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.
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.