Chapter 7 No.7

Beyond Dunkeld-which is the southern gateway of the Scottish Highlands-there stretches a great wood, within the domain of the Duke of Athole, where one can wander for miles; the path sometimes mossy, always inviting; now threading dark glens, and again winding under hoary forest trees that grow on uplands; now giving glimpses of brook or pool, and now of grassy glade on which some group of century-old larches slant their shadows; one may hear noises of chattering squirrels, of whirring pheasants, of roaring wood-streams, of pines soughing in the wind; and at last, going up a side-path, the vis

itor will come to the door of a Hermitage, bedded in densest mass of foliage. Fifty years ago-to a month-the guide opened that door for me, entered with me, and closed it behind us. I then observed that the whole inner surface of the door was one great mirror, and that there were other mirrors around; while directly opposite was a life-size painting of Ossian fingering his harp; and as I was scanning the details of this picture, the guide touched some hidden spring; Ossian straightway disappeared, sliding into the wall, and through the chasm one looked out upon clouds of spray, behind which an Alpine water-fall with roar and foam plunged down sheer forty feet into a seething pool below. The water-fall through an artful collocation of mirrors seemed to pour down behind you as well; and from the ceiling to pour down above you, and to gird you all about with its din and splash and spray. With the cliffs and the pine boughs it made a pretty grouping of Ossianic charms; and I am sorry to hear that since 1869 or thereabout, the Hermitage, by reason of some vandal outrage, has wholly disappeared.

The only memorial the traveller will find now in that region of the Ossianic harping, of which we spoke in the last chapter, is the Macpherson Stone, which some twenty-five miles farther northward, on the Highland trail, peers out from green copses in the upper valley of the Spey.

I spoke also in our last talk of the literary ferment that had declared itself, and was in active progress along the Scottish border, and in Edinboro'. We had somewhat to say of the poet Crabbe, and of his long and successful poems-now little read; and of those other poems by Cowper, some of which will be always read, and which, when their art shall grow old-fashioned and out of date, will show a tender humanity and a kindly purpose, which I trust will never go out of date.

Parson White.

White of Selborne.

You will remember that we found both of the last-named poets in the country; and that their work concerned itself largely with country life and with country scenes. And now we sidle into the country again, for our first studies to-day;-into the county of Hampshire, where lived, toward the close of the last century, two personages-not far apart in that pleasant region of rolling downs; unknown to each other; their ages, indeed, differing by more than a score of years; but both leaving books you ought to know something about.

The first of these personages was a quiet clergyman[1] of very simple tastes and simple habits, who lived in a beautiful parsonage-still standing, and still overgrown with ivies and banked about with great waving heaps of foliage-where he wrote The Natural History of Selborne. It is not a formal book or an ambitious book; it is simply a bundle of short letters extending over dates that cover twenty years in their stretch; and yet the book is so small you could carry it in your pocket. Its title describes the book; it tells what this quiet old gentleman saw and learned through twenty odd years of observation, about the birds, the beasts, the fishes, the trees, the flowers, the storms, the sunshine and the clouds of that little country parish of Selborne. And yet that simple story is told with such easy frankness, such delicacy, such simplicity, such truthfulness, such tender feeling for all God's creatures, whether beast or bird, that the little book has become almost as much a classic as Walton's Complete Angler; and the name of Gilbert White, which scarce a hundred Londoners knew when he died, is now known to every well-equipped English library everywhere. I have compared it with Walton's Complete Angler, though it has not the old fisherman's dalliance with the muses; nor has it much literary suggestiveness. There are no milkmaids courtesying to its periods, nor any songs, except those of the birds. Good old Parson White is simpler (if maybe); he is more homely; he is more direct; and by his tender particularity of detail he has given to the winged and creeping creatures of his pleasant Hampshire downs the freedom of all lands.

It is true, indeed-as I have said in another connection-that we Americans do not altogether recognize his chaffinches and his titlarks; his daws and his fern-owl are strange to us; and his robin red-breast-though undoubtedly the same which in our nursery days flitted around the dead "Children in the Wood" (while tears stood in our eyes) and

"Painfully

Did cover them with leaves,"

is by no means our American red-breast. For one, I wish it were otherwise; I wish with all my heart that I could identify the old pitying, feathered mourners in the British wood, with the rollicking, joyous singer who perches every sunrise, through all the spring, upon some near tree, within stone's throw of my window, and stirs the dewy air with his loud bravura.

Another noticeable thing about this old country parson is his freedom from all the artifices and buckram and abbreviations of learning, so that he is delightfully comprehensible by everybody. If only we could have an edition of Gray's Botany-for instance-with some ten lines of Parson White's homely descriptive English about the height and bigness, and color and habit of the flowers, instead of symbols and Latin genealogies and scholastic reticence-what a God-send it would be to the average country gentleman or country woman!

I want specially to call the attention of those young people in whose interest I am supposed to talk-to that homely truthfulness, and unabating care of this old gentleman, as giving value to a book or to any literary work whatever. They are not qualities, to be sure, which of themselves carry performance to a high poetic level; but they are qualities which give to it practical and picturesque values, and which-well laid in-will make work survive.

If I were to undertake on any occasion the direction of the composition-writing of young people, I should surely counsel painstaking and minute description of homely natural objects. Nature is better than millinery. Yet out of ten young ladies of average culture you shall be able to pick nine who shall tell a listener flowingly of the last new dress she has seen, and the stuff, and the train, and the lace, and the sleeves, and the trimmings, and all the mysteries of its fit-to one who shall give a simple, clear-drawn, and intelligible account of a new flower, or new tree, or a strange bird. Thus you will perceive that I have made of this old gentleman-whom I greatly respect-a stalking horse, to fire a sermon at my readers; and I am strongly of opinion that there are a great many country clergymen of our time and day, who, if they would bring old Parson White's zeal to the encouragement of a love and a study of natural objects, would do as much thereby to humanize and Christianize the younger members of their flocks as they can possibly do by Vanity Fairs or parochial oyster suppers.

The modest house of Gilbert White[2] was occupied very many years by the venerable Professor Bell, late president of the Linnean Society, who died in 1880. The study of the old naturalist remained long as the master left it; his oaken book-case was still there; so was the thermometer attached to the shelves by which he made his observations; his dial by which he counted the hours stands at the foot of the garden; and in the churchyard near by is his grave; while within the quaint old church, to the right of the altar, is a tablet in his honor; and in his honor, too, all the birds of Selborne will sing night and morning year after year.

A Hampshire Novelist.

Jane Austen.

And now for that other Hampshire personage, of whom I gave you a hint, as being also guiltless of London life and almost of London acquaintances; it is a lady now of whom I have to speak,[3] and one who deserves to be well known. She lived, when her books were published, only three or more miles away from Selborne, across the hills northward-at the village of Chawton, which lies upon the old coach road from Farnham to Winchester. Miss Austen was much younger-as I have said-than our old friend the parson; indeed she was only beginning to try her pen when Gilbert White was ready to lay his down. She had all his simplicities of treatment and all his acuteness of observation-to which she added a charming humor and large dramatic power; but her subjects were men and women, and not birds. She wrote many good old-fashioned novels which people read now for their light and delicate touches, their happy characterizations, their charming play of humor, and their lack of exaggeration. She makes you slip into easy acquaintance with the people of her books as if they lived next door, and would be pulling at your bell to-morrow, or to-night. And you never confound them; by the mere sound of their voices you know which is Ellinor, and which is Marianne; and as for the disagreeable people in her stories, they are just as honestly and naturally disagreeable as any neighbor you could name-whether by talking too much, or making puns, or prying into your private affairs.

Walter Scott, who read her books over and over, says, "That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with." Macaulay, too, admired her intensely; ventured even to speak of her amazing, effective naturalness-in the same paragraph with Shakespeare. Miss Mitford confided to a young niece of the authoress, that "she would give her hand," if she could write a story like Miss Austen. We may not and must not doubt her quality and her genius, whatever old-time stiffness we may find in her conversations. One book of hers at least you should read, if only to learn her manner; and as you read it remember that it was written by a young woman who had passed nearly her whole life in Hampshire-who knew scarce any of the literary people of the day; who had only made chance visits to London, and a stay of some four years in the lively city of Bath. She was very winning and beautiful-if her portrait[4] is to be relied upon-with a piquant, mischievous expression-looking very capable of making a great many hearts ache, beside those which ache in her books.

It would be impossible to cite fragments from her stories that would give any adequate notion of her manner and accomplishment; it would be very like showing the feather of a bird, to give an idea of its swoop of wing. Perhaps Pride and Prejudice, though her first written work, is the one most characteristic. You do not get lost in its sentimental strains; you do not find surfeit of immaculate conduct. There are fine woods and walks; but there is plenty of mud, and bad-going. The very heroines you often want to clutch away from their uncomely surroundings; and as for the elderly Mrs. Bennett, whose tongue is forever at its "click-clack," you cannot help wishing that she might-innocently-get choked off the scene, and appear no more. But that is not the deft Miss Austen's way; that gossiping, silly, irritating mater familias, goes on to the very end-as such people do in life-making your bile rise; and when the rainbows of felicity come at last to arch over the scenes of Pride and Prejudice, Mrs. Bennett's clacking tongue is still strident, and still reminds you in the strongest possible way, that Miss Austen has been busy with the veriest actualities of life, and not with its pretty, shimmering vapors.

Persuasion is a less interesting book, and less complete than Pride and Prejudice; its heroine, Anne Eliot, is not possessed of very salient qualities; hardly gaining or holding very earnest attention; yet with a quiet sense of duty, and such every-day fulfilment of it, as makes her righteously draw toward her all the triumphs of the little drama; a lost love is reclaimed by these quiet forces, and victory comes to crown her easy gentleness. Northanger Abbey is weaker, but with bold, striking naturalism in it; all the littlenesses and plottings and vain speech of the Bath Pump-Room seem to come to life in its pages; to just such life as we may find about our Cape Mays, and Pequod, and Ocean houses, every blessed summer's day! Miss Austen's earlier novels, which made her reputation, were written before she was twenty-five, and published later, and under many difficulties-anonymously; so she had none of that public incense regaling her, which was set ablaze for the less capable Miss Burney; and it was almost as an unknown, strange, quiet gentlewoman that she went down, in the later years of her life, to the shores of the beautiful Southampton Waters-seeking health there; and again, on the same search to the higher lands of the Hampshire downs-where she died, only forty-two, and lies buried under a black marble slab, which you may find under the vaults of the interesting old Cathedral of Winchester.

The recognition of her high qualities was not so extended in her life-time, as it is now; and thirty years after her death, a visitor to the great Hampshire Cathedral was asked by the respectable verger: "What there was particular about Miss Austen, that so many people should want to see her grave?" Even the most wooden of vergers would hardly ask the question now; her extraordinary quickness and justness of observation astonish every intelligent reader. All the more, since her life was lived within narrow lines; but what she saw, she saw true, and she remembered. That wonderful masterly Shakespearian alertness of mind in seizing upon traits and retaining their relations and colors, is what distinguishes her, as it distinguishes every kindred genius. I can understand how many people cannot overmuch relish the stories of Miss Austen-because they do not relish the people to whom she introduces us; but I cannot understand how any reader can fail to be impressed and electrified by her marvellous photographic reproduction of social shades of conduct. How delightful is that indignation of Sir John Middleton, when he learns of the villainy and falsity of Willoughby. "To think of it! and he had offered the scoundrel one of Follies' puppies!" And then-reflectively-"A pretty man he was too, and owner of one of the finest pointer bitches in England! The devil take him!" What a synopsis of the man's qualities, and of Sir John's measurement of them!

Old Juvenilia.

Sandford & Merton.

I cannot pass from this epoch, without saying somewhat concerning that tide of literature for young people which set in strongly about those times. There was Sandford and Merton, for instance; can it be that the moderns are growing up to maturity without a knowledge of the wise inculcations of that eminently respectable work? Sixty years ago it was a stunning book for all good boys, and for the good sisters of good boys. Whoever was at the head of his class was pretty apt to get Sandford and Merton; whoever had a birthday present was very likely to get Sandford and Merton; if a good aunt was in search of a proper New Year's gift for a lad the bookseller was almost sure to recommend Sandford and Merton; and when a boy went away to school, some considerate friend was very certain to pop a copy of Sandford and Merton into his satchel.

It is in the guise of a great lumbering narrative-supposed to be true-into which are whipped a score or more of little stories, each one capped with a bouncing moral. Thus, there is an ill-natured boy going out for a day's scrimmage, and playing his tricks-on a poor girl, and a blind beggar, and a lame beggar, and a farmer, and a donkey. This goes on very well for awhile; but at last the tables are turned, and he gets bitten by the blind beggar, and beaten by the lame beggar, and thrashed by the farmer, and is thrown by the donkey, and a large dog seizes him by the leg; this latter is printed in capitals, and there is a picture of it. At last, in bed, and with watery eyes, the boy reflects-that "no one can long hurt others with impunity;" so he determined to "behave better for the future." Is it any wonder that those who had access to such instructive tales a half a century ago should have grown up to be excellent men!

This book of Sandford and Merton was written by Thomas Day,[5] an eccentric rich man (the world of to-day would have called him a crank), who had a fine place near to Putney on the Thames, who sympathized strongly with Americans in Revolutionary times; who was also a disciple of Rousseau, and undertook to educate a young girl-two of them in fact, one being a foundling-so that he might have a wife of his own training, after the Rousseau standard; but the young persons did not train as he wished; so he found his mate otherwheres.

Another comfit of a book for young people, but with fewer plums of romance in it, was Evenings at Home by Dr. Aikin and Mrs. Barbauld. I am sure the very name must bring up tender memories to a great many; for it was a current book down to a time when respectable, and even mirth-loving people, did pass their evenings at home, and enjoyed doing so. The book commands even now, in some old-fashioned households, about the same sort of consecration which is given to an antique blue and white china tea-pot-not nearly so fine as the newer French ones-but which by the aid of a little imagination can be put to very pretty simmer of old times and tunes.

Mrs. Barbauld.

Mrs. Barbauld[6] was worthier than this book; she was a sister of Dr. Aikin-had distinction for great beauty in her youth; married a French clergyman of small parts and weak mind, whose intellect, in his later years, went wholly awry and made her home a martyrdom for her, against which she struggled bravely. That home was for a time out at Hampstead, only a half hour's drive from London, and she knew people worth knowing there; Fox and Johnson among the rest-though Johnson did give her a big slap for marrying as she did and for teaching an infant school.[7] She wrote poetry too, one verse at least which Wordsworth greatly admired, and with condescension declared that he would have liked to be the author of such a verse himself. I cite the verse (with some of the context), which is from an apostrophe to Life; doubtless suggested by the

"Animula, vagula, blandula"

of Adrian, to which allusion has been made in a previous chapter; but the good woman's evolution of the thought is curiously different from that of Pope:-

"Life! I know not what thou art.

But know that thou and I must part;

And when, or how, or where we met,

I own to me's a secret yet.

But this I know, when thou art fled

Where'er they lay these limbs, this head,

No clod so valueless shall be

As all that then remains of me.

O whither, whither dost thou fly,

Where bend unseen thy trackless course,

And in this strange divorce,

Ah, tell where I must seek this compound I?

*****

Life! we've been long together,

Through pleasant and through cloudy weather;

'Tis hard to part when friends are dear;

Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear;

Then-steal away, give little warning,

Choose thine own time;

Say not-Good night; but in some brighter clime

Bid me-Good morning."

I cannot part from this excellent old friend of British boys, without calling to mind her ardent Whiggism, and her very pronounced advocacy of the American cause, in her last poem of Eighteen hundred and eleven; the republican sympathies alienated a good many of her Tory friends, and brought to her temporary disrepute. Wherefor, I think, patriotic American boys may, on some coming fourth of July, fling their caps into the air for the kindly, brave-speaking Mrs. Barbauld, and for her Evenings at Home!

Miss Edgeworth.

An Irish story-teller.

You may be sure that I have not forgotten Miss Edgeworth, who was a good friend of Mrs. Barbauld, and who scored Dr. Johnson and Boswell too, for the printing of their slurs upon Miss Aikin.[8]

I suspect it would not be an easy task to bring young people, nowadays, to much enthusiasm about Miss Edgeworth[9] and her books; and yet if I were to tell all that "we fellows" used to think about her when her Popular Tales, and her delightful Parent's Assistant, with its stories exactly of the right length-about Lazy Lawrence, and Simple Susan, and the False Key, and Tarlton-were in vogue, I am afraid you would give me very little credit for critical sagacity. A most proper and interesting old lady we reckoned her, and do still. I for one never counted on her being young; it seemed to me that she must have been born straight into the severities of middle age and of story-telling. I could never imagine her at a game of romps, or buying candies on the sly. Though I had never seen her portrait-and no one else, for that matter-yet I knew the face-as well as that of my own grandmother; and what a good, kind, serene, motherly face it was! There was dignity in it, however; no boy would have thought of approaching her without a study of his deportment; he would see to it that his shoe-lacings were tied and his waistcoat buttons all in place-else, a shake of the head that would have made the cap-strings, and the frisette, and the starched ruffles shiver. But we must not speak lightly of the authoress, to whom thousands of elderly people owe so much of instruction and of entertainment.

Miss Edgeworth.

She was the daughter of an Irish gentleman who made a runaway match at Gretna Green, Maria Edgeworth being a child of that irregular marriage; and her father being widowed shortly after, married three other wives[10] successively, whose children filled the great house at Edgeworthtown in Ireland, where the authoress grew up (though born in England), and where she came to that knowledge of Irish character and habit which gives distinction and the greatest charm to her books.

Scott read them gleefully and admiringly, and as he himself confesses, took a hint from them, to put Scottish character into story, as this English-Irish lady had put Irish character into hers; and he says in his first outspoken preface to the Waverley series-that Miss Edgeworth in "making the English familiar with the character of their gay and kind-hearted neighbors may truly be said to have done more toward completing the union than perhaps all the legislative enactments by which it has been followed up." Such laurels were enough for her fame-did not braver ones grow out of the thumb-worn edges of her books. I think it would be safe to distrust the honor and directness of purpose of any boy or man who, after reading-has either scorn or dread of Maria Edgeworth.

One will not find startling things in her writing; nor will you find great brilliancy of execution-nor the pretty banter and delicate English humor, and finer touches which belong to Miss Austen: but you will find orderly progress and a good orderly story-illuminated by flashes of Irish wit, and glowing through and through with the kindness of a heart which never saw suffering without sympathy, and never any joys of even the most vulgar, without a tender satisfaction. Add to this a shrewd common sense-which never lost its way in romantic pitfalls, and an unblinking honesty, and charity of purpose-always making itself felt, and always driving a nail-and you have an array of qualities which will, I think, keep good Miss Edgeworth's name alive for a long period to come. Few people will have the courage to invest in the whole of her score of volumes octavo. It is hardly to be advised; but you may wisely choose a sprinkling of them; her Frank, for instance-her Rackrent-her Ormond, and a volume or two of her shorter tales, which will bravely hold their own amongst all the goody books of a later generation.

Two specimens of that Irish humor, which she is so apt at reporting, and which shine by their pretty flicker of unconsciousness, I must cite: the first is that of the politician-a charming type of our municipal Milesians-who resented highly his non-appointment to some fat place, after unwearied support of the government, "against his conscience, in a most honorable manner." The second is that of the hopeful old Irish dame, who trusted she might die upon a fête day, when the gates of Heaven were opened wide, and a poor "body might slip in unbeknownst."

For our good friend, Miss Edgeworth, we believe that those gates were wide open, on every day of the year.

Some Early Romanticism.

Early Romanticism.

While that clever and attractive Miss Jane Austen was engaged upon her stories in her quiet study in Steventon, Hampshire, there was opened upon England, by certain other ladies, a new sluice of literature-from which some phosphorescent sparkles are still distinguishable in our time-in brilliant red and yellow covers. I allude to the Children of the Abbey, by Miss Roche[11] (an Irish-French lady, who lived in Waterford, Ireland), to Thaddeus of Warsaw and the Scottish Chiefs by Miss Jane Porter, and the Mysteries of Udolpho by Mrs. Radcliffe, of London.[12]

Very few middle-aged readers have passed their lives without hearing of these books; the chances are strong that most of such readers have dipped into them; and if people dipped at all, before the age of fourteen, they were pretty apt to undergo complete submergence.

From ten to twelve was-as nearly as I now recollect-about the susceptible age for the Children of the Abbey; and if the book came into the hands of one of a bevy of boys or girls, in such tender years, it was pretty apt to run through them all, eruptively-like measles.

It was a book that even young people had an inclination to put under cover, if detected or liable to be detected in the reading of it; and elderly people so caught were understood to be only "glancing at it;" the sentiment is so very profuse and gushing. None of us like to make a show of our allegiance to Master Cupid. Miss Roche wrote other books-but none beside the Children of the Abbey have come down to us in the yellow and red of sixpenny form; for which we ought to be thankful.

Thaddeus of Warsaw had more excuse in the expression of tender sympathies for Poland and all Polish people, at a crisis in the history of that unfortunate kingdom. The success of the book was immense. Kosciusko sent his portrait and a medal to the author; she was made member of foreign societies, received gold crosses of honor; and oddly enough, even from America there came, under the guiding providence of Mr. John Harper,[13] then I believe Mayor of the City of New York, an elegant carved armchair, trimmed with crimson plush, to testify "the admiring gratitude of the American people" to the author of Thaddeus of Warsaw. The book, by its amazing popularity, and by the entertaining way in which it marshals its romantic effulgencies in favor of a great cause, may very naturally suggest that other, later and larger enlistment of all the forces of good story-telling, which-fifty years thereafter-in the hands of an American lady (Mrs. Stowe) contributed to a larger cause, and with more abiding results.

The Scottish Chiefs has less of gusto than the Polish novel-and as I took occasion to say when we were at that date of Scottish history-is full of bad anachronisms, and of historical untruths. Yet there is a good bracing air of the Highlands in parts of it, and an ebullient martial din of broadswords and of gathering clans which go far to redeem its maudlin sentiment. Mrs. Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho had more of the conventionally artistic qualities than either of those last named, though never so infectiously popular. There are gloomy Italian chieftains in it, splendid dark fellows with swords and pistols and plumes to match; and there are purple sunsets and massive castles with secret passages and stairs; and marks of bloody fingers, and papers that are to be signed-or not signed; and one ineffable young lady-Emily, I think, is her name-who by her spiritual presence and lovely features serves to light up all the gloom and the mystery and makes the castle, and the dark woods, and the reeking vaults, and the secret paths all blossom like a rose. I cannot advise the reading of the book.

Vathek.

Wm. Beckford.

When poor Chatterton-of whom we had speech not far back-was near to starving in London, he made one desperate effort to secure the favor and patronage of the Lord Mayor of the city, who was a very rich West India merchant, by the name of Beckford. Chatterton did gain an interview; did get promise of aid, and win strongly upon the good will of the Lord Mayor; but unfortunately his honor died only a few days thereafter. Had he lived, the young poet might have had a totally different career; and had he lived, the only son and heir of this benevolent Mayor,-William Beckford,[14] then a boy of ten,-would have had a different bringing up. At twenty, this youth printed-though he did not publish-some journals of continental travel which he had conducted in the spirit and with the large accompaniments of a young man who loves the splendor of life, and who had at command an annual revenue of six hundred thousand dollars, at that day said to be the largest moneyed income in England. What a little fragment of this sum which was squandered upon that splendid trail of travel through Europe would have made poor Chatterton happy! But young Beckford was by no means a brainless spendthrift; he had strong intellectual aptitudes; was a scholar in a certain limited yet true sense; and when twenty-two only, had written (in French) that strange, weird romance of Vathek; well worth your reading on a spare day, and which in its English version has made his fame, and keeps his name alive, now that his great houses and moneys are known and reverenced no more.

It is an Eastern story, with all the glow, color, and splendors of the days of the good Haroun al Raschid in it. There are crime and love in it too; and phantoms and beautiful women, and terrific punishment of the wicked. Vathek, the hero, who might be Beckford himself, wanders through a world of delights, where evil phantoms and genii assail him, and fascinating maidens allure him; and after adventures full of escapes and dangers and feastings, in which he listens to the melody of lutes and quaffs the delicious wine of Schiraz, he reaches at last, in company with the lovely Mironihar, the great hall of Eblis; here we come to something horrific and Dantesque-something which I am sure had its abiding influence upon the work of Edgar Poe.

"The place, though roofed with a vaulted ceiling, was so spacious and lofty that at first they took it for an immeasurable plain. But their eyes at length growing familiar with the grandeur of surrounding objects, they extended their view to those at a distance, and discovered rows of columns and arcades which gradually diminished till they terminated in a point radiant as the sun when he darts his last beams athwart the ocean.... The pavement, which was strewed over with gold-dust and saffron, exhaled so subtle an odor as almost overpowered them.... In the midst of this immense hall a vast multitude was incessantly passing, who severally kept their right hands on their hearts, without once regarding anything around them. They had all the livid paleness of death. Their eyes deep sunk in their sockets, resembled those phosphoric meteors that glimmer by night in places of interment."

And afterward, when a royal sufferer, who from livid lips had made warning exhortation to these wanderers, lifts his right hand in supplication, Vathek sees-through his bosom which was "transparent as crystal"-his heart enveloped in flames. Perhaps Hawthorne, in certain passages of the Scarlet Letter, may have had these red, burning hearts of this famous Hall of Eblis in mind.

Beckford wrote also a very interesting account of certain religious houses in Portugal which were the wonder of old days and are a wonder now. At Cintra, the picturesque suburb of Lisbon, he established a great Moorish country house within sight of the sea. Byron gives a glimpse of this in Childe Harold:-

"Here didst thou dwell, here schemes of pleasure plan,

Beneath yon mountain's ever beauteous brow;

But now, as if a thing unblest by man,

Thy fairy dwelling is as lone as thou!

Here giant weeds a passage scarce allow

To halls deserted, portals gaping wide.

Fresh lessons to the thinking bosom, how

Vain are the pleasaunces on earth supplied,

Swept into wrecks anon by Time's ungentle tide."

Byron would now have to mend his description, since the estate is at present owned by a London merchant, who has bought a title from the weak king-folk of Portugal, and keeps the great house in Pimlico order. It is one of the show places of Cintra; and if Moorish domes, and marble halls, and sculpture delicate as that of the Alhambra, and fountains, and palms, and oranges, and bowers of roses, and century-old oaks, and cliffs, and wooded dells, and far-off sight of sails from the Bay of Biscay are deserving of show, surely this old palace of the rich Englishman is.

Another palace-for Beckford had an architectural mania-was built at Fonthill, the place of his birth, not far east of Salisbury. Here was a great ancestral estate, around which he caused to be erected a huge wall of masonry, some ten or twelve miles in length, to secure privacy and protect his birds. Within he built courts, towers, and halls-some six hundred men often working together night and day on these constructions-which he equipped with the rare and munificent spoils brought back from his travel. To this Fairy land, however, Byron's lament would better apply; the walls are down and the towers have fallen; the property is divided; only here and there and blended with new structures and new offices can you see traces of the old architectural extravagance. The spoiled plantations of Jamaica-whence the Vathek revenue mostly came-brought the change; enough, however, remained for the erection of a costly home in Bath, portions of which may still be seen.

A daughter of Beckford's became Duchess of Hamilton; another daughter, who declined Ducal overtures which the father favored, was treated therefor with severities that would have become an Eastern caliph-for which, maybe, he now, like the poor creatures of Eblis Hall, is holding his right hand over "a burning heart."

Robert Burns.

Burns.

We go now out of England, northward of the Solway, to find that peasant poet[15] at whose career I hinted in the last chapter, and whose burst of Scotch song was a new wakening for that kingdom of the highlands and the moors. I dare not, and will not speak critically of his verses; there they are-in their little budget of gilt-bound, or paper-bound leaves; rhythmic, tender, coarse, glowing, burning, with a grip in many of them at our heart-strings which we may not and cannot shake off. To tell you about these poems and of their special melodies would be like taking you to the sea and telling you how the waves gather and roll-with murmurs that you know-along all the shore.

Nor can I hope to tell any more of what will be new to you about his life and fate. We all know that white-washed, low, roadside cottage-a little drive out from the old Scotch town of Ayr-where he was born; we have been there perhaps; we have seen other Scottish peasants boozing there over their ale; and have noted the names scribbled over tables and cupboards and walls to testify to the world's yearnings and to its pilgrimages thither. We know, too, that other low cottage of Mossgiel, where his poor father-a gospel abiding man-made his last struggle against the fates-and who of a Saturday night-

"Collects his spades, his mattocks, and his hoes,

Hoping the morn in ease and rest to spend,

And weary, o'er the moor, his course does homeward bend."

We all know what a brave fight the two Burns boys, Gilbert and Rob, made of it when Death, "the poor man's dearest friend," took off the father; Gilbert the elder; but Robert the brighter and keener-making verselets in the fields which the elder brother approves, and says would "bear to be printed;" and so presently after, the first poor, thin, dingy volume finds it way to the light, and gives to far-away Edinboro' people their earliest hint of this strange, fine, new, human plant which has begun to blossom under the damps of Mossgiel. But the farm life is hard; the poet is wayward; his jolly friends near by who chant his songs are not helpful; his love affairs, of which he has overstock in his young wildness, run to confusion; quarrels threaten; so he books himself with what moneys the thin, dingy volume of poems have brought him, for America.

What if he had come!

But no; one low, wee encouraging voice-the piping answer to those poems-reaches him from Edinboro', and the poet goes thither in his best gear; Dugald Stewart, and Dr. Blacklock the blind poet, and Mackenzie, of whom I have already made mention, all befriend him. The gentlewomen of Edinboro' entertain him, and admire him, and flatter him; and he, in best blue and buff, with his dark, rolling eyes, and lips that command all shapes of language, holds his dignity with these fine ladies of the Northern capital; gives compliments that make them tremble; prints other and fuller edition of his poems; goes northward amongst the highlands-dropping jewels of verse as he goes-to beautiful women, to waterfalls, to noble patrons. The next season in Edinboro', however, is no longer the same; that brilliant series of fêtes and of conquests has gone by; the new lion is too audacious; he shakes his fetters with a bold rage that intimidates. So we find him with some three hundred pounds only, saved out of the new book and the junketings of the Capital, going off to lease quietly the farm of Ellisland, near to Dumfries, and turn ploughman once more.

It is a poor place, but very beautiful; it is in Nithsdale, and the murmur of the river through its wooded banks makes the poet forget the crop of pebbles which every ploughing turns to the top. He is presently in the Excise too (1789): so gets some added pence by the gauging of beer-barrels and looking after frauds upon the revenue; married too-having out of all the loose love-strings, which held him more or less weakly, at last knotted one, which ties the quiet, pretty, womanly, much injured Jean Armour to his hearth and home, forever. And he begins that Ellisland life bravely well; has prayers at night; teaches the "toddlin' wee things" their catechism; has hope and faith, and sings-and sings; and this, amongst other things, was what he sang-

"O, Willie brewed a peck o' maut,

And Bob and Allen cam to see;

Three blither hearts that lee-lang night

Ye wad na find in Christendie.

We are na fou, we're na that fou,

But just a drappie in our e'e;

The cock may craw, the day may daw,

And ay we'll taste the barley bree.

It is the moon, I ken her horn,

That's blinkin in the lift sae hie;

She shines sae bright, to wyle us hame;

But, by my sooth, she'll wait a wee.

The cock may craw, the day may daw,

And aye we'll taste the barley bree."

No wonder the pebbles began to show more and more in the plough-land; no wonder the jolly fellows of Dumfries came oftener and oftener; the long bouts too amongst the hills chilled him; the crops grew smaller and smaller; the "barley bree" better and better; he has no tact at bargaining; a stanza of Tam O'Shanter is worth more than ten plough-days, yet he makes gifts of his best songs. Household affairs go all awry, let poor Jeanie Armour struggle as she may; the cottage palings are down; debts accumulate; and so do those rollicking nights at the Globe, or in a shieling amongst the hills. Yet from out all the impending want, and the gloom, and the desperation, come such sweet notes as these, reaching the ear of humanity everywhere:-

"John Anderson, my jo, John,

We clamb the hill thegither;

And mony a canty day, John,

W've had wi' ane anither:

Now we maun totter down, John,

But hand in hand we'll go,

And sleep thegither at the foot,

John Anderson, my jo."

At last Ellisland must be given up-crops, beasties and all; and never more the wooded banks of Nithsdale shall feel his tread, or hear his chant mingling with the river murmurs. He, and they all-five souls now-just of an age to relish most the woods, the range, the fields, the daisies of Ellisland, must go to one of the foulest and least attractive streets of Dumfries, and to a home as little attractive as the street. Fifty years thereafter I went over that house and found it small, pinched, and pitifully meagre in all its appointments; twenty years later, Hawthorne speaks of both house and street as filthy. What could or should supply the place now-to the peasant poet-of the fields, the open sky, the gentle fret and murmurs of the streams of Nithsdale?

The foul fiends who taunted him in the woods now lay hold upon him in earnest; every day his fame is flying over straits and seas; every day his poems, old and new, are planting themselves in fresh hearts and brains; every day his wild passions are dealing him back-handed blows. Old neighbors have to pass him by; modest women look away; he has forfeited social position; and I suspect, welcomed in those days of July, 1796, the approaches of the disease which he knew was sapping his life:-

"Oh, Martinmas wind! when wilt thou blaw

And shake the dead leaves frae the tree?

Oh gentle death! when wilt thou come

And tak a life that wearies me?"

And it comes, in that dismal, miserable upper chamber that you can see when you go there;-his wife ill; his little children wandering aimlessly about; it comes sharply; he is on his back-"uneasy" the nurse said, and "chafing"; when suddenly by a great effort-as if at last he would shake off all the beleaguerments of sense, and the haunting phantoms swarming about him-he rallied all his powers-rose to his full height from the bed-tottered for a moment, then fell prone forward a dead man.

This was in the month of July, 1796; Burns being then only thirty-seven. Walter Scott, a young fellow of twenty-five, living in Edinboro', had just printed his translation of Leonora. Wordsworth-unknown save for a thin booklet of indifferent verse-was living down in Dorsetshire, enjoying the "winding wood-walks green," with that sister Dorothy, who "added sunshine to his daylight." These two had not as yet made the acquaintance of that coming man, S. T. Coleridge, who is living at Clevedon, over by Bristol Channel, with that newly married wife, who has decoyed him from his schemes of American migration; and the poet of the Ancient Mariner (as yet unwritten) has published his little booklet with Mr. Cottle, of Bristol, in which are some modest verses signed C. L. And Charles Lamb (for whom those initials stand) is just now in his twenty-first year, and is living in humble lodgings in Little Queen Street, London, from which he writes to Coleridge, saying that "Burns was a God of my idolatry." And in that very year (1796) the dismalest of tragedies is to overshadow those humble lodgings of Little Queen Street. Of this and of Coleridge and of Wordsworth, we shall have somewhat to say in the chapter we open upon next.

[1] Gilbert White, b. 1720; d. 1793. Oxford man; Fellow in 1744; curate of Faringdon 1758; after 1784, at Selborne.

[2] A charmingly illustrated edition of The Natural History of Selborne-showing his ivy-covered home and other objects of interest, was published by Macmillan & Co. in 1875 (edited by Frank Buckland). I am indebted for a copy to my friend, Wm. Robinson, of the London Garden.

[3] Jane Austen, b. 1775; d. 1817. Sense and Sensibility, published 1811. Life was written by her nephew J. Austen-Leigh. Her Letters, edited by Lord Brabourne, 1884.

[4] Not the dreadful, seamy, photographic reproduction of an old oil painting that Lord Brabourne gives, which must be wholly unfair to her; but the earlier engravings.

[5] Thomas Day, b. 1748; d. 1789. Oxford man; married, 1778; Sandford and Merton published 1783.

[6] Mrs. Barbauld (Anna Letitia Aikin), b. 1743; d. 1825. There is a pleasant sketch of Mrs. Barbauld and (for a wonder) an approving and commendatory notice of her in Miss Martineau's Autobiography, vol. i., pp. 228-39.

Miss Martineau's father, it appears, had been a pupil of Mrs. Barbauld.

[7] Boswell's Johnson, vol. vi., p. 28.

[8] The circumstances are given in Crabb Robinson's Diary.

[9] Maria Edgeworth, b. 1767; d. 1849. First volume of Parent's Assistant was published, 1796; Castle Rackrent, 1800; Popular Tales, 1804.

[10] Miss Honora Sneyd among them, in 1773.

[11] Maria Regina Roche, b. 1766; d. 1845. The Grand Dict. Universal du XIX. Siècle enumerates no less than thirteen other romances by her-in forty odd volumes, all translated, and now utterly forgotten!

[12] Mrs. Radcliffe (Ann Ward), b. 1764; d. 1823; Romance of the Forest, 1791; Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794.

Miss Jane Porter, b. 1776; d. 1850; Thaddeus of Warsaw, published 1803; Scottish Chiefs, 1810; Sir Edward Seaward's Narrative (in concert with her sister Anna Maria Porter), published in 1826.

[13] Senior member of the old firm of J. & J. Harper, 82 Cliff Street.

[14] William Beckford, b. 1759; d. 1844. Vathek, published (in French), 1787; better known by an unauthentic English translation, published 1784.

[15] Robert Burns, b. 1759; d. 1796. Poems published 1786. First collected edition, 1800; Cunningham edition, with life, in 1834, 4 vols.