ENGLISH LANDS LETTERS AND KINGS

Queen Anne and the Georges

BY

DONALD G. MITCHELL

NEW YORK
Charles Scribner's Sons
MDCCCXCVII

Copyright, 1895, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK

ENGLISH LANDS LETTERS AND KINGS

By Donald G. Mitchell

I. from Celt to Tudor
II. From Elizabeth to Anne
III. Queen Anne and the Georges
IV. The Later Georges to Victoria

Each 1 vol., 12mo, cloth, gilt top, $1.50

AMERICAN LANDS AND LETTERS

From the Mayflower to Rip Van Winkel

1 vol., square 12mo, Illustrated, $2.50

LETTER OF DEDICATION

[To Mrs. Grover Cleveland.]

MY DEAR MADAM:

Many bookmakers of that early Georgian period covered by this little volume eagerly sought to dignify their opening pages with the name and titles of some high-placed patron or patroness. It is not, my dear Madam, to revive this practice that I have asked permission to inscribe this little book to so worthy an occupant of the Presidential Mansion; but, rather, I have had in mind the courteous reception which—while yet an inmate of a college on the beautiful banks of Cayuga Lake—you once gave to some portions of the literary talk embodied in these pages; and remembering, furthermore, the unswerving dignity, and the unabating womanly gentleness by which you have conquered and adorned the trying conditions of a high career, I have wished to add my applause (as I do now and here) for the grace and kindliness which have ennobled your life, and made us all proud of such an example of American womanhood.

Very respectfully yours,
      Don^d. G. Mitchell.

Edgewood, June, 1895.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VIII.

INDEX.

ENGLISH LANDS, LETTERS, & KINGS.

CHAPTER I.

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 æsthetic; 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 anæsthetics. 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."