Chapter 2 No.2

The name of Dean Berkeley-an acute and kindly philosopher-engaged our attention in the last chapter. So did that ripe scholar and master of Trinity, Richard Bentley;[1] then came that more saintly Doctor-Isaac Watts, whose Doxologies will long waken the echoes in country churches; we had a glimpse of the gloomy and lurid draperies, with which the muse of Dr. Edward Young sailed over earth and sky; sadly draggled, too, we sometimes found that muse with the stains of earth.

We spoke of a Lady-Wortley Montagu-conspicuous for her beauty, for her acquirements, for her vivacity of mind, for her boldness, for her contempt of the convenances of society, and at last, I think, a contempt for the whole male portion of the human race.

Then came that keen, discerning, accomplished poet, Alexander Pope, with a brain as strong and elastic as his body was weak and shaky; and who, of all the poets we have encountered since Elizabeth's day, knew best how to give to words their full forces, and how to make them jingle and shine.

But the lives of these I have now named, and of those previously brought to your notice[2] overreached the reign of Queen Anne, and dropped off-some in the time of George I., some under his son George II., and others in an early part of the long reign of George III.

From Stuart to Brunswick.

But how came the Georges of Hanover and Brunswick to succeed Anne Stuart? Yes, there was a son of the deposed and exiled James II. (whose mother was an Italian princess-making him half-brother to Queen Anne) known, sometimes as James Edward, and sometimes as The Pretender. He had favorers about the Court of Anne; and if the Queen had lingered somewhat longer, or if the Jacobite or Tory political machine had been a little better oiled and in better play, this Pretender might have come to the throne instead of Hanover George. Poet and Ambassador Prior, who was suspected of favoring this, was one of those who went to the Tower, and came near losing his head in the early days of King George; and Bolingbroke, the friend of Pope, a known plotter for the Stuarts, took himself off hastily to France for safety.

James Edward, however, did not give the matter up, but made a landing in Scotland in 1715 and led that dreary rebellion, in which the poor Earl of Mar went astray, and in which Argyle figured; a rebellion which gives its small scenes of battle and its network of conspiracies to Scott's story of Rob Roy. The Pretender escaped with difficulty to France, made no succeeding attempt, lived in comparative obscurity, and died in Rome fifty years later. He was, according to best accounts, a poor, weak creature, of dissipated habits-of melancholy aspect-dubbed King of England[3] by the Pope-given a stipend by the over-gracious Holy Father-and at last a costly tomb in St. Peter's, which is dignified by some good sculptural work. Travelling sentimentalists may meditate over its grandiose inscription of James III., King of England!

James Edward had married, however, a Princess Sobieski of the Polish family, by whom he had two sons, Charles Edward and Henry. The elder, Charles Edward, an ambitious, handsome, gentlemanly, and amiable man-known as the Young Pretender-did, by favor of French aid, and stimulated by larger French promises, make a landing in Scotland in 1745, which was successful at first, but ended with that defeat on Culloden Moor, which-with pretty romantic broidery-gives a gloomy setting to Scott's first novel of Waverley.

A second plotting of some friends of the Young Pretender, somewhere about 1751-1752 (dimly foreshadowed in the story of Redgauntlet), proved abortive. Thenceforward he appears no more in English history. We know only that this bright, clever, brave Chevalier, who bewitched many a Highland maiden, lived a corrupt life, made a dreary and unfortunate marriage (1772), and, bloated with drink and blighted in hopes, died at Rome in 1788.

His brother Henry was a priest, and was made a cardinal. He spent all his money in pompous living, became miserably poor, and died in Venice early in the present century-the last of his family. There is in St. Peter's Church at Rome, in the Chapel of the Presentation, a great tomb, showy with the sculptures of Canova, which commemorates all these Stuarts, and-so far as Latin inscriptions can do it-makes kings and princes of these unfortunate representatives of the family of King James II.

Still we are without an answer to our question: How and why did the Georges of Hanover come to the British throne?

Those who recall my mention[4] of that slip-shod pedantic king, James I., who came from Scotland, and who brought the Stuart name with him, will remember an allusion to an ambitious daughter of his, Elizabeth Stuart, who married a certain Frederic of the Palatinate, and possessor of the famous chateau whose beautiful ruins are still to be seen on the hill above Heidelberg. You will remember my mention of that extravagant ambition which brought her husband to grief and to an early death. Well, she had many children; and among them one named Sophia, who married, in 1658, Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick and-afterward-Elector of Hanover. She was a good woman, a fairly pronounced Protestant-unlike some sisters she had; so that in casting about for a Protestant successor to William III. and to Anne, the orthodox wise ones of England fixed upon this Sophia, the grand-daughter of old James I. She died, however, before Anne died and in the same year; so that the succession fell to her son George Louis, who became George I. of Great Britain.

He was well toward sixty when he came to England-did not care overmuch to come; loved his ease; loved his indulgences, of which he had a good many, and a good many bad ones; was a German all over; not speaking English even, nor ever learning to speak it; had been a good soldier and fought hard in his day, but did not care for more fighting, or fatigue of any sort; had little culture, and minded the welcoming odes which English poets sang to him less than he would mind the gurgling of good "trink" from a beer-bottle. Yet withal, he was fairly well-intentioned, not a meddler, never wantonly unjust, willing to do kindnesses, if not fatiguing; a heavy, good-natured, heathenish, sottish lout of a king.

Yet, as I have said,[5] Addison could not find words noble enough to tell this man how Anne was dead and he was king; if Addison had made his letter as noble as the drama of Cato, George I. would have yawned and lighted his pipe with it.

This George I. had married in early life a beautiful cousin, and a rich one, but without much character; perhaps he treated her brutally (it was certainly a Georgian fashion); and she, who was no saint, would have run away from that Hanover home-had plotted it all, and the night came, when suddenly her lover and the would-be attendant of her flight was savagely slain; and she, separated from her two children and speaking no word more to her grim husband, was consigned a prisoner to a gloomy fortress in the Aller valley, where she dragged out an embittered and disappointed life for thirty odd years; then, Death opened the gates and set the poor soul free.

This was the wife of George I., and the mother of George II.; this latter being over thirty at the time of his father's coming to England, and not getting on over-well with the king-the son, perhaps, resenting that confinement of his mother in the Ahlden fortress.

This Prince of Wales had no more love for letters than his father George I.; would have liked a jolly German drinking song better than anything Pope could do; was short, irascible, as good a fighter as the father, swore easily and often; had a good, honest wife though, who clung to him through all his badnesses. He had a city home in Leicester Square and a lodge in Richmond Park, whence he used to ride, at a hard gait, with hunting parties (Pope speaks of meeting him with such an one) and come home to long dinners and heavy ones.

It was at this lodge in Richmond Park (which is now less changed than almost any park about London and so one of the best worth seeing) that a messenger came galloping in jack-boots one evening, thirteen years after George I. had come to the throne, to tell the Prince that old George was dead (over in Osnaburg, where he had gone on a visit) and that he, the Prince, was now King George II.[6]

"Dat is one big lie"-said the new and incredulous King with an oath. But it was not a lie; the King was wrathy at being waked too early, and wanted to swear at something or somebody. But having rubbed his eyes and considered the matter, he began then and there those thirty-three years of reign, which, without much credit to George II. personally, were, as the careful Mr. Hallam says in his history, the most prosperous years which England had ever known.

Remember please, then, that George I., who succeeded Anne, reigned some thirteen years; and after him came this short, sharp-spoken George II., who reigned thirty-three years-thus bringing us down to 1760. I have dwelt upon the personalities of these two monarchs, not because they are worthy of special regard, but rather that they may serve more effectively as finger-posts or clumsy mile-stones (with wigs upon them)-to show us just how far we are moving along upon the big high-road of English history.

Samuel Richardson.

Quite early in that century into which these royal people found their way, there lived over beyond Temple Bar, near to St. Bride's Church, in the City of London, a mild-mannered, round-faced, prim little man who was printer and bookseller-in both which callings he showed great sagacity and prudence. He was moreover very companionable, especially with bookish ladies, who often dropped in upon him-he loving to talk; and to talk much about himself, and his doings, and the characters he put in his books. For this was Samuel Richardson[7]-the very great man as many people thought him-who had written Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, and Sir Charles Grandison. It is doubtful if he knew Pope or Swift or Berkeley; he was never of the "Spectator set." Pope we know read his Pamela and said there was as much good in it as in twenty sermons: yet I do not think he meant to compliment it-or the sermons. Neither did Bookseller Richardson know people in high position, except Hon. Mr. Onslow the Speaker, who gave him some of the public printing to do and put him in way of business by which he grew rich for these times and had a fine large house out by Hammersmith, where he kept a little court of his own in summer weather; the courtiers being worthy women, to whom he would read his books, or correspondence relating to them, by the hour. Possibly you have not read his novels; but I am sure your grandmothers or great-grandmothers have read some of them, and wept over them. He was not learned; was the son of a country carpenter, and in his early days was known for an easy letter-writing faculty he had; and he used to be set upon by sighing maidens-who were suffering under a prevalent contagious affection of young years-to write their love-letters for them; and so at last, in busy London, when his head was streaked with gray, he began to put together books of letters-written as if some suffering or wishful one had whispered them all in his ear. There was no machinery, no plot, no classicism, no style-but sentiment in abundance and vast prolixity, and ever-recurring villanies, and "pillows bedew'd with tears." The particularity and fulness of his descriptions were something wonderful; every button on a coat, every ring on the fingers, every tint of a ribbon, every ruffle on a cap, every ruffle of emotion, every dimple in a cheek is pictured, and then-the "pillows bedew'd with tears."

There's a great budget of Richardson correspondence that shows us how the leaven of such stories worked; letters from Miss Suffern and Miss Westcomb, and Mr. Dunallan, and a dozen others, all interlaced with his own; for it does not appear that the old gentleman ever refused the challenge of a letter, or grew tired of defending and illustrating his theories of literary art and of morals, which in his view were closely joined. The stories were published by himself-volume by volume, so that his correspondents had good chance to fire upon him-on the wing as it were: "Poor Clarissa," they say; "my heart bleeds for her, and what, pray, is to become of her; and why don't you reform Lovelace, and sha'n't he marry Clarissa? And I do not believe there was ever such a man as Sir Charles in the world." The old gentleman enjoys this and writes back by the ream; has his own little sentiment of a sort too, even in the correspondence. Mme. Belfour wants to see him-"the delightful man"-without herself being observed; so entreats him to walk some day in the Park (St. James') at a given hour; and Richardson complies, giving these data for his picture:-

"I go through the Park, once or twice a week to my little retirement; but I will for a week together, be in it, every day three or four hours, till you tell me you have seen a person who answers to this description, namely, short-rather plump-fair wig, lightish cloth coat, all black besides; one hand generally in his bosom, the other a cane in it, which he leans upon under the skirts of his coat ... looking directly fore-right as passers-by would imagine, but observing all that stirs on either hand of him; hardly ever turning back, of a light brown complexion, smoothish faced and ruddy cheeked-looking about sixty-five, a regular even pace, a gray eye sometimes lively-very lively if he have hope of seeing a lady whom he loves and honors."

Then he writes to Miss Westbrook-an adopted daughter as he calls her:-

"You rally me on my fears for your safety, and yet I know you to be near a forest where lies a great wild bear: I am accused for these fears-I am accused for playing off a sheet-full of witticisms, which you, poor girl, can't tell what to do with. Witticism! Miss W. Very well, Miss W-- But I did not expect-but no matter;-what have I done with my handkerchief-I-I-I did not really expect; but no matter, Miss W--"

A man who can put tears so easily, and for so little cause, into a letter, can put them by the barrelful in his books: and so he did, and made Europe weep. Rousseau and Diderot from over in France, philosophers as they professed to be, blubbered their admiring thanks for Clarissa Harlowe.

I have spoken of him not because he is to be counted a great classic (though Dr. Johnson affirmed it); not because I advise your wading through six or seven volumes of the darling Sir Charles Grandison-as some of our grandames did; but because he was, in a sense, the father of the modern novel; coming before Fielding; in fact, spurring the latter, by Pamela, to his great, coarse, and more wonderful accomplishment. And although what I have said of Richardson may give the impression of something paltry in the man and in his works, yet he was an honest gentleman, with good moral inclinations, great art in the dissection of emotional natures, and did give a fingering to the heart-strings which made them twang egregiously.

Harry Fielding.

The British Guild of Critics is, I think, a little more disposed to admit Richardson's claims to distinction than to be proud of them: it is not so, however, with Fielding;[8] if Richardson was "womanish," Fielding was masculine with a vengeance; gross, too, in a way, which always will, and always should, keep his books outside the pale of decent family reading. Filth is filth, and always deserves to be scored by its name-whatever blazon of genius may compass it about. I have no argument here with the artists who, for art's sake, want to strip away all the protective kirtles which the Greek Dianas wore: but when it comes to the bare bestialities of such tavern-bagnios as poor Fielding knew too well,[9] there seems room for reasonable objection, and for a strewing of some of the fig-leaves of decency. And yet this stalwart West-of-England man, "raised" in the fat meadows of Somersetshire, and who had read Pamela as a stepping-stone for his first lift into the realms of romance, was a jovial, kind-hearted, rollicking, dare-devil of a man, with no great guile in him, and no hypocrisies and no snivelling laxities. He had a great lineage, tracing back to that Landgrave of Alsace, from whom are descended the kings and emperors of the House of Hapsburg: and what a warrant for immortality does this novelist carry in those words of Gibbon!-

"The successors of Charles V. may disdain their [Somersetshire] brethren of England; but the romance of Tom Jones-that exquisite picture of humor and manners-will outlive the Palace of the Escurial and the imperial eagle of Austria."

It was at home or near by that Henry Fielding found his first schooling; at the hand-a tradition runs-of that master who served as the original for his picture of Parson Trulliber: if this indeed be so, never were school-master severities so permanently punished. After this came Eton, where he was fellow of Lord Lyttleton, who befriended him later, and of William Pitt (the elder), and of Fox-the rattle-brain father of Charles James. Then came two or more years of stay at the University of Leyden, from which he laid his course straight for the dramatic world of London; for his father, General Fielding, had a good many spendthrift habits, with which he had inoculated the son. There was need for that son to work his own way; and the way he favored was by the green-room, where the sparkle of such lively elderly ladies as Mrs. Oldcastle and Mrs. Bracegirdle had not yet wholly gone out.

He wrote play upon play with nervous English, and pretty surprises in them; but not notable for any results, whether of money-making or of moral-mending. He also had his experiences as stage manager; and between two of his plays (1735 or thereabout) married a pretty girl down in Salisbury; and with her dot, and a small country place inherited from his mother, set up as country gentleman, on the north border of Dorsetshire, determined to cut a new and larger figure in life-free from the mephitic airs of Drury Lane. There were stories-very likely apocryphal-that he ordered extravagant liveries; it is more certain that he gave himself freely, for a time, to hounds, horses, and friends. Of course such a country symposium devoured both his own and his wife's capital; and we find him very shortly back in London, buckling down to law study; very probably showing there or thereabout the "inked ruffles and the wet towel round his head," which appear in the charming retrospective glasses of Thackeray.[10]

But times are hard with him; those fast years of green-room life have told upon him; the "wet towels" round the head are in demand; some of his later plays are condemned by the Lord Chancellor;[11] in 1742, however, he makes that lunge at the sentimentalism of Richardson which, in the shape of Joseph Andrews, gives him a trumpeting success. It encourages him to print two or three volumes of miscellanies. But shadows follow him; a year later, his wife dies in his arms; Lady Wortley Montagu (who was a cousin) tells us this; and tells us how other cousins were scandalized because, a few years afterward, the novelist, with an effusive generosity that was characteristic of him, married his maid, who had lamented her mistress so sincerely, and was tenderly attached to his children. At about the same period he accepted office as Justice of the Peace-thereby still further disgruntling his aristocratic Denbigh cousins. But the quick-coming volumes of Tom Jones and their wonderful acclaim cleared the space around him; he had room to breathe and to play the magistrate; it is Henry Fielding, Esq., now,-of Bow Street, Covent Garden. Amelia followed, for which he received ￡1,000; and we hear of a new home out in the pleasant country, by Baling, north of Brentford, and the Kew Gardens.

Finally on a June day of 1754 we see him leaving this home; "at twelve precisely," he says in his last Journal, "my coach was at the door, which I was no sooner told than I kissed my children all around, and went into it with some little resolution." There needed resolution; for he was an utterly broken-down man, the pace of his wild, young days telling now fearfully, and he bound away for a voyage to the sunny climate of Portugal-to try if this would stay the end.

But it does not; in October of the same year he died in Lisbon; and there his body rests in the pretty Cemetery of the Cypresses, where all visitors who love the triumphs of English letters go to see his tomb, among the myrtles and the geraniums. If he had only lived to pluck away some of those grosser stains which defile the pages where the characters of an Allworthy and of a Parson Adams will shine forever!

Poet of the Seasons.

It was just about the opening of the second quarter of the eighteenth century-when Fielding was fresh from Eton, fifteen years before Pamela had appeared and while George II. was in waiting for the slipping off of Father George at Osnaburg-that a stout Scotch poet found his way to London to try a new style of verses with the public which was still worshipping at the shrine of Mr. Pope. This was the poet of The Seasons,[12] whose boyhood had been passed and enriched in that bight of the beautiful Tweed valley which lies between Coldstream and the tall mass of Kelso's ruin,-with Melrose and Smailhome Tower and Ettrickdale not far away, and the Lammermuir hills glowering in the north. He had studied theology in Edinboro', till some iris-hued version of a psalm (which he had wrought) brought the warning from some grim orthodox friend-that a good Dominie should rein up his imagination. So he set his face southward, with the crystal scenery of a winter on Tweed-side sparkling in his thought. He lived humbly in London, for best of reasons, near to Charing Cross; but by the aid of Northern friends, brought his Winter to book, in the spring of 1726.

It delighted everybody; the tric-trac of Pope was lacking, and so was the master's arrant polish; but the change brought its own blithe welcome.

We will try a little touch from this first poem of his which he brought in his satchel, on the boy journey to London:-

"Thro' the hushed air the whitening shower descends,

At first, thin, wavering, till at last the flakes

Fall broad and wide and fast, dimming the day

With a continual flow....

Low, the woods

Bow their hoar heads; and ere the languid sun

Faint from the west emits his evening ray,

Earth's universal face, deep hid and chill,

Is one wide dazzling waste.

The fowls of heaven,

Tamed by the cruel season, crowd around

The winnowing stone....

One alone,

The red-breast, sacred to the household gods,

Wisely regardful of the embroiling sky

In joyless fields and thorny thickets, leaves

His shivering mates.

Half afraid, he first

Against the window beats; then, brisk, alights

On the warm hearth; then hopping o'er the floor

Eyes all the smiling family askance

And pecks, and starts, and wonders where he is."

That robin red-breast has hopped over a great many floors in his time; and now after a hundred and sixty years he comes brisk as ever out of that Winter poem of Thomson's. This Scotch poet is wordy; he draws long breaths; he is sometimes tiresome; but you will catch good honest glimpses of the country in his verse without going there-not true to our American seasons in detail, but always true to Nature. The sun never rises in the west in his poems; the jonquils and the daisies are not confounded; the roses never forget to blush as roses should; the oaks are sturdy; the hazels are lithe; the brooks murmur; the torrents roar a song; the winds carry waves across the grain-fields; the clouds plant shadows on the mountains.

Thomson was befriended by Pope, who kindly made corrections in the first draught of some of his poems; and that you may see together the wordy ways of these two poets I give a sample of Pope's mending.

Thomson wrote-speaking of a gleaning girl:-

"Thoughtless of Beauty, she was beauty's self

Recluse among the woods; if city dames

Will deign their faith; and thus she went, compelled

By strong necessity, with as serene

And pleased a look as Patience ere put on,

To glean Palemon's fields."

And this is the way in which Pope does the mending:-

"Thoughtless of Beauty, she was beauty's self

Recluse among the close embowering woods.

As in the hollow breast of Apennine,

Beneath the shelter of encircling hills,

A myrtle rises far from human eyes,

And breathes its balmy fragrance o'er the wild;

So flourished, blooming, and unseen by all,

The sweet Lavinia; till at length compelled

By strong necessity's supreme command,

With smiling patience in her looks, she went

To glean Palemon's fields."

There are more words, but the words gleam! Pope is the master, yet mastered by rules; Thomson less a master, but free from bonds.

He tried play-writing, in those days when Fielding was just beginning in the same line, but it was not a success. After a year or two of travel upon the Continent, on some tutoring business, he published an ambitious poem (1734-1736) entitled Liberty-never a favorite. He had made friends, however, about the Court; and he pleasantly contrived to possess himself of some of those pensioned places, which fed unduly his natural indolence. But all will forgive him this vice, who have read his fine poem of the Castle of Indolence in Spenserian verse. It was his last work-perhaps his best, and first published in 1748, the year of his death.

One stanza from it I must quote; and shall never forget my first hearing of it, in tremulous utterance, from the lips of the venerable John Quincy Adams, after he had bid adieu (as he thought) to public life and was addressing[13] a large assemblage in the university town of New Haven:

"I care not, Fortune, what you me deny!

You cannot rob me of free Nature's grace,

You cannot shut the windows of the sky

Through which Aurora shows her brightening face;

You cannot bar my constant feet to trace

The woods and lawns by living streams at eve;

Let health my nerves and finer fibres brace

And I their toys to the great children leave,

Of fancy, reason, virtue, nought can me bereave."

Most readers will think kindly and well of this poet; and if you love the country, you will think yet more kindly of him; and on summer afternoons, when cool breezes blow in at your windows and set all the leaves astir over your head, his muse-if you have made her acquaintance-will coo to you from among the branches: but you will never and nowhere find in him the precision, the vigor, the point, the polish, we found in Pope; and which you may find, too, in the fine parcel-work done by Thomas Gray, who was a contemporary of Thomson's, but younger by some fifteen years.

Thomas Gray.

You will know of that first poem of his-Ode to Eton College; at least you know its terminal lines, which are cited on all the high-roads:-

"Where ignorance is bliss

'Tis folly to be wise!"

All the world knows, too, his Elegy, on which his fame principally rests. Its melancholy music gets somehow stamped on the brain of nearly all of us, and lends a poetic halo to every old graveyard that has the shadow of a church tower slanted over it.

Gray[14] was, like Milton, a London boy-born on Cornhill under the shadow almost of St. Paul's. The father was a cross-grained man, living apart from Mrs. Gray, who, it is said, by the gains of some haberdashery traffic which she set up in Cornhill, sent her boy to Eton and to Cambridge. At Eton he came to know Horace Walpole, travelled with him over Europe, after leaving Cambridge, until they quarrelled and each took his own path. That quarrel, however, was mended somewhat later and Walpole became as good a friend to Gray as he could be to anybody-except Mr. Walpole.

The poet, after his father's death, undertook, in a languid way, the study of law; but finally landed again in Cambridge, and was a dilettanteish student there nearly all his days, being made a Professor of History at last; but not getting fairly into harness before the gout laid hold of him and killed him. Probably no man in English literature has so large a reputation for so little work. Gibbon regretted that he should not have completed his philosophic poem on education and government; Dr. Johnson, who spoke halting praise of his poems, thought he would have made admirable books of travel; Cowper says, "I once thought Swift's letters the best that could be written, but I like Gray's better."

The truth is, he was a fastidious, scholarly man, whose over-nicety of taste was always in the way of large accomplishment. He was content to do nothing, except he did something in the best possible way. He so cherished refinements that refinements choked his impulses.

A great stickler he was, too, for social refinements-distinctions, preferments, and clap-trap-wanting his courtesies, of which he was as chary as of his poems, to have the last stamp of gentility; thus running into affectations of decorum, which, one time, made him the butt of practical jokers at his college. Some lovers of fun there sounded an alarm of fire for the sake of seeing the elegant Mr. Gray (not then grown famous, to be sure) slipping down a rope-ladder in undress, out of his window; which he did do, but presently changed his college in dudgeon. He had, moreover, a great deal of Walpole's affected contempt for authorship-wanted rather to be counted an elegant gentleman who only played with letters. He writes to his friend that the proprietors of a magazine were about to print his Elegy, and says:-

"I have but one bad way to escape the honor they would inflict upon me, and therefore desire you would make Dodsley print it immediately, without my name, but on his best paper and type. If he would add a line to say it came into his hands by accident, I should like it better."

I think he caught this starched folly (if it were folly) from Walpole. I have heard of over-elegant people in our day with the same affectation; but, as a rule, they do not write poems so good as the Elegy.

Gray died, after that quiet life of his, far down in the days of George III., 1771, leaving little work done, but a very great name. He was buried, as was fitting, beside his mother, in that churchyard at Stoke, out of which the Elegy grew. And if you ever have a half day to spare in London, it is worth your while to go out to Slough (twenty miles by the Great Western road), and thence, two miles of delicious walk among shady lanes and wanton hedges, to where Stoke-Pogis Church, curiously hung over with ivy, rises amongst the graves; and if sentimentally disposed, you may linger there, till the evening shadows fall, and repeat to yourself (or anybody you like)-

"The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea.

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way

And leaves the world to darkness and to me."

A Courtier.

I have spoken of the association of Walpole with Gray; it was not an intimate one after the two had outgrown their youth-age; indeed Walpole's association with nobody was intimate; nor was he a man whose literary reputation ever was, or ever can be great. He was son[15] of that famous British Minister of State, Sir Robert Walpole, who for many long years held the fate of England in his hand. But his son Horace cared little for politics. He was unmarried, and kept so always; had money in plenty (coming largely from Government sinecures) and a fat place at Twickenham-called Strawberry Hill; which by his vagaries in architecture and his enormous collection of bric-à-brac, he made the show place of all that region. He established a private press at this country home, and printed, among a multitude of other books, a catalogue of royal and noble authors-not reckoning others so worthy of his regard; indeed, he had a well-bred contempt for ordinary literary avocations; but he wrote and published (privately at first) a romance called The Castle of Otranto.[16] It was "a slight thing," he told his friends, which he had dashed off in an idle hour, and which he "had not put his name to; but which succeeded so well that he did not any longer entirely keep the secret." It is a tale, quite ingenious, of mingled mystery and chivalry; there are castles in it, and huge helmets, that only giants could wear; and there are dungeons, and forlorn maidens; ghosts, and sighing lovers; mysterious sounds, and pictures that come out of their frames and walk about in the moonlight-it is a pattern book to read at night in an old country house which has long corridors and deserted rooms, where the bats fly in and out, and the doors clang and clash.

But this strange creature, Horace Walpole, is known best of all by his letters[17]-nine solid volumes of them, big octavo-covering nearly the whole of his life and addressed to a half score or so of men and women on all possible topics except any serious one; and all made ready, with curious care, for publication when his death should come. On that one point he did have serious belief-he believed he should die. This great budget of his letters is one of the most extraordinary products-if we may call it so-of literature. It is hard to say what is not touched upon in them; if he is robbed, you hear how a voice out of the night said "stop"-how he slipped his watch under his waistband-how he gave up his purse with nine guineas in it-how Lady Browne was frightened and gave up her watch; if the king has gout in his toe you hear of that; if he goes to the palace he tells you who was in the ante-room and how two fellows were sweeping the floor, dancing about in sabots; how the Duc of Richelieu was pale except his nose, "which is red and wrinkled." Great hoops with brocade dresses come sailing into his letters; so do all the scandals about my lady this, or the duchess that; so do the votes in Parliament and reports about the last battle, if a war is in progress; and the French news, and new things at Strawberry Hill-over and over. And he does not think much of Gibbon, and does not think much of Dr. Johnson-who "has no judgment and no taste;" and why doesn't his friend Mason[18] (a third-rate poet) "show up the doctor and make an end of him?"-which is much like saying that Mr. Wardle's fat boy should make an end of Mr. Pickwick.

Yet do not think there is no art in all this, and that you would not like them: there is art of the highest gossipy kind; and I can readily understand how his correspondents all relished immensely his letters whenever they came. There is humor and sparkle, and there are delicate touches; he approaches his lighter topics as a humming-bird approaches flowers-a swift dart at them-a sniff, a whirl of wings, and away again.

Then he has that rare literary instinct of knowing just what each correspondent would like best to hear of-that's the secret of writing letters that will be welcome. You cannot interchange his letters. He tickles Lady Ossory's ear with sheerest gossip, and Lady Suffolk with talk of dress and of the last great Paris ball, and the poet Mason with bookish platitudes, and Conway with the leakings of political talk, and Cole with twaddle on art or science. You want to turn your back on him again and again for his arrant snobbish pretensions or some weak and violent prejudice; yet you want to listen again and again. It is such a pretty, lively, brisk, frolicsome, pétillant small-beerish talk, that engages and does not fatigue, and piques appetite yet feeds you with nothings.

He grew old there in his gim-crack of a palace, cultivating his flowers and his complexion; tiptoeing while he could over his waxed floors in lavender suit, with embroidered waistcoat and "partridge silk stockings," with chapeau bas held before him-very reverent to any visitor of distinction-and afterward (he lived almost into this century), when gout seizes him, I seem to see still-as once before[19]-the fastidious old man shuffling up and down from drawing-room to library-stopping here and there to admire some newly arrived bit of pottery-pulling out his golden snuff-box and whisking a delicate pinch into his old nostrils-then dusting his affluent shirt-frills with the tips of his dainty fingers, with an air of gratitude to Providence for having created so fine a gentleman as Horace Walpole, and of gratitude to Horace Walpole for having created so fine a place as Strawberry Hill.

Young Mr. Johnson.

And now what a different man we come upon, living just abreast of him in that rich English century and that beautiful English country! We go into Staffordshire and to the old town of Lichfield, to find the boy who afterward became the great lexicographer[20] and the great talker. The house in which he was born is there upon a corner of the great broadened street, opposite St. Mary's Church. We get a pleasant glimpse of the house on a page of Our Old Home, by Hawthorne; and another glimpse of the colossal figure of Dr. Johnson, seated in his marble chair, upon that Lichfield market-place.

His father was a bookseller; held, too, some small magistracy; was eminently respectable; loved books as well as sold them, and had a corresponding inaptitude for business. The son added to indifferent schooling, here and there, a habit of large browsing along his father's shelves; was a great, ungainly lout of a boy, but marvellously quick-witted. With some help from his father, and some from friends, and with a reputation for making verses, and tastes ranging above bookstalls, he entered at Oxford when nineteen; but the stings of poverty smote him there early; and after three years of irregular attendance, he left-only to find his father lapsing into bankruptcy and a fatal illness. On the settlement of the old bookseller's estate, ￡20 only was the portion of the son. Then follow some dreary years; he is hypochondriac and fears madness; he is under-teacher in a school; he offers to do job-work for the book-makers; he translates the narrative of a Portuguese missionary about Abyssinia; he ponders over a tragedy of Irene. Not much good comes of all this, when-on a sudden, our hero, who is now twenty-six, marries a widow-who admired his talents-who is twenty years his senior and has ￡800. Johnson was not a person to regard closely such little discrepancies as that difference in age-nor she, I suppose.

The bride is represented as not over-comely, and as one-of good judgment in most matters-who resorted to some vulgar appliances for making the most of her "good looks." Lord Macaulay[21] uses a very rampant rhetoric in his encyclop?dic mention of the paint she put upon her cheeks. With the aid of her ￡800, Johnson determined to set up a boarding-school for young gentlemen; a gaunt country-house three miles out of Lichfield was rented and equipped and advertised; but the young gentlemen did not come.

How could they be won that way? The mistress frowsy, simpering, ancient, painted, and becurled; and Mr. Johnson, gaunt, clumsy, squinting-one side of his face badly scarred with some early surgical cut; one eye involved and drooping, and a twitchy St. Vitus's dance making all uglier. What boy would not dread a possible whipping from such a master, and what mamma would not tremble for her boy? Yet I do not believe he ever whipped hard, when he had occasion; he was kind-hearted; but his scolds at a false syntax must have been terrific and have made the floors shiver.

Among the boys who did venture to that Edial school was one David Garrick, whose father had been a friend of the elder Johnson; and when the school broke up-as it did presently-Johnson and David Garrick set out together for London, to seek their fortune-carrying letters to some booksellers there; and Johnson carrying that half-written tragedy of Irene in his pocket. Garrick's rise began early, and was brilliant, but of this we cannot speak now. Johnson knocked about those London streets-translating a little, jobbing at books a little, starving and scrimping a great deal. He fell in early with a certain Richard Savage,[22] a wild, clever, disorderly poet, as hard pinched as Johnson. According to his story, he was the son of the Countess Macclesfield, but disowned by her-he only coming to knowledge of his parentage through accident, when he was grown to manhood. Johnson tells the pathetic tale of how Savage paced up and down, at night, in sight of his mother's palatial windows, gazing grief-smitten at them, and yearning for the maternal recognition, which the heartless, dishonored woman refused. So, this castaway runs to drink and all deviltries; Johnson staying him much as he can-walking with him up and down through London streets till midnight-talking poetry, philosophy, religion; hungry both of them, and many a time with only ten pence between them.

Well, at last, Savage kills his man in a tavern broil; would have been hung-the mother countess (as the story runs) hoping it would be so; but he escapes, largely through the influence of that Queen Caroline, to whom Jeanie Deans makes her eloquent plea in Scott's ever-famous novel of The Heart of Mid-Lothian. Savage escapes, but 'tis only to go to other bad ways, and at last he died in a Bristol jail.

All this offered material for a pathetic story, and Johnson made the most of it in his Life of Savage-afterward incorporated in his Lives of the Poets, but first published in 1744, about seven years after his coming to London. The book appeared anonymously; but its qualities gave it great vogue; and its essential averments formed the basis of all biographic and encyclop?dic[23] notices for nearly a century thereafter.

But was the story true? There were those who doubted at the time, and had an unpleasant sense that Johnson had been wheedled by an adventurer; but demonstration of the imposture of Savage did not come till the middle of the present century. The investigations of Moy Thomas[24] would go to show that the Savage friend of Johnson's early days in London was the most arrant of impostors; and that of all the shame that rests upon him, he can only justly be relieved of that which counts him a child of such a woman as the Countess of Macclesfield. I have dwelt upon the Savage episode, not alone because it provoked one of Johnson's best pieces of prose work, but because it shows how open were his sympathies to such tales of distress, and how quick he was to lift the rod of chastisement upon wrong-doers of whatever degree.

In London, too, that imitative classic poem, there shone in a glitter of couplets (which provoked Pope's praises) the same righteous indignation, and the stings-pricking through all his big Staffordshire bulk-of supperless-days and of shortened means:-

"By numbers here from shame or censure free

All crimes are safe, but hated Poverty;

This, only this, the rigid Law pursues,

This, only this, provokes the snarling muse.

"The sober trader at a tattered cloak

Wakes from his dream, and labors for a joke;

With brisker air the silken courtiers gaze

And turn the varied taunt a thousand ways."

Better than this was that poem (Vanity of Human Wishes) in which, even now, some of us-admiringly-

"In full flown dignity see Wolsey stand,

Law in his voice, and fortune in his hand."

And the couplet leads on through Wolsey's story to the poet's coupleted sermon, with its savors of a church-bell-

"Still raise for good the supplicating voice,

But leave to Heaven the measure and the choice.

Safe in his power whose eye discerns afar

The secret ambush of a specious prayer;

Implore his aid, in his decisions rest,

Secure whate'er he gives, he gives the best.

*****

Pour forth thy fervors for a healthful mind,

Obedient passions, and a will resigned;

*****

For faith, that, panting for a happier seat,

Counts death kind nature's signal of retreat."

We must note also that famous Prologue, spoken at Drury Lane in 1747, when the theatre came first under control of his old friend, Garrick. Never had the stage, before nor since, a nobler summons in worthier verse: it closes-

"Then prompt no more the follies you decry,

As Tyrants doom their tools of guilt to die:

'Tis yours, this night, to bid the reign commence

Of rescued Nature and reviving Sense:

To chase the charms of Sound, the pomp of Show,

For useful Mirth and salutary Woe:

Bid scenic Virtue form the rising age

And Truth diffuse her radiance from the Stage."

Garrick must have been proud to act under such banner of song as that. The tragedy of Irene came to its first representation a short time afterward; and surely it would have been worth one's while to see the stout, awkward gerund-grinder of forty, slipping into a side-box, or even behind the scenes "in a scarlet waistcoat, with rich gold lace and a gold-laced hat!" The play, however, did not prove a great success either then or thereafter. The Dictionary, for which proposals had already been issued, promised better things. That Dictionary did ultimately give him a great lift-as it has to a good many, since. The ponderous volume furnished very many New England households seventy years ago; and I can remember sitting upon it, in my child-days, to bring my head properly above the level of the table. An immense and long-continued toil went to the Dictionary. Lord Chesterfield,[25] the finished orator and the elegant man-not unwilling to have so great a work bear his name-called attention to the book and the author, when nearly ready; but Johnson was too sore with hope deferred to catch that bait; he writes an indignant letter (not published until 1790) to the elegant Chesterfield:-

"Seven years have now passed, my Lord, since I waited in your outward-rooms, or was repulsed from your door-during which time I have been pushing on my work, thro' difficulties of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it at last to the verge of publication without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favor.... The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labors-had it been early-had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary [his wife dead now] and cannot impart it, till I am known and do not want it."

This does not show the stuff which went to the making of such a man as Walpole!

The Rambler, too, it must be remembered, is making its periodic visits in those early days of the Dictionary toil. Heavy it is, like the master; and his prejudices as arrant Churchman and sturdy Tory do indeed break through its piled-up pages; but never insidiously: he sounds a trumpet before he strikes. Perhaps a little over-fond of trumpeting; loving so much his long sonorous roll of Ciceronian vocables.

But I have not the same dislike of long Johnsonian periods that a good many people have-provided always there is a Johnson to utter them. They belong to him; they match with their wordy convolutions his great billowy make of mind; and short, sharp sentences would be as incongruous as a little spurting jet d'eau where great waves come rocking on the beach.

In fact, I have a large unbelief in much of current pedagogic talk about style, and "getting a good style," and "reforming style," and "Saxon style," and so on. To be thoroughly possessed of one's own thought, and then to tell it, in the clearest possible way, is the best law I know for a good style; and a proper following of it will give to every mind that has any color of its own a style of its own. To putter about the rhetorics in search of fine phrases to wrap your thoughts in, is like going in masquerade; furbish it as you will, people will see the smear of old wear in the tinsel trappings, and smell it too.

If short, homely Saxon will serve one's purpose best in giving sharp, shrewd expression to thought, as most times it will, use Saxon; but if a Latin derivation will hit the very shade of your thinking more aptly, do not affect to scorn the Latin. Even if a French word-provided always it be at once and easily comprehensible by all whom you address-shall touch the very eye of your purpose better than another, do not scruple to use it.

But we must ask pardon for this intrusion of small school-mastery talk, while the great master of the Dictionary and of the Rambler waits. As yet we have followed him through only half of his career; a stalwart man, still in the full prime of his years; and I see grouping about him at the Turk's Head many another whom we wish to follow; a Boswell and a Burke; Reynolds and Beauclerk and Goldsmith-these all are in waiting. But for a fuller and nearer view of these old club-men of more than a century ago, we open upon another chapter of these Lands and Letters.

[1] Whoso would take measure, of his scholarly thoroughness, his reach, his pertinacity, and his capacity for striking sharp blows, should struggle through his Dissertation on Phalaris.

[2] Swift, Addison, Steele, Gay, et al., in preceding volume of Lands, Letters, and Kings ("Elizabeth to Anne")

[3] He lived for many years in the Palazzo Muti near to the church of the SS. Apostoli, in Rome; his disorderly life there made it a Regio Palazzo!

[4] Lands and Letters: "From Elizabeth to Anne," p. 100.

[5] Lands and Letters: "Elizabeth to Anne."

[6] This is one contemporary account of it-adopted by Thackeray; but Wraxall (1st vol., pp. 384-385 American reprint, Lea & Blanchard) says that the Duke of Dorset was commissioned to carry the news; but some little time being required to make himself ready, the Duchess was sent in advance. She arrived at Kew (where the Prince was staying) just as that Prince had gone to bed, as was his wont, after dinner. The Princess undertook the announcement-though demurring at the duty, and anticipating a brutal reception for one who should disturb his after-dinner nap; he was in a huff and did make the comment, noted in the text; but it was not (says Wraxall) to a messenger in jack-boots, but to the Princess of Wales herself.

[7] Richardson: b. 1689; d. 1761. Various editions of his works. Known quite generally to buyers of cheap books in our day by an abbreviated issue of Clarissa Harlowe (Routledge & Sons).

[8] Henry Fielding: b. 1707; d. 1754. Editions of his works have been edited by Arthur Murphy, William Roscoe, and Leslie Stephen; (10 vols., 1882-1883.) Life by Sir Walter Scott in Ballantyne Library; more trustworthy one is that by Austin Dobson.

[9] It is perhaps to be doubted if the bare-faced coarsenesses of Fielding (much as they are to be condemned) would provoke pruriency so much as the sentimental and sensuous languors of Richardson.

[10] History of Pendennis, Household Ed., Boston: Chap. xxix.

[11] It was in virtue of some altercations growing out of Fielding's plays that British censorship was established in 1737, and (perhaps) Fielding thereby diverted to the study of Law.

[12] James Thomson, b. 1700; d. 1748. Various editions of his poems; a very elegant one, illustrated by the Etching Club, published 1842-62.

[13] The Jubilee of the Constitution, a discourse delivered by request of the New York Historical Society, April 30, 1839, and repeated shortly after in the old "Ludlow" Church, (now "Dime Theatre"), in Church Street, New Haven.

[14] Thomas Gray, b. 1716; d. 1771. See Gosse's recent biography for critical as well as sympathetic account of his life and writings. See also Mitford's edition of his works, with life, London, 1836.

[15] Horace Walpole, b. 1717; d. 1785. The enumeration of his books, pamphlets, and of titles relating thereto fill a dozen columns of Lowndes. His letters give best measurement of the man.

[16] It purported to be a translation from the Italian of Onuphrio Muralto.

[17] Peter Cunningham Edition. London, 1857-1859. See also Horace Walpole and His World, by L. B. Seeley. 1884.

[18] Rev. William Mason, b. 1725; d. 1797; author of The English Garden, published at intervals (its successive books) between 1772 and 1782. It has little merit-Walpole to the contrary.

[19] Wet Days at Edgewood, p. 239.

[20] Samuel Johnson, b. 1709; d. 1784. Boswell's the standard life of him, and Birkbeck Hill's the best edition of that life. We miss in it, indeed, some of the "Croker" notes, which made such inviting quarry for the sharp huntsmanship of Macaulay. But the editing is done with a love and a tirelessness which are as winning as they are rare. See, also, Leslie Stephen's sketch-which is the best short life.

[21] Ency. Britannica; Art. Johnson.

[22] B. 1698; d. 1743. Poet and dramatist. Collected edit. of his writings published in 1775. His largest claim to distinction is due to the Life of Richard Savage, by Samuel Johnson; first published 1744.

[23] Vide old edition of Ency. Britannica, also Strahan's Biographical Dictionary of 1784; Biographie Universelle, et al.

[24] See Notes and Queries, November and December, 1858.

[25] Philip Dormer Stanhope (Earl of Chesterfield), b. 1694; d. 1773, best known by his Letters to His Son, first published in 1774. Johnson said they taught "the morals of a courtesan, and the manners of a dancing-master." This was perhaps over-severe. People who do not love to disport in fashionable waters are apt to be severe upon those who spend their faculties upon the coquetries of bathing costume.