own. 
 Yet, having this allowed, the heavy mass 
 That stuffs up his loose volumes, must not pass. 
 
 ***** 
 But, to be just, 'twill to his praise be found, 
 His excellencies more than faults abound ; 
 Nor dare I from his sacred temples tear 
 The laurel which he best deserves to wear. 
 
 ***** 
 And may I not have leave impartially 
 To search and censux'e Dryden's works, and try 
 If these gross faults his choice pen doth commit, 
 Proceed from want of judgment or of wit ; 
 Or if his lumpish fancy doth refuse 
 Spirit and grace to his loose slattern muse ? " 
 
 We have no doubt this opinion, thus expressed by the scape- 
 grace young earl, was very general. Dryden's own prose dis- 
 quisitions on the principles of poetry may have helped to 
 diflfuse many of those notions of genuine poetical merit by 
 which he was now tried. But, undoubtedly, what most of all 
 tended to expose Dryden's reputation to the perils of criticism 
 was the increasing number of his dramatic competitors, and 
 the evident ability of some of them. True, most of these 
 
LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION. 121 
 
 Jiompetitors were Drjden's personal friends, and some of the 
 younger of them, as Lee, Shadwell, Crowne, and Tate, were in 
 the habit of coming to him for prologues and epilogues, with 
 which to increase the attractions of their plays. On more than 
 one occasion, too, Dryden clubbed with Lee or Shadwell in 
 the composition of a dramatic piece. But, though thus on a 
 friendly footing with most of his contemporary dramatists, 
 and almost in a fatherly relation to some of them, Dryden' s 
 popularity was not the less affected by their competition. In 
 the department of prose comedy, Etherege, whose last and 
 best comedy, Sir Fopling Flutter^ was produced in 1676, and 
 Wycherley, whose four celebrated comedies were all produced 
 between 1672 and 1677, had introduced a style compared 
 with which Dryden' s best comic attempts were but heavy 
 horse-play. Even the fat hulking Shadwell, who dashed off 
 his comedies as fast as he could write, had a vein of coarse 
 natural humour which Dryden wanted. It was in vain that 
 Dryden tried to keep his pre-eminence against these rivals by 
 increased strength of language, increased intricacy of plot, and 
 an increased use of those brutal obscenities upon which they 
 all relied so much in their efforts to please. One comedy in 
 which Dryden, trusting too confidently to this last element of 
 success, pushed grossness to the utmost conceivable limit, was 
 hissed off the stage. In tragedy, it is true, his position was 
 more firm. But even in this department, some niches were 
 cut in the body of his fame. His friend, Nat. Lee, had pro- 
 duced one or two tragedies in which a tenderness and a wild 
 force of passion were discerned, to which Dryden's more mas- 
 culine genius could not pretend ; Crowne had also done one 
 or two things of a superior character ; and, though it was not 
 till 1682 that Otway produced his Venice Preserved, he had 
 already given evidence of his mastery of dramatic pathos. All 
 this Dryden might have seen without allowing himself to be 
 much concerned, conscious as he must have been that in 
 general strength he was still superior to all about him, how- 
 ever they might rival him in particulars. The deliberate 
 resolution, however, of Eochester and some other aristocratic 
 leaders of the fashion, to make good their criticisms on his 
 
122 DRYDEN, AND THE 
 
 writings, by setting up first one and then another of the 
 dramatists of the day as patterns of a higher style of art than 
 his, provoked him out of his composure. To show what he 
 could do, if called upon to defend his rights against pretenders, 
 he made a terrible example of one poor Avretch, who had been 
 puffed for the moment into undue popularity. This unfortu- 
 nate was Elkanah Settle, and the occasion of the attack was 
 a heroic tragedy written by Settle, acted with great success 
 both on the stage and at Whitehall, and published with illus- 
 trative woodcuts. On this performance Dryden made a most 
 merciless onslaught in a prose-criticism prefixed to his next 
 published play, tearing Settle's metaphors and grammar to 
 pieces. Settle replied with some spirit, but little effect, and 
 was, in fact, settled for ever. Rochester next patronized 
 Crowne and Otway for a time, but soon gave them up, and 
 contented himself with assailing Dryden more directly in such 
 lampoons as we have quoted. In the year 1679, however, 
 suspecting Dryden to have had a share in the authorship of a 
 poem, then circulating in manuscript; in which certain liberties 
 were taken with his name, he caused him to be way-laid and 
 beaten as he was going home one evening through Rose-alley 
 to his house in Gerard-street. The poem, entitled An Essay 
 on Satire, is usually printed among Dryden's works ; but it 
 remains uncertain whether Dryden was really the author. 
 
 It was fortunate for Dryden and for English literature that, 
 just about this period, when he was beginning to be regarded 
 as a veteran among the dramatists, whose farther services in 
 that department the town could afford to spare, circumstances 
 led him, almost without any wish of his own, into a new path 
 of literature. He was now arrived at the ripe age of fifty 
 years, and, if an inventory had been made of his writings, 
 they would have been found to consist of twenty-one dramas, 
 with a series of critical prose-essays for the most part bound 
 up with these dramas, and nothing in the nature of non- 
 dramatic poetry, except a few occasional pieces, of which the 
 Annus MiraUlis was still the chief. Had a discerning critic 
 examined these works with a view to discover in what pecu- 
 liar vein of verse, Dryden, if he abandoned the drama, might 
 
LITERATURE OP THE RESTORATION. 123 
 
 still do justice to his powers, he would certainly have selected 
 the vein of reflective satire. Of the most nervous and em- 
 phatic lines that could have been quoted from his plays a 
 large proportion would have been found to consist of what 
 may be called maxim metrically expressed ; while, in his 
 dramatic prologues and epilogues, which were always thought 
 among the happiest efforts of his pen, the excellence would 
 have been found to consist in very much the same power of 
 direct didactic declamation applied satirically to the humours, 
 manners, and opinions of the day. Whether any critic, 
 observing all this, would have been bold enough to advise 
 Dryden to take the hint, and quit the drama for satirical, 
 controversial, and didactic poetry, we need not inquire. Cir- 
 cumstances compelled what advice might have failed to bring 
 about. After some twenty years of political stagnation, or 
 rather of political confusion, relieved only by the occasional 
 cabals of leading statesmen, and by rumours of Catholic and 
 Protestant plots, the old Puritan feeling and the general spirit 
 of civil liberty, which the Kestoration had but pent up within 
 the vitals of England, broke forth in a regular and organized 
 form as modem English Whiggism. The controversy had 
 many ramifications, but its immediate phase at that moment 
 was an antagonism of two parties on the question of the 
 succession to the crown after Charles should die — the Tories 
 and Catholics maintaining the rights of the Duke of York as 
 the legal heir ; and the Whigs and Protestants rallying, for 
 want of a better man, round Charles's illegitimate son, the 
 handsome and popular Duke of Monmouth, then a puppet in 
 the hands of Shaftesbury, the recognised leader of the opposi- 
 tion. Charles himself was forced by reasons of state to take 
 part with his brother, and to frown on Monmouth ; but this 
 did not prevent the lords and wits of the time from dis- 
 tributing themselves pretty equally between the two parties, 
 and fighting out the dispute with all the weapons of intrigue 
 and ridicule. Shadwell, Settle, and some other minor poets, 
 lent their pens to the Whigs, and wrote squibs and satires in 
 the Whig service. Lee, Otway, Tate, and others, worked for 
 the Court party. Dryden, as laureate and Tory, had but one 
 
124 DRYDEN, AND THE 
 
 course to take. He plunged into the controversy with the 
 whole force of his genius ; and in November, 1681, when the 
 nation was waiting for the trial of Shaftesbury, then a pri- 
 soner in the Tower, he published his satire of Absalom and 
 AcMtophel, in which, under the thin veil of a story of 
 Absalom's rebellion against his father David, the existing 
 political state of England was represented from the Tory 
 point of view. Among the characters portrayed in it, Dryden 
 had the satisfaction of introducing his old critic, the Duke of 
 Buckingham, upon whom he now took ample revenge. 
 
 The satire of Ahsaloin and AcMtophely than which nothing 
 finer of the kind had ever appeared in England, and which 
 indeed surpassed all that could have been expected even from 
 Dryden at that time, was the first of a series of polemical or 
 satirical poems the composition of which occupied the last 
 eight years of his laureateship. The Medal^ a Satire against 
 Sedition, appeared in March, 1682, as the poet's comment on 
 the popular enthusiasm occasioned by the acquittal of Shaftes- 
 bury ; Mac Flecknoe, in which Shadwell, as poet-in-chief of 
 the Whigs, received a thrashing all to himself, was published 
 in October in the same year ; and, a month later, there 
 appeared the so-called Second Fart of Absalom and Achito])hel, 
 written by Nahum Tate, under Dryden's superintendence, and 
 with interpolations from Dryden's pen. In the same avowed 
 character, as literary champion of the government and the 
 party of the Duke of York, Dryden continued to labour 
 during the remainder of the reign of Charles. His Religio 
 Laid, indeed, produced early in 1683, and forming a metrical 
 statement of the grounds and extent of his own attachment 
 to the Church of England, can hardly have been destined for 
 immediate political service. But the solitary play which he 
 wrote about this period — a tragedy called The Duhe of Guise 
 — was certainly intended for political eficct ; as was also a 
 translation from the French of a work on the history of 
 French Calvinism. 
 
 How ill requited Dryden was for these services appears 
 but too clearly firom evidence proving that, at this time, he 
 was in great pecuniary difficulties. At the time when the 
 
LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION. 125 
 
 king's cast-ofF mistresses were receiving pensions of 10,000Z. 
 a-year, and when 130,000?., or more, was squandered every 
 year on secret court-purposes, Dryden's salary as laureate 
 remained unpaid for four years ; and when, in consequence of 
 his repeated solicitations, an order for part-payment of the 
 arrears was at last issued in May, 1684, it was for the miserable 
 pittance of one quarter's salary, due at midsummer, 1680, 
 leaving fifteen quarters, or 750/. still in arrears. It appears, 
 however, from a document published for the first time by Mr. 
 Bell, that an additional pension of 100?. a-year was at this 
 time conferred on Dryden — that pension to date retrospectively 
 from 1680, and the arrears to be paid, as convenient, along 
 with the larger arrears of salary. How far Dryden benefited 
 by this nominal increase of his emoluments from government, 
 or whether any further portion of the arrears was paid up, 
 while Charles continued on the throne, can hardly be ascer- 
 tained. Charles died in February, 1684-5, and Dryden, as in 
 duty bound, wrote his funeral panegyric. In this Pindaric, 
 which is entitled Threnodia Augustalis, the poet seems to hint, 
 as delicately as the occasion would permit, at the limited 
 extent of his pecuniary obligations to the deceased monarch. 
 
 " As, when the new-born phoenix takes his way, 
 His rich paternal regions to survey, 
 Of airy choristers a numerous train 
 Attends his wondrous progress o'er the plain ; 
 So, rising from his fathers urn, 
 So glorious did our Charles return. 
 The officious muses came along — 
 A gay harmonious choir, like angels ever young ; 
 The muse, that mourns him now, his happy triumph sung. 
 
 Even they coiild thrive in his auspicious reign ; 
 And such a plenteous crop they bore 
 
 Of purest and well-winnowed grain, 
 As Britain never knew before ; 
 
 Though little was their hire, and light their gain. 
 Yet somewhat to their share he threw. 
 Fed from his hand, they sung and flew, 
 Like birds of Paradise, that lived on morning dew. 
 Oh, never let their lays his name forget ! 
 The pension of a prince's praise is great." 
 
 If there was any literary man in whose favour James II. on 
 his accession, might have been expected to relax his parsi- 
 monious habits, it was Dryden. The poet had praised him 
 and made a hero of Idm for twenty years, and had, during 
 
126 DETDEN, AND THE 
 
 the last four years, been working for him incessantly. In 
 acknowledgment of these services, James could not do other- 
 wise than continue him in the laureateship ; but this was all 
 that he seemed inclined to do. In the new patent issued for 
 the purpose, not only was there no renewal of the deceased 
 king's private gTant of lOOZ. a-year, but even the annual butt 
 of sherry, hitherto forming part of the laureate's allowance, 
 was discontinued, and the salary limited to the precise money 
 payment of 2001. a-year. If, as is probable, the salary was 
 now more punctually paid than it had been under Charles, 
 the reduction may have been of less consequence. In March, 
 1685-6, however, James opened his purse, and, by fresh 
 letters patent, conferred on Dryden a permanent additional 
 salary of 1001. a-year, thus raising the" annual income of the 
 laureateship to 300 Z. The explanation of this unusual piece 
 of liberality on the part of James, has been generally supposed 
 to lie in the fact that, in the course of the preceding year, 
 Dryden had proved the thorough and unstinted character of 
 his loyalty, by declaring himself a convert to the king's 
 religion. That Dryden's passing over to the Catholic church 
 was contemporaneous with the increase of his pension, is a 
 fact ; but what may have been the exact relation between the 
 two events is a question which one ought to be cautious in 
 answering. Mr. Macaulay's view of the case is harsh enough. 
 *' Finding," he says, '' that if he continued to call himself 
 a Protestant, his services would be overlooked, he declared 
 himself a Papist. The king's parsimony instantly relaxed. 
 Dryden was gratified with a pension of one hundred pounds 
 a-year, and was employed to defend his new religion both in 
 prose and verse.^' Sir Walter Scott's view is more charitable, 
 and, we believe, more just. He regards Dryden's conversion 
 as having been, in the main, honest to the extent professed 
 by himself, though his situation and expectations may have 
 cooperated to effect it. In support of this view Mr. Bell 
 points out the fact that the pension granted by James, was, 
 after all, only a renewal of a pension granted by Charles, and 
 which, not being secured by letters patent, had lapsed on that 
 king's decease. Dryden, it is also to be remarked, remained 
 
LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION. 127 
 
 sufficiently staunch to his new faith during the rest of his life, 
 and seems even to have felt a kind of comfort in it. Probably, 
 therefore, the true state of the case is, that conformity to the 
 Catholic religion, at the time when Dryden embraced it, was 
 the least troublesome mode of systematizing for his own mind 
 a number of diverse speculations, personal and political, that 
 were then perplexing him; and that, afterwards, in conse- 
 quence of the very obloquy which his change of religion drew 
 upon him from all quarters, he hugged his new creed more 
 closely, so as to coil round him, for the first time in his life, 
 a few threads of private theological conviction. This is not 
 very different from the notion entertained by Sir Walter 
 Scott, who argues that Dryden's conversion was not, except 
 in outward profession, 'a change from Protestant to Catholic 
 belief, but rather like that of Gibbon, a choice of Catholicism 
 as the most convenient resting-place for a mind tired of 
 Pyrrhonism, and disposed to cut short the process of emanci- 
 pation from it by taking a decisive step at once. 
 
 At all events, Dryden showed sufficient polemical energy 
 in the service of the religion which he had adopted. He 
 became James's literary factotum, the defender in prose and 
 in verse of the worst measures of his rule ; and was ready to 
 do battle with Stillingfleet, Burnet, or any one else that dared 
 to use a pen on the other side. As if to make the highest 
 display of his powers as a versifier at a time when his 
 character as a man was lowest, he published, in 1687, his 
 controversial allegory of The Hind and the Panther ^ by far 
 the largest and most elaborate of all his original poems. In 
 this poem, in which the various churches and sects of the day 
 figure as beasts — the Church of Eome as a " milk-white 
 hind,^' innocent and unchanged ; the Church of England as 
 a " panther,^^ spotted, but still beautiful ; Presbyterianism as 
 a haggard ugly " wolf;'' Independency as the " bloody bear ;" 
 the Baptists as the "bristled boar;'' the Unitarians as the 
 " false fox ;" the Freethinkers as the " buffoon ape ; " and the 
 Quakers as the timid " hare " — Dryden showed that, whatever 
 his new faith had done for him, it had not changed his genius 
 for satire. In fact, precisely as daring the reign of Janres, 
 
128 
 
 Dryden appears personally as a solitary giant, warring on the 
 wrong side, so this poem remains as the sole literary work of 
 any excellence in which the wretched spirit of that reign is 
 fully represented. Dryden himself, as if he had thrown all 
 his force into it, wrote little else in verse till the year 1688, 
 when, on the occasion of the birth of James's son, afterwards 
 the Pretender, he made himself the spokesman of the exulting 
 Catholics, and published his Britannia Rediviva, 
 
 " See how the venerable infant lies 
 In early pomp ; how through the mother's eyes 
 The father's soul, with an undaunted view, 
 Looks out, and takes our homage as his due. 
 See on his future subjects how he smiles, 
 Nor meanly flatters, nor with craft beguiles ; 
 But with an open face, as on his throne. 
 Assures our birthrights, and secures his own." 
 
 Within a few months after these lines were written, the 
 father, the mother, and the baby were turned out of England ; 
 Dutch William was king ; and the Whigs had it all to them- 
 selves. Dryden, as a matter of course, had to give up the 
 laureateship ; and, as William had but a small choice of poets, 
 Shadwell was the person put in his place. 
 
 The concluding period of Dryden's career, extending from 
 the Revolution to his death in 1700, exhibits him as a Tory 
 patriarch lingering in the midst of a Whig generation, and 
 still, despite the change of dynasty, retaining his literary pre- 
 eminence. For a while, of course, he was under a cloud ; but 
 after it had passed away, he was at liberty to make his own 
 terms with the public. The country, indeed, could have no 
 literature except what he and such as he chose to furnish. 
 Locke, Sir William Temple, and others were now in a posi- 
 tion to bring forward speculations smothered during the pre- 
 vious reigns, and to scatter seeds that might spring up in new 
 literary forms. Burnet, Tillotson, and others might represent 
 Whiggism in the church. But all the literary men, especially 
 such, whose services were available at the beginning of the 
 new reign, were men who, whatever might be their volun- 
 tary relations to the new order of things, had been more or 
 less trained in the school of the Restoration, and accustomed 
 to the supremacy of Dryden. The Earl of Rochester, the 
 
LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION. 129 
 
 Earl of Roscommon, the Duke of Buckingham, Etherege, the 
 dramatist, and poor Otwaj, were dead ; but Shadwell, Settle, 
 Lee, Crowne, Tate, Wycherley, the Earl of Dorset, Tom 
 D'Urfey, and Sir Charles Sedlej, were still alive. Shadwell, 
 coarse and fat as ever, enjoyed the laureateship till his death, 
 in 1692, when Nahum Tate was appointed to succeed him. 
 Settle had degenerated into the City sliowman. Lee, liberated 
 from Bedlam, continued to wi'ite tragedies till April, 1692, 
 when he tumbled over a bulk going home drunk at night 
 through Clare Market, and was killed or stifled among the 
 snow. Little starched Johnny Crowne kept up the respect- 
 ability of his character. Wycherley lived as a,infinr of fashion 
 about town, and wi'ote no more. Sedley and the Earl of 
 Dorset were also idle ; and Tom D'Urfey made small witti- 
 cisms, and called them " pills to purge melancholy.^' Among 
 such men Dry den, so long as he cared to be seen among 
 them, held necessarily his old place. Nor were there any of 
 the younger men, as yet known, in whom the critics recognised, 
 or who recognised in themselves, any title to renounce allegi- 
 ance to the ex-laureate. Thomas Southerne had begun his 
 prolific career as a dramatist in 1682, when Dryden furnished 
 him with a prologue to his first play ; but, though after the 
 Revolution he made more money by his dramas than ever 
 Dryden had made by his, he was ashamed to admit the fact 
 to Pry den himself. Matthew Prior, twenty -four years of age 
 at the Revolution, had made his first literary appearance 
 before it, in no less important a character than that of one of 
 Dryden's political antagonists; but though The Town and 
 Country Mouse had been a decided hit, and Dryden himself 
 was said to have winced under it, no one pretended that the 
 author was anything more than a clever young man, who had 
 sat in Dryden's company, and turned his opportunities to 
 account. Five years after the Revolution, Congreve produced 
 his first comedy at the age of twenty-four ; but it was Con- 
 greve' s greatest boast in after life, that that comedy had won 
 him the warm praises of Dryden, and laid the foundation of 
 the extraordinary friendship which had subsisted between 
 them during Dryden's last years, when they used to walk 
 
 K 
 
130 DRYDEN, AND THE 
 
 together and dine together as father and son. During these 
 last years Drjden, had he been willing to see merit in any- 
 other comedies than those of his young friend Congreve, 
 might have hailed his equal in Vanbrugh, and his superior in 
 Farquhar, then beginning to write for the stage. Among 
 their coevals, destined to some distinction, he might have 
 marked CoUey Gibber, Nicholas Rowe, and John Philips, 
 the pleasing parodist of Milton. Of the epics of Blackmore 
 he had quite enough ; at least three of those immense perform- 
 ances having been given to the world before Dryden died. 
 At the time of Dryden' s death, his kinsman, Jonathan Swift, 
 was thirty-three years of age; Richard Steele was thirty; 
 Daniel Defoe was thirty ; Addison was twenty-nine ; Shaftes- 
 bury, the essayist, was twenty-nine ; Bolingbroke was twenty- 
 two; and Parnell the poet, twenty-one. With these men 
 a new literary movement was to take its origin ; but they had 
 hardly yet begun their work ; and there was not one of them, 
 Swift excepted, that would not, in the height of his subsequent 
 fame, have been proud to acknowledge his obligations to 
 Dryden. Alexander Pope, the next Englishman that was to 
 take a place in general literature as high, or nearly as high as 
 that occupied by Dryden, had been born only in the year o 
 the Revolution, and was consequently but a precocious boy of 
 twelve when Dryden left the scene. VirgiUum tantum viditj 
 as he used himself to say. 
 
 Living, a hale patriarch, among these newer men, Dryden 
 partly influenced them, and was partly influenced by them. 
 (.)n the one hand, it was from his chair in WilPs Coflee-house 
 that those literary decrees were issued which still ruled the 
 judgment of the town ; and for a young author, on visiting 
 Will's, to receive a pinch from Dryden' s snuff'-box, was equi- 
 valent to his formal admission into that society of wits. On 
 the other hand, the times were so changed and the men were 
 so changed, that Dryden, dictator as he w^as, had to yield in 
 some points, and defend himself in others. His cousin Swift, 
 whom he had offended by an unfavourable judgment given in 
 private on some of his poems, was the only man who would 
 have made a wholesale attack upon his literary reputation ; 
 
LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION. 131 
 
 but the moral character of his writings was a subject on which 
 adverse criticism was likely to be more general. At first, 
 indeed, there was little perceptible improvement in the moral 
 tone of the literature of the Revolution, as compared with that 
 of the Restoration — the elder dramatists, such as Shadwell, 
 still writing in the fashion to which they had been accustomed ; 
 and the younger ones, such as Congreve and Yanbrugh, 
 deeming it a point of honour to be as immoral as their prede- 
 cessors. In the course of a few years, however, what with the 
 influence of a Whig court, what with other causes, a purer 
 and more delicate taste crept in ; and people became ashamed 
 of what their fathers had delighted in. Dry den lived to see 
 the beginnings of this important change, and, with many 
 expressions of regret for his own past delinquencies in this 
 respect, to welcome the appearance of a chaster literature. 
 
 Those of Dryden's writings, which were produced during 
 the twelve years of his life subsequent to the Revolution, con- 
 stitute an important part of his literary remains, not merely in 
 point of bulk, but also in respect of a certain general peculi- 
 arity of their character. They may be described as for the 
 most part belonging to the department of pure, as distinct 
 from that of controversial, literature. Dryden did not indeed 
 wholly abandon satire and controversy after the Revolution ; 
 but his aim after that period seemed rather to be to produce 
 such literature as would at once be acceptable to the public, 
 and earn for himself the most money with the least trouble. 
 Deprived of his laureateship, and so rendered almost entirely 
 dependent on his pen, at a time when age was creeping upon 
 him, and the expenses of his family were greater than ever, 
 he was obliged to make considerations of economy paramount 
 in his choice of work. As was natural, he fell back at first 
 on the drama ; and his five last plays, two of which are trage- 
 dies, one an opera, and two comedies, were all produced 
 between 1689 and 1694. The profits of these dramas, how- 
 ever, were insufficient, and he was obliged to eke them out by 
 all those devices of dedication to private noblemen, execution 
 of literary commissions for elegiac poems and the like, which 
 then formed part of the professional author's means of liveli- 
 
 k2 
 
132 ." DRYDEN, AND THE 
 
 hood. Sums of 50?., lOOZ., and even, in one or two cases, 
 500/., were earned by Drjden in this disagreeable way from 
 earls, squires, and clubs of gentlemen. His poem of Eleonora 
 was a 500?. commission, executed for the Earl of Abingdon, 
 who wanted a poem in memory of his deceased wife, and, 
 without knowing anything of Dryden personally, applied to 
 him to write it ; just as now, in a similar case, a commission 
 might be given to a popular sculptor for a ^ost mortem statue. 
 In spite of the utmost allowance for the custom of the time, 
 no one, knowing the circumstances, can read the poem now 
 without absolute disgust ; and, unwilling as we are to think 
 so, it does show a certain lowness of mind in Dryden to have 
 been able, under any pressure of necessity, to write for hire 
 such extravagances as that poem contains respecting a person 
 he had never seen. Far more honourable were Dryden's 
 earnings from work done for Jacob Tonson, the publisher. 
 His dealings with Tonson had begun before the Revolution ; 
 but, after the Eevolution, Tonson was his mainstay. First 
 came several volumes of miscellanies, consisting of select 
 poems, published and unpublished, with scraps of prose and 
 translation. Then, catching at the hint furnished by the 
 success of some of the scraps of translation from the Latin 
 and Greek poets, Dryden and Tonson found it mutually 
 advantageous to prosecute that vein. Juvenal and Persius 
 were translated under Dryden's care ; and in 1697, after three 
 years of labour, he gave to the world his completed translation 
 of Virgil. Looking about for a task to succeed this, he under- 
 took to furnish Tonson with so many thousand lines of narra- 
 tive verse, to be published under the title of Fables, Where 
 the fables came from Tonson did not care, provided they 
 would sell ; and Dryden, with his rapid powers of versifica- 
 tion, soon produced versions of some tales of Chaucer and 
 Boccaccio which answered the purpose exceedingly well. 
 •They were printed in 1699. Of the other poems written by 
 Dryden in his last years, his Alexander s Feast is the roost 
 celebrated. He continued his literary labours till within 
 a few days of his death, which happened on the 1st of May, 
 1700. 
 
LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION. 133. 
 
 When we inquire what it is that makes Dryden's name so 
 important as to entitle it to rank, as it seems to do, the fifth 
 in the series of great English poets after Chaucer, Spenser, 
 Shakespeare, and Milton, we find that it is nothing else than 
 the fact, brought out in the preceding sketch, that, steadily and 
 industriously, for a period of forty-two years, he kept in the 
 front of the national literature, such as it then was. It is 
 because he represents the entire literary development of the 
 Eestoration ; it is because he fills up, as it were, the whole 
 interval between 1658 and 1700 — thus connecting the age of 
 Puritanism and Milton, with the age of the Queen Anne wits 
 — that we give him such a place in such a list. The reason is 
 a chronological one, rather than one of strict comparison of 
 personal merits. Though we place Dryden fifth in the list 
 after Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, it is not 
 necessarily because we regard him as the co-equal of those 
 men in genius ; it is only because, passing onward in time, 
 his is the next name of very distinguished magnitude after 
 theirs. Personally there is no one that would compare 
 Dryden with Shakespeare or Milton ; and perhaps there are 
 not many now that would compare him with Chaucer or 
 Spenser. On the whole, if the estimate be one of general 
 intellectual strength, he takes rank only with the first of the 
 second class, as with the Jonsons, the Fletchers, and others 
 of the Elizabethan age ; while if the estimate have regard 
 to genuine poetic or imaginative power, he sinks below 
 even these. Yet, if historical reasons only^' are regarded, 
 Dryden has perhaps a better right to his place in the list than 
 any of the others. At least as strictly as Chaucer is the 
 representative of the English literature of the latter half of 
 the fourteenth century, far more strictly than Spenser and 
 Shakespeare are the representatives of the literature of their 
 times, and in a more broad and obvious manner than Milton 
 is the literary representative of the Commonwealth, Dryden 
 represents the literary activity of the reigns of Charles and 
 James, and of the greater part of that of King William. 
 Davenant, Butler, Waller, Etherege, Otway, Wycherley, 
 Southerne, Prior, and Congreve, are names leading us piece- 
 
134 DRYDEN, AND THE 
 
 meal, as it were, over tlie same period, and illustrating perliaps 
 more exquisitely than Dryden some of its individual charac- 
 teristics ; but for a solid representative of the period as a 
 whole, resuming in himself all its more prominent character- 
 istics in one substantial aggregate, we are obliged to take 
 Dryden. Twelve years of his literary life he laboured as a 
 strong junior among the Davenants, the Butlers, and the 
 Wallers, qualifying himself to set them aside ; eighteen years 
 more were spent in acknowledged lordship over the Ethereges, 
 Otways, and Wycherleys, who occupied the middle of the 
 period; and during the twelve concluding years, he was a 
 patriarch among the Southernes, and Priors, and Congreves, 
 in whose lives the period wove itself into the next. 
 
 And yet, personally, as well as historically, Dryden is a 
 man of no mean importance. Not only is he the largest 
 figu rein one epoch of our literature ; he is a very considerable 
 figure also in our literature as a whole. To begin with the 
 most obvious, but at the same time not the least noteworthy 
 of his claims, the quantity of his contributions to our lite- 
 rature was large. He was a various and voluminous writer. 
 In Scott's collected edition of his works, they fill seventeen 
 octavo volumes. About seven of these volumes consist of 
 dramas, with accompanying prefaces and dedications, the 
 number of dramas being in all twenty-eight. Two volumes 
 more embrace the polemical poems, the satires, and the poems 
 of contemporary historical allusion, written chiefly between 
 1681 and 1683. One volume is filled with odes, songs, and 
 lyrical pieces, written at various times. The fables, or metri- 
 cal tales, redacted in his old age from Chaucer and Boccaccio, 
 occupy a volume and a half. Three volumes and a half are 
 devoted to the translations from the classic poets, including 
 Virgil. The remaining two volumes consist of miscellaneous 
 prologues, epilogues, and witty pieces of verse, and of miscel- 
 laneous prose-writings, original and translated, including the 
 critical essay on dramatic poetry. Considered as a whole, the 
 matter of the seventeen volumes is a goodly contribution from 
 one man as respects both extent and variety. Spread over 
 forty-two years, it does not argue that excessive industry 
 
 \ 
 
r 
 
 LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION. 135 
 
 which Scott, of all men in the world, has found in it ; but it 
 fairly entitles Dryden to take his place among those writers 
 who deserve regard for the quantity of their writings, in 
 addition to whatever regard they may be entitled to on the 
 score of quality. And it is a fact worth noting, that most 
 writers who have taken a high place in literature have been 
 voluminous — have not only written well, but have written 
 much. There are two ways, also, of writing much. One 
 may write much variously, or one may write much all of one 
 kind. Dryden was various as well as voluminous. 
 
 Of all that Dryden wrote, however, there is but a com- 
 paratively small portion that has won for itself a permanent 
 place in our literature; and in this Dryden differs from 
 other writers who have been equally voluminous. In other 
 words, it is a significant circumstance about Dryden that the 
 proportion of that part of his matter which survives, or 
 deserves to survive, to that part which was squandered away 
 on the age it was first written for, and there ended, is un- 
 usually small. In Shakespeare, there is very little tliat is felt 
 to be of such inferior quality as not to be worth reading in 
 due time and place. In Milton, there is, if we consider only 
 his poetry, still less. All Chaucer, almost, is felt to be worth 
 preservation by those who like Chaucer ; all Wordsworth, 
 almost, by those who like Wordsworth. But, except for 
 library purposes, there is no admirer of Dryden that would 
 care to save more than a small select portion of what he 
 wrote. His satires and polemical poems ; one or two of his 
 odes ; his translation of Virgil ; his fables ; one of his 
 comedies, and one of his tragedies, by way of specimen of his 
 dramatic powers ; a complete set of his prologues, for the sake 
 of their allusions to contemporary manners and humours ; 
 and a few pieces of his prose, to show his style of criticism — 
 these would together form a collection not much more than a 
 fourth part of the whole, and which would require to be yet 
 farther winnowed, were the purpose to leave only what was 
 sterling and in Dryden's best manner. Mr. Bell's edition, 
 which comprises in three volumes all Dryden's original non- 
 dramatic poetry, and the best collection of his prologues and 
 
136 DRYDEN, AND THE 
 
 epilogues yet made, is itself a surfeit of matter. It is exactly 
 such an edition of Dryden as ought to be included in a series 
 of the English poets intended to be complete ; but even in it 
 there is more of dross than of ore. 
 
 What is the reason of this? How is it that in Dryden, 
 the proportion of what is now rubbish to what is still precious 
 as a literary possession is so much greater than in most other 
 writers of great celebrity ? There are two reasons for it. The 
 first is, that originally, and in its own nature, much of the 
 matter that Dryden put forth was not of a kin J for which his 
 genius was fitted. Whatever his own imagination con- 
 structed on the large scale was mean and conventional. 
 Wherever, as in his translations of Virgil and his imitations 
 of Chaucer and Boccaccio, he employed his powers of lan- 
 guage and verse in refurbishing matter invented by others, 
 the poetical substance of his writings is valuable ; but the 
 sheer produce of his own imagination, as in his dramas, is in 
 general such stuff as nature disowns, and no creature can 
 take pleasure in. There is no fine power of dramatic story, 
 no exquisite invention of character or circumstance, no truth 
 to nature in ideal landscape: at the utmost, there is con- 
 ventional dramatic situation, with an occasional flash of 
 splendid dubious imagery such as may be struck out in the 
 heat of heroic declamation. Thus — 
 
 " I am as free as Nature first made man, 
 Ere the base laws of servitude began, 
 When wild in woods the noble savage ran." 
 
 Dryden's natural powers, as all his critics have remarked, lay 
 not so much in the imaginative as in the didactic, the decla- 
 matory, and the ratiociuative. What Johnson claims for 
 him, and what seems to have been claimed for him in his own 
 lifetime, was the credit of being one of the best reasoners 
 in verse that ever wrote. Mr. Macaulay means very much the 
 same thing when he calls Dryden a great " critical poet," and 
 the founder of the '' critical school of English poetry." Pro- 
 bably Milton meant something of the kind, when he said 
 that Dryden was a rhymer, but no poet. It was in decla- 
 matory and didactic rhyme, with all that could consist with 
 
^ 
 
 LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION. 137 
 
 it, that Dryden excelled. It was in the metrical utterance of 
 weighty sentences, in the metrical conduct of an argument, 
 in vehement satirical invective, and in such passages of lyric 
 passion as depended for their effect on rolling grandeur of 
 sound, that he was pre-eminently great. Even his imagina- 
 tion worked more powerfully, and his perceptions of physical 
 circumstance became keener and truer, under the influence of 
 polemical rage, the pursuit of terse maxim, or the passion for 
 sonorous declamation. Thus — 
 
 " And every shekel which he can receive 
 Shall cost a limb of his prerogative." 
 
 Or, in his character of Shaftesbury, — 
 
 ** Of these the false Achitophel was first : 
 A name to all succeeding ages curst ; 
 For close designs and crooked counsels fit ; 
 Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit ; 
 Restless, unfix'd in principles and place ; 
 In power unpleased, impatient of disgrace ; 
 A fiery soul, which, working out its way, 
 Fretted the pigmy body to decay. 
 And o'er-iuform'd the tenement of clay. 
 A daring pilot in extremity, 
 
 Pleased with the danger when the waves went high, 
 He sought the storn'o; but, for a calm unfit. 
 Would steer too nigh the sands, to boast his wit. 
 Great wits are sure to madness near allied, 
 And thin partitions do their bounds divide." 
 
 Or, in the lines which he sent to Tonson the publisher as a 
 specimen of what he could do in the way of portrait-painting, 
 if Tonson did not send him supplies — 
 
 " With leering looks, bull-faced, and freckled fair, 
 With two left legs, and Judas-coloured hair, 
 And frowzy pores, that taint the ambient air." 
 
 And, again, in every passage in the noble ode on Alexander's 
 
 Feast, as thus — 
 
 ** With ravished ears 
 The monarch hears; 
 Assvmies the god, 
 Affects to nod. 
 And seems to shake the spheres." 
 
 In satire, in critical disquisition, in aphoristic verse, or in 
 lyrical grandiloquence, Dryden was in his natural element ; 
 and one reason why, of all the matter of his voluminous 
 works, so small a portion is of permanent literary value, is 
 
138 DRYDEN, AND THE 
 
 that, in his attempts after literary variety, he could not or 
 would not restrict himself within these proper limits of his 
 genius. 
 
 But, besides this, Dryden was a slovenly worker within his 
 own field. Even of what he could do best, he did little con- 
 tinuously in a thoroughly careful manner. In his best poem, 
 there are not twenty consecutive lines without some logical 
 incoherence, some confusion of metaphor, some inaccuracy of 
 language, or some evident strain of the meaning for the sake 
 of the metre. His strength lies in passages and weighty 
 interspersed lines, not in whole poems. Even in Dryden^s 
 lifetime this complaint was made. It was hinted at in 
 The Rehearsal; Rochester speaks of Dry den's "slattern 
 muse;" and Blackmore, who criticised Dryden in his old 
 age, expresses the common opinion distinctly and deli- 
 berately — 
 
 " Into the melting-pot wTien Dryden comes, 
 What horrid stench will rise, what noisome fumes ! 
 How will he shrink, when all his lewd allay, 
 And wicked mixture, shall be purged away ? 
 When once his boasted heaps ai*e melted down, 
 A chest-full scarce will yield one sterling crown ; 
 But what remains will be so pure, 'twill bear 
 The examination of the most severe." 
 
 This is true, though it was Blackmore who said it. We 
 think, however, that Dryden's slovenliness consisted not so 
 much in a disposition to spare pains, as in a constitutional 
 robustness which rendered artistic perfection all but impos- 
 sible to him, even when he laboured hardest to attain it. Our 
 notion of Dryden is that he was originally a robust man, who, 
 when he first engaged in poetry, could produce nothing better 
 than strong stanzas of rather wooden sound and mechanism ; 
 who, by dint of perseverance and continual work, however, 
 drilled his genius into higher susceptibility, and a conscious 
 aptitude and mastery in certain directions ; and who, the 
 older he grew, became mellower, more musical, and more 
 imaginative, simply because what had been robustness at first 
 had by long practice been subdued and welded into flexibility 
 and nerve. It is stated of Dryden, that in his earlier life, at 
 least, he used, as a preparation for writing, to induce on him- 
 
LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION. 139 
 
 self an artificial state of languor, by taking medicine or let- 
 ting blood. The trait, we think, is characteristic. Dryden's 
 whole literary career was but a metaphor of it. Had he died 
 before 1670, or even before 1681, when his Annus Mirahilis 
 was still his most ambitious production, he would have been 
 remembered as little more than a robust versifier ; but, living 
 as he did till 1700, he performed work which has entitled 
 him to rank among English poets. As a contributor to the 
 actual body of our literature, and as a man who produced by 
 his influence a lasting efiect on its literary methods, Dryden's 
 place is certainly high ; and we are glad to see a new edition 
 of his poems so admirably edited, and put forth under such 
 good auspices. 
 
DEAN SWIFT/ 
 
 In dividing the history of English literature into periods, it is 
 customary to take the interval between the year 1688 and the 
 year 1727 as constituting one of those periods. This interval 
 includes the reigns of William III., Anne, and George I. If 
 we do not bind ourselves too precisely to the year 1727 as 
 closing the period, the division is proper enough. There are 
 characteristics about the time thus marked out, which distin- 
 guish it from previous and from subsequent portions of our 
 literary history. Dryden, Locke, and some other notabilities 
 of the Kestoration, lived into this period, and may be regarded 
 as partly belonging to it ; but the names more peculiarly 
 representing it are those of Swift, Burnet, Addison, Steele, 
 Pope, Shaftesbury, Gay, Arbuthnot, Atterbury, Prior, Parnell, 
 Bolingbroke, Congreve, Vanbrugh, Farquhar, Eowe, Defoe, 
 and Gibber. The names in this cluster disperse themselves 
 over the three reigns which the period includes, some of them 
 having already been known as early as the accession of 
 William, while others survived the first George, and continued 
 to add to their celebrity during the reign of his successor; but 
 the most brilliant portion of the period was from 1702 to 1714 
 or thereby, when Queen Anne was on the throne. Hence 
 the name of " wits of Queen Anne's reign," commonly applied 
 to the writers of the whole period. 
 
 A while ago this used to be spoken of as the golden or 
 Augustan age of English literature. We do not talk in that 
 manner now. We feel that when we get among the authors 
 of the times of Queen Anne and the first George, we are 
 
 * British Quarterly Eeview, October, 1854.— 1. The English Humourists 
 of the Eighteenth Century. A Series of Lectures. By W. M. Thackeray. 
 London: 1853. 
 
 2. The Ufe of Swift. By Sir Walter Scott. Edinburgh : 1848. 
 
DEAN SWIFT. 141 
 
 among very pleasant and very clever men, but by no means 
 among giants.^ In coming down to this period from those 
 going before it, we have an immediate sensation of having 
 left the region of '' greatness" behind us. We still find plenty 
 of good writing, characterised by certain qualities of trimness, 
 artificial gi-ace, and the like, to a degree not before attained; 
 here and there also, we discern something like real power and 
 strength, breaking through the prevailing element ; but, on 
 the whole, there is an absence of what, except by a compro- 
 mise of language, could be called '* great." It is the same 
 whether we regard largeness of imaginative faculty, loftiness 
 of moral spirit, or vigour of speculative capacity, as principally 
 concerned in imparting the character of " greatness" to litera- 
 ture. What of genius in the ideal survived the seventeenth 
 century in England, contented itself with nice little imagina- 
 tions of scenes and circumstances connected with the artificial 
 life of the time ; the moral quality most in repute was kind- 
 liness or courtesy ; and speculation did not go beyond that 
 point where thought retains the form either of ordinary good 
 sense, or of keen momentary wit. No sooner, in fact, do we pass 
 the time of Milton, than we feel that we have done with the 
 sublimities. A kind of lumbering largeness does remain in the 
 intellectual gait of Dryden and his contemporaries, as if the 
 age still wore the armour of the old literary forms, though not 
 at home in it ; but in Pope's days, even the afiectation of the 
 " great'^ had ceased. Not slowly to build up a grand poem of 
 continuous ideal action, not quietly and at leisure to weave 
 forth tissues of fantastic imagery, not perseveringly and labo- 
 riously to prosecute one track of speculation and bring it to a 
 close, not earnestly and courageously to throw one's whole soul 
 into a work of moral agitation and reform, was now what was 
 regarded as natural in literature. On the contrary, he was a 
 wit, or a literary man, who, living in the midst of the social 
 bustle, or on the skirts of it, could throw forth in the easiest 
 manner, little essays, squibs, and j'eux d'es^rit, pertinent to 
 the rapid occasions of the hour, and never tasking tlie mind 
 too long or too much. This was the time when that great 
 distinction between Whiggism and Toryism, which, for a 
 
142 DEAN SWIFT. 
 
 century-and-a-half has existed in Great Britain as a kind of 
 permanent social condition, affecting the intellectual activity 
 of all natives from the moment of their birth, first began to 
 be practically operative. It has, on the whole, been a wretched 
 thing for the mind of England to have had this necessity of 
 being either a Whig or a Tory put so prominently before it. 
 Perhaps, in all times, some similar necessity of taking one 
 side or the other in some current form of controversy has 
 afilicted the leading minds, and tormented the more genial 
 among them ; but we question if ever in this country in pre- 
 vious times there was a form of controversy, so little to be 
 identified, in real reason, with the one only true controversy 
 between good and evil, and so capable, therefore, of breeding 
 confusion and mischief, when so identified in practice, as this 
 poor controversy of Whig and Tory which came in with the 
 Eevolution. To be called upon to be either a Puritan or a 
 Cavalier — there was some possibility of complying with that 
 call, and still leading a tolerably free and large intellectual life ; 
 though possibly it was one cause of the rich mental development 
 of the Elizabethan epoch that the men of that time were exempt 
 from any personal obligation of attending even to this dis- 
 tinction. But, to be called upon to be either a Whig or a 
 Tory — why, how on earth can one retain any of the larger 
 humanities about him, if society is to hold him by the neck 
 between two stools such as these, pointing alternately to the one 
 and to the other, and incessantly asking him on which of the 
 two he means to sit ? Into a mind trained to regard adhesive- 
 ness to one or other of these stools as the first rule of duty or 
 of prudence, what thoughts of any high interest can find their 
 way ? Or, if any such do find their way, how are they to be 
 adjusted to so mean a rule ? Now-a-days, our higher spirits 
 solve the difiiculty by kicking both stools down, and plainly 
 telling society that they will not bind themselves to sit on 
 either, or even on both put together. Hence partly it is that, 
 in recent times, we have had renewed specimens of the "great" 
 or " sublime" in literature — the poetry, for example, of a 
 Byron, a Wordsworth, or a Tennyson. But, in the interval 
 between 1688 and 1727, there was not one wit alive whom 
 
DEAN SWIFT. 143 
 
 society let off from the necessity of being, and declaring 
 himself, either a Whig or a Tory. Constitutionally, and by 
 circumstances. Pope was the man who could have most easily 
 obtained the exemption ; but even Pope professed himself a 
 Tory. Addison and Steele were Whigs. In short, every 
 literary man was bound, by the strongest of all motives, to 
 keep in view, as a permanent fact qualifying his literary under- 
 takings, the distinction between Whiggism and Toryism, and 
 to give to at least a considerable part of his writings the 
 character of pamphlets or essays in the service of his party. 
 To minister by the pen to the occasions of Whiggism and 
 Toryism was, therefore, the main business of the wits both in 
 prose and in verse. Out of these occasions of ministration 
 there of course arose personal quarrels, and these furnished 
 fresh opportunities to the men of letters. Critics of previous 
 writings coifld be satirized and lampooned, and thus the circle 
 of subjects was widened. Moreover, there was abundant 
 matter, capable of being treated consistently with either 
 Whiggism or Toryism, in the social foibles and peculiarities 
 of the day, as we see in the Tatler and the Spectator. Nor 
 could a genial mind like that of Steele, a man of taste and 
 fine thought like Addison, and an intellect so keen, exquisite, 
 and sensitive as that of Pope, fail to variegate and surround 
 all the duller and harder literature thus called into being, with 
 more lasting touches of the humorous, the fanciful, the sweet, 
 the impassioned, the meditative, and the ideal. Thus from 
 one was obtained the character of a Sir Roger de Coverley^ 
 from another a Vision of Mirza, and from the third a Windsor 
 Forest, an Epistle of Heloise, and much else that delights us 
 still. After all, however, it remains true that the period of 
 English literature now in question, whatever admirable charac- 
 teristics it may possess, exhibits a remarkable deficiency of 
 what, with recollections of former periods to guide us in our 
 use of CDithets, we should call great or sublime. 
 
 With the single exception of Pope, and excepting him only 
 out of deference to his peculiar position as the poet or metri- 
 cal artist of his day, the greatest name in the history of 
 English literature during the early part of last century is that 
 
144 DEAN SWIFT. 
 
 of Swift. In certain fine and deep qualities, Addison and 
 Steele and perhaps Farquhar excelled him, just as in the 
 succeeding generation Goldsmith had a finer vein of genius 
 than was to be found in Johnson with all his massiveness ; 
 but in natural brawn and strength, in original energy and 
 force and imperiousness of brain, he excelled them all. It 
 was about the year 1702, when he was already thirty-five 
 years of age, that this strangest specimen of an Irishman, or 
 of an Englishman born in Ireland, first attracted attention in 
 London literary circles. The scene of his first appearance 
 was Button's cofiee-house ; the witnesses were Addison, 
 Ambrose Philips, and other wits, belonging to Addison's 
 little senate, who used to assemble there. 
 
 " They had for several successive days observed a strange clergyman come 
 into the coffee-house, who seemed utterly unacquainted with any of those who 
 frequented it, and whose custom it was to lay his hat down on a table, and 
 walk backward and forward at a good pace for half an hour or an hour, with- 
 out speaking to any mortal, or seeming in the least to attend to anything that 
 was going forward there. He then used to take up his hat, pay his money at 
 the bar, and walk away without opening his lips. After having observed this 
 singular behaviour for some time, they concluded him to be out. of his senses ; 
 and the name that he went by among them, was that of the * mad parson.' 
 This made them more than usually attentive to his motions ; and one evening, 
 as Mr. Addison and the rest were observing him, they saw him cast his eyes 
 several times on a gentleman in boots, who seemed to be just come out of the 
 country, and at last advance towards him as intending to address him. They 
 were all eager to hear what this dumb mad parson had to say, and imme- 
 diately quitted their seats to get near him. Swift went up to the country 
 gentleman, and in a very abrupt manner, without any previous salute, asked 
 him, 'Pray, sir, do you remember any good weather in the world?' The 
 countiy gentleman, after staring a little at the singularity of his manner, and 
 the oddity of the question, answered, ' Yes, sir, I thank God I remember a 
 great deal of good weather in my time.' ' That is more,' said Swift, * than I 
 can say ; I never remember any weather that was not too hot or too cold, too 
 wet or too dry ; but, however God Almighty contrives it, at the end of the 
 year 'tis all very well.' Upon saying this, he took up his hat, and without 
 uttering a syllable more, or taking the least notice of any one, walked out of 
 the coffee-house ; leaving all those who had been spectators of this odd scene 
 staring after him, and still more confirmed in the opinion of his being mad." — 
 Dr., Sheridan's I/ife of Swift, quoted in Scott's Life. 
 
 If the company present had had sufficient means of inform- 
 ation, they would have found that the mad parson with the 
 harsh swarthy features, and eyes " azure as the heavens," 
 whose oddities thus amused them, was Jonathan Swift, then 
 clergyman of Laracor, a rural parish in the diocese of Meath 
 in Ireland. They would have found that he was an Irishman 
 by birth, though of pure English descent ; that he could trace 
 
DEAN SWIFT. 145 
 
 a relationship to Drjden ; tliat, being Ibom after his father's 
 death, he had been educated, at the expense of his relatives, 
 at Trinity College, Dublin; that, leaving Ireland in his 
 twenty-second year, and with but a sorry character from the 
 College authorities, he had been received as a humble depen- 
 dent into the family of Sir William Temple, at Sheen and 
 Moorpark, near London, that courtly Whig and ex-ambassador 
 being distantly connected with his mother's family ; that here, 
 while acting as Sir William's secretary, amanuensis, librarian, 
 and what not, he had begun to write verses and other trifles, 
 some of which he had shown to Dryden, who had told him in 
 reply that they were sad stuff, and that he would never be a 
 poet ; that still, being of a restless, ambitious temper, he had 
 not given up hopes of obtaining introduction into public em- 
 ployment in England through Sir William Temple's influence; 
 that, at length, at the age of twenty-eight, despairing of any- 
 thing, better, he had quarrelled with Sir William, returned to 
 Ireland, taken priest's orders, and settled in a living; that 
 again, disgusted with Ireland and his prospects in that 
 country, he had come back to Moorpark, and resided there 
 till 1699, when Sir William's death had obliged him finally 
 to return to Ireland, and accept first a chaplaincy to Lord 
 Justice Berkeley, and then his present living in the diocese of 
 Meath. If curious about the personal habits of this restless 
 Irish parson, they might have found that he had already won 
 the reputation of an eccentric in his own parish and district ; 
 performing his parochial duties when at home with scrupulous 
 care, yet by his language and manners often shocking all ideas 
 of clerical decorum, and begetting a doubt as to his sincerity 
 in the religion he professed ; boisterous, fierce, overbearing, 
 and insulting to all about him, yet often doing acts of real 
 kindness ; exact and economical in his management of money 
 to the verge of actual parsimony, yet, on occasion, spending 
 his money freely, and never without pensioners living on his 
 bounty. They would have found that he was habitually 
 irritable, and that he was subject to a recurring giddiness of 
 the head, or vertigo, which he had brought on, as he thought 
 himself, by a surfeit of fruit while staying with Sir William 
 
 L 
 
146 DEAN SWIFT. 
 
 Temple, at Sheen. And, what might have been the best 
 bit of gossip of all, they would have foimd that, though un- 
 married, and entertaining a most unaccountable and violent 
 aversion to the very idea of marriage, he had taken over to 
 reside with him, or close to his neighbourhood, in Ireland, 
 a certain young and beautiful girl, named Hester Johnson, 
 with whom he had formed an acquaintance in Sir William 
 Temple's house, where she had been brought up, and where, 
 though she passed as a daughter of Sir William's steward, 
 she was believed to be, in reality, a natural daughter of Sir 
 William himself. They would have found that his relations 
 to this girl, whom he had himself educated from her child- 
 hood at Sheen and Moorpark, were of a very singular and 
 puzzling kind; that on the one hand she was devotedly 
 attached to him, and on the other he cherished a passionate 
 affection for her, wrote and spoke of her as his " Stella," and 
 liked always to have her near him; yet that a marriage 
 between them seemed not to be thought of by either ; and 
 that, in order to have her near him without giving rise to 
 scandal, he had taken the precaution to bring over an elderly 
 maiden lady, called Mrs. Dingley, to reside with her as a 
 companion, and was most careful to be in her society only 
 when this Mrs. Dingley was present. 
 
 There was mystery and romance enough, therefore, about 
 the wild, black-browed Irish parson, who attracted the regards 
 of the wits in Button's coffee-house. What had brought him 
 there? That was partly a mystery too; but the mystery 
 would have been pretty well solved if it had been known that, 
 uncouth-looking clerical lout as he was, he was an author 
 like the rest of them, having just written a political pamphlet 
 which was making or was to make a good deal of noise in 
 the world, and having at that moment in his pocket at least 
 one other piece which he was about to publish. The political 
 pamphlet was an Essay on the Civil Discords in Athens and 
 Rome, having an obvious bearing on certain dissensions then 
 threatening to break up the Whig party in Great Britain. 
 It was received as a vigorous piece of writing on the minis- 
 terial side, and was ascribed by some to Lord Somers, and by 
 
p 
 
 DEAN SWIFT. 147 
 
 others to Burnet. Swift had come over to claim it, and to 
 see what it and his former connexion with Temple could do 
 for him among the leading Whigs. For the truth was, an 
 ambition equal to his consciousness of power gnawed at the 
 heart of this furious and gifted man, whom a perverse fate 
 had flung away into an obscure vicarage on the wrong side 
 of the channel. His books, his garden, his canal with its 
 wdllows at Laracor ; his dearly-beloved Koger Coxe, and the 
 other perplexed and admiring parishioners of Laracor over 
 whom he domineered ; his clerical colleagues in the neigh- 
 bourhood ; and even the society of Stella, the wittiest and 
 best of her sex, whom he loved better than any other creature 
 on earth — all these were insufficient to occupy the craving void 
 in his mind. He hated Ireland, and regarded his lot there as 
 one of banishment ; he longed to be in London, and struggling 
 in the centre of whatever was going on. About the date of 
 his appointment to the living of Laracor he had lost the rich 
 deanery of Derry, which Lord Berkeley had meant to give 
 him, in consequence of a notion on the part of the bishop of 
 tlie diocese that he was a resfless, ingenious young man, who, 
 instead of residing, would be " eternally flying backwards and 
 forwards to London." The bishop's perception of his charac- 
 ter was just. At or about the very time that the wits at 
 Button's saw him stalking up and down in the coflee-house, 
 the priest of Laracor was introducing himself to Somers, 
 Halifax, Sunderland, and others, and stating the terms on 
 which he would support the Whigs with his pen. Even 
 then, it seems, he took high ground, and let it be known that 
 he was no mere hireling. The following, written at a much 
 later period, is his own explanation of the nature and limits 
 of his Whiggism, at the time when he first ofiered the Whigs 
 his services : — 
 
 '' It was then (1701-2) I began to trouble myself with the differences 
 between the principles of Whig and Tory ; having formerly employed my- 
 self in other, and, I think, much better speculations. I talked often upon this 
 subject with Lord Somers ; told him that, having been long conversant with 
 the Greek and Latin authors, and therefore a lover of liberty, I found myselt 
 much inclined to be what they call a Whig in politics; and that, besides, 
 I thought it impossible, upon any other principles, to defend or submit to tne 
 Revolution ; but as to religion, I confessed myself to be a High-Churchman, 
 
 l2 
 
148 DEAN SWIFT. 
 
 and that I could not conceive how any one who wore the habit of a 
 clergyman could be otherwise : that I had observed very well with what in- 
 solence and haughtiness some lords of the High Church party treated not 
 only their own chaplains, but all other clergymen whatsoever, and thought 
 this was sufficiently recompensed by their professions of zeal to the Church : 
 that I had Hkewise observed how the Whig lords took a direct contrary 
 measure, treated the persons of particular clergymen with particular courtesy, 
 but showed much contempt and ill-will for the order in general : that I knew 
 it was necessary for their party to make their bottom as wide as they could, 
 by taking all denominations of Protestants to be members of their body : that 
 I would not enter into the mutual reproaches made by the violent men on 
 either side : but that the connivance or encouragement given by the Whigs 
 to those writers of pamphlets who reflected upon the whole body of the clergy, 
 without any exception, would unite the Church to one man to oppose them ; 
 and that I doubted his lordship's friends did not consider the consequences 
 of this." 
 
 Even with, these limitations the assistance of so energetic 
 a man as the parson of Laracor was doubtless welcome to the 
 Whigs. His former connexion with the stately old Revolu- 
 tion Whig, Sir William Temple, may have prepared the way 
 for him, as it had already been the means of making him 
 known in some aristocratic families. But there was evidence 
 in his personal bearing and his writings that he was not 
 a man to be neglected. And if there had been any doubt on 
 the subject on his first presentation of himself to ministers, 
 the publication of his Battle of the Boohs and his Tale of a 
 Tub in 1703 and 1704 would have set it overwhelmingly at 
 rest. The author of these works (and though they were 
 anonymous, they were at once referred to Swift) could not 
 but be acknowledged as the first prose satirist, and one of the 
 most formidable writers of the age. On his subsequent visits 
 to Button's, therefore— and they were frequent enough; for, 
 as the Bishop of Derry had foreseen, he was often an absentee 
 from his parish — the mad Irish parson was no longer a 
 stranger to the company. Addison, Steele, Tickell, Philips, 
 and the other Whig wits came to know him well, and to feel 
 his weight among them in their daily convivial meetings. 
 ** To Dr. Jonathan Swift, the most agreeable companion, the 
 truest friend, and the greatest genius of the age," was the 
 inscription written by Addison on a copy of his Travels 
 presented to Swift ; and it shows what opinion Addison and 
 those about him had formed of the author of the Tale of a Tub. 
 
 Thus, passing and repassing between Laracor and London, 
 
DEAN SWIFT. 149 
 
 now lording it over his Irish parishioners, and now filling the 
 literary and Whig haunts of the great metropolis with the 
 terror of his merciless wit and talk behind his back of his 
 eccentricities and rude manners, Swift spent the interval 
 between 1702 and 1710, or between his thirty-sixth and his 
 forty-fourth year. His position as a High-Church Whig, 
 however, was an anomalous one. In the first place, it was 
 difficult to see how such a man could honestly be in the 
 Church at all. People were by no means strict in those 
 days in their notions of the clerical character; but the 
 Tale of a Tub was a strong dose even then to have come from 
 a clergyman. If Voltaire afterwards recommended the book 
 as a masterly satire against religion in general, it cannot be 
 wondered at that an outcry arose among Swift's contem- 
 poraries respecting the profanity of the book. It is true, Peter 
 and Jack, as the representatives of Popery and Presby- 
 terianism, came in for the greatest share of the author's 
 scurrility ; and Martin, as the representative of the Church of 
 England, was left with the honours of the story: but the 
 whole structure and spirit of .i.ne story, to say nothing of the 
 oaths and other irreverences mingled with its language, was 
 well calculated to shock the more serious even of Martin's 
 followers, who could not but see that rank infidelity alone 
 would be a gainer by the book. Accordingly, despite of all 
 that Swift could afterwards do, the fact that he had written 
 this book left a public doubt as to his Christianity. It is 
 quite possible, however, that, with a very questionable kind 
 of belief in Christianity, he may have been a conscientious 
 High-Churchman, zealous for the social defence and aggran- 
 disement of the ecclesiastical institution with which he was 
 connected. Whatever that institution was originally based 
 upon, it existed as part and parcel of the commonwealth of 
 England, rooted in the soil of men's habits and interests, and 
 intertwined with the whole system of social order ; and just 
 as a Bralimin, lax enough in his own speculative allegiance 
 to the Brahminical faith, might still desire to maintain 
 Brahminism as a vast pervading establishment in Hindostan, 
 so might Swift, with a heart and a head dubious enough 
 
150 DEAN SWIFT. 
 
 respecting men's eternal interest in the facts of tlie Jud^ean 
 record, see a use notwithstanding in that fabric of bishoprics, 
 deaneries, prebends, parochial livings, and curacies, which 
 ancient belief in those facts had first created and put together. 
 This kind of respect for the Church Establishment is still very 
 prevalent. It is a most excellent thing, it is thought by many, 
 to have a cleanly, cultured, gentlemanly man, invested with 
 authority in every parish throughout the land, who can look 
 after what is going on, fill up schedules, give advice, and take 
 the lead in all parish business. That Swift's faith in the 
 Church included no more than this perception of its uses as 
 a vast administrative and educational establishment, we will 
 not take upon us to say. Mr. Thackeray, indeed, openly 
 avows his opinion that Swift had no belief in the Christian 
 religion. " Swift's," he says, " was a reverent, was a pious 
 spirit — he could love and could pray;" but such religion as 
 he had, Mr. Thackeray hints, was a kind of mad, despairing 
 Deism, and had nothing of Christianity in it. Hence, 
 " having put that cassock on, it poisoned him ; he was 
 strangled in his bands. '^ The question thus broached as to 
 the nature of Swift's religion is too deep to be discussed here. 
 Though we would not exactly say, with Mr. Thackeray, 
 that Swift's was a "reverent" and " pious" spirit, there are, 
 as he phrases it, breakings out of " the stars of religion and 
 love" shining in the serene blue through " the driving clouds 
 and the maddened hurricane of Swift's life ; '' and this, 
 though vague, is about all that we have warrant for saying. 
 As to the zeal of his Churchmanship, however, there is no 
 doubt at all. There was not a man in the British realms 
 more pugnacious in the interests of his order, more resolute 
 in defending* the prerogatives of the Church of England 
 against Dissenters and others desirous of limiting them, or 
 more anxious to elevate the social position and intellectual 
 character of the clergy, than the author of the Tale of a Tub, 
 No veteran commander of a regiment could hav.e had more 
 of the military than the parson of Laracor had of the eccle- 
 siastical esprit de corps ; and, indeed. Swift's known dislike to 
 the military may be best explained as the natm'al jealousy of 
 
DEAN SWIFT. 151 
 
 tlie surplice at the larger consideration accorded by society to 
 the scarlet coat. Almost all Swift's writings between 1702 
 and 1710 are assertions of his High-Church sentiments, and 
 vindications of the establishment against its assailants. Thus 
 in 1708 came forth his Letter on the Sacramental Test, a hot 
 High-Church and anti-Dissenter pamphlet ; and this was 
 followed in the same year by his Sentiments of a Church of 
 England man with respect to Religion and Government^ and 
 by his ironical argument, aimed at free-thinkers and latitudi- 
 narians, entitled Reasons against Abolishing Christianity, 
 In 1709 he published a graver pamphlet, under the name of 
 a Project for the Advancement of Religion, in which he urged 
 certain measures for the reform of public morals and the 
 strengthening of the Establishment, recommending in parti- 
 cular a scheme of Church-extension. Thus, with all his 
 readiness to help the Whigs politically, Swift was certainly 
 faithful to his High-Church principles. But, as we have 
 said, a High-Church Whig was an anomaly which the 
 Whigs refused to comprehend. Latitudinarians, low Church- 
 men, and Dissenters, did uot know what to make of a 
 Whiggism in state-politics which was conjoined with the 
 strongest form of ecclesiastical Toryism. Hence, in spite of 
 all his ability. Swift was not a man that the Whigs could 
 patronise and prefer. They were willing to have the benefit 
 of his assistance, but their favours were reserved for men 
 more wholly their own. Various things were, indeed, talked 
 of for Swift — the secretaryship to the proposed embassy of 
 Lord Berkeley in Vienna, a prebend of Westminster, the 
 office of historiographer-royal ; nay, even a bishopric in the 
 American colonies ; but all came to nothing. Swift, at the 
 age of forty-three, and certified by Addison as " the greatest 
 genius of the age,^' was still only an Irish parson, with some 
 350Z. or 400Z. a year. How strange if the plan of the 
 Transatlantic bishopric had been carried out, and Swift had 
 settled in Virginia ! 
 
 Meanwhile, though neglected by the English Whigs, Swift 
 had risen to be a leader among the Irish clergy ; a great man 
 in their convocations and other ecclesiastical assemblies. The 
 
152 DEAN SWIFT. 
 
 object which the Irish clergy then had at heart was to 
 procure from the Government an extension to Ireland of a 
 boon granted several years before to the clergy of England, 
 namely, the remission of the tax levied by the Crown on the 
 revenues of the Church since the days of Henry VIII., in 
 the shape of tenths and first-fruits. This remission, which 
 would have amounted to about 16,000?. a year, the Whigs 
 were not disposed to grant, the corresponding remission in 
 the case of England not having been followed by the ex- 
 pected benefits. Archbishop King and the other prelates 
 were glad to have Swift as their agent in this business ; and 
 accordingly, he was absent from Ireland for upwards of 
 twelve months continuously in the years 1708 and 1709. It 
 was during this period that he set London in roars of 
 laughter by his famous BickerstafF hoax, in which he first 
 predicted the death of Partridge, the astrologer, at a par- 
 ticular day and hour, and then nearly drove the wretched 
 tradesman mad by declaring, when the time was come, that 
 the prophecy had been fulfilled, and publishing a detailed 
 account of the circumstances. Out of this BickerstafF hoax, 
 and Swift's talk over it with Addison and Steele, arose the 
 TatleVy prolific parent of so many other periodicals. 
 
 The year 1710 was an important one in the life of Swift. 
 In that year he came over to London, resolved in his own 
 mind to have a settlement of accounts with the Whigs, or to 
 break with them for ever. The Irish ecclesiastical business 
 of the tenths and first-fruits was still his pretext, but he had 
 many other arrears to introduce into the account. Accord- 
 ingly, after some civil skirmishing with Somers, Halifax, and 
 his other old friends, then just turned out of office, he openly 
 transferred his allegiance to the new Tory administration of 
 Harley and Bolingbroke. The 4th of October, not quite a 
 month after his arrival in London, was the date of his first 
 interview with Harley ; and, from that day forward till the 
 dissolution of Harley' s administration by the death of Queen 
 Anne, in 1714, Swift's relations with Harley, St. John, and 
 the other ministers, were more those of an intimate friend 
 and adviser than of a literary dependent. How he dined 
 
DEAN SWIFT. 153 
 
 almost daily with Harley or St. John ; how he bullied them, 
 and made them beg his pardon when by chance they ofFended 
 him— either, as Harley once did, by offering him a fifty- 
 pound note, or, as St. John once did, by appearing cold and 
 abstracted when Swift was his guest at dinner; how he 
 obtained from them not only the settlement of the Irish 
 business, but almost everything else he asked ; how he used 
 his influence to prevent Steele, Addison, Congreve, Kowe, and 
 his other Whig literary friends, from suffering loss of office by 
 the change in the state of politics, at the same time growing 
 cooler in his private intercourse with Addison and poor Dick, 
 and tending more to young Tory writers, such as Pope and 
 Parnell ; how, with Pope, Gay, Arbuthnot, Harley, and St. 
 John, he formed the famous club of the ScriMerus brother- 
 hood, for the satire of literary absurdities ; how he wrote 
 squibs, pamphlets, and lampoons innumerable for the Tories 
 and against the Whigs, and at one time actually edited a 
 Tory paper called the Examiner : all this is to be gathered, 
 in most interesting detail, from his epistolary journal to 
 Stella, in which he punctually kept her informed of all his 
 doings during his long three years' absence. The following 
 is a description of him at the height of his Court influence 
 during this season of triumph, from the Whiggish, and 
 therefore somewhat adverse pen of Bishop Kennet : — 
 
 " When I came to the antechamber (at Court) to wait before prayers. 
 Dr. Swift was the principal man of talk and business, and acted as master of 
 requests. He was soliciting the Earl of Arran to speak to his brother, the 
 Duke of Ormond, to get a chaplain's place established in the garrison of Hull 
 for Mr. Fiddes, a clergyman in that neighbourhood, who had lately been in 
 jail, and published sermons to pay the fees. He was promising Mr. Thorold 
 to vindertake with my lord-treasurer that, according to his petition, he should 
 obtain a salary of 200/. per annum as minister of the English church at 
 Kotterdam. He stopped F. Gwynne, Esq , going in with the red bag to the 
 Queen, and told him aloud he had something to say to him from my lord- 
 treasurer. He talked with the son of Dr. Davenant, to be sent abroad, and 
 took out his pocket-book, and wrote down several things as memoranda to do 
 for him. He turned to the fire, and took out his gold watch, and telling him 
 the time of day, complained it was very late. A gentleman said he was too 
 fast. ' How can I help it,' says the Doctor, * if the courtiers give me a watch 
 that won't go right?' Then he instructed a young nobleman that the best 
 poet in England was Mr. Pope (a Papist), who had begun a translation of 
 Homer into English verse, for which he must have them all subscribe ; * for,' 
 says he, ' the author shall not begin to print till I have a thousand guineas for 
 him.* Lord-treasurer, after leaving the Queen, came through the voouif 
 beckoning Dr. Swift to follow him : both went off just before prayers." 
 
154 DEAN SWIFT. 
 
 Let us see, by a few pickings from tlie journal to Stella, 
 in what manner the black-browed Irish vicar, who was thus 
 figuring in the mornings at Court as the friend and confidant 
 of Ministers, and almost as their domineering colleague, was 
 writing home from his lodging in the evenings to the '* dear 
 girls" at Laracor. 
 
 Dec. 3, 1710. " Pshaw, I must be writing to those dear saucy brats every 
 night whetiier I will or no ; let me have what business I will, or come home 
 ever so late, or be ever so sleepy : but it is an old saying and a true one, ' Be 
 you lords or be you earls, you must write to naughty girls.' I was to-day at 
 Court, and saw Kaymond [an Irish friend] among the beefeaters, staying to 
 see the Queen : so I put him in a better station, made two or three dozen 
 bows, and went to church, and then to Court again to pick up a dinner, as I 
 did with Sir John Stanley : and then we went to visit Lord Mountjoy, and just 
 left him ; and 'tis near eleven at night, young women, and methinks this letter 
 comes very near to the bottom, &c. &c." 
 
 Jan. 1, 1711. Morning. " I wish my dearest pretty Dingley and Stella a 
 happy new year, and health, and mirth, and good stomachs, and Fr's company. 
 Faith, I did not know how to write Fr. I wondered what was the matter; 
 but now I remember I always write Pdfr [by this combination of letters, or 
 by the word Presto, Swift designates himself in the Journal] * * Get the 
 Examiners, and read them ; the last nine or ten are full of reasons for the late 
 change and of the abuses of the last ministry ; and the great men assure me 
 they are all true. They were written by their encouragement and direction. 
 I must rise, and go see Sir Andrew Fountain ; but perhaps to-morrow I may 
 answer i/.i),'s [Stella's designation in the Journal] letter: so good morrow, 
 my mistresses all, good morrow. I wish you both a merry new year ; roast 
 beef, minced pies, and good strong beer ; and me a share of your good cheer ; 
 that I was there or you were here; and you're a little saucy dear, &c. &c." 
 
 Jan. 13, 1711. "0 faith, I had an ugly giddy fit last night in my chamber, 
 and I have got a new box of pills to take, and I hope shall have no more this 
 good while. I would not tell you before, because it would vex you, little 
 rogues; but now it is better. I dined to-day with Lord Shelbui'n, &c., &c." 
 
 Jan. 16, 1711. "My service to Mrs. Stode and Walls. Has shea boy or a 
 girl ? A girl, hmm !, and died in a week, hmmm !, and was poor Stella forced 
 to stand for godmother ? — Let me know how accounts stand, that you may 
 have your money betimes. There's four months for my lodging ; that must be 
 thought on too. And zoo go dine with Manley, and lose your money, doo ex- 
 travagant sluttikin? But don't fret. It will just be three weeks when I have 
 the next letter, that is, to-morrow. Farewell, dearest beloved M. D., and love 
 poor, poor Presto, who has not had. one happy day, since he left you, as hope 
 to be saved." 
 
 March 7, 1711. " I am weary of business and ministers. I don't go to a 
 coffee-house twice a month. I am very regular in going to sleep before 
 eleven. And so you say that Stella's a pretty girl; and so she be; and me- 
 thinks I see her just now, as handsome as the day's long. Do you know 
 what ? When I am writing in our language [a kind of baby-language of en- 
 dearment used between him and Stella, and called 'the little language'] 
 I make up my mouth just as if I was speaking it. I caught myself at it just 
 now. * * Poor Stella, won't Dingley leave her a little daylight to write to 
 Presto ? Well, well, we'll have daylight shortly, spite of her teeth ; and zoo 
 must cly Zele, and Hele, and Hele aden. Must loo mimitate Pdfr, pay ? Iss, 
 and so la shall. And so leles fol ee rettle. Dood Mollow. (You must cry 
 There and Here and Here again. Must you imitate Pdfr, pray ? Yes, and so 
 you shall. And so there 's for the letter. Good morrow.)" 
 
DEAN SWIFT. 155 
 
 And so on, through a series of daily letters, forming now 
 a goodly octavo volume or more, Swift chats and rattles 
 away to the " dear absent girls," giving them all the political 
 gossip of the time, and informing them about his own goings- 
 out and comings-in ; his dinings with Harley, St. John, and 
 occasionally with Addison and other old Whig friends ; the 
 state of his health, his troubles with his drunken servant 
 Patrick, his lodging-expenses, and a host of other things. 
 Such another journal has, perhaps, never been given to the 
 world ; and, but for it, we should never have known what 
 depths of tenderness, and power of affectionate prattle, there 
 were in the heart of this harsh and savage man. Only on 
 one topic, affecting himself during his long stay in London, 
 is he in any degree reserved. Among the acquaintanceships 
 he had formed was one with a Mrs. Vanhomrigh, a widowed 
 lady of property, who had a family of several daughters. 
 The eldest of these, Hester Vanhomrigh, was a girl of more 
 than ordinary talent and accomplishments, and of enthusiastic 
 and impetuous character ; and as Swift acquired the habit of 
 dropping in upon the ''Van.'-,'' as he called them, when he 
 had no other dinner engagement, it was not long before he 
 and Miss Vanhomrigh fell into the relationship of teacher 
 and pupil. He taught her to think, and to write verses ; and 
 as, among Swift's other peculiarities of opinion, one was that 
 he entertained what would even now be called very advanced 
 notions as to the intellectual capabilities and rights of women, 
 he found no more pleasant amusement, in the midst of his 
 politics and other business, than that of superintending the 
 growth of so hopeful a mind. 
 
 " His conduct might have made him styled 
 A father, and the nymph his child : 
 The innocent delight he took 
 To see the virgin mind her book 
 Was but the master's secret joy 
 In school to hear the finest boy." 
 
 But, alas ! Cupid got among the books. 
 
 *' Vanessa, not in years a score, 
 Dreams of a gown of forty-four; 
 Imaginaiy charms can find 
 In eyes with reading almost blind; 
 She fancies music in his tongue, 
 Nor farther looks, but thinks him young." 
 
156 DEAN SWIFT. 
 
 Nay, more ; one of Swift's lessons to her had been that 
 frankness, whether in man or woman, was one of the chief 
 of the virtues, and 
 
 " That common forms were not design'd 
 Directors to a noble mind." 
 
 ^* Then," said the nymph, 
 
 " I'll let you see 
 My actions with your rules agree ; 
 That I can vulgar forms despise, 
 And have no secrets to disguise." 
 
 She told her love, and fairly argued it out with the startled 
 tutor, discussing every element in the question, whether for 
 or against ; the disparity of their ages, her own five thousand 
 guineas, their similarity of tastes, his views of ambition, the 
 judgment the world would form of the match, and so on ; 
 and the end of it was that she reasoned so well, that Swift 
 could not but admit that there would be nothing after all so 
 very incongruous in a marriage between him and Esther 
 Vanhomrigh. So the matter rested, Swift gently resisting 
 the impetuosity of the young woman, when it threatened to 
 take him by storm, but not having the courage to adduce the 
 real and conclusive argument — the existence on the other 
 side of the channel of another and a dearer Esther. Stella, 
 on her side, knew that Swift visited a family called the 
 *'Vans;" she divined that something was wrong; but that 
 was all. 
 
 That Swift, the Mentor of ministers, their daily compa- 
 nion, their factotum, at whose bidding they dispensed their 
 patronage and their favour, should himself be suffered to 
 remain a mere vicar of an Irish parish, w^as, of course, impos- 
 sible. Vehement and even boisterous and overdone as was 
 his zeal for his own independence — *' If we let these great 
 ministers pretend too much, there will be no governing 
 them," was his maxim ; and, in order to act up to it, he 
 used to treat Dukes and Earls as if they were dogs — there 
 were yet means of honourably acknowledging his services in 
 a way to which he would have taken no exception. JSTor 
 can we doubt that Oxford and St. John, who were really 
 
DEAN SWIFT. I57 
 
 and heartily his admirers, were anxious to promote him in 
 some suitable manner. An English bishopric was certainly 
 what he coveted, and what they would at once have given 
 him. But though the bishopric of Hereford fell vacant in 
 1712, there was, as Sir Walter Scott says, " a lion in the 
 path." Queen Anne, honest dowdy woman, — her instinctive 
 dislike of Swift strengthened by the private influence of the 
 Archbishop of York, and the Duchess of Somerset, whose 
 red hair Swift had lampooned — obstinately refused to make 
 the author of the Tale of a Tuh a bishop. Even an English 
 deanery could not be found for so questionable a Christian ; 
 and in 1713 Swift was obliged to accept, as the best thing 
 he could get, the deanery of St. Patrick's, in his native city 
 of Dublin. He hurried over to Ireland to be installed, and 
 came back just in time to partake in the last struggles and 
 dissensions of the Tory administration, before Queen Anne's 
 death. By his personal exertions with ministers, and his 
 pamphlet entitled Puhltc Spirit of the WMgs, he tried to 
 buoy up the sinking Tory cause. But the Queen's death 
 destroyed all ; with George T the Whigs came in again ; the 
 late Tory ministers were dispersed and disgraced, and Swift 
 shared their fall. " Dean Swift," says Arbuthnot, " keeps 
 up his noble spirit ; and, though like a man knocked down, 
 you may behold him still with a stern countenance, and 
 aiming a blow at his adversaries." He returned, with rage 
 and grief in his heart, to Ireland, a disgraced man, and in 
 danger of arrest on account of his connexion with the late 
 ministers. Even in Dublin he was insulted as he walked in 
 the streets. 
 
 For twelve years, that is, from 1714 to 1726, Swift did 
 not quit Ireland. At his first coming, as he tells us in one 
 of his letters, he was ''horribly melancholy;" but the 
 melancholy began to wear off ; and having made up his mind 
 to his exile in the country of his detestation, he fell gradually 
 into the routine of his duties as Dean. How he boarded 
 in a private family in the town, stipulating for leave to 
 invite his friends to dinner at so much a head, and only 
 having two evenings a week at the deanery for larger recep- 
 
158 DEAN SWIFT. 
 
 tions ; how he brought Stella and Mrs. Dingley from Laracor, 
 and settled them in lodgings on the other side of the Liify, 
 keeping up the same precautions in his intercourse with them 
 as before,. but devolving the management of his receptions at 
 the deanery upon Stella, who did all the honours of the 
 house ; how he had his own way in all cathedral business, 
 and had always a few clergymen and others in his train, 
 who toadied him, and took part in the facetious horse-play of 
 which he was fond ; how gradually his physiognomy became 
 known to the citizens, and his eccentricities familiar to them, 
 till the **Dean" became the lion of Dublin, and everybody 
 turned to look at him as he walked in the streets; how, 
 among the Dean's other oddities, he was popularly charged 
 with stinginess in his entertainments, and a sharp look-out 
 after the wine ; how sometimes he would fly off from town, 
 and take refuge in some country-seat of a friendly Irish 
 nobleman ; how all this while he was reading books of all 
 kinds, writing notes and jottings, and corresponding with 
 Pope, Gay, Prior, Arbuthnot, Oxford^ Bolingbroke, and 
 other literary and political friends in London or abroad — 
 are matters in the recollection of all who have read any of 
 the biographies of Swift. It is also known that it was 
 during this period that the Stella-and- Vanessa imbroglio 
 reached its highest degree of entanglement. Scarcely had 
 the Dean located Stella and Mrs. Dingley in their lodging in 
 Dublin, when, as he had feared, the impetuous Vanessa 
 crossed the channel to be near him too. Her mother's 
 death, and the fact that she and her younger sister had a 
 small property in Ireland, were pretext enough. A scrap or 
 two from surviving letters will tell the sequel, and will 
 suggest the state of the relation^ at this time between Swift 
 and this unhappy, and certainly very extraordinary woman : — 
 
 Swift to Miss Vanhomrigh : London, Aug. 12, 1714. " I had your letter last 
 post, and before you can send me another I shall set out for Ireland. * * * 
 If you are in Ireland when I am there, I shall see you very seldom. It is not 
 a place for any freedom, but where everything is known in a week, and magni- 
 fied a hundred degrees. These are rigorous laws that must be passed through; 
 but it is probable we may meet in London in winter : or, if not, leave all to 
 fate." * * * 
 
 Miss Vanhomrigh to Swift: Dublin, 1714 {some time after August). "You 
 once had a maxim, which was to act what was right, and not mind what the 
 

 DEAN SWIFT. 159 
 
 world would say. I wish you would keep to it now. Pray, what can be 
 wrong in seeing and advising an unhappy young woman ? I cannot imagine. 
 You cannot but know that your frowns make my life unsupportable. You 
 have taught me to distinguish, and then you leave me miserable." * * * 
 
 Miss Vanhomrigh to Swift: Dublin, 1714. "You bid me be easy, and you 
 would see me as often as you could. You had better have said as often as 
 you could get the better of your inclinations so much, or as often as you 
 remembered there was such a one in the world. If you continue to treat me 
 as you do, you will not be made uneasy by me long. It is impossible to 
 describe what I have suffered since I saw you last. I am sure 1 could have 
 bore the rack much better than those killing, killing words of yours. Some- 
 times I have resolved to die without seeing yoxi more; but those resolves, to 
 your misfortune, did not last long ; for there is something in human nature 
 that prompts one to find relief in this world. I must give way to it, and beg 
 you'd see me, and speak kindly to me; for I am sure you'd not condemn any 
 one to suffer what I have done, could you but know it. The reason I write 
 to you is, because I cannot tell it to you should I see you. For when I begin 
 to complain, then you are angry ; and there is something in your looks so 
 awful, that it strikes me dumb." * * * 
 
 Here a gap intervenes, whicli record fills up with but an 
 indication here and there. Swift saw Vanessa, sometimes 
 with that " something awful in his looks which struck her 
 dumb," sometimes with words of perplexed kindness ; he per- 
 suaded her to go out, to read, to amuse herself; he introduced 
 clergymen to her — one of them afterwards Archbishop of 
 Cashel — as suitors for her hand; he induced her to leave 
 Dublin, and go to her property at Selbridge, about twelve 
 miles from Dublin, where now and then he went to visit her, 
 where she used to plant laurels against every time of his 
 coming, and where " Vanessa's bower,^^ in which she and the 
 Dean used to sit, with books and writing materials before 
 them, during those happy visits, was long an object of interest 
 to tourists ; he wrote kindly letters to her, some in French, 
 praising her talents, her conversation, and her writing, and 
 saying that he found in her " tout ce que la nature a donnee a 
 un mortel " — " Vlionneur, la vertu, le hon sens, V esprit, la 
 
 uceur, Vagrement et la fermete Warner All did not suffice ; 
 and one has to fancy, during these long years, the restless 
 beatings, on the one hand, of that impassioned woman^s heart, 
 now lying as cold, undistinguishable ashes in some Irish 
 grave ; and, on the other hand, the distraction, and anger, and 
 daily terror of the man she clung to. For, somehow or other, 
 there was an element of terror mingled with the affair. Wha 
 it was, is beyond easy scrutiny ; though possibly the data 
 
160 DEAN SWIFT. 
 
 exist, if they were well sifted. The ordinary story is that 
 some time in the midst of these entanglements with Vanessa, 
 and in consequence of their effects on the rival-relationship — 
 Stella having been brought almost to death's door by the 
 anxieties caused her by Vanessa's proximity, and by her own 
 equivocal position in society — the form of marriage was gone 
 tlirough by Swift and Stella, and they became legally hus- 
 band and wife, although with an engagement that the matter 
 should remain secret, and that there should be no change in 
 their manner of living. The year 1716, when Swift was forty- 
 nine years of age, and Stella thirty-two, is assigned as the 
 date of this event ; and the ceremony is said to have been per- 
 formed in the garden of the deanery by the Bishop of Clogher. 
 But more mystery remains. " Immediately subsequent to the 
 ceremony," says Sir Walter Scott, *' Swift's state of mind 
 appears to have been dreadful. Delany (as I have learned 
 from a friend of his widow) said that about the time it 
 was supposed to have taken place he observed Swift to be 
 extremely gloomy and agitated ; so much so, that he went to 
 Archbishop King to mention his apprehensions. On entering 
 the library Swift rushed out with a countenance of distraction, 
 and passed him without speaking. He found the archbishop 
 in tears ; and, upon asking the reason, he said, ' You have just 
 met the most unhappy man on earth ; but on the subject of 
 his wretchedness you must never ask a question.' " What 
 are we to make of this ? Nay more, what are we to make of 
 it, when we find that the alleged marriage of Swift with Stella, 
 with which Scott connects the story, is after all denied by 
 some as resting on no sufficient evidence ; even Dr. Delany, 
 though he believed in the marriage, and supposed it to have 
 taken place about the time of this remarkable interview with 
 the archbishop, having no certain information on the subject ? 
 If we assume a secret marriage with Stella, indeed, the sub- 
 sequent portion of the Vanessa story becomes more explicable. 
 On this assumption we are to imagine Swift continuing his 
 letters to Vanessa, and his occasional visits to her at Selbridge 
 on the old footing for some years after the marriage, with the 
 undivulged secret ever in his mind, increasing tenfold his 
 
DEAN SWIFT. 161 
 
 former awkwardness in encountering her presence. And so 
 we come to the year 1720, when, as the following scraps will 
 show, a new paroxysm on the part of Vanessa brought on 
 a new crisis in their relations. 
 
 Miss Vanhomrigh to Swift: Selhridge, 1720. "Believe me, it is with the 
 utmost regret that I now write to you, because I know your good-nature such 
 that you cannot see any human creature miserable without being sensibly 
 touched. Yet what can I do ? I must either unload my heart, and tell you 
 all its griefs, or sink under the inexpressible distress I now suffer by your 
 prodigious neglect of me. It is now ten long weeks since I saw you, and in 
 all that time 1 have never received but one letter from you, and a little note 
 with an excuse. Oh, have you forgot me ? You endeavour by severities to 
 force me from you. Nor can I blame you ; for with the utmost distress and 
 confusion I behold myself the cause of uneasy reflections to you. Yet I can- 
 not comfort you, but here declare that it is not in the power of art, time, or 
 
 accident, to lessen the inexpressible passion I have for . Put my passion 
 
 under the utmost restraint, send me as distant from you as the earth will 
 allow ; yet you cannot banish those charming ideas which will ever stick by 
 me whilst I have the use of memory. Nor is the love I bear you only seated 
 in my soul : for there is not a single atom of my frame that is not blended 
 with it. Therefore do not flatter yourself that separation will ever change 
 my sentiments; for I find myself unquiet in the midst of silence, and my heart 
 is at once pierced with sorrow and love. For Heaven's sake, tell me what has 
 caused this prodigious change in you which I have found of late." * * * 
 
 Miss Vanhomrigh to Swift: Dublin, 1720. * * '< I believe you thought I 
 only rallied when I told you the other night that I wovild pester you with 
 letters. Once more I advise you, if you have any regard for your quiet, to 
 alter your behaviour quickly; for I do assure you I have too much spirit to 
 sit down contented with this treatment. Because I love frankness extremely, 
 I here tell you now that I have determined to try all manner of human arts to 
 reclaim you ; and if all these fail, I am resolved to have recourse to the black 
 one, which, it is said, never does. Now see what inconveniency you will bring 
 both yourself and me unto * *. When I undertake a thing, I don't love to do 
 it by halves." 
 
 Swift to Miss Vanhomrigh : Dublin, 1720. " If you write as you do, I shall 
 come the seldomer on purpose to be pleased with your letters, which I never 
 look into without wondering how a brat that cannot read can possibly write 
 so well. * * Raillery apart, I thmk it inconvenient, for a hundred reasons, 
 that I should make your house a sort of constant dwelling-place, I will cer- 
 tainly come as often as I conveniently can ; but my health and the perpetual 
 run of ill weather hinder me from going out in the morning, and my after- 
 noons are taken up I know not how ; so that I am in rebellion with a hundred 
 people besides yourself for not seeing them. For the rest, you need make use 
 of no other black art besides your ink. It is a pity your eyes are not black, 
 or I would have said the same ; but you are a white witch, and can do no 
 mischief." * * * 
 
 Sivift to Miss Vanhomrigh : Dublin, 1720. " I received your letter when 
 some company was with me on Saturday night, and it put me in such con- 
 fusion that I could not tell what to do. This morning a woman who does 
 business for me, told me she heard I was in love with one, naming you, aud 
 
 twenty particulars; that little master and I visited you, and that the 
 
 Archbishop did so ; and that you had abundance of wit, &c. I ever feared the 
 tattle of this nasty town, and told you so ; and that was the reason why I said 
 to you long ago that I would see you seldom when you were in Ireland ; and 
 I must beg you to be easy, if, for some time, I visit you seldomer, and not in 
 so particular a manner." * * * 
 
 M 
 
162 DEAN SWIFT. 
 
 Miss Varihcynirigh to Swift: Selbridge, 1720. * * " Solitude is unsupportable 
 to a mind which is not easy. I have worn oiit my days in sighing and my 
 
 nights in watching and thinking of , who thinks not of me. How many 
 
 letters shall I send you before I receive an answer ? * * Oh that I could 
 hope to see you here, or that I covild go to you ! I was born with violent 
 passions, which terminate all in one— that inexpressible passion I have for 
 you. * * Surely you cannot possibly be so taken up, but you might command 
 a moment to write to me, and force your inclinations to so great a charity. 
 I firmly believe, if I could know your thoughts (which no human creatvire is 
 capable of guessing at, because never anyone living thought like you), I should 
 find you had often in a rage wished me religious, hoping then I should have 
 paid my devotions to Heaven. But that would not spare you ; for were I an 
 enthusiast, still you'd be the deity I should worship. What marks are there 
 of a deity, but what you are to be known by ? You are present everywhere ; 
 your dear image is always before my eyes. Sometimes you strike me with 
 that prodigious awe, I tremble with fear ; at other times a charming com- 
 passion shines through your countenance, which revives my soul. Is it 
 not more reasonable to adore a radiant form one has seen than one only 
 described?" 
 
 Smfi to Miss Vanhomrigh : Dublin, October 15, 1720. " All the morning I 
 am plagued with impertinent visits, below any man of sense or honour to 
 endure, if it were any way avoidable. Afternoons and evenings are spent 
 abroad in walking to keep off and avoid spleen as far as I can ; so that when 
 1 am not so good a correspondent as I could wish, you are not to quarrel and 
 be governor, but to impute it to my situation, and to conclude infallibly that 
 I have the same respect and kindness for you I ever professed to have." * * 
 
 Swift to Miss Vanhomrigh: Gallstoun, July 5, 1721. * * " Settle your affairs, 
 and quit this scoundrel-island, and things will be as you desire. I can say no 
 more, being called away. Mais soyez assuree que jamais personne au monde vHa, 
 6te aim4e, hpnorie, estimee, adoreepar voire ami que vous." 
 
 Vanessa did not quit the " scoundrel-island ; ^^ but, on the 
 contrary, remained in it, unmanageable as ever. In 1722, 
 about a year after the date of the last scrap, the catastrophe 
 came. In a wild fit Vanessa, as the story is, took the bold 
 step of writing to Stella, insisting on an explanation of the 
 nature of Swift's engagements to her ; Stella placed the letter 
 in Swift's hands ; and Swift, in a paroxysm of fury, rode 
 instantly to Selbridge, saw Vanesssa without speaking, laid 
 a letter on her table, and rode off again. The letter was 
 Vanessa's death-warrant. Within a few weeks she was dead, 
 having previously revoked a will in which she had bequeathed 
 all her fortune to Swift. 
 
 Whatever may have been the purport of Vanessa's commu- 
 nication to Stella, it produced no change in Swift's relations 
 to the latter. The pale pensive face of Hester Johnson, with 
 her *' fine dark eyes " and hair " black as a raven," was still 
 to be seen on reception-evenings at the deanery, where also 
 she and Mrs. Dingley would sometimes take up their abode, 
 
DEAN SWIFT. 163 
 
 when Swift was suffering from one of his attacks of vertigo, 
 and required to be nursed. Nay, during those very years in 
 which, as we have just seen, Swift was attending to the move- 
 ments to and fro of the more imperious Vanessa in the back- 
 ground, and assuaging her passion by visits and letters^ and 
 praises of her powers, and professions of his admiration of her 
 beyond all her sex, he was all the while keeping up the same 
 affectionate style of intercom'se as ever with the more gentle 
 Stella, whose happier lot it was to be stationed in the centre 
 of his domestic circle, and addressing to her, in a less forced 
 manner, praises singularly like those he addressed to her 
 rival. Thus, every year, on Stella's birth -day, he wrote a 
 little poem in honour of the occasion. Take the one for 1718, 
 beginning thus : — 
 
 " Stella this day is thirty-four, 
 (We sha'n't dispute a year or more :) 
 However, Stella, be not troubled ; 
 Although thy size and years be doubled, 
 Since first I saw thee at sixteen, 
 The brightest virgin on the green, 
 So little is thy form declined ; 
 Made up so largely in thy mind." 
 
 Stella would reciprocate these compliments by verses on the 
 Dean's birth-day ; and one is struck with the similarity of her 
 acknowledgments of what the Dean had taught her and done 
 for her, to those of Vanessa. Thus, in 1721, — 
 
 " When men began to call me fair, 
 You interposed your timely care ; 
 You early taught me to despise 
 The ogling of a coxcomb's eyes ; 
 Show'd where my judgment was misplaced, 
 Refined my fancy and my taste. 
 You taught how I might youth prolong 
 By knowing what was right and wrong ; 
 How from my heart to bring supplies 
 Of lustre to my fading eyes ; 
 How soon a beauteous mind repairs 
 The loss of changed or falling hairs; 
 How wit and virtue from within 
 Send out a smoothness o'er the skin, 
 *■ Your lectures could my fancy fix, 
 
 And I can please at thirty-six." 
 
 The death of Vanessa, in 1722, left Swift from that time 
 entirely Stella's. How she got over the Vanessa affair in her 
 own mind, when the full extent of the facts became known to 
 
 M 2 
 
164 DEAN SWIFT. 
 
 lier, can only be guessed. When some one alluded to the fact 
 that Swift had written beautifully about Vanessa, she is re- 
 ported to have said, " That doesn't signify, for we all know 
 the Dean could write beautifully about a broomstick.^' " A 
 woman, a true woman ! " is Mr. Thackeray's characteristic 
 comment. 
 
 To the world's end, those who take interest in Swift's life 
 will range themselves either on the side of Stella or on that of 
 Vanessa. Mr. Thackeray prefers Stella, but admits that in 
 doing so, though the majority of men may be on his side, he 
 will have most women against him. Which way Swift's heart 
 inclined him, it is not difficult to see. Stella was the main 
 influence of his life ; the intimacy with Vanessa was but an 
 episode. And yet when he speaks of the two women as a 
 critic, there is a curious equality in his appreciation of them. 
 Of Stella he used to say that her wit and judgment were such, 
 that " she never failed to say the best thing that was said 
 wherever she was in company;" and one of his epistolary 
 compliments to Vanessa is that he had " always remarked that, 
 neither in general nor in particular conversation, had any 
 word ever escaped her lips that could by possibility have 
 been better." Some little differences in his preceptorial 
 treatment of them may be discerned, as, for example, when he 
 finds it necessary to admonish poor Stella for her incorrigible 
 bad spelling — no such admonition, apparently, being required 
 for Vanessa ; or when, in praising Stella, he dwells chiefly on 
 her honour and gentle kindliness, whereas in praising Vanessa 
 he dwells chiefly on her genius and force of mind. But it 
 is distinctly on record that his regard for both was founded 
 on his belief that in respect of intellectual habits and culture 
 both were above the contemporary standard of their sex. And 
 here let us repeat that, not only from the evidence afforded by 
 the whole story of Swift's relations to these two women, but 
 also from the evidence of distinct doctrinal passages scattered 
 through his works, it is plain that those who in the present 
 day, both in this country and in America, maintain the intel- 
 lectual equality of the two sexes, and the right of women to 
 as full and varied an education, and as free a social use of 
 
DEAN SWIFT. 165 
 
 their powers, as Is allowed to men, may claim Swift a pioneer 
 in their cause. Both Stella and Vanessa have left their testi- 
 mony that from the very first Swift took care to indoctrinate 
 them with peculiar views on this subject ; and both thank 
 him for having done so. Stella even goes further, and almost 
 urges Swift to do on the great scale what he had done for 
 her individually : — 
 
 " 0, turn your precepts into laws, 
 Redeem the woman's ruin'd cause ; 
 Retrieve lost empire to our sex, 
 That men may bow their rebel necks." 
 
 This fact that Swift had a theory on the subject of the 
 proper mode of treating and educating women, which theory 
 was in antagonism to the ideas of his time, explains much both 
 in his conduct as a man and in his habits as a writer. 
 
 For the first six years of his exile in Ireland after the death 
 of Queen Anne, Swift had published nothing of any conse- 
 quence, and had kept aloof from politics, except when they 
 were brought to his door by local quarrels. In 1720, how- 
 ever, he again flashed forth as a political luminary, in a cha- 
 racter that could hardly have been anticipated — that of an 
 Irish patriot. Taking up the cause of the " scoundrel-island," 
 to which he belonged by birth, if not by afiection, and to 
 which fate had consigned him, in spite of all his efi'orts, he 
 made that cause his own; virtually said to his old Whig 
 enemies then in power on the other side of the water, " Yes^ 
 I am an Irishman, and I will show you what an Irishman 
 is ;" and, constituting himself the representative of the island, 
 hurled it, with all its pent-up mass of rage and wrongs, against 
 Walpole and his administration. First, in revenge for the 
 commercial wrongs of Ireland, came his Proposal for the Uni- 
 versal Use of Irish Manufactures, utterly Rejecting and 
 Renouncing Everything Wearable that comes from England'; 
 then, amidst the uproar and danger excited by this proposal, 
 other and other defiances in the same tone; and lastly, in 
 1723, on the occasion of the royal patent to poor William 
 Wood to supply Ireland, without her own consent, with 
 a hundred and eight thousand pounds' worth of copper half- 
 
166 DEAN SWIFT. 
 
 pence of English manufacture, tlie unparalleled Drapiers 
 Letters, which blasted the character of the coppers and asserted 
 the nationality of Ireland. All Ireland, Catholic as well as 
 Protestant, blessed the Dean of St. Patrick's; associations 
 were formed for the defence of his person ; and had Walpole 
 and his Whigs succeeded in bringing him to trial, it would 
 have been at the expense of an Irish rebellion. From that 
 time till his death Swift was the true King of Ireland ; only 
 when O'Connell arose did the heart of the nation yield equal 
 veneration to any single chief; and even at this day the 
 grateful Irish, forgetting his gibes against them, and for- 
 getting his continual habit of distinguishing between the 
 Irish population as a whole and the English and Protestant 
 part of it to which he belonged himself, cherish his memory 
 with loving enthusiasm, and speak of him as the " great 
 Irishman.^' Among the phases of Swift's life, this of his 
 having been an Irish patriot and agitator deserves to be par- 
 ticularly remembered. 
 
 In the year 1726, Swift, then in his sixtieth year, and in 
 the full flush of his new popularity as the champion of Irish 
 nationality, visited England for the first time since Queen 
 Anne's death. Once there, he was loth to retui-n ; and a con- 
 siderable portion of the years 1726 and 1727 was spent by 
 him in or near London. This was the time of the publication 
 of Gulliver s Travels, which had been written some years 
 before, and also of some Miscellanies, which were edited for 
 him by Pope. It was at Pope's villa at Twickenham that most 
 of his time was spent ; and it was there and at this time that 
 the long friendship between Swift and Pope ripened into that 
 extreme and affectionate intimacy which they both loved to 
 acknowledge. Gay, Arbuthnot, and Bolingbroke, now re- 
 tamed from exile, joined Pope in welcoming their friend. 
 Addison had been dead several years. Prior was dead, and 
 also Yanbrugh and Parnell. Steele was yet alive ; but 
 between him and Swift there was no longer any tie. Poli- 
 tical and aristocratic acquaintances, old and new, there were in 
 abundance, all anxious once again to have Swift among them 
 to fight their battles. Old George I. had not long to live. 
 

 DEAN SWIFT. IQj 
 
 and the Tories were trying again to come into power in the 
 train of the Prince of Wales. There were even chances of 
 an aiTangement with Walpole, with possibilities, in that or in 
 some other way, that Swift should not die a mere Irish dean. 
 These prospects were but temporaiy. The old King died ; 
 and contrary to expectation, George II. retained Walpole and 
 his Whig colleagues. In October, 1727, Swift left England 
 for the last time. He returned to Dublin just in time to 
 watch over the death-bed of Stella, who expired, after a 
 lingering illness, in January, 1728. Swift was then in his 
 sixty-second year. 
 
 The story of the remaining seventeen years of Swift's life— 
 for, with all his maladies, bodily and mental, his strong frame 
 withstood, for all that time of solitude and gloom, the wear of 
 mortality — is perhaps better known than any other part of 
 his biography. How his irritability and eccentricities and 
 avarice grew upon him, so that his friends and servants had a 
 hard task in humouring him, we learn from the traditions of 
 others ; how his memory began to fail, and other signs of 
 breaking up began to appear, we learn from himself : — 
 
 " See how the Dean begins to break ! 
 Poor gentleman, he droops apace ; 
 You plainly find it in his face. 
 , That old vertigo in his head 
 
 Will never leave him till he's dead. 
 Besides, his memory decays ; 
 He recollects not- what he says ; 
 He cannot call his friends to mind, 
 Forgets the place where last he dined ; 
 Plies you with stories o'er and o'er ; 
 He told them fifty times before." 
 
 The fire of his genius, however, was not yet burnt out. 
 Between 1729 and 1736 he continued to throw out satires 
 and lampoons in profusion, referring to the men and topics of 
 the day, and particularly to the political affairs of Ireland ; 
 and it was during this time that his Directions to Servants, his 
 Polite Conversation, and other well-known facetiae, first saw the 
 light. From the year 1736, however, it was well known in 
 Dublin that the Dean was no more what he had been, and that 
 his recovery was not to be looked for. The rest will be best 
 told in the words of Sir Walter Scott : — 
 
168 DEAN SWIFT. 
 
 " The last scene was now rapidly approaching, and the stage darkened ere 
 the curtain fell. From 1736 onward the Dean's fits of periodical giddiness 
 and deafness had returned with violence ; he could neither enjoy conversation 
 nor amuse himself with writing, and an obstinate resolution which he had 
 formed not to wear glasses, prevented him from reading. The following dis- 
 mal letter to Mrs. Whiteway [his cousin, and chief attendant in his last days] 
 in 1740, is almost the last document which we possess of the celebrated Swift 
 as a i-ational and reflecting being. It awfully foretells the catastrophe which 
 shortly after took place. 
 
 • I have been very miserable all night, and to-day extremely deaf and full of 
 pain. I am so stupid and confounded, that I cannot express the mortification 
 I am under both in body and mind. All I can say is that I am not in torture; 
 but I daily and hourly expect it. Pray let me know how your health is and 
 your family. I hardly understand one word I write. I am sure my days will 
 be very few ; few and miserable they must be. 
 
 * I am, for these few days, 
 
 'Yours entirely, 
 
 ' J. Swift.' 
 
 * If I do not blunder, it is Saturday, July 26, 1740.' 
 
 " His understanding having totally failed soon after these melancholy ex- 
 pressions of grief and affection, his first state was that of violent and furious 
 lunacy. His estate was put under the management of trustees, and his person 
 confided to the care of Dr. Lyons, a respectable clergyman, curate to the Rev. 
 Robert King, prebendary of Dunlavin, one of Swift's executors. This gentle- 
 man discharged his melancholy task with great fidelity, being much and 
 gratefully attached to the object of his care. From a state of outrageous 
 frenzy, aggravated by severe bodily suffering, the illustrious Dean of St. 
 Patrick's sank into the situation of a helpless changeling. In the course of 
 about three years he is only known to have spoken once or twice. At length, 
 when this awful moral lesson had subsisted from 1743 until the 19th of Oc- 
 tober, 1745, it pleased God to release him from this calamitous situation. 
 He died upon that day without a single pang, so gently that his attendants 
 were scarce aware of the moment of his dissolution." 
 
 Swift was seventy-eight years of age at tlie time of his 
 death, having outlived all his contemporaries of the Qaeen 
 Anne cluster of wits, with the exception of Bolinghroke, 
 Ambrose Philips, and Gibber. Congreve had died in 1 729 ; 
 Steele in the same year; Defoe, in 1731; Gay, in 1732; 
 Arbuthnot, in 1735; Tickell, in 1740; and Pope, who was 
 Swift's junior by twenty-one years, in 1744. Swift, there- 
 fore, is entitled in our literary histories to the place of pat- 
 riarch as well as to that of chief among the wits of Queen 
 Anne's reign; and he stands nearest to our own day of any of 
 them whose writings we still read. As late as the year 1820 
 a person was alive who had seen Swift as he lay dead in the 
 deanery before his burial, great crowds going to take their 
 last look of him. '^The coffin was open; he had on his head 
 neither cap nor wig ; there was not much hair on the front or 
 very top, but it was long and thick behind, very white, and 
 

 DEAN SWIFT. 169 
 
 was like flax upon the pillow." Such is the last glimpse we 
 have of Swift on earth. Exactly ninety years afterwards the 
 coffin was taken up from its resting-place in the aisle of the 
 cathedral; and the skull of Swift, the white locks now all 
 mouldered away from it, became an object of scientific curiosity. 
 Phrenologically, it was a disappointment, the extreme lowness 
 of the forehead striking every one, and the so-called organs 
 of wit, causality, and comparison being scarcely developed at 
 all. There were peculiarities, however, in the shape of the 
 interior indicating larger capacity of brain than would have 
 been inferred from the external aspect. Stella's coffin was 
 exhumed, and her skull examined at the same time. The 
 examiners found the skull " a perfect model of symmetry and 
 beauty." 
 
 Have we said too much in declaring that of all the men who 
 illustrated that period of our literary history which lies be- 
 tween the Kevolution of 1688 and the beginning or middle of 
 the reign of George II., Swift alone (excepting Pope, and 
 excepting him only on certain definite and peculiar grounds) 
 fulfils to any tolerable extent those conditions which would 
 entitle him to the epithet of " great," already refused by us 
 to his age as a whole? We do not think so. Swift was 
 a great genius; nay, if by greatness we understand general 
 mass and energy rather than any preconceived peculiarity of 
 quality, he was the greatest genius of his age. Neither 
 Addison, nor Steele, nor Pope, nor Defoe, possessed, in any- 
 thing like the same degree, that which Goethe and Niebuhr, 
 seeking a name for a certain attribute found always' present, 
 as they thought, in the higher and more forcible order of 
 historic characters, agreed to call the demoniac element. In- 
 deed very few men in our literature, from first to last, have 
 had so much of this element in them — the sign and source of 
 all real greatness — as Swift. In him it was so obvious as to 
 attract notice at once. " There is something in your looks," 
 wrote Vanessa to him, "so awful that it strikes me dumb;" 
 and again, " Sometimes you strike me with that prodigious 
 awe, I tremble with fear ;" and again, " What marks are 
 there of a deity that you are not known by?" True, these 
 
170 DEAN SWIFT. 
 
 are the words of a woman infatuated witli love ; but there 
 is evidence that wherever Swift went, and in whatever society 
 he was, there was this magnetic power in his presence. Pope 
 felt it; Addison felt it; they all felt it. We question if, 
 among all our literary celebrities, from first to last, there has 
 been one more distinguished for being personally formidable 
 to all who came near him. 
 
 And yet in calling Swift a great genius we clearly do not 
 mean to rank him in the same order of greatness with such 
 men among his predecessors as Spenser, or Shakespeare, or 
 Milton, or such men among his successors, as Scott, Coleridge 
 and Wordsworth. We even retain instinctively the right of 
 not according to him a certain kind of admiration which we 
 bestow on such men of his own generation as Pope, Steele, 
 and Addison. How is this ? What is the drawback about 
 Swift's genius which prevents us from referring him to that 
 highest order of literary greatness to which we do refer others, 
 who in respect of hard general capacity were apparently not 
 superior to him, and on the borders of which we also place 
 some who in that respect were certainly his inferiors? To 
 make the question more special, why do we call Milton great 
 in quite a different sense from that in which we consent to 
 confer the same epithet on Swift ? 
 
 Altogether, it will be said, Milton was a greater man than 
 Swift; his intellect was higher, richer, deeper, grander ; his 
 views of things are more profound, grave, stately, and exalted. 
 This is a true enough statement of the case ; and we like that 
 comprehensive use of the word intellect which it implies, 
 wrapping up, as it were, all that is in and about a man in this 
 one word, so as to dispense with the distinctions between 
 imaginative and non-imaginative, spiritual and unspiritual 
 natures, and make every possible question about a man a 
 mere question in the end as to the size or degree of his intel- 
 lect. But such a mode of speaking is too violent and re- 
 condite for common purposes. According to the common use 
 of the word intellect, it might be maintained (we do not say it 
 would) that Swift's intellect, meaning his strength of mental 
 grasp, was equal to Milton's; and yet that, by reason of the 
 
DEAN SWIFT. 171 
 
 fact that Jiis intellectual style was deficient, that lie did not 
 grasp things precisely in the Miltonic way, a distinction might 
 be drawn unfavourable, on the whole, to his genius as com- 
 pared with that of Milton. According to such a view, we 
 must seek for that in Swift's genius, upon which it depends 
 that while we accord to it all the admiration we bestow on 
 strength, our sympathies with height or sublimity are left 
 unmoved. Nor have we far to seek. When Goethe and 
 Niebuhr generalized in the phrase, ** the demoniac element," 
 that mystic something which they seemed to detect in all men 
 of unusual potency among their fellows, they used the word 
 " demoniac," not in its English sense, as signifying what ap- 
 pertains specially to the demons or powers of darkness, but in 
 its Greek sense, as equally implying the unseen agencies of 
 light and good. The demoniac element in a man, therefore, 
 may in one case be the demoniac of the etherial and celestial, 
 in another the demoniac of the Tartarean and infernal. There 
 is a demoniac of the supernatural — angels, and seraphs, and 
 white-winged airy messengers swaying men's phantasies from 
 above; and there is a demoniac of the infra-natural — fiends 
 and shapes of horror tugging at men's thoughts from beneath. 
 The demoniac in Swift was of the latter kind. It is false, it 
 would be an entire mistake as to his genius, to say that he 
 regarded, or was inspired by, only the worldly and the secular ; 
 that men, women, and their relations in the little world of 
 visible life, were all that his intellect cared to recognise. He 
 also, like our Miltons and our Shakespeares, and all our men 
 who have been anything more than prudential and pleasant 
 writers, had his being anchored in things and imaginations 
 beyond the visible verge. But while it was given to them 
 to hold rather by things and imaginations belonging to the 
 region of the celestial, to hear angelic music and the rustling 
 of seraphic wings ; it was his un happier lot to be related rather 
 to the darker and subterranean mysteries. One might say of 
 Swift that he had far less of belief in a God than of belief in 
 a devil. He is like a man walking on the earth and among 
 the busy haunts of his fellow-mortals, observing them and 
 their ways, and taking his part in the bustle ; all the while, 
 
172 DEAN SWIFT. 
 
 however, conscious of the tuggings downward of secret 
 chains reaching into the world of the demons. Hence his 
 ferocity, his misanthropy, his sceva mdignatio, all of them true 
 forms of energy, imparting unusual potency to a life ; but 
 forms of energy bred of communion with what outlies nature 
 on the lower or infernal side. 
 
 Swift, doubtless, had this melancholic tendency in him con- 
 stitutionally from the beginning. From the first we see him 
 an unruly, rebellious, gloomy, revengeful, unforgiving spirit, 
 loyal to no authority, and gnashing under every restraint. 
 With nothing small or weak in his nature, too proud to be 
 dishonest, bold and fearless in his opinions, capable of strong 
 attachments and of hatred as strong, it was to be predicted 
 that if the swarthy Irish youth, whom Sir William Temple 
 received into his house, when his college had all but expelled 
 him for contumacy, should ever be eminent in the world, it 
 would be for fierce and controversial, and not for beautiful or 
 harmonious, activity. It is clear, however^ on a survey of 
 Swift's career, that the gloom and melancholy which charac- 
 terised it, was not altogether congenital, but in part, at least 
 grew out of some special circumstance or set of circumstances, 
 having a precise date and locality among the facts of his life. 
 In other words, there was some secret in Swift's life, some 
 root of bitterness or remorse, diffusing a black poison through- 
 out his whole existence. That communion with the invisible 
 almost exclusively on the infernal side — that consciousness of 
 chains wound round his own moving frame at the one end, 
 and at the other tugged at by demons in the depths of their 
 populous pit, while no cords of love were felt sustaining him 
 from the countervailing neaven — had its origin, in part at 
 least, in some one recollection or cause of dread. It was some 
 one demon down in that pit that tugged the chains ; the others 
 but assisted him. Thackeray's perception seems to us exact 
 when he says of Swift that " he goes through life, tearing, 
 like a man possessed with a devil;" or again, changing the 
 form of the figure, that, '' like Abudah, in the Arabian story, 
 he is always looking out for the Fury, and knows that the 
 night will come, and the inevitable hag with it." What was 
 
# 
 
 DEAN SWIFT. 173 
 
 this Fury, this hag that duly came in the night, making the 
 mornings horrible by the terrors of recollection, the evenings 
 horrible by those of anticipation, and leaving but a calm hour 
 at full mid-day ? There was a secret in Swift's life ; what 
 was it ? His biographers as yet have failed to agree on this 
 dark topic. Thackeray's hypothesis, that the cause of Swift's 
 despair was chiefly his consciousness of disbelief in the creed 
 to which he had sworn his professional faith, does not seem 
 to us sufficient. In Swift's days, and even with his frank 
 nature, we think that difficulty could have been got over. 
 There was nothing, at least, so unique in the case as to justify 
 the supposition that this was what Archbishop King referred 
 to in that memorable saying to Dr. Delany, " You have just 
 met the most miserable man on earth ; but on the subject of 
 his wretchedness you must never ask a question." Had Swift 
 made a confession of scepticism to the Archbishop, we do not 
 think the prelate would have been taken so very much by sur- 
 prise. Nor can we think, with some, that Swift's vertigo (now 
 pronounced to have been increasing congestion of the brain) 
 and his life-long certainty that it would end in idiotcy or 
 madness, are the true explanation of this interview and of the 
 mystery which it shrouds. There was cause enough for me- 
 lancholy here, but not exactly the cause that meets the case. 
 Another hypothesis there is of a physical kind, which Scott 
 and others hint at, and which finds great acceptance with the 
 medical philosophers. Swift, it is said, was of " a cold tem- 
 perament," &c. &c. But why a confession on the part of 
 Swift that he was not a marrying man, even had he added 
 that he desired, above all things in the world, to be a person 
 of this sort, should have so moved the heart of an Arch- 
 bishop, we cannot conceive. Besides, although this hypo- 
 thesis might explain much of the Stella and Vanessa imbroglio, 
 it would not explain all ; nor do we see on what foundation it 
 could rest. Scott's assertion that all through Swift's writings 
 there is no evidence of his having felt the tender passion, is 
 simply untrue. On the whole, the hypothesis which has been 
 started of a too near consanguinity between Swift and Stella, 
 either known from the first to one or both, or discovered too 
 
174 DEAN SWIFT. 
 
 late, would most nearly suit tlie conditions of the case. And 
 yet, so far as we have seen, this hypothesis also rests on air, 
 with no one fact to support it. Could we suppose that Swift, 
 like another Eugene Aram, went through the world with a 
 murder on his mind, it might be taken as a solution of the 
 mystery ; but as we cannot do this, we must be content with 
 supposing that either some one of the foregoing hypotheses, 
 or some combination of them, is to be accepted, or that the 
 matter is altogether inscrutable. 
 
 Such by constitution as we have described him — with an 
 intellect strong as iron, much acquired knowledge, an ambition 
 all but insatiable, and a decided desire to be wealthy — Swift, 
 almost as a matter of course, flung himself impetuously into 
 the Whig and Tory controversy, which was the question 
 paramount in his time. In that he laboured as only a man 
 of his powers could, bringing to the side of the controversy 
 on which he chanced to be — and we believe when he was on a 
 side it was honestly because he found a certain preponderance 
 of right in it — a hard and ruthless vigour which served it im- 
 mensely. But from the first, and, at all events, after the dis- 
 appointments of a political career had been experienced by 
 him, his nature would not work alone in the narrow warfare 
 of Whiggism and Toryism, but overflowed in general bitter- 
 ness of reflection on all the customs and ways of humanity. 
 The following passage in Gulliver s Voyage to Brohdingnag^ 
 describing how the politics of Europe appeared to the King 
 of Brobdingnag, shows us Swift himself in his larger mood 
 of thought. 
 
 " This prince took a pleasure in conversing witli me, inquiring into the 
 manners, religion, laws, government, and learning of Europe ; wherein I gave 
 him the best account I was able. His apprehension was so clear, and his 
 judgment so exact, that he made very wise i-eflections and observations upon 
 all I said. But I confess that after I had been a little too copious in talking 
 of my own beloved country, of our trade, and wars by sea and land, of our 
 schisms in religion, and parties in the state, the prejudices of his education 
 prevailed so far that he could not forbear taking me up in his right hand, and 
 stroking me gently with the other, after an hearty fit of laughing, asking me, 
 whether / was a Whig or Tory. Then turning to his first minister, who waited 
 behind him with a white staff nearly as tall as the mainmast of the * Royal 
 Sovereign,' he observed how contemptible a thing was human grandeur, which 
 could be mimicked by such diminutive insects as I ; * And yet,' say s he, ' I dare 
 engage these creatures have their titles and distinctions of honour ; they con- 
 trive little nests and burrows, that they call houses and cities ; they make a 
 
or 
 
 DEAN SWIFT. 175 
 
 figure in dress and equipage ; they love, they fight, they dispute, they cheat, 
 they betray,' And thus he continued on, while my colour came and went 
 several times with indignation to hear our noble country, the mistress of arts 
 and arms, the scourge of France, the arbitress of Europe, the seat of virtue, 
 piety, honour, truth, the pride and envy of the world, so contemptuously 
 treated." ^ ^ 
 
 Swift's writings, accordingly, divide themselves, in the main, 
 into two classes, — pamphlets, tracts, lampoons, and the like, 
 bearing directly on persons and topics of the day, and written 
 with the ordinary purpose of a partisan ; and satires of a more 
 general aim, directed, in the spirit of a cynic philosopher, 
 against humanity on the whole, or against particular human 
 classes, aiTangements, and modes of thinking. In some of 
 his writings the politician and the general satirist are seen 
 together. The JDrapters Letters and most of the poetical 
 lampoons, exhibit Swift in his direct mood as a party-writer ; 
 in the Tale of a Tub we have the ostensible purpose of a 
 partisan masking a reserve of general scepticism ; in the 
 Battle of the Books we have a satire partly personal to 
 individuals, partly with a reference to a prevailing tone of 
 opinion ; in the Voyage to Laputa we have a satire on a great 
 class of men ; and in the Voyages to LilUput and Brobdingnag^ 
 and still more in the story of the Houynhnms and Yahoos, 
 we have human nature itself analysed and laid bare. 
 
 Swift took no care of his writings, never acknowledged 
 some of them, never collected them, and suffered them to find 
 their way about the world as chance, demand, and the piracy 
 of publishers directed. As all know, it is in his character 
 as a humorist, an inventor of the preposterous as a medium 
 for the reflective, and above all as a master of irony, that he 
 takes his place as one of the chiefs of English literature. 
 There can be no doubt that, as regards the literary form 
 which he affected most, he took hints from Rabelais, as the 
 greatest original in the realm of the absurd. Sometimes, as 
 in his description of the Strulbrugs in the Voyage to Laputa, 
 he approaches the ghastly power of that writer ; on the whole, 
 however, there is more of stern English realism in him, and 
 less of sheer riot and wildness. Sometimes, however. Swift 
 throws off the guise of the humorist, and speaks seriously 
 
176 DEAN SWIFT. 
 
 and in his own name. On such occasions we find ourselves 
 simply in the presence of a man of strong, sagacious, and 
 thoroughly English mind, content, as is the hahit of English- 
 men, with vigorous proximate sense, expressed in plain and 
 rather coarse idiom. For the speculative he shows in these 
 cases neither liking nor aptitude ; he takes obvious reasons 
 and arguments as they come to hand, and uses them in a 
 robust, downright Saxon manner. In one respect he stands 
 out conspicuously even among plain Saxon writers— his total 
 freedom from cant. Johnson's advice to Boswell, " above all 
 things to clear his mind of cant," was perhaps never better 
 illustrated than in the case of Dean Swift. Indeed, it might 
 be given as a summary definition of Swift's character that he 
 had cleared his mind of cant, without having succeeded in filling 
 the void with song. It was Swift's intense hatred of cant 
 — cant in religion, cant in morality, cant in literature — that 
 occasioned many of those peculiarities which shock people in 
 his writings. His principle being to view things as they are, 
 irrespective of all the accumulated cant of orators and poets, 
 he naturally prosecuted his investigations into those classes of 
 circumstances which orators and poets have omitted as unsuit- 
 able for their purposes. If they had viewed men as angels, 
 he would view them as Yahoos. If they had placed the 
 springs of action among the fine phrases and the sublimities, 
 he would trace them down into their secret connexions with 
 the bestial and the obscene. Hence— as much as for any of 
 those physiological reasons which some of his biographers 
 assign for it — his undisguised delight in filth. And hence, 
 also, probably — seeing that among the forms of cant he 
 included the traditional manner of speaking of women in their 
 relations to men — his studious contempt, whether in writing 
 for men or women, of all the accustomed decencies. It was 
 not only the more obvious forms of cant, however, that Swift 
 had in aversion. Even to that minor form of cant which 
 consists in the " trite " he gave no quarter. Whatever was 
 habitually said by the majority of people, seemed to him, for 
 that very reason, not worthy of being said at all, much less 
 put into print. A considerable portion of his writings, as, for 
 
DEAN SWIFT. 177 
 
 example, his Tritical Essay on the Faculties of the Mind, 
 and his Art of Polite Conversation — in the one of which he 
 strings together a series of the most threadbare maxims and 
 quotations to be found in books, offering the compilation as an 
 original disquisition of his own ; and, in the other, imitates the 
 insipidity of ordinary table-talk in society — may be regarded 
 as showing a systematic determination on his part to turn 
 the trite into ridicule. Hence, in his own writings, though 
 he abstains from the profound, he never falls into the com- 
 monplace. Apart from all Swift's other merits, there are to 
 be found scattered through his writings not a few distinct 
 propositions of an innovative and original character respect- 
 ing our social arrangements. We have seen his doctrine as 
 to the education of women ; and we may mention, as an 
 instance of the same kind, his denunciation of the institution 
 of standing armies as incompatible with freedom. Curiously 
 enough, also, it was Swift's belief that, Yahoos as we are, the 
 world is always in the right. 
 
 N 
 
CHATTERTON. 
 
 A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 
 
 PART I. -BRISTOL. 
 CHAPTER I. — WILKES AND LIBERTY. 
 
 Was there ever a time that did not think highly of its own 
 importance ? Was there ever a time when the world did not 
 believe itself to be going to pieces, and when alarming 'pam- 
 phlets on '' the present crisis " did not lie unbought on the 
 counters of the booksellers ? Poor mortals that we are, how 
 we do make the most of our own little portion in the general 
 drama of history ! Nor are we quite wrong, after all. There 
 is nothing really to laugh at in our laborious anxieties about 
 this same " present crisis,^' which is always happening, and 
 never over. " We live in earnest times" — what is there in the 
 incessant repetition of this stereotyped phrase, but an explicit 
 assertion, as it were, by each generation for itself, that the 
 great sense of life, transmitted already through so many gener- 
 ations, is now, in turn, passing through it? The time that 
 we ourselves are alive, the time that our eyes behold the light, 
 and that the breath is strong in our nostrils, that is the crisis 
 for us ; and although it belongs to a higher than we to deter- 
 mine the worth of what we do, yet that we should do every 
 thing with a certain amount of vehemence and bustle, seems 
 but the necessary noise of the shuttle, as we weave forth our 
 allotted portion of the general web of existence. 
 
 * A portion of this sketch appeared in the numbers of the Dublin Univei'sity 
 Magazine for July, August, and October, 1851. The rest is now published 
 for the first time. 
 
CHATTEETON. 179 
 
 Well, eighty years ago, there was " a crisis " in England. 
 That was the time, reader, when our great-grandfathers, laud- 
 ably intent on bringing about your existence and mine, were, 
 for that purpose, paying court to our reluctant great-grand- 
 mothers. George III., an obese young sovereign of thirty- 
 three, had then been ten years on the throne. Newspapers 
 were not so numerous as now ; parliament was not open to 
 reporters ; and had gentlemen of the liberal press been alive, 
 with their present political opinions, every soul of them would 
 have been hanged. Nevertheless, people got on very well ; 
 and there was enough for a nation of seven millions to take 
 interest in and talk about, when they were in an inquisitive 
 humour. Lord North, for example, an ungainly country gen- 
 tleman, with goggle eyes and big cheeks, had just succeeded 
 the Duke of Grafton as the head of a Tory ministry ; Lord 
 Chatham, throwing off his gout for the occasion, had, at the 
 age of sixty-two_, resumed his place in the public eye as the 
 thundering Jove of the Opposition ; Bute and Scotchmen were 
 still said to be sucking the blood of the nation ; and Edmund 
 Burke, then in the prime of his strength and intellect, was 
 publishing masterly pamphlets, and trying to construct, under 
 the auspices of the Marquis of Kockingham, a new Whig 
 party. Among the notabilities out of parliament were — Dr. 
 Samuel Johnson, then past his sixty-first year, and a most 
 obstinate old Tory; his friend Sir Joshua, fourteen years 
 younger ; Goldy, several years younger still ; and Garrick, 
 fifty-four years of age, but as sprightly as ever. In another 
 circle, but not less prominently before the town, were Parson 
 Home and Mrs. Macaulay ; and all England was ringing with 
 the terrible letters of the invisible Junius. But the man of 
 the hour, the hero of the self-dubbed crisis, was John Wilkes. 
 
 Arrested in 1763, on account of the publication of No. 45 
 of the North Briton, in which one of the King's speeches 
 had been severely commented on ; discharged a few days 
 afterwards in consequence of his privilege as a member of 
 parliament; lifted instantaneously by this accident into an 
 unexampled blaze of popular favour ; persecuted all the more 
 on this account by the Court party ; at last, in January, 1764, 
 
 n2 
 
180 chatterton: 
 
 expelled from his seat in the House of Commons by a vote 
 declaring him to be a seditious libeller ; put on his trial there- 
 after, before the Court of Queen's Bench, and escaping sen- 
 tence only by a voluntary flight to France-r^this squint-eyed 
 personage, known up to that time only as a profligate wit about 
 town, who lived on his wife's money, and fascinated other 
 women in spite of his ugliness, had now been for six years 
 the idol and glory of England. For six years " Wilkes and 
 Forty-five" had been chalked on the walls ; " Wilkes and 
 Liberty" had been the cry of the mobs ; and portraits of 
 Wilkes had hung in the windows of the print-shops. Ee- 
 membering that he was the champion of liberal opinions, even 
 pious Dissenters had forgotten his atheism and his profligacy. 
 They distinguished, they said, between the man and the cause 
 which he represented. 
 
 For a year or two the patriot had been content with the 
 mere echo of this applause as it was wafted to him in Paris ; 
 but, cash failing him there, and the parliament from which he 
 had been ejected having been dissolved, he had returned to 
 England early in 1768, had offered himself as a candidate 
 for the city of London, had lost that election, but had almost 
 instantly afterwards been returned for the county of Middle- 
 sex. Hereupon he had ventured to surrender himself to the 
 process of the law ; and the result had been his condemnation, 
 in June, 1768, to pay a fine of 1,000L, and undergo an im- 
 prisonment of twenty-two months. Nor had this been all. 
 No sooner had parliament met than it had proceeded to expel 
 the member for Middlesex. Then had begun the tug of war 
 between parliament and the people. Thirteen days after his 
 expulsion, the exasperated electors of Middlesex had again 
 returned Wilkes as their representative, no one having dared 
 to oppose him. Again the house had expelled him, and again 
 the electors had returned him. Not till after the fourth farce 
 of election had the contest ceased. On that occasion three 
 other candidates had presented themselves ; and one of them, 
 Colonel Luttrell, having polled 296 votes, had been declared 
 by the house to be duly elected, notwithstanding that tlie 
 votes for Wilkes had been four times as numerous. Tremen- 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 181 
 
 dous then had been the outcry of popular indignation. During 
 the whole of the years 1768 and 1769 " the violation of the 
 right of election by parliamentary despotism" had been the 
 great topic of the country ; and in the beginning of 1770 this 
 was still the question of the hour, the question forced by the 
 people into all other discussions, and regarding which all can- 
 didates for popular favour, from Chatham himself down to the 
 parish beadle, were obliged distinctly to declare themselves. 
 
 Meanwhile, Wilkes was in the King^s Bench, Southwark. 
 His consolations, we may suppose, were, that by all this his 
 popularity had been but increased ; that Parson Home and 
 the Society for the protection of the Bill of Eights had 
 organised a subscription in his favour, which would more than 
 pay his fine ; and that the whole country was waiting to do 
 him honour on the day when he should step out of prison. 
 
 It came at last : Tuesday, the 17th of April, 1770. There 
 was a considerable show of excitement all day in the vicinity 
 of the prison ; and it was with some difficulty that the patriot, 
 getting into a hackney-coach late in the afternoon, made his 
 way past the cordial clutches of the mob, into the country. 
 That evening and the next there were huzzas and illumina- 
 tions in his honour ; the house of Beckford, the Lord Mayor, 
 in the then aristocratic region of Soho-square, was conspicu- 
 ously decorated with the word " Liberty ;^' and public dinners 
 to celebrate the release of the patriot were held in various parts 
 of the city. 
 
 The rejoicings were not confined to London. In many 
 other towns of England there were demonstrations in honour 
 of Wilkes. A list of the chief places may still be culled from 
 the newspapers of the day. From these newspapers we learn, 
 what indeed might have been independently surmised, that 
 not the least eager among the towns of England in this 
 emulous show of regard for Wilkes, was the ancient mercan- 
 tile city of Bristol. The following appeared in the Public 
 Advertiser, as from a Bristol correspondent, on the very day 
 of Wilkes's release. 
 
 ''Bristol, April Uth.—We hear that on Wednesday next, being the day of 
 Mr. Wilkes's enlargement, forty -five persons are to dine at the ' Crown,' in the 
 
182 CHATTEETON : 
 
 pass^e leading from Broad-street to Tower-lane. The entertainment is to 
 consist of two rounds of beef, of 45 lbs. each ; two legs of veal, weighing 45 lbs. ; 
 two ditto of pork, 45 lbs. ; a pig, roasted, 45 lbs. ; two puddings of 45 lbs. ; 45 
 loaves; and, to drink, 45 tankai'ds of ale. After dinner, they are to smoke 
 45 pipes of tobacco, and to drink 45 bowls of punch. Among others, the fol- 
 lowing toasts are to be given : — 1. Long live the King ; 2. Long live the sup- 
 porters of British liberty ; 3. The Magistrates of Bristol. And the dinner to 
 be on the table exactly 45 minutes after two o'clock." 
 
 Whether this precise dinner, thus announced by the Bristol 
 correspondent of the Advertiser, was held or not, must, we fear, 
 remain a mystery; but that there were several dinners in Bristol 
 on the occasion, is quite certain. On Thursday, the 19th, in 
 particular, a public entertainment (possibly the above, with 
 the day altered) was given in honour of the patriot by "an 
 eminent citizen/' and attended by many of the most influential 
 men in the place. 
 
 Ah ! the poetry of coincidences ! On that same Thursday 
 evening, while the assembled guests in the " Crown " were 
 clattering their glasses in the hot room, puffing their tobacco- 
 smoke, and making the roof ring with their tipsy uproar, 
 there was walking moodily through the streets of Bristol a 
 young attorney's apprentice, who, four days before, had been 
 discharged from his employment because he had alarmed his 
 master by threatening to commit suicide. This attorney's 
 apprentice was Thomas Chatter ton. 
 
 CHAPTER II, 
 
 THE ATfOBNEY's APPRENTICE OF BRISTOL. 
 
 It was in the month of August, 1760, that a poor widow, 
 who supported herself and two children by dressmaking, and 
 by keeping a small day-school in one of the back streets of 
 Bristol, gained admission for her younger child, a boy of seven 
 years and nine months old, into Colston's school, a charitable 
 foundation, similar in some respects to Christ's Hospital in 
 London. The husband of this widow, a rough, drunken 
 fellow, who had been a singer, or sub-chaunter, in the cathe- 
 dral choir of Bristol, as well as the master of a kind of free 
 school for boys, had died a month or two before his son's birth. 
 An old grandmother, however— either the widow's own mother 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 183 
 
 or her husband's— was still alive, dependent, in some degree, 
 on the family. 
 
 For nearly seven years, or from August, 1760, to July, 
 1767, the boy remained an inmate of Colston's school, wear- 
 ing, as the Christ's Hospital boys still do, a blue coat and 
 yellow stockings, and receiving, according to the custom of 
 the institution, such a plain education as might fit him for an 
 ordinary mercantile or mechanical occupation. But, from the 
 very first, the boy was singular. For one thing, he was a 
 prodigious reader. The Bible, theological treatises, scraps of 
 history, old magazines, poetry, whatever in the shape of a 
 printed volume came in his way — all were eagerly pounced 
 upon and devoured ; and it was not long before his reputation 
 in this respect enabled him to lay one or two circulating 
 libraries under friendly contribution. Then, again, his temper, 
 people remarked, had something in it quite unusual in one so 
 young. Generally very sullen and silent, he was liable to 
 sudden and unaccountable fits of weeping, as well as to violent 
 fits of rage. He was also extremely secretive, and fond of 
 being alone ; and on Saturday and other holiday afternoons, 
 when he was at liberty to go home from school, it was quite a 
 subject of speculation with his mother, Mrs. Chatterton, and 
 her acquaintances, what the boy could be doing, sitting alone 
 for hours, as was his habit, in a garret full of all kinds of out- 
 of-the-way lumber. 
 
 When he was about ten years of age, it became known to 
 some of his seniors that the little Blue-coat was in the habit 
 of writing verses. His first attempt in this way had been a 
 pious little achievement, entitled " On the Last Epiphany ; 
 or, Christ's coming to Judgment;" and so proud had he been 
 of this performance, and so ambitious of seeing it in print, that 
 he had boldly dropped it, one Saturday afternoon, into the 
 letter-box of Felix Farley s Bristol Journal, a weekly news- 
 paper in high local repute. It accordingly appeared in the 
 columns of that newspaper on the 8th of January, 1763. 
 From that day Chatterton was a sworn poet. Piece after 
 piece was dropped by him during a period of three years into 
 the letter-box of the accommodating Journal, Only one of 
 
184 CHATTERTON : 
 
 these, however, is it necessary to mention particularly— a 
 little lampoon, printed the 7th of January, 1764, and entitled 
 " The Churchwarden and the Apparition ; a Fable." A Mr. 
 Joseph Thomas, a hrick-maker by trade, chancing in that 
 year to hold the office of churchwarden for the parish of St. 
 Mary Eedcliffe, had greatly scandalized the public mind by 
 causing the old churchyard to be levelled, and the surplus 
 earth and clay to be carted away, as people said, for his own 
 professional uses. For this outrage on decorum he was much 
 attacked by the local press, and nowhere more severely than 
 in the above-mentioned verses of the little Blue-coat ; in 
 whom, by-the-bye, there must have been a kind of hereditary 
 resentment of such a piece of sacrilege, seeing that his ances- 
 tors, the Chattertons, had been sextons of the church of St. 
 Mary RedcliiFe for a period of one hundred and fifty years 
 continuously. The office had, in fact, only passed out of the 
 family on the death of an older brother of his father, named 
 John Chatterton. 
 
 The date does not seem quite certain, but it was probably 
 nearly three years after this occurrence, and when Chatterton 
 was above fourteen years of age, and one of the senior boys 
 in the Blue-coat School, that he stepped, one afternoon, into 
 the shop of a Mr. Burgum, partner of a Mr. Catcott, in the 
 pewter trade. 
 
 "I have found out a secret about you, Mr. Burgum," he 
 said, going up to the pewterer at his desk. 
 
 *' Indeed : what is it ?'' said Mr. Burgum. 
 
 " That you are descended from one of the noblest families 
 in England." 
 
 " I did not know it," said the victim. 
 
 " It is true, though," said Chatterton ; " and to prove it, I 
 will bring you your pedigree written out, as I have traced it 
 by the help of books of the peerage and old parchments." 
 
 Accordingly, a few days afterwards, he again called, and 
 presented the astonished pewterer with a manuscript copy- 
 book, headed in large text, as follows : " Account of the 
 Family of the De Bergham, from the Norman Conquest to this 
 time ; collected from original Eecords, Tom*nament-rolls, and 
 
A STOEY OF THE YEAR 1770. 185 
 
 the Heralds of March and Garter Eecords, by T. Chatterton." 
 In this document the Burgum pedigree was elaborately traced 
 up, through no end of great names and illustrious intermar- 
 riages, to one " Simon de Seyncte Lyze, alias Senliz," who 
 had come into England with the Conqueror; married a daughter 
 of the Saxon chief, Waltheof; become possessed, among 
 other properties, of Burgham Castle, in Northumberland ; and 
 been eventually created Earl of Northampton. 
 
 Pleased with the honours thus unexpectedly thrust upon 
 him, the pewterer gave the Blue-coat five shillings for his 
 trouble. To show his gratitude, Chatterton soon returned 
 with '' A Continuation of the Account of the Family of the 
 De Bergham, from the Norman Conquest to this Time." In 
 the original pedigree, the young genealogist had judiciously 
 stopped short at the sixteenth century. In the supplement, 
 however, he ventures as far down as the reign of Charles II., 
 back to which point the pewterer is left to supply the links 
 for himself. But the chief feature in the pedigree, as ela- 
 borated in the second document, is, that, in addition to other 
 gTcat names, it contains a poet. This poet, whose name was 
 John De Bergham, was a monk of the Cistercian order, in 
 Bristol ; he had been educated in Oxford, and was " one of 
 the greatest ornaments of the age in which he lived.'' He wrote 
 several books, and translated some part of the Iliad, under the 
 title of *' Eomance of Troy." To give Mr. Burgum some 
 idea of the poetic style of this distinguished man, his ances- 
 tor, there was inserted a short poem of his in the ancient 
 dialect, entitled " The Eomaunte of the Cnychte ;" and to 
 render the meaning of the poem more intelligible, there was 
 appended a modern metrical paraphrase of it by Chatterton 
 himself. 
 
 By the eclat of this wonderful piece of genealogical and 
 heraldic ingenuity done for Mr. Burgum, as well as by the 
 occasional exercise in a more or less public manner of his 
 talent for verse-making, Chatterton, already recognised as 
 the first for attainments among all the lads in Colston's 
 school, appears to have won a kind of reputation with a few- 
 persons of the pewterer's stamp out of doors— honest people. 
 
186 CHATTERTON : 
 
 with small pretensions to literature themselves, but willing to 
 encourage a clever boy whose mother was in poor circum- 
 stances. 
 
 It was probably through the influence of such persons that, 
 after having been seven years at the school, he was removed 
 from it in July, 1767, to be apprenticed to Mr. John Lam- 
 bert, a Bristol attorney. The trustees of Colston^s school 
 paid to Lambert, on the occasion, a premium of ten pounds ; 
 and the arrangement was, that Chatterton should be bound to 
 him for seven years, during which period he was to board 
 and lodge in Mr. Lambert's house, his mother, however, 
 undertaking to wash and mend for him. There was no 
 salary ; but, as usually happens in such cases, there were 
 probably means in Bristol by which a lad writing, as 
 Chatterton did, a neat clerk's hand, could hope to earn, now 
 and then, a few stray shillings. At any rate, he had the 
 prospect of finding himself, at the end of seven years, in a 
 fair way to be a Bristol attorney. 
 
 Lambert's office-hours were from eight in the morning till 
 eight in the evening, with an interval for dinner ; from eight 
 till ten in the evening the apprentice was at liberty, but he 
 was required to be home at his master's house, which was at 
 some distance from the office, punctually by ten. An in- 
 dignity which he felt very much, and more than once com- 
 plained of, was that, by the household arrangements, which 
 were under the control of an old lady, his master's mother, 
 he was sent to take his meals in the kitchen, and made to 
 sleep with the footboy. To set against this, however, there 
 was the advantage of plenty of spare time ; for as Lambert's 
 business was not very extensive, the apprentice was often 
 left alone in the office with nothing special to do, and at 
 liberty to amuse himself as he liked. From copying letters 
 and precedents, he could turn to CamdevUs Britannia^ an 
 edition of which lay on the office-shelves, to Holinshed' s 
 Chronicles, to SpegMs Chaucer , to Geoffrey of Monmouth, 
 or to any other book that he could borrow from a library, 
 and smuggle in for his private recreation. Sometimes, also, 
 the tradition goes, his master, entering the office unexpectedly. 
 

 A STOEY OF THE YEAR 1770. 187 
 
 would catch tim writing verses, and would lecture him 
 on the subject. Once the offence was still more serious. 
 An anonymous abusive letter had been sent to Mr. Warner, 
 the head-master of Colston's school, and by the texture of 
 the paper, and other evidences, this letter was traced to 
 the ex-Bluecoat of Mr. Lambert's office, whose reasons for 
 sending it had probably been personal. On this occasion 
 his master was so exasperated as to strike him. 
 
 A young attorney's apprentice, of proud and sullen 
 temper, discontented with his situation, ambitious, conscious 
 of genius, yet treated as aJbo^L-aGdjnenial servant — such was 
 Chatterton during the "iwo years that foUoW^d his removal 
 from the Blue-coat School. To this add the want of pocket- 
 money ; for busy as he was with his master's work and his 
 own secret exercises in the way of literature, it is still authen- 
 tically known that he found time of an evening not only to 
 drop in pretty regularly at his mother's house, but also to 
 do as other attorneys' apprentices did, and prosecute little 
 amusements such as all apprentices like to find practicable. 
 Altogether, the best glimpse we have of Chatterton in his 
 commoner aspect as an attorney's apprentice in Bristol, is 
 that which we get from a letter written by him, during his 
 first year with Mr. Lambert, to a youth named Baker, who 
 had been his chum at Colston's school, and had emigrated to 
 America. Baker had written to him from South Carolina, 
 informing him, amongst other things, that he had fallen in 
 love with an American belle, of the name of Hoy land, whose 
 charms had obscured his memory of the Bristol fair ones ; 
 and begging him, it would also appear, to woo the Muses in 
 his favour, and transmit him across the Atlantic a poem or 
 two, to be presented to Miss Hoyland. Chatterton complies, 
 and sends - a long letter, beginning with a few amatory 
 effusions to Miss Hoyland, such as Baker wanted, and con- 
 cluding thus : — 
 
 "March 6tli, 1768. 
 
 "Dear Friend,— I must now close my poetical labours, my master being 
 
 returned from London, You write in a very entertaining style ; though I am 
 
 afraid mine will be to the contrary. Your celebrated Miss Kumsey is going 
 
 to be married to Mr. Fowler, as he himself informs me. Pretty children ! 
 
188 CHATTERTON : 
 
 about to enter into the comfortable yoke of matrimony, to be at their liberty ; 
 just d propos to the old law, but out of the frying-pan into the fire. For a 
 lover, heavens mend him ! but for a husband, oh, eiicellent ! What a female 
 Machiavel this Miss Rumsey is ! A very good mistress of nature, to discover 
 a demon in the habit of a parson ; to find a spirit so well adapted to the humour 
 of an English wife ; that is, one who takes off his hat to every person he 
 chances to meet, to show his staring horns \ * * mirabile, what will human 
 nature degenerate into ? Fowler aforesaid declares he makes a scruple of con- 
 science of being too free with Miss Rumsey before maiTiage. There's a gal- 
 lant for you ! "Why, a girl with anything of the woman would despise him 
 for it. But no more of this. I am glad you approve of the ladies in Charles- 
 town, and am obliged to you for the compliment of including me in your 
 happiness. My friendship is as firm as the white rock when the black waves 
 war around it, and the waters burst on its hoary top ; when the driving wind 
 ploughs the sable sea, and the rising waves aspire to the clouds, turning with 
 the rattling hail. So much for heroics ; to speak plain English, I am, and ever 
 will be, your unalterable friend. I did not give your love to Miss Rumsey, 
 having not seen her in private ; and in public she will not speak to me, because 
 of her great love to Fowler, and on another occasion. I have been violently 
 in love these three-and-twenty times since your departure, and not a few times 
 came off victorious. I am obliged to you for your curiosity, and shall esteem 
 it very much, not on account of itself, but as coming from you. The poems, 
 &c,, on Miss Hoyland, I wish better, for her sake and yours. The ' Tourna- 
 ment' I have only one canto of, which I send herewith; the remainder is 
 entirely lost. I am, with the greatest regret, going to subscribe myself, your 
 faithful and constant friend till death do us part, 
 
 " Thomas Chatterton. 
 "Mr. Baker, Gharlestown, 
 "South Carolina." 
 
 When. Chatterton wrote this letter he was fifteen years and 
 four months old. To its tone, as illustrative of certain parts 
 of his character, we shall have yet to allude ; meanwhile let 
 us attend to the reference made in it to the Tournament, one 
 canto of which is said to be sent along with it. The poem 
 here meant is doubtless the antique dramatic fragment pub- 
 lished among Chatterton's writings in the assumed guise of 
 an original poem of the fifteenth century, descriptive of a 
 tournament held at Bristol in the reign of Edward I. From 
 the manner of the allusion it is clear that as early, as this 
 period of Chatterton's life, that is, before the close of the 
 first year of his apprenticeship, lie was in the habit of 
 showing about to some of his private friends poems in an 
 antique style, which he represented as genuine antiques, 
 copied from old parchments in his possession. It was not, 
 however, till about six months after the date of the foregoing 
 epistle that he made his debut in the professed character of 
 an antiquarian and proprietor of ancient manuscripts, before 
 the good folks of Bristol generally. 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 189 
 
 In September, 1 768, a new bridge was opened at Bristol 
 with much civic pomp and ceremony. While the excitement 
 was still fresh, the antiquaries of the town were startled by 
 the appearance, in Felix Farley's Journal, of a very interest- 
 ing account of the ceremonies that had attended the similar 
 opening, several centuries before, of the old bridge, which 
 had just been superseded. This account, communicated by 
 an anonymous correspondent signing himself "Dunhelmus 
 Bristoliensis," purported to be taken from an old manuscript, 
 contemporary with the occurrence. It described how the open- 
 ing of the old bridge had taken place on a " Fridaie ; " how, 
 on that " Fridaie,' ' the ceremonies had begun by one " Master 
 Greggorie Dalbenye" going " aboute the tolly nge of the tenth 
 clock," to inform " Master Mayor all thyngs were prepared ; " 
 how the procession to the bridge had consisted^ first, of " two 
 Beadils streying fresh stre," then of a man dressed as " a 
 Saxon Elderman," then of "a mickle strong manne in armour 
 carrying a huge anlace (^^ e. sword)," then of " six clary ons 
 and minstrels," then of " Master Mayor" on a white horse, 
 then of " the Eldermen and Cittie Brothers'^ on sable horses; 
 and finally, of '' the preests, parish, mendicant, and seculor, 
 some synging Saincte Warburgh's song, others sounding 
 claryons thereto, and otherssome citrialles ; '"' how, when the 
 procession had reached the bridge, the "manne with the 
 anlace" took his station on a mound reared in the middle of 
 it ; how the rest gathered round him, '* the preestes and 
 freers, all in white albs, making a most goodlie shewe,'' and 
 singing " the song of Saincte Baldwyn : " how, when this 
 was done, " the manne on the top threwe with greet mycht 
 his anlace into the see, and the claryons sounded an auntiant 
 charge and forloyn ; " how then there was more singing, and, 
 at the town- cross, a Latin sermon " preeched by Ralph de 
 Blundeville : " and how the day was ended by festivities, the 
 performance of the play of ''The Knyghtes of Bristow" 
 by the friars of St. Augustine, and the lighting of a great 
 bonfire on Kynwulph Hill. 
 
 The antiquaries of the town were eager to know the anony- 
 
190 CHATTERTON ! 
 
 mous '* Dunhelmus Bristoliensis " who had contributed this 
 perfectly novel document to the archives of Bristol ; and they 
 succeeded in identifying him with Mr. Lambert's singular 
 apprentice, — the discoverer, as they would now learn, of a 
 similar piece of antiquity in the shape of a pedigree for Mr. 
 Burgum, the pewterer. Examined, coaxed, and threatened 
 on the subject of his authority, Chatterton prevaricated, but at 
 last adhered to the assertion that the manuscript in question 
 was one of a collection which had belonged to his father, who 
 had obtained them from the large chest or coffer in the muni- 
 ment-room of the church of St. Mary Kedclife. And here, 
 whether owing to his obstinacy or to the stupidity of the in- 
 quisitors, the matter was allowed to rest. 
 
 The general impression that followed the discovery of the 
 author of the communication relative to the opening of the 
 old bridge, was that Mr. Lambert's apprentice was really a 
 very extraordinary lad, who, besides being a poet in a small 
 way, was also a dabbler in antiquities, and had somehow 
 or other become possessed, as he said himself, of valuable 
 materials respecting the history of Bristol. Accordingly he 
 became, in some sense, a local celebrity. Among the persons 
 that took him by the hand were one or two of some name and 
 importance in Bristol — Mr. George Catcott, the partner of 
 Mr. Burgum; his brother, the Rev. Alexander Catcott; and 
 Mr. Barrett, a surgeon in good practice. Two of these had a 
 reputation as literary men. The Rev. Mr. Catcott had written 
 a book in support of the Noachian view of the Deluge, and 
 was, besides, according to Chatterton's delineations of him, a 
 kind of oracle on scientific points at Bristol tea-parties, where 
 " shewing wondering cits his fossil store," he would expound 
 his orthodox theory of springs, rocks, mountains, and strata. 
 What the reverend Catcott was at refined tea-parties, his 
 coarser brother, the pewterer, was at taverns. Chatterton 
 thus hits him off: — 
 
 " So at Llewellyn's your great brother sits, 
 The laughter of his tributary wits, 
 Ruling the noisy multitude with ease, — 
 Empties his pint, and sputters his decrees." 
 
A STOEY OF THE YEAE 1770. 191 
 
 Mr. Barrett, tlie surgeon, on the other hand, was a sedate 
 professional man, of repute as an antiquarian, and known to 
 be engaged in writing a history of Bristol. 
 
 The two Catcotts, Barrett, and Burgum, with some others, 
 known either through their means or independently of them- 
 Mr. Matthew Mease, a vintner ; Messrs. Allen and Broderip, 
 two musicians and church organists ; the Rev. Mr. Broughton; 
 Mr. Clayfield, a distiller, *' a worthy, generous man ; " 
 Mr. Alcock, a miniature painter; T. Gary, a pipe-maker; 
 H. Kator, a sugar-baker ; W. Smith, a player ; J. Rudhall, an 
 apothecary's apprentice ; such, so far as we can collect their 
 names, were the principal acquaintances and associates of 
 Chatterton during his apprenticeship with Mr. Lambert. 
 There are references also to some acquaintances of the other 
 sex : Mrs. Baker, Mrs. Carty, Miss Webb, Miss Sandford, 
 Miss Bush, Miss Thatcher, Miss Hill, &c., not to omit the 
 most conspicuous of all, and the only one between whom and 
 Chatterton one is able to surmise a sentimental relation, that 
 " female Machiavel, Miss Rumsey," so spitefully alluded to 
 in the letter to the transatlantic Mr. Baker. The Catcotts, 
 Barrett, and Burgum, however, come most into notice. On 
 the Rev. Mr. Catcott, Chatterton, we are to suppose, drops in 
 occasionally, to listen to a prelection on fossils and the Deluge ; 
 Burgum and the other Catcott he may sometimes meet at 
 Matthew Mease's, where Cattott acts the chairman ; and from 
 Barrett, calling on him at his surgery once a week or so, he 
 receives sensible advices as to the propriety of making poetry 
 subordinate to his profession, as well as (what he greatly 
 prefers) the loan of medical and uncommon books. 
 
 It is to this little public of heterogeneous individuals — 
 clergymen, surgeons, tradesmen, vintners, and young appren- 
 tices like himself — that Chatterton produces his Rowley poems, 
 and other antique writings. As early as the date of the 
 Burgum pedigree, we have seen, he had ventured to bring out 
 one antique piece, the " Romaunte of the Cnychte," by the so- 
 called John de Bergham. To this had been added, as early 
 as the commencement of 1768, the "Tournament," the poem 
 alluded to in the letter to Baker; as well as, perhaps, other 
 
192 CHATTERTON : 
 
 pieces. Farther, in the account of the opening of the old hridge 
 (September, 1768), references are introduced to the " Songe of 
 Saincte Warburghe," and the " Songe of Saincte Baldwynne," 
 showing that these antiques must have been then extant. Tn 
 short, there is evidence that, before the conclusion of his six- 
 teenth year, Chatterton had produced at least a portion of his 
 alleged antiques. But the year that followed, or from the 
 close of 1768 to the close of 1769, seems to have been his 
 most prolific period in this respect. In or about the winter of 
 1768 — 9, that is, when he had just completed his sixteenth 
 year, he produced, in the circle of his friends above mentioned, 
 his ballad of " The Bristowe Tragedie ; " his " tragical inter- 
 lude " of " ^Ua,'' in itself a large poem ; his " Elinoure and 
 Juga," a fine pastoral poem of the wars of the Eoses ; and 
 numerous other pieces of all forms and lengths, in the same 
 antique spelling. Then, also, did he first distinctly give the 
 account of those pieces to which he ever afterwards adhered — 
 to wit, that they were, for the greater part, the compositions 
 of Thomas Kowley, a priest of Bristol of the fifteenth cen- 
 tury, many of whose manuscripts, preserved in the muni- 
 ment-room of the church of St. Mary, had come into his 
 hands. 
 
 The Catcotts were the persons most interested in the re- 
 covered manuscripts; and whenever Chatterton had a new 
 poem of Rowley's on his hands, it was usually to Mr. George 
 Catcott that he first gave a copy of it. To Mr. Barrett, on 
 the other hand, he usually imparted such scraps of ancient 
 prose records, deeds, accounts of old churches, &c., as were 
 likely to be of use to that gentleman in preparing his history 
 of Bristol. So extensive, in fact, were, the surgeon's obliga- 
 tions to the young man, that he seems to have thought it 
 impossible to requite them otherwise than by a pecuniary 
 recompense. Accordingly, there is evidence of an occasional 
 guinea or half-guinea having been transferred from the pocket 
 of Mr. Barrett to that of Chatterton on the score of literary 
 assistance rendered him in the progress of his work. From 
 the Catcotts, too, Chatterton seems, on similar grounds, to 
 have now and then obtained something. That they were not 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 193 
 
 SO liberal as they might have been, however, the following 
 bill in Chatterton's handwriting will show : — 
 
 " Mr. G. Catcott, 
 
 " To the Executors of T. Rowley. 
 " To pleasure reed, in readg. his Historic works . . £5 5 
 his Poetic works . . . £5 5 
 
 £10 10 0" 
 
 Whether tlie above was splenetically sent to Catcott, or 
 whether it was only drawn up by Chatterton in a cashless 
 moment by way of frolic, is not certain ; the probability, how- 
 ever, is, that, if it was sent, the pewterer did not think it 
 necessary to discharge it. Yet he was not such a hard sub- 
 ject as his partner, Burgum, whom Chatterton (no doubt after 
 sufficient trial) represents as stinginess itself. 
 
 But it was not only as a young man of extensive antiqua- 
 rian knowledge and of decided literary talent that Chatterton 
 was known in Bristol. As the transcriber of the Rowley 
 poems, and the editor of curious pieces of information, derived 
 from ancient manuscripts which he was understood to have 
 in his possession, the Catcotts, Barrett, and the rest, had no 
 fault to find with him ; but there were other phases in which 
 lie appeared, by no means so likely to recommend him to their 
 favour, or to the favour of such other influential persons in the 
 community as might have been disposed to patronise modesty 
 in combination with youth and literature. 
 
 In a town of 70,000 inhabitants (which was about the 
 population of Bristol eighty years ago) it must be remembered 
 that all the public charaQ-ers are marked men. The mayor, 
 the various aldermen and common-coun oilmen, the city clergy- 
 men, the chief gi'ocers, bankers, and tradesmen, the teachers 
 of the public schools, &c., are all recognised as they pass 
 along the streets ; and their peculiarities, physical and moral, 
 such as the red nose of Alderman Such-an-one, the wheezy 
 voice of the Eev. Such-another, and the blustering self- 
 importance of citizen Such-a-third, are perfectly familiar to 
 the civic imagination. Now, it is the most natural of all 
 things for a young man in such a town, just arrived at a 
 tolerable conceit of himself, and determined to have a place 
 
 
 
194 CHATTERTON : 
 
 some day in Mr. Craik's " Pursuit of Knowledge under diffi- 
 culties," to be seized with a tremendous disrespect for every- 
 thing locally sacred, and to delight in promulgating it. What 
 nonsense they do talk in the town-council ; what a miserable 
 set of mercantile rogues are the wealthy citizens ; what an 
 absence of liberality and high general intelligence there is 
 in the whole procedure of the community — these are the 
 common-places (often, it must be confessed, true enough) 
 through which the high-spirited young native of a middle- 
 class British town must almost necessarily pass, on his way 
 to a higher appreciation of men and things. Through the 
 sorrows of Lichfield, the Lichfield youth realizes how it is 
 that all creation groaneth and travaileth ; and pinched by the 
 inconveniences of Dundee, the aspirant who is there nursed 
 into manhood turns down his shirt- collar at all things, and 
 takes a Byronic view of the entire universe. 
 
 Chatterton was specially liable to this discontent with all 
 around him. Of a dogged, sullen, and passionate disposition, 
 not without a considerable spice of malice ; treated as a boy, 
 yet with a brain consciously the most powerful in Bristol ; 
 sadly in want of pocket-money for purposes more or less 
 questionable, and having hardly any means of procuring it — 
 he took his revenge out in satire against all that was respect- 
 able in Bristol. If Mr. Thomas Harris, then the Eight Wor- 
 shipful Mayor of the city, passed him on the pavement, either 
 ignorant what a youth of genius he was pushing aside, or 
 looking down somewhat askance, as a mayor will do at an 
 attorney's apprentice that will not take off his hat when he is 
 expected, the thought that probably arose in his breast was, 
 ** You are a purse-proud fool, Mr. Mayor, and I have more 
 sense in my little finger than you have in your whole body." 
 If there was a civic dinner, and Chatterton was told of it, the 
 remark would be, what feeding there would be among the 
 aldermen and city brothers ; what guzzling of claret ; and 
 what after-dinner speeches by fellows that could not pronounce 
 their H's, and hardly knew how to read. If he chanced to 
 sit in church, hearing the Rev. Dr. Cutts Barton, then Dean 
 of Bristol, preach, what would pass in his mind would be, 
 
 i 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 195 
 
 " You are a drowsy old rogue, Cutts, and have no more re- 
 ligion in you than a sausage." And even when Newton, the 
 Bishop of the diocese, distinguished prelate as he was, made 
 his appearance in the pulpit, he would not be safe from the 
 excoriations of this young critic in the distant pew. Chatter- 
 ton's own friends and acquaintances, too, came in for their 
 share of his sarcasms. Lambert, we believe, he hated ; and 
 we have seen how he could wreak a personal grudge on an 
 old teacher. The Kev. Mr. Catcott, not a bad fellow in the 
 main, he soon set down, in his own private opinion, as a 
 narrow-minded parson, with no force or philosophy, conceited 
 with his reputation at tea-parties, and a dreadful bore with his 
 fossils and his theory of the Deluge. His brother, the un- 
 clerical Catcott, again, had probably more wit and vigour, but 
 dogmatised insufferably over his beer ; Burgum was a vain, 
 stingy, ungrammatical goose; and Mr. Barrett, with all his good 
 intentions, was too fond of giving common-place advices. In 
 short, Bristol was a vile place, where originality or genius, or 
 even ordinary culture and intelligence, had no chance of being 
 appreciated ; and to spend one's existence there would be but 
 a life-long attempt to teach a certain class of animals the 
 value and the beauty of pearls ! 
 
 Poor unhappy youth ! how, through the mist and din of 
 eighty years past and gone since tlien, I recognise thee walk- 
 ing in the winter evenings of 1769-70, through the dark 
 streets of Bristol, or out into its dark environs, ruminating 
 such evil thoughts as these ! And what, constituting myself 
 for the moment the mouthpiece of all that society has since 
 pronounced on thy case, should I, leaping back over long 
 years to place myself at thy side, whisper to thee by way of 
 counsel or reproach ? — 
 
 " Persist ; be content ; be more modest; think less of for- 
 bidden indulgences ; give up telling lies ; attend to your 
 master's business ; and if you will cherish the fire of genius, 
 and become a poet and a man of name, like the Johnsons, 
 the Goldsmiths, the Churchills, and others whom you think 
 yourself born to equal or surpass, at least study patience, have 
 faith in honourable courses, and realize, at)ove all, that wealth 
 
 02 
 
196 CHATTEllTON : 
 
 and fame are vanity, and that whether you succeed or fail it 
 will be all the same a hundred years after this." 
 
 " Easily said," thou wouldst answer; "cheaply advised! 
 I also could speak as you do ; if your soul were in my soul's 
 stead, I could heap up words against you, and shake mine 
 head at you. That the present will pass, and that a hundred 
 years hence all the tragedy or all the farce will have been 
 done and over — true ; I know it. Nevertheless I know also 
 that minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, the present 
 must be moved through, and exhausted ! ' A hundred years 
 after this !' Did not Manlius, the Roman, know it; and yet 
 was there not a moment in the history of the world — a moment 
 to be fully felt and gone through by Manlius — when, flung 
 from the Tarpeian rock, he, yet living, hung halfway between 
 his gaping executioners above and his ruddy death among the 
 stones below ? ' A hundred years after this !' Pompeius, the 
 Roman, knew it ; and yet was there not a moment in the 
 history of the world — a moment fully to be endured by 
 Pompeius — when, reading in the treacherous boat, he sat half- 
 way between the ship that bore his destinies and his funeral 
 pile on the Libyan shore ? Centuries back in the past these 
 moments now lie engulphed ; but what is that to me ? It 
 is my turn now ; here I am, wretched in this beastly Bristol, 
 where Savage was allowed to starve in prison ; and, by the 
 very fact that I live, I have a right to my solicitude !" 
 
 Obstinate boy ! is there then aught that can still, with some 
 show of sense, be advised to you ? Seek a friend. Leave 
 the Catcotts, lay and clerical, the Burgums, the Barretts, the 
 Matthew Meases, and the rest of them, and seek some one 
 true friend, such as surely even Bristol can supply, of about 
 the same age as yourself, or, what were better, somewhat older. 
 See him daily, walk with him, smoke with him, laugh with 
 him, discuss religion with him, hear his experiences, show 
 your poetry to him, and, above all, make a clean breast to him 
 of your various delinquencies. Or, more efficient perhaps 
 still, fall really in love. Avoid the Miss Rumseys, and find 
 out some beauty of a better kind, to whom, with or without 
 hope, you can vow the future of your noblest heart. Find 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. l97 
 
 her ; walk beneatK her window ; catch glimpses of her ; 
 dream of her ; if fortune favours, woo her, and (true you are 
 but seventeen !) win her. Bristol will then be a paradise ; its 
 sky will be lightsome, its streets beautiful, its mayor tolerable, 
 its clergy respectable, and all its warehouses palaces ! 
 
 Is this also nonsense ? Well, then, my acquaintance with 
 general biography enables me to tell you of one particular 
 family at this moment living in Bristol, with which it might 
 be well for you to get acquainted. Mr. Barrett might be able 
 to introduce you. The family I mean is that of the Mores, 
 five sisters, who keep a boarding-school for young ladies in 
 Park-street, " the most flourishing establishment of its kind 
 in the west of England." The Miss Mores, as you know, are 
 praised by all the mothers in Bristol as extremely clever and 
 accomplished young women ; and one of them, Miss Hannah, 
 is, like yourself, a writer of verses, and, like yourself, destined 
 to literary celebrity. Now I do not wish to be mischievous ; 
 but seeing that posterity will wish that you two, living as you 
 did in the same town, should at least have met and spoken 
 with each other, might 1 suggest a notion to you ? Could you 
 not elope with Hannah More? True, she is seven years 
 your senior, extremely sedate, and the very last person in the 
 world to be guilty of anynonsense with an attorney's appren- 
 tice. Nevertheless, try. Just think of the train of con- 
 sequences — the whole boarding-school in a flutter ; all Bristol 
 scandalised ; paragraphs in Felix Farley's Journal ; and pos- 
 terity effectually cheated of two things^ the tragic termination 
 
 of your own life, and the admirable old maidenhood of hers ! 
 ***** 
 
 Chatterton did not conceal his contempt from the very 
 persons it was most likely to offend. Known not only as 
 a transcriber of ancient English poetry, but also as a poet in 
 his own person, he began to support his reputation in the 
 latter character by producing from time to time, along with his 
 Eowley poems, certain lengthy compositions of his own in 
 a modern satirical vein. In these compositions, which were 
 written after the manner of Churchill, there was the strangest 
 possible jumble of crude Whig politics and personal scurrility 
 
198 CHATTERTON : 
 
 against local notabilities. What effect tliey were likely to 
 
 have on Chatterton's position in his native town, may be 
 
 inferred from a specimen or two. How would Broderip, the 
 organist, like this ? — 
 
 *• While Broderip's humdrum symphonies of flats 
 Eival the harmony of midnight cats." 
 
 Or the lay Catcott this allusion to a professional feat of his in 
 laying the topstone of a spire ? — 
 
 " Catcott is very fond of talk and fame — 
 His wish a perpetuity of name ; 
 Which to procure, a pewter altar 's made 
 To bear his name and signify his trade ; 
 In pomp burlesqued the rising spire to head, 
 To tell futurity a pewterer 's dead." 
 
 And how could the clerical Catcott like this reference to his 
 orthodoxy ? — 
 
 "Might we not, Catcott, then infer from hence 
 Your zeal for Scriptare hath devoured your sense?" 
 
 Or what would the mayor say to this ? — 
 
 " Let Han-is wear his self-sufficient air, 
 Nor dare remark, for Harris is a mayor." 
 
 Or the civic dignity of Bristol generally to this ? — 
 
 " *Tis doubtful if her aldermen can read : 
 This of a certainty the muse may tell, 
 None of her common-councilmen can spell." 
 
 Clearly enough an attorney's apprentice that was in the 
 habit of showing about such verses was not in the way to 
 procure patronage and goodwill. If, however, any of his 
 friends remonstrated with him, his answer was ready : — 
 
 te Damn'd narrow notions, tending to disgrace 
 The boasted reason of the human race ! 
 Bristol may keep her prudent maxims still ; 
 But know, my saving friends, I never will. 
 The composition of my soul is made 
 Too great for servile, avaricious trade ; 
 When, raving in the lunacy of ink, 
 I catch the pen, and publish what I think." 
 
 Accordingly Chatterton continued to support, in the eyes of 
 the portion of the community of Bristol that knew him, a two- 
 fold character — that on the one hand of an enthusiastic youth 
 with much antiquarian knowledge, the possessor of many 
 
F 
 
 A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 199 
 
 antique manuscripts, chiefly poetry of the fifteenth century ; 
 and that on the other of an ill-conditioned boy of spiteful 
 temper, the writer of somewhat clever but very scurrilous 
 verses. Nay, more, it was observable that the latter character 
 was growing upon him, apparently at the expense of the 
 former; for while, up to his seventeenth year (1768-9), his 
 chief recreation seemed to be in his antiques and Eowley 
 MSS., after that date he seemed to throw his antiques aside, 
 and devote all his time to imitations of the satires of Churchill, 
 under such names as The ConsuUad, Kew Gardens, &c. And 
 here the reader must permit me a little Essay or disquisitional 
 Interleaf on the character and writings of Chatterton, 
 
 All thinking persons have now agreed to abandon that 
 summary method of dealing with human character according 
 to which unusual and eccentric courses of action are attributed 
 to mere caprices on the part of the individuals concerned — 
 mere obstinate determinations to go out of the common 
 route. 
 
 " The dog, to gain some private ends, 
 "Went mad, and bit the man," 
 
 is a maxim less in repute than it once was. In such cases as 
 that of Chatterton, it is now believed, deeper causes are 
 always operating than the mere wish to deceive people, and 
 make a figure. 
 
 Now, in the case of Chatterton, it appears to us, we must 
 first of all take for granted an extraordinary natural precocity 
 or prematurity of the faculties. We are aware that there is 
 a prejudice against the use of this hypothesis. But why 
 should it be so? How otherwise can we represent to our- 
 selves the cause of that diversity which we see in men than 
 by going deeper than all that we know of pedigree, and con- 
 ceiving the birth of every new soul to be, as it were, a distinct 
 creative act of the unseen Spirit ? That now, in some War- 
 wickshire village, the birth should be a Shakespeare ; and that, 
 again, in the poor posthumous child of a dissipated Bristol 
 choir-singer, the tiny body should be shaken by the surcharge 
 
200 CHATTERTON : 
 
 of soul within it, are not miracles in themselves, but only 
 variations in the great standing miracle that there should be 
 birth at all. Nor with the idea of precocity is it necessary 
 to associate that either of disease or of insanity. There was 
 nothing in Chatterton to argue disease in the ordinary sense, 
 or to indicate that, had he lived, he might not, like Pope or 
 Tasso, who were also precocious, have gone on steadily in- 
 creasing in ability till the attainment of a sound old age. 
 And though it seems certain that there was a tendency to * 
 madness in the Chatterton blood — Chatterton's sister, Mrs. 
 Newton, having afterwards had an attack of insanity — we 
 think that the use of this fact by Southey and others to 
 explain the tenor of Chatterton's life, has been too hasty and 
 inconsiderate. A medical friend of ours avers that he never 
 knew a man of genius who had not some aunt or other in 
 a lunatic asylum, or at least fit for one ; and so long as we 
 can account for Chatterton's singularities in any other way, 
 we see no reason, any more than in the similar instance of 
 Charles Lamb, why ^ve should attribute them to what was at 
 the utmost only a dormant, or possibly about to be developed, 
 taint of madness in his constitution. 
 
 Assuming, then, that Chatterton, without being either a 
 mere lusus Jiaturce, or insane, was simply a child of very 
 extraordinary endowments, we would point out, as the pre- 
 dominant feature in his character, his remarkable veneration 
 for the antique. In the boyhood even of Sir Walter Scott, 
 bom as he was in the very midst of ballads and traditions, we 
 see no manifestation of a love of the past and the historic 
 nearly so strong as that which possessed Chatterton from his 
 infancy. The earliest form in which this constitutional pecu- 
 liarity appeared in him seems to have been a fondness for the 
 ecclesiastical antiquities of his native city, and, above all, an 
 attachment to the old Gothic Church of St. Mary RedclifFe. 
 
 Some time ago we saw in a provincial Scottish newspaper 
 an obituary notice of a poor idiot named John M'Bey, who 
 had been for about sixty years a prominent character in the 
 village of Huntly, Aberdeenshire. Where the poor creature 
 had been born, no one knew; he had been found, when 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 201 
 
 apparently about ten years old, wandering among tlie Gartly 
 Hills, and had been brouglit by some country people into tlie 
 village. Here, " supported by the kindness of several families, 
 at whose kitchen-tables he regularly took his place at one or 
 other of the meals of the day," he continued to reside ever 
 after a conspicuous figure in the schoolboy recollections of all 
 the inhabitants for more than half a century. The " shaggy 
 carroty head, the vacant stare, the idle trots and aimless walks 
 of ' Jock,' could yet," said the notice, " be recalled in a mo- 
 ment '^ by all that knew him. "At an early period of his 
 history,'^ proceeded the notice, *'he had formed a strong- 
 affection for the bell in the old ruined church of Euthven, in 
 the parish of Caimie ; and many were the visits he paid to 
 that object of, to him, surpassing interest. Having dubbed it 
 with the name of ' Wow,' he embraced every opportunity at 
 funerals to get a pull of the rope, interpreting the double 
 peals, in his own significant language, to mean, ' Come hame, 
 come hame.' Every funeral going to that churchyard was 
 known to him; and, till his old age, he was generally the 
 first person that appeared on the ground. The emblems of 
 his favourite bell, in bright yellow, were sewed on his gar- 
 ments ; and woe to the school-boy that would utter a word in 
 depreciation of his favourite. When near his end, he was 
 asked how he felt. He said ' he was ga'in awa' to the woiv, 
 nae to come back again.' After his death, he was laid in his 
 favourite burying-place, within sound of his cherished bell." 
 
 Do not despise this little story, reader. To our mind it 
 illustrates much. As this poor idiot, deban-ed from all the 
 general concerns of life, and untaught in other people's tenets, 
 had invented a religion for himself, setting up as a central 
 object in his own narrow circle of images and fancies an old 
 ruined belfry, which had somehow (who knows through what 
 horror of maternity ?) caught his sense of mystery, clinging to 
 this object with the whole tenacity of his affections, and even 
 devising symbols by which it might be ever present to him ; 
 so, with more complex and less rude accompaniments, does 
 the precocious boy of Bristol seem to have related himself to 
 the Gothic fabric near which he first saw the light. This 
 
202 CHATTERTON : 
 
 cliiirch was his fetich, his "wow." It was through it, as 
 through a metaphorical gateway, that his imagination worked 
 itself back into the great field of the past, so as to expatiate 
 on the ancient condition of his native " Brjstowe " and the 
 whole olden time of England. 
 
 This is no fancy of ours. " Chatterton," says one of his ear- 
 liest acquaintances, the Mr. William Smith above mentioned, 
 " was particularly fond of walking in the fields, particularly 
 in KedclifFe meadows, and of talking of his manuscripts, and 
 sometimes reading them there. There was one spot in parti- 
 cular, full in view of the church, in which he seemed to take 
 peculiar delight. He would frequently lay himself down, fix 
 his eyes upon the church, and seem as if he were in a kind of 
 trance ; then, on a sudden, he would tell me, * That steeple 
 was burnt down by lightning ; that was the place where they 
 formerly acted plays.' " To the same efi*ect, also, many allu- 
 sions to the Church in the Eowley poems ; thus : — 
 
 *• Thou seest this maestrie of a human hand, 
 The pride of Bristowe and the western land." 
 
 And here we may remind the reader of a circumstance men- 
 tioned above, namely, that the ancestors of Chatterton had, 
 for a hundred and fifty years, been sextons of this same Church 
 of St. Mary Redcliffe, and that the office had only passed 
 out of the family on the death of his father's elder brother, 
 John. Chatterton' s father, too, it should be remembered, 
 was a choir-singer in the church ; and Chatterton himself, 
 while a child, had, in virtue of old family right and proximity 
 of residence, had the run of its aisles and galleries. Can it 
 be, we would ask the physiological philosophers, that a 
 veneration for the edifice of St. Mary Eedclifie, and for all 
 connected with it, had thus come down in the Chatterton 
 blood ; that, as it were, the defunct old Chattertons, Johns 
 and Thomases in their series, who had, in times gone by, 
 paced along the interior of the church, jangling its ponderous 
 keys, brushing away its cobwebs, and talking with its stony 
 effigies of knights and saints buried below, had thus ac- 
 quired, in gradually-increasing mass, a store of antique 
 
p 
 
 A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 203 
 
 associations, to be transmitted, as a fatal heritage, to tlie un- 
 happy youth in whom their line was to become extinct and 
 immortal ? We can suppose that, in part, this was the case. 
 
 But Chatterton's disposition towards the antique did not 
 remain a mere fetichistic instinct of veneration for the relic 
 his ancestors had guarded. From his very boyhood he 
 entered with all the zeal of a reader and intelligent inquirer 
 into the service of his hereditary feeling. It would not be 
 long, for example, before, passing from the edifice to its 
 history, as recorded in the annals of Bristol, he would learn 
 to pronounce, with indefinable reverence, the name of its 
 founder, William Canynge, the Bristol merchant of the 
 fifteenth century. Whatever particulars were to be gleaned 
 from books regarding the life of this notable personage, must 
 have been familiar to Chatterton long before he ceased to be 
 a blue-coat scholar. How Canynge had been such a wealthy 
 man, that, according to William of Worcester, he was 
 owner of ten vessels, and gave employment to one hundred 
 mariners, as well as to one hundred artificers on shore ; how 
 he had been as munificent as he was wealthy ; how he had 
 been mayor of Bristol in 1431, and four separate times after- 
 wards ; how he and the town had become involved in the 
 Wars of the Eoses, and how, on the accession of Edward 
 lY., he had made the peace of the town by paying a fine to 
 that monarch ; and how, finally, he had become a priest in 
 his old age, and devoted a large part of his fortune to the 
 erection, or rather re-construction, of the Church of St. Mary 
 Bedcliffe — all this knowledge, easily accessible to an inquir- 
 ing Bristol boy, Chatterton would collect and ponder. 
 
 Chatterton, however, was not merely an inquisitive lad ; 
 he was a young poet, full of enthusiasm and constructive 
 talent. Eence, not satisfied with a meagre outline of the 
 story of Canynge, as it could be derived from the chronicles 
 of Bristol, he set himself to fill up the outirne by conjectures 
 and synchronisms, so as to make clear for himself "Canynge's 
 Life and Times," as a luminous little spot in the general dark- 
 ness of the English past. And here comes in the story of 
 the old parchments. 
 
204 CHATTERTON : 
 
 Over tlie north porcli of St. Maiy^s Eedcliffe was a room 
 known as "the muniment-room." Here, at the beginning 
 of the eighteenth century, there lay six or seven locked 
 chests, which were understood to contain old deeds and 
 other writings. One of the chests was traditionally known 
 as "Mr. Canynge's coffer." The keys of this chest had 
 been long lost ; and when, in the year 1727, it was deemed 
 expedient to secure some title-deeds that were believed to be 
 contained in it, a locksmith was employed to break it open. 
 Such documents as were thought of importance were then 
 removed, and the rest were left in the open chest as of no 
 value. The other chests were similarly treated. Accord- 
 ingly, parcels of the remaining contents were subsequently, 
 from time to time, carried off by various persons ; and, in 
 particular, it was remembered that when John Chatterton 
 was sexton, his brother, the choir-singer and teacher of Pyle- 
 street school, had carried off a quantity of them to be used 
 as book-covers and for other such-like purposes. A bundle 
 of these parchments remained in the possession of Mrs. 
 Chatterton after her husband's death, and such of them as 
 had not been previously snipped into thread-papers came 
 into Chatterton's hands. 
 
 What these old documents really contained, we have no 
 means of knowing. That some of them may have been 
 papers of historical value, is not improbable. It is certain, 
 at least, that they interested Chatterton, that the possession 
 of them nourished his sense of the antique, and that he 
 learnt to decipher parts of them, catching out old bits of 
 Latin phraseology, and such like, which he mis-wrote in 
 copying. We may eVen go farther, and surmise that out of 
 those papers he may have derived hints that were of use 
 to him in his attempt to represent the circumstances of 
 Canynge's life. They may have helped him, for example, to 
 appropriate names for some of those fictitious or semi- 
 fictitious personages whom he thought proper to group 
 around Canynge in that tableau or historical romance of 
 " Bristol in the Fifteenth Century," with the construction of 
 which he regaled himself. 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 205 
 
 Of these secondary dramatis personce^ grouped In Hs imagi- 
 nation around Canynge, the most important was a supposed 
 priest called Thomas Kowley, or more fully, " Thomas 
 Eowlie, parish-preeste of St. John's, in the city of Bristol." 
 The relations between Canynge and Eowley, as bodied forth 
 in Chatterton's conception, were as follows : — Eowley, who 
 had been at school in Bristol along with CanyngQ, became 
 chaplain to Canynge's father. On that old gentleman's death, 
 Canynge, then a rising young merchant, continued the family 
 patronage to his schoolmate, and employed him, amongst 
 other things, in collecting manuscripts and drawings for him. 
 About the time of Canynge's first mayoralty, in 1431, 
 Eowley was settled as parish-priest of St. John's ; and from 
 that time forward, for a period of thirty or forty years, the 
 two men continued on terms of the most friendly and cordial 
 intimacy — Canynge, the wealthiest man in the west of 
 England, and the civic soul of Bristol, living as a liberal 
 merchant-prince in a noble residence; Eowley, a man of 
 books and literature, in a modest priest's habitation, made 
 comfortable by his patron's munificence. These two men, 
 with a few others of minor activity — as Carpenter, Bishop of 
 Bristol ; Sir Tibbot Gorges, a country gentleman of the 
 neighbourhood ; Sir Charles Baldwin, a brave knight of 
 the Lancastrian faction; Iscam, another priest of Bristol; 
 Ladgate, a monk of London, &c. &c.— constituted, in fact, 
 an enlightened little club in Chatterton's ideal Bristol of 
 1430-60, enlivening that city by their amateur theatricals and 
 other relaxations from more severe business, and rendering 
 it more distinguished for culture than any other town in 
 England, excepting Oxford and London. The fine old 
 merchant himself occasionally uses his pen to some purpose, 
 as in his epigram on the imaginary John a Dalbenie, a hot 
 politician of the town — 
 
 " John makes a jar 'bout Lancaster and York. 
 Be still, good manna, and learn to mind thy work ! " 
 
 Generally, however, he abstains from literature himself, 
 and prefers reading or hearing the productions of his friends 
 
206 CHATTERTON I 
 
 Iscam and Rowley, especially those of Rowley, who is liis 
 poet-laureate. 
 
 Had Chatterton put forth this coinage of his brain in the 
 shape of a professed historical romance, all would have been 
 well. But from working so lovingly in the matter of an- 
 tiquity, he contracted also a preference for the antique {inform. 
 As Scott, in the very process of realizing to himself the 
 Quentin Durwards, the Mause Headriggs, and the Jedediah 
 Cleishbothams of his inimitable fictions, acquired in his own 
 person an antique way of thinking, and a mastery over the 
 antique glossary, if not a positive affection for it, so it be- 
 came natural to Chatterton, revelling as he did in conceptions 
 of the antique, to draw on, as it were, an ancient-fashioned 
 suit of thought, and make use of antique forms of language. 
 Hence, when, prompted by his literary impulse, he sought to 
 embody in verse any of those traditions or fictions relative 
 to the past time of England which his enthusiasm for the 
 antique had led him to fix upon — as, for example, the story 
 of the Danish invasions of England, the story of the Battle 
 of Hastings, or the story of a tournament in the reign of 
 Edward I. — he found himself obliged by a kind of artistic 
 necessity to impart a quaintness to his style by the use of 
 old vocables and idioms. Persisted in thereafter for the 
 mere pleasure of the exercise, the habit would become 
 exaggerated, till at last it would amount to an ungovernable 
 disposition to riot in the obsolete. 
 
 Even so far, however, there was nothing blameworthy. In 
 thus selecting a style artificially antique for the conveyance 
 of his historic fancies, Chatterton, it might be affirmed, had 
 but obeyed the proper instinct of his genius, and chosen that 
 element in which he found he could work best. Every man 
 has his mode, or set of intellectual conditions most favour- 
 able for the production and development of what is best in 
 him ; and in Chatterton^s case this mode, this set of condi- 
 tions, consisted in an affectation of the antique. For let any 
 one compare the Rowley Poems of Chatterton with his own 
 acknowledged productions, and the conclusion will be inevit- 
 able, that his forte was the antique, and that here alone lay 
 

 A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 207 
 
 any preternatural power lie possessed. There are, indeed, in 
 his acknowledged poems, felicities of expression and gleams 
 of genius, showing that even as a modern poet he would 
 certainly in time have taken a high rank ; but to do justice 
 to his astonishing abilities, we must read his antique compo- 
 sitions. In the element of the antique Chatterton rules like 
 a master ; in his modern effusions he is but a clever boy 
 beginning to handle with some effect the language of Pope 
 and Dryden. Moreover, there is a perceptible moral dif- 
 ference between the two classes of his performances. In his 
 antique poems there is freshness, enthusiasm, and a fine 
 earnest sense of the becoming ; throughout the modern ones 
 we are offended by irreverence, malevolence, and a kind of 
 vicious, boyish pruriency. And conscious as Chatterton 
 must have been of this difference ; aware as he must have 
 been that it was when he wrote in his artificially-antique 
 style that his invention worked most powerfully, that his 
 heart beat most nobly, and the poetic shiver ran most keenly 
 through his veins — we cannot w^onder that he should have 
 given himself up to this kind of literary recreation rather 
 than to any other. 
 
 Unfortunately, however, meaner causes were all this while 
 at work — maliciousness towards individuals, craving for 
 notoriety, delight in misleading people, and, above all, want 
 of money. Moreover, for this unhappy combination of moral 
 states and dispositions, it so happened that the Grandfather 
 of Lies had a very suitable temptation ready, in the shape of 
 that most successful literary imposture, the Ossian Poems, 
 then in the first blush of their contested celebrity. Yielding 
 to the temptation, Chatterton resolved to turn what was best 
 and most original in his genius — his enthusiasm for the an- 
 tique — into the service of his worst propensities. In other 
 words, he resolved i^^ adopt, with certain variations and adap- 
 tations to his own case, the trick of Macpherson. That this 
 was the act of one express and distinct determination of his 
 will — a solemn and secret compact with himself, made at a 
 very early period indeed, probably before the conclusion of 
 his fifteenth year — there can be no manner of doubt. The 
 
208 CHATTERTON : 
 
 elaboration of his scheme of imposture, however, was gradual. 
 The first exhibition of it, and probably that which suggested 
 much that followed, was the Burgum Hoax, with its after- 
 thought of the old English poet, John de Bergham. Of 
 this original trick the Bowley device was but a gigantic ex- 
 pansion. To invent a poet of the past, on whom to father all 
 his own compositions in the antique style, and to give this 
 poet a probable and fixed footing in history, was the essential 
 form of the scheme. That the poet thus invented should be 
 a native of Bristol, and that his date should be in the times of 
 the merchant Canynge, were special accidents determined by 
 Chatterton's position and peculiar capabilities. And thus the 
 two processes of invention, the legitimate and the illegitimate, 
 worked into each other's hands, — Chatterton's previous con- 
 ceptions of the life and times of Canynge providing him with a 
 proper chronological and topographical environment for his 
 required poet; and his device of the poet giving richness and 
 interest to his romance of Canynge. And, once begun, there 
 were powerful reasons why the deceit should be persevered 
 in — the pleasure of the jest itself; the secret sense of superi- 
 ority it gave him; its advantage as a means of hooking half- 
 crowns out of people's pockets; and last, though not least, the 
 impossibility of retracting, without being knocked down by 
 Barrett for damaging his history, or kicked by tK^Catcotts 
 for having made fools of them. Hence, by little and little, 
 the whole organization of the imposture, from the first rumour 
 of old manuscripts up to the use of ochre, black ^3ad, and 
 smoke, in preparing specimens of them. 
 
 But Chatterton, as we have already hinted, was not a literary 
 monomaniac, a creature of one faculty. His enthusiasm for 
 the antique, although the most remarkable part of him, was 
 not the whole of him. The Rowley habit of thought and 
 expression, though he liked to put it on, was also a thing that 
 he could at pleasure throw off. Though an antiquarian, and 
 a midnight reader of Speght's Chaucer and other black-letter 
 volumes, he was also an attorney's apprentice, accustomed to 
 small flirtations ; accustomed to debate and have brawls with 
 other attorney's apprentices, to read the newspapers and 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 209 
 
 lagazines, to be present at street mobs and public meetings, 
 and in every other way to take an apprentice's interest in the 
 current ongoings of the day. In short, besides being an 
 antiquarian, and a great creative genius in the element of the 
 English antique, Chatterton was also, in the year 1 769-70, a 
 complete and very characteristic specimen of that long-extinct 
 phenomenon, a thinking young Englishman of the early part of 
 the reign of George III. In other words, reader, besides being, 
 by the special charter of his genius, a poet in the Eowley vein, 
 he was also, by the more general right of his life eighty years 
 ago, very much such a young fellow as your own unmarried 
 great-grandfather was. 
 
 And what was that? Why, reader, your unmarried great- 
 grandfather, besides wearing a wig (which Chatterton did 
 not), a coat with broad lapels and flaps, knee-breeches, buckles, 
 and a cocked hat, was also, ten to one, a wild young dog of 
 a free-thinker, fond of Churchill and Wilkes's " Essay on 
 Woman," addicted to horrible slang against Bute and the 
 whole Scottish nation, and raving mad about a thing he 
 called Liberty. He read and repeated Junius, made jokes 
 against parsons, and (only until he married, remember) talked 
 Deism and very improper moral doctrine with respect to the 
 sexes. Now Chatterton, up to his capacities as a youth of 
 seventeen, was all this. He repudiated orthodoxy, refused to 
 be called a Christian, and held the whole clerical profession in 
 unbounded contempt. He drew up articles of faith on a slip of 
 paper (still to be seen in the British Museum) which he carried 
 in his pocket; which articles of faith were very much what 
 Pope believed before him, and what Burns, Byron, and others 
 have believed since. In short, he was recognised in Bristol 
 circles as an avowed free-thinker ; and his politics were to cor- 
 respond. He sneered at Samuel Johnson, and thought him 
 an old Tory bigot, who had got a pension for political parti- 
 zanship ; he delighted in the scandal about Bute and the 
 King's mother ; he thought the King himself an obstinate 
 dolt ; he denounced Grafton and the ministry to small Bristol 
 audiences ; and he desired the nation to rally round Wilkes. 
 One remark more, and we end our Interleaf. As Chatterton 
 
 P 
 
210 chatterton: 
 
 was this dual pnenomenon that we have described, as he was 
 composed of two parts — a mania for the antique, and that 
 general assemblage of more ordinary qualities and prejudices 
 which constituted the able young Englishman of his era; 
 so, it appears to us, the latter part of his character began, 
 about his seventeenth year, to gain upon him. Abandon- 
 ing the antique vein, wherein he had, as it were, a native gift 
 ready fashioned from the first, and all but independent of 
 culture, he began to court his more general faculties of thought 
 and observation, and to give himself more willingly up to that 
 species of literature in which, equally with other able young 
 men, he could only hope to attain ease and perfection by the 
 ordinary processes of assiduity and culture. Had he lived, we 
 believe there was an amount of general vigour and acqui- 
 sition in him that would have secured him eminence even in 
 this field, and have made him one of the conspicuous writers 
 of the eighteenth century ; but dying as he did so early, the 
 only bequest of real value he has left to the world is that more 
 specific and unaccountable deposit of his genius, the Rowley 
 antiques. 
 
 To a provincial attorney's apprentice, full of literary aspi- 
 rations, disgusted with his position in life, yet with no im- 
 mediate prospect of a better, there was but one outlook of any 
 reasonable hope or promise — the chance of being able, in the 
 meantime, to form some connexion with London periodicals 
 or publishers. Accordingly, this was the scheme which Chat- 
 terton, whose highest printed venture hitherto had been in 
 the columns of Felix Farley s Bristol Journal, set himself 
 to realize. 
 
 His first attempt was upon Dodsley, the publisher, of Pall 
 Mall, the brother and successor in business of the more cele- 
 brated Robert Dodsley, the author of the '' Muse in Livery," 
 and other trifles of some note in their day, and the projector, 
 along with Burke, of the Annual Register, The Dodsleys, it 
 should be mentioned, had published a standard collection of 
 ancient and modern English poetry, to which, it was under- 
 stood, additions would be made in subsequent volumes. This 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 211 
 
 fact ; the notoriety of the Annual Register, then in the tenth 
 year of -its existence ; probably, also, the circumstance, not 
 likely to be overlooked by a young litterateur, that in that 
 periodical there was a department for literary contributions 
 and poetry — all pointed Dodsley out to Chatterton as a likely 
 person for his purpose. Accordingly, one morning towards 
 the Christmas of 1768, the worthy publisher, entering his 
 shop in Pail-Mall, finds among his letters one from Bristol, 
 addressed in a neat small hand, and worded as follows : — 
 
 "Bristol, December 21st, 1768. 
 "Sir, — I take this method to acquaint you that I can procure copies of 
 several ancient poems, and an interlude, perhaps the oldest dramatic piece 
 extant, wrote by one Rowley, a priest of Bristol, who lived in the reigns of 
 Henry VI. and Edward IV. If these pieces will be of service to you, at your 
 command copies shall be sent to you by your most obedient servant, 
 
 " D. B. 
 
 " Please to direct to D. B., to be left with Mr. Thomas Chatterton, Redcliffe 
 Hill, Bristol." 
 
 In reply to this, Dodsley probably sent an intimation to 
 the effect that he would be glad to see the poems in question, 
 particularly the interlude ; for the following letter, turned up 
 long afterwards, along with the foregoing, among the loose 
 papers in Dodsley's counting-house, looks as if Chatterton had 
 at least received a reply to his note : — 
 
 «' Bristol, Feb. 15, 1769. 
 " Sib, — Having intelligence that the tragedy of jEUa was in being, after a 
 long and laborious search I was so happy as to attain a sight of it. I endea- 
 voured to obtain a copy of it to send you ; but the present possessor absolutely 
 denies to give me one, unless I give him one guinea for a consideration. As 
 I am unable to procure such a sum, I made a search for another copy, but 
 tinsuccessfully. Unwilling such a beauteous piece should be lost, I have made 
 bold to apply to you. Several gentlemen of learning who have seen it join 
 with me in praising it. 1 am far from having any mercenary views for myself 
 in the affair ; and, was I able, would print it at my own risk. It is a perfect 
 tragedy — the plot clear ; the language spirited ; and the songs (interspersed in 
 it) flowing, poetical, and elegantly simple ; the similes judiciously applied, 
 and, though wrote in the age of Henry VI., not inferior to many of the present 
 age. If I can procure a copy, with or without the gratification, it shall be 
 immediately sent to you. The motive that actuates me to do this, is to con- 
 vince the world that the monks (of whom some have so despicable an opinion) 
 were not such blockheads as generally thought, and that good poetry might be 
 wrote in the dark days of superstition, as well as in these more enlightened 
 ages. An immediate answer will oblige. I shall not receive your favour as 
 for myself, but as your agent. I am, sir, your most obedient servant, 
 
 "Thomas Chatterton. 
 
 " P. S. — My reason for concealing my name was, lest my master (who is now 
 out of town) should see my letters, and think I neglected his business. Direct 
 for me on Redcliffe Hill. 
 
 p2 
 
212 CHATTEETON : 
 
 [Here followed an extract from the tragedy, as a specimen of its style.] 
 " The whole contains about one thousand lines. If it should not suit you, I 
 should be obliged to you if you would calculate the expenses of printing it, as 
 I will endeavour to publish it by subscription on my own accoimt. 
 " To Mr. James Dodsley, Bookseller, Pall Mail, London." 
 
 This clumsy attempt to extract a guinea from tlie publisher 
 (Chatterton had probably just finished his own manuscript of 
 JElla, and did not like the notion of copying out so long a 
 poem on mere chance) very naturally failed. Mr. Dodsley did 
 not think the speculation worth risking a guinea on ; and 
 ^^ ^lla, a Tragycal Enterlude, or Discoorseynge Tragedte, 
 wrotten hy Thomas RowlUe ; plaiedd before Mastre Canynge, 
 atte hys Howse, nempte the Bodde Lodge,'' remained useless 
 among Chatterton' s papers. 
 
 Chatterton was not daunted. Among the notabilities of 
 the time with whose names his own excursions in the field of 
 literature necessarily made him acquainted, there was one 
 towards whom, for many reasons, he felt specially attracted — 
 the ingenious Horace Walpole, then an elderly gentleman of 
 fifty-two, leading his life of luxurious gossip and literary ease, 
 between his town house in Arlington -street, Piccadilly, and 
 his country seat at Strawberry Hill, Twickenham. Known 
 in the world of letters by his Castle of Otranto, his tragedy of 
 The Mysterious Mother, his Catalogue of Royal and Nolle 
 Authors, and other various productions, Walpole was at that 
 time busy in collecting additional materials for his Anecdotes 
 of 'Painting in England, the publication of which he had 
 begun in 1761. It is on this circumstance that Chatterton 
 fastens. One evening in March, 1769, Mr. Walpole, sitting, 
 we will suppose, by his library fire in Arlington-street, has a 
 packet brought him by his bookseller, Mr. Bathoe, of the 
 Strand (the first man, by-the-bye, that kept a circulating 
 library in London). Opening the packet, he finds, fiirst of all, 
 the following note : — 
 
 " Sib, — Being versed a little in antiquities, I have met with several curious 
 manuscripts, among which the following may be of service to you in any future 
 edition of your truly entertaining Anecdotes of Painting. In correcting the 
 mistakes (if any) in the notes, you wiU greatly oblige your most humble servant, 
 
 "Thomas Chatterton. 
 " Bristol, March 25 : Corn-street." 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 213 
 
 Appended to this short note were several pages of antique 
 writing, entitled, " The Ryse of Peyncteyne in Englande, wroten 
 by T. Rowlie, 1469, /or Mastre Canynge,'' and commencing as 
 follows ; — *' Peynctjnge jnn England haveth of ould tyme 
 bin yn use ; for, saieth the Koman wrjters, the Brytonnes dyd 
 depycte themselves, yn soundrie wyse, of the fourmes of the 
 Sonne and moone wyth the heerbe woade : albeytte I doubte 
 theie were no skylled carvellers." After which introduction, 
 the document went on to give biographical notices of certain 
 distinguished painters that flourished in England during Saxon 
 times and in the early Norman reigns. Attached to the docu- 
 ment, were explanatory notes in Chatterton's own name. One 
 of these notes informed Walpole who Kowley, the reputed 
 author of the MS., was : — " His merit as a biographer and his- 
 toriographer is great ; as a poet still greater : some of his 
 pieces would do honour to Pope ; and the person under whose 
 patronage they may appear to the world will lay the English- 
 man, the antiquary, and the poet, under eternal obligation." 
 Another note performed the like biographical ofiice for 
 Canynge, that " Mascenas of his time f and a third conveyed 
 the information that one John, the second Abbot of Saint 
 Austin's, in Bristol, mentioned in the text as " the fyrste 
 Englyshe paynstere in oyles," was also the greatest poet of 
 his age (a.d. 1186), and gave, as a specimen of his poetry, 
 three stanzas on Richard I. Finally, Chatterton offered to put 
 Walpole in possession of still other particulars from the same 
 source. 
 
 Whether from the suddenness and naivete of the attack, or 
 from the stupefying effects of the warm air of his library on a 
 March evening, Walpole was completely taken in. He can 
 hardly have glanced over the whole letter, when, really 
 interested by its contents, he takes his pen and writes the fol- 
 lowing reply : — 
 
 "Arlington-st., March 28, 1769. 
 " Sir, — I cannot but think myseK singularly obliged by a gentleman with 
 whom I have not the pleasure of being acquainted, when I read your very 
 curious and kind letter, which I have this minute received, I give you a 
 thousand thanks for it, and for the very obliging offer you make of communi- 
 cating your manuscript to me. What you have already sent me is valuable, 
 and full of information ; but, instead of correcting you, Sir, you are far more 
 
214 CHATTERTON : 
 
 able to correct me, I have not the happiness of understanding the Saxon 
 language, and, without your learned notes, shoiild not have been able to 
 comprehend Rowley's text. 
 
 " As a second edition of my Anecdotes was published last year, I must not 
 flatter myself that a third will be wanted soon ; but I shall be happy to lay up 
 any notices you will be so good as to extract for me, and send me at your 
 leisvu-e : for, as it is uncertain when I may use them, I would by no means borrow 
 or detain your MSS. 
 
 " Give me leave to ask you where Rowley's poems are to be found, I should 
 not be sorry to print them, or at least a specimen of them, if they have never 
 been printed. 
 
 " The Abbot John's verses that you have given me are wonderful for their 
 harmony and spirit, though there are some words that I do not understand. 
 You do not point out exactly the time when he lived, which I wish to know, 
 as I suppose it was long before John al Ectry's discovery of oil-painting ; if so, 
 it confirms what I have guessed, and hinted in my Anecdotes, that oil-painting 
 was known here much earlier than that discovery or revival. 
 
 " I will not trouble you with more questions now. Sir ; but flatter myself, 
 from the urbanity and politeness you have already shown me, that you will give 
 me leave to consult you, I hope, too, you will forgive the simplicity of my 
 direction, as you have favovired me with none other. — I am, Sir, your much 
 obliged and obedient humble servant, 
 
 " Horace Walpole. 
 
 *' P.S. — ^Be BO good as to direct to Mr. "Walpole, Arlington Street." 
 
 Chatterton was highly elated. He had received a letter from 
 the great Horace Walpope, written as from an equal to an equal ! 
 How differently men of that stamp treat one from the Catcotts, 
 the Barretts, and other local low-born persons ! In haste to 
 acknowledge such politeness, he sends off a supplementary 
 *' Historie of Peyncters yn England, hie T. RowUe f^ containing 
 also sketches of two new poets — Ecca, a Saxon bishop of the 
 year 557, and Elman, a Saxon bishop of the same epoch — 
 with specimens of their verses, translated from the original 
 Saxon by E-owley. He adds some more verses of the Abbot 
 John's, and promises a complete transcript of Rowley^s works 
 as soon as he shall have had time to make one. At the same 
 time he gives Walpole a confidential account of himself and 
 his prospects. This part of the letter is lost ; but Walpole 
 thus states his recollection of its tenor : — 
 
 " He informed me that he was the son of a poor widow, who supported him 
 with great difiiculty ; that he was a clerk or apprentice to an attorney, but had 
 a taste and turn for more elegant studies ; and hinted a wish that I wotdd 
 assist him with my interest in emerging out of so dull a profession, by procuring 
 him some place in which he could pursue his natiiral bent." 
 
 Clearly Chatterton was never so near telling the whole 
 truth as when, touched by Walpole's politeness, he thus ad- 
 dressed him as his only available friend. One is sorry that 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 215 
 
 he did not try the effect of a full confession. Had Walpole 
 received a letter from his unknown correspondent, conveying 
 in addition to the foregoing particulars, this farther acknow- 
 ledgment, that what he (Chatterton) had sent to him 
 (Walpole) was not a real extract from a MS., but a forgery ; 
 that, for more than a year, he had been palming off similar 
 forgeries on various persons in Bristol ; but that now he was 
 heartily tired of the cheat, and would fain be out of it ; and 
 that if he (Walpole), with such specimens before him of his 
 (Chatterton's) powers as these pretended antiques afforded, 
 should be disposed to add the kindness of his practical assist- 
 ance to that of his forgiveness for the trick attempted on him, 
 he would thereby earn the writer^s lasting gratitude, and save 
 a life not wholly irretrievable — one wonders greatly what, in 
 such circumstances, Horace Walpole would have done! W^ould 
 the reflection in the library in Arlington-street have been, 
 *' The impudent young scoundrel ! I will write to his master," 
 or *' Poor young fellow ! he throws himself upon me, and I 
 must do something for him.'' 
 
 Unfortunately, Chatterton did not put it in Walpole's option 
 whether he would be thus generous. He left the virtuoso to 
 discover the fact of the imposture for himself. Nor was it 
 difficult to do so. On the very second reading of the communi- 
 cation, to which, in a moment of credulity, he had returned 
 so polite a reply, Walpole, sufliciently alive, one would think, 
 to the possibility of a literary trick — his own Castle of Otranto 
 had been published as a pretended translation from a black- 
 letter book printed at Naples in 1529 ; and he had but recently 
 been implicated in the Ossian business — must have begun to 
 suspect that all was not right. A series of Anglo-Saxon 
 painters till then unheard of ; a new poet of the twelfth cen- 
 tury writing a poem on Kichard I. in perfectly modern metre ; 
 and a new poet of the fifteenth, advertised as having left 
 numerous poems and other writings still extant in Bristol — 
 all this in one letter was too much to swallow ; and little 
 wonder if, as he afterwards said, his reflection was that "some- 
 body having met his ' Anecdotes on Painting ' had a mind to 
 laugh at him." But when the second letter came, bringing 
 
216 CHATTERTON : 
 
 with it a batch of new painters, and specimens of two Saxon 
 poets of the sixth century ; and when, in this letter, the writer 
 explained his circumstances, and that he was a poor widow's 
 son with a turn for literature — there could be no longer any 
 doubt about the matter. His friends. Gray and Mason, to 
 whom he showed the documents, concurred with him in think- 
 ing them forgeries, and "recommended the returning them 
 without farther notice." But Walpole, with an amount of 
 good-nature for which he does not get credit, did not act so 
 summarily. He took the trouble, he says, to write to a rela- 
 tion of his, an old lady residing at Bath, desiring her to make 
 inquiries about Chatterton. The reply was a confirmation of 
 Chatterton^s story about himself, but " nothing was returned 
 about his character.^' In these circumstances, Walpole dis- 
 charges the whole matter from his mind thus : — 
 
 " Being satisfied with my intelligence about Chatterton, I wrote him a letter 
 with as much kindness and tenderness as if I had been his guardian ; for though 
 I had no doubt of his impositions, such a spirit of poetry breathed in his coin- 
 age as interested me for him ; nor was it a grave crime in a young bard to have 
 forged false notes of hand that were to pass current only in the parish of Par- 
 nassus. I undeceived him about my being a person of any interest, and lu-ged 
 to him that, in duty and gratitude to his mother, who had straitened herself to 
 breed him up to a profession, he ought to labour in it, that in her old age he 
 might absolve his filial debt ; and I told that, when he should have made his 
 f ortime, he might unbend himself with the studies consonant to his inclinations. 
 I told him also that I had communicated his transcripts to much better judges, 
 and that they were by no means satisfied with the authenticity of his sup- 
 posed MSS." 
 
 In fancying the impatient " Bah, old gentleman ! don't I 
 know all that myself? " with which the disappointed boy, 
 reading this letter, must have received its advice, the question 
 is apt to recur to us, how it is that, with such evidence of the 
 uselessness of advice before their eyes, people are so stupid as 
 to persist in. giving it. But the remark of an eminent living 
 statistician comes into our mind. " Advice," said he, " pro- 
 bably saves a percentage." And certainly this puts the 
 matter on its right basis. 
 
 Chatterton sent two letters in reply to that of Walpole. In 
 the first, the tone of which is somewhat downcast, he pro- 
 fesses himself unable to dispute with a person of such literary 
 distinction, respecting the age of a MS. ; thanks him for his 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 217 
 
 advice, and expresses his resolution to follow it/' " Though 
 I am but sixteen years," he says, " I have lived long enough 
 to see that poverty attends literature." The second letter, 
 which is dated April 14th, is more abrupt. Here he expresses 
 his conviction that the papers of E-owley are genuine, and 
 requests Walpole, unless he should be inclined to publish the 
 transcripts, to return them, as he wished to give them to 
 " Mr. Ban-ett, an able antiquary, now writing the history of 
 Bristol," and had no other copy. 
 
 When this second note reached Arlington-street, Walpole 
 was on the eve of a journey to Paris ; and, in the hurry, the 
 request to return the MSS. was not attended to. Again Chat- 
 terton wrote ; but, as the virtuoso was absent, he received no 
 answer. It was not till after six weeks that Walpole returned 
 to London ; and then so insignificant a matter was not likely 
 to be remembered. Towards the close of July, however, and 
 when he had been again in town five or six weeks, he was 
 reminded of his Bristol correspondent, by the receipt of what 
 he thought '' a singularly impertinent note :'^ — 
 
 "Sir, — I cannot reconcile your behaviour to me with the notions I once 
 entertained of you. I think myself injured, Sir ; and did you not know my 
 circumstances, you would not dare to treat me thus. I have sent twice for a 
 copy of the MSS. ; no answer from you. An explanation or excuse for yoiir 
 silence would oblige 
 
 " Thomas Chatterton. 
 
 "July 24." 
 
 Walpole's conduct, on the receipt of this note, we will let 
 himself relate : — 
 
 " My heart did not accuse me of insolence to him. I wrote an answer, 
 expostulating with him on his injustice, and renewing good advice ; but upon 
 second thoughts, reflecting that so wrong-headed a young man, of whom I knew 
 nothing, and whom I had never seen, might be absurd enough to print my 
 letter, I flung it into the fire ; and, snapping up both his poems and letters, 
 without taking a copy of either (for which I am now sorry), I retvimed both to 
 him, and thought no more of him or them." 
 
 And thus ended the correspondence between Walpole and 
 Chatterton — Walpole soon forgetting the whole afi'air, and 
 Chatterton persisting in his belief that, had he not committed 
 the blunder of letting his aristocratic correspondent know that 
 he was " a poor widow's son," he would have fared better at 
 his hands. No doubt there was something in this. But of 
 
218 CHATTERTON : 
 
 all the unreasonable tilings ever done by a misjudging public, 
 certainly that of condemning Walpole to infamy for his con- 
 duct in this affair, and charging on him all the tragic sequel 
 of Chatterton's life, is one of the most unreasonable. Why, 
 the probability is that Walpole behaved better than most people 
 would have done under the circumstances. Let any one in 
 the present day fancy how he would act if some one utterly 
 unknown to him were to try to impose on him, in a similar way, 
 through the Post-office. Would the mere cleverness of the cheat 
 take away the instinctive frown of resentment, and change it 
 into admiring enthusiasm ? That there may possibly have 
 been in London at that time persons of rare goodness, of over- 
 flowing tolerance and compassion, that would have acted differ- 
 ently from the virtuoso of Arlington-street — persons who, 
 saying to themselves, " Here is a poor young man of abilities, 
 in a bad way," would have immediately called for their carpet- 
 bags, and set off for Bristol by coach, to dig out the culprit, and 
 lecture him soundly, and make a man of him — we will not 
 deny. We fear, however, that if that time was like the present, 
 such men must have been very thinly scattered, and very 
 hard to find. Looking back now on the whole series of cir- 
 cumstances, we must, of course, feel that it was a pity the 
 correspondence did not lead to a better issue ; and Walpole 
 himself lived to know this. But as Burke has said, '* Men 
 are wise with little reflection, and good with little self-denial, 
 in the business of all times except their own." Let, therefore, 
 such as are disposed to blame Walpole in this afikir lay the 
 whole story to heart in the form of a maxim for their own 
 guidance. 
 
 While the correspondence with Walpole had been going on, 
 Chatterton had not been idle. In the month of January, 1769, 
 there appeared in London the first number of a new periodical 
 called the Town and Country Magazine^ a periodical somewhat 
 on the model of the Gentleman s Magazine^ and those other 
 curious monthly collections of scraps, with which, eighty years 
 ago, our ancestors, strangers to the more elaborate entertain- 
 ment of modem periodicals, used to regale their full-fed leisure. 
 Here was an opportunity for the young litterateur of Bristol. 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 219 
 
 Accordingly, In the February number (magazines were then 
 published retrospectively, ix., at the close of the month whose 
 name they bore), there appeared two contributions from the 
 pen of Chatterton : the one a prose account of the costume of 
 Saxon heralds, signed " D. B. ;" the other, a little complimen- 
 tary poem addressed to " Mr. Alcock, the miniature-painter of 
 Bristol,^^ and signed " Asaphides." Under these signatures 
 he continued to contribute to the magazine ; and effusions of 
 his, chiefly Ossianic prose-poems, purporting to be from the 
 Saxon or ancient British, appeared in all the subsequent 
 numbers for the year 1769, except those of June, September, 
 and October. In the number for May appeared one of the 
 finest of his minor Rowley poems. In short, at the publishing 
 office of the Town and Country^ in London, the handwriting of 
 "D. B.," of Bristol, must have been recognised, in 1769, as that 
 of one of the established coiTCspondents of the magazine ; 
 and in Bristol it must have been a fact known and enviously 
 commented on among the Carya, the Smiths, the Kators, and 
 other young men of Chatterton's acquaintance, that he could 
 have his pieces printed as often as he liked in a London perio- 
 dical. Chatterton felt the immensity of the honour ; and there 
 is extant a somewhat un veracious letter of his to a distant 
 relative, '* a breeches-maker in Salisbury," in which he brags 
 of it. He tells the breeches-maker, at the same time, of his 
 correspondence with Walpole. " It ended,'' he says, " as most 
 such do. I differed from him in the age of a MS. ; he insists 
 upon his superior talents, which is no proof of that superiority. 
 We possibly may engage publicly in some one of the 
 periodical publications, though I know not who will give the 
 onset." 
 
 The Town and Country Magazine seems to have been the 
 only metropolitan print to which Chatterton was a contributor 
 during the year 1769. But in the beginning of 1770, he 
 succeeded in another venture, and became the correspondent 
 also of a London newspaper. 
 
 The newspapers of that day were by no means such as we 
 now see. The largest of them consisted of but a single sheet, 
 corresponding in size with our small evening papers. Their 
 
220 chatterton: 
 
 contents, too, were neither so various nor so elaborately pre- 
 pared as those of our present newspapers. Advertisements, 
 paragraphs of political gossip picked up outside the Houses of 
 Parliament, and scraps of miscellaneous town, country, and 
 foreign news, constituted nearly all that the newspaper then 
 offered to its readers. What we now call " leading articles," 
 were things hardly known. It was enough for even a 
 metropolitan journal to have one editorial hand to assist the 
 publisher; and the notion of employing a staff of educated 
 men to write comments on the proceedings of the day, was 
 but in its infancy. The place, however, of leading articles by 
 paid attacMs of the newspaper was in part supplied by the 
 voluntary letters of numerous anonymous correspondents 
 interested in politics, and glad to see their lucubrations in 
 print. Men of political Tiote sometimes took this mode of 
 serving the ends of their party; but the majority of the. cor- 
 respondents of newspapers were literary clients of official men, 
 or private individuals scattered up and down the country. 
 Chief of these unpaid journalists, king among the numberless 
 Brutuses, Publicolas, and Catos, that told the nation its 
 grievances through the columns of the newspapers, was the 
 terrible Junius of the Public Advertiser. The boldest of his 
 letters was perhaps that containing his '' Address to the king," 
 which was published on the 19th of December, 1769. Tlie 
 excitement that followed this letter, and above all the report 
 that the publisher, Mr. H. J. Woodfall, was to be brought to 
 account for it before the public tribunals, produced a crisis — 
 some called it a panic, some a jubilee — in the newspaper world. 
 The other newspapers were, of course, anxious to obtain a 
 share of the eclat which the threatened prosecution conferred 
 on the Public Advertiser, Accordingly, to re-assure its cor- 
 respondents, and to convince its subscribers of its unflinching 
 liberalism in the midst of danger, the Middlesex Journal, 
 a bi-weekly newspaper of the day, not far behind the Adver- 
 tiser in credit, hastened to put forth the following manifesto : — 
 
 " William George Edmunds, of Shoe Lane, in the parish of St. Andrew's, 
 Holbom, Gent., maketh oath and saieth, that he will not at any time declare 
 the name of any person or persons who shall send any papers to the Middlesex 
 Journal, or Chronicle of Liberty, or any other publication in which he shall be 
 
A STORY :0F THE YEAK 1770. 221 
 
 ' concerned, without the express consent and direction of the author of such 
 paper ; and that he will not make any discovery by which any of his authors 
 can be found out ; and that he will give to the public, in the fairest and fullest 
 naanner, all such essays, dissertations, and other -wTitings, without any alteration, 
 so far as he can or ought, consistently with the duty of an honest man, a good 
 member of society, a friend to his country, and a loyal subject.— W. G. 
 Edmunds. 
 
 " Sworn at the Mansion House, London, January 1st, 1770, before me, 
 
 " "W. Beckford, Mayor." 
 
 " N.B. — ^Mr. E. makes it a general rule to destroy all MSS. as soon as they 
 are composed for the press. If any gentleman, however, is desirous of having 
 his MSS. returned to him, Mr. E. begs that the words * to be rettmied,' may be 
 in large letters at the end of the originals. In that case they shall be preserved 
 and delivered up to any person who shall bring an order for that purpose in the 
 same handwriting as the original." 
 
 This manifesto of Mr. Edmunds, copied by us from the 
 Middlesex Journal for February 6th, 1770, and which was 
 repeated in succeeding numbers, probably caught Chatterton's 
 eye in Bristol, and determined his already cherished intention 
 of trying his hand at a newspaper article. Accordingly, he 
 plunges at once in medias res. There had just been a change 
 of ministry. The Duke of Grafton, the favourite victim of 
 Junius, had resigned, and given place, for some secret Court 
 reason, to the goggle-eyed Lord North. Chatterton, hear- 
 ing much talk about this affair, thinks it a good topic for 
 his purpose, and, stealing a forenoon from his office-work, 
 pens, in a style mimicked after that of Junius, a " letter to 
 
 the Duke of G n," in which he informs that illustrious 
 
 personage that his resignation has '' caused more speculation 
 than any harlequinade he has already acted ;" and tells him 
 that as he had been all along the tool of Bute, to whom 
 he was at first recommended by his *' happy vacuity of inven- 
 tion," so now it is Bute's influence that has dismissed him. 
 This missive he dates " Bristol, February 16," and signs 
 " Decimus." Mr. Edmunds, receiving it in his sanctum in 
 Shoe Lane, glances over it, thinks it tolerably smart, and 
 prints it. Whether the Duke of Grafton ever saw it, poor 
 fellow, we do not know. If he did, " One wasp more " would 
 be his very natural reflection ; and he would go on sipping 
 his chocolate. 
 
 Chatterton^ s next contribution to the Middlesex Journal, or 
 at least the next that Mr. Edmunds thought proper to print, 
 was one with the same signature, dated " Bristol, April 10, 
 
222 CHATTERTON : 
 
 1770," and addressed to that much-abused lady, the Princess 
 Dowager of Wales, the mother, and, as people said, manager 
 of the king. Here is a specimen — Junius, it will be ob- 
 served, to the very cadence : — 
 
 " By you men of no principles were thrust into ofl&ces tbey did not know how 
 to discharge, and honoured with trusts they accepted only to violate ; being 
 made more conspicuously mean by commiuiicating error and often vice to the 
 character of the person who promoted them, None but a sovereign power can 
 make little villains dangerous ; the nobly vicious, the daringly ambitious, only 
 rise from themselves. Without the influence of ministerial authority, Mans- 
 field had been a pettifogging attorney, and Warbvui;on a bustling country 
 ciirate. The first had not lived to bury the substance of our laws in the 
 shadows of his explanations ; nor would the latter have confounded religion 
 with deism, and proved of no use to either. . . . The state of affairs very 
 much resembles the eve of the troubles of Charles I. Unhappy monarch, thou 
 hast a claim, a dear-bought claim, to our pity ; nothing but thy death could 
 purchase it. Hadst thou died quietly and in peace, thou hadst died infamous ; 
 thy misfortunes were the only happy means of saving thee from the book 
 of shame. What a parallel cotdd the freedom of an English pen strike out ! " 
 
 This letter was written on a Tuesday. On the Saturday, 
 or, more probably, on the Monday following, a tremendous 
 denouement took place. 
 
 Chatterton, among his other eccentricities, had often been 
 heard to talk familiarly of suicide. One evening, for example, 
 pulling out a pistol in the presence of some of his companions, 
 he had placed it to his forehead, saying, " Now, if one had 
 but courage to draw the trigger !" Nor was this mere juvenile 
 affectation. Hateful from the first, Chatterton's position in 
 Bristol had by this time become unendurable to him. All his 
 literary honours, as contributor to a London magazine and 
 correspondent of a London newspaper, were as nothing when 
 put in the balance against his present servitude. If there 
 were seasons when, sanguine in his hopes of a better future, 
 he was able to keep his disgust within bounds, there were 
 others where it rose to a perfect frenzy. 
 
 Such a season seems to have been the week in which the 
 foregoing letter was written for the Middlesex Journal. From 
 some circumstance or other Chatterton was that week reduced 
 to the necessity of asking Burgum for a loan of money ; which 
 Burgum, at the last moment, refused. Chatterton has thus 
 perpetuated the fact : — 
 
 " When wildly squandering everything I got, 
 On books and learning, and the Lord knows what ; 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 223 
 
 Could Burgum then — my critic, patron, friend- 
 Without security, attempt to lend ? 
 
 No, that would be imprudent in the man : 
 
 Accuse him of imprudence if you can !" 
 
 This disappointment throws him into a state of humour 
 bordering on the suicidal ; and, being left alone in his master's 
 office on the Saturday forenoon following, he displays it by 
 penning a kind of satirical will or suicide's farewell to the 
 world. This extraordinary document, which is still extant, is 
 headed thus : " All this wrote between 11 and 2 o'clock, 
 Saturday, in the utmost distress of mind, April 14, 1770 ;" 
 and, after some fifty lines of verse addressed to Burgum, the 
 Rev. Mr. Catcott, and Barrett, it proceeds as follows : — 
 
 " This is the last will and testament of me, Thomas Chatterton, of the city 
 of Bristol ; being sound in body, or it is the fault of my last surgeon : the 
 soundness of my mind the coroner and jury are to be judges of — desiring them 
 to take notice that the most perfect masters of human nature in Bristol dis- 
 tinguish me by the title of * the mad genius ;' therefore, if I do a mad action, it 
 is conformable to every action of my life, which aU savoured of insanity. 
 
 '^ Item. — If, after my death, which will happen to-morrow night before eight 
 o'clock, being the Feast of the Resurrection, the coroner and jury bring it in 
 lunacy, I will and direct that Paul Farr, Esq., and Mr. John Flower, at their 
 joint expense, cause my body to be interred in the tomb of my fathers, and 
 raise the monument over my body to the height of four feet five inches, placing 
 the present flat stone on the top, and adding six tablets. 
 
 [" Here follow directions for certain engravings to be placed on the six tablets 
 viz., on two of them, fronting each other, certain heraldic achievements ; on 
 another, an inscription, in old English characters, to his ancestor, Guatevine 
 Chatterton, A.D. 1210 ; on another, an inscription, in the same character, to 
 another ancestor, Alanus Chatterton, A.D. 1415 ; on another, an inscription, in 
 Roman letters, to the memoiy of his father ; and on the remaining one, this 
 epitaph to himself : — 
 
 "to the memory of 
 
 "THOMAS CHATTERTOK 
 
 " Reader, judge not. If thou art a Christian, believe that he shall be judged 
 by a supreme power : to that power alone is he now answerable."] 
 
 " And I will and direct that if the coroner's inquest bring it in felo-de-se, the 
 said monument shall be, notwithstanding, erected. And if the said Paul Farr 
 and John Flower have souls so Bristolish as to refuse this my request, they 
 will transmit a copy of my will to the Society for supporting the Bill of Rights, 
 whom I hereby empower to build the said monument according to the afore- 
 said directions. And if they, the said Paul Farr and John Flower, should 
 build the said monument, I wiU and direct that the second edition of my Keto 
 Gardens shall be dedicated to them in the following dedication : — ' To Paul Parr 
 and John Flower, Esqrs,, this book is most humbly dedicated by the author's 
 ghost.' 
 
 " Item. — I give all my vigour and fire of youth to Mr. George Catcott, being 
 sensible he is most in want of it. 
 
 ''Item. — From the same charitable motive, I give and bequeath unto the 
 Rev. Mr. Camplin, sen., aU my humility. To Mr. Burgum all my prosody and 
 grammar, likewise one moiety of my modesty ; the other moiety to any young 
 
224 CHATTERTON : 
 
 lady who can prove, without blushing, that she wants that valuable commodity. 
 To Bristol all my spirit and disinterestedness, parcels of goods unknown on her 
 quay since the days of Canning and Rowley. ('Tis true, a charitable gentleman, 
 one Mr. Colston, smuggled a considerable quantity of it ; but, it being proved 
 that he was a Papist, the worshipfvil society of aldermen endeavoured to throttle 
 him with the oath of allegiance). I leave also my religion to Dr. Cutts Barton, 
 Dean of Bristol, hereby empowei'ing the sub-sacrist to strike him on the head 
 when he goes to sleep in church. My powers of utterance I give to the Rev. 
 Mr. Broughton, hoping he will employ them to a better purpose than reading 
 lectures on the immortality of the soul. I leave the Rev. Mr. Catcott some 
 little of my free-thinking, that he may put on spectacles of reason, and see how 
 vilely he is duped in believing the Scriptures literally. (I wish he and his 
 brother George would know how far I am their real enemy ; but I have an un- 
 lucky way of raillery ; and when the strong fit of satire is upon me, I spare 
 neither friend nor foe. This is my excuse for what I have said of them else- 
 where). I leave Mr. Clayfield the sincerest thanks my gratitude can give; 
 and I will and direct that whatever any person may think the pleasvire of 
 reading my works worth, they immediately pay their own valuation to him, 
 since it is then become a lawful debt to me, and to him as my executor in this 
 case. 
 
 " I leave my moderation to the politicians on both sides of the question. I leave 
 my generosity to our present right worshipful mayor, Thomas Harris, Esq. 
 I give my abstinence to the company at the Sheriff's annual feast in general, 
 more partictdarly the aldermen. 
 
 " Item. — I give and bequeath to Mr. Matthew Mease a mourning ring with 
 this motto, * Alas, poor Chatterton ! ' provided he pays for it himself. Item. — 
 I leave the young ladies all the letters they have had from me, assuring them 
 that they need be under no apprehensions from the appearance of my ghost, for 
 I die for none of them. Item. — I leave all my debts, the whole not five pounds, 
 to the payment of the charitable and generous Chamber of Bristol, on penalty, 
 if refused, to hinder every member from a good dinner by appearing in the 
 form of a bailiff. If, in defiance of this terrible spectre, they obstinately persist 
 in refusing to discharge my debts, let my two creditors apply to the supporters 
 of the Bill of Rights. Item. — I leave my mother and sister to the protection of 
 my friends, if I have any. 
 
 " Executed in the presence of Omniscience, this 14th of April, 1770. 
 
 " Thomas Chatteeton." 
 
 Whether this dreadful document got immediately abroad 
 among Chatterton's friends, does not appear ; another docu- 
 ment, however, written at the same time and in the same mad 
 mood, was sufficiently alarming to produce a catastrophe. The 
 Mr. Clayfield mentioned with such peculiar respect in the 
 preceding paper, a distiller, of means and respectability, and 
 a friend of Mr. Lambert's, seems to have been a person of 
 more than usual consideration in the eyes of Mr. Lambert's 
 apprentice. To him, accordingly, rather than to any other 
 person in Bristol, he chose to indite a letter conveying his 
 rash intention of suicide. This letter — not actually sent to 
 Mr. Clayfield by Chatterton, but inadvertently left about, 
 it would appear, with that gentleman's address upon it — was 
 prematurely delivered to him. Startled by its contents, he lost 
 
A STOEY OF THE YEAR 1770. 225 
 
 ilo time in communicating them to Mr. Lambert. There was 
 an immediate consultation among Chatterton's friends, and 
 Mr. Barrett undertook to see the insane lad, and reason with 
 him on the folly and criminality of his conduct. Accordingly, 
 a long conversation took place between them, in which, to 
 use his own words, he took Chatterton to task for the " bad 
 company and principles he had adopted," and lectured him 
 seriously "on the horrible crime of self-murder, however 
 glossed over by present libertines." Chatterton was affected, 
 and shed tears. The next day, however, he sent Mr. Barrett 
 the following letter, the original of which may be seen in the 
 British Museum : — 
 
 " Sir, — Upon recollection I don't know how Mr. Clayfield could come by his 
 letter, as I intended to give him a letter, but did not. In regard to my motives 
 for the supposed rashness, I shall observe that I keep no worse company than 
 myself : I never drink to excess, and have, without vanity, too much sense to be 
 attached to the mercenary retailers of iniquity. No, it is my pride, my 
 damn'd native unconquerable pride, that plunges me into distraction. You 
 must know that nineteen-twentieths of my composition is pride. I must either 
 live a slave, a servant, to have no wiU of my own, which I may freely de- 
 clare as such, or die. Perplexing alternative ! but it distracts me to think of 
 it ! I will endeavour to learn humility, but it cannot be here. What it may 
 cost me in the trial, Heaven knows. 
 
 " I am your much obliged unhappy humble servant, 
 
 "T. C. 
 . " Thursday Evening." 
 
 Before this letter had been written by Chatterton, one thing 
 had been fully determined with regard to him. Mr. Lambert 
 was no longer to keep him in his service. Even had the 
 lawyer himself been willing to make the attempt, his mother, 
 who kept house for him — an old lady betw^een whom and 
 Chatterton there had never, we have reason to think, been 
 any kind of cordiality — would certainly not have listened to 
 such a thing. What ! sleep under the same roof with a profligate 
 young scoundrel that had threatened to make away with 
 himself? Find the garret in a welter some morning with the 
 young rascal's blood, and have a coroner's inquest in the 
 house ? Better at once give him up his indentures, and be rid 
 of him ! And with this advice of the old lady, even the 
 calmer deliberations of Chatterton's own friends, Barrett, 
 Catcott, and the rest, could not but agree. So on or about 
 Monday, the 16th of April, 1770, it was intimated to Chat- 
 
 Q 
 
226 CHATTERTON : 
 
 terton that he must no longer consider himself as in the 
 employment of Mr. Lambert. 
 
 Tuesday, the 17th, it will be remembered, was the .day of 
 Wilkes's release from prison ; and on Thursday, the 19th — the 
 very day, as we guess, on which the foregoing letter to 
 Mr. Barrett was written — there took place in Bristol that 
 dinner, in honour of the patriot, at which, according to the 
 announcement in the Public Advertiser j the more prominent 
 Liberals of the place were to assemble at " the Crown, in the 
 passage from Broad-street to Tower-lane," to eat their forty- 
 five pounds of meat, drink their forty-five tankards of ale and 
 their forty-five bowls of punch, and smoke their forty-five 
 pipes of tobacco. Were we wrong, then, in fancying that 
 while these guests were making merry in the Crown, Chat- 
 terton may have been moodly perambulating the adjacent 
 streets? And shall we be wrong if we fancy, farther, that 
 Banctt was one of the guests ; that the story of Mr. Lambert's 
 apprentice and his intended suicide may have been talked over 
 by the happy gentlemen, when, having finished their toasts, 
 they sat down at leisure to their pipes and their remaining 
 punch ; and that the precise moment when Mr. Barrett may 
 have received the above epistle from his misguided young 
 acquaintance, may have been, when, after seeing Catcott part 
 of the way home, he had just let himself into his surgery, 
 about midnight, with his unsteady latch-key, and begun to 
 whistle, to assure the wakeful Mrs. B. that he was perfectly 
 sober ? Shade of the surgeon, or his descendants, if he has 
 any, forgive us, if we wrong him ! 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 IMPROPER FEMALE FRIENDS, AND A JOURNEY TO LONDON. 
 
 Cast out of all chance of a livelihood in his native town, 
 there was but one course open to Chatterton : to bid farewell 
 to Bristol and attorneyship, and try what he could do in the 
 great literary mart of London. Sanguine as were his hopes 
 of success, it can have cost him but little thought to make up 
 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 227 
 
 his mind to this course ; if, indeed, he did not secretly con- 
 gratulate himself that his recent escapade had ended so agree- 
 ably. Probably there was but one thing that stood in the 
 way of an immediate declaration by himself, after the fracas 
 was over, that this was the resolution he had come to — the 
 want, namely, of a little money to serve as outfit. No sooner, 
 therefore, was this obstacle removed by the charitable deter- 
 mination of his friends, Mr. Bari'ett, Mr. Clayfield, the Cat- 
 eotts, &c., to make a little subscription for him, so as to 
 present him with the parting gift of a few pounds, than the 
 tide of feeling was turned, and from a state of despondency 
 Chatterton gave way to raptures of unbounded joy. London ! 
 London ! A few days and he should have left the dingy quays 
 of abominable Bristol, and should be treading, in the very 
 footsteps of Goldsmith, Garrick, and Johnson, the liberal 
 London streets ! 
 
 Chatterton remained exactly a week in Bristol after his 
 dismissal from Mr. Lambert's ; ^. e. from the 16th to the 24th 
 of April. A busy week we may suppose that must have been 
 to Mrs. Chatterton and her daughter : shirts to be made and 
 buttoned, stockings to be looked after, and all Thomas's ward- 
 robe to be got decently in order against his departure. Poor 
 fellow ! notwithstanding all that idle people say of him, they 
 know better ; he has a proud spirit, but a good heart, and he 
 will make his way yet with the best of them ! And so, in 
 their humble apartments, the widow and her daughter ply 
 their needles, talking of Thomas and his prospects, as only a 
 mother and sister can. 
 
 The subject of their conversation, meanwhile, is generally 
 out, going from street to street, and taking leaye of his 
 friends. Barrett, the two Catcotts, Mr. Alcock, Mr. Clayfield, 
 Burgum, Matthew Mease ; also his younger friends, the 
 Carys, Smiths, and Kators — he makes the round of them all, 
 receiving their good wishes, and making arrangements to 
 correspond with them. To less intimate acquaintances, too, 
 met accidentally in the streets, he has to bid a friendly good- 
 bye. Moreover, there are his numerous female friends— the 
 Miss Webbs, the Miss Thatchers, the Miss Hills, &c., not to 
 
 Q2 
 
228 CHATTERTON : 
 
 omit tlie " female Machiavel/^ Miss Rumsey ; wlio have all 
 heard, with more or less concern, that they are about to lose 
 their poet, and are, of course, anxious to see him before he 
 goes. Of some acquaintances of this class, probably the more 
 humble of them, he appears to have taken a kind of collective 
 farewell. Long afterwards, at least, a Mrs. Stephens, the 
 wife of a cabinet-maker in Bristol, used to tell that she re- 
 membered, when a girl, Chatterton's " taking leave of her and 
 some others, on the steps of RedclifFe Church, very cheer- 
 fully," before his going to London. "At parting, he said he 
 would give them some gingerbread ; and went over the way 
 to Mr. Freeling's, to buy some.'' In connexion with which 
 little anecdote, reader, we have a mysterious little scrap of 
 document to produce. 
 
 A. great deal of nonsense, as it seems to us, has been 
 written on the question of Chatterton's moral character. Was 
 he a libertine, as some have represented — a precocious young 
 blackguard, indebted for his bad end to his own habits of 
 profligacy; or was he at least no worse in this respect 
 than his neighbours ? Naturally resenting the harsh way in 
 which Chalmers and other earlier biographers of Chatterton 
 handled his memory, the writers of more recent notices have 
 certainly made out, in favour of " the marvellous boy," a cer- 
 tificate of good behaviour to which he was not entitled, and 
 for which he would not have thanked them. The evidence 
 on which they have laid most stress in connexion with this 
 point is that of Chatterton's sister, as given by her in her 
 letter to the E-ev. Sir Herbert Croft, eight years after Chat- 
 terton's death, and published by that gentleman in his 
 singular book, "Love and Madness." The following is a 
 passage from that touching and simple epistle, spelt as in the 
 original : — 
 
 " He wrote one letter to Sir Horace Warlpool ; and except his correspon- 
 dence with Miss Rumsey, the girl I have mentioned, I know of no other. He' 
 would frequently walk the Colledge green with the young girls that statedly 
 paraded there to show their finery. But I really believe he was no debauchee 
 (tho' some have reported it), the dear unhappy boy had faults enough I saw 
 with concern, he was proud and exceedingly impetious, but that of venality " 
 [poor Mrs. N. thinks this a fine word for licentiousness] "he could not be justly 
 accused with. Mrs. Lambert informed me not 2 months before he left Bristol, 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 229 
 
 he had never been once found out of the office in the stated hours, as they fre- 
 quently sent the footman and other servants to see. Nor but once stayed out 
 till 11 o'clock; then he had leave, as we entertained some friends at our house 
 at Christmas." 
 
 This very distinct piece of evidence in favour of Chatter- 
 ton's punctual conduct as an apprentice (he had probably the 
 fear of that she-dragon, Mrs. Lambert, before his eves), has 
 been strained by the writers alluded to into a testimony to his 
 moral reproachiessness. A fruitless attempt, we fear ! The 
 worth of a sister's assurance that her deceased brother could 
 not be justly accused of " venality," it is not difficult to esti- 
 mate ; besides that it is accompanied with the information 
 that the common report was to the contrary, and with the 
 allusion to the habit of " walking with the girls on the Col- 
 lege-green," whatever that may mean. Then, again^ we have 
 the fact that Mr. Barrett, in his remonstrance with him 
 respecting his alarming letter to Mr. Clayfield, attributed his 
 bad state of mind to his keeping immoral company. His own 
 allusions, too, scattered through his writings, are quite deci- 
 sive, even were we not to take into account the almost 
 constant tone which runs through all that part of his writings 
 that is not antique ; evidently the productions, as these 
 modern pieces are, of a clever boy too conscious of forbidden 
 things, and eager (as boys are till some real experience of the 
 heart has made them earnest and silent) to assert his question- 
 able manhood among his compeers, by constant and irreverent 
 talk about the sexes. And, after all, have we not the native 
 probabilities of the case itself? Are young men in general, 
 and attorneys' apprentices in particular, so immaculately 
 moral, that it becomes necessary to argue out something like 
 a perfectly virtuous character for Chatterton, before venturing 
 to introduce him to the admirers of genius and literature? 
 Should we fail in doing this for him, will Byron, Burns, and 
 the rest of them, refuse to shake hands with him? It is 
 a pity, certainly, that we should have to say so. Young men of 
 genius may take warning. That convenient theory of " wild 
 oats," which has been provided and put in circulation for their 
 use by the thoughtless and the interested, better for themselves 
 in the end if they decidedly reject it ! Were Byron and Burns, 
 
230 chatteeton: 
 
 or were Chatterton himself, to speak now, they would say so 
 too. Greatest is he who, needing no benefit from the theory 
 himself, yet can weigh it, and know how to be charitable ! 
 
 And now for our document. If the reader were to go to 
 the reading-room of the British Museum, and ask for the 
 Chatterton MSS. (a considerable portion of all the surviving 
 MSS. of Chatterton is in the Museum, the remainder being 
 in Bristol, and elsewhere) he would have three volumes 
 brought to him containing papers and parchments of various 
 shapes and sizes, some stained, smoked, and written like 
 antiques ; others undisguisedly modern. If, after overcoming 
 the strange feeling that here in his hands are the very sheets 
 over which eighty years ago Chatterton bent, tracing with 
 nimble fingers the black characters over the white pages, the 
 reader should examine the papers successively and indivi- 
 dually, he would come upon one that would puzzle him 
 much. It is a dingy piece of letter-paper, once folded as 
 a letter, and containing a very ugly scrawl in an uneducated 
 female hand. 
 
 Here it is, printed for the first time : — 
 
 " Sir, I send my Love to you and Tell you This if you prove Constant I not 
 miss but if you frown and Torn away I can make oart of batterd Hay pray 
 excep of me Love Hartley an send me word Cartingley. Tell me How maney 
 Dimes of Green Gingerbread Can Sho the baker of Honiste. 
 
 " My House is not belt with Stavis. I not be Coarted by Boys nor navis, 
 I Halve a man and a man Shall Halve me, if I whaint a fool I Send for 
 Thee. 
 
 " If you are going to the D I wish you a good Gonery." 
 
 What in all the world have we here ? Exercising our utmost 
 ingenuity for the pm-pose of determining, if possible, what 
 petty, and, perhaps, not very nameable, Bristol occurrence of 
 the year 1770, this lamentable piece of ill- written doggrel 
 (the reader will observe that part of the letter is in a kind of 
 cripple rhyme) grew out of, and has come down to us amid 
 the Museum MSS., to perpetuate and represent; we can 
 honestly arrive but at one conclusion — that it is the spiteful 
 epistle of some improper female friend, avenging herself with 
 all the energy of feminine malice, for the spretce injuria formce, 
 or some other fancied wrong. Did we dare to copy the 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 231 
 
 version of the letter, or rather jocular answer to it, written in 
 Chatterton's own hand on the back of the sheet, in the shape 
 of a few extremely impolite and not at all quoteable Hudi- 
 brastic lines, we think our hypothesis would appear inevitable. 
 In short, we explain the matter thus: — Among the various 
 acquaintances of Chatterton interested in the news of his 
 approaching departure, is some improper female friend, 
 labouring under the provocation of the sjpretcR injuria formce^ 
 or of some injury or fancied injury, not now ascertainable. 
 This Bristol Juno sees, with pangs incredible, her faithless 
 Jove dispensing the gingerbread he has bought at "Mr. 
 Freeling's, over the way,'^ among the numerous nymphs wait- 
 ing for it on the steps of Redcliffe Church ; she goes home, and 
 discharges all her malevolence in one fell epistle, into which, 
 with vast literary effort, she contrives to introduce an allusion 
 to the gingerbread ; this epistle, intended to pierce her Jove's 
 heart like a poisoned arrow, she sends to him anonymously ; 
 and he, reading it, and recognising the fair hand of the dis- 
 tempered donor, enjoys the joke amazingly, and expresses his 
 opinion of it and her by scribbling his wicked answer on the 
 other side. Strange bit of defunct real life, thus to be dug up 
 again into the light ! The departure of poor Chatterton for 
 London from his native place eighty-six years ago was not, it 
 would thus appear, a circumstance which all Bristol viewed 
 with indifference. Whether the Clayfields, the Barretts, and 
 the Catcotts of his acquaintance, cared much about the matter 
 or not — whether Miss Kumsey shed tears or not, — we cannot 
 say ; but here, at least, was one fair and frail denizen of some 
 mean Bristol street, in whose breast Chatterton left a rankling 
 sense of wrong or jealousy, and who was powerfully enough 
 excited by the news of his departure, to immortalise her con- 
 cern therein by penning a spiteful letter, in which she told 
 
 him he was reported to be " going to the D ," and wished 
 
 him a good journey. 
 
 Chatterton was not going to the D directly ; he was 
 
 only going to London, to follow the professional walk of litera- 
 ture. Persons going on that journey from the provinces now- 
 a-days (and it must have been the same in Chatterton'^ time) 
 
232 chatterton: 
 
 usually cany tliree tilings with them, in addition to the mere 
 essentials of luggage — a little money, a small bundle of MSS., 
 and a few letters of introduction, volunteered by well-meaning 
 friends. Let us see how Chatterton was furnished in these 
 several respects. 
 
 As regards money, the most essential of the three, but very 
 poorly, we fear ! It would throw more light than a hundred 
 disquisitions on the real truth of Chatterton's London career, 
 were we able to calculate to the precise shilling the sum of 
 money which he took with him from Bristol. Unfortunately, 
 there are no data for such a calculation. All that remains to 
 us in the shape of information on this point is a vague tradi- 
 tion, the exact worth of which we do not know, that the 
 understood arrangement among the charitable persons who 
 had agreed to get up a little subscription for him against his 
 departure was that they should subscribe a guinea each. 
 Subjecting this tradition to a strict act of judgment, directed 
 by a knowledge of the laws of human nature in general, and 
 the circumstances of Chatterton's Bristol position in particular, 
 we should say that the entire sum that could possibly be in 
 Chatterton's purse in the week before he left Bristol, did not 
 (any contribution his mother could make included) exceed ten 
 guineas. Take a more probable estimate still, and deduct the 
 expenses of the outfit and journey, and we may say Chatterton 
 was elated with the prospect of invading London with a pecu- 
 niary force of exactly five guineas. 
 
 But he had plenty of manuscripts. In one bundle he had 
 the whole of the Kowley Poems and other antiques — jElla ; 
 the Bristowe Tragedie ; Goddwyn ; The Tournament ; The 
 Battle of Hastings ; The Parliamente of Sjprytes, &c., &c. ; all 
 written and finished at least twelve months before, and form- 
 ing matter enough to fill, if printed, one considerable volume; 
 These, if he could either dispose of them in the mass or sell 
 them individually, would form a sufiicient stock to begin with. 
 On ^lla, in particular, he naturally set great value. It was 
 his masterpiece ; worth a great deal of money, even as an 
 imitation of the antique, and worth ten times more if he could 
 succeed in getting it accepted as a genuine English poem of 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 235 
 
 tlie fifteenth century. Supposing that he should not be able 
 to part with it advantageously under either guise, he would 
 at any rate have it by him, to be printed some day or other at 
 his own expense, and to make his fame as a poet and anti- 
 quarian ! Then again, in another bundle, he had his miscel- 
 laneous modern pieces in prose and in verse — his Kew Gardens^ 
 his Consuliad, and other such satires after the manner of Pope 
 and Churchill; numerous songs, elegies, and other poetical 
 trifles ; and an assortment of odds and ends bearing on English 
 antiquities. For these he cared far less himself than for his 
 Eowley poems ; but he had already ascertained that they were 
 more disposable as literary ware, and accordingly he had of 
 late almost abandoned the antique vein in their favour. They 
 might be of use to him in his dealings with the magazines 
 and newspapers ; and if they should turn out not to be exactly 
 suitable, he had a ready pen and a head full of all kinds of 
 historical knowledge, and should find no difficulty — especially 
 after his sister had forwarded to him his little collection of 
 books that was in the meantime to be left behind under her 
 charge — in throwing off other such papers by the dozen ! 
 
 Lastly, as regards the matter of introductions. It may 
 seem strange to such as are accustomed to think such things 
 essential to a young man migrating from his native place, but 
 we positively cannot find that Chatterton took one letter of 
 introduction from Bristol with him. That Matthew Mease may 
 have told him of some vintner of his acquaintance living 
 somewhere in Whitechapel that would be glad to see him, if 
 he told him he knew Mat Mease, of Bristol ; that Mr. Clayfield, 
 or Mr. Barrett, or even his master, Mr. Lambert, may have 
 recommended him to call, at his leisure, on certain well-to-do 
 Smiths or Kobinsons they had dealings with ; that his younger 
 friends, the Mr. Carys and Mr. Kudhalls, the Miss Eumseys 
 and Miss Webbs, may have given him commissions and 
 instructions destined to bring him into connexion with metro- 
 politan aunts living in Camden Town, and long-forgotten 
 cousins that had situations in the Custom House ; nay, that 
 Mrs. Chatterton herself, taxing, with the grandmother's help, 
 her genealogical memory, may have excogitated for the occasion 
 
234 CHATTERTON : 
 
 a stray relative or two in London, that it might be as well to 
 pay a visit to — is, of course, extremely probable. But — and the 
 reason, in all likelihood, was that his whole circle of acquaint- 
 ance could not muster such a thing — not a single letter to a 
 literary notability did this " Mad Genius" of Bristol, going on 
 his expedition to set the Thames on fire, take in his portman- 
 teau to be of service to him. Two things only seem to have 
 been decided : the first, that on arriving in London, he should 
 go to lodge at the house of a Mr. Walmsley, a plasterer, in 
 Shoreditch, where a Mrs. Ballance, a distant relative of his 
 mother's, and who had already been written to on the subject, 
 resided ; and the other, that his first care on his arrival should 
 be to seek out Mr. Edmunds, at the Middlesex Journal office, 
 in Shoe-lane, and beat up the editorial quarters of the Town 
 and Country Magazine. These were to be hi^foci in London; 
 and thence, by the force of his genius, he was to weave out 
 new acquaintanceships, and spread himself in all directions ! 
 Nor, on the whole, was this plan perhaps the worst. Young 
 authors coming to London to set the Thames on fire, are by 
 no means always welcome visitors to those more elderly 
 practitioners of the same craft, who, having become convinced 
 by experience of the incombustibility of the river, have 
 settled dovm on its banks with chastened hopes and more 
 practical intentions ; and it is better, in the long run, for young 
 authors themselves to purchase every inch of way they make 
 into people's good graces by some equivalent addition of new 
 work done and tendered. And yet, who will say that intro- 
 ductions are of no use ? The kind word of encouragement 
 spoken now and then by the veteran litttrateur to his younger 
 brother, the business note written now and then in his service 
 when anything in the shape of work turns up, the friendly 
 invitation now and then when a few of the same craft are to 
 meet — these little courtesies, which it is in the power of intro- 
 ductions, in the proportion perhaps of one effective to ten 
 given, to procure, how much wear and tear of heart may they 
 not save ; how many paths through poverty to a rank London 
 churchyard may they not make smoother! These, a little 
 extended and adjusted, would of themselves constitute in these 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 235 
 
 days, and while the more systematic promises of socialism are 
 in abeyance, a very good organization of literature. Nor, 
 thank God, are these wanting. That hard, austere man of 
 letters, young poet, who receives you so grimly, is so severe 
 on your fallacies and commonplaces, says not a word to flatter 
 you, and would almost drive you from literature to making 
 shoes ; let but an opportunity really to serve you present 
 itself, and you shall find that man as true as steel, and as kind 
 as a woman I That other man of letters, too, with the flash- 
 ing wit and the impetuosity that stuns and blasts you, 1 could 
 tell you of generous actions done by him ! And him, again, 
 the broad, sagacious man of abundant humour and encyclo- 
 paedic lore ; or him on whose silver hairs the honours of a 
 long celebrity sit so gracefully — what debts of gratitude, were 
 they reckoned up, should be found owing by contemporaries 
 to them ! Such men there are in London in our own days^ 
 each cordial and assisting after his own method and in his 
 own sphere ; nor was London wanting in such in the days of 
 Chatterton. Remembering this, and thinking with ourselves 
 at the same time which special man out of the 700,000 and 
 odd souls then inhabiting London, it might have been best for 
 Chatterton to have come into connexion with, we cannot but 
 speculate what might have been the result had Chatterton 
 taken with him from Bristol but one letter of introduction, 
 addressed, suppose, to Oliver Goldsmith. " To Dr. Goldsmith, 
 at No. 2, Brick Court, Middle Temple, favoured by Mr. Chat- 
 terton" — one cannot help lingering in fancy over the probable 
 consequences of a letter bearing that superscription. But it 
 did not so happen ! 
 
 It was on Tuesday, the 24th of April, and, as near as we 
 can guess, between eight and nine in the evening, that 
 Chatterton, w^ho had probably never been a single whole day 
 out of* Bristol before, took his final farewell of it. By the 
 help of the Gentleman s Magazine for April, 1771, which 
 contains a register of the weather for the same month in the 
 previous year, we are able to tell pretty exactly the state of 
 the weather at the time. Monday, the 23rd, had been " a 
 cloudy day, very cold, with some little hail and a strong north- 
 
236 CHATTERTON : 
 
 west wind ;" and on Tuesday, tlie 24th, though the wind had 
 veered round to the south-west, it was still "cold and cloudy." 
 On the evening of that cloudy day, when it is already almost 
 dark, and the streets are damp with approaching rain, three 
 figures stand at an inn-door in Bristol, waiting for the starting 
 of the London coach. They are — Chatterton, wrapped up for 
 his journey, a tight, well-built youth, of middle size ; his sister, 
 a grown young woman, two years older than himself; and his 
 mother, a sad-looking elderly person, in a cloak. Eound 
 about the coach, and greatly in the way of the porters who 
 are putting on the luggage, are one or two young men that 
 have gone there to bid Chatterton once more good-bye. They 
 stand and talk for a few minutes in the midst of the bustle, 
 while tlie passengers are hurrying backwards and forwards 
 between the coach and the lighted passage of the inn. At 
 last all is ready ; the luggage is put up, and the other passen- 
 gers have taken their seats. " Good-bye, Tom ; God bless 
 you ; and mind to write as soon as you get to London," 
 falters the widow for the last time. Tom hears her ; bids her 
 good-bye, his sister good-bye, the rest good-bye ; and springs 
 into his place in what was then called " the basket" of the 
 coach, {. 6., an exterior accommodation slung low down to the 
 body. " All right," cries the guard, and blows his horn ; the 
 coachman cracks his whip, the horses' hoofs clatter, and away 
 along the ill-lit streets goes the clumsy vehicle out towards the 
 suburbs of Bristol, Chatterton slung in the basket. The widow 
 stands at the inn-door watching it till it disappears; then, 
 taking her daughter's arm, and gathering her cloak around 
 her, walks home with a heavy heart through the drizzle ! 
 
 PART II.— LONDON. 
 
 CHAPTER I. — SHOREDITCH. 
 
 Reader, were you ever in Shoreditch ? If you are an inha- 
 bitant of London, you know or may know all about it ; if not, 
 get a map of London, and you will see that the locality named 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 237 
 
 Shoreditch forms part of one of the great highways leading 
 northwards from the centre of the city towards the suburbs. 
 The part of this highway nearest the city, including about 
 half a mile of houses on both sides, is called Bishopsgate- 
 street, from the fact that here stood one of the ancient gates 
 of the city erected by a Saxon bishop of the seventh century; 
 beyond that, for about a quarter of a mile, the thoroughfare is 
 called Norton Folgate, or, as it was originally pronounced, 
 the Northern Foldgate, after which, extending for another 
 quarter of a mile, and terminating in Hackney, is Shoreditch 
 proper, the principal street of a populous parish of the same 
 name. Tradition ascribes the origin of the name to the 
 circumstance that Jane Shore, the mistress of Edward IV., 
 ended her life here, — 
 
 " Within a ditch of loathsome scent. 
 Which carrion dogs did much frequent," 
 
 as the ballad says : but old Stow settles that matter by say- 
 ing he could prove by record that as early as four hundred 
 years before his time the place had been called Soersditch. 
 However this may be, the place deserves its name. There is, 
 indeed, no vestige of a ditch now perceptible to one passing 
 through the locality, whatever a more strict investigation 
 might disclose ; but the neighbourhood has not a very plea- 
 sant or wholesome look. The aspect which Shoreditch proper 
 now presents is that of a broad, bustling street of old-fronted 
 houses, full of heterogeneous shops, some of them exhibiting 
 considerable displays of cheap hats, haberdashery, shoes, 
 ready-made clothes, groceries, and the like ; but others be- 
 longing rather to the costermonger species. Narrower streets, 
 of more mean appearance, branch out from it on both sides. 
 Altogether Shoreditch is not the part of London where a lite- 
 rary man of the present day would voluntarily seek lodgings ; 
 and, as' there does not seem to have been much change in its 
 importance relatively to other parts of the metropolis during 
 the last eighty years, the case was probably much the same 
 in Chatterton's time. Indeed, long before that, Shoreditch, 
 partly perhaps on account of the peculiar suggestiveness of its 
 name, had obtained an unenviable reputation as a low neigh- 
 
238 CHATTERTON : 
 
 bourhood ; and " to die in Slioreditch. " was synonymous, in 
 the writings of the wits of Dry den's time, with dying like 
 a profligate, and having hags for one's nurses. 
 
 It was here, however, that Chatterton lodged when he first 
 came to London. We have already mentioned that the only 
 definite arrangement he seems to have made for his sojourn in 
 London, before leaving Bristol, consisted in his having written 
 to Mrs. Ballance, a distant relative of his mother, who lived 
 at the house of a Mr. Walmsley, a plasterer, in Shoreditch, 
 asking her to secure a lodging for him against his arrival. 
 Mrs. Ballance, whom we picture as an elderly female, the 
 widow of some seafaring man, living in London in a meagre, 
 eleemosynary way, appears to have replied to this letter by 
 writing to Mrs. Chatterton that Thomas had better come at 
 once to Mr. Walmsley's, where he could be accommodated in 
 the meantime at least, and where she would do her best to 
 make him comfortable. 
 
 Accordingly, it was to Mr. Walmsley's, in Shoreditch, that 
 Chatterton, on his arrival in London, on the evening of Wed- 
 nesday, the 25th of April, 1770, contrived to make his way. 
 Where the Bristol coach of that day stopped, we do not know ; 
 though, doubtless, even that might be ascertained if we were 
 very anxious about it; but, presuming that it was in the yard 
 of some inn near the heart of the city, Chatterton would not 
 have had far to go before introducing himself to Mrs. Ballance, 
 if, indeed, the good woman did not make her appearance at 
 the coach to meet her young relative, and help him to carry 
 home his small allowance ot luggage. It shows the impa- 
 tience and the spirit of the young stranger thus deposited in 
 the streets of London, that, late as it was when he arrived at 
 Mr. Walmsley's (it must have been between five and six 
 o'clock in the evening), and tired as he must have been with 
 his twenty hours' journey, he did not remain within doors any 
 time ; but having seen his boxes safe, and escaped the assi- 
 duities of Mrs. Ballance, sallied out for a ramble, and to make 
 calls on the persons through whose patronage he hoped to 
 gain a footing in literary circles. So much, at least, we 
 infer from the following letter to his mother, written on the 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 239 
 
 morning of the 26th, after having slept his first night at 
 Mr. Walmsley's, and giving an account of his journey and 
 his first proceedings in London : — 
 
 " London, April 26th, 1770. 
 
 " Dear Mother, — Here I am, safe and in high spirits. To give you a journal 
 of my tour wovild not be unnecessary. After riding in the basket to Brisling- 
 ton, I mounted the top of the coach, and rid easy, and was agreeably enter- 
 tained with the conversation of a Quaker in dress, but little so in personals and 
 behaviour. This laughing Friend, who is a carver, lamented his having sent his 
 tools to Worcester, as otherwise he would have accompanied me to London. I 
 left him at Bath ; when, finding it rained pretty fast, I entered an inside pas- 
 senger to Speenhamland, the half-way stage, paying seven shillings. 'Twas 
 lucky I did so, for it snowed all night, and on Marlborough Downs the snow 
 was near a foot high. 
 
 " At seven in the morning I breakfasted at Speenhamland, and then mounted 
 the coach-box for the remainder of the day, which was a remarkable fine one. 
 Honest Gee-ho complimented me with assuring me that I sat bolder and tighter 
 than any person who ever rid with him. Dined at Stroud most luxuriously 
 with a young gentleman who had slept all the preceding night in the machine, 
 and an old mercantile genius, whose school-boy son had a great deal of wit, as 
 the father thought, in remarking that Windsor was as old as our Saviour's 
 time. 
 
 " Got into London about five o'clock in the evening. Called upon Mr. 
 Edmunds, Mr. Fell, Mr. Hamilton, and Mr. Dodsley. Great encouragement from 
 them; all approved of my design. Shall soon be settled. Call upon Mr. 
 Lambert ; show him this, or tell him if I deserve a recommendation, he woidd 
 oblige me to give me one ; if I do not, it will be beneath him to take notice of 
 me. Seen all aunts, cousins — all weU — and I am welcome. Mr. T. Wensley is 
 alive, and coming home. Sister, grandmother, &c. &c. &c., remember. 
 
 " I remain your dutiful son, 
 
 " T. Chatterton." 
 
 It is a curious corroboration of Chatterton^s account of the 
 weather during his journey, that, in the meteorological 
 registers of the Gentlemari's Magazinej Wednesday, the 25th 
 of April, 17 70 —the day on which Chatterton sat beside the 
 driver of the Bristol coach all the way from Speenhamland to 
 London — is entered as a day of " smart frost, very bright and 
 very cold," snow having fallen in some parts of the country 
 during the previous night. It was on the evening of this 
 bright, cold day, therefore, that Chatterton, as we fancy, set- 
 ting out from Mr. Walmsley's between five and six o'clock, 
 contrived, by inquiring his way of people he met, to pilot 
 himself along Shoreditch, Norton Folgate, and Bishopsgate- 
 street, towards the city, bent as he was on calling that very 
 evening on the four gentlemen mentioned in his letter — 
 Mr. Edmunds, Mr. Fell, Mr. Hamilton, and Mr. Dodsley. 
 Let us see if we can make out anything respecting these 
 
240 CHATTEETON : 
 
 gentlemen : they were the first persons Chatterton visited in 
 London; and some of them had not a little to do with his 
 subsequent fate. 
 
 Mr. Edmunds has been already introduced to the reader. 
 He was the proprietor, editor, and publisher of the Middlesex 
 Journal^ a bi-weekly newspaper, to which, we have seen, 
 Chatterton had sent several communications from Bristol. 
 His offices were in Shoe-lane, Holborn. Of Mr. Hamilton 
 we learn something from that interesting collection of scraps, 
 " Nichols's Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century.'' 
 He was the printer and proprietor of The Town and Country 
 Magazine, in which capacity Chatterton had, as we know, 
 for some time corresponded with him. He was the son of 
 one Archibald Hamilton, a Scotchman, who having been 
 obliged to quit Edinburgh in 1736, for having been actively 
 concerned in the Porteous riot, had settled in London as a 
 printer, and had made a considerable fortune there. The 
 son, Archibald, enjoying the benefit of his father's connexion, 
 had also set up as a printer. He had, says Nichols, two 
 printing offices, one " in the country, on the road between 
 High gate and Finchley,'' the other in town, " near St. 
 John's Gate, Clerkenwell ; " and it was probably in allusion 
 to this circumstance that, when he started a new magazine, 
 in the beginning of 1769, he named it The Town and 
 Country Magazine. The magazine, Nichols informs us, had 
 " a prodigious sale." Nichols also gives us some particulars 
 relative to Dodsley, in addition to those already communi- 
 cated to the reader. Having succeeded his brother Eobert, 
 whose junior he was by twenty-two years, in the year 1759, 
 James Dodsley had carried on the bookselling business in 
 Pall Mall so profitably as to be already a wealthy man. 
 -When he died in 1797, he left a fortune of 70,000/.; and a 
 good part of this sum must have been accumulated before 
 1770, when he was forty-five years of age. " By a habit of 
 excluding himself from the world," says Nichols, *'Mr. 
 James Dodsley, who certainly possessed a liberal heart and 
 a strong understanding, had acquired many^ peculiarities." 
 One of these is mentioned as specially characteristic. '* He 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 241 
 
 kept a carriage many years, but studiously wished his 
 friends should not know it ; nor did he ever use it on the 
 eastern side of Temple Bar." The inscription on the tablet 
 erected to the memory of the bookseller in St. James's 
 Church, Westminster, where he was buried, is to the same 
 effect. " He was a man," says the epitaph, " of a retired 
 and contemplative turn of mind, though engaged in a very 
 extensive line of public business ; he was upright and 
 liberal in his dealings, a friend to the afflicted in general, 
 and to the poor of this parish in particular," — in fact, an 
 eccentric, shy, good sort of man. Finally, as regards Mr. 
 Fell. From what Chatterton says of him, we learn that he 
 was printer, publisher, and editor of the Freeholder's Maga- 
 zine, a periodical conducted in the interest of Wilkes, and to 
 which, as well as to the Town and Country, Chatterton had 
 recently sent articles for insertion. We imagine him, on 
 some shadow of authority, to have been a needy, nondescript 
 kind of publisher, with a place of business in Paternoster 
 Kow, and not nearly so respectable as either Edmunds or 
 Hamilton, not to speak of Dodsley. 
 
 Such were the four persons upon whom we are to imagine 
 the impetuous young fellow, who had just come off the Bristol 
 coach, dropping in unexpectedly between light and dark on 
 a cold April evening, eighty- six years ago. His hopes from 
 Edmunds were, of course, chiefly in connexion with the 
 Middlesex Journal, for which he could furnish poems and 
 paragraphs. Through Fell he might get a footing in the 
 Freeholder s Magazine, and whatever else of a literary kind 
 might be going on under the auspices of Wilkes. From 
 Hamilton he looked for some definite and paying engagement 
 on the Town and Country. From Dodsley his expectations 
 were probably still higher. Besides being the publisher of the 
 Annual Begister, and the friend of Burke and other notable 
 political men, Dodsley was a bookseller on a large scale, and 
 a publisher of poetry ; it was to him that Chatterton had applied 
 by letter sixteen months before as a likely person to publish 
 his j^lla ; one or two letters had probably passed between 
 them since ; and in resolving to introduce himself personally 
 
 R 
 
242 CHATTERTON : 
 
 to this magnate of books, Chatterton had, doubtless, dreams 
 not only of the opening of the Annual Register to his lucubra- 
 tions, but also of the appearance of his Rowley performances 
 some day or other in the form of one or more well-printed 
 vcjumes, the wonder of all the critics. It was with these views 
 on the persons severally concerned, that Chatterton made his 
 four rapid calls. The enterprise was certainly less Quixotic 
 than if a young literary provincial, now-a-days, were, on the 
 first day of his being in London, to resolve at once to call 
 on Murray or Longman, then to beat up the office of the Daily 
 News in search of the editor; after that to knock at Mr. 
 Parker's door to seek an engagement on Fraser ; and finally to 
 go and see what could be done on Dickens's Household Words, 
 Still, making all allowance for the difference in point of editorial 
 and bibliopolic dignity between that day and this, the idea 
 of achieving interviews with four difierent editors and pub- 
 lishers in one ramble was somewhat bold. As regards 
 mere time and distance, to compass calls, in such circum- 
 stances, on four different individuals — one of these living in 
 Shoe Lane, another at St. John's Gate, Clerkenwell, a third 
 in Pall Mall, and the fourth somewhere else— can have been 
 no easy task. But Chatterton was a resolute youth, with 
 plenty of the faculty of self-assertion, and capable, as we 
 imagine, not only of making four calls in one walk, but 
 also of going through each without any unnecessary degree 
 of bashfulness. We have no doubt that he saw Hamilton, 
 Fell, Edmunds, and Dodsley himself, with the most perfect 
 self-assurance ; that he explained his case to them, and stated 
 what he wanted from them, very distinctly; and that with 
 the advantage he had in having corresponded with all of 
 them before, he came off from the interviews in a very satis- 
 factory manner. As to how they received him, and what 
 they said to him, we have but his own words to his mother : 
 — " Great encouragement from them : all approved of my 
 design." The meaning of this is somewhat problematical. 
 Dodsley, we imagine, nervous and shy person as he was, 
 may have been not a little discomposed by the talk of the 
 impetuous young visitor who had so unceremoniously burst 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 243 
 
 in upon him ; and, while listening with tolerable courtesy to 
 what he said, may have been mentally resolving to have 
 nothing more to do with that odd Bristol lad, if once he 
 could get him out. Hamilton and Edmunds, we fancy, 
 were civil and general, with perhaps an intention to let the 
 lad write for them, if he chose to do so. Fell, as a needier 
 man, and more ready to catch at a promising literary recruit, 
 was, we imagine, the most cordial of all. 
 
 And so, tired and yet happy, the young stranger bent 
 his steps homeward in the direction of Shoreditch. Ah ! we 
 wonder if, in passing along Shoe Lane after his interview 
 with Edmunds, brushing with his shoulder the ugly black 
 wall of that workhouse burying-ground on the site of which 
 Farringdon market now stands, any presentiment occurred 
 to him of a spectacle which, four short months afterwards, 
 that very spot was to witness — these young limbs of his, 
 now so full of life, then closed up stark and unclaimed in a 
 workhouse shell, and borne carelessly and irreverently by one 
 or two men along that very wall to a pauper's hasty grave ! 
 Ah ! no, he paces all unwittingly, poor young heart, that spot 
 of his London doom, where even I, remembering him, shudder 
 to tears ; for God, in his mercy, hangs the veil ! 
 
 In what precise part of Shoreditch that house of Mr. 
 Walmsley was where Chatterton lodged when he first came 
 to London, and to which, on that memorable day, he 
 returned through many dark and strange streets, we do not 
 know. London Directories of the year 1770 are not things 
 easy to be found ; and, could we fijid one, we should not be 
 very certain to find Mr. Walmsley's name in it. In these 
 circumstances the literary antiquary, as he walks along 
 Shoreditch, may be allowed to single out, as the object of 
 his curiosity, any old-looking house he pleases along the 
 whole length of the thoroughfare on either side ; it being 
 stipulated only that the house so selected shall be con- 
 ceivable as having once been the abode of a plasterer. For 
 our part, we have an incommunicable impression as if the 
 house were to be sought in the close vicinity of the present 
 terminus of the Eastern Counties Eailway, or where Shore- 
 
 r2 
 
244 CHATTERTON 
 
 ditcli passes into Norton Folgate. Let that fancy stand, 
 therefore, in lieu of a better. 
 
 Here then Chatterton, tired with his long walk through 
 the streets, slept his first night in London. Here, on the 
 following morning, he breakfasted in the company of his 
 relative, Mrs. Ballance, giving her the news of Bristol, and 
 receiving from her such bits of news in return as she had to 
 communicate; and amongst them the intelligence conveyed 
 in his letter home, that Mr. T. Wensley — a seaman or petty 
 officer, as we learn from a subsequent allusion, on board a 
 King's ship, but a native of Bristol, and on that account 
 known to Mrs. Chatterton and his sister — was alive, and on 
 his way home. Hence also he sets out to visit those aunts 
 and cousins mentioned in the letter as being all well and 
 glad to see him ; and who, it is to be hoped, did not live far 
 from Shoreditch. Here, some time or other in the course of 
 the day — Thursday, the 26th ; his first real day in London, 
 and '• a very coarse, wet, cold day" it was, says the Gentle- 
 mans Magazine — he writes the letter in question, so as to 
 send it by that day's post. And here, during the remaining 
 days of that month, — Friday, the 27th, " a very coarse wet 
 day, but not so cold; " Saturday, the 28th, " a heavy morn- 
 ing, bright afternoon, cold wind ; " Sunday the 29th, " a very 
 bright day, hot sun, cold wind;" and Monday the 30th, 
 " chiefly bright, flying clouds, no rain, and warm ; " — he soon 
 finds himself fairly domiciled, becoming more familiar with 
 the Walmsleys and Mrs. Ballance, whom he sees in the 
 mornings ; and starting off every forenoon for a walk along 
 Norton Folgate and Bishopsgate Street, towards those quar- 
 ters of the metropolis where the chief attractions lay. 
 
 Chatterton lived in Mr. Walmsley's house in Shoreditch 
 about six weeks in all, or from the 24th of April till the 
 beginning of June. We are fortunately able to give a some- 
 what particular account of the economy of Mr. Walmsley's 
 family, and of the kind of accommodation which Chatterton had 
 there, and the kind of impression he produced on the various 
 members of it during his stay. The Kev. Sir Herbert Croft, 
 already alluded to as one who took much pains — more pains. 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 245 
 
 In fact, than anybody else from that time to this — to inform 
 himself of the real particulars of Chatterton's life, took the 
 judicious plan of hunting out the Walmsley family in Shore- 
 ditch, while the memory of Chatterton was still fresh, and 
 ascertaining all he could from them regarding the habits of 
 the singular being whose brief stay among them had been an 
 event of such consequence in the history of their humble 
 household. The following is an extract from the reverend 
 baronet's Love and Madness, embodying all he could gather 
 about Chatterton from this source : — 
 
 " The man and woman where he first lodged, are still (1780) living in the 
 same house. He is a plasterer. They, and their nephew and niece (the latter 
 about as old as Chatterton would be now, the former three years younger), 
 and Mrs. Ballance, who lodged in the house and desired them to let Chatterton, 
 her relation, live there also — have been seen. The little collected from them 
 you shall have in their own words. 
 
 *' Mrs. BaUance says he was as proud as Lucifer. He very soon quarrelled 
 with her for calling him * Cousin Tommy,' and asked her if she ever heard of a 
 poet's being called Tommy ; but she assured him that she knew nothing of 
 poets, and only wished he would not set up for a gentleman. Upon her recom- 
 mending it to him to get into some office, when he had been in town two or 
 three weeks, he stormed about the room like a madman, and frightened her 
 njot a little, by telling her that he hoped, with the blessing of God, very soon 
 to be sent prisoner to the Tower, which would make his fortune. He would 
 often look steadfastly in a person's face, without speaking, or seeming to see the 
 person for a quarter of an hour or more, till it was quite frightful ; during all 
 which time (she supposes, from what she has since heard) his thoughts were 
 gone about something else. He frequently declared that he should settle the 
 nation before he had done : but how could she think that her poor cousin 
 T'omniy was so great a man as she now finds he was ? His mother should 
 have written word of his greatness, and then, to be sure, she would have 
 humoured the gentleman accordingly. 
 
 " Mr, Walmsley observed little in him, but that there was something manly 
 and pleasing about him, and that he did not dislike the wenches. 
 
 " Mrs. Walmsley's account is, that she never saw any harm of him — that he 
 never mislisted her, but was always very civil whenever they met in the house 
 by accident ; that he woxild never suffer the room in which he used to read and 
 wi'ite to be swept, because, he said, poets hated brooms ; that she told him she 
 did not know any thing poet-folks were good for, but to sit in a dirty cap and 
 gown in a gaiTet, and at last to be starved ; that, during the nine (?) weeks he was 
 at her house, he never stayed out after the family hoiu-s except once, when he 
 did not come home all night, and had been, she heard, poeting a song about the 
 streets. (This night, Mrs Ballance says, she knows he lodged at a relation's 
 because Mr. Walmsley's house was shut up when he came home.) 
 
 ** The niece says, for her part, she always took him more for a mad boy than 
 anything else, he would have such flights and vagaries ; that, but for his face, 
 and her knowledge of his age, she should never have thought him a boy, he 
 was so manly, and so much himself ; that no women came after him, nor did 
 she know of any connexion — but still that he was a sad rake, and terribly fond 
 of women, and would sometimes be saucy to her ; that he ate what he chose to 
 have, with his relation, Mrs. Ballance, who lodged in the house ; but that he never 
 touched meat, and drank only water, and seemed to live on the air. . , . The 
 niece adds, that he was good-tempered, and agreeable, and obliging, but sadly 
 
246 CHATTERTON : 
 
 proud and haughty : nothing was too good for him ; nor was anything to he too 
 good for his grandmother, mother, and sister, hereafter. . . . That he used to sit 
 up almost all night, reading and writing ; and that her brother said he was 
 afraid to lie with him — for, to be sure, he was a spirit, and never slept ; for he 
 never came to bed till it was morning, and then, for what he saw, never closed 
 his eyes. 
 
 " The nephew (Chatterton's bed-fellow during the first six weeks he lodged 
 there) says that, notwithstanding his pride and haughtiness, it was impossible 
 to help liking him ; that he lived chiefly upon a bit of bread, or a tart, and 
 some water — but he once saw him take a sheep's tongue out of his pocket ; 
 that Chatterton, to his knowledge, never slept while they lay together ; that he 
 never came to bed till very late, sometimes three or four o'clock, and was 
 always awake when he (the nephew) waked, and got up at the same time, about 
 five or six ; that almost every morning the floor was covered with pieces of 
 paper not so big as sixpences, into which he had torn what he had been writing 
 before he came to bed." 
 
 Bating some coarse spitefiilness, if we may so call it, in the 
 recollection of Chatterton's haughty airs, apparent in the evi- 
 dence of Mrs. Ballance and the niece, and a slight tendency 
 to the marvellous apparent in that of the nephew (who was 
 but a boy of fourteen when Chatterton shared the room with 
 him), the above presents, we believe, a picture of Chatterton 
 as he appeared in the narrow Walmsley circle, as accurate as 
 it is vivid. Walmsley himself we rather like. We fancy 
 him an easy sort of fellow, not troubling himself much about 
 domestic matters, going out to his work in the morning, and 
 leaving his lodger to the somewhat intrusive care of the women- 
 folks. After he is gone, we are to suppose, Chatterton spends 
 the morning in reading and writing, while Mrs. Walmsley, 
 Mrs. Ballance, and the niece are slatterning about the house ; 
 and generally, as the forenoon advances, he goes out for his 
 walk towards the places of London resort. Along Norton 
 Folgate, and Bishopsgate Street, passing crowds of people and 
 hackney-coaches, and glancing, with the eye of an antiquarian 
 and a connoisseur in old architecture, at such buildings of 
 antique aspect as were and are conspicuous in that thorough- 
 fare — the old church of St. Helen's, the old church of St. 
 Ethelburga, and that much-admired remnant of the civic 
 architecture of the fifteenth century, Crosby Hall, or Crosby 
 Place, mentioned in Shakespeare's Richard III. : let the metro- 
 politan reader distinctly figure this as the usual direction fol- 
 lowed by Chatterton in his walks from Mr. Walmsley's, in 
 Shoreditch. Beyond that, his wanderings may be various ; 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 247 
 
 frequently, of course, along the main line of Comhill, past the 
 Bank, as it then was, and the then new Mansion House, into 
 Cheapside ; thence slowly along the purlieus of St. Paul's, 
 with a peculiar lingering among the book-shops of Pater- 
 noster Eow ; and further, down Ludgate Hill, and up Fleet 
 Street, towards Temple Bar and the Strand. Visits of busi- 
 ness were, we may be sure, not neglected : and, in achieving 
 his transits from one place to another, Chatterton, like the 
 rest of us, may have been guilty of the egregious folly of 
 attempting short cuts, and so may have bewildered himself 
 among mazes of mean streets, proving their populousness by 
 swarms of children, yet never to be seen by him, or by any- 
 body else, more than once. 
 
 Oh ! the weariness of these aimless walks of a young lite- 
 rary adventurer, without a purse or a friend, in the streets of 
 London I The perpetual and anxious thought within, which 
 scarcely any street-distraction can amuse ; the listlessness with 
 which, on coming to the parting of two ways, one suffers the 
 least accident to determine which way one will take, both 
 being indifferent ; the vain castle-building in sanguine 
 moments, when thousands of pounds seem possible and near ; 
 the utter prostration of spirit at other moments, when one 
 inspects the shivering beggar that passes with new interest, as 
 but another form of one's self, and when every glimpse of a 
 damp, grassless churchyard through a railing acts as a horrible 
 premonition of what may be the end ; the curious and habitual 
 examination of physiognomies met as one goes along; the 
 occasional magic of a bright eye, or a lovely form, shooting 
 a pang through the heart, and calling up, it may be, the 
 image of a peerless one, distant, denied, but unforgotten, till 
 the soul melts in very tenderness, and all the past is around 
 one again ; the sudden start from such a mood, the flush, the 
 clenched hand, the set teeth, the resolve, the manly hope, the 
 dream of a home quiet, and blest after all with one sweet 
 presence ; and then, after that, the more composed gait, and 
 the saunter towards the spots one prefers, till the waning day, 
 or the need to work and eat, brings one back fatigued to the 
 lonely room ! And so from day to day a repetition of the 
 
248 CHATTERTON : 
 
 same process. Ah, London, London! thou perpetual home 
 of a shifting multitude, how many a soul is there not within 
 thee at this hour, who, listening to that peculiar roar of thine, 
 which shows the concourse of myriads in thee, all cooperating 
 for their ends, and yet feeling excluded, like an unclaimed 
 atom, from the midst of thy bustle, might cry aloud to thee, 
 and say, " I, too, am strong ; I am young ; I am willing ; 
 I can do something ; leave me not out ; attend to me ; make 
 room for me ; devise the means of absorbing me, and such as 
 me, within thy just activity; and defer not till I and they 
 make thee hearken with our shrieks !" But London rolls on; 
 and men, young and old, do demand impossible things ! If it 
 defies us to make the medium without conform, some power 
 is at least left, to shape and rule the spirit within ! 
 
 Chatterton, we believe, came to London with as practical 
 and resolute a spirit as any literary adventurer before or since. 
 His excitement with his change of position, his confidence in 
 being able to make his way, and his activity in availing him- 
 self of every means of doing so, seem to have been really 
 prodigious. Hence, probably, his first walks in London were 
 as little listless as was possible in the circumstances. Instead 
 of idle and aimless saunterings, such as we have described, 
 many of his London walks during the first week or two of his 
 stay at Shoreditch must have been direct visits from spot to 
 spot, and from person to person. By no means dijQSdent or 
 bashful, and, so far as we can see, perfectly heart-whole as 
 regarded all the Bristol beauties he had left, he probably 
 wasted less time than many others with less genius would 
 have wasted, in useless regrets and pointless reveries. Com- 
 pared with his position at Bristol, as the miserable drudge of 
 a lawyer's office, his present life, as a free literary rover in 
 London, appeared to him, doubtless, all but paradisaic. To 
 work in the morning in his lodging in Shoreditch, with some- 
 times a saucy word for his landlady's niece, though not so 
 saucy by half as the slut would have liked ; then to go out to 
 make calls, and see sights in various quarters, buying a tart 
 at a pastrycook's for his dinner, spending a shilling, or, per- 
 haps, two, in other little indulgences, and quite alive always 
 
A STOEY OF THE YEAR 1770. 249 
 
 to the distraction of a pretty face wherever he chanced to be ; 
 then to come home again at an earlier or a later hour, and to 
 sit up half the night writing and tearing papers, greatly to 
 the bewilderment and alarm of that very ill-used boy. Master 
 Walmsley, who lost, we dare say, half his natural allowance 
 of sleep in watching his movements from beneath the blankets: 
 —here was happiness, here was liberty, here was a set of con- 
 ditions in which to commence the process of setting fire to the 
 Thames ! So, at least, it seemed to Chatterton himself during 
 his first fortnight in London ; for when Mrs. Ballance, at the 
 end of that period, ventured to suggest that he should try to 
 get into some office, we have seen what thanks the poor woman 
 got. To be sure, had Mrs. Chatterton sent her word before- 
 hand what a great man Cousin Tommy was, she would have 
 humoured the gentleman accordingly! But how was she to 
 kr.ow ? Ah ! how, indeed ? 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 TOWN-TALK EIGHTY YEARS AGO. 
 
 In coming to London, Chatterton, of course, came into the 
 midst of all the politics and current talk of the day. Bristol, 
 indeed, as a bustling and mercantile place, had had its share 
 of interest in the general on-goings of the nation ; and regu- 
 larly, as the coach had brought down the last new materials 
 of gossip from London, the politicians of Bristol had gone 
 through the budget, and given the Bristol imprimatur, or the 
 reverse, to the opinions pronounced by the metropolitan autho- 
 rities. Sometimes, too, Bristol, from its western position and 
 its extensive shipping connexions, might have the start even 
 of London in a bit of American news. On the whole, how- 
 ever, going from Bristol to London was, as regarded oppor- 
 tunities of insight into the affairs of the day, like going from 
 darkness into light, from the suburbs to the centre, from the 
 shilling gallery to the pit-stalls. Let us see what were the 
 pieces (small enough they seem now), in course of performance 
 on the stage of British life eighty years ago, when Chatterton 
 
250 CHATTERTON : 
 
 had thus just sliifted his place in the theatre ; in other words, 
 what were the topics which afforded matter of talk to that 
 insatiable gossip, the Town, towards the end of April and 
 during the whole of May, 1770. 
 
 First, then, and monopolising nearly the whole ground of 
 the domestic politics of the time, was the everlasting case of 
 Wilkes and Liberty, begun seven years before, when Chatterton 
 was a boy at Colston's school, but still apparently far from a 
 conclusion. There had been a change, however, in the relative 
 situations of the parties in this case. 
 
 Among the most earnest defenders of Wilkes and advocates 
 of the right of free election, which they considered uncon- 
 stitutionally violated in his case, were the authorities of the 
 Corporation of the City of London, then under the mayoralty 
 of the celebrated Beckford. With other corporations and 
 public bodies, they had sent in petitions to the King on the 
 subject. These petitions having been ungraciously received, 
 Beckford and his colleagues had had the boldness to wait on 
 the King (March 14th), and address a personal remonstrance 
 to him. The King's reply was as follows : — 
 
 " I shall always be ready to receive the requests and to listen to the com- 
 plaints of my subjects ; but it gives me great concern to find that any of them 
 should have been so far misled as to offer me an address and remonstrance, the 
 contents of which I cannot but consider as disrespectful to me, injixrious to my 
 parliament, and irreconcilable to the principles of the constitution." 
 
 Having read this speech, the King gave the Lord Mayor 
 and others of the deputation his hand to kiss ; after which, as 
 they were withdrawing, he turned round to his courtiers and 
 burst out laughing. " Nero fiddled whilst Rome was burn- 
 ing,'^ was the grandiloquent remark of Parson Home on the 
 occasion ; and, though this was a little too strong, it is certain 
 that the City-people were very angry. So, out of revenge, 
 and partly as a compensation to Wilkes for his exclusion from 
 the House of Commons, they made Wilkes an alderman. The 
 patriot had hardly been out of prison a week when, on 24th of 
 April — the day on which Chatterton left Bristol — he was sworn 
 in as alderman for the ward of Farringdon Without, and 
 received a magnificent banquet on the occasion. This acces- 
 sion of Wilkes to the Corporation of the City of London, was 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAK 1770. 251 
 
 not only a kind of defiance to the Court and the ruling party ; 
 it was also intended to increase the power of the City to annoy 
 these enemies in future. With such a man as Beckford as 
 mayor, and with such men as Wilkes, Sawbridge, Towns- 
 hend, and Crosby, on the bench of aldermen — all popular 
 men and of strong liberal opinions — what might the corpo- 
 ration not do ? 
 
 The same part which was being acted in the City by the 
 Lord Mayor Beckford and his colleagues, was acted, within 
 the more important sphere of parliament, by the Opposition 
 in both houses. The parliament of that session had been 
 opened on the 9th of January, and it was to be prorogued on 
 the 19th of May. The case of Wilkes had been before it from 
 the first to last, so that it had discussed little else. Uniting 
 in this case, and making it the ground of a common anta- 
 gonism to the Court and the ministry, the various elements of 
 the Opposition had constituted themselves into a powerful 
 phalanx, the leaders of which, in the one house, were Lord 
 Chatham, the Marquis of Bockingham, the Dukes of Bich- 
 mond, Portland, and Devonshire, and Lords Shelburne and 
 Temple ; and in the other house Edmund Burke, Colonel 
 Barre, George Grenville, and others. It was Wilkes, Wilkes, 
 with these men every day of the session ; whenever, in short, 
 they wished to have a wrestling-match with the ministers. 
 Thus, on the very first day of the session, Chatham had made 
 a motion on the subject in the House of Lords, on which occa- 
 sion, to the surprise of everybody, the Lord Chancellor Camden 
 seceded from his colleagues, and expressed his disapprobation 
 of their policy. He was forthwith deprived of the seals, and 
 the Lord Chancellorship went a-begging. Then followed, as 
 we know, the resignation of the premiership by the Duke of 
 Grafton, and the formation of a second edition of the same 
 cabinet under Lord North. It was in this unpopular North 
 administration of 1770 that young Charles Fox, then the 
 greatest rake and gambler about town, first took office as 
 a junior lord of the Admiralty; and the earliest parliamentary 
 displays of this future chief of the Whig statesmen were in 
 the cause of that very policy to the denunciation and destruc- 
 
252 CHATTERTON : 
 
 tion of whicli he afterwards devoted liis remarkable life. 
 Many were the gibes against this young orator of the North 
 party, whose abilities were already recognised, and whose 
 swarthy complexion and premature corpulence (he was only 
 twenty-one when the wits nicknamed him Niger Fox the Fat), 
 made him a good butt for personal attacks ; and a caricature 
 of the day is still extant with the title of " The Death of the 
 Foxes/' in which Lord Holland as the old fox, and his son 
 Charles as the young one, are represented hanging from a 
 gallows, while Farmer Bull and his wife are rejoicing over 
 their emancipated poultry. Fox was, of course, no friend to 
 Wilkes, and, in the lower house, it devolved on him to resist 
 the motions of Burke and Barre in connexion with Wilkes's 
 case. It was in the House of Lords, however, that the agita- 
 tion on that case was chiefly kept up. Among the most deci- 
 sive measures of the Opposition was a renewed motion of 
 Chatham's in that house on the 1st of May — that is, some 
 days after Wilkes^s release and promotion to the dignity of 
 alderman — " to repeal and rescind the resolutions of the 
 House of Commons in regard to the expulsion and incapacita- 
 tion of Mr. Wilkes." There was a stormy debate, in which 
 the principal speakers were, on the one side, the Duke of 
 Eichmond, Lord Chatham, Lord Lyttleton, Lord Camden, 
 Lord Shelburne, and Lord Stanhope ; and, on the other, the 
 Duke of Grafton, Lord Denbigh, Lord Mansfield, Lord 
 Egmont, Lord Pomfret, Lord Weymouth, and Lord Gower. 
 The motion was lost by a majority of eighty-nine against forty- 
 three votes. Judging from the following paragraph in the 
 London Evening News of May the 8th, the excitement in town, 
 on the week following this motion, must have been even 
 greater than usual : — 
 
 " Tuesday, May 8th. — Yesterday a great number of people assembled in 
 the lobby of the House of Commons and the avenues adjoining, in consequence 
 of a report which had been spread that Mr. Alderman Wilkes intended to go 
 thither that day to claim a seat. The crowd was so great that members were 
 hindered from passing and repassing ; whereupon the gaUery was ordered to 
 be locked and the lobby to be cleared. But Mr. "Wilkes did not go to the 
 House." 
 
 As parliament was prorogued on the 19th of May, there 
 was an end, for that season, to all parliamentary discussion of 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 253 
 
 the case of Wilkes. Members, to use the words of Junius, 
 "retired into summer quarters to rest from the disgraceful 
 labours of the campaign ;'^ (poor members of parliament now- 
 a-days have to drudge, in the hot weather, for three months 
 longer;) and Wilkes had to be content with sitting on the 
 bench as an alderman, and organizing, along with Beckford, 
 Sawbridge, and the rest of the City-folks, a new deputation to 
 gall the King. One of the most famous incidents of the day 
 was the interview of this deputation with the King on the 
 23d of May ; an interview which was not procured without 
 diflSculty. The deputation having been introduced into the 
 royal presence, the Lord Mayor, Beckford, read a " humble 
 remonstrance " to his Majesty — with as much spice in it, how- 
 ever, as the form of such documents allowed — on the decisive 
 terms in which he had been pleased to characterise their 
 address and petition of the 14th of March. The King was 
 implored to " break through all the secret and visible machi- 
 nations to which the City of London had owed its late severe 
 repulse," and to " disclaim the malignant and pernicious 
 advice" which had induced him to meet the former deputation 
 with so sharp an answer ; *' an advice of most dangerous ten- 
 dency, inasmuch as thereby the exercise of the clearest rights 
 of the subject — namely, to petition the King for redress of 
 grievances, to complain of the violation of the freedom of 
 election, to pray dissolution of parliament, to point out mal- 
 practices in administration, and to urge the removal of evil 
 ministers — hath, by the generality of one compendious word, 
 been indiscriminately checked with reprimand." No sooner 
 had the King heard this than, facing Beckford in a way to 
 show his natural obstinacy, he read the following answer : — 
 
 ** I shotild have been wanting to the public, as well as to myself, if I had not 
 expressed my dissatisfaction at the late address. My sentiments on that sub- 
 ject continue the same ; and I should ill deserve to be considered as the Father 
 of my people, if I should suffer myself to be prevailed upon to make such an 
 use of my prerogative as I cannot but think inconsistent with the interest, and 
 dangerous to the constitution of the kingdom." 
 
 Whereupon Beckford, excited beyond all regard for the 
 usual formalities of royal audiences, burst forth in an extem- 
 pore speech : — 
 
254 chatterton: 
 
 " Most gracious Sovereign, will your Majesty be pleased so far to condescend 
 as to permit the mayor of yoiir loyal City of London to declare in your royal 
 presence, on behalf of his fellow-citizens, how much the bare apprehension of 
 your Majesty's displeasure would at all times affect their minds. The declara- 
 tion of that displeasure has already filled them with inexpressible anxiety, and 
 with the deepest afiliction. Permit me, sire, to assure yo\ir Majesty, that your 
 Majesty has not, in all your dominions, any subjects more faithful, more duti- 
 ful, or more affectionate to your Majesty's person and family, or more ready to 
 sacrifice their lives and fortunes in the maintenance of the true honour and 
 dignity of your crown. 
 
 " We do, therefore, with the greatest humility and submission, most earnestly 
 supplicate yovir Majesty that you will not dismiss us from yoiu- presence with- 
 out expressing a more favourable opinion of your faithfixl citizens, and without 
 some comfort, without some prospect at least of redress. 
 
 " Permit me, sire, further to observe, that whoever has already dared, or shall 
 hereafter endeavour, by false insinuations and suggestions, to alienate yovir 
 Majesty's affections from your loyal subjects in general, and from the City of 
 London in particular, and to withdraw your confidence in and regard for your 
 people, is an enemy to your Majesty's person and family, a violator of the 
 public peace, and a betrayer of our happy constitution, as it was established at 
 the glorious Revolution." 
 
 This bold harangue, so contrary to all rules of etiquette, 
 produced a kind of consternation among the courtiers ; the 
 King, who had been, as it were, trapped into hearing it by 
 the surprise of the moment, resented it as an insult ; and the 
 deputation retired with the consciousness that the breach 
 between the City of London and the King had been made 
 wider than ever. Beckford, however, gained great credit by 
 his conduct ; the speech that he had made to the King was 
 in everybody's lips ; and, for the time, he rose to as high a 
 station of popularity as Wilkes. 
 
 While the case of Wilkes, with the numerous questions 
 that had grown out of it, thus formed the chief matter of 
 controversy in the politics of the day, there was another 
 question fraught, as the issue proved, with still more remark- 
 able consequences, which, after having been a topic of occa- 
 sional discussion for several years, began, about the time of 
 Chatterton's arrival in London, to assume a more pressing 
 and public aspect. This was the question of the disaffection 
 of the American colonies. 
 
 In the year 1764-5, as all readers of American history know, 
 the parliament of Great Britain gave the first deadly shock to 
 the allegiance of the American colonies to the British crown, by 
 decreeing the imposition on these colonies of a general stamp 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 255 
 
 tax, for the purposes of revenue. The colonies, severally and 
 conjointly, had protested and petitioned against this act of 
 authority; in 1767 the stamp tax had been exchanged for a 
 duty on paper, glass, painters' colours, and teas. This, how- 
 ever, had not satisfied the Americans, and from year to year 
 the topic had been brought up in Parliament, along with that 
 of Wilkes — the politicians and writers who took the side of 
 Wilkes generally also sympathising with the resistance of 
 the American colonists to the Home Government ; while the 
 Court party, on the other hand, who opposed Wilkes, were 
 also eager for maintaining the prerogative of Britain over the 
 colonies. Things had come to such a pass that many shrewd 
 persons foresaw a war with the colonies, and prophesied their 
 separation from the mother-country. It was the fear of this 
 result that prompted the administration of Lord North, imme- 
 diately after its accession, in the beginning of 1770, to repeal 
 so much of the Act of 1767 as imposed duties on glass, 
 paper, and painters' colours, retaining only the duty on tea. 
 As, by such an arrangement, the obnoxious jprmciple, to 
 which the Americans were repugnant, was still maintained 
 and asserted, there was little doubt that it would prove of 
 no avail. But before news could arrive of the manner in 
 which the Americans had received it, a piece of intelligence 
 crossed the Atlantic which increased the bitterness of the 
 ministerial feeling against the intractable folks on the other 
 side of the water. On the 26th of April, Chatterton's first 
 day in London, there appeared in the London evening papers 
 paragraphs conveying the news of a serious riot which had 
 occurred in the streets of Boston on the 13th of March. The 
 riot had originated in a quarrel between some of the soldiers, 
 who had been quartered in the town, greatly against the 
 wishes of the inhabitants, and the men at a rope-manufactory, 
 belonging to a Mr. Gray. The people of Boston, highly 
 incensed against the military, both on account of their inso- 
 lent behaviour, and because they had been sent among them 
 to enforce the odious Tax Act, took part with the rope- 
 makers. There was a violent disturbance of the peace ; the 
 troops fired on the people, and some unoffending persons 
 
256 CHATTERTON I 
 
 were killed : the whole town rose, and, to prevent still worse 
 results, the military commander had to withdraw the soldiers 
 to some distance. " Had they not been withdrawn," said a 
 private letter from Boston, which appeared in the London 
 Morning Post, '' the Bostonians would have set fire to their 
 beacon, a tar-barrel stuck on the top of a mast on a high 
 hill, and raised the country for eighty miles round." 
 
 Such was the news which the American post brought to 
 London on the day when Chatterton began his residence in 
 Shoreditch. For a week, or more, the town was full of it; 
 the Wilkes party rejoicing over it as a new embarrassment to 
 ministers, and the ministers themselves not knowing very 
 well what to say or think about it. From that time a war 
 with the colonies seemed a probable event. 
 
 In addition to the protracted Wilkes controversy, and to 
 this matter of the Boston riot, and its connexion with colonial 
 policy, there were, of course, a variety of minor incidents of 
 more or less interest, affording materials for gossip to the 
 town during the first five or six weeks of Chatterton^s 
 sojourn in it. At that time, as in this, there were balls, 
 horse-races, theatrical performances, murders, robberies, mar- 
 riages in high life, fires, &c. &c., all duly announced in the 
 public papers, and all excellent as pabulum for the conver- 
 sation of the idle and the curious. By way of sample, and 
 that our readers may the more easily fill out the picture for 
 themselves, we shall string together a few of those defunct 
 minutiae, as we gather them quite miscellaneously from the 
 columns of the contemporary newspapers : — 
 
 Wednesday, April 25 (day of Chatterton' s arrival in London). — " Eanelagh 
 House will be opened this evening vt^ith the usual entertainments. Admittance, 
 2s. 6d. each person ; coffee and tea included. The house will continue to be 
 open on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays tUl farther notice. N.B. — There 
 will be an armed guard on horseback to patrol the roads." — Adxertiseme^it in 
 Public Advertiser of that day. 
 
 Same evening. — At Drury-lane, the following performances : — The Clandestine 
 Marriage. Lord Ogleby, by Mr. Dibdin ; Miss Sterling, by Miss Pope, After 
 which, The Padlock, a musical piece. Benefit of Mr. Dibdin. 
 
 Same day. — A levee at St. James's. 
 
 Thursday, April 26 (Chatterton's first day in London, and day of the arrival 
 of the news of the Boston riot).— A masquerade at the Op.era House, given by 
 the club at Arthur's ; present more than 1,200 nobility, ambassadors, &c. 
 
 Same day. — A bill of indictment found at Hick's Hall against the author or 
 
A STOKY OF THE YEAR 1770. 257 
 
 editor of the Whisperer, one of the fiercest of the anti-ministerial periodicals. 
 Warrant for his apprehension issued on the 28th. 
 
 Same evening. — At Drury-lane, The Beggar's Opera, with The Minor. Mr. 
 Bannister's benefit. 
 
 Monday, April 30 (fifth day of Chatterton in London). — At Co vent-garden, 
 Addison's tragedy of Cato revived, with The Rape of Proserpine. 
 
 Wednesday, May 2 (Chatterton a week in liondon).— At Drury-lane, Hamlet 
 — the part of Hamlet by Garrick ; after which, Queen Mab. Benefit night of 
 Signor Grimaldi, Mr. Messenk, and Signor Giorgi. 
 
 Monday, May 7 (the day on which, as above stated, a crowd gathered at the 
 door of the House of Commons on the false idea that Wilkes was to go to the 
 House, and claim his seat). — "Rumour that a lady of high quality would appear 
 that evening at the Soho Masquerade in the character of an Indian princess, 
 most superbly dressed, and with pearls and diamonds to the price of 100,000^. ; 
 her train to be supported by three black young female slaves, and a canopy to 
 be held over her head by two black male slaves. To be a fine sight." 
 
 Wednesday, May 16. — " Thirteen convicts executed together at Tyburn, con- 
 veyed in five carts ; mostly boys, the eldest not being more than twenty-two 
 years of age. Some of them were greatly affected, others appeared hardened." 
 
 SatMrday, May 19. — Parliament prorogued, as stated above, 
 
 Wednesday, May 23. — The famous interview of the City deputation with the 
 King, at which Beckford made the speech quoted above. 
 
 Saturday, May 26. — Drury-lane Theatre closed for the season. 
 
 Monday, May 28. — Covent-garden Theatre closed for the season. 
 
 Same day. — " At two o'clock, a. m., a fire at the house of Messrs. Webb and 
 Fry, paper-stainers, Holbom-hill, near the end of Shoe-lane; four persons 
 burnt to death." 
 
 Same day 2%. — One of "Junius's" letters in the Public Advertiser, con- 
 taining a view of the state of the country, and a cutting criticism of the 
 conduct of ministers during the session just closed. Only two acknowledged 
 letters of " Junius " appeared during the period of Chatterton's residence in 
 London, and this was one of them. 
 
 Wednesday, May 30. — " News arrived that a French East Indian ship had 
 reached Toulon, bringing word of a dreadful earthquake at St. Helena, which 
 had entirely sunk the island in the sea." — Gentleman's Magazine. 
 
 Thursday, May 31. — Foundation-stone of Newgate prison laid by the Lord 
 Mayor Beckford. 
 
 All April and May. — Advertisements of goods, sales, quack medicines, and 
 new books in the newspapers; also paragraphs innumerable on the case of 
 Matthew and Patrick Kennedy, two brothers, tried and condemned to death 
 for the murder of John Bigby, a watchman, but who had obtained a free 
 pardon through the influence of their sister. Miss Kennedy, a celebrated 
 woman of the town, on intimate relations with several high men at Court. An 
 appeal was laid against this settlement of the matter, and a new trial appointed, 
 much to the gratification of the anti-Court party ; but Bigby's widow having 
 got 38 OZ. to keep out of the way, the trial fell to the ground, and the brothers 
 escaped. 
 
 It was into the midst of such incidents as these, episodic 
 as they were to the two great topics of Wilkes and the Con- 
 stitution and the growing disaffection of the American colo- 
 nies, that Chatterton transferred himself by his removal from 
 Bristol to London. With some of the little incidents men- 
 tioned he may even have come into direct personal contact. 
 If he did not go to see Addison's tragedy of Cato at Covent- 
 garden on the 30th of April, it is not likely that he missed 
 
258 CHATTERTON : 
 
 the opportunity of seeing Garrick in Hamlet at Dniiy-lane, 
 on the 2d of May. If the "fine sight" of the lady of high 
 quality with the hundred thousand pounds* worth of jewels 
 about her, and the three young negi'esses supporting her train, 
 did not tempt him to the vicinity of the Soho Masquerade on 
 the evening of the 7th of May, it is not at all improbable 
 that he formed one of the crowd that gathered round the door 
 of the House of Commons that evening on the false expecta- 
 tion of seeing Wilkes come to make a row, and get himself 
 committed to custody by the Speaker. Even at the distance of 
 Shoreditch the rumour of the thirteen boys hanged at Tyburn 
 on the morning of the 16th of May must have reached him ; for, 
 common as hangings were then, such an occurence was suffi- 
 ciently unusual to make some commotion through all London. 
 The prorogation of Parliament on the 19th of the same month 
 would be a matter to interest him ; much more the royal 
 audience given to the City deputation on the 23d, and Beck- 
 ford's famous speech. Shoe Lane being one of his haunts, 
 the charred ruins of the premises of Messrs. Webb and Fry 
 may very possibly have attracted his notice on the 28th or 
 29th of May as he passed along Holbom ; and, a daily fre- 
 quenter as he was of the cofiee-houses where the newspapers 
 were to be seen, he is sure to have been one of the earliest 
 and most eager readers of the Public Advertiser containing 
 Junius's powerful letter of May the 28th. 
 
 Nor is all this mere conjecture. Not only do we know it 
 as a fact that it was part of Chatterton's ambition in coming 
 to London to work himself into connexion with the prominent 
 men and interests of the day, and, above all, with the notable 
 personages of the Wilkes party ; we also know it as a fact 
 that, to some small extent at least, he succeeded in doing so/ 
 The evidence of this we shall produce in the next chapter, 
 
 CHAPTER iir. 
 
 SETTING THE THAMES ON FIRE, 
 
 Chatterton^S London life, as some of our readers must be 
 aware, forms the subject of a brief romance from the pen of 
 
 ^ 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 259 
 
 Alfred de Vigny. In that writer's pleasing volume of fiction, 
 entitled " Stello," Chatterton is introduced as the real hero in 
 the story of the so-called Kitty Bell. Kitty Bell is a young 
 married woman, who keeps a pastrycook's shop in the neigh- 
 bourhood of the Houses of Parliament. Her cakes and con- 
 fections are celebrated far and wide ; and partly from this cause, 
 partly from Kitty's own attractiveness, her shop has become a 
 habitual lounge of the legislators of the country as they pass 
 to and from their duties in St. Stephen's. Kitty, however, 
 is as virtuous as she is pretty ; and though her husband is a 
 sulky brute, and the young lords and members of Parliament 
 are very assiduous in buying cakes from her fair fingers, 
 nothing amiss can be said of her. There is one figure, indeed, 
 occasionally seen hovering about the shop, the apparition of 
 which invariably discomposes her, especially when her husband 
 is near. This turns out to be Chatterton, who, having come 
 to London to push his fortune, has, in order to be near the 
 Houses of Parliament, taken a lodging in Kitty Bell's house. 
 Kitty, with her womanly heart, has contrived to dive into her 
 mysterious lodger's secret, and to ascertain that he is a young 
 man of genius engaged in the hopeless task of establishing a 
 connexion with the public men of the day by means of literary 
 service, and, in the meantime, without a penny in his pocket. 
 She does all, in the circumstances, that fear of her brute of a 
 husband will permit. She supplies her lodger furtively with 
 tarts; screens from her husband the fact that he is unable 
 to pay for the garret he occupies ; and, in short, through 
 pity and interest, falls at last most foolishly in love with him. 
 Sustained by her kindness and encouragement, Chatterton 
 perseveres in his enterprise, gets acquainted with the Lord 
 Mayor Beckford, and is led to conceive great hopes from the 
 promise of his patronage. Beckford accordingly calls one day 
 at the shop, and, by way of fulfilling his promise, ofifers to 
 make Chatterton his — footman ! Then comes the catastrophe ; 
 Chatterton, in despair, commits suicide, and poor Kitty Bell is 
 left to serve out cakes and comfits with a heart no more. 
 
 A very pretty story this, with, unfortunately, but one ob- 
 jection to it — that it is not true ! The true story of Chatterton's 
 
 S2 
 
260 CHATTERTON : 
 
 London life, one would suppose, is to be preferred to the false 
 one ; and as the materials for the true story were before Alfred 
 de Yignj in Chatterton's own letters, it is a pity that he was 
 so fond of fiction as not to pay attention to them. Instead 
 of going to lodge at Kitty BelPs, or at any other conceivable 
 pastrycook's in Westminster, Chatterton, as our readers know, 
 went to lodge at a plasterer's in Shoreditch ; and if Providence 
 was really so kind to him as to supply him with a fair consoler 
 living under the same roof, this, as our readers also know, can 
 possibly, in the first stage of his London career, have been no 
 other than the motherly Mrs. Ballance, or, at best, that hussy, 
 the landlady's niece, to whom he " used sometimes to be saucy." 
 And so with the rest of the facts. The real progress of Chat- 
 terton, in his endeavours to make himself known — the real 
 extent of his success in working himself from his centre in 
 Shoreditch into connexion with the metropolitan men and 
 interests of the day, as summarily described in the last chapter 
 — are to be gathered, so far as they can be gathered at all, 
 from his own letters. 
 
 Chatterton's second letter to his mother was written on the 
 6th of May, or after Chatterton had been exactly ten days in 
 London. It is as follows : — 
 
 " Shoreditcli, London, May 6, 1770. 
 " Dear Mother, — I am surprised that no letter has been sent in answer to 
 my last. I am settled, and in such a settlement as I would desire. I get four 
 guineas a month by one magazine ; shall engage to write a History of England 
 and other pieces, which wUl more than double that sum. Occasional essays for 
 the daily papers would more than support me. What a glorious prospect! 
 Mr. Wilkes tiiew me by my \\Titings since I first corresponded with the book- 
 sellers here. I shall visit him next week, and by his interest will ensure Mrs. 
 Ballance the Trinity House. He affirmed that what Mr. Fell had of mine could 
 not be the writings of a youth, and expressed a desire to know the author. By 
 the means of another bookseller, I shall be introduced to Townshend and 
 Sawbridge. I am quite familiar at the Chapter CoflFee-house, and know all the 
 genivises there. A character is now unnecessary; an author carries his cha- 
 racter in his pen. My sister will improve herself in drawing. My gi-andmother 
 is, I hope, well. Bristol's mercenary walls were never destined to hold me ; 
 there,^ I was out of my element; now, I am in it. London ! — good God 1 how 
 superior is London to that despicable place Bristol ! Here is none of your little 
 meannesses, none of your mercenary securities, which disgrace that miserable 
 hamlet. Dress, which is in Bristol an eternal fund of scandal, is here only in- 
 troduced as a subject of praise ; if a man dresses well, he has taste; if careless, 
 he has his own reasons for so doing, and is prudent. N^eed I remind you of the 
 contrast? The poverty of authors is a common observation, but not always 
 a true one._ No author can be poor who understands the arts of booksellers ; 
 without this necessary knowledge the greatest genius may starve, and with it 
 the greatest dunce live in splendour. This knowledge I have pretty well dipped 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 261 
 
 into. — The Levant man-of-war, in which T. Wensley went out, is at Portsmouth ; 
 but no news of him yet. I lodge in one of Mr. Walmsley's best rooms. Let 
 Mr. Gary copy the letters on the other side, and give them to the persons for 
 whom they are designed, if not too much labour for him. 
 
 ** I remain, yours, &c. 
 
 " T. Chatterton. 
 " P.S.— I have some trifling presents for my mother, sister, Thome, &c." 
 
 [Here follow the letters to various Bristol acquaintances, 
 which Mr. Carj was to copy out and give them] : — 
 
 *' Mr. T.Cary.—l have sent you a task — I hope no unpleasing one. Tell all 
 your acquaintances for the future to read the Freeholders Magazine. When you 
 have anything for publication, send it to me, and it shall most certainly appear 
 in some periodical compilation. Your last piece was, by the ignorance of a cor- 
 rector, jumbled under the ' considerations ' in the acknowledgments, but I 
 rescued it, and insisted on its appearance. Your friend 
 
 " T. C. 
 
 " Direct for me, to be left at the Chapter Coffee-house, Paternoster-row." 
 
 " Mr. Henry Kator. — If you have not forgot Lady Betty, any complaint, 
 rebus, or enigma, on the dear charmer, directed for me, to be left at the 
 Chapter Coffee-house, Paternoster-row, shall find a place in some magazine or 
 other, as I am engaged in many. Your friend, 
 
 " T. Chatterton." 
 " Mr. Wm. Smith. — When you have any poetry for publication, send it to me, 
 to be left at the Chapter Coffee-house, Paternoster-row, and it shall most 
 certainly appear. Your friend, 
 
 " T. C." 
 
 " Mrs. Baker. — The sooner I see you the better. Send me, as soon as 
 possible, Rymsdyk's address." (Mr. Cary will leave this at Mr. Flower's, 
 Small-street.) 
 
 " Mr. Mason. — Give me a short prose description of the situation of Nash ; 
 and the poetic addition shall appear in some magazine. Send me also whatever 
 you would have published, and direct for me, to be left at the Chapter Coffee- 
 house, Paternoster-row. Yovu- friend, 
 
 " T. Chatterton." 
 
 " Mr. Mattheio Mease. — Begging Mr. Mease's pardon for making public use of 
 his name lately, I hope he will remember me, and tell all his acquaintance to 
 read the Freeholder's Magazine for the future. 
 
 " T. Chatterton." 
 
 " Tell Mr. Thaire, Mr. Gaster, Mr. A. Broughton, Mr. J. Broughton, Mr. 
 Williams, Mr. Rudhall, Mr. Thomas, Mr. Carty, Mr. Hanmor, Mr. Vaughan, 
 Mr. Ward, Mr. Kalo, Mr. Smith, &c. &c., to read the Freeholder's Magazine." 
 
 This is certainly pretty well after only ten days in London. 
 We fear, indeed, that there is a good deal of bragging in the 
 letter, intended to convey to his Bristol acquaintances a more 
 favourable impression of the progress he had already made in 
 the great metropolis than the facts, as known to himself, 
 exactly warranted. Still, it is evident that Chatterton, when 
 he wrote the letter, was in high spirits. Keducing the expres- 
 sions of the letter to the real substance of fact, on which, as it 
 
262 CHATTERTON : 
 
 seems to us, tliey may liave been founded, we should be 
 inclined to say that the information here given respecting the 
 extent of Chatterton's success in introducing himself to notice 
 during his first ten days in London, amounts to something- 
 like this : — Being a young fellow of prepossessing appear- 
 ance and address, and having, as we know, a sufficiently good 
 opinion of himself to prevent any of that awkwardness in 
 meeting strangers which arises from excessive modesty, he had 
 made the best use he could of the slight hold he had on Fell, 
 Hamilton, Edmunds, and Dodsley ; had gone to their places 
 of business perhaps oftener than they cared to see him ; had 
 talked with them, made proposals of literary assistance to 
 them, compelled them into saying something that could be 
 construed as encouragement ; had got from them hints as to 
 other quarters in which he could apply ; had probably, by 
 their advice, turned his hopes towards the great book-mart of 
 Paternoster Row, where all sorts of speculations he might help 
 in were going on ; and had thus at last found himself referred 
 to that celebrated place of resort for the booksellers of the day 
 and their literary workmen, the Chapter Coffee-house. Mr. 
 Peter Cunningham, in his Handbook of London^ has provided 
 us with an extract relative to this once famous rendezvous, 
 which will serve to give us a more distinct idea of it as it was 
 in Chatterton's time ; and, the house being still extant, those 
 who desire to perfect this idea by acquaintance with it in its 
 present condition, may do so at the expense of a mutton-chop 
 any afternoon they are in the neighbourhood of St. Paul's. 
 
 " And here my publisher would not forgive me, was I to leave the neighbour- 
 hood without taking notice of the Chapter Coffee-house, which is frequented 
 by those encouragers of literature and (as they are styled by an eminent critic) 
 ' not the worst judges of meric,' the booksellers. The conversation here 
 naturally tiims upon the newest publications ; but their criticisms are some- 
 what singxilar. When they say a good book, they do not mean to praise the 
 style or sentiment, but the quick and extensive sale of it. That book is best 
 which sells most; and if the demand for Quarles should be greater than for 
 Pope, he would have the highest place on the rubric-post." — Tke Connoisseur, 
 No. 1, Jan. 31st, 1754. 
 
 Here, then, among the talking groups of booksellers, we 
 are to fancy Chatterton a daily visitor during the first week 
 or two of his stay in town — reading the newspapers, listening 
 to the conversation, getting acquainted with '' the geniuses " 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 263 
 
 of the place, and giving very small orders to the waiters. The 
 Chapter Coffee-house was evidently a great place in his eyes, 
 and every shilling spent in it he probably regarded as a good 
 investment. All his Bristol friends were to address their 
 letters to him there, and not to his lodging at Shoreditch. 
 
 More particularly, however. Chatter ton's hopes at the period 
 of his first settlement in London, seem to have rested on the 
 intimacy he had struck up with Mr. Fell. We have already 
 communicated to the reader our impression of this personage, 
 as a gentleman in pecuniary difficulties, connected in some 
 way with Wilkes, and employing his own broken energies, and 
 the capital of other people, in the publication of the Free- 
 holder s Magazine. His reception of Chatterton, we have 
 said, seems to have been, and probably from the state of his 
 own circumstances, more frank and cordial than that of any 
 other of the booksellers Chatterton called upon. A kind of 
 mutual understanding seems, indeed, to have been at once 
 established between them. On the one hand, as we guess, 
 Chatterton was to have the pages of the Freeholders Magazine 
 thrown open to him ; on the other hand. Fell, to whom the 
 service of a clever contributor on any other terms than those 
 of hard cash, was probably a great convenience, was willing 
 to remunerate his young friend with plenty of promises, and 
 in the meantime with the benefits of his advice and counte- 
 nance, and as much praise as he liked. The prospect of being 
 introduced to Wilkes was, it would appear, the most attractive 
 bait that could be held out to Chatterton ; and we greatly 
 fear Fell made the most of the fact. " I assure you, Mr. 
 Chatterton, Mr. Wilkes has a high opinion of you ; he has 
 more than once asked me about writings of yours j and when 
 I told him that you were not eighteen, ' Upon my soul I 
 don't believe it, Mr. Fell,' said he ; 'so young a man could 
 not write like that :' these were his very words." Such, as 
 we infer from Chatterton' s own account, was the substance of 
 much of his conversation with Fell. How much of sincerity 
 there was in the farther promise on the part of Fell, that he 
 would introduce Chatterton to Wilkes, we can hardly say. 
 There is, certainly, some bragging in the manner in which 
 
264 CHATTERTON : 
 
 Chatterton announces the promised introduction to his mother ^ 
 "I shall visit him (Wilkes) next week, and, by his interest, 
 will ensure Mrs. Ballance the Trinity House ; ^' (^. e. the 
 charitable allowance granted out of the funds of this founda- 
 tion to the widows of deserving seamen.) Chatterton, we 
 fully believe, had shrewdness enough, with all his inex- 
 perience and his good opinion of himself, to know that he was 
 putting a little strain on the truth here. And so also, pro- 
 bably, in the matter of the other proposed introduction to the 
 two popular aldermen, Townshend and Sawbridge. Still, it 
 is evident that he had some trust in Fell. To read the Free- 
 holder s Magazine, and to address his letters to the Chapter 
 Coffee-house, in Paternoster Row, were his two injunctions to 
 his friends at home after he had been ten days in London. 
 
 What came of the connexion so rapidly formed with Fell 
 and the Freeholder s Magazine, will be seen from Chatterton's 
 next letter. It is to his mother : — • 
 
 " King's Bench, for the present, May 14, 1770. 
 " Dear Madam, — Don't be surprised at the name of the place. I am not 
 here as a prisoner. Matters go on swimmingly. Mr, Fell having oflfended cer- 
 tain persons, they have set his creditors upon him, and he is safe in the King's 
 Bench. I have been bettered by this accident : his successors in the Freeholder's 
 Magazine, knowing nothing of the matter, will be glad to engage me on my 
 own terms. Mi\ Edmunds has been tried before the House of Lords, sen- 
 tenced to pay a fine, and thrown into Newgate. His misfortunes wiU be to me 
 of no little service. Last week, being in the pit of Drury Lane theatre [it 
 might have been to see Garrick again], I contracted an immediate acquaintance 
 (which you know is no hard task to me) with a young gentleman in Cheapside, 
 partner in a music-shop, the greatest in the city. Hearing I could write, he 
 desired me to write a few songs for him ; this I did the same night, and con- 
 veyed them to him the next morning. These he showed to a Doctor in music, 
 and I am invited to treat with the Doctor, on the footing of a composer for 
 Ranelagh and the Gardens. 'Bravo, hey hoys, up we go!' Besides the ad- 
 vantage of visiting these expensive and polite places gratis, my vanity will be 
 fed with the sight of my name in copper-plate, and my sister wiU receive a 
 bundle of printed songs, the words by her brother. These are not all my 
 acquisitions. A gentleman who knows me at the ' Chapter,' as an author, 
 would have introduced me as a companion to the young Duke of Northumber- 
 land, in his intended general tour. But alas ! 1 speak no tongue but my own. 
 — But to return once more to a place I am sickened to write of, Bristol. [Here 
 follows some references to Mr. Lambert, and a ' clearance ' from the apprenticeship 
 to be obtained from him.] I will get some patterns worth your acceptance, and 
 wish you and my sister would improve yourselves in drawing, as it is here a 
 valuable and never-failing acquisition. My box shall be attended to ; I hope 
 my books are in it. If not, send them, and particularly Catcott's Ilutchin- 
 Bonian jargon on the Deluge, and the MS. glossary, composed of one small 
 book annexed to a larger. My sister will remember me to Miss Sandford. 
 I have not quite forgot her ; though there are so many pretty milliners, &c. 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 265 
 
 hat I have almost forgot myself. [There are similar remembrances, and mes- 
 sages to Mr. Gary ; to Miss Rumsey, who seems to be intending a journey to 
 London, and is requested to send Chatterton her address, if she does come, as 
 * London is not Bristol,' and they * may patrol the town for a day without 
 raising one whisper or nod of scandal ;* to Miss Baker, Miss Porter, Miss Singer, 
 Miss Webb, and Miss Thatcher, who is assured that 'if he is not in love with 
 her, he is in love with nobody else ;' to Miss Love, on whose name he is going 
 to write a song ; to Miss Cotton, * begging her pardon for whatever has hap- 
 pened to offend her, and telling her he did not give her this assurance when in 
 Bristol lest it should seem like an attempt to avoid the anger of her furi- 
 ous brother ; ' finally to Miss Watkins, assuring her * that the letter she has 
 made herself ridiculous by was never intended for her, but for another young 
 lady in the same neighbourhood, of the same name.' Chatterton also asks his 
 sister to send him ' a jom-nal of all the transactions of the females within the 
 circle of their acquaintance.'] I promised, before my departure, to write to 
 some hundreds, I beUeve ; but what with writing for publications and going 
 to places of public diversion, which is as absolutely necessary to me as food, 
 I find but little time to write to you. As to Mr. Barrett, Mr. Catcott, Mr. 
 Burgum, &c. &c., they rate literary lumber so low, that I believe an author, in 
 their estimation, must be poor indeed. But here matters are otherwise ; had 
 Rowley been a Londoner, instead of a Bristowyan, I could have lived by copy- 
 ing his works. . . . My youthful acquaintances wUl not take in dudgeon, that I do 
 not write oftener to them ; bu.t as I had the happy art of pleasing in conversa- 
 tion, my company was often liked where I did not like ; and to continue a cor- 
 respondence under such circumstances woiild be ridiculous. Let my sister 
 improve in copying music, drawing, and everything which requires genius : in 
 Bristol's mercantile style those things may be useless, if not a detriment to her ; 
 but here they are highly profitable, [A few additional messages to Bristol 
 friends follow, together with a hope that his grandmother 'enjoys the state 
 of health he left her in,' and an intimation, apparently in connexion with Mrs. 
 Ballance's business, that he had ' intended waiting on the Duke of Bedford 
 relative to the Trinity House ; but his Grace is dangerously HI.'] 
 
 " Monday evening. " Thomas Chatterton. 
 
 " Direct to me at Mr. Walmsley's, at Shoreditch — only." 
 
 To this letter succeeds one written to liis sister, dated May 
 the 30th, from Tom's Coffee-house — a house in Devereux 
 Court, Strand, and hardly inferior to the Chapter Coffee-house 
 as a place of resort for wits and men of letters. 
 
 " Tom's Cofiee-house, London, May 30, 1770. 
 " Dear Sister, — There is such a noise of business and politics in the room, 
 that any inaccuracy in writing here is highly excusable. My present profes- 
 sion obliges me to frequent places of the best resort. To begin with what 
 every female conversation begins with — dress : I employ my money now in 
 fitting myself fashionably, and getting into good company. This last article 
 always brings me in interest. But I have engaged to live with a gentleman, 
 the brother of a lord, (a Scotch one, indeed,) who is going to advance pretty 
 deeply into the bookselling branches. I shall have board and lodging, genteel 
 and elegant, gratis : this article, in the quarter of the town he lives, with worse 
 accommodations, would be 50Z. per annum. I shall have likewise no incon- 
 sidei'able premium ; and assure yourself every month shall end to your advan- 
 tage. I will send you two silks this summer ; and expect, in answer to this, 
 what colours you prefer. My mother shall not be forgotten. My employment 
 will be writing a voluminous History of London, to appear in numbers, the 
 beginning of next winter. As this will not, like writing political essays, oblige 
 me to go to the coffee-house, I shall be able to serve you the more by it ; but 
 it will necessitate me to go to Oxford, Cambridge, Lincoln, Coventry, and every 
 Collegiate Church near — not at all disagreeable journeys, and not to me 
 
266 CHATTEETON : 
 
 expensive. The manuscript glossary I mentioned in my last must not be 
 omitted. If money flowed as fast upon me as honours, I would give you 
 a portion of 5,0001. You have, doubtless, heard of the Lord Mayor's remon- 
 strating and addressing the King ; but it will be a piece of news to inform you 
 that / have been with the Lord Mayor on the occasion. Having addressed an 
 essay to his Lordship, it was very well received — perhaps better than it 
 deserved ; and I waited on his Lordship to have his approbation to address 
 a second letter to him, on the subject of the remonstrance and its reception. 
 His Lordship received me as politely as a citizen could, and warmly invited 
 
 me to call on him again. The rest is a secret. But the Devil of the matter 
 
 is, there is no money to be got on this side of the question. Interest is on the 
 other side. But he is a poor author who cannot write on both sides. I believe 
 I may be introduced (and if I am not, I'll introduce myself) to a I'uling power 
 in the Court party. I might have a recommendation to Sir George Colebrook, an 
 East India Director, as qualified for an of&ce no-ways despicable ; but I shall 
 not take a step to the sea whilst I can continue on land. I went yesterday to 
 Woolwich to see Mr. Wensley : he is paid to-day. The artillery is no unpleasant 
 sight, if we bar reflection, and do not consider how much mischief it may do. 
 Greenwich Hospital and St. Paul's Cathedral are the only structures which 
 could reconcile me to anything out of the Gothic. [Here are some messages to 
 Mr. Carty about Mrs. Carty, who is ill, advising him to 'leech her temples 
 plentifully, and keep her very low in diet, and as much in the dark as possible ; ' 
 also to Miss Sandford, to Miss Thatcher, and to Miss Rumsey, whom he ' thanks 
 for her complimentary expression ' in reply to his last message ; though, as she 
 does not say whether she is coming to London or not, he thinks it * unsatis- 
 factory.'] Essay -writing has this advantage — you are sure of constant pay; 
 and when you have once wrote a piece which makes the author inquired after, 
 you may bring the booksellers to your own terms. Essays on the patriotic 
 side fetch no more than what the copy is sold for. As the patriots themselves 
 are searching for a place, they have no gratuities to spare. So says one of the 
 beggars in a temporary alteration of mine in the Jovial Crew : — 
 
 * A patriot was my occupation ; 
 
 It got me a name, but no pelf; 
 Till, starved for the good of the nation, 
 I begg'd for the good of myself. 
 
 Fal, lal, &c. 
 
 * I told them, if 'twas not for me 
 
 Their freedoms would all go to pot; 
 I promised to set them all free, 
 But .never a farthing I got. 
 
 Fal, lal, &c.' 
 
 " On the other hand, unpopular essays will not even be accepted, and you 
 must pay to have them printed ; but then you seldom lose by it. Courtiei'S 
 are so sensible of their deficiency in merit, that they generally reward all who 
 know how to daub them with the appearance of it. To return to private afiairs ; 
 Friend Slude may depend upon my endeavouring to find the publications you 
 mention. They publish the Gospel Magazine here. For a whim, I wTite for it. 
 I believe there are not any sent to Bristol ; they are hardly worth the carnage 
 — methodistical and unmeaning. With the usual ceremonies to my mother 
 and grandmother, and sincerely, without ceremony, wishing them both happy 
 — when it is in my power to make them so, it shall be so — and with my kind 
 remembrance to Miss Webb and Miss Thome, I remain, as I ever was, 
 *' Yours, &c., to the end of the chapter, 
 
 ** Thomas Chatterton. 
 
 ** P.S. — I am this moment pierced through the heart by the black eye of a 
 young lady, driving along in a hackney-coach. I am quite in love ; if my love 
 lasts till that time, you shall hear of it in my next." 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 267 
 
 After this letter, there is a blank in the correspondence, so 
 far as it has been preserved, for three weeks. During these 
 three weeks, we are now able to say, an event of some im- 
 portance in Chatterton's London life took place — to wit, a 
 change of lodging. It has hitherto been assumed by his 
 biographers that he remained in his original lodgings, at Mr. 
 Walmsley's, in Shoreditch, till the first week of July. This 
 assumption, even according to the evidence which the biogra- 
 phers who have made it had before them, was hardly pardon- 
 able ; for one of Chatterton's published poems, which bears the 
 date of June 12, is dated also from the new place of lodging 
 which he is known to have occupied during the latter portion 
 of his residence in the metropolis. Other evidence, which 
 has only recently been made accessible, confirms the accuracy 
 of this date, and proves that he must have left Mr. Walmsley's 
 in the early part of the month of June. 
 
 From the very first, it may be imagined, he regarded 
 Mr .Walmsley's as only a temporary residence, convenient until 
 he found a better. The economy of Mr. Walmsley's house 
 was probably by no means to his taste. To have to share a 
 bedroom with Master Walmsley, and to be continually in 
 contact with the various inmates of the plasterer's house, more 
 especially Mrs. Ballance, who would persist in calling him 
 " Cousin Tommy," must have been disagreeable to him on 
 more accounts than one. Besides, had there been no other 
 reason for a change, the distance of Shoreditch from the pub- 
 lishing-offices, where he had to make his calls, and from the 
 coffee-houses and other places of resort which he believed 
 himself bound to frequent, would have been a sufficient one. 
 Accordingly, as soon as he began to see his way clear to future 
 employment, he determined quietly to seek another lodging. 
 During the first week of June we may fancy him going about 
 on the search through all the likely streets that take his fancy 
 within a moderate radius from Paternoster Row. At last, 
 some afternoon, going up Holborn towards the West End, 
 after calling at the office of the Middlesex in Shoe Lane, he is 
 caught by the appearance of Brooke Street, a tidy, quiet- 
 looking street, striking off from Holborn on the right, a little 
 
268 CHATTERTON : 
 
 on the City-side of Gray's Inn Lane. He turns aside from 
 Holbom into this street, sees perhaps various tickets of 
 " Kooms to let" hung up in the windows ; but, on the whole, 
 likes best one particular house so distinguished, on tlie door of 
 which he sees the name of " Mrs. Angell, Sack-maker." (The 
 term "sack-maker," from "sack" or '^ sac'' — the older na- 
 turalized French name of one portion of feminine attire, which 
 we now render by another — was then equivalent, or nearly so, 
 to our term " dress-maker.") At the door of this house, after 
 sufficient inspection of it from the outside, he knocks rather 
 loudly. The knock is answered, probably by Mrs. Angell her- 
 self — a pleasant-looking person, as we fancy, of between forty 
 and fifty years of age. He states his object ; is shown various 
 rooms, all unlet, of which he may have his choice ; and in the 
 end bargains for one, which is both bedroom and sitting-room, 
 situated almost at the top of the house, immediately " under 
 the garret," but with the window to the front. Thither, 
 either the same day or within a day or two, he removes his 
 things, alleging no reason either to Mrs. Walmsley or to Mrs. 
 Ballance, as they afterwards told Sir Herbert Croft, for his 
 leaving them so suddenly. On cleaning up the room he had 
 occupied, after he was gone, they found the floor " covered 
 with little pieces of paper, the remains of his poetings." It 
 seems, however, that he did not all at once cease his visits at 
 Walmsley's house, but for some time at least continued to call 
 there in the course of the day. 
 
 If the tradition is correct, one may yet identify the actual 
 house in Brooke Street, Holborn, where Mrs. Angell lived, and 
 where, after the first week of June, 1770, Chatterton had his 
 lodging. Mr. Peter Cunningham, whose authority in all such 
 matters is the best that can be had, states in his Handhooh 
 of London that the house was No. 4, Brooke Street. If so, 
 then it was at the better end of the street, and was the fourth 
 of those houses, counting from Holborn, on the right hand, 
 which having been formed into one range of premises in 1789, 
 by Mr. Oldham, a stove and grate manufacturer, are now 
 occupied, in the same connected fashion, by an extensive 
 furniture dealer, whose main-door is in Holborn. The house, 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 269 
 
 with the rest of the comer-'block so tenanted, is conspicuonsly 
 visible, it ought to be known, to the outside passengers of 
 every omnibus going down Holborn towards the City. The 
 tradition has clung about this house ; and the outer aspect 
 corresponds. The houses in the block are all old ; and though, 
 in consequence of their union into one range of premises, the 
 separate doors towards Brooke Street, as well as the separate 
 partition-walls on the lower stories, have disappeared, the 
 upper windows retain a look of eighty years ago. Nor have 
 any houses in the street such distinct sub-garrets. Standing on 
 the same side of the street, you count but four stories, and think 
 these make the houses high enough ; but when you cross to 
 the other side, you see that the roof slants oif very obtusely 
 above the fourth row of windows, so as to afford room for 
 another nearly perpendicular row among the tiles, under the 
 true garrets. In one of these rooms, if our present notion is 
 correct, Chatterton had his abode. And a far more cheerful 
 lodging, in external respects, it must have been than the 
 one he had left at Shoreditch — high above most of the 
 houses, with the airy heaven above, and a prospect of 
 roofs and chimneys round, and yet, if he chose to stretch a 
 little over the window, a sight of Brooke Street below 
 and the thoroughfare of Holborn to the left. The street 
 was respectable itself, with good enough shops in it; and 
 only at the inner end — where it widens into a little irregular 
 space, and bends off into alleys, affording room for a 
 small shabby market for meat, vegetables, and the like, 
 known in the neighbourhood as Brooke Market — did it lead 
 into questionable purlieus. 
 
 We should not perhaps have been so particular in describ- 
 ing the place, but that, in Chatterton' s very next letter, 
 there is a description of the street in one of its nocturnal 
 aspects, which might not otherwise be so intelligible. This 
 letter, which is dated the 19th of June, has hitherto been 
 necessarily supposed to have been written at Shoreditch ; 
 but it is in itself, if well attended to by those who know 
 the topography of London, an additional proof that he 
 had already quitted that neighbourhood. It was written, 
 
270 CHATTERTON : 
 
 we calculate, a week or ten days after lie had gone to lodge 
 at Mrs. Angell's. 
 
 " June 19, 1770. 
 " Dear Sister, — I have an horrid cold. The relation of the manner of my 
 catching it may give you more pleasure than the circumstance itself. As I 
 wrote very late Svmday night (or, rather, very early Monday morning) I thought 
 to have gone to bed pretty soon last night ; when, being half undressed, I heard 
 a very doleful voice singing Miss HiU's favourite Bedlamite song. The hum- 
 di-um of the voice so struck me, that, though I was obliged to listen a long 
 while before I covild hear the words, I found the similitude in the sound. After 
 hearing her, with pleasure, drawl for about half-an-hour, she jumped into a 
 brisker tune, and hobbled out the ever-famous song in which poor Jack 
 Fowler was to have been satirized. ' I put my hand into a bush,' ' I pricked 
 my finger to the bone,' ' I saw a ship sailing along,' * I thought the sweetest 
 flowers to find,' and other pretty flowery expressions, were twanged with no 
 inharmonious bray. I now ran to the window, and threw up the sash, resolved 
 to be satisfied whether or no it was the identical Miss Hill in propHd persond. 
 But alas ! it was a person whose twang is very well known when she is awake, 
 but who had drunk so much royal bob (the gingerbread-baker for that, you 
 know !) that she was now singing herself asleep. This somnifying liquor had 
 made her voice so like the sweet echo of Miss Hill's, that if I had not imagined 
 that she could not see her way up to London, I should absolutely have 
 imagined it hers. [Here, for some lines, the letter is hardly legible; but Chat- 
 terton seems to say that in the street under his window he saw, besides the 
 singer, a fellow loitering about in bad female company; which fellow he had 
 again, that very morning, on his return from * Marybone Gardens,' seen in 
 custody ' at the watch-house in the parish of St. Giles.' He then describes a 
 third figure who completed the picturesque street-group, as follows :] A drunken 
 fisherman, who sells souse mackarel and other delicious dainties, to the eternal 
 detriment of all two-penny ordinaries — as his best commodity, his salmon, goes 
 off at three halfpence the piece — this itinerant merchant, this moveable fish- 
 stall, having likewise had his dose of bob-royal, stood still for a while, and then 
 joined chorus in a tone which would have laid haK-a-dozen lawyers, pleading 
 for their fees, fast asleep. This naturally reminded me of Mr. Haythome's 
 song of 
 
 ' Says Plato, who-oy-oy-oy should man be vain ? ' 
 
 " However, my entertainment, though sweet enough in itself, has a dish of 
 sour sauce served up in it ; for I have a most horrible wheezing in the throat. 
 But I don't repent that I have this cold; for there are so many nostrums here, 
 that 'tis worth a man's while to get a distemper, he can be cured so cheap." 
 
 Chatterton does not despatch this letter immediatelj, but 
 keeps it by him for ten days, when he adds a postscript as 
 follows : — 
 
 " June 29lh, 1770. — My cold is over and gone. If the above did not recall 
 to your mind some sense of laughter, you have lost your ideas of risibility." 
 
 The letter may have made his sister laugh, as was intended ; 
 but on us, at this distance of time, the impression is very 
 different. We remember a passage in Pepys's Diary which 
 struck us perhaps more than anything else in that entertain- 
 ing book. It was a passage describing an excursion which 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 271 
 
 Pepjs and some companions belonging to the Navy-office 
 made down the river Thames. They returned at night, 
 when it was pitch dark, making their way slowly and with 
 much trepidation along the middle of the river as near as 
 they could guess, and hailing the moored craft that they 
 passed, in order to ascertain their whereabouts. Not a soul, 
 however, seemed to be awake on the whole river, to answer 
 their cries ; and the only sound they could hear was that of 
 a dog incessantly barking somewhere, either on the south side 
 of the river, or on board of some vessel left to his charge. 
 The barking of that dog has been in our ears ever since ; inti- 
 mating, as it were, with a kind of ghastly vividness, which 
 none of all Pepys's other commemorations, though they are 
 vivid enough, can match, that those old days of Pepys really 
 and authentically were, that the black river flowed then at 
 night, and that a world of now defunct life alternately roared 
 and reposed on its banks. And so with this last-quoted 
 letter of Chatterton. As we read it we are in Brooke Street, 
 Holborn, on a summer night eighty-six years ago. And 
 what do we see ? A wretched, drunken woman passing from 
 side to side in the faint light, and disturbing the deserted 
 street with snatches of song; after a while, a male coster- 
 monger, also drunk, reeling out from some neighbouring 
 obscurity, and, caught by the music, joining it on his own 
 account with a stentorian bass ; and meantime, standing at 
 a corner, indifferently looking on, a hulking figure of " the 
 dangerous class," who completes the trio. And is this all? 
 Hist ! An upper window in one of the houses, in which the 
 light has not yet been put out, is thrown up, and the head 
 and face of a young man emerge ; a wonderful head and face, 
 if we could see them, the face pale, under dark clustering 
 hair, and the eye a bold and burning grey. He leans out, 
 surveys the street group far below, seems interested ; and with 
 his face resting on his two hands, and his elbows resting on 
 the window-sill, he remains gazing out half-an-hour or more. 
 O month of June, 1770 ! and is this the kind of educating 
 circumstance you provide for Chatterton, solitary in his 
 London lodging, and alert in his solitude for objects to occupy 
 
272 chatterton: 
 
 his eyes, and incite him to new trains of thought ? A poor 
 sleeping street, and a serenade of two drunkards ! No ; as 
 he gazes, the drunkards reel out of view into other streets, 
 their voices growing fainter as they go ; the hulking fellow at 
 the corner also moves off, destiny guiding him along Holborn 
 to St. Giles's watch-house ; the street then, though still 
 the same narrow and poor one, is swept at least of its human 
 degradation ; the mood of the gazer changes also ; and though 
 he remains still gazing, it is not at the street any longer, but 
 at the soft summer stars ! 
 
 One letter more closes the series of those sent by Chat- 
 terton to Bristol during his first two months in London. It 
 is addressed to his friend T. Cary, and bears no date. From 
 some allusions in the letter, however, we are able to say with 
 tolerable certainty that it was written on June 29th or 30th, 
 the day before the June magazine-day. A considerable part 
 of the letter is taken up with an answer to some objections 
 which Cary had made to a panegyric of Chatterton' s on Mr. 
 Allen, the organist of Bristol, at the expense of his brother 
 organist Mr. Broderip. The panegyric is undoubtedly that 
 contained in the long poem called Kew Gardens, written 
 before Chatterton had left Bristol, and still unpublished, but 
 which Cary had, it seems, just been reading in manuscript : — 
 
 " "WTiat charms has music, when great Broderip sweats 
 To tortm-e sound to what his brother sets ! 
 With scraps of ballad-tunes, and gude Scotch sangs, 
 Which god-like Ramsay to his bagpipe twangs ; 
 With tatter'd fragments of forgotten plays ; 
 With Playford's melody to Sternhold's lays ; 
 This pipe of science, mighty Broderip comes, 
 And a strange, unconnected jumble thrums. 
 Roused to devotion in a sprightly air, 
 Danced into piety, and jigg'd to prayer, 
 A modem hornpipe's murder greets our ears, 
 The heavenly music of domestic spheres ; 
 The flying band in swift transition hops 
 Through all the tortured, vile burlesque of stops. 
 Sacred to sleep, in superstition's key. 
 Dull, doleful diapasons die away ; 
 Sleep spreads his silken wings, and, lull'd by sound, 
 The vicar slumbers, and the snore goes round ; 
 Whilst Broderip at his passive organ groans 
 Through all his slow variety of tones. 
 
 How unlike Allen ! Allen is divine. 
 His touch is sentimental, tender, fine ; 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 273 
 
 No little affectations e'er disgraced 
 
 His more refined, his sentimental taste ; 
 
 He keeps the passions with the sound in play, 
 
 And the soul trembles with the trembling key." 
 
 Gary, probably in a letter sent after Chatterton to London, 
 had objected to this as too partial to Allen, and as unfair to 
 Broderip. Chatterton, premising that he believes " there are 
 very few in Bristol who know what music is," defends his 
 comparative estimate of the two organists, and reiterates his 
 praise of Allen in strong terms, and his contempt for his 
 rival. " I am afraid, my dear friend," he says, " you do not 
 understand the merit of a full piece ; if you did, you would 
 confess to me that Allen is the only organist you have in 
 Bristol." He then continues : — 
 
 " A song of mine is a great favourite with the town, on account of the fulness 
 of the music. It has much of Mr. Allen's manner in the air. You will see 
 that and twenty more in print, after the season is over. I yesterday heard 
 several airs of my burletta sung to the harpsichord, horns, bassoons, hautboys, 
 violins, &c,, and will venture to pronounce, from the excellence of the music, 
 that it will take with the town. Observe, I write in all the magazines. I am 
 surprised you took no notice of the last London. In that and the magazine 
 coming out to-morrow are the only two pieces I have the vanity to call poetry. 
 Mind the Political Register. I am very intimately acquainted with the editor, 
 who is also editor of another publication. You will find not a little of mine in 
 the London Museum, and Town and Country. The printers of the daily publi- 
 cations are all frightened out of their patriotism, and will take nothing unless 
 'tis moderate or ministei-ial. I have not had five patriotic essays this fortnight. 
 AU must be ministerial or entertaining. I remain yours, &c. 
 
 "T. Chatterton." 
 
 We have presented the last four letters in their series, with 
 no other remarks than were necessary to make their meaning 
 clear."^ It is obvious, however, that if we are to ascertain the 
 real coherent story of Chatterton's London-life during the 
 two months they include, i. e., during the six or seven weeks 
 of his residence at Shoreditch, and the first two or three of 
 his residence in Brooke Street, we must go over the ground for 
 ourselves, weaving the facts together, along with others inde- 
 pendently known, and allowing for his exaggerations. 
 
 In the first place then, we repeat, there is abundant evi- 
 dence that Chatterton's activity during his first two months 
 
 * All the letters of Chatteiton contained in this chapter, with the exception 
 of that to Gary, were first collected and printed by Sir Herbert Croft in his 
 Love and Madness; from the second edition of which, published in 1786, we 
 have taken them. 
 
274 CHATTERTON : 
 
 in London, his perseverance in introducing himself and trying 
 to form connexions, was something unparalleled. Very few 
 young men of his age, we believe, would have gone through 
 this preliminary part of the business with half the courage 
 and self-assurance which he showed. We believe him to 
 have been capable of ringing at any number of bells, and 
 sending in his card, known or unknown, to any number of 
 persons, in the course of a forenoon ; and we sometimes won- 
 der at how many of all the doors in London he did actually 
 present himself during his stay there. Fell, Edmunds, 
 Hamilton, and Dodsley, as we have said, were the persons he 
 began with ; but he soon added to the circle of those whom 
 he favoured with his calls, others, and still others. That he 
 might the more easily carry out his plan of getting ac- 
 quainted with people likely to be of use to him, he went 
 daily to the Chapter Coffee-house, Tom's Coffee-house, and the 
 like places of resort ; entering, we doubt not, into conversa- 
 tion with many who gave him short answers, and wondered 
 who in the world he was. Considering how these places 
 were frequented, there may have been many of the men of 
 note at that time in London who had, in this way, seen Chat- 
 terton without knowing it. " I am quite familiar," he says 
 in his letter of the 6th of May, " at the Chapter Coffee- 
 house, and know all the geniuses there." One notes, how- 
 ever, that in his postscript to his next letter, of May 14th, 
 he retracts the direction he had given to his mother and 
 his friends to address to him at the Chapter, and bids them 
 address him " at Mr. Walmsley's, Shoreditch, only." Had 
 he received any rebuff at the Chapter, which made him dis- 
 continue the house? If so, there were other coffee-houses 
 besides Tom's. The theatres, too, and other places of amuse- 
 ment served his purpose. By the 28th of May, indeed, as 
 we have seen, both Drury Lane and Covent Garden were 
 closed for the season; but during the preceding month he 
 had no doubt visited both several times, at once enjoying the 
 play, and, as on the occasion he mentions in his letter of the 
 14th, picking up friends in the pit. After the great theatres 
 were closed, there were still some minor ones, as well as 
 
b 
 
 A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 275 
 
 Eanelagh Gardens and Marjlebone Gardens, where there 
 was music and other entertainment; and there, too, Chat- 
 terton occasionally paid his half-crown, flattering himself it 
 was an investment. 
 
 So much for the effort made; next as to the success. 
 Making every allowance for his own exaggerations, we 
 believe it to have been by no means inconsiderable. Let 
 us see. 
 
 His great object evidently after his first arrival in London, 
 was to distinguish himself as a political writer on the 
 " patriotic" or Opposition side. This was to be his short cut 
 to fame and wealth. To write such letters for the Middlesex 
 Journal, the Freeholder's Magazine, and other Opposition 
 papers, as should rival those of Junius, and make himself be 
 inquired after by the heads of the party, and so put forward 
 and provided for— this was the immediate form of his ambi- 
 tion. Fell and Edmunds were here his chief reliance ; but, 
 above all, he desired to be introduced to Wilkes. Could 
 that be done, his fortune would be made ! And Fell, as we 
 have seen, was to manage it for him. Unfortunately, when 
 the promised time came, Fell was not in a position to keep 
 his promise, having been laid up in the King's Bench for 
 debt, where Chatterton visits him. Edmunds, too, was put 
 out of reach about the same time, having been made an 
 example of by the Government, and thrown into Newgate, 
 by way of warning to "patriotic" publishers. The incarce- 
 ration of these two friends of Chatterton at the very time 
 when he was expecting so much from them, must, one would 
 think, have been a misfortune. But he represents it other- 
 wise. The Freeholder had only gone into other hands, and 
 he should be able to write for it yet, on even better terms 
 than if Fell had remained editor ! The Middlesex Journal, 
 too, was still to go on (Hamilton of the Town and Country 
 Magazine had come to the rescue, and taken it up) ; so that 
 here also he should be no worse off than before ! Nor were 
 these anticipations falsified. For the Freeholder indeed, he 
 does not appear to have written much after this date ; the 
 only subsequent contribution to its pages that can with toler- 
 
 T 2 
 
276 CHATTERTON : 
 
 able certainty be traced to him, being a letter, in the Junius 
 style, to the Premier, Lord North, which was not published 
 till the August number. But for the Middlesex, under 
 Hamilton, he continued to write busily. At least five letters 
 have been disinterred from the columns of this old news- 
 paper, all printed in the month of May, 1770, and which 
 there is good reason to believe were Chatterton's.* They 
 are all signed " Decimus." The first, published May 10th, 
 
 is addressed to the Earl of H h (Hillsborough, Minister 
 
 for the American colonies) ; the second, published May 15th, 
 
 is to the P D of W (^'. e., the Princess Dowager 
 
 of Wales) ; the third, published May 22nd, is to the Prime 
 Minister himself; the fourth, published May 26th, is not a 
 letter, but a kind of squib, proposing a series of subjects for 
 an exhibition of sign-board paintings ; and the last is a letter 
 "to the Freeholders of the city of Bristol," bidding them 
 shake off their lethargy, and imitate the glorious example of 
 London. We quote a sample or two of these effusions. 
 
 From the Letter to the Earl of Hillsborough, May 10. — " My Lord, — If a con- 
 stant exercise of tyranny and cruelty has not steeled your heart against all 
 sensations of compunction and remorse, permit me to remind you of the recent 
 massacre in Boston. It is an infamous attribute of the ministry of the Thane, 
 that what his tools begin in secret fraud and oppression ends in murder and 
 avowed assassination. Not contented to deprive us of our liberty, they rob 
 us of our lives ; knowing, from a sad experience, that the one without the 
 other is an insupportable burden. Your Lordship has bravely distinguished 
 yourself among the ministers of the present reign. Whilst North and the 
 instruments of his royal mistress settled the plan of operation, it was your 
 part to execute ; you were the assassin whose knife was ever ready to finish the 
 crime. If every feeling of humanity is not extinct in you, reflect, for a moment 
 reflect, on the horrid task you undertook and perpetrated. Think of the 
 injury you have done to your country, which nothing but the dissolution of 
 a Parliament, not representing the people, can erase. . . . Think of the 
 recent murders at Boston. my Lord ! however you may force a smile into 
 your countenance, however you may trifle in the train of dissipation, your 
 conscience must raise a hell within," &c. &c. 
 
 From the Letter to the Princess Dowager of Wales, May 15. . . . "I could 
 
 wish your R H would know how to act worthy your situation in life, 
 
 and not debase yourself by mingling with a group of ministers, the most 
 detestable that ever embroiled a kingdom in discord and commotion. Your 
 
 consequence in the Council can arise only from your power over his M y; 
 
 and that power you possess but by the courtesy of an unaccountable infatu- 
 ation. Filial duty has nothing to do with the question : a king has no mother, 
 no wife, no friend, considered as a king : his country, his subjects, are the only 
 objects of his public concern." .... 
 
 * These letters were first reprinted from the Middlesex Journal, by Mr. Dix, 
 in his Life of Chatterton. 
 
A STOEY OF THE YEAR 1770. 27f 
 
 From the Letter to the Premier, May 22. . . . "Fly to the Cottncil, with your 
 face whitened with fear ; tell them that justice is at the door, and the axe will 
 do its office ; tell them that whilst the spirit of English freedom exists, ven- 
 geance has also an existence ; and when Britons are denied justice from the 
 powers who have the trust of their rights, the Constitution hath given them 
 a power to do themselves justice." 
 
 From the Squib descHbing an Exhibition of Sign-paintings, May 26. . . " No. 3. 
 * The Union:' An Englishman sleeping and a Scotchman picking his pocket — 
 
 ' The K ; ' a sign for a button-maker. The painter, who has not fixed his 
 
 design to this performance, is certainly a very loyal subject. His M has 
 
 that innocent vacancy of countenance which distinguishes the representation 
 of angels and cherubims ; without guilt, without meaning, without everything 
 but an undesigning simplicity." ... 
 
 From the Letter to the Freeholders of Bristol, May 26. " Gentlemen, — As a 
 fellow-citizen, I presume to address you on a subject which I hoped would have 
 animated an abler pen. At this critical situation, when the fate of the Consti- 
 tution depends upon the exertion of an English spirit, I confess my astonish- 
 ment at finding you silent. The second city in England should not be 
 ashamed to copy the first in any laudable measure. . . . Remember the speech 
 of the glorious Canynge, in whose repeated mayoralties honour and virtue were 
 not unknown in the corporation. When the unhappy dissensions first broke 
 out between the houses of Lancaster and York, he immediately declared him- 
 self for the latter. His lady, fearful of the consequences, begged him to desist 
 and not ruin himself and family. * My family,' replied the brave citizen, * is 
 dear to me— Heaven can witness how dear ! But when discord and oppressions 
 begin to distract the realm, my country is my family; and that it is my duty 
 to protect.' " 
 
 These few samples will show hoV well Chatterton had 
 caught the trick of the Opposition/politics of the day, and 
 how expertly he could dress up the popular commonplaces. 
 That his contributions, such as they were, were thought of 
 some value by the conductors of the Middlesex Journal is 
 proved by the fact that there was one of them in at least 
 every alternate number during the whole month of May, and 
 that two or three of them are printed in what would be con- 
 sidered the chief place in the paper. 
 
 But Chatterton was not content with writing only for the 
 Middlesex. He probably tried others of the Opposition news- 
 papers, including even the great Pullic Advertiser itself, 
 which Junius had made illustrious. Then, as we shall see, 
 there were various Magazines or Monthlies, besides the Free- 
 holder, to which he sent more elaborate contributions in the 
 same political strain for publication at the end of the month, 
 or whenever else they appeared. Of these, one was the Poli- 
 tical Register. " Mind the Political Register;' he says to his 
 friend Gary in the end of June : " I am very intimately 
 acquainted with the editor, who is also editor of another pub- 
 
278 CHATTERTON : 
 
 lication." The acquaintance had probably commenced before 
 the end of May; and it is with the circumstance of his 
 writing for this periodical that we are disposed to connect the 
 story of his introduction to Beckford, as related by himself to 
 his sister in his letter of the 30th of that month. The facts 
 seem to be as follows : — 
 
 Anxious from the first to get as near the centre of affairs as 
 he could, and disappointed, by Fell's mishap, of his expected 
 introduction to Wilkes, he conceived the idea of making 
 a bold stroke so as to bring himself into direct relations with 
 the man who, for the time, was even more of a popular hero 
 than Wilkes — the Lord Mayor Beckford. His plan was to 
 write a letter to his Lordship on affairs in general, and more 
 particularly in praise of his Lordship's conduct as the cham- 
 pion of the city in their struggle with the Government. Here 
 is a specimen of what he said : — 
 
 " My Lord, — The steps you have hitherto taken in the service of your 
 country demand the warmest thanks the gratitude of an Englishman can 
 give. That you will persevere in the glorious task, is the wish of every one 
 who is a friend to the constitution of this country. Your integiity ensures 
 you from falling into the infamy of apostacy ; and your understanding is a 
 sufficient guard against the secret measures of the ministry, who are vile 
 enough to stick at no villany to complete their detestable purposes. Nor can 
 your British heart stoop to fear the contemptible threatenings of a set of 
 hireling wretches who have no power but what they derive from a person 
 
 who engrosses every power and every vice If the massacre of the 
 
 Bostonians was not concerted by the ministry, they were to be enslaved in 
 consequence of a settled plan ; and as the one was the result of the other, our 
 worthy ministers were the assassins. Alas ! the unhappy town had not 
 a Beckford ! He would have checked the audacious insolence of the army, and 
 
 dared, as an Englishman, to make use of his freedom His Majesty's 
 
 behaviour, when he received the complaints of his people (not to redress them 
 indeed, but to get rid of them, an easier way) was something particular : it was 
 set, formal, and studied. Should you address him again, my Lord, it would 
 not be amiss to tell his Majesty that you expect Ats answer, and not the answer 
 
 of his mother or ministers Your Lordship has proved the goodness of 
 
 your heart, the soundness of your principles, and the merit of the cause in 
 which you are engaged, by the rectitude of your conduct. Scandal maddens 
 at your name, because she finds nothing to reproach you with ; and the venal 
 hirelings of the ministry despair of meriting their pay by blackening your 
 character. Illiberal abuse and gross inconsistencies and absurdities recoU upon 
 their author ; and only bear testimony of the weakness of his head or the bad- 
 ness of his heart. That raan whose enemies can find nothing to lay to his 
 charge, may well dispense with the incoherent Billingsgate of a ministerial 
 writer." 
 
 This paper, we say, he intended for the Political Register. 
 But, either before getting it accepted there, or while it was 
 still only in type, he sent a copy of it direct to Beckford. He 
 
r 
 
 A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 279 
 
 gives his Lordship a day or so to read it ; and then ventures 
 on that personal call to which he makes allusion in his letter 
 to his sister of May the 30th. His Lordship, according to his 
 own account, — and we see no reason to doubt it, — receives him 
 very politely ; and not only expresses his approbation of what 
 he had already written, but consents to have a second letter, on 
 the subject of the City Remonstrance and its reception by the 
 King, publicly addressed to him. This call on Beckford pro- 
 bably took place about the 26th of May, or three days after the 
 great affair of the Remonstrance, and when the town was still 
 ringing with it. At all events, a letter bearing that date, and 
 addressed to the Lord Mayor, was found in manuscript among 
 Chatterton's papers after his death. This letter, beginning 
 " When the endeavours of a spirited people to free themselves 
 from an unsupportable slavery ,'' &c., was almost certainly the 
 letter he asked leave to address to Beckford ; and it shows 
 how completely he had succeeded in his object that he was 
 able to make arrangements for its appearing in no less im- 
 portant a periodical than the North Briton. This paper — 
 a continuation of Wilkes's celebrated periodical of the same 
 name, which had been stopped in its 46th number — differed 
 considerably from the ordinary newspapers of the day. It 
 was of small folio size, and each number usually consisted of 
 one careful essay, and no more, occupying about six pages 
 of clear and elegant type, and sold for twopence -halfpenny. 
 The editor and proprietor was a person named William 
 Bingley, a printer, whose case was then much before the 
 public. In 1768 he had, as a speculation, resumed the publi- 
 cation of the North Briton^ after it had been discontinued for 
 some years. In that year, however, having been summoned 
 as a witness in one of the trials between Wilkes and the 
 Government, he had given a singular proof of his obstinacy 
 by making oath in Court that he would answer no interroga- 
 tories whatever unless he should be put to the torture. (See 
 Junius, Letter VII.) Committed for contempt to the King's 
 Bench, he remained there utterly immovable either by threats 
 or by promises for a period of two years, publishing his North 
 Briton all the same, and dating it from his prison ; till, at last, 
 
280 CHATTEKTON : 
 
 in the first week of June 1770, Government thouglit It best 
 to let him out. As soon as he was released, he started a 
 second weekly newspaper, called Bingleys Journal, or the 
 Universal Gazetteer, of the regular newspaper size and form ; 
 the first number of which appeared on the 9th of June. This 
 paper was not to interfere with the North Briton ; both were 
 to be issued every Saturday, at the same price, from Bingley's 
 new premises at the Britannia, No. 31, Newgate Street. A 
 connexion with Bingiey, therefore, must have been thought 
 of some importance by Chatterton; and it is another proof 
 of his energy that, before Bingiey was out of prison a fort- 
 night, he had contrived to obtain such a connexion. Above 
 all, to have his letter to Beckford brought out in large fine 
 type in the North Briton, forming by itself one entire number 
 of that famous paper, must have seemed to Chatterton a 
 decided step of literary promotion. 
 
 The elation which Chatterton must naturally have felt at 
 the idea of the publication simultaneously of two letters of 
 his to the Lord Mayor in such important places as the Political 
 Register and the North Briton, and at the prospects of farther 
 recognition which would thus be opened up to him, was 
 doomed to a bitter disappointment. After May he seems to 
 have written next to nothing of a political character for the 
 Middlesex, but to have waited for his letters and the Sclat he 
 anticipated from them. One of them did appear — that written 
 first and sent to the Political Register, It was published in 
 that periodical in the course of June, and bore the signature of 
 *' Probus.^^ But before the other could appear, an event hap- 
 pened which made it impossible that it should appear at all. 
 On the 21st of June, 1770, almost exactly a month after that 
 crowning moment of his life, the presentation of the City 
 Remonstrance, and when all London, Chatterton included, 
 were expecting no end of similar manifestations of his spirit, 
 Beckford died. His death was sudden — the consequence of 
 a cold, which an imprudent journey of 100 miles, while it was 
 upon him, had aggravated into a rheumatic fever. The town 
 was thunderstruck ; and for some days nothing else was talked 
 of. Soon, however, the excitement died away; Beckford's 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 281 
 
 only legitimate son, then a boy of nine years, afterwards to be 
 known far and wide as the author of " Vathek," stepped into 
 the inheritance of his father's vast fortune, the wife being 
 amply provided for by her settlement, and several illegitimate 
 children at the same time receiving 5,000/. each ; and the 
 City people began to think which of the popular aldermen 
 they should elect for the vacant term of the Mayoralty. 
 
 And what of poor Chatterton, to whom, with his two letters, 
 and the hopes he had built upon them, an insurance on Beck- 
 ford's life was more necessary than to all the City besides ? 
 " When Beckford died," Mrs. Ballance told Sir Herbert Croft, 
 " he (Chatterton) was perfectly frantic and out of his mind, and 
 said that he was ruined." This is probably correct ; and yet 
 there is an authentic little record, from which it would appear 
 that, after his first frantic regret was over, he tried to console 
 himself ironically in a rather singular fashion. On the back 
 of the identical letter, alluded to above, as having been sent 
 to the North Briton, but which, as it could not now appear 
 there, Chatterton had recovered and sent in manuscript to his 
 friend Cary, there is an endorsement in Chatterton's hand, 
 evidently for Cary's information, as follows : — 
 
 " Accepted by Bingley. — Set for, and thrown out of, the North Briton^ 21st 
 June, on accovint of the Lord Mayor's death 
 
 £ s. d. 
 
 Lost by his death on this Essay 1116 
 
 Gained in Elegies £2 2 
 
 in Essays £3 3 
 
 5 5 
 
 Am glad he is dead by ... , £3 13 6 " 
 
 So far as we are aware, this is the first time that grief was 
 estimated in pounds, shillings, and pence ; but we need not 
 say that the method has some merits, and might, without 
 much injury to truth, come into general use ! 
 
 Beckford's death seems, however, to have had one not 
 unimportant effect on Chatterton's literary exertions. Even 
 before his interview with Beckford, as his letter to his sister 
 of the 30th of May shows us, he had begun to have doubts as 
 to the advantages of mere political writing — at any rate, of 
 political writing on the Opposition side and for the news- 
 
282 CHATTERTON : 
 
 papers. For essays of this kind, he says, one was certainly 
 sure of pay ; but the, benefit ended there ! The " patriots " being 
 all in search of place for themselves, there was little chance 
 of any farther remuneration for articles on their side than the 
 publisher's payment for the copy ! On the other hand, if one 
 wrote for the Ministerial side, no publisher would take the 
 articles, and one must pay to have them printed ; but then if 
 one could make a hit, the Ministerial men would be glad of 
 such a recruit, and could easily make it worth his while to 
 serve them ! And then follows the maxim, so characteristic 
 of the miserable boy, " He is a poor author who cannot write 
 on both sides ; " and the statement that, if necessary, he will 
 put this maxim in practice, by transferring himself to the 
 Court-party. There is evidence that he actually made an 
 attempt to carry the intention into efiect. On that very 26th 
 of May, on which he penned the letter to the Lord Mayor, 
 which was to appear in the North Briton^ lauding him and 
 the patriots for their opposition to ]\Iinisters, he penned also 
 another letter — afterwards found among his papers — addressed 
 to Lord North, and signed " Moderator,^' in which, according 
 to Walpole, he passes " an encomium on Ministers for rejecting 
 the City Remonstrance." It was probably, therefore, the 
 consciousness of having written these two letters on the same 
 day that caused him to write to his sister so coolly about 
 taking either side ; and what he says about the difficulty of 
 getting Ministerial essays published may have been but the 
 result of his own experience with regard to the " Moderator ^' 
 letter. Evidently, however, after his introduction of himself 
 to Beckford, he had resolved to wait the issue of that experi- 
 ment before taking any farther steps towards the Ministerial 
 side. But when Beckford died, and all his hopes from that 
 acquaintance were over, his conviction of the uselessness of 
 mere political writing in newspapers, especially if on the 
 patriotic side, came back with fresh force. 
 
 There was independent reason why it should do so. Since 
 the end of May there had been a perfect panic among the news- 
 paper-proprietors. As early as the beginning of that month, we 
 have seen, Edmunds of the Middlesex Journal had been pro- 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 283 
 
 secuted "by Ministers and committed to Newgate. And this 
 was but the beginning of a series of similar prosecutions. 
 After the City Eemonstrance of the 23d of May, and Junius's 
 terrible letter in the Public Advertiser of the 28th, ripping up 
 the conduct of the Parliament just prorogued, and lashing 
 Ministers for all their recent misdemeanours, including the 
 massacre at Boston, the insult to the City, and the escape of 
 the murderer Kennedy, Ministers seem to have made up their 
 minds for a crusade against the Opposition press. On the 1st 
 of June, Mr. Almon of the London Museum, the friend of 
 Wilkes, was tried in Westminster Hall before Lord Mansfield, 
 for selling a letter of Junius's in that publication ; on the 13th, 
 the greater culprit, Woodfall of the Advertiser, was tried at the 
 King's Bench on a similar charge ; and on the 13th of July, 
 Mr. Miller, of the London Evening Post, was tried for copying 
 a letter of Junius into his columns. All this had some effect. 
 The proprietors of newspapers began to be chary of printing 
 articles which might be their ruin. Thus, during the month 
 of June, Chatterton seems to have found it impossible to get 
 such articles into the Middlesex Journal as they had willingly 
 taken from him in May. *' The printers of daily publications," 
 he writes to Cary on the 29th of June, " are all frightened out 
 of their patriotism, and will take nothing unless 'tis moderate 
 or Ministerial. I have not had five patriotic essays this fort- 
 night : all must be Ministerial or entertaining.'^ Accordingly, 
 still keeping in reserve the possibility of becoming " Minis- 
 terial '^ if he should see occasion for it, he in the meantime 
 falls back on the " entertain ing;'' that is, on miscellaneous non- 
 political literature. And this leads us to our next topic — an 
 account of Chatterton' s literary exertions out of the field of 
 politics during his first two months in London. 
 
 From the very first, he had by no means depended exclu- 
 sively on political writing. In his letter to his mother of 
 the 6th of May he says, '' I get four guineas a month by 
 one magazine, and shall engage to write a History of 
 England and other pieces, which will more than double that 
 sum ;" and he clearly distinguishes between employment of 
 this kind and " occasio^al essays for the daily papers." 
 
284 CHATTERTON : 
 
 Again, in his letter to liis sister of May 30th, he speaks of an 
 engagement with a speculative bookseller, the brother of a 
 Scotch lord, who was to give him board and lodging for 
 writing a History of London, to appear in numbers. How 
 much of these statements about engagements to write large 
 historical compilations for the booksellers was actual fact, 
 founded on proposals which passed between the eager youth 
 and the bibliopolic powers of Paternoster Row and its purlieus, 
 and how much of it was mere hallucination, we cannot now 
 say. Of schemes of this sort, at all events we hear nothing 
 more; and whatever chances of literary work, as distinct 
 from ordinary newspaper- writing, Chatterton did have in Lon- 
 don, were limited to his connexions with various magazines. 
 
 We are able to enumerate all the magazines with which, 
 during the months of May and June, Chatterton is known to 
 have had any dealings. First, and by far the most hopeful 
 as regarded receipts for his exchequer, was the Town and 
 Country, to which he had been a pretty constant contributor, 
 since its second number in February 1769. This magazine, 
 which had a very large sale, was published on the last day of 
 every month at the price of one shilling; and though the 
 editor and proprietor, Hamilton, must have been rather sur- 
 prised when his well-known Bristol correspondent presented 
 himself at his office, at St. John^s Gate, Clerkenwell, to find 
 him so young, he appears to have behaved civilly, and to 
 have allowed Chatterton to regard the magazine as one of his 
 surest resources now that he had settled in town. Next, there 
 was the Freeholder s Magaziney somewhat more political in its 
 character, and also published on the last day of each month, 
 price sixpence. With this also Chatterton had had some 
 acquaintance before leaving Bristol ; and we have seen that, 
 during his first ten days in London, he was disposed to 
 regard it and its editor, Mr. Fell, as his mainstay. After 
 Fell's imprisonment, however, when the magazine went into 
 other hands — the hands, as we find from an advertisement of 
 the ninth number (that for May 1770), of a certain " patriotic 
 society," who employed W. Adland and J. Browne of Red- 
 lion Court, Fleet Street, to print it for them — Chatterton says 
 
STOEY OF THE YEAR 1770. 285 
 
 little of it. He did apparently write for it ; but not mucli. 
 Of greater consequence in his eyes was the London Museum, 
 a shilling monthly, printed, as we have said, by J. Miller, of 
 Queen's Head Passage, and which, in May 1770, had attained 
 to its fifth number. Next was the Political Register^ already 
 described. After it, may be mentioned The Court and City 
 Magazine, price sixpence, six numbers old in May 1770, 
 printed by J. Smith of 15, Paternoster Kow, and characterised 
 in the advertisements as " A Fund of Entertainment for the 
 man of quality, the citizen, the scholar, the country gentle- 
 man, and the man of gallantry, as well as the fair of every 
 denomination." This magazine had plates, as indeed most of 
 the others had; and from the advertised contents of one or 
 two numbers, we judge that the light amatory vein was 
 deemed the most attractive by the publishers. Lastly, there 
 was the Gospel Magazine, begun, as we find, in 1768, and 
 printed and sold, in 1770, by M. Lewis of No. 1, Paternoster 
 Row. This magazine, the purpose of which, as stated on its 
 title-page, was " to promote Religion, Devotion and Piety 
 from evangelical principles,'' usually consisted, if we may 
 judge from the contents of a few numbers, of scraps of 
 sermons and short religious biographies and the like, followed 
 by a few pieces of religious verse. 
 
 The editors of Chatterton's Remains, after his death, were 
 not so careful as they might have been in recovering his con- 
 tributions to the various London Magazines, or even in giving 
 the exact dates and references of those which they did recover. 
 The task, in any case, was not an easy one. Chatterton 
 adopted various signatures, and some of his contributions may 
 have appeared, as was then common, without any signature 
 at all. It is possible, therefore, that trifles which have been 
 assumed as his were not really his ; and it is far more possible 
 that trifles which he did write have been neglected. On the 
 whole, after such references as we have been able to make to 
 the old periodicals themselves, we give the following as the list 
 of at least the chief of Chatterton's known contributions to 
 these periodicals (the poetical columns of newspapers included) 
 from his arrival in London to the end of June ;— 
 
286 CHATTERTON : 
 
 " Narva and Mored, an African Eclogue," in verse, dated May 2, 1770 : 
 appeared in the Londmi, Museum for May, 
 
 "A Song," addressed to Misa C am, of Bristol, in seven stanzas, dated 
 
 " London, May 4." 
 
 '* Tlie Methodist ;" a short Hudibrastic squib ; dated May, 1770. 
 
 " Elegy," beginning " Why blooms," &c. ; dated '* Shoreditch, May 20," and 
 published in the Town and Country Magazine for May. 
 
 " The Prophecy ; " a political poem, in eighteen stanzas, published in the 
 Middlesex Jou/rnal of May 31, along with the " Letter to the Freeholders 
 of Bristol." 
 
 " The Death of Nlcou, an African Eclogue," in verse; dated "Brooke Street, 
 June 12," and published in the London Museum for June. [This is the 
 piece to which we have alluded as proving Chatterton's removal to Brooke 
 Street early in June.] 
 
 *' Maria Friendless ; " a short tale in prose, dated " June 15," and published in 
 the Town and Country Magazine for June. 
 
 " The False Step ; " a short prose tale, published in the same number of the 
 Town and Country Magazine. 
 
 "Anecdote of Judge Jeffries;" a short paragraph, published in the same 
 number of the Toion and Country Magazine. 
 
 **0n Punning," a short letter, dated "June 16," and published in the same 
 number of the Town and Country Magazine. 
 
 A Paper signed " Hunter of Oddities," dated " Slaughter's Coffee-house, Jime 
 15," and describing the conduct of a mad gentleman seen there ; published 
 in the same number of the Town and Country Magazine. [This was the 
 fourth of a series of papers, all bearing the same signature, and having 
 the same object — namely, the description of odd chai'acters picked up in 
 walking about London. There are about twelve papers in all in the 
 series, extending over all the numbers of the magazine for 1770. 
 Chatterton was certainly the author of some of them ; and though the 
 rest were published after his death, and even dated after it, this may 
 have been only the Editor's way of using copy which Chatterton had given 
 him in a lump.] 
 
 ' Elegy on W. Beckford, Esq.," in 12 stanzas, published in June. 
 
 * Letter to the Lord Mayor," signed " Probus," published in the Political 
 Register, some time in June. 
 
 We believe that, if this list were extended by the addition 
 of scraps from the same periodicals which look as if they were 
 Chatterton's, and of similar scraps from the Court and City 
 Magazine^ the Gospel Magazine^ and the Freeholder, it might 
 be more than doubled. We know, for example, that Chatter- 
 ton must have written more on Beckford's death, both in verse 
 and in prose, than the elegy above-mentioned could amount 
 to. He estimated his earnings on this topic at five guineas. 
 Indeed, it was in connexion with this topic that he made the 
 only venture towards independent publication of which there 
 is any record. In the Middlesex Journal of July 3rd, there is 
 the following advertisement : " This day was published, price 
 one shilling, an Elegy on the much-lamented death of William 
 Beckford, Esq., late Lord Mayor of, and Kepresentative in 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 287 
 
 Parliament for, tlie City of London : Printed by G. Kearsly, 
 at No. 1, Lndgate Street." A copy of this publication has 
 survived, and, on comparing it with the Elegy of Chatterton 
 mentioned above, it is found to be the same, with sixteen 
 additional stanzas. Here are the opening stanzas : — 
 
 *' Weep on, ye Britons ! give your gen'ral tear ; 
 But hence, ye venal — hence each titled slave ; 
 An honest pang should wait on Beckford's bier, 
 And patriot Anguish mark the patriot's grave. 
 
 " When like the Eoman to his field retired, 
 
 'Twas you (surrounded by unnumber'd foes) 
 Who call'd him forth, his services required, 
 And took from Age the blessing of repose." 
 
 Whether Chatterton gained any part of his five guineas by this 
 publication, or whether he lost some of them by the venture, 
 we do not know. The Elegy is as good as was going, but is 
 poor enough, and perhaps did not sell. 
 
 But we have not yet taken account of all Chatterton's 
 efforts to make money and win fame, during his first two 
 months in London. Besides writing political articles for the 
 newspapers, and miscellaneous scraps of a more literary kind 
 for the magazines, he made, as we gather from his letters, a 
 distinct effort towards connecting himself with what may be 
 called generally the minor dramatic literature of the metro- 
 polis. Within a month after his arrival in London, as we have 
 seen, the two great theatres of Drury Lane and Co vent Gar- 
 den were closed for the season ; so that, even had there been 
 any way of getting into relations with the managers of those 
 theatres, there was no time to turn it to immediate use. 
 But, though the greater theatres were shut, one or two minor 
 or summer theatres were open. Thus, at the Haymarket, 
 Foote was just about to bring out, for the delight of the town, 
 his comedy of the " Lame Lover ;'^ perhaps the greatest 
 theatrical hit of that year. Sadler's Wells was also in its 
 glory. But whatever dreams of future work for those places 
 may have passed across Chatterton's mind, there was as yet 
 no means of realizing them ; and all that his ambition did 
 conceive as within its reach, for the present, was the chance of 
 becoming connected with one or other of those places of 
 
288 CHATTERTON : 
 
 evening musical and pyroteclinic entertainment which com- 
 peted with the minor theatres for the right to entertain the 
 more dissipated Londoners during the summer and autumn 
 months. Of these there were three of some note — Kanelagh 
 Gardens, at Chelsea ; Vauxhall Gardens on the Surrey side of 
 the Thames, over against Millbank ; and Marylebone or Mary- 
 bone Gardens, on the site of part of the present New Road. 
 At all these places, the entertainments consisted of prome- 
 nading under brilliant lights, hearing concerts of music, 
 sipping tea and coffee or more expensive beverages, and 
 seeing, at the close, grand displays of fireworks. Any hope 
 that Chatterton could entertain of contributing to the pro- 
 vision involved in such a bill of fare, could obviously consist 
 only in his ability to furnish words for the musical portion of 
 it. It did so happen that he had an opportunity of making his 
 ability in this respect known, and that this opportunity was 
 more especially in connexion with Marylebone Gardens. We 
 see no reason to doubt the literal accuracy of his account to 
 his mother on the 14th of May, of the accidental manner in 
 which the connexion was brought about. " Last week," he 
 says, " being in the pit of Drury Lane Theatre, I contracted an 
 immediate acquaintance (which you know is no hard task to 
 me) with a young gentleman in Cheapside, partner in a music- 
 shop, the greatest in the city. Hearing I could write, he 
 desired me to write a few songs for him : this I did the same 
 night, and conveyed them to him the next morning. These 
 he showed to a Doctor in music, and I am invited to treat 
 with the Doctor on the footing of a composer for Ranelagh- 
 and the Gardens." For a while we hear no more of this 
 bargain or its results ; but, in the end of June, writing to 
 Gary, who had apparently been already informed of all the 
 particulars, he reports progress. '' A song of mine," he then 
 says, " is a great favourite with the town, on account of the 
 fulness of the music. You will see that and twenty more in 
 print after the season is over. I yesterday heard several 
 airs of my burletta sung to the harpsichord, horns, bassoons, 
 hautboys, violins, &c., and will venture to pronounce, from 
 the excellence of the music, that it will take with the town." 
 

 A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 289 
 
 If we interpret this into the language of direct statement, the 
 facts seem to be — that having, early in May, written some 
 songs for some musip-publisher who had an interest in Mary- 
 bone Gardens, one or two of these had already been set to music, 
 and perhaps sung at the Gardens, in the course of one of the 
 concerts, by Mr. Eeinhold, Mr. Bannister, or Mrs. Barthelemon, 
 who were then the Mary bone stars ; and that, these having 
 pleased, he had made some kind of arrangement for a more 
 extensive attempt, in the shape of a continuous burletta to be 
 brought out at the Gardens, as soon as might be convenient, — 
 had already before the end of June finished this burletta and 
 handed it over to the composer, and had even had the pleasure 
 of hearing some of the airs of it in rehearsal. 
 
 All this is corroborated by the evidence of Chatterton's 
 remaining writings. For some five-and-twenty years, indeed, 
 after his death, all traces of either his burletta or his songs 
 seem to have been lost; but in 1795, a Mr. Atterbury, who 
 somehow came into possession of the manuscripts, published 
 both together in the form of a neat little pamphlet, having 
 this title-page, " The Revenge : A Burletta, acted at Maryhone 
 Gardens 1770/ with additional songs ; hy Thomas Chatterton.'' 
 Prefixed to *' Tlie Revenge,^"* there is this list of dramatis 
 person(S. 
 
 Jupiter Mb. Eeinhold. 
 
 Bacchus Mr. Bannister. 
 
 Cupid Master Cheney. 
 
 Juno Mrs. Thompson. 
 
 The natural inference is, that the Burletta was actually 
 performed at the Gardens. After looking over the news- 
 papers for 1770, however, in which there is a pretty complete 
 series of advertisements of the entertainments at the Gardens 
 from the beginning to the end of the season, we have found 
 no trace of any such burletta having been produced that year; 
 and we rather incline to think that, if the production took 
 place at all, it was not till a subsequent season. Of ^yq short 
 songs, however, printed along with the burletta, it seems 
 likely enough that one, entitled A Bacchanalian, and purport- 
 ing to have been '' sung by Mr. Eeinhold," was actually sung 
 
 u 
 
290 CHATTERTON ! 
 
 by that gentleman at one of the mixed concerts ; and it may 
 be the very song respecting which Chatterton wrote to Gary. 
 Another of the five, entitled The Invitation fh.3is attached to it the 
 words, " To be sung by Mrs. Barthelemon and Master Cheney ;" 
 as if it had not yet gone so far as the other. The remaining 
 three have no singer's name attached to them. Probably, 
 however, to have had one song actually sung at the Gardens, 
 another about to be sung, and a burletta in progress, seemed 
 to Chatterton sufficient success. At all events, no sooner was 
 one burletta off his hands, than he began another of a more 
 modern dramatic character, entitled The Woman of Spirit, the 
 several parts of which are distributed by anticipation thus : — 
 
 Distort ..... Mr. Bannister. 
 
 Councillor' Latitat . Mr. Reinhold. 
 
 Endorse Master Cheney. 
 
 Lady Tempest . . Mrs. Thompson. 
 
 Of this intended burletta only two scenes were written. 
 
 No one can read these dramatic attempts of the industrious 
 boy without a new impression of his extraordinary cleverness 
 and versatility. The Revenge, which is in two acts, and is 
 written in rhyme throughout, partly in passages of reci- 
 tative, but with numerous solo airs, one or two duets, and 
 a chorus at the close, might really, if set to tolerable 
 music, have been a pleasant piece to hear. The words 
 are decidedly better than those of many of the musical 
 burlesques which succeed now-a-days. The story is that of a 
 quarrel between Jupiter and Juno, on account of an assigna- 
 tion which Jupiter has made with Maia ; the plot is thickened 
 by the introduction of Cupid and Bacchus ; and, after the 
 usual amount of confusion and cross-purpose, all ends happily. 
 Here is a specimen — a dispute between Bacchus and Cupid 
 respecting the comparative worth of their respective functions. 
 
 Bacchus (with a bowl). 
 
 Recitative. — Od'sniggers, t'other draught ; 'tis dev'lish heady ; 
 
 Olympus turns about {staggers) ; steady, boys, steady I 
 
 Air. — If Jove should pretend that he governs the skies, 
 I swear by this liquor his Thundership lies ; 
 A slave to his bottle, he governs by wine ; 
 And all must confess he's a servant of mine. 
 
A STORY* OF THE YEAR 1770. 291 
 
 Air chcmges. — Rosy, sparkling, powerful wine, 
 All the joys of life are thine ; 
 Search the drinking world around 
 Bacchus everywhere sits crown'd. ' 
 Whilst we lift the flowing bowl 
 Unregarded thunders roll. 
 
 Air changes. — Since man, as says each bearded sage, 
 Is but a piece of clay, 
 Whose mystic moisture lost by age, 
 To dust it falls away, 
 'Tis orthodox, beyond a doubt. 
 That drought will only fret it ; 
 To make the brittle stuff hold out 
 Is thus to drink and wet it. 
 
 Recitative. — Ah ! Master Cupid, 'slife, I did not s' ye ; 
 
 'Tis excellent champagne, and so here's t' ye : 
 I brought it to these gardens as imported ; 
 'Tis bloody strong ; you need not twice be courted ; 
 Come, drink, my boy 
 
 Cupid. 
 
 Hence, monster, hence ! I scorn thy flowing bowl : 
 It prostitutes the sense, degenerates the soul. 
 
 Bacchus. 
 
 Gadso, methinks the youngster's woundy moral! 
 He plays with ethics like a bell and coraL 
 Air. — 'Tis madness to think. 
 To judge ere you drink : 
 The bottom all wisdom contains. 
 Then let you and I 
 Now drink the bowl dry ; 
 We both shall grow wise for our pains. 
 
 Cupid. 
 
 Red tative. — Pray, keep your distance, beast, and cease your bawling. 
 Or with this dart I'll send you caterwauling. 
 Air. — The charms of wine cannot compare 
 W^ith the soft raptures of the fair ; 
 Can drunken pleasures ever find 
 A place with love and womankind ? 
 Can the full bowl pretend to vie 
 With the soft languish of the eye ? 
 Can the mad roar our passions move 
 Like gentle breathing sighs of Love ? 
 
 Bacchus. 
 Go, whine and complain 
 To the girls of the plain. 
 And sigh out your soul ere she comes to the mind ; 
 My mistress is here, 
 And, faith, I don't fear, 
 / always am happy, she always is kind. 
 Air changes. — A pox o' your lasses ! 
 A shot of my glasses 
 Your arrows surpasses ; 
 For nothing but asses 
 
 Will draw in your team. 
 
 u2 
 
292 CHATTERTON : 
 
 Whilst thus I am drinking, 
 My misery sinking, 
 The cannikin clinking, 
 I'm lost to all thinking, 
 And care is a dream. 
 
 Cupid. 
 
 Provoking insolence ! &c. 
 
 One would like to know, if possible, the exact pecuniary 
 result for Chatterton of all those various exertions of his 
 during his first two busy months in London — his political 
 articles and essays, his miscellaneous poems and other literary 
 trifles contributed to magazines, and his songs and burletta for 
 Marybone Gardens. Our only data for this calculation are 
 contained in two small documents found among his papers. 
 On one scrap found in his pocket-book was the following 
 jotting — an account, as it would seem, of his earnings up to 
 the 23rd of May :— 
 
 £ s. d. 
 
 " Received to May 23, of Mr. Hamilton, for ilficZcZZesea; . . 1 11 6 
 
 ofB 12 3 
 
 „ „ of Fell for the Tlie ConsuUad (one of 
 
 Chatterton's longer satirical poems, which Fell had 
 
 apparently bought for the Freeholder's Magazine) 10 6 
 
 „ „ of Mr. Hamilton for " Candidus" and 
 
 " Foreign Journal " (paragraphs, it seems, for the 
 
 Middlesex or the Toivn and Country) 2 
 
 of Mr. Fell 10 6 
 
 „ „ Middlesex Jov/mal 8 6 
 
 „ „ Mr. Hamilton, for 16 songs . . . . 10 6 
 
 £4: 15 9" 
 
 This, probably, carries his earnings on to the end of May. The 
 other document referred to, is that already quoted, giving an 
 ironical account of the balance in his favour by Beckford's 
 death, which is estimated at 3/. 135. 6d, This, of course, 
 was but one item in his receipts for June, though probably, 
 from the nature of the topic, the most important item. On 
 the whole, remembering that during this month his earnings 
 by newspaper- writing were almost nil; and also allowing for 
 the likelihood (and there is too much reason to fear it was a 
 fact) that some of his earnings by the magazines of that month, 
 including even part of the elegiac 31. ISs. Sd. remained un- 
 paid — we shall probably be correct if we say that Chatterton^s 
 
 \ 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 293 
 
 total receipts during his first two montlis in London cannot 
 have exceeded 10?. or 121. There is a tradition, indeed, of his 
 having received five guineas for his "burletta, but we knoTv of 
 no foundation for it. 
 
 Chatterton was singularly abstemious in his personal habits. 
 He drank only water, and rarely touched meat. Even at his 
 mother's house in Bristol he would rarely eat animal food, 
 assigning as his reason that " he had work on hand and must 
 not make himself more stupid than God had made him." His 
 receipts, therefore, small as they were, would probably have 
 satisfied all his absolute wants for a considerable time. But 
 there were other respects in which he did not deny himself. 
 " I employ my money now," he writes to his sister on the 30th 
 of May, " in fitting myself fashionably, and getting into good 
 company," i.e. going to cofiee-houses, the gardens, the thea- 
 tres, &c. Add to this little tokens sent home to his mother 
 and sister ; and it will not be difficult to see how, before the 
 end of June, even without supposing any extravagance, the 
 greater part of the ten or twelve guineas earned may have 
 evaporated. Still, there is as yet no appearance of despond- 
 ency in Chatterton as to the future. What he had spent in 
 dress and " getting into good company" was sure to bring him 
 in interest ; and month after month would bring each its own 
 earnings ! If money flowed as fast as honours upon him, he 
 would give his sister a portion of 5,000Z. ! That day might be 
 still distant ; but, at least, he could look forward to the time 
 when his mother and sister should leave Bristol and join him 
 in London ; when he could take apartments for them and him- 
 self; when they should be, all three, happy together, walking out 
 on Sundays to Hampstead or Kensington; and when the heaven 
 over London should begin to glow and blush with the burning 
 beneath it of that hard-to-kindle but still surely combustible 
 river, and the whole town, his mother and sister included, 
 should gaze at the crimson air and see Ms portrait and the 
 letters T. C. freaked in keener fire in the heart of the crimson ! 
 Dream on, poor boy, for the end is not yet ! 
 
 It will have been observed that all this while, in his cease- 
 less efforts to become known in London, Chatterton made no 
 
294 CHATTERTON : 
 
 use of his antiques. Of at least one of those longer modem 
 satirical pieces which he had brought with him to town from 
 Bristol — that called The ConsuUad — he had contrived to make 
 something ; but though he must have had his tragedy of JElla 
 with him, his fragment of the tragedy of Goddwyn, his Tour- 
 nament, his Battle of Hastings, and others of his Ho wley poems, 
 he seems to have made no attempt to get them published. 
 Indeed, his only allusion, after his arrival in London, to the 
 Eowley poems, is contained in his saying to his sister that if 
 Eowley had been a Londoner, instead of a Bristowyan, he 
 could have lived by copying his works. It is possible, how- 
 ever, from his writing to his sister for his MS. glossary of 
 obsolete terms, that he may have had some scheme in his head 
 with regard to his antiques. One wonders what would have 
 been the effect if he had tried the London public with a bit of 
 his ^lla, fresh from his lodging in Brooke Street. Fancy John- 
 son, Goldy, Warton and the rest of them reading it ! The 
 London antiquarians of that day may be supposed to have 
 been to the Bristol ones, in respect of perspicacity, as hawks 
 to doves ; but what a fluttering there would have been even 
 among the hawks ! Would it have been better for Chatterton 
 had he made the attempt? Who can tell? On the one 
 hand, by refraining from it, he moved on to a fate sad enough; 
 on the other, he might have lived on a hardened literary liar. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 BROOKE STREET, HOLBORN. 
 
 Chatterton had been in his new lodging in Brooke Street 
 now about three weeks. During that time he had become 
 pretty well acquainted with his landlady, Mrs. Angell, and 
 with her husband, Frederick Angell, who was engaged in 
 some trade or business which took him from home during the 
 day, leaving his wife, and any assistants she may have had, 
 to their dress-making. Always of social habits and willing to 
 converse with those about him, he seems now and then to 
 have sat with Mr. and Mrs. Angell of an evening, talking 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 295 
 
 with them about himself, his mother and sister, and even his 
 literary plans and expectations. The impression he made 
 on these people was verj much the same as that made on the 
 Walmsleys ; except that they seem to have been somewhat 
 superior in their general notions to the Shoreditch folks, and 
 more capable of understanding what their lodger's occupa- 
 tions were. The wife said afterwards, " He was very proud, 
 but never unkind to any one;" and the husband ''always 
 considered him something wonderful," noticed that he " ap- 
 peared to be very fond of his mother and sister," and had 
 " never seen him drink anything but water." Both, however, 
 regarded him as decidedly odd, and, latterly at least, had 
 misgivings as to whether he might not one day go out of his 
 mind. Very similar were the impressions of some neighbours, 
 who were acquainted with Mrs. Angell, heard her speak of 
 her lodger, and sometimes saw him in her house, and from 
 their own windows as he went out and in. Among these there 
 was a Mrs. Wolfe, the wife of a hair-dresser who had a shop 
 in Brooke Street, three doors from Mrs. Angell's, where 
 brushes, combs, and perfumery were sold. Being an intimate 
 acquaintance of Mrs. Angell, she had seen Chatterton often, 
 and " always thought him very proud and haughty." Some- 
 times she thought him " crazed." One night, as late as twelve 
 o'clock, chancing to be out on some errand, she saw him 
 walking up and down the street, " talking loud and occasion- 
 ally stopping as if to think on something." In the same 
 street, and apparently between Mrs. Angell's door and the 
 corner of Holborn, lived a Mr. Edwin Cross, an apothecary. 
 Dropping in at his shop, Chatterton, by familiarly talking 
 with him over the counter, had, almost from the first day of 
 his residence in Brooke Street, struck up an acquaintance with 
 him. Cross, who, from his profession, was probably a man 
 of some intelligence, began to contract a real liking for him ; 
 he thought him " an astonishing genius,'^ and knew that he 
 was engaged in writing for newspapers and magazines. Before 
 he had been long in Brooke Street, it became his settled habit 
 to call and chat with Cross every time he passed his door, 
 which was usually two or three times every day. Cross 
 
296 CHATTERTOX: 
 
 observed that he seemed to know something of physic, and 
 was very fond of talking about it. 
 
 So the month of July opens ; Chatterton going out and in 
 as usual, and sitting up late at night in his room among 
 the tiles ; still in high spirits, if not so fresh as at first, and 
 still also with some money in his pocket. This last fact is 
 somewhat touchingly proved by his next letter home, dated 
 July 8th ; sent, apparently along with a box, by the Bristol 
 coach or carrier. 
 
 " Dear Mother, — I send you in the box 
 
 " Six cups and saucers, with two basins, for my sister. If a china tea-pot and 
 cream-pot is, in your opinion, necessary, I will send them ; but I am informed 
 they are unfashionable, and that the red china, which you are provided with, 
 is more in use. 
 
 "A cargo of patterns for yourself, with a snuff-box, right French, and very 
 curious in my opinion. 
 
 " Two fans : — The silver one is more grave than the other, which would suit 
 my sister best. But that I leave to you both. 
 
 " Some British herb-snuff in the box — be careful how you open it. (This I 
 omit, lest it should injure the other matters.) Some British herb-tobacco for 
 my grandmother, with a pipe. Some trifles for Thome. Be assured, when- 
 ever I have the power, my will won't be wanting to testify that I remember 
 you. Yours, 
 
 " T. Chatterton. 
 "Julys, 1770. 
 
 "N.B. — I shall forestall your intended journey and pop down upon you at 
 Christmas. 
 
 " I could have wished you had sent my red pocket-book, as 'tis very 
 material. 
 
 " I bought two very curious twisted pipes for my grandmother; but, both 
 breaking, I was afraid to buy others, lest they should break in the box, and, 
 being loose, injure the china. Have you heard anything further of the clear- 
 ance ? Direct for me, at Mrs. Angell's, sack-maker, Brooke Street, Holbom." 
 
 From his giving his address at the end of this letter, it is 
 perhaps to be inferred that he had not till now acquainted his 
 mother with his change of lodging. Probably, as we have 
 said, he still called at ^ almsley's for his letters. This would 
 account for Mrs. Ballance's knowing his state of mind on the 
 occasion of Beckford's death. 
 
 The next letter, written to his sister, three days after the 
 last, is partly a continuation of it ; but it contains some 
 references to his literary occupations of the past month, and 
 his expectations for the month just begun. 
 
 " Dear Sister, — I have sent you some china and a fan. You have your 
 choice of two. I am surprised that you chose purple and gold. [Was this for 
 the fan or for one of the promised 'silks?'] I went into the shop to buy it; 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 297 
 
 but it is the most disagreeable colour I ever saw — dead, lifeless, and inelegant. 
 Purple and pink, or lemon and pink, are more genteel and lively. Your answer 
 in this aflfair will oblige me. Be assured that I shall ever make your wants my 
 wants, and stretch to the utmost to serve you. Remember me to Miss Sand- 
 ford, Miss Rumsey, Miss Singer, &c. &c. &c. As to the songs, I have waited 
 this week for them, and have not had time to copy one perfectly. When the 
 season 's over, you will have them all in print. I had pieces last month in the 
 following magazines — Gospel Magazine, Town and Country, (viz. * Maria Friend- 
 less,' 'False Step,' 'Hunter of Oddities,' * To Miss Bush,' &c.,) Court and City, 
 London, Political Register, &c. &c. The Christian Magazine, as they are not 
 to be had perfect, are not worth buying, [This Magazine, begun in 1760, and 
 carried on till 1767, had some celebrity as having been edited by Dr. Dodd; 
 and probably his sister or some one else had been inquiring about it.] 
 
 I remain yours, 
 " July 11, 1770. " T. Chatteeton." 
 
 The next, also to his sister, is nine days later ; and it was 
 the last but one that she and her mother were to receive from 
 him. 
 
 " I am about an Oratorio, which, when finished, will purchase you a gown. 
 You may be certain of seeing me before the 1st of January, 1771. The clear- 
 ance [from Mr. Lambert] is immaterial. My mother may expect more patterns. 
 Almost all the next Town and Country Magazine is mine. I have an universal 
 acquaintance : my company is courted everywhere ; and could I humble my- 
 self to go into a compter, could have had twenty places before now. But I must 
 be among the great ; state-matters suit me better than commercial. The ladies 
 are not out of my acquaintance. I have a great deal of business now, and must 
 therefore bid you adieu. You will have a longer letter from me soon — and 
 more to the purpose. Yours, 
 
 " T. C. 
 
 " 20th July, 1770." 
 
 These three letters, giving us glimpses as thej do of Chat- 
 terton at three successive points in the month of July, carry 
 us over nearly the whole of that month. It is necessary, 
 however, to examine them a little in the light which subse- 
 quent facts cast upon them. 
 
 It is evident, at least, that in the beginning of that month, 
 Chatterton was not in want of money. The presents sent to 
 his mother, sister, and grandmother, seem to have been rather 
 costly for a youth in his circumstances ; and probably left him 
 with so little, that ^had it been known at home how dis- 
 proportionate to his means had been this proof of his affec- 
 tion, the pleasure in receiving it would have been mixed with 
 anxiety and fear. Clearly, however, from the first, it was Chat- 
 terton's pride to convey to his mother and sister the idea that 
 he was getting on splendidly ; and probably it was part of his 
 chief delight in sending the presents, to fancy how they woidd 
 
298 CHATTERTON I 
 
 be exhibited on the widow's table to her acquaintances, — how 
 Lambert, Barrett, Catcott, and the rest would hear of them, 
 and what inferences, reflecting on their own inability to appre- 
 ciate a youth of genius, these Bristol pettifoggers would draw 
 from them ! Still, great as were Chatterton's affection and 
 pride, it is not to be conceived that he would have actually 
 impoverished himself in gratifying them, unless at the time 
 he had been convinced that he had such prospects of con- 
 tinued work as could at least supply him with what was 
 absolutely necessary for his own subsistence. Unfortunately, 
 when we look carefully at the second and third letters, we 
 begin to perceive a kind of consciousness creeping through, 
 that he had, at the time of writing the first, been too sanguine 
 in this respect. There are the same bragging generalities as 
 in the earlier letters of May and June — extremely " busy," 
 " an universal acquaintance," " his company courted every- 
 where," and the like ; but there is no such profuse mention as 
 in these earlier letters of specific shifts and contrivances in 
 reserve against the coming weeks, and of actual engagements 
 on hand. He tells of his great doings in last month's 
 magazines ; but when he condescends on the business of the 
 month then passing, all that he says is, that his songs, which 
 he had expected to see in copper-plate by this time, were still 
 not out ; that he had begun an oratorio ; and that Hamilton 
 had so much of his copy that nearly the whole of the forth- 
 coming Town and Country Magazine would be his. We hear 
 nothing of farther work for the Middlesex Journal^ for the 
 Political Register, for the London Museum, or any of the other 
 periodicals. In short, it is too plain that, by the end of July, 
 Chatterton is in want of work and begins to know it. 
 
 One can see various reasons why Chatterton should some- 
 what suddenly have found himself in this predicament, 
 without resorting to the supposition — though there may be 
 something in that too — that he and his bookselling patrons 
 were not on such good terms as at first, and that, by his 
 incessant calling upon them, he had begun to be regarded by 
 them as a bore. 
 
 The months of July and August, we should think, were 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 299 
 
 then, even more than now, about the slackest portions of the 
 London year; and in the year 1770 they seem to have been 
 even slacker than usual. It was the season of the Parliamentary 
 recess, and of the hot summer weather, when all who were 
 not absolutely tied to town were away taking their holiday. 
 Wilkes and his family, we find, were off to a watering-place 
 on the southern coast, en route for the Continent. And so with 
 other families in the same station — some north, some west, 
 some south, according to their tastes and opportunitieSi The 
 Margate hoys were in full activity, conveying their annual 
 freights of sea-sick London tradesmen, and their wives and 
 children, and packets of unnecessary sandwiches, to that 
 greedy coast-town of Kent, where the lodging-house keepers 
 had already raised their prices, and the bathing-machines 
 were out on the beach, and all the shop-windows were ex- 
 hibiting their plates of boiled prawns and shrimps, and the 
 dancing saloons and petty theatres were in full play. Even 
 men who were never happy out of the London streets, 
 yielded to custom and forsook them now. The taverns and 
 coffee-houses had little to do. The clubs were all broken up, 
 and their scattered atoms were wandering melancholy among 
 green fields, smelling the fresh hay, amusing the farmers by 
 their ignorance of crops, and saying it was so pleasant to get 
 away from town, but really longing for the time when they 
 should again come together in their familiar rooms in the 
 courts round about Temple Bar, and sit down, reconstituted 
 for another year, to their punch, their gossip, and their oysters. 
 
 So it was with the famous club of the Turk's Head, 
 Gerard Street. Where Garrick, Burke, and Sir Joshua Eey- 
 nolds, and the rest of the club were rusticating, we do not 
 know; but we can trace the great Doctor Samuel, and his 
 dear familiar Goldy. 
 
 Johnson, whom Bozzy had left with regret in the previous 
 November, in order to go back to Scotland and settle down as 
 a married man, had produced nothing this year except his 
 Tory pamphlet on the Wilkes question, entitled The False 
 Alarm ; the eficct of which had been to procure him no end of 
 abuse from the Opposition writers, and to fill the Opposition 
 
300 CHATTERTON : 
 
 papers with paragraplis about liis pension. In the midst of this 
 unpopularity he had been living on as usual, and making pre- 
 parations for a new edition of his " Shakespeare." But in the 
 end of June, — the poet Akenside had died on the 23rd of that 
 month, and his body was then lying in its coffin in his house 
 in Burlington Street, — he did as others were doing and went 
 out of town. His purpose was to visit his native Lichfield, 
 and other parts of the midland counties. During a con- 
 siderable portion of the month of July he was at Lichfield, 
 whence, as we learn from Mr. Croker, he wrote two letters to 
 Mrs. Thrale at Streatham. In one of these, dated the 11th of 
 July — the day on which Chatterton wrote the second of the 
 foregoing letters from Brooke Street — we find him informing 
 Mrs. Thrale that he was going about in his native town, 
 '' not wholly unaffected by the revolutions " that had taken 
 place in it since he remembered it, and, in particular, taking 
 considerable interest in a book recently found by Mr. Greene, 
 an apothecary of the town, which showed " who paid levies 
 in our parish, and how much they paid, above an hundred 
 years ago.^' " Many families," he says, " that paid the parish 
 rates are now extinct, like the race of Hercules. Pulvis et 
 umbra sumns. What is nearest touches us most. The pas- 
 sions rise higher at domestic than at imperial tragedies. ^^ 
 Thus moralizing about Lichfield and its vicinity, the ponder- 
 ous and noble man remained out of town apparently about 
 three months in all ; for it is not till the 2 1 st of September 
 that we are sure of his being again back in his well-known 
 quarters in Johnson's Court. 
 
 Dm-ing a portion, at least, of this same period. Goldsmith 
 was also absent from them. His Deserted Village had ap- 
 peared this year, on the 26th of May, and may, therefore, have 
 been read by Chatterton during the first week of his residence 
 in Brooke Street. Three new editions were called for in the 
 course of June ; and it was with the pathos of that exquisite 
 poem fresh in his heart, and its pictures of rural peace and 
 beauty in contrast with the crowded anguish of cities, still 
 vivid in his fancy, that Goldsmith, in the middle of July, 
 permitted himself to be taken off on a short continental tour, 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 301 
 
 as one of a party made up by liis friends the Miss Hor necks. 
 Precisely at the time when Chatterton was writing his last 
 letters home, and beginning to see want staring him in the 
 face, was this kindest of Irish hearts taking leave for a while 
 of Brick Court, Fleet Street, and all its pleasant cares. Ah, 
 me ! so very kind a heart was that, that one feels as if, when 
 it left London, Chatterton's truest hope was gone. Goldsmith 
 never saw Chatterton ; but one feels as if, had he remained in 
 London, Chatterton would have been more safe. Surely — 
 even if by some express electric communication, shot, at the 
 moment of utmost need, under the very stones and pavements 
 that intervened between the two spots — the agony pent up in 
 that garret in Brooke Street, where the gaunt despairing lad 
 was walking to and fro, would have made itself felt in the 
 chamber in Brick Court ; the tenant of that chamber would 
 have been seized by a restlessness and a creeping sense of 
 some horror near ; he would have hurried out, led, nay 
 driven, by an invisible power, and, by the grace of God, 
 Brick Court and Brooke Street would have come together! 
 O, the hasty excited gait of Goldsmith as he turned into 
 Brooke Street : the knock ; the rush upstairs ; the garret-door 
 burst open ; the arms of a friend thrown round the friendless 
 youth ; the gush of tears over him and with him ; the pride 
 melted out of the youth at once and for ever ; the joy over 
 a young soul saved! Phantasy all, phantasy all! What 
 might have been is one thing ; what has been is another. In 
 those late days of July, when Chatterton was beginning 
 to foresee the worst, Oliver Goldsmith, having escaped the 
 little mishaps of his journey, in the society of the " Jessamy 
 Bride," and her sister, from London to Dover, from Dover to 
 Calais, from Calais to Lille, and from Lille to Paris, was 
 going about in Paris seeing the sights, but longing, even in 
 such sweet company, to be back in London again, and getting 
 very nervous on account of his arrears of work. He was in 
 Paris on the 29th of July, and remained there some time. 
 Latterly the party was joined by a person who rather spoiled 
 the pleasure of it for poor Goldy — a certain coarse attorney, 
 Mr. Hickey ; who would persist in quizzing him before the 
 
302 CHATTERTON ! 
 
 ladies, and who afterwards brought home the story that, when 
 the party went to Versailles, Goldy, in order to prove himself 
 right in saying that a certain distance beyond one of the 
 fountains was within a leap, actually took the leap and fell 
 into the water. All August, Goldy had to bear his absence 
 from London, the thought of his arrears of work, and the 
 jokes of Mr. Hickey. Not till the first week in September 
 was he back in town. 
 
 Well, but though Goldsmith, Johnson, Wilkes, the legis- 
 lators of the country, and all the families of the wealthier 
 tradesmen were out of town on their annual holiday, the 
 town was not empty. A huge host of citizens of all classes 
 remained behind on duty, tiding over the languid season as 
 best they could ; keeping their windows open to abate the 
 heat of the afternoon sun as it beat on the brick houses, and 
 strolling out of an evening, if they could, to enjoy the cooler 
 air of the parks, and the green suburbs round. And these, 
 of course, still constituted " the town ; " and " the town," 
 even in the languid season, will have its excitements and its 
 topics of gossip. Thus, in London, in the months of July 
 and August 1770, though there was a comparative lull in 
 politics, consequent on the preternatural excitement of the 
 first half of the year, there was still matter of interest fot 
 the newsmongers. On the 29th of June, Alderman Treco- 
 thick had been elected, after a somewhat brisk contest in the 
 city, to succeed Beckford in the Mayoralty ; and on the 12th 
 of July, Beckford's place, as representative of the city in 
 Parliament, was filled up, after similar opposition, by the 
 election, in the old city fashion, of Alderman Oliver. These 
 elections, affbrding room as they did for new trials of 
 strength between the Wilkesites and the Court party, were 
 not regarded with indifierence ; and indeed it was not till the 
 second of the two was over that Wilkes himself left town. 
 Then, there was a good deal of interest among the city 
 people about a proposed statue to Beckford ; and motion after 
 motion on the subject was discussed at the common council. 
 The trial of Mr. Miller, of the London Evening Post, for 
 re-publishing Junius's letter, did not come on till the 13th 
 

 A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 303 
 
 of July, and gave rise to new arguments respecting the 
 liberty of the press, and the conduct of Lord Mansfield. A 
 trial of a different character, and far more piquant for the 
 town at large, was that of his Eoyal Highness the Duke 
 of Cumberland, on an action for damages brought against 
 him by the husband of a certain lady of high rank. The 
 jury awarded 10,000Z. of damages, greatly to the delight of 
 the town. For many weeks the newspapers, other matters not 
 being abundant, lived on this trial, reporting the proceedings 
 at great length, commenting on them, and printing piece by 
 piece the letters that had passed between the aristocratic 
 lovers. When cloyed with this delicious literature, citizens 
 and their apprentices who were in search of amusement 
 could avail themselves of the Haymarket and Sadler's 
 Wells Theatres, or of one or other of the public gardens. 
 Foote at the Haymarket was drawing crowds by his Lame 
 Lover ; and at the Marybone Gardens, the favourite pieces 
 were The Magic Girdle, and Serva Padrona. By way of 
 morning relish after such evening dissipations, the citizens 
 could hear of robberies committed over-night, and particu- 
 larly of robberies of the post-boys carrying the mail-bags to 
 and from London. Robberies of this class were unusually 
 common at the time, so that the post-boys never set out 
 without making up their minds to the chance of meeting a 
 highwayman. One post-boy who was robbed, the papers 
 informed their readers, was fifty years of age. 
 
 Attending to all this news from Ms hot lodging in narrow 
 Brooke Street, with a view to extract occupation for his pen 
 out of it, Chatterton, as we have said, had begun to find the 
 task a very hard one. No doubt he went about the streets 
 with his eyes and ears open, and entered the cofi*ee-houses 
 to see what he could pick up there in the shape of informa- 
 tion or suggestion. No doubt he called frequently at the 
 office of the Middlesex Journal, and made proposals to 
 Bingley of the North Briton for essays in lieu of the can- 
 celled one on Beckford, and similar proposals to the London 
 Museum, the Court and City Magazine, and the Political 
 Register. But, whether it was that some of the printers and 
 
304 CHATTERTON : 
 
 editors were out of town, or that they were overstocked 
 already and disposed to retrench, or that they had ceased to 
 care for having Chatterton's contributions in particular, cer- 
 tain it is that all these efforts were fruitless. On the Town 
 and Country Magazine alone had he any hold. ** Almost all 
 the next Town and Country Magazine is mine," he says to his 
 sister on the 20th of July ; and this is in reality the sum-total 
 of his literary dependence for that month. We have looked 
 over the July number of the Magazine, in order to verify 
 the statement. The following is a list of its contents : — 
 
 "1. state of Europe for July; 2. * Character of Eolus, by a Hunter of 
 Oddities ; 3. Anecdote of Young Reynard ; 4. An original letter from a Tutor to 
 
 his r ^1 pupil ; 5. Letter from an Irish Fortune-hunter ; 6. History of the 
 
 T^te-^-tete, or Memoirs of Tom Tilbury, &c. ; 7. Amusing and instructive 
 Questions ; 8. Remonstrance from the Secretary of the Female Coterie ; 9. Par- 
 ticular Details in the Trials of the Printers for publishing Junius's Letter; 
 10. Sergeant Glynn's Argument (in the same case) at large ; 11. Lord Mans- 
 field's Charge (in the same case); 12. The Folly of Despair — a moral Tale; 
 13. The Danger of Deceit; 14. Singular Resolution of a Married Lady; 15. 
 The Theatre, No. XVIIL ; 16. A most comic Scene from th.Q Lame Lover ; 
 
 17. Trial of his R. H. the Duke of C ; 18. Letters of the D of C 
 
 and Lady ; 19. Mr. Wedderburne's Argument and Mr. Dunning's Reply ; 
 
 20. Charge on a late remarkable Trial ; 21, The Gardener's Kalendar for July ; 
 22. Character of Peter the Great ; 23. Reflections on the Characters of Caesar 
 and Addison ; 24. *Memoirs of a Sad Dog, Part I. ; 25. *The Polite Advertiser, 
 
 by Sip Butterfly Feather ; 26. A Defence of Lady , by a Member of the 
 
 Female Coterie ; 27. Experiments on certain Dissolvents for the Stone ; 28. 
 Account of New Books, &c. ; 29. Mathematical Questions and Answers ; 30. 
 Poetical Pieces; 31. Foreign Afiairs; 32. Domestic Intelligence; 33. Births, 
 Marriages, Deaths, Bankrupts, &c. &c." 
 
 Of these articles, only the three which we have marked 
 with asterisks, are identified as Chatterton's by the editors 
 of his Remains. It is possible, however, that he wrote some 
 of the others. Still, on any supposition, his contributions to 
 the number form but a small proportion of the entire con- 
 tents. This fact may, to some extent, be reconciled with his 
 statement, in anticipation, to his sister, by supposing that, 
 though he had supplied Hamilton with copy enough to fill 
 a much larger space in the Magazine, Hamilton had, con- 
 trary to expectations, published only a small portion of it, 
 and reserved the rest for future numbers. It is certain, at 
 least, that papers by Chatterton did continue to appear 
 at intervals in the future numbers of that year. Thus, 
 in the August number (published, it must be remembered, 
 
 \ 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. S05 
 
 on the last day of August) , there appeared not only the second 
 part of the Memoirs of a Sad Dog, but also a paper on The 
 Origin^ Nature, and Design of Sculpture, to accompany an 
 engraving of a design for Beckford's statue, and a tale called 
 Tony Selwood, both written by Chatterton. These, we ima- 
 gine, with other pieces published still later, were all in Hamil- 
 ton's hands in time for the July number ; but he divided the 
 Sad Dog into two, so as not to give the public too much of 
 him at a time ; and he found it convenient to postpone the rest. 
 The Memoirs of a Sad Dog, as being one of the largest of 
 Chatterton's prose pieces, and as having been written at the 
 period when he was beginning to despond, deserve some 
 notice. They are the imaginary autobiography, in brief, of 
 one Harry Wildfire, who, having been left five thousand 
 pounds by his frugal father, sets about spending it as a fast 
 man. First he lost one of his thousands in gambling ; and 
 the remainder soon went in successive debaucheries. Ke- 
 duced to his last penny, he then throws himself on his 
 brother-in-law, Sir Stentor Eanger, a country knight, whose 
 ideas are limited to horses, but who, having some rough, 
 natural kindliness, forthwith instals his reprobate relative in 
 the post of chief of his stables. Sir Stentor sometimes has 
 visitors at his old place, and among these is " the redoubted 
 Baron Otranto" of antiquarian celebrity ; who, poking about 
 the house, falls in with what he considers a remarkable 
 curiosity in the shape of a stone with an old inscription in 
 Gothic letters. This he deciphers with great pains as " Hie 
 jacet,'' the " corpus'' of somebody or other of the thirteenth 
 century ; the fact, known to all the stable-boys, being that the 
 stone was taken from a neighbouring churchyard, and was 
 nothing more than the memorial of an honest couple, James 
 Hicks and his wife. After living with Sir Stentor two 
 years, and making some money on the turf, Wildfire recom- 
 mences his old career, and carries it on till he is again 
 ruined, when, as a last shift, he comes to town, and betakes 
 himself to literature. At the moment of his writing his sad 
 relation, he says he is " throned in a broken chair within an 
 inch of a thunder-cloud." Such is the story. The writing 
 
 X 
 
306 CHATTERTON : 
 
 is slipshod in the extreme, and the spirit deplorably coarse ; 
 nor is there any merit in the construction. The sole interest 
 it has consists in a certain evidence it furnishes of rough 
 satirical force, and in an occasional passage, like that on 
 Walpole, bearing on the author's own life and circumstances. 
 Thus, the hero, after describing one of his periods of good 
 fortune, breaks out in mock heroics as follows : — 
 
 " But, alas ! happiness is of short duration ; or, to speak in the language of 
 the high-sounding Ossian, * Behold thou art happy ; but soon, ah ! soon, wUt 
 thou be miserable. Thou art as easy and tranqml as the face of the green- 
 mantled puddle ; but soon, ah ! soon, wilt thou be tumbled and tossed by 
 misfortvmes, like the stream of the water-mill. Thou art beautiful as the 
 Cathedral of Canterbury ; but soon wilt thou be deformed like Chinese palace- 
 paling. So the sun, rising in the east, gilds the borders of the black mountains, 
 and laces with his golden rays the dark-brown heath. The hind leaps over the 
 flowery lawn, and the reeky bull rolls in the bubbling brook. The wild boar 
 makes ready his armour of defence. The inhabitants of the rocks dance, and 
 all nature joins in the song. But see ! riding on the wings of the wind, the 
 black clouds fly. The noisy thunders roar ; the rapid lightnings gleam ; the 
 rainy torrents pour ; and the dropping swain flies over the mountain, swift as 
 Bickerstaff", the son of song, when the monster Bumbailiano, keeper of the 
 dark and black cave, pursued him over the hills of death, and the green 
 meadows of dark men.' Oh, Ossian ! immortal genius ! what an invocation 
 could I make now ! But I shall leave it to the abler pen of Mr. Dufi", and spin 
 out the thread of my own adventures." 
 
 The conclusion of the piece is even more specific. Mr. 
 Wildfire, from his " broken chair within an inch of the 
 thunder-cloud," thus details his brief experience as an author 
 in London : — 
 
 " The first fruits of my pen were a political essay, and a piece of poetry. 
 The first I carried to a patriotic bookseller, who is, in his own opinion, of 
 much consequence to the cause of liberty ; and the poetry was left with an- 
 other of the same tribe, who made bold to make it a means of pufiing his 
 magazine, but refused any gratuity. Mr. Britannicus [Bingley of the North 
 Briton ?], at first imagining that the piece was not to be paid for, was lavish of 
 his praises, and, I might depend upon it, it should do honour to his flaming 
 patriotic paper ; but when he was told that I expected some recompense, he 
 assumed an air of criticism, and begged my pardon ; he did not know the 
 circumstance, and really he did not think it good language or sound reason- 
 ing ! — I was not discouraged by the objections and criticisms of the bookselling 
 tribe ; and, as I knew the art of Curlism pretty well, I made a tolerable hand 
 of it. But, Mr. Printer, the late prosecution against the booksellers having 
 frightened them all out of their patriotism, I am necessitated either to write 
 for the entertainment of the public or in defence of the ministry. As I have 
 some little remains of conscience, the latter is not very agreeable. Political 
 writing of either side of the question is of little service to the entertainment 
 or instruction of the reader. Abuse and scurrility are generally the chief 
 figures in the language of party. I am not of the opinion of those authors 
 who deem eveiy man in place a rascal, and every man out of place a patriot. 
 Permit this, then, to appear in your universally -admired magazine ; it may 
 give some entertainment to your readers and a dinner to 
 
 " Your humble servant, 
 
 ** Harry Wildfire." 
 

 A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 307 
 
 This, we fear, was but too true a description of Chat- 
 terton's own circumstances wliile he was writing. He too 
 was " throned on a broken chair within an inch of a thunder- 
 cloud," and had come to the extremity when too literally the 
 purpose of giving entertainment to his readers was bound up 
 with that of obtaining means for his own next dinner. But 
 it was not, as in the case of his imaginary hero, " the 
 monster Bumbailiano," that was pursuing him over the hills 
 of death, and the green meadows of dark men. It was a 
 more fearful monster still — the monster Want, without any 
 bailiff as harbinger. No imaginary five thousand pounds had 
 he wasted ; no writs were out against Mm ; else, probably, — 
 for Debt, though negative property, still is a kind of property, 
 and functions as such to the advantage of its possessor, — it 
 might have been better for him ! He was but a poor widow's 
 son of Bristol, who had been working like a slave for three 
 months in London to obtain the barest livelihood, and now 
 found that even that was failing him. 
 
 Hamilton, at best, must have been a stingy paymaster. 
 Judging from the rate of his previous payments — two 
 shillings for two paragraphs, and half-a-guinea for sixteen 
 songs — Chatterton's receipts from him for his July contri- 
 butions can have gone but a very little way ; even if they 
 had not been spent in anticipation before the month was 
 over. It seems clear enough, too, that if Hamilton did pay 
 punctually, according to his miserable tariff, he was resolute 
 against solicitations for an advance on the faith of future work, 
 or even of manuscript on hand. Accordingly, during the 
 latter half of July, we are to fancy Chatterton almost at his 
 last shilling. One day during that month — we imagine it 
 shortly after he had sent off the presents to his mother and 
 sister, if indeed it was not while he was packing up those 
 presents — he went into Mrs. Wolfe's shop to buy some curls 
 which he had seen in her window, and which he said he 
 wanted to send to his sister; but, on hearing the price, 
 he could not pay it, and "went away seemingly much 
 mortified." This argues that, when he had sent off the 
 presents, he was left with next to nothing. He did contrive, 
 
 x2 
 
308 CHATTERTOX : 
 
 however, during that month, and indeed to the last, to pay 
 his landlady regularly for his room ; preferring, as a matter 
 of course, that the deficit, if their must be one, should be 
 in his own actual food. No visits any longer to the theatres 
 and the gardens ; visits to the coffee-houses, if made at all, 
 conducted on the most parsimonious scale ; no purchases of 
 articles of dress, as at first ; his very shoes, if we could see 
 the soles, worn through, so that the dust gets in as he 
 walks, and if it rains his feet are wet! As he walks out, 
 it is this consciousness of his shuffling and poverty-stricken 
 appearance that most distresses him ; and it is part of his 
 meditations, as people pass him, whether they remark it. 
 Probably what he cares far less about is that, in the privacy 
 of his lodging, he lives on bread and water. But his land- 
 lady, aware of the full extent of his poverty, has noted this 
 circumstance as the most symptomatic of all. She has even 
 ascertained that he always buys his loaves, one of which 
 lasts him for a week, " as stale as possible," that they may 
 ** last the longer." Moved by this and by other observations 
 of the same kind, she ventures one day, when he is paying her 
 his rent, and when she knows that he has no money at all left, 
 to offer him back sixpence. He refused to take it, saying 
 with some anger, and pointing to his forehead, *'I have 
 that here which will get me more." Cross, the apothecary, 
 also notices when he calls upon him, that his appearance 
 betokens extreme want. Indeed, he learns from Chatterton 
 himself that Mr. Hamilton, who is now his chief reliance, is 
 " using him very badly ;^' {. e., as we suppose, either will not 
 pay him for articles already contributed, or will not let him 
 have a farthing in advance. Cross, as delicately as possible, 
 invites him again and again to take a meal with himself and 
 Mrs. Cross ; but " he was so proud," that he never could get 
 him to do so, and even feared giving him offence by repeat- 
 ing the invitation. He had come more and more to like him, 
 and to enjoy his chats twice a day with him over the 
 counter; on which occasions, as he afterwards told Warton, 
 ^' his conversation, a little infidelity excepted, was most 
 captivating." 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 309 
 
 And so out and in, out and in, during all the late days of 
 July, wanders the poor youth, growing daily more wan and 
 haggard ; out in the morning, or about mid-day, on his 
 daily round among the publishing and editorial offices near, 
 the doors of which begin to be shut against him ; or farther 
 still, on his aimless ramble into the suburbs and the seques- 
 tered places of the parks, where methinks I sometimes see 
 him weeping under trees ; and then, fatigued and fevered, 
 back again in the evening to his lodging, where, with his 
 stale loaf and a mug of water beside him, he sits up nearly 
 all night, scribbling hopelessly his Harry Wildfires and his 
 Tony Selwoods, or sometimes merely gazing hour after hour 
 at the empty grate. Mrs. Angell " frequently found his bed 
 untouched in the morning when she went to make it." The 
 biographers of Schiller tell how persons, going to a kind of 
 bank or high gTound behind the poet's house at Weimar, 
 could see him stalking up and down in his lighted room till 
 long after midnight, engaged in poetical composition, every 
 now and then sitting down to write what he had just com- 
 pleted in thought, and helping himself freely to wine, or 
 to coffee with wine in it, to maintain his phrenzy. Had the 
 watchman of Brooke Street stood opposite that window 
 among the tiles, the light of which he must have noticed 
 burning so long after all the others were dark, he, too, might 
 have seen the shadow of a poet pass and repass. But there 
 was a difference between the two cases. In the one, it is a 
 famous and noble man, to whose nerves the world will 
 willingly permit wine or spices, or whatever else may be 
 necessary that they may thrill ecstatically ; in the other, it is 
 a poor boy, not yet eighteen, living on a crust and water, and 
 writing that he may get more of that. There he sits ! The 
 short July night passes ; the light of the morning breaks over 
 the city, paling that by which he is writing ; he looks up to 
 be aware that another day has come, that people are moving 
 about the streets, and that the sparrows are chirping along 
 the eaves ! 
 
 July is gone, and it is now the month of August. There 
 is no better hope. Indeed, the prospect is worse. The last 
 
310 CHATTERTON : 
 
 driblet of money from Hamilton, on account of July, is 
 exhausting itself as former driblets had done ; and, Hamilton 
 having already enough of his copy on hand, there is no 
 demand for any new copy for the August number of the 
 Town and Country. All other magazines and periodicals are 
 closed as before. If he writes at all, it must be on pure 
 speculation, or for the mere sake of writing. 
 
 So much, probably, had become known to him before 
 August was ten days old. Mercifully it is not given to us to 
 know the history of those ten days. Out and in, out and in, 
 every day twenty-four hours long, and each of these hours 
 to be gone through somewhere and somehow, that is the 
 substance of the history, even if it could be told. Cross, 
 who could now see that his visitor was " half-starving," and 
 to whom he is more confidential about his circumstances 
 than to any one else, takes the opportunity of recommending 
 him to return to Bristol. *' He only heaved a deep sigh," 
 said Cross, " and begged me with tears in his eyes never to 
 mention the hated name again." There is indeed something 
 unaccountably stubborn in his determination not to ask any 
 assistance from that quarter. One would think that a letter 
 to Catcott or even to Cary, stating the actual truth, would 
 have had some result ; not to say that, poor as his mother 
 was, it was certainly within her power, if even by selling 
 what he had sent her and other things, to have sent him a 
 sum sufficient to prevent the worst. But he has ceased to 
 write home, and they can only guess what he is doing. 
 Eather than that the truth should be known in Bristol, and 
 that, after all his boasting, the jest should go round among 
 his friends there of his total failure, he will die of starvation ! 
 
 One effect, however, Cross's recommendation seems to have 
 produced. The thought, we have seen, of obtaining a clerk's 
 place or some similar situation in a counting-house in London, 
 had more than once occurred to him ; and also the thought 
 of getting some kind of appointment that would take him 
 abroad. To this last notion in a somewhat modified form he 
 now returns. Fond, when in Bristol, of reading medical 
 books, which Barrett used to lend him, he had picked up, as he 
 
I 
 
 A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 311 
 
 thought himself, a considerable smattering of medical know- 
 ledge ; and much of his talk with Cross was about physic. 
 In consequence perhaps of something that passed in these 
 conversations, it appeared to Chatterton that it might be 
 possible for him to get an appointment as surgeon or 
 surgeon's mate on board of some ship. How he proposed 
 to manage it, we cannot say ; but in those days ^' the ex- 
 perienced surgeons" that ships, and especially African ships, 
 carried, were probably, in many cases, without the qualifi- 
 cation of a diploma. Chatterton, at all events, was prepared 
 to doctor any crew that would take him. As a first step 
 towards trying for such an appointment, he thoiight it worth 
 while to apply to Barrett for some kind of certificate or testi- 
 monial which he might show to owners of vessels. This he 
 appears to have done directly in a letter sent to Barrett ; but 
 he also did it indirectly in the course of a letter to Catcott, 
 written on the 12th of August. The second letter is extant. 
 It is evidently an answer to one which Catcott had sent 
 to him. 
 
 "London, August 12, 1770. 
 
 *'SlR, — A correspondent from Bristol had raised my admiration to the 
 highest pitch, by informing me that an appearance of spirit and generosity had 
 crept into the niches of avarice and meanness — ^that the murderer of Newton, 
 Ferguson, [James Ferguson, the mechanician, who had written a popular work 
 simplifying Newton's Philosophy ?] had met with every encouragement that 
 ignorance could bestow ; that an episcopal palace was to be erected for the 
 enemy of the whore of Babylon, and the present turned into a stable for the 
 ten-headed beast ; that a spire was to be patched to St. Mary Redclifife, and the 
 streets kept cleaner; with many other impossibilites. But, when Mr. Catcott 
 (the Champion of Bristol) doubts it, it may be doubted. Your description of 
 the intended steeple struck me. I have seen it, but not as the invention of 
 
 Mr. . All that he can boast is Gothicizing it. Give yourself the trouble to 
 
 send to Mr. Weobley's, Holborn, for a view of the Church of St. Mary de la 
 Annunciation, at Madrid, and you will see a spire almost the parallel of what 
 you describe. The conduct of is no more than what I expected. I had re- 
 ceived information that he was absolutely engaged in the defence of the 
 ministry, and had a pamphlet on the stocks which was to have been paid with 
 a translation [i.e. to a new see; for it is clearly Dr. Newton, Bishop of Bristol, 
 that is meant.] In consequence of this information, I inserted the following 
 paragraph in one of my * Exhibitions ' [newspaper-squibs so named] : — * Reve- 
 lation unravelled by : The ministry are indefatigable in establishing 
 
 themselves ; they spare no expense so long as the expense does not lie upon 
 them. This piece represents the tools of the Administration offering the 
 Doctor a pension, or translation, to new model his treatise on the Revelation, 
 and to prove Wilkes to be an Atheist.' 
 
 " The Editor of Baddeley's Bath Journal has done me the honour to murder 
 most of my hieroglyphics, that they may be abbreviated for his paper. What- 
 ever may be the political sentiments of your inferior clergy, their superiors 
 
312 chatterton': 
 
 are all flamingly ministerial. Should your scheme for a single r6w of houses 
 in Bridge Street take place, conscience must tell you that Bristol will owe even 
 that beauty to avarice; since the absolute impossibility of finding tenants 
 for a double row is the only occasion of your having but one. The Gothic 
 dome I mentioned was not designed by Hogarth. I have no great opinion of 
 him out of his ludicrous walk ; here he was undoubtedly inimitable. It was 
 designed by the great Cipriani. The following description may give you a 
 faint idea of it. From an hexagonal spiral tower (such as I believe Redcliflfe 
 is) rose a similar palisado of Gothic pillars, three at a cluster in every angle, 
 but single and at equal distance in angular spaces. The pillars were trifoliated 
 (as Rowlie terms it), and supported by a majestic oval dome, not absolutely 
 circular (that would not be Gothic), but terminating in a point, surmounted 
 with a cross, and on the top of the cross a globe. The last two ornaments may 
 perhaps throw you into a fit of religious reflection, and give rise to many 
 pious reflections. Heaven send you the comforts of Christianity ! / request 
 them not; for I am no Christian. . . . 
 
 " I intend going abroad as a surgeon. Mr. Barrett has it in his power to 
 assist me greatly by his giving me a physical character. I hope he will. I 
 trouble you with a copy of an Essay I intend publishing. 
 
 *' I remain your much obliged humble Servant, 
 
 " Thomas Chatterton. 
 
 " Direct to me at Mrs. Angell's, sack-maker, Brooke Street, Holbom." 
 
 Aha ! What words were these that one heard ? " Heaven 
 send yon the comforts of Christianity ! I request them not ; for 
 I am no Christian !" The whole letter, with its hollow mock- 
 ing bitterness, and its cool architectural details penned by one 
 who knew himself to be on the brink of starvation, has for 
 us an air of horrible irony ; but these words, flung into it so 
 carelessly, complete the impression, and convert the horrible 
 into the ghastly. 
 
 " I am no Christian." The words are simple, strong, and 
 straightforward. What do they mean ? They mean that he, 
 a youth of seventeen years and nine months, born in a town 
 in the west of England, bred up there as an attorney's clerk, 
 and now lodged in a London garret, without food to eat, has, 
 by dint of reading and reflection, come to the conclusion that 
 the Divine One who died in Judasa eighteen hundred years ago, 
 and whom all the generations of men in the fairest lands of the 
 world since have been worshiping as the Son of God, and 
 building temples to, and believing in as their Lord and Saviour, 
 was in reality no such thing or being, but, at the utmost, a 
 wise and holy Jew ! They mean that he, this same English 
 stripling, has, in virtue of this conclusion, come to regard all 
 that part of the past history of eighteen centuries which had 
 proceeded on the belief in Christianity, as so much human 
 

 A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 313 
 
 action, grand perhaps in itself, but done in pursuit of an illu- 
 sion ! They mean that, looking about him upon all the appa- 
 ratus of bishops, churches, and schools established in the 
 service of this belief, he could view it with a smile, as a fabric 
 with no foundation, piled up by ancient zeal, and cemented by 
 time, custom, and the necessities of social arrangement ! They 
 mean that, remembering the names of great men recently or 
 anciently dead, who had nourished their souls in this belief, 
 and clung to it through grown manhood to grey old age, and 
 died serene in it, and left their testimonies to it as their 
 most solemn words to the world, he could yet account for all 
 this to himself by supposing that these men were and would 
 have been noble anyhow, and that the special form of their 
 nobility alone was due to this intense grasp they had taken of 
 Humanity^ s largest hallucination ! They mean more ! They 
 mean that he, the boy of Bristol, was decidedly of opinion, 
 with Voltaire and others, that, though the earth had rolled on 
 for ages, a brown ball spinning in the azure, and freighted 
 with beings capable of weal and woe, all longing, as by the 
 one sole law of their constitution, to hear some voice from 
 behind the azure, no such voice had really spoken, nor any 
 tongue of light from the outer realms of mystery ever struck 
 the surface of the planet, either in Judaea or elsewhere ! They 
 mean that the world did not seem to him at all to rest certainly 
 on any rule of love ; but to be possibly only an aggregate of 
 beings, more or less clever, more or less miserable, and more 
 or less rich, jostling together and working on to some end, 
 though no one could say what ! They mean that in the matter 
 even of Immortality, or a future world in continuation of this, 
 he had no absolute certainty ; that sometimes he might have 
 a glimpse of such immortality as possible, but that again the 
 glimpse would vanish quite, and it would seem to him that 
 when a man died there might very well be an end of him, and 
 that, should the earth itself ever meet a sufficient catastrophe 
 to destroy all the life upon it at once, there would be some risk 
 of an end to the race too, and to all the accumulated memories 
 and maxims of its sages and Shakespeares, and all the vast 
 lore of its libraries ! Sometimes, indeed, he might have his 
 
314 CHATTERTON : 
 
 new doubts on this, and might think both of individual life 
 as continued, and of the collective wisdom of the world as safe 
 against any catastrophe, and sure, should the earth itself be 
 cracked in pieces or shrivelled to a scroll, to take wing else- 
 whither at the moment of the last shriek, and prolong itself 
 somewhere and somehow to the further issues of the Universe! 
 But, at all events, for the Heaven and Hell of the Christian 
 he could have no belief left ; and if a poor wretch, weary of 
 the world, did think fit to kill himself, his soul, if he had one, 
 could fare none the worse in the future life for the one act of 
 rushing suddenly into it ! 
 
 There is abundant proo# in scores of passages in Chatterton's 
 writings, and in his recorded conversations with his friends 
 among the young men of Bristol, that, after the peculiarities 
 of that coarse and scoffing fashion of infidelity which had 
 crept over so much of English society in his day, and which 
 was represented in such men as Wilkes, he had substantially 
 accustomed himself to the above method of regarding the 
 Christian religion. It is unnecessary to multiply quotations 
 to illustrate his way of speaking of Methodists, preachers like 
 Whitfield, and priests in general. Here is one, selected as 
 being comprehensive : — 
 
 " 'Tis mystery all : In every sect 
 You find this palpable defect — 
 The axis of the dark machine 
 Is enigmatic and unseen ; 
 Opinion is the only guide 
 By which our senses are supplied." 
 
 Now, it was of supremely little consequence to Christianity 
 that one precocious lad the more had taken this attitude of 
 hostility to it. But it was of some consequence to the lad 
 himself. There are and have been many — and these men in 
 our Parliaments and in other high places — who might in a 
 certain sense use Chatterton's phrase, "I am no Christian," and 
 probably, in .using it, speak the exact truth ; and yet who 
 never do use it, but leave it to their loud-mouthed critics to 
 make the iiaference for them. One has to distinguish, there- 
 fore, between the sceptic who finds no occasion for asserting 
 this negative side of his views at all, and the sceptic who is 
 
b 
 
 A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 315 
 
 vehement in proclaiming the negative. The second is in a 
 different stage intellectually, and morally in a more restless 
 predicament. He is always proclaiming his independence of 
 a certain class of considerations, and yet he is always meddling 
 with them. So it was with Chatterton. In his statement 
 *' I am no Christian," and his spasmodic variations of it through 
 his writings, one sees him fascinated, as it were, by the very 
 creed towards which he is malignant, so that he cannot avoid 
 making it the topic of his thoughts. It is as if he saw that 
 he had parted with certain beliefs, the very pretence of which, 
 the very habit of even nominally professing them, was a safe- 
 guard to those who were capable of it. It is as if he were 
 conscious of one check less upon his own course to ruin than 
 even ordinary youths around him had. Nay more, said at 
 the moment at which they were said, his words to Catcott are 
 a proof that the writer has again been, for some reason or other, 
 catechising himself on the subject to which they refer. He 
 has been turning one sarcastic look more, as it were, in his 
 depression and despair, to those "comforts of Christianity" 
 the efficacy of which, in such circumstances, he has all his life 
 heard mentioned ; and the result is, that he finds they will not 
 suit him and remits them to Mr. Catcott. 
 
 Well, but was there no equivalent ? If the Christian has 
 a source of faith and hope that the world knows not of, and 
 that bears him up, as nothing else could, in times of worldly 
 distress and trial; still it is known by universal experience, that, 
 in such times of worldly distress and trial, men who are not 
 Christians do not uniformly break down. That fervid and im- 
 passioned man of majestic thought and gait, people do not call 
 him a Christian ; they call him a Pantheist or a Philosopher, 
 or something of that sort ; and yet, were he at his last shilling, 
 or his last crust, were the rack prepared for him and the multi- 
 tude howling for his destruction, every one knows that he would 
 endure and come through ! Si fr actus illabatur orhts, impavidum 
 ferientruince. He believes in Justice, and God, and the Ever- 
 lasting ! Nay more, that tough little fellow, all grey iron and 
 scepticism, whose very principle it is that there is no Everlast- 
 ing, and that men ought '' to apprehend no farther than this 
 
316 CHATTERTON: 
 
 world, and square their lives according;" lie too, unless his 
 antecedents belie him, might be beaten a long time between any 
 size of hammer and any shape of anvil ! He, too, could come 
 through. Why, since the beginning of the world, people have 
 been coming through ! Quiet, plain scholars have lived, before 
 now, in German or in Scotch University towns on boiled peas- 
 cods for months, or asingle guinea a quarter earned by teaching, 
 without saying much about it. Had youths of this type been in 
 Chatterton's place in London, in August, 1770, they would have 
 most probably survived the crisis. They would have availed 
 themselves gratefully, and yet honestly, of such small imme- 
 diate aid as those aunts and other relatives that we hear of so 
 slightly in Chatterton's letters, (one of them, a carpenter, who 
 had married one of his aunts,) might perhaps, though poor, 
 have willingly oiFered at the sharpest moment of the 
 emergency ; and, even failing that, they would have conquered 
 by sheer patience. How was it, then, in Chatterton's case — the 
 " comforts of Christianity" being placed out of the question? 
 Chatterton never would call himself an Atheist. In a time 
 when Wilkes and other contemporaries, whose language he 
 sometimes borrowed, carried on their outrages on Christianity 
 very much in that character, Chatterton, by the very structure 
 of his genius as a boy of ardour and imagination, retained 
 something in him of a poet's reverence for the sublime and 
 the awful. In express anticipation, in one of his satirical 
 poems, of the stigma of Atheism, he says — 
 
 " Fallacious is the charge; 'tis all a lie, 
 As to my reason I can testify. 
 I own a God, immortal, boundless, wise, 
 Who bid our glories of Creation rise; 
 Who form'd his varied likeness in mankind, 
 Centering his many wonders in the mind." 
 
 And, again, m one more solemn soliloquy, on which one 
 dwells with peculiar interest, as perhaps, in its kind, the 
 highest utterance by the poor boy of what was best in him, 
 and which reminds one of similar bursts of natural piety in 
 the writings of Bums and Byron : — 
 
 " God, whose thunder shakes the sky, 
 Whose eye this atom globe surveys. 
 To Thee, my only rock, I fly, 
 Thy mercy in Thy justice praise. 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 317 
 
 The mystic mazes of Thy will, 
 
 The shadows of celestial light, 
 Are past the power of human skill; 
 
 But what the Eternal acts is right. 
 
 teach me in the trying hour, 
 
 When anguish swells the dewy tear, 
 
 To still my sorrows, own thy power, 
 Thy goodness love, thy justice fear ! 
 
 If in this bosom aught but Thee 
 
 Encroaching sought a boundless sway, 
 
 Omniscience could the danger see, 
 And Mercy look the cause away. 
 
 Then, why, my soul, dost thou complain? 
 
 Why drooping seek the dark recess ? 
 Shake off the melancholy chain. 
 
 For God created all to bless. 
 
 But ah ! my breast is human still; 
 
 The rising sigh, the falling tear. 
 My languid vitals* feeble rill. 
 
 The sickness of my soul declare. 
 
 But yet, with fortitude resign'd, 
 
 I'll thank the Inflicter of the blow, 
 Forbid the sigh, compose my mind, 
 
 Nor let the gush of misery flow. 
 
 The gloomy mantle of the night, 
 
 Which on my sinking spirit steals, 
 Will vanish at the morning light 
 
 Which God, my East, my Sim reveals." 
 
 Well for the poor fatherless boy had this mood been per- 
 manent ! But, at the time of his extreme need these comforts, 
 even of such natural religion as he had, seem to have taken 
 their flight too, and left him, mocking and bitter, face to face 
 with despair. 
 
 Nor had Chatterton the resources to be found in rectitude 
 and gentleness of mere worldly character. Impetuous, stormy, 
 industrious, and energetic, as he was^ there was still in him 
 an element of weakness in what he called his " pride," as 
 well as in his open contempt for all the commoner forms of 
 moral principle. Above all, he had in him the conscious 
 sense of a past imposture, and of innumerable minor deceits 
 practised in prosecuting it. Kowley, once the darling phantasm 
 of his poetical imagination, now dogged him as a hateful 
 demon, evoked by himself from the world of spirits, and not 
 to be laid to rest. Wherever he moved, and in whatever 
 form of new labour or distraction he engaged, he could not 
 look back over his shoulder, but there was to be seen the 
 
318 CHATTERTON : 
 
 form of this demon, in the garb of a Bristol monk of the 
 fifteenth century, with his hideous old face under a cowl, 
 grinning and gliding after him. In short, whether we view 
 Chatterton's character as it naturally was, or those recol- 
 lections of past lies and deceits with which he had burdened 
 his conscience so as to deprive his character of half its natu- 
 ral force, he was very likely to endure much, and yet to break 
 down at a point where others in the same circumstances might 
 have found longer endurance quite possible. 
 
 After all, however, the most material fact in the case 
 remains to be told. Physical causes were at work. Bereft of 
 the amount of actual food, and of other comforts, necessary, 
 even with his abstemious habits, to keep body and soul 
 healthily together ; wandering about London in a perpetual 
 state of fever and excitement ; returning home to write night 
 after night without rest or sleep — little wonder if he had over- 
 strained his physical capabilities, and if brain and nerve 
 began to fail in their ofl&ce. Whatever taint of hereditary 
 insanity was in him, derived from the old line of sextons who 
 had jangled in past generations the keys of St. Mary's Church 
 in Bristol, and walked at midnight through its aisles, and 
 dug the graves of its parishioners ; or derived, more imme- 
 diately, from that drunken, wild-eyed father, whom he had 
 never seen, but who used to tell his tavern-companions that 
 he believed in Cornelius Agrippa the necromancer — it had 
 now at last come out in a way not to be mistaken. From his 
 childhood, there had been symptoms of it — his fits of weep- 
 ing, his sudden paroxysms of passion, his long reveries when 
 he gazed at people without seeming to see them, his frequent 
 mutterings aloud. Not till now, however, had these traits 
 passed the limits of what could be considered compatible with 
 sanity. But now, almost certainly, these limits were passed. 
 Noticing the strange haggard lad walking about the streets, 
 muttering perhaps to himself, or making sudden gestures, or 
 looking at what was passing, sometimes vacantly, and some- 
 times with glances unusually keen and bright, even strangers 
 could not but follow him with their eyes, and wonder who 
 he was and where he came from. Had the stranger been one 
 
A STOEY OF THE YEAR 1770. 319 
 
 accustomed to the ways of the insane, he would probahly at 
 once have pronounced that his brain was affected. And had 
 the stranger been able, with this idea in his mind, to pursue 
 his inquiries farther, so as to ascertain what peculiar form or 
 species of insanity had taken possession of him, he would 
 have found that it was that form which physicians recognise 
 as the " suicidal tendency." Physicians, as all know, do 
 recognise this as a form of madness ; and though they allow 
 that a perfectly sane man may commit suicide after deliberate 
 reasoning on the point, they attribute a large proportion of 
 suicides to the action of a certain specific impulse which 
 reason cannot overcome. In Chatterton's case, as we have 
 seen, there had been premonitory appearances of the existence 
 of this tendency. The idea of suicide had from the first been 
 familiar to him. 
 
 Something like positive proof exists that, before the month 
 of August, 1770, was very far advanced, Chatterton was 
 actually in the specific maniacal condition which physicians 
 recognise as capable of being induced by circumstances where 
 there is a predisposition. The landlady, Mrs. Angell, who had 
 always thought him odd, said that towards the end of the 
 time during which she knew him, she " did not think he was 
 quite right in his mind." Mr. Cross noticed his growing rest- 
 lessness and the sudden fits of vacancy and silence that came 
 upon him sometimes when he was talking rapidly. He also 
 noted, though he did not put the right interpretation on it at the 
 time, that in his talks about medicine, he would frequently lead 
 on to the subject of poisons, and inquire with great apparent 
 interest into the nature and effects of different poisonous drugs. 
 Even in the letter to Catcott which we have quoted, we seem 
 to see traces of over-excitement of brain, and of that morbid 
 spirit of hatred to persons which results from it. Finally, there 
 is a story of a letter sent by him to his mother, on or about 
 the 15th of August, which was written in such a strain as to 
 cause her very great anxiety. This letter — the last she ever 
 received from him — is not extant, like the others ; but Mrs. 
 Edkins, the wife of a painter and glazier in Bristol, who lived 
 long afterwards and communicated many particulars about 
 
320 ■ CHATTERTON: 
 
 the Chatterton family, distinctly remembered having been sent 
 for by Mrs. Chatterton when the letter was received. She found 
 Mrs. Chatterton " in tears and very uneasy" on account of 
 the contents of the letter ; and particularly on account of one 
 part of it, in which he told her a strange story of his walking 
 among the tombs in a churchyard, and suddenly, in a fit of 
 absent meditation, stumbling into an open grave. "But," 
 added he, in his humorous way, '' it was not the quick and 
 the dead together,' ' for he found the sexton under him, who 
 was digging the grave ! (Various forms of this story have 
 come down, one of which fixes the churchyard in question as 
 having been that of • St. Pancras.) Mrs. Edkins tried to 
 console Mrs. Chatterton by saying it was only *' one of his 
 reveries ;" but " she could not be persuaded to consider it 
 otherwise than as ominous." 
 
 And so it proved. Barrett, very properly, refused to give 
 Chatterton the certificate he wanted of competence for the 
 situation of surgeon's mate on board an African ship ; and the 
 refusal was one disappointment the more added to those which 
 were already preying upon him. His misery was almost at its 
 climax. Cross, renewing his invitations to him to come and 
 take a meal with him, was surprised to find him one day con- 
 sent. That evening he partook of a supper of oysters at 
 Cross's house, and was observed, as Cross afterwards told 
 Warton, "to eat most voraciously." For aught that we know, 
 it was the last meal he had. On the 22nd of August, at all 
 events, he had reached that extreme beyond which our fancies 
 of human destitution cannot go. On that day, according to 
 Mrs. AngelPs account, he "came home in a great passion with 
 the baker's wife, who had refused to let him have another loaf 
 till he had paid her 3s. 6d. which he owed her previously." 
 Whether Mrs. Angell behaved as one would think most land- 
 ladies in such circumstances would have done, it is hardly 
 necessary to inquire. To know that a poor boy was starving 
 under her roof, and, though he had been as proud as Lucifer, 
 not to find means, if even by calling in the police, of break- 
 ing down his resolution against eating at her expense, might 
 seem an incredible heartlessness in the worst of women. 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 321 
 
 Probably she blamed herself much afterwards ; for when, some 
 years later, Sir Herbert Croft tried to find her out and ques- 
 tion her about Chatterton, he could never see her, though she 
 still lived in the same house, and he called many times. He 
 ascertained that she was a very timid woman, whose circum- 
 stances were such that she regarded every unknown visitor as 
 a bailiiF in disguise, or some one meaning her harm ; and 
 hence, if not from a dislike, as we have supposed, to be farther 
 questioned about her mysterious lodger of former years, she 
 was always out of the way. From all that we can gather, how- 
 ever, her fault was less want of kindliness than want of energy 
 and sense ; and probably, if we knew the exact facts in their 
 exact order, her conduct, such as it was, might seem more 
 explicable. Her neighbour, Mrs. Wolfe, whom Sir Herbert 
 Croft did see, told him that Mrs. Angell said Chatterton was 
 in a moping state for a day or two; and that, though she tried, 
 she could not prevail upon him to eat anything. She certainly 
 did not foresee what was going to happen, or she would have 
 made greater efforts. The refusal of the baker's wife, on the 
 22nd, had broken the last bond that kept Chatterton to life. 
 On that or the following day, hope, patience, and all force of 
 reason finally forsook him ; and he was secretly bidding fare- 
 well to the world. Strange that at this very moment some- 
 thing was happening in his favour, which, had he but known 
 it, might even then have roused him and determined him to 
 live. The Kev. Dr. Fry, Head of St. John's College, Oxford, 
 had by some means or other seen some of the antique Rowley 
 Poems which had been circulating in Bristol, and, having con- 
 ceived an unusual desire to know something more about them 
 and their authorship, was on the eve of setting out for Bristol, 
 to make inquiries about Chatterton, whom he supposed still to 
 be there. O Dr. Fry, make haste ; set out at once ; life or 
 death depends upon it ! Dr. Fry, not knowing what we now 
 know, takes his own time, and lives to regret it. He did 
 make the journey, but it was too late. 
 
 On the 23rd of August— the day was Thursday ; the morn- 
 ing, according to the old weather-registers, " hazy," but the 
 day " fine" — Chatterton "appeared unusually grave;" and 
 
 Y 
 
322 CHATTERTON : 
 
 Mrs. Angell, according to her own account, given while she 
 was yet accessible, asked him " What ailed him ? '' to which 
 he answered pettishly, "Nothing, nothing ! Why do you ask?" 
 This is all that is recorded of that day, during which he seems 
 hardly to have left the house. On the morning of the next 
 day, Friday, the 24th of August — " clouds, sunshine, and 
 showers at intervals," is the description of the day in the 
 registers — he "lay in bed longer than usual" (the words are 
 Mrs. Angell's) ; " got up about ten o'clock, and went out with a 
 bundle of papers under his arm, which, he said, 'was a treasure 
 to any one ; but there were so many fools in the world that he 
 would put them into a place of safety, lest they should meet 
 with accident.' " He walks, as usual, with this bundle under 
 his arm, down Brooke Street ; disappears somewhere about 
 Holbom, and after a little reappears in Brooke Street, and calls 
 at Mr. Cross's shop. " He called on me'' — is Mr. Cross's state- 
 ment — " about half-past eleven in the morning." As usual, he 
 talked about various matters, and at last, probably just as he 
 was going away, he said he wanted some arsenic for an expe- 
 riment. Mr. Cross, Mr. Cross, before you go to your drawer 
 for the arsenic, look at that boy's face ! Look at it steadily ; 
 look till he quails ; and then leap upon him and hold him ! 
 Mr. Cross does not look. He sells the arsenic (yes, ' sells ;^ 
 for, somehow, during that walk in which he has disposed of 
 the bundle, he has procured the necessary pence) ; and lives 
 to repent it. Chatterton, the arsenic in his pocket, does not 
 return to his lodging immediately, but walks about, God only 
 knows where, through the vast town. " He returned," con- 
 tinues Mrs. Angell, " about seven in the evening, looking very 
 pale and dejected ; and would not eat anything, but sat moping 
 by the fire with his chin on his knees, and muttering rhymes 
 in some old language to her." After some hours, " he got up 
 to go to bed," and '^ he then kissed her — a thing he had never 
 done before." Mrs. Angell, what can that kiss mean ? Detain 
 the boy ; he is mad ; he is not fit to be left alone ; arouse the 
 whole street rather than let him go ! She does let him go, 
 and lives to repent it. " He then went up stairs," she says 
 " stamping on every stair as he went slowly up, as if he would 
 
 lUldl 
 
 J 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 323 
 
 break it." She hears him reach his room. He enters, and 
 locks the door behind him. 
 
 The Devil was abroad that night in the sleeping city. Down 
 narrow and squalid courts his presence was felt, where savage 
 men clutched miserable women by the throat, and the neigh- 
 bourhood was roused by yells of murder, and the barking of 
 dogs, and the shrieks of children. Up in wretched garrets his 
 presence was felt, where solitary mothers gazed on their infants 
 and longed to kill them. He was in the niches of dark 
 bridges, where outcasts lay huddled together, and some of them 
 stood up from time to time and looked over at the dim stream 
 below. He was in the uneasy hearts of undiscovered forgers, 
 and of ruined men plotting mischief. He was in prison-cells, 
 where condemned criminals condoled with each other in 
 obscene songs and blasphemy. What he achieved that night, 
 in and about the vast city, came duly out into light and his- 
 tory. But of all the spots over which the Black Shadow 
 hung, the chief, for that night at least, was a certain undis- 
 tinguished house in the narrow street which thousands who 
 now dwell in London pass and repass, scarce observing it, every 
 day of their lives, as they go and come along the thoroughfare 
 of Holborn. At the door of one house in that quiet street, 
 the horrid Shape watched ; through that door he passed in 
 towards midnight ; and from that door, having done his work, 
 he emerged before it was morning. 
 
 On the morrow — Saturday, the 25th of August — Mrs. 
 Angell noticed that her lodger did not come down at the time 
 expected. As he had lain longer than usual, however, on the 
 day before, she was not alarmed. But, about eleven o'clock, 
 her husband being then out, and Mrs.Wolfe having come in, 
 she began to fear that something might be the matter ; and 
 she, and Mrs.Wolfe went up stairs and knocked at the door. 
 They listened a while, but there was no answer. They then 
 tried to open the door, but found it was locked. Being then 
 thoroughly alarmed, one of them ran down stairs, and called 
 a man who chanced to be passing in the street, to come and 
 break the door open. The man did so ; and on entering they 
 found the floor littered with small pieces of paper, and Chat- 
 
 y2 
 
324 CHATTERTON : 
 
 terton " lying on the bed, with his legs hanging over, quite 
 dead/' The bed had not been lain in. The man took up 
 some of the pieces of paper ; and on one of them he read, in 
 deceased's hand^vriting, the words, " I leave my soul to its 
 Maker, my body to my mother and sister, and my curse to 
 
 Bristol. If Mr. Ca :" the rest was torn off. '' The man 
 
 then said," relates Mrs. Angell, " that he must have killed 
 himself; which we did not think till then.'' Mrs. Wolfe ran 
 immediately for Mr. Cross, who came, and was the first to 
 point out a bottle on the window containing arsenic and water. 
 " Some of the bits of arsenic were between his teeth ; " so that 
 there was no doubt that he had poisoned himself. The man 
 who had broken open the door, and who was quite unknown 
 to Mrs. Angell or Mrs. Wolfe, then went away, taking some 
 of the little pieces of paper with him. 
 
 An inquest was held on the body at the Three Crows 
 public-house, in Brooke Street, on Monday, the 27th of August, 
 before Swinson Carter, Esq., Coroner, and the following jury : 
 — Charles Skinner, — Meres, John HoUier, John Park, S. 
 G. Doran, Henry Dugdale, G. J. Hillsley, C. Sheen, E. 
 Manley, C. Moore, and — Nevett. The chief witnesses 
 examined were Mary Angell, the landlady, her husband Fred- 
 erick Angell, Mr. Cross, the apothecary, and Mrs.Wolfe. The 
 facts which they deponed have been, each and all, involved in 
 the preceding account."^ The jury, less charitable than juries 
 
 * Readers who may be curious to see the notes of the depositions in the 
 exact form in which they have come down to us, will find them in Notes and 
 Queries, Vol. vii. p. 138. They were communicated to that periodical by John 
 Matthew Gutch, Esq., of Worcester, formerly one of the proprietors of Felix 
 Farley's Bristol Journal, and a resident in Bristol ; the possessor of a large collec- 
 tion of papers, accumulated by himself and other persons, relating to Chatterton 
 and his writings. The notes are communicated by Mr. Gutch as "from a MS. 
 copy " in his possession, never before published. Unfortunately the history of 
 this " MS. copy" is not traced. Unfortunately, we say ; for there are some slight 
 discrepancies between the account they contain and other accounts ; which 
 discrepancies one would like to see explained. Thus, in the printed copy in the 
 Notes and Queries, the heading runs, "Account of an inquest held on, &c., on 
 Friday, the 27th of August, 1770 ;" whereas the 27th was not a Friday, but a 
 Monday. Again, in Mrs. Angell's evidence, as given in these MS. notes, the 
 house in which she lived, and in which Chatterton died, is made to be 17, 
 Brooke Street, instead of 4, Brooke Street, as the general tradition had always 
 ran till Mr. Gutch published the notes. No. 17, unless the numbering hai 
 been changed, would have been at the inner or meaner end of Brooke Street 
 close to the market ; but no corresponding house can now be pointed out there 
 Farther, Sir Herbert Croft, who, among his other attempts about the ye£ 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 325 
 
 now-a-days, returned a verdict of Felo de se. In accordance 
 with this verdict, the body, having been enclosed in a parish- 
 shell, was privately interred, the following day, in the 
 burying-ground attached to Shoe Lane Workhouse. This 
 appears from the entry of the burial, under the date August 
 28th, in the parish-registers of St. Andrew's, Holborn, the 
 parish in which Brooke Street is situated, and the church and 
 consecrated churchyard of which are close to Shoe Lane. Mr. 
 Peter Cunningham notices, as a coincidence, that the same 
 parish-registers contain the entry of the baptism of Eichard 
 Savage, on the 18th of January, 1696-7 ; and he enhances the 
 curiosity of the coincidence by remarking that Savage was 
 born in Fox Court, Brooke Street, close to the house where 
 Chatterton died, and died in 1743, in the jail of the very city 
 of Bristol, where, nine years later, Chatterton was born. 
 Brooke Street and Bristol exchanged their poets ! 
 
 Whether Chatterton's body remained in the Shoe Lane 
 burying-ground, to be torn up, with the bodies of other 
 paupers, fifty years afterwards, when Farringdon Market 
 usurped the site, is a point on which a question has been raised. 
 
 Li or about the year 1808, George Cumberland, Esq., 
 "descendant of Bishop Cumberland, and a literary and highly 
 respectable man," was informed by Sir Eobert Wilmot that 
 at a basket-maker's in Bristol, whose name Sir Robert had 
 forgotten, he had heard it positively stated that Chatterton was 
 buried in the churchyard of St. Mary Eedcliffe. Sir Eobert 
 
 1789 to ascertain as much about the cu-cumstances of Chatterton's death aa 
 possible, had taken care to see the coroner, found that he " had no minutes ot 
 the melancholy business," and had but a vague recollection of it at that distance 
 of time ; but was informed by him, on the evidence of such "memorandum as 
 he had, that the witnesses were Frederick Angell, Mary ^osf^^' «^^^J^'"^«^ 
 Hamsley. Probably, if we could trace the history of Mr. Gutch s MS these dis- 
 crepancies would be explained without affecting its perfect authenticity, in all 
 other respects, the statements in the MS. are singularly in accordance with the 
 independent accounts obtained by Sir Herbert Croft Warton&c., from Mrs 
 Wolfe, Mr. Cross, &c. Accordingly, though we have followed the authority ot 
 this MS. to the utmost extent in which we could recognise it as authentic, the 
 only effect it has had upon our narrative has been to ^dd^^f^^^^^^^^i^S Parti- 
 culars, especially in connexion with the closing days of Chatterton « l^^^^ yb^^^ 
 otherwise would have been wanting. With ^^^\Z'%'7'y!'^Znhl2ed 
 substantially the same as it would have been had Mr. Gutch not publishea 
 his document, but left us to the old sources of information. 
 
326 CHATTERTON : 
 
 farther said that the statement was made to him in such a 
 manner that he believed it. Mr. Cumberland thereupon 
 instituted inquiries in Bristol, so as to ascertain the truth of 
 the story. For some time he could find no one who knew 
 anything of the matter ; but at last he traced the information 
 given to Sir Eobert Wilmot, to a Mrs. Stockwell, the wife of 
 a basket-maker in Peter Street. Questioned on the subject, 
 she stated that, when a girl (apparently after Chatterton's 
 death), she had been a pupil of Mrs. Chatterton's, and that she 
 used to be frequently with her till she was twenty years old ; 
 that often she stayed with Mrs. Chatterton and slept with her ; 
 that she was " very kind and motherly," and told her many 
 things she would not tell to others — among others, " how 
 happy she was that her unfortunate boy was brought home 
 and buried in E-edcliffe.'^ This had been done, she said, 
 " through the attention of a relative in London, who, after the 
 body had been cased in a parish-shell, had it secured and sent 
 to her by the waggon." When the case arrived and was 
 opened, the body was found " black and half-putrid ;" it was, 
 therefore, interred immediately — this being done secretly by 
 Phillips, the sexton, who was a friend of the family, and 
 extremely fond of Chatterton. Mrs. Stockwell farther stated 
 that the grave was " on the right hand side of the lime-tree, 
 in the middle paved-walk in RedclifFe churchyard, about 
 twenty feet from the father's grave, which was in the paved- 
 walk, and where Mrs. Chatterton and Mrs. Newton also lay." 
 She also recollected that Mrs. Chatterton had given leave 
 to a person named Hutchinson or Taylor (she could not be 
 sure which) to bury his child over her son's coffin ; and was 
 very sorry afterwards that she had done so, as this person had 
 not only put a stone over the grave which had formerly 
 belonged to it, but had been removed and placed against the 
 church- wall, but had also subsequently buried his wife in the 
 same grave, and, on that occasion, erased the old inscription 
 on the stone to make room for a new one. This was all that 
 Mrs. Stockwell could tell ; but she mentioned to Mr. Cumber- 
 land that there was a Mrs. Kirkland, the wife of a Scotch 
 naval man, who had formerly resided in Bristol, and been on 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 327 
 
 such very intimate terms with Mrs. Chatterton in her old age 
 that she was hkely to know all about the burial. Cumberland, 
 on inquiry, found that this Mrs. Kirkland had died about three 
 months before, leaving a daughter somewhere in London, 
 whom he could not trace. But Mrs. Stockwell referred him 
 to *'a hatter's wife" (name not given) who remembered 
 Mrs. Kirkland, and had often heard her say that Chatterton 
 was privately buried in EedclifFe churchyard. To make the 
 matter more sure, Mr. Cumberland sought out the family of 
 the sexton Phillips, who had himself died in 1772. He found 
 his sister, a Mrs. Jane Phillips, still alive ; and she told him 
 that she had known Chatterton well, and that her brother, the 
 sexton, whom Chatterton used to call " uncle," was much 
 attached to the family. It was her brother that first told her 
 the news of Chatterton' s having killed himself in London ; 
 and, on hearing it, she had gone, against her brother's wish, to 
 Mrs. Chatterton, in order to know more about it. She asked 
 Mrs. Chatterton where her son was buried ; and she replied, 
 "Ask me nothing; he is dead and buried." A daughter of 
 the sexton's, now Mrs. Stephens, the wife of a cabinet-maker, 
 was also found by Cumberland and interrogated. She said 
 her father had never told her anything of the burial in 
 Kedcliffe churchyard ; and '' if he had done it privately, it was 
 not likely that he would tell her, being very reserved on all 
 occasions;" but she thought ''he would not have refused, if 
 asked, being attached to Chatterton and his mother." She 
 remembered the removal of a stone from the church- wall, and 
 the erasure of the old inscription to make room for a new one, 
 by a person named Hutchinson, whose wife had died. A 
 brother of this Mrs. Stephens, a son of the sexton, and named 
 Stephen Chatterton Phillips, was also seen by Cumberland. 
 He was then a retired sailor with a wooden leg, and was said 
 to have some resemblance to Chatterton in the face. He but 
 corroborated what his sister had said; that is, he knew 
 nothing of the burial, and " his father was not likely to tell 
 him, and yet might have done it." Finally, Cumberland saw 
 Mrs. Edkins, already mentioned as having been so intimate 
 with Mrs. Chatterton. As a Miss James, she had been at the 
 
328 CHATTERTON : 
 
 school kept by Chatterton^s father, whom she remembered 
 well ; she had known Mrs. Chatterton then, and had been 
 present afterwards at the birth of her son ; and from the time 
 of his birth, all through his school-boy period and his 
 apprenticeship with Mr. Lambert, till he went to London, she 
 had been continually seeing him and his mother. Some of 
 the most interesting particulars of Chatterton's early life were 
 procured from her. As to the private burial, however, she 
 was unable to say anything. She had gone to see Mrs. 
 Chatterton immediately after the news came of her son's 
 death. On entering, she found Mrs. Chatterton in a fit of 
 hysterics. She said she had come to ask about her health. 
 " Ay," said Mrs. Chatterton, " and about something else ;" on 
 which she burst into tears, and they cried together, and " no 
 more was said till they parted."" 
 
 All these facts, collected by Cumberland about 1808, were 
 given to him by Cromek, the editor of " Burns's Reliques," who 
 undertook to make farther researches and publish them. This 
 was not done ; and Cumberland's memoranda did not see the 
 light till they were printed as an appendix to Mr. Dix's Life 
 of Chatterton in 1851. Since that date they have received one 
 slight corroboration. In the " Memorials of Canynge, &c.," 
 published in 1854 by Mr. George Pryce, a Bristol anti- 
 quary, there is a short account of Chatterton ; and in that 
 account is included a letter written in 1853, by the late well- 
 known Mr. Joseph Cottle, of Bristol, in which he states his 
 belief that Chatterton was buried in KedclifFe churchyard. 
 His reasons for the belief are thus stated : — " About forty 
 years ago, Mr. George Cumberland called upon me and said, 
 * I have ascertained one important fact about Chatterton.' 
 ' What is it?' I said. * It is,' said he, ' that that marvellous 
 boy was buried in Redcliffe churchyard.' He continued : ' I 
 am just come from conversing with old Mrs. Edkins, a 
 friend of Chatterton's mother. She affirmed to me this fact, 
 with the following explanation :' — ' Mrs. Chatterton was pas- 
 sionately fond of her darling and only son, Thomas ; and 
 when she heard that he had destroyed himself, she im- 
 mediately wrote to a relation of hers (the poet's uncle, then 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 329 
 
 residing in London), a carpenter, urging him to send home his 
 body in a coffin or box. The box was accordingly sent down 
 to Bristol ; and when I called on my friend Mrs. Chatterton to 
 condole with her, she, as a very great secret, took me upstairs 
 and showed me the box ; and removing the lid, I saw the poor 
 boy, whilst his mother sobbed in silence. She told me that 
 she should have him taken out in the middle of the night, and 
 bury him in Kedcliffe churchyard. Afterwards, when I saw 
 her, she said she had managed it very well, so that none but 
 the sexton and his assistant knew anything about it. This 
 secrecy was necessary, as he could not be buried in conse- 
 crated ground.' " Mr. Cottle adds, that he knew the husband 
 of Mrs. Edkins, who was a respectable painter and glazier. 
 
 There is some difference, it will be observed, between the 
 account given in Mr. Cumberland's surviving memoranda and 
 that given by Mr. Cottle as his recollection of what Mr. Cum- 
 berland had told him. In the one, Mrs. Edkins says nothing 
 whatever about the private burial ; in the other, she makes the 
 detailed statement just quoted. Either, then, Mr. Cumberland 
 had seen Mrs. Edkins a second time and got from her parti- 
 culars which she had not thought fit to communicate in 1808, 
 or there was a confusion between Mrs. Edkins and Mrs. 
 Stcckwell in Mr. Cottle's memory. On the whole, one would 
 wish to believe the account, and to fancy the poor boy's bones 
 resting quietly within the hallowed precincts he loved so well, 
 and where, since 1840, the piety of Bristol has raised him 
 a modest monument. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE JUDGMENT OE POSTERITY. 
 
 Chatterton's death made very little sensation in London, 
 beyond the immediate neighbourhood in which the inquest 
 was held. We have looked over the newspapers of the time 
 with some diligence ; but, though paragraphs giving accounts 
 of such casualties were as common then as now, we have not 
 found the slightest reference to the suicide in Brooke Street. 
 
330 CHATTERTON : 
 
 The incident which figures in the newspapers as the chief 
 metropolitan fact of the day on which the suicide occurred — 
 i. e. the 24th of August — is the robbery at the foot of High- 
 gate Hill, by "a tall thin man in a light-coloured coat, 
 mounted on a black horse," of the boy carrying the Chester 
 mail. Under the same date is recorded, as a somewhat minor 
 incident, a visit paid by their Majesties to Woolwich to see 
 the artillery. . Even the Town and Country Magazine^ which 
 came out, on the 31st of August, with three contributions in 
 it from the pen of the unfortunate youth who was now no 
 more, (and one of these the article on sculpture to accompany 
 the engraved design for Beckford's monument,) takes no notice 
 in its " Domestic Intelligence " of the death of its correspond- 
 ent. Doubtless, Hamilton knew the fact in time to notice it 
 if he chose ; but he may have known also the reference made 
 to himself in Cross's evidence at the inquest. Nor, in the 
 September number, which likewise contains some of Chatter- 
 ton's writings, is the omission supplied. It is not till the 
 October number that any notice of Chatterton occurs; and 
 then it is in the form of an elegy in twenty-three stanzas, 
 " To the Memory of Mr. Thomas Chatterton, late of Bristol." 
 The elegy is dated " Bristol, October, 1770," and is signed 
 " T. C.^^ — evidently the initials of Chatterton' s friend, Thomas 
 Cary. The elegy is written with more of genuine affection 
 than of poetry ; but two stanzas may be quoted : — 
 
 " Think of his tender opening unfledged years, 
 Brought to a final crisis ere mature, 
 As Fate had grudged the wonders Nature rears, 
 Bright genius in oblivion to immure. 
 
 Weep, Nature, weep : the mighty loss bewail ; — 
 
 The wonder of our drooping isle is dead ! 
 Oh ! could but tears or plaintive sighs avail. 
 
 By night and day would I bedew my bed." 
 
 In consequence, however, of such communications as these 
 sent from Bristol, and of the naturally increased interest that 
 there would be there among the Catcotts and the Barretts in 
 the Rowley manuscripts and other papers that Chatterton had 
 left behind him ; perhaps, too, of the researches of Dr. Fry and 
 others who obtained copies of these papers and began to send 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 331 
 
 them about ; and, doubtless, to some extent also, of tbe casual 
 references to Chatterton's fate that would be made by persons 
 who had seen him in town — it is certain that before the winter 
 of 1770 — 1 was far advanced, the tragic death in the previous 
 August of a certain youth of genius named Chatterton, a 
 writer for the Magazines, and the alleged editor and tran- 
 scriber of various pieces of ancient poetry, had become a 
 topic of conversation in the literary clubs of London. 
 
 This was especially the case at the Gerard Street Club. 
 Goldy had returned from his Parisian trip before the 8th of 
 September — on which day, his biographer, Mr. Forster, finds 
 him receiving a new suit of mourning from his tailor, to be 
 worn on account of the death of his old mother, of which he 
 had received the news when in Paris. Johnson was also back 
 in town before September was over. One of the two — most 
 probably it was Goldy — having seen the Elegy in the Town and 
 Country for October, or otherwise coming across the story of 
 Chatterton, made himself acquainted with the particulars; 
 and thus Chatterton and the Eowley Poems came to be 
 discussed at the Club. By this means it probably was that 
 the Honourable Horace Walpole unexpectedly found himself, 
 one day early in 1771, reminded of his Bristol correspondent 
 of the year 1769. The occasion of his doing so was in itself 
 a somewhat memorable one. The first annual dinner of the 
 Eoyal Academy was held on St. George's Day (April 23d), 
 1771. At this dinner Sir Joshua Keynolds presided ; and 
 among the guests who sat under the pictures which were 
 hung along the walls, were almost all the distinguished men 
 of London. Walpole, who was not in the habit of seeing 
 much of Johnson, Goldsmith, and that set elsewhere, found 
 himself seated near to them. We will let himself relate the 
 rest. ''Dining," he says, "at the Koyal Academy, Doctor 
 Goldsmith drew the attention of the company with an account 
 of a marvellous treasure of ancient poems lately discovered at 
 Bristol, and expressed enthusiastic belief in them, for which 
 he was laughed at by Dr. Johnson, who was present. I soon 
 found this was the trouvaille of my friend Chatterton ; and 
 I told Dr. Goldsmith that this novelty was known to me, 
 
332 CHATTERTON : 
 
 who might, if I had pleased, have had the honour of ushering 
 the great discovery to the learned world. You may imagine, 
 Sir, we did not all agree in the measure of our faith ; but 
 though his credulity diverted me, my mirth was soon dashed ; 
 for, on asking about Chatterton, he told me he had been in 
 London and had destroyed himself. The persons of honour 
 and veracity who were present will attest with what surprise 
 and concern I thus first heard of his death." Said we not 
 that, of all the literary men then alive, the one that it might 
 have been best for Chatterton to have near him, in his hour of 
 despair, was Oliver Goldsmith ? We see that, after Chatterton 
 was dead, Goldsmith was somehow the first to hear of his 
 fate and to talk about it. 
 
 From that time, for the next six or seven years, we are to 
 fancy the interest in the Rowley Poems, and in Chatterton as 
 connected with them, gradually increasing. Catcott, as 
 possessor of the greater portion of Chatterton's transcripts of 
 the supposed ancient poems, has become a person of some 
 consequence in the eyes of local antiquarians, and he takes 
 care to make the most of it. He has already increased his 
 stock of MSS. by buying from Chatterton's mother, for five 
 guineas, such of his papers as had been left with her, — a 
 proceeding by no means to his credit, when we know that 
 about the same time he offered to sell his own collection for 
 70L Barrett, too, as the possessor of some copies of the 
 supposed antiques, finds himself inquired after. Both he and 
 Catcott lend about copies of their manuscripts, some frag- 
 ments of which get into print. The Bristol poems of the 
 fifteenth century are frequently spoken of in literary circles in 
 London. Warton, for example, was shown a collection of 
 them in 1773 by the Earl of Lichfield, who asked his opinion 
 of their genuineness. All sensible persons who had seen 
 specimens had already made up their minds that they were 
 forgeries ; but many antiquarian old women stoutly main- 
 tained the contrary. Whenever a literary man from the 
 metropolis was in the neighbourhood of Bristol, he endea- 
 voured, as a matter of course, to see Catcott and Barrett, and 
 to get all the particulars from them about Chatterton and 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 333 
 
 his circumstances. They were very communicative on this 
 subject, and spoke of Chatterton's talents, now that they had 
 a kind of property in them, far more enthusiastically than 
 they had done when he was alive; but they, and indeed 
 nearly all Bristol, persisted in believing in the genuineness of 
 the antiques. Chatterton, they said, was a youth of extra- 
 ordinary genius ; but he could not have produced such poems 
 as these were! They were, they had no doubt of it, the 
 works of the much older Bristol poet, Thomas Kowley; 
 mysteriously preserved for three hundred years in the old 
 chests in the muniment-room of St. Mary Kedcliffe, and only 
 brought to light by Chatterton! Thus, when in April 1776 
 Johnson and Boswell paid a visit to Bristol, they saw Catcott 
 and Barrett, and were shown the original MSS. Johnson, 
 says Boswell, read some of them aloud, while Catcott stood 
 by with open mouth, amazed at his scepticism ; after which, 
 Catcott, to settle the matter, led them in triumph to the 
 Church of St. Mary Kedcliffe, and, by way of unanswerable 
 argument, showed them "the chest itself." It was on this 
 occasion that Johnson said to Boswell, speaking of Chatterton, 
 " This is the most extraordinary young man that has encoun- 
 tered my knowledge. It is wonderful how the whelp has 
 written such things." In connexion with this same visit, it 
 may be interesting to state that Hannah More, who was still 
 residing in Bristol with her sisters, a young woman of twenty- 
 five, at the time of Chatterton's death, had, between that time 
 and Dr. Johnson's visit in 1776, added to the literary reputation 
 of Bristol by the publication of her first dramas. In visiting 
 Bristol, Johnson was paying a compliment to this rising 
 poetess, as well as to the memory of Chatterton. One is glad 
 to know also that, if Hannah More, as one of the conductors 
 of the best boarding-school for young ladies in Bristol, was 
 almost necessarily out of the circle of Chatterton's acquaint- 
 ances, while he was going about in the city as an attorney's 
 apprentice, she was one of the first in Bristol to sliow an 
 interest in his fate after she did hear of him, and to prove 
 that interest by being kind to his mother and sister. Mrs. 
 Chatterton, after her son's death, was seized with a nervous 
 
334 CHATTERTON : 
 
 illness, which, though she lived a good many years longer, 
 never left her ; and among those who used to go to see her 
 and sometimes take tea with her, for her dead son's sake, 
 there was none, Mrs. Stockwell said, whom she respected so 
 much as Miss More. 
 
 It was in 1777 that the Rowley Poems were first published 
 collectively, chiefly from the manuscripts in possession of 
 Catcott and Barrett. A second and more splendid edition 
 was published in 1782 by Dean Milles, President of the 
 Society of Antiquaries, with the following title : — " Poems 
 supposed to have been written at Bristol in the Fifteenth 
 Century, hy Thomas Rowley, Priest, &c. ; with a Commentary, 
 in which the antiquity of them is considered and defended hy 
 Jeremiah Milles, D.D., Dean of Exeter, ^^ Dean Milles, in his 
 preliminary dissertation on the poems, gave a very slight 
 account of Chatterton, with a view to show that he could not 
 have been their author. Immediately on the publication 
 of the volume, there blazed out a Rowley controversy, as 
 fierce as that which had attended the appearance of the 
 Ossian poems. Bryant and one or two others sided with 
 Milles ; and the question was argued and re-argued in 
 every shape ; but all the great critical and antiquarian 
 authorities, such as Malone, Tyrwhitt, and Warton, were on 
 the other side, and their arguments, from evidence external 
 and internal, set the question conclusively at rest in the 
 minds of all who could be set at rest about anything. The 
 collection and publication about the same time of Chat- 
 terton' s acknowledged miscellanies, helped somewhat in the 
 demonstration, by showing the possibility that their author 
 might also have been the author even of things so extra- 
 ordinary as the Rowley Poems. It was not till 1803, 
 however, that the two sets of pieces were printed, together 
 with additions, as the undoubted works of Chatterton. This 
 first complete edition of Chatterton's works was undertaken 
 in 1799 by subscription, with a view to raise a sum for the 
 benefit of his sister, then Mrs. Newton ; his mother being by 
 that time dead. Mr. Southey and Mr. Cottle of Bristol acted 
 as the editors. The subscription, however, not reaching the 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 335 
 
 expenses of publication, an arrangement was made with 
 Messrs. Longman in the interest of Mrs. Newton. According 
 to what Mr. Cumberland heard in Bristol in 1808, the 
 result of this speculation, and of other similar acts of kind- 
 ness shown to the Chatterton family since the fatal year 
 which had made them immortal, was that a sum of about 
 600/. came after Mrs. Newton's death to her only daughter, 
 who had for some time been in the service of Miss Hannah 
 More. This girl, the last of the Chattertons, died in 1807, 
 leaving 100/. to a young man, an attorney, to whom she was 
 about to be married. The rest went to her father's rela- 
 tives, the Newtons, living in London somewhere about the 
 Minories. 
 
 We have already quoted enough from Chatterton' s acknow- 
 ledged writings in prose and in verse, to give an idea of his 
 ability and versatility as there shown. They are certainly 
 astonishing productions for a boy not past his eighteenth 
 year ; astonishing for their very variety, and their pre- 
 cocious tone and manner, even where in substance they 
 are most worthless. He writes political letters for the 
 newspapers, shallow enough, but as good as were going ; he 
 writes scurrilous satires in the Churchill vein, with here and 
 there lines as good as any in Churchill, and sometimes with 
 turns of epigram reminding us of Pope; he writes very 
 tolerable imitations of Ossian, and elegies, and serious poems 
 showing some power both of thought and imagination ; he 
 catches the knack of magazine-articles, and scribbles them 
 off, currente calamo, exactly of a kind to suit ; he goes an 
 evening or two to Marylebone Gardens, and straightway he 
 writes a capital burletta. On the evidence, then, of his 
 acknowledged productions alone, Chatterton must be pro- 
 nounced to have been a youth of singular endowments, who, 
 had he lived, would certainly have made himself a name in 
 the literature of England at the close of the last and the 
 beginning of the present century. The passages which we 
 have hitherto quoted from these productions having, however, 
 been selected mainly as affording illustrations of his character 
 
336 CHATTERTON : 
 
 and life, it may be well to cite one or two more, exhibiting 
 rather his poetical powers as such. Here is a piece entitled 
 " An Elegy.'' 
 
 " Joyless I seek the solitary shade, 
 
 Where dusky Contemplation veils the scene ; 
 The dark retreat, of leafless branches made, 
 
 Where sickening sorrow wets the yellow'd green. 
 The darksome ruins of some sacred cell, 
 
 Where erst the sons of Superstition trod, 
 Tott'ring upon the mossy meadow, tell, 
 
 We better know, but less adore, our God. 
 
 Now, as I mournful tread the gloomy cave. 
 
 Thro' the wide window, once with mysteries dight, 
 
 The distant forest, and the darken'd wave 
 Of the swoln Avon ravishes my sight. 
 
 But see ! the thick'ning veil of Evening 's drawn, 
 
 The azure changes to a sable blue, 
 The rapturing prospects fly the less'ning lawn, 
 
 And Nature seems to mourn the dying view. 
 
 Self-sprighted Fear creeps silent thro' the gloom. 
 Starts at the rustling leaf and rolls his eyes ; 
 
 Aghast with horror, when he views the tomb. 
 With every torment of a hell he flies. 
 
 The bubbling brooks in plaintive murmurs roll ; 
 
 The bird of omen, with incessant scream, 
 To melancholy thoughts awakes the soul. 
 
 And lulls the mind to Contemplation's dream. 
 
 A dreary stillness broods o'er all the vale ; 
 
 The clouded moon emits a feeble glare ; 
 Joyless I seek the darkling hill and dale : 
 
 Where'er I wander, sorrow still is there." 
 
 This is by no means perfect, but it is in a vein of true 
 poetry ; and both the melancholy of the mood, and the 
 tendency to personification, as in " Self-sprighted Fear," are 
 very characteristic of Chatterton. The following, also a 
 fine instance of personification, is from another Elegy which 
 contains many good stanzas : — 
 
 " Pale, rugged Winter, bending o'er his tread ; — 
 His grizzled hair bedropt with icy dew ; 
 His eyes a dusky light congeal'd and dead ; 
 His robe a tinge of bright ethereal blue ! 
 
 His train a motleyed, sanguine sable cloud. 
 He limps along the russet dreary moor. 
 While rising whiiiwinds, blasting keen and loud. 
 Roll the white surges to the sounding shore." 
 
 There is a satirical description of Whitfield preaching, 
 which, if we were to quote from it, might remind readers of 
 some of Burns's humorous pieces on the New -light preachers 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 337 
 
 of Ayrshire. What we have already quoted from the 
 Burletta, however, must suffice in this vein. 
 
 It must not be supposed, however, that there are many 
 passages so good as the above in Chatterton's acknowledged 
 poems. There is not one of them that is not clever; and 
 from the longer ones there might be selected instances of 
 nervous and epigrammatic expression, and of sudden strokes 
 of fancy, which would have done credit to any veteran writer of 
 the time. But, upon the whole, except as bearing on the life 
 and character of their extraordinary author, these poems 
 possess little interest ; and, were an editor to go over them 
 now, with a view to select such portions of them as, apart 
 from the peculiar circumstances of their authorship, might 
 be entitled to preservation in a collected edition of extracts 
 from the English poets, all that he could find in them 
 suitable for his purpose might be comprised in a very few 
 printed pages. 
 
 It is very different with the antique pieces written in the 
 names of Kowley and of other poets. Whether, in the 
 composition of these poems, it was Chatterton's habit first to 
 write in ordinary phraseology, and then, by the help of 
 glossaries, to translate what he had written into archaic 
 language, or whether he had by practice become so far 
 master of ancient words and expressions as to be able to 
 write directly in the fictitious dialect he had prescribed for 
 himself, certain it is that, whenever his thoughts and fancies 
 attained their highest strain, he either was whirled into the 
 archaic form by an irresistible instinct, or deliberately 
 adopted it. Up to a certain point, as it were, Chatterton 
 could remain himself; but the moment he was hurried past 
 that point, the moment he attained to a certain degree of 
 sublimity, or fervour, or solemnity in his conceptions, and 
 was constrained to continue at the same pitch, at that 
 moment he reverted to the fifteenth century, and passed mto 
 the soul of Kowley. No one who has not read the antique 
 poems of Chatterton can conceive what extraordinary things 
 they are. Feeling this, and feeling that all tliat wc liave 
 written about Chatterton hitherto would be out of proportion, 
 
 z 
 
338 CHATTERTON : 
 
 unless we could communicate some idea of the force of his 
 genius as shown in his Eowley antiques, we shall close this 
 sketch of his life with a slight account of these poems, and 
 with a few extracts from them. 
 
 The antique poems, as printed in Southey's edition of 
 Chatterton's works in 1803, occupy one octavo volume out 
 of three. The following is a descriptive list of the most 
 important of them : — ■ 
 
 1. Fowr Eclogues, or supposed poetical dialogues of shepherds and shepherd- 
 esses at different periods in the past history of England — chiefly about the 
 period of the Wars of the Roses. The first three of the Eclogues were printed 
 from MSS. in Chatterton's writing in the possession of Mr. Catcott, to whom 
 they had been given as transcripts of old poems by Rowley ; the fourth was 
 published in the Town and Country Magazine for May, 1769, with this title, 
 " Elinonre and Juga ; written three hundi-ed years ago by T. Rowley, secular 
 priest." 
 
 2. The Parliament of Sjtrytes : " A most nierrie Entyrlude, plaied by the Car- 
 melyte Freeres at Mastre Canynges hys greete howse, before Mastre Canynges 
 and Byshoppe Carpenterre, on dedicatynge the Chyrche of Oure Ladie of Red- 
 clefte ; wroten bie T. Rowleie and J. Iscamme." Printed from Mr. Barrett's 
 History of Bristol : the original, in Chatterton's handwriting, in the British 
 Museum. 
 
 3. The Tournament : A dramatic account by Rowley of a Tournament, held 
 at Bristol before Edward I. in 1285, in which Sir Simon Burton, one of the old 
 worthies of Bristol, and the original founder of the Church of St. Mary Eedcliffe, 
 which Canynge rebuilt, showed his prowess over all other knights. Printed 
 from a copy made by Catcott from one in Chatterton's handwriting. 
 
 4. Tlie Bristoioe Tragedie ; or the Dethe of Syr Charles Bawdin : A ballad, in 
 nearly a hundred stanzas, celebrating the death of Sir Charles Baldwin, other- 
 wise Sir Baldwin Fulford, a zealous Lancastrian, who was executed at Bristol, 
 in 1461, by order of Edward IV. The poem was printed in London, in 1772, 
 from a copy made by Catcott from one in Chatterton's handwriting. Chat- 
 terton, it appears, acknowledged to his mother and sister that he was the 
 author of this poem. 
 
 5» The Storie of William Canynge : A poem in twenty-five stanzas, purporting 
 to be extracted from a prose work by Rowley, giving an account of eminent 
 natives of Bristol, from the earliest times to his own. The first thirty-four 
 lines of this poem are extant on the *' original vellum " given by Chatterton to 
 Mr. Barrett ; the rest is from various transcripts. 
 
 6. Songe to jElla, Lorde of the Casfel of Brystowe ynne dates of yore: A short 
 Pindaric lyric by Rowley, to the memory of J^^Ua, the great Saxon chieftain 
 of West England, and enemy of the Danes in the tenth century. Printed 
 from the Catcott MSS. 
 
 7. jElla: "A Tragycal Enterlude, or Discoorseynge Tragedie, wrotenn by 
 Thomas Rowleie ; plajedd before Mastre Canynge, atte hys howse nempte the 
 Rodde Lodge ; alsoe before the Duke of Norfolck, Johan Howard," This is 
 Chatterton's masterpiece. It is a long dramatic poem in various rhyme, 
 with songs interspersed, originally printed from a manuscript in Chatterton's 
 hand, in the possession of Mr. Catcott. The hero of the drama is the aforesaid 
 .^lla, the Saxon lord of Bristol in the tenth century, and the hammer of the 
 then invading Danes. The plot is this : — ^lla has just married the beauteous 
 Birtha, and is feasting at Bristol in all the joy of his spousals, when the news 
 is brought that two hosts of the Danes, under Magnus and Hurra, are ravaging 
 the countiy round. ^]lla tears himself away from Birtha ; meets the Danes ; 
 totally defeats Magnus and his host; and drives Hurra and his host skulking 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 339 
 
 into the woods. He is in the pride of his victory when his friend Celmonde, 
 who has been secretly in love with Birtha, steals from the camp, and going to 
 Bristol alone, tells Birtha that her husband is sorely wounded, and wishes her 
 to come to him. Birtha mounts a horse immediately ; and not waiting to 
 inform her maidens of her purpose, rides off with Celmonde. They go through 
 a wood ; where, as Celmonde is revealing his purpose and offering violence, 
 Hurra and his Danes come to the rescue, slay him, and magnanimously 
 protect Birtha. They escort her to Bristol ; where, meanwhile, however, 
 -^Ila has arrived, and thinking his Birtha false, has stabbed himself. He 
 survives to see her, and then dies ; and she swoons on his body. 
 
 8. Goddwynn : " A Tragedie, by Thomas Rowleie." This poem, also from 
 the Catcott MSS., is a fragment of a supposed tragedy, the scene of which is 
 laid in England immediately before the Norman Conquest, and the chief 
 persons in which are Earl Godwin, Harold, and King Edward the Confessor. 
 The topic of the drama, so far as it proceeds, is the patriotic rage of the 
 Saxons at the growing power of the Normans in the land. 
 
 9. The Balade of Charilie : "As wroten bie the gode prieste Thomas Rowleie, 
 1464." This poem, originally printed from a professed copy in Chatterton's 
 handwriting in the possession of Mr, Barrett, is a kind of narrative phantasy, 
 describing a pilgrim overtaken by a storm. A rich abbot passes him, and 
 refuses him an alms ; but a poor " Limitour " friar, who has little to spare, 
 acts a more brotherly part. 
 
 10. The Battle of Hasthujs : A long rhymed description, in two parts, of the 
 supposed incidents of the great battle by which Duke William became master 
 of England. The poem purported to be a translation by Rowley of a metrical 
 narrative by Turgot, a Saxon monk, contemporary with the Conquest. 
 Chatterton, when hard pressed, however, had admitted to Mr. Barrett that 
 the first part was his own. 
 
 These antique poems of Chatterton (and there are about 
 
 twenty shorter ones in the same scries) are, perhaps, as 
 
 worthy of being read consecutively as some corresponding 
 
 portions of the poetry of Byron, Shelley, or Keats. There are 
 
 passages in them, at least, quite equal to any to be found 
 
 in these poets ; and it is only the uncouth and spurious 
 
 appearance of antiquity which they wear when the absurd 
 
 spelling in which they were first printed is retained, that 
 
 prevents them from being known and quoted. Let lis strip 
 
 a few passages, as far as is possible without changing the 
 
 words, of this unnecessary concealment. Here is a passage, 
 
 with the spelling partly modernized, from the Balade of 
 
 Charitie : — 
 
 " In Virgine the swe'try sun 'gan sheen. 
 And hot upon the mees did cast his ray ; 
 The apple rudded from its paly green. 
 And the moll' pear did bend his leafy spray ; 
 The peed chelandrie^ sung the livelong day ; 
 'Twas now the pride, the manhood of the year, 
 And eke the ground was dight in its most deft aumere.'* 
 
 » Soft pear. 2 pied goldfinch. 3 Becoming mantle. 
 
 z2 
 
340 CHATTERTOJT : 
 
 The sun was gleaming in the mid of day ; 
 Dead still the air, and eke the welkin blucy 
 When from the sea arist in drear array 
 A heap of clouds of sable sullen hue ; 
 The which full fast unto the woodland drew, 
 Hiltring atenes' the sunne's fetive face; 
 And the black tempest swoln and gathered up apace. 
 
 Beneath an holm, fast by a pathway-side, 
 Which did unto Saint Godwin's convent lead, 
 A hapless pilgrim moaning did abide, 
 Poor in the view, imgentle in his weed. 
 Long bretfuP of the miseries of need. 
 Where from the hail-stones could the aimer fly ? 
 He had no housen there, ne any convent nigh ! 
 
 Look in his glomm^d^ face, his spright there scan : 
 How woe-begone, how withered, forwend,* dead ! 
 Haste to thy church-glebe-house, ashrewed man !^ 
 Haste to thy kist,^ thy only dortour-bed :' 
 Cale as the clay which will gre on thy head 
 Is charity and love among high elves : 
 Knight^s and barons live for pleasure and themselves. 
 
 The gathered storm is ripe ; the big drops fall ; 
 The forswat meadows smeethe^ and drench with rain ; 
 The coming ghastness does the cattle pall ; 
 And the full flocks are driving o'er the plain ; 
 Dash'd from the clouds the waters float again ; 
 The welkin opes ; the yellow levin flies ; 
 And the hot fiery smoth in the wide lowings dies.^ 
 
 List ! how the thunder's rattling dimming'" sound 
 Cheeves slowly on, and then embollen clangs,ii 
 Shakes the high spire, and, lost, dispended, drowned. 
 Still on the galliard ear of terror hangs. '^ 
 The winds are up ; the lofty elmen swangs ; 
 Again the levin and the thunder pours. 
 And the full clouds are burst attenes in stonen showers.*^ 
 
 This may serve as a specimen of the descriptive passages 
 with which the poems abomid. Here are a few samples of 
 maxim and thought tersely expressed : — 
 
 " Plays made from halie tales I hold unmeet ; 
 Let some great story of a man be sung." 
 
 " Verse may be good, but poetry wants more." 
 " Strange doom it is that in these days of ours 
 Nought but a bare recital can have place : 
 Now shapely Poesy hath lost its powers, 
 And pinant'^ History is only grace." 
 " But then renown eterne ! — It is but air 
 Bred in the phantasie, and allene living there." 
 
 1 Shrouding at once, 2 Brimful. ^ Clouded face. * Sapless. 
 
 ' Accursed man. ^ Coffin. ' Dormitory. ^ Sun-burnt meadows smoke. 
 ^ Fiery steam ; wide flamings. ^^ Noisy. " Moves slowly : swollen clangs. 
 ^* Frighted ear. *^ Languid History. 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 341 
 
 Still muiinuring at their schap,' still to the king 
 They roll their troubles like a surgy sea. 
 Han England, then, a tongue, but not a sting ? 
 Doth all complain, yet none will righted be ?" 
 
 Virgin and halie saints, who sit in glour. 
 
 Or give the mighty will, or give the good man power." 
 
 And both together sought the unknown shore. 
 Where we shall go, where many 's gone before." 
 
 So have I seen a mountain-oak that long 
 Has cast his shadow to the mountain side, 
 Brave all the winds, though ever they so strong. 
 And view the briars below with self-taught pride ; 
 But when thrown down by mighty thunder-stroke, 
 He'd rather be a briar than an oak." 
 
 The following is a personification worthy of Spenser : — 
 
 " Hope, holy sister, sweeping through the sky, 
 In crown of gold and robe of lily white. 
 Which far abroad in gentle air doth fly, 
 Meeting from distance the enjoyous sight ; 
 Albeit oft thou takest thy high flight 
 Heck^d in mist,^ and with thine eyne yblent." ^ 
 
 Perhaps, however, it is in the lyrical pieces scattered 
 through the poems that Chatterton's genius is seen at its 
 best. Here is Rowle/j/s Song to JElla : — 
 
 " Oh thou, or what I'emains of thee, 
 -^Ua, the darling of futurity. 
 Let this my song bold as thy courage l;e, 
 As everlasting to posterity ! 
 
 When Dacia's sons, whose hairs of blood-red hue, 
 Like kingcups bursting with the morning dew, 
 
 Arranged in drear array, 
 
 Upon the lethal day, 
 Spread far and wide on Watchet's shore, 
 
 Then didst thou furious stand, 
 
 And by thy valiant hand, 
 Besprenged all the mees with gore. 
 
 Drawn by thine anlace* fell, 
 
 Down to the depths of hell 
 
 Thousands of Dacians went ; 
 
 Bristowans, men of might, 
 
 Ydared the bloody fight, 
 
 And acted deeds full quaint. 
 Oh thou, where'er (thy bones at rest) 
 Thy spirit to haunt delighteth best. 
 Whether upon the blood-imbrued plain, 
 Or where thou kenst from far 
 The dismal cry of war, 
 Or seest some mountain made of corse of slain ; 
 Or seest the hatched ^ steed 
 Yprancing on the meed, 
 And neigh to be among the pointed spears ; 
 
 1 Fate. 2 Shrouded in mist. ^ Eyes blinded. ^ Sword. " Accoutred. 
 
342 CHATTERTON : 
 
 Or in black armour stalk around 
 
 Embattled Bristowe, once thy ground. 
 And glow ardtirous ^ on the castle-stairs ; 
 
 Or fiery roimd the minster glare ; 
 
 Let Bristowe still be made thy care. 
 Guard it from foemen and consuming fire ; 
 
 Like Avon's stream encirc it round ; 
 
 Ne let a flame enharm the ground, 
 Till in one flame all the whole world expire." 
 
 From this piece of powerful imagination turn to the 
 following exquisitely dainty little song, supposed to be sung 
 for the entertainment of Birtha by one of Ella's minstrels. 
 The song, though introduced into JElla, purports to be by 
 Sir Tibbot Gorges, and not by Kowley : — 
 
 " As Elinour by the green lessel- was sitting, 
 As from the sun's heate she harried,^ 
 She said, as her white hands white hosen was knitting, 
 * What pleasure it is to be married ! 
 
 * My husband, lord Thomas, a forester bold, 
 
 As ever clove pin* or the basket, 
 Does no cherisaunces from Elinour hold ; 
 I have it as soon as I ask it. 
 
 ' When I lived with my father in merry Cloud-dell, 
 
 Tho' 'twas at my lief to mind spinning, 
 I still wanted something, but what ne could tell, 
 
 My lord-fathers barb'd hall han ne winning.^ 
 
 * Each morning I rise do I set my maidens. 
 
 Some to spin, some to cardie, some bleaching ; 
 Gif any new entered do ask for mine aidens, 
 Then swithen^ you find me a-teaching. 
 
 ' Lord Walter, my father, he lov^d me well, 
 
 And nothing unto me was needing ; 
 But should I again go to merry Cloud-dell, 
 
 In soothen 'twould be without reding.'' 
 
 She said, and lord Thomas came over the lea, 
 
 As he the fat deerkins was chasing ; 
 She put by her knitting, and to him went she ; 
 So we leave them both kindly embracing." 
 
 The following, in another strain, is also one of the lyrics 
 sung by the minstrels in /Ella, It is the song of a bereaved 
 maiden : — 
 
 " 0, sing unto my roundelay, 
 0, drop the briny tear with me, 
 Daunce ne moe at halie-day, 
 Like a running river be. 
 
 My love is dead, 
 
 Gone to his death-bed, 
 
 All under the willow-tree. 
 
 * All blazing. ^ Arbour. ^ Hastened. < Marks in archery. 
 
 ^ Had no charms. ^ Straightway. ' Advice, 
 
A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770. 343 
 
 Black his criue' as the winter-night, 
 White his rood^ as the summer snow, 
 Rud his face as the morning light ; 
 Cold he lies in the grave below. 
 My love is dead, 
 Gone to his death-bed, 
 All under the willow-tree. 
 
 Sweet his tongue as the throstle's note, 
 
 Quick in dance as thought can be, 
 
 Deft his tabour, cxxdgel stout, 
 
 0, he lies by the willow-tree. 
 My love is dead, 
 Gone to his death-bed, 
 All under the willow-tree. 
 
 Hark ! the raven flaps his wing 
 
 In the briared dell below ; 
 
 Hark ! the death-owl loud doth sing 
 
 To the nightmares as they go. 
 My love is dead. 
 Gone to his death-bed, 
 All under the willow-tree. 
 
 See ! the white moon shines on high ; 
 Whiter is my true love's shroud, 
 Whiter than the morning-sky, 
 Whiter than the evening-cloud. 
 My love is dead, 
 Gone to his death-bed. 
 All under the willow tree. 
 
 Here, upon my true love's grave. 
 
 Shall the barren flowers be laid ; 
 
 Ne one halie saint to save 
 
 All the celness^ of a maid. 
 My love is dead, 
 Gone to his death-bed. 
 All under the willow-tree. 
 
 With my hands I'll dent* the briars, 
 
 Round his halie corse to gree ; 
 
 Ouphaut,^ fairy, light your fires ; 
 
 Here my body still shall be. 
 My love is dead. 
 Gone to his death-bed, 
 All under the willow-tree. 
 
 Come with acorn-cup and thorn ; 
 
 Drain my hearte's blood away ; 
 
 Life and all its good I scorn, 
 
 Dance by night, or feast by day. 
 My love is dead. 
 Gone to his death-bed, 
 All under the willow-tree. 
 
 Hair. 2 -^Q^i.^ 3 Coldness. * Fasten. * Elfin. 
 
344 CHATTERTON : 
 
 Water-witchea, crowned with raits, ^ 
 Bear me to your lethal tide : 
 I die ! I come ! my true love waits. 
 Thus the damsel spake, and died. 
 
 But perhaps the grandest thing in all Chatterton is his 
 fragmentary Ode to Liberty in his Tragedy of Godwin. We 
 know nothing finer in its kind in the whole range of English 
 poetry. A chorus is supposed to sing the song ; which is 
 throughout, it will be seen, a burst of glorious and sustained 
 personification : — 
 
 When Freedom, drest in blood-stained vest, 
 
 To every knight her war-song sung, 
 Upon her head wild weeds were spread, 
 A gory anlace ^ by her hung. 
 
 She danced on the heath; 
 
 She heard the voice of Death ; 
 Pale-eyed Affright, his heart of silver hue. 
 In vain assailed her bosom to acale.^ 
 She heard unflemed* the shrieking voice of woe. 
 And sadness in the owlet shake the dale. 
 
 She shook the burled ^ spear ; 
 
 On high she jeest^ her shield; 
 
 Her foemen all appear, 
 
 And flizz along the field. 
 Power, with his heafod straught "^ into the skies, 
 His spear a sun-beam, and his shield a star. 
 Alike tway brenning gronfires ^ rolls his eyes, 
 Cliafts with his iron feet and sounds to war. 
 
 She sits upon a rock ; 
 
 She bends before his spear ; 
 
 She rises from the shock. 
 
 Wielding her own in air. 
 Hard as the thunder doth she drive it on ; 
 Wit skilly wimpled ^ guides it to his crown ; 
 His long sharp spear, his spreading shield is gone ; 
 He falls, and falling rolleth thousands down. 
 War, gore-faced War, by envy burl'd,^'' arist 
 His fiery helm nodding to the air, 
 Ten bloody arrows in his straining fist." 
 * * * * 
 
 What a picture in the last line ! With no other evidence 
 before us than is afforded by this and the other antique pieces 
 which we have quoted, one may assert unhesitatingly, not 
 only that Chatterton was a true English poet of the eighteenth 
 century, but also that, compared with the other English poets 
 of the part of that century immediately prior to the new era 
 
 ' Rushes. 2 Sword. » Freeze. * Unterrified. * Armed. 
 
 ^ Tossed. 7 Head stretched. 8 »p^.Q burning meteors, 
 
 ^ Closely covered^ ^o Armed. 
 
IT 
 
 A STORY OF THE VEAK 1770. 345 
 
 begun by Bums and Wordsworth, he was, with all his imma- 
 turity, almost solitary in the possession of the highest poetic 
 gift. Pope, Thomson, and Goldsmith, were poets of this 
 century ; and no sensible man will for a moment think of 
 comparing the boy of Bristol, in respect of his whole activity, 
 with these fine stars of our literature, or even with some of 
 the lesser stars that shone along with them. But he had a 
 specific fire and force of imagination in him which they had 
 not; and when one remembers that he was but seventeen 
 years and nine months old when he died, and that most of 
 his antiques were written fully a year before that time, little 
 wonder that, with Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats, one 
 looks back again and again on his brief existence with a kind 
 of awe, as on the track of a heaven-shot meteor earthwards 
 through a night of gloom. 
 
WOEDSWOETH.* 
 
 Another great spirit has recently gone from the midst of us. 
 It is now three months since the nation heard, with a deep 
 though quiet sadness, that an aged man of venerable mien, 
 who for fifty years had borne worthily the name of English 
 poet, had at length disappeared from those scenes of lake and 
 mountain, where, in stately care of his own worth, he had 
 fixed his recluse abode, and passed forward, one star the more, 
 into the still unfeatured future, whither all that lives is rolling, 
 and whither, as he well knew and believed, the Shakespeares 
 and Miltons, whom men count dead, had but as yesterday 
 transferred their kindred radiance. When the news spread, 
 it seemed as if our island were suddenly a man the poorer, as 
 if some pillar or other notable object, long conspicuous on its 
 broad surface, had suddenly fallen down. It is right, then, 
 that we should detain our thoughts for a little in the vicinity of 
 this event ; that, the worldly course of such a man having now 
 been ended, we should stand for a little around his grave, and 
 think solemnly of what he was. Neither few nor unimport- 
 ant, we may be sure, are the reflections that should suggest 
 themselves over the grave of William Wordsworth. 
 
 Of the various mysteries that the human mind can contem- 
 plate, none is more baffling, and at the same time more charm- 
 ing to the understanding, than the nature of that law which 
 determines the differences of power and mental manifestation 
 between age and age. That all history is an evolution, that 
 each generation inherits all that had been accumulated by its 
 predecessor, and bequeathes in turn all that itself contains to 
 
 * North British Review : August, 1S50.— The Poetical Works 0/ William 
 Wordsworth, D.C.L., Poet Laureate, &c. London, 1849. 
 
WOKDSWORTH. 347 
 
 its successor, is an idea to which, in one form or another, 
 science binds us down. But, native as this idea now is in all 
 cultivated minds, with how many facts, and with what a large 
 proportion of our daily speech, does it not still stand in appa- 
 rent contradiction ! Looking back upon the past career of our 
 race, does not the eye single out, as by instinct, certain epochs 
 that are epochs of virtue and glory, and others that are epochs 
 of frivolity and shame? Do we not speak of the age of 
 Pericles in Greece, of the Augustan age in Rome, of the out- 
 burst of chivalry in modern Europe, of the noble era of 
 Elizabeth in England, and of the sad decrepitude that fol- 
 lowed it ? And is there not a certain justice of perception in 
 this mode of speaking ? Does it not seem as if all ages were 
 not equally favoured from on high ; gifts both moral and in- 
 tellectual being vouchsafed to one that are all but withheld 
 from another? As with individual men, so with nations and 
 with humanity at large, may not the hour of highest spiritual 
 elevation and sternest moral resolve be nearest the hour of 
 most absolute obliviousness and most profound degradation ? 
 Has not humanity also its moods — now brutal and full-acorned, 
 large in physical device, and pregnant with the wit of uncon- 
 cern ; again, touched to higher things, tearful for very good- 
 ness, turning an upward eye to the stars, and shivering to its 
 smallest nerve with the power and the sense of beauty? In rude 
 and superficial expression of which fact, have not our literary 
 men coined the common-place that a critical and sceptical age 
 always follows an age of heroism and creative genius ? These, 
 we say, are queries which, though they may not be answered to 
 their depths, it is still useful to put and ponder. One remark 
 only will we venture in connexion with them . According to one 
 theory, it is a sufficient explanation of these moral and intel- 
 lectual changes in the spirit of nations, to suppose that they 
 take place by a law of mere contagion or propagation from 
 individual to individual. One man of powerful and original 
 nature, or of unusually accurate perceptions, makes his 
 appearance in some central, or, it may be, sequestered spot ; 
 he gains admirers or makes converts ; disciples gather round 
 him, or try to form an opinion of him from a distance ; they, 
 
348 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 again, in their turn, affect others, till, at last, as the gloom of 
 the largest church is slowly changed into brilliance by the 
 successive lighting of all its lamps, so a whole country may^ 
 district by district, succumb to the peculiarity of a new influ- 
 ence ! Now, this is perfectly true ; and it would be indeed 
 difficult to estimate the amazing efficacy of such a law of in- 
 cessant diffusion from point to point over a surface. But we 
 are convinced that this mode of representing the fact under 
 notice does not convey the whole truth. Concerning even the 
 silent pestilences, we have been recently taught that they do 
 not wholly depend on transmission from individual to indivi- 
 dual, but are rather distinct derangements in the body of the 
 earth itself, tremors among its electricities and imponderables, 
 alterations of the sum-total of those material conditions 
 wherewith human life has been associated. In like manner, as 
 it appears to us, must those streaming processes of sympathy 
 and contagion, whereby a moral or intellectual change is 
 diffused over a community, be regarded as but the superficial 
 indications of a deep contemporaneous agitation pervading the 
 whole frame of Nature. From the mineral core of this vast 
 world, outwards to the last thoughts, impulses, and conclu- 
 sions of us its human inhabitants, there runs, as science 
 teaches, a mystic law of intercourse and affinity, pledging its 
 parts to act in concert. The moral and intellectual revolutions 
 of our world, its wars, its new philosophies, its outbursts of 
 creative genius, its profligate sinkings, and its noble recoveries, 
 all must rest, under the decree of supreme wisdom, on a con 
 current basis of physical undulations and vicissitudes. When, 
 the refore, a man starts up i n any locality, c h arged withja n ew 
 spirit or a newdfisire, there , be sure, the ^ romid_around him 
 I3~"simn^ ^ afiec ted. New intellectual dispositions are like 
 atmospheres ; they overhang whole countries at once. It is 
 not necessarily by communication or plagiarism that the 
 thought excogitated to-day in London breaks out to-morrow 
 in Edinburgh, or that persons in Gottingen and Oxford are 
 found speculating at the same time in the same direction. In 
 our own island, for example, it is a fact capable of experi- 
 mental verification, that whatever is being thought at any one 
 
WORDSWORTH. 349 
 
 time in any one spot, is, with a very small amount of differ- 
 ence, being independently thought at the same time in fifty 
 other places at all distances from each other. And yet it is 
 equally true that in every moral or spiritual revolution there 
 is always a leader, a forerunner, a man of originality, in whose 
 individual bosom the movement seems to have been rehearsed 
 and epitomized ; and that, in the beginning of every such 
 revolution, the power of contagion from man to man, and the 
 machinery of the clique, school, or phalanx, must come into 
 play. 
 
 We do not think that these remarks are too remote or 
 abstract for the present occasion. The nineteenth century, it 
 appears to us, is a sufficiently large portion of historic time, 
 England is a sufficiently large portion of the historic earth, 
 and the poetical literature of England, or of any other nation, 
 is a sufficiently important element in that nation's existence, 
 to jus tify our viewing t hat remarkable phenomenon, the revival 
 of English poetry in the nineteenth century, i n the light o f the 
 most extreme general conceptions that can be bro ught to bear 
 upon_it. Against the preceding observations, therefore, as 
 against what seems an appropriate background, let us try to 
 bring out the main features of the phenomenon itself, so far, 
 at least, a s these can be exhibited with reference to the life 
 and writings_ of its mos jt^ representative ma pJ' And^rst^of^ 
 Wordswoi'th regarded historically. 
 
 From Dryden till about fifty years ago, say our authorities 
 in literary history, was an era of poetical sterility in England. 
 When Coleridge gave lectures in London on the English 
 poets, he divided them into three lists or sections — the first, 
 including all the poets from Chaucer to Dryden ; the second, 
 a those from Dryden inclusive to the close of the eighteenth 
 century ; and the third, all those of his own generation. The 
 view presented by him of the characters of these three periods, 
 relatively to each other, was essentially that conveyed in the 
 strange theory of alternate ebb and flow, alternate immission 
 and withdrawal of power, as regulating the progress of the 
 universe. In other words, the first period was a period of 
 strength, youth, and outburst ; the second was a period of 
 
350 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 cleverness, conceit, and poverty ; and the third was a period of 
 revival. For, the poetic spirit being one constant thing, a 
 certain specific and invariable quality or state of the human 
 soul, not capable of change from century to century, but the 
 same of old, now, and for ever, it follows that the history of 
 poetry can present no other appearance than that of alternate 
 presence and absence, alternate excess and deficiency, alternate 
 extinction and renovation. That is to say — accepting the poetry 
 of Chaucer and Milton as true poetry, we cannot go on to 
 defend the poetry of Pope and Johnson as true poetry of a 
 different kind, and then, coming down to our own age, assert 
 that its poetry is true poetry of a different kind still. Except in 
 a very obvious sense, rendered necessary by convenience, it 
 cannot be said that there are kinds of poetry. The materials 
 on which the poetic sense works are constantly varying ; in- 
 finite, also, are the combinations of human faculty and will 
 with which this sense may be structurally associated ; but the 
 sense itself, whensoever and in whomsoever it may be found, 
 is still the same old thing that trembled in the heart of Homer. 
 An age may have it or want it ; may have more of it or less 
 of it; may have it in conjunction with this or with that 
 aggregate of other characteristics; but cannot abandon one 
 form of it and take up another. 
 
 In these remarks we have embodied what we consider a 
 very necessary caution. If much good lias been done by that 
 exaltation of meaning which the words Poet and Poetry have 
 received from the hands of Coleridge and others, as well as by 
 their kindred services in distinguishing so constantly and so 
 emphatically between the terms reason and understanding, 
 genius and talent, creation and criticism, we are not quite sure 
 but that, at the same time, this infusion of new conceptions 
 into our language has been productive of some mischief. Agree- 
 ing, upon the whole, with the sentence of condemnation which 
 has been of late passed upon part of the poor eighteenth cen- 
 tury ; believing that it w^as a critical, negative, and unpoetic 
 age ; nay, even believing (however the belief is to be recon- 
 ciled with the doctrine of continuous historic evolution) that 
 it was one of those seasons of comparative diminution of the 
 
WORDSWORTH. 351 
 
 general vital energy of our species which we have already 
 spoken of, we still think that too sweeping a use has been 
 made of this notion and its accessories by a certain class of 
 writers. Let us illustrate our meaning by an example. Keats, 
 the poet, and James Mill, the historian of India, were con- 
 temporaries. The one, according to the language introduced 
 by Coleridge, was a man of genius ; tlie other was a man of 
 talent. In the soul of Keats, if ever in a human soul at all, 
 there was a portion of the real poetic essence — the real faculty 
 divine ; Mr. Mill, on the other hand, had probably as little of 
 the poet in his composition as any celebrated man of his time, 
 but he was a man of hard metal, of real intellectual strength, 
 and of unyielding rectitude. In certain exercises of the mind 
 he could probably have crushed Keats, who certainly was no 
 weakling, as easily as a giant could crush a babe. But, sup- 
 pose the two men to have sat together on Hampstead Heath 
 in a starry night, which of them would then have been the 
 stronger— which would have known the more ecstatic pulses ? 
 Or, to make the case still more decisive, suppose the two men 
 to have been Keats and Aristotle ; Keat^, a consumptive poetic 
 boy, and Aristotle the intellect of half a world. Does not 
 such a contrast brhig out the real injustice that has been done 
 to many truly great and good men by the habit which, since 
 the time of Coleridge, has become general, of placing all the 
 men that belong to the so-called category of genius in one 
 united mass above all that only rank in the category of talent? 
 For, granting, as we certainly do, the reality of some such 
 distinction as is implied between the two substantives, is it 
 not clear that the general mass of mind possessed by a man 
 reputed to belong to the inferior category, and consequently, 
 also, his general power to influence the soul of the world, may 
 exceed a thousand times that possessed by a man of the other? 
 In other words, may not a man rank so high in the one kind, 
 that, even allowing the kind itself to be inferior, it may be 
 said with truth that he is a hundred times greater a man than 
 some specified lower man in the other ? Practically, the tenor 
 of these remarks is, that we are in the present day commit- 
 ting an injustice by following the tendency of our young 
 
352 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 Coleridgians to restrict the meaning of the quantitative word 
 " greatness" within the limits of the merely qualitative word 
 "genius." And, speculatively, their tenor may be expressed 
 in the proposition that this quality or mode of mind called 
 genius, the poetic sense, creative power, and so on, may exist 
 in association with all possible varieties of intellectual or 
 cerebral vigour, from the mediocrity of a Kirke White or an 
 Anacreon, up to the stupendousness of a Shakespeare. It is 
 thus that, while agreeing in the main with the opinion that 
 from Dryden to the close of the next hundred years was a 
 poetic interregnum, we would still make our peace with those 
 who would fight the battle of the much-abused eighteenth 
 century; and that we would steer clear of the controversy 
 whether Pope was a poet. As deficiency in poetic power does 
 not imply corresponding deficiency in what may be called 
 ordinary cerebral vigour, so the eighteenth century, though 
 admitted to have been unpoetic, may have been a very respect- 
 able century notwithstanding ; and even were we to exclude 
 Pope from the class of poets (which most certainly we would 
 not do), we might still hold him to have been a phenomenon 
 in literature, not, on that account, a whit the less remarkable. 
 A deeper analysis would carry us farther into the question as 
 to the connexion between poetic power and general intellect 
 in individuals and in ages ; but here we must stop. 
 
 Having thus explained in what sense we understand that 
 general assertion regarding the low state of English poetry in 
 the eighteenth century, (part of the seventeenth included,) with 
 which the name of Wordsworth is irrevocably associated, let 
 us attend a little to the facts of the case. In what did the 
 sterility of English poetry in that age consist, and what words 
 would best describe it ? Here Wordsworth himself comes to 
 our aid. The following is from an Appendix to the Preface to 
 the second edition of his Lyrical Ballads, published in 1800 : 
 the subject under discussion is Poetic Diction. 
 
 " The earliest poets of all nations generally wrote from passion excited by- 
 real events ; they wrote naturally and as men : feeling powerfully as they did, 
 their language was daring and figurative. In succeeding time, poets, and men 
 ambitious of the fame of poets, perceiving the influence of such language, and 
 desirous of producing the same effect without being animated with the same 
 passion, set themselves to a mechanical adoption of these figures of speech, and 
 
WORDSWORTH. 353 
 
 made use of them, sometimes with propriety, but much more frequently- 
 applied them to feelings and thoughts with which they had no natural connexion 
 whatsoever. A language was thus insensibly produced, differing materially 
 from the real language of men in any situation. The reader or hearer of this 
 distorted language found himself in a perturbed and unusual state of mind : 
 when affected by the genuine language of passion he had been in a perturbed 
 and unusual state of mind also : in both cases he was willing that his common 
 judgment and understanding should be laid asleep, and he had no instinctive and 
 infallible perception of the true to make him reject the false ; the one served as 
 a passport for the other. The emotion was in both cases delightful ; and no 
 wonder if he confounded the one with the other, and believed them both to 
 be produced by the same or similar causes. Besides, the poet spake to him in 
 the character of a man to be looked up to, a man of genius and authority. Thus, 
 and from a variety of other causes, this distorted language was received with 
 admiration ; and poets, it is probable, who had before contented themselves for 
 the most part with misapplying only expressions which at first had been dictated 
 by real passion, carried the abuse still further, and introduced phrases composed 
 apparently in the spirit of the original figurative language of passion, yet alto- 
 gether of their own invention, and characteriaed by various degrees of wanton 
 deviation from good sense and nature. . . . Perhaps in no way, by positive 
 example, could be more easily given a notion of what I mean by the phrase 
 jioetic diction than by referring to a comparison between the metrical para- 
 phrases which we have of passages in the Old and New Testament, and those 
 passages as they exist in our common translation. By way of immediate 
 example, take the following of Dr. Johnson : — 
 
 * Turn on the prudent ant thy heedless eyes, 
 
 Observe her labours, sluggard, and be wise ; 
 
 No stern command, no monitory voice, ^ 
 
 Prescribes her duties, or directs her choice ; 
 
 Yet, timely provident, she hastes away 
 
 To snatch the blessings of a plenteous day ; 
 
 When fruitful summer loads the teeming plain, 
 
 She crops the harvest, and she stores the grain. 
 
 How long shall sloth usurp thy useless hours, 
 
 Unnerve thy vigour, and enchain thy powers ? 
 
 While artful shades thy downy couch enclose. 
 
 And soft solicitation courts repose. 
 
 Amidst the drowsy charms of dull delight, 
 
 Year chases year with unremitted flight. 
 
 Till want now following, fraudulent and slow, ^ 
 
 Shall spring to seize thee, like an ambush'd foe.' 
 From this hubbub of words pass to the original. ' Go to the ant, thou 
 sluggard, consider her ways and be wise : which, having no guide overseer or 
 ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food m the har- 
 vest. How long wilt thou sleep, O sluggard ? when wilt thou arise out of thy 
 sleep ? Yet a little sleep, yet a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to 
 sleep i So shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth, and thy want as an 
 armed man.' " 
 
 To sum up the views thus presented by Wordsworth of the 
 state of English poetry after Milton, it may be said that at 
 that time the nation, having lost much of the genuine poetical 
 power it had formerly possessed, but still preserving a form 
 of composition to which it had been so long and so powerfully 
 accustomed, began to regard the essence of poetiy as lymg 
 in metre, accompanied by a certain peculiar and artificial 
 
 A A 
 
354 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 phraseology called poetic diction ; thus begetting that exag- 
 gerated antithesis between poetry and prose with which our 
 language is still infected. Instead of regarding the poetic 
 faculty as consisting in a mode or attitude of the mind, 
 disthiguishable, on the one hand, from the scientific mode or 
 attitude whose function is investigation or exposition, and, on 
 the other hand, from the oratorical mode or attitude whose 
 function is to excite or stimulate in a particular direction — 
 they made poetry to consist in a mode of language, and they 
 estimated the value of a poet according to the degree of 
 mastery he had attained in the use of this mode of language, 
 and the degree of general mental power and resource he could 
 manifest through it. Hence, in the first place, a gradual 
 increase of departure in metrical composition from the idioms 
 and combinations of words deemed appropriate to prose ; and, 
 in the second place, a gradual reduction of the range of metre 
 itself to certain fixed varieties and methods of versification, 
 which the older poets, who did not so much assort their 
 thoughts to rhymes as let the thoughts flow out in their own 
 rhythm, would have disdained as much as a natural cascade 
 would disdain the assistance of pipes. But while an exag- 
 gerated antithesis was thus established between prose and 
 poetry, it by no means followed that a very wide separation 
 was drawn between the devotees of the one and those of the 
 other. Poetry was indeed a difierent form of diction from 
 prose; but then, as it was not difficult for a clever man to 
 acquire two forms of diction, one might very well be both 
 a poet and a prose-writer ! To pass from prose to poetry was 
 but to pass, as it were, from one's town to one's country 
 house. Hence it was that so many of the literary men of 
 last century had a reputation both in prose and in verse. 
 General mental vigour candied an author triumphantly through 
 either form of composition. Wit, sarcasm, strength, manli- 
 ness, whatever qualities of intellect or disposition could earn 
 respect for a writer in prose, were all capable — with a little 
 training, or a slight native impulse towards the picturesque, 
 to aid him — of being transfused into metre. The best poetry 
 of the age was, accordingly, rather wit or reflection expressed 
 
WOKDSWORTH. 355 
 
 in metre, than real poetry in the strict sense of the word. 
 And here lies the defence of the poets of that time, as well as 
 their condemnation. Of many of them it may be denied that 
 they were poets ; but of almost all of them it may be asserted 
 that they were men of general mental vigour. In our disqui- 
 sitions concerning them, therefore, let not this be forgotten. 
 If Johnson was no poet, he was a very ponderous and noble 
 old fellow nevertheless ; and even the purists that would clip 
 the laurels of Dryden and Pope, must admit that we have no 
 such manly literati as the former now-a-days about Leicester 
 Square, and that the other was a diamond of the first water. 
 
 But the change came at length. By the mysterious opera- 
 tion of those laws which determine the risings and the sink- 
 ings of the mental state of humanity as a whole, there 
 seemed to be effected, towards the close of the eighteenth 
 century, a sudden increase of the vital energy of the species. 
 Humanity assumed a higher mood ; a deep agitation, as if 
 from a fresh electric discharge out of celestial space into the 
 solid body of our planet, shook the soul of the world, and 
 left it troubled and excited. The two most conspicuous and 
 extensive manifestations of this heightened state of the world's 
 consciousness were — in the region of speculation, the promul- 
 gation of the transce ndental philosophy in Germa ny, and, in 
 the region of action, the IVench^^EevoLjlioKu But, as if the 
 same spirit which burst forth in these two great eruptions 
 also sought vent through smaller and apparently unconnected 
 orifices all over Europe, there were not wanting other signi- 
 ficant indications of the change that was transacting itself. 
 In Germany, seemingly apart from the transcendental philo- 
 sophy, though in reality deriving strength from it through 
 a subterranean conduit, a new literature came forth under the 
 care, first of Lessing, and then of Goethe. And in our own 
 country, sprinkled over as it had been in spots by the sound 
 and fertile philosophy of Reid, there was a feebler exhibition 
 of the same phenomenon. Even in the age of reputed 
 degeneracy there had been men of the true poetic spark. 
 Dryden and Pope may not have kept it pure, but they 
 assuredly had it ; Gray, notwithstanding the dreadful disin- 
 
 A a2 
 
356 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 tegration to which his Elegy has been submitted by modern 
 critics, did certainly possess the ear and sensibility of a poet; 
 Collins and Goldsmith were men of musical hearts; and 
 Thomson, Wordsworth himself being judge, was a genuine 
 child of rural nature. Nor here, whatever other names are 
 left unmentioned, let Mm be forgotten, the boy of Bristol, the 
 drunken choir-singer's posthumous son, who was found dead 
 in his garret in Brooke Street, Holborn, on the 25th of August, 
 1770. But the real poetic outburst came after these men had 
 been removed from the scene, and was plainly a consequence 
 of that general commotion of the whole earth to which we have 
 already alluded. Its earliest unmistakeable signs may be 
 said to have been given in the works of Cowper and 
 Burns. In the bard of Olney, invalid as he was, the new 
 force that was pent up in the heart of nature found an 
 English mind that it could compel to speak for it ; and when 
 the swarthy Scottish ploughman filled the Lowlands with his 
 songs, it was clear that the process of reformation had been 
 completed as regarded this island, to its last spontaneous 
 results, and that every acre of the British earth had become 
 instinct and pregnant with the novel fire. 
 
 Accordingly, this was the period of the birth and training 
 of new English poets. Crabbe, Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, 
 and Southey, wp. ye. ( >, h^^^TPT^ ^f ^^^i^ ppn'rt ^^ and in all o f them 
 — their peculiar differences allowed for to the utmost — the 
 ncAV spirit was visib le. It was assigned to Wordsworth, 
 however, more than to any other man, to be conscious of the 
 fact, that such a new spirit had been breathed into the world 
 at all, and to conclude the process of its diffusion through 
 society, by bringing into play the powers of theoretical expo- 
 sition through the press, and personal influence over distin- 
 guished contemporaries. Born among the Cumberland hills, 
 in the year 1770, that is, in the year of Chatterton's death, 
 Wordsworth was but eleven years younger than Burns. It is 
 pleasant to think that these two men, though they never met, 
 were near neighbours. From within half a mile of Burns's 
 house at EUisland, the Cumberland mountains may be seen ; 
 and since the days of Drayton, the Scottish Scruffel and the 
 
WORDSWORTH. 357 
 
 English Skiddaw have mutually recognised each other in 
 popular verse. Wordsworth himself, on visiting the land of 
 Bums, called this fact to mind : — 
 
 " Huge CriflFers hoary top ascends, 
 By Skiddaw seen, — 
 Neighbours we were, and loving friends 
 We might have been." 
 
 When Burns died, at the age of thirty-seven, Wordsworth 
 was a young man of twenty-six. He had been destined for 
 the Church, and, for that purpose, had graduated at St. John's, 
 Cambridge ; but, caught as he had been from the first by the 
 new spirit of song, then hanging most powerfully, as it would 
 seem, over both shores of the Solway, he had already recog- 
 nised his proper office, and consecrated his life to the Muses. 
 In 1793, the year of the publication by Burns of the fourth 
 edition of his poems, Wordsworth had given to the world his 
 first productions — two poems in the heroic couplet, entitled, 
 respectively. An Evening Walk, addressed to a Young Lady, 
 and Descriptive Sketches, taken during a pedestrian Tour 
 among the Alps, These two compositions are slender 
 enough for modern reading ; but how p owerful was th e_j.m- 
 pression jthat they produced on some minds b y the peculia rity^ 
 of the ir style, m ay be inferred from the following testimony 
 of another youthful poet, who, coming to Cambridge imme- 
 diately after Wordsworth had left it, naturally took an 
 interest in what his predecessor had done. " During the 
 last year of my residence at Cambridge," says Coleridge, " I 
 became acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth's first publication, 
 entitled Descriptive Sketches ; and seldom, if ever, was the 
 emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary 
 horizon more evidently announced." It was not till 1796, 
 however, that the two poets became personally known to each 
 other. Like Coleridge, Wordsworth, who had travelled, and 
 resided in France during the fervours of the French Revo- 
 lution, partook, and in no moderate degree, of the social 
 enthusiasm of the time ; and, the two aspirants having gone 
 to live together for a summer, in a pleasant retreat on the 
 coast of Somersetshire, their demeanour, as Coleridge informs 
 
358 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 US in his BiograpMa Literaria^ attracted so much local atten- 
 tion, that Government was induced to send a spy to watch 
 them. The poor man, however, after dogging them for some 
 weeks in their walks, acquitted them of any disloyal intention, 
 and even became ashamed of his office; feeling sure, as he 
 said, from their continual talking of one Spy-Nosy, as they 
 sat together for hours on a sandbank, behind which he lay 
 concealed, that they had detected him, and were making- 
 game of him. As Wordsworth's temporary sympathies with 
 the French E-evolution may be supposed to have placed him 
 in vital connexion with one of the two great phenomena in 
 which, as we have said, the sudden access of new energy to 
 the human race as a whole at that time declared itself; so, we 
 may also suppose, those sea-side conversations of his about 
 Spy- Nosy, with the " noticeable man with large grey eyes," 
 must have placed him in sufficient connexion with the other 
 phenomenon, the Transcendental Philosophy. Moreover, in 
 1798, the two friends made a tour together in Germany ; and 
 whatever speculative insight was obtained by Coleridge 
 during his whole life, was evidently communicated, if not in 
 the form of creed, at least in the form of conception, to the 
 less analytic poet. 
 
 In 1798, Wordsworth published his Lyrical Ballads ; to 
 the second edition of which, printed in 1800, he appended his 
 first prose exposition of those principles on which as a poet 
 he professed to write, and to which Coleridge, by the fact of 
 his association with him in the publication (the Ancient 
 Mariner appeared in companionship with the Lyrical Bal- 
 lads), virtually gave in his adhesion. Wordsworth's next 
 publication was in 1807, when he printed in two volumes 
 a variety of poems composed in preceding years. Meanwhile 
 he had married, and retired to liis native Lakes, to lead 
 among their quiet beauties the tranquil life he deemed alone 
 suitable to the poetic nature. Southey's subsequent retire- 
 ment to the same part of the country, and Coleridge's frequent 
 visits to it, gave occasion to the celebrated nickname of the 
 " Lake School," applied to the three poets and their followers. 
 With the exception of a few tours in Scotland and the Con- 
 
WORDSWORTH. 359 
 
 tinent, and occasional journeys to the metropolis, the whole 
 remainder of Wordsworth's long life was spent among the 
 Lakes. Here, in the enjoyment of worldly competence, he 
 walked, boated, wrote, and attended church ; hence from time 
 to time he issued his new poems, or collections of poems, 
 accompanied by prefaces or dissertations, intended to illustrate 
 their peculiar character ; and here in the bosom of his admir- 
 ing family, he received the chance visits of such stray wor- 
 shippers as came privileged with letters of introduction, 
 talking with them in a cold stately way, and not unfrequently 
 (be the truth distinctly spoken) shocking them by the apparent 
 egotism with which he referred to or quoted his own poetry, 
 the inordinate indifference he displayed towards most things 
 besides, the painful rigour with which he exacted from those 
 around him every outward mark of respect and attention, 
 and the seriousness with which he would repeat the most 
 insignificant words that had been uttered in his praise. These 
 particulars regarding the man are already irrevocably before 
 the public in our books of literary gossip, and may not, 
 therefore, be wholly omitted even in a notice dedicated to the 
 poet. But whatever may have been his bearing in the pre- 
 sence of other men, Wordsworth must have been at least 
 modest and cordial in his communion with Nature. A nd it 
 is thus jhat we should remember him ; not as the pleasant 
 ornament of the social board, lavishing the kind word and the 
 hearty repartee ; not as the self-forgetting enthusiast of the 
 hour, burning his way through crowds, and drawing adoration 
 and love in his train ; but, asjie_was in his old age, the con- 
 sc ipus pati i arch of English^ oesyTthe grey4i,aired_agrTia^ 
 featured recluse, sFunning Ih^Haunts of men, yet with a 
 benevolent hand for the familiar woes of the neighbourh ood 
 wh ich knew and honoured him ; acc ustomedTTo walk alone by 
 da y^mid the woods" to pace muttermg by "The~ripj )le of 
 alake in jhe moonlight ; or, standing half wa;^ u£_a mountain, 
 to turn his pale unearthly ey^jowardsjhejieayen^g^ 
 S^Idbnie~wa3~t!iroug^^ into 
 
 which, almost alone of his coevals, he had lived to advance ; 
 and such he was till, in his eighty-first year, death took him. 
 
360 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 The nature of the r^ v^ ^l nt i dn p i ffp^t^^ f -. y l | ;^rf^vr|g-^yr>rfTi in the 
 state of English poetry will be best understood by attending 
 to the general tenor of certain propositions advanced and 
 illustrated by him in his various Prefaces and Dissertations 
 between 1800 and 1820. On these_prQpDsitions, as supple- 
 mentary to his general critical onslaught on the poetry of the 
 previous age, he may be supposed to have rested his claims to 
 be considered not only a poet, but a lso the father of a n ew 
 p oetical e ra. 
 
 Poetry, according to Wordsworth, " takes its origin from 
 emotion recollected in tranquillity;^' what the poet chiefly 
 does, or ought to do, is to represent, out of real life, scenes 
 and passions of an affecting or exciting character. Now, men 
 originally placed in such scenes, or animated by such pas- 
 sions, use a nervous and exquisite language expressly adapted 
 for the occasion by Nature herself ; and the poet, therefore, in 
 imitating such scenes or passions, will recal them more vividly 
 in proportion as he can succeed in employing the same lan- 
 guage. Only one consideration should operate to make him 
 modify that language; the consideration, namely, that his 
 business as a poet is to give pleasure. All such words or 
 expressions, therefore, as, though natural in the original 
 transaction of a passionate scene, would be unpleasant or 
 disgusting in its poetic rehearsal, must be omitted. Pruned 
 and weeded in accordance with this negative rule, any 
 description of a moving occurrence, whether in prose or 
 verse, would be true poetry. But to secure still more per- 
 fectly their great end, of giving pleasure while they excite 
 emotion, poets have devised the artificial assistance of metre 
 or verse. The rationale of the use of metre consists in this, 
 that it provides for the reader or hearer a succession of 
 minute pleasurable surprises apart from and independent of 
 the emotion produced by the matter for which it is the vehicle. 
 A prose version of a passionate story, though, if well managed, 
 it would not be so painful as the original transaction, and 
 might even be pleasurable, would still in many cases be 
 sufficiently painful to prevent its being read more than once. 
 But, by narrating the same in metre, the poet is able, as it 
 
WORDSWORTH. ' 361 
 
 were, cunningly to administer a series of doses of pleasure 
 artificially prepared, which, though not very perceptible, are 
 still sufficient, by mingling with the cun-ent of the meaning, 
 to attemper and sweeten its effects. And rhyme is a still 
 higher form of the same device. The necessities, therefore, of 
 metre and rhyme do oblige certain departures in poetry from 
 the primary language of emotion; but, allowing for those, 
 good poetic diction should still approach very near to the 
 language of real life. 
 
 This yiew,_ao useful as an aggression upon the florid diction 
 of the poets of the preceding age, certainl y errs by exa ggera- 
 tion. Wor dsworth's own poetry will not stand to be tried by 
 it^ for, as Coleridge has shown, there is hardly a verse, even 
 in his most simple productions, that does not deviate from the 
 so-called language of real life. And it must inevitably be so. 
 For, in the first place, the mere application of the negative 
 principle of modification laid down by Wordsworth, would 
 amount to an abandonment of the point at issue. Remove 
 all that would be poetically unpleasant from the language of 
 real passion in humble life — the bad grammar, the incohe- 
 rence, the mispronunciations, and so on ; and the language 
 that would then be left for the poet would be a very rare and 
 select language indeed, existing literally nowhere throughout 
 the community, but purely supposititious and ideal, the sap and 
 flower of all popular expression. So also with the representa- 
 tion of passions of a higher order. The only sense in which 
 the language of a great part of our best poetry can be said 
 to resemble real language, is that it is the kind of language 
 that a few of the most cultured persons of the community would 
 employ on very rare and impressive occasions. But even the 
 choicest spontaneous language of the best minds when most 
 nobly moved in real life, must undergo modification before it 
 can be used by the poet. And though Wordsworth has 
 provided for such modification, by laying down the positive 
 principle, that the poet is at all times to remember that it is 
 his office to give pleasure, and by pointing out the operation of 
 this principle as regards metre and rhyme; yet he does not seem 
 to have seen the whole energy of this principle as determining 
 
362 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 and compelling departures from common usage. His argument 
 for the virtual identity of poetic language and the language of 
 real life, reminds us of the mania for what is called a simple 
 conversational style. Why do not men write as they speak ? 
 Why do they not convey their meaning in books in the good 
 racy English which they employ at the dinner-table, or when 
 giving their household orders? Such are the absurd ques- 
 tions that are asked every day. It never seems to enter into 
 the minds of these people that conversation is one thing, 
 public speaking another, and writing a third ; that each 
 involves and requires a distinct setting, so to speak, of the 
 faculties for its exercise ; that in passing from one to either of 
 the others, certain powers must be called into play that were 
 before at rest, or sent to rest that were before in play ; and 
 that, accordingly, to demand the perpetual use of a conversa- 
 tional style, is to insist that there shall never be anything 
 greater in the world than what conversation can generate. 
 But a world thus restricted to the merely conversational 
 method of literary production would fall into decrepitude. 
 When a man talks with his friend, he is led on but by a few 
 trains of association, and finds a straggling style natural for 
 his purposes ; when he speaks in public, the wheels of thought 
 glow, the associative processes by which he advances become 
 more complex, and hence the roll, the cadence, the precipitous 
 burst ; and, lastly, when he writes, still other conditions of 
 thought come into action, and there arises the elaborate 
 sentence, winding like a rivulet through the meadow of his 
 subject, or the page jewelled with a thousand allusions. Pre- 
 cisely so in the matter more immediately under discussion. 
 Here, too, there is a gradation. A man in a state of excitement 
 talks in vivid language, and even sets his words to a rough 
 natural music, his voice swelling or trembling with its bur- 
 then, though still falling short of song. But in the literary 
 repetition of a scene, nature suggests a new set of proprieties, 
 answering to the entire difference between the mind in the 
 primary and the mind in the secondary attitude ; and a literal 
 report would be found to defeat the very end in view, and to 
 be as much out of place as a literal copy in paintirig. Even 
 
WOKDSWOETH. 363 
 
 in prose narration there must be a more select and coherent 
 language than served in the primary act of passion, as well as 
 a more melodious music. And when, moved to a still higher 
 flight, the story lifts itself into metre — availing itself, as it were, 
 of a device sanctioned by an origin in some of the more 
 splendid moments of the ancient human soul — then, in ex- 
 change for certain advantages, it submits to restrictions that 
 come along with them. Finally, if the charm of rhyme be 
 desired, this too must be purchased by farther and inevitable 
 concessions. Thus^ we repeat, there is a gradation. In prose 
 narration language is conditioned by a more complex set of 
 necessities than in actual experience; in metrical narration 
 the conditions are more complex still, so that, if the speech 
 were of marble before, there must now be speech of jasper ; 
 and, lastly, in rhyme the conditions compel the thought 
 through so fine a passage that the words it chooses must be 
 opals and rubies. Nor in all this is there any departure from 
 nature. On the contrary, it is a noble provision that, where 
 the ordinary resources even of musical prose are apt to fail, 
 the mind should have more intense methods of production in 
 reserve. Such methods are metre and rhyme. They do not 
 impair the work of intellectual invention, but rather assist it, 
 and render it capable of a more exquisite class of perform- 
 ances than would otherwise be possible. In prose, however 
 musical, the meaning flows, as it were, easily over a level, 
 obeying the guidance of its own associations ; in metre, new 
 associations are added, which, while they increase the dif- 
 ficulty, also stimulate the intellect to higher and more trans- 
 cendental reaches ; and when with this is conjoined rhyme, or 
 the obligation of conducting the already moving thought in 
 the direction or towards the horizon of a certain possible 
 number of preconceived sounds, then every fibre of the mind 
 is alert and electric, the whole strength of the household is 
 called into action, and things are done that would surprise 
 the gods. 
 
 Although there seems to be no doubt that the vehement 
 opposition that greeted Wordsworth on his appearance as a 
 poet, was determined partly by a perception on the part of the 
 
364 WOKDSWORTH. 
 
 public of those weaknesses in liis theory to which we have 
 been alluding, it seems plain also that much of it was a mere 
 display of that instinct of indignation which seizes men when 
 they see their household gods attacked. 
 
 " * Pedlars/ and ' boats,' and * waggons ! ' Oh ! ye shades 
 Of Pope and Dryden, are we come to this ?" 
 
 Such was the universal feeling of the critics. The controversy 
 between the Edinburgh Review and Wordsworth, was literally 
 a contest between the old and the new ; in which, however, 
 the old derived certain advantages from the obstinacy and 
 want of tact with which the new exposed and made a boast 
 of its most galling peculiarities. For, if Jeffrey's criticisms 
 on Wordsworth's poetry be now compared with the criticisms 
 of Wordsworth's own friend Coleridge, as published in the 
 Biograjfliia Literaria, it will be found that, immeasurably as 
 the two critics differ in spirit — the one refusing to admit 
 Wordsworth to be a good poet at all, the other considering 
 him to be the greatest English poet since Milton — there is still 
 an almost perfect coincidence in their special objections to his 
 style. What Jeffrey attacked was chiefly the alleged child- 
 ishness of much of Wordsworth's language, the babyism of 
 his " Alice Fells," with their cloaks of " duffle grey," &c. ; 
 and it is precisely on these points that Coleridge, even while 
 aware of his friend's more profound reason for such familiar- 
 ities, expresses his dissent from him. The truth is, had 
 Wordsworth been a man of more innate energy, more tre- 
 mendousness, so to speak, as a poet, he would have effected 
 the revolution that was necessary with less delay and opposi- 
 tion. Wrapping up his doctrinal peculiarities, if he had had 
 any, in the midst of his poetry, instead of protruding them 
 in a preface, he would have blasted the old spirit out by the 
 mere infatuation of the new, and wound resistless hands in 
 the hair of the nation's instincts. But instead of being the 
 Mirabeau of our literary revolution, and hardly aware of 
 his own propositions, he was, as it were, its Kobespierre, who 
 first threw his propositions tied in a bunch into the crowd 
 before him, and then fought his way pertinaciously to where 
 
WORDSWORTH. 365 
 
 they fell. But even thus (and there were doubtless advan- 
 tages in this method too) he at length obtained success. The 
 " This will never do/' with which Jefirey introduced his 
 criticism of the Excursion, proved a false augury. Slowly 
 and reluctantly the nation came round to Wordsworth ; and, 
 if there are still many that believe in his defects and short- 
 comings, all admit him to have been a true poet, and a man of 
 rare genius. Of the poets that have appeared in England 
 s ince he began~} iis f^o^1rs e — the Byrons, th p- ^Shp■11ey«^ the 
 Keatses ^the Tennysons — there is not one thnt rlops not nw p. 
 rnmr thin ^;; t n h in OT?nm p 1o an d influence. Not that these men 
 would not have been poets, even had Wordsworth never lived. 
 Through them, too, the new spirit with which the world had 
 been charged would infallibly in any case have asserted 
 itself; and, as it is, there has been in each and all of them, 
 something individual and original, which has caught portions 
 of the new spirit that even the soul of Wordsworth could not, 
 and been made capable thereby of perfectly specific things. 
 A Nestor may be the patriarch of the camp, but even his 
 deeds may be, in the end, outdone by the exploits of the 
 younger heroes. Of all the poets that have succeeded Words- 
 worth, the one that stands most in the position of revolt 
 against him is Byron. The Byronic in poetry is, in some re- 
 spects, the contradictory of the Wordsworthian. And. believing 
 as we do that Byron was also a great poet, and that through him 
 there were poured into our age elements of grandeur and power 
 that were wanting in Wordsworth, and yet needed, we would 
 willingly go on to consider historically the appearance of this 
 other tendency in our literature, known as the Byronic, and to 
 show how the two tributaries became at length united. It is 
 time, however, to leave the historical part of our subject, and 
 direct our attention more expressly to the qualities of Words- 
 worth as a poet. 
 
 That Wordsworth was a tr ue poet, that he d id posse s^jthe 
 " i nherent g low." the " vi sion and faculty divine," no one that 
 has ever read a page of his writings can honestly deny . 
 Coleridge, in whose vocabulary the word " imagination" 
 stood for the poetic faculty ^^^^^ excellence, pronounced Words- 
 
366 WORDSWOETH. 
 
 worth to be, in imaginative power, " tlie nearest of all 
 modern writers to Shakespeare and Milton." This estimate 
 may be opposed by some as too high ; but keeping in view 
 the precise sense attached by Coleridge to his words, it will be 
 difficult to lower it very much. Nor, in accepting regarding 
 Wordsworth a sentence of the same or of similar import, is it 
 necessary to have any profound theory as to the nature of this 
 so called imaginative or poetic faculty which we then assert 
 him to possess. It is sufficient if we know it when we see it, 
 or if we feel the force of any of those numerous synonyms 
 and circumlocutions by which poets and analysts (Words- 
 worth himself amongst others) have sought to describe it. 
 For, after all, we define such terms best when we rave about 
 them, adhering to no one form of expression, but supplementing, 
 as it were, the defects of all possible conception by the vague- 
 ness and the force of sound. Perhaps the phrase which, if fully 
 apprehended, would best convey the notion of what is meant 
 by imagination as the faculty of the poet, would be the phrase 
 " Creative Energy." For this phrase would carry with it 
 one very essential discrimination — the discrimination, namely, 
 of the poetic faculty, as such, both from that passive sensi- 
 bility by which the mind, presenting, as it were, a photo- 
 graphic surface to the universe, receives from it impressions 
 of whatever is ; and also from that minor and more ordinary 
 exercise of activity by which the mind, sitting thereafter 
 amid these received impressions, recollects, registers, and com- 
 pares them. What the imaginative or poetic faculty does is 
 something beyond this ; and is. more akin (with reverence be 
 it spoken) to the operation of that original cosmic power at 
 whose fiat the atoms and the elements sprang first together. 
 A certain accumulation of material, a certain assemblage of 
 impressions, or mental objects, being supplied by the con- 
 sciousness, and lying there ready, it is the part of this faculty 
 to discharge into them a portion self that shall fuse them into 
 a living whole, capable of being contemplated with pleasure. 
 This — the poiesis or creation of new unities, the information of 
 mere knowledge with somewhat of the spirit of the knower, 
 the incorporation of diverse impressions and recollections by 
 
WORDSWORTH. 367 
 
 the combining flash of a specific mental act — is essentially the 
 function of the imagination. Now, as all men possess this 
 faculty in some degree, and as in the generation of all the higher 
 species of thought or action it must be present in a very large 
 degree, by whatever name such species of thought or action 
 are called, it is only in a certain supreme sense that imagina- 
 tion is set apart in all languages as the proper faculty of 
 poets. Yet there is reason in this. Poets pre-eminently are 
 men that breathe their own spirit into things, that make self 
 dominate over what is distinct from self, that give out into the 
 universe more than they receive from it. 80 in Goethe's 
 matchless lines on the poet — 
 
 " Wherewith bestirs he human spirits ? 
 Wherewith makes he the elements obey ? 
 Is't not the stream of song that out his bosom springs, 
 And to his heart the world back coiling brings ?" 
 
 That is, the stream of song, or, in other words, of self, flow- 
 ing forth from the poet's heart into the world of phenomena, 
 entwines itself there with this and with that portion of matter 
 or experience, and then flows back to whence it came, coiling 
 what it has captured along with it. This power, this over- 
 flowing of self upon the universe, so characteristic of the 
 poet, appears most of all in his eye. The eyes of some men 
 are dull and obtuse ; those of others are sharp and piercing, 
 as if they shot their power out in lines ; the eyes of the poet 
 are heavy-laden and melancholy, like pools continually too 
 full. 
 
 Ho wever we choose t o vary the words that are taken to 
 define jhe essential facultyof the poet, we shall findj hat they 
 apply_toJWordswQrth. Every page of his poetry abounds 
 with instances of imagination. Thus, from the Excursion — 
 
 " Some tall crag 
 That is the eagle's birth-place, or some peak 
 Familiar with forgotten years, that shows 
 Inscribed upon its visionary sides 
 The history of many a winter-storm, 
 Or obscure record of the' path of fire." 
 
 Or from Peter Bell — 
 
 " And he had trudged through Yorkshire dales, 
 
 Among the rocks and winding scars ; 
 Where deep and low the hamlets lie 
 Beneath their little j^afch of shy, 
 
 And little lot of stars." 
 
368 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 Or from the fine ode on Intimations of Immortality from 
 BecoUections of Childhood — 
 
 " Our life is but a sleep and a forgetting : 
 The soul that rises with us, our life's star, 
 Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
 
 And Cometh from afar : 
 Not in entire forgetfulness, 
 And not in utter nakedness, 
 But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
 
 From God who is our home : 
 Heaven lies about us in our infancy ! 
 Shades of the prison-house begin to close 
 
 Upon the growing boy ; 
 But he beholds the light, and whence it flows — 
 
 He sees it in his joy ; 
 The youth who daily further from the east 
 Must travel, still is Nature's priest, 
 And by the vision splendid 
 Is on his way attended ; 
 At length the Man perceives it die away. 
 And fade into the light of common day." 
 
 These, and hundreds of other passages that might be 
 quoted, show that Wordsworth possessed, in a very high 
 degree indeed, the true primary quality of the poet — imagi- 
 nation; a surcharge of personality or vital spirit, per- 
 petually overflowing among the objects of the othei*wise 
 conditioned universe, and refashioning them according to its 
 pleasure. 
 
 If we proceed now to inquire what were the most prominent 
 of those other characteristics which, acting and re-acting with 
 this generic tendency in the economy of Wordsworth's mind, 
 determined the specific peculiarities of his poetical produc- 
 tions, we are sure to be impressed first of all with his ex treme 
 sensibility. t^, ^ti^ ^^^ nrate acquaintanc e with^Jlift changiup; 
 phenomeuaof external nature. It is a just complaint against 
 civilisation, as that word is at present defined, and especially 
 against life in cities, that men are thereby shut out, or 
 rather shut in, from sources of sensation the most pure and 
 healthy of any. That people should know something of 
 the aspects of the earth they live on ; that they should be 
 familiar with the features of at least a portion of its undis- 
 guised surface, with its rocks, its woods, its turf, its hills, 
 as seen in the varying lights of day and night, and the 
 varying livery of the seasons : this, it may be said, was 
 
k 
 
 WORDSWORTH. 369 
 
 clearly intended to be for ever a part of the mere privilege of 
 existence. But a large proportion of mankind have been 
 obliged to let slip even this poor item of their right in being. 
 Pent up, on the one hand, in their cares against starvation, 
 and, on the other, in their devices for artificial comfort, men 
 have ceased to regard, with the same true intimacy as of old, 
 the venerable face of their ancient mother. Certain great 
 admonitions of the outward, indeed, will always remain with 
 men wheresoever they pass their days — the overarching sky, 
 the midnight winds, the sea's expanse, the yellow cornfield, 
 the wooded landscape. And, after all, these are the images of 
 nature that have most power to stir and affect us ; these, of 
 which not even cities can deprive us. Cities, too, have their 
 own peculiar kinds of scenery, of wliich, and especially of 
 their nocturnal aspects, enough has not yet been made. Thus, 
 in Keats' s Lamia — 
 
 *• As men talk in a dream, so Corinth all, 
 Throughout her palaces imperial, 
 And all her populous streets and temples lewd, 
 Mutter'd, like tempest in the distance brew'd, 
 To the wide-spreaded night above her towers." 
 
 But of the rural mmutice of Nature, and also of what may 
 be called her aspects of the horrible and lonesome, most of 
 us, above all if we are denizens of cities, are compelled to 
 be ignorant. Very few, for example, can tell the names of 
 the various forest trees, or distinguish them from each other ; 
 and fewer still can recognise, either by name or association, 
 the various wild-flowers that grow in the meadows. How 
 much also of sympathy with nature have we not lost, by not 
 knowing, with the shepherd or husbandman, the signs of the 
 weather; what the clouds say when they hurry so, what 
 mean those motions of the cattle, and why the mists roll 
 down the hills ? And then, in the more special region of 
 phenomena to which we have alluded, who among us 
 experience, save by rare chance, the realities of those scenes 
 so telling in books of fiction — the dark and solitary moor 
 with the light glimmering in the distance, the fearful bivouac 
 in the depths of a wood, or the incessant breaking of the 
 waves at midnight against the cliff-embattled shore ? In 
 
 B 6 
 
370 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 that single ride from Ayr to Allowa' Kirk (we agree with 
 a writer in an old magazine), the immortal Tarn saw 
 more, even omitting the witches, than most of us see in a 
 lifetime. 
 
 Now, it is a curious fact, that one of the most characteristic 
 features of that revolution in English poetry with which the 
 name of Wordsworth is associated, has been the increased 
 interest that it has both instinctively aroused and knowingly 
 cultivated in the facts and appearances of material—nature. 
 If, as Wordsworth himself has said, hardly a new original 
 image or description of nature was introduced into English 
 verse in the age between Milton and Thomson, our recent 
 poets have certainly retrieved the neglect. *' Nature, nature," 
 has been their cry ; and as Bacon, after his own lordly 
 fashion of thought, fancied that it was of service to his 
 health and spirits to inhale every morning the smell of 
 freshly-ploughed earth into which he had poured wine, so 
 they have interpreted literally their prescriptions to the same 
 effect, by renewing as often as possible their acquaintance 
 with the rural earth, and falling periodically on the turf, as 
 it were, with their faces downwards. In particular, it must 
 have been remarked what an increased familiarity our recent 
 poets have contracted with the vegetable department of 
 nature. Chaucer himself could hardly have described the 
 beauties of a field or a garden more minutely than some of 
 our modern versifiers. Nor among the poets that have 
 helped to cultivate this delight in the observation of natural 
 appearances, is there any one that deserves to be ranked 
 before Wordsworth. A native of scenes celebrated for their 
 loveliness, he seems to have been endowed from the first 
 with a capacity to feel and appreciate their benignant 
 influence. In one of the few fragments that have been 
 given to the world of his unpublished poem, The Prelude, 
 he thus describes his sympathy with nature in childhood : — 
 
 " In November days, 
 When vapours rolling down the valleys, made 
 A lonely scene more lonesome ; among woods 
 At noon, and mid the calm of summer nights, 
 When, by the margin of the trembling lake. 
 
)RDSW0R1 
 
 Beneath the gloomy hills, homeward I went 
 
 In solitude, such intercourse was mine : 
 
 Mine was it in the fields, both day and night, 
 
 And by the waters, all the summer long. 
 
 And in the frosty season, when the sun 
 
 Was set, and, visible for many a mile, 
 
 The cottage windows through the twilight blazed ; 
 
 1 heeded not the summons : happy time 
 
 It was indeed for all of us ; for me 
 
 It was a time of rapture ! Shod with steel 
 
 We hissed along the polished ice, in games 
 
 Confederate, imitative of the chase 
 
 And woodland pleasures — the resounding horn, 
 
 The pack loud chiming, and the hunted hare. 
 
 So through the darkness and the cold we flew. 
 
 And not a voice was idle : with the din 
 
 Smitten, the precipices rang aloud ; 
 
 The leafless trees, and every icy crag 
 
 Tinkled like iron ; while far distant hills 
 
 Into the tumult sent an alien sound 
 
 Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars, 
 
 Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west 
 
 The orange sky of evening died away." 
 
 This intimacy with the face of the earth, this rich and 
 keen sense of pleasure in English nature, whether in her 
 vernal or her wintry aspects, Wordsworth carried with him 
 into manhood. Submitting it, together with all else that he 
 knew of himself, to his judgment for examination, he seems 
 even to have arrived at a theory, that it is essential for every 
 poet that would peacefully possess his faculty in these 
 modern times, to connect himself permanently and domes- 
 tically with some appropriate spot or tract of scenery, the 
 whole influence of which he may thoroughly exhaust and 
 incorporate with his verse. At least, in his own Crise, some 
 such general conviction appears to have blended with the 
 mere sentiment of local attachment, which was doubtless 
 strong in him, in determining his retirement to the Lakes. 
 There are even traces, we fancy, of a disposition on his part 
 to generalize the feeling still more, and to lay it down as a 
 maxim that, in all ordinary cases, the natal spot of every 
 human being is the appropriate spot of his activity through 
 life, removal from which must injure him ; and that, so far as 
 our present social arrangements render this impossible, and 
 our present facilities for locomotion render the reverse easy, 
 so far we fall short of the ideal state of things, as between 
 
 R B 2 
 
372 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 us and the globe we inhabit. In the abeyance of this law, 
 (hard law for Scotchmen !) lay, he seems to have felt, one of 
 the great uses of descriptive poetry. While men do tear 
 themselves away from their native localities, and traverse the 
 earth, or congregate in cities, descriptive poetry, he persuaded 
 himself, must ever possess a refreshing and medicinal virtue. 
 It was one of his most valued claims, therefore, that he 
 should be considered a genuine English descriptive poet. 
 And certainly this is a claim that even those who think 
 most humbly of his attainments cannot deny him. There 
 would be a propriety, we think, in remembering Wordsworth 
 as a descriptive poet, along with Chaucer and Thomson, thus 
 distinguishing him both from such poets as Burns and 
 Tennyson, on the one hand, and from such poets as Keats 
 on the other. In such poets as Burns and Tennyson, the 
 element of what may be called human reference is always 
 so decided, that though no poets describe nature more 
 beautifully when they have occasion, it would still be 
 improper to speak of them specially as descriptive poets. 
 To borrow a distinction from the sister art, it may be said 
 that, if Burns and Tennyson are more properly classed with 
 the figure-painters, notwithstanding the extreme beauty and 
 finish of their natural backgrounds, so, on the same principle, 
 Wordsworth, whose skill in delineating the human subject is 
 also admitted, may yet not erroneously be classed with the 
 landscape-painters. On the other hand, he diff'ers from poets 
 like Keats in this, that being a native of the country, and 
 accustomed therefore to the appearances of rural nature in all 
 seasons, he does not confound nature with vegetation. In 
 the poetry of Keats, as all must feel, there is an excess of 
 greenth and vegetable imagery ; in reading his descriptions, 
 we seem either to breathe the air of a hothouse, heavy with 
 the moist odours of great-leafed exotics, or to lie full 
 stretched at noon in some shady nook in a wood, rank 
 underneath with the pipy hemlock, and kindred plants of 
 strange overgrowth. In Wordsworth, as we have seen, 
 there is no such unhealthy lusciousness ; he has his spots of 
 thick herbage, and his banks^of florid richness too ; but what 
 

 WORDSWORTH. 373 
 
 he delights in is the broad, clear expanse, the placid lake, 
 the pure pellucid air, the quiet outline of the mountain. 
 
 The second characteristic of Wordsworth's poetry, to 
 which we would call attention, is the general intelle ctual 
 yigojir- it displays, the large amount of r eally exce llenT 
 tliou ght t hat is bedded in it — thought that would have been 
 valuable to the world in whatever form it had been put 
 forth, and which might easily, had Wordsworth not been a 
 poet, have been put forth otherwise than in metre. \A'e have 
 already asserted, with sufficient distinctness, that poetry is 
 something essentially different from Thought or Proposition 
 put into verse. A man may have a profound intellect, and 
 may carry in his head a quantity of thought sufficient to 
 set up a university, or to supersede a British Association, 
 and yet be no poet. Or, on the other hand, a man may 
 have something of the poetic spark in him, and be an 
 intellectual weakling. It remains true, nevertheless, that 
 intellect, or thought — clear, large intellect, such as would be 
 available for any purpose whatever ; deep, abundant thought, 
 such as we find in the best philosophical writings — is 
 essential towards forming a great poet. This intellect of the 
 poet may either exert itself in such a state of perfect diflfusion 
 through the rest of his mind in its creative act, as only to 
 become manifest in the completed grandeur of the result — 
 which is the case, for example, with the poetry of Homer 
 and Milton ; or it may retain its right to act also as a 
 separate organ for the secretion of pure matter of thought, 
 which is the case, above all, with the poetry of Shakespeare. 
 In Wordsworth's poetry the presence of a superior intellect — ■ 
 an intellect strong, high, and subtle, if not of extreme 
 dimensions — may be discovered by both of these tests. In 
 the first place, the substance of his poetry, its logical com- 
 pactness, and its entire freedom from mere rubbish or 
 c -mmonplace, prove that a powerful and scholarly mind 
 must have presided over the work of composition. On the 
 other hand, for proofs that Wordsworth was familiar, even 
 formally, with the best philosophical ideas of his time, one 
 needs only to dip into his Excursion, or any other of his 
 
374 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 severer poems. Thus, in the following passage, short as it 
 is, the metaphysical reader will discern a perfect mastery, on 
 the part of the poet, over a conception the power of grasping 
 which is recognised in the schools as the one test of a mind 
 capable of metaphysical studies : — 
 
 " My voice proclaims 
 How exquisitely the individual Mind 
 (And the progressive powers perhaps no less 
 Of the whole species) to the External world 
 Is fitted : — and how exquisitely too — 
 Theme this but little heard of among men — 
 The External world is fitted to the Mind ; 
 And the Creation (by no lower name 
 Can it be called) which they with blended might 
 Accomplish — this is our high argument." 
 
 This, and similar conceptions of a very high metaphysics, 
 were evidently as familiar to Wordsworth as they were to 
 Coleridge, from whom, it is very probable, he may have 
 originally derived them. Indeed, making due allowance for 
 the necessary difference between the scientific and the poetic 
 mode of presenting truths, it may be alleged that there is 
 hardly a notion of any generality put forth by Coleridge, 
 whether in psychology, theology, politics, or literary criticism, 
 some recognition of which may not be discovered either in 
 the poems or in the prose dissertations of Wordsworth. The 
 agreement between these two men intellectually seems to have 
 been complete in almost every particular. Both professed 
 political Conservatism ; both conducted their speculative 
 reasonings to a point where they merged in belief in Divine 
 Revelation, and in a system of tenets derived from that belief, 
 not differing essentially from theological orthodoxy ; and both 
 exhibited an ardent attachment to the forms and rules of the 
 Church of England. It may even be questioned by a 
 certain class of critics whether Wordsworth, in his treatment 
 of such matters, has not sometimes taken leave of the poetical 
 mood altogether, and assumed the mood of the preacher ; 
 whether the didactic fit did not sometimes overcome him in 
 his poetry, and whether he has not allowed the controversial 
 spirit, so manifest in his prefaces, to run over also somewhat 
 deleteriously into his metre. 
 
 But, as distinct from the general intcllcctLial excellence of 
 
WORDSWORTH. 375 
 
 Wordsworth's productions, we have to notice their singularly- 
 calm, religious, and contemplati ve ton e^ By thoughtfulness 
 or contemplativeiTess we usually mean something quite 
 distinguishable from mere intellectual vigour or opulence. 
 The French are an intellectual nation ; they think rapidly 
 and powerfully, but they do not answer to our notion of 
 a thoughtful or contemplative people. Contemplativeness, 
 according to our usage of the word, does not so much imply 
 the power of attaining or producing thought, as the power of 
 brooding sentimentally over thought already attained. If we 
 first oppose the speculative to the active, and then make a 
 farther distinction between the speculative and the contem- 
 plative, the character of Hamlet in Shakespeare may be 
 taken to represent the union of the speculative and the 
 contemplative. The Prince is a student from the university, 
 daring into all questions, and fertile at every moment in new 
 generalities and pregnant forms of expression ; but his 
 peculiarity consists in this, that far back in his mind there 
 lie certain peiTnanent thoughts and conceptions towards 
 which he always reverts when left alone, and from which he 
 has ever to be roused afresh when anytliing is to be done. 
 Now it is this tendency to relapse into a few favourite, and, 
 as it were, constitutional trains of thought, that makes the 
 contemplative cliaracter. Nor is it difficult to see in what 
 thought it is, above all others, that the contemplative mind 
 will always find its most appropriate food. Birth, death, the 
 future ; the sufferings and misdeeds of man in this life, and 
 his hopes of a life to come ; the littleness of us and our whole 
 sphere of knowledge, and the awful relations in which we 
 stand to the world of the supernatural — these, if any, are the 
 permanent and inevitable objects of human contemplation 
 and solicitude. From age to age these thoughts have been 
 handed down ; every age must entertain, and no age can 
 conclude them. What the ancient Chaldean meditated as 
 he lay at night under the stars of the desert, the same things 
 does the modem student meditate as he paces his lonely 
 room. " Man, that is born of woman, is of a few days and 
 full of trouble ; " " How can a man be justified with God? " 
 
376 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 '' O that one might plead for a man with God as a man 
 pleadeth for his neighbour!" — amid all the changes of 
 manners, dynasties, and races, these thoughts survive. They, 
 and such like, are the peculiarly human thoughts, the 
 thoughts of humanity as such ; the thoughts upon which 
 mankind must always fall back, and compared with which 
 all other thoughts are but intrusions and impertinences. 
 Now, although it would be possible, we think, to show that 
 the effect even of abstract speculation if carried far enough is 
 to lead men back into these thoughts and keep them there, 
 so that in this sense the most speculative men must, as if by 
 compulsion, become profoundly contemplative ; yet, generally 
 speaking, a distinction may be drawn between men who 
 are speculative, and men who are contemplative in their 
 tendencies. Some men are always active intellectually; 
 always engaged in some process of inquiry and ingenuity — 
 inventing a machine, scheming a project, discovering a law 
 of mind or matter. These men are, in the present sense, 
 speculative men; they are continually at work within the 
 ascertained sphere of human activity; and it is by the 
 labours of such men that the mass of this world's experience 
 of its own self-contained capabilities has been accumulated. 
 But there are other men who, either without being mentally 
 active in this way, or besides being thus active, have a con- 
 stitutional tendency at all times to fall into a musing attitude ; 
 to relapse, as we have already expressed it, into certain 
 ancient and footworn trains of thought that lead apparently 
 nowhither. These are the contemplative men ; the men 
 whose favourite position is rather at the circumference of the 
 known sphere than within it ; the men who, at whatever 
 time they may be born, receive, cherish, and transmit 
 the permanent and characteristic thoughts of the human 
 race. This quality of contemplativeness is always associated 
 in our minds with the idea of sadness, tearfulness, melan- 
 choly. The patriarch Isaac, of whom we are told that he 
 went out into the fields to meditate at eventide, seems, in 
 our fancy, the most mild and pensive of the characters of 
 Scripture. And such men are the salt of the earth. There 
 
WOEDSWOETH. 377 
 
 IS little originality, indeed, in such thoughts as, we have 
 said, form the appropriate food of the contemplative mind. 
 To realize the conception, " All flesh is grass," for example, 
 or the conception, " Why do the wicked prosper ? " seems 
 but a very small effort indeed of the intellect, by no means 
 comparable to the effort required in almost every act of daily 
 life. Nevertheless, it remains true that it is only out of a 
 deep soil of such old and simple conceptions, that any kind 
 of true human greatness can rear itself; and also that there 
 are very few minds indeed, in these days of ours, over which 
 these and similar conceptions have their due degree of power. 
 It is accordingly one of the chief merits of Wordsworth that 
 in him this reference to the supernatural, this disposition to 
 interpret all that is visible in the spirit of a conviction of its 
 evanescence, did exist in a very high and unusual measure. 
 He was essentially a pensive or contemplative man ; a man 
 that was perpetually recurring to those few extreme thoughts 
 and conceptions which most men never care to reach, and 
 beyond which no man can go. This, which was conspicuous 
 in the very aspect of his countenance, and which his recluse 
 life illustrated, he has himself explicitly asserted. 
 
 " On man, on nature, and on human life, 
 Musing in solitude, I oft perceive 
 Fair trains of imagery before me rise, 
 Accompanied by feelings of delight 
 Pure, or with no unpleasing sadness mixed ; 
 And I am conscious of affecting thoughts 
 And dear remembrances, whose presence soothes 
 Or elevates the mind, content to weigh 
 The good and evil of our mortal state. 
 — To these emotions, whencesoe'er they come, 
 Whether from breath of outward circumstance, 
 Or from the soul — an impulse to herself — 
 I would give utterance in numerous verse." 
 
 Tt is the blending in Wordsworth of this contemplative 
 tendency wjjj]_3>jpiio.h_gen^raLjdg mir of intellecVthaOias 
 earned for him the name of the EnglishTTiitosophical Poet. 
 It ought to be observed also, at the same time, that in all 
 Wordsworth's contemplative poetry the influence of Christian 
 doctrine is plainly discernible. His meditations on Man, 
 Nature, and the Future, are not those of a Pagan sage, 
 
378 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 however his language may sometimes consist even with 
 a lofty Pagan view of the universe ; on the contrary, he 
 seems to think throughout as one in whose manner of 
 transacting for himself those great and paramount conceptions 
 that form the necessary matter of all real contemplation, that 
 sweet and consoling modification had been wrought which 
 Christianity has rendered possible. 
 
 One of the results of Wordsworth's naturally pensive dis- 
 position, left to expatiate as it chiefly was among the objects 
 of a retired and pastoral neighbourhood, was, that it gave him 
 a specially keen and sympathetic eye for the characteristic 
 miseries of rural life. We do not think that he was the man 
 that could 
 
 " hang 
 Brooding above the fierce confederate storm 
 Of sorrow, barricadoed evermore 
 Within the walls of cities." 
 
 But no man, better than he, could 
 
 *' Hear Humanity in fields and groves 
 Pipe solitary anguish." 
 
 In pathetic stories of humble rural life we know no poet 
 superior to Wordsworth. All the ordinary and, if we may 
 so speak, parochial woes of rural existence in England, seem 
 to have been diligently noted and pondered by him. It is 
 tolds of Burns by Dugald Stewart, that as they were walking 
 together one morning in the direction of the Braid Hills, near 
 Edinburgh, where they commanded a prospect of the adjacent 
 country, the poet remarked that the sight of so many smoking 
 cottages gave a pleasure to his mind which he did not believe 
 any one could understand that did not know, as he did, how 
 much of real worth and happiness such poor habitations might 
 contain. Now, if the glance with which Wordsworth, in his 
 poetry, looks abroad on the cottage-sprinkled scenery of his 
 native district cannot be said to show that warm familiarity 
 with the daily tenor of humble rustic life which Burns had 
 from experience, it may at least be compared to the kindly 
 glance of some pious and diligent pastor, such as Wordsworth 
 has himself described in his Excursion, surveying from a 
 height the scattered homes of his well-known parishioners. 
 
WORDSWORTH. 379 
 
 At home in the parsonage there are books, pictures, and pro- 
 bably a piano, the care of a gentle wife or daughters ; in walk- 
 ing over the fields, too, the pastor, an academic and cultured 
 man, has necessarily thoughts and enjoyments of his own ; 
 nevertheless, what lie has seen and known of the habits of 
 those among whom he labours has given him an eye to per- 
 ceive, and a heart to appreciate, their lowliest anxieties and 
 sorrows. Almost exactly so it is with Wordsworth. The 
 incidents of rural life that he delights to depict are precisely 
 those that would arouse the interest and occupy the attention 
 of some good clergyman, active in his duties, and accustomed 
 to store up in his memory the instructive annals of his parish. 
 The death of a poor seduced girl, the return of a disabled 
 soldier to his native village, the wreck of the fortunes of a once 
 thriving family, the solitude of aged widowhood, the nightly 
 moanings of a red-cloaked maniac haunting some dreary spot 
 in the woods — nothing can exceed the pathos with which 
 Wordsworth can tell such simple local stories as these. One can 
 hardly read without tears some of his narratives of this de- 
 scription ; as, for example, that of the poem entitled Guilt 
 and Sorrow, that of the pastoral poem entitled Michael, or that 
 of the widow Margaret and her lonely cottage, as told in the 
 first book of the Excursion. Showing a similar eye for the 
 moral picturesque in humble rural life, tliough altogether of a 
 more cheerful character, is the fine and hearty tale of the 
 Waggoner, perhaps one of the most perfect of all Wordsworth's 
 compositions. And here we may remark, that if Wordsworth 
 had any such theory as we have supposed as to the advantage, 
 in the poetical occupation, of a permanent connexion on the 
 part of the poet with some one spot or district, then, in such a 
 theory, he must necessarily have had respect, as well to the 
 power of familiar modes of life to form the heart of the poet, 
 as to the influence of familiar scenery in attuning his imagina- 
 tion. And certainly there is much in this. Karely does one 
 that has removed from his native spot form elsewhere relations 
 that can stand him in stead when he wishes to glance into 
 human life at once intimately and broadly. 
 
 Somewhat dissociated in appearance from those character- 
 
380 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 istics of Wordsworth which we have already mentioned, but 
 demonstrably compatible with them, was his strong sense of 
 the antique ; his lively interest in the traditional, the legen- 
 dary, and the historical. We see in Wordsworth, in this 
 respect, a certain similarity to a man from whom otherwise he 
 differed much — Sir Walter Scott. The English poet seems 
 to have had the same liking for significant anecdotes and 
 snatches of ancient song and ballad, the same reverence for 
 pedigree, and the same pleasure in associating places known 
 to him with celebrated transactions of the past, as were ob- 
 servable, in still larger degree, in the Scottish novelist. Among 
 the poems that exemplify this characteristic of our author are, 
 the dramatic poem of The Borderers ; the beautiful poem en- 
 titled Hart-leap Well ; the long legendary poem of The White 
 Doe of Ryhtone, which is in the metre, and somewhat in the 
 style, of much of Scott's poetry ; and also many of the shorter 
 pieces written during tours in Scotland, and in various parts 
 of England. A particular illustration of this quality of 
 Wordsworth's mind is also presented in his Scott-like habit 
 of introducing almost lovingly topographical references and 
 the names of places into his verse. Thus, in the poem To 
 Joanna, describing the echo of a lady's laugh heard among 
 the mountains : — 
 
 " The rock, like something starting from a sleep, 
 Took up the Lady's voice, and laughed again ; 
 That ancient woman seated on Helm-crag 
 Was ready with her cavern ; Hammar-scar 
 And the tall steep of Silverhow sent forth 
 A noise of laughter ; Southern Loughrigg heard, 
 And Fairfield answered with a mountain tone ; 
 Helvellyn far into the clear blue sky 
 Carried the Lady's voice ; old Skiddaw blew 
 His speaking-trumpet ; back out of the clouds 
 Of Glaramara southward came the voice ; 
 And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head." 
 
 But most conspicuously of all the poet has exhibited his in- 
 terest in the antique and historical, and his power of imagina- 
 tively reproducing it, in his fine series of Ecclesiastical Sonnets, 
 wherein he traces, as in a series of bold retrospective glimpses, 
 the history of Christianity in the British Islands. There are 
 passages in these sonnets worth, for their historical effect, 
 many pages of the writings of our ecclesiastical historians. 
 
WORDSWORTH. 381 
 
 Of the various other excellences of Wordsworth as a poet 
 and a writer we will particularize but one more — the exquisite 
 propriety and delicacy of his style ; his easy and perfect mas- 
 tery over the element of language. Clearly enough he must 
 have possessed the natural gift of rich and exuberant expres- 
 sion ; but it is equally evident that he must have, at a very 
 early period, submitted this natural exuberance to a careful 
 and classic training, and also that he must have bestowed his 
 best pains in finishing, according to his own ideas of correct- 
 ness, all his compositions individually. Hence greater smooth- 
 ness and beauty, and more of strict logical coherence in 
 Wordsworth's style than is usual even among careful poets, as 
 well as a more close fitting of the language to the measure of 
 the thought, and a comparative freedom from forced rhymes 
 and jarring evasions of natural forms of words. This appears 
 even in the greater typographical neatness of a printed page 
 of Wordsworth's poetry, as compared, for example, with a 
 printed page of Byron's, the lax and dash-disrupted look of 
 which suggests to practised eyes the notion at once of more 
 energetic genius, and greater literary haste. Specimens of 
 Wordsworth's extreme felicity of expression have already 
 been given in the previous extracts ; and in selecting for in- 
 cessant repetition such poems of his as " We are Seven," and 
 such lines as those famous ones about the " yellow primrose," 
 the public have already indicated their appreciation in his case 
 of this merit in particular. A quotation or two, however, 
 illustrative of the same thing, may here be added. Observe 
 how variously and, yet simply the language, in the following 
 instances, pursues the intricacies and adapts itself to the mood 
 of the meaning : — 
 
 " A village churchyard, lying as it does in the lap of Nature, may indeed be 
 most favourably contrasted with that of a town of crowded population ; and 
 sepulture therein combines many of the best tendencies which belong to the 
 mode practised by the ancients, with others peculiar to itself. The sensations 
 'of pious cheerfulness which attend the celebration of the Sabbath-day in rural 
 places, are profitably chastised by the sight of the graves of kindred and 
 friends, gathered together in that general home towards which the thoughtful 
 yet happy spectators themselves are journeying. Hence, a parish church, in 
 the stillness of the country, is a visible centre of a community of the living 
 and the dead ; a point to which are habitually referred the nearest concerns of 
 both." — Essay on Epitaphs. 
 
382 WORDSWORTPI. 
 
 " To all that binds the soul iu powerless trauce, 
 Lip-dewiug song, and xinglet-tossiug dance." 
 
 Descriptive Sketches. 
 " She dwelt among the untrodden ways 
 Beside the springs of Dove, 
 A maid whom there were none to praise, 
 And very few to love : 
 
 A violet by a mossy stone 
 
 Half hidden from the eye ! 
 Fair as a star when only one 
 
 Is shining in the sky ! 
 
 She lived unknown, and few could know 
 
 When Lucy ceased to be ; 
 But she is in her grave, and, oh, 
 
 The difference to me !" Miscellaneous Poems. 
 
 " Then up I rose, 
 And dragged to eai-th both branch and bough, with crash 
 And merciless ravage ; and the shady nook 
 Of hazels, and the green and mossy bower, 
 Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up 
 Their quiet being : and, unless I now 
 Confound my present feelings with the past; 
 Ere from the mutilated bower I turned 
 Exulting, rich beyond the wealth of kings, 
 I felt a sense of pain when I beheld 
 The silent trees, and saw the intruding sky." Nutting. 
 
 " Great God ! I 'd rather be 
 A pagan suckled in a creed outworn ; 
 So might I, standing on this pleasant lea. 
 Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
 Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea ; 
 Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." Sonnets. 
 
 " Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room ; 
 And hermits are contented with their cells ; 
 And students with their pensive citadels ; 
 Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom. 
 Sit blithe and happy ; bees that soar for bloom, 
 High as the highest peak of Fumess-fells, 
 Will murmur by the hour in fox-glove bells : 
 In truth, the prison, unto which we doom 
 Ourselves, no prison is : and hence to me, 
 In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound 
 Within the sonnet's scanty plot of ground ; 
 Pleased if some souls (for such there needs must be) 
 Who have felt the weight of too much liberty, 
 Should find brief solace there as I have found." Sonnets. 
 
 That we would assign to Wordsworth a liigh place among 
 the poets of England, the whole tenor of our observations 
 hitherto will have made clear. At the same time, that he falls 
 short of the very highest rank ; that he stands not on the top 
 of our English Parnassus, where Chaucer, Milton, and Spenser 
 keep reverent company with Shakespeare, but rather on that 
 upper slope of the mountain w^lience these greatest are visible, 
 
WORDSWORTH. 383 
 
 and where various other poets, some of whom are not yet dead, 
 hold perhaps as just if not so fixed a footing ; this, also, we 
 trust we have been able to convey as part of our general im- 
 pression. We do not think, for example, that Wordsworth 
 was by any means so great a poet as Burns — comparing the 
 two, we mean, even as poets ; and if it is only in respect of 
 general mental vigour and capacity, and not in respect of 
 poetic genius jper se^ that such other men as Dryden, Pope, 
 and Coleridge, could be justly put in comparison with 
 Wordsworth, and, being so put in comparison, preferred to 
 him on the whole ; yet there are other names still in our list 
 of poets, for whom, even after the ground of competition has 
 been thus restricted, we believe it would be possible to take 
 up the quarrel. With all the faults of Byron, both moral and 
 literary, "we believe that in him the poetic efflux came from 
 greater constitutional depths, and brought, if less pure, at least 
 more fervent matter along with it than the poetry of Words- 
 worth ; had Keats and Shelley lived longer, even those that 
 sneer at the Byronic might have seen poets comparable, in 
 their estimation, to the Patriarch of the Lakes ; and should 
 our noble Tennyson survive to us as a constant writer till his 
 black locks have gTown grey, we, for our part, see qualities in 
 him that predict for him more than a Wordsworth^s fame. 
 Keeping in view, therefore, these comparisons and contrasts, 
 it seems proper that we should add to the foregoing enumera- 
 tion of what we consider some of Wordsworth's characteristic 
 excellences, a word or two descriptive of those accompanying- 
 defects to which it was probably owing that a man, so near 
 the highest, did not quite reach it. 
 
 First of all, then, as it seems to us, the intellect of Words- 
 worth, though very far beyond ordinary in its dimensions, and 
 very assiduously developed by culture, v/as by no means of 
 the largest known English calibre. Not to bring into the 
 comparison such rare giants of our nation as Shakespeare, 
 Bacon, and Milton, there have been, and probably still are, 
 very many distinguished men in our island fit to rank intel- 
 lectually as the peers of Wordsworth, or even as his superiors. 
 Making the necessary discrimination between native intel- 
 
384 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 lectual strength to arrive at conclusions, and tlie soundness of 
 the conclusions arrived at, we should say that Johnson, Burke, 
 Burns, David Hume, and not a few others that might be 
 named, were presumably men of more powerful intellect than 
 "Wordsworth. Partly owing to the time at which they lived, 
 partly owing to causes for which tliey were personally more 
 responsible, the intellectual conclusions of those men, or of 
 some of them, may have been less noble and lofty than 
 those of Wordsworth ; their favourite forms of thought more 
 coarse; their philosophy less true, deep, and ethereal. But 
 their intellectual strength or grasp, their sense and insight, 
 their whole available power to do, discern, and invent, were, 
 we think, greater. Even of Pope, on whose reputation as a 
 poet Wordsworth and his followers have been, in some re- 
 spects justly, so severe, it might be maintained that, com- 
 parison of poetic merit apart, his was the denser and nimbler 
 brain. Nor, we believe, would the greatest admirers of Words- 
 worth say that in force and reach of intellect he excelled his 
 friend Coleridge. Fine, stately, and silvery as Wordsworth's 
 prose writings are, they want the depth, originality, and rich- 
 ness of the similar compositions of the old man eloquent. 
 Wordsworth's, in short, was not a massive or prodigious, but 
 only a high and superior intellect. Now, though we have 
 already shown that it is not intellect as such that makes a man 
 a poet, but that either a man may have a great intellect and 
 be no poet, or may be a poet without having an extraordinary 
 intellect; yet, having shown also that to constitute a great 
 poet great intellect is essential, we may, in fact, assume it as 
 a rule that the measure of the general intellectual power of 
 any particular poet is also so far a measure of his poetic 
 excellence. According to this rule we should first apply the 
 intellectual test, so as to decide Wordsworth's place (probably 
 beside such men as Coleridge and Dryden) in our general hier- 
 archy of English men of letters of all sorts taken together ; 
 then, dividing this miscellaneous body into kinds or classes, 
 we should retain Wordsworth exactly at his ascertained 
 height among the poets ; and, lastly, allowing to the whole 
 class of poets as much additional elevation as might be thought 
 
WORDSWORTH. B85 
 
 necessary, on the score of the inherent superiority of the poetical 
 constitution as such, we should fix Wordsworth's just place 
 among all the ornaments of English literature. 
 
 A second defect in Wordsworth, as a poet, is his want of 
 humour. This charge has been made so often against other 
 celebrated writers, that one is almost ashamed to bring it for- 
 ward again in any new case whatever. Nevertheless, it is a 
 charge of real weight against any one regarding whom it can 
 be substantiated ; and it is hardly necessary to offer any proofs 
 that it is true regarding Wordsworth. There are, indeed, 
 poems of his, such as The Waggoner, The Idiot Boy, and the 
 Street Musician, that display a kind of genial and warm interest 
 in the little pleasant blunders and less than tragic mishaps of 
 daily life ; but in such instances we seem to recognise the air 
 of the poet as that of a sedate old gentleman looking at matters, 
 or hearing of them, with a hard benevolent smile, rather than 
 as that of a man of hearty native humour, recklessly enjoying 
 what is jocose. There is no real mirth, no rich sense of the 
 comic, in all that Wordsworth has written. In that full sly 
 love of a jest that must have lurked in the down-looking eye 
 of Chaucer, as well as in the broad and manly capacity of 
 laughter that distinguished Bums, the poet of the Lakes was 
 totally wanting. Hence it is, that among all his characters, 
 he has given us none such as the Host of the Tabard in the 
 Canterhury Pilgrimage; and that living, as he did, in a notable 
 part of England, the whole spirit and peculiarity of which he 
 sought to make his own, he could not imbibe nor reproduce its 
 humours. Whenever, in obedience apparently to an intel- 
 lectual perception of the existence in society of such so-called 
 " humours," he attempts to introduce them into his poetry, he 
 either only reaches the playful, or betrays his natural serious- 
 ness by keeping the moral lesson strictly in view. Now, 
 / though there have been really great poets, as, for example, 
 Milton and Schiller, in whom this defect of humour was as 
 marked as in Wordsworth, if not more so, yet in such cases 
 it will be found that the defect did, after all, operate to some 
 extent injuriously, and had to be made good in some way by 
 very ample compensations. If Milton had not humour, he had 
 
 c C 
 
386 WORDS WOETH. 
 
 a large measure of what may properly enough be called wit 
 an infinite power of scorn, and a tremendous mastery of the 
 language of abuse and sarcasm. As regards Byron, also, not 
 to mention Pope, it is impossible to say how much not only of 
 his popularity, but also of his real worth as a poet, may de- 
 pend on the quantity of admirable wit which he brought into 
 the service of the Muses. But in Wordsworth there is almost 
 as little of wit, properly so called, as of humour. His moods 
 are a benevolent seriousness, a rapt and spiritual state of the 
 feelings, and a mild and sacerdotal sympathy with all that he 
 sees. He may feel contempt, as indeed few men are said to 
 have done in a greater degree, but he has no art in the ludicrous 
 expression of it ; he sometimes smiles, but he never laughs. 
 And in a poet of actual English life, above all, this is to be 
 regarded as a considerable disqualification. 
 
 We hardly know how to indicate what we conceive to be 
 another deficiency in Wordsworth as a poet, otherwise than 
 by~'repeaEing the common criticism regarding him, that he 
 lacks energy, fire, impulse, mtensity, passion. Our previous 
 remarks will have guarded against any misconception of what 
 we here mean. We believe that Wordsworth was, according 
 to his own definition of a poet, '' a man endowed with more 
 lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, than are 
 supposed to be common among mankind ; " but what we now 
 mean is something quite consistent with this. There was no 
 tremendousness, nothing of the demoniac, nothing of the 
 Pythic, in the nature of Wordsworth. 
 
 " I surely not a man ungently made," 
 
 are the fitting words he uses in describing himself. A calm, 
 white-haired man, that could thrill to the beauty of a starry 
 night, and not a swart-faced Titan like Burns, full of strength 
 and fire, was the poet of the Excursion, With all his pathos, 
 and all his clearness of vision, there were sorrows of humanity 
 he never touched, recesses of dark moral experience he could 
 not pierce nor irradiate. We feel in his poetry as if we were 
 talked with by some mild and persuasive preacher, rather 
 than borne down by the experienced utterance of a large- 
 
WORDSWORTH. 387 
 
 hearted man. He does not move us to the depths of our 
 being ; he only affects us gently. Now, one reason for this 
 must evidently be, that naturally and by birth Wordsworth 
 was deficient in some of the more formidable elements that 
 enter into the constitution of man. Possessing in large 
 degree the elements of intellect, sensibility, and imagination, 
 he seems to have been wanting in the Byronic element of 
 personal impetus or passion. Moreover, and partly in con- 
 sequence of this, he appears to have passed through the battle 
 of life all but unwounded. This of itself would account for the 
 placid, self-possessed, and often feeble style of his poetry. In 
 the life of every man distinguished for what is called intensity 
 of character, there will almost certainly be found some sore 
 biographical circumstance — some fact deeper and more mo- 
 mentous than all the rest — some strictly historical source of 
 melancholy, that must be discovered and investigated, if we 
 would comprehend his ways. Man comes into this world 
 regardless and unformed ; and although, in his gradual pro- 
 gress through it he necessarily acquires, by the mere use of 
 liis senses and by communication with others, a multitudinous 
 store of impressions and convictions, yet, if there is to be 
 anything specific and original in his life, this, it would seem, 
 can only be produced by the operation upon him of some one 
 overbearing accident or event, that, rousing him to new wake- 
 fulness, and evoking all that is latent in his nature, shall bind 
 these impressions and convictions in a mass together, breathe 
 through them the stern element of personal concern, and 
 impart to them its seal and pressure. The experiences that 
 most commonly perform this great function in the lives of 
 men are those of Friendship and Love. The power of Love 
 to rouse men to larger and more fervid views of nature has 
 en celebrated since the beginning of time. A man that has 
 uce undergone Love's sorrow in any extreme degree, is by 
 that fact awakened at once and for ever to the melancholy 
 side of things ; he becomes alive to the gloomy in nature and 
 to the miserable in life; and by one stupendous resumption, 
 as it were, of stars, clouds, trees, and flowers into his own 
 pained being, like an old coinage requiring re-issue, he 
 
 C c 2 
 
 1 
 
388 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 realizes how it is that all creation groaneth and travaileth 
 together in spirit until now. So also, though perhaps more 
 rarely, with the influence of exalted and lost Friendship. 
 But Wordsworth, happily for himself, seems to have met 
 with no such accident of revolution. Passing through the 
 world as a pilgrim, pure-minded, and even sad with the sense 
 of the mysterious future, nothing occurred in his little journey 
 to strike him down as a dead man, and agonize him into a 
 full knowledge of the whole mystery of the present. Hence, 
 as we believe, the want of that intensity in his poetry which 
 we find in the writings, not only of the so-called subjective 
 poets, such as Byron and Dante, but also of the greatest 
 objective poets, as Goethe and Shakespeare. The ink of 
 Wordsworth is never his own blood. 
 
 It is little more than an extension of the preceding remark, 
 to say that Wordsworth was rather a poet or bard than (if we 
 may be allowed such a distinction) a lyrist or minstrel. The 
 purpose of the poet, using the term for the moment in this 
 restricted sense, is simply to describe, narrate, or represent 
 some portion of the external, as it is rounded out and made 
 significant in his own mind; the purpose of the lyrist or 
 minstrel is to pour forth the passing emotions of his soul, 
 and inflame other men with the fire that consumes himself. 
 Accordingly, the faculties most special to the merely poetic 
 exercise, as in the old Homeric epos or in modern descriptive 
 verse, are those of intellect, sensibility, and imagination — 
 passion or personal excitement being but a separate ingre- 
 dient which may be more or less present according to circum- 
 stances, and which ought, as some think, to be absent from 
 pure poetry altogether: whereas, in lyrical effiision, on the 
 other hand, passion or present excitement is nearly all in all. 
 The poetry of Keats may be taken as a specimen of pure 
 poetry as such : all his chief poems are literally compositions 
 or creations, the results of a process by which the poet's mind, 
 having projected itself into an entirely imaginary element, as 
 devoid as possible of all connexion with or similarity to the 
 present, worked and moved therein slowly and fantastically 
 at its own will and pleasure. As specimens, again, of the 
 
WORDSWORTH. 389 
 
 purely lyrical, we have all such pieces, ancient and modern, 
 as are properly denominated psalms, odes, hymns, or songs. 
 When, therefore, people talk, as they now incessantly do, of 
 calmness as being essential to the poet; and when, with 
 Wordsworth, they define the poetic art to consist in the 
 tranquil recollection of bygone emotion, it is clear that they 
 can have in view only pure poetry, the end of which, as we 
 have said, is to represent in an imaginative manner some 
 portion of the outward. For, of the lyrist or song--\vriter we 
 would affirm, precisely as we would affirm of his near kinsman, 
 the orator, that the more of passion or personal impetus he has 
 the better ; and so far from advising him to wait for complete 
 tranquillity, we would advise him to select as the true lyrical 
 moment, that first moment, whenever it is, when the primary 
 perturbation of his soul has just so far subsided that his 
 trembling hands can sweep the strings. But along with this 
 difierence comes another. The poet, in describing his scene 
 or narrating his story, feels himself impelled to every legiti- 
 mate mode of increasing the pleasure he conveys ; and the 
 result, in one direction, is Metre. But however natural Metre 
 may have been in its origin, it has now become to the poet 
 rather a pre-established arrangement or available set of condi- 
 tions to the rule of which, voluntarily and guided by his 
 instinct for harmony, he adapts what he has already in other 
 respects rendered complete, than a compulsory suggestion of 
 the poetic act itself careful for its own accoutrement. Not so, 
 however, with the lyrist. As cadence or musical utterance is 
 natural in an excited state of the feelings, so in lyrical poetry 
 ought the song or melody to be more than the words. The 
 heart of the lyrist should be a perpetual fountain of song; 
 and when he is to hold direct communication with the world, 
 n inarticulate hum or murmur, rising, as it were, from the 
 3pths of his being, ought to precede and necessitate all his 
 actual speech. Now in this lyr ical capabilit y, this love of 
 sound or cadence for its owiisaEer(in which, by the bye, we 
 have remarked that the Scotch generally excel the English,) 
 Wordsworth is certainly inferior to many other poets. One 
 might have inferred as much from the narrowness of his 
 
390 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 theory of verse ; but the fact is rendered still more apparent 
 by a perusal of his poetical compositions themselves. Very 
 few poets, we think, have been more admirable masters of 
 poetic metre : no versification that we know is more rich, 
 various, and flexible, or more soothing to the ear than that of 
 Wordsworth. But he is not a singer or a minstrel properly 
 so called ; the lyric madness does not seize him ; verse with 
 him is rather an exquisite variety of rhetoric, a legitimate 
 aesthetic device, than a necessary form of utterance. We do 
 not think that in all Wordsworth there is a single stanza after 
 reading which and quite losing sight of the words, we are still 
 haunted (as we constantly are in Burns, Byron, and Tennyson) 
 by an obstinate recollection of the tune. Were we required 
 to say in what particular portion of Wordsworth's poetry he 
 has shown most of this true lyric spirit, in which we believe 
 him to have been on the whole deficient, we should unhesitat- 
 ingly mention his Sonnets. These are among the finest and 
 most sonorous things in our language ; and it is by them, in 
 connexion with his larga poem The Excursion, or as we may 
 now say, The Recluse, that his great reputation will be most 
 surely perpetuated. 
 
scottish influence in bkitish 
 literature; 
 
 It was in the winter of 1786-87 that the poet Burns, a new 
 prospect having been suddenly opened up to him by the kind 
 intervention of Blacklock, and a few other influential men in 
 Edinburgh, abandoned his desperate project of emigrating to 
 the West Indies, and hastened to pay his first and memorable 
 visit to the Scottish metropolis. During that winter, as all 
 who are acquainted with his life know, the Ayrshire plough- 
 man, then in his twenty-ninth year, was the lion of Edin- 
 burgh society. Lord Monboddo, Dugald Stewart, Harry 
 Erskine, Dr. Eobertson, Dr. Hugh Blair, Henry Mackenzie, 
 Dr. Gregoiy, Dr. Black, Dr. Adam Ferguson — such were the 
 names then most conspicuous in the literary capital of North 
 Britain; and it was in the company of these men, alternated 
 with that of the Creeches, the Smellies, the Willie Nicols, 
 and other contemporary Edinburgh celebrities of a lower 
 grade, that Bmns first realized the fact that he was no mere 
 bard of local note, but a new power and magnate in Scottish 
 literature. 
 
 To those who are alive to the poetry of coincidences, two 
 anecdotes connected with this residence of Burns in Edin- 
 burgh will always be interesting. What reader of Lockhart's 
 Life of Scott is there who does not remember the account 
 here given of Scott's first and only interview with Burns ? As 
 the story is now more minutely told inMr.Eobert Chambers's 
 Life of Burnsy Scott, who was then a lad of sixteen, just 
 
 * North British Eeview : August, 1852. — Life of Lord Jeffrey ; with a Se- 
 lection from his Correspondence. By Lord Cockburn, one of the Judges of the 
 Court of Session in Scotland. 2 vols. 1852. [What is here printed is only 
 the introductory^part of the article as it stood in the Review.] 
 
392 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN BRITISH LITERATURE. 
 
 removed from the High School to a desk in his father's office, 
 was invited hj his friend and companion, the son of Dr. 
 Ferguson, to accompany him to Ms father's house on an 
 evening when Burns was to be there. The two youngsters 
 entered the room, sat down unnoticed by their seniors, and 
 looked on and listened in modest silence. Burns, when he 
 came in, seemed a little out of his element, and, instead of 
 mingling at once with the company, kept going about the 
 room, looking at the pictm'es on the walls. One print par- 
 ticularly arrested his attention. It represented a soldier lying 
 dead among the snow, his dog on one side, and a woman with 
 a child in her arms on the other. Underneath the print were 
 some lines of verse descriptive of the subject, which Burns 
 read aloud with a voice faltering with emotion, A little while 
 after, turning to the company and pointing to the print, he 
 asked if any one could tell him who was the author of the 
 lines. No one chanced to know, excepting Scott, who remem- 
 bered that they were from an obscure poem of Langhorne's. 
 The information, whispered by Scott to some one near, was 
 repeated to Burns, who, after asking a little more about the 
 matter, rewarded his young informant with a look of kindly 
 interest, and the words, (Sir Adam Ferguson reports them,) 
 *' You'll be a man yet, sir." Such is the one story, the story 
 of the " literary ordination," as Mr. Chambers well calls it, of 
 Scott by Burns — a scene which we think Sir William Allan 
 would have delighted to paint. The other story, we believe, 
 is now told for the first time by Lord Cockburn. Somewhere 
 about the very day on which the foregoing incident happened, 
 " a little black creature " of a boy, we are told, who was 
 going up the High Street of Edinburgh, and staring dili- 
 gently about him, was attracted by the appearance of a man 
 whom he saw standing on the pavement. He was taking 
 a good and leisurely view of the object of his curiosity, when 
 some one standing at a shop-door tapped him on the shoulder, 
 and said, '' Ay, laddie, ye may weel look at that man ! that's 
 Eobert Bums." The "little black creature,^' thus early 
 addicted to criticism, was Francis Jeffrey, the junior of Scott 
 by two years, and exactly four years behind him in the 
 
r 
 
 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN BRITISH LITERATUEE. 393 
 
 classes of tlie High School, where he was known as a clever 
 nervous little fellow, who never lost a place without crying. 
 It is mentioned as a curious fact by Lord Cockburn, that 
 Jeffrey's first teacher at the High School, a Mr. Luke Fraser, 
 had the singular good fortune of sending forth, from three 
 successive classes of four years each, three pupils no less 
 distinguished than Walter Scott, Francis Jeffrey, and Henry 
 Brougham. 
 
 It is not for the mere purpose of anecdote that we cite these 
 names and coincidences. We should like very much to make 
 out for Scotland in general as suggestive a series of her in- 
 tellectual representatives as Lord Cockburn has here made 
 out for part of the pedagogic era of the worthy and long dead 
 Mr. Luke Fraser. Confining our regards to the eighteenth 
 century, the preceding paragraphs enable us to group together 
 at least three conspicuous Scottish names as belonging, by 
 right of birth, to the third quarter of that century — Bums, 
 born in Ayrshire in 1759 ; Scott, born in Edinburgh in 1771 ; 
 and Jeffrey, bom in the same place in 1773. Supposing we 
 go a little farther back for some other prominent Scottish 
 names of the same century, the readiest to occur to the memory 
 will be those of James Thomson, the poet, born in Koxburgh- 
 shire in 1700 ; Thomas Reid, the philosopher, bom near 
 Aberdeen in 1710 ; David Hume, bom at Edinburgh in 1711 ; 
 Kobertson, the historian, born in Mid-Lothian in 1721 ; 
 Tobias Smollett, tlie novelist, born at Cardross in the same 
 year; Adam Smith, born at Kirkaldy in 1723; Kobert 
 Fergusson, the Scottish poet, born at Edinburgh in 1750 ; 
 and Dugald Stewart, born at Edinburgh in 1753. And if for 
 a similar purpose, we come down to the last quarter of the 
 century, five names at least will be sure to occur to us, in 
 addition to that of Brougham — Thomas Campbell, born at 
 / rlasgow in 1777 ; Thomas Chalmers, born at Anstmther in 
 Fifeshire in 1780; John Wilson, bom, if we may trast our 
 authorities, at Paisley in 1788 ; Thomas Carlyle, born at 
 Ecclefechan in Dumfries-shire in 1795; and Sir William 
 Hamilton, born at Glasgow before the close of the century. 
 In this list we omit the distinguished contemporary Scottish 
 
394 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN BRITISH LITERATURE. 
 
 names in physical science ; we oiiglit not, however, to omit 
 the names of Sir James Mackintosh, bom near Inverness in 
 1765 ; and James Mill, born at Montrose in 1773. The short 
 life of Burns, if we choose him as the central figure of the 
 group, connects together all these names. The oldest of them 
 was in the prime of life when Burns was born, and the 
 youngest of them had seen the light before Burns died. 
 
 On glancing in order along this series of eminent Scotch- 
 men born in the eighteenth century, it will be seen that they 
 may be roughly distributed into two nearly equal classes — 
 men of philosophic intellect, devoted to the work of general 
 speculation, or thought as such ; and men of literary or poetic 
 genius, whose works belong more properly to the category of 
 pure literary or artistic effort. In the one class may be ranked 
 Reid, Hume, Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart, Mackintosh, 
 Mill, Chalmers, and Sir William Hamilton; in the other, 
 Thomson, Smollett, Robertson, Fergusson, Burns, Scott, 
 Jeffrey, Campbell, Wilson, Irving, and Carlyle. Do not let 
 us be mistaken. In using the phrases '' philosophic intellect " 
 and " literary genius," to denote the distinction referred to, 
 we do not imply anything of accurate discrimination between 
 the phrases themselves. For aught that we care, the phrases 
 may be reversed, and the men of the one class may be styled 
 men of philosophic genius ; and those of the other, men of 
 literary habit and intellect. If we prefer to follow the popular 
 usage in our application of the terms, it is not with any 
 intention of making out for the one class, by the appropria- 
 tion to it of the peculiar term " genius,'^ a certificate of a 
 higher kind of excellence than belongs to the other. Even 
 according to the popular acceptation of the term, several of 
 those whom we have included in the literary category — as, 
 for example, Robertson — must be denied the title of men of 
 genius : while, according to no endurable definition of the 
 term, could the title of men of genius be refused to such men 
 as Adam Smith, or Chalmers, or Hamilton. Nor even, when 
 thus explained, will our classification bear any very rigid 
 scrutiny. By a considerable portion of what may be called 
 the fundamental or unapparent half of his genius, Carlyle 
 
IP sc" 
 
 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN BRITISH LITERATURE. 395 
 
 belongs to the class of speculative thinkers ; while, on the 
 other hand, the case of Chalmers is one in which the thinking 
 or speculative faculty, which certainly belonged to him, was 
 surcharged and deluged by such a constant flood from the 
 feelings that, instead of ranking him with the thinkers as 
 above, we might, with equal or greater propriety, transpose 
 him to the other side, or even name him on both sides. His 
 thinking faculty, which was what he himself set most store 
 by, was so beset and begirt by his other and more active dis- 
 positions, that instead of working on and on through any 
 resisting medium with iron continuity, it discharged itself 
 almost invariably, as soon as it touched a subject, in large 
 proximate generalizations. On the whole, then, instead of the 
 foregoing classification of eminent Scotchmen into men of 
 speculation and men of general literature, one might adopt as 
 equally serviceable a less formal classification which the 
 common satirical talk respecting Scotchmen will suggest. The 
 hard, cool, logical Scotchman — such is the stereotyped phrase 
 in which Englishmen describe the natives of North Britain. 
 There is a sufficient amount of true perception in the phrase 
 to justify its use ; but the appreciation it involves reaches 
 only to the surface. The well-known phrase, perfervidum 
 ingenmm Scotorum, used, Buchanan tells us, centuries ago on 
 the Continent to express the idea of the Scottish character 
 then universally current, and founded on a large induction of 
 instances, is, in reality, far nearer to the fact. Without 
 maintaining at present that all Scotchmen are perfervid, — that 
 Scotchman in general are, as we have seen it ingeniously 
 argued, not cool, calculating, and cautious, but positively rash, 
 fanatical, and tempestuous,— it will be enough to refer to the 
 instances which prove at least that some Scotchmen have this 
 qharacter. The thing may be expressed thus : — On referring 
 L the actual list of Scotchmen who have attained eminence 
 by their writings or speeches in this or the last century, two 
 types may be distinguished, in one or the other of which the 
 Scottish mind seems necessarily to cast itself— an intellectual 
 type specifically Scottish, but Scottish only in the sense that 
 it is the type which cultured Scottish minds assume when 
 
396 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN BRITISH LITERATURE. 
 
 they devote themselves to the work of specific investigation ; 
 and a'more popular type, characterizing those Scotchmen who, 
 instead of pursuing the work of specific investigation, follow 
 a career calling forth all the resources of Scottish sentiment. 
 Scotchmen of the first or more fixed and formal type are 
 Keid, Smith, Hume, Mill, Mackintosh, and Hamilton ; in all 
 of whom, notwithstanding their difierences, we see that 
 tendency towards metaphysical speculation for which the 
 Scottish mind has become celebrated. Scotchmen of the other 
 or popular type, partaking of the metaphysical tendency or 
 not, but drawing their essential inspiration from the senti- 
 mental depths of the national character, are Burns, Scott, 
 Chalmers, Irving, and Carlyle. However we may choose to 
 express it, the fact of this twofold forthgoing of the Scottish 
 mind, either in the scholastic and logical direction marked out 
 by one series of eminent predecessors, or in the popular and 
 literary direction • marked out by another series of eminent 
 predecessors, cannot be denied. 
 
 After all, however, there ^5, classify and distinguish as we 
 may, a remarkable degree of homogeneousness among Scotch- 
 men. The people of North Britain are more homogeneous — 
 have decidedly a more visible basis of common character — 
 than the people of South Britain. A Scotchman may indeed 
 be almost anything that is possible in this world ; he may be 
 a saint or a debauchee, a Christian or a sceptic, a spendthrift 
 or a usurer, a soldier or a statesman, a poet or a statistician, 
 a fool or a man of genius, clear-headed or confused-headed, 
 a Thomas Chalmers or a Joseph Hume, a dry man of mere 
 secular facts, or a man through whose mind there roll for ever 
 the stars and all mysteries. Still, under every possible form 
 of mental combination or activity, there will be found in every 
 Scotchman something distinguishable as his birth-quality or 
 Scotticism, And what is this Scotticism of Scotchmen — this 
 ineradicable, universally-combinable element or peculiarity, 
 breathed into the Scottish soul by those conditions of nature 
 and of life which inhere in or hover over the area of the Scottish 
 earth, and which are repeated in the same precise ensemble 
 nowhere else ? Comes it from the hills, or the moors, or the 
 
r 
 
 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN BRITISH LITERATURE. 397 
 
 mists, or any of those other features of scenery and climate 
 which distinguish bleak and rugged Scotland from green and 
 fertile England? In part, doubtless, from these, as from all 
 else that is Scottish. But there are hills, and moors, and 
 mists where Scotchmen are not bred ; and it is rather in the 
 long series of the memorable things that have been done on 
 the Scottish hills and moors — the acts which the retrospective 
 eye sees flashing through the old Scottish mists — that one is 
 to seek the origin and explanation of whatever Scotticism is. 
 Now, as compared with England at least, that which has come 
 down to the natives of Scotland as something peculiar, gene- 
 rated by the series of past transactions of which their country 
 has been the scene, is an intense spirit of nationality. 
 
 No nation in the world is more factitious than the Scotch 
 — more composite as regards the materials out of which it has 
 been constructed. If in England there have been Britons, 
 Celts, Romans, Saxons, Danes, and Normans, in Scotland 
 there have been Celts, Britons, Eomans, Norwegians, Danes, 
 Anglo-Saxons, and Normans. The only difference of any 
 consequence in this respect probably is, that whereas in 
 England the Celtic element is derived chiefly from the British 
 or Welsh, and the Gothic element chiefly from the Teutonic 
 or Continental-German source, in Scotland the Gaels have 
 furnished most of the Celtic, and the Scandinavian Germans 
 most of the Gothic element. Nor, if we regard the agencies that 
 have acted intellectually on the two nations, shall we find 
 Scotland to have been less notably affected from without than 
 England. To mention only one circumstance, the Reforma- 
 tion in Scotland was marked by a much more decided im- 
 portation of new modes of thinking and new social forms than 
 the Reformation in the sister country. But though quite as 
 I actitious, therefore, as the English nation, the Scottish, by 
 reason of its very smallness, for one thing, has always pos- 
 sessed a more intense consciousness of its nationality, and a 
 greater liability to be acted upon throughout its whole sub- 
 stance by a common thought or common feeling. Even as late 
 as the year 1707, the entire population of Scotland did not 
 exceed one million of individuals ; and if, going farther back, 
 
398 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN BRITISH LITERATURE. 
 
 we fancy this small nation placed on the frontier of one so 
 much larger, and obliged continually to defend itself against 
 the attacks of so powerful a neighbour, we can have no diffi- 
 culty in conceiving how, in the smaller nation, the feeling of 
 a central life would be sooner developed and kept more con- 
 tinuously active. The sentiment of nationality is essentially 
 negative; it is the sentiment of a people which has been 
 taught to recognise its own individuality by incessantly 
 marking the line of exclusion between itself and others. 
 Almost all the great movements of Scotland, as a nation, have 
 accordingly been of a negative character, that is, movements 
 of self-defence — the War of National Independence against 
 the Edwards ; the Non-Episcopal struggle in the reigns of the 
 Charleses ; and even the Non-Intrusion controversy of later 
 times. The very motto of Scotland, as a nation, is negative 
 — Nemo me imjpune lacesset. It is different with England. 
 There have of course been negative movements in England 
 too, but these have been movements of one faction or part of 
 the English people against another ; and the activity of tlie 
 English nation, as a whole, has consisted, not in preserving 
 its own individuality from external attack, but in fully and 
 genially evolving the various elements which it finds within 
 itself, or in powerful positive exertions of its strength upon 
 what lies outside it. 
 
 The first and most natural form of what we have called the 
 Scotticism of Scotchmen — that is, of the peculiarity which dif- 
 ferences them from people of other countries, and more ex- 
 pressly from Englishmen — is this amor patricB, this inordinate 
 intensity of national feeling. There are very few Scotchmen 
 who, whatever they may pretend, are devoid of this pride of 
 being Scotchmen. Penetrate to the heart of any Scotchman, 
 even the most Anglified, or the most philosophic that can be 
 found, and there will certainly be found a remnant in it of 
 loving regard for the little land that lies north of the Tweed. 
 And what eminent Scotchman can be named in whose consti- 
 tution a larger or smaller proportion of the amor Scotice has 
 not been visible ? In some of the foremost of such men, as 
 Burns, Scott, and Wilson, this amor Scotice has even been 
 

 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN BRITISH LITERATURE. 399 
 
 present as a confessed ingredient of their genius, — a sentiment 
 determining, to a great extent, the style and matter of all that 
 they have written or attempted. 
 
 " The rough bur -thistle spreading wide 
 Amang the bearded bear, — 
 I turn'd the weeding-heuk aside, 
 And spared the symbol dear. 
 No nation, no station 
 
 My envy e'er could raise — 
 A Scot still, but blot still, 
 I knew nae higher praise." 
 
 In ^-eading the writings of such men, one is perpetually 
 reminded, in the most direct manner, that these wi'itings are to 
 be regarded as belonging to a strictly national literature. But 
 even in those Scotchmen in the determination of whose intel- 
 lectual efforts the amor Scotice has acted no such obvious and 
 ostensible part, the presence of some mental reference to, or 
 intermittent communication of sentiment with, the land of 
 their birth, is almost sure to be detected. The speculations of 
 Eeid and Hume and Adam Smith, and, in some degree, also, 
 those of Chalmers, were on matters interesting not to Scotch- 
 men alone, but to the human race as such ; and yet, precisely 
 as these men enunciated their generalities intended for the 
 whole world in good broad Scotch, so had they all, after tHeir 
 different ways, a genuine Scottish relish for Scottish humours, 
 jokes, and antiquities. The same thing is true of Carlyle, a 
 power as he is recognised to be, not in Scottish only, but in all 
 European literature. Even James Mill, who, more than most 
 Scotchmen, succeeded in conforming, both in speech and in 
 writing, to English habits and requirements, relapsed into a 
 Scotchman when he listened to a Scottish song, or told a Scot- 
 tish anecdote. But perhaps the most interesting example of 
 the appearance of an intense amor Scotice^ where, from the 
 
 t^ture of the case, it could have been least expected, is afforded 
 y the writings of Sir William Hamilton. If there is a man 
 now alive conspicuous among his contemporaries for the exer- 
 cise on the most magnificent scale of an intellect the most 
 pure and abstract, that man is Sir William ; and yet, not even 
 when discussing the philosophy of the unconditioned or per- 
 fecting the theory of syllogism, does Sir William forget his 
 
400 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN BRITISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Scottish lineage. With what glee, in his notes, or in stray 
 passages in his dissertations themselves, does he seize every 
 opportunity of adding to the proofs that speculation in general 
 has been largely affected by the stream of specific Scottish 
 thought — quoting, for example, the saying of Scaliger, " Les 
 Ecossois sont hons Philosophes ;'''' or dwelling on the fact that 
 at one time almost every continental university had a Scottish 
 professorship of philosophy, specially so named ; or reviving 
 the memories of defunct Balfours, and Duncans, and Chal- 
 merses, and Dalgarnos, and other ^' Scoti extra Scotiam 
 agentes " of other centuries ; or startling his readers with such 
 genealogical facts as that Immanuel Kant and Sir Isaac 
 Newton had Scottish grandfathers, and that the celebrated 
 French metaphysican Destutt Tracy was, in reality, but a 
 transmogrified Scotchman of the name of Stott ! We know 
 nothing more refreshing than such evidences of strong na- 
 tional feeling in such a man. It is the Scottish Stagirite 
 not ashamed of the bonnet and plaid ; it is the philosopher in 
 whose veins flows the blood of a Covenanter. 
 
 Even now, when Scotchmen, their native country having 
 been so long merged in the higher unity of Great Britain, 
 labour altogether in the interest of this higher unity, and for- 
 get or set aside the smaller, they are still liable to be affected 
 characteristically in all that they do by the consciousness that 
 they are Scotchmen. This will be found true whether we 
 regard those Scotchmen who work side by side with English- 
 men in the conduct of British public affairs or British com- 
 merce, or those Scotchmen who vie with Englishmen in the 
 walks of British authorship and literature. In either case the 
 Scotchman is distinguished firom the Englishman by this, that 
 he carries the consciousness of his nationality about with him. 
 Were he, indeed, disposed to forget it, the banter on the 
 subject to which he is perpetually exposed in the society of his 
 English friends and acquaintances, would serve to keep him 
 in mind of it. It is the same now with the individual Scotch- 
 man cast among Englishmen as it was with the Scottish 
 nation when it had to defend its frontier against the English 
 armies. He is in the position of a smaller body placed in 
 
SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN BRITISH LITERATURE. 401 
 
 contact with a larger one, and rendered more intensely consci- 
 ous of his individuality by the constant necessity of asserting it. 
 But this self-assertion of a Scotchman among Englishmen, 
 this constant feeling "I am a Scotchman," rests, like the 
 feeling of nationality itself, on a prior assertion of what is in 
 fact a negative. For a Scotchman to be always thinking " I 
 am a Scotchman,^' is, in the circumstances now under view, 
 tantamount to always thinking " I am not an Englishman." 
 The Englishman, on the other hand, has no con*esponding 
 feeling. As a member of the larger body, whose corporate 
 activity has always, from the very circumstance of its being 
 the larger, been positive rather than negative, the Englishman 
 simply acts out harmoniously his English instincts and ten- 
 dencies ; the feeling of not being a Scotchman never (except 
 in the case of a stray Englishman located in Scotland) either 
 spontaneously remaining in his mind, or being roused in it by 
 banter. The Scotchman, in short, who works in the general 
 field of British activity, has his thoughts conditioned, to some 
 extent at least, by the negative of not being an Englishman ; 
 the Englishman thinks under no such limitation. 
 
 And this leads us to a definition more essential and inti- 
 mate of the peculiarity of Scottish as compared with English 
 thought. The rudest and most natural form of what we have 
 called the Scotticism of Scotchmen, consists, we have hitherto 
 been saying, in simple consciousness of nationality, simple 
 amor Scotia, or, under more restricted circumstances, the 
 simple feeling of not being an Englishman. There are some 
 Scotchmen, however, in whom this first and most natural form 
 of Scotticism is not very well pronounced, and who are either 
 emancipated from it, or think that they are. We know not a 
 few Scottish minds who have really succeeded in transferring 
 thj ir enthusiastic regards from Scotland, as such, to the higher 
 unity of Great Britain — men, who, sometimes speaking in 
 their own Scottish accent, sometimes in an accent almost 
 purely English, find the objects of their solicitude and 
 admiration, not in the land lying north of the Tweed, but 
 rather in England — its rich green parks and fields, its broad 
 ecclesiastical hierarchy, its noble halls of learning, its majestic 
 
 D D 
 
402 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN BEITISH LITERATUEE. 
 
 aixd varied literature, the full and generous cliaracter of its 
 manly people. We know Scotchmen whose sentiment is 
 more deeply stirred by Shakespeare^ s famous apostrophe to 
 " this England," than by Scott's to the land of brown heath 
 and shaggy wood. And as Scotland and England are now 
 united, such men are and must be on the increase. But even 
 they shall not escape. If their native quality of Scotticism 
 does not survive in them in the more palpable and open form 
 of mere national feeling, mere amor Scotice, it survives, 
 nevertheless, in an intellectual habit, having the same root, 
 and as indestructible. And what is this habit ? The popular 
 charges of dogmatism, opinionativeness, pugnacity, and the 
 like, brought against Scotchmen by Englishmen, are so many 
 approximations to a definition of it. For our part, we should 
 say that the special habit or peculiarity which distinguishes 
 the intellectual manifestations of Scotchmen — that, in short, 
 in which the Scotticism of Scotchmen most intimately con- 
 sists — is the habit of emphasis. All Scotchmen are emphatic. 
 If a Scotchman is a fool, he gives such emphasis to the 
 nonsense he utters, as to be infinitely more insufferable than 
 a fool of any other country ; if a Scotchman is a man of 
 genius, he gives such emphasis to the good things he has to 
 communicate, that they have a supremely good chance of 
 being at once or very soon attended to. This habit of 
 emphasis, we believe, is exactly that perfervidum ingenium 
 Scotorum which used to be remarked some centuries ago, 
 wherever Scotchmen were known. But emphasis is perhaps 
 a better word than fervour. Many Scotchmen are fervid 
 too, but not all ; but all, absolutely all, are emphatic. No 
 one will call Joseph Hume a fervid man, but he is certainly 
 emphatic. And so with David Hume, or Eeid, or Adam 
 Smith, or any of those colder-natured Scotchmen of whom 
 we have spoken ; fervour cannot be predicated of them, but 
 they had plenty of emphasis. In men like Burns, or 
 Chalmers, or Irving, on the other hand, there was both 
 emphasis and fervour ; so also with Carlyle ; and so, under a 
 still more curious combination, with Sir William Hamilton. 
 And as we distinguish emphasis from fervour, so would we 
 
r 
 
 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN BEITISH LITEEATURE. 403 
 
 distinguish it from perseverance. Scotchmen are said to be 
 persevering, but the saying is not universally true ; Scotch- 
 men are or are not morally persevering, but all Scotchmen 
 are intellectually emphatic. Emphasis, we repeat, intellectual 
 emphasis, the habit of laying stress on certain things rather 
 than co-ordinating all, in this consists what is essential in 
 the Scotticism of Scotchmen. And, as this observation is 
 empirically verified by the very manner in which Scotchmen 
 enunciate their words in ordinary talk, so it might be deduced 
 scientifically from what we have already said regarding the 
 nature and effects of the feeling of nationality. The habit 
 of thinking emphatically is a necessary result of thinking 
 much in the presence of, and in resistance to, a negative ; it 
 is the habit of a people that has been accustomed to act on 
 the defensive, rather than of a people peacefully self- evolved 
 and accustomed to act positively ; it is the habit of Protes- 
 tantism rather than of Catholicism, of Presbyterianism rather 
 than of Episcopacy, of Dissent rather than of Conformity. 
 
 The greatest effects which the Scottish mind has yet pro- 
 duced on the world — and these effects, by the confession of 
 Englishmen themselves, have not been small — have been the 
 results, in part at least, of this national habit of emphasis. 
 Until towards the close of last century, the special depart- 
 ment of labour in which Scotchmen had, to any great extent, 
 exerted themselves so as to make a figure in the general 
 intellectual world, was the department of Philosophy — Meta- 
 physical and Dialectic. Their triumphs in this department 
 are historical. What is called the Scottish Philosophy con- 
 stitutes, in the eyes of all who know anything of history, 
 a most important stage in the intellectual evolution of modern 
 times. From the time of those old Duncans, and Balfours, 
 aiil 1 Dalgarnos, mentioned by Sir William Hamilton, who 
 discoursed on philosophy, and wrote dialectical treatises in 
 Latin in all the cities of the Continent, down to our own 
 days, we can point to a succession of Scottish thinkers in 
 whom the interest in metaphysical studies was kept alive, 
 and by whose labours new contributions to mental science 
 were continually being made. It was by the Scottish mind, 
 
 D D 2 
 
404 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN BRITISH LITERATURE. 
 
 in fact, that the modem philosophy was conducted to that 
 point where Kant and the Germans took it up. The quali- 
 fications of the Scottish mind for this task, were, doubtless, 
 various. Perhaps there was something in that special combi- 
 nation of the Celtic and the Scandinavian out of which the 
 Scottish nation, for the most part, took its rise, to produce an 
 aptitude for dialectical exercises. Nay, farther, it would not 
 be altogether fanciful to suppose that those very national 
 struggles of the Scotch in the course of which they acquired 
 so strong a sense of their national individuality — that is, of 
 the distinction between all that was Scotch and all that was 
 not Scotch — served, in a rough way, to facilitate to all Scotch- 
 men that fundamental idea of the distinction between the 
 Ego and the Non-Ego, the clear and rigorous apprehension of 
 which is the first step in philosophy, and the one test of the 
 philosopher. But, in a still more important degree, we hold 
 the success of the Scottish mind in philosophy to have been 
 the result of the national habit of intellectual emphasis. 
 A Scotchman, when he thinks, cannot, so easily and comfort- 
 ably as the Englishman, repose on an upper level of pro- 
 positions co-ordinated for him by tradition, sweet feeling, and 
 pleasant circumstance ; that necessity of his nature which 
 leads him to emphasise certain things rather than to take all 
 things together in their established co-ordination, drives him 
 down and still down in search of certain generalities whereon 
 he may see that all can be built. It was this habit of 
 emphasis, this inability to rest on the level of sweetly- 
 composed experience, that led Hume to scepticism ; it was 
 the same habit, the same inability, conjoined however with 
 more of faith and reverence, that led Eeid to lay down in 
 the chasm of Hume's scepticism certain blocks of ultimate 
 propositions or principles, capable of being indi\ddually 
 enumerated, and yet, as he thought, forming a sufficient 
 basement for all that men think or believe. And the same 
 tendency is visible among Scotchmen now. It amazes 
 Scotchmen at the present day to see on what proximate pro- 
 positions even Englishmen who are celebrated as thinkers 
 can rest in their speculations. The truth is that, if Scotch- 
 
SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN BRITISH LITERATURE. 405 
 
 men have, so far, a source of superiority over Englishmen 
 in their habit of dwelling only on the emphatic, they have 
 also in this same habit a source of inferiority. Quietism ; 
 mysticism ; that soft, meditative disposition which takes 
 things for granted in the co-ordination established by mere 
 life and usage, pouring into the confusion thus externally 
 given the rich oil of an abounding inner joy, interpenetrating 
 all and harmonizing all — these are, for the most part, alien 
 to the Scotchman. No, his walk, as a thinker, is not by the 
 meadows and the wheat-fields, and the green lanes, and the 
 ivy-clad parish churches, where all is gentle, and antique, 
 and fertile, but by the bleak sea-shore which parts the 
 certain from the limitless, where there is doubt in the sea- 
 mew's shriek, and where it is well if, in the advancing tide, 
 he can find footing on a rock among the tangle ! But this 
 very tendency of his towards what is intellectually extreme, 
 injures his sense of proportion in what is concrete and actual; 
 and hence it is that when he leaves the field of abstract 
 thought, and betakes himself to creative literature, he so 
 seldom produces anything comparable in fulness, wealth, and 
 harmoniousness to the imaginations of a Chaucer or a Shake- 
 speare. The highest genius, indeed, involves also the capa- 
 bility of the intellectually extreme ; and accordingly, in the 
 writings of those great Englishmen, as well as in those of 
 the living English poet Tennyson, there are strokes in 
 abundance of that pure intellectual emphasis in which the 
 Scotchman delights ; but then there is also with them such a 
 genial acceptance of all things, great or small, in their estab- 
 lished co-ordination, that the flashes of emphasis are as if 
 they came not from a battle done on an open moor, but 
 from a battle transacting itself in the depths of a forest. 
 Among Scottish thinkers. Mackintosh is the one that ap- 
 pj caches nearest to the English model — a circumstance which 
 may be accounted for by the fact that much of what he did 
 consisted, from the necessities of the object-matter of his 
 speculations, in judicious compromise. 
 
 But even in the field of literature we will not abandon the 
 Scotchman. His habit of emphasis has here enabled him to 
 
406 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN BRITISH LITERATURE. 
 
 do good service too. His entry on this field, however, was 
 later than his entry on the field of philosophy. True, there 
 had been, contemporary with the Scottish philosophers, or 
 even anterior to them, Scottish poets and general prose- writers 
 of note — Dunbar, Gawain Douglas, King James, Buchanan, 
 Sir David Lindsay, Henderson, Sir George Mackenzie, Allan 
 Ramsay, and the like. True, also, in those* snatches of 
 popular ballad and song which came down from generation 
 to generation in Scotland — many of them written by no one 
 knows who, and almost all of them overflowing with either 
 humour or melancholy — there was at once a fountain and a 
 promise of an exquisite national literature. We could think 
 of old Nicol Burn, the " violer,"' till our eyes filled with 
 tears. 
 
 " But minstrel Burn cannot assuage 
 
 His woes while time endureth, 
 To see the changes of this age 
 
 Which fleeting time procureth. 
 Full many a place stands in hard case 
 
 Where joy was wont beforrow, 
 With Humes that dwelt on Leader braes, 
 
 And Scotts that dwelt on Yarrow." , 
 
 There was literature in the times when such old strains 
 were sung. But the true avatar of the Scottish mind in 
 modern literature, came later than the manifestation of the 
 same mind in philosophy. "Were we to fix a precise date 
 for it, we should name the period of Burns's first visit to 
 Edinburgh and familiar meetings with the men of literary 
 talent and distinction then assembled there. Edinburgh 
 was, indeed, even then a literary capital, boasting of its 
 Monboddos, and Stewarts, and Eobertsons, and Blairs, and 
 Mackenzies, and Gregorys — men who had already begun the 
 race of literary rivalry with their contemporaries south of the 
 Tweed. But, so far as the literary excellence of these men 
 did not depend on their participation in that tendency to 
 abstract thinking which had already produced its special 
 fruit in the Scottish Philosophy, it consisted in little more 
 than a reflection or imitation of what was already common 
 and acknowledged in the prior or contemporary literature 
 of South Britain. To write essays such as those of the 
 
SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN BRITISH LITEEATURE. 407 
 
 pronounce pure, and to produce compositions in that style 
 worthy of being ranked with the compositions of English 
 authors — such was the aim and aspiration of Edinburgh 
 literati, between whom and their London cousins there was 
 all the difference that there is between the latitude of Edin- 
 burgh and the latitude of London, between the daily use of 
 the broad Scotch dialect and the daily use of the classic 
 English. For Scotland this mere imitation of English 
 models was but a poor and unsatisfactory vein of literary 
 enterprise. What was necessary was the appearance of some 
 man of genius who should flash through all that, and who, by 
 the application to literature, or the art of universal expression, 
 of that same Scottish habit of emphasis which had already 
 produced such striking and original results in philosophy, 
 should teach the Scottish nation its true power in literature, 
 and show a first example of it. Such a man was Burns. He it 
 was who, uniting emotional fervour with intellectual emphasis, 
 and drawing his inspiration from all those depths of sentiment 
 in the Scottish people which his predecessors, the philosophers, 
 had hardly so much as touched, struck for the first time a 
 new chord, and revealed for the first time what a Scottish 
 writer could do by trusting to the whole wealth of Scottish 
 resources. And from the time of Burns, accordingly, there 
 has been a series of eminent literary Scotchmen quite different 
 from that series of hard logical Scotchmen who had till then 
 been the most conspicuous representatives of their country in 
 the eyes of the reading public of Great Britain — a series of 
 Scotchmen displaying to the world the power of emphatic 
 sentiment and emphatic expression as strikingly as their 
 predecessors had displayed the power of emphatic reasoning. 
 W^ile the old philosophic energy of Scotland still remained 
 unexhausted — the honours of Keid, and Hume, and Smith, 
 and Stewart passing on to such men as Brown, and Mill, 
 and Mackintosh, and Hamilton (in favour of the last of 
 whom even Germany has resigned her philosophic inter- 
 regnum) — the specially literary energy which had been 
 awakened in the country descended along another line in the 
 
408 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN BRITISH LITERATURE. 
 
 persons of Scott, and Jeffrey, and Chalmers, and Campbell, 
 and Wilson, and Carlyle. Considering the amount of in- 
 fluence exerted by such men upon the whole spirit and sub- 
 stance of British literature, considering how disproportionate 
 a share of the whole literary produce of Great Britain in the 
 nineteenth century has come either from them or from other 
 Scotchmen, and considering what a stamp of peculiarity marks 
 all that portion of this produce which is of Scottish origin, 
 it does not seem too much to say, that the rise and growth 
 of Scottish literature is as notable a historical phenomenon 
 as the rise and growth of the Scottish philosophy. And 
 considering, moreover, how lately Scotland has entered on 
 this literary field, how little time she has had to display her 
 powers, how recently she was in this respect savage, and 
 how much of her savage vitality yet remains to be articu- 
 lated in civilized books, may we not hope that her literary 
 avatar is but beginning, and has a goodly course yet to run ? 
 From the Solway to Caithness we hear a loud Amen ! 
 
THEORIES OF POETEY.* 
 
 There have been hundreds of disquisitions on poetry in all 
 ages — long and short, good, bad, and indifferent; and now-a- 
 days, we cannot open a magazine or a review without finding 
 something new said about our friend " The Poet," as distin- 
 guished from our other friend " The Prophet," and the like. 
 But cant cannot be helped ; and, if we are to abandon good 
 phrases because they have been used a gi-eat many times, 
 there is an end to all reviewing. Much, too, as has been 
 spoken about poetry and poets, we doubt if the world, in its 
 lucubrations on this subject, has got far beyond the antithesis 
 suggested by what Aristotle said about it two thousand years 
 ago, on the one hand, and what Bacon advanced two hundred 
 and fifty years ago, on the other. At least, acquainted as we 
 are with a good deal that Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and 
 Goethe, and Leigh Hunt, and now Mr. Dallas, have written 
 about poetry by way of more subtle and insinuating investi- 
 gation, we still feel that the best notion of the thing, for any 
 manageable purpose, is to be beaten out of the rough-hewn 
 definitions of it, from opposite sides, supplied by Aristotle and 
 Bacon. In his Poetics, Aristotle writes as follows : — 
 
 " Epic poetry and the poetry of tragedy, as well as comedy and dithyrambic 
 poetry, and most flute and lyre music, all are, in their nature, viewed generally, 
 imitations {fxifx-ncreis) ; differing from, each other, however, in three things — 
 either in that they imitate by different means, or in that they imitate dif- 
 ferent things, or in that they imitate differently and not in the same manner. 
 For, as some artists, either from technical training or from mere habit, imitate 
 various objects by colours and forms, and other artists by vocal sound; so, of 
 the "rts mentioned above, all effect their imitation by rhythm, and words and 
 melov y, employed either severally or in combination. For example, in flute 
 and lyre music, and in any other kind of music having similar effect, such 
 as pipe music, melody and rhythm are alone used. In the dance, again, 
 the imitation is accomplished by rhythm by itself, without melody; 
 there being dancers who, by means of rhythmical gesticulations, imitate 
 even manners, passions, and acts. Lastly, epic poetry produces its imita- 
 tions either by mere articulate words, or by metre superadded 
 
 * North British Review; August, 1S53.— Poetics : an Essay on Poetry. 
 By E. S. Dallas. London, 1852. 
 
410 THEORIES OF POETRY. 
 
 Since, in the second place, those who imitate copy living characters, it behoves 
 imitations either to be of serious and lofty, or of mean and trivial objects. The 
 imitation must, in fact, either be of characters and actions better than they 
 are found among ourselves, or worse, or much the same ; just as, among 
 painters, Polygnotus represented people better-looking than they were, Pauson 
 worse-looking, and Dionysius exactly as they were. Now, it is evident that 
 each of the arts above mentioned will have these differences, the difference 
 arising from their imitating different things. In the dance, and in flute and 
 lyre music, these diversities are visible ; as also in word-imitations and simple 
 metre. Homer, for example, really made men better than they are ; Cleophon 
 made them such as they are ; whereas Hegemon, the first writer of parodies, 
 and Nicochares, made them worse. So also in dithyrambics and lyrics, one 
 might, with Timotheus and Philoxenus, imitate even Persians and Cyclopses. 
 By this very difference, too, is tragedy distinguished from comedy. The one 
 even now strives in its imitations to exhibit men better than they are, the other 
 worse. . . . Still the third difference remains, namely, as to the manner or form 
 of the imitation. For even though the means of imitation, and the things 
 imitated, should be the same, there might be this difference, that the imi- 
 tation might be made either in the form of a narration, (and that either 
 through an alien narrator, as Homer does, or in one's own person without 
 changing,) or by representing the imitators as all active and taking part. 
 So that, though in one respect Homer and Sophocles would go together as imi- 
 tators, as both having earnest subjects, in another Sophocles and Aristophanes 
 
 would go together, as both imitating dramatically Two causes, both of 
 
 them natural, seem to have operated together to originate the poetic art. The 
 first is, that the tendency to imitate is innate in men from childhood, (the 
 difference between man and other animals being that he is the most imitative 
 of all, acquiring even his first lessons in knowledge through imitation,) and 
 that all take pleasure in imitation. Moreover, in the second place, just as the 
 tendency to imitate is natural to us, so also is the love of melody and of 
 rhythm ; and metre is evidently a variety of rhythm. Those, therefore, who 
 from the first were most strongly inclined to these things by nature, pro- 
 ceeding by little and little, originated poetry out of their impromptu fancies. 
 Poetry, thus originated, was broken into departments corresponding to the 
 peculiar characters of its producers ; the more serious imitating only beau- 
 tiful actions and their issues, while the more thoughtless natures imitated 
 mean incidents, inventing lampoons, as others had invented hymns and 
 eulogies. Pefore Homer we have no poem of any kind to be mentioned ; 
 though, doubtless, many existed." 
 
 Sucli, as indicated in those sentences of tlie treatise which 
 seem to be of most essential import, is the general doctrine of 
 Aristotle as to the nature of Poetry. With this contrast 
 Bacon's theory-j as stated, cursorily but profoundly, in the 
 following sentences from the Advancement of Learning : — 
 
 " The parts of human learning have reference to the three parts of man's 
 understanding, which is the seat of learning — History to his Memory ; Poesy 
 
 to his Imagination ; and Philosophy to his Reason Poesy is a part of 
 
 learning, in measure of words for the most part restrained, but in all other 
 points extremely licensed, and doth truly refer to the imagination ; which, 
 being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which Nature 
 hath severed, and sever that which Nature hath joined, and so make unlawful 
 matches and divorces of things. Pictorihus atque Poetis, &c. It (Poetiy) is 
 taken in two senses — in respect of words, or matter. In the first sense, it is 
 but a chai'acter of style, and belongeth to the arts of speech, and is not 
 pertinent for the present ; in the latter, it is, as hath been said, one of the 
 principal portions of learning, and is nothing else but feigned history, which 
 
I 
 
 THEORIES OF POETRY. 411 
 
 may be styled as well in prose as in verse. The use of this feigned history 
 hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in the 
 points wherein the nature of things doth deny it — the world being in proportion 
 inferior to the soul ; by reason whereof there is, agreeable to the spirit of 
 man, a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute 
 variety than can be found in the nature of things. Therefore, because the 
 acts or events of true history have not that magnitude which satisfieth the 
 mind of man, Poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more heroical ; 
 because true history propoundeth the successes and the issues of actions not 
 so agreeable to the merits of virtue and vice, therefore Poesy feigneth them 
 more just in retribution, and more according to revealed Providence ; because 
 true history representeth actions and events more ordinary and less inter- 
 changed, therefore Poesy endueth them with more rareness, so as it appeareth 
 that Poesy serveth and conferreth to magnanimity, morality, and delectation. 
 And, therefore, it was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, 
 because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things 
 to the desires of the mind, whereas Reason doth buckle and bow the mind 
 
 unto the nature of things In this third part of learning, which is 
 
 Poesy, I can report no deficience. For, being as a plant that cometh of the 
 lust of the earth without a formal seed, it hath sprung up and spread abroad 
 mpre than any other kind." 
 
 Now, though it would be possible, we doubt not, so to 
 stretch and comment upon Aristotle's theory of poetry as to 
 make it correspond with this of Bacon's, j&i^ prima facie^ the 
 two theories are different, and even antithetical. If both are 
 true, it is because the theorists tilt at opposite sides of the 
 shield. Aristotlejna kes the essence of poetry to consist in its ; 
 beingjmitative and truthful ; Bacon, in its being creative and -^ 
 fantastical. According to Aristotle, there is a natural tendency 
 in men to the imitation of what they see in nature ; the various 
 arts are nothing more than imitations, so to speak, with 
 different kinds of imitating substance ; and poetry is that art 
 which imitates in articulate language, or, at most, in language 
 elevated and rendered more rich and exquisite by the addition 
 of metre. According to Bacon, on the other hand, there is 
 a natural tendency and a natural prerogative in the mind of 
 man, to condition the universe anew for its own intellectual 
 satisfaction ; to brood, as it were, over the sea of actual 
 existences, carrying on the work of creation with these 
 existences for the material, and its own phantasies and long- 
 ings for the informing spirit; to.be ever on the wing among. ] 
 nature's sounds and appearances, not merely for the purpose X 
 of^^serving and co-ordinating them, but also that it may • 
 delight itself with new ideal combinations, severing what 
 ^ture has jomed, and joining what nature has put asunder. 
 Poetry, in accordance with this view, might perhaps be '~ 
 
412 THEORIES OF POETRY. 
 
 defined as the art of producing, by means of articulate lan- 
 J guage, metrical or unmetrical, a fictitious concrete ; this being 
 either like to something existing in nature, or, if unlike any- 
 thing there existing, justifying that unlikeness by the charm 
 of its own impressiveness. 
 
 Amid all the discussions of all the critics as to the nature 
 of poetry, this antagonism, if such it is, between the Aristote- 
 lian and the Baconian theories, will be found eternally repro- 
 ducing itself. When Wordsworth defined poetry to be 
 " emotion recollected in tranquillity," and declared it to be 
 the business of the poet to represent out of real life, and as 
 nearly as possible in the language of real life, scenes and 
 events of an affecting or exciting character, he reverted, and 
 with good effect, to the imitation-theory of Aristotle. All 
 Coleridge's disquisitions, on the other hand, even when his 
 friend Wordsworth is the theme and exemplar, are subtle 
 , developments of the imagination-theory of Bacon. His famous 
 remark that the true antithesis is not Poetry and Prose, but 
 Poetry and Science, is but another form of Bacon's remark,"" 
 that whereas it is the part of Reason " to buckle and bow the 
 mind to the nature of things," it is the part of Imagination, 
 as the poetical faculty, " to raise the mind by submitting the 
 shows of things to its desires." And so with the definitions, 
 \ more or less formal, of other writers. Thus Leigh Hunt : — 
 "Poetry is the utterance of a passion for truth, beauty, and 
 power, embodying and illustrating its conceptions by ima- 
 gination and fancy, and modulating its language on the 
 J principle of variety in uniformity.^^ That this definition, 
 \notwithstanding that it is constructed on the principle of 
 omitting nothing that any one would like to see included, is 
 yet essentially a glimpse from the Baconian side of the shield, 
 is obvious from the fact that its author afterwards uses as 
 synonymous with it the abbreviations " Imaginative passion," 
 *' Passion for imaginative pleasure.^' — Lastly, Mr. Dallas, with 
 all his ingenuity, does not really get much farther in the end. 
 Beginning with an expression of dissatisfaction with all 
 existing definitions of poetry, Aristotle's and Bacon's included, 
 as being definitions of the thing not in itself, but in its acci- 
 
THEORIES OF POETRY. 413 
 
 dents, he proceeds first, very properly, to make a distinction 
 between poetical feeling, which all men have, and the art of 
 poetical expression, which is the prerogative of those who are 
 called poets. Both are usually included under tlie term 
 Poetry ; but, to avoid confusion, Mr. Dallas proposes to use 
 the general term Poetry for the poetical feeling, and to call 
 the art which caters for that feeling Poesy. Then, taking for 
 his clue the fact that all have agreed that, whatever poetry is, 
 it has pleasure for its end, he seeks to work his way to the 
 required definition through a prior analysis of the nature of 
 pleasure. Having, as the result of this analysis, defined 
 pleasure to be " the harmonious and unconscious activity of 
 tlie soul," he finds his way then clear. For there are various 
 kinds of pleasure, and poetry is one of these — it is " imaginative 
 pleasure;" or, writing the thing more fully out, it is the 
 *' imaginative harmonious and unconscious activity of the soul," 
 or that kind of harmonious and unconscious activity of the soul 
 which consists in the exercise of the imagination. Poesy, of 
 course, is the corresponding art, the art of producing what 
 will give imaginative pleasure. Now, with all our respect for 
 tlie ability with which Mr. Dallas conducts his investigation, 
 and our relish for the many lucid and deep remarks which 
 drop from his pen in the course of it. we must say that, as 
 respects the main matter in discussion, his investigation does 
 not leave us fully satisfied. *' Poetry is imaginative plea- 
 sure " — very well ; but Bacon had said substantially the same 
 thing when he described poetry as a part of learning having 
 reference to the imagination; and Leigh Hunt had, as we 
 have seen, anticipated the exact phrase, defining poetry to be 
 " imaginative passion," and the faculty of the poet to be 
 the faculty of " producing imaginative pleasure.^' In short, 
 the whole difficulty, the very essence of the question, consists 
 not in the word 'pleasure^ but in the word imaginative. Had 
 Mr. Dallas bestowed one-half the pains on the illustration of 
 what is meant by imagination, that he has bestowed on the 
 analysis of what is meant by pleasure, he would have done 
 the science of poetry more service. This — the nature of the 
 imaginative faculty— is "the vaporous drop profound that 
 
414 THEORIES OF POETRY. 
 
 hangs upon the corner of the moon/^ and Mr. Dallas has not 
 endeavoured to catch it. His chapter upon the Law of 
 Imagination is one of the most cursory in the book ; and the 
 total result, as far as a serviceable definition of poetry is con- 
 cerned, is that he ends in finding himself in the same hut 
 with Bacon, after having refused its shelter. 
 
 The antagonism between the Aristotelian theory, which 
 makes poetry to consist in imitative passion, and the Baconian 
 theory, which makes it to consist in imaginative passion, is 
 curiously reproducing itself at present in the kindred art of 
 
 painting. Pre-Raphaelitism is in painting very much what 
 
 the reform led by Wordsworth was in poetical literature. Imi- 
 tate nature ; reproduce her exact and literal forms ; do not paint 
 ideal trees or vague recollections of trees, ideal brick-walls or 
 vague recollections of brick-walls, but actual trees and actual 
 ,/ brick-walls ; dismiss from your minds the trash of Sir Joshua 
 r Eeynolds about " correcting nature," " improving nature," and 
 the like ; — such are the maxims addressed by the Pre-Raphael- 
 ites, both with brush and with pen, to their fellow-artists. All 
 this is, we say, a return to the theory of Aristotle, which makes 
 the essence of art to consist in Imitation, and a protest against 
 that of Bacon, which makes the essence of art to consist 
 in Idealization. Poor Sir Joshua Eeynolds ought to fall back 
 upon Bacon, so that when he is next attacked for his phrases 
 ^' improving nature,^^ and the like, the Pre-Eaphaelites may 
 see looming behind him the more formidable figure of a man 
 whose words no one dares to call trash, and whose very 
 definition of art was couched in expressions like these : — 
 '' There is, agreeable to the spirit of man, a more ample 
 greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety 
 than can be found in the nature of things ; " " The use of 
 feigned history is to give to the mind of man some shadow of 
 satisfaction in those points wherein the nature of things doth 
 deny it.'' The battle, we say, must be fought with these 
 phrases. Nor is the battle confined to the art of painting. 
 There is a more restricted kind of Pre-Eaphaelitism now 
 making its way in the department of fictitious literature. 
 Admiring the reality, the truthfulness of Thackeray's deli- 
 
THEORIES OF POETRY. 415 
 
 neations of life and society, there are men who will have 
 nothing to do with what they call the phantasies and carica- 
 tures of the Dickens school. The business of the novelist, 
 they say, is to represent men as they are, with all their foibles 
 as well as their virtues ; in other words, to imitate real life. 
 Here again comes in the Baconian thunder. " Because the 
 acts or events of true history have not that magnitude which 
 satisfieth the mind of man, poesy (and Bacon's definition of 
 poesy includes the prose fiction) feigneth acts and events 
 greater and more heroical.^' Whether Dickens can take the 
 benefit of this authority in those cases where he is charged 
 with unreality, we need not inquire ; it evidently points, how- 
 ever, to a possible style of prose fiction different from that of 
 Fielding and Thackeray, and yet as legitimate in the view of art. 
 
 For ourselves, we hold the Imitation theory as applied to\ 
 poetry or art to be so inadequate in essential respects that it ] 
 would be time lost to try to mend it ; and we findja(i_suitable / 
 statement of what seems to us to be the very idea of j)oetry, 
 except in some definition tantamount to that of Bacon^_Only 
 consider the matter for a moment. Take any piece of verse 
 from any poet, and in what single respect can that piece of 
 verse be said to be an imitation of nature ? In the first place, 
 that it is verse at all is a huge deviation in itself from what 
 is, in any ordinary sense, natural. Men do not talk in good 
 literary prose, much less in blank verse or rhyme. Macbeth, 
 in his utmost strait and horror — Lear, when the lightnings 
 scathed his white head — did not actually talk in metre. Even 
 Bruce at Bannockburn did not address his army in trochees. 
 Here, then, at the very outset, there is a break-down in the 
 theory of Imitation, or literal truth to nature. And all v 
 prose literature shares in this break-down. Not a single per- 
 sonage in Scott's novels would have spoken precisely as 
 Scott m^kes them speak ; nay, nor is there a single character 
 in Thackeray himself strictly and in every respect a fac-simile 
 of what is real. Correct grammar, sentences of varied lengths 
 and of various cadences, much more octosyllabic or pentameter 
 verse, and still more rhymed stanzas, are all artificialities. 
 Literature has them, but in real life they are not to be found. 
 
416 THEORIES OF POETRY. 
 
 It is as truly a deviation from nature to represent a king talk- 
 ing in blank verse, or a lover plaining in rhyme, as it is, in 
 an opera, to make a martyr sing a song and be encored before 
 being thrown into the flames. So far as truth to nature is 
 concerned, an opera, or even a ballet, is hardly more artificial 
 than a drama. Supposing, however, that, in order to escape 
 from this difficulty, it should be said that metre, rhyme, rheto- 
 rical consecutiveness^ and the like, are conditions previously and 
 for other reasons existing" in the material in which the imita- 
 tion is to take place, would the theory of imitation or truth to 
 nature even then hold good ? Let it be granted that gramma- 
 tical and rhythmical prose is, as it were, a kind of marble, that 
 blank verse is, as it were, a kind of jasper, and that rhymed 
 verse is, as it Avere, a kind of amethyst or opaline ; that the 
 selection of these substances as the materials in which the 
 imitation is to be effected is a thing already and independently 
 determined on ; and that it is only in so far as imitation can 
 be achieved consistently with the nature of these substances 
 that imitation and art are held to be synonymous. Will the 
 theory even then look the facts in the face ? It will not. In 
 the time of Aristotle, indeed, when most Greek poetry was, to 
 p a greater degree than poetry is now, either directly descriptive 
 1 or directly narrative, the theory might have seemed less astray 
 than it must to us. Even then, however, it was necessarily at 
 fault. The Achilles and the Ajax of Homer, the CEdipus and 
 the Antigone of Sophocles, were, in no sense, imitations from 
 nature ; they were ideal beings, never seen on any JEgean 
 coast, and dwelling nowhere save in the halls of imagination. 
 Aristotle himself felt this ; and hence, at the risk of cracking 
 into pieces his own fundamental theory, he indulges occasion- 
 ally in a strain like that of Bacon when he maintains that 
 poetry '' representeth actions and events less ordinary and 
 interchanged, and endue th them with more rareness," than is 
 found in nature. " The poet's business," says Aristotle, " is 
 not to tell events as they have actually happened, but as they 
 possibly might happen." And again : " Poetry is more philo- 
 sophical and more sublime than history." Very true, but 
 what then becomes of the imitation ? In what possible sense 
 
I 
 
 THEORIES OF POETRY. 417 
 
 can there be imitation unless where there is something to be 
 imitated ? If that something is ideal, if it exists not actually 
 and outwardly, but only in the mind of the artist, then imita- 
 tion is the wrong word to use. , And all this will be much 
 more obvious if we refer to modern poetry. Here is a stanza 
 from Spenser — part of his description of the access to Mam- 
 mon's cave. He has just described Kevenge, Jealousy, Fear^ 
 Shame,^and other entities. 
 
 " And over them sad Horror with grim hue 
 Did always soar, beating his iron wings ; 
 And after him owls and night-ravens flew, 
 The hateful messengers of heavy things, 
 Of death and dolour telling sad tidings; 
 "Whiles sad Celeno, sitting on a clift, 
 A song of bale and bitter sorrow sings, 
 That heart of flint asunder could have rift ; 
 Which having ended, after him she flieth swift." 
 
 This is true poetry ; and yet, by no possible ingenuity, short 
 of that which identified King Jeremiah with pickled cucumbers, 
 could it be shown to consist of imitation. If it be said that it 
 is mimic creation, and that this is the sense in which Aristotle 
 meant his imitation, or jujuiricnc, to be understood, we shall 
 be very glad to accept the explanation ; but then we shall 
 have to say, in reply, that as the essence of the business lies 
 in the word " creation " as the substantive of the phrase, it is 
 a pity the brunt of the disquisition should have been borne so 
 long by the adjective. Aristotle, we believe, did mean that 
 poetry was, in the main, fiction, or invention of fables in imita- 
 tion of nature ; but, unfortunately, even then he misleads by 
 making imitation, which is but the jackal in the treatise, 
 seem the lion in the definition. Nor even then will his theory 
 be faultless and complete. Spenser's grim-hued Horror soar- 
 ing aloft, beating his iron wings, and with owls and night- 
 ravens after him, is certainly a creation ; but in what sense it 
 is a mimic creation, or a creation in imitation of nature, it 
 would take a critic, lost to all reasonable use of words, to show. 
 In short, and to close this discussion with a phrase which 
 seems to us to fall like a block of stone through all our puny 
 contemporary reasonings about art imitating nature, being true 
 to nature, and the like — " Art is ca/Ze^ art/' said Goethe, 
 *' simply because it is not nature." This, it will be seen, is 
 
418 THEORIES OF POETRY. 
 
 identical with Bacon's poesy " submitting the shows of things 
 to the desires of the mind." Only in one sense can it be said 
 that the art itself comes under the denomination of nature. 
 Thus, Shakespeare — 
 
 " E'en that art, 
 Wh-ich, you say, adds to nature, is an art 
 That nature makes." 
 
 True, as Goethe would have been the first to admit ! In this 
 sense, Spenser's grim-hued Horror beating his iron wings was 
 a part of nature, seeing that, in this sense, the poet's own soul, 
 with that very imagination starting out of it, was involved 
 and contained in the universal round. But in any sense in 
 which the words art and nature are available for the purposes 
 of critical exposition, Goethe's saying is irrefragable — " Art 
 is called art simply because it is not nature." Dissolve the 
 
 ^ poet through nature, regard the creative act itself as a part of 
 nature, and then, of course, poetry or art is truth to nature ; 
 
 ' but keep them distinct, as you must do if you talk of imita- 
 tion, and then the poet is nature's master, changer, tyrant, 
 lover, watcher, slave, and mimic, all in one, his head now low 
 in her lap, and again, a moment after, she scared and weeping, 
 that, though he is with her, he minds her not. 
 
 All this, we believe, is very necessary to be said. Pre- 
 Kaphaelitism in painting, like Wordsworth's reform in poeti- 
 cal literatm-e, (which reform consisted in the precept and 
 
 -^. example of what may be called Pre-Drydenism,) we regard, 
 so far as it is a recall of art to truth and observation, as 
 an unmixed good. But it is essentially, in this particu- 
 lar respect, a reform only in the language of art ; and art 
 itself is not language, but the creative use of it. We 
 think the Pre-Raphaelites know this; for though, in the- 
 orizing, they naturally put forward their favourite idea of 
 imitation or truthfulness, yet in their practice they are as 
 much imaginative artists as imitative. Take any of the higher 
 Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and while the language of the paint- 
 ing — that is, the flowers, and grasses, and foliage, and brick- 
 walls, and costumes — are more real and true imitations than 
 are to be seen elsewhere, the thought which this language is 
 used to convey is at least as ideal, as much a supposition, 
 imagination, or recombination, as much a mere wish or utinam, 
 
THEORIES OF POETRY. 419 
 
 as in the majority of other pictures. Still, in our theory of 
 art at the present day, or at least in our theory of literary art, 
 the notion of imitation is beginning to exist in excess. The 
 very power of that most admirable novelist, Thackeray, 
 is beginning to spoil us. We will have nothing but reality, 
 nothing but true renderings of men and women as they are ; 
 no giants or demigods any more, but persons of ordinary sta- 
 ture, and the black and the white in character so mixed that 
 people shall neither seem crows nor white doves, but all more 
 or less magpies. Good, certainly, all this ; but had the rule 
 always been peremptory, as some would now make it, where 
 had been our Achilleses, our Prometheuses, our Tancreds, our 
 Lears, our Hamlets, our Fausts, our Egmonts ; these men that 
 never were, these idealizations of what might be — not copied 
 from nature, but imagined and full fashioned by the soul of 
 man, and thence disenchained into nature, magnificent phan- 
 tasms, to roam amid its vacancies ? Nor will it do to exempt 
 the epic and the tragic muses, and to subject to the rule only 
 the muse of prose fiction. Where, in that case, had been our 
 Quixotes, our Pantagruels and Panurges, our Tvanhoes 
 and Rebeccas, our Fixleins and Siebenkaeses ? These were 
 sublimations of nature, not imitations ; suggestions to history 
 by brain and genius and an inspired philosophy. The muse 
 of prose literature is very hardly dealt with. We see not why, 
 in prose, there should not be much of that mighty licence in 
 the fantastic, that measured riot, that right of whimsy, that 
 unabashed dalliance with the extreme and the beautiful, which 
 the world allows, by prescription, to verse. Why may not 
 one in prose chase forest-nymphs, and see little green-eyed 
 elves, and delight in peonies and musk-roses, and invoke the 
 stars, and roll mists about the hills, and watch the seas thun- 
 dering through caverns, and dashing against promontories? 
 Why, in prose, quail from the grand or ghastly on the one 
 hand, or blush with shame at too much of the exquisite on the 
 other ? Is prose made of iron ? Must it never weep, must it 
 never laugh — never linger to look at a buttercup, never ride at 
 a gallop over the downs? Always at a steady trot, transacting 
 only such business as may be done within the limits of a soft 
 
 E E 2 
 
420 THEORIES OF POETRY. 
 
 sigh on the one hand, and a thin smile on the other, must it 
 leave all finer and higher work of imagination to the care of 
 sister Verse ? Partly so, perhaps ; for prose soon gets ashamed 
 of itself, and, when very highly inspired, lifts itself into verse. 
 Yet it is well for literature that we have still such men among 
 us as De Quincey and Christopher North — prose-poets to us, 
 as Richter was to the Germans ; men avoiding nothing as too 
 fantastic for their element, but free and daring in it as the 
 verse-poet in his ; fronting the grisliest shapes, ascending to 
 the farthest heights, descending to the lowest depths, pursuing 
 the quaintest conceits ; all the while, too, such masters of the 
 element itself; now piling sound on sound into a great organ- 
 symphony, now witching, as with harp-music, now letting the 
 sense die away in cadence, like the echoes of a bugle blown 
 among the hills. All honour to Thackeray and the prose-fiction 
 of social reality ; but let us not so theorize as to exclude from 
 prose-fiction, when we can get it, the boundless imagination 
 of another Eichter, or even the lawless zanyism of another 
 Rabelais. 
 
 Poetry, then, we must, after all, define in terms tantamount, 
 
 /or thereabouts, to those of Bacon. With Bacon himself we 
 
 j may define it vaguely as having reference to the imagination, 
 
 I*' which faculty submitteth the shows of things to the desires 
 
 \pf the mind, whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind 
 
 unto the nature of things." Or we may vary the phrase, and, 
 
 with Coleridge, call it, ''the vision and faculty divine;" or, 
 
 with Leigh Hunt, "imaginative passion," the passion for 
 
 " imaginative pleasure;" or, with Mr. Dallas, more analytically, 
 
 " the imaginative, harmonious, and unconscious activity of the 
 
 soul." In any case, imagination is^the main word, the main 
 
 idea. Upon this Shakespeare himself has put his seal. 
 
 " The lunatic, the lover, a&d the poet, 
 Ai'e of imagination all compact." 
 
 In short, poesy is what the Greek language recognised it to 
 
 be — 7roiif)(Tig, or creation. The antithesis, therefore, is between 
 
 ^ Poetry and Science — woiriaiQ and voriaig. Let the universe of 
 
 all accumulated existence, inner and outer, material and mental, 
 
 up to the present moment, lie under one like a sea, and there 
 
 \ 
 
THEORIES OF POETRY. 421 
 
 ire two ways in which it may be intellectually dealt with and 
 brooded over. On the one hand, the intellect of man may 
 brood over it inquiringly, striving to penetrate beneath it, to 
 understand the system of laws by which its multitudinous 
 atoms are held together, to master the mystery of its pulsations 
 and sequences. This is the mood of the man of science. On 
 the other hand, the intellect of man may brood over it crea- | ^ 
 tively, careless how it is held together, or whether it is held , 
 together at all, and regarding it only as a great accumulation/ 
 of material to be submitted farther to the operation of a com-\ 
 bining energy, and lashed and beaten up into new existences. ! 
 This is the mood of the poet. The poet is emphatically the ( "" 
 man who continues the work of creation ; who forms, fashions, 
 combines, imagines ; who breathes his own spirit into things ; 
 who conditions the universe anew according to his whim and 
 pleasure ; who bestows heads of brass on men when he likes, 
 and sees beautiful women with arms of azure ; who walks amid 
 Nature's appearances, divorcing them, rematching them, inter- 
 weaving them, starting at every step, as it were, a flock of 
 white- winged phantasies that fly and flutter into the heaven of 
 the future. 
 
 All very well ; but, in plain English, what is meant by this 
 imagination, this creative faculty, which is allowed by all to 
 be the characteristic of the poet ? Mr. Dallas will tell you 
 that psychologists differ in their definitions of imagination. 
 Dugald Stewart, and others, he says, have regarded it solely 
 as the faculty which looks to the possible and unknown, which 
 invents hippogriffs and the like ideal beasts — in short, the 
 creative faculty proper. Mr. Dallas properly maintains that 
 this is not sufficient, and that the faculty unphilosophically 
 called Conception — that is, the faculty which mirrors or re- 
 produces the real — must also be included in the poetic imagi- 
 nation. And this is nearly all that he says on the subject. 
 
 Now, if we were to venture on a closer definition, such as 
 might stand its ground, and be found applicable over the 
 whole length and breadth of poetry, we should, perhaps, 
 affirm something to the following effect: — The poetic or 
 imaginative faculty is the power of intellectually producing a 
 
422 THEORIES OF POETRY. 
 
 \i new or artificial concrete ; and the poetic genius or tempera- 
 ment is that disposition of mind which leads hahitually, or hy 
 preferences to this kind of intellectual exercise. There is much 
 in this statement that might need explanation. In the first 
 place, we would call attention to the words " intellectually 
 producing/' " intellectual exercise.^^ These words are not 
 needlessly inserted. It seems to us that the distinct recogni- 
 tion of what is implied in these words would save a great 
 deal of confusion. The phrases *' poetic fire," *' poetic pas- 
 sion,^' and the like, true and useful as they are on proper 
 occasion, are calculated sometimes to mislead. There is fire, 
 there is passion in the poet ; but that which is peculiar in the 
 poet, that which constitutes the poetic tendency as such, is a 
 special intellectual habit, distinct from the intellectual habit 
 of the man of science. The poetic process may be set in 
 operation by, and accompanied by, any amount of passion or 
 feeling; but the poetic process itself, so far as such distinctions 
 are of any value, is an intellectual process. Farther, as to its 
 kind, it is the intellectual process of producing a new or 
 artificial concrete. This distinguishes poetry at once in all its 
 varieties, and whether in verse or in prose, from the other 
 forms of literature. In scientific or expository literature the 
 tendency is to the abstract, to the translation of the facts and 
 appearances of nature into general intellectual conceptions 
 and forms of language. In oratorical literature, or the litera- 
 ture of moral stimulation, the aim is to urge the mind in a 
 certain direction, or to induce upon it a certain state. There 
 remains, distinct from either of these, the literature of the 
 concrete, the aim of which is to represent the facts and 
 appearances of nature and life, or to form out of them new 
 concrete combinations. There are men who delight in things 
 simply because they have happened, or because they can 
 imagine them to happen — men, for example, to whom it is a 
 real pleasure to know that at such and such a time a knight 
 in armour rode along that way and across that bridge ; who 
 have an infinite relish for such a fact as that Sulla had a face 
 mottled white and red, so that an Athenian wit compared it to 
 a mulberry dipped in meal ; who can go back to that moment. 
 
I 
 
 THEORIES OF POETRY. 423 
 
 ay, and re-arrest time there, as in a picture, when Manlius 
 hung half-way down the Tarpeian rock, and had his death of 
 blood yet beneath him, or when Marie Antoinette lay under 
 the axe, and it had not fallen ; men, to whom also the mere 
 embodiments of their own fancy or of the fancy of others 
 are visions they never tire to doat and gaze on. These are 
 the votaries of the concrete. Now, so far as that literature of 
 the concrete whose business it is to gratify such feelings, deals 
 merely with (the actual factsjof the past as delivered to it by 
 memory, it resolves itself into the department of history ; 
 while, so far as it remains unexhausted by such a subduction, 
 it is poetry or creative literature. We speak, of course theo- 
 retically ; in practice, as all know, the two shade into each 
 other, the historian often requiring and displaying the ima- 
 gination of the poet, and the poet, on the other hand, often 
 relapsing into the describer and the historian. And here it is 
 that one part of our definition may be found fault with. See- 
 ing that the poet does not necessarily,_in every case, invent 
 scenes and incidents totally ideal, but often treats poetically 
 the actual fields and landscapes of the earth and the real 
 incidents of life — seeing, in fact, that much of our best and 
 most genuine poetry is descriptive and historical — why define 
 poesy to be the production of a new or artificial concrete ? 
 Why not call it either the reproduction of an old or the 
 production of a new concrete? There is, we believe, no 
 objection to calling it so, except that the division which would 
 be thus established is not fundamental, ^i^eyer^piece, of 
 poetry, we believe, even the most descriptive and historical, 
 that which makes it poetical is not the concrete as furnished by 
 sheer recollection, but the concrete as shaped and bodied forth 
 anew by the poet's thought — that is, as, in the strictest sense, 
 factitious and artificial. Shelley, indeed, very sweetly calls 
 poetry " the record of the best and happiest moments of the 
 best and happiest minds;" but then this only refers us 
 farther back in time for the poetry, which certainly does not 
 consist in the act of recording, if it he only recording, but 
 already lay in the good and happy moments that are recorded. 
 Thus, if it be said that the beautiful passage in Wordsworth 
 
424 THEORIES OF POETRY. 
 
 describing a winter landscape, witli the lake on whicli he 
 skated with his companions in his boyhood, is a mere tran- 
 script of a scene from recollection, we reply, that, if it be so, 
 (which we do not admit,) then the poetry of the passage was 
 transacted along with the skating, and the critic, instead of 
 watching the man at his writing-table, must keep by the side 
 of the boy on the ice. In short, in every case whatever, 
 poetry is the production of an artificial concrete — artificial 
 either in toto, or in so far as it is matter of sense or memory 
 worked into form by the infusion of a meaning. The word 
 artificial, we know, has bad associations connected with it ; 
 but, as Hazlitt said of Allegory, the word is really a harmless 
 word, and won't bite you. It is only necessary to see what it 
 means here to invest it with all that is splendid. 
 " The poetical tendency, then, is the tendency to that kind of 
 mental activity which consists in the production, we might 
 almost say secretion, by the mind of an artificial concrete ; and 
 the poetic genius is that kind or condition of mind to which this 
 kind of activity is constitutionally most delightful and easy. 
 \ Of the legitimacy and nobleness of such a mode of activity what 
 need is there to say anything ? With some theorists, indeed, 
 poets are little better than privileged liars, and poetry is little 
 better than the art of lying so as to give pleasure. Even 
 Bacon, with his synonyms of " feigned history^' and the like, 
 evidently means to insinuate a kind of contempt for poetry as 
 compared with philosophy. The one he calls '' the theatre," 
 where it is not good to stay long ; the other is the "judicial 
 place or palace of the mind." This is natural enough in a 
 man the tenor of whose own intellectual work must have 
 inclined him, apart even from the original constitutional bias 
 whicli determined that^ to prefer the exercise which " buckled 
 and bowed the mind to the nature of things," to the exercise 
 which " elevates the mind by submitting the shows of things 
 to its desires." But recognising, as he did, that the one 
 exercise is, equally with the other, the exercise of a faculty 
 which is part and parcel of the human constitution, he was 
 not the man to go very far with the joke about poets being a 
 species of liars. That, we believe, was Bentham's fun. One 
 
THEORIES OF POETRY. 425 
 
 can see what a good thing the old gentleman might have 
 made of it. " Why was that poor fellow transported ? Why, 
 the fact is, at last assizes, he originated a piece of new 
 concrete, which the law calls perjury." But the joke may be 
 taken by the other end. When that deity of the Grecian 
 mythology, (if the Grecian mythology had such a deity,) 
 whose function it was to create trees, walked one sultry day 
 over the yet treeless earth, big with unutterable thought, and 
 when, chancing to lie down in a green spot, the creative 
 phrenzy came upon him, his thought rushed forth, and, with a 
 w^hirr of earthy atoms all round and a tearing of turf, the 
 first of oaks sprang up completed, that also was the origina- 
 tion of a new piece of concrete, but one could hardly say that 
 it was telling a lie. Had his godship been a philosopher 
 instead of a poet — had he buckled and bowed his mind to 
 the nature of things instead of accommodating the shows of 
 things to his desires — the world might have been without 
 oaks to this very day. 
 
 Poetical activity being defined generally to be that kind 
 of intellectual activity which results in the production, or, as 
 one might say, deposition by the mind, of new matter of the 
 concrete, it follows that there are as many varieties in the 
 exercise of this activity as there are possible forms of an 
 intellectual concrete. To attempt a complete enumeration of 
 the various ways in which imaginative activity may show 
 itself, would be almost hopeless ; an instance or two, how- 
 ever^ may bring some of the more common of them before 
 the mind. 
 
 "The sun had just sunk below the tops of the mountains, whose long 
 shadows stretched athwart the valley ; but his sloping rays, shooting through 
 an opening of the cliffs, touched with a yellow gleam the summits of the 
 forest that hung upon the opposite steeps, and streamed in full splendour 
 upon the towers and battlements of a castle that spread its extensive ramparts 
 along the brow of a precipice above. The splendour of these illuminated 
 objects was heightened by the contrasted shade which involved the valley 
 below." — Mbs. Radcliffe. 
 
 " Almost at the root 
 Of that tall pine, the shadow of whose bare 
 And slender stem, while here I sit at eve, 
 Oft stretches towards me, like a long straight path, 
 Traced faintly on the greensward — there, beneath 
 A plain blue stone, a gentle dalesman lies." — WoBDSWORTH. 
 
426 THEOKIES OF POETRY. 
 
 These are plain instances of that kind of imaginative 
 exercise which consists in the imagination of scenes or objects, 
 A large proportion of the imaginative activity of men 
 generally, and of authors in particular, is of this species. 
 It includes pictures and descriptions of all kinds, from the 
 most literal reproductions of the real, whether in country or 
 town, to the most absolute phantasies in form and colour ; 
 and from the scale of a single object, such as the moon or 
 a bank of violets, to the scale of a Wordsworthian landscape, 
 or of a Milton's universe with its orbs and interspaces. It 
 V may be called descriptive imagination. 
 
 "And Priam tlien alighted from his chariot, 
 Leaving Idseus with it, who remained 
 Holding the mules and horses ; and the old man 
 Went straight in-doors, where the beloved of Jove 
 Achilles sat, and found him. In the room 
 Were others, but apart ; and two alone — 
 The hero Automedon and Alcinous, 
 A branch of Mars — stood by him. They had been 
 At meals, and had not yet removed the board. 
 Great Priam came, without their seeing him, 
 And, kneeling down, he clasped Achilles' knees, 
 And kissed those terrible homicidal hands 
 Which had deprived him of so many sons." — Homer. 
 
 J This is the imagination of iuQident, or narrative imagi- 
 nation. The instance is plain even to baldness— it is direct 
 Homeric narration; but for this very reason it will better 
 stand as a type of that large department of imaginative 
 activity to which it belongs. In this department are included 
 all narrations of incidents, whether historical and real, or 
 , fictitious and horribly supernatural ; from the scale, too, of 
 y — ■ thef single incident\s told in a b allad , or incidentally as a 
 link in a continuous story, up to the sustained unity of the 
 epos or drama, as in Crusoe^ Don Quixote, the Iliad, the 
 Divine Comedy, the Faery Queene, Macheth, or Paradise Lost. 
 r^It is unnecessary to point out that the narration of incident 
 \ always involves a certain amount of description of scenery. 
 
 " The Reve was a slender colerike man, 
 His beard was shave as nigh as ever he can, 
 His hair was by his ears round yshorn. 
 His top was docked like a priest beforne. 
 Full longe were his legg^s and full lean, 
 yiike a staff; there was no calf yseen." — Chaucer. 
 
I 
 
 THEORIES OF POETRY. 427 
 
 This may stand as a specimen of what is in reality a sub- 
 variety of the imaginative exercise first mentioned, but is 
 important enough to be adverted to apart. It may be called 
 the imagination of physiognomy and costume, under which 
 head might be collected an immense number of passages from 
 all quarters of our literature. This department, too, will 
 include both the real and ideal — the real, as in Chaucer's 
 and Scott's portraits of men and women ; the ideal, as in 
 Spenser's personifications, in Ariosto's hippogrifF, or in 
 Dante's Nimrod in a pit in hell, with his face as large as 
 the dome of St. Peter's, and his body in proportion, blowing 
 a horn, and yelling gibberish. Connected with this in prac- 
 tice, but distinguishable from it, is another variety of imagi- 
 native exercise, which may be called the imagination oi states 
 of feeling, ) Here is an example : — 
 
 " A fig for those by law protected ! 
 Liberty's a glorious feast ; 
 Courts for cowards were erected ; 
 Churches built to please the priest." 
 
 BuRNs's Jolly BeggarB. 
 
 This stanza, it will be observed — and we have chosen it 
 on purpose — is, in itself, as little poetical as may be ; it is 
 mere harsh Chartist prose. But in so far as it is an imagined 
 piece of concrete — that is, in so far as it is an imagination by 
 the poet of the state of feeling of another mind, or of his own 
 mind in certain circumstances — it is poetical. This is an 
 important consideration, for it links the poet not only with 
 what is poetical in itself, but with a whole, much bigger, 
 world of what is unpoetical in itself. The poet may imagine 
 opinions, doctrines, heresies, cogitations, debates, expositions 
 — there is no limit to his traffic with the moral any more 
 than with the sensuous appearances of the universe ; only, as 
 a poet, he deals with all these as concrete things, existing in 
 the objective air, and from which his own soul stands 
 royally disentangled, as a spade stands loose from the sand 
 it digs, whether it be sand of gold or sand of silex. The 
 moment any of the doctrines he is dealing with melts subjec- 
 tively into his own personal state of being (which is neces- 
 sarily and nobly happening continually,) at that moment the 
 
428 THEORIES OF POETRY. 
 
 poet ceases to be a poet pure, and becomes so far a thinker 
 or moralist in union with the poet. As regards the literary 
 range of this kind of imaginative exercise, — the imagination 
 of states of feeling, — it is only necessary to remember what a 
 large proportion it includes of our lyric poetry, and how far 
 it extends itself into the epic and the drama, where (and 
 especially in the drama) it forms, together with the imagi- 
 nation of costume, the greater part of what is called the 
 invention of character. 
 
 The foregoing is but a slight enumeration of some of the 
 various modes of imaginative exercise as they are popularly 
 distinguishable ; and, in transferring them into creative litera- 
 ture at large, they must be conceived as incessantly inter- 
 blended, and as existing in all varieties and degrees of 
 association with personal thought, personal purpose, and 
 personal calm or storm of feeling. It is matter of common 
 observation, however, that some writers excel more in one 
 and some more in another of the kinds of imagination 
 enumerated. One writer is said to excel in descriptions, 
 but to be deficient in plot and incident ; nay, to excel in that 
 kind of description which consists in the imagination of form, 
 but to be deficient in that which consists in the imagination 
 of colour. Another is said to excel in plot, but to be poor 
 in the invention of character, and in other particulars. In 
 short, the imagination, though in one sense it acts loose and 
 apart from the personality, flying freely round and round 
 it, like a sea-bird round a rock, seems, in a deeper sense, 
 restricted by the same law as the personality in its choice 
 and apprehension of the concrete. The organ of ideality, 
 as the phrenologist would say, is the organ by which man 
 freely bodies forth an ideal objective, and yet, let ideality 
 bulge out in a man's head as big as an &gg^ it is of no use 
 applying it, with Keats or Milton, in the direction of white 
 pinks, pansies freaked with jet, sapphire battlements, and 
 crimson-lipped shells, unless there is a little knot on the 
 eyebrow over the organ of colour. 
 
 The poetical tendency of the human mind being this ten- 
 dency to the ideal concrete — to the imagination of scenes, 
 
THEORIES OF POETRY. 429 
 
 incidents, physiognomies, states of feeling, and so on ; and all 
 men Having more or less of this tendency, catering for them 
 in the ideal concrete, very much in the same way, and to the 
 same effect, as their senses cater for them in the real (so that 
 the imagination of a man might be said to be nothing more 
 than the ghosts of his senses wandering in an unseen world), 
 it follows that the poet, par excellence, is simply the man 
 whose intellectual activity is consumed in this kind of exer- 
 cise. All men have imagination ; but the poet is '^ of imagi- 
 nation all compact." He lives and moves in the ideal 
 concrete. He teems with imaginations of forms, colours, 
 incidents, physiognomies, feelings, and characters. The 
 ghosts of his senses are as busy in an unseen world of sky, 
 and cloud, and sea, and vegetation, and cities, and high- 
 ways, and thronged markets of men, and mysterious beings, 
 belonging even to the horizon of that existence, as his real 
 senses are with all the nearer world of nature and life. But 
 the notable peculiarity lies in this, that every thought of his 
 in the interest of this world is an excursion into that. In this 
 respect the theory which has been applied to the exposition 
 of the Grecian mythology, applies equally to poetic genius in 
 general. The essence of the mythical process, it is said, lay 
 in this, that the early children of the earth having no 
 abstract language, every thought of theirs, of whatever kind, 
 and about whatever matter, was necessarily a new act of 
 imagination, a new excursion in the ideal concrete. If they 
 thought of the wind, they did not think of a fluid rushing 
 about, but of a deity blowing from a cave ; if they thought 
 of virtue rewarded, they saw the idea in the shape of a 
 visible transaction, in some lone place, between beings 
 human and divine. And so, allowing for a certain obvious 
 amount of difference, with the poetical mode of thought 
 to this day. Every thought of the poet, about whatever 
 subject, is transacted not only in propositional language, 
 but for the most part in a kind of phantasmagoric, or repre- 
 sentative language of imaginary scenes, objects, incidents, 
 and circumstances. To clothe his feelings with circum- 
 stance ; to weave forth whatever arises in his mind into 
 
430 THEORIES OF POETRY. 
 
 an olDJectlve tissue of imagery and incident that shall sub- 
 stantiate it and make it visible ; such is the constant aim and 
 art of the poet. Take an example. The idea of life occurs 
 to the poet Keats, and how does he express it ? 
 
 " Stop and consider ! Life is but a day ; 
 A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way 
 From a tree's summit ; a poor Indian's sleep, 
 While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep 
 Of Montmorenci. Why so sad a moan ? 
 Life is the rose's hope while yet unblown ; 
 The reading of an ever-changing tale ; 
 The light uplifting of a maiden's veil ; 
 A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air ; 
 A laughing school-b6y, without grief or care, 
 Riding the springy branches of an elm." 
 
 This Is true iroir\aiQ. What with the power of innate analogy, 
 what with the occult suasion of the rhyme, there arose first 
 in the poet's mind, contemporaneous with the idea of life, nay, 
 as incorporate with that idea, the imaginary object or vision 
 of the dew-drop falling through foliage — that imagined cir- 
 cumstance is, therefore, flung forth as representative of the 
 idea. But even this does not exhaust the creative force ; the 
 idea bodies itself again in the new imaginary circumstance of 
 the Indian in his boat ; and that, too, is flung forth. Then 
 there is a rest ; but the idea still buds, still seeks to express 
 itself in new circumstance, and five other translations of it 
 follow. And these seven pictures, these seven morsels of 
 imagined concrete, supposing them all to be intellectually 
 genuine, are as truly the poet's thoughts about life as any 
 seven scientific definitions would be the thoughts of the 
 physiologist or the metaphysician. And so in other in- 
 stances. Tennyson's Vision of Sin is a continued phantas- 
 magory of scene and incident representative of a meaning ; 
 and if the meaning is not plain throughout, it is because it 
 v/r would be impossible for the poet himself to translate every 
 ( portion of it out of that language of phantasmagory in which 
 alone it came into existence. Again, Spenser's personifi- 
 cations — his grim-hued Horror soaring on iron wings, his 
 Jealousy sitting alone biting his lips, and the like — are all 
 thoughts expressed in circumstance, the circumstance in this 
 case being that of costume and physiognomy. So, too, with 
 
THEORIES OF POETRY. 431 
 
 such splendid personifications as those of De Quincey — the 
 eldest and the youngest of the Ladies of Sorrow ; the one, 
 the Lady of Tears, with eyes sweet and subtle, wild and 
 sleepy by turns, a diadem on her head, and keys at her 
 girdle ; the other, the Lady of Darkness, her head turreted 
 like Cybele, rising almost beyond the reach of sight, the 
 blazing misery of her eyes concealed by a treble veil of 
 crape. In short, every thought of the poet is an imagination 
 of concrete circumstance of some kind or other — circumstance 
 of visual scenery, of incident, of physiognomy, of feeling, or 
 of character. The poet's thought, let the subject be what it 
 may, brings him to 
 
 " Visions of all places : a bowery nook 
 Will be elysium — an eternal book 
 Whence he may copy many a lovely saying 
 About the leaves and flowers — about the playing 
 Of nymphs in woods and fountains, and the shade 
 Keeping a silence round a sleeping maid ; 
 And many a verse from so strange influence, 
 That we must ever wonder how and whence 
 It came ; " 
 
 this occultness arising from the inscrutability of the law 
 which connects one concrete phantasy of the dreaming mind 
 with another. Kegarding the poet, then, considered in his 
 nature, we may sum up by saying, that the act of cogitation 
 with him is nothing else than the intellectual secretion of 
 .fictitious circumstance — the nature of the circumstance in each 
 case depending on the operation of those mysterious afiinities 
 which relate thought to the world of sense. In regarding the 
 poet more expressly as a literary artist, all that we have to do 
 is to vary the phrase, and say— the intellectual invention of 
 fictitious circumstance. This will apply to all that is truly 
 poetical in literature, whether on the large scale or on the 
 small. In every case what is poetical in literature consists of 
 the embodiment of some notion or feeling, or some aggregate of 
 notions and feelings, in appropriate imagined circumstances. 
 Thus, in historical or biographical writing, the poetic faculty 
 is shown by the skill, sometimes conscious and sometimes 
 unconscious, with which the figures are not only portrayed in 
 themselves, but set against imagined visible back-grounds, 
 
432 THEORIES OF POETRr. 
 
 and made to move amid circumstances having a pre-arranged 
 harmony with what they do. The achievement of this, in 
 consistency with the truth of record, is the highest triumph of 
 the descriptive historian. In fictitious prose-narrative the 
 same poetic art has still freer scope. That a lover should be 
 leaning over a stile at one moment, and sitting under a tree at 
 another ; that it should be clear, pure moonlight when Henry 
 is happy, and that the moon should be bowling through 
 clouds, and a dog be heard howling at a farmhouse near, 
 when the same Henry means to commit suicide — are artifices 
 of which every ordinary novelist is master who knows his 
 trade. The giant Grangousier, in Rabelais, sitting by the 
 fire, very intent upon the broiling of some chesnuts, drawing 
 scratches on the hearth with the end of a burnt stick, and 
 telling to his wife and children pleasant stories of the days of 
 old, is an instance of a higher kind, paralleled by many in 
 Scott and Cervantes. And, then, in the epic and the drama ! 
 Hamlet with the skull in his hand, and Homer's heroes 
 ^ij-ing by the ttoXv^Xolg^olo ! It is the same throughout 
 the whole literature of fiction — always thought expressed and 
 thrown oiF in the language of representative circumstance. 
 Indeed, Goethg's theory o£-]ioeticaL or creative l iterature was, 
 that it is nothing else Jhan _the moods of its practiti oners 
 object! vized as t^ey rise. A man feels himself oppressed and 
 agitated byteelings and longings, now of one kind, now of 
 another, that have gathered upon him till they have assumed 
 the form of a definite moral uneasiness ; if he is not a literary 
 man, he must contrive to work off* the load, in some way or 
 other, by the ordinary activity of life — which, indeed, is the 
 great preventive established by nature; if he is a literary 
 man, then the uneasiness is but the motive to creation, and 
 the result is — a song, a drama, an epic, or a novel. Scheming 
 out some plan or story, which is in itself a sort of allegory of 
 his mood as a whole, he fills up the sketch with minor 
 incidents, scenes, and characters, which are nothing more, as 
 it were, than the breaking up of the mood into its minutiae, 
 and the elaboration of these minutiae, one by one, into the 
 concrete. This done, the mood has passed into the objective ; 
 
THEOEIES OF PQETEY. 433 
 
 It may be looked at as something external to the mind, which 
 is therefore from that moment rid of it, and ready for another. 
 Such, at least, was Goethe's theory, which, he said, would 
 apply most rigidly to all that he had himself written. Nor 
 would it be difficult, with due explanation, to apply the 
 theory to the works of all the other masters of creative or 
 poetical literature — Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Scott, and 
 Shakespeare. Dante may be said to have slowly translated 
 his whole life into one representative performance. 
 
 Several suppTefiientarynconsiderations must be now adduced. 
 The form of the poet's cogitation, we have said, is the evolu- 
 tion not of abstract propositions but of representative concrete 
 circumstances. But in this, too, there may be degrees of 
 better and worse, of greater and less. Precisely as, of two 
 writers thinking in the language of abstract speculation, we 
 can say, without hesitation, which has the more powerful 
 mind; so of two writers thinking in the other language 
 of concrete circumstance, one may be evidently superior 
 to the other. There is room, in short, for all varieties of 
 greater and less among poets as among other people; there 
 may be poets who are giants, and there may be poets 
 who are pigmies. Hence the folly of the attempts to exalt 
 the poetical genius, merely as such, above other kinds of 
 intellectual manifestation. A man may be constitutionally 
 formed so that he thinks his thoughts in the language of 
 concrete circumstance; and still his thoughts may be very 
 little thoughts, hardly worth having in any language. Both 
 poets and men of science must be tried among their peers. 
 Whether there is a common measure, and what it is ; whether 
 there is an intrinsic superiority in the mode of cogitation of 
 the poet over that of the philosopher, or the reverse; and 
 whether and how far we may then institute a comparison of 
 absolute greatness between Aristotle and Homer, between 
 Milton and Kant— are questions of a higher calculus, which 
 most men may leave alone. There is no difficulty, however, 
 when the question is between a Kirke White and a Kant ; 
 and when a poor poet, ever so genuine in a small way, 
 intrudes himself on the Exchange of the general world. 
 
434 THEORIES OF POETRY. 
 
 telling people there that his intellect is " genius," and that 
 theirs is " talent," he evidently runs a risk of being very 
 unceremoniously treated. 
 
 " This palace standetli in the air. 
 By necromancy placed there, 
 That it no tempest needs to fear. 
 
 Which way soe'er it blow it : 
 And somewhat southward tow'rd the noon 
 There lies a way up to the moon, 
 And thence the fairy can as soon 
 
 Pass to the Earth below it." 
 
 This is very sweety and nice, and poetical (it is by Drayton ; 
 not a small poet, but a considerable one) ; and yet there needs 
 be no great hesitation in saying that, call it genius or what 
 we will, there was less commotion of the elements when it 
 was produced than when Newton excogitated his theory of 
 the Law of Gravitation. 
 
 But, to pass to another point. The imagination, as we 
 have already said, following the law of the personality, some 
 imaginations are strong where others are weak, and weak 
 where others are strong. In other words, though all poets, as 
 such, express themselves in the language of concrete circum- 
 stance, some are greater adepts in one kind of circumstance, 
 others in another. Some are great in the circumstance of 
 form, which is the sculptor's favourite circumstance; others 
 can produce admirable compositions in chiaroscuro ; others, . 
 again, have the whole rainbow on their pallet. And so, some 
 express themselves better in incident, others better in phy- 
 siognomy and character. All this is recognised in daily 
 criticism. Now, the consequence of the diversity is, that it is 
 very difficult to compare poets even amongst themselves. It 
 is not every poet, that, like Shakespeare, exhibits an imagi- 
 nation that is absolutely or all but absolutely universal, 
 using with equal ease the language of form, of colour, of 
 character, and of incident. Shakespeare himself, if we may 
 infer anything from his minor poems, and from the careless- 
 ness with which he took ready-made plots for his dramas 
 from any quarter (in which, however, there may be a philo- 
 sophy), was not so great a master of incident as of other kinds 
 of circumstance, and could hardly have rivalled Homer, or 
 
THEORIES OF POETRY. 435 
 
 Scott, purely as a narrative poet. How, tlien, establish 
 a comparative measure, assigning a relative value to eac 
 kind of circumstance? How balance what Chaucer has and 
 has not, against what Milton has and has not — Chaucer so 
 skilful in physiognomy, against Milton who has so little of it, 
 but who has so much else ; or how estimate the chiaroscuro of 
 Byron as against the richly coloured vegetation of Keats? 
 Here, too, a scientific rule is undiscoverable, and a judgment 
 is only possible in very decided cases, or by the peremptory 
 verdict of private taste. 
 
 *' Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the mellow shade, 
 Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid." 
 
 Who will venture to institute a sure comparison of merit 
 between this exquisite bit of colour from Tennyson, and the 
 following simple narrative lines from the same poet ? — 
 
 " And all the man was broken with remorse ; 
 And all his love came back a hundredfold ; 
 And for three hours he sobbed o'er William's child, 
 Thinking of William." 
 
 There Is yet a third thing that has to be taken into considera- 
 tion. Be a man as truly a poet as it is possible to be, and be 
 the kind of circumstance in which his imagination excels as 
 accurately known as possible, it is not always that he can do 
 his best. The poet, like other men, is subject to inequalities 
 of mood and feeling. Now he is excited and perturbed, 
 because the occasion is one to rouse his being from its 
 depths ; now he is placid, calm, and, as one might say, com- 
 monplace. Hence variations in the interest of the poetical 
 efforts of one and the same poet. As he cannot choose but 
 think poetically, whether roused or not, even the leisurely 
 babble of his poorest hours, if he chooses to put it forth, will 
 be sweet and poetical. But he is not to be measured by 
 this, any more than the philosopher by his casual trifles, or 
 the orator by his speeches on questions that are insignificant. 
 Nay, more than this, it is important to remark that it is only 
 at a certain pitch of feeling that some men become poets. 
 For, though the essence of poetry consists, as we have said, 
 in a particular mode of intelhctual exercise, yet the emotional 
 
 F F 2 
 
436 THEORIES OP POETRY. 
 
 moment at wHcli diiFerent minds adopt this mode of exercise 
 may not be the same. The language of concrete circumstance 
 is natural to all men when they are very highly excited : all 
 joy, all sorrow, all rage, expresses itself in vivid imaginations. 
 The question then not unfrequently ought to be, At what level 
 of feeling a man is or professes to be a poet ? On this may 
 depend, not your verdict as to the genuineness of his poetry, 
 but your disposition to spare time to listen to it. The most 
 assiduous members of Parliament do not feel bound to be in 
 the House even when a leader is speaking, unless it is on a 
 Cabinet question or a question of some considerable interest. 
 Some orators know this and reserve themselves; others, 
 delighting in their profession, speak on every question. It is 
 the same with poets, and with the same result. A Keats, 
 though always poetical, may often be poetical with so small 
 a stimulus, that only lovers of poetry for its own sake feel 
 themselves sufficiently interested. Why are Milton's minor 
 poems, exquisite as they are, not cited as measures of the 
 magnitude of his genius ? Because they are not his speeches 
 on Cabinet questions. Why is Spenser the favourite poet of 
 poets, rather than a popular favourite like Byron ? For the 
 same reason that a Court is crowded during a trial for life or 
 death, but attended only by barristers during the trial of an 
 intricate civil case. The subject chosen by a poetical writer, 
 we have already said, is a kind of allegory of the whole state 
 of his mental being at the moment ; but some writers are not 
 moved to allegorize so easily as others, and it is a question 
 with readers what states of being they care most to see allego- 
 rized. This, then, is to be taken into account^ in comparing 
 poet with poet. Precisely as an orator is remembered by his 
 speeches on great questions, and as the position of a painter 
 among painters is determined in part by the interest of his 
 subjects, so, in a comparison of poets together, or of the same 
 poet with himself, the earnestness of the occasion always goes 
 for something. Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, exquisite 
 as a poetical study, does not bear one down with the same 
 human interest as his plays ; and there is a mighty gradation 
 of interest in advancing from leisurely compositions of the 
 
THEORIES OF POETRY. 437 
 
 sweet sensuous order, such as Keats's Endymion and Spenser's 
 Faery Queene, to the stern and severe splendour of a Divina 
 Commedta or a Prometheus Vincttis, True, on the one hand, 
 poets choose their own subjects, so that these themselves are 
 to be taken into the estimate; and, on the other, the very 
 practice of the art of poetical expression on any subject, like 
 the glow of the orator when he begins to speak, leads on and 
 on to unexpected regions. Yet, after all, in weighing a poem 
 against others, so as to pronounce a judgment as to relative 
 greatness, this consideration of the emotional level at which 
 it was produced, and of its interest in connexion with the 
 general work and sentiment of the world, is a source of much 
 perplexity. 
 
 " Sweet bird, that shunn'st the noise of folly, 
 Most musical, most melancholy ! 
 Thee, chantress, oft the woods among 
 I woo, to hear thy even-song ; 
 And, missing thee, I walk unseen 
 On the dry, smooth-shaven green, 
 To behold the wandering moon 
 Riding near her highest noon, 
 Like one that hath been led astray 
 Through the heaven's wide pathless way, 
 And oft, as if her head she bow'd. 
 Stooping through a fleecy cloud. 
 Oft, on a plat of rising ground, 
 I hear the far-off curfew sound, 
 Over some wide watered shore. 
 Swinging slow with sullen roar." 
 
 How decide between this from Milton's Fenseroso, and this, in 
 so different a key, from Shakespeare's Lear f — 
 
 " Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks ! rage ! blow ! 
 You cataracts and hvirricanoes, spout 
 Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks ! 
 You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, 
 Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts. 
 Singe my white head ! and thou all-shaking thunder, 
 Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world." 
 
 A fourth consideration, which intrudes itself into the ques- 
 tion of our appreciation of actual poetry, and which is not 
 sufficiently borne in mind, is, that in almost every poem there 
 is much present besides the pure poetry. Poetry, as such, is 
 cogitation in the language of concrete circumstance. Some 
 poets excel constitutionally in one kind of circumstance, some 
 in another; some are moved to this mode of cogitation on 
 
438 THEORIES OF POETRY. 
 
 a less, otliers on a greater emotional occasion ; but, over and 
 above all tbis, it is to be noted that no poet always and 
 invariably cogitates in the poetical manner. Speculation, 
 information, mental produce and mental activity of all kinds, 
 may be exhibited in the course of a work which is properly 
 called a poem on account of its general character; and, as 
 men are liable to be impressed by greatness in every form 
 wherever they meet it, all that is thus precious in the extra- 
 poetical contents of a poem, is included in the estimate of the 
 greatness of the poet. One example will suffice. Shakespeare 
 is as astonishing for the exuberance of his genius in abstract 
 generalization, and for the depth of his analytic and philo- 
 sophic insight, as for the scope and minuteness of his poetic 
 imagination. It is as if into a mind poetical in /orm, there 
 had been poured also all the matter that existed in the mind 
 of his contemporary Bacon. In Shakespeare's plays we have 
 thought, history, exposition, and philosophy, all within the 
 round of the poet. The only difference between him and 
 Bacon sometimes is, that Bacon writes an essay and calls it 
 his own, and that Shakespeare writes a similar essay, and 
 puts it into the mouth of a Ulysses or a Polonius. It is only 
 this fiction of a speaker and an audience, together with the 
 circumstance of the verse, that retains many of Shakespeare's 
 noblest passages within the pale of strict poetry. 
 
 Hitherto, it will be observed, we have made no formal dis- 
 tinction between the poet, specifically so called, and the 
 general practitioners of creative literature, of whatever species. 
 Our examples, indeed, have been taken in the main from 
 those whom the world recognises as poets ; but, as far as our 
 remarks have gone, poetry still stands synonymous with the 
 whole literature of imagination. All who express their 
 meaning, and impress it upon the world, by the literary 
 representation of scenes, incidents, physiognomies, and cha- 
 racters, whether suggested by the real world or wholly 
 imaginary, are poets. All who, doing this, do it grandly, 
 and manifest a rich and powerful nature, are great poets. 
 Those who excel more in the language of one kind of 
 circumstance, are poets more especially of that kind of 
 
THEORIES OF POETRY. 439 
 
 circumstance — poets of visual scenery, poets of incident 
 and narration, poets of physiognomy, or poets of character 
 and sentiment, as the case may be. Those who are poetical 
 only at a high key, and in the contemplation of themes of 
 large human interest, are the poets who take the deepest 
 hold on the memory of the human race. Finally, those who, 
 having the largest amount of poetic genius, and of the best 
 kind, associate therewith the most extensive array of other 
 intellectual qualities, are the men who, even as poets, give 
 their poems the greatest impetus and the greatest universal 
 chance. 
 
 Not a word in all this, however, to exclude imaginative 
 prose-writers. So far, the Homers, the Platos, the Sopho- 
 cleses, the Aristophaneses, the Virgils, the Dantes, the 
 Boccaccios, the Chancers, the Cervanteses, the Spensers, the 
 Shakespeares, the Miltons, the Tassos, the Moliferes, the 
 Goethes, the Richters, the Scotts, the Defoes, of the world 
 are all huddled together, the principal figures of a great 
 crowd, including alike poets and prose-writers. These indeed 
 may, in accordance with considerations already suggested, be 
 distributed into groups, and that either by reference to degree 
 or by reference to kind. But no considerations have yet been 
 adduced that would separate the imaginative prose- writers, as 
 such — the Boccaccios, the Cervanteses, the Richters, the Scotts, 
 the Defoes, and the De Quinceys — from the imaginative verse- 
 writers, as such. Now, though this is good provisionally ; 
 though it is well to keep together for a while in the same 
 field of view all writers of imagination, whether bards or 
 prose-writers ; and though, as we have already said, there is 
 no reason why imagination in prose should not be allowed to 
 do all it can do, and why prose-writers like Richter and 
 De Quincey should not be crowned with poetic laurel ; yet 
 the universal instinct of men, not to say also the prejudice of 
 association and custom, demands that the poets, as a sect or 
 brotherhood, shall be more accurately defined. How, then, 
 lead out the poets, in the supreme sense, from the general 
 throng where they yet stand waiting ? By what device call 
 the poets by themselves into the foreground, and leave the 
 
440 THEORIES OF POETRY. 
 
 prose-writers behind ? By a union of two devices ! Gro in 
 front of the general crowd, you two ; you, flag-bearer, with 
 your richly-painted flag, and you, fluter, with your silver 
 flute ! Flap the flag, and let them see it ; sound the flute, 
 and let them hear it ! Lo ! already the crowd wavers ; it 
 sways to and fro ; some figures seem to be pressing forward 
 from the midst, and at last one silver -headed old Serjeant 
 steps out in front of all, and begins to march to the sound of 
 the flute. Who is it but old Homer? He is blind, and 
 cannot see the flag, but he knows it is there, and the flute 
 guides him. Others and others follow the patriarch, whom 
 they never deserted yet, some looking to the flag, and others 
 listening to the flute, but all marching in one direction. 
 Shakespeare comes with the rest, stepping lightly, as if but 
 half in earnest. And thus at last, lured by the flag and by 
 the flute, all the poets are brought out into the foreground. 
 The flag is Imagery ; the flute is Verse. In other words, poets 
 proper are distinguished from the general crowd of imagi- 
 native writers by a peculiar richness of language, which is 
 called imagery, and by the use, along with that language, of 
 a measured arrangement of words known as verse. 
 
 It is, as Mr. Dallas observes, a moot point whether Imagery 
 or Verse is to be regarded as the more essential element of 
 poetry. It has been usual, of late, to give the palm to 
 imagery. Thus, it was a remark of Lord Jeffrey — and the 
 remark has almost passed into a proverb — that a want of 
 relish for such rich sensuous poetry as that of Keats would 
 argue a want of true poetical taste. The same would probably 
 be said of Spenser. Mr. Dallas, on tlie other hand, thinks 
 Verse more essential than Imagery, and in this Leigh Hunt 
 would probably agree with him. The importance attached to 
 a sensuous richness of language as part of poetry is, Mr. 
 Dallas thinks, too great at present; and in opposition to 
 Lord Jeffrey, or at least by way of corrective to his remark 
 about Keats, he proposes that a power of appreciating such 
 severe literary beauty as that of Sophocles, shall, more than 
 anything else, be reckoned to the credit of a man's poetical 
 taste. We think Mr. Dallas, on the whole, is in the right ; 
 
THEORIES OF POETRY. 441 
 
 and this will appear more clearly if we consider briefly 
 what Imagery and Verse respectively are, in their relation to 
 poetry. 
 
 Imagery in poetry is essentially this — secondary concrete 
 adduced by the imagination in the expression of prior con- 
 crete. Thus, in the simile, — 
 
 " The superior Fiend 
 Was moving toward the shore, his ponderous shield 
 Behind him cast ; the broad circumference 
 Himg on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb 
 Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views 
 At evening from the top of Fesole." 
 
 Here the primary circumstance in the imagination of the 
 poet is Satan, with his shield hung round his shoulders. 
 While imagining this, however, the poet, moving at ease in 
 the whole world of concrete things, strikes upon a totally 
 distinct visual appearance, that of the moon seen through 
 a telescope; and his imagination, enamoured with the like- 
 ness, cannot resist imparting the new picture to the reader as 
 something auxiliary and additional to the first. Again, take 
 the metafhor : — 
 
 " Sky lowered, and, muttering thunder, some sad drops 
 Wept at completing of the mortal sin 
 Original." 
 
 Here the process is the same as in the simile, but more 
 unconscious and complete. The concrete circumstance first in 
 the mind (so far at least as these lines are concerned) is the 
 sky dropping rain ; in the imagination of this circumstance, 
 another imagined circumstance, that of a being shedding 
 tears, intrudes itself; the two circumstances, so like to the 
 mind that it hardly is conscious that they are two, are com- 
 bined by a kind of identifying flash ; and the rich double 
 concrete is presented to the reader. So essentially with that 
 highest species of metaphor, the personification or vivification 
 (of which, indeed, the metaphor quoted is an example), the 
 speciality of which consists in this, that a piece of concrete 
 taken from the inanimate world is wedded to a piece of con- 
 crete taken from the world of life. The two worlds lying 
 as it were side by side in the human imagination as the two 
 halves of all being, this kind of metaphor is the most natural 
 
442 THEORIES OF POETRY. 
 
 and the most frequent of all ; and powerful imaginations are 
 exceedingly prone to it. A subvarietj, to which some writers 
 are much addicted, is the identification of brute with human 
 circumstance, as witness Dickens's dogs and ponies. 
 
 Almost all so-called images may be reduced under one or 
 other of the foregoing heads ; and, in any case, all imagery 
 will be found to consist in the use of concrete to help out 
 concrete — in the impinging of the mind, so to speak, while 
 dealing with one concrete circumstance against other and 
 other concrete circumstances. Now, as the very essence of 
 the poet consists in the incessant imagination of concrete 
 circumstance, a language rich in imagery is in itself a proof of 
 the possession of poetical faculty in a high degree. Cceteris 
 paribus, that is, where there is an equal amount of imagina- 
 tion and of the same quality, in the bodying forth of the main 
 circumstance of a poem or a poetical passage — ^whether that is 
 a circumstance of visible scenery, of incident, of physiognomy, 
 or of mental state — the more of subsidiary circumstance 
 e,volved in intellectual connexion with the main one the 
 higher the evidence of poetical power. There is an analogy, 
 in this respect, between poetical and scientific writers. Some 
 scientific writers, as, for example, Locke, attend so rigorously 
 to the main thought they are pursuing as to give to their style 
 a kind of nakedness and iron straightness ; others, as, for 
 example. Bacon, without being indifferent to the main 
 thought, are so full of intellectual matter of all kinds that 
 they enrich every sentence with a detritus of smaller proposi- 
 tions related to the one immediately on hand. So with poets. 
 Some poets — as Keats, Shakespeare, and Milton in much of 
 his poetry — so teem with accumulated concrete circumstance, 
 or generate it so fast, as their imagination works, that every 
 imagined circumstance as it is put forth from them takes with 
 it an accompaniment of parasitic fancies. Others, as the Greek 
 dramatists and Dante, sculpture their thoughts roundly and 
 massively in severe outline. It seems probable that the tendency 
 to excess of imagery is natural to the Gothic or Eomantic as 
 distinct from the Hellenic or Classical imagination ; but it is 
 not unlikely that the fact that poetry is now read instead of ^ 
 
THEORIES OF POETRY. 443 
 
 )emg merely heard, as it once was, has something to do with 
 it. As regards the question when imagery is excessive, iohe7i 
 the richness of a poet's language is to he called extravagance, 
 no general principle can be laid down. The judgment on 
 this point in each case must depend on the particular state 
 of the case. A useful distinction, under this head, might 
 possibly be drawn between the liberty of the poet and the 
 duty of the artist. Keats' s Endymion, one might safely, in 
 reference to such a distinction, pronounce to be too rich ; for 
 in that poem there is no proportion between the imagery, or 
 accessory concrete, and the main stem of the imagined 
 circumstance from which the poem derives its name. In the 
 Eve of St. Agnes, on the other hand, there is no such fault. 
 
 Of verse, as connected with poetry, various theories have 
 been given. Wordsworth, whose theory is always more 
 narrow than his practice, makes the rationale of verse to 
 consist in this, that it provides for the mind a succession of 
 minute pleasurable surprises in addition to the mere pleasure 
 communicated by the meaning. Others regard the use of 
 verse as consisting in its power to secure the attention of the 
 reader or hearer. Others regard it as a voluntary homage of 
 the mind to law as law, repaid by the usual rewards of dis- 
 interested obedience. Mr. Dallas sets these and other theories 
 aside, and puts the matter on its right basis. Verse is an 
 artificial source of pleasure ; it is an incentive to attention, or 
 a device for economizing attention ; and it is an act of obedi- 
 ence to law if you choose so to regard it. All these, however, 
 are merely statements respecting verse as something already 
 found out and existing ; not one of them is a theory of verse 
 in its origin and nature. Such a theory, if it is to be sought \ 
 for at all, must clearly consist in the assertion of this, as a \ 
 fundamental fact of nature — that, when the mind of man is / 
 either excited to a certain pitch, or engaged in a certain kind of / 
 exercise, its transactions adjust themselves_, in a more express^ 
 manner than usual, to time as meted out in beats or intervals. 
 Mr. Dallas, giving to the statement its most transcendental ' 
 form, says that the rationale of metre is to be deduced from 
 the ^act that Time being, according to Kant, but a leading 
 
444 THEORIES OP POETRY. 
 
 form of sense, must fall under the law of imagination, the 
 faculty representative of sense. Quite independent of this 
 philosophic generalization, which it would at least require 
 much time to work down for the ordinary market, there are 
 many facts, some of which Mr. Dallas very acutely points out,>^ 
 all tending to indicate the existence of such a law as we have 
 referred to. The swinging of a student to and fro in his chair 
 during a fit of cogitation, the oratorical see-saw, the evident 
 connexion of mental states with the breathings and the pulse- 
 beats, the power of the tick-tick of a clock to induce reverie, 
 and of the clinkum-clankum of a bell to make the fool think 
 words to it, are all instances of the existence of such a law. 
 Nay, the beginnings of poetical metre itself are to be traced in 
 speech far on this side of what is accounted poetry. There is 
 a visible tendency to metre in every articulate expression of 
 strong feeling ; and the ancient Greeks, we are told, used to 
 amuse themselves with scanning passages in the speeches of 
 their great orators. Without trying to investigate this point 
 farther, however, we would simply refer to a consideration 
 connected with it, which seems important for our present 
 purpose. The law, as stated hypothetically, is, that the mind, 
 either when excited to a certain pitch, or when engaged in 
 a particular kind of exercise, takes on, in its transactions, 
 a marked concordance with time as measured by beats. Now, 
 whether is it the first or the second mental condition that 
 necessitates this concordance? Poetry we have all along 
 defined as a special mode of intellectual exercise, possible 
 under all degrees of emotional excitement — the exercise of the 
 mind imaginatively, or in the figuring forth of concrete cir- 
 cumstance. Is it, then, poetry, as such, that requires metre, 
 or only poetry by virtue of the emotion with w^hich it is in 
 general accompanied, that emotion either preceding and 
 stimulating the imaginative action, or being generated by it, 
 as heat is evolved by friction ? The question is not an easy 
 one. On the whole, liowever, we incline to the belief that, 
 though poetry and passion, like two inseparable friends that 
 have taken up house together, have metre for their common 
 servant, it is on passion, and not on poetry, that metre holds 
 
THEORIES OF POETRY. 445 
 
 by original tenure. The very reasons we adduce for thinking so 
 will show that the question is not a mere metaphysical quibble. 
 These are — that metre is found, in its highest and most decided 
 form, in lyrical poetry, or the poetry of feeling, narrative 
 poetry having less, and dramatic poetry still less of it ; and 
 that, wherever, in the course of a poem, there is an unusual 
 metrical boom and vigour, the passage so characterized will be 
 found to be one not so much of pure concrete richness, as of 
 strong accompanying passion. What, then, if song, instead of 
 being, as common language makes it, the complete and 
 developed form of poetry, should have to be philosophically 
 defined as the complete and developed form of oratory, passing 
 into poetry only in as far as passion, in its utterance, always 
 seizes and whirls with it shreds and atoms of imagined cir- 
 cumstance? If this is the true theory, verse belongs, by 
 historical origin, to oratory, and lingers with poetry only as 
 an entailed inheritance. Prose, then, may^ as we have said, 
 make inroads upon that region of the literature of the concrete 
 which has hitherto been under the dominion of verse. But, 
 on the other hand, verse, whatever it may have been in its 
 origin, exists now, like many other sovereignties, by right of 
 expediency, constitutional guarantee, and the voluntary sub- 
 mission of those who are its subjects. And here it is that the 
 tlieories of Wordsworth and others have their proper place. 
 They are theories of verse, not in its origin, but in its character 
 as an existing institution in the literature of the concrete. 
 They tell us what we can now do intellectually by means of 
 verse, which we could not do if her royalty were abolished. 
 They point to the fact, that in literature, as in other departments 
 of activity, law and order, and even the etiquette of exquisite 
 artificial ceremonial, though they may impose intolerable 
 burdens on the disaffected and the boorish, are but conditions 
 of liberty and development to all higher, and finer, and more 
 cultured natures. In short, (and this is the important fact,) 
 metre, rhyme, and the like, are not only devices for the sweet 
 and pleasurable conveyance of the poet's meaning after it is 
 formed ; they are devices assisting beforehand in the creation 
 of that meaning — devices so spurring and delighting the 
 
446 THEORIES OF POETRY. 
 
 imagination, while they chafe and restrain it, that its thoughts 
 and combinations in the world of concrete circumstance are 
 more rich, more rare, more occult, more beautiful, and more 
 incomprehensible, than they would otherwise be. Like the 
 effect of the music on the fountain and the company of 
 Bacchanals in Tennyson's strange vision, is the effect of verse 
 on poetical thought. 
 
 " Then methought I heard a mellow sound, 
 Gathering up from all the lower ground ; 
 Narrowing in to where they sat assembled, 
 Low, voluptuous music winding trembled, 
 Wov'n in circles : they that heard it sigh'd. 
 Panted hand in hand with faces pale, 
 Swung themselves, and in low tones replied, 
 Till the fountain spouted, showering wide 
 Sleet of diamond-drift and pearly hail." 
 
 But here we must stop our discussions on the Theory of 
 Poetry. For much that we have left undiscussed, and especi- 
 ally for a philosophical division of poetry according to its 
 kinds, we must refer to Mr. Dallas. We recommend his book 
 highly and cordially. There is perhaps a stronger dash of 
 what may be called Okenism in his style of speculation, than 
 some readers may like; as, for example, in his systematic 
 laying out of everything into corresponding threes or triads. 
 Thus, poetry figures throughout his treatise as a compound 
 result of three laws — the law of unconsciousness, the law of 
 harmony, and the law of imagination; which laws are supreme 
 respectively in three kinds of poetry — lyrical poetry, epic 
 poetry, and dramatic poetry ; which three kinds of poetry, 
 again, correspond historically with Eastern, primitive, or 
 divine art, Grecian, antique, or classical art, and Western, 
 modern, or romantic art; which historical division, again, 
 corresponds philosophically with such trinities as these — I, 
 he, you ; time future, time past, time present ; immortality, 
 God, freedom ; the good, the true, the beautiful. All this, 
 stated thus' abruptly and without explanation, may seem more 
 hopeless sort of matter to some than it would to us ; but even 
 they will find in the book much that will please them, in the 
 shape of shrewd observation, and lucid and deep criticism, 
 valuable on its own account, and very different from what 
 used to be supplied to the last age by its critics. 
 
PKOSE AND YERSE DE QUINCEI.* 
 
 In the Preface to this series of volumes (which is intended 
 to be a more perfect accomplishment, under the author's own 
 editorship, of a scheme of literary collection already executed 
 very creditably by an American publisher), Mr. De Quincey 
 ventures on something rather unusual — a theoretical classifi- 
 cation of his own writings for the benefit of critics. The 
 following is the passage in which he states this classification 
 and the groimds of it : — 
 
 " Taking as the basis of my remarks the collective American edition, I will 
 here attempt a rude general classification of all the articles which compose it. 
 I distribute them grossly into three classes ; — 
 
 " First, into that class which proposes primarily to amuse the reader ; but 
 which, in doing so, may or may not happen occasionally to reach a higher 
 station, at which the amusement passes into an impassioned interest. Some 
 jmpers are merely playful ; but others have a mixed character. These present 
 Autobiographic Sketches illustrate what I mean. Generally, they pretend to 
 little beyond that sort of amusement which attaches to any real story, thought- 
 fully and faithfully related, moving throixgh a succession of scenes suflBciently 
 varied, that are not suffered to remain too long vipon the eye, and that connect 
 themselves at every stage with intellectual objects. But, even here, I do not 
 scruple to claim from the reader, occasionally, a higher consideration. At 
 times, the narrative I'ises into a far higher key. . . . 
 
 " Into the second class I throw those papers which address themselves purely 
 to the understanding as an insulated faculty ; or do so primarily. Let me 
 call them by the general name of essays. These, as in other cases of the same 
 kind, must have their value measured by two separate questions. A. — What 
 is the problem, and of what rank in dignity or use, which the essay under- 
 takes ? And next — that yjoint being settled — B. — What is the success ob- 
 tained ? and (as a separate question) What is the executive ability displayed in 
 the solution of the problem ? This latter question is naturally no qviestion for 
 myself, as the answer would involve a verdict upon my own merit. But, 
 generally, there will be quite enough in the answer to Question A for esta- 
 blishing the value of any essay oh its soundest basis. Prudens interrogatio est 
 dimidium scientice. Skilfully to frame your question, is half-way towards 
 insuring the true answer. Two or three of the problems treated in these 
 essays I will here rehearse [Mr. De Quincey here cites, as examples of the 
 
 * British Quarterly Review; July, lS5i.— Selections Grave and Gay, from 
 Writings published and unpublished. By Thomas De Quincey. Vols. I. and 
 II.; containing "Autobiographic Sketches." Edinburgh, 1S53-4. 
 
448 
 
 PROSE AND VERSE: DE QUINCEY. 
 
 kind of writings wluch lie refers to the second class, his essays on the following 
 subjects : — Essenism, The Ccesars, and Cicero.'] These specimens are sufficient 
 for the purpose of informing the reader that I do not write without a 
 thoughtful consideration of my subject ; and, also, that to think reasonably 
 upon any question, has never been allowed by me as a sufficient ground for 
 writing upon it, unless I believed myself able to ofter some considerable 
 novelty. Generally, I claim (not arrogantly, but with firmness) the merit of 
 rectification applied to absolute errors, or to injurious limitations of the truth. 
 " Finally, as a third class, and, in virtue of their aim, as a far higher class 
 of compositions, included in the American collection, I rank The Confessions 
 of an Opiwn-Eater, and also (but more emphatically) the Suspiria de Profundis. 
 On these, as modes of impassioned prose, ranging under no precedents that 
 I am aware of in any literature, it is much more difficult to speak justly, 
 whether in a hostile or a friendly character. As yet neither of these two 
 tvorks has ever received the least degree of that correction and pruning which 
 both require so extensively ; and of the Suspiria, not more than perhaps one- 
 third has yet been printed. When both have been fully revised, I shall feel 
 myself entitled to ask for a more determinate adjudication on their claims as 
 works of art. At present I feel authorized to make haughtier pretensions in 
 right of their conception than I shall venture to do, under the peril of being 
 supposed to characterize their execution. Two remarks only I shall address to 
 the equity of my reader. First, 1 desire to remind him of the perilous diffi- 
 culty besieging aU attempts to clothe in words the visionary scenes derived 
 from the world of dreams, where a single false note, a single word in a wrong 
 key, ruins the whole music ; and, secondly, I desire him to consider the utter 
 sterility of universal literature in this one department of impassioned prose, 
 which certainly argues some singular difficulty suggesting a singular duty of 
 indulgence in criticising any attempt that even imperfectly succeeds. The 
 Bole Confessions, belonging to past times, that have at all succeeded in 
 engaging the attention of men, are those of St. Austin and of Rousseau. The 
 very idea of breathing a record of human passion, not into the ear of the 
 random crowd, but of the saintly confessional, argues an impassioned theme. 
 Impassioned, therefore, should be the tenor of the composition. Now, in 
 St. Augustine's Confessions is found one most impassioned passage — viz., the 
 lamentation for the death of his youthful friend in the fourth book ; one, and 
 no more. Farther, there is nothing In Rousseau, there is not even so much. 
 In the whole work there is nothing grandly afiecting but the character and 
 the inexplicable misery of the writer," 
 
 No one acquainted with Mr. De Quincey's writings, will 
 deny the soundness and the completeness of this classifica- 
 tion ; nor do we think thaLAXriticjDXQPOsin^ to himself so 
 
 ambitious^a task as a.ru 
 
 ^, 
 
 genius as a whole^^could 
 aiid~pr^ceed_Jo_ex^miae 
 
 WTJter o'flnteresting memoirs ; secojidT g r ^s an essayist or 
 diicidator of difficult historical a nd othe? prohlems ; and, 
 lastljplisranalmost uniq^^'pfac Htioner of a^^ecjiliar style of 
 imag^inatlve^prtigliiyl mpassion edj Such an examina- 
 
 tion, conducted ever so rigorously, if by a competent person, 
 would confirm the impression now entertained on all hands, 
 that among the most remarkable names in the history of 
 English literature for many a day, must be ranked that of 
 
PROSE AND VERSE : DE QUINCEY. 449 
 
 Thomas De Quincey. Our purpose, however, is by no means 
 so extensive. We do not mean to comment on Mr. De 
 Quincey as a writer of memoirs and narratives, nor to cull 
 from his numerous contributions in that department — the 
 present two volumes included — any of the delightful reminis- 
 cences with which they abound. We do not mean, either, to 
 follow Mr. De Quincey through any of the various tracks of 
 speculation into which his pure intellectual activity has led 
 him, and thus to exhibit the delicacy and subtlety of his 
 thinking faculty, the range of his observation and knowledge, 
 and the value of his conclusions on obscure and vexed ques- 
 tions. In this department, we believe, he would be found 
 fully entitled to the praise which he has claimed for himself — 
 the praise of having been practically faithful to that theory of 
 literature which maintains that no man is entitled to write 
 upon a subject merely by having something reasonable to 
 say about it, unless that something is also, to some extent, 
 novel. It is with Mr. De Quincey, however, in the last 
 of the three aspects in which he has presented himself to 
 notice in the foregoing passage that we propose exclusively to 
 concern ourselves. We thank Mr. De Quincey for having so 
 presented himself. Not only, in so doing, has he indicated, 
 with all due modesty, what he esteems his peculiar and 
 characteristic place in English literature, and the scene and 
 nature of his highest triumphs as a writer ; he has also, at 
 the same time, suggested a very curious subject for critical 
 discussion. As it is a subject we have sometimes thought of, 
 we are glad to have so fit an opportunity for saying a few 
 words upon it. 
 
 By the established custom of all languages, there is an 
 immense interval between the mental state accounted proper 
 in prose composition, and that allowed, and even required, in 
 verse. A man, for the most part, would be ashamed of per- 
 mitting himself in prose the same freedom of intellectual 
 whimsy, the same arbitrariness of combination, the same riot 
 of imagery, the same care for the exquisite in sound and 
 form, perhaps even the same depth and fervour of feeling, that 
 he would exhibit unabashed in verse. There is an idea, as it 
 
 G G 
 
450 PROSE AND verse: de quincey. 
 
 were, that if the matter lying in the mind waiting for expres- 
 sion is of a very select and rare kind, or if the mood is 
 peculiarly fine and elevated, a writer must quit the platform 
 of prose, and ascend into the region of metre. To use a 
 homely figure, the feeling is that, in such circumstances, one 
 must not remain in the plainly -furnished apartment on the 
 ground-floor where ordinary business is transacted, but must 
 step up-stairs to the place of elegance and leisure. Take, for 
 example, the following passage from Comus : — 
 
 " Sabrina fair, 
 
 Listen where thou art sitting 
 Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave. 
 
 In twisted braids of lilies knitting 
 The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair ; 
 Listen for dear honour's sake, 
 Goddess of the silver lake — 
 Listen and save." 
 
 What we say is, that if any man, having preconceived 
 exactly the tissue of meaning involved in this passage, had 
 tried to express it in prose, he would have had a sense of 
 shame in doing so, and would have run the risk of being 
 regarded as a coxcomb. Only in verse will men consent, as 
 a general rule, to receive such specimens of the intellectually 
 exquisite ; but offer them never so tiny a thing of the kind in 
 verse, and they are not only satisfied, but charmed. Nor is 
 it only w4th regard to the peculiarly exquisite, or the pecu- 
 liarly luscious in meaning, that this is true ; it is true, also, 
 to a certain extent, of the peculiarly sublime, or the peculiarly 
 magnificent. Thus Samson, soliloquizing on his blindness — 
 
 " The vilest here excel me ; 
 They creep, yet see. I, dark, in light exposed 
 To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and wrong ; 
 "Within doors, or without, still as a fool 
 In power of others, never in my own. 
 Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half, 
 O dark, dark, dark ; amid the blaze of noon 
 Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse, 
 Without all hope of day ! 
 0, first-created beam, and thou great "Word, 
 Let there be light, and light was over all ; 
 Why am I thus bereaved thy prime decree ? 
 The sun to me is dark 
 And silent as the moon. 
 When she deserts the night. 
 Hid in her vacant interlunar cave." 
 
PKOSE AND VERSE : DE QUINCEY. 451 
 
 In prose something equivalent to this might have been 
 permitted by reason of the severe impressiveness of the 
 theme ; but to render the entire mass of thoughts and images 
 acceptable precisely as they are, without retrenchment or 
 toning down, one almost requires to see the golden cincture 
 of the enclasping verse. Take a passage where, this cincture 
 having been purposely removed in the process of translation, 
 the sheer meaning may be seen by itself in a tumbled 
 prose-heap. The following is a description from ^schylus, 
 literally translated : — 
 
 " So Tydeus, raving and greedy for the fight, wars like a serpent in its 
 hissings beneath the noon-tide heat, and he s nites the sage seer, son of 
 Oicleus, with a taunt, saying, that he is crouching to death and battle out of 
 cowardice. Shouting out such words as these, he shakes their shadowy crests, 
 the hairy honours of his helm, while beneath his buckler bells cast in brass 
 are shrilly pealing terror. On his buckler, too, he has this arrogant device — 
 a gleaming sky tricked out with stars, and in the centre a brilliant full moon 
 conspicuous, most august of the heavenly bodies, the eye of night. Chafing 
 thus in his vaunting harness, he wars beside the bank of the river, enamoured 
 of conflict, like a steed champing his bit with rage, that rushes forth when he 
 hears the voice of the trumpet." 
 
 Knowing that this is translated from verse, we admire it ; 
 but if it were presented to us as an original effort of descrip- 
 tion in prose, we should, though still admiring it, feel that it 
 went beyond bounds. What we should feel would be, not 
 that such a description ought not to be given, but that prose 
 is not good enough and leisurely enough to have the honour 
 of containing it. And, so generally, when a man launches 
 forth in a grand strain, or when he begins to pour forth intel- 
 lectual matter more than usually rich and luscious, our disposi- 
 tion is to interrupt him and persuade him to exchange the 
 style of prose for that of metre. *' Had we not better step up 
 stairs?" is virtually what we say on such occasions ; and this 
 not ironically, but with a view to hear out what has to be said 
 with greater pleasure. In short, we allow all ordinary business 
 of a literary kind — plain statement, equable narrative, pro- 
 found investigation, strong direct appeal — to be transacted in 
 prose ; we even permit a moderate amount of beauty, of enthu- 
 siasm, and of imaginative play to intermingle with the current 
 of prose-composition ; but there is a point, marked either by 
 the unusual fineness of the matter of thought, its unusual 
 
 G g2 
 
452 PROSE AND verse: de quincey. 
 
 arbitrariness and luxuriance, its unusual grandeur, or its un- 
 usually impassioned character, at which, by a sort of law of 
 custom, a man must either consent to be silent, or must lift 
 himself into verse. On such occasions it is as when a speaker 
 is expected to leave his ordinary place in the body of the 
 house and mount the tribune. 
 
 There is an element in the philosophy of this matter which 
 it may be well to attend to before going farther. We have 
 spoken as if the meaning to be uttered were generally already 
 in the mind, before the form of utterance is chosen. We have 
 represented the case as if there were already internally pre- 
 pared by a writer a certain tissue and series of thoughts and 
 images, and as if it were then capable of being made a delibe- 
 rate question whether he should emit the intellectual whole 
 thus prepared in metre or in prose. But this is not the actual 
 state of the fact. The actual fact is, that the meaning that 
 will in any case exist to be expressed is conditioned beforehand 
 \ by the form of expression selected — in other words, that the 
 ; matter cogitated does not precede the form of expression and 
 I engage this or that form of expression at its option, but that 
 1 the form of expression assists from the outset in determining 
 I the kind of matter that shall be cogitated. This removes a 
 ;' practical difficulty. A man who writes in prose is, by the fact 
 that he does so, kept within the bounds of prose in the cha- 
 racter of his mental combinations. Those peculiar finenesses 
 and flights of intellectual activity which are native to verse, 
 are then simply not developed. His thoughts stop short pre- 
 cisely at that point of richness, quaintness, or luxuriance where 
 prose ceases to be prose. That this point will vary according 
 to a writer's taste and faculty does not for the present matter. 
 Qn the other hand, the writer who uses metre and jrhyni^ does 
 not prosecute his train of meaning independently of them, 
 but partly by their very aid in leading him this way or that. 
 A man who has made up his mind to add to all the other con- 
 ditions of his thinking, these two — first, that he shall think in 
 (synchronism with certain metrical beats ; and secondly, that 
 he shall think forward, as it were, to that point in his mental 
 horizon where he sees the glimmer of a certain predetermined 
 
PROSE AND VEKSE : DE QUINCEY. 453 
 
 r^hyme — necessarily accustoms himself to a more complex law 
 fof cogitation than rules the prose- writer, and moves through 
 ^an atmosphere of more arbitrary and exquisite and occult siig^ 
 .gestions. This may look mechanical, but it is the very ration^ 
 \ale of verse and its functions. Versifiers are men who have 
 voluntarily, in accordance with some original bent in their 
 nature, submitted their thoughts to a more complex mechanism 
 than^ordinary prose- writers ; and whose reward is, that, when 
 they are such masters of the mechanism as no longer to think 
 of its existence, they can revel in combinations more intimate, 
 extreme, and exquisite than their prose thoughts would be. _In 
 reading a passage of verse, therefore, we have to bear in mind 
 th^t the meaning came in part to be what it is because the 
 verse^assisted to create it. Thus, in the passage quoted from 
 Comus, it is unnecessary to trouble ourselves with fancying 
 what reception such a dainty little picture would have met 
 with if offered originally in prose ; for it is what it is, simply 
 because metre and rhyme conspired in the production of it. 
 So, also, in the passage from Sainson Agom'sfes, the mass of 
 thoughts and images would have stood somewhat different 
 from the first, had it not been shaped implicitly to fill the mould 
 of that precise metre. Again, in the description from jEschylus, 
 whatever passes the degree of imaginative richness deemed 
 suitable to prose, is justified by the recollection that these 
 excesses were perpetrated in verse. And this last instance 
 suggests an observation of some importance. It may happen 
 — and does often happen — that the metrical form may have 
 been necessary to the evolution of a particular piece of mean- 
 ing, and may yet not be so necessary to the preservation and 
 perpetuation of it, after it has been produced. Only under the 
 condition of metre may a thought of special splendour or 
 beauty have been actually excogitated ; and yet, once it is 
 fairly on this side of the Styx, the metrical mould necessary 
 for its safe conveyance hither may be fractured, and the thought 
 will still stand appreciable on its own merits. And thus it is 
 that much of the greatness of the highest poetry is indestruc- 
 tible by even the rudest process of transmutation into literal 
 prose. The actual matter of Homer's Iliad and of the great 
 
454 PKOSE AND VEESE: DE QUINCEY. 
 
 Greek tragedies miglit never have existed but for the sugges- 
 tive power in the minds of the poets of those precise hexa- 
 meters and iambic and choral measures in which it was 
 imagined and delivered ; but much of what is noble in it 
 survives yet in the baldest prose translation. The precious- 
 ness of the thought is to be recognised, as it were, even after 
 the fabric of the verse has been crumbled into the mere form 
 of unmetrical powder. 
 
 All this, however, does not affect the practical importance 
 of the consideration that custom has established a distinction 
 between w^hat is lawful in prose and what is lawful in verse. 
 Tnie, for the reasons above stated, the distinction causes no 
 one any personal inconvenience. He who prefers to write in 
 prose does so because he finds he can make prose sufficient. 
 The necessity for writing in verse only exists where there is 
 the prior habit, if we may so call it, of thinking in verse. 
 When the thoughts of a prose- writer reach that degree of ex- 
 quisiteness, or lusciousness, or imaginative grandeur, where 
 prose refuses to contain them, nature provides the remedy by 
 simply whirling the man into verse. He has the option of 
 allowing himself to be so whirled, or of restraining himself, 
 and refusing to go on whenever the said point is reached. He 
 may choose never " to go up stairs," never to put himself into 
 such a strain that it shall be necessary for him to ascend the 
 tribune in order to speak. But here lies the great question. 
 \ Where is that ideal point at which a man must either smother 
 I what is brewing in him, or ascend the tribune and speak in 
 Werse ? What are the limits and capabilities of prose ; and 
 through what series of gradations does prose pass into tech- 
 nical and completed verse ? If a man refuses to be whirled 
 past the extreme prose point, what amount of farther intel- 
 lectual possibility, and of what precise kind, does he thus 
 forgo? Is the ulterior region into which verse admits co- 
 extensive with that which it leaves behind ; and, if not, what 
 is its measure ? Does it overhang the realm of prose like a 
 superior ether, nearer the empyrean, or does it only softly round 
 it to a small measurable distance ? Is the relation of prose 
 to verse that of absolute inferiority, or of inferiority in some 
 
PROSE AND yerse: de quincey. 455 
 
 respects counterbalanced by superiority in others ? In short, 
 what is it that verse can do that prose cannot, and what is the 
 value of this special kind of intellectual work which only verse 
 can transact? We have spoken vaguely of the boundary 
 between prose and verse as being marked by a certain degree 
 of fineness, or exquisiteness, or occultness, or lusciousness,, or 
 arbitrariness, or grandeur, or passionateness in the matter of 
 thought to be expressed ; we must now seek for a more exact 
 definition, so as to see what proportion of just human thought 
 prose at its utmost will contain, and what residue must either 
 be forgone or allowed to exhibit itself in verse. 
 
 It will be admitted, at least, that for all the purposes of 
 what is called investigation, speculation, generalization, philo- 
 sophical discussion and exposition, prose is sufficient. There is 
 no need for a man "to step up stairs " so long as he deals with 
 matter pertaining to what is called the pure understanding. A 
 Kant, a Leibnitz, or a Sir William Hamilton, so far as their 
 pure reasonings are concerned, need never find themselves 
 whirled past the prose point, notwithstanding that the matters 
 about which their reasoning is employed may be the generali- 
 ties on which the universe rests, and that their conclusions in 
 such matters may be the result of vast force of intellect, and 
 may set the whole world in amaze. The actual reasonings of 
 even a half-inspired Plato may be delivered to their last link 
 without the aid of verse. This, then, is much to say in behalf 
 of poor prose. It ought to silence the absurd chatter of many 
 a versifier exulting in his technick without any just knowledge 
 of what it really is. The large world-shaking abstraction, the 
 profound all-penetrating stroke of intellect, the rich shower of 
 fructifying propositions, the iron chain of conquering syllogisms 
 — all these are possible to the prose- writer in a manner and to 
 an extent beyond the legitimate or usual powers of verse. The 
 verse of a Shakespeare, it is true, will teem with matter se- 
 creted by the purely intellectual organ, the same being so in- 
 terfused with the poetic, that the superfetation does not seem 
 a fault ; and a Wordsworth may, in beautiful metre, reproduce 
 the philosophizings of a Spinoza. But even these masters of 
 verse could do nothing in this department by the help of their 
 
456 PROSE AND VEKSE : DE QUINCEY. 
 
 iambics wliicli equal power could not have done more rigor- 
 ously and systematically with the iambics away. In passing 
 into verse, the poet may take such matter with him, but he 
 must treat it in such a manner that, from the point of view of 
 the pure thinker, there is a loss of the logical virtue. This is 
 a point which might be discussed at length ; suffice it to say 
 that, with all the reverence that exists for poetry as distinct 
 from prose, no one will deny that at the present moment there 
 lies imbedded in the prose-treatises of the world, a mass of 
 most precious substance distinct from all that can be found in 
 verse. 
 
 i Again, prose is sufficient for the expression of at least 
 ja large proportion of all possible human emotion. It would 
 ibe difficult to say at what pitch of mere feeling it would be 
 absolutely necessary to go " up stairs " for the sake of 
 adequately expressing it. Joy, sorrow, indignation, rage, 
 love, hatred — there is ample scope for the expression of these 
 passions within the limits of prose. Impassioned prose 
 oratory can exhibit as splendid renderings of some of these 
 passions, as any that can be found in poetry. Indeed there are 
 some passions — as, for example, those of laughter and indigna- 
 tion — which find a more natural utterance in prose. And yet 
 it is precisely in this matter of the expression of feeling or 
 passion, that we first come in sight of the natural origin of 
 metre. At a certain pitch of fervour or feeling, the voice 
 does instinctively lift itself into song. Intense grief breaks 
 into a wail, great joy bursts into a measured shout, pride 
 moves to a slow march ; all extreme passion tends to cadence. 
 " And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber 
 over the gate and wept ; and, as he went, thus he said, Oh, 
 my son, Absalom, my son, my son Absalom ! Would God I 
 had died for thee ; Oh, Absalom, my son, my son ! " Wher- 
 ever there is emotion like this, we have a rudimentary metre 
 in its expression ; and verse in all its forms is nothing else 
 than the prolongation and extended ingenious application of 
 this hint of nature. It may be laid down as a principle, 
 t herefore^ that impassioned writing tends to the metrical ; and 
 that^_therefore, though this tendency may gratify itself to 
 
PROSE AND verse: de quincey. 457 
 
 a great length, almost to an indefinite length, within the 
 limits of such wild metrical prose as it will itself create for 
 the passing occasion, yet at a certain point in all feelings, and 
 more particularly in such feelings as joy, sorrow, and love, it 
 will overleap the boundary of what in any sense can be called 
 prose, and seize, by a kind of necessity, on that artifice of 
 verse ^ which past custom has provided and consecrated. 
 Walking by the river-side, full of thought and sadness, even 
 the homely rustic minstrel will find it natural to pour forth 
 his feelings to the established cadence of some well-known 
 melody — 
 
 " But minstrel Burn cannot assuage 
 
 His woes while time endureth, 
 To see the changes of this age, 
 
 Which fleeting Time procureth : 
 Full many a place stands in hard case, 
 
 Where joy was wont beforrow. 
 With Humes that dwelt on Leader braes, 
 
 And Scotts that dwelt on Yarrow ;" 
 
 the very tune of the thought, as it were, keeping time with 
 
 the arm, as it moves with the bow of an imaginary violin. 
 
 And so with more modern and more cultured poets. Thus 
 
 Tennyson : — 
 
 " Break, break, break, 
 
 On thy cold grey stones, sea ! 
 And I would that my tongue could utter 
 The thoughts that arise in me ! 
 
 0, well for the fisherman's boy, 
 
 That he shouts with his sister at play ; 
 
 O, well for the sailor-lad, 
 
 That he sings in his boat on the bay. 
 
 And the stately ships go on 
 
 To their haven under the hill ; 
 But O for the touch of a vanished hand, 
 
 And the sound of a voice that is still ! 
 
 Break, break, break, 
 
 At the foot of thy crags, sea ! 
 But the tender grace of a day that is dead 
 
 Will never come back to me." 
 
 This is not a case in which the same feeling, to the same 
 intensity of pitch, could have been expressed in any form of 
 metrical prose, and in which, therefore, the verse, is only 
 adopted to increase the beauty of the form ; it is, we verily 
 believe, a case in which the feeling had to overleap the bounds 
 
458 PllOSE AND veese: de quincey. 
 
 of possible prose, in search of a means of appropriate expres- 
 sion, on pain of being repressed or mutilated if these means 
 were not found. 
 
 There remains now only the field of representative litera- 
 ture, the literature of the concrete. How far does prose stretch 
 over this field ; and what portion of it, if any, is the exclusive 
 possession of verse? The field divides itself, theoretically 
 speaking, into two halves or sections — the domain of mere 
 history and description, in which the business of the writer is 
 with the actual concrete, the actual scenes and events of the 
 world ; and the high domain of imagination or fiction, in which 
 the business of the writer is with concrete furnished forth by 
 his own creative phantasy. 
 
 Is prose sufficient for all the purposes of historical or 
 descriptive writing, viewed as separately as may be from 
 that department of imaginative writing into which it shades 
 off so gradually ? We should say that it is. We should say 
 that for all the purposes of exact record, of exact reproduction 
 of fact in all its vast variety of kinds — fact of scenery, fact of 
 biography, fact of history, fact even of transacted passion — 
 prose is sufficient, and verse unnecessary, or even objection- 
 able. For the true and accurate retention and representation 
 of all that man can observe (and a large and splendid function 
 this is) prose is superior to verse ; and when this function is 
 committed to verse, there is an inevitable sacrifice of the pure 
 aim of the function, though that sacrifice may at times be 
 attended with the gain of something supposed to be better. 
 That this statement may not be immediately assented to will 
 arise from a confusion of the descriptive and the imaginative. 
 Thomson^s Seasons, and much of Wordsworth's poetry, are 
 entitled descriptive compositions ; but, properly considered, 
 they are not records, but the imaginative use of records. 
 Again, Homer is a narrative poet, but narration with him is 
 but a special use of tlie imaginative faculty. Isolate strictly 
 the department of historical or descriptive writing proper 
 from that into which it so readily shades off, and prose is the 
 legitimate king of it. We can conceive but of two apparent 
 exceptions — first, where verse itself is one of the facts to be 
 
PROSE AND VEESE; DE QUINCEY. 459 
 
 recorded ; and, secondly, where tlie historian or the describer 
 waxes so warm in the act of description that he approaches 
 the singing point. In the first case, verse must be treated as 
 any other fact, that is, represented accurately, that is, quoted 
 — which, however, is a prose feat ; in the second case, it is 
 not the facts that the historian sings, but his own impas- 
 sioned feeling about them — a matter abeady provided for 
 under another head. 
 
 And now for the real tug of war. What are the relative 
 capabilities of Prose and Verse in the great field of fictitious 
 or imaginative literature ? It is needless to say that here it 
 is that, by the universal impression of mankind. Verse is 
 allowed the superior rank of the two sisters. The very lan- 
 guage we use implies this. The word poetry literally means 
 creation or fiction ; and is thus co-extensive with the whole 
 field of literature under notice. And yet it is by a deviation 
 from the common usage of speech, that we use the word 
 poetry in this its wide etymological sense. When we speak 
 of a poet, we mean, unless we indicate otherwise, a man who 
 Avrites in verse ; when we speak of English poetry, we mean 
 the library of English books written in verse. This is 
 significant. It indicates the belief that the essential act of 
 iroLrjCTi^ is somehow connected with the metrical tendency, 
 and best transacts itself in alliance with that tendency. In 
 other words, it implies a conviction, founded if not on prin- 
 ciple, at least on experience, that when the mind sets itself to 
 work in that peculiar manner which we designate by the term 
 imagination or imaginative exercise, the assumption of the 
 metrical form of expression is natural, and, perhaps in some 
 cases, essential to it. And yet this is contradicted at once, 
 to some extent, by palpable fact. In the prose literature 
 of all languages, there is a vast proportion of works in 
 which the prevailing intention of the authors is that of 
 strict TTOLTjo-if;, the strict invention and elaboration of an im- 
 aginary or fictitious concrete. There is the novel, the prose 
 romance, the sentimental tale, the whole body of the prose 
 literature of imagination in its thousand forms. Bohinson 
 Crusoe^ Don Quixote, the Waverley Novels, and the like, are 
 
460 PROSE AND verse: de quincey. 
 
 prose efforts of a kind as strictly falling under the head of 
 TToirjat^ or creation, in its widest sense, as the Prometheus 
 VinctuSy Paradise Lost, or Tennyson's Princess. Accordingly, 
 we do sometimes rank the writers of imaginative prose among 
 poets or " makers." The question, then, arises : can we, by 
 philosophical investigation, or by the examination of actual 
 instances, determine in what precise conditions it is that the 
 generic act of iroi'rj(Ti<;, or imaginative exercise, disdains the 
 level ground of prose, and even its highest mountain-tops, and 
 rises instinctively and necessarily on the wings of verse ? 
 
 There are various kinds of Troirjcn^, or imaginative exercise, 
 according to the species of concrete imagined. There is the 
 TTotT^o-fc? of mere inanimate objects and scenery, as in much of 
 Thomson ; there is the TrotT^o-t? of physiognomy and costume, 
 as in much of Scott and Chaucer; there is the Trocrjat^ of 
 incident and action, as in narrative poetry; there is the 
 7rot77<7t9 of feelings and states of mind, as in songs ; there is, 
 as a kind of extension of this last, the irotrjaL^ of character. 
 From the masterly exercise of these different kinds of iroirjai'^ 
 in different forms of combination, arise the great kinds of 
 poetry — the descriptive, the epic, the dramatic, and the lyric. 
 But out of this objective classification of the varieties of 
 imaginative exercise, can we derive the clue that we seek? 
 At first sight not. If Thomson and Wordsworth describe 
 imaginary scenes in verse, so do Dickens and Scott and a 
 thousand others in prose ; if we have admirable delineations 
 of physiognomy and costume in the Canterhury Pilgrimage, 
 so also have we in the Waverley Novels; if the Iliad is an 
 effort of narrative imagination, so also is Don Quixote; if 
 feelings and characters are represented in song and the Iambic 
 drama, so are they also in prose fiction. And yet, as we 
 hinted at the outset, there does seem to be a condition sub- 
 sisting even in the nature of the objective matter imagined, 
 when prose will not generally contain and convey that matter. 
 What is that condition? The instances cited at the outset 
 served vaguely to indicate it. In the quotation from Milton, 
 and in that from ^schylus, it was felt that there was some- 
 thing in the actual matter of imaginary concrete presented by 
 
PROSE AND VERSE : DE QUINCE Y. 461 
 
 the passages, which would have had to be parted with, if the 
 medium had been prose. Thus, in the first passage, it was felt 
 that the image of Sabrina 
 
 " Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave, 
 In twisted braids of lilies knitting 
 The loose train of her amber-dropping hair," 
 
 would make poor prose too amorous. Again, in the passage 
 from ^schylus, it was felt that the concrete description in 
 the following sentence would have sustained some reduction, 
 if the composition had originally been in prose. 
 
 " On his buckler, too, he had this arrogant device — a gleaming sky tricked 
 out with stars, and in the centre a brilliant full moon conspicuous (most august 
 of the heavenly bodies, the eye of night)." 
 
 Prose might have given all of this as far as the parenthesis, 
 but there it would have stopped. 
 
 So far as we had come to any conclusion from these 
 instances as to the precise character of that concrete which 
 prose instinctively refuses to carry, and which is yet welcome 
 if it is presented in verse, we defined it as consisting in a 
 certain unusual degree of richness, or lusciousness, or exqui- 
 siteness, or arbitrariness, or occultness, or grandeur, or pas- 
 sionateness. We will now limit the catalogue of qualities 
 to these two, richness and arbitrariness ; and aver, as an 
 approximation to the truth, that the character of a concrete 
 combination by the imaginative faculty pure, which deter- 
 mines that it must take place in verse, is either an unusual 
 degree of richness, or an unusual degree of arbitrariness. 
 This may not appear to reserve for verse a sufficient monopoly 
 of interest in the great intellectual function of woiricng ; but, 
 duly interpreted, we believe it will be found to correspond 
 with the fact. It is not, we believe, the mere grandeur or 
 magnificence of a phantasy, it is not its mere fineness or 
 delicacy, or exquisiteness, that necessarily renders prose 
 incapable of it ; it is solely, or all but solely, its richness, or 
 its arbitrariness. The limits of prose as regards the quality 
 of passionateness, we have already said something about 
 under a former head. What we call an " impassioned 
 imagination,^' is a mixed thing, consisting of an objective 
 
462 PROSE AND VERSE : DE QUINCEY. 
 
 phantasy, with a peculiar subjective mood breathed through 
 it : it is TTotrjo-tc in conjunction with TraS^aig ; and, having 
 ah'eady considered when it is that iraOrjcng breaks out into 
 singing, we are only now concerned with the distinct inquiry 
 at what point, if at any, Troir^aic: itself insists on becoming 
 metrical. 
 
 In the first place, then, there is a peculiar richness of literary 
 concrete of which prose seems to be incapable. By richness 
 of concrete, we mean very much what is meant by excess of 
 imagery. Let there be a splendid single combination of tlie 
 poetical faculty — a splendid imaginary scene, a splendid 
 imaginary incident or action, a splendid imaginary state of 
 feeling or character — and prose will surely and easily com- 
 pass it. The severe story of a Greek drama may be told 
 in outline in noble prose ; nay, each incident in such a drama 
 may be rendered in a prose narrative, so as to be impressive 
 and effective. The visual fancy of the blind Lear and his 
 guide on the cliff at Dover^ or of Milton's Satan alighting on 
 the orb of the sun, and darkening it like a telescopic spot, 
 may also be outlined in prose, so as finely to affect the 
 imagination. And so, universally, a single imagined circum- 
 stance, however grand, or a moderately sparse tissue of 
 imagined circumstances, may be delivered in prose. But 
 when the outline is thickly filled up with imagery ; when, in 
 the expression of the main circumstance already imagined, 
 masses of subsidiary circumstance are adduced; when the 
 stem of the original poetic thought does not proceed straight 
 and shaft-like, but is clustered over with rich parasitic 
 fancies, then prose begins to despair. Thus, in Alexander 
 Smith's image descriptive of the commencement of a friend- 
 ship between one youth, the speaker, and another whom he 
 admired : — 
 
 " An opulent soul 
 Dropt in my path like a great cup of gold, 
 All rich and rough with stories of the gods." 
 
 Here the main fancy, the cup of gold dropped in the 
 youth's path, is perfectly within the compass of imaginative 
 prose ; but only a daring prose- writer would have turned the 
 
I 
 
 PEOSE AND VERSE : DE QUINCEY. 463 
 
 cup SO lovingly to show its rich chasing — or, as we say, 
 would have so dallied with the image. Again, in the fine 
 stanza from Keats's Eve of St. Agnes : — 
 
 " And still she slept an aznre-lidded sleep, 
 In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender'd ; 
 While he from forth the cloaet brought a heap 
 Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd ; 
 With jellies soother than the creamy curd. 
 And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon ; 
 Manna and dates, in argosy transferred, 
 From Fez ; and spiced dainties, every one, 
 From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon." 
 
 In some very luscious prose, such as we find in the Arabian 
 Nights, we might have had the picture as elaborately finished, 
 and even the same express catalogue of dainties ; but one or 
 two of the touches of subsidiary circumstance, as in the first, 
 seventh, and last lines, would have been almost certainly 
 omitted. Again, much more visibly, in the following passage 
 from Paradise Lost, describing Satan defying Gabriel and his 
 host of warrior-angels. 
 
 ** While thus he spake, the angelic squadron bright 
 Turn'd fiery red, sharpening in mooned horns 
 Their phalanx, and began to hem him round 
 With ported spears, as thick as when a field 
 Of Cei-es, ripe for harvest, waving bends 
 Her bearded grove of ears, which way the wind 
 Sways them ; the careful ploughman doubting stands, 
 Lest on the threshing-floor his hopeful sheaves 
 Prove chafiT. On the other side, Satan alarmed, 
 Collecting all his might, dilated stood. 
 Like Teneriffe, or Atlas, unremoved. 
 His stature reached the sky, and on his crest 
 Sat horror plumed." 
 
 Here, it is obvious, verse has left prose caught in the thicket. 
 The main circumstance could have been represented in prose; 
 and prose might have dared one or two of the strokes of 
 subsidiary imagination ; but such a profusion of simile and 
 metaphor in so short a space would have bewildered and 
 encumbered it. And so, generally, we may consider it as 
 made out that prose is incapable of so rich a literary concrete 
 as verse may justly undertake ; and that, where prose deals 
 with pure poetic matter, a certain comparative thinness or 
 sparseness is requisite in the texture of that matter, however 
 bold, or fine, or grand may be the separate imaginations 
 
464 PROSE AND VERSE: DE QUINCEY. 
 
 which compose it. Hence it is, we think, that ancient 
 classical poetrj, and especially Greek epic and dramatic 
 poetry, is more capable, as a whole, of retaining its impres- 
 siveness when translated into prose, than most modern poetry 
 when similarly treated. The ancient poetry was more severe, 
 delighting in imaginations clearly and separately sculptured ; 
 the modern muse favours richness of subsidiary imagery, and 
 delights in ornamenting even its largest creations with minute 
 tracery. 
 
 Again, in the second place, a certain degree of arhitrariness 
 in an imaginative combination seems to place it beyond the 
 capacity of ordinary prose. Our meaning will be best seen 
 by an example or two. When Shelley says, 
 
 " Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, 
 Stains the white radiance of eternity ; " 
 
 he presents to the mind a singularly beautiful image or com- 
 bination, which is at once accepted and enjoyed. Yet it is 
 a combination, so different from anything likely to have 
 suggested itself to the logical understanding, or even to the 
 imagination as swayed and directed by the logical under- 
 standing, that we question if it could have been arrived at 
 but for that extraordinary nimbleness in seizing remote 
 analogies which is communicated to the mind when it thinks 
 under the complex law of metre. A prose-writer of great 
 imaginative power will often strike out combinations of a 
 high degree of arbitrariness, but rarely will he feel himself 
 entitled to such an excursion into the occult as the above. 
 So, also, in the following passage from Keats : — 
 
 " Sorrow ! 
 
 Why dost borrow 
 The natural hue of health from vermeil lips ? 
 
 To give maiden blushes 
 
 To the white-rose bushes ? 
 Or is it thy dewy hand the daisy tips ? 
 
 Sorrow ! 
 
 Why dost borrow 
 The lustrous passion from a falcon-eye ? 
 
 To give the glow-worm light ? 
 
 Or, on a moonless night, 
 To tinge, on syren shores, the salt sea-spry ?" 
 
I 
 
 PROSE AND VEESE: DE QUINCEY. 465 
 
 Here, also, the links of association between idea and idea seem 
 to he too occult, and the entire tissue of images too arbitrary, 
 for prose to have produced a passage exactly equivalent ; and 
 yet, as it is presented to us in verse, we have no doubt as to 
 the legitimacy of the combination, and are thankful for it. 
 And the reason again is, that the mind, rising and falling on 
 the undulation of metre — poised, so to speak, on metrical 
 wings — is enabled to catch, as it were, more fantastic and 
 airy analogies, and to dart to greater distances with less sense 
 of difficulty, than when pacing never so majestically on the 
 terra firma of prose. The following from Tennyson is a fine 
 instance of the same : — 
 
 " The splendour falls on castle walls, 
 And snowy summits old in story ; 
 The long light shakes across the lakes, 
 And the wild cataract leaps in glory. 
 Blow, bugle, blow ; set the wild echoes flying. 
 Answer, echoes, answer — dying, dying, dying j" 
 
 a combination, the coherence of which is felt by every 
 imaginative mind, and which possesses a singular represen- 
 tative, as distinct from mere expository power ; and which 
 yet almost defies analysis. Tennyson, as one of those poets 
 who have most remarkably restrained themselves to the 
 essential domain of verse, not caring to write what prose 
 might have had the power to execute, abounds with similar 
 instances. In Shakespeare, too, who has by no means so 
 restricted himself, but has, after his own prodigious fashion, 
 torn up whole masses of the rough prose-world and sub- 
 mitted them, as well as the finer matter of poetic phantasy, to 
 the all-crushing power of his verse, we find examples of the 
 same hardly paralleled in the rest of literature. Thus, ad 
 aperturam, — 
 
 " Thou remember'st 
 Since once I sat upon a promontory. 
 And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back, 
 Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath, 
 That the rude sea grew civil at her song, 
 And certain stars shot madly from their spheres, 
 To hear the sea-maid's music." 
 
 H H 
 
466 PEOSE AND VEKSE: DE QUINCEY. 
 
 Again : — 
 
 " Sit, Jessica ; look how the floor of heaven 
 Is thick inlaid with patinas of bright gold. 
 There's not the smallest orb that thou behold'st 
 But in his motion like an angel sings, 
 Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims." 
 
 We will close this series of examples with a very apt one 
 from Milton, describing the loathsome appearance of Sin and 
 her brood at the gates of hell. 
 
 " Far less abhorred than these 
 Vexed Scylla, bathing in the sea that parts 
 Calabria from the hoarse Trinacrian shore ; 
 Nor uglier follow the night-hag, when, called 
 In secret, riding through the air she comes, 
 Lured with the smell of infant blood, to dance 
 With Lapland witches, while the labouring moon 
 Eclipses at their charms." 
 
 All these examples seem to make it clear that there belongs 
 to verse a certain extreme arbitrariness of imaginative 
 association, sometimes taking the character of mere light 
 extravagance of whimsy, sometimes leading to a ghastly 
 and unearthly effect, and often surprising the mind with 
 unexpected gleams of beauty and grandeur. For, though we 
 have already maintained for prose the capability of pure gran- 
 deur and sublimity in imaginative effects, we must note here, 
 as in the interest of verse, that one source of grandeur is this 
 very licence of most arbitrary combination which verse gives. 
 Some light might, perhaps, be cast on this whole question 
 of the relative and essential capabilities of verse and prose, 
 by a study of the law of Shakespeare's incessant instinctive 
 shiftings in his dramas between the two modes of writing. 
 In such a study it would require to be premised that, as 
 Shakespeare stands, by birthright and choice, on the verse 
 side of the river, and only makes occasional excursions to the 
 prose side, it is to be expected that his practice will indicate 
 rather the range within which prose has the sole title, than 
 the extent of ground over which it may expatiate as joint- 
 proprietor. Forbearing for the present, however, any such 
 interesting inquiry, let us be content with the approximate 
 
I conclusions 
 
 PROSE AND VERSE: DE QUINCEY. 467 
 
 conclusions to which we have independently come. These 
 may be recapitulated as follows: — That in the whole vast 
 field of the speculative and didactic — a field in which the 
 soul of man may win triumphs no wise inferior, let illiterate 
 poetasters babble as they will, to those of the mightiest sons 
 of song — prose is the legitimate monarch, receiving verse but 
 as a visitor and guest who will carry back bits of rich ore 
 and other specimens of the land's produce ; that in the great 
 business of record, also, prose is pre-eminent, verse but 
 voluntarily assisting ; that in the expression of passion, and 
 the work of moral stimulation, verse and prose meet as 
 co-equals, prose undertaking the rougher and harder duty 
 where passion intermingles with the storm of current doctrine, 
 and with the play and conflict of social interests — sometimes, 
 when thus engaged, bursting forth into such strains of irre- 
 gular music that verse takes up the echo, and prolongs it in 
 measured modulation, leaving prose rapt and listening to hear 
 itself outdone ; and, lastly, that in the noble realm of poetry 
 or imagination, prose also is capable of all exquisite, beau- 
 tiful, powerful, and magnificent effects, but that, by reason 
 of a gTcater ease with fancies when they come in crowds, 
 and of a greater range and arbitrariness of combination, 
 verse here moves with the more royal gait. And thus prose 
 and verse are presented as two circles or spheres not entirely 
 separate, as some would make them, but intersecting and 
 interpenetrating through a large portion of both their bulks, 
 and disconnected only in two crescents outstanding at the 
 right and left, or, if you adjust them differently, at the upper 
 and lower extremities. The left or lower crescent, the 
 peculiar and sole region of prose, is where we labour amid 
 the sheer didactic or the didactic combined with the practical 
 and the stern; the right or upper crescent, the peculiar and 
 sole region of verse, is where 7ra9r}ai^ at its utmost thrill and 
 ecstasy interblends with the highest and most daring iroirjmg. 
 Now, what Mr. De Quincey, in his clear and modest self- 
 appreciation, claims as one of his titles to a place in English 
 literature, if not as his most valued title, is, that, being 
 expressly a prose writer, he has yet, as a prose writer, pushed 
 
 H h2 
 
468 PROSE AND VERSE : DE QUINCEY. 
 
 farther into the peculiar and established domain of verse, as 
 we have just defined it, than almost any other prose writer 
 in the language. In the passage we quoted from him at the 
 beginning of the article, he represents himself as almost a 
 unique practitioner in at least one department of high impas- 
 sioned and imaginative prose — that which partakes of the 
 character of personal confessions. In universal literature he 
 can refer but to one passage, in the Confessions of St. Augus- 
 tine, as coming under the same literary precedents as parts 
 of his own Oj)ium Eater and of his Suspiria de Profundis. 
 This is likely to be true, if Mr. De Quincey says it ; Wt it 
 is well to bear in mind (the more especially as there is a 
 certain grammatical ambiguity in Mr. De Quincey' s expres- 
 sion — " the utter sterility of universal literature in this one 
 department of impassioned prose," — which might lead to a 
 misunderstanding of Mr. De Quincey's meaning), that if there 
 has not been much of impassioned prose-writing of this one 
 species, the literature of all languages contains noble speci- 
 mens of impassioned and imaginative prose of one kind or 
 another. To name the first example that occurs to us, 
 Milton's prose works contain passages of such grandeur as 
 almost to rival his poetry. Let the following stand as a 
 specimen: it is the concluding passage of his treatise on 
 the Causes that have hindered the Reformation in England, 
 written in the form of an epistle to a friend. 
 
 " Oh ! Sir, I do now feel myself inwrapt on the sudden into those mazes 
 and labyrinths of dreadful and hideous thoughts, that which way to get out, 
 or which way to end, I know not ; unless I turn mine eyes, and with your 
 help, lift up my hands to that eternal and propitious throne, where nothing is 
 readier than grace and refuge to the distresses of mortal suppliants, and as it 
 were a shame to leave those serious thoughts less piously than the heathen 
 were wont to conclude their graver discourses, 
 
 " Thou, therefore, that sitst in light and glory unapproachable, Parent of 
 angels and men ! next, thee I implore. Omnipotent King, Redeemer of that 
 lost remnant whose nature thou didst assume. Ineffable and Everlasting 
 Love ! and thou, the third subsistence of Divine Infinitude, Ilkimining 
 Spirit, the joy and solace of created things ! — one tri-personed Godhead ! look 
 upon this thy poor and almost spent and expiring Church ; leave her not thus 
 a prey to these importunate wolves, that wait and think long till they devoiir 
 thy tender flock — these wUd boars that have broke into thy vineyard, and left 
 the print of their polluting hoofs on the souls of thy servants. Oh ! let them 
 not bring about their damned designs that now stand at the entrance of the 
 bottomless pit, expecting the watchward to open and let out those di'eadfid 
 locusts and scorpions to rein vol ve us in that pitchy cloud of infernal darkness, 
 where we shall never more see the sun of thy truth again, never hope for the ^ 
 
PROSE AND VERSE : DE QUINCEY. 469 
 
 cheerful dawn, never more hear the bird of morning sing. Be moved with 
 l)ity at the afflicted state of this onr shaken monarchy, that now lies labouring 
 under her throes, and struggling against the grudges of more dreaded cala- 
 mities. 
 
 " Oh ! Thou, that after the impetuous rage of five bloody inundations and 
 the succeeding sword of intestine war, soaking the land in her own gore, 
 didst pity the sad and ceaseless revolution of our swift and thick-coming 
 sorrows — when we were quite breathless, didst motion peace and terms of 
 covenant with us, and having first well-nigh freed us from anti-Christian 
 thraldom, didst build up this Britannic empire to a glorious and epviable 
 height, with all her daughter islands about her — stay us in this felicity ; let 
 not the obstinacy of our half-obedience and will-worship bring forth that 
 viper of sedition that for these fourscore years has been breeding to eat 
 through the entrails of our peace; but let her cast her abortive spawn 
 without the danger of this travailing and throbbing kingdom, that we may 
 still remember, in our solemn thanksgivings, how for us the northern ocean, 
 even to the frozen Thule, was scattered with the proud shipwrecks of the 
 Spanish Armada, and the very maw of hell ransacked, and made to give up 
 her concealed destruction, ere she could vent it in that horrible and damned 
 blast. 
 
 " Oh, how much more glorious will those former deliverances appear, when 
 we shall know them not only to have saved us from greatest miseries past, 
 but to have reserved us for gi-eatest happiness to come ! Hitherto Thou hast 
 but freed us, and that not fully, from the unjust and tyrannous chain of thy 
 foes ; now unite us entirely, and appropriate lis to Thyself ; tie us ever- 
 lastingly in willing homage to the prerogative of thy Eternal throne. 
 
 "And now we £iow, Thou, our most certain hope and defence, that thine 
 enemies have been consulting all the sorceries of the great whore, and have 
 joined their plots with that sad intelligencing tyrant that mischiefs the world 
 with his mines of Ophir, and lies thirsting to revenge his naval ruins that 
 have larded our seas : but let them all take counsel together, and let it come 
 to nought ; let them decree and do thou cancel it ; let them gather themselves 
 and be scattered ; let them embattle themselves and be broken ; let them 
 embattle and be broken, for thou art with us, 
 
 " Then, amidst the hymns and hallelujahs of saints, some one may perhaps 
 be heard offering at high strains, in new and lofty measures, to sing and 
 celebrate thy divine mercies and marvellous judgments in this land throughout 
 all ages ; whereby this great and warlike nation, instructed and inured to the 
 fervent and continual practice of truth and righteousness, and casting far 
 from her the rags of her old vices, may press on hard to that high and happy 
 emulation, to be found the soberest, wisest, and most Christian people, at 
 that day, when Thoti, the Eternal and shortly-expected King, shalt open the 
 clouds to judge the several kingdoms of the world, and, distributing national 
 honours and rewards to religious and just commonwealths, shalt put an end 
 to all earthly tyrannies, proclaiming the universal and mild monarchy throiigh 
 heaven and earth. Where they undoubtedly, that by their labours, counsels, 
 and prayers, have been earnest for the common good of religion and their 
 country, shall receive, above the inferior order of the blessed, the regal 
 addition of principalities, legions, and thrones, under their glorious titles, and, 
 in supereminence of beatific vision, progressing the dateless and iiTCvoluble 
 circle of eternity, shall clasp inseparable hands with joy and bliss, in over 
 measure for ever. But they, contrary, that by the impairing and diminution 
 of the true faith, the distresses and servitude of their country, asfure to high 
 dignity, rtile, and promotion here, after a shameful end in this life (which God 
 grant them !) shall be thrown down eternally into the darkest and deepest 
 gulf of hell, where, under the despiteful control, the trample and the spurn of 
 all the other damned, that in the anguish of their tortures, shall have no 
 other ease than to exercise a raving and bestial tyranny over them, as their 
 slaves and negroes, they shall remain in that plight for ever, the basest, the 
 lowermost, the most dejected, most underfoot and down-trodden vassals of 
 perdition." 
 
470 PKOSE AND VERSE : DE QUINCEY. 
 
 This may pass as a specimen of imjpassioned prose hardly 
 to be matched in the English language. For specimens of 
 what may more properly be called imaginative prose, we 
 might refer also to English writers, and to some English 
 writers now living. But in this connexion it is perhaps fairest 
 to name that foreign writer, who, by the general consent of 
 literary Europe, is accounted facile princess among all prose 
 invaders of the peculiar dominion of verse — the German, 
 Jean Paul. All who are acquainted with the writings of 
 Jean Paul, must be aware that, whatever is to be said of his 
 genius as a whole, or in comparison with that of his com- 
 patriot Goethe, in the single faculty of wild and rich prose- 
 poesy he is the most astonishing even of German writers. 
 Passages verifying this might be quoted in scores from his 
 fictions. The famous dream of Christ and the Universe is 
 perhaps the grandest and most daring phantasy of the kind in 
 literature ; and, had we space, we should quote it. We will 
 quote, instead, a shorter and less awful passage — the singularly 
 beautiful conclusion of the novel of Quintus Fixlein, describing 
 the solitary walk homewards of a man who has just left two 
 dear friends. 
 
 " "We were all of us too deeply moved. We at last tore ourselves asunder 
 from repeated embraces ; my friend retired with the soul whom he loves. 
 I remained alone behind him with the night. 
 
 " And I walked without aim through woods, through valleys, and over 
 brooks, and through sleeping villages, to enjoy the great Night like a Day. 
 I walked, and still looked, like the magnet, to the region of midnight, to 
 strengthen my heart at the gleaming twilight, at this upstretching aurora of a 
 morning beneath our feet. While night butterflies flitted, white blossoms 
 fluttered, white stai's fell, and the white snow-powder hung silvery in the high 
 shadow of the Earth, which reaches beyond the Moon, and which is our Night. 
 Then began the JEolian hai'p of creation to tremble and to sound, blown on 
 from above ; and my immortal soul was a string in this harp. The heart of a 
 brother, everlasting Man, swelled under the everlasting Heaven, as the seas 
 swell under the sun and under the moon. The distant village clocks struck 
 midnight, mingling, as it were, with the ever-pealing tone of ancient Eternity, 
 The limbs of my buried ones touched cold on my soul, and drove away its 
 blots, as dead hands heal eruptions of the skin I walked silently through 
 little hamlets, and close by their outer churchyards, where crumbled upcast 
 coffin-boards were glimmering, while the once-bright eyes that had lain in 
 them were mouldered into grey ashes. Cold thought ! clutch not like a cold 
 spectre at my heart : I look up to the starry sky, and an everlasting chain 
 stretches thither, and over, and below ; and all is life, and warmth, and light, 
 and all is Godlike or God. 
 
 " Towards morning I descried thy late lights, little city of my dwelling, 
 \vhich I belong to on this side the grave ; I returned to the earth ; and in the 
 steeples, behind the by-advanced great midnight, it struck half-past two. 
 About this hour, in 1794, Mars went down in the west, aad the moon 
 
PROSE AND VEESE : DE QUINCEY. 471 
 
 rose in the east ; and my soul desired, in grief for the noble wai'like blood 
 which is still streaming on the blossoms of spring : ' Ah, retire, bloody "War- 
 like red Mars ; and thou, still Peace, come forth, like the mild divided moon." 
 — Mr. Cablyle's Translation. 
 
 Even after sucli a passage as this, there are passages in 
 Mr. De Quincey's writings, whose power as specimens of 
 impassioned and imaginative prose would be felt as something 
 new. His Confessions, his Suspiria de Profundis, and even 
 his present volumes of AutohiograpMc Sketches, contain pas- 
 sages which, for weird and sublime beauty, and for power of 
 embodying the impalpable and the visionary, are not sur- 
 passed anywhere in poetry. Take the following as an 
 example : it is an attempt to impersonate and generalize in 
 distinct living shapes those various forms or powers of sorrow 
 that hold dominion over man and human life. As there are 
 three Graces, three Fates, and three Furies, so,, says De 
 Quincey, there are three Ladies of Sorrow : — 
 
 "the three ladies of sorrow. 
 
 " The eldest of the three is named Mater Lachrymarum, our Lady of Tears. 
 She it is that night and day raves and moans, calling for vanished faces. She 
 stood in Rama, when a voice was heard of lamentation — ' Rachel weeping for 
 her children and refusing to be comforted.' She it was that stood in Bethlehem 
 on the night when Herod's sword swept its nurseries of innocents, and the 
 little feet were stiffened for ever, which, heard at times as they tottered along 
 floors overhead, woke pulses of love in household hearts that were not un- 
 marked in heaven. Her eyes are sweet and subtle, wild and sleepy by turns ; 
 oftentimes rising to the clouds ; oftentimes challenging the heavens. She wears 
 a diadem round her head. And I knew by childish memories that she could 
 go abroad upon the winds, when she heard the sobbing of litanies or the 
 thundering of organs, and when she beheld the mustering of summer clouds. 
 This sister, the elder, it is that carries keys more than Papal at her girdle, 
 which open every cottage and every palace. She, to my knowledge, sate all 
 last summer by the bedside of the blind beggar, him that so often and so gladly 
 I talked with, whose pious daughter, eight years old, with the sunny counte- 
 nance, resisted the temptations of play and village mirth to travel all day long 
 on dusty roads with her afflicted father. For this did God send her a gi-eat 
 reward. In the spring-time of the year, and whilst yet her own spring was 
 budding, he took her to Himself. But her blind father Inoums for ever over 
 her ; still he dreams at midnight that the little guiding hand is locked within 
 his own ; and still he wakens to a darkness that is now within a second and a 
 deeper darkness. This Mater Lachryraarum also has been sitting all this winter 
 of 1844-45 within the bedchamber of the Czar, bringing before his eyes a 
 daughter (not less pious) that vanished to God not less suddenly, and left 
 behind her a darkness not less profound. By the power of her keys it is that 
 Our Lady of Tears glides, a ghostly intruder, into the chamber of sleepless 
 men, sleepless women, sleepless children, from Ganges to the Nile, from Nile 
 to Mississippi ; and her, because she is the first-bom of her house, and has the 
 widest empire, let us honour with the title of ' Madonna.' 
 
 " The second sister is called Mater Suspirionim, Our Lady of Sighs. She 
 neither scales the clouds, nor walks abroad upon the winds. She wears no 
 
472 PROSE AND VERSE : DE QUINCEY. 
 
 diadem. And her eyes, if they were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor 
 subtle ; no man could read their story ; they would be found filled with perish- 
 ing dreams and with wrecks of forgotten delirium. But she raises not her eyes; 
 her head, on which sits a dilapidated turban, droops for ever — for ever fastens 
 on the dust. She weeps not. She groans not. But she sighs inaudibly at 
 intervals. Her sister. Madonna, is oftentimes stormy and frantic — raging in 
 the highest against heaven, and demanding back her darlings. But Our Lady 
 of Sighs never clamours, never defies, dreams not of rebellious aspirations. She 
 is humble to abjectness. Hers is the meekness that belongs to the hopeless. 
 Murmur she may, but it is in her sleep. Whisper she may, but it is to herself 
 in the twilight. Mutter she does at times, but it is in solitary places that are 
 desolate as she is desolate, in ruined cities, and when the sun has gone down to 
 rest. This sister is the visitor of the Pariah, of the Jew, of the bondsman to 
 the oar in Mediterranean galleys, of the English criminal in Norfolk Island, 
 blotted out from remembrance in sweet far-oflF England, of the bafiled penitent 
 reverting his eye for ever upon a solitary grave, which to him seems the altar 
 overthrown of some past and bloody sacrifice, on which altar no oblations can 
 now be availing, whether towards pardon that he might implore, or towards 
 reparation that he might attempt. Every slave that at noonday looks up to 
 the tropical sun with timid reproach, as he points with one hand to the earth 
 our general mother, but for Mm a stepmother, as he points with the other hand 
 to the Bible our general teacher, but against him sealed and sequestered ; — 
 every woman sitting in darkness, without love to shelter her head, or hope to 
 illume her solitude, because the heaven-bom instincts kindling in her nature 
 germs of holy affections, which God implanted in her womanly bosom, having 
 been stifled by social necessities, now bum sullenly to waste, like sepulchral 
 lamps among the ancients ; — every nun defrauded of her unretuming May-time 
 by wicked kinsmen, whom God will judge ; — every captive in every dungeon ; — 
 all that are betrayed, and all that are rejected, outcasts by traditionary law, and 
 children of hereditary disgrace — all these walk with ' Our Lady of Sighs.' She 
 also carries a key ; but she needs it little. For her kingdom is chiefly among 
 the tents of shame, and the houseless vagrant of every clime. Yet in the very 
 highest ranks of men she finds chapels of her own ; and even in glorious Eng- 
 land there are some that, to the world, carry their heads as proudly as the 
 reindeer, who yet secretly have received her mark upon theii* foreheads. 
 
 " But the third sister, who is also the yoimgest — ! Hush ! whisper, whilst we 
 talk of her I Her kingdom is not large, or else no flesh should live ; but within 
 that kingdom all power is hers. Her head, turreted like that of Cybele, rises 
 almost beyond the reach of night. She droops not ; and her eyes, rising so high, 
 might b§ hidden by distance. But, being what they are, they cannot be hidden; 
 through the treble veil of crape which she wears, the fierce light of a blazing 
 misery, that rests not for matins or for vespers — for noon of day, or noon of 
 night — for ebbing or for flowing tide — may be read from the very ground. 
 She is the defier of God. She is also the mother of lunacies, and the suggestress 
 of suicides. Deep lie the roots of her power ; but narrow is the nation that she 
 rules. For she can approach only those in whom a profound nature has been 
 upheaved by central convulsions ; in whom the heart trembles and the brain 
 rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without and tempest from within. 
 Madonna moves with uncertain steps, fast or slow, but still with tragic grace. 
 Our Lady of Sighs creeps timidly and stealthily. But this youngest sister moves 
 with incalcvdable motions, bounding, and with tiger's leaps. She carries no key; 
 for, though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is 
 permitted to enter at all. And her name is Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of 
 Darkness," 
 
 In this noble piece of prose, as in the passages from Milton 
 and Eichter, no one can fail to remark, in exact accordance 
 with what we have advanced in the course of this article, that \ 
 
PROSE AND VEESE : DE QUINCE Y. 473 
 
 precisely as the passion gains in force and intensity, and the 
 pure process of poetic combination transacts itself with ease 
 and vigour, the language acquires and sustains a more decided 
 metrical cadence. It would not be difficult to arrange parts of 
 the passages so that what has been printed as prose should 
 present to the eye the appearance of irregular verse. And so 
 generally, a peculiar rhythm or music will always be found in 
 highly impassioned or imaginative prose. The voice swells 
 with its burthen ; the hand rises and falls ; and the foot beats 
 time. And thus, as we have more than once said, prose passes 
 into verse by visible gradations. Still, there is a clear line of 
 separation between the most metrical prose, and what is con- 
 ventionally recognised as verse ; and with all the great effects 
 that may be produced on this side of the line of separation, 
 Prose, as such, is entitled to be credited. And why should 
 not prose do its utmost ? Why should we not have more men 
 like Richter and De Quincey to teach prose its uses and 
 capabilities? " The muse of prose-literature," we have ven- 
 tured to say on another occasion, " has been very hardly 
 dealt with. We see not why, in prose, there should not be 
 much of that mighty licence in the fantastic, that measured 
 riot, that right of whimsy, that unabashed dalliance with the 
 extreme and the beautiful, which the world allows, by pre- 
 scription, to verse. Why may not one in prose chase forest- 
 nymphs, and see little green-eyed elves, and delight in peonies 
 and musk-roses, and invoke the stars and roll mists about the 
 hills, and watch the seas thundering through caverns, and 
 dashing against the promontories ? Why, in prose, quail from 
 the grand or ghastly on the one hand, or blush with shame 
 at too much of the exquisite on the other ? Is prose made of 
 iron? Must it never weep — must it never laugh; never 
 linger to look at a buttercup, never ride at a gallop over the 
 downs? Always at a steady trot, transacting only such 
 business as may be done within the limits of a soft sigh on 
 the one hand, and a thin smile on the other, must it leave all 
 finer and higher work of imagination to the care of sister 
 verse?" All speed, then, to the prose invasion of the peculiar 
 realm of verse; and the farther the conquest can proceed, 
 
474 PKOSE AND YEESE : DE QUINCET. 
 
 perhaps the better in the end for both parties. The time is 
 perhaps coming when the best prose shall be more like verse 
 than it now is, and the best verse shall not disdain a certain 
 resemblance to prose. 
 
 A word in conclusion, to prevent misconception. We have 
 tried to define the special and peculiar domain of verse ; but we 
 have scrupulously avoided saying anything that would imply 
 an opinion that verse may not, both lawfally and with good 
 effect, go beyond that domain. We have all along supposed 
 the contrary. Verse, merely as a form of expression, has 
 charms of its own. A thought, or an incident, or a feeling, 
 which may be perfectly well expressed in prose, may be 
 rendered more pleasing, more impressive, and more memorable, 
 by being expressed in metre or rhyme. If a man has some 
 doctrine or theory which he wishes to expound, there is no 
 reason, if he finds it possible, and chooses to take the trouble, 
 why he should not make the exposition a metrical one ; and, 
 if his verses are good, there is every probability that, on 
 account of the public relish for metre in itself, his exposition 
 will take a more secure place in literature than would have 
 been attained by a corresponding piece of didactic prose. So 
 also a witticism, or a description, or a plain, homely story, 
 may often be delivered more neatly, tersely, and delightfully, 
 if it comes in the garb of verse. In the same way, a man may 
 impress more powerfully some strongly-felt sentiment, by 
 throwing it into a series of nervous and hearty lines. In short, 
 we ought to be ready to accept wit in metre, or narrative in 
 metre, or politics in metre, or anything else in metre, when 
 we can get it ; and we ought, in every such case, to allow all 
 that additional credit to the author which is due to his skill in 
 so delightful an art as versification. Much of the poetry of 
 Horace, all the satires of Juvenal, the Hudibras of Butler, 
 Pope's metrical essays, and many other compositions of 
 tolerably diverse kinds, may be cited as examples of that 
 order of poetry which consists of shrewdness, wit, manly 
 feeling, and general intellectual vigour manifesting themselves 
 in metre. Who does not admire the exquisite literary felicity 
 displayed in such works, and who, having them in his mind, 
 
PROSE AND VEESE : DE QUINCEY. 475 
 
 can remain insensible to the claims of verse, to range at large 
 wherever it chooses to go? Wliat we wish to make clear, 
 however, is, that a distinction may and must be drawn 
 between verse considered as an essential condition of a peculiar 
 kind of thought, and verse considered as an optional form of 
 expression, which may be chosen, in almost any case, for the 
 sake of its fine and elegant effects. The fact that verse 
 may be regarded in this latter aspect is, we think, the sole 
 justification of nine-tenths of what is called poetry in all 
 languages. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 K. CLAY, PEINTtK, BREAD STEEET HILL. 
 
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