A Pair of Poets.
Two poets.
Were it only to change the current of our talk, I bring now a brace of poets to your notice; not well paired indeed, as you will find: but each one in his own way giving us music that strongly contrasts with The Deserted Village, and the ponderous Satires of Johnson.
Shenstone.
Shenstone[4] is a name not very much known—not very much worth knowing: he was a big, somewhat scholarly, fastidious, indolent, rhyme-haunted man, who had studied at Oxford, and who, when the muses were buzzing about his ears, came into possession of a pretty farm in that bit of Shropshire which (by queer English fashion) is planted within the northern borders of Worcestershire; and it was there that he wrote—what is typical of all that he ever wrote, and what has his current and favorite sing-song in it:—
"Since Phyllis vouchsafed me a look
I never once dreamt of my vine.
May I lose both my pipe and my crook
If I knew of a kid that was mine!
I prized every hour that went by
Beyond all that had pleased me before;
But now they are past, and I sigh;
And I grieve that I prized them no more."
And again—
"When forced the fair nymph to forego
What anguish I felt at my heart!
Yet I thought—but it might not be so—
'Twas with pain that she saw me depart.
She gazed as I slowly withdrew.
My path I could hardly discern;
So sweetly she bade me Adieu
I thought that she bade me return!"
What should we think of that if we encountered it fresh in a corner of one of our Sunday newspapers? We should hardly reckon its author among our boasted treasures; yet Burns says "his elegies do honor to our language," and a great deal of the same guileless tintinnabulum did have its admirers all over England a century ago; and some of Shenstone's pretty wares have come drifting down on the wings of albums and anthologies fairly into our day.
Yet I should rather have encountered him in his fields, than in his garret; for he made those fields very beautiful. He was a bad farmer, to be sure; and sacrificed turnips to marigolds; and wheat to primroses and daisies, fast as the season went round; but his home at Leasowes was a place worth visiting for its charming graces of every rural sort; even our staid John Adams, when he was in England in those days, looking after American colonial interests—must needs coach it in company with Jefferson from Cirencester to Leasowes, for a sight of this charming homestead. Goldsmith too gave its beauties the embalmment of his language; and Dr. Johnson sat down upon it, with the weight of his ponderous sentences. One echo more we will have of him, as it comes fresh from his pet paradise of that corner of Shropshire—and certainly carrying a honeyed rhythmic flow:—
"My banks they are furnished with bees,
Whose murmur invites one to sleep;
My grottoes are shaded with trees,
And my hills are white over with sheep.
I seldom have met with a loss,
Such health do my fountains bestow;
My fountains all bordered with moss
Where the hare-bells and violets grow."
William Collins.
William Collins[5] was a man of a totally different stamp—better worth your knowing—yet maybe with the general public not so well known. There is the chink of true and rare poetic metal in his verse, and it is fused by an imagination capable of intense heat and wonderful flame. He was only a hatter's boy from Chichester, in the South of England; was at Oxford for a while, and left there in a huff—though securing a degree, 1743; afterward went to London; wrote and printed some odes, which he knew were better than most current poetry, but which nobody bought or read. He sulked under that neglect, and his rage ran—sometimes to verse—sometimes to drink; he had known Thomson and Johnson, and both befriended him; but the world did not; indeed he never met the world half way; the poetic phrenzy in him so fined his sensibilities that he could not and would not put out a feeling hand for promiscuous greetings. Poverty, too, came in the wake of his poetic cultures, to aggravate his mental inaptitudes and his moral distractions—all ending at last in a mad-house. He was not, to be sure, continuously under restraint—such terrific restraints as belonged to treatment of the insane in that day; but for a half dozen or more years of the latter part of his life—wandering all awry—saying weak and pointless things, in place of the odes which had coruscated under his fine fancy; lingering about his childhood's home; stealing under the cathedral vaults of Chichester (where his body rests now), and lifting up a vacant and wild treble of sound in dreary sing-song to mingle with the music from the choir.
There are accomplished critics who insist that the odes of Collins carry in them the finest and the loftiest strains which go to marry the music of the nineteenth century poets to the music of the days of Elizabeth. Certain it is, that he loomed far above the ding-dong of such as Shenstone—that he scorned the classic trammels of the empire of Pope—certain that there were fires in him which were lighted by poets who lived before the time of the Stuarts, and which gave foretaste and promise of the freedom and the graces that shine to-day.[6]
I cannot quote better to show his quality than from that "Ode to Evening" which is so often cited:—
"For when thy folding star arising, shows
His paly circlet at his warning lamp,
The fragrant hours and elves
Who slept in flowers the day,
"And many a nymph who wreathes her brows with
And sheds the freshning dew, and, lovelier still,
The pensive pleasures sweet,
Prepare thy shadowy car.
"Then lead, calm votress, where some sheety lake
Cheers the lone heath, or some time hallowed pile,
Or upland fallows gray
Reflect its last cool gleam.
"But when chill, blustering winds or driving rain
Forbid my willing feet, be mine the hut
That from the mountain's side,
Views wilds and swelling floods,
"And hamlets brown and dim discovered spires,
And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all
Thy dewy fingers draw
The gradual dusky veil."
This is poetry that goes without help of rhyme; even its halts are big with invitations to the "upland fallows gray," and to the "pensive pleasures sweet." Swinburne says, with piquancy and truth, "Corot, on canvas, might have signed the 'Ode to Evening.'"
Dr. Johnson, who was a strong friend of Collins, tells us, in his Lives of the Poets, that he died in 1756; and that story is repeated by most early biographies; the truth is, however, that after that date he was living—only a sort of death in life, under the care of his sister at Chichester; and it was not until 1759, when—his moral and physical wreck complete—the end came.
Miss Burney.
Miss Burney.
We have next to bring to your notice, a clever, somewhat frisky, débonnaire young person of the other sex, whom you should know—whom perhaps you do know; I mean Miss Frances Burney.[7] You will remember that we have encountered her once before pushing her kindly way into old Dr. Johnson's ante-room when he was near to death. The old gentleman had known intimately her father, Dr. Burney, and had always shown for her a strong attachment; so did a great many of Dr. Burney's acquaintances, Garrick among them and Burke; and it was probably from such men and their talk that she caught the literary bee in her bonnet and wrote her famous story of Evelina. You should read that story—whatever you may do with Cecilia and other later ones—if only to see how good and cleanly a piece of work in the way of a society novel can come out of those broiling times, when Humphrey Clinker and Tom Jones and the prurient and sentimental languors of Richardson were on the toilette tables of the clever and the honest.
The book of Evelina is, all over, Miss Burney; that gives it the rarest and best sort of realism. Through all her work indeed, we have this over-jubilant and gushing, yet timid and diffident young lady, writing her stories—with all her timidities and large, unspoken hopes, tumbling and twittering in the bosoms of her heroines: if my lady has the fidgets, the fidgets come into her books; and you can always chase back the tremors that smite from time to time the fair Evelina, to the kindred tremors that afflict the clever and sensitive daughter of old Dr. Burney.
The book was published anonymously at first, and the secret of authorship tolerably well kept; she says her papa did not know; but young ladies are apt to put too small a limit to the knowledge of their papas! It is very certain that her self-consciousness, and tremulous, affected, simpers of ignorance, were not good to stave away suspicion. It was not long before the world, confounding book and person, came to call her "Evelina."
A pretty picture with this motif comes into her Diary: On a certain morning, our Dr. Franklin—being then in London on colonial business—makes a call upon Dr. Burney:—and in absence of her father, meets the daughter: a big, square-shouldered man, very formal, very stout, but very kindly, approaches her and says—"I think I have the pleasure of speaking with Evelina."
"Oh, no," she replies, "I am Frances Burney," and he—"Ah—indeed! I thought it had been Evelina:" and there it ends, and we lose sight of our broad-shouldered Dr. Franklin, with only this "Ah!" upon his lips.
She had a modesty that was vain by its excess, and was awkward when caught unexpectedly or with strangers; in great trepidation lest her books might be talked of—yet with her books and her authorship always tormentingly uppermost in her thought. Her Diary and letters are full of them. Yet she is attractive—strangely so—by her sympathetic qualities; so responsive to every shade of sorrow or of joy; winning, because so tell-tale of heart; and with a tongue that could prattle gracefully when at ease; Evelina, in short, without Evelina's beauty or expectations.
I have read the book over again after a gap of many years—with a view to this talk of the authoress, and find myself wondering more than ever, how so many of great and commanding intellect should have so heartily admired it. Burke read it with most eager attention and largest praise; old Dr. Johnson delighted in it, and declared it superior in many points to Richardson (which for him was extravagant commendation). Even Mme. de Stael, some few years later, gave it her applause; and the quick and swift-witted Mrs. Thrale was in raptures with it; and Mrs. Thrale knew a dunce, and detested dunces. There must have been a deftness in her touch of things local,—of which, I think, she was but half conscious; there was beside a pretty dramatic art which found play in many pages of her Diary, and in all she did and all she spoke. For her third novel of Camilla, which scarce ever comes off the shelf of old libraries now—where it survives in deserved retirement—she received, according to the rumors current in those days, the sum of £3,000; such rumors, very likely exaggerated the amount; they are apt to do so—in all times.
Her Diary[8] is of special interest; particularly the portion which takes one into the domestic life of Royalty. For one of the bitter fruits of her celebrity, was her appointment as Lady of the Robes (or other such title), to the Queen. The service indeed did not last many years, but long enough to give us a good sight of the well-disposed, fussy, indolent, kind-hearted Queen, and of the inquisitive, obstinate, good-natured King.
Trials of the Queen.
She was at the palace, indeed, when one of the earlier attacks of that mental ailment which at last slew George III.—fell upon him. She sees the poor Queen growing wild with dread—disturbed and trembling under those flashes of disorderly talk which smite upon her ear. She watches the King as he goes out to his drive on a certain fatal day;—hears the hushed, muffled steps and the babel of uncertain sounds, as he comes back late at night,—waits hour on hour for her usual summons to the Queen's presence, which does not come. At last, midnight being long past (and she meantime having hint of some great calamity) goes to the Queen's chamber; two other lady attendants were with her, she says; and the Queen, ghostly pale and shuddering—puts her hand kindly upon that of the poor little trembling Miss Burney and says "I am like ice—so cold—so cold!"
"I tried to speak," says Miss Burney in her Diary, "but burst into tears: then the Queen did." And there was cause: for from beyond the chamber—along the corridor,—came the idle jabbering of King George; and the intellectual power (such as there was of it) "thro' words and things went sounding on its dim and perilous way."
I tell this not to test the reader's capability for sympathy, but to fasten poor little Miss Burney, the author of Evelina and Cecilia, in mind; and to connect her service in the palace of St. James, in the year 1788, with the first threat and the first real attack of the King's insanity. I am afraid we must set down, as one helping cause to the King's affliction, the American obstinacy in maintaining their Independence.
Miss Burney shortly after, with a pension of £100, retired from the royal duties, which had tried her sadly; and some years later encountering and greatly admiring General d'Arblay, who had come over an exile from France, in company with other distinguished emigrants, on the outbreak of the French Revolution, she married him (1793), and gave him a home that grew up out of the moneys received from her Camilla—hence called by old Dr. Burney, "Camilla Cottage."
She survived her husband and a son (a clergyman of the Established Church), and lived to so great an age as to find all her conquests in fiction over-run at last by the brilliant successes of Miss Austen, of Miss Edgeworth, and the more splendid triumphs of Walter Scott. She died almost in our day (1840) and was buried in Bath; but her best monument you can see without going there; it is her book of Evelina and her Diary.
Hannah More.
Mistress More.
Over-fine literary people will, I suppose, hardly recognize Hannah More—or Mistress Hannah More,[9] as I prefer to call her, in virtue of a good old English, and a good old New Englandish custom, too, which gave this title of dignity to matronly women—married or unmarried, of mature age, and of worthy lives.
We must go into the neighborhood of that picturesque old city of Bristol, in the West of England, to find her. She was one of the five daughters of a respectable schoolmaster in Gloucestershire. Hannah, though among the youngest, proved the clever one, and had written poems, more than passably good, before she was fifteen; and had completed a pastoral drama, when only seventeen. She was, moreover, comely; she was witty and alert of mind, and had so won upon the affections of a neighbor landholder, and wealthy gentleman of culture, that a marriage between the two came after a while to be arranged for; but this affair never went beyond the arrangement,—for reasons which do not clearly appear. It does appear that the parties remained friendly, and that Mistress Hannah More was in receipt of an annual pension of £200—in the way of amende perhaps—her life through, from the backsliding but friendly groom. I am sorry to tell this story of her (about the £200). I think so well of her as to wish she had put it in an envelope, and returned it with her compliments—year after year—if need were. However, it went, as did many another hundred pounds and thousand pounds of her earnings, in the line of those great charities which illustrated and adorned her life.
Her elder sisters as early as 1757 established in Bristol a school for young ladies, which became one of the most popular and favorite schools of the West of England; and when Hannah, some fifteen years later, went up to London, to look after the publication of her Search after Happiness, one or two of the sisters accompanied her; and Miss Hannah, who was "taken off her feet" by the acting of Garrick, was met most kindly by the great tragedian—was taken to his house, indeed, and became thereafter one of the most intimate of the friends of Mrs. Garrick. Dr. Johnson, too, was enchanted by the brisk humor and lively repartee in these clever West-of-England girls; and we have on record a bit of his talk to one of them. He said, in his leviathan way: "I have heard that you are engaged in the useful and honorable employment of teaching young ladies." Whereupon they tell the story of it all, in their bright, full, eager way, and of their successes: and the Doctor, softened and made jolly and companionable, says, "What, five women live happily together in the same house! Bless me! I never was in Bristol—but I will come and see you. I'll come; I love you all five!" One of the sisters wrote home that she thought—"perhaps—the big Doctor might marry Hannah; for 'twas nothing but—'My love,' and 'My little Kitten,' between them all the evening."
Shortly thereafter Mistress More wrote her tragedy of Percy; nobody, I think, reads it now; but Garrick became sponsor for it—writing both prologue and epilogue; and by reason perhaps of his sponsorship it ran some twenty nights successively; the tale of her stage profits running up to £600, which would pay for a good many trips from London to Bristol. When she came to treat for the publication of a poem which she wrote at that period—she being ignorant of rates,—it was arranged with her publisher that she should receive the sum, whatever it might have been, which was paid Goldsmith for The Deserted Village!
In those early years she was the lively one, and the gay one, and the worldly one of the family; but with the death of Garrick, which came upon her like a blow, life and all its colors seemed to change. She haunted London and the theatres no more; she went up to weep indeed at her home on the Adelphi Terrace[10] with the disconsolate Mrs. Garrick; but all phases of life have now, for Miss More, taken on a soberer hue; she teaches; she founds schools for the poor; she founds chapels; she writes tracts; her forward and sturdy evangelical proclivities involve her indeed in difficulties with the local church authorities; for her charities go vaulting over their canons; whereupon she relents and abases herself—and then sins in the same holy and beneficent ways of charity again—canons or no canons.
As a worker she is indefatigable; she drives, rides, and walks over her missionary ground near to Bristol, with the zeal of a gold-hunter. There were those who questioned her wisdom and who questioned the quality of her wit, but never one, I think, anywhere, who questioned her goodness. She wrote a novel called Coelebs in Search of a Wife. Do you happen to have read it? I hardly know whether to advise it, or not; there is so much to read! But if you do, you will find most excellent English in it, and a great deal of very good preaching; and many hints about the social habits of that time—trustworthy even to the dinner hour and the lunch hour; and maxims good enough for a copy book, or a calendar; and you will find—what you will not find in all stories nowadays—a definite beginning and a definite end. I know what you may say, if you do read it. You would say that the sermons are too long, and that the hero is a prig; and that you would never marry him if he were worth twice his fortune, and were to offer himself ten times over. Well—perhaps not; but he had a deal of money. And that book of Coelebs—whatever you may choose to say of it, had a tremendous success; it ran over Europe like wildfire; was translated into French, into German, into Dutch, into Polish, and I know not what language besides; and across the Atlantic—in those colonial days, when book-shops were not, as now, at every corner—over thirty thousand copies were sold. Those of us who can remember forty and fifty years back, and who knew anything of the inner side of an old-fashioned New England homestead, must recall the saintship that invested good Mistress Hannah More! What unfailing Sunday books her books did make! and with what child-like awe we looked upon her good, kind, old, peaked face as it looked out from the frontispiece—with soberly frilled hair all about the forehead, and over this a muslin cap with huge ruffles hemming in the face, and above this circumambient ruffle and in the lee of the great puff of muslin—which gave place, I suppose, to the old lady's comb—a portentous bow, constructed of an awful quantity of ribbon and crowning that saintly, kindly, homely face of Hannah More.
Do you remember—I wonder—that in the early pages of "The Newcomes"—the Colonel tells Olive Newcome, how he used in his boy days to steal the reading of some of Fielding's famous novels; and how Joseph Andrews, in that forbidden series, had a very sober binding; so that his mamma, Mrs. Newcome, when she observed the boy reading it, thought—deceived by that grave binding—that the boy might be regaling himself with some work of Mistress Hannah More's; and how, under this belief, she took up the book when he had laid it by; and read and read, and flung it down all on a sudden with such a killing, scornful look at the young Colonel, as he never, never forgot in all his life.
It was unfair of Thackeray to poke fun in this way at good Mistress Hannah More! We may smile at her quaintness—her primness—her starch; but there is that in her industry, her courage, her mental range, her wide Christian beneficence which we must always venerate.
We have run on so far, that we have no words to-day for the sturdy old King George. We turn him over to another chapter, when we will speak too of Sterne—whom we had almost forgotten—and of Chatterton and of some writing men who sometimes lifted up their voices in the British Parliament.
[1] David Hume, b. 1711; d. 1776. Best edition of his works edited by Green and Grose, 4 vols., 1874. For life, see Burton and Huxley.
[2] Adam Smith, b. 1723; d. 1790. A Fifeshire man, and author of that famous book—The Wealth of Nations; a good book to read in these times, or in any times. He may indeed say rash things about "that crafty animal called a Politician," and the mean rapacity of capitalists; but he is full of sympathy for the poor, and for those who labor; and is everywhere large in his thought and healthy and generous. I am glad to pay this tribute, though only in a note.
[3] George Tobias Smollett, b. 1721; d. 1771. A Scottish physician, author of various popular novels, of which The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker is, by many, counted the best.
[4] William Shenstone, b. 1714; d. 1763. His works (verse and prose) were published in 1764-69.
[5] William Collins, b. 1731; d. 1759. Interesting memoir by Moy Thomas, published in 1858.
[6] Swinburne says, with something more than his usual exaggeration—"the only man of his time who had in him a note of pure lyric song";—excluding Gray, and both the Wesleys!
[7] Frances Burney, b. 1752; d. 1840. She is perhaps better known as Mme. D'Arblay; though she married somewhat late in life, and after her reputation had been won.
[8] The newest and most faithful copy of her Diary and Letters has been published by George Bell & Sons, London, 1889, 2 vols., 8vo.
[9] Hannah More, b. 1745; d. 1833.
[10] Near present London "Embankment"; John Adams was in that day stopping at a tavern near by.
I have spoken within the last few pages of David Hume—philosopher and historian; he was kindly natured, witty, serene, with a capacity for large and enduring friendships; yet with not much beguiling warmth in him; leaving a much accredited history, and philosophical writings eminent for their ingenuity, acuteness, and subtlety. Under our larger and freer range of thinking to-day, it is hard to understand how he became such a bugbear to so many, and was so unwisely set upon with personal scourgings; even if a man's religious conclusions be all awry, we shall make them no better, nor undo them, by tying a noisy kettle of maledictions at his heels, and goading him into a yelping and maddened gallop all down the high ways. He died unmarried in 1776; his elder brother John, for some reasons of property—which he counted larger than the historian's large repute—changed his name to Home; so that there is not now in Scotland any representative of the immediate family of this Scotch metaphysician, who bears his name. I spoke of Shenstone and gave some specimens of his rhythmic and tender graces; but he never struck deeply into the poetic mine, whether of passion or of mystery. William Collins, however, did; he was not among the very foremost poets certainly, but he gave to us tingling and sonorous echoes of the great utterances of olden times, and piquant foretaste of nobler utterances that were to come. We had our little social brush with the lively and chatty "Evelina" Burney; we paid our worship at the shrine of Mistress Hannah More—and I tried hard to fix her quaint, homely, kindly figure in your gallery of literary portraits.
She lived, like Mme. d'Arblay, to a very great age—eighty-eight, I think, and was (with the exception of the last-named lady) the latest survivor of all those whose lives and works we have thus far made subject of comment in the present volume. And the life and works of these people about whom we have latterly spoken, have had steady parallelism—longer or shorter—with the life and reign of George III.
King George III.
George III.
We ought to know something of the personality of this king who came to the head of the British household while all these keen brains were astir in it, and within the limits of whose rule the American Revolution began, and ended in the establishment of a new nationality; while the French Revolution too gathered its seething forces, and shot up its lurid flame and fell away into the fiery mastership of Napoleon.
You will remember that George II. was son of George I., who inherited through his mother, Sophia (of Brunswick), who was granddaughter of old King James I. of Scotland and England. George III. was not the son—but a grandson—of George II. His father, Prince Frederic, who lived to mature years, who wrote some poor poetry—who was generous, wayward, incompetent, always at issue with father and mother both—was a man nobody much respected and nobody greatly mourned for. It was of him that a squib-like epitaph was written, which I suppose expressed pretty justly popular indifference respecting him and others of his family:—
Here lies Fred,
Who was alive and is dead.
Had it been his father
I had much rather;
Had it been his sister,
No one would have missed her.
But since 'tis only Fred
Who was alive and is dead,
There's no more to be said.
George III. was severely brought up by his mother and by old Lord Bute; taught to be every inch a king; and he was royally stiff and obstinate to the last. Two romantic episodes attaching to his young days belong to the royal traditions—in which a pretty Quakeress, and that beautiful Sarah Lennox—whose portrait by Reynolds now hangs in Holland House—both figure; but these episodes are of vague and shadowy outline, almost mythical, with issues only of the Maud Muller sort—they sighing "it might have been," and he—not sighing at all. It is certain that he accepted complacently and contentedly the bride Charlotte, who came over to him from Germany; and alone of all the quartette of Georges, made a devoted and constant husband as long as he reigned. But if he did not give his queen heart-aches in the usual Georgian fashion, I have no doubt that he gave her many a heart-ache of other sorts; for he was bigoted, unyielding, austere, and, like most men, selfish. He had his notions about meal-times and prayer-time, and getting-up time, and about what meals should be eaten and what not eaten; under this discipline wife and children grew up—until the boys made their escape, which they did actively. Yet this old gentleman of the crown is considerate too—more perhaps outside his palace than within: he purposes no unkindness; he indulges in pleasant chit-chat with his humble neighbors at Windsor; has sometimes half-crowns by him for poor favorites; cherishes homely tastes; knows a good pig when he sees it, and can test the fat upon a bullock with a punch of his staff. He professed a certain art knowledge, too—but always loved the spectacular, melodramatic works of our Benjamin West (in which, art-heresy of the time he had excellent company), better than the rare sweet faces of Reynolds, or the picturesqueness of Gainsborough.
He was English in his speech (though familiar with French and German); English, too, in his contempt for the mere graces of oratory; loving better point-blank talk, fired with interrogation points and interjections. Mme. d'Arblay, whose acquaintance we made, makes us a party to some of this talk:—"And so you wrote 'Evelina,' eh? and they didn't know; what—what? You didn't tell? eh? And you mean to write another—eh—what?"
Yet withal, Dr. Franklin—whose name is entered in the London Directory of 1770, as "Agent for Pennsylvania," Craven Street, Strand—says of the king: "I can scarcely conceive a man of better disposition, of more exemplary virtues, or more truly desirous of promoting the welfare of his subjects." Ten years later, I think Dr. Franklin would have qualified the speech.
But he never could have gainsaid the exemplary virtues of that quiet household—where king and queen lived like Darby and Joan—going before light through the chilly corridors to morning prayers; with early dinners, no suppers, no gambling, no painted women coming between them. Yet the king, as he grew old, loved plays and farces, and used to laugh obstreperously at them, till Charlotte would tap him with her fan and pray his majesty to be "less noisy."
He knew genealogies and geography; he could talk with courtiers about their aunts and cousins, and stepfathers and mothers-in-law—which is a great lift to conversation for some minds. He knew all parts of his establishment—who cleaned the silver and the brass; and what both cost. Like all such meddling, fussy masters of households, he believed himself always right; prayed himself into accessions of that belief: and on that belief went on pounding and pumelling the American branch of his family into a state that proved explosive. In short he was one of those methodic, obstinate, sober, stiffly religious, conventional, straight backed, economic, terrific, excellent men whom we all like to look at, and read about, rather than to live with.
As a school-master he would have set the old lessons in Cocker (if it were Cocker) and recognized nothing better; and if the sums were not done, you would hear of it. "What, what? not done? sums not done!" and then the old red ruler, and the hand put out, and a spat, and another spat. This was George III. "Those colonists not going to pay taxes, eh? and throwing tea into Boston harbor? What—what? Zounds—punish the rebels. Punish 'em well! I'll teach 'em. Flinging tea overboard—what—eh?"
And so the war crept on; and all through it the great old stiff school-master brandishing his red ruler and making cuts with it over seas. But the time came when he couldn't reach his rebels; and then the long ruler, which was the national power, got broken in half, and it has stayed broken in half ever since.
There is interesting record of the first approaches of that insanity which ultimately beset the king, in Mme. d'Arblay's Diary, which we have already mentioned; but he made what seemed an entire recovery from the early stroke of 1788; and was king, in all his headstrong and kingly ways, once more. It was in 1785 when John Adams was presented to him as Envoy of the United States of America—not a presentation, it would seem, that would have any soothing aspect.
Yet the old king received Mr. Adams courteously; and under the pretty fustian of conventional speech the one covered his regrets and the other covered his exultation. But it was not many years before the distraught brain—after renewed threats—waylaid the monarch again—this time with a surer grip; his speech, his sight, his hearing, all lost their fineness of quality and went down in the general wreck; in 1810, that mad-cap, that posture-master, that over-fine gentleman—so far as dress and carriage and polite accomplishment could make George IV. a gentleman—took rule; but for years thereafter, his lunatic father, in white hair and long white beard, might be seen stalking along the terrace at Windsor, babbling weak drivel, and humming broken tunes, leading no whither.
Two Orators.
Charles James Fox.
Among the younger members of the famous Literary Club, some ten years after its foundation, was a muscular, swarthy young fellow[1]—full of wit and humor, a great friend of Burke's until the bitterness of politics parted them; shy of approaches to Dr. Johnson, with whom he differed on almost all points; a man known now in literary ways only by the fragment of British History which he wrote, but known in his own times as the most brilliant of debaters, most liberal in his politics, and always an ardent friend of America. This was Charles James Fox, who could trace back his descent—if he had chosen—through a Duchess of Gordon, to Charles II., and who was a younger son of a very rich Lord Holland, owner and occupant of that famous Holland House, which with its remnant of evergreen garden (in whose alleys we found Addison walking) still makes a venerable breakwater against the waves of brick and mortar which are piling around it.
Lord Holland was over-indulgent to this son of his, allowing him, when a boy on his first visit to Bath, five guineas a night to "risk" at cards; and the boy took with great kindness to that order of training, sending home to his father, when he came to travel (after a brief career at Oxford) vouchers, and honest vouchers too, for gaming debts of one hundred thousand dollars from the city of Naples alone. And he matched these losses, and larger ones, at Brooks's in London. Old stagers said that he was so sagacious and brilliant at whist, that he could easily have won his five thousand a year; but he took to hazards at dice that brought him losses—on one occasion at least—of four times as much in a night. It is a wonder he ever became the man in Parliament that he was, after such dandling as befell him in the lap of luxury. Yet he was an accomplished Greek scholar; loving the finesse of the language, and loving more the exquisite tenderness of such lamentations as that of Alcestis; his sympathies all alive indeed, in youth and manhood, to humane instincts—the pains and pleasures of the race touching his heart-strings, as winds touch an Eolian harp. Study of exact sciences put him to sleep; he loved the game of Probabilities better than the certainties of mathematics—gambling away great estates, and put to keenest endeavor by the tears of a woman; speaking with his heart on his tongue—too much there indeed—carrying the comradery of the clubs into public life; sharp as a knife to those who had done him, or his, injury; but unbosoming himself with reckless freedom to those who had befriended him; never un-ready in debate; warming easily into an eloquence that charmed men. But there must have been much in the voice and eye to explain the force of speeches which now seem almost dull;[2] the best elocutionist cannot read the magnetism into them which electrified the Commons, and which made Burke declare him the "most brilliant debater the world ever saw."
Indeed we can only account for his great successes as an orator, his amazing repute, and his exceptional popularity, when we sum up a half score of contributory causes, which lie outside of the cold print of the Parliamentary record; among these, we count—his Holland wealth and training, his environments of rank and luxury, his picturesque bearing, his bonhomie, his scorn of the rank he held, his accessibility to all, his outspoken, democratic sympathies, that warmed him into outbursts of generous passion, his fearlessness, his bearding of the king, his earnestness whenever afoot, his very shortcomings too, and the crowding disabilities that grew out of his trust—his simplicities—his lack of forethought, his want of moneyed prudence, his free-handedness, his little, unfailing, every-day kindnesses—these all backed his speeches and put a tender under-tone, and a glow, and a drawing power in them, which we look for vainly in the rhetoric or the argumentation. He was often in Parliament—sometimes in the Ministry; but his disorderly and reckless life (gaming was not his worst vice) made his fellow-politicians wary, and put a bar to any easy confidences between himself and the old-fashioned, sober-sided, orderly George III. We must think of him as an accomplished, generous-hearted, impulsive, dissolute wreck of a man.
William Pitt.
If I mention Pitt,[3] it is only because you will find in your historical reading, his name always coupled with that of Fox; but he never went to our Literary Club; had little companionship with literary men; yet he had keen scholarship—within a somewhat limited range—and an insatiate ambition. He was tall, spare, pale-faced, haughty, with a contempt for sentiment, and a contempt for money; and of intellect—all compact. At an age when many are still at college, he had made amazing speeches in Parliament; not profuse, not swollen with words, not rhetorical—but clear, sharp, polished, strenuous, with now and then the glitter of some apt and resonant line from his classics.[4]
His perspicuous and never-failing flow of language was due, not a little, to an early habit of translating at sight, from Greek and Latin orators, under direction of his father the Earl of Chatham—not taught by this great master to give slavish word for word translation; but as apt and polished and vigorous a rendering as he could accomplish, without any surrender, or mal-presentment of the leading thoughts. Nor do I know any class-room exercise, nowadays, which would so test and amplify a young student's vocabulary, or teach him better the easy and forcible use of his own language. But, to have its full disciplinary power, it should be a loud, ore rotunda rendering—not a mere lip-service; a launch, straight out from shores, into whatever waters or wilds the heathen orators may be sailing upon, and a full showing of their changing drift—whether in the eddies of a playful irony, or under the driving sweep of their storms of denunciation.
Singularly apart from literary men, and most literary influences, Macaulay has objected (perhaps with some reason) to Pitt's cruel disregard of Dr. Johnson's needs and longings in his latter years; it would have been a charming thing, for instance, for the son of Chatham to put a Government ship at the service of the invalided philosopher, for a voyage under Italian skies; but with Pitt, the large political ends which were taking shape in his mind, and in process of evolution, blinded him to lesser and personal or kindly interests. A nod of the obstinate old king would have counted for more than a tragedy of Irene. All his classicism was but a weapon to smite with, or from which to forge the links of those shining parentheses by which he strangled an opponent. Nothing beyond or below the cool, considerate humanities of the cultured, self-poised gentleman (unless we except some rare outbreak of petulance) belongs to this great orator, who could thrust one through with a rapier held by the best rules of fence; and who never did or could say a word so warm as to touch a friend or make an enemy forget his courtliness. Guiding the political fate of England through a period of such strain, as demanded more nerve and more discretion than any period of a century before, or of a century thereafter—admired by all, and loved by very few, Pitt died quite alone, in a little cottage on Wimbledon Common[5]—even his servants had left;—died too of old age; an old age that grew out of his tormenting labors and ambitions—before he was fifty.