"My poor dear, dearest sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a mad-house, from whence I fear she must be moved to a hospital. My poor father was slightly wounded. God has preserved to me my senses. Write as religious a letter as possible, but no mention of what is gone and done with."
And only a day after this, the weak old father, with his plastered head, is playing cribbage; and again, on another day, friends having come in—very many for those small rooms—and the last ceremonies not yet over, and they all sitting down at some special repast—Lamb bethinks himself of all that has happened, of what lies in the next room (he tells this in a letter to Coleridge), and rushes thither to kiss once more the cold face and to pray forgiveness that he has forgotten her so soon.
Poor Mary recovers; she lives for years with her brother; the horror of the past staying like a black dream in their thought—of which they dare not speak. And when new visitations of estrangement threaten, they two, brother and sister, walk away out from the streets—on to Edmonton, through green fields, by hedges, under trees which they much enjoy, to the doctor's strong guardianship and ward, until repose comes again and a return. Lamb at last goes to live at Enfield, which is close by Edmonton, north of London, that he may be near her prison-house at all times and seasons.
Yet in all these days when the pains and fears of that distracting life are resting on him, he is putting those tender and playful touches into the pleasant essays we know so well; conjuring for himself and for thousands everywhere a world of sunshine that shall overlap the dreary one in which he lives, and spend its graces and cheeriness upon the mind of the poor forlorn one, who with sisterly affection cleaves there and journeys meekly and obediently and sadly beside him.
I do not know how to trust myself to make a citation from those essays which shall carry to those not over-familiar some good hint of their qualities; but I venture upon a bit from his Dream-Children:—
"Then I told how for seven long years, in hope sometimes, sometimes in despair, yet persisting ever, I courted the fair Alice W——; and as much as children could understand, I explained to them what coyness, and difficulty, and denial, meant in maidens—when suddenly, turning to little Alice, the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with such a reality of re-presentment that I became in doubt which of them stood there before me, or whose that bright hair was; and while I stood gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding, and still receding, till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in the uttermost distance, which—without speech—strangely impressed upon me the effects of speech:—We are not of Alice, not of thee, nor are we children at all. The children of Alice call Bartram father, we are nothing—less than nothing and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe, millions of ages, before we have existence and a name; and immediately awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my arm-chair—where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged by my side."
Lamb was not deep-thoughted; he would have lost the trail in those meditations and searchings to which Coleridge in his cooler and clearer moments invited and led the way; but there was about him an individuality, a delicacy of thought, a quaint play of airy fancies, a beguiling inconsequence, that have made his path in letters a delightful one for thousands to follow.
I cannot leave his name without calling attention to the charming little stories of Mrs. Leicester's School—written by Charles Lamb and his sister jointly. They are—or profess to be—the tales told by school children themselves of their memories—whether sorrows or joys; and are so artless in their narrative, so pathetic often, that you cannot help but follow the trend of their simple language as you would follow a story which an older sister might tell you about your own homes and your own father and mother.
Those essays of Lamb may sometimes show a liking for things we cannot like; in his dealings with the old dramatists he may pour chirrupy praises where we cannot follow with ours. We may not be won over, though we see Marston through those pitiful eyes and the lens of that always tender heart. And why should we? That criticism is not the best which serves to put us in agreeing herds, and to leash us in a bundled cohesion of opinion; but it is better worth if it stimulate us by putting beside our individuality of outlook the warming or the chafing or the contesting individuality of another mind. There is never a time when Lamb's generous, kindly, witty opinions—whether about men or books, or every-day topics—will not find a great company of delighted readers, if not of ardent sponsors. Then, for style—what is to be said, except that it is so gracious, so winning, we are delighted with its flow, its cadences, its surprises, its charming lapses—like waves on summer beaches—or like an August brook, prattling, babbling, and finding spread and pause in some pellucid, overshadowed pool—where we rest in fulness of summery content.
He was never a strong man physically, and his poor thin form vanished from the sight of men in 1834, six months after Coleridge died; and the poor sister—unaware what helplessness and loneliness had fallen on her, lingered for years in blessed ignorance; she then died; and so we turn over that page of English letters on which are scored Elia and the Tales of Shakespeare and pass to others.
Wordsworth.
A lake poet.
On the 29th day of June, just half a century ago, upon a beautiful sunny afternoon—most rare in the Lake Counties of England—I had one of the outside places upon an English coach, which was making its daily trip from Kendal, along the borders of Lake Windermere, and on by Grasmere and under the flank of Helvellyn, to Derwent-Water and Keswick. I stopped halfway at the good inn of the "Salutation" in Ambleside, with the blue of Windermere stretching before me; and in the twilight took a row upon the lake—the surface being scarce ruffled, and the shores, with their copses of wood, and their slopes of green lawn, as beautiful as a dream.
"I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
And as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving thro' the water like a swan."
Wordsworth.
The words were Wordsworth's[8] own; and this was his country; and he who was counted the King-poet in those College Days which were not then long behind me, was living only a little way off. From different points in the embowered roads I could catch a glimpse of the light in his window, at Rydal Mount. Stratford had been seen indeed, but there were only memories there; and Abbotsford, but Scott and the last of his family were gone; and Olney, but Cowper had been silent a matter of forty years; and here, at last, I was to come into near presence of one of the living magicians of English verse—in his own lair, with his mountains and his lakes around him. But I did not interview him: no thought of such audacity came nigh me: there was more modesty in those days than now. Yet it has occurred to me since—with some relentings—that I might have won a look of benediction from the old man of seventy-five, if I had sought his door, and told him—as I might truthfully have done—that within a twelvemonth of their issue his beautiful sextette of "Moxon" volumes were lying, thumb-worn, on my desk, in a far-off New England college-room; and that within the month I had wandered up the Valley of the Wye, with his Tintern Abbey pulsing in my thought more stirringly than the ivy-leaves that wrapped the ruin; and that only the week before I had followed lovingly his White Doe of Rylstone along the picturesque borders of Wharfdale, and across the grassy glades of Bolton Priory and among the splintered ledges
"Where Rylstone Brook with Wharf is blended."
Poets love to know that they have laid such trail for even the youngest of followers; and though the personal benedictions were missed, I did go around next morning—being Sunday—to the little chapel on the heights of Rydal, where he was to worship; and from my seat saw him enter; knowing him on the instant; tall (to my seeming), erect, yet with step somewhat shaky; his coat closely buttoned; his air serious, and self-possessed; his features large, mouth almost coarse; hair white as the driven snow, fringing a dome of baldness; an eye with a dreamy expression in it, and seeming to look—beyond, and still beyond. He carried, too, his serious air into his share of the service, and made his successive responses of "Good Lord deliver us!" and "Amen!" with an emphasis that rung throughout the little chapel.
I trust the reader will excuse these personal reminiscences, which I write down to fix in mind more distinctly the poet, whose work and life we have only space to glance at now, and whose name will close the roll of poets for the present volume.
His Poems.
There is, and always has been, on the part of too many admirers of Wordsworth a disposition to resent any depreciation or expression of dissent from fullest praise, which has counted against his reputation. We do not like—any of us—to be forced into our admiration of this or that poet, and will not be, for long whiles together. There is no bolstering of bad work that will make it permanently sound; so, too, what good things are done—whatever opposing sneers or silence may do—will surely, some day or other, be found out. A book or a poem that needs careful and insistent pilotage by critics, into the harbor of a great Fame, will not be so sure of safe anchorage and good holding-ground as one that drifts thither under stress of the unbroken, quiet, resistless tide of a cultivated popular judgment. Wordsworth's place is a very high one; some things he has done are incomparable; some altitudes of thought he has reached range among the Miltonic heights. But he has printed—as so many people have—too much. His vanities—which were excellently well developed—seem to have made him insensible to any demerits in his own work and incapable of believing that hand or brain of his could do aught that was not so far above common level as to warrant its acceptance by the world. I think he was conscientious in this; I do not believe that, like many an author, he put before us what he knew or suspected to be inferior, simply because he knew it would be devoured. There was none of that dishonesty in Wordsworth. He religiously believed that even "Peter Bell" and the dreariest lines of the "Idiot Boy" had a mission.
If Wordsworth had possessed Browning's sense of humor, he would have withdrawn an eighth of his published works; if he had possessed Hood's sense of humor, I think he would have withdrawn a third. Humor is a great and good shortener. Humor seeks to provoke mirth and ripples of cheery satisfaction, so it shuns length and prosiness. Humor is a charming quality in either preacher or poet; and brevity is one of the best parts of humor; indeed brevity and humor always lock hands. Unfortunately, Wordsworth had no humor. Again, that too free and lax play of language in Wordsworth—that told nothing vital, but only served to tie together, by loose and swaying looplets, the flashing jewels wherein his real genius coruscated and crystallized—not only fatigued us who followed and wanted to follow, but it filled the master's time and books and thought to the neglect of that large entertainment of some systematized purpose—some great, balanced, and concreted scheme of poetic story, which he always hinted at, but never made good. Take that budget of verse which went toward the making of the "Recluse"—how incomplete; how unfinished even in detail; yet splashed up and down with brilliancies of thought and fancy; with here and there noble, statuesque, single figures; like a great antechamber, detaining us with its diverting objects, with interposed, wearisome, official talk—we all the while hoping to fare through to some point where we shall see the grandeur of the house and take in reverently its great proportions, and pay homage to the master. But we never come to those Arcana; we end in waiting; great, fine bursts of song, and of glowing narrative—sun, mountains, and clouds giving us august attendance—but no mapping of a whole, whose scheme is fitly balanced, and whose foundations bear up a completed body and dome, with cross and crown. But though his languors of language, his prosiness, his self-satisfaction do madden one to damnatory speech, yet when his song breaks out at its best—seeming to tie the upper mysterious world to this mundane level—to make steps of melody and of heavenly lift to invite and charm as toward the Infinite, we are ashamed of our too easy discomfiture:—
"Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
"O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That Nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: nor indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest;
"But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which be they what they may,
Are yet a fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the Eternal silence: truths that wake,
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor,
Nor man, nor boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy.
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can, in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore."
These verses belong to an ode that should never be forgotten when we reckon up the higher reaches of the poetic tides of this generation.
I am disposed to think that all of us, as we grow older, come into larger and fuller appreciation of the wonderful intuitions of this poet and of his marvellous grasp of all the subtler meanings in Nature's aspects. Certainly those lines composed above Tintern Abbey, do not offer food for babes. Only older ones know that—
"Nature never did betray
The heart that loves her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy; for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings."
So, too, in the Excursion, whose mention we perhaps dwelt upon too lightly—that grand Wordsworthian mating of man with Nature is always shining through the poet's purpose, and gleaming along his lines: a deep and radical purpose it is; all else sways to it; all else is dwarfed and made small in the comparison. Hence, poor Mary Lamb is half-justified in her outcry—that under its dominance a poor dweller in town has hardly "a soul to be saved."[9] Grand, surely, are many of his utterances, morally and intellectually, and carrying richest adornments of poesy to their livery; immortal—yes; yet not favorites for these many generations: too encumbered; sheathed about with tamer things, that will not let the sword of his intent gleam with a vital keenness and poignancy. Always the great lesson which the stars and the mountains and rolling rivers sing—sing in his lines; but buttressed with over-much building up of supporting and flanking words. Always the grand appeal to man's moral nature and instincts is imminent; always the verse radiant with the beguiling lights which he has set to burn upon the hills and in the skies; but, too often, even the sunset glories pall, and weary with their over-painting and golden suffusions of language.
If one is tempted to go back to the contemporary criticism of the Excursion, he should temper the matter-of-fact admeasurement and antipathies of Jeffrey in the Edinburgh, with the kindlier and more feeling discourse of Charles Lamb in the Quarterly (1814). And of this latter, it is to be remembered that its warm unction and earnestness were very much abated by editorial jugglery. Lamb never forgave Gifford for putting "his d——d shoemaker phraseology instead of mine;" and in an explanatory letter to Wordsworth he tells him that many passages are cut out altogether, and "what is left is of course the worse for their having been there," and in a wonderful figure continues,—"the eyes are pulled out, and the bleeding sockets are left."
Personal History.
Wordsworth was a Cumberland man by birth, and from the very first opened his young eyes upon such scenes as lay along the Derwent. His father was an attorney-at-law and agent for the Lonsdale estates; nor does the poet fail to assure us in his autobiographic notes—with a pride that is only half veiled—of the gentle blood that flowed in his mother's veins. But the family purse was not plethoric; and—his father dying, when Wordsworth was only fourteen—it was through the kindness of his uncles that he had his "innings" at Trinity College, Cambridge, and felt his poetic pulses stirred by the memory of such old Cambridge men as Milton, and Waller, and Gray. The flat meadows bordering the Cam were doubtless tame to his Cumberland eyes, nor do University memories count for much in irradiating his future work; perhaps the brightest gleam that comes from those cloistered sources upon his verse is that which is reflected from the wondrous vaulted ceiling of King's College Chapel:—
"That branching roof
Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells
Where light and shade repose, where music dwells,
Lingering and wandering on as loth to die."
A vacation passed in the mountains of Switzerland sharpened an appetite for travel upon the Continent; and thither he went shortly after taking his degree (1791); was in Orleans and in Paris the succeeding year; caught the fever of those revolutionary times, and for a while seriously entertained the purpose of throwing himself into the swirl of that tide of Girondism which was to fall away so shortly after, leaving tracks of blood.
There was a short stay in London on his return—counting for very little in the story of his life. Westminster Bridge and A Farmer of Tilsbury Vale are all that bring a glimmer of remembrance to the lover of his books, out of the tumult and roar of "Lothbury" and Cheapside. Thereafter came the quiet life in Dorsetshire with his good sister Dora—where his poetic moods first came to print—and where Coleridge found him (1796) and cemented that friendship which drew him next year into Somersetshire—a friendship, which, with one brief interruption, that promised a bitter quarrel—lasted throughout their lives. There—at Alfoxden, in Somersetshire—was forged that little book of Lyrical Ballads, containing the Ancient Mariner and Tintern Abbey—the best possible types of the respective powers of the two poets.
In 1799 Wordsworth established himself at Grasmere, in Westmoreland, his sister remaining—as she always did—a beloved inmate of his home. In 1802 he married, most fortunately, a woman who was always sympathetic and kindly, as well as an excellent and devoted mother of the children born to them;[10] moreover, she was exceptionally endowed to stimulate and give range to his poetic ambitions. Between Grasmere or its neighborhood, and the better-known home of Rydal Mount, the poet passed the remainder of his life. There were, indeed, frequent interludes of travel—to Scotland, to Leicestershire, to Southern England, to Ireland, and the Continent—from all which places he came back with an unabated love for the lakes and mountains which bounded his home. Never did there live a more exalted lover of Nature; and specially for those scenes of Nature which cradled him in infancy and which cheered his manhood. Without being largely experienced in the devices of gardening craft, he yet gave frequent and profitable advice to those among his friends who were building up homes in the surrounding lake district; and the Beaumont family of Leicestershire show with pride a winter garden at Coleorton, which is an evergreen remembrancer of the poet's skill and taste. He resented all undue interference with natural surfaces; his art was the larger art of winning one to the reasonableness and beauty of nature's own purposes.
Not a resident in the neighborhood of Ambleside but knew his gaunt figure stalking up and down the hills; yet not counted over-affable; the villagers report him—"distant, vera distant. As for his habits he had none—niver knew him wi' a pot i' his hand or a pipe i' his mouth." And another says—"As for fishing, he hadn't a bit of fish in him, hadn't Wordsworth—not a bit o' fish in him!"[11] This sounds strangely to one familiar with Lines to gold and silver fish in a glass globe.
Certainly he did not love babble nor little persiflage; he had neither the art to coin it nor the humor to redeem it. But he was capable of sensible, heavily-charged talk, even upon practical themes, showing a capacity for, and a habit of, consecutive and logical thinking. Often reading and discoursing on poets and their work, but chary of any exuberance of praise; if ever cynical, tending that way under such provocation. Not indisposed—for small cause—to recite from Wordsworth (as Emerson tells us in the story of his first visit to Rydal Mount); but reciting well, and putting large, dashing movement into the verse—as of faraway rebounding water-falls. His egotism, though not easily kept under, was not riotously exacting or audacious; one could see at the bottom of it—not the little vanities of a flibbertigibbet, but respect and reverence for his inborn seership and for his long priesthood at the altar of the Muses.
He had no musical ear, no power of distinguishing tunes, yet was rapt into ecstatic fervor by the near and sweet warbling of a bird. Books he loved only for their uses; he favored no finical "keeping" of them, but plunged into an uncut volume with a smeared fruit-knife—if need were. Southey dreaded his visits to his Keswick library, saying he was "like a bear in a tulip garden." He was parsimonious too; generosity in praise, or in purse, was unknown to him; and he had stiff school-mastery ways with youngish men—craving oblation and large tokens of respect. De Quincey said he never offered to carry a lady's shawl; hardly offered a hand to help her over a stile. He was not mobile, not adaptive, not gossipy; last of men for a picnic or a tea-party. His shaking of hands was "feckless;" which to a Scottish ear means a hand-shake not to be run after and with no heartiness in its grip. That home of Rydal Mount was a modest and charming one; within—severely simple; in abstemiousness the poet was almost an anchorite: without—a terrace walk, a velvety stretch of turf, mossy vases, a dial, a few patches of flowers, grayish house-walls on which the clambering vines took hold, quaint stone chimney-tops on which the lichens clung and around which the swallows played, views of Rydal Water, glimpses of Windermere, of Nab-scar, and of nearer heights crowned with foliage.
Wordsworth was never a man of large means; his poems gave only small moneyed returns; nor did he care overmuch for expensive indulgences; travelling was his greatest and most coveted luxury. All new scenes in nature came to his eye as so many new phases of his oldest and tenderest friend.
For a considerable period he was in receipt of a small revenue from a local Commissionership of Stamps, and during the last eight years of his life received a pension of £300 from the Government. A year after the grant, upon the death of Dr. Southey, he was, through the urgence of friends, and at the solicitation of Sir Robert Peel, induced to accept the post of Poet Laureate—going up to London, at the age of seventy-three, to kiss the hand of the young Queen, in recognition of that honor. This young Queen, then in her twenty-fourth year, was her present gracious lady, Victoria, who had succeeded to her bluff sailor-uncle, William IV., in 1837, and to her sorrier uncle, George IV., who had died in 1830.
Wordsworth was among those stately country gentlemen who believed that with the passage of the great Reform Bill of 1832, England was about to enter upon her decadence. Like many another poet, he had faith in established privileges, and faith in grand traditions. He bestirred himself, too, in the latter years of his life, to defeat—if it might be—the scheme for pushing railways across his quiet and beautiful region among the lakes of Westmoreland and Cumberland. Happily he did not live to see the desecration of his charming solitudes; it would have made him wroth to watch the wreaths of vapor from the engines floating around the chimney-tops of Rydal Mount.[12] The lines he wrote fifty years before his death, he lived by to the last:—
"To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that thro' me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.
The budding twigs spread out their fan
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there."
He had not only a poet's, but a Briton's love for that old England—of mossy roofs, and park lands, and smoking chimneys, and great old houses, and gnarled oaks, and way-side cottages. He cherished all Raskin's antipathy to huge manufacturing centres, and the din of machinery and trip-hammers; he would have no pounding to fright the cuckoos, and no reservoirs among the hills to choke the rills; but everywhere the brooks purling their own murmurous ways through leafy solitudes and sweet, open valleys.
Well, those are the sights that win most, I think, toward the celestial visions which the good poet always cherished, and which symbolized best the "dear Jerusalem,"—
"Along whose streets, with pleasing sound,
The living waters flow,
And on the banks, on either side.
The trees of life do grow."
Only the name—William Wordsworth—is graven upon the simple stone which marks the poet's grave, in a corner of the church-yard at Grasmere; and the bodies of wife and children lie grouped there beside him.
[1] Samuel Rogers, b. 1768; d. 1855. His Pleasures of Memory, published 1792; Italy, 1822-28.
[2] Crabb Robinson, chap. ix., 1881, p. 165, vol. ii., says he "was noted for his generosity toward poor artists." The story he tells in confirmation is, that Sir Thomas Lawrence appeared at his door and begged him to save the president of the Royal Academy from disgrace, which must follow except a few thousands were raised next day; he (Sir Thomas) offering his paintings, drawings, etc., in guarantee. Crabb Robinson continues that "Rogers saw Lord Ward [a nobleman of great wealth] next day and arranged for the advance by him;" an advance that never brought loss to either Ward or Rogers. The latter's "generosities" were a good many of them of this color; i.e., securing advances which were pretty sure to be repaid.
[3] S. T. Coleridge, b. 1772; d. 1834. Many of his works edited by H. N. Coleridge, husband of his only daughter Sara. Special mention should be made of the Coleridgean labors of that indefatigable worker, the late J. Dykes Campbell.
[4] He had a son Hartley, whom Crabb Robinson describes in 1816 as "one of the strangest boys I ever saw. He has the features of a foreign Jew, with starched and affected manners." He also speaks of the other son, Derwent, as a "hearty boy, with a good-natured expression." The daughter—afterward Mrs. Henry Nelson Coleridge, editress of many of her father's works (continues Robinson), "has a face of great sweetness."
[5] Southey did not go to Keswick to reside until 1803-4. Coleridge, however, was there as an occupant of a portion of the future Southey home in 1800. Southey paid him a visit in the summer of 1801. See Traill, chap. v. See also Memorials of Coleorton, passim.
[6] Probably some time between 1803 and 1806.
[7] Charles Lamb, b. 1775; d. 1834.
[8] William Wordsworth, b. 1770; d. 1850. Evening Walk published 1793; Lyrical Ballads (in conjunction with Coleridge), 1798; Excursion, 1814; White Doe of Rylstone, 1815; first collected edition of poems, 1836-37; Life by W. H. Myers; a much fuller, but somewhat muddled one, by William Knight, 3 vols,, 8vo, 1889. Dowden's edition of Wordsworth's poems (Aldine Series) is latest and best.
[9] See Lamb's Letters, cited in Knight, vol. ii., p. 235.
[10] His wife was Mary Hutchinson, of Penrith. Their children were John, b. 1803; Dorothy, b. 1804 (became Mrs. Quinlan and died before her father); Thomas, b. 1806; Catharine, b. 1808; and William, b. 1810—the last being the only one who survived the poet.
[11] This based on "Mr. Rawnsley's Gleanings amongst the Villagers." See Athenæum, February 23, 1889.
[12] There is a very interesting account of Wordsworth's home life, etc., in Miss Martineau's Autobiography, vol. i., p. 504 et seq.—but very much colored, as all her pictures are, by her own megrims and disposition to sneer at all the world—except Miss Martineau.
Adams, John, 187.
Addison, Joseph, 4.
Aikin, Dr., 273-276.
Allston, Washington, 316.
Anne, Queen, the times of, 1-3.
Austen, Jane, her life and personality, 265-267; opinions of Walter Scott, Macaulay, and Miss Mitford concerning, 266, 267; her Pride and Prejudice, 268; Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, 268, 269; her qualities, 270, 271; burial-place, 270.
Austen, Lady, and William Cowper, 246, 247.
Barbauld, Mrs., 273-276.
Beauclerk, Topham, 114-116.
Beckford, William, and his Vathek, 285-291.
Bentley, Richard, his Siris: A chain of Philosophical Reflections and Inquiries concerning the Virtues of Tarwater, 9; writes on the Epistles of Phalaris, 9-11; his family, 10; portrait of, 10, 11; as a writer and as a man, 11, 12.
Berkeley, George, his Theory of Vision, 4; his career, 4-9; his verse, 5; his sermons, 6; The Minute Philosopher, 7; his family, 7; his philosophy, 9.
Blair, Hugh, 230.
Blounts, Alexander Pope and the, 34.
Boswell, James, and his Life of Dr. Johnson, 118-122.
Boufflers, Madame de, and David Hume, 150.
Burke, Edmund, 112, 113; his words concerning Beauclerk's widow, 115; his burial-place, 145.
Burney, Frances, and Dr. Johnson, 138, 142, 164, 165; her stories, 165; Evelina, 165-168; Camilla, 168; her Diary, 168-169; last years, 170, 171.
Burns, Robert, his poetry, 291; his career, 292-297; his death, 298, 301; compared with Samuel Rogers, 302, 303.
Camilla, Miss Burney's, 170.
Carlyle, Thomas, his words concerning Coleridge, 318.
Castle of Otranto, The, Walpole's, 84.
Chatterton, Thomas, the young poet, 202-205; his end, 205, 206, 209; and Horace Walpole, 206-209; the Rowley Poems, 207, 208; compared with Poe, 210.
Chesterfield, Lord, and Dr. Johnson, 97, 98.
Children of the Abbey, Miss Roche's, 282, 283.
Christabel, Coleridge's, 317, 318.
Coach, the Venetian, 3.
Cœlebs, Hannah More's, 175, 176.
Coleridge, S. T., 298, 299; his life, 309-317; Lamb's apostrophe to, 310; and Southey, 311, 312; and Wordsworth, 313; his Ancient Mariner, 314, and Washington Allston, 316; his opium habit, 316, 317; his Christabel, 317; Carlyle's words concerning, 318; his death, 318.
Collins, William, 100-163; his Ode to Evening, 163, 180.
Coverley, Sir Roger de, 2.
Cowper, William, his family and education, 239, 240; his love affair, 240; mental trouble, 241, 242; and Mrs. Unwin, 243-245, and Rev. John Newton, 245; John Gilpin's Ride, 245, 246, and Lady Austen, 246; The Task, 240, 247; on American affairs, 248; later life, 249-253; his Homer, 250, 251; his place as a poet, 254-256.
Crabbe, George, compared with Pope, 232, 233; his birth and early work, 233-235; private chaplain to the Duke of Rutland, 235, 236; his life and character, 237, 238.
Curchod, Mademoiselle, afterward Madame Necker, 123.