English Lands Letters and Kings

We open in this book upon times-belonging to the earlier quarter of the eighteenth century-when, upon the Continent of Europe, Peter the Great was stamping out sites for cities in the bogs by the Finland gulf-when that mad-cap Swedish King Charles XII. was cutting his bloody swathe through Poland-when Louis XIV., tired at last of wars, and more tired of Marlborough, was nearing the end of his magnificent career, and when King Mammon was making ready his huge bloat of the Mississippi Bubble for France and of the South Sea Company for England.

Queen Anne, that great lady of the abounding ringlets-so kindly and so weak-was now free from the clutch of Sara of "Blenheim"; and veering sometimes, under Harleyan influences, toward her half-brother the "Pretender;" and other times under persuasion of such as Somers, favoring her cousins of Hanover.

The visitor to London in those times could have taken the "Silent way" along the river-a shilling for two oarsmen and sixpence for a "scull"-from the Bridge to Limehouse; or he might encounter, along the Strand, sooty chimney sweepers and noisy venders of eggs and butter, with high-piled baskets upon their heads. Sir Roger de Coverley coming to town-if we may believe Addison-cannot sleep the first week by reason of the street cries; while Will Honeycomb, on the other hand, likens these cries to songs of nightingales: always and everywhere this difference of ear, between those who love the country and those who love the towns!

There were lumbering hackney cabs in London streets to be hired at ten shillings a day (of twelve hours) for those who preferred this to the "Silent way"; and there were grand coaches for those who could pay for such display; evidences of wealth were growing year by year. The Venetian Republic, now in its last days of power, made a brave if false show upon London streets in those times. Luttrel[1] says, under date of May, 1707:-

"Yesterday the Vn ambassadors made their public entry thro' the city to Somerset House in great state and splendor; their coach of state embroidered with gold, and the richest that ever was seen in England: They had two with 8 horses, and eight with 6 horses, trimmed very fine with ribbons; 48 footmen in blue velvet covered with gold lace; 24 gentlemen and pages on horseback with feathers in their hats, etc."

Dr. Swift, four years after, writes to Stella-"The Venetian coach is the most monstrous, huge, fine, rich, gilt thing I ever saw."

An Irish Bishop.

It could not have been more than two or three years after this sight of the Venetian Coach that Dean Swift introduced to his friend Miss Vanhomrigh (Vanessa) a young protégé of his, whom he had known at Dublin, and who had made a great reputation there among thinkers, by an ingenious Theory of Vision, and by his eloquent advocacy of an Idealism, which he believed would cut away all standing ground for the materialism that threatened Christian Faith.

Bishop Berkeley.

This protégé was George Berkeley[2]-afterward Dean and Bishop-a most engaging and winning person then and always. Addison befriended this young philosopher, who wrote half a dozen papers for Steele's Guardian, with much of Steele's grace in them, and more than Steele's Christian earnestness. He went over to the Continent in the wake of a British Ambassador-was four or five years there, variously employed, equipping himself in worldly knowledge, and came back to warn[3] Englishmen against that extravagance and greed for money, which had made possible the South-Sea disaster. New Yorkers might read the warning with profit now. For himself, he comes presently to the Deanship of Derry, and to a considerable legacy from that Miss Vanhomrigh-the acquaintance of an hour-so impressed had she been by Berkeley's promise of good. Nor was the promise ever belied.

With an altruism unusual then, and unusual now, he braved the loss of his Deanship, and current friendships in England, and set his heart, his energies, and his fortune upon a scheme for building up the English colonies in America in ways of Christian living, and of learning. Long before, the devout George Herbert had said that Religion was "ready to pass to the American Strand;" and now Berkeley, fresh from the sight of dearth and decay in Europe, was earnest in the belief that Christian civilization was to win its greatest coming conquests "over seas." His enthusiasms had, for once, carried him into verse, of which a prophetic refrain has tingled in many an American ear:-

Westward the course of Empire takes its way!

The nidus of the good Dean's hopes and schemes lay in a great college which was to be built up in the Summer Islands (Bermuda) where the air "is perpetually fanned and kept cool by sea-breezes." But his stepping-stone on the way thither was Rhode Island; and for the harbor of Newport he sailed, with a few friends, and a newly married wife in the year 1728, after long and weary waiting for a grant, which at last is made good on parchment, but never made good in money.

Berkeley at Newport.

Yet he has faith; and for nearly three years lingers there at his farm of Whitehall (the old house still standing), within sound of the surf that breaks upon the ribbed and glistening sands of Newport beaches. The winter is not so mild as in England, but he "has seen colder ones in Italy." Possibly it may be well to set up the college in Newport rather than the Summer Islands-when the grant comes: but the grant does not come. He makes friends of the farmers about him-of the Quakers, the Methodists; sometimes he preaches at Trinity Church (still there), and his sermons are unctuous with the broadest and most liberal Churchism: "Sad," he says in one, "that Religion, which requires us to love, should become the cause of our hating one another." He corresponds with Samuel Johnson, of Stratford, Ct.;[4] also, possibly, with Mr. Jonathan Edwards, not as yet driven away into the wilds of Western Massachusetts, by theologic contumacies, from his pleasant Northampton home. In the hearing of the pleasant lapse of the waters upon the beaches-while he waits-the Dean sets himself to that pleasant, curious writing of The Minute Philosopher in which he adroitly parries thrusts with the whole tribe of Free Thinkers, and sublimates anew his old and cherished theory-that the spiritual apprehension of material things is the only condition (or cause) of their being.

Children are born to him-and death winnows his small flock-while he waits. John Smibert, who was fellow-voyager with him, painted that little family of the Dean, and the picture is now in possession of Yale College. At last, in despair of receiving the royal grant, he goes back with his family to England (1731). Many of his books,[5] and eventually his Whitehall farm, were bestowed upon Yale; and in that lively institution year after year, there be earnest students who contend still for Berkeley scholarships and Berkeley prizes; while the name of the good Dean is still further kept in American remembrance, by that noble site of a Great Pacific University, which on the Californian shores, looks through a Golden Gate to a pathway still bearing "Westward."

We may well believe that the Dean was disheartened by the breaking down-through no fault of his own-of the great scheme and hope of his life. But he found friendly hands and hearts upon his return to England. Through the influences of Queen Caroline (consort of George II.) he was given the bishopric of Cloyne-seated among the heathery hills which lie northward of the harbor of Queenstown. All the poor people of that region loved him: and who did not?

He was never so profound a thinker, as he was ingenious, subtle, and acute. Though his philosophies all were over-topped by his sweet humanities,[6] yet American students may well cherish his memory, and keep his Alciphron-if not his Hylas and Philonous-upon their book-rolls.

A Scholar.

Richard Bentley

It is certain that in your forays into the literature of these times-if made with any earnestness-you will come upon the name of Dr. Bentley;[7] if nowhere else, then attached to critical footnotes at the bottom of books.

His demolition of the claims, long maintained by an older generation of scholars, respecting certain Epistles of Phalaris, commanded attention at an early stage of his career, and showed ability to cross swords, in a scholastic and bitter way, with such men as Atterbury and Boyle; and-if need were-with such others as Sir William Temple and Dr. Swift.

As early as 1700 he had come to the mastership of Trinity College, Cambridge (where a portrait of him by Thornhill now hangs in the Master's Lodge), a proud position-made prouder by his large hospitalities. He had a sensible wife, courteous "for two"-as many scholars' wives have need to be-and two daughters; one of whom inheriting the father's sharp tongue, made a good many young fellows of the college sing; and made some of them sigh too-marrying at last a certain young Cumberland, who became the father of Richard Cumberland, the poet and dramatist.[8]

Some small chronicler tells us of his preference for port over claret; indeed he loved all intense things, rather than things diluted, and was inaccessible to those finer, milder, delicater graces-whether of wine or poetry-which ripen under long reposeful workings. I spoke of a portrait of him in the Master's Lodge; there was another in Pope's Dunciad-not so flattering:

"The mighty scholiast, whose unwearied pains

Made Horace dull, and humbled Milton's strains;

Turn what they will to verse, their toil is vain,

Critics like me shall make it prose again."

-Lib. iv., 211 et seq.

Bentley's scholarship

He left no great work; yet what he did in lines of classical criticism could not by any possibility have been better done by others. He supplied interpretations-where the world had blundered and stumbled-which blazed their way to unquestioned acceptance. He mastered all the difficulties of language, and wore the mastership with a proud and insolent self-assertion-a very Goliath of learning, with spear like a weaver's beam, and no son of Jesse to lay him low. One wishing to see his slap-dash manner and his amazing command of authorities should read the Dissertation on Phalaris; not a lovable man surely, but prince of all schoolmastery lore: and how rarely we love the schoolmaster! When you meet with that name of Bentley you may safely give it great weight in all scholarly matters, and not so much in matters of taste. Trust him in foot-notes to Aristophanes (a good mate for him!) or to Terence; trust him less in foot-notes to Milton,[9] or even Horace (when he leaves prosody to talk of rhythmic susurrus). You will think furthermore of this Dr. Bentley as living through all his fierce battles of criticisms and of college mastership to an extreme old age, and into days when Swift and Pope and Steele and Addison were all gone-a gray, rugged, persistent, captious old man, with a great, full eye that looked one through and through, and with a short nose, turned up-as if he always scented a false quantity in the air.

Two Doctors.

We approach a doctor now as mild and gentle as Bentley was irritable and pugnacious; a man not often enrolled among literary veterans; treated with scorn, maybe, by the professional critics; and yet this name now brought to your attention is I think, tenderly associated with New Englanders' earliest recollections of rhyme or verse; and it is specially these literary firstlings of the memory that it is well for us to trace and hold in hand. Let us listen for a moment to that old cradle hymn:

"Hush, my dear, lie still and slumber,

Holy angels guard thy bed;

Heavenly blessings without number

Gently falling on thy head."

How the quaint, simple melody lingers yet, coming from far-away times, when it drifted over hundreds of New England homes, which as yet knew not Pinafore nor Mr. Sankey!

Isaac Watts

It is of Dr. Watts's[10] familiar name that I speak: he was the son of a lodging-house keeper in Southampton-in which city a Watts memorial Hall was dedicated as late as 1875. Being a dissenter, he was debarred the advantages of a university education, but he taught dissenters how to put grace into their hymns and sermons; and without being a strong logician, he put such clearness into his Treatise upon Logic as to carry it for a time into the curriculum of Oxford.

Our American poet, Bryant, had great admiration for the familiar Watts's version of the 100th Psalm:-

We'll crowd thy gates with thankful songs,

High as the heavens our voices raise;

And earth, with her ten thousand tongues,

Shall fill thy courts with sounding praise.

And what pious tremors shook the air, when the country choirs in New England meeting-houses lifted up their voices to the old hymn, commencing:-

There is a land of pure delight!

I don't know but these bits of moral music may have been hustled out from modern church primers for something more ?sthetic; but I am sure that a good many white-haired people-of whom I hope to count some among my readers-are carried back pleasantly by the rhythmic jingle of the good Doctor to those child days when hopes were fresh, and holidays a joy, and summers long; and when flowery paths stretched out before us, over which we have gone toiling since-to quite other music than that of Dr. Isaac Watts. And if his songs are gone out of our fine books, and have fallen below the mention of the dilettanti critics, I am the more glad to rescue his name, as that of an honest, devout, hard-working, cultivated man who has woven an immeasurable deal of moral fibre into the web and woof of many generations of men and women.

By the generosity of a friend he was endowed with all the privileges of a beautiful baronial home (Abney Park) where he lived for thirty odd years-reaching almost four score-never forgetting his simplicities, his humilities, his faith, his sweet humanities, and never having done harm, or wished harm, to any of God's creatures; and this cannot be said of many who preach, and of many of whom we are to talk.

Edward Young.

There was another clerical poet of less private worth, who had a very great reputation early in the eighteenth century. Fragments of his sombre-colored and magniloquent Night Thoughts are still frequently encountered in Commonplace Books of Poetry; while some of his picturesque or full-freighted lines, or half lines, have passed into common speech; such as-

"The undevout astronomer is mad;"

"Tired Nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep;"

"Procrastination is the thief of time."

Doctor Young.

You will recognize these as old acquaintances; and you are to credit them to Dr. Edward Young,[11] who was born about two hundred years ago down in Hampshire, son of a father who had been Chaplain to King William III. He was an Oxford man, lived a wild life there-attaching himself to a fast young Duke of Wharton, who led him into many awkward scrapes-and developing an early love, which clung by him through life, for attaching himself to great people. He wrote plays which were not good, and odes which were worse than the plays, but touched off with little jets of terrific adulation:-

"To poets, sacred is a Dorset's name,

Their wonted passport thro' the gates of fame;

It bribes the partial reader into praise

And throws a glory round the sheltered lays."

And so on-to a Compton, a Lady Germaine, a Duke, in nauseous succession. In fact, he seemed incapable of using any colors but gaudy or resplendent ones, and is nothing if not exaggerated, and using heaps of words. Would you hear how he puts Jonah into the whale's mouth?-

"As yawns an earthquake, when imprisoned air

Struggles for vent, and lays the centre bare,

The whale expands his jaws' enormous size.

The prophet views the cavern with surprise,

Measures his monstrous teeth, afar descried,

And rolls his wondering eyes from side to side,

Then takes possession of the spacious seat

And sails secure within the dark retreat."

This is from his poem of the Last Day, which has some of his best work in it. He wrote flattering words of Addison, which Addison could not return in the same measure. He had acquaintance with Pope, with Swift, with Lady Mary Montagu, and others whom he counted worth knowing. He made a vain run for Parliament, and ended by taking church orders somewhat late in life-staying one of his plays,[12] which was just then in rehearsal, as inconsistent with his new duties. He married the elegant widowed daughter of an earl, who died not many years thereafter; and from this affliction, and his brooding over it, came his best-known poem of Night Thoughts. It had great currency in England, and was admired, and translated, and read largely upon the Continent. For many a year, a copy of Young's mournful, magniloquent poem, bound in morocco and gilt-edged, was reckoned one of the most acceptable and worthy gifts to a person in affliction.

Young's Night Thoughts.

But of a surety it has not the same hold upon people in this century that it had in the last. There are eloquent passages in it-passages almost rising to sublimity. His love of superlatives and of wordy exaggerations served him in good stead when he came to talk of the shortness of time, and the length of eternity, and the depth of the grave, and the shadows of death. Amidst these topics he moved on the great sable pinions of his muse with a sweep of wing, and a steadiness of poise, that drew a great many sorrowing and pious souls after him.

This is his Apostrophe to Night:

"O majestic Night!

Nature's great ancestor! Day's elder born!

And fated to survive the transient sun!

By mortals and immortals seen with awe!

A starry crown thy raven brow adorns,

An azure zone thy waist; clouds in Heaven's loom

Wrought through varieties of drapery divine

Thy flowing mantle form, and heaven throughout

Voluminously pour thy pompous train."

There is no well-considered scheme or method in his poems; but his august sorrowing and devout meditations, clothed in a great pomp of language, chase each other over his mind, as vagrant high-sweeping clouds chase over the sky. You may watch and follow them in dreamy hours, with a languid pleasure; but a real sorrow, or a real task do not, I think, find much help in them.

Dr. Young believed, in the moodiness of his grief, that he was going to bid adieu to the world; but he did not; we find him back at court long after the funeral bells had sounded in his verse:-back there too, in search of offices of some sort; bowing obsequiously to those who had gifts in their hands.

Good Mrs. Hannah More tells us that being on one occasion at a Parliamentary party, where some volumes of original letters were shown, she was specially anxious to see one of her dear Dr. Young, for whose Night Thoughts she expressed enthusiastic admiration. Her anxiety was gratified, and she adds that she had

"the mortification to read the most fawning, servile, mendicant letter that was perhaps ever penned by a clergyman, imploring the mistress of George II. to exert her interest for his preferment."

I do not like to tell such things to those who admire the poet; but we are after the truth-first of all. A curious mixture he was, of frugality and piety-of love for reputation and emotional religion. He essayed the writing of some of his tragic episodes in a dark room, "with a candle stuck in a skull;" and such love of claptrap abode with him and qualified most of his work.

Night Thoughts has some unforgetable things in it: there is a lurid splendor in many of the lines, and great imaginative range. But his was an imagination not chastened by a severe taste or held in check by the discretions of an elevated and cultured judgment. Upon the whole, I have more respect for the memory of Dr. Watts, than for the memory of Dr. Young.

Lady Wortley Montagu.

Mary Wortley Montagu.

It is a lady that I next introduce; a very much admired lady in her day; and much admired by many even now. She was correspondent at one time of Dr. Young, as well as of Pope, Steele, and Swift (who was one of the few men she feared). She knew and greatly admired Congreve, had free entrée to the palace in time of George I., could and did translate Epictetus before she was turned of twenty, and wrote letters to her daughter, Lady Bute, that were long held up to young ladies as patterns of epistolary work: of course it is Lady Mary Montagu,[13] of whom I speak.

Lady Mary Montagu.

She was born at Thoresby Park, a little northward of Sherwood Forest in Nottingham; was the petted daughter of the Earl of Kingston, and he introduced her (as the story runs) when only eight years old to that famous Kit-Kat Club, which held its summer sessions out by Hampstead Heath; and the applause that greeted her beauty and sprightliness there, very likely fastened upon her that greed for public triumphs which clung to her all her life. She presided at her father's table, was taught in Greek, Latin, French, Italian; was full of accomplishments, and at twenty-one fell in with Mr. Montagu, similarly accomplished, whom she had a half mind to marry. Her father, however, had other views, against which the self-willed young lady rebelled; she had, however, her hesitations-sometimes flinging a new bait to Mr. Montagu and then showing a coquettish coolness. Finally, between two days, she decides; orders Mr. Montagu to have his chaise and four in readiness and makes a runaway match of it.

Their life for some time is in a suburb of London; where the Lady Mary chafes at the retirement, in a way which is not very agreeable to Mr. Montagu and nettles him; and the nettles creep into their future correspondence. But her husband being appointed (1716) ambassador to Constantinople, her Ladyship sets off delightedly with a retinue of attendants to the shores of the Bosphorus; and writes thence and on her way thither, letters full of piquancy and charm.

To the distinguished Mr. Pope, who has addressed her in almost a lover's strain, she says:

"'Tis certain that I may, if I please, take the fine things you say to me for wit and raillery; and, it may be, it would be taking them right. But I never in my life was half so well disposed to believe you in earnest as I am at present."

And thereupon she goes on to describe a Sunday at the opera in the garden of the Favorita at Vienna.

First of all Englishwomen, she had her son inoculated for the small-pox; this method of prevention being practised at that time in portions of Turkey. Succeeding in this, she brought the method, and strong advocacy of it, back to England with her. It was a bold thing to do, and she always loved boldnesses. It was a humane thing to do, and her humanities were always active. The medical professors looked doubtingly upon it; even the clergy preached against it as contravening the intentions of Providence-just as some zealots, fifty years ago, declared against the employment of chloroform and other an?sthetics. But Lady Mary succeeded in her endeavors, and inoculation became shortly after an approved and adopted practice.

On the return from the Turkish embassy Mr. Montagu, perhaps at the instance of Pope, bought a home for her at Twickenham, a delightful suburb of London, where the poet was then residing, and at the zenith of his fame. His poetic worship at her shrine was renewed with all the old ardor. He gave Sir Godfrey Kneller a commission to paint her portrait in Turkish dress, with which she had done great execution at court balls.

"The picture," says Pope, in a letter to her, "dwells really at my heart, and I have made a perfect passion of preferring your present face to your past."

What the past had been we may infer from this bit of verse, written while she was in the East:

"In vain my structures rise, my gardens grow,

In vain fair Thames reflects the double scenes

Of hanging mountains and of sloping greens.

Joy dwells not there; to happier seats it flies,

And only dwells where Wortley casts her eyes.

What are the gay parterre and checkered shade,

The morning bower, the evening colonnade,

But soft recesses of uneasy minds

To sigh unheard into the passing winds;

So the struck deer in some sequestered part

Lies down to die, the arrow at his heart;

There, stretched unseen, in coverts hid from day

Bleeds drop by drop and pants his life away."

But this worship is not for very long; there comes a quarrel, which is so sharp and bitter, and with such echoes in ode or satire, as to become the scandal of the neighborhood.

What brought it about cannot be so distinctly told. Lady Mary persisted in saying that the crippled sensitive poet had forgotten himself to so impudent an avowal of love that she had repelled him with a shout of laughter, and so turned his heart into gall.

That his heart was all gall toward her thereafter there needed no proof beyond his stinging couplets; and though he denied her tale with unction, he never told a story of his own in respect to this affair which made her character seem the worse, or his the better.

In an evil hour her ladyship (who had written verse already, which for her fame's sake it were better she had never written), undertook, with the aid of her friend Lord Hervey, to reply to the lampoons of Pope. Thereupon the shrinking, keen-smarting poet made other burning verses, by which the Hervey and the Montagu were both put to the torture. It must have been uncomfortable weather for her ladyship at Twickenham in those days. True, Hervey, Peterborough, Bolingbroke, and many of the courtiers were at her service; and she was a favorite of George I.-so far as any respectable woman could be called a favorite of that gross creature; but Pope's shafts of ridicule had a feather of grace about them that carried them straight and far. Mr. Montagu himself was a husband who loved London and his coal-fields without her ladyship, rather better than Twickenham gardens with her ladyship.

Twenty years of gay "outing" she lives, between London and its suburbs; happy, yet not happy; courted and not courted. She writes to her sister Lady Mar[14] in these times:

"Don't you remember how miserable we were in the little parlor at Thoresby? We then thought marrying would put us at once in possession of all we wanted.... One should pluck up a spirit and live upon cordials, when one can have no other nourishment. These are my present endeavors, and I run about though I have five thousand pins and needles running into my heart. I try to console myself with a small damsel [her daughter, afterward Lady Bute] who is at present everything I like; but, alas, she is yet in a white frock. At fourteen she may run away with the butler."

And when this maiden in white had married (better than the mother dared hope), and her son, a vagrant, had gone out into the world and the night, Lady Mary-believing in "cordials"-gathered her robes about her, and took her fading face into the blaze of the Continental cities.

Her reputation for wit, and daring, and beauty has gone before her, and she writes piquantly and with great complacency of the attentions and greetings that meet her in Venice, Florence, and Milan. The appetite for this life grows with feeding; so it becomes virtually a separation from her husband, though cool, business-like letters regularly pass between them. Her son, though grown up into an "accomplished" man, is a scoundrel-drifting about Europe; and when they encounter the mother insists that he shall drop his name, and deny relationship.

Twenty-two years she lives in that Continental exile, writing all the while letters to her daughter, which she loved to compare with the letters of Madame de Sévigné. They are witty and sparkling and have passed into a certain place in English literature, but they are not Sévigné letters. Toward the last of her residence abroad she bought an old ruinous palace in Lombardy, not far from Lago di Guarda, equipped three or four of its rooms, and with a little bevy of servants, lived in retirement-busied with reading, with her ducks, her pigeons, and her garden.

She writes her daughter:

"The active scenes are over at my age; I indulge, with all the art I can, my taste for reading. If I could confine it to valuable books; they are almost as scarce as valuable men.... As I approach a second childhood I endeavor to enter into the pleasures of it.... I am reading an idle tale, not expecting wit or truth in it; and am very glad it is not metaphysics to puzzle my judgment, or history to mislead my opinion."

She is well past sixty and has lost all her old graces when she falls into this misanthropic spirit; has grown strangely neglectful of her person too; she says that for eleven years now she has not looked in a mirror.[15]

But presently Mr. Montagu dies leaving an immense fortune; there are business reasons demanding her return; so she brings back that shrunken, unseemly face, and figure of hers to London; takes a house there and fills it with servants. A cousin, speaking of a call upon her, says:

"It is like the Tower of Babel; a Hungarian servant takes your name at the door, he gives it to an Italian, who delivers it to a Frenchman. The Frenchman to a Swiss, and the Swiss to a Polander; so that by the time you get to her ladyship's presence you have changed your name five times, without the expense of an Act of Parliament."

Horace Walpole pays her a visit, and says, "she was old, dirty, tawdry, and painted." But he did not like her: I do not think she liked him.

Could it be that this old lady-past seventy-with her fine house and her polyglot of service and her flush purse, thought to call back the old trail of flatterers? I do not know. I know very well she did not, and that within a twelvemonth she died.

There is in Lichfield Cathedral a cenotaph representing Beauty weeping the loss of her Preserver; it was placed there by some grateful person to perpetuate the memory of the Lady Mary's benevolence in introducing inoculation; and I think it is the only eulogy to be found on any memorial tablet of this strange, witty, beautiful, indiscreet, studious, unhappy, disappointed woman.

Alexander Pope.

Alexander Pope.

We close our chapter with some mention of that proud, shy, infirm poet of whom we have caught shadowy glimpses in the story of Wortley Montagu. There are scores of little crackling couplets floating about on the lips of people well known as Pope's.[16]

"A wit's a feather and a chief's a rod,

An honest man's the noblest work of God."

"Know then, this truth, eno' for man to know,

Virtue alone is happiness below."

"Honor and shame from no condition rise,

Act well your part; there all the honor lies!"

These must be familiar; and your school must differ from most schools, if some of these or other such, from the same author, have not one time done service as snappers at the end of a composition, or as a bit of decoration in the middle of it.

All know, too, in a general way, that Pope was an infirm man, without perhaps a clear idea of what his infirmity may have been; some of those fierce lampoons already alluded to, which went flying back and forth around the shades of Twickenham, speak of the poet as an ape, a hunchback, a monster. The truth is that he inherited from his father a feeble and crooked frame with some spinal weakness which did give a measure of excuse to the coarse and brutal satirists of those days. His height was much below that of ordinary men, so that cushions or a higher chair were always necessary at table to bring him to the level of his friends; his legs were thin and shrunken and he walked feebly; his countenance was drawn and pinched; yet he had good features, with the delicate complexion of a woman, and a great blue eye, full of expression. His toilette was always a serious affair for him-specially when he went abroad or would appear at his best (as he always wished to do)-involving the assistance of one or two attendants to adjust his paddings, his stays, his canvas jackets, and his twice doubled hose.

I have dwelt with more particularity upon his personal aspect, because it serves to explain, or at least largely to qualify, a great many apparent mysteries in his social career.

He was a London boy, born of Romish parents; his father being a small trader in the city, but retiring, about the time of this weakly boy's birth, to a home at Binfield-a country parish lying between Windsor and Reading, where they show now a grove of beaches which was a favorite haunt of the boy poet. He caught schooling in a hap-hazard way, as Romanists needed to do in those times; but had a quick, big brain, that made up for many shortcomings in teachers. Before twelve he had his Latin with some Greek, and had written verse; and after that age was his own master-sucking literary sweets where he could find them.

Before twelve, too, he had made many London visitations-partly to study French there and partly to find his way to Will's coffee-house, and catch sight of old John Dryden, then drawing near to the end of his worldly honors. And this thin, white-faced, crippled boy looking stealthily up at the master, even then had wild ambitious dreams of the day when he too should have his dignities and lay down the law for English letters.

Out by Binfield he happened upon good friends. Among others a Blount family to which belonged two daughters Blount-sympathetic companions to him then and long afterward; scores of letters, too, there were, to which now Teresa Blount and now Miss Patty Blount were parties: He seeming in those romantic days (upon the edge of Windsor Forest) sometimes in love with one and sometimes the other; and they, in this mixing of letters getting probably as confused as he, and a great deal more vexed; and so came coldness and short-lived quarrelling, making one thing pretty sure-that when a young man or woman begins to play with the different tenses of the verb "I love," a single correspondent is much better than two. However, his friendship with Miss Patty Blount lasted his life out.

An old baronet of the neighborhood, who had been diplomat in James I.'s day, took a fancy to this keen-thoughted lad and made a companion of him. He came to know old Wycherly too, and scores of men about town; even Jacob Tonson, the famous publisher of those times, had written to Pope before he was twenty, asking the privilege of printing certain pastorals of his writing, which had been handed about in the clubs; and thought them-what they really were-astonishing for their literary finish.

His Poetic Methods.

Poetry of Pope.

But young Mr. Pope does not think much of the pastorals, save as stepping-stones; they paved his way to a large acquaintance with the London wits; and it would seem that at one time he thought of living at the dreadful pace of these gentlemen-in bottles and midnight routs; perhaps he tried it for a while; but his feeble frame could stand no such neck-breaking gallop. He can, however, put more of wearisome elaboration and pains-taking skill to his rhymes than any of the verse-makers of his time. He has by nature a mincing step of his own-different as possible from the long, easy lope of Dryden-and that step he perfects by unwearied practice, and word-mongering, until it comes to the wondrous ten-syllabled movement, which for polish, and rhythmic tric-trac is unmatchable.

The Essay on Criticism, Windsor Forest, and the Rape of the Lock, all belonged to those early years at Binfield, and I give a test of each; first, from the Essay:-

"Where'er you find 'the cooling Western breeze,'

In the next line, it 'whispers through the trees:'

If crystal streams 'with pleasing murmurs creep,'

The reader's threatened (not in vain) with 'sleep;'

Then, at the last and only couplet fraught

With some unmeaning thing they call a thought,

A needless Alexandrine ends the song,

That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along."

Next this bustling bit, from Windsor Forest:-

"See, from the brake the whirring pheasant springs

And mounts exulting on triumphant wings.

*****

Ah! what avail his glossy, varying dyes,

His purple crest, and scarlet-circled eyes,

The vivid green his shining plumes unfold,

His painted wings, and breast that flames with gold."

And again, this, from the Rape of the Lock:-

"Just then, Clarissa drew with tempting grace

A two-edged weapon from her shining case;

So ladies in romance assist their knight,

Present the spear, and arm him for the fight,

He takes the gift with reverence, and extends

The little engine on his fingers' ends;

This just behind Belinda's neck he spread,

As o'er the fragrant steams she bends her head.

Swift to the lock a thousand sprites repair,

A thousand wings, by turns, throw back the hair;

And thrice they twitched the diamond in her ear,

Thrice she looked back, and thrice the foe drew near."

And yet again-this worthier excerpt from the same dainty poem:-

"Fair nymphs, and well-drest youths around her shone

But every eye was fixed on her alone.

On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore,

Which Jews might kiss, and infidels adore.

Her lively looks a sprightly mind disclose,

Quick as her eyes, and as unfixed as those;

Favors to none, to all she smiles extends;

Oft she rejects, but never once offends."

Ten pages of extracts would not show better his amazing attention to details-his quick eye-his gifts in word-craft, and his musical exploitation of his themes. I know that this poet works in harness, and has not the free movement of one who gallops under a loose rein; the couplets fetter him; may be they cramp him; but there is a blithe, strong resonance of true metal, in the clinking chains that bind him. No, I do not think that Pope is to be laughed out of court, in our day, or in any day, because he labored at form and polish, or because he loved so much the tingle of a rhyme; I think there was something else that tingled in a good deal that he wrote and will continue to tingle so long as Wit is known by its own name.

The good word spoken for him in the Spectator-the great printed authority in literary matters-brought him into more intimate association with the Literary Guild of that paper; he wrote for the Spectator on several occasions. An early contribution is that of 1712 (November 10th), where he calls attention to the famous verses which the Emperor Adrian spoke on his death-bed; he says:-

"I was in company the other day with five or six men of learning, who agreed that they showed a gayety unworthy that prince in those circumstances;" and he quotes the lines:

Animula vagula, blandula

Hospes Comes que Corporis

Pallidula, rigida, nudula, etc.

"But," he says, "methinks it was by no means a gay, but a very serious soliloquy to his soul at the point of his departure."

And out of this comment and thought of Pope's, contributed casually (if Pope ever did anything casually) to the Spectator, came by and by from the poet's anvil, that immortal hymn we all know,-

"Vital spark of heavenly flame,

Quit, oh quit, this mortal frame;

Trembling, hoping, lingering, flying,

Oh the pain, the bliss of dying!"

The Rape of the Lock.

Rape of the Lock

I cited two significant fragments from the Rape of the Lock, a poem belonging to Pope's early period, and which is reckoned by most poets and critics,[17] as well as biographers, his masterpiece, and a beautiful work of the highest literary art. I recognize the superior authority, but cannot share the exalted admiration; at least, it does not beget such loving approval as brings one back again and again to its perusal. It does not seem to me to furnish very inspiring reading.

The setting of this little poem is not large; the story is of a stolen lock of hair, and of the resentments that follow; and if one might venture upon a synopsis of so delicate a feat of workmanship, it might run in this way:-Belinda, the despoiled heroine, sleeps; sprites put dreams in her head and give warning of impending woe. "Shock" (her dog) barks and wakes her; she betakes herself to her toilet-the fairy-fingered sylphs assisting:

Some thrid the mazy ringlets of her hair;

Some hang upon the pendants of her ear,

-all pictured like carving on a cherry-stone. At last, fully equipped, she goes to a fête upon the Thames; pretty glimpses of the river scenes follow; a crazy baron covets a lock of Belinda's hair. The zephyrs play; day fades; cards come; crowding sprites pile into the game, and twist all into a fairy cable. The covetous baron snips off a lock of Belinda's hair, while she bends over the tea-pot. The nimble sylphs bring from the "Cave of Spleen" a stock of shrieks, and tears, and megrims. Sir Plume ("of amber snuff-box justly vain") champions Belinda, and demands satisfaction of the ravisher-which he does not win; so the battle rages-"Fans clap, silks rustle, and tough whalebones crack," and in the hurly-burly the stolen lock gets wafted into "lunar spheres," and comet-like, closes the shining tale:

"This lock the muse [thus] consecrates to Fame

And midst the stars inscribes Belinda's name."

Yet Belinda's sovereignty is of an ignoble sort; her tiara made up of pins and pomades; indeed the women all are as small as the sylphs; toy creatures, and creatures of toys; no nobility, in or about them; and very much to make an honest, self-respecting woman of our time fling down the silvery poem with a wearisome distaste.

All this is said with a thorough recognition of its art-its amazing dexterities of verse-its playful leaps of fancy-its bright shimmer of over-nature; and yet those gossamer gnomes seem to me like an intrusion; I cannot forget that they were an afterthought of Pope himself; I cannot bring myself to think of the charming fairy-folk of Fletcher, or of Drayton's Nymphidia, or of the Midsummer Night's Dream wallowing in pomades, and straining at whalebone stays! These live through an eternal frolic in the air; those-of the Rape of the Lock-lie in a literary show-case, like a taxidermist's trophies.

In the sobered time of life, when the iris hues have only fitful play, I think a man goes away from these earlier poems of Pope (if he reads them) with new zest, to those wonderful metric condensations of old truths, which flash and burn along the lines of his moral essays. There could be few more helpful rhetorical lessons, for boy or girl, than the effort to pack some of Pope's stinging couplets, or decades of lines, into an equal number of lines in prose; the difficulties would be great indeed and would vitalize the lesson; and the lesson, I think, would be far fuller of profitable ends, than the old "parsing" exercise, and syntactic analysis and description of sentences according to the nomenclature of Mr. Lindley Murray or of Mr. Somebody-else.

Pope's Homer, and Life at Twickenham.

Homer of Pope.

Notwithstanding his much writing, Pope in those early days under the beeches of Windsor forest, was not winning such financial rewards as his friends thought he deserved. The Spectator did not pay much money for little poetic trifles-such as the Messiah; and Jacob Tonson was the screw which some publishers are. There can be no doubt that the poet, with his fine tastes, felt the restraints of a limited income; his old father, who perhaps did not carry sharp business habits into his retirement, had been compelled to leave the country house of Binfield, and had gone over to a suburban street dwelling near to Chiswick. In this emergency, (if emergency it were,) was it not the oddest thing in the world that his friends should have advised a translation of Homer?

Yet they did; and so this dauntless young fellow, not over-critical in his Greek knowledge, but with an abounding sense of the marvellous beauties that lay in the old Homeric hexameters, sets about his task; and after five years' toil accomplishes it in such a way as makes it probable that there can never be an English Homer that will quite match it. There are juster ones; there are faithfuller ones; but not one that has been so enduringly popular. Steeping himself in the mythologies and the Trojan traditions, he has grafted thereupon his stock of British word-craft: Ajax, Achilles, and the rest range to their places in the martial clank of his couplets, with a life and charm which, if not imbued with Homeric limpidities and melodies, possess an engaging picturesqueness that belongs to few long English epics.

And the poem took: that trenchant Dean Swift strode into the ante-rooms of the great men of Court, and swore that he must have a hundred or a thousand pounds subscribed for the new Homer of Mr. Pope; and he got it; Mr. Pope was the fashion.

Up to that time in the whole history of English literature there had been no such payment for literary wares as accrued to the author of the new Homer-the sum reaching, for both Iliad and Odyssey, some ￡9,000; with which the shrewd poet bought an annuity (cheaper then than now) of some ￡500, and a long lease of the Twickenham house and gardens; where, thereafter, amidst his willows and his grottos, he lived until his death.

The house[18]-if indeed any part be now the same-has been built over and enlarged, and has a jaunty suburban villa pretension that does not look Homeric; but the grotto, or tunnel, which he cut under the high road running parallel with the Thames, and through which he might pass unobserved from garden to garden and from his house to the river, is still to be seen there; and trees of his planting still hang their limbs over the pretty greensward that goes down in gentle slope to the Thames banks. He put the same polish upon his grounds he did upon his verse: his grotto flashed with curious spars, glass jewels, and prismatic tinted shells; his walks were decorously paved and rolled and his turf shorn to a nicety. He entertained there in his thrifty way, watching his butler very sharply, and by reason of his infirmities, was very measured in his wine-drinking. Swift, who used to come and pass days with him, may have made the glasses jingle: and there were other worthy friends who, when they came for a dinner, kept the poet in a tremor of unrest. The Prince of Wales, after the Georges of Hanover had come in, used sometimes to honor the poet with a visit; and the rich and powerful Bolingbroke-what time he lived at Battersea-used to come up in his barge, landing at the garden entrance-as most great visitors did-and discuss with him those faiths, dogmas, truisms, and splendid generalities which afterward took form in the famous Essay on Man.

Though the Twickenham home was on a great high road from London to Teddington and Hampton Court, and the greater high road of the river, it had, like all English suburban places now, its high enclosing walls that gave privacy; and the river shores had their skirting of rhododendrons and willows and great beds of laurestina, so that the weak, misshapen poet might take his walks unobserved. He had his vanities, but he did not love to be pointed at. He carried a mind of extreme sensitiveness under that dwarfed figure; and is mad-maybe, sometimes, with destiny, that has crippled him so; and bites that thin lip of his till the blood starts. But he does not waste force or pride on repinings; he feels an altitude in that supple mind of his which lifts him above the bad lines of portraits or figures. He knows that the ready hand and brain, and the faculty of verse which comes tripping to his tongue, and the wit which flashes through and through his utterance, will make for him-has made for him-a path through whatever beleaguerments of sense, straight up and on to the gates of the Temple of Fame.

Pope's vanities.

We have had many vain men to encounter in these talks of ours-men assured of their own judgment and taste; but not one, I think, as yet, so thoroughly and highly conscious that his cleverness and scholarship and deftness and wit were as sure of their reward as the sun was sure to shine.

I can fancy him pausing after having wrought some splendid score of Homeric lines, which blaze and palpitate with new Greek fire: I can fancy him humming them over to himself-growing heated with the flames that flash and play in them-his slight, frail figure trembling with the rhythmic outburst, and he smiling serenely at a mastery which his will and wit have brought to such supreme pitch of excellence that no handling of English will go beyond it.

His Last Days.

Last days of Pope.

I have spoken of one face-I mean Lady Mary Montagu's-which used sometimes to light up the grotto of Mr. Pope, and have told you how that badly managed friendship went out in a great muddle of sootiness and rage; nor were the mud and the filth, which he used in that direction with such cruel vigor, weapons which he was unused to handling: poor John Dennis, a poet and critic of that day, had been put in a rage over and over. Lord Hervey had been scarified. Blackmore and Phillips and Bentley had caught his stiletto thrusts; even Daniel Defoe had been subject of his sneers; and so had the bland, courteous Addison. This sensitive, weak-limbed man saw offence where other men saw none; and straightway drew out that flashing sword of his and made the blood spurt. Of course there were counter-thrusts, and heavy ones, that caused that poor decrepid figure of his to writhe again-all the more because he pretended a stoicism that felt no such attack. To say that he often made his thrusts without reason, and that much of his satire was dastardly, is saying what all the world knows, and what every admirer of his fine powers must lament. But he had his steady friendships, too, and his tendernesses. Nothing could exceed the kindly consideration and affectionate watchfulness which belonged to his protection and shelter of his old mother, lingering in that poet's faery home of Twickenham till over ninety. A strange, close friendship knit him to Dean Swift, who had seemed incapable of rallying this sensitive man's-or, indeed, any man's-affections. Pope, and Bolingbroke-the brilliant and the courted-were long bound together in very close and friendly communion; the tears of this latter were among the honestest which fell when the poet died. Bishop Warburton, too, was most kindly treated by Pope in all his later years, and to this gentleman most of his books were left. There can be no doubt, also, that the poet felt the tenderest regard for that neighbor of his, Miss Patty Blount, who had grown old beside him, and who used at times to bring her quiet face into the parlors of Twickenham. Pope in his last days would, I think, have seen her oftener-did covertly wish for a sight of that kindly smile, which he had known so long and perhaps had valued more than he had dared to confess. But in those final days she had gone her ways; maybe was grown tired of waiting upon the peevish humors of the poet; certainly was not seen by him more often than a fair neighborly regard would dictate. Yet he left her all his rights there at Twickenham, and much money beside.

Death of Pope.

They say that at the last he complained of seeing things dimly-seeing things, too, which others did not see (as the bystanders told him). "Then, 'twas a vision," he said. Two days thereafter he entered very quietly upon the visions all men see after death; leaving that poor, scathed, misshapen body-I should think gladly-leaving the pleasant home shaded by the willows he had planted; and leaving a few wonderful poems which I am sure will live in literature as long as books are printed.

[1] Narcisse Luttrel: A brief historical Relation of State affairs from September, 1678, to April, 1714.

[2] George Berkeley, b. 1685; d. 1753. His works (3 vols.) and Life and Letters (1 vol.); edited by Fraser, in 1871. See also very interesting monograph on Berkeley, in Professor Tyler's Three Men of Letters, Putnam, 1895.

[3] An essay toward preventing the Ruin of Great Britain, 1721.

[4] Dr. Samuel Johnson, afterward, 1754, first President of King's (now Columbia) College, New York; he was a graduate of Yale; life by Dr. Beardsley.

[5] In 1730, he writes to Samuel Johnson, of Stratford, Ct.: "Pray let me know whether they [the college authorities] would admit the writings of Hooker and Chillingworth to the Library of the College of New Haven?"

[6] One of his last publications was, "Siris: a chain of Philosophical Reflections and inquiries concerning the Virtues of Tar-water." And it is remarkable that its arguments and teeming illustrations have not been laid hold of by our modern venders of Tar-soap.

[7] Richard Bentley, b. 1662; d. 1742. Native of Oulton, Yorkshire. Was first Boyle Lecturer, 1692; Master of Trinity, 1700; Works, edited by Dyce, London, 1836 (only 3 vols. issued of a proposed 8 vol. edition). Life, by Jacob M?hly, Leipsic, 1868.

[8] B. 1732; d. 1811. Best known by his Memoirs, 1806; among his plays is False Impressions, in which appears Scud, the forerunner of Dickens's Alfred Jingle.

[9] All along the foot-notes in a great Quarto of the Paradise Lost (London, 1732) Bentley's critical pyrotechnics flame, and flare; and he closes a bristling preface with this droll caveat;-"I made [these] notes extempore, and put them to the Press as soon as made; without any Apprehension of growing leaner by Censures, or plumper by Commendations."

[10] Isaac Watts, b. 1674; d. 1748. Hor? Lyric?: Memoir by Southey (vol. ix., Sacred Classics: London, 1834). Lowndes (Bib. Manual) says, that up to 1864, there were sold annually 50,000 copies of Watts's Hymns.

[11] B. 1681; d. 1765. Works, with memoir, by J. Mitford. 2 vols., 12mo. London, 1834.

[12] Only staying; since the play (of The Brothers) was brought out in 1753, some twenty years after his establishment in the rectory of Welwyn.

[13] Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, b. 1690 (or 1689?); d. 1762. Works (3 vols.), edited by her great grandson, Lord Wharncliffe: Later edition (1861), with life by Moy Thomas.

[14] Wife of Lord Mar, who was exiled for his engagement in the abortive rebellion of 1715.

[15] Dilke; Papers, etc., vol. ii. pp. 354-5.

[16] Alexander Pope, b. 1688; d. 1744. Editions of his works are numerous. I name those by Bowles and Roscoe, with that of Elwin and Courthope; see also Dilke's Papers of a Critic, Leslie Stephen's Life, and notices by Lowell, Minto, and Mrs. Oliphant.

[17] Lowell, Professor Minto, De Quincey, Hazlitt, Covington, etc. De Quincey says, "It is the most exquisite monument of playful fancy that universal literature offers."

[18] The identity of the house of Pope was destroyed by a lady owner (widow of Dr. Phipps, the Court oculist) in or about 1807. Pope loved landscape gardening and was aided by Kent and Bridgeman. Warburton speaks extravagantly of the poetic graces which he lavished upon his grotto.

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.

It was a little after the middle of the last century that our story opens again. George II., whose virtues and vices were clock-like in their regularities, was on the throne; Queen Caroline, whom he had always abused and always venerated, was in her grave for twelve or more years past.

Outside politics were ripening for that French and English war-in which a Montcalm and a Wolfe figured upon our side the water, and which has been put in picturesque array by Francis Parkman; the geraniums and oleanders were blossoming over the Portuguese grave of Harry Fielding; Thomson had sung his last notes in his Castle of Indolence and was laid to rest-not in Kelso, or Dryburgh, where his body should have mouldered-but in a little Richmond Church, within gunshot of the "Star and Garter." Gray was still studying the scholarly measures of the Bard, in his beloved Cambridge; Horace Walpole playing the élégant was fattening on his revenues at Strawberry Hill; while Dr. Johnson-notwithstanding the Dictionary and the Rambler-had been latterly (1756) in such sore straits as to appeal to his friend Richardson for the loan of a few guineas to save him from jail; and Richardson, fresh then in his triumphs from Clarissa Harlowe and the great Grandison, was not slow to grant the request,[1] and to enjoy all the more his Kingship among the women, in his great house out at Hammersmith.

London streets.

A sharp walk of a quarter of an hour from St. Paul's would, in that time, take one into the green fields that lay in Islington; and beyond, upon the Waltham road, were the hedges, pikes, and quiet paddocks, through which went galloping-at a little later day-that citizen of "credit and renown," John Gilpin, instead of the clattering suburbs that now stretch nearly all the way between Cheapside and the "Bell" at Edmonton.

Of the many bridges which now span the Thames, only two[2] representatives were in existence; the old Westminster was there in its first freshness, and ferrymen quarrelling with it, because it spoiled their carrying trade to Vauxhall and parts adjacent; and the old London Bridge was cumbered by lumbering houses, held up by trusses and cross-beams, while its openings were so low and its piers so many as to make, at certain stages of the tide, furious cascades which drove great wheels geared to cumbrous pumping machinery, to throw up water for the behoof of London citizens. The old Fleet Prison was in existence, and its smudgy stifling air hung over all that low region above which now leap the great arches of the Holborn Viaduct; and round the corner, in the reek and smoke of Fleet Street, half way between the spire of St. Bride's and the spire of St. Clement's Danes-up a grimy court that is, very likely, just as grimy to-day, lived that Leviathan of a man, Dr. Samuel Johnson.

Johnson and Rasselas.

Rasselas.

He had passed through his green days, and the nights when he strolled supperless about London with that poor wretch of a poet Richard Savage. The school at Edial with its three pupils was well behind him; so was the dining behind the screen at Cave's (the bookseller who presided over the Gentleman's Magazine, with St. John's Gate on the cover then, and on the cover now): so was his age of sentiment ended.

His wife Tetty had gone the way of all flesh (1752) and he had mourned her truly: in proof of this may be counted the presence under his roof of a certain old lady, Miss Williams, who is peevish, who is tempestuous, who is blind, who tests the tea with her fingers, who will talk, and then again, she won't talk; yet Johnson befriends her, pensions her-when he has money,-sends home sweetbreads from the tavern for her; and when his friends ask why he tolerates this vixen, he gives the soundest reason that he has-"she was a friend of Tetty; she was with poor Tetty when she died!"

And his brain was as big, or bigger, than his heart; it had made itself felt all over England by long, honest work-by brave, loud speech. He had snubbed the elegant Lord Chesterfield, who would have liked to see his name upon the first page of the great Dictionary. Not an outcast of the neighborhood but had heard of his audacious kindness; not a linkboy but knew him by the chink of his half-pence; not a beggar but had been bettered by his generous dole; not a watchman but knew him by his unwieldy hulk, and his awkward, intrepid walk; and we know him-if we know him at all-not by his Rambler and his Rasselas, so much as by the story of his life. Who rates Rasselas among his or her cherished books of fiction?

What an unlikely, and what a ponderous beginning it has!

"Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow, attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia!"

When, in days long past, I have read thus far in this elephantine novelette to my children, they were pretty apt to explode upon me with-"Please try something else!" Yet this elephantine novelette has a host of excellent and eloquent moral reflections in it, shouldering and elbowing themselves out from its flimsy dress of fiction. Shall I give a hint of the scheme of this old story? An Abyssinian prince living in the middle of a happy valley, walled in by mountains that are beautiful, and watered by rivers that are musical, in the enjoyment of all luxuries, does at last become restless-as so many people do-not so much from a want, as from the want of a want. So he conspires with Imlac, a poet, to escape from the thraldom of complete ease: a sister of the prince and her handmaid steal away with them; and with plenty of jewels the party enter upon their exploration of the ways of outside life. They encounter hermits whose solitude does not cure their pains, and shepherds whose simplicities do not conquer misfortune, and philosophers whose philosophy does not relieve their anxieties, and scholars whose learning does not make them happy.

Imlac, the poet, sums up their findings in saying-"You will rarely meet one who does not think the lot of his neighbor better than his own." This is its whole philosophy. There are interlarded discourses upon learning, and marriage, and death, and riches, which might have been cut from a Rambler or from a sermon. They travel through upper Egypt, and sojourn in the grand Cairo; but there is no shimmer of the desert, and no flash of crescent or scimitar, and no dreamy orientalism; its Eastern sages talk as if they might have thundered their ponderous sentences from the pulpit of St. Bride's. As a finality-if the tale can be said to have any finality-the princess thinks she would like-of all things-Knowledge: the poor handmaid, who has had her little adventure, by being captured by a Bedouin chief, thinks she would like best a convent on some oasis in the desert; while the prince would like a miniature kingdom whose rule he might administer with justice as easily as one might wind a watch; but all agree that, when the Nile flood favors, they will go contentedly back to the happy valley from which they set out upon their wanderings. It is interesting to know that the story was written by Dr. Johnson on the evenings of a single week; and written-before he had come to his pension[3]-to defray the expenses of his mother's funeral; and it is interesting further to know that the magniloquent tale did forge its way into the front rank of readers at a time when Roderick Random and Tom Jones were comparatively fresh books, and only five years after Mr. Richardson had issued from his book-shop under the shadows of St. Bride's, hardly a gunshot away from the house of Johnson, the voluminous history of Sir Charles Grandison.

The Painter and the Club.

Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Among the friends the Doctor made in those days of Ramblers and Idlers was one Joshua Reynolds,[4] some fourteen years the junior of the Doctor, but sedate and thoughtful beyond his age; with an eye, too, for the beautiful faces of young English girls which had never been opened on them before; and doing artist work that is quite different in quality and motive from that of the old stand-by Mr. Hogarth, who not long before this time had been preaching his painted sermons of the Rake's Progress.

Reynolds had made his trip to Italy, and had brought back from Rome, in addition to his studies of Raphael-an affection of the ear-caught, as he always said, in the draughty corridors of the Vatican, which obliged him ever after to carry an ear-trumpet; but his courtesy and grace and precision of speech made the awkwardness forgotten. Looking at the exquisite child's face of his little Penelope Boothby, expressing all that was most winning in girlhood for him who was so reverent of exterior graces, and looking from this to the leathern, seamy face of Johnson, and his unlaundered linen, and snuffy frills (when he wore any), and it is hard to understand the intimacy of these two men; but there was a tenderness of soul under the Doctor's slouchy ways which the keen painter recognized; and in the painter there was a resolute intellection, which Johnson was not slow to detect, and which presently-when the new Royal Academy was founded by George III.-was to have expression in the great painter's discourses on Art-discourses which for their courageous common-sense will, I think, outrank much of the art-writing of to-day.

Turks-Head Club.

In 1760 (the year after Rasselas appeared) Reynolds moved into a fine house, for that day, in Leicester Square-a quarter now given over mostly to French lodgers; but in its neighborhood one may find a marble bust of the eminent painter; and the house where he gave great steaming dinners-famous for their profusion and disorderly array-is still there, though given over to small artists and sellers of bric-à-brac. His good sister, Miss Fanny, who was his housekeeper, loved painting and poetry, and a drive in the painter's chariot, which he set up in later days, better than she loved housewifery. Over-shrewd ones said that Sir Joshua (the title came to him a few years after with the presidency of the Royal Academy) did not marry because he had wholesome dread of a wife's extravagance; certain it is that he remained a bachelor all his life, and thereby was a fitting person to discuss with the widowed Johnson the formation of a club. The Doctor was always clubably disposed; so he caught at the idea of Sir Joshua, and thence sprung that society-called "The Literary Club" afterward, which held its sessions, first at the Turk's Head, in Gerrard Street, Soho Square-on Monday evenings at the start, and afterward on Fridays-numbering among its early members Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, Hawkins, Beauclerk, and Goldsmith. This famous club, though moving from place to place in the closing years of the last century, still preserved its identity; it took a new lease of life in the first quarter of the present century, and it still survives in a very quiet old age, holding its fortnightly meetings-rather sparingly attended, it is true-at Willis's Rooms, St. James's Street, in the west of London. Among recent members may be named Gladstone, Sir Frederick Leighton, Lord Salisbury, the Duke of Argyle, Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold.[5]

Some Old Club-men.

Edmund Burke.

Burke,[6] who was among the original nine members, was very much the junior of Johnson; but known to him as a sometime Irish student at law, who had written only a few years before two brilliant treatises; one on Natural Society, and the other on the Sublime and Beautiful.

Later he had done excellent historic work in connection with Dodsley's Annual Register; but he had not yet entered upon that sea of political turmoil over which he was to sweep in so grand a way and with such blaze of triumph. It is possible indeed that he was indebted to the associations of the club for some of the initiative steps toward that wonderful career whose outcome in Parliament, in the courts, and in pamphleteering, has become a component part of the literature of England. Burke, even at that early stage of his progress (his first speech was made in 1766) had all his vast resources at ready command; Johnson did not wish to meet him in debate without warning; true he was afraid of no mere eloquence; he was used to puncturing bloat of that sort; but Burke's most fiery speeches were beaded throughout with globules of thought, which must be grasped and squelched one by one, if mastery were sought. He was impetuous, too, and aggressive, but reverent of the superior age and reputation of the Doctor; and I daresay coyly avoided those American questions which later came to the front, and upon which they held views diametrically opposed. In after years it used to be said that Burke's speeches would empty the benches of the Commons-ye philosophized; and when not heated, spoke with a drawling utterance and a touch of Irish brogue flavoring his voice; indeed he talked so well he was never tired of talking; his sentences so swelled out under the amplitude of his illustrations and allusions that I think he came at last to take a pride in their very longitude, and trailed his gorgeous convolutions of speech with the delighted eagerness with which a fine woman trails her sheen of satins and velvets.

Topham Beauclerk.

Dr. Nugent, a physician of culture, father-in-law of Mr. Burke, was also one of the original members of the club-getting the preferment-as so many in all times do get preferment-simply because son-in-law, father-in-law, or nephew-to somebody else. Another noticeable member of the club was Topham Beauclerk, not by any means the man a casual observer would have taken for an associate of Johnson. He was courtly and elegant in bearing, a man of fashion, smiled upon by such as Lord Chesterfield and Horace Walpole, and who traced his descent back through the first Duke of St. Albans to Nell Gwynne and Charles the Second. He inherited by right, therefore, gayety and humor and wit, and rare histrionic power, and Satan-ry to match. Old Dr. Johnson fairly languished in his admiration of the way in which Topham Beauclerk could tell a story. "It costs me fearful pains," he was used to say; "but this fellow trips through with an airy grace that costs him nothing."

Beauclerk was proud of his membership, and brought his own share of wit, of general information, and of cheery bonhomie to the common reckoning. He married a certain well-known and much-admired Lady Diana Bolingbroke-a divorcée of two days' standing-and treated her shamefully; that being the proper thing for a fashionable man to do, who was emulous of the domestic virtues of George II. At his death, with a large jointure in hand, she had peace; and Burke said, with a humor that was uncommon to him: "It was really enlivening to behold her placed in that sweet house, released from all her cares: ￡1,000 per annum at her disposal, and her husband dead! It was pleasant, it was delightful, to see her enjoyment of the situation!" Beauclerk was too fine a fellow to think well of the domesticities; there was a good deal of the blood of Charles the Second in him. Over and over we come upon such-men of parts squandered in the small interchanges of fashionable life; perpetually saying slight, good things for a dinner-table; telling a story with rare gusto; the envy of heavy talkers who can never catch butterflies on the wing; looking down upon serious duty whether in art or letters; and so, leaving nothing behind them but a pretty and not always delicate perfume.

David Garrick.

Another of the clubmen was David Garrick-not one of the original nine, but voted in a few years after. Dr. Johnson does indeed give a characteristic growl when his name is proposed-"What do we want of play-actors?" but his good nature triumphs. Little Garrick was an old scholar of his at Edial; and though he has conquered all theatric arts and won all their prizes, he is still for him, "little Garrick." A taste for splendor and dress had always belonged to him. In his boy-days he had written to his father, who was stationed at Gibraltar, "I hope, Papa, you find velvet cheap there; for some one has given me a knee-buckle, and it would go capitally with velvet breeches. Amen, and so be it!"

That love for the buckles and the velvet clung to him. When Edial school broke up, he tramped with Johnson to London-the master with the poor tragedy of Irene in his pocket, and the boy with such gewgaws and pence as he could rake together. Perhaps, also, the tragic splendor of Shakespeare's verse shimmering mistily across his visions of the future, making his finger-ends tingle and his pulse beat high.

But a legacy of ￡1,000 comes to the Garrick lad presently, which he invests in a wine business, in company with his staid brother, Peter Garrick, who looks after affairs in Lichfield, and who is terribly disturbed when he hears that David is taking to theatric studies;-has acted parts even!

And Davy writes back relenting, and sorry to grieve them at home; but keeps at his parts. And Peter writes more and more disconsolately, lamenting this great reproach, and David writes pretty letters of fence, and the wine business leaks away, and Peter is in despair; and Davy sends remittances which are certainly not legitimate business dividends, thus propping up the sinking wine venture; and before Peter is reconciled, has become the hero of the London boards, with a bank credit that would buy all their ports and clarets twice over.

And this wonderful histrionic genius, probably unparalleled on the English stage before or since his day, so gay, so brisk-so witty betimes-so capable of a song or a fandango, brought life to the club. Nor was there lack in him of literary qualities; his prologues were of the best, and he had the charming art of listening provocatively when the great doctor expounded.

Mr. Boswell.

James Boswell.

Another early member of the club, whom I think we should have liked to see making his way with a very assured step into the Turk's Head, of a Monday or a Friday, was James Boswell, Esquire.[7] It is a household name now, and will remain so for years to come by reason of the extraordinary life which he wrote, of his master and patron, Dr. Johnson. Yet it was only a year or so before the formation of the club that this jaunty Scotch gentleman, son of a laird, and of vast assurance-having been a tuft-hunter from his youth-caught his first sight of the great Doctor, in the little shop of Davies the bookseller; and the great man had given a snubbing, then and there, to the pert, but always obsequious Boswell; the future biographer, however, digested excellently well provision of that sort, and I think the Doctor had always a tenderness for those who took his flagellations without complaint. Certain it is that there grew up thereafter an intimacy between the two, which is one of the most curious things in the history of English Men of Letters. I know that hard things are said of Mr. Boswell, and that every tyro in criticism loves to have a blow at the well-fed arrogance of the man. Macaulay has specially given him a grievous black-eye; but Macaulay-particularly in those early review papers-was apt to let his exuberant and cumulative rhetoric carry him up to a climacteric which the ladder of his facts would scantly reach. To be sure Boswell was a toady; but rather from veneration of those he worshipped than desire of personal advancement; he was an arrant tuft-hunter, thereby enlarging the sphere of his observations; but he was fairly up in classical studies; had large fund of information; was sufficiently well-bred (indeed, in contrast with the Doctor, I think we may say excellently well-bred); he rarely, if ever, said malicious things, though often impertinent ones; his conundrums again and again gave a new turn to dull talk; and he had a way, which some even more stolid people possess in our time, of baiting conversation by interposing irrelevant matter, with an air of innocence that captivates; then there was the pleasant conceit of the man-full-fed, sleek, and shining out all over him-over his face, and his erect but somewhat paunchy figure; all which qualities were contributory to the humor and fulness and charm of that famous biography which we can read backward or forward-in the morning or at night-by the chapter or by the page-with our pipe or without it-with our knitting or without it-and always with an amazed and delighted sense that the dear, old, clumsy, gray-stockinged, snuff-ridden Doctor has come to life once more, and is toddling along our streets, belching out his wit and wrath, and leaning on the arm of the ever-ready and most excellent and obsequious James Boswell, Esquire.

Such a book is not to be sneered at, nor the writer of it; perhaps we think it would be easy for us or anybody to write such another, if we would only forget conventionalisms and have the courage of our impressions; but if we made trial, I daresay we should find that to forget conventionalisms is just what we can't and do not know how to do; and so our impressions get bundled into the swathings of an ambitious rhetoric which spoils our chances and vulgarizes effort. I do not say Boswell was a very high-toned man or a very capable man in most directions; but he did have the art of easy narrative to a most uncommon degree; and did clearly perceive and apprehend just those points and qualities which go to make portraiture complete and satisfying.[8] I do not believe that he stupidly blundered into doing his biographic work well; stupid blundering never did and never could accomplish work that will meet acceptance by the intelligence of the world.

Gibbon.

Edward Gibbon.

I come now to speak of a more respectable personage-one of whom you have often heard, and whose resounding periods, full of Roman History you will most surely have read; I mean Edward Gibbon[9]-not an original member of the club, but elected at an early day. His life has great interest. He was the sole survivor of seven children; his father being a Member of Parliament-very reputable, but very inefficient. There were fears that his famous son would be a cripple for life, so weakly was he, and so ill put together; but growing stronger, he went to Oxford; was there for only a short time; did not love Oxford then, or ever; inclined to theologic inquiry and became Romanist; which so angered his father that he sent him to Lausanne, Switzerland, to be re-converted under the Calvinist teachers of that region to Protestantism. This in due time came about; and it was perhaps by a sort of compensating mental retaliation for this topsy-turvy condition of his youth that he assumed and cultivated the pugnacious indifference to religion which so marked all his later years and much of his work. He had his love passages, too, there upon the beautiful borders of Lake Geneva; a certain Mademoiselle Curchod, daughter of a Protestant clergyman, lived near by; and with her the future historian read poetry, read philosophy, read the skies and the mountains, discoursed upon the conjugation of verbs, and upon conjugalities of other sorts; but this the English father disapproved as much as he had disapproved of Romanism; and by reason of this-as Gibbon tells us, in his delightful autobiography-that "sweet dream came to an end." It is true the French biographers[10] put a rather different phase upon the story, and represent that while Mademoiselle respected young Mr. Gibbon very much, she could not return his ardor. Two colors, I have observed, are very commonly given to any sudden interruption of such festivities.

Mademoiselle, however, did not pine in single blessedness; she had a career before her. She became in a few years the distinguished wife of Necker, the great finance minister of France in the days immediately preceding the Revolution, and the mother of a still more famous daughter-that Mme. de Stael who wrote Corinne.

Though Gibbon lived and died a bachelor, he always maintained friendly relations with his old flame Mme. Necker, being frequently a guest at her elegant Paris home; and she, on at least one occasion, a guest of the historian in London. It was in the year 1774-ten years after its foundation, that Gibbon was elected member of the Literary Club; he being then in his thirty-seventh year and well known for his wide learning and his conversational powers. He was recognized as an author, too, of critical acumen, and great range of language; some of his earlier treatises were written in French, which he knew as well as English; German he never knew; but the first volume of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire did not appear until the year 1776-a good tag for that great American date! That first volume made a prodigious surprise, and immense applause. Poor Hume[11] (whose story waits), struggling with the mortal disease which was to carry him off in that year, wrote his praises from Edinburgh. Horace Walpole, who had the vanity of professing to know everybody worth knowing, says, "I am astonished; I know the man a little; I could not believe it was in him; I must get to know him better."

Yet Gibbon was not a modest man in the ordinary sense; never, except when-very rarely-warmed into a colloquial display of his extraordinary learning, did he impress a stranger with any sense of his power. He was short and corpulent; had a waddling walk and puffy cheeks and a weak double chin; with very much in his general aspect and manner to explain the miscarriage of his love-affair, and nothing at all to explain the Decline of the Roman Empire. Withal, he was obsequious, studiously courteous; had ready smiles at command; had a mincing manner; his wig was always in order, and so was his flowered waistcoat; and he tapped his snuff-box with an easy dégagé air, that gave no warrant for anything more than an agreeable titillation of the nerves. But if an opening came for a thrust of his cumulated learning in establishing some historic point in dispute, it poured out with a gush, authority upon authority, citation on citation, as full and impetuous and unlooked for as a great spring flood.

He went over to Paris with his honors fresh upon him; was cordially received there; the Necker influence, and his familiarity with French, standing him in good stead. He affected a certain style too. "I have," he says, "two footmen in handsome liveries behind my coach, and my apartment is hung with damask." He loved such display, though only the hired luxury of a hotel. He had never a taste for the simpler enjoyments of English country life; never mounted a horse and scorned partridge shooting or angling. In a letter to a friend he says, "Never pretend to allure me by painting in odious colors the dust of London. I love the dust, and whenever I move into the Weald, it is to visit you, and not your trees."

It does not appear that he went frequently to the Turk's-Head Club. The brusquerie of Johnson would have grated on him-grated on him in more senses than one, we suspect; and the gruff Doctor would have scorned his dilettanteism as much as his scepticism. Gibbon took kindly, though, to Goldsmith; but he hated Boswell honestly, and Boswell honestly hated back.[12]

His letters were never strong or bright, nor were his occasional literary criticisms either acute or profound; all his great powers were kept in reserve for his magnum opus-the History. For the quietude he thought necessary to its completion he went again to the home of his youth at Lausanne, and there, in sight of that wondrous panorama of lake and mountain, upon a site where now stands the Hotel Gibbon,[13] and a few acacia trees under which the historian meditated, the great work was brought to completion-a great work then, and a great work now, measured by what standard we will. To say that one approaches the accuracy of Gibbon is to exhaust praise; to say that one surpasses him in reach of learning is to deal in hyperbole. Even the historian, Dr. Freeman, who, I think, did much prefer saying a critical thing to saying a pleasant thing, testified that-"He remains the one historian of the eighteenth century whom modern research has neither set aside, nor threatened to set aside." Modern high critics sneer at his large, ceremonious manner; Ruskin pronounces "his English the worst ever written by an educated Englishman"[14] (the same Ruskin who found a "mass of errors" under the sunshine of Claude). But let us remember what burden of knowledge those grandiloquent sentences of Gibbon had to carry; what reach of empire they had to cover! Here be no pigmies, predicating the outcome of little factions, no discourse about the smallness of word-meanings; but vast populations are arrayed under our eye. We cannot talk of the stars in their courses as we talk of the will-o'-wisps of politicians. Rome marching to its dissolution, with captive nations in its trail,[15] must put a lofty strain upon the page that records her downfall.

Through all, this corpulent, learned, dainty, keen-eyed, indefatigable little man, is cool-over cool; he has no enthusiasms but the enthusiasm of knowing things. No wrongs that he records seem to chafe him; his blood has no boiling-point; his love no flame; his indignation no scorching power. A great, imposing, processional array of sovereigns, armies, nations-of the wise, the vicious, the savage, the learned, the good; but not a figure in it all, however pure or innocent, which kindles his sympathies into a glow; not one so profligate as to make his anger burn; not one so lofty or so true as to give warmth to his expressions of reverence.

Yet notwithstanding, if any of my young readers are projecting the writing of a history, I strongly advise them to avoid the subject of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Oliver Goldsmith.

Oliver Goldsmith.

And now we come to another member of our club, who reaped far fewer of the substantial rewards of life.--Who, with any relish for the beatitudes of letters, has not tender reverence for the memory of Goldsmith? He was the youngest member of the club at its start, and yet the thirty-four years he then counted had been full of change and adventure: he had wandered away early from the beautiful paternal home of Lissoy in Ireland; had studied in Scotland and in Leyden; had idled in both; had been vagrant over Europe; had tried medicine, tried flute-playing, tried school-keeping, tried proof-reading for the old shopkeeper, Samuel Richardson, and had finally landed in a court not far from Johnson's, where he did work for the booksellers. Amongst this work were certain essays which attracted the old Doctor's attention by their rare literary qualities; and the old gentleman had befriended the author-all the more when he found him a man who did not befriend himself; and who, if he had only sixpence in his pocket (and he was not apt to have more), would give the half of it to a beggar. A little over-love for wine, too-when the chance of a tavern dinner came to him-was another weakness which the great Doctor knew how to pardon; and so Goldsmith became one of the original clubmen; Reynolds, with all his courtly ceremony, growing to love the man; so did Burke; but Boswell was always a little jealous of him, and Goldsmith caught at any occasion for giving a good slap to that sleek self-consequence which shone out all over Boswell-even to his knee-buckles and his silken hose. I do not suppose that Goldsmith contributed much to the weightier debates of the club, and can imagine him sulking somewhat if he found no good opening in the troubled waters in which to feather his dainty oar. Again there was an awkwardness, partly self-consciousness, partly organic tremor, which put him at bad odds in promiscuous talk; to say nothing of the irascibility which he had not learned to control, and which sometimes put a stammer to the tongue; hence, Boswell says, "poorest of talkers;" but around in his chambers, with one or two sympathetic listeners only, and perhaps a bottle of Canary flanking him, and with a topic started that chimed with the emotional nature of the man, and I am sure he would have talked out a whole chapter of a new Vicar of Wakefield.

But whatever the tongue might do, there was no doubt about the pen; we find him even undertaking discourses upon Animated Nature, and history-of Greece or of Rome. Has he then the plodding faculty, and is he a man of research? No; but he has the aptitude to seize upon the plums in the researches of others, and embody them in the amber of his language. He poaches all over the fields of history and science, and bags the bright-winged birds which the compilers have never seen, or which, if seen, they have classed with the gray and the dun of the sparrows. His poetry, when he makes it, may not have so much of polished clang and witty jingle as the verse of Pope; it may lack the great ground-swell of rhythmic cadence which belongs to Johnson; but-somewhere between the lines, and subtly pervading every pause and flow-there is a tenderness, a suave, poetic perfume, a caressing touch of both mind and heart which we cannot describe-nor forget.

Of the original club-men, Goldsmith[16] died first, in 1774, at Brick-court in the Temple; he was forty-five years old, and yielded to a quick, sharp illness at the last, into which all the worries of a much worried life seemed to crowd him. He had been plotting new works, and a new life too; a getting away (if it might be) from the smirch that hung about him in the Temple corridors, out to the Edgware farmery, where primroses and hedges grew, and where there was a scent upon the air, of that old country home of Lissoy:

"I still had hopes my latest hours to crown,

Amidst those humble bowers to lay me down;

To husband out life's taper at the close,

And keep the flame from wasting by repose.

I still had hopes, for pride attends me still,

Amidst the swains to show my book-learned skill;

Around my fire an evening group to draw

And tell of all I felt and all I saw.

And, as a hare, whom hounds and horns pursue,

Pants to the place from which at first he flew,

I still had hopes, my long vexations past,

Here to return, and die at home at last."

A stolid physician, called in consultation in those last days, and seeing his disordered state, asked, "If his mind was at ease?" Mind at ease! Surely a rasping question to put to a man whose pulse is thumping toward the hundreds, whose purse is empty, plans broken up, credit gone, debts crowding him at every point, pains racking him, and the grimy Fleet Prison close by, throwing its shadow straight across his path. No, his mind is not at ease; and the pulse does gallop faster and faster, and harder and harder to the end; when, let us hope-ease did come, and-God willing-"Rest for the weary."

The Thrales and the End.

Meantime Dr. Johnson has been withdrawing somewhat from his old regular attendance upon the club. New men have come in, of whiggish tendencies; he hears things he does not like to hear; the Americans are at last making a fight of it; he is a heavier walker than once; besides which his increased revenue has perhaps made him a little more free of the Mitre tavern than of old; then he has made the acquaintance of Mr. Thrale and of Mrs. Thrale-an every-way memorable acquaintance for him. Mr. Thrale is a wealthy brewer, one while Member of Parliament-his works standing on the ground in Southwark now held by Barclay & Perkins, some of whose dependencies cover the site of that Globe Theatre where William Shakespeare was sometime actor and shareholder. Withal, Mr. Thrale is a most generous, sound-headed, practical, kindly man, without being very acute, or cultured, or any way accomplished. Mrs. Thrale, however, has her literary qualities; can jingle a little of not inharmonious verse of her own; reads omnivorously; is apt in French or Latin; is full of esprit and liveliness, and is not without a certain charm of person. She is small indeed, but with striking features and picturesque; easily gracious at her table; witty, headstrong, arch, proud of association with the great Dr. Johnson; really having strong friendship for him; enduring his rudenesses; yielding to him in very much, but not so submissive as to take his opinion (or that of any other man) about whether she should or should not marry Signor Piozzi, when afterward she came to be a widow. In fact, she had in fine development the very womanly way-of having her own way.

The Thrales owned a delightful country place at Streatham, a pleasant drive out from the city, down through Southwark and Brixton and on the road to Croydon; and there Johnson went again and again: Mr. Thrale was so kind, and Mrs. Thrale so engaging. At last they put at his service a complete apartment, where he could, on his blue days, growl to his liking. Who can say what might have been the career of the great lexicographer if he had fallen into such downy quarters in his callow days; should we have had the Dictionary? Surely never the life of Savage, with its personal piquancy, and possibly never the Boswelliana.

Tour to the Hebrides.

But Johnson was not wholly idle; neither the luxuries of Streatham, nor the chink of his pension money, could stay the unrest of his mind: he writes dedications for other people-shoals of them; he re-edits twice over the great Dictionary; publishes The False Alarm; completes his Lives of the Poets; and in the interim-between visits to Oxford, Brighton, and Lichfield-he makes that famous trip, with Boswell, to Scotland and the Hebrides; and never, I think, was so unimportant a journey so known of men. Every smart boy in every American school, knows now what puddings he ate, and about the cudgel that he carried, and the boiled mutton that was set before him. The bare mention of these things brings back a relishy smack of the whole story of the journey. Is it for the literary quality of the book which describes it? Is it for our interest in the great, nettlesome, ponderous traveller; or is it by reason of a sneaking fondness we all have for the perennial stream of Boswell's gossip? I cannot tell, for one: I do not puzzle with the question; but I enjoy.

Last days of Johnson.

In the year 1779 his old friend Garrick died,-leaving nearly a million of dollars, which came to him by that stage following and thrift which had so worried the orthodox and respectable brother Peter of the wine-shop. The interesting Mrs. Garrick came, after a time, to a lively widowhood on the Adelphi Terrace-looking out over what is now the London Embankment, and with such friends as Miss Hannah More, and "Evelina" Burney, and the old wheezing Doctor himself, to cheer her loneliness and share her luxurious dinners. The year after, in 1780, Topham Beauclerk died; and so that other bright light in the Turks-Head Club is dashed forever.

These, things may well have put new wrinkles in the old Doctor's visage; but he still keeps good courage; works in his spasmodic way;-dines with the printer Strahan; dines at the Mitre; dines at Streatham; coquettes, in his lumbering way, with Mrs. Thrale, and goes home to the fogs and grime of Bolt Court.

Shall I quote from a letter to the last-named lady, dating in the year 1780?

"How do you think I live? On Thursday I dined with Hamilton and went thence to Mrs. Ord. On Friday at the Reynolds'-on Sunday at Dr. Burney's with the two sweets [daughters of Mrs. T.] from Kensington; on Monday with Reynolds; to-day with Mr. Langton; to-morrow with the Bishop of St. Asaph. I not only scour the town from day to day, but many visitors come to me in the morning, so that my work [Lives of the Poets] makes little progress.

"You are at all places of high resort, and bring home hearts by dozens, while I am seeking for something to say of men about whom I know nothing but their verses.... Congreve, whom I despatched at the Borough, is one of the best of the little lives: but then I had the benefit of your conversation."

This is very well for a plethoric old gentleman of seventy-one. The next year, 1781, his friend and patron Mr. Thrale died. This loss was a grievous one for Johnson. He had relished his kindliness and his large, practical sagacity: indeed I think he had relished in him the lack of that literary talk and allusion which so many of his acquaintances thought it necessary to throw out as bait for the Leviathan. But was the Doctor to enjoy still the delights of that Streatham retreat? It is certain that a year did not pass before there was much gossip, in neighboring gossiping circles, that associated the name of Johnson with the clever and wealthy widow, as a possible successor to Mr. Thrale. I do not think any such gossips of the male kind ever ventured within easy reach of the Doctor's oaken cudgel. There is no evidence that any thought of such alliance ever came into Johnson's mind; but I do think he had sometimes regaled himself with the hope of a certain kindly protectorate over the luxuries and the mistress of Streatham, which would keep all its old charms open to him, and permit of a fatherly dalliance with the family there. It appeared, however, that the clever lady had other views; and did marry three years after-very much to the disgust of her children-Signor Piozzi, a musician of very fair reputation; did live a happy enough life with him; did publish a book or two full of sparkle and many errors, and some mischievously strong cuts at people she disliked; did live thereafter to a great old age, and carried roses in her cheeks amongst the eighties; though I think these roses came from the apothecaries. She was always fond of decoration.

In 1783 the Doctor had a stroke of paralysis, from which, however, he rallied and was himself once more-dining with Dilly, with Reynolds, at the Mitre too, with Boswell; he even projects new work-suggests the formation of another club in the city, and more within reach: So tenaciously do we cling, and so hopefully do we keep plotting! Finally in June, 1784, he takes his last dinner at the old club; Reynolds and Burke and Langton and Boswell are there, with others he does not know so well; he is feeble at this sitting and ill at ease; clouds gathering over him, from which, however, there flashes out from time to time a blaze of his old wit.

Thereafter, it is mostly Bolt-court-poor blind Miss Williams gone, by this time, and also the sorry physician who had been long a pensioner on him, and whose nostrums he had taken out of charity. Of all the faces that once welcomed him there in their way, only his black man Francis left.

Langton comes to see him; and Reynolds comes bringing more cheer, though the ear trumpet is awkward for the sick man; Burke comes and shows all the melting tenderness of a woman; Boswell, too-before he goes north-bounces in and out, his conceit and assurance mollified and decently draped by the sorrow that hung over him. Little Miss Burney rushes in to the ante-room and stays there hours, hoping some shortest last interview with the great man who had said kindly things to her-never thinking that he could not relish her gossippy prattle about the court, and the royal George, now that a great, swift tide was lifting him into the presence of another king.

Death of Johnson.

The old superstitious awe and dread of death, which had belonged to him throughout life, disappeared in these latter days, and the gloom-with its teasing vampires-was rarefied into a certain celestial haze that hung over him tenderly. He did not excitedly wrestle with the awful possibilities the change might bring, nor work himself into any craze of pious exhilaration to bridge the gap; but was restful as a babe at last, and so was led away tranquilly, by his own child-like trust, over the threshold of the mysteries we must all confront.

[1] See note, Hill's Boswell, p. 304, vol. i.

[2] Blackfriars was not built until 1769, and the old Westminster in 1750.

[3] Pension granted, 1762: Rasselas published, 1759.

[4] Joshua Reynolds, b. 1723; d. 1792. His Discourses published, 1771. Life by Leslie, 1867.

[5] It is from this latter gentleman-whom I had the good fortune to meet in the course of his visit to this country-that my information in regard to the latter status of the club is derived.

[6] Edmund Burke, b. 1729; d. 1797. Editions of his works are various. Best life of him is by John Morley (1867).

[7] B. 1740; d. 1795.

[8] There is, to be sure, a great deal of what the natural reserve of most men would lead them to withhold. But if this "free-telling" does add some of the finer lights and most artistic touches to his picture, and if he perceives this to be so (and have we any right to assume the contrary?) shall we not credit it rightly to his book-making art and commend it accordingly?

That his gentlemanly reserves are not of a pronounced sort may count against the delicacy of his nature, but not necessarily against his capacity as a literary artist.

[9] Edward Gibbon, b. 1737; d. 1794. Dr. Milman's is the standard edition of his History. Bowdler's edition (1825) is noticeable for its expurgations. The work, through its translations, holds as large a place in the historic curriculum of French, Italian, and German students, as in that of English-speaking nations.

[10] Biographie Universale; Article Necker (Mme. Necker, née Susanne Curchod).

[11] Hume's first volume of English History appeared in 1754-just twenty-two years before the Decline and Fall. Hume was about twenty-six years Gibbon's senior.

[12] Boswell says in his Diary (1779): "Gibbon is an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow, and poisons our literary club to me."

[13] The old house has wholly disappeared; the hotel covers a portion of Gibbon's garden.

[14] Letter in the Pall Mall Gazette in relation to Sir John Lubbock's "List of Hundred Best Books." Reprinted in Critic (American) of March 20, 1886.

[15] See, for instance, account of Julian's march, and of the taking of Constantinople.

[16] Oliver Goldsmith, b. 1728; d. 1774. Fullest and best Life, that of John Forster.