An Orator and Playwright.
Sheridan.
Sheridan is another name about which you have a better right to hear, since he was a favorite member of the Turk's Head coterie, and is a distinct literary survivor of that epoch.[6] He was son of Thomas Sheridan, author of a life of Swift and of a now rarely cited English Dictionary. The son Richard, after studying at Harrow, and afterward with his father, made a runaway match with a beautiful Miss Linley; and he continued doing runaway things all his life. A duel which his sharp marriage provoked, gave him material for his early play of The Rivals,—a play which has come to renewed popularity in our day, and country, under the pleasant humor of Jefferson. The School for Scandal is another of his comedies which makes its appearance from year to year: and Charles Surface and Lady Teazle—no less than Mrs. Malaprop, and Lydia Languish, are people who hang by, very persistently, and with whom we are pretty sure to make acquaintance at some time in our lives.
Mrs. Sheridan proved a much better wife than the conditions of the marriage promised; and I suppose that she was, in a way, contented with the ribbons and fine gowns, and equipages he provided for her (when he could); and with his unctuous, tender speeches, and his fame, and an occasional tap under the chin,—and with his forgetfulness of her when he went to the clubs, or the green-room, or the tavern—as he did very often, and stayed very late. Indeed "staying late," was the ruin of him. But this language into which I have fallen—not without warrant—should not convey the idea that this man was a commonplace, dissolute spendthrift; far from it. His spendings were sublimated by a crazy splendor of ungovernable and ill-regulated generosities, in which his Irish nature bubbled over; and his dissipation wore always the blazon of high social cheer; his excesses not sordid or grovelling, but they carried a quasi air of distinction, and were illuminated by the glow of his easy talk and the flashes of his wit.
His wildest spendings were always made without shamefacedness; but, on the contrary, with a bold alacrity, that gave assurance of riches as heaped up as those of an Arabian Night's tale. That wife of his, too—with her peachy tint, her faery grace, and her syren voice—seemed altogether a fit portion and adornment of the oriental profusion he always coveted and always owed for. His longings and ambitions were pitched upon a high key—a key to which his social aptitudes were charmingly attuned; and there was a time early in his career when it was a distinction to have the privilege of entrée at his beautiful home in Orchard Street, Portman Square, to share his sybaritic tastes, and to listen to the siren who warbled there.
At twenty-four this favorite of fortune had written that play which drew all London to see Captain Absolute; at twenty-five he had become half owner of that great theatre of Drury Lane, from whose till the hands of Garrick had drawn out a great fortune, and from which Richard Sheridan was to draw, often—more than was fairly in it. Meantime he had inspired, and, in connection with his father-in-law, had composed, the comic opera of the Duenna, whose success was enormous, and whose bouncing bits of lyrical jingle have come quivering through all the couloirs of intervening days, to ours: instance,—
"I ne'er could any lustre see
In eyes that would not look on me.
Is her hand so soft and pure?
I must press it to be sure."
Then comes the School for Scandal, and—two years later—the Critic; and always the steaming suppers and the singing of many sirens, and deeper thrusts into the till of Old Drury; stockholders may wince and creditors too; but who shall gainsay or doubt the imperial genius who is winged with victory? Garrick, whose days of conquest are nearly over—is his friend; so is Burke, won by his wit, and by his rolling Irish r's; Goldsmith acknowledges his sovereignty: Dr. Johnson veils dislike of his radicalism and of his tirades against taxation, as he welcomes him to the Club.
In 1780, while still under thirty, he entered Parliament (for Stafford) and posed there for new conquests. There came frequent occasions for the interjection of his witty collocation of apothegms, lighted by his brilliant elocution; but there was not much in his parliamentary career to attract national attention until the debates opened with reference to the Warren Hastings impeachment. These offered topics which appealed to his emotional nature, and under the indoctrination and the coaching of Burke, he made such appeal for the far-off, down-trodden princesses of India as electrified the nation. "Whatever the acuteness of the bar, the dignity of the Senate, or the morality of the pulpit could furnish [in eloquence] had not been equal to it." This was the verdict of so good a judge as Burke. Yet, reading this speech—or so much of it as the records show—or those others which followed,[7] when the great trial had opened in Westminster Hall, we find it hard to understand the enthusiasm of the old plaudits. There is wit, indeed, in whatever work warms him to a glow; old truisms get a setting in his oratorio reaches which make them gleam like diamonds; but there is none of that logical method which wraps one around with convictions; but in place of it a beautiful mass of rhetorical spray, that delights and refreshes and passes—like a summer cloud.
Meanwhile the suppers abound, and so do the debts: that siren wife, who had kept his accounts, and made extracts and filled his note-books (and his flasks), passes away. It is a shock that does not rally his forces, but rather disperses them. He is lié in these times with the Prince of Wales; dines with him; wines with him. Who shall say he does not troll with him some of the piquant snatches of his own verse? As this:
"A bumper of good liquor
Will end a contest quicker
Than justice, judge, or vicar;
So fill a cheerful glass
And let good humor pass.
But if more deep the quarrel,
Why, sooner drain the barrel
Than be the hateful fellow
That's crabbed when he's mellow."
He did drain the barrel; he did fall from all his dizzy eminence; he did die a drunkard of the grosser sort; without money, almost without friends.[8] There was a great rally of coronets at his funeral, and a pompous procession of those who went to bury him at Westminster. You will find his name there, in the Poets' Corner of the Abbey, and will give to his memory your wonder and your pity; but not, I think, much veneration.
The Boy Chatterton.
Chatterton.
We shift the scenes now for a new episode in our little story of letters, although we are under the same murky sky of London. George the Third is just finishing the first decade of his long reign; most of the clubmen of whom we have spoken are still alive, and go up, with more or less of regularity, to pay their court to Dr. Johnson; but we have our eye specially upon a pale, handsome-faced, long-haired lad, not beyond the schooling age, who knows nothing of courts or clubs, who has stolen away from the thraldom of a small attorney's office in Bristol, in the West of England, to come up to London and face the world there, and try to conquer it. He does not know the task he has undertaken. His brain, indeed, is full of fine fancies; he has the poetic fervor in full flow upon him. He has left a mother and a sister—whom he loves dearly—his only near relatives; and he writes to that mother under date of May, 1770:
"I am settled, and in such a settlement as I would desire. I get four guineas a month by one magazine; shall engage to write a History of England, or other pieces, which will more than double that sum. Occasional essays for the daily papers would more than support me. What a glorious prospect!"
And, again, a few weeks later to his sister:
"I employ my money now in fitting myself fashionably, as my profession (of letters) obliges me to frequent the places of best resort. But I have engaged to live with a gentleman, the brother of a lord, who is going to advance pretty deeply into the bookselling branches. I shall have lodging and boarding, genteel and elegant, gratis. I shall have likewise no inconsiderable premium. I will send you two silks this summer, and expect, in answer to this, what colors you prefer.... Essay writing has this advantage: you are sure of constant pay; and when you have once wrote a piece which makes the author inquired after, you may bring the booksellers to your own terms."
Ah, how young he was! If only those first literary dreams and hopes could be realized, which nestle in the brains of so many—what silks—what houses—what gold—what fame! Yet this stripling not yet eighteen could write. I will give you a taste of his quality—in verses shorn of some of the old words he put in them for sake of disguise:—
"The budding floweret blushes at the light,
The meads are sprinkled with the yellow hue,
In daisied mantles is the mountain dight,
The nesh young cowslip bendeth with the dew;
The trees enleafed, into heaven straught,
When gentle winds do blow, to whistling din are brought.
The evening comes and brings the dew along,
The ruddy welkin sheeneth to the eyne;
Around the ale stake minstrels sing their song;
Young ivy round the door-post doth entwine.
I lay me on the grass; yet, to my will
Albeit all is fair, there lacketh something still."[9]
And again, of a different order, this—from the same long poem:—
"O sing unto my Roundelay,
O drop the briny tear with me,
Dance no more at Holy day
Like a running river be.
My Love is dead,
Gone to his death bed,
All under the willow tree.
Come with acorn cup and thorn
Drain my hearte's blood away;
Life and all its good I scorn,
Dance by night or feast by day.
My love is dead
Gone to his death-bed
All under the willow tree."
Well, this is the poetry of the marvellous boy Chatterton[10]—fragments of which you will find in all the anthologies. That last tender letter to his sister, which I set before you—so gleeful, with promise of silks and of brilliant essays, was written on the last day of the month of May, 1770; and on the 24th of August—not three months later—after three days of starvation enforced by a poverty of which his pride would not let him tell, he took poison and made an end of his career.
Few knew of this; few knew that there had been any such adventurer in London; fewer yet, knew what poems—brimming, many of them, with fine fancies—he had left behind him.
A few months after, at the first annual dinner of the newly founded Royal Academy of Art, Goldsmith,[11] being present, talked at table of a certain extraordinary lad who had come up the year before from Bristol—and had died the summer past—literally of starvation—leaving behind him certain wonderful poems, which in their phrases, he said, had an air of great antiquity. And Horace Walpole being also present—he never omitted being present at a Royal Society dinner, when it was possible for him to go—overhearing the talk and the name, said (we may fancy), "Bless me, young Chatterton, to be sure!—I had some correspondence with the young man; nice poems—but apocryphal—poor fellow; dead is he—starved, eh? dear me?—shocking—quite so!" and I suppose that he took snuff and dusted his ruffles thereafter, and then toyed with his delicate glass of fine old Sercial Madeira. This was like Walpole—wantonly like him. There had been a correspondence, as he condescendingly admitted, that I will tell you of.
This Bristol boy, growing up in sight of Durdham downs, and the gorge of the Avon and blue hills of Wales—with poetic visions haunting him—had somehow come upon old parchments—perhaps out of the muniment rooms of St. Mary's Redcliffe church, where his father had been sexton; he had been captivated by the quaint lettering, and awed by the odor of sanctity; and straightway imaged to himself an old mediæval priest, to be clothed upon with his own poetic sensibilities, and in the rusty phrases of the fourteenth century, to unfold to the world the poetic yearnings and aspirations that were seething in the brain of this wonderful boy. The ancient Dictionaries and old copies of Chaucer supplied the language; the antique parchments gave local allusions and the nomenclature; and for inspiration and motive—the winds that blew from over Chepstow and Tintern Abbey, and Caerleon, and whistled round the buttresses of St. Mary's Redcliffe—supplied more than enough. So began the modern antique poems of Thomas Rowley; not a new device in the literary world; for Macpherson, whom we shall encounter presently, only a few years before had launched some of the "Ossian" poems, to the great wonderment and puzzle of the literary world; and Walpole, still earlier, had claimed a false antiquity and Neapolitan origin for his Castle of Otranto. To Walpole, therefore, the eager boy sent some fragments of his Rowley poems, which Walpole courteously acknowledged, and asked for a continuance of such favors. Poor Chatterton, presuming on this courtesy wrote again, declaring his dependent condition—apprenticed to a scrivener, and with mother and sister dependent on him—but believing that with God's help, and the encouragement of his distinguished patron, he might find the way to other and better Rowley poems.
Meantime Walpole, through his scholarly friend the poet Gray, had come to doubt the antiquity of Rowley's verse; and the plebeianism of this correspondent has shocked his gentility. He replies coolly, therefore; expresses doubts of the Rowley authorship, and advises poor Chatterton to keep by his apprenticeship at the scriveners. This sets the young poet's blood on fire; he will go to London; he will win his way; he will smite the Philistines hip and thigh. And—as I have told you—he did go; did work; did struggle. But it is a great self-seeking world he has to face, full throughout of thwarting circumstance. Yet courage and pride hold him up—hold him up for months against terrific odds; at least he will tell nothing of his griefs. Thus his last pennies, which should have gone for bread, go to carry little love-tokens to the dear ones he has left. So lost is he in his little Holborn chamber, in that great seething, turbulent whirl of London, that he thinks—even as he mixes his death potion—they will never know; they will never hear: "Gone"—that is all! But they do know: and for them it is to chant broken-hearted the refrain of his own roundelay,
My love is dead,
Gone to his death bed
All under the willow tree.
It is not alone for reason of the romantic aspects of the story that I have given you this glimpse of the boy Chatterton, but because there was really much literary merit and great promise in his work; in some respects, he reminds us of our American Poe—the same disposition to deal with mysteries, the same uncontrolled ardors, the same haughty pride; and although Chatterton's range in all rhythmic art was far below that of Poe, and although he did not carry so bold and venturous a step as the American into the region of diableries, he had perhaps more varied fancies and more homely tendernesses. The antique gloss which he put upon his work was unworthy his genius; helping no way save to stimulate curiosity, and done with a crudeness which, under the light of modern philologic study, would have deceived no one. But under this varnish of archæologic fustian and mould, there is show of an imaginative power and of a high poetic instinct, which will hold critical respect[12] and regard as long as English poetry shall be read.
Laurence Sterne.
A sentimentalist.
Just two years before Chatterton died in Holborn, another noted literary character—Laurence Sterne[13]—died in Old Bond Street, at what were fashionable lodgings then, and what is now a fashionable tailor's shop; died there almost alone; for he was not a man who wins such friendships as hold through all weathers. A well known friend of the sick man—Mr. Crawford—was giving a dinner that day a few doors off; and Garrick was a guest at his table; so was David Hume, the historian; half through the dinner, the host told his footman to go over and ask after the sick man; and this is the report the footman gave to outsiders: "I went to the gentleman's lodgings, and the mistress opened the door. Says I—'How is Mr. Sterne to-day?' She told me to go up to the nurse; so I went, and he was just a-dying; I waited a while; but in five minutes he said, 'Now it's come.' Then he put up his hand, as if to stop a blow, and died in a minute. The gentlemen were all very sorry." And all the sorrow anywhere—save in the heart of his poor daughter Lydia—was, I suspect, of the same stamp. His wife certainly would get on very well without him: she had for a good many years already.
Laurence Sterne.
You know the name of Mr. Sterne, I daresay, a great deal better than his works; and it is well enough that you should. A good many fragments drift about in books of miscellany which you are very likely to know and to admire; for some of them are surely of most exquisite quality. Take for instance that talk of Corporal Trim with Uncle Toby about the poor lieutenant, and of his ways and times of saying his prayers:—
"When the Lieutenant had taken his glass of sack and toast he felt himself a little revived, and sent down into the kitchen to let me know that in about ten minutes he would be glad if I would step upstairs. 'I believe,' said the landlord, 'he is going to say his prayers, for there was a book laid on the chair by the bedside, and as I shut the door I saw him take up a cushion.'
"'I thought,' said the curate, 'that you gentlemen of the army, Mr. Trim, never said your prayers at all."
"'A soldier, an' please your Reverence,' said I, 'prays as often as a parson; and when he is fighting for his king and for his own life, and for his honor too, he has the most reason to pray to God of any one in the whole world.'
"''Twas well said of thee, Trim!' said my Uncle Toby.
"'But when a soldier,' said I, 'an' please your Reverence, has been standing for twelve hours together in the trenches, up to his knees in cold water, or engaged for months together in long and dangerous marches—detached here—countermanded there; benumbed in his joints;—perhaps without straw in his tent to kneel on, he must say his prayers how and when he can.' 'I believe', said I, for I was piqued, quoth the Corporal, 'for the reputation of the army—I believe, an't please your Reverence—that when a soldier gets time to pray he prays as heartily as a Parson—though not with all his fuss and hypocrisy."
"'Thou should'st not have said that, Trim,' said my uncle Toby; 'for God only knows who is a hypocrite and who is not. At the great and general review of us all, Corporal, at the day of judgment (and not till then) it will be seen who have done their duties in this world and who have not, and we shall be advanced, Trim, accordingly.'
"'I hope we shall,' said Trim.
"'It is the Scripture,' said my uncle Toby, 'and I will show it thee in the morning.'"
Now this beautiful naturalness, this delightful, artistic abstention from all rant or extravagance, makes us wish overmuch that the whole guileless character of my uncle Toby had been as charmingly and as decently set in the text; but unfortunately, there is a continuous embroidery of it all with ribald blotches, and far-fetched foulness of speech; nor is his coarseness—like that of Fielding—half excused by the coarseness of the age; it is inherent and vital: Fielding, indeed, is vulgar and coarse, and obstreperous—with the scent of bad spirits and bad company on him;[14] but this other, though a parson, and perfumed, and wearing may-be, satin small-clothes, has vile and grovelling tastes that overflow in double-meanings of lewdness: even Goldsmith, who was not squeamish, calls him "the blackguard parson." It is not probable that Goldsmith ever encountered him; nor did Dr. Johnson. Beauclerk, Garrick, and Walpole would have been more in his line; for he loved the glint, and the capital letters, and the showy tag-rags of fashion. And on the strength of his literary reputation, which had sudden and brilliant burst, and of his good family—since a not far-off ancestor had been Archbishop of York—he conquered and enjoyed, for his little day, all that London fashion had to offer. I suspect he took a solid comfort in dying in so respectable a quarter as Old Bond Street. He was buried over Bayswater way, not far from the Marble Arch, in the graveyard then pertaining to St. George's (Hanover Square) church. And there was a story, supported by a good deal of circumstantial evidence, that his body was spirited away and recognized a few days afterward by a medical student among the spoils of a dissecting-room. This story would horrify more than it did, had it attached to an author whose humor had kindled love;—as if this man did somehow deserve a more effective "cutting-up" after death than he ever received before it.
The Rev. Laurence Sterne had—I should have told you—a church-living down in Yorkshire, to which was afterward added, by adroit diplomacy of his friends, an official position in connection with York Cathedral. I do not think the people of his parish missed him much when he was away; and I am very sure they missed him a good deal, whenever he was—nominally—there: painting, fiddling, shooting, and dining-out, took very much of his parochial time; and Tristram Shandy and its success, literary and pecuniary, introduced him to a career in London, and in Paris afterward—for he was always an immense favorite with the French (instance Tony Johannot's illustrations)—to which he yielded himself with a graceful acquiescence that, I am afraid, put his parishioners more out of mind than the fiddling and the shooting had done.
I believe that he loved his daughter Lydia with an honest love; with respect to his wife, one cannot be so sure; some of the most tender letters he left, are addressed to a Mrs. Draper, who was his "dear Eliza"—through a great many quires of paper. He was a Cambridge man and well taught;—of abundant reading, which he made to serve his turn in various ways, and conspicuously by his stealings; he stole from Rabelais; he stole from Shakespeare; he stole from Fuller;[15] he stole from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy; not a stealing of ideas only, but of words and sentences and half-pages together, without a sign of obligation; and yet he did so wrap about these thefts with the strings and lappets of his own abounding humor and drollery, as to give to the whole—thieving and Shandyism combined—a stamp of individuality. Ten to one that these old authors who had suffered the pilfering, would have lost cognizance of their expressions, in the new surroundings of the Yorkshire parson; and joined in the common grin of applause with which the world welcomed and forgave them.
But I linger longer on this name than the man deserves. Pathos there is in his stories, to be sure, that makes you wilt in spite of yourself; but a mile away from those Bond Street chambers where this pale, thin, silk-stockinged clergyman lives, and has his dinner invitations ten deep, is that old scar-faced Dr. Johnson about whom the beggars crowd; who can put no such pathos into his cumbrous sentences indeed; but the presence of that old, blind, petulant woman in his house—who had waited on his lost wife—is itself a bit of pathos that I think will outlast the story of Maria—and that should do so forty times over. I wish I could blot out the silk stockings, the rustling cassock, the simper, the pestilent love letters, the pretences, the artificialities of the man; they are oppressive; they rob his words of weight. Wit—to be sure, and humor—truculent, sparkling—more than enough; for the rest, there is hypocrisy, pretension—beastliness—untruth—all pinned under a satinquilted cloak of vague and unreal piety.
[1] Charles James Fox, b. 1749; d. 1806. Elected to club membership in 1774. His great great-grandmother was the Duchess of Portsmouth; and the Lord Holland so well known for his entertainments at Holland House, early in this century, was a nephew of Charles James Fox. Life by George Otto Trevelyan.
[2] Instance, speech on French affairs and the question of making peace with Napoleon—just then elected First Consul. Date of February, 1800.
[3] William Pitt, b. 1759; d. 1806. Younger son of the Earl of Chatham. He entered Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, 1773.
[4] Wraxall in his Memoirs (p. 344) cites special instance in the speech, where he deprecates new alliance between North and Fox—alluding to personal results to himself:—
"Fortuna sævo læta negotio et——"
(leaving out the mea virtute) then pounding on the table, and adding with oratorical vim
"——probamque
Pauperiem sine dole quæro."
Here (says Wraxall, who was an auditor) he cast his eyes down—passing his handkerchief across his lips—to recover breath only. Certainly he was grandly clear of anything like avarice; no great statesman of England (unless Gladstone) ever thought so little of money.
[5] See Francis Horner article in Edinburgh Review, October, 1843.
[6] Richard Brinsley Sheridan, b. 1751; d. 1816. Moore's Biography, interesting but not authoritative. Mrs. Oliphant's sketch in the Morley Lives, is one of that lady's most charming books.
[7] It was on February 7, 1787, that Sheridan made his first notable speech on the Begum charge in the House of Commons; the second, in the impeachment trial in Westminster Hall, in June, 1788. Others followed of less interest toward the close of the trial in 1794. The best reports are of the speeches made in 1788, published at the instigation of Sir Cornewall Lewis, in 1859. See Wilkes, Sheridan, and Fox, by W. Fraser Rae. 1874.
[8] A fearful account of Sheridan's condition in his last days is to be found in the Croker Papers (1884), chap. x. It is embodied in what purports to be a literal transcript of a conversational narrative by George IV., J. Wilson Croker being interlocutor and listener.
[9] Œlia (Humphry Ward's version).
[10] Thomas Chatterton, b. 1752; d. 1770. Tyrwhitt's edition, "Poems supposed to have been written by Thomas Rowley," etc., dates from 1777.
[11] Foster's Goldsmith, vol. ii., p. 248.
[12] Dr. Skeat—as a philologist—is naturally severe upon a thief of archaisms, whose robberies and arrogance did puzzle for a while even the archæologists.
Per contra—there is a disposition among many recent critics to rank him high among the pioneers of the "New Romantic" movement in England; Vid. Rodin Noel—Essays on the Poets; also, Athenæum, No. 3073.
[13] Sterne: b. 1713; d. 1768. Life, by H. D. Traill; a fuller one by Percy Fitzgerald.
[14] Notwithstanding there was almost always evidence of gentlemanly instincts at bottom; and under the scoriæ of a dissipated life and habits the sparkling of a soul of honor.
[15] In a sermon read by Corporal Trim (p. 209, Tristram Shandy, vol. i., London, 1790) are a good many strong points taken, without acknowledgment, from one of Richard Bentley's sermons, preached at Cambridge against Popery, on November 5th—shortly after the first attempt of "the Pretender." This strange similitude is not noticed in Dr. Ferrier's summing up of Sterne's sinning in this line.
We had sight of George III. in our last chapter, and we shall catch sight of him again from time to time; for he was a persistent lingerer, and a most obstinate liver. We had glimpses, too, of that cheery, sunny-faced, eloquent, ill-balanced man, Charles James Fox, whom we ought to remember as a true friend to America, in those critical days when taxation was swelling into tyranny. William Pitt, whom we also saw, and to whom we would have been delighted to listen, would never have won greatly upon American sympathies; too cold, too austere, too classic, too fine. Sheridan, on the other hand, would, and did, conquer hearts everywhere; but unfortunately spending his forces in great paroxysms of effort; one while the greatest comedist, and again the greatest orator, always the greatest spendthrift; and anon the greatest debtor, who only pays his debts by dying.
Sterne covered better his deficiencies of money and of soul. Who could have put more or truer feeling into the story of the poor ill lieutenant of the inn, whom Corporal Trim (at Uncle Toby's instance) had gone to see, and of whom he makes report? And uncle Toby says he will fetch him home and set him afoot in his regiment.
"Never," says Trim, "can he march."
"But he shall march," says uncle Toby.
"He will die in his tracks," says Trim.
"He shall not die," says Toby, with an oath—which oath, says Sterne, the recording angel washed away, so soon as it was uttered. The Rev. Laurence Sterne, it is to be feared, counted too largely upon the swash of such tender recording angels. Only a host of them, with best lachrymal equipment, could float away poor Sterne's misdeeds!
We touched upon the sad life and fate of the marvellous boy, Chatterton—not a great poet, but with an exuberant poetic glow within him which gave new brightness to old Romanticism, and which kindled in after days many a fancy into flame—up and down the pages of later and bolder poets. Were his forgeries perhaps instigated by the Ossianic mystification?
Macpherson and other Scots.
James Macpherson.
I do not know if you have ever encountered the poems of Ossian. They are out of fashion now; I doubt if fragments even get into the school-books; but some of my readers may remember in a corner of the art-gallery of Yale University a painting, with two life-size figures in it, by Colonel John Trumbull—a limp and bleeding, and somewhat dainty warrior, leaning upon the shoulder of a flax-haired maiden; with a little strain from Ossian's Fingal, in the placard below, to tell the story. The mighty Lamderg (who is the warrior) died: and Gelchossa (the flax-haired young woman) "mourned three days beside her love. The hunters found her dead." The picture is, I suspect, almost the only permanent mark in America of the amazing popularity which once belonged to the strange, weird, monotonous, gloomy, thin poems of Ossian. There are descriptions of mountain crags in them, and of splintered pines, of thunder blasts and of ocean hoar; and there are crags again, and bleeding warriors, and flax-haired women; harps, moonlight, broken clouds, and crags again: I cite a few fragments:
"The oaks of the mountains fall; the ocean shrinks and grows again; the moon herself is lost in heaven; but thou art forever the same, rejoicing in the brightness of thy course. When the world is dark with tempests, when thunder rolls and lightning flies, thou lookest in thy beauty from the clouds and laughest at the storm.
... "Rise, moon, from behind thy clouds! Stars of the night arise, lead me, some light, to the place where my love rests from the chase alone—his bow near him unstrung; his dogs panting around him. The stream and the wind roar aloud, I hear not the voice of my love."
Poems of Ossian.
And yet these poetic flights, which, it would seem might be made up from collective but injudicious use of the Songs of Solomon and the mental exaltations which come from over-indulgence in tea drinking, or other strong waters, were borne, on a swift gale of plaudits in the latter half of the last century all over Europe. Professors of Literature (such as Dr. Hugh Blair) wrote treatises upon their fire and grace; such men as Goethe and Schiller were fast admirers; Napoleon was said to be bewildered by their beauty. Of course they had French translation; and there were versions in German, Greek, Dutch, Spanish, and Latin. The Abbé Cesarotti, besides writing a dissertation in favor of the authenticity of the Gaelic poems, gave an Italian version (the favorite one of Napoleon) which in parts has a rounded play of vocables that makes one forget all poverty of invention. Thus when Ossian says,
"Thy side that is white as the foam of the troubled sea, when dark winds pour it on rocky Cuthon——" it is rounded by the Italian into this pretty bit of mellifluence:—
"Il tuo fianco ch' è candido come la spuma del turbato mare,
Quando gli oscuri venti lo spingono contro la mormorante
Roccia di Cutone——"[1]
And who, pray, was this Macpherson[2] of the Ossian poems, and what was his claim? He was a Scotch school-master; born somewhere in the upper valley of the Spey, beyond the Grampians and in the heart of the Highlands. He had been at Aberdeen University awhile, and again at Edinboro'; but took no degree at either. He wrote and printed some poor verse when twenty; followed it up with some fragments of old Gaelic song, which commanded wide attention; and in 1762 published that poem of Fingal—professedly by Ossian, an old Gaelic bard; and this made him famous. The measure and range were new, and there was a torrent of flame and thunder and love and fury running through it which captivated: he went up to London—was appointed to go with Governor Johnston to Florida,[3] in America; remained there at Pensacola, a year or more; but quarrelled with his chief (he had rare aptitude for quarrelling) and came back in 1766. Some English historical work followed; but with little success or profit. Yet he was a canny Scotchman, and so laid his plans that he became agent for some rich nabob of India (from those pickings winning a great fortune eventually); entered Parliament in 1780; had a country house at Putney, where he entertained lavishly; and at last built a great show place in the Highlands, near to his birth-place—which one may see to-day—with an obelisk to his memory, looking down on the valley of the Spey; and not so far away from the old coach-road, that passes through Killiecrankie, from Blair Athol to Inverness, but the coachman can show it—as he did to me—with his whip.
There were those who questioned from the beginning whether the Ossianic poems did really come from the Gaelic;—Dr. Johnson among them, whose contemptuous doubts infuriated the Macpherson to such a degree that he challenged the doughty Doctor. Johnson replied in what may be called forcible speech:—