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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 30455 ***
+
+ESSAYS
+
+IN
+
+ENGLISH LITERATURE
+
+1780-1860
+
+
+BY
+
+GEORGE SAINTSBURY
+
+PERCIVAL AND CO.
+_KING STREET, COVENT GARDEN_
+
+LONDON
+
+1890
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+Of the essays in this volume, the introductory paper on "The Kinds of
+Criticism" has not before appeared in print. All the rest, with one
+exception (the Essay on Lockhart which appeared in the _National
+Review_), were originally published in _Macmillan's Magazine_. To the
+Editors and Publishers of both these periodicals I owe my best thanks
+for permission to reprint the articles. To the Editor of _Macmillan's
+Magazine_ in particular (to whom, if dedications were not somewhat in
+ill odour, I should, in memory of friendship old and new, have dedicated
+the book), I am further indebted for suggesting several of the subjects
+as well as accepting the essays. These appear in the main as they
+appeared; but I have not scrupled to alter phrase or substance where it
+seemed desirable, and I have in a few places restored passages which had
+been sacrificed to the usual exigencies of space. In two cases, those of
+Lockhart and De Quincey, I have thought it best to discuss, in a brief
+appendix, some questions which have presented themselves since the
+original publications. In consequence of these alterations and additions
+as well as for other reasons, it may be convenient to give the dates and
+places of the original appearance of each essay. They are as follows:--
+
+    Lockhart, _National Review_, Aug. 1884. Borrow, _Macmillan's
+    Magazine_, Jan. 1886. Peacock, do. April 1886. Wilson (under the
+    title of "Christopher North"), do. July 1886. Hazlitt, do. March
+    1887. Jeffrey, do. August 1887. Moore, do. March 1888. Sydney
+    Smith, do. May 1888. Praed, do. Sept. 1888. Leigh Hunt, do.
+    April 1889. Crabbe, do. June 1889. Hogg, do. Sept. 1889. De
+    Quincey, do. June 1890.
+
+The present order is chronological, following the birth-years of the
+authors discussed.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+INTRODUCTORY ESSAY--
+
+  THE KINDS OF CRITICISM                                              ix
+
+   I. CRABBE                                                           1
+
+  II. HOGG                                                            33
+
+ III. SYDNEY SMITH                                                    67
+
+  IV. JEFFREY                                                        100
+
+   V. HAZLITT                                                        135
+
+  VI. MOORE                                                          170
+
+ VII. LEIGH HUNT                                                     201
+
+VIII. PEACOCK                                                        234
+
+  IX. WILSON                                                         270
+
+   X. DE QUINCEY                                                     304
+
+  XI. LOCKHART                                                       339
+
+ XII. PRAED                                                          374
+
+XIII. BORROW                                                         403
+
+
+APPENDIX--A. DE QUINCEY                                              440
+
+          B. LOCKHART                                                444
+
+
+INDEX                                                                449
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+THE KINDS OF CRITICISM
+
+
+It is probably unnecessary, and might possibly be impertinent, to renew
+here at any length the old debate between reviewers as reviewers, and
+reviewers as authors--the debate whether the reissue of work contributed
+to periodicals is desirable or not. The plea that half the best prose
+literature of this century would be inaccessible if the practice had
+been forbidden, and the retort that anything which can pretend to keep
+company with the best literature of the century will be readily relieved
+from the objection, at once sum up the whole quarrel, and leave it
+undecided. For my own part, I think that there is a sufficient
+connection of subject in the following chapters, and I hope that there
+is a sufficient uniformity of treatment. The former point, as the least
+important, may be dismissed first. All the literature here discussed
+is--with the exception of Crabbe's earliest poems, and the late
+aftermath of Peacock and Borrow--work of one and the same period, the
+first half of the present century. The authors criticised were all
+contemporaries; with only one exception, if with one, they were all
+writing more or less busily within a single decade, that of 1820 to
+1830. And they have the further connection (which has at least the
+reality of having been present to my mind in selecting them), that while
+every one of them was a man of great literary power, hardly one has been
+by general consent, or except by private crotchet would be, put among
+the very greatest. They stand not far below, but distinctly below,
+Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats. Yet again, they
+agree in the fact that hardly one of them has yet been securely set in
+the literary niche which is his due, all having been at some time either
+unduly valued or unduly neglected, and one or two never having yet
+received even due appreciation. The greatest of all critics was accused,
+unjustly, of having a certain dislike of clear, undoubted supremacy. It
+would be far more fair to say that Sainte-Beuve had eminently, what
+perhaps all critics who are not mere carpers on the one hand, or mere
+splashers of superlatives on the other, have more or less--an affection
+for subjects possessing but qualified merit, and so giving to criticism
+a certain additional interest in the task of placing and appraising
+them.
+
+This last sentence may not meet with universal assent, but it will bring
+me conveniently to the second part of my subject. I should not have
+republished these essays if I had not thought that, whatever may be
+their faults (and a man who does not see the faults of his own writing
+on revising it a second time for the press after an interval, must be
+either a great genius or an intolerable fool), they possess a certain
+unity of critical method. Nor should I have republished them if it had
+seemed to me that this method was exactly identical with that of any
+other critic of the present day in England. I have at least endeavoured
+to wear my rue with a difference, and that not merely for the sake of
+differing.
+
+Mr. Goldwin Smith, whose work is not likely to be impeached for defect
+either in form or in substance, wrote but a few months ago, in
+melancholy mood, that the province of criticism appeared to be now
+limited to the saying of fine things. I agree with him that this is one
+vicious extreme of the popular conception of the art; but in order to
+define correctly, we cannot be contented with one only. The other, as it
+seems to me, is fixed by the notion, now warmly championed by some
+younger critics both at home and abroad, that criticism must be of all
+things "scientific." For my own part, I have gravely and strenuously
+endeavoured to ascertain from the writings both of foreign critics (the
+chief of whom was the late M. Hennequin in France), and of their
+disciples at home, what "scientific" criticism means. In no case have I
+been able to obtain any clear conception of its connotation in the
+mouths or minds of those who use the phrase. The new heaven and the new
+earth which they promise are no doubt to be very different from our own
+old earth and heaven; of that they are sure, and their sureness does not
+fail to make itself plain. But what the flora and fauna, the biology and
+geology of the new heaven and earth are to be, I have never succeeded in
+ascertaining. The country would appear to be like that Land of Ignorance
+which, as Lord Brooke says, "none can describe until he be past it."
+Only I have perceived that when this "scientific" criticism sticks
+closest to its own formulas and ways, it appears to me to be very bad
+criticism; and that when, as sometimes happens, it is good criticism,
+its ways and formulas are not perceptibly distinguishable from those of
+criticism which is not "scientific." For the rest, it is all but
+demonstrable that "scientific" literary criticism is impossible, unless
+the word "scientific" is to have its meaning very illegitimately
+altered. For the essential qualities of literature, as of all art, are
+communicated by the individual, they depend upon idiosyncrasy: and this
+makes science in any proper sense powerless. _She_ can deal only with
+classes, only with general laws; and so long as these classes are
+constantly reduced to "species of one," and these laws are set at nought
+by incalculable and singular influences, she must be constantly baffled
+and find all her elaborate plant of formulas and generalisations
+useless. Of course, there are generalisations possible in literature,
+and to such I may return presently; but scientific criticism of
+literature must always be a contradiction in terms. You may to some
+considerable extent ascertain the general laws of language, of metre, of
+music, as applied to verbal rhythm and cadence; you may classify the
+subjects which appeal to the general, and further classify their
+particular manners of appeal; you may arrange the most ingenious
+"product-of-the-circumstances" theories about race, climate, religion.
+But always sooner or later, and much more often sooner than later, the
+mocking demon of the individual, or, if a different phrase be preferred,
+the great and splendid mystery of the idiosyncrasy of the artist, will
+meet and baffle you. You will find that on the showing of this science
+falsely so called, there is no reason why Chapelain should not be a
+poet, and none why Shakespeare is. You will ask science in vain to tell
+you why some dozen or sixteen of the simplest words in language arranged
+by one man or in one fashion, why a certain number of dabs of colour
+arranged by another man or in another fashion, make a permanent addition
+to the delight of the world, while other words and other dabs of colour,
+differently arranged by others, do not. To put the matter yet otherwise,
+the whole end, aim, and object of literature and the criticism of
+literature, as of all art, and the criticism of all art, is beauty and
+the enjoyment of beauty. With beauty science has absolutely nothing to
+do.
+
+It is no doubt the sense, conscious or unconscious, of this that has
+inclined men to that other conception of criticism as a saying of fine
+things, of which Mr. Goldwin Smith complains, and which certainly has
+many votaries, in most countries at the present day. These votaries have
+their various kinds. There is the critic who simply uses his subject as
+a sort of springboard or platform, on and from which to display his
+natural grace and agility, his urbane learning, his faculty of pleasant
+wit. This is perhaps the most popular of all critics, and no age has
+ever had better examples of him than this age. There is a more serious
+kind who founds on his subject (if indeed founding be not too solemn a
+term) elaborate descants, makes it the theme of complicated variations.
+There is a third, closely allied to him, who seeks in it apparently
+first of all, and sometimes with no further aim, an opportunity for the
+display of style. And lastly (though as usual all these kinds pervade
+and melt into one another, so that, while in any individual one may
+prevail, it is rare to find an individual in whom that one is alone
+present) there is the purely impressionist critic who endeavours in his
+own way to show the impression which the subject has, or which he
+chooses to represent that it has, produced on him. This last is in a
+better case than the others; but still he, as it seems to me, misses
+the full and proper office of the critic, though he may have an
+agreeable and even useful function of his own.
+
+For the full and proper office of the critic (again as it seems to me)
+can never be discharged except by those who remember that "critic" means
+"judge." Expressions of personal liking, though they can hardly be kept
+out of criticism, are not by themselves judgment. The famous "J'aime
+mieux Alfred de Musset," though it came from a man of extraordinary
+mental power and no small specially critical ability, is not criticism.
+Mere _obiter dicta_ of any kind, though they may be most agreeable and
+even most legitimate sets-off to critical conversation, are not
+criticism. The most admirable discourses from the merely literary point
+of view on taste, Shakespeare, and the musical glasses, with some
+parenthetic reference to the matter in hand, are not criticism. There
+must be at least some attempt to take in and render the whole virtue of
+the subjects considered, some effort to compare them with their likes in
+other as well as the same languages, some endeavour to class and value
+them. And as a condition preliminary to this process, there must, I
+think, be a not inconsiderable study of widely differing periods, forms,
+manners, of literature itself. The test question, as I should put it, of
+the value of criticism is "What idea of the original would this critic
+give to a tolerably instructed person who did not know that original?"
+And again, "How far has this critic seen steadily and seen whole, the
+subject which he has set himself to consider? How far has he referred
+the main peculiarities of that subject to their proximate causes and
+effects? How far has he attempted to place, and succeeded in placing,
+the subject in the general history of literature, in the particular
+history of its own language, in the collection of authors of its own
+department?" How far, in short, has he applied what I may perhaps be
+excused for calling the comparative method in literature to the
+particular instance? I have read very famous and in their way very
+accomplished examples of literature ostensibly critical, in which few if
+any of these questions seem to have been even considered by the critic.
+He may have said many pretty things; he may have shown what a clever
+fellow he is; he may have in his own person contributed good literature
+to swell the literary sum. But has he done anything to aid the general
+grasp of that literary sum, to place his man under certain lights and in
+certain aspects, with due allowance for the possibility of other aspects
+and other lights? Very often, I think, it must be admitted that he has
+not. I should be the first to admit that my own attempts to do this are
+unsuccessful and faulty; and I only plead for them that they are such
+attempts, and that they have been made on the basis of tolerably wide
+and tolerably careful reading.
+
+For, after all, it is this reading which is the main and principal
+thing. It will not of course by itself make a critic; but few are the
+critics that will ever be made without it. We have at this moment an
+awful example of an exceedingly clever writer who has commenced critic,
+disdaining this preparation. Some of my friends jeer or comminate at Mr.
+Howells; for my part I only shudder and echo the celebrated "There, but
+for the grace of God." Here is a clever man, a very clever man, an
+excellent though of late years slightly depraved practitioner in one
+branch of art, who, suddenly and without preparation, takes to another,
+and becomes a spectacle to men and angels. I hope that we shall one day
+have a collection of Mr. Howells's critical _dicta_ on novels and other
+things; they will be one of the most valuable, one of the most terrible
+of books as showing what happens when a man speaks without knowledge. To
+read what Mr. Howells says of Mr. Thackeray is almost an illiberal
+education. The reason of the error is quite obvious. It is simply that
+the clever American does not know; he has not sufficient range of
+comparison. For my own part, I should not dare to continue criticising
+so much as a circulating library novel, if I did not perpetually pay my
+respects to the classics of many literatures: and I am not sure that I
+do not appreciate the classics of many literatures all the better from
+my not infrequent reading of circulating library novels.
+
+The only objection of validity that I have ever seen taken to what I
+have ventured to call comparative criticism, is that it proceeds too
+much, as the most learned of living French critics once observed of an
+English writer, _par cases et par compartiments_, that is to say, as I
+understand M. Brunetière, with a rather too methodical classification.
+This, however, was written some seven or eight years ago, and since then
+I have found M. Brunetière speaking about critical method as
+distinguished from the science of criticism, and insisting on the
+necessity of comparison, not less positively, and no doubt with far more
+authority, than I have done myself. Yet I half think that M. Brunetière,
+like most of us, does not practise quite up to the level of his
+preaching; and I should say that on mediæval literature, on Romantic
+literature, and on some other things, his own excellent censorship might
+be further improved by a still more catholic sympathy, and a still more
+constant habit of looking at everything and every writer in conjunction
+with their analogues and their opposites in the same and other
+literatures. This constant reference of comparison may indeed stand in
+the way of those flowing deliverances of personal opinion, in more or
+less agreeable language, which are perhaps, or rather certainly, what is
+most popular in criticism; I do not think that they will ever stand in
+the way of criticism proper. As I understand that long and difficult
+art, its end, as far as the individual is concerned, is to provide the
+mind with a sort of conspectus of literature, as a good atlas thoroughly
+conned provides a man with a conspectus of the _orbis terrarum_. To the
+man with a geographical head, the mention of a place at once suggests
+its bearings to other places, its history, its products, all its
+relations in short; to the man with a critical head, the mention of a
+book or an author should call up a similar mental picture. The picture,
+indeed, will never be as complete in the one instance as in the other,
+because the intellect and the artistic faculty of man are far vaster
+than this planet, far more diverse, far more intricately and
+perplexingly arranged than all its abundant material dispositions and
+products. The life of Methuselah and the mind of Shakespeare together
+could hardly take the whole of critical knowledge to be their joint
+province. But the area of survey may be constantly increased; the
+particularity of knowledge constantly made more minute.
+
+Another objection, more fantastic in appearance but rather attractive in
+its way, is that the comparative critic becomes too much of a universal
+lover, and too little of an enthusiast, that he has an irritating and
+ungentlemanly habit of seeing blemishes in the greatest, a pottering and
+peddling fancy for discovering beauties in the most insignificant; that
+he lacks the exclusiveness and the fastidiousness of intellectual
+aristocracy, the fervour and rapture of æsthetic passion. To this, one
+can answer little more than, "It may be so." Certainly the critic of
+this kind will very rarely be able to indulge in the _engouement_ which
+is the apparent delight of some of his class. He will deal very
+cautiously in superlatives, and his commendations, when he gives them,
+will sometimes have, to more gushing persons, the slightly ludicrous air
+which attached to the modest boast of somebody that he was "the third
+best authority in England on gray shirtings." On the other hand, the
+critic of this kind will not be able to neglect the uninteresting with
+the serene nonchalance of some of his fellows. He will sometimes have to
+look back on days and months and years of laborious reading and say to
+himself, "Were it not well for us, as others use, to take all this for
+granted?" But to say this is to say no more than that the thorough-going
+practice of any art and mystery involves a great deal of tedious,
+thankless, and even positively fruitless work, brushes away a good many
+illusions, and interferes a good deal with personal comfort. Cockaigne
+is a delightful country, and the Cockaigne of criticism is as agreeable
+as the other provinces. But none of these provinces has usually been
+accounted a wise man's paradise.
+
+It may be asked, "What is the end which you propose for this comparative
+reading? A method must lead somewhere; whither does this method lead? or
+does it lead only to statistics and classifications?" Certainly it does
+not, or at least should not. It leads, like all method, to
+generalisations which, though as I have said I do not believe that they
+have attained or ever will attain the character of science, at least
+throw no small light and interest on the study of literature as a whole,
+and of its examples as particulars. It gives, I think (speaking as a
+fool), a constantly greater power of distinguishing good work from bad
+work, by giving constantly nearer approach (though perhaps it may never
+wholly and finally attain) to the knowledge of the exact characteristics
+which distinguish the two. And the way in which it does this is by a
+constant process of weakening or strengthening, as the case may be, the
+less or more correct generalisations with which the critic starts, or
+which he forms in the early days of his reading. There has often been
+brought against some great critics the charge that their critical
+standards have altered at different times of their career. This simply
+means that they have been constantly applying the comparative method,
+and profiting by the application. After all, there are few, though there
+are some, absolute truths in criticism; and a man will often be
+relatively right in condemning, from certain aspects and in certain
+combinations, work which, under other aspects and in other combinations,
+he has been relatively quite as right in admiring. Occasionally, no
+doubt, there will be an apparent exception to the rule of critical
+development, as in the case of Hazlitt: but that remarkable exception
+does not fail to justify the rule. For in truth, Hazlitt's critical
+range was not so wide as his penetration was deep; and he avows, almost
+exultingly, that after a comparatively early time of life, he
+practically left off reading. That is to say, he carefully avoided
+renewing his plant, and he usually eschewed new material--conditions
+which, no doubt, conduce to the uniformity, and, within obvious limits,
+are not prejudicial to the excellence of the product.
+
+It is possible that the title "The Kinds of Criticism" may have excited
+in some readers expectations of the discussion of a subject which has
+not yet been handled. We have recently seen revived the sempiternal
+argument between authors and critics--an argument in which it may be as
+well to say that the present writer has not yet taken part either
+anonymously or otherwise. The authors, or some of them, have remarked
+that they have never personally benefited by criticism; and the critics,
+after their disagreeable way, have retorted that this was obvious. A
+critic of great ingenuity, my friend Mr. Andrew Lang, has, with his
+usual humour, suggested that critics and reviewers are two different
+kinds, and have nothing to do with each other essentially, though
+accidentally, and in the imperfect arrangements of the world, the
+discharge of their functions may happen to be combined in the same
+person. As a matter of practice, this is no doubt too often the case; as
+a matter of theory, nothing ought much less to be the case. I think
+that if I were dictator, one of the first non-political things that I
+should do, would be to make the order of reviewers as close a one, at
+least, as the bench of judges, or the staff of the Mint, or of any
+public establishment of a similar character. That any large amount of
+reviewing is determined by fear or favour is a general idea which has
+little more basis than a good many other general ideas. But that a very
+large amount of reviewing is determined by doubtless well-meaning
+incompetence, there is no doubt whatever. It is on the whole the most
+difficult kind of newspaper writing, and it is on the whole the most
+lightly assigned and the most irresponsibly performed. I have heard of
+newspapers where the reviews depended almost wholly on the accident of
+some of the staff taking a holiday, or being laid for a time on the
+shelf, or being considered not up to other work; of others, though this
+I own is scarcely credible, where the whole reviewing was farmed out to
+a manager, to be allotted to devils as good to him seemed; of many where
+the reviews were a sort of exercising-ground on which novices were
+trained, broken-down hacks turned out to grass, and invalids allowed a
+little gentle exercise. And I know of not a few papers and not a few
+reviewers in which and by whom, errors and accidents excepted, the best
+work possible is given to one of the most important kinds of work. Of
+common mistakes on the subject, which are not merely silly crazes, such
+as the log-rolling craze and the five-pound note craze and the like, the
+worst known to me, though it is shared by some who should know better,
+is that a specialist is the best reviewer. I do not say that he is
+always the worst; but that is about as far as my charity, informed by
+much experience, can go. Even if he has no special craze or megrim, and
+does not decide offhand that a man is hopeless because he calls Charles
+the Great Charlemagne, or _vice versâ_, he is constantly out of focus.
+The perfect reviewer would be (and the only reviewer whose reviews are
+worth reading is he who more or less approximates to this ideal) the
+Platonic or pseudo-Platonic philosopher who is "second best in
+everything," who has enough special knowledge not to miss merits or
+defects, and enough general knowledge to estimate the particular subject
+at, and not above, its relative value to the whole. There have been good
+critics who were unable to bring themselves down to the mere reading of
+ephemeral work, but I do not think they were the better for this; I am
+sure that there never was a good reviewer, even of the lowest trash, who
+was not _in posse_ or _in esse_ a good critic of the highest and most
+enduring literature. The writer of funny articles, and the "slater," and
+the intelligent _compte-rendu_ man, and the person who writes six
+columns on the general theory of poetry when he professes to review Mr.
+Apollo's last book, may do all these things well and not be good
+critics; but then all these things may be done, and done well, and yet
+not be good reviews.
+
+Whether the reviewer and the critic are valuable members of society or
+useless encumbrances, must be questions left to the decision of the
+world at large, which apparently is not in a hurry to decide either way.
+There are, no doubt, certain things that the critic, whether he be
+critic major or critic minor, Sainte-Beuve or Mr. Gall, cannot do. He
+cannot certainly, and for the present, sell or prevent the sale of a
+book. "You slated this and it has gone through twenty editions" is not a
+more uncommon remark than the other, "They slated that and you extol it
+to the skies." Both, as generally urged, rest on fallacy. In the first
+case, nothing was probably farther from the critic's intention than to
+say "this book is not popular"; the most that he intended was "this book
+is not good." In the second case, it has been discovered of late (it is
+one of the few things that we have discovered) that very rarely has any
+really good thing, even in the most famous or infamous attacks on it,
+been attacked, even with a shadow of success, for its goodness. The
+critics were severe on Byron's faults, on Keats's faults, and on the
+present Laureate's faults; they were seldom severe on their goodness,
+though they often failed to appreciate it fully.
+
+This, however, is in one sense a digression, for there is no criticism
+of contemporary work in this volume. I think, however, as I have just
+endeavoured to point out, that criticism of contemporary work and
+criticism of classics should proceed on the same lines, and I think that
+both require the same qualities and the same outfit. Nor am I certain
+that if narrow inquiry were made, some of the best criticism in all
+times and in all languages would not be found in the merest casual
+reviewing. That in all cases the critic must start from a wide
+comparative study of different languages and literatures, is the first
+position to be laid down. In the next place he must, I think, constantly
+refer back his sensations of agreement and disagreement, of liking and
+disliking, in the same comparative fashion. "Why do I like the
+_Agamemnon_ and dislike Mr. Dash's five-act tragedy?" is a question to
+be constantly put, and to be answered only by a pretty close personal
+inquiry as to what "I" really do like in the _Agamemnon_ and do dislike
+in Mr. Dash. And in answering it, it will hardly be possible to consider
+too large a number of instances of all degrees of merit, from Aeschylus
+himself to Mr. Dash himself, of all languages, of all times. Let
+Englishmen be compared with Englishmen of other times to bring out this
+set of differences, with foreigners of modern times to bring out that,
+with Greeks and Romans to bring out the other. Let poets of old days be
+compared with poets of new, classics with romantics, rhymed with
+unrhymed. Let the straitest doctrinaire criticism of men of talent like
+Boileau and simpletons like Rymer be compared with the fullest
+appreciations of Coleridge and Hazlitt, of Sainte-Beuve and Mr. Arnold.
+"Compare, always compare" is the first axiom of criticism.[1]
+
+The second, I think, is "Always make sure, as far as you possibly can,
+that what you like and dislike is the literary and not the
+extra-literary character of the matter under examination." Make sure,
+that is to say, that admiration for the author is not due to his having
+taken care that the Whig dogs or the Tory dogs shall not have the best
+of it, to his having written as a gentleman for gentlemen, or as an
+uneasy anti-aristocrat for uneasy anti-aristocrats, as a believer
+(fervent or acquiescent) in the supernatural, or as a person who lays
+it down that miracles do not happen, as an Englishman or a Frenchman, a
+classic or a romantic. Very difficult indeed is the chase and discovery
+of these enemies: for extra-literary prejudices are as cunning as winter
+hares or leaf-insects, in disguising themselves by simulating literary
+forms.
+
+Lastly, never be content without at least endeavouring to connect cause
+and effect in some way, without giving something like a reason for the
+faith that is in you. No doubt the critic will often be tempted, will
+sometimes be actually forced to say, "'J'aime mieux Alfred de Musset,'
+and there's an end of it." All the imperfect kinds, as they seem to me,
+of criticism are recommended by the fact that they are, unlike some
+other literary matter, not only easier writing but also easier reading.
+The agreeable exercises of style where adjectives meet substantives to
+whom they never thought they could possibly be introduced (as a certain
+naughty wit has it), the pleasant chatter about personal reminiscences,
+the flowers of rhetoric, the fruits of wit, may not be easy, but they
+are at any rate easier than fashioning some intelligent and intelligible
+response to the perpetual "Why?" the _quare stans_ of criticism.
+
+In the following pages, I shall no doubt be found, like other people, to
+have come very far short of my own ideal, and my own precepts. I may
+even say that I have knowingly and intentionally come short of them to
+some extent. Biographical and anecdotic detail has, I believe, much
+less to do with the real appreciation of the literary value of an author
+than is generally thought. In rare instances, it throws a light, but the
+examples in which we know practically nothing at all, as in that of
+Shakespeare, or only a few leading facts as in that of Dante, are not
+those in which criticism is least useful or least satisfactory. At the
+same time biographical and anecdotic details please most people, and if
+they are not allowed to shoulder out criticism altogether, there can be
+no harm in them. For myself, I should like to have the whole works of
+every author of merit, and I should care little to know anything
+whatever about his life; but that is a mere private opinion and possibly
+a private crotchet. Accordingly some space has been given in most of
+these Essays to a sketch of the life of the subject. Nor has it seemed
+advisable (except as a matter of necessary, but very occasional,
+digression) to argue at length upon abstract and general questions such
+as the definition of poetry, or the kinds and limits of the novel. Large
+as is the body of criticism so-called which the last hundred years have
+seen, it may be doubted whether there is even yet accumulated a
+sufficient _corpus_ of really critical discussion of individuals. If I
+have in these Essays contributed even a very little to such an
+accumulation, I shall have done that which I purposed.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Only by dint of this constant comparison, can the critic save
+himself from the besetting error which makes men believe that there is
+some absolute progress in life and art, instead of, for the most part,
+mere eddyings-round in the same circle. I am tempted to glance at this,
+because of a passage which I read while this Essay was a-writing, a
+passage signed by a person whom I name altogether for the sake of
+honour, Mr. James Sully. "If we compare," says Mr. Sully, "Fielding for
+example with Balzac, Thackeray, or one of the great Russian novelists,
+we see at once what a simple toylike structure used to serve art for a
+human world. A mind versed in life as contemporary fiction depicts it,
+feels, on turning to the already antiquated forms of the eighteenth
+century, that it has to divest itself for the nonce of more than half
+its equipment of habitual thought and emotion." This might serve as text
+for a long sermon, I only cite it in passing as an interesting example
+of the _idola specus_ which beset a clever man who loses the power of
+comparative vision, and sees _Tom Jones_ as a toylike structure with the
+_Kreutzer Sonata_ beside it as a human world.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+CRABBE
+
+
+There is a certain small class of persons in the history of literature
+the members of which possess, at least for literary students, an
+interest peculiar to themselves. They are the writers who having
+attained, not merely popular vogue, but fame as solid as fame can ever
+be, in their own day, having been praised by the praised, and having as
+far as can be seen owed this praise to none of the merely external and
+irrelevant causes--politics, religion, fashion or what not--from which
+it sometimes arises, experience in a more or less short time after their
+death the fate of being, not exactly cast down from their high place,
+but left respectfully alone in it, unvisited, unincensed, unread. Among
+these writers, over the gate of whose division of the literary Elysium
+the famous, "Who now reads Bolingbroke?" might serve as motto, the
+author of "The Village" and "Tales of the Hall" is one of the most
+remarkable. As for Crabbe's popularity in his own day there is no
+mistake about that. It was extraordinarily long, it was extremely wide,
+it included the select few as well as the vulgar, it was felt and more
+or less fully acquiesced in by persons of the most diverse tastes,
+habits, and literary standards. His was not the case, which occurs now
+and then, of a man who makes a great reputation in early life and long
+afterwards preserves it because, either by accident or prudence, he does
+not enter the lists with his younger rivals, and therefore these rivals
+can afford to show him a reverence which is at once graceful and cheap.
+Crabbe won his spurs in full eighteenth century, and might have boasted,
+altering Landor's words, that he had dined early and in the best of
+company, or have parodied Goldsmith, and said, "I have Johnson and
+Burke: all the wits have been here." But when his studious though barren
+manhood was passed, and he again began, as almost an old man, to write
+poetry, he entered into full competition with the giants of the new
+school, whose ideals and whose education were utterly different from
+his. While "The Library" and "The Village" came to a public which still
+had Johnson, which had but just lost Goldsmith, and which had no other
+poetical novelty before it than Cowper, "The Borough" and the later
+Tales entered the lists with "Marmion" and "Childe Harold," with
+"Christabel" and "The Excursion," even with "Endymion" and "The Revolt
+of Islam." Yet these later works of Crabbe met with the fullest
+recognition both from readers and from critics of the most opposite
+tendencies. Scott, the most generous, and Wordsworth,[2] the most
+grudging, of all the poets of the day towards their fellows, united in
+praising Crabbe; and unromantic as the poet of "The Village" seems to us
+he was perhaps Sir Walter's favourite English bard. Scott read him
+constantly, he quotes him incessantly; and no one who has read it can
+ever forget how Crabbe figures in the most pathetic biographical pages
+ever written--Lockhart's account of the death at Abbotsford. Byron's
+criticism was as weak as his verse was powerful, but still Byron had no
+doubt about Crabbe. The utmost flight of memory or even of imagination
+can hardly get together three contemporary critics whose standards,
+tempers, and verdicts, were more different than those of Gifford,
+Jeffrey, and Wilson. Yet it is scarcely too much to say that they are
+all in a tale about Crabbe. In this unexampled chorus of eulogy there
+rose (for some others who can hardly have admired him much were simply
+silent) one single note, so far as I know, or rather one single rattling
+peal of thunder on the other side. It is true that this was significant
+enough, for it came from William Hazlitt.
+
+Yet against this chorus, which was not, as has sometimes happened, the
+mere utterance of a loud-voiced few, but was echoed by a great multitude
+who eagerly bought and read Crabbe, must be set the almost total
+forgetfulness of his work which has followed. It is true that of living
+or lately living persons in the first rank of literature some great
+names can be cited on his side; and what is more, that these great names
+show the same curious diversity in agreement which has been already
+noticed as one of Crabbe's triumphs. The translator of Omar Khayyám, his
+friend the present Laureate, and the author of "The Dream of Gerontius,"
+are men whose literary ideals are known to be different enough; yet they
+add a third trinity as remarkable as those others of Gifford, Jeffrey,
+and Wilson, of Wordsworth, Byron, and Scott. Much more recently Mr.
+Courthope has used Crabbe as a weapon in that battle of his with
+literary Liberalism which he has waged not always quite to the
+comprehension of his fellow-critics; Mr. Leslie Stephen has discussed
+him as one who knows and loves his eighteenth century. But who reads
+him? Who quotes him? Who likes him? I think I can venture to say, with
+all proper humility, that I know Crabbe pretty well; I think I may say
+with neither humility nor pride, but simply as a person whose business
+it has been for some years to read books, and articles, and debates,
+that I know what has been written and said in England lately. You will
+find hardly a note of Crabbe in these writings and sayings. He does not
+even survive, as "Matthew Green, who wrote 'The Spleen,'" and others
+survive, by quotations which formerly made their mark, and are retained
+without a knowledge of their original. If anything is known about Crabbe
+to the general reader, it is the parody in "Rejected Addresses," an
+extraordinarily happy parody no doubt, in fact rather better Crabbe in
+Crabbe's weakest moments than Crabbe himself. But naturally there is
+nothing of his best there; and it is by his best things, let it be
+repeated over and over in face of all opposition, that a poet must be
+judged.
+
+Although Crabbe's life, save for one dramatic revolution, was one of the
+least eventful in our literary history, it is by no means one of the
+least interesting. Mr. Kebbel's book[3] gives a very fair summary of it;
+but the Life by Crabbe's son which is prefixed to the collected editions
+of the poems, and on which Mr. Kebbel's own is avowedly based, is
+perhaps the more interesting of the two. It is written with a curious
+mixture of the old literary state and formality, and of a feeling on
+the writer's part that he is not a literary man himself, and that not
+only his father, but Mr. Lockhart, Mr. Moore, Mr. Bowles and the other
+high literary persons who assisted him were august beings of another
+sphere. This is all the more agreeable, in that Crabbe's sons had
+advantages of education and otherwise which were denied to their father,
+and might in the ordinary course of things have been expected to show
+towards him a lofty patronage rather than any filial reverence. The poet
+himself was born at Aldborough, a now tolerably well-known
+watering-place (the fortune of which was made by Mr. Wilkie Collins in
+_No Name_) on Christmas Eve, 1754. That not uncommon infirmity of noble
+minds which seeks to prove distinguished ancestry seems to have had no
+hold on the plain common sense of the Crabbe family, who maintained
+themselves to be at the best Norfolk yeomen, and though they possessed a
+coat-of-arms, avowed with much frankness that they did not know how they
+got it. A hundred and forty years ago they had apparently lost even the
+dignity of yeomanhood, and occupied stations quite in the lower rank of
+the middle class as tradesmen, non-commissioned officers in the navy or
+the merchant service, and so forth. George Crabbe, the grandfather, was
+collector of customs at Aldborough, but his son, also a George, was a
+parish schoolmaster and a parish clerk before he returned to the
+Suffolk port as deputy collector and then as salt-master, or collector
+of the salt duties. He seems to have had no kind of polish, and late in
+life was a mere rough drinking exciseman; but his education, especially
+in mathematics, appears to have been considerable, and his ability in
+business not small. The third George, his eldest son, was also fairly
+though very irregularly educated for a time, and his father, perceiving
+that he was "a fool about a boat," had the rather unusual common sense
+to destine him to a learned profession. Unluckily his will was better
+than his means, and while the profession which Crabbe chose or which was
+chosen for him--that of medicine--was not the best suited to his tastes
+or talents, the resources of the family were not equal to giving him a
+full education, even in that. He was still at intervals employed in the
+Customs warehouses at "piling up butter and cheese" even after he was
+apprenticed at fourteen to a country surgeon. The twelve years which he
+spent in this apprenticeship, in an abhorred return for a short time to
+the cheese and butter, in a brief visit to London, where he had no means
+to walk the hospitals, and in an attempt to practise with little or no
+qualification at Aldborough itself, present a rather dismal history of
+apprenticeship which taught nothing. But Love was, for once, most truly
+and literally Crabbe's solace and his salvation, his master and his
+patron. When he was barely eighteen, still an apprentice, and
+possessed, as far as can be made out, of neither manners nor prospects,
+he met a certain Miss Sarah Elmy. She was three or four years older than
+himself and much better connected, being the niece and eventual
+co-heiress of a wealthy yeoman squire. She was, it is said, pretty; she
+was evidently accomplished, and she seems to have had access to the
+country society of those days. But Mira, as Crabbe called her, perhaps
+merely in the fashion of the eighteenth century, perhaps in remembrance
+of Fulke Greville's heroine (for he knew his Elizabethans rather well
+for a man of those days), and no doubt also with a secret joy to think
+that the last syllables of her Christian name and surname in a way spelt
+the appellation, fell in love with the boy and made his fortune. But for
+her Crabbe would probably have subsided, not contentedly but stolidly,
+into the lot of a Doctor Slop of the time, consoling himself with snuff
+(which he always loved) and schnaps (to which we have hints that in his
+youth he was not averse). Mira was at once unalterably faithful to him
+and unalterably determined not to marry unless he could give her
+something like a position. Their long engagement (they were not married
+till he was twenty-nine and she was thirty-three) may, as we shall see,
+have carried with it some of the penalties of long engagements. But it
+is as certain as any such thing can be that but for it English
+literature would have lacked the name of Crabbe.
+
+There is no space here to go through the sufferings of the novitiate. At
+last, at the extreme end of 1779, Crabbe made up his mind once more to
+seek his fortune, this time by aid of literature only, in London. His
+son too has printed rare scraps of a very interesting Journal to Mira
+which he kept during at least a part of the terrible year of struggle
+which he passed there. He saw the riots of '80; he canvassed, always
+more or less in vain, the booksellers and the peers; he spent
+three-and-sixpence of his last ten shillings on a copy of Dryden; he was
+much less disturbed about imminent starvation than by the delay of a
+letter from Mira ("my dearest Sally" she becomes with a pathetic lapse
+from convention, when the pinch is sorest) or by the doubt whether he
+had enough left to pay the postage of one. He writes prayers (but not
+for the public eye), abstracts of sermons for Mira, addresses (rather
+adulatory) to Lord Shelburne, which received no answer. All this has the
+most genuine note that ever man of letters put into his work, for
+whatever Crabbe was or was not, now or at any time, he was utterly
+sincere; and his sincerity makes his not very abundant letters and
+journals unusually interesting. At last, after a year, during which his
+means of subsistence are for the most part absolutely unknown, he, as he
+says himself, fixed "by some propitious influence, in some happy moment"
+on Edmund Burke as the subject of a last appeal.
+
+Nothing in all literary history is, in a modest way and without pearls
+and gold, quite so like a fairy tale as the difference in Crabbe's
+fortunes which this propitious influence brought about. On the day when
+he wrote to Burke he was, as he said in the letter, "an outcast, without
+friends, without employment, without bread." In some twenty-four hours
+(the night-term of which he passed in ceaselessly pacing Westminster
+Bridge to cheat the agony of expectation) he was a made man. It was not
+merely that, directly or indirectly, Burke procured him a solid and an
+increasing income. He did much more than that. Crabbe, like most
+self-educated men, was quite uncritical of his own work: Burke took him
+into his own house for months, encouraged him to submit his poems,
+criticised them at once without mercy and with judgment, found him
+publishers, found him a public, turned him from a raw country boy into a
+man who at least had met society of the best kind. It is a platitude to
+say that for a hundred persons who will give money or patronage there is
+scarcely one who will take trouble of this kind; and if any devil's
+advocate objects the delight of producing a "lion," it may be answered
+that for Burke at least this delight would not have been delightful at
+all.
+
+The immediate form which the patronage of Burke and that, soon added, of
+Thurlow took, is one which rather shocks the present day. They made
+Crabbe turn to the Church, and got a complaisant bishop to ordain him.
+They sent him (a rather dangerous experiment) to be curate in his own
+native place, and finally Burke procured him the chaplaincy at Belvoir.
+The young Duke of Rutland, who had been made a strong Tory by Pitt, was
+fond of letters, and his Duchess Isabel, who was,--like her elder
+kinswoman, Dryden's Duchess of Ormond--
+
+    A daughter of the rose, whose cheeks unite
+    The varying beauties of the red and white,
+
+in other words, a Somerset, was one of the most beautiful and gracious
+women in England. Crabbe, whose strictly literary fortunes I postpone
+for the present, was apparently treated with the greatest possible
+kindness by both; but he was not quite happy,[4] and his ever-prudent
+Mira still would not marry him. At last Thurlow's patronage took the
+practical form (it had already taken that, equally practical, of a
+hundred pounds) of two small Chancellor's livings in Dorsetshire,
+residence at which was dispensed with by the easy fashions of the day.
+The Duke of Rutland, when he was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland,
+did not take Crabbe with him, a circumstance which has excited some
+unnecessary discussion; but he gave him free quarters at Belvoir, where
+he and his wife lived for a time before they migrated to a neighbouring
+curacy--his wife, for even Mira's prudence had yielded at last to the
+Dorsetshire livings, and they were married in December 1783. They lived
+together for nearly thirty years, in, as it would seem, unbroken mutual
+devotion, but Mrs. Crabbe's health seems very early to have broken down,
+and a remarkable endorsement of Crabbe's on a letter of hers has been
+preserved. I do not think Mr. Kebbel quotes it; it ends, "And yet
+happiness was denied"--a sentence fully encouraging to Mr. Browning and
+other good men who have denounced long engagements.[5] The story of
+Crabbe's life after his marriage may be told very shortly. His first
+patron died in Ireland, but the duchess with some difficulty prevailed
+on Thurlow to exchange his former gifts for more convenient and rather
+better livings in the neighbourhood of Belvoir, at the chief of which,
+Muston, Crabbe long resided. The death of his wife's uncle made him
+leave his living and take up his abode for many years at Glemham, in
+Suffolk, only to find, when he returned, that (not unnaturally, though
+to his own great indignation) dissent had taken bodily possession of the
+parish. His wife died in 1813, and the continued kindness, after nearly
+a generation, of the house of Rutland, gave him the living of
+Trowbridge, in Wiltshire, with a small Leicestershire incumbency near
+Belvoir added, instead of Muston. At Trowbridge he lived nearly twenty
+years, revisiting London society, making the acquaintance personally (he
+had already known him by letter) of Sir Walter, paying a memorable visit
+to Edinburgh, flirting in an elderly and simple fashion with many
+ladies, writing much and being even more of a lion in the society of
+George the Fourth's reign than he had been in the days of George the
+Third. He died on 3rd February 1832.
+
+Crabbe's character is not at all enigmatical, and emerges as clearly in
+those letters and diaries of his which have been published, as in
+anecdotes of him by others. Perhaps the famous story of his politely
+endeavouring to talk French to divers Highlanders, during George the
+Fourth's visit to Edinburgh, is slightly embroidered--Lockhart, who
+tells it, was a mystifier without peer. If he did gently but firmly
+extinguish a candle-snuff while Wordsworth and Sir George Beaumont were
+indulging in poetic ecstasies over the beautiful undulations of the
+smoke, there may have been something to say for him as Anne Scott, to
+whom Wordsworth told the story, is said to have hinted, from the side of
+one of the senses. His life, no less than his work, speaks him a man of
+amiable though by no means wholly sweet temper, of more common sense
+than romance, and of more simplicity than common sense. His nature and
+his early trials made him not exactly sour, but shy, till age and
+prosperity mellowed him; but simplicity was his chief characteristic in
+age and youth alike.
+
+The mere facts of his strictly literary career are chiefly remarkable
+for the enormous gap between his two periods of productiveness. In early
+youth he published some verses in the magazines and a poem called
+"Inebriety," which appeared at Ipswich in 1775. His year of struggle in
+London saw the publication of another short piece "The Candidate," but
+with the ill-luck which then pursued him, the bookseller who brought it
+out became bankrupt. His despairing resort to Burke ushered in "The
+Library," 1781, followed by "The Village," 1783, which Johnson revised
+and improved not a little. Two years later again came "The Newspaper,"
+and then twenty-two years passed without anything appearing from
+Crabbe's pen. It was not that he was otherwise occupied, for he had
+little or nothing to do, and for the greater part of the time, lived
+away from his parish. It was not that he was idle, for we have his son's
+testimony that he was perpetually writing, and that holocausts of
+manuscripts in prose and verse used from time to time to be offered up
+in the open air, for fear of setting the house on fire by their mass. At
+last, in 1807, "The Parish Register" appeared, and three years later
+"The Borough"--perhaps the strongest division of his work. The
+miscellaneous Tales came in 1812, the "Tales of the Hall" in 1819.
+Meanwhile and afterwards, various collected editions appeared, the last
+and most complete being in 1829--a very comely little book in eight
+volumes. His death led to the issue of some "Posthumous Tales" and to
+the inclusion by his son of divers fragments both in the Life and in the
+Works. It is understood, however, that there are still considerable
+remains in manuscript; perhaps they might be published with less harm to
+the author's fame and with less fear of incurring a famous curse than in
+the case of almost any other poet.
+
+For Crabbe, though by no means always at his best, is one of the most
+curiously equal of verse-writers. "Inebriety" and such other very
+youthful things are not to be counted; but between "The Village" of 1783
+and the "Posthumous Tales" of more than fifty years later, the
+difference is surprisingly small. Such as it is, it rather reverses
+ordinary experience, for the later poems exhibit the greater play of
+fancy, the earlier the exacter graces of form and expression. Yet there
+is nothing really wonderful in this, for Crabbe's earliest poems were
+published under severe surveillance of himself and others, and at a time
+which still thought nothing of such value in literature as correctness,
+while his later were written under no particular censorship, and when
+the Romantic revival had already, for better or worse, emancipated the
+world. The change was in Crabbe's case not wholly for the better. He
+does not in his later verse become more prosaic, but he becomes
+considerably less intelligible. There is a passage in "The Old
+Bachelor," too long to quote but worth referring to, which, though it
+may be easy enough to understand it with a little goodwill, I defy
+anybody to understand in its literal and grammatical meaning. Such
+welters of words are very common in Crabbe, and Johnson saved him from
+one of them in the very first lines of "The Village." Yet Johnson could
+never have written the passages which earned Crabbe his fame. The great
+lexicographer knew man in general much better than Crabbe did; but he
+nowhere shows anything like Crabbe's power of seizing and reproducing
+man in particular. Crabbe is one of the first and certainly one of the
+greatest of the "realists" who, exactly reversing the old philosophical
+signification of the word, devote themselves to the particular only. Yet
+of the three small volumes by which he, after his introduction to
+Burke, made his reputation, and on which he lived for a quarter of a
+century, the first and the last display comparatively little of this
+peculiar quality. "The Library" and "The Newspaper" are characteristic
+pieces of the school of Pope, but not characteristic of their author.
+The first catalogues books as folio, quarto, octavo, and so forth, and
+then cross-catalogues them as law, physic, divinity, and the rest, but
+is otherwise written very much in the air. "The Newspaper" suited Crabbe
+a little better, because he pretty obviously took a particular newspaper
+and went through its contents--scandal, news, reviews, advertisements--in
+his own special fashion: but still the subject did not appeal to him. In
+"The Village," on the other hand, contemporaries and successors alike
+have agreed to recognise Crabbe in his true vein. The two famous
+passages which attracted the suffrages of judges so different as Scott
+and Wordsworth, are still, after more than a hundred years, fresh,
+distinct, and striking. Here they are once more:--
+
+    Theirs is yon House that holds the parish poor,
+    Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door;
+    There, where the putrid vapours, flagging, play,
+    And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;--
+    There children dwell who know no parents' care;
+    Parents who know no children's love dwell there!
+    Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed,
+    Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed;
+    Dejected widows, with unheeded tears,
+    And crippled age with more than childhood fears;
+    The lame, the blind, and, far the happiest they!
+    The moping idiot and the madman gay.
+
+           ·       ·       ·       ·       ·
+
+    Anon, a figure enters, quaintly neat,
+    All pride and business, bustle and conceit;
+    With looks unaltered by these scenes of woe,
+    With speed that, entering, speaks his haste to go,
+    He bids the gazing throng around him fly,
+    And carries fate and physic in his eye:
+    A potent quack, long versed in human ills,
+    Who first insults the victim whom he kills;
+    Whose murderous hand a drowsy Bench protect,
+    And whose most tender mercy is neglect.
+    Paid by the parish for attendance here,
+    He wears contempt upon his sapient sneer;
+    In haste he seeks the bed where Misery lies,
+    Impatience marked in his averted eyes;
+    And some habitual queries hurried o'er,
+    Without reply he rushes on the door:
+    His drooping patient, long inured to pain,
+    And long unheeded, knows remonstrance vain,
+    He ceases now the feeble help to crave
+    Of man; and silent, sinks into the grave.
+
+The poet executed endless variations on this class of theme, but he
+never quite succeeded in discovering a new one, though in process of
+time he brought his narrow study of the Aldborough fishermen and
+townsfolk down still more narrowly to individuals. His landscape is
+always marvellously exact, the strokes selected with extraordinary skill
+_ad hoc_ so as to show autumn rather than spring, failure rather than
+hope, the riddle of the painful earth rather than any joy of living.
+Attempts have been made to vindicate Crabbe from the charge of being a
+gloomy poet, but I cannot think them successful; I can hardly think that
+they have been quite serious. Crabbe, our chief realist poet, has an
+altogether astonishing likeness to the chief prose realist of France,
+Gustave Flaubert, so far as his manner of view goes, for in point of
+style the two have small resemblance. One of the most striking things in
+Crabbe's biography is his remembrance of the gradual disillusion of a
+day of pleasure which, as a child, he enjoyed in a new boat of his
+father's. We all of us, except those who are gifted or cursed with the
+proverbial duck's back, have these experiences and these remembrances of
+them. But most men either simply grin and bear it, or carrying the grin
+a little farther, console themselves by regarding their own
+disappointments from the ironic and humorous point of view. Crabbe,
+though not destitute of humour, does not seem to have been able or
+disposed to employ it in this way. Perhaps he never quite got over the
+terrible and, for the most part unrecorded, year in London: perhaps the
+difference between the Mira of promise and the Mira of possession--the
+"happiness denied"--had something to do with it: perhaps it was a
+question of natural disposition with him. But when, years afterwards, as
+a prosperous middle-aged man, he began his series of published poems
+once more with "The Parish Register," the same manner of seeing is
+evident, though the minute elaboration of the views themselves is
+almost infinitely greater. Nor did he ever succeed in altering this
+manner, if he ever tried to do so.
+
+With the exception of his few Lyrics, the most important of which, "Sir
+Eustace Grey" (one of his very best things), is itself a tale in
+different metre, and a few other occasional pieces of little importance,
+the entire work of Crabbe, voluminous as it is, is framed upon a single
+pattern, the vignettes of "The Village" being merely enlarged in size
+and altered in frame in the later books. The three parts of "The Parish
+Register," the twenty-four Letters of "The Borough," some of which have
+single and others grouped subjects, and the sixty or seventy pieces
+which make up the three divisions of Tales, consist almost exclusively
+of heroic couplets, shorter measures very rarely intervening. They are
+also almost wholly devoted to narratives, partly satirical, partly
+pathetic, of the lives of individuals of the lower and middle class
+chiefly. Jeffrey, who was a great champion of Crabbe and allotted
+several essays to him, takes delight in analysing the plots or stories
+of these tales; but it is a little amusing to notice that he does it for
+the most part exactly as if he were criticising a novelist or a
+dramatist. "The object," says he, in one place, "is to show that a man's
+fluency of speech depends very much upon his confidence in the
+approbation of his auditors": "In Squire Thomas we have the history of a
+mean, domineering spirit," and so forth. Gifford in one place actually
+discusses Crabbe as a novelist. I shall make some further reference to
+this curious attitude of Crabbe's admiring critics. For the moment I
+shall only remark that the singularly mean character of so much of
+Crabbe's style, the "style of drab stucco," as it has been unkindly
+called, which is familiar from the wicked wit that told how the youth at
+the theatre
+
+    Regained the felt and felt what he regained,
+
+is by no means universal. The most powerful of all his pieces, the
+history of Peter Grimes, the tyrant of apprentices, is almost entirely
+free from it, and so are a few others. But it is common enough to be a
+very serious stumbling-block. In nine tales out of ten this is the
+staple:--
+
+    Of a fair town where Dr. Rack was guide,
+    His only daughter was the boast and pride.
+
+Now that is unexceptionable verse enough, but what is the good of
+putting it in verse at all? Here again:--
+
+    For he who makes me thus on business wait,
+    Is not for business in a proper state.
+
+It is obvious that you cannot trust a man who, unless he is intending a
+burlesque, can bring himself to write like that. Crabbe not only brings
+himself to it, but rejoices and luxuriates in the style. The tale from
+which that last luckless distich is taken, "The Elder Brother," is full
+of pathos and about equally full of false notes. If we turn to a far
+different subject, the very vigorously conceived "Natural Death of
+Love," we find a piece of strong and true satire, the best thing of its
+kind in the author, which is kept up throughout. Although, like all
+satire, it belongs at best but to the outer courts of poetry, it is so
+good that none can complain. Then the page is turned and one reads:--
+
+    "I met," said Richard, when returned to dine,
+    "In my excursion with a friend of mine."
+
+It may be childish, it may be uncritical, but I own that such verse as
+that excites in me an irritation which destroys all power of enjoyment,
+except the enjoyment of ridicule. Nor let any one say that pedestrian
+passages of the kind are inseparable from ordinary narrative in verse
+and from the adaptation of verse to miscellaneous themes. If it were so
+the argument would be fatal to such adaptation, but it is not. Pope
+seldom indulges in such passages, though he does sometimes: Dryden never
+does. He can praise, abuse, argue, tell stories, make questionable
+jests, do anything in verse that is still poetry, that has a throb and a
+quiver and a swell in it, and is not merely limp, rhythmed prose. In
+Crabbe, save in a few passages of feeling and a great many of mere
+description--the last an excellent setting for poetry but not
+necessarily poetical--this rhythmed prose is everywhere. The matter
+which it serves to convey is, with the limitations above given, varied,
+and it is excellent. No one except the greatest prose novelists has such
+a gallery of distinct, sharply etched characters, such another gallery
+of equally distinct scenes and manner-pieces, to set before the reader.
+Exasperating as Crabbe's style sometimes is, he seldom bores--never
+indeed except in his rare passages of digressive reflection. It has, I
+think, been observed, and if not the observation is obvious, that he has
+done with the pen for the neighbourhood of Aldborough and Glemham what
+Crome and Cotman have done for the neighbourhood of Norwich with the
+pencil. His observation of human nature, so far as it goes, is not less
+careful, true, and vivid. His pictures of manners, to those who read
+them at all, are perfectly fresh and in no respect grotesque or faded,
+dead as the manners themselves are. His pictures of motives and of
+facts, of vice and virtue, never can fade, because the subjects are
+perennial and are truly caught. Even his plays on words, which horrified
+Jeffrey--
+
+    Alas! your reverence, wanton thoughts I grant
+    Were once my motive, now the thoughts of want,
+
+and the like--are not worse than Milton's jokes on the guns. He has
+immense talent, and he has the originality which sets talent to work in
+a way not tried by others, and may thus be very fairly said to turn it
+into genius. He is all this and more. But despite the warnings of a
+certain precedent, I cannot help stating the case which we have
+discussed in the old form, and asking, was Crabbe a poet?
+
+And thus putting the question, we may try to sum up. It is the gracious
+habit of a summing-up to introduce, if possible, a dictum of the famous
+men our fathers that were before us. I have already referred to
+Hazlitt's criticism on Crabbe in _The Spirit of the Age_, and I need not
+here urge at very great length the cautions which are always necessary
+in considering any judgment of Hazlitt's.[6] Much that he says even in
+the brief space of six or eight pages which he allots to Crabbe is
+unjust; much is explicably, and not too creditably, unjust. Crabbe was a
+successful man, and Hazlitt did not like successful men: he was a
+clergyman of the Church of England, and Hazlitt did not love clergymen
+of the Church of England: he had been a duke's chaplain, and Hazlitt
+loathed dukes: he had been a Radical, and was still (though Hazlitt does
+not seem to have thought him so) a Liberal, but his Liberalism had been
+Torified into a tame variety. Again, Crabbe, though by no means
+squeamish, is the most unvoluptuous and dispassionate of all describers
+of inconvenient things; and Hazlitt was the author of _Liber Amoris_.
+Accordingly there is much that is untrue in the tissue of denunciation
+which the critic devotes to the poet. But there are two passages in this
+tirade which alone might show how great a critic Hazlitt himself was.
+Here in a couple of lines ("they turn, one and all, on the same sort of
+teasing, helpless, unimaginative distress") is the germ of one of the
+most famous and certainly of the best passages of the late Mr. Arnold;
+and here again is one of those critical taps of the finger which shivers
+by a touch of the weakest part a whole Rupert's drop of misapprehension.
+Crabbe justified himself by Pope's example. "Nothing," says Hazlitt,
+"can be more dissimilar. Pope describes what is striking: Crabbe would
+have described merely what was there.... In Pope there was an appeal to
+the imagination, you see what was passing _in a poetical point of
+view_."
+
+Even here (and I have not been able to quote the whole passage) there is
+one of the flaws, which Hazlitt rarely avoided, in the use of the word
+"striking"; for, Heaven knows, Crabbe is often striking enough. But the
+description of Pope as showing things "in a poetical point of view" hits
+the white at once, wounds Crabbe mortally, and demolishes realism, as we
+have been pleased to understand it for the last generation or two.
+Hazlitt, it is true, has not followed up the attack, as I shall hope to
+show in an instant; but he has indicated the right line of it. As far as
+mere treatment goes, the fault of Crabbe is that he is pictorial rather
+than poetic, and photographic rather than pictorial. He sees his subject
+steadily, and even in a way he sees it whole; but he does not see it in
+the poetical way. You are bound in the shallows and the miseries of the
+individual; never do you reach the large freedom of the poet who looks
+at the universal. The absence of selection, of the discarding of details
+that are not wanted, has no doubt a great deal to do with this--Hazlitt
+seems to have thought that it had everything to do. I do not quite agree
+with him there. Dante, I think, was sometimes quite as minute as Crabbe;
+and I do not know that any one less hardy than Hazlitt himself would
+single out, as Hazlitt expressly does, the death-bed scene of Buckingham
+as a conquering instance in Pope to compare with Crabbe. We know that
+the bard of Twickenham grossly exaggerated this. But suppose he had not?
+Would it have been worse verse? I think not. Although the faculty of
+selecting instead of giving all, as Hazlitt himself justly contends, is
+one of the things which make _poesis non ut pictura_, it is not all, and
+I think myself that a poet, if he is a poet, could be almost absolutely
+literal. Shakespeare is so in the picture of Gloucester's corpse. Is
+that not poetry?
+
+The defect of Crabbe, as it seems to me, is best indicated by reference
+to one of the truest of all dicta on poetry, the famous maxim of
+Joubert--that the lyre is a winged instrument and must transport. There
+is no wing in Crabbe, there is no transport, because, as I hold (and
+this is where I go beyond Hazlitt), there is no music. In all poetry,
+the very highest as well as the very lowest that is still poetry, there
+is something which transports, and that something in my view is always
+the music of the verse, of the words, of the cadence, of the rhythm, of
+the sounds superadded to the meaning. When you get the best music
+married to the best meaning, then you get, say, Shakespeare: when you
+get some music married to even moderate meaning, you get, say, Moore.
+Wordsworth can, as everybody but Wordsworthians holds, and as some even
+of Wordsworthians admit, write the most detestable doggerel and
+platitude. But when any one who knows what poetry is reads--
+
+    Our noisy years seem moments in the being
+    Of the eternal silence,
+
+he sees that, quite independently of the meaning, which disturbs the
+soul of no less a person than Mr. John Morley, there is one note added
+to the articulate music of the world--a note that never will leave off
+resounding till the eternal silence itself gulfs it. He leaves
+Wordsworth, he goes straight into the middle of the eighteenth century,
+and he sees Thomson with his hands in his dressing-gown pockets biting
+at the peaches, and hears him between the mouthfuls murmuring--
+
+    So when the shepherd of the Hebrid Isles,
+    Placed far amid the melancholy main,
+
+and there is another note, as different as possible in kind yet still
+alike, struck for ever. Yet again, to take example still from the less
+romantic poets, and in this case from a poet, whom Mr. Kebbel specially
+and disadvantageously contrasts with Crabbe, when we read the old
+schoolboy's favourite--
+
+    When the British warrior queen,
+    Bleeding from the Roman rods,
+
+we hear the same quality of music informing words, though again in a
+kind somewhat lower, commoner, and less. In this matter, as in all
+matters that are worth handling at all, we come of course _ad
+mysterium_. Why certain combinations of letters, sounds, cadences,
+should almost without the aid of meaning, though no doubt immensely
+assisted by meaning, produce this effect of poetry on men no man can
+say. But they do; and the chief merit of criticism is that it enables us
+by much study of different times and different languages to recognise
+some part of the laws, though not the ultimate and complete causes, of
+the production.
+
+Now I can only say that Crabbe does not produce, or only in the rarest
+instances produces, this effect on me, and what is more, that on ceasing
+to be a patient in search of poetical stimulant and becoming merely a
+gelid critic, I do not discover even in Crabbe's warmest admirers any
+evidence that he produced this effect on them. Both in the eulogies
+which Mr. Kebbel quotes, and in those that he does not quote, I observe
+that the eulogists either discreetly avoid saying what they mean by
+poetry, or specify for praise something in Crabbe that is not distinctly
+poetical. Cardinal Newman said that Crabbe "pleased and touched him at
+thirty years' interval," and pleaded that this answers to the
+"accidental definition of a classic." Most certainly; but not
+necessarily to that of a poetical classic. Jeffrey thought him
+"original and powerful." Granted; but there are plenty of original and
+powerful writers who are not poets. Wilson gave him the superlative for
+"original and vivid painting." Perhaps; but is Hogarth a poet? Jane
+Austen "thought she could have married him." She had not read his
+biography; but even if she had would that prove him to be a poet? Lord
+Tennyson is said to single out the following passage, which is certainly
+one of Crabbe's best, if not his very best:--
+
+    Early he rose, and looked with many a sigh
+    On the red light that filled the eastern sky;
+    Oft had he stood before, alert and gay,
+    To hail the glories of the new-born day;
+    But now dejected, languid, listless, low,
+    He saw the wind upon the water blow,
+    And the cold stream curled onward as the gale
+    From the pine-hill blew harshly down the vale;
+    On the right side the youth a wood surveyed,
+    With all its dark intensity of shade;
+    Where the rough wind alone was heard to move
+    In this, the pause of nature and of love
+    When now the young are reared, and when the old,
+    Lost to the tie, grow negligent and cold:
+    Far to the left he saw the huts of men,
+    Half hid in mist that hung upon the fen:
+    Before him swallows gathering for the sea,
+    Took their short flights and twittered o'er the lea;
+    And near the bean-sheaf stood, the harvest done,
+    And slowly blackened in the sickly sun;
+    All these were sad in nature, or they took
+    Sadness from him, the likeness of his look
+    And of his mind--he pondered for a while,
+    Then met his Fanny with a borrowed smile.
+
+It is good: it is extraordinarily good: it could not be better of its
+kind. It is as nearly poetry as anything that Crabbe ever did--but is it
+quite? If it is (and I am not careful to deny it) the reason, as it
+seems to me, is that the verbal and rhythmical music here, with its
+special effect of "transporting" of "making the common as if it were
+uncommon," is infinitely better than is usual with Crabbe, that in fact
+there is music as well as meaning. Hardly anywhere else, not even in the
+best passages of the story of Peter Grimes, shall we find such music;
+and in its absence it may be said of Crabbe much more truly than of
+Dryden (who carries the true if not the finest poetical undertone with
+him even into the rant of Almanzor and Maximin, into the interminable
+arguments of "Religio Laici" and "The Hind and the Panther") that he is
+a classic of our prose.
+
+Yet the qualities which are so noteworthy in him are all qualities which
+are valuable to the poet, and which for the most part are present in
+good poets. And I cannot help thinking that this was what actually
+deceived some of his contemporaries and made others content for the most
+part to acquiesce in an exaggerated estimate of his poetical merits. It
+must be remembered that even the latest generation which, as a whole and
+unhesitatingly, admired Crabbe, had been brought up on the poets of the
+eighteenth century, in the very best of whom the qualities which Crabbe
+lacks had been but sparingly and not eminently present. It must be
+remembered too, that from the great vice of the poetry of the eighteenth
+century, its artificiality and convention, Crabbe is conspicuously free.
+The return to nature was not the only secret of the return to poetry;
+but it was part of it, and that Crabbe returned to nature no one could
+doubt. Moreover he came just between the school of prose fiction which
+practically ended with _Evelina_ and the school of prose fiction which
+opened its different branches with _Waverley_ and _Sense and
+Sensibility_. His contemporaries found nowhere else the narrative power,
+the faculty of character-drawing, the genius for description of places
+and manners, which they found in Crabbe; and they knew that in almost
+all, if not in all the great poets there is narrative power, faculty of
+character-drawing, genius for description. Yet again, Crabbe put these
+gifts into verse which at its best was excellent in its own way, and at
+its worst was a blessed contrast to Darwin or to Hayley. Some readers
+may have had an uncomfortable though only half-conscious feeling that if
+they had not a poet in Crabbe they had not a poet at all. At all events
+they made up their minds that they had a poet in him.
+
+But are we bound to follow their example? I think not. You could play on
+Crabbe that odd trick which used, it is said, to be actually played on
+some mediæval verse chroniclers and unrhyme him--that is to say, put
+him into prose with the least possible changes--and his merits would,
+save in rare instances, remain very much as they are now. You could put
+other words in the place of his words, keeping the verse, and it would
+not as a rule be much the worse. You cannot do either of these things
+with poets who are poets. Therefore I shall conclude that save at the
+rarest moments, moments of some sudden gust of emotion, some happy
+accident, some special grace of the Muses to reward long and blameless
+toil in their service, Crabbe was not a poet. But I have not the least
+intention of denying that he was great, and all but of the greatest
+among English writers.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] In 1834, after Crabbe's death, Wordsworth wrote to his son: "Your
+father's works ... will last, from their combined merit as poetry and
+truth, full as long as anything that has been expressed in verse since
+the date of their first appearance." A very different estimate by
+Wordsworth of Crabbe has been published in Mr. Clayden's _Rogers and his
+Contemporaries_. Here he argues at great length that "Crabbe's verses
+can in no sense be called poetry," and that "nineteen out of twenty of
+his pictures are mere matter of fact." It is fair to say that this was
+in 1808, before the appearance of "The Borough" and of almost all
+Crabbe's best work.
+
+[3] _Great Writers; Crabbe_: by T. E. Kebbel. London, 1888.
+
+[4] Although constantly patronised by the Rutland family in successive
+generations, and honoured by the attentions of "Old Q." and others, his
+poems are full of growls at patrons. These cannot be mere echoes of
+Oldham and Johnson, but their exact reason is unknown. His son's
+reference to it is so extremely cautious that it has been read as a
+confession that Crabbe was prone to his cups, and quarrelsome in them--a
+signal instance of the unwisdom of not speaking out.
+
+[5] Rogers told Ticknor in 1838 that "Crabbe was nearly ruined by grief
+and vexation at the conduct of his wife for above seven years, at the
+end of which time she proved to be insane." But this was long after her
+death and Crabbe's, and it is not clear that while she was alive Rogers
+knew Crabbe at all. Nor is there the slightest reason for attaching to
+the phrase "vexation at the conduct" the sense which it would usually
+have. A quatrain found after Crabbe's death wrapped round his wife's
+wedding-ring is touching, and graceful in its old-fashioned way.
+
+    The ring so worn, as you behold,
+    So thin, so pale, is yet of gold:
+    The passion such it was to prove;
+    Worn with life's cares, love yet was love.
+
+[6] See below, Essay on Hazlitt.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+HOGG
+
+
+"What on earth," it was once asked "will you make of Hogg?" I think that
+there is something to be made of Hogg, and that it is something worth
+the making. In the first place, it is hardly possible, without studying
+"the Shepherd" pretty close, fully to appreciate three other persons,
+all greater, and one infinitely greater, than himself; namely, Wilson,
+Lockhart, and Scott. To the two first he was a client in the Roman
+sense, a plaything, something of a butt, and an invaluable source of
+inspiration or at least suggestion. Towards the last he occupied a very
+curious position, never I think quite paralleled elsewhere--the position
+of a Boswell who would fain be a Boswell and is not allowed to be, who
+has wild notions that he is really a greater man than Johnson and
+occasionally blasphemes against his idol, but who in the intervals is
+truly Boswellian. In the second place, he has usually hitherto been not
+criticised at all, but either somewhat sneered at or else absurdly
+over-praised. In the third place, as both Scott and Byron recognised, he
+is probably the most remarkable example we have of absolute
+self-education, or of no education: for Burns was an academically
+instructed student in comparison with Hogg. In the fourth, he produced,
+amid a mass of rubbish, some charming verse and one prose-story which,
+though it is almost overlooked by the general, some good judges are, I
+believe, agreed with me in regarding as one of the very best things of
+its kind, while it is also a very curious literary puzzle.
+
+The anecdotic history, more or less authentic, of the Ettrick Shepherd
+would fill volumes, and I must try to give some of the cream of it
+presently. The non-anecdotic part may be despatched in a few sentences.
+The exact date of his birth is not known, but he was baptized on 9th
+December 1770. His father was a good shepherd and a bad farmer--a
+combination of characteristics which Hogg himself inherited unimpaired
+and unimproved. If he had any early education at all, he forgot it so
+completely that he had, as a grown-up man, to teach himself writing if
+not reading a second time. He pursued his proper vocation for about
+thirty years, during the latter part of which time he became known as a
+composer of very good songs, "Donald Macdonald" being ranked as the
+best. He printed a few as a pamphlet in the first year of the century,
+but met with little success. Then he fell in with Scott, to whom he had
+been introduced as a purveyor of ballads, not a few of which his
+mother, Margaret Laidlaw, knew by heart. This old lady it was who gave
+Scott the true enough warning that the ballads were "made for singing
+and no for reading." Scott in his turn set Hogg on the track of making
+some money by his literary work, and Constable published _The Mountain
+Bard_ together with a treatise called _Hogg on Sheep_, which I have not
+read, and of which I am not sure that I should be a good critic if I
+had. The two books brought Hogg three hundred pounds. This sum he poured
+into the usual Danaids' vessel of the Scotch peasant--the taking and
+stocking of a farm, which he had neither judgment to select, capital to
+work, nor skill to manage; and he went on doing very much the same thing
+for the rest of his life. The exact dates of that life are very sparely
+given in his own _Autobiography_, in his daughter's _Memorials_, and in
+the other notices of him that I have seen. He would appear to have spent
+four or five years in the promising attempt to run, not one but two
+large stock-farms. Then he tried shepherding again, without much
+success; and finally in 1810, being forty years old and able to write,
+he went to Edinburgh and "commenced," as the good old academic phrase
+has it, literary man. He brought out a new book of songs called _The
+Forest Minstrel_, and then he started a periodical, _The Spy_. On this,
+as he tells us, Scott very wisely remonstrated with him, asking him
+whether he thought he could be more elegant than Addison or Mackenzie.
+Hogg replied with his usual modesty that at any rate he would be "mair
+original." The originality appears to have consisted in personality; for
+Hogg acknowledges one exceedingly insolent attack on Scott himself,
+which Scott seems, after at first resenting it (and yet Hogg tells us
+elsewhere that he never resented any such thing), to have forgiven. He
+had also some not clearly known employments of the factorship or
+surveyorship kind; he was much patronised by two worthy hatters, Messrs.
+Grieve and Scott, and in 1813 the book which contains all his best
+verse, _The Queen's Wake_, was published. It was deservedly successful;
+but, by a species of bad luck which pursued Hogg with extraordinary
+assiduity, the two first editions yielded nothing, as his publisher was
+not solvent. The third, which Blackwood issued, brought him in good
+profit. Two years later he became in a way a made man. He had very
+diligently sought the patronage of Harriet, Duchess of Buccleuch, and,
+his claims being warmly supported by Scott and specially recommended by
+the Duchess on her deathbed to her husband, Hogg received rent free, or
+at a peppercorn, the farm of Mossend, Eltrive or Altrive. It is agreed
+even by Hogg's least judicious admirers that if he had been satisfied
+with this endowment and had then devoted himself, as he actually did, to
+writing, he might have lived and died in comfort, even though his
+singular luck in not being paid continued to haunt him. But he must
+needs repeat his old mistake and take the adjacent farm of Mount Benger,
+which, with a certain reckless hospitable way of living for which he is
+not so blamable, kept him in difficulties all the rest of his life and
+made him die in them. He lived twenty years longer; married a
+good-looking girl much his superior in rank and twenty years his junior,
+who seems to have made him an excellent wife; engaged in infinite
+magazine- and book-writing, of which more presently; became the
+inspirer, model and butt of _Blackwood's Magazine_; constantly
+threatened to quarrel with it for traducing him, and once did so; loved
+Edinburgh convivialities more well than wisely; had the very ill luck to
+survive Scott and to commit the folly of writing a pamphlet (more silly
+than anything else) on the "domestic manners" of that great man, which
+estranged Lockhart, hitherto his fast friend; paid a visit to London in
+1832, whereby hang tales; and died himself on 21st November 1835.
+
+Such, briefly but not I think insufficiently given, is the Hogg of
+history. The Hogg of anecdote is a much more considerable and difficult
+person. He mixes himself up with or becomes by turns (whichever phrase
+may be preferred) the Shepherd of the _Noctes_ and the Hogg who is
+revealed to us, say his panegyrists, with "uncalled-for malignity" in
+Lockhart's _Life of Scott_. But these panegyrists seem to forget that
+there are two documents which happen not to be signed either "John
+Gibson Lockhart" or "Christopher North," and that these documents are
+Hogg's _Autobiography_, published by himself, and the _Domestic Manners
+of Sir Walter Scott_, likewise authenticated. In these two we have the
+Hogg of the _ana_ put forward pretty vividly. For instance, Hogg tells
+us how, late in Sir Walter's life, he and his wife called upon Scott.
+"In we went and were received with all the affection of old friends. But
+his whole discourse was addressed to my wife, while I was left to shift
+for myself.... In order to attract his attention from my wife to one who
+I thought as well deserved it, I went close up to him with a
+scrutinising look and said, 'Gudeness guide us, Sir Walter, but ye hae
+gotten a braw gown.'" The rest of the story is not bad, but less
+characteristic. Immediately afterwards Hogg tells his own speech about
+being "not sae yelegant but mair original" than Addison. Then there is
+the other capital legend, also self-told, how he said to Scott, "Dear
+Sir Walter, ye can never suppose that I belang to your school of
+chivalry! Ye are the king of that school, but I'm the king of the
+mountain and fairy school, which is a far higher ane than yours!"
+"This," says Professor Veitch, a philosopher, a scholar, and a man of
+letters, "though put with an almost sublime egotism, is in the main
+true." Almost equally characteristic is the fact that, after beginning
+his pamphlet by calling Lockhart "the only man thoroughly qualified for
+the task" of writing Scott's life, Hogg elsewhere, in one of the
+extraordinary flings that distinguish him, writes: "Of Lockhart's genius
+and capabilities Sir Walter always spoke with the greatest enthusiasm:
+more than I thought he deserved. For I knew him a great deal better than
+Sir Walter did, and, whatever Lockhart may pretend, I knew Sir Walter a
+thousand times better than he did."
+
+Now be it remembered that these passages are descriptive of Hogg's Hogg,
+to use the always useful classification of Dr. Holmes. To complete them
+(the actual texts are too long to give here) it is only necessary to
+compare the accounts of a certain dinner at Bowhill given respectively
+by Hogg in the _Domestic Manners_ and by Lockhart in his biography, and
+also those given in the same places of the one-sided quarrel between
+Scott and Hogg, because the former, according to his almost invariable
+habit, refused to collaborate in Hogg's _Poetic Mirror_. In all this we
+have the man's own testimony about himself. It is not in the least
+incompatible with his having been, as his panegyrists contend, an
+affectionate friend, husband, and father; a very good fellow when his
+vanity or his whims were not touched; and inexhaustibly fertile in the
+kind of rough profusion of flower and weed that uncultivated soil
+frequently produces. But it most certainly is also not inconsistent, but
+on the contrary highly consistent, with the picture drawn by Lockhart in
+his great book; and it shows how, to say the least and mildest, the
+faults and foibles of the curious personage known as "the Shepherd of
+the _Noctes_" were not the parts of the character on which Wilson need
+have spent, or did spend, most of his invention. Even if the "boozing
+buffoon" had been a boozing buffoon and nothing more, Hogg, who
+confesses with a little affected remorse, but with evident pride, that
+he once got regularly drunk every night for some six weeks running, till
+"an inflammatory fever" kindly pulled him up, could not have greatly
+objected to this part of the matter. The wildest excesses of the
+_Eidolon_-Shepherd's vanity do not exceed that speech to Scott which
+Professor Veitch thinks so true; and the quaintest pranks played by the
+same shadow do not exceed in quaintness the immortal story of Hogg being
+introduced to Mrs. Scott for the first time, extending himself on a sofa
+at full length (on the excuse that he "thought he could never do wrong
+to copy the lady of the house," who happened at the time to be in a
+delicate state of health), and ending by addressing her as "Charlotte."
+This is the story that Mrs. Garden, Hogg's daughter, without attempting
+to contest its truth, describes as told by Lockhart with "uncalled-for
+malignity." Now when anybody who knows something of Lockhart comes
+across "malignant," "scorpion," or any term of the kind, he, if he is
+wise, merely shrugs his shoulders. All the literary copy-books have got
+it that Lockhart was malignant, and there is of course no more to be
+said.[7] But something may be done by a little industrious clearing
+away of fiction in particulars. It may be most assuredly and confidently
+asserted that no one reading the _Life of Scott_ without knowing what
+Hogg's friends have said of it would dream of seeing malignity in the
+notices which it contains of the Shepherd. Before writing this paper I
+gave myself the trouble, or indulged myself in the pleasure (for perhaps
+that is the more appropriate phrase in reference to the most delightful
+of biographies, if not of books), of marking with slips of paper all the
+passages in Lockhart referring to Hogg, and reading them consecutively.
+I am quite sure that any one who does this, even knowing little or
+nothing of the circumstances, will wonder where on earth the "ungenerous
+assaults," the "virulent detraction," the "bitter words," the "false
+friendship," and so forth, with which Lockhart has been charged, are to
+be found. But any one who knows that Hogg had, just before his own
+death, and while the sorrow of Sir Walter's end was fresh, published the
+possibly not ill-intentioned but certainly ill-mannered pamphlet
+referred to--a pamphlet which contains among other things, besides the
+grossest impertinences about Lady Scott's origin, at least one
+insinuation that Scott wrote Lockhart's books for him--if any one
+further knows (I think the late Mr. Scott Douglas was the first to point
+out the fact) that Hogg had calmly looted Lockhart's biography of Burns,
+then he will think that the "scorpion," instead of using his sting,
+showed most uncommon forbearance. This false friend, virulent detractor
+and ungenerous assailant describes Hogg as "a true son of nature and
+genius with a naturally kind and simple character." He does indeed
+remark that Hogg's "notions of literary honesty were exceedingly loose."
+But (not to mention the Burns affair, which gave me some years ago a
+clue to this sentence) the remark is subjoined to a letter in which Hogg
+placidly suggests that he shall write an autobiographic sketch, and that
+Scott, transcribing it and substituting the third person for the first,
+shall father it as his own. The other offence I suppose was the remark
+that "the Shepherd's nerves were not heroically strung." This perhaps
+might have been left out, but if it was the fact (and Hogg's defenders
+never seem to have traversed it) it suggested itself naturally enough in
+the context, which deals with Hogg's extraordinary desire, when nearly
+forty, to enter the militia as an ensign. Moreover the same passage
+contains plenty of kindly description of the Shepherd. Perhaps there is
+"false friendship" in quoting a letter from Scott to Byron which
+describes Hogg as "a wonderful creature," or in describing the
+Shepherd's greeting to Wilkie, "Thank God for it! I did not know you
+were so young a man" as "graceful," or in the citation of Jeffrey's
+famous blunder in selecting for special praise a fabrication of Hogg's
+among the "Jacobite Ballads," or in the genial description, without a
+touch of ridicule, of Hogg at the St. Ronan's Games. The sentence on
+Hogg's death is indeed severe: "It had been better for his memory had
+his end been of earlier date; for he did not follow his benefactor until
+he had insulted his dust." It is even perhaps a little too severe,
+considering Hogg's irresponsible and childlike nature. But Lockhart
+might justly have retorted that men of sixty-four have no business to be
+irresponsible children; and it is certainly true that in this unlucky
+pamphlet Hogg distinctly accuses Scott of anonymously puffing himself at
+his, Hogg's, expense, of being over and over again jealous of him, of
+plagiarising his plots, of sneering at him, and, if the passage has any
+meaning, of joining a conspiracy of "the whole of the aristocracy and
+literature of the country" to keep Hogg down and "crush him to a
+nonentity." Neither could Lockhart have been exactly pleased at the
+passage where Scott is represented as afraid to clear the character of
+an innocent friend to the boy Duke of Buccleuch.
+
+    He told me that which I never knew nor suspected before; that a
+    certain gamekeeper, on whom he bestowed his maledictions without
+    reserve, had prejudiced my best friend, the young Duke of
+    Buccleuch, against me by a story; and though he himself knew it
+    to be a malicious and invidious lie, yet seeing his grace so
+    much irritated, he durst not open his lips on the subject,
+    further than by saying, "But, my lord duke, you must always
+    remember that Hogg is no ordinary man, although he may have shot
+    a stray moorcock." And then turning to me he said, "Before you
+    had ventured to give any saucy language to a low scoundrel of an
+    English gamekeeper, you should have thought of Fielding's tale
+    of Black George."
+
+    "I never saw that tale," said I, "and dinna ken ought about it.
+    But never trouble your head about that matter, Sir Walter, for
+    it is awthegither out o' nature for our young chief to entertain
+    ony animosity against me. The thing will never mair be heard of,
+    an' the chap that tauld the lees on me will gang to hell, that's
+    aye some comfort."
+
+Part of my reason for quoting this last passage is to recall to those
+who are familiar with the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_ the extraordinary felicity
+of the imitation. This, which Hogg with his own pen represents himself
+as speaking with his own mouth, might be found textually in any page of
+the _Noctes_ without seeming in the least out of keeping with the ideal
+Hogg.
+
+And this brings me to the second charge of Hogg's friends, that Wilson
+wickedly caricatured his humble friend, if indeed he did not manufacture
+a Shepherd out of his own brain. This is as uncritical as the other, and
+even more surprising. That any one acquainted with Hogg's works,
+especially his autobiographic productions, should fail to recognise the
+resemblance is astonishing enough; but what is more astonishing is that
+any one interested in Hogg's fame should not perceive that the Shepherd
+of the _Noctes_ is Hogg magnified and embellished in every way. He is
+not a better poet, for the simple reason that the verses put in his
+mouth are usually Hogg's own and not always his best. But out of the
+_Confessions of a Sinner_, Hogg has never signed anything half so good
+as the best prose passages assigned to him in the _Noctes_. They are
+what he might have written if he had taken pains: they are in his key
+and vein; but they are much above him. Again, unless any reader is so
+extraordinarily devoid of humour as to be shocked by the mere
+horse-play, it must be clear to him that the Shepherd's manners are
+dressed up with extraordinary skill, so as to be just what he would have
+liked them to be. As for the drinking and so forth, it simply comes to
+this--that the habits which were fashionable when the century was not
+yet in its teens, or just in them, were getting to be looked on askance
+when it was entering or had entered on its thirties. But, instead of
+being annoyed at this Socrates-Falstaff, as somebody has called it, one
+might have thought that both Hogg himself and his admirers would have
+taken it as an immense compliment. The only really bad turn that Wilson
+seems to have done his friend was posthumous and pardonable. He
+undertook the task of writing the Shepherd's life and editing his
+_Remains_ for the benefit of his family, who were left very badly off;
+and he not only did not do it but appears to have lost the documents
+with which he was entrusted. It is fair to say that after the deaths,
+which came close together, of his wife, of Blackwood, and of Hogg
+himself, Wilson was never fully the same man; and that his strongly
+sentimental nature, joined to his now inveterate habit of writing
+rapidly as the fancy took him, would have made the task of hammering out
+a biography and of selecting and editing _Remains_ so distasteful from
+different points of view as to be practically impossible. But in that
+case of course he should not have undertaken it, or should have
+relinquished it as soon as he found out the difficulties. Allan
+Cunningham, it is said, would have gladly done the business; and there
+were few men better qualified.
+
+And now, having done a by no means unnecessary task in this preliminary
+clearance of rubbish, let us see what sort of a person in literature and
+life this Ettrick Shepherd really was--the Shepherd whom Scott not only
+befriended with unwearied and lifelong kindness, but ranked very high as
+an original talent, whom Byron thought Scott's only second worth
+speaking of, whom Southey, a very different person from either, esteemed
+highly, whom Wilson selected as the mouthpiece and model for one of the
+most singular and (I venture to say despite a certain passing wave of
+unpopularity) one of the most enduring of literary character-parts, and
+to whom Lockhart was, as Hogg himself late in life sets down, "a warm
+and disinterested friend." We have seen what Professor Veitch thinks of
+him--that he is the king of a higher school than Scott's. On the other
+hand, I fear the general English impression of him is rather that given
+by no Englishman, but by Thomas Carlyle, at the time of Hogg's visit to
+London in 1832. Carlyle describes him as talking and behaving like a
+"gomeril," and amusing the town by walking about in a huge gray plaid,
+which was supposed to be an advertisement, suggested by his publisher.
+
+The king of a school higher than Scott's and the veriest gomeril--these
+surely, though the judges be not quite of equal competence, are
+judgments of a singularly contradictory kind. Let us see what middle
+term we can find between them.
+
+The mighty volume (it has been Hogg's ill-fortune that the most
+accessible edition of his work is in two great double-columned royal
+octavos, heavy to the hand and not too grateful to the eye) which
+contains the Shepherd's collected poetical work is not for every reader.
+"Poets? where are they?" Wordsworth is said, on the authority of De
+Quincey, to have asked, with a want of graciousness of manners uncommon
+even in him and never forgiven by Hogg, when the latter used the plural
+in his presence, and in that of Wilson and Lloyd. It was unjust as well
+as rude, but endless allowance certainly has to be made for Hogg as a
+poet. I do not know to whom the epigram that "everything that is written
+in Scotch dialect is not necessarily poetry" is originally due, but
+there is certainly some justice in it. Scotch, as a language, has grand
+accommodations; it has richer vowels and a more varied and musical
+arrangement of consonants than English, while it falls not much short of
+English in freedom from that mere monotony which besets the
+richly-vowelled continental languages. It has an almost unrivalled
+provision of poetical _clichés_ (the sternest purist may admit a French
+word which has no English equivalent), that is to say, the stock phrases
+which Heaven knows who first minted and which will pass till they are
+worn out of all knowledge. It has two great poets--one in the
+vernacular, one in the literary language--who are rich enough to keep a
+bank for their inferiors almost to the end of time. The depreciation of
+it by "glaikit Englishers" (I am a glaikit Englisher who does not
+depreciate), simply because it is unfamiliar and rustic-looking, is
+silly enough. But its best practitioners are sometimes prone to forget
+that nothing ready-made will do as poetry, and that you can no more take
+a short cut to Parnassus by spelling good "guid" and liberally using
+"ava," than you can execute the same journey by calling a girl a nymph
+and a boy a swain. The reason why Burns is a great poet, and one of the
+greatest, is that he seldom or never does this in Scots. When he takes
+to the short cut, as he does sometimes, he usually "gets to his
+English." Of Hogg, who wrote some charming things and many good ones,
+the same cannot be said. No writer known to me, not even the eminent Dr.
+Young, who has the root of the poetical matter in him at all, is so
+utterly uncritical as Hogg. He does not seem even to have known when he
+borrowed and when he was original. We have seen that he told Scott that
+he was not of his school. Now a great deal that he wrote, perhaps
+indeed actually the major part of his verse, is simply imitation and not
+often very good imitation of Scott. Here is a passage:--
+
+    Light on her airy steed she sprung,
+    Around with golden tassels hung.
+    No chieftain there rode half so free,
+    Or half so light and gracefully.
+    How sweet to see her ringlets pale
+    Wide-waving in the southland gale,
+    Which through the broom-wood odorous flew
+    To fan her cheeks of rosy hue!
+    Whene'er it heaved her bosom's screen
+    What beauties in her form were seen!
+    And when her courser's mane it swung,
+    A thousand silver bells were rung.
+    A sight so fair, on Scottish plain,
+    A Scot shall never see again.
+
+I think we know where this comes from. Indeed Hogg had a certain
+considerable faculty of conscious parody as well as of unconscious
+imitation, and his _Poetic Mirror_, which he wrote as a kind of humorous
+revenge on his brother bards for refusing to contribute, is a fair
+second to _Rejected Addresses_. The amusing thing is that he often
+parodied where he did not mean parody in the least, and nowadays we do
+not want Scott-and-water. Another vein of Hogg's, which he worked
+mercilessly, is a similar imitation, not of Scott, but of the weakest
+echoes of Percy's _Reliques_:--
+
+    O sad, sad, was young Mary's plight:
+      She took the cup, no word she spake,
+    She had even wished that very night
+      To sleep and never more to wake.
+
+Sad, sad indeed is the plight of the poet who publishes verses like
+this, of which there are thousands of lines to be found in Hogg. And
+then one comes to "Kilmeny," and the note changes with a vengeance:--
+
+    Bonny Kilmeny gaed up the glen;
+    But it wasna to meet Duneira's men,
+    Nor the rosy monk of the isle to see,
+    For Kilmeny was pure as pure could be.
+    It was only to hear the yorlin sing,
+    And pu' the cress-flower round the spring,
+    The scarlet hip and the hindberry,
+    For Kilmeny was pure as pure could be.
+
+           ·       ·       ·       ·       ·
+
+    Kilmeny looked up with a lovely grace,
+    But nae smile was seen on Kilmeny's face;
+    As still was her look and as still was her ee
+    As the stillness that lay on the emeraut lea,
+    Or the mist that sleeps on a waveless sea.
+    For Kilmeny had been she kent not where,
+    And Kilmeny had seen what she could not declare;
+    Kilmeny had been where the cock never crew,
+    Where the rain never fell and the wind never blew.
+
+No matter that it is necessary even here to make a cento, that the
+untutored singer cannot keep up the song by natural force and has not
+skill enough to dissemble the lapses. "Kilmeny" at its best is
+poetry--such poetry as, to take Hogg's contemporaries only, there is
+none in Rogers or Crabbe, little I fear in Southey, and not very much in
+Moore. Then there is no doubt at all that he could write ballads. "The
+Witch of Fife" is long and is not improved by being written (at least
+in one version) in a kind of Scots that never was on land or sea, but it
+is quite admirable of its class. "The Good Grey Cat," his own imitation
+of himself in the _Poetic Mirror_, comes perhaps second to it, and "The
+Abbot McKinnon" (which is rather close to the imitations of Scott)
+third. But there are plenty of others. As for his poems of the more
+ambitious kind, "Mador of the Moor," "Pilgrims of the Sun," and even
+"Queen Hynde," let blushing glory--the glory attached to the literary
+department--hide the days on which he produced those. She can very well
+afford it, for the hiding leaves untouched the division of Hogg's
+poetical work which furnishes his highest claims to fame except
+"Kilmeny," the division of the songs. These are numerous and unequal as
+a matter of course. Not a few of them are merely variations on older
+scraps and fragments of the kind which Burns had made popular; some of
+them are absolute rubbish; some of them are mere imitations of Burns
+himself. But this leaves abundance of precious remnants, as the
+Shepherd's covenanting friends would have said. The before-mentioned
+"Donald Macdonald" is a famous song of its kind: "I'll no wake wi'
+Annie" comes very little short of Burns's "Green grow the rashes O!" The
+piece on the lifting of the banner of Buccleuch, though a curious
+contrast with Scott's "Up with the Banner" does not suffer too much by
+the comparison: "Cam' ye by Athole" and "When the kye comes hame"
+everybody knows, and I do not know whether it is a mere delusion, but
+there seems to me to be a rare and agreeable humour in "The Village of
+Balmaquhapple."
+
+    D'ye ken the big village of Balmaquhapple?
+    The great muckle village of Balmaquhapple?
+    'Tis steeped in iniquity up to the thrapple,
+    An' what's to become o' poor Balmaquhapple?
+
+Whereafter follows an invocation to St. Andrew, with a characteristic
+suggestion that he may spare himself the trouble of intervening for
+certain persons such as
+
+    Geordie, our deacon for want of a better,
+    And Bess, wha delights in the sins that beset her--
+
+ending with the milder prayer:
+
+    But as for the rest, for the women's sake save them,
+    Their bodies at least, and their sauls if they have them.
+
+           ·       ·       ·       ·       ·
+
+    And save, without word of confession auricular,
+    The clerk's bonny daughters, and Bell in particular;
+    For ye ken that their beauty's the pride and the stapple
+    Of the great wicked village of Balmaquhapple!
+
+"Donald McGillavry," which deceived Jeffrey, is another of the
+half-inarticulate songs which have the gift of setting the blood
+coursing;
+
+    Donald's gane up the hill hard an' hungry;
+    Donald's come down the hill wild an' angry:
+    Donald will clear the gowk's nest cleverly;
+    Here's to the King and Donald McGillavry!
+
+           ·       ·       ·       ·       ·
+
+    Donald has foughten wi' reif and roguery,
+    Donald has dinnered wi' banes and beggary;
+    Better it war for Whigs an' Whiggery
+    Meeting the deevil than Donald McGillavry.
+    Come like a tailor, Donald McGillavry,
+    Come like a tailor, Donald McGillavry,
+    Push about, in an' out, thimble them cleverly.
+    Here's to King James an' Donald McGillavry!
+
+"Love is Like a Dizziness," and the "Boys' Song,"
+
+    Where the pools are bright and deep,
+    Where the grey trout lies asleep,
+    Up the river and over the lea,
+    That's the way for Billy and me--
+
+and plenty more charming things will reward the explorer of the
+Shepherd's country. Only let that explorer be prepared for pages on
+pages of the most unreadable stuff, the kind of stuff which hardly any
+educated man, however great a "gomeril" he might be, would ever dream of
+putting to paper, much less of sending to press. It is fair to repeat
+that the educated man who thus refrained would probably be a very long
+time before he wrote "Kilmeny," or even "Donald McGillavry" and "The
+Village of Balmaquhapple."
+
+Still (though to say it is enough to make him turn in his grave) if Hogg
+had been a verse-writer alone he would, except for "Kilmeny" and his
+songs, hardly be worth remembering, save by professed critics and
+literary free-selectors. A little better than Allan Cunningham, he is
+but for that single, sudden, and unsustained inspiration of "Kilmeny,"
+and one or two of his songs, so far below Burns that Burns might enable
+us to pay no attention to him and not lose much. As for Scott, "Proud
+Maisie" (an unapproachable thing), the fragments that Elspeth Cheyne
+sings, even the single stanza in _Guy Mannering_, "Are these the Links
+of Forth? she said," any one of a thousand snatches that Sir Walter has
+scattered about his books with a godlike carelessness will "ding" Hogg
+and all his works on their own field. But then it is not saying anything
+very serious against a man to say that he is not so great as Scott. With
+those who know what poetry is, Hogg will keep his corner ("not a
+polished corner," as Sydney Smith would say) of the temple of Apollo.
+
+Hogg wrote prose even more freely than he wrote verse, and after the
+same fashion--a fashion which he describes with equal frankness and
+truth by the phrases, "dashing on," "writing as if in desperation,"
+"mingling pathos and absurdity," and so forth. Tales, novels, sketches,
+all were the same to him; and he had the same queer mixture of
+confidence in their merits and doubt about the manner in which they were
+written. _The Brownie of Bodsbeck_, _The Three Perils of Man_ (which
+appears refashioned in the modern editions of his works as _The Siege of
+Roxburgh_), _The Three Perils of Woman_, _The Shepherd's Calendar_ and
+numerous other uncollected tales exhibit for the most part very much the
+same characteristics. Hogg knew the Scottish peasantry well, he had
+abundant stores of unpublished folklore, he could invent more when
+wanted, he was not destitute of the true poetic knowledge of human
+nature, and at his best he could write strikingly and picturesquely. But
+he simply did not know what self-criticism was, he had no notion of the
+conduct or carpentry of a story, and though he was rather fond of
+choosing antique subjects, and prided himself on his knowledge of old
+Scots, he was quite as likely to put the baldest modern touches in the
+mouth of a heroine of the fourteenth or fifteenth century as not. If
+anybody takes pleasure in seeing how a good story can be spoilt, let him
+look at the sixth chapter of the _Shepherd's Calendar_, "The Souters of
+Selkirk;" and if any one wants to read a novel of antiquity which is not
+like Scott, let him read _The Bridal of Polmood_.
+
+In the midst, however, of all this chaotic work, there is still to be
+found, though misnamed, one of the most remarkable stories of its kind
+ever written--a story which, as I have said before, is not only
+extraordinarily good of itself, but insists peremptorily that the reader
+shall wonder how the devil it got where it is. This is the book now
+called _The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Fanatic_, but by its
+proper and original title, _The Confessions of a Justified Sinner_.
+Hogg's reference to it in his _Autobiography_ is sufficiently odd. "The
+next year (1824)," he says, "I published _The Confessions of a Fanatic
+[Sinner]_, but, it being a story replete with horrors, after I had
+written it I durst not venture to put my name to it, so it was
+published anonymously, and of course did not sell very well--so at least
+I believe, for I do not remember ever receiving anything for it, and I
+am sure if there had been a reversion [he means return] I should have
+had a moiety. However I never asked anything, so on that point there was
+no misunderstanding." And he says nothing more about it, except to
+inform us that his publishers, Messrs. Longman, who had given him for
+his two previous books a hundred and fifty pounds each "as soon as the
+volumes were put to press," and who had published the _Confessions_ on
+half profits, observed, when his next book was offered to them, that
+"his last publication (the _Confessions_) had been found fault with in
+some very material points, and they begged leave to decline the present
+one until they consulted some other persons." That is all. But the
+Reverend Thomas Thomson, Hogg's editor, an industrious and not
+incompetent man of letters, while admitting that it is "in excellence of
+plot, concentration of language and vigorous language, one of the best
+and most interesting [he might have said the best without a second] of
+Hogg's tales," observes that it "alarmed the religious portion of the
+community who hastily thought that the author was assailing
+Christianity." "Nothing could be more unfounded," says the Reverend
+Thomas Thomson with much justice. He might have added that it would have
+been much more reasonable to suspect the author of practice with the
+Evil One in order to obtain the power of writing anything so much better
+than his usual work.
+
+For, in truth, _The Confessions of a Justified Sinner_, while it has all
+Hogg's merits and more, is quite astoundingly free from his defects. His
+tales are generally innocent of the most rudimentary notions of
+construction: this goes closely ordered, with a few pardonable enough
+digressions, from beginning to end. He has usually little concentrated
+grasp of character: the few personages of the _Confessions_ are
+consistent throughout. His dialogue is, as a rule, extraordinarily
+slipshod and unequal: here there is no fault to find with it. His
+greatest lack, in short, is the lack of form: and here, though the story
+might perhaps have been curtailed, or rather "cut" in the middle, with
+advantage, the form is excellent. As its original edition, though an
+agreeable volume, is rare, and its later ones are buried amidst
+discordant rubbish, it may not be improper to give some account of it.
+The time is pitched just about the Revolution and the years following,
+and, according to a common if not altogether praiseworthy custom, the
+story consists of an editor's narrative and of the _Confessions_ proper
+imbedded therein. The narrative tells how a drinking Royalist laird
+married an exceedingly precise young woman, how the dissension which was
+probable broke out between them, how a certain divine, the Reverend
+Robert Wringhim, endeavoured to convert the sinner at the instances of
+the saint, and perhaps succeeded in consoling the saint at the expense
+of the sinner; how the laird sought more congenial society with a
+certain cousin of his named Arabella Logan, and how, rather out of
+jealousy than forgiveness, such a union or quasi-union took place
+between husband and wife that they had two sons, George and Robert, the
+elder of whom was his father's favourite and like, while the younger was
+pretty much left to the care of Mr. Wringhim. The tale then tells how,
+after hardly seeing one another in boyhood, the brothers met as young
+men at Edinburgh, where on extreme provocation the elder was within an
+ace of killing the younger. The end of it was that, after Robert had
+brought against George a charge of assaulting him on Arthur's Seat,
+George himself was found mysteriously murdered in an Edinburgh close.
+His mother cared naught for it; his father soon died of grief; the
+obnoxious Robert succeeded to the estates, and only Arabella Logan was
+left to do what she could to clear up the mystery, which, after certain
+strange passages, she did. But when warrants were made out against
+Robert he had disappeared, and the whole thing remained wrapped in more
+mystery than ever.
+
+To this narrative succeed the confessions of Robert himself. He takes of
+course the extreme side both of his mother and of her doctrines, but for
+some time, though an accomplished Pharisee, he is not assured of
+salvation, till at last his adopted (if not real) father Wringhim
+announces that he has wrestled sufficiently in prayer and has received
+assurance.
+
+Thereupon the young man sallies out in much exaltation of feeling and
+full of contempt for the unconverted. As he goes he meets another young
+man of mysterious appearance, who seems to be an exact double of
+himself. This wraith, however, presents himself as only a humble admirer
+of Robert's spiritual glory, and holds much converse with him. He meets
+this person repeatedly, but is never able to ascertain who he is. The
+stranger says that he may be called Gil Martin if Robert likes, but
+hints that he is some great one--perhaps the Czar Peter, who was then
+known to be travelling incognito about Europe. For a time Robert's
+Illustrious Friend (as he generally calls him) exaggerates the extremest
+doctrines of Calvinism, and slips easily from this into suggestions of
+positive crime. A minister named Blanchard, who has overheard his
+conversation, warns Robert against him, and Gil Martin in return points
+out Blanchard as an enemy to religion whom it is Robert's duty to take
+off. They lay wait for the minister and pistol him, the Illustrious
+Friend managing not only to avert all suspicion from themselves, but to
+throw it with capital consequences on a perfectly innocent person. After
+this initiation in blood Robert is fully reconciled to the "great work"
+and, going to Edinburgh, is led by his Illustrious Friend without
+difficulty into the series of plots against his brother which had to
+outsiders so strange an appearance, and which ended in a fresh murder.
+When Robert in the course of events above described becomes master of
+Dalchastel, the family estate, his Illustrious Friend accompanies him
+and the same process goes on. But now things turn less happily for
+Robert. He finds himself, without any consciousness of the acts charged,
+accused on apparently indubitable evidence, first of peccadillos, then
+of serious crimes. Seduction, forgery, murder, even matricide are hinted
+against him, and at last, under the impression that indisputable proofs
+of the last two crimes have been discovered, he flies from his house.
+After a short period of wandering, in which his Illustrious Friend
+alternately stirs up all men against him and tempts him to suicide, he
+finally in despair succumbs to the temptation and puts an end to his
+life. This of course ends the _Memoir_, or rather the _Memoir_ ends just
+before the catastrophe. There is then a short postscript in which the
+editor tells a tale of a suicide found with some such legend attaching
+to him on a Border hillside, of an account given in _Blackwood_ of the
+searching of the grave, and of a visit to it made by himself (the
+editor), his friend Mr. L----t of C----d [Lockhart of Chiefswood], Mr.
+L----w [Scott's Laidlaw] and others. The whole thing ends with a very
+well written bit of rationalisation of the now familiar kind,
+discussing the authenticity of the _Memoirs_, and concluding that they
+are probably the work of some one suffering from religious mania, or
+perhaps a sort of parable or allegory worked out with insufficient
+skill.
+
+Although some such account as this was necessary, no such account,
+unless illustrated with the most copious citation, could do justice to
+the book. The first part or Narrative is not of extraordinary, though it
+is of considerable merit, and has some of Hogg's usual faults. The
+_Memoirs_ proper are almost wholly free from these faults. In no book
+known to me is the grave treatment of the topsy-turvy and improbable
+better managed; although, by an old trick, it pleases the "editor" to
+depreciate his work in the passage just mentioned. The writer, whoever
+he was, was fully qualified for the task. The possibility of a young man
+of narrow intellect--his passion against his brother already excited,
+and his whole mind given to the theology of predestination--gliding into
+such ideas as are here described is undoubted; and it is made thoroughly
+credible to the reader. The story of the pretended Gil Martin,
+preposterous as it is, is told by the unlucky maniac exactly in the
+manner in which a man deluded, but with occasional suspicions of his
+delusion, would tell it. The gradual change from intended and successful
+rascality and crime into the incurring or the supposed incurring of the
+most hideous guilt without any actual consciousness of guilty action may
+seem an almost hopeless thing to treat probably. Yet it is so treated
+here. And the final gathering and blackening of the clouds of despair
+(though here again there is a very slight touch of Hogg's undue
+prolongation of things) exhibits literary power of the ghastly kind
+infinitely different from and far above the usual raw-head-and-bloody-bones
+story of the supernatural.
+
+Now, who wrote it?
+
+No doubt, so far as I know, has been generally entertained of Hogg's
+authorship, though, since I myself entertained doubts on the subject, I
+have found some good judges not unwilling to agree with me. Although
+admitting that it appeared anonymously, Hogg claims it, as we have seen,
+not only without hesitation but apparently without any suspicion that it
+was a particularly valuable or meritorious thing to claim, and without
+any attempt to shift, divide, or in any way disclaim the responsibility,
+though the book had been a failure. His publishers do not seem to have
+doubted then that it was his; nor, I have been told, have their
+representatives any reason to doubt it now. His daughter, I think, does
+not so much as mention it in her _Memorials_, but his various
+biographers have never, so far as I know, hinted the least hesitation.
+At the same time I am absolutely unable to believe that it is Hogg's
+unadulterated and unassisted work. It is not one of those cases where a
+man once tries a particular style, and then from accident, disgust, or
+what not, relinquishes it. Hogg was always trying the supernatural, and
+he failed in it, except in this instance, as often as he tried it. Why
+should he on this particular occasion have been saved from himself? and
+who saved him?--for that great part of the book at least is his there
+can be no doubt.
+
+By way of answer to these questions I can at least point out certain
+coincidences and probabilities. It has been seen that Lockhart's name
+actually figures in the postscript to the book. Now at this time and for
+long afterwards Lockhart was one of the closest of Hogg's literary
+allies; and Hogg, while admitting that the author of _Peter's Letters_
+hoaxed him as he hoaxed everybody, is warm in his praise. He describes
+him in his _Autobiography_ as "a warm and disinterested friend." He
+tells us in the book on Scott how he had a plan, even later than this,
+that Lockhart should edit all his (the Shepherd's) works, for
+discouraging which plan he was very cross with Sir Walter. Further, the
+vein of the _Confessions_ is very closely akin to, if not wholly
+identical with, a vein which Lockhart not only worked on his own account
+but worked at this very same time. It was in these very years of his
+residence at Chiefswood that Lockhart produced the little masterpiece of
+"Adam Blair" (where the terrors and temptations of a convinced
+Presbyterian minister are dwelt upon), and "Matthew Wald," which is
+itself the history of a lunatic as full of horrors, and those of no very
+different kind, as the _Confessions_ themselves. That editing, and
+perhaps something more than editing, on Lockhart's part would have been
+exactly the thing necessary to prune and train and direct the Shepherd's
+disorderly luxuriance into the methodical madness of the Justified
+Sinner--to give Hogg's loose though by no means vulgar style the dress
+of his own polished manner--to weed and shape and correct and straighten
+the faults of the Boar of the Forest--nobody who knows the undoubted
+writing of the two men will deny. And Lockhart, who was so careless of
+his work that to this day it is difficult, if not impossible, to
+ascertain what he did or did not write unassisted, would certainly not
+have been the man to claim a share in the book, even had it made more
+noise; though he may have thought of this as well as of other things
+when, in his wrath over the foolish blethering about Scott, he wrote
+that the Shepherd's views of literary morality were peculiar. As for
+Hogg himself, he would never have thought of acknowledging any such
+editing or collaboration if it did take place; and that not nearly so
+much from vanity or dishonesty as from simple carelessness, dashed
+perhaps with something of the habit of literary _supercherie_ which the
+society in which he lived affected, and which he carried as far at least
+as any one of its members.
+
+It may seem rather hard after praising a man's ewe lamb so highly to
+question his right in her. But I do not think there is any real
+hardship. I should think that the actual imagination of the story is
+chiefly Hogg's, for Lockhart's forte was not that quality, and his own
+novels suffer rather for want of it. If this be the one specimen of what
+the Shepherd's genius could turn out when it submitted to correction and
+training, it gives us a useful and interesting explanation why the mass
+of his work, with such excellent flashes, is so flawed and formless as a
+whole. It explains why he wished Lockhart to edit the others. It
+explains at the same time why (for the Shepherd's vanity was never far
+off) he set apparently little store by the book. It is only a hypothesis
+of course, and a hypothesis which is very unlikely ever to be proved,
+while in the nature of things it is even less capable of disproof. But I
+think there is good critical reason for it.
+
+At any rate, I confess for myself, that I should not take anything like
+the same interest in Hogg, if he were not the putative author of the
+_Confessions_. The book is in a style which wearies soon if it be
+overdone, and which is very difficult indeed to do well. But it is one
+of the very best things of its kind, and that is a claim which ought
+never to be overlooked. And if Hogg in some lucky moment did really
+"write it all by himself," as the children say, then we could make up
+for him a volume composed of it, of "Kilmeny," and of the best of the
+songs, which would be a very remarkable volume indeed. It would not
+represent a twentieth part of his collected work, and it would probably
+represent a still smaller fraction of what he wrote, while all the rest
+would be vastly inferior. But it would be a title to no inconsiderable
+place in literature, and we know that good judges did think Hogg, with
+all his personal weakness and all his literary shortcomings, entitled to
+such a place.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[7] For something more, however, see the Essay on Lockhart below.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+SYDNEY SMITH
+
+
+The hackneyed joke about biographers adding a new terror to death holds
+still as good as ever. But biography can sometimes make a good case
+against her persecutors; and one of the instances which she would
+certainly adduce would be the instance of Sydney Smith. I more than
+suspect that his actual works are less and less read as time goes on,
+and that the brilliant virulence of _Peter Plymley_, the even greater
+brilliance, not marred by virulence at all, of the _Letters to
+Archdeacon Singleton_, the inimitable quips of his articles in the
+_Edinburgh Review_, are familiar, if they are familiar at all, only to
+the professed readers of the literature of the past, and perhaps to some
+intelligent newspaper men who find Sydney[8] to be what Fuseli
+pronounced Blake, "d----d good to steal from." But the _Life_ which
+Lady Holland, with her mother's and Mrs. Austin's aid, produced more
+than thirty years ago has had a different fate; and a fresh lease of
+popularity seems to have been secured by another _Life_, published by
+Mr. Stuart Reid in 1883. This was partly abridged from the first, and
+partly supplied with fresh matter by a new sifting of the documents
+which Lady Holland had used. Nor do the authors of these works, however
+great must be our gratitude to them, take to themselves any such share
+of the credit as is due to Boswell in the case of Johnson, to Lockhart
+in the case of Scott, to Carlyle in the case of Sterling. Neither can
+lay claim to the highest literary merit of writing or arrangement; and
+the latter of the two contains digressions, not interesting to all
+readers, about the nobility of Sydney's cause. It is because both books
+let their subject reveal himself by familiar letters, scraps of journal,
+or conversation, and because the revelation of self is so full and so
+delightful, that Sydney Smith's immortality, now that the generation
+which actually heard him talk has all but disappeared, is still secured
+without the slightest fear of disturbance or decay. With a few
+exceptions (the Mrs. Partington business, the apologue of the dinners at
+the synod of Dort, "Noodle's Oration," and one or two more), the things
+by which Sydney is known to the general, all come, not from his works,
+but from his _Life_ or _Lives_. No one with any sense of fun can read
+the Works without being delighted; but in the Life and the letters the
+same qualities of wit appear, with other qualities which in the Works
+hardly appear at all. A person absolutely ignorant of anything but the
+Works might possibly dismiss Sydney Smith as a brilliant but bitter and
+not too consistent partisan, who fought desperately against abuses when
+his party was out, and discovered that they were not abuses at all when
+his party was in. A reader of his Life and of his private utterances
+knows him better, likes him better, and certainly does not admire him
+less.
+
+He was born in 1771, the son of an eccentric and apparently rather
+provoking person, who for no assigned reason left his wife at the church
+door in order to wander about the world, and who maintained his vagabond
+principles so well that, as his granddaughter ruefully records, he
+bought, spent money on, and sold at a loss, no less than nineteen
+different houses in England and Wales. Sydney was also the second of
+four clever brothers, the eldest and cleverest being the somewhat famous
+"Bobus," who co-operated in the _Microcosm_ with Canning and Frere,
+survived his better known brother but a fortnight, founded a family, and
+has left one of those odd reputations of immense talent not justified by
+any producible work, to which our English life of public schools,
+universities, and Parliament gives peculiar facilities. Bobus and Cecil
+the third brother were sent to Eton: Sydney and Courtenay, the fourth,
+to Winchester, after a childhood spent in precocious reading and arguing
+among themselves. From Winchester Sydney (of whose school-days some
+trifling but only trifling anecdotes are recorded,) proceeded in regular
+course to New College, Oxford, and being elected of right to a
+Fellowship, then worth about a hundred pounds a year, was left by his
+father to "do for himself" on that not extensive revenue. He did for
+himself at Oxford during the space of nine years; and it is supposed
+that his straitened circumstances had something to do with his dislike
+for universities, which however was a kind of point of conscience among
+his Whig friends. It is at least singular that this residence of nearly
+a decade has left hardly a single story or recorded incident of any
+kind; and that though three generations of undergraduates passed through
+Oxford in his time, no one of them seems in later years to have had
+anything to say of not the least famous and one of the most sociable of
+Englishmen. At that time, it is true, and for long afterwards, the men
+of New College kept more to themselves than the men of any other college
+in Oxford; but still it is odd. Another little mystery is, Why did
+Sydney take orders? Although there is not the slightest reason to
+question his being, according to his own standard, a very sincere and
+sufficient divine, it obviously was not quite the profession for him.
+He is said to have wished for the Bar, but to have deferred to his
+father's wishes for the Church. That Sydney was an affectionate and
+dutiful son nobody need doubt: he was always affectionate, and in his
+own way dutiful. But he is about the last man one can think of as likely
+to undertake an uncongenial profession out of high-flown dutifulness to
+a father who had long left him to his own resources, and who had neither
+influence nor prospects in the Church to offer him. The Fellowship would
+have kept him, as it had kept him already, till briefs came. However, he
+did take orders; and the later _Life_ gives more particulars than the
+first as to the incumbency which indirectly determined his career. It
+was the curacy of Netheravon on Salisbury Plain; and its almost complete
+seclusion was tempered by a kindly squire, Mr. Hicks-Beach,
+great-grandfather of the present Sir Michael Hicks-Beach. Mr.
+Hicks-Beach offered Sydney the post of tutor to his eldest son; Sydney
+accepted it, started for Germany with his pupil, but (as he
+picturesquely though rather vaguely expresses it) "put into Edinburgh
+under stress of war" and stayed there for five years.
+
+The sojourn at Edinburgh began in June 1798: it ended in August 1803. It
+will thus be seen that Sydney was by no means a very young man even when
+he began reviewing, the year before leaving the Scotch capital. Indeed
+the aimless prolongation of his stay at Oxford, which brought him
+neither friends, money, nor professional experience of any kind, threw
+him considerably behindhand all his life; and this delay, much more than
+Tory persecution or Whig indifference, was the cause of the comparative
+slowness with which he made his way. His time at Edinburgh was, however,
+usefully spent even before that invention of the _Review_, over which
+there is an amicable and unimportant dispute between himself and
+Jeffrey. His tutorship was so successful that Mr. Hicks-Beach rewarded
+it with a cheque for a thousand pounds: he did duty in the Episcopal
+churches of Edinburgh: he made friends with all the Whigs and many of
+the Tories of the place: he laughed unceasingly at Scotchmen and liked
+them very much. Also, about the middle of his stay, he got married, but
+not to a Scotch girl. His wife was Miss Catherine Pybus, of Cheam, and
+the marriage was as harebrained a one, from the point of view of
+settlements, as Jeffrey's own.[9] Sydney's settlement on his wife is
+well known: it consisted of "six small silver teaspoons much worn," with
+which worldly goods he did her literally endow by throwing them into her
+lap. It would appear that there never was a happier marriage; but it
+certainly seemed for some years as if there might have been many more
+prosperous in point of money. When Sydney moved to London he had no
+very definite prospect of any income whatever; and had not Mrs. Smith
+sold her mother's jewels (which came to her just at the time), they
+would apparently have had some difficulty in furnishing their house in
+Doughty Street. But Horner, their friend (the "parish bull" of Scott's
+irreverent comparison), had gone to London before them, and impressed
+himself, apparently by sheer gravity, on the political world as a good
+young man. Introduced by him, Sydney Smith soon became one of the circle
+at Holland House. It is indeed not easy to live on invitations and your
+mother-in-law's pearls; but Sydney reviewed vigorously, preached
+occasionally, before very long received a regular appointment at the
+Foundling Hospital, and made some money by lecturing very agreeably at
+the Royal Institution on Moral Philosophy--a subject of which he
+honestly admits that he knew, in the technical sense, nothing. But his
+hearers did not want technical ethics, and in Sydney Smith they had a
+moral philosopher of the practical kind who could hardly be excelled
+either in sense or in wit. One little incident of this time, however,
+throws some light on the complaints which have been made about the delay
+of his promotion. He applied to a London rector to license him to a
+vacant chapel, which had not hitherto been used for the services of the
+Church. The immediate answer has not been preserved; but from what
+followed it clearly was a civil and rather evasive but perfectly
+intelligible request to be excused. The man was of course quite within
+his right, and a dozen good reasons can be guessed for his conduct. He
+may really have objected, as he seems to have said he did, to take a
+step which his predecessors had refused to take, and which might
+inconvenience his successors. But Sydney would not take the refusal, and
+wrote another very logical, but extremely injudicious, letter pressing
+his request with much elaboration, and begging the worthy Doctor of
+Divinity to observe that he, the Doctor, was guilty of inconsistency and
+other faults. Naturally this put the Doctor's back up, and he now
+replied with a flat and very high and mighty refusal. We know from
+another instance that Sydney was indisposed to take "No" for an answer.
+However he obtained, besides his place at the Foundling, preacherships
+in two proprietary chapels, and seems to have had both business and
+pleasure enough on his hands during his London sojourn, which was about
+the same length as his Edinburgh one. It was, however, much more
+profitable, for in three years the ministry of "All the Talents" came
+in, the Holland House interest was exerted, and the Chancellor's living
+of Foston, near York, valued at five hundred pounds a year, was given to
+Sydney. He paid for it, after a fashion which in a less zealous and
+convinced Whig might seem a little dubious, by the famous lampoons of
+the _Plymley Letters_, advocating the claims of Catholic emancipation,
+and extolling Fox and Grenville at the expense of Perceval and Canning.
+Very edifying is it to find Sydney Smith objecting to this latter that
+he is a "diner out," a "maker of jokes and parodies," a trifler on
+important subjects--in fact each and all of the things which the Rev.
+Sydney Smith himself was, in a perfection only equalled by the object of
+his righteous wrath. But of Peter more presently.
+
+Even his admiring biographers have noticed, with something of a chuckle,
+the revenge which Perceval, who was the chief object of Plymley's
+sarcasm, took, without in the least knowing it, on his lampooner. Had it
+not been for the Clergy Residence Bill, which that very respectable, if
+not very brilliant, statesman passed in 1808, and which put an end to
+perhaps the most flagrant of all then existing abuses, Sydney, the enemy
+of abuses, would no doubt have continued with a perfectly clear
+conscience to draw the revenues of Foston, and while serving it by a
+curate, to preach, lecture, dine out, and rebuke Canning for making
+jokes, in London. As it was he had to make up his mind, though he
+obtained a respite from the Archbishop, to resign (which in the
+recurring frost of Whig hopes was not to be thought of), to exchange,
+which he found impossible, or to bury himself in Yorkshire. This was a
+real hardship upon him, because Foston, as it was, was uninhabitable,
+and had had no resident clergyman since the seventeenth century. But
+whatever bad things could be said of Sydney (and I really do not know
+what they are, except that the combination of a sharp wit, a ready pen,
+and strong political prejudices sometimes made him abuse his talents),
+no one could say that he ever shirked either a difficulty or a duty.
+When his first three years' leave expired, he went down in 1809 with his
+family to York, and established himself at Heslington, a village near
+the city and not far from his parish. And when a second term of
+dispensation from actual residence was over, he set to work and built
+the snuggest if the ugliest parsonage in England, with farm-buildings
+and all complete, at the cost of some four thousand pounds. Of the
+details of that building his own inimitable account exists, and is or
+ought to be well known. The brick-pit and kiln on the property, which
+were going to save fortunes and resulted in nothing but the production
+of exactly a hundred and fifty thousand unusable bricks: the four oxen,
+Tug, Lug, Haul and Crawl, who were to be the instruments of another
+economy and proved to be, at least in Sydneian language, equal to
+nothing but the consumption of "buckets of sal volatile:" the entry of
+the distracted mother of the household on her new domains with a baby
+clutched in her arms and one shoe left in the circumambient mud: the
+great folks of the neighbourhood (Lord and Lady Carlisle) coming to call
+graciously on the strangers, and being whelmed, coach and four,
+outriders and all, in a ploughed field of despond: the "universal
+scratcher" in the meadows, inclined so as to let the brute creation of
+all heights enjoy that luxury: Bunch the butler, a female child of
+tender years but stout proportions: Annie Kay the factotum: the
+"Immortal," a chariot which was picked up at York in the last stage of
+decay, and carried the family for many years half over England--all
+these things and persons are told in divers delightful scraps of
+autobiography and in innumerable letters, after a fashion impossible to
+better and at a length too long to quote.
+
+Sydney Smith was for more than twenty years rector of Foston, and for
+fully fifteen actually resided there. During this time he made the
+acquaintance of Lord and Lady Grey, next to Lord and Lady Holland his
+most constant friends, visited a little, entertained in his own
+unostentatious but hearty fashion a great deal, wrote many articles for
+the _Edinburgh Review_, found himself in a minority of one or two among
+the clergy of Yorkshire on the subject of Emancipation and similar
+matters, but was on the most friendly terms possible with his diocesan,
+Archbishop Vernon Harcourt. Nor was he even without further preferment,
+for he held for some years (on the then not discredited understanding of
+resignation when one of the Howards was ready for it) the neighbouring
+and valuable living of Londesborough. Then the death of an aunt put an
+end to his monetary anxieties, which for years had been considerable, by
+the legacy of a small but sufficient fortune. And at last, when he was
+approaching sixty, the good things of the Church, which he never
+affected to despise, came in earnest. The Tory Chancellor Lyndhurst gave
+him a stall at Bristol, which carried with it a small Devonshire living,
+and soon afterwards he was able to exchange Foston (which he had greatly
+improved), for Combe Florey near Taunton. When his friend Lord Grey
+became Prime Minister, the stall at Bristol was exchanged for a much
+more valuable one at St. Paul's; Halberton, the Devonshire vicarage, and
+Combe Florey still remaining his. These made up an ecclesiastical
+revenue not far short of three thousand a year, which Sydney enjoyed for
+the last fifteen years of his life. He never got anything more, and it
+is certain that for a time he was very sore at not being made a bishop,
+or at least offered a bishopric. Lord Holland had rather rashly
+explained the whole difficulty years before, by reporting a conversation
+of his with Lord Grenville, in which they had hoped that when the Whigs
+came into power they would be more grateful to Sydney than the Tories
+had been to Swift. Sydney's acuteness must have made him wince at the
+omen. For my part I do not see why either Harley or Grey should have
+hesitated, as far as any scruples of their own went. But I think any
+fair-minded person must admit the possibility of a scruple, though he
+may not share it, about the effect of seeing either the _Tale of a Tub_
+or _Peter Plymley's Letters_, with "By the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop
+of----" on the title-page. The people who would have been shocked might
+in each case have been fools: there is nothing that I at least can see,
+in either book, inconsistent with sound religion and churchmanship. But
+they would have been honest fools, and of such a Prime Minister has to
+take heed. So Amen Corner (or rather, for he did not live there, certain
+streets near Grosvenor Square) in London, and Combe Florey in the
+country, were Sydney Smith's abodes till his death. In the former he
+gave his breakfasts and dinners in the season, being further enabled to
+do so by his share (some thirty thousand pounds) of his brother
+Courtenay's Indian fortune. The latter, after rebuilding it,--for he had
+either a fate or a passion for bricks and mortar,--he made on a small
+scale one of the most beautiful and hospitable houses in the West of
+England.
+
+To Combe Florey, as to Foston, a sheaf of fantastic legends attaches
+itself; indeed, as Lady Holland was not very fond of dates, it is
+sometimes not clear to which of the two residences some of them apply.
+At both Sydney had a huge store-room, or rather grocer's and chemist's
+shop, from which he supplied the wants, not merely of his household, but
+of half the neighbourhood. It appears to have been at Combe Florey (for
+though no longer poor he still had a frugal mind), that he hit upon the
+device of "putting the cheapest soaps in the dearest papers," confident
+of the result upon the female temper. It was certainly there that he
+fitted up two favourite donkeys with a kind of holiday-dress of antlers,
+to meet the objection of one of his lady-visitors that he had no deer;
+and converted certain large bay-trees in boxes into the semblance of an
+orangery, by fastening some dozens of fine fruit to the branches. I like
+to think of the mixed astonishment and disgust of a great Russian, and a
+not very small Frenchman, both not long deceased, M. Tourguénieff and M.
+Paul de Saint-Victor, if they had heard of these pleasing tomfooleries.
+But tomfoolery, though, when properly and not inordinately indulged, one
+of the best things in life, must, like the other good things of life,
+come to an end. After an illness of some months Sydney Smith died at his
+house in Green Street, of heart disease, on 22nd February 1845, in the
+seventy-fourth year of his age.
+
+The memorials and evidences of his peculiar if not unique genius consist
+of three different kinds; reported or remembered conversations and
+jokes, letters, and formal literary work. He was once most famous as a
+talker; but conversation is necessarily the most perishable of all
+things, and its recorded fragments bear keeping less than any other
+relics. Some of the verbal jests assigned to him (notably the famous
+one about the tortoise, which, after being long known by the initiated
+not to be his, has at last been formally claimed by its rightful owner),
+are certainly or probably borrowed or falsely attributed, as rich
+conversationalists always borrow or receive. And always the things have
+something of the mangled air which sayings detached from their context
+can hardly escape. It is otherwise with the letters. The best letters
+are always most like the actual conversation of their writers, and
+probably no one ever wrote more as he talked than Sydney Smith. The
+specially literary qualities of his writing for print are here too in
+great measure; and on the whole, though of course the importance of
+subject is nearly always less, and the interest of sustained work is
+wholly absent, nowhere can the entire Sydney be better seen. Of the
+three satirists of modern times with whom he may not unfairly claim to
+rank--Pascal, Swift, and Voltaire--he is most like Voltaire in his
+faculty of presenting a good thing with a preface which does not in the
+least prepare you for it, and then leaving it without the slightest
+attempt to go back on it, and elaborate it, and make sure that his
+hearer has duly appreciated it and laughed at it. And of the two, though
+the palm of concentration must be given to Voltaire, the palm of
+absolute simplicity must be given to Sydney. Hardly any of his letters
+are without these unforced flashes of wit, from almost his first
+epistle to Jeffrey (where, after rallying that great little man on being
+the "only male despondent he has met," he adds the postscript, "I beg to
+except the Tuxford waiter, who desponds exactly as you do") to his very
+last to Miss Harcourt, in which he mildly dismisses one of his brethren
+as "anything but a _polished_ corner of the Temple." There is the "usual
+establishment for an eldest landed baby:" the proposition, advanced in
+the grave and chaste manner, that "the information of very plain women
+is so inconsiderable, that I agree with you in setting no store by it:"
+the plaintive expostulation with Lady Holland (who had asked him to
+dinner on the ninth of the month, after previously asking him to stay
+from the fifth to the twelfth), "it is like giving a gentleman an
+assignation for Wednesday when you are going to marry him on the
+previous Sunday--an attempt to combine the stimulus of gallantry with
+the security of connubial relations:" the simple and touching
+information that "Lord Tankerville has sent me a whole buck. This
+necessarily takes up a good deal of my time;" that "geranium-fed bacon
+is of a beautiful colour, but it takes so many plants to fatten one pig
+that such a system can never answer;" that "it is a mistake to think
+that Dr. Bond could be influenced by partridges. He is a man of very
+independent mind, with whom pheasants at least, or perhaps even turkeys,
+are necessary;" and scores more with references to which I find the
+fly-leaves of my copy of the letters covered. If any one wants to see
+how much solid there is with all this froth, let him turn to the
+passages showing the unconquerable manliness, fairness, and good sense
+with which Sydney treated the unhappy subject of Queen Caroline, out of
+which his friends were so ready to make political capital; or to the
+admirable epistle in which he takes seriously, and blunts once for all,
+the points of certain foolish witticisms as to the readiness with which
+he, a man about town, had taken to catechisms and cabbages in an almost
+uninhabited part of the despised country. In conversation he would seem
+sometimes to have a little, a very little, "forced the note." The Quaker
+baby, and the lady "with whom you might give an assembly or populate a
+parish," are instances in point. But he never does this in his letters.
+I take particular pleasure in the following passage written to Miss
+Georgiana Harcourt within two years of his death: "What a charming
+existence! To live in the midst of holy people; to know that nothing
+profane can approach you; to be certain that a Dissenter can no more be
+found in the Palace than a snake can exist in Ireland, or ripe fruit in
+Scotland! To have your society strong, and undiluted by the laity; to
+bid adieu to human learning; to feast on the Canons and revel in the
+Thirty-Nine Articles! Happy Georgiana!" Now if Sydney had been what some
+foolish people think him, merely a scoffer, there would be no fun in
+this; it would be as impertinent and in as bad taste as the stale jokes
+of the eighteenth century about Christianity. But he was much else.
+
+Of course, however, no rational man will contend that in estimating
+Sydney Smith's place in the general memory, his deliberate literary
+work, or at least that portion of it which he chose to present on
+reflection, acknowledged and endorsed, can be overlooked. His _Life_
+contains (what is infinitely desirable in all such Lives and by no means
+always or often furnished) a complete list of his contributions to the
+_Edinburgh Review_, and his works contain most of them. To these have to
+be added the pamphlets, of which the chief and incomparably the best
+are, at intervals of thirty years, _Peter Plymley_ and the _Letters to
+Archdeacon Singleton_, together with sermons, speeches, and other
+miscellaneous matter. The whole, except the things which he did not
+himself care to reprint, can be obtained now in one volume; but the
+print is not to be recommended to aged or weakly sight.
+
+Sydney Smith had no false modesty, and in not a few letters to Jeffrey
+he speaks of his own contributions to the _Edinburgh_ with the greatest
+freedom, combating and quite refusing to accept his editor's suggestion
+as to their flippancy and fantasticality, professing with much frankness
+that this is the way he can write and no other, and more than once
+telling Jeffrey that whatever they may think in solemn Scotland, his,
+Sydney's, articles are a great deal more read in England and elsewhere
+than any others. Although there are maxims to the contrary effect, the
+judgment of a clever man, not very young and tolerably familiar with the
+world, on his own work, is very seldom far wrong. I should say myself
+that, putting aside the historic estimate, Sydney Smith's articles are
+by far the most interesting nowadays of those contributed by any one
+before the days of Macaulay, who began just as Sydney ceased to write
+anonymously in 1827, on his Bristol appointment. They are also by far
+the most distinct and original. Jeffrey, Brougham, and the rest wrote,
+for the most part, very much after the fashion of the ancients: if a
+very few changes were made for date, passages of Jeffrey's criticism
+might almost be passages of Dryden, certainly passages of the better
+critics of the eighteenth century, as far as manner goes. There is
+nobody at all like Sydney Smith before him in England, for Swift's style
+is wholly different. To begin with, Sydney had a strong prejudice in
+favour of writing very short articles, and a horror of reading long
+ones--the latter being perhaps less peculiar to himself than the former.
+Then he never made the slightest pretence at systematic or dogmatic
+criticism of anything whatever. In literature proper he seems indeed to
+have had no particular principles, and I cannot say that he had very
+good taste. He commits the almost unpardonable sin of not merely
+blaspheming Madame de Sévigné, but preferring to her that second-rate
+leader-writer in petticoats, Madame de Staël. On the other hand, if he
+had no literary principles, he had (except in rare cases where politics
+came in, and not often then) few literary prejudices, and his happily
+incorrigible good sense and good humour were proof against the frequent
+bias of his associates. Though he could not have been very sensible,
+from what he himself says, of their highest qualities, he championed
+Scott's novels incessantly against the Whigs and prigs of Holland House.
+He gives a most well-timed warning to Jeffrey that the constant
+running-down of Wordsworth had very much the look of persecution, though
+with his usual frankness he avows that he has not read the particular
+article in question, because the subject is "quite uninteresting to
+him." I think he would, if driven hard, have admitted with equal
+frankness that poetry, merely as poetry, was generally uninteresting.
+Still he had so many interests of various kinds, that few books failed
+to appeal to one or the other, and he, in his turn, has seldom failed to
+give a lively if not a very exact or critical account of his subject.
+But it is in his way of giving this account that the peculiarity,
+glanced at above as making a parallel between him and Voltaire, appears.
+It is, I have said, almost original, and what is more, endless as has
+been the periodical writing of the last eighty years, and sedulously as
+later writers have imitated earlier, I do not know that it has ever
+been successfully copied. It consists in giving rapid and apparently
+business-like summaries, packed, with apparent negligence and real art,
+full of the flashes of wit so often noticed and to be noticed. Such are,
+in the article on "The Island of Ceylon," the honey-bird "into whose
+body the soul of a common informer seems to have migrated," and "the
+chaplain of the garrison, all in black, the Rev. Mr. Somebody or other
+whose name we have forgotten," the discovery of whose body in a serpent
+his ruthless clerical brother pronounces to be "the best history of the
+kind he remembers." Very likely there may be people who can read this,
+even the "all in black," without laughing, and among them I should
+suppose must be the somebody or other, whose name we too have forgotten,
+who is said to have imagined that he had more than parried Sydney's
+unforgiven jest about the joke and the surgical operation, by retorting,
+"Yes! an _English_ joke." I have always wept to think that Sydney did
+not live to hear this retort. The classical places for this kind of
+summary work are the article just named on Ceylon, and that on Waterton.
+But the most inimitable single example, if it is not too shocking to
+this very proper age, is the argument of Mat Lewis's tragedy: "Ottilia
+becomes quite furious from the conviction that Cæsario has been sleeping
+with a second lady called Estella; whereas he has really been sleeping
+with a third lady called Amelrosa."
+
+Among the most important of these essays are the two famous ones on
+Methodism and on Indian missions, which gave far more offence to the
+religious public of evangelical persuasion than all Sydney's jokes on
+bishops, or his arguments for Catholic emancipation, and which (owing to
+the strong influence which then, as now, Nonconformists possessed in the
+counsels of the Liberal party) probably had as much to do as anything
+else with the reluctance of the Whig leaders, when they came into power,
+to give their friend the highest ecclesiastical preferment. These
+subjects are rather difficult to treat in a general literary essay, and
+it may perhaps be admitted that here, as in dealing with poetry and
+other subjects of the more transcendental kind, Sydney showed a touch of
+Philistinism, and a distinct inability to comprehend exaltation of
+sentiment and thought. But the general sense is admirably sound and
+perfectly orthodox; and the way in which so apparently light and
+careless a writer has laboriously supported every one of his charges,
+and almost every one of his flings, with chapter and verse from the
+writings of the incriminated societies, is very remarkable. Nor can it,
+I think, be doubted that the publication, in so widely read a
+periodical, of the nauseous follies of speech in which well-meaning
+persons indulged, had something to do with the gradual disuse of a style
+than which nothing could be more prejudicial to religion, for the simple
+reason that nothing else could make religion ridiculous. The medicine
+did not of course operate at once, and silly people still write silly
+things. But I hardly think that the Wesleyan body or the Church
+Missionary Society would now officially publish such stuff as the
+passage about Brother Carey, who, while in the actual paroxysm of
+sea-sickness, was "wonderfully comforted by the contemplation of the
+goodness of God," or that about Brother Ward "in design clasping to his
+bosom" the magnanimous Captain Wickes, who subsequently "seemed very
+low," when a French privateer was in sight. Jeffrey was, it seems, a
+little afraid of these well-deserved exposures, which, from the
+necessity of abundant quotation, are an exception to the general
+shortness of Sydney's articles. Sydney's interest in certain subjects
+led him constantly to take up fresh books on them; and thus a series of
+series might be made out of his papers, with some advantage to the
+reader perhaps, if a new edition of his works were undertaken. The chief
+of such subjects is America, in dealing with which he pleased the
+Americans by descanting on their gradual emancipation from English
+prejudices and abuses, but infuriated them by constant denunciations of
+slavery, and by laughing at their lack of literature and cultivation.
+With India he also dealt often, his brothers' connection with it giving
+him an interest therein. Prisons were another favourite subject, though,
+in his zeal for making them uncomfortable, he committed himself to one
+really atrocious suggestion--that of dark cells for long periods of
+time. It is odd that the same person should make such a truly diabolical
+proposal, and yet be in a perpetual state of humanitarian rage about
+man-traps and spring-guns, which were certainly milder engines of
+torture. It is odd, too, that Sydney, who was never tired of arguing
+that prisons ought to be made uncomfortable, because nobody need go
+there unless he chose, should have been furiously wroth with poor Mr.
+Justice Best for suggesting much the same thing of spring-guns. The
+greatest political triumph of his manner is to be found no doubt in the
+article "Bentham on Fallacies," in which the unreadable diatribes of the
+apostle of utilitarianism are somehow spirited and crisped up into a
+series of brilliant arguments, and the whole is crowned by the famous
+"Noodle's Oration," the summary and storehouse of all that ever has been
+or can be said on the Liberal side in the lighter manner. It has not
+lost its point even from the fact that Noodle has now for a long time
+changed his party, and has elaborated for himself, after his manner, a
+similar stock of platitudes and absurdities in favour of the very things
+for which Sydney was fighting.
+
+The qualities of these articles appear equally in the miscellaneous
+essays, in the speeches, and even in the sermons, though Sydney Smith,
+unlike Sterne, never condescended to buffoonery or theatrical tricks in
+the pulpit. In _Peter Plymley's Letters_ they appear concentrated and
+acidulated: in the _Letters to Archdeacon Singleton_, in the
+_Repudiation Letters_, and the _Letters on Railways_ which date from his
+very last days, concentrated and mellowed. More than one good judge has
+been of the opinion that Sydney's powers increased to the very end of
+his life, and it is not surprising that this should have been the case.
+Although he did plenty of work in his time, the literary part of it was
+never of an exhausting nature. Though one of the most original of
+commentators, he was a commentator pure and simple, and found, but did
+not supply, his matter. Thus there was no danger of running dry, and as
+his happiest style was not indignation but good-natured raillery, his
+increasing prosperity, not chequered, till quite the close of his life,
+by any serious bodily ailment, put him more and more in the right
+atmosphere and temper for indulging his genius. _Plymley_, though very
+amusing, and, except in the Canning matter above referred to, not
+glaringly unfair for a political lampoon, is distinctly acrimonious, and
+almost (as "almost" as Sydney could be) ill-tempered. It is possible to
+read between the lines that the writer is furious at his party being out
+of office, and is much more angry with Mr. Perceval for having the ear
+of the country than for being a respectable nonentity. The main
+argument, moreover, is bad in itself, and was refuted by facts. Sydney
+pretends to be, as his friend Jeffrey really was, in mortal terror lest
+the French should invade England, and, joined by rebellious Irishmen
+and wrathful Catholics generally, produce an English revolution. The
+Tories replied, "We will take good care that the French shall _not_
+land, and that Irishmen shall _not_ rise." And they did take the said
+good care, and they beat the Frenchmen thorough and thorough while
+Sydney and his friends were pointing their epigrams. Therefore, though
+much of the contention is unanswerable enough, the thing is doubtfully
+successful as a whole. In the _Letters to Archdeacon Singleton_ the tone
+is almost uniformly good-humoured, and the argument, whether quite
+consistent or not in the particular speaker's mouth, is absolutely
+sound, and has been practically admitted since by almost all the best
+friends of the Church. Here occurs that inimitable passage before
+referred to.
+
+    I met the other day, in an old Dutch chronicle, with a passage
+    so apposite to this subject, that, though it is somewhat too
+    light for the occasion, I cannot abstain from quoting it. There
+    was a great meeting of all the clergy at Dordrecht, and the
+    chronicler thus describes it, which I give in the language of
+    the translation: "And there was great store of Bishops in the
+    town, in their robes goodly to behold, and all the great men of
+    the State were there, and folks poured in in boats on the Meuse,
+    the Merse, the Rhine, and the Linge, coming from the Isle of
+    Beverlandt and Isselmond, and from all quarters in the Bailiwick
+    of Dort; Arminians and Gomarists, with the friends of John
+    Barneveldt and of Hugh Grote. And before my Lords the Bishops,
+    Simon of Gloucester, who was a Bishop in those parts, disputed
+    with Vorstius and Leoline the Monk, and many texts of Scripture
+    were bandied to and fro; and when this was done, and many
+    propositions made, and it waxed towards twelve of the clock, my
+    Lords the Bishops prepared to set them down to a fair repast, in
+    which was great store of good things--and among the rest a
+    roasted peacock, having in lieu of a tail the arms and banners
+    of the Archbishop, which was a goodly sight to all who favoured
+    the Church--and then the Archbishop would say a grace, as was
+    seemly to do, he being a very holy man; but ere he had finished,
+    a great mob of townspeople and folks from the country, who were
+    gathered under the windows, cried out _Bread! bread!_ for there
+    was a great famine, and wheat had risen to three times the
+    ordinary price of the _sleich_; and when they had done crying
+    _Bread! bread!_ they called out _No Bishops!_ and began to cast
+    up stones at the windows. Whereat my Lords the Bishops were in a
+    great fright, and cast their dinner out of the window to appease
+    the mob, and so the men of that town were well pleased, and did
+    devour the meats with a great appetite; and then you might have
+    seen my Lords standing with empty plates, and looking wistfully
+    at each other, till Simon of Gloucester, he who disputed with
+    Leoline the Monk, stood up among them and said, _Good my Lords,
+    is it your pleasure to stand here fasting, and that those who
+    count lower in the Church than you do should feast and fluster?
+    Let us order to us the dinner of the Deans and Canons which is
+    making ready for them in the chamber below._ And this speech of
+    Simon of Gloucester pleased the Bishops much; and so they sent
+    for the host, one William of Ypres, and told him it was for the
+    public good, and he, much fearing the Bishops, brought them the
+    dinner of the Deans and Canons; and so the Deans and Canons went
+    away without dinner, and were pelted by the men of the town,
+    because they had not put any meat out of the windows like the
+    Bishops; and when the Count came to hear of it, he said it was a
+    pleasant conceit, _and that the Bishops were right cunning men,
+    and had ding'd the Canons well_."
+
+Even in the Singleton Letters, however, there are some little lapses of
+the same kind (worse, indeed, because these letters were signed) as the
+attack on Canning in the Plymley Letters. Sydney Smith exclaiming
+against "derision and persiflage, the great principle by which the world
+is now governed," is again edifying. But in truth Sydney never had the
+weakness (for I have known it called a weakness) of looking too
+carefully to see what the enemy's advocate is going to say. Take even
+the famous, the immortal apologue of Mrs. Partington. It covered, we are
+usually told, the Upper House with ridicule, and did as much as anything
+else to carry the Reform Bill. And yet, though it is a watery apologue,
+it will not hold water for a moment. The implied conclusion is, that the
+Atlantic beat Mrs. Partington. Did it? It made, no doubt, a great mess
+in her house, it put her to flight, it put her to shame. But when I was
+last at Sidmouth the line of high-water mark was, I believe, much what
+it was before the great storm of 1824, and though the particular Mrs.
+Partington had no doubt been gathered to her fathers, the Mrs.
+Partington of the day was, equally without doubt, living very
+comfortably in the house which the Atlantic had threatened to swallow
+up.
+
+It was, however, perhaps part of Sydney's strength that he never cared
+to consider too curiously, or on too many sides. Besides his inimitable
+felicity of expression (the Singleton Letters are simply crammed with
+epigram), he had the sturdiest possible common sense and the liveliest
+possible humour. I have known his claim to the title of "humourist"
+called in question by precisians: nobody could deny him the title of
+good-humourist. Except that the sentimental side of Toryism would never
+have appealed to him, it was chiefly an accident of time that he was a
+polemical Liberal. He would always and naturally have been on the side
+opposite to that on which most of the fools were. When he came into the
+world, as the straitest Tory will admit, there were in that world a
+great many abuses as they are called, that is to say, a great many
+things which, once useful and excellent, had either decayed into
+positive nuisances, or dried up into neutral and harmless but
+obstructive rubbish. There were also many silly and some mischievous
+people, as well as some wise and useful ones, who defended the abuses.
+Sydney Smith was an ideal soldier of reform for his time, and in his
+way. He was not extraordinarily long-sighted--indeed (as his famous and
+constantly-repeated advice to "take short views of life" shows) he had a
+distinct distrust of taking too anxious thought for political or any
+other morrows. But he had a most keen and, in many cases, a most just
+scent and sight for the immediate inconveniences and injustices of the
+day, and for the shortest and most effective ways of mending them. He
+was perhaps more destitute of romance and of reverence (though he had
+too much good taste to be positively irreverent) than any man who ever
+lived. He never could have paralleled, he never could have even
+understood, Scott's feelings about the Regalia, or that ever-famous
+incident of Sir Walter's life, when returning with Jeffrey and other
+Whig friends from some public meeting, he protested against the
+innovations which, harmless or even beneficial individually and in
+themselves, would by degrees destroy every thing that made Scotland
+Scotland. I am afraid that his warmest admirers, even those of his own
+political complexion, must admit that he was, as has been said, more
+than a little of a Philistine; that he expressed, and expressed
+capitally in one way, that curious middle-class sentiment, or denial of
+sentiment, which won its first triumph in the first Reform Bill and its
+last in the Exhibition of twenty years later, which destroyed no doubt
+much that was absurd, and some things that were noxious, but which
+induced in England a reign of shoddy in politics, in philosophy, in art,
+in literature, and, when its own reign was over, left England weak and
+divided, instead of, as it had been under the reign of abuses, united
+and strong. The bombardment of Copenhagen may or may not have been a
+dreadful thing: it was at any rate better than the abandonment of
+Khartoum. Nor can Sydney any more than his friends be acquitted of
+having held the extraordinary notion that you can "rest and be thankful"
+in politics, that you can set Demos at bishops, but stave and tail him
+off when he comes to canons; that you can level beautifully down to a
+certain point, and then stop levelling for ever afterwards; that because
+you can laugh Brother Ringletub out of court, laughter will be equally
+effective with Cardinal Newman; and that though it is the height of
+"anility" (a favourite word of his) to believe in a country gentleman,
+it is the height of rational religion to believe in a ten-pound
+householder.
+
+But however open to exception his principles may be, and that not merely
+from the point of view of highflying Toryism, his carrying out of them
+in life and in literature had the two abiding justifications of being
+infinitely amusing, and of being amusing always in thoroughly good
+temper. It is, as I have said, impossible to read Sydney Smith's _Life_,
+and still more impossible to read his letters, without liking him warmly
+and personally, without seeing that he was not only a man who liked to
+be comfortable (that is not very rare), that he was not only one who
+liked others to be comfortable (that is rarer), but one who in every
+situation in which he was thrown, did his utmost to make others as well
+as himself comfortable (which is rarest of all). If the references in
+_Peter Plymley_ to Canning were unjustifiable from him, there is little
+or no reason to think that they were prompted by personal jealousy; and
+though, as has been said, he was undoubtedly sore, and unreasonably
+sore, at not receiving the preferment which he thought he had deserved,
+he does not seem to have been personally jealous of any man who had
+received it. The parson of Foston and Combe Florey may not have been
+(his latest biographer, admiring though he be, pathetically laments that
+he was not) a spiritually minded man. But happy beyond almost all other
+parishioners of the time were the parishioners of Combe Florey and
+Foston, though one of them did once throw a pair of scissors at his
+provoking pastor. He was a fast and affectionate friend; and though he
+was rather given to haunting rich men, he did it not only without
+servility, but without that alternative of bearishness and freaks which
+has sometimes been adopted. As a prince of talkers he might have been a
+bore to a generation which (I own I think in that perhaps single point),
+wiser than its fathers, is not so ambitious as they were to sit as a
+bucket and be pumped into. But in that infinitely happier system of
+conversation by books, which any one can enjoy as he likes and interrupt
+as he likes at his own fireside, Sydney is still a prince. There may be
+living somewhere some one who does not think so very badly of slavery,
+who is most emphatically of opinion that "the fools were right," in the
+matters of Catholic emancipation and Reform, who thinks well of public
+schools and universities, who even, though he may not like spring-guns
+much, thinks that John Jones had only himself to blame if, after ample
+warning and with no business except the business of supplying a London
+poulterer with his landlord's game, he trespassed and came to the worst.
+Yet even this monster, if he happened to be possessed of the sense of
+fun and literature, (which is perhaps impossible), could not read even
+the most acrid of Sydney's political diatribes without shrieking with
+laughter, if, in his ogreish way, he were given to such violent
+demonstrations; could certainly not read the _Life_ and the letters
+without admitting, in a moment of unwonted humanity, that here was a man
+who, for goodness as well as for cleverness, for sound practical wisdom
+as well as for fantastic verbal wit, has had hardly a superior and very
+few equals.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[8] To speak of him in this way is not impertinence or familiarity. He
+was most generally addressed as "Mr. Sydney," and his references to his
+wife are nearly always to "Mrs. Sydney," seldom or never to "Mrs.
+Smith."
+
+[9] See next Essay.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+JEFFREY
+
+
+"Jeffrey and I," says Christopher North in one of his more malicious
+moments, "do nothing original; it's porter's work." A tolerably
+experienced student of human nature might almost, without knowing the
+facts, guess the amount of truth contained in this fling. North, as
+North, had done nothing that the world calls original: North, as Wilson,
+had done a by no means inconsiderable quantity of such work in verse and
+prose. But Jeffrey really did underlie the accusation contained in the
+words. A great name in literature, nothing stands to his credit in
+permanent literary record but a volume (a sufficiently big one, no
+doubt[10]) of criticisms on the work of other men; and though this
+volume is only a selection from his actual writings, no further gleaning
+could be made of any different material. Even his celebrated, or once
+celebrated, "Treatise on Beauty" is but a review article, worked up into
+an encyclopædia article, and dealing almost wholly with pure criticism.
+Against him, if against any one, the famous and constantly repeated gibe
+about the fellows who have failed in literature and art, falls short and
+harmless. In another of its forms, "the corruption of a poet is the
+generation of a critic," it might be more appropriate. For Jeffrey, as
+we know from his boyish letters, once thought, like almost every boy who
+is not an idiot, that he might be a poet, and scribbled verses in
+plenty. But the distinguishing feature in this case was, that he waited
+for no failure, for no public ridicule or neglect, not even for any
+private nipping of the merciful, but so seldom effective, sort, to check
+those sterile growths. The critic was sufficiently early developed in
+him to prevent the corruption of the poet from presenting itself, in its
+usual disastrous fashion, to the senses of the world. Thus he lives (for
+his political and legal renown, though not inconsiderable, is
+comparatively unimportant) as a critic pure and simple.
+
+His biographer, Lord Cockburn, tells us that "Francis Jeffrey, the
+greatest of British critics, was born in Edinburgh on 23d October 1773."
+It must be at the end, not the beginning, of this paper that we decide
+whether Jeffrey deserves the superlative. He seems certainly to have
+begun his critical practice very early. He was the son of a depute-clerk
+of the Court of Session, and respectably, though not brilliantly,
+connected. His father was a great Tory, and, though it would be
+uncharitable to say that this was the reason why Jeffrey was a great
+Liberal, the two facts were probably not unconnected in the line of
+causation. Francis went to the High School when he was eight, and to the
+College at Glasgow when he was fourteen. He does not appear to have been
+a prodigy at either; but he has an almost unequalled record for early
+work of the self-undertaken kind. He seems from his boyhood to have been
+addicted to filling reams of paper, and shelves full of note-books, with
+extracts, abstracts, critical annotations, criticisms of these
+criticisms, and all manner of writing of the same kind. I believe it is
+the general experience that this kind of thing does harm in nineteen
+cases, for one in which it does good; but Jeffrey was certainly a
+striking exception to the rule, though perhaps he might not have been so
+if his producing, or at least publishing, time had not been unusually
+delayed. Indeed, his whole mental history appears to have been of a
+curiously piecemeal character; and his scrappy and self-guided education
+may have conduced to the priggishness which he showed early, and never
+entirely lost, till fame, prosperity, and the approach of old age
+mellowed it out of him. He was not sixteen when his sojourn at Glasgow
+came to an end; and, for more than two years, he seems to have been left
+to a kind of studious independence, attending only a couple of law
+classes at Edinburgh University. Then his father insisted on his going
+to Oxford: a curious step, the reasons for which are anything but clear.
+For the paternal idea seems to have been that Jeffrey was to study not
+arts, but law; a study for which Oxford may present facilities now, but
+which most certainly was quite out of its way in Jeffrey's time, and
+especially in the case of a Scotch boy of ordinary freshman's age.
+
+It is painful to have to say that Jeffrey hated Oxford, because there
+are few instances on record in which such hatred does not show the hater
+to have been a very bad man indeed. There are, however, some special
+excuses for the little Scotchman. His college (Queen's) was not perhaps
+very happily selected; he had been sent there in the teeth of his own
+will, which was a pretty strong will; he was horrified, after the free
+selection of Scotch classes, to find a regular curriculum which he had
+to take or leave as a whole; the priggishness of Oxford was not his
+priggishness, its amusements (for he hated sport of every kind) were not
+his amusements; and, in short, there was a general incompatibility. He
+came up in September and went down in July, having done nothing except
+having, according to a not ill-natured jest, "lost the broad Scotch, but
+gained only the narrow English,"--a peculiarity which sometimes brought
+a little mild ridicule on him both from Scotchmen and Englishmen.
+
+Very soon after his return to Edinburgh, he seems to have settled down
+steadily to study for the Scotch bar, and during his studies
+distinguished himself as a member of the famous Speculative Society,
+both in essay-writing and in the debates. He was called on 16th December
+1794.
+
+Although there have never been very quick returns at the bar, either of
+England or Scotland, the smaller numbers of the latter might be thought
+likely to bring young men of talent earlier to the front. This
+advantage, however, appears to have been counterbalanced partly by the
+strong family interests which made a kind of aristocracy among Scotch
+lawyers, and partly by the influence of politics and of Government
+patronage. Jeffrey was, comparatively speaking, a "kinless loon"; and,
+while he was steadily resolved not to put himself forward as a candidate
+for the Tory manna of which Dundas was the Moses, his filial reverence
+long prevented him from declaring himself a very violent Whig. Indeed,
+he gave an instance of this reverence which might serve as a pretty text
+for a casuistical discussion. Henry Erskine, Dean of the Faculty of
+Advocates, was in 1796 deprived by vote of that, the most honourable
+position of the Scotch bar, for having presided at a Whig meeting.
+Jeffrey, like Gibbon, sighed as a Whig, but obeyed as a son, and stayed
+away from the poll. His days were certainly long in the land; but I am
+inclined to think that, in a parallel case, some Tories at least would
+have taken the chance of shorter life with less speckled honour.
+However, it is hard to quarrel with a man for obeying his parents; and
+perhaps, after all, the Whigs did not think the matter of so much
+importance as they affected to do. It is certain that Jeffrey was a
+little dashed by the slowness of his success at the bar. Towards the end
+of 1798, he set out for London with a budget of letters of introduction,
+and thoughts of settling down to literature. But the editors and
+publishers to whom he was introduced did not know what a treasure lay
+underneath the scanty surface of this Scotch advocate, and they were
+either inaccessible or repulsive. He returned to Edinburgh, and, for
+another two years, waited for fortune philosophically enough, though
+with lingering thoughts of England, and growing ones of India. It was
+just at the turn of the century, that his fortunes began, in various
+ways, also to take a turn. For some years, though a person by no means
+given to miscellaneous acquaintances, he had been slowly forming the
+remarkable circle of friends from whose combined brains was soon to
+start the _Edinburgh Review_. He fell in love, and married his second
+cousin, Catherine Wilson, on 1st November 1801--a bold and by no means
+canny step, for his father was ill-off, the bride was tocherless, and he
+says that he had never earned a hundred pounds a year in fees. They did
+not, however, launch out greatly, and their house in Buccleuch Place
+(not the least famous locality in literature) was furnished on a scale
+which some modern colleges, conducted on the principles of enforced
+economy, would think Spartan for an undergraduate. Shortly afterwards,
+and very little before the appearance of the Blue and Yellow, Jeffrey
+made another innovation, which was perhaps not less profitable to him,
+by establishing a practice in ecclesiastical causes; though he met with
+a professional check in his rejection, on party principles, for the
+so-called collectorship, a kind of reporter's post of some emolument and
+not inconsiderable distinction.
+
+The story of the _Edinburgh Review_ and its foundation has been very
+often told on the humorous, if not exactly historical, authority of
+Sydney Smith. It is unnecessary to repeat it. It is undoubted that the
+idea was Sydney's. It is equally undoubted that, but for Jeffrey, the
+said idea might never have taken form at all, and would never have
+retained any form for more than a few months. It was only Jeffrey's
+long-established habit of critical writing, the untiring energy into
+which he whipped up his no doubt gifted but quite untrained
+contributors, and the skill which he almost at once developed in editing
+proper,--that is to say in selecting, arranging, adapting, and, even to
+some extent, re-writing contributions--which secured success. Very
+different opinions have been expressed at different times on the
+intrinsic merits of this celebrated production; and perhaps, on the
+whole, the principal feeling of explorers into the long and dusty
+ranges of its early volumes, has been one of disappointment. I believe
+myself that, in similar cases, a similar result is very common indeed,
+and that it is due to the operation of two familiar fallacies. The one
+is the delusion as to the products of former times being necessarily
+better than those of the present; a delusion which is not the less
+deluding because of its counterpart, the delusion about progress. The
+other is a more peculiar and subtle one. I shall not go so far as a very
+experienced journalist who once said to me commiseratingly, "My good
+sir, I won't exactly say that literary merit hurts a newspaper." But
+there is no doubt that all the great successes of journalism, for the
+last hundred years, have been much more due to the fact of the new
+venture being new, of its supplying something that the public wanted and
+had not got, than to the fact of the supply being extraordinarily good
+in kind. In nearly every case, the intrinsic merit has improved as the
+thing went on, but it has ceased to be a novel merit. Nothing would be
+easier than to show that the early _Edinburgh_ articles were very far
+from perfect. Of Jeffrey we shall speak presently, and there is no doubt
+that Sydney at his best was, and is always, delightful. But the
+blundering bluster of Brougham, the solemn ineffectiveness of Horner (of
+whom I can never think without also thinking of Scott's delightful
+Shandean jest on him), the respectable erudition of the Scotch
+professors, cannot for one single moment be compared with the work
+which, in Jeffrey's own later days, in those of Macvey Napier, and in
+the earlier ones of Empson, was contributed by Hazlitt, by Carlyle, by
+Stephen, and, above all, by Macaulay. The _Review_ never had any one who
+could emulate the ornateness of De Quincey or Wilson, the pure and
+perfect English of Southey, or the inimitable insolence, so polished and
+so intangible, of Lockhart. But it may at least claim that it led the
+way, and that the very men who attacked its principles and surpassed its
+practice had, in some cases, been actually trained in its school, and
+were in all, imitating and following its model. To analyse, with
+chemical exactness, the constituents of a literary novelty is never
+easy, if it is ever possible. But some of the contrasts between the
+style of criticism most prevalent at the time, and the style of the new
+venture are obvious and important. The older rivals of the _Edinburgh_
+maintained for the most part a decent and amiable impartiality; the
+_Edinburgh_, whatever it pretended to be, was violently partisan,
+unhesitatingly personal, and more inclined to find fault, the more
+distinguished the subject was. The reviews of the time had got into the
+hands either of gentlemen and ladies who were happy to be thought
+literary, and only too glad to write for nothing, or else into those of
+the lowest booksellers' hacks, who praised or blamed according to
+orders, wrote without interest and without vigour, and were quite
+content to earn the smallest pittance. The _Edinburgh_ started from the
+first on the principle that its contributors should be paid, and paid
+well, whether they liked it or not, thus establishing at once an
+inducement to do well and a check on personal eccentricity and
+irresponsibility; while whatever partisanship there might be in its
+pages, there was at any rate no mere literary puffery.
+
+From being, but for his private studies, rather an idle person, Jeffrey
+became an extremely busy one. The _Review_ gave him not a little
+occupation, and his practice increased rapidly. In 1803 the institution,
+at Scott's suggestion, of the famous Friday Club, in which, for the
+greater part of the first half of this century, the best men in
+Edinburgh, Johnstone and Maxwell, Whig and Tory alike, met in peaceable
+conviviality, did a good deal to console Jeffrey, who was now as much
+given to company as he had been in his early youth to solitude, for the
+partial breaking up of the circle of friends--Allen, Horner, Smith,
+Brougham, Lord Webb Seymour--in which he had previously mixed. In the
+same year he became a volunteer, an act of patriotism the more
+creditable, that he seems to have been sincerely convinced of the
+probability of an invasion, and of the certainty of its success if it
+occurred. But I have no room here for anything but a rapid review of the
+not very numerous or striking events of his life. Soon, however, after
+the date last mentioned, he met with two afflictions peculiarly trying
+to a man whose domestic affections were unusually strong. These were the
+deaths of his favourite sister in May 1804, and of his wife in October
+1805. The last blow drove him nearly to despair; and the extreme and
+open-mouthed "sensibility" of his private letters, on this and similar
+occasions, is very valuable as an index of character, oddly as it
+contrasts, in the vulgar estimate, with the supposed cynicism and
+savagery of the critic. In yet another year occurred the somewhat
+ludicrous duel, or beginning of a duel, with Moore, in which several
+police constables did perform the friendly office which Mr. Winkle
+vainly deprecated, and in which Jeffrey's, not Moore's, pistol was
+discovered to be leadless. There is a sentence in a letter of Jeffrey's
+concerning the thing which is characteristic and amusing: "I am glad to
+have gone through this scene, both because it satisfies me that my
+nerves are good enough to enable me to act in conformity to my notions
+of propriety without any suffering, and because it also assures me that
+I am really as little in love with life as I have been for some time in
+the habit of professing." It is needless to say that this was an example
+of the excellence of beginning with a little aversion, for Jeffrey and
+Moore fraternised immediately afterwards and remained friends for life.
+The quarrel, or half quarrel, with Scott as to the review of "Marmion,"
+the planning and producing of the _Quarterly Review, English Bards and
+Scotch Reviewers_, not a few other events of the same kind, must be
+passed over rapidly. About six years after the death of his first wife,
+Jeffrey met, and fell in love with, a certain Miss Charlotte Wilkes,
+great-niece of the patriot, and niece of a New York banker, and of a
+Monsieur and Madame Simond, who were travelling in Europe. He married
+her two years later, having gone through the very respectable probation
+of crossing and re-crossing the Atlantic (he was a very bad sailor) in a
+sailing ship, in winter, and in time of war, to fetch his bride. Nor had
+he long been married before he took the celebrated country house of
+Craigcrook, where, for more than thirty years, he spent all the spare
+time of an exceedingly happy life. Then we may jump some fifteen years
+to the great Reform contest which gave Jeffrey the reward, such as it
+was, of his long constancy in opposition, in the shape of the Lord
+Advocateship. He was not always successful as a debater; but he had the
+opportunity of adding a third reputation to those which he had already
+gained in literature and in law. He had the historical duty of piloting
+the Scotch Reform Bill through Parliament, and he had the, in his case,
+pleasurable and honourable pain of taking the official steps in
+Parliament necessitated by the mental incapacity of Sir Walter Scott.
+Early in 1834 he was provided for by promotion to the Scotch Bench. He
+had five years before, on being appointed Dean of Faculty, given up the
+editorship of the _Review_, which he had held for seven-and-twenty
+years. For some time previous to his resignation, his own contributions,
+which in early days had run up to half a dozen in a single number, and
+had averaged two or three for more than twenty years, had become more
+and more intermittent. After that resignation he contributed two or
+three articles at very long intervals. He was perhaps more lavish of
+advice than he need have been to Macvey Napier, and after Napier's death
+it passed into the control of his own son-in-law, Empson. Long, however,
+before the reins passed from his own hands, a rival more galling if less
+formidable than the _Quarterly_ had arisen in the shape of _Blackwood's
+Magazine_. The more ponderous and stately publication always affected,
+to some extent, to ignore its audacious junior; and Lord Cockburn
+(perhaps instigated not more by prudence than by regard for Lockhart and
+Wilson, both of whom were living) passes over in complete silence the
+establishment of the magazine, the publication of the Chaldee
+manuscript, and the still greater hubbub which arose around the supposed
+attacks of Lockhart on Playfair, and the _Edinburgh_ reviewers
+generally, with regard to their religious opinions. How deep the
+feelings really excited were, may be seen from a letter of Jeffrey's,
+published, not by Cockburn, but by Wilson's daughter in the life of her
+father. In this Jeffrey practically drums out a new and certainly most
+promising recruit for his supposed share in the business, and inveighs
+in the most passionate terms against the imputation. It is undesirable
+to enter at length into any such matters here. It need only be said that
+Allen, one of the founders of the _Edinburgh_, and always a kind of
+standing counsel to it, is now acknowledged to have been something
+uncommonly like an atheist, that Sydney Smith (as I believe most
+unjustly) was often, and is sometimes still, regarded as standing
+towards his profession very much in the attitude of a French _abbé_ of
+the eighteenth century, that almost the whole staff of the _Review_,
+including Jeffrey, had, as every Edinburgh man of position knew,
+belonged to the so-called Academy of Physics, the first principle of
+which was that only three facts (the words are Lord Cockburn's) were to
+be admitted without proof: (1) Mind exists; (2) matter exists; (3) every
+change indicates a cause. Nowadays the most orthodox of metaphysicians
+would admit that this limitation of position by no means implied
+atheism. But seventy years ago it would have been the exception to find
+an orthodox metaphysician who did admit it; and Lockhart, or rather
+Baron von Lauerwinkel, was perfectly justified in taking the view which
+ordinary opinion took.
+
+These jars, however, were long over when Jeffrey became Lord Jeffrey,
+and subsided upon the placid bench. He lived sixteen years longer,
+alternating between Edinburgh, Craigcrook, and divers houses which he
+hired from time to time, on Loch Lomond, on the Clyde, and latterly at
+some English watering-places in the west. His health was not
+particularly good, though hardly worse than any man who lives to nearly
+eighty, with constant sedentary and few out-of-door occupations, and
+with a cheerful devotion to the good things of this life, must expect.
+And he was on the whole singularly happy, being passionately devoted to
+his wife, his daughter, and his grandchildren; possessing ample means,
+and making a cheerful and sensible use of them; seeing the increasing
+triumph of the political principles to which he had attached himself;
+knowing that he was regarded by friends and foes alike, as the chief
+living English representative of an important branch of literature; and
+retaining to the last an almost unparalleled juvenility of tastes and
+interests. His letters to Dickens are well known, and, though I should
+be very sorry to stake his critical reputation upon them, there could
+not be better documents for his vivid enjoyment of life. He died on 26th
+January 1850, in his seventy-seventh year, having been in harness almost
+to the very last. He had written a letter the day before to Empson,
+describing one of those curious waking visions known to all sick folk,
+in which there had appeared part of a proof-sheet of a new edition of
+the Apocrypha, and a new political paper filled with discussions on Free
+Trade.
+
+In reading Jeffrey's work[11] nowadays, the critical reader finds it
+considerably more difficult to gain and keep the author's own point of
+view than in the case of any other great English critic. With Hazlitt,
+with Coleridge, with Wilson, with Carlyle, with Macaulay, we very soon
+fall into step, so to speak, with our author. If we cannot exactly
+prophesy what he will say on any given subject, we can make a pretty
+shrewd guess at it; and when, as it seems to us, he stumbles and shies,
+we have a sort of feeling beforehand that he is going to do it, and a
+decided inkling of the reason. But my own experience is, that a modern
+reader of Jeffrey, who takes him systematically, and endeavours to trace
+cause and effect in him, is liable to be constantly thrown out before he
+finds the secret. For Jeffrey, in the most puzzling way, lies between
+the ancients and the moderns in matter of criticism, and we never quite
+know where to have him. It is ten to one, for instance, that the novice
+approaches him with the idea that he is a "classic" of the old rock.
+Imagine the said novice's confusion, when he finds Jeffrey not merely
+exalting Shakespeare to the skies, but warmly praising Elizabethan
+poetry in general, anticipating Mr. Matthew Arnold almost literally, in
+the estimate of Dryden and Pope as classics of our prose, and hailing
+with tears of joy the herald of the emancipation in Cowper. Surely our
+novice may be excused if, despite certain misgiving memories of such
+reviews as that of "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," he concludes that
+Jeffrey has been maligned, and that he was really a Romantic before
+Romanticism. Unhappy novice! he will find his new conclusion not less
+rapidly and more completely staggered than his old. Indeed, until the
+clue is once gained, Jeffrey must appear to be one of the most
+incomprehensibly inconsistent of writers and of critics. On one page he
+declares that Campbell's extracts from Chamberlayne's "Pharonnida" have
+made him "quite impatient for an opportunity of perusing the whole
+poem,"--Romantic surely, quite Romantic. "The tameness and poorness of
+the serious style of Addison and Swift,"--Romantic again, quite
+Romantic. Yet when we come to Jeffrey's own contemporaries, he
+constantly appears as much bewigged and befogged with pseudo-classicism
+as M. de Jouy himself. He commits himself, in the year of grace 1829, to
+the statement that "the rich melodies of Keats and Shelley, and the
+fantastical emphasis of Wordsworth are melting fast from the field of
+our vision," while he contrasts with this "rapid withering of the
+laurel" the "comparative absence of marks of decay" on Rogers and
+Campbell. The poets of his own time whom he praises most heartily, and
+with least reserve, are Campbell and Crabbe; and he is quite as
+enthusiastic over "Theodric" and "Gertrude" as over the two great
+war-pieces of the same author, which are worth a hundred "Gertrudes" and
+about ten thousand "Theodrics." Reviewing Scott, not merely when they
+were personal friends (they were always that), but when Scott was a
+contributor to the _Edinburgh_, and giving general praise to "The Lay,"
+he glances with an unmistakable meaning at the "dignity of the subject,"
+regrets the "imitation and antiquarian researches," and criticises the
+versification in a way which shows that he had not in the least grasped
+its scheme. It is hardly necessary to quote his well-known attacks on
+Wordsworth; but, though I am myself anything but a Wordsworthian, and
+would willingly give up to chaos and old night nineteen-twentieths of
+the "extremely valooable chains of thought" which the good man used to
+forge, it is in the first place quite clear that the twentieth ought to
+have saved him from Jeffrey's claws; in the second, that the critic
+constantly selects the wrong things as well as the right for
+condemnation and ridicule; and in the third, that he would have praised,
+or at any rate not blamed, in another, the very things which he blames
+in Wordsworth. Even his praise of Crabbe, excessive as it may now
+appear, is diversified by curious patches of blame which seem to me at
+any rate, singularly uncritical. There are, for instance, a very great
+many worse jests in poetry than,
+
+    Oh, had he learnt to make the wig he wears!
+
+--which Jeffrey pronounces a misplaced piece of buffoonery. I cannot
+help thinking that if Campbell instead of Southey had written the lines,
+
+    To see brute nature scorn him and renounce
+    Its homage to the human form divine,
+
+Jeffrey would, to say the least, not have hinted that they were "little
+better than drivelling." But I do not think that when Jeffrey wrote
+these things, or when he actually perpetrated such almost unforgivable
+phrases as "stuff about dancing daffodils," he was speaking away from
+his sincere conviction. On the contrary, though partisanship may
+frequently have determined the suppression or the utterance, the
+emphasising or the softening, of his opinions, I do not think that he
+ever said anything but what he sincerely thought. The problem,
+therefore, is to discover and define, if possible, the critical
+standpoint of a man whose judgment was at once so acute and so purblind;
+who could write the admirable surveys of English poetry contained in the
+essays on Mme. de Staël and Campbell, and yet be guilty of the stuff (we
+thank him for the word) about the dancing daffodils; who could talk of
+"the splendid strains of Moore" (though I have myself a relatively high
+opinion of Moore) and pronounce "The White Doe of Rylstone" (though I
+am not very fond of that animal as a whole) "the very worst poem he ever
+saw printed in a quarto volume"; who could really appreciate parts even
+of Wordsworth himself, and yet sneer at the very finest passages of the
+poems he partly admired. It is unnecessary to multiply inconsistencies,
+because the reader who does not want the trouble of reading Jeffrey must
+be content to take them for granted, and the reader who does read
+Jeffrey will discover them in plenty for himself. But they are not
+limited, it should be said, to purely literary criticism; and they
+appear, if not quite so strongly, in his estimates of personal
+character, and even in his purely political arguments.
+
+The explanation, as far as there is any, (and perhaps such explanations,
+as Hume says of another matter, only push ignorance a stage farther
+back), seems to me to lie in what I can only call the Gallicanism of
+Jeffrey's mind and character. As Horace Walpole has been pronounced the
+most French of Englishmen, so may Francis Jeffrey be pronounced the most
+French of Scotchmen. The reader of his letters, no less than the reader
+of his essays, constantly comes across the most curious and multiform
+instances of this Frenchness. The early priggishness is French; the
+effusive domestic affection is French; the antipathy to dogmatic
+theology, combined with general recognition of the Supreme Being, is
+French; the talk (I had almost said the chatter) about virtue and
+sympathy, and so forth, is French; the Whig recognition of the rights
+of man, joined to a kind of bureaucratical distrust and terror of the
+common people (a combination almost unknown in England), is French.
+Everybody remembers the ingenious argument in _Peter Simple_ that the
+French were quite as brave as the English, indeed more so, but that they
+were extraordinarily ticklish. Jeffrey, we have seen, was very far from
+being a coward, but he was very ticklish indeed. His private letters
+throw the most curious light possible on the secret, as far as he was
+concerned, of the earlier Whig opposition to the war, and of the later
+Whig advocacy of reform. Jeffrey by no means thought the cause of the
+Revolution divine, like the Friends of Liberty, or admired Napoleon like
+Hazlitt, or believed in the inherent right of Manchester and Birmingham
+to representation like the zealots of 1830. But he was always dreadfully
+afraid of invasion in the first place, and of popular insurrection in
+the second; and he wanted peace and reform to calm his fears. As a young
+man he was, with a lack of confidence in his countrymen probably
+unparalleled in a Scotchman, sure that a French corporal's guard might
+march from end to end of Scotland, and a French privateer's boat's crew
+carry off "the fattest cattle and the fairest women" (these are his very
+words) "of any Scotch seaboard county." The famous, or infamous,
+Cevallos article--an ungenerous and pusillanimous attack on the Spanish
+patriots, which practically founded the _Quarterly Review_, by finally
+disgusting all Tories and many Whigs with the _Edinburgh_--was, it
+seems, prompted merely by the conviction that the Spanish cause was
+hopeless, and that maintaining it, or assisting it, must lead to mere
+useless bloodshed. He felt profoundly the crime of Napoleon's rule; but
+he thought Napoleon unconquerable, and so did his best to prevent him
+being conquered. He was sure that the multitude would revolt if reform
+was not granted; and he was, therefore, eager for reform. Later, he got
+into his head the oddest crotchet of all his life, which was that a
+Conservative government, with a sort of approval from the people
+generally, and especially from the English peasantry, would scheme for a
+_coup d'état_, and (his own words again) "make mincemeat of their
+opponents in a single year." He may be said almost to have left the
+world in a state of despair over the probable results of the Revolutions
+of 1848-49; and it is impossible to guess what would have happened to
+him if he had survived to witness the Second of December. Never was
+there such a case, at least among Englishmen, of timorous pugnacity and
+plucky pessimism. But it would be by no means difficult to parallel the
+temperament in France; and, indeed, the comparative frequency of it
+there, may be thought to be no small cause of the political and military
+disasters of the country.
+
+In literature, and especially in criticism, Jeffrey's characteristics
+were still more decidedly and unquestionably French. He came into the
+world almost too soon to feel the German impulse, even if he had been
+disposed to feel it. But, as a matter of fact, he was not at all
+disposed. The faults of taste of the German Romantic School, its
+alternate homeliness and extravagance, its abuse of the supernatural,
+its undoubted offences against order and proportion, scandalised him
+only a little less than they would have scandalised Voltaire and did
+scandalise the later Voltairians. Jeffrey was perfectly prepared to be
+Romantic up to a certain point,--the point which he had himself reached
+in his early course of independent reading and criticism. He was even a
+little inclined to sympathise with the reverend Mr. Bowles on the great
+question whether Pope was a poet; and, as I have said, he uses, about
+the older English literature, phrases which might almost satisfy a
+fanatic of the school of Hazlitt or of Lamb. He is, if anything, rather
+too severe on French as compared with English drama. Yet, when he comes
+to his own contemporaries, and sometimes even in reference to earlier
+writers, we find him slipping into those purely arbitrary severities of
+condemnation, those capricious stigmatisings of this as improper, and
+that as vulgar, and the other as unbecoming, which are the
+characteristics of the pseudo-correct and pseudo-classical school of
+criticism. He was a great admirer of Cowper, and yet he is shocked by
+Cowper's use, in his translation of Homer, of the phrases, "to entreat
+Achilles to a calm" (evidently he had forgotten Shakespeare's "pursue
+him and entreat him to a peace"), "this wrangler here," "like a fellow
+of no worth." He was certainly not likely to be unjust to Charles James
+Fox. So he is unhappy, rather than contemptuous, over such excellent
+phrases as "swearing away the lives," "crying injustice," "fond of
+ill-treating." These appear to Mr. Aristarchus Jeffrey too "homely and
+familiar," too "low and vapid"; while a harmless and rather agreeable
+Shakespearian parallel of Fox's seems to him downright impropriety. The
+fun of the thing is that the passage turns on the well-known misuse of
+"flat burglary"; and if Jeffrey had had a little more sense of humour
+(his deficiency in which, for all his keen wit, is another Gallic note
+in him), he must have seen that the words were ludicrously applicable to
+his own condemnation and his own frame of mind. These settings-up of a
+wholly arbitrary canon of mere taste, these excommunicatings of such and
+such a thing as "low" and "improper," without assigned or assignable
+reason, are eminently Gallic. They may be found not merely in the older
+school before 1830, but in almost all French critics up to the present
+day: there is perhaps not one, with the single exception of
+Sainte-Beuve, who is habitually free from them. The critic may be quite
+unable to say why _tarte à la crême_ is such a shocking expression, or
+even to produce any important authority for the shockingness of it. But
+he is quite certain that it is shocking. Jeffrey is but too much given
+to protesting against _tarte à la crême_; and the reasons for his error
+are almost exactly the same as in the case of the usual Frenchman; that
+is to say, a very just and wholesome preference for order, proportion,
+literary orthodoxy, freedom from will-worship and eccentric divagations,
+unfortunately distorted by a certain absence of catholicity, by a
+tendency to regard novelty as bad, merely because it is novelty, and by
+a curious reluctance, as Lamb has it of another great man of the same
+generation, to go shares with any newcomer in literary commerce.
+
+But when these reservations have been made, when his standpoint has been
+clearly discovered and marked out, and when some little tricks, such as
+the affectation of delivering judgments without appeal, which is still
+kept up by a few, though very few, reviewers, have been further allowed
+for, Jeffrey is a most admirable essayist and critic. As an essayist, a
+writer of _causeries_, I do not think he has been surpassed among
+Englishmen in the art of interweaving quotation, abstract, and comment.
+The best proof of his felicity in this respect is that in almost all the
+books which he has reviewed, (and he has reviewed many of the most
+interesting books in literature) the passages and traits, the anecdotes
+and phrases, which have made most mark in the general memory, and which
+are often remembered with very indistinct consciousness of their origin,
+are to be found in his reviews. Sometimes the very perfection of his
+skill in this respect makes it rather difficult to know where he is
+abstracting or paraphrasing, and where he is speaking outright and for
+himself; but that is a very small fault. Yet his merits as an essayist,
+though considerable, are not to be compared, even to the extent to which
+Hazlitt's are to be compared, with his merits as a critic, and
+especially as a literary critic. It would be interesting to criticise
+his political criticism; but it is always best to keep politics out
+where it can be managed. Besides, Jeffrey as a political critic is a
+subject of almost exclusively historical interest, while as a literary
+critic he is important at this very day, and perhaps more important than
+he was in his own. For the spirit of merely æsthetic criticism, which
+was in his day only in its infancy, has long been full grown and
+rampant; so that, good work as it has done in its time, it decidedly
+needs chastening by an admixture of the dogmatic criticism, which at
+least tries to keep its impressions together and in order, and to
+connect them into some coherent doctrine and creed.
+
+Of this dogmatic criticism Jeffrey, with all his shortcomings, is
+perhaps the very best example that we have in English. He had addressed
+himself more directly and theoretically to literary criticism than
+Lockhart. Prejudiced as he often was, he was not affected by the wild
+gusts of personal and political passion which frequently blew Hazlitt a
+thousand miles off the course of true criticism. He keeps his eye on the
+object, which De Quincey seldom does. He is not affected by that desire
+to preach on certain pet subjects which affects the admirable critical
+faculty of Carlyle. He never blusters and splashes at random like
+Wilson. And he never indulges in the mannered and rather superfluous
+graces which marred, to some tastes, the work of his successor in
+critical authority, if there has been any such, the author of _Essays in
+Criticism_.
+
+Let us, as we just now looked through Jeffrey's work to pick out the
+less favourable characteristics which distinguish his position, look
+through it again to see those qualities which he shares, but in greater
+measure than most, with all good critics. The literary essay which
+stands first in his collected works is on Madame de Staël. Now that good
+lady, of whom some judges in these days do not think very much, was a
+kind of goddess on earth in literature, however much she might bore them
+in life, to the English Whig party in general; while Jeffrey's French
+tastes must have made her, or at least her books, specially attractive
+to him. Accordingly he has written a great deal about her, no less than
+three essays appearing in the collected works. Writing at least partly
+in her lifetime and under the influences just glanced at, he is of
+course profuse in compliments. But it is very amusing and highly
+instructive to observe how, in the intervals of these compliments, he
+contrives to take the good Corinne to pieces, to smash up her ingenious
+Perfectibilism, and to put in order her rather rash literary judgments.
+It is in connection also with her, that he gives one of the best of not
+a few general sketches of the history of literature which his work
+contains. Of course there are here, as always, isolated expressions as
+to which, however much we admit that Jeffrey was a clever man, we cannot
+agree with Jeffrey. He thinks Aristophanes "coarse" and "vulgar" just as
+a living pundit thinks him "base," while (though nobody of course can
+deny the coarseness) Aristophanes and vulgarity are certainly many miles
+asunder. We may protest against the chronological, even more than
+against the critical, blunder which couples Cowley and Donne, putting
+Donne, moreover, who wrote long before Cowley was born, and differs from
+him in genius almost as the author of the _Iliad_ does from the author
+of the _Henriade_, second. But hardly anything in English criticism is
+better than Jeffrey's discussion of the general French imputation of
+"want of taste and politeness" to English and German writers, especially
+English. It is a very general, and a very mistaken notion that the
+Romantic movement in France has done away with this imputation to a
+great extent. On the contrary, though it has long been a kind of
+fashion in France to admire Shakespeare, and though since the labours of
+MM. Taine and Montégut, the study of English literature generally has
+grown and flourished, it is, I believe, the very rarest thing to find a
+Frenchman who, in his heart of hearts, does not cling to the old "pearls
+in the dung-heap" idea, not merely in reference to Shakespeare, but to
+English writers, and especially English humorists, generally. Nothing
+can be more admirable than Jeffrey's comments on this matter. They are
+especially admirable because they are not made from the point of view of
+a _Romantique à tous crins_; because, as has been already pointed out,
+he himself is largely penetrated by the very preference for order and
+proportion which is at the bottom of the French mistake; and because he
+is, therefore, arguing in a tongue understanded of those whom he
+censures. Another essay which may be read with especial advantage is
+that on Scott's edition of Swift. Here, again, there was a kind of test
+subject, and perhaps Jeffrey does not come quite scatheless out of the
+trial: to me, at any rate, his account of Swift's political and moral
+conduct and character seems both uncritical and unfair. But here, too,
+the value of his literary criticism shows itself. He might very easily
+have been tempted to extend his injustice from the writer to the
+writings, especially since, as has been elsewhere shown, he was by no
+means a fanatical admirer of the Augustan age, and thought the serious
+style of Addison and Swift tame and poor. It is possible of course, here
+also, to find things that seem to be errors, both in the general sketch
+which Jeffrey, according to his custom, prefixes, and in the particular
+remarks on Swift himself. For instance, to deny fancy to the author of
+the _Tale of a Tub_, of _Gulliver_, and of the _Polite Conversation_, is
+very odd indeed. But there are few instances of a greater triumph of
+sound literary judgment over political and personal prejudice than
+Jeffrey's description, not merely of the great works just mentioned (it
+is curious, and illustrates his defective appreciation of humour, that
+he likes the greatest least, and is positively unjust to the _Tale of a
+Tub_), but also of those wonderful pamphlets, articles, lampoons, skits
+(libels if any one likes), which proved too strong for the generalship
+of Marlborough and the administrative talents of Godolphin; and which
+are perhaps the only literary works that ever really changed, for a not
+inconsiderable period, the government of England. "Considered," he says,
+"with a view to the purposes for which they were intended, they have
+probably never been equalled in any period of the world." They certainly
+have not; but to find a Whig, and a Whig writing in the very moment of
+Tory triumph after Waterloo, ready to admit the fact, is not a trivial
+thing. Another excellent example of Jeffrey's strength, by no means
+unmixed with examples of his weakness, is to be found in his essays on
+Cowper. I have already given some of the weakness: the strength is to be
+found in his general description of Cowper's revolt, thought so daring
+at the time, now so apparently moderate, against poetic diction. These
+instances are to be found under miscellaneous sections, biographical,
+historical, and so forth; but the reader will naturally turn to the
+considerable divisions headed Poetry and Fiction. Here are the chief
+rocks of offence already indicated, and here also are many excellent
+things which deserve reading. Here is the remarkable essay, quoted
+above, on Campbell's _Specimens_. Here is the criticism of Weber's
+edition of Ford, and another of those critical surveys of the course of
+English literature which Jeffrey was so fond of doing, and which he did
+so well, together with some remarks on the magnificently spendthrift
+style of our Elizabethan dramatists which would deserve almost the first
+place in an anthology of his critical beauties. The paper on Hazlitt's
+_Characters of Shakespeare_ (Hazlitt was an _Edinburgh_ reviewer, and
+his biographer, not Jeffrey's, has chronicled a remarkable piece of
+generosity on Jeffrey's part towards his wayward contributor) is a
+little defaced by a patronising spirit, not, indeed, of that memorably
+mistaken kind which induced the famous and unlucky sentence to Macvey
+Napier about Carlyle, but something in the spirit of the schoolmaster
+who observes, "See this clever boy of mine, and only think how much
+better I could do it myself." Yet it contains some admirable passages on
+Shakespeare, if not on Hazlitt; and it would be impossible to deny that
+its hinted condemnation of Hazlitt's "desultory and capricious
+acuteness" is just enough. On the other hand, how significant is it of
+Jeffrey's own limitations that he should protest against Hazlitt's
+sympathy with such "conceits and puerilities" as the immortal and
+unmatchable
+
+    Take him and cut him out in little stars,
+
+with the rest of the passage. But there you have the French spirit. I do
+not believe that there ever was a Frenchman since the seventeenth
+century (unless perchance it was Gérard de Nerval, and he was not quite
+sane), who could put his hand on his heart and deny that the little
+stars seemed to him puerile and conceited.
+
+Jeffrey's dealings with Byron (I do not now speak of the article on
+_Hours of Idleness_, which was simply a just rebuke of really puerile
+and conceited rubbish) are not, to me, very satisfactory. The critic
+seems, in the rather numerous articles which he has devoted to the
+"noble Poet," as they used to call him, to have felt his genius unduly
+rebuked by that of his subject. He spends a great deal, and surely an
+unnecessarily great deal, of time in solemnly, and no doubt quite
+sincerely, rebuking Byron's morality; and in doing so he is sometimes
+almost absurd. He calls him "not more obscene perhaps than Dryden or
+Prior," which is simply ludicrous, because it is very rare that this
+particular word can be applied to Byron at all, while even his
+staunchest champion must admit that it applies to glorious John and to
+dear Mat Prior. He helps, unconsciously no doubt, to spread the very
+contagion which he denounces, by talking about Byron's demoniacal power,
+going so far as actually to contrast _Manfred_ with Marlowe to the
+advantage of the former. And he is so completely overcome by what he
+calls the "dreadful tone of sincerity" of this "puissant spirit," that
+he never seems to have had leisure or courage to apply the critical
+tests and solvents of which few men have had a greater command. Had he
+done so, it is impossible not to believe that, whether he did or did not
+pronounce Byron's sentiment to be as theatrical, as vulgar, and as false
+as it seems to some later critics, he would at any rate have substituted
+for his edifying but rather irrelevant moral denunciations some exposure
+of those gross faults in style and metre, in phrase and form, which now
+disgust us.
+
+There are many essays remaining on which I should like to comment if
+there were room enough. But I have only space for a few more general
+remarks on his general characteristics, and especially those which, as
+Sainte-Beuve said to the altered Jeffrey of our altered days, are
+"important to us." Let me repeat then that the peculiar value of Jeffrey
+is not, as is that of Coleridge, of Hazlitt, or of Lamb, in very subtle,
+very profound, or very original views of his subjects. He is neither a
+critical Columbus nor a critical Socrates; he neither opens up
+undiscovered countries, nor provokes and stimulates to the discovery of
+them. His strength lies in the combination of a fairly wide range of
+sympathy with an extraordinary shrewdness and good sense in applying
+that sympathy. Tested for range alone, or for subtlety alone, he will
+frequently be found wanting; but he almost invariably catches up those
+who have thus outstripped him, when the subject of the trial is shifted
+to soundness of estimate, intelligent connection of view, and absence of
+eccentricity. And it must be again and again repeated that Jeffrey is by
+no means justly chargeable with the Dryasdust failings so often
+attributed to academic criticism. They said that on the actual Bench he
+worried counsel a little too much, but that his decisions were almost
+invariably sound. Not quite so much perhaps can be said for his other
+exercise of the judicial function. But however much he may sometimes
+seem to carp and complain, however much we may sometimes wish for a
+little more equity and a little less law, it is astonishing how weighty
+Jeffrey's critical judgments are after three quarters of a century which
+has seen so many seeming heavy things grow light. There may be much
+that he does not see; there may be some things which he is physically
+unable to see; but what he does see, he sees with a clearness, and
+co-ordinates in its bearings on other things seen with a precision,
+which are hardly to be matched among the fluctuating and diverse race of
+critics.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[10] To prevent mistakes it may be as well to say that Jeffrey's
+_Contributions to the Edinburgh Review_ appeared first in four volumes,
+then in three, then in one.
+
+[11] In the following remarks, reference is confined to the
+_Contributions to the Edinburgh Review_, 1 vol. London, 1853. This is
+not merely a matter of convenience; the selection having been made with
+very great care by Jeffrey himself at a time when his faculties were in
+perfect order, and including full specimens of every kind of his work.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+HAZLITT
+
+
+The following paper was in great part composed, when I came across some
+sentences on Hazlitt, written indeed before I was born, but practically
+unpublished until the other day. In a review of the late Mr. Horne's
+_New Spirit of the Age_, contributed to the _Morning Chronicle_ in 1845
+and but recently included in his collected works, Thackeray writes thus
+of the author of the book whose title Horne had rather rashly borrowed:
+
+    The author of the _Spirit of the Age_ was one of the keenest and
+    brightest critics that ever lived. With partialities and
+    prejudices innumerable, he had a wit so keen, a sensibility so
+    exquisite, an appreciation of humour, or pathos, or even of the
+    greatest art, so lively, quick, and cultivated, that it was
+    always good to know what were the impressions made by books or
+    men or pictures on such a mind; and that, as there were not
+    probably a dozen men in England with powers so varied, all the
+    rest of the world might be rejoiced to listen to the opinions of
+    this accomplished critic. He was of so different a caste to the
+    people who gave authority in his day--the pompous big-wigs and
+    schoolmen, who never could pardon him his familiarity of manner
+    so unlike their own--his popular--too popular habits--and
+    sympathies so much beneath their dignity; his loose, disorderly
+    education gathered round those bookstalls or picture galleries
+    where he laboured a penniless student, in lonely journeys over
+    Europe tramped on foot (and not made, after the fashion of the
+    regular critics of the day, by the side of a young nobleman in a
+    postchaise), in every school of knowledge from St. Peter's at
+    Rome to St. Giles's in London. In all his modes of life and
+    thought, he was so different from the established authorities,
+    with their degrees and white neck-cloths, that they hooted the
+    man down with all the power of their lungs, and disdained to
+    hear truth that came from such a ragged philosopher.
+
+Some exceptions, no doubt, must be taken to this enthusiastic, and in
+the main just, verdict. Hazlitt himself denied himself wit, yet if this
+was mock humility, I am inclined to think that he spoke truth
+unwittingly. His appreciation of humour was fitful and anything but
+impartial, while, biographically speaking, the hardships of his
+apprenticeship are very considerably exaggerated. It was not, for
+instance, in a penniless or pedestrian manner that he visited St.
+Peter's at Rome; but journeying with comforts of wine, _vetturini_, and
+partridges, which his second wife's income paid for. But this does not
+matter much, and, on the whole, the estimate is as just as it is
+generous. Perhaps something of its inspiration may be set down to
+fellow-feeling, both in politics and in the unsuccessful cultivation of
+the arts of design. But as high an estimate of Hazlitt is quite
+compatible with the strongest political dissent from his opinions, and
+with a total freedom from the charge of wearing the willow for painting.
+
+There is indeed no doubt that Hazlitt is one of the most absolutely
+unequal writers in English, if not in any, literature, Wilson being
+perhaps his only compeer. The term absolute is used with intention and
+precision. There may be others who, in different parts of their work,
+are more unequal than he is; but with him the inequality is pervading,
+and shows itself in his finest passages, in those where he is most at
+home, as much as in his hastiest and most uncongenial taskwork. It could
+not, indeed, be otherwise, because the inequality itself is due less to
+an intellectual than to a moral defect. The clear sunshine of Hazlitt's
+admirably acute intellect is always there; but it is constantly obscured
+by driving clouds of furious prejudice. Even as the clouds pass, the
+light may still be seen on distant and scattered parts of the landscape;
+but wherever their influence extends, there is nothing but thick
+darkness, gusty wind and drenching rain. And the two phenomena, the
+abiding intellectual light, and the fits and squalls of moral darkness,
+appear to be totally independent of each other, or of any single will or
+cause of any kind. It would be perfectly easy, and may perhaps be in
+place later, to give a brief collection of some of the most absurd and
+outrageous sayings that any writer, not a mere fool, can be charged
+with: of sentences not representing quips and cranks of humour, or
+judgments temporary and one-sided, though having a certain relative
+validity, but containing blunders and calumnies so gross and palpable,
+that the man who set them down might seem to have forfeited all claim to
+the reputation either of an intelligent or a responsible being. And yet,
+side by side with these, are other passages (and fortunately a much
+greater number) which justify, and more than justify, Hazlitt's claims
+to be as Thackeray says, "one of the keenest and brightest critics that
+ever lived"; as Lamb had said earlier, "one of the wisest and finest
+spirits breathing."
+
+The only exception to be taken to the well-known panegyric of Elia is,
+that it bestows this eulogy on Hazlitt "in his natural and healthy
+state." Unluckily, it would seem, by a concurrence of all testimony,
+even the most partial, that the unhealthy state was quite as natural as
+the healthy one. Lamb himself plaintively wishes that "he would not
+quarrel with the world at the rate he does"; and De Quincey, in his
+short, but very interesting, biographical notice of Hazlitt (a notice
+entirely free from the malignity with which De Quincey has been
+sometimes charged), declares with quite as much truth as point, that
+Hazlitt's guiding principle was, "Whatever is, is wrong." He was the
+very ideal of a literary Ishmael; and after the fullest admission of the
+almost incredible virulence and unfairness of his foes, it has to be
+admitted, likewise, that he was quite as ready to quarrel with his
+friends. He succeeded, at least once, in forcing a quarrel even upon
+Lamb. His relations with Leigh Hunt (who, whatever his faults were, was
+not unamiable) were constantly strained, and at least once actually
+broken by his infernal temper. Nor were his relations with women more
+fortunate or more creditable than those with men. That the fault was
+entirely on his side in the rupture with his first wife is, no doubt,
+not the case; for Mrs. Hazlitt's, or Miss Stoddart's, own friends admit
+that she was of a peculiar and rather trying disposition. It is indeed
+evident that she was the sort of person (most teasing of all others to a
+man of Hazlitt's temperament) who would put her head back as he was
+kissing her, to ask if he would like another cup of tea, or interrupt a
+declaration to suggest shutting the window. As for the famous and almost
+legendary episode of Sarah Walker, the lodging-house keeper's daughter,
+and the _Liber Amoris_, the obvious and irresistible attack of something
+like erotic madness which it implies absolves Hazlitt partly--but only
+partly, for there is a kind of shabbiness about the affair which shuts
+it out from all reasonable claim to be regarded as a new act of the
+endless drama of _All for Love, or The World Well Lost!_ Of his second
+marriage, the only persons who might be expected to give us some
+information either can or will say next to nothing. But when a man with
+such antecedents marries a woman of whom no one has anything bad to
+say, lives with her for a year, chiefly on her money, and is then
+quitted by her with the information that she will have nothing more to
+do with him, it is not, I think, uncharitable to conjecture that most of
+the fault is his.
+
+It is not, however, only of Hazlitt's rather imperfectly known life, or
+of his pretty generally acknowledged character, that I wish to speak
+here. His strange mixture of manly common-sense and childish prejudice,
+the dislike of foreigners which accompanied his Liberalism and his
+Bonapartism, and other traits, are very much more English than Irish.
+But Irish, at least on the father's side, his family was, and had been
+for generations. He was himself the son of a Unitarian minister, was
+born at Maidstone in 1778, accompanied his parents as a very little boy
+to America, but passed the greater part of his youth at Wem in
+Shropshire, where the interview with Coleridge, which decided his fate,
+took place. Yet for some time after that, he was mainly occupied with
+studies, not of literature, but of art. He had been intended for his
+father's profession, but had early taken a disgust to it. At such
+schools as he had been able to frequent, he had gained the character of
+a boy rather insusceptible of ordinary teaching; and his letters (they
+are rare throughout his life) show him to us as something very like a
+juvenile prig. According to his own account, he "thought for at least
+eight years" without being able to pen a line, or at least a page; and
+the worst accusation that can truly be brought against him is that, by
+his own confession, he left off reading when he began to write. Those
+who (for their sins or for their good) are condemned to a life of
+writing for the press know that such an abstinence as this is almost
+fatal. Perhaps no man ever did good work in periodical writing, unless
+he had previously had a more or less prolonged period of reading, with
+no view to writing. Certainly no one ever did other than very faulty
+work if, not having such a store to draw on, when he began writing he
+left off reading.
+
+The first really important event in Hazlitt's life, except the visit
+from Coleridge in 1798, was his own visit to Paris after the Peace of
+Amiens in 1802--a visit authorised and defrayed by certain commissions
+to copy pictures at the Louvre, which was then, in consequence of French
+conquests, the picture-gallery of Europe. The chief of these
+commissioners was a Mr. Railton, a person of some fortune at Liverpool,
+and the father of a daughter who, if she was anything like her portrait,
+had one of the most beautiful faces of modern times. Miss Railton was
+one of Hazlitt's many loves: it was, perhaps, fortunate for her that the
+course of the love did not run smooth. Almost immediately on his return,
+he made acquaintance with the Lambs, and, as Mr. W. C. Hazlitt, his
+grandson and biographer, thinks, with Miss Stoddart, his future wife.
+Miss Stoddart, there is no doubt, was an elderly coquette, though
+perfectly "proper." Besides the "William" of her early correspondence
+with Mary Lamb, we hear of three or four other lovers of hers between
+1803 and 1808, when she married Hazlitt. It so happens that one, and
+only one, letter of his to her has been preserved. His biographer seems
+to think it in another sense unique; but it is, in effect, a very
+typical letter from a literary lover of a rather passionate temperament.
+The two were married, in defiance of superstition, on Sunday, the first
+of May; and certainly the superstition had not the worst of it.
+
+At first, however, no evil results seemed likely. Miss Stoddart had a
+certain property settled on her at Winterslow, on the south-eastern
+border of Salisbury Plain, and for nearly four years the couple seem to
+have dwelt there (once, at least, entertaining the Lambs), and producing
+children, of whom only one lived. It was not till 1812 that they removed
+to London, and that Hazlitt engaged in writing for the newspapers. From
+this time till the end of his life, some eighteen years, he was never at
+a loss for employment--a succession of daily and weekly papers, with
+occasional employment on the _Edinburgh Review_, providing him, it would
+seem, with sufficiently abundant opportunities for copy. The _London_,
+the _New Monthly_ (where Campbell's dislike did him no harm), and other
+magazines also employed him. For a time, he seems to have joined "the
+gallery," and written ordinary press-work. During this time, which was
+very short, and this time only, his friends admit a certain indulgence
+in drinking, which he gave up completely, but which was used against him
+with as much pitilessness as indecency in _Blackwood_; though heaven
+only knows how the most Tory soul alive could see fitness of things in
+the accusation of gin-drinking brought against Hazlitt by the
+whiskey-drinkers of the _Noctes_. For the greater part of his literary
+life he seems to have been almost a total abstainer, indulging only in
+the very strongest of tea. He soon gave up miscellaneous press-work, as
+far as politics went; but his passion for the theatre retained him as a
+theatrical critic almost to the end of his life. He gradually drifted
+into the business really best suited to him, that of essay-writing, and
+occasionally lecturing on literary and miscellaneous subjects. During
+the greatest part of his early London life, he was resident in a famous
+house, now destroyed, in York Street, Westminster, next door to Bentham
+and reputed to have once been tenanted by Milton; and he was a constant
+attendant on Lamb's Wednesday evenings. The details of his life, it has
+been said, are not much known. The chief of them, besides the breaking
+out of his lifelong war with _Blackwood_ and the _Quarterly_, was,
+perhaps, his unlucky participation in the duel which proved fatal to
+Scott, the editor of the _London_. It is impossible to imagine a more
+deplorable muddle than this affair. Scott, after refusing the challenge
+of Lockhart,[12] with whom he had, according to the customs of those
+days, a sufficient ground of quarrel, accepted that of Christie,
+Lockhart's second, with whom he had no quarrel at all. Moreover, when
+his adversary had deliberately spared him in the first fire, he insisted
+(it is said owing to the stupid conduct of his own second) on another,
+and was mortally wounded. Hazlitt, who was more than indirectly
+concerned in the affair, had a professed objection to duelling, which
+would have been more creditable to him if he had not been avowedly of a
+timid temper. But, most unfortunately, he was said, and believed, to
+have spurred Scott on to the acceptance of the challenge, nor do his own
+champions deny it. The scandal is long bygone, but is, unluckily, a fair
+sample of the ugly stories which cluster round Hazlitt's name, and which
+have hitherto prevented that justice being done to him which his
+abilities deserve and demand.
+
+This wretched affair occurred in February 1821, and, shortly afterwards,
+the crowning complications of Hazlitt's own life, the business of the
+_Liber Amoris_ and the divorce with his first wife, took place. The
+first could only be properly described by an abundance of extracts, for
+which there is here no room. Of the second, which, it must be
+remembered, went on simultaneously with the first, it is sufficient to
+say that the circumstances are nearly incredible. It was conducted under
+the Scotch law with a blessed indifference to collusion: the direct
+means taken to effect it were, if report may be trusted, scandalous; and
+the parties met during the whole time, and placidly wrangled over money
+matters, with a callousness which is ineffably disgusting. I have
+hinted, in reference to Sarah Walker, that the tyranny of "Love
+unconquered in battle" may be taken by a very charitable person to be a
+sufficient excuse. In this other affair there is no such palliation;
+unless the very charitable person should hold that a wife, who could so
+forget her own dignity, justified any forgetfulness on the part of her
+husband; and that a husband, who could haggle and chaffer about the
+terms on which he should be disgracefully separated from his wife,
+justified any forgetfulness of dignity on the wife's part.
+
+Little has to be said about the rest of Hazlitt's life. Miss Sarah
+Walker would have nothing to say to him; and it has been already
+mentioned that the lady whom he afterwards married, a Mrs. Bridgewater,
+had enough of him after a year's experience. He did not outlive this
+last shock more than five years; and unfortunately his death was
+preceded by a complete financial break-down, though he was more
+industrious during these later years than at any other time, and though
+he had abundance of well-paid work. The failure of the publishers, who
+were to have paid him five hundred pounds for his _magnum opus_, the
+partisan and almost valueless _Life of Napoleon_, had something to do
+with this, and the dishonesty of an agent is said to have had more, but
+details are not forthcoming. He died on the eighteenth of September
+1830, saying, "Well, I have had a happy life"; and despite his son's
+assertion that, like Goldsmith, he had something on his mind, I believe
+this to have been not ironical but quite sincere. He was only fifty-two,
+so that the infirmities of age had not begun to press on him. Although,
+except during the brief duration of his second marriage, he had always
+lived by his wits, it does not appear that he was ever in any want, or
+that he had at any time to deny himself his favourite pleasures of
+wandering about and being idle when he chose. If he had not been
+completely happy in his life, he had lived it; if he had not seen the
+triumph of his opinions, he had been able always to hold to them. He was
+one of those men, such as an extreme devotion to literature now and then
+breeds, who, by the intensity of their enjoyment of quite commonplace
+delights--a face passed in the street, a sunset, a quiet hour of
+reflection, even a well-cooked meal--make up for the suffering of not
+wholly commonplace woes. I do not know whether even the joy of literary
+battle did not overweigh the pain of the dishonest wounds which he
+received from illiberal adversaries. I think that he had a happy life,
+and I am glad that he had. For he was in literature a great man. I am
+myself disposed to hold that, for all his accesses of hopelessly
+uncritical prejudice, he was the greatest critic that England has yet
+produced; and there are some who hold (though I do not agree with them)
+that he was even greater as a miscellaneous essayist than as a critic.
+It is certainly upon his essays, critical and other, that his fame must
+rest; not on the frenzied outpourings of the _Liber Amoris_ (full as
+these are of flashes of genius), or upon the one-sided and ill-planned
+_Life of Napoleon_; still less on his clever-boy essay on the
+_Principles of Human Action_, or on his attempts in grammar, in literary
+compilation and abridgment, and the like. Seven volumes of Bonn's
+Standard Library, with another published elsewhere containing his
+writings on Art, contain nearly all the documents of Hazlitt's fame: a
+few do not seem to have been yet collected from his _Remains_ and from
+the publications in which they originally appeared.
+
+These books--the _Spirit of the Age_, _Table Talk_, _The Plain Speaker_,
+_The Round Table_ (including the _Conversations with Northcote_ and
+_Characteristics_), _Lectures on the English Poets and Comic Writers_,
+_Elizabethan Literature_ and _Characters of Shakespeare_, _Sketches and
+Essays_ (including _Winterslow_)--represent the work, roughly speaking,
+of the last twenty years of Hazlitt's life; for in the earlier and
+longer period he wrote very little, and, indeed, declares that for a
+long time he had a difficulty in writing at all. They are all singularly
+homogeneous in general character, the lectures written as lectures
+differing very little from the essays written as essays, and even the
+frantic diatribes of the "Letter to Gifford" bearing a strong family
+likeness to the good-humoured _reportage_ of "On going to a Fight," or
+the singularly picturesque and pathetic egotism of the "Farewell to
+Essay-writing." This family resemblance is the more curious because,
+independently of the diversity of subject, Hazlitt can hardly be said to
+possess a style or, at least, a manner--indeed, he somewhere or other
+distinctly disclaims the possession. Yet, irregular as he is in his
+fashion of writing, no less than in the merit of it, the germs of some
+of the most famous styles of this century may be discovered in his
+casual and haphazard work. Everybody knows Jeffrey's question to
+Macaulay, "Where the devil did you get that style?" If any one will read
+Hazlitt (who, be it remembered, was a contributor to the _Edinburgh_)
+carefully, he will see where Macaulay got that style, or at least the
+beginning of it, much as he improved on it afterwards. Nor is there any
+doubt that, in a very different way, Hazlitt served as a model to
+Thackeray, to Dickens, and to many not merely of the most popular, but
+of the greatest, writers of the middle of the century. Indeed, in the
+_Spirit of the Age_ there are distinct anticipations of Carlyle. He had
+the not uncommon fate of producing work which, little noted by the
+public, struck very strongly those of his juniors who had any literary
+faculty. If he had been, just by a little, a greater man than he was, he
+would, no doubt, have elaborated an individual manner, and not have
+contented himself with the hints and germs of manners. As it was, he had
+more of seed than of fruit. And the secret of this is, undoubtedly, to
+be found in the obstinate individuality of thought which characterised
+him all through. Hazlitt may sometimes have adopted an opinion partly
+because other people did not hold it, but he never adopted an opinion
+because other people did hold it. And all his opinions, even those which
+seem to have been adopted simply to quarrel with the world, were genuine
+opinions. He has himself drawn a striking contrast in this point,
+between himself and Lamb, in one of the very best of all his essays, the
+beautiful "Farewell to Essay-writing" reprinted in _Winterslow_. The
+contrast is a remarkable one, and most men, probably, who take great
+interest in literature or politics, or indeed in any subject admitting
+of principles, will be able to furnish similar contrasts from their own
+experience.
+
+    In matters of taste and feeling, one proof that my conclusions
+    have not been quite shallow and hasty, is the circumstance of
+    their having been lasting. I have the same favourite books,
+    pictures, passages that I ever had; I may therefore presume
+    that they will last me my life--nay, I may indulge a hope that
+    my thoughts will survive me. This continuity of impression is
+    the only thing on which I pride myself. Even Lamb, whose relish
+    of certain things is as keen and earnest as possible, takes a
+    surfeit of admiration, and I should be afraid to ask about his
+    select authors or particular friends after a lapse of ten years.
+    As for myself, any one knows where to have me. What I have once
+    made up my mind to, I abide by to the end of the chapter.
+
+This is quite true if we add a proviso to it--a proviso, to be sure, of
+no small importance. Hazlitt is always the same when he is not
+different, when his political or personal ails and angers do not obscure
+his critical judgment. His uniformity of principle extends only to the
+two subjects of literature and of art; unless a third may be added, to
+wit, the various good things of this life, as they are commonly called.
+He was not so great a metaphysician as he thought himself. He "shows to
+the utmost of his knowledge, and that not deep"; a want of depth not
+surprising when we find him confessing that he had to go to Taylor, the
+Platonist, to tell him something of Platonic ideas. It may be more than
+suspected that he had read little but the French and English
+philosophers of the eighteenth century; a very interesting class of
+persons, but, except Condillac, Hume, and Berkeley, scarcely
+metaphysicians. As for his politics, Hazlitt seems to me to have had no
+clear political creed at all. He hated something called "the hag
+legitimacy," but for the hag despotism, in the person of Bonaparte, he
+had nothing but love. How any one possessed of brains could combine
+Liberty and the first Napoleon in one common worship is, I confess, a
+mystery too great for me; and I fear that any one who could call
+"Jupiter Scapin" "the greatest man who ever lived," must be entirely
+blind to such constituents of greatness as justice, mercy, chivalry, and
+all that makes a gentleman. Indeed, I am afraid that "gentleman" is
+exactly what cannot be predicated of Hazlitt. No gentleman could have
+published the _Liber Amoris_, not at all because of its so-called
+voluptuousness, but because of its shameless kissing and telling. But
+the most curious example of Hazlitt's weaknesses is the language he uses
+in regard to those men with whom he had both political and literary
+differences. That he had provocation in some cases (he had absolutely
+none from Sir Walter Scott) is perfectly true. But what provocation will
+excuse such things as the following, all taken from one book, the
+_Spirit of the Age_? He speaks of Scott's "zeal to restore the spirit of
+loyalty, of passive obedience, and of non-resistance," as an
+acknowledgment for his having been "created a baronet by a prince of the
+House of Brunswick." Alas for dates and circumstances, for times and
+seasons, when they stand in the way of a fling of Hazlitt's! In the
+character of Scott himself an entire page and a half is devoted to an
+elaborate peroration in one huge sentence, denouncing him in such terms
+as "pettifogging," "littleness," "pique," "secret and envenomed blows,"
+"slime of rankling malice and mercenary scorn," "trammels of servility,"
+"lies," "garbage," etc. etc. The Duke of Wellington he always speaks of
+as a brainless noodle, forgetting apparently that the description does
+not make his idol's defeat more creditable to the vanquished. As for the
+character of Gifford, and the earlier "Letter to Gifford," I should have
+to print them entire to show the state of Hazlitt's mind in regard to
+this notorious, and certainly not very amiable person. His own words,
+"the dotage of age and the fury of a woman," form the best short
+description of both. He screams, he foams at the mouth, he gnashes and
+tears and kicks, rather than fights. Nor is it only on living authors
+and living persons (as some of his unfavourable critics have said) that
+he exercises his spleen. His remarks on Burke (_Round Table_, p. 150)
+suggest temporary insanity. Sir Philip Sidney (as Lamb, a perfectly
+impartial person who had no politics at all, pointed out) was a kind of
+representative of the courtly monarchist school in literature. So down
+must Sir Philip go; and not only the _Arcadia_, that "vain and
+amatorious poem" which Milton condemned, but the sonnets which one would
+have thought such a lover of poetry as Hazlitt must have spared, go down
+also before his remorseless bludgeon.
+
+But there is no need to say any more of these faults of his, and there
+is no need to say much of another and more purely literary fault with
+which he has been charged--the fault of excessive quotation. In him the
+error lies rather in the constant repetition of the same, than in a too
+great multitude of different borrowings. Almost priding himself on
+limited study, and (as he tells us) very rarely reading his own work
+after it was printed, he has certainly abused his right of press most
+damnably in some cases. "Dry as a remainder biscuit," and "of no mark or
+likelihood," occur to me as the most constantly recurrent tags; but
+there are many others.
+
+These various drawbacks, however, only set off the merits which almost
+every lover of literature must perceive in him. In most writers, in all
+save the very greatest, we look for one or two, or for a few special
+faculties and capacities, and we know perfectly well that other
+(generally many other) capacities and faculties will not be found in
+them at all. We do not dream of finding rollicking mirth in Milton, or
+gorgeous embroidery of style in Swift, or unadorned simplicity in
+Browne. But in Hazlitt you may find something of almost everything,
+except the finer kinds of wit and humour; to which last, however, he
+makes a certain side-approach by dint of his appreciation of the irony
+of Nature and Fate. Almost every other grace of matter and form that can
+be found in prose may be found at times in his. He is generally thought
+of as, and for the most part is, a rather plain and straightforward
+writer, with few tricks and frounces of phrase and style. Yet most of
+the fine writing of these latter days is but as crumpled tarlatan to
+brocaded satin beside the passage on Coleridge in the _English Poets_,
+or the description of Winterslow and its neighbourhood in the "Farewell
+to Essay-writing," or "On a Landscape of Nicolas Poussin" in the
+_Table-Talk_. Read these pieces and nothing else, and an excusable
+impression might be given that the writer was nothing if not florid. But
+turn over a dozen pages, and the most admirable examples of the grave
+and simple manner occur. He is an inveterate quoter, yet few men are
+more original. No man is his superior in lively, gossiping description,
+yet he could, within his limits, reason closely and expound admirably.
+It is, indeed, almost always necessary, when he condemns anything, to
+inquire very carefully as to the reasons of the condemnation. But
+nothing that he likes (except Napoleon) is ever bad: everything that he
+praises will repay the right man who, at the right time, examines it to
+see for what Hazlitt likes it. I have, for my part, no doubt that Miss
+Sarah Walker was a very engaging young woman; but (though the witness is
+the same) I have the gravest doubts as to Hazlitt's charges against her.
+
+We shall find this same curious difference everywhere in Hazlitt. He has
+been talking, for instance, with keen relish of the "Conversation of
+Authors" (it is he, be it remembered, who has handed down to us the
+immortal debate at one of Lamb's Wednesdays on "People one would Like
+to have Seen"), and saying excellent things about it. Then he changes
+the key, and tells us that the conversation of "Gentlemen and Men of
+Fashion" will not do. Perhaps not; but the wicked critic stops and asks
+himself whether Hazlitt had known much of the conversation of "Gentlemen
+and Men of Fashion"? We can find no record of any such experiences of
+his. In his youth he had no opportunity: in his middle age he was
+notoriously recalcitrant to all the usages of society, would not dress,
+and scarcely ever dined out except with a few cronies. This does not
+seem to be the best qualification for a pronouncement on the question.
+Yet this same essay is full of admirable things, the most admirable
+being, perhaps, the description of the man who "had you at an advantage
+by never understanding you." I find, indeed, in looking through my
+copies of his books, re-read for the purpose of this paper, an
+innumerable and bewildering multitude of essays, of passages, and of
+short phrases, marked for reference. In the seven volumes above referred
+to (to which, as has been said, not a little has to be added) there must
+be hundreds of separate articles and conversations; not counting as
+separate the short maxims and thoughts of the _Characteristics_, and one
+or two other similar collections, in which, indeed, several passages are
+duplicated from the Essays. At least two out of every three are
+characteristic of Hazlitt: not one in any twenty is not well worth
+reading and, if occasion served, commenting on. They are, indeed, as far
+from being consecutive as (according to the Yankee) was the conversation
+of Edgar Poe; and the multitude and diversity of their subjects fit them
+better for occasional than for continuous reading.[13] Perhaps, if any
+single volume deserves to be recommended to a beginner in Hazlitt it had
+better be _The Plain Speaker_, where there is the greatest range of
+subject, and where the author is seen in an almost complete repertory of
+his numerous parts. But there is not much to choose between it and _The
+Round Table_ (where, however, the papers are shorter as a rule),
+_Table-Talk_, and the volume called, though not by the author, _Sketches
+and Essays_. I myself care considerably less for the _Conversations with
+Northcote_, the personal element in which has often attracted readers;
+and the attempts referred to above as _Characteristics_, avowedly in the
+manner of La Rochefoucauld, are sometimes merely extracts from the
+essays, and rarely have the self-containedness, the exact and chiselled
+proportion, which distinguishes the true _pensée_ as La Rochefoucauld
+and some other Frenchmen, and as Hobbes perhaps alone of Englishmen,
+wrote it. But to criticise these numerous papers is like sifting a
+cluster of motes, and the mere enumeration of their titles would fill
+up more than half the room which I have to spare. They must be
+criticised or characterised in two groups only, the strictly critical
+and the miscellaneous, the latter excluding politics. As for art, I do
+not pretend to be more than a connoisseur according to Blake's
+definition, that is to say, one who refuses to let himself be
+connoisseured out of his senses. I shall only, in reference to this last
+subject, observe that the singularly germinal character of Hazlitt's
+work is noticeable here also; for no one who reads the essay on Nicolas
+Poussin will fail to add Mr. Ruskin to Hazlitt's fair herd of literary
+children.
+
+His criticism is scattered through all the volumes of general essays;
+but is found by itself in the series of lectures, or essays (they are
+rather the latter than the former), on the characters of Shakespeare, on
+Elizabethan Literature, on the English Poets, and on the English Comic
+Writers. I cannot myself help thinking that in these four Hazlitt is at
+his best; though there may be nothing so attractive to the general, and
+few such brilliant passages as may be found in the "Farewell to
+Essay-writing," in the paper on Poussin, in "Going to a Fight," in
+"Going a Journey," and others of the same class. The reason of the
+preference is by no means a greater interest in the subject of one
+class, than in the subject of another. It is that, from the very nature
+of the case, Hazlitt's unlucky prejudices interfere much more seldom
+with his literary work. They interfere sometimes, as in the case of
+Sidney, as in some remarks about Coleridge and Wordsworth, and
+elsewhere; but these instances are rare indeed compared with those that
+occur in the other division. On the other hand, there are always present
+Hazlitt's enthusiastic appreciation of what is good in letters, his
+combination of gusto with sound theory as to what is excellent in prose
+and verse, his felicitous method of expression, and the acuteness that
+kept him from that excessive and paradoxical admiration which both Lamb
+and Coleridge affected, and which has gained many more pupils than his
+own moderation. Nothing better has ever been written as a general view
+of the subject than his introduction to his Lectures on Elizabethan
+Literature; and almost all the faults to be found in it are due merely
+to occasional deficiency of information, not to error of judgment. He is
+a little paradoxical on Jonson; but not many critics could furnish a
+happier contrast than his enthusiastic praise of certain passages of
+Beaumont and Fletcher, and his cool toning down of Lamb's extravagant
+eulogy on Ford. He is a little unfair to the Caroline poets; but here
+the great disturbing influence comes in. If his comparison of ancient
+and modern literature is rather weak, that is because Hazlitt was
+anything but widely acquainted with either; and, indeed, it may be said
+in general that wherever he goes wrong, it is not because he judges
+wrongly on known facts, but because he either does not know the facts,
+or is prevented from seeing them by distractions of prejudice. To go
+through his Characters of Shakespeare would be impossible, and besides,
+it is a point of honour for one student of Shakespeare to differ with
+all others. I can only say that I know no critic with whom on this point
+I differ so seldom as with Hazlitt. Even better, perhaps, are the two
+sets of lectures on the Poets and Comic Writers. The generalisations are
+not always sound, for, as must be constantly repeated, Hazlitt was not
+widely read in literatures other than his own, and his standpoint for
+comparison is therefore rather insufficient. But take him where his
+information is sufficient, and how good he is! Of the famous four
+treatments of the dramatists of the Restoration--Lamb's, Hazlitt's,
+Leigh Hunt's, and Macaulay's--his seems to me by far the best. In regard
+to Butler, his critical sense has for once triumphed over his political
+prejudice; unless some very unkind devil's advocate should suggest that
+the supposed ingratitude of the King to Butler reconciled Hazlitt to
+him. He is admirable on Burns; and nothing can be more unjust or sillier
+than to pretend, as has been pretended, that Burns's loose morality
+engaged Hazlitt on his side. De Quincey was often a very acute critic,
+but anything more uncritical than his attack on Hazlitt's comparison of
+Burns and Wordsworth in relation to passion, it would be difficult to
+find. Hazlitt "could forgive Swift for being a Tory," he tells us--which
+is at any rate more than some other people, who have a better reputation
+for impartiality than his, seem to have been able to do. No one has
+written better than he on Pope, who still seems to have the faculty of
+distorting some critical judgments. His chapter on the English novelists
+(that is to say, those of the last century) is perhaps the best thing
+ever written on the subject; and is particularly valuable nowadays when
+there is a certain tendency to undervalue Smollett in order to exalt
+Fielding, who certainly needs no such illegitimate and uncritical
+leverage. I do not think that he is, on the whole, unjust to Campbell;
+though his Gallican, or rather Napoleonic mania made him commit the
+literary crime of slighting "The Battle of the Baltic." But in all his
+criticism of English literature (and he has attempted little else,
+except by way of digression) he is, for the critic, a study never to be
+wearied of, always to be profited by. His very aberrations are often
+more instructive than other men's right-goings; and if he sometimes
+fails to detect or acknowledge a beauty, he never praises a defect.
+
+It is less easy to sum up the merits of the miscellaneous pieces, for
+the very obvious reason that they can hardly be brought under any
+general form or illustrated by any small number of typical instances.
+Perhaps the best way of "sampling" this undisciplined multitude is to
+select a few papers by name, so as to show the variety of Hazlitt's
+interests. The one already mentioned, "On Going to a Fight," which
+shocked some proprieties even in its own day, ranks almost first; but
+the reader should take care to accompany it with the official record of
+that celebrated contest between Neate and the Gasman. All fights are
+good reading; but this particular effort of Hazlitt's makes one sigh for
+a _Boxiana_ or _Pugilistica_ edited by him. Next, I think, must be
+ranked "On Going a Journey," with its fine appreciation of solitary
+travelling which does not exclude reminiscences of pleasant journeys in
+company. But these two, with the article on Poussin and the "Farewell to
+Essay-writing," have been so often mentioned that it may seem as if
+Hazlitt's store were otherwise poor. Nothing could be farther from the
+truth. The "Character of Cobbett" is the best thing the writer ever did
+of the kind, and the best thing known to me on Cobbett. "Of the Past and
+the Future" is perhaps the height of the popular metaphysical style--the
+style from which, as was noted, Hazlitt may never have got free as far
+as philosophising is concerned, but of which he is a master. "On the
+Indian Jugglers" is a capital example of what may be called improving a
+text; and it contains some of the most interesting and genial examples
+of Hazlitt's honest delight in games such as rackets and fives, a
+delight which (heaven help his critics) was frequently regarded at the
+time as "low." "On Paradox and Commonplace" is less remarkable for its
+contribution to the discussion of the subject, than as exhibiting one of
+Hazlitt's most curious critical megrims--his dislike of Shelley. I wish
+I could think that he had any better reason for this than the fact that
+Shelley was a gentleman by birth and his own contemporary. Most
+disappointing of all, perhaps, is "On Criticism," which the reader (as
+his prophetic soul, if he is a sensible reader, has probably warned him
+beforehand) soon finds to be little but an open or covert diatribe
+against the contemporary critics whom Hazlitt did not like, or who did
+not like Hazlitt. The apparently promising "On the Knowledge of
+Character" chiefly yields the remark that Hazlitt could not have admired
+Cæsar if he had resembled (in face) the Duke of Wellington. But "My
+first Acquaintance with Poets" is again a masterpiece; and to me, at
+least, "Merry England" is perfect. Hazlitt is almost the only person up
+to his own day who dared to vindicate the claims of nonsense, though he
+seems to have talked and written as little of it as most men. The
+chapter "On Editors" is very amusing, though perhaps not entirely in the
+way in which Hazlitt meant it; but I cannot think him happy "On
+Footmen," or on "The Conversation of Lords," for reasons already
+sufficiently stated. A sun-dial is a much more promising subject than a
+broomstick, yet many essays might be written on sun-dials without there
+being any fear of Hazlitt's being surpassed. Better still is "On Taste,"
+which, if the twenty or thirty best papers in Hazlitt were collected
+(and a most charming volume they would make), would rank among the very
+best. "On Reading New Books" contains excellent sense, but perhaps is,
+as Hazlitt not seldom is, a little deficient in humour; while the
+absence of any necessity for humour makes the discussion "Whether Belief
+is Voluntary" a capital one. Hazlitt is not wholly of the opinion of
+that Ebrew Jew who said to M. Renan, "_On fait ce qu'on veut mais on
+croit ce qu'on peut._"
+
+The shorter papers of the _Round Table_ yield perhaps a little less
+freely in the way of specially notable examples. They come closer to a
+certain kind of Addisonian essay, a short lay-sermon, without the
+charming divagation of the longer articles. To see how nearly Hazlitt
+can reach the level of a rather older and cleverer George Osborne, turn
+to the paper here on Classical Education. He is quite orthodox for a
+wonder: perhaps because opinion was beginning to veer a little to the
+side of Useful Knowledge; but he is as dry as his own favourite biscuit,
+and as guiltless of freshness. He is best in this volume where he notes
+particular points such as Kean's Iago, Milton's versification (here,
+however, he does not get quite to the heart of the matter), "John
+Buncle," and "The Excursion." In this last he far outsteps the scanty
+confines of the earlier papers of the _Round Table_, and allows himself
+that score of pages which seems to be with so many men the normal limit
+of a good essay. Of his shortest style one sample from "Trifles light as
+Air" is so characteristic, in more ways than one, that it must be quoted
+whole.
+
+    I am by education and conviction inclined to Republicanism and
+    Puritanism. In America they have both. But I confess I feel a
+    little staggered as to the practical efficacy and saving grace
+    of first principles, when I ask myself, Can they throughout the
+    United States from Boston to Baltimore, produce a single head
+    like one of Titian's Venetian Nobles, nurtured in all the pride
+    of aristocracy and all the blindness of popery? Of all the
+    branches of political economy the human face is perhaps the best
+    criterion of value.
+
+If I were editing Hazlitt's works I should put these sentences on the
+title-page of every volume; for, dogmatist as he thought himself, it is
+certain that he was in reality purely æsthetic, though, I need hardly
+say, not in the absurd sense, or no-sense, which modern misuse of
+language has chosen to fix on the word. Therefore he is very good (where
+few are good at all) on Dreams; and, being a great observer of himself,
+singularly instructive on Application to Study. "On Londoners and
+Country People" is one of his liveliest efforts; and the pique at his
+own inclusion in the Cockney School fortunately evaporates in some
+delightful reminiscences, including one of the few classic passages on
+the great game of marbles. His remarks on the company at the
+Southampton coffee-house, which have been often and much praised, please
+me less: they are too much like attempts in the manner of the Queen Anne
+men, and Hazlitt is always best when he imitates nobody. "Hot and Cold"
+(which might have been more intelligibly called "North and South") is
+distinctly curious, bringing out again what may be called Hazlitt's
+fanciful observation; and it may generally be said that, however
+alarming and however suggestive of commonplace the titles "On
+Respectable People," "On People of Sense," "On Novelty and Familiarity,"
+may be, Hazlitt may almost invariably be trusted to produce something
+that is not commonplace, that is not laboured paradox, that is eminently
+literature.
+
+I know that a haphazard catalogue of the titles of essays (for it is
+little more) such as fills the last paragraph or two may not seem very
+succulent. But within moderate space there is really no other means of
+indicating the author's extraordinary range of subject, and at the same
+time the pervading excellence of his treatment. To exemplify a
+difference which has sometimes been thought to require explanation, his
+work as regards system, connection with anything else, immediate
+occasion (which with him was generally what his friend, Mr. Skimpole,
+would have called "pounds") is always Journalism: in result, it is
+almost always Literature. Its staple subjects, as far as there can be
+said to be any staple where the thread is so various, are very much
+those which the average newspaper-writer since his time has had to deal
+with--politics, book-reviewing, criticism on plays and pictures, social
+etceteras, the minor morals, the miscellaneous incidents of daily life.
+It is true that Hazlitt was only for a short time in the straitest
+shafts, the most galling traces, of periodical hack-work. His practice
+was rather that of George Warrington, who worked till he had filled his
+purse, and then lay idle till he had emptied it. He used (an indulgence
+agreeable in the mouth, but bitter in the belly) very frequently to
+receive money beforehand for work which was not yet done. Although
+anything but careful, he was never an extravagant man, his tastes being
+for the most part simple; and he never, even during his first married
+life, seems to have been burdened by an expensive household. Moreover,
+he got rid of Mrs. Hazlitt on very easy terms. Still he must constantly
+have had on him the sensation that he lived by his work, and by that
+only. It seems to be (as far as one can make it out) this sensation
+which more than anything else jades and tires what some very
+metaphorical men of letters are pleased to call their Pegasus. But
+Hazlitt, though he served in the shafts, shows little trace of the
+harness. He has frequent small carelessnesses of style, but he would
+probably have had as many or more if he had been the easiest and
+gentlest of easy-writing gentlemen. He never seems to have allowed
+himself to be cramped in his choice of his subjects, and wrote for the
+editors, of whom he speaks so amusingly, with almost as much freedom of
+speech as if he had had a private press of his own, and had issued
+dainty little tractates on Dutch paper to be fought for by bibliophiles.
+His prejudices, his desultoriness, his occasional lack of correctness of
+fact (he speaks of "Fontaine's Translation" of Æsop, and makes use of
+the extraordinary phrase, "The whole Council of Trent with Father Paul
+at their head," than which a more curious blunder is hardly
+conceivable), his wayward inconsistencies, his freaks of bad taste,
+would in all probability have been aggravated rather than alleviated by
+the greater freedom and less responsibility of an independent or an
+endowed student. The fact is that he was a born man of letters, and that
+he could not help turning whatsoever he touched into literature, whether
+it was criticism on books or on pictures, a fight or a supper, a game at
+marbles, a political diatribe, or the report of a literary conversation.
+He doubtless had favourite subjects; but I do not know that it can be
+said that he treated one class of subjects better than another, with the
+exception that I must hold him to have been first of all a literary
+critic. He certainly could not write a work of great length; for the
+faults of his _Life of Napoleon_ are grave even when its view of the
+subject is taken as undisputed, and it holds among his productions about
+the same place (that of longest and worst) which the book it was
+designed to counterwork holds among Scott's. Nor was he, as it seems to
+me, quite at home in very short papers--in papers of the length of the
+average newspaper article. What he could do, as hardly any other man has
+ever done it in England, was a _causerie_ of about the same length as
+Sainte-Beuve's or a little shorter, less limited in range, but also less
+artfully proportioned than the great Frenchman's literary and historical
+studies, giving scope for considerable digression, but coming to an end
+before the author was wearied of his subject, or had exhausted the fresh
+thoughts and the happy borrowings and analogies which he had ready for
+it. Of what is rather affectedly called "architectonic," Hazlitt has
+nothing. No essay of his is ever an exhaustive or even a symmetrical
+treatment of its nominal, or of any, theme. He somewhere speaks of
+himself as finding it easy to go on stringing pearls when he has once
+got the string; but, for my part, I should say that the string was much
+more doubtful than the pearls. Except in a very few set pieces, his
+whole charm consists in the succession of irregular, half-connected, but
+unending and infinitely variegated thoughts, fancies, phrases,
+quotations, which he pours forth not merely at a particular "Open
+Sesame," but at "Open barley," "Open rye," or any other grain in the
+corn-chandler's list. No doubt the charm of these is increased by the
+fact that they are never quite haphazard, never absolutely promiscuous,
+despite their desultory arrangement; no doubt also a certain additional
+interest arises from the constant revelation which they make of
+Hazlitt's curious personality, his enthusiastic appreciation flecked
+with spots of grudging spite, his clear intellect clouded with
+prejudice, his admiration of greatness and nobility of character
+co-existing with the faculty of doing very mean and even disgraceful
+things, his abundant relish of life contrasted with almost constant
+repining. He must have been one of the most uncomfortable of all English
+men of letters, who can be called great, to know as a friend. He is
+certainly, to those who know him only as readers, one of the most
+fruitful both in instruction and in delight.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[12] For some further remarks on this duel as it concerns Lockhart see
+Appendix.
+
+[13] Since this paper was first published Mr. Alexander Ireland has
+edited a most excellent selection from Hazlitt.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+MOORE
+
+
+It would be interesting, though perhaps a little impertinent, to put to
+any given number of well-informed persons under the age of forty or
+fifty the sudden query, who was Thomas Brown the Younger? And it is very
+possible that a majority of them would answer that he had something to
+do with Rugby. It is certain that with respect to that part of his work
+in which he was pleased so to call himself, Moore is but little known.
+The considerable mass of his hack-work has gone whither all hack-work
+goes, fortunately enough for those of us who have to do it. The vast
+monument erected to him by his pupil, friend, and literary executor,
+Lord Russell, or rather Lord John Russell, is a monument of such a
+Cyclopean order of architecture, both in respect of bulk and in respect
+of style, that most honest biographers and critics acknowledge
+themselves to have explored its recesses but cursorily. Less of him,
+even as a poet proper, is now read than of any of the brilliant group
+of poets of which he was one, with the possible exceptions of Crabbe and
+Rogers; while, more unfortunate than Crabbe, he has had no Mr. Courthope
+to come to his rescue. But he has recently had what is an unusual thing
+for an English poet, a French biographer.[14] I shall not have very much
+to say of the details of M. Vallat's very creditable and useful
+monograph. It would be possible, if I were merely reviewing it, to pick
+out some of the curious errors of hasty deduction which are rarely
+wanting in a book of its nationality. If (and no shame to him) Moore's
+father sold cheese and whisky, _le whisky d'Irlande_ was no doubt his
+staple commodity in the one branch, but scarcely _le fromage de Stilton_
+in the other. An English lawyer's studies are not even now, except at
+the universities and for purposes of perfunctory examination, very much
+in "Justinian," and in Moore's time they were still less so. And if
+Bromham Church is near Sloperton, then it will follow as the night the
+day that it is not _dans le Bedfordshire_. But these things matter very
+little. They are found, in their different kinds, in all books; and if
+we English bookmakers (at least some of us) are not likely to make a
+Bordeaux wine merchant sell Burgundy as his chief commodity, or say that
+a village near Amiens is _dans le Béarn_, we no doubt do other things
+quite as bad. On the whole, M. Vallat's sketch, though of moderate
+length, is quite the soberest and most trustworthy sketch of Moore's
+life and of his books, as books merely, that I know. In matters of pure
+criticism M. Vallat is less blameless. He quotes authorities with that
+apparent indifference to, or even ignorance of, their relative value
+which is so yawning a pit for the feet of the foreigner in all cases;
+and perhaps a wider knowledge of English poetry in general would have
+been a better preparation for the study of Moore's in particular.
+"Never," says M. Renan very wisely, "never does a foreigner satisfy the
+nation whose history he writes"; and this is as true of literary history
+as of history proper. But M. Vallat satisfies us in a very considerable
+degree; and even putting aside the question whether he is satisfactory
+altogether, he has given us quite sufficient text in the mere fact that
+he has bestowed upon Moore an amount of attention and competence which
+no compatriot of the author of "Lalla Rookh" has cared to bestow for
+many years.
+
+I shall also here take the liberty of neglecting a very great--as far as
+bulk goes, by far the greatest--part of Moore's own performance. He has
+inserted so many interesting autobiographical particulars in the
+prefaces to his complete works, that visits to the great mausoleum of
+the Russell memoirs are rarely necessary, and still more rarely
+profitable. His work for the booksellers was done at a time when the
+best class of such work was much better done than the best class of it
+is now; but it was after all work for the booksellers. His _History of
+Ireland_, his _Life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald_, etc., may be pretty
+exactly gauged by saying that they are a good deal better than Scott's
+work of a merely similar kind (in which it is hardly necessary to say
+that I do not include the _Tales of a Grandfather_ or the introductions
+to the Dryden, the Swift, and the Ballantyne novels), not nearly so good
+as Southey's, and not quite so good as Campbell's. The Life of Byron
+holds a different place. With the poems, or some of them, it forms the
+only part of Moore's literary work which is still read; and though it is
+read much more for its substance than for its execution, it is still a
+masterly performance of a very difficult task. The circumstances which
+brought it about are well known, and no discussion of them would be
+possible without plunging into the Byron controversy generally, which
+the present writer most distinctly declines to do. But these
+circumstances, with other things among which Moore's own comparative
+faculty for the business may be not unjustly mentioned, prevent it from
+taking rank at all approaching that of Boswell's or Lockhart's
+inimitable biographies. The chief thing to note in it as regards Moore
+himself, is the help it gives in a matter to which we shall have to
+refer again, his attitude towards those whom his time still called "the
+great."
+
+And so we are left with the poems--not an inconsiderable companion
+seeing that its stature is some seven hundred small quarto pages closely
+packed with verses in double columns. Part of this volume is, however,
+devoted to the "Epicurean," a not unremarkable example of ornate prose
+in many respects resembling the author's verse. Indeed, as close readers
+of Moore know, there exists an unfinished verse form of it which, in
+style and general character, is not unlike a more serious "Lalla Rookh."
+As far as poetry goes, almost everything that will be said of "Lalla
+Rookh" might be said of "Alciphron": this latter, however, is a little
+more Byronic than its more famous sister, and in that respect not quite
+so successful.
+
+Moore's life, which is not uninteresting as a key to his personal
+character, is very fairly treated by M. Vallat, chiefly from the poet's
+own authority; but it need not detain us very long. He was born at
+Dublin on 28th May 1779. There is no mystery about his origin. His
+father, John Moore, was a small grocer and liquor-shop keeper who
+received later the place of barrack-master from a patron of his son. The
+mother, Anastasia Codd, was a Wexford girl, and seems to have been well
+educated and somewhat above her husband in station. Thomas was sent to
+several private schools, where he appears to have attained to some
+scholarship and to have early practised composition in the tongue of
+the hated Saxon. When he was fourteen, the first measure of Catholic
+Emancipation opened Trinity College to him, and that establishment, "the
+intellectual eye of Ireland" as Sir William Harcourt has justly called
+it, received him a year later. The "silent sister" has fostered an
+always genial, if sometimes inexact, fashion of scholarship, in which
+Moore's talents were well suited to shine, and a pleasant social
+atmosphere wherein he was also not misplaced. But the time drew near to
+'98, and Moore, although he had always too much good sense to dip deeply
+into sedition, was, from his sentimental habits, likely to run some risk
+of being thought to have dipped in it. Although it is certain that he
+would have regarded what is called Nationalism in our days with disgust
+and horror, he cannot be acquitted of using, to the end of his life, the
+loosest of language on subjects where precision is particularly to be
+desired. Robert Emmet was his contemporary, and the action which the
+authorities took was but too well justified by the outbreak of the
+insurrection later. A Commission was named for purifying the college.
+Its head was Lord Clare, one of the greatest of Irishmen, the base or
+ignorant vilifying of whom by some persons in these days has been one of
+the worst results of the Home Rule movement. It had a rather comic
+assessor in Dr. Duigenan, the same, I believe, of whom it has been
+recorded that, at an earlier stage of his academic career and when a
+junior Fellow, he threatened to "bulge the Provost's eye." The oath was
+tendered to each examinate, and on the day before Moore's appearance
+Emmet and others had gone by default, while it was at least whispered
+that there had been treachery in the camp. Moore's own performance was,
+by his own account, heroic and successful: by another, which he very
+fairly gives, a little less heroic but still successful. Both show
+clearly that Clare was nothing like the stage-tyrant which the
+imagination of the seditious has chosen to represent him as being. That
+M. Vallat should talk rather foolishly about Emmet was to be expected;
+for Emmet's rhetorical rubbish was sure to impose, and has always
+imposed, on Frenchmen. The truth of course is that this young
+person--though one of those whom every humane man would like to keep
+mewed up till they arrived, if they ever did arrive, which is
+improbable, at years of discretion--was one of the most mischievous of
+agitators. He was one of those who light a bonfire and then are shocked
+at its burning, who throw a kingdom into anarchy and misery and think
+that they are cleared by a reference to Harmodius and Aristogeiton. It
+is one of the most fearful delights of the educated Tory to remember
+what the grievance of Harmodius and Aristogeiton really was. Moore (who
+had something of the folly of Emmet, but none of his reckless conceit)
+escaped, and his family must have been exceedingly glad to send him
+over to the Isle of Britain. He entered at the Middle Temple in 1799,
+but hardly made even a pretence of reading law. His actual experience is
+one of those puzzles which continually meet the student of literary
+history in the days when society was much smaller, the makers of
+literature fewer, and the resources of patronage greater. Moore toiled
+not, neither did he spin. He slipped, apparently on the mere strength of
+an ordinary introduction, into the good graces of Lord Moira, who
+introduced him to the exiled Royal Family of France, and to the richest
+members of the Whig aristocracy--the Duke of Bedford, the Marquis of
+Lansdowne and others, not to mention the Prince of Wales himself. The
+young Irishman had indeed, as usual, his "proposals" in his
+pocket--proposals for a translation of Anacreon which appeared in May
+1800. The thing which thus founded one of the easiest, if not the most
+wholly triumphant, of literary careers is not a bad thing. The original,
+now abandoned as a clever though late imitation, was known even in
+Moore's time to be in parts of very doubtful authenticity, but it still
+remains, as an original, a very pretty thing. Moore's version is not
+quite so pretty, and is bolstered out with paraphrase and amplification
+to a rather intolerable extent. But there was considerable
+fellow-feeling between the author, whoever he was, and the translator,
+and the result is not despicable. Still there is no doubt that work as
+good or better might appear now, and the author would be lucky if he
+cleared a hundred pounds and a favourable review or two by the
+transaction. Moore was made for life. These things happen at one time
+and do not happen at another. We are inclined to accept them as ultimate
+facts into which it is useless to inquire. There does not appear to be
+among the numerous fixed laws of the universe any one which regulates
+the proportion of literary desert to immediate reward, and it is on the
+whole well that it should be so. At any rate the publication increased
+Moore's claims as a "lion," and encouraged him to publish next year the
+_Poems of the late Thomas Little_ (he always stuck to the Christian
+name), which put up his fame and rather put down his character.
+
+In later editions Thomas Little has been so much subjected to the
+fig-leaf and knife that we have known readers who wondered why on earth
+any one should ever have objected to him. He was a good deal more
+uncastrated originally, but there never was much harm in him. It is true
+that the excuse made by Sterne for Tristram Shandy, and often repeated
+for Moore, does not quite apply. There is not much guilt in Little, but
+there is certainly very little innocence. He knows that a certain amount
+of not too gross indecency will raise a snigger, and, like Voltaire and
+Sterne himself, he sets himself to raise it. But he does not do it very
+wickedly. The propriety of the nineteenth century, moreover, had not
+then made the surprisingly rapid strides of a few years later, and some
+time had to pass before Moore was to go out with Jeffrey, and nearly
+challenge Byron, for questioning his morality. The rewards of his
+harmless iniquity were at hand; and in the autumn of 1803 he was made
+Secretary of the Admiralty in Bermuda. Bermuda, it is said, is an
+exceedingly pleasant place; but either there is no Secretary of the
+Admiralty there now, or they do not give the post to young men
+four-and-twenty years old who have written two very thin volumes of
+light verses. The Bermoothes are not still vexed with that kind of Civil
+Servant. The appointment was not altogether fortunate for Moore,
+inasmuch as his deputy (for they not only gave nice berths to men of
+letters then, but let them have deputies) embezzled public and private
+moneys, with disastrous results to his easy-going principal. But for the
+time it was all, as most things were with Moore, plain sailing. He went
+out in a frigate, and was the delight of the gun-room. As soon as he got
+tired of the Bermudas, he appointed his deputy and went to travel in
+America, composing large numbers of easy poems. In October 1804 he was
+back in England, still voyaging at His Majesty's expense, and having
+achieved his fifteen months' trip wholly on those terms. Little is heard
+of him for the next two years, and then the publication of his American
+and other poems, with some free reflections on the American character,
+brought down on him the wrath of _The Edinburgh_, and provoked the
+famous leadless or half-leadless duel at Chalk Farm. It was rather hard
+on Moore, if the real cause of his castigation was that he had offended
+democratic principles, while the ostensible cause was that, as Thomas
+Little, he had five years before written loose and humorous verses. So
+thinks M. Vallat, with whom we are not wholly disposed to agree, for
+Jeffrey, though a Whig, was no Democrat, and he was a rather strict
+moralist. However, no harm came of the meeting in any sense, though its
+somewhat burlesque termination made the irreverent laugh. It was indeed
+not fated that Moore should smell serious powder, though his courage
+seems to have been fully equal to any such occasion. The same year
+brought him two unquestioned and unalloyed advantages, the friendship of
+Rogers and the beginning of the Irish Melodies, from which he reaped not
+a little solid benefit, and which contain by far his highest and most
+lasting poetry. It is curious, but by no means unexampled, that, at the
+very time at which he was thus showing that he had found his right way,
+he also diverged into one wholly wrong--that of the serious and very
+ineffective Satires, "Corruption," "Intolerance," and others. The year
+1809 brought "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" with a gibe from
+Byron and a challenge from Moore. But Moore's challenges were fated to
+have no other result than making the challenged his friends for life.
+All this time he had been more or less "about town." In 1811 he married
+Elizabeth Dyke ("Bessy"), an actress of virtue and beauty, and wrote the
+very inferior comic opera of "The Blue Stocking." Lord Moira gave the
+pair a home first in his own house, then at Kegworth near Donington,
+whence they moved to Ashbourne. Moore was busy now. The politics of "The
+Two-penny Postbag" are of course sometimes dead enough to us; but
+sometimes also they are not, and then the easy grace of the satire,
+which is always pungent and never venomed, is not much below Canning.
+Its author also did a good deal of other work of the same kind, besides
+beginning to review for _The Edinburgh_. Considering that he was in a
+way making his bread and butter by lampooning, however good-humouredly,
+the ruler of his country, he seems to have been a little unreasonable in
+feeling shocked that Lord Moira, on going as viceroy to India, did not
+provide for him. In the first place he was provided for already; and in
+the second place you cannot reasonably expect to enjoy the pleasures of
+independence and those of dependence at the same time. At the end of
+1817 he left Mayfield (his cottage near Ashbourne) and Lord Moira, for
+Lord Lansdowne and Sloperton, a cottage near Bowood, the end of the one
+sojourn and the beginning of the other being distinguished by the
+appearance of his two best works, next to the Irish Melodies--"Lalla
+Rookh" and "The Fudge Family at Paris." His first and almost his only
+heavy stroke of ill-luck now came on him: his deputy at Bermuda levanted
+with some six thousand pounds, for which Moore was liable. Many friends
+came to his aid, and after some delay and negotiations, during which he
+had to go abroad, Lord Lansdowne paid what was necessary. But Moore
+afterwards paid Lord Lansdowne, which makes a decided distinction
+between his conduct and that of Theodore Hook in a similar case.
+
+Although the days of Moore lasted for half an ordinary lifetime after
+this, they saw few important events save the imbroglio over the Byron
+memoirs. They saw also the composition of a great deal of literature and
+journalism, all very well paid, notwithstanding which, Moore seems to
+have been always in a rather unintelligible state of pecuniary distress.
+That he made his parents an allowance, as some allege in explanation,
+will not in the least account for this; for, creditable as it was in him
+to make it, this allowance did not exceed one hundred pounds a year. He
+must have spent little in an ordinary way, for his Sloperton
+establishment was of the most modest character, while his wife was an
+excellent manager, and never went into society. Probably he might have
+endorsed, if he had been asked, the great principle which somebody or
+other has formulated, that the most expensive way of living is staying
+in other peoples houses. At any rate his condition was rather precarious
+till 1835, when Lord John Russell and Lord Lansdowne obtained for him a
+Civil List pension of three hundred pounds a year. In his very last days
+this was further increased by an additional hundred a year to his wife.
+His end was not happy. The softening of the brain, which set in about
+1848, and which had been preceded for some time by premonitory symptoms,
+can hardly, as in the cases of Scott and Southey, be set down to
+overwork, for though Moore had not been idle, his literary life had been
+mere child's play to theirs. He died on 26th February 1852.
+
+Of Moore's character not much need be said, nor need what is said be
+otherwise than favourable. Not only to modern tastes, but to the
+sturdier tastes of his own day, and even of the days immediately before
+his, there was a little too much of the parasite and the hanger-on about
+him. It is easy to say that a man of his talents, when he had once
+obtained a start, might surely have gone his own way and lived his own
+life, without taking up the position of a kind of superior gamekeeper or
+steward at rich men's gates. But race, fashion, and a good many other
+things have to be taken into account; and it is fair to Moore to
+remember that he was, as it were from the first, bound to the
+chariot-wheels of "the great," and could hardly liberate himself from
+them without churlishness and violence. Moreover, it cannot possibly be
+denied by any fair critic that if he accepted to some extent the awkward
+position of led-poet, he showed in it as much independence as was
+compatible with the function. Both in money matters, in his language to
+his patrons, and in a certain general but indefinable tone of behaviour,
+he contrasts not less favourably than remarkably, both with the
+ultra-Tory Hook, to whom we have already compared him, and with the
+ultra-Radical Leigh Hunt. Moore had as little of Wagg as he had of
+Skimpole about him; though he allowed his way of life to compare in some
+respects perilously with theirs. It is only necessary to look at his
+letters to Byron--always ready enough to treat as spaniels those of his
+inferiors in station who appeared to be of the spaniel kind--to
+appreciate his general attitude, and his behaviour in this instance is
+by no means different from his behaviour in others. As a politician
+there is no doubt that he at least thought himself to be quite sincere.
+It may be that, if he had been, his political satires would have galled
+Tories more than they did then, and could hardly be read by persons of
+that persuasion with such complete enjoyment as they can now. But the
+insincerity was quite unconscious, and indeed can hardly be said to have
+been insincerity at all. Moore had not a political head, and in English
+as in Irish politics his beliefs were probably not founded on any
+clearly comprehended principles. But such as they were he held to them
+firmly. Against his domestic character nobody has ever said anything;
+and it is sufficient to observe that not a few of the best as well as of
+the greatest men of his time, Scott as well as Byron, Lord John Russell
+as well as Lord Moira, appear not only to have admired his abilities and
+liked his social qualities, but to have sincerely respected his
+character. And so we may at last find ourselves alone with the plump
+volume of poems in which we shall hardly discover with the amiable M.
+Vallat "the greatest lyric poet of England," but in which we shall find
+a poet certainly, and if not a very great poet, at any rate a poet who
+has done many things well, and one particular thing better than anybody
+else.
+
+The volume opens with "Lalla Rookh," a proceeding which, if not
+justified by chronology, is completely justified by the facts that Moore
+was to his contemporaries the author of that poem chiefly, and that it
+is by far the most considerable thing not only in mere bulk, but in
+arrangement, plan, and style, that he ever did. Perhaps I am not quite a
+fair judge of "Lalla Rookh." I was brought up in what is called a strict
+household where, though the rule was not, as far as I can remember,
+enforced by any penalties, it was a point of honour that in the nursery
+and school-room none but "Sunday books" should be read on Sunday. But
+this severity was tempered by one of the easements often occurring in a
+world which, if not the best, is certainly not the worst of all possible
+worlds. For the convenience of servants, or for some other reason, the
+children were much more in the drawing-room on Sundays than on any other
+day, and it was an unwritten rule that any book that lived in the
+drawing-room was fit Sunday-reading. The consequence was that from the
+time I could read, till childish things were put away, I used to spend a
+considerable part of the first day of the week in reading and re-reading
+a collection of books, four of which were Scott's poems, "Lalla Rookh,"
+_The Essays of Elia_ (First Edition,--I have got it now), and Southey's
+_Doctor_. Therefore it may be that I rank "Lalla Rookh" rather too high.
+At the same time, I confess that it still seems to me a very respectable
+poem indeed of the second rank. Of course it is artificial. The parade
+of second, or third, or twentieth-hand learning in the notes makes one
+smile, and the whole reminds one (as I daresay it has reminded many
+others before) of a harp of the period with the gilt a little tarnished,
+the ribbons more than a little faded, and the silk stool on which the
+young woman in ringlets used to sit much worn. All this is easy
+metaphorical criticism, if it is criticism at all. For I am not sure
+that, when the last age has got a little farther off from our
+descendants, they will see anything more ludicrous in such a harp than
+we see in the faded spinets of a generation earlier still. But much
+remains to Lalla if not to Feramorz. The prose interludes have lost none
+of their airy grace. Even Mr. Burnand has not been able to make Mokanna
+ridiculous, nor have the recent accounts of the actual waste of desert
+and felt huts banished at least the poetical beauty of "Merou's bright
+palaces and groves." There are those who laugh at the bower of roses by
+Bendemeer's stream: I do not. "Paradise and the Peri" is perhaps the
+prettiest purely sentimental poem that English or any other language can
+show. "The Fire Worshippers" are rather long, but there is a famous
+fight--more than one indeed--in them to relieve the monotony. For "The
+Light of the Harem" alone I have never been able to get up much
+enthusiasm; but even "The Light of the Harem" is a great deal better
+than Moore's subsequent attempt in the style of "Lalla Rookh," or
+something like it, "The Loves of the Angels." There is only one good
+thing that I can find to say of that: it is not so bad as the poem which
+similarity of title makes one think of in connection with
+it--Lamartine's disastrous "Chute d'un Ange."
+
+As "Lalla Rookh" is far the most important of Moore's serious poems, so
+"The Fudge Family in Paris" is far the best of his humorous poems. I do
+not forget "The Two-penny Postbag," nor many capital later verses of the
+same kind, the best of which perhaps is the Epistle from Henry of Exeter
+to John of Tchume. But "The Fudge Family" has all the merits of these,
+with a scheme and framework of dramatic character which they lack. Miss
+Biddy and her vanities, Master Bob and his guttling, the eminent
+turncoat Phil Fudge, Esq. himself and his politics, are all excellent.
+But I avow that Phelim Connor is to me the most delightful, though he
+has always been rather a puzzle. If he is intended to be a satire on the
+class now represented by the O'Briens and the McCarthys he is exquisite,
+and it is small wonder that Young Ireland has never loved Moore much.
+But I do not think that Thomas Brown the Younger meant it, or at least
+wholly meant it, as satire, and this is perhaps the best proof of his
+unpractical way of looking at politics. For Phelim Connor is a much more
+damning sketch than any of the Fudges. Vanity, gluttony, the scheming
+intrigues of eld, may not be nice things, but they are common to the
+whole human race. The hollow rant which enjoys the advantages of liberty
+and declaims against the excesses of tyranny is in its perfection Irish
+alone. However this may be, these lighter poems of Moore are great fun,
+and it is no small misfortune that the younger generation of readers
+pays so little attention to them. For they are full of acute observation
+of manners, politics, and society by an accomplished man of the world,
+put into pointed and notable form by an accomplished man of letters. Our
+fathers knew them well, and many a quotation familiar enough at second
+hand is due originally to the Fudge Family in their second appearance
+(not so good, but still good) many years later, to "The Two-penny
+Postbag" and to the long list of miscellaneous satires and skits. The
+last sentence is however to be taken as most strictly excluding
+"Corruption," "Intolerance," and "The Sceptic." "Rhymes on the Road,"
+travel-pieces out of Moore's line, may also be mercifully left aside:
+and "Evenings in Greece;" and "The Summer Fête" (any universal provider
+would have supplied as good a poem with the supper and the rout-seats)
+need not delay the critic and will not extraordinarily delight the
+reader. Not here is Moore's spur of Parnassus to be found.
+
+For that domain of his we must go to the songs which, in extraordinary
+numbers, make up the whole of the divisions headed Irish Melodies,
+National Airs, Sacred Songs, Ballads and Songs, and some of the finest
+of which are found outside these divisions in the longer poems from
+"Lalla Rookh" downwards. The singular musical melody of these pieces has
+never been seriously denied by any one, but it seems to be thought,
+especially nowadays, that because they are musically melodious they are
+not poetical. It is probably useless to protest against a prejudice
+which, where it is not due to simple thoughtlessness or to blind
+following of fashion, argues a certain constitutional defect of the
+understanding powers. But it may be just necessary to repeat pretty
+firmly that any one who regards, even with a tincture of contempt, such
+work (to take various characteristic examples) as Dryden's lyrics, as
+Shenstone's, as Moore's, as Macaulay's Lays, because he thinks that, if
+he did not contemn them, his worship of Shakespeare, of Shelley, of
+Wordsworth would be suspect, is most emphatically not a critic of poetry
+and not even a catholic lover of it. Which said, let us betake ourselves
+to seeing what Moore's special virtue is. It is acknowledged that it
+consists partly in marrying music most happily to verse; but what is not
+so fully acknowledged as it ought to be is, that it also consists in
+marrying music not merely to verse, but to poetry. Among the more
+abstract questions of poetical criticism few are more interesting than
+this, the connection of what may be called musical music with poetical
+music; and it is one which has not been much discussed. Let us take the
+two greatest of Moore's own contemporaries in lyric, the two greatest
+lyrists as some think (I give no opinion on this) in English, and
+compare their work with his. Shelley has the poetical music in an
+unsurpassable and sometimes in an almost unapproached degree, but his
+verse is admittedly very difficult to set to music. I should myself go
+farther and say that it has in it some indefinable quality antagonistic
+to such setting. Except the famous Indian Serenade, I do not know any
+poem of Shelley's that has been set with anything approaching to
+success, and in the best setting that I know of this the honeymoon of
+the marriage turns into a "red moon" before long. That this is not
+merely due to the fact that Shelley likes intricate metres any one who
+examines Moore can see. That it is due merely to the fact that Shelley,
+as we know from Peacock, was almost destitute of any ear for music is
+the obvious and common explanation. But neither will this serve, for we
+happen also to know that Burns, whose lyric, of a higher quality than
+Moore's, assorts with music as naturally as Moore's own, was quite as
+deficient as Shelley in this respect. So was Scott, who could yet write
+admirable songs to be sung. It seems therefore almost impossible, on the
+comparison of these three instances, to deny the existence of some
+peculiar musical music in poetry, which is distinct from poetical music,
+though it may coexist with it or may be separated from it, and which is
+independent both of technical musical training and even of what is
+commonly called "ear" in the poet. That Moore possessed it in probably
+the highest degree, will I think, hardly be denied. It never seems to
+have mattered to him whether he wrote the words for the air or altered
+the air to suit the words. The two fit like a glove, and if, as is
+sometimes the case, the same or a similar poetical measure is heard set
+to another air than Moore's, this other always seems intrusive and
+wrong. He draws attention in one case to the extraordinary irregularity
+of his own metre (an irregularity to which the average pindaric is a
+mere jog-trot), yet the air fits it exactly. Of course the two feet
+which most naturally go to music, the anapæst and the trochee, are
+commonest with him; but the point is that he seems to find no more
+difficulty, if he does not take so much pleasure, in setting
+combinations of a very different kind. Nor is this peculiar gift by any
+means unimportant from the purely poetical side, the side on which the
+verse is looked at without any regard to air or accompaniment. For the
+great drawback to "songs to be sung" in general since Elizabethan days
+(when, as Mr. Arber and Mr. Bullen have shown, it was very different)
+has been the constant tendency of the verse-writer to sacrifice to his
+musical necessities either meaning or poetic sound or both. The climax
+of this is of course reached in the ineffable balderdash which usually
+does duty for the libretto of an opera, but it is quite as noticeable in
+the ordinary songs of the drawing-room. Now Moore is quite free from
+this blame. He may not have the highest and rarest strokes of poetic
+expression; but at any rate he seldom or never sins against either
+reason or poetry for the sake of rhythm and rhyme. He is always the
+master not the servant, the artist not the clumsy craftsman. And this I
+say not by any means as one likely to pardon poetical shortcomings in
+consideration of musical merit, for, shameful as the confession may be,
+a little music goes a long way with me; and what music I do like, is
+rather of the kind opposite to Moore's facile styles. Yet it is easy,
+even from the musical view, to exaggerate his facility. Berlioz is not
+generally thought a barrel-organ composer, and he bestowed early and
+particular pains on Moore.
+
+To many persons, however, the results are more interesting than the
+analysis of their qualities and principles; so let us go to the songs
+themselves. To my fancy the three best of Moore's songs, and three of
+the finest songs in any language, are "Oft in the stilly Night," "When
+in Death I shall calm recline," and "I saw from the Beach." They all
+exemplify what has been pointed out above, the complete adaptation of
+words to music and music to words, coupled with a decidedly high quality
+of poetical merit in the verse, quite apart from the mere music. It can
+hardly be necessary to quote them, for they are or ought to be familiar
+to everybody; but in selecting these three I have no intention of
+distinguishing them in point of general excellence from scores, nay
+hundreds of others. "Go where Glory waits thee" is the first of the
+Irish melodies, and one of those most hackneyed by the enthusiasm of
+bygone Pogsons. But its merit ought in no way to suffer on that account
+with persons who are not Pogsons. It ought to be possible for the
+reader, it is certainly possible for the critic, to dismiss Pogson
+altogether, to wave Pogson off, and to read anything as if it had never
+been read before. If this be done we shall hardly wonder at the delight
+which our fathers, who will not compare altogether badly with ourselves,
+took in Thomas Moore. "When he who adores thee" is supposed on pretty
+good evidence to have been inspired by the most hollow and senseless of
+all pseudo-patriotic delusions, a delusion of which the best thing that
+can be said is that "the pride of thus dying for" it has been about the
+last thing that it ever did inspire, and that most persons who have
+suffered from it have usually had the good sense to take lucrative
+places from the tyrant as soon as they could get them, and to live
+happily ever after. But the basest, the most brutal, and the bloodiest
+of Saxons may recognise in Moore's poem the expression of a possible, if
+not a real, feeling given with infinite grace and pathos. The same
+string reverberates even in the thrice and thousand times hackneyed Harp
+of Tara. "Rich and rare were the Gems she wore" is chiefly comic opera,
+but it is very pretty comic opera; and the two pieces "There is not in
+the wide world" and "How dear to me" exemplify, for the first but by no
+means for the last time, Moore's extraordinary command of the last
+phase of that curious thing called by the century that gave him birth
+Sensibility. We have turned Sensibility out of doors; but he would be a
+rash man who should say that we have not let in seven worse devils of
+the gushing kind in her comparatively innocent room.
+
+Then we may skip not a few pieces, only referring once more to "The
+Legacy" ("When in Death I shall calm recline"), an anacreontic quite
+unsurpassable in its own kind. We need dwell but briefly on such pieces
+as "Believe me if all those endearing young Charms," which is typical of
+much that Moore wrote, but does not reach the true devil-may-care note
+of Suckling, or as "By the Hope within us springing," for Moore's
+war-like pieces are seldom or never good. But with "Love's Young Dream"
+we come back to the style of which it is impossible to say less than
+that it is quite admirable in its kind. Then after a page or two we come
+to the chief _cruces_ of Moore's pathetic and of his comic manner, "The
+Last Rose of Summer," "The Young May Moon," and "The Minstrel Boy." I
+cannot say very much for the last, which is tainted with the unreality
+of all Moore's Tyrtean efforts; but "The Young May Moon" could not be
+better, and I am not going to abandon the Rose, for all her perfume be
+something musty--a _pot-pourri_ rose rather than a fresh one. The song
+of O'Ruark with its altogether fatal climax--
+
+    On our side is virtue and Erin,
+    On theirs is the Saxon and guilt--
+
+(which carries with it the delightful reflection that it was an Irishman
+running away with an Irishwoman that occasioned this sweeping moral
+contrast) must be given up; but surely not so "Oh had we some bright
+little Isle of our own." For indeed if one only had some bright little
+isle of that kind, some _rive fidèle où l'on aime toujours_, and where
+things in general are adjusted to such a state, then would Thomas Moore
+be the Laureate of that bright and tight little island.
+
+But it is alarming to find that we have not yet got through twenty-five
+pages out of some hundred or two, and that the Irish Melodies are not
+yet nearly exhausted. Not a few of the best known of Moore's songs,
+including "Oft in the stilly Night," are to be found in the division of
+National Airs, which is as a whole a triumph of that extraordinary
+genius for setting which has been already noticed. Here is "Flow on thou
+shining River," here the capital "When I touch the String," on which
+Thackeray loved to make variations. But "Oft in the stilly Night" itself
+is far above the others. We do not say "stilly" now: we have been taught
+by Coleridge (who used to use it freely himself before he laughed at it)
+to laugh at "stilly" and "paly" and so forth. But the most acrimonious
+critic may be challenged to point out another weakness of the same kind,
+and on the whole the straightforward simplicity of the phrase equals
+the melody of the rhythm.
+
+The Sacred Songs need not delay us long; for they are not better than
+sacred songs in general, which is saying remarkably little. Perhaps the
+most interesting thing in them is the well-known couplet,
+
+    This world is but a fleeting show
+    For man's illusion given--
+
+which, as has justly been observed, contains one of the most singular
+estimates of the divine purpose anywhere to be found. But Moore might,
+like Mr. Midshipman Easy, have excused himself by remarking, "Ah! well,
+I don't understand these things." The miscellaneous division of Ballads,
+Songs, etc., is much more fruitful. "The Leaf and the Fountain,"
+beginning "Tell me, kind seer, I pray thee," though rather long, is
+singularly good of its kind--the kind of half-narrative ballad. So in a
+lighter strain is "The Indian Bark." Nor is Moore less at home after his
+own fashion in the songs from the Anthology. It is true that the same
+fault which has been found with his Anacreon may be found here, and that
+it is all the more sensible because at least in some cases the originals
+are much higher poetry than the pseudo-Teian. To the form and style of
+Meleager Moore could not pretend; but as these are rather songs on Greek
+motives than translations from the Greek, the slackness and dilution
+matter less. But the strictly miscellaneous division holds some of the
+best work. We could no doubt dispense with the well-known ditty (for
+once very nearly the "rubbish" with which Moore is so often and so
+unjustly charged) where Posada rhymes of necessity to Granada, and
+where, quite against the author's habit, the ridiculous term "Sultana"
+is fished out to do similar duty in reference to the Dulcinea, or rather
+to the Maritornes, of a muleteer. But this is quite an exception, and as
+a rule the facile verse is as felicitous as it is facile. Perhaps no one
+stands out very far above the rest; perhaps all have more or less the
+mark of easy variations on a few well-known themes. The old comparison
+that they are as numerous as motes, as bright, as fleeting, and as
+individually insignificant, comes naturally enough to the mind. But then
+they are very numerous, they are very bright, and if they are fleeting,
+their number provides plenty more to take the place of that which passes
+away. Nor is it by any means true that they lack individual
+significance.
+
+This enumeration of a few out of many ornaments of Moore's muse will of
+course irritate those who object to the "brick-of-the-house" mode of
+criticism; while it may not be minute enough, or sufficiently bolstered
+by actual quotation, to please those who hold that simple extract is the
+best, if not the only tolerable form of criticism. But the critic is not
+alone in finding that, whether he carry his ass or ride upon it, he
+cannot please all his public. What has been said is probably enough, in
+the case of a writer whose work, though as a whole rather unjustly
+forgotten, survives in parts more securely even than the work of greater
+men, to remind readers of at least the outlines and bases of his claim
+to esteem. And the more those outlines are followed up, and the
+structure founded on those bases is examined, the more certain, I think,
+is Moore of recovering, not the position which M. Vallat would assign to
+him of the greatest lyrist of England (a position which he never held
+and never could hold except with very prejudiced or very incompetent
+judges), not that of the equal of Scott or Byron or Shelley or
+Wordsworth, but still a position high enough and singularly isolated at
+its height. Viewed from the point of strictly poetical criticism, he no
+doubt ranks only with those poets who have expressed easily and
+acceptably the likings and passions and thoughts and fancies of the
+average man, and who have expressed these with no extraordinary cunning
+or witchery. To go further in limitation, the average man, of whom he is
+thus the bard, is a rather sophisticated average man, without very deep
+thoughts or feelings, without a very fertile or fresh imagination or
+fancy, with even a touch--a little touch--of cant and "gush" and other
+defects incident to average and sophisticated humanity. But this
+humanity is at any time and every time no small portion of humanity at
+large, and it is to Moore's credit that he sings its feelings and its
+thoughts so as always to get the human and durable element in them
+visible and audible through the "trappings of convention." Again, he has
+that all-saving touch of humour which enables him, sentimentalist as he
+is, to be an admirable comedian as well. Yet again, he has at least
+something of the two qualities which one must demand of a poet who is a
+poet, and not a mere maker of rhymes. His note of feeling, if not full
+or deep, is true and real. His faculty of expression is not only
+considerable, but it is also distinguished; it is a faculty which in the
+same measure and degree nobody else has possessed. On one side he had
+the gift of singing those admirable songs of which we have been talking.
+On the other, he had the gift of right satiric verse to a degree which
+only three others of the great dead men of this century in
+England--Canning, Praed, and Thackeray--have reached. Besides all this,
+he was a "considerable man of letters." But your considerable men of
+letters, after flourishing, turn to dust in their season, and other
+considerable or inconsiderable men of letters spring out of it. The true
+poets and even the true satirists abide, and both as a poet and a
+satirist Thomas Moore abides and will abide with them.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[14] _Etude sur la Vie et les Oeuvres de Thomas Moore_; by Gustave
+Vallat. Paris: Rousseau. London: Asher and Co. Dublin: Hodges, Figgis,
+and Co. 1887.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+LEIGH HUNT
+
+
+To compare the peaceful and home-keeping art of criticism to the
+adventurous one of lighthouse-building may seem an excursion into the
+heroi-comic, if not into the tragic-burlesque. Neither is it in the
+least my intention to dwell on a tolerably obvious metaphorical
+resemblance between the two. It is certainly the business of the critic
+to warn others off from the mistakes which have been committed by his
+forerunners, and perhaps (for let us anticipate the crushing wit) from
+his own. But that is not my reason for the suggestion. There is a story
+of I forget what lighthouse which Smeaton, or Stevenson, or somebody
+else, had unusual difficulty in establishing. The rock was too near the
+surface for it to be safe or practicable to moor barges over it; and it
+was uncovered for too short a time to enable any solid foundations to be
+laid or even begun during one tide. So the engineer, with other
+adventurous persons, got himself landed on it, succeeded after a vain
+attempt or two in working an iron rod into the middle, and then hung on
+bodily while the tide was up, that he and his men might begin again as
+soon as it receded. In a mild and unexciting fashion, that is what the
+critic has to do--to dig about till he makes a lodgment in his author,
+hang on to it, and then begin to build. It is not always very easy work,
+and it is never less easy than in the case of the author whom somebody
+has kindly called "the Ariel of criticism." Leigh Hunt is an extremely
+difficult person upon whom to make any critical lodgment, for the reason
+that (I do not intend any disrespect by the comparison) he has much less
+of the rock about him than of the shifting sand. I do not now speak of
+the great Skimpole problem--we shall come to that presently--but merely
+of the writer as shown in his works.
+
+The works themselves are not particularly easy to get together in any
+complete form, some of them being almost inextricably entangled in
+defunct periodicals, and others reappearing in different guises in the
+author's many published volumes. Mr. Kent's bibliography gives forty-six
+different entries; Mr. Alexander Ireland's (to which he refers) gives, I
+think, over eighty. Some years ago I remember receiving the catalogue of
+a second-hand bookseller who offered what he very frankly confessed to
+be far from a complete collection of the first editions, at the price of
+a score or two of pounds; and here at least the first are in some cases
+the only issues. Probably this is one reason why selections from Leigh
+Hunt, of which Mr. Kent's is the latest and best, have been frequent. I
+have seen two certainly, and I think three, within as many years.
+Luckily, however, quite enough for the reader's if not for the critic's
+purpose is easily obtainable. The poems can be bought in more forms than
+one; Messrs. Smith and Elder have reprinted cheaply the "Autobiography,"
+"Men, Women, and Books," "Imagination and Fancy," "The Town," "Wit and
+Humour," "Table Talk," and "A Jar of Honey." Other reprints of "One
+Hundred Romances of Real Life" (one of his merest pieces of book-making)
+and of his "Stories from the Italian Poets," one of his worst pieces of
+criticism, but agreeably reproduced in every respect save the hideous
+American spelling, have recently appeared. The complete and uniform
+issue, the want of which to some lovers of books (I own myself among
+them) is never quite made up by a scratch company of volumes of all
+dates, sizes, and prints, is indeed wanting. But still you can get a
+working Leigh Hunt together.
+
+It is when you have got him that your trouble begins; and before it is
+done the critic, if he be one of those who are not satisfied with a mere
+_compte rendu_, is likely to acknowledge that Leigh Hunt, if "Ariel" be
+in some respects too complimentary a name for him, is at any rate a
+most tricksy spirit. The finest taste in some ways, contrasting with
+what can only be called the most horrible vulgarity in others; a light
+hand tediously boring again and again at obviously miscomprehended
+questions of religion, philosophy, and politics; a keen appetite for
+humour condescending to thin and repeated jests; a reviler of kings
+going out of his way laboriously to beslaver royalty; a man of letters,
+of talent almost touching genius, who seldom writes a dozen consecutive
+good pages:--these are only some of the inconsistencies that meet us in
+Leigh Hunt.
+
+He has related the history of his immediate and remoter forbears with
+considerable minuteness--with more minuteness indeed by far than he has
+bestowed upon all but a few passages of his own life. For the general
+reader, however, it is quite sufficient to know that his father, the
+Reverend Isaac Hunt, who belonged to a clerical family in Barbados, went
+for his education to the still British Provinces of North America,
+married a Philadelphia girl, Mary Shewell, practised as a lawyer till
+the Revolution broke out, and then being driven from his adopted country
+as a loyalist, settled in England, took orders, drifted into
+Unitarianism or anythingarianism, and ended his days, after not
+infrequent visits to the King's Bench, comfortably enough, but hanging
+rather loose on society, his friends, and a pension. Leigh Hunt (his
+godfathers and godmothers gave him also the names of James Henry, which
+he dropped) was the youngest son, and was born on 19th October 1784. His
+best youthful remembrance, and one of the most really humorous things he
+ever said, was that he used, after a childish indulgence in bad
+language, to think to himself with a shudder when he received any mark
+of favour, "Ah! they little suspect I'm the boy who said 'd----n.'" But
+at seven years old he went to Christ's Hospital, and continued there for
+another seven. His reminiscences of that seminary, put down pretty
+early, and afterwards embodied in the "Autobiography," are even better
+known from the fact that they served as a text, and as the occasion of a
+little gentle raillery, to Elia's famous essay than in themselves. For
+some years after leaving school he did nothing definite but write
+verses, which his father (who seems to have been gifted with a plentiful
+lack of judgment in most incidents and relations of life) published when
+the boy was but sixteen. They are as nearly as possible valueless, but
+they went through three editions in a very short time. It ought to be
+remembered that except Cowper, who was just dead, and Crabbe, who had
+for years intermitted writing, the public had only Rogers and Southey
+for poets, for it would none of the "Lyrical Ballads," and the "Lay of
+the Last Minstrel" had not yet been published. So that it did not make
+one of its worst mistakes in taking up Leigh Hunt, who certainly had
+poetry in him, if he did not put it forth quite so early as this. He was
+made a kind of lion, but, fortunately or unfortunately for him, only in
+middle-class circles where there were no patrons. He was quite an old
+man--nearly twenty--when he made regular entry into the periodical
+writing which kept him (with the aid of his friends) for nearly sixty
+years. "Mr. Town, Junior" (altered from an old signature of Colman's)
+contributed theatrical criticisms, which do not seem to have been paid
+for, to an evening paper, the _Traveller_, now surviving as a second
+title to the _Globe_. His bent in this direction was assisted by the
+fact that his elder brother John had been apprenticed to a printer, and
+had desires to be a publisher. In January 1808 the two brothers started
+the _Examiner_, and Leigh Hunt edited it with a great deal of courage
+for fourteen years. He threw away for this the only piece of solid
+preferment that he ever had, a clerkship in the War Office which
+Addington gave him. The references to this act of recklessness or
+self-sacrifice in the Autobiography are rather enigmatical. His two
+functions were no doubt incompatible at best, especially considering the
+violent Opposition tone which the _Examiner_ took. But Leigh Hunt,
+whatever faults he had, was not quite a hypocrite; and he hints pretty
+broadly that if he had not resigned he might have been asked to do so,
+not from any political reasons, but simply because he did his work very
+badly. He was much more at home in the _Examiner_ (with which for a
+short time was joined the quarterly _Reflector_), though his warmest
+admirers candidly admit that he knew nothing about politics. In 1809 he
+married a Miss Marianne Kent, whose station was not very exalted, and
+whose son admits with unusual frankness that she was "the reverse of
+handsome, and without accomplishments," adding rather whimsically that
+this person, "the reverse of handsome," had "a pretty figure, beautiful
+black hair and magnificent eyes," and though "without accomplishments"
+had "a very strong natural turn for plastic art." At any rate she seems
+to have suited Leigh Hunt admirably. The _Examiner_ soon became
+ill-noted with Government, but it was not till the end of 1812 that a
+grip could be got of it. Leigh Hunt's offence is in the ordinary books
+rather undervalued. That he (or his contributor) called the Prince
+Regent, as is commonly said, "a fat Adonis of fifty" (the exact words
+are, "this Adonis in loveliness is a corpulent man of fifty") may have
+been the chief sting, but was certainly not the chief legal offence.
+Leigh Hunt called the ruler of his country "a violator of his word, a
+libertine over head and ears in disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties,
+the companion of demi-reps, a man who had just closed half a century
+without one single claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect
+of posterity." It might be true or it might be false; but certainly
+there was then not a country in Europe where it would have been allowed
+to be said of the chief of the state. And I am not sure that it could be
+said now anywhere but in Ireland, where considerably worse things were
+said with impunity of Lord Spencer and Sir George Trevelyan. At any rate
+the brothers were prosecuted and fined five hundred pounds each, with
+two years' imprisonment. The sentence was carried out; but Leigh Hunt's
+imprisonment in Horsemonger Lane Gaol was the merest farce of
+incarceration. He could not indeed go beyond the prison walls. But he
+had a comfortable suite of rooms which he was permitted to furnish and
+decorate just as he liked; he was allowed to have his wife and family
+with him; he had a tiny garden of his own, and free access to that of
+the prison; there was no restriction on visitors, who brought him
+presents just as they chose; and he became a kind of fashion with the
+Opposition. Jeremy Bentham came and played at battledore and shuttlecock
+with him--an almost appalling idea, for it will not do to trust too
+implicitly to Leigh Hunt's declaration that Jeremy's object was to
+suggest "an improvement in the constitution of shuttlecocks." The
+_Examiner_ itself continued undisturbed, and except for the "I can't get
+out" feeling, which even of itself cannot be compared for one moment to
+that of a modern prisoner condemned to his cell and the
+exercising-ground, it is rather difficult to see much reason for Leigh
+Hunt's complaints. The imprisonment may have affected his health, but it
+certainly brought him troops of friends, and gave him leisure to do not
+only his journalist's work, but things much more serious. Here he wrote
+and published his first poem since the Juvenilia, "A Feast of the Poets"
+(not much of a thing), and here he wrote, though he did not publish it
+till his liberation, the "Story of Rimini," by far his most important
+poem, both for intrinsic character and for influence on others. He had
+known Lamb from boyhood, and Shelley some years; he now made the
+acquaintance of Keats, Hazlitt, and Byron.
+
+In the next five years after his liberation he did a great deal of work,
+the best by far being the periodical called the _Indicator_, a weekly
+paper which ran for sixty-six numbers. The _Indicator_ was the first
+thing that I ever read of Hunt's, and, by no means for that reason only,
+I think it the best. Its buttonholing papers, of a kind since widely
+imitated, were the most popular; but there are romantic things in it,
+such as "The Daughter of Hippocrates" (paraphrased and expanded from Sir
+John Mandeville with Hunt's peculiar skill), which seem to me better. It
+was at the end of these five years that Leigh Hunt resolved upon the
+second adventure (his imprisonment being the first and involuntary) of
+his otherwise easy-going life--an adventure the immediate consequences
+of which were unfortunate in many ways, but which supplied him with a
+good deal of literary material. This was his visit to Italy as a kind of
+literary _attaché_ to Lord Byron, and editor of a quarterly magazine,
+the _Liberal_. The idea was Shelley's, and if Shelley had lived, it
+might not have resulted quite so disastrously, for Shelley was
+absolutely untiring as a helper of lame dogs over stiles. As it was, the
+excursion distinctly contradicted the saying (condemned by some as
+immoral) that a bad beginning makes a good ending. The Hunt family,
+which now included several children, embarked, in November of all months
+in the year, on a small ship bound for Italy. They were something like a
+month getting down the Channel in tremendous weather, and at last when
+their ship had to turn tail from near Scilly and run into Dartmouth,
+Hunt, whose wife was extremely ill of lung-disease, made up his mind to
+stay for the winter in Devonshire. He passed the time pleasantly enough
+at Plymouth, which they left once more in May 1822, reaching Leghorn at
+the end of June. Shelley's death happened within ten days of their
+arrival, and Byron and Leigh Hunt were left to get on together. How
+badly they got on is pretty generally known, might have been foreseen
+from the beginning, and is not very profitable to dwell on. Leigh Hunt's
+mixture of familiarity and "airs" could not have been worse mixed to
+suit the taste of Byron. The "noble poet" too was not a person who liked
+to be spunged upon; and his coolest admirers may sympathise with his
+disgust when he found that he had upon his hands a man of letters with a
+large family whom he was literally expected to keep, whose society was
+disagreeable to him, who lampooned his friends, who differed with him on
+every point of taste, and who did not think it necessary to be grateful.
+For Leigh Hunt, somewhat on Lamb's system of compensation for coming
+late by going away early, combined his readiness to receive favours with
+a practice of not acknowledging the slightest obligation for them.
+Byron's departure for Greece was in its way lucky, but it left Hunt
+stranded. He remained in Italy for rather more than three years and then
+returned home across the Continent. The _Liberal_, which contains work
+of his, of Byron's, of Shelley's, and of Hazlitt's, is interesting
+enough and worth buying in its original form, but it did not pay. Of the
+unlucky book on his relations with Byron which followed--the worst act
+by far of his life--I shall not say much. No one has attempted to defend
+it, and he himself apologises for it frankly and fully in his
+Autobiography. It is impossible, however, not to remark that the offence
+was much aggravated by its deliberate character. For the book was not
+published in the heat of the moment, but three years after Hunt's return
+to England and four after Byron's death.
+
+The remaining thirty years of Hunt's life were wholly literary. As for
+residences, he hovered about London, living successively at Highgate,
+Epsom, Brompton, Chelsea, Kensington, and divers other places. At
+Chelsea he was very intimate with the Carlyles, and, while he was
+perhaps of all living men of letters most leniently judged by those not
+particularly lenient judges, we have nowhere such vivid glimpses of
+Hunt's peculiar weaknesses as in the memoirs of Carlyle and his wife.
+Why Leigh Hunt was always in such difficulties is not at first obvious,
+for he was the reverse of an idle man; he seems, though thriftless, to
+have been by no means very sumptuous in his way of living; everybody
+helped him, and his writing was always popular. He appears to have felt
+not a little sore that nothing was done for him when his political
+friends came into power after the Reform Bill--and remained there for
+almost the whole of the rest of his life. He had certainly in some
+senses borne the burden and heat of the day for Liberalism. But he was
+one of those reckless people who, without meaning to offend anybody in
+particular, offend friends as well as foes; the days of sinecures were
+even then passing or passed; and it is very difficult to conceive any
+office, even with the lightest duties, in which Leigh Hunt would not
+have come to grief. As for his writing, his son's earnest plea as to his
+not being an idle man is no doubt true enough, but he never seems to
+have reconciled himself to the regular drudgery of miscellaneous
+article writing for newspapers which is almost the only kind of
+journalism that really pays, and his books did not sell very largely. In
+his latter days, however, things became easier for him. The unfailing
+kindness of the Shelley family gave him (in 1844 when Sir Percy Shelley
+came into his property) a regular annuity of £120; two royal gifts of
+£200 each and in 1847 a pension of the same amount were added; and two
+benefit nights of Dickens's famous amateur company brought him in
+something like a cool thousand, as Dickens himself would have said. Of
+his last years Mr. Kent, who was intimate with him, gives much the
+pleasantest account known to me. He died on 28th August 1859, surviving
+his wife only two years.
+
+I can imagine some one, at the name of Dickens in the preceding
+paragraph, thinking or saying, that if the author of _Bleak House_
+raised a thousand pounds for his old friend, he took the value of it and
+infinitely more out of him. It is impossible to shirk the Skimpole
+affair in any really critical notice of Leigh Hunt. To put unpleasant
+things briefly, that famous character was at once recognised by every
+one as a caricature, perhaps ill-natured but certainly brilliant, of
+what an enemy might have said of the author of "Rimini." Thornton Hunt,
+the eldest of Leigh Hunt's children, and a writer of no small power,
+took the matter up and forced from Dickens a contradiction, or
+disavowal, with which I am afraid the recording angel must have had
+some little difficulty. Strangely enough the last words of Macaulay's
+that we have concern this affair; and they may be quoted as Sir George
+Trevelyan gives them, written by his uncle in those days at Holly Lodge
+when the shadow of death was heavy on him.
+
+    _December 23, 1859._ An odd declaration by Dickens that he did
+    not mean Leigh Hunt by Harold Skimpole. Yet he owns that he took
+    the light externals of the character from Leigh Hunt, and surely
+    it is by those light externals that the bulk of mankind will
+    always recognise character. Besides, it is to be observed that
+    the vices of H. S. are vices to which L. H. had, to say the
+    least, some little leaning, and which the world generally
+    attributed to him most unsparingly. That he had loose notions of
+    _meum_ and _tuum_; that he had no high feeling of independence;
+    that he had no sense of obligation; that he took money wherever
+    he could get it; that he felt no gratitude for it; that he was
+    just as ready to defame a person who had relieved his distress
+    as a person who had refused him relief--these were things which,
+    as Dickens must have known, were said, truly or falsely, about
+    L. H., and had made a deep impression on the public mind.
+
+Now Macaulay has not always been leniently judged; but I do not think
+that, with the single exception of Croker's case, he can be accused of
+having borne hardly on the moral character of any one of his
+contemporaries. He had befriended Leigh Hunt in every way; he had got
+him into the _Edinburgh_; he had lent (that is to say given) him money
+freely, and I do not think that his fiercest enemy can seriously think
+that he bore Hunt a grudge for having told him, as he himself records,
+that the "Lays" were not so good as Spenser, whom Macaulay in one of the
+rare lapses of his memory had unjustly blasphemed, and whom Leigh Hunt
+adored. To my mind, if there were any doubt about Dickens's intention,
+or about the fitting in a certain sense of the cap, this testimony of
+Macaulay's would settle it. But I cannot conceive any doubt remaining in
+the mind of any person who has read Leigh Hunt's works, who has even
+read the Autobiography. Of the grossest faults in Skimpole's character,
+such as the selling of Jo's secret, Leigh Hunt was indeed incapable, and
+the insertion of these is at once a blot on Dickens's memory and a kind
+of excuse for his disclaimer; but as regards the lighter touches the
+likeness is unmistakable. Skimpole's most elaborate jests about "pounds"
+are hardly an exaggeration of the man who gravely and more than once
+tells us that his difficulties and irregularities with money came from a
+congenital incapacity to appreciate arithmetic, and who admits that
+Shelley (whose affairs he knew very well) once gave him no less than
+fourteen hundred pounds (that is to say some sixteen months of Shelley's
+income at his wealthiest) to clear him, and that he was not cleared,
+though apparently he gave Shelley to understand that he was.
+
+There are many excuses for him which Skimpole had not. His own pleas of
+tropical blood and so forth will not greatly avail. But the old
+patron-theory and its more subtle transformation (the influence of
+which is sometimes shown even by Thackeray in the act of denouncing it),
+to the effect that the State or the public, or somebody, is bound to
+look after your man of genius, had bitten deep into the being of the
+literary man of our grandfathers' time. Anybody who has read _Thomas
+Poole and his Friends_ must have seen how not merely Coleridge, of whose
+known liability to the weakness the book furnished new proofs, but even,
+to some extent and vicariously, the austere Wordsworth, cherished the
+idea. But for the most part, men kept it to themselves. Leigh Hunt never
+could keep anything to himself, and he has left record on record of the
+easy manner in which he acted on his beliefs.
+
+For this I own that I care little, especially since he never borrowed
+money of me. There is a Statute of Limitations for all such things in
+letters as well as in law. What is much harder to forgive is the
+ill-bred pertness, often if not always innocent enough in intention, but
+rather the worse than the better for that, which mars so much of his
+actual literary work. When almost an old man he wrote--when a very old
+man he quotes, with childlike surprise that any one should see anything
+objectionable in them--the following lines:
+
+    Perhaps you have known what it is to feel longings,
+    To pat buxom shoulders at routs and mad throngings--
+    Well--think what it was at a vision like that!
+    A grace after dinner! a Venus grown fat!
+
+It would be almost unbelievable of any man but Leigh Hunt that he
+placidly remarks in reference to this impertinence that "he had not the
+pleasure of Lady Blessington's acquaintance," as if that did not make
+things ten times worse. He had laid the foundation of not a few of the
+literary enmities he suffered from, by writing, thirty years earlier, a
+"Feast of the Poets," on the pattern of Suckling, in which he took,
+though much more excusably, the same kind of ill-bred liberties; and
+similar things abound in his works. It is scarcely surprising that the
+good Macvey Napier (rather awkwardly, and giving Macaulay much trouble
+to patch things up) should have said that he would like a
+"gentleman-like" article from Mr. Hunt for the _Edinburgh_; and the
+taunt about the Cockney School undoubtedly derived its venom from this
+weakness of his. Lamb was not descended from the kings that long the
+Tuscan sceptre swayed, and had some homely ways; Keats had to do with
+livery-stables, Hazlitt with shady lodging-houses and lodging-house
+keepers. But Keats might have been, whatever his weaknesses, his own and
+Spenser's Sir Calidore for gentle feeling and conduct; the man who
+called Lamb vulgar would only prove his own vulgarity; and Hazlitt,
+though he had some darker stains on his character than any that rest on
+Hunt, was far too potent a spirit for the fire within him not to burn
+out mere vulgarity. Leigh Hunt I fear must be allowed to be now and
+then merely vulgar--a Pogson of talent, of genius, of immense
+amiability, of rather hard luck, but still of the Pogsons, Pogsonic.
+
+As I shall have plenty of good to say of him, I may as well despatch at
+once whatever else I have to say that is bad, which is little. The
+faults of taste which have just been noticed passed easily into
+occasional, though only occasional, faults of criticism. I do not
+recommend anybody who has not the faculty of critical adjustment, and
+who wants to like Leigh Hunt, to read his essay on Dante in the _Italian
+Poets_. For flashes of crass insensibility to great poetry it is
+difficult to match anywhere, and impossible to match in Leigh Hunt. His
+favourite theological doctrine, like that of Béranger's hero, was, _Ne
+damnons personne_. He did not like monarchy, and he did not understand
+metaphysics. So the great poet, who, more than any other great poet
+except Shakespeare, grows on those who read him, receives from Leigh
+Hunt not an honest confession, like Sir Walter's, that he does not like
+him, which is perhaps the first honest impression of the majority of
+Dante's readers, but tirade upon tirade of abuse and bad criticism.
+Further, Leigh Hunt's unfortunate necessity of preserving his own
+journalism has made him keep a thousand things that he ought to have
+left to the kindly shade of the newspaper files--a cemetery where, thank
+Heaven, the tombs are not open as in the other city of Dis. The book
+called _Table Talk_, for instance, contains, with a little better
+matter, chiefly mere rubbish like this section:
+
+    BEAUMARCHAIS
+
+    Beaumarchais, author of the celebrated comedy of "Figaro," an
+    abridgment of which has been rendered more famous by the music
+    of Mozart, made a large fortune by supplying the American
+    republicans with arms and ammunition, and lost it by
+    speculations in salt and printing. His comedy is one of those
+    productions which are accounted dangerous, from developing the
+    spirit of intrigue and gallantry with more gaiety than
+    objection; and they would be more unanimously so, if the good
+    humour and self-examination to which they excite did not suggest
+    a spirit of charity and inquiry beyond themselves.
+
+Leigh Hunt tried almost every conceivable kind of literature, including
+a historical novel, _Sir Ralph Esher_, several dramas (one or two of
+which, the "Legend of Florence" being the chief, got acted), and at
+nearly the beginning and nearly the end of his career two religious
+works, or works on religion, an attack on Methodism and "The Religion of
+the Heart." All this we may not unkindly brush away, and consider him
+first as a poet, secondly as a critic, and thirdly as what can be best,
+though rather unphilosophically, called a miscellanist.
+
+Few good judges nowadays, I think, would deny that Leigh Hunt had a
+certain faculty for poetry, and fewer still would rank it very high. To
+something like, but less than, the tunefulness of Moore, he joined a
+very much better taste in models and an infinitely wider and deeper
+study of them. There is no doubt that his versification in "Rimini"
+(which may be described as Chaucerian in basis with a strong admixture
+of Dryden, further crossed and dashed slightly with the peculiar music
+of the followers of Spenser, especially Browne and Wither) had a very
+strong influence both on Keats and on Shelley, and that it drew from
+them music much better than itself. This fluent, musical, many-coloured
+verse was a capital medium for tale-telling, and Leigh Hunt is always at
+his best when he employs it. The more varied measures and the more
+ambitious aim of "Captain Sword and Captain Pen" seem to me very much
+less successful. Not only was Leigh Hunt far from strong enough for a
+serious argument, but the cheery, sentimental optimism of which he was
+one of the most persevering exponents--the kind of thing which
+vehemently protests that in the good time coming nobody shall be damned,
+or starved, or put in prison, or subjected to the perils of villainous
+saltpetre, or prevented from doing just what he likes, and that all
+existence ought to be and shortly will be a vaguely refined beer and
+skittles--did not lend itself very well to verse. Nor are Hunt's lyrics
+particularly strong. His best thing by far is the charming trifle (the
+heroine being, it has been said and also denied, Mrs. Carlyle) which he
+called a "rondeau," though it is not one.
+
+    Jenny kissed me when we met,
+    Jumping from the chair she sat in:
+    Time, you thief, who love to get
+    Sweets into your list, put _that_ in!
+    Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
+    Say that health and wealth have missed me,
+    Say I'm growing old--but add,
+        Jenny kissed me.
+
+Even here it may be noticed that though the last four lines could hardly
+be bettered, the second couplet is rather weak. Some of Leigh Hunt's
+sonnets, especially that which he wrote on the Nile in rivalry with
+Shelley and Keats, are very good.
+
+    It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands,
+    Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream;
+    And times and things, as in that vision, seem
+    Keeping along it their eternal stands;--
+    Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd-bands
+    That roamed through the young earth, the glory extreme
+    Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam,
+    _The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands._
+    Then comes a mightier silence, stern and strong,
+    As of a world left empty of its throng,
+    And the void weighs on us; and then we wake,
+    And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along
+    'Twixt villages, and think how we shall take
+    Our own calm journey on for human sake.
+
+This was written in 1818, and I think it will be admitted that the
+italicised line is a rediscovery of a cadence which had been lost for
+centuries, and which has been constantly borrowed and imitated since.
+
+Every now and then he had touches of something much above his usual
+style, as in the concluding lines of the whimsical "flyting," as the
+Scotch poets of the fifteenth century would have called it, between the
+Man and the Fish:
+
+    Man's life is warm, glad, sad, 'twixt loves and graves,
+      Boundless in hope, honoured with pangs austere,
+    Heaven-gazing; and his angel-wings he craves:
+      The fish is swift, small-needing, vague yet clear,
+    A cold, sweet, silver life, wrapped in round waves,
+      Quickened with touches of transporting fear.
+
+As a rule, however, his poetry has little or nothing of this kind, and
+he will hold his place in the English _corpus poetarum_, first, because
+he was an associate of better poets than himself; secondly, because he
+invented a medium for the poetic tale which was as poetical as Crabbe's
+was prosaic; thirdly, because of all persons perhaps who have ever
+attempted English verse on their own account, he had the most genuine
+affection for, and the most intimate and extensive acquaintance with,
+the triumphs of his predecessors in poetry. Of prose he was a much less
+trustworthy judge, as may be instanced once for all by his pronouncing
+Gibbon's style to be bad; but of poetry he could tell with an
+extraordinary mixture of sympathy and discretion. And this will
+introduce us to his second faculty, the faculty of literary criticism,
+in which he is, with all his drawbacks, on a level with Coleridge, with
+Lamb, and with Hazlitt, his defects as compared with them being in each
+case made up by compensatory, or more than compensatory, merits.
+
+How considerable a critic Leigh Hunt was, may be judged from the fact
+that he himself confesses the great critical fault of his principal
+poem--the selection, for amplification and paraphrase, of a subject
+which has once for all been treated with imperial and immortal brevity
+by a great poet. With equal ingenuousness and equal truth he further
+confesses that, at the time, he not only did not see this fault, but was
+critically incapable of seeing it. For there is that one comfort about
+this discomfortable and discredited art of ours, that age at any rate
+does not impair it. The first sprightly runnings of criticism are never
+the best; and in the case of all really great critics, from Dryden to
+Sainte-Beuve, the critical faculty has gone on constantly increasing.
+The chief examples of Leigh Hunt's critical accomplishment are to be
+found in the two books called respectively, _Wit and Humour_, and
+_Imagination and Fancy_, both being selections from the English poets,
+with critical remarks interspersed as a sort of running commentary. But
+hardly any book of his is quite barren of such examples; for he neither
+would, nor indeed apparently could, restrain his desultory fancy from
+this as from other indulgences. His criticism is very distinct in kind.
+It is almost purely and in the strict and proper sense æsthetic--that is
+to say, it does hardly anything but reproduce the sensations produced
+upon Hunt himself by the reading of his favourite passages. As his sense
+of poetry was extraordinarily keen and accurate, there is perhaps no
+body of "beauties" of English poetry to be found anywhere in the
+language which is selected with such uniform and unerring judgment as
+this or these. Even Lamb, in his own favourite subjects and authors,
+misses treasure-trove which Leigh Hunt unfailingly discovers, as in the
+now pretty generally acknowledged case of the character of De Flores in
+Middleton's "Changeling." And Lamb had a much less wide and a much more
+crotchety system of admissions and exclusions. Macaulay was perfectly
+right in fixing, at the beginning of his essay on the dramatists of the
+Restoration, upon this catholicity of Hunt's taste as the main merit in
+it; and it is really a great pity that the two volumes referred to were
+not, as they were intended to be, followed up by others respectively
+devoted to Action and Passion, Contemplation, and Song. But Leigh Hunt
+was sixty when he planned them, and age, infirmity, perhaps also the
+less pressing need which the comparative affluence of his later years
+brought, prevented the completion. It has also to be remarked that Hunt
+is much better as a taster than as a professor or expounder. He says
+indeed many happy things about his favourite passages, but they
+evidently represent rather afterthought than forethought. He is not good
+at generalities, and when he tries them is apt, instead of flying (as
+an Ariel of criticism should do), to sprawl. Yet it was impossible for a
+man who was so almost invariably right in particulars, to go very wrong
+in general; and the worst that can be said of Leigh Hunt's general
+critical axioms and conclusions is that they are much better than the
+reasons that support them. For instance, he is probably right in calling
+the famous "intellectual" and "henpecked you all" in "Don Juan," "the
+happiest triple rhyme ever written." But when he goes on to say that
+"the sweepingness of the assumption completes the flowing breadth of the
+effect," he goes very near to talking nonsense. For most people,
+however, a true opinion persuasively stated is of much more consequence
+than the most elaborate logical justification of it; and it is this that
+makes Leigh Hunt's criticism such excellent good reading. It is
+impossible not to feel that when a guide (which after all a critic
+should be) is recommended with cautions that, though an invaluable
+fellow for the most part, he is not unlikely in certain places to lead
+the traveller over a precipice, it is a very dubious kind of
+recommendation. Yet this is the way in which one has to speak of Jeffrey
+and Hazlitt, of Wilson and De Quincey. Of Leigh Hunt it need hardly ever
+be said; for in the unlucky diatribes on Dante above cited, the most
+unwary reader can see that his author has lost his temper and with it
+his head. As a rule he avoids the things that he is not qualified to
+judge, such as the rougher and sublimer parts of poetry. Of its
+sweetness and its music, of its grace and its wit, of its tenderness and
+its fancy, no better judge ever existed than Leigh Hunt. He jumped at
+such things, when he came near them, almost as involuntarily as a needle
+to a magnet.
+
+He was, however, perhaps most popular in his own time, and certainly he
+gained most of the not excessive share of pecuniary profit which fell to
+his lot, as what I have called a miscellanist. One of the things which
+have not yet been sufficiently done in the criticism of English literary
+history, is a careful review of the successive steps by which the
+periodical essay of Addison and his followers during the eighteenth
+century passed into the magazine-paper of our own days. The later
+examples of the eighteenth century, the "Observers" and "Connoisseurs,"
+the "Loungers" and "Mirrors" and "Lookers-On," are fairly well worth
+reading in themselves, especially as the little volumes of the "British
+Essayists" go capitally in a travelling-bag; but the gap between them
+and the productions of Leigh Hunt, of Lamb, and of the _Blackwood_ men,
+with Praed's schoolboy attempts not left out, is a very considerable
+one. Leigh Hunt is himself entitled to a high place in the new school so
+far as mere priority goes, and to one not low in actual merit. He
+relates himself, more than once, with the childishness which is the good
+side of his Skimpolism, how not merely his literary friends but persons
+of quality had special favourites among the miscellaneous papers of the
+_Indicator_, like (he would certainly have used the parallel himself if
+he had known it or thought of it) the Court of France with Marot's
+Psalms. This miscellaneous work of his extends, as it ought to do, to
+all manner of subjects. The pleasantest example to my fancy is the book
+called _The Town_, a gossiping description of London from St. Paul's to
+St. James's, which he afterwards followed up with books on the West End
+and Kensington, and which, though of course second-hand as to its facts,
+is by no means uncritical, and by far the best reading of any book of
+its kind. Even the Autobiography might take rank in this class; and the
+same kind of stuff made up the staple of the numerous periodicals which
+Leigh Hunt edited or wrote, and of the still more numerous books which
+he compounded out of the dead periodicals. It may be that a severe
+criticism will declare that, here as well as elsewhere, he was more
+original than accomplished; and that his way of treating subjects was
+pursued with better success by his imitators than by himself. Such a
+paper, for instance, as "On Beds and Bedrooms" suggests (and is dwarfed
+by the suggestion) Lamb's "Convalescent" and other similar work. "Jack
+Abbott's Breakfast," which is, or was, exceedingly popular with Hunt's
+admirers, is an account of the misfortunes of a luckless young man who
+goes to breakfast with an absent-minded pedagogue, and, being turned
+away empty, orders successive refreshments at different coffee-houses,
+each of which proves a feast of Tantalus. The idea is not bad; but the
+carrying out suits the stage better than the study, and is certainly far
+below such things as Maginn's adventures of Jack Ginger and his friends,
+with the tale untold that Humphries told Harlow. "A Few Remarks on the
+Rare Vice called Lying" is a most promising title; he must be a very
+good-natured judge who finds appended to it a performing article. "The
+Old Lady" and "The Old Gentleman" were once great favourites; they seem
+to have been studied from Earle's _Microcosmography_, not the least
+excellent of the books that have proceeded from foster-children of
+Walter de Merton, but they are over-laboured in particulars. So too are
+"The Adventures of Carfington Blundell" and "Inside of an Omnibus."
+Leigh Hunt's humour is so devoid of bitterness that it sometimes becomes
+insipid; his narrative so fluent and gossiping that it sometimes becomes
+insignificant. His enemies called him immoral, which appears to have
+been a gross calumny so far as his private life was concerned, and is
+certainly a gross exaggeration as regards his writing. But he was rather
+too much given to dally about voluptuous subjects with a sort of
+chuckling epicene triviality. He is so far from being passionate that he
+sometimes becomes almost offensive. He is terribly apt to labour a
+conceit or a prettiness till it becomes vapid; and his "Criticism on
+Female Beauty," though it contains some extremely sensible remarks, also
+contains much which is suggestive of Mr. Tupman. Yet his miscellaneous
+writing has one great merit (besides its gentle playfulness and its
+untiring variety) which might procure pardon for worse faults. With no
+one perhaps are those literary memories which transform and vivify life
+so constantly present as with Leigh Hunt. Although the world was a
+perfectly real thing to him, and not by any means seen only through the
+windows of a library, he took everywhere with him the remembrances of
+what he had read, and they helped him to clothe and colour what he saw
+and what he wrote. Between him, therefore, and readers who themselves
+have read a good deal, and loved what they have read not a little, there
+is always something in common; and yet probably no bookish writer has
+been less resented by his unbookish readers as a thruster of the
+abominable things--superior knowledge and superior scholarship--upon
+them. Some vices of the snob Leigh Hunt undoubtedly had, but he was
+never in the least a pretentious snob. He quotes his books not in the
+spirit of a man who is looking down on his fellows from a proper
+elevation, but in the spirit of a kindly host who is anxious that his
+guests should enjoy the good things on his table.
+
+It is this sincere and unostentatious love of letters, and anxiety to
+spread the love of letters, that is the redeeming point of Leigh Hunt
+throughout: he is saved _quia multum amavit_. It was this which prompted
+that rather grandiose but still admirable palinode of Christopher North,
+in August 1834,--"the Animosities are mortal: but the Humanities live
+for ever,"--an apology which naturally enough pleased Hunt very much. He
+is one of those persons with whom it is impossible to be angry, or at
+least to be angry long. "The bailiff who took him was fond of him," it
+is recorded of Captain Costigan; and in milder moments the same may be
+said of the critical bailiffs who are compelled to "take" Leigh Hunt.
+Even in his least happy books (such as the "Jar of Honey from Mount
+Hybla," where all sorts of matter, some of it by no means well known to
+the writer, have been hastily cobbled together) this love, and for the
+most part intelligent and animated love, for literature appears. If in
+another of his least happy attempts, the critical parts of the already
+mentioned _Stories from the Italian Poets_, he is miles below the great
+argument of Dante, and if he is even guilty to some extent of
+vulgarising the lesser but still great poets with whom he deals, he
+never comes, even in Dante, to any passage he can understand without
+exhibiting such a warmth of enthusiasm and enjoyment that it softens the
+stoniest readers. He can gravely call Dante's Hell "geologically
+speaking a most fantastical formation" (which it certainly is), and
+joke clumsily about the poet's putting Cunizza and Rahab in Paradise. He
+can write, in the true spirit of vulgarising, that "the Florentine is
+thought to have been less strict in his conduct in regard to the sex
+than might be supposed from his platonical aspirations," heedless of the
+great confessions implied in the swoon at Francesca's story, and the
+passage through the fire at the end of the seventh circle of Purgatory.
+But when he comes to things like "Dolce color d'oriental zaffiro," and
+"Era già l'ora," it is hardly possible to do more justice to the
+subject. The whole description of his Italian sojourn in the
+Autobiography is an example of the best kind of such writing. Again, of
+all the people who have rejoiced in Samuel Pepys, Leigh Hunt "does it
+most natural," being indeed a kind of nineteenth-century Pepys himself,
+whom the gods had made less comfortable in worldly circumstances and no
+man of business, but to whom as a compensation they had given the
+feeling for poetry which Samuel lacked. At different times Dryden,
+Spenser, and Chaucer were respectively his favourite English poets; and
+as there was nothing faithless in his inconstancy, he took up his new
+loves without ceasing to love the old. It is perhaps rather more
+surprising that he should have liked Spenser than that he should have
+liked the other two; and we must suppose that the profusion of beautiful
+pictures in the "Faerie Queen" enabled him, not to appreciate (for he
+never could have done that), but to tolerate or pass over the deep
+melancholy and the occasional philosophisings of the poet. But the
+attraction of Dryden and Chaucer for him is very easily understood. Both
+are eminently cheerful poets, Dryden with the cheerfulness born of manly
+sense, Chaucer with that of youth and abounding animal spirits. Leigh
+Hunt seems to have found this cheerfulness as akin to his own, as the
+vigour of both was complementary and satisfactory to his own, I shall
+not say weakness, but fragility. Add yet again to this that Hunt
+seems--a thing very rarely to be said of critics--never to have disliked
+a thing simply because he could not understand it. If he sometimes
+abused Dante, it was not merely because he could not understand him,
+though he certainly could not, but because Dante trod (and when Dante
+treads he treads heavily) on his most cherished prejudices. Now he had
+not very many prejudices, and so he had an advantage here also.
+
+Lastly, as he may be read with pleasure, so he may be skipped without
+shame. There are some writers whom to skip may seem to a conscientious
+devotee of letters both wicked and unwise--wicked because it is
+disrespectful to them, unwise because it is quite likely to inflict loss
+on the reader. Now nobody can ever think of respecting Leigh Hunt; he is
+not unfrequently amiable, but never in the least venerable. Even at his
+best he seldom or never affects the reader with admiration, only with a
+mild pleasure. It is at once a penalty for his sins and a compliment to
+his good qualities, that to make any kind of fuss over him would be
+absurd. Nor is there any selfish risk run by treating him, in the
+literary sense, in an unceremonious manner. His writing of all kinds
+carries desultoriness to the height, and may be begun at the beginning,
+or at the end, or in the middle, and left off at any place, without the
+least risk of serious loss. He is excellent good company for half an
+hour, sometimes for much longer; but the reader rarely thinks very much
+of what he has said when the interview is over, and never experiences
+any violent hunger or thirst for its renewal, though such renewal is
+agreeable enough in its way. Such an author is a convenient possession
+on the shelves: a possession so convenient that occasionally a blush of
+shame may suggest itself at the thought that he should be treated so
+cavalierly. But this is quixotic. The very best things that he has done
+hardly deserve more respectful treatment, for they are little more than
+a faithful and fairly lively description of his own enjoyments; the
+worst things deserve treatment much less respectful. Yet let us not
+leave him with a harsh mouth; for, as has been said, he loved the good
+literature of others very much, and he wrote not a little that was good
+literature of his own.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+PEACOCK
+
+
+In the year 1875 Mr. Bentley conferred no small favour upon lovers of
+English literature by reprinting, in compact form and good print, the
+works of Thomas Love Peacock, up to that time scattered and in some
+cases not easily obtainable. So far as the publisher was concerned,
+nothing more could reasonably have been demanded; it is not easy to say
+quite so much of the editor, the late Sir Henry Cole. His editorial
+labours were indeed considerably lightened by assistance from other
+hands. Lord Houghton contributed a critical preface, which has the ease,
+point, and grasp of all his critical monographs. Miss Edith Nicolls, the
+novelist's granddaughter, supplied a short biography, written with much
+simplicity and excellent good taste. But as to editing in the proper
+sense--introduction, comment, illustration, explanation--there is next
+to none of it in the book. The principal thing, however, was to have
+Peacock's delightful work conveniently accessible, and that the issue
+of 1875 accomplished. The author is still by no means universally or
+even generally known; though he has been something of a critic's
+favourite. Almost the only dissenter, as far as I know, among critics,
+is Mrs. Oliphant, who has not merely confessed herself, in her book on
+the literary history of Peacock's time, unable to comprehend the
+admiration expressed by certain critics for _Headlong Hall_ and its
+fellows, but is even, if I do not mistake her, somewhat sceptical of the
+complete sincerity of that admiration. There is no need to argue the
+point with this agreeable practitioner of Peacock's own art. A certain
+well-known passage of Thackeray, about ladies and _Jonathan Wild_, will
+sufficiently explain her own inability to taste Peacock's persiflage. As
+for the genuineness of the relish of those who can taste him there is no
+way that I know to convince sceptics. For my own part I can only say
+that, putting aside scattered readings of his work in earlier days, I
+think I have read the novels through on an average once a year ever
+since their combined appearance. Indeed, with Scott, Thackeray, Borrow,
+and Christopher North, Peacock composes my own private Paradise of
+Dainty Devices, wherein I walk continually when I have need of rest and
+refreshment. This is a fact of no public importance, and is only
+mentioned as a kind of justification for recommending him to others.
+
+Peacock was born at Weymouth on 18th October 1785. His father (who died
+a year or two after his birth) was a London merchant; his mother was the
+daughter of a naval officer. He seems during his childhood to have done
+very much what he pleased, though, as it happened, study always pleased
+him; and his gibes in later life at public schools and universities lose
+something of their point when it is remembered that he was at no
+university, at no school save a private one, and that he left even that
+private school when he was thirteen. He seems, however, to have been
+very well grounded there, and on leaving it he conducted his education
+and his life at his own pleasure for many years. He published poems
+before he was twenty, and he fell in love shortly after he was
+twenty-two. The course of this love did not run smooth, and the lady,
+marrying some one else, died shortly afterwards. She lived in Peacock's
+memory till his death, sixty years later, which event is said to have
+been heralded (in accordance with not the least poetical of the many
+poetical superstitions of dreaming) by frequent visions of this shadowy
+love of the past. Probably to distract himself, Peacock, who had
+hitherto attempted no profession, accepted the rather unpromising post
+of under-secretary to Admiral Sir Home Popham on board ship. His mother,
+in her widowhood, and he himself had lived much with his sailor
+grandfather, and he was always fond of naval matters. But it is not
+surprising to find that his occupation, though he kept it for something
+like a year, was not to his taste. He gave it up in the spring of 1809,
+and returned to leisure, poetry, and pedestrianism. The "Genius of the
+Thames," a sufficiently remarkable poem, was the result of the two
+latter fancies. A year later he went to Wales and met his future wife,
+Jane Griffith, though he did not marry her for ten years more. He
+returned frequently to the principality, and in 1812 made, at Nant
+Gwillt, the acquaintance of Shelley and his wife Harriet. This was the
+foundation of a well-known friendship, which has supplied by far the
+most solid and trustworthy materials existing for the poet's biography.
+It was Wales, too, that furnished the scene of his first and far from
+worst novel _Headlong Hall_, which was published in 1816. From 1815 to
+1819 Peacock lived at Marlow, where his intercourse with Shelley was
+resumed, and where he produced not merely _Headlong Hall_ but
+_Melincourt_ (the most unequal, notwithstanding many charming sketches,
+of his works), the delightful _Nightmare Abbey_ (with a caricature, as
+genius caricatures, of Shelley for the hero), and the long and
+remarkable poem of "Rhododaphne."
+
+During the whole of this long time, that is to say up to his
+thirty-fourth year, with the exception of his year of secretaryship,
+Peacock had been his own master. He now, in 1819, owed curtailment of
+his liberty but considerable increase of fortune to a long-disused
+practice on the part of the managers of public institutions, of which
+Sir Henry Taylor gave another interesting example. The directors of the
+East India Company offered him a clerkship because he was a clever
+novelist and a good Greek scholar. He retained his place ("a precious
+good place too," as Thackeray with good-humoured envy says of it in "The
+Hoggarty Diamond") with due promotion for thirty-seven years, and
+retired from it in 1856 with a large pension. He had married Miss
+Griffith very shortly after his appointment; in 1822 _Maid Marian_
+appeared, and in 1823 Peacock took a cottage, which became after a time
+his chief and latterly his only residence, at Halliford, near his
+beloved river. For some years he published nothing, but 1829 and 1831
+saw the production of perhaps his two best books, _The Misfortunes of
+Elphin_ and _Crotchet Castle_. After _Crotchet Castle_, official duties
+and perhaps domestic troubles (for his wife was a helpless invalid)
+interrupted his literary work for more than twenty years, an almost
+unexampled break in the literary activity of a man so fond of letters.
+In 1852 he began to write again as a contributor to _Fraser's Magazine_.
+It is rather unfortunate that no complete republication, nor even any
+complete list of these articles, has been made. The papers on Shelley
+and the charming story of _Gryll Grange_ were the chief of them. The
+author was an old man when he wrote this last, but he survived it six
+years, and died on 23d January 1866, having latterly lived very much
+alone. Indeed, after Shelley's death he seems never to have had any very
+intimate friend except Lord Broughton, with whose papers most of
+Peacock's correspondence is for the present locked up.
+
+There is a passage in Shelley's "Letter to Maria Gisborne" which has
+been often quoted before, but which must necessarily be quoted again
+whenever Peacock's life and literary character are discussed:--
+
+                                  And there
+    Is English P----, with his mountain Fair
+    Turned into a flamingo, that shy bird
+    That gleams i' the Indian air. Have you not heard
+    When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindoo,
+    His best friends hear no more of him? But you
+    Will see him, and will like him too, I hope,
+    With his milk-white Snowdonian Antelope
+    Matched with his Camelopard. _His fine wit
+    Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it;_
+    A strain too learnèd for a shallow age,
+    Too wise for selfish bigots; let his page
+    Which charms the chosen spirits of his time,
+    Fold itself up for a serener clime
+    Of years to come, and find its recompense
+    In that just expectation.
+
+The enigmas in this passage (where it is undisputed that "English P----"
+is Peacock) have much exercised the commentators. That Miss Griffith,
+after her marriage, while still remaining a Snowdonian antelope, should
+also have been a flamingo, is odd enough; but this as well as the
+"camelopard" (probably turning on some private jest then intelligible
+enough to the persons concerned, but dark to others) is not particularly
+worth illuminating. The italicised words describing Peacock's wit are
+more legitimate subjects of discussion. They seem to me, though not
+perhaps literally explicable after the fashion of the duller kind of
+commentator, to contain both a very happy description of Peacock's
+peculiar humour, and a very sufficient explanation of the causes which
+have, both then and since, made that humour palatable rather to the few
+than to the many. Not only is Peacock peculiarly liable to the charge of
+being too clever, but he uses his cleverness in a way peculiarly
+bewildering to those who like to have "This is a horse" writ large under
+the presentation of the animal. His "rascally comparative" fancy, and
+the abundant stores of material with which his reading provided it, lead
+him perpetually to widen "the wound," till it is not surprising that
+"the knife" (the particular satirical or polemical point that he is
+urging) gets "lost in it." This weakness, if it be one, has in its
+different ways of operation all sorts of curious results. One is, that
+his personal portraits are perhaps farther removed from faithful
+representations of the originals than the personal sketches of any other
+writer, even among the most deliberate misrepresenters. There is,
+indeed, a droll topsy-turvy resemblance to Shelley throughout the
+Scythrop of _Nightmare Abbey_, but there Peacock was hardly using the
+knife at all. When he satirises persons, he goes so far away from their
+real personalities that the libel ceases to be libellous. It is
+difficult to say whether Mr. Mystic, Mr. Flosky, or Mr. Skionar is least
+like Coleridge; and Southey, intensely sensitive as he was to criticism,
+need not have lost his equanimity over Mr. Feathernest. A single point
+suggested itself to Peacock, that point suggested another, and so on and
+so on, till he was miles away from the start. The inconsistency of his
+political views has been justly, if somewhat plaintively, reflected on
+by Lord Houghton in the words, "the intimate friends of Mr. Peacock may
+have understood his political sentiments, but it is extremely difficult
+to discover them from his works." I should, however, myself say that,
+though it may be extremely difficult to deduce any definite political
+sentiments from Peacock's works, it is very easy to see in them a
+general and not inconsistent political attitude--that of intolerance of
+the vulgar and the stupid. Stupidity and vulgarity not being
+(fortunately or unfortunately) monopolised by any political party, and
+being (no doubt unfortunately) often condescended to by both, it is not
+surprising to find Peacock--especially with his noble disregard of
+apparent consistency and the inveterate habit of pillar-to-post joking,
+which has been commented on--distributing his shafts with great
+impartiality on Trojan and Greek; on the opponents of reform in his
+earlier manhood, and on the believers in progress during his later; on
+virtual representation and the telegraph; on barouche-driving as a
+gentleman's profession, and lecturing as a gentleman's profession. But
+this impartiality (or, if anybody prefers it, inconsistency) has
+naturally added to the difficulties of some readers with his works. It
+is time, however, to endeavour to give some idea of the gay variety of
+those works themselves.
+
+Although there are few novelists who observe plot less than Peacock,
+there are few also who are more regular in the particular fashion in
+which they disdain plot. Peacock is in fiction what the dramatists of
+the school of Ben Jonson down to Shadwell are in comedy--he works in
+"humours." It ought not to be, but perhaps is, necessary to remind the
+reader that this is by no means the same thing in essence, though
+accidentally it very often is the same, as being a humourist. The dealer
+in humours takes some fad or craze in his characters, some minor ruling
+passion, and makes his profit out of it. Generally (and almost always in
+Peacock's case) he takes if he can one or more of these humours as a
+central point, and lets the others play and revolve in a more or less
+eccentric fashion round it. In almost every book of Peacock's there is a
+host who is possessed by the cheerful mania for collecting other maniacs
+round him. Harry Headlong of Headlong Hall, Esquire, a young Welsh
+gentleman of means, and of generous though rather unchastened taste,
+finding, as Peacock says, in the earliest of his gibes at the
+universities, that there are no such things as men of taste and
+philosophy in Oxford, assembles a motley host in London, and asks them
+down to his place at Llanberis. The adventures of the visit (ending up
+with several weddings) form the scheme of the book, as indeed
+repetitions of something very little different form the scheme of all
+the other books, with the exception of _The Misfortunes of Elphin_, and
+perhaps _Maid Marian_. Of books so simple in one way, and so complex in
+others, it is impossible and unnecessary to give any detailed analysis.
+But each contains characteristics which contribute too much to the
+knowledge of Peacock's idiosyncrasy to pass altogether unnoticed. The
+contrasts in _Headlong Hall_ between the pessimist Mr. Escot, the
+optimist Mr. Foster, and the happy-mean man Mr. Jenkison (who inclines
+to both in turn, but on the whole rather to optimism), are much less
+amusing than the sketches of Welsh scenery and habits, the passages of
+arms with representatives of the _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly Reviews_
+(which Peacock always hated), and the satire on "improving," craniology,
+and other passing fancies of the day. The book also contains the first
+and most unfriendly of those sketches of clergymen of the Church of
+England which Peacock gradually softened till, in Dr. Folliott and Dr.
+Opimian, his curses became blessings altogether. The Reverend Dr. Gaster
+is an ignoble brute, though not quite life-like enough to be really
+offensive. But the most charming part of the book by far (for its women
+are mere lay figures) is to be found in the convivial scenes. _Headlong
+Hall_ contains, besides other occasional verse of merit, two
+drinking-songs--"Hail to the Headlong," and the still better "A
+Heel-tap! a heel-tap! I never could bear it"--songs not quite so good as
+those in the subsequent books, but good enough to make any reader think
+with a gentle sigh of the departure of good fellowship from the earth.
+Undergraduates and Scotchmen (and even in their case the fashion is said
+to be dying) alone practise at the present day the full rites of Comus.
+
+_Melincourt_, published, and indeed written, very soon after _Headlong
+Hall_, is a much more ambitious attempt. It is some three times the
+length of its predecessor, and is, though not much longer than a single
+volume of some three-volume novels, the longest book that Peacock ever
+wrote. It is also much more ambitiously planned; the twice attempted
+abduction of the heiress, Anthelia Melincourt, giving something like a
+regular plot, while the introduction of Sir Oran Haut-ton (an
+orang-outang whom the eccentric hero, Forester, has domesticated and
+intends to introduce to parliamentary life) can only be understood as
+aiming at a regular satire on the whole of human life, conceived in a
+milder spirit than "Gulliver," but belonging in some degree to the same
+class. Forester himself, a disciple of Rousseau, a fervent anti-slavery
+man who goes to the length of refusing his guests sugar, and an
+ideologist in many other ways, is also an ambitious sketch; and Peacock
+has introduced episodes after the fashion of eighteenth-century fiction,
+besides a great number of satirical excursions dealing with his enemies
+of the Lake school, with paper money, and with many other things and
+persons. The whole, as a whole, has a certain heaviness. The
+enthusiastic Forester is a little of a prig, and a little of a bore; his
+friend the professorial Mr. Fax proses dreadfully; the Oran Haut-ton
+scenes, amusing enough of themselves, are overloaded (as is the whole
+book) with justificative selections from Buffon, Lord Monboddo, and
+other authorities. The portraits of Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth,
+Canning, and others, are neither like, nor in themselves very happy, and
+the heroine Anthelia is sufficiently uninteresting to make us extremely
+indifferent whether the virtuous Forester or the _roué_ Lord Anophel
+Achthar gets her. On the other hand, detached passages are in the
+author's very best vein; and there is a truly delightful scene between
+Lord Anophel and his chaplain Grovelgrub, when the athletic Sir Oran has
+not only foiled their attempt on Anthelia, but has mast-headed them on
+the top of a rock perpendicular. But the gem of the book is the election
+for the borough of One-Vote--a very amusing farce on the subject of
+rotten boroughs. Mr. Forester has bought one of the One-Vote seats for
+his friend the Orang, and, going to introduce him to the constituency,
+falls in with the purchaser of the other seat, Mr. Sarcastic, who is a
+practical humorist of the most accomplished kind. The satirical
+arguments with which Sarcastic combats Forester's enthusiastic views of
+life and politics, the elaborate spectacle which he gets up on the day
+of nomination, and the free fight which follows, are recounted with
+extraordinary spirit. Nor is the least of the attractions of the book an
+admirable drinking-song, superior to either of those in _Headlong Hall_,
+though perhaps better known to most people by certain Thackerayan
+reminiscences of it than in itself:--
+
+    THE GHOSTS
+
+    In life three ghostly friars were we,
+    And now three friendly ghosts we be.
+    Around our shadowy table placed,
+    The spectral bowl before us floats:
+    With wine that none but ghosts can taste
+    We wash our unsubstantial throats.
+    Three merry ghosts--three merry ghosts--three merry ghosts are we:
+    Let the ocean be port and we'll think it good sport
+      To be laid in that Red Sea.
+
+    With songs that jovial spectres chaunt,
+    Our old refectory still we haunt.
+    The traveller hears our midnight mirth:
+    "Oh list," he cries, "the haunted choir!
+    The merriest ghost that walks the earth
+    Is now the ghost of a ghostly friar."
+    Three merry ghosts--three merry ghosts--three merry ghosts are we:
+    Let the ocean be port and we'll think it good sport
+      To be laid in that Red Sea.
+
+In the preface to a new edition of _Melincourt_, which Peacock wrote
+nearly thirty years later, and which contains a sort of promise of
+_Gryll Grange_, there is no sign of any dissatisfaction on the author's
+part with the plan of the earlier book; but in his next, which came
+quickly, he changed that plan very decidedly. _Nightmare Abbey_ is the
+shortest, as _Melincourt_ is the longest, of his tales; and as
+_Melincourt_ is the most unequal and the most clogged with heavy matter,
+so _Nightmare Abbey_ contains the most unbroken tissue of farcical,
+though not in the least coarsely farcical, incidents and conversations.
+The misanthropic Scythrop (whose habit of Madeira-drinking has made some
+exceedingly literal people sure that he really could not be intended for
+the water-drinking Shelley); his yet gloomier father, Mr. Glowry; his
+intricate entanglements with the lovely Marionetta and the still more
+beautiful Celinda; his fall between the two stools; his resolve to
+commit suicide; the solution of that awkward resolve--are all simply
+delightful. Extravagant as the thing is, its brevity and the throng of
+incidents and jokes prevent it from becoming in the least tedious. The
+pessimist-fatalist Mr. Toobad, with his "innumerable proofs of the
+temporary supremacy of the devil," and his catchword "the devil has come
+among us, having great wrath," appears just enough, and not too much.
+The introduced sketch of Byron as Mr. Cypress would be the least happy
+thing of the piece if it did not give occasion for a capital serious
+burlesque of Byronic verse, the lines, "There is a fever of the spirit,"
+which, as better known than most of Peacock's verse, need not be quoted.
+Mr. Flosky, a fresh caricature of Coleridge, is even less like the
+original than Mr. Mystic, but he is much more like a human being, and in
+himself is great fun. An approach to a more charitable view of the
+clergy is discoverable in the curate Mr. Larynx, who, if not extremely
+ghostly, is neither a sot nor a sloven. But the quarrels and
+reconciliations between Scythrop and Marionetta, his invincible
+inability to make up his mind, the mysterious advent of Marionetta's
+rival, and her residence in hidden chambers, the alternate sympathy and
+repulsion between Scythrop and those elder disciples of pessimism, his
+father and Mr. Toobad--all the contradictions of Shelley's character, in
+short, with a suspicion of the incidents of his life brought into the
+most ludicrous relief, must always form the great charm of the book. A
+tolerably rapid reader may get through it in an hour or so, and there is
+hardly a more delightful hour's reading of anything like the same kind
+in the English language, either for the incidental strokes of wit and
+humour, or for the easy mastery with which the whole is hit off. It
+contains, moreover, another drinking-catch, "Seamen Three," which,
+though it is, like its companion, better known than most of Peacock's
+songs, may perhaps find a place:--
+
+    Seamen three! What men be ye?
+    Gotham's three wise men we be.
+    Whither in your bowl so free?
+    To rake the moon from out the sea.
+    The bowl goes trim, the moon doth shine,
+    And our ballast is old wine;
+    And your ballast is old wine.
+
+    Who art thou so fast adrift?
+    I am he they call Old Care.
+    Here on board we will thee lift.
+    No: I may not enter there.
+    Wherefore so? 'Tis Jove's decree
+    In a bowl Care may not be;
+    In a bowl Care may not be.
+
+    Fear ye not the waves that roll?
+    No: in charmèd bowl we swim.
+    What the charm that floats the bowl?
+    Water may not pass the brim.
+    The bowl goes trim, the moon doth shine,
+    And our ballast is old wine;
+    And your ballast is old wine.
+
+A third song sung by Marionetta, "Why are thy looks so blank, Grey
+Friar?" is as good in another way; nor should it be forgotten that the
+said Marionetta, who has been thought to have some features of the
+luckless Harriet Shelley, is Peacock's first lifelike study of a girl,
+and one of his pleasantest.
+
+The book which came out four years after, _Maid Marian_, has, I believe,
+been much the most popular and the best known of Peacock's short
+romances. It owed this popularity, in great part, doubtless, to the fact
+that the author has altered little in the well-known and delightful old
+story, and has not added very much to its facts, contenting himself with
+illustrating the whole in his own satirical fashion. But there is also
+no doubt that the dramatisation of _Maid Marian_ by Planché and Bishop
+as an operetta helped, if it did not make, its fame. The snatches of
+song through the novel are more frequent than in any other of the books,
+so that Mr. Planché must have had but little trouble with it. Some of
+these snatches are among Peacock's best verse, such as the famous
+"Bramble Song," the great hit of the operetta, the equally well-known
+"Oh, bold Robin Hood," and the charming snatch:--
+
+    For the tender beech and the sapling oak,
+      That grow by the shadowy rill,
+    You may cut down both at a single stroke,
+      You may cut down which you will;
+
+    But this you must know, that as long as they grow,
+      Whatever change may be,
+    You never can teach either oak or beech
+      To be aught but a greenwood tree.
+
+This snatch, which, in its mixture of sentiment, truth, and what may be
+excusably called "rollick," is very characteristic of its author, and
+is put in the mouth of Brother Michael, practically the hero of the
+piece, and the happiest of the various workings up of Friar Tuck,
+despite his considerable indebtedness to a certain older friar, whom we
+must not call "of the funnels." That Peacock was a Pantagruelist to the
+heart's core is evident in all his work; but his following of Master
+Francis is nowhere clearer than in _Maid Marian_, and it no doubt helps
+us to understand why those who cannot relish Rabelais should look
+askance at Peacock. For the rest, no book of Peacock's requires such
+brief comment as this charming pastoral, which was probably little less
+in Thackeray's mind than _Ivanhoe_ itself when he wrote _Rebecca and
+Rowena_. The author draws in (it would be hardly fair to say drags in)
+some of his stock satire on courts, the clergy, the landed gentry, and
+so forth; but the very nature of the subject excludes the somewhat
+tedious digressions which mar _Melincourt_, and which once or twice
+menace, though they never actually succeed in spoiling, the unbroken fun
+of _Nightmare Abbey_.
+
+_The Misfortunes of Elphin_, which followed after an interval of seven
+years, is, I believe, the least generally popular of Peacock's works,
+though (not at all for that reason) it happens to be my own favourite.
+The most curious instance of this general unpopularity is the entire
+omission, as far as I am aware, of any reference to it in any of the
+popular guide-books to Wales. One piece of verse, indeed, the "War-song
+of Dinas Vawr," a triumph of easy verse and covert sarcasm, has had some
+vogue, but the rest is only known to Peacockians. The abundance of Welsh
+lore which, at any rate in appearance, it contains, may have had
+something to do with this; though the translations or adaptations,
+whether faithful or not, are the best literary renderings of Welsh known
+to me. Something also, and probably more, is due to the saturation of
+the whole from beginning to end with Peacock's driest humour. Not only
+is the account of the sapping and destruction of the embankment of
+Gwaelod an open and continuous satire on the opposition to Reform, but
+the whole book is written in the spirit and manner of _Candide_--a
+spirit and manner which Englishmen have generally been readier to
+relish, when they relish them at all, in another language than in their
+own. The respectable domestic virtues of Elphin and his wife Angharad,
+the blameless loves of Taliesin and the Princess Melanghel, hardly serve
+even as a foil to the satiric treatment of the other characters. The
+careless incompetence of the poetical King Gwythno, the coarser vices of
+other Welsh princes, the marital toleration or blindness of Arthur, the
+cynical frankness of the robber King Melvas, above all, the drunkenness
+of the immortal Seithenyn, give the humorist themes which he caresses
+with inexhaustible affection, but in a manner no doubt very puzzling,
+if not shocking, to matter-of-fact readers. Seithenyn, the drunken
+prince and dyke-warden, whose carelessness lets in the inundation, is by
+far Peacock's most original creation (for Scythrop, as has been said, is
+rather a humorous distortion of the actual than a creation). His
+complete self-satisfaction, his utter fearlessness of consequences, his
+ready adaptation to whatever part, be it prince or butler, presents
+itself to him, and above all, the splendid topsy-turviness of his
+fashion of argument, make Seithenyn one of the happiest, if not one of
+the greatest, results of whimsical imagination and study of human
+nature. "They have not"--says the somewhile prince, now King Melvas's
+butler, when Taliesin discovers him twenty years after his supposed
+death--"they have not made it [his death] known to me, for the best of
+all reasons, that one can only know the truth. For if that which we
+think we know is not truth, it is something which we do not know. A man
+cannot know his own death. For while he knows anything he is alive; at
+least, I never heard of a dead man who knew anything, or pretended to
+know anything: if he had so pretended I should have told him to his face
+that he was no dead man." How nobly consistent is this with his other
+argument in the days of his princedom and his neglect of the embankment!
+Elphin has just reproached him with the proverb, "Wine speaks in the
+silence of reason." "I am very sorry," said Seithenyn, "that you see
+things in a wrong light. But we will not quarrel, for three reasons:
+first, because you are the son of the king, and may do and say what you
+please without any one having a right to be displeased; second, because
+I never quarrel with a guest, even if he grows riotous in his cups;
+third, because there is nothing to quarrel about. And perhaps that is
+the best reason of the three; or rather the first is the best, because
+you are the son of the king; and the third is the second, that is the
+second best, because there is nothing to quarrel about; and the second
+is nothing to the purpose, because, though guests will grow riotous in
+their cups in spite of my good orderly example, God forbid that I should
+say that is the case with you. And I completely agree in the truth of
+your remark that reason speaks in the silence of wine."
+
+_Crotchet Castle_, the last but one of the series, which was published
+two years after _Elphin_ and nearly thirty before _Gryll Grange_, has
+been already called the best; and the statement is not inconsistent with
+the description already given of _Nightmare Abbey_ and of _Elphin_. For
+_Nightmare Abbey_ is chiefly farce, and _The Misfortunes of Elphin_ is
+chiefly sardonic persiflage. _Crotchet Castle_ is comedy of a high and
+varied kind. Peacock has returned in it to the machinery of a country
+house with its visitors, each of whom is more or less of a crotcheteer;
+and has thrown in a little romantic interest in the suit of a certain
+unmoneyed Captain Fitzchrome to a noble damsel who is expected to marry
+money, as well as in the desertion and subsequent rescue of Susannah
+Touchandgo, daughter of a levanting financier. The charm of the book,
+however, which distinguishes it from all its predecessors, is the
+introduction of characters neither ridiculous nor simply good in the
+persons of the Rev. Dr. Folliott and Lady Clarinda Bossnowl,
+Fitzchrome's beloved. "Lady Clarinda," says the captain, when the said
+Lady Clarinda has been playing off a certain not unladylike practical
+joke on him, "is a very pleasant young lady;" and most assuredly she is,
+a young lady (in the nineteenth century and in prose) of the tribe of
+Beatrice, if not even of Rosalind. As for Dr. Folliott, the author is
+said to have described him as his amends for his earlier clerical
+sketches, and the amends are ample. A stout Tory, a fellow of infinite
+jest, a lover of good living, an inveterate paradoxer, a pitiless
+exposer of current cants and fallacies, and, lastly, a tall man of his
+hands, Dr. Folliott is always delightful, whether he is knocking down
+thieves, or annihilating, in a rather Johnsonian manner, the economist,
+Mr. McQuedy, and the journalist, Mr. Eavesdrop, or laying down the law
+as to the composition of breakfast and supper, or using strong language
+as to "the learned friend" (Brougham), or bringing out, partly by
+opposition and partly by irony, the follies of the transcendentalists,
+the fops, the doctrinaires, and the mediævalists of the party. The
+book, moreover, contains the last and not the least of Peacock's
+admirable drinking-songs:--
+
+    If I drink water while this doth last,
+      May I never again drink wine;
+    For how can a man, in his life of a span,
+      Do anything better than dine?
+    We'll dine and drink, and say if we think
+      That anything better can be;
+    And when we have dined, wish all mankind
+      May dine as well as we.
+
+    And though a good wish will fill no dish,
+      And brim no cup with sack,
+    Yet thoughts will spring as the glasses ring
+      To illumine our studious track.
+    O'er the brilliant dreams of our hopeful schemes
+      The light of the flask shall shine;
+    And we'll sit till day, but we'll find the way
+      To drench the world with wine.
+
+The song is good in itself, but it is even more interesting as being the
+last product of Peacock's Anacreontic vein. Almost a generation passed
+before the appearance of his next and last novel, and though there is
+plenty of good eating and drinking in _Gryll Grange_, the old fine
+rapture had disappeared in society meanwhile, and Peacock obediently
+took note of the disappearance. It is considered, I believe, a mark of
+barbarian tastes to lament the change. But I am not certain that the Age
+of Apollinaris and lectures has yet produced anything that can vie as
+literature with the products of the ages of Wine and Song.
+
+_Gryll Grange_, however, in no way deserves the name of a dry stick. It
+is, next to _Melincourt_, the longest of Peacock's novels, and it is
+entirely free from the drawbacks of the forty-years-older book. Mr.
+Falconer, the hero, who lives in a tower alone with seven lovely and
+discreet foster-sisters, has some resemblances to Mr. Forester, but he
+is much less of a prig. The life and the conversation bear, instead of
+the marks of a young man's writing, the marks of the writing of one who
+has seen the manners and cities of many other men, and the personages
+throughout are singularly lifelike. The loves of the second hero and
+heroine, Lord Curryfin and Miss Niphet, are much more interesting than
+their names would suggest. And the most loquacious person of the book,
+the Rev. Dr. Opimian, if he is somewhat less racy than Dr. Folliott, is
+not less agreeable. One main charm of the novel lies in its vigorous
+criticism of modern society in phases which have not yet passed away.
+"Progress" is attacked with curious ardour; and the battle between
+literature and science, which in our days even Mr. Matthew Arnold waged
+but as one _cauponans bellum_, is fought with a vigour that is a joy to
+see. It would be rather interesting to know whether Peacock, in planning
+the central incident of the play (an "Aristophanic comedy," satirising
+modern ways), was aware of the existence of Mansel's delightful parody
+of the "Clouds." But "Phrontisterion" has never been widely known out
+of Oxford, and the bearing of Peacock's own performance is rather social
+than political. Not the least noteworthy thing in the book is the
+practical apology which is made in it to Scotchmen and political
+economists (two classes whom Peacock had earlier persecuted) in the
+personage of Mr. McBorrowdale, a candid friend of Liberalism, who is
+extremely refreshing. And besides the Aristophanic comedy, _Gryll
+Grange_ contains some of Peacock's most delightful verse, notably the
+really exquisite stanzas on "Love and Age."
+
+The book is the more valuable because of the material it supplies, in
+this and other places, for rebutting the charges that Peacock was a mere
+Epicurean, or a mere carper. Independently of the verses just named, and
+the hardly less perfect "Death of Philemon," the prose conversation
+shows how delicately and with how much feeling he could think on those
+points of life where satire and jollification are out of place. For the
+purely modern man, indeed, it might be well to begin the reading of
+Peacock with _Gryll Grange_, in order that he may not be set out of
+harmony with his author by the robuster but less familiar tones, as well
+as by the rawer though not less vigorous workmanship, of _Headlong Hall_
+and its immediate successors. The happy mean between the heart on the
+sleeve and the absence of heart has scarcely been better shown than in
+this latest novel.
+
+I have no space here to go through the miscellaneous work which
+completes Peacock's literary baggage. His regular poems, all early, are
+very much better than the work of many men who have won a place among
+British poets. His criticism, though not great in amount, is good; and
+he is especially happy in the kind of miscellaneous trifle (such as his
+trilingual poem on a whitebait dinner), which is generally thought
+appropriate to "university wits." But the characteristics of these
+miscellanies are not very different from the characteristics of his
+prose fiction, and, for purposes of discussion, may be included with
+them.
+
+Lord Houghton has defined and explained Peacock's literary idiosyncrasy
+as that of a man of the eighteenth century belated and strayed in the
+nineteenth. It is always easy to improve on a given pattern, but I
+certainly think that this definition of Lord Houghton's (which, it
+should be said, is not given in his own words) needs a little
+improvement. For the differences which strike us in Peacock--the easy
+joviality, the satirical view of life, the contempt of formulas and of
+science--though they certainly distinguish many chief literary men of
+the eighteenth century from most chief literary men of the nineteenth,
+are not specially characteristic of the eighteenth century itself. They
+are found in the seventeenth, in the Renaissance, in classical
+antiquity--wherever, in short, the art of letters and the art of life
+have had comparatively free play. The chief differentia of Peacock is a
+differentia common among men of letters; that is to say, among men of
+letters who are accustomed to society, who take no sacerdotal or
+singing-robe view of literature, who appreciate the distinction which
+literary cultivation gives them over the herd of mankind, but who by no
+means take that distinction too seriously. Aristophanes, Horace, Lucian,
+Rabelais, Montaigne, Saint-Evremond, these are all Peacock's literary
+ancestors, each, of course, with his own difference in especial and in
+addition. Aristophanes was more of a politician and a patriot, Lucian
+more of a freethinker, Horace more of a simple _pococurante_. Rabelais
+may have had a little inclination to science itself (he would soon have
+found it out if he had lived a little later), Montaigne may have been
+more of a pure egotist, Saint-Evremond more of a man of society, and of
+the verse and prose of society. But they all had the same _ethos_, the
+same love of letters as letters, the same contempt of mere progress as
+progress, the same relish for the simpler and more human pleasures, the
+same good fellowship, the same tendency to escape from the labyrinth of
+life's riddles by what has been called the humour-gate, the same
+irreconcilable hatred of stupidity and vulgarity and cant. The
+eighteenth century has, no doubt, had its claim to be regarded as the
+special flourishing time of this mental state urged by many others
+besides Lord Houghton; but I doubt whether the claim can be sustained,
+at any rate to the detriment of other times, and the men of other
+times. That century took itself too seriously--a fault fatal to the
+claim at once. Indeed, the truth is that while this attitude has in some
+periods been very rare, it cannot be said to be the peculiar, still less
+the universal, characteristic of any period. It is a personal not a
+periodic distinction; and there are persons who might make out a fair
+claim to it even in the depths of the Middle Ages or of the nineteenth
+century.
+
+However this may be, Peacock certainly held the theory of those who take
+life easily, who do not love anything very much except old books, old
+wine, and a few other things, not all of which perhaps need be old, who
+are rather inclined to see the folly of it than the pity of it, and who
+have an invincible tendency, if they tilt at anything at all, to tilt at
+the prevailing cants and arrogances of the time. These cants and
+arrogances of course vary. The position occupied by monkery at one time
+may be occupied by physical science at another; and a belief in graven
+images may supply in the third century the target, which is supplied by
+a belief in the supreme wisdom of majorities in the nineteenth. But the
+general principles--the cult of the Muses and the Graces for their own
+sake, and the practice of satiric archery at the follies of the
+day--appear in all the elect of this particular election, and they
+certainly appear in Peacock. The results no doubt are distasteful, not
+to say shocking, to some excellent people. It is impossible to avoid a
+slight chuckle when one thinks of the horror with which some such people
+must read Peacock's calm statement, repeated I think more than once,
+that one of his most perfect heroes "found, as he had often found
+before, that the more his mind was troubled, the more madeira he could
+drink without disordering his head." I have no doubt that the United
+Kingdom Alliance, if it knew this dreadful sentence (but probably the
+study of the United Kingdom Alliance is not much in Peacock), would like
+to burn all the copies of _Gryll Grange_ by the hands of Mr. Berry, and
+make the reprinting of it a misdemeanour, if not a felony. But it is not
+necessary to follow Sir Wilfrid Lawson, or to be a believer in
+education, or in telegraphs, or in majorities, in order to feel the
+repulsion which some people evidently feel for the manner of Peacock.
+With one sense absent and another strongly present it is impossible for
+any one to like him. The present sense is that which has been rather
+grandiosely called the sense of moral responsibility in literature. The
+absent sense is that sixth, seventh, or eighth sense, called a sense of
+humour, and about this there is no arguing. Those who have it, instead
+of being quietly and humbly thankful, are perhaps a little too apt to
+celebrate their joy in the face of the afflicted ones who have it not;
+the afflicted ones, who have it not, only follow a general law in
+protesting that the sense of humour is a very worthless thing, if not a
+complete humbug. But there are others of whom it would be absurd to say
+that they have no sense of humour, and yet who cannot place themselves
+at the Peacockian point of view, or at the point of view of those who
+like Peacock. His humour is not their humour; his wit not their wit.
+Like one of his own characters (who did not show his usual wisdom in the
+remark), they "must take pleasure in the thing represented before they
+can take pleasure in the representation." And in the things that Peacock
+represents they do not take pleasure. That gentlemen should drink a
+great deal of burgundy and sing songs during the process, appears to
+them at the best childish, at the worst horribly wrong. The
+prince-butler Seithenyn is a reprobate old man, who was unfaithful to
+his trust and shamelessly given to sensual indulgence. Dr. Folliott, as
+a parish priest, should not have drunk so much wine; and it would have
+been much more satisfactory to hear more of Dr. Opimian's sermons and
+district visiting, and less of his dinners with Squire Gryll and Mr.
+Falconer. Peacock's irony on social and political arrangements is all
+sterile, all destructive, and the sentiment that "most opinions that
+have anything to be said for them are about two thousand years old" is a
+libel on mankind. They feel, in short, for Peacock the animosity,
+mingled with contempt, which the late M. Amiel felt for "clever
+mockers."
+
+It is probably useless to argue with any such. It might, indeed, be
+urged in all seriousness that the Peacockian attitude is not in the
+least identical with the Mephistophelian; that it is based simply on the
+very sober and arguable ground that human nature is always very much the
+same, liable to the same delusions and the same weaknesses; and that the
+oldest things are likely to be best, not for any intrinsic or mystical
+virtue of antiquity, but because they have had most time to be found out
+in, and have not been found out. It may further be argued, as it has
+often been argued before, that the use of ridicule as a general
+criterion can do no harm, and may do much good. If the thing ridiculed
+be of God, it will stand; if it be not, the sooner it is laughed off the
+face of the earth the better. But there is probably little good in
+urging all this. Just as a lover of the greatest of Greek dramatists
+must recognise at once that it would be perfectly useless to attempt to
+argue Lord Coleridge out of the idea that Aristophanes, though a genius,
+was vulgar and base of soul, so to go a good deal lower in the scale of
+years, and somewhat lower in the scale of genius, everybody who rejoices
+in the author of "Aristophanes in London" must see that he has no chance
+of converting Mrs. Oliphant, or any other person who does not like
+Peacock. The middle term is not present, the disputants do not in fact
+use the same language. The only thing to do is to recommend this
+particular pleasure to those who are capable of being pleased by it, and
+to whom, as no doubt it is to a great number, it is pleasure yet
+untried.
+
+It is well to go about enjoying it with a certain caution. The reader
+must not expect always to agree with Peacock, who not only did not
+always agree with himself, but was also a man of almost ludicrously
+strong prejudices. He hated paper money; whereas the only feeling that
+most of us have on that subject is that we have not always as much of it
+as we should like. He hated Scotchmen, and there are many of his readers
+who without any claim to Scotch blood, but knowing the place and the
+people, will say,
+
+    That better wine and better men
+    We shall not meet in May,
+
+or for the matter of that in any other month. Partly because he hated
+Scotchmen, and partly because in his earlier days Sir Walter was a
+pillar of Toryism, he hated Scott, and has been guilty not merely of an
+absurd and no doubt partly humorous comparison of the Waverley novels to
+pantomimes, but of more definite criticisms which will bear the test of
+examination as badly. His strictures on a famous verse of "The Dream of
+Fair Women" are indefensible, though there is perhaps more to be said
+for the accompanying gibe at Sir John Millais's endeavour to carry out
+the description of Cleopatra in black (chiefly black) and white. The
+reader of Peacock must never mind his author trampling on his, the
+reader's, favourite corns; or rather he must lay his account with the
+agreeable certainty that Peacock will shortly afterwards trample on
+other corns which are not at all his favourites. For my part I am quite
+willing to accept these conditions. And I do not find that my admiration
+for Coleridge, and my sympathy with those who opposed the first Reform
+Bill, and my inclination to dispute the fact that Oxford is only a place
+of "unread books," make me like Peacock one whit the less. It is the law
+of the game, and those who play the game must put up with its laws. And
+it must be remembered that, at any rate in his later and best books,
+Peacock never wholly "took a side." He has always provided some
+personage or other who reduces all the whimsies and prejudices of his
+characters, even including his own, under a kind of dry light. Such is
+Lady Clarinda, who regards all the crotcheteers of Crotchet Castle with
+the same benevolent amusement; such Mr. McBorrowdale, who, when he is
+requested to settle the question of the superiority or inferiority of
+Greek harmony and perspective to modern, replies, "I think ye may just
+buz that bottle before you." (Alas! to think that if a man used the word
+"buz" nowadays some wiseacre would accuse him of vulgarity or of false
+English.) The general criticism in his work is always sane and vigorous,
+even though there may be flaws in the particular censures; and it is
+very seldom that even in his utterances of most flagrant prejudice
+anything really illiberal can be found. He had read much too widely and
+with too much discrimination for that. His reading had been corrected by
+too much of the cheerful give-and-take of social discussion, his dry
+light was softened and coloured by too frequent rainbows, the Apollonian
+rays being reflected on Bacchic dew. Anything that might otherwise seem
+hard and harsh in Peacock's perpetual ridicule is softened and mellowed
+by this pervading good fellowship which, as it is never pushed to the
+somewhat extravagant limits of the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_, so it
+distinguishes Peacock himself from the authors to whom in pure style he
+is most akin, and to whom Lord Houghton has already compared him--the
+French tale-tellers from Anthony Hamilton to Voltaire. In these, perfect
+as their form often is, there is constantly a slight want of geniality,
+a perpetual clatter and glitter of intellectual rapier and dagger which
+sometimes becomes rather irritating and teasing to ear and eye. Even the
+objects of Peacock's severest sarcasm, his Galls and Vamps and
+Eavesdrops, are allowed to join in the choruses and the bumpers of his
+easy-going symposia. The sole nexus is not cash payment but something
+much more agreeable, and it is allowed that even Mr. Mystic had "some
+super-excellent madeira." Yet how far the wine is from getting above the
+wit in these merry books is not likely to escape even the most
+unsympathetic reader. The mark may be selected recklessly or unjustly,
+but the arrows always fly straight to it.
+
+Peacock, in short, has eminently that quality of literature which may be
+called recreation. It may be that he is not extraordinarily instructive,
+though there is a good deal of quaint and not despicable erudition
+wrapped up in his apparently careless pages. It may be that he does not
+prove much; that he has, in fact, very little concern to prove anything.
+But in one of the only two modes of refreshment and distraction possible
+in literature, he is a very great master. The first of these modes is
+that of creation--that in which the writer spirits his readers away into
+some scene and manner of life quite different from that with which they
+are ordinarily conversant. With this Peacock, even in his professed
+poetical work, has not very much to do; and in his novels, even in _Maid
+Marian_, he hardly attempts it. The other is the mode of satirical
+presentment of well-known and familiar things, and this is all his own.
+Even his remotest subjects are near enough to be in a manner familiar,
+and _Gryll Grange_, with a few insignificant changes of names and
+current follies, might have been written yesterday. He is, therefore,
+not likely for a long time to lose the freshness and point which, at any
+rate for the ordinary reader, are required in satirical handlings of
+ordinary life; while his purely literary merits, especially his grasp
+of the perennial follies and characters of humanity, of the _ludicrum
+humani generis_ which never varies much in substance under its
+ever-varying dress, are such as to assure him life even after the
+immediate peculiarities which he satirised have ceased to be anything
+but history.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+WILSON
+
+
+Among those judgments of his contemporaries which make a sort of Inferno
+of the posthumous writings of Thomas Carlyle, that passed upon
+"Christopher North" has always seemed to me the most interesting, and
+perhaps on the whole the fairest. There is enough and to spare of
+onesidedness in it, and of the harshness which comes from onesidedness.
+But it is hardly at all sour, and, when allowance is made for the point
+of view, by no means unjust. The whole is interesting from the literary
+side, but as it fills two large pages it is much too long to quote. The
+personal description, "the broad-shouldered stately bulk of the man
+struck me: his flashing eye, copious dishevelled head of hair, and rapid
+unconcerned progress like that of a plough through stubble," is
+characteristically graphic, and far the best of the numerous pen
+sketches of "the Professor." As for the criticism, the following is the
+kernel passage of it:--
+
+    Wilson had much nobleness of heart and many traits of noble
+    genius, but the central tie-beam seemed wanting always; very
+    long ago I perceived in him the most irreconcilable
+    contradictions: Toryism with sansculottism; Methodism of a sort
+    with total incredulity; a noble loyal and religious nature not
+    strong enough to vanquish the perverse element it is born into.
+    Hence a being all split into precipitous chasms and the wildest
+    volcanic tumults; rocks over-grown indeed with tropical
+    luxuriance of leaf and flower but knit together at the
+    bottom--that was my old figure of speech--only by an ocean of
+    whisky punch. On these terms nothing can be done. Wilson seems
+    to me always by far the most _gifted_ of our literary men either
+    then or still. And yet intrinsically he has written nothing that
+    can endure. The central gift was wanting.
+
+Something in the unfavourable part of this must no doubt be set down to
+the critic's usual forgetfulness of his own admirable dictum, "he is not
+thou, but himself; other than thou." John was quite other than Thomas,
+and Thomas judged him somewhat summarily as if he were a failure of a
+Thomas. Yet the criticism, if partly harsh and as a whole somewhat
+incomplete, is true enough. Wilson has written "intrinsically nothing
+that can endure," if it be judged by any severe test. An English
+Diderot, he must bear a harder version of the judgment on Diderot, that
+he had written good pages but no good book. Only very rarely has he even
+written good pages, in the sense of pages good throughout. The almost
+inconceivable haste with which he wrote (he is credited with having on
+one occasion actually written fifty-six pages of print for _Blackwood_
+in two days, and in the years of its double numbers he often
+contributed from a hundred to a hundred and fifty pages in a single
+month)--this prodigious haste would not of itself account for the
+puerilities, the touches of bad taste, the false pathos, the tedious
+burlesque, the more tedious jactation which disfigure his work. A man
+writing against time may be driven to dulness, or commonplace, or
+inelegance of style; but he need never commit any of the faults just
+noticed. They were due beyond doubt, in Wilson's case, to a natural
+idiosyncrasy, the great characteristic of which Carlyle has happily hit
+off in the phrase, "want of a tie-beam," whether he has or has not been
+charitable in suggesting that the missing link was supplied by whisky
+punch. The least attractive point about Wilson's work is undoubtedly
+what his censor elsewhere describes as his habit of "giving a kick" to
+many men and things. There is no more unpleasant feature of the _Noctes_
+than the apparent inability of the writer to refrain from sly "kicks"
+even at the objects of his greatest veneration. A kind of mania of
+detraction seizes him at times, a mania which some of his admirers have
+more kindly than wisely endeavoured to shuffle off as a humorous
+dramatic touch intentionally administered to him by his Eidolon North.
+The most disgraceful, perhaps the only really disgraceful, instance of
+this is the carping and offensive criticism of Scott's _Demonology_,
+written and published at a time when Sir Walter's known state of health
+and fortunes might have protected him even from an enemy, much more from
+a friend, and a deeply obliged friend such as Wilson. Nor is this the
+only fling at Scott. Wordsworth, much more vulnerable, is also much more
+frequently assailed; and even Shakespeare does not come off scot-free
+when Wilson is in his ugly moods.
+
+It need hardly be said that I have no intention of saying that Scott or
+Wordsworth or Shakespeare may not be criticised. It is the way in which
+the criticism is done which is the crime; and for these acts of literary
+high treason, or at least leasing-making, as well as for all Wilson's
+other faults, nothing seems to me so much responsible as the want of
+bottom which Carlyle notes. I do not think that Wilson had any solid
+fund of principles, putting morals and religion aside, either in
+politics or in literature. He liked and he hated much and strongly, and
+being a healthy creature he on the whole liked the right things and
+hated the wrong ones; but it was for the most part a merely instinctive
+liking and hatred, quite un-coördinated, and by no means unlikely to
+pass the next moment into hatred or liking as the case might be.
+
+These are grave faults. But for the purpose of providing that pleasure
+which is to be got from literature (and this, like one or two other
+chapters here, is partly an effort in literary hedonism) Wilson stands
+very high, indeed so high that he can be ranked only below the highest.
+He who will enjoy him must be an intelligent voluptuary, and especially
+well versed in the art of skipping. When Wilson begins to talk fine,
+when he begins to wax pathetic, and when he gets into many others of his
+numerous altitudes, it will behove the reader, according to his own
+tastes, to skip with discretion and vigour. If he cannot do this, if his
+eye is not wary enough, or if his conscience forbids him to obey his
+eyes' warnings, Wilson is not for him. It is true that Mr. Skelton has
+tried to make a "Comedy of the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_," in which the
+skipping is done ready to hand. But, with all the respect due to the
+author of _Thalatta_, the process is not, at least speaking according to
+my judgment, successful. No one can really taste that eccentric book
+unless he reads it as a whole; its humours arbitrarily separated and
+cut-and-dried are nearly unintelligible. Indeed Professor Ferrier's
+original attempt to give Wilson's work only, and not all of that work
+when it happened to be mixed with others, seems to me to have been a
+mistake. But of that further, when we come to speak of the _Noctes_
+themselves.
+
+Wilson's life, for more than two-thirds of it a very happy one and not
+devoid of a certain eventfulness, can be summarised pretty briefly,
+especially as a full account of it is available in the very delightful
+work of his daughter Mrs. Gordon. Born in 1785, the son of a rich
+manufacturer of Paisley and a mother who boasted gentle blood, he was
+brought up first in the house of a country minister (whose parish he has
+made famous in several sketches), then at the University of Glasgow, and
+then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was early left possessor of a
+considerable fortune, and his first love, a certain "Margaret," having
+proved unkind, he established himself at Elleray on Windermere and
+entered into all the Lake society. Before very long (he was twenty-six
+at the time) he married Miss Jane Penny, daughter of a Liverpool
+merchant, and kept open house at Elleray for some years. Then his
+fortune disappeared in the keeping of a dishonest relation, and he had,
+in a way, his livelihood to make. I say "in a way," because the wind
+appears to have been considerably tempered to this shorn but robust
+lamb. He had not even to give up Elleray, though he could not live there
+in his old style. He had a mother who was able and willing to entertain
+him at Edinburgh, on the sole understanding that he did not "turn Whig,"
+of which there was very little danger. He was enabled to keep not too
+exhausting or anxious terms as an advocate at the Scottish bar; and
+before long he was endowed, against the infinitely superior claims of
+Sir William Hamilton, and by sheer force of personal and political
+influence, with the lucrative Professorship of Moral Philosophy in the
+University of Edinburgh. But even before this he had been exempted from
+the necessity of cultivating literature on a little oatmeal by his
+connexion with _Blackwood's Magazine_. The story of that magazine has
+often been told; never perhaps quite fully, but sufficiently. Wilson was
+not at any time, strictly speaking, editor; and a statement under his
+own hand avers that he never received any editorial pay, and was
+sometimes subject to that criticism which the publisher, as all men know
+from a famous letter of Scott's, was sometimes in the habit of
+exercising rather indiscreetly. But for a very great number of years,
+there is no doubt that he held a kind of quasi-editorial position, which
+included the censorship of other men's work and an almost, if not quite,
+unlimited right of printing his own. For some time the even more
+masterful spirit of Lockhart (against whom by the way Mrs. Gordon seems
+to have had a rather unreasonable prejudice) qualified his control over
+"Maga." But Lockhart's promotion to the _Quarterly_ removed this
+influence, and from 1825 (speaking roughly) to 1835 Wilson was supreme.
+The death of William Blackwood and of the Ettrick Shepherd in the
+last-named year, and of his own wife in 1837 (the latter a blow from
+which he never recovered), strongly affected not his control over the
+publication but his desire to control it; and after 1839 his
+contributions (save in the years 1845 and 1848) were very few. Ill
+health and broken spirits disabled him, and in 1852 he had to resign
+his professorship, dying two years later after some months of almost
+total prostration. Of the rest of the deeds of Christopher, and of his
+pugilism, and of his learning, and of his pedestrian exploits, and of
+his fishing, and of his cock-fighting, and of his hearty enjoyment of
+life generally, the books of the chronicles of Mrs. Gordon, and still
+more the twelve volumes of his works and the unreprinted contributions
+to _Blackwood_, shall tell.
+
+It is with those works that our principal business is, and some of them
+I shall take the liberty of at once dismissing. His poems are now
+matters of interest to very few mortals. It is not that they are bad,
+for they are not; but that they are almost wholly without distinction.
+He came just late enough to have got the seed of the great romantic
+revival; and his verse work is rarely more than the work of a clever man
+who has partly learnt and partly divined the manner of Burns, Scott,
+Campbell, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, and the rest. Nor, to my fancy,
+are his prose tales of much more value. I read them many years ago and
+cared little for them. I re-read, or attempted to re-read, them the
+other day and cared less. There seems, from the original prospectus of
+the edition of his works, to have been an intention of editing the
+course of moral philosophy which, with more or fewer variations,
+obtained him the agreeable income of a thousand a year or so for thirty
+years. But whether (as Mrs. Gordon seems to hint) the notes were in too
+dilapidated and chaotic a condition for use, or whether Professor
+Ferrier, his son-in-law and editor (himself, with Dean Mansel, the last
+of the exact philosophers of Britain), revolted at the idea of printing
+anything so merely literary, or what it was, I know not--at any rate
+they do not now figure in the list. This leaves us ten volumes of
+collected works, to wit, four of the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_, four of
+_Essays Critical and Imaginative_, and two of _The Recreations of
+Christopher North_, all with a very few exceptions reprinted from
+_Blackwood_. Mrs. Gordon filially groans because the reprint was not
+more extensive, and without endorsing her own very high opinion of her
+father's work, it is possible to agree with her. It is especially
+noteworthy that from the essays are excluded three out of the four chief
+critical series which Wilson wrote--that on Spenser, praised by a writer
+so little given to reckless praise as Hallam, the _Specimens of British
+Critics_, and the _Dies Boreales_,--leaving only the series on Homer
+with its quasi-Appendix on the Greek dramatists, and the _Noctes_
+themselves.
+
+It must be confessed that the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_ are not easy things to
+commend to the modern reader, if I may use the word commend in its
+proper sense and with no air of patronage. Even Scotchmen (perhaps,
+indeed, Scotchmen most of all) are wont nowadays to praise them rather
+apologetically, as may be seen in the case of their editor and abridger
+Mr. Skelton. Like most other very original things they drew after them a
+flock of imbecile imitations; and up to the present day those who have
+lived in the remoter parts of Scotland must know, or recently remember,
+dreary compositions in corrupt following of the _Noctes_, with
+exaggerated attempts at Christopher's worst mannerisms, and invariably
+including a ghastly caricature of the Shepherd. Even in themselves they
+abound in stumbling-blocks, which are perhaps multiplied, at least at
+the threshold, by the arbitrary separation in Ferrier's edition of
+Wilson's part, and not all his part, from the whole series; eighteen
+numbers being excluded bodily to begin with, while many more and parts
+of more are omitted subsequently. The critical mistake of this is
+evident, for much of the machinery and all the characters of the
+_Noctes_ were given to, not by, Wilson, and in all probability he
+accepted them not too willingly. The origin of the fantastic personages,
+the creation of which was a perfect mania with the early contributors to
+_Blackwood_, and who are, it is to be feared, too often a nuisance to
+modern readers, is rather dubious. Maginn's friends have claimed the
+origination of the _Noctes_ proper, and of its well-known motto
+paraphrased from Phocylides, for "The Doctor," or, if his chief
+_Blackwood_ designation be preferred, for the Ensign--Ensign O'Doherty.
+Professor Ferrier, on the other hand, has shown a not unnatural but by
+no means critical or exact desire to hint that Wilson invented the
+whole. There is no doubt that the real original is to be found in the
+actual suppers at "Ambrose's." These Lockhart had described, in _Peter's
+Letters_, before the appearance of the first _Noctes_ (the reader must
+not be shocked, the false concord is invariable in the book itself) and
+not long after the establishment of "Maga." As was the case with the
+magazine generally, the early numbers were extremely local and extremely
+personal. Wilson's glory is that he to a great extent, though not
+wholly, lifted them out of this rut, when he became the chief if not the
+sole writer after Lockhart's removal to London, and, with rare
+exceptions, reduced the personages to three strongly marked and very
+dramatic characters, Christopher North himself, the Ettrick Shepherd,
+and "Tickler." All these three were in a manner portraits, but no one is
+a mere photograph from a single person. On the whole, however, I suspect
+that Christopher North is a much closer likeness, if not of what Wilson
+himself was, yet at any rate of what he would have liked to be, than
+some of his apologists maintain. These charitable souls excuse the
+egotism, the personality, the violence, the inconsistency, the absurd
+assumption of omniscience and Admirable-Crichtonism, on the plea that
+"Christopher" is only the ideal Editor and not the actual Professor. It
+is quite true that Wilson, who, like all men of humour, must have known
+his own foibles, not unfrequently satirises them; but it is clear from
+his other work and from his private letters that they _were_ his
+foibles. The figure of the Shepherd, who is the chief speaker and on the
+whole the most interesting, is a more debatable one. It is certain that
+many of Hogg's friends, and, in his touchy moments he himself,
+considered that great liberty was taken with him, if not that (as the
+_Quarterly_ put it in a phrase which evidently made Wilson very angry)
+he was represented as a mere "boozing buffoon." On the other hand it is
+equally certain that the Shepherd never did anything that exhibited half
+the power over thought and language which is shown in the best passages
+of his _Noctes_ eidolon. Some of the adventures described as having
+happened to him are historically known as having happened to Wilson
+himself, and his sentiments are much more the writer's than the
+speaker's. At the same time the admirably imitated patois and the subtle
+rendering of Hogg's very well known foibles--his inordinate and
+stupendous vanity, his proneness to take liberties with his betters, his
+irritable temper, and the rest--give a false air of identity which is
+very noteworthy. The third portrait is said to have been the farthest
+from life, except in some physical peculiarities, of the three.
+"Tickler," whose original was Wilson's maternal uncle Robert Sym, an
+Edinburgh "writer," and something of a humorist in the flesh, is very
+skilfully made to hold the position of common-sense intermediary between
+the two originals, North and the Shepherd. He has his own peculiarities,
+but he has also a habit of bringing his friends down from their
+altitudes in a Voltairian fashion which is of great benefit to the
+dialogues, and may be compared to Peacock's similar use of some of his
+characters. The few occasional interlocutors are of little moment, with
+one exception; and the only female characters, Mrs. and Miss Gentle,
+would have been very much better away. They are not in the least
+lifelike, and usually exhibit the namby-pambiness into which Wilson too
+often fell when he wished to be refined and pathetic. The "English" or
+half-English characters, who come in sometimes as foils, are also rather
+of the stick, sticky. On the other hand, the interruptions of Ambrose,
+the host, and his household, though a little farcical, are well judged.
+And of the one exception above mentioned, the live Thomas De Quincey,
+who is brought in without disguise or excuse in some of the very best of
+the series, it can only be said that the imitation of his written style
+is extraordinary, and that men who knew his conversation say that the
+rendering of that is more extraordinary still.
+
+The same designed exaggeration which some uncritical persons have called
+Rabelaisian (not noticing that the very fault of the _Noctes_ is that,
+unlike Rabelais, their author mixes up probabilities and improbabilities
+so that there is a perpetual jarring) is maintained throughout the
+scenery and etceteras. The comfortable but modest accommodations of
+Ambrose's hotels in Gabriel's Road and Picardy Place are turned into
+abodes of not particularly tasteful luxury which put Lord Beaconsfield's
+famous upholstery to shame, and remind one of what they probably
+suggested, Edgar Poe's equally famous and much more terrible sketch of a
+model drawing-room. All the plate is carefully described as "silver"; if
+it had been gold there might have been some humour in it. The "wax"
+candles and "silken" curtains (if they had been _Arabian Nights_ lamps
+and oriental drapery the same might be said) are always insisted on. If
+there is any joke here it seems to lie in the contrast with Wilson's
+actual habits, which were very simple. For instance, he gives us a
+gorgeous description of the apparatus of North's solitary confinement
+when writing for _Blackwood_; his daughter's unvarnished account of the
+same process agrees exactly as to time, rate of production, and so
+forth, but substitutes water for the old hock and "Scots pint" (magnum)
+of claret, a dirty little terra-cotta inkstand for the silver utensil of
+the _Noctes_, and a single large tallow candle for Christopher's "floods
+of light." He carried the whim so far as to construct for himself--his
+_Noctes_ self--an imaginary hall-by-the-sea on the Firth of Forth, which
+in the same way seems to have had an actual resemblance, half of
+likeness, half of contrast, to the actual Elleray, and to enlarge his
+own comfortable town house in Gloucester Place to a sort of fairy palace
+in Moray Place. But that which has most puzzled and shocked readers are
+the specially Gargantuan passages relating to eating and drinking. The
+comments made on this seem (he was anything but patient of criticism) to
+have annoyed Wilson very much; and in some of the later _Noctes_ he
+drops hints that the whole is mere Barmecide business. Unfortunately the
+same criticism applies to this as to the upholstery--the exaggeration is
+"done too natural." The Shepherd's consumption of oysters not by dozens
+but by fifties, the allowance of "six common kettles-full of water" for
+the night's toddy ration of the three, North's above-mentioned bottle of
+old hock at dinner and magnum of claret after, the dinners and suppers
+and "whets" which appear so often;--all these stop short of the actually
+incredible, and are nothing more than extremely convivial men of the
+time, who were also large eaters, would have actually consumed. Lord
+Alvanley's three hearty suppers, the exploits of the old member of
+Parliament in Boz's sketch of Bellamy's (I forget his real name, but he
+was not a myth), and other things might be quoted to show that there is
+a fatal verisimilitude in the Ambrosian feasts which may, or may not,
+make them shocking (they don't shock me), but which certainly takes them
+out of the category of merely humorous exaggeration. The Shepherd's
+"jugs" numerous as they are (and by the way the Shepherd propounds two
+absolutely contradictory theories of toddy-making, one of which,
+according to the instructions of my preceptors in that art, who lived
+within sight of the hills that look down on Glenlivet, is a damnable
+heresy) are not in the least like the _seze muiz, deux bussars, et six
+tupins_ of tripe that Gargamelle so rashly devoured. There are men now
+living, and honoured members of society in Scotland, who admit the soft
+impeachment of having drunk in their youth twelve or fourteen "double"
+tumblers at a sitting. Now a double tumbler, be it known to the
+Southron, is a jorum of toddy to which there go two wineglasses (of
+course of the old-fashioned size, not our modern goblets) of whisky.
+"Indeed," said a humorous and indulgent lady correspondent of Wilson's,
+"indeed, I really think you eat too many oysters at the _Noctes_;" and
+any one who believes in distributive justice must admit that they did.
+
+If, therefore, the reader is of the modern cutlet-and-cup-of-coffee
+school of feeding, he will no doubt find the _Noctes_ most grossly and
+palpably gluttonous. If he be a very superior person he will smile at
+the upholstery. If he objects to horseplay he will be horrified at
+finding the characters on one occasion engaging in a regular "mill," on
+more than one corking each other's faces during slumber, sometimes
+playing at pyramids like the bounding brothers of acrobatic fame, at
+others indulging in leap-frog with the servants, permitting themselves
+practical jokes of all kinds, affecting to be drowned by an explosive
+haggis, and so forth. Every now and then he will come to a passage at
+which, without being superfine at all, he may find his gorge rise;
+though there is nothing quite so bad in the _Noctes_ as the picture of
+the ravens eating a dead Quaker in the _Recreations_, a picture for
+which Wilson offers a very lame defence elsewhere. He must put all sorts
+of prejudice, literary, political, and other, in his pocket. He must be
+prepared not only for constant and very scurrilous flings at "Cockneys"
+(Wilson extends the term far beyond the Hunt and Hazlitt school, an
+extension which to this day seems to give a strange delight to Edinburgh
+journalists), but for the wildest heterodoxies and inconsistencies of
+political, literary, and miscellaneous judgment, for much bastard
+verse-prose, for a good many quite uninteresting local and ephemeral
+allusions, and, of course, for any quantity of Scotch dialect. If all
+these allowances and provisos are too many for him to make, it is
+probably useless for him to attempt the _Noctes_ at all. He will pretty
+certainly, with the _Quarterly_ reviewer, set their characters down as
+boozing buffoons, and decline the honour of an invitation to Ambrose's
+or The Lodge, to Southside or the tent in Ettrick Forest.
+
+But any one who can accommodate himself to these little matters, much
+more any one who can enter into the spirit of days merrier, more
+leisurely, and if not less straitlaced than our own, yet lacing their
+laces in a different fashion, will find the _Noctes_ very delightful
+indeed. The mere high jinks, when the secret of being in the vein with
+them has been mastered, are seldom unamusing, and sometimes (notably in
+the long swim out to sea of Tickler and the Shepherd) are quite
+admirable fooling. No one who has an eye for the literary-dramatic can
+help, after a few _Noctes_ have been read, admiring the skill with which
+the characters are at once typified and individualised, the substance
+which they acquire in the reader's mind, the personal interest in them
+which is excited. And to all this, peculiarly suited for an alterative
+in these solemn days, has to be added the abundance of scattered and
+incomplete but remarkable gems of expression and thought that come at
+every few pages, sometimes at every page, of the series.
+
+Some of the burlesque narratives (such as the Shepherd's Mazeppa-like
+ride on the Bonassus) are inimitably good, though they are too often
+spoilt by Wilson's great faults of prolixity and uncertainty of touch.
+The criticisms, of which there are many, are also extremely unequal,
+but not a few very fine passages may be found among them. The politics,
+it must be owned, are not good for much, even from the Tory point of
+view. But the greatest attraction of the whole, next to its sunshiny
+heartiness and humour, is to be found in innumerable and indescribable
+bits, phrases, sentences, short paragraphs, which have, more than
+anything out of the dialogues of the very best novels, the character and
+charm of actual conversation. To read a _Noctes_ has, for those who have
+the happy gift of realising literature, not much less than the effect of
+actually taking part in one, with no danger of headache or indigestion
+after, and without the risk of being playfully corked, or required to
+leap the table for a wager, or forced to extemporise sixteen stanzas
+standing on the mantelpiece. There must be some peculiar virtue in this,
+for, as is very well known, the usual dialogue leaves the reader more
+outside of it than almost any other kind of literature.
+
+This peculiar charm is of necessity wanting to the rest of Wilson's
+works, and in so far they are inferior to the _Noctes_; but they have
+compensatory merits of their own, while, considered merely as
+literature, there are better things in them than anything that is to be
+found in the colloquies of those men of great gormandising
+abilities--Christopher North, James Hogg, and Timothy Tickler. Of the
+four volumes of _Essays Critical and Imaginative_, the fourth, on Homer
+and his translators, with an unfinished companion piece on the Greek
+drama, stands by itself, and has indeed, I believe, been separately
+published. It is well worth reading through at a sitting, which cannot
+be said of every volume of criticism. What is more, it may, I think, be
+put almost first in its own division of the art, though whether that
+division of the art is a high or low one is another question. I should
+not myself rank it very high. With Wilson, criticism, at least here, is
+little more than the eloquent expression of likes and dislikes. The long
+passages in which he deals with the wrath of Achilles and with the love
+of Calypso, though subject to the general stricture already more than
+once passed, are really beautiful specimens of literary enthusiasm; nor
+is there anything in English more calculated to initiate the reader,
+especially the young reader, in the love at least, if not the
+understanding, of Homer. The same enthusiastic and obviously quite
+genuine appreciation appears in the essay on the "Agamemnon." But of
+criticism as criticism--of what has been called tracing of literary
+cause and effect, of any coherent and co-ordinated theory of the good
+and bad in verse and prose, and the reasons of their goodness or
+badness, it must be said of this, as of Wilson's other critical work,
+that it is to be found _nusquam nullibi nullimodis_. He can preach
+(though with too great volubility, and with occasional faults of taste)
+delightful sermons about what he likes at the moment--for it is by no
+means always the same; and he can make formidable onslaughts with
+various weapons on what he dislikes at the moment--which again is not
+always the same. But a man so certain to go off at score whenever his
+likes or dislikes are excited, and so absolutely unable to check himself
+whenever he feels tempted thus to go off, lacks the very first
+qualifications of the critic:--lacks them, indeed, almost as much as the
+mere word-grinder who looks to see whether a plural substantive has a
+singular verb, and is satisfied if it has not, and horrified if it has.
+His most famous sentence "The Animosities are mortal, but the Humanities
+live for ever" is certainly noble. But it would have been better if the
+Humanities had oftener choked the Animosities at their birth.
+
+Wilson's criticism is to be found more or less everywhere in his
+collected writings. I have said that I think it a pity that, of his
+longest critical attempts, only one has been republished; and the reason
+is simple. For with an unequal writer (and Wilson is a writer unequalled
+in his inequality) his best work is as likely to be found in his worst
+book as his worst work in his best book; while the constant
+contemplation for a considerable period of one subject is more likely
+than anything else to dispel his habits of digression and padding. But
+the ubiquity of his criticism through the ten volumes was, in the
+circumstances of their editing, simply unavoidable. He had himself
+superintended a selection of all kinds, which he called _The Recreations
+of Christopher North_, and this had to be reprinted entire. It followed
+that, in the _Essays Critical and Imaginative_, an equally miscellaneous
+character should be observed. Almost everything given, and much not
+given, in the Works is worth consideration, but for critical purposes a
+choice is necessary. Let us take the consolidated essay on Wordsworth
+(most of which dates before 1822), the famous paper on Lord, then Mr.,
+Tennyson's poems in 1832, and the generous palinode on Macaulay's "Lays"
+of 1842. No three papers could better show Wilson in his three literary
+stages, that of rather cautious tentative (for though he was not a very
+young man in 1818, the date of the earliest of the Wordsworth papers, he
+was a young writer), that of practised and unrestrained vigour (for 1832
+represents about his literary zenith), and that of reflective decadence,
+for by 1842 he had ceased to write habitually, and was already bowed
+down by mental sorrows and physical ailments.
+
+In the first paper, or set of papers, it is evident that he is
+ambitiously groping after a more systematic style of criticism than he
+found in practice to be possible for him. Although he elsewhere scoffs
+at definitions, he tries to formulate very precisely the genius of
+Scott, of Byron, and of Wordsworth; he does his best to connect his
+individual judgments with these formulas; he shuns mere verbal
+criticism, and (to some extent) mere exaltation or depreciation of
+particular passages. But it is quite evident that he is ill at ease; and
+I do not think that any one now reading the essay can call it a
+successful one, or can attempt to rank it with those which, from
+different points of view, Hazlitt and De Quincey (Hazlitt nearly at the
+same time) wrote about Wordsworth. Indeed, Hazlitt is the most valuable
+of all examples for a critical comparison with Wilson; both being
+violent partisans and crotcheteers, both being animated with the truest
+love of poetry, but the one possessing and the other lacking the
+"tie-beam" of a consistent critical theory.
+
+A dozen years later Wilson had cast his slough, and had become the
+autocratic, freespoken, self-constituted dictator, Christopher North. He
+was confronted with the very difficult problem of Mr. Tennyson's poems.
+He knew they were poetry; that he could not help seeing and knowing. But
+they seemed to him to be the work of a "cockney" (it would be
+interesting to know whether there ever was any one less of a cockney
+than the author of "Mariana"), and he was irritated by some silly praise
+which had been given to them. So he set to work, and perpetrated the
+queerest jumble of sound and unsound criticism that exists in the
+archives of that art, so far as a humble but laborious student and
+practitioner thereof knoweth. He could not for the life of him help
+admiring "Adeline," "Oriana," "Mariana," "The Ode to Memory." Yet he had
+nothing but scorn for the scarcely less exquisite "Mermaid" and "Sea
+Fairies"--though the first few lines of the latter, excluded by this and
+other pseudo-criticism from the knowledge of half a generation of
+English readers, equal almost anything that the poet has ever done. And
+only the lucky memory of a remark of Hartley Coleridge's (who never went
+wrong in criticism, whatever he did in life) saved him from explicitly
+damning "The Dying Swan," which stands at the very head of a whole class
+of poetry. In all this essay, to borrow one of his own favourite words,
+he simply "plouters"--splashes and flounders about without any guidance
+of critical theory. Compare, to keep up the comparative method, the
+paper with the still more famous and far more deadly attack which
+Lockhart made a little later in the _Quarterly_. There one finds little,
+if any, generosity; an infinitely more cold-blooded and deliberate
+determination to "cut up." But the critic (and how quaint and pathetic
+it is to think that the said critic was the author of "I ride from land
+to land" and "When youthful hope is fled") sees his theory of poetry
+straight before him, and never takes his eye off it. The individual
+censures may be just or unjust, but they fit together like the
+propositions of a masterpiece of legal judgment. The poet is condemned
+under the statute,--so much the worse for the statute perhaps, but that
+does not matter--and he can only plead No jurisdiction; whereas with
+Christopher it is quite different. If he does not exactly blunder right
+(and he sometimes does that), he constantly blunders wrong--goes wrong,
+that is to say, without any excuse of theory or general view. That is
+not criticism.
+
+We shall not find matters much mended from the strictly critical point
+of view, when we come, ten years later, to the article on the "Lays."
+Here Christopher, as I hold with all respect to persons of distinction,
+is absolutely right. He does not say one word too much of the fire and
+life of those wonderful verses, of that fight of all fights--as far as
+English verse goes, except Drayton's "Agincourt" and the last canto of
+"Marmion"; as far as English prose goes, except some passages of Mallory
+and two or three pages of Kingsley's--the Battle of the Lake Regillus.
+The subject and the swing attracted him; he liked the fight, and he
+liked the ring as of Sir Walter at his very best. But he goes
+appallingly wrong all through on general critical points.
+
+Yet, according to his own perverse fashion, he never goes wrong without
+going right. Throughout his critical work there are scattered the most
+intelligent ideas, the neatest phrases, the most appreciative judgments.
+How good is it to say that "the battle of Trafalgar, though in some
+sort it neither began nor ended anything, was a kind of consummation of
+national prowess." How good again in its very straightforwardness and
+simplicity is the dictum "it is not necessary that we should understand
+fine poetry in order to feel and enjoy it, any more than fine music."
+Hundreds and thousands of these things lie about the pages. And in the
+next page to each the critic probably goes and says something which
+shows that he had entirely forgotten them. An intelligent man may be
+angry with Christopher--I should doubt whether any one who is not
+occasionally both angry and disgusted with him can be an intelligent
+man. But it is impossible to dislike him or fail to admire him as a
+whole.
+
+There is a third and very extensive division of Wilson's work which may
+not improbably be more popular, or might be if it were accessible
+separately, with the public of to-day, than either of those which have
+been surveyed. His "drunken _Noctes_," as Carlyle unkindly calls them,
+require a certain peculiar attitude of mind to appreciate them. As for
+his criticisms, it is frequently said, and it certainly would not become
+me to deny it, that nobody reads criticism but critics. But Wilson's
+renown as an athlete, a sportsman, and a lover of nature, who had a
+singular gift in expressing his love, has not yet died; and there is an
+ample audience now for men who can write about athletics, about sport,
+and about scenery. Nor is it questionable that on these subjects he is
+seen, on the whole, at his best. True, his faults pursue him even here,
+and are aggravated by a sort of fashion of the time which made him
+elaborately digress into politics, into literature, even (God rest his
+soul!) into a kind of quasi-professional and professorial sermonising on
+morals and theology, in the midst of his sporting articles. But the
+metal more attractive of the main subject would probably recommend these
+papers widely, if they were not scattered pell-mell about the _Essays
+Critical and Imaginative_, and the _Recreations of Christopher North_.
+Speaking generally they fall into three divisions--essays on sport in
+general, essays on the English Lakes, and essays on the Scottish
+Highlands. The best of the first class are the famous papers called
+"Christopher North in his Sporting Jacket," and the scattered reviews
+and articles redacted in the _Recreations_ under the general title of
+"Anglimania." In the second class all are good; and a volume composed of
+"Christopher at the Lakes," "A Day at Windermere," "Christopher on
+Colonsay" (a wild extravaganza which had a sort of basis of fact in a
+trotting-match won on a pony which Wilson afterwards sold for four
+pounds), and "A Saunter at Grasmere," with one or two more, would be a
+thing of price. The best of the third class beyond all question is the
+collection, also redacted by the author for the _Recreations_, entitled
+"The Moors." This last is perhaps the best of all the sporting and
+descriptive pieces, though not the least exemplary of its authors
+vagaries; for before he can get to the Moors, he gives us heaven knows
+how many pages of a criticism on Wordsworth, which, in that place at any
+rate, we do not in the least want; and in the very middle of his
+wonderful and sanguinary exploits on and near Ben Cruachan, he
+"interrupts the muffins" in order to deliver to a most farcical and
+impertinent assemblage a quite serious and still more impertinent
+sermon. But all these papers are more or less delightful. For the
+glowing description of, and the sneaking apology for, cat-worrying which
+the "Sporting Jacket" contains, nothing can be said. Wilson deliberately
+overlooks the fact that the whole fun of that nefarious amusement
+consists in the pitting of a plucky but weak animal against something
+much more strongly built and armed than itself. One may regret the P.R.,
+and indulge in a not wholly sneaking affection for cock-fighting,
+dog-fighting, and anything in which there is a fair match, without
+having the slightest weakness for this kind of brutality. But, generally
+speaking, Wilson is a thoroughly fair sportsman, and how enthusiastic he
+is, no one who has read him can fail to know. Of the scenery of loch or
+lake, of hill or mountain, he was at once an ardent lover and a
+describer who has never been equalled. His accustomed exaggeration and
+false emphasis are nowhere so little perceptible as when he deals with
+Ben Cruachan or the Old Man of Coniston, with the Four Great Lakes of
+Britain, East and West (one of his finest passages), or with the glens
+of Etive and Borrowdale. The accursed influence of an unchastened taste
+is indeed observable in the before-mentioned "Dead Quaker of Helvellyn,"
+a piece of unrelieved nastiness which he has in vain tried to excuse.
+But the whole of the series from which this is taken ("Christopher in
+his Aviary") is in his least happy style, alternately grandiose and low,
+relieved indeed by touches of observation and feeling, as all his work
+is, but hardly redeemed by them. The depths of his possible fall may
+also be seen from a short piece which Professor Ferrier, obligingly
+describing it as "too lively to be omitted," has adjoined to
+"Christopher at the Lakes." But, on the whole, all the articles
+mentioned in the list at the beginning of this paragraph, with the
+capital "Streams" as an addition, with the soliloquies on "The Seasons,"
+and with part (_not_ the narrative part) of "Highland Storms," are
+delightful reading. The progress of the sportsman has never been better
+given than in "Christopher North in his Sporting Jacket." In "The Moors"
+the actual sporting part is perhaps a little spoilt by the affectation
+of infallibility, qualified it is true by an aside or two, which so
+often mars the Christopherian utterances. But Wilson's description has
+never been bettered. The thunderstorm on the hill, the rough
+conviviality at the illicit distillery, the evening voyage on the loch,
+match, if they do not beat, anything of the kind in much more recent
+books far better known to the present generation. A special favourite of
+mine is the rather unceremonious review of Sir Humphry Davy's strangely
+over-praised "Salmonia." The passage of utter scorn and indignation at
+the preposterous statement of the chief personage in the dialogues, that
+after an exceptionally hard day's walking and fishing "half a pint of
+claret per man is enough," is sublime. Nearly the earliest, and
+certainly the best, protest against some modern fashions in shooting is
+to be found in "The Moors." In the same series, the visit to the hill
+cottage, preceding that to the still, has what it has since become the
+fashion to call the idyllic flavour, without too much of the rather
+mawkish pathos with which, in imitation of Mackenzie and the
+sensibility-writers of the last century, Wilson is apt to daub his
+pictures of rural and humble life. The passages on Oxford, to go to a
+slightly different but allied subject, in "Old North and Young North" (a
+paper not yet mentioned), may have full appeal to Oxford men, but I can
+hardly be mistaken in thinking that outsiders must see at least some of
+the beauty of them. But the list of specially desirable things in these
+articles is endless; hardly one of them can be taken up without
+discovering many such, not one of them without discovering some.[15]
+
+And, throughout the whole collection, there is the additional
+satisfaction that the author is writing only of what he thoroughly knows
+and understands. At the Lakes Wilson lived for years, and was familiar
+with every cranny of the hills, from the Pillar to Hawes Water, and from
+Newby Bridge to Saddleback. He began marching and fishing through the
+Highlands when he was a boy, enticed even his wife into perilous
+pedestrian enterprises with him, and, though the extent of his knowledge
+was perhaps not quite so large as he pretends, he certainly knew great
+tracts as well as he knew Edinburgh. Nor were his qualifications as a
+sportsman less authentic, despite the somewhat Munchausenish appearance
+which some of the feats narrated in the _Noctes_ and the _Recreations_
+wear, and are indeed intended to wear. His enormous baskets of trout
+seem to have been, if not quite so regular as he sometimes makes them
+out, at any rate fully historical as occasional feats. As has been
+hinted, he really did win the trotting-match on the pony, Colonsay,
+against a thoroughbred, though it was only on the technical point of the
+thoroughbred breaking his pace. His walk from London to Oxford in a
+night seems to have been a fact, and indeed there is nothing at all
+impossible in it, for the distance through Wycombe is not more than
+fifty-three miles; while the less certainly authenticated feat of
+walking from Liverpool to Elleray (eighty miles at least), without more
+than a short rest, also appears to be genuine. Like the heroes of a song
+that he loved, though he seems to have sung it in a corrupt text, he
+could wrestle and fight and jump out anywhere; and, until he was
+thoroughly broken by illness, he appears to have made the very most of
+the not inconsiderable spare time of a Scotch professor who has once got
+his long series of lectures committed to paper, and has nothing to do
+for the rest of his life but collect bundles of pound notes at the
+beginning of each session. All this, joined to his literary gifts, gives
+a reality to his out-of-door papers which is hardly to be found
+elsewhere except in some passages of Kingsley, between whom and Wilson
+there are many and most curious resemblances, chequered by national and
+personal differences only less curious.
+
+I do not think he was a good reviewer, even after making allowance for
+the prejudices and partisanships of the time, and for the monkey tricks
+of mannerism, which, at any rate in his earlier days, were incumbent on
+a reviewer in "Maga." He is too prone to the besetting sins of
+reviewing--the right hand defections and left hand fallings off, which,
+being interpreted, consist first in expressing agreement or
+disagreement with the author's views, and secondly in digressing into
+personal statements of one's own views of things connected with them
+instead of expounding more or less clearly what the book is, and
+addressing oneself to the great question, Is it a good or a bad piece of
+work according to the standard which the author himself strove to reach?
+I have said that I do not think he was on the whole a good critic (for a
+man may be a good critic and a bad reviewer, though the reverse will
+hardly stand), and I have given my reasons. That he was neither a great,
+nor even a very good poet or tale-teller, I have no doubt whatever. But
+this leaves untouched the attraction of his miscellaneous work, and its
+suitableness for the purpose of recreation. For that purpose I think it
+to be among the very best work in all literature. Its unfailing life and
+vigour, its vast variety, the healthy and inspiriting character of the
+subjects with which in the main it deals, are the characteristics which
+make its volumes easy-chair books of the best order. Its beauty no doubt
+is irregular, faulty, engaging rather than exquisite, attractive rather
+than artistically or scientifically perfect. I do not know that there is
+even any reason to join in the general lament over Wilson as being a
+gigantic failure, a monument of wasted energies and half-developed
+faculty. I do not at all think that there was anything in him much
+better than he actually did, or that he ever could have polished and
+sand-papered the faults out of his work. It would pretty certainly have
+lost freshness and vigour; it would quite certainly have been less in
+bulk, and bulk is a very important point in literature that is to serve
+as recreation. It is to me not much less certain that it never would
+have attained the first rank in symmetry and order. I am quite content
+with it as it is, and I only wish that still more of it were easily
+accessible.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[15] If I accepted (a rash acceptance) the challenge to name the three
+very best things in Wilson I should, I think, choose the famous Fairy's
+Funeral in the _Recreations_, the Shepherd's account of his recovery
+from illness in the _Noctes_, and, in a lighter vein, the picture of
+girls bathing in "Streams."
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+DE QUINCEY[16]
+
+
+In not a few respects the literary lot of Thomas De Quincey, both during
+his life and after it, has been exceedingly peculiar. In one respect it
+has been unique. I do not know that any other author of anything like
+his merit, during our time, has had a piece of work published for fully
+twenty years as his, only for it to be excluded as somebody else's at
+the end of that time. Certainly _The Traditions of the Rabbins_ was very
+De Quinceyish; indeed, it was so De Quinceyish that the discovery, after
+such a length of time, that it was not De Quincey's at all, but
+"Salathiel" Croly's, must have given unpleasant qualms to more than one
+critic accustomed to be positive on internal evidence. But if De Quincey
+had thus attributed to him work that was not his, he has also had the
+utmost difficulty in getting attributed to him, in any accessible form,
+work that was his own. Three, or nominally four, editions--one in the
+decade of his death, superintended for the most part by himself; another
+in 1862, whose blue coat and white labels dwell in the fond memory; and
+another in 1878 (reprinted in 1880) a little altered and enlarged, with
+the Rabbins turned out and more soberly clad, but identical in the
+main--put before the British public for some thirty-five years a certain
+portion of his strange, long-delayed, but voluminous work. This work had
+occupied him for about the same period, that is to say for the last and
+shorter half of his extraordinary and yet uneventful life. Now, after
+much praying of readers, and grumbling of critics, we have a fifth and
+definitive edition from the English critic who has given most attention
+to De Quincey, Professor Masson.[17] I may say, with hearty
+acknowledgment of Mr. Masson's services to English literature, that I do
+not very much like this last edition. De Quincey, never much favoured by
+the mechanical producers of books, has had his sizings, as Byron would
+say, still further stinted in the matter of print, margins, and the
+like; and what I cannot but regard as a rather unceremonious tampering
+with his own arrangement has taken place, the new matter being not added
+in supplementary volumes or in appendices to the reprinted volumes, but
+thrust into or between the separate essays, sometimes to the destruction
+of De Quincey's "redaction" altogether, and always to the confusion and
+dislocation of his arrangement, which has also been neglected in other
+ways. Still the actual generation of readers will undoubtedly have
+before them a fuller and completer edition of De Quincey than even
+Americans have yet had; and they will have it edited by an accomplished
+scholar who has taken a great deal of pains to acquaint himself
+thoroughly with the subject.
+
+Will they form a different estimate from that which those of us who have
+known the older editions for a quarter of a century have formed, and
+will that estimate, if it is different, be higher or lower? To answer
+such questions is always difficult; but it is especially difficult here,
+for a certain reason which I had chiefly in mind when I said just now
+that De Quincey's literary lot has been very peculiar. I believe that I
+am not speaking for myself only; I am quite sure that I am speaking my
+own deliberate opinion when I say that on scarcely any English writer is
+it so hard to strike a critical balance--to get a clear definite opinion
+that you can put on the shelf and need merely take down now and then to
+be dusted and polished up by a fresh reading--as on De Quincey. This is
+partly due to the fact that his merits are of the class that appeals to,
+while his faults are of the class that is excused by, the average boy
+who has some interest in literature. To read the _Essay on Murder_, the
+_English Mail Coach_, _The Spanish Nun_, _The Cæsars_, and half a score
+other things at the age of about fifteen or sixteen is, or ought to be,
+to fall in love with them. And there is nothing more unpleasant for _les
+âmes bien nées_, as the famous distich has it, than to find fault in
+after life with that with which you have fallen in love at fifteen or
+sixteen. Yet most unfortunately, just as De Quincey's merits, or some of
+them, appeal specially to youth, and his defects specially escape the
+notice of youth, so age with stealing steps especially claws those
+merits into his clutch and leaves the defects exposed to derision. The
+most gracious state of authors is that they shall charm at all ages
+those whom they do charm. There are others--Dante, Cervantes, Goethe are
+instances--as to whom you may even begin with a little aversion, and go
+on to love them more and more. De Quincey, I fear, belongs to a third
+class, with whom it is difficult to keep up the first love, or rather
+whose defects begin before long to urge themselves upon the critical
+lover (some would say there are no critical lovers, but that I deny)
+with an even less happy result than is recorded in one of Catullus's
+finest lines. This kind of discovery
+
+    Cogit amare _minus_, _nec_ bene velle _magis_.
+
+How and to what extent this is the case, it must be the business of this
+paper to attempt to show. But first it is desirable to give, as usual,
+a brief sketch of De Quincey's life. It need only be a brief one, for
+the external events of that life were few and meagre; nor can they be
+said to be, even after the researches of Mr. Page and Professor Masson,
+very accurately or exhaustively known. Before those researches "all was
+mist and myth" about De Quincey. I remember as a boy, a year or two
+after his death, hearing a piece of scandal about his domestic
+relations, which seems to have had no foundation whatever, but which
+pretty evidently was an echo of the "libel" (published in a short-lived
+newspaper of the kind which after many years has again risen to infest
+London) whereof he complains with perhaps more acrimony than dignity in
+a paper for the first time exhumed and reprinted in Professor Masson's
+edition. Many of the details of the _Confessions_ and the
+_Autobiography_ have a singular unbelievableness as one reads them; and
+though the tendency of recent biographers has been to accept them as on
+the whole genuine, I own that I am rather sceptical about many of them
+still. Was the ever-famous Malay a real Malay, or a thing of shreds and
+patches? Did De Quincey actually call upon the awful Dean Cyril Jackson
+and affably discuss with him the propriety of entering himself at
+Christ-church? Did he really journey pennilessly down to Eton on the
+chance of finding a casual peer of the realm of tender years who would
+back a bill for him? These are but a few out of a large number of
+questions which in idle moods (for the answer to hardly one of them is
+of the least importance) suggest themselves; and which have been very
+partially answered hitherto even of late years, though they have been
+much discussed. The plain and tolerably certain facts which are
+important in connection with his work may be pretty rapidly summed up.
+
+Thomas de Quincey, or Quincey, was born in Manchester--but apparently
+not, as he himself thought, at the country house of Greenhay which his
+parents afterwards inhabited--on 15th August 1785. His father was a
+merchant, well to do but of weak health, who died when Thomas was seven
+years old. Of his childhood he has left very copious reminiscences, and
+there is no doubt that reminiscences of childhood do linger long after
+later memories have disappeared. But to what extent De Quincey gave
+"cocked hats and canes" to his childish thoughts and to his relations
+with his brothers and sisters, individual judgment must decide. I should
+say, for my part, that the extent was considerable. It seems, however,
+pretty clear that he was as a child, very much what he was all his
+life--emphatically "old-fashioned," retiring without being exactly shy,
+full of far-brought fancies and yet intensely concentrated upon himself.
+In 1796 his mother moved to Bath, and Thomas was educated first at the
+Grammar School there and then at a private school in Wiltshire. It was
+at Bath, his headquarters being there, that he met various persons of
+distinction--Lord Westport, Lord and Lady Carbery, and others--who
+figure largely in the _Autobiography_, but are never heard of
+afterwards. It was with Lord Westport, a boy somewhat younger than
+himself, that he took a trip to Ireland, the only country beyond Great
+Britain that he visited. In 1800 he was sent by his guardians to the
+Manchester Grammar School in order to obtain, by three years' boarding
+there, one of the Somerset Exhibitions to Brasenose. As a separate
+income of £150 had been left by De Quincey's father to each of his sons,
+as this income, or part of it, must have been accumulating, and as the
+mother was very well off, this roundabout way of securing for him a
+miserable forty or fifty pounds a year seems strange enough. But it has
+to be remembered that for all these details we have little security but
+De Quincey himself. However, that he did go to Manchester, and did,
+after rather more than two of his three years' probation, run away is
+indisputable. His mother was living at Chester, and the calf was not
+killed for this prodigal son; but he had liberty given him to wander
+about Wales on an allowance of a guinea a week. That there is some
+mystery, or mystification, about all this is nearly certain. If things
+really went as he represents them, his mother ought to have been
+ashamed of herself, and his guardians ought to have had, to say the
+least, an experience of the roughest side of Lord Eldon's tongue. The
+wanderings in Wales were followed by the famous sojourn in Soho, with
+its waitings at money-lenders' doors, and its perambulations of Oxford
+Street. Then, by another sudden revolution, we find De Quincey with
+two-thirds of his allowance handed over to him and permission to go to
+Oxford as he wished, but abandoned to his own devices by his mother and
+his guardians, as surely no mother and no guardians ever abandoned an
+exceptionally unworldly boy of eighteen before. They seem to have put
+fifty guineas in his pocket and sent him up to Oxford, without even
+recommending him a college, and with an income which made it practically
+certain that he would once more seek the Jews. When he had spent so much
+of his fifty guineas that there was not enough left to pay caution-money
+at most colleges, he went to Worcester, where it happened to be low. He
+seems to have stayed there, on and off, for nearly six years. But he
+took no degree, his eternal caprices making him shun _vivâ voce_ (then a
+much more important part of the examination than it is now) after
+sending in unusually good written papers. Instead of taking a degree, he
+began to take opium, and to make acquaintance with the "Lakers" in both
+their haunts of Somerset and Westmoreland. He entered himself at the
+Middle Temple, he may have eaten some dinners, and somehow or other he
+"came into his property," though there are dire surmises that it was by
+the Hebrew door. At any rate in November 1809 he gave up both Oxford and
+London (which he had frequented a good deal, chiefly, he says, for the
+sake of the opera of which he was very fond), and established himself at
+Grasmere. One of the most singular things about his singular life--an
+oddity due, no doubt, in part to the fact that he outlived his more
+literary associates instead of being outlived by them--is that though we
+hear much from De Quincey of other people we hear extremely little from
+other people about De Quincey. Indeed what we do so hear dates almost
+entirely from the last days of his life.
+
+As for the autobiographic details in his _Confessions_ and elsewhere,
+anybody who chooses may put those Sibylline leaves together for himself.
+It would only appear certain that for ten years he led the life of a
+recluse student and a hard laudanum-drinker, varied by a little society
+now and then; that in 1816 he married Margaret Simpson, a dalesman's
+daughter, of whom we have hardly any personal notices save to the effect
+that she was very beautiful, and who seems to have been almost the most
+exemplary of wives to almost the most eccentric of husbands; that for
+most of the time he was in more or less ease and affluence (ease and
+affluence still, it would seem, of a treacherous Hebraic origin); and
+that about 1819 he found himself in great pecuniary difficulties. Then
+at length he turned to literature, started as editor of a little Tory
+paper at Kendal, went to London, and took rank, never to be cancelled,
+as a man of letters by the first part of _The Confessions of an
+Opium-Eater_, published in the _London Magazine_ for 1821. He began as a
+magazine-writer, and he continued as such till the end of his life; his
+publications in book-form being, till he was induced to collect his
+articles, quite insignificant. Between 1821 and 1825 he seems to have
+been chiefly in London, though sometimes at Grasmere; between 1825 and
+1830 chiefly at Grasmere, but much in Edinburgh, where Wilson (whose
+friendship he had secured, not at Oxford, though they were
+contemporaries, but at the Lakes) was now residing, and where he was
+introduced to Blackwood. In 1830 he moved his household to the Scotch
+capital, and lived there, and (after his wife's death in 1837) at
+Lasswade, or rather Polton, for the rest of his life. His affairs had
+come to their worst before he lost his wife, and it is now known that
+for some considerable time he lived, like Mr. Chrystal Croftangry, in
+the sanctuary of Holyrood. But De Quincey's way of "living" at any place
+was as mysterious as most of his other ways; and, though he seems to
+have been very fond of his family and not at all put out by them, it was
+his constant habit to establish himself in separate lodgings. These he
+as constantly shifted (sometimes as far as Glasgow) for no intelligible
+reason that has ever been discovered or surmised, his pecuniary troubles
+having long ceased. It was in the latest and most permanent of these
+lodgings, 42 Lothian Street, Edinburgh, not at Lasswade, that he died on
+the 8th of December 1859. He had latterly written mainly, though not
+solely, for _Tait's Magazine_ and _Hogg's Instructor_. But his chief
+literary employment for at least seven years before this, had been the
+arrangement of the authorised edition of his works, the last or
+fourteenth volume of which was in the press at the time of his death.
+
+So meagre are the known facts in a life of seventy-four years, during
+nearly forty of which De Quincey, though never popular, was still
+recognised as a great name in English letters, while during the same
+period he knew, and was known to, not a few distinguished men. But
+little as is recorded of the facts of his life, even less is recorded of
+his character, and for once it is almost impossible to discover that
+character from his works. The few persons who met him all agree as to
+his impenetrability,--an impenetrability not in the least due to posing,
+but apparently natural and fated. De Quincey was at once egotistic and
+impersonal, at once delighted to talk and resolutely shunning society.
+To him, one is tempted to say, reading and writing did come by nature,
+and nothing else was natural at all. With books he is always at home. A
+De Quincey in a world where there was neither reading nor writing of
+books, would certainly either have committed suicide or gone mad. Pope's
+theory of the master-passion, so often abused, justified itself here.
+
+The quantity of work produced during this singular existence, from the
+time when De Quincey first began, unusually late, to write for
+publication, was very large. As collected by the author, it filled
+fourteen volumes; the collection was subsequently enlarged to sixteen,
+and though the new edition promises to restrict itself to the older and
+lesser number, the contents of each volume have been very considerably
+increased. But this printed and reprinted total, so far as can be judged
+from De Quincey's own assertions and from the observations of those who
+were acquainted with him during his later years, must have been but the
+smaller part of what he actually wrote. He was always writing, and
+always leaving deposits of his manuscripts in the various lodgings where
+it was his habit to bestow himself. The greater part of De Quincey's
+writing was of a kind almost as easily written by so full a reader and
+so logical a thinker as an ordinary newspaper article by an ordinary
+man; and except when he was sleeping, wandering about, or reading, he
+was always writing. It is, of course, true that he spent a great deal of
+time, especially in his last years of all, in re-writing and
+re-fashioning previously executed work; and also that illness and opium
+made considerable inroads on his leisure. But I should imagine that if
+we had all that he actually wrote during these nearly forty years, forty
+or sixty printed volumes would more nearly express its amount than
+fourteen or sixteen.
+
+Still what we have is no mean bulk of work for any man to have
+accomplished, especially when it is considered how extraordinarily good
+much of it is. To classify it is not particularly easy; and I doubt,
+myself, whether any classification is necessary. De Quincey himself
+tried, and made rather a muddle of it. Professor Masson is trying also.
+But, in truth, except those wonderful purple patches of "numerous"
+prose, which are stuck all about the work, and perhaps in strictness not
+excepting them, everything that De Quincey wrote, whether it was dream
+or reminiscence, literary criticism or historical study, politics or
+political economy, had one characteristic so strongly impressed on it as
+to dwarf and obscure the differences of subject. It is not very easy to
+find a description at once accurate and fair, brief and adequate, of
+this peculiarity; it is best hinted at in a remark on De Quincey's
+conversation which I have seen quoted somewhere (whether by Professor
+Masson or not I hardly know), that it was, with many interesting and
+delightful qualities, a kind of "rigmarole." So far as I remember, the
+remark was not applied in any unfriendly spirit, nor is it adduced here
+in any such. But both in the printed works, in the remembrances of De
+Quincey's conversation which have been printed, in his letters which are
+exactly like his articles, and in those astonishing imaginary
+conversations attributed to him in the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_, which are
+said, by good authorities, exactly to represent his way of talk, this
+quality of rigmarole appears. It is absolutely impossible for him to
+keep to his subject, or any subject. It is as impossible for him to pull
+himself up briefly in any digression from that subject. In his finest
+passages, as in his most trivial, he is at the mercy of the
+will-o'-the-wisp of divagation. In his later re-handlings of his work,
+he did to some extent limit his followings of this will-o'-the-wisp to
+notes, but by no means always; and both in his later and in his earlier
+work, as it was written for the first time, he indulged them freely in
+the text.
+
+For pure rigmarole, for stories, as Mr. Chadband has it, "of a cock and
+of a bull, and of a lady and of a half-crown," few things, even in De
+Quincey, can exceed, and nothing out of De Quincey can approach, the
+passages about the woman he met on the "cop" at Chester, and about the
+Greek letter that he did not send to the Bishop of Bangor, in the
+preliminary part of the _Confessions_. The first is the more teasing,
+because with a quite elvish superfluity of naughtiness he has here
+indulged in a kind of double rigmarole about the woman and the "bore"
+in the river, and flits from one to the other, and from the other to the
+one (his main story standing still the while), for half a dozen pages,
+till the reader feels as Coleridge's auditors must have felt when he
+talked about "Ball and Bell, Bell and Ball." But the Greek letter
+episode, or rather, the episode about the Greek letter which never was
+written, is, if possible, more flagrantly rigmarolish.
+The-cop-and-bore-and-woman digression contains some remarkable
+description as a kind of solace to the Puck-led traveller; the other is
+bare of any such comfort. The Bishop's old housekeeper, who was De
+Quincey's landlady, told him, it seems, that the Bishop had cautioned
+her against taking in lodgers whom she did not know, and De Quincey was
+very angry. As he thought he could write Greek much better than the
+Bishop, he meditated expostulation in that language. He did not
+expostulate, but he proceeds instead to consider the possible effect on
+the Bishop if he had. There was a contemporary writer whom we can
+imagine struck by a similar whimsy: but Charles Lamb would have given us
+the Bishop and himself "quite natural and distinct" in a dozen lines,
+and then have dropped the subject, leaving our sides aching with
+laughter, and our appetites longing for more. De Quincey tells us at
+great length who the Bishop was, and how he was the Head of Brasenose,
+with some remarks on the relative status of Oxford Colleges. Then he
+debates the pros and cons on the question whether the Bishop would have
+answered the letter or not, with some remarks on the difference between
+strict scholarship and the power of composing in a dead language. He
+rises to real humour in the remark, that as "Methodists swarmed in
+Carnarvonshire," he "could in no case have found pleasure in causing
+mortification" to the Bishop, even if he had vanquished him. By this
+time we have had some three pages of it, and could well, especially with
+this lively touch to finish, accept them, though they be something
+tedious, supposing the incident to be closed. The treacherous author
+leads us to suppose that it is closed; telling us how he left Bangor,
+and went to Carnarvon, which change gradually drew his thoughts away
+from the Bishop. So far is this from being the case, that he goes back
+to that Reverend Father, and for two mortal pages more, speculates
+further what would happen if he had written to the Bishop, what the
+Bishop would have said, whether he would not have asked him (De Quincey)
+to the Palace, whether, in his capacity of Head of a House, he would not
+have welcomed him to that seat of learning, and finally smoothed his way
+to a fellowship. By which time, one is perfectly sick of the Bishop, and
+of these speculations on the might-have-been, which are indeed by no
+means unnatural, being exactly what every man indulges in now and then
+in his own case, which, in conversation, would not be unpleasant, but
+which, gradually and diffusedly set down in a book, and interrupting a
+narrative, are most certainly "rigmarole."
+
+Rigmarole, however, can be a very agreeable thing in its way, and De
+Quincey has carried it to a point of perfection never reached by any
+other rigmaroler. Despite his undoubted possession of a kind of humour,
+it is a very remarkable thing that he rigmaroles, so far as can be made
+out by the application of the most sensitive tests, quite seriously, and
+almost, if not quite, unconsciously. These digressions or deviations are
+studded with quips and jests, good, bad, and indifferent. But the writer
+never seems to suspect that his own general attitude is at least
+susceptible of being made fun of. It is said, and we can very well
+believe it, that he was excessively annoyed at Lamb's delightful parody
+of his _Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected_; and,
+on the whole, I should say that no great man of letters in this century,
+except Balzac and Victor Hugo, was so insensible to the ludicrous aspect
+of his own performances. This in the author of the _Essay on Murder_ may
+seem surprising, but, in fact, there are few things of which there are
+so many subdivisions, or in which the subdivisions are marked off from
+each other by such apparently impermeable lines, as humour. If I may
+refine a little I should say that there was very frequently, if not
+generally, a humorous basis for these divagations of De Quincey's; but
+that he almost invariably lost sight of that basis, and proceeded to
+reason quite gravely away from it, in what is (not entirely with
+justice) called the scholastic manner. How much of this was due to the
+influence of Jean Paul and the other German humorists of the last
+century, with whom he became acquainted very early, I should not like to
+say. I confess that my own enjoyment of Richter, which has nevertheless
+been considerable, has always been lessened by the presence in him, to a
+still greater degree, of this same habit of quasi-serious divagation. To
+appreciate the mistake of it, it is only necessary to compare the manner
+of Swift. The _Tale of a Tub_ is in appearance as daringly discursive as
+anything can be, but the author in the first place never loses his way,
+and in the second never fails to keep a watchful eye on himself, lest he
+should be getting too serious or too tedious. That is what Richter and
+De Quincey fail to do.
+
+Yet though these drawbacks are grave, and though they are (to judge from
+my own experience) felt more seriously at each successive reading, most
+assuredly no man who loves English literature could spare De Quincey
+from it; most assuredly all who love English literature would sooner
+spare some much more faultless writers. Even that quality of his which
+has been already noted, his extraordinary attraction for youth, is a
+singular and priceless one. The Master of the Court of the Gentiles, or
+the Instructor of the Sons of the Prophets, he might be called in a
+fantastic nomenclature, which he would have himself appreciated, if it
+had been applied to any one but himself. What he somewhere calls his
+"extraordinary ignorance of daily life" does not revolt youth. His
+little pedantries, which to the day of his death were like those of a
+clever schoolboy, appeal directly to it. His best fun is quite
+intelligible; his worst not wholly uncongenial. His habit (a certain
+most respected professor in a northern university may recognise the
+words) of "getting into logical coaches and letting himself be carried
+on without minding where he is going" is anything but repugnant to brisk
+minds of seventeen. They are quite able to comprehend the great if
+mannered beauty of his finest style--the style, to quote his own words
+once more, as of "an elaborate and pompous sunset." Such a schoolmaster
+to bring youths of promise, not merely to good literature but to the
+best, nowhere else exists. But he is much more than a mere schoolmaster,
+and in order that we may see what he is, it is desirable first of all to
+despatch two other objections made to him from different quarters, and
+on different lines of thought. The one objection (I should say that I do
+not fully espouse either of them) is that he is an untrustworthy critic
+of books; the other is that he is a very spiteful commentator on men.
+
+This latter charge has found wide acceptance and has been practically
+corroborated and endorsed by persons as different as Southey and
+Carlyle. It would not in any case concern us much, for when a man is
+once dead it matters uncommonly little whether he was personally
+unamiable or not. But I think that De Quincey has in this respect been
+hardly treated. He led such a wholly unnatural life, he was at all times
+and in all places so thoroughly excluded from the natural contact and
+friction of society, that his utterances hardly partake of the ordinary
+character of men's speech. In the "vacant interlunar caves" where he hid
+himself, he could hardly feel the restraints that press on those who
+move within ear-shot and jostle of their fellows on this actual earth.
+This is not a triumphant defence, no doubt; but I think it is a defence.
+And further, it has yet to be proved that De Quincey set down anything
+in malice. He called his literary idol, Wordsworth, "inhumanly
+arrogant." Does anybody--not being a Wordsworthian and therefore out of
+reach of reason--doubt that Wordsworth's arrogance was inhuman? He, not
+unprovoked by scant gratitude on Coleridge's part for very solid
+services, and by a doubtless sincere but rather unctuous protest of his
+brother in opium-eating against the _Confessions_, told some home truths
+against that magnificent genius but most unsatisfactory man. A sort of
+foolish folk has recently arisen which tells us that because Coleridge
+wrote "The Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan," he was quite entitled to
+leave his wife and children to be looked after by anybody who chose, to
+take stipends from casual benefactors, and to scold, by himself or by
+his next friend Mr. Wordsworth, other benefactors, like Thomas Poole,
+who were not prepared at a moment's notice to give him a hundred pounds
+for a trip to the Azores. The rest of us, though we may feel no call to
+denounce Coleridge for these proceedings, may surely hold that "The
+Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan" are no defence to the particular
+charges. I do not see that De Quincey said anything worse of Coleridge
+than any man who knew the then little, but now well-known facts of
+Coleridge's life, was entitled to say if he chose. And so in other
+cases. That he was what is called a thoughtful person--that is to say
+that he ever said to himself, "Will what I am writing give pain, and
+ought I to give that pain?"--I do not allege. In fact, the very excuse
+which has been made for him above is inconsistent with it. He always
+wrote far too much as one in another planet for anything of the kind to
+occur to him, and he was perhaps for a very similar reason rather too
+fond of the "personal talk" which Wordsworth wisely disdained. But that
+he was in any proper sense spiteful, that is to say that he ever wrote
+either with a deliberate intention to wound or with a deliberate
+indifference whether he wounded or not, I do not believe.
+
+The other charge, that he was a bad or rather a very untrustworthy
+critic of books, cannot be met quite so directly. He is indeed
+responsible for a singularly large number of singularly grave critical
+blunders--by which I mean of course not critical opinions disagreeing
+with my own, but critical opinions which the general consent of
+competent critics, on the whole, negatives. The minor classical writers
+are not much read now, but there must be a sufficient jury to whom I can
+appeal to know what is to be done with a professed critic of style--at
+least asserting himself to be no mean classical scholar--who declares
+that "Paganism had no more brilliant master of composition to show
+than"--Velleius Paterculus! Suppose this to be a mere fling or freak,
+what is to be thought of a man who evidently sets Cicero, as a writer,
+if not as a thinker, above Plato? It would be not only possible but easy
+to follow this up with a long list of critical enormities on De
+Quincey's part, enormities due not to accidental and casual crotchet or
+prejudice, as in Hazlitt's case, but apparently to some perverse
+idiosyncrasy. I doubt very much, though the doubt may seem horribly
+heretical to some people, whether De Quincey really cared much for
+poetry as poetry. He liked philosophical poets:--Milton, Wordsworth,
+Shakespeare (inasmuch as he perceived Shakespeare to be the greatest of
+philosophical poets), Pope even in a certain way. But read the
+interesting paper which late in life he devoted to Shelley. He treats
+Shelley as a man admirably, with freedom alike from the maudlin
+sentiment of our modern chatterers and from Puritanical preciseness. He
+is not too hard on him in any way, he thinks him a pleasing personality
+and a thinker distorted but interesting. Of Shelley's strictly poetical
+quality he says nothing, if he knew or felt anything. In fact, of
+lyrical poetry generally, that is to say of poetry in its most purely
+poetical condition, he speaks very little in all his extensive critical
+dissertations. His want of appreciation of it may supply explanation of
+his unpardonable treatment of Goethe. That he should have maltreated
+_Wilhelm Meister_ is quite excusable. There are fervent admirers of
+Goethe at his best who acknowledge most fully the presence in _Wilhelm_
+of the two worst characteristics of German life and literature, bad
+taste and tediousness. But it is not excusable that much later, and
+indeed at the very height of his literary powers and practice, he should
+have written the article in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ on the author
+of _Faust_, of _Egmont_, and above all of the shorter poems. Here he
+deliberately assents to the opinion that _Werther_ is "superior to
+everything that came after it, and for mere power, Goethe's paramount
+work," dismisses _Faust_ as something that "no two people have ever
+agreed about," sentences _Egmont_ as "violating the historic truth of
+character," and mentions not a single one of those lyrics, unmatched, or
+rather only matched by Heine, in the language, by which Goethe first
+gave German rank with the great poetic tongues. His severity on Swift is
+connected with his special "will-worship" of ornate style, of which more
+presently, and in general it may be said that De Quincey's extremely
+logical disposition of mind was rather a snare to him in his criticism.
+He was constantly constructing general principles and then arguing
+downwards from them; in which case woe to any individual fact or person
+that happened to get in the way. Where Wilson, the "only intimate male
+friend I have had" (as he somewhere says with a half-pathetic touch of
+self-illumination more instructive than reams of imaginative
+autobiography), went wrong from not having enough of general principle,
+where Hazlitt went wrong from letting prejudices unconnected with the
+literary side of the matter blind his otherwise piercing literary sight,
+De Quincey fell through an unswervingness of deduction more French than
+English. Your ornate writer must be better than your plain one, _ergo_,
+let us say, Cicero must be better than Swift.
+
+One other curious weakness of his (which has been glanced at already)
+remains to be noticed. This is the altogether deplorable notion of
+jocularity which he only too often exhibits. Mr. Masson, trying to
+propitiate the enemy, admits that "to address the historian Josephus as
+'Joe,' through a whole article, and give him a black eye into the
+bargain, is positively profane." I am not sure as to the profanity,
+knowing nothing particularly sacred about Josephus. But if Mr. Masson
+had called it excessively silly, I should have agreed heartily; and if
+any one else denounced it as a breach of good literary manners, I do not
+know that I should protest. The habit is the more curious in that all
+authorities agree as to the exceptional combination of scholarliness and
+courtliness which marked De Quincey's colloquial style and expression.
+Wilson's daughter, Mrs. Gordon, says that he used to address her
+father's cook "as if she had been a duchess"; and that the cook, though
+much flattered, was somewhat aghast at his _punctilio_. That a man of
+this kind should think it both allowable and funny to talk of Josephus
+as "Joe," and of Magliabecchi as "Mag," may be only a new example of
+that odd law of human nature which constantly prompts people in various
+relations of life, and not least in literature, to assume most the
+particular qualities (not always virtues or graces) that they have not.
+Yet it is fair to remember that Wilson and the _Blackwood_ set, together
+with not a few writers in the _London Magazine_--the two literary
+coteries in connexion with whom De Quincey started as a writer--had
+deliberately imported this element of horse-play into literature, that
+it at least did not seem to interfere with their popularity, and that De
+Quincey himself, after 1830, lived too little in touch with actual life
+to be aware that the style was becoming as unfashionable as it had
+always, save on very exceptional subjects, been ungraceful. Even on
+Wilson, who was to the manner born of riotous spirits, it often sits
+awkwardly; in De Quincey's case it is, to borrow Sir Walter's admirable
+simile in another case, like "the forced impudence of a bashful man."
+Grim humour he can manage admirably, and he also--as in the passage
+about the fate which waited upon all who possessed anything which might
+be convenient to Wordsworth, if they died--can manage a certain kind of
+sly humour not much less admirably. But "Joe" and "Mag," and, to take
+another example, the stuff about Catalina's "crocodile papa" in _The
+Spanish Nun_, are neither grim nor sly, they are only puerile. His
+stanchest defender asks, "why De Quincey should not have the same
+license as Swift and Thackeray?" The answer is quick and crushing. Swift
+and Thackeray justify their license by their use of it; De Quincey does
+not. After which it is hardly necessary to add, though this is almost
+final in itself, that neither Swift nor Thackeray interlards perfectly
+and unaffectedly serious work with mere fooling of the "Joe" and "Mag"
+kind. Swift did not put _mollis abuti_ in the _Four last years of Queen
+Anne_, nor Thackeray his _Punch_ jokes in the death-scene of Colonel
+Newcome. I can quite conceive De Quincey doing both.
+
+And now I have done enough in the fault-finding way, and nothing shall
+induce me to say another word of De Quincey in this article save in
+praise. For praise he himself gives the amplest occasion; he might
+almost remain unblamed altogether if his praisers had not been
+frequently unwise, and if his _exemplar_ were not specially _vitiis
+imitabile_. Few English writers have touched so large a number of
+subjects with such competence both in information and in power of
+handling. Still fewer have exhibited such remarkable logical faculty.
+One main reason why one is sometimes tempted to quarrel with him is that
+his play of fence is so excellent that one longs to cross swords. For
+this and for other reasons no writer has a more stimulating effect, or
+is more likely to lead his readers on to explore and to think for
+themselves. In none is that incurable curiosity, that infinite variety
+of desire for knowledge and for argument which age cannot quench, more
+observable. Few if any have the indefinable quality of freshness in so
+large a measure. You never quite know, though you may have a shrewd
+suspicion, what De Quincey will say on any subject; his gift of sighting
+and approaching new facets of it is so immense. Whether he was in truth
+as accomplished a classical scholar as he claimed to be I do not know;
+he has left few positive documents to tell us. But I should think that
+he was, for he has all the characteristics of a scholar of the best and
+rarest kind--the scholar who is exact as to language without failing to
+comprehend literature, and competent in literature without being
+slipshod as to language. His historical insight, of which the famous
+_Cæsars_ is the best example, was, though sometimes coloured by his
+fancy, and at other times distorted by a slight tendency to
+_supercherie_ as in _The Tartars_ and _The Spanish Nun_, wonderfully
+powerful and acute. He was not exactly as Southey was, "omnilegent"; but
+in his own departments, and they were numerous, he went farther below
+the surface and connected his readings together better than Southey did.
+Of the two classes of severer study to which he specially addicted
+himself, his political economy suffered perhaps a little, acute as his
+views in it often are, from the fact that in his time it was practically
+a new study, and that he had neither sufficient facts nor sufficient
+literature to go upon. In metaphysics, to which he gave himself up for
+years, and in which he seems really to have known whatever there was to
+know, I fear that the opium fiend cheated the world of something like
+masterpieces. Only three men during De Quincey's lifetime had anything
+like his powers in this department. Of these three men, Sir William
+Hamilton either could not or would not write English. Ferrier could and
+did write English; but he could not, as De Quincey could, throw upon
+philosophy the play of literary and miscellaneous illustration which of
+all the sciences it most requires, and which all its really supreme
+exponents have been able to give it. Mansel could do both these things;
+but he was somewhat indolent, and had many avocations. De Quincey could
+write perfect English, he had every resource of illustration and relief
+at command, he was in his way as "brazen-bowelled" at work as he was
+"golden-mouthed" at expression, and he had ample leisure. But the
+inability to undertake sustained labour, which he himself recognises as
+the one unquestionable curse of opium, deprived us of an English
+philosopher who would have stood as far above Kant in exoteric graces,
+as he would have stood above Bacon in esoteric value. It was not
+entirely De Quincey's fault. It seems to be generally recognised now
+that whatever occasional excesses he may have committed, opium was
+really required in his case, and gave us what we have as much as it took
+away what we have not. But if any one chose to write in the antique
+style a debate between Philosophy, Tar-water, and Laudanum, it would be
+almost enough to put in the mouth of Philosophy, "This gave me Berkeley
+and that deprived me of De Quincey."
+
+De Quincey is, however, first of all a writer of ornate English, which
+was never, with him, a mere cover to bare thought. Overpraise and
+mispraise him as anybody may, he cannot be overpraised for this. Mistake
+as he chose to do, and as others have chosen to do, the relative value
+of his gift, the absolute value of it is unmistakable. What other
+Englishman, from Sir Thomas Browne downwards, has written a sentence
+surpassing in melody that on Our Lady of Sighs: "And her eyes, if they
+were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor subtle; no man could read
+their story; they would be found filled with perishing dreams and with
+wrecks of forgotten delirium"? Compare that with the masterpieces of
+some later practitioners. There are no out-of-the-way words; there is no
+needless expense of adjectives; the sense is quite adequate to the
+sound; the sound is only what is required as accompaniment to the sense.
+And though I do not know that in a single instance of equal length--even
+in the still more famous, and as a whole justly more famous, _tour de
+force_ on Our Lady of Darkness--De Quincey ever quite equalled the
+combined simplicity and majesty of this phrase, he has constantly come
+close to it. The _Suspiria_ are full of such passages--there are even
+some who prefer _Savannah la Mar_ to the _Ladies of Sorrow_. Beautiful
+as it is I do not, because the accursed superfluous adjective appears
+there. The famous passages of the _Confessions_ are in every one's
+memory; and so I suppose is the _Vision of Sudden Death_. Many passages
+in _The Cæsars_, though somewhat less florid, are hardly less good; and
+the close of _Joan of Arc_ is as famous as the most ambitious attempts
+of the _Confessions_ and the _Mail Coach_. Moreover, in all the sixteen
+volumes, specimens of the same kind may be found here and there,
+alternating with very different matter; so much so, that it has no doubt
+often occurred to readers that the author's occasional divergence into
+questionable quips and cranks is a deliberate attempt to set off his
+rhetoric, as dramatists of the noblest school have often set off their
+tragedy, with comedy, if not with farce. That such a principle would
+imply confusion of the study and the stage is arguable enough, but it
+does not follow that it was not present. At any rate the contrast,
+deliberate or not, is very strong indeed in De Quincey--stronger than in
+any other prose author except his friend, and pupil rather than master,
+Wilson.
+
+The great advantage that De Quincey has, not only over this friend of
+his but over all practitioners of the ornate style in this century, lies
+in his sureness of hand in the first place, and secondly in the
+comparative frugality of means which perhaps is an inseparable
+accompaniment of sureness of hand. To mention living persons would be
+invidious; but Wilson and Landor are within the most scrupulous critic's
+right of comparison. All three were contemporaries; all three were
+Oxford men--Landor about ten years senior to the other two--and all
+three in their different ways set themselves deliberately to reverse the
+practice of English prose for nearly a century and a half. They did
+great things, but De Quincey did, I think, the greatest and certainly
+the most classical in the proper sense, for all Landor's superior air of
+Hellenism. Voluble as De Quincey often is, he seems always to have felt
+that when you are in your altitudes it is well not to stay there too
+long. And his flights, while they are far more uniformly high than
+Wilson's, which alternately soar and drag, are much more merciful in
+regard of length than Landor's, as well as for the most part much more
+closely connected with the sense of his subjects. There is scarcely one
+of the _Imaginary Conversations_ which would not be the better for very
+considerable thinning, while, with the exception perhaps of _The English
+Mail Coach_, De Quincey's surplusage, obvious enough in many cases, is
+scarcely ever found in his most elaborate and ornate passages. The total
+amount of such passages in the _Confessions_ is by no means large, and
+the more ambitious parts of the _Suspiria_ do not much exceed a dozen
+pages. De Quincey was certainly justified by his own practice in
+adopting and urging as he did the distinction, due, he says, to
+Wordsworth, between the common and erroneous idea of style as the
+_dress_ of thought, and the true definition of it as the _incarnation_
+of thought. The most wizened of coxcombs may spend days and years in
+dressing up his meagre and ugly carcass; but few are the sons of men who
+have sufficient thought to provide the soul of any considerable series
+of avatars. De Quincey had; and therefore, though the manner (with
+certain exceptions heretofore taken) in him is always worth attention,
+it never need or should divert attention from the matter. And thus he
+was not driven to make a little thought do tyrannous duty as lay-figure
+for an infinite amount of dress, or to hang out frippery on a
+clothes-line with not so much as a lay-figure inside it. Even when he is
+most conspicuously "fighting a prize," there is always solid stuff in
+him.
+
+Few indeed are the writers of whom so much can be said, and fewer still
+the miscellaneous writers, among whom De Quincey must be classed. On
+almost any subject that interested him--and the number of such subjects
+was astonishing, curious as are the gaps between the different groups of
+them--what he has to say is pretty sure, even if it be the wildest
+paradox in appearance, to be worth attending to. And in regard to most
+things that he has to say, the reader may be pretty sure also that he
+will not find them better said elsewhere. It has sometimes been
+complained by students, both of De Quincey the man and of De Quincey the
+writer, that there is something not exactly human in him. There is
+certainly much in him of the dæmonic, to use a word which was a very
+good word and really required in the language, and which ought not to be
+exiled because it has been foolishly abused. Sometimes, as has also been
+complained, the demon is a mere familiar with the tricksiness of Puck
+rather than the lightness of Ariel. But far oftener he is a more potent
+spirit than any Robin Goodfellow, and as powerful as Ariel and Ariel's
+master. Trust him wholly you may not; a characteristic often noted in
+intelligences that are neither exactly human, nor exactly diabolic, nor
+exactly divine. But he will do great things for you, and a little wit
+and courage on your part will prevent his doing anything serious against
+you. To him, with much greater justice than to Hogg, might Wilson have
+applied the nickname of Brownie, which he was so fond of bestowing upon
+the author of "Kilmeny." He will do solid work, conjure up a concert of
+aerial music, play a shrewd trick now and then, and all this with a
+curious air of irresponsibility and of remoteness of nature. In ancient
+days when kings played experiments to ascertain the universal or
+original language, some monarch might have been tempted to take a very
+clever child, interest him so far as possible in nothing but books and
+opium, and see whether he would turn out anything like De Quincey. But
+it is in the highest degree improbable that he would. Therefore let us
+rejoice, though according to the precepts of wisdom and not too
+indiscriminately, in our De Quincey as we once, and probably once for
+all, received him.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[16] See Appendix A--De Quincey.
+
+[17] _The Collected Writings of Thomas de Quincey_; edited by David
+Masson. In fourteen volumes; Edinburgh, 1889-90.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+LOCKHART
+
+
+In every age there are certain writers who seem to miss their due meed
+of fame, and this is most naturally and unavoidably the case in ages
+which see a great deal of what may be called occasional literature.
+There is, as it seems to me, a special example of this general
+proposition in the present century, and that example is the writer whose
+name stands at the head of this chapter. No one, perhaps, who speaks
+with any competence either of knowledge or judgment, would say that
+Lockhart made an inconsiderable figure in English literature. He wrote
+what some men consider the best biography on a large scale, and what
+almost every one considers the second best biography on a large scale,
+in English. His _Spanish Ballads_ are admitted, by those who know the
+originals, to have done them almost more than justice; and by those who
+do not know those originals, to be charming in themselves. His novels,
+if not masterpieces, have kept the field better than most: I saw a very
+badly printed and flaringly-covered copy of _Reginald Dalton_ for sale
+at the bookstall at Victoria Station the day before writing these words.
+He was a pillar of the _Quarterly_, of _Blackwood_, of _Fraser_, at a
+time when quarterly and monthly magazines played a greater part in
+literature than they have played since or are likely to play again. He
+edited one of these periodicals for thirty years. "Nobody," as Mr.
+Browning has it, "calls him a dunce." Yet there is no collected edition
+of his works; his sober, sound, scholarly, admirably witty, and, with
+some very few exceptions, admirably catholic literary criticism, is
+rarely quoted; and to add to this, there is a curious prepossession
+against him, which, though nearly a generation has passed since his
+death, has by no means disappeared.[18] Some years ago, in a periodical
+where I was, for the most part, allowed to say exactly what I liked in
+matters literary, I found a sentence laudatory of Lockhart, from the
+purely literary point of view, omitted between proof and publication. It
+so happened that the editor of this periodical could not even have known
+Lockhart personally, or have been offended by his management of the
+_Quarterly_, much less by his early _fredaines_ in _Blackwood_ and
+_Fraser_. It was this circumstance that first suggested to me the notion
+of trying to supply something like a criticism of this remarkable
+critic, which nobody has yet (1884) done, and which seems worth doing.
+For while the work of many of Lockhart's contemporaries, famous at the
+time, distinctly loses by re-reading, his for the most part does not;
+and it happens to display exactly the characteristics which are most
+wanting in criticism, biographical and literary, at the present day. If
+any one at the outset desires a definition, or at least an enumeration
+of those characteristics, I should say that they are sobriety of style
+and reserve of feeling, coupled with delicacy of intellectual
+appreciation and æsthetic sympathy, a strong and firm creed in matters
+political and literary, not excluding that catholicity of judgment which
+men of strong belief frequently lack, and, above all, the faculty of
+writing like a gentleman without writing like a mere gentleman. No one
+can charge Lockhart with dilettantism: no one certainly can charge him
+with feebleness of intellect, or insufficient equipment of culture, or
+lack of humour and wit.
+
+His life was, except for the domestic misfortunes which marked its
+close, by no means eventful; and the present writer, if he had access to
+any special sources of information (which he has not), would abstain
+very carefully from using them. John Gibson Lockhart was born at the
+Manse of Cambusnethan on 14th July 1794, went to school early, was
+matriculated at Glasgow at twelve years old, transferred himself by
+means of a Snell exhibition to Balliol at fifteen, and took a first
+class in 1813. They said he caricatured the examiners: this was,
+perhaps, not the unparalleled audacity which admiring commentators have
+described it as being. Very many very odd things have been done in the
+Schools. But if there was nothing extraordinary in his Oxford life
+except what was, even for those days, the early age at which he began
+it, his next step was something out of the common; for he went to
+Germany, was introduced to Goethe, and spent some time there. An odd
+coincidence in the literary history of the nineteenth century is that
+both Lockhart and Quinet practically began literature by translating a
+German book, and that both had the remarkably good luck to find
+publishers who paid them beforehand. There are few such publishers now.
+Lockhart's book was Schlegel's _Lectures on History_, and his publisher
+was Mr. Blackwood. Then he came back to Scotland and to Edinburgh, and
+was called to the bar, and "swept the outer house with his gown," after
+the fashion admirably described in _Peter's Letters_, and referred to by
+Scott in not the least delightful though one of the most melancholy of
+his works, the Introduction to the _Chronicles of the Canongate_.
+Lockhart, one of whose distinguishing characteristics throughout life
+was shyness and reserve, was no speaker. Indeed, as he happily enough
+remarked in reply to the toast of his health at the farewell dinner
+given to celebrate his removal to London, "I cannot speak; if I could, I
+should not have left you." But if he could not speak he could write,
+and the establishment of _Blackwood's Magazine_, after its first
+abortive numbers, gave him scope. "The scorpion which delighteth to
+sting the faces of men," as he or Wilson describes himself in the
+_Chaldee Manuscript_ (for the passage is beyond Hogg's part), certainly
+justified the description. As to this famous _Manuscript_, the late
+Professor Ferrier undoubtedly made a blunder (in the same key as those
+that he made in describing the _Noctes_, in company with which he
+reprinted it) as "in its way as good as _The Battle of the Books_." _The
+Battle of the Books_, full of mistakes as it is, is literature, and the
+_Chaldee Manuscript_ is only capital journalism. But it is capital
+journalism; and the exuberance of its wit, if it be only wit of the
+undergraduate kind (and Lockhart at least was still but an undergraduate
+in years), is refreshing enough. The dreadful manner in which it
+fluttered the dovecotes of Edinburgh Whiggism need not be further
+commented on, till Lockhart's next work (this time an almost though not
+quite independent one) has been noticed. This was _Peter's Letters to
+his Kinsfolk_, an elaborate book, half lampoon, half mystification,
+which appeared in 1819. This book, which derived its title from Scott's
+account of his journey to Paris, and in its plan followed to some extent
+_Humphrey Clinker_, is one of the most careful examples of literary
+hoaxing to be found. It purported to be the work of a certain Dr. Peter
+Morris, a Welshman, and it is hardly necessary to say that there was no
+such person. It had a handsome frontispiece depicting this Peter Morris,
+and displaying not, like the portrait in Southey's _Doctor_, the occiput
+merely, but the full face and features. This portrait was described, and
+as far as that went it seems truly described, as "an interesting example
+of a new style of engraving by Lizars." Mr. Bates, who probably knows,
+says that there was no first edition, but that it was published with
+"second edition" on the title-page. My copy has the same date, 1819, but
+is styled the _third_ edition, and has a postscript commenting on the
+to-do the book made. However all this may be, it is a very handsome
+book, excellently printed and containing capital portraits and
+vignettes, while the matter is worthy of the get-up. The descriptions of
+the Outer-House, of Craigcrook and its high jinks, of Abbotsford, of the
+finding of "Ambrose's," of the manufacture of Glasgow punch, and of many
+other things, are admirable; and there is a charming sketch of Oxford
+undergraduate life, less exaggerated than that in _Reginald Dalton_,
+probably because the subject was fresher in the author's memory.
+
+Lockhart modestly speaks of this book in his _Life of Scott_ as one that
+"none but a very young and thoughtless person would have written." It
+may safely be said that no one but a very clever person, whether young
+or old, could have written it, though it is too long and has occasional
+faults of a specially youthful kind. But it made, coming as it did upon
+the heels of the _Chaldee Manuscript_, a terrible commotion in
+Edinburgh. The impartial observer of men and things may, indeed, have
+noticed in the records of the ages, that a libelled Liberal is the man
+in all the world who utters the loudest cries. The examples of the
+Reformers, and of the eighteenth-century _Philosophes_, are notorious
+and hackneyed; but I can supply (without, I trust, violating the
+sanctity of private life) a fresh and pleasing example. Once upon a
+time, a person whom we shall call A. paid a visit to a person whom we
+shall call B. "How sad," said A., "are those personal attacks of the
+---- on Mr. Gladstone."--"Personality," said B., "is always disgusting;
+and I am very sorry to hear that the ---- has followed the bad example
+of the personal attacks on Lord Beaconsfield."--"Oh! but," quoth A.,
+"that was _quite_ a different thing." Now B. went out to dinner that
+night, and sitting next to a distinguished Liberal member of Parliament,
+told him this tale, expecting that he would laugh. "Ah! yes," said he
+with much gravity, "it is _very_ different, you know."
+
+In the same way the good Whig folk of Edinburgh regarded it as very
+different that the _Edinburgh Review_ should scoff at Tories, and that
+_Blackwood_ and _Peter_ should scoff at Whigs. The scorpion which
+delighted to sting the faces of men, probably at this time founded a
+reputation which has stuck to him for more than seventy years after Dr.
+Peter Morris drove his shandrydan through Scotland. Sir Walter (then
+Mr.) Scott held wisely aloof from the extremely exuberant Toryism of
+_Blackwood_, and, indeed, had had some quarrels with its publisher and
+virtual editor. But he could not fail to be introduced to a man whose
+tastes and principles were so closely allied to his own. A year after
+the appearance of _Peter's Letters_, Lockhart married, on 29th April
+1820 (a perilous approximation to the unlucky month of May), Sophia
+Scott, the Duke of Buccleuch's "Little Jacobite," the most like her
+father of all his children. Every reader of the _Life_ knows the
+delightful pictures, enough for interest and not enough for vulgar
+obtrusion, given by Lockhart of life at Chiefswood, the cottage near
+Abbotsford which he and his wife inhabited for nearly six years.
+
+They were very busy years for Lockhart. He was still active in
+contributing to _Blackwood_; he wrote all his four novels, and he
+published the _Spanish Ballads_. _Valerius_ and _Adam Blair_ appeared in
+1821, _Reginald Dalton_ and the _Ballads_ in 1823, _Matthew Wald_ in
+1824.
+
+The novels, though containing much that is very remarkable, are not his
+strongest work; indeed, any critic who speaks with knowledge must admit
+that Lockhart had every faculty for writing novels, except the faculty
+of novel-writing. _Valerius_, a classical story of the visit of a
+Roman-Briton to Rome, and the persecution of the Christians in the days
+of Trajan, is, like everything of its author's, admirably written, but,
+like every classical novel without exception, save only _Hypatia_ (which
+makes its interests and its personages daringly modern), it somehow
+rings false and faint, though not, perhaps, so faint or so false as most
+of its fellows. _Adam Blair_, the story of the sudden succumbing to
+natural temptation of a pious minister of the kirk, is unquestionably
+Lockhart's masterpiece in this kind. It is full of passion, full of
+force, and the characters of Charlotte Campbell and Adam Blair himself
+are perfectly conceived. But the story-gift is still wanting. The reader
+finds himself outside: wondering why the people do these things, and
+whether in real life they would have done them, instead of following the
+story with absorption, and asking himself no questions at all. The same,
+in a different way, is the case with Lockhart's longest book, _Reginald
+Dalton_; and this has the additional disadvantage that neither hero nor
+heroine are much more than lay-figures, while in _Adam Blair_ both are
+flesh and blood. The Oxford scenes are amusing but exaggerated--the
+obvious work of a man who supplies the defects of a ten years' memory by
+deepening the strokes where he does remember. _Matthew Wald_, which is a
+novel of madness, has excellent passages, but is conventional and wooden
+as a whole. Nothing was more natural than that Lockhart, with the
+example of Scott immediately before him, should try novel-writing; not
+many things are more indicative of his literary ability than that,
+after a bare three years' practice, he left a field which certainly was
+not his.
+
+In the early autumn of 1825, just before the great collapse of his
+affairs, Scott went to Ireland with Lockhart in his company. But very
+early in the following year, before the collapse was decided, Lockhart
+and his family moved to London, on his appointment as editor of the
+_Quarterly_, in succession to Gifford. Probably there never was a better
+appointment of the kind. Lockhart was a born critic: he had both the
+faculty and the will to work up the papers of his contributors to the
+proper level; he was firm and decided in his literary and political
+views, without going to the extreme Giffordian acerbity in both; and his
+intelligence and erudition were very wide. "He could write," says a
+phrase in some article I have somewhere seen quoted, "on any subject
+from poetry to dry-rot;" and there is no doubt that an editor, if he
+cannot exactly write on any subject from poetry to dry-rot, should be
+able to take an interest in any subject between and, if necessary,
+beyond those poles. Otherwise he has the choice of two undesirables;
+either he frowns unduly on the dry-rot articles, which probably interest
+large sections of the public (itself very subject to dry-rot), or he
+lets the dry-rot contributor inflict his hobby, without mercy and
+unedited, on a reluctant audience. But Lockhart, though he is said (for
+his contributions are not, as far as I know, anywhere exactly
+indicated) to have contributed fully a hundred articles to the
+_Quarterly_, that is to say one to nearly every number during the
+twenty-eight years of his editorship, by no means confined himself to
+this work. It was, indeed, during its progress that he composed not
+merely the _Life of Napoleon_, which was little more than an abridgment,
+though a very clever abridgment, of Scott's book, but the _Lives_ of
+Burns and of Scott himself. Before, however, dealing with these, his
+_Spanish Ballads_ and other poetical work may be conveniently disposed
+of.
+
+Lockhart's verse is in the same scattered condition as his prose; but it
+is evident that he had very considerable poetical faculty. The charming
+piece, "When youthful hope is fled," attributed to him on Mrs. Norton's
+authority; the well-known "Captain Paton's Lament," which has been
+republished in the _Tales from Blackwood_; and the mono-rhymed epitaph
+on "Bright broken Maginn," in which some wiseacres have seen ill-nature,
+but which really is a masterpiece of humorous pathos, are all in very
+different styles, and are all excellent each in its style. But these
+things are mere waifs, separated from each other in widely different
+publications; and until they are put together no general impression of
+the author's poetical talent, except a vaguely favourable one, can be
+derived from them. The _Spanish Ballads_ form something like a
+substantive work, and one of nearly as great merit as is possible to
+poetical translations of poetry. I believe opinions differ as to their
+fidelity to the original. Here and there, it is said, the author has
+exchanged a vivid and characteristic touch for a conventional and feeble
+one. Thus, my friend Mr. Hannay points out to me that in the original of
+"The Lord of Butrago" the reason given by Montanez for not accompanying
+the King's flight is not the somewhat _fade_ one that
+
+    Castile's proud dames shall never point the finger of disdain,
+
+but the nobler argument, showing the best side of feudal sentiment, that
+the widows of his tenants shall never say that he fled and left their
+husbands to fight and fall. Lockhart's master, Sir Walter, would
+certainly not have missed this touch, and it is odd that Lockhart
+himself did. But such things will happen to translators. On the other
+hand, it is, I believe, admitted (and the same very capable authority in
+Spanish is my warranty) that on the whole the originals have rather
+gained than lost; and certainly no one can fail to enjoy the _Ballads_
+as they stand in English. The "Wandering Knight's Song" has always
+seemed to me a gem without flaw, especially the last stanza. Few men,
+again, manage the long "fourteener" with middle rhyme better than
+Lockhart, though he is less happy with the anapæst, and has not fully
+mastered the very difficult trochaic measure of "The Death of Don
+Pedro." In "The Count Arnaldos," wherein, indeed, the subject lends
+itself better to that cadence, the result is more satisfactory. The
+merits, however, of these _Ballads_ are not technical merely, or rather,
+the technical merits are well subordinated to the production of the
+general effect. About the nature of that effect much ink has been shed.
+It is produced equally by Greek hexameters, by old French assonanced
+_tirades_, by English "eights and sixes," and by not a few other
+measures. But in itself it is more or less the same--the stirring of the
+blood as by the sound of a trumpet, or else the melting of the mood into
+or close to tears. The ballad effect is thus the simplest and most
+primitive of all poetical effects; it is Lockhart's merit that he seldom
+fails to produce it. The simplicity and spontaneity of his verse may, to
+some people, be surprising in a writer so thoroughly and intensely
+literary; but Lockhart's character was as complex as his verse is
+simple, and the verse itself is not the least valuable guide to it.
+
+It has been said that his removal to London and his responsible office
+by no means reduced his general literary activity. Whether he continued
+to contribute to _Blackwood_ I am not sure; some phrases in the _Noctes_
+seem to argue the contrary. But he not only, as has been said, wrote for
+the _Quarterly_ assiduously, but after a short time joined the new
+venture of _Fraser_, and showed in that rollicking periodical that the
+sting of the "scorpion" had by no means been extracted. He produced,
+moreover, in 1828, his _Life of Burns_, and in 1836-37 his _Life of
+Scott_. These, with the sketch of Theodore Hook written for the
+_Quarterly_ in 1843, and separately published later, make three very
+remarkable examples of literary biography on very different scales,
+dealing with very different subjects, and, by comparison of their
+uniform excellence, showing that the author had an almost unique genius
+for this kind of composition. The _Life of Scott_ fills seven capacious
+volumes; the _Life of Burns_ goes easily into one; the _Life of Hook_
+does not reach a hundred smallish pages. But they are all equally
+well-proportioned in themselves and to their subjects; they all exhibit
+the same complete grasp of the secret of biography; and they all have
+the peculiarity of being full of facts without presenting an undigested
+appearance. They thus stand at an equal distance from biography of the
+fashion of the old academic _Eloge_ of the last century, which makes an
+elegant discourse about a man, but either deliberately or by accident
+gives precise information about hardly any of the facts of the man's
+life; and from modern biography, which tumbles upon the devoted reader a
+cataract of letters, documents, and facts of all sorts, uncombined and
+undigested by any exercise of narrative or critical skill on the part of
+the author. Lockhart's biographies, therefore, belong equally (to borrow
+De Quincey's useful, though, as far as terminology goes, not very happy
+distinction) to the literature of knowledge and the literature of
+power. They are storehouses of information; but they are, at the same
+time, works of art, and of very great art. The earliest of the three,
+the _Life of Burns_, is to this day by far the best book on the subject;
+indeed, with its few errors and defects of fact corrected and
+supplemented as they have been by the late Mr. Douglas, it makes all
+other Lives quite superfluous. Yet it was much more difficult,
+especially for a Scotchman, to write a good book about Burns then than
+now; though I am told that, for a Scotchman, there is still a
+considerable difficulty in the matter. Lockhart was familiar with
+Edinburgh society--indeed, he had long formed a part of it--and
+Edinburgh society was still, when he wrote, very sore at the charge of
+having by turns patronised and neglected Burns. Lockhart was a decided
+Tory, and Burns, during the later part of his life at any rate, had
+permitted himself manifestations of political opinion which Whigs
+themselves admitted to be imprudent freaks, and which even a
+good-natured Tory might be excused for regarding as something very much
+worse. But the biographer's treatment of both these subjects is
+perfectly tolerant, judicious, and fair, and the same may be said of his
+whole account of Burns. Indeed, the main characteristic of Lockhart's
+criticism, a robust and quiet sanity, fitted him admirably for the task
+of biography. He is never in extremes, and he never avoids extremes by
+the common expedient of see-sawing between two sides, two parties, or
+two views of a man's character. He holds aloof equally from _engouement_
+and from depreciation, and if, as a necessary consequence, he failed,
+and fails, to please fanatics on either side, he cannot fail to please
+those who know what criticism really means.
+
+These good qualities were shown even to better advantage in a pleasanter
+but, at the same time, far more difficult task, the famous _Life of
+Scott_. The extraordinary interest of the subject, and the fashion, no
+less skilful than modest, in which the biographer keeps himself in the
+background, and seems constantly to be merely editing Scott's words,
+have perhaps obscured the literary value of the book to some readers. Of
+the perpetual comparison with Boswell, it may be said, once for all,
+that it is a comparison of matter merely; and that from the properly
+literary point of view, the point of view of workmanship and form, it
+does not exist. Perhaps the most surprising thing is that, even in
+moments of personal irritation, any one should have been found to accuse
+Lockhart of softening Scott's faults. The other charge, of malice to
+Scott, is indeed more extraordinary still in a certain way; but, being
+merely imbecile, it need not be taken into account. A delightful
+document informs us that, in the opinion of the Hon. Charles Sumner,
+Fenimore Cooper (who, stung by some references to him in the book,
+attacked it) administered "a proper castigation to the vulgar minds of
+Scott and Lockhart." This is a jest so pleasing that it almost puts one
+in good temper with the whole affair. But, in fact, Lockhart,
+considering his relationship to Scott, and considering Scott's
+greatness, could hardly have spoken more plainly as to the grave fault
+of judgment which made a man of letters and a member of a learned
+profession mix himself up secretly, and almost clandestinely, with
+commercial speculations. On this point the biographer does not attempt
+to mince matters; and on no other point was it necessary for him to be
+equally candid, for this, grave as it is, is almost the only fault to be
+found with Scott's character. This candour, however, is only one of the
+merits of the book. The wonderfully skilful arrangement of so vast and
+heterogeneous a mass of materials, the way in which the writer's own
+work and his quoted matter dovetail into one another, the completeness
+of the picture given of Scott's character and life, have never been
+equalled in any similar book. Not a few minor touches, moreover, which
+are very apt to escape notice, enhance its merit. Lockhart was a man of
+all men least given to wear his heart upon his sleeve, yet no one has
+dealt with such pitiful subjects as his later volumes involve, at once
+with such total absence of "gush" and with such noble and pathetic
+appreciation. For Scott's misfortunes were by no means the only matters
+which touched him nearly, in and in connection with the chronicle. The
+constant illness and sufferings of his own child form part of it; his
+wife died during its composition and publication, and all these things
+are mentioned with as little parade of stoicism as of sentiment. I do
+not think that, as an example of absolute and perfect good taste, the
+account of Scott's death can be surpassed in literature. The same
+quality exhibits itself in another matter. No biographer can be less
+anxious to display his own personality than Lockhart; and though for six
+years he was a constant, and for much longer an occasional, spectator of
+the events he describes, he never introduces himself except when it is
+necessary. Yet, on the other hand, when Scott himself makes
+complimentary references to him (as when he speaks of his party "having
+Lockhart to say clever things"), he neither omits the passage nor stoops
+to the missish _minauderie_, too common in such cases, of translating
+"spare my blushes" into some kind of annotation. Lockhart will not talk
+about Lockhart; but if others, whom the public likes to hear, talk about
+him, Lockhart does not put his fan before his face.
+
+This admirable book, however, is both well enough known (if not so well
+known as it deserves) and large enough to make it both unnecessary and
+impossible to criticise it at length here. The third work noticed
+above, the sketch of the life of Theodore Hook, though it has been
+reprinted more than once, and is still, I believe, kept in print and on
+sale, is probably less familiar to most readers. It is, however, almost
+as striking an example, though of course an example in miniature only,
+of Lockhart's aptitude for the great and difficult art of literary
+biography as either of the two books just mentioned. Here the difficulty
+was of a different kind. A great many people liked Theodore Hook, but it
+was nearly impossible for any one to respect him; yet it was quite
+impossible for Lockhart, a political sympathiser and a personal friend,
+to treat him harshly in an obituary notice. There was no danger of his
+setting down aught in malice; but there might be thought to be a
+considerable danger of over-extenuation. The danger was the greater,
+inasmuch as Lockhart himself had certainly not escaped, and had perhaps
+to some extent deserved, one of Hook's reproaches. No man questioned his
+integrity; he was not a reckless spendthrift; he was not given to
+excesses in living, or to hanging about great houses; nor was he
+careless of moral and social rules. But the scorpion which had delighted
+to sting the faces of men might have had some awkwardness in dealing
+with the editor of _John Bull_. The result, however, victoriously
+surmounts all difficulties without evading one. Nothing that is the
+truth about Hook is omitted, or even blinked; and from reading Lockhart
+alone, any intelligent reader might know the worst that is to be said
+about him. Neither are any of his faults, in the unfair sense,
+extenuated. His malicious and vulgar practical jokes; his carelessness
+at Mauritius; the worse than carelessness which allowed him to shirk,
+when he had ample means of discharging it by degrees, a debt which he
+acknowledged that he justly owed; the folly and vanity which led him to
+waste his time, his wit, and his money in playing the hanger-on at
+country houses and town dinner-tables; his hard living, and the laxity
+which induced him not merely to form irregular connections, but
+prevented him from taking the only step which could, in some measure,
+repair his fault, are all fairly put, and blamed frankly. Even in that
+more delicate matter of the personal journalism, Lockhart's procedure is
+as ingenuous as it is ingenious; and the passage of the sketch which
+deals with "the blazing audacity of invective, the curious delicacy of
+persiflage, the strong caustic satire" (expressions, by the way, which
+suit Lockhart himself much better than Hook, though Lockhart had not
+Hook's broad humour), in fact, admits that the application of these
+things was not justifiable, nor to be justified. Yet with all this, the
+impression left by the sketch is distinctly favourable on the whole,
+which, in the circumstances, must be admitted to be a triumph of
+advocacy obtained not at the expense of truth, but by the art of the
+advocate in making the best of it.
+
+The facts of Lockhart's life between his removal to London and his death
+may be rapidly summarised, the purpose of this notice being rather
+critical than biographical. He had hardly settled in town when, as he
+himself tells, he had to attempt, fruitlessly enough, the task of
+mediator in the financial disasters of Constable and Scott; and his own
+share of domestic troubles began early. His eldest son, after repeated
+escapes, died in 1831; Scott followed shortly; Miss Anne Scott, after
+her father's death, came in broken health to Lockhart's house, and died
+there only a year later; and in the spring of 1837 his wife likewise
+died. Then Fortune let him alone for a little, to return in no better
+humour some years later.
+
+It is, however, from the early "thirties" that one of the best known
+memorials of Lockhart dates; that is to say, the portrait, or rather the
+two portraits, in the Fraser Gallery. In the general group of the
+Fraserians he sits between Fraser himself and Theodore Hook, with the
+diminutive figure of Crofton Croker half intercepted beyond him; and his
+image forms the third plate in Mr. Bates's republication of the gallery.
+It is said to be the most faithful of the whole series, and it is
+certainly the handsomest, giving even a more flattering representation
+than the full-face portrait by Pickersgill which serves as frontispiece
+to the modern editions of the _Ballads_. In this latter the curious
+towzled mop of hair, in which our fathers delighted, rather mars the
+effect; while in Maclise's sketch (which is in profile) it is less
+obtrusive. In this latter, too, there is clearly perceivable what the
+Shepherd in the _Noctes_ calls "a sort of laugh aboot the screwed-up
+mouth of him that fules ca'd no canny, for they couldna thole the
+meaning o't." There is not much doubt that Lockhart aided and abetted
+Maginn in much of the mischief that distinguished the early days of
+_Fraser_, though his fastidious taste is never likely to have stooped to
+the coarseness which was too natural to Maginn. It is believed that to
+him is due the wicked wresting of Alaric Watts' second initial into
+"Attila," which gave the victim so much grief, and he probably did many
+other things of the same kind. But Lockhart was never vulgar, and
+_Fraser_ in those days very often was.
+
+In 1843 Lockhart received his first and last piece of political
+preferment, being appointed, says one of the authorities before me,
+Chancellor of the Duchy of Cornwall, and (says another) Chancellor of
+the Duchy of Lancaster. Such are biographers; but the matter is not of
+the slightest importance, though I do not myself quite see how it could
+have been Lancaster. A third and more trustworthy writer gives the post
+as "Auditorship" of the Duchy of Lancaster, which is possible enough.
+
+In 1847, the death of Sir Walter Scott's last surviving son brought the
+title and estate to Lockhart's son Walter, but he died in 1853.
+Lockhart's only other child had married Mr. Hope--called, after his
+brother-in-law's death, Mr. Hope Scott, of whom an elaborate biography
+has been published. Little in it concerns Lockhart, but the admirable
+letter which he wrote to Mr. Hope on his conversion to the Roman Church.
+This step, followed as it was by Mrs. Hope, could not but be, and in
+this letter is delicately hinted to be, no small grief to Lockhart, who
+saw Abbotsford fall under influences for which certainly neither he nor
+its founder had any respect. His repeated domestic losses, and many
+years of constant work and excitement, appear to have told on him, and
+very shortly after his son's death in April 1853 he resigned the
+editorship of the _Quarterly_. He then visited Italy, a visit from
+which, if he had been a superstitious man, the ominous precedent of
+Scott might have deterred him. His journey did him no good, and he died
+at Abbotsford on the 25th of November. December, says another authority,
+for so it is that history gets written, even in thirty years.
+
+The comparatively brief notices which are all that have been published
+about Lockhart, uniformly mention the unpopularity (to use a mild word)
+which pursued him, and which, as I have remarked, does not seem to have
+exhausted itself even yet. It is not very difficult to account for the
+origin of this; and the neglect to supply any collection of his work,
+and any authoritative account of his life and character, will quite
+explain its continuance. In the first place, Lockhart was well known as
+a most sarcastic writer; in the second, he was for nearly a lifetime
+editor of one of the chief organs of party politics and literary
+criticism in England. He might have survived the _Chaldee Manuscript_,
+and _Peter's Letters_, and the lampoons in _Fraser_: he might even have
+got the better of the youthful imprudence which led him to fix upon
+himself a description which was sure to be used and abused against him
+by the "fules," if he had not succeeded to the chair of the _Quarterly_.
+Individual and, to a great extent, anonymous indulgence of the luxury of
+scorn never gave any man a very bad character, even if he were, as
+Lockhart was, personally shy and reserved, unable to make up for written
+sarcasm with verbal flummery, and, in virtue of an incapacity for
+gushing, deprived of the easiest and, by public personages, most
+commonly practised means of proving that a man has "a good heart after
+all." But when he complicated his sins by editing the _Quarterly_ at a
+time when everybody attacked everybody else in exactly such terms as
+pleased them, the sins of his youth were pretty sure to be visited on
+him. In the first place, there was the great army of the criticised, who
+always consider that the editor of the paper which dissects them is
+really responsible. The luckless Harriet Martineau, who, if I remember
+rightly, gives in her autobiography a lurid picture of Lockhart "going
+down at night to the printer's" and inserting dreadful things about her,
+and who, I believe, took the feminine plan of revenging herself in an
+obituary article, was only one of a great multitude.
+
+Lockhart does not seem to have taken over from Gifford quite such a
+troublesome crew of helpers as Macvey Napier inherited from Jeffrey, and
+he was also free from the monitions of his predecessor. But in Croker he
+had a first lieutenant who could not very well be checked, and who
+(though he, too, has had rather hard measure) had no equal in the art of
+making himself offensive. Besides, those were the days when the famous
+"Scum condensed of Irish bog" lines appeared in a great daily newspaper
+about O'Connell. Imagine the _Times_ addressing Mr. Parnell as "Scum
+condensed of Irish bog," with the other amenities that follow, in this
+year of grace!
+
+But Lockhart had not only his authors, he had his contributors. "A'
+contributors," says the before-quoted Shepherd, in a moment of such
+preternatural wisdom that he must have been "fou," "are in a manner
+fierce." They are--it is the nature and essence of the animal to be so.
+The contributor who is not allowed to contribute is fierce, as a matter
+of course; but not less fierce is the contributor who thinks himself too
+much edited, and the contributor who imperatively insists that his
+article on Chinese metaphysics shall go in at once, and the contributor
+who, being an excellent hand at articles on the currency, wants to be
+allowed to write on dancing; and, in short, as the Shepherd says, all
+contributors. Now it does not appear (for, as I must repeat, I have no
+kind of private information on the subject) that Lockhart was by any
+means an easy-going editor, or one of that kind which allows a certain
+number of privileged writers to send in what they like. We are told in
+many places that he "greatly improved" his contributors' articles; and I
+should say that if there is one thing which drives a contributor to the
+verge of madness, it is to have his articles "greatly improved." A hint
+in the _Noctes_ (and it may be observed that though the references to
+Lockhart in the _Noctes_ are not very numerous, they are valuable, for
+Wilson's friendship seems to have been mixed with a small grain of
+jealousy which preserves them from being commonplace) suggests that his
+friends did not consider him as by any means too ready to accept their
+papers. All this, added to his early character of scoffer at Whig
+dignities, and his position as leader _en titre_ of Tory journalism, was
+quite sufficient to create a reputation partly exaggerated, partly quite
+false, which has endured simply because no trouble has been taken to
+sift and prove it.
+
+The head and front of Lockhart's offending, in a purely literary view,
+seems to be the famous _Quarterly_ article on Lord Tennyson's volume of
+1832. That article is sometimes spoken of as Croker's, but there can be
+no manner of doubt that it is Lockhart's; and, indeed, it is quoted as
+his by Professor Ferrier, who, through Wilson, must have known the
+facts. Now I do not think I yield to any man living in admiration of the
+Laureate, but I am unable to think much the worse, or, indeed, any the
+worse, of Lockhart because of this article. In the first place, it is
+extremely clever, being, perhaps, the very best example of politely
+cruel criticism in existence. In the second, most, if not all, of the
+criticism is perfectly just. If Lord Tennyson himself, at this safe
+distance of time, can think of the famous strawberry story and its
+application without laughing, he must be an extremely sensitive Peer.
+And nobody, I suppose, would now defend the wondrous stanza which was
+paralleled from the _Groves of Blarney_. The fact is that criticism of
+criticism after some time is apt to be doubly unjust. It is wont to
+assume, or rather to imagine, that the critic must have known what the
+author was going to do, as well as what he had actually done; and it is
+wont to forget that the work criticised was very often, as it presented
+itself to the critic, very different from what it is when it presents
+itself to the critic's critic. The best justification of Lockhart's
+verdict on the volume of 1832 is what Lord Tennyson himself has done
+with the volume of 1832. Far more than half the passages objected to
+have since been excised or altered. But there are other excuses. In the
+first place, Mr. Tennyson, as he then was, represented a further
+development of schools of poetry against which the _Quarterly_ had
+always, rightly or wrongly, set its face, and a certain loyalty to the
+principles of his paper is, after all, not the worst fault of a critic.
+In the second, no one can fairly deny that some points in Mr. Tennyson's
+early, if not in his later, manner must have been highly and rightly
+disgustful to a critic who, like Lockhart, was above all things
+masculine and abhorrent of "gush." In the third, it is, unfortunately,
+not given to all critics to admire all styles alike. Let those to whom
+it is given thank God therefor; but let them, at the same time, remember
+that they are as much bound to accept whatever is good in all kinds of
+critics as whatever is good in all kinds of poets.
+
+Now Lockhart, within his own range, and it was for the time a very wide
+one, was certainly not a narrow critic, just as he certainly was not a
+feeble one. In the before-mentioned _Peter's Letters_ (which, with all
+its faults, is one of his best, and particularly one of his most
+spontaneous and characteristic works) the denunciation of the "facetious
+and rejoicing ignorance" which enabled contemporary critics to pooh-pooh
+Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, and Coleridge is excellent. And it must be
+remembered that in 1819, whatever might be the case with Coleridge,
+Wordsworth and Lamb were by no means taken to the hearts of Tories on
+their merits, and that in this very passage _Blackwood_ is condemned not
+less severely than the _Edinburgh_. Another point in which Lockhart made
+a great advance was that he was one of the first (Lamb himself is, in
+England, his only important forerunner) to unite and combine criticism
+of different branches of art. He never has the disgusting technical
+jargon, or the undisciplined fluency, of the mere art critic, any more
+than he has the gabble of the mere connoisseur. But it is constantly
+evident that he has a knowledge of and a feeling for the art of line and
+colour as well as of words. Nothing can be better than the fragments of
+criticism which are interspersed in the Scott book; and if his estimate
+of Hook as a novelist seems exaggerated, it must be remembered, as he
+has himself noted, that Thackeray was, at the time he spoke, nothing
+more than an amusing contributor of remarkably promising trifles to
+magazines, and that, from the appearance of _Waverley_ to that of
+_Pickwick_, no novelist of the first class had made an appearance. It
+is, moreover, characteristic of Lockhart as a critic that he is, as has
+been noted, always manly and robust. He was never false to his own early
+protest against "the banishing from the mind of a reverence for feeling,
+as abstracted from mere questions of immediate and obvious utility." But
+he never allowed that reverence to get the better of him and drag him
+into the deplorable excesses of gush into which, from his day to ours,
+criticism has more and more had a tendency to fall. If he makes no
+parade of definite æsthetic principles, it is clear that throughout he
+had such principles, and that they were principles of a very good kind.
+He had a wide knowledge of foreign literature without any taint of
+"Xenomania," sufficient scholarship (despite the unlucky false quantity
+of _Janua_, which he overlooked) in the older languages, and a thorough
+knowledge and love of English literature. His style is, to me at any
+rate, peculiarly attractive. Contrasted with the more brightly coloured
+and fantastically-shaped styles, of which, in his own day, De Quincey,
+Wilson, Macaulay, and Carlyle set the fashion, it may possibly seem tame
+to those who are not satisfied with proportion in form and harmony in
+tint; it will certainly not seem so to those who are more fortunately
+gifted. Indeed, compared either with Wilson's welter of words, now
+bombastic, now gushing, now horse-playful, or with the endless and
+heartbreaking antitheses of what Brougham ill-naturedly but truly called
+"Tom's snip-snap," it is infinitely preferable. The conclusion of the
+essay on Theodore Hook is not easily surpassable as an example of solid
+polished prose, which is prose, and does not attempt to be a hybrid
+between prose and poetry. The last page of the Tennyson review is
+perfect for quiet humour.
+
+But there is no doubt that though Lockhart was an admirable critic
+merely as such, a poet, or at least a song-writer, of singular ability
+and charm within certain limits, and a master of sharp light raillery
+that never missed its mark and never lumbered on the way, his most
+unique and highest merit is that of biographer. Carlyle, though treating
+Lockhart himself with great politeness, does not allow this, and
+complains that Lockhart's conception of his task was "not very
+elevated." That is what a great many people said of Boswell, whom
+Carlyle thought an almost perfect biographer. But, as it happens, the
+critic here has fallen into the dangerous temptation of giving his
+reasons. Lockhart's plan was not, it seems, in the case of his _Scott_,
+very elevated, because it was not "to show Scott as he was by nature, as
+the world acted on him, as he acted on the world," and so forth. Now,
+unfortunately, this is exactly what it seems to me that Lockhart,
+whether he meant to do it or not, has done in the very book which
+Carlyle was criticising. And it seems to me, further, that he always
+does this in all his biographical efforts. Sometimes he appears (for
+here another criticism of Carlyle's on the _Burns_, not the _Scott_, is
+more to the point) to quote and extract from other and much inferior
+writers to an extent rather surprising in so excellent a penman,
+especially when it is remembered that, except to a dunce, the extraction
+and stringing together of quotations is far more troublesome than
+original writing. But even then the extracts are always luminous. With
+ninety-nine out of a hundred biographies the total impression which
+Carlyle demands, and very properly demands, is, in fact, a total absence
+of impression. The reader's mind is as dark, though it may be as full,
+as a cellar when the coals have been shot into it. Now this is never the
+case with Lockhart's biographies, whether they are books in half a dozen
+volumes, or essays in half a hundred pages. He subordinates what even
+Carlyle allowed to be his "clear nervous forcible style" so entirely to
+the task of representing his subject, he has such a perfect general
+conception of that subject, that only a very dense reader can fail to
+perceive the presentment. Whether it is the right or whether it is the
+wrong presentment may, of course, be a matter of opinion, but, such as
+it is, it is always there.
+
+One other point of interest about Lockhart has to be mentioned. He was
+an eminent example, perhaps one of the most eminent, of a "gentleman of
+the press." He did a great many kinds of literary work, and he did all
+of them well; novel-writing, perhaps (which, as has been said, he gave
+up almost immediately), least well. But he does not seem to have felt
+any very strong or peculiar call to any particular class of original
+literary work, and his one great and substantive book may be fairly
+taken to have been much more decided by accident and his relationship to
+Scott than by deliberate choice. He was, in fact, eminently a
+journalist, and it is very much to be wished that there were more
+journalists like him. For from the two great reproaches of the craft to
+which so many of us belong, and which seems to be gradually swallowing
+up all other varieties of literary occupation, he was conspicuously
+free. He never did work slovenly in form, and he never did work that was
+not in one way or other consistent with a decided set of literary and
+political principles. There is a great deal of nonsense talked about the
+unprincipled character of journalism, no doubt; and nobody knows better
+than those who have some experience of it, that if, as George Warrington
+says, "too many of us write against our own party," it is the fault
+simply of those who do so. If a man has a faculty of saying anything, he
+can generally get an opportunity of saying what he likes, and avoid
+occasions of saying what he does not like. But the mere journalist
+Swiss of heaven (or the other place), is certainly not unknown, and by
+all accounts he was in Lockhart's time rather common. No one ever
+accused Lockhart himself of being one of the class. A still more
+important fault, undoubtedly, of journalism is its tendency to slovenly
+work, and here again Lockhart was conspicuously guiltless. His actual
+production must have been very considerable, though in the absence of
+any collection, or even any index, of his contributions to periodicals,
+it is impossible to say exactly to how much it would extend. But, at a
+rough guess, the _Scott_, the _Burns_, and the _Napoleon_, the
+_Ballads_, the novels, and _Peter_, a hundred _Quarterly_ articles, and
+an unknown number in _Blackwood_ and _Fraser_, would make at least
+twenty or five-and-twenty volumes of a pretty closely printed library
+edition. Yet all this, as far as it can be identified, has the same
+careful though unostentatious distinction of style, the same admirable
+faculty of sarcasm, wherever sarcasm is required, the same depth of
+feeling, wherever feeling is called for, the same refusal to make a
+parade of feeling even where it is shown. Never trivial, never vulgar,
+never feeble, never stilted, never diffuse, Lockhart is one of the very
+best recent specimens of that class of writers of all work, which since
+Dryden's time has continually increased, is increasing, and does not
+seem likely to diminish. The growth may or may not be matter for
+regret; probably none of the more capable members of the class itself
+feels any particular desire to magnify his office. But if the office is
+to exist, let it at least be the object of those who hold it to perform
+its duties with that hatred of commonplace and cant and the _popularis
+aura_, with, as nearly as may be in each case, that conscience and
+thoroughness of workmanship, which Lockhart's writings uniformly
+display.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[18] See Appendix B--Lockhart.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+PRAED
+
+
+It was not till half a century after his death that Praed, who is loved
+by those who love him perhaps as sincerely as most greater writers, had
+his works presented to the public in a form which may be called
+complete.[19] This is of itself rather a cautious statement in
+appearance, but I am not sure that it ought not to be made more cautious
+still. The completeness is not complete, though it is in one respect
+rather more than complete; and the form is exceedingly informal. Neither
+in size, nor in print, nor in character of editing and arrangement do
+the two little fat volumes which were ushered into the world by Derwent
+Coleridge in 1864, and the one little thin volume which appeared in
+1887 under Sir George Young's name with no notes and not much
+introduction, and the very creditable edition of the political poems
+which appeared a year later under the same care but better cared for,
+agree together. But this, though a nuisance to those who love not a set
+of odd volumes, would matter comparatively little if the discrepancies
+were not equally great in a much more important matter than that of mere
+externals. Only the last of the four volumes and three books just
+enumerated can be said to have been really edited, and though that is
+edited very well, it is the least important. Sir George Young, who has
+thus done a pious work to his uncle's memory, was concerned not merely
+in the previous cheap issue of the prose, but in the more elaborate
+issue of the poems in 1864. But either his green unknowing youth did not
+at that time know what editing meant, or he was under the restraint of
+some higher powers. Except that the issue of 1864 has that well-known
+page-look of "Moxon's," which is identified to all lovers of poetry with
+associations of Shelley, of Lord Tennyson, and of other masters, and
+that the pieces are duly dated, it is difficult to say any good thing of
+the book. There are no notes; and Praed is an author who is much in need
+of annotation. With singular injudiciousness, a great deal of album and
+other verse is included which was evidently not intended for
+publication, which does not display the writer at his best, or even in
+his characteristic vein at all, while the memoir is meagre in fact and
+decidedly feeble in criticism. As for the prose, though Sir George Young
+has prefixed an introduction good as far as it goes, there is no index,
+no table even of contents, and the separate papers are not dated, nor is
+any indication given of their origin--a defect which, for reasons to be
+indicated shortly, is especially troublesome in Praed's case.
+Accordingly anything like a critical study of the poet is beset with
+very unusual difficulties, and the mere reading of him, if it were less
+agreeable in itself, could not be said to be exactly easy. Luckily Praed
+is a writer so eminently engaging to the mere reader, as well as so
+interesting in divers ways to the personage whom some one has politely
+called "the gelid critic," that no sins or shortcomings of his editors
+can do him much harm, so long as they let him be read at all.
+
+Winthrop Mackworth was the third son of Serjeant Praed, Chairman of the
+Board of Audit, and, though his family was both by extraction and by
+actual seat Devonian, he was born in John Street, Bedford Row, on 26th
+June 1802, the year of the birth of Victor Hugo, who was perhaps about
+as unlike Praed in every conceivable point, except metrical mastery, as
+two men possessing poetic faculty can be unlike one another. John Street
+may not appear as meet a nurse for a poetic child as Besançon,
+especially now when it has settled down into the usual office-and-chambers
+state of Bloomsbury. But it is unusually wide for a London street; it
+has trees--those of the Foundling Hospital and those of Gray's Inn--at
+either end, and all about it cluster memories of the Bedford Row
+conspiracy, and of that immortal dinner which was given by the Briefless
+One and his timid partner to Mr. Goldmore, and of Sydney Smith's sojourn
+in Doughty Street, and of divers other pleasant things. In connection,
+however, with Praed himself, we do not hear much more of John Street. It
+was soon exchanged for the more cheerful locality of Teignmouth, where
+his father (who was a member of the old western family of Mackworth,
+Praed being an added surname) had a country house. Serjeant Praed
+encouraged, if he did not positively teach, the boy to write English
+verse at a very early age: a practice which I should be rather slow to
+approve, but which has been credited, perhaps justly, with the very
+remarkable formal accuracy and metrical ease of Praed's after-work.
+Winthrop lost his mother early, was sent to a private school at eight
+years old, and to Eton in the year 1814. Public schools in their effect
+of allegiance on public schoolboys have counted for much in English
+history, literary and other, and Eton has counted for more than any of
+them. But hardly in any case has it counted for so much with the general
+reader as in Praed's. A friend of mine, who, while entertaining high
+and lofty views on principle, takes low ones by a kind of natural
+attraction, says that the straightforward title of _The Etonian_ and
+Praed's connection with it are enough to account for this. There you
+have a cardinal fact easy to seize and easy to remember. "Praed? Oh!
+yes, the man who wrote _The Etonian_; he must have been an Eton man,"
+says the general reader. This is cynicism, and cannot be too strongly
+reprehended. But unluckily, as in other cases, a kind of critical
+deduction or reaction from this view has also taken place, and there are
+persons who maintain that Praed's merit is a kind of coterie-merit, a
+thing which Eton men are bound, and others are not bound but the
+reverse, to uphold. This is an old, but apparently still effective
+trick. I read not long ago a somewhat elaborate attempt to make out that
+the people who admire Mr. Matthew Arnold's poems admire them because
+they, the people, are Oxford men. Now this form of "ruling out" is
+undoubtedly ingenious. "You admire Mr. Arnold's poems?"--"Yes, I
+do."--"You are an Oxford man?"--"Yes, I am."--"Ah! I see." And it is
+perfectly useless for the victim to argue that his admiration of the
+poet and his allegiance to the University have nothing to do with each
+other. In the present case I, at least, am free from this illogical but
+damaging disqualification. I do not think that any one living admires
+Praed more than I do; and neither Eton nor Cambridge, which may be said
+to have divided influence on him, claims any allegiance from me. On
+Praed himself, however, the influence of Eton was certainly great, if
+not of the greatest. Here he began in school periodicals ("Apis Matina"
+a bee buzzing in manuscript only, preceded _The Etonian_) his prose and,
+to some though a less extent, his verse-exercises in finished
+literature. Here he made the beginnings of that circle of friends
+(afterwards slightly enlarged at Cambridge by the addition of
+non-Etonians and including one or two Oxford men who had been at Eton)
+which practically formed the staff of _The Etonian_ itself and of the
+subsequent _Knight's Quarterly_ and _Brazen Head_. The greatest of them
+all, Macaulay, belonged to the later Trinity set; but the Etonians
+proper included divers men of mark. There has been, I believe, a
+frequent idea that boys who contribute to school-magazines never do
+anything else. Praed certainly could not be produced as an instance. He
+was not a great athlete, partly because his health was always weak,
+partly because athletics were then in their infancy. But he is said to
+have been a good player at fives and tennis, an amateur actor of merit,
+expert at chess and whist, and latterly a debater of promise, while, in
+the well-known way of his own school and University, he was more than a
+sufficient scholar. He went to Trinity in October 1821, and in the three
+following years won the Browne Medals for Greek verse four times and
+the Chancellor's Medal for English verse twice. He was third in the
+Classical Tripos, was elected to a Fellowship at his college in 1827,
+and in 1830 obtained the Seatonian Prize with a piece, "The Ascent of
+Elijah," which is remarkable for the extraordinary facility with which
+it catches the notes of the just published _Christian Year_. He was a
+great speaker at the Union, and, as has been hinted, he made a fresh
+circle of literary friends for himself, the chief ornaments whereof were
+Macaulay and Charles Austin. It was also during his sojourn at Cambridge
+that the short-lived but brilliant venture of _Knight's Quarterly_ was
+launched. He was about four years resident at Trinity in the first
+instance; after which, according to a practice then common enough but
+now, I believe, obsolete, he returned to Eton as private and particular
+tutor to Lord Ernest Bruce. This employment kept him for two years. He
+then read law, was called to the Bar in 1829, and in 1830 was elected to
+Parliament for the moribund borough of St. Germans. He was re-elected
+next year, contested St. Ives, when St. Germans lost its members, but
+was beaten, was elected in 1834 for Great Yarmouth, and in 1837 for
+Aylesbury, which last seat he held to his death. During the whole of
+this time he sat as a Conservative, becoming a more thorough one as time
+went on; and as he had been at Cambridge a very decided Whig, and had
+before his actual entrance on public life written many pointed and some
+bitter lampoons against the Tories, the change, in the language of his
+amiable and partial friend and biographer, "occasioned considerable
+surprise." Of this also more presently: for it is well to get merely
+biographical details over with as little digression as possible.
+Surprise or no surprise, he won good opinions from both sides, acquired
+considerable reputation as a debater and a man of business, was in the
+confidence both of the Duke of Wellington and of Sir Robert Peel, was
+made Secretary of the Board of Control in 1834, married in 1835, was
+appointed Deputy-High Steward of his University (a mysterious
+appointment, of the duties of which I have no notion), and died of
+disease of the lungs on 15th July 1839. Not very much has been published
+about Praed personally; but in what has been published, and in what I
+have heard, I cannot remember a single unfriendly sentence.
+
+Notwithstanding his reputation as an "inspired schoolboy," I do not know
+that sober criticism would call him a really precocious writer,
+especially in verse. The pieces by which he is best known and which have
+most individuality, date in no case very early, and in almost all cases
+after his five-and-twentieth year. What does date very early (and
+unluckily it has been printed with a copiousness betokening more
+affection than judgment, considering that the author had more sense
+than to print it at all) is scarcely distinguishable from any other
+verses of any other clever boy. It is impossible to augur any future
+excellence from such stuff as
+
+    Emilia often sheds the tear
+      But affectation bids it flow,
+
+or as
+
+    From breasts which feel compassion's glow
+      Solicit mild the kind relief;
+
+and, for one's own part, one is inclined to solicit mild the kind relief
+of not having to read it. Even when Praed had become, at least
+technically, a man, there is no very great improvement as a whole,
+though here and there one may see, looking backwards from the finished
+examples, faint beginnings of his peculiar touches, especially of that
+pleasant trick of repeating the same word or phrase with a different and
+slightly altered sense which, as Mr. Austin Dobson has suggested, may
+have been taken from Burns. The Cambridge prize poems are quite
+authentic and respectable examples of that style which has received its
+final criticism in
+
+    Ply battleaxe and hurtling catapult:
+    Jerusalem is ours! _Id Deus vult_,--
+
+though they do not contain anything so nice as that, or as its great
+author's more famous couplet respecting Africa and the men thereof. The
+longer romances of the same date, "Gog," "Lilian," "The Troubadour,"
+are little more than clever reminiscences sometimes of Scott, Byron,
+Moore, and other contemporaries, sometimes of Prior and the _vers de
+société_ of the eighteenth century. The best passage by far of all this
+is the close of "How to Rhyme with Love," and this, as it seems to me,
+is the only passage of even moderate length which, in the poems dating
+before Praed took his degree, in the least foretells the poet of "The
+Red Fisherman," "The Vicar," the "Letters from Teignmouth," the
+"Fourteenth of February" (earliest in date and not least charming fruit
+of the true vein), "Good-night to the Season," and best and most
+delightful of all, the peerless "Letter of Advice," which is as much the
+very best thing of its own kind as the "Divine Comedy."
+
+In prose Praed was a little earlier, but not very much. _The Etonian_
+itself was, even in its earliest numbers, written at an age when many,
+perhaps most, men have already left school; and the earlier numbers are
+as imitative, of the _Spectator_ and its late and now little read
+followers of the eighteenth century, as is the verse above quoted. The
+youthful boisterousness of _Blackwood_ gave Praed a more congenial
+because a fresher cue; and in the style of which Maginn, as Adjutant
+O'Doherty, had set the example in his Latinisings of popular verse, and
+which was to be worked to death by Father Prout, there are few things
+better than the "Musæ O'Connorianæ" which celebrates the great fight of
+Mac Nevis and Mac Twolter. But there is here still the distinct
+following of a model the taint of the school-exercise. Very much more
+original is "The Knight and the Knave:" indeed I should call this the
+first original thing, though it be a parody, that Praed did. To say that
+it reminds one in more than subject of _Rebecca and Rowena_, and that it
+was written some twenty years earlier, is to say a very great deal. Even
+here, however, the writer's ground is rented, not freehold. It is very
+different in such papers as "Old Boots" and "The Country Curate," while
+in the later prose contributed to _Knight's Quarterly_ the improvement
+in originality is marked. "The Union Club" is amusing enough all
+through: but considering that it was written in 1823, two years before
+Jeffrey asked the author of a certain essay on Milton "where he got that
+style," one passage of the speech put in the mouth of Macaulay is
+positively startling. "The Best Bat in the School" is quite delightful,
+and "My First Folly," though very unequal, contains in the introduction
+scene, between Vyvian Joyeuse and Margaret Orleans, a specimen of a kind
+of dialogue nowhere to be found before, so far as I know, and giving
+proof that, if Praed had set himself to it, he might have started a new
+kind of novel.
+
+It does not appear, however, that his fancy led him with any decided
+bent to prose composition, and he very early deserted it for verse;
+though he is said to have, at a comparatively late period of his short
+life, worked in harness as a regular leader-writer for the _Morning
+Post_ during more than a year. No examples of this work of his have been
+reprinted, nor, so far as I know, does any means of identifying them
+exist, though I personally should like to examine them. He was still at
+Cambridge when he drifted into another channel, which was still not his
+own channel, but in which he feathered his oars under two different
+flags with no small skill and dexterity. Sir George Young has a very
+high idea of his uncle's political verse, and places him "first among
+English writers, before Prior, before Canning, before the authors of the
+'Rolliad,' and far before Moore or any of the still anonymous
+contributors to the later London press." I cannot subscribe to this.
+Neither as Whig nor as Tory, neither as satirist of George the Fourth
+nor as satirist of the Reform Bill, does Praed seem to me to have been
+within a hundred miles of that elder schoolfellow of his who wrote
+
+    All creeping creatures, venomous and low,
+    Still blasphemous or blackguard, praise Lepaux.
+
+He has nothing for sustained wit and ease equal to the best pieces of
+the "Fudge Family" and the "Two-penny Postbag"; and (for I do not know
+why one should not praise a man because he happens to be alive and one's
+friend) I do not think he has the touch of the true political satirist
+as Mr. Traill has it in "Professor Baloonatics Craniocracs," or in that
+admirable satire on democracy which is addressed to the "Philosopher
+Crazed, from the Island of Crazes."
+
+Indeed, by mentioning Prior, Sir George seems to put himself rather out
+of court. Praed _is_ very nearly if not quite Prior's equal, but the
+sphere of neither was politics. Prior's political pieces are thin and
+poor beside his social verse, and with rare exceptions I could not put
+anything political of Praed's higher than the shoe-string of "Araminta."
+Neither of these two charming poets seems to have felt seriously enough
+for political satire. Matthew, we know, played the traitor; and though
+Mackworth ratted to my own side, I fear it must be confessed that he did
+rat. I can only discover in his political verse two fixed principles,
+both of which no doubt did him credit, but which hardly, even when taken
+together, amount to a sufficient political creed. The one was fidelity
+to Canning and his memory: the other was impatience of the cant of the
+reformers. He could make admirable fun of Joseph Hume, and of still
+smaller fry like Waithman; he could attack Lord Grey's nepotism and
+doctrinairism fiercely enough. Once or twice, or, to be fair, more than
+once or twice, he struck out a happy, indeed a brilliant flash. He was
+admirable at what Sir George Young calls, justly enough, "political
+patter songs" such as,
+
+    Young widowhood shall lose its weeds,
+      Old kings shall loathe the Tories,
+    And monks be tired of telling beads,
+      And Blues of telling stories;
+    And titled suitors shall be crossed,
+      And famished poets married,
+    And Canning's motion shall be lost,
+      And Hume's amendment carried;
+    And Chancery shall cease to doubt,
+      And Algebra to prove,
+    And hoops come in, and gas go out
+      Before I cease to love.
+
+He hit off an exceedingly savage and certainly not wholly just "Epitaph
+on the King of the Sandwich Islands" which puts the conception of George
+the Fourth that Thackeray afterwards made popular, and contains these
+felicitous lines:
+
+    The people in his happy reign,
+      Were blessed beyond all other nations:
+    Unharmed by foreign axe and chain,
+      Unhealed by civic innovations;
+    They served the usual logs and stones,
+      With all the usual rites and terrors,
+    And swallowed all their fathers' bones,
+      And swallowed all their fathers' errors.
+
+    When the fierce mob, with clubs and knives,
+      All swore that nothing should prevent them,
+    But that their representatives
+      Should actually represent them,
+    He interposed the proper checks,
+      By sending troops, with drums and banners,
+    To cut their speeches short, and necks,
+      And break their heads, to mend their manners.
+
+Occasionally in a sort of middle vein between politics and society he
+wrote in the "patter" style just noticed quite admirable things like
+"Twenty-eight and Twenty-nine." Throughout the great debates on Reform
+he rallied the reformers with the same complete and apparently useless
+superiority of wit and sense which has often, if not invariably, been
+shown at similar crises on the losing side. And once, on an
+ever-memorable occasion, he broke into those famous and most touching
+"Stanzas on seeing the Speaker Asleep" which affect one almost to tears
+by their grace of form and by the perennial and indeed ever-increasing
+applicability of their matter.
+
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker: it's surely fair,
+    If you don't in your bed, that you should in your chair:
+    Longer and longer still they grow,
+    Tory and Radical, Aye and No;
+    Talking by night and talking by day;
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.
+
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker: slumber lies
+    Light and brief on a Speaker's eyes--
+    Fielden or Finn, in a minute or two,
+    Some disorderly thing will do;
+    Riot will chase repose away;
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.
+
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker; Cobbett will soon
+    Move to abolish the sun and moon;
+    Hume, no doubt, will be taking the sense
+    Of the House on a saving of thirteen-pence;
+    Grattan will growl or Baldwin bray;
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.
+
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker: dream of the time
+    When loyalty was not quite a crime,
+    When Grant was a pupil in Canning's school,
+    And Palmerston fancied Wood a fool.
+    Lord, how principles pass away!
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.
+
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sweet to men
+    Is the sleep that comes but now and then;
+    Sweet to the sorrowful, sweet to the ill,
+    Sweet to the children who work in a mill.
+    You have more need of sleep than they,
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.
+
+But the chief merit of Praed's political verse as a whole seems to me to
+be that it kept his hand in, and enabled him to develop and refine the
+trick, above referred to, of playing on words so as to give a graceful
+turn to verse composed in his true vocation.
+
+Of the verse so composed there are more kinds than one; though perhaps
+only in two kinds is the author absolutely at his best. There is first a
+certain class of pieces which strongly recall Macaulay's "Lays" and may
+have had some connexion of origin with them. Of course those who are
+foolish enough to affect to see nothing good in "The Battle of the Lake
+Regillus," or "Ivry," or "The Armada," will not like "Cassandra," or
+"Sir Nicholas at Marston Moor," or the "Covenanter's Lament for Bothwell
+Brigg," or "Arminius." Nevertheless they are fine in their way.
+"Arminius" is too long, and it suffers from the obvious comparison with
+Cowper's far finer "Boadicea." But its best lines, such as the
+well-known
+
+    I curse him by our country's gods,
+      The terrible, the dark,
+    The scatterers of the Roman rods,
+      The quellers of the bark,
+
+are excellent in the style, and "Sir Nicholas" is charming. But not here
+either did Apollo seriously wait for Praed. The later romances or tales
+are far better than the earlier. "The Legend of the Haunted Tree" shows
+in full swing that happy compound and contrast of sentiment and humour
+in which the writer excelled. And "The Teufelhaus" is, except "The Red
+Fisherman" perhaps, the best thing of its kind in English. These lines
+are good enough for anything:
+
+    But little he cared, that stripling pale,
+    For the sinking sun or the rising gale;
+    For he, as he rode, was dreaming now,
+    Poor youth, of a woman's broken vow,
+    Of the cup dashed down, ere the wine was tasted,
+    Of eloquent speeches sadly wasted,
+    Of a gallant heart all burnt to ashes,
+    And the Baron of Katzberg's long moustaches.
+
+And these:
+
+    Swift as the rush of an eagle's wing,
+    Or the flight of a shaft from Tartar string,
+    Into the wood Sir Rudolph went:
+    Not with more joy the schoolboys run
+    To the gay green fields when their task is done;
+    Not with more haste the members fly,
+    When Hume has caught the Speaker's eye.
+
+But in "The Red Fisherman" itself there is nothing that is not good. It
+is very short, ten small pages only of some five-and-twenty lines each.
+But there is not a weak place in it from the moment when "the Abbot
+arose and closed his book" to the account of his lamentable and yet
+lucky fate and punishment whereof "none but he and the fisherman could
+tell the reason why." Neither of the two other practitioners who may be
+called the masters of this style, Hood and Barham, nor Praed himself
+elsewhere, nor any of his and their imitators has trodden the
+breadthless line between real terror and mere burlesque with so steady a
+foot.
+
+Still not here was his "farthest," as the geographers say, nor in the
+considerable mass of smaller poems which practically defy
+classification. In them, as so often elsewhere in Praed, one comes
+across odd notes, stray flashes of genius which he never seems to have
+cared to combine or follow out, such as the unwontedly solemn "Time's
+Song," the best wholly serious thing that he has done, and the charming
+"L'Inconnue." But we find the perfect Praed, and we find him only, in
+the verses of society proper, the second part of the "Poems of Life and
+Manners" as they are headed, which began, as far as one can make out, to
+be written about 1826, and the gift of which Praed never lost, though he
+practised it little in the very last years of his life. Here, in a
+hundred pages, with a few to be added from elsewhere, are to be found
+some of the best-bred and best-natured verse within the English
+language, some of the most original and remarkable metrical experiments,
+a profusion of the liveliest fancy, a rush of the gayest rhyme. They
+begin with "The Vicar," _vir nullâ non donandus lauru_.
+
+    [Whose] talk was like a stream, which runs
+      With rapid change from rocks to roses:
+    It slipped from politics to puns,
+      It passed from Mahomet to Moses;
+    Beginning with the laws which keep
+      The planets in their radiant courses,
+    And ending with some precept deep
+      For dressing eels, or shoeing horses.
+
+Three of the Vicar's companion "Everyday Characters" are good, but I
+think not so good as he; the fifth piece, however, "The Portrait of a
+Lady," is quite his equal.
+
+    You'll be forgotten--as old debts
+      By persons who are used to borrow;
+    Forgotten--as the sun that sets,
+      When shines a new one on the morrow;
+    Forgotten--like the luscious peach
+      That blessed the schoolboy last September;
+    Forgotten--like a maiden speech,
+      Which all men praise, but none remember.
+
+    Yet ere you sink into the stream
+      That whelms alike sage, saint, and martyr,
+    And soldier's sword, and minstrel's theme,
+      And Canning's wit, and Gatton's charter,
+    Here, of the fortunes of your youth,
+      My fancy weaves her dim conjectures,
+    Which have, perhaps, as much of truth
+      As passion's vows, or Cobbett's lectures.
+
+Here, and perhaps here first, at least in the order of the published
+poems, appears that curious mixture of pathos and quizzing, sentiment
+and satire, which has never been mastered more fully or communicated
+more happily than by Praed. But not even yet do we meet with it in its
+happiest form: nor is that form to be found in "Josephine" which is much
+better in substance than in manner, or in the half-social,
+half-political patter of "The Brazen Head," or in "Twenty-eight and
+Twenty-nine." It sounds first in the "Song for the Fourteenth of
+February." No one, so far as I know, has traced any exact original[20]
+for the altogether admirable metre which, improved and glorified later
+in "The Letter of Advice," appears first in lighter matter still like
+this:
+
+    Shall I kneel to a Sylvia or Celia,
+      Whom no one e'er saw, or may see,
+    A fancy-drawn Laura Amelia,
+      An _ad libit_ Anna Marie?
+    Shall I court an initial with stars to it,
+      Go mad for a G. or a J.,
+    Get Bishop to put a few bars to it,
+    And print it on Valentine's Day?
+
+But every competent critic has seen in it the origin of the more
+gorgeous and full-mouthed, if not more accomplished and dexterous,
+rhythm in which Mr. Swinburne has written "Dolores," and the even more
+masterly dedication of the first "Poems and Ballads." The shortening of
+the last line which the later poet has introduced is a touch of genius,
+but not perhaps greater than Praed's own recognition of the
+extraordinarily vivid and ringing qualities of the stanza. I profoundly
+believe that metrical quality is, other things being tolerably equal,
+the great secret of the enduring attraction of verse: and nowhere, not
+in the greatest lyrics, is that quality more unmistakable than in the
+"Letter of Advice." I really do not know how many times I have read it;
+but I never can read it to this day without being forced to read it out
+loud like a schoolboy and mark with accompaniment of hand-beat such
+lines as
+
+    Remember the thrilling romances
+      We read on the bank in the glen:
+    Remember the suitors our fancies
+      Would picture for both of us then.
+    They wore the red cross on their shoulder,
+      They had vanquished and pardoned their foe--
+    Sweet friend, are you wiser or colder?
+      My own Araminta, say "No!"
+
+           ·       ·       ·       ·       ·
+
+    He must walk--like a god of old story
+      Come down from the home of his rest;
+    He must smile--like the sun in his glory,
+      On the buds he loves ever the best;
+    And oh! from its ivory portal
+      Like music his soft speech must flow!
+    If he speak, smile, or walk like a mortal,
+      My own Araminta, say "No!"
+
+There are, metrically speaking, few finer couplets in English than the
+first of that second stanza. Looked at from another point of view, the
+mixture of the comic and the serious in the piece is remarkable enough;
+but not so remarkable, I think, as its extraordinary metrical
+accomplishment. There is not a note or a syllable wrong in the whole
+thing, but every sound and every cadence comes exactly where it ought to
+come, so as to be, in a delightful phrase of Southey's, "necessary and
+voluptuous and right."
+
+It is no wonder that when Praed had discovered such a medium he should
+have worked it freely. But he never impressed on it such a combination
+of majesty and grace as in this letter of Medora Trevilian. As far as
+the metre goes I think the eight-lined stanzas of this piece better
+suited to it than the twelve-lined ones of "Good Night to the Season"
+and the first "Letter from Teignmouth," but both are very delightful.
+Perhaps the first is the best known of all Praed's poems, and certainly
+some things in it, such as
+
+    The ice of her ladyship's manners,
+    The ice of his lordship's champagne,
+
+are among the most quoted. But this antithetical trick, of which Praed
+was so fond, is repeated a little often in it; and it seems to me to
+lack the freshness as well as the fire of the "Advice." On the other
+hand, the "Letter from Teignmouth" is the best thing that even Praed has
+ever done for combined grace and tenderness.
+
+    You once could be pleased with our ballads--
+      To-day you have critical ears;
+    You once could be charmed with our salads--
+      Alas! you've been dining with Peers;
+    You trifled and flirted with many--
+      You've forgotten the when and the how;
+    There was one you liked better than any--
+      Perhaps you've forgotten her now.
+    But of those you remember most newly,
+      Of those who delight or enthral,
+    None love you a quarter so truly
+      As some you will find at our Ball.
+
+    They tell me you've many who flatter,
+      Because of your wit and your song:
+    They tell me--and what does it matter?--
+      You like to be praised by the throng:
+    They tell me you're shadowed with laurel:
+      They tell me you're loved by a Blue:
+    They tell me you're sadly immoral--
+      Dear Clarence, that cannot be true!
+    But to me, you are still what I found you,
+      Before you grew clever and tall;
+    And you'll think of the spell that once bound you;
+      And you'll come--won't you come?--to our Ball!
+
+Is not that perfectly charming?
+
+It is perhaps a matter of mere taste whether it is or is not more
+charming than pieces like "School and Schoolfellows" (the best of
+Praed's purely Eton poems) and "Marriage Chimes," in which, if not Eton,
+the Etonian set also comes in. If I like these latter pieces less, it
+is not so much because of their more personal and less universal
+subjects as because their style is much less individual. The resemblance
+to Hood cannot be missed, and though I believe there is some dispute as
+to which of the two poets actually hit upon the particular style first,
+there can be little doubt that Hood attained to the greater excellence
+in it. The real sense and savingness of that doctrine of the "principal
+and most excellent things," which has sometimes been preached rather
+corruptly and narrowly, is that the best things that a man does are
+those that he does best. Now though
+
+    I wondered what they meant by stock,
+      I wrote delightful Sapphics,
+
+and
+
+    With no hard work but Bovney stream,
+      No chill except Long Morning,
+
+are very nice things, I do not think they are so good in their kind as
+the other things that I have quoted; and this, though the poem contains
+the following wholly delightful stanza in the style of the "Ode on a
+Distant Prospect of Clapham Academy":
+
+    Tom Mill was used to blacken eyes
+      Without the fear of sessions;
+    Charles Medlar loathed false quantities
+      As much as false professions;
+    Now Mill keeps order in the land,
+      A magistrate pedantic;
+    And Medlar's feet repose unscanned
+      Beneath the wide Atlantic.
+
+The same may even be said of "Utopia," a much-praised, often-quoted, and
+certainly very amusing poem, of "I'm not a Lover now," and of others,
+which are also, though less exactly, in Hood's manner. To attempt to
+distinguish between that manner and the manner which is Praed's own is a
+rather perilous attempt; and the people who hate all attempts at
+reducing criticism to principle, and who think that a critic should only
+say clever things about his subject, will of course dislike me for it.
+But that I cannot help. I should say then that Hood had the advantage of
+Praed in purely serious poetry; for Araminta's bard never did anything
+at all approaching "The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies," "The Haunted
+House," or a score of other things. He had also the advantage in pure
+broad humour. But where Praed excelled was in the mixed style, not of
+sharp contrast as in Hood's "Lay of the Desert Born" and "Demon Ship,"
+where from real pity and real terror the reader suddenly stumbles into
+pure burlesque, but of wholly blended and tempered humour and pathos. It
+is this mixed style in which I think his note is to be found as it is to
+be found in no other poet, and as it could hardly be found in any but
+one with Praed's peculiar talent and temper combined with his peculiar
+advantages of education, fortune, and social atmosphere. He never had to
+"pump out sheets of fun" on a sick-bed for the printer's devil, like
+his less well-fated but assuredly not less well-gifted rival; and as his
+scholarship was exactly of the kind to refine, temper, and adjust his
+literary manner, so his society and circumstances were exactly of the
+kind to repress, or at least not to encourage, exuberance or
+boisterousness in his literary matter. There are I believe who call him
+trivial, even frivolous; and if this be done sincerely by any careful
+readers of "The Red Fisherman" and the "Letter of Advice" I fear I must
+peremptorily disable their judgment. But this appearance of levity is in
+great part due exactly to the perfect modulation and adjustment of his
+various notes. He never shrieks or guffaws: there is no horse-play in
+him, just as there is no tearing a passion to tatters. His slight
+mannerisms, more than once referred to, rarely exceed what is justified
+by good literary manners. His points are very often so delicate, so
+little insisted on or underlined, that a careless reader may miss them
+altogether; his "questionings" are so little "obstinate" that a careless
+reader may think them empty.
+
+    Will it come with a rose or a brier?
+      Will it come with a blessing or curse?
+    Will its bonnets be lower or higher?
+      Will its morals be better or worse?
+
+The author of this perhaps seems to some a mere jesting Pilate, and if
+he does, they are quite right not to even try to like him.
+
+I have seen disdainful remarks on those critics who, however warily,
+admire a considerable number of authors, as though they were coarse and
+omnivorous persons, unfit to rank with the delicates who can only relish
+one or two things in literature. But this is a foolish mistake. "One to
+one" is not "cursedly confined" in the relation of book and reader; and
+a man need not be a Don Juan of letters to have a list of almost _mille
+e tre_ loves in that department. He must indeed love the best or those
+among the best only, in the almost innumerable kinds, which is not a
+very severe restriction. And Praed is of this so fortunately numerous
+company. I do not agree with those who lament his early death on the
+ground of its depriving literature or politics of his future greatness.
+In politics he would most probably not have become anything greater than
+an industrious and respectable official; and in letters his best work
+was pretty certainly done. For it was a work that could only be done in
+youth. In his scholarly but not frigidly correct form, in his irregular
+sallies and flashes of a genius really individual as far as it went but
+never perhaps likely to go much farther, in the freshness of his
+imitations, in the imperfection of his originalities, Praed was the most
+perfect representative we have had or ever are likely to have of what
+has been called, with a perhaps reprehensible parody on great words,
+"the eternal undergraduate within us, who rejoices before life." He is
+thus at the very antipodes of Wertherism and Byronism, a light but
+gallant champion of cheerfulness and the joy of living. Although there
+is about him absolutely nothing artificial--the curse of the lighter
+poetry as a rule--and though he attains to deep pathos now and then, and
+once or twice (notably in "The Red Fisherman") to a kind of grim
+earnestness, neither of these things is his real _forte_. Playing with
+literature and with life, not frivolously or without heart, but with no
+very deep cares and no very passionate feeling, is Praed's attitude
+whenever he is at his best. And he does not play at playing as many
+writers do: it is all perfectly genuine. Even Prior has not excelled
+such lines as these in one of his early and by no means his best poems
+(an adaptation too), for mingled jest and earnest--
+
+    But Isabel, by accident,
+      Was wandering by that minute;
+    She opened that dark monument
+      And found her slave within it;
+    _The clergy said the Mass in vain,
+      The College could not save me:
+    But life, she swears, returned again
+      With the first kiss she gave me._
+
+Hardly, if at all, could he have kept up this attitude towards life
+after he had come to forty year; and he might have become either a
+merely intelligent and respectable person, which is most probable, or an
+elderly youth, which is of all things most detestable, or a
+caterwauler, or a cynic, or a preacher. From all these fates the gods
+mercifully saved him, and he abides with us (the presentation being but
+slightly marred by the injudicious prodigality of his editors) only as
+the poet of Medora's musical despair lest Araminta should derogate, of
+the Abbot's nightmare sufferings at the hands of the Red Fisherman, of
+the plaintive appeal after much lively gossip--
+
+    And you'll come--won't you come?--to our Ball,
+
+of all the pleasures, and the jests, and the tastes, and the studies,
+and the woes, provided only they are healthy and manly, of Twenty-five.
+Unhappy is the person of whom it can be said that he neither has been,
+is, nor ever will be in the temper and circumstances of which Praed's
+verse is the exact and consummate expression; not much less unhappy he
+for whom that verse does not perform the best perhaps of all the offices
+of literature, and call up, it may be in happier guise than that in
+which they once really existed, the many beloved shadows of the past.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[19] 1. _The Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, with a Memoir by the
+Rev. Derwent Coleridge._ In two volumes. London, 1864. 2. _Essays by
+Winthrop Mackworth Praed, collected and arranged by Sir George Young,
+Bart._ London, 1887. 3. _The Political and Occasional Poems of Winthrop
+Mackworth Praed, edited, with Notes, by Sir George Young._ London, 1888.
+
+[20] Since I wrote this I have been reminded by my friend Mr. Mowbray
+Morris of Byron's
+
+    I enter thy garden of roses,
+    Beloved and fair Haidee.
+
+It is not impossible that this _is_ the immediate original. But Praed
+has so improved on it as to deserve a new patent.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+GEORGE BORROW
+
+
+In this paper I do not undertake to throw any new light on the
+little-known life of the author of _Lavengro_. Among the few people who
+knew Borrow intimately, surely some one will soon be found who will give
+to the world an account of his curious life, and perhaps some specimens
+of those "mountains of manuscript" which, as he regretfully declares,
+never could find a publisher--an impossibility which, if I may be
+permitted to offer an opinion, does not reflect any great credit on
+publishers. For the present purpose it is sufficient to sum up the
+generally-known facts that Borrow was born in 1803 at East Dereham in
+Norfolk, his father being a captain in the army, who came of Cornish
+blood, his mother a lady of Norfolk birth and Huguenot extraction. His
+youth he has himself described in a fashion which nobody is likely to
+care to paraphrase. After the years of travel chronicled in _Lavengro_,
+he seems to have found scope for his philological and adventurous
+tendencies in the rather unlikely service of the Bible Society; and he
+sojourned in Russia and Spain to the great advantage of English
+literature. This occupied him during the greater part of the years from
+1830 to 1840. Then he came back to his native country--or, at any rate,
+his native district--married a widow of some property at Lowestoft, and
+spent the last forty years of his life at Oulton Hall, near the piece of
+water which is thronged in summer by all manner of sportsmen and others.
+He died but a few years ago; and even since his death he seems to have
+lacked the due meed of praise which the Lord Chief Justice of the equal
+foot usually brings, even to persons far less deserving than Borrow.
+
+There is this difficulty in writing about him, that the audience must
+necessarily consist of fervent devotees on the one hand, and of complete
+infidels, or at least complete know-nothings, on the other. To any one
+who, having the faculty to understand either, has read _Lavengro_ or
+_The Bible in Spain_, or even _Wild Wales_, praise bestowed on Borrow is
+apt to seem impertinence. To anybody else (and unfortunately the anybody
+else is in a large majority) praise bestowed on Borrow is apt to look
+like that very dubious kind of praise which is bestowed on somebody of
+whom no one but the praiser has ever heard. I cannot think of any single
+writer (Peacock himself is not an exception) who is in quite parallel
+case. And, as usual, there is a certain excuse for the general public.
+Borrow kept himself, during not the least exciting period of English
+history, quite aloof from English politics, and from the life of great
+English cities. But he did more than this. He is the only really
+considerable writer of his time in any modern European nation who seems
+to have taken absolutely no interest in current events, literary and
+other. Putting a very few allusions aside, he might have belonged to
+almost any period. His political idiosyncrasy will be noticed presently;
+but he, who lived through the whole period from Waterloo to Maiwand, has
+not, as far as I remember, mentioned a single English writer later than
+Scott and Byron. He saw the rise, and, in some instances, the death, of
+Tennyson, Thackeray, Macaulay, Carlyle, Dickens. There is not a
+reference to any one of them in his works. He saw political changes such
+as no man for two centuries had seen, and (except the Corn Laws, to
+which he has some half-ironical allusions, and the Ecclesiastical Titles
+Bill, which stirred his one active sentiment) he has referred to never a
+one. He seems in some singular fashion to have stood outside of all
+these things. His Spanish travels are dated for us by references to Doña
+Isabel and Don Carlos, to Mr. Villiers and Lord Palmerston. But cut
+these dates out, and they might be travels of the last century. His
+Welsh book proclaims itself as written in the full course of the
+Crimean War; but excise a few passages which bear directly on that
+event, and the most ingenious critic would be puzzled to "place" the
+composition. Shakespeare, we know, was for all time, not of one age
+only; but I think we may say of Borrow, without too severely or
+conceitedly marking the difference, that he was not of or for any
+particular age or time at all. If the celebrated query in Longfellow's
+_Hyperion_, "What is time?" had been addressed to him, his most
+appropriate answer, and one which he was quite capable of giving, would
+have been, "I really don't know."
+
+To this singular historical vagueness has to be added a critical
+vagueness even greater. I am sorry that I am unable to confirm or to
+gainsay at first hand Borrow's wonderfully high estimate of certain
+Welsh poets. But if the originals are anything like his translations of
+them, I do not think that Ab Gwilym and Lewis Glyn Cothi, Gronwy Owen
+and Huw Morris can have been quite such mighty bards as he makes out.
+Fortunately, however, a better test presents itself. In one book of his,
+_Wild Wales_, there are two estimates of Scott's works. Borrow finds in
+an inn a copy of _Woodstock_ (which he calls by its less known title of
+_The Cavalier_), and decides that it is "trashy": chiefly, it would
+appear, because the portrait therein contained of Harrison, for whom
+Borrow seems, on one of his inscrutable principles of prejudice, to
+have had a liking, is not wholly favourable. He afterwards informs us
+that Scott's "Norman Horseshoe" (no very exquisite song at the best, and
+among Scott's somewhat less than exquisite) is "one of the most stirring
+lyrics of modern times," and that he sang it for a whole evening;
+evidently because it recounts a defeat of the Normans, whom Borrow, as
+he elsewhere tells us in sundry places, disliked for reasons more or
+less similar to those which made him like Harrison, the butcher. In
+other words, he could not judge a work of literature as literature at
+all. If it expressed sentiments with which he agreed, or called up
+associations which were pleasant to him, good luck to it; if it
+expressed sentiments with which he did not agree, and called up no
+pleasant associations, bad luck.
+
+In politics and religion this curious and very John Bullish unreason is
+still more apparent. I suppose Borrow may be called, though he does not
+call himself, a Tory. He certainly was an unfriend to Whiggery, and a
+hater of Radicalism. He seems to have given up even the Corn Laws with a
+certain amount of regret, and his general attitude is quite Eldonian.
+But he combined with his general Toryism very curious Radicalisms of
+detail, such as are to be found in Cobbett (who, as appeared at last,
+and as all reasonable men should have always known, was really a Tory of
+a peculiar type), and in several other English persons. The Church, the
+Monarchy, and the Constitution generally were dear to Borrow, but he
+hated all the aristocracy (except those whom he knew personally) and
+most of the gentry. Also, he had the odd Radical sympathy for anybody
+who, as the vernacular has it, was "kept out of his rights." I do not
+know, but I should think, that Borrow was a strong Tichbornite. In that
+curious book _Wild Wales_, where almost more of his real character
+appears than in any other, he has to do with the Crimean War. It was
+going on during the whole time of his tour, and he once or twice reports
+conversations in which, from his knowledge of Russia, he demonstrated
+beforehand to Welsh inquirers how improbable, not to say impossible, it
+was that the Russian should be beaten. But the thing that seems really
+to have interested him most was the case of Lieutenant P---- or
+Lieutenant Parry, whom he sometimes refers to in the fuller and
+sometimes in the less explicit manner. My own memories of 1854 are
+rather indistinct, and I confess that I have not taken the trouble to
+look up this celebrated case. As far as I can remember, and as far as
+Borrow's references here and elsewhere go, it was the doubtless
+lamentable but not uncommon case of a man who is difficult to live with,
+and who has to live with others. Such cases occur at intervals in every
+mess, college, and other similar aggregation of humanity. The person
+difficult to live with gets, to use an Oxford phrase, "drawn." If he is
+reformable he takes the lesson, and very likely becomes excellent
+friends with those who "drew" him. If he is not, he loses his temper,
+and evil results of one kind or another follow. Borrow's Lieutenant
+P---- seems unluckily to have been of the latter kind, and was, if I
+mistake not, recommended by the authorities to withdraw from a situation
+which, to him, was evidently a false and unsuitable one. With this
+Borrow could not away. He gravely chronicles the fact of his reading an
+"excellent article in a local paper on the case of Lieutenant P----";
+and with no less gravity (though he was, in a certain way, one of the
+first humorists of our day) he suggests that the complaints of the
+martyred P---- to the Almighty were probably not unconnected with our
+Crimean disasters. This curious parochialism pursues him into more
+purely religious matters. I do not know any other really great man of
+letters of the last three-quarters of a century of whose attitude
+Carlyle's famous words, "regarding God's universe as a larger patrimony
+of Saint Peter, from which it were well and pleasant to hunt the Pope,"
+are so literally true. It was not in Borrow's case a case of _sancta
+simplicitas_. He has at times flashes of by no means orthodox sentiment,
+and seems to have fought, and perhaps hardly won, many a battle against
+the army of the doubters. But when it comes to the Pope, he is as
+single-minded an enthusiast as John Bunyan himself, whom, by the way,
+he resembles in more than one point. The attitude was, of course, common
+enough among his contemporaries; indeed any man who has reached middle
+life must remember numerous examples among his own friends and kindred.
+But in literature, and such literature as Borrow's, it is rare.
+
+Yet again, the curiously piecemeal, and the curiously arbitrary
+character of Borrow's literary studies in languages other than his own,
+is noteworthy in so great a linguist. The entire range of French
+literature, old as well as new, he seems to have ignored altogether--I
+should imagine out of pure John Bullishness. He has very few references
+to German, though he was a good German scholar--a fact which I account
+for by the other fact, that in his earlier literary period German was
+fashionable, and that he never would have anything to do with anything
+that fashion favoured. Italian, though he certainly knew it well, is
+equally slighted. His education, if not his taste for languages, must
+have made him a tolerable (he never could have been an exact) classical
+scholar. But it is clear that insolent Greece and haughty Rome possessed
+no attraction for him. I question whether even Spanish would not have
+been too common a toy to attract him much, if it had not been for the
+accidental circumstances which connected him with Spain.
+
+Lastly (for I love to get my devil's advocate work over), in Borrow's
+varied and strangely attractive gallery of portraits and characters,
+most observers must perceive the absence of the note of passion. I have
+sometimes tried to think that miraculous episode of Isopel Berners and
+the Armenian verbs, with the whole sojourn of Lavengro in the dingle, a
+mere wayward piece of irony--a kind of conscious ascetic myth. But I am
+afraid the interpretation will not do. The subsequent conversation with
+Ursula Petulengro under the hedge might be only a companion piece; even
+the more wonderful, though much less interesting, dialogue with the
+Irish girl in the last chapters of _Wild Wales_ might be so rendered by
+a hardy exegete. But the negative evidence in all the books is too
+strong. It may be taken as positively certain that Borrow never was "in
+love," as the phrase is, and that he had hardly the remotest conception
+of what being in love means. It is possible that he was a most cleanly
+liver--it is possible that he was quite the reverse: I have not the
+slightest information either way. But that he never in all his life
+heard with understanding the refrain of the "Pervigilium,"
+
+    Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit eras amet,
+
+I take as certain.
+
+The foregoing remarks have, I think, summed up all Borrow's defects, and
+it will be observed that even these defects have for the most part the
+attraction of a certain strangeness and oddity. If they had not been
+accompanied by great and peculiar merits, he would not have emerged from
+the category of the merely bizarre, where he might have been left
+without further attention. But, as a matter of fact, all, or almost all,
+of his defects are not only counterbalanced by merits, but are
+themselves, in a great degree, exaggerations or perversions of what is
+intrinsically meritorious. With less wilfulness, with more attention to
+the literature, the events, the personages of his own time, with a more
+critical and common-sense attitude towards his own crotchets, Borrow
+could hardly have wrought out for himself (as he has to an extent hardly
+paralleled by any other prose writer who has not deliberately chosen
+supernatural or fantastic themes) the region of fantasy, neither too
+real nor too historical, which Joubert thought proper to the poet.
+Strong and vivid as Borrow's drawing of places and persons is, he always
+contrives to throw in touches which somehow give the whole the air of
+being rather a vision than a fact. Never was such a John-a-Dreams as
+this solid, pugilistic John Bull. Part of this literary effect of his is
+due to his quaint habit of avoiding, where he can, the mention of proper
+names. The description, for instance, of Old Sarum and Salisbury itself
+in _Lavengro_ is sufficient to identify them to the most careless
+reader, even if the name of Stonehenge had not occurred on the page
+before; but they are not named. The description of Bettws-y-Coed in
+_Wild Wales_, though less poetical, is equally vivid. Yet here it would
+be quite possible for a reader, who did not know the place and its
+relation to other named places, to pass without any idea of the actual
+spot. It is the same with his frequent references to his beloved city of
+Norwich, and his less frequent references to his later home at Oulton. A
+paraphrase, an innuendo, a word to the wise he delights in, but anything
+perfectly clear and precise he abhors. And by this means and others,
+which it might be tedious to trace out too closely, he succeeds in
+throwing the same cloudy vagueness over times as well as places and
+persons. A famous passage--perhaps the best known, and not far from the
+best he ever wrote--about Byron's funeral, fixes, of course, the date of
+the wondrous facts or fictions recorded in _Lavengro_ to a nicety. Yet
+who, as he reads it and its sequel (for the separation of _Lavengro_ and
+_The Romany Rye_ is merely arbitrary, though the second book is, as a
+whole, less interesting than the former), ever thinks of what was
+actually going on in the very positive and prosaic England of 1824-25?
+The later chapters of _Lavengro_ are the only modern _Roman d'Aventures_
+that I know. The hero goes "overthwart and endlong," just like the
+figures whom all readers know in Malory, and some in his originals. I do
+not know that it would be more surprising if Borrow had found Sir Ozana
+dying at the chapel in Lyonesse, or had seen the full function of the
+Grail, though I fear he would have protested against that as popish.
+Without any apparent art, certainly without the elaborate apparatus
+which most prose tellers of fantastic tales use, and generally fail in
+using, Borrow spirits his readers at once away from mere reality. If his
+events are frequently as odd as a dream, they are always as perfectly
+commonplace and real for the moment as the events of a dream are--a
+little fact which the above-mentioned tellers of the above-mentioned
+fantastic stories are too apt to forget. It is in this natural romantic
+gift that Borrow's greatest charm lies. But it is accompanied and nearly
+equalled, both in quality and in degree, by a faculty for dialogue.
+Except Defoe and Dumas, I cannot think of any novelists who contrive to
+tell a story in dialogue and to keep up the ball of conversation so well
+as Borrow; while he is considerably the superior of both in pure style
+and in the literary quality of his talk. Borrow's humour, though it is
+of the general class of the older English--that is to say, the
+pre-Addisonian--humorists, is a species quite by itself. It is rather
+narrow in range, a little garrulous, busied very often about curiously
+small matters, but wonderfully observant and true, and possessing a
+quaint dry savour as individual as that of some wines. A characteristic
+of this kind probably accompanies the romantic _ethos_ more commonly
+than superficial judges both of life and literature are apt to suppose;
+but the conjunction is nowhere seen better than in Borrow. Whether
+humour can or cannot exist without a disposition to satire co-existing,
+is one of those abstract points of criticism for which the public of the
+present day has little appetite. It is certain (and that is what chiefly
+concerns us for the present) that the two were not dissociated in
+Borrow. His purely satirical faculty was very strong indeed, and
+probably if he had lived a less retired life it would have found fuller
+exercise. At present the most remarkable instance of it which exists is
+the inimitable portrait-caricature of the learned Unitarian, generally
+known as "Taylor of Norwich." I have somewhere (I think it was in Miss
+Martineau's _Autobiography_) seen this reflected on as a flagrant
+instance of ingratitude and ill-nature. The good Harriet, among whose
+numerous gifts nature had not included any great sense of humour,
+naturally did not perceive the artistic justification of the sketch,
+which I do not hesitate to call one of the most masterly things of the
+kind in literature.
+
+Another Taylor, the well-known French baron of that name, is much more
+mildly treated, though with little less skill of portraiture. As for
+"the publisher" of _Lavengro_, the portrait there, though very clever,
+is spoilt by rather too much evidence of personal animus, and by the
+absence of redeeming strokes; but it shows the same satiric power as
+the sketch of the worthy student of German who has had the singular
+ill-fortune to have his books quizzed by Carlyle, and himself quizzed by
+Borrow. It is a strong evidence of Borrow's abstraction from general
+society that with this satiric gift, and evidently with a total freedom
+from scruple as to its application, he should have left hardly anything
+else of the kind. It is indeed impossible to ascertain how much of the
+abundant character-drawing in his four chief books (all of which, be it
+remembered, are autobiographic and professedly historical) is fact and
+how much fancy. It is almost impossible to open them anywhere without
+coming upon personal sketches, more or less elaborate, in which the
+satiric touch is rarely wanting. The official admirer of "the grand
+Baintham" at remote Corcubion, the end of all the European world; the
+treasure-seeker, Benedict Mol; the priest at Cordova, with his
+revelations about the Holy Office; the Gibraltar Jew; are only a few
+figures out of the abundant gallery of _The Bible in Spain_. _Lavengro_,
+besides the capital and full-length portraits above referred to, is
+crowded with others hardly inferior, among which only one failure, the
+disguised priest with the mysterious name, is to be found. Not that even
+he has not good strokes and plenty of them, but that Borrow's prejudices
+prevented his hand from being free. But Jasper Petulengro, and Mrs.
+Hearne, and the girl Leonora, and Isopel, that vigorous and slighted
+maid, and dozens of minor figures, of whom more presently, atone for
+him. _The Romany Rye_ adds only minor figures to the gallery, because
+the major figures have appeared before; while the plan and subject of
+_Wild Wales_ also exclude anything more than vignettes. But what
+admirable vignettes they are, and how constantly bitten in with satiric
+spirit, all lovers of Borrow know.
+
+It is, however, perhaps time to give some more exact account of the
+books thus familiarly and curiously referred to; for Borrow most
+assuredly is not a popular writer. Not long before his death _Lavengro_,
+_The Romany Rye_, and _Wild Wales_ were only in their third edition,
+though the first was nearly thirty, and the last nearly twenty, years
+old. _The Bible in Spain_ had, at any rate in its earlier days, a wider
+sale, but I do not think that even that is very generally known. I
+should doubt whether the total number sold, during some fifty years, of
+volumes surpassed in interest of incident, style, character and
+description by few books of the century, has equalled the sale, within
+any one of the last few years, of a fairly popular book by any fairly
+popular novelist of to-day. And there is not the obstacle to Borrow's
+popularity that there is to that of some other writers, notably the
+already-mentioned author of _Crotchet Castle_. No extensive literary
+cultivation is necessary to read him. A good deal even of his peculiar
+charm may be missed by a prosaic or inattentive reader, and yet enough
+will remain. But he has probably paid the penalty of originality, which
+allows itself to be mastered by quaintness, and which refuses to meet
+public taste at least half-way. It is certainly difficult at times to
+know what to make of Borrow. And the general public, perhaps excusably,
+is apt not to like things or persons when it does not know what to make
+of them.
+
+Borrow's literary work, even putting aside the "mountains of manuscript"
+which he speaks of as unpublished, was not inconsiderable. There were,
+in the first place, his translations, which, though no doubt not without
+value, do not much concern us here. There is, secondly, his early
+hackwork, his _Chaines de l'Esclavage_, which also may be neglected.
+Thirdly, there are his philological speculations or compilations, the
+chief of which is, I believe, his _Romano-Lavo-Lil_, the latest
+published of his works. But Borrow, though an extraordinary linguist,
+was a somewhat unchastened philologer, and the results of his life-long
+philological studies appear to much better advantage from the literary
+than from the scientific point of view. Then there is _The Gypsies in
+Spain_, a very interesting book of its kind, marked throughout with
+Borrow's characteristics, but for literary purposes merged to a great
+extent in _The Bible in Spain_. And, lastly, there are the four original
+books, as they may be called, which, at great leisure, and writing
+simply because he chose to write, Borrow produced during the twenty
+years of his middle age. He was in his fortieth year when, in 1842, he
+published _The Bible in Spain_. _Lavengro_ came nearly ten years later,
+and coincided with (no doubt it was partially stimulated by) the ferment
+over the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. Its second part, _The Romany Rye_,
+did not appear till six afterwards, that is to say, in 1857, and its
+resuscitation of quarrels, which the country had quite forgotten (and
+when it remembered them was rather ashamed of), must be pronounced
+unfortunate. Last, in 1862, came _Wild Wales_, the characteristically
+belated record of a tour in the principality during the year of the
+Crimean War. On these four books Borrow's literary fame rests. His other
+works are interesting because they were written by the author of these,
+or because of their subjects, or because of the effect they had on other
+men of letters, notably Longfellow and Mérimée, on the latter of whom
+Borrow had an especially remarkable influence. These four are
+interesting of themselves.
+
+The earliest has been, I believe, and for reasons quite apart from its
+biblical subject perhaps deserves to be, the greatest general favourite,
+though its literary value is a good deal below that of _Lavengro_. _The
+Bible in Spain_ records the journeys, which, as an agent of the Bible
+Society, Borrow took through the Peninsula at a singularly interesting
+time, the disturbed years of the early reign of Isabel Segunda. Navarre
+and Aragon, with Catalonia, Valencia, and Murcia, he seems to have left
+entirely unvisited; I suppose because of the Carlists. Nor did he
+attempt the southern part of Portugal; but Castile and Leon, with the
+north of Portugal and the south of Spain, he quartered in the most
+interesting manner, riding everywhere with his servant and his
+saddle-bag of Testaments at, I should suppose, a considerable cost to
+the subscribers of the Society and at, it may be hoped, some gain to the
+propagation of evangelical principles in the Peninsula, but certainly
+with the results of extreme satisfaction to himself and of a very
+delightful addition to English literature. He was actually imprisoned at
+Madrid, and was frequently in danger from Carlists, and brigands, and
+severely orthodox ecclesiastics. It is possible to imagine a more
+ideally perfect missionary; but it is hardly possible to imagine a more
+ideally perfect traveller. His early habits of roughing it, his gipsy
+initiation, his faculties as a linguist, and his other faculties as a
+born vagrant, certain to fall on his feet anywhere, were all called into
+operation. But he might have had all these advantages and yet lacked the
+extraordinary literary talent which the book reveals. In the first
+chapter there is a certain stiffness; but the passage of the Tagus in
+the second must have told every competent reader in 1842 that he had to
+deal with somebody quite different from the run of common writers, and
+thenceforward the book never flags till the end. How far the story is
+rigidly historical I should be very sorry to have to decide. The author
+makes a kind of apology in his preface for the amount of fact which has
+been supplied from memory. I daresay the memory was quite trustworthy,
+and certainly adventures are to the adventurous. We have had daring
+travellers enough during the last half-century, but I do not know that
+any one has ever had quite such a romantic experience as Borrow's ride
+across the Hispano-Portuguese frontier with a gipsy _contrabandista_,
+who was at the time a very particular object of police inquiry. I
+daresay the interests of the Bible Society required the adventurous
+journey to the wilds of Finisterra. But I feel that if that association
+had been a mere mundane company and Borrow its agent, troublesome
+shareholders might have asked awkward questions at the annual meeting.
+Still, this sceptical attitude is only part of the official duty of the
+critic, just as, of course, Borrow's adventurous journeys into the most
+remote and interesting parts of Spain were part of the duty of the
+colporteur. The book is so delightful that, except when duty calls, no
+one would willingly take any exception to any part or feature of it. The
+constant change of scene, the romantic episodes of adventure, the
+kaleidoscope of characters, the crisp dialogue, the quaint reflection
+and comment relieve each other without a break. I do not know whether it
+is really true to Spain and Spanish life, and, to tell the exact truth,
+I do not in the least care. If it is not Spanish it is remarkably human
+and remarkably literary, and those are the chief and principal things.
+
+_Lavengro_, which followed, has all the merits of its predecessor and
+more. It is a little spoilt in its later chapters by the purpose, the
+antipapal purpose, which appears still more fully in _The Romany Rye_.
+But the strong and singular individuality of its flavour as a whole
+would have been more than sufficient to carry off a greater fault. There
+are, I should suppose, few books the successive pictures of which leave
+such an impression on the reader who is prepared to receive that
+impression. The word picture is here rightly used, for in all Borrow's
+books more or less, and in this particularly, the narrative is anything
+but continuous. It is a succession of dissolving views which grow clear
+and distinct for a time and then fade off into vagueness before once
+more appearing distinctly; nor has this mode of dealing with a subject
+ever been more successfully applied than in _Lavengro_. At the same time
+the mode is one singularly difficult of treatment by any reviewer. To
+describe _Lavengro_ with any chance of distinctness to those who have
+not read it, it would be necessary to give a series of sketches in
+words, like those famous ones of the pictures in _Jane Eyre_. East
+Dereham, the Viper Collector, the French Prisoners at Norman Cross, the
+Gipsy Encampment, the Sojourn in Edinburgh (with a passing view of
+Scotch schoolboys only inferior, as everything is, to Sir Walter's
+history of Green-breeks), the Irish Sojourn (with the horse whispering
+and the "dog of peace,") the settlement in Norwich (with Borrow's
+compulsory legal studies and his very uncompulsory excursions into
+Italian, Hebrew, Welsh, Scandinavian, anything that obviously would not
+pay), the new meeting with the gipsies in the Castle Field, the
+fight--only the first of many excellent fights--these are but a few of
+the memories which rise to every reader of even the early chapters of
+this extraordinary book, and they do not cover its first hundred pages
+in the common edition. Then his father dies and the born vagrant is set
+loose for vagrancy. He goes to London, with a stock of translations
+which is to make him famous, and a recommendation from Taylor of Norwich
+to "the publisher." The publisher exacted something more than his pound
+of flesh in the form of Newgate Lives and review articles, and paid,
+when he did pay, in bills of uncertain date which were very likely to be
+protested. But Borrow won through it all, making odd acquaintances with
+a young man of fashion (his least lifelike sketch); with an apple-seller
+on London Bridge, who was something of a "fence" and had erected Moll
+Flanders (surely the oddest patroness ever so selected) into a kind of
+patron saint; with a mysterious Armenian merchant of vast wealth, whom
+the young man, according to his own account, finally put on a kind of
+filibustering expedition against both the Sublime Porte and the White
+Czar, for the restoration of Armenian independence. At last, out of
+health with perpetual work and low living, out of employ, his friends
+beyond call, he sees destruction before him, writes _The Life and
+Adventures of Joseph Sell_ (name of fortunate omen!) almost at a heat
+and on a capital, fixed and floating, of eighteen-pence, and disposes of
+it for twenty pounds by the special providence of the Muses. With this
+twenty pounds his journey into the blue distance begins. He travels,
+partly by coach, to somewhere near Salisbury, and gives the first of the
+curiously unfavourable portraits of stage coachmen, which remain to
+check Dickens's rose-coloured representations of Mr. Weller and his
+brethren. I incline to think that Borrow's was likely to be the truer
+picture. According to him, the average stage coachman was anything but
+an amiable character, greedy, insolent to all but persons of wealth and
+rank, a hanger-on of those who might claim either; bruiser enough to be
+a bully but not enough to be anything more; in short, one of the worst
+products of civilisation. From civilisation itself, however, Borrow soon
+disappears, as far as any traceable signs go. He journeys, not farther
+west but northwards, into the West Midlands and the marches of Wales. He
+buys a tinker's beat and fit-out from a feeble vessel of the craft, who
+has been expelled by "the Flaming Tinman," a half-gipsy of robustious
+behaviour. He is met by old Mrs. Hearne, the mother-in-law of his gipsy
+friend Jasper Petulengro, who resents a Gorgio's initiation in gipsy
+ways, and very nearly poisons him by the wily aid of her grand-daughter
+Leonora. He recovers, thanks to a Welsh travelling preacher and to
+castor oil. And then, when the Welshman has left him, comes the climax
+and turning-point of the whole story, the great fight with Jem Bosvile,
+"the Flaming Tinman." The much-abused adjective Homeric belongs in sober
+strictness to this immortal battle, which has the additional interest
+not thought of by Homer (for goddesses do not count) that Borrow's
+second and guardian angel is a young woman of great attractions and
+severe morality, Miss Isopel (or Belle) Berners, whose extraction,
+allowing for the bar sinister, is honourable, and who, her hands being
+fully able to keep her head, has sojourned without ill fortune in the
+Flaming Tinman's very disreputable company. Bosvile, vanquished by pluck
+and good fortune rather than strength, flees the place with his wife.
+Isopel remains behind and the couple take up their joint residence, a
+residence of perfect propriety, in this dingle, the exact locality of
+which I have always longed to know, that I might make an autumnal
+pilgrimage to it. Isopel, Brynhild as she is, would apparently have had
+no objection to be honourably wooed. But her eccentric companion
+confines himself to teaching her "I love" in Armenian, which she finds
+unsatisfactory; and she at last departs, leaving a letter which tells
+Mr. Borrow some home truths. And, even before this catastrophe has been
+reached, _Lavengro_ itself ends with a more startling abruptness than
+perhaps any nominally complete book before or since.
+
+It would be a little interesting to know whether the continuation, _The
+Romany Rye_, which opens as if there had been no break whatever, was
+written continuously or with a break. At any rate its opening chapters
+contain the finish of the lamentable history of Belle Berners, which
+must induce every reader of sensibility to trust that Borrow, in writing
+it, was only indulging in his very considerable faculty of perverse
+romancing. The chief argument to the contrary is, that surely no man,
+however imbued with romantic perversity, would have made himself cut so
+poor a figure as Borrow here does without cause. The gipsies reappear to
+save the situation, and a kind of minor Belle Berners drama is played
+out with Ursula, Jasper's sister. Then the story takes another of its
+abrupt turns. Jasper, half in generosity it would appear, half in
+waywardness, insists on Borrow purchasing a thorough-bred horse which is
+for sale, advances the money, and despatches him across England to
+Horncastle Fair to sell it. The usual Le Sagelike adventures occur, the
+oddest of them being the hero's residence for some considerable time as
+clerk and storekeeper at a great roadside inn. At last he reaches
+Horncastle, and sells the horse to advantage. Then the story closes as
+abruptly and mysteriously almost as that of _Lavengro_, with a long and
+in parts, it must be confessed, rather dull conversation between the
+hero, the Hungarian who has bought the horse, and the dealer who has
+acted as go-between. This dealer, in honour of Borrow, of whom he has
+heard through the gipsies, executes the wasteful and very meaningless
+ceremony of throwing two bottles of old rose champagne, at a guinea
+apiece, through the window. Even this is too dramatic a finale for
+Borrow's unconquerable singularity, and he adds a short dialogue between
+himself and a recruiting sergeant. And after this again there comes an
+appendix containing an _apologia_ for _Lavengro_, a great deal more
+polemic against Romanism, some historical views of more originality than
+exactness, and a diatribe against gentility, Scotchmen, Scott, and other
+black beasts of Borrow's. This appendix has received from some professed
+admirers of the author a great deal more attention than it deserves. In
+the first place, it was evidently written in a fit of personal pique; in
+the second, it is chiefly argumentative, and Borrow had absolutely no
+argumentative faculty. To say that it contains a great deal of quaint
+and piquant writing is only to say that its writer wrote it, and though
+the description of "Charlie-over-the-waterism" probably does not apply
+to any being who ever lived, except to a few school-girls of both sexes,
+it has a strong infusion of Borrow's satiric gift. As for the diatribes
+against gentility, Borrow has only done very clumsily what Thackeray had
+done long before without clumsiness. It can escape nobody who has read
+his books with a seeing eye that he was himself exceedingly proud, not
+merely of being a gentleman in the ethical sense, but of being one in
+the sense of station and extraction--as, by the way, the decriers of
+British snobbishness usually are, so that no special blame attaches to
+Borrow for the inconsistency. Only let it be understood, once for all,
+that to describe him as "the apostle of the ungenteel" is either to
+speak in riddles or quite to misunderstand his real merits and
+abilities.
+
+I believe that some of the small but fierce tribe of Borrovians are
+inclined to resent the putting of the last of this remarkable series,
+_Wild Wales_, on a level with the other three. With such I can by no
+means agree. _Wild Wales_ has not, of course, the charm of unfamiliar
+scenery and the freshness of youthful impression which distinguish _The
+Bible in Spain_; it does not attempt anything like the novel-interest of
+_Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_; and though, as has been pointed out
+above, something of Borrow's secret and mysterious way of indicating
+places survives, it is a pretty distinct itinerary over great part of
+the actual principality. I have followed most of its tracks on foot
+myself, and nobody who wants a Welsh guide-book can take a pleasanter
+one, though he might easily find one much less erratic. It may thus
+have, to superficial observers, a positive and prosaic flavour as
+compared with the romantic character of the other three. But this
+distinction is not real. The tones are a little subdued, as was likely
+to be the case with an elderly gentleman of fifty, travelling with his
+wife and stepdaughter, and not publishing the record of his travels till
+he was nearly ten years older. The localities are traceable on the map
+and in Murray, instead of being the enchanted dingles and the
+half-mythical woods of _Lavengro_. The personages of the former books
+return no more, though, with one of his most excellent touches of art,
+the author has suggested the contrast of youth and age by a single gipsy
+interview in one of the later chapters. Borrow, like all sensible men,
+was at no time indifferent to good food and drink, especially good ale;
+but the trencher plays in _Wild Wales_ a part, the importance of which
+may perhaps have shocked some of our latter-day delicates, to whom
+strong beer is a word of loathing, and who wonder how on earth our
+grandfathers and fathers used to dispose of "black strap." A very
+different set of readers may be repelled by the strong literary colour
+of the book, which is almost a Welsh anthology in parts. But those few
+who can boast themselves to find the whole of a book, not merely its
+parts, and to judge that whole when found, will be not least fond of
+_Wild Wales_. If they have, as every reader of Borrow should have, the
+spirit of the roads upon them, and are never more happy than when
+journeying on "Shanks his mare," they will, of course, have in addition
+a peculiar and personal love for it. It is, despite the interludes of
+literary history, as full of Borrow's peculiar conversational gift as
+any of its predecessors. Its thumbnail sketches, if somewhat more
+subdued and less elaborate, are not less full of character. John Jones,
+the Dissenting weaver, who served Borrow at once as a guide and a
+whetstone of Welsh in the neighbourhood of Llangollen; the "kenfigenous"
+Welshwoman who first, but by no means last, exhibited the curious local
+jealousy of a Welsh-speaking Englishman; the doctor and the Italian
+barometer-seller at Cerrig-y-Druidion; the "best Pridydd of the world"
+in Anglesey, with his unlucky addiction to beer and flattery; the waiter
+at Bala; the "ecclesiastical cat" (a cat worthy to rank with those of
+Southey and Gautier); the characters of the walk across the hills from
+Machynlleth to the Devil's Bridge; the scene at the public-house on the
+Glamorgan Border, where the above-mentioned jealousy comes out so
+strongly; the mad Irishwoman, Johanna Colgan (a masterpiece by herself);
+and the Irish girl, with her hardly inferior history of the
+faction-fights of Scotland Road (which Borrow, by a mistake, has put in
+Manchester instead of in Liverpool); these make a list which I have
+written down merely as they occurred to me, without opening the book,
+and without prejudice to another list, nearly as long, which might be
+added. _Wild Wales_, too, because of its easy and direct opportunity of
+comparing its description with the originals, is particularly valuable
+as showing how sober, and yet how forcible, Borrow's descriptions are.
+As to incident, one often, as before, suspects him of romancing, and it
+stands to reason that his dialogue, written long after the event, must
+be full of the "cocked-hat-and-cane" style of narrative. But his
+description, while it has all the vividness, has also all the
+faithfulness and sobriety of the best landscape-painting. See a place
+which Kingsley or Mr. Ruskin, or some other master of our decorative
+school, has described--much more one which has fallen into the hands of
+the small fry of their imitators--and you are almost sure to find that
+it has been overdone. This is never, or hardly ever, the case with
+Borrow, and it is so rare a merit, when it is found in a man who does
+not shirk description where necessary, that it deserves to be counted to
+him at no grudging rate.
+
+But there is no doubt that the distinguishing feature of the book is its
+survey of Welsh poetical literature. I have already confessed that I am
+not qualified to judge the accuracy of Borrow's translations, and by no
+means disposed to over-value them. But any one who takes an interest in
+literature at all, must, I think, feel that interest not a little
+excited by the curious Old-Mortality-like peregrinations which the
+author of _Wild Wales_ made to the birth-place, or the burial-place as
+it might be, of bard after bard, and by the short but masterly accounts
+which he gives of the objects of his search. Of none of the numerous
+subjects of his linguistic rovings does Borrow seem to have been fonder,
+putting Romany aside, than of Welsh. He learnt it in a peculiarly
+contraband manner originally, which, no doubt, endeared it to him; it
+was little known to and often ridiculed by most Englishmen, which was
+another attraction; and it was extremely unlikely to "pay" in any way,
+which was a third. Perhaps he was not such an adept in it as he would
+have us believe--the respected Cymmrodorion Society or Professor Rhys
+must settle that. But it needs no knowledge of Welsh whatever to
+perceive the genuine enthusiasm, and the genuine range of his
+acquaintance with the language from the purely literary side. When he
+tells us that Ab Gwilym was a greater poet than Ovid or Chaucer I feel
+considerable doubts whether he was quite competent to understand Ovid
+and little or no doubt that he has done wrong to Chaucer. But when,
+leaving these idle comparisons, he luxuriates in details about Ab Gwilym
+himself, and his poems, and his lady loves, and so forth, I have no
+doubt about Borrow's appreciation (casual prejudices always excepted) of
+literature. Nor is it easy to exaggerate the charm which he has added to
+Welsh scenery by this constant identification of it with the men, and
+the deeds, and the words of the past.
+
+Little has been said hitherto of Borrow's more purely literary
+characteristics from the point of view of formal criticism. They are
+sufficiently interesting. He unites with a general plainness of speech
+and writing, not unworthy of Defoe or Cobbett, a very odd and
+complicated mannerism, which, as he had the wisdom to make it the
+seasoning and not the main substance of his literary fare, is never
+disgusting. The secret of this may be, no doubt, in part sought in his
+early familiarity with a great many foreign languages, some of whose
+idioms he transplanted into English: but this is by no means the whole
+of the receipt. Perhaps it is useless to examine analytically that
+receipt's details, or rather (for the analysis may be said to be
+compulsory on any one who calls himself a critic), useless to offer its
+results to the reader. One point which can escape no one who reads with
+his eyes open is the frequent, yet not too abundant, repetition of the
+same or very similar words--a point wherein much of the secret of
+persons so dissimilar as Carlyle, Borrow, and Thackeray consists. This
+is a well-known fact--so well known indeed that when a person who
+desires to acquire style hears of it, he often goes and does likewise,
+with what result all reviewers know. The peculiarity of Borrow, as far
+as I can mark it, is that, despite his strong mannerism, he never relies
+on it as too many others, great and small, are wont to do. The character
+sketches, of which, as I have said, he is so abundant a master, are
+always put in the plainest and simplest English. So are his flashes of
+ethical reflection, which, though like all ethical reflections often
+one-sided, are of the first order of insight. I really do not know that,
+in the mint-and-anise-and-cummin order of criticism, I have more than
+one charge to make against Borrow. That is that he, like other persons
+of his own and the immediately preceding time, is wont to make a most
+absurd misuse of the word individual. With Borrow "individual" means
+simply "person": a piece of literary gentility of which he, of all
+others, ought to have been ashamed.
+
+But such criticism has but very little propriety in the case of a
+writer, whose attraction is neither mainly nor in any very great degree
+one of pure form. His early critics compared him to Le Sage, and the
+comparison is natural. But if it is natural, it is not extraordinarily
+critical. Both men wrote of vagabonds, and to some extent of picaroons;
+both neglected the conventionalities of their own language and
+literature; both had a singular knowledge of human nature. But Le Sage
+is one of the most impersonal of all great writers, and Borrow is one of
+the most personal. And it is undoubtedly in the revelation of his
+personality that great part of his charm lies. It is, as has been fully
+acknowledged, a one-sided, wrong-headed, not always quite right-hearted
+personality. But it is intensely English, possessing at the same time a
+certain strain of romance which the other John Bulls of literature
+mostly lack, and which John Bunyan, the king of them all, only reached
+within the limits, still more limited than Borrow's, of purely
+religious, if not purely ecclesiastical, interests. A born grumbler; a
+person with an intense appetite for the good things of this life;
+profoundly impressed with, and at the same time sceptically critical of,
+the bad or good things of another life; apt, as he somewhere says
+himself, "to hit people when he is not pleased"; illogical; constantly
+right in general, despite his extremely roundabout ways of reaching his
+conclusion; sometimes absurd, and yet full of humour; alternately
+prosaic and capable of the highest poetry; George Borrow, Cornishman on
+the father's side and Huguenot on the mother's, managed to display in
+perfection most of the characteristics of what once was, and let us hope
+has not quite ceased to be, the English type. If he had a slight
+overdose of Celtic blood and Celtic peculiarity, it was more than made
+up by the readiness of literary expression which it gave him. He, if any
+one, bore an English heart, though, as there often has been in
+Englishmen, there was something perhaps more as well as something less
+than English in his fashion of expression.
+
+To conclude, Borrow has--what after all is the chief mark of a great
+writer--distinction. "Try to be like somebody," said the unlucky
+critic-bookseller to Lamartine; and he has been gibbeted for it, very
+justly, for the best part of a century. It must be admitted that "try
+not to be like other people," though a much more fashionable, is likely
+to be quite as disastrous a recommendation. But the great writers,
+whether they try to be like other people or try not to be like them (and
+sometimes in the first case most of all), succeed only in being
+themselves, and that is what Borrow does. His attraction is rather
+complex, and different parts of it may, and no doubt do, apply with
+differing force to this and that reader. One may be fascinated by his
+pictures of an unconventional and open-air life, the very possibilities
+of which are to a great extent lost in our days, though patches of
+ground here and there in England (notably the tracts of open ground
+between Cromer and Wells in Borrow's own county) still recall them. To
+others he may be attractive for his sturdy patriotism, or his
+adventurous and wayward spirit, or his glimpses of superstition and
+romance. The racy downrightness of his talk; the axioms, such as that to
+the Welsh alewife, "The goodness of ale depends less upon who brews it
+than upon what it is brewed of"; or the sarcastic touches as that of the
+dapper shopkeeper, who, regarding the funeral of Byron, observed, "I,
+too, am frequently unhappy," may each and all have their votaries. His
+literary devotion to literature would, perhaps, of itself attract few;
+for, as has been hinted, it partook very much of the character of
+will-worship, and there are few people who like any will-worship in
+letters except their own; but it adds to his general attraction, no
+doubt, in the case of many. That neither it, nor any other of his
+claims, has yet forced itself as it should on the general public is an
+undoubted fact; a fact not difficult to understand, though rather
+difficult fully to explain, at least without some air of superior
+knowingness and taste. Yet he has, as has been said, his devotees, and I
+think they are likely rather to increase than to decrease. He wants
+editing, for his allusive fashion of writing probably makes a great part
+of him nearly unintelligible to those who have not from their youth up
+devoted themselves to the acquisition of useless knowledge. There ought
+to be a good life of him. The great mass of his translations, published
+and unpublished, and the smaller mass of his early hackwork, no doubt
+deserve judicious excerption. If professed philologers were not even
+more ready than most other specialists each to excommunicate all the
+others except himself and his own particular Johnny Dods of Farthing's
+Acre, it would be rather interesting to hear what some modern men of
+many languages have to say to Borrow's linguistic achievements. But all
+these things are only desirable embellishments and assistances. His real
+claims and his real attractions are comprised in four small volumes, the
+purchase of which, under modern arrangements of booksellers, leaves some
+change out of a sovereign, and which will about half fill the ordinary
+bag used for briefs and dynamite. It is not a large literary baggage,
+and it does not attempt any very varied literary kinds. If not exactly a
+novelist in any one of his books, Borrow is a romancer, in the true and
+not the ironic sense of the word, in all of them. He has not been
+approached in merit by any romancer who has published books in our days,
+except Charles Kingsley; and his work, if less varied in range and charm
+than Kingsley's, has a much stronger and more concentrated flavour.
+Moreover, he is the one English writer of our time, and perhaps of times
+still farther back, who seems never to have tried to be anything but
+himself; who went his own way all his life long with complete
+indifference to what the public or the publishers liked, as well as to
+what canons of literary form and standards of literary perfection
+seemed to indicate as best worth aiming at. A most self-sufficient
+person was Borrow, in the good and ancient sense, as well as, to some
+extent, in the sense which is bad and modern. And what is more, he was
+not only a self-sufficient person, but is very sufficient also to the
+tastes of all those who love good English and good literature.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX A
+
+DE QUINCEY
+
+
+A short time after the publication of my essay on De Quincey I learnt,
+to my great concern, that it had given offence to his daughter Florence,
+the widow of one of the heroes of the Indian Mutiny, Colonel Baird
+Smith. Mrs. Baird Smith complained, in a letter to the newspapers, that
+I had accused her father of untruthfulness, and requested the public to
+suspend their judgment until the publication of certain new documents,
+in the form of letters, which had been discovered. I might have replied,
+if my intent had been hostile, that little fault could be justly found
+with a critic of the existing evidence if new evidence were required to
+confute him. But as the very last intention that I had in writing the
+paper was to impute anything that can be properly called untruthfulness
+to De Quincey, I thought it better to say so and to wait for the further
+documents. In a subsequent private correspondence with Mrs. Baird Smith,
+I found that what had offended her (her complaints being at first quite
+general) was certain remarks on De Quincey's aristocratic acquaintances
+as appearing in the _Autobiography_ and "not heard of afterwards,"
+certain comments on the Malay incident and others like it, some on the
+mystery of her father's money affairs, and the passage on his general
+"impenetrability." The matter is an instance of the difficulty of
+dealing with recent reputations, when the commentator gives his name.
+Some really unkind things have been said of De Quincey; my intention was
+not to say anything unkind at all, but simply to give an account of the
+thing "as it strikes" if not "a contemporary" yet a well-willing junior.
+Take for instance the Malay incident. We know from De Quincey himself
+that, within a few years, the truth of this famous story was questioned,
+and that he was accused of having borrowed it from something of Hogg's.
+He disclaimed this, no doubt truly. He protested that it was a
+faithfully recorded incident: but though the events were then fresh, he
+did not produce a single witness to prove that any Malay had been near
+Grasmere at the time. And so elsewhere. As I have remarked about Borrow,
+there are some people who have a knack of recounting truth so that it
+looks as if it never had been true. I have been informed by Mr. James
+Runciman that he himself once made considerable inquiries on the track
+of _Lavengro_, and found that that remarkable book is, to some extent at
+any rate, apparently historic. On the other hand I have been told by
+another Borrovian who knew Borrow (which I never did) that the _Life of
+Joseph Sell_ never existed. In such cases a critic can only go on
+internal evidence, and I am sure that the vast majority of critics would
+decide against most of De Quincey's stories on that. I do not suppose
+that he ever, like Lamb, deliberately begat "lie-children": but
+opium-eating is not absolutely repugnant to delusion, and literary
+mystification was not so much the exception as the rule in his earlier
+time. As to his "impenetrability," I can only throw myself on the
+readers of such memoirs and reminiscences as have been published
+respecting him. The almost unanimous verdict of his acquaintances and
+critics has been that he was in a way mysterious, and though no doubt
+this mystery did not extend to his children, it seems to have extended
+to almost every one else. I gather from Mrs. Baird Smith's own remarks
+that from first to last all who were concerned with him treated him as a
+person unfit to be trusted with money, and while his habit of solitary
+lodging is doubtless capable of a certain amount of explanation, it
+cannot be described as other than curious. I had never intended to throw
+doubt on his actual acquaintance with Lord Westport or Lady Carbery.
+These persons or their representatives were alive when the
+_Autobiography_ was published, and would no doubt have protested if De
+Quincey had not spoken truly. But I must still hold that their total
+disappearance from his subsequent life is peculiar. Some other points,
+such as his mentioning Wilson as his "only intimate male friend" are
+textually cited from himself, and if I seem to have spoken harshly of
+his early treatment by his family I may surely shelter myself behind the
+touching incident, recorded in the biographies, of his crying on his
+deathbed, "My dear mother! then I was greatly mistaken." If this does
+not prove that he himself had entertained on the subject ideas which,
+whether false or true, were unfavourable, then it is purely meaningless.
+
+In conclusion, I have only to repeat my regret that I should, by a
+perhaps thoughtless forgetfulness of the feelings of survivors, have
+hurt those feelings. But I think I am entitled to say that the view of
+De Quincey's character and cast of thought given in the text, while
+imputing nothing discreditable in intention, is founded on the whole
+published work and all the biographical evidence then accessible to me,
+and will not be materially altered by anything since published or likely
+to be so in future. The world, though often not quite right, is never
+quite wrong about a man, and it would be almost impossible that it
+should be wrong in face of such autobiographic details as are furnished,
+not merely by the _Autobiography_ itself, but by a mass of notes spread
+over seven years in composition and full of personal idiosyncrasy. I not
+only acquit De Quincey of all serious moral delinquency,--I declare
+distinctly that no imputation of it was ever intended. It is quite
+possible that some of his biographers and of those who knew him may have
+exaggerated his peculiarities, less possible I think that those
+peculiarities should not have existed. But the matter, except for my own
+regret at having offended De Quincey's daughter, will have been a happy
+one if it results in a systematic publication of his letters, which,
+from the specimens already printed, must be very characteristic and very
+interesting. In almost all cases a considerable collection of letters is
+the most effective, and especially the most truth-telling, of all
+possible "lives." No letters indeed are likely to increase the literary
+repute of the author of the _Confessions_ and of the _Cæsars_; but they
+may very well clear up and fill in the hitherto rather fragmentary and
+conjectural notion of his character, and they may, on the other hand,
+confirm that idea of both which, however false it may seem to his
+children, and others who were united to him by ties of affection, has
+commended itself to careful students of his published works.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX B
+
+LOCKHART
+
+
+The most singular instance of the floating dislike to Lockhart's memory,
+to which I have more than once referred in the text, occurred
+subsequently to the original publication of my essay, and not very long
+ago, when my friend Mr. Louis Stevenson thought proper to call Lockhart
+a "cad." This extraordinary _obiter dictum_ provoked, as might have been
+expected, not a few protests, but I do not remember that Mr. Stevenson
+rejoined, and I have not myself had any opportunity of learning from him
+what he meant. I can only suppose that the ebullition must have been
+prompted by one of two things, the old scandal about the duel in which
+John Scott the editor of the _London_ was shot, and a newer one, which
+was first bruited abroad, I think, in Mr. Sidney Colvin's book on Keats.
+Both of these, and especially the first, may be worth a little
+discussion.
+
+I do not think that any one who examines Mr. Colvin's allegation, will
+think it very damaging. It comes to this, that Keats's friend Bailey met
+Lockhart in the house of Bishop Greig at Stirling, told him some
+particulars about Keats, extracted from him a promise that he would not
+use them against the poet, and afterwards thought he recognised some of
+the details in the _Blackwood_ attack which ranks next to the famous
+_Quarterly_ article. Here it is to be observed, first, that there is no
+sufficient evidence that Lockhart wrote this _Blackwood_ article;
+secondly, that it is by no means certain that if he did, he was making,
+or considered himself to be making, any improper use of what he had
+heard; thirdly, that for the actual interview and its tenor we have only
+a vague _ex parte_ statement made long after date.
+
+The other matter is much more important, and as the duel itself has been
+mentioned more than once or twice in the foregoing pages, and as it is
+to this day being frequently referred to in what seems to me an entirely
+erroneous manner, with occasional implications that Lockhart showed the
+white feather, it may be well to give a sketch of what actually
+happened, as far as can be made out from the most trustworthy accounts,
+published and unpublished.
+
+One of Lockhart's signatures in _Blackwood_--a signature which, however,
+like others, was not, I believe, peculiar to him--was "Zeta," and this
+Zeta assailed the Cockney school in a sufficiently scorpion-like manner.
+Thereupon Scott's magazine, the _London_, retorted, attacking Lockhart
+by name. On this Lockhart set out for London and, with a certain young
+Scotch barrister named Christie as his second, challenged Scott. But
+Scott refused to fight, unless Lockhart would deny that he was editor of
+_Blackwood_. Lockhart declared that Scott had no right to ask this, and
+stigmatised him as a coward. He then published a statement, sending at
+the same time a copy to Scott. In the published form the denial of
+editorship was made, in the one sent to Scott it was omitted. Thereupon
+Scott called Lockhart a liar. Of this Lockhart took no notice, but
+Christie his second did, and, an altercation taking place between them,
+Scott challenged Christie and they went out, Scott's second being Mr. P.
+G. Patmore, Christie's Mr. Traill, afterwards well known as a London
+police magistrate. Christie fired in the air, Scott fired at Christie
+and missed. Thereupon Mr. Patmore demanded a second shot, which, I am
+informed, could and should, by all laws of the duello, have been
+refused. Both principal and second on the other side were, however,
+inexperienced and probably unwilling to baulk their adversaries. Shots
+were again exchanged, Christie this time (as he can hardly be blamed for
+doing) taking aim at his adversary and wounding him mortally. Patmore
+fled the country, Christie and Traill took their trial and were
+acquitted.
+
+I have elsewhere remarked that this deplorable result is said to have
+been brought on by errors of judgment on the part of more than one
+person. Hazlitt, himself no duellist and even accused of personal
+timidity, is said to have egged on Scott, and to have stung him by some
+remark of his bitter tongue into challenging Christie, and there is no
+doubt that Patmore's conduct was most reprehensible. But we are here
+concerned with Lockhart, not with them. As far as I understand the
+imputations made on him, he is charged either with want of
+straightforwardness in omitting part of his explanation in the copy sent
+to Scott, or with cowardice in taking no notice of Scott's subsequent
+lie direct, or with both. Let us examine this.
+
+At first sight the incident of what, from the most notorious action of
+Lord Clive, we may call the "red and white treaties" seems odd. But it
+is to be observed, first, that Lockhart could not be said to conceal
+from Scott what he published to all the world; secondly, that his
+conduct was perfectly consistent throughout. He had challenged Scott,
+who had declined to go out. Having offered his adversary satisfaction,
+he was not bound to let him take it with a proviso, or to satisfy his
+private inquisitiveness. But if not under menace, but considering Scott
+after his refusal as unworthy the notice of a gentleman, and not further
+to be taken into account, he chose to inform the public of the truth, he
+had a perfect right to do so. And it is hardly necessary to say that it
+was the truth that he was not editor of _Blackwood_.
+
+This consideration will also account for his conduct in not renewing his
+challenge after Scott's offensive words. He had offered the man
+satisfaction and had been refused. No one is bound to go on challenging
+a reluctant adversary. At all times Lockhart seems to have been
+perfectly ready to back his opinion, as may be seen from a long affair
+which had happened earlier, in connection with the "Baron Lauerwinkel"
+matter. There he had promptly come forward and in his own name
+challenged the anonymous author of a pamphlet bearing the title of
+"Hypocrisy Unveiled." The anonym had, like Scott, shirked, and had
+maintained his anonymity. (Lord Cockburn says it was an open secret, but
+I do not know who he was.) Thereupon Lockhart took no further notice,
+just as he did in the later matter, and I do not believe that a court of
+honour in any country would find fault with him. At any rate, I think
+that we are entitled to know, much more definitely than I have ever seen
+it stated, what the charge against him is. We may indeed blame him in
+both these matters, and perhaps in others, for neglecting the sound rule
+that anonymous writing should never be personal. If he did this,
+however, he is in the same box with almost every writer for the press in
+his own generation, and with too many in this. I maintain that in each
+case he promptly gave the guarantee which the honour of his time
+required, and which is perhaps the only possible guarantee, that of
+being ready to answer in person for what he had written impersonally.
+This was all he could do, and he did it.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+ Allen, Thomas, 113
+
+ Arnold, Matthew, 116, 257, 378
+
+ Austen, Jane, 29
+
+
+ _Blackwood's Magazine_, 37 _sqq._, 276 _sqq._, 343 _sqq._
+
+ Borrow, George, 403-439;
+   his life, 403, 404;
+   his excessive oddity, 404-411;
+   his satiric and character-drawing faculty, 414-417;
+   sketches of his books, 417-433;
+   his general literary character, 433-439
+
+ Brougham, Lord, 107, 109
+
+ Burke, Edmund, 10 _sqq._
+
+ Burns, Robert, 34, 48, 53, 159, 160, 353
+
+ Byron, Lord, 3, 131, 132, 393
+
+
+ Canning, George, 75, 97, 200, 385
+
+ Carlyle, Thomas, 47, 270-272, 323, 369, 370
+
+ Coleridge, S. T., 141
+
+ Colvin, Mr. Sidney, 445
+
+ Courthope, Mr. W. J., 4
+
+ Crabbe, George, 1-32;
+   the decline of his popularity, 1-5;
+   sketch of his life, 6-12;
+   his works and their characteristics, 13-20;
+   their prosaic element, 20-25;
+   was he a poet?, 25-32
+
+ Cunningham, Allan, 46, 53
+
+
+ Dante, 26, 218, 230, 231
+
+ Douglas, Scott, 41, 353
+
+ Dryden, John, 22, 30, 85, 232
+
+
+ Fitzgerald, Edward (translator of Omar Khayyám), 4
+
+ Flaubert, Gustave, 19
+
+ _Fraser's Magazine_, 359, 360
+
+
+ Gifford, William, 3, 21, 152
+
+
+ Hannay, Mr. David, 350
+
+ Hazlitt, William, 135-169;
+   differing estimates of him, 135-140;
+   his life, 140-146;
+   his works, 146-169
+   ----xxi, xxii, 4, 24, 25, 130, 131, 217
+
+ Hogg, James, 33-66;
+   his special interest, 33, 34;
+   his life, 34-37;
+   anecdotes and estimates of him, 37-47;
+   his poems, 47-54;
+   his general prose, 54, 55;
+   _The Confessions of a Sinner_, 55-64
+
+ Hood and Praed, 397-399
+
+ Hook, Theodore, 357-359
+
+ Howells, Mr. W. D., xvii
+
+ Hunt, Leigh, 201-233;
+   scattered condition of his work, 201-203;
+   his life, 204-213;
+   the "Skimpole" matter, 213-216;
+   his vulgarity, 217-219;
+   his poems, 219-223;
+   his critical and miscellaneous work, 223-233
+
+
+ Jeffrey, Francis, 100-134;
+   a critic pure and simple, 100, 101;
+   his life, 101-114;
+   the foundation of the _Edinburgh Review_, 106-109;
+   his criticism, 115, 134
+   ----3, 4, 21, 24, 29
+
+ Johnson, Samuel, 2, 11, 14, 16
+
+ Joubert, Joseph, 26
+
+
+ Lang, Mr. Andrew, xxii
+
+ Lockhart, John Gibson, 339-373, and Appendix B;
+   his literary fate, 339-341;
+   his life, 341-346, 359-361;
+   _The Chaldee MS._ and _Peter's Letters_, 343-345;
+   the novels, 346-349;
+   the poems, 349-351;
+   _Life of Burns_, 353;
+   _Life of Scott_, 354-356;
+   _Life of Hook_, 357-359;
+   his editorship of the _Quarterly_ and his criticism generally, 361-373;
+   charges against him, 445-448
+   ----3, 6, 13, 33, 37, 39-44, 60, 63, 64, 108, 112, 113, 293, 294
+
+
+ Macaulay, Lord, 294, 384
+
+ Maguire, W., 279, 360
+ [Transcriber's Note: The alternative form of Maguire, Maginn, is used in
+ the main body of the text.]
+
+ Masson, Professor, 305 _sqq._
+
+ Moore, Thomas, 170-200;
+   a French critic on him, 170-172;
+   his miscellaneous work, 172-174;
+   his life, 174-183;
+   his character, 183-185;
+   survey of his poetry, 185-200
+   ----6, 27, 110.
+
+ Morley, Mr. John, 27
+
+
+ Newman, Cardinal, 4
+
+ North, Christopher. _See_ Wilson, John
+
+
+ Peacock, Thomas Love, 234-269;
+   his literary position, 234, 235;
+   his life, 236-239;
+   some difficulties in him, 239-242;
+   survey of his work, 242-259;
+   its special characteristics, 257-269
+
+ Pope, Alexander, 22, 25
+
+ Praed, W. M., 374-402;
+   editions of him, 374-376;
+   his life, 376-381;
+   his early writings, 381-384;
+   his poetical work, 385-398;
+   Hood and Praed, 397-399;
+   his special charm, 399-402
+
+
+ Quincey, Thomas de, 304-338, and Appendix A;
+   editions of him, 304-309;
+   his life, 309-314;
+   his faculty of rigmarole, 314-321;
+   defects and merits of his work, 321-338
+   ----47, 282
+
+
+ Rogers, Samuel, 12 _note_
+
+
+ Scott, John, his duel and death, 143, 144; Appendix B
+
+ Scott, Sir Walter, 34-36, 49, 54, 63, 111, 151, 265, 273, 354-359, 406, 407
+
+ Shelley, P. B., 190, 191, 210, 247-250
+
+ Smith, Bobus, 69
+
+ Smith, Mr. Goldwin, xi, xiv
+
+ Smith, Sydney, 67-99;
+   the beneficence of his biographers, 67-69;
+   his life, 69-80;
+   his letters, 81-84;
+   his published work, 84-99
+
+ Staël, Madame de, 126, 127
+
+ Stephen, Mr. Leslie, 4
+
+ Stevenson, Mr. R. L., 445
+
+ Sully, Mr. James, xxvii _note_
+
+ Swift, Jonathan, Jeffrey on, 128, 129
+
+
+ Tennyson, Lord, 4, 29, 292, 293, 365, 366
+
+ Thackeray, W. M., on Hazlitt, 135, 136
+
+ Thomson, James, 27
+
+ Thurlow, Lord, 10-12
+
+
+ Vallat, M. Jules, 171 _sqq._
+
+ Veitch, Professor, 38, 40, 46
+
+ Voltaire, 81
+
+
+ Walker, Sarah, 139 _sqq._
+
+ Wilson, John, 270-303;
+   Carlyle's judgment of him and another, 270-274;
+   his life, 274-277;
+   the _Noctes_, 278-288;
+   his miscellaneous work, 288-303
+
+ Wilson, John, 3, 4, 29, 44-47.
+   _See_ also Essays on De Quincey and Lockhart
+
+ Wordsworth, William, 3, 27, 117, 323
+
+
+ Young, Sir George, 375
+
+
+ "Zeta," 446
+
+
+THE END
+
+_Printed by R. & R. CLARK, Edinburgh._
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860, by 
+George Saintsbury
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 30455 ***
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 30455 ***</div>
+
+<h1>
+ESSAYS<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 70%;">IN<br /></span>
+<br />
+ENGLISH LITERATURE</h1>
+
+<h2>1780-1860</h2>
+
+
+<p class='center' style="margin-top: 3em;">BY
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: x-large; ">GEORGE SAINTSBURY</span></p>
+
+<p class='center' style="margin-top: 3em;">PERCIVAL AND CO.<br />
+<i>KING STREET</i>, <i>COVENT GARDEN</i><br />
+<b>London</b><br />
+1890</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">{v}</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+
+
+<p>Of the essays in this volume, the introductory paper on "The Kinds of
+Criticism" has not before appeared in print. All the rest, with one
+exception (the Essay on Lockhart which appeared in the <i>National
+Review</i>), were originally published in <i>Macmillan's Magazine</i>. To the
+Editors and Publishers of both these periodicals I owe my best thanks
+for permission to reprint the articles. To the Editor of <i>Macmillan's
+Magazine</i> in particular (to whom, if dedications were not somewhat in
+ill odour, I should, in memory of friendship old and new, have dedicated
+the book), I am further indebted for suggesting several of the subjects
+as well as accepting the essays. These appear in the main as they
+appeared;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">{vi}</a></span> but I have not scrupled to alter phrase or substance where it
+seemed desirable, and I have in a few places restored passages which had
+been sacrificed to the usual exigencies of space. In two cases, those of
+Lockhart and De Quincey, I have thought it best to discuss, in a brief
+appendix, some questions which have presented themselves since the
+original publications. In consequence of these alterations and additions
+as well as for other reasons, it may be convenient to give the dates and
+places of the original appearance of each essay. They are as follows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Lockhart, <i>National Review</i>, Aug. 1884. Borrow, <i>Macmillan's
+Magazine</i>, Jan. 1886. Peacock, do. April 1886. Wilson (under the
+title of "Christopher North"), do. July 1886. Hazlitt, do. March
+1887. Jeffrey, do. August 1887. Moore, do. March 1888. Sydney
+Smith, do. May 1888. Praed, do. Sept. 1888. Leigh Hunt, do. April
+1889. Crabbe, do. June 1889. Hogg, do. Sept. 1889. De Quincey,
+do. June 1890.</p></div>
+
+<p>The present order is chronological, following the birth-years of the
+authors discussed.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+
+
+<div class="center">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align="right" colspan="3">PAGE</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left" colspan="2">INTRODUCTORY ESSAY&mdash;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left" colspan="2"><span class="smcap">The Kinds of Criticism</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_ix">ix</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">I. </td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Crabbe</span> </td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">II. </td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Hogg</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_33">33</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">III.</td><td align="left"> <span class="smcap">Sydney Smith</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_67">67</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">IV.</td><td align="left"> <span class="smcap">Jeffrey</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_100">100</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">V.</td><td align="left"> <span class="smcap">Hazlitt</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_135">135</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">VI. </td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Moore</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_170">170</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">VII.</td><td align="left"> <span class="smcap">Leigh Hunt</span> </td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_201">201</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">VIII.</td><td align="left"> <span class="smcap">Peacock</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_234">234</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">IX.</td><td align="left"> <span class="smcap">Wilson</span> </td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_270">270</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">X.</td><td align="left"> <span class="smcap">De Quincey</span> </td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_304">304</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XI.</td><td align="left"> <span class="smcap">Lockhart</span> </td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_339">339</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XII.</td><td align="left"> <span class="smcap">Praed</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_374">374</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XIII.</td><td align="left"> <span class="smcap">Borrow</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_403">403</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">APPENDIX&mdash;</td><td align="left">A. <span class="smcap">De Quincey</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_440">440</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"></td><td align="left">B. <span class="smcap">Lockhart</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_444">444</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left" colspan="2">INDEX</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_449">449</a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">{ix}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="INTRODUCTION" id="INTRODUCTION"></a>INTRODUCTION<br />
+<br />
+THE KINDS OF CRITICISM</h2>
+
+
+<p>It is probably unnecessary, and might possibly be impertinent, to renew
+here at any length the old debate between reviewers as reviewers, and
+reviewers as authors&mdash;the debate whether the reissue of work contributed
+to periodicals is desirable or not. The plea that half the best prose
+literature of this century would be inaccessible if the practice had
+been forbidden, and the retort that anything which can pretend to keep
+company with the best literature of the century will be readily relieved
+from the objection, at once sum up the whole quarrel, and leave it
+undecided. For my own part, I think that there is a sufficient
+connection of subject in the following chapters, and I hope that there
+is a sufficient uniformity of treatment. The former point, as the least
+important, may be dismissed first. All the literature here discussed
+is&mdash;with the exception of Crabbe's earliest poems, and the late
+aftermath of Peacock and Borrow&mdash;work of one and the same period,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">{x}</a></span> the
+first half of the present century. The authors criticised were all
+contemporaries; with only one exception, if with one, they were all
+writing more or less busily within a single decade, that of 1820 to
+1830. And they have the further connection (which has at least the
+reality of having been present to my mind in selecting them), that while
+every one of them was a man of great literary power, hardly one has been
+by general consent, or except by private crotchet would be, put among
+the very greatest. They stand not far below, but distinctly below,
+Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats. Yet again, they
+agree in the fact that hardly one of them has yet been securely set in
+the literary niche which is his due, all having been at some time either
+unduly valued or unduly neglected, and one or two never having yet
+received even due appreciation. The greatest of all critics was accused,
+unjustly, of having a certain dislike of clear, undoubted supremacy. It
+would be far more fair to say that Sainte-Beuve had eminently, what
+perhaps all critics who are not mere carpers on the one hand, or mere
+splashers of superlatives on the other, have more or less&mdash;an affection
+for subjects possessing but qualified merit, and so giving to criticism
+a certain additional interest in the task of placing and appraising
+them.</p>
+
+<p>This last sentence may not meet with universal assent, but it will bring
+me conveniently to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">{xi}</a></span> second part of my subject. I should not have
+republished these essays if I had not thought that, whatever may be
+their faults (and a man who does not see the faults of his own writing
+on revising it a second time for the press after an interval, must be
+either a great genius or an intolerable fool), they possess a certain
+unity of critical method. Nor should I have republished them if it had
+seemed to me that this method was exactly identical with that of any
+other critic of the present day in England. I have at least endeavoured
+to wear my rue with a difference, and that not merely for the sake of
+differing.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Goldwin Smith, whose work is not likely to be impeached for defect
+either in form or in substance, wrote but a few months ago, in
+melancholy mood, that the province of criticism appeared to be now
+limited to the saying of fine things. I agree with him that this is one
+vicious extreme of the popular conception of the art; but in order to
+define correctly, we cannot be contented with one only. The other, as it
+seems to me, is fixed by the notion, now warmly championed by some
+younger critics both at home and abroad, that criticism must be of all
+things "scientific." For my own part, I have gravely and strenuously
+endeavoured to ascertain from the writings both of foreign critics (the
+chief of whom was the late M. Hennequin in France), and of their
+disciples at home, what "scientific" criticism means. In no case have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">{xii}</a></span> I
+been able to obtain any clear conception of its connotation in the
+mouths or minds of those who use the phrase. The new heaven and the new
+earth which they promise are no doubt to be very different from our own
+old earth and heaven; of that they are sure, and their sureness does not
+fail to make itself plain. But what the flora and fauna, the biology and
+geology of the new heaven and earth are to be, I have never succeeded in
+ascertaining. The country would appear to be like that Land of Ignorance
+which, as Lord Brooke says, "none can describe until he be past it."
+Only I have perceived that when this "scientific" criticism sticks
+closest to its own formulas and ways, it appears to me to be very bad
+criticism; and that when, as sometimes happens, it is good criticism,
+its ways and formulas are not perceptibly distinguishable from those of
+criticism which is not "scientific." For the rest, it is all but
+demonstrable that "scientific" literary criticism is impossible, unless
+the word "scientific" is to have its meaning very illegitimately
+altered. For the essential qualities of literature, as of all art, are
+communicated by the individual, they depend upon idiosyncrasy: and this
+makes science in any proper sense powerless. <i>She</i> can deal only with
+classes, only with general laws; and so long as these classes are
+constantly reduced to "species of one," and these laws are set at nought
+by incalculable and singular influences, she must be constantly baffled
+and find all her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xiii" id="Page_xiii">{xiii}</a></span> elaborate plant of formulas and generalisations
+useless. Of course, there are generalisations possible in literature,
+and to such I may return presently; but scientific criticism of
+literature must always be a contradiction in terms. You may to some
+considerable extent ascertain the general laws of language, of metre, of
+music, as applied to verbal rhythm and cadence; you may classify the
+subjects which appeal to the general, and further classify their
+particular manners of appeal; you may arrange the most ingenious
+"product-of-the-circumstances" theories about race, climate, religion.
+But always sooner or later, and much more often sooner than later, the
+mocking demon of the individual, or, if a different phrase be preferred,
+the great and splendid mystery of the idiosyncrasy of the artist, will
+meet and baffle you. You will find that on the showing of this science
+falsely so called, there is no reason why Chapelain should not be a
+poet, and none why Shakespeare is. You will ask science in vain to tell
+you why some dozen or sixteen of the simplest words in language arranged
+by one man or in one fashion, why a certain number of dabs of colour
+arranged by another man or in another fashion, make a permanent addition
+to the delight of the world, while other words and other dabs of colour,
+differently arranged by others, do not. To put the matter yet otherwise,
+the whole end, aim, and object of literature and the criticism of
+literature, as of all art, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xiv" id="Page_xiv">{xiv}</a></span> the criticism of all art, is beauty and
+the enjoyment of beauty. With beauty science has absolutely nothing to
+do.</p>
+
+<p>It is no doubt the sense, conscious or unconscious, of this that has
+inclined men to that other conception of criticism as a saying of fine
+things, of which Mr. Goldwin Smith complains, and which certainly has
+many votaries, in most countries at the present day. These votaries have
+their various kinds. There is the critic who simply uses his subject as
+a sort of springboard or platform, on and from which to display his
+natural grace and agility, his urbane learning, his faculty of pleasant
+wit. This is perhaps the most popular of all critics, and no age has
+ever had better examples of him than this age. There is a more serious
+kind who founds on his subject (if indeed founding be not too solemn a
+term) elaborate descants, makes it the theme of complicated variations.
+There is a third, closely allied to him, who seeks in it apparently
+first of all, and sometimes with no further aim, an opportunity for the
+display of style. And lastly (though as usual all these kinds pervade
+and melt into one another, so that, while in any individual one may
+prevail, it is rare to find an individual in whom that one is alone
+present) there is the purely impressionist critic who endeavours in his
+own way to show the impression which the subject has, or which he
+chooses to represent that it has, produced on him. This last is in a
+better case than the others; but still he, as it seems to me,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xv" id="Page_xv">{xv}</a></span> misses
+the full and proper office of the critic, though he may have an
+agreeable and even useful function of his own.</p>
+
+<p>For the full and proper office of the critic (again as it seems to me)
+can never be discharged except by those who remember that "critic" means
+"judge." Expressions of personal liking, though they can hardly be kept
+out of criticism, are not by themselves judgment. The famous "J'aime
+mieux Alfred de Musset," though it came from a man of extraordinary
+mental power and no small specially critical ability, is not criticism.
+Mere <i>obiter dicta</i> of any kind, though they may be most agreeable and
+even most legitimate sets-off to critical conversation, are not
+criticism. The most admirable discourses from the merely literary point
+of view on taste, Shakespeare, and the musical glasses, with some
+parenthetic reference to the matter in hand, are not criticism. There
+must be at least some attempt to take in and render the whole virtue of
+the subjects considered, some effort to compare them with their likes in
+other as well as the same languages, some endeavour to class and value
+them. And as a condition preliminary to this process, there must, I
+think, be a not inconsiderable study of widely differing periods, forms,
+manners, of literature itself. The test question, as I should put it, of
+the value of criticism is "What idea of the original would this critic
+give to a tolerably instructed person who did not know that original?"
+And again, "How far has this critic seen<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xvi" id="Page_xvi">{xvi}</a></span> steadily and seen whole, the
+subject which he has set himself to consider? How far has he referred
+the main peculiarities of that subject to their proximate causes and
+effects? How far has he attempted to place, and succeeded in placing,
+the subject in the general history of literature, in the particular
+history of its own language, in the collection of authors of its own
+department?" How far, in short, has he applied what I may perhaps be
+excused for calling the comparative method in literature to the
+particular instance? I have read very famous and in their way very
+accomplished examples of literature ostensibly critical, in which few if
+any of these questions seem to have been even considered by the critic.
+He may have said many pretty things; he may have shown what a clever
+fellow he is; he may have in his own person contributed good literature
+to swell the literary sum. But has he done anything to aid the general
+grasp of that literary sum, to place his man under certain lights and in
+certain aspects, with due allowance for the possibility of other aspects
+and other lights? Very often, I think, it must be admitted that he has
+not. I should be the first to admit that my own attempts to do this are
+unsuccessful and faulty; and I only plead for them that they are such
+attempts, and that they have been made on the basis of tolerably wide
+and tolerably careful reading.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xvii" id="Page_xvii">{xvii}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>For, after all, it is this reading which is the main and principal
+thing. It will not of course by itself make a critic; but few are the
+critics that will ever be made without it. We have at this moment an
+awful example of an exceedingly clever writer who has commenced critic,
+disdaining this preparation. Some of my friends jeer or comminate at Mr.
+Howells; for my part I only shudder and echo the celebrated "There, but
+for the grace of God." Here is a clever man, a very clever man, an
+excellent though of late years slightly depraved practitioner in one
+branch of art, who, suddenly and without preparation, takes to another,
+and becomes a spectacle to men and angels. I hope that we shall one day
+have a collection of Mr. Howells's critical <i>dicta</i> on novels and other
+things; they will be one of the most valuable, one of the most terrible
+of books as showing what happens when a man speaks without knowledge. To
+read what Mr. Howells says of Mr. Thackeray is almost an illiberal
+education. The reason of the error is quite obvious. It is simply that
+the clever American does not know; he has not sufficient range of
+comparison. For my own part, I should not dare to continue criticising
+so much as a circulating library novel, if I did not perpetually pay my
+respects to the classics of many literatures: and I am not sure that I
+do not appreciate the classics of many literatures all the better from
+my not infrequent reading of circulating library novels.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xviii" id="Page_xviii">{xviii}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The only objection of validity that I have ever seen taken to what I
+have ventured to call comparative criticism, is that it proceeds too
+much, as the most learned of living French critics once observed of an
+English writer, <i>par cases et par compartiments</i>, that is to say, as I
+understand M. Brunetière, with a rather too methodical classification.
+This, however, was written some seven or eight years ago, and since then
+I have found M. Brunetière speaking about critical method as
+distinguished from the science of criticism, and insisting on the
+necessity of comparison, not less positively, and no doubt with far more
+authority, than I have done myself. Yet I half think that M. Brunetière,
+like most of us, does not practise quite up to the level of his
+preaching; and I should say that on mediæval literature, on Romantic
+literature, and on some other things, his own excellent censorship might
+be further improved by a still more catholic sympathy, and a still more
+constant habit of looking at everything and every writer in conjunction
+with their analogues and their opposites in the same and other
+literatures. This constant reference of comparison may indeed stand in
+the way of those flowing deliverances of personal opinion, in more or
+less agreeable language, which are perhaps, or rather certainly, what is
+most popular in criticism; I do not think that they will ever stand in
+the way of criticism proper. As I understand that long and difficult
+art, its end, as far as the individual<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xix" id="Page_xix">{xix}</a></span> is concerned, is to provide the
+mind with a sort of conspectus of literature, as a good atlas thoroughly
+conned provides a man with a conspectus of the <i>orbis terrarum</i>. To the
+man with a geographical head, the mention of a place at once suggests
+its bearings to other places, its history, its products, all its
+relations in short; to the man with a critical head, the mention of a
+book or an author should call up a similar mental picture. The picture,
+indeed, will never be as complete in the one instance as in the other,
+because the intellect and the artistic faculty of man are far vaster
+than this planet, far more diverse, far more intricately and
+perplexingly arranged than all its abundant material dispositions and
+products. The life of Methuselah and the mind of Shakespeare together
+could hardly take the whole of critical knowledge to be their joint
+province. But the area of survey may be constantly increased; the
+particularity of knowledge constantly made more minute.</p>
+
+<p>Another objection, more fantastic in appearance but rather attractive in
+its way, is that the comparative critic becomes too much of a universal
+lover, and too little of an enthusiast, that he has an irritating and
+ungentlemanly habit of seeing blemishes in the greatest, a pottering and
+peddling fancy for discovering beauties in the most insignificant; that
+he lacks the exclusiveness and the fastidiousness of intellectual
+aristocracy, the fervour and rapture of æsthetic passion. To<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xx" id="Page_xx">{xx}</a></span> this, one
+can answer little more than, "It may be so." Certainly the critic of
+this kind will very rarely be able to indulge in the <i>engouement</i> which
+is the apparent delight of some of his class. He will deal very
+cautiously in superlatives, and his commendations, when he gives them,
+will sometimes have, to more gushing persons, the slightly ludicrous air
+which attached to the modest boast of somebody that he was "the third
+best authority in England on gray shirtings." On the other hand, the
+critic of this kind will not be able to neglect the uninteresting with
+the serene nonchalance of some of his fellows. He will sometimes have to
+look back on days and months and years of laborious reading and say to
+himself, "Were it not well for us, as others use, to take all this for
+granted?" But to say this is to say no more than that the thorough-going
+practice of any art and mystery involves a great deal of tedious,
+thankless, and even positively fruitless work, brushes away a good many
+illusions, and interferes a good deal with personal comfort. Cockaigne
+is a delightful country, and the Cockaigne of criticism is as agreeable
+as the other provinces. But none of these provinces has usually been
+accounted a wise man's paradise.</p>
+
+<p>It may be asked, "What is the end which you propose for this comparative
+reading? A method must lead somewhere; whither does this method lead? or
+does it lead only to statistics and classifications?" Certainly it does
+not, or at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xxi" id="Page_xxi">{xxi}</a></span> least should not. It leads, like all method, to
+generalisations which, though as I have said I do not believe that they
+have attained or ever will attain the character of science, at least
+throw no small light and interest on the study of literature as a whole,
+and of its examples as particulars. It gives, I think (speaking as a
+fool), a constantly greater power of distinguishing good work from bad
+work, by giving constantly nearer approach (though perhaps it may never
+wholly and finally attain) to the knowledge of the exact characteristics
+which distinguish the two. And the way in which it does this is by a
+constant process of weakening or strengthening, as the case may be, the
+less or more correct generalisations with which the critic starts, or
+which he forms in the early days of his reading. There has often been
+brought against some great critics the charge that their critical
+standards have altered at different times of their career. This simply
+means that they have been constantly applying the comparative method,
+and profiting by the application. After all, there are few, though there
+are some, absolute truths in criticism; and a man will often be
+relatively right in condemning, from certain aspects and in certain
+combinations, work which, under other aspects and in other combinations,
+he has been relatively quite as right in admiring. Occasionally, no
+doubt, there will be an apparent exception to the rule of critical
+development, as in the case of Hazlitt:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xxii" id="Page_xxii">{xxii}</a></span> but that remarkable exception
+does not fail to justify the rule. For in truth, Hazlitt's critical
+range was not so wide as his penetration was deep; and he avows, almost
+exultingly, that after a comparatively early time of life, he
+practically left off reading. That is to say, he carefully avoided
+renewing his plant, and he usually eschewed new material&mdash;conditions
+which, no doubt, conduce to the uniformity, and, within obvious limits,
+are not prejudicial to the excellence of the product.</p>
+
+<p>It is possible that the title "The Kinds of Criticism" may have excited
+in some readers expectations of the discussion of a subject which has
+not yet been handled. We have recently seen revived the sempiternal
+argument between authors and critics&mdash;an argument in which it may be as
+well to say that the present writer has not yet taken part either
+anonymously or otherwise. The authors, or some of them, have remarked
+that they have never personally benefited by criticism; and the critics,
+after their disagreeable way, have retorted that this was obvious. A
+critic of great ingenuity, my friend Mr. Andrew Lang, has, with his
+usual humour, suggested that critics and reviewers are two different
+kinds, and have nothing to do with each other essentially, though
+accidentally, and in the imperfect arrangements of the world, the
+discharge of their functions may happen to be combined in the same
+person. As a matter of practice, this is no doubt too often the case; as
+a matter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xxiii" id="Page_xxiii">{xxiii}</a></span> of theory, nothing ought much less to be the case. I think
+that if I were dictator, one of the first non-political things that I
+should do, would be to make the order of reviewers as close a one, at
+least, as the bench of judges, or the staff of the Mint, or of any
+public establishment of a similar character. That any large amount of
+reviewing is determined by fear or favour is a general idea which has
+little more basis than a good many other general ideas. But that a very
+large amount of reviewing is determined by doubtless well-meaning
+incompetence, there is no doubt whatever. It is on the whole the most
+difficult kind of newspaper writing, and it is on the whole the most
+lightly assigned and the most irresponsibly performed. I have heard of
+newspapers where the reviews depended almost wholly on the accident of
+some of the staff taking a holiday, or being laid for a time on the
+shelf, or being considered not up to other work; of others, though this
+I own is scarcely credible, where the whole reviewing was farmed out to
+a manager, to be allotted to devils as good to him seemed; of many where
+the reviews were a sort of exercising-ground on which novices were
+trained, broken-down hacks turned out to grass, and invalids allowed a
+little gentle exercise. And I know of not a few papers and not a few
+reviewers in which and by whom, errors and accidents excepted, the best
+work possible is given to one of the most important kinds of work. Of
+common<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xxiv" id="Page_xxiv">{xxiv}</a></span> mistakes on the subject, which are not merely silly crazes, such
+as the log-rolling craze and the five-pound note craze and the like, the
+worst known to me, though it is shared by some who should know better,
+is that a specialist is the best reviewer. I do not say that he is
+always the worst; but that is about as far as my charity, informed by
+much experience, can go. Even if he has no special craze or megrim, and
+does not decide offhand that a man is hopeless because he calls Charles
+the Great Charlemagne, or <i>vice versâ</i>, he is constantly out of focus.
+The perfect reviewer would be (and the only reviewer whose reviews are
+worth reading is he who more or less approximates to this ideal) the
+Platonic or pseudo-Platonic philosopher who is "second best in
+everything," who has enough special knowledge not to miss merits or
+defects, and enough general knowledge to estimate the particular subject
+at, and not above, its relative value to the whole. There have been good
+critics who were unable to bring themselves down to the mere reading of
+ephemeral work, but I do not think they were the better for this; I am
+sure that there never was a good reviewer, even of the lowest trash, who
+was not <i>in posse</i> or <i>in esse</i> a good critic of the highest and most
+enduring literature. The writer of funny articles, and the "slater," and
+the intelligent <i>compte-rendu</i> man, and the person who writes six
+columns on the general theory of poetry when he professes to review Mr.
+Apollo's last book, may do all these things well and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xxv" id="Page_xxv">{xxv}</a></span> not be good
+critics; but then all these things may be done, and done well, and yet
+not be good reviews.</p>
+
+<p>Whether the reviewer and the critic are valuable members of society or
+useless encumbrances, must be questions left to the decision of the
+world at large, which apparently is not in a hurry to decide either way.
+There are, no doubt, certain things that the critic, whether he be
+critic major or critic minor, Sainte-Beuve or Mr. Gall, cannot do. He
+cannot certainly, and for the present, sell or prevent the sale of a
+book. "You slated this and it has gone through twenty editions" is not a
+more uncommon remark than the other, "They slated that and you extol it
+to the skies." Both, as generally urged, rest on fallacy. In the first
+case, nothing was probably farther from the critic's intention than to
+say "this book is not popular"; the most that he intended was "this book
+is not good." In the second case, it has been discovered of late (it is
+one of the few things that we have discovered) that very rarely has any
+really good thing, even in the most famous or infamous attacks on it,
+been attacked, even with a shadow of success, for its goodness. The
+critics were severe on Byron's faults, on Keats's faults, and on the
+present Laureate's faults; they were seldom severe on their goodness,
+though they often failed to appreciate it fully.</p>
+
+<p>This, however, is in one sense a digression, for there is no criticism
+of contemporary work in this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xxvi" id="Page_xxvi">{xxvi}</a></span> volume. I think, however, as I have just
+endeavoured to point out, that criticism of contemporary work and
+criticism of classics should proceed on the same lines, and I think that
+both require the same qualities and the same outfit. Nor am I certain
+that if narrow inquiry were made, some of the best criticism in all
+times and in all languages would not be found in the merest casual
+reviewing. That in all cases the critic must start from a wide
+comparative study of different languages and literatures, is the first
+position to be laid down. In the next place he must, I think, constantly
+refer back his sensations of agreement and disagreement, of liking and
+disliking, in the same comparative fashion. "Why do I like the
+<i>Agamemnon</i> and dislike Mr. Dash's five-act tragedy?" is a question to
+be constantly put, and to be answered only by a pretty close personal
+inquiry as to what "I" really do like in the <i>Agamemnon</i> and do dislike
+in Mr. Dash. And in answering it, it will hardly be possible to consider
+too large a number of instances of all degrees of merit, from Aeschylus
+himself to Mr. Dash himself, of all languages, of all times. Let
+Englishmen be compared with Englishmen of other times to bring out this
+set of differences, with foreigners of modern times to bring out that,
+with Greeks and Romans to bring out the other. Let poets of old days be
+compared with poets of new, classics with romantics, rhymed with
+unrhymed. Let the straitest doctrinaire<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xxvii" id="Page_xxvii">{xxvii}</a></span> criticism of men of talent like
+Boileau and simpletons like Rymer be compared with the fullest
+appreciations of Coleridge and Hazlitt, of Sainte-Beuve and Mr. Arnold.
+"Compare, always compare" is the first axiom of criticism.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+
+<p>The second, I think, is "Always make sure, as far as you possibly can,
+that what you like and dislike is the literary and not the
+extra-literary character of the matter under examination." Make sure,
+that is to say, that admiration for the author is not due to his having
+taken care that the Whig dogs or the Tory dogs shall not have the best
+of it, to his having written as a gentleman for gentlemen, or as an
+uneasy anti-aristocrat for uneasy anti-aristocrats, as a believer
+(fervent or acquiescent) in the supernatural, or as a person<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xxviii" id="Page_xxviii">{xxviii}</a></span> who lays
+it down that miracles do not happen, as an Englishman or a Frenchman, a
+classic or a romantic. Very difficult indeed is the chase and discovery
+of these enemies: for extra-literary prejudices are as cunning as winter
+hares or leaf-insects, in disguising themselves by simulating literary
+forms.</p>
+
+<p>Lastly, never be content without at least endeavouring to connect cause
+and effect in some way, without giving something like a reason for the
+faith that is in you. No doubt the critic will often be tempted, will
+sometimes be actually forced to say, "'J'aime mieux Alfred de Musset,'
+and there's an end of it." All the imperfect kinds, as they seem to me,
+of criticism are recommended by the fact that they are, unlike some
+other literary matter, not only easier writing but also easier reading.
+The agreeable exercises of style where adjectives meet substantives to
+whom they never thought they could possibly be introduced (as a certain
+naughty wit has it), the pleasant chatter about personal reminiscences,
+the flowers of rhetoric, the fruits of wit, may not be easy, but they
+are at any rate easier than fashioning some intelligent and intelligible
+response to the perpetual "Why?" the <i>quare stans</i> of criticism.</p>
+
+<p>In the following pages, I shall no doubt be found, like other people, to
+have come very far short of my own ideal, and my own precepts. I may
+even say that I have knowingly and intentionally come short of them to
+some extent. Biographical<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xxix" id="Page_xxix">{xxix}</a></span> and anecdotic detail has, I believe, much
+less to do with the real appreciation of the literary value of an author
+than is generally thought. In rare instances, it throws a light, but the
+examples in which we know practically nothing at all, as in that of
+Shakespeare, or only a few leading facts as in that of Dante, are not
+those in which criticism is least useful or least satisfactory. At the
+same time biographical and anecdotic details please most people, and if
+they are not allowed to shoulder out criticism altogether, there can be
+no harm in them. For myself, I should like to have the whole works of
+every author of merit, and I should care little to know anything
+whatever about his life; but that is a mere private opinion and possibly
+a private crotchet. Accordingly some space has been given in most of
+these Essays to a sketch of the life of the subject. Nor has it seemed
+advisable (except as a matter of necessary, but very occasional,
+digression) to argue at length upon abstract and general questions such
+as the definition of poetry, or the kinds and limits of the novel. Large
+as is the body of criticism so-called which the last hundred years have
+seen, it may be doubted whether there is even yet accumulated a
+sufficient <i>corpus</i> of really critical discussion of individuals. If I
+have in these Essays contributed even a very little to such an
+accumulation, I shall have done that which I purposed.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">{1}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I<br />
+<br />
+CRABBE</h2>
+
+
+<p>There is a certain small class of persons in the history of literature
+the members of which possess, at least for literary students, an
+interest peculiar to themselves. They are the writers who having
+attained, not merely popular vogue, but fame as solid as fame can ever
+be, in their own day, having been praised by the praised, and having as
+far as can be seen owed this praise to none of the merely external and
+irrelevant causes&mdash;politics, religion, fashion or what not&mdash;from which
+it sometimes arises, experience in a more or less short time after their
+death the fate of being, not exactly cast down from their high place,
+but left respectfully alone in it, unvisited, unincensed, unread. Among
+these writers, over the gate of whose division of the literary Elysium
+the famous, "Who now reads Bolingbroke?" might serve as motto, the
+author of "The Village" and "Tales of the Hall" is one of the most
+remarkable. As for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">{2}</a></span> Crabbe's popularity in his own day there is no
+mistake about that. It was extraordinarily long, it was extremely wide,
+it included the select few as well as the vulgar, it was felt and more
+or less fully acquiesced in by persons of the most diverse tastes,
+habits, and literary standards. His was not the case, which occurs now
+and then, of a man who makes a great reputation in early life and long
+afterwards preserves it because, either by accident or prudence, he does
+not enter the lists with his younger rivals, and therefore these rivals
+can afford to show him a reverence which is at once graceful and cheap.
+Crabbe won his spurs in full eighteenth century, and might have boasted,
+altering Landor's words, that he had dined early and in the best of
+company, or have parodied Goldsmith, and said, "I have Johnson and
+Burke: all the wits have been here." But when his studious though barren
+manhood was passed, and he again began, as almost an old man, to write
+poetry, he entered into full competition with the giants of the new
+school, whose ideals and whose education were utterly different from
+his. While "The Library" and "The Village" came to a public which still
+had Johnson, which had but just lost Goldsmith, and which had no other
+poetical novelty before it than Cowper, "The Borough" and the later
+Tales entered the lists with "Marmion" and "Childe Harold," with
+"Christabel" and "The Excursion," even with "Endymion" and "The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">{3}</a></span> Revolt
+of Islam." Yet these later works of Crabbe met with the fullest
+recognition both from readers and from critics of the most opposite
+tendencies. Scott, the most generous, and Wordsworth,<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> the most
+grudging, of all the poets of the day towards their fellows, united in
+praising Crabbe; and unromantic as the poet of "The Village" seems to us
+he was perhaps Sir Walter's favourite English bard. Scott read him
+constantly, he quotes him incessantly; and no one who has read it can
+ever forget how Crabbe figures in the most pathetic biographical pages
+ever written&mdash;Lockhart's account of the death at Abbotsford. Byron's
+criticism was as weak as his verse was powerful, but still Byron had no
+doubt about Crabbe. The utmost flight of memory or even of imagination
+can hardly get together three contemporary critics whose standards,
+tempers, and verdicts, were more different than those of Gifford,
+Jeffrey, and Wilson. Yet it is scarcely too much to say that they are
+all in a tale about Crabbe.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">{4}</a></span> In this unexampled chorus of eulogy there
+rose (for some others who can hardly have admired him much were simply
+silent) one single note, so far as I know, or rather one single rattling
+peal of thunder on the other side. It is true that this was significant
+enough, for it came from William Hazlitt.</p>
+
+<p>Yet against this chorus, which was not, as has sometimes happened, the
+mere utterance of a loud-voiced few, but was echoed by a great multitude
+who eagerly bought and read Crabbe, must be set the almost total
+forgetfulness of his work which has followed. It is true that of living
+or lately living persons in the first rank of literature some great
+names can be cited on his side; and what is more, that these great names
+show the same curious diversity in agreement which has been already
+noticed as one of Crabbe's triumphs. The translator of Omar Khayyám, his
+friend the present Laureate, and the author of "The Dream of Gerontius,"
+are men whose literary ideals are known to be different enough; yet they
+add a third trinity as remarkable as those others of Gifford, Jeffrey,
+and Wilson, of Wordsworth, Byron, and Scott. Much more recently Mr.
+Courthope has used Crabbe as a weapon in that battle of his with
+literary Liberalism which he has waged not always quite to the
+comprehension of his fellow-critics; Mr. Leslie Stephen has discussed
+him as one who knows and loves his eighteenth century. But who reads
+him? Who quotes him? Who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">{5}</a></span> likes him? I think I can venture to say, with
+all proper humility, that I know Crabbe pretty well; I think I may say
+with neither humility nor pride, but simply as a person whose business
+it has been for some years to read books, and articles, and debates,
+that I know what has been written and said in England lately. You will
+find hardly a note of Crabbe in these writings and sayings. He does not
+even survive, as "Matthew Green, who wrote 'The Spleen,'" and others
+survive, by quotations which formerly made their mark, and are retained
+without a knowledge of their original. If anything is known about Crabbe
+to the general reader, it is the parody in "Rejected Addresses," an
+extraordinarily happy parody no doubt, in fact rather better Crabbe in
+Crabbe's weakest moments than Crabbe himself. But naturally there is
+nothing of his best there; and it is by his best things, let it be
+repeated over and over in face of all opposition, that a poet must be
+judged.</p>
+
+<p>Although Crabbe's life, save for one dramatic revolution, was one of the
+least eventful in our literary history, it is by no means one of the
+least interesting. Mr. Kebbel's book<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> gives a very fair summary of it;
+but the Life by Crabbe's son which is prefixed to the collected editions
+of the poems, and on which Mr. Kebbel's own is avowedly based, is
+perhaps the more interesting of the two. It is written with a curious
+mixture of the old<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">{6}</a></span> literary state and formality, and of a feeling on
+the writer's part that he is not a literary man himself, and that not
+only his father, but Mr. Lockhart, Mr. Moore, Mr. Bowles and the other
+high literary persons who assisted him were august beings of another
+sphere. This is all the more agreeable, in that Crabbe's sons had
+advantages of education and otherwise which were denied to their father,
+and might in the ordinary course of things have been expected to show
+towards him a lofty patronage rather than any filial reverence. The poet
+himself was born at Aldborough, a now tolerably well-known
+watering-place (the fortune of which was made by Mr. Wilkie Collins in
+<i>No Name</i>) on Christmas Eve, 1754. That not uncommon infirmity of noble
+minds which seeks to prove distinguished ancestry seems to have had no
+hold on the plain common sense of the Crabbe family, who maintained
+themselves to be at the best Norfolk yeomen, and though they possessed a
+coat-of-arms, avowed with much frankness that they did not know how they
+got it. A hundred and forty years ago they had apparently lost even the
+dignity of yeomanhood, and occupied stations quite in the lower rank of
+the middle class as tradesmen, non-commissioned officers in the navy or
+the merchant service, and so forth. George Crabbe, the grandfather, was
+collector of customs at Aldborough, but his son, also a George, was a
+parish schoolmaster and a parish clerk before he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">{7}</a></span> returned to the
+Suffolk port as deputy collector and then as salt-master, or collector
+of the salt duties. He seems to have had no kind of polish, and late in
+life was a mere rough drinking exciseman; but his education, especially
+in mathematics, appears to have been considerable, and his ability in
+business not small. The third George, his eldest son, was also fairly
+though very irregularly educated for a time, and his father, perceiving
+that he was "a fool about a boat," had the rather unusual common sense
+to destine him to a learned profession. Unluckily his will was better
+than his means, and while the profession which Crabbe chose or which was
+chosen for him&mdash;that of medicine&mdash;was not the best suited to his tastes
+or talents, the resources of the family were not equal to giving him a
+full education, even in that. He was still at intervals employed in the
+Customs warehouses at "piling up butter and cheese" even after he was
+apprenticed at fourteen to a country surgeon. The twelve years which he
+spent in this apprenticeship, in an abhorred return for a short time to
+the cheese and butter, in a brief visit to London, where he had no means
+to walk the hospitals, and in an attempt to practise with little or no
+qualification at Aldborough itself, present a rather dismal history of
+apprenticeship which taught nothing. But Love was, for once, most truly
+and literally Crabbe's solace and his salvation, his master and his
+patron. When he was barely eighteen, still an apprentice,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">{8}</a></span> and
+possessed, as far as can be made out, of neither manners nor prospects,
+he met a certain Miss Sarah Elmy. She was three or four years older than
+himself and much better connected, being the niece and eventual
+co-heiress of a wealthy yeoman squire. She was, it is said, pretty; she
+was evidently accomplished, and she seems to have had access to the
+country society of those days. But Mira, as Crabbe called her, perhaps
+merely in the fashion of the eighteenth century, perhaps in remembrance
+of Fulke Greville's heroine (for he knew his Elizabethans rather well
+for a man of those days), and no doubt also with a secret joy to think
+that the last syllables of her Christian name and surname in a way spelt
+the appellation, fell in love with the boy and made his fortune. But for
+her Crabbe would probably have subsided, not contentedly but stolidly,
+into the lot of a Doctor Slop of the time, consoling himself with snuff
+(which he always loved) and schnaps (to which we have hints that in his
+youth he was not averse). Mira was at once unalterably faithful to him
+and unalterably determined not to marry unless he could give her
+something like a position. Their long engagement (they were not married
+till he was twenty-nine and she was thirty-three) may, as we shall see,
+have carried with it some of the penalties of long engagements. But it
+is as certain as any such thing can be that but for it English
+literature would have lacked the name of Crabbe.</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">{9}</a></span></p>
+<p>There is no space here to go through the sufferings of the novitiate. At
+last, at the extreme end of 1779, Crabbe made up his mind once more to
+seek his fortune, this time by aid of literature only, in London. His
+son too has printed rare scraps of a very interesting Journal to Mira
+which he kept during at least a part of the terrible year of struggle
+which he passed there. He saw the riots of '80; he canvassed, always
+more or less in vain, the booksellers and the peers; he spent
+three-and-sixpence of his last ten shillings on a copy of Dryden; he was
+much less disturbed about imminent starvation than by the delay of a
+letter from Mira ("my dearest Sally" she becomes with a pathetic lapse
+from convention, when the pinch is sorest) or by the doubt whether he
+had enough left to pay the postage of one. He writes prayers (but not
+for the public eye), abstracts of sermons for Mira, addresses (rather
+adulatory) to Lord Shelburne, which received no answer. All this has the
+most genuine note that ever man of letters put into his work, for
+whatever Crabbe was or was not, now or at any time, he was utterly
+sincere; and his sincerity makes his not very abundant letters and
+journals unusually interesting. At last, after a year, during which his
+means of subsistence are for the most part absolutely unknown, he, as he
+says himself, fixed "by some propitious influence, in some happy moment"
+on Edmund Burke as the subject of a last appeal.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">{10}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Nothing in all literary history is, in a modest way and without pearls
+and gold, quite so like a fairy tale as the difference in Crabbe's
+fortunes which this propitious influence brought about. On the day when
+he wrote to Burke he was, as he said in the letter, "an outcast, without
+friends, without employment, without bread." In some twenty-four hours
+(the night-term of which he passed in ceaselessly pacing Westminster
+Bridge to cheat the agony of expectation) he was a made man. It was not
+merely that, directly or indirectly, Burke procured him a solid and an
+increasing income. He did much more than that. Crabbe, like most
+self-educated men, was quite uncritical of his own work: Burke took him
+into his own house for months, encouraged him to submit his poems,
+criticised them at once without mercy and with judgment, found him
+publishers, found him a public, turned him from a raw country boy into a
+man who at least had met society of the best kind. It is a platitude to
+say that for a hundred persons who will give money or patronage there is
+scarcely one who will take trouble of this kind; and if any devil's
+advocate objects the delight of producing a "lion," it may be answered
+that for Burke at least this delight would not have been delightful at
+all.</p>
+
+<p>The immediate form which the patronage of Burke and that, soon added, of
+Thurlow took, is one which rather shocks the present day. They made
+Crabbe turn to the Church, and got a complaisant<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">{11}</a></span> bishop to ordain him.
+They sent him (a rather dangerous experiment) to be curate in his own
+native place, and finally Burke procured him the chaplaincy at Belvoir.
+The young Duke of Rutland, who had been made a strong Tory by Pitt, was
+fond of letters, and his Duchess Isabel, who was,&mdash;like her elder
+kinswoman, Dryden's Duchess of Ormond&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A daughter of the rose, whose cheeks unite<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The varying beauties of the red and white,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>in other words, a Somerset, was one of the most beautiful and gracious
+women in England. Crabbe, whose strictly literary fortunes I postpone
+for the present, was apparently treated with the greatest possible
+kindness by both; but he was not quite happy,<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> and his ever-prudent
+Mira still would not marry him. At last Thurlow's patronage took the
+practical form (it had already taken that, equally practical, of a
+hundred pounds) of two small Chancellor's livings in Dorsetshire,
+residence at which was dispensed with by the easy fashions of the day.
+The Duke of Rutland, when he was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland,
+did not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">{12}</a></span> take Crabbe with him, a circumstance which has excited some
+unnecessary discussion; but he gave him free quarters at Belvoir, where
+he and his wife lived for a time before they migrated to a neighbouring
+curacy&mdash;his wife, for even Mira's prudence had yielded at last to the
+Dorsetshire livings, and they were married in December 1783. They lived
+together for nearly thirty years, in, as it would seem, unbroken mutual
+devotion, but Mrs. Crabbe's health seems very early to have broken down,
+and a remarkable endorsement of Crabbe's on a letter of hers has been
+preserved. I do not think Mr. Kebbel quotes it; it ends, "And yet
+happiness was denied"&mdash;a sentence fully encouraging to Mr. Browning and
+other good men who have denounced long engagements.<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> The story of
+Crabbe's life after his marriage may be told very shortly. His first
+patron died in Ireland, but the duchess with some difficulty prevailed
+on Thurlow to exchange his former gifts for more convenient and rather<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">{13}</a></span>
+better livings in the neighbourhood of Belvoir, at the chief of which,
+Muston, Crabbe long resided. The death of his wife's uncle made him
+leave his living and take up his abode for many years at Glemham, in
+Suffolk, only to find, when he returned, that (not unnaturally, though
+to his own great indignation) dissent had taken bodily possession of the
+parish. His wife died in 1813, and the continued kindness, after nearly
+a generation, of the house of Rutland, gave him the living of
+Trowbridge, in Wiltshire, with a small Leicestershire incumbency near
+Belvoir added, instead of Muston. At Trowbridge he lived nearly twenty
+years, revisiting London society, making the acquaintance personally (he
+had already known him by letter) of Sir Walter, paying a memorable visit
+to Edinburgh, flirting in an elderly and simple fashion with many
+ladies, writing much and being even more of a lion in the society of
+George the Fourth's reign than he had been in the days of George the
+Third. He died on 3rd February 1832.</p>
+
+<p>Crabbe's character is not at all enigmatical, and emerges as clearly in
+those letters and diaries of his which have been published, as in
+anecdotes of him by others. Perhaps the famous story of his politely
+endeavouring to talk French to divers Highlanders, during George the
+Fourth's visit to Edinburgh, is slightly embroidered&mdash;Lockhart, who
+tells it, was a mystifier without peer. If he did gently but firmly
+extinguish a candle-snuff while<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">{14}</a></span> Wordsworth and Sir George Beaumont were
+indulging in poetic ecstasies over the beautiful undulations of the
+smoke, there may have been something to say for him as Anne Scott, to
+whom Wordsworth told the story, is said to have hinted, from the side of
+one of the senses. His life, no less than his work, speaks him a man of
+amiable though by no means wholly sweet temper, of more common sense
+than romance, and of more simplicity than common sense. His nature and
+his early trials made him not exactly sour, but shy, till age and
+prosperity mellowed him; but simplicity was his chief characteristic in
+age and youth alike.</p>
+
+<p>The mere facts of his strictly literary career are chiefly remarkable
+for the enormous gap between his two periods of productiveness. In early
+youth he published some verses in the magazines and a poem called
+"Inebriety," which appeared at Ipswich in 1775. His year of struggle in
+London saw the publication of another short piece "The Candidate," but
+with the ill-luck which then pursued him, the bookseller who brought it
+out became bankrupt. His despairing resort to Burke ushered in "The
+Library," 1781, followed by "The Village," 1783, which Johnson revised
+and improved not a little. Two years later again came "The Newspaper,"
+and then twenty-two years passed without anything appearing from
+Crabbe's pen. It was not that he was otherwise occupied, for he had
+little or nothing to do, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">{15}</a></span> for the greater part of the time, lived
+away from his parish. It was not that he was idle, for we have his son's
+testimony that he was perpetually writing, and that holocausts of
+manuscripts in prose and verse used from time to time to be offered up
+in the open air, for fear of setting the house on fire by their mass. At
+last, in 1807, "The Parish Register" appeared, and three years later
+"The Borough"&mdash;perhaps the strongest division of his work. The
+miscellaneous Tales came in 1812, the "Tales of the Hall" in 1819.
+Meanwhile and afterwards, various collected editions appeared, the last
+and most complete being in 1829&mdash;a very comely little book in eight
+volumes. His death led to the issue of some "Posthumous Tales" and to
+the inclusion by his son of divers fragments both in the Life and in the
+Works. It is understood, however, that there are still considerable
+remains in manuscript; perhaps they might be published with less harm to
+the author's fame and with less fear of incurring a famous curse than in
+the case of almost any other poet.</p>
+
+<p>For Crabbe, though by no means always at his best, is one of the most
+curiously equal of verse-writers. "Inebriety" and such other very
+youthful things are not to be counted; but between "The Village" of 1783
+and the "Posthumous Tales" of more than fifty years later, the
+difference is surprisingly small. Such as it is, it rather reverses
+ordinary experience, for the later poems exhibit<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">{16}</a></span> the greater play of
+fancy, the earlier the exacter graces of form and expression. Yet there
+is nothing really wonderful in this, for Crabbe's earliest poems were
+published under severe surveillance of himself and others, and at a time
+which still thought nothing of such value in literature as correctness,
+while his later were written under no particular censorship, and when
+the Romantic revival had already, for better or worse, emancipated the
+world. The change was in Crabbe's case not wholly for the better. He
+does not in his later verse become more prosaic, but he becomes
+considerably less intelligible. There is a passage in "The Old
+Bachelor," too long to quote but worth referring to, which, though it
+may be easy enough to understand it with a little goodwill, I defy
+anybody to understand in its literal and grammatical meaning. Such
+welters of words are very common in Crabbe, and Johnson saved him from
+one of them in the very first lines of "The Village." Yet Johnson could
+never have written the passages which earned Crabbe his fame. The great
+lexicographer knew man in general much better than Crabbe did; but he
+nowhere shows anything like Crabbe's power of seizing and reproducing
+man in particular. Crabbe is one of the first and certainly one of the
+greatest of the "realists" who, exactly reversing the old philosophical
+signification of the word, devote themselves to the particular only. Yet
+of the three small volumes by which he, after<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">{17}</a></span> his introduction to
+Burke, made his reputation, and on which he lived for a quarter of a
+century, the first and the last display comparatively little of this
+peculiar quality. "The Library" and "The Newspaper" are characteristic
+pieces of the school of Pope, but not characteristic of their author.
+The first catalogues books as folio, quarto, octavo, and so forth, and
+then cross-catalogues them as law, physic, divinity, and the rest, but
+is otherwise written very much in the air. "The Newspaper" suited Crabbe
+a little better, because he pretty obviously took a particular newspaper
+and went through its contents&mdash;scandal, news, reviews,
+advertisements&mdash;in his own special fashion: but still the subject did
+not appeal to him. In "The Village," on the other hand, contemporaries
+and successors alike have agreed to recognise Crabbe in his true vein.
+The two famous passages which attracted the suffrages of judges so
+different as Scott and Wordsworth, are still, after more than a hundred
+years, fresh, distinct, and striking. Here they are once more:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Theirs is yon House that holds the parish poor,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There, where the putrid vapours, flagging, play,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There children dwell who know no parents' care;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Parents who know no children's love dwell there!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">{18}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dejected widows, with unheeded tears,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And crippled age with more than childhood fears;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The lame, the blind, and, far the happiest they!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The moping idiot and the madman gay.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Anon, a figure enters, quaintly neat,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All pride and business, bustle and conceit;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With looks unaltered by these scenes of woe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With speed that, entering, speaks his haste to go,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He bids the gazing throng around him fly,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And carries fate and physic in his eye:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A potent quack, long versed in human ills,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who first insults the victim whom he kills;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose murderous hand a drowsy Bench protect,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And whose most tender mercy is neglect.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Paid by the parish for attendance here,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He wears contempt upon his sapient sneer;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In haste he seeks the bed where Misery lies,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Impatience marked in his averted eyes;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And some habitual queries hurried o'er,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Without reply he rushes on the door:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His drooping patient, long inured to pain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And long unheeded, knows remonstrance vain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He ceases now the feeble help to crave<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of man; and silent, sinks into the grave.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The poet executed endless variations on this class of theme, but he
+never quite succeeded in discovering a new one, though in process of
+time he brought his narrow study of the Aldborough fishermen and
+townsfolk down still more narrowly to individuals. His landscape is
+always marvellously exact, the strokes selected with extraordinary skill
+<i>ad hoc</i> so as to show autumn rather than spring, failure rather than
+hope, the riddle of the painful earth rather than any joy of living.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">{19}</a></span>
+Attempts have been made to vindicate Crabbe from the charge of being a
+gloomy poet, but I cannot think them successful; I can hardly think that
+they have been quite serious. Crabbe, our chief realist poet, has an
+altogether astonishing likeness to the chief prose realist of France,
+Gustave Flaubert, so far as his manner of view goes, for in point of
+style the two have small resemblance. One of the most striking things in
+Crabbe's biography is his remembrance of the gradual disillusion of a
+day of pleasure which, as a child, he enjoyed in a new boat of his
+father's. We all of us, except those who are gifted or cursed with the
+proverbial duck's back, have these experiences and these remembrances of
+them. But most men either simply grin and bear it, or carrying the grin
+a little farther, console themselves by regarding their own
+disappointments from the ironic and humorous point of view. Crabbe,
+though not destitute of humour, does not seem to have been able or
+disposed to employ it in this way. Perhaps he never quite got over the
+terrible and, for the most part unrecorded, year in London: perhaps the
+difference between the Mira of promise and the Mira of possession&mdash;the
+"happiness denied"&mdash;had something to do with it: perhaps it was a
+question of natural disposition with him. But when, years afterwards, as
+a prosperous middle-aged man, he began his series of published poems
+once more with "The Parish Register," the same manner of seeing is
+evident, though the minute<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">{20}</a></span> elaboration of the views themselves is
+almost infinitely greater. Nor did he ever succeed in altering this
+manner, if he ever tried to do so.</p>
+
+<p>With the exception of his few Lyrics, the most important of which, "Sir
+Eustace Grey" (one of his very best things), is itself a tale in
+different metre, and a few other occasional pieces of little importance,
+the entire work of Crabbe, voluminous as it is, is framed upon a single
+pattern, the vignettes of "The Village" being merely enlarged in size
+and altered in frame in the later books. The three parts of "The Parish
+Register," the twenty-four Letters of "The Borough," some of which have
+single and others grouped subjects, and the sixty or seventy pieces
+which make up the three divisions of Tales, consist almost exclusively
+of heroic couplets, shorter measures very rarely intervening. They are
+also almost wholly devoted to narratives, partly satirical, partly
+pathetic, of the lives of individuals of the lower and middle class
+chiefly. Jeffrey, who was a great champion of Crabbe and allotted
+several essays to him, takes delight in analysing the plots or stories
+of these tales; but it is a little amusing to notice that he does it for
+the most part exactly as if he were criticising a novelist or a
+dramatist. "The object," says he, in one place, "is to show that a man's
+fluency of speech depends very much upon his confidence in the
+approbation of his auditors": "In Squire Thomas we have the history of a
+mean,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">{21}</a></span> domineering spirit," and so forth. Gifford in one place actually
+discusses Crabbe as a novelist. I shall make some further reference to
+this curious attitude of Crabbe's admiring critics. For the moment I
+shall only remark that the singularly mean character of so much of
+Crabbe's style, the "style of drab stucco," as it has been unkindly
+called, which is familiar from the wicked wit that told how the youth at
+the theatre</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Regained the felt and felt what he regained,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>is by no means universal. The most powerful of all his pieces, the
+history of Peter Grimes, the tyrant of apprentices, is almost entirely
+free from it, and so are a few others. But it is common enough to be a
+very serious stumbling-block. In nine tales out of ten this is the
+staple:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Of a fair town where Dr. Rack was guide,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His only daughter was the boast and pride.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Now that is unexceptionable verse enough, but what is the good of
+putting it in verse at all? Here again:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">For he who makes me thus on business wait,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is not for business in a proper state.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is obvious that you cannot trust a man who, unless he is intending a
+burlesque, can bring himself to write like that. Crabbe not only brings
+himself to it, but rejoices and luxuriates in the style. The tale from
+which that last luckless<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">{22}</a></span> distich is taken, "The Elder Brother," is full
+of pathos and about equally full of false notes. If we turn to a far
+different subject, the very vigorously conceived "Natural Death of
+Love," we find a piece of strong and true satire, the best thing of its
+kind in the author, which is kept up throughout. Although, like all
+satire, it belongs at best but to the outer courts of poetry, it is so
+good that none can complain. Then the page is turned and one reads:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I met," said Richard, when returned to dine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">"In my excursion with a friend of mine."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It may be childish, it may be uncritical, but I own that such verse as
+that excites in me an irritation which destroys all power of enjoyment,
+except the enjoyment of ridicule. Nor let any one say that pedestrian
+passages of the kind are inseparable from ordinary narrative in verse
+and from the adaptation of verse to miscellaneous themes. If it were so
+the argument would be fatal to such adaptation, but it is not. Pope
+seldom indulges in such passages, though he does sometimes: Dryden never
+does. He can praise, abuse, argue, tell stories, make questionable
+jests, do anything in verse that is still poetry, that has a throb and a
+quiver and a swell in it, and is not merely limp, rhythmed prose. In
+Crabbe, save in a few passages of feeling and a great many of mere
+description&mdash;the last an excellent setting for poetry but not
+necessarily poetical&mdash;this rhythmed prose is everywhere. The matter
+which it serves<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">{23}</a></span> to convey is, with the limitations above given, varied,
+and it is excellent. No one except the greatest prose novelists has such
+a gallery of distinct, sharply etched characters, such another gallery
+of equally distinct scenes and manner-pieces, to set before the reader.
+Exasperating as Crabbe's style sometimes is, he seldom bores&mdash;never
+indeed except in his rare passages of digressive reflection. It has, I
+think, been observed, and if not the observation is obvious, that he has
+done with the pen for the neighbourhood of Aldborough and Glemham what
+Crome and Cotman have done for the neighbourhood of Norwich with the
+pencil. His observation of human nature, so far as it goes, is not less
+careful, true, and vivid. His pictures of manners, to those who read
+them at all, are perfectly fresh and in no respect grotesque or faded,
+dead as the manners themselves are. His pictures of motives and of
+facts, of vice and virtue, never can fade, because the subjects are
+perennial and are truly caught. Even his plays on words, which horrified
+Jeffrey&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Alas! your reverence, wanton thoughts I grant<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Were once my motive, now the thoughts of want,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and the like&mdash;are not worse than Milton's jokes on the guns. He has
+immense talent, and he has the originality which sets talent to work in
+a way not tried by others, and may thus be very fairly said to turn it
+into genius. He is all this and more. But despite the warnings of a
+certain precedent, I cannot help stating the case which we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">{24}</a></span> have
+discussed in the old form, and asking, was Crabbe a poet?</p>
+
+<p>And thus putting the question, we may try to sum up. It is the gracious
+habit of a summing-up to introduce, if possible, a dictum of the famous
+men our fathers that were before us. I have already referred to
+Hazlitt's criticism on Crabbe in <i>The Spirit of the Age</i>, and I need not
+here urge at very great length the cautions which are always necessary
+in considering any judgment of Hazlitt's.<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> Much that he says even in
+the brief space of six or eight pages which he allots to Crabbe is
+unjust; much is explicably, and not too creditably, unjust. Crabbe was a
+successful man, and Hazlitt did not like successful men: he was a
+clergyman of the Church of England, and Hazlitt did not love clergymen
+of the Church of England: he had been a duke's chaplain, and Hazlitt
+loathed dukes: he had been a Radical, and was still (though Hazlitt does
+not seem to have thought him so) a Liberal, but his Liberalism had been
+Torified into a tame variety. Again, Crabbe, though by no means
+squeamish, is the most unvoluptuous and dispassionate of all describers
+of inconvenient things; and Hazlitt was the author of <i>Liber Amoris</i>.
+Accordingly there is much that is untrue in the tissue of denunciation
+which the critic devotes to the poet. But there are two passages in this
+tirade which alone might show how great a critic Hazlitt himself was.
+Here in a couple of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">{25}</a></span> lines ("they turn, one and all, on the same sort of
+teasing, helpless, unimaginative distress") is the germ of one of the
+most famous and certainly of the best passages of the late Mr. Arnold;
+and here again is one of those critical taps of the finger which shivers
+by a touch of the weakest part a whole Rupert's drop of misapprehension.
+Crabbe justified himself by Pope's example. "Nothing," says Hazlitt,
+"can be more dissimilar. Pope describes what is striking: Crabbe would
+have described merely what was there.... In Pope there was an appeal to
+the imagination, you see what was passing <i>in a poetical point of
+view</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Even here (and I have not been able to quote the whole passage) there is
+one of the flaws, which Hazlitt rarely avoided, in the use of the word
+"striking"; for, Heaven knows, Crabbe is often striking enough. But the
+description of Pope as showing things "in a poetical point of view" hits
+the white at once, wounds Crabbe mortally, and demolishes realism, as we
+have been pleased to understand it for the last generation or two.
+Hazlitt, it is true, has not followed up the attack, as I shall hope to
+show in an instant; but he has indicated the right line of it. As far as
+mere treatment goes, the fault of Crabbe is that he is pictorial rather
+than poetic, and photographic rather than pictorial. He sees his subject
+steadily, and even in a way he sees it whole; but he does not see it in
+the poetical way. You are bound in the shallows and the miseries of the
+individual; never do you<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">{26}</a></span> reach the large freedom of the poet who looks
+at the universal. The absence of selection, of the discarding of details
+that are not wanted, has no doubt a great deal to do with this&mdash;Hazlitt
+seems to have thought that it had everything to do. I do not quite agree
+with him there. Dante, I think, was sometimes quite as minute as Crabbe;
+and I do not know that any one less hardy than Hazlitt himself would
+single out, as Hazlitt expressly does, the death-bed scene of Buckingham
+as a conquering instance in Pope to compare with Crabbe. We know that
+the bard of Twickenham grossly exaggerated this. But suppose he had not?
+Would it have been worse verse? I think not. Although the faculty of
+selecting instead of giving all, as Hazlitt himself justly contends, is
+one of the things which make <i>poesis non ut pictura</i>, it is not all, and
+I think myself that a poet, if he is a poet, could be almost absolutely
+literal. Shakespeare is so in the picture of Gloucester's corpse. Is
+that not poetry?</p>
+
+<p>The defect of Crabbe, as it seems to me, is best indicated by reference
+to one of the truest of all dicta on poetry, the famous maxim of
+Joubert&mdash;that the lyre is a winged instrument and must transport. There
+is no wing in Crabbe, there is no transport, because, as I hold (and
+this is where I go beyond Hazlitt), there is no music. In all poetry,
+the very highest as well as the very lowest that is still poetry, there
+is something which transports, and that something in my view is always
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">{27}</a></span> music of the verse, of the words, of the cadence, of the rhythm, of
+the sounds superadded to the meaning. When you get the best music
+married to the best meaning, then you get, say, Shakespeare: when you
+get some music married to even moderate meaning, you get, say, Moore.
+Wordsworth can, as everybody but Wordsworthians holds, and as some even
+of Wordsworthians admit, write the most detestable doggerel and
+platitude. But when any one who knows what poetry is reads&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Our noisy years seem moments in the being<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the eternal silence,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>he sees that, quite independently of the meaning, which disturbs the
+soul of no less a person than Mr. John Morley, there is one note added
+to the articulate music of the world&mdash;a note that never will leave off
+resounding till the eternal silence itself gulfs it. He leaves
+Wordsworth, he goes straight into the middle of the eighteenth century,
+and he sees Thomson with his hands in his dressing-gown pockets biting
+at the peaches, and hears him between the mouthfuls murmuring&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">So when the shepherd of the Hebrid Isles,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Placed far amid the melancholy main,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and there is another note, as different as possible in kind yet still
+alike, struck for ever. Yet again, to take example still from the less
+romantic poets, and in this case from a poet, whom Mr. Kebbel specially
+and disadvantageously contrasts with Crabbe, when we read the old
+schoolboy's favourite<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">{28}</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">When the British warrior queen,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bleeding from the Roman rods,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>we hear the same quality of music informing words, though again in a
+kind somewhat lower, commoner, and less. In this matter, as in all
+matters that are worth handling at all, we come of course <i>ad
+mysterium</i>. Why certain combinations of letters, sounds, cadences,
+should almost without the aid of meaning, though no doubt immensely
+assisted by meaning, produce this effect of poetry on men no man can
+say. But they do; and the chief merit of criticism is that it enables us
+by much study of different times and different languages to recognise
+some part of the laws, though not the ultimate and complete causes, of
+the production.</p>
+
+<p>Now I can only say that Crabbe does not produce, or only in the rarest
+instances produces, this effect on me, and what is more, that on ceasing
+to be a patient in search of poetical stimulant and becoming merely a
+gelid critic, I do not discover even in Crabbe's warmest admirers any
+evidence that he produced this effect on them. Both in the eulogies
+which Mr. Kebbel quotes, and in those that he does not quote, I observe
+that the eulogists either discreetly avoid saying what they mean by
+poetry, or specify for praise something in Crabbe that is not distinctly
+poetical. Cardinal Newman said that Crabbe "pleased and touched him at
+thirty years' interval," and pleaded that this answers to the
+"accidental definition of a classic." Most certainly; but not
+necessarily to that of a poetical<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">{29}</a></span> classic. Jeffrey thought him
+"original and powerful." Granted; but there are plenty of original and
+powerful writers who are not poets. Wilson gave him the superlative for
+"original and vivid painting." Perhaps; but is Hogarth a poet? Jane
+Austen "thought she could have married him." She had not read his
+biography; but even if she had would that prove him to be a poet? Lord
+Tennyson is said to single out the following passage, which is certainly
+one of Crabbe's best, if not his very best:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Early he rose, and looked with many a sigh<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On the red light that filled the eastern sky;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oft had he stood before, alert and gay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To hail the glories of the new-born day;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But now dejected, languid, listless, low,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He saw the wind upon the water blow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the cold stream curled onward as the gale<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From the pine-hill blew harshly down the vale;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On the right side the youth a wood surveyed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With all its dark intensity of shade;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where the rough wind alone was heard to move<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In this, the pause of nature and of love<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When now the young are reared, and when the old,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lost to the tie, grow negligent and cold:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Far to the left he saw the huts of men,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Half hid in mist that hung upon the fen:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Before him swallows gathering for the sea,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Took their short flights and twittered o'er the lea;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And near the bean-sheaf stood, the harvest done,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And slowly blackened in the sickly sun;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All these were sad in nature, or they took<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sadness from him, the likeness of his look<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And of his mind&mdash;he pondered for a while,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then met his Fanny with a borrowed smile.<br /></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">{30}</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>It is good: it is extraordinarily good: it could not be better of its
+kind. It is as nearly poetry as anything that Crabbe ever did&mdash;but is it
+quite? If it is (and I am not careful to deny it) the reason, as it
+seems to me, is that the verbal and rhythmical music here, with its
+special effect of "transporting" of "making the common as if it were
+uncommon," is infinitely better than is usual with Crabbe, that in fact
+there is music as well as meaning. Hardly anywhere else, not even in the
+best passages of the story of Peter Grimes, shall we find such music;
+and in its absence it may be said of Crabbe much more truly than of
+Dryden (who carries the true if not the finest poetical undertone with
+him even into the rant of Almanzor and Maximin, into the interminable
+arguments of "Religio Laici" and "The Hind and the Panther") that he is
+a classic of our prose.</p>
+
+<p>Yet the qualities which are so noteworthy in him are all qualities which
+are valuable to the poet, and which for the most part are present in
+good poets. And I cannot help thinking that this was what actually
+deceived some of his contemporaries and made others content for the most
+part to acquiesce in an exaggerated estimate of his poetical merits. It
+must be remembered that even the latest generation which, as a whole and
+unhesitatingly, admired Crabbe, had been brought up on the poets of the
+eighteenth century, in the very best of whom the qualities which Crabbe
+lacks had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">{31}</a></span> been but sparingly and not eminently present. It must be
+remembered too, that from the great vice of the poetry of the eighteenth
+century, its artificiality and convention, Crabbe is conspicuously free.
+The return to nature was not the only secret of the return to poetry;
+but it was part of it, and that Crabbe returned to nature no one could
+doubt. Moreover he came just between the school of prose fiction which
+practically ended with <i>Evelina</i> and the school of prose fiction which
+opened its different branches with <i>Waverley</i> and <i>Sense and
+Sensibility</i>. His contemporaries found nowhere else the narrative power,
+the faculty of character-drawing, the genius for description of places
+and manners, which they found in Crabbe; and they knew that in almost
+all, if not in all the great poets there is narrative power, faculty of
+character-drawing, genius for description. Yet again, Crabbe put these
+gifts into verse which at its best was excellent in its own way, and at
+its worst was a blessed contrast to Darwin or to Hayley. Some readers
+may have had an uncomfortable though only half-conscious feeling that if
+they had not a poet in Crabbe they had not a poet at all. At all events
+they made up their minds that they had a poet in him.</p>
+
+<p>But are we bound to follow their example? I think not. You could play on
+Crabbe that odd trick which used, it is said, to be actually played on
+some mediæval verse chroniclers and unrhyme<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">{32}</a></span> him&mdash;that is to say, put
+him into prose with the least possible changes&mdash;and his merits would,
+save in rare instances, remain very much as they are now. You could put
+other words in the place of his words, keeping the verse, and it would
+not as a rule be much the worse. You cannot do either of these things
+with poets who are poets. Therefore I shall conclude that save at the
+rarest moments, moments of some sudden gust of emotion, some happy
+accident, some special grace of the Muses to reward long and blameless
+toil in their service, Crabbe was not a poet. But I have not the least
+intention of denying that he was great, and all but of the greatest
+among English writers.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">{33}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II<br />
+<br />
+HOGG</h2>
+
+
+<p>"What on earth," it was once asked "will you make of Hogg?" I think that
+there is something to be made of Hogg, and that it is something worth
+the making. In the first place, it is hardly possible, without studying
+"the Shepherd" pretty close, fully to appreciate three other persons,
+all greater, and one infinitely greater, than himself; namely, Wilson,
+Lockhart, and Scott. To the two first he was a client in the Roman
+sense, a plaything, something of a butt, and an invaluable source of
+inspiration or at least suggestion. Towards the last he occupied a very
+curious position, never I think quite paralleled elsewhere&mdash;the position
+of a Boswell who would fain be a Boswell and is not allowed to be, who
+has wild notions that he is really a greater man than Johnson and
+occasionally blasphemes against his idol, but who in the intervals is
+truly Boswellian. In the second place, he has usually hitherto been not
+criticised at all, but either somewhat sneered at or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">{34}</a></span> else absurdly
+over-praised. In the third place, as both Scott and Byron recognised, he
+is probably the most remarkable example we have of absolute
+self-education, or of no education: for Burns was an academically
+instructed student in comparison with Hogg. In the fourth, he produced,
+amid a mass of rubbish, some charming verse and one prose-story which,
+though it is almost overlooked by the general, some good judges are, I
+believe, agreed with me in regarding as one of the very best things of
+its kind, while it is also a very curious literary puzzle.</p>
+
+<p>The anecdotic history, more or less authentic, of the Ettrick Shepherd
+would fill volumes, and I must try to give some of the cream of it
+presently. The non-anecdotic part may be despatched in a few sentences.
+The exact date of his birth is not known, but he was baptized on 9th
+December 1770. His father was a good shepherd and a bad farmer&mdash;a
+combination of characteristics which Hogg himself inherited unimpaired
+and unimproved. If he had any early education at all, he forgot it so
+completely that he had, as a grown-up man, to teach himself writing if
+not reading a second time. He pursued his proper vocation for about
+thirty years, during the latter part of which time he became known as a
+composer of very good songs, "Donald Macdonald" being ranked as the
+best. He printed a few as a pamphlet in the first year of the century,
+but met with little success. Then he fell in with Scott, to whom he had
+been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">{35}</a></span> introduced as a purveyor of ballads, not a few of which his
+mother, Margaret Laidlaw, knew by heart. This old lady it was who gave
+Scott the true enough warning that the ballads were "made for singing
+and no for reading." Scott in his turn set Hogg on the track of making
+some money by his literary work, and Constable published <i>The Mountain
+Bard</i> together with a treatise called <i>Hogg on Sheep</i>, which I have not
+read, and of which I am not sure that I should be a good critic if I
+had. The two books brought Hogg three hundred pounds. This sum he poured
+into the usual Danaids' vessel of the Scotch peasant&mdash;the taking and
+stocking of a farm, which he had neither judgment to select, capital to
+work, nor skill to manage; and he went on doing very much the same thing
+for the rest of his life. The exact dates of that life are very sparely
+given in his own <i>Autobiography</i>, in his daughter's <i>Memorials</i>, and in
+the other notices of him that I have seen. He would appear to have spent
+four or five years in the promising attempt to run, not one but two
+large stock-farms. Then he tried shepherding again, without much
+success; and finally in 1810, being forty years old and able to write,
+he went to Edinburgh and "commenced," as the good old academic phrase
+has it, literary man. He brought out a new book of songs called <i>The
+Forest Minstrel</i>, and then he started a periodical, <i>The Spy</i>. On this,
+as he tells us, Scott very wisely remonstrated with him, asking him
+whether he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">{36}</a></span> thought he could be more elegant than Addison or Mackenzie.
+Hogg replied with his usual modesty that at any rate he would be "mair
+original." The originality appears to have consisted in personality; for
+Hogg acknowledges one exceedingly insolent attack on Scott himself,
+which Scott seems, after at first resenting it (and yet Hogg tells us
+elsewhere that he never resented any such thing), to have forgiven. He
+had also some not clearly known employments of the factorship or
+surveyorship kind; he was much patronised by two worthy hatters, Messrs.
+Grieve and Scott, and in 1813 the book which contains all his best
+verse, <i>The Queen's Wake</i>, was published. It was deservedly successful;
+but, by a species of bad luck which pursued Hogg with extraordinary
+assiduity, the two first editions yielded nothing, as his publisher was
+not solvent. The third, which Blackwood issued, brought him in good
+profit. Two years later he became in a way a made man. He had very
+diligently sought the patronage of Harriet, Duchess of Buccleuch, and,
+his claims being warmly supported by Scott and specially recommended by
+the Duchess on her deathbed to her husband, Hogg received rent free, or
+at a peppercorn, the farm of Mossend, Eltrive or Altrive. It is agreed
+even by Hogg's least judicious admirers that if he had been satisfied
+with this endowment and had then devoted himself, as he actually did, to
+writing, he might have lived and died in comfort, even though his
+singular luck in not being<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">{37}</a></span> paid continued to haunt him. But he must
+needs repeat his old mistake and take the adjacent farm of Mount Benger,
+which, with a certain reckless hospitable way of living for which he is
+not so blamable, kept him in difficulties all the rest of his life and
+made him die in them. He lived twenty years longer; married a
+good-looking girl much his superior in rank and twenty years his junior,
+who seems to have made him an excellent wife; engaged in infinite
+magazine- and book-writing, of which more presently; became the
+inspirer, model and butt of <i>Blackwood's Magazine</i>; constantly
+threatened to quarrel with it for traducing him, and once did so; loved
+Edinburgh convivialities more well than wisely; had the very ill luck to
+survive Scott and to commit the folly of writing a pamphlet (more silly
+than anything else) on the "domestic manners" of that great man, which
+estranged Lockhart, hitherto his fast friend; paid a visit to London in
+1832, whereby hang tales; and died himself on 21st November 1835.</p>
+
+<p>Such, briefly but not I think insufficiently given, is the Hogg of
+history. The Hogg of anecdote is a much more considerable and difficult
+person. He mixes himself up with or becomes by turns (whichever phrase
+may be preferred) the Shepherd of the <i>Noctes</i> and the Hogg who is
+revealed to us, say his panegyrists, with "uncalled-for malignity" in
+Lockhart's <i>Life of Scott</i>. But these panegyrists seem to forget that
+there are two documents which happen not to be signed either "John
+Gibson<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">{38}</a></span> Lockhart" or "Christopher North," and that these documents are
+Hogg's <i>Autobiography</i>, published by himself, and the <i>Domestic Manners
+of Sir Walter Scott</i>, likewise authenticated. In these two we have the
+Hogg of the <i>ana</i> put forward pretty vividly. For instance, Hogg tells
+us how, late in Sir Walter's life, he and his wife called upon Scott.
+"In we went and were received with all the affection of old friends. But
+his whole discourse was addressed to my wife, while I was left to shift
+for myself.... In order to attract his attention from my wife to one who
+I thought as well deserved it, I went close up to him with a
+scrutinising look and said, 'Gudeness guide us, Sir Walter, but ye hae
+gotten a braw gown.'" The rest of the story is not bad, but less
+characteristic. Immediately afterwards Hogg tells his own speech about
+being "not sae yelegant but mair original" than Addison. Then there is
+the other capital legend, also self-told, how he said to Scott, "Dear
+Sir Walter, ye can never suppose that I belang to your school of
+chivalry! Ye are the king of that school, but I'm the king of the
+mountain and fairy school, which is a far higher ane than yours!"
+"This," says Professor Veitch, a philosopher, a scholar, and a man of
+letters, "though put with an almost sublime egotism, is in the main
+true." Almost equally characteristic is the fact that, after beginning
+his pamphlet by calling Lockhart "the only man thoroughly qualified for
+the task" of writing Scott's life, Hogg<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">{39}</a></span> elsewhere, in one of the
+extraordinary flings that distinguish him, writes: "Of Lockhart's genius
+and capabilities Sir Walter always spoke with the greatest enthusiasm:
+more than I thought he deserved. For I knew him a great deal better than
+Sir Walter did, and, whatever Lockhart may pretend, I knew Sir Walter a
+thousand times better than he did."</p>
+
+<p>Now be it remembered that these passages are descriptive of Hogg's Hogg,
+to use the always useful classification of Dr. Holmes. To complete them
+(the actual texts are too long to give here) it is only necessary to
+compare the accounts of a certain dinner at Bowhill given respectively
+by Hogg in the <i>Domestic Manners</i> and by Lockhart in his biography, and
+also those given in the same places of the one-sided quarrel between
+Scott and Hogg, because the former, according to his almost invariable
+habit, refused to collaborate in Hogg's <i>Poetic Mirror</i>. In all this we
+have the man's own testimony about himself. It is not in the least
+incompatible with his having been, as his panegyrists contend, an
+affectionate friend, husband, and father; a very good fellow when his
+vanity or his whims were not touched; and inexhaustibly fertile in the
+kind of rough profusion of flower and weed that uncultivated soil
+frequently produces. But it most certainly is also not inconsistent, but
+on the contrary highly consistent, with the picture drawn by Lockhart in
+his great book; and it shows how, to say the least and mildest, the
+faults<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">{40}</a></span> and foibles of the curious personage known as "the Shepherd of
+the <i>Noctes</i>" were not the parts of the character on which Wilson need
+have spent, or did spend, most of his invention. Even if the "boozing
+buffoon" had been a boozing buffoon and nothing more, Hogg, who
+confesses with a little affected remorse, but with evident pride, that
+he once got regularly drunk every night for some six weeks running, till
+"an inflammatory fever" kindly pulled him up, could not have greatly
+objected to this part of the matter. The wildest excesses of the
+<i>Eidolon</i>-Shepherd's vanity do not exceed that speech to Scott which
+Professor Veitch thinks so true; and the quaintest pranks played by the
+same shadow do not exceed in quaintness the immortal story of Hogg being
+introduced to Mrs. Scott for the first time, extending himself on a sofa
+at full length (on the excuse that he "thought he could never do wrong
+to copy the lady of the house," who happened at the time to be in a
+delicate state of health), and ending by addressing her as "Charlotte."
+This is the story that Mrs. Garden, Hogg's daughter, without attempting
+to contest its truth, describes as told by Lockhart with "uncalled-for
+malignity." Now when anybody who knows something of Lockhart comes
+across "malignant," "scorpion," or any term of the kind, he, if he is
+wise, merely shrugs his shoulders. All the literary copy-books have got
+it that Lockhart was malignant, and there is of course no more to be
+said.<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> But something may<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">{41}</a></span> be done by a little industrious clearing
+away of fiction in particulars. It may be most assuredly and confidently
+asserted that no one reading the <i>Life of Scott</i> without knowing what
+Hogg's friends have said of it would dream of seeing malignity in the
+notices which it contains of the Shepherd. Before writing this paper I
+gave myself the trouble, or indulged myself in the pleasure (for perhaps
+that is the more appropriate phrase in reference to the most delightful
+of biographies, if not of books), of marking with slips of paper all the
+passages in Lockhart referring to Hogg, and reading them consecutively.
+I am quite sure that any one who does this, even knowing little or
+nothing of the circumstances, will wonder where on earth the "ungenerous
+assaults," the "virulent detraction," the "bitter words," the "false
+friendship," and so forth, with which Lockhart has been charged, are to
+be found. But any one who knows that Hogg had, just before his own
+death, and while the sorrow of Sir Walter's end was fresh, published the
+possibly not ill-intentioned but certainly ill-mannered pamphlet
+referred to&mdash;a pamphlet which contains among other things, besides the
+grossest impertinences about Lady Scott's origin, at least one
+insinuation that Scott wrote Lockhart's books for him&mdash;if any one
+further knows (I think the late Mr. Scott Douglas was the first to point
+out the fact) that Hogg had calmly looted Lockhart's biography of Burns,
+then he will think that the "scorpion," instead of using his sting,
+showed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">{42}</a></span> most uncommon forbearance. This false friend, virulent detractor
+and ungenerous assailant describes Hogg as "a true son of nature and
+genius with a naturally kind and simple character." He does indeed
+remark that Hogg's "notions of literary honesty were exceedingly loose."
+But (not to mention the Burns affair, which gave me some years ago a
+clue to this sentence) the remark is subjoined to a letter in which Hogg
+placidly suggests that he shall write an autobiographic sketch, and that
+Scott, transcribing it and substituting the third person for the first,
+shall father it as his own. The other offence I suppose was the remark
+that "the Shepherd's nerves were not heroically strung." This perhaps
+might have been left out, but if it was the fact (and Hogg's defenders
+never seem to have traversed it) it suggested itself naturally enough in
+the context, which deals with Hogg's extraordinary desire, when nearly
+forty, to enter the militia as an ensign. Moreover the same passage
+contains plenty of kindly description of the Shepherd. Perhaps there is
+"false friendship" in quoting a letter from Scott to Byron which
+describes Hogg as "a wonderful creature," or in describing the
+Shepherd's greeting to Wilkie, "Thank God for it! I did not know you
+were so young a man" as "graceful," or in the citation of Jeffrey's
+famous blunder in selecting for special praise a fabrication of Hogg's
+among the "Jacobite Ballads," or in the genial description, without a
+touch of ridicule, of Hogg at the St. Ronan's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">{43}</a></span> Games. The sentence on
+Hogg's death is indeed severe: "It had been better for his memory had
+his end been of earlier date; for he did not follow his benefactor until
+he had insulted his dust." It is even perhaps a little too severe,
+considering Hogg's irresponsible and childlike nature. But Lockhart
+might justly have retorted that men of sixty-four have no business to be
+irresponsible children; and it is certainly true that in this unlucky
+pamphlet Hogg distinctly accuses Scott of anonymously puffing himself at
+his, Hogg's, expense, of being over and over again jealous of him, of
+plagiarising his plots, of sneering at him, and, if the passage has any
+meaning, of joining a conspiracy of "the whole of the aristocracy and
+literature of the country" to keep Hogg down and "crush him to a
+nonentity." Neither could Lockhart have been exactly pleased at the
+passage where Scott is represented as afraid to clear the character of
+an innocent friend to the boy Duke of Buccleuch.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>He told me that which I never knew nor suspected before; that a
+certain gamekeeper, on whom he bestowed his maledictions without
+reserve, had prejudiced my best friend, the young Duke of
+Buccleuch, against me by a story; and though he himself knew it
+to be a malicious and invidious lie, yet seeing his grace so much
+irritated, he durst not open his lips on the subject, further
+than by saying, "But, my lord duke, you must always remember that
+Hogg is no ordinary man, although he may have shot a stray
+moorcock." And then turning to me he said, "Before you had
+ventured to give any saucy language to a low scoundrel of an
+English<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">{44}</a></span> gamekeeper, you should have thought of Fielding's tale
+of Black George."</p>
+
+<p>"I never saw that tale," said I, "and dinna ken ought about it.
+But never trouble your head about that matter, Sir Walter, for it
+is awthegither out o' nature for our young chief to entertain ony
+animosity against me. The thing will never mair be heard of, an'
+the chap that tauld the lees on me will gang to hell, that's aye
+some comfort."</p></div>
+
+<p>Part of my reason for quoting this last passage is to recall to those
+who are familiar with the <i>Noctes Ambrosianæ</i> the extraordinary felicity
+of the imitation. This, which Hogg with his own pen represents himself
+as speaking with his own mouth, might be found textually in any page of
+the <i>Noctes</i> without seeming in the least out of keeping with the ideal
+Hogg.</p>
+
+<p>And this brings me to the second charge of Hogg's friends, that Wilson
+wickedly caricatured his humble friend, if indeed he did not manufacture
+a Shepherd out of his own brain. This is as uncritical as the other, and
+even more surprising. That any one acquainted with Hogg's works,
+especially his autobiographic productions, should fail to recognise the
+resemblance is astonishing enough; but what is more astonishing is that
+any one interested in Hogg's fame should not perceive that the Shepherd
+of the <i>Noctes</i> is Hogg magnified and embellished in every way. He is
+not a better poet, for the simple reason that the verses put in his
+mouth are usually Hogg's own and not always his best. But out of the
+<i>Confessions<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">{45}</a></span> of a Sinner</i>, Hogg has never signed anything half so good
+as the best prose passages assigned to him in the <i>Noctes</i>. They are
+what he might have written if he had taken pains: they are in his key
+and vein; but they are much above him. Again, unless any reader is so
+extraordinarily devoid of humour as to be shocked by the mere
+horse-play, it must be clear to him that the Shepherd's manners are
+dressed up with extraordinary skill, so as to be just what he would have
+liked them to be. As for the drinking and so forth, it simply comes to
+this&mdash;that the habits which were fashionable when the century was not
+yet in its teens, or just in them, were getting to be looked on askance
+when it was entering or had entered on its thirties. But, instead of
+being annoyed at this Socrates-Falstaff, as somebody has called it, one
+might have thought that both Hogg himself and his admirers would have
+taken it as an immense compliment. The only really bad turn that Wilson
+seems to have done his friend was posthumous and pardonable. He
+undertook the task of writing the Shepherd's life and editing his
+<i>Remains</i> for the benefit of his family, who were left very badly off;
+and he not only did not do it but appears to have lost the documents
+with which he was entrusted. It is fair to say that after the deaths,
+which came close together, of his wife, of Blackwood, and of Hogg
+himself, Wilson was never fully the same man; and that his strongly
+sentimental nature, joined to his now inveterate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">{46}</a></span> habit of writing
+rapidly as the fancy took him, would have made the task of hammering out
+a biography and of selecting and editing <i>Remains</i> so distasteful from
+different points of view as to be practically impossible. But in that
+case of course he should not have undertaken it, or should have
+relinquished it as soon as he found out the difficulties. Allan
+Cunningham, it is said, would have gladly done the business; and there
+were few men better qualified.</p>
+
+<p>And now, having done a by no means unnecessary task in this preliminary
+clearance of rubbish, let us see what sort of a person in literature and
+life this Ettrick Shepherd really was&mdash;the Shepherd whom Scott not only
+befriended with unwearied and lifelong kindness, but ranked very high as
+an original talent, whom Byron thought Scott's only second worth
+speaking of, whom Southey, a very different person from either, esteemed
+highly, whom Wilson selected as the mouthpiece and model for one of the
+most singular and (I venture to say despite a certain passing wave of
+unpopularity) one of the most enduring of literary character-parts, and
+to whom Lockhart was, as Hogg himself late in life sets down, "a warm
+and disinterested friend." We have seen what Professor Veitch thinks of
+him&mdash;that he is the king of a higher school than Scott's. On the other
+hand, I fear the general English impression of him is rather that given
+by no Englishman, but by Thomas Carlyle, at the time of Hogg's visit to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">{47}</a></span>
+London in 1832. Carlyle describes him as talking and behaving like a
+"gomeril," and amusing the town by walking about in a huge gray plaid,
+which was supposed to be an advertisement, suggested by his publisher.</p>
+
+<p>The king of a school higher than Scott's and the veriest gomeril&mdash;these
+surely, though the judges be not quite of equal competence, are
+judgments of a singularly contradictory kind. Let us see what middle
+term we can find between them.</p>
+
+<p>The mighty volume (it has been Hogg's ill-fortune that the most
+accessible edition of his work is in two great double-columned royal
+octavos, heavy to the hand and not too grateful to the eye) which
+contains the Shepherd's collected poetical work is not for every reader.
+"Poets? where are they?" Wordsworth is said, on the authority of De
+Quincey, to have asked, with a want of graciousness of manners uncommon
+even in him and never forgiven by Hogg, when the latter used the plural
+in his presence, and in that of Wilson and Lloyd. It was unjust as well
+as rude, but endless allowance certainly has to be made for Hogg as a
+poet. I do not know to whom the epigram that "everything that is written
+in Scotch dialect is not necessarily poetry" is originally due, but
+there is certainly some justice in it. Scotch, as a language, has grand
+accommodations; it has richer vowels and a more varied and musical
+arrangement of consonants than English, while it falls not much short of
+English in freedom from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">{48}</a></span> that mere monotony which besets the
+richly-vowelled continental languages. It has an almost unrivalled
+provision of poetical <i>clichés</i> (the sternest purist may admit a French
+word which has no English equivalent), that is to say, the stock phrases
+which Heaven knows who first minted and which will pass till they are
+worn out of all knowledge. It has two great poets&mdash;one in the
+vernacular, one in the literary language&mdash;who are rich enough to keep a
+bank for their inferiors almost to the end of time. The depreciation of
+it by "glaikit Englishers" (I am a glaikit Englisher who does not
+depreciate), simply because it is unfamiliar and rustic-looking, is
+silly enough. But its best practitioners are sometimes prone to forget
+that nothing ready-made will do as poetry, and that you can no more take
+a short cut to Parnassus by spelling good "guid" and liberally using
+"ava," than you can execute the same journey by calling a girl a nymph
+and a boy a swain. The reason why Burns is a great poet, and one of the
+greatest, is that he seldom or never does this in Scots. When he takes
+to the short cut, as he does sometimes, he usually "gets to his
+English." Of Hogg, who wrote some charming things and many good ones,
+the same cannot be said. No writer known to me, not even the eminent Dr.
+Young, who has the root of the poetical matter in him at all, is so
+utterly uncritical as Hogg. He does not seem even to have known when he
+borrowed and when he was original. We have seen that he told Scott that
+he was not of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">{49}</a></span> his school. Now a great deal that he wrote, perhaps
+indeed actually the major part of his verse, is simply imitation and not
+often very good imitation of Scott. Here is a passage:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Light on her airy steed she sprung,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Around with golden tassels hung.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No chieftain there rode half so free,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or half so light and gracefully.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How sweet to see her ringlets pale<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wide-waving in the southland gale,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which through the broom-wood odorous flew<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To fan her cheeks of rosy hue!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whene'er it heaved her bosom's screen<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What beauties in her form were seen!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And when her courser's mane it swung,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A thousand silver bells were rung.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A sight so fair, on Scottish plain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A Scot shall never see again.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>I think we know where this comes from. Indeed Hogg had a certain
+considerable faculty of conscious parody as well as of unconscious
+imitation, and his <i>Poetic Mirror</i>, which he wrote as a kind of humorous
+revenge on his brother bards for refusing to contribute, is a fair
+second to <i>Rejected Addresses</i>. The amusing thing is that he often
+parodied where he did not mean parody in the least, and nowadays we do
+not want Scott-and-water. Another vein of Hogg's, which he worked
+mercilessly, is a similar imitation, not of Scott, but of the weakest
+echoes of Percy's <i>Reliques</i>:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">O sad, sad, was young Mary's plight:<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">She took the cup, no word she spake,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She had even wished that very night<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To sleep and never more to wake.<br /></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">{50}</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>Sad, sad indeed is the plight of the poet who publishes verses like
+this, of which there are thousands of lines to be found in Hogg. And
+then one comes to "Kilmeny," and the note changes with a vengeance:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Bonny Kilmeny gaed up the glen;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But it wasna to meet Duneira's men,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nor the rosy monk of the isle to see,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For Kilmeny was pure as pure could be.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It was only to hear the yorlin sing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And pu' the cress-flower round the spring,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The scarlet hip and the hindberry,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For Kilmeny was pure as pure could be.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Kilmeny looked up with a lovely grace,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But nae smile was seen on Kilmeny's face;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As still was her look and as still was her ee<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As the stillness that lay on the emeraut lea,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or the mist that sleeps on a waveless sea.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For Kilmeny had been she kent not where,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Kilmeny had seen what she could not declare;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Kilmeny had been where the cock never crew,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where the rain never fell and the wind never blew.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>No matter that it is necessary even here to make a cento, that the
+untutored singer cannot keep up the song by natural force and has not
+skill enough to dissemble the lapses. "Kilmeny" at its best is
+poetry&mdash;such poetry as, to take Hogg's contemporaries only, there is
+none in Rogers or Crabbe, little I fear in Southey, and not very much in
+Moore. Then there is no doubt at all that he could write ballads. "The
+Witch of Fife" is long and is not improved by being<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">{51}</a></span> written (at least
+in one version) in a kind of Scots that never was on land or sea, but it
+is quite admirable of its class. "The Good Grey Cat," his own imitation
+of himself in the <i>Poetic Mirror</i>, comes perhaps second to it, and "The
+Abbot McKinnon" (which is rather close to the imitations of Scott)
+third. But there are plenty of others. As for his poems of the more
+ambitious kind, "Mador of the Moor," "Pilgrims of the Sun," and even
+"Queen Hynde," let blushing glory&mdash;the glory attached to the literary
+department&mdash;hide the days on which he produced those. She can very well
+afford it, for the hiding leaves untouched the division of Hogg's
+poetical work which furnishes his highest claims to fame except
+"Kilmeny," the division of the songs. These are numerous and unequal as
+a matter of course. Not a few of them are merely variations on older
+scraps and fragments of the kind which Burns had made popular; some of
+them are absolute rubbish; some of them are mere imitations of Burns
+himself. But this leaves abundance of precious remnants, as the
+Shepherd's covenanting friends would have said. The before-mentioned
+"Donald Macdonald" is a famous song of its kind: "I'll no wake wi'
+Annie" comes very little short of Burns's "Green grow the rashes O!" The
+piece on the lifting of the banner of Buccleuch, though a curious
+contrast with Scott's "Up with the Banner" does not suffer too much by
+the comparison: "Cam' ye by Athole" and "When<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">{52}</a></span> the kye comes hame"
+everybody knows, and I do not know whether it is a mere delusion, but
+there seems to me to be a rare and agreeable humour in "The Village of
+Balmaquhapple."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">D'ye ken the big village of Balmaquhapple?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The great muckle village of Balmaquhapple?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Tis steeped in iniquity up to the thrapple,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">An' what's to become o' poor Balmaquhapple?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Whereafter follows an invocation to St. Andrew, with a characteristic
+suggestion that he may spare himself the trouble of intervening for
+certain persons such as</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Geordie, our deacon for want of a better,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Bess, wha delights in the sins that beset her&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>ending with the milder prayer:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But as for the rest, for the women's sake save them,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Their bodies at least, and their sauls if they have them.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And save, without word of confession auricular,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The clerk's bonny daughters, and Bell in particular;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For ye ken that their beauty's the pride and the stapple<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the great wicked village of Balmaquhapple!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"Donald McGillavry," which deceived Jeffrey, is another of the
+half-inarticulate songs which have the gift of setting the blood
+coursing;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Donald's gane up the hill hard an' hungry;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Donald's come down the hill wild an' angry:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Donald will clear the gowk's nest cleverly;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Here's to the King and Donald McGillavry!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Donald has foughten wi' reif and roguery,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Donald has dinnered wi' banes and beggary;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">{53}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Better it war for Whigs an' Whiggery<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Meeting the deevil than Donald McGillavry.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Come like a tailor, Donald McGillavry,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Come like a tailor, Donald McGillavry,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Push about, in an' out, thimble them cleverly.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Here's to King James an' Donald McGillavry!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"Love is Like a Dizziness," and the "Boys' Song,"</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Where the pools are bright and deep,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where the grey trout lies asleep,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Up the river and over the lea,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That's the way for Billy and me&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and plenty more charming things will reward the explorer of the
+Shepherd's country. Only let that explorer be prepared for pages on
+pages of the most unreadable stuff, the kind of stuff which hardly any
+educated man, however great a "gomeril" he might be, would ever dream of
+putting to paper, much less of sending to press. It is fair to repeat
+that the educated man who thus refrained would probably be a very long
+time before he wrote "Kilmeny," or even "Donald McGillavry" and "The
+Village of Balmaquhapple."</p>
+
+<p>Still (though to say it is enough to make him turn in his grave) if Hogg
+had been a verse-writer alone he would, except for "Kilmeny" and his
+songs, hardly be worth remembering, save by professed critics and
+literary free-selectors. A little better than Allan Cunningham, he is
+but for that single, sudden, and unsustained inspiration of "Kilmeny,"
+and one or two of his songs, so far below Burns that Burns might enable
+us to pay<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">{54}</a></span> no attention to him and not lose much. As for Scott, "Proud
+Maisie" (an unapproachable thing), the fragments that Elspeth Cheyne
+sings, even the single stanza in <i>Guy Mannering</i>, "Are these the Links
+of Forth? she said," any one of a thousand snatches that Sir Walter has
+scattered about his books with a godlike carelessness will "ding" Hogg
+and all his works on their own field. But then it is not saying anything
+very serious against a man to say that he is not so great as Scott. With
+those who know what poetry is, Hogg will keep his corner ("not a
+polished corner," as Sydney Smith would say) of the temple of Apollo.</p>
+
+<p>Hogg wrote prose even more freely than he wrote verse, and after the
+same fashion&mdash;a fashion which he describes with equal frankness and
+truth by the phrases, "dashing on," "writing as if in desperation,"
+"mingling pathos and absurdity," and so forth. Tales, novels, sketches,
+all were the same to him; and he had the same queer mixture of
+confidence in their merits and doubt about the manner in which they were
+written. <i>The Brownie of Bodsbeck</i>, <i>The Three Perils of Man</i> (which
+appears refashioned in the modern editions of his works as <i>The Siege of
+Roxburgh</i>), <i>The Three Perils of Woman</i>, <i>The Shepherd's Calendar</i> and
+numerous other uncollected tales exhibit for the most part very much the
+same characteristics. Hogg knew the Scottish peasantry well, he had
+abundant stores of unpublished folklore,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">{55}</a></span> he could invent more when
+wanted, he was not destitute of the true poetic knowledge of human
+nature, and at his best he could write strikingly and picturesquely. But
+he simply did not know what self-criticism was, he had no notion of the
+conduct or carpentry of a story, and though he was rather fond of
+choosing antique subjects, and prided himself on his knowledge of old
+Scots, he was quite as likely to put the baldest modern touches in the
+mouth of a heroine of the fourteenth or fifteenth century as not. If
+anybody takes pleasure in seeing how a good story can be spoilt, let him
+look at the sixth chapter of the <i>Shepherd's Calendar</i>, "The Souters of
+Selkirk;" and if any one wants to read a novel of antiquity which is not
+like Scott, let him read <i>The Bridal of Polmood</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In the midst, however, of all this chaotic work, there is still to be
+found, though misnamed, one of the most remarkable stories of its kind
+ever written&mdash;a story which, as I have said before, is not only
+extraordinarily good of itself, but insists peremptorily that the reader
+shall wonder how the devil it got where it is. This is the book now
+called <i>The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Fanatic</i>, but by its
+proper and original title, <i>The Confessions of a Justified Sinner</i>.
+Hogg's reference to it in his <i>Autobiography</i> is sufficiently odd. "The
+next year (1824)," he says, "I published <i>The Confessions of a Fanatic
+[Sinner]</i>, but, it being a story replete with horrors, after I had
+written it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">{56}</a></span> I durst not venture to put my name to it, so it was
+published anonymously, and of course did not sell very well&mdash;so at least
+I believe, for I do not remember ever receiving anything for it, and I
+am sure if there had been a reversion [he means return] I should have
+had a moiety. However I never asked anything, so on that point there was
+no misunderstanding." And he says nothing more about it, except to
+inform us that his publishers, Messrs. Longman, who had given him for
+his two previous books a hundred and fifty pounds each "as soon as the
+volumes were put to press," and who had published the <i>Confessions</i> on
+half profits, observed, when his next book was offered to them, that
+"his last publication (the <i>Confessions</i>) had been found fault with in
+some very material points, and they begged leave to decline the present
+one until they consulted some other persons." That is all. But the
+Reverend Thomas Thomson, Hogg's editor, an industrious and not
+incompetent man of letters, while admitting that it is "in excellence of
+plot, concentration of language and vigorous language, one of the best
+and most interesting [he might have said the best without a second] of
+Hogg's tales," observes that it "alarmed the religious portion of the
+community who hastily thought that the author was assailing
+Christianity." "Nothing could be more unfounded," says the Reverend
+Thomas Thomson with much justice. He might have added that it would have
+been much more<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">{57}</a></span> reasonable to suspect the author of practice with the
+Evil One in order to obtain the power of writing anything so much better
+than his usual work.</p>
+
+<p>For, in truth, <i>The Confessions of a Justified Sinner</i>, while it has all
+Hogg's merits and more, is quite astoundingly free from his defects. His
+tales are generally innocent of the most rudimentary notions of
+construction: this goes closely ordered, with a few pardonable enough
+digressions, from beginning to end. He has usually little concentrated
+grasp of character: the few personages of the <i>Confessions</i> are
+consistent throughout. His dialogue is, as a rule, extraordinarily
+slipshod and unequal: here there is no fault to find with it. His
+greatest lack, in short, is the lack of form: and here, though the story
+might perhaps have been curtailed, or rather "cut" in the middle, with
+advantage, the form is excellent. As its original edition, though an
+agreeable volume, is rare, and its later ones are buried amidst
+discordant rubbish, it may not be improper to give some account of it.
+The time is pitched just about the Revolution and the years following,
+and, according to a common if not altogether praiseworthy custom, the
+story consists of an editor's narrative and of the <i>Confessions</i> proper
+imbedded therein. The narrative tells how a drinking Royalist laird
+married an exceedingly precise young woman, how the dissension which was
+probable broke out between them, how a certain divine, the Reverend
+Robert<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">{58}</a></span> Wringhim, endeavoured to convert the sinner at the instances of
+the saint, and perhaps succeeded in consoling the saint at the expense
+of the sinner; how the laird sought more congenial society with a
+certain cousin of his named Arabella Logan, and how, rather out of
+jealousy than forgiveness, such a union or quasi-union took place
+between husband and wife that they had two sons, George and Robert, the
+elder of whom was his father's favourite and like, while the younger was
+pretty much left to the care of Mr. Wringhim. The tale then tells how,
+after hardly seeing one another in boyhood, the brothers met as young
+men at Edinburgh, where on extreme provocation the elder was within an
+ace of killing the younger. The end of it was that, after Robert had
+brought against George a charge of assaulting him on Arthur's Seat,
+George himself was found mysteriously murdered in an Edinburgh close.
+His mother cared naught for it; his father soon died of grief; the
+obnoxious Robert succeeded to the estates, and only Arabella Logan was
+left to do what she could to clear up the mystery, which, after certain
+strange passages, she did. But when warrants were made out against
+Robert he had disappeared, and the whole thing remained wrapped in more
+mystery than ever.</p>
+
+<p>To this narrative succeed the confessions of Robert himself. He takes of
+course the extreme side both of his mother and of her doctrines, but for
+some time, though an accomplished Pharisee,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">{59}</a></span> he is not assured of
+salvation, till at last his adopted (if not real) father Wringhim
+announces that he has wrestled sufficiently in prayer and has received
+assurance.</p>
+
+<p>Thereupon the young man sallies out in much exaltation of feeling and
+full of contempt for the unconverted. As he goes he meets another young
+man of mysterious appearance, who seems to be an exact double of
+himself. This wraith, however, presents himself as only a humble admirer
+of Robert's spiritual glory, and holds much converse with him. He meets
+this person repeatedly, but is never able to ascertain who he is. The
+stranger says that he may be called Gil Martin if Robert likes, but
+hints that he is some great one&mdash;perhaps the Czar Peter, who was then
+known to be travelling incognito about Europe. For a time Robert's
+Illustrious Friend (as he generally calls him) exaggerates the extremest
+doctrines of Calvinism, and slips easily from this into suggestions of
+positive crime. A minister named Blanchard, who has overheard his
+conversation, warns Robert against him, and Gil Martin in return points
+out Blanchard as an enemy to religion whom it is Robert's duty to take
+off. They lay wait for the minister and pistol him, the Illustrious
+Friend managing not only to avert all suspicion from themselves, but to
+throw it with capital consequences on a perfectly innocent person. After
+this initiation in blood Robert is fully reconciled to the "great work"
+and, going to Edinburgh, is led by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">{60}</a></span> his Illustrious Friend without
+difficulty into the series of plots against his brother which had to
+outsiders so strange an appearance, and which ended in a fresh murder.
+When Robert in the course of events above described becomes master of
+Dalchastel, the family estate, his Illustrious Friend accompanies him
+and the same process goes on. But now things turn less happily for
+Robert. He finds himself, without any consciousness of the acts charged,
+accused on apparently indubitable evidence, first of peccadillos, then
+of serious crimes. Seduction, forgery, murder, even matricide are hinted
+against him, and at last, under the impression that indisputable proofs
+of the last two crimes have been discovered, he flies from his house.
+After a short period of wandering, in which his Illustrious Friend
+alternately stirs up all men against him and tempts him to suicide, he
+finally in despair succumbs to the temptation and puts an end to his
+life. This of course ends the <i>Memoir</i>, or rather the <i>Memoir</i> ends just
+before the catastrophe. There is then a short postscript in which the
+editor tells a tale of a suicide found with some such legend attaching
+to him on a Border hillside, of an account given in <i>Blackwood</i> of the
+searching of the grave, and of a visit to it made by himself (the
+editor), his friend Mr. L&mdash;&mdash;t of C&mdash;&mdash;d [Lockhart of Chiefswood], Mr.
+L&mdash;&mdash;w [Scott's Laidlaw] and others. The whole thing ends with a very
+well written bit of rationalisation of the now familiar kind,
+discussing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">{61}</a></span> the authenticity of the <i>Memoirs</i>, and concluding that they
+are probably the work of some one suffering from religious mania, or
+perhaps a sort of parable or allegory worked out with insufficient
+skill.</p>
+
+<p>Although some such account as this was necessary, no such account,
+unless illustrated with the most copious citation, could do justice to
+the book. The first part or Narrative is not of extraordinary, though it
+is of considerable merit, and has some of Hogg's usual faults. The
+<i>Memoirs</i> proper are almost wholly free from these faults. In no book
+known to me is the grave treatment of the topsy-turvy and improbable
+better managed; although, by an old trick, it pleases the "editor" to
+depreciate his work in the passage just mentioned. The writer, whoever
+he was, was fully qualified for the task. The possibility of a young man
+of narrow intellect&mdash;his passion against his brother already excited,
+and his whole mind given to the theology of predestination&mdash;gliding into
+such ideas as are here described is undoubted; and it is made thoroughly
+credible to the reader. The story of the pretended Gil Martin,
+preposterous as it is, is told by the unlucky maniac exactly in the
+manner in which a man deluded, but with occasional suspicions of his
+delusion, would tell it. The gradual change from intended and successful
+rascality and crime into the incurring or the supposed incurring of the
+most hideous guilt without any actual consciousness of guilty action may
+seem<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">{62}</a></span> an almost hopeless thing to treat probably. Yet it is so treated
+here. And the final gathering and blackening of the clouds of despair
+(though here again there is a very slight touch of Hogg's undue
+prolongation of things) exhibits literary power of the ghastly kind
+infinitely different from and far above the usual
+raw-head-and-bloody-bones story of the supernatural.</p>
+
+<p>Now, who wrote it?</p>
+
+<p>No doubt, so far as I know, has been generally entertained of Hogg's
+authorship, though, since I myself entertained doubts on the subject, I
+have found some good judges not unwilling to agree with me. Although
+admitting that it appeared anonymously, Hogg claims it, as we have seen,
+not only without hesitation but apparently without any suspicion that it
+was a particularly valuable or meritorious thing to claim, and without
+any attempt to shift, divide, or in any way disclaim the responsibility,
+though the book had been a failure. His publishers do not seem to have
+doubted then that it was his; nor, I have been told, have their
+representatives any reason to doubt it now. His daughter, I think, does
+not so much as mention it in her <i>Memorials</i>, but his various
+biographers have never, so far as I know, hinted the least hesitation.
+At the same time I am absolutely unable to believe that it is Hogg's
+unadulterated and unassisted work. It is not one of those cases where a
+man once tries a particular style, and then from accident, disgust, or
+what not, relinquishes it. Hogg was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">{63}</a></span> always trying the supernatural, and
+he failed in it, except in this instance, as often as he tried it. Why
+should he on this particular occasion have been saved from himself? and
+who saved him?&mdash;for that great part of the book at least is his there
+can be no doubt.</p>
+
+<p>By way of answer to these questions I can at least point out certain
+coincidences and probabilities. It has been seen that Lockhart's name
+actually figures in the postscript to the book. Now at this time and for
+long afterwards Lockhart was one of the closest of Hogg's literary
+allies; and Hogg, while admitting that the author of <i>Peter's Letters</i>
+hoaxed him as he hoaxed everybody, is warm in his praise. He describes
+him in his <i>Autobiography</i> as "a warm and disinterested friend." He
+tells us in the book on Scott how he had a plan, even later than this,
+that Lockhart should edit all his (the Shepherd's) works, for
+discouraging which plan he was very cross with Sir Walter. Further, the
+vein of the <i>Confessions</i> is very closely akin to, if not wholly
+identical with, a vein which Lockhart not only worked on his own account
+but worked at this very same time. It was in these very years of his
+residence at Chiefswood that Lockhart produced the little masterpiece of
+"Adam Blair" (where the terrors and temptations of a convinced
+Presbyterian minister are dwelt upon), and "Matthew Wald," which is
+itself the history of a lunatic as full of horrors, and those of no very
+different kind, as the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">{64}</a></span> <i>Confessions</i> themselves. That editing, and
+perhaps something more than editing, on Lockhart's part would have been
+exactly the thing necessary to prune and train and direct the Shepherd's
+disorderly luxuriance into the methodical madness of the Justified
+Sinner&mdash;to give Hogg's loose though by no means vulgar style the dress
+of his own polished manner&mdash;to weed and shape and correct and straighten
+the faults of the Boar of the Forest&mdash;nobody who knows the undoubted
+writing of the two men will deny. And Lockhart, who was so careless of
+his work that to this day it is difficult, if not impossible, to
+ascertain what he did or did not write unassisted, would certainly not
+have been the man to claim a share in the book, even had it made more
+noise; though he may have thought of this as well as of other things
+when, in his wrath over the foolish blethering about Scott, he wrote
+that the Shepherd's views of literary morality were peculiar. As for
+Hogg himself, he would never have thought of acknowledging any such
+editing or collaboration if it did take place; and that not nearly so
+much from vanity or dishonesty as from simple carelessness, dashed
+perhaps with something of the habit of literary <i>supercherie</i> which the
+society in which he lived affected, and which he carried as far at least
+as any one of its members.</p>
+
+<p>It may seem rather hard after praising a man's ewe lamb so highly to
+question his right in her. But I do not think there is any real
+hardship. I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">{65}</a></span> should think that the actual imagination of the story is
+chiefly Hogg's, for Lockhart's forte was not that quality, and his own
+novels suffer rather for want of it. If this be the one specimen of what
+the Shepherd's genius could turn out when it submitted to correction and
+training, it gives us a useful and interesting explanation why the mass
+of his work, with such excellent flashes, is so flawed and formless as a
+whole. It explains why he wished Lockhart to edit the others. It
+explains at the same time why (for the Shepherd's vanity was never far
+off) he set apparently little store by the book. It is only a hypothesis
+of course, and a hypothesis which is very unlikely ever to be proved,
+while in the nature of things it is even less capable of disproof. But I
+think there is good critical reason for it.</p>
+
+<p>At any rate, I confess for myself, that I should not take anything like
+the same interest in Hogg, if he were not the putative author of the
+<i>Confessions</i>. The book is in a style which wearies soon if it be
+overdone, and which is very difficult indeed to do well. But it is one
+of the very best things of its kind, and that is a claim which ought
+never to be overlooked. And if Hogg in some lucky moment did really
+"write it all by himself," as the children say, then we could make up
+for him a volume composed of it, of "Kilmeny," and of the best of the
+songs, which would be a very remarkable volume indeed. It would not
+represent a twentieth part of his collected work, and it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">{66}</a></span> would probably
+represent a still smaller fraction of what he wrote, while all the rest
+would be vastly inferior. But it would be a title to no inconsiderable
+place in literature, and we know that good judges did think Hogg, with
+all his personal weakness and all his literary shortcomings, entitled to
+such a place.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">{67}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III<br />
+<br />
+SYDNEY SMITH</h2>
+
+
+<p>The hackneyed joke about biographers adding a new terror to death holds
+still as good as ever. But biography can sometimes make a good case
+against her persecutors; and one of the instances which she would
+certainly adduce would be the instance of Sydney Smith. I more than
+suspect that his actual works are less and less read as time goes on,
+and that the brilliant virulence of <i>Peter Plymley</i>, the even greater
+brilliance, not marred by virulence at all, of the <i>Letters to
+Archdeacon Singleton</i>, the inimitable quips of his articles in the
+<i>Edinburgh Review</i>, are familiar, if they are familiar at all, only to
+the professed readers of the literature of the past, and perhaps to some
+intelligent newspaper men who find Sydney<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> to be what Fuseli
+pronounced Blake,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">{68}</a></span> "d&mdash;&mdash;d good to steal from." But the <i>Life</i> which
+Lady Holland, with her mother's and Mrs. Austin's aid, produced more
+than thirty years ago has had a different fate; and a fresh lease of
+popularity seems to have been secured by another <i>Life</i>, published by
+Mr. Stuart Reid in 1883. This was partly abridged from the first, and
+partly supplied with fresh matter by a new sifting of the documents
+which Lady Holland had used. Nor do the authors of these works, however
+great must be our gratitude to them, take to themselves any such share
+of the credit as is due to Boswell in the case of Johnson, to Lockhart
+in the case of Scott, to Carlyle in the case of Sterling. Neither can
+lay claim to the highest literary merit of writing or arrangement; and
+the latter of the two contains digressions, not interesting to all
+readers, about the nobility of Sydney's cause. It is because both books
+let their subject reveal himself by familiar letters, scraps of journal,
+or conversation, and because the revelation of self is so full and so
+delightful, that Sydney Smith's immortality, now that the generation
+which actually heard him talk has all but disappeared, is still secured
+without the slightest fear of disturbance or decay. With a few
+exceptions (the Mrs. Partington business, the apologue of the dinners at
+the synod of Dort, "Noodle's Oration," and one or two more), the things
+by which Sydney is known to the general, all come, not from his works,
+but from his <i>Life</i> or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">{69}</a></span> <i>Lives</i>. No one with any sense of fun can read
+the Works without being delighted; but in the Life and the letters the
+same qualities of wit appear, with other qualities which in the Works
+hardly appear at all. A person absolutely ignorant of anything but the
+Works might possibly dismiss Sydney Smith as a brilliant but bitter and
+not too consistent partisan, who fought desperately against abuses when
+his party was out, and discovered that they were not abuses at all when
+his party was in. A reader of his Life and of his private utterances
+knows him better, likes him better, and certainly does not admire him
+less.</p>
+
+<p>He was born in 1771, the son of an eccentric and apparently rather
+provoking person, who for no assigned reason left his wife at the church
+door in order to wander about the world, and who maintained his vagabond
+principles so well that, as his granddaughter ruefully records, he
+bought, spent money on, and sold at a loss, no less than nineteen
+different houses in England and Wales. Sydney was also the second of
+four clever brothers, the eldest and cleverest being the somewhat famous
+"Bobus," who co-operated in the <i>Microcosm</i> with Canning and Frere,
+survived his better known brother but a fortnight, founded a family, and
+has left one of those odd reputations of immense talent not justified by
+any producible work, to which our English life of public schools,
+universities, and Parliament gives peculiar facilities. Bobus and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">{70}</a></span> Cecil
+the third brother were sent to Eton: Sydney and Courtenay, the fourth,
+to Winchester, after a childhood spent in precocious reading and arguing
+among themselves. From Winchester Sydney (of whose school-days some
+trifling but only trifling anecdotes are recorded,) proceeded in regular
+course to New College, Oxford, and being elected of right to a
+Fellowship, then worth about a hundred pounds a year, was left by his
+father to "do for himself" on that not extensive revenue. He did for
+himself at Oxford during the space of nine years; and it is supposed
+that his straitened circumstances had something to do with his dislike
+for universities, which however was a kind of point of conscience among
+his Whig friends. It is at least singular that this residence of nearly
+a decade has left hardly a single story or recorded incident of any
+kind; and that though three generations of undergraduates passed through
+Oxford in his time, no one of them seems in later years to have had
+anything to say of not the least famous and one of the most sociable of
+Englishmen. At that time, it is true, and for long afterwards, the men
+of New College kept more to themselves than the men of any other college
+in Oxford; but still it is odd. Another little mystery is, Why did
+Sydney take orders? Although there is not the slightest reason to
+question his being, according to his own standard, a very sincere and
+sufficient divine, it obviously was not quite the profession for him.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">{71}</a></span>
+He is said to have wished for the Bar, but to have deferred to his
+father's wishes for the Church. That Sydney was an affectionate and
+dutiful son nobody need doubt: he was always affectionate, and in his
+own way dutiful. But he is about the last man one can think of as likely
+to undertake an uncongenial profession out of high-flown dutifulness to
+a father who had long left him to his own resources, and who had neither
+influence nor prospects in the Church to offer him. The Fellowship would
+have kept him, as it had kept him already, till briefs came. However, he
+did take orders; and the later <i>Life</i> gives more particulars than the
+first as to the incumbency which indirectly determined his career. It
+was the curacy of Netheravon on Salisbury Plain; and its almost complete
+seclusion was tempered by a kindly squire, Mr. Hicks-Beach,
+great-grandfather of the present Sir Michael Hicks-Beach. Mr.
+Hicks-Beach offered Sydney the post of tutor to his eldest son; Sydney
+accepted it, started for Germany with his pupil, but (as he
+picturesquely though rather vaguely expresses it) "put into Edinburgh
+under stress of war" and stayed there for five years.</p>
+
+<p>The sojourn at Edinburgh began in June 1798: it ended in August 1803. It
+will thus be seen that Sydney was by no means a very young man even when
+he began reviewing, the year before leaving the Scotch capital. Indeed
+the aimless prolongation<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">{72}</a></span> of his stay at Oxford, which brought him
+neither friends, money, nor professional experience of any kind, threw
+him considerably behindhand all his life; and this delay, much more than
+Tory persecution or Whig indifference, was the cause of the comparative
+slowness with which he made his way. His time at Edinburgh was, however,
+usefully spent even before that invention of the <i>Review</i>, over which
+there is an amicable and unimportant dispute between himself and
+Jeffrey. His tutorship was so successful that Mr. Hicks-Beach rewarded
+it with a cheque for a thousand pounds: he did duty in the Episcopal
+churches of Edinburgh: he made friends with all the Whigs and many of
+the Tories of the place: he laughed unceasingly at Scotchmen and liked
+them very much. Also, about the middle of his stay, he got married, but
+not to a Scotch girl. His wife was Miss Catherine Pybus, of Cheam, and
+the marriage was as harebrained a one, from the point of view of
+settlements, as Jeffrey's own.<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> Sydney's settlement on his wife is
+well known: it consisted of "six small silver teaspoons much worn," with
+which worldly goods he did her literally endow by throwing them into her
+lap. It would appear that there never was a happier marriage; but it
+certainly seemed for some years as if there might have been many more
+prosperous in point of money. When Sydney moved to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">{73}</a></span> London he had no
+very definite prospect of any income whatever; and had not Mrs. Smith
+sold her mother's jewels (which came to her just at the time), they
+would apparently have had some difficulty in furnishing their house in
+Doughty Street. But Horner, their friend (the "parish bull" of Scott's
+irreverent comparison), had gone to London before them, and impressed
+himself, apparently by sheer gravity, on the political world as a good
+young man. Introduced by him, Sydney Smith soon became one of the circle
+at Holland House. It is indeed not easy to live on invitations and your
+mother-in-law's pearls; but Sydney reviewed vigorously, preached
+occasionally, before very long received a regular appointment at the
+Foundling Hospital, and made some money by lecturing very agreeably at
+the Royal Institution on Moral Philosophy&mdash;a subject of which he
+honestly admits that he knew, in the technical sense, nothing. But his
+hearers did not want technical ethics, and in Sydney Smith they had a
+moral philosopher of the practical kind who could hardly be excelled
+either in sense or in wit. One little incident of this time, however,
+throws some light on the complaints which have been made about the delay
+of his promotion. He applied to a London rector to license him to a
+vacant chapel, which had not hitherto been used for the services of the
+Church. The immediate answer has not been preserved; but from what
+followed it clearly was a civil and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">{74}</a></span> rather evasive but perfectly
+intelligible request to be excused. The man was of course quite within
+his right, and a dozen good reasons can be guessed for his conduct. He
+may really have objected, as he seems to have said he did, to take a
+step which his predecessors had refused to take, and which might
+inconvenience his successors. But Sydney would not take the refusal, and
+wrote another very logical, but extremely injudicious, letter pressing
+his request with much elaboration, and begging the worthy Doctor of
+Divinity to observe that he, the Doctor, was guilty of inconsistency and
+other faults. Naturally this put the Doctor's back up, and he now
+replied with a flat and very high and mighty refusal. We know from
+another instance that Sydney was indisposed to take "No" for an answer.
+However he obtained, besides his place at the Foundling, preacherships
+in two proprietary chapels, and seems to have had both business and
+pleasure enough on his hands during his London sojourn, which was about
+the same length as his Edinburgh one. It was, however, much more
+profitable, for in three years the ministry of "All the Talents" came
+in, the Holland House interest was exerted, and the Chancellor's living
+of Foston, near York, valued at five hundred pounds a year, was given to
+Sydney. He paid for it, after a fashion which in a less zealous and
+convinced Whig might seem a little dubious, by the famous lampoons of
+the <i>Plymley Letters</i>, advocating the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">{75}</a></span> claims of Catholic emancipation,
+and extolling Fox and Grenville at the expense of Perceval and Canning.
+Very edifying is it to find Sydney Smith objecting to this latter that
+he is a "diner out," a "maker of jokes and parodies," a trifler on
+important subjects&mdash;in fact each and all of the things which the Rev.
+Sydney Smith himself was, in a perfection only equalled by the object of
+his righteous wrath. But of Peter more presently.</p>
+
+<p>Even his admiring biographers have noticed, with something of a chuckle,
+the revenge which Perceval, who was the chief object of Plymley's
+sarcasm, took, without in the least knowing it, on his lampooner. Had it
+not been for the Clergy Residence Bill, which that very respectable, if
+not very brilliant, statesman passed in 1808, and which put an end to
+perhaps the most flagrant of all then existing abuses, Sydney, the enemy
+of abuses, would no doubt have continued with a perfectly clear
+conscience to draw the revenues of Foston, and while serving it by a
+curate, to preach, lecture, dine out, and rebuke Canning for making
+jokes, in London. As it was he had to make up his mind, though he
+obtained a respite from the Archbishop, to resign (which in the
+recurring frost of Whig hopes was not to be thought of), to exchange,
+which he found impossible, or to bury himself in Yorkshire. This was a
+real hardship upon him, because Foston, as it was, was uninhabitable,
+and had had no resident clergyman<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">{76}</a></span> since the seventeenth century. But
+whatever bad things could be said of Sydney (and I really do not know
+what they are, except that the combination of a sharp wit, a ready pen,
+and strong political prejudices sometimes made him abuse his talents),
+no one could say that he ever shirked either a difficulty or a duty.
+When his first three years' leave expired, he went down in 1809 with his
+family to York, and established himself at Heslington, a village near
+the city and not far from his parish. And when a second term of
+dispensation from actual residence was over, he set to work and built
+the snuggest if the ugliest parsonage in England, with farm-buildings
+and all complete, at the cost of some four thousand pounds. Of the
+details of that building his own inimitable account exists, and is or
+ought to be well known. The brick-pit and kiln on the property, which
+were going to save fortunes and resulted in nothing but the production
+of exactly a hundred and fifty thousand unusable bricks: the four oxen,
+Tug, Lug, Haul and Crawl, who were to be the instruments of another
+economy and proved to be, at least in Sydneian language, equal to
+nothing but the consumption of "buckets of sal volatile:" the entry of
+the distracted mother of the household on her new domains with a baby
+clutched in her arms and one shoe left in the circumambient mud: the
+great folks of the neighbourhood (Lord and Lady Carlisle) coming to call
+graciously on the strangers,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">{77}</a></span> and being whelmed, coach and four,
+outriders and all, in a ploughed field of despond: the "universal
+scratcher" in the meadows, inclined so as to let the brute creation of
+all heights enjoy that luxury: Bunch the butler, a female child of
+tender years but stout proportions: Annie Kay the factotum: the
+"Immortal," a chariot which was picked up at York in the last stage of
+decay, and carried the family for many years half over England&mdash;all
+these things and persons are told in divers delightful scraps of
+autobiography and in innumerable letters, after a fashion impossible to
+better and at a length too long to quote.</p>
+
+<p>Sydney Smith was for more than twenty years rector of Foston, and for
+fully fifteen actually resided there. During this time he made the
+acquaintance of Lord and Lady Grey, next to Lord and Lady Holland his
+most constant friends, visited a little, entertained in his own
+unostentatious but hearty fashion a great deal, wrote many articles for
+the <i>Edinburgh Review</i>, found himself in a minority of one or two among
+the clergy of Yorkshire on the subject of Emancipation and similar
+matters, but was on the most friendly terms possible with his diocesan,
+Archbishop Vernon Harcourt. Nor was he even without further preferment,
+for he held for some years (on the then not discredited understanding of
+resignation when one of the Howards was ready for it) the neighbouring
+and valuable living of Londesborough.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">{78}</a></span> Then the death of an aunt put an
+end to his monetary anxieties, which for years had been considerable, by
+the legacy of a small but sufficient fortune. And at last, when he was
+approaching sixty, the good things of the Church, which he never
+affected to despise, came in earnest. The Tory Chancellor Lyndhurst gave
+him a stall at Bristol, which carried with it a small Devonshire living,
+and soon afterwards he was able to exchange Foston (which he had greatly
+improved), for Combe Florey near Taunton. When his friend Lord Grey
+became Prime Minister, the stall at Bristol was exchanged for a much
+more valuable one at St. Paul's; Halberton, the Devonshire vicarage, and
+Combe Florey still remaining his. These made up an ecclesiastical
+revenue not far short of three thousand a year, which Sydney enjoyed for
+the last fifteen years of his life. He never got anything more, and it
+is certain that for a time he was very sore at not being made a bishop,
+or at least offered a bishopric. Lord Holland had rather rashly
+explained the whole difficulty years before, by reporting a conversation
+of his with Lord Grenville, in which they had hoped that when the Whigs
+came into power they would be more grateful to Sydney than the Tories
+had been to Swift. Sydney's acuteness must have made him wince at the
+omen. For my part I do not see why either Harley or Grey should have
+hesitated, as far as any scruples of their own went.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">{79}</a></span> But I think any
+fair-minded person must admit the possibility of a scruple, though he
+may not share it, about the effect of seeing either the <i>Tale of a Tub</i>
+or <i>Peter Plymley's Letters</i>, with "By the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop
+of&mdash;&mdash;" on the title-page. The people who would have been shocked might
+in each case have been fools: there is nothing that I at least can see,
+in either book, inconsistent with sound religion and churchmanship. But
+they would have been honest fools, and of such a Prime Minister has to
+take heed. So Amen Corner (or rather, for he did not live there, certain
+streets near Grosvenor Square) in London, and Combe Florey in the
+country, were Sydney Smith's abodes till his death. In the former he
+gave his breakfasts and dinners in the season, being further enabled to
+do so by his share (some thirty thousand pounds) of his brother
+Courtenay's Indian fortune. The latter, after rebuilding it,&mdash;for he had
+either a fate or a passion for bricks and mortar,&mdash;he made on a small
+scale one of the most beautiful and hospitable houses in the West of
+England.</p>
+
+<p>To Combe Florey, as to Foston, a sheaf of fantastic legends attaches
+itself; indeed, as Lady Holland was not very fond of dates, it is
+sometimes not clear to which of the two residences some of them apply.
+At both Sydney had a huge store-room, or rather grocer's and chemist's
+shop, from which he supplied the wants, not merely of his household, but
+of half the neighbourhood. It<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">{80}</a></span> appears to have been at Combe Florey (for
+though no longer poor he still had a frugal mind), that he hit upon the
+device of "putting the cheapest soaps in the dearest papers," confident
+of the result upon the female temper. It was certainly there that he
+fitted up two favourite donkeys with a kind of holiday-dress of antlers,
+to meet the objection of one of his lady-visitors that he had no deer;
+and converted certain large bay-trees in boxes into the semblance of an
+orangery, by fastening some dozens of fine fruit to the branches. I like
+to think of the mixed astonishment and disgust of a great Russian, and a
+not very small Frenchman, both not long deceased, M. Tourguénieff and M.
+Paul de Saint-Victor, if they had heard of these pleasing tomfooleries.
+But tomfoolery, though, when properly and not inordinately indulged, one
+of the best things in life, must, like the other good things of life,
+come to an end. After an illness of some months Sydney Smith died at his
+house in Green Street, of heart disease, on 22nd February 1845, in the
+seventy-fourth year of his age.</p>
+
+<p>The memorials and evidences of his peculiar if not unique genius consist
+of three different kinds; reported or remembered conversations and
+jokes, letters, and formal literary work. He was once most famous as a
+talker; but conversation is necessarily the most perishable of all
+things, and its recorded fragments bear keeping less than any other
+relics. Some of the verbal jests assigned to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">{81}</a></span> him (notably the famous
+one about the tortoise, which, after being long known by the initiated
+not to be his, has at last been formally claimed by its rightful owner),
+are certainly or probably borrowed or falsely attributed, as rich
+conversationalists always borrow or receive. And always the things have
+something of the mangled air which sayings detached from their context
+can hardly escape. It is otherwise with the letters. The best letters
+are always most like the actual conversation of their writers, and
+probably no one ever wrote more as he talked than Sydney Smith. The
+specially literary qualities of his writing for print are here too in
+great measure; and on the whole, though of course the importance of
+subject is nearly always less, and the interest of sustained work is
+wholly absent, nowhere can the entire Sydney be better seen. Of the
+three satirists of modern times with whom he may not unfairly claim to
+rank&mdash;Pascal, Swift, and Voltaire&mdash;he is most like Voltaire in his
+faculty of presenting a good thing with a preface which does not in the
+least prepare you for it, and then leaving it without the slightest
+attempt to go back on it, and elaborate it, and make sure that his
+hearer has duly appreciated it and laughed at it. And of the two, though
+the palm of concentration must be given to Voltaire, the palm of
+absolute simplicity must be given to Sydney. Hardly any of his letters
+are without these unforced flashes of wit, from almost his first<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">{82}</a></span>
+epistle to Jeffrey (where, after rallying that great little man on being
+the "only male despondent he has met," he adds the postscript, "I beg to
+except the Tuxford waiter, who desponds exactly as you do") to his very
+last to Miss Harcourt, in which he mildly dismisses one of his brethren
+as "anything but a <i>polished</i> corner of the Temple." There is the "usual
+establishment for an eldest landed baby:" the proposition, advanced in
+the grave and chaste manner, that "the information of very plain women
+is so inconsiderable, that I agree with you in setting no store by it:"
+the plaintive expostulation with Lady Holland (who had asked him to
+dinner on the ninth of the month, after previously asking him to stay
+from the fifth to the twelfth), "it is like giving a gentleman an
+assignation for Wednesday when you are going to marry him on the
+previous Sunday&mdash;an attempt to combine the stimulus of gallantry with
+the security of connubial relations:" the simple and touching
+information that "Lord Tankerville has sent me a whole buck. This
+necessarily takes up a good deal of my time;" that "geranium-fed bacon
+is of a beautiful colour, but it takes so many plants to fatten one pig
+that such a system can never answer;" that "it is a mistake to think
+that Dr. Bond could be influenced by partridges. He is a man of very
+independent mind, with whom pheasants at least, or perhaps even turkeys,
+are necessary;" and scores more with references to which I find the
+fly-leaves of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">{83}</a></span> my copy of the letters covered. If any one wants to see
+how much solid there is with all this froth, let him turn to the
+passages showing the unconquerable manliness, fairness, and good sense
+with which Sydney treated the unhappy subject of Queen Caroline, out of
+which his friends were so ready to make political capital; or to the
+admirable epistle in which he takes seriously, and blunts once for all,
+the points of certain foolish witticisms as to the readiness with which
+he, a man about town, had taken to catechisms and cabbages in an almost
+uninhabited part of the despised country. In conversation he would seem
+sometimes to have a little, a very little, "forced the note." The Quaker
+baby, and the lady "with whom you might give an assembly or populate a
+parish," are instances in point. But he never does this in his letters.
+I take particular pleasure in the following passage written to Miss
+Georgiana Harcourt within two years of his death: "What a charming
+existence! To live in the midst of holy people; to know that nothing
+profane can approach you; to be certain that a Dissenter can no more be
+found in the Palace than a snake can exist in Ireland, or ripe fruit in
+Scotland! To have your society strong, and undiluted by the laity; to
+bid adieu to human learning; to feast on the Canons and revel in the
+Thirty-Nine Articles! Happy Georgiana!" Now if Sydney had been what some
+foolish people think him, merely a scoffer, there would be no fun<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">{84}</a></span> in
+this; it would be as impertinent and in as bad taste as the stale jokes
+of the eighteenth century about Christianity. But he was much else.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, however, no rational man will contend that in estimating
+Sydney Smith's place in the general memory, his deliberate literary
+work, or at least that portion of it which he chose to present on
+reflection, acknowledged and endorsed, can be overlooked. His <i>Life</i>
+contains (what is infinitely desirable in all such Lives and by no means
+always or often furnished) a complete list of his contributions to the
+<i>Edinburgh Review</i>, and his works contain most of them. To these have to
+be added the pamphlets, of which the chief and incomparably the best
+are, at intervals of thirty years, <i>Peter Plymley</i> and the <i>Letters to
+Archdeacon Singleton</i>, together with sermons, speeches, and other
+miscellaneous matter. The whole, except the things which he did not
+himself care to reprint, can be obtained now in one volume; but the
+print is not to be recommended to aged or weakly sight.</p>
+
+<p>Sydney Smith had no false modesty, and in not a few letters to Jeffrey
+he speaks of his own contributions to the <i>Edinburgh</i> with the greatest
+freedom, combating and quite refusing to accept his editor's suggestion
+as to their flippancy and fantasticality, professing with much frankness
+that this is the way he can write and no other, and more than once
+telling Jeffrey that whatever they may think in solemn Scotland, his,
+Sydney's,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">{85}</a></span> articles are a great deal more read in England and elsewhere
+than any others. Although there are maxims to the contrary effect, the
+judgment of a clever man, not very young and tolerably familiar with the
+world, on his own work, is very seldom far wrong. I should say myself
+that, putting aside the historic estimate, Sydney Smith's articles are
+by far the most interesting nowadays of those contributed by any one
+before the days of Macaulay, who began just as Sydney ceased to write
+anonymously in 1827, on his Bristol appointment. They are also by far
+the most distinct and original. Jeffrey, Brougham, and the rest wrote,
+for the most part, very much after the fashion of the ancients: if a
+very few changes were made for date, passages of Jeffrey's criticism
+might almost be passages of Dryden, certainly passages of the better
+critics of the eighteenth century, as far as manner goes. There is
+nobody at all like Sydney Smith before him in England, for Swift's style
+is wholly different. To begin with, Sydney had a strong prejudice in
+favour of writing very short articles, and a horror of reading long
+ones&mdash;the latter being perhaps less peculiar to himself than the former.
+Then he never made the slightest pretence at systematic or dogmatic
+criticism of anything whatever. In literature proper he seems indeed to
+have had no particular principles, and I cannot say that he had very
+good taste. He commits the almost unpardonable sin of not merely
+blaspheming Madame<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">{86}</a></span> de Sévigné, but preferring to her that second-rate
+leader-writer in petticoats, Madame de Staël. On the other hand, if he
+had no literary principles, he had (except in rare cases where politics
+came in, and not often then) few literary prejudices, and his happily
+incorrigible good sense and good humour were proof against the frequent
+bias of his associates. Though he could not have been very sensible,
+from what he himself says, of their highest qualities, he championed
+Scott's novels incessantly against the Whigs and prigs of Holland House.
+He gives a most well-timed warning to Jeffrey that the constant
+running-down of Wordsworth had very much the look of persecution, though
+with his usual frankness he avows that he has not read the particular
+article in question, because the subject is "quite uninteresting to
+him." I think he would, if driven hard, have admitted with equal
+frankness that poetry, merely as poetry, was generally uninteresting.
+Still he had so many interests of various kinds, that few books failed
+to appeal to one or the other, and he, in his turn, has seldom failed to
+give a lively if not a very exact or critical account of his subject.
+But it is in his way of giving this account that the peculiarity,
+glanced at above as making a parallel between him and Voltaire, appears.
+It is, I have said, almost original, and what is more, endless as has
+been the periodical writing of the last eighty years, and sedulously as
+later writers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">{87}</a></span> have imitated earlier, I do not know that it has ever
+been successfully copied. It consists in giving rapid and apparently
+business-like summaries, packed, with apparent negligence and real art,
+full of the flashes of wit so often noticed and to be noticed. Such are,
+in the article on "The Island of Ceylon," the honey-bird "into whose
+body the soul of a common informer seems to have migrated," and "the
+chaplain of the garrison, all in black, the Rev. Mr. Somebody or other
+whose name we have forgotten," the discovery of whose body in a serpent
+his ruthless clerical brother pronounces to be "the best history of the
+kind he remembers." Very likely there may be people who can read this,
+even the "all in black," without laughing, and among them I should
+suppose must be the somebody or other, whose name we too have forgotten,
+who is said to have imagined that he had more than parried Sydney's
+unforgiven jest about the joke and the surgical operation, by retorting,
+"Yes! an <i>English</i> joke." I have always wept to think that Sydney did
+not live to hear this retort. The classical places for this kind of
+summary work are the article just named on Ceylon, and that on Waterton.
+But the most inimitable single example, if it is not too shocking to
+this very proper age, is the argument of Mat Lewis's tragedy: "Ottilia
+becomes quite furious from the conviction that Cæsario has been sleeping
+with a second lady called Estella; whereas he has really been sleeping
+with a third lady called Amelrosa."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">{88}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Among the most important of these essays are the two famous ones on
+Methodism and on Indian missions, which gave far more offence to the
+religious public of evangelical persuasion than all Sydney's jokes on
+bishops, or his arguments for Catholic emancipation, and which (owing to
+the strong influence which then, as now, Nonconformists possessed in the
+counsels of the Liberal party) probably had as much to do as anything
+else with the reluctance of the Whig leaders, when they came into power,
+to give their friend the highest ecclesiastical preferment. These
+subjects are rather difficult to treat in a general literary essay, and
+it may perhaps be admitted that here, as in dealing with poetry and
+other subjects of the more transcendental kind, Sydney showed a touch of
+Philistinism, and a distinct inability to comprehend exaltation of
+sentiment and thought. But the general sense is admirably sound and
+perfectly orthodox; and the way in which so apparently light and
+careless a writer has laboriously supported every one of his charges,
+and almost every one of his flings, with chapter and verse from the
+writings of the incriminated societies, is very remarkable. Nor can it,
+I think, be doubted that the publication, in so widely read a
+periodical, of the nauseous follies of speech in which well-meaning
+persons indulged, had something to do with the gradual disuse of a style
+than which nothing could be more prejudicial to religion, for the simple
+reason that nothing else could make religion ridiculous.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">{89}</a></span> The medicine
+did not of course operate at once, and silly people still write silly
+things. But I hardly think that the Wesleyan body or the Church
+Missionary Society would now officially publish such stuff as the
+passage about Brother Carey, who, while in the actual paroxysm of
+sea-sickness, was "wonderfully comforted by the contemplation of the
+goodness of God," or that about Brother Ward "in design clasping to his
+bosom" the magnanimous Captain Wickes, who subsequently "seemed very
+low," when a French privateer was in sight. Jeffrey was, it seems, a
+little afraid of these well-deserved exposures, which, from the
+necessity of abundant quotation, are an exception to the general
+shortness of Sydney's articles. Sydney's interest in certain subjects
+led him constantly to take up fresh books on them; and thus a series of
+series might be made out of his papers, with some advantage to the
+reader perhaps, if a new edition of his works were undertaken. The chief
+of such subjects is America, in dealing with which he pleased the
+Americans by descanting on their gradual emancipation from English
+prejudices and abuses, but infuriated them by constant denunciations of
+slavery, and by laughing at their lack of literature and cultivation.
+With India he also dealt often, his brothers' connection with it giving
+him an interest therein. Prisons were another favourite subject, though,
+in his zeal for making them uncomfortable, he committed himself to one
+really atrocious suggestion&mdash;that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">{90}</a></span> of dark cells for long periods of
+time. It is odd that the same person should make such a truly diabolical
+proposal, and yet be in a perpetual state of humanitarian rage about
+man-traps and spring-guns, which were certainly milder engines of
+torture. It is odd, too, that Sydney, who was never tired of arguing
+that prisons ought to be made uncomfortable, because nobody need go
+there unless he chose, should have been furiously wroth with poor Mr.
+Justice Best for suggesting much the same thing of spring-guns. The
+greatest political triumph of his manner is to be found no doubt in the
+article "Bentham on Fallacies," in which the unreadable diatribes of the
+apostle of utilitarianism are somehow spirited and crisped up into a
+series of brilliant arguments, and the whole is crowned by the famous
+"Noodle's Oration," the summary and storehouse of all that ever has been
+or can be said on the Liberal side in the lighter manner. It has not
+lost its point even from the fact that Noodle has now for a long time
+changed his party, and has elaborated for himself, after his manner, a
+similar stock of platitudes and absurdities in favour of the very things
+for which Sydney was fighting.</p>
+
+<p>The qualities of these articles appear equally in the miscellaneous
+essays, in the speeches, and even in the sermons, though Sydney Smith,
+unlike Sterne, never condescended to buffoonery or theatrical tricks in
+the pulpit. In <i>Peter Plymley's Letters</i> they appear concentrated and
+acidulated:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">{91}</a></span> in the <i>Letters to Archdeacon Singleton</i>, in the
+<i>Repudiation Letters</i>, and the <i>Letters on Railways</i> which date from his
+very last days, concentrated and mellowed. More than one good judge has
+been of the opinion that Sydney's powers increased to the very end of
+his life, and it is not surprising that this should have been the case.
+Although he did plenty of work in his time, the literary part of it was
+never of an exhausting nature. Though one of the most original of
+commentators, he was a commentator pure and simple, and found, but did
+not supply, his matter. Thus there was no danger of running dry, and as
+his happiest style was not indignation but good-natured raillery, his
+increasing prosperity, not chequered, till quite the close of his life,
+by any serious bodily ailment, put him more and more in the right
+atmosphere and temper for indulging his genius. <i>Plymley</i>, though very
+amusing, and, except in the Canning matter above referred to, not
+glaringly unfair for a political lampoon, is distinctly acrimonious, and
+almost (as "almost" as Sydney could be) ill-tempered. It is possible to
+read between the lines that the writer is furious at his party being out
+of office, and is much more angry with Mr. Perceval for having the ear
+of the country than for being a respectable nonentity. The main
+argument, moreover, is bad in itself, and was refuted by facts. Sydney
+pretends to be, as his friend Jeffrey really was, in mortal terror lest
+the French<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">{92}</a></span> should invade England, and, joined by rebellious Irishmen
+and wrathful Catholics generally, produce an English revolution. The
+Tories replied, "We will take good care that the French shall <i>not</i>
+land, and that Irishmen shall <i>not</i> rise." And they did take the said
+good care, and they beat the Frenchmen thorough and thorough while
+Sydney and his friends were pointing their epigrams. Therefore, though
+much of the contention is unanswerable enough, the thing is doubtfully
+successful as a whole. In the <i>Letters to Archdeacon Singleton</i> the tone
+is almost uniformly good-humoured, and the argument, whether quite
+consistent or not in the particular speaker's mouth, is absolutely
+sound, and has been practically admitted since by almost all the best
+friends of the Church. Here occurs that inimitable passage before
+referred to.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I met the other day, in an old Dutch chronicle, with a passage so
+apposite to this subject, that, though it is somewhat too light
+for the occasion, I cannot abstain from quoting it. There was a
+great meeting of all the clergy at Dordrecht, and the chronicler
+thus describes it, which I give in the language of the
+translation: "And there was great store of Bishops in the town,
+in their robes goodly to behold, and all the great men of the
+State were there, and folks poured in in boats on the Meuse, the
+Merse, the Rhine, and the Linge, coming from the Isle of
+Beverlandt and Isselmond, and from all quarters in the Bailiwick
+of Dort; Arminians and Gomarists, with the friends of John
+Barneveldt and of Hugh Grote. And before my Lords the Bishops,
+Simon of Gloucester, who was a Bishop in those parts, disputed
+with Vorstius and Leoline the Monk, and many texts of Scripture
+were bandied to and fro; and when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">{93}</a></span> this was done, and many
+propositions made, and it waxed towards twelve of the clock, my
+Lords the Bishops prepared to set them down to a fair repast, in
+which was great store of good things&mdash;and among the rest a
+roasted peacock, having in lieu of a tail the arms and banners of
+the Archbishop, which was a goodly sight to all who favoured the
+Church&mdash;and then the Archbishop would say a grace, as was seemly
+to do, he being a very holy man; but ere he had finished, a great
+mob of townspeople and folks from the country, who were gathered
+under the windows, cried out <i>Bread! bread!</i> for there was a
+great famine, and wheat had risen to three times the ordinary
+price of the <i>sleich</i>; and when they had done crying <i>Bread!
+bread!</i> they called out <i>No Bishops!</i> and began to cast up stones
+at the windows. Whereat my Lords the Bishops were in a great
+fright, and cast their dinner out of the window to appease the
+mob, and so the men of that town were well pleased, and did
+devour the meats with a great appetite; and then you might have
+seen my Lords standing with empty plates, and looking wistfully
+at each other, till Simon of Gloucester, he who disputed with
+Leoline the Monk, stood up among them and said, <i>Good my Lords,
+is it your pleasure to stand here fasting, and that those who
+count lower in the Church than you do should feast and fluster?
+Let us order to us the dinner of the Deans and Canons which is
+making ready for them in the chamber below.</i> And this speech of
+Simon of Gloucester pleased the Bishops much; and so they sent
+for the host, one William of Ypres, and told him it was for the
+public good, and he, much fearing the Bishops, brought them the
+dinner of the Deans and Canons; and so the Deans and Canons went
+away without dinner, and were pelted by the men of the town,
+because they had not put any meat out of the windows like the
+Bishops; and when the Count came to hear of it, he said it was a
+pleasant conceit, <i>and that the Bishops were right cunning men,
+and had ding'd the Canons well</i>."</p></div>
+
+<p>Even in the Singleton Letters, however, there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">{94}</a></span> are some little lapses of
+the same kind (worse, indeed, because these letters were signed) as the
+attack on Canning in the Plymley Letters. Sydney Smith exclaiming
+against "derision and persiflage, the great principle by which the world
+is now governed," is again edifying. But in truth Sydney never had the
+weakness (for I have known it called a weakness) of looking too
+carefully to see what the enemy's advocate is going to say. Take even
+the famous, the immortal apologue of Mrs. Partington. It covered, we are
+usually told, the Upper House with ridicule, and did as much as anything
+else to carry the Reform Bill. And yet, though it is a watery apologue,
+it will not hold water for a moment. The implied conclusion is, that the
+Atlantic beat Mrs. Partington. Did it? It made, no doubt, a great mess
+in her house, it put her to flight, it put her to shame. But when I was
+last at Sidmouth the line of high-water mark was, I believe, much what
+it was before the great storm of 1824, and though the particular Mrs.
+Partington had no doubt been gathered to her fathers, the Mrs.
+Partington of the day was, equally without doubt, living very
+comfortably in the house which the Atlantic had threatened to swallow
+up.</p>
+
+<p>It was, however, perhaps part of Sydney's strength that he never cared
+to consider too curiously, or on too many sides. Besides his inimitable
+felicity of expression (the Singleton Letters are simply crammed with
+epigram), he had the sturdiest<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">{95}</a></span> possible common sense and the liveliest
+possible humour. I have known his claim to the title of "humourist"
+called in question by precisians: nobody could deny him the title of
+good-humourist. Except that the sentimental side of Toryism would never
+have appealed to him, it was chiefly an accident of time that he was a
+polemical Liberal. He would always and naturally have been on the side
+opposite to that on which most of the fools were. When he came into the
+world, as the straitest Tory will admit, there were in that world a
+great many abuses as they are called, that is to say, a great many
+things which, once useful and excellent, had either decayed into
+positive nuisances, or dried up into neutral and harmless but
+obstructive rubbish. There were also many silly and some mischievous
+people, as well as some wise and useful ones, who defended the abuses.
+Sydney Smith was an ideal soldier of reform for his time, and in his
+way. He was not extraordinarily long-sighted&mdash;indeed (as his famous and
+constantly-repeated advice to "take short views of life" shows) he had a
+distinct distrust of taking too anxious thought for political or any
+other morrows. But he had a most keen and, in many cases, a most just
+scent and sight for the immediate inconveniences and injustices of the
+day, and for the shortest and most effective ways of mending them. He
+was perhaps more destitute of romance and of reverence (though he had
+too much good taste to be positively irreverent) than<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">{96}</a></span> any man who ever
+lived. He never could have paralleled, he never could have even
+understood, Scott's feelings about the Regalia, or that ever-famous
+incident of Sir Walter's life, when returning with Jeffrey and other
+Whig friends from some public meeting, he protested against the
+innovations which, harmless or even beneficial individually and in
+themselves, would by degrees destroy every thing that made Scotland
+Scotland. I am afraid that his warmest admirers, even those of his own
+political complexion, must admit that he was, as has been said, more
+than a little of a Philistine; that he expressed, and expressed
+capitally in one way, that curious middle-class sentiment, or denial of
+sentiment, which won its first triumph in the first Reform Bill and its
+last in the Exhibition of twenty years later, which destroyed no doubt
+much that was absurd, and some things that were noxious, but which
+induced in England a reign of shoddy in politics, in philosophy, in art,
+in literature, and, when its own reign was over, left England weak and
+divided, instead of, as it had been under the reign of abuses, united
+and strong. The bombardment of Copenhagen may or may not have been a
+dreadful thing: it was at any rate better than the abandonment of
+Khartoum. Nor can Sydney any more than his friends be acquitted of
+having held the extraordinary notion that you can "rest and be thankful"
+in politics, that you can set Demos at bishops, but stave and tail him
+off<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">{97}</a></span> when he comes to canons; that you can level beautifully down to a
+certain point, and then stop levelling for ever afterwards; that because
+you can laugh Brother Ringletub out of court, laughter will be equally
+effective with Cardinal Newman; and that though it is the height of
+"anility" (a favourite word of his) to believe in a country gentleman,
+it is the height of rational religion to believe in a ten-pound
+householder.</p>
+
+<p>But however open to exception his principles may be, and that not merely
+from the point of view of highflying Toryism, his carrying out of them
+in life and in literature had the two abiding justifications of being
+infinitely amusing, and of being amusing always in thoroughly good
+temper. It is, as I have said, impossible to read Sydney Smith's <i>Life</i>,
+and still more impossible to read his letters, without liking him warmly
+and personally, without seeing that he was not only a man who liked to
+be comfortable (that is not very rare), that he was not only one who
+liked others to be comfortable (that is rarer), but one who in every
+situation in which he was thrown, did his utmost to make others as well
+as himself comfortable (which is rarest of all). If the references in
+<i>Peter Plymley</i> to Canning were unjustifiable from him, there is little
+or no reason to think that they were prompted by personal jealousy; and
+though, as has been said, he was undoubtedly sore, and unreasonably
+sore, at not receiving the preferment which he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">{98}</a></span> thought he had deserved,
+he does not seem to have been personally jealous of any man who had
+received it. The parson of Foston and Combe Florey may not have been
+(his latest biographer, admiring though he be, pathetically laments that
+he was not) a spiritually minded man. But happy beyond almost all other
+parishioners of the time were the parishioners of Combe Florey and
+Foston, though one of them did once throw a pair of scissors at his
+provoking pastor. He was a fast and affectionate friend; and though he
+was rather given to haunting rich men, he did it not only without
+servility, but without that alternative of bearishness and freaks which
+has sometimes been adopted. As a prince of talkers he might have been a
+bore to a generation which (I own I think in that perhaps single point),
+wiser than its fathers, is not so ambitious as they were to sit as a
+bucket and be pumped into. But in that infinitely happier system of
+conversation by books, which any one can enjoy as he likes and interrupt
+as he likes at his own fireside, Sydney is still a prince. There may be
+living somewhere some one who does not think so very badly of slavery,
+who is most emphatically of opinion that "the fools were right," in the
+matters of Catholic emancipation and Reform, who thinks well of public
+schools and universities, who even, though he may not like spring-guns
+much, thinks that John Jones had only himself to blame if, after ample
+warning and with no business except the business of supplying<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">{99}</a></span> a London
+poulterer with his landlord's game, he trespassed and came to the worst.
+Yet even this monster, if he happened to be possessed of the sense of
+fun and literature, (which is perhaps impossible), could not read even
+the most acrid of Sydney's political diatribes without shrieking with
+laughter, if, in his ogreish way, he were given to such violent
+demonstrations; could certainly not read the <i>Life</i> and the letters
+without admitting, in a moment of unwonted humanity, that here was a man
+who, for goodness as well as for cleverness, for sound practical wisdom
+as well as for fantastic verbal wit, has had hardly a superior and very
+few equals.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">{100}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV<br />
+<br />
+JEFFREY</h2>
+
+
+<p>"Jeffrey and I," says Christopher North in one of his more malicious
+moments, "do nothing original; it's porter's work." A tolerably
+experienced student of human nature might almost, without knowing the
+facts, guess the amount of truth contained in this fling. North, as
+North, had done nothing that the world calls original: North, as Wilson,
+had done a by no means inconsiderable quantity of such work in verse and
+prose. But Jeffrey really did underlie the accusation contained in the
+words. A great name in literature, nothing stands to his credit in
+permanent literary record but a volume (a sufficiently big one, no
+doubt<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a>) of criticisms on the work of other men; and though this
+volume is only a selection from his actual writings, no further gleaning
+could be made of any different material. Even his celebrated,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">{101}</a></span> or once
+celebrated, "Treatise on Beauty" is but a review article, worked up into
+an encyclopædia article, and dealing almost wholly with pure criticism.
+Against him, if against any one, the famous and constantly repeated gibe
+about the fellows who have failed in literature and art, falls short and
+harmless. In another of its forms, "the corruption of a poet is the
+generation of a critic," it might be more appropriate. For Jeffrey, as
+we know from his boyish letters, once thought, like almost every boy who
+is not an idiot, that he might be a poet, and scribbled verses in
+plenty. But the distinguishing feature in this case was, that he waited
+for no failure, for no public ridicule or neglect, not even for any
+private nipping of the merciful, but so seldom effective, sort, to check
+those sterile growths. The critic was sufficiently early developed in
+him to prevent the corruption of the poet from presenting itself, in its
+usual disastrous fashion, to the senses of the world. Thus he lives (for
+his political and legal renown, though not inconsiderable, is
+comparatively unimportant) as a critic pure and simple.</p>
+
+<p>His biographer, Lord Cockburn, tells us that "Francis Jeffrey, the
+greatest of British critics, was born in Edinburgh on 23d October 1773."
+It must be at the end, not the beginning, of this paper that we decide
+whether Jeffrey deserves the superlative. He seems certainly to have
+begun his critical practice very early. He was the son of a depute-clerk
+of the Court of Session, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">{102}</a></span> respectably, though not brilliantly,
+connected. His father was a great Tory, and, though it would be
+uncharitable to say that this was the reason why Jeffrey was a great
+Liberal, the two facts were probably not unconnected in the line of
+causation. Francis went to the High School when he was eight, and to the
+College at Glasgow when he was fourteen. He does not appear to have been
+a prodigy at either; but he has an almost unequalled record for early
+work of the self-undertaken kind. He seems from his boyhood to have been
+addicted to filling reams of paper, and shelves full of note-books, with
+extracts, abstracts, critical annotations, criticisms of these
+criticisms, and all manner of writing of the same kind. I believe it is
+the general experience that this kind of thing does harm in nineteen
+cases, for one in which it does good; but Jeffrey was certainly a
+striking exception to the rule, though perhaps he might not have been so
+if his producing, or at least publishing, time had not been unusually
+delayed. Indeed, his whole mental history appears to have been of a
+curiously piecemeal character; and his scrappy and self-guided education
+may have conduced to the priggishness which he showed early, and never
+entirely lost, till fame, prosperity, and the approach of old age
+mellowed it out of him. He was not sixteen when his sojourn at Glasgow
+came to an end; and, for more than two years, he seems to have been left
+to a kind of studious independence, attending only a couple of law<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">{103}</a></span>
+classes at Edinburgh University. Then his father insisted on his going
+to Oxford: a curious step, the reasons for which are anything but clear.
+For the paternal idea seems to have been that Jeffrey was to study not
+arts, but law; a study for which Oxford may present facilities now, but
+which most certainly was quite out of its way in Jeffrey's time, and
+especially in the case of a Scotch boy of ordinary freshman's age.</p>
+
+<p>It is painful to have to say that Jeffrey hated Oxford, because there
+are few instances on record in which such hatred does not show the hater
+to have been a very bad man indeed. There are, however, some special
+excuses for the little Scotchman. His college (Queen's) was not perhaps
+very happily selected; he had been sent there in the teeth of his own
+will, which was a pretty strong will; he was horrified, after the free
+selection of Scotch classes, to find a regular curriculum which he had
+to take or leave as a whole; the priggishness of Oxford was not his
+priggishness, its amusements (for he hated sport of every kind) were not
+his amusements; and, in short, there was a general incompatibility. He
+came up in September and went down in July, having done nothing except
+having, according to a not ill-natured jest, "lost the broad Scotch, but
+gained only the narrow English,"&mdash;a peculiarity which sometimes brought
+a little mild ridicule on him both from Scotchmen and Englishmen.</p>
+
+<p>Very soon after his return to Edinburgh, he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">{104}</a></span> seems to have settled down
+steadily to study for the Scotch bar, and during his studies
+distinguished himself as a member of the famous Speculative Society,
+both in essay-writing and in the debates. He was called on 16th December
+1794.</p>
+
+<p>Although there have never been very quick returns at the bar, either of
+England or Scotland, the smaller numbers of the latter might be thought
+likely to bring young men of talent earlier to the front. This
+advantage, however, appears to have been counterbalanced partly by the
+strong family interests which made a kind of aristocracy among Scotch
+lawyers, and partly by the influence of politics and of Government
+patronage. Jeffrey was, comparatively speaking, a "kinless loon"; and,
+while he was steadily resolved not to put himself forward as a candidate
+for the Tory manna of which Dundas was the Moses, his filial reverence
+long prevented him from declaring himself a very violent Whig. Indeed,
+he gave an instance of this reverence which might serve as a pretty text
+for a casuistical discussion. Henry Erskine, Dean of the Faculty of
+Advocates, was in 1796 deprived by vote of that, the most honourable
+position of the Scotch bar, for having presided at a Whig meeting.
+Jeffrey, like Gibbon, sighed as a Whig, but obeyed as a son, and stayed
+away from the poll. His days were certainly long in the land; but I am
+inclined to think that, in a parallel case, some Tories at least would
+have taken the chance of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">{105}</a></span> shorter life with less speckled honour.
+However, it is hard to quarrel with a man for obeying his parents; and
+perhaps, after all, the Whigs did not think the matter of so much
+importance as they affected to do. It is certain that Jeffrey was a
+little dashed by the slowness of his success at the bar. Towards the end
+of 1798, he set out for London with a budget of letters of introduction,
+and thoughts of settling down to literature. But the editors and
+publishers to whom he was introduced did not know what a treasure lay
+underneath the scanty surface of this Scotch advocate, and they were
+either inaccessible or repulsive. He returned to Edinburgh, and, for
+another two years, waited for fortune philosophically enough, though
+with lingering thoughts of England, and growing ones of India. It was
+just at the turn of the century, that his fortunes began, in various
+ways, also to take a turn. For some years, though a person by no means
+given to miscellaneous acquaintances, he had been slowly forming the
+remarkable circle of friends from whose combined brains was soon to
+start the <i>Edinburgh Review</i>. He fell in love, and married his second
+cousin, Catherine Wilson, on 1st November 1801&mdash;a bold and by no means
+canny step, for his father was ill-off, the bride was tocherless, and he
+says that he had never earned a hundred pounds a year in fees. They did
+not, however, launch out greatly, and their house in Buccleuch Place
+(not the least famous locality in literature) was furnished<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">{106}</a></span> on a scale
+which some modern colleges, conducted on the principles of enforced
+economy, would think Spartan for an undergraduate. Shortly afterwards,
+and very little before the appearance of the Blue and Yellow, Jeffrey
+made another innovation, which was perhaps not less profitable to him,
+by establishing a practice in ecclesiastical causes; though he met with
+a professional check in his rejection, on party principles, for the
+so-called collectorship, a kind of reporter's post of some emolument and
+not inconsiderable distinction.</p>
+
+<p>The story of the <i>Edinburgh Review</i> and its foundation has been very
+often told on the humorous, if not exactly historical, authority of
+Sydney Smith. It is unnecessary to repeat it. It is undoubted that the
+idea was Sydney's. It is equally undoubted that, but for Jeffrey, the
+said idea might never have taken form at all, and would never have
+retained any form for more than a few months. It was only Jeffrey's
+long-established habit of critical writing, the untiring energy into
+which he whipped up his no doubt gifted but quite untrained
+contributors, and the skill which he almost at once developed in editing
+proper,&mdash;that is to say in selecting, arranging, adapting, and, even to
+some extent, re-writing contributions&mdash;which secured success. Very
+different opinions have been expressed at different times on the
+intrinsic merits of this celebrated production; and perhaps, on the
+whole, the principal feeling of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">{107}</a></span> explorers into the long and dusty
+ranges of its early volumes, has been one of disappointment. I believe
+myself that, in similar cases, a similar result is very common indeed,
+and that it is due to the operation of two familiar fallacies. The one
+is the delusion as to the products of former times being necessarily
+better than those of the present; a delusion which is not the less
+deluding because of its counterpart, the delusion about progress. The
+other is a more peculiar and subtle one. I shall not go so far as a very
+experienced journalist who once said to me commiseratingly, "My good
+sir, I won't exactly say that literary merit hurts a newspaper." But
+there is no doubt that all the great successes of journalism, for the
+last hundred years, have been much more due to the fact of the new
+venture being new, of its supplying something that the public wanted and
+had not got, than to the fact of the supply being extraordinarily good
+in kind. In nearly every case, the intrinsic merit has improved as the
+thing went on, but it has ceased to be a novel merit. Nothing would be
+easier than to show that the early <i>Edinburgh</i> articles were very far
+from perfect. Of Jeffrey we shall speak presently, and there is no doubt
+that Sydney at his best was, and is always, delightful. But the
+blundering bluster of Brougham, the solemn ineffectiveness of Horner (of
+whom I can never think without also thinking of Scott's delightful
+Shandean jest on him), the respectable erudition of the Scotch<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">{108}</a></span>
+professors, cannot for one single moment be compared with the work
+which, in Jeffrey's own later days, in those of Macvey Napier, and in
+the earlier ones of Empson, was contributed by Hazlitt, by Carlyle, by
+Stephen, and, above all, by Macaulay. The <i>Review</i> never had any one who
+could emulate the ornateness of De Quincey or Wilson, the pure and
+perfect English of Southey, or the inimitable insolence, so polished and
+so intangible, of Lockhart. But it may at least claim that it led the
+way, and that the very men who attacked its principles and surpassed its
+practice had, in some cases, been actually trained in its school, and
+were in all, imitating and following its model. To analyse, with
+chemical exactness, the constituents of a literary novelty is never
+easy, if it is ever possible. But some of the contrasts between the
+style of criticism most prevalent at the time, and the style of the new
+venture are obvious and important. The older rivals of the <i>Edinburgh</i>
+maintained for the most part a decent and amiable impartiality; the
+<i>Edinburgh</i>, whatever it pretended to be, was violently partisan,
+unhesitatingly personal, and more inclined to find fault, the more
+distinguished the subject was. The reviews of the time had got into the
+hands either of gentlemen and ladies who were happy to be thought
+literary, and only too glad to write for nothing, or else into those of
+the lowest booksellers' hacks, who praised or blamed according to
+orders, wrote without interest and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">{109}</a></span> without vigour, and were quite
+content to earn the smallest pittance. The <i>Edinburgh</i> started from the
+first on the principle that its contributors should be paid, and paid
+well, whether they liked it or not, thus establishing at once an
+inducement to do well and a check on personal eccentricity and
+irresponsibility; while whatever partisanship there might be in its
+pages, there was at any rate no mere literary puffery.</p>
+
+<p>From being, but for his private studies, rather an idle person, Jeffrey
+became an extremely busy one. The <i>Review</i> gave him not a little
+occupation, and his practice increased rapidly. In 1803 the institution,
+at Scott's suggestion, of the famous Friday Club, in which, for the
+greater part of the first half of this century, the best men in
+Edinburgh, Johnstone and Maxwell, Whig and Tory alike, met in peaceable
+conviviality, did a good deal to console Jeffrey, who was now as much
+given to company as he had been in his early youth to solitude, for the
+partial breaking up of the circle of friends&mdash;Allen, Horner, Smith,
+Brougham, Lord Webb Seymour&mdash;in which he had previously mixed. In the
+same year he became a volunteer, an act of patriotism the more
+creditable, that he seems to have been sincerely convinced of the
+probability of an invasion, and of the certainty of its success if it
+occurred. But I have no room here for anything but a rapid review of the
+not very numerous or striking events of his life. Soon, however, after
+the date last mentioned, he met with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">{110}</a></span> two afflictions peculiarly trying
+to a man whose domestic affections were unusually strong. These were the
+deaths of his favourite sister in May 1804, and of his wife in October
+1805. The last blow drove him nearly to despair; and the extreme and
+open-mouthed "sensibility" of his private letters, on this and similar
+occasions, is very valuable as an index of character, oddly as it
+contrasts, in the vulgar estimate, with the supposed cynicism and
+savagery of the critic. In yet another year occurred the somewhat
+ludicrous duel, or beginning of a duel, with Moore, in which several
+police constables did perform the friendly office which Mr. Winkle
+vainly deprecated, and in which Jeffrey's, not Moore's, pistol was
+discovered to be leadless. There is a sentence in a letter of Jeffrey's
+concerning the thing which is characteristic and amusing: "I am glad to
+have gone through this scene, both because it satisfies me that my
+nerves are good enough to enable me to act in conformity to my notions
+of propriety without any suffering, and because it also assures me that
+I am really as little in love with life as I have been for some time in
+the habit of professing." It is needless to say that this was an example
+of the excellence of beginning with a little aversion, for Jeffrey and
+Moore fraternised immediately afterwards and remained friends for life.
+The quarrel, or half quarrel, with Scott as to the review of "Marmion,"
+the planning and producing of the <i>Quarterly Review, English Bards<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">{111}</a></span> and
+Scotch Reviewers</i>, not a few other events of the same kind, must be
+passed over rapidly. About six years after the death of his first wife,
+Jeffrey met, and fell in love with, a certain Miss Charlotte Wilkes,
+great-niece of the patriot, and niece of a New York banker, and of a
+Monsieur and Madame Simond, who were travelling in Europe. He married
+her two years later, having gone through the very respectable probation
+of crossing and re-crossing the Atlantic (he was a very bad sailor) in a
+sailing ship, in winter, and in time of war, to fetch his bride. Nor had
+he long been married before he took the celebrated country house of
+Craigcrook, where, for more than thirty years, he spent all the spare
+time of an exceedingly happy life. Then we may jump some fifteen years
+to the great Reform contest which gave Jeffrey the reward, such as it
+was, of his long constancy in opposition, in the shape of the Lord
+Advocateship. He was not always successful as a debater; but he had the
+opportunity of adding a third reputation to those which he had already
+gained in literature and in law. He had the historical duty of piloting
+the Scotch Reform Bill through Parliament, and he had the, in his case,
+pleasurable and honourable pain of taking the official steps in
+Parliament necessitated by the mental incapacity of Sir Walter Scott.
+Early in 1834 he was provided for by promotion to the Scotch Bench. He
+had five years before, on being appointed Dean of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">{112}</a></span> Faculty, given up the
+editorship of the <i>Review</i>, which he had held for seven-and-twenty
+years. For some time previous to his resignation, his own contributions,
+which in early days had run up to half a dozen in a single number, and
+had averaged two or three for more than twenty years, had become more
+and more intermittent. After that resignation he contributed two or
+three articles at very long intervals. He was perhaps more lavish of
+advice than he need have been to Macvey Napier, and after Napier's death
+it passed into the control of his own son-in-law, Empson. Long, however,
+before the reins passed from his own hands, a rival more galling if less
+formidable than the <i>Quarterly</i> had arisen in the shape of <i>Blackwood's
+Magazine</i>. The more ponderous and stately publication always affected,
+to some extent, to ignore its audacious junior; and Lord Cockburn
+(perhaps instigated not more by prudence than by regard for Lockhart and
+Wilson, both of whom were living) passes over in complete silence the
+establishment of the magazine, the publication of the Chaldee
+manuscript, and the still greater hubbub which arose around the supposed
+attacks of Lockhart on Playfair, and the <i>Edinburgh</i> reviewers
+generally, with regard to their religious opinions. How deep the
+feelings really excited were, may be seen from a letter of Jeffrey's,
+published, not by Cockburn, but by Wilson's daughter in the life of her
+father. In this Jeffrey practically<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">{113}</a></span> drums out a new and certainly most
+promising recruit for his supposed share in the business, and inveighs
+in the most passionate terms against the imputation. It is undesirable
+to enter at length into any such matters here. It need only be said that
+Allen, one of the founders of the <i>Edinburgh</i>, and always a kind of
+standing counsel to it, is now acknowledged to have been something
+uncommonly like an atheist, that Sydney Smith (as I believe most
+unjustly) was often, and is sometimes still, regarded as standing
+towards his profession very much in the attitude of a French <i>abbé</i> of
+the eighteenth century, that almost the whole staff of the <i>Review</i>,
+including Jeffrey, had, as every Edinburgh man of position knew,
+belonged to the so-called Academy of Physics, the first principle of
+which was that only three facts (the words are Lord Cockburn's) were to
+be admitted without proof: (1) Mind exists; (2) matter exists; (3) every
+change indicates a cause. Nowadays the most orthodox of metaphysicians
+would admit that this limitation of position by no means implied
+atheism. But seventy years ago it would have been the exception to find
+an orthodox metaphysician who did admit it; and Lockhart, or rather
+Baron von Lauerwinkel, was perfectly justified in taking the view which
+ordinary opinion took.</p>
+
+<p>These jars, however, were long over when Jeffrey became Lord Jeffrey,
+and subsided upon the placid bench. He lived sixteen years longer,
+alternating<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">{114}</a></span> between Edinburgh, Craigcrook, and divers houses which he
+hired from time to time, on Loch Lomond, on the Clyde, and latterly at
+some English watering-places in the west. His health was not
+particularly good, though hardly worse than any man who lives to nearly
+eighty, with constant sedentary and few out-of-door occupations, and
+with a cheerful devotion to the good things of this life, must expect.
+And he was on the whole singularly happy, being passionately devoted to
+his wife, his daughter, and his grandchildren; possessing ample means,
+and making a cheerful and sensible use of them; seeing the increasing
+triumph of the political principles to which he had attached himself;
+knowing that he was regarded by friends and foes alike, as the chief
+living English representative of an important branch of literature; and
+retaining to the last an almost unparalleled juvenility of tastes and
+interests. His letters to Dickens are well known, and, though I should
+be very sorry to stake his critical reputation upon them, there could
+not be better documents for his vivid enjoyment of life. He died on 26th
+January 1850, in his seventy-seventh year, having been in harness almost
+to the very last. He had written a letter the day before to Empson,
+describing one of those curious waking visions known to all sick folk,
+in which there had appeared part of a proof-sheet of a new edition of
+the Apocrypha, and a new political paper filled with discussions on Free
+Trade.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">{115}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In reading Jeffrey's work<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> nowadays, the critical reader finds it
+considerably more difficult to gain and keep the author's own point of
+view than in the case of any other great English critic. With Hazlitt,
+with Coleridge, with Wilson, with Carlyle, with Macaulay, we very soon
+fall into step, so to speak, with our author. If we cannot exactly
+prophesy what he will say on any given subject, we can make a pretty
+shrewd guess at it; and when, as it seems to us, he stumbles and shies,
+we have a sort of feeling beforehand that he is going to do it, and a
+decided inkling of the reason. But my own experience is, that a modern
+reader of Jeffrey, who takes him systematically, and endeavours to trace
+cause and effect in him, is liable to be constantly thrown out before he
+finds the secret. For Jeffrey, in the most puzzling way, lies between
+the ancients and the moderns in matter of criticism, and we never quite
+know where to have him. It is ten to one, for instance, that the novice
+approaches him with the idea that he is a "classic" of the old rock.
+Imagine the said novice's confusion, when he finds Jeffrey not merely
+exalting Shakespeare to the skies, but warmly praising Elizabethan
+poetry in general, anticipating<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">{116}</a></span> Mr. Matthew Arnold almost literally, in
+the estimate of Dryden and Pope as classics of our prose, and hailing
+with tears of joy the herald of the emancipation in Cowper. Surely our
+novice may be excused if, despite certain misgiving memories of such
+reviews as that of "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," he concludes that
+Jeffrey has been maligned, and that he was really a Romantic before
+Romanticism. Unhappy novice! he will find his new conclusion not less
+rapidly and more completely staggered than his old. Indeed, until the
+clue is once gained, Jeffrey must appear to be one of the most
+incomprehensibly inconsistent of writers and of critics. On one page he
+declares that Campbell's extracts from Chamberlayne's "Pharonnida" have
+made him "quite impatient for an opportunity of perusing the whole
+poem,"&mdash;Romantic surely, quite Romantic. "The tameness and poorness of
+the serious style of Addison and Swift,"&mdash;Romantic again, quite
+Romantic. Yet when we come to Jeffrey's own contemporaries, he
+constantly appears as much bewigged and befogged with pseudo-classicism
+as M. de Jouy himself. He commits himself, in the year of grace 1829, to
+the statement that "the rich melodies of Keats and Shelley, and the
+fantastical emphasis of Wordsworth are melting fast from the field of
+our vision," while he contrasts with this "rapid withering of the
+laurel" the "comparative absence of marks of decay" on Rogers and
+Campbell. The poets of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">{117}</a></span> his own time whom he praises most heartily, and
+with least reserve, are Campbell and Crabbe; and he is quite as
+enthusiastic over "Theodric" and "Gertrude" as over the two great
+war-pieces of the same author, which are worth a hundred "Gertrudes" and
+about ten thousand "Theodrics." Reviewing Scott, not merely when they
+were personal friends (they were always that), but when Scott was a
+contributor to the <i>Edinburgh</i>, and giving general praise to "The Lay,"
+he glances with an unmistakable meaning at the "dignity of the subject,"
+regrets the "imitation and antiquarian researches," and criticises the
+versification in a way which shows that he had not in the least grasped
+its scheme. It is hardly necessary to quote his well-known attacks on
+Wordsworth; but, though I am myself anything but a Wordsworthian, and
+would willingly give up to chaos and old night nineteen-twentieths of
+the "extremely valooable chains of thought" which the good man used to
+forge, it is in the first place quite clear that the twentieth ought to
+have saved him from Jeffrey's claws; in the second, that the critic
+constantly selects the wrong things as well as the right for
+condemnation and ridicule; and in the third, that he would have praised,
+or at any rate not blamed, in another, the very things which he blames
+in Wordsworth. Even his praise of Crabbe, excessive as it may now
+appear, is diversified by curious patches of blame which seem to me at
+any rate,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">{118}</a></span> singularly uncritical. There are, for instance, a very great
+many worse jests in poetry than,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh, had he learnt to make the wig he wears!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;which Jeffrey pronounces a misplaced piece of buffoonery. I cannot
+help thinking that if Campbell instead of Southey had written the lines,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">To see brute nature scorn him and renounce<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Its homage to the human form divine,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Jeffrey would, to say the least, not have hinted that they were "little
+better than drivelling." But I do not think that when Jeffrey wrote
+these things, or when he actually perpetrated such almost unforgivable
+phrases as "stuff about dancing daffodils," he was speaking away from
+his sincere conviction. On the contrary, though partisanship may
+frequently have determined the suppression or the utterance, the
+emphasising or the softening, of his opinions, I do not think that he
+ever said anything but what he sincerely thought. The problem,
+therefore, is to discover and define, if possible, the critical
+standpoint of a man whose judgment was at once so acute and so purblind;
+who could write the admirable surveys of English poetry contained in the
+essays on Mme. de Staël and Campbell, and yet be guilty of the stuff (we
+thank him for the word) about the dancing daffodils; who could talk of
+"the splendid strains of Moore" (though I have myself a relatively high
+opinion of Moore) and pronounce "The White Doe of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">{119}</a></span> Rylstone" (though I
+am not very fond of that animal as a whole) "the very worst poem he ever
+saw printed in a quarto volume"; who could really appreciate parts even
+of Wordsworth himself, and yet sneer at the very finest passages of the
+poems he partly admired. It is unnecessary to multiply inconsistencies,
+because the reader who does not want the trouble of reading Jeffrey must
+be content to take them for granted, and the reader who does read
+Jeffrey will discover them in plenty for himself. But they are not
+limited, it should be said, to purely literary criticism; and they
+appear, if not quite so strongly, in his estimates of personal
+character, and even in his purely political arguments.</p>
+
+<p>The explanation, as far as there is any, (and perhaps such explanations,
+as Hume says of another matter, only push ignorance a stage farther
+back), seems to me to lie in what I can only call the Gallicanism of
+Jeffrey's mind and character. As Horace Walpole has been pronounced the
+most French of Englishmen, so may Francis Jeffrey be pronounced the most
+French of Scotchmen. The reader of his letters, no less than the reader
+of his essays, constantly comes across the most curious and multiform
+instances of this Frenchness. The early priggishness is French; the
+effusive domestic affection is French; the antipathy to dogmatic
+theology, combined with general recognition of the Supreme Being, is
+French; the talk (I had almost said the chatter) about virtue and
+sympathy,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">{120}</a></span> and so forth, is French; the Whig recognition of the rights
+of man, joined to a kind of bureaucratical distrust and terror of the
+common people (a combination almost unknown in England), is French.
+Everybody remembers the ingenious argument in <i>Peter Simple</i> that the
+French were quite as brave as the English, indeed more so, but that they
+were extraordinarily ticklish. Jeffrey, we have seen, was very far from
+being a coward, but he was very ticklish indeed. His private letters
+throw the most curious light possible on the secret, as far as he was
+concerned, of the earlier Whig opposition to the war, and of the later
+Whig advocacy of reform. Jeffrey by no means thought the cause of the
+Revolution divine, like the Friends of Liberty, or admired Napoleon like
+Hazlitt, or believed in the inherent right of Manchester and Birmingham
+to representation like the zealots of 1830. But he was always dreadfully
+afraid of invasion in the first place, and of popular insurrection in
+the second; and he wanted peace and reform to calm his fears. As a young
+man he was, with a lack of confidence in his countrymen probably
+unparalleled in a Scotchman, sure that a French corporal's guard might
+march from end to end of Scotland, and a French privateer's boat's crew
+carry off "the fattest cattle and the fairest women" (these are his very
+words) "of any Scotch seaboard county." The famous, or infamous,
+Cevallos article&mdash;an ungenerous and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">{121}</a></span> pusillanimous attack on the Spanish
+patriots, which practically founded the <i>Quarterly Review</i>, by finally
+disgusting all Tories and many Whigs with the <i>Edinburgh</i>&mdash;was, it
+seems, prompted merely by the conviction that the Spanish cause was
+hopeless, and that maintaining it, or assisting it, must lead to mere
+useless bloodshed. He felt profoundly the crime of Napoleon's rule; but
+he thought Napoleon unconquerable, and so did his best to prevent him
+being conquered. He was sure that the multitude would revolt if reform
+was not granted; and he was, therefore, eager for reform. Later, he got
+into his head the oddest crotchet of all his life, which was that a
+Conservative government, with a sort of approval from the people
+generally, and especially from the English peasantry, would scheme for a
+<i>coup d'état</i>, and (his own words again) "make mincemeat of their
+opponents in a single year." He may be said almost to have left the
+world in a state of despair over the probable results of the Revolutions
+of 1848-49; and it is impossible to guess what would have happened to
+him if he had survived to witness the Second of December. Never was
+there such a case, at least among Englishmen, of timorous pugnacity and
+plucky pessimism. But it would be by no means difficult to parallel the
+temperament in France; and, indeed, the comparative frequency of it
+there, may be thought to be no small cause of the political and military
+disasters of the country.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">{122}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In literature, and especially in criticism, Jeffrey's characteristics
+were still more decidedly and unquestionably French. He came into the
+world almost too soon to feel the German impulse, even if he had been
+disposed to feel it. But, as a matter of fact, he was not at all
+disposed. The faults of taste of the German Romantic School, its
+alternate homeliness and extravagance, its abuse of the supernatural,
+its undoubted offences against order and proportion, scandalised him
+only a little less than they would have scandalised Voltaire and did
+scandalise the later Voltairians. Jeffrey was perfectly prepared to be
+Romantic up to a certain point,&mdash;the point which he had himself reached
+in his early course of independent reading and criticism. He was even a
+little inclined to sympathise with the reverend Mr. Bowles on the great
+question whether Pope was a poet; and, as I have said, he uses, about
+the older English literature, phrases which might almost satisfy a
+fanatic of the school of Hazlitt or of Lamb. He is, if anything, rather
+too severe on French as compared with English drama. Yet, when he comes
+to his own contemporaries, and sometimes even in reference to earlier
+writers, we find him slipping into those purely arbitrary severities of
+condemnation, those capricious stigmatisings of this as improper, and
+that as vulgar, and the other as unbecoming, which are the
+characteristics of the pseudo-correct and pseudo-classical school of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">{123}</a></span>
+criticism. He was a great admirer of Cowper, and yet he is shocked by
+Cowper's use, in his translation of Homer, of the phrases, "to entreat
+Achilles to a calm" (evidently he had forgotten Shakespeare's "pursue
+him and entreat him to a peace"), "this wrangler here," "like a fellow
+of no worth." He was certainly not likely to be unjust to Charles James
+Fox. So he is unhappy, rather than contemptuous, over such excellent
+phrases as "swearing away the lives," "crying injustice," "fond of
+ill-treating." These appear to Mr. Aristarchus Jeffrey too "homely and
+familiar," too "low and vapid"; while a harmless and rather agreeable
+Shakespearian parallel of Fox's seems to him downright impropriety. The
+fun of the thing is that the passage turns on the well-known misuse of
+"flat burglary"; and if Jeffrey had had a little more sense of humour
+(his deficiency in which, for all his keen wit, is another Gallic note
+in him), he must have seen that the words were ludicrously applicable to
+his own condemnation and his own frame of mind. These settings-up of a
+wholly arbitrary canon of mere taste, these excommunicatings of such and
+such a thing as "low" and "improper," without assigned or assignable
+reason, are eminently Gallic. They may be found not merely in the older
+school before 1830, but in almost all French critics up to the present
+day: there is perhaps not one, with the single exception of
+Sainte-Beuve, who is habitually free from them. The critic may be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">{124}</a></span> quite
+unable to say why <i>tarte à la crême</i> is such a shocking expression, or
+even to produce any important authority for the shockingness of it. But
+he is quite certain that it is shocking. Jeffrey is but too much given
+to protesting against <i>tarte à la crême</i>; and the reasons for his error
+are almost exactly the same as in the case of the usual Frenchman; that
+is to say, a very just and wholesome preference for order, proportion,
+literary orthodoxy, freedom from will-worship and eccentric divagations,
+unfortunately distorted by a certain absence of catholicity, by a
+tendency to regard novelty as bad, merely because it is novelty, and by
+a curious reluctance, as Lamb has it of another great man of the same
+generation, to go shares with any newcomer in literary commerce.</p>
+
+<p>But when these reservations have been made, when his standpoint has been
+clearly discovered and marked out, and when some little tricks, such as
+the affectation of delivering judgments without appeal, which is still
+kept up by a few, though very few, reviewers, have been further allowed
+for, Jeffrey is a most admirable essayist and critic. As an essayist, a
+writer of <i>causeries</i>, I do not think he has been surpassed among
+Englishmen in the art of interweaving quotation, abstract, and comment.
+The best proof of his felicity in this respect is that in almost all the
+books which he has reviewed, (and he has reviewed many of the most
+interesting books in literature) the passages<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">{125}</a></span> and traits, the anecdotes
+and phrases, which have made most mark in the general memory, and which
+are often remembered with very indistinct consciousness of their origin,
+are to be found in his reviews. Sometimes the very perfection of his
+skill in this respect makes it rather difficult to know where he is
+abstracting or paraphrasing, and where he is speaking outright and for
+himself; but that is a very small fault. Yet his merits as an essayist,
+though considerable, are not to be compared, even to the extent to which
+Hazlitt's are to be compared, with his merits as a critic, and
+especially as a literary critic. It would be interesting to criticise
+his political criticism; but it is always best to keep politics out
+where it can be managed. Besides, Jeffrey as a political critic is a
+subject of almost exclusively historical interest, while as a literary
+critic he is important at this very day, and perhaps more important than
+he was in his own. For the spirit of merely æsthetic criticism, which
+was in his day only in its infancy, has long been full grown and
+rampant; so that, good work as it has done in its time, it decidedly
+needs chastening by an admixture of the dogmatic criticism, which at
+least tries to keep its impressions together and in order, and to
+connect them into some coherent doctrine and creed.</p>
+
+<p>Of this dogmatic criticism Jeffrey, with all his shortcomings, is
+perhaps the very best example that we have in English. He had addressed
+himself more directly and theoretically to literary<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">{126}</a></span> criticism than
+Lockhart. Prejudiced as he often was, he was not affected by the wild
+gusts of personal and political passion which frequently blew Hazlitt a
+thousand miles off the course of true criticism. He keeps his eye on the
+object, which De Quincey seldom does. He is not affected by that desire
+to preach on certain pet subjects which affects the admirable critical
+faculty of Carlyle. He never blusters and splashes at random like
+Wilson. And he never indulges in the mannered and rather superfluous
+graces which marred, to some tastes, the work of his successor in
+critical authority, if there has been any such, the author of <i>Essays in
+Criticism</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Let us, as we just now looked through Jeffrey's work to pick out the
+less favourable characteristics which distinguish his position, look
+through it again to see those qualities which he shares, but in greater
+measure than most, with all good critics. The literary essay which
+stands first in his collected works is on Madame de Staël. Now that good
+lady, of whom some judges in these days do not think very much, was a
+kind of goddess on earth in literature, however much she might bore them
+in life, to the English Whig party in general; while Jeffrey's French
+tastes must have made her, or at least her books, specially attractive
+to him. Accordingly he has written a great deal about her, no less than
+three essays appearing in the collected works. Writing at least partly
+in her lifetime and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">{127}</a></span> under the influences just glanced at, he is of
+course profuse in compliments. But it is very amusing and highly
+instructive to observe how, in the intervals of these compliments, he
+contrives to take the good Corinne to pieces, to smash up her ingenious
+Perfectibilism, and to put in order her rather rash literary judgments.
+It is in connection also with her, that he gives one of the best of not
+a few general sketches of the history of literature which his work
+contains. Of course there are here, as always, isolated expressions as
+to which, however much we admit that Jeffrey was a clever man, we cannot
+agree with Jeffrey. He thinks Aristophanes "coarse" and "vulgar" just as
+a living pundit thinks him "base," while (though nobody of course can
+deny the coarseness) Aristophanes and vulgarity are certainly many miles
+asunder. We may protest against the chronological, even more than
+against the critical, blunder which couples Cowley and Donne, putting
+Donne, moreover, who wrote long before Cowley was born, and differs from
+him in genius almost as the author of the <i>Iliad</i> does from the author
+of the <i>Henriade</i>, second. But hardly anything in English criticism is
+better than Jeffrey's discussion of the general French imputation of
+"want of taste and politeness" to English and German writers, especially
+English. It is a very general, and a very mistaken notion that the
+Romantic movement in France has done away with this imputation to a
+great extent. On the contrary,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">{128}</a></span> though it has long been a kind of
+fashion in France to admire Shakespeare, and though since the labours of
+MM. Taine and Montégut, the study of English literature generally has
+grown and flourished, it is, I believe, the very rarest thing to find a
+Frenchman who, in his heart of hearts, does not cling to the old "pearls
+in the dung-heap" idea, not merely in reference to Shakespeare, but to
+English writers, and especially English humorists, generally. Nothing
+can be more admirable than Jeffrey's comments on this matter. They are
+especially admirable because they are not made from the point of view of
+a <i>Romantique à tous crins</i>; because, as has been already pointed out,
+he himself is largely penetrated by the very preference for order and
+proportion which is at the bottom of the French mistake; and because he
+is, therefore, arguing in a tongue understanded of those whom he
+censures. Another essay which may be read with especial advantage is
+that on Scott's edition of Swift. Here, again, there was a kind of test
+subject, and perhaps Jeffrey does not come quite scatheless out of the
+trial: to me, at any rate, his account of Swift's political and moral
+conduct and character seems both uncritical and unfair. But here, too,
+the value of his literary criticism shows itself. He might very easily
+have been tempted to extend his injustice from the writer to the
+writings, especially since, as has been elsewhere shown, he was by no
+means a fanatical<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">{129}</a></span> admirer of the Augustan age, and thought the serious
+style of Addison and Swift tame and poor. It is possible of course, here
+also, to find things that seem to be errors, both in the general sketch
+which Jeffrey, according to his custom, prefixes, and in the particular
+remarks on Swift himself. For instance, to deny fancy to the author of
+the <i>Tale of a Tub</i>, of <i>Gulliver</i>, and of the <i>Polite Conversation</i>, is
+very odd indeed. But there are few instances of a greater triumph of
+sound literary judgment over political and personal prejudice than
+Jeffrey's description, not merely of the great works just mentioned (it
+is curious, and illustrates his defective appreciation of humour, that
+he likes the greatest least, and is positively unjust to the <i>Tale of a
+Tub</i>), but also of those wonderful pamphlets, articles, lampoons, skits
+(libels if any one likes), which proved too strong for the generalship
+of Marlborough and the administrative talents of Godolphin; and which
+are perhaps the only literary works that ever really changed, for a not
+inconsiderable period, the government of England. "Considered," he says,
+"with a view to the purposes for which they were intended, they have
+probably never been equalled in any period of the world." They certainly
+have not; but to find a Whig, and a Whig writing in the very moment of
+Tory triumph after Waterloo, ready to admit the fact, is not a trivial
+thing. Another excellent example of Jeffrey's strength, by no means<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">{130}</a></span>
+unmixed with examples of his weakness, is to be found in his essays on
+Cowper. I have already given some of the weakness: the strength is to be
+found in his general description of Cowper's revolt, thought so daring
+at the time, now so apparently moderate, against poetic diction. These
+instances are to be found under miscellaneous sections, biographical,
+historical, and so forth; but the reader will naturally turn to the
+considerable divisions headed Poetry and Fiction. Here are the chief
+rocks of offence already indicated, and here also are many excellent
+things which deserve reading. Here is the remarkable essay, quoted
+above, on Campbell's <i>Specimens</i>. Here is the criticism of Weber's
+edition of Ford, and another of those critical surveys of the course of
+English literature which Jeffrey was so fond of doing, and which he did
+so well, together with some remarks on the magnificently spendthrift
+style of our Elizabethan dramatists which would deserve almost the first
+place in an anthology of his critical beauties. The paper on Hazlitt's
+<i>Characters of Shakespeare</i> (Hazlitt was an <i>Edinburgh</i> reviewer, and
+his biographer, not Jeffrey's, has chronicled a remarkable piece of
+generosity on Jeffrey's part towards his wayward contributor) is a
+little defaced by a patronising spirit, not, indeed, of that memorably
+mistaken kind which induced the famous and unlucky sentence to Macvey
+Napier about Carlyle, but something in the spirit of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">{131}</a></span> schoolmaster
+who observes, "See this clever boy of mine, and only think how much
+better I could do it myself." Yet it contains some admirable passages on
+Shakespeare, if not on Hazlitt; and it would be impossible to deny that
+its hinted condemnation of Hazlitt's "desultory and capricious
+acuteness" is just enough. On the other hand, how significant is it of
+Jeffrey's own limitations that he should protest against Hazlitt's
+sympathy with such "conceits and puerilities" as the immortal and
+unmatchable</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Take him and cut him out in little stars,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>with the rest of the passage. But there you have the French spirit. I do
+not believe that there ever was a Frenchman since the seventeenth
+century (unless perchance it was Gérard de Nerval, and he was not quite
+sane), who could put his hand on his heart and deny that the little
+stars seemed to him puerile and conceited.</p>
+
+<p>Jeffrey's dealings with Byron (I do not now speak of the article on
+<i>Hours of Idleness</i>, which was simply a just rebuke of really puerile
+and conceited rubbish) are not, to me, very satisfactory. The critic
+seems, in the rather numerous articles which he has devoted to the
+"noble Poet," as they used to call him, to have felt his genius unduly
+rebuked by that of his subject. He spends a great deal, and surely an
+unnecessarily great deal, of time in solemnly, and no doubt quite
+sincerely,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">{132}</a></span> rebuking Byron's morality; and in doing so he is sometimes
+almost absurd. He calls him "not more obscene perhaps than Dryden or
+Prior," which is simply ludicrous, because it is very rare that this
+particular word can be applied to Byron at all, while even his
+staunchest champion must admit that it applies to glorious John and to
+dear Mat Prior. He helps, unconsciously no doubt, to spread the very
+contagion which he denounces, by talking about Byron's demoniacal power,
+going so far as actually to contrast <i>Manfred</i> with Marlowe to the
+advantage of the former. And he is so completely overcome by what he
+calls the "dreadful tone of sincerity" of this "puissant spirit," that
+he never seems to have had leisure or courage to apply the critical
+tests and solvents of which few men have had a greater command. Had he
+done so, it is impossible not to believe that, whether he did or did not
+pronounce Byron's sentiment to be as theatrical, as vulgar, and as false
+as it seems to some later critics, he would at any rate have substituted
+for his edifying but rather irrelevant moral denunciations some exposure
+of those gross faults in style and metre, in phrase and form, which now
+disgust us.</p>
+
+<p>There are many essays remaining on which I should like to comment if
+there were room enough. But I have only space for a few more general
+remarks on his general characteristics, and especially those which, as
+Sainte-Beuve said to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">{133}</a></span> altered Jeffrey of our altered days, are
+"important to us." Let me repeat then that the peculiar value of Jeffrey
+is not, as is that of Coleridge, of Hazlitt, or of Lamb, in very subtle,
+very profound, or very original views of his subjects. He is neither a
+critical Columbus nor a critical Socrates; he neither opens up
+undiscovered countries, nor provokes and stimulates to the discovery of
+them. His strength lies in the combination of a fairly wide range of
+sympathy with an extraordinary shrewdness and good sense in applying
+that sympathy. Tested for range alone, or for subtlety alone, he will
+frequently be found wanting; but he almost invariably catches up those
+who have thus outstripped him, when the subject of the trial is shifted
+to soundness of estimate, intelligent connection of view, and absence of
+eccentricity. And it must be again and again repeated that Jeffrey is by
+no means justly chargeable with the Dryasdust failings so often
+attributed to academic criticism. They said that on the actual Bench he
+worried counsel a little too much, but that his decisions were almost
+invariably sound. Not quite so much perhaps can be said for his other
+exercise of the judicial function. But however much he may sometimes
+seem to carp and complain, however much we may sometimes wish for a
+little more equity and a little less law, it is astonishing how weighty
+Jeffrey's critical judgments are after three quarters of a century which
+has seen so many<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">{134}</a></span> seeming heavy things grow light. There may be much
+that he does not see; there may be some things which he is physically
+unable to see; but what he does see, he sees with a clearness, and
+co-ordinates in its bearings on other things seen with a precision,
+which are hardly to be matched among the fluctuating and diverse race of
+critics.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">{135}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V<br />
+<br />
+HAZLITT</h2>
+
+
+<p>The following paper was in great part composed, when I came across some
+sentences on Hazlitt, written indeed before I was born, but practically
+unpublished until the other day. In a review of the late Mr. Horne's
+<i>New Spirit of the Age</i>, contributed to the <i>Morning Chronicle</i> in 1845
+and but recently included in his collected works, Thackeray writes thus
+of the author of the book whose title Horne had rather rashly borrowed:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The author of the <i>Spirit of the Age</i> was one of the keenest and
+brightest critics that ever lived. With partialities and
+prejudices innumerable, he had a wit so keen, a sensibility so
+exquisite, an appreciation of humour, or pathos, or even of the
+greatest art, so lively, quick, and cultivated, that it was
+always good to know what were the impressions made by books or
+men or pictures on such a mind; and that, as there were not
+probably a dozen men in England with powers so varied, all the
+rest of the world might be rejoiced to listen to the opinions of
+this accomplished critic. He was of so different a caste to the
+people who gave authority in his day&mdash;the pompous big-wigs and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">{136}</a></span>
+schoolmen, who never could pardon him his familiarity of manner
+so unlike their own&mdash;his popular&mdash;too popular habits&mdash;and
+sympathies so much beneath their dignity; his loose, disorderly
+education gathered round those bookstalls or picture galleries
+where he laboured a penniless student, in lonely journeys over
+Europe tramped on foot (and not made, after the fashion of the
+regular critics of the day, by the side of a young nobleman in a
+postchaise), in every school of knowledge from St. Peter's at
+Rome to St. Giles's in London. In all his modes of life and
+thought, he was so different from the established authorities,
+with their degrees and white neck-cloths, that they hooted the
+man down with all the power of their lungs, and disdained to hear
+truth that came from such a ragged philosopher.</p></div>
+
+<p>Some exceptions, no doubt, must be taken to this enthusiastic, and in
+the main just, verdict. Hazlitt himself denied himself wit, yet if this
+was mock humility, I am inclined to think that he spoke truth
+unwittingly. His appreciation of humour was fitful and anything but
+impartial, while, biographically speaking, the hardships of his
+apprenticeship are very considerably exaggerated. It was not, for
+instance, in a penniless or pedestrian manner that he visited St.
+Peter's at Rome; but journeying with comforts of wine, <i>vetturini</i>, and
+partridges, which his second wife's income paid for. But this does not
+matter much, and, on the whole, the estimate is as just as it is
+generous. Perhaps something of its inspiration may be set down to
+fellow-feeling, both in politics and in the unsuccessful cultivation of
+the arts of design. But as high an estimate of Hazlitt is quite
+compatible<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">{137}</a></span> with the strongest political dissent from his opinions, and
+with a total freedom from the charge of wearing the willow for painting.</p>
+
+<p>There is indeed no doubt that Hazlitt is one of the most absolutely
+unequal writers in English, if not in any, literature, Wilson being
+perhaps his only compeer. The term absolute is used with intention and
+precision. There may be others who, in different parts of their work,
+are more unequal than he is; but with him the inequality is pervading,
+and shows itself in his finest passages, in those where he is most at
+home, as much as in his hastiest and most uncongenial taskwork. It could
+not, indeed, be otherwise, because the inequality itself is due less to
+an intellectual than to a moral defect. The clear sunshine of Hazlitt's
+admirably acute intellect is always there; but it is constantly obscured
+by driving clouds of furious prejudice. Even as the clouds pass, the
+light may still be seen on distant and scattered parts of the landscape;
+but wherever their influence extends, there is nothing but thick
+darkness, gusty wind and drenching rain. And the two phenomena, the
+abiding intellectual light, and the fits and squalls of moral darkness,
+appear to be totally independent of each other, or of any single will or
+cause of any kind. It would be perfectly easy, and may perhaps be in
+place later, to give a brief collection of some of the most absurd and
+outrageous sayings that any writer, not a mere fool,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">{138}</a></span> can be charged
+with: of sentences not representing quips and cranks of humour, or
+judgments temporary and one-sided, though having a certain relative
+validity, but containing blunders and calumnies so gross and palpable,
+that the man who set them down might seem to have forfeited all claim to
+the reputation either of an intelligent or a responsible being. And yet,
+side by side with these, are other passages (and fortunately a much
+greater number) which justify, and more than justify, Hazlitt's claims
+to be as Thackeray says, "one of the keenest and brightest critics that
+ever lived"; as Lamb had said earlier, "one of the wisest and finest
+spirits breathing."</p>
+
+<p>The only exception to be taken to the well-known panegyric of Elia is,
+that it bestows this eulogy on Hazlitt "in his natural and healthy
+state." Unluckily, it would seem, by a concurrence of all testimony,
+even the most partial, that the unhealthy state was quite as natural as
+the healthy one. Lamb himself plaintively wishes that "he would not
+quarrel with the world at the rate he does"; and De Quincey, in his
+short, but very interesting, biographical notice of Hazlitt (a notice
+entirely free from the malignity with which De Quincey has been
+sometimes charged), declares with quite as much truth as point, that
+Hazlitt's guiding principle was, "Whatever is, is wrong." He was the
+very ideal of a literary Ishmael; and after the fullest admission of the
+almost incredible virulence and unfairness of his foes, it has to be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">{139}</a></span>
+admitted, likewise, that he was quite as ready to quarrel with his
+friends. He succeeded, at least once, in forcing a quarrel even upon
+Lamb. His relations with Leigh Hunt (who, whatever his faults were, was
+not unamiable) were constantly strained, and at least once actually
+broken by his infernal temper. Nor were his relations with women more
+fortunate or more creditable than those with men. That the fault was
+entirely on his side in the rupture with his first wife is, no doubt,
+not the case; for Mrs. Hazlitt's, or Miss Stoddart's, own friends admit
+that she was of a peculiar and rather trying disposition. It is indeed
+evident that she was the sort of person (most teasing of all others to a
+man of Hazlitt's temperament) who would put her head back as he was
+kissing her, to ask if he would like another cup of tea, or interrupt a
+declaration to suggest shutting the window. As for the famous and almost
+legendary episode of Sarah Walker, the lodging-house keeper's daughter,
+and the <i>Liber Amoris</i>, the obvious and irresistible attack of something
+like erotic madness which it implies absolves Hazlitt partly&mdash;but only
+partly, for there is a kind of shabbiness about the affair which shuts
+it out from all reasonable claim to be regarded as a new act of the
+endless drama of <i>All for Love, or The World Well Lost!</i> Of his second
+marriage, the only persons who might be expected to give us some
+information either can or will say next to nothing. But when a man with
+such antecedents marries a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">{140}</a></span> woman of whom no one has anything bad to
+say, lives with her for a year, chiefly on her money, and is then
+quitted by her with the information that she will have nothing more to
+do with him, it is not, I think, uncharitable to conjecture that most of
+the fault is his.</p>
+
+<p>It is not, however, only of Hazlitt's rather imperfectly known life, or
+of his pretty generally acknowledged character, that I wish to speak
+here. His strange mixture of manly common-sense and childish prejudice,
+the dislike of foreigners which accompanied his Liberalism and his
+Bonapartism, and other traits, are very much more English than Irish.
+But Irish, at least on the father's side, his family was, and had been
+for generations. He was himself the son of a Unitarian minister, was
+born at Maidstone in 1778, accompanied his parents as a very little boy
+to America, but passed the greater part of his youth at Wem in
+Shropshire, where the interview with Coleridge, which decided his fate,
+took place. Yet for some time after that, he was mainly occupied with
+studies, not of literature, but of art. He had been intended for his
+father's profession, but had early taken a disgust to it. At such
+schools as he had been able to frequent, he had gained the character of
+a boy rather insusceptible of ordinary teaching; and his letters (they
+are rare throughout his life) show him to us as something very like a
+juvenile prig. According to his own account, he "thought for at least
+eight years" without being able to pen a line,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">{141}</a></span> or at least a page; and
+the worst accusation that can truly be brought against him is that, by
+his own confession, he left off reading when he began to write. Those
+who (for their sins or for their good) are condemned to a life of
+writing for the press know that such an abstinence as this is almost
+fatal. Perhaps no man ever did good work in periodical writing, unless
+he had previously had a more or less prolonged period of reading, with
+no view to writing. Certainly no one ever did other than very faulty
+work if, not having such a store to draw on, when he began writing he
+left off reading.</p>
+
+<p>The first really important event in Hazlitt's life, except the visit
+from Coleridge in 1798, was his own visit to Paris after the Peace of
+Amiens in 1802&mdash;a visit authorised and defrayed by certain commissions
+to copy pictures at the Louvre, which was then, in consequence of French
+conquests, the picture-gallery of Europe. The chief of these
+commissioners was a Mr. Railton, a person of some fortune at Liverpool,
+and the father of a daughter who, if she was anything like her portrait,
+had one of the most beautiful faces of modern times. Miss Railton was
+one of Hazlitt's many loves: it was, perhaps, fortunate for her that the
+course of the love did not run smooth. Almost immediately on his return,
+he made acquaintance with the Lambs, and, as Mr. W. C. Hazlitt, his
+grandson and biographer, thinks, with Miss Stoddart, his future wife.
+Miss Stoddart, there is no doubt,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">{142}</a></span> was an elderly coquette, though
+perfectly "proper." Besides the "William" of her early correspondence
+with Mary Lamb, we hear of three or four other lovers of hers between
+1803 and 1808, when she married Hazlitt. It so happens that one, and
+only one, letter of his to her has been preserved. His biographer seems
+to think it in another sense unique; but it is, in effect, a very
+typical letter from a literary lover of a rather passionate temperament.
+The two were married, in defiance of superstition, on Sunday, the first
+of May; and certainly the superstition had not the worst of it.</p>
+
+<p>At first, however, no evil results seemed likely. Miss Stoddart had a
+certain property settled on her at Winterslow, on the south-eastern
+border of Salisbury Plain, and for nearly four years the couple seem to
+have dwelt there (once, at least, entertaining the Lambs), and producing
+children, of whom only one lived. It was not till 1812 that they removed
+to London, and that Hazlitt engaged in writing for the newspapers. From
+this time till the end of his life, some eighteen years, he was never at
+a loss for employment&mdash;a succession of daily and weekly papers, with
+occasional employment on the <i>Edinburgh Review</i>, providing him, it would
+seem, with sufficiently abundant opportunities for copy. The <i>London</i>,
+the <i>New Monthly</i> (where Campbell's dislike did him no harm), and other
+magazines also employed him. For a time, he seems to have joined "the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">{143}</a></span>
+gallery," and written ordinary press-work. During this time, which was
+very short, and this time only, his friends admit a certain indulgence
+in drinking, which he gave up completely, but which was used against him
+with as much pitilessness as indecency in <i>Blackwood</i>; though heaven
+only knows how the most Tory soul alive could see fitness of things in
+the accusation of gin-drinking brought against Hazlitt by the
+whiskey-drinkers of the <i>Noctes</i>. For the greater part of his literary
+life he seems to have been almost a total abstainer, indulging only in
+the very strongest of tea. He soon gave up miscellaneous press-work, as
+far as politics went; but his passion for the theatre retained him as a
+theatrical critic almost to the end of his life. He gradually drifted
+into the business really best suited to him, that of essay-writing, and
+occasionally lecturing on literary and miscellaneous subjects. During
+the greatest part of his early London life, he was resident in a famous
+house, now destroyed, in York Street, Westminster, next door to Bentham
+and reputed to have once been tenanted by Milton; and he was a constant
+attendant on Lamb's Wednesday evenings. The details of his life, it has
+been said, are not much known. The chief of them, besides the breaking
+out of his lifelong war with <i>Blackwood</i> and the <i>Quarterly</i>, was,
+perhaps, his unlucky participation in the duel which proved fatal to
+Scott, the editor of the <i>London</i>. It is impossible to imagine a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">{144}</a></span> more
+deplorable muddle than this affair. Scott, after refusing the challenge
+of Lockhart,<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> with whom he had, according to the customs of those
+days, a sufficient ground of quarrel, accepted that of Christie,
+Lockhart's second, with whom he had no quarrel at all. Moreover, when
+his adversary had deliberately spared him in the first fire, he insisted
+(it is said owing to the stupid conduct of his own second) on another,
+and was mortally wounded. Hazlitt, who was more than indirectly
+concerned in the affair, had a professed objection to duelling, which
+would have been more creditable to him if he had not been avowedly of a
+timid temper. But, most unfortunately, he was said, and believed, to
+have spurred Scott on to the acceptance of the challenge, nor do his own
+champions deny it. The scandal is long bygone, but is, unluckily, a fair
+sample of the ugly stories which cluster round Hazlitt's name, and which
+have hitherto prevented that justice being done to him which his
+abilities deserve and demand.</p>
+
+<p>This wretched affair occurred in February 1821, and, shortly afterwards,
+the crowning complications of Hazlitt's own life, the business of the
+<i>Liber Amoris</i> and the divorce with his first wife, took place. The
+first could only be properly described by an abundance of extracts, for
+which there is here no room. Of the second, which, it must be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">{145}</a></span>
+remembered, went on simultaneously with the first, it is sufficient to
+say that the circumstances are nearly incredible. It was conducted under
+the Scotch law with a blessed indifference to collusion: the direct
+means taken to effect it were, if report may be trusted, scandalous; and
+the parties met during the whole time, and placidly wrangled over money
+matters, with a callousness which is ineffably disgusting. I have
+hinted, in reference to Sarah Walker, that the tyranny of "Love
+unconquered in battle" may be taken by a very charitable person to be a
+sufficient excuse. In this other affair there is no such palliation;
+unless the very charitable person should hold that a wife, who could so
+forget her own dignity, justified any forgetfulness on the part of her
+husband; and that a husband, who could haggle and chaffer about the
+terms on which he should be disgracefully separated from his wife,
+justified any forgetfulness of dignity on the wife's part.</p>
+
+<p>Little has to be said about the rest of Hazlitt's life. Miss Sarah
+Walker would have nothing to say to him; and it has been already
+mentioned that the lady whom he afterwards married, a Mrs. Bridgewater,
+had enough of him after a year's experience. He did not outlive this
+last shock more than five years; and unfortunately his death was
+preceded by a complete financial break-down, though he was more
+industrious during these later years than at any other time, and though
+he had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">{146}</a></span> abundance of well-paid work. The failure of the publishers, who
+were to have paid him five hundred pounds for his <i>magnum opus</i>, the
+partisan and almost valueless <i>Life of Napoleon</i>, had something to do
+with this, and the dishonesty of an agent is said to have had more, but
+details are not forthcoming. He died on the eighteenth of September
+1830, saying, "Well, I have had a happy life"; and despite his son's
+assertion that, like Goldsmith, he had something on his mind, I believe
+this to have been not ironical but quite sincere. He was only fifty-two,
+so that the infirmities of age had not begun to press on him. Although,
+except during the brief duration of his second marriage, he had always
+lived by his wits, it does not appear that he was ever in any want, or
+that he had at any time to deny himself his favourite pleasures of
+wandering about and being idle when he chose. If he had not been
+completely happy in his life, he had lived it; if he had not seen the
+triumph of his opinions, he had been able always to hold to them. He was
+one of those men, such as an extreme devotion to literature now and then
+breeds, who, by the intensity of their enjoyment of quite commonplace
+delights&mdash;a face passed in the street, a sunset, a quiet hour of
+reflection, even a well-cooked meal&mdash;make up for the suffering of not
+wholly commonplace woes. I do not know whether even the joy of literary
+battle did not overweigh the pain of the dishonest wounds which he
+received<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">{147}</a></span> from illiberal adversaries. I think that he had a happy life,
+and I am glad that he had. For he was in literature a great man. I am
+myself disposed to hold that, for all his accesses of hopelessly
+uncritical prejudice, he was the greatest critic that England has yet
+produced; and there are some who hold (though I do not agree with them)
+that he was even greater as a miscellaneous essayist than as a critic.
+It is certainly upon his essays, critical and other, that his fame must
+rest; not on the frenzied outpourings of the <i>Liber Amoris</i> (full as
+these are of flashes of genius), or upon the one-sided and ill-planned
+<i>Life of Napoleon</i>; still less on his clever-boy essay on the
+<i>Principles of Human Action</i>, or on his attempts in grammar, in literary
+compilation and abridgment, and the like. Seven volumes of Bonn's
+Standard Library, with another published elsewhere containing his
+writings on Art, contain nearly all the documents of Hazlitt's fame: a
+few do not seem to have been yet collected from his <i>Remains</i> and from
+the publications in which they originally appeared.</p>
+
+<p>These books&mdash;the <i>Spirit of the Age</i>, <i>Table Talk</i>, <i>The Plain Speaker</i>,
+<i>The Round Table</i> (including the <i>Conversations with Northcote</i> and
+<i>Characteristics</i>), <i>Lectures on the English Poets and Comic Writers</i>,
+<i>Elizabethan Literature</i> and <i>Characters of Shakespeare</i>, <i>Sketches and
+Essays</i> (including <i>Winterslow</i>)&mdash;represent the work, roughly speaking,
+of the last twenty years of Hazlitt's life; for in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">{148}</a></span> earlier and
+longer period he wrote very little, and, indeed, declares that for a
+long time he had a difficulty in writing at all. They are all singularly
+homogeneous in general character, the lectures written as lectures
+differing very little from the essays written as essays, and even the
+frantic diatribes of the "Letter to Gifford" bearing a strong family
+likeness to the good-humoured <i>reportage</i> of "On going to a Fight," or
+the singularly picturesque and pathetic egotism of the "Farewell to
+Essay-writing." This family resemblance is the more curious because,
+independently of the diversity of subject, Hazlitt can hardly be said to
+possess a style or, at least, a manner&mdash;indeed, he somewhere or other
+distinctly disclaims the possession. Yet, irregular as he is in his
+fashion of writing, no less than in the merit of it, the germs of some
+of the most famous styles of this century may be discovered in his
+casual and haphazard work. Everybody knows Jeffrey's question to
+Macaulay, "Where the devil did you get that style?" If any one will read
+Hazlitt (who, be it remembered, was a contributor to the <i>Edinburgh</i>)
+carefully, he will see where Macaulay got that style, or at least the
+beginning of it, much as he improved on it afterwards. Nor is there any
+doubt that, in a very different way, Hazlitt served as a model to
+Thackeray, to Dickens, and to many not merely of the most popular, but
+of the greatest, writers of the middle of the century. Indeed, in the
+<i>Spirit<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">{149}</a></span> of the Age</i> there are distinct anticipations of Carlyle. He had
+the not uncommon fate of producing work which, little noted by the
+public, struck very strongly those of his juniors who had any literary
+faculty. If he had been, just by a little, a greater man than he was, he
+would, no doubt, have elaborated an individual manner, and not have
+contented himself with the hints and germs of manners. As it was, he had
+more of seed than of fruit. And the secret of this is, undoubtedly, to
+be found in the obstinate individuality of thought which characterised
+him all through. Hazlitt may sometimes have adopted an opinion partly
+because other people did not hold it, but he never adopted an opinion
+because other people did hold it. And all his opinions, even those which
+seem to have been adopted simply to quarrel with the world, were genuine
+opinions. He has himself drawn a striking contrast in this point,
+between himself and Lamb, in one of the very best of all his essays, the
+beautiful "Farewell to Essay-writing" reprinted in <i>Winterslow</i>. The
+contrast is a remarkable one, and most men, probably, who take great
+interest in literature or politics, or indeed in any subject admitting
+of principles, will be able to furnish similar contrasts from their own
+experience.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In matters of taste and feeling, one proof that my conclusions
+have not been quite shallow and hasty, is the circumstance of
+their having been lasting. I have the same favourite books,
+pictures, passages that I ever had; I may<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">{150}</a></span> therefore presume that
+they will last me my life&mdash;nay, I may indulge a hope that my
+thoughts will survive me. This continuity of impression is the
+only thing on which I pride myself. Even Lamb, whose relish of
+certain things is as keen and earnest as possible, takes a
+surfeit of admiration, and I should be afraid to ask about his
+select authors or particular friends after a lapse of ten years.
+As for myself, any one knows where to have me. What I have once
+made up my mind to, I abide by to the end of the chapter.</p></div>
+
+<p>This is quite true if we add a proviso to it&mdash;a proviso, to be sure, of
+no small importance. Hazlitt is always the same when he is not
+different, when his political or personal ails and angers do not obscure
+his critical judgment. His uniformity of principle extends only to the
+two subjects of literature and of art; unless a third may be added, to
+wit, the various good things of this life, as they are commonly called.
+He was not so great a metaphysician as he thought himself. He "shows to
+the utmost of his knowledge, and that not deep"; a want of depth not
+surprising when we find him confessing that he had to go to Taylor, the
+Platonist, to tell him something of Platonic ideas. It may be more than
+suspected that he had read little but the French and English
+philosophers of the eighteenth century; a very interesting class of
+persons, but, except Condillac, Hume, and Berkeley, scarcely
+metaphysicians. As for his politics, Hazlitt seems to me to have had no
+clear political creed at all. He hated something called "the hag
+legitimacy," but for the hag despotism,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">{151}</a></span> in the person of Bonaparte, he
+had nothing but love. How any one possessed of brains could combine
+Liberty and the first Napoleon in one common worship is, I confess, a
+mystery too great for me; and I fear that any one who could call
+"Jupiter Scapin" "the greatest man who ever lived," must be entirely
+blind to such constituents of greatness as justice, mercy, chivalry, and
+all that makes a gentleman. Indeed, I am afraid that "gentleman" is
+exactly what cannot be predicated of Hazlitt. No gentleman could have
+published the <i>Liber Amoris</i>, not at all because of its so-called
+voluptuousness, but because of its shameless kissing and telling. But
+the most curious example of Hazlitt's weaknesses is the language he uses
+in regard to those men with whom he had both political and literary
+differences. That he had provocation in some cases (he had absolutely
+none from Sir Walter Scott) is perfectly true. But what provocation will
+excuse such things as the following, all taken from one book, the
+<i>Spirit of the Age</i>? He speaks of Scott's "zeal to restore the spirit of
+loyalty, of passive obedience, and of non-resistance," as an
+acknowledgment for his having been "created a baronet by a prince of the
+House of Brunswick." Alas for dates and circumstances, for times and
+seasons, when they stand in the way of a fling of Hazlitt's! In the
+character of Scott himself an entire page and a half is devoted to an
+elaborate peroration in one huge sentence, denouncing him in such terms
+as "pettifogging," "littleness," "pique,"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">{152}</a></span> "secret and envenomed blows,"
+"slime of rankling malice and mercenary scorn," "trammels of servility,"
+"lies," "garbage," etc. etc. The Duke of Wellington he always speaks of
+as a brainless noodle, forgetting apparently that the description does
+not make his idol's defeat more creditable to the vanquished. As for the
+character of Gifford, and the earlier "Letter to Gifford," I should have
+to print them entire to show the state of Hazlitt's mind in regard to
+this notorious, and certainly not very amiable person. His own words,
+"the dotage of age and the fury of a woman," form the best short
+description of both. He screams, he foams at the mouth, he gnashes and
+tears and kicks, rather than fights. Nor is it only on living authors
+and living persons (as some of his unfavourable critics have said) that
+he exercises his spleen. His remarks on Burke (<i>Round Table</i>, p. 150)
+suggest temporary insanity. Sir Philip Sidney (as Lamb, a perfectly
+impartial person who had no politics at all, pointed out) was a kind of
+representative of the courtly monarchist school in literature. So down
+must Sir Philip go; and not only the <i>Arcadia</i>, that "vain and
+amatorious poem" which Milton condemned, but the sonnets which one would
+have thought such a lover of poetry as Hazlitt must have spared, go down
+also before his remorseless bludgeon.</p>
+
+<p>But there is no need to say any more of these faults of his, and there
+is no need to say much of another and more purely literary fault with
+which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">{153}</a></span> he has been charged&mdash;the fault of excessive quotation. In him the
+error lies rather in the constant repetition of the same, than in a too
+great multitude of different borrowings. Almost priding himself on
+limited study, and (as he tells us) very rarely reading his own work
+after it was printed, he has certainly abused his right of press most
+damnably in some cases. "Dry as a remainder biscuit," and "of no mark or
+likelihood," occur to me as the most constantly recurrent tags; but
+there are many others.</p>
+
+<p>These various drawbacks, however, only set off the merits which almost
+every lover of literature must perceive in him. In most writers, in all
+save the very greatest, we look for one or two, or for a few special
+faculties and capacities, and we know perfectly well that other
+(generally many other) capacities and faculties will not be found in
+them at all. We do not dream of finding rollicking mirth in Milton, or
+gorgeous embroidery of style in Swift, or unadorned simplicity in
+Browne. But in Hazlitt you may find something of almost everything,
+except the finer kinds of wit and humour; to which last, however, he
+makes a certain side-approach by dint of his appreciation of the irony
+of Nature and Fate. Almost every other grace of matter and form that can
+be found in prose may be found at times in his. He is generally thought
+of as, and for the most part is, a rather plain and straightforward
+writer, with few tricks and frounces of phrase and style. Yet most<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">{154}</a></span> of
+the fine writing of these latter days is but as crumpled tarlatan to
+brocaded satin beside the passage on Coleridge in the <i>English Poets</i>,
+or the description of Winterslow and its neighbourhood in the "Farewell
+to Essay-writing," or "On a Landscape of Nicolas Poussin" in the
+<i>Table-Talk</i>. Read these pieces and nothing else, and an excusable
+impression might be given that the writer was nothing if not florid. But
+turn over a dozen pages, and the most admirable examples of the grave
+and simple manner occur. He is an inveterate quoter, yet few men are
+more original. No man is his superior in lively, gossiping description,
+yet he could, within his limits, reason closely and expound admirably.
+It is, indeed, almost always necessary, when he condemns anything, to
+inquire very carefully as to the reasons of the condemnation. But
+nothing that he likes (except Napoleon) is ever bad: everything that he
+praises will repay the right man who, at the right time, examines it to
+see for what Hazlitt likes it. I have, for my part, no doubt that Miss
+Sarah Walker was a very engaging young woman; but (though the witness is
+the same) I have the gravest doubts as to Hazlitt's charges against her.</p>
+
+<p>We shall find this same curious difference everywhere in Hazlitt. He has
+been talking, for instance, with keen relish of the "Conversation of
+Authors" (it is he, be it remembered, who has handed down to us the
+immortal debate at one of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">{155}</a></span> Lamb's Wednesdays on "People one would Like
+to have Seen"), and saying excellent things about it. Then he changes
+the key, and tells us that the conversation of "Gentlemen and Men of
+Fashion" will not do. Perhaps not; but the wicked critic stops and asks
+himself whether Hazlitt had known much of the conversation of "Gentlemen
+and Men of Fashion"? We can find no record of any such experiences of
+his. In his youth he had no opportunity: in his middle age he was
+notoriously recalcitrant to all the usages of society, would not dress,
+and scarcely ever dined out except with a few cronies. This does not
+seem to be the best qualification for a pronouncement on the question.
+Yet this same essay is full of admirable things, the most admirable
+being, perhaps, the description of the man who "had you at an advantage
+by never understanding you." I find, indeed, in looking through my
+copies of his books, re-read for the purpose of this paper, an
+innumerable and bewildering multitude of essays, of passages, and of
+short phrases, marked for reference. In the seven volumes above referred
+to (to which, as has been said, not a little has to be added) there must
+be hundreds of separate articles and conversations; not counting as
+separate the short maxims and thoughts of the <i>Characteristics</i>, and one
+or two other similar collections, in which, indeed, several passages are
+duplicated from the Essays. At least two out of every three are
+characteristic of Hazlitt:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">{156}</a></span> not one in any twenty is not well worth
+reading and, if occasion served, commenting on. They are, indeed, as far
+from being consecutive as (according to the Yankee) was the conversation
+of Edgar Poe; and the multitude and diversity of their subjects fit them
+better for occasional than for continuous reading.<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> Perhaps, if any
+single volume deserves to be recommended to a beginner in Hazlitt it had
+better be <i>The Plain Speaker</i>, where there is the greatest range of
+subject, and where the author is seen in an almost complete repertory of
+his numerous parts. But there is not much to choose between it and <i>The
+Round Table</i> (where, however, the papers are shorter as a rule),
+<i>Table-Talk</i>, and the volume called, though not by the author, <i>Sketches
+and Essays</i>. I myself care considerably less for the <i>Conversations with
+Northcote</i>, the personal element in which has often attracted readers;
+and the attempts referred to above as <i>Characteristics</i>, avowedly in the
+manner of La Rochefoucauld, are sometimes merely extracts from the
+essays, and rarely have the self-containedness, the exact and chiselled
+proportion, which distinguishes the true <i>pensée</i> as La Rochefoucauld
+and some other Frenchmen, and as Hobbes perhaps alone of Englishmen,
+wrote it. But to criticise these numerous papers is like sifting a
+cluster of motes, and the mere enumeration of their titles<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">{157}</a></span> would fill
+up more than half the room which I have to spare. They must be
+criticised or characterised in two groups only, the strictly critical
+and the miscellaneous, the latter excluding politics. As for art, I do
+not pretend to be more than a connoisseur according to Blake's
+definition, that is to say, one who refuses to let himself be
+connoisseured out of his senses. I shall only, in reference to this last
+subject, observe that the singularly germinal character of Hazlitt's
+work is noticeable here also; for no one who reads the essay on Nicolas
+Poussin will fail to add Mr. Ruskin to Hazlitt's fair herd of literary
+children.</p>
+
+<p>His criticism is scattered through all the volumes of general essays;
+but is found by itself in the series of lectures, or essays (they are
+rather the latter than the former), on the characters of Shakespeare, on
+Elizabethan Literature, on the English Poets, and on the English Comic
+Writers. I cannot myself help thinking that in these four Hazlitt is at
+his best; though there may be nothing so attractive to the general, and
+few such brilliant passages as may be found in the "Farewell to
+Essay-writing," in the paper on Poussin, in "Going to a Fight," in
+"Going a Journey," and others of the same class. The reason of the
+preference is by no means a greater interest in the subject of one
+class, than in the subject of another. It is that, from the very nature
+of the case, Hazlitt's unlucky prejudices<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">{158}</a></span> interfere much more seldom
+with his literary work. They interfere sometimes, as in the case of
+Sidney, as in some remarks about Coleridge and Wordsworth, and
+elsewhere; but these instances are rare indeed compared with those that
+occur in the other division. On the other hand, there are always present
+Hazlitt's enthusiastic appreciation of what is good in letters, his
+combination of gusto with sound theory as to what is excellent in prose
+and verse, his felicitous method of expression, and the acuteness that
+kept him from that excessive and paradoxical admiration which both Lamb
+and Coleridge affected, and which has gained many more pupils than his
+own moderation. Nothing better has ever been written as a general view
+of the subject than his introduction to his Lectures on Elizabethan
+Literature; and almost all the faults to be found in it are due merely
+to occasional deficiency of information, not to error of judgment. He is
+a little paradoxical on Jonson; but not many critics could furnish a
+happier contrast than his enthusiastic praise of certain passages of
+Beaumont and Fletcher, and his cool toning down of Lamb's extravagant
+eulogy on Ford. He is a little unfair to the Caroline poets; but here
+the great disturbing influence comes in. If his comparison of ancient
+and modern literature is rather weak, that is because Hazlitt was
+anything but widely acquainted with either; and, indeed, it may be said
+in general that wherever he goes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">{159}</a></span> wrong, it is not because he judges
+wrongly on known facts, but because he either does not know the facts,
+or is prevented from seeing them by distractions of prejudice. To go
+through his Characters of Shakespeare would be impossible, and besides,
+it is a point of honour for one student of Shakespeare to differ with
+all others. I can only say that I know no critic with whom on this point
+I differ so seldom as with Hazlitt. Even better, perhaps, are the two
+sets of lectures on the Poets and Comic Writers. The generalisations are
+not always sound, for, as must be constantly repeated, Hazlitt was not
+widely read in literatures other than his own, and his standpoint for
+comparison is therefore rather insufficient. But take him where his
+information is sufficient, and how good he is! Of the famous four
+treatments of the dramatists of the Restoration&mdash;Lamb's, Hazlitt's,
+Leigh Hunt's, and Macaulay's&mdash;his seems to me by far the best. In regard
+to Butler, his critical sense has for once triumphed over his political
+prejudice; unless some very unkind devil's advocate should suggest that
+the supposed ingratitude of the King to Butler reconciled Hazlitt to
+him. He is admirable on Burns; and nothing can be more unjust or sillier
+than to pretend, as has been pretended, that Burns's loose morality
+engaged Hazlitt on his side. De Quincey was often a very acute critic,
+but anything more uncritical than his attack on Hazlitt's comparison of
+Burns and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">{160}</a></span> Wordsworth in relation to passion, it would be difficult to
+find. Hazlitt "could forgive Swift for being a Tory," he tells us&mdash;which
+is at any rate more than some other people, who have a better reputation
+for impartiality than his, seem to have been able to do. No one has
+written better than he on Pope, who still seems to have the faculty of
+distorting some critical judgments. His chapter on the English novelists
+(that is to say, those of the last century) is perhaps the best thing
+ever written on the subject; and is particularly valuable nowadays when
+there is a certain tendency to undervalue Smollett in order to exalt
+Fielding, who certainly needs no such illegitimate and uncritical
+leverage. I do not think that he is, on the whole, unjust to Campbell;
+though his Gallican, or rather Napoleonic mania made him commit the
+literary crime of slighting "The Battle of the Baltic." But in all his
+criticism of English literature (and he has attempted little else,
+except by way of digression) he is, for the critic, a study never to be
+wearied of, always to be profited by. His very aberrations are often
+more instructive than other men's right-goings; and if he sometimes
+fails to detect or acknowledge a beauty, he never praises a defect.</p>
+
+<p>It is less easy to sum up the merits of the miscellaneous pieces, for
+the very obvious reason that they can hardly be brought under any
+general form or illustrated by any small number of typical<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">{161}</a></span> instances.
+Perhaps the best way of "sampling" this undisciplined multitude is to
+select a few papers by name, so as to show the variety of Hazlitt's
+interests. The one already mentioned, "On Going to a Fight," which
+shocked some proprieties even in its own day, ranks almost first; but
+the reader should take care to accompany it with the official record of
+that celebrated contest between Neate and the Gasman. All fights are
+good reading; but this particular effort of Hazlitt's makes one sigh for
+a <i>Boxiana</i> or <i>Pugilistica</i> edited by him. Next, I think, must be
+ranked "On Going a Journey," with its fine appreciation of solitary
+travelling which does not exclude reminiscences of pleasant journeys in
+company. But these two, with the article on Poussin and the "Farewell to
+Essay-writing," have been so often mentioned that it may seem as if
+Hazlitt's store were otherwise poor. Nothing could be farther from the
+truth. The "Character of Cobbett" is the best thing the writer ever did
+of the kind, and the best thing known to me on Cobbett. "Of the Past and
+the Future" is perhaps the height of the popular metaphysical style&mdash;the
+style from which, as was noted, Hazlitt may never have got free as far
+as philosophising is concerned, but of which he is a master. "On the
+Indian Jugglers" is a capital example of what may be called improving a
+text; and it contains some of the most interesting and genial examples
+of Hazlitt's honest delight in games such as rackets and fives, a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">{162}</a></span>
+delight which (heaven help his critics) was frequently regarded at the
+time as "low." "On Paradox and Commonplace" is less remarkable for its
+contribution to the discussion of the subject, than as exhibiting one of
+Hazlitt's most curious critical megrims&mdash;his dislike of Shelley. I wish
+I could think that he had any better reason for this than the fact that
+Shelley was a gentleman by birth and his own contemporary. Most
+disappointing of all, perhaps, is "On Criticism," which the reader (as
+his prophetic soul, if he is a sensible reader, has probably warned him
+beforehand) soon finds to be little but an open or covert diatribe
+against the contemporary critics whom Hazlitt did not like, or who did
+not like Hazlitt. The apparently promising "On the Knowledge of
+Character" chiefly yields the remark that Hazlitt could not have admired
+Cæsar if he had resembled (in face) the Duke of Wellington. But "My
+first Acquaintance with Poets" is again a masterpiece; and to me, at
+least, "Merry England" is perfect. Hazlitt is almost the only person up
+to his own day who dared to vindicate the claims of nonsense, though he
+seems to have talked and written as little of it as most men. The
+chapter "On Editors" is very amusing, though perhaps not entirely in the
+way in which Hazlitt meant it; but I cannot think him happy "On
+Footmen," or on "The Conversation of Lords," for reasons already
+sufficiently stated. A sun-dial is a much more promising<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">{163}</a></span> subject than a
+broomstick, yet many essays might be written on sun-dials without there
+being any fear of Hazlitt's being surpassed. Better still is "On Taste,"
+which, if the twenty or thirty best papers in Hazlitt were collected
+(and a most charming volume they would make), would rank among the very
+best. "On Reading New Books" contains excellent sense, but perhaps is,
+as Hazlitt not seldom is, a little deficient in humour; while the
+absence of any necessity for humour makes the discussion "Whether Belief
+is Voluntary" a capital one. Hazlitt is not wholly of the opinion of
+that Ebrew Jew who said to M. Renan, "<i>On fait ce qu'on veut mais on
+croit ce qu'on peut.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>The shorter papers of the <i>Round Table</i> yield perhaps a little less
+freely in the way of specially notable examples. They come closer to a
+certain kind of Addisonian essay, a short lay-sermon, without the
+charming divagation of the longer articles. To see how nearly Hazlitt
+can reach the level of a rather older and cleverer George Osborne, turn
+to the paper here on Classical Education. He is quite orthodox for a
+wonder: perhaps because opinion was beginning to veer a little to the
+side of Useful Knowledge; but he is as dry as his own favourite biscuit,
+and as guiltless of freshness. He is best in this volume where he notes
+particular points such as Kean's Iago, Milton's versification (here,
+however, he does not get quite to the heart of the matter), "John<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">{164}</a></span>
+Buncle," and "The Excursion." In this last he far outsteps the scanty
+confines of the earlier papers of the <i>Round Table</i>, and allows himself
+that score of pages which seems to be with so many men the normal limit
+of a good essay. Of his shortest style one sample from "Trifles light as
+Air" is so characteristic, in more ways than one, that it must be quoted
+whole.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I am by education and conviction inclined to Republicanism and
+Puritanism. In America they have both. But I confess I feel a
+little staggered as to the practical efficacy and saving grace of
+first principles, when I ask myself, Can they throughout the
+United States from Boston to Baltimore, produce a single head
+like one of Titian's Venetian Nobles, nurtured in all the pride
+of aristocracy and all the blindness of popery? Of all the
+branches of political economy the human face is perhaps the best
+criterion of value.</p></div>
+
+<p>If I were editing Hazlitt's works I should put these sentences on the
+title-page of every volume; for, dogmatist as he thought himself, it is
+certain that he was in reality purely æsthetic, though, I need hardly
+say, not in the absurd sense, or no-sense, which modern misuse of
+language has chosen to fix on the word. Therefore he is very good (where
+few are good at all) on Dreams; and, being a great observer of himself,
+singularly instructive on Application to Study. "On Londoners and
+Country People" is one of his liveliest efforts; and the pique at his
+own inclusion in the Cockney School fortunately evaporates in some
+delightful reminiscences, including one of the few classic passages on
+the great game of marbles. His<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">{165}</a></span> remarks on the company at the
+Southampton coffee-house, which have been often and much praised, please
+me less: they are too much like attempts in the manner of the Queen Anne
+men, and Hazlitt is always best when he imitates nobody. "Hot and Cold"
+(which might have been more intelligibly called "North and South") is
+distinctly curious, bringing out again what may be called Hazlitt's
+fanciful observation; and it may generally be said that, however
+alarming and however suggestive of commonplace the titles "On
+Respectable People," "On People of Sense," "On Novelty and Familiarity,"
+may be, Hazlitt may almost invariably be trusted to produce something
+that is not commonplace, that is not laboured paradox, that is eminently
+literature.</p>
+
+<p>I know that a haphazard catalogue of the titles of essays (for it is
+little more) such as fills the last paragraph or two may not seem very
+succulent. But within moderate space there is really no other means of
+indicating the author's extraordinary range of subject, and at the same
+time the pervading excellence of his treatment. To exemplify a
+difference which has sometimes been thought to require explanation, his
+work as regards system, connection with anything else, immediate
+occasion (which with him was generally what his friend, Mr. Skimpole,
+would have called "pounds") is always Journalism: in result, it is
+almost always Literature. Its staple subjects, as far as there can<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">{166}</a></span> be
+said to be any staple where the thread is so various, are very much
+those which the average newspaper-writer since his time has had to deal
+with&mdash;politics, book-reviewing, criticism on plays and pictures, social
+etceteras, the minor morals, the miscellaneous incidents of daily life.
+It is true that Hazlitt was only for a short time in the straitest
+shafts, the most galling traces, of periodical hack-work. His practice
+was rather that of George Warrington, who worked till he had filled his
+purse, and then lay idle till he had emptied it. He used (an indulgence
+agreeable in the mouth, but bitter in the belly) very frequently to
+receive money beforehand for work which was not yet done. Although
+anything but careful, he was never an extravagant man, his tastes being
+for the most part simple; and he never, even during his first married
+life, seems to have been burdened by an expensive household. Moreover,
+he got rid of Mrs. Hazlitt on very easy terms. Still he must constantly
+have had on him the sensation that he lived by his work, and by that
+only. It seems to be (as far as one can make it out) this sensation
+which more than anything else jades and tires what some very
+metaphorical men of letters are pleased to call their Pegasus. But
+Hazlitt, though he served in the shafts, shows little trace of the
+harness. He has frequent small carelessnesses of style, but he would
+probably have had as many or more if he had been the easiest and
+gentlest of easy-writing gentlemen. He never seems to have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">{167}</a></span> allowed
+himself to be cramped in his choice of his subjects, and wrote for the
+editors, of whom he speaks so amusingly, with almost as much freedom of
+speech as if he had had a private press of his own, and had issued
+dainty little tractates on Dutch paper to be fought for by bibliophiles.
+His prejudices, his desultoriness, his occasional lack of correctness of
+fact (he speaks of "Fontaine's Translation" of Æsop, and makes use of
+the extraordinary phrase, "The whole Council of Trent with Father Paul
+at their head," than which a more curious blunder is hardly
+conceivable), his wayward inconsistencies, his freaks of bad taste,
+would in all probability have been aggravated rather than alleviated by
+the greater freedom and less responsibility of an independent or an
+endowed student. The fact is that he was a born man of letters, and that
+he could not help turning whatsoever he touched into literature, whether
+it was criticism on books or on pictures, a fight or a supper, a game at
+marbles, a political diatribe, or the report of a literary conversation.
+He doubtless had favourite subjects; but I do not know that it can be
+said that he treated one class of subjects better than another, with the
+exception that I must hold him to have been first of all a literary
+critic. He certainly could not write a work of great length; for the
+faults of his <i>Life of Napoleon</i> are grave even when its view of the
+subject is taken as undisputed, and it holds among his productions about
+the same place (that of longest and worst)<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">{168}</a></span> which the book it was
+designed to counterwork holds among Scott's. Nor was he, as it seems to
+me, quite at home in very short papers&mdash;in papers of the length of the
+average newspaper article. What he could do, as hardly any other man has
+ever done it in England, was a <i>causerie</i> of about the same length as
+Sainte-Beuve's or a little shorter, less limited in range, but also less
+artfully proportioned than the great Frenchman's literary and historical
+studies, giving scope for considerable digression, but coming to an end
+before the author was wearied of his subject, or had exhausted the fresh
+thoughts and the happy borrowings and analogies which he had ready for
+it. Of what is rather affectedly called "architectonic," Hazlitt has
+nothing. No essay of his is ever an exhaustive or even a symmetrical
+treatment of its nominal, or of any, theme. He somewhere speaks of
+himself as finding it easy to go on stringing pearls when he has once
+got the string; but, for my part, I should say that the string was much
+more doubtful than the pearls. Except in a very few set pieces, his
+whole charm consists in the succession of irregular, half-connected, but
+unending and infinitely variegated thoughts, fancies, phrases,
+quotations, which he pours forth not merely at a particular "Open
+Sesame," but at "Open barley," "Open rye," or any other grain in the
+corn-chandler's list. No doubt the charm of these is increased by the
+fact that they are never quite<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">{169}</a></span> haphazard, never absolutely promiscuous,
+despite their desultory arrangement; no doubt also a certain additional
+interest arises from the constant revelation which they make of
+Hazlitt's curious personality, his enthusiastic appreciation flecked
+with spots of grudging spite, his clear intellect clouded with
+prejudice, his admiration of greatness and nobility of character
+co-existing with the faculty of doing very mean and even disgraceful
+things, his abundant relish of life contrasted with almost constant
+repining. He must have been one of the most uncomfortable of all English
+men of letters, who can be called great, to know as a friend. He is
+certainly, to those who know him only as readers, one of the most
+fruitful both in instruction and in delight.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">{170}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI<br />
+<br />
+MOORE</h2>
+
+
+<p>It would be interesting, though perhaps a little impertinent, to put to
+any given number of well-informed persons under the age of forty or
+fifty the sudden query, who was Thomas Brown the Younger? And it is very
+possible that a majority of them would answer that he had something to
+do with Rugby. It is certain that with respect to that part of his work
+in which he was pleased so to call himself, Moore is but little known.
+The considerable mass of his hack-work has gone whither all hack-work
+goes, fortunately enough for those of us who have to do it. The vast
+monument erected to him by his pupil, friend, and literary executor,
+Lord Russell, or rather Lord John Russell, is a monument of such a
+Cyclopean order of architecture, both in respect of bulk and in respect
+of style, that most honest biographers and critics acknowledge
+themselves to have explored its recesses but cursorily. Less of him,
+even as a poet proper, is now read than of any of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">{171}</a></span> brilliant group
+of poets of which he was one, with the possible exceptions of Crabbe and
+Rogers; while, more unfortunate than Crabbe, he has had no Mr. Courthope
+to come to his rescue. But he has recently had what is an unusual thing
+for an English poet, a French biographer.<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> I shall not have very much
+to say of the details of M. Vallat's very creditable and useful
+monograph. It would be possible, if I were merely reviewing it, to pick
+out some of the curious errors of hasty deduction which are rarely
+wanting in a book of its nationality. If (and no shame to him) Moore's
+father sold cheese and whisky, <i>le whisky d'Irlande</i> was no doubt his
+staple commodity in the one branch, but scarcely <i>le fromage de Stilton</i>
+in the other. An English lawyer's studies are not even now, except at
+the universities and for purposes of perfunctory examination, very much
+in "Justinian," and in Moore's time they were still less so. And if
+Bromham Church is near Sloperton, then it will follow as the night the
+day that it is not <i>dans le Bedfordshire</i>. But these things matter very
+little. They are found, in their different kinds, in all books; and if
+we English bookmakers (at least some of us) are not likely to make a
+Bordeaux wine merchant sell Burgundy as his chief commodity, or say that
+a village near Amiens is <i>dans<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">{172}</a></span> le Béarn</i>, we no doubt do other things
+quite as bad. On the whole, M. Vallat's sketch, though of moderate
+length, is quite the soberest and most trustworthy sketch of Moore's
+life and of his books, as books merely, that I know. In matters of pure
+criticism M. Vallat is less blameless. He quotes authorities with that
+apparent indifference to, or even ignorance of, their relative value
+which is so yawning a pit for the feet of the foreigner in all cases;
+and perhaps a wider knowledge of English poetry in general would have
+been a better preparation for the study of Moore's in particular.
+"Never," says M. Renan very wisely, "never does a foreigner satisfy the
+nation whose history he writes"; and this is as true of literary history
+as of history proper. But M. Vallat satisfies us in a very considerable
+degree; and even putting aside the question whether he is satisfactory
+altogether, he has given us quite sufficient text in the mere fact that
+he has bestowed upon Moore an amount of attention and competence which
+no compatriot of the author of "Lalla Rookh" has cared to bestow for
+many years.</p>
+
+<p>I shall also here take the liberty of neglecting a very great&mdash;as far as
+bulk goes, by far the greatest&mdash;part of Moore's own performance. He has
+inserted so many interesting autobiographical particulars in the
+prefaces to his complete works, that visits to the great mausoleum of
+the Russell memoirs are rarely necessary, and still more rarely<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">{173}</a></span>
+profitable. His work for the booksellers was done at a time when the
+best class of such work was much better done than the best class of it
+is now; but it was after all work for the booksellers. His <i>History of
+Ireland</i>, his <i>Life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald</i>, etc., may be pretty
+exactly gauged by saying that they are a good deal better than Scott's
+work of a merely similar kind (in which it is hardly necessary to say
+that I do not include the <i>Tales of a Grandfather</i> or the introductions
+to the Dryden, the Swift, and the Ballantyne novels), not nearly so good
+as Southey's, and not quite so good as Campbell's. The Life of Byron
+holds a different place. With the poems, or some of them, it forms the
+only part of Moore's literary work which is still read; and though it is
+read much more for its substance than for its execution, it is still a
+masterly performance of a very difficult task. The circumstances which
+brought it about are well known, and no discussion of them would be
+possible without plunging into the Byron controversy generally, which
+the present writer most distinctly declines to do. But these
+circumstances, with other things among which Moore's own comparative
+faculty for the business may be not unjustly mentioned, prevent it from
+taking rank at all approaching that of Boswell's or Lockhart's
+inimitable biographies. The chief thing to note in it as regards Moore
+himself, is the help it gives in a matter to which we shall have to
+refer again,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">{174}</a></span> his attitude towards those whom his time still called "the
+great."</p>
+
+<p>And so we are left with the poems&mdash;not an inconsiderable companion
+seeing that its stature is some seven hundred small quarto pages closely
+packed with verses in double columns. Part of this volume is, however,
+devoted to the "Epicurean," a not unremarkable example of ornate prose
+in many respects resembling the author's verse. Indeed, as close readers
+of Moore know, there exists an unfinished verse form of it which, in
+style and general character, is not unlike a more serious "Lalla Rookh."
+As far as poetry goes, almost everything that will be said of "Lalla
+Rookh" might be said of "Alciphron": this latter, however, is a little
+more Byronic than its more famous sister, and in that respect not quite
+so successful.</p>
+
+<p>Moore's life, which is not uninteresting as a key to his personal
+character, is very fairly treated by M. Vallat, chiefly from the poet's
+own authority; but it need not detain us very long. He was born at
+Dublin on 28th May 1779. There is no mystery about his origin. His
+father, John Moore, was a small grocer and liquor-shop keeper who
+received later the place of barrack-master from a patron of his son. The
+mother, Anastasia Codd, was a Wexford girl, and seems to have been well
+educated and somewhat above her husband in station. Thomas was sent to
+several private schools, where he appears to have attained to some
+scholarship and to have early practised composition<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">{175}</a></span> in the tongue of
+the hated Saxon. When he was fourteen, the first measure of Catholic
+Emancipation opened Trinity College to him, and that establishment, "the
+intellectual eye of Ireland" as Sir William Harcourt has justly called
+it, received him a year later. The "silent sister" has fostered an
+always genial, if sometimes inexact, fashion of scholarship, in which
+Moore's talents were well suited to shine, and a pleasant social
+atmosphere wherein he was also not misplaced. But the time drew near to
+'98, and Moore, although he had always too much good sense to dip deeply
+into sedition, was, from his sentimental habits, likely to run some risk
+of being thought to have dipped in it. Although it is certain that he
+would have regarded what is called Nationalism in our days with disgust
+and horror, he cannot be acquitted of using, to the end of his life, the
+loosest of language on subjects where precision is particularly to be
+desired. Robert Emmet was his contemporary, and the action which the
+authorities took was but too well justified by the outbreak of the
+insurrection later. A Commission was named for purifying the college.
+Its head was Lord Clare, one of the greatest of Irishmen, the base or
+ignorant vilifying of whom by some persons in these days has been one of
+the worst results of the Home Rule movement. It had a rather comic
+assessor in Dr. Duigenan, the same, I believe, of whom it has been
+recorded that, at an earlier stage of his academic career and when a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">{176}</a></span>
+junior Fellow, he threatened to "bulge the Provost's eye." The oath was
+tendered to each examinate, and on the day before Moore's appearance
+Emmet and others had gone by default, while it was at least whispered
+that there had been treachery in the camp. Moore's own performance was,
+by his own account, heroic and successful: by another, which he very
+fairly gives, a little less heroic but still successful. Both show
+clearly that Clare was nothing like the stage-tyrant which the
+imagination of the seditious has chosen to represent him as being. That
+M. Vallat should talk rather foolishly about Emmet was to be expected;
+for Emmet's rhetorical rubbish was sure to impose, and has always
+imposed, on Frenchmen. The truth of course is that this young
+person&mdash;though one of those whom every humane man would like to keep
+mewed up till they arrived, if they ever did arrive, which is
+improbable, at years of discretion&mdash;was one of the most mischievous of
+agitators. He was one of those who light a bonfire and then are shocked
+at its burning, who throw a kingdom into anarchy and misery and think
+that they are cleared by a reference to Harmodius and Aristogeiton. It
+is one of the most fearful delights of the educated Tory to remember
+what the grievance of Harmodius and Aristogeiton really was. Moore (who
+had something of the folly of Emmet, but none of his reckless conceit)
+escaped, and his family must<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">{177}</a></span> have been exceedingly glad to send him
+over to the Isle of Britain. He entered at the Middle Temple in 1799,
+but hardly made even a pretence of reading law. His actual experience is
+one of those puzzles which continually meet the student of literary
+history in the days when society was much smaller, the makers of
+literature fewer, and the resources of patronage greater. Moore toiled
+not, neither did he spin. He slipped, apparently on the mere strength of
+an ordinary introduction, into the good graces of Lord Moira, who
+introduced him to the exiled Royal Family of France, and to the richest
+members of the Whig aristocracy&mdash;the Duke of Bedford, the Marquis of
+Lansdowne and others, not to mention the Prince of Wales himself. The
+young Irishman had indeed, as usual, his "proposals" in his
+pocket&mdash;proposals for a translation of Anacreon which appeared in May
+1800. The thing which thus founded one of the easiest, if not the most
+wholly triumphant, of literary careers is not a bad thing. The original,
+now abandoned as a clever though late imitation, was known even in
+Moore's time to be in parts of very doubtful authenticity, but it still
+remains, as an original, a very pretty thing. Moore's version is not
+quite so pretty, and is bolstered out with paraphrase and amplification
+to a rather intolerable extent. But there was considerable
+fellow-feeling between the author, whoever he was, and the translator,
+and the result is not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">{178}</a></span> despicable. Still there is no doubt that work as
+good or better might appear now, and the author would be lucky if he
+cleared a hundred pounds and a favourable review or two by the
+transaction. Moore was made for life. These things happen at one time
+and do not happen at another. We are inclined to accept them as ultimate
+facts into which it is useless to inquire. There does not appear to be
+among the numerous fixed laws of the universe any one which regulates
+the proportion of literary desert to immediate reward, and it is on the
+whole well that it should be so. At any rate the publication increased
+Moore's claims as a "lion," and encouraged him to publish next year the
+<i>Poems of the late Thomas Little</i> (he always stuck to the Christian
+name), which put up his fame and rather put down his character.</p>
+
+<p>In later editions Thomas Little has been so much subjected to the
+fig-leaf and knife that we have known readers who wondered why on earth
+any one should ever have objected to him. He was a good deal more
+uncastrated originally, but there never was much harm in him. It is true
+that the excuse made by Sterne for Tristram Shandy, and often repeated
+for Moore, does not quite apply. There is not much guilt in Little, but
+there is certainly very little innocence. He knows that a certain amount
+of not too gross indecency will raise a snigger, and, like Voltaire and
+Sterne himself, he sets himself to raise it. But<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">{179}</a></span> he does not do it very
+wickedly. The propriety of the nineteenth century, moreover, had not
+then made the surprisingly rapid strides of a few years later, and some
+time had to pass before Moore was to go out with Jeffrey, and nearly
+challenge Byron, for questioning his morality. The rewards of his
+harmless iniquity were at hand; and in the autumn of 1803 he was made
+Secretary of the Admiralty in Bermuda. Bermuda, it is said, is an
+exceedingly pleasant place; but either there is no Secretary of the
+Admiralty there now, or they do not give the post to young men
+four-and-twenty years old who have written two very thin volumes of
+light verses. The Bermoothes are not still vexed with that kind of Civil
+Servant. The appointment was not altogether fortunate for Moore,
+inasmuch as his deputy (for they not only gave nice berths to men of
+letters then, but let them have deputies) embezzled public and private
+moneys, with disastrous results to his easy-going principal. But for the
+time it was all, as most things were with Moore, plain sailing. He went
+out in a frigate, and was the delight of the gun-room. As soon as he got
+tired of the Bermudas, he appointed his deputy and went to travel in
+America, composing large numbers of easy poems. In October 1804 he was
+back in England, still voyaging at His Majesty's expense, and having
+achieved his fifteen months' trip wholly on those terms. Little is heard
+of him for the next two<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">{180}</a></span> years, and then the publication of his American
+and other poems, with some free reflections on the American character,
+brought down on him the wrath of <i>The Edinburgh</i>, and provoked the
+famous leadless or half-leadless duel at Chalk Farm. It was rather hard
+on Moore, if the real cause of his castigation was that he had offended
+democratic principles, while the ostensible cause was that, as Thomas
+Little, he had five years before written loose and humorous verses. So
+thinks M. Vallat, with whom we are not wholly disposed to agree, for
+Jeffrey, though a Whig, was no Democrat, and he was a rather strict
+moralist. However, no harm came of the meeting in any sense, though its
+somewhat burlesque termination made the irreverent laugh. It was indeed
+not fated that Moore should smell serious powder, though his courage
+seems to have been fully equal to any such occasion. The same year
+brought him two unquestioned and unalloyed advantages, the friendship of
+Rogers and the beginning of the Irish Melodies, from which he reaped not
+a little solid benefit, and which contain by far his highest and most
+lasting poetry. It is curious, but by no means unexampled, that, at the
+very time at which he was thus showing that he had found his right way,
+he also diverged into one wholly wrong&mdash;that of the serious and very
+ineffective Satires, "Corruption," "Intolerance," and others. The year
+1809 brought "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" with a gibe from
+Byron<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">{181}</a></span> and a challenge from Moore. But Moore's challenges were fated to
+have no other result than making the challenged his friends for life.
+All this time he had been more or less "about town." In 1811 he married
+Elizabeth Dyke ("Bessy"), an actress of virtue and beauty, and wrote the
+very inferior comic opera of "The Blue Stocking." Lord Moira gave the
+pair a home first in his own house, then at Kegworth near Donington,
+whence they moved to Ashbourne. Moore was busy now. The politics of "The
+Two-penny Postbag" are of course sometimes dead enough to us; but
+sometimes also they are not, and then the easy grace of the satire,
+which is always pungent and never venomed, is not much below Canning.
+Its author also did a good deal of other work of the same kind, besides
+beginning to review for <i>The Edinburgh</i>. Considering that he was in a
+way making his bread and butter by lampooning, however good-humouredly,
+the ruler of his country, he seems to have been a little unreasonable in
+feeling shocked that Lord Moira, on going as viceroy to India, did not
+provide for him. In the first place he was provided for already; and in
+the second place you cannot reasonably expect to enjoy the pleasures of
+independence and those of dependence at the same time. At the end of
+1817 he left Mayfield (his cottage near Ashbourne) and Lord Moira, for
+Lord Lansdowne and Sloperton, a cottage near Bowood, the end of the one
+sojourn<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">{182}</a></span> and the beginning of the other being distinguished by the
+appearance of his two best works, next to the Irish Melodies&mdash;"Lalla
+Rookh" and "The Fudge Family at Paris." His first and almost his only
+heavy stroke of ill-luck now came on him: his deputy at Bermuda levanted
+with some six thousand pounds, for which Moore was liable. Many friends
+came to his aid, and after some delay and negotiations, during which he
+had to go abroad, Lord Lansdowne paid what was necessary. But Moore
+afterwards paid Lord Lansdowne, which makes a decided distinction
+between his conduct and that of Theodore Hook in a similar case.</p>
+
+<p>Although the days of Moore lasted for half an ordinary lifetime after
+this, they saw few important events save the imbroglio over the Byron
+memoirs. They saw also the composition of a great deal of literature and
+journalism, all very well paid, notwithstanding which, Moore seems to
+have been always in a rather unintelligible state of pecuniary distress.
+That he made his parents an allowance, as some allege in explanation,
+will not in the least account for this; for, creditable as it was in him
+to make it, this allowance did not exceed one hundred pounds a year. He
+must have spent little in an ordinary way, for his Sloperton
+establishment was of the most modest character, while his wife was an
+excellent manager, and never went into society. Probably he might have
+endorsed, if he had been asked, the great<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">{183}</a></span> principle which somebody or
+other has formulated, that the most expensive way of living is staying
+in other peoples houses. At any rate his condition was rather precarious
+till 1835, when Lord John Russell and Lord Lansdowne obtained for him a
+Civil List pension of three hundred pounds a year. In his very last days
+this was further increased by an additional hundred a year to his wife.
+His end was not happy. The softening of the brain, which set in about
+1848, and which had been preceded for some time by premonitory symptoms,
+can hardly, as in the cases of Scott and Southey, be set down to
+overwork, for though Moore had not been idle, his literary life had been
+mere child's play to theirs. He died on 26th February 1852.</p>
+
+<p>Of Moore's character not much need be said, nor need what is said be
+otherwise than favourable. Not only to modern tastes, but to the
+sturdier tastes of his own day, and even of the days immediately before
+his, there was a little too much of the parasite and the hanger-on about
+him. It is easy to say that a man of his talents, when he had once
+obtained a start, might surely have gone his own way and lived his own
+life, without taking up the position of a kind of superior gamekeeper or
+steward at rich men's gates. But race, fashion, and a good many other
+things have to be taken into account; and it is fair to Moore to
+remember that he was, as it were from the first, bound to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">{184}</a></span>
+chariot-wheels of "the great," and could hardly liberate himself from
+them without churlishness and violence. Moreover, it cannot possibly be
+denied by any fair critic that if he accepted to some extent the awkward
+position of led-poet, he showed in it as much independence as was
+compatible with the function. Both in money matters, in his language to
+his patrons, and in a certain general but indefinable tone of behaviour,
+he contrasts not less favourably than remarkably, both with the
+ultra-Tory Hook, to whom we have already compared him, and with the
+ultra-Radical Leigh Hunt. Moore had as little of Wagg as he had of
+Skimpole about him; though he allowed his way of life to compare in some
+respects perilously with theirs. It is only necessary to look at his
+letters to Byron&mdash;always ready enough to treat as spaniels those of his
+inferiors in station who appeared to be of the spaniel kind&mdash;to
+appreciate his general attitude, and his behaviour in this instance is
+by no means different from his behaviour in others. As a politician
+there is no doubt that he at least thought himself to be quite sincere.
+It may be that, if he had been, his political satires would have galled
+Tories more than they did then, and could hardly be read by persons of
+that persuasion with such complete enjoyment as they can now. But the
+insincerity was quite unconscious, and indeed can hardly be said to have
+been insincerity at all. Moore had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">{185}</a></span> not a political head, and in English
+as in Irish politics his beliefs were probably not founded on any
+clearly comprehended principles. But such as they were he held to them
+firmly. Against his domestic character nobody has ever said anything;
+and it is sufficient to observe that not a few of the best as well as of
+the greatest men of his time, Scott as well as Byron, Lord John Russell
+as well as Lord Moira, appear not only to have admired his abilities and
+liked his social qualities, but to have sincerely respected his
+character. And so we may at last find ourselves alone with the plump
+volume of poems in which we shall hardly discover with the amiable M.
+Vallat "the greatest lyric poet of England," but in which we shall find
+a poet certainly, and if not a very great poet, at any rate a poet who
+has done many things well, and one particular thing better than anybody
+else.</p>
+
+<p>The volume opens with "Lalla Rookh," a proceeding which, if not
+justified by chronology, is completely justified by the facts that Moore
+was to his contemporaries the author of that poem chiefly, and that it
+is by far the most considerable thing not only in mere bulk, but in
+arrangement, plan, and style, that he ever did. Perhaps I am not quite a
+fair judge of "Lalla Rookh." I was brought up in what is called a strict
+household where, though the rule was not, as far as I can remember,
+enforced by any penalties, it was a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">{186}</a></span> point of honour that in the nursery
+and school-room none but "Sunday books" should be read on Sunday. But
+this severity was tempered by one of the easements often occurring in a
+world which, if not the best, is certainly not the worst of all possible
+worlds. For the convenience of servants, or for some other reason, the
+children were much more in the drawing-room on Sundays than on any other
+day, and it was an unwritten rule that any book that lived in the
+drawing-room was fit Sunday-reading. The consequence was that from the
+time I could read, till childish things were put away, I used to spend a
+considerable part of the first day of the week in reading and re-reading
+a collection of books, four of which were Scott's poems, "Lalla Rookh,"
+<i>The Essays of Elia</i> (First Edition,&mdash;I have got it now), and Southey's
+<i>Doctor</i>. Therefore it may be that I rank "Lalla Rookh" rather too high.
+At the same time, I confess that it still seems to me a very respectable
+poem indeed of the second rank. Of course it is artificial. The parade
+of second, or third, or twentieth-hand learning in the notes makes one
+smile, and the whole reminds one (as I daresay it has reminded many
+others before) of a harp of the period with the gilt a little tarnished,
+the ribbons more than a little faded, and the silk stool on which the
+young woman in ringlets used to sit much worn. All this is easy
+metaphorical criticism, if it is criticism at all. For I am not sure
+that,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">{187}</a></span> when the last age has got a little farther off from our
+descendants, they will see anything more ludicrous in such a harp than
+we see in the faded spinets of a generation earlier still. But much
+remains to Lalla if not to Feramorz. The prose interludes have lost none
+of their airy grace. Even Mr. Burnand has not been able to make Mokanna
+ridiculous, nor have the recent accounts of the actual waste of desert
+and felt huts banished at least the poetical beauty of "Merou's bright
+palaces and groves." There are those who laugh at the bower of roses by
+Bendemeer's stream: I do not. "Paradise and the Peri" is perhaps the
+prettiest purely sentimental poem that English or any other language can
+show. "The Fire Worshippers" are rather long, but there is a famous
+fight&mdash;more than one indeed&mdash;in them to relieve the monotony. For "The
+Light of the Harem" alone I have never been able to get up much
+enthusiasm; but even "The Light of the Harem" is a great deal better
+than Moore's subsequent attempt in the style of "Lalla Rookh," or
+something like it, "The Loves of the Angels." There is only one good
+thing that I can find to say of that: it is not so bad as the poem which
+similarity of title makes one think of in connection with
+it&mdash;Lamartine's disastrous "Chute d'un Ange."</p>
+
+<p>As "Lalla Rookh" is far the most important of Moore's serious poems, so
+"The Fudge Family in Paris" is far the best of his humorous poems. I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">{188}</a></span> do
+not forget "The Two-penny Postbag," nor many capital later verses of the
+same kind, the best of which perhaps is the Epistle from Henry of Exeter
+to John of Tchume. But "The Fudge Family" has all the merits of these,
+with a scheme and framework of dramatic character which they lack. Miss
+Biddy and her vanities, Master Bob and his guttling, the eminent
+turncoat Phil Fudge, Esq. himself and his politics, are all excellent.
+But I avow that Phelim Connor is to me the most delightful, though he
+has always been rather a puzzle. If he is intended to be a satire on the
+class now represented by the O'Briens and the McCarthys he is exquisite,
+and it is small wonder that Young Ireland has never loved Moore much.
+But I do not think that Thomas Brown the Younger meant it, or at least
+wholly meant it, as satire, and this is perhaps the best proof of his
+unpractical way of looking at politics. For Phelim Connor is a much more
+damning sketch than any of the Fudges. Vanity, gluttony, the scheming
+intrigues of eld, may not be nice things, but they are common to the
+whole human race. The hollow rant which enjoys the advantages of liberty
+and declaims against the excesses of tyranny is in its perfection Irish
+alone. However this may be, these lighter poems of Moore are great fun,
+and it is no small misfortune that the younger generation of readers
+pays so little attention to them. For they are full of acute observation
+of manners,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">{189}</a></span> politics, and society by an accomplished man of the world,
+put into pointed and notable form by an accomplished man of letters. Our
+fathers knew them well, and many a quotation familiar enough at second
+hand is due originally to the Fudge Family in their second appearance
+(not so good, but still good) many years later, to "The Two-penny
+Postbag" and to the long list of miscellaneous satires and skits. The
+last sentence is however to be taken as most strictly excluding
+"Corruption," "Intolerance," and "The Sceptic." "Rhymes on the Road,"
+travel-pieces out of Moore's line, may also be mercifully left aside:
+and "Evenings in Greece;" and "The Summer Fête" (any universal provider
+would have supplied as good a poem with the supper and the rout-seats)
+need not delay the critic and will not extraordinarily delight the
+reader. Not here is Moore's spur of Parnassus to be found.</p>
+
+<p>For that domain of his we must go to the songs which, in extraordinary
+numbers, make up the whole of the divisions headed Irish Melodies,
+National Airs, Sacred Songs, Ballads and Songs, and some of the finest
+of which are found outside these divisions in the longer poems from
+"Lalla Rookh" downwards. The singular musical melody of these pieces has
+never been seriously denied by any one, but it seems to be thought,
+especially nowadays, that because they are musically melodious they are
+not poetical. It is probably useless<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">{190}</a></span> to protest against a prejudice
+which, where it is not due to simple thoughtlessness or to blind
+following of fashion, argues a certain constitutional defect of the
+understanding powers. But it may be just necessary to repeat pretty
+firmly that any one who regards, even with a tincture of contempt, such
+work (to take various characteristic examples) as Dryden's lyrics, as
+Shenstone's, as Moore's, as Macaulay's Lays, because he thinks that, if
+he did not contemn them, his worship of Shakespeare, of Shelley, of
+Wordsworth would be suspect, is most emphatically not a critic of poetry
+and not even a catholic lover of it. Which said, let us betake ourselves
+to seeing what Moore's special virtue is. It is acknowledged that it
+consists partly in marrying music most happily to verse; but what is not
+so fully acknowledged as it ought to be is, that it also consists in
+marrying music not merely to verse, but to poetry. Among the more
+abstract questions of poetical criticism few are more interesting than
+this, the connection of what may be called musical music with poetical
+music; and it is one which has not been much discussed. Let us take the
+two greatest of Moore's own contemporaries in lyric, the two greatest
+lyrists as some think (I give no opinion on this) in English, and
+compare their work with his. Shelley has the poetical music in an
+unsurpassable and sometimes in an almost unapproached degree, but his
+verse is admittedly very difficult to set to music. I should myself go
+farther<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">{191}</a></span> and say that it has in it some indefinable quality antagonistic
+to such setting. Except the famous Indian Serenade, I do not know any
+poem of Shelley's that has been set with anything approaching to
+success, and in the best setting that I know of this the honeymoon of
+the marriage turns into a "red moon" before long. That this is not
+merely due to the fact that Shelley likes intricate metres any one who
+examines Moore can see. That it is due merely to the fact that Shelley,
+as we know from Peacock, was almost destitute of any ear for music is
+the obvious and common explanation. But neither will this serve, for we
+happen also to know that Burns, whose lyric, of a higher quality than
+Moore's, assorts with music as naturally as Moore's own, was quite as
+deficient as Shelley in this respect. So was Scott, who could yet write
+admirable songs to be sung. It seems therefore almost impossible, on the
+comparison of these three instances, to deny the existence of some
+peculiar musical music in poetry, which is distinct from poetical music,
+though it may coexist with it or may be separated from it, and which is
+independent both of technical musical training and even of what is
+commonly called "ear" in the poet. That Moore possessed it in probably
+the highest degree, will I think, hardly be denied. It never seems to
+have mattered to him whether he wrote the words for the air or altered
+the air to suit the words. The two fit like<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">{192}</a></span> a glove, and if, as is
+sometimes the case, the same or a similar poetical measure is heard set
+to another air than Moore's, this other always seems intrusive and
+wrong. He draws attention in one case to the extraordinary irregularity
+of his own metre (an irregularity to which the average pindaric is a
+mere jog-trot), yet the air fits it exactly. Of course the two feet
+which most naturally go to music, the anapæst and the trochee, are
+commonest with him; but the point is that he seems to find no more
+difficulty, if he does not take so much pleasure, in setting
+combinations of a very different kind. Nor is this peculiar gift by any
+means unimportant from the purely poetical side, the side on which the
+verse is looked at without any regard to air or accompaniment. For the
+great drawback to "songs to be sung" in general since Elizabethan days
+(when, as Mr. Arber and Mr. Bullen have shown, it was very different)
+has been the constant tendency of the verse-writer to sacrifice to his
+musical necessities either meaning or poetic sound or both. The climax
+of this is of course reached in the ineffable balderdash which usually
+does duty for the libretto of an opera, but it is quite as noticeable in
+the ordinary songs of the drawing-room. Now Moore is quite free from
+this blame. He may not have the highest and rarest strokes of poetic
+expression; but at any rate he seldom or never sins against either
+reason or poetry for the sake of rhythm and rhyme. He is always the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">{193}</a></span>
+master not the servant, the artist not the clumsy craftsman. And this I
+say not by any means as one likely to pardon poetical shortcomings in
+consideration of musical merit, for, shameful as the confession may be,
+a little music goes a long way with me; and what music I do like, is
+rather of the kind opposite to Moore's facile styles. Yet it is easy,
+even from the musical view, to exaggerate his facility. Berlioz is not
+generally thought a barrel-organ composer, and he bestowed early and
+particular pains on Moore.</p>
+
+<p>To many persons, however, the results are more interesting than the
+analysis of their qualities and principles; so let us go to the songs
+themselves. To my fancy the three best of Moore's songs, and three of
+the finest songs in any language, are "Oft in the stilly Night," "When
+in Death I shall calm recline," and "I saw from the Beach." They all
+exemplify what has been pointed out above, the complete adaptation of
+words to music and music to words, coupled with a decidedly high quality
+of poetical merit in the verse, quite apart from the mere music. It can
+hardly be necessary to quote them, for they are or ought to be familiar
+to everybody; but in selecting these three I have no intention of
+distinguishing them in point of general excellence from scores, nay
+hundreds of others. "Go where Glory waits thee" is the first of the
+Irish melodies, and one of those most hackneyed by the enthusiasm of
+bygone Pogsons.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">{194}</a></span> But its merit ought in no way to suffer on that account
+with persons who are not Pogsons. It ought to be possible for the
+reader, it is certainly possible for the critic, to dismiss Pogson
+altogether, to wave Pogson off, and to read anything as if it had never
+been read before. If this be done we shall hardly wonder at the delight
+which our fathers, who will not compare altogether badly with ourselves,
+took in Thomas Moore. "When he who adores thee" is supposed on pretty
+good evidence to have been inspired by the most hollow and senseless of
+all pseudo-patriotic delusions, a delusion of which the best thing that
+can be said is that "the pride of thus dying for" it has been about the
+last thing that it ever did inspire, and that most persons who have
+suffered from it have usually had the good sense to take lucrative
+places from the tyrant as soon as they could get them, and to live
+happily ever after. But the basest, the most brutal, and the bloodiest
+of Saxons may recognise in Moore's poem the expression of a possible, if
+not a real, feeling given with infinite grace and pathos. The same
+string reverberates even in the thrice and thousand times hackneyed Harp
+of Tara. "Rich and rare were the Gems she wore" is chiefly comic opera,
+but it is very pretty comic opera; and the two pieces "There is not in
+the wide world" and "How dear to me" exemplify, for the first but by no
+means for the last time, Moore's extraordinary command of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">{195}</a></span> last
+phase of that curious thing called by the century that gave him birth
+Sensibility. We have turned Sensibility out of doors; but he would be a
+rash man who should say that we have not let in seven worse devils of
+the gushing kind in her comparatively innocent room.</p>
+
+<p>Then we may skip not a few pieces, only referring once more to "The
+Legacy" ("When in Death I shall calm recline"), an anacreontic quite
+unsurpassable in its own kind. We need dwell but briefly on such pieces
+as "Believe me if all those endearing young Charms," which is typical of
+much that Moore wrote, but does not reach the true devil-may-care note
+of Suckling, or as "By the Hope within us springing," for Moore's
+war-like pieces are seldom or never good. But with "Love's Young Dream"
+we come back to the style of which it is impossible to say less than
+that it is quite admirable in its kind. Then after a page or two we come
+to the chief <i>cruces</i> of Moore's pathetic and of his comic manner, "The
+Last Rose of Summer," "The Young May Moon," and "The Minstrel Boy." I
+cannot say very much for the last, which is tainted with the unreality
+of all Moore's Tyrtean efforts; but "The Young May Moon" could not be
+better, and I am not going to abandon the Rose, for all her perfume be
+something musty&mdash;a <i>pot-pourri</i> rose rather than a fresh one. The song
+of O'Ruark with its altogether fatal climax<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">{196}</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">On our side is virtue and Erin,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On theirs is the Saxon and guilt&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>(which carries with it the delightful reflection that it was an Irishman
+running away with an Irishwoman that occasioned this sweeping moral
+contrast) must be given up; but surely not so "Oh had we some bright
+little Isle of our own." For indeed if one only had some bright little
+isle of that kind, some <i>rive fidèle où l'on aime toujours</i>, and where
+things in general are adjusted to such a state, then would Thomas Moore
+be the Laureate of that bright and tight little island.</p>
+
+<p>But it is alarming to find that we have not yet got through twenty-five
+pages out of some hundred or two, and that the Irish Melodies are not
+yet nearly exhausted. Not a few of the best known of Moore's songs,
+including "Oft in the stilly Night," are to be found in the division of
+National Airs, which is as a whole a triumph of that extraordinary
+genius for setting which has been already noticed. Here is "Flow on thou
+shining River," here the capital "When I touch the String," on which
+Thackeray loved to make variations. But "Oft in the stilly Night" itself
+is far above the others. We do not say "stilly" now: we have been taught
+by Coleridge (who used to use it freely himself before he laughed at it)
+to laugh at "stilly" and "paly" and so forth. But the most acrimonious
+critic may be challenged to point out another weakness of the same kind,
+and on the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">{197}</a></span> whole the straightforward simplicity of the phrase equals
+the melody of the rhythm.</p>
+
+<p>The Sacred Songs need not delay us long; for they are not better than
+sacred songs in general, which is saying remarkably little. Perhaps the
+most interesting thing in them is the well-known couplet,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">This world is but a fleeting show<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For man's illusion given&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>which, as has justly been observed, contains one of the most singular
+estimates of the divine purpose anywhere to be found. But Moore might,
+like Mr. Midshipman Easy, have excused himself by remarking, "Ah! well,
+I don't understand these things." The miscellaneous division of Ballads,
+Songs, etc., is much more fruitful. "The Leaf and the Fountain,"
+beginning "Tell me, kind seer, I pray thee," though rather long, is
+singularly good of its kind&mdash;the kind of half-narrative ballad. So in a
+lighter strain is "The Indian Bark." Nor is Moore less at home after his
+own fashion in the songs from the Anthology. It is true that the same
+fault which has been found with his Anacreon may be found here, and that
+it is all the more sensible because at least in some cases the originals
+are much higher poetry than the pseudo-Teian. To the form and style of
+Meleager Moore could not pretend; but as these are rather songs on Greek
+motives than translations from the Greek, the slackness and dilution
+matter less. But the strictly miscellaneous division holds some of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">{198}</a></span>
+best work. We could no doubt dispense with the well-known ditty (for
+once very nearly the "rubbish" with which Moore is so often and so
+unjustly charged) where Posada rhymes of necessity to Granada, and
+where, quite against the author's habit, the ridiculous term "Sultana"
+is fished out to do similar duty in reference to the Dulcinea, or rather
+to the Maritornes, of a muleteer. But this is quite an exception, and as
+a rule the facile verse is as felicitous as it is facile. Perhaps no one
+stands out very far above the rest; perhaps all have more or less the
+mark of easy variations on a few well-known themes. The old comparison
+that they are as numerous as motes, as bright, as fleeting, and as
+individually insignificant, comes naturally enough to the mind. But then
+they are very numerous, they are very bright, and if they are fleeting,
+their number provides plenty more to take the place of that which passes
+away. Nor is it by any means true that they lack individual
+significance.</p>
+
+<p>This enumeration of a few out of many ornaments of Moore's muse will of
+course irritate those who object to the "brick-of-the-house" mode of
+criticism; while it may not be minute enough, or sufficiently bolstered
+by actual quotation, to please those who hold that simple extract is the
+best, if not the only tolerable form of criticism. But the critic is not
+alone in finding that, whether he carry his ass or ride upon it, he
+cannot please all his public. What has been said is probably enough,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">{199}</a></span> in
+the case of a writer whose work, though as a whole rather unjustly
+forgotten, survives in parts more securely even than the work of greater
+men, to remind readers of at least the outlines and bases of his claim
+to esteem. And the more those outlines are followed up, and the
+structure founded on those bases is examined, the more certain, I think,
+is Moore of recovering, not the position which M. Vallat would assign to
+him of the greatest lyrist of England (a position which he never held
+and never could hold except with very prejudiced or very incompetent
+judges), not that of the equal of Scott or Byron or Shelley or
+Wordsworth, but still a position high enough and singularly isolated at
+its height. Viewed from the point of strictly poetical criticism, he no
+doubt ranks only with those poets who have expressed easily and
+acceptably the likings and passions and thoughts and fancies of the
+average man, and who have expressed these with no extraordinary cunning
+or witchery. To go further in limitation, the average man, of whom he is
+thus the bard, is a rather sophisticated average man, without very deep
+thoughts or feelings, without a very fertile or fresh imagination or
+fancy, with even a touch&mdash;a little touch&mdash;of cant and "gush" and other
+defects incident to average and sophisticated humanity. But this
+humanity is at any time and every time no small portion of humanity at
+large, and it is to Moore's credit that he sings its feelings and its
+thoughts so as always to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">{200}</a></span> get the human and durable element in them
+visible and audible through the "trappings of convention." Again, he has
+that all-saving touch of humour which enables him, sentimentalist as he
+is, to be an admirable comedian as well. Yet again, he has at least
+something of the two qualities which one must demand of a poet who is a
+poet, and not a mere maker of rhymes. His note of feeling, if not full
+or deep, is true and real. His faculty of expression is not only
+considerable, but it is also distinguished; it is a faculty which in the
+same measure and degree nobody else has possessed. On one side he had
+the gift of singing those admirable songs of which we have been talking.
+On the other, he had the gift of right satiric verse to a degree which
+only three others of the great dead men of this century in
+England&mdash;Canning, Praed, and Thackeray&mdash;have reached. Besides all this,
+he was a "considerable man of letters." But your considerable men of
+letters, after flourishing, turn to dust in their season, and other
+considerable or inconsiderable men of letters spring out of it. The true
+poets and even the true satirists abide, and both as a poet and a
+satirist Thomas Moore abides and will abide with them.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">{201}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII<br />
+<br />
+LEIGH HUNT</h2>
+
+
+<p>To compare the peaceful and home-keeping art of criticism to the
+adventurous one of lighthouse-building may seem an excursion into the
+heroi-comic, if not into the tragic-burlesque. Neither is it in the
+least my intention to dwell on a tolerably obvious metaphorical
+resemblance between the two. It is certainly the business of the critic
+to warn others off from the mistakes which have been committed by his
+forerunners, and perhaps (for let us anticipate the crushing wit) from
+his own. But that is not my reason for the suggestion. There is a story
+of I forget what lighthouse which Smeaton, or Stevenson, or somebody
+else, had unusual difficulty in establishing. The rock was too near the
+surface for it to be safe or practicable to moor barges over it; and it
+was uncovered for too short a time to enable any solid foundations to be
+laid or even begun during one tide. So the engineer, with other
+adventurous persons, got himself landed on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">{202}</a></span> it, succeeded after a vain
+attempt or two in working an iron rod into the middle, and then hung on
+bodily while the tide was up, that he and his men might begin again as
+soon as it receded. In a mild and unexciting fashion, that is what the
+critic has to do&mdash;to dig about till he makes a lodgment in his author,
+hang on to it, and then begin to build. It is not always very easy work,
+and it is never less easy than in the case of the author whom somebody
+has kindly called "the Ariel of criticism." Leigh Hunt is an extremely
+difficult person upon whom to make any critical lodgment, for the reason
+that (I do not intend any disrespect by the comparison) he has much less
+of the rock about him than of the shifting sand. I do not now speak of
+the great Skimpole problem&mdash;we shall come to that presently&mdash;but merely
+of the writer as shown in his works.</p>
+
+<p>The works themselves are not particularly easy to get together in any
+complete form, some of them being almost inextricably entangled in
+defunct periodicals, and others reappearing in different guises in the
+author's many published volumes. Mr. Kent's bibliography gives forty-six
+different entries; Mr. Alexander Ireland's (to which he refers) gives, I
+think, over eighty. Some years ago I remember receiving the catalogue of
+a second-hand bookseller who offered what he very frankly confessed to
+be far from a complete collection of the first editions, at the price of
+a score or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">{203}</a></span> two of pounds; and here at least the first are in some cases
+the only issues. Probably this is one reason why selections from Leigh
+Hunt, of which Mr. Kent's is the latest and best, have been frequent. I
+have seen two certainly, and I think three, within as many years.
+Luckily, however, quite enough for the reader's if not for the critic's
+purpose is easily obtainable. The poems can be bought in more forms than
+one; Messrs. Smith and Elder have reprinted cheaply the "Autobiography,"
+"Men, Women, and Books," "Imagination and Fancy," "The Town," "Wit and
+Humour," "Table Talk," and "A Jar of Honey." Other reprints of "One
+Hundred Romances of Real Life" (one of his merest pieces of book-making)
+and of his "Stories from the Italian Poets," one of his worst pieces of
+criticism, but agreeably reproduced in every respect save the hideous
+American spelling, have recently appeared. The complete and uniform
+issue, the want of which to some lovers of books (I own myself among
+them) is never quite made up by a scratch company of volumes of all
+dates, sizes, and prints, is indeed wanting. But still you can get a
+working Leigh Hunt together.</p>
+
+<p>It is when you have got him that your trouble begins; and before it is
+done the critic, if he be one of those who are not satisfied with a mere
+<i>compte rendu</i>, is likely to acknowledge that Leigh Hunt, if "Ariel" be
+in some respects too<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">{204}</a></span> complimentary a name for him, is at any rate a
+most tricksy spirit. The finest taste in some ways, contrasting with
+what can only be called the most horrible vulgarity in others; a light
+hand tediously boring again and again at obviously miscomprehended
+questions of religion, philosophy, and politics; a keen appetite for
+humour condescending to thin and repeated jests; a reviler of kings
+going out of his way laboriously to beslaver royalty; a man of letters,
+of talent almost touching genius, who seldom writes a dozen consecutive
+good pages:&mdash;these are only some of the inconsistencies that meet us in
+Leigh Hunt.</p>
+
+<p>He has related the history of his immediate and remoter forbears with
+considerable minuteness&mdash;with more minuteness indeed by far than he has
+bestowed upon all but a few passages of his own life. For the general
+reader, however, it is quite sufficient to know that his father, the
+Reverend Isaac Hunt, who belonged to a clerical family in Barbados, went
+for his education to the still British Provinces of North America,
+married a Philadelphia girl, Mary Shewell, practised as a lawyer till
+the Revolution broke out, and then being driven from his adopted country
+as a loyalist, settled in England, took orders, drifted into
+Unitarianism or anythingarianism, and ended his days, after not
+infrequent visits to the King's Bench, comfortably enough, but hanging
+rather loose on society, his friends, and a pension. Leigh Hunt (his
+godfathers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">{205}</a></span> and godmothers gave him also the names of James Henry, which
+he dropped) was the youngest son, and was born on 19th October 1784. His
+best youthful remembrance, and one of the most really humorous things he
+ever said, was that he used, after a childish indulgence in bad
+language, to think to himself with a shudder when he received any mark
+of favour, "Ah! they little suspect I'm the boy who said 'd&mdash;&mdash;n.'" But
+at seven years old he went to Christ's Hospital, and continued there for
+another seven. His reminiscences of that seminary, put down pretty
+early, and afterwards embodied in the "Autobiography," are even better
+known from the fact that they served as a text, and as the occasion of a
+little gentle raillery, to Elia's famous essay than in themselves. For
+some years after leaving school he did nothing definite but write
+verses, which his father (who seems to have been gifted with a plentiful
+lack of judgment in most incidents and relations of life) published when
+the boy was but sixteen. They are as nearly as possible valueless, but
+they went through three editions in a very short time. It ought to be
+remembered that except Cowper, who was just dead, and Crabbe, who had
+for years intermitted writing, the public had only Rogers and Southey
+for poets, for it would none of the "Lyrical Ballads," and the "Lay of
+the Last Minstrel" had not yet been published. So that it did not make
+one of its worst mistakes in taking up Leigh Hunt, who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">{206}</a></span> certainly had
+poetry in him, if he did not put it forth quite so early as this. He was
+made a kind of lion, but, fortunately or unfortunately for him, only in
+middle-class circles where there were no patrons. He was quite an old
+man&mdash;nearly twenty&mdash;when he made regular entry into the periodical
+writing which kept him (with the aid of his friends) for nearly sixty
+years. "Mr. Town, Junior" (altered from an old signature of Colman's)
+contributed theatrical criticisms, which do not seem to have been paid
+for, to an evening paper, the <i>Traveller</i>, now surviving as a second
+title to the <i>Globe</i>. His bent in this direction was assisted by the
+fact that his elder brother John had been apprenticed to a printer, and
+had desires to be a publisher. In January 1808 the two brothers started
+the <i>Examiner</i>, and Leigh Hunt edited it with a great deal of courage
+for fourteen years. He threw away for this the only piece of solid
+preferment that he ever had, a clerkship in the War Office which
+Addington gave him. The references to this act of recklessness or
+self-sacrifice in the Autobiography are rather enigmatical. His two
+functions were no doubt incompatible at best, especially considering the
+violent Opposition tone which the <i>Examiner</i> took. But Leigh Hunt,
+whatever faults he had, was not quite a hypocrite; and he hints pretty
+broadly that if he had not resigned he might have been asked to do so,
+not from any political reasons, but simply because he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">{207}</a></span> did his work very
+badly. He was much more at home in the <i>Examiner</i> (with which for a
+short time was joined the quarterly <i>Reflector</i>), though his warmest
+admirers candidly admit that he knew nothing about politics. In 1809 he
+married a Miss Marianne Kent, whose station was not very exalted, and
+whose son admits with unusual frankness that she was "the reverse of
+handsome, and without accomplishments," adding rather whimsically that
+this person, "the reverse of handsome," had "a pretty figure, beautiful
+black hair and magnificent eyes," and though "without accomplishments"
+had "a very strong natural turn for plastic art." At any rate she seems
+to have suited Leigh Hunt admirably. The <i>Examiner</i> soon became
+ill-noted with Government, but it was not till the end of 1812 that a
+grip could be got of it. Leigh Hunt's offence is in the ordinary books
+rather undervalued. That he (or his contributor) called the Prince
+Regent, as is commonly said, "a fat Adonis of fifty" (the exact words
+are, "this Adonis in loveliness is a corpulent man of fifty") may have
+been the chief sting, but was certainly not the chief legal offence.
+Leigh Hunt called the ruler of his country "a violator of his word, a
+libertine over head and ears in disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties,
+the companion of demi-reps, a man who had just closed half a century
+without one single claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect
+of posterity." It might be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">{208}</a></span> true or it might be false; but certainly
+there was then not a country in Europe where it would have been allowed
+to be said of the chief of the state. And I am not sure that it could be
+said now anywhere but in Ireland, where considerably worse things were
+said with impunity of Lord Spencer and Sir George Trevelyan. At any rate
+the brothers were prosecuted and fined five hundred pounds each, with
+two years' imprisonment. The sentence was carried out; but Leigh Hunt's
+imprisonment in Horsemonger Lane Gaol was the merest farce of
+incarceration. He could not indeed go beyond the prison walls. But he
+had a comfortable suite of rooms which he was permitted to furnish and
+decorate just as he liked; he was allowed to have his wife and family
+with him; he had a tiny garden of his own, and free access to that of
+the prison; there was no restriction on visitors, who brought him
+presents just as they chose; and he became a kind of fashion with the
+Opposition. Jeremy Bentham came and played at battledore and shuttlecock
+with him&mdash;an almost appalling idea, for it will not do to trust too
+implicitly to Leigh Hunt's declaration that Jeremy's object was to
+suggest "an improvement in the constitution of shuttlecocks." The
+<i>Examiner</i> itself continued undisturbed, and except for the "I can't get
+out" feeling, which even of itself cannot be compared for one moment to
+that of a modern prisoner condemned to his cell and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">{209}</a></span> the
+exercising-ground, it is rather difficult to see much reason for Leigh
+Hunt's complaints. The imprisonment may have affected his health, but it
+certainly brought him troops of friends, and gave him leisure to do not
+only his journalist's work, but things much more serious. Here he wrote
+and published his first poem since the Juvenilia, "A Feast of the Poets"
+(not much of a thing), and here he wrote, though he did not publish it
+till his liberation, the "Story of Rimini," by far his most important
+poem, both for intrinsic character and for influence on others. He had
+known Lamb from boyhood, and Shelley some years; he now made the
+acquaintance of Keats, Hazlitt, and Byron.</p>
+
+<p>In the next five years after his liberation he did a great deal of work,
+the best by far being the periodical called the <i>Indicator</i>, a weekly
+paper which ran for sixty-six numbers. The <i>Indicator</i> was the first
+thing that I ever read of Hunt's, and, by no means for that reason only,
+I think it the best. Its buttonholing papers, of a kind since widely
+imitated, were the most popular; but there are romantic things in it,
+such as "The Daughter of Hippocrates" (paraphrased and expanded from Sir
+John Mandeville with Hunt's peculiar skill), which seem to me better. It
+was at the end of these five years that Leigh Hunt resolved upon the
+second adventure (his imprisonment being the first and involuntary) of
+his otherwise easy-going<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">{210}</a></span> life&mdash;an adventure the immediate consequences
+of which were unfortunate in many ways, but which supplied him with a
+good deal of literary material. This was his visit to Italy as a kind of
+literary <i>attaché</i> to Lord Byron, and editor of a quarterly magazine,
+the <i>Liberal</i>. The idea was Shelley's, and if Shelley had lived, it
+might not have resulted quite so disastrously, for Shelley was
+absolutely untiring as a helper of lame dogs over stiles. As it was, the
+excursion distinctly contradicted the saying (condemned by some as
+immoral) that a bad beginning makes a good ending. The Hunt family,
+which now included several children, embarked, in November of all months
+in the year, on a small ship bound for Italy. They were something like a
+month getting down the Channel in tremendous weather, and at last when
+their ship had to turn tail from near Scilly and run into Dartmouth,
+Hunt, whose wife was extremely ill of lung-disease, made up his mind to
+stay for the winter in Devonshire. He passed the time pleasantly enough
+at Plymouth, which they left once more in May 1822, reaching Leghorn at
+the end of June. Shelley's death happened within ten days of their
+arrival, and Byron and Leigh Hunt were left to get on together. How
+badly they got on is pretty generally known, might have been foreseen
+from the beginning, and is not very profitable to dwell on. Leigh Hunt's
+mixture of familiarity and "airs" could not have been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">{211}</a></span> worse mixed to
+suit the taste of Byron. The "noble poet" too was not a person who liked
+to be spunged upon; and his coolest admirers may sympathise with his
+disgust when he found that he had upon his hands a man of letters with a
+large family whom he was literally expected to keep, whose society was
+disagreeable to him, who lampooned his friends, who differed with him on
+every point of taste, and who did not think it necessary to be grateful.
+For Leigh Hunt, somewhat on Lamb's system of compensation for coming
+late by going away early, combined his readiness to receive favours with
+a practice of not acknowledging the slightest obligation for them.
+Byron's departure for Greece was in its way lucky, but it left Hunt
+stranded. He remained in Italy for rather more than three years and then
+returned home across the Continent. The <i>Liberal</i>, which contains work
+of his, of Byron's, of Shelley's, and of Hazlitt's, is interesting
+enough and worth buying in its original form, but it did not pay. Of the
+unlucky book on his relations with Byron which followed&mdash;the worst act
+by far of his life&mdash;I shall not say much. No one has attempted to defend
+it, and he himself apologises for it frankly and fully in his
+Autobiography. It is impossible, however, not to remark that the offence
+was much aggravated by its deliberate character. For the book was not
+published in the heat of the moment, but three years after Hunt's return
+to England and four after Byron's death.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">{212}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The remaining thirty years of Hunt's life were wholly literary. As for
+residences, he hovered about London, living successively at Highgate,
+Epsom, Brompton, Chelsea, Kensington, and divers other places. At
+Chelsea he was very intimate with the Carlyles, and, while he was
+perhaps of all living men of letters most leniently judged by those not
+particularly lenient judges, we have nowhere such vivid glimpses of
+Hunt's peculiar weaknesses as in the memoirs of Carlyle and his wife.
+Why Leigh Hunt was always in such difficulties is not at first obvious,
+for he was the reverse of an idle man; he seems, though thriftless, to
+have been by no means very sumptuous in his way of living; everybody
+helped him, and his writing was always popular. He appears to have felt
+not a little sore that nothing was done for him when his political
+friends came into power after the Reform Bill&mdash;and remained there for
+almost the whole of the rest of his life. He had certainly in some
+senses borne the burden and heat of the day for Liberalism. But he was
+one of those reckless people who, without meaning to offend anybody in
+particular, offend friends as well as foes; the days of sinecures were
+even then passing or passed; and it is very difficult to conceive any
+office, even with the lightest duties, in which Leigh Hunt would not
+have come to grief. As for his writing, his son's earnest plea as to his
+not being an idle man is no doubt true enough, but he never seems to
+have reconciled himself to the regular<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">{213}</a></span> drudgery of miscellaneous
+article writing for newspapers which is almost the only kind of
+journalism that really pays, and his books did not sell very largely. In
+his latter days, however, things became easier for him. The unfailing
+kindness of the Shelley family gave him (in 1844 when Sir Percy Shelley
+came into his property) a regular annuity of £120; two royal gifts of
+£200 each and in 1847 a pension of the same amount were added; and two
+benefit nights of Dickens's famous amateur company brought him in
+something like a cool thousand, as Dickens himself would have said. Of
+his last years Mr. Kent, who was intimate with him, gives much the
+pleasantest account known to me. He died on 28th August 1859, surviving
+his wife only two years.</p>
+
+<p>I can imagine some one, at the name of Dickens in the preceding
+paragraph, thinking or saying, that if the author of <i>Bleak House</i>
+raised a thousand pounds for his old friend, he took the value of it and
+infinitely more out of him. It is impossible to shirk the Skimpole
+affair in any really critical notice of Leigh Hunt. To put unpleasant
+things briefly, that famous character was at once recognised by every
+one as a caricature, perhaps ill-natured but certainly brilliant, of
+what an enemy might have said of the author of "Rimini." Thornton Hunt,
+the eldest of Leigh Hunt's children, and a writer of no small power,
+took the matter up and forced from Dickens a contradiction, or
+disavowal,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">{214}</a></span> with which I am afraid the recording angel must have had
+some little difficulty. Strangely enough the last words of Macaulay's
+that we have concern this affair; and they may be quoted as Sir George
+Trevelyan gives them, written by his uncle in those days at Holly Lodge
+when the shadow of death was heavy on him.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>December 23, 1859.</i> An odd declaration by Dickens that he did
+not mean Leigh Hunt by Harold Skimpole. Yet he owns that he took
+the light externals of the character from Leigh Hunt, and surely
+it is by those light externals that the bulk of mankind will
+always recognise character. Besides, it is to be observed that
+the vices of H. S. are vices to which L. H. had, to say the
+least, some little leaning, and which the world generally
+attributed to him most unsparingly. That he had loose notions of
+<i>meum</i> and <i>tuum</i>; that he had no high feeling of independence;
+that he had no sense of obligation; that he took money wherever
+he could get it; that he felt no gratitude for it; that he was
+just as ready to defame a person who had relieved his distress as
+a person who had refused him relief&mdash;these were things which, as
+Dickens must have known, were said, truly or falsely, about L.
+H., and had made a deep impression on the public mind.</p></div>
+
+<p>Now Macaulay has not always been leniently judged; but I do not think
+that, with the single exception of Croker's case, he can be accused of
+having borne hardly on the moral character of any one of his
+contemporaries. He had befriended Leigh Hunt in every way; he had got
+him into the <i>Edinburgh</i>; he had lent (that is to say given) him money
+freely, and I do not think that his fiercest enemy can seriously think
+that he bore Hunt a grudge for having told him, as he himself<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">{215}</a></span> records,
+that the "Lays" were not so good as Spenser, whom Macaulay in one of the
+rare lapses of his memory had unjustly blasphemed, and whom Leigh Hunt
+adored. To my mind, if there were any doubt about Dickens's intention,
+or about the fitting in a certain sense of the cap, this testimony of
+Macaulay's would settle it. But I cannot conceive any doubt remaining in
+the mind of any person who has read Leigh Hunt's works, who has even
+read the Autobiography. Of the grossest faults in Skimpole's character,
+such as the selling of Jo's secret, Leigh Hunt was indeed incapable, and
+the insertion of these is at once a blot on Dickens's memory and a kind
+of excuse for his disclaimer; but as regards the lighter touches the
+likeness is unmistakable. Skimpole's most elaborate jests about "pounds"
+are hardly an exaggeration of the man who gravely and more than once
+tells us that his difficulties and irregularities with money came from a
+congenital incapacity to appreciate arithmetic, and who admits that
+Shelley (whose affairs he knew very well) once gave him no less than
+fourteen hundred pounds (that is to say some sixteen months of Shelley's
+income at his wealthiest) to clear him, and that he was not cleared,
+though apparently he gave Shelley to understand that he was.</p>
+
+<p>There are many excuses for him which Skimpole had not. His own pleas of
+tropical blood and so forth will not greatly avail. But the old
+patron-theory<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">{216}</a></span> and its more subtle transformation (the influence of
+which is sometimes shown even by Thackeray in the act of denouncing it),
+to the effect that the State or the public, or somebody, is bound to
+look after your man of genius, had bitten deep into the being of the
+literary man of our grandfathers' time. Anybody who has read <i>Thomas
+Poole and his Friends</i> must have seen how not merely Coleridge, of whose
+known liability to the weakness the book furnished new proofs, but even,
+to some extent and vicariously, the austere Wordsworth, cherished the
+idea. But for the most part, men kept it to themselves. Leigh Hunt never
+could keep anything to himself, and he has left record on record of the
+easy manner in which he acted on his beliefs.</p>
+
+<p>For this I own that I care little, especially since he never borrowed
+money of me. There is a Statute of Limitations for all such things in
+letters as well as in law. What is much harder to forgive is the
+ill-bred pertness, often if not always innocent enough in intention, but
+rather the worse than the better for that, which mars so much of his
+actual literary work. When almost an old man he wrote&mdash;when a very old
+man he quotes, with childlike surprise that any one should see anything
+objectionable in them&mdash;the following lines:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Perhaps you have known what it is to feel longings,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To pat buxom shoulders at routs and mad throngings&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Well&mdash;think what it was at a vision like that!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A grace after dinner! a Venus grown fat!<br /></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">{217}</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>It would be almost unbelievable of any man but Leigh Hunt that he
+placidly remarks in reference to this impertinence that "he had not the
+pleasure of Lady Blessington's acquaintance," as if that did not make
+things ten times worse. He had laid the foundation of not a few of the
+literary enmities he suffered from, by writing, thirty years earlier, a
+"Feast of the Poets," on the pattern of Suckling, in which he took,
+though much more excusably, the same kind of ill-bred liberties; and
+similar things abound in his works. It is scarcely surprising that the
+good Macvey Napier (rather awkwardly, and giving Macaulay much trouble
+to patch things up) should have said that he would like a
+"gentleman-like" article from Mr. Hunt for the <i>Edinburgh</i>; and the
+taunt about the Cockney School undoubtedly derived its venom from this
+weakness of his. Lamb was not descended from the kings that long the
+Tuscan sceptre swayed, and had some homely ways; Keats had to do with
+livery-stables, Hazlitt with shady lodging-houses and lodging-house
+keepers. But Keats might have been, whatever his weaknesses, his own and
+Spenser's Sir Calidore for gentle feeling and conduct; the man who
+called Lamb vulgar would only prove his own vulgarity; and Hazlitt,
+though he had some darker stains on his character than any that rest on
+Hunt, was far too potent a spirit for the fire within him not to burn
+out mere vulgarity. Leigh Hunt I fear must be allowed to be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">{218}</a></span> now and
+then merely vulgar&mdash;a Pogson of talent, of genius, of immense
+amiability, of rather hard luck, but still of the Pogsons, Pogsonic.</p>
+
+<p>As I shall have plenty of good to say of him, I may as well despatch at
+once whatever else I have to say that is bad, which is little. The
+faults of taste which have just been noticed passed easily into
+occasional, though only occasional, faults of criticism. I do not
+recommend anybody who has not the faculty of critical adjustment, and
+who wants to like Leigh Hunt, to read his essay on Dante in the <i>Italian
+Poets</i>. For flashes of crass insensibility to great poetry it is
+difficult to match anywhere, and impossible to match in Leigh Hunt. His
+favourite theological doctrine, like that of Béranger's hero, was, <i>Ne
+damnons personne</i>. He did not like monarchy, and he did not understand
+metaphysics. So the great poet, who, more than any other great poet
+except Shakespeare, grows on those who read him, receives from Leigh
+Hunt not an honest confession, like Sir Walter's, that he does not like
+him, which is perhaps the first honest impression of the majority of
+Dante's readers, but tirade upon tirade of abuse and bad criticism.
+Further, Leigh Hunt's unfortunate necessity of preserving his own
+journalism has made him keep a thousand things that he ought to have
+left to the kindly shade of the newspaper files&mdash;a cemetery where, thank
+Heaven, the tombs are not open as in the other city of Dis. The book
+called <i>Table<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">{219}</a></span> Talk</i>, for instance, contains, with a little better
+matter, chiefly mere rubbish like this section:</p>
+
+
+<h3>BEAUMARCHAIS</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Beaumarchais, author of the celebrated comedy of "Figaro," an
+abridgment of which has been rendered more famous by the music of
+Mozart, made a large fortune by supplying the American
+republicans with arms and ammunition, and lost it by speculations
+in salt and printing. His comedy is one of those productions
+which are accounted dangerous, from developing the spirit of
+intrigue and gallantry with more gaiety than objection; and they
+would be more unanimously so, if the good humour and
+self-examination to which they excite did not suggest a spirit of
+charity and inquiry beyond themselves.</p></div>
+
+<p>Leigh Hunt tried almost every conceivable kind of literature, including
+a historical novel, <i>Sir Ralph Esher</i>, several dramas (one or two of
+which, the "Legend of Florence" being the chief, got acted), and at
+nearly the beginning and nearly the end of his career two religious
+works, or works on religion, an attack on Methodism and "The Religion of
+the Heart." All this we may not unkindly brush away, and consider him
+first as a poet, secondly as a critic, and thirdly as what can be best,
+though rather unphilosophically, called a miscellanist.</p>
+
+<p>Few good judges nowadays, I think, would deny that Leigh Hunt had a
+certain faculty for poetry, and fewer still would rank it very high. To
+something like, but less than, the tunefulness of Moore, he joined a
+very much better taste in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">{220}</a></span> models and an infinitely wider and deeper
+study of them. There is no doubt that his versification in "Rimini"
+(which may be described as Chaucerian in basis with a strong admixture
+of Dryden, further crossed and dashed slightly with the peculiar music
+of the followers of Spenser, especially Browne and Wither) had a very
+strong influence both on Keats and on Shelley, and that it drew from
+them music much better than itself. This fluent, musical, many-coloured
+verse was a capital medium for tale-telling, and Leigh Hunt is always at
+his best when he employs it. The more varied measures and the more
+ambitious aim of "Captain Sword and Captain Pen" seem to me very much
+less successful. Not only was Leigh Hunt far from strong enough for a
+serious argument, but the cheery, sentimental optimism of which he was
+one of the most persevering exponents&mdash;the kind of thing which
+vehemently protests that in the good time coming nobody shall be damned,
+or starved, or put in prison, or subjected to the perils of villainous
+saltpetre, or prevented from doing just what he likes, and that all
+existence ought to be and shortly will be a vaguely refined beer and
+skittles&mdash;did not lend itself very well to verse. Nor are Hunt's lyrics
+particularly strong. His best thing by far is the charming trifle (the
+heroine being, it has been said and also denied, Mrs. Carlyle) which he
+called a "rondeau," though it is not one.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">{221}</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Jenny kissed me when we met,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Jumping from the chair she sat in:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Time, you thief, who love to get<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sweets into your list, put <i>that</i> in!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Say that health and wealth have missed me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Say I'm growing old&mdash;but add,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Jenny kissed me.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Even here it may be noticed that though the last four lines could hardly
+be bettered, the second couplet is rather weak. Some of Leigh Hunt's
+sonnets, especially that which he wrote on the Nile in rivalry with
+Shelley and Keats, are very good.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And times and things, as in that vision, seem<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Keeping along it their eternal stands;&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd-bands<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That roamed through the young earth, the glory extreme<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands.</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then comes a mightier silence, stern and strong,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As of a world left empty of its throng,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the void weighs on us; and then we wake,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Twixt villages, and think how we shall take<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Our own calm journey on for human sake.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This was written in 1818, and I think it will be admitted that the
+italicised line is a rediscovery of a cadence which had been lost for
+centuries, and which has been constantly borrowed and imitated since.</p>
+
+<p>Every now and then he had touches of something<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">{222}</a></span> much above his usual
+style, as in the concluding lines of the whimsical "flyting," as the
+Scotch poets of the fifteenth century would have called it, between the
+Man and the Fish:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Man's life is warm, glad, sad, 'twixt loves and graves,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Boundless in hope, honoured with pangs austere,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Heaven-gazing; and his angel-wings he craves:<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The fish is swift, small-needing, vague yet clear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A cold, sweet, silver life, wrapped in round waves,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Quickened with touches of transporting fear.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>As a rule, however, his poetry has little or nothing of this kind, and
+he will hold his place in the English <i>corpus poetarum</i>, first, because
+he was an associate of better poets than himself; secondly, because he
+invented a medium for the poetic tale which was as poetical as Crabbe's
+was prosaic; thirdly, because of all persons perhaps who have ever
+attempted English verse on their own account, he had the most genuine
+affection for, and the most intimate and extensive acquaintance with,
+the triumphs of his predecessors in poetry. Of prose he was a much less
+trustworthy judge, as may be instanced once for all by his pronouncing
+Gibbon's style to be bad; but of poetry he could tell with an
+extraordinary mixture of sympathy and discretion. And this will
+introduce us to his second faculty, the faculty of literary criticism,
+in which he is, with all his drawbacks, on a level with Coleridge, with
+Lamb, and with Hazlitt, his defects as compared with them being in each
+case made<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">{223}</a></span> up by compensatory, or more than compensatory, merits.</p>
+
+<p>How considerable a critic Leigh Hunt was, may be judged from the fact
+that he himself confesses the great critical fault of his principal
+poem&mdash;the selection, for amplification and paraphrase, of a subject
+which has once for all been treated with imperial and immortal brevity
+by a great poet. With equal ingenuousness and equal truth he further
+confesses that, at the time, he not only did not see this fault, but was
+critically incapable of seeing it. For there is that one comfort about
+this discomfortable and discredited art of ours, that age at any rate
+does not impair it. The first sprightly runnings of criticism are never
+the best; and in the case of all really great critics, from Dryden to
+Sainte-Beuve, the critical faculty has gone on constantly increasing.
+The chief examples of Leigh Hunt's critical accomplishment are to be
+found in the two books called respectively, <i>Wit and Humour</i>, and
+<i>Imagination and Fancy</i>, both being selections from the English poets,
+with critical remarks interspersed as a sort of running commentary. But
+hardly any book of his is quite barren of such examples; for he neither
+would, nor indeed apparently could, restrain his desultory fancy from
+this as from other indulgences. His criticism is very distinct in kind.
+It is almost purely and in the strict and proper sense æsthetic&mdash;that is
+to say, it does hardly anything but reproduce the sensations produced<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">{224}</a></span>
+upon Hunt himself by the reading of his favourite passages. As his sense
+of poetry was extraordinarily keen and accurate, there is perhaps no
+body of "beauties" of English poetry to be found anywhere in the
+language which is selected with such uniform and unerring judgment as
+this or these. Even Lamb, in his own favourite subjects and authors,
+misses treasure-trove which Leigh Hunt unfailingly discovers, as in the
+now pretty generally acknowledged case of the character of De Flores in
+Middleton's "Changeling." And Lamb had a much less wide and a much more
+crotchety system of admissions and exclusions. Macaulay was perfectly
+right in fixing, at the beginning of his essay on the dramatists of the
+Restoration, upon this catholicity of Hunt's taste as the main merit in
+it; and it is really a great pity that the two volumes referred to were
+not, as they were intended to be, followed up by others respectively
+devoted to Action and Passion, Contemplation, and Song. But Leigh Hunt
+was sixty when he planned them, and age, infirmity, perhaps also the
+less pressing need which the comparative affluence of his later years
+brought, prevented the completion. It has also to be remarked that Hunt
+is much better as a taster than as a professor or expounder. He says
+indeed many happy things about his favourite passages, but they
+evidently represent rather afterthought than forethought. He is not good
+at generalities, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">{225}</a></span> when he tries them is apt, instead of flying (as
+an Ariel of criticism should do), to sprawl. Yet it was impossible for a
+man who was so almost invariably right in particulars, to go very wrong
+in general; and the worst that can be said of Leigh Hunt's general
+critical axioms and conclusions is that they are much better than the
+reasons that support them. For instance, he is probably right in calling
+the famous "intellectual" and "henpecked you all" in "Don Juan," "the
+happiest triple rhyme ever written." But when he goes on to say that
+"the sweepingness of the assumption completes the flowing breadth of the
+effect," he goes very near to talking nonsense. For most people,
+however, a true opinion persuasively stated is of much more consequence
+than the most elaborate logical justification of it; and it is this that
+makes Leigh Hunt's criticism such excellent good reading. It is
+impossible not to feel that when a guide (which after all a critic
+should be) is recommended with cautions that, though an invaluable
+fellow for the most part, he is not unlikely in certain places to lead
+the traveller over a precipice, it is a very dubious kind of
+recommendation. Yet this is the way in which one has to speak of Jeffrey
+and Hazlitt, of Wilson and De Quincey. Of Leigh Hunt it need hardly ever
+be said; for in the unlucky diatribes on Dante above cited, the most
+unwary reader can see that his author has lost his temper and with it
+his head. As a rule he avoids<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">{226}</a></span> the things that he is not qualified to
+judge, such as the rougher and sublimer parts of poetry. Of its
+sweetness and its music, of its grace and its wit, of its tenderness and
+its fancy, no better judge ever existed than Leigh Hunt. He jumped at
+such things, when he came near them, almost as involuntarily as a needle
+to a magnet.</p>
+
+<p>He was, however, perhaps most popular in his own time, and certainly he
+gained most of the not excessive share of pecuniary profit which fell to
+his lot, as what I have called a miscellanist. One of the things which
+have not yet been sufficiently done in the criticism of English literary
+history, is a careful review of the successive steps by which the
+periodical essay of Addison and his followers during the eighteenth
+century passed into the magazine-paper of our own days. The later
+examples of the eighteenth century, the "Observers" and "Connoisseurs,"
+the "Loungers" and "Mirrors" and "Lookers-On," are fairly well worth
+reading in themselves, especially as the little volumes of the "British
+Essayists" go capitally in a travelling-bag; but the gap between them
+and the productions of Leigh Hunt, of Lamb, and of the <i>Blackwood</i> men,
+with Praed's schoolboy attempts not left out, is a very considerable
+one. Leigh Hunt is himself entitled to a high place in the new school so
+far as mere priority goes, and to one not low in actual merit. He
+relates himself, more than once, with the childishness which is the good
+side of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">{227}</a></span> Skimpolism, how not merely his literary friends but persons
+of quality had special favourites among the miscellaneous papers of the
+<i>Indicator</i>, like (he would certainly have used the parallel himself if
+he had known it or thought of it) the Court of France with Marot's
+Psalms. This miscellaneous work of his extends, as it ought to do, to
+all manner of subjects. The pleasantest example to my fancy is the book
+called <i>The Town</i>, a gossiping description of London from St. Paul's to
+St. James's, which he afterwards followed up with books on the West End
+and Kensington, and which, though of course second-hand as to its facts,
+is by no means uncritical, and by far the best reading of any book of
+its kind. Even the Autobiography might take rank in this class; and the
+same kind of stuff made up the staple of the numerous periodicals which
+Leigh Hunt edited or wrote, and of the still more numerous books which
+he compounded out of the dead periodicals. It may be that a severe
+criticism will declare that, here as well as elsewhere, he was more
+original than accomplished; and that his way of treating subjects was
+pursued with better success by his imitators than by himself. Such a
+paper, for instance, as "On Beds and Bedrooms" suggests (and is dwarfed
+by the suggestion) Lamb's "Convalescent" and other similar work. "Jack
+Abbott's Breakfast," which is, or was, exceedingly popular with Hunt's
+admirers, is an account of the misfortunes of a luckless young<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">{228}</a></span> man who
+goes to breakfast with an absent-minded pedagogue, and, being turned
+away empty, orders successive refreshments at different coffee-houses,
+each of which proves a feast of Tantalus. The idea is not bad; but the
+carrying out suits the stage better than the study, and is certainly far
+below such things as Maginn's adventures of Jack Ginger and his friends,
+with the tale untold that Humphries told Harlow. "A Few Remarks on the
+Rare Vice called Lying" is a most promising title; he must be a very
+good-natured judge who finds appended to it a performing article. "The
+Old Lady" and "The Old Gentleman" were once great favourites; they seem
+to have been studied from Earle's <i>Microcosmography</i>, not the least
+excellent of the books that have proceeded from foster-children of
+Walter de Merton, but they are over-laboured in particulars. So too are
+"The Adventures of Carfington Blundell" and "Inside of an Omnibus."
+Leigh Hunt's humour is so devoid of bitterness that it sometimes becomes
+insipid; his narrative so fluent and gossiping that it sometimes becomes
+insignificant. His enemies called him immoral, which appears to have
+been a gross calumny so far as his private life was concerned, and is
+certainly a gross exaggeration as regards his writing. But he was rather
+too much given to dally about voluptuous subjects with a sort of
+chuckling epicene triviality. He is so far from being passionate that he
+sometimes becomes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">{229}</a></span> almost offensive. He is terribly apt to labour a
+conceit or a prettiness till it becomes vapid; and his "Criticism on
+Female Beauty," though it contains some extremely sensible remarks, also
+contains much which is suggestive of Mr. Tupman. Yet his miscellaneous
+writing has one great merit (besides its gentle playfulness and its
+untiring variety) which might procure pardon for worse faults. With no
+one perhaps are those literary memories which transform and vivify life
+so constantly present as with Leigh Hunt. Although the world was a
+perfectly real thing to him, and not by any means seen only through the
+windows of a library, he took everywhere with him the remembrances of
+what he had read, and they helped him to clothe and colour what he saw
+and what he wrote. Between him, therefore, and readers who themselves
+have read a good deal, and loved what they have read not a little, there
+is always something in common; and yet probably no bookish writer has
+been less resented by his unbookish readers as a thruster of the
+abominable things&mdash;superior knowledge and superior scholarship&mdash;upon
+them. Some vices of the snob Leigh Hunt undoubtedly had, but he was
+never in the least a pretentious snob. He quotes his books not in the
+spirit of a man who is looking down on his fellows from a proper
+elevation, but in the spirit of a kindly host who is anxious that his
+guests should enjoy the good things on his table.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">{230}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is this sincere and unostentatious love of letters, and anxiety to
+spread the love of letters, that is the redeeming point of Leigh Hunt
+throughout: he is saved <i>quia multum amavit</i>. It was this which prompted
+that rather grandiose but still admirable palinode of Christopher North,
+in August 1834,&mdash;"the Animosities are mortal: but the Humanities live
+for ever,"&mdash;an apology which naturally enough pleased Hunt very much. He
+is one of those persons with whom it is impossible to be angry, or at
+least to be angry long. "The bailiff who took him was fond of him," it
+is recorded of Captain Costigan; and in milder moments the same may be
+said of the critical bailiffs who are compelled to "take" Leigh Hunt.
+Even in his least happy books (such as the "Jar of Honey from Mount
+Hybla," where all sorts of matter, some of it by no means well known to
+the writer, have been hastily cobbled together) this love, and for the
+most part intelligent and animated love, for literature appears. If in
+another of his least happy attempts, the critical parts of the already
+mentioned <i>Stories from the Italian Poets</i>, he is miles below the great
+argument of Dante, and if he is even guilty to some extent of
+vulgarising the lesser but still great poets with whom he deals, he
+never comes, even in Dante, to any passage he can understand without
+exhibiting such a warmth of enthusiasm and enjoyment that it softens the
+stoniest readers. He can gravely call Dante's Hell "geologically
+speaking a most<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">{231}</a></span> fantastical formation" (which it certainly is), and
+joke clumsily about the poet's putting Cunizza and Rahab in Paradise. He
+can write, in the true spirit of vulgarising, that "the Florentine is
+thought to have been less strict in his conduct in regard to the sex
+than might be supposed from his platonical aspirations," heedless of the
+great confessions implied in the swoon at Francesca's story, and the
+passage through the fire at the end of the seventh circle of Purgatory.
+But when he comes to things like "Dolce color d'oriental zaffiro," and
+"Era già l'ora," it is hardly possible to do more justice to the
+subject. The whole description of his Italian sojourn in the
+Autobiography is an example of the best kind of such writing. Again, of
+all the people who have rejoiced in Samuel Pepys, Leigh Hunt "does it
+most natural," being indeed a kind of nineteenth-century Pepys himself,
+whom the gods had made less comfortable in worldly circumstances and no
+man of business, but to whom as a compensation they had given the
+feeling for poetry which Samuel lacked. At different times Dryden,
+Spenser, and Chaucer were respectively his favourite English poets; and
+as there was nothing faithless in his inconstancy, he took up his new
+loves without ceasing to love the old. It is perhaps rather more
+surprising that he should have liked Spenser than that he should have
+liked the other two; and we must suppose that the profusion of beautiful
+pictures in the "Faerie Queen" enabled him, not to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">{232}</a></span> appreciate (for he
+never could have done that), but to tolerate or pass over the deep
+melancholy and the occasional philosophisings of the poet. But the
+attraction of Dryden and Chaucer for him is very easily understood. Both
+are eminently cheerful poets, Dryden with the cheerfulness born of manly
+sense, Chaucer with that of youth and abounding animal spirits. Leigh
+Hunt seems to have found this cheerfulness as akin to his own, as the
+vigour of both was complementary and satisfactory to his own, I shall
+not say weakness, but fragility. Add yet again to this that Hunt
+seems&mdash;a thing very rarely to be said of critics&mdash;never to have disliked
+a thing simply because he could not understand it. If he sometimes
+abused Dante, it was not merely because he could not understand him,
+though he certainly could not, but because Dante trod (and when Dante
+treads he treads heavily) on his most cherished prejudices. Now he had
+not very many prejudices, and so he had an advantage here also.</p>
+
+<p>Lastly, as he may be read with pleasure, so he may be skipped without
+shame. There are some writers whom to skip may seem to a conscientious
+devotee of letters both wicked and unwise&mdash;wicked because it is
+disrespectful to them, unwise because it is quite likely to inflict loss
+on the reader. Now nobody can ever think of respecting Leigh Hunt; he is
+not unfrequently amiable, but never in the least venerable. Even at his
+best he seldom or never affects the reader with admiration, only with a
+mild pleasure. It is at once a penalty for his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">{233}</a></span> sins and a compliment to
+his good qualities, that to make any kind of fuss over him would be
+absurd. Nor is there any selfish risk run by treating him, in the
+literary sense, in an unceremonious manner. His writing of all kinds
+carries desultoriness to the height, and may be begun at the beginning,
+or at the end, or in the middle, and left off at any place, without the
+least risk of serious loss. He is excellent good company for half an
+hour, sometimes for much longer; but the reader rarely thinks very much
+of what he has said when the interview is over, and never experiences
+any violent hunger or thirst for its renewal, though such renewal is
+agreeable enough in its way. Such an author is a convenient possession
+on the shelves: a possession so convenient that occasionally a blush of
+shame may suggest itself at the thought that he should be treated so
+cavalierly. But this is quixotic. The very best things that he has done
+hardly deserve more respectful treatment, for they are little more than
+a faithful and fairly lively description of his own enjoyments; the
+worst things deserve treatment much less respectful. Yet let us not
+leave him with a harsh mouth; for, as has been said, he loved the good
+literature of others very much, and he wrote not a little that was good
+literature of his own.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">{234}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>VIII<br />
+<br />
+PEACOCK</h2>
+
+
+<p>In the year 1875 Mr. Bentley conferred no small favour upon lovers of
+English literature by reprinting, in compact form and good print, the
+works of Thomas Love Peacock, up to that time scattered and in some
+cases not easily obtainable. So far as the publisher was concerned,
+nothing more could reasonably have been demanded; it is not easy to say
+quite so much of the editor, the late Sir Henry Cole. His editorial
+labours were indeed considerably lightened by assistance from other
+hands. Lord Houghton contributed a critical preface, which has the ease,
+point, and grasp of all his critical monographs. Miss Edith Nicolls, the
+novelist's granddaughter, supplied a short biography, written with much
+simplicity and excellent good taste. But as to editing in the proper
+sense&mdash;introduction, comment, illustration, explanation&mdash;there is next
+to none of it in the book. The principal thing, however, was to have
+Peacock's delightful work<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">{235}</a></span> conveniently accessible, and that the issue
+of 1875 accomplished. The author is still by no means universally or
+even generally known; though he has been something of a critic's
+favourite. Almost the only dissenter, as far as I know, among critics,
+is Mrs. Oliphant, who has not merely confessed herself, in her book on
+the literary history of Peacock's time, unable to comprehend the
+admiration expressed by certain critics for <i>Headlong Hall</i> and its
+fellows, but is even, if I do not mistake her, somewhat sceptical of the
+complete sincerity of that admiration. There is no need to argue the
+point with this agreeable practitioner of Peacock's own art. A certain
+well-known passage of Thackeray, about ladies and <i>Jonathan Wild</i>, will
+sufficiently explain her own inability to taste Peacock's persiflage. As
+for the genuineness of the relish of those who can taste him there is no
+way that I know to convince sceptics. For my own part I can only say
+that, putting aside scattered readings of his work in earlier days, I
+think I have read the novels through on an average once a year ever
+since their combined appearance. Indeed, with Scott, Thackeray, Borrow,
+and Christopher North, Peacock composes my own private Paradise of
+Dainty Devices, wherein I walk continually when I have need of rest and
+refreshment. This is a fact of no public importance, and is only
+mentioned as a kind of justification for recommending him to others.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">{236}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Peacock was born at Weymouth on 18th October 1785. His father (who died
+a year or two after his birth) was a London merchant; his mother was the
+daughter of a naval officer. He seems during his childhood to have done
+very much what he pleased, though, as it happened, study always pleased
+him; and his gibes in later life at public schools and universities lose
+something of their point when it is remembered that he was at no
+university, at no school save a private one, and that he left even that
+private school when he was thirteen. He seems, however, to have been
+very well grounded there, and on leaving it he conducted his education
+and his life at his own pleasure for many years. He published poems
+before he was twenty, and he fell in love shortly after he was
+twenty-two. The course of this love did not run smooth, and the lady,
+marrying some one else, died shortly afterwards. She lived in Peacock's
+memory till his death, sixty years later, which event is said to have
+been heralded (in accordance with not the least poetical of the many
+poetical superstitions of dreaming) by frequent visions of this shadowy
+love of the past. Probably to distract himself, Peacock, who had
+hitherto attempted no profession, accepted the rather unpromising post
+of under-secretary to Admiral Sir Home Popham on board ship. His mother,
+in her widowhood, and he himself had lived much with his sailor
+grandfather, and he was always<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">{237}</a></span> fond of naval matters. But it is not
+surprising to find that his occupation, though he kept it for something
+like a year, was not to his taste. He gave it up in the spring of 1809,
+and returned to leisure, poetry, and pedestrianism. The "Genius of the
+Thames," a sufficiently remarkable poem, was the result of the two
+latter fancies. A year later he went to Wales and met his future wife,
+Jane Griffith, though he did not marry her for ten years more. He
+returned frequently to the principality, and in 1812 made, at Nant
+Gwillt, the acquaintance of Shelley and his wife Harriet. This was the
+foundation of a well-known friendship, which has supplied by far the
+most solid and trustworthy materials existing for the poet's biography.
+It was Wales, too, that furnished the scene of his first and far from
+worst novel <i>Headlong Hall</i>, which was published in 1816. From 1815 to
+1819 Peacock lived at Marlow, where his intercourse with Shelley was
+resumed, and where he produced not merely <i>Headlong Hall</i> but
+<i>Melincourt</i> (the most unequal, notwithstanding many charming sketches,
+of his works), the delightful <i>Nightmare Abbey</i> (with a caricature, as
+genius caricatures, of Shelley for the hero), and the long and
+remarkable poem of "Rhododaphne."</p>
+
+<p>During the whole of this long time, that is to say up to his
+thirty-fourth year, with the exception of his year of secretaryship,
+Peacock had been his own master. He now, in 1819, owed curtailment<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">{238}</a></span> of
+his liberty but considerable increase of fortune to a long-disused
+practice on the part of the managers of public institutions, of which
+Sir Henry Taylor gave another interesting example. The directors of the
+East India Company offered him a clerkship because he was a clever
+novelist and a good Greek scholar. He retained his place ("a precious
+good place too," as Thackeray with good-humoured envy says of it in "The
+Hoggarty Diamond") with due promotion for thirty-seven years, and
+retired from it in 1856 with a large pension. He had married Miss
+Griffith very shortly after his appointment; in 1822 <i>Maid Marian</i>
+appeared, and in 1823 Peacock took a cottage, which became after a time
+his chief and latterly his only residence, at Halliford, near his
+beloved river. For some years he published nothing, but 1829 and 1831
+saw the production of perhaps his two best books, <i>The Misfortunes of
+Elphin</i> and <i>Crotchet Castle</i>. After <i>Crotchet Castle</i>, official duties
+and perhaps domestic troubles (for his wife was a helpless invalid)
+interrupted his literary work for more than twenty years, an almost
+unexampled break in the literary activity of a man so fond of letters.
+In 1852 he began to write again as a contributor to <i>Fraser's Magazine</i>.
+It is rather unfortunate that no complete republication, nor even any
+complete list of these articles, has been made. The papers on Shelley
+and the charming story of <i>Gryll Grange</i> were the chief of them. The
+author was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">{239}</a></span> an old man when he wrote this last, but he survived it six
+years, and died on 23d January 1866, having latterly lived very much
+alone. Indeed, after Shelley's death he seems never to have had any very
+intimate friend except Lord Broughton, with whose papers most of
+Peacock's correspondence is for the present locked up.</p>
+
+<p>There is a passage in Shelley's "Letter to Maria Gisborne" which has
+been often quoted before, but which must necessarily be quoted again
+whenever Peacock's life and literary character are discussed:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">And there<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is English P&mdash;&mdash;, with his mountain Fair<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Turned into a flamingo, that shy bird<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That gleams i' the Indian air. Have you not heard<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindoo,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His best friends hear no more of him? But you<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Will see him, and will like him too, I hope,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With his milk-white Snowdonian Antelope<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Matched with his Camelopard. <i>His fine wit</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A strain too learnèd for a shallow age,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Too wise for selfish bigots; let his page<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which charms the chosen spirits of his time,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fold itself up for a serener clime<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of years to come, and find its recompense<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In that just expectation.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The enigmas in this passage (where it is undisputed that "English P&mdash;&mdash;"
+is Peacock) have much exercised the commentators. That Miss Griffith,
+after her marriage, while still remaining a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">{240}</a></span> Snowdonian antelope, should
+also have been a flamingo, is odd enough; but this as well as the
+"camelopard" (probably turning on some private jest then intelligible
+enough to the persons concerned, but dark to others) is not particularly
+worth illuminating. The italicised words describing Peacock's wit are
+more legitimate subjects of discussion. They seem to me, though not
+perhaps literally explicable after the fashion of the duller kind of
+commentator, to contain both a very happy description of Peacock's
+peculiar humour, and a very sufficient explanation of the causes which
+have, both then and since, made that humour palatable rather to the few
+than to the many. Not only is Peacock peculiarly liable to the charge of
+being too clever, but he uses his cleverness in a way peculiarly
+bewildering to those who like to have "This is a horse" writ large under
+the presentation of the animal. His "rascally comparative" fancy, and
+the abundant stores of material with which his reading provided it, lead
+him perpetually to widen "the wound," till it is not surprising that
+"the knife" (the particular satirical or polemical point that he is
+urging) gets "lost in it." This weakness, if it be one, has in its
+different ways of operation all sorts of curious results. One is, that
+his personal portraits are perhaps farther removed from faithful
+representations of the originals than the personal sketches of any other
+writer, even among the most deliberate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">{241}</a></span> misrepresenters. There is,
+indeed, a droll topsy-turvy resemblance to Shelley throughout the
+Scythrop of <i>Nightmare Abbey</i>, but there Peacock was hardly using the
+knife at all. When he satirises persons, he goes so far away from their
+real personalities that the libel ceases to be libellous. It is
+difficult to say whether Mr. Mystic, Mr. Flosky, or Mr. Skionar is least
+like Coleridge; and Southey, intensely sensitive as he was to criticism,
+need not have lost his equanimity over Mr. Feathernest. A single point
+suggested itself to Peacock, that point suggested another, and so on and
+so on, till he was miles away from the start. The inconsistency of his
+political views has been justly, if somewhat plaintively, reflected on
+by Lord Houghton in the words, "the intimate friends of Mr. Peacock may
+have understood his political sentiments, but it is extremely difficult
+to discover them from his works." I should, however, myself say that,
+though it may be extremely difficult to deduce any definite political
+sentiments from Peacock's works, it is very easy to see in them a
+general and not inconsistent political attitude&mdash;that of intolerance of
+the vulgar and the stupid. Stupidity and vulgarity not being
+(fortunately or unfortunately) monopolised by any political party, and
+being (no doubt unfortunately) often condescended to by both, it is not
+surprising to find Peacock&mdash;especially with his noble disregard of
+apparent consistency and the inveterate habit of pillar-to-post joking,
+which has been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">{242}</a></span> commented on&mdash;distributing his shafts with great
+impartiality on Trojan and Greek; on the opponents of reform in his
+earlier manhood, and on the believers in progress during his later; on
+virtual representation and the telegraph; on barouche-driving as a
+gentleman's profession, and lecturing as a gentleman's profession. But
+this impartiality (or, if anybody prefers it, inconsistency) has
+naturally added to the difficulties of some readers with his works. It
+is time, however, to endeavour to give some idea of the gay variety of
+those works themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Although there are few novelists who observe plot less than Peacock,
+there are few also who are more regular in the particular fashion in
+which they disdain plot. Peacock is in fiction what the dramatists of
+the school of Ben Jonson down to Shadwell are in comedy&mdash;he works in
+"humours." It ought not to be, but perhaps is, necessary to remind the
+reader that this is by no means the same thing in essence, though
+accidentally it very often is the same, as being a humourist. The dealer
+in humours takes some fad or craze in his characters, some minor ruling
+passion, and makes his profit out of it. Generally (and almost always in
+Peacock's case) he takes if he can one or more of these humours as a
+central point, and lets the others play and revolve in a more or less
+eccentric fashion round it. In almost every book of Peacock's there is a
+host who is possessed by the cheerful mania for collecting other maniacs
+round<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">{243}</a></span> him. Harry Headlong of Headlong Hall, Esquire, a young Welsh
+gentleman of means, and of generous though rather unchastened taste,
+finding, as Peacock says, in the earliest of his gibes at the
+universities, that there are no such things as men of taste and
+philosophy in Oxford, assembles a motley host in London, and asks them
+down to his place at Llanberis. The adventures of the visit (ending up
+with several weddings) form the scheme of the book, as indeed
+repetitions of something very little different form the scheme of all
+the other books, with the exception of <i>The Misfortunes of Elphin</i>, and
+perhaps <i>Maid Marian</i>. Of books so simple in one way, and so complex in
+others, it is impossible and unnecessary to give any detailed analysis.
+But each contains characteristics which contribute too much to the
+knowledge of Peacock's idiosyncrasy to pass altogether unnoticed. The
+contrasts in <i>Headlong Hall</i> between the pessimist Mr. Escot, the
+optimist Mr. Foster, and the happy-mean man Mr. Jenkison (who inclines
+to both in turn, but on the whole rather to optimism), are much less
+amusing than the sketches of Welsh scenery and habits, the passages of
+arms with representatives of the <i>Edinburgh</i> and <i>Quarterly Reviews</i>
+(which Peacock always hated), and the satire on "improving," craniology,
+and other passing fancies of the day. The book also contains the first
+and most unfriendly of those sketches of clergymen of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">{244}</a></span> Church of
+England which Peacock gradually softened till, in Dr. Folliott and Dr.
+Opimian, his curses became blessings altogether. The Reverend Dr. Gaster
+is an ignoble brute, though not quite life-like enough to be really
+offensive. But the most charming part of the book by far (for its women
+are mere lay figures) is to be found in the convivial scenes. <i>Headlong
+Hall</i> contains, besides other occasional verse of merit, two
+drinking-songs&mdash;"Hail to the Headlong," and the still better "A
+Heel-tap! a heel-tap! I never could bear it"&mdash;songs not quite so good as
+those in the subsequent books, but good enough to make any reader think
+with a gentle sigh of the departure of good fellowship from the earth.
+Undergraduates and Scotchmen (and even in their case the fashion is said
+to be dying) alone practise at the present day the full rites of Comus.</p>
+
+<p><i>Melincourt</i>, published, and indeed written, very soon after <i>Headlong
+Hall</i>, is a much more ambitious attempt. It is some three times the
+length of its predecessor, and is, though not much longer than a single
+volume of some three-volume novels, the longest book that Peacock ever
+wrote. It is also much more ambitiously planned; the twice attempted
+abduction of the heiress, Anthelia Melincourt, giving something like a
+regular plot, while the introduction of Sir Oran Haut-ton (an
+orang-outang whom the eccentric hero, Forester, has domesticated and
+intends to introduce to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">{245}</a></span> parliamentary life) can only be understood as
+aiming at a regular satire on the whole of human life, conceived in a
+milder spirit than "Gulliver," but belonging in some degree to the same
+class. Forester himself, a disciple of Rousseau, a fervent anti-slavery
+man who goes to the length of refusing his guests sugar, and an
+ideologist in many other ways, is also an ambitious sketch; and Peacock
+has introduced episodes after the fashion of eighteenth-century fiction,
+besides a great number of satirical excursions dealing with his enemies
+of the Lake school, with paper money, and with many other things and
+persons. The whole, as a whole, has a certain heaviness. The
+enthusiastic Forester is a little of a prig, and a little of a bore; his
+friend the professorial Mr. Fax proses dreadfully; the Oran Haut-ton
+scenes, amusing enough of themselves, are overloaded (as is the whole
+book) with justificative selections from Buffon, Lord Monboddo, and
+other authorities. The portraits of Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth,
+Canning, and others, are neither like, nor in themselves very happy, and
+the heroine Anthelia is sufficiently uninteresting to make us extremely
+indifferent whether the virtuous Forester or the <i>roué</i> Lord Anophel
+Achthar gets her. On the other hand, detached passages are in the
+author's very best vein; and there is a truly delightful scene between
+Lord Anophel and his chaplain Grovelgrub, when the athletic Sir Oran has
+not only foiled their attempt on Anthelia, but has mast-headed them on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">{246}</a></span>
+the top of a rock perpendicular. But the gem of the book is the election
+for the borough of One-Vote&mdash;a very amusing farce on the subject of
+rotten boroughs. Mr. Forester has bought one of the One-Vote seats for
+his friend the Orang, and, going to introduce him to the constituency,
+falls in with the purchaser of the other seat, Mr. Sarcastic, who is a
+practical humorist of the most accomplished kind. The satirical
+arguments with which Sarcastic combats Forester's enthusiastic views of
+life and politics, the elaborate spectacle which he gets up on the day
+of nomination, and the free fight which follows, are recounted with
+extraordinary spirit. Nor is the least of the attractions of the book an
+admirable drinking-song, superior to either of those in <i>Headlong Hall</i>,
+though perhaps better known to most people by certain Thackerayan
+reminiscences of it than in itself:&mdash;</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">The Ghosts</span></h3>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">In life three ghostly friars were we,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And now three friendly ghosts we be.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Around our shadowy table placed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The spectral bowl before us floats:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With wine that none but ghosts can taste<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We wash our unsubstantial throats.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Three merry ghosts&mdash;three merry ghosts&mdash;three merry ghosts are we:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let the ocean be port and we'll think it good sport<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To be laid in that Red Sea.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">With songs that jovial spectres chaunt,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Our old refectory still we haunt.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">{247}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The traveller hears our midnight mirth:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">"Oh list," he cries, "the haunted choir!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The merriest ghost that walks the earth<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is now the ghost of a ghostly friar."<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Three merry ghosts&mdash;three merry ghosts&mdash;three merry ghosts are we:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let the ocean be port and we'll think it good sport<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To be laid in that Red Sea.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In the preface to a new edition of <i>Melincourt</i>, which Peacock wrote
+nearly thirty years later, and which contains a sort of promise of
+<i>Gryll Grange</i>, there is no sign of any dissatisfaction on the author's
+part with the plan of the earlier book; but in his next, which came
+quickly, he changed that plan very decidedly. <i>Nightmare Abbey</i> is the
+shortest, as <i>Melincourt</i> is the longest, of his tales; and as
+<i>Melincourt</i> is the most unequal and the most clogged with heavy matter,
+so <i>Nightmare Abbey</i> contains the most unbroken tissue of farcical,
+though not in the least coarsely farcical, incidents and conversations.
+The misanthropic Scythrop (whose habit of Madeira-drinking has made some
+exceedingly literal people sure that he really could not be intended for
+the water-drinking Shelley); his yet gloomier father, Mr. Glowry; his
+intricate entanglements with the lovely Marionetta and the still more
+beautiful Celinda; his fall between the two stools; his resolve to
+commit suicide; the solution of that awkward resolve&mdash;are all simply
+delightful. Extravagant as the thing is, its brevity and the throng of
+incidents and jokes prevent it from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">{248}</a></span> becoming in the least tedious. The
+pessimist-fatalist Mr. Toobad, with his "innumerable proofs of the
+temporary supremacy of the devil," and his catchword "the devil has come
+among us, having great wrath," appears just enough, and not too much.
+The introduced sketch of Byron as Mr. Cypress would be the least happy
+thing of the piece if it did not give occasion for a capital serious
+burlesque of Byronic verse, the lines, "There is a fever of the spirit,"
+which, as better known than most of Peacock's verse, need not be quoted.
+Mr. Flosky, a fresh caricature of Coleridge, is even less like the
+original than Mr. Mystic, but he is much more like a human being, and in
+himself is great fun. An approach to a more charitable view of the
+clergy is discoverable in the curate Mr. Larynx, who, if not extremely
+ghostly, is neither a sot nor a sloven. But the quarrels and
+reconciliations between Scythrop and Marionetta, his invincible
+inability to make up his mind, the mysterious advent of Marionetta's
+rival, and her residence in hidden chambers, the alternate sympathy and
+repulsion between Scythrop and those elder disciples of pessimism, his
+father and Mr. Toobad&mdash;all the contradictions of Shelley's character, in
+short, with a suspicion of the incidents of his life brought into the
+most ludicrous relief, must always form the great charm of the book. A
+tolerably rapid reader may get through it in an hour or so, and there is
+hardly a more delightful hour's reading of anything like the same kind
+in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">{249}</a></span> the English language, either for the incidental strokes of wit and
+humour, or for the easy mastery with which the whole is hit off. It
+contains, moreover, another drinking-catch, "Seamen Three," which,
+though it is, like its companion, better known than most of Peacock's
+songs, may perhaps find a place:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Seamen three! What men be ye?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Gotham's three wise men we be.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whither in your bowl so free?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To rake the moon from out the sea.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The bowl goes trim, the moon doth shine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And our ballast is old wine;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And your ballast is old wine.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Who art thou so fast adrift?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I am he they call Old Care.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Here on board we will thee lift.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No: I may not enter there.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wherefore so? 'Tis Jove's decree<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In a bowl Care may not be;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In a bowl Care may not be.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Fear ye not the waves that roll?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No: in charmèd bowl we swim.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What the charm that floats the bowl?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Water may not pass the brim.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The bowl goes trim, the moon doth shine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And our ballast is old wine;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And your ballast is old wine.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>A third song sung by Marionetta, "Why are thy looks so blank, Grey
+Friar?" is as good in another way; nor should it be forgotten that the
+said Marionetta, who has been thought to have some features of the
+luckless Harriet Shelley, is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">{250}</a></span> Peacock's first lifelike study of a girl,
+and one of his pleasantest.</p>
+
+<p>The book which came out four years after, <i>Maid Marian</i>, has, I believe,
+been much the most popular and the best known of Peacock's short
+romances. It owed this popularity, in great part, doubtless, to the fact
+that the author has altered little in the well-known and delightful old
+story, and has not added very much to its facts, contenting himself with
+illustrating the whole in his own satirical fashion. But there is also
+no doubt that the dramatisation of <i>Maid Marian</i> by Planché and Bishop
+as an operetta helped, if it did not make, its fame. The snatches of
+song through the novel are more frequent than in any other of the books,
+so that Mr. Planché must have had but little trouble with it. Some of
+these snatches are among Peacock's best verse, such as the famous
+"Bramble Song," the great hit of the operetta, the equally well-known
+"Oh, bold Robin Hood," and the charming snatch:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">For the tender beech and the sapling oak,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That grow by the shadowy rill,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You may cut down both at a single stroke,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">You may cut down which you will;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But this you must know, that as long as they grow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Whatever change may be,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You never can teach either oak or beech<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To be aught but a greenwood tree.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This snatch, which, in its mixture of sentiment, truth, and what may be
+excusably called "rollick,"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">{251}</a></span> is very characteristic of its author, and
+is put in the mouth of Brother Michael, practically the hero of the
+piece, and the happiest of the various workings up of Friar Tuck,
+despite his considerable indebtedness to a certain older friar, whom we
+must not call "of the funnels." That Peacock was a Pantagruelist to the
+heart's core is evident in all his work; but his following of Master
+Francis is nowhere clearer than in <i>Maid Marian</i>, and it no doubt helps
+us to understand why those who cannot relish Rabelais should look
+askance at Peacock. For the rest, no book of Peacock's requires such
+brief comment as this charming pastoral, which was probably little less
+in Thackeray's mind than <i>Ivanhoe</i> itself when he wrote <i>Rebecca and
+Rowena</i>. The author draws in (it would be hardly fair to say drags in)
+some of his stock satire on courts, the clergy, the landed gentry, and
+so forth; but the very nature of the subject excludes the somewhat
+tedious digressions which mar <i>Melincourt</i>, and which once or twice
+menace, though they never actually succeed in spoiling, the unbroken fun
+of <i>Nightmare Abbey</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Misfortunes of Elphin</i>, which followed after an interval of seven
+years, is, I believe, the least generally popular of Peacock's works,
+though (not at all for that reason) it happens to be my own favourite.
+The most curious instance of this general unpopularity is the entire
+omission, as far as I am aware, of any reference to it in any of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">{252}</a></span>
+popular guide-books to Wales. One piece of verse, indeed, the "War-song
+of Dinas Vawr," a triumph of easy verse and covert sarcasm, has had some
+vogue, but the rest is only known to Peacockians. The abundance of Welsh
+lore which, at any rate in appearance, it contains, may have had
+something to do with this; though the translations or adaptations,
+whether faithful or not, are the best literary renderings of Welsh known
+to me. Something also, and probably more, is due to the saturation of
+the whole from beginning to end with Peacock's driest humour. Not only
+is the account of the sapping and destruction of the embankment of
+Gwaelod an open and continuous satire on the opposition to Reform, but
+the whole book is written in the spirit and manner of <i>Candide</i>&mdash;a
+spirit and manner which Englishmen have generally been readier to
+relish, when they relish them at all, in another language than in their
+own. The respectable domestic virtues of Elphin and his wife Angharad,
+the blameless loves of Taliesin and the Princess Melanghel, hardly serve
+even as a foil to the satiric treatment of the other characters. The
+careless incompetence of the poetical King Gwythno, the coarser vices of
+other Welsh princes, the marital toleration or blindness of Arthur, the
+cynical frankness of the robber King Melvas, above all, the drunkenness
+of the immortal Seithenyn, give the humorist themes which he caresses
+with inexhaustible affection, but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">{253}</a></span> in a manner no doubt very puzzling,
+if not shocking, to matter-of-fact readers. Seithenyn, the drunken
+prince and dyke-warden, whose carelessness lets in the inundation, is by
+far Peacock's most original creation (for Scythrop, as has been said, is
+rather a humorous distortion of the actual than a creation). His
+complete self-satisfaction, his utter fearlessness of consequences, his
+ready adaptation to whatever part, be it prince or butler, presents
+itself to him, and above all, the splendid topsy-turviness of his
+fashion of argument, make Seithenyn one of the happiest, if not one of
+the greatest, results of whimsical imagination and study of human
+nature. "They have not"&mdash;says the somewhile prince, now King Melvas's
+butler, when Taliesin discovers him twenty years after his supposed
+death&mdash;"they have not made it [his death] known to me, for the best of
+all reasons, that one can only know the truth. For if that which we
+think we know is not truth, it is something which we do not know. A man
+cannot know his own death. For while he knows anything he is alive; at
+least, I never heard of a dead man who knew anything, or pretended to
+know anything: if he had so pretended I should have told him to his face
+that he was no dead man." How nobly consistent is this with his other
+argument in the days of his princedom and his neglect of the embankment!
+Elphin has just reproached him with the proverb, "Wine speaks in the
+silence of reason." "I am very sorry," said Seithenyn,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">{254}</a></span> "that you see
+things in a wrong light. But we will not quarrel, for three reasons:
+first, because you are the son of the king, and may do and say what you
+please without any one having a right to be displeased; second, because
+I never quarrel with a guest, even if he grows riotous in his cups;
+third, because there is nothing to quarrel about. And perhaps that is
+the best reason of the three; or rather the first is the best, because
+you are the son of the king; and the third is the second, that is the
+second best, because there is nothing to quarrel about; and the second
+is nothing to the purpose, because, though guests will grow riotous in
+their cups in spite of my good orderly example, God forbid that I should
+say that is the case with you. And I completely agree in the truth of
+your remark that reason speaks in the silence of wine."</p>
+
+<p><i>Crotchet Castle</i>, the last but one of the series, which was published
+two years after <i>Elphin</i> and nearly thirty before <i>Gryll Grange</i>, has
+been already called the best; and the statement is not inconsistent with
+the description already given of <i>Nightmare Abbey</i> and of <i>Elphin</i>. For
+<i>Nightmare Abbey</i> is chiefly farce, and <i>The Misfortunes of Elphin</i> is
+chiefly sardonic persiflage. <i>Crotchet Castle</i> is comedy of a high and
+varied kind. Peacock has returned in it to the machinery of a country
+house with its visitors, each of whom is more or less of a crotcheteer;
+and has thrown in a little romantic interest in the suit of a certain
+unmoneyed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">{255}</a></span> Captain Fitzchrome to a noble damsel who is expected to marry
+money, as well as in the desertion and subsequent rescue of Susannah
+Touchandgo, daughter of a levanting financier. The charm of the book,
+however, which distinguishes it from all its predecessors, is the
+introduction of characters neither ridiculous nor simply good in the
+persons of the Rev. Dr. Folliott and Lady Clarinda Bossnowl,
+Fitzchrome's beloved. "Lady Clarinda," says the captain, when the said
+Lady Clarinda has been playing off a certain not unladylike practical
+joke on him, "is a very pleasant young lady;" and most assuredly she is,
+a young lady (in the nineteenth century and in prose) of the tribe of
+Beatrice, if not even of Rosalind. As for Dr. Folliott, the author is
+said to have described him as his amends for his earlier clerical
+sketches, and the amends are ample. A stout Tory, a fellow of infinite
+jest, a lover of good living, an inveterate paradoxer, a pitiless
+exposer of current cants and fallacies, and, lastly, a tall man of his
+hands, Dr. Folliott is always delightful, whether he is knocking down
+thieves, or annihilating, in a rather Johnsonian manner, the economist,
+Mr. McQuedy, and the journalist, Mr. Eavesdrop, or laying down the law
+as to the composition of breakfast and supper, or using strong language
+as to "the learned friend" (Brougham), or bringing out, partly by
+opposition and partly by irony, the follies of the transcendentalists,
+the fops, the doctrinaires, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">{256}</a></span> the mediævalists of the party. The
+book, moreover, contains the last and not the least of Peacock's
+admirable drinking-songs:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">If I drink water while this doth last,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">May I never again drink wine;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For how can a man, in his life of a span,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Do anything better than dine?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We'll dine and drink, and say if we think<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That anything better can be;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And when we have dined, wish all mankind<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">May dine as well as we.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And though a good wish will fill no dish,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And brim no cup with sack,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet thoughts will spring as the glasses ring<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To illumine our studious track.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O'er the brilliant dreams of our hopeful schemes<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The light of the flask shall shine;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And we'll sit till day, but we'll find the way<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To drench the world with wine.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The song is good in itself, but it is even more interesting as being the
+last product of Peacock's Anacreontic vein. Almost a generation passed
+before the appearance of his next and last novel, and though there is
+plenty of good eating and drinking in <i>Gryll Grange</i>, the old fine
+rapture had disappeared in society meanwhile, and Peacock obediently
+took note of the disappearance. It is considered, I believe, a mark of
+barbarian tastes to lament the change. But I am not certain that the Age
+of Apollinaris and lectures has yet produced anything that can vie as
+literature with the products of the ages of Wine and Song.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">{257}</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>Gryll Grange</i>, however, in no way deserves the name of a dry stick. It
+is, next to <i>Melincourt</i>, the longest of Peacock's novels, and it is
+entirely free from the drawbacks of the forty-years-older book. Mr.
+Falconer, the hero, who lives in a tower alone with seven lovely and
+discreet foster-sisters, has some resemblances to Mr. Forester, but he
+is much less of a prig. The life and the conversation bear, instead of
+the marks of a young man's writing, the marks of the writing of one who
+has seen the manners and cities of many other men, and the personages
+throughout are singularly lifelike. The loves of the second hero and
+heroine, Lord Curryfin and Miss Niphet, are much more interesting than
+their names would suggest. And the most loquacious person of the book,
+the Rev. Dr. Opimian, if he is somewhat less racy than Dr. Folliott, is
+not less agreeable. One main charm of the novel lies in its vigorous
+criticism of modern society in phases which have not yet passed away.
+"Progress" is attacked with curious ardour; and the battle between
+literature and science, which in our days even Mr. Matthew Arnold waged
+but as one <i>cauponans bellum</i>, is fought with a vigour that is a joy to
+see. It would be rather interesting to know whether Peacock, in planning
+the central incident of the play (an "Aristophanic comedy," satirising
+modern ways), was aware of the existence of Mansel's delightful parody
+of the "Clouds." But "Phrontisterion" has never been widely known<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">{258}</a></span> out
+of Oxford, and the bearing of Peacock's own performance is rather social
+than political. Not the least noteworthy thing in the book is the
+practical apology which is made in it to Scotchmen and political
+economists (two classes whom Peacock had earlier persecuted) in the
+personage of Mr. McBorrowdale, a candid friend of Liberalism, who is
+extremely refreshing. And besides the Aristophanic comedy, <i>Gryll
+Grange</i> contains some of Peacock's most delightful verse, notably the
+really exquisite stanzas on "Love and Age."</p>
+
+<p>The book is the more valuable because of the material it supplies, in
+this and other places, for rebutting the charges that Peacock was a mere
+Epicurean, or a mere carper. Independently of the verses just named, and
+the hardly less perfect "Death of Philemon," the prose conversation
+shows how delicately and with how much feeling he could think on those
+points of life where satire and jollification are out of place. For the
+purely modern man, indeed, it might be well to begin the reading of
+Peacock with <i>Gryll Grange</i>, in order that he may not be set out of
+harmony with his author by the robuster but less familiar tones, as well
+as by the rawer though not less vigorous workmanship, of <i>Headlong Hall</i>
+and its immediate successors. The happy mean between the heart on the
+sleeve and the absence of heart has scarcely been better shown than in
+this latest novel.</p>
+
+<p>I have no space here to go through the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">{259}</a></span> miscellaneous work which
+completes Peacock's literary baggage. His regular poems, all early, are
+very much better than the work of many men who have won a place among
+British poets. His criticism, though not great in amount, is good; and
+he is especially happy in the kind of miscellaneous trifle (such as his
+trilingual poem on a whitebait dinner), which is generally thought
+appropriate to "university wits." But the characteristics of these
+miscellanies are not very different from the characteristics of his
+prose fiction, and, for purposes of discussion, may be included with
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Lord Houghton has defined and explained Peacock's literary idiosyncrasy
+as that of a man of the eighteenth century belated and strayed in the
+nineteenth. It is always easy to improve on a given pattern, but I
+certainly think that this definition of Lord Houghton's (which, it
+should be said, is not given in his own words) needs a little
+improvement. For the differences which strike us in Peacock&mdash;the easy
+joviality, the satirical view of life, the contempt of formulas and of
+science&mdash;though they certainly distinguish many chief literary men of
+the eighteenth century from most chief literary men of the nineteenth,
+are not specially characteristic of the eighteenth century itself. They
+are found in the seventeenth, in the Renaissance, in classical
+antiquity&mdash;wherever, in short, the art of letters and the art of life
+have had comparatively free play. The chief differentia of Peacock<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">{260}</a></span> is a
+differentia common among men of letters; that is to say, among men of
+letters who are accustomed to society, who take no sacerdotal or
+singing-robe view of literature, who appreciate the distinction which
+literary cultivation gives them over the herd of mankind, but who by no
+means take that distinction too seriously. Aristophanes, Horace, Lucian,
+Rabelais, Montaigne, Saint-Evremond, these are all Peacock's literary
+ancestors, each, of course, with his own difference in especial and in
+addition. Aristophanes was more of a politician and a patriot, Lucian
+more of a freethinker, Horace more of a simple <i>pococurante</i>. Rabelais
+may have had a little inclination to science itself (he would soon have
+found it out if he had lived a little later), Montaigne may have been
+more of a pure egotist, Saint-Evremond more of a man of society, and of
+the verse and prose of society. But they all had the same <i>ethos</i>, the
+same love of letters as letters, the same contempt of mere progress as
+progress, the same relish for the simpler and more human pleasures, the
+same good fellowship, the same tendency to escape from the labyrinth of
+life's riddles by what has been called the humour-gate, the same
+irreconcilable hatred of stupidity and vulgarity and cant. The
+eighteenth century has, no doubt, had its claim to be regarded as the
+special flourishing time of this mental state urged by many others
+besides Lord Houghton; but I doubt whether the claim can be sustained,
+at any<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">{261}</a></span> rate to the detriment of other times, and the men of other
+times. That century took itself too seriously&mdash;a fault fatal to the
+claim at once. Indeed, the truth is that while this attitude has in some
+periods been very rare, it cannot be said to be the peculiar, still less
+the universal, characteristic of any period. It is a personal not a
+periodic distinction; and there are persons who might make out a fair
+claim to it even in the depths of the Middle Ages or of the nineteenth
+century.</p>
+
+<p>However this may be, Peacock certainly held the theory of those who take
+life easily, who do not love anything very much except old books, old
+wine, and a few other things, not all of which perhaps need be old, who
+are rather inclined to see the folly of it than the pity of it, and who
+have an invincible tendency, if they tilt at anything at all, to tilt at
+the prevailing cants and arrogances of the time. These cants and
+arrogances of course vary. The position occupied by monkery at one time
+may be occupied by physical science at another; and a belief in graven
+images may supply in the third century the target, which is supplied by
+a belief in the supreme wisdom of majorities in the nineteenth. But the
+general principles&mdash;the cult of the Muses and the Graces for their own
+sake, and the practice of satiric archery at the follies of the
+day&mdash;appear in all the elect of this particular election, and they
+certainly appear in Peacock. The results no doubt are distasteful, not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">{262}</a></span>
+to say shocking, to some excellent people. It is impossible to avoid a
+slight chuckle when one thinks of the horror with which some such people
+must read Peacock's calm statement, repeated I think more than once,
+that one of his most perfect heroes "found, as he had often found
+before, that the more his mind was troubled, the more madeira he could
+drink without disordering his head." I have no doubt that the United
+Kingdom Alliance, if it knew this dreadful sentence (but probably the
+study of the United Kingdom Alliance is not much in Peacock), would like
+to burn all the copies of <i>Gryll Grange</i> by the hands of Mr. Berry, and
+make the reprinting of it a misdemeanour, if not a felony. But it is not
+necessary to follow Sir Wilfrid Lawson, or to be a believer in
+education, or in telegraphs, or in majorities, in order to feel the
+repulsion which some people evidently feel for the manner of Peacock.
+With one sense absent and another strongly present it is impossible for
+any one to like him. The present sense is that which has been rather
+grandiosely called the sense of moral responsibility in literature. The
+absent sense is that sixth, seventh, or eighth sense, called a sense of
+humour, and about this there is no arguing. Those who have it, instead
+of being quietly and humbly thankful, are perhaps a little too apt to
+celebrate their joy in the face of the afflicted ones who have it not;
+the afflicted ones, who have it not, only follow a general law in
+protesting that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">{263}</a></span> the sense of humour is a very worthless thing, if not a
+complete humbug. But there are others of whom it would be absurd to say
+that they have no sense of humour, and yet who cannot place themselves
+at the Peacockian point of view, or at the point of view of those who
+like Peacock. His humour is not their humour; his wit not their wit.
+Like one of his own characters (who did not show his usual wisdom in the
+remark), they "must take pleasure in the thing represented before they
+can take pleasure in the representation." And in the things that Peacock
+represents they do not take pleasure. That gentlemen should drink a
+great deal of burgundy and sing songs during the process, appears to
+them at the best childish, at the worst horribly wrong. The
+prince-butler Seithenyn is a reprobate old man, who was unfaithful to
+his trust and shamelessly given to sensual indulgence. Dr. Folliott, as
+a parish priest, should not have drunk so much wine; and it would have
+been much more satisfactory to hear more of Dr. Opimian's sermons and
+district visiting, and less of his dinners with Squire Gryll and Mr.
+Falconer. Peacock's irony on social and political arrangements is all
+sterile, all destructive, and the sentiment that "most opinions that
+have anything to be said for them are about two thousand years old" is a
+libel on mankind. They feel, in short, for Peacock the animosity,
+mingled with contempt, which the late M. Amiel felt for "clever
+mockers."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">{264}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is probably useless to argue with any such. It might, indeed, be
+urged in all seriousness that the Peacockian attitude is not in the
+least identical with the Mephistophelian; that it is based simply on the
+very sober and arguable ground that human nature is always very much the
+same, liable to the same delusions and the same weaknesses; and that the
+oldest things are likely to be best, not for any intrinsic or mystical
+virtue of antiquity, but because they have had most time to be found out
+in, and have not been found out. It may further be argued, as it has
+often been argued before, that the use of ridicule as a general
+criterion can do no harm, and may do much good. If the thing ridiculed
+be of God, it will stand; if it be not, the sooner it is laughed off the
+face of the earth the better. But there is probably little good in
+urging all this. Just as a lover of the greatest of Greek dramatists
+must recognise at once that it would be perfectly useless to attempt to
+argue Lord Coleridge out of the idea that Aristophanes, though a genius,
+was vulgar and base of soul, so to go a good deal lower in the scale of
+years, and somewhat lower in the scale of genius, everybody who rejoices
+in the author of "Aristophanes in London" must see that he has no chance
+of converting Mrs. Oliphant, or any other person who does not like
+Peacock. The middle term is not present, the disputants do not in fact
+use the same language. The only thing to do is to recommend this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">{265}</a></span>
+particular pleasure to those who are capable of being pleased by it, and
+to whom, as no doubt it is to a great number, it is pleasure yet
+untried.</p>
+
+<p>It is well to go about enjoying it with a certain caution. The reader
+must not expect always to agree with Peacock, who not only did not
+always agree with himself, but was also a man of almost ludicrously
+strong prejudices. He hated paper money; whereas the only feeling that
+most of us have on that subject is that we have not always as much of it
+as we should like. He hated Scotchmen, and there are many of his readers
+who without any claim to Scotch blood, but knowing the place and the
+people, will say,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">That better wine and better men<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We shall not meet in May,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>or for the matter of that in any other month. Partly because he hated
+Scotchmen, and partly because in his earlier days Sir Walter was a
+pillar of Toryism, he hated Scott, and has been guilty not merely of an
+absurd and no doubt partly humorous comparison of the Waverley novels to
+pantomimes, but of more definite criticisms which will bear the test of
+examination as badly. His strictures on a famous verse of "The Dream of
+Fair Women" are indefensible, though there is perhaps more to be said
+for the accompanying gibe at Sir John Millais's endeavour to carry out
+the description of Cleopatra in black (chiefly black)<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">{266}</a></span> and white. The
+reader of Peacock must never mind his author trampling on his, the
+reader's, favourite corns; or rather he must lay his account with the
+agreeable certainty that Peacock will shortly afterwards trample on
+other corns which are not at all his favourites. For my part I am quite
+willing to accept these conditions. And I do not find that my admiration
+for Coleridge, and my sympathy with those who opposed the first Reform
+Bill, and my inclination to dispute the fact that Oxford is only a place
+of "unread books," make me like Peacock one whit the less. It is the law
+of the game, and those who play the game must put up with its laws. And
+it must be remembered that, at any rate in his later and best books,
+Peacock never wholly "took a side." He has always provided some
+personage or other who reduces all the whimsies and prejudices of his
+characters, even including his own, under a kind of dry light. Such is
+Lady Clarinda, who regards all the crotcheteers of Crotchet Castle with
+the same benevolent amusement; such Mr. McBorrowdale, who, when he is
+requested to settle the question of the superiority or inferiority of
+Greek harmony and perspective to modern, replies, "I think ye may just
+buz that bottle before you." (Alas! to think that if a man used the word
+"buz" nowadays some wiseacre would accuse him of vulgarity or of false
+English.) The general criticism in his work is always sane and vigorous,
+even though there may<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">{267}</a></span> be flaws in the particular censures; and it is
+very seldom that even in his utterances of most flagrant prejudice
+anything really illiberal can be found. He had read much too widely and
+with too much discrimination for that. His reading had been corrected by
+too much of the cheerful give-and-take of social discussion, his dry
+light was softened and coloured by too frequent rainbows, the Apollonian
+rays being reflected on Bacchic dew. Anything that might otherwise seem
+hard and harsh in Peacock's perpetual ridicule is softened and mellowed
+by this pervading good fellowship which, as it is never pushed to the
+somewhat extravagant limits of the <i>Noctes Ambrosianæ</i>, so it
+distinguishes Peacock himself from the authors to whom in pure style he
+is most akin, and to whom Lord Houghton has already compared him&mdash;the
+French tale-tellers from Anthony Hamilton to Voltaire. In these, perfect
+as their form often is, there is constantly a slight want of geniality,
+a perpetual clatter and glitter of intellectual rapier and dagger which
+sometimes becomes rather irritating and teasing to ear and eye. Even the
+objects of Peacock's severest sarcasm, his Galls and Vamps and
+Eavesdrops, are allowed to join in the choruses and the bumpers of his
+easy-going symposia. The sole nexus is not cash payment but something
+much more agreeable, and it is allowed that even Mr. Mystic had "some
+super-excellent madeira." Yet how far the wine is from getting above the
+wit in these merry books<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">{268}</a></span> is not likely to escape even the most
+unsympathetic reader. The mark may be selected recklessly or unjustly,
+but the arrows always fly straight to it.</p>
+
+<p>Peacock, in short, has eminently that quality of literature which may be
+called recreation. It may be that he is not extraordinarily instructive,
+though there is a good deal of quaint and not despicable erudition
+wrapped up in his apparently careless pages. It may be that he does not
+prove much; that he has, in fact, very little concern to prove anything.
+But in one of the only two modes of refreshment and distraction possible
+in literature, he is a very great master. The first of these modes is
+that of creation&mdash;that in which the writer spirits his readers away into
+some scene and manner of life quite different from that with which they
+are ordinarily conversant. With this Peacock, even in his professed
+poetical work, has not very much to do; and in his novels, even in <i>Maid
+Marian</i>, he hardly attempts it. The other is the mode of satirical
+presentment of well-known and familiar things, and this is all his own.
+Even his remotest subjects are near enough to be in a manner familiar,
+and <i>Gryll Grange</i>, with a few insignificant changes of names and
+current follies, might have been written yesterday. He is, therefore,
+not likely for a long time to lose the freshness and point which, at any
+rate for the ordinary reader, are required in satirical handlings of
+ordinary life; while his purely literary merits, especially his grasp<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">{269}</a></span>
+of the perennial follies and characters of humanity, of the <i>ludicrum
+humani generis</i> which never varies much in substance under its
+ever-varying dress, are such as to assure him life even after the
+immediate peculiarities which he satirised have ceased to be anything
+but history.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">{270}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IX" id="IX"></a>IX<br />
+<br />
+WILSON</h2>
+
+
+<p>Among those judgments of his contemporaries which make a sort of Inferno
+of the posthumous writings of Thomas Carlyle, that passed upon
+"Christopher North" has always seemed to me the most interesting, and
+perhaps on the whole the fairest. There is enough and to spare of
+onesidedness in it, and of the harshness which comes from onesidedness.
+But it is hardly at all sour, and, when allowance is made for the point
+of view, by no means unjust. The whole is interesting from the literary
+side, but as it fills two large pages it is much too long to quote. The
+personal description, "the broad-shouldered stately bulk of the man
+struck me: his flashing eye, copious dishevelled head of hair, and rapid
+unconcerned progress like that of a plough through stubble," is
+characteristically graphic, and far the best of the numerous pen
+sketches of "the Professor." As for the criticism, the following is the
+kernel passage of it:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">{271}</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Wilson had much nobleness of heart and many traits of noble
+genius, but the central tie-beam seemed wanting always; very long
+ago I perceived in him the most irreconcilable contradictions:
+Toryism with sansculottism; Methodism of a sort with total
+incredulity; a noble loyal and religious nature not strong enough
+to vanquish the perverse element it is born into. Hence a being
+all split into precipitous chasms and the wildest volcanic
+tumults; rocks over-grown indeed with tropical luxuriance of leaf
+and flower but knit together at the bottom&mdash;that was my old
+figure of speech&mdash;only by an ocean of whisky punch. On these
+terms nothing can be done. Wilson seems to me always by far the
+most <i>gifted</i> of our literary men either then or still. And yet
+intrinsically he has written nothing that can endure. The central
+gift was wanting.</p></div>
+
+<p>Something in the unfavourable part of this must no doubt be set down to
+the critic's usual forgetfulness of his own admirable dictum, "he is not
+thou, but himself; other than thou." John was quite other than Thomas,
+and Thomas judged him somewhat summarily as if he were a failure of a
+Thomas. Yet the criticism, if partly harsh and as a whole somewhat
+incomplete, is true enough. Wilson has written "intrinsically nothing
+that can endure," if it be judged by any severe test. An English
+Diderot, he must bear a harder version of the judgment on Diderot, that
+he had written good pages but no good book. Only very rarely has he even
+written good pages, in the sense of pages good throughout. The almost
+inconceivable haste with which he wrote (he is credited with having on
+one occasion actually written fifty-six pages of print for <i>Blackwood</i>
+in two days, and in the years<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">{272}</a></span> of its double numbers he often
+contributed from a hundred to a hundred and fifty pages in a single
+month)&mdash;this prodigious haste would not of itself account for the
+puerilities, the touches of bad taste, the false pathos, the tedious
+burlesque, the more tedious jactation which disfigure his work. A man
+writing against time may be driven to dulness, or commonplace, or
+inelegance of style; but he need never commit any of the faults just
+noticed. They were due beyond doubt, in Wilson's case, to a natural
+idiosyncrasy, the great characteristic of which Carlyle has happily hit
+off in the phrase, "want of a tie-beam," whether he has or has not been
+charitable in suggesting that the missing link was supplied by whisky
+punch. The least attractive point about Wilson's work is undoubtedly
+what his censor elsewhere describes as his habit of "giving a kick" to
+many men and things. There is no more unpleasant feature of the <i>Noctes</i>
+than the apparent inability of the writer to refrain from sly "kicks"
+even at the objects of his greatest veneration. A kind of mania of
+detraction seizes him at times, a mania which some of his admirers have
+more kindly than wisely endeavoured to shuffle off as a humorous
+dramatic touch intentionally administered to him by his Eidolon North.
+The most disgraceful, perhaps the only really disgraceful, instance of
+this is the carping and offensive criticism of Scott's <i>Demonology</i>,
+written and published at a time when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">{273}</a></span> Sir Walter's known state of health
+and fortunes might have protected him even from an enemy, much more from
+a friend, and a deeply obliged friend such as Wilson. Nor is this the
+only fling at Scott. Wordsworth, much more vulnerable, is also much more
+frequently assailed; and even Shakespeare does not come off scot-free
+when Wilson is in his ugly moods.</p>
+
+<p>It need hardly be said that I have no intention of saying that Scott or
+Wordsworth or Shakespeare may not be criticised. It is the way in which
+the criticism is done which is the crime; and for these acts of literary
+high treason, or at least leasing-making, as well as for all Wilson's
+other faults, nothing seems to me so much responsible as the want of
+bottom which Carlyle notes. I do not think that Wilson had any solid
+fund of principles, putting morals and religion aside, either in
+politics or in literature. He liked and he hated much and strongly, and
+being a healthy creature he on the whole liked the right things and
+hated the wrong ones; but it was for the most part a merely instinctive
+liking and hatred, quite un-coördinated, and by no means unlikely to
+pass the next moment into hatred or liking as the case might be.</p>
+
+<p>These are grave faults. But for the purpose of providing that pleasure
+which is to be got from literature (and this, like one or two other
+chapters here, is partly an effort in literary hedonism) Wilson stands
+very high, indeed so high that he can be ranked only below the highest.
+He who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">{274}</a></span> will enjoy him must be an intelligent voluptuary, and especially
+well versed in the art of skipping. When Wilson begins to talk fine,
+when he begins to wax pathetic, and when he gets into many others of his
+numerous altitudes, it will behove the reader, according to his own
+tastes, to skip with discretion and vigour. If he cannot do this, if his
+eye is not wary enough, or if his conscience forbids him to obey his
+eyes' warnings, Wilson is not for him. It is true that Mr. Skelton has
+tried to make a "Comedy of the <i>Noctes Ambrosianæ</i>," in which the
+skipping is done ready to hand. But, with all the respect due to the
+author of <i>Thalatta</i>, the process is not, at least speaking according to
+my judgment, successful. No one can really taste that eccentric book
+unless he reads it as a whole; its humours arbitrarily separated and
+cut-and-dried are nearly unintelligible. Indeed Professor Ferrier's
+original attempt to give Wilson's work only, and not all of that work
+when it happened to be mixed with others, seems to me to have been a
+mistake. But of that further, when we come to speak of the <i>Noctes</i>
+themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Wilson's life, for more than two-thirds of it a very happy one and not
+devoid of a certain eventfulness, can be summarised pretty briefly,
+especially as a full account of it is available in the very delightful
+work of his daughter Mrs. Gordon. Born in 1785, the son of a rich
+manufacturer of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">{275}</a></span> Paisley and a mother who boasted gentle blood, he was
+brought up first in the house of a country minister (whose parish he has
+made famous in several sketches), then at the University of Glasgow, and
+then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was early left possessor of a
+considerable fortune, and his first love, a certain "Margaret," having
+proved unkind, he established himself at Elleray on Windermere and
+entered into all the Lake society. Before very long (he was twenty-six
+at the time) he married Miss Jane Penny, daughter of a Liverpool
+merchant, and kept open house at Elleray for some years. Then his
+fortune disappeared in the keeping of a dishonest relation, and he had,
+in a way, his livelihood to make. I say "in a way," because the wind
+appears to have been considerably tempered to this shorn but robust
+lamb. He had not even to give up Elleray, though he could not live there
+in his old style. He had a mother who was able and willing to entertain
+him at Edinburgh, on the sole understanding that he did not "turn Whig,"
+of which there was very little danger. He was enabled to keep not too
+exhausting or anxious terms as an advocate at the Scottish bar; and
+before long he was endowed, against the infinitely superior claims of
+Sir William Hamilton, and by sheer force of personal and political
+influence, with the lucrative Professorship of Moral Philosophy in the
+University of Edinburgh. But even before this he had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">{276}</a></span> been exempted from
+the necessity of cultivating literature on a little oatmeal by his
+connexion with <i>Blackwood's Magazine</i>. The story of that magazine has
+often been told; never perhaps quite fully, but sufficiently. Wilson was
+not at any time, strictly speaking, editor; and a statement under his
+own hand avers that he never received any editorial pay, and was
+sometimes subject to that criticism which the publisher, as all men know
+from a famous letter of Scott's, was sometimes in the habit of
+exercising rather indiscreetly. But for a very great number of years,
+there is no doubt that he held a kind of quasi-editorial position, which
+included the censorship of other men's work and an almost, if not quite,
+unlimited right of printing his own. For some time the even more
+masterful spirit of Lockhart (against whom by the way Mrs. Gordon seems
+to have had a rather unreasonable prejudice) qualified his control over
+"Maga." But Lockhart's promotion to the <i>Quarterly</i> removed this
+influence, and from 1825 (speaking roughly) to 1835 Wilson was supreme.
+The death of William Blackwood and of the Ettrick Shepherd in the
+last-named year, and of his own wife in 1837 (the latter a blow from
+which he never recovered), strongly affected not his control over the
+publication but his desire to control it; and after 1839 his
+contributions (save in the years 1845 and 1848) were very few. Ill
+health and broken spirits disabled him, and in 1852 he had to resign<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">{277}</a></span>
+his professorship, dying two years later after some months of almost
+total prostration. Of the rest of the deeds of Christopher, and of his
+pugilism, and of his learning, and of his pedestrian exploits, and of
+his fishing, and of his cock-fighting, and of his hearty enjoyment of
+life generally, the books of the chronicles of Mrs. Gordon, and still
+more the twelve volumes of his works and the unreprinted contributions
+to <i>Blackwood</i>, shall tell.</p>
+
+<p>It is with those works that our principal business is, and some of them
+I shall take the liberty of at once dismissing. His poems are now
+matters of interest to very few mortals. It is not that they are bad,
+for they are not; but that they are almost wholly without distinction.
+He came just late enough to have got the seed of the great romantic
+revival; and his verse work is rarely more than the work of a clever man
+who has partly learnt and partly divined the manner of Burns, Scott,
+Campbell, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, and the rest. Nor, to my fancy,
+are his prose tales of much more value. I read them many years ago and
+cared little for them. I re-read, or attempted to re-read, them the
+other day and cared less. There seems, from the original prospectus of
+the edition of his works, to have been an intention of editing the
+course of moral philosophy which, with more or fewer variations,
+obtained him the agreeable income of a thousand a year or so for thirty
+years. But whether (as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">{278}</a></span> Mrs. Gordon seems to hint) the notes were in too
+dilapidated and chaotic a condition for use, or whether Professor
+Ferrier, his son-in-law and editor (himself, with Dean Mansel, the last
+of the exact philosophers of Britain), revolted at the idea of printing
+anything so merely literary, or what it was, I know not&mdash;at any rate
+they do not now figure in the list. This leaves us ten volumes of
+collected works, to wit, four of the <i>Noctes Ambrosianæ</i>, four of
+<i>Essays Critical and Imaginative</i>, and two of <i>The Recreations of
+Christopher North</i>, all with a very few exceptions reprinted from
+<i>Blackwood</i>. Mrs. Gordon filially groans because the reprint was not
+more extensive, and without endorsing her own very high opinion of her
+father's work, it is possible to agree with her. It is especially
+noteworthy that from the essays are excluded three out of the four chief
+critical series which Wilson wrote&mdash;that on Spenser, praised by a writer
+so little given to reckless praise as Hallam, the <i>Specimens of British
+Critics</i>, and the <i>Dies Boreales</i>,&mdash;leaving only the series on Homer
+with its quasi-Appendix on the Greek dramatists, and the <i>Noctes</i>
+themselves.</p>
+
+<p>It must be confessed that the <i>Noctes Ambrosianæ</i> are not easy things to
+commend to the modern reader, if I may use the word commend in its
+proper sense and with no air of patronage. Even Scotchmen (perhaps,
+indeed, Scotchmen most of all) are wont nowadays to praise them rather
+apologetically, as may be seen in the case<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">{279}</a></span> of their editor and abridger
+Mr. Skelton. Like most other very original things they drew after them a
+flock of imbecile imitations; and up to the present day those who have
+lived in the remoter parts of Scotland must know, or recently remember,
+dreary compositions in corrupt following of the <i>Noctes</i>, with
+exaggerated attempts at Christopher's worst mannerisms, and invariably
+including a ghastly caricature of the Shepherd. Even in themselves they
+abound in stumbling-blocks, which are perhaps multiplied, at least at
+the threshold, by the arbitrary separation in Ferrier's edition of
+Wilson's part, and not all his part, from the whole series; eighteen
+numbers being excluded bodily to begin with, while many more and parts
+of more are omitted subsequently. The critical mistake of this is
+evident, for much of the machinery and all the characters of the
+<i>Noctes</i> were given to, not by, Wilson, and in all probability he
+accepted them not too willingly. The origin of the fantastic personages,
+the creation of which was a perfect mania with the early contributors to
+<i>Blackwood</i>, and who are, it is to be feared, too often a nuisance to
+modern readers, is rather dubious. Maginn's friends have claimed the
+origination of the <i>Noctes</i> proper, and of its well-known motto
+paraphrased from Phocylides, for "The Doctor," or, if his chief
+<i>Blackwood</i> designation be preferred, for the Ensign&mdash;Ensign O'Doherty.
+Professor Ferrier, on the other hand,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">{280}</a></span> has shown a not unnatural but by
+no means critical or exact desire to hint that Wilson invented the
+whole. There is no doubt that the real original is to be found in the
+actual suppers at "Ambrose's." These Lockhart had described, in <i>Peter's
+Letters</i>, before the appearance of the first <i>Noctes</i> (the reader must
+not be shocked, the false concord is invariable in the book itself) and
+not long after the establishment of "Maga." As was the case with the
+magazine generally, the early numbers were extremely local and extremely
+personal. Wilson's glory is that he to a great extent, though not
+wholly, lifted them out of this rut, when he became the chief if not the
+sole writer after Lockhart's removal to London, and, with rare
+exceptions, reduced the personages to three strongly marked and very
+dramatic characters, Christopher North himself, the Ettrick Shepherd,
+and "Tickler." All these three were in a manner portraits, but no one is
+a mere photograph from a single person. On the whole, however, I suspect
+that Christopher North is a much closer likeness, if not of what Wilson
+himself was, yet at any rate of what he would have liked to be, than
+some of his apologists maintain. These charitable souls excuse the
+egotism, the personality, the violence, the inconsistency, the absurd
+assumption of omniscience and Admirable-Crichtonism, on the plea that
+"Christopher" is only the ideal Editor and not the actual Professor. It
+is quite<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">{281}</a></span> true that Wilson, who, like all men of humour, must have known
+his own foibles, not unfrequently satirises them; but it is clear from
+his other work and from his private letters that they <i>were</i> his
+foibles. The figure of the Shepherd, who is the chief speaker and on the
+whole the most interesting, is a more debatable one. It is certain that
+many of Hogg's friends, and, in his touchy moments he himself,
+considered that great liberty was taken with him, if not that (as the
+<i>Quarterly</i> put it in a phrase which evidently made Wilson very angry)
+he was represented as a mere "boozing buffoon." On the other hand it is
+equally certain that the Shepherd never did anything that exhibited half
+the power over thought and language which is shown in the best passages
+of his <i>Noctes</i> eidolon. Some of the adventures described as having
+happened to him are historically known as having happened to Wilson
+himself, and his sentiments are much more the writer's than the
+speaker's. At the same time the admirably imitated patois and the subtle
+rendering of Hogg's very well known foibles&mdash;his inordinate and
+stupendous vanity, his proneness to take liberties with his betters, his
+irritable temper, and the rest&mdash;give a false air of identity which is
+very noteworthy. The third portrait is said to have been the farthest
+from life, except in some physical peculiarities, of the three.
+"Tickler," whose original was Wilson's maternal uncle Robert Sym, an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">{282}</a></span>
+Edinburgh "writer," and something of a humorist in the flesh, is very
+skilfully made to hold the position of common-sense intermediary between
+the two originals, North and the Shepherd. He has his own peculiarities,
+but he has also a habit of bringing his friends down from their
+altitudes in a Voltairian fashion which is of great benefit to the
+dialogues, and may be compared to Peacock's similar use of some of his
+characters. The few occasional interlocutors are of little moment, with
+one exception; and the only female characters, Mrs. and Miss Gentle,
+would have been very much better away. They are not in the least
+lifelike, and usually exhibit the namby-pambiness into which Wilson too
+often fell when he wished to be refined and pathetic. The "English" or
+half-English characters, who come in sometimes as foils, are also rather
+of the stick, sticky. On the other hand, the interruptions of Ambrose,
+the host, and his household, though a little farcical, are well judged.
+And of the one exception above mentioned, the live Thomas De Quincey,
+who is brought in without disguise or excuse in some of the very best of
+the series, it can only be said that the imitation of his written style
+is extraordinary, and that men who knew his conversation say that the
+rendering of that is more extraordinary still.</p>
+
+<p>The same designed exaggeration which some uncritical persons have called
+Rabelaisian (not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">{283}</a></span> noticing that the very fault of the <i>Noctes</i> is that,
+unlike Rabelais, their author mixes up probabilities and improbabilities
+so that there is a perpetual jarring) is maintained throughout the
+scenery and etceteras. The comfortable but modest accommodations of
+Ambrose's hotels in Gabriel's Road and Picardy Place are turned into
+abodes of not particularly tasteful luxury which put Lord Beaconsfield's
+famous upholstery to shame, and remind one of what they probably
+suggested, Edgar Poe's equally famous and much more terrible sketch of a
+model drawing-room. All the plate is carefully described as "silver"; if
+it had been gold there might have been some humour in it. The "wax"
+candles and "silken" curtains (if they had been <i>Arabian Nights</i> lamps
+and oriental drapery the same might be said) are always insisted on. If
+there is any joke here it seems to lie in the contrast with Wilson's
+actual habits, which were very simple. For instance, he gives us a
+gorgeous description of the apparatus of North's solitary confinement
+when writing for <i>Blackwood</i>; his daughter's unvarnished account of the
+same process agrees exactly as to time, rate of production, and so
+forth, but substitutes water for the old hock and "Scots pint" (magnum)
+of claret, a dirty little terra-cotta inkstand for the silver utensil of
+the <i>Noctes</i>, and a single large tallow candle for Christopher's "floods
+of light." He carried the whim so far as to construct for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">{284}</a></span> himself&mdash;his
+<i>Noctes</i> self&mdash;an imaginary hall-by-the-sea on the Firth of Forth, which
+in the same way seems to have had an actual resemblance, half of
+likeness, half of contrast, to the actual Elleray, and to enlarge his
+own comfortable town house in Gloucester Place to a sort of fairy palace
+in Moray Place. But that which has most puzzled and shocked readers are
+the specially Gargantuan passages relating to eating and drinking. The
+comments made on this seem (he was anything but patient of criticism) to
+have annoyed Wilson very much; and in some of the later <i>Noctes</i> he
+drops hints that the whole is mere Barmecide business. Unfortunately the
+same criticism applies to this as to the upholstery&mdash;the exaggeration is
+"done too natural." The Shepherd's consumption of oysters not by dozens
+but by fifties, the allowance of "six common kettles-full of water" for
+the night's toddy ration of the three, North's above-mentioned bottle of
+old hock at dinner and magnum of claret after, the dinners and suppers
+and "whets" which appear so often;&mdash;all these stop short of the actually
+incredible, and are nothing more than extremely convivial men of the
+time, who were also large eaters, would have actually consumed. Lord
+Alvanley's three hearty suppers, the exploits of the old member of
+Parliament in Boz's sketch of Bellamy's (I forget his real name, but he
+was not a myth), and other things might be quoted to show that there is
+a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">{285}</a></span> fatal verisimilitude in the Ambrosian feasts which may, or may not,
+make them shocking (they don't shock me), but which certainly takes them
+out of the category of merely humorous exaggeration. The Shepherd's
+"jugs" numerous as they are (and by the way the Shepherd propounds two
+absolutely contradictory theories of toddy-making, one of which,
+according to the instructions of my preceptors in that art, who lived
+within sight of the hills that look down on Glenlivet, is a damnable
+heresy) are not in the least like the <i>seze muiz, deux bussars, et six
+tupins</i> of tripe that Gargamelle so rashly devoured. There are men now
+living, and honoured members of society in Scotland, who admit the soft
+impeachment of having drunk in their youth twelve or fourteen "double"
+tumblers at a sitting. Now a double tumbler, be it known to the
+Southron, is a jorum of toddy to which there go two wineglasses (of
+course of the old-fashioned size, not our modern goblets) of whisky.
+"Indeed," said a humorous and indulgent lady correspondent of Wilson's,
+"indeed, I really think you eat too many oysters at the <i>Noctes</i>;" and
+any one who believes in distributive justice must admit that they did.</p>
+
+<p>If, therefore, the reader is of the modern cutlet-and-cup-of-coffee
+school of feeding, he will no doubt find the <i>Noctes</i> most grossly and
+palpably gluttonous. If he be a very superior person he will smile at
+the upholstery. If he objects to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">{286}</a></span> horseplay he will be horrified at
+finding the characters on one occasion engaging in a regular "mill," on
+more than one corking each other's faces during slumber, sometimes
+playing at pyramids like the bounding brothers of acrobatic fame, at
+others indulging in leap-frog with the servants, permitting themselves
+practical jokes of all kinds, affecting to be drowned by an explosive
+haggis, and so forth. Every now and then he will come to a passage at
+which, without being superfine at all, he may find his gorge rise;
+though there is nothing quite so bad in the <i>Noctes</i> as the picture of
+the ravens eating a dead Quaker in the <i>Recreations</i>, a picture for
+which Wilson offers a very lame defence elsewhere. He must put all sorts
+of prejudice, literary, political, and other, in his pocket. He must be
+prepared not only for constant and very scurrilous flings at "Cockneys"
+(Wilson extends the term far beyond the Hunt and Hazlitt school, an
+extension which to this day seems to give a strange delight to Edinburgh
+journalists), but for the wildest heterodoxies and inconsistencies of
+political, literary, and miscellaneous judgment, for much bastard
+verse-prose, for a good many quite uninteresting local and ephemeral
+allusions, and, of course, for any quantity of Scotch dialect. If all
+these allowances and provisos are too many for him to make, it is
+probably useless for him to attempt the <i>Noctes</i> at all. He will pretty
+certainly, with the <i>Quarterly</i> reviewer, set their characters down as
+boozing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">{287}</a></span> buffoons, and decline the honour of an invitation to Ambrose's
+or The Lodge, to Southside or the tent in Ettrick Forest.</p>
+
+<p>But any one who can accommodate himself to these little matters, much
+more any one who can enter into the spirit of days merrier, more
+leisurely, and if not less straitlaced than our own, yet lacing their
+laces in a different fashion, will find the <i>Noctes</i> very delightful
+indeed. The mere high jinks, when the secret of being in the vein with
+them has been mastered, are seldom unamusing, and sometimes (notably in
+the long swim out to sea of Tickler and the Shepherd) are quite
+admirable fooling. No one who has an eye for the literary-dramatic can
+help, after a few <i>Noctes</i> have been read, admiring the skill with which
+the characters are at once typified and individualised, the substance
+which they acquire in the reader's mind, the personal interest in them
+which is excited. And to all this, peculiarly suited for an alterative
+in these solemn days, has to be added the abundance of scattered and
+incomplete but remarkable gems of expression and thought that come at
+every few pages, sometimes at every page, of the series.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the burlesque narratives (such as the Shepherd's Mazeppa-like
+ride on the Bonassus) are inimitably good, though they are too often
+spoilt by Wilson's great faults of prolixity and uncertainty of touch.
+The criticisms, of which there are many, are also extremely unequal,
+but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">{288}</a></span> not a few very fine passages may be found among them. The politics,
+it must be owned, are not good for much, even from the Tory point of
+view. But the greatest attraction of the whole, next to its sunshiny
+heartiness and humour, is to be found in innumerable and indescribable
+bits, phrases, sentences, short paragraphs, which have, more than
+anything out of the dialogues of the very best novels, the character and
+charm of actual conversation. To read a <i>Noctes</i> has, for those who have
+the happy gift of realising literature, not much less than the effect of
+actually taking part in one, with no danger of headache or indigestion
+after, and without the risk of being playfully corked, or required to
+leap the table for a wager, or forced to extemporise sixteen stanzas
+standing on the mantelpiece. There must be some peculiar virtue in this,
+for, as is very well known, the usual dialogue leaves the reader more
+outside of it than almost any other kind of literature.</p>
+
+<p>This peculiar charm is of necessity wanting to the rest of Wilson's
+works, and in so far they are inferior to the <i>Noctes</i>; but they have
+compensatory merits of their own, while, considered merely as
+literature, there are better things in them than anything that is to be
+found in the colloquies of those men of great gormandising
+abilities&mdash;Christopher North, James Hogg, and Timothy Tickler. Of the
+four volumes of <i>Essays Critical and Imaginative</i>, the fourth, on Homer
+and his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">{289}</a></span> translators, with an unfinished companion piece on the Greek
+drama, stands by itself, and has indeed, I believe, been separately
+published. It is well worth reading through at a sitting, which cannot
+be said of every volume of criticism. What is more, it may, I think, be
+put almost first in its own division of the art, though whether that
+division of the art is a high or low one is another question. I should
+not myself rank it very high. With Wilson, criticism, at least here, is
+little more than the eloquent expression of likes and dislikes. The long
+passages in which he deals with the wrath of Achilles and with the love
+of Calypso, though subject to the general stricture already more than
+once passed, are really beautiful specimens of literary enthusiasm; nor
+is there anything in English more calculated to initiate the reader,
+especially the young reader, in the love at least, if not the
+understanding, of Homer. The same enthusiastic and obviously quite
+genuine appreciation appears in the essay on the "Agamemnon." But of
+criticism as criticism&mdash;of what has been called tracing of literary
+cause and effect, of any coherent and co-ordinated theory of the good
+and bad in verse and prose, and the reasons of their goodness or
+badness, it must be said of this, as of Wilson's other critical work,
+that it is to be found <i>nusquam nullibi nullimodis</i>. He can preach
+(though with too great volubility, and with occasional faults of taste)
+delightful sermons about<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">{290}</a></span> what he likes at the moment&mdash;for it is by no
+means always the same; and he can make formidable onslaughts with
+various weapons on what he dislikes at the moment&mdash;which again is not
+always the same. But a man so certain to go off at score whenever his
+likes or dislikes are excited, and so absolutely unable to check himself
+whenever he feels tempted thus to go off, lacks the very first
+qualifications of the critic:&mdash;lacks them, indeed, almost as much as the
+mere word-grinder who looks to see whether a plural substantive has a
+singular verb, and is satisfied if it has not, and horrified if it has.
+His most famous sentence "The Animosities are mortal, but the Humanities
+live for ever" is certainly noble. But it would have been better if the
+Humanities had oftener choked the Animosities at their birth.</p>
+
+<p>Wilson's criticism is to be found more or less everywhere in his
+collected writings. I have said that I think it a pity that, of his
+longest critical attempts, only one has been republished; and the reason
+is simple. For with an unequal writer (and Wilson is a writer unequalled
+in his inequality) his best work is as likely to be found in his worst
+book as his worst work in his best book; while the constant
+contemplation for a considerable period of one subject is more likely
+than anything else to dispel his habits of digression and padding. But
+the ubiquity of his criticism through the ten volumes was, in the
+circumstances<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">{291}</a></span> of their editing, simply unavoidable. He had himself
+superintended a selection of all kinds, which he called <i>The Recreations
+of Christopher North</i>, and this had to be reprinted entire. It followed
+that, in the <i>Essays Critical and Imaginative</i>, an equally miscellaneous
+character should be observed. Almost everything given, and much not
+given, in the Works is worth consideration, but for critical purposes a
+choice is necessary. Let us take the consolidated essay on Wordsworth
+(most of which dates before 1822), the famous paper on Lord, then Mr.,
+Tennyson's poems in 1832, and the generous palinode on Macaulay's "Lays"
+of 1842. No three papers could better show Wilson in his three literary
+stages, that of rather cautious tentative (for though he was not a very
+young man in 1818, the date of the earliest of the Wordsworth papers, he
+was a young writer), that of practised and unrestrained vigour (for 1832
+represents about his literary zenith), and that of reflective decadence,
+for by 1842 he had ceased to write habitually, and was already bowed
+down by mental sorrows and physical ailments.</p>
+
+<p>In the first paper, or set of papers, it is evident that he is
+ambitiously groping after a more systematic style of criticism than he
+found in practice to be possible for him. Although he elsewhere scoffs
+at definitions, he tries to formulate very precisely the genius of
+Scott, of Byron, and of Wordsworth; he does his best to connect his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">{292}</a></span>
+individual judgments with these formulas; he shuns mere verbal
+criticism, and (to some extent) mere exaltation or depreciation of
+particular passages. But it is quite evident that he is ill at ease; and
+I do not think that any one now reading the essay can call it a
+successful one, or can attempt to rank it with those which, from
+different points of view, Hazlitt and De Quincey (Hazlitt nearly at the
+same time) wrote about Wordsworth. Indeed, Hazlitt is the most valuable
+of all examples for a critical comparison with Wilson; both being
+violent partisans and crotcheteers, both being animated with the truest
+love of poetry, but the one possessing and the other lacking the
+"tie-beam" of a consistent critical theory.</p>
+
+<p>A dozen years later Wilson had cast his slough, and had become the
+autocratic, freespoken, self-constituted dictator, Christopher North. He
+was confronted with the very difficult problem of Mr. Tennyson's poems.
+He knew they were poetry; that he could not help seeing and knowing. But
+they seemed to him to be the work of a "cockney" (it would be
+interesting to know whether there ever was any one less of a cockney
+than the author of "Mariana"), and he was irritated by some silly praise
+which had been given to them. So he set to work, and perpetrated the
+queerest jumble of sound and unsound criticism that exists in the
+archives of that art, so far as a humble but laborious student and
+practitioner thereof knoweth.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">{293}</a></span> He could not for the life of him help
+admiring "Adeline," "Oriana," "Mariana," "The Ode to Memory." Yet he had
+nothing but scorn for the scarcely less exquisite "Mermaid" and "Sea
+Fairies"&mdash;though the first few lines of the latter, excluded by this and
+other pseudo-criticism from the knowledge of half a generation of
+English readers, equal almost anything that the poet has ever done. And
+only the lucky memory of a remark of Hartley Coleridge's (who never went
+wrong in criticism, whatever he did in life) saved him from explicitly
+damning "The Dying Swan," which stands at the very head of a whole class
+of poetry. In all this essay, to borrow one of his own favourite words,
+he simply "plouters"&mdash;splashes and flounders about without any guidance
+of critical theory. Compare, to keep up the comparative method, the
+paper with the still more famous and far more deadly attack which
+Lockhart made a little later in the <i>Quarterly</i>. There one finds little,
+if any, generosity; an infinitely more cold-blooded and deliberate
+determination to "cut up." But the critic (and how quaint and pathetic
+it is to think that the said critic was the author of "I ride from land
+to land" and "When youthful hope is fled") sees his theory of poetry
+straight before him, and never takes his eye off it. The individual
+censures may be just or unjust, but they fit together like the
+propositions of a masterpiece of legal judgment. The poet is condemned<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">{294}</a></span>
+under the statute,&mdash;so much the worse for the statute perhaps, but that
+does not matter&mdash;and he can only plead No jurisdiction; whereas with
+Christopher it is quite different. If he does not exactly blunder right
+(and he sometimes does that), he constantly blunders wrong&mdash;goes wrong,
+that is to say, without any excuse of theory or general view. That is
+not criticism.</p>
+
+<p>We shall not find matters much mended from the strictly critical point
+of view, when we come, ten years later, to the article on the "Lays."
+Here Christopher, as I hold with all respect to persons of distinction,
+is absolutely right. He does not say one word too much of the fire and
+life of those wonderful verses, of that fight of all fights&mdash;as far as
+English verse goes, except Drayton's "Agincourt" and the last canto of
+"Marmion"; as far as English prose goes, except some passages of Mallory
+and two or three pages of Kingsley's&mdash;the Battle of the Lake Regillus.
+The subject and the swing attracted him; he liked the fight, and he
+liked the ring as of Sir Walter at his very best. But he goes
+appallingly wrong all through on general critical points.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, according to his own perverse fashion, he never goes wrong without
+going right. Throughout his critical work there are scattered the most
+intelligent ideas, the neatest phrases, the most appreciative judgments.
+How good is it to say that "the battle of Trafalgar, though in some
+sort<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">{295}</a></span> it neither began nor ended anything, was a kind of consummation of
+national prowess." How good again in its very straightforwardness and
+simplicity is the dictum "it is not necessary that we should understand
+fine poetry in order to feel and enjoy it, any more than fine music."
+Hundreds and thousands of these things lie about the pages. And in the
+next page to each the critic probably goes and says something which
+shows that he had entirely forgotten them. An intelligent man may be
+angry with Christopher&mdash;I should doubt whether any one who is not
+occasionally both angry and disgusted with him can be an intelligent
+man. But it is impossible to dislike him or fail to admire him as a
+whole.</p>
+
+<p>There is a third and very extensive division of Wilson's work which may
+not improbably be more popular, or might be if it were accessible
+separately, with the public of to-day, than either of those which have
+been surveyed. His "drunken <i>Noctes</i>," as Carlyle unkindly calls them,
+require a certain peculiar attitude of mind to appreciate them. As for
+his criticisms, it is frequently said, and it certainly would not become
+me to deny it, that nobody reads criticism but critics. But Wilson's
+renown as an athlete, a sportsman, and a lover of nature, who had a
+singular gift in expressing his love, has not yet died; and there is an
+ample audience now for men who can write about athletics, about sport,
+and about scenery. Nor is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">{296}</a></span> it questionable that on these subjects he is
+seen, on the whole, at his best. True, his faults pursue him even here,
+and are aggravated by a sort of fashion of the time which made him
+elaborately digress into politics, into literature, even (God rest his
+soul!) into a kind of quasi-professional and professorial sermonising on
+morals and theology, in the midst of his sporting articles. But the
+metal more attractive of the main subject would probably recommend these
+papers widely, if they were not scattered pell-mell about the <i>Essays
+Critical and Imaginative</i>, and the <i>Recreations of Christopher North</i>.
+Speaking generally they fall into three divisions&mdash;essays on sport in
+general, essays on the English Lakes, and essays on the Scottish
+Highlands. The best of the first class are the famous papers called
+"Christopher North in his Sporting Jacket," and the scattered reviews
+and articles redacted in the <i>Recreations</i> under the general title of
+"Anglimania." In the second class all are good; and a volume composed of
+"Christopher at the Lakes," "A Day at Windermere," "Christopher on
+Colonsay" (a wild extravaganza which had a sort of basis of fact in a
+trotting-match won on a pony which Wilson afterwards sold for four
+pounds), and "A Saunter at Grasmere," with one or two more, would be a
+thing of price. The best of the third class beyond all question is the
+collection, also redacted by the author for the <i>Recreations</i>, entitled
+"The Moors." This last is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">{297}</a></span> perhaps the best of all the sporting and
+descriptive pieces, though not the least exemplary of its authors
+vagaries; for before he can get to the Moors, he gives us heaven knows
+how many pages of a criticism on Wordsworth, which, in that place at any
+rate, we do not in the least want; and in the very middle of his
+wonderful and sanguinary exploits on and near Ben Cruachan, he
+"interrupts the muffins" in order to deliver to a most farcical and
+impertinent assemblage a quite serious and still more impertinent
+sermon. But all these papers are more or less delightful. For the
+glowing description of, and the sneaking apology for, cat-worrying which
+the "Sporting Jacket" contains, nothing can be said. Wilson deliberately
+overlooks the fact that the whole fun of that nefarious amusement
+consists in the pitting of a plucky but weak animal against something
+much more strongly built and armed than itself. One may regret the P.R.,
+and indulge in a not wholly sneaking affection for cock-fighting,
+dog-fighting, and anything in which there is a fair match, without
+having the slightest weakness for this kind of brutality. But, generally
+speaking, Wilson is a thoroughly fair sportsman, and how enthusiastic he
+is, no one who has read him can fail to know. Of the scenery of loch or
+lake, of hill or mountain, he was at once an ardent lover and a
+describer who has never been equalled. His accustomed exaggeration and
+false emphasis are nowhere so little perceptible as when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">{298}</a></span> he deals with
+Ben Cruachan or the Old Man of Coniston, with the Four Great Lakes of
+Britain, East and West (one of his finest passages), or with the glens
+of Etive and Borrowdale. The accursed influence of an unchastened taste
+is indeed observable in the before-mentioned "Dead Quaker of Helvellyn,"
+a piece of unrelieved nastiness which he has in vain tried to excuse.
+But the whole of the series from which this is taken ("Christopher in
+his Aviary") is in his least happy style, alternately grandiose and low,
+relieved indeed by touches of observation and feeling, as all his work
+is, but hardly redeemed by them. The depths of his possible fall may
+also be seen from a short piece which Professor Ferrier, obligingly
+describing it as "too lively to be omitted," has adjoined to
+"Christopher at the Lakes." But, on the whole, all the articles
+mentioned in the list at the beginning of this paragraph, with the
+capital "Streams" as an addition, with the soliloquies on "The Seasons,"
+and with part (<i>not</i> the narrative part) of "Highland Storms," are
+delightful reading. The progress of the sportsman has never been better
+given than in "Christopher North in his Sporting Jacket." In "The Moors"
+the actual sporting part is perhaps a little spoilt by the affectation
+of infallibility, qualified it is true by an aside or two, which so
+often mars the Christopherian utterances. But Wilson's description has
+never been bettered. The thunderstorm on the hill, the rough
+conviviality at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">{299}</a></span> the illicit distillery, the evening voyage on the loch,
+match, if they do not beat, anything of the kind in much more recent
+books far better known to the present generation. A special favourite of
+mine is the rather unceremonious review of Sir Humphry Davy's strangely
+over-praised "Salmonia." The passage of utter scorn and indignation at
+the preposterous statement of the chief personage in the dialogues, that
+after an exceptionally hard day's walking and fishing "half a pint of
+claret per man is enough," is sublime. Nearly the earliest, and
+certainly the best, protest against some modern fashions in shooting is
+to be found in "The Moors." In the same series, the visit to the hill
+cottage, preceding that to the still, has what it has since become the
+fashion to call the idyllic flavour, without too much of the rather
+mawkish pathos with which, in imitation of Mackenzie and the
+sensibility-writers of the last century, Wilson is apt to daub his
+pictures of rural and humble life. The passages on Oxford, to go to a
+slightly different but allied subject, in "Old North and Young North" (a
+paper not yet mentioned), may have full appeal to Oxford men, but I can
+hardly be mistaken in thinking that outsiders must see at least some of
+the beauty of them. But the list of specially desirable things in these
+articles is endless; hardly one of them can be taken up without
+discovering<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">{300}</a></span> many such, not one of them without discovering some.<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a></p>
+
+<p>And, throughout the whole collection, there is the additional
+satisfaction that the author is writing only of what he thoroughly knows
+and understands. At the Lakes Wilson lived for years, and was familiar
+with every cranny of the hills, from the Pillar to Hawes Water, and from
+Newby Bridge to Saddleback. He began marching and fishing through the
+Highlands when he was a boy, enticed even his wife into perilous
+pedestrian enterprises with him, and, though the extent of his knowledge
+was perhaps not quite so large as he pretends, he certainly knew great
+tracts as well as he knew Edinburgh. Nor were his qualifications as a
+sportsman less authentic, despite the somewhat Munchausenish appearance
+which some of the feats narrated in the <i>Noctes</i> and the <i>Recreations</i>
+wear, and are indeed intended to wear. His enormous baskets of trout
+seem to have been, if not quite so regular as he sometimes makes them
+out, at any rate fully historical as occasional feats. As has been
+hinted, he really did win the trotting-match on the pony, Colonsay,
+against a thoroughbred, though it was only on the technical point of the
+thoroughbred breaking his pace. His walk from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">{301}</a></span> London to Oxford in a
+night seems to have been a fact, and indeed there is nothing at all
+impossible in it, for the distance through Wycombe is not more than
+fifty-three miles; while the less certainly authenticated feat of
+walking from Liverpool to Elleray (eighty miles at least), without more
+than a short rest, also appears to be genuine. Like the heroes of a song
+that he loved, though he seems to have sung it in a corrupt text, he
+could wrestle and fight and jump out anywhere; and, until he was
+thoroughly broken by illness, he appears to have made the very most of
+the not inconsiderable spare time of a Scotch professor who has once got
+his long series of lectures committed to paper, and has nothing to do
+for the rest of his life but collect bundles of pound notes at the
+beginning of each session. All this, joined to his literary gifts, gives
+a reality to his out-of-door papers which is hardly to be found
+elsewhere except in some passages of Kingsley, between whom and Wilson
+there are many and most curious resemblances, chequered by national and
+personal differences only less curious.</p>
+
+<p>I do not think he was a good reviewer, even after making allowance for
+the prejudices and partisanships of the time, and for the monkey tricks
+of mannerism, which, at any rate in his earlier days, were incumbent on
+a reviewer in "Maga." He is too prone to the besetting sins of
+reviewing&mdash;the right hand defections and left hand fallings off, which,
+being interpreted, consist<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">{302}</a></span> first in expressing agreement or
+disagreement with the author's views, and secondly in digressing into
+personal statements of one's own views of things connected with them
+instead of expounding more or less clearly what the book is, and
+addressing oneself to the great question, Is it a good or a bad piece of
+work according to the standard which the author himself strove to reach?
+I have said that I do not think he was on the whole a good critic (for a
+man may be a good critic and a bad reviewer, though the reverse will
+hardly stand), and I have given my reasons. That he was neither a great,
+nor even a very good poet or tale-teller, I have no doubt whatever. But
+this leaves untouched the attraction of his miscellaneous work, and its
+suitableness for the purpose of recreation. For that purpose I think it
+to be among the very best work in all literature. Its unfailing life and
+vigour, its vast variety, the healthy and inspiriting character of the
+subjects with which in the main it deals, are the characteristics which
+make its volumes easy-chair books of the best order. Its beauty no doubt
+is irregular, faulty, engaging rather than exquisite, attractive rather
+than artistically or scientifically perfect. I do not know that there is
+even any reason to join in the general lament over Wilson as being a
+gigantic failure, a monument of wasted energies and half-developed
+faculty. I do not at all think that there was anything in him much
+better than he actually did, or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">{303}</a></span> that he ever could have polished and
+sand-papered the faults out of his work. It would pretty certainly have
+lost freshness and vigour; it would quite certainly have been less in
+bulk, and bulk is a very important point in literature that is to serve
+as recreation. It is to me not much less certain that it never would
+have attained the first rank in symmetry and order. I am quite content
+with it as it is, and I only wish that still more of it were easily
+accessible.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">{304}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="X" id="X"></a>X<br />
+<br />
+DE QUINCEY<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>In not a few respects the literary lot of Thomas De Quincey, both during
+his life and after it, has been exceedingly peculiar. In one respect it
+has been unique. I do not know that any other author of anything like
+his merit, during our time, has had a piece of work published for fully
+twenty years as his, only for it to be excluded as somebody else's at
+the end of that time. Certainly <i>The Traditions of the Rabbins</i> was very
+De Quinceyish; indeed, it was so De Quinceyish that the discovery, after
+such a length of time, that it was not De Quincey's at all, but
+"Salathiel" Croly's, must have given unpleasant qualms to more than one
+critic accustomed to be positive on internal evidence. But if De Quincey
+had thus attributed to him work that was not his, he has also had the
+utmost difficulty in getting attributed to him, in any accessible form,
+work that was his own. Three, or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">{305}</a></span> nominally four, editions&mdash;one in the
+decade of his death, superintended for the most part by himself; another
+in 1862, whose blue coat and white labels dwell in the fond memory; and
+another in 1878 (reprinted in 1880) a little altered and enlarged, with
+the Rabbins turned out and more soberly clad, but identical in the
+main&mdash;put before the British public for some thirty-five years a certain
+portion of his strange, long-delayed, but voluminous work. This work had
+occupied him for about the same period, that is to say for the last and
+shorter half of his extraordinary and yet uneventful life. Now, after
+much praying of readers, and grumbling of critics, we have a fifth and
+definitive edition from the English critic who has given most attention
+to De Quincey, Professor Masson.<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> I may say, with hearty
+acknowledgment of Mr. Masson's services to English literature, that I do
+not very much like this last edition. De Quincey, never much favoured by
+the mechanical producers of books, has had his sizings, as Byron would
+say, still further stinted in the matter of print, margins, and the
+like; and what I cannot but regard as a rather unceremonious tampering
+with his own arrangement has taken place, the new matter being not added
+in supplementary volumes or in appendices to the reprinted volumes, but
+thrust into or between the separate essays, sometimes to the destruction
+of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">{306}</a></span> De Quincey's "redaction" altogether, and always to the confusion and
+dislocation of his arrangement, which has also been neglected in other
+ways. Still the actual generation of readers will undoubtedly have
+before them a fuller and completer edition of De Quincey than even
+Americans have yet had; and they will have it edited by an accomplished
+scholar who has taken a great deal of pains to acquaint himself
+thoroughly with the subject.</p>
+
+<p>Will they form a different estimate from that which those of us who have
+known the older editions for a quarter of a century have formed, and
+will that estimate, if it is different, be higher or lower? To answer
+such questions is always difficult; but it is especially difficult here,
+for a certain reason which I had chiefly in mind when I said just now
+that De Quincey's literary lot has been very peculiar. I believe that I
+am not speaking for myself only; I am quite sure that I am speaking my
+own deliberate opinion when I say that on scarcely any English writer is
+it so hard to strike a critical balance&mdash;to get a clear definite opinion
+that you can put on the shelf and need merely take down now and then to
+be dusted and polished up by a fresh reading&mdash;as on De Quincey. This is
+partly due to the fact that his merits are of the class that appeals to,
+while his faults are of the class that is excused by, the average boy
+who has some interest in literature.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">{307}</a></span> To read the <i>Essay on Murder</i>, the
+<i>English Mail Coach</i>, <i>The Spanish Nun</i>, <i>The Cæsars</i>, and half a score
+other things at the age of about fifteen or sixteen is, or ought to be,
+to fall in love with them. And there is nothing more unpleasant for <i>les
+âmes bien nées</i>, as the famous distich has it, than to find fault in
+after life with that with which you have fallen in love at fifteen or
+sixteen. Yet most unfortunately, just as De Quincey's merits, or some of
+them, appeal specially to youth, and his defects specially escape the
+notice of youth, so age with stealing steps especially claws those
+merits into his clutch and leaves the defects exposed to derision. The
+most gracious state of authors is that they shall charm at all ages
+those whom they do charm. There are others&mdash;Dante, Cervantes, Goethe are
+instances&mdash;as to whom you may even begin with a little aversion, and go
+on to love them more and more. De Quincey, I fear, belongs to a third
+class, with whom it is difficult to keep up the first love, or rather
+whose defects begin before long to urge themselves upon the critical
+lover (some would say there are no critical lovers, but that I deny)
+with an even less happy result than is recorded in one of Catullus's
+finest lines. This kind of discovery</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Cogit amare <i>minus</i>, <i>nec</i> bene velle <i>magis</i>.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>How and to what extent this is the case, it must be the business of this
+paper to attempt to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">{308}</a></span> show. But first it is desirable to give, as usual,
+a brief sketch of De Quincey's life. It need only be a brief one, for
+the external events of that life were few and meagre; nor can they be
+said to be, even after the researches of Mr. Page and Professor Masson,
+very accurately or exhaustively known. Before those researches "all was
+mist and myth" about De Quincey. I remember as a boy, a year or two
+after his death, hearing a piece of scandal about his domestic
+relations, which seems to have had no foundation whatever, but which
+pretty evidently was an echo of the "libel" (published in a short-lived
+newspaper of the kind which after many years has again risen to infest
+London) whereof he complains with perhaps more acrimony than dignity in
+a paper for the first time exhumed and reprinted in Professor Masson's
+edition. Many of the details of the <i>Confessions</i> and the
+<i>Autobiography</i> have a singular unbelievableness as one reads them; and
+though the tendency of recent biographers has been to accept them as on
+the whole genuine, I own that I am rather sceptical about many of them
+still. Was the ever-famous Malay a real Malay, or a thing of shreds and
+patches? Did De Quincey actually call upon the awful Dean Cyril Jackson
+and affably discuss with him the propriety of entering himself at
+Christ-church? Did he really journey pennilessly down to Eton on the
+chance of finding a casual peer of the realm of tender years who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">{309}</a></span> would
+back a bill for him? These are but a few out of a large number of
+questions which in idle moods (for the answer to hardly one of them is
+of the least importance) suggest themselves; and which have been very
+partially answered hitherto even of late years, though they have been
+much discussed. The plain and tolerably certain facts which are
+important in connection with his work may be pretty rapidly summed up.</p>
+
+<p>Thomas de Quincey, or Quincey, was born in Manchester&mdash;but apparently
+not, as he himself thought, at the country house of Greenhay which his
+parents afterwards inhabited&mdash;on 15th August 1785. His father was a
+merchant, well to do but of weak health, who died when Thomas was seven
+years old. Of his childhood he has left very copious reminiscences, and
+there is no doubt that reminiscences of childhood do linger long after
+later memories have disappeared. But to what extent De Quincey gave
+"cocked hats and canes" to his childish thoughts and to his relations
+with his brothers and sisters, individual judgment must decide. I should
+say, for my part, that the extent was considerable. It seems, however,
+pretty clear that he was as a child, very much what he was all his
+life&mdash;emphatically "old-fashioned," retiring without being exactly shy,
+full of far-brought fancies and yet intensely concentrated upon himself.
+In 1796 his mother moved to Bath, and Thomas was educated first at the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">{310}</a></span>
+Grammar School there and then at a private school in Wiltshire. It was
+at Bath, his headquarters being there, that he met various persons of
+distinction&mdash;Lord Westport, Lord and Lady Carbery, and others&mdash;who
+figure largely in the <i>Autobiography</i>, but are never heard of
+afterwards. It was with Lord Westport, a boy somewhat younger than
+himself, that he took a trip to Ireland, the only country beyond Great
+Britain that he visited. In 1800 he was sent by his guardians to the
+Manchester Grammar School in order to obtain, by three years' boarding
+there, one of the Somerset Exhibitions to Brasenose. As a separate
+income of £150 had been left by De Quincey's father to each of his sons,
+as this income, or part of it, must have been accumulating, and as the
+mother was very well off, this roundabout way of securing for him a
+miserable forty or fifty pounds a year seems strange enough. But it has
+to be remembered that for all these details we have little security but
+De Quincey himself. However, that he did go to Manchester, and did,
+after rather more than two of his three years' probation, run away is
+indisputable. His mother was living at Chester, and the calf was not
+killed for this prodigal son; but he had liberty given him to wander
+about Wales on an allowance of a guinea a week. That there is some
+mystery, or mystification, about all this is nearly certain. If things
+really went as he represents them, his mother ought to have been
+ashamed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">{311}</a></span> of herself, and his guardians ought to have had, to say the
+least, an experience of the roughest side of Lord Eldon's tongue. The
+wanderings in Wales were followed by the famous sojourn in Soho, with
+its waitings at money-lenders' doors, and its perambulations of Oxford
+Street. Then, by another sudden revolution, we find De Quincey with
+two-thirds of his allowance handed over to him and permission to go to
+Oxford as he wished, but abandoned to his own devices by his mother and
+his guardians, as surely no mother and no guardians ever abandoned an
+exceptionally unworldly boy of eighteen before. They seem to have put
+fifty guineas in his pocket and sent him up to Oxford, without even
+recommending him a college, and with an income which made it practically
+certain that he would once more seek the Jews. When he had spent so much
+of his fifty guineas that there was not enough left to pay caution-money
+at most colleges, he went to Worcester, where it happened to be low. He
+seems to have stayed there, on and off, for nearly six years. But he
+took no degree, his eternal caprices making him shun <i>vivâ voce</i> (then a
+much more important part of the examination than it is now) after
+sending in unusually good written papers. Instead of taking a degree, he
+began to take opium, and to make acquaintance with the "Lakers" in both
+their haunts of Somerset and Westmoreland. He entered himself at the
+Middle<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">{312}</a></span> Temple, he may have eaten some dinners, and somehow or other he
+"came into his property," though there are dire surmises that it was by
+the Hebrew door. At any rate in November 1809 he gave up both Oxford and
+London (which he had frequented a good deal, chiefly, he says, for the
+sake of the opera of which he was very fond), and established himself at
+Grasmere. One of the most singular things about his singular life&mdash;an
+oddity due, no doubt, in part to the fact that he outlived his more
+literary associates instead of being outlived by them&mdash;is that though we
+hear much from De Quincey of other people we hear extremely little from
+other people about De Quincey. Indeed what we do so hear dates almost
+entirely from the last days of his life.</p>
+
+<p>As for the autobiographic details in his <i>Confessions</i> and elsewhere,
+anybody who chooses may put those Sibylline leaves together for himself.
+It would only appear certain that for ten years he led the life of a
+recluse student and a hard laudanum-drinker, varied by a little society
+now and then; that in 1816 he married Margaret Simpson, a dalesman's
+daughter, of whom we have hardly any personal notices save to the effect
+that she was very beautiful, and who seems to have been almost the most
+exemplary of wives to almost the most eccentric of husbands; that for
+most of the time he was in more or less ease and affluence (ease and
+affluence still, it would seem, of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">{313}</a></span> a treacherous Hebraic origin); and
+that about 1819 he found himself in great pecuniary difficulties. Then
+at length he turned to literature, started as editor of a little Tory
+paper at Kendal, went to London, and took rank, never to be cancelled,
+as a man of letters by the first part of <i>The Confessions of an
+Opium-Eater</i>, published in the <i>London Magazine</i> for 1821. He began as a
+magazine-writer, and he continued as such till the end of his life; his
+publications in book-form being, till he was induced to collect his
+articles, quite insignificant. Between 1821 and 1825 he seems to have
+been chiefly in London, though sometimes at Grasmere; between 1825 and
+1830 chiefly at Grasmere, but much in Edinburgh, where Wilson (whose
+friendship he had secured, not at Oxford, though they were
+contemporaries, but at the Lakes) was now residing, and where he was
+introduced to Blackwood. In 1830 he moved his household to the Scotch
+capital, and lived there, and (after his wife's death in 1837) at
+Lasswade, or rather Polton, for the rest of his life. His affairs had
+come to their worst before he lost his wife, and it is now known that
+for some considerable time he lived, like Mr. Chrystal Croftangry, in
+the sanctuary of Holyrood. But De Quincey's way of "living" at any place
+was as mysterious as most of his other ways; and, though he seems to
+have been very fond of his family and not at all put out by them, it was
+his constant<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">{314}</a></span> habit to establish himself in separate lodgings. These he
+as constantly shifted (sometimes as far as Glasgow) for no intelligible
+reason that has ever been discovered or surmised, his pecuniary troubles
+having long ceased. It was in the latest and most permanent of these
+lodgings, 42 Lothian Street, Edinburgh, not at Lasswade, that he died on
+the 8th of December 1859. He had latterly written mainly, though not
+solely, for <i>Tait's Magazine</i> and <i>Hogg's Instructor</i>. But his chief
+literary employment for at least seven years before this, had been the
+arrangement of the authorised edition of his works, the last or
+fourteenth volume of which was in the press at the time of his death.</p>
+
+<p>So meagre are the known facts in a life of seventy-four years, during
+nearly forty of which De Quincey, though never popular, was still
+recognised as a great name in English letters, while during the same
+period he knew, and was known to, not a few distinguished men. But
+little as is recorded of the facts of his life, even less is recorded of
+his character, and for once it is almost impossible to discover that
+character from his works. The few persons who met him all agree as to
+his impenetrability,&mdash;an impenetrability not in the least due to posing,
+but apparently natural and fated. De Quincey was at once egotistic and
+impersonal, at once delighted to talk and resolutely shunning society.
+To him, one is tempted to say, reading and writing did come by nature,
+and nothing else<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">{315}</a></span> was natural at all. With books he is always at home. A
+De Quincey in a world where there was neither reading nor writing of
+books, would certainly either have committed suicide or gone mad. Pope's
+theory of the master-passion, so often abused, justified itself here.</p>
+
+<p>The quantity of work produced during this singular existence, from the
+time when De Quincey first began, unusually late, to write for
+publication, was very large. As collected by the author, it filled
+fourteen volumes; the collection was subsequently enlarged to sixteen,
+and though the new edition promises to restrict itself to the older and
+lesser number, the contents of each volume have been very considerably
+increased. But this printed and reprinted total, so far as can be judged
+from De Quincey's own assertions and from the observations of those who
+were acquainted with him during his later years, must have been but the
+smaller part of what he actually wrote. He was always writing, and
+always leaving deposits of his manuscripts in the various lodgings where
+it was his habit to bestow himself. The greater part of De Quincey's
+writing was of a kind almost as easily written by so full a reader and
+so logical a thinker as an ordinary newspaper article by an ordinary
+man; and except when he was sleeping, wandering about, or reading, he
+was always writing. It is, of course, true that he spent a great deal of
+time, especially in his last years of all, in re-writing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">{316}</a></span> and
+re-fashioning previously executed work; and also that illness and opium
+made considerable inroads on his leisure. But I should imagine that if
+we had all that he actually wrote during these nearly forty years, forty
+or sixty printed volumes would more nearly express its amount than
+fourteen or sixteen.</p>
+
+<p>Still what we have is no mean bulk of work for any man to have
+accomplished, especially when it is considered how extraordinarily good
+much of it is. To classify it is not particularly easy; and I doubt,
+myself, whether any classification is necessary. De Quincey himself
+tried, and made rather a muddle of it. Professor Masson is trying also.
+But, in truth, except those wonderful purple patches of "numerous"
+prose, which are stuck all about the work, and perhaps in strictness not
+excepting them, everything that De Quincey wrote, whether it was dream
+or reminiscence, literary criticism or historical study, politics or
+political economy, had one characteristic so strongly impressed on it as
+to dwarf and obscure the differences of subject. It is not very easy to
+find a description at once accurate and fair, brief and adequate, of
+this peculiarity; it is best hinted at in a remark on De Quincey's
+conversation which I have seen quoted somewhere (whether by Professor
+Masson or not I hardly know), that it was, with many interesting and
+delightful qualities, a kind of "rigmarole." So far as I remember, the
+remark was not applied in any unfriendly spirit, nor is it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">{317}</a></span> adduced here
+in any such. But both in the printed works, in the remembrances of De
+Quincey's conversation which have been printed, in his letters which are
+exactly like his articles, and in those astonishing imaginary
+conversations attributed to him in the <i>Noctes Ambrosianæ</i>, which are
+said, by good authorities, exactly to represent his way of talk, this
+quality of rigmarole appears. It is absolutely impossible for him to
+keep to his subject, or any subject. It is as impossible for him to pull
+himself up briefly in any digression from that subject. In his finest
+passages, as in his most trivial, he is at the mercy of the
+will-o'-the-wisp of divagation. In his later re-handlings of his work,
+he did to some extent limit his followings of this will-o'-the-wisp to
+notes, but by no means always; and both in his later and in his earlier
+work, as it was written for the first time, he indulged them freely in
+the text.</p>
+
+<p>For pure rigmarole, for stories, as Mr. Chadband has it, "of a cock and
+of a bull, and of a lady and of a half-crown," few things, even in De
+Quincey, can exceed, and nothing out of De Quincey can approach, the
+passages about the woman he met on the "cop" at Chester, and about the
+Greek letter that he did not send to the Bishop of Bangor, in the
+preliminary part of the <i>Confessions</i>. The first is the more teasing,
+because with a quite elvish superfluity of naughtiness he has here
+indulged in a kind of double rigmarole<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">{318}</a></span> about the woman and the "bore"
+in the river, and flits from one to the other, and from the other to the
+one (his main story standing still the while), for half a dozen pages,
+till the reader feels as Coleridge's auditors must have felt when he
+talked about "Ball and Bell, Bell and Ball." But the Greek letter
+episode, or rather, the episode about the Greek letter which never was
+written, is, if possible, more flagrantly rigmarolish.
+The-cop-and-bore-and-woman digression contains some remarkable
+description as a kind of solace to the Puck-led traveller; the other is
+bare of any such comfort. The Bishop's old housekeeper, who was De
+Quincey's landlady, told him, it seems, that the Bishop had cautioned
+her against taking in lodgers whom she did not know, and De Quincey was
+very angry. As he thought he could write Greek much better than the
+Bishop, he meditated expostulation in that language. He did not
+expostulate, but he proceeds instead to consider the possible effect on
+the Bishop if he had. There was a contemporary writer whom we can
+imagine struck by a similar whimsy: but Charles Lamb would have given us
+the Bishop and himself "quite natural and distinct" in a dozen lines,
+and then have dropped the subject, leaving our sides aching with
+laughter, and our appetites longing for more. De Quincey tells us at
+great length who the Bishop was, and how he was the Head of Brasenose,
+with some remarks on the relative status of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">{319}</a></span> Oxford Colleges. Then he
+debates the pros and cons on the question whether the Bishop would have
+answered the letter or not, with some remarks on the difference between
+strict scholarship and the power of composing in a dead language. He
+rises to real humour in the remark, that as "Methodists swarmed in
+Carnarvonshire," he "could in no case have found pleasure in causing
+mortification" to the Bishop, even if he had vanquished him. By this
+time we have had some three pages of it, and could well, especially with
+this lively touch to finish, accept them, though they be something
+tedious, supposing the incident to be closed. The treacherous author
+leads us to suppose that it is closed; telling us how he left Bangor,
+and went to Carnarvon, which change gradually drew his thoughts away
+from the Bishop. So far is this from being the case, that he goes back
+to that Reverend Father, and for two mortal pages more, speculates
+further what would happen if he had written to the Bishop, what the
+Bishop would have said, whether he would not have asked him (De Quincey)
+to the Palace, whether, in his capacity of Head of a House, he would not
+have welcomed him to that seat of learning, and finally smoothed his way
+to a fellowship. By which time, one is perfectly sick of the Bishop, and
+of these speculations on the might-have-been, which are indeed by no
+means unnatural, being exactly what every man indulges in now and then
+in his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">{320}</a></span> own case, which, in conversation, would not be unpleasant, but
+which, gradually and diffusedly set down in a book, and interrupting a
+narrative, are most certainly "rigmarole."</p>
+
+<p>Rigmarole, however, can be a very agreeable thing in its way, and De
+Quincey has carried it to a point of perfection never reached by any
+other rigmaroler. Despite his undoubted possession of a kind of humour,
+it is a very remarkable thing that he rigmaroles, so far as can be made
+out by the application of the most sensitive tests, quite seriously, and
+almost, if not quite, unconsciously. These digressions or deviations are
+studded with quips and jests, good, bad, and indifferent. But the writer
+never seems to suspect that his own general attitude is at least
+susceptible of being made fun of. It is said, and we can very well
+believe it, that he was excessively annoyed at Lamb's delightful parody
+of his <i>Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected</i>; and,
+on the whole, I should say that no great man of letters in this century,
+except Balzac and Victor Hugo, was so insensible to the ludicrous aspect
+of his own performances. This in the author of the <i>Essay on Murder</i> may
+seem surprising, but, in fact, there are few things of which there are
+so many subdivisions, or in which the subdivisions are marked off from
+each other by such apparently impermeable lines, as humour. If I may
+refine a little I should say that there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">{321}</a></span> was very frequently, if not
+generally, a humorous basis for these divagations of De Quincey's; but
+that he almost invariably lost sight of that basis, and proceeded to
+reason quite gravely away from it, in what is (not entirely with
+justice) called the scholastic manner. How much of this was due to the
+influence of Jean Paul and the other German humorists of the last
+century, with whom he became acquainted very early, I should not like to
+say. I confess that my own enjoyment of Richter, which has nevertheless
+been considerable, has always been lessened by the presence in him, to a
+still greater degree, of this same habit of quasi-serious divagation. To
+appreciate the mistake of it, it is only necessary to compare the manner
+of Swift. The <i>Tale of a Tub</i> is in appearance as daringly discursive as
+anything can be, but the author in the first place never loses his way,
+and in the second never fails to keep a watchful eye on himself, lest he
+should be getting too serious or too tedious. That is what Richter and
+De Quincey fail to do.</p>
+
+<p>Yet though these drawbacks are grave, and though they are (to judge from
+my own experience) felt more seriously at each successive reading, most
+assuredly no man who loves English literature could spare De Quincey
+from it; most assuredly all who love English literature would sooner
+spare some much more faultless writers. Even that quality of his which
+has been already noted, his extraordinary<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">{322}</a></span> attraction for youth, is a
+singular and priceless one. The Master of the Court of the Gentiles, or
+the Instructor of the Sons of the Prophets, he might be called in a
+fantastic nomenclature, which he would have himself appreciated, if it
+had been applied to any one but himself. What he somewhere calls his
+"extraordinary ignorance of daily life" does not revolt youth. His
+little pedantries, which to the day of his death were like those of a
+clever schoolboy, appeal directly to it. His best fun is quite
+intelligible; his worst not wholly uncongenial. His habit (a certain
+most respected professor in a northern university may recognise the
+words) of "getting into logical coaches and letting himself be carried
+on without minding where he is going" is anything but repugnant to brisk
+minds of seventeen. They are quite able to comprehend the great if
+mannered beauty of his finest style&mdash;the style, to quote his own words
+once more, as of "an elaborate and pompous sunset." Such a schoolmaster
+to bring youths of promise, not merely to good literature but to the
+best, nowhere else exists. But he is much more than a mere schoolmaster,
+and in order that we may see what he is, it is desirable first of all to
+despatch two other objections made to him from different quarters, and
+on different lines of thought. The one objection (I should say that I do
+not fully espouse either of them) is that he is an untrustworthy critic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">{323}</a></span>
+of books; the other is that he is a very spiteful commentator on men.</p>
+
+<p>This latter charge has found wide acceptance and has been practically
+corroborated and endorsed by persons as different as Southey and
+Carlyle. It would not in any case concern us much, for when a man is
+once dead it matters uncommonly little whether he was personally
+unamiable or not. But I think that De Quincey has in this respect been
+hardly treated. He led such a wholly unnatural life, he was at all times
+and in all places so thoroughly excluded from the natural contact and
+friction of society, that his utterances hardly partake of the ordinary
+character of men's speech. In the "vacant interlunar caves" where he hid
+himself, he could hardly feel the restraints that press on those who
+move within ear-shot and jostle of their fellows on this actual earth.
+This is not a triumphant defence, no doubt; but I think it is a defence.
+And further, it has yet to be proved that De Quincey set down anything
+in malice. He called his literary idol, Wordsworth, "inhumanly
+arrogant." Does anybody&mdash;not being a Wordsworthian and therefore out of
+reach of reason&mdash;doubt that Wordsworth's arrogance was inhuman? He, not
+unprovoked by scant gratitude on Coleridge's part for very solid
+services, and by a doubtless sincere but rather unctuous protest of his
+brother in opium-eating against the <i>Confessions</i>, told some home truths
+against that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">{324}</a></span> magnificent genius but most unsatisfactory man. A sort of
+foolish folk has recently arisen which tells us that because Coleridge
+wrote "The Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan," he was quite entitled to
+leave his wife and children to be looked after by anybody who chose, to
+take stipends from casual benefactors, and to scold, by himself or by
+his next friend Mr. Wordsworth, other benefactors, like Thomas Poole,
+who were not prepared at a moment's notice to give him a hundred pounds
+for a trip to the Azores. The rest of us, though we may feel no call to
+denounce Coleridge for these proceedings, may surely hold that "The
+Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan" are no defence to the particular
+charges. I do not see that De Quincey said anything worse of Coleridge
+than any man who knew the then little, but now well-known facts of
+Coleridge's life, was entitled to say if he chose. And so in other
+cases. That he was what is called a thoughtful person&mdash;that is to say
+that he ever said to himself, "Will what I am writing give pain, and
+ought I to give that pain?"&mdash;I do not allege. In fact, the very excuse
+which has been made for him above is inconsistent with it. He always
+wrote far too much as one in another planet for anything of the kind to
+occur to him, and he was perhaps for a very similar reason rather too
+fond of the "personal talk" which Wordsworth wisely disdained. But that
+he was in any proper sense spiteful, that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">{325}</a></span> is to say that he ever wrote
+either with a deliberate intention to wound or with a deliberate
+indifference whether he wounded or not, I do not believe.</p>
+
+<p>The other charge, that he was a bad or rather a very untrustworthy
+critic of books, cannot be met quite so directly. He is indeed
+responsible for a singularly large number of singularly grave critical
+blunders&mdash;by which I mean of course not critical opinions disagreeing
+with my own, but critical opinions which the general consent of
+competent critics, on the whole, negatives. The minor classical writers
+are not much read now, but there must be a sufficient jury to whom I can
+appeal to know what is to be done with a professed critic of style&mdash;at
+least asserting himself to be no mean classical scholar&mdash;who declares
+that "Paganism had no more brilliant master of composition to show
+than"&mdash;Velleius Paterculus! Suppose this to be a mere fling or freak,
+what is to be thought of a man who evidently sets Cicero, as a writer,
+if not as a thinker, above Plato? It would be not only possible but easy
+to follow this up with a long list of critical enormities on De
+Quincey's part, enormities due not to accidental and casual crotchet or
+prejudice, as in Hazlitt's case, but apparently to some perverse
+idiosyncrasy. I doubt very much, though the doubt may seem horribly
+heretical to some people, whether De Quincey really cared much for
+poetry as poetry. He liked philosophical poets:&mdash;Milton,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">{326}</a></span> Wordsworth,
+Shakespeare (inasmuch as he perceived Shakespeare to be the greatest of
+philosophical poets), Pope even in a certain way. But read the
+interesting paper which late in life he devoted to Shelley. He treats
+Shelley as a man admirably, with freedom alike from the maudlin
+sentiment of our modern chatterers and from Puritanical preciseness. He
+is not too hard on him in any way, he thinks him a pleasing personality
+and a thinker distorted but interesting. Of Shelley's strictly poetical
+quality he says nothing, if he knew or felt anything. In fact, of
+lyrical poetry generally, that is to say of poetry in its most purely
+poetical condition, he speaks very little in all his extensive critical
+dissertations. His want of appreciation of it may supply explanation of
+his unpardonable treatment of Goethe. That he should have maltreated
+<i>Wilhelm Meister</i> is quite excusable. There are fervent admirers of
+Goethe at his best who acknowledge most fully the presence in <i>Wilhelm</i>
+of the two worst characteristics of German life and literature, bad
+taste and tediousness. But it is not excusable that much later, and
+indeed at the very height of his literary powers and practice, he should
+have written the article in the <i>Encyclopædia Britannica</i> on the author
+of <i>Faust</i>, of <i>Egmont</i>, and above all of the shorter poems. Here he
+deliberately assents to the opinion that <i>Werther</i> is "superior to
+everything that came after it, and for mere power, Goethe's paramount
+work,"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">{327}</a></span> dismisses <i>Faust</i> as something that "no two people have ever
+agreed about," sentences <i>Egmont</i> as "violating the historic truth of
+character," and mentions not a single one of those lyrics, unmatched, or
+rather only matched by Heine, in the language, by which Goethe first
+gave German rank with the great poetic tongues. His severity on Swift is
+connected with his special "will-worship" of ornate style, of which more
+presently, and in general it may be said that De Quincey's extremely
+logical disposition of mind was rather a snare to him in his criticism.
+He was constantly constructing general principles and then arguing
+downwards from them; in which case woe to any individual fact or person
+that happened to get in the way. Where Wilson, the "only intimate male
+friend I have had" (as he somewhere says with a half-pathetic touch of
+self-illumination more instructive than reams of imaginative
+autobiography), went wrong from not having enough of general principle,
+where Hazlitt went wrong from letting prejudices unconnected with the
+literary side of the matter blind his otherwise piercing literary sight,
+De Quincey fell through an unswervingness of deduction more French than
+English. Your ornate writer must be better than your plain one, <i>ergo</i>,
+let us say, Cicero must be better than Swift.</p>
+
+<p>One other curious weakness of his (which has been glanced at already)
+remains to be noticed. This is the altogether deplorable notion of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">{328}</a></span>
+jocularity which he only too often exhibits. Mr. Masson, trying to
+propitiate the enemy, admits that "to address the historian Josephus as
+'Joe,' through a whole article, and give him a black eye into the
+bargain, is positively profane." I am not sure as to the profanity,
+knowing nothing particularly sacred about Josephus. But if Mr. Masson
+had called it excessively silly, I should have agreed heartily; and if
+any one else denounced it as a breach of good literary manners, I do not
+know that I should protest. The habit is the more curious in that all
+authorities agree as to the exceptional combination of scholarliness and
+courtliness which marked De Quincey's colloquial style and expression.
+Wilson's daughter, Mrs. Gordon, says that he used to address her
+father's cook "as if she had been a duchess"; and that the cook, though
+much flattered, was somewhat aghast at his <i>punctilio</i>. That a man of
+this kind should think it both allowable and funny to talk of Josephus
+as "Joe," and of Magliabecchi as "Mag," may be only a new example of
+that odd law of human nature which constantly prompts people in various
+relations of life, and not least in literature, to assume most the
+particular qualities (not always virtues or graces) that they have not.
+Yet it is fair to remember that Wilson and the <i>Blackwood</i> set, together
+with not a few writers in the <i>London Magazine</i>&mdash;the two literary
+coteries in connexion with whom De Quincey started as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">{329}</a></span> a writer&mdash;had
+deliberately imported this element of horse-play into literature, that
+it at least did not seem to interfere with their popularity, and that De
+Quincey himself, after 1830, lived too little in touch with actual life
+to be aware that the style was becoming as unfashionable as it had
+always, save on very exceptional subjects, been ungraceful. Even on
+Wilson, who was to the manner born of riotous spirits, it often sits
+awkwardly; in De Quincey's case it is, to borrow Sir Walter's admirable
+simile in another case, like "the forced impudence of a bashful man."
+Grim humour he can manage admirably, and he also&mdash;as in the passage
+about the fate which waited upon all who possessed anything which might
+be convenient to Wordsworth, if they died&mdash;can manage a certain kind of
+sly humour not much less admirably. But "Joe" and "Mag," and, to take
+another example, the stuff about Catalina's "crocodile papa" in <i>The
+Spanish Nun</i>, are neither grim nor sly, they are only puerile. His
+stanchest defender asks, "why De Quincey should not have the same
+license as Swift and Thackeray?" The answer is quick and crushing. Swift
+and Thackeray justify their license by their use of it; De Quincey does
+not. After which it is hardly necessary to add, though this is almost
+final in itself, that neither Swift nor Thackeray interlards perfectly
+and unaffectedly serious work with mere fooling of the "Joe" and "Mag"
+kind. Swift<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">{330}</a></span> did not put <i>mollis abuti</i> in the <i>Four last years of Queen
+Anne</i>, nor Thackeray his <i>Punch</i> jokes in the death-scene of Colonel
+Newcome. I can quite conceive De Quincey doing both.</p>
+
+<p>And now I have done enough in the fault-finding way, and nothing shall
+induce me to say another word of De Quincey in this article save in
+praise. For praise he himself gives the amplest occasion; he might
+almost remain unblamed altogether if his praisers had not been
+frequently unwise, and if his <i>exemplar</i> were not specially <i>vitiis
+imitabile</i>. Few English writers have touched so large a number of
+subjects with such competence both in information and in power of
+handling. Still fewer have exhibited such remarkable logical faculty.
+One main reason why one is sometimes tempted to quarrel with him is that
+his play of fence is so excellent that one longs to cross swords. For
+this and for other reasons no writer has a more stimulating effect, or
+is more likely to lead his readers on to explore and to think for
+themselves. In none is that incurable curiosity, that infinite variety
+of desire for knowledge and for argument which age cannot quench, more
+observable. Few if any have the indefinable quality of freshness in so
+large a measure. You never quite know, though you may have a shrewd
+suspicion, what De Quincey will say on any subject; his gift of sighting
+and approaching new facets of it is so immense.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">{331}</a></span> Whether he was in truth
+as accomplished a classical scholar as he claimed to be I do not know;
+he has left few positive documents to tell us. But I should think that
+he was, for he has all the characteristics of a scholar of the best and
+rarest kind&mdash;the scholar who is exact as to language without failing to
+comprehend literature, and competent in literature without being
+slipshod as to language. His historical insight, of which the famous
+<i>Cæsars</i> is the best example, was, though sometimes coloured by his
+fancy, and at other times distorted by a slight tendency to
+<i>supercherie</i> as in <i>The Tartars</i> and <i>The Spanish Nun</i>, wonderfully
+powerful and acute. He was not exactly as Southey was, "omnilegent"; but
+in his own departments, and they were numerous, he went farther below
+the surface and connected his readings together better than Southey did.
+Of the two classes of severer study to which he specially addicted
+himself, his political economy suffered perhaps a little, acute as his
+views in it often are, from the fact that in his time it was practically
+a new study, and that he had neither sufficient facts nor sufficient
+literature to go upon. In metaphysics, to which he gave himself up for
+years, and in which he seems really to have known whatever there was to
+know, I fear that the opium fiend cheated the world of something like
+masterpieces. Only three men during De Quincey's lifetime had anything
+like his powers in this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">{332}</a></span> department. Of these three men, Sir William
+Hamilton either could not or would not write English. Ferrier could and
+did write English; but he could not, as De Quincey could, throw upon
+philosophy the play of literary and miscellaneous illustration which of
+all the sciences it most requires, and which all its really supreme
+exponents have been able to give it. Mansel could do both these things;
+but he was somewhat indolent, and had many avocations. De Quincey could
+write perfect English, he had every resource of illustration and relief
+at command, he was in his way as "brazen-bowelled" at work as he was
+"golden-mouthed" at expression, and he had ample leisure. But the
+inability to undertake sustained labour, which he himself recognises as
+the one unquestionable curse of opium, deprived us of an English
+philosopher who would have stood as far above Kant in exoteric graces,
+as he would have stood above Bacon in esoteric value. It was not
+entirely De Quincey's fault. It seems to be generally recognised now
+that whatever occasional excesses he may have committed, opium was
+really required in his case, and gave us what we have as much as it took
+away what we have not. But if any one chose to write in the antique
+style a debate between Philosophy, Tar-water, and Laudanum, it would be
+almost enough to put in the mouth of Philosophy, "This gave me Berkeley
+and that deprived me of De Quincey."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">{333}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>De Quincey is, however, first of all a writer of ornate English, which
+was never, with him, a mere cover to bare thought. Overpraise and
+mispraise him as anybody may, he cannot be overpraised for this. Mistake
+as he chose to do, and as others have chosen to do, the relative value
+of his gift, the absolute value of it is unmistakable. What other
+Englishman, from Sir Thomas Browne downwards, has written a sentence
+surpassing in melody that on Our Lady of Sighs: "And her eyes, if they
+were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor subtle; no man could read
+their story; they would be found filled with perishing dreams and with
+wrecks of forgotten delirium"? Compare that with the masterpieces of
+some later practitioners. There are no out-of-the-way words; there is no
+needless expense of adjectives; the sense is quite adequate to the
+sound; the sound is only what is required as accompaniment to the sense.
+And though I do not know that in a single instance of equal length&mdash;even
+in the still more famous, and as a whole justly more famous, <i>tour de
+force</i> on Our Lady of Darkness&mdash;De Quincey ever quite equalled the
+combined simplicity and majesty of this phrase, he has constantly come
+close to it. The <i>Suspiria</i> are full of such passages&mdash;there are even
+some who prefer <i>Savannah la Mar</i> to the <i>Ladies of Sorrow</i>. Beautiful
+as it is I do not, because the accursed superfluous adjective appears
+there. The famous passages of the <i>Confessions</i> are in every one's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">{334}</a></span>
+memory; and so I suppose is the <i>Vision of Sudden Death</i>. Many passages
+in <i>The Cæsars</i>, though somewhat less florid, are hardly less good; and
+the close of <i>Joan of Arc</i> is as famous as the most ambitious attempts
+of the <i>Confessions</i> and the <i>Mail Coach</i>. Moreover, in all the sixteen
+volumes, specimens of the same kind may be found here and there,
+alternating with very different matter; so much so, that it has no doubt
+often occurred to readers that the author's occasional divergence into
+questionable quips and cranks is a deliberate attempt to set off his
+rhetoric, as dramatists of the noblest school have often set off their
+tragedy, with comedy, if not with farce. That such a principle would
+imply confusion of the study and the stage is arguable enough, but it
+does not follow that it was not present. At any rate the contrast,
+deliberate or not, is very strong indeed in De Quincey&mdash;stronger than in
+any other prose author except his friend, and pupil rather than master,
+Wilson.</p>
+
+<p>The great advantage that De Quincey has, not only over this friend of
+his but over all practitioners of the ornate style in this century, lies
+in his sureness of hand in the first place, and secondly in the
+comparative frugality of means which perhaps is an inseparable
+accompaniment of sureness of hand. To mention living persons would be
+invidious; but Wilson and Landor are within the most scrupulous critic's
+right of comparison. All<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">{335}</a></span> three were contemporaries; all three were
+Oxford men&mdash;Landor about ten years senior to the other two&mdash;and all
+three in their different ways set themselves deliberately to reverse the
+practice of English prose for nearly a century and a half. They did
+great things, but De Quincey did, I think, the greatest and certainly
+the most classical in the proper sense, for all Landor's superior air of
+Hellenism. Voluble as De Quincey often is, he seems always to have felt
+that when you are in your altitudes it is well not to stay there too
+long. And his flights, while they are far more uniformly high than
+Wilson's, which alternately soar and drag, are much more merciful in
+regard of length than Landor's, as well as for the most part much more
+closely connected with the sense of his subjects. There is scarcely one
+of the <i>Imaginary Conversations</i> which would not be the better for very
+considerable thinning, while, with the exception perhaps of <i>The English
+Mail Coach</i>, De Quincey's surplusage, obvious enough in many cases, is
+scarcely ever found in his most elaborate and ornate passages. The total
+amount of such passages in the <i>Confessions</i> is by no means large, and
+the more ambitious parts of the <i>Suspiria</i> do not much exceed a dozen
+pages. De Quincey was certainly justified by his own practice in
+adopting and urging as he did the distinction, due, he says, to
+Wordsworth, between the common and erroneous idea of style as the
+<i>dress</i> of thought,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">{336}</a></span> and the true definition of it as the <i>incarnation</i>
+of thought. The most wizened of coxcombs may spend days and years in
+dressing up his meagre and ugly carcass; but few are the sons of men who
+have sufficient thought to provide the soul of any considerable series
+of avatars. De Quincey had; and therefore, though the manner (with
+certain exceptions heretofore taken) in him is always worth attention,
+it never need or should divert attention from the matter. And thus he
+was not driven to make a little thought do tyrannous duty as lay-figure
+for an infinite amount of dress, or to hang out frippery on a
+clothes-line with not so much as a lay-figure inside it. Even when he is
+most conspicuously "fighting a prize," there is always solid stuff in
+him.</p>
+
+<p>Few indeed are the writers of whom so much can be said, and fewer still
+the miscellaneous writers, among whom De Quincey must be classed. On
+almost any subject that interested him&mdash;and the number of such subjects
+was astonishing, curious as are the gaps between the different groups of
+them&mdash;what he has to say is pretty sure, even if it be the wildest
+paradox in appearance, to be worth attending to. And in regard to most
+things that he has to say, the reader may be pretty sure also that he
+will not find them better said elsewhere. It has sometimes been
+complained by students, both of De Quincey the man and of De Quincey the
+writer, that there is something not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">{337}</a></span> exactly human in him. There is
+certainly much in him of the dæmonic, to use a word which was a very
+good word and really required in the language, and which ought not to be
+exiled because it has been foolishly abused. Sometimes, as has also been
+complained, the demon is a mere familiar with the tricksiness of Puck
+rather than the lightness of Ariel. But far oftener he is a more potent
+spirit than any Robin Goodfellow, and as powerful as Ariel and Ariel's
+master. Trust him wholly you may not; a characteristic often noted in
+intelligences that are neither exactly human, nor exactly diabolic, nor
+exactly divine. But he will do great things for you, and a little wit
+and courage on your part will prevent his doing anything serious against
+you. To him, with much greater justice than to Hogg, might Wilson have
+applied the nickname of Brownie, which he was so fond of bestowing upon
+the author of "Kilmeny." He will do solid work, conjure up a concert of
+aerial music, play a shrewd trick now and then, and all this with a
+curious air of irresponsibility and of remoteness of nature. In ancient
+days when kings played experiments to ascertain the universal or
+original language, some monarch might have been tempted to take a very
+clever child, interest him so far as possible in nothing but books and
+opium, and see whether he would turn out anything like De Quincey. But
+it is in the highest degree<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">{338}</a></span> improbable that he would. Therefore let us
+rejoice, though according to the precepts of wisdom and not too
+indiscriminately, in our De Quincey as we once, and probably once for
+all, received him.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">{339}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XI" id="XI"></a>XI<br />
+<br />
+LOCKHART</h2>
+
+
+<p>In every age there are certain writers who seem to miss their due meed
+of fame, and this is most naturally and unavoidably the case in ages
+which see a great deal of what may be called occasional literature.
+There is, as it seems to me, a special example of this general
+proposition in the present century, and that example is the writer whose
+name stands at the head of this chapter. No one, perhaps, who speaks
+with any competence either of knowledge or judgment, would say that
+Lockhart made an inconsiderable figure in English literature. He wrote
+what some men consider the best biography on a large scale, and what
+almost every one considers the second best biography on a large scale,
+in English. His <i>Spanish Ballads</i> are admitted, by those who know the
+originals, to have done them almost more than justice; and by those who
+do not know those originals, to be charming in themselves. His novels,
+if not masterpieces, have kept the field<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">{340}</a></span> better than most: I saw a very
+badly printed and flaringly-covered copy of <i>Reginald Dalton</i> for sale
+at the bookstall at Victoria Station the day before writing these words.
+He was a pillar of the <i>Quarterly</i>, of <i>Blackwood</i>, of <i>Fraser</i>, at a
+time when quarterly and monthly magazines played a greater part in
+literature than they have played since or are likely to play again. He
+edited one of these periodicals for thirty years. "Nobody," as Mr.
+Browning has it, "calls him a dunce." Yet there is no collected edition
+of his works; his sober, sound, scholarly, admirably witty, and, with
+some very few exceptions, admirably catholic literary criticism, is
+rarely quoted; and to add to this, there is a curious prepossession
+against him, which, though nearly a generation has passed since his
+death, has by no means disappeared.<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> Some years ago, in a periodical
+where I was, for the most part, allowed to say exactly what I liked in
+matters literary, I found a sentence laudatory of Lockhart, from the
+purely literary point of view, omitted between proof and publication. It
+so happened that the editor of this periodical could not even have known
+Lockhart personally, or have been offended by his management of the
+<i>Quarterly</i>, much less by his early <i>fredaines</i> in <i>Blackwood</i> and
+<i>Fraser</i>. It was this circumstance that first suggested to me the notion
+of trying to supply something like a criticism of this remarkable
+critic, which nobody has yet<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">{341}</a></span> (1884) done, and which seems worth doing.
+For while the work of many of Lockhart's contemporaries, famous at the
+time, distinctly loses by re-reading, his for the most part does not;
+and it happens to display exactly the characteristics which are most
+wanting in criticism, biographical and literary, at the present day. If
+any one at the outset desires a definition, or at least an enumeration
+of those characteristics, I should say that they are sobriety of style
+and reserve of feeling, coupled with delicacy of intellectual
+appreciation and æsthetic sympathy, a strong and firm creed in matters
+political and literary, not excluding that catholicity of judgment which
+men of strong belief frequently lack, and, above all, the faculty of
+writing like a gentleman without writing like a mere gentleman. No one
+can charge Lockhart with dilettantism: no one certainly can charge him
+with feebleness of intellect, or insufficient equipment of culture, or
+lack of humour and wit.</p>
+
+<p>His life was, except for the domestic misfortunes which marked its
+close, by no means eventful; and the present writer, if he had access to
+any special sources of information (which he has not), would abstain
+very carefully from using them. John Gibson Lockhart was born at the
+Manse of Cambusnethan on 14th July 1794, went to school early, was
+matriculated at Glasgow at twelve years old, transferred himself by
+means of a Snell exhibition to Balliol at fifteen, and took a first
+class in 1813. They said he caricatured the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">{342}</a></span> examiners: this was,
+perhaps, not the unparalleled audacity which admiring commentators have
+described it as being. Very many very odd things have been done in the
+Schools. But if there was nothing extraordinary in his Oxford life
+except what was, even for those days, the early age at which he began
+it, his next step was something out of the common; for he went to
+Germany, was introduced to Goethe, and spent some time there. An odd
+coincidence in the literary history of the nineteenth century is that
+both Lockhart and Quinet practically began literature by translating a
+German book, and that both had the remarkably good luck to find
+publishers who paid them beforehand. There are few such publishers now.
+Lockhart's book was Schlegel's <i>Lectures on History</i>, and his publisher
+was Mr. Blackwood. Then he came back to Scotland and to Edinburgh, and
+was called to the bar, and "swept the outer house with his gown," after
+the fashion admirably described in <i>Peter's Letters</i>, and referred to by
+Scott in not the least delightful though one of the most melancholy of
+his works, the Introduction to the <i>Chronicles of the Canongate</i>.
+Lockhart, one of whose distinguishing characteristics throughout life
+was shyness and reserve, was no speaker. Indeed, as he happily enough
+remarked in reply to the toast of his health at the farewell dinner
+given to celebrate his removal to London, "I cannot speak; if I could, I
+should not have left you." But if he could not speak he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">{343}</a></span> could write,
+and the establishment of <i>Blackwood's Magazine</i>, after its first
+abortive numbers, gave him scope. "The scorpion which delighteth to
+sting the faces of men," as he or Wilson describes himself in the
+<i>Chaldee Manuscript</i> (for the passage is beyond Hogg's part), certainly
+justified the description. As to this famous <i>Manuscript</i>, the late
+Professor Ferrier undoubtedly made a blunder (in the same key as those
+that he made in describing the <i>Noctes</i>, in company with which he
+reprinted it) as "in its way as good as <i>The Battle of the Books</i>." <i>The
+Battle of the Books</i>, full of mistakes as it is, is literature, and the
+<i>Chaldee Manuscript</i> is only capital journalism. But it is capital
+journalism; and the exuberance of its wit, if it be only wit of the
+undergraduate kind (and Lockhart at least was still but an undergraduate
+in years), is refreshing enough. The dreadful manner in which it
+fluttered the dovecotes of Edinburgh Whiggism need not be further
+commented on, till Lockhart's next work (this time an almost though not
+quite independent one) has been noticed. This was <i>Peter's Letters to
+his Kinsfolk</i>, an elaborate book, half lampoon, half mystification,
+which appeared in 1819. This book, which derived its title from Scott's
+account of his journey to Paris, and in its plan followed to some extent
+<i>Humphrey Clinker</i>, is one of the most careful examples of literary
+hoaxing to be found. It purported to be the work of a certain Dr. Peter
+Morris, a Welshman, and it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">{344}</a></span> is hardly necessary to say that there was no
+such person. It had a handsome frontispiece depicting this Peter Morris,
+and displaying not, like the portrait in Southey's <i>Doctor</i>, the occiput
+merely, but the full face and features. This portrait was described, and
+as far as that went it seems truly described, as "an interesting example
+of a new style of engraving by Lizars." Mr. Bates, who probably knows,
+says that there was no first edition, but that it was published with
+"second edition" on the title-page. My copy has the same date, 1819, but
+is styled the <i>third</i> edition, and has a postscript commenting on the
+to-do the book made. However all this may be, it is a very handsome
+book, excellently printed and containing capital portraits and
+vignettes, while the matter is worthy of the get-up. The descriptions of
+the Outer-House, of Craigcrook and its high jinks, of Abbotsford, of the
+finding of "Ambrose's," of the manufacture of Glasgow punch, and of many
+other things, are admirable; and there is a charming sketch of Oxford
+undergraduate life, less exaggerated than that in <i>Reginald Dalton</i>,
+probably because the subject was fresher in the author's memory.</p>
+
+<p>Lockhart modestly speaks of this book in his <i>Life of Scott</i> as one that
+"none but a very young and thoughtless person would have written." It
+may safely be said that no one but a very clever person, whether young
+or old, could have written it, though it is too long and has occasional
+faults of a specially youthful kind. But it made, coming<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">{345}</a></span> as it did upon
+the heels of the <i>Chaldee Manuscript</i>, a terrible commotion in
+Edinburgh. The impartial observer of men and things may, indeed, have
+noticed in the records of the ages, that a libelled Liberal is the man
+in all the world who utters the loudest cries. The examples of the
+Reformers, and of the eighteenth-century <i>Philosophes</i>, are notorious
+and hackneyed; but I can supply (without, I trust, violating the
+sanctity of private life) a fresh and pleasing example. Once upon a
+time, a person whom we shall call A. paid a visit to a person whom we
+shall call B. "How sad," said A., "are those personal attacks of the
+&mdash;&mdash; on Mr. Gladstone."&mdash;"Personality," said B., "is always disgusting;
+and I am very sorry to hear that the &mdash;&mdash; has followed the bad example
+of the personal attacks on Lord Beaconsfield."&mdash;"Oh! but," quoth A.,
+"that was <i>quite</i> a different thing." Now B. went out to dinner that
+night, and sitting next to a distinguished Liberal member of Parliament,
+told him this tale, expecting that he would laugh. "Ah! yes," said he
+with much gravity, "it is <i>very</i> different, you know."</p>
+
+<p>In the same way the good Whig folk of Edinburgh regarded it as very
+different that the <i>Edinburgh Review</i> should scoff at Tories, and that
+<i>Blackwood</i> and <i>Peter</i> should scoff at Whigs. The scorpion which
+delighted to sting the faces of men, probably at this time founded a
+reputation which has stuck to him for more than seventy years after Dr.
+Peter Morris drove his shandrydan through<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">{346}</a></span> Scotland. Sir Walter (then
+Mr.) Scott held wisely aloof from the extremely exuberant Toryism of
+<i>Blackwood</i>, and, indeed, had had some quarrels with its publisher and
+virtual editor. But he could not fail to be introduced to a man whose
+tastes and principles were so closely allied to his own. A year after
+the appearance of <i>Peter's Letters</i>, Lockhart married, on 29th April
+1820 (a perilous approximation to the unlucky month of May), Sophia
+Scott, the Duke of Buccleuch's "Little Jacobite," the most like her
+father of all his children. Every reader of the <i>Life</i> knows the
+delightful pictures, enough for interest and not enough for vulgar
+obtrusion, given by Lockhart of life at Chiefswood, the cottage near
+Abbotsford which he and his wife inhabited for nearly six years.</p>
+
+<p>They were very busy years for Lockhart. He was still active in
+contributing to <i>Blackwood</i>; he wrote all his four novels, and he
+published the <i>Spanish Ballads</i>. <i>Valerius</i> and <i>Adam Blair</i> appeared in
+1821, <i>Reginald Dalton</i> and the <i>Ballads</i> in 1823, <i>Matthew Wald</i> in
+1824.</p>
+
+<p>The novels, though containing much that is very remarkable, are not his
+strongest work; indeed, any critic who speaks with knowledge must admit
+that Lockhart had every faculty for writing novels, except the faculty
+of novel-writing. <i>Valerius</i>, a classical story of the visit of a
+Roman-Briton to Rome, and the persecution of the Christians in the days
+of Trajan, is, like everything of its author's,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">{347}</a></span> admirably written, but,
+like every classical novel without exception, save only <i>Hypatia</i> (which
+makes its interests and its personages daringly modern), it somehow
+rings false and faint, though not, perhaps, so faint or so false as most
+of its fellows. <i>Adam Blair</i>, the story of the sudden succumbing to
+natural temptation of a pious minister of the kirk, is unquestionably
+Lockhart's masterpiece in this kind. It is full of passion, full of
+force, and the characters of Charlotte Campbell and Adam Blair himself
+are perfectly conceived. But the story-gift is still wanting. The reader
+finds himself outside: wondering why the people do these things, and
+whether in real life they would have done them, instead of following the
+story with absorption, and asking himself no questions at all. The same,
+in a different way, is the case with Lockhart's longest book, <i>Reginald
+Dalton</i>; and this has the additional disadvantage that neither hero nor
+heroine are much more than lay-figures, while in <i>Adam Blair</i> both are
+flesh and blood. The Oxford scenes are amusing but exaggerated&mdash;the
+obvious work of a man who supplies the defects of a ten years' memory by
+deepening the strokes where he does remember. <i>Matthew Wald</i>, which is a
+novel of madness, has excellent passages, but is conventional and wooden
+as a whole. Nothing was more natural than that Lockhart, with the
+example of Scott immediately before him, should try novel-writing; not
+many things are more<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">{348}</a></span> indicative of his literary ability than that,
+after a bare three years' practice, he left a field which certainly was
+not his.</p>
+
+<p>In the early autumn of 1825, just before the great collapse of his
+affairs, Scott went to Ireland with Lockhart in his company. But very
+early in the following year, before the collapse was decided, Lockhart
+and his family moved to London, on his appointment as editor of the
+<i>Quarterly</i>, in succession to Gifford. Probably there never was a better
+appointment of the kind. Lockhart was a born critic: he had both the
+faculty and the will to work up the papers of his contributors to the
+proper level; he was firm and decided in his literary and political
+views, without going to the extreme Giffordian acerbity in both; and his
+intelligence and erudition were very wide. "He could write," says a
+phrase in some article I have somewhere seen quoted, "on any subject
+from poetry to dry-rot;" and there is no doubt that an editor, if he
+cannot exactly write on any subject from poetry to dry-rot, should be
+able to take an interest in any subject between and, if necessary,
+beyond those poles. Otherwise he has the choice of two undesirables;
+either he frowns unduly on the dry-rot articles, which probably interest
+large sections of the public (itself very subject to dry-rot), or he
+lets the dry-rot contributor inflict his hobby, without mercy and
+unedited, on a reluctant audience. But Lockhart, though he is said (for
+his contributions are not, as far as I know,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">{349}</a></span> anywhere exactly
+indicated) to have contributed fully a hundred articles to the
+<i>Quarterly</i>, that is to say one to nearly every number during the
+twenty-eight years of his editorship, by no means confined himself to
+this work. It was, indeed, during its progress that he composed not
+merely the <i>Life of Napoleon</i>, which was little more than an abridgment,
+though a very clever abridgment, of Scott's book, but the <i>Lives</i> of
+Burns and of Scott himself. Before, however, dealing with these, his
+<i>Spanish Ballads</i> and other poetical work may be conveniently disposed
+of.</p>
+
+<p>Lockhart's verse is in the same scattered condition as his prose; but it
+is evident that he had very considerable poetical faculty. The charming
+piece, "When youthful hope is fled," attributed to him on Mrs. Norton's
+authority; the well-known "Captain Paton's Lament," which has been
+republished in the <i>Tales from Blackwood</i>; and the mono-rhymed epitaph
+on "Bright broken Maginn," in which some wiseacres have seen ill-nature,
+but which really is a masterpiece of humorous pathos, are all in very
+different styles, and are all excellent each in its style. But these
+things are mere waifs, separated from each other in widely different
+publications; and until they are put together no general impression of
+the author's poetical talent, except a vaguely favourable one, can be
+derived from them. The <i>Spanish Ballads</i> form something like a
+substantive work, and one of nearly as great merit as is possible to
+poetical translations of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">{350}</a></span> poetry. I believe opinions differ as to their
+fidelity to the original. Here and there, it is said, the author has
+exchanged a vivid and characteristic touch for a conventional and feeble
+one. Thus, my friend Mr. Hannay points out to me that in the original of
+"The Lord of Butrago" the reason given by Montanez for not accompanying
+the King's flight is not the somewhat <i>fade</i> one that</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Castile's proud dames shall never point the finger of disdain,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>but the nobler argument, showing the best side of feudal sentiment, that
+the widows of his tenants shall never say that he fled and left their
+husbands to fight and fall. Lockhart's master, Sir Walter, would
+certainly not have missed this touch, and it is odd that Lockhart
+himself did. But such things will happen to translators. On the other
+hand, it is, I believe, admitted (and the same very capable authority in
+Spanish is my warranty) that on the whole the originals have rather
+gained than lost; and certainly no one can fail to enjoy the <i>Ballads</i>
+as they stand in English. The "Wandering Knight's Song" has always
+seemed to me a gem without flaw, especially the last stanza. Few men,
+again, manage the long "fourteener" with middle rhyme better than
+Lockhart, though he is less happy with the anapæst, and has not fully
+mastered the very difficult trochaic measure of "The Death of Don
+Pedro." In "The Count Arnaldos," wherein, indeed, the subject lends
+itself better to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">{351}</a></span> that cadence, the result is more satisfactory. The
+merits, however, of these <i>Ballads</i> are not technical merely, or rather,
+the technical merits are well subordinated to the production of the
+general effect. About the nature of that effect much ink has been shed.
+It is produced equally by Greek hexameters, by old French assonanced
+<i>tirades</i>, by English "eights and sixes," and by not a few other
+measures. But in itself it is more or less the same&mdash;the stirring of the
+blood as by the sound of a trumpet, or else the melting of the mood into
+or close to tears. The ballad effect is thus the simplest and most
+primitive of all poetical effects; it is Lockhart's merit that he seldom
+fails to produce it. The simplicity and spontaneity of his verse may, to
+some people, be surprising in a writer so thoroughly and intensely
+literary; but Lockhart's character was as complex as his verse is
+simple, and the verse itself is not the least valuable guide to it.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said that his removal to London and his responsible office
+by no means reduced his general literary activity. Whether he continued
+to contribute to <i>Blackwood</i> I am not sure; some phrases in the <i>Noctes</i>
+seem to argue the contrary. But he not only, as has been said, wrote for
+the <i>Quarterly</i> assiduously, but after a short time joined the new
+venture of <i>Fraser</i>, and showed in that rollicking periodical that the
+sting of the "scorpion" had by no means been extracted. He produced,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">{352}</a></span>
+moreover, in 1828, his <i>Life of Burns</i>, and in 1836-37 his <i>Life of
+Scott</i>. These, with the sketch of Theodore Hook written for the
+<i>Quarterly</i> in 1843, and separately published later, make three very
+remarkable examples of literary biography on very different scales,
+dealing with very different subjects, and, by comparison of their
+uniform excellence, showing that the author had an almost unique genius
+for this kind of composition. The <i>Life of Scott</i> fills seven capacious
+volumes; the <i>Life of Burns</i> goes easily into one; the <i>Life of Hook</i>
+does not reach a hundred smallish pages. But they are all equally
+well-proportioned in themselves and to their subjects; they all exhibit
+the same complete grasp of the secret of biography; and they all have
+the peculiarity of being full of facts without presenting an undigested
+appearance. They thus stand at an equal distance from biography of the
+fashion of the old academic <i>Eloge</i> of the last century, which makes an
+elegant discourse about a man, but either deliberately or by accident
+gives precise information about hardly any of the facts of the man's
+life; and from modern biography, which tumbles upon the devoted reader a
+cataract of letters, documents, and facts of all sorts, uncombined and
+undigested by any exercise of narrative or critical skill on the part of
+the author. Lockhart's biographies, therefore, belong equally (to borrow
+De Quincey's useful, though, as far as terminology goes, not very happy
+distinction) to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">{353}</a></span> the literature of knowledge and the literature of
+power. They are storehouses of information; but they are, at the same
+time, works of art, and of very great art. The earliest of the three,
+the <i>Life of Burns</i>, is to this day by far the best book on the subject;
+indeed, with its few errors and defects of fact corrected and
+supplemented as they have been by the late Mr. Douglas, it makes all
+other Lives quite superfluous. Yet it was much more difficult,
+especially for a Scotchman, to write a good book about Burns then than
+now; though I am told that, for a Scotchman, there is still a
+considerable difficulty in the matter. Lockhart was familiar with
+Edinburgh society&mdash;indeed, he had long formed a part of it&mdash;and
+Edinburgh society was still, when he wrote, very sore at the charge of
+having by turns patronised and neglected Burns. Lockhart was a decided
+Tory, and Burns, during the later part of his life at any rate, had
+permitted himself manifestations of political opinion which Whigs
+themselves admitted to be imprudent freaks, and which even a
+good-natured Tory might be excused for regarding as something very much
+worse. But the biographer's treatment of both these subjects is
+perfectly tolerant, judicious, and fair, and the same may be said of his
+whole account of Burns. Indeed, the main characteristic of Lockhart's
+criticism, a robust and quiet sanity, fitted him admirably for the task
+of biography. He is never in extremes,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">{354}</a></span> and he never avoids extremes by
+the common expedient of see-sawing between two sides, two parties, or
+two views of a man's character. He holds aloof equally from <i>engouement</i>
+and from depreciation, and if, as a necessary consequence, he failed,
+and fails, to please fanatics on either side, he cannot fail to please
+those who know what criticism really means.</p>
+
+<p>These good qualities were shown even to better advantage in a pleasanter
+but, at the same time, far more difficult task, the famous <i>Life of
+Scott</i>. The extraordinary interest of the subject, and the fashion, no
+less skilful than modest, in which the biographer keeps himself in the
+background, and seems constantly to be merely editing Scott's words,
+have perhaps obscured the literary value of the book to some readers. Of
+the perpetual comparison with Boswell, it may be said, once for all,
+that it is a comparison of matter merely; and that from the properly
+literary point of view, the point of view of workmanship and form, it
+does not exist. Perhaps the most surprising thing is that, even in
+moments of personal irritation, any one should have been found to accuse
+Lockhart of softening Scott's faults. The other charge, of malice to
+Scott, is indeed more extraordinary still in a certain way; but, being
+merely imbecile, it need not be taken into account. A delightful
+document informs us that, in the opinion of the Hon. Charles Sumner,
+Fenimore Cooper (who,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">{355}</a></span> stung by some references to him in the book,
+attacked it) administered "a proper castigation to the vulgar minds of
+Scott and Lockhart." This is a jest so pleasing that it almost puts one
+in good temper with the whole affair. But, in fact, Lockhart,
+considering his relationship to Scott, and considering Scott's
+greatness, could hardly have spoken more plainly as to the grave fault
+of judgment which made a man of letters and a member of a learned
+profession mix himself up secretly, and almost clandestinely, with
+commercial speculations. On this point the biographer does not attempt
+to mince matters; and on no other point was it necessary for him to be
+equally candid, for this, grave as it is, is almost the only fault to be
+found with Scott's character. This candour, however, is only one of the
+merits of the book. The wonderfully skilful arrangement of so vast and
+heterogeneous a mass of materials, the way in which the writer's own
+work and his quoted matter dovetail into one another, the completeness
+of the picture given of Scott's character and life, have never been
+equalled in any similar book. Not a few minor touches, moreover, which
+are very apt to escape notice, enhance its merit. Lockhart was a man of
+all men least given to wear his heart upon his sleeve, yet no one has
+dealt with such pitiful subjects as his later volumes involve, at once
+with such total absence of "gush" and with such noble and pathetic
+appreciation.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">{356}</a></span> For Scott's misfortunes were by no means the only matters
+which touched him nearly, in and in connection with the chronicle. The
+constant illness and sufferings of his own child form part of it; his
+wife died during its composition and publication, and all these things
+are mentioned with as little parade of stoicism as of sentiment. I do
+not think that, as an example of absolute and perfect good taste, the
+account of Scott's death can be surpassed in literature. The same
+quality exhibits itself in another matter. No biographer can be less
+anxious to display his own personality than Lockhart; and though for six
+years he was a constant, and for much longer an occasional, spectator of
+the events he describes, he never introduces himself except when it is
+necessary. Yet, on the other hand, when Scott himself makes
+complimentary references to him (as when he speaks of his party "having
+Lockhart to say clever things"), he neither omits the passage nor stoops
+to the missish <i>minauderie</i>, too common in such cases, of translating
+"spare my blushes" into some kind of annotation. Lockhart will not talk
+about Lockhart; but if others, whom the public likes to hear, talk about
+him, Lockhart does not put his fan before his face.</p>
+
+<p>This admirable book, however, is both well enough known (if not so well
+known as it deserves) and large enough to make it both unnecessary and
+impossible to criticise it at length here. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">{357}</a></span> third work noticed
+above, the sketch of the life of Theodore Hook, though it has been
+reprinted more than once, and is still, I believe, kept in print and on
+sale, is probably less familiar to most readers. It is, however, almost
+as striking an example, though of course an example in miniature only,
+of Lockhart's aptitude for the great and difficult art of literary
+biography as either of the two books just mentioned. Here the difficulty
+was of a different kind. A great many people liked Theodore Hook, but it
+was nearly impossible for any one to respect him; yet it was quite
+impossible for Lockhart, a political sympathiser and a personal friend,
+to treat him harshly in an obituary notice. There was no danger of his
+setting down aught in malice; but there might be thought to be a
+considerable danger of over-extenuation. The danger was the greater,
+inasmuch as Lockhart himself had certainly not escaped, and had perhaps
+to some extent deserved, one of Hook's reproaches. No man questioned his
+integrity; he was not a reckless spendthrift; he was not given to
+excesses in living, or to hanging about great houses; nor was he
+careless of moral and social rules. But the scorpion which had delighted
+to sting the faces of men might have had some awkwardness in dealing
+with the editor of <i>John Bull</i>. The result, however, victoriously
+surmounts all difficulties without evading one. Nothing that is the
+truth about Hook is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">{358}</a></span> omitted, or even blinked; and from reading Lockhart
+alone, any intelligent reader might know the worst that is to be said
+about him. Neither are any of his faults, in the unfair sense,
+extenuated. His malicious and vulgar practical jokes; his carelessness
+at Mauritius; the worse than carelessness which allowed him to shirk,
+when he had ample means of discharging it by degrees, a debt which he
+acknowledged that he justly owed; the folly and vanity which led him to
+waste his time, his wit, and his money in playing the hanger-on at
+country houses and town dinner-tables; his hard living, and the laxity
+which induced him not merely to form irregular connections, but
+prevented him from taking the only step which could, in some measure,
+repair his fault, are all fairly put, and blamed frankly. Even in that
+more delicate matter of the personal journalism, Lockhart's procedure is
+as ingenuous as it is ingenious; and the passage of the sketch which
+deals with "the blazing audacity of invective, the curious delicacy of
+persiflage, the strong caustic satire" (expressions, by the way, which
+suit Lockhart himself much better than Hook, though Lockhart had not
+Hook's broad humour), in fact, admits that the application of these
+things was not justifiable, nor to be justified. Yet with all this, the
+impression left by the sketch is distinctly favourable on the whole,
+which, in the circumstances, must be admitted to be a triumph of
+advocacy obtained<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">{359}</a></span> not at the expense of truth, but by the art of the
+advocate in making the best of it.</p>
+
+<p>The facts of Lockhart's life between his removal to London and his death
+may be rapidly summarised, the purpose of this notice being rather
+critical than biographical. He had hardly settled in town when, as he
+himself tells, he had to attempt, fruitlessly enough, the task of
+mediator in the financial disasters of Constable and Scott; and his own
+share of domestic troubles began early. His eldest son, after repeated
+escapes, died in 1831; Scott followed shortly; Miss Anne Scott, after
+her father's death, came in broken health to Lockhart's house, and died
+there only a year later; and in the spring of 1837 his wife likewise
+died. Then Fortune let him alone for a little, to return in no better
+humour some years later.</p>
+
+<p>It is, however, from the early "thirties" that one of the best known
+memorials of Lockhart dates; that is to say, the portrait, or rather the
+two portraits, in the Fraser Gallery. In the general group of the
+Fraserians he sits between Fraser himself and Theodore Hook, with the
+diminutive figure of Crofton Croker half intercepted beyond him; and his
+image forms the third plate in Mr. Bates's republication of the gallery.
+It is said to be the most faithful of the whole series, and it is
+certainly the handsomest, giving even a more flattering representation
+than the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">{360}</a></span> full-face portrait by Pickersgill which serves as frontispiece
+to the modern editions of the <i>Ballads</i>. In this latter the curious
+towzled mop of hair, in which our fathers delighted, rather mars the
+effect; while in Maclise's sketch (which is in profile) it is less
+obtrusive. In this latter, too, there is clearly perceivable what the
+Shepherd in the <i>Noctes</i> calls "a sort of laugh aboot the screwed-up
+mouth of him that fules ca'd no canny, for they couldna thole the
+meaning o't." There is not much doubt that Lockhart aided and abetted
+Maginn in much of the mischief that distinguished the early days of
+<i>Fraser</i>, though his fastidious taste is never likely to have stooped to
+the coarseness which was too natural to Maginn. It is believed that to
+him is due the wicked wresting of Alaric Watts' second initial into
+"Attila," which gave the victim so much grief, and he probably did many
+other things of the same kind. But Lockhart was never vulgar, and
+<i>Fraser</i> in those days very often was.</p>
+
+<p>In 1843 Lockhart received his first and last piece of political
+preferment, being appointed, says one of the authorities before me,
+Chancellor of the Duchy of Cornwall, and (says another) Chancellor of
+the Duchy of Lancaster. Such are biographers; but the matter is not of
+the slightest importance, though I do not myself quite see how it could
+have been Lancaster. A third and more trustworthy<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">{361}</a></span> writer gives the post
+as "Auditorship" of the Duchy of Lancaster, which is possible enough.</p>
+
+<p>In 1847, the death of Sir Walter Scott's last surviving son brought the
+title and estate to Lockhart's son Walter, but he died in 1853.
+Lockhart's only other child had married Mr. Hope&mdash;called, after his
+brother-in-law's death, Mr. Hope Scott, of whom an elaborate biography
+has been published. Little in it concerns Lockhart, but the admirable
+letter which he wrote to Mr. Hope on his conversion to the Roman Church.
+This step, followed as it was by Mrs. Hope, could not but be, and in
+this letter is delicately hinted to be, no small grief to Lockhart, who
+saw Abbotsford fall under influences for which certainly neither he nor
+its founder had any respect. His repeated domestic losses, and many
+years of constant work and excitement, appear to have told on him, and
+very shortly after his son's death in April 1853 he resigned the
+editorship of the <i>Quarterly</i>. He then visited Italy, a visit from
+which, if he had been a superstitious man, the ominous precedent of
+Scott might have deterred him. His journey did him no good, and he died
+at Abbotsford on the 25th of November. December, says another authority,
+for so it is that history gets written, even in thirty years.</p>
+
+<p>The comparatively brief notices which are all that have been published
+about Lockhart,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">{362}</a></span> uniformly mention the unpopularity (to use a mild word)
+which pursued him, and which, as I have remarked, does not seem to have
+exhausted itself even yet. It is not very difficult to account for the
+origin of this; and the neglect to supply any collection of his work,
+and any authoritative account of his life and character, will quite
+explain its continuance. In the first place, Lockhart was well known as
+a most sarcastic writer; in the second, he was for nearly a lifetime
+editor of one of the chief organs of party politics and literary
+criticism in England. He might have survived the <i>Chaldee Manuscript</i>,
+and <i>Peter's Letters</i>, and the lampoons in <i>Fraser</i>: he might even have
+got the better of the youthful imprudence which led him to fix upon
+himself a description which was sure to be used and abused against him
+by the "fules," if he had not succeeded to the chair of the <i>Quarterly</i>.
+Individual and, to a great extent, anonymous indulgence of the luxury of
+scorn never gave any man a very bad character, even if he were, as
+Lockhart was, personally shy and reserved, unable to make up for written
+sarcasm with verbal flummery, and, in virtue of an incapacity for
+gushing, deprived of the easiest and, by public personages, most
+commonly practised means of proving that a man has "a good heart after
+all." But when he complicated his sins by editing the <i>Quarterly</i> at a
+time when everybody attacked everybody else in exactly such terms as
+pleased<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">{363}</a></span> them, the sins of his youth were pretty sure to be visited on
+him. In the first place, there was the great army of the criticised, who
+always consider that the editor of the paper which dissects them is
+really responsible. The luckless Harriet Martineau, who, if I remember
+rightly, gives in her autobiography a lurid picture of Lockhart "going
+down at night to the printer's" and inserting dreadful things about her,
+and who, I believe, took the feminine plan of revenging herself in an
+obituary article, was only one of a great multitude.</p>
+
+<p>Lockhart does not seem to have taken over from Gifford quite such a
+troublesome crew of helpers as Macvey Napier inherited from Jeffrey, and
+he was also free from the monitions of his predecessor. But in Croker he
+had a first lieutenant who could not very well be checked, and who
+(though he, too, has had rather hard measure) had no equal in the art of
+making himself offensive. Besides, those were the days when the famous
+"Scum condensed of Irish bog" lines appeared in a great daily newspaper
+about O'Connell. Imagine the <i>Times</i> addressing Mr. Parnell as "Scum
+condensed of Irish bog," with the other amenities that follow, in this
+year of grace!</p>
+
+<p>But Lockhart had not only his authors, he had his contributors. "A'
+contributors," says the before-quoted Shepherd, in a moment of such<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">{364}</a></span>
+preternatural wisdom that he must have been "fou," "are in a manner
+fierce." They are&mdash;it is the nature and essence of the animal to be so.
+The contributor who is not allowed to contribute is fierce, as a matter
+of course; but not less fierce is the contributor who thinks himself too
+much edited, and the contributor who imperatively insists that his
+article on Chinese metaphysics shall go in at once, and the contributor
+who, being an excellent hand at articles on the currency, wants to be
+allowed to write on dancing; and, in short, as the Shepherd says, all
+contributors. Now it does not appear (for, as I must repeat, I have no
+kind of private information on the subject) that Lockhart was by any
+means an easy-going editor, or one of that kind which allows a certain
+number of privileged writers to send in what they like. We are told in
+many places that he "greatly improved" his contributors' articles; and I
+should say that if there is one thing which drives a contributor to the
+verge of madness, it is to have his articles "greatly improved." A hint
+in the <i>Noctes</i> (and it may be observed that though the references to
+Lockhart in the <i>Noctes</i> are not very numerous, they are valuable, for
+Wilson's friendship seems to have been mixed with a small grain of
+jealousy which preserves them from being commonplace) suggests that his
+friends did not consider him as by any means too ready to accept their
+papers. All this,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">{365}</a></span> added to his early character of scoffer at Whig
+dignities, and his position as leader <i>en titre</i> of Tory journalism, was
+quite sufficient to create a reputation partly exaggerated, partly quite
+false, which has endured simply because no trouble has been taken to
+sift and prove it.</p>
+
+<p>The head and front of Lockhart's offending, in a purely literary view,
+seems to be the famous <i>Quarterly</i> article on Lord Tennyson's volume of
+1832. That article is sometimes spoken of as Croker's, but there can be
+no manner of doubt that it is Lockhart's; and, indeed, it is quoted as
+his by Professor Ferrier, who, through Wilson, must have known the
+facts. Now I do not think I yield to any man living in admiration of the
+Laureate, but I am unable to think much the worse, or, indeed, any the
+worse, of Lockhart because of this article. In the first place, it is
+extremely clever, being, perhaps, the very best example of politely
+cruel criticism in existence. In the second, most, if not all, of the
+criticism is perfectly just. If Lord Tennyson himself, at this safe
+distance of time, can think of the famous strawberry story and its
+application without laughing, he must be an extremely sensitive Peer.
+And nobody, I suppose, would now defend the wondrous stanza which was
+paralleled from the <i>Groves of Blarney</i>. The fact is that criticism of
+criticism after some time is apt to be doubly unjust. It is wont to
+assume, or rather to imagine, that the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">{366}</a></span> critic must have known what the
+author was going to do, as well as what he had actually done; and it is
+wont to forget that the work criticised was very often, as it presented
+itself to the critic, very different from what it is when it presents
+itself to the critic's critic. The best justification of Lockhart's
+verdict on the volume of 1832 is what Lord Tennyson himself has done
+with the volume of 1832. Far more than half the passages objected to
+have since been excised or altered. But there are other excuses. In the
+first place, Mr. Tennyson, as he then was, represented a further
+development of schools of poetry against which the <i>Quarterly</i> had
+always, rightly or wrongly, set its face, and a certain loyalty to the
+principles of his paper is, after all, not the worst fault of a critic.
+In the second, no one can fairly deny that some points in Mr. Tennyson's
+early, if not in his later, manner must have been highly and rightly
+disgustful to a critic who, like Lockhart, was above all things
+masculine and abhorrent of "gush." In the third, it is, unfortunately,
+not given to all critics to admire all styles alike. Let those to whom
+it is given thank God therefor; but let them, at the same time, remember
+that they are as much bound to accept whatever is good in all kinds of
+critics as whatever is good in all kinds of poets.</p>
+
+<p>Now Lockhart, within his own range, and it was for the time a very wide
+one, was certainly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">{367}</a></span> not a narrow critic, just as he certainly was not a
+feeble one. In the before-mentioned <i>Peter's Letters</i> (which, with all
+its faults, is one of his best, and particularly one of his most
+spontaneous and characteristic works) the denunciation of the "facetious
+and rejoicing ignorance" which enabled contemporary critics to pooh-pooh
+Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, and Coleridge is excellent. And it must be
+remembered that in 1819, whatever might be the case with Coleridge,
+Wordsworth and Lamb were by no means taken to the hearts of Tories on
+their merits, and that in this very passage <i>Blackwood</i> is condemned not
+less severely than the <i>Edinburgh</i>. Another point in which Lockhart made
+a great advance was that he was one of the first (Lamb himself is, in
+England, his only important forerunner) to unite and combine criticism
+of different branches of art. He never has the disgusting technical
+jargon, or the undisciplined fluency, of the mere art critic, any more
+than he has the gabble of the mere connoisseur. But it is constantly
+evident that he has a knowledge of and a feeling for the art of line and
+colour as well as of words. Nothing can be better than the fragments of
+criticism which are interspersed in the Scott book; and if his estimate
+of Hook as a novelist seems exaggerated, it must be remembered, as he
+has himself noted, that Thackeray was, at the time he spoke, nothing
+more than an amusing contributor of remarkably<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">{368}</a></span> promising trifles to
+magazines, and that, from the appearance of <i>Waverley</i> to that of
+<i>Pickwick</i>, no novelist of the first class had made an appearance. It
+is, moreover, characteristic of Lockhart as a critic that he is, as has
+been noted, always manly and robust. He was never false to his own early
+protest against "the banishing from the mind of a reverence for feeling,
+as abstracted from mere questions of immediate and obvious utility." But
+he never allowed that reverence to get the better of him and drag him
+into the deplorable excesses of gush into which, from his day to ours,
+criticism has more and more had a tendency to fall. If he makes no
+parade of definite æsthetic principles, it is clear that throughout he
+had such principles, and that they were principles of a very good kind.
+He had a wide knowledge of foreign literature without any taint of
+"Xenomania," sufficient scholarship (despite the unlucky false quantity
+of <i>Janua</i>, which he overlooked) in the older languages, and a thorough
+knowledge and love of English literature. His style is, to me at any
+rate, peculiarly attractive. Contrasted with the more brightly coloured
+and fantastically-shaped styles, of which, in his own day, De Quincey,
+Wilson, Macaulay, and Carlyle set the fashion, it may possibly seem tame
+to those who are not satisfied with proportion in form and harmony in
+tint; it will certainly not seem so to those who are more fortunately
+gifted. Indeed, compared either with Wilson's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">{369}</a></span> welter of words, now
+bombastic, now gushing, now horse-playful, or with the endless and
+heartbreaking antitheses of what Brougham ill-naturedly but truly called
+"Tom's snip-snap," it is infinitely preferable. The conclusion of the
+essay on Theodore Hook is not easily surpassable as an example of solid
+polished prose, which is prose, and does not attempt to be a hybrid
+between prose and poetry. The last page of the Tennyson review is
+perfect for quiet humour.</p>
+
+<p>But there is no doubt that though Lockhart was an admirable critic
+merely as such, a poet, or at least a song-writer, of singular ability
+and charm within certain limits, and a master of sharp light raillery
+that never missed its mark and never lumbered on the way, his most
+unique and highest merit is that of biographer. Carlyle, though treating
+Lockhart himself with great politeness, does not allow this, and
+complains that Lockhart's conception of his task was "not very
+elevated." That is what a great many people said of Boswell, whom
+Carlyle thought an almost perfect biographer. But, as it happens, the
+critic here has fallen into the dangerous temptation of giving his
+reasons. Lockhart's plan was not, it seems, in the case of his <i>Scott</i>,
+very elevated, because it was not "to show Scott as he was by nature, as
+the world acted on him, as he acted on the world," and so forth. Now,
+unfortunately, this is exactly what it seems to me that Lockhart,
+whether he meant to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">{370}</a></span> do it or not, has done in the very book which
+Carlyle was criticising. And it seems to me, further, that he always
+does this in all his biographical efforts. Sometimes he appears (for
+here another criticism of Carlyle's on the <i>Burns</i>, not the <i>Scott</i>, is
+more to the point) to quote and extract from other and much inferior
+writers to an extent rather surprising in so excellent a penman,
+especially when it is remembered that, except to a dunce, the extraction
+and stringing together of quotations is far more troublesome than
+original writing. But even then the extracts are always luminous. With
+ninety-nine out of a hundred biographies the total impression which
+Carlyle demands, and very properly demands, is, in fact, a total absence
+of impression. The reader's mind is as dark, though it may be as full,
+as a cellar when the coals have been shot into it. Now this is never the
+case with Lockhart's biographies, whether they are books in half a dozen
+volumes, or essays in half a hundred pages. He subordinates what even
+Carlyle allowed to be his "clear nervous forcible style" so entirely to
+the task of representing his subject, he has such a perfect general
+conception of that subject, that only a very dense reader can fail to
+perceive the presentment. Whether it is the right or whether it is the
+wrong presentment may, of course, be a matter of opinion, but, such as
+it is, it is always there.</p>
+
+<p>One other point of interest about Lockhart has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">{371}</a></span> to be mentioned. He was
+an eminent example, perhaps one of the most eminent, of a "gentleman of
+the press." He did a great many kinds of literary work, and he did all
+of them well; novel-writing, perhaps (which, as has been said, he gave
+up almost immediately), least well. But he does not seem to have felt
+any very strong or peculiar call to any particular class of original
+literary work, and his one great and substantive book may be fairly
+taken to have been much more decided by accident and his relationship to
+Scott than by deliberate choice. He was, in fact, eminently a
+journalist, and it is very much to be wished that there were more
+journalists like him. For from the two great reproaches of the craft to
+which so many of us belong, and which seems to be gradually swallowing
+up all other varieties of literary occupation, he was conspicuously
+free. He never did work slovenly in form, and he never did work that was
+not in one way or other consistent with a decided set of literary and
+political principles. There is a great deal of nonsense talked about the
+unprincipled character of journalism, no doubt; and nobody knows better
+than those who have some experience of it, that if, as George Warrington
+says, "too many of us write against our own party," it is the fault
+simply of those who do so. If a man has a faculty of saying anything, he
+can generally get an opportunity of saying what he likes, and avoid
+occasions of saying what he does<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">{372}</a></span> not like. But the mere journalist
+Swiss of heaven (or the other place), is certainly not unknown, and by
+all accounts he was in Lockhart's time rather common. No one ever
+accused Lockhart himself of being one of the class. A still more
+important fault, undoubtedly, of journalism is its tendency to slovenly
+work, and here again Lockhart was conspicuously guiltless. His actual
+production must have been very considerable, though in the absence of
+any collection, or even any index, of his contributions to periodicals,
+it is impossible to say exactly to how much it would extend. But, at a
+rough guess, the <i>Scott</i>, the <i>Burns</i>, and the <i>Napoleon</i>, the
+<i>Ballads</i>, the novels, and <i>Peter</i>, a hundred <i>Quarterly</i> articles, and
+an unknown number in <i>Blackwood</i> and <i>Fraser</i>, would make at least
+twenty or five-and-twenty volumes of a pretty closely printed library
+edition. Yet all this, as far as it can be identified, has the same
+careful though unostentatious distinction of style, the same admirable
+faculty of sarcasm, wherever sarcasm is required, the same depth of
+feeling, wherever feeling is called for, the same refusal to make a
+parade of feeling even where it is shown. Never trivial, never vulgar,
+never feeble, never stilted, never diffuse, Lockhart is one of the very
+best recent specimens of that class of writers of all work, which since
+Dryden's time has continually increased, is increasing, and does not
+seem likely to diminish. The growth may or may not be matter for
+regret;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">{373}</a></span> probably none of the more capable members of the class itself
+feels any particular desire to magnify his office. But if the office is
+to exist, let it at least be the object of those who hold it to perform
+its duties with that hatred of commonplace and cant and the <i>popularis
+aura</i>, with, as nearly as may be in each case, that conscience and
+thoroughness of workmanship, which Lockhart's writings uniformly
+display.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">{374}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XII" id="XII"></a>XII<br />
+<br />
+PRAED</h2>
+
+
+<p>It was not till half a century after his death that Praed, who is loved
+by those who love him perhaps as sincerely as most greater writers, had
+his works presented to the public in a form which may be called
+complete.<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a> This is of itself rather a cautious statement in
+appearance, but I am not sure that it ought not to be made more cautious
+still. The completeness is not complete, though it is in one respect
+rather more than complete; and the form is exceedingly informal. Neither
+in size, nor in print, nor in character of editing and arrangement do
+the two little fat volumes which were ushered into the world by Derwent
+Coleridge in 1864, and the one little thin volume which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">{375}</a></span> appeared in
+1887 under Sir George Young's name with no notes and not much
+introduction, and the very creditable edition of the political poems
+which appeared a year later under the same care but better cared for,
+agree together. But this, though a nuisance to those who love not a set
+of odd volumes, would matter comparatively little if the discrepancies
+were not equally great in a much more important matter than that of mere
+externals. Only the last of the four volumes and three books just
+enumerated can be said to have been really edited, and though that is
+edited very well, it is the least important. Sir George Young, who has
+thus done a pious work to his uncle's memory, was concerned not merely
+in the previous cheap issue of the prose, but in the more elaborate
+issue of the poems in 1864. But either his green unknowing youth did not
+at that time know what editing meant, or he was under the restraint of
+some higher powers. Except that the issue of 1864 has that well-known
+page-look of "Moxon's," which is identified to all lovers of poetry with
+associations of Shelley, of Lord Tennyson, and of other masters, and
+that the pieces are duly dated, it is difficult to say any good thing of
+the book. There are no notes; and Praed is an author who is much in need
+of annotation. With singular injudiciousness, a great deal of album and
+other verse is included which was evidently not intended for
+publication, which does not display<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">{376}</a></span> the writer at his best, or even in
+his characteristic vein at all, while the memoir is meagre in fact and
+decidedly feeble in criticism. As for the prose, though Sir George Young
+has prefixed an introduction good as far as it goes, there is no index,
+no table even of contents, and the separate papers are not dated, nor is
+any indication given of their origin&mdash;a defect which, for reasons to be
+indicated shortly, is especially troublesome in Praed's case.
+Accordingly anything like a critical study of the poet is beset with
+very unusual difficulties, and the mere reading of him, if it were less
+agreeable in itself, could not be said to be exactly easy. Luckily Praed
+is a writer so eminently engaging to the mere reader, as well as so
+interesting in divers ways to the personage whom some one has politely
+called "the gelid critic," that no sins or shortcomings of his editors
+can do him much harm, so long as they let him be read at all.</p>
+
+<p>Winthrop Mackworth was the third son of Serjeant Praed, Chairman of the
+Board of Audit, and, though his family was both by extraction and by
+actual seat Devonian, he was born in John Street, Bedford Row, on 26th
+June 1802, the year of the birth of Victor Hugo, who was perhaps about
+as unlike Praed in every conceivable point, except metrical mastery, as
+two men possessing poetic faculty can be unlike one another. John Street
+may not appear as meet a nurse for a poetic child as Besançon,
+especially now when it has settled<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">{377}</a></span> down into the usual
+office-and-chambers state of Bloomsbury. But it is unusually wide for a
+London street; it has trees&mdash;those of the Foundling Hospital and those
+of Gray's Inn&mdash;at either end, and all about it cluster memories of the
+Bedford Row conspiracy, and of that immortal dinner which was given by
+the Briefless One and his timid partner to Mr. Goldmore, and of Sydney
+Smith's sojourn in Doughty Street, and of divers other pleasant things.
+In connection, however, with Praed himself, we do not hear much more of
+John Street. It was soon exchanged for the more cheerful locality of
+Teignmouth, where his father (who was a member of the old western family
+of Mackworth, Praed being an added surname) had a country house.
+Serjeant Praed encouraged, if he did not positively teach, the boy to
+write English verse at a very early age: a practice which I should be
+rather slow to approve, but which has been credited, perhaps justly,
+with the very remarkable formal accuracy and metrical ease of Praed's
+after-work. Winthrop lost his mother early, was sent to a private school
+at eight years old, and to Eton in the year 1814. Public schools in
+their effect of allegiance on public schoolboys have counted for much in
+English history, literary and other, and Eton has counted for more than
+any of them. But hardly in any case has it counted for so much with the
+general reader as in Praed's. A friend of mine, who, while entertaining
+high and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">{378}</a></span> lofty views on principle, takes low ones by a kind of natural
+attraction, says that the straightforward title of <i>The Etonian</i> and
+Praed's connection with it are enough to account for this. There you
+have a cardinal fact easy to seize and easy to remember. "Praed? Oh!
+yes, the man who wrote <i>The Etonian</i>; he must have been an Eton man,"
+says the general reader. This is cynicism, and cannot be too strongly
+reprehended. But unluckily, as in other cases, a kind of critical
+deduction or reaction from this view has also taken place, and there are
+persons who maintain that Praed's merit is a kind of coterie-merit, a
+thing which Eton men are bound, and others are not bound but the
+reverse, to uphold. This is an old, but apparently still effective
+trick. I read not long ago a somewhat elaborate attempt to make out that
+the people who admire Mr. Matthew Arnold's poems admire them because
+they, the people, are Oxford men. Now this form of "ruling out" is
+undoubtedly ingenious. "You admire Mr. Arnold's poems?"&mdash;"Yes, I
+do."&mdash;"You are an Oxford man?"&mdash;"Yes, I am."&mdash;"Ah! I see." And it is
+perfectly useless for the victim to argue that his admiration of the
+poet and his allegiance to the University have nothing to do with each
+other. In the present case I, at least, am free from this illogical but
+damaging disqualification. I do not think that any one living admires
+Praed more than I do;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">{379}</a></span> and neither Eton nor Cambridge, which may be said
+to have divided influence on him, claims any allegiance from me. On
+Praed himself, however, the influence of Eton was certainly great, if
+not of the greatest. Here he began in school periodicals ("Apis Matina"
+a bee buzzing in manuscript only, preceded <i>The Etonian</i>) his prose and,
+to some though a less extent, his verse-exercises in finished
+literature. Here he made the beginnings of that circle of friends
+(afterwards slightly enlarged at Cambridge by the addition of
+non-Etonians and including one or two Oxford men who had been at Eton)
+which practically formed the staff of <i>The Etonian</i> itself and of the
+subsequent <i>Knight's Quarterly</i> and <i>Brazen Head</i>. The greatest of them
+all, Macaulay, belonged to the later Trinity set; but the Etonians
+proper included divers men of mark. There has been, I believe, a
+frequent idea that boys who contribute to school-magazines never do
+anything else. Praed certainly could not be produced as an instance. He
+was not a great athlete, partly because his health was always weak,
+partly because athletics were then in their infancy. But he is said to
+have been a good player at fives and tennis, an amateur actor of merit,
+expert at chess and whist, and latterly a debater of promise, while, in
+the well-known way of his own school and University, he was more than a
+sufficient scholar. He went to Trinity in October 1821, and in the three
+following years won the Browne<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">{380}</a></span> Medals for Greek verse four times and
+the Chancellor's Medal for English verse twice. He was third in the
+Classical Tripos, was elected to a Fellowship at his college in 1827,
+and in 1830 obtained the Seatonian Prize with a piece, "The Ascent of
+Elijah," which is remarkable for the extraordinary facility with which
+it catches the notes of the just published <i>Christian Year</i>. He was a
+great speaker at the Union, and, as has been hinted, he made a fresh
+circle of literary friends for himself, the chief ornaments whereof were
+Macaulay and Charles Austin. It was also during his sojourn at Cambridge
+that the short-lived but brilliant venture of <i>Knight's Quarterly</i> was
+launched. He was about four years resident at Trinity in the first
+instance; after which, according to a practice then common enough but
+now, I believe, obsolete, he returned to Eton as private and particular
+tutor to Lord Ernest Bruce. This employment kept him for two years. He
+then read law, was called to the Bar in 1829, and in 1830 was elected to
+Parliament for the moribund borough of St. Germans. He was re-elected
+next year, contested St. Ives, when St. Germans lost its members, but
+was beaten, was elected in 1834 for Great Yarmouth, and in 1837 for
+Aylesbury, which last seat he held to his death. During the whole of
+this time he sat as a Conservative, becoming a more thorough one as time
+went on; and as he had been at Cambridge a very decided<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">{381}</a></span> Whig, and had
+before his actual entrance on public life written many pointed and some
+bitter lampoons against the Tories, the change, in the language of his
+amiable and partial friend and biographer, "occasioned considerable
+surprise." Of this also more presently: for it is well to get merely
+biographical details over with as little digression as possible.
+Surprise or no surprise, he won good opinions from both sides, acquired
+considerable reputation as a debater and a man of business, was in the
+confidence both of the Duke of Wellington and of Sir Robert Peel, was
+made Secretary of the Board of Control in 1834, married in 1835, was
+appointed Deputy-High Steward of his University (a mysterious
+appointment, of the duties of which I have no notion), and died of
+disease of the lungs on 15th July 1839. Not very much has been published
+about Praed personally; but in what has been published, and in what I
+have heard, I cannot remember a single unfriendly sentence.</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding his reputation as an "inspired schoolboy," I do not know
+that sober criticism would call him a really precocious writer,
+especially in verse. The pieces by which he is best known and which have
+most individuality, date in no case very early, and in almost all cases
+after his five-and-twentieth year. What does date very early (and
+unluckily it has been printed with a copiousness betokening more
+affection than judgment,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">{382}</a></span> considering that the author had more sense
+than to print it at all) is scarcely distinguishable from any other
+verses of any other clever boy. It is impossible to augur any future
+excellence from such stuff as</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Emilia often sheds the tear<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">But affectation bids it flow,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>or as</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">From breasts which feel compassion's glow<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Solicit mild the kind relief;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and, for one's own part, one is inclined to solicit mild the kind relief
+of not having to read it. Even when Praed had become, at least
+technically, a man, there is no very great improvement as a whole,
+though here and there one may see, looking backwards from the finished
+examples, faint beginnings of his peculiar touches, especially of that
+pleasant trick of repeating the same word or phrase with a different and
+slightly altered sense which, as Mr. Austin Dobson has suggested, may
+have been taken from Burns. The Cambridge prize poems are quite
+authentic and respectable examples of that style which has received its
+final criticism in</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Ply battleaxe and hurtling catapult:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Jerusalem is ours! <i>Id Deus vult</i>,&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>though they do not contain anything so nice as that, or as its great
+author's more famous couplet respecting Africa and the men thereof. The
+longer romances of the same date, "Gog," "Lilian,"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">{383}</a></span> "The Troubadour,"
+are little more than clever reminiscences sometimes of Scott, Byron,
+Moore, and other contemporaries, sometimes of Prior and the <i>vers de
+société</i> of the eighteenth century. The best passage by far of all this
+is the close of "How to Rhyme with Love," and this, as it seems to me,
+is the only passage of even moderate length which, in the poems dating
+before Praed took his degree, in the least foretells the poet of "The
+Red Fisherman," "The Vicar," the "Letters from Teignmouth," the
+"Fourteenth of February" (earliest in date and not least charming fruit
+of the true vein), "Good-night to the Season," and best and most
+delightful of all, the peerless "Letter of Advice," which is as much the
+very best thing of its own kind as the "Divine Comedy."</p>
+
+<p>In prose Praed was a little earlier, but not very much. <i>The Etonian</i>
+itself was, even in its earliest numbers, written at an age when many,
+perhaps most, men have already left school; and the earlier numbers are
+as imitative, of the <i>Spectator</i> and its late and now little read
+followers of the eighteenth century, as is the verse above quoted. The
+youthful boisterousness of <i>Blackwood</i> gave Praed a more congenial
+because a fresher cue; and in the style of which Maginn, as Adjutant
+O'Doherty, had set the example in his Latinisings of popular verse, and
+which was to be worked to death by Father Prout, there are few things
+better than the "Musæ O'Connorianæ" which celebrates the great fight of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">{384}</a></span>
+Mac Nevis and Mac Twolter. But there is here still the distinct
+following of a model the taint of the school-exercise. Very much more
+original is "The Knight and the Knave:" indeed I should call this the
+first original thing, though it be a parody, that Praed did. To say that
+it reminds one in more than subject of <i>Rebecca and Rowena</i>, and that it
+was written some twenty years earlier, is to say a very great deal. Even
+here, however, the writer's ground is rented, not freehold. It is very
+different in such papers as "Old Boots" and "The Country Curate," while
+in the later prose contributed to <i>Knight's Quarterly</i> the improvement
+in originality is marked. "The Union Club" is amusing enough all
+through: but considering that it was written in 1823, two years before
+Jeffrey asked the author of a certain essay on Milton "where he got that
+style," one passage of the speech put in the mouth of Macaulay is
+positively startling. "The Best Bat in the School" is quite delightful,
+and "My First Folly," though very unequal, contains in the introduction
+scene, between Vyvian Joyeuse and Margaret Orleans, a specimen of a kind
+of dialogue nowhere to be found before, so far as I know, and giving
+proof that, if Praed had set himself to it, he might have started a new
+kind of novel.</p>
+
+<p>It does not appear, however, that his fancy led him with any decided
+bent to prose composition, and he very early deserted it for verse;
+though<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">{385}</a></span> he is said to have, at a comparatively late period of his short
+life, worked in harness as a regular leader-writer for the <i>Morning
+Post</i> during more than a year. No examples of this work of his have been
+reprinted, nor, so far as I know, does any means of identifying them
+exist, though I personally should like to examine them. He was still at
+Cambridge when he drifted into another channel, which was still not his
+own channel, but in which he feathered his oars under two different
+flags with no small skill and dexterity. Sir George Young has a very
+high idea of his uncle's political verse, and places him "first among
+English writers, before Prior, before Canning, before the authors of the
+'Rolliad,' and far before Moore or any of the still anonymous
+contributors to the later London press." I cannot subscribe to this.
+Neither as Whig nor as Tory, neither as satirist of George the Fourth
+nor as satirist of the Reform Bill, does Praed seem to me to have been
+within a hundred miles of that elder schoolfellow of his who wrote</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">All creeping creatures, venomous and low,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Still blasphemous or blackguard, praise Lepaux.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He has nothing for sustained wit and ease equal to the best pieces of
+the "Fudge Family" and the "Two-penny Postbag"; and (for I do not know
+why one should not praise a man because he happens to be alive and one's
+friend) I do not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">{386}</a></span> think he has the touch of the true political satirist
+as Mr. Traill has it in "Professor Baloonatics Craniocracs," or in that
+admirable satire on democracy which is addressed to the "Philosopher
+Crazed, from the Island of Crazes."</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, by mentioning Prior, Sir George seems to put himself rather out
+of court. Praed <i>is</i> very nearly if not quite Prior's equal, but the
+sphere of neither was politics. Prior's political pieces are thin and
+poor beside his social verse, and with rare exceptions I could not put
+anything political of Praed's higher than the shoe-string of "Araminta."
+Neither of these two charming poets seems to have felt seriously enough
+for political satire. Matthew, we know, played the traitor; and though
+Mackworth ratted to my own side, I fear it must be confessed that he did
+rat. I can only discover in his political verse two fixed principles,
+both of which no doubt did him credit, but which hardly, even when taken
+together, amount to a sufficient political creed. The one was fidelity
+to Canning and his memory: the other was impatience of the cant of the
+reformers. He could make admirable fun of Joseph Hume, and of still
+smaller fry like Waithman; he could attack Lord Grey's nepotism and
+doctrinairism fiercely enough. Once or twice, or, to be fair, more than
+once or twice, he struck out a happy, indeed a brilliant flash. He was
+admirable at what Sir George Young calls, justly enough, "political
+patter songs" such as,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">{387}</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Young widowhood shall lose its weeds,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Old kings shall loathe the Tories,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And monks be tired of telling beads,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And Blues of telling stories;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And titled suitors shall be crossed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And famished poets married,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Canning's motion shall be lost,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And Hume's amendment carried;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Chancery shall cease to doubt,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And Algebra to prove,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And hoops come in, and gas go out<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Before I cease to love.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He hit off an exceedingly savage and certainly not wholly just "Epitaph
+on the King of the Sandwich Islands" which puts the conception of George
+the Fourth that Thackeray afterwards made popular, and contains these
+felicitous lines:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The people in his happy reign,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Were blessed beyond all other nations:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Unharmed by foreign axe and chain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Unhealed by civic innovations;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They served the usual logs and stones,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With all the usual rites and terrors,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And swallowed all their fathers' bones,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And swallowed all their fathers' errors.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">When the fierce mob, with clubs and knives,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">All swore that nothing should prevent them,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But that their representatives<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Should actually represent them,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He interposed the proper checks,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">By sending troops, with drums and banners,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To cut their speeches short, and necks,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And break their heads, to mend their manners.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Occasionally in a sort of middle vein between<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">{388}</a></span> politics and society he
+wrote in the "patter" style just noticed quite admirable things like
+"Twenty-eight and Twenty-nine." Throughout the great debates on Reform
+he rallied the reformers with the same complete and apparently useless
+superiority of wit and sense which has often, if not invariably, been
+shown at similar crises on the losing side. And once, on an
+ever-memorable occasion, he broke into those famous and most touching
+"Stanzas on seeing the Speaker Asleep" which affect one almost to tears
+by their grace of form and by the perennial and indeed ever-increasing
+applicability of their matter.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Sleep, Mr. Speaker: it's surely fair,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If you don't in your bed, that you should in your chair:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Longer and longer still they grow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Tory and Radical, Aye and No;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Talking by night and talking by day;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Sleep, Mr. Speaker: slumber lies<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Light and brief on a Speaker's eyes&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fielden or Finn, in a minute or two,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Some disorderly thing will do;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Riot will chase repose away;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Sleep, Mr. Speaker; Cobbett will soon<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Move to abolish the sun and moon;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hume, no doubt, will be taking the sense<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the House on a saving of thirteen-pence;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Grattan will growl or Baldwin bray;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">{389}</a></span><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Sleep, Mr. Speaker: dream of the time<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When loyalty was not quite a crime,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When Grant was a pupil in Canning's school,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Palmerston fancied Wood a fool.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lord, how principles pass away!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sweet to men<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is the sleep that comes but now and then;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sweet to the sorrowful, sweet to the ill,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sweet to the children who work in a mill.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You have more need of sleep than they,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But the chief merit of Praed's political verse as a whole seems to me to
+be that it kept his hand in, and enabled him to develop and refine the
+trick, above referred to, of playing on words so as to give a graceful
+turn to verse composed in his true vocation.</p>
+
+<p>Of the verse so composed there are more kinds than one; though perhaps
+only in two kinds is the author absolutely at his best. There is first a
+certain class of pieces which strongly recall Macaulay's "Lays" and may
+have had some connexion of origin with them. Of course those who are
+foolish enough to affect to see nothing good in "The Battle of the Lake
+Regillus," or "Ivry," or "The Armada," will not like "Cassandra," or
+"Sir Nicholas at Marston Moor," or the "Covenanter's Lament for Bothwell
+Brigg," or "Arminius." Nevertheless they are fine in their way.
+"Arminius" is too long, and it suffers from the obvious<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">{390}</a></span> comparison with
+Cowper's far finer "Boadicea." But its best lines, such as the
+well-known</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I curse him by our country's gods,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The terrible, the dark,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The scatterers of the Roman rods,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The quellers of the bark,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>are excellent in the style, and "Sir Nicholas" is charming. But not here
+either did Apollo seriously wait for Praed. The later romances or tales
+are far better than the earlier. "The Legend of the Haunted Tree" shows
+in full swing that happy compound and contrast of sentiment and humour
+in which the writer excelled. And "The Teufelhaus" is, except "The Red
+Fisherman" perhaps, the best thing of its kind in English. These lines
+are good enough for anything:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But little he cared, that stripling pale,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For the sinking sun or the rising gale;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For he, as he rode, was dreaming now,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Poor youth, of a woman's broken vow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the cup dashed down, ere the wine was tasted,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of eloquent speeches sadly wasted,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of a gallant heart all burnt to ashes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the Baron of Katzberg's long moustaches.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And these:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Swift as the rush of an eagle's wing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or the flight of a shaft from Tartar string,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Into the wood Sir Rudolph went:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not with more joy the schoolboys run<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To the gay green fields when their task is done;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not with more haste the members fly,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When Hume has caught the Speaker's eye.<br /></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">{391}</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>But in "The Red Fisherman" itself there is nothing that is not good. It
+is very short, ten small pages only of some five-and-twenty lines each.
+But there is not a weak place in it from the moment when "the Abbot
+arose and closed his book" to the account of his lamentable and yet
+lucky fate and punishment whereof "none but he and the fisherman could
+tell the reason why." Neither of the two other practitioners who may be
+called the masters of this style, Hood and Barham, nor Praed himself
+elsewhere, nor any of his and their imitators has trodden the
+breadthless line between real terror and mere burlesque with so steady a
+foot.</p>
+
+<p>Still not here was his "farthest," as the geographers say, nor in the
+considerable mass of smaller poems which practically defy
+classification. In them, as so often elsewhere in Praed, one comes
+across odd notes, stray flashes of genius which he never seems to have
+cared to combine or follow out, such as the unwontedly solemn "Time's
+Song," the best wholly serious thing that he has done, and the charming
+"L'Inconnue." But we find the perfect Praed, and we find him only, in
+the verses of society proper, the second part of the "Poems of Life and
+Manners" as they are headed, which began, as far as one can make out, to
+be written about 1826, and the gift of which Praed never lost, though he
+practised it little in the very last years of his life. Here, in a
+hundred pages, with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">{392}</a></span> a few to be added from elsewhere, are to be found
+some of the best-bred and best-natured verse within the English
+language, some of the most original and remarkable metrical experiments,
+a profusion of the liveliest fancy, a rush of the gayest rhyme. They
+begin with "The Vicar," <i>vir nullâ non donandus lauru</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">[Whose] talk was like a stream, which runs<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With rapid change from rocks to roses:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It slipped from politics to puns,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">It passed from Mahomet to Moses;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Beginning with the laws which keep<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The planets in their radiant courses,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And ending with some precept deep<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">For dressing eels, or shoeing horses.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Three of the Vicar's companion "Everyday Characters" are good, but I
+think not so good as he; the fifth piece, however, "The Portrait of a
+Lady," is quite his equal.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">You'll be forgotten&mdash;as old debts<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">By persons who are used to borrow;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Forgotten&mdash;as the sun that sets,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">When shines a new one on the morrow;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Forgotten&mdash;like the luscious peach<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That blessed the schoolboy last September;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Forgotten&mdash;like a maiden speech,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Which all men praise, but none remember.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Yet ere you sink into the stream<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That whelms alike sage, saint, and martyr,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And soldier's sword, and minstrel's theme,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And Canning's wit, and Gatton's charter,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Here, of the fortunes of your youth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">My fancy weaves her dim conjectures,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">{393}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which have, perhaps, as much of truth<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">As passion's vows, or Cobbett's lectures.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Here, and perhaps here first, at least in the order of the published
+poems, appears that curious mixture of pathos and quizzing, sentiment
+and satire, which has never been mastered more fully or communicated
+more happily than by Praed. But not even yet do we meet with it in its
+happiest form: nor is that form to be found in "Josephine" which is much
+better in substance than in manner, or in the half-social,
+half-political patter of "The Brazen Head," or in "Twenty-eight and
+Twenty-nine." It sounds first in the "Song for the Fourteenth of
+February." No one, so far as I know, has traced any exact original<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a>
+for the altogether admirable metre which, improved and glorified later
+in "The Letter of Advice," appears first in lighter matter still like
+this:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Shall I kneel to a Sylvia or Celia,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Whom no one e'er saw, or may see,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A fancy-drawn Laura Amelia,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">An <i>ad libit</i> Anna Marie?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shall I court an initial with stars to it,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Go mad for a G. or a J.,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Get Bishop to put a few bars to it,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And print it on Valentine's Day?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But every competent critic has seen in it the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">{394}</a></span> origin of the more
+gorgeous and full-mouthed, if not more accomplished and dexterous,
+rhythm in which Mr. Swinburne has written "Dolores," and the even more
+masterly dedication of the first "Poems and Ballads." The shortening of
+the last line which the later poet has introduced is a touch of genius,
+but not perhaps greater than Praed's own recognition of the
+extraordinarily vivid and ringing qualities of the stanza. I profoundly
+believe that metrical quality is, other things being tolerably equal,
+the great secret of the enduring attraction of verse: and nowhere, not
+in the greatest lyrics, is that quality more unmistakable than in the
+"Letter of Advice." I really do not know how many times I have read it;
+but I never can read it to this day without being forced to read it out
+loud like a schoolboy and mark with accompaniment of hand-beat such
+lines as</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Remember the thrilling romances<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">We read on the bank in the glen:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Remember the suitors our fancies<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Would picture for both of us then.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They wore the red cross on their shoulder,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">They had vanquished and pardoned their foe&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sweet friend, are you wiser or colder?<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">My own Araminta, say "No!"<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He must walk&mdash;like a god of old story<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Come down from the home of his rest;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He must smile&mdash;like the sun in his glory,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">On the buds he loves ever the best;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">{395}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And oh! from its ivory portal<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Like music his soft speech must flow!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If he speak, smile, or walk like a mortal,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">My own Araminta, say "No!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There are, metrically speaking, few finer couplets in English than the
+first of that second stanza. Looked at from another point of view, the
+mixture of the comic and the serious in the piece is remarkable enough;
+but not so remarkable, I think, as its extraordinary metrical
+accomplishment. There is not a note or a syllable wrong in the whole
+thing, but every sound and every cadence comes exactly where it ought to
+come, so as to be, in a delightful phrase of Southey's, "necessary and
+voluptuous and right."</p>
+
+<p>It is no wonder that when Praed had discovered such a medium he should
+have worked it freely. But he never impressed on it such a combination
+of majesty and grace as in this letter of Medora Trevilian. As far as
+the metre goes I think the eight-lined stanzas of this piece better
+suited to it than the twelve-lined ones of "Good Night to the Season"
+and the first "Letter from Teignmouth," but both are very delightful.
+Perhaps the first is the best known of all Praed's poems, and certainly
+some things in it, such as</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The ice of her ladyship's manners,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The ice of his lordship's champagne,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>are among the most quoted. But this antithetical trick, of which Praed
+was so fond, is repeated a little often in it; and it seems to me to
+lack the freshness as well as the fire of the "Advice." On<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">{396}</a></span> the other
+hand, the "Letter from Teignmouth" is the best thing that even Praed has
+ever done for combined grace and tenderness.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">You once could be pleased with our ballads&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To-day you have critical ears;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You once could be charmed with our salads&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Alas! you've been dining with Peers;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You trifled and flirted with many&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">You've forgotten the when and the how;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There was one you liked better than any&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Perhaps you've forgotten her now.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But of those you remember most newly,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Of those who delight or enthral,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">None love you a quarter so truly<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">As some you will find at our Ball.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">They tell me you've many who flatter,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Because of your wit and your song:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They tell me&mdash;and what does it matter?&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">You like to be praised by the throng:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They tell me you're shadowed with laurel:<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">They tell me you're loved by a Blue:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They tell me you're sadly immoral&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Dear Clarence, that cannot be true!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But to me, you are still what I found you,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Before you grew clever and tall;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And you'll think of the spell that once bound you;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And you'll come&mdash;won't you come?&mdash;to our Ball!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Is not that perfectly charming?</p>
+
+<p>It is perhaps a matter of mere taste whether it is or is not more
+charming than pieces like "School and Schoolfellows" (the best of
+Praed's purely Eton poems) and "Marriage Chimes," in which, if not Eton,
+the Etonian set also comes in.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">{397}</a></span> If I like these latter pieces less, it
+is not so much because of their more personal and less universal
+subjects as because their style is much less individual. The resemblance
+to Hood cannot be missed, and though I believe there is some dispute as
+to which of the two poets actually hit upon the particular style first,
+there can be little doubt that Hood attained to the greater excellence
+in it. The real sense and savingness of that doctrine of the "principal
+and most excellent things," which has sometimes been preached rather
+corruptly and narrowly, is that the best things that a man does are
+those that he does best. Now though</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I wondered what they meant by stock,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I wrote delightful Sapphics,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">With no hard work but Bovney stream,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">No chill except Long Morning,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>are very nice things, I do not think they are so good in their kind as
+the other things that I have quoted; and this, though the poem contains
+the following wholly delightful stanza in the style of the "Ode on a
+Distant Prospect of Clapham Academy":</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Tom Mill was used to blacken eyes<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Without the fear of sessions;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Charles Medlar loathed false quantities<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">As much as false professions;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Now Mill keeps order in the land,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">A magistrate pedantic;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">{398}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Medlar's feet repose unscanned<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Beneath the wide Atlantic.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The same may even be said of "Utopia," a much-praised, often-quoted, and
+certainly very amusing poem, of "I'm not a Lover now," and of others,
+which are also, though less exactly, in Hood's manner. To attempt to
+distinguish between that manner and the manner which is Praed's own is a
+rather perilous attempt; and the people who hate all attempts at
+reducing criticism to principle, and who think that a critic should only
+say clever things about his subject, will of course dislike me for it.
+But that I cannot help. I should say then that Hood had the advantage of
+Praed in purely serious poetry; for Araminta's bard never did anything
+at all approaching "The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies," "The Haunted
+House," or a score of other things. He had also the advantage in pure
+broad humour. But where Praed excelled was in the mixed style, not of
+sharp contrast as in Hood's "Lay of the Desert Born" and "Demon Ship,"
+where from real pity and real terror the reader suddenly stumbles into
+pure burlesque, but of wholly blended and tempered humour and pathos. It
+is this mixed style in which I think his note is to be found as it is to
+be found in no other poet, and as it could hardly be found in any but
+one with Praed's peculiar talent and temper combined with his peculiar
+advantages of education, fortune, and social atmosphere. He never had to
+"pump out sheets of fun" on a sick-bed for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">{399}</a></span> printer's devil, like
+his less well-fated but assuredly not less well-gifted rival; and as his
+scholarship was exactly of the kind to refine, temper, and adjust his
+literary manner, so his society and circumstances were exactly of the
+kind to repress, or at least not to encourage, exuberance or
+boisterousness in his literary matter. There are I believe who call him
+trivial, even frivolous; and if this be done sincerely by any careful
+readers of "The Red Fisherman" and the "Letter of Advice" I fear I must
+peremptorily disable their judgment. But this appearance of levity is in
+great part due exactly to the perfect modulation and adjustment of his
+various notes. He never shrieks or guffaws: there is no horse-play in
+him, just as there is no tearing a passion to tatters. His slight
+mannerisms, more than once referred to, rarely exceed what is justified
+by good literary manners. His points are very often so delicate, so
+little insisted on or underlined, that a careless reader may miss them
+altogether; his "questionings" are so little "obstinate" that a careless
+reader may think them empty.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Will it come with a rose or a brier?<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Will it come with a blessing or curse?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Will its bonnets be lower or higher?<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Will its morals be better or worse?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The author of this perhaps seems to some a mere jesting Pilate, and if
+he does, they are quite right not to even try to like him.</p>
+
+<p>I have seen disdainful remarks on those critics<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">{400}</a></span> who, however warily,
+admire a considerable number of authors, as though they were coarse and
+omnivorous persons, unfit to rank with the delicates who can only relish
+one or two things in literature. But this is a foolish mistake. "One to
+one" is not "cursedly confined" in the relation of book and reader; and
+a man need not be a Don Juan of letters to have a list of almost <i>mille
+e tre</i> loves in that department. He must indeed love the best or those
+among the best only, in the almost innumerable kinds, which is not a
+very severe restriction. And Praed is of this so fortunately numerous
+company. I do not agree with those who lament his early death on the
+ground of its depriving literature or politics of his future greatness.
+In politics he would most probably not have become anything greater than
+an industrious and respectable official; and in letters his best work
+was pretty certainly done. For it was a work that could only be done in
+youth. In his scholarly but not frigidly correct form, in his irregular
+sallies and flashes of a genius really individual as far as it went but
+never perhaps likely to go much farther, in the freshness of his
+imitations, in the imperfection of his originalities, Praed was the most
+perfect representative we have had or ever are likely to have of what
+has been called, with a perhaps reprehensible parody on great words,
+"the eternal undergraduate within us, who rejoices before life." He is
+thus at the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">{401}</a></span> very antipodes of Wertherism and Byronism, a light but
+gallant champion of cheerfulness and the joy of living. Although there
+is about him absolutely nothing artificial&mdash;the curse of the lighter
+poetry as a rule&mdash;and though he attains to deep pathos now and then, and
+once or twice (notably in "The Red Fisherman") to a kind of grim
+earnestness, neither of these things is his real <i>forte</i>. Playing with
+literature and with life, not frivolously or without heart, but with no
+very deep cares and no very passionate feeling, is Praed's attitude
+whenever he is at his best. And he does not play at playing as many
+writers do: it is all perfectly genuine. Even Prior has not excelled
+such lines as these in one of his early and by no means his best poems
+(an adaptation too), for mingled jest and earnest&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But Isabel, by accident,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Was wandering by that minute;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She opened that dark monument<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And found her slave within it;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>The clergy said the Mass in vain,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>The College could not save me:</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>But life, she swears, returned again</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>With the first kiss she gave me.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Hardly, if at all, could he have kept up this attitude towards life
+after he had come to forty year; and he might have become either a
+merely intelligent and respectable person, which is most probable, or an
+elderly youth, which is of all things<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">{402}</a></span> most detestable, or a
+caterwauler, or a cynic, or a preacher. From all these fates the gods
+mercifully saved him, and he abides with us (the presentation being but
+slightly marred by the injudicious prodigality of his editors) only as
+the poet of Medora's musical despair lest Araminta should derogate, of
+the Abbot's nightmare sufferings at the hands of the Red Fisherman, of
+the plaintive appeal after much lively gossip&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And you'll come&mdash;won't you come?&mdash;to our Ball,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>of all the pleasures, and the jests, and the tastes, and the studies,
+and the woes, provided only they are healthy and manly, of Twenty-five.
+Unhappy is the person of whom it can be said that he neither has been,
+is, nor ever will be in the temper and circumstances of which Praed's
+verse is the exact and consummate expression; not much less unhappy he
+for whom that verse does not perform the best perhaps of all the offices
+of literature, and call up, it may be in happier guise than that in
+which they once really existed, the many beloved shadows of the past.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403">{403}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIII" id="XIII"></a>XIII<br />
+<br />
+GEORGE BORROW</h2>
+
+
+<p>In this paper I do not undertake to throw any new light on the
+little-known life of the author of <i>Lavengro</i>. Among the few people who
+knew Borrow intimately, surely some one will soon be found who will give
+to the world an account of his curious life, and perhaps some specimens
+of those "mountains of manuscript" which, as he regretfully declares,
+never could find a publisher&mdash;an impossibility which, if I may be
+permitted to offer an opinion, does not reflect any great credit on
+publishers. For the present purpose it is sufficient to sum up the
+generally-known facts that Borrow was born in 1803 at East Dereham in
+Norfolk, his father being a captain in the army, who came of Cornish
+blood, his mother a lady of Norfolk birth and Huguenot extraction. His
+youth he has himself described in a fashion which nobody is likely to
+care to paraphrase. After the years of travel chronicled in <i>Lavengro</i>,
+he seems to have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404">{404}</a></span> found scope for his philological and adventurous
+tendencies in the rather unlikely service of the Bible Society; and he
+sojourned in Russia and Spain to the great advantage of English
+literature. This occupied him during the greater part of the years from
+1830 to 1840. Then he came back to his native country&mdash;or, at any rate,
+his native district&mdash;married a widow of some property at Lowestoft, and
+spent the last forty years of his life at Oulton Hall, near the piece of
+water which is thronged in summer by all manner of sportsmen and others.
+He died but a few years ago; and even since his death he seems to have
+lacked the due meed of praise which the Lord Chief Justice of the equal
+foot usually brings, even to persons far less deserving than Borrow.</p>
+
+<p>There is this difficulty in writing about him, that the audience must
+necessarily consist of fervent devotees on the one hand, and of complete
+infidels, or at least complete know-nothings, on the other. To any one
+who, having the faculty to understand either, has read <i>Lavengro</i> or
+<i>The Bible in Spain</i>, or even <i>Wild Wales</i>, praise bestowed on Borrow is
+apt to seem impertinence. To anybody else (and unfortunately the anybody
+else is in a large majority) praise bestowed on Borrow is apt to look
+like that very dubious kind of praise which is bestowed on somebody of
+whom no one but the praiser has ever heard. I cannot think of any single
+writer (Peacock himself<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">{405}</a></span> is not an exception) who is in quite parallel
+case. And, as usual, there is a certain excuse for the general public.
+Borrow kept himself, during not the least exciting period of English
+history, quite aloof from English politics, and from the life of great
+English cities. But he did more than this. He is the only really
+considerable writer of his time in any modern European nation who seems
+to have taken absolutely no interest in current events, literary and
+other. Putting a very few allusions aside, he might have belonged to
+almost any period. His political idiosyncrasy will be noticed presently;
+but he, who lived through the whole period from Waterloo to Maiwand, has
+not, as far as I remember, mentioned a single English writer later than
+Scott and Byron. He saw the rise, and, in some instances, the death, of
+Tennyson, Thackeray, Macaulay, Carlyle, Dickens. There is not a
+reference to any one of them in his works. He saw political changes such
+as no man for two centuries had seen, and (except the Corn Laws, to
+which he has some half-ironical allusions, and the Ecclesiastical Titles
+Bill, which stirred his one active sentiment) he has referred to never a
+one. He seems in some singular fashion to have stood outside of all
+these things. His Spanish travels are dated for us by references to Doña
+Isabel and Don Carlos, to Mr. Villiers and Lord Palmerston. But cut
+these dates out, and they might be travels of the last century. His
+Welsh book proclaims<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">{406}</a></span> itself as written in the full course of the
+Crimean War; but excise a few passages which bear directly on that
+event, and the most ingenious critic would be puzzled to "place" the
+composition. Shakespeare, we know, was for all time, not of one age
+only; but I think we may say of Borrow, without too severely or
+conceitedly marking the difference, that he was not of or for any
+particular age or time at all. If the celebrated query in Longfellow's
+<i>Hyperion</i>, "What is time?" had been addressed to him, his most
+appropriate answer, and one which he was quite capable of giving, would
+have been, "I really don't know."</p>
+
+<p>To this singular historical vagueness has to be added a critical
+vagueness even greater. I am sorry that I am unable to confirm or to
+gainsay at first hand Borrow's wonderfully high estimate of certain
+Welsh poets. But if the originals are anything like his translations of
+them, I do not think that Ab Gwilym and Lewis Glyn Cothi, Gronwy Owen
+and Huw Morris can have been quite such mighty bards as he makes out.
+Fortunately, however, a better test presents itself. In one book of his,
+<i>Wild Wales</i>, there are two estimates of Scott's works. Borrow finds in
+an inn a copy of <i>Woodstock</i> (which he calls by its less known title of
+<i>The Cavalier</i>), and decides that it is "trashy": chiefly, it would
+appear, because the portrait therein contained of Harrison, for whom
+Borrow seems, on one of his inscrutable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">{407}</a></span> principles of prejudice, to
+have had a liking, is not wholly favourable. He afterwards informs us
+that Scott's "Norman Horseshoe" (no very exquisite song at the best, and
+among Scott's somewhat less than exquisite) is "one of the most stirring
+lyrics of modern times," and that he sang it for a whole evening;
+evidently because it recounts a defeat of the Normans, whom Borrow, as
+he elsewhere tells us in sundry places, disliked for reasons more or
+less similar to those which made him like Harrison, the butcher. In
+other words, he could not judge a work of literature as literature at
+all. If it expressed sentiments with which he agreed, or called up
+associations which were pleasant to him, good luck to it; if it
+expressed sentiments with which he did not agree, and called up no
+pleasant associations, bad luck.</p>
+
+<p>In politics and religion this curious and very John Bullish unreason is
+still more apparent. I suppose Borrow may be called, though he does not
+call himself, a Tory. He certainly was an unfriend to Whiggery, and a
+hater of Radicalism. He seems to have given up even the Corn Laws with a
+certain amount of regret, and his general attitude is quite Eldonian.
+But he combined with his general Toryism very curious Radicalisms of
+detail, such as are to be found in Cobbett (who, as appeared at last,
+and as all reasonable men should have always known, was really a Tory of
+a peculiar type), and in several other English persons. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">{408}</a></span> Church, the
+Monarchy, and the Constitution generally were dear to Borrow, but he
+hated all the aristocracy (except those whom he knew personally) and
+most of the gentry. Also, he had the odd Radical sympathy for anybody
+who, as the vernacular has it, was "kept out of his rights." I do not
+know, but I should think, that Borrow was a strong Tichbornite. In that
+curious book <i>Wild Wales</i>, where almost more of his real character
+appears than in any other, he has to do with the Crimean War. It was
+going on during the whole time of his tour, and he once or twice reports
+conversations in which, from his knowledge of Russia, he demonstrated
+beforehand to Welsh inquirers how improbable, not to say impossible, it
+was that the Russian should be beaten. But the thing that seems really
+to have interested him most was the case of Lieutenant P&mdash;&mdash; or
+Lieutenant Parry, whom he sometimes refers to in the fuller and
+sometimes in the less explicit manner. My own memories of 1854 are
+rather indistinct, and I confess that I have not taken the trouble to
+look up this celebrated case. As far as I can remember, and as far as
+Borrow's references here and elsewhere go, it was the doubtless
+lamentable but not uncommon case of a man who is difficult to live with,
+and who has to live with others. Such cases occur at intervals in every
+mess, college, and other similar aggregation of humanity. The person
+difficult to live with gets, to use an Oxford<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409">{409}</a></span> phrase, "drawn." If he is
+reformable he takes the lesson, and very likely becomes excellent
+friends with those who "drew" him. If he is not, he loses his temper,
+and evil results of one kind or another follow. Borrow's Lieutenant
+P&mdash;&mdash; seems unluckily to have been of the latter kind, and was, if I
+mistake not, recommended by the authorities to withdraw from a situation
+which, to him, was evidently a false and unsuitable one. With this
+Borrow could not away. He gravely chronicles the fact of his reading an
+"excellent article in a local paper on the case of Lieutenant P&mdash;&mdash;";
+and with no less gravity (though he was, in a certain way, one of the
+first humorists of our day) he suggests that the complaints of the
+martyred P&mdash;&mdash; to the Almighty were probably not unconnected with our
+Crimean disasters. This curious parochialism pursues him into more
+purely religious matters. I do not know any other really great man of
+letters of the last three-quarters of a century of whose attitude
+Carlyle's famous words, "regarding God's universe as a larger patrimony
+of Saint Peter, from which it were well and pleasant to hunt the Pope,"
+are so literally true. It was not in Borrow's case a case of <i>sancta
+simplicitas</i>. He has at times flashes of by no means orthodox sentiment,
+and seems to have fought, and perhaps hardly won, many a battle against
+the army of the doubters. But when it comes to the Pope, he is as
+single-minded an enthusiast as John Bunyan<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410">{410}</a></span> himself, whom, by the way,
+he resembles in more than one point. The attitude was, of course, common
+enough among his contemporaries; indeed any man who has reached middle
+life must remember numerous examples among his own friends and kindred.
+But in literature, and such literature as Borrow's, it is rare.</p>
+
+<p>Yet again, the curiously piecemeal, and the curiously arbitrary
+character of Borrow's literary studies in languages other than his own,
+is noteworthy in so great a linguist. The entire range of French
+literature, old as well as new, he seems to have ignored altogether&mdash;I
+should imagine out of pure John Bullishness. He has very few references
+to German, though he was a good German scholar&mdash;a fact which I account
+for by the other fact, that in his earlier literary period German was
+fashionable, and that he never would have anything to do with anything
+that fashion favoured. Italian, though he certainly knew it well, is
+equally slighted. His education, if not his taste for languages, must
+have made him a tolerable (he never could have been an exact) classical
+scholar. But it is clear that insolent Greece and haughty Rome possessed
+no attraction for him. I question whether even Spanish would not have
+been too common a toy to attract him much, if it had not been for the
+accidental circumstances which connected him with Spain.</p>
+
+<p>Lastly (for I love to get my devil's advocate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411">{411}</a></span> work over), in Borrow's
+varied and strangely attractive gallery of portraits and characters,
+most observers must perceive the absence of the note of passion. I have
+sometimes tried to think that miraculous episode of Isopel Berners and
+the Armenian verbs, with the whole sojourn of Lavengro in the dingle, a
+mere wayward piece of irony&mdash;a kind of conscious ascetic myth. But I am
+afraid the interpretation will not do. The subsequent conversation with
+Ursula Petulengro under the hedge might be only a companion piece; even
+the more wonderful, though much less interesting, dialogue with the
+Irish girl in the last chapters of <i>Wild Wales</i> might be so rendered by
+a hardy exegete. But the negative evidence in all the books is too
+strong. It may be taken as positively certain that Borrow never was "in
+love," as the phrase is, and that he had hardly the remotest conception
+of what being in love means. It is possible that he was a most cleanly
+liver&mdash;it is possible that he was quite the reverse: I have not the
+slightest information either way. But that he never in all his life
+heard with understanding the refrain of the "Pervigilium,"</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit eras amet,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>I take as certain.</p>
+
+<p>The foregoing remarks have, I think, summed up all Borrow's defects, and
+it will be observed that even these defects have for the most part the
+attraction of a certain strangeness and oddity. If<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412">{412}</a></span> they had not been
+accompanied by great and peculiar merits, he would not have emerged from
+the category of the merely bizarre, where he might have been left
+without further attention. But, as a matter of fact, all, or almost all,
+of his defects are not only counterbalanced by merits, but are
+themselves, in a great degree, exaggerations or perversions of what is
+intrinsically meritorious. With less wilfulness, with more attention to
+the literature, the events, the personages of his own time, with a more
+critical and common-sense attitude towards his own crotchets, Borrow
+could hardly have wrought out for himself (as he has to an extent hardly
+paralleled by any other prose writer who has not deliberately chosen
+supernatural or fantastic themes) the region of fantasy, neither too
+real nor too historical, which Joubert thought proper to the poet.
+Strong and vivid as Borrow's drawing of places and persons is, he always
+contrives to throw in touches which somehow give the whole the air of
+being rather a vision than a fact. Never was such a John-a-Dreams as
+this solid, pugilistic John Bull. Part of this literary effect of his is
+due to his quaint habit of avoiding, where he can, the mention of proper
+names. The description, for instance, of Old Sarum and Salisbury itself
+in <i>Lavengro</i> is sufficient to identify them to the most careless
+reader, even if the name of Stonehenge had not occurred on the page
+before; but they are not named. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413">{413}</a></span> description of Bettws-y-Coed in
+<i>Wild Wales</i>, though less poetical, is equally vivid. Yet here it would
+be quite possible for a reader, who did not know the place and its
+relation to other named places, to pass without any idea of the actual
+spot. It is the same with his frequent references to his beloved city of
+Norwich, and his less frequent references to his later home at Oulton. A
+paraphrase, an innuendo, a word to the wise he delights in, but anything
+perfectly clear and precise he abhors. And by this means and others,
+which it might be tedious to trace out too closely, he succeeds in
+throwing the same cloudy vagueness over times as well as places and
+persons. A famous passage&mdash;perhaps the best known, and not far from the
+best he ever wrote&mdash;about Byron's funeral, fixes, of course, the date of
+the wondrous facts or fictions recorded in <i>Lavengro</i> to a nicety. Yet
+who, as he reads it and its sequel (for the separation of <i>Lavengro</i> and
+<i>The Romany Rye</i> is merely arbitrary, though the second book is, as a
+whole, less interesting than the former), ever thinks of what was
+actually going on in the very positive and prosaic England of 1824-25?
+The later chapters of <i>Lavengro</i> are the only modern <i>Roman d'Aventures</i>
+that I know. The hero goes "overthwart and endlong," just like the
+figures whom all readers know in Malory, and some in his originals. I do
+not know that it would be more surprising if Borrow had found Sir<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414">{414}</a></span> Ozana
+dying at the chapel in Lyonesse, or had seen the full function of the
+Grail, though I fear he would have protested against that as popish.
+Without any apparent art, certainly without the elaborate apparatus
+which most prose tellers of fantastic tales use, and generally fail in
+using, Borrow spirits his readers at once away from mere reality. If his
+events are frequently as odd as a dream, they are always as perfectly
+commonplace and real for the moment as the events of a dream are&mdash;a
+little fact which the above-mentioned tellers of the above-mentioned
+fantastic stories are too apt to forget. It is in this natural romantic
+gift that Borrow's greatest charm lies. But it is accompanied and nearly
+equalled, both in quality and in degree, by a faculty for dialogue.
+Except Defoe and Dumas, I cannot think of any novelists who contrive to
+tell a story in dialogue and to keep up the ball of conversation so well
+as Borrow; while he is considerably the superior of both in pure style
+and in the literary quality of his talk. Borrow's humour, though it is
+of the general class of the older English&mdash;that is to say, the
+pre-Addisonian&mdash;humorists, is a species quite by itself. It is rather
+narrow in range, a little garrulous, busied very often about curiously
+small matters, but wonderfully observant and true, and possessing a
+quaint dry savour as individual as that of some wines. A characteristic
+of this kind probably accompanies the romantic <i>ethos</i> more commonly
+than superficial judges both<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415">{415}</a></span> of life and literature are apt to suppose;
+but the conjunction is nowhere seen better than in Borrow. Whether
+humour can or cannot exist without a disposition to satire co-existing,
+is one of those abstract points of criticism for which the public of the
+present day has little appetite. It is certain (and that is what chiefly
+concerns us for the present) that the two were not dissociated in
+Borrow. His purely satirical faculty was very strong indeed, and
+probably if he had lived a less retired life it would have found fuller
+exercise. At present the most remarkable instance of it which exists is
+the inimitable portrait-caricature of the learned Unitarian, generally
+known as "Taylor of Norwich." I have somewhere (I think it was in Miss
+Martineau's <i>Autobiography</i>) seen this reflected on as a flagrant
+instance of ingratitude and ill-nature. The good Harriet, among whose
+numerous gifts nature had not included any great sense of humour,
+naturally did not perceive the artistic justification of the sketch,
+which I do not hesitate to call one of the most masterly things of the
+kind in literature.</p>
+
+<p>Another Taylor, the well-known French baron of that name, is much more
+mildly treated, though with little less skill of portraiture. As for
+"the publisher" of <i>Lavengro</i>, the portrait there, though very clever,
+is spoilt by rather too much evidence of personal animus, and by the
+absence of redeeming strokes; but it shows the same satiric<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416">{416}</a></span> power as
+the sketch of the worthy student of German who has had the singular
+ill-fortune to have his books quizzed by Carlyle, and himself quizzed by
+Borrow. It is a strong evidence of Borrow's abstraction from general
+society that with this satiric gift, and evidently with a total freedom
+from scruple as to its application, he should have left hardly anything
+else of the kind. It is indeed impossible to ascertain how much of the
+abundant character-drawing in his four chief books (all of which, be it
+remembered, are autobiographic and professedly historical) is fact and
+how much fancy. It is almost impossible to open them anywhere without
+coming upon personal sketches, more or less elaborate, in which the
+satiric touch is rarely wanting. The official admirer of "the grand
+Baintham" at remote Corcubion, the end of all the European world; the
+treasure-seeker, Benedict Mol; the priest at Cordova, with his
+revelations about the Holy Office; the Gibraltar Jew; are only a few
+figures out of the abundant gallery of <i>The Bible in Spain</i>. <i>Lavengro</i>,
+besides the capital and full-length portraits above referred to, is
+crowded with others hardly inferior, among which only one failure, the
+disguised priest with the mysterious name, is to be found. Not that even
+he has not good strokes and plenty of them, but that Borrow's prejudices
+prevented his hand from being free. But Jasper Petulengro, and Mrs.
+Hearne, and the girl Leonora, and Isopel, that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417">{417}</a></span> vigorous and slighted
+maid, and dozens of minor figures, of whom more presently, atone for
+him. <i>The Romany Rye</i> adds only minor figures to the gallery, because
+the major figures have appeared before; while the plan and subject of
+<i>Wild Wales</i> also exclude anything more than vignettes. But what
+admirable vignettes they are, and how constantly bitten in with satiric
+spirit, all lovers of Borrow know.</p>
+
+<p>It is, however, perhaps time to give some more exact account of the
+books thus familiarly and curiously referred to; for Borrow most
+assuredly is not a popular writer. Not long before his death <i>Lavengro</i>,
+<i>The Romany Rye</i>, and <i>Wild Wales</i> were only in their third edition,
+though the first was nearly thirty, and the last nearly twenty, years
+old. <i>The Bible in Spain</i> had, at any rate in its earlier days, a wider
+sale, but I do not think that even that is very generally known. I
+should doubt whether the total number sold, during some fifty years, of
+volumes surpassed in interest of incident, style, character and
+description by few books of the century, has equalled the sale, within
+any one of the last few years, of a fairly popular book by any fairly
+popular novelist of to-day. And there is not the obstacle to Borrow's
+popularity that there is to that of some other writers, notably the
+already-mentioned author of <i>Crotchet Castle</i>. No extensive literary
+cultivation is necessary to read him. A good deal even of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418">{418}</a></span> his peculiar
+charm may be missed by a prosaic or inattentive reader, and yet enough
+will remain. But he has probably paid the penalty of originality, which
+allows itself to be mastered by quaintness, and which refuses to meet
+public taste at least half-way. It is certainly difficult at times to
+know what to make of Borrow. And the general public, perhaps excusably,
+is apt not to like things or persons when it does not know what to make
+of them.</p>
+
+<p>Borrow's literary work, even putting aside the "mountains of manuscript"
+which he speaks of as unpublished, was not inconsiderable. There were,
+in the first place, his translations, which, though no doubt not without
+value, do not much concern us here. There is, secondly, his early
+hackwork, his <i>Chaines de l'Esclavage</i>, which also may be neglected.
+Thirdly, there are his philological speculations or compilations, the
+chief of which is, I believe, his <i>Romano-Lavo-Lil</i>, the latest
+published of his works. But Borrow, though an extraordinary linguist,
+was a somewhat unchastened philologer, and the results of his life-long
+philological studies appear to much better advantage from the literary
+than from the scientific point of view. Then there is <i>The Gypsies in
+Spain</i>, a very interesting book of its kind, marked throughout with
+Borrow's characteristics, but for literary purposes merged to a great
+extent in <i>The Bible in Spain</i>. And, lastly, there are the four original
+books,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_419" id="Page_419">{419}</a></span> as they may be called, which, at great leisure, and writing
+simply because he chose to write, Borrow produced during the twenty
+years of his middle age. He was in his fortieth year when, in 1842, he
+published <i>The Bible in Spain</i>. <i>Lavengro</i> came nearly ten years later,
+and coincided with (no doubt it was partially stimulated by) the ferment
+over the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. Its second part, <i>The Romany Rye</i>,
+did not appear till six afterwards, that is to say, in 1857, and its
+resuscitation of quarrels, which the country had quite forgotten (and
+when it remembered them was rather ashamed of), must be pronounced
+unfortunate. Last, in 1862, came <i>Wild Wales</i>, the characteristically
+belated record of a tour in the principality during the year of the
+Crimean War. On these four books Borrow's literary fame rests. His other
+works are interesting because they were written by the author of these,
+or because of their subjects, or because of the effect they had on other
+men of letters, notably Longfellow and Mérimée, on the latter of whom
+Borrow had an especially remarkable influence. These four are
+interesting of themselves.</p>
+
+<p>The earliest has been, I believe, and for reasons quite apart from its
+biblical subject perhaps deserves to be, the greatest general favourite,
+though its literary value is a good deal below that of <i>Lavengro</i>. <i>The
+Bible in Spain</i> records the journeys, which, as an agent of the Bible
+Society,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_420" id="Page_420">{420}</a></span> Borrow took through the Peninsula at a singularly interesting
+time, the disturbed years of the early reign of Isabel Segunda. Navarre
+and Aragon, with Catalonia, Valencia, and Murcia, he seems to have left
+entirely unvisited; I suppose because of the Carlists. Nor did he
+attempt the southern part of Portugal; but Castile and Leon, with the
+north of Portugal and the south of Spain, he quartered in the most
+interesting manner, riding everywhere with his servant and his
+saddle-bag of Testaments at, I should suppose, a considerable cost to
+the subscribers of the Society and at, it may be hoped, some gain to the
+propagation of evangelical principles in the Peninsula, but certainly
+with the results of extreme satisfaction to himself and of a very
+delightful addition to English literature. He was actually imprisoned at
+Madrid, and was frequently in danger from Carlists, and brigands, and
+severely orthodox ecclesiastics. It is possible to imagine a more
+ideally perfect missionary; but it is hardly possible to imagine a more
+ideally perfect traveller. His early habits of roughing it, his gipsy
+initiation, his faculties as a linguist, and his other faculties as a
+born vagrant, certain to fall on his feet anywhere, were all called into
+operation. But he might have had all these advantages and yet lacked the
+extraordinary literary talent which the book reveals. In the first
+chapter there is a certain stiffness; but the passage of the Tagus in
+the second must have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_421" id="Page_421">{421}</a></span> told every competent reader in 1842 that he had to
+deal with somebody quite different from the run of common writers, and
+thenceforward the book never flags till the end. How far the story is
+rigidly historical I should be very sorry to have to decide. The author
+makes a kind of apology in his preface for the amount of fact which has
+been supplied from memory. I daresay the memory was quite trustworthy,
+and certainly adventures are to the adventurous. We have had daring
+travellers enough during the last half-century, but I do not know that
+any one has ever had quite such a romantic experience as Borrow's ride
+across the Hispano-Portuguese frontier with a gipsy <i>contrabandista</i>,
+who was at the time a very particular object of police inquiry. I
+daresay the interests of the Bible Society required the adventurous
+journey to the wilds of Finisterra. But I feel that if that association
+had been a mere mundane company and Borrow its agent, troublesome
+shareholders might have asked awkward questions at the annual meeting.
+Still, this sceptical attitude is only part of the official duty of the
+critic, just as, of course, Borrow's adventurous journeys into the most
+remote and interesting parts of Spain were part of the duty of the
+colporteur. The book is so delightful that, except when duty calls, no
+one would willingly take any exception to any part or feature of it. The
+constant change of scene, the romantic episodes of adventure, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_422" id="Page_422">{422}</a></span>
+kaleidoscope of characters, the crisp dialogue, the quaint reflection
+and comment relieve each other without a break. I do not know whether it
+is really true to Spain and Spanish life, and, to tell the exact truth,
+I do not in the least care. If it is not Spanish it is remarkably human
+and remarkably literary, and those are the chief and principal things.</p>
+
+<p><i>Lavengro</i>, which followed, has all the merits of its predecessor and
+more. It is a little spoilt in its later chapters by the purpose, the
+antipapal purpose, which appears still more fully in <i>The Romany Rye</i>.
+But the strong and singular individuality of its flavour as a whole
+would have been more than sufficient to carry off a greater fault. There
+are, I should suppose, few books the successive pictures of which leave
+such an impression on the reader who is prepared to receive that
+impression. The word picture is here rightly used, for in all Borrow's
+books more or less, and in this particularly, the narrative is anything
+but continuous. It is a succession of dissolving views which grow clear
+and distinct for a time and then fade off into vagueness before once
+more appearing distinctly; nor has this mode of dealing with a subject
+ever been more successfully applied than in <i>Lavengro</i>. At the same time
+the mode is one singularly difficult of treatment by any reviewer. To
+describe <i>Lavengro</i> with any chance of distinctness to those who have
+not read it, it would be necessary to give a series<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_423" id="Page_423">{423}</a></span> of sketches in
+words, like those famous ones of the pictures in <i>Jane Eyre</i>. East
+Dereham, the Viper Collector, the French Prisoners at Norman Cross, the
+Gipsy Encampment, the Sojourn in Edinburgh (with a passing view of
+Scotch schoolboys only inferior, as everything is, to Sir Walter's
+history of Green-breeks), the Irish Sojourn (with the horse whispering
+and the "dog of peace,") the settlement in Norwich (with Borrow's
+compulsory legal studies and his very uncompulsory excursions into
+Italian, Hebrew, Welsh, Scandinavian, anything that obviously would not
+pay), the new meeting with the gipsies in the Castle Field, the
+fight&mdash;only the first of many excellent fights&mdash;these are but a few of
+the memories which rise to every reader of even the early chapters of
+this extraordinary book, and they do not cover its first hundred pages
+in the common edition. Then his father dies and the born vagrant is set
+loose for vagrancy. He goes to London, with a stock of translations
+which is to make him famous, and a recommendation from Taylor of Norwich
+to "the publisher." The publisher exacted something more than his pound
+of flesh in the form of Newgate Lives and review articles, and paid,
+when he did pay, in bills of uncertain date which were very likely to be
+protested. But Borrow won through it all, making odd acquaintances with
+a young man of fashion (his least lifelike sketch); with an apple-seller
+on London Bridge, who was something of a "fence"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_424" id="Page_424">{424}</a></span> and had erected Moll
+Flanders (surely the oddest patroness ever so selected) into a kind of
+patron saint; with a mysterious Armenian merchant of vast wealth, whom
+the young man, according to his own account, finally put on a kind of
+filibustering expedition against both the Sublime Porte and the White
+Czar, for the restoration of Armenian independence. At last, out of
+health with perpetual work and low living, out of employ, his friends
+beyond call, he sees destruction before him, writes <i>The Life and
+Adventures of Joseph Sell</i> (name of fortunate omen!) almost at a heat
+and on a capital, fixed and floating, of eighteen-pence, and disposes of
+it for twenty pounds by the special providence of the Muses. With this
+twenty pounds his journey into the blue distance begins. He travels,
+partly by coach, to somewhere near Salisbury, and gives the first of the
+curiously unfavourable portraits of stage coachmen, which remain to
+check Dickens's rose-coloured representations of Mr. Weller and his
+brethren. I incline to think that Borrow's was likely to be the truer
+picture. According to him, the average stage coachman was anything but
+an amiable character, greedy, insolent to all but persons of wealth and
+rank, a hanger-on of those who might claim either; bruiser enough to be
+a bully but not enough to be anything more; in short, one of the worst
+products of civilisation. From civilisation itself, however, Borrow soon
+disappears, as far as any traceable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_425" id="Page_425">{425}</a></span> signs go. He journeys, not farther
+west but northwards, into the West Midlands and the marches of Wales. He
+buys a tinker's beat and fit-out from a feeble vessel of the craft, who
+has been expelled by "the Flaming Tinman," a half-gipsy of robustious
+behaviour. He is met by old Mrs. Hearne, the mother-in-law of his gipsy
+friend Jasper Petulengro, who resents a Gorgio's initiation in gipsy
+ways, and very nearly poisons him by the wily aid of her grand-daughter
+Leonora. He recovers, thanks to a Welsh travelling preacher and to
+castor oil. And then, when the Welshman has left him, comes the climax
+and turning-point of the whole story, the great fight with Jem Bosvile,
+"the Flaming Tinman." The much-abused adjective Homeric belongs in sober
+strictness to this immortal battle, which has the additional interest
+not thought of by Homer (for goddesses do not count) that Borrow's
+second and guardian angel is a young woman of great attractions and
+severe morality, Miss Isopel (or Belle) Berners, whose extraction,
+allowing for the bar sinister, is honourable, and who, her hands being
+fully able to keep her head, has sojourned without ill fortune in the
+Flaming Tinman's very disreputable company. Bosvile, vanquished by pluck
+and good fortune rather than strength, flees the place with his wife.
+Isopel remains behind and the couple take up their joint residence, a
+residence of perfect propriety, in this dingle, the exact locality of
+which I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_426" id="Page_426">{426}</a></span> have always longed to know, that I might make an autumnal
+pilgrimage to it. Isopel, Brynhild as she is, would apparently have had
+no objection to be honourably wooed. But her eccentric companion
+confines himself to teaching her "I love" in Armenian, which she finds
+unsatisfactory; and she at last departs, leaving a letter which tells
+Mr. Borrow some home truths. And, even before this catastrophe has been
+reached, <i>Lavengro</i> itself ends with a more startling abruptness than
+perhaps any nominally complete book before or since.</p>
+
+<p>It would be a little interesting to know whether the continuation, <i>The
+Romany Rye</i>, which opens as if there had been no break whatever, was
+written continuously or with a break. At any rate its opening chapters
+contain the finish of the lamentable history of Belle Berners, which
+must induce every reader of sensibility to trust that Borrow, in writing
+it, was only indulging in his very considerable faculty of perverse
+romancing. The chief argument to the contrary is, that surely no man,
+however imbued with romantic perversity, would have made himself cut so
+poor a figure as Borrow here does without cause. The gipsies reappear to
+save the situation, and a kind of minor Belle Berners drama is played
+out with Ursula, Jasper's sister. Then the story takes another of its
+abrupt turns. Jasper, half in generosity it would appear, half in
+waywardness, insists on Borrow purchasing a thorough-bred horse which is
+for sale, advances<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_427" id="Page_427">{427}</a></span> the money, and despatches him across England to
+Horncastle Fair to sell it. The usual Le Sagelike adventures occur, the
+oddest of them being the hero's residence for some considerable time as
+clerk and storekeeper at a great roadside inn. At last he reaches
+Horncastle, and sells the horse to advantage. Then the story closes as
+abruptly and mysteriously almost as that of <i>Lavengro</i>, with a long and
+in parts, it must be confessed, rather dull conversation between the
+hero, the Hungarian who has bought the horse, and the dealer who has
+acted as go-between. This dealer, in honour of Borrow, of whom he has
+heard through the gipsies, executes the wasteful and very meaningless
+ceremony of throwing two bottles of old rose champagne, at a guinea
+apiece, through the window. Even this is too dramatic a finale for
+Borrow's unconquerable singularity, and he adds a short dialogue between
+himself and a recruiting sergeant. And after this again there comes an
+appendix containing an <i>apologia</i> for <i>Lavengro</i>, a great deal more
+polemic against Romanism, some historical views of more originality than
+exactness, and a diatribe against gentility, Scotchmen, Scott, and other
+black beasts of Borrow's. This appendix has received from some professed
+admirers of the author a great deal more attention than it deserves. In
+the first place, it was evidently written in a fit of personal pique; in
+the second, it is chiefly argumentative, and Borrow had absolutely no
+argumentative<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_428" id="Page_428">{428}</a></span> faculty. To say that it contains a great deal of quaint
+and piquant writing is only to say that its writer wrote it, and though
+the description of "Charlie-over-the-waterism" probably does not apply
+to any being who ever lived, except to a few school-girls of both sexes,
+it has a strong infusion of Borrow's satiric gift. As for the diatribes
+against gentility, Borrow has only done very clumsily what Thackeray had
+done long before without clumsiness. It can escape nobody who has read
+his books with a seeing eye that he was himself exceedingly proud, not
+merely of being a gentleman in the ethical sense, but of being one in
+the sense of station and extraction&mdash;as, by the way, the decriers of
+British snobbishness usually are, so that no special blame attaches to
+Borrow for the inconsistency. Only let it be understood, once for all,
+that to describe him as "the apostle of the ungenteel" is either to
+speak in riddles or quite to misunderstand his real merits and
+abilities.</p>
+
+<p>I believe that some of the small but fierce tribe of Borrovians are
+inclined to resent the putting of the last of this remarkable series,
+<i>Wild Wales</i>, on a level with the other three. With such I can by no
+means agree. <i>Wild Wales</i> has not, of course, the charm of unfamiliar
+scenery and the freshness of youthful impression which distinguish <i>The
+Bible in Spain</i>; it does not attempt anything like the novel-interest of
+<i>Lavengro</i> and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_429" id="Page_429">{429}</a></span> <i>The Romany Rye</i>; and though, as has been pointed out
+above, something of Borrow's secret and mysterious way of indicating
+places survives, it is a pretty distinct itinerary over great part of
+the actual principality. I have followed most of its tracks on foot
+myself, and nobody who wants a Welsh guide-book can take a pleasanter
+one, though he might easily find one much less erratic. It may thus
+have, to superficial observers, a positive and prosaic flavour as
+compared with the romantic character of the other three. But this
+distinction is not real. The tones are a little subdued, as was likely
+to be the case with an elderly gentleman of fifty, travelling with his
+wife and stepdaughter, and not publishing the record of his travels till
+he was nearly ten years older. The localities are traceable on the map
+and in Murray, instead of being the enchanted dingles and the
+half-mythical woods of <i>Lavengro</i>. The personages of the former books
+return no more, though, with one of his most excellent touches of art,
+the author has suggested the contrast of youth and age by a single gipsy
+interview in one of the later chapters. Borrow, like all sensible men,
+was at no time indifferent to good food and drink, especially good ale;
+but the trencher plays in <i>Wild Wales</i> a part, the importance of which
+may perhaps have shocked some of our latter-day delicates, to whom
+strong beer is a word of loathing, and who wonder how on earth our
+grandfathers and fathers used to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_430" id="Page_430">{430}</a></span> dispose of "black strap." A very
+different set of readers may be repelled by the strong literary colour
+of the book, which is almost a Welsh anthology in parts. But those few
+who can boast themselves to find the whole of a book, not merely its
+parts, and to judge that whole when found, will be not least fond of
+<i>Wild Wales</i>. If they have, as every reader of Borrow should have, the
+spirit of the roads upon them, and are never more happy than when
+journeying on "Shanks his mare," they will, of course, have in addition
+a peculiar and personal love for it. It is, despite the interludes of
+literary history, as full of Borrow's peculiar conversational gift as
+any of its predecessors. Its thumbnail sketches, if somewhat more
+subdued and less elaborate, are not less full of character. John Jones,
+the Dissenting weaver, who served Borrow at once as a guide and a
+whetstone of Welsh in the neighbourhood of Llangollen; the "kenfigenous"
+Welshwoman who first, but by no means last, exhibited the curious local
+jealousy of a Welsh-speaking Englishman; the doctor and the Italian
+barometer-seller at Cerrig-y-Druidion; the "best Pridydd of the world"
+in Anglesey, with his unlucky addiction to beer and flattery; the waiter
+at Bala; the "ecclesiastical cat" (a cat worthy to rank with those of
+Southey and Gautier); the characters of the walk across the hills from
+Machynlleth to the Devil's Bridge; the scene at the public-house on the
+Glamorgan Border,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_431" id="Page_431">{431}</a></span> where the above-mentioned jealousy comes out so
+strongly; the mad Irishwoman, Johanna Colgan (a masterpiece by herself);
+and the Irish girl, with her hardly inferior history of the
+faction-fights of Scotland Road (which Borrow, by a mistake, has put in
+Manchester instead of in Liverpool); these make a list which I have
+written down merely as they occurred to me, without opening the book,
+and without prejudice to another list, nearly as long, which might be
+added. <i>Wild Wales</i>, too, because of its easy and direct opportunity of
+comparing its description with the originals, is particularly valuable
+as showing how sober, and yet how forcible, Borrow's descriptions are.
+As to incident, one often, as before, suspects him of romancing, and it
+stands to reason that his dialogue, written long after the event, must
+be full of the "cocked-hat-and-cane" style of narrative. But his
+description, while it has all the vividness, has also all the
+faithfulness and sobriety of the best landscape-painting. See a place
+which Kingsley or Mr. Ruskin, or some other master of our decorative
+school, has described&mdash;much more one which has fallen into the hands of
+the small fry of their imitators&mdash;and you are almost sure to find that
+it has been overdone. This is never, or hardly ever, the case with
+Borrow, and it is so rare a merit, when it is found in a man who does
+not shirk description where necessary, that it deserves to be counted to
+him at no grudging rate.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_432" id="Page_432">{432}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But there is no doubt that the distinguishing feature of the book is its
+survey of Welsh poetical literature. I have already confessed that I am
+not qualified to judge the accuracy of Borrow's translations, and by no
+means disposed to over-value them. But any one who takes an interest in
+literature at all, must, I think, feel that interest not a little
+excited by the curious Old-Mortality-like peregrinations which the
+author of <i>Wild Wales</i> made to the birth-place, or the burial-place as
+it might be, of bard after bard, and by the short but masterly accounts
+which he gives of the objects of his search. Of none of the numerous
+subjects of his linguistic rovings does Borrow seem to have been fonder,
+putting Romany aside, than of Welsh. He learnt it in a peculiarly
+contraband manner originally, which, no doubt, endeared it to him; it
+was little known to and often ridiculed by most Englishmen, which was
+another attraction; and it was extremely unlikely to "pay" in any way,
+which was a third. Perhaps he was not such an adept in it as he would
+have us believe&mdash;the respected Cymmrodorion Society or Professor Rhys
+must settle that. But it needs no knowledge of Welsh whatever to
+perceive the genuine enthusiasm, and the genuine range of his
+acquaintance with the language from the purely literary side. When he
+tells us that Ab Gwilym was a greater poet than Ovid or Chaucer I feel
+considerable doubts whether he was quite competent to understand<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_433" id="Page_433">{433}</a></span> Ovid
+and little or no doubt that he has done wrong to Chaucer. But when,
+leaving these idle comparisons, he luxuriates in details about Ab Gwilym
+himself, and his poems, and his lady loves, and so forth, I have no
+doubt about Borrow's appreciation (casual prejudices always excepted) of
+literature. Nor is it easy to exaggerate the charm which he has added to
+Welsh scenery by this constant identification of it with the men, and
+the deeds, and the words of the past.</p>
+
+<p>Little has been said hitherto of Borrow's more purely literary
+characteristics from the point of view of formal criticism. They are
+sufficiently interesting. He unites with a general plainness of speech
+and writing, not unworthy of Defoe or Cobbett, a very odd and
+complicated mannerism, which, as he had the wisdom to make it the
+seasoning and not the main substance of his literary fare, is never
+disgusting. The secret of this may be, no doubt, in part sought in his
+early familiarity with a great many foreign languages, some of whose
+idioms he transplanted into English: but this is by no means the whole
+of the receipt. Perhaps it is useless to examine analytically that
+receipt's details, or rather (for the analysis may be said to be
+compulsory on any one who calls himself a critic), useless to offer its
+results to the reader. One point which can escape no one who reads with
+his eyes open is the frequent, yet not too abundant, repetition of the
+same or very similar<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_434" id="Page_434">{434}</a></span> words&mdash;a point wherein much of the secret of
+persons so dissimilar as Carlyle, Borrow, and Thackeray consists. This
+is a well-known fact&mdash;so well known indeed that when a person who
+desires to acquire style hears of it, he often goes and does likewise,
+with what result all reviewers know. The peculiarity of Borrow, as far
+as I can mark it, is that, despite his strong mannerism, he never relies
+on it as too many others, great and small, are wont to do. The character
+sketches, of which, as I have said, he is so abundant a master, are
+always put in the plainest and simplest English. So are his flashes of
+ethical reflection, which, though like all ethical reflections often
+one-sided, are of the first order of insight. I really do not know that,
+in the mint-and-anise-and-cummin order of criticism, I have more than
+one charge to make against Borrow. That is that he, like other persons
+of his own and the immediately preceding time, is wont to make a most
+absurd misuse of the word individual. With Borrow "individual" means
+simply "person": a piece of literary gentility of which he, of all
+others, ought to have been ashamed.</p>
+
+<p>But such criticism has but very little propriety in the case of a
+writer, whose attraction is neither mainly nor in any very great degree
+one of pure form. His early critics compared him to Le Sage, and the
+comparison is natural. But if it is natural, it is not extraordinarily
+critical. Both men wrote of vagabonds, and to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_435" id="Page_435">{435}</a></span> some extent of picaroons;
+both neglected the conventionalities of their own language and
+literature; both had a singular knowledge of human nature. But Le Sage
+is one of the most impersonal of all great writers, and Borrow is one of
+the most personal. And it is undoubtedly in the revelation of his
+personality that great part of his charm lies. It is, as has been fully
+acknowledged, a one-sided, wrong-headed, not always quite right-hearted
+personality. But it is intensely English, possessing at the same time a
+certain strain of romance which the other John Bulls of literature
+mostly lack, and which John Bunyan, the king of them all, only reached
+within the limits, still more limited than Borrow's, of purely
+religious, if not purely ecclesiastical, interests. A born grumbler; a
+person with an intense appetite for the good things of this life;
+profoundly impressed with, and at the same time sceptically critical of,
+the bad or good things of another life; apt, as he somewhere says
+himself, "to hit people when he is not pleased"; illogical; constantly
+right in general, despite his extremely roundabout ways of reaching his
+conclusion; sometimes absurd, and yet full of humour; alternately
+prosaic and capable of the highest poetry; George Borrow, Cornishman on
+the father's side and Huguenot on the mother's, managed to display in
+perfection most of the characteristics of what once was, and let us hope
+has not quite ceased to be, the English<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_436" id="Page_436">{436}</a></span> type. If he had a slight
+overdose of Celtic blood and Celtic peculiarity, it was more than made
+up by the readiness of literary expression which it gave him. He, if any
+one, bore an English heart, though, as there often has been in
+Englishmen, there was something perhaps more as well as something less
+than English in his fashion of expression.</p>
+
+<p>To conclude, Borrow has&mdash;what after all is the chief mark of a great
+writer&mdash;distinction. "Try to be like somebody," said the unlucky
+critic-bookseller to Lamartine; and he has been gibbeted for it, very
+justly, for the best part of a century. It must be admitted that "try
+not to be like other people," though a much more fashionable, is likely
+to be quite as disastrous a recommendation. But the great writers,
+whether they try to be like other people or try not to be like them (and
+sometimes in the first case most of all), succeed only in being
+themselves, and that is what Borrow does. His attraction is rather
+complex, and different parts of it may, and no doubt do, apply with
+differing force to this and that reader. One may be fascinated by his
+pictures of an unconventional and open-air life, the very possibilities
+of which are to a great extent lost in our days, though patches of
+ground here and there in England (notably the tracts of open ground
+between Cromer and Wells in Borrow's own county) still recall them. To
+others he may be attractive for his sturdy patriotism, or his
+adventurous and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_437" id="Page_437">{437}</a></span> wayward spirit, or his glimpses of superstition and
+romance. The racy downrightness of his talk; the axioms, such as that to
+the Welsh alewife, "The goodness of ale depends less upon who brews it
+than upon what it is brewed of"; or the sarcastic touches as that of the
+dapper shopkeeper, who, regarding the funeral of Byron, observed, "I,
+too, am frequently unhappy," may each and all have their votaries. His
+literary devotion to literature would, perhaps, of itself attract few;
+for, as has been hinted, it partook very much of the character of
+will-worship, and there are few people who like any will-worship in
+letters except their own; but it adds to his general attraction, no
+doubt, in the case of many. That neither it, nor any other of his
+claims, has yet forced itself as it should on the general public is an
+undoubted fact; a fact not difficult to understand, though rather
+difficult fully to explain, at least without some air of superior
+knowingness and taste. Yet he has, as has been said, his devotees, and I
+think they are likely rather to increase than to decrease. He wants
+editing, for his allusive fashion of writing probably makes a great part
+of him nearly unintelligible to those who have not from their youth up
+devoted themselves to the acquisition of useless knowledge. There ought
+to be a good life of him. The great mass of his translations, published
+and unpublished, and the smaller mass of his early hackwork, no<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_438" id="Page_438">{438}</a></span> doubt
+deserve judicious excerption. If professed philologers were not even
+more ready than most other specialists each to excommunicate all the
+others except himself and his own particular Johnny Dods of Farthing's
+Acre, it would be rather interesting to hear what some modern men of
+many languages have to say to Borrow's linguistic achievements. But all
+these things are only desirable embellishments and assistances. His real
+claims and his real attractions are comprised in four small volumes, the
+purchase of which, under modern arrangements of booksellers, leaves some
+change out of a sovereign, and which will about half fill the ordinary
+bag used for briefs and dynamite. It is not a large literary baggage,
+and it does not attempt any very varied literary kinds. If not exactly a
+novelist in any one of his books, Borrow is a romancer, in the true and
+not the ironic sense of the word, in all of them. He has not been
+approached in merit by any romancer who has published books in our days,
+except Charles Kingsley; and his work, if less varied in range and charm
+than Kingsley's, has a much stronger and more concentrated flavour.
+Moreover, he is the one English writer of our time, and perhaps of times
+still farther back, who seems never to have tried to be anything but
+himself; who went his own way all his life long with complete
+indifference to what the public or the publishers liked, as well as to
+what canons of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_439" id="Page_439">{439}</a></span> literary form and standards of literary perfection
+seemed to indicate as best worth aiming at. A most self-sufficient
+person was Borrow, in the good and ancient sense, as well as, to some
+extent, in the sense which is bad and modern. And what is more, he was
+not only a self-sufficient person, but is very sufficient also to the
+tastes of all those who love good English and good literature.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_440" id="Page_440">{440}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="APPENDIX_A" id="APPENDIX_A"></a>APPENDIX A<br />
+<br />
+DE QUINCEY</h2>
+
+
+<p>A short time after the publication of my essay on De Quincey I learnt,
+to my great concern, that it had given offence to his daughter Florence,
+the widow of one of the heroes of the Indian Mutiny, Colonel Baird
+Smith. Mrs. Baird Smith complained, in a letter to the newspapers, that
+I had accused her father of untruthfulness, and requested the public to
+suspend their judgment until the publication of certain new documents,
+in the form of letters, which had been discovered. I might have replied,
+if my intent had been hostile, that little fault could be justly found
+with a critic of the existing evidence if new evidence were required to
+confute him. But as the very last intention that I had in writing the
+paper was to impute anything that can be properly called untruthfulness
+to De Quincey, I thought it better to say so and to wait for the further
+documents. In a subsequent private correspondence with Mrs. Baird Smith,
+I found that what had offended her (her complaints being at first quite
+general) was certain remarks on De Quincey's aristocratic acquaintances
+as appearing in the <i>Autobiography</i> and "not heard of afterwards,"
+certain comments on the Malay incident and others like it, some on the
+mystery of her father's money affairs, and the passage on his general
+"impenetrability." The matter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_441" id="Page_441">{441}</a></span> is an instance of the difficulty of
+dealing with recent reputations, when the commentator gives his name.
+Some really unkind things have been said of De Quincey; my intention was
+not to say anything unkind at all, but simply to give an account of the
+thing "as it strikes" if not "a contemporary" yet a well-willing junior.
+Take for instance the Malay incident. We know from De Quincey himself
+that, within a few years, the truth of this famous story was questioned,
+and that he was accused of having borrowed it from something of Hogg's.
+He disclaimed this, no doubt truly. He protested that it was a
+faithfully recorded incident: but though the events were then fresh, he
+did not produce a single witness to prove that any Malay had been near
+Grasmere at the time. And so elsewhere. As I have remarked about Borrow,
+there are some people who have a knack of recounting truth so that it
+looks as if it never had been true. I have been informed by Mr. James
+Runciman that he himself once made considerable inquiries on the track
+of <i>Lavengro</i>, and found that that remarkable book is, to some extent at
+any rate, apparently historic. On the other hand I have been told by
+another Borrovian who knew Borrow (which I never did) that the <i>Life of
+Joseph Sell</i> never existed. In such cases a critic can only go on
+internal evidence, and I am sure that the vast majority of critics would
+decide against most of De Quincey's stories on that. I do not suppose
+that he ever, like Lamb, deliberately begat "lie-children": but
+opium-eating is not absolutely repugnant to delusion, and literary
+mystification was not so much the exception as the rule in his earlier
+time. As to his "impenetrability," I can only throw myself on the
+readers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_442" id="Page_442">{442}</a></span> of such memoirs and reminiscences as have been published
+respecting him. The almost unanimous verdict of his acquaintances and
+critics has been that he was in a way mysterious, and though no doubt
+this mystery did not extend to his children, it seems to have extended
+to almost every one else. I gather from Mrs. Baird Smith's own remarks
+that from first to last all who were concerned with him treated him as a
+person unfit to be trusted with money, and while his habit of solitary
+lodging is doubtless capable of a certain amount of explanation, it
+cannot be described as other than curious. I had never intended to throw
+doubt on his actual acquaintance with Lord Westport or Lady Carbery.
+These persons or their representatives were alive when the
+<i>Autobiography</i> was published, and would no doubt have protested if De
+Quincey had not spoken truly. But I must still hold that their total
+disappearance from his subsequent life is peculiar. Some other points,
+such as his mentioning Wilson as his "only intimate male friend" are
+textually cited from himself, and if I seem to have spoken harshly of
+his early treatment by his family I may surely shelter myself behind the
+touching incident, recorded in the biographies, of his crying on his
+deathbed, "My dear mother! then I was greatly mistaken." If this does
+not prove that he himself had entertained on the subject ideas which,
+whether false or true, were unfavourable, then it is purely meaningless.</p>
+
+<p>In conclusion, I have only to repeat my regret that I should, by a
+perhaps thoughtless forgetfulness of the feelings of survivors, have
+hurt those feelings. But I think I am entitled to say that the view of
+De Quincey's character and cast of thought given in the text, while
+imputing nothing discreditable in intention, is founded<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_443" id="Page_443">{443}</a></span> on the whole
+published work and all the biographical evidence then accessible to me,
+and will not be materially altered by anything since published or likely
+to be so in future. The world, though often not quite right, is never
+quite wrong about a man, and it would be almost impossible that it
+should be wrong in face of such autobiographic details as are furnished,
+not merely by the <i>Autobiography</i> itself, but by a mass of notes spread
+over seven years in composition and full of personal idiosyncrasy. I not
+only acquit De Quincey of all serious moral delinquency,&mdash;I declare
+distinctly that no imputation of it was ever intended. It is quite
+possible that some of his biographers and of those who knew him may have
+exaggerated his peculiarities, less possible I think that those
+peculiarities should not have existed. But the matter, except for my own
+regret at having offended De Quincey's daughter, will have been a happy
+one if it results in a systematic publication of his letters, which,
+from the specimens already printed, must be very characteristic and very
+interesting. In almost all cases a considerable collection of letters is
+the most effective, and especially the most truth-telling, of all
+possible "lives." No letters indeed are likely to increase the literary
+repute of the author of the <i>Confessions</i> and of the <i>Cæsars</i>; but they
+may very well clear up and fill in the hitherto rather fragmentary and
+conjectural notion of his character, and they may, on the other hand,
+confirm that idea of both which, however false it may seem to his
+children, and others who were united to him by ties of affection, has
+commended itself to careful students of his published works.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_444" id="Page_444">{444}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="APPENDIX_B" id="APPENDIX_B"></a>APPENDIX B<br />
+<br />
+LOCKHART</h2>
+
+
+<p>The most singular instance of the floating dislike to Lockhart's memory,
+to which I have more than once referred in the text, occurred
+subsequently to the original publication of my essay, and not very long
+ago, when my friend Mr. Louis Stevenson thought proper to call Lockhart
+a "cad." This extraordinary <i>obiter dictum</i> provoked, as might have been
+expected, not a few protests, but I do not remember that Mr. Stevenson
+rejoined, and I have not myself had any opportunity of learning from him
+what he meant. I can only suppose that the ebullition must have been
+prompted by one of two things, the old scandal about the duel in which
+John Scott the editor of the <i>London</i> was shot, and a newer one, which
+was first bruited abroad, I think, in Mr. Sidney Colvin's book on Keats.
+Both of these, and especially the first, may be worth a little
+discussion.</p>
+
+<p>I do not think that any one who examines Mr. Colvin's allegation, will
+think it very damaging. It comes to this, that Keats's friend Bailey met
+Lockhart in the house of Bishop Greig at Stirling, told him some
+particulars about Keats, extracted from him a promise that he would not
+use them against the poet, and afterwards thought he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_445" id="Page_445">{445}</a></span> recognised some of
+the details in the <i>Blackwood</i> attack which ranks next to the famous
+<i>Quarterly</i> article. Here it is to be observed, first, that there is no
+sufficient evidence that Lockhart wrote this <i>Blackwood</i> article;
+secondly, that it is by no means certain that if he did, he was making,
+or considered himself to be making, any improper use of what he had
+heard; thirdly, that for the actual interview and its tenor we have only
+a vague <i>ex parte</i> statement made long after date.</p>
+
+<p>The other matter is much more important, and as the duel itself has been
+mentioned more than once or twice in the foregoing pages, and as it is
+to this day being frequently referred to in what seems to me an entirely
+erroneous manner, with occasional implications that Lockhart showed the
+white feather, it may be well to give a sketch of what actually
+happened, as far as can be made out from the most trustworthy accounts,
+published and unpublished.</p>
+
+<p>One of Lockhart's signatures in <i>Blackwood</i>&mdash;a signature which, however,
+like others, was not, I believe, peculiar to him&mdash;was "Zeta," and this
+Zeta assailed the Cockney school in a sufficiently scorpion-like manner.
+Thereupon Scott's magazine, the <i>London</i>, retorted, attacking Lockhart
+by name. On this Lockhart set out for London and, with a certain young
+Scotch barrister named Christie as his second, challenged Scott. But
+Scott refused to fight, unless Lockhart would deny that he was editor of
+<i>Blackwood</i>. Lockhart declared that Scott had no right to ask this, and
+stigmatised him as a coward. He then published a statement, sending at
+the same time<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_446" id="Page_446">{446}</a></span> a copy to Scott. In the published form the denial of
+editorship was made, in the one sent to Scott it was omitted. Thereupon
+Scott called Lockhart a liar. Of this Lockhart took no notice, but
+Christie his second did, and, an altercation taking place between them,
+Scott challenged Christie and they went out, Scott's second being Mr. P.
+G. Patmore, Christie's Mr. Traill, afterwards well known as a London
+police magistrate. Christie fired in the air, Scott fired at Christie
+and missed. Thereupon Mr. Patmore demanded a second shot, which, I am
+informed, could and should, by all laws of the duello, have been
+refused. Both principal and second on the other side were, however,
+inexperienced and probably unwilling to baulk their adversaries. Shots
+were again exchanged, Christie this time (as he can hardly be blamed for
+doing) taking aim at his adversary and wounding him mortally. Patmore
+fled the country, Christie and Traill took their trial and were
+acquitted.</p>
+
+<p>I have elsewhere remarked that this deplorable result is said to have
+been brought on by errors of judgment on the part of more than one
+person. Hazlitt, himself no duellist and even accused of personal
+timidity, is said to have egged on Scott, and to have stung him by some
+remark of his bitter tongue into challenging Christie, and there is no
+doubt that Patmore's conduct was most reprehensible. But we are here
+concerned with Lockhart, not with them. As far as I understand the
+imputations made on him, he is charged either with want of
+straightforwardness in omitting part of his explanation in the copy sent
+to Scott, or with cowardice in taking no<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_447" id="Page_447">{447}</a></span> notice of Scott's subsequent
+lie direct, or with both. Let us examine this.</p>
+
+<p>At first sight the incident of what, from the most notorious action of
+Lord Clive, we may call the "red and white treaties" seems odd. But it
+is to be observed, first, that Lockhart could not be said to conceal
+from Scott what he published to all the world; secondly, that his
+conduct was perfectly consistent throughout. He had challenged Scott,
+who had declined to go out. Having offered his adversary satisfaction,
+he was not bound to let him take it with a proviso, or to satisfy his
+private inquisitiveness. But if not under menace, but considering Scott
+after his refusal as unworthy the notice of a gentleman, and not further
+to be taken into account, he chose to inform the public of the truth, he
+had a perfect right to do so. And it is hardly necessary to say that it
+was the truth that he was not editor of <i>Blackwood</i>.</p>
+
+<p>This consideration will also account for his conduct in not renewing his
+challenge after Scott's offensive words. He had offered the man
+satisfaction and had been refused. No one is bound to go on challenging
+a reluctant adversary. At all times Lockhart seems to have been
+perfectly ready to back his opinion, as may be seen from a long affair
+which had happened earlier, in connection with the "Baron Lauerwinkel"
+matter. There he had promptly come forward and in his own name
+challenged the anonymous author of a pamphlet bearing the title of
+"Hypocrisy Unveiled." The anonym had, like Scott, shirked, and had
+maintained his anonymity. (Lord Cockburn says it was an open secret, but
+I do not know who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_448" id="Page_448">{448}</a></span> he was.) Thereupon Lockhart took no further notice,
+just as he did in the later matter, and I do not believe that a court of
+honour in any country would find fault with him. At any rate, I think
+that we are entitled to know, much more definitely than I have ever seen
+it stated, what the charge against him is. We may indeed blame him in
+both these matters, and perhaps in others, for neglecting the sound rule
+that anonymous writing should never be personal. If he did this,
+however, he is in the same box with almost every writer for the press in
+his own generation, and with too many in this. I maintain that in each
+case he promptly gave the guarantee which the honour of his time
+required, and which is perhaps the only possible guarantee, that of
+being ready to answer in person for what he had written impersonally.
+This was all he could do, and he did it.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_449" id="Page_449">{449}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a>INDEX</h2>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Allen, Thomas, <a href="#Page_113">113</a></li>
+
+<li>Arnold, Matthew, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_378">378</a></li>
+
+<li>Austen, Jane, <a href="#Page_29">29</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li><i>Blackwood's Magazine</i>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a> <i>sqq.</i>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a> <i>sqq.</i>, <a href="#Page_343">343</a> <i>sqq.</i></li>
+
+<li>Borrow, George, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>-<a href="#Page_439">439</a>;</li>
+<li><ul><li>  his life, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>, <a href="#Page_404">404</a>;</li>
+<li>  his excessive oddity, <a href="#Page_404">404</a>-<a href="#Page_411">411</a>;</li>
+<li>  his satiric and character-drawing faculty, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>-<a href="#Page_417">417</a>;</li>
+<li>  sketches of his books, <a href="#Page_417">417</a>-<a href="#Page_433">433</a>;</li>
+<li>  his general literary character, <a href="#Page_433">433</a>-<a href="#Page_439">439</a></li></ul></li>
+
+
+<li>Brougham, Lord, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a></li>
+
+<li>Burke, Edmund, <a href="#Page_10">10</a> <i>sqq.</i></li>
+
+<li>Burns, Robert, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_353">353</a></li>
+
+<li>Byron, Lord, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_393">393</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Canning, George, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_385">385</a></li>
+
+<li>Carlyle, Thomas, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>-<a href="#Page_272">272</a>, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>, <a href="#Page_370">370</a></li>
+
+<li>Coleridge, S. T., <a href="#Page_141">141</a></li>
+
+<li>Colvin, Mr. Sidney, <a href="#Page_445">445</a></li>
+
+<li>Courthope, Mr. W. J., <a href="#Page_4">4</a></li>
+
+<li>Crabbe, George, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>-<a href="#Page_32">32</a>;</li>
+<li><ul><li>  the decline of his popularity, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>-<a href="#Page_5">5</a>;</li>
+<li>  sketch of his life, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>-<a href="#Page_12">12</a>;</li>
+<li>  his works and their characteristics, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>-<a href="#Page_20">20</a>;</li>
+<li>  their prosaic element, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>-<a href="#Page_25">25</a>;</li>
+<li>  was he a poet?, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>-<a href="#Page_32">32</a></li></ul></li>
+
+
+<li>Cunningham, Allan, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Dante, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>, <a href="#Page_231">231</a></li>
+
+<li>Douglas, Scott, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_353">353</a></li>
+
+<li>Dryden, John, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Fitzgerald, Edward (translator of Omar Khayyám), <a href="#Page_4">4</a></li>
+
+<li>Flaubert, Gustave, <a href="#Page_19">19</a></li>
+
+<li><i>Fraser's Magazine</i>, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>, <a href="#Page_360">360</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Gifford, William, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Hannay, Mr. David, <a href="#Page_350">350</a></li>
+
+<li>Hazlitt, William, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>-<a href="#Page_169">169</a>;</li>
+<li><ul><li>  differing estimates of him, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>-<a href="#Page_140">140</a>;</li>
+<li>  his life, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>-<a href="#Page_146">146</a>;</li>
+<li>  his works, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>-<a href="#Page_169">169</a></li>
+<li>  &mdash;&mdash;<a href="#Page_xxi">xxi</a>, <a href="#Page_xxii">xxii</a>, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a></li></ul></li>
+
+
+<li>Hogg, James, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>-<a href="#Page_66">66</a>;</li>
+<li><ul><li>  his special interest, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>;</li>
+<li>  his life, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>-<a href="#Page_37">37</a>;</li>
+<li>  anecdotes and estimates of him, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>-<a href="#Page_47">47</a>;</li>
+<li>  his poems, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>-<a href="#Page_54">54</a>;</li>
+<li>  his general prose, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>;</li>
+<li>  <i>The Confessions of a Sinner</i>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>-<a href="#Page_64">64</a></li></ul></li>
+
+
+<li>Hood and Praed, <a href="#Page_397">397</a>-<a href="#Page_399">399</a></li>
+
+<li>Hook, Theodore, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>-<a href="#Page_359">359</a></li>
+
+<li>Howells, Mr. W. D., <a href="#Page_xvii">xvii</a></li>
+
+<li>Hunt, Leigh, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>-<a href="#Page_233">233</a>;</li>
+<li><ul><li>  scattered condition of his work, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>-<a href="#Page_203">203</a>;</li>
+<li>  his life, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>-<a href="#Page_213">213</a>;</li>
+<li>  the "Skimpole" matter, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>-<a href="#Page_216">216</a>;</li>
+<li>  his vulgarity, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>-<a href="#Page_219">219</a>;</li>
+<li>  his poems, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>-<a href="#Page_223">223</a>;</li>
+<li>  his critical and miscellaneous work, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>-<a href="#Page_233">233</a></li></ul></li></ul>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_450" id="Page_450">{450}</a></span></p>
+
+<ul><li>Jeffrey, Francis, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>-<a href="#Page_134">134</a>;</li>
+<li><ul><li>  a critic pure and simple, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>;</li>
+<li>  his life, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>-<a href="#Page_114">114</a>;</li>
+<li>  the foundation of the <i>Edinburgh Review</i>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>-<a href="#Page_109">109</a>;</li>
+<li>  his criticism, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a></li>
+<li>  &mdash;&mdash;<a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a></li></ul></li>
+
+
+<li>Johnson, Samuel, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a></li>
+
+<li>Joubert, Joseph, <a href="#Page_26">26</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Lang, Mr. Andrew, <a href="#Page_xxii">xxii</a></li>
+
+<li>Lockhart, John Gibson, <a href="#Page_339">339</a>-<a href="#Page_373">373</a>, and <a href="#APPENDIX_B">Appendix B</a>;</li>
+<li><ul><li>  his literary fate, <a href="#Page_339">339</a>-<a href="#Page_341">341</a>;</li>
+<li>  his life, <a href="#Page_341">341</a>-<a href="#Page_346">346</a>, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>-<a href="#Page_361">361</a>;</li>
+<li>  <i>The Chaldee MS.</i> and <i>Peter's Letters</i>, <a href="#Page_343">343</a>-<a href="#Page_345">345</a>;</li>
+<li>  the novels, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>-<a href="#Page_349">349</a>;</li>
+<li>  the poems, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>-<a href="#Page_351">351</a>;</li>
+<li>  <i>Life of Burns</i>, <a href="#Page_353">353</a>;</li>
+<li>  <i>Life of Scott</i>, <a href="#Page_354">354</a>-<a href="#Page_356">356</a>;</li>
+<li>  <i>Life of Hook</i>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>-<a href="#Page_359">359</a>;</li>
+<li>  his editorship of the <i>Quarterly</i> and his criticism generally, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>-<a href="#Page_373">373</a>;</li>
+<li>  charges against him, <a href="#Page_445">445</a>-<a href="#Page_448">448</a></li>
+<li>  &mdash;&mdash;<a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>-<a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a></li></ul></li></ul>
+
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Macaulay, Lord, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>, <a href="#Page_384">384</a></li>
+
+<li>Maguire, W., <a href="#Page_279">279</a>, <a href="#Page_360">360</a></li>
+<li> [Transcriber's Note: The alternative form of Maguire, Maginn, is used in
+ the main body of the text.]</li>
+
+<li>Masson, Professor, <a href="#Page_305">305</a> <i>sqq.</i></li>
+
+<li>Moore, Thomas, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>-<a href="#Page_200">200</a>;</li>
+<li><ul><li>  a French critic on him, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>-<a href="#Page_172">172</a>;</li>
+<li>  his miscellaneous work, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>-<a href="#Page_174">174</a>;</li>
+<li>  his life, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>-<a href="#Page_183">183</a>;</li>
+<li>  his character, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>-<a href="#Page_185">185</a>;</li>
+<li>  survey of his poetry, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>-<a href="#Page_200">200</a></li>
+<li>  &mdash;&mdash;<a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.</li></ul></li>
+
+
+<li>Morley, Mr. John, <a href="#Page_27">27</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Newman, Cardinal, <a href="#Page_4">4</a></li>
+
+<li>North, Christopher. <i>See</i> Wilson, John</li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Peacock, Thomas Love, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>-<a href="#Page_269">269</a>;</li>
+<li><ul><li>  his literary position, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>;</li>
+<li>  his life, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>-<a href="#Page_239">239</a>;</li>
+<li>  some difficulties in him, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>-<a href="#Page_242">242</a>;</li>
+<li>  survey of his work, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>-<a href="#Page_259">259</a>;</li>
+<li>  its special characteristics, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>-<a href="#Page_269">269</a></li></ul></li>
+
+
+<li>Pope, Alexander, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a></li>
+
+<li>Praed, W. M., <a href="#Page_374">374</a>-<a href="#Page_402">402</a>;</li>
+<li><ul><li>  editions of him, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>-<a href="#Page_376">376</a>;</li>
+<li>  his life, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>-<a href="#Page_381">381</a>;</li>
+<li>  his early writings, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>-<a href="#Page_384">384</a>;</li>
+<li>  his poetical work, <a href="#Page_385">385</a>-<a href="#Page_398">398</a>;</li>
+<li>  Hood and Praed, <a href="#Page_397">397</a>-<a href="#Page_399">399</a>;</li>
+<li>  his special charm, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>-<a href="#Page_402">402</a></li></ul></li></ul>
+
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Quincey, Thomas de, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>-<a href="#Page_338">338</a>, and <a href="#APPENDIX_A">Appendix A</a>;</li>
+<li><ul><li>  editions of him, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>-<a href="#Page_309">309</a>;</li>
+<li>  his life, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>-<a href="#Page_314">314</a>;</li>
+<li>  his faculty of rigmarole, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>-<a href="#Page_321">321</a>;</li>
+<li>  defects and merits of his work, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>-<a href="#Page_338">338</a></li>
+<li>  &mdash;&mdash;<a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_282">282</a></li></ul></li></ul>
+
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Rogers, Samuel, <a href="#Page_12">12</a> <i><a href="#Footnote_5_5">note</a></i></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Scott, John, his duel and death, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>; <a href="#APPENDIX_B">Appendix B</a></li>
+
+<li>Scott, Sir Walter, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>-<a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>, <a href="#Page_354">354</a>-<a href="#Page_359">359</a>, <a href="#Page_406">406</a>, <a href="#Page_407">407</a></li>
+
+<li>Shelley, P. B., <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>-<a href="#Page_250">250</a></li>
+
+<li>Smith, Bobus, <a href="#Page_69">69</a></li>
+
+<li>Smith, Mr. Goldwin, <a href="#Page_xi">xi</a>, <a href="#Page_xiv">xiv</a></li>
+
+<li>Smith, Sydney, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>-<a href="#Page_99">99</a>;</li>
+<li><ul><li>  the beneficence of his biographers, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>-<a href="#Page_69">69</a>;</li>
+<li>  his life, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>-<a href="#Page_80">80</a>;</li>
+<li>  his letters, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>-<a href="#Page_84">84</a>;</li>
+<li>  his published work, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>-<a href="#Page_99">99</a></li></ul></li>
+
+
+<li>Staël, Madame de, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a></li>
+
+<li>Stephen, Mr. Leslie, <a href="#Page_4">4</a></li>
+
+<li>Stevenson, Mr. R. L., <a href="#Page_445">445</a></li>
+
+<li>Sully, Mr. James, <a href="#Page_xxvii">xxvii</a> <i><a href="#Footnote_1_1">note</a></i></li>
+
+<li>Swift, Jonathan, Jeffrey on, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Tennyson, Lord, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>, <a href="#Page_365">365</a>, <a href="#Page_366">366</a></li>
+
+<li>Thackeray, W. M., on Hazlitt, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_451" id="Page_451">{451}</a></span></li>
+
+<li>Thomson, James, <a href="#Page_27">27</a></li>
+
+<li>Thurlow, Lord, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>-<a href="#Page_12">12</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Vallat, M. Jules, <a href="#Page_171">171</a> <i>sqq.</i></li>
+
+<li>Veitch, Professor, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a></li>
+
+<li>Voltaire, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Walker, Sarah, <a href="#Page_139">139</a> <i>sqq.</i></li>
+
+<li>Wilson, John, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>-<a href="#Page_303">303</a>;</li>
+<li><ul><li>  Carlyle's judgment of him and another, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>-<a href="#Page_274">274</a>;</li>
+<li>  his life, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>-<a href="#Page_277">277</a>;</li>
+<li>  the <i>Noctes</i>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>-<a href="#Page_288">288</a>;</li>
+<li>  his miscellaneous work, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>-<a href="#Page_303">303</a></li></ul></li>
+
+
+<li>Wilson, John, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>-<a href="#Page_47">47</a>.</li>
+<li><ul><li>  <i>See</i> also Essays on <a href="#APPENDIX_A">De Quincey</a> and <a href="#APPENDIX_B">Lockhart</a></li></ul></li>
+
+
+<li>Wordsworth, William, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_323">323</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Young, Sir George, <a href="#Page_375">375</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>"Zeta," <a href="#Page_446">446</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+
+<p class="center">THE END</p>
+
+
+
+<p class='center'><i>Printed by <span class="smcap">R. &amp; R. Clark</span>, Edinburgh.</i></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+
+<h3>FOOTNOTES</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Only by dint of this constant comparison, can the critic
+save himself from the besetting error which makes men believe that there
+is some absolute progress in life and art, instead of, for the most
+part, mere eddyings-round in the same circle. I am tempted to glance at
+this, because of a passage which I read while this Essay was a-writing,
+a passage signed by a person whom I name altogether for the sake of
+honour, Mr. James Sully. "If we compare," says Mr. Sully, "Fielding for
+example with Balzac, Thackeray, or one of the great Russian novelists,
+we see at once what a simple toylike structure used to serve art for a
+human world. A mind versed in life as contemporary fiction depicts it,
+feels, on turning to the already antiquated forms of the eighteenth
+century, that it has to divest itself for the nonce of more than half
+its equipment of habitual thought and emotion." This might serve as text
+for a long sermon, I only cite it in passing as an interesting example
+of the <i>idola specus</i> which beset a clever man who loses the power of
+comparative vision, and sees <i>Tom Jones</i> as a toylike structure with the
+<i>Kreutzer Sonata</i> beside it as a human world.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> In 1834, after Crabbe's death, Wordsworth wrote to his son:
+"Your father's works ... will last, from their combined merit as poetry
+and truth, full as long as anything that has been expressed in verse
+since the date of their first appearance." A very different estimate by
+Wordsworth of Crabbe has been published in Mr. Clayden's <i>Rogers and his
+Contemporaries</i>. Here he argues at great length that "Crabbe's verses
+can in no sense be called poetry," and that "nineteen out of twenty of
+his pictures are mere matter of fact." It is fair to say that this was
+in 1808, before the appearance of "The Borough" and of almost all
+Crabbe's best work.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> <i>Great Writers; Crabbe</i>: by T. E. Kebbel. London, 1888.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Although constantly patronised by the Rutland family in
+successive generations, and honoured by the attentions of "Old Q." and
+others, his poems are full of growls at patrons. These cannot be mere
+echoes of Oldham and Johnson, but their exact reason is unknown. His
+son's reference to it is so extremely cautious that it has been read as
+a confession that Crabbe was prone to his cups, and quarrelsome in
+them&mdash;a signal instance of the unwisdom of not speaking out.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> Rogers told Ticknor in 1838 that "Crabbe was nearly ruined
+by grief and vexation at the conduct of his wife for above seven years,
+at the end of which time she proved to be insane." But this was long
+after her death and Crabbe's, and it is not clear that while she was
+alive Rogers knew Crabbe at all. Nor is there the slightest reason for
+attaching to the phrase "vexation at the conduct" the sense which it
+would usually have. A quatrain found after Crabbe's death wrapped round
+his wife's wedding-ring is touching, and graceful in its old-fashioned
+way.
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The ring so worn, as you behold,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So thin, so pale, is yet of gold:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The passion such it was to prove;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Worn with life's cares, love yet was love.<br /></span>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> See below, <a href="#V">Essay on Hazlitt</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> For something more, however, see the <a href="#XI">Essay on Lockhart</a>
+below.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> To speak of him in this way is not impertinence or
+familiarity. He was most generally addressed as "Mr. Sydney," and his
+references to his wife are nearly always to "Mrs. Sydney," seldom or
+never to "Mrs. Smith."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> See next <a href="#IV">Essay</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> To prevent mistakes it may be as well to say that
+Jeffrey's <i>Contributions to the Edinburgh Review</i> appeared first in four
+volumes, then in three, then in one.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> In the following remarks, reference is confined to the
+<i>Contributions to the Edinburgh Review</i>, 1 vol. London, 1853. This is
+not merely a matter of convenience; the selection having been made with
+very great care by Jeffrey himself at a time when his faculties were in
+perfect order, and including full specimens of every kind of his work.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> For some further remarks on this duel as it concerns
+Lockhart see <a href="#APPENDIX_B">Appendix</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> Since this paper was first published Mr. Alexander Ireland
+has edited a most excellent selection from Hazlitt.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> <i>Etude sur la Vie et les &OElig;uvres de Thomas Moore</i>; by
+Gustave Vallat. Paris: Rousseau. London: Asher and Co. Dublin: Hodges,
+Figgis, and Co. 1887.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> If I accepted (a rash acceptance) the challenge to name
+the three very best things in Wilson I should, I think, choose the
+famous Fairy's Funeral in the <i>Recreations</i>, the Shepherd's account of
+his recovery from illness in the <i>Noctes</i>, and, in a lighter vein, the
+picture of girls bathing in "Streams."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> See Appendix A&mdash;<a href="#APPENDIX_A">De Quincey</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> <i>The Collected Writings of Thomas de Quincey</i>; edited by
+David Masson. In fourteen volumes; Edinburgh, 1889-90.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> See Appendix B&mdash;<a href="#APPENDIX_B">Lockhart</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> 1. <i>The Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, with a Memoir
+by the Rev. Derwent Coleridge.</i> In two volumes. London, 1864. 2. <i>Essays
+by Winthrop Mackworth Praed, collected and arranged by Sir George Young,
+Bart.</i> London, 1887. 3. <i>The Political and Occasional Poems of Winthrop
+Mackworth Praed, edited, with Notes, by Sir George Young.</i> London,
+1888.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> Since I wrote this I have been reminded by my friend Mr.
+Mowbray Morris of Byron's
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I enter thy garden of roses,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Beloved and fair Haidee.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+It is not impossible that this <i>is</i> the immediate original. But Praed
+has so improved on it as to deserve a new patent.</p></div>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 30455 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #30455 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30455)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860, by 
+George Saintsbury
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860
+
+Author: George Saintsbury
+
+Release Date: November 12, 2009 [EBook #30455]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS IN ENGLISH LIT., 1780-1860 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Susan Skinner, Jonathan Ingram and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ESSAYS
+
+IN
+
+ENGLISH LITERATURE
+
+1780-1860
+
+
+BY
+
+GEORGE SAINTSBURY
+
+PERCIVAL AND CO.
+_KING STREET, COVENT GARDEN_
+
+LONDON
+
+1890
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+Of the essays in this volume, the introductory paper on "The Kinds of
+Criticism" has not before appeared in print. All the rest, with one
+exception (the Essay on Lockhart which appeared in the _National
+Review_), were originally published in _Macmillan's Magazine_. To the
+Editors and Publishers of both these periodicals I owe my best thanks
+for permission to reprint the articles. To the Editor of _Macmillan's
+Magazine_ in particular (to whom, if dedications were not somewhat in
+ill odour, I should, in memory of friendship old and new, have dedicated
+the book), I am further indebted for suggesting several of the subjects
+as well as accepting the essays. These appear in the main as they
+appeared; but I have not scrupled to alter phrase or substance where it
+seemed desirable, and I have in a few places restored passages which had
+been sacrificed to the usual exigencies of space. In two cases, those of
+Lockhart and De Quincey, I have thought it best to discuss, in a brief
+appendix, some questions which have presented themselves since the
+original publications. In consequence of these alterations and additions
+as well as for other reasons, it may be convenient to give the dates and
+places of the original appearance of each essay. They are as follows:--
+
+    Lockhart, _National Review_, Aug. 1884. Borrow, _Macmillan's
+    Magazine_, Jan. 1886. Peacock, do. April 1886. Wilson (under the
+    title of "Christopher North"), do. July 1886. Hazlitt, do. March
+    1887. Jeffrey, do. August 1887. Moore, do. March 1888. Sydney
+    Smith, do. May 1888. Praed, do. Sept. 1888. Leigh Hunt, do.
+    April 1889. Crabbe, do. June 1889. Hogg, do. Sept. 1889. De
+    Quincey, do. June 1890.
+
+The present order is chronological, following the birth-years of the
+authors discussed.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+INTRODUCTORY ESSAY--
+
+  THE KINDS OF CRITICISM                                              ix
+
+   I. CRABBE                                                           1
+
+  II. HOGG                                                            33
+
+ III. SYDNEY SMITH                                                    67
+
+  IV. JEFFREY                                                        100
+
+   V. HAZLITT                                                        135
+
+  VI. MOORE                                                          170
+
+ VII. LEIGH HUNT                                                     201
+
+VIII. PEACOCK                                                        234
+
+  IX. WILSON                                                         270
+
+   X. DE QUINCEY                                                     304
+
+  XI. LOCKHART                                                       339
+
+ XII. PRAED                                                          374
+
+XIII. BORROW                                                         403
+
+
+APPENDIX--A. DE QUINCEY                                              440
+
+          B. LOCKHART                                                444
+
+
+INDEX                                                                449
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+THE KINDS OF CRITICISM
+
+
+It is probably unnecessary, and might possibly be impertinent, to renew
+here at any length the old debate between reviewers as reviewers, and
+reviewers as authors--the debate whether the reissue of work contributed
+to periodicals is desirable or not. The plea that half the best prose
+literature of this century would be inaccessible if the practice had
+been forbidden, and the retort that anything which can pretend to keep
+company with the best literature of the century will be readily relieved
+from the objection, at once sum up the whole quarrel, and leave it
+undecided. For my own part, I think that there is a sufficient
+connection of subject in the following chapters, and I hope that there
+is a sufficient uniformity of treatment. The former point, as the least
+important, may be dismissed first. All the literature here discussed
+is--with the exception of Crabbe's earliest poems, and the late
+aftermath of Peacock and Borrow--work of one and the same period, the
+first half of the present century. The authors criticised were all
+contemporaries; with only one exception, if with one, they were all
+writing more or less busily within a single decade, that of 1820 to
+1830. And they have the further connection (which has at least the
+reality of having been present to my mind in selecting them), that while
+every one of them was a man of great literary power, hardly one has been
+by general consent, or except by private crotchet would be, put among
+the very greatest. They stand not far below, but distinctly below,
+Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats. Yet again, they
+agree in the fact that hardly one of them has yet been securely set in
+the literary niche which is his due, all having been at some time either
+unduly valued or unduly neglected, and one or two never having yet
+received even due appreciation. The greatest of all critics was accused,
+unjustly, of having a certain dislike of clear, undoubted supremacy. It
+would be far more fair to say that Sainte-Beuve had eminently, what
+perhaps all critics who are not mere carpers on the one hand, or mere
+splashers of superlatives on the other, have more or less--an affection
+for subjects possessing but qualified merit, and so giving to criticism
+a certain additional interest in the task of placing and appraising
+them.
+
+This last sentence may not meet with universal assent, but it will bring
+me conveniently to the second part of my subject. I should not have
+republished these essays if I had not thought that, whatever may be
+their faults (and a man who does not see the faults of his own writing
+on revising it a second time for the press after an interval, must be
+either a great genius or an intolerable fool), they possess a certain
+unity of critical method. Nor should I have republished them if it had
+seemed to me that this method was exactly identical with that of any
+other critic of the present day in England. I have at least endeavoured
+to wear my rue with a difference, and that not merely for the sake of
+differing.
+
+Mr. Goldwin Smith, whose work is not likely to be impeached for defect
+either in form or in substance, wrote but a few months ago, in
+melancholy mood, that the province of criticism appeared to be now
+limited to the saying of fine things. I agree with him that this is one
+vicious extreme of the popular conception of the art; but in order to
+define correctly, we cannot be contented with one only. The other, as it
+seems to me, is fixed by the notion, now warmly championed by some
+younger critics both at home and abroad, that criticism must be of all
+things "scientific." For my own part, I have gravely and strenuously
+endeavoured to ascertain from the writings both of foreign critics (the
+chief of whom was the late M. Hennequin in France), and of their
+disciples at home, what "scientific" criticism means. In no case have I
+been able to obtain any clear conception of its connotation in the
+mouths or minds of those who use the phrase. The new heaven and the new
+earth which they promise are no doubt to be very different from our own
+old earth and heaven; of that they are sure, and their sureness does not
+fail to make itself plain. But what the flora and fauna, the biology and
+geology of the new heaven and earth are to be, I have never succeeded in
+ascertaining. The country would appear to be like that Land of Ignorance
+which, as Lord Brooke says, "none can describe until he be past it."
+Only I have perceived that when this "scientific" criticism sticks
+closest to its own formulas and ways, it appears to me to be very bad
+criticism; and that when, as sometimes happens, it is good criticism,
+its ways and formulas are not perceptibly distinguishable from those of
+criticism which is not "scientific." For the rest, it is all but
+demonstrable that "scientific" literary criticism is impossible, unless
+the word "scientific" is to have its meaning very illegitimately
+altered. For the essential qualities of literature, as of all art, are
+communicated by the individual, they depend upon idiosyncrasy: and this
+makes science in any proper sense powerless. _She_ can deal only with
+classes, only with general laws; and so long as these classes are
+constantly reduced to "species of one," and these laws are set at nought
+by incalculable and singular influences, she must be constantly baffled
+and find all her elaborate plant of formulas and generalisations
+useless. Of course, there are generalisations possible in literature,
+and to such I may return presently; but scientific criticism of
+literature must always be a contradiction in terms. You may to some
+considerable extent ascertain the general laws of language, of metre, of
+music, as applied to verbal rhythm and cadence; you may classify the
+subjects which appeal to the general, and further classify their
+particular manners of appeal; you may arrange the most ingenious
+"product-of-the-circumstances" theories about race, climate, religion.
+But always sooner or later, and much more often sooner than later, the
+mocking demon of the individual, or, if a different phrase be preferred,
+the great and splendid mystery of the idiosyncrasy of the artist, will
+meet and baffle you. You will find that on the showing of this science
+falsely so called, there is no reason why Chapelain should not be a
+poet, and none why Shakespeare is. You will ask science in vain to tell
+you why some dozen or sixteen of the simplest words in language arranged
+by one man or in one fashion, why a certain number of dabs of colour
+arranged by another man or in another fashion, make a permanent addition
+to the delight of the world, while other words and other dabs of colour,
+differently arranged by others, do not. To put the matter yet otherwise,
+the whole end, aim, and object of literature and the criticism of
+literature, as of all art, and the criticism of all art, is beauty and
+the enjoyment of beauty. With beauty science has absolutely nothing to
+do.
+
+It is no doubt the sense, conscious or unconscious, of this that has
+inclined men to that other conception of criticism as a saying of fine
+things, of which Mr. Goldwin Smith complains, and which certainly has
+many votaries, in most countries at the present day. These votaries have
+their various kinds. There is the critic who simply uses his subject as
+a sort of springboard or platform, on and from which to display his
+natural grace and agility, his urbane learning, his faculty of pleasant
+wit. This is perhaps the most popular of all critics, and no age has
+ever had better examples of him than this age. There is a more serious
+kind who founds on his subject (if indeed founding be not too solemn a
+term) elaborate descants, makes it the theme of complicated variations.
+There is a third, closely allied to him, who seeks in it apparently
+first of all, and sometimes with no further aim, an opportunity for the
+display of style. And lastly (though as usual all these kinds pervade
+and melt into one another, so that, while in any individual one may
+prevail, it is rare to find an individual in whom that one is alone
+present) there is the purely impressionist critic who endeavours in his
+own way to show the impression which the subject has, or which he
+chooses to represent that it has, produced on him. This last is in a
+better case than the others; but still he, as it seems to me, misses
+the full and proper office of the critic, though he may have an
+agreeable and even useful function of his own.
+
+For the full and proper office of the critic (again as it seems to me)
+can never be discharged except by those who remember that "critic" means
+"judge." Expressions of personal liking, though they can hardly be kept
+out of criticism, are not by themselves judgment. The famous "J'aime
+mieux Alfred de Musset," though it came from a man of extraordinary
+mental power and no small specially critical ability, is not criticism.
+Mere _obiter dicta_ of any kind, though they may be most agreeable and
+even most legitimate sets-off to critical conversation, are not
+criticism. The most admirable discourses from the merely literary point
+of view on taste, Shakespeare, and the musical glasses, with some
+parenthetic reference to the matter in hand, are not criticism. There
+must be at least some attempt to take in and render the whole virtue of
+the subjects considered, some effort to compare them with their likes in
+other as well as the same languages, some endeavour to class and value
+them. And as a condition preliminary to this process, there must, I
+think, be a not inconsiderable study of widely differing periods, forms,
+manners, of literature itself. The test question, as I should put it, of
+the value of criticism is "What idea of the original would this critic
+give to a tolerably instructed person who did not know that original?"
+And again, "How far has this critic seen steadily and seen whole, the
+subject which he has set himself to consider? How far has he referred
+the main peculiarities of that subject to their proximate causes and
+effects? How far has he attempted to place, and succeeded in placing,
+the subject in the general history of literature, in the particular
+history of its own language, in the collection of authors of its own
+department?" How far, in short, has he applied what I may perhaps be
+excused for calling the comparative method in literature to the
+particular instance? I have read very famous and in their way very
+accomplished examples of literature ostensibly critical, in which few if
+any of these questions seem to have been even considered by the critic.
+He may have said many pretty things; he may have shown what a clever
+fellow he is; he may have in his own person contributed good literature
+to swell the literary sum. But has he done anything to aid the general
+grasp of that literary sum, to place his man under certain lights and in
+certain aspects, with due allowance for the possibility of other aspects
+and other lights? Very often, I think, it must be admitted that he has
+not. I should be the first to admit that my own attempts to do this are
+unsuccessful and faulty; and I only plead for them that they are such
+attempts, and that they have been made on the basis of tolerably wide
+and tolerably careful reading.
+
+For, after all, it is this reading which is the main and principal
+thing. It will not of course by itself make a critic; but few are the
+critics that will ever be made without it. We have at this moment an
+awful example of an exceedingly clever writer who has commenced critic,
+disdaining this preparation. Some of my friends jeer or comminate at Mr.
+Howells; for my part I only shudder and echo the celebrated "There, but
+for the grace of God." Here is a clever man, a very clever man, an
+excellent though of late years slightly depraved practitioner in one
+branch of art, who, suddenly and without preparation, takes to another,
+and becomes a spectacle to men and angels. I hope that we shall one day
+have a collection of Mr. Howells's critical _dicta_ on novels and other
+things; they will be one of the most valuable, one of the most terrible
+of books as showing what happens when a man speaks without knowledge. To
+read what Mr. Howells says of Mr. Thackeray is almost an illiberal
+education. The reason of the error is quite obvious. It is simply that
+the clever American does not know; he has not sufficient range of
+comparison. For my own part, I should not dare to continue criticising
+so much as a circulating library novel, if I did not perpetually pay my
+respects to the classics of many literatures: and I am not sure that I
+do not appreciate the classics of many literatures all the better from
+my not infrequent reading of circulating library novels.
+
+The only objection of validity that I have ever seen taken to what I
+have ventured to call comparative criticism, is that it proceeds too
+much, as the most learned of living French critics once observed of an
+English writer, _par cases et par compartiments_, that is to say, as I
+understand M. Brunetière, with a rather too methodical classification.
+This, however, was written some seven or eight years ago, and since then
+I have found M. Brunetière speaking about critical method as
+distinguished from the science of criticism, and insisting on the
+necessity of comparison, not less positively, and no doubt with far more
+authority, than I have done myself. Yet I half think that M. Brunetière,
+like most of us, does not practise quite up to the level of his
+preaching; and I should say that on mediæval literature, on Romantic
+literature, and on some other things, his own excellent censorship might
+be further improved by a still more catholic sympathy, and a still more
+constant habit of looking at everything and every writer in conjunction
+with their analogues and their opposites in the same and other
+literatures. This constant reference of comparison may indeed stand in
+the way of those flowing deliverances of personal opinion, in more or
+less agreeable language, which are perhaps, or rather certainly, what is
+most popular in criticism; I do not think that they will ever stand in
+the way of criticism proper. As I understand that long and difficult
+art, its end, as far as the individual is concerned, is to provide the
+mind with a sort of conspectus of literature, as a good atlas thoroughly
+conned provides a man with a conspectus of the _orbis terrarum_. To the
+man with a geographical head, the mention of a place at once suggests
+its bearings to other places, its history, its products, all its
+relations in short; to the man with a critical head, the mention of a
+book or an author should call up a similar mental picture. The picture,
+indeed, will never be as complete in the one instance as in the other,
+because the intellect and the artistic faculty of man are far vaster
+than this planet, far more diverse, far more intricately and
+perplexingly arranged than all its abundant material dispositions and
+products. The life of Methuselah and the mind of Shakespeare together
+could hardly take the whole of critical knowledge to be their joint
+province. But the area of survey may be constantly increased; the
+particularity of knowledge constantly made more minute.
+
+Another objection, more fantastic in appearance but rather attractive in
+its way, is that the comparative critic becomes too much of a universal
+lover, and too little of an enthusiast, that he has an irritating and
+ungentlemanly habit of seeing blemishes in the greatest, a pottering and
+peddling fancy for discovering beauties in the most insignificant; that
+he lacks the exclusiveness and the fastidiousness of intellectual
+aristocracy, the fervour and rapture of æsthetic passion. To this, one
+can answer little more than, "It may be so." Certainly the critic of
+this kind will very rarely be able to indulge in the _engouement_ which
+is the apparent delight of some of his class. He will deal very
+cautiously in superlatives, and his commendations, when he gives them,
+will sometimes have, to more gushing persons, the slightly ludicrous air
+which attached to the modest boast of somebody that he was "the third
+best authority in England on gray shirtings." On the other hand, the
+critic of this kind will not be able to neglect the uninteresting with
+the serene nonchalance of some of his fellows. He will sometimes have to
+look back on days and months and years of laborious reading and say to
+himself, "Were it not well for us, as others use, to take all this for
+granted?" But to say this is to say no more than that the thorough-going
+practice of any art and mystery involves a great deal of tedious,
+thankless, and even positively fruitless work, brushes away a good many
+illusions, and interferes a good deal with personal comfort. Cockaigne
+is a delightful country, and the Cockaigne of criticism is as agreeable
+as the other provinces. But none of these provinces has usually been
+accounted a wise man's paradise.
+
+It may be asked, "What is the end which you propose for this comparative
+reading? A method must lead somewhere; whither does this method lead? or
+does it lead only to statistics and classifications?" Certainly it does
+not, or at least should not. It leads, like all method, to
+generalisations which, though as I have said I do not believe that they
+have attained or ever will attain the character of science, at least
+throw no small light and interest on the study of literature as a whole,
+and of its examples as particulars. It gives, I think (speaking as a
+fool), a constantly greater power of distinguishing good work from bad
+work, by giving constantly nearer approach (though perhaps it may never
+wholly and finally attain) to the knowledge of the exact characteristics
+which distinguish the two. And the way in which it does this is by a
+constant process of weakening or strengthening, as the case may be, the
+less or more correct generalisations with which the critic starts, or
+which he forms in the early days of his reading. There has often been
+brought against some great critics the charge that their critical
+standards have altered at different times of their career. This simply
+means that they have been constantly applying the comparative method,
+and profiting by the application. After all, there are few, though there
+are some, absolute truths in criticism; and a man will often be
+relatively right in condemning, from certain aspects and in certain
+combinations, work which, under other aspects and in other combinations,
+he has been relatively quite as right in admiring. Occasionally, no
+doubt, there will be an apparent exception to the rule of critical
+development, as in the case of Hazlitt: but that remarkable exception
+does not fail to justify the rule. For in truth, Hazlitt's critical
+range was not so wide as his penetration was deep; and he avows, almost
+exultingly, that after a comparatively early time of life, he
+practically left off reading. That is to say, he carefully avoided
+renewing his plant, and he usually eschewed new material--conditions
+which, no doubt, conduce to the uniformity, and, within obvious limits,
+are not prejudicial to the excellence of the product.
+
+It is possible that the title "The Kinds of Criticism" may have excited
+in some readers expectations of the discussion of a subject which has
+not yet been handled. We have recently seen revived the sempiternal
+argument between authors and critics--an argument in which it may be as
+well to say that the present writer has not yet taken part either
+anonymously or otherwise. The authors, or some of them, have remarked
+that they have never personally benefited by criticism; and the critics,
+after their disagreeable way, have retorted that this was obvious. A
+critic of great ingenuity, my friend Mr. Andrew Lang, has, with his
+usual humour, suggested that critics and reviewers are two different
+kinds, and have nothing to do with each other essentially, though
+accidentally, and in the imperfect arrangements of the world, the
+discharge of their functions may happen to be combined in the same
+person. As a matter of practice, this is no doubt too often the case; as
+a matter of theory, nothing ought much less to be the case. I think
+that if I were dictator, one of the first non-political things that I
+should do, would be to make the order of reviewers as close a one, at
+least, as the bench of judges, or the staff of the Mint, or of any
+public establishment of a similar character. That any large amount of
+reviewing is determined by fear or favour is a general idea which has
+little more basis than a good many other general ideas. But that a very
+large amount of reviewing is determined by doubtless well-meaning
+incompetence, there is no doubt whatever. It is on the whole the most
+difficult kind of newspaper writing, and it is on the whole the most
+lightly assigned and the most irresponsibly performed. I have heard of
+newspapers where the reviews depended almost wholly on the accident of
+some of the staff taking a holiday, or being laid for a time on the
+shelf, or being considered not up to other work; of others, though this
+I own is scarcely credible, where the whole reviewing was farmed out to
+a manager, to be allotted to devils as good to him seemed; of many where
+the reviews were a sort of exercising-ground on which novices were
+trained, broken-down hacks turned out to grass, and invalids allowed a
+little gentle exercise. And I know of not a few papers and not a few
+reviewers in which and by whom, errors and accidents excepted, the best
+work possible is given to one of the most important kinds of work. Of
+common mistakes on the subject, which are not merely silly crazes, such
+as the log-rolling craze and the five-pound note craze and the like, the
+worst known to me, though it is shared by some who should know better,
+is that a specialist is the best reviewer. I do not say that he is
+always the worst; but that is about as far as my charity, informed by
+much experience, can go. Even if he has no special craze or megrim, and
+does not decide offhand that a man is hopeless because he calls Charles
+the Great Charlemagne, or _vice versâ_, he is constantly out of focus.
+The perfect reviewer would be (and the only reviewer whose reviews are
+worth reading is he who more or less approximates to this ideal) the
+Platonic or pseudo-Platonic philosopher who is "second best in
+everything," who has enough special knowledge not to miss merits or
+defects, and enough general knowledge to estimate the particular subject
+at, and not above, its relative value to the whole. There have been good
+critics who were unable to bring themselves down to the mere reading of
+ephemeral work, but I do not think they were the better for this; I am
+sure that there never was a good reviewer, even of the lowest trash, who
+was not _in posse_ or _in esse_ a good critic of the highest and most
+enduring literature. The writer of funny articles, and the "slater," and
+the intelligent _compte-rendu_ man, and the person who writes six
+columns on the general theory of poetry when he professes to review Mr.
+Apollo's last book, may do all these things well and not be good
+critics; but then all these things may be done, and done well, and yet
+not be good reviews.
+
+Whether the reviewer and the critic are valuable members of society or
+useless encumbrances, must be questions left to the decision of the
+world at large, which apparently is not in a hurry to decide either way.
+There are, no doubt, certain things that the critic, whether he be
+critic major or critic minor, Sainte-Beuve or Mr. Gall, cannot do. He
+cannot certainly, and for the present, sell or prevent the sale of a
+book. "You slated this and it has gone through twenty editions" is not a
+more uncommon remark than the other, "They slated that and you extol it
+to the skies." Both, as generally urged, rest on fallacy. In the first
+case, nothing was probably farther from the critic's intention than to
+say "this book is not popular"; the most that he intended was "this book
+is not good." In the second case, it has been discovered of late (it is
+one of the few things that we have discovered) that very rarely has any
+really good thing, even in the most famous or infamous attacks on it,
+been attacked, even with a shadow of success, for its goodness. The
+critics were severe on Byron's faults, on Keats's faults, and on the
+present Laureate's faults; they were seldom severe on their goodness,
+though they often failed to appreciate it fully.
+
+This, however, is in one sense a digression, for there is no criticism
+of contemporary work in this volume. I think, however, as I have just
+endeavoured to point out, that criticism of contemporary work and
+criticism of classics should proceed on the same lines, and I think that
+both require the same qualities and the same outfit. Nor am I certain
+that if narrow inquiry were made, some of the best criticism in all
+times and in all languages would not be found in the merest casual
+reviewing. That in all cases the critic must start from a wide
+comparative study of different languages and literatures, is the first
+position to be laid down. In the next place he must, I think, constantly
+refer back his sensations of agreement and disagreement, of liking and
+disliking, in the same comparative fashion. "Why do I like the
+_Agamemnon_ and dislike Mr. Dash's five-act tragedy?" is a question to
+be constantly put, and to be answered only by a pretty close personal
+inquiry as to what "I" really do like in the _Agamemnon_ and do dislike
+in Mr. Dash. And in answering it, it will hardly be possible to consider
+too large a number of instances of all degrees of merit, from Aeschylus
+himself to Mr. Dash himself, of all languages, of all times. Let
+Englishmen be compared with Englishmen of other times to bring out this
+set of differences, with foreigners of modern times to bring out that,
+with Greeks and Romans to bring out the other. Let poets of old days be
+compared with poets of new, classics with romantics, rhymed with
+unrhymed. Let the straitest doctrinaire criticism of men of talent like
+Boileau and simpletons like Rymer be compared with the fullest
+appreciations of Coleridge and Hazlitt, of Sainte-Beuve and Mr. Arnold.
+"Compare, always compare" is the first axiom of criticism.[1]
+
+The second, I think, is "Always make sure, as far as you possibly can,
+that what you like and dislike is the literary and not the
+extra-literary character of the matter under examination." Make sure,
+that is to say, that admiration for the author is not due to his having
+taken care that the Whig dogs or the Tory dogs shall not have the best
+of it, to his having written as a gentleman for gentlemen, or as an
+uneasy anti-aristocrat for uneasy anti-aristocrats, as a believer
+(fervent or acquiescent) in the supernatural, or as a person who lays
+it down that miracles do not happen, as an Englishman or a Frenchman, a
+classic or a romantic. Very difficult indeed is the chase and discovery
+of these enemies: for extra-literary prejudices are as cunning as winter
+hares or leaf-insects, in disguising themselves by simulating literary
+forms.
+
+Lastly, never be content without at least endeavouring to connect cause
+and effect in some way, without giving something like a reason for the
+faith that is in you. No doubt the critic will often be tempted, will
+sometimes be actually forced to say, "'J'aime mieux Alfred de Musset,'
+and there's an end of it." All the imperfect kinds, as they seem to me,
+of criticism are recommended by the fact that they are, unlike some
+other literary matter, not only easier writing but also easier reading.
+The agreeable exercises of style where adjectives meet substantives to
+whom they never thought they could possibly be introduced (as a certain
+naughty wit has it), the pleasant chatter about personal reminiscences,
+the flowers of rhetoric, the fruits of wit, may not be easy, but they
+are at any rate easier than fashioning some intelligent and intelligible
+response to the perpetual "Why?" the _quare stans_ of criticism.
+
+In the following pages, I shall no doubt be found, like other people, to
+have come very far short of my own ideal, and my own precepts. I may
+even say that I have knowingly and intentionally come short of them to
+some extent. Biographical and anecdotic detail has, I believe, much
+less to do with the real appreciation of the literary value of an author
+than is generally thought. In rare instances, it throws a light, but the
+examples in which we know practically nothing at all, as in that of
+Shakespeare, or only a few leading facts as in that of Dante, are not
+those in which criticism is least useful or least satisfactory. At the
+same time biographical and anecdotic details please most people, and if
+they are not allowed to shoulder out criticism altogether, there can be
+no harm in them. For myself, I should like to have the whole works of
+every author of merit, and I should care little to know anything
+whatever about his life; but that is a mere private opinion and possibly
+a private crotchet. Accordingly some space has been given in most of
+these Essays to a sketch of the life of the subject. Nor has it seemed
+advisable (except as a matter of necessary, but very occasional,
+digression) to argue at length upon abstract and general questions such
+as the definition of poetry, or the kinds and limits of the novel. Large
+as is the body of criticism so-called which the last hundred years have
+seen, it may be doubted whether there is even yet accumulated a
+sufficient _corpus_ of really critical discussion of individuals. If I
+have in these Essays contributed even a very little to such an
+accumulation, I shall have done that which I purposed.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Only by dint of this constant comparison, can the critic save
+himself from the besetting error which makes men believe that there is
+some absolute progress in life and art, instead of, for the most part,
+mere eddyings-round in the same circle. I am tempted to glance at this,
+because of a passage which I read while this Essay was a-writing, a
+passage signed by a person whom I name altogether for the sake of
+honour, Mr. James Sully. "If we compare," says Mr. Sully, "Fielding for
+example with Balzac, Thackeray, or one of the great Russian novelists,
+we see at once what a simple toylike structure used to serve art for a
+human world. A mind versed in life as contemporary fiction depicts it,
+feels, on turning to the already antiquated forms of the eighteenth
+century, that it has to divest itself for the nonce of more than half
+its equipment of habitual thought and emotion." This might serve as text
+for a long sermon, I only cite it in passing as an interesting example
+of the _idola specus_ which beset a clever man who loses the power of
+comparative vision, and sees _Tom Jones_ as a toylike structure with the
+_Kreutzer Sonata_ beside it as a human world.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+CRABBE
+
+
+There is a certain small class of persons in the history of literature
+the members of which possess, at least for literary students, an
+interest peculiar to themselves. They are the writers who having
+attained, not merely popular vogue, but fame as solid as fame can ever
+be, in their own day, having been praised by the praised, and having as
+far as can be seen owed this praise to none of the merely external and
+irrelevant causes--politics, religion, fashion or what not--from which
+it sometimes arises, experience in a more or less short time after their
+death the fate of being, not exactly cast down from their high place,
+but left respectfully alone in it, unvisited, unincensed, unread. Among
+these writers, over the gate of whose division of the literary Elysium
+the famous, "Who now reads Bolingbroke?" might serve as motto, the
+author of "The Village" and "Tales of the Hall" is one of the most
+remarkable. As for Crabbe's popularity in his own day there is no
+mistake about that. It was extraordinarily long, it was extremely wide,
+it included the select few as well as the vulgar, it was felt and more
+or less fully acquiesced in by persons of the most diverse tastes,
+habits, and literary standards. His was not the case, which occurs now
+and then, of a man who makes a great reputation in early life and long
+afterwards preserves it because, either by accident or prudence, he does
+not enter the lists with his younger rivals, and therefore these rivals
+can afford to show him a reverence which is at once graceful and cheap.
+Crabbe won his spurs in full eighteenth century, and might have boasted,
+altering Landor's words, that he had dined early and in the best of
+company, or have parodied Goldsmith, and said, "I have Johnson and
+Burke: all the wits have been here." But when his studious though barren
+manhood was passed, and he again began, as almost an old man, to write
+poetry, he entered into full competition with the giants of the new
+school, whose ideals and whose education were utterly different from
+his. While "The Library" and "The Village" came to a public which still
+had Johnson, which had but just lost Goldsmith, and which had no other
+poetical novelty before it than Cowper, "The Borough" and the later
+Tales entered the lists with "Marmion" and "Childe Harold," with
+"Christabel" and "The Excursion," even with "Endymion" and "The Revolt
+of Islam." Yet these later works of Crabbe met with the fullest
+recognition both from readers and from critics of the most opposite
+tendencies. Scott, the most generous, and Wordsworth,[2] the most
+grudging, of all the poets of the day towards their fellows, united in
+praising Crabbe; and unromantic as the poet of "The Village" seems to us
+he was perhaps Sir Walter's favourite English bard. Scott read him
+constantly, he quotes him incessantly; and no one who has read it can
+ever forget how Crabbe figures in the most pathetic biographical pages
+ever written--Lockhart's account of the death at Abbotsford. Byron's
+criticism was as weak as his verse was powerful, but still Byron had no
+doubt about Crabbe. The utmost flight of memory or even of imagination
+can hardly get together three contemporary critics whose standards,
+tempers, and verdicts, were more different than those of Gifford,
+Jeffrey, and Wilson. Yet it is scarcely too much to say that they are
+all in a tale about Crabbe. In this unexampled chorus of eulogy there
+rose (for some others who can hardly have admired him much were simply
+silent) one single note, so far as I know, or rather one single rattling
+peal of thunder on the other side. It is true that this was significant
+enough, for it came from William Hazlitt.
+
+Yet against this chorus, which was not, as has sometimes happened, the
+mere utterance of a loud-voiced few, but was echoed by a great multitude
+who eagerly bought and read Crabbe, must be set the almost total
+forgetfulness of his work which has followed. It is true that of living
+or lately living persons in the first rank of literature some great
+names can be cited on his side; and what is more, that these great names
+show the same curious diversity in agreement which has been already
+noticed as one of Crabbe's triumphs. The translator of Omar Khayyám, his
+friend the present Laureate, and the author of "The Dream of Gerontius,"
+are men whose literary ideals are known to be different enough; yet they
+add a third trinity as remarkable as those others of Gifford, Jeffrey,
+and Wilson, of Wordsworth, Byron, and Scott. Much more recently Mr.
+Courthope has used Crabbe as a weapon in that battle of his with
+literary Liberalism which he has waged not always quite to the
+comprehension of his fellow-critics; Mr. Leslie Stephen has discussed
+him as one who knows and loves his eighteenth century. But who reads
+him? Who quotes him? Who likes him? I think I can venture to say, with
+all proper humility, that I know Crabbe pretty well; I think I may say
+with neither humility nor pride, but simply as a person whose business
+it has been for some years to read books, and articles, and debates,
+that I know what has been written and said in England lately. You will
+find hardly a note of Crabbe in these writings and sayings. He does not
+even survive, as "Matthew Green, who wrote 'The Spleen,'" and others
+survive, by quotations which formerly made their mark, and are retained
+without a knowledge of their original. If anything is known about Crabbe
+to the general reader, it is the parody in "Rejected Addresses," an
+extraordinarily happy parody no doubt, in fact rather better Crabbe in
+Crabbe's weakest moments than Crabbe himself. But naturally there is
+nothing of his best there; and it is by his best things, let it be
+repeated over and over in face of all opposition, that a poet must be
+judged.
+
+Although Crabbe's life, save for one dramatic revolution, was one of the
+least eventful in our literary history, it is by no means one of the
+least interesting. Mr. Kebbel's book[3] gives a very fair summary of it;
+but the Life by Crabbe's son which is prefixed to the collected editions
+of the poems, and on which Mr. Kebbel's own is avowedly based, is
+perhaps the more interesting of the two. It is written with a curious
+mixture of the old literary state and formality, and of a feeling on
+the writer's part that he is not a literary man himself, and that not
+only his father, but Mr. Lockhart, Mr. Moore, Mr. Bowles and the other
+high literary persons who assisted him were august beings of another
+sphere. This is all the more agreeable, in that Crabbe's sons had
+advantages of education and otherwise which were denied to their father,
+and might in the ordinary course of things have been expected to show
+towards him a lofty patronage rather than any filial reverence. The poet
+himself was born at Aldborough, a now tolerably well-known
+watering-place (the fortune of which was made by Mr. Wilkie Collins in
+_No Name_) on Christmas Eve, 1754. That not uncommon infirmity of noble
+minds which seeks to prove distinguished ancestry seems to have had no
+hold on the plain common sense of the Crabbe family, who maintained
+themselves to be at the best Norfolk yeomen, and though they possessed a
+coat-of-arms, avowed with much frankness that they did not know how they
+got it. A hundred and forty years ago they had apparently lost even the
+dignity of yeomanhood, and occupied stations quite in the lower rank of
+the middle class as tradesmen, non-commissioned officers in the navy or
+the merchant service, and so forth. George Crabbe, the grandfather, was
+collector of customs at Aldborough, but his son, also a George, was a
+parish schoolmaster and a parish clerk before he returned to the
+Suffolk port as deputy collector and then as salt-master, or collector
+of the salt duties. He seems to have had no kind of polish, and late in
+life was a mere rough drinking exciseman; but his education, especially
+in mathematics, appears to have been considerable, and his ability in
+business not small. The third George, his eldest son, was also fairly
+though very irregularly educated for a time, and his father, perceiving
+that he was "a fool about a boat," had the rather unusual common sense
+to destine him to a learned profession. Unluckily his will was better
+than his means, and while the profession which Crabbe chose or which was
+chosen for him--that of medicine--was not the best suited to his tastes
+or talents, the resources of the family were not equal to giving him a
+full education, even in that. He was still at intervals employed in the
+Customs warehouses at "piling up butter and cheese" even after he was
+apprenticed at fourteen to a country surgeon. The twelve years which he
+spent in this apprenticeship, in an abhorred return for a short time to
+the cheese and butter, in a brief visit to London, where he had no means
+to walk the hospitals, and in an attempt to practise with little or no
+qualification at Aldborough itself, present a rather dismal history of
+apprenticeship which taught nothing. But Love was, for once, most truly
+and literally Crabbe's solace and his salvation, his master and his
+patron. When he was barely eighteen, still an apprentice, and
+possessed, as far as can be made out, of neither manners nor prospects,
+he met a certain Miss Sarah Elmy. She was three or four years older than
+himself and much better connected, being the niece and eventual
+co-heiress of a wealthy yeoman squire. She was, it is said, pretty; she
+was evidently accomplished, and she seems to have had access to the
+country society of those days. But Mira, as Crabbe called her, perhaps
+merely in the fashion of the eighteenth century, perhaps in remembrance
+of Fulke Greville's heroine (for he knew his Elizabethans rather well
+for a man of those days), and no doubt also with a secret joy to think
+that the last syllables of her Christian name and surname in a way spelt
+the appellation, fell in love with the boy and made his fortune. But for
+her Crabbe would probably have subsided, not contentedly but stolidly,
+into the lot of a Doctor Slop of the time, consoling himself with snuff
+(which he always loved) and schnaps (to which we have hints that in his
+youth he was not averse). Mira was at once unalterably faithful to him
+and unalterably determined not to marry unless he could give her
+something like a position. Their long engagement (they were not married
+till he was twenty-nine and she was thirty-three) may, as we shall see,
+have carried with it some of the penalties of long engagements. But it
+is as certain as any such thing can be that but for it English
+literature would have lacked the name of Crabbe.
+
+There is no space here to go through the sufferings of the novitiate. At
+last, at the extreme end of 1779, Crabbe made up his mind once more to
+seek his fortune, this time by aid of literature only, in London. His
+son too has printed rare scraps of a very interesting Journal to Mira
+which he kept during at least a part of the terrible year of struggle
+which he passed there. He saw the riots of '80; he canvassed, always
+more or less in vain, the booksellers and the peers; he spent
+three-and-sixpence of his last ten shillings on a copy of Dryden; he was
+much less disturbed about imminent starvation than by the delay of a
+letter from Mira ("my dearest Sally" she becomes with a pathetic lapse
+from convention, when the pinch is sorest) or by the doubt whether he
+had enough left to pay the postage of one. He writes prayers (but not
+for the public eye), abstracts of sermons for Mira, addresses (rather
+adulatory) to Lord Shelburne, which received no answer. All this has the
+most genuine note that ever man of letters put into his work, for
+whatever Crabbe was or was not, now or at any time, he was utterly
+sincere; and his sincerity makes his not very abundant letters and
+journals unusually interesting. At last, after a year, during which his
+means of subsistence are for the most part absolutely unknown, he, as he
+says himself, fixed "by some propitious influence, in some happy moment"
+on Edmund Burke as the subject of a last appeal.
+
+Nothing in all literary history is, in a modest way and without pearls
+and gold, quite so like a fairy tale as the difference in Crabbe's
+fortunes which this propitious influence brought about. On the day when
+he wrote to Burke he was, as he said in the letter, "an outcast, without
+friends, without employment, without bread." In some twenty-four hours
+(the night-term of which he passed in ceaselessly pacing Westminster
+Bridge to cheat the agony of expectation) he was a made man. It was not
+merely that, directly or indirectly, Burke procured him a solid and an
+increasing income. He did much more than that. Crabbe, like most
+self-educated men, was quite uncritical of his own work: Burke took him
+into his own house for months, encouraged him to submit his poems,
+criticised them at once without mercy and with judgment, found him
+publishers, found him a public, turned him from a raw country boy into a
+man who at least had met society of the best kind. It is a platitude to
+say that for a hundred persons who will give money or patronage there is
+scarcely one who will take trouble of this kind; and if any devil's
+advocate objects the delight of producing a "lion," it may be answered
+that for Burke at least this delight would not have been delightful at
+all.
+
+The immediate form which the patronage of Burke and that, soon added, of
+Thurlow took, is one which rather shocks the present day. They made
+Crabbe turn to the Church, and got a complaisant bishop to ordain him.
+They sent him (a rather dangerous experiment) to be curate in his own
+native place, and finally Burke procured him the chaplaincy at Belvoir.
+The young Duke of Rutland, who had been made a strong Tory by Pitt, was
+fond of letters, and his Duchess Isabel, who was,--like her elder
+kinswoman, Dryden's Duchess of Ormond--
+
+    A daughter of the rose, whose cheeks unite
+    The varying beauties of the red and white,
+
+in other words, a Somerset, was one of the most beautiful and gracious
+women in England. Crabbe, whose strictly literary fortunes I postpone
+for the present, was apparently treated with the greatest possible
+kindness by both; but he was not quite happy,[4] and his ever-prudent
+Mira still would not marry him. At last Thurlow's patronage took the
+practical form (it had already taken that, equally practical, of a
+hundred pounds) of two small Chancellor's livings in Dorsetshire,
+residence at which was dispensed with by the easy fashions of the day.
+The Duke of Rutland, when he was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland,
+did not take Crabbe with him, a circumstance which has excited some
+unnecessary discussion; but he gave him free quarters at Belvoir, where
+he and his wife lived for a time before they migrated to a neighbouring
+curacy--his wife, for even Mira's prudence had yielded at last to the
+Dorsetshire livings, and they were married in December 1783. They lived
+together for nearly thirty years, in, as it would seem, unbroken mutual
+devotion, but Mrs. Crabbe's health seems very early to have broken down,
+and a remarkable endorsement of Crabbe's on a letter of hers has been
+preserved. I do not think Mr. Kebbel quotes it; it ends, "And yet
+happiness was denied"--a sentence fully encouraging to Mr. Browning and
+other good men who have denounced long engagements.[5] The story of
+Crabbe's life after his marriage may be told very shortly. His first
+patron died in Ireland, but the duchess with some difficulty prevailed
+on Thurlow to exchange his former gifts for more convenient and rather
+better livings in the neighbourhood of Belvoir, at the chief of which,
+Muston, Crabbe long resided. The death of his wife's uncle made him
+leave his living and take up his abode for many years at Glemham, in
+Suffolk, only to find, when he returned, that (not unnaturally, though
+to his own great indignation) dissent had taken bodily possession of the
+parish. His wife died in 1813, and the continued kindness, after nearly
+a generation, of the house of Rutland, gave him the living of
+Trowbridge, in Wiltshire, with a small Leicestershire incumbency near
+Belvoir added, instead of Muston. At Trowbridge he lived nearly twenty
+years, revisiting London society, making the acquaintance personally (he
+had already known him by letter) of Sir Walter, paying a memorable visit
+to Edinburgh, flirting in an elderly and simple fashion with many
+ladies, writing much and being even more of a lion in the society of
+George the Fourth's reign than he had been in the days of George the
+Third. He died on 3rd February 1832.
+
+Crabbe's character is not at all enigmatical, and emerges as clearly in
+those letters and diaries of his which have been published, as in
+anecdotes of him by others. Perhaps the famous story of his politely
+endeavouring to talk French to divers Highlanders, during George the
+Fourth's visit to Edinburgh, is slightly embroidered--Lockhart, who
+tells it, was a mystifier without peer. If he did gently but firmly
+extinguish a candle-snuff while Wordsworth and Sir George Beaumont were
+indulging in poetic ecstasies over the beautiful undulations of the
+smoke, there may have been something to say for him as Anne Scott, to
+whom Wordsworth told the story, is said to have hinted, from the side of
+one of the senses. His life, no less than his work, speaks him a man of
+amiable though by no means wholly sweet temper, of more common sense
+than romance, and of more simplicity than common sense. His nature and
+his early trials made him not exactly sour, but shy, till age and
+prosperity mellowed him; but simplicity was his chief characteristic in
+age and youth alike.
+
+The mere facts of his strictly literary career are chiefly remarkable
+for the enormous gap between his two periods of productiveness. In early
+youth he published some verses in the magazines and a poem called
+"Inebriety," which appeared at Ipswich in 1775. His year of struggle in
+London saw the publication of another short piece "The Candidate," but
+with the ill-luck which then pursued him, the bookseller who brought it
+out became bankrupt. His despairing resort to Burke ushered in "The
+Library," 1781, followed by "The Village," 1783, which Johnson revised
+and improved not a little. Two years later again came "The Newspaper,"
+and then twenty-two years passed without anything appearing from
+Crabbe's pen. It was not that he was otherwise occupied, for he had
+little or nothing to do, and for the greater part of the time, lived
+away from his parish. It was not that he was idle, for we have his son's
+testimony that he was perpetually writing, and that holocausts of
+manuscripts in prose and verse used from time to time to be offered up
+in the open air, for fear of setting the house on fire by their mass. At
+last, in 1807, "The Parish Register" appeared, and three years later
+"The Borough"--perhaps the strongest division of his work. The
+miscellaneous Tales came in 1812, the "Tales of the Hall" in 1819.
+Meanwhile and afterwards, various collected editions appeared, the last
+and most complete being in 1829--a very comely little book in eight
+volumes. His death led to the issue of some "Posthumous Tales" and to
+the inclusion by his son of divers fragments both in the Life and in the
+Works. It is understood, however, that there are still considerable
+remains in manuscript; perhaps they might be published with less harm to
+the author's fame and with less fear of incurring a famous curse than in
+the case of almost any other poet.
+
+For Crabbe, though by no means always at his best, is one of the most
+curiously equal of verse-writers. "Inebriety" and such other very
+youthful things are not to be counted; but between "The Village" of 1783
+and the "Posthumous Tales" of more than fifty years later, the
+difference is surprisingly small. Such as it is, it rather reverses
+ordinary experience, for the later poems exhibit the greater play of
+fancy, the earlier the exacter graces of form and expression. Yet there
+is nothing really wonderful in this, for Crabbe's earliest poems were
+published under severe surveillance of himself and others, and at a time
+which still thought nothing of such value in literature as correctness,
+while his later were written under no particular censorship, and when
+the Romantic revival had already, for better or worse, emancipated the
+world. The change was in Crabbe's case not wholly for the better. He
+does not in his later verse become more prosaic, but he becomes
+considerably less intelligible. There is a passage in "The Old
+Bachelor," too long to quote but worth referring to, which, though it
+may be easy enough to understand it with a little goodwill, I defy
+anybody to understand in its literal and grammatical meaning. Such
+welters of words are very common in Crabbe, and Johnson saved him from
+one of them in the very first lines of "The Village." Yet Johnson could
+never have written the passages which earned Crabbe his fame. The great
+lexicographer knew man in general much better than Crabbe did; but he
+nowhere shows anything like Crabbe's power of seizing and reproducing
+man in particular. Crabbe is one of the first and certainly one of the
+greatest of the "realists" who, exactly reversing the old philosophical
+signification of the word, devote themselves to the particular only. Yet
+of the three small volumes by which he, after his introduction to
+Burke, made his reputation, and on which he lived for a quarter of a
+century, the first and the last display comparatively little of this
+peculiar quality. "The Library" and "The Newspaper" are characteristic
+pieces of the school of Pope, but not characteristic of their author.
+The first catalogues books as folio, quarto, octavo, and so forth, and
+then cross-catalogues them as law, physic, divinity, and the rest, but
+is otherwise written very much in the air. "The Newspaper" suited Crabbe
+a little better, because he pretty obviously took a particular newspaper
+and went through its contents--scandal, news, reviews, advertisements--in
+his own special fashion: but still the subject did not appeal to him. In
+"The Village," on the other hand, contemporaries and successors alike
+have agreed to recognise Crabbe in his true vein. The two famous
+passages which attracted the suffrages of judges so different as Scott
+and Wordsworth, are still, after more than a hundred years, fresh,
+distinct, and striking. Here they are once more:--
+
+    Theirs is yon House that holds the parish poor,
+    Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door;
+    There, where the putrid vapours, flagging, play,
+    And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;--
+    There children dwell who know no parents' care;
+    Parents who know no children's love dwell there!
+    Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed,
+    Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed;
+    Dejected widows, with unheeded tears,
+    And crippled age with more than childhood fears;
+    The lame, the blind, and, far the happiest they!
+    The moping idiot and the madman gay.
+
+           ·       ·       ·       ·       ·
+
+    Anon, a figure enters, quaintly neat,
+    All pride and business, bustle and conceit;
+    With looks unaltered by these scenes of woe,
+    With speed that, entering, speaks his haste to go,
+    He bids the gazing throng around him fly,
+    And carries fate and physic in his eye:
+    A potent quack, long versed in human ills,
+    Who first insults the victim whom he kills;
+    Whose murderous hand a drowsy Bench protect,
+    And whose most tender mercy is neglect.
+    Paid by the parish for attendance here,
+    He wears contempt upon his sapient sneer;
+    In haste he seeks the bed where Misery lies,
+    Impatience marked in his averted eyes;
+    And some habitual queries hurried o'er,
+    Without reply he rushes on the door:
+    His drooping patient, long inured to pain,
+    And long unheeded, knows remonstrance vain,
+    He ceases now the feeble help to crave
+    Of man; and silent, sinks into the grave.
+
+The poet executed endless variations on this class of theme, but he
+never quite succeeded in discovering a new one, though in process of
+time he brought his narrow study of the Aldborough fishermen and
+townsfolk down still more narrowly to individuals. His landscape is
+always marvellously exact, the strokes selected with extraordinary skill
+_ad hoc_ so as to show autumn rather than spring, failure rather than
+hope, the riddle of the painful earth rather than any joy of living.
+Attempts have been made to vindicate Crabbe from the charge of being a
+gloomy poet, but I cannot think them successful; I can hardly think that
+they have been quite serious. Crabbe, our chief realist poet, has an
+altogether astonishing likeness to the chief prose realist of France,
+Gustave Flaubert, so far as his manner of view goes, for in point of
+style the two have small resemblance. One of the most striking things in
+Crabbe's biography is his remembrance of the gradual disillusion of a
+day of pleasure which, as a child, he enjoyed in a new boat of his
+father's. We all of us, except those who are gifted or cursed with the
+proverbial duck's back, have these experiences and these remembrances of
+them. But most men either simply grin and bear it, or carrying the grin
+a little farther, console themselves by regarding their own
+disappointments from the ironic and humorous point of view. Crabbe,
+though not destitute of humour, does not seem to have been able or
+disposed to employ it in this way. Perhaps he never quite got over the
+terrible and, for the most part unrecorded, year in London: perhaps the
+difference between the Mira of promise and the Mira of possession--the
+"happiness denied"--had something to do with it: perhaps it was a
+question of natural disposition with him. But when, years afterwards, as
+a prosperous middle-aged man, he began his series of published poems
+once more with "The Parish Register," the same manner of seeing is
+evident, though the minute elaboration of the views themselves is
+almost infinitely greater. Nor did he ever succeed in altering this
+manner, if he ever tried to do so.
+
+With the exception of his few Lyrics, the most important of which, "Sir
+Eustace Grey" (one of his very best things), is itself a tale in
+different metre, and a few other occasional pieces of little importance,
+the entire work of Crabbe, voluminous as it is, is framed upon a single
+pattern, the vignettes of "The Village" being merely enlarged in size
+and altered in frame in the later books. The three parts of "The Parish
+Register," the twenty-four Letters of "The Borough," some of which have
+single and others grouped subjects, and the sixty or seventy pieces
+which make up the three divisions of Tales, consist almost exclusively
+of heroic couplets, shorter measures very rarely intervening. They are
+also almost wholly devoted to narratives, partly satirical, partly
+pathetic, of the lives of individuals of the lower and middle class
+chiefly. Jeffrey, who was a great champion of Crabbe and allotted
+several essays to him, takes delight in analysing the plots or stories
+of these tales; but it is a little amusing to notice that he does it for
+the most part exactly as if he were criticising a novelist or a
+dramatist. "The object," says he, in one place, "is to show that a man's
+fluency of speech depends very much upon his confidence in the
+approbation of his auditors": "In Squire Thomas we have the history of a
+mean, domineering spirit," and so forth. Gifford in one place actually
+discusses Crabbe as a novelist. I shall make some further reference to
+this curious attitude of Crabbe's admiring critics. For the moment I
+shall only remark that the singularly mean character of so much of
+Crabbe's style, the "style of drab stucco," as it has been unkindly
+called, which is familiar from the wicked wit that told how the youth at
+the theatre
+
+    Regained the felt and felt what he regained,
+
+is by no means universal. The most powerful of all his pieces, the
+history of Peter Grimes, the tyrant of apprentices, is almost entirely
+free from it, and so are a few others. But it is common enough to be a
+very serious stumbling-block. In nine tales out of ten this is the
+staple:--
+
+    Of a fair town where Dr. Rack was guide,
+    His only daughter was the boast and pride.
+
+Now that is unexceptionable verse enough, but what is the good of
+putting it in verse at all? Here again:--
+
+    For he who makes me thus on business wait,
+    Is not for business in a proper state.
+
+It is obvious that you cannot trust a man who, unless he is intending a
+burlesque, can bring himself to write like that. Crabbe not only brings
+himself to it, but rejoices and luxuriates in the style. The tale from
+which that last luckless distich is taken, "The Elder Brother," is full
+of pathos and about equally full of false notes. If we turn to a far
+different subject, the very vigorously conceived "Natural Death of
+Love," we find a piece of strong and true satire, the best thing of its
+kind in the author, which is kept up throughout. Although, like all
+satire, it belongs at best but to the outer courts of poetry, it is so
+good that none can complain. Then the page is turned and one reads:--
+
+    "I met," said Richard, when returned to dine,
+    "In my excursion with a friend of mine."
+
+It may be childish, it may be uncritical, but I own that such verse as
+that excites in me an irritation which destroys all power of enjoyment,
+except the enjoyment of ridicule. Nor let any one say that pedestrian
+passages of the kind are inseparable from ordinary narrative in verse
+and from the adaptation of verse to miscellaneous themes. If it were so
+the argument would be fatal to such adaptation, but it is not. Pope
+seldom indulges in such passages, though he does sometimes: Dryden never
+does. He can praise, abuse, argue, tell stories, make questionable
+jests, do anything in verse that is still poetry, that has a throb and a
+quiver and a swell in it, and is not merely limp, rhythmed prose. In
+Crabbe, save in a few passages of feeling and a great many of mere
+description--the last an excellent setting for poetry but not
+necessarily poetical--this rhythmed prose is everywhere. The matter
+which it serves to convey is, with the limitations above given, varied,
+and it is excellent. No one except the greatest prose novelists has such
+a gallery of distinct, sharply etched characters, such another gallery
+of equally distinct scenes and manner-pieces, to set before the reader.
+Exasperating as Crabbe's style sometimes is, he seldom bores--never
+indeed except in his rare passages of digressive reflection. It has, I
+think, been observed, and if not the observation is obvious, that he has
+done with the pen for the neighbourhood of Aldborough and Glemham what
+Crome and Cotman have done for the neighbourhood of Norwich with the
+pencil. His observation of human nature, so far as it goes, is not less
+careful, true, and vivid. His pictures of manners, to those who read
+them at all, are perfectly fresh and in no respect grotesque or faded,
+dead as the manners themselves are. His pictures of motives and of
+facts, of vice and virtue, never can fade, because the subjects are
+perennial and are truly caught. Even his plays on words, which horrified
+Jeffrey--
+
+    Alas! your reverence, wanton thoughts I grant
+    Were once my motive, now the thoughts of want,
+
+and the like--are not worse than Milton's jokes on the guns. He has
+immense talent, and he has the originality which sets talent to work in
+a way not tried by others, and may thus be very fairly said to turn it
+into genius. He is all this and more. But despite the warnings of a
+certain precedent, I cannot help stating the case which we have
+discussed in the old form, and asking, was Crabbe a poet?
+
+And thus putting the question, we may try to sum up. It is the gracious
+habit of a summing-up to introduce, if possible, a dictum of the famous
+men our fathers that were before us. I have already referred to
+Hazlitt's criticism on Crabbe in _The Spirit of the Age_, and I need not
+here urge at very great length the cautions which are always necessary
+in considering any judgment of Hazlitt's.[6] Much that he says even in
+the brief space of six or eight pages which he allots to Crabbe is
+unjust; much is explicably, and not too creditably, unjust. Crabbe was a
+successful man, and Hazlitt did not like successful men: he was a
+clergyman of the Church of England, and Hazlitt did not love clergymen
+of the Church of England: he had been a duke's chaplain, and Hazlitt
+loathed dukes: he had been a Radical, and was still (though Hazlitt does
+not seem to have thought him so) a Liberal, but his Liberalism had been
+Torified into a tame variety. Again, Crabbe, though by no means
+squeamish, is the most unvoluptuous and dispassionate of all describers
+of inconvenient things; and Hazlitt was the author of _Liber Amoris_.
+Accordingly there is much that is untrue in the tissue of denunciation
+which the critic devotes to the poet. But there are two passages in this
+tirade which alone might show how great a critic Hazlitt himself was.
+Here in a couple of lines ("they turn, one and all, on the same sort of
+teasing, helpless, unimaginative distress") is the germ of one of the
+most famous and certainly of the best passages of the late Mr. Arnold;
+and here again is one of those critical taps of the finger which shivers
+by a touch of the weakest part a whole Rupert's drop of misapprehension.
+Crabbe justified himself by Pope's example. "Nothing," says Hazlitt,
+"can be more dissimilar. Pope describes what is striking: Crabbe would
+have described merely what was there.... In Pope there was an appeal to
+the imagination, you see what was passing _in a poetical point of
+view_."
+
+Even here (and I have not been able to quote the whole passage) there is
+one of the flaws, which Hazlitt rarely avoided, in the use of the word
+"striking"; for, Heaven knows, Crabbe is often striking enough. But the
+description of Pope as showing things "in a poetical point of view" hits
+the white at once, wounds Crabbe mortally, and demolishes realism, as we
+have been pleased to understand it for the last generation or two.
+Hazlitt, it is true, has not followed up the attack, as I shall hope to
+show in an instant; but he has indicated the right line of it. As far as
+mere treatment goes, the fault of Crabbe is that he is pictorial rather
+than poetic, and photographic rather than pictorial. He sees his subject
+steadily, and even in a way he sees it whole; but he does not see it in
+the poetical way. You are bound in the shallows and the miseries of the
+individual; never do you reach the large freedom of the poet who looks
+at the universal. The absence of selection, of the discarding of details
+that are not wanted, has no doubt a great deal to do with this--Hazlitt
+seems to have thought that it had everything to do. I do not quite agree
+with him there. Dante, I think, was sometimes quite as minute as Crabbe;
+and I do not know that any one less hardy than Hazlitt himself would
+single out, as Hazlitt expressly does, the death-bed scene of Buckingham
+as a conquering instance in Pope to compare with Crabbe. We know that
+the bard of Twickenham grossly exaggerated this. But suppose he had not?
+Would it have been worse verse? I think not. Although the faculty of
+selecting instead of giving all, as Hazlitt himself justly contends, is
+one of the things which make _poesis non ut pictura_, it is not all, and
+I think myself that a poet, if he is a poet, could be almost absolutely
+literal. Shakespeare is so in the picture of Gloucester's corpse. Is
+that not poetry?
+
+The defect of Crabbe, as it seems to me, is best indicated by reference
+to one of the truest of all dicta on poetry, the famous maxim of
+Joubert--that the lyre is a winged instrument and must transport. There
+is no wing in Crabbe, there is no transport, because, as I hold (and
+this is where I go beyond Hazlitt), there is no music. In all poetry,
+the very highest as well as the very lowest that is still poetry, there
+is something which transports, and that something in my view is always
+the music of the verse, of the words, of the cadence, of the rhythm, of
+the sounds superadded to the meaning. When you get the best music
+married to the best meaning, then you get, say, Shakespeare: when you
+get some music married to even moderate meaning, you get, say, Moore.
+Wordsworth can, as everybody but Wordsworthians holds, and as some even
+of Wordsworthians admit, write the most detestable doggerel and
+platitude. But when any one who knows what poetry is reads--
+
+    Our noisy years seem moments in the being
+    Of the eternal silence,
+
+he sees that, quite independently of the meaning, which disturbs the
+soul of no less a person than Mr. John Morley, there is one note added
+to the articulate music of the world--a note that never will leave off
+resounding till the eternal silence itself gulfs it. He leaves
+Wordsworth, he goes straight into the middle of the eighteenth century,
+and he sees Thomson with his hands in his dressing-gown pockets biting
+at the peaches, and hears him between the mouthfuls murmuring--
+
+    So when the shepherd of the Hebrid Isles,
+    Placed far amid the melancholy main,
+
+and there is another note, as different as possible in kind yet still
+alike, struck for ever. Yet again, to take example still from the less
+romantic poets, and in this case from a poet, whom Mr. Kebbel specially
+and disadvantageously contrasts with Crabbe, when we read the old
+schoolboy's favourite--
+
+    When the British warrior queen,
+    Bleeding from the Roman rods,
+
+we hear the same quality of music informing words, though again in a
+kind somewhat lower, commoner, and less. In this matter, as in all
+matters that are worth handling at all, we come of course _ad
+mysterium_. Why certain combinations of letters, sounds, cadences,
+should almost without the aid of meaning, though no doubt immensely
+assisted by meaning, produce this effect of poetry on men no man can
+say. But they do; and the chief merit of criticism is that it enables us
+by much study of different times and different languages to recognise
+some part of the laws, though not the ultimate and complete causes, of
+the production.
+
+Now I can only say that Crabbe does not produce, or only in the rarest
+instances produces, this effect on me, and what is more, that on ceasing
+to be a patient in search of poetical stimulant and becoming merely a
+gelid critic, I do not discover even in Crabbe's warmest admirers any
+evidence that he produced this effect on them. Both in the eulogies
+which Mr. Kebbel quotes, and in those that he does not quote, I observe
+that the eulogists either discreetly avoid saying what they mean by
+poetry, or specify for praise something in Crabbe that is not distinctly
+poetical. Cardinal Newman said that Crabbe "pleased and touched him at
+thirty years' interval," and pleaded that this answers to the
+"accidental definition of a classic." Most certainly; but not
+necessarily to that of a poetical classic. Jeffrey thought him
+"original and powerful." Granted; but there are plenty of original and
+powerful writers who are not poets. Wilson gave him the superlative for
+"original and vivid painting." Perhaps; but is Hogarth a poet? Jane
+Austen "thought she could have married him." She had not read his
+biography; but even if she had would that prove him to be a poet? Lord
+Tennyson is said to single out the following passage, which is certainly
+one of Crabbe's best, if not his very best:--
+
+    Early he rose, and looked with many a sigh
+    On the red light that filled the eastern sky;
+    Oft had he stood before, alert and gay,
+    To hail the glories of the new-born day;
+    But now dejected, languid, listless, low,
+    He saw the wind upon the water blow,
+    And the cold stream curled onward as the gale
+    From the pine-hill blew harshly down the vale;
+    On the right side the youth a wood surveyed,
+    With all its dark intensity of shade;
+    Where the rough wind alone was heard to move
+    In this, the pause of nature and of love
+    When now the young are reared, and when the old,
+    Lost to the tie, grow negligent and cold:
+    Far to the left he saw the huts of men,
+    Half hid in mist that hung upon the fen:
+    Before him swallows gathering for the sea,
+    Took their short flights and twittered o'er the lea;
+    And near the bean-sheaf stood, the harvest done,
+    And slowly blackened in the sickly sun;
+    All these were sad in nature, or they took
+    Sadness from him, the likeness of his look
+    And of his mind--he pondered for a while,
+    Then met his Fanny with a borrowed smile.
+
+It is good: it is extraordinarily good: it could not be better of its
+kind. It is as nearly poetry as anything that Crabbe ever did--but is it
+quite? If it is (and I am not careful to deny it) the reason, as it
+seems to me, is that the verbal and rhythmical music here, with its
+special effect of "transporting" of "making the common as if it were
+uncommon," is infinitely better than is usual with Crabbe, that in fact
+there is music as well as meaning. Hardly anywhere else, not even in the
+best passages of the story of Peter Grimes, shall we find such music;
+and in its absence it may be said of Crabbe much more truly than of
+Dryden (who carries the true if not the finest poetical undertone with
+him even into the rant of Almanzor and Maximin, into the interminable
+arguments of "Religio Laici" and "The Hind and the Panther") that he is
+a classic of our prose.
+
+Yet the qualities which are so noteworthy in him are all qualities which
+are valuable to the poet, and which for the most part are present in
+good poets. And I cannot help thinking that this was what actually
+deceived some of his contemporaries and made others content for the most
+part to acquiesce in an exaggerated estimate of his poetical merits. It
+must be remembered that even the latest generation which, as a whole and
+unhesitatingly, admired Crabbe, had been brought up on the poets of the
+eighteenth century, in the very best of whom the qualities which Crabbe
+lacks had been but sparingly and not eminently present. It must be
+remembered too, that from the great vice of the poetry of the eighteenth
+century, its artificiality and convention, Crabbe is conspicuously free.
+The return to nature was not the only secret of the return to poetry;
+but it was part of it, and that Crabbe returned to nature no one could
+doubt. Moreover he came just between the school of prose fiction which
+practically ended with _Evelina_ and the school of prose fiction which
+opened its different branches with _Waverley_ and _Sense and
+Sensibility_. His contemporaries found nowhere else the narrative power,
+the faculty of character-drawing, the genius for description of places
+and manners, which they found in Crabbe; and they knew that in almost
+all, if not in all the great poets there is narrative power, faculty of
+character-drawing, genius for description. Yet again, Crabbe put these
+gifts into verse which at its best was excellent in its own way, and at
+its worst was a blessed contrast to Darwin or to Hayley. Some readers
+may have had an uncomfortable though only half-conscious feeling that if
+they had not a poet in Crabbe they had not a poet at all. At all events
+they made up their minds that they had a poet in him.
+
+But are we bound to follow their example? I think not. You could play on
+Crabbe that odd trick which used, it is said, to be actually played on
+some mediæval verse chroniclers and unrhyme him--that is to say, put
+him into prose with the least possible changes--and his merits would,
+save in rare instances, remain very much as they are now. You could put
+other words in the place of his words, keeping the verse, and it would
+not as a rule be much the worse. You cannot do either of these things
+with poets who are poets. Therefore I shall conclude that save at the
+rarest moments, moments of some sudden gust of emotion, some happy
+accident, some special grace of the Muses to reward long and blameless
+toil in their service, Crabbe was not a poet. But I have not the least
+intention of denying that he was great, and all but of the greatest
+among English writers.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] In 1834, after Crabbe's death, Wordsworth wrote to his son: "Your
+father's works ... will last, from their combined merit as poetry and
+truth, full as long as anything that has been expressed in verse since
+the date of their first appearance." A very different estimate by
+Wordsworth of Crabbe has been published in Mr. Clayden's _Rogers and his
+Contemporaries_. Here he argues at great length that "Crabbe's verses
+can in no sense be called poetry," and that "nineteen out of twenty of
+his pictures are mere matter of fact." It is fair to say that this was
+in 1808, before the appearance of "The Borough" and of almost all
+Crabbe's best work.
+
+[3] _Great Writers; Crabbe_: by T. E. Kebbel. London, 1888.
+
+[4] Although constantly patronised by the Rutland family in successive
+generations, and honoured by the attentions of "Old Q." and others, his
+poems are full of growls at patrons. These cannot be mere echoes of
+Oldham and Johnson, but their exact reason is unknown. His son's
+reference to it is so extremely cautious that it has been read as a
+confession that Crabbe was prone to his cups, and quarrelsome in them--a
+signal instance of the unwisdom of not speaking out.
+
+[5] Rogers told Ticknor in 1838 that "Crabbe was nearly ruined by grief
+and vexation at the conduct of his wife for above seven years, at the
+end of which time she proved to be insane." But this was long after her
+death and Crabbe's, and it is not clear that while she was alive Rogers
+knew Crabbe at all. Nor is there the slightest reason for attaching to
+the phrase "vexation at the conduct" the sense which it would usually
+have. A quatrain found after Crabbe's death wrapped round his wife's
+wedding-ring is touching, and graceful in its old-fashioned way.
+
+    The ring so worn, as you behold,
+    So thin, so pale, is yet of gold:
+    The passion such it was to prove;
+    Worn with life's cares, love yet was love.
+
+[6] See below, Essay on Hazlitt.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+HOGG
+
+
+"What on earth," it was once asked "will you make of Hogg?" I think that
+there is something to be made of Hogg, and that it is something worth
+the making. In the first place, it is hardly possible, without studying
+"the Shepherd" pretty close, fully to appreciate three other persons,
+all greater, and one infinitely greater, than himself; namely, Wilson,
+Lockhart, and Scott. To the two first he was a client in the Roman
+sense, a plaything, something of a butt, and an invaluable source of
+inspiration or at least suggestion. Towards the last he occupied a very
+curious position, never I think quite paralleled elsewhere--the position
+of a Boswell who would fain be a Boswell and is not allowed to be, who
+has wild notions that he is really a greater man than Johnson and
+occasionally blasphemes against his idol, but who in the intervals is
+truly Boswellian. In the second place, he has usually hitherto been not
+criticised at all, but either somewhat sneered at or else absurdly
+over-praised. In the third place, as both Scott and Byron recognised, he
+is probably the most remarkable example we have of absolute
+self-education, or of no education: for Burns was an academically
+instructed student in comparison with Hogg. In the fourth, he produced,
+amid a mass of rubbish, some charming verse and one prose-story which,
+though it is almost overlooked by the general, some good judges are, I
+believe, agreed with me in regarding as one of the very best things of
+its kind, while it is also a very curious literary puzzle.
+
+The anecdotic history, more or less authentic, of the Ettrick Shepherd
+would fill volumes, and I must try to give some of the cream of it
+presently. The non-anecdotic part may be despatched in a few sentences.
+The exact date of his birth is not known, but he was baptized on 9th
+December 1770. His father was a good shepherd and a bad farmer--a
+combination of characteristics which Hogg himself inherited unimpaired
+and unimproved. If he had any early education at all, he forgot it so
+completely that he had, as a grown-up man, to teach himself writing if
+not reading a second time. He pursued his proper vocation for about
+thirty years, during the latter part of which time he became known as a
+composer of very good songs, "Donald Macdonald" being ranked as the
+best. He printed a few as a pamphlet in the first year of the century,
+but met with little success. Then he fell in with Scott, to whom he had
+been introduced as a purveyor of ballads, not a few of which his
+mother, Margaret Laidlaw, knew by heart. This old lady it was who gave
+Scott the true enough warning that the ballads were "made for singing
+and no for reading." Scott in his turn set Hogg on the track of making
+some money by his literary work, and Constable published _The Mountain
+Bard_ together with a treatise called _Hogg on Sheep_, which I have not
+read, and of which I am not sure that I should be a good critic if I
+had. The two books brought Hogg three hundred pounds. This sum he poured
+into the usual Danaids' vessel of the Scotch peasant--the taking and
+stocking of a farm, which he had neither judgment to select, capital to
+work, nor skill to manage; and he went on doing very much the same thing
+for the rest of his life. The exact dates of that life are very sparely
+given in his own _Autobiography_, in his daughter's _Memorials_, and in
+the other notices of him that I have seen. He would appear to have spent
+four or five years in the promising attempt to run, not one but two
+large stock-farms. Then he tried shepherding again, without much
+success; and finally in 1810, being forty years old and able to write,
+he went to Edinburgh and "commenced," as the good old academic phrase
+has it, literary man. He brought out a new book of songs called _The
+Forest Minstrel_, and then he started a periodical, _The Spy_. On this,
+as he tells us, Scott very wisely remonstrated with him, asking him
+whether he thought he could be more elegant than Addison or Mackenzie.
+Hogg replied with his usual modesty that at any rate he would be "mair
+original." The originality appears to have consisted in personality; for
+Hogg acknowledges one exceedingly insolent attack on Scott himself,
+which Scott seems, after at first resenting it (and yet Hogg tells us
+elsewhere that he never resented any such thing), to have forgiven. He
+had also some not clearly known employments of the factorship or
+surveyorship kind; he was much patronised by two worthy hatters, Messrs.
+Grieve and Scott, and in 1813 the book which contains all his best
+verse, _The Queen's Wake_, was published. It was deservedly successful;
+but, by a species of bad luck which pursued Hogg with extraordinary
+assiduity, the two first editions yielded nothing, as his publisher was
+not solvent. The third, which Blackwood issued, brought him in good
+profit. Two years later he became in a way a made man. He had very
+diligently sought the patronage of Harriet, Duchess of Buccleuch, and,
+his claims being warmly supported by Scott and specially recommended by
+the Duchess on her deathbed to her husband, Hogg received rent free, or
+at a peppercorn, the farm of Mossend, Eltrive or Altrive. It is agreed
+even by Hogg's least judicious admirers that if he had been satisfied
+with this endowment and had then devoted himself, as he actually did, to
+writing, he might have lived and died in comfort, even though his
+singular luck in not being paid continued to haunt him. But he must
+needs repeat his old mistake and take the adjacent farm of Mount Benger,
+which, with a certain reckless hospitable way of living for which he is
+not so blamable, kept him in difficulties all the rest of his life and
+made him die in them. He lived twenty years longer; married a
+good-looking girl much his superior in rank and twenty years his junior,
+who seems to have made him an excellent wife; engaged in infinite
+magazine- and book-writing, of which more presently; became the
+inspirer, model and butt of _Blackwood's Magazine_; constantly
+threatened to quarrel with it for traducing him, and once did so; loved
+Edinburgh convivialities more well than wisely; had the very ill luck to
+survive Scott and to commit the folly of writing a pamphlet (more silly
+than anything else) on the "domestic manners" of that great man, which
+estranged Lockhart, hitherto his fast friend; paid a visit to London in
+1832, whereby hang tales; and died himself on 21st November 1835.
+
+Such, briefly but not I think insufficiently given, is the Hogg of
+history. The Hogg of anecdote is a much more considerable and difficult
+person. He mixes himself up with or becomes by turns (whichever phrase
+may be preferred) the Shepherd of the _Noctes_ and the Hogg who is
+revealed to us, say his panegyrists, with "uncalled-for malignity" in
+Lockhart's _Life of Scott_. But these panegyrists seem to forget that
+there are two documents which happen not to be signed either "John
+Gibson Lockhart" or "Christopher North," and that these documents are
+Hogg's _Autobiography_, published by himself, and the _Domestic Manners
+of Sir Walter Scott_, likewise authenticated. In these two we have the
+Hogg of the _ana_ put forward pretty vividly. For instance, Hogg tells
+us how, late in Sir Walter's life, he and his wife called upon Scott.
+"In we went and were received with all the affection of old friends. But
+his whole discourse was addressed to my wife, while I was left to shift
+for myself.... In order to attract his attention from my wife to one who
+I thought as well deserved it, I went close up to him with a
+scrutinising look and said, 'Gudeness guide us, Sir Walter, but ye hae
+gotten a braw gown.'" The rest of the story is not bad, but less
+characteristic. Immediately afterwards Hogg tells his own speech about
+being "not sae yelegant but mair original" than Addison. Then there is
+the other capital legend, also self-told, how he said to Scott, "Dear
+Sir Walter, ye can never suppose that I belang to your school of
+chivalry! Ye are the king of that school, but I'm the king of the
+mountain and fairy school, which is a far higher ane than yours!"
+"This," says Professor Veitch, a philosopher, a scholar, and a man of
+letters, "though put with an almost sublime egotism, is in the main
+true." Almost equally characteristic is the fact that, after beginning
+his pamphlet by calling Lockhart "the only man thoroughly qualified for
+the task" of writing Scott's life, Hogg elsewhere, in one of the
+extraordinary flings that distinguish him, writes: "Of Lockhart's genius
+and capabilities Sir Walter always spoke with the greatest enthusiasm:
+more than I thought he deserved. For I knew him a great deal better than
+Sir Walter did, and, whatever Lockhart may pretend, I knew Sir Walter a
+thousand times better than he did."
+
+Now be it remembered that these passages are descriptive of Hogg's Hogg,
+to use the always useful classification of Dr. Holmes. To complete them
+(the actual texts are too long to give here) it is only necessary to
+compare the accounts of a certain dinner at Bowhill given respectively
+by Hogg in the _Domestic Manners_ and by Lockhart in his biography, and
+also those given in the same places of the one-sided quarrel between
+Scott and Hogg, because the former, according to his almost invariable
+habit, refused to collaborate in Hogg's _Poetic Mirror_. In all this we
+have the man's own testimony about himself. It is not in the least
+incompatible with his having been, as his panegyrists contend, an
+affectionate friend, husband, and father; a very good fellow when his
+vanity or his whims were not touched; and inexhaustibly fertile in the
+kind of rough profusion of flower and weed that uncultivated soil
+frequently produces. But it most certainly is also not inconsistent, but
+on the contrary highly consistent, with the picture drawn by Lockhart in
+his great book; and it shows how, to say the least and mildest, the
+faults and foibles of the curious personage known as "the Shepherd of
+the _Noctes_" were not the parts of the character on which Wilson need
+have spent, or did spend, most of his invention. Even if the "boozing
+buffoon" had been a boozing buffoon and nothing more, Hogg, who
+confesses with a little affected remorse, but with evident pride, that
+he once got regularly drunk every night for some six weeks running, till
+"an inflammatory fever" kindly pulled him up, could not have greatly
+objected to this part of the matter. The wildest excesses of the
+_Eidolon_-Shepherd's vanity do not exceed that speech to Scott which
+Professor Veitch thinks so true; and the quaintest pranks played by the
+same shadow do not exceed in quaintness the immortal story of Hogg being
+introduced to Mrs. Scott for the first time, extending himself on a sofa
+at full length (on the excuse that he "thought he could never do wrong
+to copy the lady of the house," who happened at the time to be in a
+delicate state of health), and ending by addressing her as "Charlotte."
+This is the story that Mrs. Garden, Hogg's daughter, without attempting
+to contest its truth, describes as told by Lockhart with "uncalled-for
+malignity." Now when anybody who knows something of Lockhart comes
+across "malignant," "scorpion," or any term of the kind, he, if he is
+wise, merely shrugs his shoulders. All the literary copy-books have got
+it that Lockhart was malignant, and there is of course no more to be
+said.[7] But something may be done by a little industrious clearing
+away of fiction in particulars. It may be most assuredly and confidently
+asserted that no one reading the _Life of Scott_ without knowing what
+Hogg's friends have said of it would dream of seeing malignity in the
+notices which it contains of the Shepherd. Before writing this paper I
+gave myself the trouble, or indulged myself in the pleasure (for perhaps
+that is the more appropriate phrase in reference to the most delightful
+of biographies, if not of books), of marking with slips of paper all the
+passages in Lockhart referring to Hogg, and reading them consecutively.
+I am quite sure that any one who does this, even knowing little or
+nothing of the circumstances, will wonder where on earth the "ungenerous
+assaults," the "virulent detraction," the "bitter words," the "false
+friendship," and so forth, with which Lockhart has been charged, are to
+be found. But any one who knows that Hogg had, just before his own
+death, and while the sorrow of Sir Walter's end was fresh, published the
+possibly not ill-intentioned but certainly ill-mannered pamphlet
+referred to--a pamphlet which contains among other things, besides the
+grossest impertinences about Lady Scott's origin, at least one
+insinuation that Scott wrote Lockhart's books for him--if any one
+further knows (I think the late Mr. Scott Douglas was the first to point
+out the fact) that Hogg had calmly looted Lockhart's biography of Burns,
+then he will think that the "scorpion," instead of using his sting,
+showed most uncommon forbearance. This false friend, virulent detractor
+and ungenerous assailant describes Hogg as "a true son of nature and
+genius with a naturally kind and simple character." He does indeed
+remark that Hogg's "notions of literary honesty were exceedingly loose."
+But (not to mention the Burns affair, which gave me some years ago a
+clue to this sentence) the remark is subjoined to a letter in which Hogg
+placidly suggests that he shall write an autobiographic sketch, and that
+Scott, transcribing it and substituting the third person for the first,
+shall father it as his own. The other offence I suppose was the remark
+that "the Shepherd's nerves were not heroically strung." This perhaps
+might have been left out, but if it was the fact (and Hogg's defenders
+never seem to have traversed it) it suggested itself naturally enough in
+the context, which deals with Hogg's extraordinary desire, when nearly
+forty, to enter the militia as an ensign. Moreover the same passage
+contains plenty of kindly description of the Shepherd. Perhaps there is
+"false friendship" in quoting a letter from Scott to Byron which
+describes Hogg as "a wonderful creature," or in describing the
+Shepherd's greeting to Wilkie, "Thank God for it! I did not know you
+were so young a man" as "graceful," or in the citation of Jeffrey's
+famous blunder in selecting for special praise a fabrication of Hogg's
+among the "Jacobite Ballads," or in the genial description, without a
+touch of ridicule, of Hogg at the St. Ronan's Games. The sentence on
+Hogg's death is indeed severe: "It had been better for his memory had
+his end been of earlier date; for he did not follow his benefactor until
+he had insulted his dust." It is even perhaps a little too severe,
+considering Hogg's irresponsible and childlike nature. But Lockhart
+might justly have retorted that men of sixty-four have no business to be
+irresponsible children; and it is certainly true that in this unlucky
+pamphlet Hogg distinctly accuses Scott of anonymously puffing himself at
+his, Hogg's, expense, of being over and over again jealous of him, of
+plagiarising his plots, of sneering at him, and, if the passage has any
+meaning, of joining a conspiracy of "the whole of the aristocracy and
+literature of the country" to keep Hogg down and "crush him to a
+nonentity." Neither could Lockhart have been exactly pleased at the
+passage where Scott is represented as afraid to clear the character of
+an innocent friend to the boy Duke of Buccleuch.
+
+    He told me that which I never knew nor suspected before; that a
+    certain gamekeeper, on whom he bestowed his maledictions without
+    reserve, had prejudiced my best friend, the young Duke of
+    Buccleuch, against me by a story; and though he himself knew it
+    to be a malicious and invidious lie, yet seeing his grace so
+    much irritated, he durst not open his lips on the subject,
+    further than by saying, "But, my lord duke, you must always
+    remember that Hogg is no ordinary man, although he may have shot
+    a stray moorcock." And then turning to me he said, "Before you
+    had ventured to give any saucy language to a low scoundrel of an
+    English gamekeeper, you should have thought of Fielding's tale
+    of Black George."
+
+    "I never saw that tale," said I, "and dinna ken ought about it.
+    But never trouble your head about that matter, Sir Walter, for
+    it is awthegither out o' nature for our young chief to entertain
+    ony animosity against me. The thing will never mair be heard of,
+    an' the chap that tauld the lees on me will gang to hell, that's
+    aye some comfort."
+
+Part of my reason for quoting this last passage is to recall to those
+who are familiar with the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_ the extraordinary felicity
+of the imitation. This, which Hogg with his own pen represents himself
+as speaking with his own mouth, might be found textually in any page of
+the _Noctes_ without seeming in the least out of keeping with the ideal
+Hogg.
+
+And this brings me to the second charge of Hogg's friends, that Wilson
+wickedly caricatured his humble friend, if indeed he did not manufacture
+a Shepherd out of his own brain. This is as uncritical as the other, and
+even more surprising. That any one acquainted with Hogg's works,
+especially his autobiographic productions, should fail to recognise the
+resemblance is astonishing enough; but what is more astonishing is that
+any one interested in Hogg's fame should not perceive that the Shepherd
+of the _Noctes_ is Hogg magnified and embellished in every way. He is
+not a better poet, for the simple reason that the verses put in his
+mouth are usually Hogg's own and not always his best. But out of the
+_Confessions of a Sinner_, Hogg has never signed anything half so good
+as the best prose passages assigned to him in the _Noctes_. They are
+what he might have written if he had taken pains: they are in his key
+and vein; but they are much above him. Again, unless any reader is so
+extraordinarily devoid of humour as to be shocked by the mere
+horse-play, it must be clear to him that the Shepherd's manners are
+dressed up with extraordinary skill, so as to be just what he would have
+liked them to be. As for the drinking and so forth, it simply comes to
+this--that the habits which were fashionable when the century was not
+yet in its teens, or just in them, were getting to be looked on askance
+when it was entering or had entered on its thirties. But, instead of
+being annoyed at this Socrates-Falstaff, as somebody has called it, one
+might have thought that both Hogg himself and his admirers would have
+taken it as an immense compliment. The only really bad turn that Wilson
+seems to have done his friend was posthumous and pardonable. He
+undertook the task of writing the Shepherd's life and editing his
+_Remains_ for the benefit of his family, who were left very badly off;
+and he not only did not do it but appears to have lost the documents
+with which he was entrusted. It is fair to say that after the deaths,
+which came close together, of his wife, of Blackwood, and of Hogg
+himself, Wilson was never fully the same man; and that his strongly
+sentimental nature, joined to his now inveterate habit of writing
+rapidly as the fancy took him, would have made the task of hammering out
+a biography and of selecting and editing _Remains_ so distasteful from
+different points of view as to be practically impossible. But in that
+case of course he should not have undertaken it, or should have
+relinquished it as soon as he found out the difficulties. Allan
+Cunningham, it is said, would have gladly done the business; and there
+were few men better qualified.
+
+And now, having done a by no means unnecessary task in this preliminary
+clearance of rubbish, let us see what sort of a person in literature and
+life this Ettrick Shepherd really was--the Shepherd whom Scott not only
+befriended with unwearied and lifelong kindness, but ranked very high as
+an original talent, whom Byron thought Scott's only second worth
+speaking of, whom Southey, a very different person from either, esteemed
+highly, whom Wilson selected as the mouthpiece and model for one of the
+most singular and (I venture to say despite a certain passing wave of
+unpopularity) one of the most enduring of literary character-parts, and
+to whom Lockhart was, as Hogg himself late in life sets down, "a warm
+and disinterested friend." We have seen what Professor Veitch thinks of
+him--that he is the king of a higher school than Scott's. On the other
+hand, I fear the general English impression of him is rather that given
+by no Englishman, but by Thomas Carlyle, at the time of Hogg's visit to
+London in 1832. Carlyle describes him as talking and behaving like a
+"gomeril," and amusing the town by walking about in a huge gray plaid,
+which was supposed to be an advertisement, suggested by his publisher.
+
+The king of a school higher than Scott's and the veriest gomeril--these
+surely, though the judges be not quite of equal competence, are
+judgments of a singularly contradictory kind. Let us see what middle
+term we can find between them.
+
+The mighty volume (it has been Hogg's ill-fortune that the most
+accessible edition of his work is in two great double-columned royal
+octavos, heavy to the hand and not too grateful to the eye) which
+contains the Shepherd's collected poetical work is not for every reader.
+"Poets? where are they?" Wordsworth is said, on the authority of De
+Quincey, to have asked, with a want of graciousness of manners uncommon
+even in him and never forgiven by Hogg, when the latter used the plural
+in his presence, and in that of Wilson and Lloyd. It was unjust as well
+as rude, but endless allowance certainly has to be made for Hogg as a
+poet. I do not know to whom the epigram that "everything that is written
+in Scotch dialect is not necessarily poetry" is originally due, but
+there is certainly some justice in it. Scotch, as a language, has grand
+accommodations; it has richer vowels and a more varied and musical
+arrangement of consonants than English, while it falls not much short of
+English in freedom from that mere monotony which besets the
+richly-vowelled continental languages. It has an almost unrivalled
+provision of poetical _clichés_ (the sternest purist may admit a French
+word which has no English equivalent), that is to say, the stock phrases
+which Heaven knows who first minted and which will pass till they are
+worn out of all knowledge. It has two great poets--one in the
+vernacular, one in the literary language--who are rich enough to keep a
+bank for their inferiors almost to the end of time. The depreciation of
+it by "glaikit Englishers" (I am a glaikit Englisher who does not
+depreciate), simply because it is unfamiliar and rustic-looking, is
+silly enough. But its best practitioners are sometimes prone to forget
+that nothing ready-made will do as poetry, and that you can no more take
+a short cut to Parnassus by spelling good "guid" and liberally using
+"ava," than you can execute the same journey by calling a girl a nymph
+and a boy a swain. The reason why Burns is a great poet, and one of the
+greatest, is that he seldom or never does this in Scots. When he takes
+to the short cut, as he does sometimes, he usually "gets to his
+English." Of Hogg, who wrote some charming things and many good ones,
+the same cannot be said. No writer known to me, not even the eminent Dr.
+Young, who has the root of the poetical matter in him at all, is so
+utterly uncritical as Hogg. He does not seem even to have known when he
+borrowed and when he was original. We have seen that he told Scott that
+he was not of his school. Now a great deal that he wrote, perhaps
+indeed actually the major part of his verse, is simply imitation and not
+often very good imitation of Scott. Here is a passage:--
+
+    Light on her airy steed she sprung,
+    Around with golden tassels hung.
+    No chieftain there rode half so free,
+    Or half so light and gracefully.
+    How sweet to see her ringlets pale
+    Wide-waving in the southland gale,
+    Which through the broom-wood odorous flew
+    To fan her cheeks of rosy hue!
+    Whene'er it heaved her bosom's screen
+    What beauties in her form were seen!
+    And when her courser's mane it swung,
+    A thousand silver bells were rung.
+    A sight so fair, on Scottish plain,
+    A Scot shall never see again.
+
+I think we know where this comes from. Indeed Hogg had a certain
+considerable faculty of conscious parody as well as of unconscious
+imitation, and his _Poetic Mirror_, which he wrote as a kind of humorous
+revenge on his brother bards for refusing to contribute, is a fair
+second to _Rejected Addresses_. The amusing thing is that he often
+parodied where he did not mean parody in the least, and nowadays we do
+not want Scott-and-water. Another vein of Hogg's, which he worked
+mercilessly, is a similar imitation, not of Scott, but of the weakest
+echoes of Percy's _Reliques_:--
+
+    O sad, sad, was young Mary's plight:
+      She took the cup, no word she spake,
+    She had even wished that very night
+      To sleep and never more to wake.
+
+Sad, sad indeed is the plight of the poet who publishes verses like
+this, of which there are thousands of lines to be found in Hogg. And
+then one comes to "Kilmeny," and the note changes with a vengeance:--
+
+    Bonny Kilmeny gaed up the glen;
+    But it wasna to meet Duneira's men,
+    Nor the rosy monk of the isle to see,
+    For Kilmeny was pure as pure could be.
+    It was only to hear the yorlin sing,
+    And pu' the cress-flower round the spring,
+    The scarlet hip and the hindberry,
+    For Kilmeny was pure as pure could be.
+
+           ·       ·       ·       ·       ·
+
+    Kilmeny looked up with a lovely grace,
+    But nae smile was seen on Kilmeny's face;
+    As still was her look and as still was her ee
+    As the stillness that lay on the emeraut lea,
+    Or the mist that sleeps on a waveless sea.
+    For Kilmeny had been she kent not where,
+    And Kilmeny had seen what she could not declare;
+    Kilmeny had been where the cock never crew,
+    Where the rain never fell and the wind never blew.
+
+No matter that it is necessary even here to make a cento, that the
+untutored singer cannot keep up the song by natural force and has not
+skill enough to dissemble the lapses. "Kilmeny" at its best is
+poetry--such poetry as, to take Hogg's contemporaries only, there is
+none in Rogers or Crabbe, little I fear in Southey, and not very much in
+Moore. Then there is no doubt at all that he could write ballads. "The
+Witch of Fife" is long and is not improved by being written (at least
+in one version) in a kind of Scots that never was on land or sea, but it
+is quite admirable of its class. "The Good Grey Cat," his own imitation
+of himself in the _Poetic Mirror_, comes perhaps second to it, and "The
+Abbot McKinnon" (which is rather close to the imitations of Scott)
+third. But there are plenty of others. As for his poems of the more
+ambitious kind, "Mador of the Moor," "Pilgrims of the Sun," and even
+"Queen Hynde," let blushing glory--the glory attached to the literary
+department--hide the days on which he produced those. She can very well
+afford it, for the hiding leaves untouched the division of Hogg's
+poetical work which furnishes his highest claims to fame except
+"Kilmeny," the division of the songs. These are numerous and unequal as
+a matter of course. Not a few of them are merely variations on older
+scraps and fragments of the kind which Burns had made popular; some of
+them are absolute rubbish; some of them are mere imitations of Burns
+himself. But this leaves abundance of precious remnants, as the
+Shepherd's covenanting friends would have said. The before-mentioned
+"Donald Macdonald" is a famous song of its kind: "I'll no wake wi'
+Annie" comes very little short of Burns's "Green grow the rashes O!" The
+piece on the lifting of the banner of Buccleuch, though a curious
+contrast with Scott's "Up with the Banner" does not suffer too much by
+the comparison: "Cam' ye by Athole" and "When the kye comes hame"
+everybody knows, and I do not know whether it is a mere delusion, but
+there seems to me to be a rare and agreeable humour in "The Village of
+Balmaquhapple."
+
+    D'ye ken the big village of Balmaquhapple?
+    The great muckle village of Balmaquhapple?
+    'Tis steeped in iniquity up to the thrapple,
+    An' what's to become o' poor Balmaquhapple?
+
+Whereafter follows an invocation to St. Andrew, with a characteristic
+suggestion that he may spare himself the trouble of intervening for
+certain persons such as
+
+    Geordie, our deacon for want of a better,
+    And Bess, wha delights in the sins that beset her--
+
+ending with the milder prayer:
+
+    But as for the rest, for the women's sake save them,
+    Their bodies at least, and their sauls if they have them.
+
+           ·       ·       ·       ·       ·
+
+    And save, without word of confession auricular,
+    The clerk's bonny daughters, and Bell in particular;
+    For ye ken that their beauty's the pride and the stapple
+    Of the great wicked village of Balmaquhapple!
+
+"Donald McGillavry," which deceived Jeffrey, is another of the
+half-inarticulate songs which have the gift of setting the blood
+coursing;
+
+    Donald's gane up the hill hard an' hungry;
+    Donald's come down the hill wild an' angry:
+    Donald will clear the gowk's nest cleverly;
+    Here's to the King and Donald McGillavry!
+
+           ·       ·       ·       ·       ·
+
+    Donald has foughten wi' reif and roguery,
+    Donald has dinnered wi' banes and beggary;
+    Better it war for Whigs an' Whiggery
+    Meeting the deevil than Donald McGillavry.
+    Come like a tailor, Donald McGillavry,
+    Come like a tailor, Donald McGillavry,
+    Push about, in an' out, thimble them cleverly.
+    Here's to King James an' Donald McGillavry!
+
+"Love is Like a Dizziness," and the "Boys' Song,"
+
+    Where the pools are bright and deep,
+    Where the grey trout lies asleep,
+    Up the river and over the lea,
+    That's the way for Billy and me--
+
+and plenty more charming things will reward the explorer of the
+Shepherd's country. Only let that explorer be prepared for pages on
+pages of the most unreadable stuff, the kind of stuff which hardly any
+educated man, however great a "gomeril" he might be, would ever dream of
+putting to paper, much less of sending to press. It is fair to repeat
+that the educated man who thus refrained would probably be a very long
+time before he wrote "Kilmeny," or even "Donald McGillavry" and "The
+Village of Balmaquhapple."
+
+Still (though to say it is enough to make him turn in his grave) if Hogg
+had been a verse-writer alone he would, except for "Kilmeny" and his
+songs, hardly be worth remembering, save by professed critics and
+literary free-selectors. A little better than Allan Cunningham, he is
+but for that single, sudden, and unsustained inspiration of "Kilmeny,"
+and one or two of his songs, so far below Burns that Burns might enable
+us to pay no attention to him and not lose much. As for Scott, "Proud
+Maisie" (an unapproachable thing), the fragments that Elspeth Cheyne
+sings, even the single stanza in _Guy Mannering_, "Are these the Links
+of Forth? she said," any one of a thousand snatches that Sir Walter has
+scattered about his books with a godlike carelessness will "ding" Hogg
+and all his works on their own field. But then it is not saying anything
+very serious against a man to say that he is not so great as Scott. With
+those who know what poetry is, Hogg will keep his corner ("not a
+polished corner," as Sydney Smith would say) of the temple of Apollo.
+
+Hogg wrote prose even more freely than he wrote verse, and after the
+same fashion--a fashion which he describes with equal frankness and
+truth by the phrases, "dashing on," "writing as if in desperation,"
+"mingling pathos and absurdity," and so forth. Tales, novels, sketches,
+all were the same to him; and he had the same queer mixture of
+confidence in their merits and doubt about the manner in which they were
+written. _The Brownie of Bodsbeck_, _The Three Perils of Man_ (which
+appears refashioned in the modern editions of his works as _The Siege of
+Roxburgh_), _The Three Perils of Woman_, _The Shepherd's Calendar_ and
+numerous other uncollected tales exhibit for the most part very much the
+same characteristics. Hogg knew the Scottish peasantry well, he had
+abundant stores of unpublished folklore, he could invent more when
+wanted, he was not destitute of the true poetic knowledge of human
+nature, and at his best he could write strikingly and picturesquely. But
+he simply did not know what self-criticism was, he had no notion of the
+conduct or carpentry of a story, and though he was rather fond of
+choosing antique subjects, and prided himself on his knowledge of old
+Scots, he was quite as likely to put the baldest modern touches in the
+mouth of a heroine of the fourteenth or fifteenth century as not. If
+anybody takes pleasure in seeing how a good story can be spoilt, let him
+look at the sixth chapter of the _Shepherd's Calendar_, "The Souters of
+Selkirk;" and if any one wants to read a novel of antiquity which is not
+like Scott, let him read _The Bridal of Polmood_.
+
+In the midst, however, of all this chaotic work, there is still to be
+found, though misnamed, one of the most remarkable stories of its kind
+ever written--a story which, as I have said before, is not only
+extraordinarily good of itself, but insists peremptorily that the reader
+shall wonder how the devil it got where it is. This is the book now
+called _The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Fanatic_, but by its
+proper and original title, _The Confessions of a Justified Sinner_.
+Hogg's reference to it in his _Autobiography_ is sufficiently odd. "The
+next year (1824)," he says, "I published _The Confessions of a Fanatic
+[Sinner]_, but, it being a story replete with horrors, after I had
+written it I durst not venture to put my name to it, so it was
+published anonymously, and of course did not sell very well--so at least
+I believe, for I do not remember ever receiving anything for it, and I
+am sure if there had been a reversion [he means return] I should have
+had a moiety. However I never asked anything, so on that point there was
+no misunderstanding." And he says nothing more about it, except to
+inform us that his publishers, Messrs. Longman, who had given him for
+his two previous books a hundred and fifty pounds each "as soon as the
+volumes were put to press," and who had published the _Confessions_ on
+half profits, observed, when his next book was offered to them, that
+"his last publication (the _Confessions_) had been found fault with in
+some very material points, and they begged leave to decline the present
+one until they consulted some other persons." That is all. But the
+Reverend Thomas Thomson, Hogg's editor, an industrious and not
+incompetent man of letters, while admitting that it is "in excellence of
+plot, concentration of language and vigorous language, one of the best
+and most interesting [he might have said the best without a second] of
+Hogg's tales," observes that it "alarmed the religious portion of the
+community who hastily thought that the author was assailing
+Christianity." "Nothing could be more unfounded," says the Reverend
+Thomas Thomson with much justice. He might have added that it would have
+been much more reasonable to suspect the author of practice with the
+Evil One in order to obtain the power of writing anything so much better
+than his usual work.
+
+For, in truth, _The Confessions of a Justified Sinner_, while it has all
+Hogg's merits and more, is quite astoundingly free from his defects. His
+tales are generally innocent of the most rudimentary notions of
+construction: this goes closely ordered, with a few pardonable enough
+digressions, from beginning to end. He has usually little concentrated
+grasp of character: the few personages of the _Confessions_ are
+consistent throughout. His dialogue is, as a rule, extraordinarily
+slipshod and unequal: here there is no fault to find with it. His
+greatest lack, in short, is the lack of form: and here, though the story
+might perhaps have been curtailed, or rather "cut" in the middle, with
+advantage, the form is excellent. As its original edition, though an
+agreeable volume, is rare, and its later ones are buried amidst
+discordant rubbish, it may not be improper to give some account of it.
+The time is pitched just about the Revolution and the years following,
+and, according to a common if not altogether praiseworthy custom, the
+story consists of an editor's narrative and of the _Confessions_ proper
+imbedded therein. The narrative tells how a drinking Royalist laird
+married an exceedingly precise young woman, how the dissension which was
+probable broke out between them, how a certain divine, the Reverend
+Robert Wringhim, endeavoured to convert the sinner at the instances of
+the saint, and perhaps succeeded in consoling the saint at the expense
+of the sinner; how the laird sought more congenial society with a
+certain cousin of his named Arabella Logan, and how, rather out of
+jealousy than forgiveness, such a union or quasi-union took place
+between husband and wife that they had two sons, George and Robert, the
+elder of whom was his father's favourite and like, while the younger was
+pretty much left to the care of Mr. Wringhim. The tale then tells how,
+after hardly seeing one another in boyhood, the brothers met as young
+men at Edinburgh, where on extreme provocation the elder was within an
+ace of killing the younger. The end of it was that, after Robert had
+brought against George a charge of assaulting him on Arthur's Seat,
+George himself was found mysteriously murdered in an Edinburgh close.
+His mother cared naught for it; his father soon died of grief; the
+obnoxious Robert succeeded to the estates, and only Arabella Logan was
+left to do what she could to clear up the mystery, which, after certain
+strange passages, she did. But when warrants were made out against
+Robert he had disappeared, and the whole thing remained wrapped in more
+mystery than ever.
+
+To this narrative succeed the confessions of Robert himself. He takes of
+course the extreme side both of his mother and of her doctrines, but for
+some time, though an accomplished Pharisee, he is not assured of
+salvation, till at last his adopted (if not real) father Wringhim
+announces that he has wrestled sufficiently in prayer and has received
+assurance.
+
+Thereupon the young man sallies out in much exaltation of feeling and
+full of contempt for the unconverted. As he goes he meets another young
+man of mysterious appearance, who seems to be an exact double of
+himself. This wraith, however, presents himself as only a humble admirer
+of Robert's spiritual glory, and holds much converse with him. He meets
+this person repeatedly, but is never able to ascertain who he is. The
+stranger says that he may be called Gil Martin if Robert likes, but
+hints that he is some great one--perhaps the Czar Peter, who was then
+known to be travelling incognito about Europe. For a time Robert's
+Illustrious Friend (as he generally calls him) exaggerates the extremest
+doctrines of Calvinism, and slips easily from this into suggestions of
+positive crime. A minister named Blanchard, who has overheard his
+conversation, warns Robert against him, and Gil Martin in return points
+out Blanchard as an enemy to religion whom it is Robert's duty to take
+off. They lay wait for the minister and pistol him, the Illustrious
+Friend managing not only to avert all suspicion from themselves, but to
+throw it with capital consequences on a perfectly innocent person. After
+this initiation in blood Robert is fully reconciled to the "great work"
+and, going to Edinburgh, is led by his Illustrious Friend without
+difficulty into the series of plots against his brother which had to
+outsiders so strange an appearance, and which ended in a fresh murder.
+When Robert in the course of events above described becomes master of
+Dalchastel, the family estate, his Illustrious Friend accompanies him
+and the same process goes on. But now things turn less happily for
+Robert. He finds himself, without any consciousness of the acts charged,
+accused on apparently indubitable evidence, first of peccadillos, then
+of serious crimes. Seduction, forgery, murder, even matricide are hinted
+against him, and at last, under the impression that indisputable proofs
+of the last two crimes have been discovered, he flies from his house.
+After a short period of wandering, in which his Illustrious Friend
+alternately stirs up all men against him and tempts him to suicide, he
+finally in despair succumbs to the temptation and puts an end to his
+life. This of course ends the _Memoir_, or rather the _Memoir_ ends just
+before the catastrophe. There is then a short postscript in which the
+editor tells a tale of a suicide found with some such legend attaching
+to him on a Border hillside, of an account given in _Blackwood_ of the
+searching of the grave, and of a visit to it made by himself (the
+editor), his friend Mr. L----t of C----d [Lockhart of Chiefswood], Mr.
+L----w [Scott's Laidlaw] and others. The whole thing ends with a very
+well written bit of rationalisation of the now familiar kind,
+discussing the authenticity of the _Memoirs_, and concluding that they
+are probably the work of some one suffering from religious mania, or
+perhaps a sort of parable or allegory worked out with insufficient
+skill.
+
+Although some such account as this was necessary, no such account,
+unless illustrated with the most copious citation, could do justice to
+the book. The first part or Narrative is not of extraordinary, though it
+is of considerable merit, and has some of Hogg's usual faults. The
+_Memoirs_ proper are almost wholly free from these faults. In no book
+known to me is the grave treatment of the topsy-turvy and improbable
+better managed; although, by an old trick, it pleases the "editor" to
+depreciate his work in the passage just mentioned. The writer, whoever
+he was, was fully qualified for the task. The possibility of a young man
+of narrow intellect--his passion against his brother already excited,
+and his whole mind given to the theology of predestination--gliding into
+such ideas as are here described is undoubted; and it is made thoroughly
+credible to the reader. The story of the pretended Gil Martin,
+preposterous as it is, is told by the unlucky maniac exactly in the
+manner in which a man deluded, but with occasional suspicions of his
+delusion, would tell it. The gradual change from intended and successful
+rascality and crime into the incurring or the supposed incurring of the
+most hideous guilt without any actual consciousness of guilty action may
+seem an almost hopeless thing to treat probably. Yet it is so treated
+here. And the final gathering and blackening of the clouds of despair
+(though here again there is a very slight touch of Hogg's undue
+prolongation of things) exhibits literary power of the ghastly kind
+infinitely different from and far above the usual raw-head-and-bloody-bones
+story of the supernatural.
+
+Now, who wrote it?
+
+No doubt, so far as I know, has been generally entertained of Hogg's
+authorship, though, since I myself entertained doubts on the subject, I
+have found some good judges not unwilling to agree with me. Although
+admitting that it appeared anonymously, Hogg claims it, as we have seen,
+not only without hesitation but apparently without any suspicion that it
+was a particularly valuable or meritorious thing to claim, and without
+any attempt to shift, divide, or in any way disclaim the responsibility,
+though the book had been a failure. His publishers do not seem to have
+doubted then that it was his; nor, I have been told, have their
+representatives any reason to doubt it now. His daughter, I think, does
+not so much as mention it in her _Memorials_, but his various
+biographers have never, so far as I know, hinted the least hesitation.
+At the same time I am absolutely unable to believe that it is Hogg's
+unadulterated and unassisted work. It is not one of those cases where a
+man once tries a particular style, and then from accident, disgust, or
+what not, relinquishes it. Hogg was always trying the supernatural, and
+he failed in it, except in this instance, as often as he tried it. Why
+should he on this particular occasion have been saved from himself? and
+who saved him?--for that great part of the book at least is his there
+can be no doubt.
+
+By way of answer to these questions I can at least point out certain
+coincidences and probabilities. It has been seen that Lockhart's name
+actually figures in the postscript to the book. Now at this time and for
+long afterwards Lockhart was one of the closest of Hogg's literary
+allies; and Hogg, while admitting that the author of _Peter's Letters_
+hoaxed him as he hoaxed everybody, is warm in his praise. He describes
+him in his _Autobiography_ as "a warm and disinterested friend." He
+tells us in the book on Scott how he had a plan, even later than this,
+that Lockhart should edit all his (the Shepherd's) works, for
+discouraging which plan he was very cross with Sir Walter. Further, the
+vein of the _Confessions_ is very closely akin to, if not wholly
+identical with, a vein which Lockhart not only worked on his own account
+but worked at this very same time. It was in these very years of his
+residence at Chiefswood that Lockhart produced the little masterpiece of
+"Adam Blair" (where the terrors and temptations of a convinced
+Presbyterian minister are dwelt upon), and "Matthew Wald," which is
+itself the history of a lunatic as full of horrors, and those of no very
+different kind, as the _Confessions_ themselves. That editing, and
+perhaps something more than editing, on Lockhart's part would have been
+exactly the thing necessary to prune and train and direct the Shepherd's
+disorderly luxuriance into the methodical madness of the Justified
+Sinner--to give Hogg's loose though by no means vulgar style the dress
+of his own polished manner--to weed and shape and correct and straighten
+the faults of the Boar of the Forest--nobody who knows the undoubted
+writing of the two men will deny. And Lockhart, who was so careless of
+his work that to this day it is difficult, if not impossible, to
+ascertain what he did or did not write unassisted, would certainly not
+have been the man to claim a share in the book, even had it made more
+noise; though he may have thought of this as well as of other things
+when, in his wrath over the foolish blethering about Scott, he wrote
+that the Shepherd's views of literary morality were peculiar. As for
+Hogg himself, he would never have thought of acknowledging any such
+editing or collaboration if it did take place; and that not nearly so
+much from vanity or dishonesty as from simple carelessness, dashed
+perhaps with something of the habit of literary _supercherie_ which the
+society in which he lived affected, and which he carried as far at least
+as any one of its members.
+
+It may seem rather hard after praising a man's ewe lamb so highly to
+question his right in her. But I do not think there is any real
+hardship. I should think that the actual imagination of the story is
+chiefly Hogg's, for Lockhart's forte was not that quality, and his own
+novels suffer rather for want of it. If this be the one specimen of what
+the Shepherd's genius could turn out when it submitted to correction and
+training, it gives us a useful and interesting explanation why the mass
+of his work, with such excellent flashes, is so flawed and formless as a
+whole. It explains why he wished Lockhart to edit the others. It
+explains at the same time why (for the Shepherd's vanity was never far
+off) he set apparently little store by the book. It is only a hypothesis
+of course, and a hypothesis which is very unlikely ever to be proved,
+while in the nature of things it is even less capable of disproof. But I
+think there is good critical reason for it.
+
+At any rate, I confess for myself, that I should not take anything like
+the same interest in Hogg, if he were not the putative author of the
+_Confessions_. The book is in a style which wearies soon if it be
+overdone, and which is very difficult indeed to do well. But it is one
+of the very best things of its kind, and that is a claim which ought
+never to be overlooked. And if Hogg in some lucky moment did really
+"write it all by himself," as the children say, then we could make up
+for him a volume composed of it, of "Kilmeny," and of the best of the
+songs, which would be a very remarkable volume indeed. It would not
+represent a twentieth part of his collected work, and it would probably
+represent a still smaller fraction of what he wrote, while all the rest
+would be vastly inferior. But it would be a title to no inconsiderable
+place in literature, and we know that good judges did think Hogg, with
+all his personal weakness and all his literary shortcomings, entitled to
+such a place.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[7] For something more, however, see the Essay on Lockhart below.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+SYDNEY SMITH
+
+
+The hackneyed joke about biographers adding a new terror to death holds
+still as good as ever. But biography can sometimes make a good case
+against her persecutors; and one of the instances which she would
+certainly adduce would be the instance of Sydney Smith. I more than
+suspect that his actual works are less and less read as time goes on,
+and that the brilliant virulence of _Peter Plymley_, the even greater
+brilliance, not marred by virulence at all, of the _Letters to
+Archdeacon Singleton_, the inimitable quips of his articles in the
+_Edinburgh Review_, are familiar, if they are familiar at all, only to
+the professed readers of the literature of the past, and perhaps to some
+intelligent newspaper men who find Sydney[8] to be what Fuseli
+pronounced Blake, "d----d good to steal from." But the _Life_ which
+Lady Holland, with her mother's and Mrs. Austin's aid, produced more
+than thirty years ago has had a different fate; and a fresh lease of
+popularity seems to have been secured by another _Life_, published by
+Mr. Stuart Reid in 1883. This was partly abridged from the first, and
+partly supplied with fresh matter by a new sifting of the documents
+which Lady Holland had used. Nor do the authors of these works, however
+great must be our gratitude to them, take to themselves any such share
+of the credit as is due to Boswell in the case of Johnson, to Lockhart
+in the case of Scott, to Carlyle in the case of Sterling. Neither can
+lay claim to the highest literary merit of writing or arrangement; and
+the latter of the two contains digressions, not interesting to all
+readers, about the nobility of Sydney's cause. It is because both books
+let their subject reveal himself by familiar letters, scraps of journal,
+or conversation, and because the revelation of self is so full and so
+delightful, that Sydney Smith's immortality, now that the generation
+which actually heard him talk has all but disappeared, is still secured
+without the slightest fear of disturbance or decay. With a few
+exceptions (the Mrs. Partington business, the apologue of the dinners at
+the synod of Dort, "Noodle's Oration," and one or two more), the things
+by which Sydney is known to the general, all come, not from his works,
+but from his _Life_ or _Lives_. No one with any sense of fun can read
+the Works without being delighted; but in the Life and the letters the
+same qualities of wit appear, with other qualities which in the Works
+hardly appear at all. A person absolutely ignorant of anything but the
+Works might possibly dismiss Sydney Smith as a brilliant but bitter and
+not too consistent partisan, who fought desperately against abuses when
+his party was out, and discovered that they were not abuses at all when
+his party was in. A reader of his Life and of his private utterances
+knows him better, likes him better, and certainly does not admire him
+less.
+
+He was born in 1771, the son of an eccentric and apparently rather
+provoking person, who for no assigned reason left his wife at the church
+door in order to wander about the world, and who maintained his vagabond
+principles so well that, as his granddaughter ruefully records, he
+bought, spent money on, and sold at a loss, no less than nineteen
+different houses in England and Wales. Sydney was also the second of
+four clever brothers, the eldest and cleverest being the somewhat famous
+"Bobus," who co-operated in the _Microcosm_ with Canning and Frere,
+survived his better known brother but a fortnight, founded a family, and
+has left one of those odd reputations of immense talent not justified by
+any producible work, to which our English life of public schools,
+universities, and Parliament gives peculiar facilities. Bobus and Cecil
+the third brother were sent to Eton: Sydney and Courtenay, the fourth,
+to Winchester, after a childhood spent in precocious reading and arguing
+among themselves. From Winchester Sydney (of whose school-days some
+trifling but only trifling anecdotes are recorded,) proceeded in regular
+course to New College, Oxford, and being elected of right to a
+Fellowship, then worth about a hundred pounds a year, was left by his
+father to "do for himself" on that not extensive revenue. He did for
+himself at Oxford during the space of nine years; and it is supposed
+that his straitened circumstances had something to do with his dislike
+for universities, which however was a kind of point of conscience among
+his Whig friends. It is at least singular that this residence of nearly
+a decade has left hardly a single story or recorded incident of any
+kind; and that though three generations of undergraduates passed through
+Oxford in his time, no one of them seems in later years to have had
+anything to say of not the least famous and one of the most sociable of
+Englishmen. At that time, it is true, and for long afterwards, the men
+of New College kept more to themselves than the men of any other college
+in Oxford; but still it is odd. Another little mystery is, Why did
+Sydney take orders? Although there is not the slightest reason to
+question his being, according to his own standard, a very sincere and
+sufficient divine, it obviously was not quite the profession for him.
+He is said to have wished for the Bar, but to have deferred to his
+father's wishes for the Church. That Sydney was an affectionate and
+dutiful son nobody need doubt: he was always affectionate, and in his
+own way dutiful. But he is about the last man one can think of as likely
+to undertake an uncongenial profession out of high-flown dutifulness to
+a father who had long left him to his own resources, and who had neither
+influence nor prospects in the Church to offer him. The Fellowship would
+have kept him, as it had kept him already, till briefs came. However, he
+did take orders; and the later _Life_ gives more particulars than the
+first as to the incumbency which indirectly determined his career. It
+was the curacy of Netheravon on Salisbury Plain; and its almost complete
+seclusion was tempered by a kindly squire, Mr. Hicks-Beach,
+great-grandfather of the present Sir Michael Hicks-Beach. Mr.
+Hicks-Beach offered Sydney the post of tutor to his eldest son; Sydney
+accepted it, started for Germany with his pupil, but (as he
+picturesquely though rather vaguely expresses it) "put into Edinburgh
+under stress of war" and stayed there for five years.
+
+The sojourn at Edinburgh began in June 1798: it ended in August 1803. It
+will thus be seen that Sydney was by no means a very young man even when
+he began reviewing, the year before leaving the Scotch capital. Indeed
+the aimless prolongation of his stay at Oxford, which brought him
+neither friends, money, nor professional experience of any kind, threw
+him considerably behindhand all his life; and this delay, much more than
+Tory persecution or Whig indifference, was the cause of the comparative
+slowness with which he made his way. His time at Edinburgh was, however,
+usefully spent even before that invention of the _Review_, over which
+there is an amicable and unimportant dispute between himself and
+Jeffrey. His tutorship was so successful that Mr. Hicks-Beach rewarded
+it with a cheque for a thousand pounds: he did duty in the Episcopal
+churches of Edinburgh: he made friends with all the Whigs and many of
+the Tories of the place: he laughed unceasingly at Scotchmen and liked
+them very much. Also, about the middle of his stay, he got married, but
+not to a Scotch girl. His wife was Miss Catherine Pybus, of Cheam, and
+the marriage was as harebrained a one, from the point of view of
+settlements, as Jeffrey's own.[9] Sydney's settlement on his wife is
+well known: it consisted of "six small silver teaspoons much worn," with
+which worldly goods he did her literally endow by throwing them into her
+lap. It would appear that there never was a happier marriage; but it
+certainly seemed for some years as if there might have been many more
+prosperous in point of money. When Sydney moved to London he had no
+very definite prospect of any income whatever; and had not Mrs. Smith
+sold her mother's jewels (which came to her just at the time), they
+would apparently have had some difficulty in furnishing their house in
+Doughty Street. But Horner, their friend (the "parish bull" of Scott's
+irreverent comparison), had gone to London before them, and impressed
+himself, apparently by sheer gravity, on the political world as a good
+young man. Introduced by him, Sydney Smith soon became one of the circle
+at Holland House. It is indeed not easy to live on invitations and your
+mother-in-law's pearls; but Sydney reviewed vigorously, preached
+occasionally, before very long received a regular appointment at the
+Foundling Hospital, and made some money by lecturing very agreeably at
+the Royal Institution on Moral Philosophy--a subject of which he
+honestly admits that he knew, in the technical sense, nothing. But his
+hearers did not want technical ethics, and in Sydney Smith they had a
+moral philosopher of the practical kind who could hardly be excelled
+either in sense or in wit. One little incident of this time, however,
+throws some light on the complaints which have been made about the delay
+of his promotion. He applied to a London rector to license him to a
+vacant chapel, which had not hitherto been used for the services of the
+Church. The immediate answer has not been preserved; but from what
+followed it clearly was a civil and rather evasive but perfectly
+intelligible request to be excused. The man was of course quite within
+his right, and a dozen good reasons can be guessed for his conduct. He
+may really have objected, as he seems to have said he did, to take a
+step which his predecessors had refused to take, and which might
+inconvenience his successors. But Sydney would not take the refusal, and
+wrote another very logical, but extremely injudicious, letter pressing
+his request with much elaboration, and begging the worthy Doctor of
+Divinity to observe that he, the Doctor, was guilty of inconsistency and
+other faults. Naturally this put the Doctor's back up, and he now
+replied with a flat and very high and mighty refusal. We know from
+another instance that Sydney was indisposed to take "No" for an answer.
+However he obtained, besides his place at the Foundling, preacherships
+in two proprietary chapels, and seems to have had both business and
+pleasure enough on his hands during his London sojourn, which was about
+the same length as his Edinburgh one. It was, however, much more
+profitable, for in three years the ministry of "All the Talents" came
+in, the Holland House interest was exerted, and the Chancellor's living
+of Foston, near York, valued at five hundred pounds a year, was given to
+Sydney. He paid for it, after a fashion which in a less zealous and
+convinced Whig might seem a little dubious, by the famous lampoons of
+the _Plymley Letters_, advocating the claims of Catholic emancipation,
+and extolling Fox and Grenville at the expense of Perceval and Canning.
+Very edifying is it to find Sydney Smith objecting to this latter that
+he is a "diner out," a "maker of jokes and parodies," a trifler on
+important subjects--in fact each and all of the things which the Rev.
+Sydney Smith himself was, in a perfection only equalled by the object of
+his righteous wrath. But of Peter more presently.
+
+Even his admiring biographers have noticed, with something of a chuckle,
+the revenge which Perceval, who was the chief object of Plymley's
+sarcasm, took, without in the least knowing it, on his lampooner. Had it
+not been for the Clergy Residence Bill, which that very respectable, if
+not very brilliant, statesman passed in 1808, and which put an end to
+perhaps the most flagrant of all then existing abuses, Sydney, the enemy
+of abuses, would no doubt have continued with a perfectly clear
+conscience to draw the revenues of Foston, and while serving it by a
+curate, to preach, lecture, dine out, and rebuke Canning for making
+jokes, in London. As it was he had to make up his mind, though he
+obtained a respite from the Archbishop, to resign (which in the
+recurring frost of Whig hopes was not to be thought of), to exchange,
+which he found impossible, or to bury himself in Yorkshire. This was a
+real hardship upon him, because Foston, as it was, was uninhabitable,
+and had had no resident clergyman since the seventeenth century. But
+whatever bad things could be said of Sydney (and I really do not know
+what they are, except that the combination of a sharp wit, a ready pen,
+and strong political prejudices sometimes made him abuse his talents),
+no one could say that he ever shirked either a difficulty or a duty.
+When his first three years' leave expired, he went down in 1809 with his
+family to York, and established himself at Heslington, a village near
+the city and not far from his parish. And when a second term of
+dispensation from actual residence was over, he set to work and built
+the snuggest if the ugliest parsonage in England, with farm-buildings
+and all complete, at the cost of some four thousand pounds. Of the
+details of that building his own inimitable account exists, and is or
+ought to be well known. The brick-pit and kiln on the property, which
+were going to save fortunes and resulted in nothing but the production
+of exactly a hundred and fifty thousand unusable bricks: the four oxen,
+Tug, Lug, Haul and Crawl, who were to be the instruments of another
+economy and proved to be, at least in Sydneian language, equal to
+nothing but the consumption of "buckets of sal volatile:" the entry of
+the distracted mother of the household on her new domains with a baby
+clutched in her arms and one shoe left in the circumambient mud: the
+great folks of the neighbourhood (Lord and Lady Carlisle) coming to call
+graciously on the strangers, and being whelmed, coach and four,
+outriders and all, in a ploughed field of despond: the "universal
+scratcher" in the meadows, inclined so as to let the brute creation of
+all heights enjoy that luxury: Bunch the butler, a female child of
+tender years but stout proportions: Annie Kay the factotum: the
+"Immortal," a chariot which was picked up at York in the last stage of
+decay, and carried the family for many years half over England--all
+these things and persons are told in divers delightful scraps of
+autobiography and in innumerable letters, after a fashion impossible to
+better and at a length too long to quote.
+
+Sydney Smith was for more than twenty years rector of Foston, and for
+fully fifteen actually resided there. During this time he made the
+acquaintance of Lord and Lady Grey, next to Lord and Lady Holland his
+most constant friends, visited a little, entertained in his own
+unostentatious but hearty fashion a great deal, wrote many articles for
+the _Edinburgh Review_, found himself in a minority of one or two among
+the clergy of Yorkshire on the subject of Emancipation and similar
+matters, but was on the most friendly terms possible with his diocesan,
+Archbishop Vernon Harcourt. Nor was he even without further preferment,
+for he held for some years (on the then not discredited understanding of
+resignation when one of the Howards was ready for it) the neighbouring
+and valuable living of Londesborough. Then the death of an aunt put an
+end to his monetary anxieties, which for years had been considerable, by
+the legacy of a small but sufficient fortune. And at last, when he was
+approaching sixty, the good things of the Church, which he never
+affected to despise, came in earnest. The Tory Chancellor Lyndhurst gave
+him a stall at Bristol, which carried with it a small Devonshire living,
+and soon afterwards he was able to exchange Foston (which he had greatly
+improved), for Combe Florey near Taunton. When his friend Lord Grey
+became Prime Minister, the stall at Bristol was exchanged for a much
+more valuable one at St. Paul's; Halberton, the Devonshire vicarage, and
+Combe Florey still remaining his. These made up an ecclesiastical
+revenue not far short of three thousand a year, which Sydney enjoyed for
+the last fifteen years of his life. He never got anything more, and it
+is certain that for a time he was very sore at not being made a bishop,
+or at least offered a bishopric. Lord Holland had rather rashly
+explained the whole difficulty years before, by reporting a conversation
+of his with Lord Grenville, in which they had hoped that when the Whigs
+came into power they would be more grateful to Sydney than the Tories
+had been to Swift. Sydney's acuteness must have made him wince at the
+omen. For my part I do not see why either Harley or Grey should have
+hesitated, as far as any scruples of their own went. But I think any
+fair-minded person must admit the possibility of a scruple, though he
+may not share it, about the effect of seeing either the _Tale of a Tub_
+or _Peter Plymley's Letters_, with "By the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop
+of----" on the title-page. The people who would have been shocked might
+in each case have been fools: there is nothing that I at least can see,
+in either book, inconsistent with sound religion and churchmanship. But
+they would have been honest fools, and of such a Prime Minister has to
+take heed. So Amen Corner (or rather, for he did not live there, certain
+streets near Grosvenor Square) in London, and Combe Florey in the
+country, were Sydney Smith's abodes till his death. In the former he
+gave his breakfasts and dinners in the season, being further enabled to
+do so by his share (some thirty thousand pounds) of his brother
+Courtenay's Indian fortune. The latter, after rebuilding it,--for he had
+either a fate or a passion for bricks and mortar,--he made on a small
+scale one of the most beautiful and hospitable houses in the West of
+England.
+
+To Combe Florey, as to Foston, a sheaf of fantastic legends attaches
+itself; indeed, as Lady Holland was not very fond of dates, it is
+sometimes not clear to which of the two residences some of them apply.
+At both Sydney had a huge store-room, or rather grocer's and chemist's
+shop, from which he supplied the wants, not merely of his household, but
+of half the neighbourhood. It appears to have been at Combe Florey (for
+though no longer poor he still had a frugal mind), that he hit upon the
+device of "putting the cheapest soaps in the dearest papers," confident
+of the result upon the female temper. It was certainly there that he
+fitted up two favourite donkeys with a kind of holiday-dress of antlers,
+to meet the objection of one of his lady-visitors that he had no deer;
+and converted certain large bay-trees in boxes into the semblance of an
+orangery, by fastening some dozens of fine fruit to the branches. I like
+to think of the mixed astonishment and disgust of a great Russian, and a
+not very small Frenchman, both not long deceased, M. Tourguénieff and M.
+Paul de Saint-Victor, if they had heard of these pleasing tomfooleries.
+But tomfoolery, though, when properly and not inordinately indulged, one
+of the best things in life, must, like the other good things of life,
+come to an end. After an illness of some months Sydney Smith died at his
+house in Green Street, of heart disease, on 22nd February 1845, in the
+seventy-fourth year of his age.
+
+The memorials and evidences of his peculiar if not unique genius consist
+of three different kinds; reported or remembered conversations and
+jokes, letters, and formal literary work. He was once most famous as a
+talker; but conversation is necessarily the most perishable of all
+things, and its recorded fragments bear keeping less than any other
+relics. Some of the verbal jests assigned to him (notably the famous
+one about the tortoise, which, after being long known by the initiated
+not to be his, has at last been formally claimed by its rightful owner),
+are certainly or probably borrowed or falsely attributed, as rich
+conversationalists always borrow or receive. And always the things have
+something of the mangled air which sayings detached from their context
+can hardly escape. It is otherwise with the letters. The best letters
+are always most like the actual conversation of their writers, and
+probably no one ever wrote more as he talked than Sydney Smith. The
+specially literary qualities of his writing for print are here too in
+great measure; and on the whole, though of course the importance of
+subject is nearly always less, and the interest of sustained work is
+wholly absent, nowhere can the entire Sydney be better seen. Of the
+three satirists of modern times with whom he may not unfairly claim to
+rank--Pascal, Swift, and Voltaire--he is most like Voltaire in his
+faculty of presenting a good thing with a preface which does not in the
+least prepare you for it, and then leaving it without the slightest
+attempt to go back on it, and elaborate it, and make sure that his
+hearer has duly appreciated it and laughed at it. And of the two, though
+the palm of concentration must be given to Voltaire, the palm of
+absolute simplicity must be given to Sydney. Hardly any of his letters
+are without these unforced flashes of wit, from almost his first
+epistle to Jeffrey (where, after rallying that great little man on being
+the "only male despondent he has met," he adds the postscript, "I beg to
+except the Tuxford waiter, who desponds exactly as you do") to his very
+last to Miss Harcourt, in which he mildly dismisses one of his brethren
+as "anything but a _polished_ corner of the Temple." There is the "usual
+establishment for an eldest landed baby:" the proposition, advanced in
+the grave and chaste manner, that "the information of very plain women
+is so inconsiderable, that I agree with you in setting no store by it:"
+the plaintive expostulation with Lady Holland (who had asked him to
+dinner on the ninth of the month, after previously asking him to stay
+from the fifth to the twelfth), "it is like giving a gentleman an
+assignation for Wednesday when you are going to marry him on the
+previous Sunday--an attempt to combine the stimulus of gallantry with
+the security of connubial relations:" the simple and touching
+information that "Lord Tankerville has sent me a whole buck. This
+necessarily takes up a good deal of my time;" that "geranium-fed bacon
+is of a beautiful colour, but it takes so many plants to fatten one pig
+that such a system can never answer;" that "it is a mistake to think
+that Dr. Bond could be influenced by partridges. He is a man of very
+independent mind, with whom pheasants at least, or perhaps even turkeys,
+are necessary;" and scores more with references to which I find the
+fly-leaves of my copy of the letters covered. If any one wants to see
+how much solid there is with all this froth, let him turn to the
+passages showing the unconquerable manliness, fairness, and good sense
+with which Sydney treated the unhappy subject of Queen Caroline, out of
+which his friends were so ready to make political capital; or to the
+admirable epistle in which he takes seriously, and blunts once for all,
+the points of certain foolish witticisms as to the readiness with which
+he, a man about town, had taken to catechisms and cabbages in an almost
+uninhabited part of the despised country. In conversation he would seem
+sometimes to have a little, a very little, "forced the note." The Quaker
+baby, and the lady "with whom you might give an assembly or populate a
+parish," are instances in point. But he never does this in his letters.
+I take particular pleasure in the following passage written to Miss
+Georgiana Harcourt within two years of his death: "What a charming
+existence! To live in the midst of holy people; to know that nothing
+profane can approach you; to be certain that a Dissenter can no more be
+found in the Palace than a snake can exist in Ireland, or ripe fruit in
+Scotland! To have your society strong, and undiluted by the laity; to
+bid adieu to human learning; to feast on the Canons and revel in the
+Thirty-Nine Articles! Happy Georgiana!" Now if Sydney had been what some
+foolish people think him, merely a scoffer, there would be no fun in
+this; it would be as impertinent and in as bad taste as the stale jokes
+of the eighteenth century about Christianity. But he was much else.
+
+Of course, however, no rational man will contend that in estimating
+Sydney Smith's place in the general memory, his deliberate literary
+work, or at least that portion of it which he chose to present on
+reflection, acknowledged and endorsed, can be overlooked. His _Life_
+contains (what is infinitely desirable in all such Lives and by no means
+always or often furnished) a complete list of his contributions to the
+_Edinburgh Review_, and his works contain most of them. To these have to
+be added the pamphlets, of which the chief and incomparably the best
+are, at intervals of thirty years, _Peter Plymley_ and the _Letters to
+Archdeacon Singleton_, together with sermons, speeches, and other
+miscellaneous matter. The whole, except the things which he did not
+himself care to reprint, can be obtained now in one volume; but the
+print is not to be recommended to aged or weakly sight.
+
+Sydney Smith had no false modesty, and in not a few letters to Jeffrey
+he speaks of his own contributions to the _Edinburgh_ with the greatest
+freedom, combating and quite refusing to accept his editor's suggestion
+as to their flippancy and fantasticality, professing with much frankness
+that this is the way he can write and no other, and more than once
+telling Jeffrey that whatever they may think in solemn Scotland, his,
+Sydney's, articles are a great deal more read in England and elsewhere
+than any others. Although there are maxims to the contrary effect, the
+judgment of a clever man, not very young and tolerably familiar with the
+world, on his own work, is very seldom far wrong. I should say myself
+that, putting aside the historic estimate, Sydney Smith's articles are
+by far the most interesting nowadays of those contributed by any one
+before the days of Macaulay, who began just as Sydney ceased to write
+anonymously in 1827, on his Bristol appointment. They are also by far
+the most distinct and original. Jeffrey, Brougham, and the rest wrote,
+for the most part, very much after the fashion of the ancients: if a
+very few changes were made for date, passages of Jeffrey's criticism
+might almost be passages of Dryden, certainly passages of the better
+critics of the eighteenth century, as far as manner goes. There is
+nobody at all like Sydney Smith before him in England, for Swift's style
+is wholly different. To begin with, Sydney had a strong prejudice in
+favour of writing very short articles, and a horror of reading long
+ones--the latter being perhaps less peculiar to himself than the former.
+Then he never made the slightest pretence at systematic or dogmatic
+criticism of anything whatever. In literature proper he seems indeed to
+have had no particular principles, and I cannot say that he had very
+good taste. He commits the almost unpardonable sin of not merely
+blaspheming Madame de Sévigné, but preferring to her that second-rate
+leader-writer in petticoats, Madame de Staël. On the other hand, if he
+had no literary principles, he had (except in rare cases where politics
+came in, and not often then) few literary prejudices, and his happily
+incorrigible good sense and good humour were proof against the frequent
+bias of his associates. Though he could not have been very sensible,
+from what he himself says, of their highest qualities, he championed
+Scott's novels incessantly against the Whigs and prigs of Holland House.
+He gives a most well-timed warning to Jeffrey that the constant
+running-down of Wordsworth had very much the look of persecution, though
+with his usual frankness he avows that he has not read the particular
+article in question, because the subject is "quite uninteresting to
+him." I think he would, if driven hard, have admitted with equal
+frankness that poetry, merely as poetry, was generally uninteresting.
+Still he had so many interests of various kinds, that few books failed
+to appeal to one or the other, and he, in his turn, has seldom failed to
+give a lively if not a very exact or critical account of his subject.
+But it is in his way of giving this account that the peculiarity,
+glanced at above as making a parallel between him and Voltaire, appears.
+It is, I have said, almost original, and what is more, endless as has
+been the periodical writing of the last eighty years, and sedulously as
+later writers have imitated earlier, I do not know that it has ever
+been successfully copied. It consists in giving rapid and apparently
+business-like summaries, packed, with apparent negligence and real art,
+full of the flashes of wit so often noticed and to be noticed. Such are,
+in the article on "The Island of Ceylon," the honey-bird "into whose
+body the soul of a common informer seems to have migrated," and "the
+chaplain of the garrison, all in black, the Rev. Mr. Somebody or other
+whose name we have forgotten," the discovery of whose body in a serpent
+his ruthless clerical brother pronounces to be "the best history of the
+kind he remembers." Very likely there may be people who can read this,
+even the "all in black," without laughing, and among them I should
+suppose must be the somebody or other, whose name we too have forgotten,
+who is said to have imagined that he had more than parried Sydney's
+unforgiven jest about the joke and the surgical operation, by retorting,
+"Yes! an _English_ joke." I have always wept to think that Sydney did
+not live to hear this retort. The classical places for this kind of
+summary work are the article just named on Ceylon, and that on Waterton.
+But the most inimitable single example, if it is not too shocking to
+this very proper age, is the argument of Mat Lewis's tragedy: "Ottilia
+becomes quite furious from the conviction that Cæsario has been sleeping
+with a second lady called Estella; whereas he has really been sleeping
+with a third lady called Amelrosa."
+
+Among the most important of these essays are the two famous ones on
+Methodism and on Indian missions, which gave far more offence to the
+religious public of evangelical persuasion than all Sydney's jokes on
+bishops, or his arguments for Catholic emancipation, and which (owing to
+the strong influence which then, as now, Nonconformists possessed in the
+counsels of the Liberal party) probably had as much to do as anything
+else with the reluctance of the Whig leaders, when they came into power,
+to give their friend the highest ecclesiastical preferment. These
+subjects are rather difficult to treat in a general literary essay, and
+it may perhaps be admitted that here, as in dealing with poetry and
+other subjects of the more transcendental kind, Sydney showed a touch of
+Philistinism, and a distinct inability to comprehend exaltation of
+sentiment and thought. But the general sense is admirably sound and
+perfectly orthodox; and the way in which so apparently light and
+careless a writer has laboriously supported every one of his charges,
+and almost every one of his flings, with chapter and verse from the
+writings of the incriminated societies, is very remarkable. Nor can it,
+I think, be doubted that the publication, in so widely read a
+periodical, of the nauseous follies of speech in which well-meaning
+persons indulged, had something to do with the gradual disuse of a style
+than which nothing could be more prejudicial to religion, for the simple
+reason that nothing else could make religion ridiculous. The medicine
+did not of course operate at once, and silly people still write silly
+things. But I hardly think that the Wesleyan body or the Church
+Missionary Society would now officially publish such stuff as the
+passage about Brother Carey, who, while in the actual paroxysm of
+sea-sickness, was "wonderfully comforted by the contemplation of the
+goodness of God," or that about Brother Ward "in design clasping to his
+bosom" the magnanimous Captain Wickes, who subsequently "seemed very
+low," when a French privateer was in sight. Jeffrey was, it seems, a
+little afraid of these well-deserved exposures, which, from the
+necessity of abundant quotation, are an exception to the general
+shortness of Sydney's articles. Sydney's interest in certain subjects
+led him constantly to take up fresh books on them; and thus a series of
+series might be made out of his papers, with some advantage to the
+reader perhaps, if a new edition of his works were undertaken. The chief
+of such subjects is America, in dealing with which he pleased the
+Americans by descanting on their gradual emancipation from English
+prejudices and abuses, but infuriated them by constant denunciations of
+slavery, and by laughing at their lack of literature and cultivation.
+With India he also dealt often, his brothers' connection with it giving
+him an interest therein. Prisons were another favourite subject, though,
+in his zeal for making them uncomfortable, he committed himself to one
+really atrocious suggestion--that of dark cells for long periods of
+time. It is odd that the same person should make such a truly diabolical
+proposal, and yet be in a perpetual state of humanitarian rage about
+man-traps and spring-guns, which were certainly milder engines of
+torture. It is odd, too, that Sydney, who was never tired of arguing
+that prisons ought to be made uncomfortable, because nobody need go
+there unless he chose, should have been furiously wroth with poor Mr.
+Justice Best for suggesting much the same thing of spring-guns. The
+greatest political triumph of his manner is to be found no doubt in the
+article "Bentham on Fallacies," in which the unreadable diatribes of the
+apostle of utilitarianism are somehow spirited and crisped up into a
+series of brilliant arguments, and the whole is crowned by the famous
+"Noodle's Oration," the summary and storehouse of all that ever has been
+or can be said on the Liberal side in the lighter manner. It has not
+lost its point even from the fact that Noodle has now for a long time
+changed his party, and has elaborated for himself, after his manner, a
+similar stock of platitudes and absurdities in favour of the very things
+for which Sydney was fighting.
+
+The qualities of these articles appear equally in the miscellaneous
+essays, in the speeches, and even in the sermons, though Sydney Smith,
+unlike Sterne, never condescended to buffoonery or theatrical tricks in
+the pulpit. In _Peter Plymley's Letters_ they appear concentrated and
+acidulated: in the _Letters to Archdeacon Singleton_, in the
+_Repudiation Letters_, and the _Letters on Railways_ which date from his
+very last days, concentrated and mellowed. More than one good judge has
+been of the opinion that Sydney's powers increased to the very end of
+his life, and it is not surprising that this should have been the case.
+Although he did plenty of work in his time, the literary part of it was
+never of an exhausting nature. Though one of the most original of
+commentators, he was a commentator pure and simple, and found, but did
+not supply, his matter. Thus there was no danger of running dry, and as
+his happiest style was not indignation but good-natured raillery, his
+increasing prosperity, not chequered, till quite the close of his life,
+by any serious bodily ailment, put him more and more in the right
+atmosphere and temper for indulging his genius. _Plymley_, though very
+amusing, and, except in the Canning matter above referred to, not
+glaringly unfair for a political lampoon, is distinctly acrimonious, and
+almost (as "almost" as Sydney could be) ill-tempered. It is possible to
+read between the lines that the writer is furious at his party being out
+of office, and is much more angry with Mr. Perceval for having the ear
+of the country than for being a respectable nonentity. The main
+argument, moreover, is bad in itself, and was refuted by facts. Sydney
+pretends to be, as his friend Jeffrey really was, in mortal terror lest
+the French should invade England, and, joined by rebellious Irishmen
+and wrathful Catholics generally, produce an English revolution. The
+Tories replied, "We will take good care that the French shall _not_
+land, and that Irishmen shall _not_ rise." And they did take the said
+good care, and they beat the Frenchmen thorough and thorough while
+Sydney and his friends were pointing their epigrams. Therefore, though
+much of the contention is unanswerable enough, the thing is doubtfully
+successful as a whole. In the _Letters to Archdeacon Singleton_ the tone
+is almost uniformly good-humoured, and the argument, whether quite
+consistent or not in the particular speaker's mouth, is absolutely
+sound, and has been practically admitted since by almost all the best
+friends of the Church. Here occurs that inimitable passage before
+referred to.
+
+    I met the other day, in an old Dutch chronicle, with a passage
+    so apposite to this subject, that, though it is somewhat too
+    light for the occasion, I cannot abstain from quoting it. There
+    was a great meeting of all the clergy at Dordrecht, and the
+    chronicler thus describes it, which I give in the language of
+    the translation: "And there was great store of Bishops in the
+    town, in their robes goodly to behold, and all the great men of
+    the State were there, and folks poured in in boats on the Meuse,
+    the Merse, the Rhine, and the Linge, coming from the Isle of
+    Beverlandt and Isselmond, and from all quarters in the Bailiwick
+    of Dort; Arminians and Gomarists, with the friends of John
+    Barneveldt and of Hugh Grote. And before my Lords the Bishops,
+    Simon of Gloucester, who was a Bishop in those parts, disputed
+    with Vorstius and Leoline the Monk, and many texts of Scripture
+    were bandied to and fro; and when this was done, and many
+    propositions made, and it waxed towards twelve of the clock, my
+    Lords the Bishops prepared to set them down to a fair repast, in
+    which was great store of good things--and among the rest a
+    roasted peacock, having in lieu of a tail the arms and banners
+    of the Archbishop, which was a goodly sight to all who favoured
+    the Church--and then the Archbishop would say a grace, as was
+    seemly to do, he being a very holy man; but ere he had finished,
+    a great mob of townspeople and folks from the country, who were
+    gathered under the windows, cried out _Bread! bread!_ for there
+    was a great famine, and wheat had risen to three times the
+    ordinary price of the _sleich_; and when they had done crying
+    _Bread! bread!_ they called out _No Bishops!_ and began to cast
+    up stones at the windows. Whereat my Lords the Bishops were in a
+    great fright, and cast their dinner out of the window to appease
+    the mob, and so the men of that town were well pleased, and did
+    devour the meats with a great appetite; and then you might have
+    seen my Lords standing with empty plates, and looking wistfully
+    at each other, till Simon of Gloucester, he who disputed with
+    Leoline the Monk, stood up among them and said, _Good my Lords,
+    is it your pleasure to stand here fasting, and that those who
+    count lower in the Church than you do should feast and fluster?
+    Let us order to us the dinner of the Deans and Canons which is
+    making ready for them in the chamber below._ And this speech of
+    Simon of Gloucester pleased the Bishops much; and so they sent
+    for the host, one William of Ypres, and told him it was for the
+    public good, and he, much fearing the Bishops, brought them the
+    dinner of the Deans and Canons; and so the Deans and Canons went
+    away without dinner, and were pelted by the men of the town,
+    because they had not put any meat out of the windows like the
+    Bishops; and when the Count came to hear of it, he said it was a
+    pleasant conceit, _and that the Bishops were right cunning men,
+    and had ding'd the Canons well_."
+
+Even in the Singleton Letters, however, there are some little lapses of
+the same kind (worse, indeed, because these letters were signed) as the
+attack on Canning in the Plymley Letters. Sydney Smith exclaiming
+against "derision and persiflage, the great principle by which the world
+is now governed," is again edifying. But in truth Sydney never had the
+weakness (for I have known it called a weakness) of looking too
+carefully to see what the enemy's advocate is going to say. Take even
+the famous, the immortal apologue of Mrs. Partington. It covered, we are
+usually told, the Upper House with ridicule, and did as much as anything
+else to carry the Reform Bill. And yet, though it is a watery apologue,
+it will not hold water for a moment. The implied conclusion is, that the
+Atlantic beat Mrs. Partington. Did it? It made, no doubt, a great mess
+in her house, it put her to flight, it put her to shame. But when I was
+last at Sidmouth the line of high-water mark was, I believe, much what
+it was before the great storm of 1824, and though the particular Mrs.
+Partington had no doubt been gathered to her fathers, the Mrs.
+Partington of the day was, equally without doubt, living very
+comfortably in the house which the Atlantic had threatened to swallow
+up.
+
+It was, however, perhaps part of Sydney's strength that he never cared
+to consider too curiously, or on too many sides. Besides his inimitable
+felicity of expression (the Singleton Letters are simply crammed with
+epigram), he had the sturdiest possible common sense and the liveliest
+possible humour. I have known his claim to the title of "humourist"
+called in question by precisians: nobody could deny him the title of
+good-humourist. Except that the sentimental side of Toryism would never
+have appealed to him, it was chiefly an accident of time that he was a
+polemical Liberal. He would always and naturally have been on the side
+opposite to that on which most of the fools were. When he came into the
+world, as the straitest Tory will admit, there were in that world a
+great many abuses as they are called, that is to say, a great many
+things which, once useful and excellent, had either decayed into
+positive nuisances, or dried up into neutral and harmless but
+obstructive rubbish. There were also many silly and some mischievous
+people, as well as some wise and useful ones, who defended the abuses.
+Sydney Smith was an ideal soldier of reform for his time, and in his
+way. He was not extraordinarily long-sighted--indeed (as his famous and
+constantly-repeated advice to "take short views of life" shows) he had a
+distinct distrust of taking too anxious thought for political or any
+other morrows. But he had a most keen and, in many cases, a most just
+scent and sight for the immediate inconveniences and injustices of the
+day, and for the shortest and most effective ways of mending them. He
+was perhaps more destitute of romance and of reverence (though he had
+too much good taste to be positively irreverent) than any man who ever
+lived. He never could have paralleled, he never could have even
+understood, Scott's feelings about the Regalia, or that ever-famous
+incident of Sir Walter's life, when returning with Jeffrey and other
+Whig friends from some public meeting, he protested against the
+innovations which, harmless or even beneficial individually and in
+themselves, would by degrees destroy every thing that made Scotland
+Scotland. I am afraid that his warmest admirers, even those of his own
+political complexion, must admit that he was, as has been said, more
+than a little of a Philistine; that he expressed, and expressed
+capitally in one way, that curious middle-class sentiment, or denial of
+sentiment, which won its first triumph in the first Reform Bill and its
+last in the Exhibition of twenty years later, which destroyed no doubt
+much that was absurd, and some things that were noxious, but which
+induced in England a reign of shoddy in politics, in philosophy, in art,
+in literature, and, when its own reign was over, left England weak and
+divided, instead of, as it had been under the reign of abuses, united
+and strong. The bombardment of Copenhagen may or may not have been a
+dreadful thing: it was at any rate better than the abandonment of
+Khartoum. Nor can Sydney any more than his friends be acquitted of
+having held the extraordinary notion that you can "rest and be thankful"
+in politics, that you can set Demos at bishops, but stave and tail him
+off when he comes to canons; that you can level beautifully down to a
+certain point, and then stop levelling for ever afterwards; that because
+you can laugh Brother Ringletub out of court, laughter will be equally
+effective with Cardinal Newman; and that though it is the height of
+"anility" (a favourite word of his) to believe in a country gentleman,
+it is the height of rational religion to believe in a ten-pound
+householder.
+
+But however open to exception his principles may be, and that not merely
+from the point of view of highflying Toryism, his carrying out of them
+in life and in literature had the two abiding justifications of being
+infinitely amusing, and of being amusing always in thoroughly good
+temper. It is, as I have said, impossible to read Sydney Smith's _Life_,
+and still more impossible to read his letters, without liking him warmly
+and personally, without seeing that he was not only a man who liked to
+be comfortable (that is not very rare), that he was not only one who
+liked others to be comfortable (that is rarer), but one who in every
+situation in which he was thrown, did his utmost to make others as well
+as himself comfortable (which is rarest of all). If the references in
+_Peter Plymley_ to Canning were unjustifiable from him, there is little
+or no reason to think that they were prompted by personal jealousy; and
+though, as has been said, he was undoubtedly sore, and unreasonably
+sore, at not receiving the preferment which he thought he had deserved,
+he does not seem to have been personally jealous of any man who had
+received it. The parson of Foston and Combe Florey may not have been
+(his latest biographer, admiring though he be, pathetically laments that
+he was not) a spiritually minded man. But happy beyond almost all other
+parishioners of the time were the parishioners of Combe Florey and
+Foston, though one of them did once throw a pair of scissors at his
+provoking pastor. He was a fast and affectionate friend; and though he
+was rather given to haunting rich men, he did it not only without
+servility, but without that alternative of bearishness and freaks which
+has sometimes been adopted. As a prince of talkers he might have been a
+bore to a generation which (I own I think in that perhaps single point),
+wiser than its fathers, is not so ambitious as they were to sit as a
+bucket and be pumped into. But in that infinitely happier system of
+conversation by books, which any one can enjoy as he likes and interrupt
+as he likes at his own fireside, Sydney is still a prince. There may be
+living somewhere some one who does not think so very badly of slavery,
+who is most emphatically of opinion that "the fools were right," in the
+matters of Catholic emancipation and Reform, who thinks well of public
+schools and universities, who even, though he may not like spring-guns
+much, thinks that John Jones had only himself to blame if, after ample
+warning and with no business except the business of supplying a London
+poulterer with his landlord's game, he trespassed and came to the worst.
+Yet even this monster, if he happened to be possessed of the sense of
+fun and literature, (which is perhaps impossible), could not read even
+the most acrid of Sydney's political diatribes without shrieking with
+laughter, if, in his ogreish way, he were given to such violent
+demonstrations; could certainly not read the _Life_ and the letters
+without admitting, in a moment of unwonted humanity, that here was a man
+who, for goodness as well as for cleverness, for sound practical wisdom
+as well as for fantastic verbal wit, has had hardly a superior and very
+few equals.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[8] To speak of him in this way is not impertinence or familiarity. He
+was most generally addressed as "Mr. Sydney," and his references to his
+wife are nearly always to "Mrs. Sydney," seldom or never to "Mrs.
+Smith."
+
+[9] See next Essay.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+JEFFREY
+
+
+"Jeffrey and I," says Christopher North in one of his more malicious
+moments, "do nothing original; it's porter's work." A tolerably
+experienced student of human nature might almost, without knowing the
+facts, guess the amount of truth contained in this fling. North, as
+North, had done nothing that the world calls original: North, as Wilson,
+had done a by no means inconsiderable quantity of such work in verse and
+prose. But Jeffrey really did underlie the accusation contained in the
+words. A great name in literature, nothing stands to his credit in
+permanent literary record but a volume (a sufficiently big one, no
+doubt[10]) of criticisms on the work of other men; and though this
+volume is only a selection from his actual writings, no further gleaning
+could be made of any different material. Even his celebrated, or once
+celebrated, "Treatise on Beauty" is but a review article, worked up into
+an encyclopædia article, and dealing almost wholly with pure criticism.
+Against him, if against any one, the famous and constantly repeated gibe
+about the fellows who have failed in literature and art, falls short and
+harmless. In another of its forms, "the corruption of a poet is the
+generation of a critic," it might be more appropriate. For Jeffrey, as
+we know from his boyish letters, once thought, like almost every boy who
+is not an idiot, that he might be a poet, and scribbled verses in
+plenty. But the distinguishing feature in this case was, that he waited
+for no failure, for no public ridicule or neglect, not even for any
+private nipping of the merciful, but so seldom effective, sort, to check
+those sterile growths. The critic was sufficiently early developed in
+him to prevent the corruption of the poet from presenting itself, in its
+usual disastrous fashion, to the senses of the world. Thus he lives (for
+his political and legal renown, though not inconsiderable, is
+comparatively unimportant) as a critic pure and simple.
+
+His biographer, Lord Cockburn, tells us that "Francis Jeffrey, the
+greatest of British critics, was born in Edinburgh on 23d October 1773."
+It must be at the end, not the beginning, of this paper that we decide
+whether Jeffrey deserves the superlative. He seems certainly to have
+begun his critical practice very early. He was the son of a depute-clerk
+of the Court of Session, and respectably, though not brilliantly,
+connected. His father was a great Tory, and, though it would be
+uncharitable to say that this was the reason why Jeffrey was a great
+Liberal, the two facts were probably not unconnected in the line of
+causation. Francis went to the High School when he was eight, and to the
+College at Glasgow when he was fourteen. He does not appear to have been
+a prodigy at either; but he has an almost unequalled record for early
+work of the self-undertaken kind. He seems from his boyhood to have been
+addicted to filling reams of paper, and shelves full of note-books, with
+extracts, abstracts, critical annotations, criticisms of these
+criticisms, and all manner of writing of the same kind. I believe it is
+the general experience that this kind of thing does harm in nineteen
+cases, for one in which it does good; but Jeffrey was certainly a
+striking exception to the rule, though perhaps he might not have been so
+if his producing, or at least publishing, time had not been unusually
+delayed. Indeed, his whole mental history appears to have been of a
+curiously piecemeal character; and his scrappy and self-guided education
+may have conduced to the priggishness which he showed early, and never
+entirely lost, till fame, prosperity, and the approach of old age
+mellowed it out of him. He was not sixteen when his sojourn at Glasgow
+came to an end; and, for more than two years, he seems to have been left
+to a kind of studious independence, attending only a couple of law
+classes at Edinburgh University. Then his father insisted on his going
+to Oxford: a curious step, the reasons for which are anything but clear.
+For the paternal idea seems to have been that Jeffrey was to study not
+arts, but law; a study for which Oxford may present facilities now, but
+which most certainly was quite out of its way in Jeffrey's time, and
+especially in the case of a Scotch boy of ordinary freshman's age.
+
+It is painful to have to say that Jeffrey hated Oxford, because there
+are few instances on record in which such hatred does not show the hater
+to have been a very bad man indeed. There are, however, some special
+excuses for the little Scotchman. His college (Queen's) was not perhaps
+very happily selected; he had been sent there in the teeth of his own
+will, which was a pretty strong will; he was horrified, after the free
+selection of Scotch classes, to find a regular curriculum which he had
+to take or leave as a whole; the priggishness of Oxford was not his
+priggishness, its amusements (for he hated sport of every kind) were not
+his amusements; and, in short, there was a general incompatibility. He
+came up in September and went down in July, having done nothing except
+having, according to a not ill-natured jest, "lost the broad Scotch, but
+gained only the narrow English,"--a peculiarity which sometimes brought
+a little mild ridicule on him both from Scotchmen and Englishmen.
+
+Very soon after his return to Edinburgh, he seems to have settled down
+steadily to study for the Scotch bar, and during his studies
+distinguished himself as a member of the famous Speculative Society,
+both in essay-writing and in the debates. He was called on 16th December
+1794.
+
+Although there have never been very quick returns at the bar, either of
+England or Scotland, the smaller numbers of the latter might be thought
+likely to bring young men of talent earlier to the front. This
+advantage, however, appears to have been counterbalanced partly by the
+strong family interests which made a kind of aristocracy among Scotch
+lawyers, and partly by the influence of politics and of Government
+patronage. Jeffrey was, comparatively speaking, a "kinless loon"; and,
+while he was steadily resolved not to put himself forward as a candidate
+for the Tory manna of which Dundas was the Moses, his filial reverence
+long prevented him from declaring himself a very violent Whig. Indeed,
+he gave an instance of this reverence which might serve as a pretty text
+for a casuistical discussion. Henry Erskine, Dean of the Faculty of
+Advocates, was in 1796 deprived by vote of that, the most honourable
+position of the Scotch bar, for having presided at a Whig meeting.
+Jeffrey, like Gibbon, sighed as a Whig, but obeyed as a son, and stayed
+away from the poll. His days were certainly long in the land; but I am
+inclined to think that, in a parallel case, some Tories at least would
+have taken the chance of shorter life with less speckled honour.
+However, it is hard to quarrel with a man for obeying his parents; and
+perhaps, after all, the Whigs did not think the matter of so much
+importance as they affected to do. It is certain that Jeffrey was a
+little dashed by the slowness of his success at the bar. Towards the end
+of 1798, he set out for London with a budget of letters of introduction,
+and thoughts of settling down to literature. But the editors and
+publishers to whom he was introduced did not know what a treasure lay
+underneath the scanty surface of this Scotch advocate, and they were
+either inaccessible or repulsive. He returned to Edinburgh, and, for
+another two years, waited for fortune philosophically enough, though
+with lingering thoughts of England, and growing ones of India. It was
+just at the turn of the century, that his fortunes began, in various
+ways, also to take a turn. For some years, though a person by no means
+given to miscellaneous acquaintances, he had been slowly forming the
+remarkable circle of friends from whose combined brains was soon to
+start the _Edinburgh Review_. He fell in love, and married his second
+cousin, Catherine Wilson, on 1st November 1801--a bold and by no means
+canny step, for his father was ill-off, the bride was tocherless, and he
+says that he had never earned a hundred pounds a year in fees. They did
+not, however, launch out greatly, and their house in Buccleuch Place
+(not the least famous locality in literature) was furnished on a scale
+which some modern colleges, conducted on the principles of enforced
+economy, would think Spartan for an undergraduate. Shortly afterwards,
+and very little before the appearance of the Blue and Yellow, Jeffrey
+made another innovation, which was perhaps not less profitable to him,
+by establishing a practice in ecclesiastical causes; though he met with
+a professional check in his rejection, on party principles, for the
+so-called collectorship, a kind of reporter's post of some emolument and
+not inconsiderable distinction.
+
+The story of the _Edinburgh Review_ and its foundation has been very
+often told on the humorous, if not exactly historical, authority of
+Sydney Smith. It is unnecessary to repeat it. It is undoubted that the
+idea was Sydney's. It is equally undoubted that, but for Jeffrey, the
+said idea might never have taken form at all, and would never have
+retained any form for more than a few months. It was only Jeffrey's
+long-established habit of critical writing, the untiring energy into
+which he whipped up his no doubt gifted but quite untrained
+contributors, and the skill which he almost at once developed in editing
+proper,--that is to say in selecting, arranging, adapting, and, even to
+some extent, re-writing contributions--which secured success. Very
+different opinions have been expressed at different times on the
+intrinsic merits of this celebrated production; and perhaps, on the
+whole, the principal feeling of explorers into the long and dusty
+ranges of its early volumes, has been one of disappointment. I believe
+myself that, in similar cases, a similar result is very common indeed,
+and that it is due to the operation of two familiar fallacies. The one
+is the delusion as to the products of former times being necessarily
+better than those of the present; a delusion which is not the less
+deluding because of its counterpart, the delusion about progress. The
+other is a more peculiar and subtle one. I shall not go so far as a very
+experienced journalist who once said to me commiseratingly, "My good
+sir, I won't exactly say that literary merit hurts a newspaper." But
+there is no doubt that all the great successes of journalism, for the
+last hundred years, have been much more due to the fact of the new
+venture being new, of its supplying something that the public wanted and
+had not got, than to the fact of the supply being extraordinarily good
+in kind. In nearly every case, the intrinsic merit has improved as the
+thing went on, but it has ceased to be a novel merit. Nothing would be
+easier than to show that the early _Edinburgh_ articles were very far
+from perfect. Of Jeffrey we shall speak presently, and there is no doubt
+that Sydney at his best was, and is always, delightful. But the
+blundering bluster of Brougham, the solemn ineffectiveness of Horner (of
+whom I can never think without also thinking of Scott's delightful
+Shandean jest on him), the respectable erudition of the Scotch
+professors, cannot for one single moment be compared with the work
+which, in Jeffrey's own later days, in those of Macvey Napier, and in
+the earlier ones of Empson, was contributed by Hazlitt, by Carlyle, by
+Stephen, and, above all, by Macaulay. The _Review_ never had any one who
+could emulate the ornateness of De Quincey or Wilson, the pure and
+perfect English of Southey, or the inimitable insolence, so polished and
+so intangible, of Lockhart. But it may at least claim that it led the
+way, and that the very men who attacked its principles and surpassed its
+practice had, in some cases, been actually trained in its school, and
+were in all, imitating and following its model. To analyse, with
+chemical exactness, the constituents of a literary novelty is never
+easy, if it is ever possible. But some of the contrasts between the
+style of criticism most prevalent at the time, and the style of the new
+venture are obvious and important. The older rivals of the _Edinburgh_
+maintained for the most part a decent and amiable impartiality; the
+_Edinburgh_, whatever it pretended to be, was violently partisan,
+unhesitatingly personal, and more inclined to find fault, the more
+distinguished the subject was. The reviews of the time had got into the
+hands either of gentlemen and ladies who were happy to be thought
+literary, and only too glad to write for nothing, or else into those of
+the lowest booksellers' hacks, who praised or blamed according to
+orders, wrote without interest and without vigour, and were quite
+content to earn the smallest pittance. The _Edinburgh_ started from the
+first on the principle that its contributors should be paid, and paid
+well, whether they liked it or not, thus establishing at once an
+inducement to do well and a check on personal eccentricity and
+irresponsibility; while whatever partisanship there might be in its
+pages, there was at any rate no mere literary puffery.
+
+From being, but for his private studies, rather an idle person, Jeffrey
+became an extremely busy one. The _Review_ gave him not a little
+occupation, and his practice increased rapidly. In 1803 the institution,
+at Scott's suggestion, of the famous Friday Club, in which, for the
+greater part of the first half of this century, the best men in
+Edinburgh, Johnstone and Maxwell, Whig and Tory alike, met in peaceable
+conviviality, did a good deal to console Jeffrey, who was now as much
+given to company as he had been in his early youth to solitude, for the
+partial breaking up of the circle of friends--Allen, Horner, Smith,
+Brougham, Lord Webb Seymour--in which he had previously mixed. In the
+same year he became a volunteer, an act of patriotism the more
+creditable, that he seems to have been sincerely convinced of the
+probability of an invasion, and of the certainty of its success if it
+occurred. But I have no room here for anything but a rapid review of the
+not very numerous or striking events of his life. Soon, however, after
+the date last mentioned, he met with two afflictions peculiarly trying
+to a man whose domestic affections were unusually strong. These were the
+deaths of his favourite sister in May 1804, and of his wife in October
+1805. The last blow drove him nearly to despair; and the extreme and
+open-mouthed "sensibility" of his private letters, on this and similar
+occasions, is very valuable as an index of character, oddly as it
+contrasts, in the vulgar estimate, with the supposed cynicism and
+savagery of the critic. In yet another year occurred the somewhat
+ludicrous duel, or beginning of a duel, with Moore, in which several
+police constables did perform the friendly office which Mr. Winkle
+vainly deprecated, and in which Jeffrey's, not Moore's, pistol was
+discovered to be leadless. There is a sentence in a letter of Jeffrey's
+concerning the thing which is characteristic and amusing: "I am glad to
+have gone through this scene, both because it satisfies me that my
+nerves are good enough to enable me to act in conformity to my notions
+of propriety without any suffering, and because it also assures me that
+I am really as little in love with life as I have been for some time in
+the habit of professing." It is needless to say that this was an example
+of the excellence of beginning with a little aversion, for Jeffrey and
+Moore fraternised immediately afterwards and remained friends for life.
+The quarrel, or half quarrel, with Scott as to the review of "Marmion,"
+the planning and producing of the _Quarterly Review, English Bards and
+Scotch Reviewers_, not a few other events of the same kind, must be
+passed over rapidly. About six years after the death of his first wife,
+Jeffrey met, and fell in love with, a certain Miss Charlotte Wilkes,
+great-niece of the patriot, and niece of a New York banker, and of a
+Monsieur and Madame Simond, who were travelling in Europe. He married
+her two years later, having gone through the very respectable probation
+of crossing and re-crossing the Atlantic (he was a very bad sailor) in a
+sailing ship, in winter, and in time of war, to fetch his bride. Nor had
+he long been married before he took the celebrated country house of
+Craigcrook, where, for more than thirty years, he spent all the spare
+time of an exceedingly happy life. Then we may jump some fifteen years
+to the great Reform contest which gave Jeffrey the reward, such as it
+was, of his long constancy in opposition, in the shape of the Lord
+Advocateship. He was not always successful as a debater; but he had the
+opportunity of adding a third reputation to those which he had already
+gained in literature and in law. He had the historical duty of piloting
+the Scotch Reform Bill through Parliament, and he had the, in his case,
+pleasurable and honourable pain of taking the official steps in
+Parliament necessitated by the mental incapacity of Sir Walter Scott.
+Early in 1834 he was provided for by promotion to the Scotch Bench. He
+had five years before, on being appointed Dean of Faculty, given up the
+editorship of the _Review_, which he had held for seven-and-twenty
+years. For some time previous to his resignation, his own contributions,
+which in early days had run up to half a dozen in a single number, and
+had averaged two or three for more than twenty years, had become more
+and more intermittent. After that resignation he contributed two or
+three articles at very long intervals. He was perhaps more lavish of
+advice than he need have been to Macvey Napier, and after Napier's death
+it passed into the control of his own son-in-law, Empson. Long, however,
+before the reins passed from his own hands, a rival more galling if less
+formidable than the _Quarterly_ had arisen in the shape of _Blackwood's
+Magazine_. The more ponderous and stately publication always affected,
+to some extent, to ignore its audacious junior; and Lord Cockburn
+(perhaps instigated not more by prudence than by regard for Lockhart and
+Wilson, both of whom were living) passes over in complete silence the
+establishment of the magazine, the publication of the Chaldee
+manuscript, and the still greater hubbub which arose around the supposed
+attacks of Lockhart on Playfair, and the _Edinburgh_ reviewers
+generally, with regard to their religious opinions. How deep the
+feelings really excited were, may be seen from a letter of Jeffrey's,
+published, not by Cockburn, but by Wilson's daughter in the life of her
+father. In this Jeffrey practically drums out a new and certainly most
+promising recruit for his supposed share in the business, and inveighs
+in the most passionate terms against the imputation. It is undesirable
+to enter at length into any such matters here. It need only be said that
+Allen, one of the founders of the _Edinburgh_, and always a kind of
+standing counsel to it, is now acknowledged to have been something
+uncommonly like an atheist, that Sydney Smith (as I believe most
+unjustly) was often, and is sometimes still, regarded as standing
+towards his profession very much in the attitude of a French _abbé_ of
+the eighteenth century, that almost the whole staff of the _Review_,
+including Jeffrey, had, as every Edinburgh man of position knew,
+belonged to the so-called Academy of Physics, the first principle of
+which was that only three facts (the words are Lord Cockburn's) were to
+be admitted without proof: (1) Mind exists; (2) matter exists; (3) every
+change indicates a cause. Nowadays the most orthodox of metaphysicians
+would admit that this limitation of position by no means implied
+atheism. But seventy years ago it would have been the exception to find
+an orthodox metaphysician who did admit it; and Lockhart, or rather
+Baron von Lauerwinkel, was perfectly justified in taking the view which
+ordinary opinion took.
+
+These jars, however, were long over when Jeffrey became Lord Jeffrey,
+and subsided upon the placid bench. He lived sixteen years longer,
+alternating between Edinburgh, Craigcrook, and divers houses which he
+hired from time to time, on Loch Lomond, on the Clyde, and latterly at
+some English watering-places in the west. His health was not
+particularly good, though hardly worse than any man who lives to nearly
+eighty, with constant sedentary and few out-of-door occupations, and
+with a cheerful devotion to the good things of this life, must expect.
+And he was on the whole singularly happy, being passionately devoted to
+his wife, his daughter, and his grandchildren; possessing ample means,
+and making a cheerful and sensible use of them; seeing the increasing
+triumph of the political principles to which he had attached himself;
+knowing that he was regarded by friends and foes alike, as the chief
+living English representative of an important branch of literature; and
+retaining to the last an almost unparalleled juvenility of tastes and
+interests. His letters to Dickens are well known, and, though I should
+be very sorry to stake his critical reputation upon them, there could
+not be better documents for his vivid enjoyment of life. He died on 26th
+January 1850, in his seventy-seventh year, having been in harness almost
+to the very last. He had written a letter the day before to Empson,
+describing one of those curious waking visions known to all sick folk,
+in which there had appeared part of a proof-sheet of a new edition of
+the Apocrypha, and a new political paper filled with discussions on Free
+Trade.
+
+In reading Jeffrey's work[11] nowadays, the critical reader finds it
+considerably more difficult to gain and keep the author's own point of
+view than in the case of any other great English critic. With Hazlitt,
+with Coleridge, with Wilson, with Carlyle, with Macaulay, we very soon
+fall into step, so to speak, with our author. If we cannot exactly
+prophesy what he will say on any given subject, we can make a pretty
+shrewd guess at it; and when, as it seems to us, he stumbles and shies,
+we have a sort of feeling beforehand that he is going to do it, and a
+decided inkling of the reason. But my own experience is, that a modern
+reader of Jeffrey, who takes him systematically, and endeavours to trace
+cause and effect in him, is liable to be constantly thrown out before he
+finds the secret. For Jeffrey, in the most puzzling way, lies between
+the ancients and the moderns in matter of criticism, and we never quite
+know where to have him. It is ten to one, for instance, that the novice
+approaches him with the idea that he is a "classic" of the old rock.
+Imagine the said novice's confusion, when he finds Jeffrey not merely
+exalting Shakespeare to the skies, but warmly praising Elizabethan
+poetry in general, anticipating Mr. Matthew Arnold almost literally, in
+the estimate of Dryden and Pope as classics of our prose, and hailing
+with tears of joy the herald of the emancipation in Cowper. Surely our
+novice may be excused if, despite certain misgiving memories of such
+reviews as that of "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," he concludes that
+Jeffrey has been maligned, and that he was really a Romantic before
+Romanticism. Unhappy novice! he will find his new conclusion not less
+rapidly and more completely staggered than his old. Indeed, until the
+clue is once gained, Jeffrey must appear to be one of the most
+incomprehensibly inconsistent of writers and of critics. On one page he
+declares that Campbell's extracts from Chamberlayne's "Pharonnida" have
+made him "quite impatient for an opportunity of perusing the whole
+poem,"--Romantic surely, quite Romantic. "The tameness and poorness of
+the serious style of Addison and Swift,"--Romantic again, quite
+Romantic. Yet when we come to Jeffrey's own contemporaries, he
+constantly appears as much bewigged and befogged with pseudo-classicism
+as M. de Jouy himself. He commits himself, in the year of grace 1829, to
+the statement that "the rich melodies of Keats and Shelley, and the
+fantastical emphasis of Wordsworth are melting fast from the field of
+our vision," while he contrasts with this "rapid withering of the
+laurel" the "comparative absence of marks of decay" on Rogers and
+Campbell. The poets of his own time whom he praises most heartily, and
+with least reserve, are Campbell and Crabbe; and he is quite as
+enthusiastic over "Theodric" and "Gertrude" as over the two great
+war-pieces of the same author, which are worth a hundred "Gertrudes" and
+about ten thousand "Theodrics." Reviewing Scott, not merely when they
+were personal friends (they were always that), but when Scott was a
+contributor to the _Edinburgh_, and giving general praise to "The Lay,"
+he glances with an unmistakable meaning at the "dignity of the subject,"
+regrets the "imitation and antiquarian researches," and criticises the
+versification in a way which shows that he had not in the least grasped
+its scheme. It is hardly necessary to quote his well-known attacks on
+Wordsworth; but, though I am myself anything but a Wordsworthian, and
+would willingly give up to chaos and old night nineteen-twentieths of
+the "extremely valooable chains of thought" which the good man used to
+forge, it is in the first place quite clear that the twentieth ought to
+have saved him from Jeffrey's claws; in the second, that the critic
+constantly selects the wrong things as well as the right for
+condemnation and ridicule; and in the third, that he would have praised,
+or at any rate not blamed, in another, the very things which he blames
+in Wordsworth. Even his praise of Crabbe, excessive as it may now
+appear, is diversified by curious patches of blame which seem to me at
+any rate, singularly uncritical. There are, for instance, a very great
+many worse jests in poetry than,
+
+    Oh, had he learnt to make the wig he wears!
+
+--which Jeffrey pronounces a misplaced piece of buffoonery. I cannot
+help thinking that if Campbell instead of Southey had written the lines,
+
+    To see brute nature scorn him and renounce
+    Its homage to the human form divine,
+
+Jeffrey would, to say the least, not have hinted that they were "little
+better than drivelling." But I do not think that when Jeffrey wrote
+these things, or when he actually perpetrated such almost unforgivable
+phrases as "stuff about dancing daffodils," he was speaking away from
+his sincere conviction. On the contrary, though partisanship may
+frequently have determined the suppression or the utterance, the
+emphasising or the softening, of his opinions, I do not think that he
+ever said anything but what he sincerely thought. The problem,
+therefore, is to discover and define, if possible, the critical
+standpoint of a man whose judgment was at once so acute and so purblind;
+who could write the admirable surveys of English poetry contained in the
+essays on Mme. de Staël and Campbell, and yet be guilty of the stuff (we
+thank him for the word) about the dancing daffodils; who could talk of
+"the splendid strains of Moore" (though I have myself a relatively high
+opinion of Moore) and pronounce "The White Doe of Rylstone" (though I
+am not very fond of that animal as a whole) "the very worst poem he ever
+saw printed in a quarto volume"; who could really appreciate parts even
+of Wordsworth himself, and yet sneer at the very finest passages of the
+poems he partly admired. It is unnecessary to multiply inconsistencies,
+because the reader who does not want the trouble of reading Jeffrey must
+be content to take them for granted, and the reader who does read
+Jeffrey will discover them in plenty for himself. But they are not
+limited, it should be said, to purely literary criticism; and they
+appear, if not quite so strongly, in his estimates of personal
+character, and even in his purely political arguments.
+
+The explanation, as far as there is any, (and perhaps such explanations,
+as Hume says of another matter, only push ignorance a stage farther
+back), seems to me to lie in what I can only call the Gallicanism of
+Jeffrey's mind and character. As Horace Walpole has been pronounced the
+most French of Englishmen, so may Francis Jeffrey be pronounced the most
+French of Scotchmen. The reader of his letters, no less than the reader
+of his essays, constantly comes across the most curious and multiform
+instances of this Frenchness. The early priggishness is French; the
+effusive domestic affection is French; the antipathy to dogmatic
+theology, combined with general recognition of the Supreme Being, is
+French; the talk (I had almost said the chatter) about virtue and
+sympathy, and so forth, is French; the Whig recognition of the rights
+of man, joined to a kind of bureaucratical distrust and terror of the
+common people (a combination almost unknown in England), is French.
+Everybody remembers the ingenious argument in _Peter Simple_ that the
+French were quite as brave as the English, indeed more so, but that they
+were extraordinarily ticklish. Jeffrey, we have seen, was very far from
+being a coward, but he was very ticklish indeed. His private letters
+throw the most curious light possible on the secret, as far as he was
+concerned, of the earlier Whig opposition to the war, and of the later
+Whig advocacy of reform. Jeffrey by no means thought the cause of the
+Revolution divine, like the Friends of Liberty, or admired Napoleon like
+Hazlitt, or believed in the inherent right of Manchester and Birmingham
+to representation like the zealots of 1830. But he was always dreadfully
+afraid of invasion in the first place, and of popular insurrection in
+the second; and he wanted peace and reform to calm his fears. As a young
+man he was, with a lack of confidence in his countrymen probably
+unparalleled in a Scotchman, sure that a French corporal's guard might
+march from end to end of Scotland, and a French privateer's boat's crew
+carry off "the fattest cattle and the fairest women" (these are his very
+words) "of any Scotch seaboard county." The famous, or infamous,
+Cevallos article--an ungenerous and pusillanimous attack on the Spanish
+patriots, which practically founded the _Quarterly Review_, by finally
+disgusting all Tories and many Whigs with the _Edinburgh_--was, it
+seems, prompted merely by the conviction that the Spanish cause was
+hopeless, and that maintaining it, or assisting it, must lead to mere
+useless bloodshed. He felt profoundly the crime of Napoleon's rule; but
+he thought Napoleon unconquerable, and so did his best to prevent him
+being conquered. He was sure that the multitude would revolt if reform
+was not granted; and he was, therefore, eager for reform. Later, he got
+into his head the oddest crotchet of all his life, which was that a
+Conservative government, with a sort of approval from the people
+generally, and especially from the English peasantry, would scheme for a
+_coup d'état_, and (his own words again) "make mincemeat of their
+opponents in a single year." He may be said almost to have left the
+world in a state of despair over the probable results of the Revolutions
+of 1848-49; and it is impossible to guess what would have happened to
+him if he had survived to witness the Second of December. Never was
+there such a case, at least among Englishmen, of timorous pugnacity and
+plucky pessimism. But it would be by no means difficult to parallel the
+temperament in France; and, indeed, the comparative frequency of it
+there, may be thought to be no small cause of the political and military
+disasters of the country.
+
+In literature, and especially in criticism, Jeffrey's characteristics
+were still more decidedly and unquestionably French. He came into the
+world almost too soon to feel the German impulse, even if he had been
+disposed to feel it. But, as a matter of fact, he was not at all
+disposed. The faults of taste of the German Romantic School, its
+alternate homeliness and extravagance, its abuse of the supernatural,
+its undoubted offences against order and proportion, scandalised him
+only a little less than they would have scandalised Voltaire and did
+scandalise the later Voltairians. Jeffrey was perfectly prepared to be
+Romantic up to a certain point,--the point which he had himself reached
+in his early course of independent reading and criticism. He was even a
+little inclined to sympathise with the reverend Mr. Bowles on the great
+question whether Pope was a poet; and, as I have said, he uses, about
+the older English literature, phrases which might almost satisfy a
+fanatic of the school of Hazlitt or of Lamb. He is, if anything, rather
+too severe on French as compared with English drama. Yet, when he comes
+to his own contemporaries, and sometimes even in reference to earlier
+writers, we find him slipping into those purely arbitrary severities of
+condemnation, those capricious stigmatisings of this as improper, and
+that as vulgar, and the other as unbecoming, which are the
+characteristics of the pseudo-correct and pseudo-classical school of
+criticism. He was a great admirer of Cowper, and yet he is shocked by
+Cowper's use, in his translation of Homer, of the phrases, "to entreat
+Achilles to a calm" (evidently he had forgotten Shakespeare's "pursue
+him and entreat him to a peace"), "this wrangler here," "like a fellow
+of no worth." He was certainly not likely to be unjust to Charles James
+Fox. So he is unhappy, rather than contemptuous, over such excellent
+phrases as "swearing away the lives," "crying injustice," "fond of
+ill-treating." These appear to Mr. Aristarchus Jeffrey too "homely and
+familiar," too "low and vapid"; while a harmless and rather agreeable
+Shakespearian parallel of Fox's seems to him downright impropriety. The
+fun of the thing is that the passage turns on the well-known misuse of
+"flat burglary"; and if Jeffrey had had a little more sense of humour
+(his deficiency in which, for all his keen wit, is another Gallic note
+in him), he must have seen that the words were ludicrously applicable to
+his own condemnation and his own frame of mind. These settings-up of a
+wholly arbitrary canon of mere taste, these excommunicatings of such and
+such a thing as "low" and "improper," without assigned or assignable
+reason, are eminently Gallic. They may be found not merely in the older
+school before 1830, but in almost all French critics up to the present
+day: there is perhaps not one, with the single exception of
+Sainte-Beuve, who is habitually free from them. The critic may be quite
+unable to say why _tarte à la crême_ is such a shocking expression, or
+even to produce any important authority for the shockingness of it. But
+he is quite certain that it is shocking. Jeffrey is but too much given
+to protesting against _tarte à la crême_; and the reasons for his error
+are almost exactly the same as in the case of the usual Frenchman; that
+is to say, a very just and wholesome preference for order, proportion,
+literary orthodoxy, freedom from will-worship and eccentric divagations,
+unfortunately distorted by a certain absence of catholicity, by a
+tendency to regard novelty as bad, merely because it is novelty, and by
+a curious reluctance, as Lamb has it of another great man of the same
+generation, to go shares with any newcomer in literary commerce.
+
+But when these reservations have been made, when his standpoint has been
+clearly discovered and marked out, and when some little tricks, such as
+the affectation of delivering judgments without appeal, which is still
+kept up by a few, though very few, reviewers, have been further allowed
+for, Jeffrey is a most admirable essayist and critic. As an essayist, a
+writer of _causeries_, I do not think he has been surpassed among
+Englishmen in the art of interweaving quotation, abstract, and comment.
+The best proof of his felicity in this respect is that in almost all the
+books which he has reviewed, (and he has reviewed many of the most
+interesting books in literature) the passages and traits, the anecdotes
+and phrases, which have made most mark in the general memory, and which
+are often remembered with very indistinct consciousness of their origin,
+are to be found in his reviews. Sometimes the very perfection of his
+skill in this respect makes it rather difficult to know where he is
+abstracting or paraphrasing, and where he is speaking outright and for
+himself; but that is a very small fault. Yet his merits as an essayist,
+though considerable, are not to be compared, even to the extent to which
+Hazlitt's are to be compared, with his merits as a critic, and
+especially as a literary critic. It would be interesting to criticise
+his political criticism; but it is always best to keep politics out
+where it can be managed. Besides, Jeffrey as a political critic is a
+subject of almost exclusively historical interest, while as a literary
+critic he is important at this very day, and perhaps more important than
+he was in his own. For the spirit of merely æsthetic criticism, which
+was in his day only in its infancy, has long been full grown and
+rampant; so that, good work as it has done in its time, it decidedly
+needs chastening by an admixture of the dogmatic criticism, which at
+least tries to keep its impressions together and in order, and to
+connect them into some coherent doctrine and creed.
+
+Of this dogmatic criticism Jeffrey, with all his shortcomings, is
+perhaps the very best example that we have in English. He had addressed
+himself more directly and theoretically to literary criticism than
+Lockhart. Prejudiced as he often was, he was not affected by the wild
+gusts of personal and political passion which frequently blew Hazlitt a
+thousand miles off the course of true criticism. He keeps his eye on the
+object, which De Quincey seldom does. He is not affected by that desire
+to preach on certain pet subjects which affects the admirable critical
+faculty of Carlyle. He never blusters and splashes at random like
+Wilson. And he never indulges in the mannered and rather superfluous
+graces which marred, to some tastes, the work of his successor in
+critical authority, if there has been any such, the author of _Essays in
+Criticism_.
+
+Let us, as we just now looked through Jeffrey's work to pick out the
+less favourable characteristics which distinguish his position, look
+through it again to see those qualities which he shares, but in greater
+measure than most, with all good critics. The literary essay which
+stands first in his collected works is on Madame de Staël. Now that good
+lady, of whom some judges in these days do not think very much, was a
+kind of goddess on earth in literature, however much she might bore them
+in life, to the English Whig party in general; while Jeffrey's French
+tastes must have made her, or at least her books, specially attractive
+to him. Accordingly he has written a great deal about her, no less than
+three essays appearing in the collected works. Writing at least partly
+in her lifetime and under the influences just glanced at, he is of
+course profuse in compliments. But it is very amusing and highly
+instructive to observe how, in the intervals of these compliments, he
+contrives to take the good Corinne to pieces, to smash up her ingenious
+Perfectibilism, and to put in order her rather rash literary judgments.
+It is in connection also with her, that he gives one of the best of not
+a few general sketches of the history of literature which his work
+contains. Of course there are here, as always, isolated expressions as
+to which, however much we admit that Jeffrey was a clever man, we cannot
+agree with Jeffrey. He thinks Aristophanes "coarse" and "vulgar" just as
+a living pundit thinks him "base," while (though nobody of course can
+deny the coarseness) Aristophanes and vulgarity are certainly many miles
+asunder. We may protest against the chronological, even more than
+against the critical, blunder which couples Cowley and Donne, putting
+Donne, moreover, who wrote long before Cowley was born, and differs from
+him in genius almost as the author of the _Iliad_ does from the author
+of the _Henriade_, second. But hardly anything in English criticism is
+better than Jeffrey's discussion of the general French imputation of
+"want of taste and politeness" to English and German writers, especially
+English. It is a very general, and a very mistaken notion that the
+Romantic movement in France has done away with this imputation to a
+great extent. On the contrary, though it has long been a kind of
+fashion in France to admire Shakespeare, and though since the labours of
+MM. Taine and Montégut, the study of English literature generally has
+grown and flourished, it is, I believe, the very rarest thing to find a
+Frenchman who, in his heart of hearts, does not cling to the old "pearls
+in the dung-heap" idea, not merely in reference to Shakespeare, but to
+English writers, and especially English humorists, generally. Nothing
+can be more admirable than Jeffrey's comments on this matter. They are
+especially admirable because they are not made from the point of view of
+a _Romantique à tous crins_; because, as has been already pointed out,
+he himself is largely penetrated by the very preference for order and
+proportion which is at the bottom of the French mistake; and because he
+is, therefore, arguing in a tongue understanded of those whom he
+censures. Another essay which may be read with especial advantage is
+that on Scott's edition of Swift. Here, again, there was a kind of test
+subject, and perhaps Jeffrey does not come quite scatheless out of the
+trial: to me, at any rate, his account of Swift's political and moral
+conduct and character seems both uncritical and unfair. But here, too,
+the value of his literary criticism shows itself. He might very easily
+have been tempted to extend his injustice from the writer to the
+writings, especially since, as has been elsewhere shown, he was by no
+means a fanatical admirer of the Augustan age, and thought the serious
+style of Addison and Swift tame and poor. It is possible of course, here
+also, to find things that seem to be errors, both in the general sketch
+which Jeffrey, according to his custom, prefixes, and in the particular
+remarks on Swift himself. For instance, to deny fancy to the author of
+the _Tale of a Tub_, of _Gulliver_, and of the _Polite Conversation_, is
+very odd indeed. But there are few instances of a greater triumph of
+sound literary judgment over political and personal prejudice than
+Jeffrey's description, not merely of the great works just mentioned (it
+is curious, and illustrates his defective appreciation of humour, that
+he likes the greatest least, and is positively unjust to the _Tale of a
+Tub_), but also of those wonderful pamphlets, articles, lampoons, skits
+(libels if any one likes), which proved too strong for the generalship
+of Marlborough and the administrative talents of Godolphin; and which
+are perhaps the only literary works that ever really changed, for a not
+inconsiderable period, the government of England. "Considered," he says,
+"with a view to the purposes for which they were intended, they have
+probably never been equalled in any period of the world." They certainly
+have not; but to find a Whig, and a Whig writing in the very moment of
+Tory triumph after Waterloo, ready to admit the fact, is not a trivial
+thing. Another excellent example of Jeffrey's strength, by no means
+unmixed with examples of his weakness, is to be found in his essays on
+Cowper. I have already given some of the weakness: the strength is to be
+found in his general description of Cowper's revolt, thought so daring
+at the time, now so apparently moderate, against poetic diction. These
+instances are to be found under miscellaneous sections, biographical,
+historical, and so forth; but the reader will naturally turn to the
+considerable divisions headed Poetry and Fiction. Here are the chief
+rocks of offence already indicated, and here also are many excellent
+things which deserve reading. Here is the remarkable essay, quoted
+above, on Campbell's _Specimens_. Here is the criticism of Weber's
+edition of Ford, and another of those critical surveys of the course of
+English literature which Jeffrey was so fond of doing, and which he did
+so well, together with some remarks on the magnificently spendthrift
+style of our Elizabethan dramatists which would deserve almost the first
+place in an anthology of his critical beauties. The paper on Hazlitt's
+_Characters of Shakespeare_ (Hazlitt was an _Edinburgh_ reviewer, and
+his biographer, not Jeffrey's, has chronicled a remarkable piece of
+generosity on Jeffrey's part towards his wayward contributor) is a
+little defaced by a patronising spirit, not, indeed, of that memorably
+mistaken kind which induced the famous and unlucky sentence to Macvey
+Napier about Carlyle, but something in the spirit of the schoolmaster
+who observes, "See this clever boy of mine, and only think how much
+better I could do it myself." Yet it contains some admirable passages on
+Shakespeare, if not on Hazlitt; and it would be impossible to deny that
+its hinted condemnation of Hazlitt's "desultory and capricious
+acuteness" is just enough. On the other hand, how significant is it of
+Jeffrey's own limitations that he should protest against Hazlitt's
+sympathy with such "conceits and puerilities" as the immortal and
+unmatchable
+
+    Take him and cut him out in little stars,
+
+with the rest of the passage. But there you have the French spirit. I do
+not believe that there ever was a Frenchman since the seventeenth
+century (unless perchance it was Gérard de Nerval, and he was not quite
+sane), who could put his hand on his heart and deny that the little
+stars seemed to him puerile and conceited.
+
+Jeffrey's dealings with Byron (I do not now speak of the article on
+_Hours of Idleness_, which was simply a just rebuke of really puerile
+and conceited rubbish) are not, to me, very satisfactory. The critic
+seems, in the rather numerous articles which he has devoted to the
+"noble Poet," as they used to call him, to have felt his genius unduly
+rebuked by that of his subject. He spends a great deal, and surely an
+unnecessarily great deal, of time in solemnly, and no doubt quite
+sincerely, rebuking Byron's morality; and in doing so he is sometimes
+almost absurd. He calls him "not more obscene perhaps than Dryden or
+Prior," which is simply ludicrous, because it is very rare that this
+particular word can be applied to Byron at all, while even his
+staunchest champion must admit that it applies to glorious John and to
+dear Mat Prior. He helps, unconsciously no doubt, to spread the very
+contagion which he denounces, by talking about Byron's demoniacal power,
+going so far as actually to contrast _Manfred_ with Marlowe to the
+advantage of the former. And he is so completely overcome by what he
+calls the "dreadful tone of sincerity" of this "puissant spirit," that
+he never seems to have had leisure or courage to apply the critical
+tests and solvents of which few men have had a greater command. Had he
+done so, it is impossible not to believe that, whether he did or did not
+pronounce Byron's sentiment to be as theatrical, as vulgar, and as false
+as it seems to some later critics, he would at any rate have substituted
+for his edifying but rather irrelevant moral denunciations some exposure
+of those gross faults in style and metre, in phrase and form, which now
+disgust us.
+
+There are many essays remaining on which I should like to comment if
+there were room enough. But I have only space for a few more general
+remarks on his general characteristics, and especially those which, as
+Sainte-Beuve said to the altered Jeffrey of our altered days, are
+"important to us." Let me repeat then that the peculiar value of Jeffrey
+is not, as is that of Coleridge, of Hazlitt, or of Lamb, in very subtle,
+very profound, or very original views of his subjects. He is neither a
+critical Columbus nor a critical Socrates; he neither opens up
+undiscovered countries, nor provokes and stimulates to the discovery of
+them. His strength lies in the combination of a fairly wide range of
+sympathy with an extraordinary shrewdness and good sense in applying
+that sympathy. Tested for range alone, or for subtlety alone, he will
+frequently be found wanting; but he almost invariably catches up those
+who have thus outstripped him, when the subject of the trial is shifted
+to soundness of estimate, intelligent connection of view, and absence of
+eccentricity. And it must be again and again repeated that Jeffrey is by
+no means justly chargeable with the Dryasdust failings so often
+attributed to academic criticism. They said that on the actual Bench he
+worried counsel a little too much, but that his decisions were almost
+invariably sound. Not quite so much perhaps can be said for his other
+exercise of the judicial function. But however much he may sometimes
+seem to carp and complain, however much we may sometimes wish for a
+little more equity and a little less law, it is astonishing how weighty
+Jeffrey's critical judgments are after three quarters of a century which
+has seen so many seeming heavy things grow light. There may be much
+that he does not see; there may be some things which he is physically
+unable to see; but what he does see, he sees with a clearness, and
+co-ordinates in its bearings on other things seen with a precision,
+which are hardly to be matched among the fluctuating and diverse race of
+critics.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[10] To prevent mistakes it may be as well to say that Jeffrey's
+_Contributions to the Edinburgh Review_ appeared first in four volumes,
+then in three, then in one.
+
+[11] In the following remarks, reference is confined to the
+_Contributions to the Edinburgh Review_, 1 vol. London, 1853. This is
+not merely a matter of convenience; the selection having been made with
+very great care by Jeffrey himself at a time when his faculties were in
+perfect order, and including full specimens of every kind of his work.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+HAZLITT
+
+
+The following paper was in great part composed, when I came across some
+sentences on Hazlitt, written indeed before I was born, but practically
+unpublished until the other day. In a review of the late Mr. Horne's
+_New Spirit of the Age_, contributed to the _Morning Chronicle_ in 1845
+and but recently included in his collected works, Thackeray writes thus
+of the author of the book whose title Horne had rather rashly borrowed:
+
+    The author of the _Spirit of the Age_ was one of the keenest and
+    brightest critics that ever lived. With partialities and
+    prejudices innumerable, he had a wit so keen, a sensibility so
+    exquisite, an appreciation of humour, or pathos, or even of the
+    greatest art, so lively, quick, and cultivated, that it was
+    always good to know what were the impressions made by books or
+    men or pictures on such a mind; and that, as there were not
+    probably a dozen men in England with powers so varied, all the
+    rest of the world might be rejoiced to listen to the opinions of
+    this accomplished critic. He was of so different a caste to the
+    people who gave authority in his day--the pompous big-wigs and
+    schoolmen, who never could pardon him his familiarity of manner
+    so unlike their own--his popular--too popular habits--and
+    sympathies so much beneath their dignity; his loose, disorderly
+    education gathered round those bookstalls or picture galleries
+    where he laboured a penniless student, in lonely journeys over
+    Europe tramped on foot (and not made, after the fashion of the
+    regular critics of the day, by the side of a young nobleman in a
+    postchaise), in every school of knowledge from St. Peter's at
+    Rome to St. Giles's in London. In all his modes of life and
+    thought, he was so different from the established authorities,
+    with their degrees and white neck-cloths, that they hooted the
+    man down with all the power of their lungs, and disdained to
+    hear truth that came from such a ragged philosopher.
+
+Some exceptions, no doubt, must be taken to this enthusiastic, and in
+the main just, verdict. Hazlitt himself denied himself wit, yet if this
+was mock humility, I am inclined to think that he spoke truth
+unwittingly. His appreciation of humour was fitful and anything but
+impartial, while, biographically speaking, the hardships of his
+apprenticeship are very considerably exaggerated. It was not, for
+instance, in a penniless or pedestrian manner that he visited St.
+Peter's at Rome; but journeying with comforts of wine, _vetturini_, and
+partridges, which his second wife's income paid for. But this does not
+matter much, and, on the whole, the estimate is as just as it is
+generous. Perhaps something of its inspiration may be set down to
+fellow-feeling, both in politics and in the unsuccessful cultivation of
+the arts of design. But as high an estimate of Hazlitt is quite
+compatible with the strongest political dissent from his opinions, and
+with a total freedom from the charge of wearing the willow for painting.
+
+There is indeed no doubt that Hazlitt is one of the most absolutely
+unequal writers in English, if not in any, literature, Wilson being
+perhaps his only compeer. The term absolute is used with intention and
+precision. There may be others who, in different parts of their work,
+are more unequal than he is; but with him the inequality is pervading,
+and shows itself in his finest passages, in those where he is most at
+home, as much as in his hastiest and most uncongenial taskwork. It could
+not, indeed, be otherwise, because the inequality itself is due less to
+an intellectual than to a moral defect. The clear sunshine of Hazlitt's
+admirably acute intellect is always there; but it is constantly obscured
+by driving clouds of furious prejudice. Even as the clouds pass, the
+light may still be seen on distant and scattered parts of the landscape;
+but wherever their influence extends, there is nothing but thick
+darkness, gusty wind and drenching rain. And the two phenomena, the
+abiding intellectual light, and the fits and squalls of moral darkness,
+appear to be totally independent of each other, or of any single will or
+cause of any kind. It would be perfectly easy, and may perhaps be in
+place later, to give a brief collection of some of the most absurd and
+outrageous sayings that any writer, not a mere fool, can be charged
+with: of sentences not representing quips and cranks of humour, or
+judgments temporary and one-sided, though having a certain relative
+validity, but containing blunders and calumnies so gross and palpable,
+that the man who set them down might seem to have forfeited all claim to
+the reputation either of an intelligent or a responsible being. And yet,
+side by side with these, are other passages (and fortunately a much
+greater number) which justify, and more than justify, Hazlitt's claims
+to be as Thackeray says, "one of the keenest and brightest critics that
+ever lived"; as Lamb had said earlier, "one of the wisest and finest
+spirits breathing."
+
+The only exception to be taken to the well-known panegyric of Elia is,
+that it bestows this eulogy on Hazlitt "in his natural and healthy
+state." Unluckily, it would seem, by a concurrence of all testimony,
+even the most partial, that the unhealthy state was quite as natural as
+the healthy one. Lamb himself plaintively wishes that "he would not
+quarrel with the world at the rate he does"; and De Quincey, in his
+short, but very interesting, biographical notice of Hazlitt (a notice
+entirely free from the malignity with which De Quincey has been
+sometimes charged), declares with quite as much truth as point, that
+Hazlitt's guiding principle was, "Whatever is, is wrong." He was the
+very ideal of a literary Ishmael; and after the fullest admission of the
+almost incredible virulence and unfairness of his foes, it has to be
+admitted, likewise, that he was quite as ready to quarrel with his
+friends. He succeeded, at least once, in forcing a quarrel even upon
+Lamb. His relations with Leigh Hunt (who, whatever his faults were, was
+not unamiable) were constantly strained, and at least once actually
+broken by his infernal temper. Nor were his relations with women more
+fortunate or more creditable than those with men. That the fault was
+entirely on his side in the rupture with his first wife is, no doubt,
+not the case; for Mrs. Hazlitt's, or Miss Stoddart's, own friends admit
+that she was of a peculiar and rather trying disposition. It is indeed
+evident that she was the sort of person (most teasing of all others to a
+man of Hazlitt's temperament) who would put her head back as he was
+kissing her, to ask if he would like another cup of tea, or interrupt a
+declaration to suggest shutting the window. As for the famous and almost
+legendary episode of Sarah Walker, the lodging-house keeper's daughter,
+and the _Liber Amoris_, the obvious and irresistible attack of something
+like erotic madness which it implies absolves Hazlitt partly--but only
+partly, for there is a kind of shabbiness about the affair which shuts
+it out from all reasonable claim to be regarded as a new act of the
+endless drama of _All for Love, or The World Well Lost!_ Of his second
+marriage, the only persons who might be expected to give us some
+information either can or will say next to nothing. But when a man with
+such antecedents marries a woman of whom no one has anything bad to
+say, lives with her for a year, chiefly on her money, and is then
+quitted by her with the information that she will have nothing more to
+do with him, it is not, I think, uncharitable to conjecture that most of
+the fault is his.
+
+It is not, however, only of Hazlitt's rather imperfectly known life, or
+of his pretty generally acknowledged character, that I wish to speak
+here. His strange mixture of manly common-sense and childish prejudice,
+the dislike of foreigners which accompanied his Liberalism and his
+Bonapartism, and other traits, are very much more English than Irish.
+But Irish, at least on the father's side, his family was, and had been
+for generations. He was himself the son of a Unitarian minister, was
+born at Maidstone in 1778, accompanied his parents as a very little boy
+to America, but passed the greater part of his youth at Wem in
+Shropshire, where the interview with Coleridge, which decided his fate,
+took place. Yet for some time after that, he was mainly occupied with
+studies, not of literature, but of art. He had been intended for his
+father's profession, but had early taken a disgust to it. At such
+schools as he had been able to frequent, he had gained the character of
+a boy rather insusceptible of ordinary teaching; and his letters (they
+are rare throughout his life) show him to us as something very like a
+juvenile prig. According to his own account, he "thought for at least
+eight years" without being able to pen a line, or at least a page; and
+the worst accusation that can truly be brought against him is that, by
+his own confession, he left off reading when he began to write. Those
+who (for their sins or for their good) are condemned to a life of
+writing for the press know that such an abstinence as this is almost
+fatal. Perhaps no man ever did good work in periodical writing, unless
+he had previously had a more or less prolonged period of reading, with
+no view to writing. Certainly no one ever did other than very faulty
+work if, not having such a store to draw on, when he began writing he
+left off reading.
+
+The first really important event in Hazlitt's life, except the visit
+from Coleridge in 1798, was his own visit to Paris after the Peace of
+Amiens in 1802--a visit authorised and defrayed by certain commissions
+to copy pictures at the Louvre, which was then, in consequence of French
+conquests, the picture-gallery of Europe. The chief of these
+commissioners was a Mr. Railton, a person of some fortune at Liverpool,
+and the father of a daughter who, if she was anything like her portrait,
+had one of the most beautiful faces of modern times. Miss Railton was
+one of Hazlitt's many loves: it was, perhaps, fortunate for her that the
+course of the love did not run smooth. Almost immediately on his return,
+he made acquaintance with the Lambs, and, as Mr. W. C. Hazlitt, his
+grandson and biographer, thinks, with Miss Stoddart, his future wife.
+Miss Stoddart, there is no doubt, was an elderly coquette, though
+perfectly "proper." Besides the "William" of her early correspondence
+with Mary Lamb, we hear of three or four other lovers of hers between
+1803 and 1808, when she married Hazlitt. It so happens that one, and
+only one, letter of his to her has been preserved. His biographer seems
+to think it in another sense unique; but it is, in effect, a very
+typical letter from a literary lover of a rather passionate temperament.
+The two were married, in defiance of superstition, on Sunday, the first
+of May; and certainly the superstition had not the worst of it.
+
+At first, however, no evil results seemed likely. Miss Stoddart had a
+certain property settled on her at Winterslow, on the south-eastern
+border of Salisbury Plain, and for nearly four years the couple seem to
+have dwelt there (once, at least, entertaining the Lambs), and producing
+children, of whom only one lived. It was not till 1812 that they removed
+to London, and that Hazlitt engaged in writing for the newspapers. From
+this time till the end of his life, some eighteen years, he was never at
+a loss for employment--a succession of daily and weekly papers, with
+occasional employment on the _Edinburgh Review_, providing him, it would
+seem, with sufficiently abundant opportunities for copy. The _London_,
+the _New Monthly_ (where Campbell's dislike did him no harm), and other
+magazines also employed him. For a time, he seems to have joined "the
+gallery," and written ordinary press-work. During this time, which was
+very short, and this time only, his friends admit a certain indulgence
+in drinking, which he gave up completely, but which was used against him
+with as much pitilessness as indecency in _Blackwood_; though heaven
+only knows how the most Tory soul alive could see fitness of things in
+the accusation of gin-drinking brought against Hazlitt by the
+whiskey-drinkers of the _Noctes_. For the greater part of his literary
+life he seems to have been almost a total abstainer, indulging only in
+the very strongest of tea. He soon gave up miscellaneous press-work, as
+far as politics went; but his passion for the theatre retained him as a
+theatrical critic almost to the end of his life. He gradually drifted
+into the business really best suited to him, that of essay-writing, and
+occasionally lecturing on literary and miscellaneous subjects. During
+the greatest part of his early London life, he was resident in a famous
+house, now destroyed, in York Street, Westminster, next door to Bentham
+and reputed to have once been tenanted by Milton; and he was a constant
+attendant on Lamb's Wednesday evenings. The details of his life, it has
+been said, are not much known. The chief of them, besides the breaking
+out of his lifelong war with _Blackwood_ and the _Quarterly_, was,
+perhaps, his unlucky participation in the duel which proved fatal to
+Scott, the editor of the _London_. It is impossible to imagine a more
+deplorable muddle than this affair. Scott, after refusing the challenge
+of Lockhart,[12] with whom he had, according to the customs of those
+days, a sufficient ground of quarrel, accepted that of Christie,
+Lockhart's second, with whom he had no quarrel at all. Moreover, when
+his adversary had deliberately spared him in the first fire, he insisted
+(it is said owing to the stupid conduct of his own second) on another,
+and was mortally wounded. Hazlitt, who was more than indirectly
+concerned in the affair, had a professed objection to duelling, which
+would have been more creditable to him if he had not been avowedly of a
+timid temper. But, most unfortunately, he was said, and believed, to
+have spurred Scott on to the acceptance of the challenge, nor do his own
+champions deny it. The scandal is long bygone, but is, unluckily, a fair
+sample of the ugly stories which cluster round Hazlitt's name, and which
+have hitherto prevented that justice being done to him which his
+abilities deserve and demand.
+
+This wretched affair occurred in February 1821, and, shortly afterwards,
+the crowning complications of Hazlitt's own life, the business of the
+_Liber Amoris_ and the divorce with his first wife, took place. The
+first could only be properly described by an abundance of extracts, for
+which there is here no room. Of the second, which, it must be
+remembered, went on simultaneously with the first, it is sufficient to
+say that the circumstances are nearly incredible. It was conducted under
+the Scotch law with a blessed indifference to collusion: the direct
+means taken to effect it were, if report may be trusted, scandalous; and
+the parties met during the whole time, and placidly wrangled over money
+matters, with a callousness which is ineffably disgusting. I have
+hinted, in reference to Sarah Walker, that the tyranny of "Love
+unconquered in battle" may be taken by a very charitable person to be a
+sufficient excuse. In this other affair there is no such palliation;
+unless the very charitable person should hold that a wife, who could so
+forget her own dignity, justified any forgetfulness on the part of her
+husband; and that a husband, who could haggle and chaffer about the
+terms on which he should be disgracefully separated from his wife,
+justified any forgetfulness of dignity on the wife's part.
+
+Little has to be said about the rest of Hazlitt's life. Miss Sarah
+Walker would have nothing to say to him; and it has been already
+mentioned that the lady whom he afterwards married, a Mrs. Bridgewater,
+had enough of him after a year's experience. He did not outlive this
+last shock more than five years; and unfortunately his death was
+preceded by a complete financial break-down, though he was more
+industrious during these later years than at any other time, and though
+he had abundance of well-paid work. The failure of the publishers, who
+were to have paid him five hundred pounds for his _magnum opus_, the
+partisan and almost valueless _Life of Napoleon_, had something to do
+with this, and the dishonesty of an agent is said to have had more, but
+details are not forthcoming. He died on the eighteenth of September
+1830, saying, "Well, I have had a happy life"; and despite his son's
+assertion that, like Goldsmith, he had something on his mind, I believe
+this to have been not ironical but quite sincere. He was only fifty-two,
+so that the infirmities of age had not begun to press on him. Although,
+except during the brief duration of his second marriage, he had always
+lived by his wits, it does not appear that he was ever in any want, or
+that he had at any time to deny himself his favourite pleasures of
+wandering about and being idle when he chose. If he had not been
+completely happy in his life, he had lived it; if he had not seen the
+triumph of his opinions, he had been able always to hold to them. He was
+one of those men, such as an extreme devotion to literature now and then
+breeds, who, by the intensity of their enjoyment of quite commonplace
+delights--a face passed in the street, a sunset, a quiet hour of
+reflection, even a well-cooked meal--make up for the suffering of not
+wholly commonplace woes. I do not know whether even the joy of literary
+battle did not overweigh the pain of the dishonest wounds which he
+received from illiberal adversaries. I think that he had a happy life,
+and I am glad that he had. For he was in literature a great man. I am
+myself disposed to hold that, for all his accesses of hopelessly
+uncritical prejudice, he was the greatest critic that England has yet
+produced; and there are some who hold (though I do not agree with them)
+that he was even greater as a miscellaneous essayist than as a critic.
+It is certainly upon his essays, critical and other, that his fame must
+rest; not on the frenzied outpourings of the _Liber Amoris_ (full as
+these are of flashes of genius), or upon the one-sided and ill-planned
+_Life of Napoleon_; still less on his clever-boy essay on the
+_Principles of Human Action_, or on his attempts in grammar, in literary
+compilation and abridgment, and the like. Seven volumes of Bonn's
+Standard Library, with another published elsewhere containing his
+writings on Art, contain nearly all the documents of Hazlitt's fame: a
+few do not seem to have been yet collected from his _Remains_ and from
+the publications in which they originally appeared.
+
+These books--the _Spirit of the Age_, _Table Talk_, _The Plain Speaker_,
+_The Round Table_ (including the _Conversations with Northcote_ and
+_Characteristics_), _Lectures on the English Poets and Comic Writers_,
+_Elizabethan Literature_ and _Characters of Shakespeare_, _Sketches and
+Essays_ (including _Winterslow_)--represent the work, roughly speaking,
+of the last twenty years of Hazlitt's life; for in the earlier and
+longer period he wrote very little, and, indeed, declares that for a
+long time he had a difficulty in writing at all. They are all singularly
+homogeneous in general character, the lectures written as lectures
+differing very little from the essays written as essays, and even the
+frantic diatribes of the "Letter to Gifford" bearing a strong family
+likeness to the good-humoured _reportage_ of "On going to a Fight," or
+the singularly picturesque and pathetic egotism of the "Farewell to
+Essay-writing." This family resemblance is the more curious because,
+independently of the diversity of subject, Hazlitt can hardly be said to
+possess a style or, at least, a manner--indeed, he somewhere or other
+distinctly disclaims the possession. Yet, irregular as he is in his
+fashion of writing, no less than in the merit of it, the germs of some
+of the most famous styles of this century may be discovered in his
+casual and haphazard work. Everybody knows Jeffrey's question to
+Macaulay, "Where the devil did you get that style?" If any one will read
+Hazlitt (who, be it remembered, was a contributor to the _Edinburgh_)
+carefully, he will see where Macaulay got that style, or at least the
+beginning of it, much as he improved on it afterwards. Nor is there any
+doubt that, in a very different way, Hazlitt served as a model to
+Thackeray, to Dickens, and to many not merely of the most popular, but
+of the greatest, writers of the middle of the century. Indeed, in the
+_Spirit of the Age_ there are distinct anticipations of Carlyle. He had
+the not uncommon fate of producing work which, little noted by the
+public, struck very strongly those of his juniors who had any literary
+faculty. If he had been, just by a little, a greater man than he was, he
+would, no doubt, have elaborated an individual manner, and not have
+contented himself with the hints and germs of manners. As it was, he had
+more of seed than of fruit. And the secret of this is, undoubtedly, to
+be found in the obstinate individuality of thought which characterised
+him all through. Hazlitt may sometimes have adopted an opinion partly
+because other people did not hold it, but he never adopted an opinion
+because other people did hold it. And all his opinions, even those which
+seem to have been adopted simply to quarrel with the world, were genuine
+opinions. He has himself drawn a striking contrast in this point,
+between himself and Lamb, in one of the very best of all his essays, the
+beautiful "Farewell to Essay-writing" reprinted in _Winterslow_. The
+contrast is a remarkable one, and most men, probably, who take great
+interest in literature or politics, or indeed in any subject admitting
+of principles, will be able to furnish similar contrasts from their own
+experience.
+
+    In matters of taste and feeling, one proof that my conclusions
+    have not been quite shallow and hasty, is the circumstance of
+    their having been lasting. I have the same favourite books,
+    pictures, passages that I ever had; I may therefore presume
+    that they will last me my life--nay, I may indulge a hope that
+    my thoughts will survive me. This continuity of impression is
+    the only thing on which I pride myself. Even Lamb, whose relish
+    of certain things is as keen and earnest as possible, takes a
+    surfeit of admiration, and I should be afraid to ask about his
+    select authors or particular friends after a lapse of ten years.
+    As for myself, any one knows where to have me. What I have once
+    made up my mind to, I abide by to the end of the chapter.
+
+This is quite true if we add a proviso to it--a proviso, to be sure, of
+no small importance. Hazlitt is always the same when he is not
+different, when his political or personal ails and angers do not obscure
+his critical judgment. His uniformity of principle extends only to the
+two subjects of literature and of art; unless a third may be added, to
+wit, the various good things of this life, as they are commonly called.
+He was not so great a metaphysician as he thought himself. He "shows to
+the utmost of his knowledge, and that not deep"; a want of depth not
+surprising when we find him confessing that he had to go to Taylor, the
+Platonist, to tell him something of Platonic ideas. It may be more than
+suspected that he had read little but the French and English
+philosophers of the eighteenth century; a very interesting class of
+persons, but, except Condillac, Hume, and Berkeley, scarcely
+metaphysicians. As for his politics, Hazlitt seems to me to have had no
+clear political creed at all. He hated something called "the hag
+legitimacy," but for the hag despotism, in the person of Bonaparte, he
+had nothing but love. How any one possessed of brains could combine
+Liberty and the first Napoleon in one common worship is, I confess, a
+mystery too great for me; and I fear that any one who could call
+"Jupiter Scapin" "the greatest man who ever lived," must be entirely
+blind to such constituents of greatness as justice, mercy, chivalry, and
+all that makes a gentleman. Indeed, I am afraid that "gentleman" is
+exactly what cannot be predicated of Hazlitt. No gentleman could have
+published the _Liber Amoris_, not at all because of its so-called
+voluptuousness, but because of its shameless kissing and telling. But
+the most curious example of Hazlitt's weaknesses is the language he uses
+in regard to those men with whom he had both political and literary
+differences. That he had provocation in some cases (he had absolutely
+none from Sir Walter Scott) is perfectly true. But what provocation will
+excuse such things as the following, all taken from one book, the
+_Spirit of the Age_? He speaks of Scott's "zeal to restore the spirit of
+loyalty, of passive obedience, and of non-resistance," as an
+acknowledgment for his having been "created a baronet by a prince of the
+House of Brunswick." Alas for dates and circumstances, for times and
+seasons, when they stand in the way of a fling of Hazlitt's! In the
+character of Scott himself an entire page and a half is devoted to an
+elaborate peroration in one huge sentence, denouncing him in such terms
+as "pettifogging," "littleness," "pique," "secret and envenomed blows,"
+"slime of rankling malice and mercenary scorn," "trammels of servility,"
+"lies," "garbage," etc. etc. The Duke of Wellington he always speaks of
+as a brainless noodle, forgetting apparently that the description does
+not make his idol's defeat more creditable to the vanquished. As for the
+character of Gifford, and the earlier "Letter to Gifford," I should have
+to print them entire to show the state of Hazlitt's mind in regard to
+this notorious, and certainly not very amiable person. His own words,
+"the dotage of age and the fury of a woman," form the best short
+description of both. He screams, he foams at the mouth, he gnashes and
+tears and kicks, rather than fights. Nor is it only on living authors
+and living persons (as some of his unfavourable critics have said) that
+he exercises his spleen. His remarks on Burke (_Round Table_, p. 150)
+suggest temporary insanity. Sir Philip Sidney (as Lamb, a perfectly
+impartial person who had no politics at all, pointed out) was a kind of
+representative of the courtly monarchist school in literature. So down
+must Sir Philip go; and not only the _Arcadia_, that "vain and
+amatorious poem" which Milton condemned, but the sonnets which one would
+have thought such a lover of poetry as Hazlitt must have spared, go down
+also before his remorseless bludgeon.
+
+But there is no need to say any more of these faults of his, and there
+is no need to say much of another and more purely literary fault with
+which he has been charged--the fault of excessive quotation. In him the
+error lies rather in the constant repetition of the same, than in a too
+great multitude of different borrowings. Almost priding himself on
+limited study, and (as he tells us) very rarely reading his own work
+after it was printed, he has certainly abused his right of press most
+damnably in some cases. "Dry as a remainder biscuit," and "of no mark or
+likelihood," occur to me as the most constantly recurrent tags; but
+there are many others.
+
+These various drawbacks, however, only set off the merits which almost
+every lover of literature must perceive in him. In most writers, in all
+save the very greatest, we look for one or two, or for a few special
+faculties and capacities, and we know perfectly well that other
+(generally many other) capacities and faculties will not be found in
+them at all. We do not dream of finding rollicking mirth in Milton, or
+gorgeous embroidery of style in Swift, or unadorned simplicity in
+Browne. But in Hazlitt you may find something of almost everything,
+except the finer kinds of wit and humour; to which last, however, he
+makes a certain side-approach by dint of his appreciation of the irony
+of Nature and Fate. Almost every other grace of matter and form that can
+be found in prose may be found at times in his. He is generally thought
+of as, and for the most part is, a rather plain and straightforward
+writer, with few tricks and frounces of phrase and style. Yet most of
+the fine writing of these latter days is but as crumpled tarlatan to
+brocaded satin beside the passage on Coleridge in the _English Poets_,
+or the description of Winterslow and its neighbourhood in the "Farewell
+to Essay-writing," or "On a Landscape of Nicolas Poussin" in the
+_Table-Talk_. Read these pieces and nothing else, and an excusable
+impression might be given that the writer was nothing if not florid. But
+turn over a dozen pages, and the most admirable examples of the grave
+and simple manner occur. He is an inveterate quoter, yet few men are
+more original. No man is his superior in lively, gossiping description,
+yet he could, within his limits, reason closely and expound admirably.
+It is, indeed, almost always necessary, when he condemns anything, to
+inquire very carefully as to the reasons of the condemnation. But
+nothing that he likes (except Napoleon) is ever bad: everything that he
+praises will repay the right man who, at the right time, examines it to
+see for what Hazlitt likes it. I have, for my part, no doubt that Miss
+Sarah Walker was a very engaging young woman; but (though the witness is
+the same) I have the gravest doubts as to Hazlitt's charges against her.
+
+We shall find this same curious difference everywhere in Hazlitt. He has
+been talking, for instance, with keen relish of the "Conversation of
+Authors" (it is he, be it remembered, who has handed down to us the
+immortal debate at one of Lamb's Wednesdays on "People one would Like
+to have Seen"), and saying excellent things about it. Then he changes
+the key, and tells us that the conversation of "Gentlemen and Men of
+Fashion" will not do. Perhaps not; but the wicked critic stops and asks
+himself whether Hazlitt had known much of the conversation of "Gentlemen
+and Men of Fashion"? We can find no record of any such experiences of
+his. In his youth he had no opportunity: in his middle age he was
+notoriously recalcitrant to all the usages of society, would not dress,
+and scarcely ever dined out except with a few cronies. This does not
+seem to be the best qualification for a pronouncement on the question.
+Yet this same essay is full of admirable things, the most admirable
+being, perhaps, the description of the man who "had you at an advantage
+by never understanding you." I find, indeed, in looking through my
+copies of his books, re-read for the purpose of this paper, an
+innumerable and bewildering multitude of essays, of passages, and of
+short phrases, marked for reference. In the seven volumes above referred
+to (to which, as has been said, not a little has to be added) there must
+be hundreds of separate articles and conversations; not counting as
+separate the short maxims and thoughts of the _Characteristics_, and one
+or two other similar collections, in which, indeed, several passages are
+duplicated from the Essays. At least two out of every three are
+characteristic of Hazlitt: not one in any twenty is not well worth
+reading and, if occasion served, commenting on. They are, indeed, as far
+from being consecutive as (according to the Yankee) was the conversation
+of Edgar Poe; and the multitude and diversity of their subjects fit them
+better for occasional than for continuous reading.[13] Perhaps, if any
+single volume deserves to be recommended to a beginner in Hazlitt it had
+better be _The Plain Speaker_, where there is the greatest range of
+subject, and where the author is seen in an almost complete repertory of
+his numerous parts. But there is not much to choose between it and _The
+Round Table_ (where, however, the papers are shorter as a rule),
+_Table-Talk_, and the volume called, though not by the author, _Sketches
+and Essays_. I myself care considerably less for the _Conversations with
+Northcote_, the personal element in which has often attracted readers;
+and the attempts referred to above as _Characteristics_, avowedly in the
+manner of La Rochefoucauld, are sometimes merely extracts from the
+essays, and rarely have the self-containedness, the exact and chiselled
+proportion, which distinguishes the true _pensée_ as La Rochefoucauld
+and some other Frenchmen, and as Hobbes perhaps alone of Englishmen,
+wrote it. But to criticise these numerous papers is like sifting a
+cluster of motes, and the mere enumeration of their titles would fill
+up more than half the room which I have to spare. They must be
+criticised or characterised in two groups only, the strictly critical
+and the miscellaneous, the latter excluding politics. As for art, I do
+not pretend to be more than a connoisseur according to Blake's
+definition, that is to say, one who refuses to let himself be
+connoisseured out of his senses. I shall only, in reference to this last
+subject, observe that the singularly germinal character of Hazlitt's
+work is noticeable here also; for no one who reads the essay on Nicolas
+Poussin will fail to add Mr. Ruskin to Hazlitt's fair herd of literary
+children.
+
+His criticism is scattered through all the volumes of general essays;
+but is found by itself in the series of lectures, or essays (they are
+rather the latter than the former), on the characters of Shakespeare, on
+Elizabethan Literature, on the English Poets, and on the English Comic
+Writers. I cannot myself help thinking that in these four Hazlitt is at
+his best; though there may be nothing so attractive to the general, and
+few such brilliant passages as may be found in the "Farewell to
+Essay-writing," in the paper on Poussin, in "Going to a Fight," in
+"Going a Journey," and others of the same class. The reason of the
+preference is by no means a greater interest in the subject of one
+class, than in the subject of another. It is that, from the very nature
+of the case, Hazlitt's unlucky prejudices interfere much more seldom
+with his literary work. They interfere sometimes, as in the case of
+Sidney, as in some remarks about Coleridge and Wordsworth, and
+elsewhere; but these instances are rare indeed compared with those that
+occur in the other division. On the other hand, there are always present
+Hazlitt's enthusiastic appreciation of what is good in letters, his
+combination of gusto with sound theory as to what is excellent in prose
+and verse, his felicitous method of expression, and the acuteness that
+kept him from that excessive and paradoxical admiration which both Lamb
+and Coleridge affected, and which has gained many more pupils than his
+own moderation. Nothing better has ever been written as a general view
+of the subject than his introduction to his Lectures on Elizabethan
+Literature; and almost all the faults to be found in it are due merely
+to occasional deficiency of information, not to error of judgment. He is
+a little paradoxical on Jonson; but not many critics could furnish a
+happier contrast than his enthusiastic praise of certain passages of
+Beaumont and Fletcher, and his cool toning down of Lamb's extravagant
+eulogy on Ford. He is a little unfair to the Caroline poets; but here
+the great disturbing influence comes in. If his comparison of ancient
+and modern literature is rather weak, that is because Hazlitt was
+anything but widely acquainted with either; and, indeed, it may be said
+in general that wherever he goes wrong, it is not because he judges
+wrongly on known facts, but because he either does not know the facts,
+or is prevented from seeing them by distractions of prejudice. To go
+through his Characters of Shakespeare would be impossible, and besides,
+it is a point of honour for one student of Shakespeare to differ with
+all others. I can only say that I know no critic with whom on this point
+I differ so seldom as with Hazlitt. Even better, perhaps, are the two
+sets of lectures on the Poets and Comic Writers. The generalisations are
+not always sound, for, as must be constantly repeated, Hazlitt was not
+widely read in literatures other than his own, and his standpoint for
+comparison is therefore rather insufficient. But take him where his
+information is sufficient, and how good he is! Of the famous four
+treatments of the dramatists of the Restoration--Lamb's, Hazlitt's,
+Leigh Hunt's, and Macaulay's--his seems to me by far the best. In regard
+to Butler, his critical sense has for once triumphed over his political
+prejudice; unless some very unkind devil's advocate should suggest that
+the supposed ingratitude of the King to Butler reconciled Hazlitt to
+him. He is admirable on Burns; and nothing can be more unjust or sillier
+than to pretend, as has been pretended, that Burns's loose morality
+engaged Hazlitt on his side. De Quincey was often a very acute critic,
+but anything more uncritical than his attack on Hazlitt's comparison of
+Burns and Wordsworth in relation to passion, it would be difficult to
+find. Hazlitt "could forgive Swift for being a Tory," he tells us--which
+is at any rate more than some other people, who have a better reputation
+for impartiality than his, seem to have been able to do. No one has
+written better than he on Pope, who still seems to have the faculty of
+distorting some critical judgments. His chapter on the English novelists
+(that is to say, those of the last century) is perhaps the best thing
+ever written on the subject; and is particularly valuable nowadays when
+there is a certain tendency to undervalue Smollett in order to exalt
+Fielding, who certainly needs no such illegitimate and uncritical
+leverage. I do not think that he is, on the whole, unjust to Campbell;
+though his Gallican, or rather Napoleonic mania made him commit the
+literary crime of slighting "The Battle of the Baltic." But in all his
+criticism of English literature (and he has attempted little else,
+except by way of digression) he is, for the critic, a study never to be
+wearied of, always to be profited by. His very aberrations are often
+more instructive than other men's right-goings; and if he sometimes
+fails to detect or acknowledge a beauty, he never praises a defect.
+
+It is less easy to sum up the merits of the miscellaneous pieces, for
+the very obvious reason that they can hardly be brought under any
+general form or illustrated by any small number of typical instances.
+Perhaps the best way of "sampling" this undisciplined multitude is to
+select a few papers by name, so as to show the variety of Hazlitt's
+interests. The one already mentioned, "On Going to a Fight," which
+shocked some proprieties even in its own day, ranks almost first; but
+the reader should take care to accompany it with the official record of
+that celebrated contest between Neate and the Gasman. All fights are
+good reading; but this particular effort of Hazlitt's makes one sigh for
+a _Boxiana_ or _Pugilistica_ edited by him. Next, I think, must be
+ranked "On Going a Journey," with its fine appreciation of solitary
+travelling which does not exclude reminiscences of pleasant journeys in
+company. But these two, with the article on Poussin and the "Farewell to
+Essay-writing," have been so often mentioned that it may seem as if
+Hazlitt's store were otherwise poor. Nothing could be farther from the
+truth. The "Character of Cobbett" is the best thing the writer ever did
+of the kind, and the best thing known to me on Cobbett. "Of the Past and
+the Future" is perhaps the height of the popular metaphysical style--the
+style from which, as was noted, Hazlitt may never have got free as far
+as philosophising is concerned, but of which he is a master. "On the
+Indian Jugglers" is a capital example of what may be called improving a
+text; and it contains some of the most interesting and genial examples
+of Hazlitt's honest delight in games such as rackets and fives, a
+delight which (heaven help his critics) was frequently regarded at the
+time as "low." "On Paradox and Commonplace" is less remarkable for its
+contribution to the discussion of the subject, than as exhibiting one of
+Hazlitt's most curious critical megrims--his dislike of Shelley. I wish
+I could think that he had any better reason for this than the fact that
+Shelley was a gentleman by birth and his own contemporary. Most
+disappointing of all, perhaps, is "On Criticism," which the reader (as
+his prophetic soul, if he is a sensible reader, has probably warned him
+beforehand) soon finds to be little but an open or covert diatribe
+against the contemporary critics whom Hazlitt did not like, or who did
+not like Hazlitt. The apparently promising "On the Knowledge of
+Character" chiefly yields the remark that Hazlitt could not have admired
+Cæsar if he had resembled (in face) the Duke of Wellington. But "My
+first Acquaintance with Poets" is again a masterpiece; and to me, at
+least, "Merry England" is perfect. Hazlitt is almost the only person up
+to his own day who dared to vindicate the claims of nonsense, though he
+seems to have talked and written as little of it as most men. The
+chapter "On Editors" is very amusing, though perhaps not entirely in the
+way in which Hazlitt meant it; but I cannot think him happy "On
+Footmen," or on "The Conversation of Lords," for reasons already
+sufficiently stated. A sun-dial is a much more promising subject than a
+broomstick, yet many essays might be written on sun-dials without there
+being any fear of Hazlitt's being surpassed. Better still is "On Taste,"
+which, if the twenty or thirty best papers in Hazlitt were collected
+(and a most charming volume they would make), would rank among the very
+best. "On Reading New Books" contains excellent sense, but perhaps is,
+as Hazlitt not seldom is, a little deficient in humour; while the
+absence of any necessity for humour makes the discussion "Whether Belief
+is Voluntary" a capital one. Hazlitt is not wholly of the opinion of
+that Ebrew Jew who said to M. Renan, "_On fait ce qu'on veut mais on
+croit ce qu'on peut._"
+
+The shorter papers of the _Round Table_ yield perhaps a little less
+freely in the way of specially notable examples. They come closer to a
+certain kind of Addisonian essay, a short lay-sermon, without the
+charming divagation of the longer articles. To see how nearly Hazlitt
+can reach the level of a rather older and cleverer George Osborne, turn
+to the paper here on Classical Education. He is quite orthodox for a
+wonder: perhaps because opinion was beginning to veer a little to the
+side of Useful Knowledge; but he is as dry as his own favourite biscuit,
+and as guiltless of freshness. He is best in this volume where he notes
+particular points such as Kean's Iago, Milton's versification (here,
+however, he does not get quite to the heart of the matter), "John
+Buncle," and "The Excursion." In this last he far outsteps the scanty
+confines of the earlier papers of the _Round Table_, and allows himself
+that score of pages which seems to be with so many men the normal limit
+of a good essay. Of his shortest style one sample from "Trifles light as
+Air" is so characteristic, in more ways than one, that it must be quoted
+whole.
+
+    I am by education and conviction inclined to Republicanism and
+    Puritanism. In America they have both. But I confess I feel a
+    little staggered as to the practical efficacy and saving grace
+    of first principles, when I ask myself, Can they throughout the
+    United States from Boston to Baltimore, produce a single head
+    like one of Titian's Venetian Nobles, nurtured in all the pride
+    of aristocracy and all the blindness of popery? Of all the
+    branches of political economy the human face is perhaps the best
+    criterion of value.
+
+If I were editing Hazlitt's works I should put these sentences on the
+title-page of every volume; for, dogmatist as he thought himself, it is
+certain that he was in reality purely æsthetic, though, I need hardly
+say, not in the absurd sense, or no-sense, which modern misuse of
+language has chosen to fix on the word. Therefore he is very good (where
+few are good at all) on Dreams; and, being a great observer of himself,
+singularly instructive on Application to Study. "On Londoners and
+Country People" is one of his liveliest efforts; and the pique at his
+own inclusion in the Cockney School fortunately evaporates in some
+delightful reminiscences, including one of the few classic passages on
+the great game of marbles. His remarks on the company at the
+Southampton coffee-house, which have been often and much praised, please
+me less: they are too much like attempts in the manner of the Queen Anne
+men, and Hazlitt is always best when he imitates nobody. "Hot and Cold"
+(which might have been more intelligibly called "North and South") is
+distinctly curious, bringing out again what may be called Hazlitt's
+fanciful observation; and it may generally be said that, however
+alarming and however suggestive of commonplace the titles "On
+Respectable People," "On People of Sense," "On Novelty and Familiarity,"
+may be, Hazlitt may almost invariably be trusted to produce something
+that is not commonplace, that is not laboured paradox, that is eminently
+literature.
+
+I know that a haphazard catalogue of the titles of essays (for it is
+little more) such as fills the last paragraph or two may not seem very
+succulent. But within moderate space there is really no other means of
+indicating the author's extraordinary range of subject, and at the same
+time the pervading excellence of his treatment. To exemplify a
+difference which has sometimes been thought to require explanation, his
+work as regards system, connection with anything else, immediate
+occasion (which with him was generally what his friend, Mr. Skimpole,
+would have called "pounds") is always Journalism: in result, it is
+almost always Literature. Its staple subjects, as far as there can be
+said to be any staple where the thread is so various, are very much
+those which the average newspaper-writer since his time has had to deal
+with--politics, book-reviewing, criticism on plays and pictures, social
+etceteras, the minor morals, the miscellaneous incidents of daily life.
+It is true that Hazlitt was only for a short time in the straitest
+shafts, the most galling traces, of periodical hack-work. His practice
+was rather that of George Warrington, who worked till he had filled his
+purse, and then lay idle till he had emptied it. He used (an indulgence
+agreeable in the mouth, but bitter in the belly) very frequently to
+receive money beforehand for work which was not yet done. Although
+anything but careful, he was never an extravagant man, his tastes being
+for the most part simple; and he never, even during his first married
+life, seems to have been burdened by an expensive household. Moreover,
+he got rid of Mrs. Hazlitt on very easy terms. Still he must constantly
+have had on him the sensation that he lived by his work, and by that
+only. It seems to be (as far as one can make it out) this sensation
+which more than anything else jades and tires what some very
+metaphorical men of letters are pleased to call their Pegasus. But
+Hazlitt, though he served in the shafts, shows little trace of the
+harness. He has frequent small carelessnesses of style, but he would
+probably have had as many or more if he had been the easiest and
+gentlest of easy-writing gentlemen. He never seems to have allowed
+himself to be cramped in his choice of his subjects, and wrote for the
+editors, of whom he speaks so amusingly, with almost as much freedom of
+speech as if he had had a private press of his own, and had issued
+dainty little tractates on Dutch paper to be fought for by bibliophiles.
+His prejudices, his desultoriness, his occasional lack of correctness of
+fact (he speaks of "Fontaine's Translation" of Æsop, and makes use of
+the extraordinary phrase, "The whole Council of Trent with Father Paul
+at their head," than which a more curious blunder is hardly
+conceivable), his wayward inconsistencies, his freaks of bad taste,
+would in all probability have been aggravated rather than alleviated by
+the greater freedom and less responsibility of an independent or an
+endowed student. The fact is that he was a born man of letters, and that
+he could not help turning whatsoever he touched into literature, whether
+it was criticism on books or on pictures, a fight or a supper, a game at
+marbles, a political diatribe, or the report of a literary conversation.
+He doubtless had favourite subjects; but I do not know that it can be
+said that he treated one class of subjects better than another, with the
+exception that I must hold him to have been first of all a literary
+critic. He certainly could not write a work of great length; for the
+faults of his _Life of Napoleon_ are grave even when its view of the
+subject is taken as undisputed, and it holds among his productions about
+the same place (that of longest and worst) which the book it was
+designed to counterwork holds among Scott's. Nor was he, as it seems to
+me, quite at home in very short papers--in papers of the length of the
+average newspaper article. What he could do, as hardly any other man has
+ever done it in England, was a _causerie_ of about the same length as
+Sainte-Beuve's or a little shorter, less limited in range, but also less
+artfully proportioned than the great Frenchman's literary and historical
+studies, giving scope for considerable digression, but coming to an end
+before the author was wearied of his subject, or had exhausted the fresh
+thoughts and the happy borrowings and analogies which he had ready for
+it. Of what is rather affectedly called "architectonic," Hazlitt has
+nothing. No essay of his is ever an exhaustive or even a symmetrical
+treatment of its nominal, or of any, theme. He somewhere speaks of
+himself as finding it easy to go on stringing pearls when he has once
+got the string; but, for my part, I should say that the string was much
+more doubtful than the pearls. Except in a very few set pieces, his
+whole charm consists in the succession of irregular, half-connected, but
+unending and infinitely variegated thoughts, fancies, phrases,
+quotations, which he pours forth not merely at a particular "Open
+Sesame," but at "Open barley," "Open rye," or any other grain in the
+corn-chandler's list. No doubt the charm of these is increased by the
+fact that they are never quite haphazard, never absolutely promiscuous,
+despite their desultory arrangement; no doubt also a certain additional
+interest arises from the constant revelation which they make of
+Hazlitt's curious personality, his enthusiastic appreciation flecked
+with spots of grudging spite, his clear intellect clouded with
+prejudice, his admiration of greatness and nobility of character
+co-existing with the faculty of doing very mean and even disgraceful
+things, his abundant relish of life contrasted with almost constant
+repining. He must have been one of the most uncomfortable of all English
+men of letters, who can be called great, to know as a friend. He is
+certainly, to those who know him only as readers, one of the most
+fruitful both in instruction and in delight.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[12] For some further remarks on this duel as it concerns Lockhart see
+Appendix.
+
+[13] Since this paper was first published Mr. Alexander Ireland has
+edited a most excellent selection from Hazlitt.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+MOORE
+
+
+It would be interesting, though perhaps a little impertinent, to put to
+any given number of well-informed persons under the age of forty or
+fifty the sudden query, who was Thomas Brown the Younger? And it is very
+possible that a majority of them would answer that he had something to
+do with Rugby. It is certain that with respect to that part of his work
+in which he was pleased so to call himself, Moore is but little known.
+The considerable mass of his hack-work has gone whither all hack-work
+goes, fortunately enough for those of us who have to do it. The vast
+monument erected to him by his pupil, friend, and literary executor,
+Lord Russell, or rather Lord John Russell, is a monument of such a
+Cyclopean order of architecture, both in respect of bulk and in respect
+of style, that most honest biographers and critics acknowledge
+themselves to have explored its recesses but cursorily. Less of him,
+even as a poet proper, is now read than of any of the brilliant group
+of poets of which he was one, with the possible exceptions of Crabbe and
+Rogers; while, more unfortunate than Crabbe, he has had no Mr. Courthope
+to come to his rescue. But he has recently had what is an unusual thing
+for an English poet, a French biographer.[14] I shall not have very much
+to say of the details of M. Vallat's very creditable and useful
+monograph. It would be possible, if I were merely reviewing it, to pick
+out some of the curious errors of hasty deduction which are rarely
+wanting in a book of its nationality. If (and no shame to him) Moore's
+father sold cheese and whisky, _le whisky d'Irlande_ was no doubt his
+staple commodity in the one branch, but scarcely _le fromage de Stilton_
+in the other. An English lawyer's studies are not even now, except at
+the universities and for purposes of perfunctory examination, very much
+in "Justinian," and in Moore's time they were still less so. And if
+Bromham Church is near Sloperton, then it will follow as the night the
+day that it is not _dans le Bedfordshire_. But these things matter very
+little. They are found, in their different kinds, in all books; and if
+we English bookmakers (at least some of us) are not likely to make a
+Bordeaux wine merchant sell Burgundy as his chief commodity, or say that
+a village near Amiens is _dans le Béarn_, we no doubt do other things
+quite as bad. On the whole, M. Vallat's sketch, though of moderate
+length, is quite the soberest and most trustworthy sketch of Moore's
+life and of his books, as books merely, that I know. In matters of pure
+criticism M. Vallat is less blameless. He quotes authorities with that
+apparent indifference to, or even ignorance of, their relative value
+which is so yawning a pit for the feet of the foreigner in all cases;
+and perhaps a wider knowledge of English poetry in general would have
+been a better preparation for the study of Moore's in particular.
+"Never," says M. Renan very wisely, "never does a foreigner satisfy the
+nation whose history he writes"; and this is as true of literary history
+as of history proper. But M. Vallat satisfies us in a very considerable
+degree; and even putting aside the question whether he is satisfactory
+altogether, he has given us quite sufficient text in the mere fact that
+he has bestowed upon Moore an amount of attention and competence which
+no compatriot of the author of "Lalla Rookh" has cared to bestow for
+many years.
+
+I shall also here take the liberty of neglecting a very great--as far as
+bulk goes, by far the greatest--part of Moore's own performance. He has
+inserted so many interesting autobiographical particulars in the
+prefaces to his complete works, that visits to the great mausoleum of
+the Russell memoirs are rarely necessary, and still more rarely
+profitable. His work for the booksellers was done at a time when the
+best class of such work was much better done than the best class of it
+is now; but it was after all work for the booksellers. His _History of
+Ireland_, his _Life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald_, etc., may be pretty
+exactly gauged by saying that they are a good deal better than Scott's
+work of a merely similar kind (in which it is hardly necessary to say
+that I do not include the _Tales of a Grandfather_ or the introductions
+to the Dryden, the Swift, and the Ballantyne novels), not nearly so good
+as Southey's, and not quite so good as Campbell's. The Life of Byron
+holds a different place. With the poems, or some of them, it forms the
+only part of Moore's literary work which is still read; and though it is
+read much more for its substance than for its execution, it is still a
+masterly performance of a very difficult task. The circumstances which
+brought it about are well known, and no discussion of them would be
+possible without plunging into the Byron controversy generally, which
+the present writer most distinctly declines to do. But these
+circumstances, with other things among which Moore's own comparative
+faculty for the business may be not unjustly mentioned, prevent it from
+taking rank at all approaching that of Boswell's or Lockhart's
+inimitable biographies. The chief thing to note in it as regards Moore
+himself, is the help it gives in a matter to which we shall have to
+refer again, his attitude towards those whom his time still called "the
+great."
+
+And so we are left with the poems--not an inconsiderable companion
+seeing that its stature is some seven hundred small quarto pages closely
+packed with verses in double columns. Part of this volume is, however,
+devoted to the "Epicurean," a not unremarkable example of ornate prose
+in many respects resembling the author's verse. Indeed, as close readers
+of Moore know, there exists an unfinished verse form of it which, in
+style and general character, is not unlike a more serious "Lalla Rookh."
+As far as poetry goes, almost everything that will be said of "Lalla
+Rookh" might be said of "Alciphron": this latter, however, is a little
+more Byronic than its more famous sister, and in that respect not quite
+so successful.
+
+Moore's life, which is not uninteresting as a key to his personal
+character, is very fairly treated by M. Vallat, chiefly from the poet's
+own authority; but it need not detain us very long. He was born at
+Dublin on 28th May 1779. There is no mystery about his origin. His
+father, John Moore, was a small grocer and liquor-shop keeper who
+received later the place of barrack-master from a patron of his son. The
+mother, Anastasia Codd, was a Wexford girl, and seems to have been well
+educated and somewhat above her husband in station. Thomas was sent to
+several private schools, where he appears to have attained to some
+scholarship and to have early practised composition in the tongue of
+the hated Saxon. When he was fourteen, the first measure of Catholic
+Emancipation opened Trinity College to him, and that establishment, "the
+intellectual eye of Ireland" as Sir William Harcourt has justly called
+it, received him a year later. The "silent sister" has fostered an
+always genial, if sometimes inexact, fashion of scholarship, in which
+Moore's talents were well suited to shine, and a pleasant social
+atmosphere wherein he was also not misplaced. But the time drew near to
+'98, and Moore, although he had always too much good sense to dip deeply
+into sedition, was, from his sentimental habits, likely to run some risk
+of being thought to have dipped in it. Although it is certain that he
+would have regarded what is called Nationalism in our days with disgust
+and horror, he cannot be acquitted of using, to the end of his life, the
+loosest of language on subjects where precision is particularly to be
+desired. Robert Emmet was his contemporary, and the action which the
+authorities took was but too well justified by the outbreak of the
+insurrection later. A Commission was named for purifying the college.
+Its head was Lord Clare, one of the greatest of Irishmen, the base or
+ignorant vilifying of whom by some persons in these days has been one of
+the worst results of the Home Rule movement. It had a rather comic
+assessor in Dr. Duigenan, the same, I believe, of whom it has been
+recorded that, at an earlier stage of his academic career and when a
+junior Fellow, he threatened to "bulge the Provost's eye." The oath was
+tendered to each examinate, and on the day before Moore's appearance
+Emmet and others had gone by default, while it was at least whispered
+that there had been treachery in the camp. Moore's own performance was,
+by his own account, heroic and successful: by another, which he very
+fairly gives, a little less heroic but still successful. Both show
+clearly that Clare was nothing like the stage-tyrant which the
+imagination of the seditious has chosen to represent him as being. That
+M. Vallat should talk rather foolishly about Emmet was to be expected;
+for Emmet's rhetorical rubbish was sure to impose, and has always
+imposed, on Frenchmen. The truth of course is that this young
+person--though one of those whom every humane man would like to keep
+mewed up till they arrived, if they ever did arrive, which is
+improbable, at years of discretion--was one of the most mischievous of
+agitators. He was one of those who light a bonfire and then are shocked
+at its burning, who throw a kingdom into anarchy and misery and think
+that they are cleared by a reference to Harmodius and Aristogeiton. It
+is one of the most fearful delights of the educated Tory to remember
+what the grievance of Harmodius and Aristogeiton really was. Moore (who
+had something of the folly of Emmet, but none of his reckless conceit)
+escaped, and his family must have been exceedingly glad to send him
+over to the Isle of Britain. He entered at the Middle Temple in 1799,
+but hardly made even a pretence of reading law. His actual experience is
+one of those puzzles which continually meet the student of literary
+history in the days when society was much smaller, the makers of
+literature fewer, and the resources of patronage greater. Moore toiled
+not, neither did he spin. He slipped, apparently on the mere strength of
+an ordinary introduction, into the good graces of Lord Moira, who
+introduced him to the exiled Royal Family of France, and to the richest
+members of the Whig aristocracy--the Duke of Bedford, the Marquis of
+Lansdowne and others, not to mention the Prince of Wales himself. The
+young Irishman had indeed, as usual, his "proposals" in his
+pocket--proposals for a translation of Anacreon which appeared in May
+1800. The thing which thus founded one of the easiest, if not the most
+wholly triumphant, of literary careers is not a bad thing. The original,
+now abandoned as a clever though late imitation, was known even in
+Moore's time to be in parts of very doubtful authenticity, but it still
+remains, as an original, a very pretty thing. Moore's version is not
+quite so pretty, and is bolstered out with paraphrase and amplification
+to a rather intolerable extent. But there was considerable
+fellow-feeling between the author, whoever he was, and the translator,
+and the result is not despicable. Still there is no doubt that work as
+good or better might appear now, and the author would be lucky if he
+cleared a hundred pounds and a favourable review or two by the
+transaction. Moore was made for life. These things happen at one time
+and do not happen at another. We are inclined to accept them as ultimate
+facts into which it is useless to inquire. There does not appear to be
+among the numerous fixed laws of the universe any one which regulates
+the proportion of literary desert to immediate reward, and it is on the
+whole well that it should be so. At any rate the publication increased
+Moore's claims as a "lion," and encouraged him to publish next year the
+_Poems of the late Thomas Little_ (he always stuck to the Christian
+name), which put up his fame and rather put down his character.
+
+In later editions Thomas Little has been so much subjected to the
+fig-leaf and knife that we have known readers who wondered why on earth
+any one should ever have objected to him. He was a good deal more
+uncastrated originally, but there never was much harm in him. It is true
+that the excuse made by Sterne for Tristram Shandy, and often repeated
+for Moore, does not quite apply. There is not much guilt in Little, but
+there is certainly very little innocence. He knows that a certain amount
+of not too gross indecency will raise a snigger, and, like Voltaire and
+Sterne himself, he sets himself to raise it. But he does not do it very
+wickedly. The propriety of the nineteenth century, moreover, had not
+then made the surprisingly rapid strides of a few years later, and some
+time had to pass before Moore was to go out with Jeffrey, and nearly
+challenge Byron, for questioning his morality. The rewards of his
+harmless iniquity were at hand; and in the autumn of 1803 he was made
+Secretary of the Admiralty in Bermuda. Bermuda, it is said, is an
+exceedingly pleasant place; but either there is no Secretary of the
+Admiralty there now, or they do not give the post to young men
+four-and-twenty years old who have written two very thin volumes of
+light verses. The Bermoothes are not still vexed with that kind of Civil
+Servant. The appointment was not altogether fortunate for Moore,
+inasmuch as his deputy (for they not only gave nice berths to men of
+letters then, but let them have deputies) embezzled public and private
+moneys, with disastrous results to his easy-going principal. But for the
+time it was all, as most things were with Moore, plain sailing. He went
+out in a frigate, and was the delight of the gun-room. As soon as he got
+tired of the Bermudas, he appointed his deputy and went to travel in
+America, composing large numbers of easy poems. In October 1804 he was
+back in England, still voyaging at His Majesty's expense, and having
+achieved his fifteen months' trip wholly on those terms. Little is heard
+of him for the next two years, and then the publication of his American
+and other poems, with some free reflections on the American character,
+brought down on him the wrath of _The Edinburgh_, and provoked the
+famous leadless or half-leadless duel at Chalk Farm. It was rather hard
+on Moore, if the real cause of his castigation was that he had offended
+democratic principles, while the ostensible cause was that, as Thomas
+Little, he had five years before written loose and humorous verses. So
+thinks M. Vallat, with whom we are not wholly disposed to agree, for
+Jeffrey, though a Whig, was no Democrat, and he was a rather strict
+moralist. However, no harm came of the meeting in any sense, though its
+somewhat burlesque termination made the irreverent laugh. It was indeed
+not fated that Moore should smell serious powder, though his courage
+seems to have been fully equal to any such occasion. The same year
+brought him two unquestioned and unalloyed advantages, the friendship of
+Rogers and the beginning of the Irish Melodies, from which he reaped not
+a little solid benefit, and which contain by far his highest and most
+lasting poetry. It is curious, but by no means unexampled, that, at the
+very time at which he was thus showing that he had found his right way,
+he also diverged into one wholly wrong--that of the serious and very
+ineffective Satires, "Corruption," "Intolerance," and others. The year
+1809 brought "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" with a gibe from
+Byron and a challenge from Moore. But Moore's challenges were fated to
+have no other result than making the challenged his friends for life.
+All this time he had been more or less "about town." In 1811 he married
+Elizabeth Dyke ("Bessy"), an actress of virtue and beauty, and wrote the
+very inferior comic opera of "The Blue Stocking." Lord Moira gave the
+pair a home first in his own house, then at Kegworth near Donington,
+whence they moved to Ashbourne. Moore was busy now. The politics of "The
+Two-penny Postbag" are of course sometimes dead enough to us; but
+sometimes also they are not, and then the easy grace of the satire,
+which is always pungent and never venomed, is not much below Canning.
+Its author also did a good deal of other work of the same kind, besides
+beginning to review for _The Edinburgh_. Considering that he was in a
+way making his bread and butter by lampooning, however good-humouredly,
+the ruler of his country, he seems to have been a little unreasonable in
+feeling shocked that Lord Moira, on going as viceroy to India, did not
+provide for him. In the first place he was provided for already; and in
+the second place you cannot reasonably expect to enjoy the pleasures of
+independence and those of dependence at the same time. At the end of
+1817 he left Mayfield (his cottage near Ashbourne) and Lord Moira, for
+Lord Lansdowne and Sloperton, a cottage near Bowood, the end of the one
+sojourn and the beginning of the other being distinguished by the
+appearance of his two best works, next to the Irish Melodies--"Lalla
+Rookh" and "The Fudge Family at Paris." His first and almost his only
+heavy stroke of ill-luck now came on him: his deputy at Bermuda levanted
+with some six thousand pounds, for which Moore was liable. Many friends
+came to his aid, and after some delay and negotiations, during which he
+had to go abroad, Lord Lansdowne paid what was necessary. But Moore
+afterwards paid Lord Lansdowne, which makes a decided distinction
+between his conduct and that of Theodore Hook in a similar case.
+
+Although the days of Moore lasted for half an ordinary lifetime after
+this, they saw few important events save the imbroglio over the Byron
+memoirs. They saw also the composition of a great deal of literature and
+journalism, all very well paid, notwithstanding which, Moore seems to
+have been always in a rather unintelligible state of pecuniary distress.
+That he made his parents an allowance, as some allege in explanation,
+will not in the least account for this; for, creditable as it was in him
+to make it, this allowance did not exceed one hundred pounds a year. He
+must have spent little in an ordinary way, for his Sloperton
+establishment was of the most modest character, while his wife was an
+excellent manager, and never went into society. Probably he might have
+endorsed, if he had been asked, the great principle which somebody or
+other has formulated, that the most expensive way of living is staying
+in other peoples houses. At any rate his condition was rather precarious
+till 1835, when Lord John Russell and Lord Lansdowne obtained for him a
+Civil List pension of three hundred pounds a year. In his very last days
+this was further increased by an additional hundred a year to his wife.
+His end was not happy. The softening of the brain, which set in about
+1848, and which had been preceded for some time by premonitory symptoms,
+can hardly, as in the cases of Scott and Southey, be set down to
+overwork, for though Moore had not been idle, his literary life had been
+mere child's play to theirs. He died on 26th February 1852.
+
+Of Moore's character not much need be said, nor need what is said be
+otherwise than favourable. Not only to modern tastes, but to the
+sturdier tastes of his own day, and even of the days immediately before
+his, there was a little too much of the parasite and the hanger-on about
+him. It is easy to say that a man of his talents, when he had once
+obtained a start, might surely have gone his own way and lived his own
+life, without taking up the position of a kind of superior gamekeeper or
+steward at rich men's gates. But race, fashion, and a good many other
+things have to be taken into account; and it is fair to Moore to
+remember that he was, as it were from the first, bound to the
+chariot-wheels of "the great," and could hardly liberate himself from
+them without churlishness and violence. Moreover, it cannot possibly be
+denied by any fair critic that if he accepted to some extent the awkward
+position of led-poet, he showed in it as much independence as was
+compatible with the function. Both in money matters, in his language to
+his patrons, and in a certain general but indefinable tone of behaviour,
+he contrasts not less favourably than remarkably, both with the
+ultra-Tory Hook, to whom we have already compared him, and with the
+ultra-Radical Leigh Hunt. Moore had as little of Wagg as he had of
+Skimpole about him; though he allowed his way of life to compare in some
+respects perilously with theirs. It is only necessary to look at his
+letters to Byron--always ready enough to treat as spaniels those of his
+inferiors in station who appeared to be of the spaniel kind--to
+appreciate his general attitude, and his behaviour in this instance is
+by no means different from his behaviour in others. As a politician
+there is no doubt that he at least thought himself to be quite sincere.
+It may be that, if he had been, his political satires would have galled
+Tories more than they did then, and could hardly be read by persons of
+that persuasion with such complete enjoyment as they can now. But the
+insincerity was quite unconscious, and indeed can hardly be said to have
+been insincerity at all. Moore had not a political head, and in English
+as in Irish politics his beliefs were probably not founded on any
+clearly comprehended principles. But such as they were he held to them
+firmly. Against his domestic character nobody has ever said anything;
+and it is sufficient to observe that not a few of the best as well as of
+the greatest men of his time, Scott as well as Byron, Lord John Russell
+as well as Lord Moira, appear not only to have admired his abilities and
+liked his social qualities, but to have sincerely respected his
+character. And so we may at last find ourselves alone with the plump
+volume of poems in which we shall hardly discover with the amiable M.
+Vallat "the greatest lyric poet of England," but in which we shall find
+a poet certainly, and if not a very great poet, at any rate a poet who
+has done many things well, and one particular thing better than anybody
+else.
+
+The volume opens with "Lalla Rookh," a proceeding which, if not
+justified by chronology, is completely justified by the facts that Moore
+was to his contemporaries the author of that poem chiefly, and that it
+is by far the most considerable thing not only in mere bulk, but in
+arrangement, plan, and style, that he ever did. Perhaps I am not quite a
+fair judge of "Lalla Rookh." I was brought up in what is called a strict
+household where, though the rule was not, as far as I can remember,
+enforced by any penalties, it was a point of honour that in the nursery
+and school-room none but "Sunday books" should be read on Sunday. But
+this severity was tempered by one of the easements often occurring in a
+world which, if not the best, is certainly not the worst of all possible
+worlds. For the convenience of servants, or for some other reason, the
+children were much more in the drawing-room on Sundays than on any other
+day, and it was an unwritten rule that any book that lived in the
+drawing-room was fit Sunday-reading. The consequence was that from the
+time I could read, till childish things were put away, I used to spend a
+considerable part of the first day of the week in reading and re-reading
+a collection of books, four of which were Scott's poems, "Lalla Rookh,"
+_The Essays of Elia_ (First Edition,--I have got it now), and Southey's
+_Doctor_. Therefore it may be that I rank "Lalla Rookh" rather too high.
+At the same time, I confess that it still seems to me a very respectable
+poem indeed of the second rank. Of course it is artificial. The parade
+of second, or third, or twentieth-hand learning in the notes makes one
+smile, and the whole reminds one (as I daresay it has reminded many
+others before) of a harp of the period with the gilt a little tarnished,
+the ribbons more than a little faded, and the silk stool on which the
+young woman in ringlets used to sit much worn. All this is easy
+metaphorical criticism, if it is criticism at all. For I am not sure
+that, when the last age has got a little farther off from our
+descendants, they will see anything more ludicrous in such a harp than
+we see in the faded spinets of a generation earlier still. But much
+remains to Lalla if not to Feramorz. The prose interludes have lost none
+of their airy grace. Even Mr. Burnand has not been able to make Mokanna
+ridiculous, nor have the recent accounts of the actual waste of desert
+and felt huts banished at least the poetical beauty of "Merou's bright
+palaces and groves." There are those who laugh at the bower of roses by
+Bendemeer's stream: I do not. "Paradise and the Peri" is perhaps the
+prettiest purely sentimental poem that English or any other language can
+show. "The Fire Worshippers" are rather long, but there is a famous
+fight--more than one indeed--in them to relieve the monotony. For "The
+Light of the Harem" alone I have never been able to get up much
+enthusiasm; but even "The Light of the Harem" is a great deal better
+than Moore's subsequent attempt in the style of "Lalla Rookh," or
+something like it, "The Loves of the Angels." There is only one good
+thing that I can find to say of that: it is not so bad as the poem which
+similarity of title makes one think of in connection with
+it--Lamartine's disastrous "Chute d'un Ange."
+
+As "Lalla Rookh" is far the most important of Moore's serious poems, so
+"The Fudge Family in Paris" is far the best of his humorous poems. I do
+not forget "The Two-penny Postbag," nor many capital later verses of the
+same kind, the best of which perhaps is the Epistle from Henry of Exeter
+to John of Tchume. But "The Fudge Family" has all the merits of these,
+with a scheme and framework of dramatic character which they lack. Miss
+Biddy and her vanities, Master Bob and his guttling, the eminent
+turncoat Phil Fudge, Esq. himself and his politics, are all excellent.
+But I avow that Phelim Connor is to me the most delightful, though he
+has always been rather a puzzle. If he is intended to be a satire on the
+class now represented by the O'Briens and the McCarthys he is exquisite,
+and it is small wonder that Young Ireland has never loved Moore much.
+But I do not think that Thomas Brown the Younger meant it, or at least
+wholly meant it, as satire, and this is perhaps the best proof of his
+unpractical way of looking at politics. For Phelim Connor is a much more
+damning sketch than any of the Fudges. Vanity, gluttony, the scheming
+intrigues of eld, may not be nice things, but they are common to the
+whole human race. The hollow rant which enjoys the advantages of liberty
+and declaims against the excesses of tyranny is in its perfection Irish
+alone. However this may be, these lighter poems of Moore are great fun,
+and it is no small misfortune that the younger generation of readers
+pays so little attention to them. For they are full of acute observation
+of manners, politics, and society by an accomplished man of the world,
+put into pointed and notable form by an accomplished man of letters. Our
+fathers knew them well, and many a quotation familiar enough at second
+hand is due originally to the Fudge Family in their second appearance
+(not so good, but still good) many years later, to "The Two-penny
+Postbag" and to the long list of miscellaneous satires and skits. The
+last sentence is however to be taken as most strictly excluding
+"Corruption," "Intolerance," and "The Sceptic." "Rhymes on the Road,"
+travel-pieces out of Moore's line, may also be mercifully left aside:
+and "Evenings in Greece;" and "The Summer Fête" (any universal provider
+would have supplied as good a poem with the supper and the rout-seats)
+need not delay the critic and will not extraordinarily delight the
+reader. Not here is Moore's spur of Parnassus to be found.
+
+For that domain of his we must go to the songs which, in extraordinary
+numbers, make up the whole of the divisions headed Irish Melodies,
+National Airs, Sacred Songs, Ballads and Songs, and some of the finest
+of which are found outside these divisions in the longer poems from
+"Lalla Rookh" downwards. The singular musical melody of these pieces has
+never been seriously denied by any one, but it seems to be thought,
+especially nowadays, that because they are musically melodious they are
+not poetical. It is probably useless to protest against a prejudice
+which, where it is not due to simple thoughtlessness or to blind
+following of fashion, argues a certain constitutional defect of the
+understanding powers. But it may be just necessary to repeat pretty
+firmly that any one who regards, even with a tincture of contempt, such
+work (to take various characteristic examples) as Dryden's lyrics, as
+Shenstone's, as Moore's, as Macaulay's Lays, because he thinks that, if
+he did not contemn them, his worship of Shakespeare, of Shelley, of
+Wordsworth would be suspect, is most emphatically not a critic of poetry
+and not even a catholic lover of it. Which said, let us betake ourselves
+to seeing what Moore's special virtue is. It is acknowledged that it
+consists partly in marrying music most happily to verse; but what is not
+so fully acknowledged as it ought to be is, that it also consists in
+marrying music not merely to verse, but to poetry. Among the more
+abstract questions of poetical criticism few are more interesting than
+this, the connection of what may be called musical music with poetical
+music; and it is one which has not been much discussed. Let us take the
+two greatest of Moore's own contemporaries in lyric, the two greatest
+lyrists as some think (I give no opinion on this) in English, and
+compare their work with his. Shelley has the poetical music in an
+unsurpassable and sometimes in an almost unapproached degree, but his
+verse is admittedly very difficult to set to music. I should myself go
+farther and say that it has in it some indefinable quality antagonistic
+to such setting. Except the famous Indian Serenade, I do not know any
+poem of Shelley's that has been set with anything approaching to
+success, and in the best setting that I know of this the honeymoon of
+the marriage turns into a "red moon" before long. That this is not
+merely due to the fact that Shelley likes intricate metres any one who
+examines Moore can see. That it is due merely to the fact that Shelley,
+as we know from Peacock, was almost destitute of any ear for music is
+the obvious and common explanation. But neither will this serve, for we
+happen also to know that Burns, whose lyric, of a higher quality than
+Moore's, assorts with music as naturally as Moore's own, was quite as
+deficient as Shelley in this respect. So was Scott, who could yet write
+admirable songs to be sung. It seems therefore almost impossible, on the
+comparison of these three instances, to deny the existence of some
+peculiar musical music in poetry, which is distinct from poetical music,
+though it may coexist with it or may be separated from it, and which is
+independent both of technical musical training and even of what is
+commonly called "ear" in the poet. That Moore possessed it in probably
+the highest degree, will I think, hardly be denied. It never seems to
+have mattered to him whether he wrote the words for the air or altered
+the air to suit the words. The two fit like a glove, and if, as is
+sometimes the case, the same or a similar poetical measure is heard set
+to another air than Moore's, this other always seems intrusive and
+wrong. He draws attention in one case to the extraordinary irregularity
+of his own metre (an irregularity to which the average pindaric is a
+mere jog-trot), yet the air fits it exactly. Of course the two feet
+which most naturally go to music, the anapæst and the trochee, are
+commonest with him; but the point is that he seems to find no more
+difficulty, if he does not take so much pleasure, in setting
+combinations of a very different kind. Nor is this peculiar gift by any
+means unimportant from the purely poetical side, the side on which the
+verse is looked at without any regard to air or accompaniment. For the
+great drawback to "songs to be sung" in general since Elizabethan days
+(when, as Mr. Arber and Mr. Bullen have shown, it was very different)
+has been the constant tendency of the verse-writer to sacrifice to his
+musical necessities either meaning or poetic sound or both. The climax
+of this is of course reached in the ineffable balderdash which usually
+does duty for the libretto of an opera, but it is quite as noticeable in
+the ordinary songs of the drawing-room. Now Moore is quite free from
+this blame. He may not have the highest and rarest strokes of poetic
+expression; but at any rate he seldom or never sins against either
+reason or poetry for the sake of rhythm and rhyme. He is always the
+master not the servant, the artist not the clumsy craftsman. And this I
+say not by any means as one likely to pardon poetical shortcomings in
+consideration of musical merit, for, shameful as the confession may be,
+a little music goes a long way with me; and what music I do like, is
+rather of the kind opposite to Moore's facile styles. Yet it is easy,
+even from the musical view, to exaggerate his facility. Berlioz is not
+generally thought a barrel-organ composer, and he bestowed early and
+particular pains on Moore.
+
+To many persons, however, the results are more interesting than the
+analysis of their qualities and principles; so let us go to the songs
+themselves. To my fancy the three best of Moore's songs, and three of
+the finest songs in any language, are "Oft in the stilly Night," "When
+in Death I shall calm recline," and "I saw from the Beach." They all
+exemplify what has been pointed out above, the complete adaptation of
+words to music and music to words, coupled with a decidedly high quality
+of poetical merit in the verse, quite apart from the mere music. It can
+hardly be necessary to quote them, for they are or ought to be familiar
+to everybody; but in selecting these three I have no intention of
+distinguishing them in point of general excellence from scores, nay
+hundreds of others. "Go where Glory waits thee" is the first of the
+Irish melodies, and one of those most hackneyed by the enthusiasm of
+bygone Pogsons. But its merit ought in no way to suffer on that account
+with persons who are not Pogsons. It ought to be possible for the
+reader, it is certainly possible for the critic, to dismiss Pogson
+altogether, to wave Pogson off, and to read anything as if it had never
+been read before. If this be done we shall hardly wonder at the delight
+which our fathers, who will not compare altogether badly with ourselves,
+took in Thomas Moore. "When he who adores thee" is supposed on pretty
+good evidence to have been inspired by the most hollow and senseless of
+all pseudo-patriotic delusions, a delusion of which the best thing that
+can be said is that "the pride of thus dying for" it has been about the
+last thing that it ever did inspire, and that most persons who have
+suffered from it have usually had the good sense to take lucrative
+places from the tyrant as soon as they could get them, and to live
+happily ever after. But the basest, the most brutal, and the bloodiest
+of Saxons may recognise in Moore's poem the expression of a possible, if
+not a real, feeling given with infinite grace and pathos. The same
+string reverberates even in the thrice and thousand times hackneyed Harp
+of Tara. "Rich and rare were the Gems she wore" is chiefly comic opera,
+but it is very pretty comic opera; and the two pieces "There is not in
+the wide world" and "How dear to me" exemplify, for the first but by no
+means for the last time, Moore's extraordinary command of the last
+phase of that curious thing called by the century that gave him birth
+Sensibility. We have turned Sensibility out of doors; but he would be a
+rash man who should say that we have not let in seven worse devils of
+the gushing kind in her comparatively innocent room.
+
+Then we may skip not a few pieces, only referring once more to "The
+Legacy" ("When in Death I shall calm recline"), an anacreontic quite
+unsurpassable in its own kind. We need dwell but briefly on such pieces
+as "Believe me if all those endearing young Charms," which is typical of
+much that Moore wrote, but does not reach the true devil-may-care note
+of Suckling, or as "By the Hope within us springing," for Moore's
+war-like pieces are seldom or never good. But with "Love's Young Dream"
+we come back to the style of which it is impossible to say less than
+that it is quite admirable in its kind. Then after a page or two we come
+to the chief _cruces_ of Moore's pathetic and of his comic manner, "The
+Last Rose of Summer," "The Young May Moon," and "The Minstrel Boy." I
+cannot say very much for the last, which is tainted with the unreality
+of all Moore's Tyrtean efforts; but "The Young May Moon" could not be
+better, and I am not going to abandon the Rose, for all her perfume be
+something musty--a _pot-pourri_ rose rather than a fresh one. The song
+of O'Ruark with its altogether fatal climax--
+
+    On our side is virtue and Erin,
+    On theirs is the Saxon and guilt--
+
+(which carries with it the delightful reflection that it was an Irishman
+running away with an Irishwoman that occasioned this sweeping moral
+contrast) must be given up; but surely not so "Oh had we some bright
+little Isle of our own." For indeed if one only had some bright little
+isle of that kind, some _rive fidèle où l'on aime toujours_, and where
+things in general are adjusted to such a state, then would Thomas Moore
+be the Laureate of that bright and tight little island.
+
+But it is alarming to find that we have not yet got through twenty-five
+pages out of some hundred or two, and that the Irish Melodies are not
+yet nearly exhausted. Not a few of the best known of Moore's songs,
+including "Oft in the stilly Night," are to be found in the division of
+National Airs, which is as a whole a triumph of that extraordinary
+genius for setting which has been already noticed. Here is "Flow on thou
+shining River," here the capital "When I touch the String," on which
+Thackeray loved to make variations. But "Oft in the stilly Night" itself
+is far above the others. We do not say "stilly" now: we have been taught
+by Coleridge (who used to use it freely himself before he laughed at it)
+to laugh at "stilly" and "paly" and so forth. But the most acrimonious
+critic may be challenged to point out another weakness of the same kind,
+and on the whole the straightforward simplicity of the phrase equals
+the melody of the rhythm.
+
+The Sacred Songs need not delay us long; for they are not better than
+sacred songs in general, which is saying remarkably little. Perhaps the
+most interesting thing in them is the well-known couplet,
+
+    This world is but a fleeting show
+    For man's illusion given--
+
+which, as has justly been observed, contains one of the most singular
+estimates of the divine purpose anywhere to be found. But Moore might,
+like Mr. Midshipman Easy, have excused himself by remarking, "Ah! well,
+I don't understand these things." The miscellaneous division of Ballads,
+Songs, etc., is much more fruitful. "The Leaf and the Fountain,"
+beginning "Tell me, kind seer, I pray thee," though rather long, is
+singularly good of its kind--the kind of half-narrative ballad. So in a
+lighter strain is "The Indian Bark." Nor is Moore less at home after his
+own fashion in the songs from the Anthology. It is true that the same
+fault which has been found with his Anacreon may be found here, and that
+it is all the more sensible because at least in some cases the originals
+are much higher poetry than the pseudo-Teian. To the form and style of
+Meleager Moore could not pretend; but as these are rather songs on Greek
+motives than translations from the Greek, the slackness and dilution
+matter less. But the strictly miscellaneous division holds some of the
+best work. We could no doubt dispense with the well-known ditty (for
+once very nearly the "rubbish" with which Moore is so often and so
+unjustly charged) where Posada rhymes of necessity to Granada, and
+where, quite against the author's habit, the ridiculous term "Sultana"
+is fished out to do similar duty in reference to the Dulcinea, or rather
+to the Maritornes, of a muleteer. But this is quite an exception, and as
+a rule the facile verse is as felicitous as it is facile. Perhaps no one
+stands out very far above the rest; perhaps all have more or less the
+mark of easy variations on a few well-known themes. The old comparison
+that they are as numerous as motes, as bright, as fleeting, and as
+individually insignificant, comes naturally enough to the mind. But then
+they are very numerous, they are very bright, and if they are fleeting,
+their number provides plenty more to take the place of that which passes
+away. Nor is it by any means true that they lack individual
+significance.
+
+This enumeration of a few out of many ornaments of Moore's muse will of
+course irritate those who object to the "brick-of-the-house" mode of
+criticism; while it may not be minute enough, or sufficiently bolstered
+by actual quotation, to please those who hold that simple extract is the
+best, if not the only tolerable form of criticism. But the critic is not
+alone in finding that, whether he carry his ass or ride upon it, he
+cannot please all his public. What has been said is probably enough, in
+the case of a writer whose work, though as a whole rather unjustly
+forgotten, survives in parts more securely even than the work of greater
+men, to remind readers of at least the outlines and bases of his claim
+to esteem. And the more those outlines are followed up, and the
+structure founded on those bases is examined, the more certain, I think,
+is Moore of recovering, not the position which M. Vallat would assign to
+him of the greatest lyrist of England (a position which he never held
+and never could hold except with very prejudiced or very incompetent
+judges), not that of the equal of Scott or Byron or Shelley or
+Wordsworth, but still a position high enough and singularly isolated at
+its height. Viewed from the point of strictly poetical criticism, he no
+doubt ranks only with those poets who have expressed easily and
+acceptably the likings and passions and thoughts and fancies of the
+average man, and who have expressed these with no extraordinary cunning
+or witchery. To go further in limitation, the average man, of whom he is
+thus the bard, is a rather sophisticated average man, without very deep
+thoughts or feelings, without a very fertile or fresh imagination or
+fancy, with even a touch--a little touch--of cant and "gush" and other
+defects incident to average and sophisticated humanity. But this
+humanity is at any time and every time no small portion of humanity at
+large, and it is to Moore's credit that he sings its feelings and its
+thoughts so as always to get the human and durable element in them
+visible and audible through the "trappings of convention." Again, he has
+that all-saving touch of humour which enables him, sentimentalist as he
+is, to be an admirable comedian as well. Yet again, he has at least
+something of the two qualities which one must demand of a poet who is a
+poet, and not a mere maker of rhymes. His note of feeling, if not full
+or deep, is true and real. His faculty of expression is not only
+considerable, but it is also distinguished; it is a faculty which in the
+same measure and degree nobody else has possessed. On one side he had
+the gift of singing those admirable songs of which we have been talking.
+On the other, he had the gift of right satiric verse to a degree which
+only three others of the great dead men of this century in
+England--Canning, Praed, and Thackeray--have reached. Besides all this,
+he was a "considerable man of letters." But your considerable men of
+letters, after flourishing, turn to dust in their season, and other
+considerable or inconsiderable men of letters spring out of it. The true
+poets and even the true satirists abide, and both as a poet and a
+satirist Thomas Moore abides and will abide with them.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[14] _Etude sur la Vie et les Oeuvres de Thomas Moore_; by Gustave
+Vallat. Paris: Rousseau. London: Asher and Co. Dublin: Hodges, Figgis,
+and Co. 1887.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+LEIGH HUNT
+
+
+To compare the peaceful and home-keeping art of criticism to the
+adventurous one of lighthouse-building may seem an excursion into the
+heroi-comic, if not into the tragic-burlesque. Neither is it in the
+least my intention to dwell on a tolerably obvious metaphorical
+resemblance between the two. It is certainly the business of the critic
+to warn others off from the mistakes which have been committed by his
+forerunners, and perhaps (for let us anticipate the crushing wit) from
+his own. But that is not my reason for the suggestion. There is a story
+of I forget what lighthouse which Smeaton, or Stevenson, or somebody
+else, had unusual difficulty in establishing. The rock was too near the
+surface for it to be safe or practicable to moor barges over it; and it
+was uncovered for too short a time to enable any solid foundations to be
+laid or even begun during one tide. So the engineer, with other
+adventurous persons, got himself landed on it, succeeded after a vain
+attempt or two in working an iron rod into the middle, and then hung on
+bodily while the tide was up, that he and his men might begin again as
+soon as it receded. In a mild and unexciting fashion, that is what the
+critic has to do--to dig about till he makes a lodgment in his author,
+hang on to it, and then begin to build. It is not always very easy work,
+and it is never less easy than in the case of the author whom somebody
+has kindly called "the Ariel of criticism." Leigh Hunt is an extremely
+difficult person upon whom to make any critical lodgment, for the reason
+that (I do not intend any disrespect by the comparison) he has much less
+of the rock about him than of the shifting sand. I do not now speak of
+the great Skimpole problem--we shall come to that presently--but merely
+of the writer as shown in his works.
+
+The works themselves are not particularly easy to get together in any
+complete form, some of them being almost inextricably entangled in
+defunct periodicals, and others reappearing in different guises in the
+author's many published volumes. Mr. Kent's bibliography gives forty-six
+different entries; Mr. Alexander Ireland's (to which he refers) gives, I
+think, over eighty. Some years ago I remember receiving the catalogue of
+a second-hand bookseller who offered what he very frankly confessed to
+be far from a complete collection of the first editions, at the price of
+a score or two of pounds; and here at least the first are in some cases
+the only issues. Probably this is one reason why selections from Leigh
+Hunt, of which Mr. Kent's is the latest and best, have been frequent. I
+have seen two certainly, and I think three, within as many years.
+Luckily, however, quite enough for the reader's if not for the critic's
+purpose is easily obtainable. The poems can be bought in more forms than
+one; Messrs. Smith and Elder have reprinted cheaply the "Autobiography,"
+"Men, Women, and Books," "Imagination and Fancy," "The Town," "Wit and
+Humour," "Table Talk," and "A Jar of Honey." Other reprints of "One
+Hundred Romances of Real Life" (one of his merest pieces of book-making)
+and of his "Stories from the Italian Poets," one of his worst pieces of
+criticism, but agreeably reproduced in every respect save the hideous
+American spelling, have recently appeared. The complete and uniform
+issue, the want of which to some lovers of books (I own myself among
+them) is never quite made up by a scratch company of volumes of all
+dates, sizes, and prints, is indeed wanting. But still you can get a
+working Leigh Hunt together.
+
+It is when you have got him that your trouble begins; and before it is
+done the critic, if he be one of those who are not satisfied with a mere
+_compte rendu_, is likely to acknowledge that Leigh Hunt, if "Ariel" be
+in some respects too complimentary a name for him, is at any rate a
+most tricksy spirit. The finest taste in some ways, contrasting with
+what can only be called the most horrible vulgarity in others; a light
+hand tediously boring again and again at obviously miscomprehended
+questions of religion, philosophy, and politics; a keen appetite for
+humour condescending to thin and repeated jests; a reviler of kings
+going out of his way laboriously to beslaver royalty; a man of letters,
+of talent almost touching genius, who seldom writes a dozen consecutive
+good pages:--these are only some of the inconsistencies that meet us in
+Leigh Hunt.
+
+He has related the history of his immediate and remoter forbears with
+considerable minuteness--with more minuteness indeed by far than he has
+bestowed upon all but a few passages of his own life. For the general
+reader, however, it is quite sufficient to know that his father, the
+Reverend Isaac Hunt, who belonged to a clerical family in Barbados, went
+for his education to the still British Provinces of North America,
+married a Philadelphia girl, Mary Shewell, practised as a lawyer till
+the Revolution broke out, and then being driven from his adopted country
+as a loyalist, settled in England, took orders, drifted into
+Unitarianism or anythingarianism, and ended his days, after not
+infrequent visits to the King's Bench, comfortably enough, but hanging
+rather loose on society, his friends, and a pension. Leigh Hunt (his
+godfathers and godmothers gave him also the names of James Henry, which
+he dropped) was the youngest son, and was born on 19th October 1784. His
+best youthful remembrance, and one of the most really humorous things he
+ever said, was that he used, after a childish indulgence in bad
+language, to think to himself with a shudder when he received any mark
+of favour, "Ah! they little suspect I'm the boy who said 'd----n.'" But
+at seven years old he went to Christ's Hospital, and continued there for
+another seven. His reminiscences of that seminary, put down pretty
+early, and afterwards embodied in the "Autobiography," are even better
+known from the fact that they served as a text, and as the occasion of a
+little gentle raillery, to Elia's famous essay than in themselves. For
+some years after leaving school he did nothing definite but write
+verses, which his father (who seems to have been gifted with a plentiful
+lack of judgment in most incidents and relations of life) published when
+the boy was but sixteen. They are as nearly as possible valueless, but
+they went through three editions in a very short time. It ought to be
+remembered that except Cowper, who was just dead, and Crabbe, who had
+for years intermitted writing, the public had only Rogers and Southey
+for poets, for it would none of the "Lyrical Ballads," and the "Lay of
+the Last Minstrel" had not yet been published. So that it did not make
+one of its worst mistakes in taking up Leigh Hunt, who certainly had
+poetry in him, if he did not put it forth quite so early as this. He was
+made a kind of lion, but, fortunately or unfortunately for him, only in
+middle-class circles where there were no patrons. He was quite an old
+man--nearly twenty--when he made regular entry into the periodical
+writing which kept him (with the aid of his friends) for nearly sixty
+years. "Mr. Town, Junior" (altered from an old signature of Colman's)
+contributed theatrical criticisms, which do not seem to have been paid
+for, to an evening paper, the _Traveller_, now surviving as a second
+title to the _Globe_. His bent in this direction was assisted by the
+fact that his elder brother John had been apprenticed to a printer, and
+had desires to be a publisher. In January 1808 the two brothers started
+the _Examiner_, and Leigh Hunt edited it with a great deal of courage
+for fourteen years. He threw away for this the only piece of solid
+preferment that he ever had, a clerkship in the War Office which
+Addington gave him. The references to this act of recklessness or
+self-sacrifice in the Autobiography are rather enigmatical. His two
+functions were no doubt incompatible at best, especially considering the
+violent Opposition tone which the _Examiner_ took. But Leigh Hunt,
+whatever faults he had, was not quite a hypocrite; and he hints pretty
+broadly that if he had not resigned he might have been asked to do so,
+not from any political reasons, but simply because he did his work very
+badly. He was much more at home in the _Examiner_ (with which for a
+short time was joined the quarterly _Reflector_), though his warmest
+admirers candidly admit that he knew nothing about politics. In 1809 he
+married a Miss Marianne Kent, whose station was not very exalted, and
+whose son admits with unusual frankness that she was "the reverse of
+handsome, and without accomplishments," adding rather whimsically that
+this person, "the reverse of handsome," had "a pretty figure, beautiful
+black hair and magnificent eyes," and though "without accomplishments"
+had "a very strong natural turn for plastic art." At any rate she seems
+to have suited Leigh Hunt admirably. The _Examiner_ soon became
+ill-noted with Government, but it was not till the end of 1812 that a
+grip could be got of it. Leigh Hunt's offence is in the ordinary books
+rather undervalued. That he (or his contributor) called the Prince
+Regent, as is commonly said, "a fat Adonis of fifty" (the exact words
+are, "this Adonis in loveliness is a corpulent man of fifty") may have
+been the chief sting, but was certainly not the chief legal offence.
+Leigh Hunt called the ruler of his country "a violator of his word, a
+libertine over head and ears in disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties,
+the companion of demi-reps, a man who had just closed half a century
+without one single claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect
+of posterity." It might be true or it might be false; but certainly
+there was then not a country in Europe where it would have been allowed
+to be said of the chief of the state. And I am not sure that it could be
+said now anywhere but in Ireland, where considerably worse things were
+said with impunity of Lord Spencer and Sir George Trevelyan. At any rate
+the brothers were prosecuted and fined five hundred pounds each, with
+two years' imprisonment. The sentence was carried out; but Leigh Hunt's
+imprisonment in Horsemonger Lane Gaol was the merest farce of
+incarceration. He could not indeed go beyond the prison walls. But he
+had a comfortable suite of rooms which he was permitted to furnish and
+decorate just as he liked; he was allowed to have his wife and family
+with him; he had a tiny garden of his own, and free access to that of
+the prison; there was no restriction on visitors, who brought him
+presents just as they chose; and he became a kind of fashion with the
+Opposition. Jeremy Bentham came and played at battledore and shuttlecock
+with him--an almost appalling idea, for it will not do to trust too
+implicitly to Leigh Hunt's declaration that Jeremy's object was to
+suggest "an improvement in the constitution of shuttlecocks." The
+_Examiner_ itself continued undisturbed, and except for the "I can't get
+out" feeling, which even of itself cannot be compared for one moment to
+that of a modern prisoner condemned to his cell and the
+exercising-ground, it is rather difficult to see much reason for Leigh
+Hunt's complaints. The imprisonment may have affected his health, but it
+certainly brought him troops of friends, and gave him leisure to do not
+only his journalist's work, but things much more serious. Here he wrote
+and published his first poem since the Juvenilia, "A Feast of the Poets"
+(not much of a thing), and here he wrote, though he did not publish it
+till his liberation, the "Story of Rimini," by far his most important
+poem, both for intrinsic character and for influence on others. He had
+known Lamb from boyhood, and Shelley some years; he now made the
+acquaintance of Keats, Hazlitt, and Byron.
+
+In the next five years after his liberation he did a great deal of work,
+the best by far being the periodical called the _Indicator_, a weekly
+paper which ran for sixty-six numbers. The _Indicator_ was the first
+thing that I ever read of Hunt's, and, by no means for that reason only,
+I think it the best. Its buttonholing papers, of a kind since widely
+imitated, were the most popular; but there are romantic things in it,
+such as "The Daughter of Hippocrates" (paraphrased and expanded from Sir
+John Mandeville with Hunt's peculiar skill), which seem to me better. It
+was at the end of these five years that Leigh Hunt resolved upon the
+second adventure (his imprisonment being the first and involuntary) of
+his otherwise easy-going life--an adventure the immediate consequences
+of which were unfortunate in many ways, but which supplied him with a
+good deal of literary material. This was his visit to Italy as a kind of
+literary _attaché_ to Lord Byron, and editor of a quarterly magazine,
+the _Liberal_. The idea was Shelley's, and if Shelley had lived, it
+might not have resulted quite so disastrously, for Shelley was
+absolutely untiring as a helper of lame dogs over stiles. As it was, the
+excursion distinctly contradicted the saying (condemned by some as
+immoral) that a bad beginning makes a good ending. The Hunt family,
+which now included several children, embarked, in November of all months
+in the year, on a small ship bound for Italy. They were something like a
+month getting down the Channel in tremendous weather, and at last when
+their ship had to turn tail from near Scilly and run into Dartmouth,
+Hunt, whose wife was extremely ill of lung-disease, made up his mind to
+stay for the winter in Devonshire. He passed the time pleasantly enough
+at Plymouth, which they left once more in May 1822, reaching Leghorn at
+the end of June. Shelley's death happened within ten days of their
+arrival, and Byron and Leigh Hunt were left to get on together. How
+badly they got on is pretty generally known, might have been foreseen
+from the beginning, and is not very profitable to dwell on. Leigh Hunt's
+mixture of familiarity and "airs" could not have been worse mixed to
+suit the taste of Byron. The "noble poet" too was not a person who liked
+to be spunged upon; and his coolest admirers may sympathise with his
+disgust when he found that he had upon his hands a man of letters with a
+large family whom he was literally expected to keep, whose society was
+disagreeable to him, who lampooned his friends, who differed with him on
+every point of taste, and who did not think it necessary to be grateful.
+For Leigh Hunt, somewhat on Lamb's system of compensation for coming
+late by going away early, combined his readiness to receive favours with
+a practice of not acknowledging the slightest obligation for them.
+Byron's departure for Greece was in its way lucky, but it left Hunt
+stranded. He remained in Italy for rather more than three years and then
+returned home across the Continent. The _Liberal_, which contains work
+of his, of Byron's, of Shelley's, and of Hazlitt's, is interesting
+enough and worth buying in its original form, but it did not pay. Of the
+unlucky book on his relations with Byron which followed--the worst act
+by far of his life--I shall not say much. No one has attempted to defend
+it, and he himself apologises for it frankly and fully in his
+Autobiography. It is impossible, however, not to remark that the offence
+was much aggravated by its deliberate character. For the book was not
+published in the heat of the moment, but three years after Hunt's return
+to England and four after Byron's death.
+
+The remaining thirty years of Hunt's life were wholly literary. As for
+residences, he hovered about London, living successively at Highgate,
+Epsom, Brompton, Chelsea, Kensington, and divers other places. At
+Chelsea he was very intimate with the Carlyles, and, while he was
+perhaps of all living men of letters most leniently judged by those not
+particularly lenient judges, we have nowhere such vivid glimpses of
+Hunt's peculiar weaknesses as in the memoirs of Carlyle and his wife.
+Why Leigh Hunt was always in such difficulties is not at first obvious,
+for he was the reverse of an idle man; he seems, though thriftless, to
+have been by no means very sumptuous in his way of living; everybody
+helped him, and his writing was always popular. He appears to have felt
+not a little sore that nothing was done for him when his political
+friends came into power after the Reform Bill--and remained there for
+almost the whole of the rest of his life. He had certainly in some
+senses borne the burden and heat of the day for Liberalism. But he was
+one of those reckless people who, without meaning to offend anybody in
+particular, offend friends as well as foes; the days of sinecures were
+even then passing or passed; and it is very difficult to conceive any
+office, even with the lightest duties, in which Leigh Hunt would not
+have come to grief. As for his writing, his son's earnest plea as to his
+not being an idle man is no doubt true enough, but he never seems to
+have reconciled himself to the regular drudgery of miscellaneous
+article writing for newspapers which is almost the only kind of
+journalism that really pays, and his books did not sell very largely. In
+his latter days, however, things became easier for him. The unfailing
+kindness of the Shelley family gave him (in 1844 when Sir Percy Shelley
+came into his property) a regular annuity of £120; two royal gifts of
+£200 each and in 1847 a pension of the same amount were added; and two
+benefit nights of Dickens's famous amateur company brought him in
+something like a cool thousand, as Dickens himself would have said. Of
+his last years Mr. Kent, who was intimate with him, gives much the
+pleasantest account known to me. He died on 28th August 1859, surviving
+his wife only two years.
+
+I can imagine some one, at the name of Dickens in the preceding
+paragraph, thinking or saying, that if the author of _Bleak House_
+raised a thousand pounds for his old friend, he took the value of it and
+infinitely more out of him. It is impossible to shirk the Skimpole
+affair in any really critical notice of Leigh Hunt. To put unpleasant
+things briefly, that famous character was at once recognised by every
+one as a caricature, perhaps ill-natured but certainly brilliant, of
+what an enemy might have said of the author of "Rimini." Thornton Hunt,
+the eldest of Leigh Hunt's children, and a writer of no small power,
+took the matter up and forced from Dickens a contradiction, or
+disavowal, with which I am afraid the recording angel must have had
+some little difficulty. Strangely enough the last words of Macaulay's
+that we have concern this affair; and they may be quoted as Sir George
+Trevelyan gives them, written by his uncle in those days at Holly Lodge
+when the shadow of death was heavy on him.
+
+    _December 23, 1859._ An odd declaration by Dickens that he did
+    not mean Leigh Hunt by Harold Skimpole. Yet he owns that he took
+    the light externals of the character from Leigh Hunt, and surely
+    it is by those light externals that the bulk of mankind will
+    always recognise character. Besides, it is to be observed that
+    the vices of H. S. are vices to which L. H. had, to say the
+    least, some little leaning, and which the world generally
+    attributed to him most unsparingly. That he had loose notions of
+    _meum_ and _tuum_; that he had no high feeling of independence;
+    that he had no sense of obligation; that he took money wherever
+    he could get it; that he felt no gratitude for it; that he was
+    just as ready to defame a person who had relieved his distress
+    as a person who had refused him relief--these were things which,
+    as Dickens must have known, were said, truly or falsely, about
+    L. H., and had made a deep impression on the public mind.
+
+Now Macaulay has not always been leniently judged; but I do not think
+that, with the single exception of Croker's case, he can be accused of
+having borne hardly on the moral character of any one of his
+contemporaries. He had befriended Leigh Hunt in every way; he had got
+him into the _Edinburgh_; he had lent (that is to say given) him money
+freely, and I do not think that his fiercest enemy can seriously think
+that he bore Hunt a grudge for having told him, as he himself records,
+that the "Lays" were not so good as Spenser, whom Macaulay in one of the
+rare lapses of his memory had unjustly blasphemed, and whom Leigh Hunt
+adored. To my mind, if there were any doubt about Dickens's intention,
+or about the fitting in a certain sense of the cap, this testimony of
+Macaulay's would settle it. But I cannot conceive any doubt remaining in
+the mind of any person who has read Leigh Hunt's works, who has even
+read the Autobiography. Of the grossest faults in Skimpole's character,
+such as the selling of Jo's secret, Leigh Hunt was indeed incapable, and
+the insertion of these is at once a blot on Dickens's memory and a kind
+of excuse for his disclaimer; but as regards the lighter touches the
+likeness is unmistakable. Skimpole's most elaborate jests about "pounds"
+are hardly an exaggeration of the man who gravely and more than once
+tells us that his difficulties and irregularities with money came from a
+congenital incapacity to appreciate arithmetic, and who admits that
+Shelley (whose affairs he knew very well) once gave him no less than
+fourteen hundred pounds (that is to say some sixteen months of Shelley's
+income at his wealthiest) to clear him, and that he was not cleared,
+though apparently he gave Shelley to understand that he was.
+
+There are many excuses for him which Skimpole had not. His own pleas of
+tropical blood and so forth will not greatly avail. But the old
+patron-theory and its more subtle transformation (the influence of
+which is sometimes shown even by Thackeray in the act of denouncing it),
+to the effect that the State or the public, or somebody, is bound to
+look after your man of genius, had bitten deep into the being of the
+literary man of our grandfathers' time. Anybody who has read _Thomas
+Poole and his Friends_ must have seen how not merely Coleridge, of whose
+known liability to the weakness the book furnished new proofs, but even,
+to some extent and vicariously, the austere Wordsworth, cherished the
+idea. But for the most part, men kept it to themselves. Leigh Hunt never
+could keep anything to himself, and he has left record on record of the
+easy manner in which he acted on his beliefs.
+
+For this I own that I care little, especially since he never borrowed
+money of me. There is a Statute of Limitations for all such things in
+letters as well as in law. What is much harder to forgive is the
+ill-bred pertness, often if not always innocent enough in intention, but
+rather the worse than the better for that, which mars so much of his
+actual literary work. When almost an old man he wrote--when a very old
+man he quotes, with childlike surprise that any one should see anything
+objectionable in them--the following lines:
+
+    Perhaps you have known what it is to feel longings,
+    To pat buxom shoulders at routs and mad throngings--
+    Well--think what it was at a vision like that!
+    A grace after dinner! a Venus grown fat!
+
+It would be almost unbelievable of any man but Leigh Hunt that he
+placidly remarks in reference to this impertinence that "he had not the
+pleasure of Lady Blessington's acquaintance," as if that did not make
+things ten times worse. He had laid the foundation of not a few of the
+literary enmities he suffered from, by writing, thirty years earlier, a
+"Feast of the Poets," on the pattern of Suckling, in which he took,
+though much more excusably, the same kind of ill-bred liberties; and
+similar things abound in his works. It is scarcely surprising that the
+good Macvey Napier (rather awkwardly, and giving Macaulay much trouble
+to patch things up) should have said that he would like a
+"gentleman-like" article from Mr. Hunt for the _Edinburgh_; and the
+taunt about the Cockney School undoubtedly derived its venom from this
+weakness of his. Lamb was not descended from the kings that long the
+Tuscan sceptre swayed, and had some homely ways; Keats had to do with
+livery-stables, Hazlitt with shady lodging-houses and lodging-house
+keepers. But Keats might have been, whatever his weaknesses, his own and
+Spenser's Sir Calidore for gentle feeling and conduct; the man who
+called Lamb vulgar would only prove his own vulgarity; and Hazlitt,
+though he had some darker stains on his character than any that rest on
+Hunt, was far too potent a spirit for the fire within him not to burn
+out mere vulgarity. Leigh Hunt I fear must be allowed to be now and
+then merely vulgar--a Pogson of talent, of genius, of immense
+amiability, of rather hard luck, but still of the Pogsons, Pogsonic.
+
+As I shall have plenty of good to say of him, I may as well despatch at
+once whatever else I have to say that is bad, which is little. The
+faults of taste which have just been noticed passed easily into
+occasional, though only occasional, faults of criticism. I do not
+recommend anybody who has not the faculty of critical adjustment, and
+who wants to like Leigh Hunt, to read his essay on Dante in the _Italian
+Poets_. For flashes of crass insensibility to great poetry it is
+difficult to match anywhere, and impossible to match in Leigh Hunt. His
+favourite theological doctrine, like that of Béranger's hero, was, _Ne
+damnons personne_. He did not like monarchy, and he did not understand
+metaphysics. So the great poet, who, more than any other great poet
+except Shakespeare, grows on those who read him, receives from Leigh
+Hunt not an honest confession, like Sir Walter's, that he does not like
+him, which is perhaps the first honest impression of the majority of
+Dante's readers, but tirade upon tirade of abuse and bad criticism.
+Further, Leigh Hunt's unfortunate necessity of preserving his own
+journalism has made him keep a thousand things that he ought to have
+left to the kindly shade of the newspaper files--a cemetery where, thank
+Heaven, the tombs are not open as in the other city of Dis. The book
+called _Table Talk_, for instance, contains, with a little better
+matter, chiefly mere rubbish like this section:
+
+    BEAUMARCHAIS
+
+    Beaumarchais, author of the celebrated comedy of "Figaro," an
+    abridgment of which has been rendered more famous by the music
+    of Mozart, made a large fortune by supplying the American
+    republicans with arms and ammunition, and lost it by
+    speculations in salt and printing. His comedy is one of those
+    productions which are accounted dangerous, from developing the
+    spirit of intrigue and gallantry with more gaiety than
+    objection; and they would be more unanimously so, if the good
+    humour and self-examination to which they excite did not suggest
+    a spirit of charity and inquiry beyond themselves.
+
+Leigh Hunt tried almost every conceivable kind of literature, including
+a historical novel, _Sir Ralph Esher_, several dramas (one or two of
+which, the "Legend of Florence" being the chief, got acted), and at
+nearly the beginning and nearly the end of his career two religious
+works, or works on religion, an attack on Methodism and "The Religion of
+the Heart." All this we may not unkindly brush away, and consider him
+first as a poet, secondly as a critic, and thirdly as what can be best,
+though rather unphilosophically, called a miscellanist.
+
+Few good judges nowadays, I think, would deny that Leigh Hunt had a
+certain faculty for poetry, and fewer still would rank it very high. To
+something like, but less than, the tunefulness of Moore, he joined a
+very much better taste in models and an infinitely wider and deeper
+study of them. There is no doubt that his versification in "Rimini"
+(which may be described as Chaucerian in basis with a strong admixture
+of Dryden, further crossed and dashed slightly with the peculiar music
+of the followers of Spenser, especially Browne and Wither) had a very
+strong influence both on Keats and on Shelley, and that it drew from
+them music much better than itself. This fluent, musical, many-coloured
+verse was a capital medium for tale-telling, and Leigh Hunt is always at
+his best when he employs it. The more varied measures and the more
+ambitious aim of "Captain Sword and Captain Pen" seem to me very much
+less successful. Not only was Leigh Hunt far from strong enough for a
+serious argument, but the cheery, sentimental optimism of which he was
+one of the most persevering exponents--the kind of thing which
+vehemently protests that in the good time coming nobody shall be damned,
+or starved, or put in prison, or subjected to the perils of villainous
+saltpetre, or prevented from doing just what he likes, and that all
+existence ought to be and shortly will be a vaguely refined beer and
+skittles--did not lend itself very well to verse. Nor are Hunt's lyrics
+particularly strong. His best thing by far is the charming trifle (the
+heroine being, it has been said and also denied, Mrs. Carlyle) which he
+called a "rondeau," though it is not one.
+
+    Jenny kissed me when we met,
+    Jumping from the chair she sat in:
+    Time, you thief, who love to get
+    Sweets into your list, put _that_ in!
+    Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
+    Say that health and wealth have missed me,
+    Say I'm growing old--but add,
+        Jenny kissed me.
+
+Even here it may be noticed that though the last four lines could hardly
+be bettered, the second couplet is rather weak. Some of Leigh Hunt's
+sonnets, especially that which he wrote on the Nile in rivalry with
+Shelley and Keats, are very good.
+
+    It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands,
+    Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream;
+    And times and things, as in that vision, seem
+    Keeping along it their eternal stands;--
+    Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd-bands
+    That roamed through the young earth, the glory extreme
+    Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam,
+    _The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands._
+    Then comes a mightier silence, stern and strong,
+    As of a world left empty of its throng,
+    And the void weighs on us; and then we wake,
+    And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along
+    'Twixt villages, and think how we shall take
+    Our own calm journey on for human sake.
+
+This was written in 1818, and I think it will be admitted that the
+italicised line is a rediscovery of a cadence which had been lost for
+centuries, and which has been constantly borrowed and imitated since.
+
+Every now and then he had touches of something much above his usual
+style, as in the concluding lines of the whimsical "flyting," as the
+Scotch poets of the fifteenth century would have called it, between the
+Man and the Fish:
+
+    Man's life is warm, glad, sad, 'twixt loves and graves,
+      Boundless in hope, honoured with pangs austere,
+    Heaven-gazing; and his angel-wings he craves:
+      The fish is swift, small-needing, vague yet clear,
+    A cold, sweet, silver life, wrapped in round waves,
+      Quickened with touches of transporting fear.
+
+As a rule, however, his poetry has little or nothing of this kind, and
+he will hold his place in the English _corpus poetarum_, first, because
+he was an associate of better poets than himself; secondly, because he
+invented a medium for the poetic tale which was as poetical as Crabbe's
+was prosaic; thirdly, because of all persons perhaps who have ever
+attempted English verse on their own account, he had the most genuine
+affection for, and the most intimate and extensive acquaintance with,
+the triumphs of his predecessors in poetry. Of prose he was a much less
+trustworthy judge, as may be instanced once for all by his pronouncing
+Gibbon's style to be bad; but of poetry he could tell with an
+extraordinary mixture of sympathy and discretion. And this will
+introduce us to his second faculty, the faculty of literary criticism,
+in which he is, with all his drawbacks, on a level with Coleridge, with
+Lamb, and with Hazlitt, his defects as compared with them being in each
+case made up by compensatory, or more than compensatory, merits.
+
+How considerable a critic Leigh Hunt was, may be judged from the fact
+that he himself confesses the great critical fault of his principal
+poem--the selection, for amplification and paraphrase, of a subject
+which has once for all been treated with imperial and immortal brevity
+by a great poet. With equal ingenuousness and equal truth he further
+confesses that, at the time, he not only did not see this fault, but was
+critically incapable of seeing it. For there is that one comfort about
+this discomfortable and discredited art of ours, that age at any rate
+does not impair it. The first sprightly runnings of criticism are never
+the best; and in the case of all really great critics, from Dryden to
+Sainte-Beuve, the critical faculty has gone on constantly increasing.
+The chief examples of Leigh Hunt's critical accomplishment are to be
+found in the two books called respectively, _Wit and Humour_, and
+_Imagination and Fancy_, both being selections from the English poets,
+with critical remarks interspersed as a sort of running commentary. But
+hardly any book of his is quite barren of such examples; for he neither
+would, nor indeed apparently could, restrain his desultory fancy from
+this as from other indulgences. His criticism is very distinct in kind.
+It is almost purely and in the strict and proper sense æsthetic--that is
+to say, it does hardly anything but reproduce the sensations produced
+upon Hunt himself by the reading of his favourite passages. As his sense
+of poetry was extraordinarily keen and accurate, there is perhaps no
+body of "beauties" of English poetry to be found anywhere in the
+language which is selected with such uniform and unerring judgment as
+this or these. Even Lamb, in his own favourite subjects and authors,
+misses treasure-trove which Leigh Hunt unfailingly discovers, as in the
+now pretty generally acknowledged case of the character of De Flores in
+Middleton's "Changeling." And Lamb had a much less wide and a much more
+crotchety system of admissions and exclusions. Macaulay was perfectly
+right in fixing, at the beginning of his essay on the dramatists of the
+Restoration, upon this catholicity of Hunt's taste as the main merit in
+it; and it is really a great pity that the two volumes referred to were
+not, as they were intended to be, followed up by others respectively
+devoted to Action and Passion, Contemplation, and Song. But Leigh Hunt
+was sixty when he planned them, and age, infirmity, perhaps also the
+less pressing need which the comparative affluence of his later years
+brought, prevented the completion. It has also to be remarked that Hunt
+is much better as a taster than as a professor or expounder. He says
+indeed many happy things about his favourite passages, but they
+evidently represent rather afterthought than forethought. He is not good
+at generalities, and when he tries them is apt, instead of flying (as
+an Ariel of criticism should do), to sprawl. Yet it was impossible for a
+man who was so almost invariably right in particulars, to go very wrong
+in general; and the worst that can be said of Leigh Hunt's general
+critical axioms and conclusions is that they are much better than the
+reasons that support them. For instance, he is probably right in calling
+the famous "intellectual" and "henpecked you all" in "Don Juan," "the
+happiest triple rhyme ever written." But when he goes on to say that
+"the sweepingness of the assumption completes the flowing breadth of the
+effect," he goes very near to talking nonsense. For most people,
+however, a true opinion persuasively stated is of much more consequence
+than the most elaborate logical justification of it; and it is this that
+makes Leigh Hunt's criticism such excellent good reading. It is
+impossible not to feel that when a guide (which after all a critic
+should be) is recommended with cautions that, though an invaluable
+fellow for the most part, he is not unlikely in certain places to lead
+the traveller over a precipice, it is a very dubious kind of
+recommendation. Yet this is the way in which one has to speak of Jeffrey
+and Hazlitt, of Wilson and De Quincey. Of Leigh Hunt it need hardly ever
+be said; for in the unlucky diatribes on Dante above cited, the most
+unwary reader can see that his author has lost his temper and with it
+his head. As a rule he avoids the things that he is not qualified to
+judge, such as the rougher and sublimer parts of poetry. Of its
+sweetness and its music, of its grace and its wit, of its tenderness and
+its fancy, no better judge ever existed than Leigh Hunt. He jumped at
+such things, when he came near them, almost as involuntarily as a needle
+to a magnet.
+
+He was, however, perhaps most popular in his own time, and certainly he
+gained most of the not excessive share of pecuniary profit which fell to
+his lot, as what I have called a miscellanist. One of the things which
+have not yet been sufficiently done in the criticism of English literary
+history, is a careful review of the successive steps by which the
+periodical essay of Addison and his followers during the eighteenth
+century passed into the magazine-paper of our own days. The later
+examples of the eighteenth century, the "Observers" and "Connoisseurs,"
+the "Loungers" and "Mirrors" and "Lookers-On," are fairly well worth
+reading in themselves, especially as the little volumes of the "British
+Essayists" go capitally in a travelling-bag; but the gap between them
+and the productions of Leigh Hunt, of Lamb, and of the _Blackwood_ men,
+with Praed's schoolboy attempts not left out, is a very considerable
+one. Leigh Hunt is himself entitled to a high place in the new school so
+far as mere priority goes, and to one not low in actual merit. He
+relates himself, more than once, with the childishness which is the good
+side of his Skimpolism, how not merely his literary friends but persons
+of quality had special favourites among the miscellaneous papers of the
+_Indicator_, like (he would certainly have used the parallel himself if
+he had known it or thought of it) the Court of France with Marot's
+Psalms. This miscellaneous work of his extends, as it ought to do, to
+all manner of subjects. The pleasantest example to my fancy is the book
+called _The Town_, a gossiping description of London from St. Paul's to
+St. James's, which he afterwards followed up with books on the West End
+and Kensington, and which, though of course second-hand as to its facts,
+is by no means uncritical, and by far the best reading of any book of
+its kind. Even the Autobiography might take rank in this class; and the
+same kind of stuff made up the staple of the numerous periodicals which
+Leigh Hunt edited or wrote, and of the still more numerous books which
+he compounded out of the dead periodicals. It may be that a severe
+criticism will declare that, here as well as elsewhere, he was more
+original than accomplished; and that his way of treating subjects was
+pursued with better success by his imitators than by himself. Such a
+paper, for instance, as "On Beds and Bedrooms" suggests (and is dwarfed
+by the suggestion) Lamb's "Convalescent" and other similar work. "Jack
+Abbott's Breakfast," which is, or was, exceedingly popular with Hunt's
+admirers, is an account of the misfortunes of a luckless young man who
+goes to breakfast with an absent-minded pedagogue, and, being turned
+away empty, orders successive refreshments at different coffee-houses,
+each of which proves a feast of Tantalus. The idea is not bad; but the
+carrying out suits the stage better than the study, and is certainly far
+below such things as Maginn's adventures of Jack Ginger and his friends,
+with the tale untold that Humphries told Harlow. "A Few Remarks on the
+Rare Vice called Lying" is a most promising title; he must be a very
+good-natured judge who finds appended to it a performing article. "The
+Old Lady" and "The Old Gentleman" were once great favourites; they seem
+to have been studied from Earle's _Microcosmography_, not the least
+excellent of the books that have proceeded from foster-children of
+Walter de Merton, but they are over-laboured in particulars. So too are
+"The Adventures of Carfington Blundell" and "Inside of an Omnibus."
+Leigh Hunt's humour is so devoid of bitterness that it sometimes becomes
+insipid; his narrative so fluent and gossiping that it sometimes becomes
+insignificant. His enemies called him immoral, which appears to have
+been a gross calumny so far as his private life was concerned, and is
+certainly a gross exaggeration as regards his writing. But he was rather
+too much given to dally about voluptuous subjects with a sort of
+chuckling epicene triviality. He is so far from being passionate that he
+sometimes becomes almost offensive. He is terribly apt to labour a
+conceit or a prettiness till it becomes vapid; and his "Criticism on
+Female Beauty," though it contains some extremely sensible remarks, also
+contains much which is suggestive of Mr. Tupman. Yet his miscellaneous
+writing has one great merit (besides its gentle playfulness and its
+untiring variety) which might procure pardon for worse faults. With no
+one perhaps are those literary memories which transform and vivify life
+so constantly present as with Leigh Hunt. Although the world was a
+perfectly real thing to him, and not by any means seen only through the
+windows of a library, he took everywhere with him the remembrances of
+what he had read, and they helped him to clothe and colour what he saw
+and what he wrote. Between him, therefore, and readers who themselves
+have read a good deal, and loved what they have read not a little, there
+is always something in common; and yet probably no bookish writer has
+been less resented by his unbookish readers as a thruster of the
+abominable things--superior knowledge and superior scholarship--upon
+them. Some vices of the snob Leigh Hunt undoubtedly had, but he was
+never in the least a pretentious snob. He quotes his books not in the
+spirit of a man who is looking down on his fellows from a proper
+elevation, but in the spirit of a kindly host who is anxious that his
+guests should enjoy the good things on his table.
+
+It is this sincere and unostentatious love of letters, and anxiety to
+spread the love of letters, that is the redeeming point of Leigh Hunt
+throughout: he is saved _quia multum amavit_. It was this which prompted
+that rather grandiose but still admirable palinode of Christopher North,
+in August 1834,--"the Animosities are mortal: but the Humanities live
+for ever,"--an apology which naturally enough pleased Hunt very much. He
+is one of those persons with whom it is impossible to be angry, or at
+least to be angry long. "The bailiff who took him was fond of him," it
+is recorded of Captain Costigan; and in milder moments the same may be
+said of the critical bailiffs who are compelled to "take" Leigh Hunt.
+Even in his least happy books (such as the "Jar of Honey from Mount
+Hybla," where all sorts of matter, some of it by no means well known to
+the writer, have been hastily cobbled together) this love, and for the
+most part intelligent and animated love, for literature appears. If in
+another of his least happy attempts, the critical parts of the already
+mentioned _Stories from the Italian Poets_, he is miles below the great
+argument of Dante, and if he is even guilty to some extent of
+vulgarising the lesser but still great poets with whom he deals, he
+never comes, even in Dante, to any passage he can understand without
+exhibiting such a warmth of enthusiasm and enjoyment that it softens the
+stoniest readers. He can gravely call Dante's Hell "geologically
+speaking a most fantastical formation" (which it certainly is), and
+joke clumsily about the poet's putting Cunizza and Rahab in Paradise. He
+can write, in the true spirit of vulgarising, that "the Florentine is
+thought to have been less strict in his conduct in regard to the sex
+than might be supposed from his platonical aspirations," heedless of the
+great confessions implied in the swoon at Francesca's story, and the
+passage through the fire at the end of the seventh circle of Purgatory.
+But when he comes to things like "Dolce color d'oriental zaffiro," and
+"Era già l'ora," it is hardly possible to do more justice to the
+subject. The whole description of his Italian sojourn in the
+Autobiography is an example of the best kind of such writing. Again, of
+all the people who have rejoiced in Samuel Pepys, Leigh Hunt "does it
+most natural," being indeed a kind of nineteenth-century Pepys himself,
+whom the gods had made less comfortable in worldly circumstances and no
+man of business, but to whom as a compensation they had given the
+feeling for poetry which Samuel lacked. At different times Dryden,
+Spenser, and Chaucer were respectively his favourite English poets; and
+as there was nothing faithless in his inconstancy, he took up his new
+loves without ceasing to love the old. It is perhaps rather more
+surprising that he should have liked Spenser than that he should have
+liked the other two; and we must suppose that the profusion of beautiful
+pictures in the "Faerie Queen" enabled him, not to appreciate (for he
+never could have done that), but to tolerate or pass over the deep
+melancholy and the occasional philosophisings of the poet. But the
+attraction of Dryden and Chaucer for him is very easily understood. Both
+are eminently cheerful poets, Dryden with the cheerfulness born of manly
+sense, Chaucer with that of youth and abounding animal spirits. Leigh
+Hunt seems to have found this cheerfulness as akin to his own, as the
+vigour of both was complementary and satisfactory to his own, I shall
+not say weakness, but fragility. Add yet again to this that Hunt
+seems--a thing very rarely to be said of critics--never to have disliked
+a thing simply because he could not understand it. If he sometimes
+abused Dante, it was not merely because he could not understand him,
+though he certainly could not, but because Dante trod (and when Dante
+treads he treads heavily) on his most cherished prejudices. Now he had
+not very many prejudices, and so he had an advantage here also.
+
+Lastly, as he may be read with pleasure, so he may be skipped without
+shame. There are some writers whom to skip may seem to a conscientious
+devotee of letters both wicked and unwise--wicked because it is
+disrespectful to them, unwise because it is quite likely to inflict loss
+on the reader. Now nobody can ever think of respecting Leigh Hunt; he is
+not unfrequently amiable, but never in the least venerable. Even at his
+best he seldom or never affects the reader with admiration, only with a
+mild pleasure. It is at once a penalty for his sins and a compliment to
+his good qualities, that to make any kind of fuss over him would be
+absurd. Nor is there any selfish risk run by treating him, in the
+literary sense, in an unceremonious manner. His writing of all kinds
+carries desultoriness to the height, and may be begun at the beginning,
+or at the end, or in the middle, and left off at any place, without the
+least risk of serious loss. He is excellent good company for half an
+hour, sometimes for much longer; but the reader rarely thinks very much
+of what he has said when the interview is over, and never experiences
+any violent hunger or thirst for its renewal, though such renewal is
+agreeable enough in its way. Such an author is a convenient possession
+on the shelves: a possession so convenient that occasionally a blush of
+shame may suggest itself at the thought that he should be treated so
+cavalierly. But this is quixotic. The very best things that he has done
+hardly deserve more respectful treatment, for they are little more than
+a faithful and fairly lively description of his own enjoyments; the
+worst things deserve treatment much less respectful. Yet let us not
+leave him with a harsh mouth; for, as has been said, he loved the good
+literature of others very much, and he wrote not a little that was good
+literature of his own.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+PEACOCK
+
+
+In the year 1875 Mr. Bentley conferred no small favour upon lovers of
+English literature by reprinting, in compact form and good print, the
+works of Thomas Love Peacock, up to that time scattered and in some
+cases not easily obtainable. So far as the publisher was concerned,
+nothing more could reasonably have been demanded; it is not easy to say
+quite so much of the editor, the late Sir Henry Cole. His editorial
+labours were indeed considerably lightened by assistance from other
+hands. Lord Houghton contributed a critical preface, which has the ease,
+point, and grasp of all his critical monographs. Miss Edith Nicolls, the
+novelist's granddaughter, supplied a short biography, written with much
+simplicity and excellent good taste. But as to editing in the proper
+sense--introduction, comment, illustration, explanation--there is next
+to none of it in the book. The principal thing, however, was to have
+Peacock's delightful work conveniently accessible, and that the issue
+of 1875 accomplished. The author is still by no means universally or
+even generally known; though he has been something of a critic's
+favourite. Almost the only dissenter, as far as I know, among critics,
+is Mrs. Oliphant, who has not merely confessed herself, in her book on
+the literary history of Peacock's time, unable to comprehend the
+admiration expressed by certain critics for _Headlong Hall_ and its
+fellows, but is even, if I do not mistake her, somewhat sceptical of the
+complete sincerity of that admiration. There is no need to argue the
+point with this agreeable practitioner of Peacock's own art. A certain
+well-known passage of Thackeray, about ladies and _Jonathan Wild_, will
+sufficiently explain her own inability to taste Peacock's persiflage. As
+for the genuineness of the relish of those who can taste him there is no
+way that I know to convince sceptics. For my own part I can only say
+that, putting aside scattered readings of his work in earlier days, I
+think I have read the novels through on an average once a year ever
+since their combined appearance. Indeed, with Scott, Thackeray, Borrow,
+and Christopher North, Peacock composes my own private Paradise of
+Dainty Devices, wherein I walk continually when I have need of rest and
+refreshment. This is a fact of no public importance, and is only
+mentioned as a kind of justification for recommending him to others.
+
+Peacock was born at Weymouth on 18th October 1785. His father (who died
+a year or two after his birth) was a London merchant; his mother was the
+daughter of a naval officer. He seems during his childhood to have done
+very much what he pleased, though, as it happened, study always pleased
+him; and his gibes in later life at public schools and universities lose
+something of their point when it is remembered that he was at no
+university, at no school save a private one, and that he left even that
+private school when he was thirteen. He seems, however, to have been
+very well grounded there, and on leaving it he conducted his education
+and his life at his own pleasure for many years. He published poems
+before he was twenty, and he fell in love shortly after he was
+twenty-two. The course of this love did not run smooth, and the lady,
+marrying some one else, died shortly afterwards. She lived in Peacock's
+memory till his death, sixty years later, which event is said to have
+been heralded (in accordance with not the least poetical of the many
+poetical superstitions of dreaming) by frequent visions of this shadowy
+love of the past. Probably to distract himself, Peacock, who had
+hitherto attempted no profession, accepted the rather unpromising post
+of under-secretary to Admiral Sir Home Popham on board ship. His mother,
+in her widowhood, and he himself had lived much with his sailor
+grandfather, and he was always fond of naval matters. But it is not
+surprising to find that his occupation, though he kept it for something
+like a year, was not to his taste. He gave it up in the spring of 1809,
+and returned to leisure, poetry, and pedestrianism. The "Genius of the
+Thames," a sufficiently remarkable poem, was the result of the two
+latter fancies. A year later he went to Wales and met his future wife,
+Jane Griffith, though he did not marry her for ten years more. He
+returned frequently to the principality, and in 1812 made, at Nant
+Gwillt, the acquaintance of Shelley and his wife Harriet. This was the
+foundation of a well-known friendship, which has supplied by far the
+most solid and trustworthy materials existing for the poet's biography.
+It was Wales, too, that furnished the scene of his first and far from
+worst novel _Headlong Hall_, which was published in 1816. From 1815 to
+1819 Peacock lived at Marlow, where his intercourse with Shelley was
+resumed, and where he produced not merely _Headlong Hall_ but
+_Melincourt_ (the most unequal, notwithstanding many charming sketches,
+of his works), the delightful _Nightmare Abbey_ (with a caricature, as
+genius caricatures, of Shelley for the hero), and the long and
+remarkable poem of "Rhododaphne."
+
+During the whole of this long time, that is to say up to his
+thirty-fourth year, with the exception of his year of secretaryship,
+Peacock had been his own master. He now, in 1819, owed curtailment of
+his liberty but considerable increase of fortune to a long-disused
+practice on the part of the managers of public institutions, of which
+Sir Henry Taylor gave another interesting example. The directors of the
+East India Company offered him a clerkship because he was a clever
+novelist and a good Greek scholar. He retained his place ("a precious
+good place too," as Thackeray with good-humoured envy says of it in "The
+Hoggarty Diamond") with due promotion for thirty-seven years, and
+retired from it in 1856 with a large pension. He had married Miss
+Griffith very shortly after his appointment; in 1822 _Maid Marian_
+appeared, and in 1823 Peacock took a cottage, which became after a time
+his chief and latterly his only residence, at Halliford, near his
+beloved river. For some years he published nothing, but 1829 and 1831
+saw the production of perhaps his two best books, _The Misfortunes of
+Elphin_ and _Crotchet Castle_. After _Crotchet Castle_, official duties
+and perhaps domestic troubles (for his wife was a helpless invalid)
+interrupted his literary work for more than twenty years, an almost
+unexampled break in the literary activity of a man so fond of letters.
+In 1852 he began to write again as a contributor to _Fraser's Magazine_.
+It is rather unfortunate that no complete republication, nor even any
+complete list of these articles, has been made. The papers on Shelley
+and the charming story of _Gryll Grange_ were the chief of them. The
+author was an old man when he wrote this last, but he survived it six
+years, and died on 23d January 1866, having latterly lived very much
+alone. Indeed, after Shelley's death he seems never to have had any very
+intimate friend except Lord Broughton, with whose papers most of
+Peacock's correspondence is for the present locked up.
+
+There is a passage in Shelley's "Letter to Maria Gisborne" which has
+been often quoted before, but which must necessarily be quoted again
+whenever Peacock's life and literary character are discussed:--
+
+                                  And there
+    Is English P----, with his mountain Fair
+    Turned into a flamingo, that shy bird
+    That gleams i' the Indian air. Have you not heard
+    When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindoo,
+    His best friends hear no more of him? But you
+    Will see him, and will like him too, I hope,
+    With his milk-white Snowdonian Antelope
+    Matched with his Camelopard. _His fine wit
+    Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it;_
+    A strain too learnèd for a shallow age,
+    Too wise for selfish bigots; let his page
+    Which charms the chosen spirits of his time,
+    Fold itself up for a serener clime
+    Of years to come, and find its recompense
+    In that just expectation.
+
+The enigmas in this passage (where it is undisputed that "English P----"
+is Peacock) have much exercised the commentators. That Miss Griffith,
+after her marriage, while still remaining a Snowdonian antelope, should
+also have been a flamingo, is odd enough; but this as well as the
+"camelopard" (probably turning on some private jest then intelligible
+enough to the persons concerned, but dark to others) is not particularly
+worth illuminating. The italicised words describing Peacock's wit are
+more legitimate subjects of discussion. They seem to me, though not
+perhaps literally explicable after the fashion of the duller kind of
+commentator, to contain both a very happy description of Peacock's
+peculiar humour, and a very sufficient explanation of the causes which
+have, both then and since, made that humour palatable rather to the few
+than to the many. Not only is Peacock peculiarly liable to the charge of
+being too clever, but he uses his cleverness in a way peculiarly
+bewildering to those who like to have "This is a horse" writ large under
+the presentation of the animal. His "rascally comparative" fancy, and
+the abundant stores of material with which his reading provided it, lead
+him perpetually to widen "the wound," till it is not surprising that
+"the knife" (the particular satirical or polemical point that he is
+urging) gets "lost in it." This weakness, if it be one, has in its
+different ways of operation all sorts of curious results. One is, that
+his personal portraits are perhaps farther removed from faithful
+representations of the originals than the personal sketches of any other
+writer, even among the most deliberate misrepresenters. There is,
+indeed, a droll topsy-turvy resemblance to Shelley throughout the
+Scythrop of _Nightmare Abbey_, but there Peacock was hardly using the
+knife at all. When he satirises persons, he goes so far away from their
+real personalities that the libel ceases to be libellous. It is
+difficult to say whether Mr. Mystic, Mr. Flosky, or Mr. Skionar is least
+like Coleridge; and Southey, intensely sensitive as he was to criticism,
+need not have lost his equanimity over Mr. Feathernest. A single point
+suggested itself to Peacock, that point suggested another, and so on and
+so on, till he was miles away from the start. The inconsistency of his
+political views has been justly, if somewhat plaintively, reflected on
+by Lord Houghton in the words, "the intimate friends of Mr. Peacock may
+have understood his political sentiments, but it is extremely difficult
+to discover them from his works." I should, however, myself say that,
+though it may be extremely difficult to deduce any definite political
+sentiments from Peacock's works, it is very easy to see in them a
+general and not inconsistent political attitude--that of intolerance of
+the vulgar and the stupid. Stupidity and vulgarity not being
+(fortunately or unfortunately) monopolised by any political party, and
+being (no doubt unfortunately) often condescended to by both, it is not
+surprising to find Peacock--especially with his noble disregard of
+apparent consistency and the inveterate habit of pillar-to-post joking,
+which has been commented on--distributing his shafts with great
+impartiality on Trojan and Greek; on the opponents of reform in his
+earlier manhood, and on the believers in progress during his later; on
+virtual representation and the telegraph; on barouche-driving as a
+gentleman's profession, and lecturing as a gentleman's profession. But
+this impartiality (or, if anybody prefers it, inconsistency) has
+naturally added to the difficulties of some readers with his works. It
+is time, however, to endeavour to give some idea of the gay variety of
+those works themselves.
+
+Although there are few novelists who observe plot less than Peacock,
+there are few also who are more regular in the particular fashion in
+which they disdain plot. Peacock is in fiction what the dramatists of
+the school of Ben Jonson down to Shadwell are in comedy--he works in
+"humours." It ought not to be, but perhaps is, necessary to remind the
+reader that this is by no means the same thing in essence, though
+accidentally it very often is the same, as being a humourist. The dealer
+in humours takes some fad or craze in his characters, some minor ruling
+passion, and makes his profit out of it. Generally (and almost always in
+Peacock's case) he takes if he can one or more of these humours as a
+central point, and lets the others play and revolve in a more or less
+eccentric fashion round it. In almost every book of Peacock's there is a
+host who is possessed by the cheerful mania for collecting other maniacs
+round him. Harry Headlong of Headlong Hall, Esquire, a young Welsh
+gentleman of means, and of generous though rather unchastened taste,
+finding, as Peacock says, in the earliest of his gibes at the
+universities, that there are no such things as men of taste and
+philosophy in Oxford, assembles a motley host in London, and asks them
+down to his place at Llanberis. The adventures of the visit (ending up
+with several weddings) form the scheme of the book, as indeed
+repetitions of something very little different form the scheme of all
+the other books, with the exception of _The Misfortunes of Elphin_, and
+perhaps _Maid Marian_. Of books so simple in one way, and so complex in
+others, it is impossible and unnecessary to give any detailed analysis.
+But each contains characteristics which contribute too much to the
+knowledge of Peacock's idiosyncrasy to pass altogether unnoticed. The
+contrasts in _Headlong Hall_ between the pessimist Mr. Escot, the
+optimist Mr. Foster, and the happy-mean man Mr. Jenkison (who inclines
+to both in turn, but on the whole rather to optimism), are much less
+amusing than the sketches of Welsh scenery and habits, the passages of
+arms with representatives of the _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly Reviews_
+(which Peacock always hated), and the satire on "improving," craniology,
+and other passing fancies of the day. The book also contains the first
+and most unfriendly of those sketches of clergymen of the Church of
+England which Peacock gradually softened till, in Dr. Folliott and Dr.
+Opimian, his curses became blessings altogether. The Reverend Dr. Gaster
+is an ignoble brute, though not quite life-like enough to be really
+offensive. But the most charming part of the book by far (for its women
+are mere lay figures) is to be found in the convivial scenes. _Headlong
+Hall_ contains, besides other occasional verse of merit, two
+drinking-songs--"Hail to the Headlong," and the still better "A
+Heel-tap! a heel-tap! I never could bear it"--songs not quite so good as
+those in the subsequent books, but good enough to make any reader think
+with a gentle sigh of the departure of good fellowship from the earth.
+Undergraduates and Scotchmen (and even in their case the fashion is said
+to be dying) alone practise at the present day the full rites of Comus.
+
+_Melincourt_, published, and indeed written, very soon after _Headlong
+Hall_, is a much more ambitious attempt. It is some three times the
+length of its predecessor, and is, though not much longer than a single
+volume of some three-volume novels, the longest book that Peacock ever
+wrote. It is also much more ambitiously planned; the twice attempted
+abduction of the heiress, Anthelia Melincourt, giving something like a
+regular plot, while the introduction of Sir Oran Haut-ton (an
+orang-outang whom the eccentric hero, Forester, has domesticated and
+intends to introduce to parliamentary life) can only be understood as
+aiming at a regular satire on the whole of human life, conceived in a
+milder spirit than "Gulliver," but belonging in some degree to the same
+class. Forester himself, a disciple of Rousseau, a fervent anti-slavery
+man who goes to the length of refusing his guests sugar, and an
+ideologist in many other ways, is also an ambitious sketch; and Peacock
+has introduced episodes after the fashion of eighteenth-century fiction,
+besides a great number of satirical excursions dealing with his enemies
+of the Lake school, with paper money, and with many other things and
+persons. The whole, as a whole, has a certain heaviness. The
+enthusiastic Forester is a little of a prig, and a little of a bore; his
+friend the professorial Mr. Fax proses dreadfully; the Oran Haut-ton
+scenes, amusing enough of themselves, are overloaded (as is the whole
+book) with justificative selections from Buffon, Lord Monboddo, and
+other authorities. The portraits of Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth,
+Canning, and others, are neither like, nor in themselves very happy, and
+the heroine Anthelia is sufficiently uninteresting to make us extremely
+indifferent whether the virtuous Forester or the _roué_ Lord Anophel
+Achthar gets her. On the other hand, detached passages are in the
+author's very best vein; and there is a truly delightful scene between
+Lord Anophel and his chaplain Grovelgrub, when the athletic Sir Oran has
+not only foiled their attempt on Anthelia, but has mast-headed them on
+the top of a rock perpendicular. But the gem of the book is the election
+for the borough of One-Vote--a very amusing farce on the subject of
+rotten boroughs. Mr. Forester has bought one of the One-Vote seats for
+his friend the Orang, and, going to introduce him to the constituency,
+falls in with the purchaser of the other seat, Mr. Sarcastic, who is a
+practical humorist of the most accomplished kind. The satirical
+arguments with which Sarcastic combats Forester's enthusiastic views of
+life and politics, the elaborate spectacle which he gets up on the day
+of nomination, and the free fight which follows, are recounted with
+extraordinary spirit. Nor is the least of the attractions of the book an
+admirable drinking-song, superior to either of those in _Headlong Hall_,
+though perhaps better known to most people by certain Thackerayan
+reminiscences of it than in itself:--
+
+    THE GHOSTS
+
+    In life three ghostly friars were we,
+    And now three friendly ghosts we be.
+    Around our shadowy table placed,
+    The spectral bowl before us floats:
+    With wine that none but ghosts can taste
+    We wash our unsubstantial throats.
+    Three merry ghosts--three merry ghosts--three merry ghosts are we:
+    Let the ocean be port and we'll think it good sport
+      To be laid in that Red Sea.
+
+    With songs that jovial spectres chaunt,
+    Our old refectory still we haunt.
+    The traveller hears our midnight mirth:
+    "Oh list," he cries, "the haunted choir!
+    The merriest ghost that walks the earth
+    Is now the ghost of a ghostly friar."
+    Three merry ghosts--three merry ghosts--three merry ghosts are we:
+    Let the ocean be port and we'll think it good sport
+      To be laid in that Red Sea.
+
+In the preface to a new edition of _Melincourt_, which Peacock wrote
+nearly thirty years later, and which contains a sort of promise of
+_Gryll Grange_, there is no sign of any dissatisfaction on the author's
+part with the plan of the earlier book; but in his next, which came
+quickly, he changed that plan very decidedly. _Nightmare Abbey_ is the
+shortest, as _Melincourt_ is the longest, of his tales; and as
+_Melincourt_ is the most unequal and the most clogged with heavy matter,
+so _Nightmare Abbey_ contains the most unbroken tissue of farcical,
+though not in the least coarsely farcical, incidents and conversations.
+The misanthropic Scythrop (whose habit of Madeira-drinking has made some
+exceedingly literal people sure that he really could not be intended for
+the water-drinking Shelley); his yet gloomier father, Mr. Glowry; his
+intricate entanglements with the lovely Marionetta and the still more
+beautiful Celinda; his fall between the two stools; his resolve to
+commit suicide; the solution of that awkward resolve--are all simply
+delightful. Extravagant as the thing is, its brevity and the throng of
+incidents and jokes prevent it from becoming in the least tedious. The
+pessimist-fatalist Mr. Toobad, with his "innumerable proofs of the
+temporary supremacy of the devil," and his catchword "the devil has come
+among us, having great wrath," appears just enough, and not too much.
+The introduced sketch of Byron as Mr. Cypress would be the least happy
+thing of the piece if it did not give occasion for a capital serious
+burlesque of Byronic verse, the lines, "There is a fever of the spirit,"
+which, as better known than most of Peacock's verse, need not be quoted.
+Mr. Flosky, a fresh caricature of Coleridge, is even less like the
+original than Mr. Mystic, but he is much more like a human being, and in
+himself is great fun. An approach to a more charitable view of the
+clergy is discoverable in the curate Mr. Larynx, who, if not extremely
+ghostly, is neither a sot nor a sloven. But the quarrels and
+reconciliations between Scythrop and Marionetta, his invincible
+inability to make up his mind, the mysterious advent of Marionetta's
+rival, and her residence in hidden chambers, the alternate sympathy and
+repulsion between Scythrop and those elder disciples of pessimism, his
+father and Mr. Toobad--all the contradictions of Shelley's character, in
+short, with a suspicion of the incidents of his life brought into the
+most ludicrous relief, must always form the great charm of the book. A
+tolerably rapid reader may get through it in an hour or so, and there is
+hardly a more delightful hour's reading of anything like the same kind
+in the English language, either for the incidental strokes of wit and
+humour, or for the easy mastery with which the whole is hit off. It
+contains, moreover, another drinking-catch, "Seamen Three," which,
+though it is, like its companion, better known than most of Peacock's
+songs, may perhaps find a place:--
+
+    Seamen three! What men be ye?
+    Gotham's three wise men we be.
+    Whither in your bowl so free?
+    To rake the moon from out the sea.
+    The bowl goes trim, the moon doth shine,
+    And our ballast is old wine;
+    And your ballast is old wine.
+
+    Who art thou so fast adrift?
+    I am he they call Old Care.
+    Here on board we will thee lift.
+    No: I may not enter there.
+    Wherefore so? 'Tis Jove's decree
+    In a bowl Care may not be;
+    In a bowl Care may not be.
+
+    Fear ye not the waves that roll?
+    No: in charmèd bowl we swim.
+    What the charm that floats the bowl?
+    Water may not pass the brim.
+    The bowl goes trim, the moon doth shine,
+    And our ballast is old wine;
+    And your ballast is old wine.
+
+A third song sung by Marionetta, "Why are thy looks so blank, Grey
+Friar?" is as good in another way; nor should it be forgotten that the
+said Marionetta, who has been thought to have some features of the
+luckless Harriet Shelley, is Peacock's first lifelike study of a girl,
+and one of his pleasantest.
+
+The book which came out four years after, _Maid Marian_, has, I believe,
+been much the most popular and the best known of Peacock's short
+romances. It owed this popularity, in great part, doubtless, to the fact
+that the author has altered little in the well-known and delightful old
+story, and has not added very much to its facts, contenting himself with
+illustrating the whole in his own satirical fashion. But there is also
+no doubt that the dramatisation of _Maid Marian_ by Planché and Bishop
+as an operetta helped, if it did not make, its fame. The snatches of
+song through the novel are more frequent than in any other of the books,
+so that Mr. Planché must have had but little trouble with it. Some of
+these snatches are among Peacock's best verse, such as the famous
+"Bramble Song," the great hit of the operetta, the equally well-known
+"Oh, bold Robin Hood," and the charming snatch:--
+
+    For the tender beech and the sapling oak,
+      That grow by the shadowy rill,
+    You may cut down both at a single stroke,
+      You may cut down which you will;
+
+    But this you must know, that as long as they grow,
+      Whatever change may be,
+    You never can teach either oak or beech
+      To be aught but a greenwood tree.
+
+This snatch, which, in its mixture of sentiment, truth, and what may be
+excusably called "rollick," is very characteristic of its author, and
+is put in the mouth of Brother Michael, practically the hero of the
+piece, and the happiest of the various workings up of Friar Tuck,
+despite his considerable indebtedness to a certain older friar, whom we
+must not call "of the funnels." That Peacock was a Pantagruelist to the
+heart's core is evident in all his work; but his following of Master
+Francis is nowhere clearer than in _Maid Marian_, and it no doubt helps
+us to understand why those who cannot relish Rabelais should look
+askance at Peacock. For the rest, no book of Peacock's requires such
+brief comment as this charming pastoral, which was probably little less
+in Thackeray's mind than _Ivanhoe_ itself when he wrote _Rebecca and
+Rowena_. The author draws in (it would be hardly fair to say drags in)
+some of his stock satire on courts, the clergy, the landed gentry, and
+so forth; but the very nature of the subject excludes the somewhat
+tedious digressions which mar _Melincourt_, and which once or twice
+menace, though they never actually succeed in spoiling, the unbroken fun
+of _Nightmare Abbey_.
+
+_The Misfortunes of Elphin_, which followed after an interval of seven
+years, is, I believe, the least generally popular of Peacock's works,
+though (not at all for that reason) it happens to be my own favourite.
+The most curious instance of this general unpopularity is the entire
+omission, as far as I am aware, of any reference to it in any of the
+popular guide-books to Wales. One piece of verse, indeed, the "War-song
+of Dinas Vawr," a triumph of easy verse and covert sarcasm, has had some
+vogue, but the rest is only known to Peacockians. The abundance of Welsh
+lore which, at any rate in appearance, it contains, may have had
+something to do with this; though the translations or adaptations,
+whether faithful or not, are the best literary renderings of Welsh known
+to me. Something also, and probably more, is due to the saturation of
+the whole from beginning to end with Peacock's driest humour. Not only
+is the account of the sapping and destruction of the embankment of
+Gwaelod an open and continuous satire on the opposition to Reform, but
+the whole book is written in the spirit and manner of _Candide_--a
+spirit and manner which Englishmen have generally been readier to
+relish, when they relish them at all, in another language than in their
+own. The respectable domestic virtues of Elphin and his wife Angharad,
+the blameless loves of Taliesin and the Princess Melanghel, hardly serve
+even as a foil to the satiric treatment of the other characters. The
+careless incompetence of the poetical King Gwythno, the coarser vices of
+other Welsh princes, the marital toleration or blindness of Arthur, the
+cynical frankness of the robber King Melvas, above all, the drunkenness
+of the immortal Seithenyn, give the humorist themes which he caresses
+with inexhaustible affection, but in a manner no doubt very puzzling,
+if not shocking, to matter-of-fact readers. Seithenyn, the drunken
+prince and dyke-warden, whose carelessness lets in the inundation, is by
+far Peacock's most original creation (for Scythrop, as has been said, is
+rather a humorous distortion of the actual than a creation). His
+complete self-satisfaction, his utter fearlessness of consequences, his
+ready adaptation to whatever part, be it prince or butler, presents
+itself to him, and above all, the splendid topsy-turviness of his
+fashion of argument, make Seithenyn one of the happiest, if not one of
+the greatest, results of whimsical imagination and study of human
+nature. "They have not"--says the somewhile prince, now King Melvas's
+butler, when Taliesin discovers him twenty years after his supposed
+death--"they have not made it [his death] known to me, for the best of
+all reasons, that one can only know the truth. For if that which we
+think we know is not truth, it is something which we do not know. A man
+cannot know his own death. For while he knows anything he is alive; at
+least, I never heard of a dead man who knew anything, or pretended to
+know anything: if he had so pretended I should have told him to his face
+that he was no dead man." How nobly consistent is this with his other
+argument in the days of his princedom and his neglect of the embankment!
+Elphin has just reproached him with the proverb, "Wine speaks in the
+silence of reason." "I am very sorry," said Seithenyn, "that you see
+things in a wrong light. But we will not quarrel, for three reasons:
+first, because you are the son of the king, and may do and say what you
+please without any one having a right to be displeased; second, because
+I never quarrel with a guest, even if he grows riotous in his cups;
+third, because there is nothing to quarrel about. And perhaps that is
+the best reason of the three; or rather the first is the best, because
+you are the son of the king; and the third is the second, that is the
+second best, because there is nothing to quarrel about; and the second
+is nothing to the purpose, because, though guests will grow riotous in
+their cups in spite of my good orderly example, God forbid that I should
+say that is the case with you. And I completely agree in the truth of
+your remark that reason speaks in the silence of wine."
+
+_Crotchet Castle_, the last but one of the series, which was published
+two years after _Elphin_ and nearly thirty before _Gryll Grange_, has
+been already called the best; and the statement is not inconsistent with
+the description already given of _Nightmare Abbey_ and of _Elphin_. For
+_Nightmare Abbey_ is chiefly farce, and _The Misfortunes of Elphin_ is
+chiefly sardonic persiflage. _Crotchet Castle_ is comedy of a high and
+varied kind. Peacock has returned in it to the machinery of a country
+house with its visitors, each of whom is more or less of a crotcheteer;
+and has thrown in a little romantic interest in the suit of a certain
+unmoneyed Captain Fitzchrome to a noble damsel who is expected to marry
+money, as well as in the desertion and subsequent rescue of Susannah
+Touchandgo, daughter of a levanting financier. The charm of the book,
+however, which distinguishes it from all its predecessors, is the
+introduction of characters neither ridiculous nor simply good in the
+persons of the Rev. Dr. Folliott and Lady Clarinda Bossnowl,
+Fitzchrome's beloved. "Lady Clarinda," says the captain, when the said
+Lady Clarinda has been playing off a certain not unladylike practical
+joke on him, "is a very pleasant young lady;" and most assuredly she is,
+a young lady (in the nineteenth century and in prose) of the tribe of
+Beatrice, if not even of Rosalind. As for Dr. Folliott, the author is
+said to have described him as his amends for his earlier clerical
+sketches, and the amends are ample. A stout Tory, a fellow of infinite
+jest, a lover of good living, an inveterate paradoxer, a pitiless
+exposer of current cants and fallacies, and, lastly, a tall man of his
+hands, Dr. Folliott is always delightful, whether he is knocking down
+thieves, or annihilating, in a rather Johnsonian manner, the economist,
+Mr. McQuedy, and the journalist, Mr. Eavesdrop, or laying down the law
+as to the composition of breakfast and supper, or using strong language
+as to "the learned friend" (Brougham), or bringing out, partly by
+opposition and partly by irony, the follies of the transcendentalists,
+the fops, the doctrinaires, and the mediævalists of the party. The
+book, moreover, contains the last and not the least of Peacock's
+admirable drinking-songs:--
+
+    If I drink water while this doth last,
+      May I never again drink wine;
+    For how can a man, in his life of a span,
+      Do anything better than dine?
+    We'll dine and drink, and say if we think
+      That anything better can be;
+    And when we have dined, wish all mankind
+      May dine as well as we.
+
+    And though a good wish will fill no dish,
+      And brim no cup with sack,
+    Yet thoughts will spring as the glasses ring
+      To illumine our studious track.
+    O'er the brilliant dreams of our hopeful schemes
+      The light of the flask shall shine;
+    And we'll sit till day, but we'll find the way
+      To drench the world with wine.
+
+The song is good in itself, but it is even more interesting as being the
+last product of Peacock's Anacreontic vein. Almost a generation passed
+before the appearance of his next and last novel, and though there is
+plenty of good eating and drinking in _Gryll Grange_, the old fine
+rapture had disappeared in society meanwhile, and Peacock obediently
+took note of the disappearance. It is considered, I believe, a mark of
+barbarian tastes to lament the change. But I am not certain that the Age
+of Apollinaris and lectures has yet produced anything that can vie as
+literature with the products of the ages of Wine and Song.
+
+_Gryll Grange_, however, in no way deserves the name of a dry stick. It
+is, next to _Melincourt_, the longest of Peacock's novels, and it is
+entirely free from the drawbacks of the forty-years-older book. Mr.
+Falconer, the hero, who lives in a tower alone with seven lovely and
+discreet foster-sisters, has some resemblances to Mr. Forester, but he
+is much less of a prig. The life and the conversation bear, instead of
+the marks of a young man's writing, the marks of the writing of one who
+has seen the manners and cities of many other men, and the personages
+throughout are singularly lifelike. The loves of the second hero and
+heroine, Lord Curryfin and Miss Niphet, are much more interesting than
+their names would suggest. And the most loquacious person of the book,
+the Rev. Dr. Opimian, if he is somewhat less racy than Dr. Folliott, is
+not less agreeable. One main charm of the novel lies in its vigorous
+criticism of modern society in phases which have not yet passed away.
+"Progress" is attacked with curious ardour; and the battle between
+literature and science, which in our days even Mr. Matthew Arnold waged
+but as one _cauponans bellum_, is fought with a vigour that is a joy to
+see. It would be rather interesting to know whether Peacock, in planning
+the central incident of the play (an "Aristophanic comedy," satirising
+modern ways), was aware of the existence of Mansel's delightful parody
+of the "Clouds." But "Phrontisterion" has never been widely known out
+of Oxford, and the bearing of Peacock's own performance is rather social
+than political. Not the least noteworthy thing in the book is the
+practical apology which is made in it to Scotchmen and political
+economists (two classes whom Peacock had earlier persecuted) in the
+personage of Mr. McBorrowdale, a candid friend of Liberalism, who is
+extremely refreshing. And besides the Aristophanic comedy, _Gryll
+Grange_ contains some of Peacock's most delightful verse, notably the
+really exquisite stanzas on "Love and Age."
+
+The book is the more valuable because of the material it supplies, in
+this and other places, for rebutting the charges that Peacock was a mere
+Epicurean, or a mere carper. Independently of the verses just named, and
+the hardly less perfect "Death of Philemon," the prose conversation
+shows how delicately and with how much feeling he could think on those
+points of life where satire and jollification are out of place. For the
+purely modern man, indeed, it might be well to begin the reading of
+Peacock with _Gryll Grange_, in order that he may not be set out of
+harmony with his author by the robuster but less familiar tones, as well
+as by the rawer though not less vigorous workmanship, of _Headlong Hall_
+and its immediate successors. The happy mean between the heart on the
+sleeve and the absence of heart has scarcely been better shown than in
+this latest novel.
+
+I have no space here to go through the miscellaneous work which
+completes Peacock's literary baggage. His regular poems, all early, are
+very much better than the work of many men who have won a place among
+British poets. His criticism, though not great in amount, is good; and
+he is especially happy in the kind of miscellaneous trifle (such as his
+trilingual poem on a whitebait dinner), which is generally thought
+appropriate to "university wits." But the characteristics of these
+miscellanies are not very different from the characteristics of his
+prose fiction, and, for purposes of discussion, may be included with
+them.
+
+Lord Houghton has defined and explained Peacock's literary idiosyncrasy
+as that of a man of the eighteenth century belated and strayed in the
+nineteenth. It is always easy to improve on a given pattern, but I
+certainly think that this definition of Lord Houghton's (which, it
+should be said, is not given in his own words) needs a little
+improvement. For the differences which strike us in Peacock--the easy
+joviality, the satirical view of life, the contempt of formulas and of
+science--though they certainly distinguish many chief literary men of
+the eighteenth century from most chief literary men of the nineteenth,
+are not specially characteristic of the eighteenth century itself. They
+are found in the seventeenth, in the Renaissance, in classical
+antiquity--wherever, in short, the art of letters and the art of life
+have had comparatively free play. The chief differentia of Peacock is a
+differentia common among men of letters; that is to say, among men of
+letters who are accustomed to society, who take no sacerdotal or
+singing-robe view of literature, who appreciate the distinction which
+literary cultivation gives them over the herd of mankind, but who by no
+means take that distinction too seriously. Aristophanes, Horace, Lucian,
+Rabelais, Montaigne, Saint-Evremond, these are all Peacock's literary
+ancestors, each, of course, with his own difference in especial and in
+addition. Aristophanes was more of a politician and a patriot, Lucian
+more of a freethinker, Horace more of a simple _pococurante_. Rabelais
+may have had a little inclination to science itself (he would soon have
+found it out if he had lived a little later), Montaigne may have been
+more of a pure egotist, Saint-Evremond more of a man of society, and of
+the verse and prose of society. But they all had the same _ethos_, the
+same love of letters as letters, the same contempt of mere progress as
+progress, the same relish for the simpler and more human pleasures, the
+same good fellowship, the same tendency to escape from the labyrinth of
+life's riddles by what has been called the humour-gate, the same
+irreconcilable hatred of stupidity and vulgarity and cant. The
+eighteenth century has, no doubt, had its claim to be regarded as the
+special flourishing time of this mental state urged by many others
+besides Lord Houghton; but I doubt whether the claim can be sustained,
+at any rate to the detriment of other times, and the men of other
+times. That century took itself too seriously--a fault fatal to the
+claim at once. Indeed, the truth is that while this attitude has in some
+periods been very rare, it cannot be said to be the peculiar, still less
+the universal, characteristic of any period. It is a personal not a
+periodic distinction; and there are persons who might make out a fair
+claim to it even in the depths of the Middle Ages or of the nineteenth
+century.
+
+However this may be, Peacock certainly held the theory of those who take
+life easily, who do not love anything very much except old books, old
+wine, and a few other things, not all of which perhaps need be old, who
+are rather inclined to see the folly of it than the pity of it, and who
+have an invincible tendency, if they tilt at anything at all, to tilt at
+the prevailing cants and arrogances of the time. These cants and
+arrogances of course vary. The position occupied by monkery at one time
+may be occupied by physical science at another; and a belief in graven
+images may supply in the third century the target, which is supplied by
+a belief in the supreme wisdom of majorities in the nineteenth. But the
+general principles--the cult of the Muses and the Graces for their own
+sake, and the practice of satiric archery at the follies of the
+day--appear in all the elect of this particular election, and they
+certainly appear in Peacock. The results no doubt are distasteful, not
+to say shocking, to some excellent people. It is impossible to avoid a
+slight chuckle when one thinks of the horror with which some such people
+must read Peacock's calm statement, repeated I think more than once,
+that one of his most perfect heroes "found, as he had often found
+before, that the more his mind was troubled, the more madeira he could
+drink without disordering his head." I have no doubt that the United
+Kingdom Alliance, if it knew this dreadful sentence (but probably the
+study of the United Kingdom Alliance is not much in Peacock), would like
+to burn all the copies of _Gryll Grange_ by the hands of Mr. Berry, and
+make the reprinting of it a misdemeanour, if not a felony. But it is not
+necessary to follow Sir Wilfrid Lawson, or to be a believer in
+education, or in telegraphs, or in majorities, in order to feel the
+repulsion which some people evidently feel for the manner of Peacock.
+With one sense absent and another strongly present it is impossible for
+any one to like him. The present sense is that which has been rather
+grandiosely called the sense of moral responsibility in literature. The
+absent sense is that sixth, seventh, or eighth sense, called a sense of
+humour, and about this there is no arguing. Those who have it, instead
+of being quietly and humbly thankful, are perhaps a little too apt to
+celebrate their joy in the face of the afflicted ones who have it not;
+the afflicted ones, who have it not, only follow a general law in
+protesting that the sense of humour is a very worthless thing, if not a
+complete humbug. But there are others of whom it would be absurd to say
+that they have no sense of humour, and yet who cannot place themselves
+at the Peacockian point of view, or at the point of view of those who
+like Peacock. His humour is not their humour; his wit not their wit.
+Like one of his own characters (who did not show his usual wisdom in the
+remark), they "must take pleasure in the thing represented before they
+can take pleasure in the representation." And in the things that Peacock
+represents they do not take pleasure. That gentlemen should drink a
+great deal of burgundy and sing songs during the process, appears to
+them at the best childish, at the worst horribly wrong. The
+prince-butler Seithenyn is a reprobate old man, who was unfaithful to
+his trust and shamelessly given to sensual indulgence. Dr. Folliott, as
+a parish priest, should not have drunk so much wine; and it would have
+been much more satisfactory to hear more of Dr. Opimian's sermons and
+district visiting, and less of his dinners with Squire Gryll and Mr.
+Falconer. Peacock's irony on social and political arrangements is all
+sterile, all destructive, and the sentiment that "most opinions that
+have anything to be said for them are about two thousand years old" is a
+libel on mankind. They feel, in short, for Peacock the animosity,
+mingled with contempt, which the late M. Amiel felt for "clever
+mockers."
+
+It is probably useless to argue with any such. It might, indeed, be
+urged in all seriousness that the Peacockian attitude is not in the
+least identical with the Mephistophelian; that it is based simply on the
+very sober and arguable ground that human nature is always very much the
+same, liable to the same delusions and the same weaknesses; and that the
+oldest things are likely to be best, not for any intrinsic or mystical
+virtue of antiquity, but because they have had most time to be found out
+in, and have not been found out. It may further be argued, as it has
+often been argued before, that the use of ridicule as a general
+criterion can do no harm, and may do much good. If the thing ridiculed
+be of God, it will stand; if it be not, the sooner it is laughed off the
+face of the earth the better. But there is probably little good in
+urging all this. Just as a lover of the greatest of Greek dramatists
+must recognise at once that it would be perfectly useless to attempt to
+argue Lord Coleridge out of the idea that Aristophanes, though a genius,
+was vulgar and base of soul, so to go a good deal lower in the scale of
+years, and somewhat lower in the scale of genius, everybody who rejoices
+in the author of "Aristophanes in London" must see that he has no chance
+of converting Mrs. Oliphant, or any other person who does not like
+Peacock. The middle term is not present, the disputants do not in fact
+use the same language. The only thing to do is to recommend this
+particular pleasure to those who are capable of being pleased by it, and
+to whom, as no doubt it is to a great number, it is pleasure yet
+untried.
+
+It is well to go about enjoying it with a certain caution. The reader
+must not expect always to agree with Peacock, who not only did not
+always agree with himself, but was also a man of almost ludicrously
+strong prejudices. He hated paper money; whereas the only feeling that
+most of us have on that subject is that we have not always as much of it
+as we should like. He hated Scotchmen, and there are many of his readers
+who without any claim to Scotch blood, but knowing the place and the
+people, will say,
+
+    That better wine and better men
+    We shall not meet in May,
+
+or for the matter of that in any other month. Partly because he hated
+Scotchmen, and partly because in his earlier days Sir Walter was a
+pillar of Toryism, he hated Scott, and has been guilty not merely of an
+absurd and no doubt partly humorous comparison of the Waverley novels to
+pantomimes, but of more definite criticisms which will bear the test of
+examination as badly. His strictures on a famous verse of "The Dream of
+Fair Women" are indefensible, though there is perhaps more to be said
+for the accompanying gibe at Sir John Millais's endeavour to carry out
+the description of Cleopatra in black (chiefly black) and white. The
+reader of Peacock must never mind his author trampling on his, the
+reader's, favourite corns; or rather he must lay his account with the
+agreeable certainty that Peacock will shortly afterwards trample on
+other corns which are not at all his favourites. For my part I am quite
+willing to accept these conditions. And I do not find that my admiration
+for Coleridge, and my sympathy with those who opposed the first Reform
+Bill, and my inclination to dispute the fact that Oxford is only a place
+of "unread books," make me like Peacock one whit the less. It is the law
+of the game, and those who play the game must put up with its laws. And
+it must be remembered that, at any rate in his later and best books,
+Peacock never wholly "took a side." He has always provided some
+personage or other who reduces all the whimsies and prejudices of his
+characters, even including his own, under a kind of dry light. Such is
+Lady Clarinda, who regards all the crotcheteers of Crotchet Castle with
+the same benevolent amusement; such Mr. McBorrowdale, who, when he is
+requested to settle the question of the superiority or inferiority of
+Greek harmony and perspective to modern, replies, "I think ye may just
+buz that bottle before you." (Alas! to think that if a man used the word
+"buz" nowadays some wiseacre would accuse him of vulgarity or of false
+English.) The general criticism in his work is always sane and vigorous,
+even though there may be flaws in the particular censures; and it is
+very seldom that even in his utterances of most flagrant prejudice
+anything really illiberal can be found. He had read much too widely and
+with too much discrimination for that. His reading had been corrected by
+too much of the cheerful give-and-take of social discussion, his dry
+light was softened and coloured by too frequent rainbows, the Apollonian
+rays being reflected on Bacchic dew. Anything that might otherwise seem
+hard and harsh in Peacock's perpetual ridicule is softened and mellowed
+by this pervading good fellowship which, as it is never pushed to the
+somewhat extravagant limits of the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_, so it
+distinguishes Peacock himself from the authors to whom in pure style he
+is most akin, and to whom Lord Houghton has already compared him--the
+French tale-tellers from Anthony Hamilton to Voltaire. In these, perfect
+as their form often is, there is constantly a slight want of geniality,
+a perpetual clatter and glitter of intellectual rapier and dagger which
+sometimes becomes rather irritating and teasing to ear and eye. Even the
+objects of Peacock's severest sarcasm, his Galls and Vamps and
+Eavesdrops, are allowed to join in the choruses and the bumpers of his
+easy-going symposia. The sole nexus is not cash payment but something
+much more agreeable, and it is allowed that even Mr. Mystic had "some
+super-excellent madeira." Yet how far the wine is from getting above the
+wit in these merry books is not likely to escape even the most
+unsympathetic reader. The mark may be selected recklessly or unjustly,
+but the arrows always fly straight to it.
+
+Peacock, in short, has eminently that quality of literature which may be
+called recreation. It may be that he is not extraordinarily instructive,
+though there is a good deal of quaint and not despicable erudition
+wrapped up in his apparently careless pages. It may be that he does not
+prove much; that he has, in fact, very little concern to prove anything.
+But in one of the only two modes of refreshment and distraction possible
+in literature, he is a very great master. The first of these modes is
+that of creation--that in which the writer spirits his readers away into
+some scene and manner of life quite different from that with which they
+are ordinarily conversant. With this Peacock, even in his professed
+poetical work, has not very much to do; and in his novels, even in _Maid
+Marian_, he hardly attempts it. The other is the mode of satirical
+presentment of well-known and familiar things, and this is all his own.
+Even his remotest subjects are near enough to be in a manner familiar,
+and _Gryll Grange_, with a few insignificant changes of names and
+current follies, might have been written yesterday. He is, therefore,
+not likely for a long time to lose the freshness and point which, at any
+rate for the ordinary reader, are required in satirical handlings of
+ordinary life; while his purely literary merits, especially his grasp
+of the perennial follies and characters of humanity, of the _ludicrum
+humani generis_ which never varies much in substance under its
+ever-varying dress, are such as to assure him life even after the
+immediate peculiarities which he satirised have ceased to be anything
+but history.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+WILSON
+
+
+Among those judgments of his contemporaries which make a sort of Inferno
+of the posthumous writings of Thomas Carlyle, that passed upon
+"Christopher North" has always seemed to me the most interesting, and
+perhaps on the whole the fairest. There is enough and to spare of
+onesidedness in it, and of the harshness which comes from onesidedness.
+But it is hardly at all sour, and, when allowance is made for the point
+of view, by no means unjust. The whole is interesting from the literary
+side, but as it fills two large pages it is much too long to quote. The
+personal description, "the broad-shouldered stately bulk of the man
+struck me: his flashing eye, copious dishevelled head of hair, and rapid
+unconcerned progress like that of a plough through stubble," is
+characteristically graphic, and far the best of the numerous pen
+sketches of "the Professor." As for the criticism, the following is the
+kernel passage of it:--
+
+    Wilson had much nobleness of heart and many traits of noble
+    genius, but the central tie-beam seemed wanting always; very
+    long ago I perceived in him the most irreconcilable
+    contradictions: Toryism with sansculottism; Methodism of a sort
+    with total incredulity; a noble loyal and religious nature not
+    strong enough to vanquish the perverse element it is born into.
+    Hence a being all split into precipitous chasms and the wildest
+    volcanic tumults; rocks over-grown indeed with tropical
+    luxuriance of leaf and flower but knit together at the
+    bottom--that was my old figure of speech--only by an ocean of
+    whisky punch. On these terms nothing can be done. Wilson seems
+    to me always by far the most _gifted_ of our literary men either
+    then or still. And yet intrinsically he has written nothing that
+    can endure. The central gift was wanting.
+
+Something in the unfavourable part of this must no doubt be set down to
+the critic's usual forgetfulness of his own admirable dictum, "he is not
+thou, but himself; other than thou." John was quite other than Thomas,
+and Thomas judged him somewhat summarily as if he were a failure of a
+Thomas. Yet the criticism, if partly harsh and as a whole somewhat
+incomplete, is true enough. Wilson has written "intrinsically nothing
+that can endure," if it be judged by any severe test. An English
+Diderot, he must bear a harder version of the judgment on Diderot, that
+he had written good pages but no good book. Only very rarely has he even
+written good pages, in the sense of pages good throughout. The almost
+inconceivable haste with which he wrote (he is credited with having on
+one occasion actually written fifty-six pages of print for _Blackwood_
+in two days, and in the years of its double numbers he often
+contributed from a hundred to a hundred and fifty pages in a single
+month)--this prodigious haste would not of itself account for the
+puerilities, the touches of bad taste, the false pathos, the tedious
+burlesque, the more tedious jactation which disfigure his work. A man
+writing against time may be driven to dulness, or commonplace, or
+inelegance of style; but he need never commit any of the faults just
+noticed. They were due beyond doubt, in Wilson's case, to a natural
+idiosyncrasy, the great characteristic of which Carlyle has happily hit
+off in the phrase, "want of a tie-beam," whether he has or has not been
+charitable in suggesting that the missing link was supplied by whisky
+punch. The least attractive point about Wilson's work is undoubtedly
+what his censor elsewhere describes as his habit of "giving a kick" to
+many men and things. There is no more unpleasant feature of the _Noctes_
+than the apparent inability of the writer to refrain from sly "kicks"
+even at the objects of his greatest veneration. A kind of mania of
+detraction seizes him at times, a mania which some of his admirers have
+more kindly than wisely endeavoured to shuffle off as a humorous
+dramatic touch intentionally administered to him by his Eidolon North.
+The most disgraceful, perhaps the only really disgraceful, instance of
+this is the carping and offensive criticism of Scott's _Demonology_,
+written and published at a time when Sir Walter's known state of health
+and fortunes might have protected him even from an enemy, much more from
+a friend, and a deeply obliged friend such as Wilson. Nor is this the
+only fling at Scott. Wordsworth, much more vulnerable, is also much more
+frequently assailed; and even Shakespeare does not come off scot-free
+when Wilson is in his ugly moods.
+
+It need hardly be said that I have no intention of saying that Scott or
+Wordsworth or Shakespeare may not be criticised. It is the way in which
+the criticism is done which is the crime; and for these acts of literary
+high treason, or at least leasing-making, as well as for all Wilson's
+other faults, nothing seems to me so much responsible as the want of
+bottom which Carlyle notes. I do not think that Wilson had any solid
+fund of principles, putting morals and religion aside, either in
+politics or in literature. He liked and he hated much and strongly, and
+being a healthy creature he on the whole liked the right things and
+hated the wrong ones; but it was for the most part a merely instinctive
+liking and hatred, quite un-coördinated, and by no means unlikely to
+pass the next moment into hatred or liking as the case might be.
+
+These are grave faults. But for the purpose of providing that pleasure
+which is to be got from literature (and this, like one or two other
+chapters here, is partly an effort in literary hedonism) Wilson stands
+very high, indeed so high that he can be ranked only below the highest.
+He who will enjoy him must be an intelligent voluptuary, and especially
+well versed in the art of skipping. When Wilson begins to talk fine,
+when he begins to wax pathetic, and when he gets into many others of his
+numerous altitudes, it will behove the reader, according to his own
+tastes, to skip with discretion and vigour. If he cannot do this, if his
+eye is not wary enough, or if his conscience forbids him to obey his
+eyes' warnings, Wilson is not for him. It is true that Mr. Skelton has
+tried to make a "Comedy of the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_," in which the
+skipping is done ready to hand. But, with all the respect due to the
+author of _Thalatta_, the process is not, at least speaking according to
+my judgment, successful. No one can really taste that eccentric book
+unless he reads it as a whole; its humours arbitrarily separated and
+cut-and-dried are nearly unintelligible. Indeed Professor Ferrier's
+original attempt to give Wilson's work only, and not all of that work
+when it happened to be mixed with others, seems to me to have been a
+mistake. But of that further, when we come to speak of the _Noctes_
+themselves.
+
+Wilson's life, for more than two-thirds of it a very happy one and not
+devoid of a certain eventfulness, can be summarised pretty briefly,
+especially as a full account of it is available in the very delightful
+work of his daughter Mrs. Gordon. Born in 1785, the son of a rich
+manufacturer of Paisley and a mother who boasted gentle blood, he was
+brought up first in the house of a country minister (whose parish he has
+made famous in several sketches), then at the University of Glasgow, and
+then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was early left possessor of a
+considerable fortune, and his first love, a certain "Margaret," having
+proved unkind, he established himself at Elleray on Windermere and
+entered into all the Lake society. Before very long (he was twenty-six
+at the time) he married Miss Jane Penny, daughter of a Liverpool
+merchant, and kept open house at Elleray for some years. Then his
+fortune disappeared in the keeping of a dishonest relation, and he had,
+in a way, his livelihood to make. I say "in a way," because the wind
+appears to have been considerably tempered to this shorn but robust
+lamb. He had not even to give up Elleray, though he could not live there
+in his old style. He had a mother who was able and willing to entertain
+him at Edinburgh, on the sole understanding that he did not "turn Whig,"
+of which there was very little danger. He was enabled to keep not too
+exhausting or anxious terms as an advocate at the Scottish bar; and
+before long he was endowed, against the infinitely superior claims of
+Sir William Hamilton, and by sheer force of personal and political
+influence, with the lucrative Professorship of Moral Philosophy in the
+University of Edinburgh. But even before this he had been exempted from
+the necessity of cultivating literature on a little oatmeal by his
+connexion with _Blackwood's Magazine_. The story of that magazine has
+often been told; never perhaps quite fully, but sufficiently. Wilson was
+not at any time, strictly speaking, editor; and a statement under his
+own hand avers that he never received any editorial pay, and was
+sometimes subject to that criticism which the publisher, as all men know
+from a famous letter of Scott's, was sometimes in the habit of
+exercising rather indiscreetly. But for a very great number of years,
+there is no doubt that he held a kind of quasi-editorial position, which
+included the censorship of other men's work and an almost, if not quite,
+unlimited right of printing his own. For some time the even more
+masterful spirit of Lockhart (against whom by the way Mrs. Gordon seems
+to have had a rather unreasonable prejudice) qualified his control over
+"Maga." But Lockhart's promotion to the _Quarterly_ removed this
+influence, and from 1825 (speaking roughly) to 1835 Wilson was supreme.
+The death of William Blackwood and of the Ettrick Shepherd in the
+last-named year, and of his own wife in 1837 (the latter a blow from
+which he never recovered), strongly affected not his control over the
+publication but his desire to control it; and after 1839 his
+contributions (save in the years 1845 and 1848) were very few. Ill
+health and broken spirits disabled him, and in 1852 he had to resign
+his professorship, dying two years later after some months of almost
+total prostration. Of the rest of the deeds of Christopher, and of his
+pugilism, and of his learning, and of his pedestrian exploits, and of
+his fishing, and of his cock-fighting, and of his hearty enjoyment of
+life generally, the books of the chronicles of Mrs. Gordon, and still
+more the twelve volumes of his works and the unreprinted contributions
+to _Blackwood_, shall tell.
+
+It is with those works that our principal business is, and some of them
+I shall take the liberty of at once dismissing. His poems are now
+matters of interest to very few mortals. It is not that they are bad,
+for they are not; but that they are almost wholly without distinction.
+He came just late enough to have got the seed of the great romantic
+revival; and his verse work is rarely more than the work of a clever man
+who has partly learnt and partly divined the manner of Burns, Scott,
+Campbell, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, and the rest. Nor, to my fancy,
+are his prose tales of much more value. I read them many years ago and
+cared little for them. I re-read, or attempted to re-read, them the
+other day and cared less. There seems, from the original prospectus of
+the edition of his works, to have been an intention of editing the
+course of moral philosophy which, with more or fewer variations,
+obtained him the agreeable income of a thousand a year or so for thirty
+years. But whether (as Mrs. Gordon seems to hint) the notes were in too
+dilapidated and chaotic a condition for use, or whether Professor
+Ferrier, his son-in-law and editor (himself, with Dean Mansel, the last
+of the exact philosophers of Britain), revolted at the idea of printing
+anything so merely literary, or what it was, I know not--at any rate
+they do not now figure in the list. This leaves us ten volumes of
+collected works, to wit, four of the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_, four of
+_Essays Critical and Imaginative_, and two of _The Recreations of
+Christopher North_, all with a very few exceptions reprinted from
+_Blackwood_. Mrs. Gordon filially groans because the reprint was not
+more extensive, and without endorsing her own very high opinion of her
+father's work, it is possible to agree with her. It is especially
+noteworthy that from the essays are excluded three out of the four chief
+critical series which Wilson wrote--that on Spenser, praised by a writer
+so little given to reckless praise as Hallam, the _Specimens of British
+Critics_, and the _Dies Boreales_,--leaving only the series on Homer
+with its quasi-Appendix on the Greek dramatists, and the _Noctes_
+themselves.
+
+It must be confessed that the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_ are not easy things to
+commend to the modern reader, if I may use the word commend in its
+proper sense and with no air of patronage. Even Scotchmen (perhaps,
+indeed, Scotchmen most of all) are wont nowadays to praise them rather
+apologetically, as may be seen in the case of their editor and abridger
+Mr. Skelton. Like most other very original things they drew after them a
+flock of imbecile imitations; and up to the present day those who have
+lived in the remoter parts of Scotland must know, or recently remember,
+dreary compositions in corrupt following of the _Noctes_, with
+exaggerated attempts at Christopher's worst mannerisms, and invariably
+including a ghastly caricature of the Shepherd. Even in themselves they
+abound in stumbling-blocks, which are perhaps multiplied, at least at
+the threshold, by the arbitrary separation in Ferrier's edition of
+Wilson's part, and not all his part, from the whole series; eighteen
+numbers being excluded bodily to begin with, while many more and parts
+of more are omitted subsequently. The critical mistake of this is
+evident, for much of the machinery and all the characters of the
+_Noctes_ were given to, not by, Wilson, and in all probability he
+accepted them not too willingly. The origin of the fantastic personages,
+the creation of which was a perfect mania with the early contributors to
+_Blackwood_, and who are, it is to be feared, too often a nuisance to
+modern readers, is rather dubious. Maginn's friends have claimed the
+origination of the _Noctes_ proper, and of its well-known motto
+paraphrased from Phocylides, for "The Doctor," or, if his chief
+_Blackwood_ designation be preferred, for the Ensign--Ensign O'Doherty.
+Professor Ferrier, on the other hand, has shown a not unnatural but by
+no means critical or exact desire to hint that Wilson invented the
+whole. There is no doubt that the real original is to be found in the
+actual suppers at "Ambrose's." These Lockhart had described, in _Peter's
+Letters_, before the appearance of the first _Noctes_ (the reader must
+not be shocked, the false concord is invariable in the book itself) and
+not long after the establishment of "Maga." As was the case with the
+magazine generally, the early numbers were extremely local and extremely
+personal. Wilson's glory is that he to a great extent, though not
+wholly, lifted them out of this rut, when he became the chief if not the
+sole writer after Lockhart's removal to London, and, with rare
+exceptions, reduced the personages to three strongly marked and very
+dramatic characters, Christopher North himself, the Ettrick Shepherd,
+and "Tickler." All these three were in a manner portraits, but no one is
+a mere photograph from a single person. On the whole, however, I suspect
+that Christopher North is a much closer likeness, if not of what Wilson
+himself was, yet at any rate of what he would have liked to be, than
+some of his apologists maintain. These charitable souls excuse the
+egotism, the personality, the violence, the inconsistency, the absurd
+assumption of omniscience and Admirable-Crichtonism, on the plea that
+"Christopher" is only the ideal Editor and not the actual Professor. It
+is quite true that Wilson, who, like all men of humour, must have known
+his own foibles, not unfrequently satirises them; but it is clear from
+his other work and from his private letters that they _were_ his
+foibles. The figure of the Shepherd, who is the chief speaker and on the
+whole the most interesting, is a more debatable one. It is certain that
+many of Hogg's friends, and, in his touchy moments he himself,
+considered that great liberty was taken with him, if not that (as the
+_Quarterly_ put it in a phrase which evidently made Wilson very angry)
+he was represented as a mere "boozing buffoon." On the other hand it is
+equally certain that the Shepherd never did anything that exhibited half
+the power over thought and language which is shown in the best passages
+of his _Noctes_ eidolon. Some of the adventures described as having
+happened to him are historically known as having happened to Wilson
+himself, and his sentiments are much more the writer's than the
+speaker's. At the same time the admirably imitated patois and the subtle
+rendering of Hogg's very well known foibles--his inordinate and
+stupendous vanity, his proneness to take liberties with his betters, his
+irritable temper, and the rest--give a false air of identity which is
+very noteworthy. The third portrait is said to have been the farthest
+from life, except in some physical peculiarities, of the three.
+"Tickler," whose original was Wilson's maternal uncle Robert Sym, an
+Edinburgh "writer," and something of a humorist in the flesh, is very
+skilfully made to hold the position of common-sense intermediary between
+the two originals, North and the Shepherd. He has his own peculiarities,
+but he has also a habit of bringing his friends down from their
+altitudes in a Voltairian fashion which is of great benefit to the
+dialogues, and may be compared to Peacock's similar use of some of his
+characters. The few occasional interlocutors are of little moment, with
+one exception; and the only female characters, Mrs. and Miss Gentle,
+would have been very much better away. They are not in the least
+lifelike, and usually exhibit the namby-pambiness into which Wilson too
+often fell when he wished to be refined and pathetic. The "English" or
+half-English characters, who come in sometimes as foils, are also rather
+of the stick, sticky. On the other hand, the interruptions of Ambrose,
+the host, and his household, though a little farcical, are well judged.
+And of the one exception above mentioned, the live Thomas De Quincey,
+who is brought in without disguise or excuse in some of the very best of
+the series, it can only be said that the imitation of his written style
+is extraordinary, and that men who knew his conversation say that the
+rendering of that is more extraordinary still.
+
+The same designed exaggeration which some uncritical persons have called
+Rabelaisian (not noticing that the very fault of the _Noctes_ is that,
+unlike Rabelais, their author mixes up probabilities and improbabilities
+so that there is a perpetual jarring) is maintained throughout the
+scenery and etceteras. The comfortable but modest accommodations of
+Ambrose's hotels in Gabriel's Road and Picardy Place are turned into
+abodes of not particularly tasteful luxury which put Lord Beaconsfield's
+famous upholstery to shame, and remind one of what they probably
+suggested, Edgar Poe's equally famous and much more terrible sketch of a
+model drawing-room. All the plate is carefully described as "silver"; if
+it had been gold there might have been some humour in it. The "wax"
+candles and "silken" curtains (if they had been _Arabian Nights_ lamps
+and oriental drapery the same might be said) are always insisted on. If
+there is any joke here it seems to lie in the contrast with Wilson's
+actual habits, which were very simple. For instance, he gives us a
+gorgeous description of the apparatus of North's solitary confinement
+when writing for _Blackwood_; his daughter's unvarnished account of the
+same process agrees exactly as to time, rate of production, and so
+forth, but substitutes water for the old hock and "Scots pint" (magnum)
+of claret, a dirty little terra-cotta inkstand for the silver utensil of
+the _Noctes_, and a single large tallow candle for Christopher's "floods
+of light." He carried the whim so far as to construct for himself--his
+_Noctes_ self--an imaginary hall-by-the-sea on the Firth of Forth, which
+in the same way seems to have had an actual resemblance, half of
+likeness, half of contrast, to the actual Elleray, and to enlarge his
+own comfortable town house in Gloucester Place to a sort of fairy palace
+in Moray Place. But that which has most puzzled and shocked readers are
+the specially Gargantuan passages relating to eating and drinking. The
+comments made on this seem (he was anything but patient of criticism) to
+have annoyed Wilson very much; and in some of the later _Noctes_ he
+drops hints that the whole is mere Barmecide business. Unfortunately the
+same criticism applies to this as to the upholstery--the exaggeration is
+"done too natural." The Shepherd's consumption of oysters not by dozens
+but by fifties, the allowance of "six common kettles-full of water" for
+the night's toddy ration of the three, North's above-mentioned bottle of
+old hock at dinner and magnum of claret after, the dinners and suppers
+and "whets" which appear so often;--all these stop short of the actually
+incredible, and are nothing more than extremely convivial men of the
+time, who were also large eaters, would have actually consumed. Lord
+Alvanley's three hearty suppers, the exploits of the old member of
+Parliament in Boz's sketch of Bellamy's (I forget his real name, but he
+was not a myth), and other things might be quoted to show that there is
+a fatal verisimilitude in the Ambrosian feasts which may, or may not,
+make them shocking (they don't shock me), but which certainly takes them
+out of the category of merely humorous exaggeration. The Shepherd's
+"jugs" numerous as they are (and by the way the Shepherd propounds two
+absolutely contradictory theories of toddy-making, one of which,
+according to the instructions of my preceptors in that art, who lived
+within sight of the hills that look down on Glenlivet, is a damnable
+heresy) are not in the least like the _seze muiz, deux bussars, et six
+tupins_ of tripe that Gargamelle so rashly devoured. There are men now
+living, and honoured members of society in Scotland, who admit the soft
+impeachment of having drunk in their youth twelve or fourteen "double"
+tumblers at a sitting. Now a double tumbler, be it known to the
+Southron, is a jorum of toddy to which there go two wineglasses (of
+course of the old-fashioned size, not our modern goblets) of whisky.
+"Indeed," said a humorous and indulgent lady correspondent of Wilson's,
+"indeed, I really think you eat too many oysters at the _Noctes_;" and
+any one who believes in distributive justice must admit that they did.
+
+If, therefore, the reader is of the modern cutlet-and-cup-of-coffee
+school of feeding, he will no doubt find the _Noctes_ most grossly and
+palpably gluttonous. If he be a very superior person he will smile at
+the upholstery. If he objects to horseplay he will be horrified at
+finding the characters on one occasion engaging in a regular "mill," on
+more than one corking each other's faces during slumber, sometimes
+playing at pyramids like the bounding brothers of acrobatic fame, at
+others indulging in leap-frog with the servants, permitting themselves
+practical jokes of all kinds, affecting to be drowned by an explosive
+haggis, and so forth. Every now and then he will come to a passage at
+which, without being superfine at all, he may find his gorge rise;
+though there is nothing quite so bad in the _Noctes_ as the picture of
+the ravens eating a dead Quaker in the _Recreations_, a picture for
+which Wilson offers a very lame defence elsewhere. He must put all sorts
+of prejudice, literary, political, and other, in his pocket. He must be
+prepared not only for constant and very scurrilous flings at "Cockneys"
+(Wilson extends the term far beyond the Hunt and Hazlitt school, an
+extension which to this day seems to give a strange delight to Edinburgh
+journalists), but for the wildest heterodoxies and inconsistencies of
+political, literary, and miscellaneous judgment, for much bastard
+verse-prose, for a good many quite uninteresting local and ephemeral
+allusions, and, of course, for any quantity of Scotch dialect. If all
+these allowances and provisos are too many for him to make, it is
+probably useless for him to attempt the _Noctes_ at all. He will pretty
+certainly, with the _Quarterly_ reviewer, set their characters down as
+boozing buffoons, and decline the honour of an invitation to Ambrose's
+or The Lodge, to Southside or the tent in Ettrick Forest.
+
+But any one who can accommodate himself to these little matters, much
+more any one who can enter into the spirit of days merrier, more
+leisurely, and if not less straitlaced than our own, yet lacing their
+laces in a different fashion, will find the _Noctes_ very delightful
+indeed. The mere high jinks, when the secret of being in the vein with
+them has been mastered, are seldom unamusing, and sometimes (notably in
+the long swim out to sea of Tickler and the Shepherd) are quite
+admirable fooling. No one who has an eye for the literary-dramatic can
+help, after a few _Noctes_ have been read, admiring the skill with which
+the characters are at once typified and individualised, the substance
+which they acquire in the reader's mind, the personal interest in them
+which is excited. And to all this, peculiarly suited for an alterative
+in these solemn days, has to be added the abundance of scattered and
+incomplete but remarkable gems of expression and thought that come at
+every few pages, sometimes at every page, of the series.
+
+Some of the burlesque narratives (such as the Shepherd's Mazeppa-like
+ride on the Bonassus) are inimitably good, though they are too often
+spoilt by Wilson's great faults of prolixity and uncertainty of touch.
+The criticisms, of which there are many, are also extremely unequal,
+but not a few very fine passages may be found among them. The politics,
+it must be owned, are not good for much, even from the Tory point of
+view. But the greatest attraction of the whole, next to its sunshiny
+heartiness and humour, is to be found in innumerable and indescribable
+bits, phrases, sentences, short paragraphs, which have, more than
+anything out of the dialogues of the very best novels, the character and
+charm of actual conversation. To read a _Noctes_ has, for those who have
+the happy gift of realising literature, not much less than the effect of
+actually taking part in one, with no danger of headache or indigestion
+after, and without the risk of being playfully corked, or required to
+leap the table for a wager, or forced to extemporise sixteen stanzas
+standing on the mantelpiece. There must be some peculiar virtue in this,
+for, as is very well known, the usual dialogue leaves the reader more
+outside of it than almost any other kind of literature.
+
+This peculiar charm is of necessity wanting to the rest of Wilson's
+works, and in so far they are inferior to the _Noctes_; but they have
+compensatory merits of their own, while, considered merely as
+literature, there are better things in them than anything that is to be
+found in the colloquies of those men of great gormandising
+abilities--Christopher North, James Hogg, and Timothy Tickler. Of the
+four volumes of _Essays Critical and Imaginative_, the fourth, on Homer
+and his translators, with an unfinished companion piece on the Greek
+drama, stands by itself, and has indeed, I believe, been separately
+published. It is well worth reading through at a sitting, which cannot
+be said of every volume of criticism. What is more, it may, I think, be
+put almost first in its own division of the art, though whether that
+division of the art is a high or low one is another question. I should
+not myself rank it very high. With Wilson, criticism, at least here, is
+little more than the eloquent expression of likes and dislikes. The long
+passages in which he deals with the wrath of Achilles and with the love
+of Calypso, though subject to the general stricture already more than
+once passed, are really beautiful specimens of literary enthusiasm; nor
+is there anything in English more calculated to initiate the reader,
+especially the young reader, in the love at least, if not the
+understanding, of Homer. The same enthusiastic and obviously quite
+genuine appreciation appears in the essay on the "Agamemnon." But of
+criticism as criticism--of what has been called tracing of literary
+cause and effect, of any coherent and co-ordinated theory of the good
+and bad in verse and prose, and the reasons of their goodness or
+badness, it must be said of this, as of Wilson's other critical work,
+that it is to be found _nusquam nullibi nullimodis_. He can preach
+(though with too great volubility, and with occasional faults of taste)
+delightful sermons about what he likes at the moment--for it is by no
+means always the same; and he can make formidable onslaughts with
+various weapons on what he dislikes at the moment--which again is not
+always the same. But a man so certain to go off at score whenever his
+likes or dislikes are excited, and so absolutely unable to check himself
+whenever he feels tempted thus to go off, lacks the very first
+qualifications of the critic:--lacks them, indeed, almost as much as the
+mere word-grinder who looks to see whether a plural substantive has a
+singular verb, and is satisfied if it has not, and horrified if it has.
+His most famous sentence "The Animosities are mortal, but the Humanities
+live for ever" is certainly noble. But it would have been better if the
+Humanities had oftener choked the Animosities at their birth.
+
+Wilson's criticism is to be found more or less everywhere in his
+collected writings. I have said that I think it a pity that, of his
+longest critical attempts, only one has been republished; and the reason
+is simple. For with an unequal writer (and Wilson is a writer unequalled
+in his inequality) his best work is as likely to be found in his worst
+book as his worst work in his best book; while the constant
+contemplation for a considerable period of one subject is more likely
+than anything else to dispel his habits of digression and padding. But
+the ubiquity of his criticism through the ten volumes was, in the
+circumstances of their editing, simply unavoidable. He had himself
+superintended a selection of all kinds, which he called _The Recreations
+of Christopher North_, and this had to be reprinted entire. It followed
+that, in the _Essays Critical and Imaginative_, an equally miscellaneous
+character should be observed. Almost everything given, and much not
+given, in the Works is worth consideration, but for critical purposes a
+choice is necessary. Let us take the consolidated essay on Wordsworth
+(most of which dates before 1822), the famous paper on Lord, then Mr.,
+Tennyson's poems in 1832, and the generous palinode on Macaulay's "Lays"
+of 1842. No three papers could better show Wilson in his three literary
+stages, that of rather cautious tentative (for though he was not a very
+young man in 1818, the date of the earliest of the Wordsworth papers, he
+was a young writer), that of practised and unrestrained vigour (for 1832
+represents about his literary zenith), and that of reflective decadence,
+for by 1842 he had ceased to write habitually, and was already bowed
+down by mental sorrows and physical ailments.
+
+In the first paper, or set of papers, it is evident that he is
+ambitiously groping after a more systematic style of criticism than he
+found in practice to be possible for him. Although he elsewhere scoffs
+at definitions, he tries to formulate very precisely the genius of
+Scott, of Byron, and of Wordsworth; he does his best to connect his
+individual judgments with these formulas; he shuns mere verbal
+criticism, and (to some extent) mere exaltation or depreciation of
+particular passages. But it is quite evident that he is ill at ease; and
+I do not think that any one now reading the essay can call it a
+successful one, or can attempt to rank it with those which, from
+different points of view, Hazlitt and De Quincey (Hazlitt nearly at the
+same time) wrote about Wordsworth. Indeed, Hazlitt is the most valuable
+of all examples for a critical comparison with Wilson; both being
+violent partisans and crotcheteers, both being animated with the truest
+love of poetry, but the one possessing and the other lacking the
+"tie-beam" of a consistent critical theory.
+
+A dozen years later Wilson had cast his slough, and had become the
+autocratic, freespoken, self-constituted dictator, Christopher North. He
+was confronted with the very difficult problem of Mr. Tennyson's poems.
+He knew they were poetry; that he could not help seeing and knowing. But
+they seemed to him to be the work of a "cockney" (it would be
+interesting to know whether there ever was any one less of a cockney
+than the author of "Mariana"), and he was irritated by some silly praise
+which had been given to them. So he set to work, and perpetrated the
+queerest jumble of sound and unsound criticism that exists in the
+archives of that art, so far as a humble but laborious student and
+practitioner thereof knoweth. He could not for the life of him help
+admiring "Adeline," "Oriana," "Mariana," "The Ode to Memory." Yet he had
+nothing but scorn for the scarcely less exquisite "Mermaid" and "Sea
+Fairies"--though the first few lines of the latter, excluded by this and
+other pseudo-criticism from the knowledge of half a generation of
+English readers, equal almost anything that the poet has ever done. And
+only the lucky memory of a remark of Hartley Coleridge's (who never went
+wrong in criticism, whatever he did in life) saved him from explicitly
+damning "The Dying Swan," which stands at the very head of a whole class
+of poetry. In all this essay, to borrow one of his own favourite words,
+he simply "plouters"--splashes and flounders about without any guidance
+of critical theory. Compare, to keep up the comparative method, the
+paper with the still more famous and far more deadly attack which
+Lockhart made a little later in the _Quarterly_. There one finds little,
+if any, generosity; an infinitely more cold-blooded and deliberate
+determination to "cut up." But the critic (and how quaint and pathetic
+it is to think that the said critic was the author of "I ride from land
+to land" and "When youthful hope is fled") sees his theory of poetry
+straight before him, and never takes his eye off it. The individual
+censures may be just or unjust, but they fit together like the
+propositions of a masterpiece of legal judgment. The poet is condemned
+under the statute,--so much the worse for the statute perhaps, but that
+does not matter--and he can only plead No jurisdiction; whereas with
+Christopher it is quite different. If he does not exactly blunder right
+(and he sometimes does that), he constantly blunders wrong--goes wrong,
+that is to say, without any excuse of theory or general view. That is
+not criticism.
+
+We shall not find matters much mended from the strictly critical point
+of view, when we come, ten years later, to the article on the "Lays."
+Here Christopher, as I hold with all respect to persons of distinction,
+is absolutely right. He does not say one word too much of the fire and
+life of those wonderful verses, of that fight of all fights--as far as
+English verse goes, except Drayton's "Agincourt" and the last canto of
+"Marmion"; as far as English prose goes, except some passages of Mallory
+and two or three pages of Kingsley's--the Battle of the Lake Regillus.
+The subject and the swing attracted him; he liked the fight, and he
+liked the ring as of Sir Walter at his very best. But he goes
+appallingly wrong all through on general critical points.
+
+Yet, according to his own perverse fashion, he never goes wrong without
+going right. Throughout his critical work there are scattered the most
+intelligent ideas, the neatest phrases, the most appreciative judgments.
+How good is it to say that "the battle of Trafalgar, though in some
+sort it neither began nor ended anything, was a kind of consummation of
+national prowess." How good again in its very straightforwardness and
+simplicity is the dictum "it is not necessary that we should understand
+fine poetry in order to feel and enjoy it, any more than fine music."
+Hundreds and thousands of these things lie about the pages. And in the
+next page to each the critic probably goes and says something which
+shows that he had entirely forgotten them. An intelligent man may be
+angry with Christopher--I should doubt whether any one who is not
+occasionally both angry and disgusted with him can be an intelligent
+man. But it is impossible to dislike him or fail to admire him as a
+whole.
+
+There is a third and very extensive division of Wilson's work which may
+not improbably be more popular, or might be if it were accessible
+separately, with the public of to-day, than either of those which have
+been surveyed. His "drunken _Noctes_," as Carlyle unkindly calls them,
+require a certain peculiar attitude of mind to appreciate them. As for
+his criticisms, it is frequently said, and it certainly would not become
+me to deny it, that nobody reads criticism but critics. But Wilson's
+renown as an athlete, a sportsman, and a lover of nature, who had a
+singular gift in expressing his love, has not yet died; and there is an
+ample audience now for men who can write about athletics, about sport,
+and about scenery. Nor is it questionable that on these subjects he is
+seen, on the whole, at his best. True, his faults pursue him even here,
+and are aggravated by a sort of fashion of the time which made him
+elaborately digress into politics, into literature, even (God rest his
+soul!) into a kind of quasi-professional and professorial sermonising on
+morals and theology, in the midst of his sporting articles. But the
+metal more attractive of the main subject would probably recommend these
+papers widely, if they were not scattered pell-mell about the _Essays
+Critical and Imaginative_, and the _Recreations of Christopher North_.
+Speaking generally they fall into three divisions--essays on sport in
+general, essays on the English Lakes, and essays on the Scottish
+Highlands. The best of the first class are the famous papers called
+"Christopher North in his Sporting Jacket," and the scattered reviews
+and articles redacted in the _Recreations_ under the general title of
+"Anglimania." In the second class all are good; and a volume composed of
+"Christopher at the Lakes," "A Day at Windermere," "Christopher on
+Colonsay" (a wild extravaganza which had a sort of basis of fact in a
+trotting-match won on a pony which Wilson afterwards sold for four
+pounds), and "A Saunter at Grasmere," with one or two more, would be a
+thing of price. The best of the third class beyond all question is the
+collection, also redacted by the author for the _Recreations_, entitled
+"The Moors." This last is perhaps the best of all the sporting and
+descriptive pieces, though not the least exemplary of its authors
+vagaries; for before he can get to the Moors, he gives us heaven knows
+how many pages of a criticism on Wordsworth, which, in that place at any
+rate, we do not in the least want; and in the very middle of his
+wonderful and sanguinary exploits on and near Ben Cruachan, he
+"interrupts the muffins" in order to deliver to a most farcical and
+impertinent assemblage a quite serious and still more impertinent
+sermon. But all these papers are more or less delightful. For the
+glowing description of, and the sneaking apology for, cat-worrying which
+the "Sporting Jacket" contains, nothing can be said. Wilson deliberately
+overlooks the fact that the whole fun of that nefarious amusement
+consists in the pitting of a plucky but weak animal against something
+much more strongly built and armed than itself. One may regret the P.R.,
+and indulge in a not wholly sneaking affection for cock-fighting,
+dog-fighting, and anything in which there is a fair match, without
+having the slightest weakness for this kind of brutality. But, generally
+speaking, Wilson is a thoroughly fair sportsman, and how enthusiastic he
+is, no one who has read him can fail to know. Of the scenery of loch or
+lake, of hill or mountain, he was at once an ardent lover and a
+describer who has never been equalled. His accustomed exaggeration and
+false emphasis are nowhere so little perceptible as when he deals with
+Ben Cruachan or the Old Man of Coniston, with the Four Great Lakes of
+Britain, East and West (one of his finest passages), or with the glens
+of Etive and Borrowdale. The accursed influence of an unchastened taste
+is indeed observable in the before-mentioned "Dead Quaker of Helvellyn,"
+a piece of unrelieved nastiness which he has in vain tried to excuse.
+But the whole of the series from which this is taken ("Christopher in
+his Aviary") is in his least happy style, alternately grandiose and low,
+relieved indeed by touches of observation and feeling, as all his work
+is, but hardly redeemed by them. The depths of his possible fall may
+also be seen from a short piece which Professor Ferrier, obligingly
+describing it as "too lively to be omitted," has adjoined to
+"Christopher at the Lakes." But, on the whole, all the articles
+mentioned in the list at the beginning of this paragraph, with the
+capital "Streams" as an addition, with the soliloquies on "The Seasons,"
+and with part (_not_ the narrative part) of "Highland Storms," are
+delightful reading. The progress of the sportsman has never been better
+given than in "Christopher North in his Sporting Jacket." In "The Moors"
+the actual sporting part is perhaps a little spoilt by the affectation
+of infallibility, qualified it is true by an aside or two, which so
+often mars the Christopherian utterances. But Wilson's description has
+never been bettered. The thunderstorm on the hill, the rough
+conviviality at the illicit distillery, the evening voyage on the loch,
+match, if they do not beat, anything of the kind in much more recent
+books far better known to the present generation. A special favourite of
+mine is the rather unceremonious review of Sir Humphry Davy's strangely
+over-praised "Salmonia." The passage of utter scorn and indignation at
+the preposterous statement of the chief personage in the dialogues, that
+after an exceptionally hard day's walking and fishing "half a pint of
+claret per man is enough," is sublime. Nearly the earliest, and
+certainly the best, protest against some modern fashions in shooting is
+to be found in "The Moors." In the same series, the visit to the hill
+cottage, preceding that to the still, has what it has since become the
+fashion to call the idyllic flavour, without too much of the rather
+mawkish pathos with which, in imitation of Mackenzie and the
+sensibility-writers of the last century, Wilson is apt to daub his
+pictures of rural and humble life. The passages on Oxford, to go to a
+slightly different but allied subject, in "Old North and Young North" (a
+paper not yet mentioned), may have full appeal to Oxford men, but I can
+hardly be mistaken in thinking that outsiders must see at least some of
+the beauty of them. But the list of specially desirable things in these
+articles is endless; hardly one of them can be taken up without
+discovering many such, not one of them without discovering some.[15]
+
+And, throughout the whole collection, there is the additional
+satisfaction that the author is writing only of what he thoroughly knows
+and understands. At the Lakes Wilson lived for years, and was familiar
+with every cranny of the hills, from the Pillar to Hawes Water, and from
+Newby Bridge to Saddleback. He began marching and fishing through the
+Highlands when he was a boy, enticed even his wife into perilous
+pedestrian enterprises with him, and, though the extent of his knowledge
+was perhaps not quite so large as he pretends, he certainly knew great
+tracts as well as he knew Edinburgh. Nor were his qualifications as a
+sportsman less authentic, despite the somewhat Munchausenish appearance
+which some of the feats narrated in the _Noctes_ and the _Recreations_
+wear, and are indeed intended to wear. His enormous baskets of trout
+seem to have been, if not quite so regular as he sometimes makes them
+out, at any rate fully historical as occasional feats. As has been
+hinted, he really did win the trotting-match on the pony, Colonsay,
+against a thoroughbred, though it was only on the technical point of the
+thoroughbred breaking his pace. His walk from London to Oxford in a
+night seems to have been a fact, and indeed there is nothing at all
+impossible in it, for the distance through Wycombe is not more than
+fifty-three miles; while the less certainly authenticated feat of
+walking from Liverpool to Elleray (eighty miles at least), without more
+than a short rest, also appears to be genuine. Like the heroes of a song
+that he loved, though he seems to have sung it in a corrupt text, he
+could wrestle and fight and jump out anywhere; and, until he was
+thoroughly broken by illness, he appears to have made the very most of
+the not inconsiderable spare time of a Scotch professor who has once got
+his long series of lectures committed to paper, and has nothing to do
+for the rest of his life but collect bundles of pound notes at the
+beginning of each session. All this, joined to his literary gifts, gives
+a reality to his out-of-door papers which is hardly to be found
+elsewhere except in some passages of Kingsley, between whom and Wilson
+there are many and most curious resemblances, chequered by national and
+personal differences only less curious.
+
+I do not think he was a good reviewer, even after making allowance for
+the prejudices and partisanships of the time, and for the monkey tricks
+of mannerism, which, at any rate in his earlier days, were incumbent on
+a reviewer in "Maga." He is too prone to the besetting sins of
+reviewing--the right hand defections and left hand fallings off, which,
+being interpreted, consist first in expressing agreement or
+disagreement with the author's views, and secondly in digressing into
+personal statements of one's own views of things connected with them
+instead of expounding more or less clearly what the book is, and
+addressing oneself to the great question, Is it a good or a bad piece of
+work according to the standard which the author himself strove to reach?
+I have said that I do not think he was on the whole a good critic (for a
+man may be a good critic and a bad reviewer, though the reverse will
+hardly stand), and I have given my reasons. That he was neither a great,
+nor even a very good poet or tale-teller, I have no doubt whatever. But
+this leaves untouched the attraction of his miscellaneous work, and its
+suitableness for the purpose of recreation. For that purpose I think it
+to be among the very best work in all literature. Its unfailing life and
+vigour, its vast variety, the healthy and inspiriting character of the
+subjects with which in the main it deals, are the characteristics which
+make its volumes easy-chair books of the best order. Its beauty no doubt
+is irregular, faulty, engaging rather than exquisite, attractive rather
+than artistically or scientifically perfect. I do not know that there is
+even any reason to join in the general lament over Wilson as being a
+gigantic failure, a monument of wasted energies and half-developed
+faculty. I do not at all think that there was anything in him much
+better than he actually did, or that he ever could have polished and
+sand-papered the faults out of his work. It would pretty certainly have
+lost freshness and vigour; it would quite certainly have been less in
+bulk, and bulk is a very important point in literature that is to serve
+as recreation. It is to me not much less certain that it never would
+have attained the first rank in symmetry and order. I am quite content
+with it as it is, and I only wish that still more of it were easily
+accessible.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[15] If I accepted (a rash acceptance) the challenge to name the three
+very best things in Wilson I should, I think, choose the famous Fairy's
+Funeral in the _Recreations_, the Shepherd's account of his recovery
+from illness in the _Noctes_, and, in a lighter vein, the picture of
+girls bathing in "Streams."
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+DE QUINCEY[16]
+
+
+In not a few respects the literary lot of Thomas De Quincey, both during
+his life and after it, has been exceedingly peculiar. In one respect it
+has been unique. I do not know that any other author of anything like
+his merit, during our time, has had a piece of work published for fully
+twenty years as his, only for it to be excluded as somebody else's at
+the end of that time. Certainly _The Traditions of the Rabbins_ was very
+De Quinceyish; indeed, it was so De Quinceyish that the discovery, after
+such a length of time, that it was not De Quincey's at all, but
+"Salathiel" Croly's, must have given unpleasant qualms to more than one
+critic accustomed to be positive on internal evidence. But if De Quincey
+had thus attributed to him work that was not his, he has also had the
+utmost difficulty in getting attributed to him, in any accessible form,
+work that was his own. Three, or nominally four, editions--one in the
+decade of his death, superintended for the most part by himself; another
+in 1862, whose blue coat and white labels dwell in the fond memory; and
+another in 1878 (reprinted in 1880) a little altered and enlarged, with
+the Rabbins turned out and more soberly clad, but identical in the
+main--put before the British public for some thirty-five years a certain
+portion of his strange, long-delayed, but voluminous work. This work had
+occupied him for about the same period, that is to say for the last and
+shorter half of his extraordinary and yet uneventful life. Now, after
+much praying of readers, and grumbling of critics, we have a fifth and
+definitive edition from the English critic who has given most attention
+to De Quincey, Professor Masson.[17] I may say, with hearty
+acknowledgment of Mr. Masson's services to English literature, that I do
+not very much like this last edition. De Quincey, never much favoured by
+the mechanical producers of books, has had his sizings, as Byron would
+say, still further stinted in the matter of print, margins, and the
+like; and what I cannot but regard as a rather unceremonious tampering
+with his own arrangement has taken place, the new matter being not added
+in supplementary volumes or in appendices to the reprinted volumes, but
+thrust into or between the separate essays, sometimes to the destruction
+of De Quincey's "redaction" altogether, and always to the confusion and
+dislocation of his arrangement, which has also been neglected in other
+ways. Still the actual generation of readers will undoubtedly have
+before them a fuller and completer edition of De Quincey than even
+Americans have yet had; and they will have it edited by an accomplished
+scholar who has taken a great deal of pains to acquaint himself
+thoroughly with the subject.
+
+Will they form a different estimate from that which those of us who have
+known the older editions for a quarter of a century have formed, and
+will that estimate, if it is different, be higher or lower? To answer
+such questions is always difficult; but it is especially difficult here,
+for a certain reason which I had chiefly in mind when I said just now
+that De Quincey's literary lot has been very peculiar. I believe that I
+am not speaking for myself only; I am quite sure that I am speaking my
+own deliberate opinion when I say that on scarcely any English writer is
+it so hard to strike a critical balance--to get a clear definite opinion
+that you can put on the shelf and need merely take down now and then to
+be dusted and polished up by a fresh reading--as on De Quincey. This is
+partly due to the fact that his merits are of the class that appeals to,
+while his faults are of the class that is excused by, the average boy
+who has some interest in literature. To read the _Essay on Murder_, the
+_English Mail Coach_, _The Spanish Nun_, _The Cæsars_, and half a score
+other things at the age of about fifteen or sixteen is, or ought to be,
+to fall in love with them. And there is nothing more unpleasant for _les
+âmes bien nées_, as the famous distich has it, than to find fault in
+after life with that with which you have fallen in love at fifteen or
+sixteen. Yet most unfortunately, just as De Quincey's merits, or some of
+them, appeal specially to youth, and his defects specially escape the
+notice of youth, so age with stealing steps especially claws those
+merits into his clutch and leaves the defects exposed to derision. The
+most gracious state of authors is that they shall charm at all ages
+those whom they do charm. There are others--Dante, Cervantes, Goethe are
+instances--as to whom you may even begin with a little aversion, and go
+on to love them more and more. De Quincey, I fear, belongs to a third
+class, with whom it is difficult to keep up the first love, or rather
+whose defects begin before long to urge themselves upon the critical
+lover (some would say there are no critical lovers, but that I deny)
+with an even less happy result than is recorded in one of Catullus's
+finest lines. This kind of discovery
+
+    Cogit amare _minus_, _nec_ bene velle _magis_.
+
+How and to what extent this is the case, it must be the business of this
+paper to attempt to show. But first it is desirable to give, as usual,
+a brief sketch of De Quincey's life. It need only be a brief one, for
+the external events of that life were few and meagre; nor can they be
+said to be, even after the researches of Mr. Page and Professor Masson,
+very accurately or exhaustively known. Before those researches "all was
+mist and myth" about De Quincey. I remember as a boy, a year or two
+after his death, hearing a piece of scandal about his domestic
+relations, which seems to have had no foundation whatever, but which
+pretty evidently was an echo of the "libel" (published in a short-lived
+newspaper of the kind which after many years has again risen to infest
+London) whereof he complains with perhaps more acrimony than dignity in
+a paper for the first time exhumed and reprinted in Professor Masson's
+edition. Many of the details of the _Confessions_ and the
+_Autobiography_ have a singular unbelievableness as one reads them; and
+though the tendency of recent biographers has been to accept them as on
+the whole genuine, I own that I am rather sceptical about many of them
+still. Was the ever-famous Malay a real Malay, or a thing of shreds and
+patches? Did De Quincey actually call upon the awful Dean Cyril Jackson
+and affably discuss with him the propriety of entering himself at
+Christ-church? Did he really journey pennilessly down to Eton on the
+chance of finding a casual peer of the realm of tender years who would
+back a bill for him? These are but a few out of a large number of
+questions which in idle moods (for the answer to hardly one of them is
+of the least importance) suggest themselves; and which have been very
+partially answered hitherto even of late years, though they have been
+much discussed. The plain and tolerably certain facts which are
+important in connection with his work may be pretty rapidly summed up.
+
+Thomas de Quincey, or Quincey, was born in Manchester--but apparently
+not, as he himself thought, at the country house of Greenhay which his
+parents afterwards inhabited--on 15th August 1785. His father was a
+merchant, well to do but of weak health, who died when Thomas was seven
+years old. Of his childhood he has left very copious reminiscences, and
+there is no doubt that reminiscences of childhood do linger long after
+later memories have disappeared. But to what extent De Quincey gave
+"cocked hats and canes" to his childish thoughts and to his relations
+with his brothers and sisters, individual judgment must decide. I should
+say, for my part, that the extent was considerable. It seems, however,
+pretty clear that he was as a child, very much what he was all his
+life--emphatically "old-fashioned," retiring without being exactly shy,
+full of far-brought fancies and yet intensely concentrated upon himself.
+In 1796 his mother moved to Bath, and Thomas was educated first at the
+Grammar School there and then at a private school in Wiltshire. It was
+at Bath, his headquarters being there, that he met various persons of
+distinction--Lord Westport, Lord and Lady Carbery, and others--who
+figure largely in the _Autobiography_, but are never heard of
+afterwards. It was with Lord Westport, a boy somewhat younger than
+himself, that he took a trip to Ireland, the only country beyond Great
+Britain that he visited. In 1800 he was sent by his guardians to the
+Manchester Grammar School in order to obtain, by three years' boarding
+there, one of the Somerset Exhibitions to Brasenose. As a separate
+income of £150 had been left by De Quincey's father to each of his sons,
+as this income, or part of it, must have been accumulating, and as the
+mother was very well off, this roundabout way of securing for him a
+miserable forty or fifty pounds a year seems strange enough. But it has
+to be remembered that for all these details we have little security but
+De Quincey himself. However, that he did go to Manchester, and did,
+after rather more than two of his three years' probation, run away is
+indisputable. His mother was living at Chester, and the calf was not
+killed for this prodigal son; but he had liberty given him to wander
+about Wales on an allowance of a guinea a week. That there is some
+mystery, or mystification, about all this is nearly certain. If things
+really went as he represents them, his mother ought to have been
+ashamed of herself, and his guardians ought to have had, to say the
+least, an experience of the roughest side of Lord Eldon's tongue. The
+wanderings in Wales were followed by the famous sojourn in Soho, with
+its waitings at money-lenders' doors, and its perambulations of Oxford
+Street. Then, by another sudden revolution, we find De Quincey with
+two-thirds of his allowance handed over to him and permission to go to
+Oxford as he wished, but abandoned to his own devices by his mother and
+his guardians, as surely no mother and no guardians ever abandoned an
+exceptionally unworldly boy of eighteen before. They seem to have put
+fifty guineas in his pocket and sent him up to Oxford, without even
+recommending him a college, and with an income which made it practically
+certain that he would once more seek the Jews. When he had spent so much
+of his fifty guineas that there was not enough left to pay caution-money
+at most colleges, he went to Worcester, where it happened to be low. He
+seems to have stayed there, on and off, for nearly six years. But he
+took no degree, his eternal caprices making him shun _vivâ voce_ (then a
+much more important part of the examination than it is now) after
+sending in unusually good written papers. Instead of taking a degree, he
+began to take opium, and to make acquaintance with the "Lakers" in both
+their haunts of Somerset and Westmoreland. He entered himself at the
+Middle Temple, he may have eaten some dinners, and somehow or other he
+"came into his property," though there are dire surmises that it was by
+the Hebrew door. At any rate in November 1809 he gave up both Oxford and
+London (which he had frequented a good deal, chiefly, he says, for the
+sake of the opera of which he was very fond), and established himself at
+Grasmere. One of the most singular things about his singular life--an
+oddity due, no doubt, in part to the fact that he outlived his more
+literary associates instead of being outlived by them--is that though we
+hear much from De Quincey of other people we hear extremely little from
+other people about De Quincey. Indeed what we do so hear dates almost
+entirely from the last days of his life.
+
+As for the autobiographic details in his _Confessions_ and elsewhere,
+anybody who chooses may put those Sibylline leaves together for himself.
+It would only appear certain that for ten years he led the life of a
+recluse student and a hard laudanum-drinker, varied by a little society
+now and then; that in 1816 he married Margaret Simpson, a dalesman's
+daughter, of whom we have hardly any personal notices save to the effect
+that she was very beautiful, and who seems to have been almost the most
+exemplary of wives to almost the most eccentric of husbands; that for
+most of the time he was in more or less ease and affluence (ease and
+affluence still, it would seem, of a treacherous Hebraic origin); and
+that about 1819 he found himself in great pecuniary difficulties. Then
+at length he turned to literature, started as editor of a little Tory
+paper at Kendal, went to London, and took rank, never to be cancelled,
+as a man of letters by the first part of _The Confessions of an
+Opium-Eater_, published in the _London Magazine_ for 1821. He began as a
+magazine-writer, and he continued as such till the end of his life; his
+publications in book-form being, till he was induced to collect his
+articles, quite insignificant. Between 1821 and 1825 he seems to have
+been chiefly in London, though sometimes at Grasmere; between 1825 and
+1830 chiefly at Grasmere, but much in Edinburgh, where Wilson (whose
+friendship he had secured, not at Oxford, though they were
+contemporaries, but at the Lakes) was now residing, and where he was
+introduced to Blackwood. In 1830 he moved his household to the Scotch
+capital, and lived there, and (after his wife's death in 1837) at
+Lasswade, or rather Polton, for the rest of his life. His affairs had
+come to their worst before he lost his wife, and it is now known that
+for some considerable time he lived, like Mr. Chrystal Croftangry, in
+the sanctuary of Holyrood. But De Quincey's way of "living" at any place
+was as mysterious as most of his other ways; and, though he seems to
+have been very fond of his family and not at all put out by them, it was
+his constant habit to establish himself in separate lodgings. These he
+as constantly shifted (sometimes as far as Glasgow) for no intelligible
+reason that has ever been discovered or surmised, his pecuniary troubles
+having long ceased. It was in the latest and most permanent of these
+lodgings, 42 Lothian Street, Edinburgh, not at Lasswade, that he died on
+the 8th of December 1859. He had latterly written mainly, though not
+solely, for _Tait's Magazine_ and _Hogg's Instructor_. But his chief
+literary employment for at least seven years before this, had been the
+arrangement of the authorised edition of his works, the last or
+fourteenth volume of which was in the press at the time of his death.
+
+So meagre are the known facts in a life of seventy-four years, during
+nearly forty of which De Quincey, though never popular, was still
+recognised as a great name in English letters, while during the same
+period he knew, and was known to, not a few distinguished men. But
+little as is recorded of the facts of his life, even less is recorded of
+his character, and for once it is almost impossible to discover that
+character from his works. The few persons who met him all agree as to
+his impenetrability,--an impenetrability not in the least due to posing,
+but apparently natural and fated. De Quincey was at once egotistic and
+impersonal, at once delighted to talk and resolutely shunning society.
+To him, one is tempted to say, reading and writing did come by nature,
+and nothing else was natural at all. With books he is always at home. A
+De Quincey in a world where there was neither reading nor writing of
+books, would certainly either have committed suicide or gone mad. Pope's
+theory of the master-passion, so often abused, justified itself here.
+
+The quantity of work produced during this singular existence, from the
+time when De Quincey first began, unusually late, to write for
+publication, was very large. As collected by the author, it filled
+fourteen volumes; the collection was subsequently enlarged to sixteen,
+and though the new edition promises to restrict itself to the older and
+lesser number, the contents of each volume have been very considerably
+increased. But this printed and reprinted total, so far as can be judged
+from De Quincey's own assertions and from the observations of those who
+were acquainted with him during his later years, must have been but the
+smaller part of what he actually wrote. He was always writing, and
+always leaving deposits of his manuscripts in the various lodgings where
+it was his habit to bestow himself. The greater part of De Quincey's
+writing was of a kind almost as easily written by so full a reader and
+so logical a thinker as an ordinary newspaper article by an ordinary
+man; and except when he was sleeping, wandering about, or reading, he
+was always writing. It is, of course, true that he spent a great deal of
+time, especially in his last years of all, in re-writing and
+re-fashioning previously executed work; and also that illness and opium
+made considerable inroads on his leisure. But I should imagine that if
+we had all that he actually wrote during these nearly forty years, forty
+or sixty printed volumes would more nearly express its amount than
+fourteen or sixteen.
+
+Still what we have is no mean bulk of work for any man to have
+accomplished, especially when it is considered how extraordinarily good
+much of it is. To classify it is not particularly easy; and I doubt,
+myself, whether any classification is necessary. De Quincey himself
+tried, and made rather a muddle of it. Professor Masson is trying also.
+But, in truth, except those wonderful purple patches of "numerous"
+prose, which are stuck all about the work, and perhaps in strictness not
+excepting them, everything that De Quincey wrote, whether it was dream
+or reminiscence, literary criticism or historical study, politics or
+political economy, had one characteristic so strongly impressed on it as
+to dwarf and obscure the differences of subject. It is not very easy to
+find a description at once accurate and fair, brief and adequate, of
+this peculiarity; it is best hinted at in a remark on De Quincey's
+conversation which I have seen quoted somewhere (whether by Professor
+Masson or not I hardly know), that it was, with many interesting and
+delightful qualities, a kind of "rigmarole." So far as I remember, the
+remark was not applied in any unfriendly spirit, nor is it adduced here
+in any such. But both in the printed works, in the remembrances of De
+Quincey's conversation which have been printed, in his letters which are
+exactly like his articles, and in those astonishing imaginary
+conversations attributed to him in the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_, which are
+said, by good authorities, exactly to represent his way of talk, this
+quality of rigmarole appears. It is absolutely impossible for him to
+keep to his subject, or any subject. It is as impossible for him to pull
+himself up briefly in any digression from that subject. In his finest
+passages, as in his most trivial, he is at the mercy of the
+will-o'-the-wisp of divagation. In his later re-handlings of his work,
+he did to some extent limit his followings of this will-o'-the-wisp to
+notes, but by no means always; and both in his later and in his earlier
+work, as it was written for the first time, he indulged them freely in
+the text.
+
+For pure rigmarole, for stories, as Mr. Chadband has it, "of a cock and
+of a bull, and of a lady and of a half-crown," few things, even in De
+Quincey, can exceed, and nothing out of De Quincey can approach, the
+passages about the woman he met on the "cop" at Chester, and about the
+Greek letter that he did not send to the Bishop of Bangor, in the
+preliminary part of the _Confessions_. The first is the more teasing,
+because with a quite elvish superfluity of naughtiness he has here
+indulged in a kind of double rigmarole about the woman and the "bore"
+in the river, and flits from one to the other, and from the other to the
+one (his main story standing still the while), for half a dozen pages,
+till the reader feels as Coleridge's auditors must have felt when he
+talked about "Ball and Bell, Bell and Ball." But the Greek letter
+episode, or rather, the episode about the Greek letter which never was
+written, is, if possible, more flagrantly rigmarolish.
+The-cop-and-bore-and-woman digression contains some remarkable
+description as a kind of solace to the Puck-led traveller; the other is
+bare of any such comfort. The Bishop's old housekeeper, who was De
+Quincey's landlady, told him, it seems, that the Bishop had cautioned
+her against taking in lodgers whom she did not know, and De Quincey was
+very angry. As he thought he could write Greek much better than the
+Bishop, he meditated expostulation in that language. He did not
+expostulate, but he proceeds instead to consider the possible effect on
+the Bishop if he had. There was a contemporary writer whom we can
+imagine struck by a similar whimsy: but Charles Lamb would have given us
+the Bishop and himself "quite natural and distinct" in a dozen lines,
+and then have dropped the subject, leaving our sides aching with
+laughter, and our appetites longing for more. De Quincey tells us at
+great length who the Bishop was, and how he was the Head of Brasenose,
+with some remarks on the relative status of Oxford Colleges. Then he
+debates the pros and cons on the question whether the Bishop would have
+answered the letter or not, with some remarks on the difference between
+strict scholarship and the power of composing in a dead language. He
+rises to real humour in the remark, that as "Methodists swarmed in
+Carnarvonshire," he "could in no case have found pleasure in causing
+mortification" to the Bishop, even if he had vanquished him. By this
+time we have had some three pages of it, and could well, especially with
+this lively touch to finish, accept them, though they be something
+tedious, supposing the incident to be closed. The treacherous author
+leads us to suppose that it is closed; telling us how he left Bangor,
+and went to Carnarvon, which change gradually drew his thoughts away
+from the Bishop. So far is this from being the case, that he goes back
+to that Reverend Father, and for two mortal pages more, speculates
+further what would happen if he had written to the Bishop, what the
+Bishop would have said, whether he would not have asked him (De Quincey)
+to the Palace, whether, in his capacity of Head of a House, he would not
+have welcomed him to that seat of learning, and finally smoothed his way
+to a fellowship. By which time, one is perfectly sick of the Bishop, and
+of these speculations on the might-have-been, which are indeed by no
+means unnatural, being exactly what every man indulges in now and then
+in his own case, which, in conversation, would not be unpleasant, but
+which, gradually and diffusedly set down in a book, and interrupting a
+narrative, are most certainly "rigmarole."
+
+Rigmarole, however, can be a very agreeable thing in its way, and De
+Quincey has carried it to a point of perfection never reached by any
+other rigmaroler. Despite his undoubted possession of a kind of humour,
+it is a very remarkable thing that he rigmaroles, so far as can be made
+out by the application of the most sensitive tests, quite seriously, and
+almost, if not quite, unconsciously. These digressions or deviations are
+studded with quips and jests, good, bad, and indifferent. But the writer
+never seems to suspect that his own general attitude is at least
+susceptible of being made fun of. It is said, and we can very well
+believe it, that he was excessively annoyed at Lamb's delightful parody
+of his _Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected_; and,
+on the whole, I should say that no great man of letters in this century,
+except Balzac and Victor Hugo, was so insensible to the ludicrous aspect
+of his own performances. This in the author of the _Essay on Murder_ may
+seem surprising, but, in fact, there are few things of which there are
+so many subdivisions, or in which the subdivisions are marked off from
+each other by such apparently impermeable lines, as humour. If I may
+refine a little I should say that there was very frequently, if not
+generally, a humorous basis for these divagations of De Quincey's; but
+that he almost invariably lost sight of that basis, and proceeded to
+reason quite gravely away from it, in what is (not entirely with
+justice) called the scholastic manner. How much of this was due to the
+influence of Jean Paul and the other German humorists of the last
+century, with whom he became acquainted very early, I should not like to
+say. I confess that my own enjoyment of Richter, which has nevertheless
+been considerable, has always been lessened by the presence in him, to a
+still greater degree, of this same habit of quasi-serious divagation. To
+appreciate the mistake of it, it is only necessary to compare the manner
+of Swift. The _Tale of a Tub_ is in appearance as daringly discursive as
+anything can be, but the author in the first place never loses his way,
+and in the second never fails to keep a watchful eye on himself, lest he
+should be getting too serious or too tedious. That is what Richter and
+De Quincey fail to do.
+
+Yet though these drawbacks are grave, and though they are (to judge from
+my own experience) felt more seriously at each successive reading, most
+assuredly no man who loves English literature could spare De Quincey
+from it; most assuredly all who love English literature would sooner
+spare some much more faultless writers. Even that quality of his which
+has been already noted, his extraordinary attraction for youth, is a
+singular and priceless one. The Master of the Court of the Gentiles, or
+the Instructor of the Sons of the Prophets, he might be called in a
+fantastic nomenclature, which he would have himself appreciated, if it
+had been applied to any one but himself. What he somewhere calls his
+"extraordinary ignorance of daily life" does not revolt youth. His
+little pedantries, which to the day of his death were like those of a
+clever schoolboy, appeal directly to it. His best fun is quite
+intelligible; his worst not wholly uncongenial. His habit (a certain
+most respected professor in a northern university may recognise the
+words) of "getting into logical coaches and letting himself be carried
+on without minding where he is going" is anything but repugnant to brisk
+minds of seventeen. They are quite able to comprehend the great if
+mannered beauty of his finest style--the style, to quote his own words
+once more, as of "an elaborate and pompous sunset." Such a schoolmaster
+to bring youths of promise, not merely to good literature but to the
+best, nowhere else exists. But he is much more than a mere schoolmaster,
+and in order that we may see what he is, it is desirable first of all to
+despatch two other objections made to him from different quarters, and
+on different lines of thought. The one objection (I should say that I do
+not fully espouse either of them) is that he is an untrustworthy critic
+of books; the other is that he is a very spiteful commentator on men.
+
+This latter charge has found wide acceptance and has been practically
+corroborated and endorsed by persons as different as Southey and
+Carlyle. It would not in any case concern us much, for when a man is
+once dead it matters uncommonly little whether he was personally
+unamiable or not. But I think that De Quincey has in this respect been
+hardly treated. He led such a wholly unnatural life, he was at all times
+and in all places so thoroughly excluded from the natural contact and
+friction of society, that his utterances hardly partake of the ordinary
+character of men's speech. In the "vacant interlunar caves" where he hid
+himself, he could hardly feel the restraints that press on those who
+move within ear-shot and jostle of their fellows on this actual earth.
+This is not a triumphant defence, no doubt; but I think it is a defence.
+And further, it has yet to be proved that De Quincey set down anything
+in malice. He called his literary idol, Wordsworth, "inhumanly
+arrogant." Does anybody--not being a Wordsworthian and therefore out of
+reach of reason--doubt that Wordsworth's arrogance was inhuman? He, not
+unprovoked by scant gratitude on Coleridge's part for very solid
+services, and by a doubtless sincere but rather unctuous protest of his
+brother in opium-eating against the _Confessions_, told some home truths
+against that magnificent genius but most unsatisfactory man. A sort of
+foolish folk has recently arisen which tells us that because Coleridge
+wrote "The Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan," he was quite entitled to
+leave his wife and children to be looked after by anybody who chose, to
+take stipends from casual benefactors, and to scold, by himself or by
+his next friend Mr. Wordsworth, other benefactors, like Thomas Poole,
+who were not prepared at a moment's notice to give him a hundred pounds
+for a trip to the Azores. The rest of us, though we may feel no call to
+denounce Coleridge for these proceedings, may surely hold that "The
+Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan" are no defence to the particular
+charges. I do not see that De Quincey said anything worse of Coleridge
+than any man who knew the then little, but now well-known facts of
+Coleridge's life, was entitled to say if he chose. And so in other
+cases. That he was what is called a thoughtful person--that is to say
+that he ever said to himself, "Will what I am writing give pain, and
+ought I to give that pain?"--I do not allege. In fact, the very excuse
+which has been made for him above is inconsistent with it. He always
+wrote far too much as one in another planet for anything of the kind to
+occur to him, and he was perhaps for a very similar reason rather too
+fond of the "personal talk" which Wordsworth wisely disdained. But that
+he was in any proper sense spiteful, that is to say that he ever wrote
+either with a deliberate intention to wound or with a deliberate
+indifference whether he wounded or not, I do not believe.
+
+The other charge, that he was a bad or rather a very untrustworthy
+critic of books, cannot be met quite so directly. He is indeed
+responsible for a singularly large number of singularly grave critical
+blunders--by which I mean of course not critical opinions disagreeing
+with my own, but critical opinions which the general consent of
+competent critics, on the whole, negatives. The minor classical writers
+are not much read now, but there must be a sufficient jury to whom I can
+appeal to know what is to be done with a professed critic of style--at
+least asserting himself to be no mean classical scholar--who declares
+that "Paganism had no more brilliant master of composition to show
+than"--Velleius Paterculus! Suppose this to be a mere fling or freak,
+what is to be thought of a man who evidently sets Cicero, as a writer,
+if not as a thinker, above Plato? It would be not only possible but easy
+to follow this up with a long list of critical enormities on De
+Quincey's part, enormities due not to accidental and casual crotchet or
+prejudice, as in Hazlitt's case, but apparently to some perverse
+idiosyncrasy. I doubt very much, though the doubt may seem horribly
+heretical to some people, whether De Quincey really cared much for
+poetry as poetry. He liked philosophical poets:--Milton, Wordsworth,
+Shakespeare (inasmuch as he perceived Shakespeare to be the greatest of
+philosophical poets), Pope even in a certain way. But read the
+interesting paper which late in life he devoted to Shelley. He treats
+Shelley as a man admirably, with freedom alike from the maudlin
+sentiment of our modern chatterers and from Puritanical preciseness. He
+is not too hard on him in any way, he thinks him a pleasing personality
+and a thinker distorted but interesting. Of Shelley's strictly poetical
+quality he says nothing, if he knew or felt anything. In fact, of
+lyrical poetry generally, that is to say of poetry in its most purely
+poetical condition, he speaks very little in all his extensive critical
+dissertations. His want of appreciation of it may supply explanation of
+his unpardonable treatment of Goethe. That he should have maltreated
+_Wilhelm Meister_ is quite excusable. There are fervent admirers of
+Goethe at his best who acknowledge most fully the presence in _Wilhelm_
+of the two worst characteristics of German life and literature, bad
+taste and tediousness. But it is not excusable that much later, and
+indeed at the very height of his literary powers and practice, he should
+have written the article in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ on the author
+of _Faust_, of _Egmont_, and above all of the shorter poems. Here he
+deliberately assents to the opinion that _Werther_ is "superior to
+everything that came after it, and for mere power, Goethe's paramount
+work," dismisses _Faust_ as something that "no two people have ever
+agreed about," sentences _Egmont_ as "violating the historic truth of
+character," and mentions not a single one of those lyrics, unmatched, or
+rather only matched by Heine, in the language, by which Goethe first
+gave German rank with the great poetic tongues. His severity on Swift is
+connected with his special "will-worship" of ornate style, of which more
+presently, and in general it may be said that De Quincey's extremely
+logical disposition of mind was rather a snare to him in his criticism.
+He was constantly constructing general principles and then arguing
+downwards from them; in which case woe to any individual fact or person
+that happened to get in the way. Where Wilson, the "only intimate male
+friend I have had" (as he somewhere says with a half-pathetic touch of
+self-illumination more instructive than reams of imaginative
+autobiography), went wrong from not having enough of general principle,
+where Hazlitt went wrong from letting prejudices unconnected with the
+literary side of the matter blind his otherwise piercing literary sight,
+De Quincey fell through an unswervingness of deduction more French than
+English. Your ornate writer must be better than your plain one, _ergo_,
+let us say, Cicero must be better than Swift.
+
+One other curious weakness of his (which has been glanced at already)
+remains to be noticed. This is the altogether deplorable notion of
+jocularity which he only too often exhibits. Mr. Masson, trying to
+propitiate the enemy, admits that "to address the historian Josephus as
+'Joe,' through a whole article, and give him a black eye into the
+bargain, is positively profane." I am not sure as to the profanity,
+knowing nothing particularly sacred about Josephus. But if Mr. Masson
+had called it excessively silly, I should have agreed heartily; and if
+any one else denounced it as a breach of good literary manners, I do not
+know that I should protest. The habit is the more curious in that all
+authorities agree as to the exceptional combination of scholarliness and
+courtliness which marked De Quincey's colloquial style and expression.
+Wilson's daughter, Mrs. Gordon, says that he used to address her
+father's cook "as if she had been a duchess"; and that the cook, though
+much flattered, was somewhat aghast at his _punctilio_. That a man of
+this kind should think it both allowable and funny to talk of Josephus
+as "Joe," and of Magliabecchi as "Mag," may be only a new example of
+that odd law of human nature which constantly prompts people in various
+relations of life, and not least in literature, to assume most the
+particular qualities (not always virtues or graces) that they have not.
+Yet it is fair to remember that Wilson and the _Blackwood_ set, together
+with not a few writers in the _London Magazine_--the two literary
+coteries in connexion with whom De Quincey started as a writer--had
+deliberately imported this element of horse-play into literature, that
+it at least did not seem to interfere with their popularity, and that De
+Quincey himself, after 1830, lived too little in touch with actual life
+to be aware that the style was becoming as unfashionable as it had
+always, save on very exceptional subjects, been ungraceful. Even on
+Wilson, who was to the manner born of riotous spirits, it often sits
+awkwardly; in De Quincey's case it is, to borrow Sir Walter's admirable
+simile in another case, like "the forced impudence of a bashful man."
+Grim humour he can manage admirably, and he also--as in the passage
+about the fate which waited upon all who possessed anything which might
+be convenient to Wordsworth, if they died--can manage a certain kind of
+sly humour not much less admirably. But "Joe" and "Mag," and, to take
+another example, the stuff about Catalina's "crocodile papa" in _The
+Spanish Nun_, are neither grim nor sly, they are only puerile. His
+stanchest defender asks, "why De Quincey should not have the same
+license as Swift and Thackeray?" The answer is quick and crushing. Swift
+and Thackeray justify their license by their use of it; De Quincey does
+not. After which it is hardly necessary to add, though this is almost
+final in itself, that neither Swift nor Thackeray interlards perfectly
+and unaffectedly serious work with mere fooling of the "Joe" and "Mag"
+kind. Swift did not put _mollis abuti_ in the _Four last years of Queen
+Anne_, nor Thackeray his _Punch_ jokes in the death-scene of Colonel
+Newcome. I can quite conceive De Quincey doing both.
+
+And now I have done enough in the fault-finding way, and nothing shall
+induce me to say another word of De Quincey in this article save in
+praise. For praise he himself gives the amplest occasion; he might
+almost remain unblamed altogether if his praisers had not been
+frequently unwise, and if his _exemplar_ were not specially _vitiis
+imitabile_. Few English writers have touched so large a number of
+subjects with such competence both in information and in power of
+handling. Still fewer have exhibited such remarkable logical faculty.
+One main reason why one is sometimes tempted to quarrel with him is that
+his play of fence is so excellent that one longs to cross swords. For
+this and for other reasons no writer has a more stimulating effect, or
+is more likely to lead his readers on to explore and to think for
+themselves. In none is that incurable curiosity, that infinite variety
+of desire for knowledge and for argument which age cannot quench, more
+observable. Few if any have the indefinable quality of freshness in so
+large a measure. You never quite know, though you may have a shrewd
+suspicion, what De Quincey will say on any subject; his gift of sighting
+and approaching new facets of it is so immense. Whether he was in truth
+as accomplished a classical scholar as he claimed to be I do not know;
+he has left few positive documents to tell us. But I should think that
+he was, for he has all the characteristics of a scholar of the best and
+rarest kind--the scholar who is exact as to language without failing to
+comprehend literature, and competent in literature without being
+slipshod as to language. His historical insight, of which the famous
+_Cæsars_ is the best example, was, though sometimes coloured by his
+fancy, and at other times distorted by a slight tendency to
+_supercherie_ as in _The Tartars_ and _The Spanish Nun_, wonderfully
+powerful and acute. He was not exactly as Southey was, "omnilegent"; but
+in his own departments, and they were numerous, he went farther below
+the surface and connected his readings together better than Southey did.
+Of the two classes of severer study to which he specially addicted
+himself, his political economy suffered perhaps a little, acute as his
+views in it often are, from the fact that in his time it was practically
+a new study, and that he had neither sufficient facts nor sufficient
+literature to go upon. In metaphysics, to which he gave himself up for
+years, and in which he seems really to have known whatever there was to
+know, I fear that the opium fiend cheated the world of something like
+masterpieces. Only three men during De Quincey's lifetime had anything
+like his powers in this department. Of these three men, Sir William
+Hamilton either could not or would not write English. Ferrier could and
+did write English; but he could not, as De Quincey could, throw upon
+philosophy the play of literary and miscellaneous illustration which of
+all the sciences it most requires, and which all its really supreme
+exponents have been able to give it. Mansel could do both these things;
+but he was somewhat indolent, and had many avocations. De Quincey could
+write perfect English, he had every resource of illustration and relief
+at command, he was in his way as "brazen-bowelled" at work as he was
+"golden-mouthed" at expression, and he had ample leisure. But the
+inability to undertake sustained labour, which he himself recognises as
+the one unquestionable curse of opium, deprived us of an English
+philosopher who would have stood as far above Kant in exoteric graces,
+as he would have stood above Bacon in esoteric value. It was not
+entirely De Quincey's fault. It seems to be generally recognised now
+that whatever occasional excesses he may have committed, opium was
+really required in his case, and gave us what we have as much as it took
+away what we have not. But if any one chose to write in the antique
+style a debate between Philosophy, Tar-water, and Laudanum, it would be
+almost enough to put in the mouth of Philosophy, "This gave me Berkeley
+and that deprived me of De Quincey."
+
+De Quincey is, however, first of all a writer of ornate English, which
+was never, with him, a mere cover to bare thought. Overpraise and
+mispraise him as anybody may, he cannot be overpraised for this. Mistake
+as he chose to do, and as others have chosen to do, the relative value
+of his gift, the absolute value of it is unmistakable. What other
+Englishman, from Sir Thomas Browne downwards, has written a sentence
+surpassing in melody that on Our Lady of Sighs: "And her eyes, if they
+were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor subtle; no man could read
+their story; they would be found filled with perishing dreams and with
+wrecks of forgotten delirium"? Compare that with the masterpieces of
+some later practitioners. There are no out-of-the-way words; there is no
+needless expense of adjectives; the sense is quite adequate to the
+sound; the sound is only what is required as accompaniment to the sense.
+And though I do not know that in a single instance of equal length--even
+in the still more famous, and as a whole justly more famous, _tour de
+force_ on Our Lady of Darkness--De Quincey ever quite equalled the
+combined simplicity and majesty of this phrase, he has constantly come
+close to it. The _Suspiria_ are full of such passages--there are even
+some who prefer _Savannah la Mar_ to the _Ladies of Sorrow_. Beautiful
+as it is I do not, because the accursed superfluous adjective appears
+there. The famous passages of the _Confessions_ are in every one's
+memory; and so I suppose is the _Vision of Sudden Death_. Many passages
+in _The Cæsars_, though somewhat less florid, are hardly less good; and
+the close of _Joan of Arc_ is as famous as the most ambitious attempts
+of the _Confessions_ and the _Mail Coach_. Moreover, in all the sixteen
+volumes, specimens of the same kind may be found here and there,
+alternating with very different matter; so much so, that it has no doubt
+often occurred to readers that the author's occasional divergence into
+questionable quips and cranks is a deliberate attempt to set off his
+rhetoric, as dramatists of the noblest school have often set off their
+tragedy, with comedy, if not with farce. That such a principle would
+imply confusion of the study and the stage is arguable enough, but it
+does not follow that it was not present. At any rate the contrast,
+deliberate or not, is very strong indeed in De Quincey--stronger than in
+any other prose author except his friend, and pupil rather than master,
+Wilson.
+
+The great advantage that De Quincey has, not only over this friend of
+his but over all practitioners of the ornate style in this century, lies
+in his sureness of hand in the first place, and secondly in the
+comparative frugality of means which perhaps is an inseparable
+accompaniment of sureness of hand. To mention living persons would be
+invidious; but Wilson and Landor are within the most scrupulous critic's
+right of comparison. All three were contemporaries; all three were
+Oxford men--Landor about ten years senior to the other two--and all
+three in their different ways set themselves deliberately to reverse the
+practice of English prose for nearly a century and a half. They did
+great things, but De Quincey did, I think, the greatest and certainly
+the most classical in the proper sense, for all Landor's superior air of
+Hellenism. Voluble as De Quincey often is, he seems always to have felt
+that when you are in your altitudes it is well not to stay there too
+long. And his flights, while they are far more uniformly high than
+Wilson's, which alternately soar and drag, are much more merciful in
+regard of length than Landor's, as well as for the most part much more
+closely connected with the sense of his subjects. There is scarcely one
+of the _Imaginary Conversations_ which would not be the better for very
+considerable thinning, while, with the exception perhaps of _The English
+Mail Coach_, De Quincey's surplusage, obvious enough in many cases, is
+scarcely ever found in his most elaborate and ornate passages. The total
+amount of such passages in the _Confessions_ is by no means large, and
+the more ambitious parts of the _Suspiria_ do not much exceed a dozen
+pages. De Quincey was certainly justified by his own practice in
+adopting and urging as he did the distinction, due, he says, to
+Wordsworth, between the common and erroneous idea of style as the
+_dress_ of thought, and the true definition of it as the _incarnation_
+of thought. The most wizened of coxcombs may spend days and years in
+dressing up his meagre and ugly carcass; but few are the sons of men who
+have sufficient thought to provide the soul of any considerable series
+of avatars. De Quincey had; and therefore, though the manner (with
+certain exceptions heretofore taken) in him is always worth attention,
+it never need or should divert attention from the matter. And thus he
+was not driven to make a little thought do tyrannous duty as lay-figure
+for an infinite amount of dress, or to hang out frippery on a
+clothes-line with not so much as a lay-figure inside it. Even when he is
+most conspicuously "fighting a prize," there is always solid stuff in
+him.
+
+Few indeed are the writers of whom so much can be said, and fewer still
+the miscellaneous writers, among whom De Quincey must be classed. On
+almost any subject that interested him--and the number of such subjects
+was astonishing, curious as are the gaps between the different groups of
+them--what he has to say is pretty sure, even if it be the wildest
+paradox in appearance, to be worth attending to. And in regard to most
+things that he has to say, the reader may be pretty sure also that he
+will not find them better said elsewhere. It has sometimes been
+complained by students, both of De Quincey the man and of De Quincey the
+writer, that there is something not exactly human in him. There is
+certainly much in him of the dæmonic, to use a word which was a very
+good word and really required in the language, and which ought not to be
+exiled because it has been foolishly abused. Sometimes, as has also been
+complained, the demon is a mere familiar with the tricksiness of Puck
+rather than the lightness of Ariel. But far oftener he is a more potent
+spirit than any Robin Goodfellow, and as powerful as Ariel and Ariel's
+master. Trust him wholly you may not; a characteristic often noted in
+intelligences that are neither exactly human, nor exactly diabolic, nor
+exactly divine. But he will do great things for you, and a little wit
+and courage on your part will prevent his doing anything serious against
+you. To him, with much greater justice than to Hogg, might Wilson have
+applied the nickname of Brownie, which he was so fond of bestowing upon
+the author of "Kilmeny." He will do solid work, conjure up a concert of
+aerial music, play a shrewd trick now and then, and all this with a
+curious air of irresponsibility and of remoteness of nature. In ancient
+days when kings played experiments to ascertain the universal or
+original language, some monarch might have been tempted to take a very
+clever child, interest him so far as possible in nothing but books and
+opium, and see whether he would turn out anything like De Quincey. But
+it is in the highest degree improbable that he would. Therefore let us
+rejoice, though according to the precepts of wisdom and not too
+indiscriminately, in our De Quincey as we once, and probably once for
+all, received him.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[16] See Appendix A--De Quincey.
+
+[17] _The Collected Writings of Thomas de Quincey_; edited by David
+Masson. In fourteen volumes; Edinburgh, 1889-90.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+LOCKHART
+
+
+In every age there are certain writers who seem to miss their due meed
+of fame, and this is most naturally and unavoidably the case in ages
+which see a great deal of what may be called occasional literature.
+There is, as it seems to me, a special example of this general
+proposition in the present century, and that example is the writer whose
+name stands at the head of this chapter. No one, perhaps, who speaks
+with any competence either of knowledge or judgment, would say that
+Lockhart made an inconsiderable figure in English literature. He wrote
+what some men consider the best biography on a large scale, and what
+almost every one considers the second best biography on a large scale,
+in English. His _Spanish Ballads_ are admitted, by those who know the
+originals, to have done them almost more than justice; and by those who
+do not know those originals, to be charming in themselves. His novels,
+if not masterpieces, have kept the field better than most: I saw a very
+badly printed and flaringly-covered copy of _Reginald Dalton_ for sale
+at the bookstall at Victoria Station the day before writing these words.
+He was a pillar of the _Quarterly_, of _Blackwood_, of _Fraser_, at a
+time when quarterly and monthly magazines played a greater part in
+literature than they have played since or are likely to play again. He
+edited one of these periodicals for thirty years. "Nobody," as Mr.
+Browning has it, "calls him a dunce." Yet there is no collected edition
+of his works; his sober, sound, scholarly, admirably witty, and, with
+some very few exceptions, admirably catholic literary criticism, is
+rarely quoted; and to add to this, there is a curious prepossession
+against him, which, though nearly a generation has passed since his
+death, has by no means disappeared.[18] Some years ago, in a periodical
+where I was, for the most part, allowed to say exactly what I liked in
+matters literary, I found a sentence laudatory of Lockhart, from the
+purely literary point of view, omitted between proof and publication. It
+so happened that the editor of this periodical could not even have known
+Lockhart personally, or have been offended by his management of the
+_Quarterly_, much less by his early _fredaines_ in _Blackwood_ and
+_Fraser_. It was this circumstance that first suggested to me the notion
+of trying to supply something like a criticism of this remarkable
+critic, which nobody has yet (1884) done, and which seems worth doing.
+For while the work of many of Lockhart's contemporaries, famous at the
+time, distinctly loses by re-reading, his for the most part does not;
+and it happens to display exactly the characteristics which are most
+wanting in criticism, biographical and literary, at the present day. If
+any one at the outset desires a definition, or at least an enumeration
+of those characteristics, I should say that they are sobriety of style
+and reserve of feeling, coupled with delicacy of intellectual
+appreciation and æsthetic sympathy, a strong and firm creed in matters
+political and literary, not excluding that catholicity of judgment which
+men of strong belief frequently lack, and, above all, the faculty of
+writing like a gentleman without writing like a mere gentleman. No one
+can charge Lockhart with dilettantism: no one certainly can charge him
+with feebleness of intellect, or insufficient equipment of culture, or
+lack of humour and wit.
+
+His life was, except for the domestic misfortunes which marked its
+close, by no means eventful; and the present writer, if he had access to
+any special sources of information (which he has not), would abstain
+very carefully from using them. John Gibson Lockhart was born at the
+Manse of Cambusnethan on 14th July 1794, went to school early, was
+matriculated at Glasgow at twelve years old, transferred himself by
+means of a Snell exhibition to Balliol at fifteen, and took a first
+class in 1813. They said he caricatured the examiners: this was,
+perhaps, not the unparalleled audacity which admiring commentators have
+described it as being. Very many very odd things have been done in the
+Schools. But if there was nothing extraordinary in his Oxford life
+except what was, even for those days, the early age at which he began
+it, his next step was something out of the common; for he went to
+Germany, was introduced to Goethe, and spent some time there. An odd
+coincidence in the literary history of the nineteenth century is that
+both Lockhart and Quinet practically began literature by translating a
+German book, and that both had the remarkably good luck to find
+publishers who paid them beforehand. There are few such publishers now.
+Lockhart's book was Schlegel's _Lectures on History_, and his publisher
+was Mr. Blackwood. Then he came back to Scotland and to Edinburgh, and
+was called to the bar, and "swept the outer house with his gown," after
+the fashion admirably described in _Peter's Letters_, and referred to by
+Scott in not the least delightful though one of the most melancholy of
+his works, the Introduction to the _Chronicles of the Canongate_.
+Lockhart, one of whose distinguishing characteristics throughout life
+was shyness and reserve, was no speaker. Indeed, as he happily enough
+remarked in reply to the toast of his health at the farewell dinner
+given to celebrate his removal to London, "I cannot speak; if I could, I
+should not have left you." But if he could not speak he could write,
+and the establishment of _Blackwood's Magazine_, after its first
+abortive numbers, gave him scope. "The scorpion which delighteth to
+sting the faces of men," as he or Wilson describes himself in the
+_Chaldee Manuscript_ (for the passage is beyond Hogg's part), certainly
+justified the description. As to this famous _Manuscript_, the late
+Professor Ferrier undoubtedly made a blunder (in the same key as those
+that he made in describing the _Noctes_, in company with which he
+reprinted it) as "in its way as good as _The Battle of the Books_." _The
+Battle of the Books_, full of mistakes as it is, is literature, and the
+_Chaldee Manuscript_ is only capital journalism. But it is capital
+journalism; and the exuberance of its wit, if it be only wit of the
+undergraduate kind (and Lockhart at least was still but an undergraduate
+in years), is refreshing enough. The dreadful manner in which it
+fluttered the dovecotes of Edinburgh Whiggism need not be further
+commented on, till Lockhart's next work (this time an almost though not
+quite independent one) has been noticed. This was _Peter's Letters to
+his Kinsfolk_, an elaborate book, half lampoon, half mystification,
+which appeared in 1819. This book, which derived its title from Scott's
+account of his journey to Paris, and in its plan followed to some extent
+_Humphrey Clinker_, is one of the most careful examples of literary
+hoaxing to be found. It purported to be the work of a certain Dr. Peter
+Morris, a Welshman, and it is hardly necessary to say that there was no
+such person. It had a handsome frontispiece depicting this Peter Morris,
+and displaying not, like the portrait in Southey's _Doctor_, the occiput
+merely, but the full face and features. This portrait was described, and
+as far as that went it seems truly described, as "an interesting example
+of a new style of engraving by Lizars." Mr. Bates, who probably knows,
+says that there was no first edition, but that it was published with
+"second edition" on the title-page. My copy has the same date, 1819, but
+is styled the _third_ edition, and has a postscript commenting on the
+to-do the book made. However all this may be, it is a very handsome
+book, excellently printed and containing capital portraits and
+vignettes, while the matter is worthy of the get-up. The descriptions of
+the Outer-House, of Craigcrook and its high jinks, of Abbotsford, of the
+finding of "Ambrose's," of the manufacture of Glasgow punch, and of many
+other things, are admirable; and there is a charming sketch of Oxford
+undergraduate life, less exaggerated than that in _Reginald Dalton_,
+probably because the subject was fresher in the author's memory.
+
+Lockhart modestly speaks of this book in his _Life of Scott_ as one that
+"none but a very young and thoughtless person would have written." It
+may safely be said that no one but a very clever person, whether young
+or old, could have written it, though it is too long and has occasional
+faults of a specially youthful kind. But it made, coming as it did upon
+the heels of the _Chaldee Manuscript_, a terrible commotion in
+Edinburgh. The impartial observer of men and things may, indeed, have
+noticed in the records of the ages, that a libelled Liberal is the man
+in all the world who utters the loudest cries. The examples of the
+Reformers, and of the eighteenth-century _Philosophes_, are notorious
+and hackneyed; but I can supply (without, I trust, violating the
+sanctity of private life) a fresh and pleasing example. Once upon a
+time, a person whom we shall call A. paid a visit to a person whom we
+shall call B. "How sad," said A., "are those personal attacks of the
+---- on Mr. Gladstone."--"Personality," said B., "is always disgusting;
+and I am very sorry to hear that the ---- has followed the bad example
+of the personal attacks on Lord Beaconsfield."--"Oh! but," quoth A.,
+"that was _quite_ a different thing." Now B. went out to dinner that
+night, and sitting next to a distinguished Liberal member of Parliament,
+told him this tale, expecting that he would laugh. "Ah! yes," said he
+with much gravity, "it is _very_ different, you know."
+
+In the same way the good Whig folk of Edinburgh regarded it as very
+different that the _Edinburgh Review_ should scoff at Tories, and that
+_Blackwood_ and _Peter_ should scoff at Whigs. The scorpion which
+delighted to sting the faces of men, probably at this time founded a
+reputation which has stuck to him for more than seventy years after Dr.
+Peter Morris drove his shandrydan through Scotland. Sir Walter (then
+Mr.) Scott held wisely aloof from the extremely exuberant Toryism of
+_Blackwood_, and, indeed, had had some quarrels with its publisher and
+virtual editor. But he could not fail to be introduced to a man whose
+tastes and principles were so closely allied to his own. A year after
+the appearance of _Peter's Letters_, Lockhart married, on 29th April
+1820 (a perilous approximation to the unlucky month of May), Sophia
+Scott, the Duke of Buccleuch's "Little Jacobite," the most like her
+father of all his children. Every reader of the _Life_ knows the
+delightful pictures, enough for interest and not enough for vulgar
+obtrusion, given by Lockhart of life at Chiefswood, the cottage near
+Abbotsford which he and his wife inhabited for nearly six years.
+
+They were very busy years for Lockhart. He was still active in
+contributing to _Blackwood_; he wrote all his four novels, and he
+published the _Spanish Ballads_. _Valerius_ and _Adam Blair_ appeared in
+1821, _Reginald Dalton_ and the _Ballads_ in 1823, _Matthew Wald_ in
+1824.
+
+The novels, though containing much that is very remarkable, are not his
+strongest work; indeed, any critic who speaks with knowledge must admit
+that Lockhart had every faculty for writing novels, except the faculty
+of novel-writing. _Valerius_, a classical story of the visit of a
+Roman-Briton to Rome, and the persecution of the Christians in the days
+of Trajan, is, like everything of its author's, admirably written, but,
+like every classical novel without exception, save only _Hypatia_ (which
+makes its interests and its personages daringly modern), it somehow
+rings false and faint, though not, perhaps, so faint or so false as most
+of its fellows. _Adam Blair_, the story of the sudden succumbing to
+natural temptation of a pious minister of the kirk, is unquestionably
+Lockhart's masterpiece in this kind. It is full of passion, full of
+force, and the characters of Charlotte Campbell and Adam Blair himself
+are perfectly conceived. But the story-gift is still wanting. The reader
+finds himself outside: wondering why the people do these things, and
+whether in real life they would have done them, instead of following the
+story with absorption, and asking himself no questions at all. The same,
+in a different way, is the case with Lockhart's longest book, _Reginald
+Dalton_; and this has the additional disadvantage that neither hero nor
+heroine are much more than lay-figures, while in _Adam Blair_ both are
+flesh and blood. The Oxford scenes are amusing but exaggerated--the
+obvious work of a man who supplies the defects of a ten years' memory by
+deepening the strokes where he does remember. _Matthew Wald_, which is a
+novel of madness, has excellent passages, but is conventional and wooden
+as a whole. Nothing was more natural than that Lockhart, with the
+example of Scott immediately before him, should try novel-writing; not
+many things are more indicative of his literary ability than that,
+after a bare three years' practice, he left a field which certainly was
+not his.
+
+In the early autumn of 1825, just before the great collapse of his
+affairs, Scott went to Ireland with Lockhart in his company. But very
+early in the following year, before the collapse was decided, Lockhart
+and his family moved to London, on his appointment as editor of the
+_Quarterly_, in succession to Gifford. Probably there never was a better
+appointment of the kind. Lockhart was a born critic: he had both the
+faculty and the will to work up the papers of his contributors to the
+proper level; he was firm and decided in his literary and political
+views, without going to the extreme Giffordian acerbity in both; and his
+intelligence and erudition were very wide. "He could write," says a
+phrase in some article I have somewhere seen quoted, "on any subject
+from poetry to dry-rot;" and there is no doubt that an editor, if he
+cannot exactly write on any subject from poetry to dry-rot, should be
+able to take an interest in any subject between and, if necessary,
+beyond those poles. Otherwise he has the choice of two undesirables;
+either he frowns unduly on the dry-rot articles, which probably interest
+large sections of the public (itself very subject to dry-rot), or he
+lets the dry-rot contributor inflict his hobby, without mercy and
+unedited, on a reluctant audience. But Lockhart, though he is said (for
+his contributions are not, as far as I know, anywhere exactly
+indicated) to have contributed fully a hundred articles to the
+_Quarterly_, that is to say one to nearly every number during the
+twenty-eight years of his editorship, by no means confined himself to
+this work. It was, indeed, during its progress that he composed not
+merely the _Life of Napoleon_, which was little more than an abridgment,
+though a very clever abridgment, of Scott's book, but the _Lives_ of
+Burns and of Scott himself. Before, however, dealing with these, his
+_Spanish Ballads_ and other poetical work may be conveniently disposed
+of.
+
+Lockhart's verse is in the same scattered condition as his prose; but it
+is evident that he had very considerable poetical faculty. The charming
+piece, "When youthful hope is fled," attributed to him on Mrs. Norton's
+authority; the well-known "Captain Paton's Lament," which has been
+republished in the _Tales from Blackwood_; and the mono-rhymed epitaph
+on "Bright broken Maginn," in which some wiseacres have seen ill-nature,
+but which really is a masterpiece of humorous pathos, are all in very
+different styles, and are all excellent each in its style. But these
+things are mere waifs, separated from each other in widely different
+publications; and until they are put together no general impression of
+the author's poetical talent, except a vaguely favourable one, can be
+derived from them. The _Spanish Ballads_ form something like a
+substantive work, and one of nearly as great merit as is possible to
+poetical translations of poetry. I believe opinions differ as to their
+fidelity to the original. Here and there, it is said, the author has
+exchanged a vivid and characteristic touch for a conventional and feeble
+one. Thus, my friend Mr. Hannay points out to me that in the original of
+"The Lord of Butrago" the reason given by Montanez for not accompanying
+the King's flight is not the somewhat _fade_ one that
+
+    Castile's proud dames shall never point the finger of disdain,
+
+but the nobler argument, showing the best side of feudal sentiment, that
+the widows of his tenants shall never say that he fled and left their
+husbands to fight and fall. Lockhart's master, Sir Walter, would
+certainly not have missed this touch, and it is odd that Lockhart
+himself did. But such things will happen to translators. On the other
+hand, it is, I believe, admitted (and the same very capable authority in
+Spanish is my warranty) that on the whole the originals have rather
+gained than lost; and certainly no one can fail to enjoy the _Ballads_
+as they stand in English. The "Wandering Knight's Song" has always
+seemed to me a gem without flaw, especially the last stanza. Few men,
+again, manage the long "fourteener" with middle rhyme better than
+Lockhart, though he is less happy with the anapæst, and has not fully
+mastered the very difficult trochaic measure of "The Death of Don
+Pedro." In "The Count Arnaldos," wherein, indeed, the subject lends
+itself better to that cadence, the result is more satisfactory. The
+merits, however, of these _Ballads_ are not technical merely, or rather,
+the technical merits are well subordinated to the production of the
+general effect. About the nature of that effect much ink has been shed.
+It is produced equally by Greek hexameters, by old French assonanced
+_tirades_, by English "eights and sixes," and by not a few other
+measures. But in itself it is more or less the same--the stirring of the
+blood as by the sound of a trumpet, or else the melting of the mood into
+or close to tears. The ballad effect is thus the simplest and most
+primitive of all poetical effects; it is Lockhart's merit that he seldom
+fails to produce it. The simplicity and spontaneity of his verse may, to
+some people, be surprising in a writer so thoroughly and intensely
+literary; but Lockhart's character was as complex as his verse is
+simple, and the verse itself is not the least valuable guide to it.
+
+It has been said that his removal to London and his responsible office
+by no means reduced his general literary activity. Whether he continued
+to contribute to _Blackwood_ I am not sure; some phrases in the _Noctes_
+seem to argue the contrary. But he not only, as has been said, wrote for
+the _Quarterly_ assiduously, but after a short time joined the new
+venture of _Fraser_, and showed in that rollicking periodical that the
+sting of the "scorpion" had by no means been extracted. He produced,
+moreover, in 1828, his _Life of Burns_, and in 1836-37 his _Life of
+Scott_. These, with the sketch of Theodore Hook written for the
+_Quarterly_ in 1843, and separately published later, make three very
+remarkable examples of literary biography on very different scales,
+dealing with very different subjects, and, by comparison of their
+uniform excellence, showing that the author had an almost unique genius
+for this kind of composition. The _Life of Scott_ fills seven capacious
+volumes; the _Life of Burns_ goes easily into one; the _Life of Hook_
+does not reach a hundred smallish pages. But they are all equally
+well-proportioned in themselves and to their subjects; they all exhibit
+the same complete grasp of the secret of biography; and they all have
+the peculiarity of being full of facts without presenting an undigested
+appearance. They thus stand at an equal distance from biography of the
+fashion of the old academic _Eloge_ of the last century, which makes an
+elegant discourse about a man, but either deliberately or by accident
+gives precise information about hardly any of the facts of the man's
+life; and from modern biography, which tumbles upon the devoted reader a
+cataract of letters, documents, and facts of all sorts, uncombined and
+undigested by any exercise of narrative or critical skill on the part of
+the author. Lockhart's biographies, therefore, belong equally (to borrow
+De Quincey's useful, though, as far as terminology goes, not very happy
+distinction) to the literature of knowledge and the literature of
+power. They are storehouses of information; but they are, at the same
+time, works of art, and of very great art. The earliest of the three,
+the _Life of Burns_, is to this day by far the best book on the subject;
+indeed, with its few errors and defects of fact corrected and
+supplemented as they have been by the late Mr. Douglas, it makes all
+other Lives quite superfluous. Yet it was much more difficult,
+especially for a Scotchman, to write a good book about Burns then than
+now; though I am told that, for a Scotchman, there is still a
+considerable difficulty in the matter. Lockhart was familiar with
+Edinburgh society--indeed, he had long formed a part of it--and
+Edinburgh society was still, when he wrote, very sore at the charge of
+having by turns patronised and neglected Burns. Lockhart was a decided
+Tory, and Burns, during the later part of his life at any rate, had
+permitted himself manifestations of political opinion which Whigs
+themselves admitted to be imprudent freaks, and which even a
+good-natured Tory might be excused for regarding as something very much
+worse. But the biographer's treatment of both these subjects is
+perfectly tolerant, judicious, and fair, and the same may be said of his
+whole account of Burns. Indeed, the main characteristic of Lockhart's
+criticism, a robust and quiet sanity, fitted him admirably for the task
+of biography. He is never in extremes, and he never avoids extremes by
+the common expedient of see-sawing between two sides, two parties, or
+two views of a man's character. He holds aloof equally from _engouement_
+and from depreciation, and if, as a necessary consequence, he failed,
+and fails, to please fanatics on either side, he cannot fail to please
+those who know what criticism really means.
+
+These good qualities were shown even to better advantage in a pleasanter
+but, at the same time, far more difficult task, the famous _Life of
+Scott_. The extraordinary interest of the subject, and the fashion, no
+less skilful than modest, in which the biographer keeps himself in the
+background, and seems constantly to be merely editing Scott's words,
+have perhaps obscured the literary value of the book to some readers. Of
+the perpetual comparison with Boswell, it may be said, once for all,
+that it is a comparison of matter merely; and that from the properly
+literary point of view, the point of view of workmanship and form, it
+does not exist. Perhaps the most surprising thing is that, even in
+moments of personal irritation, any one should have been found to accuse
+Lockhart of softening Scott's faults. The other charge, of malice to
+Scott, is indeed more extraordinary still in a certain way; but, being
+merely imbecile, it need not be taken into account. A delightful
+document informs us that, in the opinion of the Hon. Charles Sumner,
+Fenimore Cooper (who, stung by some references to him in the book,
+attacked it) administered "a proper castigation to the vulgar minds of
+Scott and Lockhart." This is a jest so pleasing that it almost puts one
+in good temper with the whole affair. But, in fact, Lockhart,
+considering his relationship to Scott, and considering Scott's
+greatness, could hardly have spoken more plainly as to the grave fault
+of judgment which made a man of letters and a member of a learned
+profession mix himself up secretly, and almost clandestinely, with
+commercial speculations. On this point the biographer does not attempt
+to mince matters; and on no other point was it necessary for him to be
+equally candid, for this, grave as it is, is almost the only fault to be
+found with Scott's character. This candour, however, is only one of the
+merits of the book. The wonderfully skilful arrangement of so vast and
+heterogeneous a mass of materials, the way in which the writer's own
+work and his quoted matter dovetail into one another, the completeness
+of the picture given of Scott's character and life, have never been
+equalled in any similar book. Not a few minor touches, moreover, which
+are very apt to escape notice, enhance its merit. Lockhart was a man of
+all men least given to wear his heart upon his sleeve, yet no one has
+dealt with such pitiful subjects as his later volumes involve, at once
+with such total absence of "gush" and with such noble and pathetic
+appreciation. For Scott's misfortunes were by no means the only matters
+which touched him nearly, in and in connection with the chronicle. The
+constant illness and sufferings of his own child form part of it; his
+wife died during its composition and publication, and all these things
+are mentioned with as little parade of stoicism as of sentiment. I do
+not think that, as an example of absolute and perfect good taste, the
+account of Scott's death can be surpassed in literature. The same
+quality exhibits itself in another matter. No biographer can be less
+anxious to display his own personality than Lockhart; and though for six
+years he was a constant, and for much longer an occasional, spectator of
+the events he describes, he never introduces himself except when it is
+necessary. Yet, on the other hand, when Scott himself makes
+complimentary references to him (as when he speaks of his party "having
+Lockhart to say clever things"), he neither omits the passage nor stoops
+to the missish _minauderie_, too common in such cases, of translating
+"spare my blushes" into some kind of annotation. Lockhart will not talk
+about Lockhart; but if others, whom the public likes to hear, talk about
+him, Lockhart does not put his fan before his face.
+
+This admirable book, however, is both well enough known (if not so well
+known as it deserves) and large enough to make it both unnecessary and
+impossible to criticise it at length here. The third work noticed
+above, the sketch of the life of Theodore Hook, though it has been
+reprinted more than once, and is still, I believe, kept in print and on
+sale, is probably less familiar to most readers. It is, however, almost
+as striking an example, though of course an example in miniature only,
+of Lockhart's aptitude for the great and difficult art of literary
+biography as either of the two books just mentioned. Here the difficulty
+was of a different kind. A great many people liked Theodore Hook, but it
+was nearly impossible for any one to respect him; yet it was quite
+impossible for Lockhart, a political sympathiser and a personal friend,
+to treat him harshly in an obituary notice. There was no danger of his
+setting down aught in malice; but there might be thought to be a
+considerable danger of over-extenuation. The danger was the greater,
+inasmuch as Lockhart himself had certainly not escaped, and had perhaps
+to some extent deserved, one of Hook's reproaches. No man questioned his
+integrity; he was not a reckless spendthrift; he was not given to
+excesses in living, or to hanging about great houses; nor was he
+careless of moral and social rules. But the scorpion which had delighted
+to sting the faces of men might have had some awkwardness in dealing
+with the editor of _John Bull_. The result, however, victoriously
+surmounts all difficulties without evading one. Nothing that is the
+truth about Hook is omitted, or even blinked; and from reading Lockhart
+alone, any intelligent reader might know the worst that is to be said
+about him. Neither are any of his faults, in the unfair sense,
+extenuated. His malicious and vulgar practical jokes; his carelessness
+at Mauritius; the worse than carelessness which allowed him to shirk,
+when he had ample means of discharging it by degrees, a debt which he
+acknowledged that he justly owed; the folly and vanity which led him to
+waste his time, his wit, and his money in playing the hanger-on at
+country houses and town dinner-tables; his hard living, and the laxity
+which induced him not merely to form irregular connections, but
+prevented him from taking the only step which could, in some measure,
+repair his fault, are all fairly put, and blamed frankly. Even in that
+more delicate matter of the personal journalism, Lockhart's procedure is
+as ingenuous as it is ingenious; and the passage of the sketch which
+deals with "the blazing audacity of invective, the curious delicacy of
+persiflage, the strong caustic satire" (expressions, by the way, which
+suit Lockhart himself much better than Hook, though Lockhart had not
+Hook's broad humour), in fact, admits that the application of these
+things was not justifiable, nor to be justified. Yet with all this, the
+impression left by the sketch is distinctly favourable on the whole,
+which, in the circumstances, must be admitted to be a triumph of
+advocacy obtained not at the expense of truth, but by the art of the
+advocate in making the best of it.
+
+The facts of Lockhart's life between his removal to London and his death
+may be rapidly summarised, the purpose of this notice being rather
+critical than biographical. He had hardly settled in town when, as he
+himself tells, he had to attempt, fruitlessly enough, the task of
+mediator in the financial disasters of Constable and Scott; and his own
+share of domestic troubles began early. His eldest son, after repeated
+escapes, died in 1831; Scott followed shortly; Miss Anne Scott, after
+her father's death, came in broken health to Lockhart's house, and died
+there only a year later; and in the spring of 1837 his wife likewise
+died. Then Fortune let him alone for a little, to return in no better
+humour some years later.
+
+It is, however, from the early "thirties" that one of the best known
+memorials of Lockhart dates; that is to say, the portrait, or rather the
+two portraits, in the Fraser Gallery. In the general group of the
+Fraserians he sits between Fraser himself and Theodore Hook, with the
+diminutive figure of Crofton Croker half intercepted beyond him; and his
+image forms the third plate in Mr. Bates's republication of the gallery.
+It is said to be the most faithful of the whole series, and it is
+certainly the handsomest, giving even a more flattering representation
+than the full-face portrait by Pickersgill which serves as frontispiece
+to the modern editions of the _Ballads_. In this latter the curious
+towzled mop of hair, in which our fathers delighted, rather mars the
+effect; while in Maclise's sketch (which is in profile) it is less
+obtrusive. In this latter, too, there is clearly perceivable what the
+Shepherd in the _Noctes_ calls "a sort of laugh aboot the screwed-up
+mouth of him that fules ca'd no canny, for they couldna thole the
+meaning o't." There is not much doubt that Lockhart aided and abetted
+Maginn in much of the mischief that distinguished the early days of
+_Fraser_, though his fastidious taste is never likely to have stooped to
+the coarseness which was too natural to Maginn. It is believed that to
+him is due the wicked wresting of Alaric Watts' second initial into
+"Attila," which gave the victim so much grief, and he probably did many
+other things of the same kind. But Lockhart was never vulgar, and
+_Fraser_ in those days very often was.
+
+In 1843 Lockhart received his first and last piece of political
+preferment, being appointed, says one of the authorities before me,
+Chancellor of the Duchy of Cornwall, and (says another) Chancellor of
+the Duchy of Lancaster. Such are biographers; but the matter is not of
+the slightest importance, though I do not myself quite see how it could
+have been Lancaster. A third and more trustworthy writer gives the post
+as "Auditorship" of the Duchy of Lancaster, which is possible enough.
+
+In 1847, the death of Sir Walter Scott's last surviving son brought the
+title and estate to Lockhart's son Walter, but he died in 1853.
+Lockhart's only other child had married Mr. Hope--called, after his
+brother-in-law's death, Mr. Hope Scott, of whom an elaborate biography
+has been published. Little in it concerns Lockhart, but the admirable
+letter which he wrote to Mr. Hope on his conversion to the Roman Church.
+This step, followed as it was by Mrs. Hope, could not but be, and in
+this letter is delicately hinted to be, no small grief to Lockhart, who
+saw Abbotsford fall under influences for which certainly neither he nor
+its founder had any respect. His repeated domestic losses, and many
+years of constant work and excitement, appear to have told on him, and
+very shortly after his son's death in April 1853 he resigned the
+editorship of the _Quarterly_. He then visited Italy, a visit from
+which, if he had been a superstitious man, the ominous precedent of
+Scott might have deterred him. His journey did him no good, and he died
+at Abbotsford on the 25th of November. December, says another authority,
+for so it is that history gets written, even in thirty years.
+
+The comparatively brief notices which are all that have been published
+about Lockhart, uniformly mention the unpopularity (to use a mild word)
+which pursued him, and which, as I have remarked, does not seem to have
+exhausted itself even yet. It is not very difficult to account for the
+origin of this; and the neglect to supply any collection of his work,
+and any authoritative account of his life and character, will quite
+explain its continuance. In the first place, Lockhart was well known as
+a most sarcastic writer; in the second, he was for nearly a lifetime
+editor of one of the chief organs of party politics and literary
+criticism in England. He might have survived the _Chaldee Manuscript_,
+and _Peter's Letters_, and the lampoons in _Fraser_: he might even have
+got the better of the youthful imprudence which led him to fix upon
+himself a description which was sure to be used and abused against him
+by the "fules," if he had not succeeded to the chair of the _Quarterly_.
+Individual and, to a great extent, anonymous indulgence of the luxury of
+scorn never gave any man a very bad character, even if he were, as
+Lockhart was, personally shy and reserved, unable to make up for written
+sarcasm with verbal flummery, and, in virtue of an incapacity for
+gushing, deprived of the easiest and, by public personages, most
+commonly practised means of proving that a man has "a good heart after
+all." But when he complicated his sins by editing the _Quarterly_ at a
+time when everybody attacked everybody else in exactly such terms as
+pleased them, the sins of his youth were pretty sure to be visited on
+him. In the first place, there was the great army of the criticised, who
+always consider that the editor of the paper which dissects them is
+really responsible. The luckless Harriet Martineau, who, if I remember
+rightly, gives in her autobiography a lurid picture of Lockhart "going
+down at night to the printer's" and inserting dreadful things about her,
+and who, I believe, took the feminine plan of revenging herself in an
+obituary article, was only one of a great multitude.
+
+Lockhart does not seem to have taken over from Gifford quite such a
+troublesome crew of helpers as Macvey Napier inherited from Jeffrey, and
+he was also free from the monitions of his predecessor. But in Croker he
+had a first lieutenant who could not very well be checked, and who
+(though he, too, has had rather hard measure) had no equal in the art of
+making himself offensive. Besides, those were the days when the famous
+"Scum condensed of Irish bog" lines appeared in a great daily newspaper
+about O'Connell. Imagine the _Times_ addressing Mr. Parnell as "Scum
+condensed of Irish bog," with the other amenities that follow, in this
+year of grace!
+
+But Lockhart had not only his authors, he had his contributors. "A'
+contributors," says the before-quoted Shepherd, in a moment of such
+preternatural wisdom that he must have been "fou," "are in a manner
+fierce." They are--it is the nature and essence of the animal to be so.
+The contributor who is not allowed to contribute is fierce, as a matter
+of course; but not less fierce is the contributor who thinks himself too
+much edited, and the contributor who imperatively insists that his
+article on Chinese metaphysics shall go in at once, and the contributor
+who, being an excellent hand at articles on the currency, wants to be
+allowed to write on dancing; and, in short, as the Shepherd says, all
+contributors. Now it does not appear (for, as I must repeat, I have no
+kind of private information on the subject) that Lockhart was by any
+means an easy-going editor, or one of that kind which allows a certain
+number of privileged writers to send in what they like. We are told in
+many places that he "greatly improved" his contributors' articles; and I
+should say that if there is one thing which drives a contributor to the
+verge of madness, it is to have his articles "greatly improved." A hint
+in the _Noctes_ (and it may be observed that though the references to
+Lockhart in the _Noctes_ are not very numerous, they are valuable, for
+Wilson's friendship seems to have been mixed with a small grain of
+jealousy which preserves them from being commonplace) suggests that his
+friends did not consider him as by any means too ready to accept their
+papers. All this, added to his early character of scoffer at Whig
+dignities, and his position as leader _en titre_ of Tory journalism, was
+quite sufficient to create a reputation partly exaggerated, partly quite
+false, which has endured simply because no trouble has been taken to
+sift and prove it.
+
+The head and front of Lockhart's offending, in a purely literary view,
+seems to be the famous _Quarterly_ article on Lord Tennyson's volume of
+1832. That article is sometimes spoken of as Croker's, but there can be
+no manner of doubt that it is Lockhart's; and, indeed, it is quoted as
+his by Professor Ferrier, who, through Wilson, must have known the
+facts. Now I do not think I yield to any man living in admiration of the
+Laureate, but I am unable to think much the worse, or, indeed, any the
+worse, of Lockhart because of this article. In the first place, it is
+extremely clever, being, perhaps, the very best example of politely
+cruel criticism in existence. In the second, most, if not all, of the
+criticism is perfectly just. If Lord Tennyson himself, at this safe
+distance of time, can think of the famous strawberry story and its
+application without laughing, he must be an extremely sensitive Peer.
+And nobody, I suppose, would now defend the wondrous stanza which was
+paralleled from the _Groves of Blarney_. The fact is that criticism of
+criticism after some time is apt to be doubly unjust. It is wont to
+assume, or rather to imagine, that the critic must have known what the
+author was going to do, as well as what he had actually done; and it is
+wont to forget that the work criticised was very often, as it presented
+itself to the critic, very different from what it is when it presents
+itself to the critic's critic. The best justification of Lockhart's
+verdict on the volume of 1832 is what Lord Tennyson himself has done
+with the volume of 1832. Far more than half the passages objected to
+have since been excised or altered. But there are other excuses. In the
+first place, Mr. Tennyson, as he then was, represented a further
+development of schools of poetry against which the _Quarterly_ had
+always, rightly or wrongly, set its face, and a certain loyalty to the
+principles of his paper is, after all, not the worst fault of a critic.
+In the second, no one can fairly deny that some points in Mr. Tennyson's
+early, if not in his later, manner must have been highly and rightly
+disgustful to a critic who, like Lockhart, was above all things
+masculine and abhorrent of "gush." In the third, it is, unfortunately,
+not given to all critics to admire all styles alike. Let those to whom
+it is given thank God therefor; but let them, at the same time, remember
+that they are as much bound to accept whatever is good in all kinds of
+critics as whatever is good in all kinds of poets.
+
+Now Lockhart, within his own range, and it was for the time a very wide
+one, was certainly not a narrow critic, just as he certainly was not a
+feeble one. In the before-mentioned _Peter's Letters_ (which, with all
+its faults, is one of his best, and particularly one of his most
+spontaneous and characteristic works) the denunciation of the "facetious
+and rejoicing ignorance" which enabled contemporary critics to pooh-pooh
+Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, and Coleridge is excellent. And it must be
+remembered that in 1819, whatever might be the case with Coleridge,
+Wordsworth and Lamb were by no means taken to the hearts of Tories on
+their merits, and that in this very passage _Blackwood_ is condemned not
+less severely than the _Edinburgh_. Another point in which Lockhart made
+a great advance was that he was one of the first (Lamb himself is, in
+England, his only important forerunner) to unite and combine criticism
+of different branches of art. He never has the disgusting technical
+jargon, or the undisciplined fluency, of the mere art critic, any more
+than he has the gabble of the mere connoisseur. But it is constantly
+evident that he has a knowledge of and a feeling for the art of line and
+colour as well as of words. Nothing can be better than the fragments of
+criticism which are interspersed in the Scott book; and if his estimate
+of Hook as a novelist seems exaggerated, it must be remembered, as he
+has himself noted, that Thackeray was, at the time he spoke, nothing
+more than an amusing contributor of remarkably promising trifles to
+magazines, and that, from the appearance of _Waverley_ to that of
+_Pickwick_, no novelist of the first class had made an appearance. It
+is, moreover, characteristic of Lockhart as a critic that he is, as has
+been noted, always manly and robust. He was never false to his own early
+protest against "the banishing from the mind of a reverence for feeling,
+as abstracted from mere questions of immediate and obvious utility." But
+he never allowed that reverence to get the better of him and drag him
+into the deplorable excesses of gush into which, from his day to ours,
+criticism has more and more had a tendency to fall. If he makes no
+parade of definite æsthetic principles, it is clear that throughout he
+had such principles, and that they were principles of a very good kind.
+He had a wide knowledge of foreign literature without any taint of
+"Xenomania," sufficient scholarship (despite the unlucky false quantity
+of _Janua_, which he overlooked) in the older languages, and a thorough
+knowledge and love of English literature. His style is, to me at any
+rate, peculiarly attractive. Contrasted with the more brightly coloured
+and fantastically-shaped styles, of which, in his own day, De Quincey,
+Wilson, Macaulay, and Carlyle set the fashion, it may possibly seem tame
+to those who are not satisfied with proportion in form and harmony in
+tint; it will certainly not seem so to those who are more fortunately
+gifted. Indeed, compared either with Wilson's welter of words, now
+bombastic, now gushing, now horse-playful, or with the endless and
+heartbreaking antitheses of what Brougham ill-naturedly but truly called
+"Tom's snip-snap," it is infinitely preferable. The conclusion of the
+essay on Theodore Hook is not easily surpassable as an example of solid
+polished prose, which is prose, and does not attempt to be a hybrid
+between prose and poetry. The last page of the Tennyson review is
+perfect for quiet humour.
+
+But there is no doubt that though Lockhart was an admirable critic
+merely as such, a poet, or at least a song-writer, of singular ability
+and charm within certain limits, and a master of sharp light raillery
+that never missed its mark and never lumbered on the way, his most
+unique and highest merit is that of biographer. Carlyle, though treating
+Lockhart himself with great politeness, does not allow this, and
+complains that Lockhart's conception of his task was "not very
+elevated." That is what a great many people said of Boswell, whom
+Carlyle thought an almost perfect biographer. But, as it happens, the
+critic here has fallen into the dangerous temptation of giving his
+reasons. Lockhart's plan was not, it seems, in the case of his _Scott_,
+very elevated, because it was not "to show Scott as he was by nature, as
+the world acted on him, as he acted on the world," and so forth. Now,
+unfortunately, this is exactly what it seems to me that Lockhart,
+whether he meant to do it or not, has done in the very book which
+Carlyle was criticising. And it seems to me, further, that he always
+does this in all his biographical efforts. Sometimes he appears (for
+here another criticism of Carlyle's on the _Burns_, not the _Scott_, is
+more to the point) to quote and extract from other and much inferior
+writers to an extent rather surprising in so excellent a penman,
+especially when it is remembered that, except to a dunce, the extraction
+and stringing together of quotations is far more troublesome than
+original writing. But even then the extracts are always luminous. With
+ninety-nine out of a hundred biographies the total impression which
+Carlyle demands, and very properly demands, is, in fact, a total absence
+of impression. The reader's mind is as dark, though it may be as full,
+as a cellar when the coals have been shot into it. Now this is never the
+case with Lockhart's biographies, whether they are books in half a dozen
+volumes, or essays in half a hundred pages. He subordinates what even
+Carlyle allowed to be his "clear nervous forcible style" so entirely to
+the task of representing his subject, he has such a perfect general
+conception of that subject, that only a very dense reader can fail to
+perceive the presentment. Whether it is the right or whether it is the
+wrong presentment may, of course, be a matter of opinion, but, such as
+it is, it is always there.
+
+One other point of interest about Lockhart has to be mentioned. He was
+an eminent example, perhaps one of the most eminent, of a "gentleman of
+the press." He did a great many kinds of literary work, and he did all
+of them well; novel-writing, perhaps (which, as has been said, he gave
+up almost immediately), least well. But he does not seem to have felt
+any very strong or peculiar call to any particular class of original
+literary work, and his one great and substantive book may be fairly
+taken to have been much more decided by accident and his relationship to
+Scott than by deliberate choice. He was, in fact, eminently a
+journalist, and it is very much to be wished that there were more
+journalists like him. For from the two great reproaches of the craft to
+which so many of us belong, and which seems to be gradually swallowing
+up all other varieties of literary occupation, he was conspicuously
+free. He never did work slovenly in form, and he never did work that was
+not in one way or other consistent with a decided set of literary and
+political principles. There is a great deal of nonsense talked about the
+unprincipled character of journalism, no doubt; and nobody knows better
+than those who have some experience of it, that if, as George Warrington
+says, "too many of us write against our own party," it is the fault
+simply of those who do so. If a man has a faculty of saying anything, he
+can generally get an opportunity of saying what he likes, and avoid
+occasions of saying what he does not like. But the mere journalist
+Swiss of heaven (or the other place), is certainly not unknown, and by
+all accounts he was in Lockhart's time rather common. No one ever
+accused Lockhart himself of being one of the class. A still more
+important fault, undoubtedly, of journalism is its tendency to slovenly
+work, and here again Lockhart was conspicuously guiltless. His actual
+production must have been very considerable, though in the absence of
+any collection, or even any index, of his contributions to periodicals,
+it is impossible to say exactly to how much it would extend. But, at a
+rough guess, the _Scott_, the _Burns_, and the _Napoleon_, the
+_Ballads_, the novels, and _Peter_, a hundred _Quarterly_ articles, and
+an unknown number in _Blackwood_ and _Fraser_, would make at least
+twenty or five-and-twenty volumes of a pretty closely printed library
+edition. Yet all this, as far as it can be identified, has the same
+careful though unostentatious distinction of style, the same admirable
+faculty of sarcasm, wherever sarcasm is required, the same depth of
+feeling, wherever feeling is called for, the same refusal to make a
+parade of feeling even where it is shown. Never trivial, never vulgar,
+never feeble, never stilted, never diffuse, Lockhart is one of the very
+best recent specimens of that class of writers of all work, which since
+Dryden's time has continually increased, is increasing, and does not
+seem likely to diminish. The growth may or may not be matter for
+regret; probably none of the more capable members of the class itself
+feels any particular desire to magnify his office. But if the office is
+to exist, let it at least be the object of those who hold it to perform
+its duties with that hatred of commonplace and cant and the _popularis
+aura_, with, as nearly as may be in each case, that conscience and
+thoroughness of workmanship, which Lockhart's writings uniformly
+display.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[18] See Appendix B--Lockhart.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+PRAED
+
+
+It was not till half a century after his death that Praed, who is loved
+by those who love him perhaps as sincerely as most greater writers, had
+his works presented to the public in a form which may be called
+complete.[19] This is of itself rather a cautious statement in
+appearance, but I am not sure that it ought not to be made more cautious
+still. The completeness is not complete, though it is in one respect
+rather more than complete; and the form is exceedingly informal. Neither
+in size, nor in print, nor in character of editing and arrangement do
+the two little fat volumes which were ushered into the world by Derwent
+Coleridge in 1864, and the one little thin volume which appeared in
+1887 under Sir George Young's name with no notes and not much
+introduction, and the very creditable edition of the political poems
+which appeared a year later under the same care but better cared for,
+agree together. But this, though a nuisance to those who love not a set
+of odd volumes, would matter comparatively little if the discrepancies
+were not equally great in a much more important matter than that of mere
+externals. Only the last of the four volumes and three books just
+enumerated can be said to have been really edited, and though that is
+edited very well, it is the least important. Sir George Young, who has
+thus done a pious work to his uncle's memory, was concerned not merely
+in the previous cheap issue of the prose, but in the more elaborate
+issue of the poems in 1864. But either his green unknowing youth did not
+at that time know what editing meant, or he was under the restraint of
+some higher powers. Except that the issue of 1864 has that well-known
+page-look of "Moxon's," which is identified to all lovers of poetry with
+associations of Shelley, of Lord Tennyson, and of other masters, and
+that the pieces are duly dated, it is difficult to say any good thing of
+the book. There are no notes; and Praed is an author who is much in need
+of annotation. With singular injudiciousness, a great deal of album and
+other verse is included which was evidently not intended for
+publication, which does not display the writer at his best, or even in
+his characteristic vein at all, while the memoir is meagre in fact and
+decidedly feeble in criticism. As for the prose, though Sir George Young
+has prefixed an introduction good as far as it goes, there is no index,
+no table even of contents, and the separate papers are not dated, nor is
+any indication given of their origin--a defect which, for reasons to be
+indicated shortly, is especially troublesome in Praed's case.
+Accordingly anything like a critical study of the poet is beset with
+very unusual difficulties, and the mere reading of him, if it were less
+agreeable in itself, could not be said to be exactly easy. Luckily Praed
+is a writer so eminently engaging to the mere reader, as well as so
+interesting in divers ways to the personage whom some one has politely
+called "the gelid critic," that no sins or shortcomings of his editors
+can do him much harm, so long as they let him be read at all.
+
+Winthrop Mackworth was the third son of Serjeant Praed, Chairman of the
+Board of Audit, and, though his family was both by extraction and by
+actual seat Devonian, he was born in John Street, Bedford Row, on 26th
+June 1802, the year of the birth of Victor Hugo, who was perhaps about
+as unlike Praed in every conceivable point, except metrical mastery, as
+two men possessing poetic faculty can be unlike one another. John Street
+may not appear as meet a nurse for a poetic child as Besançon,
+especially now when it has settled down into the usual office-and-chambers
+state of Bloomsbury. But it is unusually wide for a London street; it
+has trees--those of the Foundling Hospital and those of Gray's Inn--at
+either end, and all about it cluster memories of the Bedford Row
+conspiracy, and of that immortal dinner which was given by the Briefless
+One and his timid partner to Mr. Goldmore, and of Sydney Smith's sojourn
+in Doughty Street, and of divers other pleasant things. In connection,
+however, with Praed himself, we do not hear much more of John Street. It
+was soon exchanged for the more cheerful locality of Teignmouth, where
+his father (who was a member of the old western family of Mackworth,
+Praed being an added surname) had a country house. Serjeant Praed
+encouraged, if he did not positively teach, the boy to write English
+verse at a very early age: a practice which I should be rather slow to
+approve, but which has been credited, perhaps justly, with the very
+remarkable formal accuracy and metrical ease of Praed's after-work.
+Winthrop lost his mother early, was sent to a private school at eight
+years old, and to Eton in the year 1814. Public schools in their effect
+of allegiance on public schoolboys have counted for much in English
+history, literary and other, and Eton has counted for more than any of
+them. But hardly in any case has it counted for so much with the general
+reader as in Praed's. A friend of mine, who, while entertaining high
+and lofty views on principle, takes low ones by a kind of natural
+attraction, says that the straightforward title of _The Etonian_ and
+Praed's connection with it are enough to account for this. There you
+have a cardinal fact easy to seize and easy to remember. "Praed? Oh!
+yes, the man who wrote _The Etonian_; he must have been an Eton man,"
+says the general reader. This is cynicism, and cannot be too strongly
+reprehended. But unluckily, as in other cases, a kind of critical
+deduction or reaction from this view has also taken place, and there are
+persons who maintain that Praed's merit is a kind of coterie-merit, a
+thing which Eton men are bound, and others are not bound but the
+reverse, to uphold. This is an old, but apparently still effective
+trick. I read not long ago a somewhat elaborate attempt to make out that
+the people who admire Mr. Matthew Arnold's poems admire them because
+they, the people, are Oxford men. Now this form of "ruling out" is
+undoubtedly ingenious. "You admire Mr. Arnold's poems?"--"Yes, I
+do."--"You are an Oxford man?"--"Yes, I am."--"Ah! I see." And it is
+perfectly useless for the victim to argue that his admiration of the
+poet and his allegiance to the University have nothing to do with each
+other. In the present case I, at least, am free from this illogical but
+damaging disqualification. I do not think that any one living admires
+Praed more than I do; and neither Eton nor Cambridge, which may be said
+to have divided influence on him, claims any allegiance from me. On
+Praed himself, however, the influence of Eton was certainly great, if
+not of the greatest. Here he began in school periodicals ("Apis Matina"
+a bee buzzing in manuscript only, preceded _The Etonian_) his prose and,
+to some though a less extent, his verse-exercises in finished
+literature. Here he made the beginnings of that circle of friends
+(afterwards slightly enlarged at Cambridge by the addition of
+non-Etonians and including one or two Oxford men who had been at Eton)
+which practically formed the staff of _The Etonian_ itself and of the
+subsequent _Knight's Quarterly_ and _Brazen Head_. The greatest of them
+all, Macaulay, belonged to the later Trinity set; but the Etonians
+proper included divers men of mark. There has been, I believe, a
+frequent idea that boys who contribute to school-magazines never do
+anything else. Praed certainly could not be produced as an instance. He
+was not a great athlete, partly because his health was always weak,
+partly because athletics were then in their infancy. But he is said to
+have been a good player at fives and tennis, an amateur actor of merit,
+expert at chess and whist, and latterly a debater of promise, while, in
+the well-known way of his own school and University, he was more than a
+sufficient scholar. He went to Trinity in October 1821, and in the three
+following years won the Browne Medals for Greek verse four times and
+the Chancellor's Medal for English verse twice. He was third in the
+Classical Tripos, was elected to a Fellowship at his college in 1827,
+and in 1830 obtained the Seatonian Prize with a piece, "The Ascent of
+Elijah," which is remarkable for the extraordinary facility with which
+it catches the notes of the just published _Christian Year_. He was a
+great speaker at the Union, and, as has been hinted, he made a fresh
+circle of literary friends for himself, the chief ornaments whereof were
+Macaulay and Charles Austin. It was also during his sojourn at Cambridge
+that the short-lived but brilliant venture of _Knight's Quarterly_ was
+launched. He was about four years resident at Trinity in the first
+instance; after which, according to a practice then common enough but
+now, I believe, obsolete, he returned to Eton as private and particular
+tutor to Lord Ernest Bruce. This employment kept him for two years. He
+then read law, was called to the Bar in 1829, and in 1830 was elected to
+Parliament for the moribund borough of St. Germans. He was re-elected
+next year, contested St. Ives, when St. Germans lost its members, but
+was beaten, was elected in 1834 for Great Yarmouth, and in 1837 for
+Aylesbury, which last seat he held to his death. During the whole of
+this time he sat as a Conservative, becoming a more thorough one as time
+went on; and as he had been at Cambridge a very decided Whig, and had
+before his actual entrance on public life written many pointed and some
+bitter lampoons against the Tories, the change, in the language of his
+amiable and partial friend and biographer, "occasioned considerable
+surprise." Of this also more presently: for it is well to get merely
+biographical details over with as little digression as possible.
+Surprise or no surprise, he won good opinions from both sides, acquired
+considerable reputation as a debater and a man of business, was in the
+confidence both of the Duke of Wellington and of Sir Robert Peel, was
+made Secretary of the Board of Control in 1834, married in 1835, was
+appointed Deputy-High Steward of his University (a mysterious
+appointment, of the duties of which I have no notion), and died of
+disease of the lungs on 15th July 1839. Not very much has been published
+about Praed personally; but in what has been published, and in what I
+have heard, I cannot remember a single unfriendly sentence.
+
+Notwithstanding his reputation as an "inspired schoolboy," I do not know
+that sober criticism would call him a really precocious writer,
+especially in verse. The pieces by which he is best known and which have
+most individuality, date in no case very early, and in almost all cases
+after his five-and-twentieth year. What does date very early (and
+unluckily it has been printed with a copiousness betokening more
+affection than judgment, considering that the author had more sense
+than to print it at all) is scarcely distinguishable from any other
+verses of any other clever boy. It is impossible to augur any future
+excellence from such stuff as
+
+    Emilia often sheds the tear
+      But affectation bids it flow,
+
+or as
+
+    From breasts which feel compassion's glow
+      Solicit mild the kind relief;
+
+and, for one's own part, one is inclined to solicit mild the kind relief
+of not having to read it. Even when Praed had become, at least
+technically, a man, there is no very great improvement as a whole,
+though here and there one may see, looking backwards from the finished
+examples, faint beginnings of his peculiar touches, especially of that
+pleasant trick of repeating the same word or phrase with a different and
+slightly altered sense which, as Mr. Austin Dobson has suggested, may
+have been taken from Burns. The Cambridge prize poems are quite
+authentic and respectable examples of that style which has received its
+final criticism in
+
+    Ply battleaxe and hurtling catapult:
+    Jerusalem is ours! _Id Deus vult_,--
+
+though they do not contain anything so nice as that, or as its great
+author's more famous couplet respecting Africa and the men thereof. The
+longer romances of the same date, "Gog," "Lilian," "The Troubadour,"
+are little more than clever reminiscences sometimes of Scott, Byron,
+Moore, and other contemporaries, sometimes of Prior and the _vers de
+société_ of the eighteenth century. The best passage by far of all this
+is the close of "How to Rhyme with Love," and this, as it seems to me,
+is the only passage of even moderate length which, in the poems dating
+before Praed took his degree, in the least foretells the poet of "The
+Red Fisherman," "The Vicar," the "Letters from Teignmouth," the
+"Fourteenth of February" (earliest in date and not least charming fruit
+of the true vein), "Good-night to the Season," and best and most
+delightful of all, the peerless "Letter of Advice," which is as much the
+very best thing of its own kind as the "Divine Comedy."
+
+In prose Praed was a little earlier, but not very much. _The Etonian_
+itself was, even in its earliest numbers, written at an age when many,
+perhaps most, men have already left school; and the earlier numbers are
+as imitative, of the _Spectator_ and its late and now little read
+followers of the eighteenth century, as is the verse above quoted. The
+youthful boisterousness of _Blackwood_ gave Praed a more congenial
+because a fresher cue; and in the style of which Maginn, as Adjutant
+O'Doherty, had set the example in his Latinisings of popular verse, and
+which was to be worked to death by Father Prout, there are few things
+better than the "Musæ O'Connorianæ" which celebrates the great fight of
+Mac Nevis and Mac Twolter. But there is here still the distinct
+following of a model the taint of the school-exercise. Very much more
+original is "The Knight and the Knave:" indeed I should call this the
+first original thing, though it be a parody, that Praed did. To say that
+it reminds one in more than subject of _Rebecca and Rowena_, and that it
+was written some twenty years earlier, is to say a very great deal. Even
+here, however, the writer's ground is rented, not freehold. It is very
+different in such papers as "Old Boots" and "The Country Curate," while
+in the later prose contributed to _Knight's Quarterly_ the improvement
+in originality is marked. "The Union Club" is amusing enough all
+through: but considering that it was written in 1823, two years before
+Jeffrey asked the author of a certain essay on Milton "where he got that
+style," one passage of the speech put in the mouth of Macaulay is
+positively startling. "The Best Bat in the School" is quite delightful,
+and "My First Folly," though very unequal, contains in the introduction
+scene, between Vyvian Joyeuse and Margaret Orleans, a specimen of a kind
+of dialogue nowhere to be found before, so far as I know, and giving
+proof that, if Praed had set himself to it, he might have started a new
+kind of novel.
+
+It does not appear, however, that his fancy led him with any decided
+bent to prose composition, and he very early deserted it for verse;
+though he is said to have, at a comparatively late period of his short
+life, worked in harness as a regular leader-writer for the _Morning
+Post_ during more than a year. No examples of this work of his have been
+reprinted, nor, so far as I know, does any means of identifying them
+exist, though I personally should like to examine them. He was still at
+Cambridge when he drifted into another channel, which was still not his
+own channel, but in which he feathered his oars under two different
+flags with no small skill and dexterity. Sir George Young has a very
+high idea of his uncle's political verse, and places him "first among
+English writers, before Prior, before Canning, before the authors of the
+'Rolliad,' and far before Moore or any of the still anonymous
+contributors to the later London press." I cannot subscribe to this.
+Neither as Whig nor as Tory, neither as satirist of George the Fourth
+nor as satirist of the Reform Bill, does Praed seem to me to have been
+within a hundred miles of that elder schoolfellow of his who wrote
+
+    All creeping creatures, venomous and low,
+    Still blasphemous or blackguard, praise Lepaux.
+
+He has nothing for sustained wit and ease equal to the best pieces of
+the "Fudge Family" and the "Two-penny Postbag"; and (for I do not know
+why one should not praise a man because he happens to be alive and one's
+friend) I do not think he has the touch of the true political satirist
+as Mr. Traill has it in "Professor Baloonatics Craniocracs," or in that
+admirable satire on democracy which is addressed to the "Philosopher
+Crazed, from the Island of Crazes."
+
+Indeed, by mentioning Prior, Sir George seems to put himself rather out
+of court. Praed _is_ very nearly if not quite Prior's equal, but the
+sphere of neither was politics. Prior's political pieces are thin and
+poor beside his social verse, and with rare exceptions I could not put
+anything political of Praed's higher than the shoe-string of "Araminta."
+Neither of these two charming poets seems to have felt seriously enough
+for political satire. Matthew, we know, played the traitor; and though
+Mackworth ratted to my own side, I fear it must be confessed that he did
+rat. I can only discover in his political verse two fixed principles,
+both of which no doubt did him credit, but which hardly, even when taken
+together, amount to a sufficient political creed. The one was fidelity
+to Canning and his memory: the other was impatience of the cant of the
+reformers. He could make admirable fun of Joseph Hume, and of still
+smaller fry like Waithman; he could attack Lord Grey's nepotism and
+doctrinairism fiercely enough. Once or twice, or, to be fair, more than
+once or twice, he struck out a happy, indeed a brilliant flash. He was
+admirable at what Sir George Young calls, justly enough, "political
+patter songs" such as,
+
+    Young widowhood shall lose its weeds,
+      Old kings shall loathe the Tories,
+    And monks be tired of telling beads,
+      And Blues of telling stories;
+    And titled suitors shall be crossed,
+      And famished poets married,
+    And Canning's motion shall be lost,
+      And Hume's amendment carried;
+    And Chancery shall cease to doubt,
+      And Algebra to prove,
+    And hoops come in, and gas go out
+      Before I cease to love.
+
+He hit off an exceedingly savage and certainly not wholly just "Epitaph
+on the King of the Sandwich Islands" which puts the conception of George
+the Fourth that Thackeray afterwards made popular, and contains these
+felicitous lines:
+
+    The people in his happy reign,
+      Were blessed beyond all other nations:
+    Unharmed by foreign axe and chain,
+      Unhealed by civic innovations;
+    They served the usual logs and stones,
+      With all the usual rites and terrors,
+    And swallowed all their fathers' bones,
+      And swallowed all their fathers' errors.
+
+    When the fierce mob, with clubs and knives,
+      All swore that nothing should prevent them,
+    But that their representatives
+      Should actually represent them,
+    He interposed the proper checks,
+      By sending troops, with drums and banners,
+    To cut their speeches short, and necks,
+      And break their heads, to mend their manners.
+
+Occasionally in a sort of middle vein between politics and society he
+wrote in the "patter" style just noticed quite admirable things like
+"Twenty-eight and Twenty-nine." Throughout the great debates on Reform
+he rallied the reformers with the same complete and apparently useless
+superiority of wit and sense which has often, if not invariably, been
+shown at similar crises on the losing side. And once, on an
+ever-memorable occasion, he broke into those famous and most touching
+"Stanzas on seeing the Speaker Asleep" which affect one almost to tears
+by their grace of form and by the perennial and indeed ever-increasing
+applicability of their matter.
+
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker: it's surely fair,
+    If you don't in your bed, that you should in your chair:
+    Longer and longer still they grow,
+    Tory and Radical, Aye and No;
+    Talking by night and talking by day;
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.
+
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker: slumber lies
+    Light and brief on a Speaker's eyes--
+    Fielden or Finn, in a minute or two,
+    Some disorderly thing will do;
+    Riot will chase repose away;
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.
+
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker; Cobbett will soon
+    Move to abolish the sun and moon;
+    Hume, no doubt, will be taking the sense
+    Of the House on a saving of thirteen-pence;
+    Grattan will growl or Baldwin bray;
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.
+
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker: dream of the time
+    When loyalty was not quite a crime,
+    When Grant was a pupil in Canning's school,
+    And Palmerston fancied Wood a fool.
+    Lord, how principles pass away!
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.
+
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sweet to men
+    Is the sleep that comes but now and then;
+    Sweet to the sorrowful, sweet to the ill,
+    Sweet to the children who work in a mill.
+    You have more need of sleep than they,
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.
+
+But the chief merit of Praed's political verse as a whole seems to me to
+be that it kept his hand in, and enabled him to develop and refine the
+trick, above referred to, of playing on words so as to give a graceful
+turn to verse composed in his true vocation.
+
+Of the verse so composed there are more kinds than one; though perhaps
+only in two kinds is the author absolutely at his best. There is first a
+certain class of pieces which strongly recall Macaulay's "Lays" and may
+have had some connexion of origin with them. Of course those who are
+foolish enough to affect to see nothing good in "The Battle of the Lake
+Regillus," or "Ivry," or "The Armada," will not like "Cassandra," or
+"Sir Nicholas at Marston Moor," or the "Covenanter's Lament for Bothwell
+Brigg," or "Arminius." Nevertheless they are fine in their way.
+"Arminius" is too long, and it suffers from the obvious comparison with
+Cowper's far finer "Boadicea." But its best lines, such as the
+well-known
+
+    I curse him by our country's gods,
+      The terrible, the dark,
+    The scatterers of the Roman rods,
+      The quellers of the bark,
+
+are excellent in the style, and "Sir Nicholas" is charming. But not here
+either did Apollo seriously wait for Praed. The later romances or tales
+are far better than the earlier. "The Legend of the Haunted Tree" shows
+in full swing that happy compound and contrast of sentiment and humour
+in which the writer excelled. And "The Teufelhaus" is, except "The Red
+Fisherman" perhaps, the best thing of its kind in English. These lines
+are good enough for anything:
+
+    But little he cared, that stripling pale,
+    For the sinking sun or the rising gale;
+    For he, as he rode, was dreaming now,
+    Poor youth, of a woman's broken vow,
+    Of the cup dashed down, ere the wine was tasted,
+    Of eloquent speeches sadly wasted,
+    Of a gallant heart all burnt to ashes,
+    And the Baron of Katzberg's long moustaches.
+
+And these:
+
+    Swift as the rush of an eagle's wing,
+    Or the flight of a shaft from Tartar string,
+    Into the wood Sir Rudolph went:
+    Not with more joy the schoolboys run
+    To the gay green fields when their task is done;
+    Not with more haste the members fly,
+    When Hume has caught the Speaker's eye.
+
+But in "The Red Fisherman" itself there is nothing that is not good. It
+is very short, ten small pages only of some five-and-twenty lines each.
+But there is not a weak place in it from the moment when "the Abbot
+arose and closed his book" to the account of his lamentable and yet
+lucky fate and punishment whereof "none but he and the fisherman could
+tell the reason why." Neither of the two other practitioners who may be
+called the masters of this style, Hood and Barham, nor Praed himself
+elsewhere, nor any of his and their imitators has trodden the
+breadthless line between real terror and mere burlesque with so steady a
+foot.
+
+Still not here was his "farthest," as the geographers say, nor in the
+considerable mass of smaller poems which practically defy
+classification. In them, as so often elsewhere in Praed, one comes
+across odd notes, stray flashes of genius which he never seems to have
+cared to combine or follow out, such as the unwontedly solemn "Time's
+Song," the best wholly serious thing that he has done, and the charming
+"L'Inconnue." But we find the perfect Praed, and we find him only, in
+the verses of society proper, the second part of the "Poems of Life and
+Manners" as they are headed, which began, as far as one can make out, to
+be written about 1826, and the gift of which Praed never lost, though he
+practised it little in the very last years of his life. Here, in a
+hundred pages, with a few to be added from elsewhere, are to be found
+some of the best-bred and best-natured verse within the English
+language, some of the most original and remarkable metrical experiments,
+a profusion of the liveliest fancy, a rush of the gayest rhyme. They
+begin with "The Vicar," _vir nullâ non donandus lauru_.
+
+    [Whose] talk was like a stream, which runs
+      With rapid change from rocks to roses:
+    It slipped from politics to puns,
+      It passed from Mahomet to Moses;
+    Beginning with the laws which keep
+      The planets in their radiant courses,
+    And ending with some precept deep
+      For dressing eels, or shoeing horses.
+
+Three of the Vicar's companion "Everyday Characters" are good, but I
+think not so good as he; the fifth piece, however, "The Portrait of a
+Lady," is quite his equal.
+
+    You'll be forgotten--as old debts
+      By persons who are used to borrow;
+    Forgotten--as the sun that sets,
+      When shines a new one on the morrow;
+    Forgotten--like the luscious peach
+      That blessed the schoolboy last September;
+    Forgotten--like a maiden speech,
+      Which all men praise, but none remember.
+
+    Yet ere you sink into the stream
+      That whelms alike sage, saint, and martyr,
+    And soldier's sword, and minstrel's theme,
+      And Canning's wit, and Gatton's charter,
+    Here, of the fortunes of your youth,
+      My fancy weaves her dim conjectures,
+    Which have, perhaps, as much of truth
+      As passion's vows, or Cobbett's lectures.
+
+Here, and perhaps here first, at least in the order of the published
+poems, appears that curious mixture of pathos and quizzing, sentiment
+and satire, which has never been mastered more fully or communicated
+more happily than by Praed. But not even yet do we meet with it in its
+happiest form: nor is that form to be found in "Josephine" which is much
+better in substance than in manner, or in the half-social,
+half-political patter of "The Brazen Head," or in "Twenty-eight and
+Twenty-nine." It sounds first in the "Song for the Fourteenth of
+February." No one, so far as I know, has traced any exact original[20]
+for the altogether admirable metre which, improved and glorified later
+in "The Letter of Advice," appears first in lighter matter still like
+this:
+
+    Shall I kneel to a Sylvia or Celia,
+      Whom no one e'er saw, or may see,
+    A fancy-drawn Laura Amelia,
+      An _ad libit_ Anna Marie?
+    Shall I court an initial with stars to it,
+      Go mad for a G. or a J.,
+    Get Bishop to put a few bars to it,
+    And print it on Valentine's Day?
+
+But every competent critic has seen in it the origin of the more
+gorgeous and full-mouthed, if not more accomplished and dexterous,
+rhythm in which Mr. Swinburne has written "Dolores," and the even more
+masterly dedication of the first "Poems and Ballads." The shortening of
+the last line which the later poet has introduced is a touch of genius,
+but not perhaps greater than Praed's own recognition of the
+extraordinarily vivid and ringing qualities of the stanza. I profoundly
+believe that metrical quality is, other things being tolerably equal,
+the great secret of the enduring attraction of verse: and nowhere, not
+in the greatest lyrics, is that quality more unmistakable than in the
+"Letter of Advice." I really do not know how many times I have read it;
+but I never can read it to this day without being forced to read it out
+loud like a schoolboy and mark with accompaniment of hand-beat such
+lines as
+
+    Remember the thrilling romances
+      We read on the bank in the glen:
+    Remember the suitors our fancies
+      Would picture for both of us then.
+    They wore the red cross on their shoulder,
+      They had vanquished and pardoned their foe--
+    Sweet friend, are you wiser or colder?
+      My own Araminta, say "No!"
+
+           ·       ·       ·       ·       ·
+
+    He must walk--like a god of old story
+      Come down from the home of his rest;
+    He must smile--like the sun in his glory,
+      On the buds he loves ever the best;
+    And oh! from its ivory portal
+      Like music his soft speech must flow!
+    If he speak, smile, or walk like a mortal,
+      My own Araminta, say "No!"
+
+There are, metrically speaking, few finer couplets in English than the
+first of that second stanza. Looked at from another point of view, the
+mixture of the comic and the serious in the piece is remarkable enough;
+but not so remarkable, I think, as its extraordinary metrical
+accomplishment. There is not a note or a syllable wrong in the whole
+thing, but every sound and every cadence comes exactly where it ought to
+come, so as to be, in a delightful phrase of Southey's, "necessary and
+voluptuous and right."
+
+It is no wonder that when Praed had discovered such a medium he should
+have worked it freely. But he never impressed on it such a combination
+of majesty and grace as in this letter of Medora Trevilian. As far as
+the metre goes I think the eight-lined stanzas of this piece better
+suited to it than the twelve-lined ones of "Good Night to the Season"
+and the first "Letter from Teignmouth," but both are very delightful.
+Perhaps the first is the best known of all Praed's poems, and certainly
+some things in it, such as
+
+    The ice of her ladyship's manners,
+    The ice of his lordship's champagne,
+
+are among the most quoted. But this antithetical trick, of which Praed
+was so fond, is repeated a little often in it; and it seems to me to
+lack the freshness as well as the fire of the "Advice." On the other
+hand, the "Letter from Teignmouth" is the best thing that even Praed has
+ever done for combined grace and tenderness.
+
+    You once could be pleased with our ballads--
+      To-day you have critical ears;
+    You once could be charmed with our salads--
+      Alas! you've been dining with Peers;
+    You trifled and flirted with many--
+      You've forgotten the when and the how;
+    There was one you liked better than any--
+      Perhaps you've forgotten her now.
+    But of those you remember most newly,
+      Of those who delight or enthral,
+    None love you a quarter so truly
+      As some you will find at our Ball.
+
+    They tell me you've many who flatter,
+      Because of your wit and your song:
+    They tell me--and what does it matter?--
+      You like to be praised by the throng:
+    They tell me you're shadowed with laurel:
+      They tell me you're loved by a Blue:
+    They tell me you're sadly immoral--
+      Dear Clarence, that cannot be true!
+    But to me, you are still what I found you,
+      Before you grew clever and tall;
+    And you'll think of the spell that once bound you;
+      And you'll come--won't you come?--to our Ball!
+
+Is not that perfectly charming?
+
+It is perhaps a matter of mere taste whether it is or is not more
+charming than pieces like "School and Schoolfellows" (the best of
+Praed's purely Eton poems) and "Marriage Chimes," in which, if not Eton,
+the Etonian set also comes in. If I like these latter pieces less, it
+is not so much because of their more personal and less universal
+subjects as because their style is much less individual. The resemblance
+to Hood cannot be missed, and though I believe there is some dispute as
+to which of the two poets actually hit upon the particular style first,
+there can be little doubt that Hood attained to the greater excellence
+in it. The real sense and savingness of that doctrine of the "principal
+and most excellent things," which has sometimes been preached rather
+corruptly and narrowly, is that the best things that a man does are
+those that he does best. Now though
+
+    I wondered what they meant by stock,
+      I wrote delightful Sapphics,
+
+and
+
+    With no hard work but Bovney stream,
+      No chill except Long Morning,
+
+are very nice things, I do not think they are so good in their kind as
+the other things that I have quoted; and this, though the poem contains
+the following wholly delightful stanza in the style of the "Ode on a
+Distant Prospect of Clapham Academy":
+
+    Tom Mill was used to blacken eyes
+      Without the fear of sessions;
+    Charles Medlar loathed false quantities
+      As much as false professions;
+    Now Mill keeps order in the land,
+      A magistrate pedantic;
+    And Medlar's feet repose unscanned
+      Beneath the wide Atlantic.
+
+The same may even be said of "Utopia," a much-praised, often-quoted, and
+certainly very amusing poem, of "I'm not a Lover now," and of others,
+which are also, though less exactly, in Hood's manner. To attempt to
+distinguish between that manner and the manner which is Praed's own is a
+rather perilous attempt; and the people who hate all attempts at
+reducing criticism to principle, and who think that a critic should only
+say clever things about his subject, will of course dislike me for it.
+But that I cannot help. I should say then that Hood had the advantage of
+Praed in purely serious poetry; for Araminta's bard never did anything
+at all approaching "The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies," "The Haunted
+House," or a score of other things. He had also the advantage in pure
+broad humour. But where Praed excelled was in the mixed style, not of
+sharp contrast as in Hood's "Lay of the Desert Born" and "Demon Ship,"
+where from real pity and real terror the reader suddenly stumbles into
+pure burlesque, but of wholly blended and tempered humour and pathos. It
+is this mixed style in which I think his note is to be found as it is to
+be found in no other poet, and as it could hardly be found in any but
+one with Praed's peculiar talent and temper combined with his peculiar
+advantages of education, fortune, and social atmosphere. He never had to
+"pump out sheets of fun" on a sick-bed for the printer's devil, like
+his less well-fated but assuredly not less well-gifted rival; and as his
+scholarship was exactly of the kind to refine, temper, and adjust his
+literary manner, so his society and circumstances were exactly of the
+kind to repress, or at least not to encourage, exuberance or
+boisterousness in his literary matter. There are I believe who call him
+trivial, even frivolous; and if this be done sincerely by any careful
+readers of "The Red Fisherman" and the "Letter of Advice" I fear I must
+peremptorily disable their judgment. But this appearance of levity is in
+great part due exactly to the perfect modulation and adjustment of his
+various notes. He never shrieks or guffaws: there is no horse-play in
+him, just as there is no tearing a passion to tatters. His slight
+mannerisms, more than once referred to, rarely exceed what is justified
+by good literary manners. His points are very often so delicate, so
+little insisted on or underlined, that a careless reader may miss them
+altogether; his "questionings" are so little "obstinate" that a careless
+reader may think them empty.
+
+    Will it come with a rose or a brier?
+      Will it come with a blessing or curse?
+    Will its bonnets be lower or higher?
+      Will its morals be better or worse?
+
+The author of this perhaps seems to some a mere jesting Pilate, and if
+he does, they are quite right not to even try to like him.
+
+I have seen disdainful remarks on those critics who, however warily,
+admire a considerable number of authors, as though they were coarse and
+omnivorous persons, unfit to rank with the delicates who can only relish
+one or two things in literature. But this is a foolish mistake. "One to
+one" is not "cursedly confined" in the relation of book and reader; and
+a man need not be a Don Juan of letters to have a list of almost _mille
+e tre_ loves in that department. He must indeed love the best or those
+among the best only, in the almost innumerable kinds, which is not a
+very severe restriction. And Praed is of this so fortunately numerous
+company. I do not agree with those who lament his early death on the
+ground of its depriving literature or politics of his future greatness.
+In politics he would most probably not have become anything greater than
+an industrious and respectable official; and in letters his best work
+was pretty certainly done. For it was a work that could only be done in
+youth. In his scholarly but not frigidly correct form, in his irregular
+sallies and flashes of a genius really individual as far as it went but
+never perhaps likely to go much farther, in the freshness of his
+imitations, in the imperfection of his originalities, Praed was the most
+perfect representative we have had or ever are likely to have of what
+has been called, with a perhaps reprehensible parody on great words,
+"the eternal undergraduate within us, who rejoices before life." He is
+thus at the very antipodes of Wertherism and Byronism, a light but
+gallant champion of cheerfulness and the joy of living. Although there
+is about him absolutely nothing artificial--the curse of the lighter
+poetry as a rule--and though he attains to deep pathos now and then, and
+once or twice (notably in "The Red Fisherman") to a kind of grim
+earnestness, neither of these things is his real _forte_. Playing with
+literature and with life, not frivolously or without heart, but with no
+very deep cares and no very passionate feeling, is Praed's attitude
+whenever he is at his best. And he does not play at playing as many
+writers do: it is all perfectly genuine. Even Prior has not excelled
+such lines as these in one of his early and by no means his best poems
+(an adaptation too), for mingled jest and earnest--
+
+    But Isabel, by accident,
+      Was wandering by that minute;
+    She opened that dark monument
+      And found her slave within it;
+    _The clergy said the Mass in vain,
+      The College could not save me:
+    But life, she swears, returned again
+      With the first kiss she gave me._
+
+Hardly, if at all, could he have kept up this attitude towards life
+after he had come to forty year; and he might have become either a
+merely intelligent and respectable person, which is most probable, or an
+elderly youth, which is of all things most detestable, or a
+caterwauler, or a cynic, or a preacher. From all these fates the gods
+mercifully saved him, and he abides with us (the presentation being but
+slightly marred by the injudicious prodigality of his editors) only as
+the poet of Medora's musical despair lest Araminta should derogate, of
+the Abbot's nightmare sufferings at the hands of the Red Fisherman, of
+the plaintive appeal after much lively gossip--
+
+    And you'll come--won't you come?--to our Ball,
+
+of all the pleasures, and the jests, and the tastes, and the studies,
+and the woes, provided only they are healthy and manly, of Twenty-five.
+Unhappy is the person of whom it can be said that he neither has been,
+is, nor ever will be in the temper and circumstances of which Praed's
+verse is the exact and consummate expression; not much less unhappy he
+for whom that verse does not perform the best perhaps of all the offices
+of literature, and call up, it may be in happier guise than that in
+which they once really existed, the many beloved shadows of the past.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[19] 1. _The Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, with a Memoir by the
+Rev. Derwent Coleridge._ In two volumes. London, 1864. 2. _Essays by
+Winthrop Mackworth Praed, collected and arranged by Sir George Young,
+Bart._ London, 1887. 3. _The Political and Occasional Poems of Winthrop
+Mackworth Praed, edited, with Notes, by Sir George Young._ London, 1888.
+
+[20] Since I wrote this I have been reminded by my friend Mr. Mowbray
+Morris of Byron's
+
+    I enter thy garden of roses,
+    Beloved and fair Haidee.
+
+It is not impossible that this _is_ the immediate original. But Praed
+has so improved on it as to deserve a new patent.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+GEORGE BORROW
+
+
+In this paper I do not undertake to throw any new light on the
+little-known life of the author of _Lavengro_. Among the few people who
+knew Borrow intimately, surely some one will soon be found who will give
+to the world an account of his curious life, and perhaps some specimens
+of those "mountains of manuscript" which, as he regretfully declares,
+never could find a publisher--an impossibility which, if I may be
+permitted to offer an opinion, does not reflect any great credit on
+publishers. For the present purpose it is sufficient to sum up the
+generally-known facts that Borrow was born in 1803 at East Dereham in
+Norfolk, his father being a captain in the army, who came of Cornish
+blood, his mother a lady of Norfolk birth and Huguenot extraction. His
+youth he has himself described in a fashion which nobody is likely to
+care to paraphrase. After the years of travel chronicled in _Lavengro_,
+he seems to have found scope for his philological and adventurous
+tendencies in the rather unlikely service of the Bible Society; and he
+sojourned in Russia and Spain to the great advantage of English
+literature. This occupied him during the greater part of the years from
+1830 to 1840. Then he came back to his native country--or, at any rate,
+his native district--married a widow of some property at Lowestoft, and
+spent the last forty years of his life at Oulton Hall, near the piece of
+water which is thronged in summer by all manner of sportsmen and others.
+He died but a few years ago; and even since his death he seems to have
+lacked the due meed of praise which the Lord Chief Justice of the equal
+foot usually brings, even to persons far less deserving than Borrow.
+
+There is this difficulty in writing about him, that the audience must
+necessarily consist of fervent devotees on the one hand, and of complete
+infidels, or at least complete know-nothings, on the other. To any one
+who, having the faculty to understand either, has read _Lavengro_ or
+_The Bible in Spain_, or even _Wild Wales_, praise bestowed on Borrow is
+apt to seem impertinence. To anybody else (and unfortunately the anybody
+else is in a large majority) praise bestowed on Borrow is apt to look
+like that very dubious kind of praise which is bestowed on somebody of
+whom no one but the praiser has ever heard. I cannot think of any single
+writer (Peacock himself is not an exception) who is in quite parallel
+case. And, as usual, there is a certain excuse for the general public.
+Borrow kept himself, during not the least exciting period of English
+history, quite aloof from English politics, and from the life of great
+English cities. But he did more than this. He is the only really
+considerable writer of his time in any modern European nation who seems
+to have taken absolutely no interest in current events, literary and
+other. Putting a very few allusions aside, he might have belonged to
+almost any period. His political idiosyncrasy will be noticed presently;
+but he, who lived through the whole period from Waterloo to Maiwand, has
+not, as far as I remember, mentioned a single English writer later than
+Scott and Byron. He saw the rise, and, in some instances, the death, of
+Tennyson, Thackeray, Macaulay, Carlyle, Dickens. There is not a
+reference to any one of them in his works. He saw political changes such
+as no man for two centuries had seen, and (except the Corn Laws, to
+which he has some half-ironical allusions, and the Ecclesiastical Titles
+Bill, which stirred his one active sentiment) he has referred to never a
+one. He seems in some singular fashion to have stood outside of all
+these things. His Spanish travels are dated for us by references to Doña
+Isabel and Don Carlos, to Mr. Villiers and Lord Palmerston. But cut
+these dates out, and they might be travels of the last century. His
+Welsh book proclaims itself as written in the full course of the
+Crimean War; but excise a few passages which bear directly on that
+event, and the most ingenious critic would be puzzled to "place" the
+composition. Shakespeare, we know, was for all time, not of one age
+only; but I think we may say of Borrow, without too severely or
+conceitedly marking the difference, that he was not of or for any
+particular age or time at all. If the celebrated query in Longfellow's
+_Hyperion_, "What is time?" had been addressed to him, his most
+appropriate answer, and one which he was quite capable of giving, would
+have been, "I really don't know."
+
+To this singular historical vagueness has to be added a critical
+vagueness even greater. I am sorry that I am unable to confirm or to
+gainsay at first hand Borrow's wonderfully high estimate of certain
+Welsh poets. But if the originals are anything like his translations of
+them, I do not think that Ab Gwilym and Lewis Glyn Cothi, Gronwy Owen
+and Huw Morris can have been quite such mighty bards as he makes out.
+Fortunately, however, a better test presents itself. In one book of his,
+_Wild Wales_, there are two estimates of Scott's works. Borrow finds in
+an inn a copy of _Woodstock_ (which he calls by its less known title of
+_The Cavalier_), and decides that it is "trashy": chiefly, it would
+appear, because the portrait therein contained of Harrison, for whom
+Borrow seems, on one of his inscrutable principles of prejudice, to
+have had a liking, is not wholly favourable. He afterwards informs us
+that Scott's "Norman Horseshoe" (no very exquisite song at the best, and
+among Scott's somewhat less than exquisite) is "one of the most stirring
+lyrics of modern times," and that he sang it for a whole evening;
+evidently because it recounts a defeat of the Normans, whom Borrow, as
+he elsewhere tells us in sundry places, disliked for reasons more or
+less similar to those which made him like Harrison, the butcher. In
+other words, he could not judge a work of literature as literature at
+all. If it expressed sentiments with which he agreed, or called up
+associations which were pleasant to him, good luck to it; if it
+expressed sentiments with which he did not agree, and called up no
+pleasant associations, bad luck.
+
+In politics and religion this curious and very John Bullish unreason is
+still more apparent. I suppose Borrow may be called, though he does not
+call himself, a Tory. He certainly was an unfriend to Whiggery, and a
+hater of Radicalism. He seems to have given up even the Corn Laws with a
+certain amount of regret, and his general attitude is quite Eldonian.
+But he combined with his general Toryism very curious Radicalisms of
+detail, such as are to be found in Cobbett (who, as appeared at last,
+and as all reasonable men should have always known, was really a Tory of
+a peculiar type), and in several other English persons. The Church, the
+Monarchy, and the Constitution generally were dear to Borrow, but he
+hated all the aristocracy (except those whom he knew personally) and
+most of the gentry. Also, he had the odd Radical sympathy for anybody
+who, as the vernacular has it, was "kept out of his rights." I do not
+know, but I should think, that Borrow was a strong Tichbornite. In that
+curious book _Wild Wales_, where almost more of his real character
+appears than in any other, he has to do with the Crimean War. It was
+going on during the whole time of his tour, and he once or twice reports
+conversations in which, from his knowledge of Russia, he demonstrated
+beforehand to Welsh inquirers how improbable, not to say impossible, it
+was that the Russian should be beaten. But the thing that seems really
+to have interested him most was the case of Lieutenant P---- or
+Lieutenant Parry, whom he sometimes refers to in the fuller and
+sometimes in the less explicit manner. My own memories of 1854 are
+rather indistinct, and I confess that I have not taken the trouble to
+look up this celebrated case. As far as I can remember, and as far as
+Borrow's references here and elsewhere go, it was the doubtless
+lamentable but not uncommon case of a man who is difficult to live with,
+and who has to live with others. Such cases occur at intervals in every
+mess, college, and other similar aggregation of humanity. The person
+difficult to live with gets, to use an Oxford phrase, "drawn." If he is
+reformable he takes the lesson, and very likely becomes excellent
+friends with those who "drew" him. If he is not, he loses his temper,
+and evil results of one kind or another follow. Borrow's Lieutenant
+P---- seems unluckily to have been of the latter kind, and was, if I
+mistake not, recommended by the authorities to withdraw from a situation
+which, to him, was evidently a false and unsuitable one. With this
+Borrow could not away. He gravely chronicles the fact of his reading an
+"excellent article in a local paper on the case of Lieutenant P----";
+and with no less gravity (though he was, in a certain way, one of the
+first humorists of our day) he suggests that the complaints of the
+martyred P---- to the Almighty were probably not unconnected with our
+Crimean disasters. This curious parochialism pursues him into more
+purely religious matters. I do not know any other really great man of
+letters of the last three-quarters of a century of whose attitude
+Carlyle's famous words, "regarding God's universe as a larger patrimony
+of Saint Peter, from which it were well and pleasant to hunt the Pope,"
+are so literally true. It was not in Borrow's case a case of _sancta
+simplicitas_. He has at times flashes of by no means orthodox sentiment,
+and seems to have fought, and perhaps hardly won, many a battle against
+the army of the doubters. But when it comes to the Pope, he is as
+single-minded an enthusiast as John Bunyan himself, whom, by the way,
+he resembles in more than one point. The attitude was, of course, common
+enough among his contemporaries; indeed any man who has reached middle
+life must remember numerous examples among his own friends and kindred.
+But in literature, and such literature as Borrow's, it is rare.
+
+Yet again, the curiously piecemeal, and the curiously arbitrary
+character of Borrow's literary studies in languages other than his own,
+is noteworthy in so great a linguist. The entire range of French
+literature, old as well as new, he seems to have ignored altogether--I
+should imagine out of pure John Bullishness. He has very few references
+to German, though he was a good German scholar--a fact which I account
+for by the other fact, that in his earlier literary period German was
+fashionable, and that he never would have anything to do with anything
+that fashion favoured. Italian, though he certainly knew it well, is
+equally slighted. His education, if not his taste for languages, must
+have made him a tolerable (he never could have been an exact) classical
+scholar. But it is clear that insolent Greece and haughty Rome possessed
+no attraction for him. I question whether even Spanish would not have
+been too common a toy to attract him much, if it had not been for the
+accidental circumstances which connected him with Spain.
+
+Lastly (for I love to get my devil's advocate work over), in Borrow's
+varied and strangely attractive gallery of portraits and characters,
+most observers must perceive the absence of the note of passion. I have
+sometimes tried to think that miraculous episode of Isopel Berners and
+the Armenian verbs, with the whole sojourn of Lavengro in the dingle, a
+mere wayward piece of irony--a kind of conscious ascetic myth. But I am
+afraid the interpretation will not do. The subsequent conversation with
+Ursula Petulengro under the hedge might be only a companion piece; even
+the more wonderful, though much less interesting, dialogue with the
+Irish girl in the last chapters of _Wild Wales_ might be so rendered by
+a hardy exegete. But the negative evidence in all the books is too
+strong. It may be taken as positively certain that Borrow never was "in
+love," as the phrase is, and that he had hardly the remotest conception
+of what being in love means. It is possible that he was a most cleanly
+liver--it is possible that he was quite the reverse: I have not the
+slightest information either way. But that he never in all his life
+heard with understanding the refrain of the "Pervigilium,"
+
+    Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit eras amet,
+
+I take as certain.
+
+The foregoing remarks have, I think, summed up all Borrow's defects, and
+it will be observed that even these defects have for the most part the
+attraction of a certain strangeness and oddity. If they had not been
+accompanied by great and peculiar merits, he would not have emerged from
+the category of the merely bizarre, where he might have been left
+without further attention. But, as a matter of fact, all, or almost all,
+of his defects are not only counterbalanced by merits, but are
+themselves, in a great degree, exaggerations or perversions of what is
+intrinsically meritorious. With less wilfulness, with more attention to
+the literature, the events, the personages of his own time, with a more
+critical and common-sense attitude towards his own crotchets, Borrow
+could hardly have wrought out for himself (as he has to an extent hardly
+paralleled by any other prose writer who has not deliberately chosen
+supernatural or fantastic themes) the region of fantasy, neither too
+real nor too historical, which Joubert thought proper to the poet.
+Strong and vivid as Borrow's drawing of places and persons is, he always
+contrives to throw in touches which somehow give the whole the air of
+being rather a vision than a fact. Never was such a John-a-Dreams as
+this solid, pugilistic John Bull. Part of this literary effect of his is
+due to his quaint habit of avoiding, where he can, the mention of proper
+names. The description, for instance, of Old Sarum and Salisbury itself
+in _Lavengro_ is sufficient to identify them to the most careless
+reader, even if the name of Stonehenge had not occurred on the page
+before; but they are not named. The description of Bettws-y-Coed in
+_Wild Wales_, though less poetical, is equally vivid. Yet here it would
+be quite possible for a reader, who did not know the place and its
+relation to other named places, to pass without any idea of the actual
+spot. It is the same with his frequent references to his beloved city of
+Norwich, and his less frequent references to his later home at Oulton. A
+paraphrase, an innuendo, a word to the wise he delights in, but anything
+perfectly clear and precise he abhors. And by this means and others,
+which it might be tedious to trace out too closely, he succeeds in
+throwing the same cloudy vagueness over times as well as places and
+persons. A famous passage--perhaps the best known, and not far from the
+best he ever wrote--about Byron's funeral, fixes, of course, the date of
+the wondrous facts or fictions recorded in _Lavengro_ to a nicety. Yet
+who, as he reads it and its sequel (for the separation of _Lavengro_ and
+_The Romany Rye_ is merely arbitrary, though the second book is, as a
+whole, less interesting than the former), ever thinks of what was
+actually going on in the very positive and prosaic England of 1824-25?
+The later chapters of _Lavengro_ are the only modern _Roman d'Aventures_
+that I know. The hero goes "overthwart and endlong," just like the
+figures whom all readers know in Malory, and some in his originals. I do
+not know that it would be more surprising if Borrow had found Sir Ozana
+dying at the chapel in Lyonesse, or had seen the full function of the
+Grail, though I fear he would have protested against that as popish.
+Without any apparent art, certainly without the elaborate apparatus
+which most prose tellers of fantastic tales use, and generally fail in
+using, Borrow spirits his readers at once away from mere reality. If his
+events are frequently as odd as a dream, they are always as perfectly
+commonplace and real for the moment as the events of a dream are--a
+little fact which the above-mentioned tellers of the above-mentioned
+fantastic stories are too apt to forget. It is in this natural romantic
+gift that Borrow's greatest charm lies. But it is accompanied and nearly
+equalled, both in quality and in degree, by a faculty for dialogue.
+Except Defoe and Dumas, I cannot think of any novelists who contrive to
+tell a story in dialogue and to keep up the ball of conversation so well
+as Borrow; while he is considerably the superior of both in pure style
+and in the literary quality of his talk. Borrow's humour, though it is
+of the general class of the older English--that is to say, the
+pre-Addisonian--humorists, is a species quite by itself. It is rather
+narrow in range, a little garrulous, busied very often about curiously
+small matters, but wonderfully observant and true, and possessing a
+quaint dry savour as individual as that of some wines. A characteristic
+of this kind probably accompanies the romantic _ethos_ more commonly
+than superficial judges both of life and literature are apt to suppose;
+but the conjunction is nowhere seen better than in Borrow. Whether
+humour can or cannot exist without a disposition to satire co-existing,
+is one of those abstract points of criticism for which the public of the
+present day has little appetite. It is certain (and that is what chiefly
+concerns us for the present) that the two were not dissociated in
+Borrow. His purely satirical faculty was very strong indeed, and
+probably if he had lived a less retired life it would have found fuller
+exercise. At present the most remarkable instance of it which exists is
+the inimitable portrait-caricature of the learned Unitarian, generally
+known as "Taylor of Norwich." I have somewhere (I think it was in Miss
+Martineau's _Autobiography_) seen this reflected on as a flagrant
+instance of ingratitude and ill-nature. The good Harriet, among whose
+numerous gifts nature had not included any great sense of humour,
+naturally did not perceive the artistic justification of the sketch,
+which I do not hesitate to call one of the most masterly things of the
+kind in literature.
+
+Another Taylor, the well-known French baron of that name, is much more
+mildly treated, though with little less skill of portraiture. As for
+"the publisher" of _Lavengro_, the portrait there, though very clever,
+is spoilt by rather too much evidence of personal animus, and by the
+absence of redeeming strokes; but it shows the same satiric power as
+the sketch of the worthy student of German who has had the singular
+ill-fortune to have his books quizzed by Carlyle, and himself quizzed by
+Borrow. It is a strong evidence of Borrow's abstraction from general
+society that with this satiric gift, and evidently with a total freedom
+from scruple as to its application, he should have left hardly anything
+else of the kind. It is indeed impossible to ascertain how much of the
+abundant character-drawing in his four chief books (all of which, be it
+remembered, are autobiographic and professedly historical) is fact and
+how much fancy. It is almost impossible to open them anywhere without
+coming upon personal sketches, more or less elaborate, in which the
+satiric touch is rarely wanting. The official admirer of "the grand
+Baintham" at remote Corcubion, the end of all the European world; the
+treasure-seeker, Benedict Mol; the priest at Cordova, with his
+revelations about the Holy Office; the Gibraltar Jew; are only a few
+figures out of the abundant gallery of _The Bible in Spain_. _Lavengro_,
+besides the capital and full-length portraits above referred to, is
+crowded with others hardly inferior, among which only one failure, the
+disguised priest with the mysterious name, is to be found. Not that even
+he has not good strokes and plenty of them, but that Borrow's prejudices
+prevented his hand from being free. But Jasper Petulengro, and Mrs.
+Hearne, and the girl Leonora, and Isopel, that vigorous and slighted
+maid, and dozens of minor figures, of whom more presently, atone for
+him. _The Romany Rye_ adds only minor figures to the gallery, because
+the major figures have appeared before; while the plan and subject of
+_Wild Wales_ also exclude anything more than vignettes. But what
+admirable vignettes they are, and how constantly bitten in with satiric
+spirit, all lovers of Borrow know.
+
+It is, however, perhaps time to give some more exact account of the
+books thus familiarly and curiously referred to; for Borrow most
+assuredly is not a popular writer. Not long before his death _Lavengro_,
+_The Romany Rye_, and _Wild Wales_ were only in their third edition,
+though the first was nearly thirty, and the last nearly twenty, years
+old. _The Bible in Spain_ had, at any rate in its earlier days, a wider
+sale, but I do not think that even that is very generally known. I
+should doubt whether the total number sold, during some fifty years, of
+volumes surpassed in interest of incident, style, character and
+description by few books of the century, has equalled the sale, within
+any one of the last few years, of a fairly popular book by any fairly
+popular novelist of to-day. And there is not the obstacle to Borrow's
+popularity that there is to that of some other writers, notably the
+already-mentioned author of _Crotchet Castle_. No extensive literary
+cultivation is necessary to read him. A good deal even of his peculiar
+charm may be missed by a prosaic or inattentive reader, and yet enough
+will remain. But he has probably paid the penalty of originality, which
+allows itself to be mastered by quaintness, and which refuses to meet
+public taste at least half-way. It is certainly difficult at times to
+know what to make of Borrow. And the general public, perhaps excusably,
+is apt not to like things or persons when it does not know what to make
+of them.
+
+Borrow's literary work, even putting aside the "mountains of manuscript"
+which he speaks of as unpublished, was not inconsiderable. There were,
+in the first place, his translations, which, though no doubt not without
+value, do not much concern us here. There is, secondly, his early
+hackwork, his _Chaines de l'Esclavage_, which also may be neglected.
+Thirdly, there are his philological speculations or compilations, the
+chief of which is, I believe, his _Romano-Lavo-Lil_, the latest
+published of his works. But Borrow, though an extraordinary linguist,
+was a somewhat unchastened philologer, and the results of his life-long
+philological studies appear to much better advantage from the literary
+than from the scientific point of view. Then there is _The Gypsies in
+Spain_, a very interesting book of its kind, marked throughout with
+Borrow's characteristics, but for literary purposes merged to a great
+extent in _The Bible in Spain_. And, lastly, there are the four original
+books, as they may be called, which, at great leisure, and writing
+simply because he chose to write, Borrow produced during the twenty
+years of his middle age. He was in his fortieth year when, in 1842, he
+published _The Bible in Spain_. _Lavengro_ came nearly ten years later,
+and coincided with (no doubt it was partially stimulated by) the ferment
+over the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. Its second part, _The Romany Rye_,
+did not appear till six afterwards, that is to say, in 1857, and its
+resuscitation of quarrels, which the country had quite forgotten (and
+when it remembered them was rather ashamed of), must be pronounced
+unfortunate. Last, in 1862, came _Wild Wales_, the characteristically
+belated record of a tour in the principality during the year of the
+Crimean War. On these four books Borrow's literary fame rests. His other
+works are interesting because they were written by the author of these,
+or because of their subjects, or because of the effect they had on other
+men of letters, notably Longfellow and Mérimée, on the latter of whom
+Borrow had an especially remarkable influence. These four are
+interesting of themselves.
+
+The earliest has been, I believe, and for reasons quite apart from its
+biblical subject perhaps deserves to be, the greatest general favourite,
+though its literary value is a good deal below that of _Lavengro_. _The
+Bible in Spain_ records the journeys, which, as an agent of the Bible
+Society, Borrow took through the Peninsula at a singularly interesting
+time, the disturbed years of the early reign of Isabel Segunda. Navarre
+and Aragon, with Catalonia, Valencia, and Murcia, he seems to have left
+entirely unvisited; I suppose because of the Carlists. Nor did he
+attempt the southern part of Portugal; but Castile and Leon, with the
+north of Portugal and the south of Spain, he quartered in the most
+interesting manner, riding everywhere with his servant and his
+saddle-bag of Testaments at, I should suppose, a considerable cost to
+the subscribers of the Society and at, it may be hoped, some gain to the
+propagation of evangelical principles in the Peninsula, but certainly
+with the results of extreme satisfaction to himself and of a very
+delightful addition to English literature. He was actually imprisoned at
+Madrid, and was frequently in danger from Carlists, and brigands, and
+severely orthodox ecclesiastics. It is possible to imagine a more
+ideally perfect missionary; but it is hardly possible to imagine a more
+ideally perfect traveller. His early habits of roughing it, his gipsy
+initiation, his faculties as a linguist, and his other faculties as a
+born vagrant, certain to fall on his feet anywhere, were all called into
+operation. But he might have had all these advantages and yet lacked the
+extraordinary literary talent which the book reveals. In the first
+chapter there is a certain stiffness; but the passage of the Tagus in
+the second must have told every competent reader in 1842 that he had to
+deal with somebody quite different from the run of common writers, and
+thenceforward the book never flags till the end. How far the story is
+rigidly historical I should be very sorry to have to decide. The author
+makes a kind of apology in his preface for the amount of fact which has
+been supplied from memory. I daresay the memory was quite trustworthy,
+and certainly adventures are to the adventurous. We have had daring
+travellers enough during the last half-century, but I do not know that
+any one has ever had quite such a romantic experience as Borrow's ride
+across the Hispano-Portuguese frontier with a gipsy _contrabandista_,
+who was at the time a very particular object of police inquiry. I
+daresay the interests of the Bible Society required the adventurous
+journey to the wilds of Finisterra. But I feel that if that association
+had been a mere mundane company and Borrow its agent, troublesome
+shareholders might have asked awkward questions at the annual meeting.
+Still, this sceptical attitude is only part of the official duty of the
+critic, just as, of course, Borrow's adventurous journeys into the most
+remote and interesting parts of Spain were part of the duty of the
+colporteur. The book is so delightful that, except when duty calls, no
+one would willingly take any exception to any part or feature of it. The
+constant change of scene, the romantic episodes of adventure, the
+kaleidoscope of characters, the crisp dialogue, the quaint reflection
+and comment relieve each other without a break. I do not know whether it
+is really true to Spain and Spanish life, and, to tell the exact truth,
+I do not in the least care. If it is not Spanish it is remarkably human
+and remarkably literary, and those are the chief and principal things.
+
+_Lavengro_, which followed, has all the merits of its predecessor and
+more. It is a little spoilt in its later chapters by the purpose, the
+antipapal purpose, which appears still more fully in _The Romany Rye_.
+But the strong and singular individuality of its flavour as a whole
+would have been more than sufficient to carry off a greater fault. There
+are, I should suppose, few books the successive pictures of which leave
+such an impression on the reader who is prepared to receive that
+impression. The word picture is here rightly used, for in all Borrow's
+books more or less, and in this particularly, the narrative is anything
+but continuous. It is a succession of dissolving views which grow clear
+and distinct for a time and then fade off into vagueness before once
+more appearing distinctly; nor has this mode of dealing with a subject
+ever been more successfully applied than in _Lavengro_. At the same time
+the mode is one singularly difficult of treatment by any reviewer. To
+describe _Lavengro_ with any chance of distinctness to those who have
+not read it, it would be necessary to give a series of sketches in
+words, like those famous ones of the pictures in _Jane Eyre_. East
+Dereham, the Viper Collector, the French Prisoners at Norman Cross, the
+Gipsy Encampment, the Sojourn in Edinburgh (with a passing view of
+Scotch schoolboys only inferior, as everything is, to Sir Walter's
+history of Green-breeks), the Irish Sojourn (with the horse whispering
+and the "dog of peace,") the settlement in Norwich (with Borrow's
+compulsory legal studies and his very uncompulsory excursions into
+Italian, Hebrew, Welsh, Scandinavian, anything that obviously would not
+pay), the new meeting with the gipsies in the Castle Field, the
+fight--only the first of many excellent fights--these are but a few of
+the memories which rise to every reader of even the early chapters of
+this extraordinary book, and they do not cover its first hundred pages
+in the common edition. Then his father dies and the born vagrant is set
+loose for vagrancy. He goes to London, with a stock of translations
+which is to make him famous, and a recommendation from Taylor of Norwich
+to "the publisher." The publisher exacted something more than his pound
+of flesh in the form of Newgate Lives and review articles, and paid,
+when he did pay, in bills of uncertain date which were very likely to be
+protested. But Borrow won through it all, making odd acquaintances with
+a young man of fashion (his least lifelike sketch); with an apple-seller
+on London Bridge, who was something of a "fence" and had erected Moll
+Flanders (surely the oddest patroness ever so selected) into a kind of
+patron saint; with a mysterious Armenian merchant of vast wealth, whom
+the young man, according to his own account, finally put on a kind of
+filibustering expedition against both the Sublime Porte and the White
+Czar, for the restoration of Armenian independence. At last, out of
+health with perpetual work and low living, out of employ, his friends
+beyond call, he sees destruction before him, writes _The Life and
+Adventures of Joseph Sell_ (name of fortunate omen!) almost at a heat
+and on a capital, fixed and floating, of eighteen-pence, and disposes of
+it for twenty pounds by the special providence of the Muses. With this
+twenty pounds his journey into the blue distance begins. He travels,
+partly by coach, to somewhere near Salisbury, and gives the first of the
+curiously unfavourable portraits of stage coachmen, which remain to
+check Dickens's rose-coloured representations of Mr. Weller and his
+brethren. I incline to think that Borrow's was likely to be the truer
+picture. According to him, the average stage coachman was anything but
+an amiable character, greedy, insolent to all but persons of wealth and
+rank, a hanger-on of those who might claim either; bruiser enough to be
+a bully but not enough to be anything more; in short, one of the worst
+products of civilisation. From civilisation itself, however, Borrow soon
+disappears, as far as any traceable signs go. He journeys, not farther
+west but northwards, into the West Midlands and the marches of Wales. He
+buys a tinker's beat and fit-out from a feeble vessel of the craft, who
+has been expelled by "the Flaming Tinman," a half-gipsy of robustious
+behaviour. He is met by old Mrs. Hearne, the mother-in-law of his gipsy
+friend Jasper Petulengro, who resents a Gorgio's initiation in gipsy
+ways, and very nearly poisons him by the wily aid of her grand-daughter
+Leonora. He recovers, thanks to a Welsh travelling preacher and to
+castor oil. And then, when the Welshman has left him, comes the climax
+and turning-point of the whole story, the great fight with Jem Bosvile,
+"the Flaming Tinman." The much-abused adjective Homeric belongs in sober
+strictness to this immortal battle, which has the additional interest
+not thought of by Homer (for goddesses do not count) that Borrow's
+second and guardian angel is a young woman of great attractions and
+severe morality, Miss Isopel (or Belle) Berners, whose extraction,
+allowing for the bar sinister, is honourable, and who, her hands being
+fully able to keep her head, has sojourned without ill fortune in the
+Flaming Tinman's very disreputable company. Bosvile, vanquished by pluck
+and good fortune rather than strength, flees the place with his wife.
+Isopel remains behind and the couple take up their joint residence, a
+residence of perfect propriety, in this dingle, the exact locality of
+which I have always longed to know, that I might make an autumnal
+pilgrimage to it. Isopel, Brynhild as she is, would apparently have had
+no objection to be honourably wooed. But her eccentric companion
+confines himself to teaching her "I love" in Armenian, which she finds
+unsatisfactory; and she at last departs, leaving a letter which tells
+Mr. Borrow some home truths. And, even before this catastrophe has been
+reached, _Lavengro_ itself ends with a more startling abruptness than
+perhaps any nominally complete book before or since.
+
+It would be a little interesting to know whether the continuation, _The
+Romany Rye_, which opens as if there had been no break whatever, was
+written continuously or with a break. At any rate its opening chapters
+contain the finish of the lamentable history of Belle Berners, which
+must induce every reader of sensibility to trust that Borrow, in writing
+it, was only indulging in his very considerable faculty of perverse
+romancing. The chief argument to the contrary is, that surely no man,
+however imbued with romantic perversity, would have made himself cut so
+poor a figure as Borrow here does without cause. The gipsies reappear to
+save the situation, and a kind of minor Belle Berners drama is played
+out with Ursula, Jasper's sister. Then the story takes another of its
+abrupt turns. Jasper, half in generosity it would appear, half in
+waywardness, insists on Borrow purchasing a thorough-bred horse which is
+for sale, advances the money, and despatches him across England to
+Horncastle Fair to sell it. The usual Le Sagelike adventures occur, the
+oddest of them being the hero's residence for some considerable time as
+clerk and storekeeper at a great roadside inn. At last he reaches
+Horncastle, and sells the horse to advantage. Then the story closes as
+abruptly and mysteriously almost as that of _Lavengro_, with a long and
+in parts, it must be confessed, rather dull conversation between the
+hero, the Hungarian who has bought the horse, and the dealer who has
+acted as go-between. This dealer, in honour of Borrow, of whom he has
+heard through the gipsies, executes the wasteful and very meaningless
+ceremony of throwing two bottles of old rose champagne, at a guinea
+apiece, through the window. Even this is too dramatic a finale for
+Borrow's unconquerable singularity, and he adds a short dialogue between
+himself and a recruiting sergeant. And after this again there comes an
+appendix containing an _apologia_ for _Lavengro_, a great deal more
+polemic against Romanism, some historical views of more originality than
+exactness, and a diatribe against gentility, Scotchmen, Scott, and other
+black beasts of Borrow's. This appendix has received from some professed
+admirers of the author a great deal more attention than it deserves. In
+the first place, it was evidently written in a fit of personal pique; in
+the second, it is chiefly argumentative, and Borrow had absolutely no
+argumentative faculty. To say that it contains a great deal of quaint
+and piquant writing is only to say that its writer wrote it, and though
+the description of "Charlie-over-the-waterism" probably does not apply
+to any being who ever lived, except to a few school-girls of both sexes,
+it has a strong infusion of Borrow's satiric gift. As for the diatribes
+against gentility, Borrow has only done very clumsily what Thackeray had
+done long before without clumsiness. It can escape nobody who has read
+his books with a seeing eye that he was himself exceedingly proud, not
+merely of being a gentleman in the ethical sense, but of being one in
+the sense of station and extraction--as, by the way, the decriers of
+British snobbishness usually are, so that no special blame attaches to
+Borrow for the inconsistency. Only let it be understood, once for all,
+that to describe him as "the apostle of the ungenteel" is either to
+speak in riddles or quite to misunderstand his real merits and
+abilities.
+
+I believe that some of the small but fierce tribe of Borrovians are
+inclined to resent the putting of the last of this remarkable series,
+_Wild Wales_, on a level with the other three. With such I can by no
+means agree. _Wild Wales_ has not, of course, the charm of unfamiliar
+scenery and the freshness of youthful impression which distinguish _The
+Bible in Spain_; it does not attempt anything like the novel-interest of
+_Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_; and though, as has been pointed out
+above, something of Borrow's secret and mysterious way of indicating
+places survives, it is a pretty distinct itinerary over great part of
+the actual principality. I have followed most of its tracks on foot
+myself, and nobody who wants a Welsh guide-book can take a pleasanter
+one, though he might easily find one much less erratic. It may thus
+have, to superficial observers, a positive and prosaic flavour as
+compared with the romantic character of the other three. But this
+distinction is not real. The tones are a little subdued, as was likely
+to be the case with an elderly gentleman of fifty, travelling with his
+wife and stepdaughter, and not publishing the record of his travels till
+he was nearly ten years older. The localities are traceable on the map
+and in Murray, instead of being the enchanted dingles and the
+half-mythical woods of _Lavengro_. The personages of the former books
+return no more, though, with one of his most excellent touches of art,
+the author has suggested the contrast of youth and age by a single gipsy
+interview in one of the later chapters. Borrow, like all sensible men,
+was at no time indifferent to good food and drink, especially good ale;
+but the trencher plays in _Wild Wales_ a part, the importance of which
+may perhaps have shocked some of our latter-day delicates, to whom
+strong beer is a word of loathing, and who wonder how on earth our
+grandfathers and fathers used to dispose of "black strap." A very
+different set of readers may be repelled by the strong literary colour
+of the book, which is almost a Welsh anthology in parts. But those few
+who can boast themselves to find the whole of a book, not merely its
+parts, and to judge that whole when found, will be not least fond of
+_Wild Wales_. If they have, as every reader of Borrow should have, the
+spirit of the roads upon them, and are never more happy than when
+journeying on "Shanks his mare," they will, of course, have in addition
+a peculiar and personal love for it. It is, despite the interludes of
+literary history, as full of Borrow's peculiar conversational gift as
+any of its predecessors. Its thumbnail sketches, if somewhat more
+subdued and less elaborate, are not less full of character. John Jones,
+the Dissenting weaver, who served Borrow at once as a guide and a
+whetstone of Welsh in the neighbourhood of Llangollen; the "kenfigenous"
+Welshwoman who first, but by no means last, exhibited the curious local
+jealousy of a Welsh-speaking Englishman; the doctor and the Italian
+barometer-seller at Cerrig-y-Druidion; the "best Pridydd of the world"
+in Anglesey, with his unlucky addiction to beer and flattery; the waiter
+at Bala; the "ecclesiastical cat" (a cat worthy to rank with those of
+Southey and Gautier); the characters of the walk across the hills from
+Machynlleth to the Devil's Bridge; the scene at the public-house on the
+Glamorgan Border, where the above-mentioned jealousy comes out so
+strongly; the mad Irishwoman, Johanna Colgan (a masterpiece by herself);
+and the Irish girl, with her hardly inferior history of the
+faction-fights of Scotland Road (which Borrow, by a mistake, has put in
+Manchester instead of in Liverpool); these make a list which I have
+written down merely as they occurred to me, without opening the book,
+and without prejudice to another list, nearly as long, which might be
+added. _Wild Wales_, too, because of its easy and direct opportunity of
+comparing its description with the originals, is particularly valuable
+as showing how sober, and yet how forcible, Borrow's descriptions are.
+As to incident, one often, as before, suspects him of romancing, and it
+stands to reason that his dialogue, written long after the event, must
+be full of the "cocked-hat-and-cane" style of narrative. But his
+description, while it has all the vividness, has also all the
+faithfulness and sobriety of the best landscape-painting. See a place
+which Kingsley or Mr. Ruskin, or some other master of our decorative
+school, has described--much more one which has fallen into the hands of
+the small fry of their imitators--and you are almost sure to find that
+it has been overdone. This is never, or hardly ever, the case with
+Borrow, and it is so rare a merit, when it is found in a man who does
+not shirk description where necessary, that it deserves to be counted to
+him at no grudging rate.
+
+But there is no doubt that the distinguishing feature of the book is its
+survey of Welsh poetical literature. I have already confessed that I am
+not qualified to judge the accuracy of Borrow's translations, and by no
+means disposed to over-value them. But any one who takes an interest in
+literature at all, must, I think, feel that interest not a little
+excited by the curious Old-Mortality-like peregrinations which the
+author of _Wild Wales_ made to the birth-place, or the burial-place as
+it might be, of bard after bard, and by the short but masterly accounts
+which he gives of the objects of his search. Of none of the numerous
+subjects of his linguistic rovings does Borrow seem to have been fonder,
+putting Romany aside, than of Welsh. He learnt it in a peculiarly
+contraband manner originally, which, no doubt, endeared it to him; it
+was little known to and often ridiculed by most Englishmen, which was
+another attraction; and it was extremely unlikely to "pay" in any way,
+which was a third. Perhaps he was not such an adept in it as he would
+have us believe--the respected Cymmrodorion Society or Professor Rhys
+must settle that. But it needs no knowledge of Welsh whatever to
+perceive the genuine enthusiasm, and the genuine range of his
+acquaintance with the language from the purely literary side. When he
+tells us that Ab Gwilym was a greater poet than Ovid or Chaucer I feel
+considerable doubts whether he was quite competent to understand Ovid
+and little or no doubt that he has done wrong to Chaucer. But when,
+leaving these idle comparisons, he luxuriates in details about Ab Gwilym
+himself, and his poems, and his lady loves, and so forth, I have no
+doubt about Borrow's appreciation (casual prejudices always excepted) of
+literature. Nor is it easy to exaggerate the charm which he has added to
+Welsh scenery by this constant identification of it with the men, and
+the deeds, and the words of the past.
+
+Little has been said hitherto of Borrow's more purely literary
+characteristics from the point of view of formal criticism. They are
+sufficiently interesting. He unites with a general plainness of speech
+and writing, not unworthy of Defoe or Cobbett, a very odd and
+complicated mannerism, which, as he had the wisdom to make it the
+seasoning and not the main substance of his literary fare, is never
+disgusting. The secret of this may be, no doubt, in part sought in his
+early familiarity with a great many foreign languages, some of whose
+idioms he transplanted into English: but this is by no means the whole
+of the receipt. Perhaps it is useless to examine analytically that
+receipt's details, or rather (for the analysis may be said to be
+compulsory on any one who calls himself a critic), useless to offer its
+results to the reader. One point which can escape no one who reads with
+his eyes open is the frequent, yet not too abundant, repetition of the
+same or very similar words--a point wherein much of the secret of
+persons so dissimilar as Carlyle, Borrow, and Thackeray consists. This
+is a well-known fact--so well known indeed that when a person who
+desires to acquire style hears of it, he often goes and does likewise,
+with what result all reviewers know. The peculiarity of Borrow, as far
+as I can mark it, is that, despite his strong mannerism, he never relies
+on it as too many others, great and small, are wont to do. The character
+sketches, of which, as I have said, he is so abundant a master, are
+always put in the plainest and simplest English. So are his flashes of
+ethical reflection, which, though like all ethical reflections often
+one-sided, are of the first order of insight. I really do not know that,
+in the mint-and-anise-and-cummin order of criticism, I have more than
+one charge to make against Borrow. That is that he, like other persons
+of his own and the immediately preceding time, is wont to make a most
+absurd misuse of the word individual. With Borrow "individual" means
+simply "person": a piece of literary gentility of which he, of all
+others, ought to have been ashamed.
+
+But such criticism has but very little propriety in the case of a
+writer, whose attraction is neither mainly nor in any very great degree
+one of pure form. His early critics compared him to Le Sage, and the
+comparison is natural. But if it is natural, it is not extraordinarily
+critical. Both men wrote of vagabonds, and to some extent of picaroons;
+both neglected the conventionalities of their own language and
+literature; both had a singular knowledge of human nature. But Le Sage
+is one of the most impersonal of all great writers, and Borrow is one of
+the most personal. And it is undoubtedly in the revelation of his
+personality that great part of his charm lies. It is, as has been fully
+acknowledged, a one-sided, wrong-headed, not always quite right-hearted
+personality. But it is intensely English, possessing at the same time a
+certain strain of romance which the other John Bulls of literature
+mostly lack, and which John Bunyan, the king of them all, only reached
+within the limits, still more limited than Borrow's, of purely
+religious, if not purely ecclesiastical, interests. A born grumbler; a
+person with an intense appetite for the good things of this life;
+profoundly impressed with, and at the same time sceptically critical of,
+the bad or good things of another life; apt, as he somewhere says
+himself, "to hit people when he is not pleased"; illogical; constantly
+right in general, despite his extremely roundabout ways of reaching his
+conclusion; sometimes absurd, and yet full of humour; alternately
+prosaic and capable of the highest poetry; George Borrow, Cornishman on
+the father's side and Huguenot on the mother's, managed to display in
+perfection most of the characteristics of what once was, and let us hope
+has not quite ceased to be, the English type. If he had a slight
+overdose of Celtic blood and Celtic peculiarity, it was more than made
+up by the readiness of literary expression which it gave him. He, if any
+one, bore an English heart, though, as there often has been in
+Englishmen, there was something perhaps more as well as something less
+than English in his fashion of expression.
+
+To conclude, Borrow has--what after all is the chief mark of a great
+writer--distinction. "Try to be like somebody," said the unlucky
+critic-bookseller to Lamartine; and he has been gibbeted for it, very
+justly, for the best part of a century. It must be admitted that "try
+not to be like other people," though a much more fashionable, is likely
+to be quite as disastrous a recommendation. But the great writers,
+whether they try to be like other people or try not to be like them (and
+sometimes in the first case most of all), succeed only in being
+themselves, and that is what Borrow does. His attraction is rather
+complex, and different parts of it may, and no doubt do, apply with
+differing force to this and that reader. One may be fascinated by his
+pictures of an unconventional and open-air life, the very possibilities
+of which are to a great extent lost in our days, though patches of
+ground here and there in England (notably the tracts of open ground
+between Cromer and Wells in Borrow's own county) still recall them. To
+others he may be attractive for his sturdy patriotism, or his
+adventurous and wayward spirit, or his glimpses of superstition and
+romance. The racy downrightness of his talk; the axioms, such as that to
+the Welsh alewife, "The goodness of ale depends less upon who brews it
+than upon what it is brewed of"; or the sarcastic touches as that of the
+dapper shopkeeper, who, regarding the funeral of Byron, observed, "I,
+too, am frequently unhappy," may each and all have their votaries. His
+literary devotion to literature would, perhaps, of itself attract few;
+for, as has been hinted, it partook very much of the character of
+will-worship, and there are few people who like any will-worship in
+letters except their own; but it adds to his general attraction, no
+doubt, in the case of many. That neither it, nor any other of his
+claims, has yet forced itself as it should on the general public is an
+undoubted fact; a fact not difficult to understand, though rather
+difficult fully to explain, at least without some air of superior
+knowingness and taste. Yet he has, as has been said, his devotees, and I
+think they are likely rather to increase than to decrease. He wants
+editing, for his allusive fashion of writing probably makes a great part
+of him nearly unintelligible to those who have not from their youth up
+devoted themselves to the acquisition of useless knowledge. There ought
+to be a good life of him. The great mass of his translations, published
+and unpublished, and the smaller mass of his early hackwork, no doubt
+deserve judicious excerption. If professed philologers were not even
+more ready than most other specialists each to excommunicate all the
+others except himself and his own particular Johnny Dods of Farthing's
+Acre, it would be rather interesting to hear what some modern men of
+many languages have to say to Borrow's linguistic achievements. But all
+these things are only desirable embellishments and assistances. His real
+claims and his real attractions are comprised in four small volumes, the
+purchase of which, under modern arrangements of booksellers, leaves some
+change out of a sovereign, and which will about half fill the ordinary
+bag used for briefs and dynamite. It is not a large literary baggage,
+and it does not attempt any very varied literary kinds. If not exactly a
+novelist in any one of his books, Borrow is a romancer, in the true and
+not the ironic sense of the word, in all of them. He has not been
+approached in merit by any romancer who has published books in our days,
+except Charles Kingsley; and his work, if less varied in range and charm
+than Kingsley's, has a much stronger and more concentrated flavour.
+Moreover, he is the one English writer of our time, and perhaps of times
+still farther back, who seems never to have tried to be anything but
+himself; who went his own way all his life long with complete
+indifference to what the public or the publishers liked, as well as to
+what canons of literary form and standards of literary perfection
+seemed to indicate as best worth aiming at. A most self-sufficient
+person was Borrow, in the good and ancient sense, as well as, to some
+extent, in the sense which is bad and modern. And what is more, he was
+not only a self-sufficient person, but is very sufficient also to the
+tastes of all those who love good English and good literature.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX A
+
+DE QUINCEY
+
+
+A short time after the publication of my essay on De Quincey I learnt,
+to my great concern, that it had given offence to his daughter Florence,
+the widow of one of the heroes of the Indian Mutiny, Colonel Baird
+Smith. Mrs. Baird Smith complained, in a letter to the newspapers, that
+I had accused her father of untruthfulness, and requested the public to
+suspend their judgment until the publication of certain new documents,
+in the form of letters, which had been discovered. I might have replied,
+if my intent had been hostile, that little fault could be justly found
+with a critic of the existing evidence if new evidence were required to
+confute him. But as the very last intention that I had in writing the
+paper was to impute anything that can be properly called untruthfulness
+to De Quincey, I thought it better to say so and to wait for the further
+documents. In a subsequent private correspondence with Mrs. Baird Smith,
+I found that what had offended her (her complaints being at first quite
+general) was certain remarks on De Quincey's aristocratic acquaintances
+as appearing in the _Autobiography_ and "not heard of afterwards,"
+certain comments on the Malay incident and others like it, some on the
+mystery of her father's money affairs, and the passage on his general
+"impenetrability." The matter is an instance of the difficulty of
+dealing with recent reputations, when the commentator gives his name.
+Some really unkind things have been said of De Quincey; my intention was
+not to say anything unkind at all, but simply to give an account of the
+thing "as it strikes" if not "a contemporary" yet a well-willing junior.
+Take for instance the Malay incident. We know from De Quincey himself
+that, within a few years, the truth of this famous story was questioned,
+and that he was accused of having borrowed it from something of Hogg's.
+He disclaimed this, no doubt truly. He protested that it was a
+faithfully recorded incident: but though the events were then fresh, he
+did not produce a single witness to prove that any Malay had been near
+Grasmere at the time. And so elsewhere. As I have remarked about Borrow,
+there are some people who have a knack of recounting truth so that it
+looks as if it never had been true. I have been informed by Mr. James
+Runciman that he himself once made considerable inquiries on the track
+of _Lavengro_, and found that that remarkable book is, to some extent at
+any rate, apparently historic. On the other hand I have been told by
+another Borrovian who knew Borrow (which I never did) that the _Life of
+Joseph Sell_ never existed. In such cases a critic can only go on
+internal evidence, and I am sure that the vast majority of critics would
+decide against most of De Quincey's stories on that. I do not suppose
+that he ever, like Lamb, deliberately begat "lie-children": but
+opium-eating is not absolutely repugnant to delusion, and literary
+mystification was not so much the exception as the rule in his earlier
+time. As to his "impenetrability," I can only throw myself on the
+readers of such memoirs and reminiscences as have been published
+respecting him. The almost unanimous verdict of his acquaintances and
+critics has been that he was in a way mysterious, and though no doubt
+this mystery did not extend to his children, it seems to have extended
+to almost every one else. I gather from Mrs. Baird Smith's own remarks
+that from first to last all who were concerned with him treated him as a
+person unfit to be trusted with money, and while his habit of solitary
+lodging is doubtless capable of a certain amount of explanation, it
+cannot be described as other than curious. I had never intended to throw
+doubt on his actual acquaintance with Lord Westport or Lady Carbery.
+These persons or their representatives were alive when the
+_Autobiography_ was published, and would no doubt have protested if De
+Quincey had not spoken truly. But I must still hold that their total
+disappearance from his subsequent life is peculiar. Some other points,
+such as his mentioning Wilson as his "only intimate male friend" are
+textually cited from himself, and if I seem to have spoken harshly of
+his early treatment by his family I may surely shelter myself behind the
+touching incident, recorded in the biographies, of his crying on his
+deathbed, "My dear mother! then I was greatly mistaken." If this does
+not prove that he himself had entertained on the subject ideas which,
+whether false or true, were unfavourable, then it is purely meaningless.
+
+In conclusion, I have only to repeat my regret that I should, by a
+perhaps thoughtless forgetfulness of the feelings of survivors, have
+hurt those feelings. But I think I am entitled to say that the view of
+De Quincey's character and cast of thought given in the text, while
+imputing nothing discreditable in intention, is founded on the whole
+published work and all the biographical evidence then accessible to me,
+and will not be materially altered by anything since published or likely
+to be so in future. The world, though often not quite right, is never
+quite wrong about a man, and it would be almost impossible that it
+should be wrong in face of such autobiographic details as are furnished,
+not merely by the _Autobiography_ itself, but by a mass of notes spread
+over seven years in composition and full of personal idiosyncrasy. I not
+only acquit De Quincey of all serious moral delinquency,--I declare
+distinctly that no imputation of it was ever intended. It is quite
+possible that some of his biographers and of those who knew him may have
+exaggerated his peculiarities, less possible I think that those
+peculiarities should not have existed. But the matter, except for my own
+regret at having offended De Quincey's daughter, will have been a happy
+one if it results in a systematic publication of his letters, which,
+from the specimens already printed, must be very characteristic and very
+interesting. In almost all cases a considerable collection of letters is
+the most effective, and especially the most truth-telling, of all
+possible "lives." No letters indeed are likely to increase the literary
+repute of the author of the _Confessions_ and of the _Cæsars_; but they
+may very well clear up and fill in the hitherto rather fragmentary and
+conjectural notion of his character, and they may, on the other hand,
+confirm that idea of both which, however false it may seem to his
+children, and others who were united to him by ties of affection, has
+commended itself to careful students of his published works.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX B
+
+LOCKHART
+
+
+The most singular instance of the floating dislike to Lockhart's memory,
+to which I have more than once referred in the text, occurred
+subsequently to the original publication of my essay, and not very long
+ago, when my friend Mr. Louis Stevenson thought proper to call Lockhart
+a "cad." This extraordinary _obiter dictum_ provoked, as might have been
+expected, not a few protests, but I do not remember that Mr. Stevenson
+rejoined, and I have not myself had any opportunity of learning from him
+what he meant. I can only suppose that the ebullition must have been
+prompted by one of two things, the old scandal about the duel in which
+John Scott the editor of the _London_ was shot, and a newer one, which
+was first bruited abroad, I think, in Mr. Sidney Colvin's book on Keats.
+Both of these, and especially the first, may be worth a little
+discussion.
+
+I do not think that any one who examines Mr. Colvin's allegation, will
+think it very damaging. It comes to this, that Keats's friend Bailey met
+Lockhart in the house of Bishop Greig at Stirling, told him some
+particulars about Keats, extracted from him a promise that he would not
+use them against the poet, and afterwards thought he recognised some of
+the details in the _Blackwood_ attack which ranks next to the famous
+_Quarterly_ article. Here it is to be observed, first, that there is no
+sufficient evidence that Lockhart wrote this _Blackwood_ article;
+secondly, that it is by no means certain that if he did, he was making,
+or considered himself to be making, any improper use of what he had
+heard; thirdly, that for the actual interview and its tenor we have only
+a vague _ex parte_ statement made long after date.
+
+The other matter is much more important, and as the duel itself has been
+mentioned more than once or twice in the foregoing pages, and as it is
+to this day being frequently referred to in what seems to me an entirely
+erroneous manner, with occasional implications that Lockhart showed the
+white feather, it may be well to give a sketch of what actually
+happened, as far as can be made out from the most trustworthy accounts,
+published and unpublished.
+
+One of Lockhart's signatures in _Blackwood_--a signature which, however,
+like others, was not, I believe, peculiar to him--was "Zeta," and this
+Zeta assailed the Cockney school in a sufficiently scorpion-like manner.
+Thereupon Scott's magazine, the _London_, retorted, attacking Lockhart
+by name. On this Lockhart set out for London and, with a certain young
+Scotch barrister named Christie as his second, challenged Scott. But
+Scott refused to fight, unless Lockhart would deny that he was editor of
+_Blackwood_. Lockhart declared that Scott had no right to ask this, and
+stigmatised him as a coward. He then published a statement, sending at
+the same time a copy to Scott. In the published form the denial of
+editorship was made, in the one sent to Scott it was omitted. Thereupon
+Scott called Lockhart a liar. Of this Lockhart took no notice, but
+Christie his second did, and, an altercation taking place between them,
+Scott challenged Christie and they went out, Scott's second being Mr. P.
+G. Patmore, Christie's Mr. Traill, afterwards well known as a London
+police magistrate. Christie fired in the air, Scott fired at Christie
+and missed. Thereupon Mr. Patmore demanded a second shot, which, I am
+informed, could and should, by all laws of the duello, have been
+refused. Both principal and second on the other side were, however,
+inexperienced and probably unwilling to baulk their adversaries. Shots
+were again exchanged, Christie this time (as he can hardly be blamed for
+doing) taking aim at his adversary and wounding him mortally. Patmore
+fled the country, Christie and Traill took their trial and were
+acquitted.
+
+I have elsewhere remarked that this deplorable result is said to have
+been brought on by errors of judgment on the part of more than one
+person. Hazlitt, himself no duellist and even accused of personal
+timidity, is said to have egged on Scott, and to have stung him by some
+remark of his bitter tongue into challenging Christie, and there is no
+doubt that Patmore's conduct was most reprehensible. But we are here
+concerned with Lockhart, not with them. As far as I understand the
+imputations made on him, he is charged either with want of
+straightforwardness in omitting part of his explanation in the copy sent
+to Scott, or with cowardice in taking no notice of Scott's subsequent
+lie direct, or with both. Let us examine this.
+
+At first sight the incident of what, from the most notorious action of
+Lord Clive, we may call the "red and white treaties" seems odd. But it
+is to be observed, first, that Lockhart could not be said to conceal
+from Scott what he published to all the world; secondly, that his
+conduct was perfectly consistent throughout. He had challenged Scott,
+who had declined to go out. Having offered his adversary satisfaction,
+he was not bound to let him take it with a proviso, or to satisfy his
+private inquisitiveness. But if not under menace, but considering Scott
+after his refusal as unworthy the notice of a gentleman, and not further
+to be taken into account, he chose to inform the public of the truth, he
+had a perfect right to do so. And it is hardly necessary to say that it
+was the truth that he was not editor of _Blackwood_.
+
+This consideration will also account for his conduct in not renewing his
+challenge after Scott's offensive words. He had offered the man
+satisfaction and had been refused. No one is bound to go on challenging
+a reluctant adversary. At all times Lockhart seems to have been
+perfectly ready to back his opinion, as may be seen from a long affair
+which had happened earlier, in connection with the "Baron Lauerwinkel"
+matter. There he had promptly come forward and in his own name
+challenged the anonymous author of a pamphlet bearing the title of
+"Hypocrisy Unveiled." The anonym had, like Scott, shirked, and had
+maintained his anonymity. (Lord Cockburn says it was an open secret, but
+I do not know who he was.) Thereupon Lockhart took no further notice,
+just as he did in the later matter, and I do not believe that a court of
+honour in any country would find fault with him. At any rate, I think
+that we are entitled to know, much more definitely than I have ever seen
+it stated, what the charge against him is. We may indeed blame him in
+both these matters, and perhaps in others, for neglecting the sound rule
+that anonymous writing should never be personal. If he did this,
+however, he is in the same box with almost every writer for the press in
+his own generation, and with too many in this. I maintain that in each
+case he promptly gave the guarantee which the honour of his time
+required, and which is perhaps the only possible guarantee, that of
+being ready to answer in person for what he had written impersonally.
+This was all he could do, and he did it.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+ Allen, Thomas, 113
+
+ Arnold, Matthew, 116, 257, 378
+
+ Austen, Jane, 29
+
+
+ _Blackwood's Magazine_, 37 _sqq._, 276 _sqq._, 343 _sqq._
+
+ Borrow, George, 403-439;
+   his life, 403, 404;
+   his excessive oddity, 404-411;
+   his satiric and character-drawing faculty, 414-417;
+   sketches of his books, 417-433;
+   his general literary character, 433-439
+
+ Brougham, Lord, 107, 109
+
+ Burke, Edmund, 10 _sqq._
+
+ Burns, Robert, 34, 48, 53, 159, 160, 353
+
+ Byron, Lord, 3, 131, 132, 393
+
+
+ Canning, George, 75, 97, 200, 385
+
+ Carlyle, Thomas, 47, 270-272, 323, 369, 370
+
+ Coleridge, S. T., 141
+
+ Colvin, Mr. Sidney, 445
+
+ Courthope, Mr. W. J., 4
+
+ Crabbe, George, 1-32;
+   the decline of his popularity, 1-5;
+   sketch of his life, 6-12;
+   his works and their characteristics, 13-20;
+   their prosaic element, 20-25;
+   was he a poet?, 25-32
+
+ Cunningham, Allan, 46, 53
+
+
+ Dante, 26, 218, 230, 231
+
+ Douglas, Scott, 41, 353
+
+ Dryden, John, 22, 30, 85, 232
+
+
+ Fitzgerald, Edward (translator of Omar Khayyám), 4
+
+ Flaubert, Gustave, 19
+
+ _Fraser's Magazine_, 359, 360
+
+
+ Gifford, William, 3, 21, 152
+
+
+ Hannay, Mr. David, 350
+
+ Hazlitt, William, 135-169;
+   differing estimates of him, 135-140;
+   his life, 140-146;
+   his works, 146-169
+   ----xxi, xxii, 4, 24, 25, 130, 131, 217
+
+ Hogg, James, 33-66;
+   his special interest, 33, 34;
+   his life, 34-37;
+   anecdotes and estimates of him, 37-47;
+   his poems, 47-54;
+   his general prose, 54, 55;
+   _The Confessions of a Sinner_, 55-64
+
+ Hood and Praed, 397-399
+
+ Hook, Theodore, 357-359
+
+ Howells, Mr. W. D., xvii
+
+ Hunt, Leigh, 201-233;
+   scattered condition of his work, 201-203;
+   his life, 204-213;
+   the "Skimpole" matter, 213-216;
+   his vulgarity, 217-219;
+   his poems, 219-223;
+   his critical and miscellaneous work, 223-233
+
+
+ Jeffrey, Francis, 100-134;
+   a critic pure and simple, 100, 101;
+   his life, 101-114;
+   the foundation of the _Edinburgh Review_, 106-109;
+   his criticism, 115, 134
+   ----3, 4, 21, 24, 29
+
+ Johnson, Samuel, 2, 11, 14, 16
+
+ Joubert, Joseph, 26
+
+
+ Lang, Mr. Andrew, xxii
+
+ Lockhart, John Gibson, 339-373, and Appendix B;
+   his literary fate, 339-341;
+   his life, 341-346, 359-361;
+   _The Chaldee MS._ and _Peter's Letters_, 343-345;
+   the novels, 346-349;
+   the poems, 349-351;
+   _Life of Burns_, 353;
+   _Life of Scott_, 354-356;
+   _Life of Hook_, 357-359;
+   his editorship of the _Quarterly_ and his criticism generally, 361-373;
+   charges against him, 445-448
+   ----3, 6, 13, 33, 37, 39-44, 60, 63, 64, 108, 112, 113, 293, 294
+
+
+ Macaulay, Lord, 294, 384
+
+ Maguire, W., 279, 360
+ [Transcriber's Note: The alternative form of Maguire, Maginn, is used in
+ the main body of the text.]
+
+ Masson, Professor, 305 _sqq._
+
+ Moore, Thomas, 170-200;
+   a French critic on him, 170-172;
+   his miscellaneous work, 172-174;
+   his life, 174-183;
+   his character, 183-185;
+   survey of his poetry, 185-200
+   ----6, 27, 110.
+
+ Morley, Mr. John, 27
+
+
+ Newman, Cardinal, 4
+
+ North, Christopher. _See_ Wilson, John
+
+
+ Peacock, Thomas Love, 234-269;
+   his literary position, 234, 235;
+   his life, 236-239;
+   some difficulties in him, 239-242;
+   survey of his work, 242-259;
+   its special characteristics, 257-269
+
+ Pope, Alexander, 22, 25
+
+ Praed, W. M., 374-402;
+   editions of him, 374-376;
+   his life, 376-381;
+   his early writings, 381-384;
+   his poetical work, 385-398;
+   Hood and Praed, 397-399;
+   his special charm, 399-402
+
+
+ Quincey, Thomas de, 304-338, and Appendix A;
+   editions of him, 304-309;
+   his life, 309-314;
+   his faculty of rigmarole, 314-321;
+   defects and merits of his work, 321-338
+   ----47, 282
+
+
+ Rogers, Samuel, 12 _note_
+
+
+ Scott, John, his duel and death, 143, 144; Appendix B
+
+ Scott, Sir Walter, 34-36, 49, 54, 63, 111, 151, 265, 273, 354-359, 406, 407
+
+ Shelley, P. B., 190, 191, 210, 247-250
+
+ Smith, Bobus, 69
+
+ Smith, Mr. Goldwin, xi, xiv
+
+ Smith, Sydney, 67-99;
+   the beneficence of his biographers, 67-69;
+   his life, 69-80;
+   his letters, 81-84;
+   his published work, 84-99
+
+ Staël, Madame de, 126, 127
+
+ Stephen, Mr. Leslie, 4
+
+ Stevenson, Mr. R. L., 445
+
+ Sully, Mr. James, xxvii _note_
+
+ Swift, Jonathan, Jeffrey on, 128, 129
+
+
+ Tennyson, Lord, 4, 29, 292, 293, 365, 366
+
+ Thackeray, W. M., on Hazlitt, 135, 136
+
+ Thomson, James, 27
+
+ Thurlow, Lord, 10-12
+
+
+ Vallat, M. Jules, 171 _sqq._
+
+ Veitch, Professor, 38, 40, 46
+
+ Voltaire, 81
+
+
+ Walker, Sarah, 139 _sqq._
+
+ Wilson, John, 270-303;
+   Carlyle's judgment of him and another, 270-274;
+   his life, 274-277;
+   the _Noctes_, 278-288;
+   his miscellaneous work, 288-303
+
+ Wilson, John, 3, 4, 29, 44-47.
+   _See_ also Essays on De Quincey and Lockhart
+
+ Wordsworth, William, 3, 27, 117, 323
+
+
+ Young, Sir George, 375
+
+
+ "Zeta," 446
+
+
+THE END
+
+_Printed by R. & R. CLARK, Edinburgh._
+
+
+
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860, by 
+George Saintsbury
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860
+
+Author: George Saintsbury
+
+Release Date: November 12, 2009 [EBook #30455]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS IN ENGLISH LIT., 1780-1860 ***
+
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+
+
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+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
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+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<h1>
+ESSAYS<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 70%;">IN<br /></span>
+<br />
+ENGLISH LITERATURE</h1>
+
+<h2>1780-1860</h2>
+
+
+<p class='center' style="margin-top: 3em;">BY
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: x-large; ">GEORGE SAINTSBURY</span></p>
+
+<p class='center' style="margin-top: 3em;">PERCIVAL AND CO.<br />
+<i>KING STREET</i>, <i>COVENT GARDEN</i><br />
+<b>London</b><br />
+1890</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">{v}</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+
+
+<p>Of the essays in this volume, the introductory paper on "The Kinds of
+Criticism" has not before appeared in print. All the rest, with one
+exception (the Essay on Lockhart which appeared in the <i>National
+Review</i>), were originally published in <i>Macmillan's Magazine</i>. To the
+Editors and Publishers of both these periodicals I owe my best thanks
+for permission to reprint the articles. To the Editor of <i>Macmillan's
+Magazine</i> in particular (to whom, if dedications were not somewhat in
+ill odour, I should, in memory of friendship old and new, have dedicated
+the book), I am further indebted for suggesting several of the subjects
+as well as accepting the essays. These appear in the main as they
+appeared;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">{vi}</a></span> but I have not scrupled to alter phrase or substance where it
+seemed desirable, and I have in a few places restored passages which had
+been sacrificed to the usual exigencies of space. In two cases, those of
+Lockhart and De Quincey, I have thought it best to discuss, in a brief
+appendix, some questions which have presented themselves since the
+original publications. In consequence of these alterations and additions
+as well as for other reasons, it may be convenient to give the dates and
+places of the original appearance of each essay. They are as follows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Lockhart, <i>National Review</i>, Aug. 1884. Borrow, <i>Macmillan's
+Magazine</i>, Jan. 1886. Peacock, do. April 1886. Wilson (under the
+title of "Christopher North"), do. July 1886. Hazlitt, do. March
+1887. Jeffrey, do. August 1887. Moore, do. March 1888. Sydney
+Smith, do. May 1888. Praed, do. Sept. 1888. Leigh Hunt, do. April
+1889. Crabbe, do. June 1889. Hogg, do. Sept. 1889. De Quincey,
+do. June 1890.</p></div>
+
+<p>The present order is chronological, following the birth-years of the
+authors discussed.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+
+
+<div class="center">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align="right" colspan="3">PAGE</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left" colspan="2">INTRODUCTORY ESSAY&mdash;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left" colspan="2"><span class="smcap">The Kinds of Criticism</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_ix">ix</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">I. </td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Crabbe</span> </td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">II. </td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Hogg</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_33">33</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">III.</td><td align="left"> <span class="smcap">Sydney Smith</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_67">67</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">IV.</td><td align="left"> <span class="smcap">Jeffrey</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_100">100</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">V.</td><td align="left"> <span class="smcap">Hazlitt</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_135">135</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">VI. </td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Moore</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_170">170</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">VII.</td><td align="left"> <span class="smcap">Leigh Hunt</span> </td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_201">201</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">VIII.</td><td align="left"> <span class="smcap">Peacock</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_234">234</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">IX.</td><td align="left"> <span class="smcap">Wilson</span> </td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_270">270</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">X.</td><td align="left"> <span class="smcap">De Quincey</span> </td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_304">304</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XI.</td><td align="left"> <span class="smcap">Lockhart</span> </td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_339">339</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XII.</td><td align="left"> <span class="smcap">Praed</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_374">374</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XIII.</td><td align="left"> <span class="smcap">Borrow</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_403">403</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">APPENDIX&mdash;</td><td align="left">A. <span class="smcap">De Quincey</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_440">440</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"></td><td align="left">B. <span class="smcap">Lockhart</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_444">444</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left" colspan="2">INDEX</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_449">449</a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">{ix}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="INTRODUCTION" id="INTRODUCTION"></a>INTRODUCTION<br />
+<br />
+THE KINDS OF CRITICISM</h2>
+
+
+<p>It is probably unnecessary, and might possibly be impertinent, to renew
+here at any length the old debate between reviewers as reviewers, and
+reviewers as authors&mdash;the debate whether the reissue of work contributed
+to periodicals is desirable or not. The plea that half the best prose
+literature of this century would be inaccessible if the practice had
+been forbidden, and the retort that anything which can pretend to keep
+company with the best literature of the century will be readily relieved
+from the objection, at once sum up the whole quarrel, and leave it
+undecided. For my own part, I think that there is a sufficient
+connection of subject in the following chapters, and I hope that there
+is a sufficient uniformity of treatment. The former point, as the least
+important, may be dismissed first. All the literature here discussed
+is&mdash;with the exception of Crabbe's earliest poems, and the late
+aftermath of Peacock and Borrow&mdash;work of one and the same period,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">{x}</a></span> the
+first half of the present century. The authors criticised were all
+contemporaries; with only one exception, if with one, they were all
+writing more or less busily within a single decade, that of 1820 to
+1830. And they have the further connection (which has at least the
+reality of having been present to my mind in selecting them), that while
+every one of them was a man of great literary power, hardly one has been
+by general consent, or except by private crotchet would be, put among
+the very greatest. They stand not far below, but distinctly below,
+Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats. Yet again, they
+agree in the fact that hardly one of them has yet been securely set in
+the literary niche which is his due, all having been at some time either
+unduly valued or unduly neglected, and one or two never having yet
+received even due appreciation. The greatest of all critics was accused,
+unjustly, of having a certain dislike of clear, undoubted supremacy. It
+would be far more fair to say that Sainte-Beuve had eminently, what
+perhaps all critics who are not mere carpers on the one hand, or mere
+splashers of superlatives on the other, have more or less&mdash;an affection
+for subjects possessing but qualified merit, and so giving to criticism
+a certain additional interest in the task of placing and appraising
+them.</p>
+
+<p>This last sentence may not meet with universal assent, but it will bring
+me conveniently to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">{xi}</a></span> second part of my subject. I should not have
+republished these essays if I had not thought that, whatever may be
+their faults (and a man who does not see the faults of his own writing
+on revising it a second time for the press after an interval, must be
+either a great genius or an intolerable fool), they possess a certain
+unity of critical method. Nor should I have republished them if it had
+seemed to me that this method was exactly identical with that of any
+other critic of the present day in England. I have at least endeavoured
+to wear my rue with a difference, and that not merely for the sake of
+differing.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Goldwin Smith, whose work is not likely to be impeached for defect
+either in form or in substance, wrote but a few months ago, in
+melancholy mood, that the province of criticism appeared to be now
+limited to the saying of fine things. I agree with him that this is one
+vicious extreme of the popular conception of the art; but in order to
+define correctly, we cannot be contented with one only. The other, as it
+seems to me, is fixed by the notion, now warmly championed by some
+younger critics both at home and abroad, that criticism must be of all
+things "scientific." For my own part, I have gravely and strenuously
+endeavoured to ascertain from the writings both of foreign critics (the
+chief of whom was the late M. Hennequin in France), and of their
+disciples at home, what "scientific" criticism means. In no case have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">{xii}</a></span> I
+been able to obtain any clear conception of its connotation in the
+mouths or minds of those who use the phrase. The new heaven and the new
+earth which they promise are no doubt to be very different from our own
+old earth and heaven; of that they are sure, and their sureness does not
+fail to make itself plain. But what the flora and fauna, the biology and
+geology of the new heaven and earth are to be, I have never succeeded in
+ascertaining. The country would appear to be like that Land of Ignorance
+which, as Lord Brooke says, "none can describe until he be past it."
+Only I have perceived that when this "scientific" criticism sticks
+closest to its own formulas and ways, it appears to me to be very bad
+criticism; and that when, as sometimes happens, it is good criticism,
+its ways and formulas are not perceptibly distinguishable from those of
+criticism which is not "scientific." For the rest, it is all but
+demonstrable that "scientific" literary criticism is impossible, unless
+the word "scientific" is to have its meaning very illegitimately
+altered. For the essential qualities of literature, as of all art, are
+communicated by the individual, they depend upon idiosyncrasy: and this
+makes science in any proper sense powerless. <i>She</i> can deal only with
+classes, only with general laws; and so long as these classes are
+constantly reduced to "species of one," and these laws are set at nought
+by incalculable and singular influences, she must be constantly baffled
+and find all her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xiii" id="Page_xiii">{xiii}</a></span> elaborate plant of formulas and generalisations
+useless. Of course, there are generalisations possible in literature,
+and to such I may return presently; but scientific criticism of
+literature must always be a contradiction in terms. You may to some
+considerable extent ascertain the general laws of language, of metre, of
+music, as applied to verbal rhythm and cadence; you may classify the
+subjects which appeal to the general, and further classify their
+particular manners of appeal; you may arrange the most ingenious
+"product-of-the-circumstances" theories about race, climate, religion.
+But always sooner or later, and much more often sooner than later, the
+mocking demon of the individual, or, if a different phrase be preferred,
+the great and splendid mystery of the idiosyncrasy of the artist, will
+meet and baffle you. You will find that on the showing of this science
+falsely so called, there is no reason why Chapelain should not be a
+poet, and none why Shakespeare is. You will ask science in vain to tell
+you why some dozen or sixteen of the simplest words in language arranged
+by one man or in one fashion, why a certain number of dabs of colour
+arranged by another man or in another fashion, make a permanent addition
+to the delight of the world, while other words and other dabs of colour,
+differently arranged by others, do not. To put the matter yet otherwise,
+the whole end, aim, and object of literature and the criticism of
+literature, as of all art, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xiv" id="Page_xiv">{xiv}</a></span> the criticism of all art, is beauty and
+the enjoyment of beauty. With beauty science has absolutely nothing to
+do.</p>
+
+<p>It is no doubt the sense, conscious or unconscious, of this that has
+inclined men to that other conception of criticism as a saying of fine
+things, of which Mr. Goldwin Smith complains, and which certainly has
+many votaries, in most countries at the present day. These votaries have
+their various kinds. There is the critic who simply uses his subject as
+a sort of springboard or platform, on and from which to display his
+natural grace and agility, his urbane learning, his faculty of pleasant
+wit. This is perhaps the most popular of all critics, and no age has
+ever had better examples of him than this age. There is a more serious
+kind who founds on his subject (if indeed founding be not too solemn a
+term) elaborate descants, makes it the theme of complicated variations.
+There is a third, closely allied to him, who seeks in it apparently
+first of all, and sometimes with no further aim, an opportunity for the
+display of style. And lastly (though as usual all these kinds pervade
+and melt into one another, so that, while in any individual one may
+prevail, it is rare to find an individual in whom that one is alone
+present) there is the purely impressionist critic who endeavours in his
+own way to show the impression which the subject has, or which he
+chooses to represent that it has, produced on him. This last is in a
+better case than the others; but still he, as it seems to me,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xv" id="Page_xv">{xv}</a></span> misses
+the full and proper office of the critic, though he may have an
+agreeable and even useful function of his own.</p>
+
+<p>For the full and proper office of the critic (again as it seems to me)
+can never be discharged except by those who remember that "critic" means
+"judge." Expressions of personal liking, though they can hardly be kept
+out of criticism, are not by themselves judgment. The famous "J'aime
+mieux Alfred de Musset," though it came from a man of extraordinary
+mental power and no small specially critical ability, is not criticism.
+Mere <i>obiter dicta</i> of any kind, though they may be most agreeable and
+even most legitimate sets-off to critical conversation, are not
+criticism. The most admirable discourses from the merely literary point
+of view on taste, Shakespeare, and the musical glasses, with some
+parenthetic reference to the matter in hand, are not criticism. There
+must be at least some attempt to take in and render the whole virtue of
+the subjects considered, some effort to compare them with their likes in
+other as well as the same languages, some endeavour to class and value
+them. And as a condition preliminary to this process, there must, I
+think, be a not inconsiderable study of widely differing periods, forms,
+manners, of literature itself. The test question, as I should put it, of
+the value of criticism is "What idea of the original would this critic
+give to a tolerably instructed person who did not know that original?"
+And again, "How far has this critic seen<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xvi" id="Page_xvi">{xvi}</a></span> steadily and seen whole, the
+subject which he has set himself to consider? How far has he referred
+the main peculiarities of that subject to their proximate causes and
+effects? How far has he attempted to place, and succeeded in placing,
+the subject in the general history of literature, in the particular
+history of its own language, in the collection of authors of its own
+department?" How far, in short, has he applied what I may perhaps be
+excused for calling the comparative method in literature to the
+particular instance? I have read very famous and in their way very
+accomplished examples of literature ostensibly critical, in which few if
+any of these questions seem to have been even considered by the critic.
+He may have said many pretty things; he may have shown what a clever
+fellow he is; he may have in his own person contributed good literature
+to swell the literary sum. But has he done anything to aid the general
+grasp of that literary sum, to place his man under certain lights and in
+certain aspects, with due allowance for the possibility of other aspects
+and other lights? Very often, I think, it must be admitted that he has
+not. I should be the first to admit that my own attempts to do this are
+unsuccessful and faulty; and I only plead for them that they are such
+attempts, and that they have been made on the basis of tolerably wide
+and tolerably careful reading.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xvii" id="Page_xvii">{xvii}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>For, after all, it is this reading which is the main and principal
+thing. It will not of course by itself make a critic; but few are the
+critics that will ever be made without it. We have at this moment an
+awful example of an exceedingly clever writer who has commenced critic,
+disdaining this preparation. Some of my friends jeer or comminate at Mr.
+Howells; for my part I only shudder and echo the celebrated "There, but
+for the grace of God." Here is a clever man, a very clever man, an
+excellent though of late years slightly depraved practitioner in one
+branch of art, who, suddenly and without preparation, takes to another,
+and becomes a spectacle to men and angels. I hope that we shall one day
+have a collection of Mr. Howells's critical <i>dicta</i> on novels and other
+things; they will be one of the most valuable, one of the most terrible
+of books as showing what happens when a man speaks without knowledge. To
+read what Mr. Howells says of Mr. Thackeray is almost an illiberal
+education. The reason of the error is quite obvious. It is simply that
+the clever American does not know; he has not sufficient range of
+comparison. For my own part, I should not dare to continue criticising
+so much as a circulating library novel, if I did not perpetually pay my
+respects to the classics of many literatures: and I am not sure that I
+do not appreciate the classics of many literatures all the better from
+my not infrequent reading of circulating library novels.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xviii" id="Page_xviii">{xviii}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The only objection of validity that I have ever seen taken to what I
+have ventured to call comparative criticism, is that it proceeds too
+much, as the most learned of living French critics once observed of an
+English writer, <i>par cases et par compartiments</i>, that is to say, as I
+understand M. Brunetière, with a rather too methodical classification.
+This, however, was written some seven or eight years ago, and since then
+I have found M. Brunetière speaking about critical method as
+distinguished from the science of criticism, and insisting on the
+necessity of comparison, not less positively, and no doubt with far more
+authority, than I have done myself. Yet I half think that M. Brunetière,
+like most of us, does not practise quite up to the level of his
+preaching; and I should say that on mediæval literature, on Romantic
+literature, and on some other things, his own excellent censorship might
+be further improved by a still more catholic sympathy, and a still more
+constant habit of looking at everything and every writer in conjunction
+with their analogues and their opposites in the same and other
+literatures. This constant reference of comparison may indeed stand in
+the way of those flowing deliverances of personal opinion, in more or
+less agreeable language, which are perhaps, or rather certainly, what is
+most popular in criticism; I do not think that they will ever stand in
+the way of criticism proper. As I understand that long and difficult
+art, its end, as far as the individual<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xix" id="Page_xix">{xix}</a></span> is concerned, is to provide the
+mind with a sort of conspectus of literature, as a good atlas thoroughly
+conned provides a man with a conspectus of the <i>orbis terrarum</i>. To the
+man with a geographical head, the mention of a place at once suggests
+its bearings to other places, its history, its products, all its
+relations in short; to the man with a critical head, the mention of a
+book or an author should call up a similar mental picture. The picture,
+indeed, will never be as complete in the one instance as in the other,
+because the intellect and the artistic faculty of man are far vaster
+than this planet, far more diverse, far more intricately and
+perplexingly arranged than all its abundant material dispositions and
+products. The life of Methuselah and the mind of Shakespeare together
+could hardly take the whole of critical knowledge to be their joint
+province. But the area of survey may be constantly increased; the
+particularity of knowledge constantly made more minute.</p>
+
+<p>Another objection, more fantastic in appearance but rather attractive in
+its way, is that the comparative critic becomes too much of a universal
+lover, and too little of an enthusiast, that he has an irritating and
+ungentlemanly habit of seeing blemishes in the greatest, a pottering and
+peddling fancy for discovering beauties in the most insignificant; that
+he lacks the exclusiveness and the fastidiousness of intellectual
+aristocracy, the fervour and rapture of æsthetic passion. To<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xx" id="Page_xx">{xx}</a></span> this, one
+can answer little more than, "It may be so." Certainly the critic of
+this kind will very rarely be able to indulge in the <i>engouement</i> which
+is the apparent delight of some of his class. He will deal very
+cautiously in superlatives, and his commendations, when he gives them,
+will sometimes have, to more gushing persons, the slightly ludicrous air
+which attached to the modest boast of somebody that he was "the third
+best authority in England on gray shirtings." On the other hand, the
+critic of this kind will not be able to neglect the uninteresting with
+the serene nonchalance of some of his fellows. He will sometimes have to
+look back on days and months and years of laborious reading and say to
+himself, "Were it not well for us, as others use, to take all this for
+granted?" But to say this is to say no more than that the thorough-going
+practice of any art and mystery involves a great deal of tedious,
+thankless, and even positively fruitless work, brushes away a good many
+illusions, and interferes a good deal with personal comfort. Cockaigne
+is a delightful country, and the Cockaigne of criticism is as agreeable
+as the other provinces. But none of these provinces has usually been
+accounted a wise man's paradise.</p>
+
+<p>It may be asked, "What is the end which you propose for this comparative
+reading? A method must lead somewhere; whither does this method lead? or
+does it lead only to statistics and classifications?" Certainly it does
+not, or at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xxi" id="Page_xxi">{xxi}</a></span> least should not. It leads, like all method, to
+generalisations which, though as I have said I do not believe that they
+have attained or ever will attain the character of science, at least
+throw no small light and interest on the study of literature as a whole,
+and of its examples as particulars. It gives, I think (speaking as a
+fool), a constantly greater power of distinguishing good work from bad
+work, by giving constantly nearer approach (though perhaps it may never
+wholly and finally attain) to the knowledge of the exact characteristics
+which distinguish the two. And the way in which it does this is by a
+constant process of weakening or strengthening, as the case may be, the
+less or more correct generalisations with which the critic starts, or
+which he forms in the early days of his reading. There has often been
+brought against some great critics the charge that their critical
+standards have altered at different times of their career. This simply
+means that they have been constantly applying the comparative method,
+and profiting by the application. After all, there are few, though there
+are some, absolute truths in criticism; and a man will often be
+relatively right in condemning, from certain aspects and in certain
+combinations, work which, under other aspects and in other combinations,
+he has been relatively quite as right in admiring. Occasionally, no
+doubt, there will be an apparent exception to the rule of critical
+development, as in the case of Hazlitt:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xxii" id="Page_xxii">{xxii}</a></span> but that remarkable exception
+does not fail to justify the rule. For in truth, Hazlitt's critical
+range was not so wide as his penetration was deep; and he avows, almost
+exultingly, that after a comparatively early time of life, he
+practically left off reading. That is to say, he carefully avoided
+renewing his plant, and he usually eschewed new material&mdash;conditions
+which, no doubt, conduce to the uniformity, and, within obvious limits,
+are not prejudicial to the excellence of the product.</p>
+
+<p>It is possible that the title "The Kinds of Criticism" may have excited
+in some readers expectations of the discussion of a subject which has
+not yet been handled. We have recently seen revived the sempiternal
+argument between authors and critics&mdash;an argument in which it may be as
+well to say that the present writer has not yet taken part either
+anonymously or otherwise. The authors, or some of them, have remarked
+that they have never personally benefited by criticism; and the critics,
+after their disagreeable way, have retorted that this was obvious. A
+critic of great ingenuity, my friend Mr. Andrew Lang, has, with his
+usual humour, suggested that critics and reviewers are two different
+kinds, and have nothing to do with each other essentially, though
+accidentally, and in the imperfect arrangements of the world, the
+discharge of their functions may happen to be combined in the same
+person. As a matter of practice, this is no doubt too often the case; as
+a matter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xxiii" id="Page_xxiii">{xxiii}</a></span> of theory, nothing ought much less to be the case. I think
+that if I were dictator, one of the first non-political things that I
+should do, would be to make the order of reviewers as close a one, at
+least, as the bench of judges, or the staff of the Mint, or of any
+public establishment of a similar character. That any large amount of
+reviewing is determined by fear or favour is a general idea which has
+little more basis than a good many other general ideas. But that a very
+large amount of reviewing is determined by doubtless well-meaning
+incompetence, there is no doubt whatever. It is on the whole the most
+difficult kind of newspaper writing, and it is on the whole the most
+lightly assigned and the most irresponsibly performed. I have heard of
+newspapers where the reviews depended almost wholly on the accident of
+some of the staff taking a holiday, or being laid for a time on the
+shelf, or being considered not up to other work; of others, though this
+I own is scarcely credible, where the whole reviewing was farmed out to
+a manager, to be allotted to devils as good to him seemed; of many where
+the reviews were a sort of exercising-ground on which novices were
+trained, broken-down hacks turned out to grass, and invalids allowed a
+little gentle exercise. And I know of not a few papers and not a few
+reviewers in which and by whom, errors and accidents excepted, the best
+work possible is given to one of the most important kinds of work. Of
+common<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xxiv" id="Page_xxiv">{xxiv}</a></span> mistakes on the subject, which are not merely silly crazes, such
+as the log-rolling craze and the five-pound note craze and the like, the
+worst known to me, though it is shared by some who should know better,
+is that a specialist is the best reviewer. I do not say that he is
+always the worst; but that is about as far as my charity, informed by
+much experience, can go. Even if he has no special craze or megrim, and
+does not decide offhand that a man is hopeless because he calls Charles
+the Great Charlemagne, or <i>vice versâ</i>, he is constantly out of focus.
+The perfect reviewer would be (and the only reviewer whose reviews are
+worth reading is he who more or less approximates to this ideal) the
+Platonic or pseudo-Platonic philosopher who is "second best in
+everything," who has enough special knowledge not to miss merits or
+defects, and enough general knowledge to estimate the particular subject
+at, and not above, its relative value to the whole. There have been good
+critics who were unable to bring themselves down to the mere reading of
+ephemeral work, but I do not think they were the better for this; I am
+sure that there never was a good reviewer, even of the lowest trash, who
+was not <i>in posse</i> or <i>in esse</i> a good critic of the highest and most
+enduring literature. The writer of funny articles, and the "slater," and
+the intelligent <i>compte-rendu</i> man, and the person who writes six
+columns on the general theory of poetry when he professes to review Mr.
+Apollo's last book, may do all these things well and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xxv" id="Page_xxv">{xxv}</a></span> not be good
+critics; but then all these things may be done, and done well, and yet
+not be good reviews.</p>
+
+<p>Whether the reviewer and the critic are valuable members of society or
+useless encumbrances, must be questions left to the decision of the
+world at large, which apparently is not in a hurry to decide either way.
+There are, no doubt, certain things that the critic, whether he be
+critic major or critic minor, Sainte-Beuve or Mr. Gall, cannot do. He
+cannot certainly, and for the present, sell or prevent the sale of a
+book. "You slated this and it has gone through twenty editions" is not a
+more uncommon remark than the other, "They slated that and you extol it
+to the skies." Both, as generally urged, rest on fallacy. In the first
+case, nothing was probably farther from the critic's intention than to
+say "this book is not popular"; the most that he intended was "this book
+is not good." In the second case, it has been discovered of late (it is
+one of the few things that we have discovered) that very rarely has any
+really good thing, even in the most famous or infamous attacks on it,
+been attacked, even with a shadow of success, for its goodness. The
+critics were severe on Byron's faults, on Keats's faults, and on the
+present Laureate's faults; they were seldom severe on their goodness,
+though they often failed to appreciate it fully.</p>
+
+<p>This, however, is in one sense a digression, for there is no criticism
+of contemporary work in this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xxvi" id="Page_xxvi">{xxvi}</a></span> volume. I think, however, as I have just
+endeavoured to point out, that criticism of contemporary work and
+criticism of classics should proceed on the same lines, and I think that
+both require the same qualities and the same outfit. Nor am I certain
+that if narrow inquiry were made, some of the best criticism in all
+times and in all languages would not be found in the merest casual
+reviewing. That in all cases the critic must start from a wide
+comparative study of different languages and literatures, is the first
+position to be laid down. In the next place he must, I think, constantly
+refer back his sensations of agreement and disagreement, of liking and
+disliking, in the same comparative fashion. "Why do I like the
+<i>Agamemnon</i> and dislike Mr. Dash's five-act tragedy?" is a question to
+be constantly put, and to be answered only by a pretty close personal
+inquiry as to what "I" really do like in the <i>Agamemnon</i> and do dislike
+in Mr. Dash. And in answering it, it will hardly be possible to consider
+too large a number of instances of all degrees of merit, from Aeschylus
+himself to Mr. Dash himself, of all languages, of all times. Let
+Englishmen be compared with Englishmen of other times to bring out this
+set of differences, with foreigners of modern times to bring out that,
+with Greeks and Romans to bring out the other. Let poets of old days be
+compared with poets of new, classics with romantics, rhymed with
+unrhymed. Let the straitest doctrinaire<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xxvii" id="Page_xxvii">{xxvii}</a></span> criticism of men of talent like
+Boileau and simpletons like Rymer be compared with the fullest
+appreciations of Coleridge and Hazlitt, of Sainte-Beuve and Mr. Arnold.
+"Compare, always compare" is the first axiom of criticism.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+
+<p>The second, I think, is "Always make sure, as far as you possibly can,
+that what you like and dislike is the literary and not the
+extra-literary character of the matter under examination." Make sure,
+that is to say, that admiration for the author is not due to his having
+taken care that the Whig dogs or the Tory dogs shall not have the best
+of it, to his having written as a gentleman for gentlemen, or as an
+uneasy anti-aristocrat for uneasy anti-aristocrats, as a believer
+(fervent or acquiescent) in the supernatural, or as a person<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xxviii" id="Page_xxviii">{xxviii}</a></span> who lays
+it down that miracles do not happen, as an Englishman or a Frenchman, a
+classic or a romantic. Very difficult indeed is the chase and discovery
+of these enemies: for extra-literary prejudices are as cunning as winter
+hares or leaf-insects, in disguising themselves by simulating literary
+forms.</p>
+
+<p>Lastly, never be content without at least endeavouring to connect cause
+and effect in some way, without giving something like a reason for the
+faith that is in you. No doubt the critic will often be tempted, will
+sometimes be actually forced to say, "'J'aime mieux Alfred de Musset,'
+and there's an end of it." All the imperfect kinds, as they seem to me,
+of criticism are recommended by the fact that they are, unlike some
+other literary matter, not only easier writing but also easier reading.
+The agreeable exercises of style where adjectives meet substantives to
+whom they never thought they could possibly be introduced (as a certain
+naughty wit has it), the pleasant chatter about personal reminiscences,
+the flowers of rhetoric, the fruits of wit, may not be easy, but they
+are at any rate easier than fashioning some intelligent and intelligible
+response to the perpetual "Why?" the <i>quare stans</i> of criticism.</p>
+
+<p>In the following pages, I shall no doubt be found, like other people, to
+have come very far short of my own ideal, and my own precepts. I may
+even say that I have knowingly and intentionally come short of them to
+some extent. Biographical<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xxix" id="Page_xxix">{xxix}</a></span> and anecdotic detail has, I believe, much
+less to do with the real appreciation of the literary value of an author
+than is generally thought. In rare instances, it throws a light, but the
+examples in which we know practically nothing at all, as in that of
+Shakespeare, or only a few leading facts as in that of Dante, are not
+those in which criticism is least useful or least satisfactory. At the
+same time biographical and anecdotic details please most people, and if
+they are not allowed to shoulder out criticism altogether, there can be
+no harm in them. For myself, I should like to have the whole works of
+every author of merit, and I should care little to know anything
+whatever about his life; but that is a mere private opinion and possibly
+a private crotchet. Accordingly some space has been given in most of
+these Essays to a sketch of the life of the subject. Nor has it seemed
+advisable (except as a matter of necessary, but very occasional,
+digression) to argue at length upon abstract and general questions such
+as the definition of poetry, or the kinds and limits of the novel. Large
+as is the body of criticism so-called which the last hundred years have
+seen, it may be doubted whether there is even yet accumulated a
+sufficient <i>corpus</i> of really critical discussion of individuals. If I
+have in these Essays contributed even a very little to such an
+accumulation, I shall have done that which I purposed.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">{1}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I<br />
+<br />
+CRABBE</h2>
+
+
+<p>There is a certain small class of persons in the history of literature
+the members of which possess, at least for literary students, an
+interest peculiar to themselves. They are the writers who having
+attained, not merely popular vogue, but fame as solid as fame can ever
+be, in their own day, having been praised by the praised, and having as
+far as can be seen owed this praise to none of the merely external and
+irrelevant causes&mdash;politics, religion, fashion or what not&mdash;from which
+it sometimes arises, experience in a more or less short time after their
+death the fate of being, not exactly cast down from their high place,
+but left respectfully alone in it, unvisited, unincensed, unread. Among
+these writers, over the gate of whose division of the literary Elysium
+the famous, "Who now reads Bolingbroke?" might serve as motto, the
+author of "The Village" and "Tales of the Hall" is one of the most
+remarkable. As for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">{2}</a></span> Crabbe's popularity in his own day there is no
+mistake about that. It was extraordinarily long, it was extremely wide,
+it included the select few as well as the vulgar, it was felt and more
+or less fully acquiesced in by persons of the most diverse tastes,
+habits, and literary standards. His was not the case, which occurs now
+and then, of a man who makes a great reputation in early life and long
+afterwards preserves it because, either by accident or prudence, he does
+not enter the lists with his younger rivals, and therefore these rivals
+can afford to show him a reverence which is at once graceful and cheap.
+Crabbe won his spurs in full eighteenth century, and might have boasted,
+altering Landor's words, that he had dined early and in the best of
+company, or have parodied Goldsmith, and said, "I have Johnson and
+Burke: all the wits have been here." But when his studious though barren
+manhood was passed, and he again began, as almost an old man, to write
+poetry, he entered into full competition with the giants of the new
+school, whose ideals and whose education were utterly different from
+his. While "The Library" and "The Village" came to a public which still
+had Johnson, which had but just lost Goldsmith, and which had no other
+poetical novelty before it than Cowper, "The Borough" and the later
+Tales entered the lists with "Marmion" and "Childe Harold," with
+"Christabel" and "The Excursion," even with "Endymion" and "The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">{3}</a></span> Revolt
+of Islam." Yet these later works of Crabbe met with the fullest
+recognition both from readers and from critics of the most opposite
+tendencies. Scott, the most generous, and Wordsworth,<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> the most
+grudging, of all the poets of the day towards their fellows, united in
+praising Crabbe; and unromantic as the poet of "The Village" seems to us
+he was perhaps Sir Walter's favourite English bard. Scott read him
+constantly, he quotes him incessantly; and no one who has read it can
+ever forget how Crabbe figures in the most pathetic biographical pages
+ever written&mdash;Lockhart's account of the death at Abbotsford. Byron's
+criticism was as weak as his verse was powerful, but still Byron had no
+doubt about Crabbe. The utmost flight of memory or even of imagination
+can hardly get together three contemporary critics whose standards,
+tempers, and verdicts, were more different than those of Gifford,
+Jeffrey, and Wilson. Yet it is scarcely too much to say that they are
+all in a tale about Crabbe.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">{4}</a></span> In this unexampled chorus of eulogy there
+rose (for some others who can hardly have admired him much were simply
+silent) one single note, so far as I know, or rather one single rattling
+peal of thunder on the other side. It is true that this was significant
+enough, for it came from William Hazlitt.</p>
+
+<p>Yet against this chorus, which was not, as has sometimes happened, the
+mere utterance of a loud-voiced few, but was echoed by a great multitude
+who eagerly bought and read Crabbe, must be set the almost total
+forgetfulness of his work which has followed. It is true that of living
+or lately living persons in the first rank of literature some great
+names can be cited on his side; and what is more, that these great names
+show the same curious diversity in agreement which has been already
+noticed as one of Crabbe's triumphs. The translator of Omar Khayyám, his
+friend the present Laureate, and the author of "The Dream of Gerontius,"
+are men whose literary ideals are known to be different enough; yet they
+add a third trinity as remarkable as those others of Gifford, Jeffrey,
+and Wilson, of Wordsworth, Byron, and Scott. Much more recently Mr.
+Courthope has used Crabbe as a weapon in that battle of his with
+literary Liberalism which he has waged not always quite to the
+comprehension of his fellow-critics; Mr. Leslie Stephen has discussed
+him as one who knows and loves his eighteenth century. But who reads
+him? Who quotes him? Who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">{5}</a></span> likes him? I think I can venture to say, with
+all proper humility, that I know Crabbe pretty well; I think I may say
+with neither humility nor pride, but simply as a person whose business
+it has been for some years to read books, and articles, and debates,
+that I know what has been written and said in England lately. You will
+find hardly a note of Crabbe in these writings and sayings. He does not
+even survive, as "Matthew Green, who wrote 'The Spleen,'" and others
+survive, by quotations which formerly made their mark, and are retained
+without a knowledge of their original. If anything is known about Crabbe
+to the general reader, it is the parody in "Rejected Addresses," an
+extraordinarily happy parody no doubt, in fact rather better Crabbe in
+Crabbe's weakest moments than Crabbe himself. But naturally there is
+nothing of his best there; and it is by his best things, let it be
+repeated over and over in face of all opposition, that a poet must be
+judged.</p>
+
+<p>Although Crabbe's life, save for one dramatic revolution, was one of the
+least eventful in our literary history, it is by no means one of the
+least interesting. Mr. Kebbel's book<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> gives a very fair summary of it;
+but the Life by Crabbe's son which is prefixed to the collected editions
+of the poems, and on which Mr. Kebbel's own is avowedly based, is
+perhaps the more interesting of the two. It is written with a curious
+mixture of the old<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">{6}</a></span> literary state and formality, and of a feeling on
+the writer's part that he is not a literary man himself, and that not
+only his father, but Mr. Lockhart, Mr. Moore, Mr. Bowles and the other
+high literary persons who assisted him were august beings of another
+sphere. This is all the more agreeable, in that Crabbe's sons had
+advantages of education and otherwise which were denied to their father,
+and might in the ordinary course of things have been expected to show
+towards him a lofty patronage rather than any filial reverence. The poet
+himself was born at Aldborough, a now tolerably well-known
+watering-place (the fortune of which was made by Mr. Wilkie Collins in
+<i>No Name</i>) on Christmas Eve, 1754. That not uncommon infirmity of noble
+minds which seeks to prove distinguished ancestry seems to have had no
+hold on the plain common sense of the Crabbe family, who maintained
+themselves to be at the best Norfolk yeomen, and though they possessed a
+coat-of-arms, avowed with much frankness that they did not know how they
+got it. A hundred and forty years ago they had apparently lost even the
+dignity of yeomanhood, and occupied stations quite in the lower rank of
+the middle class as tradesmen, non-commissioned officers in the navy or
+the merchant service, and so forth. George Crabbe, the grandfather, was
+collector of customs at Aldborough, but his son, also a George, was a
+parish schoolmaster and a parish clerk before he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">{7}</a></span> returned to the
+Suffolk port as deputy collector and then as salt-master, or collector
+of the salt duties. He seems to have had no kind of polish, and late in
+life was a mere rough drinking exciseman; but his education, especially
+in mathematics, appears to have been considerable, and his ability in
+business not small. The third George, his eldest son, was also fairly
+though very irregularly educated for a time, and his father, perceiving
+that he was "a fool about a boat," had the rather unusual common sense
+to destine him to a learned profession. Unluckily his will was better
+than his means, and while the profession which Crabbe chose or which was
+chosen for him&mdash;that of medicine&mdash;was not the best suited to his tastes
+or talents, the resources of the family were not equal to giving him a
+full education, even in that. He was still at intervals employed in the
+Customs warehouses at "piling up butter and cheese" even after he was
+apprenticed at fourteen to a country surgeon. The twelve years which he
+spent in this apprenticeship, in an abhorred return for a short time to
+the cheese and butter, in a brief visit to London, where he had no means
+to walk the hospitals, and in an attempt to practise with little or no
+qualification at Aldborough itself, present a rather dismal history of
+apprenticeship which taught nothing. But Love was, for once, most truly
+and literally Crabbe's solace and his salvation, his master and his
+patron. When he was barely eighteen, still an apprentice,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">{8}</a></span> and
+possessed, as far as can be made out, of neither manners nor prospects,
+he met a certain Miss Sarah Elmy. She was three or four years older than
+himself and much better connected, being the niece and eventual
+co-heiress of a wealthy yeoman squire. She was, it is said, pretty; she
+was evidently accomplished, and she seems to have had access to the
+country society of those days. But Mira, as Crabbe called her, perhaps
+merely in the fashion of the eighteenth century, perhaps in remembrance
+of Fulke Greville's heroine (for he knew his Elizabethans rather well
+for a man of those days), and no doubt also with a secret joy to think
+that the last syllables of her Christian name and surname in a way spelt
+the appellation, fell in love with the boy and made his fortune. But for
+her Crabbe would probably have subsided, not contentedly but stolidly,
+into the lot of a Doctor Slop of the time, consoling himself with snuff
+(which he always loved) and schnaps (to which we have hints that in his
+youth he was not averse). Mira was at once unalterably faithful to him
+and unalterably determined not to marry unless he could give her
+something like a position. Their long engagement (they were not married
+till he was twenty-nine and she was thirty-three) may, as we shall see,
+have carried with it some of the penalties of long engagements. But it
+is as certain as any such thing can be that but for it English
+literature would have lacked the name of Crabbe.</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">{9}</a></span></p>
+<p>There is no space here to go through the sufferings of the novitiate. At
+last, at the extreme end of 1779, Crabbe made up his mind once more to
+seek his fortune, this time by aid of literature only, in London. His
+son too has printed rare scraps of a very interesting Journal to Mira
+which he kept during at least a part of the terrible year of struggle
+which he passed there. He saw the riots of '80; he canvassed, always
+more or less in vain, the booksellers and the peers; he spent
+three-and-sixpence of his last ten shillings on a copy of Dryden; he was
+much less disturbed about imminent starvation than by the delay of a
+letter from Mira ("my dearest Sally" she becomes with a pathetic lapse
+from convention, when the pinch is sorest) or by the doubt whether he
+had enough left to pay the postage of one. He writes prayers (but not
+for the public eye), abstracts of sermons for Mira, addresses (rather
+adulatory) to Lord Shelburne, which received no answer. All this has the
+most genuine note that ever man of letters put into his work, for
+whatever Crabbe was or was not, now or at any time, he was utterly
+sincere; and his sincerity makes his not very abundant letters and
+journals unusually interesting. At last, after a year, during which his
+means of subsistence are for the most part absolutely unknown, he, as he
+says himself, fixed "by some propitious influence, in some happy moment"
+on Edmund Burke as the subject of a last appeal.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">{10}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Nothing in all literary history is, in a modest way and without pearls
+and gold, quite so like a fairy tale as the difference in Crabbe's
+fortunes which this propitious influence brought about. On the day when
+he wrote to Burke he was, as he said in the letter, "an outcast, without
+friends, without employment, without bread." In some twenty-four hours
+(the night-term of which he passed in ceaselessly pacing Westminster
+Bridge to cheat the agony of expectation) he was a made man. It was not
+merely that, directly or indirectly, Burke procured him a solid and an
+increasing income. He did much more than that. Crabbe, like most
+self-educated men, was quite uncritical of his own work: Burke took him
+into his own house for months, encouraged him to submit his poems,
+criticised them at once without mercy and with judgment, found him
+publishers, found him a public, turned him from a raw country boy into a
+man who at least had met society of the best kind. It is a platitude to
+say that for a hundred persons who will give money or patronage there is
+scarcely one who will take trouble of this kind; and if any devil's
+advocate objects the delight of producing a "lion," it may be answered
+that for Burke at least this delight would not have been delightful at
+all.</p>
+
+<p>The immediate form which the patronage of Burke and that, soon added, of
+Thurlow took, is one which rather shocks the present day. They made
+Crabbe turn to the Church, and got a complaisant<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">{11}</a></span> bishop to ordain him.
+They sent him (a rather dangerous experiment) to be curate in his own
+native place, and finally Burke procured him the chaplaincy at Belvoir.
+The young Duke of Rutland, who had been made a strong Tory by Pitt, was
+fond of letters, and his Duchess Isabel, who was,&mdash;like her elder
+kinswoman, Dryden's Duchess of Ormond&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A daughter of the rose, whose cheeks unite<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The varying beauties of the red and white,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>in other words, a Somerset, was one of the most beautiful and gracious
+women in England. Crabbe, whose strictly literary fortunes I postpone
+for the present, was apparently treated with the greatest possible
+kindness by both; but he was not quite happy,<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> and his ever-prudent
+Mira still would not marry him. At last Thurlow's patronage took the
+practical form (it had already taken that, equally practical, of a
+hundred pounds) of two small Chancellor's livings in Dorsetshire,
+residence at which was dispensed with by the easy fashions of the day.
+The Duke of Rutland, when he was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland,
+did not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">{12}</a></span> take Crabbe with him, a circumstance which has excited some
+unnecessary discussion; but he gave him free quarters at Belvoir, where
+he and his wife lived for a time before they migrated to a neighbouring
+curacy&mdash;his wife, for even Mira's prudence had yielded at last to the
+Dorsetshire livings, and they were married in December 1783. They lived
+together for nearly thirty years, in, as it would seem, unbroken mutual
+devotion, but Mrs. Crabbe's health seems very early to have broken down,
+and a remarkable endorsement of Crabbe's on a letter of hers has been
+preserved. I do not think Mr. Kebbel quotes it; it ends, "And yet
+happiness was denied"&mdash;a sentence fully encouraging to Mr. Browning and
+other good men who have denounced long engagements.<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> The story of
+Crabbe's life after his marriage may be told very shortly. His first
+patron died in Ireland, but the duchess with some difficulty prevailed
+on Thurlow to exchange his former gifts for more convenient and rather<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">{13}</a></span>
+better livings in the neighbourhood of Belvoir, at the chief of which,
+Muston, Crabbe long resided. The death of his wife's uncle made him
+leave his living and take up his abode for many years at Glemham, in
+Suffolk, only to find, when he returned, that (not unnaturally, though
+to his own great indignation) dissent had taken bodily possession of the
+parish. His wife died in 1813, and the continued kindness, after nearly
+a generation, of the house of Rutland, gave him the living of
+Trowbridge, in Wiltshire, with a small Leicestershire incumbency near
+Belvoir added, instead of Muston. At Trowbridge he lived nearly twenty
+years, revisiting London society, making the acquaintance personally (he
+had already known him by letter) of Sir Walter, paying a memorable visit
+to Edinburgh, flirting in an elderly and simple fashion with many
+ladies, writing much and being even more of a lion in the society of
+George the Fourth's reign than he had been in the days of George the
+Third. He died on 3rd February 1832.</p>
+
+<p>Crabbe's character is not at all enigmatical, and emerges as clearly in
+those letters and diaries of his which have been published, as in
+anecdotes of him by others. Perhaps the famous story of his politely
+endeavouring to talk French to divers Highlanders, during George the
+Fourth's visit to Edinburgh, is slightly embroidered&mdash;Lockhart, who
+tells it, was a mystifier without peer. If he did gently but firmly
+extinguish a candle-snuff while<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">{14}</a></span> Wordsworth and Sir George Beaumont were
+indulging in poetic ecstasies over the beautiful undulations of the
+smoke, there may have been something to say for him as Anne Scott, to
+whom Wordsworth told the story, is said to have hinted, from the side of
+one of the senses. His life, no less than his work, speaks him a man of
+amiable though by no means wholly sweet temper, of more common sense
+than romance, and of more simplicity than common sense. His nature and
+his early trials made him not exactly sour, but shy, till age and
+prosperity mellowed him; but simplicity was his chief characteristic in
+age and youth alike.</p>
+
+<p>The mere facts of his strictly literary career are chiefly remarkable
+for the enormous gap between his two periods of productiveness. In early
+youth he published some verses in the magazines and a poem called
+"Inebriety," which appeared at Ipswich in 1775. His year of struggle in
+London saw the publication of another short piece "The Candidate," but
+with the ill-luck which then pursued him, the bookseller who brought it
+out became bankrupt. His despairing resort to Burke ushered in "The
+Library," 1781, followed by "The Village," 1783, which Johnson revised
+and improved not a little. Two years later again came "The Newspaper,"
+and then twenty-two years passed without anything appearing from
+Crabbe's pen. It was not that he was otherwise occupied, for he had
+little or nothing to do, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">{15}</a></span> for the greater part of the time, lived
+away from his parish. It was not that he was idle, for we have his son's
+testimony that he was perpetually writing, and that holocausts of
+manuscripts in prose and verse used from time to time to be offered up
+in the open air, for fear of setting the house on fire by their mass. At
+last, in 1807, "The Parish Register" appeared, and three years later
+"The Borough"&mdash;perhaps the strongest division of his work. The
+miscellaneous Tales came in 1812, the "Tales of the Hall" in 1819.
+Meanwhile and afterwards, various collected editions appeared, the last
+and most complete being in 1829&mdash;a very comely little book in eight
+volumes. His death led to the issue of some "Posthumous Tales" and to
+the inclusion by his son of divers fragments both in the Life and in the
+Works. It is understood, however, that there are still considerable
+remains in manuscript; perhaps they might be published with less harm to
+the author's fame and with less fear of incurring a famous curse than in
+the case of almost any other poet.</p>
+
+<p>For Crabbe, though by no means always at his best, is one of the most
+curiously equal of verse-writers. "Inebriety" and such other very
+youthful things are not to be counted; but between "The Village" of 1783
+and the "Posthumous Tales" of more than fifty years later, the
+difference is surprisingly small. Such as it is, it rather reverses
+ordinary experience, for the later poems exhibit<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">{16}</a></span> the greater play of
+fancy, the earlier the exacter graces of form and expression. Yet there
+is nothing really wonderful in this, for Crabbe's earliest poems were
+published under severe surveillance of himself and others, and at a time
+which still thought nothing of such value in literature as correctness,
+while his later were written under no particular censorship, and when
+the Romantic revival had already, for better or worse, emancipated the
+world. The change was in Crabbe's case not wholly for the better. He
+does not in his later verse become more prosaic, but he becomes
+considerably less intelligible. There is a passage in "The Old
+Bachelor," too long to quote but worth referring to, which, though it
+may be easy enough to understand it with a little goodwill, I defy
+anybody to understand in its literal and grammatical meaning. Such
+welters of words are very common in Crabbe, and Johnson saved him from
+one of them in the very first lines of "The Village." Yet Johnson could
+never have written the passages which earned Crabbe his fame. The great
+lexicographer knew man in general much better than Crabbe did; but he
+nowhere shows anything like Crabbe's power of seizing and reproducing
+man in particular. Crabbe is one of the first and certainly one of the
+greatest of the "realists" who, exactly reversing the old philosophical
+signification of the word, devote themselves to the particular only. Yet
+of the three small volumes by which he, after<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">{17}</a></span> his introduction to
+Burke, made his reputation, and on which he lived for a quarter of a
+century, the first and the last display comparatively little of this
+peculiar quality. "The Library" and "The Newspaper" are characteristic
+pieces of the school of Pope, but not characteristic of their author.
+The first catalogues books as folio, quarto, octavo, and so forth, and
+then cross-catalogues them as law, physic, divinity, and the rest, but
+is otherwise written very much in the air. "The Newspaper" suited Crabbe
+a little better, because he pretty obviously took a particular newspaper
+and went through its contents&mdash;scandal, news, reviews,
+advertisements&mdash;in his own special fashion: but still the subject did
+not appeal to him. In "The Village," on the other hand, contemporaries
+and successors alike have agreed to recognise Crabbe in his true vein.
+The two famous passages which attracted the suffrages of judges so
+different as Scott and Wordsworth, are still, after more than a hundred
+years, fresh, distinct, and striking. Here they are once more:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Theirs is yon House that holds the parish poor,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There, where the putrid vapours, flagging, play,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There children dwell who know no parents' care;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Parents who know no children's love dwell there!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">{18}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dejected widows, with unheeded tears,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And crippled age with more than childhood fears;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The lame, the blind, and, far the happiest they!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The moping idiot and the madman gay.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Anon, a figure enters, quaintly neat,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All pride and business, bustle and conceit;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With looks unaltered by these scenes of woe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With speed that, entering, speaks his haste to go,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He bids the gazing throng around him fly,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And carries fate and physic in his eye:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A potent quack, long versed in human ills,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who first insults the victim whom he kills;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose murderous hand a drowsy Bench protect,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And whose most tender mercy is neglect.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Paid by the parish for attendance here,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He wears contempt upon his sapient sneer;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In haste he seeks the bed where Misery lies,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Impatience marked in his averted eyes;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And some habitual queries hurried o'er,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Without reply he rushes on the door:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His drooping patient, long inured to pain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And long unheeded, knows remonstrance vain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He ceases now the feeble help to crave<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of man; and silent, sinks into the grave.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The poet executed endless variations on this class of theme, but he
+never quite succeeded in discovering a new one, though in process of
+time he brought his narrow study of the Aldborough fishermen and
+townsfolk down still more narrowly to individuals. His landscape is
+always marvellously exact, the strokes selected with extraordinary skill
+<i>ad hoc</i> so as to show autumn rather than spring, failure rather than
+hope, the riddle of the painful earth rather than any joy of living.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">{19}</a></span>
+Attempts have been made to vindicate Crabbe from the charge of being a
+gloomy poet, but I cannot think them successful; I can hardly think that
+they have been quite serious. Crabbe, our chief realist poet, has an
+altogether astonishing likeness to the chief prose realist of France,
+Gustave Flaubert, so far as his manner of view goes, for in point of
+style the two have small resemblance. One of the most striking things in
+Crabbe's biography is his remembrance of the gradual disillusion of a
+day of pleasure which, as a child, he enjoyed in a new boat of his
+father's. We all of us, except those who are gifted or cursed with the
+proverbial duck's back, have these experiences and these remembrances of
+them. But most men either simply grin and bear it, or carrying the grin
+a little farther, console themselves by regarding their own
+disappointments from the ironic and humorous point of view. Crabbe,
+though not destitute of humour, does not seem to have been able or
+disposed to employ it in this way. Perhaps he never quite got over the
+terrible and, for the most part unrecorded, year in London: perhaps the
+difference between the Mira of promise and the Mira of possession&mdash;the
+"happiness denied"&mdash;had something to do with it: perhaps it was a
+question of natural disposition with him. But when, years afterwards, as
+a prosperous middle-aged man, he began his series of published poems
+once more with "The Parish Register," the same manner of seeing is
+evident, though the minute<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">{20}</a></span> elaboration of the views themselves is
+almost infinitely greater. Nor did he ever succeed in altering this
+manner, if he ever tried to do so.</p>
+
+<p>With the exception of his few Lyrics, the most important of which, "Sir
+Eustace Grey" (one of his very best things), is itself a tale in
+different metre, and a few other occasional pieces of little importance,
+the entire work of Crabbe, voluminous as it is, is framed upon a single
+pattern, the vignettes of "The Village" being merely enlarged in size
+and altered in frame in the later books. The three parts of "The Parish
+Register," the twenty-four Letters of "The Borough," some of which have
+single and others grouped subjects, and the sixty or seventy pieces
+which make up the three divisions of Tales, consist almost exclusively
+of heroic couplets, shorter measures very rarely intervening. They are
+also almost wholly devoted to narratives, partly satirical, partly
+pathetic, of the lives of individuals of the lower and middle class
+chiefly. Jeffrey, who was a great champion of Crabbe and allotted
+several essays to him, takes delight in analysing the plots or stories
+of these tales; but it is a little amusing to notice that he does it for
+the most part exactly as if he were criticising a novelist or a
+dramatist. "The object," says he, in one place, "is to show that a man's
+fluency of speech depends very much upon his confidence in the
+approbation of his auditors": "In Squire Thomas we have the history of a
+mean,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">{21}</a></span> domineering spirit," and so forth. Gifford in one place actually
+discusses Crabbe as a novelist. I shall make some further reference to
+this curious attitude of Crabbe's admiring critics. For the moment I
+shall only remark that the singularly mean character of so much of
+Crabbe's style, the "style of drab stucco," as it has been unkindly
+called, which is familiar from the wicked wit that told how the youth at
+the theatre</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Regained the felt and felt what he regained,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>is by no means universal. The most powerful of all his pieces, the
+history of Peter Grimes, the tyrant of apprentices, is almost entirely
+free from it, and so are a few others. But it is common enough to be a
+very serious stumbling-block. In nine tales out of ten this is the
+staple:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Of a fair town where Dr. Rack was guide,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His only daughter was the boast and pride.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Now that is unexceptionable verse enough, but what is the good of
+putting it in verse at all? Here again:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">For he who makes me thus on business wait,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is not for business in a proper state.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is obvious that you cannot trust a man who, unless he is intending a
+burlesque, can bring himself to write like that. Crabbe not only brings
+himself to it, but rejoices and luxuriates in the style. The tale from
+which that last luckless<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">{22}</a></span> distich is taken, "The Elder Brother," is full
+of pathos and about equally full of false notes. If we turn to a far
+different subject, the very vigorously conceived "Natural Death of
+Love," we find a piece of strong and true satire, the best thing of its
+kind in the author, which is kept up throughout. Although, like all
+satire, it belongs at best but to the outer courts of poetry, it is so
+good that none can complain. Then the page is turned and one reads:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I met," said Richard, when returned to dine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">"In my excursion with a friend of mine."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It may be childish, it may be uncritical, but I own that such verse as
+that excites in me an irritation which destroys all power of enjoyment,
+except the enjoyment of ridicule. Nor let any one say that pedestrian
+passages of the kind are inseparable from ordinary narrative in verse
+and from the adaptation of verse to miscellaneous themes. If it were so
+the argument would be fatal to such adaptation, but it is not. Pope
+seldom indulges in such passages, though he does sometimes: Dryden never
+does. He can praise, abuse, argue, tell stories, make questionable
+jests, do anything in verse that is still poetry, that has a throb and a
+quiver and a swell in it, and is not merely limp, rhythmed prose. In
+Crabbe, save in a few passages of feeling and a great many of mere
+description&mdash;the last an excellent setting for poetry but not
+necessarily poetical&mdash;this rhythmed prose is everywhere. The matter
+which it serves<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">{23}</a></span> to convey is, with the limitations above given, varied,
+and it is excellent. No one except the greatest prose novelists has such
+a gallery of distinct, sharply etched characters, such another gallery
+of equally distinct scenes and manner-pieces, to set before the reader.
+Exasperating as Crabbe's style sometimes is, he seldom bores&mdash;never
+indeed except in his rare passages of digressive reflection. It has, I
+think, been observed, and if not the observation is obvious, that he has
+done with the pen for the neighbourhood of Aldborough and Glemham what
+Crome and Cotman have done for the neighbourhood of Norwich with the
+pencil. His observation of human nature, so far as it goes, is not less
+careful, true, and vivid. His pictures of manners, to those who read
+them at all, are perfectly fresh and in no respect grotesque or faded,
+dead as the manners themselves are. His pictures of motives and of
+facts, of vice and virtue, never can fade, because the subjects are
+perennial and are truly caught. Even his plays on words, which horrified
+Jeffrey&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Alas! your reverence, wanton thoughts I grant<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Were once my motive, now the thoughts of want,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and the like&mdash;are not worse than Milton's jokes on the guns. He has
+immense talent, and he has the originality which sets talent to work in
+a way not tried by others, and may thus be very fairly said to turn it
+into genius. He is all this and more. But despite the warnings of a
+certain precedent, I cannot help stating the case which we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">{24}</a></span> have
+discussed in the old form, and asking, was Crabbe a poet?</p>
+
+<p>And thus putting the question, we may try to sum up. It is the gracious
+habit of a summing-up to introduce, if possible, a dictum of the famous
+men our fathers that were before us. I have already referred to
+Hazlitt's criticism on Crabbe in <i>The Spirit of the Age</i>, and I need not
+here urge at very great length the cautions which are always necessary
+in considering any judgment of Hazlitt's.<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> Much that he says even in
+the brief space of six or eight pages which he allots to Crabbe is
+unjust; much is explicably, and not too creditably, unjust. Crabbe was a
+successful man, and Hazlitt did not like successful men: he was a
+clergyman of the Church of England, and Hazlitt did not love clergymen
+of the Church of England: he had been a duke's chaplain, and Hazlitt
+loathed dukes: he had been a Radical, and was still (though Hazlitt does
+not seem to have thought him so) a Liberal, but his Liberalism had been
+Torified into a tame variety. Again, Crabbe, though by no means
+squeamish, is the most unvoluptuous and dispassionate of all describers
+of inconvenient things; and Hazlitt was the author of <i>Liber Amoris</i>.
+Accordingly there is much that is untrue in the tissue of denunciation
+which the critic devotes to the poet. But there are two passages in this
+tirade which alone might show how great a critic Hazlitt himself was.
+Here in a couple of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">{25}</a></span> lines ("they turn, one and all, on the same sort of
+teasing, helpless, unimaginative distress") is the germ of one of the
+most famous and certainly of the best passages of the late Mr. Arnold;
+and here again is one of those critical taps of the finger which shivers
+by a touch of the weakest part a whole Rupert's drop of misapprehension.
+Crabbe justified himself by Pope's example. "Nothing," says Hazlitt,
+"can be more dissimilar. Pope describes what is striking: Crabbe would
+have described merely what was there.... In Pope there was an appeal to
+the imagination, you see what was passing <i>in a poetical point of
+view</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Even here (and I have not been able to quote the whole passage) there is
+one of the flaws, which Hazlitt rarely avoided, in the use of the word
+"striking"; for, Heaven knows, Crabbe is often striking enough. But the
+description of Pope as showing things "in a poetical point of view" hits
+the white at once, wounds Crabbe mortally, and demolishes realism, as we
+have been pleased to understand it for the last generation or two.
+Hazlitt, it is true, has not followed up the attack, as I shall hope to
+show in an instant; but he has indicated the right line of it. As far as
+mere treatment goes, the fault of Crabbe is that he is pictorial rather
+than poetic, and photographic rather than pictorial. He sees his subject
+steadily, and even in a way he sees it whole; but he does not see it in
+the poetical way. You are bound in the shallows and the miseries of the
+individual; never do you<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">{26}</a></span> reach the large freedom of the poet who looks
+at the universal. The absence of selection, of the discarding of details
+that are not wanted, has no doubt a great deal to do with this&mdash;Hazlitt
+seems to have thought that it had everything to do. I do not quite agree
+with him there. Dante, I think, was sometimes quite as minute as Crabbe;
+and I do not know that any one less hardy than Hazlitt himself would
+single out, as Hazlitt expressly does, the death-bed scene of Buckingham
+as a conquering instance in Pope to compare with Crabbe. We know that
+the bard of Twickenham grossly exaggerated this. But suppose he had not?
+Would it have been worse verse? I think not. Although the faculty of
+selecting instead of giving all, as Hazlitt himself justly contends, is
+one of the things which make <i>poesis non ut pictura</i>, it is not all, and
+I think myself that a poet, if he is a poet, could be almost absolutely
+literal. Shakespeare is so in the picture of Gloucester's corpse. Is
+that not poetry?</p>
+
+<p>The defect of Crabbe, as it seems to me, is best indicated by reference
+to one of the truest of all dicta on poetry, the famous maxim of
+Joubert&mdash;that the lyre is a winged instrument and must transport. There
+is no wing in Crabbe, there is no transport, because, as I hold (and
+this is where I go beyond Hazlitt), there is no music. In all poetry,
+the very highest as well as the very lowest that is still poetry, there
+is something which transports, and that something in my view is always
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">{27}</a></span> music of the verse, of the words, of the cadence, of the rhythm, of
+the sounds superadded to the meaning. When you get the best music
+married to the best meaning, then you get, say, Shakespeare: when you
+get some music married to even moderate meaning, you get, say, Moore.
+Wordsworth can, as everybody but Wordsworthians holds, and as some even
+of Wordsworthians admit, write the most detestable doggerel and
+platitude. But when any one who knows what poetry is reads&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Our noisy years seem moments in the being<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the eternal silence,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>he sees that, quite independently of the meaning, which disturbs the
+soul of no less a person than Mr. John Morley, there is one note added
+to the articulate music of the world&mdash;a note that never will leave off
+resounding till the eternal silence itself gulfs it. He leaves
+Wordsworth, he goes straight into the middle of the eighteenth century,
+and he sees Thomson with his hands in his dressing-gown pockets biting
+at the peaches, and hears him between the mouthfuls murmuring&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">So when the shepherd of the Hebrid Isles,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Placed far amid the melancholy main,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and there is another note, as different as possible in kind yet still
+alike, struck for ever. Yet again, to take example still from the less
+romantic poets, and in this case from a poet, whom Mr. Kebbel specially
+and disadvantageously contrasts with Crabbe, when we read the old
+schoolboy's favourite<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">{28}</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">When the British warrior queen,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bleeding from the Roman rods,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>we hear the same quality of music informing words, though again in a
+kind somewhat lower, commoner, and less. In this matter, as in all
+matters that are worth handling at all, we come of course <i>ad
+mysterium</i>. Why certain combinations of letters, sounds, cadences,
+should almost without the aid of meaning, though no doubt immensely
+assisted by meaning, produce this effect of poetry on men no man can
+say. But they do; and the chief merit of criticism is that it enables us
+by much study of different times and different languages to recognise
+some part of the laws, though not the ultimate and complete causes, of
+the production.</p>
+
+<p>Now I can only say that Crabbe does not produce, or only in the rarest
+instances produces, this effect on me, and what is more, that on ceasing
+to be a patient in search of poetical stimulant and becoming merely a
+gelid critic, I do not discover even in Crabbe's warmest admirers any
+evidence that he produced this effect on them. Both in the eulogies
+which Mr. Kebbel quotes, and in those that he does not quote, I observe
+that the eulogists either discreetly avoid saying what they mean by
+poetry, or specify for praise something in Crabbe that is not distinctly
+poetical. Cardinal Newman said that Crabbe "pleased and touched him at
+thirty years' interval," and pleaded that this answers to the
+"accidental definition of a classic." Most certainly; but not
+necessarily to that of a poetical<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">{29}</a></span> classic. Jeffrey thought him
+"original and powerful." Granted; but there are plenty of original and
+powerful writers who are not poets. Wilson gave him the superlative for
+"original and vivid painting." Perhaps; but is Hogarth a poet? Jane
+Austen "thought she could have married him." She had not read his
+biography; but even if she had would that prove him to be a poet? Lord
+Tennyson is said to single out the following passage, which is certainly
+one of Crabbe's best, if not his very best:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Early he rose, and looked with many a sigh<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On the red light that filled the eastern sky;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oft had he stood before, alert and gay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To hail the glories of the new-born day;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But now dejected, languid, listless, low,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He saw the wind upon the water blow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the cold stream curled onward as the gale<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From the pine-hill blew harshly down the vale;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On the right side the youth a wood surveyed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With all its dark intensity of shade;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where the rough wind alone was heard to move<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In this, the pause of nature and of love<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When now the young are reared, and when the old,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lost to the tie, grow negligent and cold:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Far to the left he saw the huts of men,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Half hid in mist that hung upon the fen:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Before him swallows gathering for the sea,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Took their short flights and twittered o'er the lea;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And near the bean-sheaf stood, the harvest done,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And slowly blackened in the sickly sun;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All these were sad in nature, or they took<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sadness from him, the likeness of his look<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And of his mind&mdash;he pondered for a while,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then met his Fanny with a borrowed smile.<br /></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">{30}</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>It is good: it is extraordinarily good: it could not be better of its
+kind. It is as nearly poetry as anything that Crabbe ever did&mdash;but is it
+quite? If it is (and I am not careful to deny it) the reason, as it
+seems to me, is that the verbal and rhythmical music here, with its
+special effect of "transporting" of "making the common as if it were
+uncommon," is infinitely better than is usual with Crabbe, that in fact
+there is music as well as meaning. Hardly anywhere else, not even in the
+best passages of the story of Peter Grimes, shall we find such music;
+and in its absence it may be said of Crabbe much more truly than of
+Dryden (who carries the true if not the finest poetical undertone with
+him even into the rant of Almanzor and Maximin, into the interminable
+arguments of "Religio Laici" and "The Hind and the Panther") that he is
+a classic of our prose.</p>
+
+<p>Yet the qualities which are so noteworthy in him are all qualities which
+are valuable to the poet, and which for the most part are present in
+good poets. And I cannot help thinking that this was what actually
+deceived some of his contemporaries and made others content for the most
+part to acquiesce in an exaggerated estimate of his poetical merits. It
+must be remembered that even the latest generation which, as a whole and
+unhesitatingly, admired Crabbe, had been brought up on the poets of the
+eighteenth century, in the very best of whom the qualities which Crabbe
+lacks had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">{31}</a></span> been but sparingly and not eminently present. It must be
+remembered too, that from the great vice of the poetry of the eighteenth
+century, its artificiality and convention, Crabbe is conspicuously free.
+The return to nature was not the only secret of the return to poetry;
+but it was part of it, and that Crabbe returned to nature no one could
+doubt. Moreover he came just between the school of prose fiction which
+practically ended with <i>Evelina</i> and the school of prose fiction which
+opened its different branches with <i>Waverley</i> and <i>Sense and
+Sensibility</i>. His contemporaries found nowhere else the narrative power,
+the faculty of character-drawing, the genius for description of places
+and manners, which they found in Crabbe; and they knew that in almost
+all, if not in all the great poets there is narrative power, faculty of
+character-drawing, genius for description. Yet again, Crabbe put these
+gifts into verse which at its best was excellent in its own way, and at
+its worst was a blessed contrast to Darwin or to Hayley. Some readers
+may have had an uncomfortable though only half-conscious feeling that if
+they had not a poet in Crabbe they had not a poet at all. At all events
+they made up their minds that they had a poet in him.</p>
+
+<p>But are we bound to follow their example? I think not. You could play on
+Crabbe that odd trick which used, it is said, to be actually played on
+some mediæval verse chroniclers and unrhyme<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">{32}</a></span> him&mdash;that is to say, put
+him into prose with the least possible changes&mdash;and his merits would,
+save in rare instances, remain very much as they are now. You could put
+other words in the place of his words, keeping the verse, and it would
+not as a rule be much the worse. You cannot do either of these things
+with poets who are poets. Therefore I shall conclude that save at the
+rarest moments, moments of some sudden gust of emotion, some happy
+accident, some special grace of the Muses to reward long and blameless
+toil in their service, Crabbe was not a poet. But I have not the least
+intention of denying that he was great, and all but of the greatest
+among English writers.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">{33}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II<br />
+<br />
+HOGG</h2>
+
+
+<p>"What on earth," it was once asked "will you make of Hogg?" I think that
+there is something to be made of Hogg, and that it is something worth
+the making. In the first place, it is hardly possible, without studying
+"the Shepherd" pretty close, fully to appreciate three other persons,
+all greater, and one infinitely greater, than himself; namely, Wilson,
+Lockhart, and Scott. To the two first he was a client in the Roman
+sense, a plaything, something of a butt, and an invaluable source of
+inspiration or at least suggestion. Towards the last he occupied a very
+curious position, never I think quite paralleled elsewhere&mdash;the position
+of a Boswell who would fain be a Boswell and is not allowed to be, who
+has wild notions that he is really a greater man than Johnson and
+occasionally blasphemes against his idol, but who in the intervals is
+truly Boswellian. In the second place, he has usually hitherto been not
+criticised at all, but either somewhat sneered at or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">{34}</a></span> else absurdly
+over-praised. In the third place, as both Scott and Byron recognised, he
+is probably the most remarkable example we have of absolute
+self-education, or of no education: for Burns was an academically
+instructed student in comparison with Hogg. In the fourth, he produced,
+amid a mass of rubbish, some charming verse and one prose-story which,
+though it is almost overlooked by the general, some good judges are, I
+believe, agreed with me in regarding as one of the very best things of
+its kind, while it is also a very curious literary puzzle.</p>
+
+<p>The anecdotic history, more or less authentic, of the Ettrick Shepherd
+would fill volumes, and I must try to give some of the cream of it
+presently. The non-anecdotic part may be despatched in a few sentences.
+The exact date of his birth is not known, but he was baptized on 9th
+December 1770. His father was a good shepherd and a bad farmer&mdash;a
+combination of characteristics which Hogg himself inherited unimpaired
+and unimproved. If he had any early education at all, he forgot it so
+completely that he had, as a grown-up man, to teach himself writing if
+not reading a second time. He pursued his proper vocation for about
+thirty years, during the latter part of which time he became known as a
+composer of very good songs, "Donald Macdonald" being ranked as the
+best. He printed a few as a pamphlet in the first year of the century,
+but met with little success. Then he fell in with Scott, to whom he had
+been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">{35}</a></span> introduced as a purveyor of ballads, not a few of which his
+mother, Margaret Laidlaw, knew by heart. This old lady it was who gave
+Scott the true enough warning that the ballads were "made for singing
+and no for reading." Scott in his turn set Hogg on the track of making
+some money by his literary work, and Constable published <i>The Mountain
+Bard</i> together with a treatise called <i>Hogg on Sheep</i>, which I have not
+read, and of which I am not sure that I should be a good critic if I
+had. The two books brought Hogg three hundred pounds. This sum he poured
+into the usual Danaids' vessel of the Scotch peasant&mdash;the taking and
+stocking of a farm, which he had neither judgment to select, capital to
+work, nor skill to manage; and he went on doing very much the same thing
+for the rest of his life. The exact dates of that life are very sparely
+given in his own <i>Autobiography</i>, in his daughter's <i>Memorials</i>, and in
+the other notices of him that I have seen. He would appear to have spent
+four or five years in the promising attempt to run, not one but two
+large stock-farms. Then he tried shepherding again, without much
+success; and finally in 1810, being forty years old and able to write,
+he went to Edinburgh and "commenced," as the good old academic phrase
+has it, literary man. He brought out a new book of songs called <i>The
+Forest Minstrel</i>, and then he started a periodical, <i>The Spy</i>. On this,
+as he tells us, Scott very wisely remonstrated with him, asking him
+whether he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">{36}</a></span> thought he could be more elegant than Addison or Mackenzie.
+Hogg replied with his usual modesty that at any rate he would be "mair
+original." The originality appears to have consisted in personality; for
+Hogg acknowledges one exceedingly insolent attack on Scott himself,
+which Scott seems, after at first resenting it (and yet Hogg tells us
+elsewhere that he never resented any such thing), to have forgiven. He
+had also some not clearly known employments of the factorship or
+surveyorship kind; he was much patronised by two worthy hatters, Messrs.
+Grieve and Scott, and in 1813 the book which contains all his best
+verse, <i>The Queen's Wake</i>, was published. It was deservedly successful;
+but, by a species of bad luck which pursued Hogg with extraordinary
+assiduity, the two first editions yielded nothing, as his publisher was
+not solvent. The third, which Blackwood issued, brought him in good
+profit. Two years later he became in a way a made man. He had very
+diligently sought the patronage of Harriet, Duchess of Buccleuch, and,
+his claims being warmly supported by Scott and specially recommended by
+the Duchess on her deathbed to her husband, Hogg received rent free, or
+at a peppercorn, the farm of Mossend, Eltrive or Altrive. It is agreed
+even by Hogg's least judicious admirers that if he had been satisfied
+with this endowment and had then devoted himself, as he actually did, to
+writing, he might have lived and died in comfort, even though his
+singular luck in not being<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">{37}</a></span> paid continued to haunt him. But he must
+needs repeat his old mistake and take the adjacent farm of Mount Benger,
+which, with a certain reckless hospitable way of living for which he is
+not so blamable, kept him in difficulties all the rest of his life and
+made him die in them. He lived twenty years longer; married a
+good-looking girl much his superior in rank and twenty years his junior,
+who seems to have made him an excellent wife; engaged in infinite
+magazine- and book-writing, of which more presently; became the
+inspirer, model and butt of <i>Blackwood's Magazine</i>; constantly
+threatened to quarrel with it for traducing him, and once did so; loved
+Edinburgh convivialities more well than wisely; had the very ill luck to
+survive Scott and to commit the folly of writing a pamphlet (more silly
+than anything else) on the "domestic manners" of that great man, which
+estranged Lockhart, hitherto his fast friend; paid a visit to London in
+1832, whereby hang tales; and died himself on 21st November 1835.</p>
+
+<p>Such, briefly but not I think insufficiently given, is the Hogg of
+history. The Hogg of anecdote is a much more considerable and difficult
+person. He mixes himself up with or becomes by turns (whichever phrase
+may be preferred) the Shepherd of the <i>Noctes</i> and the Hogg who is
+revealed to us, say his panegyrists, with "uncalled-for malignity" in
+Lockhart's <i>Life of Scott</i>. But these panegyrists seem to forget that
+there are two documents which happen not to be signed either "John
+Gibson<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">{38}</a></span> Lockhart" or "Christopher North," and that these documents are
+Hogg's <i>Autobiography</i>, published by himself, and the <i>Domestic Manners
+of Sir Walter Scott</i>, likewise authenticated. In these two we have the
+Hogg of the <i>ana</i> put forward pretty vividly. For instance, Hogg tells
+us how, late in Sir Walter's life, he and his wife called upon Scott.
+"In we went and were received with all the affection of old friends. But
+his whole discourse was addressed to my wife, while I was left to shift
+for myself.... In order to attract his attention from my wife to one who
+I thought as well deserved it, I went close up to him with a
+scrutinising look and said, 'Gudeness guide us, Sir Walter, but ye hae
+gotten a braw gown.'" The rest of the story is not bad, but less
+characteristic. Immediately afterwards Hogg tells his own speech about
+being "not sae yelegant but mair original" than Addison. Then there is
+the other capital legend, also self-told, how he said to Scott, "Dear
+Sir Walter, ye can never suppose that I belang to your school of
+chivalry! Ye are the king of that school, but I'm the king of the
+mountain and fairy school, which is a far higher ane than yours!"
+"This," says Professor Veitch, a philosopher, a scholar, and a man of
+letters, "though put with an almost sublime egotism, is in the main
+true." Almost equally characteristic is the fact that, after beginning
+his pamphlet by calling Lockhart "the only man thoroughly qualified for
+the task" of writing Scott's life, Hogg<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">{39}</a></span> elsewhere, in one of the
+extraordinary flings that distinguish him, writes: "Of Lockhart's genius
+and capabilities Sir Walter always spoke with the greatest enthusiasm:
+more than I thought he deserved. For I knew him a great deal better than
+Sir Walter did, and, whatever Lockhart may pretend, I knew Sir Walter a
+thousand times better than he did."</p>
+
+<p>Now be it remembered that these passages are descriptive of Hogg's Hogg,
+to use the always useful classification of Dr. Holmes. To complete them
+(the actual texts are too long to give here) it is only necessary to
+compare the accounts of a certain dinner at Bowhill given respectively
+by Hogg in the <i>Domestic Manners</i> and by Lockhart in his biography, and
+also those given in the same places of the one-sided quarrel between
+Scott and Hogg, because the former, according to his almost invariable
+habit, refused to collaborate in Hogg's <i>Poetic Mirror</i>. In all this we
+have the man's own testimony about himself. It is not in the least
+incompatible with his having been, as his panegyrists contend, an
+affectionate friend, husband, and father; a very good fellow when his
+vanity or his whims were not touched; and inexhaustibly fertile in the
+kind of rough profusion of flower and weed that uncultivated soil
+frequently produces. But it most certainly is also not inconsistent, but
+on the contrary highly consistent, with the picture drawn by Lockhart in
+his great book; and it shows how, to say the least and mildest, the
+faults<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">{40}</a></span> and foibles of the curious personage known as "the Shepherd of
+the <i>Noctes</i>" were not the parts of the character on which Wilson need
+have spent, or did spend, most of his invention. Even if the "boozing
+buffoon" had been a boozing buffoon and nothing more, Hogg, who
+confesses with a little affected remorse, but with evident pride, that
+he once got regularly drunk every night for some six weeks running, till
+"an inflammatory fever" kindly pulled him up, could not have greatly
+objected to this part of the matter. The wildest excesses of the
+<i>Eidolon</i>-Shepherd's vanity do not exceed that speech to Scott which
+Professor Veitch thinks so true; and the quaintest pranks played by the
+same shadow do not exceed in quaintness the immortal story of Hogg being
+introduced to Mrs. Scott for the first time, extending himself on a sofa
+at full length (on the excuse that he "thought he could never do wrong
+to copy the lady of the house," who happened at the time to be in a
+delicate state of health), and ending by addressing her as "Charlotte."
+This is the story that Mrs. Garden, Hogg's daughter, without attempting
+to contest its truth, describes as told by Lockhart with "uncalled-for
+malignity." Now when anybody who knows something of Lockhart comes
+across "malignant," "scorpion," or any term of the kind, he, if he is
+wise, merely shrugs his shoulders. All the literary copy-books have got
+it that Lockhart was malignant, and there is of course no more to be
+said.<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> But something may<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">{41}</a></span> be done by a little industrious clearing
+away of fiction in particulars. It may be most assuredly and confidently
+asserted that no one reading the <i>Life of Scott</i> without knowing what
+Hogg's friends have said of it would dream of seeing malignity in the
+notices which it contains of the Shepherd. Before writing this paper I
+gave myself the trouble, or indulged myself in the pleasure (for perhaps
+that is the more appropriate phrase in reference to the most delightful
+of biographies, if not of books), of marking with slips of paper all the
+passages in Lockhart referring to Hogg, and reading them consecutively.
+I am quite sure that any one who does this, even knowing little or
+nothing of the circumstances, will wonder where on earth the "ungenerous
+assaults," the "virulent detraction," the "bitter words," the "false
+friendship," and so forth, with which Lockhart has been charged, are to
+be found. But any one who knows that Hogg had, just before his own
+death, and while the sorrow of Sir Walter's end was fresh, published the
+possibly not ill-intentioned but certainly ill-mannered pamphlet
+referred to&mdash;a pamphlet which contains among other things, besides the
+grossest impertinences about Lady Scott's origin, at least one
+insinuation that Scott wrote Lockhart's books for him&mdash;if any one
+further knows (I think the late Mr. Scott Douglas was the first to point
+out the fact) that Hogg had calmly looted Lockhart's biography of Burns,
+then he will think that the "scorpion," instead of using his sting,
+showed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">{42}</a></span> most uncommon forbearance. This false friend, virulent detractor
+and ungenerous assailant describes Hogg as "a true son of nature and
+genius with a naturally kind and simple character." He does indeed
+remark that Hogg's "notions of literary honesty were exceedingly loose."
+But (not to mention the Burns affair, which gave me some years ago a
+clue to this sentence) the remark is subjoined to a letter in which Hogg
+placidly suggests that he shall write an autobiographic sketch, and that
+Scott, transcribing it and substituting the third person for the first,
+shall father it as his own. The other offence I suppose was the remark
+that "the Shepherd's nerves were not heroically strung." This perhaps
+might have been left out, but if it was the fact (and Hogg's defenders
+never seem to have traversed it) it suggested itself naturally enough in
+the context, which deals with Hogg's extraordinary desire, when nearly
+forty, to enter the militia as an ensign. Moreover the same passage
+contains plenty of kindly description of the Shepherd. Perhaps there is
+"false friendship" in quoting a letter from Scott to Byron which
+describes Hogg as "a wonderful creature," or in describing the
+Shepherd's greeting to Wilkie, "Thank God for it! I did not know you
+were so young a man" as "graceful," or in the citation of Jeffrey's
+famous blunder in selecting for special praise a fabrication of Hogg's
+among the "Jacobite Ballads," or in the genial description, without a
+touch of ridicule, of Hogg at the St. Ronan's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">{43}</a></span> Games. The sentence on
+Hogg's death is indeed severe: "It had been better for his memory had
+his end been of earlier date; for he did not follow his benefactor until
+he had insulted his dust." It is even perhaps a little too severe,
+considering Hogg's irresponsible and childlike nature. But Lockhart
+might justly have retorted that men of sixty-four have no business to be
+irresponsible children; and it is certainly true that in this unlucky
+pamphlet Hogg distinctly accuses Scott of anonymously puffing himself at
+his, Hogg's, expense, of being over and over again jealous of him, of
+plagiarising his plots, of sneering at him, and, if the passage has any
+meaning, of joining a conspiracy of "the whole of the aristocracy and
+literature of the country" to keep Hogg down and "crush him to a
+nonentity." Neither could Lockhart have been exactly pleased at the
+passage where Scott is represented as afraid to clear the character of
+an innocent friend to the boy Duke of Buccleuch.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>He told me that which I never knew nor suspected before; that a
+certain gamekeeper, on whom he bestowed his maledictions without
+reserve, had prejudiced my best friend, the young Duke of
+Buccleuch, against me by a story; and though he himself knew it
+to be a malicious and invidious lie, yet seeing his grace so much
+irritated, he durst not open his lips on the subject, further
+than by saying, "But, my lord duke, you must always remember that
+Hogg is no ordinary man, although he may have shot a stray
+moorcock." And then turning to me he said, "Before you had
+ventured to give any saucy language to a low scoundrel of an
+English<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">{44}</a></span> gamekeeper, you should have thought of Fielding's tale
+of Black George."</p>
+
+<p>"I never saw that tale," said I, "and dinna ken ought about it.
+But never trouble your head about that matter, Sir Walter, for it
+is awthegither out o' nature for our young chief to entertain ony
+animosity against me. The thing will never mair be heard of, an'
+the chap that tauld the lees on me will gang to hell, that's aye
+some comfort."</p></div>
+
+<p>Part of my reason for quoting this last passage is to recall to those
+who are familiar with the <i>Noctes Ambrosianæ</i> the extraordinary felicity
+of the imitation. This, which Hogg with his own pen represents himself
+as speaking with his own mouth, might be found textually in any page of
+the <i>Noctes</i> without seeming in the least out of keeping with the ideal
+Hogg.</p>
+
+<p>And this brings me to the second charge of Hogg's friends, that Wilson
+wickedly caricatured his humble friend, if indeed he did not manufacture
+a Shepherd out of his own brain. This is as uncritical as the other, and
+even more surprising. That any one acquainted with Hogg's works,
+especially his autobiographic productions, should fail to recognise the
+resemblance is astonishing enough; but what is more astonishing is that
+any one interested in Hogg's fame should not perceive that the Shepherd
+of the <i>Noctes</i> is Hogg magnified and embellished in every way. He is
+not a better poet, for the simple reason that the verses put in his
+mouth are usually Hogg's own and not always his best. But out of the
+<i>Confessions<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">{45}</a></span> of a Sinner</i>, Hogg has never signed anything half so good
+as the best prose passages assigned to him in the <i>Noctes</i>. They are
+what he might have written if he had taken pains: they are in his key
+and vein; but they are much above him. Again, unless any reader is so
+extraordinarily devoid of humour as to be shocked by the mere
+horse-play, it must be clear to him that the Shepherd's manners are
+dressed up with extraordinary skill, so as to be just what he would have
+liked them to be. As for the drinking and so forth, it simply comes to
+this&mdash;that the habits which were fashionable when the century was not
+yet in its teens, or just in them, were getting to be looked on askance
+when it was entering or had entered on its thirties. But, instead of
+being annoyed at this Socrates-Falstaff, as somebody has called it, one
+might have thought that both Hogg himself and his admirers would have
+taken it as an immense compliment. The only really bad turn that Wilson
+seems to have done his friend was posthumous and pardonable. He
+undertook the task of writing the Shepherd's life and editing his
+<i>Remains</i> for the benefit of his family, who were left very badly off;
+and he not only did not do it but appears to have lost the documents
+with which he was entrusted. It is fair to say that after the deaths,
+which came close together, of his wife, of Blackwood, and of Hogg
+himself, Wilson was never fully the same man; and that his strongly
+sentimental nature, joined to his now inveterate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">{46}</a></span> habit of writing
+rapidly as the fancy took him, would have made the task of hammering out
+a biography and of selecting and editing <i>Remains</i> so distasteful from
+different points of view as to be practically impossible. But in that
+case of course he should not have undertaken it, or should have
+relinquished it as soon as he found out the difficulties. Allan
+Cunningham, it is said, would have gladly done the business; and there
+were few men better qualified.</p>
+
+<p>And now, having done a by no means unnecessary task in this preliminary
+clearance of rubbish, let us see what sort of a person in literature and
+life this Ettrick Shepherd really was&mdash;the Shepherd whom Scott not only
+befriended with unwearied and lifelong kindness, but ranked very high as
+an original talent, whom Byron thought Scott's only second worth
+speaking of, whom Southey, a very different person from either, esteemed
+highly, whom Wilson selected as the mouthpiece and model for one of the
+most singular and (I venture to say despite a certain passing wave of
+unpopularity) one of the most enduring of literary character-parts, and
+to whom Lockhart was, as Hogg himself late in life sets down, "a warm
+and disinterested friend." We have seen what Professor Veitch thinks of
+him&mdash;that he is the king of a higher school than Scott's. On the other
+hand, I fear the general English impression of him is rather that given
+by no Englishman, but by Thomas Carlyle, at the time of Hogg's visit to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">{47}</a></span>
+London in 1832. Carlyle describes him as talking and behaving like a
+"gomeril," and amusing the town by walking about in a huge gray plaid,
+which was supposed to be an advertisement, suggested by his publisher.</p>
+
+<p>The king of a school higher than Scott's and the veriest gomeril&mdash;these
+surely, though the judges be not quite of equal competence, are
+judgments of a singularly contradictory kind. Let us see what middle
+term we can find between them.</p>
+
+<p>The mighty volume (it has been Hogg's ill-fortune that the most
+accessible edition of his work is in two great double-columned royal
+octavos, heavy to the hand and not too grateful to the eye) which
+contains the Shepherd's collected poetical work is not for every reader.
+"Poets? where are they?" Wordsworth is said, on the authority of De
+Quincey, to have asked, with a want of graciousness of manners uncommon
+even in him and never forgiven by Hogg, when the latter used the plural
+in his presence, and in that of Wilson and Lloyd. It was unjust as well
+as rude, but endless allowance certainly has to be made for Hogg as a
+poet. I do not know to whom the epigram that "everything that is written
+in Scotch dialect is not necessarily poetry" is originally due, but
+there is certainly some justice in it. Scotch, as a language, has grand
+accommodations; it has richer vowels and a more varied and musical
+arrangement of consonants than English, while it falls not much short of
+English in freedom from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">{48}</a></span> that mere monotony which besets the
+richly-vowelled continental languages. It has an almost unrivalled
+provision of poetical <i>clichés</i> (the sternest purist may admit a French
+word which has no English equivalent), that is to say, the stock phrases
+which Heaven knows who first minted and which will pass till they are
+worn out of all knowledge. It has two great poets&mdash;one in the
+vernacular, one in the literary language&mdash;who are rich enough to keep a
+bank for their inferiors almost to the end of time. The depreciation of
+it by "glaikit Englishers" (I am a glaikit Englisher who does not
+depreciate), simply because it is unfamiliar and rustic-looking, is
+silly enough. But its best practitioners are sometimes prone to forget
+that nothing ready-made will do as poetry, and that you can no more take
+a short cut to Parnassus by spelling good "guid" and liberally using
+"ava," than you can execute the same journey by calling a girl a nymph
+and a boy a swain. The reason why Burns is a great poet, and one of the
+greatest, is that he seldom or never does this in Scots. When he takes
+to the short cut, as he does sometimes, he usually "gets to his
+English." Of Hogg, who wrote some charming things and many good ones,
+the same cannot be said. No writer known to me, not even the eminent Dr.
+Young, who has the root of the poetical matter in him at all, is so
+utterly uncritical as Hogg. He does not seem even to have known when he
+borrowed and when he was original. We have seen that he told Scott that
+he was not of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">{49}</a></span> his school. Now a great deal that he wrote, perhaps
+indeed actually the major part of his verse, is simply imitation and not
+often very good imitation of Scott. Here is a passage:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Light on her airy steed she sprung,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Around with golden tassels hung.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No chieftain there rode half so free,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or half so light and gracefully.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How sweet to see her ringlets pale<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wide-waving in the southland gale,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which through the broom-wood odorous flew<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To fan her cheeks of rosy hue!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whene'er it heaved her bosom's screen<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What beauties in her form were seen!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And when her courser's mane it swung,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A thousand silver bells were rung.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A sight so fair, on Scottish plain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A Scot shall never see again.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>I think we know where this comes from. Indeed Hogg had a certain
+considerable faculty of conscious parody as well as of unconscious
+imitation, and his <i>Poetic Mirror</i>, which he wrote as a kind of humorous
+revenge on his brother bards for refusing to contribute, is a fair
+second to <i>Rejected Addresses</i>. The amusing thing is that he often
+parodied where he did not mean parody in the least, and nowadays we do
+not want Scott-and-water. Another vein of Hogg's, which he worked
+mercilessly, is a similar imitation, not of Scott, but of the weakest
+echoes of Percy's <i>Reliques</i>:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">O sad, sad, was young Mary's plight:<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">She took the cup, no word she spake,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She had even wished that very night<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To sleep and never more to wake.<br /></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">{50}</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>Sad, sad indeed is the plight of the poet who publishes verses like
+this, of which there are thousands of lines to be found in Hogg. And
+then one comes to "Kilmeny," and the note changes with a vengeance:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Bonny Kilmeny gaed up the glen;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But it wasna to meet Duneira's men,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nor the rosy monk of the isle to see,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For Kilmeny was pure as pure could be.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It was only to hear the yorlin sing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And pu' the cress-flower round the spring,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The scarlet hip and the hindberry,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For Kilmeny was pure as pure could be.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Kilmeny looked up with a lovely grace,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But nae smile was seen on Kilmeny's face;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As still was her look and as still was her ee<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As the stillness that lay on the emeraut lea,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or the mist that sleeps on a waveless sea.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For Kilmeny had been she kent not where,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Kilmeny had seen what she could not declare;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Kilmeny had been where the cock never crew,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where the rain never fell and the wind never blew.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>No matter that it is necessary even here to make a cento, that the
+untutored singer cannot keep up the song by natural force and has not
+skill enough to dissemble the lapses. "Kilmeny" at its best is
+poetry&mdash;such poetry as, to take Hogg's contemporaries only, there is
+none in Rogers or Crabbe, little I fear in Southey, and not very much in
+Moore. Then there is no doubt at all that he could write ballads. "The
+Witch of Fife" is long and is not improved by being<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">{51}</a></span> written (at least
+in one version) in a kind of Scots that never was on land or sea, but it
+is quite admirable of its class. "The Good Grey Cat," his own imitation
+of himself in the <i>Poetic Mirror</i>, comes perhaps second to it, and "The
+Abbot McKinnon" (which is rather close to the imitations of Scott)
+third. But there are plenty of others. As for his poems of the more
+ambitious kind, "Mador of the Moor," "Pilgrims of the Sun," and even
+"Queen Hynde," let blushing glory&mdash;the glory attached to the literary
+department&mdash;hide the days on which he produced those. She can very well
+afford it, for the hiding leaves untouched the division of Hogg's
+poetical work which furnishes his highest claims to fame except
+"Kilmeny," the division of the songs. These are numerous and unequal as
+a matter of course. Not a few of them are merely variations on older
+scraps and fragments of the kind which Burns had made popular; some of
+them are absolute rubbish; some of them are mere imitations of Burns
+himself. But this leaves abundance of precious remnants, as the
+Shepherd's covenanting friends would have said. The before-mentioned
+"Donald Macdonald" is a famous song of its kind: "I'll no wake wi'
+Annie" comes very little short of Burns's "Green grow the rashes O!" The
+piece on the lifting of the banner of Buccleuch, though a curious
+contrast with Scott's "Up with the Banner" does not suffer too much by
+the comparison: "Cam' ye by Athole" and "When<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">{52}</a></span> the kye comes hame"
+everybody knows, and I do not know whether it is a mere delusion, but
+there seems to me to be a rare and agreeable humour in "The Village of
+Balmaquhapple."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">D'ye ken the big village of Balmaquhapple?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The great muckle village of Balmaquhapple?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Tis steeped in iniquity up to the thrapple,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">An' what's to become o' poor Balmaquhapple?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Whereafter follows an invocation to St. Andrew, with a characteristic
+suggestion that he may spare himself the trouble of intervening for
+certain persons such as</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Geordie, our deacon for want of a better,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Bess, wha delights in the sins that beset her&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>ending with the milder prayer:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But as for the rest, for the women's sake save them,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Their bodies at least, and their sauls if they have them.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And save, without word of confession auricular,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The clerk's bonny daughters, and Bell in particular;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For ye ken that their beauty's the pride and the stapple<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the great wicked village of Balmaquhapple!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"Donald McGillavry," which deceived Jeffrey, is another of the
+half-inarticulate songs which have the gift of setting the blood
+coursing;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Donald's gane up the hill hard an' hungry;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Donald's come down the hill wild an' angry:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Donald will clear the gowk's nest cleverly;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Here's to the King and Donald McGillavry!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Donald has foughten wi' reif and roguery,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Donald has dinnered wi' banes and beggary;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">{53}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Better it war for Whigs an' Whiggery<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Meeting the deevil than Donald McGillavry.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Come like a tailor, Donald McGillavry,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Come like a tailor, Donald McGillavry,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Push about, in an' out, thimble them cleverly.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Here's to King James an' Donald McGillavry!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"Love is Like a Dizziness," and the "Boys' Song,"</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Where the pools are bright and deep,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where the grey trout lies asleep,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Up the river and over the lea,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That's the way for Billy and me&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and plenty more charming things will reward the explorer of the
+Shepherd's country. Only let that explorer be prepared for pages on
+pages of the most unreadable stuff, the kind of stuff which hardly any
+educated man, however great a "gomeril" he might be, would ever dream of
+putting to paper, much less of sending to press. It is fair to repeat
+that the educated man who thus refrained would probably be a very long
+time before he wrote "Kilmeny," or even "Donald McGillavry" and "The
+Village of Balmaquhapple."</p>
+
+<p>Still (though to say it is enough to make him turn in his grave) if Hogg
+had been a verse-writer alone he would, except for "Kilmeny" and his
+songs, hardly be worth remembering, save by professed critics and
+literary free-selectors. A little better than Allan Cunningham, he is
+but for that single, sudden, and unsustained inspiration of "Kilmeny,"
+and one or two of his songs, so far below Burns that Burns might enable
+us to pay<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">{54}</a></span> no attention to him and not lose much. As for Scott, "Proud
+Maisie" (an unapproachable thing), the fragments that Elspeth Cheyne
+sings, even the single stanza in <i>Guy Mannering</i>, "Are these the Links
+of Forth? she said," any one of a thousand snatches that Sir Walter has
+scattered about his books with a godlike carelessness will "ding" Hogg
+and all his works on their own field. But then it is not saying anything
+very serious against a man to say that he is not so great as Scott. With
+those who know what poetry is, Hogg will keep his corner ("not a
+polished corner," as Sydney Smith would say) of the temple of Apollo.</p>
+
+<p>Hogg wrote prose even more freely than he wrote verse, and after the
+same fashion&mdash;a fashion which he describes with equal frankness and
+truth by the phrases, "dashing on," "writing as if in desperation,"
+"mingling pathos and absurdity," and so forth. Tales, novels, sketches,
+all were the same to him; and he had the same queer mixture of
+confidence in their merits and doubt about the manner in which they were
+written. <i>The Brownie of Bodsbeck</i>, <i>The Three Perils of Man</i> (which
+appears refashioned in the modern editions of his works as <i>The Siege of
+Roxburgh</i>), <i>The Three Perils of Woman</i>, <i>The Shepherd's Calendar</i> and
+numerous other uncollected tales exhibit for the most part very much the
+same characteristics. Hogg knew the Scottish peasantry well, he had
+abundant stores of unpublished folklore,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">{55}</a></span> he could invent more when
+wanted, he was not destitute of the true poetic knowledge of human
+nature, and at his best he could write strikingly and picturesquely. But
+he simply did not know what self-criticism was, he had no notion of the
+conduct or carpentry of a story, and though he was rather fond of
+choosing antique subjects, and prided himself on his knowledge of old
+Scots, he was quite as likely to put the baldest modern touches in the
+mouth of a heroine of the fourteenth or fifteenth century as not. If
+anybody takes pleasure in seeing how a good story can be spoilt, let him
+look at the sixth chapter of the <i>Shepherd's Calendar</i>, "The Souters of
+Selkirk;" and if any one wants to read a novel of antiquity which is not
+like Scott, let him read <i>The Bridal of Polmood</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In the midst, however, of all this chaotic work, there is still to be
+found, though misnamed, one of the most remarkable stories of its kind
+ever written&mdash;a story which, as I have said before, is not only
+extraordinarily good of itself, but insists peremptorily that the reader
+shall wonder how the devil it got where it is. This is the book now
+called <i>The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Fanatic</i>, but by its
+proper and original title, <i>The Confessions of a Justified Sinner</i>.
+Hogg's reference to it in his <i>Autobiography</i> is sufficiently odd. "The
+next year (1824)," he says, "I published <i>The Confessions of a Fanatic
+[Sinner]</i>, but, it being a story replete with horrors, after I had
+written it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">{56}</a></span> I durst not venture to put my name to it, so it was
+published anonymously, and of course did not sell very well&mdash;so at least
+I believe, for I do not remember ever receiving anything for it, and I
+am sure if there had been a reversion [he means return] I should have
+had a moiety. However I never asked anything, so on that point there was
+no misunderstanding." And he says nothing more about it, except to
+inform us that his publishers, Messrs. Longman, who had given him for
+his two previous books a hundred and fifty pounds each "as soon as the
+volumes were put to press," and who had published the <i>Confessions</i> on
+half profits, observed, when his next book was offered to them, that
+"his last publication (the <i>Confessions</i>) had been found fault with in
+some very material points, and they begged leave to decline the present
+one until they consulted some other persons." That is all. But the
+Reverend Thomas Thomson, Hogg's editor, an industrious and not
+incompetent man of letters, while admitting that it is "in excellence of
+plot, concentration of language and vigorous language, one of the best
+and most interesting [he might have said the best without a second] of
+Hogg's tales," observes that it "alarmed the religious portion of the
+community who hastily thought that the author was assailing
+Christianity." "Nothing could be more unfounded," says the Reverend
+Thomas Thomson with much justice. He might have added that it would have
+been much more<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">{57}</a></span> reasonable to suspect the author of practice with the
+Evil One in order to obtain the power of writing anything so much better
+than his usual work.</p>
+
+<p>For, in truth, <i>The Confessions of a Justified Sinner</i>, while it has all
+Hogg's merits and more, is quite astoundingly free from his defects. His
+tales are generally innocent of the most rudimentary notions of
+construction: this goes closely ordered, with a few pardonable enough
+digressions, from beginning to end. He has usually little concentrated
+grasp of character: the few personages of the <i>Confessions</i> are
+consistent throughout. His dialogue is, as a rule, extraordinarily
+slipshod and unequal: here there is no fault to find with it. His
+greatest lack, in short, is the lack of form: and here, though the story
+might perhaps have been curtailed, or rather "cut" in the middle, with
+advantage, the form is excellent. As its original edition, though an
+agreeable volume, is rare, and its later ones are buried amidst
+discordant rubbish, it may not be improper to give some account of it.
+The time is pitched just about the Revolution and the years following,
+and, according to a common if not altogether praiseworthy custom, the
+story consists of an editor's narrative and of the <i>Confessions</i> proper
+imbedded therein. The narrative tells how a drinking Royalist laird
+married an exceedingly precise young woman, how the dissension which was
+probable broke out between them, how a certain divine, the Reverend
+Robert<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">{58}</a></span> Wringhim, endeavoured to convert the sinner at the instances of
+the saint, and perhaps succeeded in consoling the saint at the expense
+of the sinner; how the laird sought more congenial society with a
+certain cousin of his named Arabella Logan, and how, rather out of
+jealousy than forgiveness, such a union or quasi-union took place
+between husband and wife that they had two sons, George and Robert, the
+elder of whom was his father's favourite and like, while the younger was
+pretty much left to the care of Mr. Wringhim. The tale then tells how,
+after hardly seeing one another in boyhood, the brothers met as young
+men at Edinburgh, where on extreme provocation the elder was within an
+ace of killing the younger. The end of it was that, after Robert had
+brought against George a charge of assaulting him on Arthur's Seat,
+George himself was found mysteriously murdered in an Edinburgh close.
+His mother cared naught for it; his father soon died of grief; the
+obnoxious Robert succeeded to the estates, and only Arabella Logan was
+left to do what she could to clear up the mystery, which, after certain
+strange passages, she did. But when warrants were made out against
+Robert he had disappeared, and the whole thing remained wrapped in more
+mystery than ever.</p>
+
+<p>To this narrative succeed the confessions of Robert himself. He takes of
+course the extreme side both of his mother and of her doctrines, but for
+some time, though an accomplished Pharisee,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">{59}</a></span> he is not assured of
+salvation, till at last his adopted (if not real) father Wringhim
+announces that he has wrestled sufficiently in prayer and has received
+assurance.</p>
+
+<p>Thereupon the young man sallies out in much exaltation of feeling and
+full of contempt for the unconverted. As he goes he meets another young
+man of mysterious appearance, who seems to be an exact double of
+himself. This wraith, however, presents himself as only a humble admirer
+of Robert's spiritual glory, and holds much converse with him. He meets
+this person repeatedly, but is never able to ascertain who he is. The
+stranger says that he may be called Gil Martin if Robert likes, but
+hints that he is some great one&mdash;perhaps the Czar Peter, who was then
+known to be travelling incognito about Europe. For a time Robert's
+Illustrious Friend (as he generally calls him) exaggerates the extremest
+doctrines of Calvinism, and slips easily from this into suggestions of
+positive crime. A minister named Blanchard, who has overheard his
+conversation, warns Robert against him, and Gil Martin in return points
+out Blanchard as an enemy to religion whom it is Robert's duty to take
+off. They lay wait for the minister and pistol him, the Illustrious
+Friend managing not only to avert all suspicion from themselves, but to
+throw it with capital consequences on a perfectly innocent person. After
+this initiation in blood Robert is fully reconciled to the "great work"
+and, going to Edinburgh, is led by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">{60}</a></span> his Illustrious Friend without
+difficulty into the series of plots against his brother which had to
+outsiders so strange an appearance, and which ended in a fresh murder.
+When Robert in the course of events above described becomes master of
+Dalchastel, the family estate, his Illustrious Friend accompanies him
+and the same process goes on. But now things turn less happily for
+Robert. He finds himself, without any consciousness of the acts charged,
+accused on apparently indubitable evidence, first of peccadillos, then
+of serious crimes. Seduction, forgery, murder, even matricide are hinted
+against him, and at last, under the impression that indisputable proofs
+of the last two crimes have been discovered, he flies from his house.
+After a short period of wandering, in which his Illustrious Friend
+alternately stirs up all men against him and tempts him to suicide, he
+finally in despair succumbs to the temptation and puts an end to his
+life. This of course ends the <i>Memoir</i>, or rather the <i>Memoir</i> ends just
+before the catastrophe. There is then a short postscript in which the
+editor tells a tale of a suicide found with some such legend attaching
+to him on a Border hillside, of an account given in <i>Blackwood</i> of the
+searching of the grave, and of a visit to it made by himself (the
+editor), his friend Mr. L&mdash;&mdash;t of C&mdash;&mdash;d [Lockhart of Chiefswood], Mr.
+L&mdash;&mdash;w [Scott's Laidlaw] and others. The whole thing ends with a very
+well written bit of rationalisation of the now familiar kind,
+discussing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">{61}</a></span> the authenticity of the <i>Memoirs</i>, and concluding that they
+are probably the work of some one suffering from religious mania, or
+perhaps a sort of parable or allegory worked out with insufficient
+skill.</p>
+
+<p>Although some such account as this was necessary, no such account,
+unless illustrated with the most copious citation, could do justice to
+the book. The first part or Narrative is not of extraordinary, though it
+is of considerable merit, and has some of Hogg's usual faults. The
+<i>Memoirs</i> proper are almost wholly free from these faults. In no book
+known to me is the grave treatment of the topsy-turvy and improbable
+better managed; although, by an old trick, it pleases the "editor" to
+depreciate his work in the passage just mentioned. The writer, whoever
+he was, was fully qualified for the task. The possibility of a young man
+of narrow intellect&mdash;his passion against his brother already excited,
+and his whole mind given to the theology of predestination&mdash;gliding into
+such ideas as are here described is undoubted; and it is made thoroughly
+credible to the reader. The story of the pretended Gil Martin,
+preposterous as it is, is told by the unlucky maniac exactly in the
+manner in which a man deluded, but with occasional suspicions of his
+delusion, would tell it. The gradual change from intended and successful
+rascality and crime into the incurring or the supposed incurring of the
+most hideous guilt without any actual consciousness of guilty action may
+seem<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">{62}</a></span> an almost hopeless thing to treat probably. Yet it is so treated
+here. And the final gathering and blackening of the clouds of despair
+(though here again there is a very slight touch of Hogg's undue
+prolongation of things) exhibits literary power of the ghastly kind
+infinitely different from and far above the usual
+raw-head-and-bloody-bones story of the supernatural.</p>
+
+<p>Now, who wrote it?</p>
+
+<p>No doubt, so far as I know, has been generally entertained of Hogg's
+authorship, though, since I myself entertained doubts on the subject, I
+have found some good judges not unwilling to agree with me. Although
+admitting that it appeared anonymously, Hogg claims it, as we have seen,
+not only without hesitation but apparently without any suspicion that it
+was a particularly valuable or meritorious thing to claim, and without
+any attempt to shift, divide, or in any way disclaim the responsibility,
+though the book had been a failure. His publishers do not seem to have
+doubted then that it was his; nor, I have been told, have their
+representatives any reason to doubt it now. His daughter, I think, does
+not so much as mention it in her <i>Memorials</i>, but his various
+biographers have never, so far as I know, hinted the least hesitation.
+At the same time I am absolutely unable to believe that it is Hogg's
+unadulterated and unassisted work. It is not one of those cases where a
+man once tries a particular style, and then from accident, disgust, or
+what not, relinquishes it. Hogg was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">{63}</a></span> always trying the supernatural, and
+he failed in it, except in this instance, as often as he tried it. Why
+should he on this particular occasion have been saved from himself? and
+who saved him?&mdash;for that great part of the book at least is his there
+can be no doubt.</p>
+
+<p>By way of answer to these questions I can at least point out certain
+coincidences and probabilities. It has been seen that Lockhart's name
+actually figures in the postscript to the book. Now at this time and for
+long afterwards Lockhart was one of the closest of Hogg's literary
+allies; and Hogg, while admitting that the author of <i>Peter's Letters</i>
+hoaxed him as he hoaxed everybody, is warm in his praise. He describes
+him in his <i>Autobiography</i> as "a warm and disinterested friend." He
+tells us in the book on Scott how he had a plan, even later than this,
+that Lockhart should edit all his (the Shepherd's) works, for
+discouraging which plan he was very cross with Sir Walter. Further, the
+vein of the <i>Confessions</i> is very closely akin to, if not wholly
+identical with, a vein which Lockhart not only worked on his own account
+but worked at this very same time. It was in these very years of his
+residence at Chiefswood that Lockhart produced the little masterpiece of
+"Adam Blair" (where the terrors and temptations of a convinced
+Presbyterian minister are dwelt upon), and "Matthew Wald," which is
+itself the history of a lunatic as full of horrors, and those of no very
+different kind, as the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">{64}</a></span> <i>Confessions</i> themselves. That editing, and
+perhaps something more than editing, on Lockhart's part would have been
+exactly the thing necessary to prune and train and direct the Shepherd's
+disorderly luxuriance into the methodical madness of the Justified
+Sinner&mdash;to give Hogg's loose though by no means vulgar style the dress
+of his own polished manner&mdash;to weed and shape and correct and straighten
+the faults of the Boar of the Forest&mdash;nobody who knows the undoubted
+writing of the two men will deny. And Lockhart, who was so careless of
+his work that to this day it is difficult, if not impossible, to
+ascertain what he did or did not write unassisted, would certainly not
+have been the man to claim a share in the book, even had it made more
+noise; though he may have thought of this as well as of other things
+when, in his wrath over the foolish blethering about Scott, he wrote
+that the Shepherd's views of literary morality were peculiar. As for
+Hogg himself, he would never have thought of acknowledging any such
+editing or collaboration if it did take place; and that not nearly so
+much from vanity or dishonesty as from simple carelessness, dashed
+perhaps with something of the habit of literary <i>supercherie</i> which the
+society in which he lived affected, and which he carried as far at least
+as any one of its members.</p>
+
+<p>It may seem rather hard after praising a man's ewe lamb so highly to
+question his right in her. But I do not think there is any real
+hardship. I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">{65}</a></span> should think that the actual imagination of the story is
+chiefly Hogg's, for Lockhart's forte was not that quality, and his own
+novels suffer rather for want of it. If this be the one specimen of what
+the Shepherd's genius could turn out when it submitted to correction and
+training, it gives us a useful and interesting explanation why the mass
+of his work, with such excellent flashes, is so flawed and formless as a
+whole. It explains why he wished Lockhart to edit the others. It
+explains at the same time why (for the Shepherd's vanity was never far
+off) he set apparently little store by the book. It is only a hypothesis
+of course, and a hypothesis which is very unlikely ever to be proved,
+while in the nature of things it is even less capable of disproof. But I
+think there is good critical reason for it.</p>
+
+<p>At any rate, I confess for myself, that I should not take anything like
+the same interest in Hogg, if he were not the putative author of the
+<i>Confessions</i>. The book is in a style which wearies soon if it be
+overdone, and which is very difficult indeed to do well. But it is one
+of the very best things of its kind, and that is a claim which ought
+never to be overlooked. And if Hogg in some lucky moment did really
+"write it all by himself," as the children say, then we could make up
+for him a volume composed of it, of "Kilmeny," and of the best of the
+songs, which would be a very remarkable volume indeed. It would not
+represent a twentieth part of his collected work, and it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">{66}</a></span> would probably
+represent a still smaller fraction of what he wrote, while all the rest
+would be vastly inferior. But it would be a title to no inconsiderable
+place in literature, and we know that good judges did think Hogg, with
+all his personal weakness and all his literary shortcomings, entitled to
+such a place.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">{67}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III<br />
+<br />
+SYDNEY SMITH</h2>
+
+
+<p>The hackneyed joke about biographers adding a new terror to death holds
+still as good as ever. But biography can sometimes make a good case
+against her persecutors; and one of the instances which she would
+certainly adduce would be the instance of Sydney Smith. I more than
+suspect that his actual works are less and less read as time goes on,
+and that the brilliant virulence of <i>Peter Plymley</i>, the even greater
+brilliance, not marred by virulence at all, of the <i>Letters to
+Archdeacon Singleton</i>, the inimitable quips of his articles in the
+<i>Edinburgh Review</i>, are familiar, if they are familiar at all, only to
+the professed readers of the literature of the past, and perhaps to some
+intelligent newspaper men who find Sydney<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> to be what Fuseli
+pronounced Blake,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">{68}</a></span> "d&mdash;&mdash;d good to steal from." But the <i>Life</i> which
+Lady Holland, with her mother's and Mrs. Austin's aid, produced more
+than thirty years ago has had a different fate; and a fresh lease of
+popularity seems to have been secured by another <i>Life</i>, published by
+Mr. Stuart Reid in 1883. This was partly abridged from the first, and
+partly supplied with fresh matter by a new sifting of the documents
+which Lady Holland had used. Nor do the authors of these works, however
+great must be our gratitude to them, take to themselves any such share
+of the credit as is due to Boswell in the case of Johnson, to Lockhart
+in the case of Scott, to Carlyle in the case of Sterling. Neither can
+lay claim to the highest literary merit of writing or arrangement; and
+the latter of the two contains digressions, not interesting to all
+readers, about the nobility of Sydney's cause. It is because both books
+let their subject reveal himself by familiar letters, scraps of journal,
+or conversation, and because the revelation of self is so full and so
+delightful, that Sydney Smith's immortality, now that the generation
+which actually heard him talk has all but disappeared, is still secured
+without the slightest fear of disturbance or decay. With a few
+exceptions (the Mrs. Partington business, the apologue of the dinners at
+the synod of Dort, "Noodle's Oration," and one or two more), the things
+by which Sydney is known to the general, all come, not from his works,
+but from his <i>Life</i> or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">{69}</a></span> <i>Lives</i>. No one with any sense of fun can read
+the Works without being delighted; but in the Life and the letters the
+same qualities of wit appear, with other qualities which in the Works
+hardly appear at all. A person absolutely ignorant of anything but the
+Works might possibly dismiss Sydney Smith as a brilliant but bitter and
+not too consistent partisan, who fought desperately against abuses when
+his party was out, and discovered that they were not abuses at all when
+his party was in. A reader of his Life and of his private utterances
+knows him better, likes him better, and certainly does not admire him
+less.</p>
+
+<p>He was born in 1771, the son of an eccentric and apparently rather
+provoking person, who for no assigned reason left his wife at the church
+door in order to wander about the world, and who maintained his vagabond
+principles so well that, as his granddaughter ruefully records, he
+bought, spent money on, and sold at a loss, no less than nineteen
+different houses in England and Wales. Sydney was also the second of
+four clever brothers, the eldest and cleverest being the somewhat famous
+"Bobus," who co-operated in the <i>Microcosm</i> with Canning and Frere,
+survived his better known brother but a fortnight, founded a family, and
+has left one of those odd reputations of immense talent not justified by
+any producible work, to which our English life of public schools,
+universities, and Parliament gives peculiar facilities. Bobus and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">{70}</a></span> Cecil
+the third brother were sent to Eton: Sydney and Courtenay, the fourth,
+to Winchester, after a childhood spent in precocious reading and arguing
+among themselves. From Winchester Sydney (of whose school-days some
+trifling but only trifling anecdotes are recorded,) proceeded in regular
+course to New College, Oxford, and being elected of right to a
+Fellowship, then worth about a hundred pounds a year, was left by his
+father to "do for himself" on that not extensive revenue. He did for
+himself at Oxford during the space of nine years; and it is supposed
+that his straitened circumstances had something to do with his dislike
+for universities, which however was a kind of point of conscience among
+his Whig friends. It is at least singular that this residence of nearly
+a decade has left hardly a single story or recorded incident of any
+kind; and that though three generations of undergraduates passed through
+Oxford in his time, no one of them seems in later years to have had
+anything to say of not the least famous and one of the most sociable of
+Englishmen. At that time, it is true, and for long afterwards, the men
+of New College kept more to themselves than the men of any other college
+in Oxford; but still it is odd. Another little mystery is, Why did
+Sydney take orders? Although there is not the slightest reason to
+question his being, according to his own standard, a very sincere and
+sufficient divine, it obviously was not quite the profession for him.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">{71}</a></span>
+He is said to have wished for the Bar, but to have deferred to his
+father's wishes for the Church. That Sydney was an affectionate and
+dutiful son nobody need doubt: he was always affectionate, and in his
+own way dutiful. But he is about the last man one can think of as likely
+to undertake an uncongenial profession out of high-flown dutifulness to
+a father who had long left him to his own resources, and who had neither
+influence nor prospects in the Church to offer him. The Fellowship would
+have kept him, as it had kept him already, till briefs came. However, he
+did take orders; and the later <i>Life</i> gives more particulars than the
+first as to the incumbency which indirectly determined his career. It
+was the curacy of Netheravon on Salisbury Plain; and its almost complete
+seclusion was tempered by a kindly squire, Mr. Hicks-Beach,
+great-grandfather of the present Sir Michael Hicks-Beach. Mr.
+Hicks-Beach offered Sydney the post of tutor to his eldest son; Sydney
+accepted it, started for Germany with his pupil, but (as he
+picturesquely though rather vaguely expresses it) "put into Edinburgh
+under stress of war" and stayed there for five years.</p>
+
+<p>The sojourn at Edinburgh began in June 1798: it ended in August 1803. It
+will thus be seen that Sydney was by no means a very young man even when
+he began reviewing, the year before leaving the Scotch capital. Indeed
+the aimless prolongation<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">{72}</a></span> of his stay at Oxford, which brought him
+neither friends, money, nor professional experience of any kind, threw
+him considerably behindhand all his life; and this delay, much more than
+Tory persecution or Whig indifference, was the cause of the comparative
+slowness with which he made his way. His time at Edinburgh was, however,
+usefully spent even before that invention of the <i>Review</i>, over which
+there is an amicable and unimportant dispute between himself and
+Jeffrey. His tutorship was so successful that Mr. Hicks-Beach rewarded
+it with a cheque for a thousand pounds: he did duty in the Episcopal
+churches of Edinburgh: he made friends with all the Whigs and many of
+the Tories of the place: he laughed unceasingly at Scotchmen and liked
+them very much. Also, about the middle of his stay, he got married, but
+not to a Scotch girl. His wife was Miss Catherine Pybus, of Cheam, and
+the marriage was as harebrained a one, from the point of view of
+settlements, as Jeffrey's own.<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> Sydney's settlement on his wife is
+well known: it consisted of "six small silver teaspoons much worn," with
+which worldly goods he did her literally endow by throwing them into her
+lap. It would appear that there never was a happier marriage; but it
+certainly seemed for some years as if there might have been many more
+prosperous in point of money. When Sydney moved to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">{73}</a></span> London he had no
+very definite prospect of any income whatever; and had not Mrs. Smith
+sold her mother's jewels (which came to her just at the time), they
+would apparently have had some difficulty in furnishing their house in
+Doughty Street. But Horner, their friend (the "parish bull" of Scott's
+irreverent comparison), had gone to London before them, and impressed
+himself, apparently by sheer gravity, on the political world as a good
+young man. Introduced by him, Sydney Smith soon became one of the circle
+at Holland House. It is indeed not easy to live on invitations and your
+mother-in-law's pearls; but Sydney reviewed vigorously, preached
+occasionally, before very long received a regular appointment at the
+Foundling Hospital, and made some money by lecturing very agreeably at
+the Royal Institution on Moral Philosophy&mdash;a subject of which he
+honestly admits that he knew, in the technical sense, nothing. But his
+hearers did not want technical ethics, and in Sydney Smith they had a
+moral philosopher of the practical kind who could hardly be excelled
+either in sense or in wit. One little incident of this time, however,
+throws some light on the complaints which have been made about the delay
+of his promotion. He applied to a London rector to license him to a
+vacant chapel, which had not hitherto been used for the services of the
+Church. The immediate answer has not been preserved; but from what
+followed it clearly was a civil and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">{74}</a></span> rather evasive but perfectly
+intelligible request to be excused. The man was of course quite within
+his right, and a dozen good reasons can be guessed for his conduct. He
+may really have objected, as he seems to have said he did, to take a
+step which his predecessors had refused to take, and which might
+inconvenience his successors. But Sydney would not take the refusal, and
+wrote another very logical, but extremely injudicious, letter pressing
+his request with much elaboration, and begging the worthy Doctor of
+Divinity to observe that he, the Doctor, was guilty of inconsistency and
+other faults. Naturally this put the Doctor's back up, and he now
+replied with a flat and very high and mighty refusal. We know from
+another instance that Sydney was indisposed to take "No" for an answer.
+However he obtained, besides his place at the Foundling, preacherships
+in two proprietary chapels, and seems to have had both business and
+pleasure enough on his hands during his London sojourn, which was about
+the same length as his Edinburgh one. It was, however, much more
+profitable, for in three years the ministry of "All the Talents" came
+in, the Holland House interest was exerted, and the Chancellor's living
+of Foston, near York, valued at five hundred pounds a year, was given to
+Sydney. He paid for it, after a fashion which in a less zealous and
+convinced Whig might seem a little dubious, by the famous lampoons of
+the <i>Plymley Letters</i>, advocating the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">{75}</a></span> claims of Catholic emancipation,
+and extolling Fox and Grenville at the expense of Perceval and Canning.
+Very edifying is it to find Sydney Smith objecting to this latter that
+he is a "diner out," a "maker of jokes and parodies," a trifler on
+important subjects&mdash;in fact each and all of the things which the Rev.
+Sydney Smith himself was, in a perfection only equalled by the object of
+his righteous wrath. But of Peter more presently.</p>
+
+<p>Even his admiring biographers have noticed, with something of a chuckle,
+the revenge which Perceval, who was the chief object of Plymley's
+sarcasm, took, without in the least knowing it, on his lampooner. Had it
+not been for the Clergy Residence Bill, which that very respectable, if
+not very brilliant, statesman passed in 1808, and which put an end to
+perhaps the most flagrant of all then existing abuses, Sydney, the enemy
+of abuses, would no doubt have continued with a perfectly clear
+conscience to draw the revenues of Foston, and while serving it by a
+curate, to preach, lecture, dine out, and rebuke Canning for making
+jokes, in London. As it was he had to make up his mind, though he
+obtained a respite from the Archbishop, to resign (which in the
+recurring frost of Whig hopes was not to be thought of), to exchange,
+which he found impossible, or to bury himself in Yorkshire. This was a
+real hardship upon him, because Foston, as it was, was uninhabitable,
+and had had no resident clergyman<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">{76}</a></span> since the seventeenth century. But
+whatever bad things could be said of Sydney (and I really do not know
+what they are, except that the combination of a sharp wit, a ready pen,
+and strong political prejudices sometimes made him abuse his talents),
+no one could say that he ever shirked either a difficulty or a duty.
+When his first three years' leave expired, he went down in 1809 with his
+family to York, and established himself at Heslington, a village near
+the city and not far from his parish. And when a second term of
+dispensation from actual residence was over, he set to work and built
+the snuggest if the ugliest parsonage in England, with farm-buildings
+and all complete, at the cost of some four thousand pounds. Of the
+details of that building his own inimitable account exists, and is or
+ought to be well known. The brick-pit and kiln on the property, which
+were going to save fortunes and resulted in nothing but the production
+of exactly a hundred and fifty thousand unusable bricks: the four oxen,
+Tug, Lug, Haul and Crawl, who were to be the instruments of another
+economy and proved to be, at least in Sydneian language, equal to
+nothing but the consumption of "buckets of sal volatile:" the entry of
+the distracted mother of the household on her new domains with a baby
+clutched in her arms and one shoe left in the circumambient mud: the
+great folks of the neighbourhood (Lord and Lady Carlisle) coming to call
+graciously on the strangers,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">{77}</a></span> and being whelmed, coach and four,
+outriders and all, in a ploughed field of despond: the "universal
+scratcher" in the meadows, inclined so as to let the brute creation of
+all heights enjoy that luxury: Bunch the butler, a female child of
+tender years but stout proportions: Annie Kay the factotum: the
+"Immortal," a chariot which was picked up at York in the last stage of
+decay, and carried the family for many years half over England&mdash;all
+these things and persons are told in divers delightful scraps of
+autobiography and in innumerable letters, after a fashion impossible to
+better and at a length too long to quote.</p>
+
+<p>Sydney Smith was for more than twenty years rector of Foston, and for
+fully fifteen actually resided there. During this time he made the
+acquaintance of Lord and Lady Grey, next to Lord and Lady Holland his
+most constant friends, visited a little, entertained in his own
+unostentatious but hearty fashion a great deal, wrote many articles for
+the <i>Edinburgh Review</i>, found himself in a minority of one or two among
+the clergy of Yorkshire on the subject of Emancipation and similar
+matters, but was on the most friendly terms possible with his diocesan,
+Archbishop Vernon Harcourt. Nor was he even without further preferment,
+for he held for some years (on the then not discredited understanding of
+resignation when one of the Howards was ready for it) the neighbouring
+and valuable living of Londesborough.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">{78}</a></span> Then the death of an aunt put an
+end to his monetary anxieties, which for years had been considerable, by
+the legacy of a small but sufficient fortune. And at last, when he was
+approaching sixty, the good things of the Church, which he never
+affected to despise, came in earnest. The Tory Chancellor Lyndhurst gave
+him a stall at Bristol, which carried with it a small Devonshire living,
+and soon afterwards he was able to exchange Foston (which he had greatly
+improved), for Combe Florey near Taunton. When his friend Lord Grey
+became Prime Minister, the stall at Bristol was exchanged for a much
+more valuable one at St. Paul's; Halberton, the Devonshire vicarage, and
+Combe Florey still remaining his. These made up an ecclesiastical
+revenue not far short of three thousand a year, which Sydney enjoyed for
+the last fifteen years of his life. He never got anything more, and it
+is certain that for a time he was very sore at not being made a bishop,
+or at least offered a bishopric. Lord Holland had rather rashly
+explained the whole difficulty years before, by reporting a conversation
+of his with Lord Grenville, in which they had hoped that when the Whigs
+came into power they would be more grateful to Sydney than the Tories
+had been to Swift. Sydney's acuteness must have made him wince at the
+omen. For my part I do not see why either Harley or Grey should have
+hesitated, as far as any scruples of their own went.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">{79}</a></span> But I think any
+fair-minded person must admit the possibility of a scruple, though he
+may not share it, about the effect of seeing either the <i>Tale of a Tub</i>
+or <i>Peter Plymley's Letters</i>, with "By the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop
+of&mdash;&mdash;" on the title-page. The people who would have been shocked might
+in each case have been fools: there is nothing that I at least can see,
+in either book, inconsistent with sound religion and churchmanship. But
+they would have been honest fools, and of such a Prime Minister has to
+take heed. So Amen Corner (or rather, for he did not live there, certain
+streets near Grosvenor Square) in London, and Combe Florey in the
+country, were Sydney Smith's abodes till his death. In the former he
+gave his breakfasts and dinners in the season, being further enabled to
+do so by his share (some thirty thousand pounds) of his brother
+Courtenay's Indian fortune. The latter, after rebuilding it,&mdash;for he had
+either a fate or a passion for bricks and mortar,&mdash;he made on a small
+scale one of the most beautiful and hospitable houses in the West of
+England.</p>
+
+<p>To Combe Florey, as to Foston, a sheaf of fantastic legends attaches
+itself; indeed, as Lady Holland was not very fond of dates, it is
+sometimes not clear to which of the two residences some of them apply.
+At both Sydney had a huge store-room, or rather grocer's and chemist's
+shop, from which he supplied the wants, not merely of his household, but
+of half the neighbourhood. It<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">{80}</a></span> appears to have been at Combe Florey (for
+though no longer poor he still had a frugal mind), that he hit upon the
+device of "putting the cheapest soaps in the dearest papers," confident
+of the result upon the female temper. It was certainly there that he
+fitted up two favourite donkeys with a kind of holiday-dress of antlers,
+to meet the objection of one of his lady-visitors that he had no deer;
+and converted certain large bay-trees in boxes into the semblance of an
+orangery, by fastening some dozens of fine fruit to the branches. I like
+to think of the mixed astonishment and disgust of a great Russian, and a
+not very small Frenchman, both not long deceased, M. Tourguénieff and M.
+Paul de Saint-Victor, if they had heard of these pleasing tomfooleries.
+But tomfoolery, though, when properly and not inordinately indulged, one
+of the best things in life, must, like the other good things of life,
+come to an end. After an illness of some months Sydney Smith died at his
+house in Green Street, of heart disease, on 22nd February 1845, in the
+seventy-fourth year of his age.</p>
+
+<p>The memorials and evidences of his peculiar if not unique genius consist
+of three different kinds; reported or remembered conversations and
+jokes, letters, and formal literary work. He was once most famous as a
+talker; but conversation is necessarily the most perishable of all
+things, and its recorded fragments bear keeping less than any other
+relics. Some of the verbal jests assigned to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">{81}</a></span> him (notably the famous
+one about the tortoise, which, after being long known by the initiated
+not to be his, has at last been formally claimed by its rightful owner),
+are certainly or probably borrowed or falsely attributed, as rich
+conversationalists always borrow or receive. And always the things have
+something of the mangled air which sayings detached from their context
+can hardly escape. It is otherwise with the letters. The best letters
+are always most like the actual conversation of their writers, and
+probably no one ever wrote more as he talked than Sydney Smith. The
+specially literary qualities of his writing for print are here too in
+great measure; and on the whole, though of course the importance of
+subject is nearly always less, and the interest of sustained work is
+wholly absent, nowhere can the entire Sydney be better seen. Of the
+three satirists of modern times with whom he may not unfairly claim to
+rank&mdash;Pascal, Swift, and Voltaire&mdash;he is most like Voltaire in his
+faculty of presenting a good thing with a preface which does not in the
+least prepare you for it, and then leaving it without the slightest
+attempt to go back on it, and elaborate it, and make sure that his
+hearer has duly appreciated it and laughed at it. And of the two, though
+the palm of concentration must be given to Voltaire, the palm of
+absolute simplicity must be given to Sydney. Hardly any of his letters
+are without these unforced flashes of wit, from almost his first<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">{82}</a></span>
+epistle to Jeffrey (where, after rallying that great little man on being
+the "only male despondent he has met," he adds the postscript, "I beg to
+except the Tuxford waiter, who desponds exactly as you do") to his very
+last to Miss Harcourt, in which he mildly dismisses one of his brethren
+as "anything but a <i>polished</i> corner of the Temple." There is the "usual
+establishment for an eldest landed baby:" the proposition, advanced in
+the grave and chaste manner, that "the information of very plain women
+is so inconsiderable, that I agree with you in setting no store by it:"
+the plaintive expostulation with Lady Holland (who had asked him to
+dinner on the ninth of the month, after previously asking him to stay
+from the fifth to the twelfth), "it is like giving a gentleman an
+assignation for Wednesday when you are going to marry him on the
+previous Sunday&mdash;an attempt to combine the stimulus of gallantry with
+the security of connubial relations:" the simple and touching
+information that "Lord Tankerville has sent me a whole buck. This
+necessarily takes up a good deal of my time;" that "geranium-fed bacon
+is of a beautiful colour, but it takes so many plants to fatten one pig
+that such a system can never answer;" that "it is a mistake to think
+that Dr. Bond could be influenced by partridges. He is a man of very
+independent mind, with whom pheasants at least, or perhaps even turkeys,
+are necessary;" and scores more with references to which I find the
+fly-leaves of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">{83}</a></span> my copy of the letters covered. If any one wants to see
+how much solid there is with all this froth, let him turn to the
+passages showing the unconquerable manliness, fairness, and good sense
+with which Sydney treated the unhappy subject of Queen Caroline, out of
+which his friends were so ready to make political capital; or to the
+admirable epistle in which he takes seriously, and blunts once for all,
+the points of certain foolish witticisms as to the readiness with which
+he, a man about town, had taken to catechisms and cabbages in an almost
+uninhabited part of the despised country. In conversation he would seem
+sometimes to have a little, a very little, "forced the note." The Quaker
+baby, and the lady "with whom you might give an assembly or populate a
+parish," are instances in point. But he never does this in his letters.
+I take particular pleasure in the following passage written to Miss
+Georgiana Harcourt within two years of his death: "What a charming
+existence! To live in the midst of holy people; to know that nothing
+profane can approach you; to be certain that a Dissenter can no more be
+found in the Palace than a snake can exist in Ireland, or ripe fruit in
+Scotland! To have your society strong, and undiluted by the laity; to
+bid adieu to human learning; to feast on the Canons and revel in the
+Thirty-Nine Articles! Happy Georgiana!" Now if Sydney had been what some
+foolish people think him, merely a scoffer, there would be no fun<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">{84}</a></span> in
+this; it would be as impertinent and in as bad taste as the stale jokes
+of the eighteenth century about Christianity. But he was much else.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, however, no rational man will contend that in estimating
+Sydney Smith's place in the general memory, his deliberate literary
+work, or at least that portion of it which he chose to present on
+reflection, acknowledged and endorsed, can be overlooked. His <i>Life</i>
+contains (what is infinitely desirable in all such Lives and by no means
+always or often furnished) a complete list of his contributions to the
+<i>Edinburgh Review</i>, and his works contain most of them. To these have to
+be added the pamphlets, of which the chief and incomparably the best
+are, at intervals of thirty years, <i>Peter Plymley</i> and the <i>Letters to
+Archdeacon Singleton</i>, together with sermons, speeches, and other
+miscellaneous matter. The whole, except the things which he did not
+himself care to reprint, can be obtained now in one volume; but the
+print is not to be recommended to aged or weakly sight.</p>
+
+<p>Sydney Smith had no false modesty, and in not a few letters to Jeffrey
+he speaks of his own contributions to the <i>Edinburgh</i> with the greatest
+freedom, combating and quite refusing to accept his editor's suggestion
+as to their flippancy and fantasticality, professing with much frankness
+that this is the way he can write and no other, and more than once
+telling Jeffrey that whatever they may think in solemn Scotland, his,
+Sydney's,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">{85}</a></span> articles are a great deal more read in England and elsewhere
+than any others. Although there are maxims to the contrary effect, the
+judgment of a clever man, not very young and tolerably familiar with the
+world, on his own work, is very seldom far wrong. I should say myself
+that, putting aside the historic estimate, Sydney Smith's articles are
+by far the most interesting nowadays of those contributed by any one
+before the days of Macaulay, who began just as Sydney ceased to write
+anonymously in 1827, on his Bristol appointment. They are also by far
+the most distinct and original. Jeffrey, Brougham, and the rest wrote,
+for the most part, very much after the fashion of the ancients: if a
+very few changes were made for date, passages of Jeffrey's criticism
+might almost be passages of Dryden, certainly passages of the better
+critics of the eighteenth century, as far as manner goes. There is
+nobody at all like Sydney Smith before him in England, for Swift's style
+is wholly different. To begin with, Sydney had a strong prejudice in
+favour of writing very short articles, and a horror of reading long
+ones&mdash;the latter being perhaps less peculiar to himself than the former.
+Then he never made the slightest pretence at systematic or dogmatic
+criticism of anything whatever. In literature proper he seems indeed to
+have had no particular principles, and I cannot say that he had very
+good taste. He commits the almost unpardonable sin of not merely
+blaspheming Madame<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">{86}</a></span> de Sévigné, but preferring to her that second-rate
+leader-writer in petticoats, Madame de Staël. On the other hand, if he
+had no literary principles, he had (except in rare cases where politics
+came in, and not often then) few literary prejudices, and his happily
+incorrigible good sense and good humour were proof against the frequent
+bias of his associates. Though he could not have been very sensible,
+from what he himself says, of their highest qualities, he championed
+Scott's novels incessantly against the Whigs and prigs of Holland House.
+He gives a most well-timed warning to Jeffrey that the constant
+running-down of Wordsworth had very much the look of persecution, though
+with his usual frankness he avows that he has not read the particular
+article in question, because the subject is "quite uninteresting to
+him." I think he would, if driven hard, have admitted with equal
+frankness that poetry, merely as poetry, was generally uninteresting.
+Still he had so many interests of various kinds, that few books failed
+to appeal to one or the other, and he, in his turn, has seldom failed to
+give a lively if not a very exact or critical account of his subject.
+But it is in his way of giving this account that the peculiarity,
+glanced at above as making a parallel between him and Voltaire, appears.
+It is, I have said, almost original, and what is more, endless as has
+been the periodical writing of the last eighty years, and sedulously as
+later writers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">{87}</a></span> have imitated earlier, I do not know that it has ever
+been successfully copied. It consists in giving rapid and apparently
+business-like summaries, packed, with apparent negligence and real art,
+full of the flashes of wit so often noticed and to be noticed. Such are,
+in the article on "The Island of Ceylon," the honey-bird "into whose
+body the soul of a common informer seems to have migrated," and "the
+chaplain of the garrison, all in black, the Rev. Mr. Somebody or other
+whose name we have forgotten," the discovery of whose body in a serpent
+his ruthless clerical brother pronounces to be "the best history of the
+kind he remembers." Very likely there may be people who can read this,
+even the "all in black," without laughing, and among them I should
+suppose must be the somebody or other, whose name we too have forgotten,
+who is said to have imagined that he had more than parried Sydney's
+unforgiven jest about the joke and the surgical operation, by retorting,
+"Yes! an <i>English</i> joke." I have always wept to think that Sydney did
+not live to hear this retort. The classical places for this kind of
+summary work are the article just named on Ceylon, and that on Waterton.
+But the most inimitable single example, if it is not too shocking to
+this very proper age, is the argument of Mat Lewis's tragedy: "Ottilia
+becomes quite furious from the conviction that Cæsario has been sleeping
+with a second lady called Estella; whereas he has really been sleeping
+with a third lady called Amelrosa."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">{88}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Among the most important of these essays are the two famous ones on
+Methodism and on Indian missions, which gave far more offence to the
+religious public of evangelical persuasion than all Sydney's jokes on
+bishops, or his arguments for Catholic emancipation, and which (owing to
+the strong influence which then, as now, Nonconformists possessed in the
+counsels of the Liberal party) probably had as much to do as anything
+else with the reluctance of the Whig leaders, when they came into power,
+to give their friend the highest ecclesiastical preferment. These
+subjects are rather difficult to treat in a general literary essay, and
+it may perhaps be admitted that here, as in dealing with poetry and
+other subjects of the more transcendental kind, Sydney showed a touch of
+Philistinism, and a distinct inability to comprehend exaltation of
+sentiment and thought. But the general sense is admirably sound and
+perfectly orthodox; and the way in which so apparently light and
+careless a writer has laboriously supported every one of his charges,
+and almost every one of his flings, with chapter and verse from the
+writings of the incriminated societies, is very remarkable. Nor can it,
+I think, be doubted that the publication, in so widely read a
+periodical, of the nauseous follies of speech in which well-meaning
+persons indulged, had something to do with the gradual disuse of a style
+than which nothing could be more prejudicial to religion, for the simple
+reason that nothing else could make religion ridiculous.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">{89}</a></span> The medicine
+did not of course operate at once, and silly people still write silly
+things. But I hardly think that the Wesleyan body or the Church
+Missionary Society would now officially publish such stuff as the
+passage about Brother Carey, who, while in the actual paroxysm of
+sea-sickness, was "wonderfully comforted by the contemplation of the
+goodness of God," or that about Brother Ward "in design clasping to his
+bosom" the magnanimous Captain Wickes, who subsequently "seemed very
+low," when a French privateer was in sight. Jeffrey was, it seems, a
+little afraid of these well-deserved exposures, which, from the
+necessity of abundant quotation, are an exception to the general
+shortness of Sydney's articles. Sydney's interest in certain subjects
+led him constantly to take up fresh books on them; and thus a series of
+series might be made out of his papers, with some advantage to the
+reader perhaps, if a new edition of his works were undertaken. The chief
+of such subjects is America, in dealing with which he pleased the
+Americans by descanting on their gradual emancipation from English
+prejudices and abuses, but infuriated them by constant denunciations of
+slavery, and by laughing at their lack of literature and cultivation.
+With India he also dealt often, his brothers' connection with it giving
+him an interest therein. Prisons were another favourite subject, though,
+in his zeal for making them uncomfortable, he committed himself to one
+really atrocious suggestion&mdash;that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">{90}</a></span> of dark cells for long periods of
+time. It is odd that the same person should make such a truly diabolical
+proposal, and yet be in a perpetual state of humanitarian rage about
+man-traps and spring-guns, which were certainly milder engines of
+torture. It is odd, too, that Sydney, who was never tired of arguing
+that prisons ought to be made uncomfortable, because nobody need go
+there unless he chose, should have been furiously wroth with poor Mr.
+Justice Best for suggesting much the same thing of spring-guns. The
+greatest political triumph of his manner is to be found no doubt in the
+article "Bentham on Fallacies," in which the unreadable diatribes of the
+apostle of utilitarianism are somehow spirited and crisped up into a
+series of brilliant arguments, and the whole is crowned by the famous
+"Noodle's Oration," the summary and storehouse of all that ever has been
+or can be said on the Liberal side in the lighter manner. It has not
+lost its point even from the fact that Noodle has now for a long time
+changed his party, and has elaborated for himself, after his manner, a
+similar stock of platitudes and absurdities in favour of the very things
+for which Sydney was fighting.</p>
+
+<p>The qualities of these articles appear equally in the miscellaneous
+essays, in the speeches, and even in the sermons, though Sydney Smith,
+unlike Sterne, never condescended to buffoonery or theatrical tricks in
+the pulpit. In <i>Peter Plymley's Letters</i> they appear concentrated and
+acidulated:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">{91}</a></span> in the <i>Letters to Archdeacon Singleton</i>, in the
+<i>Repudiation Letters</i>, and the <i>Letters on Railways</i> which date from his
+very last days, concentrated and mellowed. More than one good judge has
+been of the opinion that Sydney's powers increased to the very end of
+his life, and it is not surprising that this should have been the case.
+Although he did plenty of work in his time, the literary part of it was
+never of an exhausting nature. Though one of the most original of
+commentators, he was a commentator pure and simple, and found, but did
+not supply, his matter. Thus there was no danger of running dry, and as
+his happiest style was not indignation but good-natured raillery, his
+increasing prosperity, not chequered, till quite the close of his life,
+by any serious bodily ailment, put him more and more in the right
+atmosphere and temper for indulging his genius. <i>Plymley</i>, though very
+amusing, and, except in the Canning matter above referred to, not
+glaringly unfair for a political lampoon, is distinctly acrimonious, and
+almost (as "almost" as Sydney could be) ill-tempered. It is possible to
+read between the lines that the writer is furious at his party being out
+of office, and is much more angry with Mr. Perceval for having the ear
+of the country than for being a respectable nonentity. The main
+argument, moreover, is bad in itself, and was refuted by facts. Sydney
+pretends to be, as his friend Jeffrey really was, in mortal terror lest
+the French<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">{92}</a></span> should invade England, and, joined by rebellious Irishmen
+and wrathful Catholics generally, produce an English revolution. The
+Tories replied, "We will take good care that the French shall <i>not</i>
+land, and that Irishmen shall <i>not</i> rise." And they did take the said
+good care, and they beat the Frenchmen thorough and thorough while
+Sydney and his friends were pointing their epigrams. Therefore, though
+much of the contention is unanswerable enough, the thing is doubtfully
+successful as a whole. In the <i>Letters to Archdeacon Singleton</i> the tone
+is almost uniformly good-humoured, and the argument, whether quite
+consistent or not in the particular speaker's mouth, is absolutely
+sound, and has been practically admitted since by almost all the best
+friends of the Church. Here occurs that inimitable passage before
+referred to.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I met the other day, in an old Dutch chronicle, with a passage so
+apposite to this subject, that, though it is somewhat too light
+for the occasion, I cannot abstain from quoting it. There was a
+great meeting of all the clergy at Dordrecht, and the chronicler
+thus describes it, which I give in the language of the
+translation: "And there was great store of Bishops in the town,
+in their robes goodly to behold, and all the great men of the
+State were there, and folks poured in in boats on the Meuse, the
+Merse, the Rhine, and the Linge, coming from the Isle of
+Beverlandt and Isselmond, and from all quarters in the Bailiwick
+of Dort; Arminians and Gomarists, with the friends of John
+Barneveldt and of Hugh Grote. And before my Lords the Bishops,
+Simon of Gloucester, who was a Bishop in those parts, disputed
+with Vorstius and Leoline the Monk, and many texts of Scripture
+were bandied to and fro; and when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">{93}</a></span> this was done, and many
+propositions made, and it waxed towards twelve of the clock, my
+Lords the Bishops prepared to set them down to a fair repast, in
+which was great store of good things&mdash;and among the rest a
+roasted peacock, having in lieu of a tail the arms and banners of
+the Archbishop, which was a goodly sight to all who favoured the
+Church&mdash;and then the Archbishop would say a grace, as was seemly
+to do, he being a very holy man; but ere he had finished, a great
+mob of townspeople and folks from the country, who were gathered
+under the windows, cried out <i>Bread! bread!</i> for there was a
+great famine, and wheat had risen to three times the ordinary
+price of the <i>sleich</i>; and when they had done crying <i>Bread!
+bread!</i> they called out <i>No Bishops!</i> and began to cast up stones
+at the windows. Whereat my Lords the Bishops were in a great
+fright, and cast their dinner out of the window to appease the
+mob, and so the men of that town were well pleased, and did
+devour the meats with a great appetite; and then you might have
+seen my Lords standing with empty plates, and looking wistfully
+at each other, till Simon of Gloucester, he who disputed with
+Leoline the Monk, stood up among them and said, <i>Good my Lords,
+is it your pleasure to stand here fasting, and that those who
+count lower in the Church than you do should feast and fluster?
+Let us order to us the dinner of the Deans and Canons which is
+making ready for them in the chamber below.</i> And this speech of
+Simon of Gloucester pleased the Bishops much; and so they sent
+for the host, one William of Ypres, and told him it was for the
+public good, and he, much fearing the Bishops, brought them the
+dinner of the Deans and Canons; and so the Deans and Canons went
+away without dinner, and were pelted by the men of the town,
+because they had not put any meat out of the windows like the
+Bishops; and when the Count came to hear of it, he said it was a
+pleasant conceit, <i>and that the Bishops were right cunning men,
+and had ding'd the Canons well</i>."</p></div>
+
+<p>Even in the Singleton Letters, however, there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">{94}</a></span> are some little lapses of
+the same kind (worse, indeed, because these letters were signed) as the
+attack on Canning in the Plymley Letters. Sydney Smith exclaiming
+against "derision and persiflage, the great principle by which the world
+is now governed," is again edifying. But in truth Sydney never had the
+weakness (for I have known it called a weakness) of looking too
+carefully to see what the enemy's advocate is going to say. Take even
+the famous, the immortal apologue of Mrs. Partington. It covered, we are
+usually told, the Upper House with ridicule, and did as much as anything
+else to carry the Reform Bill. And yet, though it is a watery apologue,
+it will not hold water for a moment. The implied conclusion is, that the
+Atlantic beat Mrs. Partington. Did it? It made, no doubt, a great mess
+in her house, it put her to flight, it put her to shame. But when I was
+last at Sidmouth the line of high-water mark was, I believe, much what
+it was before the great storm of 1824, and though the particular Mrs.
+Partington had no doubt been gathered to her fathers, the Mrs.
+Partington of the day was, equally without doubt, living very
+comfortably in the house which the Atlantic had threatened to swallow
+up.</p>
+
+<p>It was, however, perhaps part of Sydney's strength that he never cared
+to consider too curiously, or on too many sides. Besides his inimitable
+felicity of expression (the Singleton Letters are simply crammed with
+epigram), he had the sturdiest<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">{95}</a></span> possible common sense and the liveliest
+possible humour. I have known his claim to the title of "humourist"
+called in question by precisians: nobody could deny him the title of
+good-humourist. Except that the sentimental side of Toryism would never
+have appealed to him, it was chiefly an accident of time that he was a
+polemical Liberal. He would always and naturally have been on the side
+opposite to that on which most of the fools were. When he came into the
+world, as the straitest Tory will admit, there were in that world a
+great many abuses as they are called, that is to say, a great many
+things which, once useful and excellent, had either decayed into
+positive nuisances, or dried up into neutral and harmless but
+obstructive rubbish. There were also many silly and some mischievous
+people, as well as some wise and useful ones, who defended the abuses.
+Sydney Smith was an ideal soldier of reform for his time, and in his
+way. He was not extraordinarily long-sighted&mdash;indeed (as his famous and
+constantly-repeated advice to "take short views of life" shows) he had a
+distinct distrust of taking too anxious thought for political or any
+other morrows. But he had a most keen and, in many cases, a most just
+scent and sight for the immediate inconveniences and injustices of the
+day, and for the shortest and most effective ways of mending them. He
+was perhaps more destitute of romance and of reverence (though he had
+too much good taste to be positively irreverent) than<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">{96}</a></span> any man who ever
+lived. He never could have paralleled, he never could have even
+understood, Scott's feelings about the Regalia, or that ever-famous
+incident of Sir Walter's life, when returning with Jeffrey and other
+Whig friends from some public meeting, he protested against the
+innovations which, harmless or even beneficial individually and in
+themselves, would by degrees destroy every thing that made Scotland
+Scotland. I am afraid that his warmest admirers, even those of his own
+political complexion, must admit that he was, as has been said, more
+than a little of a Philistine; that he expressed, and expressed
+capitally in one way, that curious middle-class sentiment, or denial of
+sentiment, which won its first triumph in the first Reform Bill and its
+last in the Exhibition of twenty years later, which destroyed no doubt
+much that was absurd, and some things that were noxious, but which
+induced in England a reign of shoddy in politics, in philosophy, in art,
+in literature, and, when its own reign was over, left England weak and
+divided, instead of, as it had been under the reign of abuses, united
+and strong. The bombardment of Copenhagen may or may not have been a
+dreadful thing: it was at any rate better than the abandonment of
+Khartoum. Nor can Sydney any more than his friends be acquitted of
+having held the extraordinary notion that you can "rest and be thankful"
+in politics, that you can set Demos at bishops, but stave and tail him
+off<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">{97}</a></span> when he comes to canons; that you can level beautifully down to a
+certain point, and then stop levelling for ever afterwards; that because
+you can laugh Brother Ringletub out of court, laughter will be equally
+effective with Cardinal Newman; and that though it is the height of
+"anility" (a favourite word of his) to believe in a country gentleman,
+it is the height of rational religion to believe in a ten-pound
+householder.</p>
+
+<p>But however open to exception his principles may be, and that not merely
+from the point of view of highflying Toryism, his carrying out of them
+in life and in literature had the two abiding justifications of being
+infinitely amusing, and of being amusing always in thoroughly good
+temper. It is, as I have said, impossible to read Sydney Smith's <i>Life</i>,
+and still more impossible to read his letters, without liking him warmly
+and personally, without seeing that he was not only a man who liked to
+be comfortable (that is not very rare), that he was not only one who
+liked others to be comfortable (that is rarer), but one who in every
+situation in which he was thrown, did his utmost to make others as well
+as himself comfortable (which is rarest of all). If the references in
+<i>Peter Plymley</i> to Canning were unjustifiable from him, there is little
+or no reason to think that they were prompted by personal jealousy; and
+though, as has been said, he was undoubtedly sore, and unreasonably
+sore, at not receiving the preferment which he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">{98}</a></span> thought he had deserved,
+he does not seem to have been personally jealous of any man who had
+received it. The parson of Foston and Combe Florey may not have been
+(his latest biographer, admiring though he be, pathetically laments that
+he was not) a spiritually minded man. But happy beyond almost all other
+parishioners of the time were the parishioners of Combe Florey and
+Foston, though one of them did once throw a pair of scissors at his
+provoking pastor. He was a fast and affectionate friend; and though he
+was rather given to haunting rich men, he did it not only without
+servility, but without that alternative of bearishness and freaks which
+has sometimes been adopted. As a prince of talkers he might have been a
+bore to a generation which (I own I think in that perhaps single point),
+wiser than its fathers, is not so ambitious as they were to sit as a
+bucket and be pumped into. But in that infinitely happier system of
+conversation by books, which any one can enjoy as he likes and interrupt
+as he likes at his own fireside, Sydney is still a prince. There may be
+living somewhere some one who does not think so very badly of slavery,
+who is most emphatically of opinion that "the fools were right," in the
+matters of Catholic emancipation and Reform, who thinks well of public
+schools and universities, who even, though he may not like spring-guns
+much, thinks that John Jones had only himself to blame if, after ample
+warning and with no business except the business of supplying<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">{99}</a></span> a London
+poulterer with his landlord's game, he trespassed and came to the worst.
+Yet even this monster, if he happened to be possessed of the sense of
+fun and literature, (which is perhaps impossible), could not read even
+the most acrid of Sydney's political diatribes without shrieking with
+laughter, if, in his ogreish way, he were given to such violent
+demonstrations; could certainly not read the <i>Life</i> and the letters
+without admitting, in a moment of unwonted humanity, that here was a man
+who, for goodness as well as for cleverness, for sound practical wisdom
+as well as for fantastic verbal wit, has had hardly a superior and very
+few equals.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">{100}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV<br />
+<br />
+JEFFREY</h2>
+
+
+<p>"Jeffrey and I," says Christopher North in one of his more malicious
+moments, "do nothing original; it's porter's work." A tolerably
+experienced student of human nature might almost, without knowing the
+facts, guess the amount of truth contained in this fling. North, as
+North, had done nothing that the world calls original: North, as Wilson,
+had done a by no means inconsiderable quantity of such work in verse and
+prose. But Jeffrey really did underlie the accusation contained in the
+words. A great name in literature, nothing stands to his credit in
+permanent literary record but a volume (a sufficiently big one, no
+doubt<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a>) of criticisms on the work of other men; and though this
+volume is only a selection from his actual writings, no further gleaning
+could be made of any different material. Even his celebrated,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">{101}</a></span> or once
+celebrated, "Treatise on Beauty" is but a review article, worked up into
+an encyclopædia article, and dealing almost wholly with pure criticism.
+Against him, if against any one, the famous and constantly repeated gibe
+about the fellows who have failed in literature and art, falls short and
+harmless. In another of its forms, "the corruption of a poet is the
+generation of a critic," it might be more appropriate. For Jeffrey, as
+we know from his boyish letters, once thought, like almost every boy who
+is not an idiot, that he might be a poet, and scribbled verses in
+plenty. But the distinguishing feature in this case was, that he waited
+for no failure, for no public ridicule or neglect, not even for any
+private nipping of the merciful, but so seldom effective, sort, to check
+those sterile growths. The critic was sufficiently early developed in
+him to prevent the corruption of the poet from presenting itself, in its
+usual disastrous fashion, to the senses of the world. Thus he lives (for
+his political and legal renown, though not inconsiderable, is
+comparatively unimportant) as a critic pure and simple.</p>
+
+<p>His biographer, Lord Cockburn, tells us that "Francis Jeffrey, the
+greatest of British critics, was born in Edinburgh on 23d October 1773."
+It must be at the end, not the beginning, of this paper that we decide
+whether Jeffrey deserves the superlative. He seems certainly to have
+begun his critical practice very early. He was the son of a depute-clerk
+of the Court of Session, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">{102}</a></span> respectably, though not brilliantly,
+connected. His father was a great Tory, and, though it would be
+uncharitable to say that this was the reason why Jeffrey was a great
+Liberal, the two facts were probably not unconnected in the line of
+causation. Francis went to the High School when he was eight, and to the
+College at Glasgow when he was fourteen. He does not appear to have been
+a prodigy at either; but he has an almost unequalled record for early
+work of the self-undertaken kind. He seems from his boyhood to have been
+addicted to filling reams of paper, and shelves full of note-books, with
+extracts, abstracts, critical annotations, criticisms of these
+criticisms, and all manner of writing of the same kind. I believe it is
+the general experience that this kind of thing does harm in nineteen
+cases, for one in which it does good; but Jeffrey was certainly a
+striking exception to the rule, though perhaps he might not have been so
+if his producing, or at least publishing, time had not been unusually
+delayed. Indeed, his whole mental history appears to have been of a
+curiously piecemeal character; and his scrappy and self-guided education
+may have conduced to the priggishness which he showed early, and never
+entirely lost, till fame, prosperity, and the approach of old age
+mellowed it out of him. He was not sixteen when his sojourn at Glasgow
+came to an end; and, for more than two years, he seems to have been left
+to a kind of studious independence, attending only a couple of law<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">{103}</a></span>
+classes at Edinburgh University. Then his father insisted on his going
+to Oxford: a curious step, the reasons for which are anything but clear.
+For the paternal idea seems to have been that Jeffrey was to study not
+arts, but law; a study for which Oxford may present facilities now, but
+which most certainly was quite out of its way in Jeffrey's time, and
+especially in the case of a Scotch boy of ordinary freshman's age.</p>
+
+<p>It is painful to have to say that Jeffrey hated Oxford, because there
+are few instances on record in which such hatred does not show the hater
+to have been a very bad man indeed. There are, however, some special
+excuses for the little Scotchman. His college (Queen's) was not perhaps
+very happily selected; he had been sent there in the teeth of his own
+will, which was a pretty strong will; he was horrified, after the free
+selection of Scotch classes, to find a regular curriculum which he had
+to take or leave as a whole; the priggishness of Oxford was not his
+priggishness, its amusements (for he hated sport of every kind) were not
+his amusements; and, in short, there was a general incompatibility. He
+came up in September and went down in July, having done nothing except
+having, according to a not ill-natured jest, "lost the broad Scotch, but
+gained only the narrow English,"&mdash;a peculiarity which sometimes brought
+a little mild ridicule on him both from Scotchmen and Englishmen.</p>
+
+<p>Very soon after his return to Edinburgh, he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">{104}</a></span> seems to have settled down
+steadily to study for the Scotch bar, and during his studies
+distinguished himself as a member of the famous Speculative Society,
+both in essay-writing and in the debates. He was called on 16th December
+1794.</p>
+
+<p>Although there have never been very quick returns at the bar, either of
+England or Scotland, the smaller numbers of the latter might be thought
+likely to bring young men of talent earlier to the front. This
+advantage, however, appears to have been counterbalanced partly by the
+strong family interests which made a kind of aristocracy among Scotch
+lawyers, and partly by the influence of politics and of Government
+patronage. Jeffrey was, comparatively speaking, a "kinless loon"; and,
+while he was steadily resolved not to put himself forward as a candidate
+for the Tory manna of which Dundas was the Moses, his filial reverence
+long prevented him from declaring himself a very violent Whig. Indeed,
+he gave an instance of this reverence which might serve as a pretty text
+for a casuistical discussion. Henry Erskine, Dean of the Faculty of
+Advocates, was in 1796 deprived by vote of that, the most honourable
+position of the Scotch bar, for having presided at a Whig meeting.
+Jeffrey, like Gibbon, sighed as a Whig, but obeyed as a son, and stayed
+away from the poll. His days were certainly long in the land; but I am
+inclined to think that, in a parallel case, some Tories at least would
+have taken the chance of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">{105}</a></span> shorter life with less speckled honour.
+However, it is hard to quarrel with a man for obeying his parents; and
+perhaps, after all, the Whigs did not think the matter of so much
+importance as they affected to do. It is certain that Jeffrey was a
+little dashed by the slowness of his success at the bar. Towards the end
+of 1798, he set out for London with a budget of letters of introduction,
+and thoughts of settling down to literature. But the editors and
+publishers to whom he was introduced did not know what a treasure lay
+underneath the scanty surface of this Scotch advocate, and they were
+either inaccessible or repulsive. He returned to Edinburgh, and, for
+another two years, waited for fortune philosophically enough, though
+with lingering thoughts of England, and growing ones of India. It was
+just at the turn of the century, that his fortunes began, in various
+ways, also to take a turn. For some years, though a person by no means
+given to miscellaneous acquaintances, he had been slowly forming the
+remarkable circle of friends from whose combined brains was soon to
+start the <i>Edinburgh Review</i>. He fell in love, and married his second
+cousin, Catherine Wilson, on 1st November 1801&mdash;a bold and by no means
+canny step, for his father was ill-off, the bride was tocherless, and he
+says that he had never earned a hundred pounds a year in fees. They did
+not, however, launch out greatly, and their house in Buccleuch Place
+(not the least famous locality in literature) was furnished<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">{106}</a></span> on a scale
+which some modern colleges, conducted on the principles of enforced
+economy, would think Spartan for an undergraduate. Shortly afterwards,
+and very little before the appearance of the Blue and Yellow, Jeffrey
+made another innovation, which was perhaps not less profitable to him,
+by establishing a practice in ecclesiastical causes; though he met with
+a professional check in his rejection, on party principles, for the
+so-called collectorship, a kind of reporter's post of some emolument and
+not inconsiderable distinction.</p>
+
+<p>The story of the <i>Edinburgh Review</i> and its foundation has been very
+often told on the humorous, if not exactly historical, authority of
+Sydney Smith. It is unnecessary to repeat it. It is undoubted that the
+idea was Sydney's. It is equally undoubted that, but for Jeffrey, the
+said idea might never have taken form at all, and would never have
+retained any form for more than a few months. It was only Jeffrey's
+long-established habit of critical writing, the untiring energy into
+which he whipped up his no doubt gifted but quite untrained
+contributors, and the skill which he almost at once developed in editing
+proper,&mdash;that is to say in selecting, arranging, adapting, and, even to
+some extent, re-writing contributions&mdash;which secured success. Very
+different opinions have been expressed at different times on the
+intrinsic merits of this celebrated production; and perhaps, on the
+whole, the principal feeling of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">{107}</a></span> explorers into the long and dusty
+ranges of its early volumes, has been one of disappointment. I believe
+myself that, in similar cases, a similar result is very common indeed,
+and that it is due to the operation of two familiar fallacies. The one
+is the delusion as to the products of former times being necessarily
+better than those of the present; a delusion which is not the less
+deluding because of its counterpart, the delusion about progress. The
+other is a more peculiar and subtle one. I shall not go so far as a very
+experienced journalist who once said to me commiseratingly, "My good
+sir, I won't exactly say that literary merit hurts a newspaper." But
+there is no doubt that all the great successes of journalism, for the
+last hundred years, have been much more due to the fact of the new
+venture being new, of its supplying something that the public wanted and
+had not got, than to the fact of the supply being extraordinarily good
+in kind. In nearly every case, the intrinsic merit has improved as the
+thing went on, but it has ceased to be a novel merit. Nothing would be
+easier than to show that the early <i>Edinburgh</i> articles were very far
+from perfect. Of Jeffrey we shall speak presently, and there is no doubt
+that Sydney at his best was, and is always, delightful. But the
+blundering bluster of Brougham, the solemn ineffectiveness of Horner (of
+whom I can never think without also thinking of Scott's delightful
+Shandean jest on him), the respectable erudition of the Scotch<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">{108}</a></span>
+professors, cannot for one single moment be compared with the work
+which, in Jeffrey's own later days, in those of Macvey Napier, and in
+the earlier ones of Empson, was contributed by Hazlitt, by Carlyle, by
+Stephen, and, above all, by Macaulay. The <i>Review</i> never had any one who
+could emulate the ornateness of De Quincey or Wilson, the pure and
+perfect English of Southey, or the inimitable insolence, so polished and
+so intangible, of Lockhart. But it may at least claim that it led the
+way, and that the very men who attacked its principles and surpassed its
+practice had, in some cases, been actually trained in its school, and
+were in all, imitating and following its model. To analyse, with
+chemical exactness, the constituents of a literary novelty is never
+easy, if it is ever possible. But some of the contrasts between the
+style of criticism most prevalent at the time, and the style of the new
+venture are obvious and important. The older rivals of the <i>Edinburgh</i>
+maintained for the most part a decent and amiable impartiality; the
+<i>Edinburgh</i>, whatever it pretended to be, was violently partisan,
+unhesitatingly personal, and more inclined to find fault, the more
+distinguished the subject was. The reviews of the time had got into the
+hands either of gentlemen and ladies who were happy to be thought
+literary, and only too glad to write for nothing, or else into those of
+the lowest booksellers' hacks, who praised or blamed according to
+orders, wrote without interest and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">{109}</a></span> without vigour, and were quite
+content to earn the smallest pittance. The <i>Edinburgh</i> started from the
+first on the principle that its contributors should be paid, and paid
+well, whether they liked it or not, thus establishing at once an
+inducement to do well and a check on personal eccentricity and
+irresponsibility; while whatever partisanship there might be in its
+pages, there was at any rate no mere literary puffery.</p>
+
+<p>From being, but for his private studies, rather an idle person, Jeffrey
+became an extremely busy one. The <i>Review</i> gave him not a little
+occupation, and his practice increased rapidly. In 1803 the institution,
+at Scott's suggestion, of the famous Friday Club, in which, for the
+greater part of the first half of this century, the best men in
+Edinburgh, Johnstone and Maxwell, Whig and Tory alike, met in peaceable
+conviviality, did a good deal to console Jeffrey, who was now as much
+given to company as he had been in his early youth to solitude, for the
+partial breaking up of the circle of friends&mdash;Allen, Horner, Smith,
+Brougham, Lord Webb Seymour&mdash;in which he had previously mixed. In the
+same year he became a volunteer, an act of patriotism the more
+creditable, that he seems to have been sincerely convinced of the
+probability of an invasion, and of the certainty of its success if it
+occurred. But I have no room here for anything but a rapid review of the
+not very numerous or striking events of his life. Soon, however, after
+the date last mentioned, he met with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">{110}</a></span> two afflictions peculiarly trying
+to a man whose domestic affections were unusually strong. These were the
+deaths of his favourite sister in May 1804, and of his wife in October
+1805. The last blow drove him nearly to despair; and the extreme and
+open-mouthed "sensibility" of his private letters, on this and similar
+occasions, is very valuable as an index of character, oddly as it
+contrasts, in the vulgar estimate, with the supposed cynicism and
+savagery of the critic. In yet another year occurred the somewhat
+ludicrous duel, or beginning of a duel, with Moore, in which several
+police constables did perform the friendly office which Mr. Winkle
+vainly deprecated, and in which Jeffrey's, not Moore's, pistol was
+discovered to be leadless. There is a sentence in a letter of Jeffrey's
+concerning the thing which is characteristic and amusing: "I am glad to
+have gone through this scene, both because it satisfies me that my
+nerves are good enough to enable me to act in conformity to my notions
+of propriety without any suffering, and because it also assures me that
+I am really as little in love with life as I have been for some time in
+the habit of professing." It is needless to say that this was an example
+of the excellence of beginning with a little aversion, for Jeffrey and
+Moore fraternised immediately afterwards and remained friends for life.
+The quarrel, or half quarrel, with Scott as to the review of "Marmion,"
+the planning and producing of the <i>Quarterly Review, English Bards<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">{111}</a></span> and
+Scotch Reviewers</i>, not a few other events of the same kind, must be
+passed over rapidly. About six years after the death of his first wife,
+Jeffrey met, and fell in love with, a certain Miss Charlotte Wilkes,
+great-niece of the patriot, and niece of a New York banker, and of a
+Monsieur and Madame Simond, who were travelling in Europe. He married
+her two years later, having gone through the very respectable probation
+of crossing and re-crossing the Atlantic (he was a very bad sailor) in a
+sailing ship, in winter, and in time of war, to fetch his bride. Nor had
+he long been married before he took the celebrated country house of
+Craigcrook, where, for more than thirty years, he spent all the spare
+time of an exceedingly happy life. Then we may jump some fifteen years
+to the great Reform contest which gave Jeffrey the reward, such as it
+was, of his long constancy in opposition, in the shape of the Lord
+Advocateship. He was not always successful as a debater; but he had the
+opportunity of adding a third reputation to those which he had already
+gained in literature and in law. He had the historical duty of piloting
+the Scotch Reform Bill through Parliament, and he had the, in his case,
+pleasurable and honourable pain of taking the official steps in
+Parliament necessitated by the mental incapacity of Sir Walter Scott.
+Early in 1834 he was provided for by promotion to the Scotch Bench. He
+had five years before, on being appointed Dean of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">{112}</a></span> Faculty, given up the
+editorship of the <i>Review</i>, which he had held for seven-and-twenty
+years. For some time previous to his resignation, his own contributions,
+which in early days had run up to half a dozen in a single number, and
+had averaged two or three for more than twenty years, had become more
+and more intermittent. After that resignation he contributed two or
+three articles at very long intervals. He was perhaps more lavish of
+advice than he need have been to Macvey Napier, and after Napier's death
+it passed into the control of his own son-in-law, Empson. Long, however,
+before the reins passed from his own hands, a rival more galling if less
+formidable than the <i>Quarterly</i> had arisen in the shape of <i>Blackwood's
+Magazine</i>. The more ponderous and stately publication always affected,
+to some extent, to ignore its audacious junior; and Lord Cockburn
+(perhaps instigated not more by prudence than by regard for Lockhart and
+Wilson, both of whom were living) passes over in complete silence the
+establishment of the magazine, the publication of the Chaldee
+manuscript, and the still greater hubbub which arose around the supposed
+attacks of Lockhart on Playfair, and the <i>Edinburgh</i> reviewers
+generally, with regard to their religious opinions. How deep the
+feelings really excited were, may be seen from a letter of Jeffrey's,
+published, not by Cockburn, but by Wilson's daughter in the life of her
+father. In this Jeffrey practically<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">{113}</a></span> drums out a new and certainly most
+promising recruit for his supposed share in the business, and inveighs
+in the most passionate terms against the imputation. It is undesirable
+to enter at length into any such matters here. It need only be said that
+Allen, one of the founders of the <i>Edinburgh</i>, and always a kind of
+standing counsel to it, is now acknowledged to have been something
+uncommonly like an atheist, that Sydney Smith (as I believe most
+unjustly) was often, and is sometimes still, regarded as standing
+towards his profession very much in the attitude of a French <i>abbé</i> of
+the eighteenth century, that almost the whole staff of the <i>Review</i>,
+including Jeffrey, had, as every Edinburgh man of position knew,
+belonged to the so-called Academy of Physics, the first principle of
+which was that only three facts (the words are Lord Cockburn's) were to
+be admitted without proof: (1) Mind exists; (2) matter exists; (3) every
+change indicates a cause. Nowadays the most orthodox of metaphysicians
+would admit that this limitation of position by no means implied
+atheism. But seventy years ago it would have been the exception to find
+an orthodox metaphysician who did admit it; and Lockhart, or rather
+Baron von Lauerwinkel, was perfectly justified in taking the view which
+ordinary opinion took.</p>
+
+<p>These jars, however, were long over when Jeffrey became Lord Jeffrey,
+and subsided upon the placid bench. He lived sixteen years longer,
+alternating<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">{114}</a></span> between Edinburgh, Craigcrook, and divers houses which he
+hired from time to time, on Loch Lomond, on the Clyde, and latterly at
+some English watering-places in the west. His health was not
+particularly good, though hardly worse than any man who lives to nearly
+eighty, with constant sedentary and few out-of-door occupations, and
+with a cheerful devotion to the good things of this life, must expect.
+And he was on the whole singularly happy, being passionately devoted to
+his wife, his daughter, and his grandchildren; possessing ample means,
+and making a cheerful and sensible use of them; seeing the increasing
+triumph of the political principles to which he had attached himself;
+knowing that he was regarded by friends and foes alike, as the chief
+living English representative of an important branch of literature; and
+retaining to the last an almost unparalleled juvenility of tastes and
+interests. His letters to Dickens are well known, and, though I should
+be very sorry to stake his critical reputation upon them, there could
+not be better documents for his vivid enjoyment of life. He died on 26th
+January 1850, in his seventy-seventh year, having been in harness almost
+to the very last. He had written a letter the day before to Empson,
+describing one of those curious waking visions known to all sick folk,
+in which there had appeared part of a proof-sheet of a new edition of
+the Apocrypha, and a new political paper filled with discussions on Free
+Trade.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">{115}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In reading Jeffrey's work<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> nowadays, the critical reader finds it
+considerably more difficult to gain and keep the author's own point of
+view than in the case of any other great English critic. With Hazlitt,
+with Coleridge, with Wilson, with Carlyle, with Macaulay, we very soon
+fall into step, so to speak, with our author. If we cannot exactly
+prophesy what he will say on any given subject, we can make a pretty
+shrewd guess at it; and when, as it seems to us, he stumbles and shies,
+we have a sort of feeling beforehand that he is going to do it, and a
+decided inkling of the reason. But my own experience is, that a modern
+reader of Jeffrey, who takes him systematically, and endeavours to trace
+cause and effect in him, is liable to be constantly thrown out before he
+finds the secret. For Jeffrey, in the most puzzling way, lies between
+the ancients and the moderns in matter of criticism, and we never quite
+know where to have him. It is ten to one, for instance, that the novice
+approaches him with the idea that he is a "classic" of the old rock.
+Imagine the said novice's confusion, when he finds Jeffrey not merely
+exalting Shakespeare to the skies, but warmly praising Elizabethan
+poetry in general, anticipating<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">{116}</a></span> Mr. Matthew Arnold almost literally, in
+the estimate of Dryden and Pope as classics of our prose, and hailing
+with tears of joy the herald of the emancipation in Cowper. Surely our
+novice may be excused if, despite certain misgiving memories of such
+reviews as that of "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," he concludes that
+Jeffrey has been maligned, and that he was really a Romantic before
+Romanticism. Unhappy novice! he will find his new conclusion not less
+rapidly and more completely staggered than his old. Indeed, until the
+clue is once gained, Jeffrey must appear to be one of the most
+incomprehensibly inconsistent of writers and of critics. On one page he
+declares that Campbell's extracts from Chamberlayne's "Pharonnida" have
+made him "quite impatient for an opportunity of perusing the whole
+poem,"&mdash;Romantic surely, quite Romantic. "The tameness and poorness of
+the serious style of Addison and Swift,"&mdash;Romantic again, quite
+Romantic. Yet when we come to Jeffrey's own contemporaries, he
+constantly appears as much bewigged and befogged with pseudo-classicism
+as M. de Jouy himself. He commits himself, in the year of grace 1829, to
+the statement that "the rich melodies of Keats and Shelley, and the
+fantastical emphasis of Wordsworth are melting fast from the field of
+our vision," while he contrasts with this "rapid withering of the
+laurel" the "comparative absence of marks of decay" on Rogers and
+Campbell. The poets of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">{117}</a></span> his own time whom he praises most heartily, and
+with least reserve, are Campbell and Crabbe; and he is quite as
+enthusiastic over "Theodric" and "Gertrude" as over the two great
+war-pieces of the same author, which are worth a hundred "Gertrudes" and
+about ten thousand "Theodrics." Reviewing Scott, not merely when they
+were personal friends (they were always that), but when Scott was a
+contributor to the <i>Edinburgh</i>, and giving general praise to "The Lay,"
+he glances with an unmistakable meaning at the "dignity of the subject,"
+regrets the "imitation and antiquarian researches," and criticises the
+versification in a way which shows that he had not in the least grasped
+its scheme. It is hardly necessary to quote his well-known attacks on
+Wordsworth; but, though I am myself anything but a Wordsworthian, and
+would willingly give up to chaos and old night nineteen-twentieths of
+the "extremely valooable chains of thought" which the good man used to
+forge, it is in the first place quite clear that the twentieth ought to
+have saved him from Jeffrey's claws; in the second, that the critic
+constantly selects the wrong things as well as the right for
+condemnation and ridicule; and in the third, that he would have praised,
+or at any rate not blamed, in another, the very things which he blames
+in Wordsworth. Even his praise of Crabbe, excessive as it may now
+appear, is diversified by curious patches of blame which seem to me at
+any rate,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">{118}</a></span> singularly uncritical. There are, for instance, a very great
+many worse jests in poetry than,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh, had he learnt to make the wig he wears!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;which Jeffrey pronounces a misplaced piece of buffoonery. I cannot
+help thinking that if Campbell instead of Southey had written the lines,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">To see brute nature scorn him and renounce<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Its homage to the human form divine,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Jeffrey would, to say the least, not have hinted that they were "little
+better than drivelling." But I do not think that when Jeffrey wrote
+these things, or when he actually perpetrated such almost unforgivable
+phrases as "stuff about dancing daffodils," he was speaking away from
+his sincere conviction. On the contrary, though partisanship may
+frequently have determined the suppression or the utterance, the
+emphasising or the softening, of his opinions, I do not think that he
+ever said anything but what he sincerely thought. The problem,
+therefore, is to discover and define, if possible, the critical
+standpoint of a man whose judgment was at once so acute and so purblind;
+who could write the admirable surveys of English poetry contained in the
+essays on Mme. de Staël and Campbell, and yet be guilty of the stuff (we
+thank him for the word) about the dancing daffodils; who could talk of
+"the splendid strains of Moore" (though I have myself a relatively high
+opinion of Moore) and pronounce "The White Doe of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">{119}</a></span> Rylstone" (though I
+am not very fond of that animal as a whole) "the very worst poem he ever
+saw printed in a quarto volume"; who could really appreciate parts even
+of Wordsworth himself, and yet sneer at the very finest passages of the
+poems he partly admired. It is unnecessary to multiply inconsistencies,
+because the reader who does not want the trouble of reading Jeffrey must
+be content to take them for granted, and the reader who does read
+Jeffrey will discover them in plenty for himself. But they are not
+limited, it should be said, to purely literary criticism; and they
+appear, if not quite so strongly, in his estimates of personal
+character, and even in his purely political arguments.</p>
+
+<p>The explanation, as far as there is any, (and perhaps such explanations,
+as Hume says of another matter, only push ignorance a stage farther
+back), seems to me to lie in what I can only call the Gallicanism of
+Jeffrey's mind and character. As Horace Walpole has been pronounced the
+most French of Englishmen, so may Francis Jeffrey be pronounced the most
+French of Scotchmen. The reader of his letters, no less than the reader
+of his essays, constantly comes across the most curious and multiform
+instances of this Frenchness. The early priggishness is French; the
+effusive domestic affection is French; the antipathy to dogmatic
+theology, combined with general recognition of the Supreme Being, is
+French; the talk (I had almost said the chatter) about virtue and
+sympathy,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">{120}</a></span> and so forth, is French; the Whig recognition of the rights
+of man, joined to a kind of bureaucratical distrust and terror of the
+common people (a combination almost unknown in England), is French.
+Everybody remembers the ingenious argument in <i>Peter Simple</i> that the
+French were quite as brave as the English, indeed more so, but that they
+were extraordinarily ticklish. Jeffrey, we have seen, was very far from
+being a coward, but he was very ticklish indeed. His private letters
+throw the most curious light possible on the secret, as far as he was
+concerned, of the earlier Whig opposition to the war, and of the later
+Whig advocacy of reform. Jeffrey by no means thought the cause of the
+Revolution divine, like the Friends of Liberty, or admired Napoleon like
+Hazlitt, or believed in the inherent right of Manchester and Birmingham
+to representation like the zealots of 1830. But he was always dreadfully
+afraid of invasion in the first place, and of popular insurrection in
+the second; and he wanted peace and reform to calm his fears. As a young
+man he was, with a lack of confidence in his countrymen probably
+unparalleled in a Scotchman, sure that a French corporal's guard might
+march from end to end of Scotland, and a French privateer's boat's crew
+carry off "the fattest cattle and the fairest women" (these are his very
+words) "of any Scotch seaboard county." The famous, or infamous,
+Cevallos article&mdash;an ungenerous and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">{121}</a></span> pusillanimous attack on the Spanish
+patriots, which practically founded the <i>Quarterly Review</i>, by finally
+disgusting all Tories and many Whigs with the <i>Edinburgh</i>&mdash;was, it
+seems, prompted merely by the conviction that the Spanish cause was
+hopeless, and that maintaining it, or assisting it, must lead to mere
+useless bloodshed. He felt profoundly the crime of Napoleon's rule; but
+he thought Napoleon unconquerable, and so did his best to prevent him
+being conquered. He was sure that the multitude would revolt if reform
+was not granted; and he was, therefore, eager for reform. Later, he got
+into his head the oddest crotchet of all his life, which was that a
+Conservative government, with a sort of approval from the people
+generally, and especially from the English peasantry, would scheme for a
+<i>coup d'état</i>, and (his own words again) "make mincemeat of their
+opponents in a single year." He may be said almost to have left the
+world in a state of despair over the probable results of the Revolutions
+of 1848-49; and it is impossible to guess what would have happened to
+him if he had survived to witness the Second of December. Never was
+there such a case, at least among Englishmen, of timorous pugnacity and
+plucky pessimism. But it would be by no means difficult to parallel the
+temperament in France; and, indeed, the comparative frequency of it
+there, may be thought to be no small cause of the political and military
+disasters of the country.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">{122}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In literature, and especially in criticism, Jeffrey's characteristics
+were still more decidedly and unquestionably French. He came into the
+world almost too soon to feel the German impulse, even if he had been
+disposed to feel it. But, as a matter of fact, he was not at all
+disposed. The faults of taste of the German Romantic School, its
+alternate homeliness and extravagance, its abuse of the supernatural,
+its undoubted offences against order and proportion, scandalised him
+only a little less than they would have scandalised Voltaire and did
+scandalise the later Voltairians. Jeffrey was perfectly prepared to be
+Romantic up to a certain point,&mdash;the point which he had himself reached
+in his early course of independent reading and criticism. He was even a
+little inclined to sympathise with the reverend Mr. Bowles on the great
+question whether Pope was a poet; and, as I have said, he uses, about
+the older English literature, phrases which might almost satisfy a
+fanatic of the school of Hazlitt or of Lamb. He is, if anything, rather
+too severe on French as compared with English drama. Yet, when he comes
+to his own contemporaries, and sometimes even in reference to earlier
+writers, we find him slipping into those purely arbitrary severities of
+condemnation, those capricious stigmatisings of this as improper, and
+that as vulgar, and the other as unbecoming, which are the
+characteristics of the pseudo-correct and pseudo-classical school of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">{123}</a></span>
+criticism. He was a great admirer of Cowper, and yet he is shocked by
+Cowper's use, in his translation of Homer, of the phrases, "to entreat
+Achilles to a calm" (evidently he had forgotten Shakespeare's "pursue
+him and entreat him to a peace"), "this wrangler here," "like a fellow
+of no worth." He was certainly not likely to be unjust to Charles James
+Fox. So he is unhappy, rather than contemptuous, over such excellent
+phrases as "swearing away the lives," "crying injustice," "fond of
+ill-treating." These appear to Mr. Aristarchus Jeffrey too "homely and
+familiar," too "low and vapid"; while a harmless and rather agreeable
+Shakespearian parallel of Fox's seems to him downright impropriety. The
+fun of the thing is that the passage turns on the well-known misuse of
+"flat burglary"; and if Jeffrey had had a little more sense of humour
+(his deficiency in which, for all his keen wit, is another Gallic note
+in him), he must have seen that the words were ludicrously applicable to
+his own condemnation and his own frame of mind. These settings-up of a
+wholly arbitrary canon of mere taste, these excommunicatings of such and
+such a thing as "low" and "improper," without assigned or assignable
+reason, are eminently Gallic. They may be found not merely in the older
+school before 1830, but in almost all French critics up to the present
+day: there is perhaps not one, with the single exception of
+Sainte-Beuve, who is habitually free from them. The critic may be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">{124}</a></span> quite
+unable to say why <i>tarte à la crême</i> is such a shocking expression, or
+even to produce any important authority for the shockingness of it. But
+he is quite certain that it is shocking. Jeffrey is but too much given
+to protesting against <i>tarte à la crême</i>; and the reasons for his error
+are almost exactly the same as in the case of the usual Frenchman; that
+is to say, a very just and wholesome preference for order, proportion,
+literary orthodoxy, freedom from will-worship and eccentric divagations,
+unfortunately distorted by a certain absence of catholicity, by a
+tendency to regard novelty as bad, merely because it is novelty, and by
+a curious reluctance, as Lamb has it of another great man of the same
+generation, to go shares with any newcomer in literary commerce.</p>
+
+<p>But when these reservations have been made, when his standpoint has been
+clearly discovered and marked out, and when some little tricks, such as
+the affectation of delivering judgments without appeal, which is still
+kept up by a few, though very few, reviewers, have been further allowed
+for, Jeffrey is a most admirable essayist and critic. As an essayist, a
+writer of <i>causeries</i>, I do not think he has been surpassed among
+Englishmen in the art of interweaving quotation, abstract, and comment.
+The best proof of his felicity in this respect is that in almost all the
+books which he has reviewed, (and he has reviewed many of the most
+interesting books in literature) the passages<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">{125}</a></span> and traits, the anecdotes
+and phrases, which have made most mark in the general memory, and which
+are often remembered with very indistinct consciousness of their origin,
+are to be found in his reviews. Sometimes the very perfection of his
+skill in this respect makes it rather difficult to know where he is
+abstracting or paraphrasing, and where he is speaking outright and for
+himself; but that is a very small fault. Yet his merits as an essayist,
+though considerable, are not to be compared, even to the extent to which
+Hazlitt's are to be compared, with his merits as a critic, and
+especially as a literary critic. It would be interesting to criticise
+his political criticism; but it is always best to keep politics out
+where it can be managed. Besides, Jeffrey as a political critic is a
+subject of almost exclusively historical interest, while as a literary
+critic he is important at this very day, and perhaps more important than
+he was in his own. For the spirit of merely æsthetic criticism, which
+was in his day only in its infancy, has long been full grown and
+rampant; so that, good work as it has done in its time, it decidedly
+needs chastening by an admixture of the dogmatic criticism, which at
+least tries to keep its impressions together and in order, and to
+connect them into some coherent doctrine and creed.</p>
+
+<p>Of this dogmatic criticism Jeffrey, with all his shortcomings, is
+perhaps the very best example that we have in English. He had addressed
+himself more directly and theoretically to literary<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">{126}</a></span> criticism than
+Lockhart. Prejudiced as he often was, he was not affected by the wild
+gusts of personal and political passion which frequently blew Hazlitt a
+thousand miles off the course of true criticism. He keeps his eye on the
+object, which De Quincey seldom does. He is not affected by that desire
+to preach on certain pet subjects which affects the admirable critical
+faculty of Carlyle. He never blusters and splashes at random like
+Wilson. And he never indulges in the mannered and rather superfluous
+graces which marred, to some tastes, the work of his successor in
+critical authority, if there has been any such, the author of <i>Essays in
+Criticism</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Let us, as we just now looked through Jeffrey's work to pick out the
+less favourable characteristics which distinguish his position, look
+through it again to see those qualities which he shares, but in greater
+measure than most, with all good critics. The literary essay which
+stands first in his collected works is on Madame de Staël. Now that good
+lady, of whom some judges in these days do not think very much, was a
+kind of goddess on earth in literature, however much she might bore them
+in life, to the English Whig party in general; while Jeffrey's French
+tastes must have made her, or at least her books, specially attractive
+to him. Accordingly he has written a great deal about her, no less than
+three essays appearing in the collected works. Writing at least partly
+in her lifetime and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">{127}</a></span> under the influences just glanced at, he is of
+course profuse in compliments. But it is very amusing and highly
+instructive to observe how, in the intervals of these compliments, he
+contrives to take the good Corinne to pieces, to smash up her ingenious
+Perfectibilism, and to put in order her rather rash literary judgments.
+It is in connection also with her, that he gives one of the best of not
+a few general sketches of the history of literature which his work
+contains. Of course there are here, as always, isolated expressions as
+to which, however much we admit that Jeffrey was a clever man, we cannot
+agree with Jeffrey. He thinks Aristophanes "coarse" and "vulgar" just as
+a living pundit thinks him "base," while (though nobody of course can
+deny the coarseness) Aristophanes and vulgarity are certainly many miles
+asunder. We may protest against the chronological, even more than
+against the critical, blunder which couples Cowley and Donne, putting
+Donne, moreover, who wrote long before Cowley was born, and differs from
+him in genius almost as the author of the <i>Iliad</i> does from the author
+of the <i>Henriade</i>, second. But hardly anything in English criticism is
+better than Jeffrey's discussion of the general French imputation of
+"want of taste and politeness" to English and German writers, especially
+English. It is a very general, and a very mistaken notion that the
+Romantic movement in France has done away with this imputation to a
+great extent. On the contrary,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">{128}</a></span> though it has long been a kind of
+fashion in France to admire Shakespeare, and though since the labours of
+MM. Taine and Montégut, the study of English literature generally has
+grown and flourished, it is, I believe, the very rarest thing to find a
+Frenchman who, in his heart of hearts, does not cling to the old "pearls
+in the dung-heap" idea, not merely in reference to Shakespeare, but to
+English writers, and especially English humorists, generally. Nothing
+can be more admirable than Jeffrey's comments on this matter. They are
+especially admirable because they are not made from the point of view of
+a <i>Romantique à tous crins</i>; because, as has been already pointed out,
+he himself is largely penetrated by the very preference for order and
+proportion which is at the bottom of the French mistake; and because he
+is, therefore, arguing in a tongue understanded of those whom he
+censures. Another essay which may be read with especial advantage is
+that on Scott's edition of Swift. Here, again, there was a kind of test
+subject, and perhaps Jeffrey does not come quite scatheless out of the
+trial: to me, at any rate, his account of Swift's political and moral
+conduct and character seems both uncritical and unfair. But here, too,
+the value of his literary criticism shows itself. He might very easily
+have been tempted to extend his injustice from the writer to the
+writings, especially since, as has been elsewhere shown, he was by no
+means a fanatical<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">{129}</a></span> admirer of the Augustan age, and thought the serious
+style of Addison and Swift tame and poor. It is possible of course, here
+also, to find things that seem to be errors, both in the general sketch
+which Jeffrey, according to his custom, prefixes, and in the particular
+remarks on Swift himself. For instance, to deny fancy to the author of
+the <i>Tale of a Tub</i>, of <i>Gulliver</i>, and of the <i>Polite Conversation</i>, is
+very odd indeed. But there are few instances of a greater triumph of
+sound literary judgment over political and personal prejudice than
+Jeffrey's description, not merely of the great works just mentioned (it
+is curious, and illustrates his defective appreciation of humour, that
+he likes the greatest least, and is positively unjust to the <i>Tale of a
+Tub</i>), but also of those wonderful pamphlets, articles, lampoons, skits
+(libels if any one likes), which proved too strong for the generalship
+of Marlborough and the administrative talents of Godolphin; and which
+are perhaps the only literary works that ever really changed, for a not
+inconsiderable period, the government of England. "Considered," he says,
+"with a view to the purposes for which they were intended, they have
+probably never been equalled in any period of the world." They certainly
+have not; but to find a Whig, and a Whig writing in the very moment of
+Tory triumph after Waterloo, ready to admit the fact, is not a trivial
+thing. Another excellent example of Jeffrey's strength, by no means<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">{130}</a></span>
+unmixed with examples of his weakness, is to be found in his essays on
+Cowper. I have already given some of the weakness: the strength is to be
+found in his general description of Cowper's revolt, thought so daring
+at the time, now so apparently moderate, against poetic diction. These
+instances are to be found under miscellaneous sections, biographical,
+historical, and so forth; but the reader will naturally turn to the
+considerable divisions headed Poetry and Fiction. Here are the chief
+rocks of offence already indicated, and here also are many excellent
+things which deserve reading. Here is the remarkable essay, quoted
+above, on Campbell's <i>Specimens</i>. Here is the criticism of Weber's
+edition of Ford, and another of those critical surveys of the course of
+English literature which Jeffrey was so fond of doing, and which he did
+so well, together with some remarks on the magnificently spendthrift
+style of our Elizabethan dramatists which would deserve almost the first
+place in an anthology of his critical beauties. The paper on Hazlitt's
+<i>Characters of Shakespeare</i> (Hazlitt was an <i>Edinburgh</i> reviewer, and
+his biographer, not Jeffrey's, has chronicled a remarkable piece of
+generosity on Jeffrey's part towards his wayward contributor) is a
+little defaced by a patronising spirit, not, indeed, of that memorably
+mistaken kind which induced the famous and unlucky sentence to Macvey
+Napier about Carlyle, but something in the spirit of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">{131}</a></span> schoolmaster
+who observes, "See this clever boy of mine, and only think how much
+better I could do it myself." Yet it contains some admirable passages on
+Shakespeare, if not on Hazlitt; and it would be impossible to deny that
+its hinted condemnation of Hazlitt's "desultory and capricious
+acuteness" is just enough. On the other hand, how significant is it of
+Jeffrey's own limitations that he should protest against Hazlitt's
+sympathy with such "conceits and puerilities" as the immortal and
+unmatchable</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Take him and cut him out in little stars,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>with the rest of the passage. But there you have the French spirit. I do
+not believe that there ever was a Frenchman since the seventeenth
+century (unless perchance it was Gérard de Nerval, and he was not quite
+sane), who could put his hand on his heart and deny that the little
+stars seemed to him puerile and conceited.</p>
+
+<p>Jeffrey's dealings with Byron (I do not now speak of the article on
+<i>Hours of Idleness</i>, which was simply a just rebuke of really puerile
+and conceited rubbish) are not, to me, very satisfactory. The critic
+seems, in the rather numerous articles which he has devoted to the
+"noble Poet," as they used to call him, to have felt his genius unduly
+rebuked by that of his subject. He spends a great deal, and surely an
+unnecessarily great deal, of time in solemnly, and no doubt quite
+sincerely,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">{132}</a></span> rebuking Byron's morality; and in doing so he is sometimes
+almost absurd. He calls him "not more obscene perhaps than Dryden or
+Prior," which is simply ludicrous, because it is very rare that this
+particular word can be applied to Byron at all, while even his
+staunchest champion must admit that it applies to glorious John and to
+dear Mat Prior. He helps, unconsciously no doubt, to spread the very
+contagion which he denounces, by talking about Byron's demoniacal power,
+going so far as actually to contrast <i>Manfred</i> with Marlowe to the
+advantage of the former. And he is so completely overcome by what he
+calls the "dreadful tone of sincerity" of this "puissant spirit," that
+he never seems to have had leisure or courage to apply the critical
+tests and solvents of which few men have had a greater command. Had he
+done so, it is impossible not to believe that, whether he did or did not
+pronounce Byron's sentiment to be as theatrical, as vulgar, and as false
+as it seems to some later critics, he would at any rate have substituted
+for his edifying but rather irrelevant moral denunciations some exposure
+of those gross faults in style and metre, in phrase and form, which now
+disgust us.</p>
+
+<p>There are many essays remaining on which I should like to comment if
+there were room enough. But I have only space for a few more general
+remarks on his general characteristics, and especially those which, as
+Sainte-Beuve said to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">{133}</a></span> altered Jeffrey of our altered days, are
+"important to us." Let me repeat then that the peculiar value of Jeffrey
+is not, as is that of Coleridge, of Hazlitt, or of Lamb, in very subtle,
+very profound, or very original views of his subjects. He is neither a
+critical Columbus nor a critical Socrates; he neither opens up
+undiscovered countries, nor provokes and stimulates to the discovery of
+them. His strength lies in the combination of a fairly wide range of
+sympathy with an extraordinary shrewdness and good sense in applying
+that sympathy. Tested for range alone, or for subtlety alone, he will
+frequently be found wanting; but he almost invariably catches up those
+who have thus outstripped him, when the subject of the trial is shifted
+to soundness of estimate, intelligent connection of view, and absence of
+eccentricity. And it must be again and again repeated that Jeffrey is by
+no means justly chargeable with the Dryasdust failings so often
+attributed to academic criticism. They said that on the actual Bench he
+worried counsel a little too much, but that his decisions were almost
+invariably sound. Not quite so much perhaps can be said for his other
+exercise of the judicial function. But however much he may sometimes
+seem to carp and complain, however much we may sometimes wish for a
+little more equity and a little less law, it is astonishing how weighty
+Jeffrey's critical judgments are after three quarters of a century which
+has seen so many<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">{134}</a></span> seeming heavy things grow light. There may be much
+that he does not see; there may be some things which he is physically
+unable to see; but what he does see, he sees with a clearness, and
+co-ordinates in its bearings on other things seen with a precision,
+which are hardly to be matched among the fluctuating and diverse race of
+critics.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">{135}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V<br />
+<br />
+HAZLITT</h2>
+
+
+<p>The following paper was in great part composed, when I came across some
+sentences on Hazlitt, written indeed before I was born, but practically
+unpublished until the other day. In a review of the late Mr. Horne's
+<i>New Spirit of the Age</i>, contributed to the <i>Morning Chronicle</i> in 1845
+and but recently included in his collected works, Thackeray writes thus
+of the author of the book whose title Horne had rather rashly borrowed:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The author of the <i>Spirit of the Age</i> was one of the keenest and
+brightest critics that ever lived. With partialities and
+prejudices innumerable, he had a wit so keen, a sensibility so
+exquisite, an appreciation of humour, or pathos, or even of the
+greatest art, so lively, quick, and cultivated, that it was
+always good to know what were the impressions made by books or
+men or pictures on such a mind; and that, as there were not
+probably a dozen men in England with powers so varied, all the
+rest of the world might be rejoiced to listen to the opinions of
+this accomplished critic. He was of so different a caste to the
+people who gave authority in his day&mdash;the pompous big-wigs and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">{136}</a></span>
+schoolmen, who never could pardon him his familiarity of manner
+so unlike their own&mdash;his popular&mdash;too popular habits&mdash;and
+sympathies so much beneath their dignity; his loose, disorderly
+education gathered round those bookstalls or picture galleries
+where he laboured a penniless student, in lonely journeys over
+Europe tramped on foot (and not made, after the fashion of the
+regular critics of the day, by the side of a young nobleman in a
+postchaise), in every school of knowledge from St. Peter's at
+Rome to St. Giles's in London. In all his modes of life and
+thought, he was so different from the established authorities,
+with their degrees and white neck-cloths, that they hooted the
+man down with all the power of their lungs, and disdained to hear
+truth that came from such a ragged philosopher.</p></div>
+
+<p>Some exceptions, no doubt, must be taken to this enthusiastic, and in
+the main just, verdict. Hazlitt himself denied himself wit, yet if this
+was mock humility, I am inclined to think that he spoke truth
+unwittingly. His appreciation of humour was fitful and anything but
+impartial, while, biographically speaking, the hardships of his
+apprenticeship are very considerably exaggerated. It was not, for
+instance, in a penniless or pedestrian manner that he visited St.
+Peter's at Rome; but journeying with comforts of wine, <i>vetturini</i>, and
+partridges, which his second wife's income paid for. But this does not
+matter much, and, on the whole, the estimate is as just as it is
+generous. Perhaps something of its inspiration may be set down to
+fellow-feeling, both in politics and in the unsuccessful cultivation of
+the arts of design. But as high an estimate of Hazlitt is quite
+compatible<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">{137}</a></span> with the strongest political dissent from his opinions, and
+with a total freedom from the charge of wearing the willow for painting.</p>
+
+<p>There is indeed no doubt that Hazlitt is one of the most absolutely
+unequal writers in English, if not in any, literature, Wilson being
+perhaps his only compeer. The term absolute is used with intention and
+precision. There may be others who, in different parts of their work,
+are more unequal than he is; but with him the inequality is pervading,
+and shows itself in his finest passages, in those where he is most at
+home, as much as in his hastiest and most uncongenial taskwork. It could
+not, indeed, be otherwise, because the inequality itself is due less to
+an intellectual than to a moral defect. The clear sunshine of Hazlitt's
+admirably acute intellect is always there; but it is constantly obscured
+by driving clouds of furious prejudice. Even as the clouds pass, the
+light may still be seen on distant and scattered parts of the landscape;
+but wherever their influence extends, there is nothing but thick
+darkness, gusty wind and drenching rain. And the two phenomena, the
+abiding intellectual light, and the fits and squalls of moral darkness,
+appear to be totally independent of each other, or of any single will or
+cause of any kind. It would be perfectly easy, and may perhaps be in
+place later, to give a brief collection of some of the most absurd and
+outrageous sayings that any writer, not a mere fool,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">{138}</a></span> can be charged
+with: of sentences not representing quips and cranks of humour, or
+judgments temporary and one-sided, though having a certain relative
+validity, but containing blunders and calumnies so gross and palpable,
+that the man who set them down might seem to have forfeited all claim to
+the reputation either of an intelligent or a responsible being. And yet,
+side by side with these, are other passages (and fortunately a much
+greater number) which justify, and more than justify, Hazlitt's claims
+to be as Thackeray says, "one of the keenest and brightest critics that
+ever lived"; as Lamb had said earlier, "one of the wisest and finest
+spirits breathing."</p>
+
+<p>The only exception to be taken to the well-known panegyric of Elia is,
+that it bestows this eulogy on Hazlitt "in his natural and healthy
+state." Unluckily, it would seem, by a concurrence of all testimony,
+even the most partial, that the unhealthy state was quite as natural as
+the healthy one. Lamb himself plaintively wishes that "he would not
+quarrel with the world at the rate he does"; and De Quincey, in his
+short, but very interesting, biographical notice of Hazlitt (a notice
+entirely free from the malignity with which De Quincey has been
+sometimes charged), declares with quite as much truth as point, that
+Hazlitt's guiding principle was, "Whatever is, is wrong." He was the
+very ideal of a literary Ishmael; and after the fullest admission of the
+almost incredible virulence and unfairness of his foes, it has to be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">{139}</a></span>
+admitted, likewise, that he was quite as ready to quarrel with his
+friends. He succeeded, at least once, in forcing a quarrel even upon
+Lamb. His relations with Leigh Hunt (who, whatever his faults were, was
+not unamiable) were constantly strained, and at least once actually
+broken by his infernal temper. Nor were his relations with women more
+fortunate or more creditable than those with men. That the fault was
+entirely on his side in the rupture with his first wife is, no doubt,
+not the case; for Mrs. Hazlitt's, or Miss Stoddart's, own friends admit
+that she was of a peculiar and rather trying disposition. It is indeed
+evident that she was the sort of person (most teasing of all others to a
+man of Hazlitt's temperament) who would put her head back as he was
+kissing her, to ask if he would like another cup of tea, or interrupt a
+declaration to suggest shutting the window. As for the famous and almost
+legendary episode of Sarah Walker, the lodging-house keeper's daughter,
+and the <i>Liber Amoris</i>, the obvious and irresistible attack of something
+like erotic madness which it implies absolves Hazlitt partly&mdash;but only
+partly, for there is a kind of shabbiness about the affair which shuts
+it out from all reasonable claim to be regarded as a new act of the
+endless drama of <i>All for Love, or The World Well Lost!</i> Of his second
+marriage, the only persons who might be expected to give us some
+information either can or will say next to nothing. But when a man with
+such antecedents marries a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">{140}</a></span> woman of whom no one has anything bad to
+say, lives with her for a year, chiefly on her money, and is then
+quitted by her with the information that she will have nothing more to
+do with him, it is not, I think, uncharitable to conjecture that most of
+the fault is his.</p>
+
+<p>It is not, however, only of Hazlitt's rather imperfectly known life, or
+of his pretty generally acknowledged character, that I wish to speak
+here. His strange mixture of manly common-sense and childish prejudice,
+the dislike of foreigners which accompanied his Liberalism and his
+Bonapartism, and other traits, are very much more English than Irish.
+But Irish, at least on the father's side, his family was, and had been
+for generations. He was himself the son of a Unitarian minister, was
+born at Maidstone in 1778, accompanied his parents as a very little boy
+to America, but passed the greater part of his youth at Wem in
+Shropshire, where the interview with Coleridge, which decided his fate,
+took place. Yet for some time after that, he was mainly occupied with
+studies, not of literature, but of art. He had been intended for his
+father's profession, but had early taken a disgust to it. At such
+schools as he had been able to frequent, he had gained the character of
+a boy rather insusceptible of ordinary teaching; and his letters (they
+are rare throughout his life) show him to us as something very like a
+juvenile prig. According to his own account, he "thought for at least
+eight years" without being able to pen a line,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">{141}</a></span> or at least a page; and
+the worst accusation that can truly be brought against him is that, by
+his own confession, he left off reading when he began to write. Those
+who (for their sins or for their good) are condemned to a life of
+writing for the press know that such an abstinence as this is almost
+fatal. Perhaps no man ever did good work in periodical writing, unless
+he had previously had a more or less prolonged period of reading, with
+no view to writing. Certainly no one ever did other than very faulty
+work if, not having such a store to draw on, when he began writing he
+left off reading.</p>
+
+<p>The first really important event in Hazlitt's life, except the visit
+from Coleridge in 1798, was his own visit to Paris after the Peace of
+Amiens in 1802&mdash;a visit authorised and defrayed by certain commissions
+to copy pictures at the Louvre, which was then, in consequence of French
+conquests, the picture-gallery of Europe. The chief of these
+commissioners was a Mr. Railton, a person of some fortune at Liverpool,
+and the father of a daughter who, if she was anything like her portrait,
+had one of the most beautiful faces of modern times. Miss Railton was
+one of Hazlitt's many loves: it was, perhaps, fortunate for her that the
+course of the love did not run smooth. Almost immediately on his return,
+he made acquaintance with the Lambs, and, as Mr. W. C. Hazlitt, his
+grandson and biographer, thinks, with Miss Stoddart, his future wife.
+Miss Stoddart, there is no doubt,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">{142}</a></span> was an elderly coquette, though
+perfectly "proper." Besides the "William" of her early correspondence
+with Mary Lamb, we hear of three or four other lovers of hers between
+1803 and 1808, when she married Hazlitt. It so happens that one, and
+only one, letter of his to her has been preserved. His biographer seems
+to think it in another sense unique; but it is, in effect, a very
+typical letter from a literary lover of a rather passionate temperament.
+The two were married, in defiance of superstition, on Sunday, the first
+of May; and certainly the superstition had not the worst of it.</p>
+
+<p>At first, however, no evil results seemed likely. Miss Stoddart had a
+certain property settled on her at Winterslow, on the south-eastern
+border of Salisbury Plain, and for nearly four years the couple seem to
+have dwelt there (once, at least, entertaining the Lambs), and producing
+children, of whom only one lived. It was not till 1812 that they removed
+to London, and that Hazlitt engaged in writing for the newspapers. From
+this time till the end of his life, some eighteen years, he was never at
+a loss for employment&mdash;a succession of daily and weekly papers, with
+occasional employment on the <i>Edinburgh Review</i>, providing him, it would
+seem, with sufficiently abundant opportunities for copy. The <i>London</i>,
+the <i>New Monthly</i> (where Campbell's dislike did him no harm), and other
+magazines also employed him. For a time, he seems to have joined "the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">{143}</a></span>
+gallery," and written ordinary press-work. During this time, which was
+very short, and this time only, his friends admit a certain indulgence
+in drinking, which he gave up completely, but which was used against him
+with as much pitilessness as indecency in <i>Blackwood</i>; though heaven
+only knows how the most Tory soul alive could see fitness of things in
+the accusation of gin-drinking brought against Hazlitt by the
+whiskey-drinkers of the <i>Noctes</i>. For the greater part of his literary
+life he seems to have been almost a total abstainer, indulging only in
+the very strongest of tea. He soon gave up miscellaneous press-work, as
+far as politics went; but his passion for the theatre retained him as a
+theatrical critic almost to the end of his life. He gradually drifted
+into the business really best suited to him, that of essay-writing, and
+occasionally lecturing on literary and miscellaneous subjects. During
+the greatest part of his early London life, he was resident in a famous
+house, now destroyed, in York Street, Westminster, next door to Bentham
+and reputed to have once been tenanted by Milton; and he was a constant
+attendant on Lamb's Wednesday evenings. The details of his life, it has
+been said, are not much known. The chief of them, besides the breaking
+out of his lifelong war with <i>Blackwood</i> and the <i>Quarterly</i>, was,
+perhaps, his unlucky participation in the duel which proved fatal to
+Scott, the editor of the <i>London</i>. It is impossible to imagine a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">{144}</a></span> more
+deplorable muddle than this affair. Scott, after refusing the challenge
+of Lockhart,<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> with whom he had, according to the customs of those
+days, a sufficient ground of quarrel, accepted that of Christie,
+Lockhart's second, with whom he had no quarrel at all. Moreover, when
+his adversary had deliberately spared him in the first fire, he insisted
+(it is said owing to the stupid conduct of his own second) on another,
+and was mortally wounded. Hazlitt, who was more than indirectly
+concerned in the affair, had a professed objection to duelling, which
+would have been more creditable to him if he had not been avowedly of a
+timid temper. But, most unfortunately, he was said, and believed, to
+have spurred Scott on to the acceptance of the challenge, nor do his own
+champions deny it. The scandal is long bygone, but is, unluckily, a fair
+sample of the ugly stories which cluster round Hazlitt's name, and which
+have hitherto prevented that justice being done to him which his
+abilities deserve and demand.</p>
+
+<p>This wretched affair occurred in February 1821, and, shortly afterwards,
+the crowning complications of Hazlitt's own life, the business of the
+<i>Liber Amoris</i> and the divorce with his first wife, took place. The
+first could only be properly described by an abundance of extracts, for
+which there is here no room. Of the second, which, it must be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">{145}</a></span>
+remembered, went on simultaneously with the first, it is sufficient to
+say that the circumstances are nearly incredible. It was conducted under
+the Scotch law with a blessed indifference to collusion: the direct
+means taken to effect it were, if report may be trusted, scandalous; and
+the parties met during the whole time, and placidly wrangled over money
+matters, with a callousness which is ineffably disgusting. I have
+hinted, in reference to Sarah Walker, that the tyranny of "Love
+unconquered in battle" may be taken by a very charitable person to be a
+sufficient excuse. In this other affair there is no such palliation;
+unless the very charitable person should hold that a wife, who could so
+forget her own dignity, justified any forgetfulness on the part of her
+husband; and that a husband, who could haggle and chaffer about the
+terms on which he should be disgracefully separated from his wife,
+justified any forgetfulness of dignity on the wife's part.</p>
+
+<p>Little has to be said about the rest of Hazlitt's life. Miss Sarah
+Walker would have nothing to say to him; and it has been already
+mentioned that the lady whom he afterwards married, a Mrs. Bridgewater,
+had enough of him after a year's experience. He did not outlive this
+last shock more than five years; and unfortunately his death was
+preceded by a complete financial break-down, though he was more
+industrious during these later years than at any other time, and though
+he had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">{146}</a></span> abundance of well-paid work. The failure of the publishers, who
+were to have paid him five hundred pounds for his <i>magnum opus</i>, the
+partisan and almost valueless <i>Life of Napoleon</i>, had something to do
+with this, and the dishonesty of an agent is said to have had more, but
+details are not forthcoming. He died on the eighteenth of September
+1830, saying, "Well, I have had a happy life"; and despite his son's
+assertion that, like Goldsmith, he had something on his mind, I believe
+this to have been not ironical but quite sincere. He was only fifty-two,
+so that the infirmities of age had not begun to press on him. Although,
+except during the brief duration of his second marriage, he had always
+lived by his wits, it does not appear that he was ever in any want, or
+that he had at any time to deny himself his favourite pleasures of
+wandering about and being idle when he chose. If he had not been
+completely happy in his life, he had lived it; if he had not seen the
+triumph of his opinions, he had been able always to hold to them. He was
+one of those men, such as an extreme devotion to literature now and then
+breeds, who, by the intensity of their enjoyment of quite commonplace
+delights&mdash;a face passed in the street, a sunset, a quiet hour of
+reflection, even a well-cooked meal&mdash;make up for the suffering of not
+wholly commonplace woes. I do not know whether even the joy of literary
+battle did not overweigh the pain of the dishonest wounds which he
+received<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">{147}</a></span> from illiberal adversaries. I think that he had a happy life,
+and I am glad that he had. For he was in literature a great man. I am
+myself disposed to hold that, for all his accesses of hopelessly
+uncritical prejudice, he was the greatest critic that England has yet
+produced; and there are some who hold (though I do not agree with them)
+that he was even greater as a miscellaneous essayist than as a critic.
+It is certainly upon his essays, critical and other, that his fame must
+rest; not on the frenzied outpourings of the <i>Liber Amoris</i> (full as
+these are of flashes of genius), or upon the one-sided and ill-planned
+<i>Life of Napoleon</i>; still less on his clever-boy essay on the
+<i>Principles of Human Action</i>, or on his attempts in grammar, in literary
+compilation and abridgment, and the like. Seven volumes of Bonn's
+Standard Library, with another published elsewhere containing his
+writings on Art, contain nearly all the documents of Hazlitt's fame: a
+few do not seem to have been yet collected from his <i>Remains</i> and from
+the publications in which they originally appeared.</p>
+
+<p>These books&mdash;the <i>Spirit of the Age</i>, <i>Table Talk</i>, <i>The Plain Speaker</i>,
+<i>The Round Table</i> (including the <i>Conversations with Northcote</i> and
+<i>Characteristics</i>), <i>Lectures on the English Poets and Comic Writers</i>,
+<i>Elizabethan Literature</i> and <i>Characters of Shakespeare</i>, <i>Sketches and
+Essays</i> (including <i>Winterslow</i>)&mdash;represent the work, roughly speaking,
+of the last twenty years of Hazlitt's life; for in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">{148}</a></span> earlier and
+longer period he wrote very little, and, indeed, declares that for a
+long time he had a difficulty in writing at all. They are all singularly
+homogeneous in general character, the lectures written as lectures
+differing very little from the essays written as essays, and even the
+frantic diatribes of the "Letter to Gifford" bearing a strong family
+likeness to the good-humoured <i>reportage</i> of "On going to a Fight," or
+the singularly picturesque and pathetic egotism of the "Farewell to
+Essay-writing." This family resemblance is the more curious because,
+independently of the diversity of subject, Hazlitt can hardly be said to
+possess a style or, at least, a manner&mdash;indeed, he somewhere or other
+distinctly disclaims the possession. Yet, irregular as he is in his
+fashion of writing, no less than in the merit of it, the germs of some
+of the most famous styles of this century may be discovered in his
+casual and haphazard work. Everybody knows Jeffrey's question to
+Macaulay, "Where the devil did you get that style?" If any one will read
+Hazlitt (who, be it remembered, was a contributor to the <i>Edinburgh</i>)
+carefully, he will see where Macaulay got that style, or at least the
+beginning of it, much as he improved on it afterwards. Nor is there any
+doubt that, in a very different way, Hazlitt served as a model to
+Thackeray, to Dickens, and to many not merely of the most popular, but
+of the greatest, writers of the middle of the century. Indeed, in the
+<i>Spirit<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">{149}</a></span> of the Age</i> there are distinct anticipations of Carlyle. He had
+the not uncommon fate of producing work which, little noted by the
+public, struck very strongly those of his juniors who had any literary
+faculty. If he had been, just by a little, a greater man than he was, he
+would, no doubt, have elaborated an individual manner, and not have
+contented himself with the hints and germs of manners. As it was, he had
+more of seed than of fruit. And the secret of this is, undoubtedly, to
+be found in the obstinate individuality of thought which characterised
+him all through. Hazlitt may sometimes have adopted an opinion partly
+because other people did not hold it, but he never adopted an opinion
+because other people did hold it. And all his opinions, even those which
+seem to have been adopted simply to quarrel with the world, were genuine
+opinions. He has himself drawn a striking contrast in this point,
+between himself and Lamb, in one of the very best of all his essays, the
+beautiful "Farewell to Essay-writing" reprinted in <i>Winterslow</i>. The
+contrast is a remarkable one, and most men, probably, who take great
+interest in literature or politics, or indeed in any subject admitting
+of principles, will be able to furnish similar contrasts from their own
+experience.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In matters of taste and feeling, one proof that my conclusions
+have not been quite shallow and hasty, is the circumstance of
+their having been lasting. I have the same favourite books,
+pictures, passages that I ever had; I may<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">{150}</a></span> therefore presume that
+they will last me my life&mdash;nay, I may indulge a hope that my
+thoughts will survive me. This continuity of impression is the
+only thing on which I pride myself. Even Lamb, whose relish of
+certain things is as keen and earnest as possible, takes a
+surfeit of admiration, and I should be afraid to ask about his
+select authors or particular friends after a lapse of ten years.
+As for myself, any one knows where to have me. What I have once
+made up my mind to, I abide by to the end of the chapter.</p></div>
+
+<p>This is quite true if we add a proviso to it&mdash;a proviso, to be sure, of
+no small importance. Hazlitt is always the same when he is not
+different, when his political or personal ails and angers do not obscure
+his critical judgment. His uniformity of principle extends only to the
+two subjects of literature and of art; unless a third may be added, to
+wit, the various good things of this life, as they are commonly called.
+He was not so great a metaphysician as he thought himself. He "shows to
+the utmost of his knowledge, and that not deep"; a want of depth not
+surprising when we find him confessing that he had to go to Taylor, the
+Platonist, to tell him something of Platonic ideas. It may be more than
+suspected that he had read little but the French and English
+philosophers of the eighteenth century; a very interesting class of
+persons, but, except Condillac, Hume, and Berkeley, scarcely
+metaphysicians. As for his politics, Hazlitt seems to me to have had no
+clear political creed at all. He hated something called "the hag
+legitimacy," but for the hag despotism,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">{151}</a></span> in the person of Bonaparte, he
+had nothing but love. How any one possessed of brains could combine
+Liberty and the first Napoleon in one common worship is, I confess, a
+mystery too great for me; and I fear that any one who could call
+"Jupiter Scapin" "the greatest man who ever lived," must be entirely
+blind to such constituents of greatness as justice, mercy, chivalry, and
+all that makes a gentleman. Indeed, I am afraid that "gentleman" is
+exactly what cannot be predicated of Hazlitt. No gentleman could have
+published the <i>Liber Amoris</i>, not at all because of its so-called
+voluptuousness, but because of its shameless kissing and telling. But
+the most curious example of Hazlitt's weaknesses is the language he uses
+in regard to those men with whom he had both political and literary
+differences. That he had provocation in some cases (he had absolutely
+none from Sir Walter Scott) is perfectly true. But what provocation will
+excuse such things as the following, all taken from one book, the
+<i>Spirit of the Age</i>? He speaks of Scott's "zeal to restore the spirit of
+loyalty, of passive obedience, and of non-resistance," as an
+acknowledgment for his having been "created a baronet by a prince of the
+House of Brunswick." Alas for dates and circumstances, for times and
+seasons, when they stand in the way of a fling of Hazlitt's! In the
+character of Scott himself an entire page and a half is devoted to an
+elaborate peroration in one huge sentence, denouncing him in such terms
+as "pettifogging," "littleness," "pique,"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">{152}</a></span> "secret and envenomed blows,"
+"slime of rankling malice and mercenary scorn," "trammels of servility,"
+"lies," "garbage," etc. etc. The Duke of Wellington he always speaks of
+as a brainless noodle, forgetting apparently that the description does
+not make his idol's defeat more creditable to the vanquished. As for the
+character of Gifford, and the earlier "Letter to Gifford," I should have
+to print them entire to show the state of Hazlitt's mind in regard to
+this notorious, and certainly not very amiable person. His own words,
+"the dotage of age and the fury of a woman," form the best short
+description of both. He screams, he foams at the mouth, he gnashes and
+tears and kicks, rather than fights. Nor is it only on living authors
+and living persons (as some of his unfavourable critics have said) that
+he exercises his spleen. His remarks on Burke (<i>Round Table</i>, p. 150)
+suggest temporary insanity. Sir Philip Sidney (as Lamb, a perfectly
+impartial person who had no politics at all, pointed out) was a kind of
+representative of the courtly monarchist school in literature. So down
+must Sir Philip go; and not only the <i>Arcadia</i>, that "vain and
+amatorious poem" which Milton condemned, but the sonnets which one would
+have thought such a lover of poetry as Hazlitt must have spared, go down
+also before his remorseless bludgeon.</p>
+
+<p>But there is no need to say any more of these faults of his, and there
+is no need to say much of another and more purely literary fault with
+which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">{153}</a></span> he has been charged&mdash;the fault of excessive quotation. In him the
+error lies rather in the constant repetition of the same, than in a too
+great multitude of different borrowings. Almost priding himself on
+limited study, and (as he tells us) very rarely reading his own work
+after it was printed, he has certainly abused his right of press most
+damnably in some cases. "Dry as a remainder biscuit," and "of no mark or
+likelihood," occur to me as the most constantly recurrent tags; but
+there are many others.</p>
+
+<p>These various drawbacks, however, only set off the merits which almost
+every lover of literature must perceive in him. In most writers, in all
+save the very greatest, we look for one or two, or for a few special
+faculties and capacities, and we know perfectly well that other
+(generally many other) capacities and faculties will not be found in
+them at all. We do not dream of finding rollicking mirth in Milton, or
+gorgeous embroidery of style in Swift, or unadorned simplicity in
+Browne. But in Hazlitt you may find something of almost everything,
+except the finer kinds of wit and humour; to which last, however, he
+makes a certain side-approach by dint of his appreciation of the irony
+of Nature and Fate. Almost every other grace of matter and form that can
+be found in prose may be found at times in his. He is generally thought
+of as, and for the most part is, a rather plain and straightforward
+writer, with few tricks and frounces of phrase and style. Yet most<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">{154}</a></span> of
+the fine writing of these latter days is but as crumpled tarlatan to
+brocaded satin beside the passage on Coleridge in the <i>English Poets</i>,
+or the description of Winterslow and its neighbourhood in the "Farewell
+to Essay-writing," or "On a Landscape of Nicolas Poussin" in the
+<i>Table-Talk</i>. Read these pieces and nothing else, and an excusable
+impression might be given that the writer was nothing if not florid. But
+turn over a dozen pages, and the most admirable examples of the grave
+and simple manner occur. He is an inveterate quoter, yet few men are
+more original. No man is his superior in lively, gossiping description,
+yet he could, within his limits, reason closely and expound admirably.
+It is, indeed, almost always necessary, when he condemns anything, to
+inquire very carefully as to the reasons of the condemnation. But
+nothing that he likes (except Napoleon) is ever bad: everything that he
+praises will repay the right man who, at the right time, examines it to
+see for what Hazlitt likes it. I have, for my part, no doubt that Miss
+Sarah Walker was a very engaging young woman; but (though the witness is
+the same) I have the gravest doubts as to Hazlitt's charges against her.</p>
+
+<p>We shall find this same curious difference everywhere in Hazlitt. He has
+been talking, for instance, with keen relish of the "Conversation of
+Authors" (it is he, be it remembered, who has handed down to us the
+immortal debate at one of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">{155}</a></span> Lamb's Wednesdays on "People one would Like
+to have Seen"), and saying excellent things about it. Then he changes
+the key, and tells us that the conversation of "Gentlemen and Men of
+Fashion" will not do. Perhaps not; but the wicked critic stops and asks
+himself whether Hazlitt had known much of the conversation of "Gentlemen
+and Men of Fashion"? We can find no record of any such experiences of
+his. In his youth he had no opportunity: in his middle age he was
+notoriously recalcitrant to all the usages of society, would not dress,
+and scarcely ever dined out except with a few cronies. This does not
+seem to be the best qualification for a pronouncement on the question.
+Yet this same essay is full of admirable things, the most admirable
+being, perhaps, the description of the man who "had you at an advantage
+by never understanding you." I find, indeed, in looking through my
+copies of his books, re-read for the purpose of this paper, an
+innumerable and bewildering multitude of essays, of passages, and of
+short phrases, marked for reference. In the seven volumes above referred
+to (to which, as has been said, not a little has to be added) there must
+be hundreds of separate articles and conversations; not counting as
+separate the short maxims and thoughts of the <i>Characteristics</i>, and one
+or two other similar collections, in which, indeed, several passages are
+duplicated from the Essays. At least two out of every three are
+characteristic of Hazlitt:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">{156}</a></span> not one in any twenty is not well worth
+reading and, if occasion served, commenting on. They are, indeed, as far
+from being consecutive as (according to the Yankee) was the conversation
+of Edgar Poe; and the multitude and diversity of their subjects fit them
+better for occasional than for continuous reading.<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> Perhaps, if any
+single volume deserves to be recommended to a beginner in Hazlitt it had
+better be <i>The Plain Speaker</i>, where there is the greatest range of
+subject, and where the author is seen in an almost complete repertory of
+his numerous parts. But there is not much to choose between it and <i>The
+Round Table</i> (where, however, the papers are shorter as a rule),
+<i>Table-Talk</i>, and the volume called, though not by the author, <i>Sketches
+and Essays</i>. I myself care considerably less for the <i>Conversations with
+Northcote</i>, the personal element in which has often attracted readers;
+and the attempts referred to above as <i>Characteristics</i>, avowedly in the
+manner of La Rochefoucauld, are sometimes merely extracts from the
+essays, and rarely have the self-containedness, the exact and chiselled
+proportion, which distinguishes the true <i>pensée</i> as La Rochefoucauld
+and some other Frenchmen, and as Hobbes perhaps alone of Englishmen,
+wrote it. But to criticise these numerous papers is like sifting a
+cluster of motes, and the mere enumeration of their titles<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">{157}</a></span> would fill
+up more than half the room which I have to spare. They must be
+criticised or characterised in two groups only, the strictly critical
+and the miscellaneous, the latter excluding politics. As for art, I do
+not pretend to be more than a connoisseur according to Blake's
+definition, that is to say, one who refuses to let himself be
+connoisseured out of his senses. I shall only, in reference to this last
+subject, observe that the singularly germinal character of Hazlitt's
+work is noticeable here also; for no one who reads the essay on Nicolas
+Poussin will fail to add Mr. Ruskin to Hazlitt's fair herd of literary
+children.</p>
+
+<p>His criticism is scattered through all the volumes of general essays;
+but is found by itself in the series of lectures, or essays (they are
+rather the latter than the former), on the characters of Shakespeare, on
+Elizabethan Literature, on the English Poets, and on the English Comic
+Writers. I cannot myself help thinking that in these four Hazlitt is at
+his best; though there may be nothing so attractive to the general, and
+few such brilliant passages as may be found in the "Farewell to
+Essay-writing," in the paper on Poussin, in "Going to a Fight," in
+"Going a Journey," and others of the same class. The reason of the
+preference is by no means a greater interest in the subject of one
+class, than in the subject of another. It is that, from the very nature
+of the case, Hazlitt's unlucky prejudices<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">{158}</a></span> interfere much more seldom
+with his literary work. They interfere sometimes, as in the case of
+Sidney, as in some remarks about Coleridge and Wordsworth, and
+elsewhere; but these instances are rare indeed compared with those that
+occur in the other division. On the other hand, there are always present
+Hazlitt's enthusiastic appreciation of what is good in letters, his
+combination of gusto with sound theory as to what is excellent in prose
+and verse, his felicitous method of expression, and the acuteness that
+kept him from that excessive and paradoxical admiration which both Lamb
+and Coleridge affected, and which has gained many more pupils than his
+own moderation. Nothing better has ever been written as a general view
+of the subject than his introduction to his Lectures on Elizabethan
+Literature; and almost all the faults to be found in it are due merely
+to occasional deficiency of information, not to error of judgment. He is
+a little paradoxical on Jonson; but not many critics could furnish a
+happier contrast than his enthusiastic praise of certain passages of
+Beaumont and Fletcher, and his cool toning down of Lamb's extravagant
+eulogy on Ford. He is a little unfair to the Caroline poets; but here
+the great disturbing influence comes in. If his comparison of ancient
+and modern literature is rather weak, that is because Hazlitt was
+anything but widely acquainted with either; and, indeed, it may be said
+in general that wherever he goes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">{159}</a></span> wrong, it is not because he judges
+wrongly on known facts, but because he either does not know the facts,
+or is prevented from seeing them by distractions of prejudice. To go
+through his Characters of Shakespeare would be impossible, and besides,
+it is a point of honour for one student of Shakespeare to differ with
+all others. I can only say that I know no critic with whom on this point
+I differ so seldom as with Hazlitt. Even better, perhaps, are the two
+sets of lectures on the Poets and Comic Writers. The generalisations are
+not always sound, for, as must be constantly repeated, Hazlitt was not
+widely read in literatures other than his own, and his standpoint for
+comparison is therefore rather insufficient. But take him where his
+information is sufficient, and how good he is! Of the famous four
+treatments of the dramatists of the Restoration&mdash;Lamb's, Hazlitt's,
+Leigh Hunt's, and Macaulay's&mdash;his seems to me by far the best. In regard
+to Butler, his critical sense has for once triumphed over his political
+prejudice; unless some very unkind devil's advocate should suggest that
+the supposed ingratitude of the King to Butler reconciled Hazlitt to
+him. He is admirable on Burns; and nothing can be more unjust or sillier
+than to pretend, as has been pretended, that Burns's loose morality
+engaged Hazlitt on his side. De Quincey was often a very acute critic,
+but anything more uncritical than his attack on Hazlitt's comparison of
+Burns and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">{160}</a></span> Wordsworth in relation to passion, it would be difficult to
+find. Hazlitt "could forgive Swift for being a Tory," he tells us&mdash;which
+is at any rate more than some other people, who have a better reputation
+for impartiality than his, seem to have been able to do. No one has
+written better than he on Pope, who still seems to have the faculty of
+distorting some critical judgments. His chapter on the English novelists
+(that is to say, those of the last century) is perhaps the best thing
+ever written on the subject; and is particularly valuable nowadays when
+there is a certain tendency to undervalue Smollett in order to exalt
+Fielding, who certainly needs no such illegitimate and uncritical
+leverage. I do not think that he is, on the whole, unjust to Campbell;
+though his Gallican, or rather Napoleonic mania made him commit the
+literary crime of slighting "The Battle of the Baltic." But in all his
+criticism of English literature (and he has attempted little else,
+except by way of digression) he is, for the critic, a study never to be
+wearied of, always to be profited by. His very aberrations are often
+more instructive than other men's right-goings; and if he sometimes
+fails to detect or acknowledge a beauty, he never praises a defect.</p>
+
+<p>It is less easy to sum up the merits of the miscellaneous pieces, for
+the very obvious reason that they can hardly be brought under any
+general form or illustrated by any small number of typical<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">{161}</a></span> instances.
+Perhaps the best way of "sampling" this undisciplined multitude is to
+select a few papers by name, so as to show the variety of Hazlitt's
+interests. The one already mentioned, "On Going to a Fight," which
+shocked some proprieties even in its own day, ranks almost first; but
+the reader should take care to accompany it with the official record of
+that celebrated contest between Neate and the Gasman. All fights are
+good reading; but this particular effort of Hazlitt's makes one sigh for
+a <i>Boxiana</i> or <i>Pugilistica</i> edited by him. Next, I think, must be
+ranked "On Going a Journey," with its fine appreciation of solitary
+travelling which does not exclude reminiscences of pleasant journeys in
+company. But these two, with the article on Poussin and the "Farewell to
+Essay-writing," have been so often mentioned that it may seem as if
+Hazlitt's store were otherwise poor. Nothing could be farther from the
+truth. The "Character of Cobbett" is the best thing the writer ever did
+of the kind, and the best thing known to me on Cobbett. "Of the Past and
+the Future" is perhaps the height of the popular metaphysical style&mdash;the
+style from which, as was noted, Hazlitt may never have got free as far
+as philosophising is concerned, but of which he is a master. "On the
+Indian Jugglers" is a capital example of what may be called improving a
+text; and it contains some of the most interesting and genial examples
+of Hazlitt's honest delight in games such as rackets and fives, a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">{162}</a></span>
+delight which (heaven help his critics) was frequently regarded at the
+time as "low." "On Paradox and Commonplace" is less remarkable for its
+contribution to the discussion of the subject, than as exhibiting one of
+Hazlitt's most curious critical megrims&mdash;his dislike of Shelley. I wish
+I could think that he had any better reason for this than the fact that
+Shelley was a gentleman by birth and his own contemporary. Most
+disappointing of all, perhaps, is "On Criticism," which the reader (as
+his prophetic soul, if he is a sensible reader, has probably warned him
+beforehand) soon finds to be little but an open or covert diatribe
+against the contemporary critics whom Hazlitt did not like, or who did
+not like Hazlitt. The apparently promising "On the Knowledge of
+Character" chiefly yields the remark that Hazlitt could not have admired
+Cæsar if he had resembled (in face) the Duke of Wellington. But "My
+first Acquaintance with Poets" is again a masterpiece; and to me, at
+least, "Merry England" is perfect. Hazlitt is almost the only person up
+to his own day who dared to vindicate the claims of nonsense, though he
+seems to have talked and written as little of it as most men. The
+chapter "On Editors" is very amusing, though perhaps not entirely in the
+way in which Hazlitt meant it; but I cannot think him happy "On
+Footmen," or on "The Conversation of Lords," for reasons already
+sufficiently stated. A sun-dial is a much more promising<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">{163}</a></span> subject than a
+broomstick, yet many essays might be written on sun-dials without there
+being any fear of Hazlitt's being surpassed. Better still is "On Taste,"
+which, if the twenty or thirty best papers in Hazlitt were collected
+(and a most charming volume they would make), would rank among the very
+best. "On Reading New Books" contains excellent sense, but perhaps is,
+as Hazlitt not seldom is, a little deficient in humour; while the
+absence of any necessity for humour makes the discussion "Whether Belief
+is Voluntary" a capital one. Hazlitt is not wholly of the opinion of
+that Ebrew Jew who said to M. Renan, "<i>On fait ce qu'on veut mais on
+croit ce qu'on peut.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>The shorter papers of the <i>Round Table</i> yield perhaps a little less
+freely in the way of specially notable examples. They come closer to a
+certain kind of Addisonian essay, a short lay-sermon, without the
+charming divagation of the longer articles. To see how nearly Hazlitt
+can reach the level of a rather older and cleverer George Osborne, turn
+to the paper here on Classical Education. He is quite orthodox for a
+wonder: perhaps because opinion was beginning to veer a little to the
+side of Useful Knowledge; but he is as dry as his own favourite biscuit,
+and as guiltless of freshness. He is best in this volume where he notes
+particular points such as Kean's Iago, Milton's versification (here,
+however, he does not get quite to the heart of the matter), "John<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">{164}</a></span>
+Buncle," and "The Excursion." In this last he far outsteps the scanty
+confines of the earlier papers of the <i>Round Table</i>, and allows himself
+that score of pages which seems to be with so many men the normal limit
+of a good essay. Of his shortest style one sample from "Trifles light as
+Air" is so characteristic, in more ways than one, that it must be quoted
+whole.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I am by education and conviction inclined to Republicanism and
+Puritanism. In America they have both. But I confess I feel a
+little staggered as to the practical efficacy and saving grace of
+first principles, when I ask myself, Can they throughout the
+United States from Boston to Baltimore, produce a single head
+like one of Titian's Venetian Nobles, nurtured in all the pride
+of aristocracy and all the blindness of popery? Of all the
+branches of political economy the human face is perhaps the best
+criterion of value.</p></div>
+
+<p>If I were editing Hazlitt's works I should put these sentences on the
+title-page of every volume; for, dogmatist as he thought himself, it is
+certain that he was in reality purely æsthetic, though, I need hardly
+say, not in the absurd sense, or no-sense, which modern misuse of
+language has chosen to fix on the word. Therefore he is very good (where
+few are good at all) on Dreams; and, being a great observer of himself,
+singularly instructive on Application to Study. "On Londoners and
+Country People" is one of his liveliest efforts; and the pique at his
+own inclusion in the Cockney School fortunately evaporates in some
+delightful reminiscences, including one of the few classic passages on
+the great game of marbles. His<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">{165}</a></span> remarks on the company at the
+Southampton coffee-house, which have been often and much praised, please
+me less: they are too much like attempts in the manner of the Queen Anne
+men, and Hazlitt is always best when he imitates nobody. "Hot and Cold"
+(which might have been more intelligibly called "North and South") is
+distinctly curious, bringing out again what may be called Hazlitt's
+fanciful observation; and it may generally be said that, however
+alarming and however suggestive of commonplace the titles "On
+Respectable People," "On People of Sense," "On Novelty and Familiarity,"
+may be, Hazlitt may almost invariably be trusted to produce something
+that is not commonplace, that is not laboured paradox, that is eminently
+literature.</p>
+
+<p>I know that a haphazard catalogue of the titles of essays (for it is
+little more) such as fills the last paragraph or two may not seem very
+succulent. But within moderate space there is really no other means of
+indicating the author's extraordinary range of subject, and at the same
+time the pervading excellence of his treatment. To exemplify a
+difference which has sometimes been thought to require explanation, his
+work as regards system, connection with anything else, immediate
+occasion (which with him was generally what his friend, Mr. Skimpole,
+would have called "pounds") is always Journalism: in result, it is
+almost always Literature. Its staple subjects, as far as there can<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">{166}</a></span> be
+said to be any staple where the thread is so various, are very much
+those which the average newspaper-writer since his time has had to deal
+with&mdash;politics, book-reviewing, criticism on plays and pictures, social
+etceteras, the minor morals, the miscellaneous incidents of daily life.
+It is true that Hazlitt was only for a short time in the straitest
+shafts, the most galling traces, of periodical hack-work. His practice
+was rather that of George Warrington, who worked till he had filled his
+purse, and then lay idle till he had emptied it. He used (an indulgence
+agreeable in the mouth, but bitter in the belly) very frequently to
+receive money beforehand for work which was not yet done. Although
+anything but careful, he was never an extravagant man, his tastes being
+for the most part simple; and he never, even during his first married
+life, seems to have been burdened by an expensive household. Moreover,
+he got rid of Mrs. Hazlitt on very easy terms. Still he must constantly
+have had on him the sensation that he lived by his work, and by that
+only. It seems to be (as far as one can make it out) this sensation
+which more than anything else jades and tires what some very
+metaphorical men of letters are pleased to call their Pegasus. But
+Hazlitt, though he served in the shafts, shows little trace of the
+harness. He has frequent small carelessnesses of style, but he would
+probably have had as many or more if he had been the easiest and
+gentlest of easy-writing gentlemen. He never seems to have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">{167}</a></span> allowed
+himself to be cramped in his choice of his subjects, and wrote for the
+editors, of whom he speaks so amusingly, with almost as much freedom of
+speech as if he had had a private press of his own, and had issued
+dainty little tractates on Dutch paper to be fought for by bibliophiles.
+His prejudices, his desultoriness, his occasional lack of correctness of
+fact (he speaks of "Fontaine's Translation" of Æsop, and makes use of
+the extraordinary phrase, "The whole Council of Trent with Father Paul
+at their head," than which a more curious blunder is hardly
+conceivable), his wayward inconsistencies, his freaks of bad taste,
+would in all probability have been aggravated rather than alleviated by
+the greater freedom and less responsibility of an independent or an
+endowed student. The fact is that he was a born man of letters, and that
+he could not help turning whatsoever he touched into literature, whether
+it was criticism on books or on pictures, a fight or a supper, a game at
+marbles, a political diatribe, or the report of a literary conversation.
+He doubtless had favourite subjects; but I do not know that it can be
+said that he treated one class of subjects better than another, with the
+exception that I must hold him to have been first of all a literary
+critic. He certainly could not write a work of great length; for the
+faults of his <i>Life of Napoleon</i> are grave even when its view of the
+subject is taken as undisputed, and it holds among his productions about
+the same place (that of longest and worst)<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">{168}</a></span> which the book it was
+designed to counterwork holds among Scott's. Nor was he, as it seems to
+me, quite at home in very short papers&mdash;in papers of the length of the
+average newspaper article. What he could do, as hardly any other man has
+ever done it in England, was a <i>causerie</i> of about the same length as
+Sainte-Beuve's or a little shorter, less limited in range, but also less
+artfully proportioned than the great Frenchman's literary and historical
+studies, giving scope for considerable digression, but coming to an end
+before the author was wearied of his subject, or had exhausted the fresh
+thoughts and the happy borrowings and analogies which he had ready for
+it. Of what is rather affectedly called "architectonic," Hazlitt has
+nothing. No essay of his is ever an exhaustive or even a symmetrical
+treatment of its nominal, or of any, theme. He somewhere speaks of
+himself as finding it easy to go on stringing pearls when he has once
+got the string; but, for my part, I should say that the string was much
+more doubtful than the pearls. Except in a very few set pieces, his
+whole charm consists in the succession of irregular, half-connected, but
+unending and infinitely variegated thoughts, fancies, phrases,
+quotations, which he pours forth not merely at a particular "Open
+Sesame," but at "Open barley," "Open rye," or any other grain in the
+corn-chandler's list. No doubt the charm of these is increased by the
+fact that they are never quite<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">{169}</a></span> haphazard, never absolutely promiscuous,
+despite their desultory arrangement; no doubt also a certain additional
+interest arises from the constant revelation which they make of
+Hazlitt's curious personality, his enthusiastic appreciation flecked
+with spots of grudging spite, his clear intellect clouded with
+prejudice, his admiration of greatness and nobility of character
+co-existing with the faculty of doing very mean and even disgraceful
+things, his abundant relish of life contrasted with almost constant
+repining. He must have been one of the most uncomfortable of all English
+men of letters, who can be called great, to know as a friend. He is
+certainly, to those who know him only as readers, one of the most
+fruitful both in instruction and in delight.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">{170}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI<br />
+<br />
+MOORE</h2>
+
+
+<p>It would be interesting, though perhaps a little impertinent, to put to
+any given number of well-informed persons under the age of forty or
+fifty the sudden query, who was Thomas Brown the Younger? And it is very
+possible that a majority of them would answer that he had something to
+do with Rugby. It is certain that with respect to that part of his work
+in which he was pleased so to call himself, Moore is but little known.
+The considerable mass of his hack-work has gone whither all hack-work
+goes, fortunately enough for those of us who have to do it. The vast
+monument erected to him by his pupil, friend, and literary executor,
+Lord Russell, or rather Lord John Russell, is a monument of such a
+Cyclopean order of architecture, both in respect of bulk and in respect
+of style, that most honest biographers and critics acknowledge
+themselves to have explored its recesses but cursorily. Less of him,
+even as a poet proper, is now read than of any of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">{171}</a></span> brilliant group
+of poets of which he was one, with the possible exceptions of Crabbe and
+Rogers; while, more unfortunate than Crabbe, he has had no Mr. Courthope
+to come to his rescue. But he has recently had what is an unusual thing
+for an English poet, a French biographer.<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> I shall not have very much
+to say of the details of M. Vallat's very creditable and useful
+monograph. It would be possible, if I were merely reviewing it, to pick
+out some of the curious errors of hasty deduction which are rarely
+wanting in a book of its nationality. If (and no shame to him) Moore's
+father sold cheese and whisky, <i>le whisky d'Irlande</i> was no doubt his
+staple commodity in the one branch, but scarcely <i>le fromage de Stilton</i>
+in the other. An English lawyer's studies are not even now, except at
+the universities and for purposes of perfunctory examination, very much
+in "Justinian," and in Moore's time they were still less so. And if
+Bromham Church is near Sloperton, then it will follow as the night the
+day that it is not <i>dans le Bedfordshire</i>. But these things matter very
+little. They are found, in their different kinds, in all books; and if
+we English bookmakers (at least some of us) are not likely to make a
+Bordeaux wine merchant sell Burgundy as his chief commodity, or say that
+a village near Amiens is <i>dans<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">{172}</a></span> le Béarn</i>, we no doubt do other things
+quite as bad. On the whole, M. Vallat's sketch, though of moderate
+length, is quite the soberest and most trustworthy sketch of Moore's
+life and of his books, as books merely, that I know. In matters of pure
+criticism M. Vallat is less blameless. He quotes authorities with that
+apparent indifference to, or even ignorance of, their relative value
+which is so yawning a pit for the feet of the foreigner in all cases;
+and perhaps a wider knowledge of English poetry in general would have
+been a better preparation for the study of Moore's in particular.
+"Never," says M. Renan very wisely, "never does a foreigner satisfy the
+nation whose history he writes"; and this is as true of literary history
+as of history proper. But M. Vallat satisfies us in a very considerable
+degree; and even putting aside the question whether he is satisfactory
+altogether, he has given us quite sufficient text in the mere fact that
+he has bestowed upon Moore an amount of attention and competence which
+no compatriot of the author of "Lalla Rookh" has cared to bestow for
+many years.</p>
+
+<p>I shall also here take the liberty of neglecting a very great&mdash;as far as
+bulk goes, by far the greatest&mdash;part of Moore's own performance. He has
+inserted so many interesting autobiographical particulars in the
+prefaces to his complete works, that visits to the great mausoleum of
+the Russell memoirs are rarely necessary, and still more rarely<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">{173}</a></span>
+profitable. His work for the booksellers was done at a time when the
+best class of such work was much better done than the best class of it
+is now; but it was after all work for the booksellers. His <i>History of
+Ireland</i>, his <i>Life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald</i>, etc., may be pretty
+exactly gauged by saying that they are a good deal better than Scott's
+work of a merely similar kind (in which it is hardly necessary to say
+that I do not include the <i>Tales of a Grandfather</i> or the introductions
+to the Dryden, the Swift, and the Ballantyne novels), not nearly so good
+as Southey's, and not quite so good as Campbell's. The Life of Byron
+holds a different place. With the poems, or some of them, it forms the
+only part of Moore's literary work which is still read; and though it is
+read much more for its substance than for its execution, it is still a
+masterly performance of a very difficult task. The circumstances which
+brought it about are well known, and no discussion of them would be
+possible without plunging into the Byron controversy generally, which
+the present writer most distinctly declines to do. But these
+circumstances, with other things among which Moore's own comparative
+faculty for the business may be not unjustly mentioned, prevent it from
+taking rank at all approaching that of Boswell's or Lockhart's
+inimitable biographies. The chief thing to note in it as regards Moore
+himself, is the help it gives in a matter to which we shall have to
+refer again,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">{174}</a></span> his attitude towards those whom his time still called "the
+great."</p>
+
+<p>And so we are left with the poems&mdash;not an inconsiderable companion
+seeing that its stature is some seven hundred small quarto pages closely
+packed with verses in double columns. Part of this volume is, however,
+devoted to the "Epicurean," a not unremarkable example of ornate prose
+in many respects resembling the author's verse. Indeed, as close readers
+of Moore know, there exists an unfinished verse form of it which, in
+style and general character, is not unlike a more serious "Lalla Rookh."
+As far as poetry goes, almost everything that will be said of "Lalla
+Rookh" might be said of "Alciphron": this latter, however, is a little
+more Byronic than its more famous sister, and in that respect not quite
+so successful.</p>
+
+<p>Moore's life, which is not uninteresting as a key to his personal
+character, is very fairly treated by M. Vallat, chiefly from the poet's
+own authority; but it need not detain us very long. He was born at
+Dublin on 28th May 1779. There is no mystery about his origin. His
+father, John Moore, was a small grocer and liquor-shop keeper who
+received later the place of barrack-master from a patron of his son. The
+mother, Anastasia Codd, was a Wexford girl, and seems to have been well
+educated and somewhat above her husband in station. Thomas was sent to
+several private schools, where he appears to have attained to some
+scholarship and to have early practised composition<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">{175}</a></span> in the tongue of
+the hated Saxon. When he was fourteen, the first measure of Catholic
+Emancipation opened Trinity College to him, and that establishment, "the
+intellectual eye of Ireland" as Sir William Harcourt has justly called
+it, received him a year later. The "silent sister" has fostered an
+always genial, if sometimes inexact, fashion of scholarship, in which
+Moore's talents were well suited to shine, and a pleasant social
+atmosphere wherein he was also not misplaced. But the time drew near to
+'98, and Moore, although he had always too much good sense to dip deeply
+into sedition, was, from his sentimental habits, likely to run some risk
+of being thought to have dipped in it. Although it is certain that he
+would have regarded what is called Nationalism in our days with disgust
+and horror, he cannot be acquitted of using, to the end of his life, the
+loosest of language on subjects where precision is particularly to be
+desired. Robert Emmet was his contemporary, and the action which the
+authorities took was but too well justified by the outbreak of the
+insurrection later. A Commission was named for purifying the college.
+Its head was Lord Clare, one of the greatest of Irishmen, the base or
+ignorant vilifying of whom by some persons in these days has been one of
+the worst results of the Home Rule movement. It had a rather comic
+assessor in Dr. Duigenan, the same, I believe, of whom it has been
+recorded that, at an earlier stage of his academic career and when a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">{176}</a></span>
+junior Fellow, he threatened to "bulge the Provost's eye." The oath was
+tendered to each examinate, and on the day before Moore's appearance
+Emmet and others had gone by default, while it was at least whispered
+that there had been treachery in the camp. Moore's own performance was,
+by his own account, heroic and successful: by another, which he very
+fairly gives, a little less heroic but still successful. Both show
+clearly that Clare was nothing like the stage-tyrant which the
+imagination of the seditious has chosen to represent him as being. That
+M. Vallat should talk rather foolishly about Emmet was to be expected;
+for Emmet's rhetorical rubbish was sure to impose, and has always
+imposed, on Frenchmen. The truth of course is that this young
+person&mdash;though one of those whom every humane man would like to keep
+mewed up till they arrived, if they ever did arrive, which is
+improbable, at years of discretion&mdash;was one of the most mischievous of
+agitators. He was one of those who light a bonfire and then are shocked
+at its burning, who throw a kingdom into anarchy and misery and think
+that they are cleared by a reference to Harmodius and Aristogeiton. It
+is one of the most fearful delights of the educated Tory to remember
+what the grievance of Harmodius and Aristogeiton really was. Moore (who
+had something of the folly of Emmet, but none of his reckless conceit)
+escaped, and his family must<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">{177}</a></span> have been exceedingly glad to send him
+over to the Isle of Britain. He entered at the Middle Temple in 1799,
+but hardly made even a pretence of reading law. His actual experience is
+one of those puzzles which continually meet the student of literary
+history in the days when society was much smaller, the makers of
+literature fewer, and the resources of patronage greater. Moore toiled
+not, neither did he spin. He slipped, apparently on the mere strength of
+an ordinary introduction, into the good graces of Lord Moira, who
+introduced him to the exiled Royal Family of France, and to the richest
+members of the Whig aristocracy&mdash;the Duke of Bedford, the Marquis of
+Lansdowne and others, not to mention the Prince of Wales himself. The
+young Irishman had indeed, as usual, his "proposals" in his
+pocket&mdash;proposals for a translation of Anacreon which appeared in May
+1800. The thing which thus founded one of the easiest, if not the most
+wholly triumphant, of literary careers is not a bad thing. The original,
+now abandoned as a clever though late imitation, was known even in
+Moore's time to be in parts of very doubtful authenticity, but it still
+remains, as an original, a very pretty thing. Moore's version is not
+quite so pretty, and is bolstered out with paraphrase and amplification
+to a rather intolerable extent. But there was considerable
+fellow-feeling between the author, whoever he was, and the translator,
+and the result is not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">{178}</a></span> despicable. Still there is no doubt that work as
+good or better might appear now, and the author would be lucky if he
+cleared a hundred pounds and a favourable review or two by the
+transaction. Moore was made for life. These things happen at one time
+and do not happen at another. We are inclined to accept them as ultimate
+facts into which it is useless to inquire. There does not appear to be
+among the numerous fixed laws of the universe any one which regulates
+the proportion of literary desert to immediate reward, and it is on the
+whole well that it should be so. At any rate the publication increased
+Moore's claims as a "lion," and encouraged him to publish next year the
+<i>Poems of the late Thomas Little</i> (he always stuck to the Christian
+name), which put up his fame and rather put down his character.</p>
+
+<p>In later editions Thomas Little has been so much subjected to the
+fig-leaf and knife that we have known readers who wondered why on earth
+any one should ever have objected to him. He was a good deal more
+uncastrated originally, but there never was much harm in him. It is true
+that the excuse made by Sterne for Tristram Shandy, and often repeated
+for Moore, does not quite apply. There is not much guilt in Little, but
+there is certainly very little innocence. He knows that a certain amount
+of not too gross indecency will raise a snigger, and, like Voltaire and
+Sterne himself, he sets himself to raise it. But<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">{179}</a></span> he does not do it very
+wickedly. The propriety of the nineteenth century, moreover, had not
+then made the surprisingly rapid strides of a few years later, and some
+time had to pass before Moore was to go out with Jeffrey, and nearly
+challenge Byron, for questioning his morality. The rewards of his
+harmless iniquity were at hand; and in the autumn of 1803 he was made
+Secretary of the Admiralty in Bermuda. Bermuda, it is said, is an
+exceedingly pleasant place; but either there is no Secretary of the
+Admiralty there now, or they do not give the post to young men
+four-and-twenty years old who have written two very thin volumes of
+light verses. The Bermoothes are not still vexed with that kind of Civil
+Servant. The appointment was not altogether fortunate for Moore,
+inasmuch as his deputy (for they not only gave nice berths to men of
+letters then, but let them have deputies) embezzled public and private
+moneys, with disastrous results to his easy-going principal. But for the
+time it was all, as most things were with Moore, plain sailing. He went
+out in a frigate, and was the delight of the gun-room. As soon as he got
+tired of the Bermudas, he appointed his deputy and went to travel in
+America, composing large numbers of easy poems. In October 1804 he was
+back in England, still voyaging at His Majesty's expense, and having
+achieved his fifteen months' trip wholly on those terms. Little is heard
+of him for the next two<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">{180}</a></span> years, and then the publication of his American
+and other poems, with some free reflections on the American character,
+brought down on him the wrath of <i>The Edinburgh</i>, and provoked the
+famous leadless or half-leadless duel at Chalk Farm. It was rather hard
+on Moore, if the real cause of his castigation was that he had offended
+democratic principles, while the ostensible cause was that, as Thomas
+Little, he had five years before written loose and humorous verses. So
+thinks M. Vallat, with whom we are not wholly disposed to agree, for
+Jeffrey, though a Whig, was no Democrat, and he was a rather strict
+moralist. However, no harm came of the meeting in any sense, though its
+somewhat burlesque termination made the irreverent laugh. It was indeed
+not fated that Moore should smell serious powder, though his courage
+seems to have been fully equal to any such occasion. The same year
+brought him two unquestioned and unalloyed advantages, the friendship of
+Rogers and the beginning of the Irish Melodies, from which he reaped not
+a little solid benefit, and which contain by far his highest and most
+lasting poetry. It is curious, but by no means unexampled, that, at the
+very time at which he was thus showing that he had found his right way,
+he also diverged into one wholly wrong&mdash;that of the serious and very
+ineffective Satires, "Corruption," "Intolerance," and others. The year
+1809 brought "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" with a gibe from
+Byron<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">{181}</a></span> and a challenge from Moore. But Moore's challenges were fated to
+have no other result than making the challenged his friends for life.
+All this time he had been more or less "about town." In 1811 he married
+Elizabeth Dyke ("Bessy"), an actress of virtue and beauty, and wrote the
+very inferior comic opera of "The Blue Stocking." Lord Moira gave the
+pair a home first in his own house, then at Kegworth near Donington,
+whence they moved to Ashbourne. Moore was busy now. The politics of "The
+Two-penny Postbag" are of course sometimes dead enough to us; but
+sometimes also they are not, and then the easy grace of the satire,
+which is always pungent and never venomed, is not much below Canning.
+Its author also did a good deal of other work of the same kind, besides
+beginning to review for <i>The Edinburgh</i>. Considering that he was in a
+way making his bread and butter by lampooning, however good-humouredly,
+the ruler of his country, he seems to have been a little unreasonable in
+feeling shocked that Lord Moira, on going as viceroy to India, did not
+provide for him. In the first place he was provided for already; and in
+the second place you cannot reasonably expect to enjoy the pleasures of
+independence and those of dependence at the same time. At the end of
+1817 he left Mayfield (his cottage near Ashbourne) and Lord Moira, for
+Lord Lansdowne and Sloperton, a cottage near Bowood, the end of the one
+sojourn<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">{182}</a></span> and the beginning of the other being distinguished by the
+appearance of his two best works, next to the Irish Melodies&mdash;"Lalla
+Rookh" and "The Fudge Family at Paris." His first and almost his only
+heavy stroke of ill-luck now came on him: his deputy at Bermuda levanted
+with some six thousand pounds, for which Moore was liable. Many friends
+came to his aid, and after some delay and negotiations, during which he
+had to go abroad, Lord Lansdowne paid what was necessary. But Moore
+afterwards paid Lord Lansdowne, which makes a decided distinction
+between his conduct and that of Theodore Hook in a similar case.</p>
+
+<p>Although the days of Moore lasted for half an ordinary lifetime after
+this, they saw few important events save the imbroglio over the Byron
+memoirs. They saw also the composition of a great deal of literature and
+journalism, all very well paid, notwithstanding which, Moore seems to
+have been always in a rather unintelligible state of pecuniary distress.
+That he made his parents an allowance, as some allege in explanation,
+will not in the least account for this; for, creditable as it was in him
+to make it, this allowance did not exceed one hundred pounds a year. He
+must have spent little in an ordinary way, for his Sloperton
+establishment was of the most modest character, while his wife was an
+excellent manager, and never went into society. Probably he might have
+endorsed, if he had been asked, the great<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">{183}</a></span> principle which somebody or
+other has formulated, that the most expensive way of living is staying
+in other peoples houses. At any rate his condition was rather precarious
+till 1835, when Lord John Russell and Lord Lansdowne obtained for him a
+Civil List pension of three hundred pounds a year. In his very last days
+this was further increased by an additional hundred a year to his wife.
+His end was not happy. The softening of the brain, which set in about
+1848, and which had been preceded for some time by premonitory symptoms,
+can hardly, as in the cases of Scott and Southey, be set down to
+overwork, for though Moore had not been idle, his literary life had been
+mere child's play to theirs. He died on 26th February 1852.</p>
+
+<p>Of Moore's character not much need be said, nor need what is said be
+otherwise than favourable. Not only to modern tastes, but to the
+sturdier tastes of his own day, and even of the days immediately before
+his, there was a little too much of the parasite and the hanger-on about
+him. It is easy to say that a man of his talents, when he had once
+obtained a start, might surely have gone his own way and lived his own
+life, without taking up the position of a kind of superior gamekeeper or
+steward at rich men's gates. But race, fashion, and a good many other
+things have to be taken into account; and it is fair to Moore to
+remember that he was, as it were from the first, bound to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">{184}</a></span>
+chariot-wheels of "the great," and could hardly liberate himself from
+them without churlishness and violence. Moreover, it cannot possibly be
+denied by any fair critic that if he accepted to some extent the awkward
+position of led-poet, he showed in it as much independence as was
+compatible with the function. Both in money matters, in his language to
+his patrons, and in a certain general but indefinable tone of behaviour,
+he contrasts not less favourably than remarkably, both with the
+ultra-Tory Hook, to whom we have already compared him, and with the
+ultra-Radical Leigh Hunt. Moore had as little of Wagg as he had of
+Skimpole about him; though he allowed his way of life to compare in some
+respects perilously with theirs. It is only necessary to look at his
+letters to Byron&mdash;always ready enough to treat as spaniels those of his
+inferiors in station who appeared to be of the spaniel kind&mdash;to
+appreciate his general attitude, and his behaviour in this instance is
+by no means different from his behaviour in others. As a politician
+there is no doubt that he at least thought himself to be quite sincere.
+It may be that, if he had been, his political satires would have galled
+Tories more than they did then, and could hardly be read by persons of
+that persuasion with such complete enjoyment as they can now. But the
+insincerity was quite unconscious, and indeed can hardly be said to have
+been insincerity at all. Moore had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">{185}</a></span> not a political head, and in English
+as in Irish politics his beliefs were probably not founded on any
+clearly comprehended principles. But such as they were he held to them
+firmly. Against his domestic character nobody has ever said anything;
+and it is sufficient to observe that not a few of the best as well as of
+the greatest men of his time, Scott as well as Byron, Lord John Russell
+as well as Lord Moira, appear not only to have admired his abilities and
+liked his social qualities, but to have sincerely respected his
+character. And so we may at last find ourselves alone with the plump
+volume of poems in which we shall hardly discover with the amiable M.
+Vallat "the greatest lyric poet of England," but in which we shall find
+a poet certainly, and if not a very great poet, at any rate a poet who
+has done many things well, and one particular thing better than anybody
+else.</p>
+
+<p>The volume opens with "Lalla Rookh," a proceeding which, if not
+justified by chronology, is completely justified by the facts that Moore
+was to his contemporaries the author of that poem chiefly, and that it
+is by far the most considerable thing not only in mere bulk, but in
+arrangement, plan, and style, that he ever did. Perhaps I am not quite a
+fair judge of "Lalla Rookh." I was brought up in what is called a strict
+household where, though the rule was not, as far as I can remember,
+enforced by any penalties, it was a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">{186}</a></span> point of honour that in the nursery
+and school-room none but "Sunday books" should be read on Sunday. But
+this severity was tempered by one of the easements often occurring in a
+world which, if not the best, is certainly not the worst of all possible
+worlds. For the convenience of servants, or for some other reason, the
+children were much more in the drawing-room on Sundays than on any other
+day, and it was an unwritten rule that any book that lived in the
+drawing-room was fit Sunday-reading. The consequence was that from the
+time I could read, till childish things were put away, I used to spend a
+considerable part of the first day of the week in reading and re-reading
+a collection of books, four of which were Scott's poems, "Lalla Rookh,"
+<i>The Essays of Elia</i> (First Edition,&mdash;I have got it now), and Southey's
+<i>Doctor</i>. Therefore it may be that I rank "Lalla Rookh" rather too high.
+At the same time, I confess that it still seems to me a very respectable
+poem indeed of the second rank. Of course it is artificial. The parade
+of second, or third, or twentieth-hand learning in the notes makes one
+smile, and the whole reminds one (as I daresay it has reminded many
+others before) of a harp of the period with the gilt a little tarnished,
+the ribbons more than a little faded, and the silk stool on which the
+young woman in ringlets used to sit much worn. All this is easy
+metaphorical criticism, if it is criticism at all. For I am not sure
+that,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">{187}</a></span> when the last age has got a little farther off from our
+descendants, they will see anything more ludicrous in such a harp than
+we see in the faded spinets of a generation earlier still. But much
+remains to Lalla if not to Feramorz. The prose interludes have lost none
+of their airy grace. Even Mr. Burnand has not been able to make Mokanna
+ridiculous, nor have the recent accounts of the actual waste of desert
+and felt huts banished at least the poetical beauty of "Merou's bright
+palaces and groves." There are those who laugh at the bower of roses by
+Bendemeer's stream: I do not. "Paradise and the Peri" is perhaps the
+prettiest purely sentimental poem that English or any other language can
+show. "The Fire Worshippers" are rather long, but there is a famous
+fight&mdash;more than one indeed&mdash;in them to relieve the monotony. For "The
+Light of the Harem" alone I have never been able to get up much
+enthusiasm; but even "The Light of the Harem" is a great deal better
+than Moore's subsequent attempt in the style of "Lalla Rookh," or
+something like it, "The Loves of the Angels." There is only one good
+thing that I can find to say of that: it is not so bad as the poem which
+similarity of title makes one think of in connection with
+it&mdash;Lamartine's disastrous "Chute d'un Ange."</p>
+
+<p>As "Lalla Rookh" is far the most important of Moore's serious poems, so
+"The Fudge Family in Paris" is far the best of his humorous poems. I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">{188}</a></span> do
+not forget "The Two-penny Postbag," nor many capital later verses of the
+same kind, the best of which perhaps is the Epistle from Henry of Exeter
+to John of Tchume. But "The Fudge Family" has all the merits of these,
+with a scheme and framework of dramatic character which they lack. Miss
+Biddy and her vanities, Master Bob and his guttling, the eminent
+turncoat Phil Fudge, Esq. himself and his politics, are all excellent.
+But I avow that Phelim Connor is to me the most delightful, though he
+has always been rather a puzzle. If he is intended to be a satire on the
+class now represented by the O'Briens and the McCarthys he is exquisite,
+and it is small wonder that Young Ireland has never loved Moore much.
+But I do not think that Thomas Brown the Younger meant it, or at least
+wholly meant it, as satire, and this is perhaps the best proof of his
+unpractical way of looking at politics. For Phelim Connor is a much more
+damning sketch than any of the Fudges. Vanity, gluttony, the scheming
+intrigues of eld, may not be nice things, but they are common to the
+whole human race. The hollow rant which enjoys the advantages of liberty
+and declaims against the excesses of tyranny is in its perfection Irish
+alone. However this may be, these lighter poems of Moore are great fun,
+and it is no small misfortune that the younger generation of readers
+pays so little attention to them. For they are full of acute observation
+of manners,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">{189}</a></span> politics, and society by an accomplished man of the world,
+put into pointed and notable form by an accomplished man of letters. Our
+fathers knew them well, and many a quotation familiar enough at second
+hand is due originally to the Fudge Family in their second appearance
+(not so good, but still good) many years later, to "The Two-penny
+Postbag" and to the long list of miscellaneous satires and skits. The
+last sentence is however to be taken as most strictly excluding
+"Corruption," "Intolerance," and "The Sceptic." "Rhymes on the Road,"
+travel-pieces out of Moore's line, may also be mercifully left aside:
+and "Evenings in Greece;" and "The Summer Fête" (any universal provider
+would have supplied as good a poem with the supper and the rout-seats)
+need not delay the critic and will not extraordinarily delight the
+reader. Not here is Moore's spur of Parnassus to be found.</p>
+
+<p>For that domain of his we must go to the songs which, in extraordinary
+numbers, make up the whole of the divisions headed Irish Melodies,
+National Airs, Sacred Songs, Ballads and Songs, and some of the finest
+of which are found outside these divisions in the longer poems from
+"Lalla Rookh" downwards. The singular musical melody of these pieces has
+never been seriously denied by any one, but it seems to be thought,
+especially nowadays, that because they are musically melodious they are
+not poetical. It is probably useless<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">{190}</a></span> to protest against a prejudice
+which, where it is not due to simple thoughtlessness or to blind
+following of fashion, argues a certain constitutional defect of the
+understanding powers. But it may be just necessary to repeat pretty
+firmly that any one who regards, even with a tincture of contempt, such
+work (to take various characteristic examples) as Dryden's lyrics, as
+Shenstone's, as Moore's, as Macaulay's Lays, because he thinks that, if
+he did not contemn them, his worship of Shakespeare, of Shelley, of
+Wordsworth would be suspect, is most emphatically not a critic of poetry
+and not even a catholic lover of it. Which said, let us betake ourselves
+to seeing what Moore's special virtue is. It is acknowledged that it
+consists partly in marrying music most happily to verse; but what is not
+so fully acknowledged as it ought to be is, that it also consists in
+marrying music not merely to verse, but to poetry. Among the more
+abstract questions of poetical criticism few are more interesting than
+this, the connection of what may be called musical music with poetical
+music; and it is one which has not been much discussed. Let us take the
+two greatest of Moore's own contemporaries in lyric, the two greatest
+lyrists as some think (I give no opinion on this) in English, and
+compare their work with his. Shelley has the poetical music in an
+unsurpassable and sometimes in an almost unapproached degree, but his
+verse is admittedly very difficult to set to music. I should myself go
+farther<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">{191}</a></span> and say that it has in it some indefinable quality antagonistic
+to such setting. Except the famous Indian Serenade, I do not know any
+poem of Shelley's that has been set with anything approaching to
+success, and in the best setting that I know of this the honeymoon of
+the marriage turns into a "red moon" before long. That this is not
+merely due to the fact that Shelley likes intricate metres any one who
+examines Moore can see. That it is due merely to the fact that Shelley,
+as we know from Peacock, was almost destitute of any ear for music is
+the obvious and common explanation. But neither will this serve, for we
+happen also to know that Burns, whose lyric, of a higher quality than
+Moore's, assorts with music as naturally as Moore's own, was quite as
+deficient as Shelley in this respect. So was Scott, who could yet write
+admirable songs to be sung. It seems therefore almost impossible, on the
+comparison of these three instances, to deny the existence of some
+peculiar musical music in poetry, which is distinct from poetical music,
+though it may coexist with it or may be separated from it, and which is
+independent both of technical musical training and even of what is
+commonly called "ear" in the poet. That Moore possessed it in probably
+the highest degree, will I think, hardly be denied. It never seems to
+have mattered to him whether he wrote the words for the air or altered
+the air to suit the words. The two fit like<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">{192}</a></span> a glove, and if, as is
+sometimes the case, the same or a similar poetical measure is heard set
+to another air than Moore's, this other always seems intrusive and
+wrong. He draws attention in one case to the extraordinary irregularity
+of his own metre (an irregularity to which the average pindaric is a
+mere jog-trot), yet the air fits it exactly. Of course the two feet
+which most naturally go to music, the anapæst and the trochee, are
+commonest with him; but the point is that he seems to find no more
+difficulty, if he does not take so much pleasure, in setting
+combinations of a very different kind. Nor is this peculiar gift by any
+means unimportant from the purely poetical side, the side on which the
+verse is looked at without any regard to air or accompaniment. For the
+great drawback to "songs to be sung" in general since Elizabethan days
+(when, as Mr. Arber and Mr. Bullen have shown, it was very different)
+has been the constant tendency of the verse-writer to sacrifice to his
+musical necessities either meaning or poetic sound or both. The climax
+of this is of course reached in the ineffable balderdash which usually
+does duty for the libretto of an opera, but it is quite as noticeable in
+the ordinary songs of the drawing-room. Now Moore is quite free from
+this blame. He may not have the highest and rarest strokes of poetic
+expression; but at any rate he seldom or never sins against either
+reason or poetry for the sake of rhythm and rhyme. He is always the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">{193}</a></span>
+master not the servant, the artist not the clumsy craftsman. And this I
+say not by any means as one likely to pardon poetical shortcomings in
+consideration of musical merit, for, shameful as the confession may be,
+a little music goes a long way with me; and what music I do like, is
+rather of the kind opposite to Moore's facile styles. Yet it is easy,
+even from the musical view, to exaggerate his facility. Berlioz is not
+generally thought a barrel-organ composer, and he bestowed early and
+particular pains on Moore.</p>
+
+<p>To many persons, however, the results are more interesting than the
+analysis of their qualities and principles; so let us go to the songs
+themselves. To my fancy the three best of Moore's songs, and three of
+the finest songs in any language, are "Oft in the stilly Night," "When
+in Death I shall calm recline," and "I saw from the Beach." They all
+exemplify what has been pointed out above, the complete adaptation of
+words to music and music to words, coupled with a decidedly high quality
+of poetical merit in the verse, quite apart from the mere music. It can
+hardly be necessary to quote them, for they are or ought to be familiar
+to everybody; but in selecting these three I have no intention of
+distinguishing them in point of general excellence from scores, nay
+hundreds of others. "Go where Glory waits thee" is the first of the
+Irish melodies, and one of those most hackneyed by the enthusiasm of
+bygone Pogsons.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">{194}</a></span> But its merit ought in no way to suffer on that account
+with persons who are not Pogsons. It ought to be possible for the
+reader, it is certainly possible for the critic, to dismiss Pogson
+altogether, to wave Pogson off, and to read anything as if it had never
+been read before. If this be done we shall hardly wonder at the delight
+which our fathers, who will not compare altogether badly with ourselves,
+took in Thomas Moore. "When he who adores thee" is supposed on pretty
+good evidence to have been inspired by the most hollow and senseless of
+all pseudo-patriotic delusions, a delusion of which the best thing that
+can be said is that "the pride of thus dying for" it has been about the
+last thing that it ever did inspire, and that most persons who have
+suffered from it have usually had the good sense to take lucrative
+places from the tyrant as soon as they could get them, and to live
+happily ever after. But the basest, the most brutal, and the bloodiest
+of Saxons may recognise in Moore's poem the expression of a possible, if
+not a real, feeling given with infinite grace and pathos. The same
+string reverberates even in the thrice and thousand times hackneyed Harp
+of Tara. "Rich and rare were the Gems she wore" is chiefly comic opera,
+but it is very pretty comic opera; and the two pieces "There is not in
+the wide world" and "How dear to me" exemplify, for the first but by no
+means for the last time, Moore's extraordinary command of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">{195}</a></span> last
+phase of that curious thing called by the century that gave him birth
+Sensibility. We have turned Sensibility out of doors; but he would be a
+rash man who should say that we have not let in seven worse devils of
+the gushing kind in her comparatively innocent room.</p>
+
+<p>Then we may skip not a few pieces, only referring once more to "The
+Legacy" ("When in Death I shall calm recline"), an anacreontic quite
+unsurpassable in its own kind. We need dwell but briefly on such pieces
+as "Believe me if all those endearing young Charms," which is typical of
+much that Moore wrote, but does not reach the true devil-may-care note
+of Suckling, or as "By the Hope within us springing," for Moore's
+war-like pieces are seldom or never good. But with "Love's Young Dream"
+we come back to the style of which it is impossible to say less than
+that it is quite admirable in its kind. Then after a page or two we come
+to the chief <i>cruces</i> of Moore's pathetic and of his comic manner, "The
+Last Rose of Summer," "The Young May Moon," and "The Minstrel Boy." I
+cannot say very much for the last, which is tainted with the unreality
+of all Moore's Tyrtean efforts; but "The Young May Moon" could not be
+better, and I am not going to abandon the Rose, for all her perfume be
+something musty&mdash;a <i>pot-pourri</i> rose rather than a fresh one. The song
+of O'Ruark with its altogether fatal climax<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">{196}</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">On our side is virtue and Erin,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On theirs is the Saxon and guilt&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>(which carries with it the delightful reflection that it was an Irishman
+running away with an Irishwoman that occasioned this sweeping moral
+contrast) must be given up; but surely not so "Oh had we some bright
+little Isle of our own." For indeed if one only had some bright little
+isle of that kind, some <i>rive fidèle où l'on aime toujours</i>, and where
+things in general are adjusted to such a state, then would Thomas Moore
+be the Laureate of that bright and tight little island.</p>
+
+<p>But it is alarming to find that we have not yet got through twenty-five
+pages out of some hundred or two, and that the Irish Melodies are not
+yet nearly exhausted. Not a few of the best known of Moore's songs,
+including "Oft in the stilly Night," are to be found in the division of
+National Airs, which is as a whole a triumph of that extraordinary
+genius for setting which has been already noticed. Here is "Flow on thou
+shining River," here the capital "When I touch the String," on which
+Thackeray loved to make variations. But "Oft in the stilly Night" itself
+is far above the others. We do not say "stilly" now: we have been taught
+by Coleridge (who used to use it freely himself before he laughed at it)
+to laugh at "stilly" and "paly" and so forth. But the most acrimonious
+critic may be challenged to point out another weakness of the same kind,
+and on the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">{197}</a></span> whole the straightforward simplicity of the phrase equals
+the melody of the rhythm.</p>
+
+<p>The Sacred Songs need not delay us long; for they are not better than
+sacred songs in general, which is saying remarkably little. Perhaps the
+most interesting thing in them is the well-known couplet,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">This world is but a fleeting show<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For man's illusion given&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>which, as has justly been observed, contains one of the most singular
+estimates of the divine purpose anywhere to be found. But Moore might,
+like Mr. Midshipman Easy, have excused himself by remarking, "Ah! well,
+I don't understand these things." The miscellaneous division of Ballads,
+Songs, etc., is much more fruitful. "The Leaf and the Fountain,"
+beginning "Tell me, kind seer, I pray thee," though rather long, is
+singularly good of its kind&mdash;the kind of half-narrative ballad. So in a
+lighter strain is "The Indian Bark." Nor is Moore less at home after his
+own fashion in the songs from the Anthology. It is true that the same
+fault which has been found with his Anacreon may be found here, and that
+it is all the more sensible because at least in some cases the originals
+are much higher poetry than the pseudo-Teian. To the form and style of
+Meleager Moore could not pretend; but as these are rather songs on Greek
+motives than translations from the Greek, the slackness and dilution
+matter less. But the strictly miscellaneous division holds some of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">{198}</a></span>
+best work. We could no doubt dispense with the well-known ditty (for
+once very nearly the "rubbish" with which Moore is so often and so
+unjustly charged) where Posada rhymes of necessity to Granada, and
+where, quite against the author's habit, the ridiculous term "Sultana"
+is fished out to do similar duty in reference to the Dulcinea, or rather
+to the Maritornes, of a muleteer. But this is quite an exception, and as
+a rule the facile verse is as felicitous as it is facile. Perhaps no one
+stands out very far above the rest; perhaps all have more or less the
+mark of easy variations on a few well-known themes. The old comparison
+that they are as numerous as motes, as bright, as fleeting, and as
+individually insignificant, comes naturally enough to the mind. But then
+they are very numerous, they are very bright, and if they are fleeting,
+their number provides plenty more to take the place of that which passes
+away. Nor is it by any means true that they lack individual
+significance.</p>
+
+<p>This enumeration of a few out of many ornaments of Moore's muse will of
+course irritate those who object to the "brick-of-the-house" mode of
+criticism; while it may not be minute enough, or sufficiently bolstered
+by actual quotation, to please those who hold that simple extract is the
+best, if not the only tolerable form of criticism. But the critic is not
+alone in finding that, whether he carry his ass or ride upon it, he
+cannot please all his public. What has been said is probably enough,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">{199}</a></span> in
+the case of a writer whose work, though as a whole rather unjustly
+forgotten, survives in parts more securely even than the work of greater
+men, to remind readers of at least the outlines and bases of his claim
+to esteem. And the more those outlines are followed up, and the
+structure founded on those bases is examined, the more certain, I think,
+is Moore of recovering, not the position which M. Vallat would assign to
+him of the greatest lyrist of England (a position which he never held
+and never could hold except with very prejudiced or very incompetent
+judges), not that of the equal of Scott or Byron or Shelley or
+Wordsworth, but still a position high enough and singularly isolated at
+its height. Viewed from the point of strictly poetical criticism, he no
+doubt ranks only with those poets who have expressed easily and
+acceptably the likings and passions and thoughts and fancies of the
+average man, and who have expressed these with no extraordinary cunning
+or witchery. To go further in limitation, the average man, of whom he is
+thus the bard, is a rather sophisticated average man, without very deep
+thoughts or feelings, without a very fertile or fresh imagination or
+fancy, with even a touch&mdash;a little touch&mdash;of cant and "gush" and other
+defects incident to average and sophisticated humanity. But this
+humanity is at any time and every time no small portion of humanity at
+large, and it is to Moore's credit that he sings its feelings and its
+thoughts so as always to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">{200}</a></span> get the human and durable element in them
+visible and audible through the "trappings of convention." Again, he has
+that all-saving touch of humour which enables him, sentimentalist as he
+is, to be an admirable comedian as well. Yet again, he has at least
+something of the two qualities which one must demand of a poet who is a
+poet, and not a mere maker of rhymes. His note of feeling, if not full
+or deep, is true and real. His faculty of expression is not only
+considerable, but it is also distinguished; it is a faculty which in the
+same measure and degree nobody else has possessed. On one side he had
+the gift of singing those admirable songs of which we have been talking.
+On the other, he had the gift of right satiric verse to a degree which
+only three others of the great dead men of this century in
+England&mdash;Canning, Praed, and Thackeray&mdash;have reached. Besides all this,
+he was a "considerable man of letters." But your considerable men of
+letters, after flourishing, turn to dust in their season, and other
+considerable or inconsiderable men of letters spring out of it. The true
+poets and even the true satirists abide, and both as a poet and a
+satirist Thomas Moore abides and will abide with them.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">{201}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII<br />
+<br />
+LEIGH HUNT</h2>
+
+
+<p>To compare the peaceful and home-keeping art of criticism to the
+adventurous one of lighthouse-building may seem an excursion into the
+heroi-comic, if not into the tragic-burlesque. Neither is it in the
+least my intention to dwell on a tolerably obvious metaphorical
+resemblance between the two. It is certainly the business of the critic
+to warn others off from the mistakes which have been committed by his
+forerunners, and perhaps (for let us anticipate the crushing wit) from
+his own. But that is not my reason for the suggestion. There is a story
+of I forget what lighthouse which Smeaton, or Stevenson, or somebody
+else, had unusual difficulty in establishing. The rock was too near the
+surface for it to be safe or practicable to moor barges over it; and it
+was uncovered for too short a time to enable any solid foundations to be
+laid or even begun during one tide. So the engineer, with other
+adventurous persons, got himself landed on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">{202}</a></span> it, succeeded after a vain
+attempt or two in working an iron rod into the middle, and then hung on
+bodily while the tide was up, that he and his men might begin again as
+soon as it receded. In a mild and unexciting fashion, that is what the
+critic has to do&mdash;to dig about till he makes a lodgment in his author,
+hang on to it, and then begin to build. It is not always very easy work,
+and it is never less easy than in the case of the author whom somebody
+has kindly called "the Ariel of criticism." Leigh Hunt is an extremely
+difficult person upon whom to make any critical lodgment, for the reason
+that (I do not intend any disrespect by the comparison) he has much less
+of the rock about him than of the shifting sand. I do not now speak of
+the great Skimpole problem&mdash;we shall come to that presently&mdash;but merely
+of the writer as shown in his works.</p>
+
+<p>The works themselves are not particularly easy to get together in any
+complete form, some of them being almost inextricably entangled in
+defunct periodicals, and others reappearing in different guises in the
+author's many published volumes. Mr. Kent's bibliography gives forty-six
+different entries; Mr. Alexander Ireland's (to which he refers) gives, I
+think, over eighty. Some years ago I remember receiving the catalogue of
+a second-hand bookseller who offered what he very frankly confessed to
+be far from a complete collection of the first editions, at the price of
+a score or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">{203}</a></span> two of pounds; and here at least the first are in some cases
+the only issues. Probably this is one reason why selections from Leigh
+Hunt, of which Mr. Kent's is the latest and best, have been frequent. I
+have seen two certainly, and I think three, within as many years.
+Luckily, however, quite enough for the reader's if not for the critic's
+purpose is easily obtainable. The poems can be bought in more forms than
+one; Messrs. Smith and Elder have reprinted cheaply the "Autobiography,"
+"Men, Women, and Books," "Imagination and Fancy," "The Town," "Wit and
+Humour," "Table Talk," and "A Jar of Honey." Other reprints of "One
+Hundred Romances of Real Life" (one of his merest pieces of book-making)
+and of his "Stories from the Italian Poets," one of his worst pieces of
+criticism, but agreeably reproduced in every respect save the hideous
+American spelling, have recently appeared. The complete and uniform
+issue, the want of which to some lovers of books (I own myself among
+them) is never quite made up by a scratch company of volumes of all
+dates, sizes, and prints, is indeed wanting. But still you can get a
+working Leigh Hunt together.</p>
+
+<p>It is when you have got him that your trouble begins; and before it is
+done the critic, if he be one of those who are not satisfied with a mere
+<i>compte rendu</i>, is likely to acknowledge that Leigh Hunt, if "Ariel" be
+in some respects too<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">{204}</a></span> complimentary a name for him, is at any rate a
+most tricksy spirit. The finest taste in some ways, contrasting with
+what can only be called the most horrible vulgarity in others; a light
+hand tediously boring again and again at obviously miscomprehended
+questions of religion, philosophy, and politics; a keen appetite for
+humour condescending to thin and repeated jests; a reviler of kings
+going out of his way laboriously to beslaver royalty; a man of letters,
+of talent almost touching genius, who seldom writes a dozen consecutive
+good pages:&mdash;these are only some of the inconsistencies that meet us in
+Leigh Hunt.</p>
+
+<p>He has related the history of his immediate and remoter forbears with
+considerable minuteness&mdash;with more minuteness indeed by far than he has
+bestowed upon all but a few passages of his own life. For the general
+reader, however, it is quite sufficient to know that his father, the
+Reverend Isaac Hunt, who belonged to a clerical family in Barbados, went
+for his education to the still British Provinces of North America,
+married a Philadelphia girl, Mary Shewell, practised as a lawyer till
+the Revolution broke out, and then being driven from his adopted country
+as a loyalist, settled in England, took orders, drifted into
+Unitarianism or anythingarianism, and ended his days, after not
+infrequent visits to the King's Bench, comfortably enough, but hanging
+rather loose on society, his friends, and a pension. Leigh Hunt (his
+godfathers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">{205}</a></span> and godmothers gave him also the names of James Henry, which
+he dropped) was the youngest son, and was born on 19th October 1784. His
+best youthful remembrance, and one of the most really humorous things he
+ever said, was that he used, after a childish indulgence in bad
+language, to think to himself with a shudder when he received any mark
+of favour, "Ah! they little suspect I'm the boy who said 'd&mdash;&mdash;n.'" But
+at seven years old he went to Christ's Hospital, and continued there for
+another seven. His reminiscences of that seminary, put down pretty
+early, and afterwards embodied in the "Autobiography," are even better
+known from the fact that they served as a text, and as the occasion of a
+little gentle raillery, to Elia's famous essay than in themselves. For
+some years after leaving school he did nothing definite but write
+verses, which his father (who seems to have been gifted with a plentiful
+lack of judgment in most incidents and relations of life) published when
+the boy was but sixteen. They are as nearly as possible valueless, but
+they went through three editions in a very short time. It ought to be
+remembered that except Cowper, who was just dead, and Crabbe, who had
+for years intermitted writing, the public had only Rogers and Southey
+for poets, for it would none of the "Lyrical Ballads," and the "Lay of
+the Last Minstrel" had not yet been published. So that it did not make
+one of its worst mistakes in taking up Leigh Hunt, who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">{206}</a></span> certainly had
+poetry in him, if he did not put it forth quite so early as this. He was
+made a kind of lion, but, fortunately or unfortunately for him, only in
+middle-class circles where there were no patrons. He was quite an old
+man&mdash;nearly twenty&mdash;when he made regular entry into the periodical
+writing which kept him (with the aid of his friends) for nearly sixty
+years. "Mr. Town, Junior" (altered from an old signature of Colman's)
+contributed theatrical criticisms, which do not seem to have been paid
+for, to an evening paper, the <i>Traveller</i>, now surviving as a second
+title to the <i>Globe</i>. His bent in this direction was assisted by the
+fact that his elder brother John had been apprenticed to a printer, and
+had desires to be a publisher. In January 1808 the two brothers started
+the <i>Examiner</i>, and Leigh Hunt edited it with a great deal of courage
+for fourteen years. He threw away for this the only piece of solid
+preferment that he ever had, a clerkship in the War Office which
+Addington gave him. The references to this act of recklessness or
+self-sacrifice in the Autobiography are rather enigmatical. His two
+functions were no doubt incompatible at best, especially considering the
+violent Opposition tone which the <i>Examiner</i> took. But Leigh Hunt,
+whatever faults he had, was not quite a hypocrite; and he hints pretty
+broadly that if he had not resigned he might have been asked to do so,
+not from any political reasons, but simply because he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">{207}</a></span> did his work very
+badly. He was much more at home in the <i>Examiner</i> (with which for a
+short time was joined the quarterly <i>Reflector</i>), though his warmest
+admirers candidly admit that he knew nothing about politics. In 1809 he
+married a Miss Marianne Kent, whose station was not very exalted, and
+whose son admits with unusual frankness that she was "the reverse of
+handsome, and without accomplishments," adding rather whimsically that
+this person, "the reverse of handsome," had "a pretty figure, beautiful
+black hair and magnificent eyes," and though "without accomplishments"
+had "a very strong natural turn for plastic art." At any rate she seems
+to have suited Leigh Hunt admirably. The <i>Examiner</i> soon became
+ill-noted with Government, but it was not till the end of 1812 that a
+grip could be got of it. Leigh Hunt's offence is in the ordinary books
+rather undervalued. That he (or his contributor) called the Prince
+Regent, as is commonly said, "a fat Adonis of fifty" (the exact words
+are, "this Adonis in loveliness is a corpulent man of fifty") may have
+been the chief sting, but was certainly not the chief legal offence.
+Leigh Hunt called the ruler of his country "a violator of his word, a
+libertine over head and ears in disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties,
+the companion of demi-reps, a man who had just closed half a century
+without one single claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect
+of posterity." It might be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">{208}</a></span> true or it might be false; but certainly
+there was then not a country in Europe where it would have been allowed
+to be said of the chief of the state. And I am not sure that it could be
+said now anywhere but in Ireland, where considerably worse things were
+said with impunity of Lord Spencer and Sir George Trevelyan. At any rate
+the brothers were prosecuted and fined five hundred pounds each, with
+two years' imprisonment. The sentence was carried out; but Leigh Hunt's
+imprisonment in Horsemonger Lane Gaol was the merest farce of
+incarceration. He could not indeed go beyond the prison walls. But he
+had a comfortable suite of rooms which he was permitted to furnish and
+decorate just as he liked; he was allowed to have his wife and family
+with him; he had a tiny garden of his own, and free access to that of
+the prison; there was no restriction on visitors, who brought him
+presents just as they chose; and he became a kind of fashion with the
+Opposition. Jeremy Bentham came and played at battledore and shuttlecock
+with him&mdash;an almost appalling idea, for it will not do to trust too
+implicitly to Leigh Hunt's declaration that Jeremy's object was to
+suggest "an improvement in the constitution of shuttlecocks." The
+<i>Examiner</i> itself continued undisturbed, and except for the "I can't get
+out" feeling, which even of itself cannot be compared for one moment to
+that of a modern prisoner condemned to his cell and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">{209}</a></span> the
+exercising-ground, it is rather difficult to see much reason for Leigh
+Hunt's complaints. The imprisonment may have affected his health, but it
+certainly brought him troops of friends, and gave him leisure to do not
+only his journalist's work, but things much more serious. Here he wrote
+and published his first poem since the Juvenilia, "A Feast of the Poets"
+(not much of a thing), and here he wrote, though he did not publish it
+till his liberation, the "Story of Rimini," by far his most important
+poem, both for intrinsic character and for influence on others. He had
+known Lamb from boyhood, and Shelley some years; he now made the
+acquaintance of Keats, Hazlitt, and Byron.</p>
+
+<p>In the next five years after his liberation he did a great deal of work,
+the best by far being the periodical called the <i>Indicator</i>, a weekly
+paper which ran for sixty-six numbers. The <i>Indicator</i> was the first
+thing that I ever read of Hunt's, and, by no means for that reason only,
+I think it the best. Its buttonholing papers, of a kind since widely
+imitated, were the most popular; but there are romantic things in it,
+such as "The Daughter of Hippocrates" (paraphrased and expanded from Sir
+John Mandeville with Hunt's peculiar skill), which seem to me better. It
+was at the end of these five years that Leigh Hunt resolved upon the
+second adventure (his imprisonment being the first and involuntary) of
+his otherwise easy-going<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">{210}</a></span> life&mdash;an adventure the immediate consequences
+of which were unfortunate in many ways, but which supplied him with a
+good deal of literary material. This was his visit to Italy as a kind of
+literary <i>attaché</i> to Lord Byron, and editor of a quarterly magazine,
+the <i>Liberal</i>. The idea was Shelley's, and if Shelley had lived, it
+might not have resulted quite so disastrously, for Shelley was
+absolutely untiring as a helper of lame dogs over stiles. As it was, the
+excursion distinctly contradicted the saying (condemned by some as
+immoral) that a bad beginning makes a good ending. The Hunt family,
+which now included several children, embarked, in November of all months
+in the year, on a small ship bound for Italy. They were something like a
+month getting down the Channel in tremendous weather, and at last when
+their ship had to turn tail from near Scilly and run into Dartmouth,
+Hunt, whose wife was extremely ill of lung-disease, made up his mind to
+stay for the winter in Devonshire. He passed the time pleasantly enough
+at Plymouth, which they left once more in May 1822, reaching Leghorn at
+the end of June. Shelley's death happened within ten days of their
+arrival, and Byron and Leigh Hunt were left to get on together. How
+badly they got on is pretty generally known, might have been foreseen
+from the beginning, and is not very profitable to dwell on. Leigh Hunt's
+mixture of familiarity and "airs" could not have been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">{211}</a></span> worse mixed to
+suit the taste of Byron. The "noble poet" too was not a person who liked
+to be spunged upon; and his coolest admirers may sympathise with his
+disgust when he found that he had upon his hands a man of letters with a
+large family whom he was literally expected to keep, whose society was
+disagreeable to him, who lampooned his friends, who differed with him on
+every point of taste, and who did not think it necessary to be grateful.
+For Leigh Hunt, somewhat on Lamb's system of compensation for coming
+late by going away early, combined his readiness to receive favours with
+a practice of not acknowledging the slightest obligation for them.
+Byron's departure for Greece was in its way lucky, but it left Hunt
+stranded. He remained in Italy for rather more than three years and then
+returned home across the Continent. The <i>Liberal</i>, which contains work
+of his, of Byron's, of Shelley's, and of Hazlitt's, is interesting
+enough and worth buying in its original form, but it did not pay. Of the
+unlucky book on his relations with Byron which followed&mdash;the worst act
+by far of his life&mdash;I shall not say much. No one has attempted to defend
+it, and he himself apologises for it frankly and fully in his
+Autobiography. It is impossible, however, not to remark that the offence
+was much aggravated by its deliberate character. For the book was not
+published in the heat of the moment, but three years after Hunt's return
+to England and four after Byron's death.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">{212}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The remaining thirty years of Hunt's life were wholly literary. As for
+residences, he hovered about London, living successively at Highgate,
+Epsom, Brompton, Chelsea, Kensington, and divers other places. At
+Chelsea he was very intimate with the Carlyles, and, while he was
+perhaps of all living men of letters most leniently judged by those not
+particularly lenient judges, we have nowhere such vivid glimpses of
+Hunt's peculiar weaknesses as in the memoirs of Carlyle and his wife.
+Why Leigh Hunt was always in such difficulties is not at first obvious,
+for he was the reverse of an idle man; he seems, though thriftless, to
+have been by no means very sumptuous in his way of living; everybody
+helped him, and his writing was always popular. He appears to have felt
+not a little sore that nothing was done for him when his political
+friends came into power after the Reform Bill&mdash;and remained there for
+almost the whole of the rest of his life. He had certainly in some
+senses borne the burden and heat of the day for Liberalism. But he was
+one of those reckless people who, without meaning to offend anybody in
+particular, offend friends as well as foes; the days of sinecures were
+even then passing or passed; and it is very difficult to conceive any
+office, even with the lightest duties, in which Leigh Hunt would not
+have come to grief. As for his writing, his son's earnest plea as to his
+not being an idle man is no doubt true enough, but he never seems to
+have reconciled himself to the regular<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">{213}</a></span> drudgery of miscellaneous
+article writing for newspapers which is almost the only kind of
+journalism that really pays, and his books did not sell very largely. In
+his latter days, however, things became easier for him. The unfailing
+kindness of the Shelley family gave him (in 1844 when Sir Percy Shelley
+came into his property) a regular annuity of £120; two royal gifts of
+£200 each and in 1847 a pension of the same amount were added; and two
+benefit nights of Dickens's famous amateur company brought him in
+something like a cool thousand, as Dickens himself would have said. Of
+his last years Mr. Kent, who was intimate with him, gives much the
+pleasantest account known to me. He died on 28th August 1859, surviving
+his wife only two years.</p>
+
+<p>I can imagine some one, at the name of Dickens in the preceding
+paragraph, thinking or saying, that if the author of <i>Bleak House</i>
+raised a thousand pounds for his old friend, he took the value of it and
+infinitely more out of him. It is impossible to shirk the Skimpole
+affair in any really critical notice of Leigh Hunt. To put unpleasant
+things briefly, that famous character was at once recognised by every
+one as a caricature, perhaps ill-natured but certainly brilliant, of
+what an enemy might have said of the author of "Rimini." Thornton Hunt,
+the eldest of Leigh Hunt's children, and a writer of no small power,
+took the matter up and forced from Dickens a contradiction, or
+disavowal,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">{214}</a></span> with which I am afraid the recording angel must have had
+some little difficulty. Strangely enough the last words of Macaulay's
+that we have concern this affair; and they may be quoted as Sir George
+Trevelyan gives them, written by his uncle in those days at Holly Lodge
+when the shadow of death was heavy on him.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>December 23, 1859.</i> An odd declaration by Dickens that he did
+not mean Leigh Hunt by Harold Skimpole. Yet he owns that he took
+the light externals of the character from Leigh Hunt, and surely
+it is by those light externals that the bulk of mankind will
+always recognise character. Besides, it is to be observed that
+the vices of H. S. are vices to which L. H. had, to say the
+least, some little leaning, and which the world generally
+attributed to him most unsparingly. That he had loose notions of
+<i>meum</i> and <i>tuum</i>; that he had no high feeling of independence;
+that he had no sense of obligation; that he took money wherever
+he could get it; that he felt no gratitude for it; that he was
+just as ready to defame a person who had relieved his distress as
+a person who had refused him relief&mdash;these were things which, as
+Dickens must have known, were said, truly or falsely, about L.
+H., and had made a deep impression on the public mind.</p></div>
+
+<p>Now Macaulay has not always been leniently judged; but I do not think
+that, with the single exception of Croker's case, he can be accused of
+having borne hardly on the moral character of any one of his
+contemporaries. He had befriended Leigh Hunt in every way; he had got
+him into the <i>Edinburgh</i>; he had lent (that is to say given) him money
+freely, and I do not think that his fiercest enemy can seriously think
+that he bore Hunt a grudge for having told him, as he himself<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">{215}</a></span> records,
+that the "Lays" were not so good as Spenser, whom Macaulay in one of the
+rare lapses of his memory had unjustly blasphemed, and whom Leigh Hunt
+adored. To my mind, if there were any doubt about Dickens's intention,
+or about the fitting in a certain sense of the cap, this testimony of
+Macaulay's would settle it. But I cannot conceive any doubt remaining in
+the mind of any person who has read Leigh Hunt's works, who has even
+read the Autobiography. Of the grossest faults in Skimpole's character,
+such as the selling of Jo's secret, Leigh Hunt was indeed incapable, and
+the insertion of these is at once a blot on Dickens's memory and a kind
+of excuse for his disclaimer; but as regards the lighter touches the
+likeness is unmistakable. Skimpole's most elaborate jests about "pounds"
+are hardly an exaggeration of the man who gravely and more than once
+tells us that his difficulties and irregularities with money came from a
+congenital incapacity to appreciate arithmetic, and who admits that
+Shelley (whose affairs he knew very well) once gave him no less than
+fourteen hundred pounds (that is to say some sixteen months of Shelley's
+income at his wealthiest) to clear him, and that he was not cleared,
+though apparently he gave Shelley to understand that he was.</p>
+
+<p>There are many excuses for him which Skimpole had not. His own pleas of
+tropical blood and so forth will not greatly avail. But the old
+patron-theory<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">{216}</a></span> and its more subtle transformation (the influence of
+which is sometimes shown even by Thackeray in the act of denouncing it),
+to the effect that the State or the public, or somebody, is bound to
+look after your man of genius, had bitten deep into the being of the
+literary man of our grandfathers' time. Anybody who has read <i>Thomas
+Poole and his Friends</i> must have seen how not merely Coleridge, of whose
+known liability to the weakness the book furnished new proofs, but even,
+to some extent and vicariously, the austere Wordsworth, cherished the
+idea. But for the most part, men kept it to themselves. Leigh Hunt never
+could keep anything to himself, and he has left record on record of the
+easy manner in which he acted on his beliefs.</p>
+
+<p>For this I own that I care little, especially since he never borrowed
+money of me. There is a Statute of Limitations for all such things in
+letters as well as in law. What is much harder to forgive is the
+ill-bred pertness, often if not always innocent enough in intention, but
+rather the worse than the better for that, which mars so much of his
+actual literary work. When almost an old man he wrote&mdash;when a very old
+man he quotes, with childlike surprise that any one should see anything
+objectionable in them&mdash;the following lines:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Perhaps you have known what it is to feel longings,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To pat buxom shoulders at routs and mad throngings&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Well&mdash;think what it was at a vision like that!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A grace after dinner! a Venus grown fat!<br /></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">{217}</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>It would be almost unbelievable of any man but Leigh Hunt that he
+placidly remarks in reference to this impertinence that "he had not the
+pleasure of Lady Blessington's acquaintance," as if that did not make
+things ten times worse. He had laid the foundation of not a few of the
+literary enmities he suffered from, by writing, thirty years earlier, a
+"Feast of the Poets," on the pattern of Suckling, in which he took,
+though much more excusably, the same kind of ill-bred liberties; and
+similar things abound in his works. It is scarcely surprising that the
+good Macvey Napier (rather awkwardly, and giving Macaulay much trouble
+to patch things up) should have said that he would like a
+"gentleman-like" article from Mr. Hunt for the <i>Edinburgh</i>; and the
+taunt about the Cockney School undoubtedly derived its venom from this
+weakness of his. Lamb was not descended from the kings that long the
+Tuscan sceptre swayed, and had some homely ways; Keats had to do with
+livery-stables, Hazlitt with shady lodging-houses and lodging-house
+keepers. But Keats might have been, whatever his weaknesses, his own and
+Spenser's Sir Calidore for gentle feeling and conduct; the man who
+called Lamb vulgar would only prove his own vulgarity; and Hazlitt,
+though he had some darker stains on his character than any that rest on
+Hunt, was far too potent a spirit for the fire within him not to burn
+out mere vulgarity. Leigh Hunt I fear must be allowed to be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">{218}</a></span> now and
+then merely vulgar&mdash;a Pogson of talent, of genius, of immense
+amiability, of rather hard luck, but still of the Pogsons, Pogsonic.</p>
+
+<p>As I shall have plenty of good to say of him, I may as well despatch at
+once whatever else I have to say that is bad, which is little. The
+faults of taste which have just been noticed passed easily into
+occasional, though only occasional, faults of criticism. I do not
+recommend anybody who has not the faculty of critical adjustment, and
+who wants to like Leigh Hunt, to read his essay on Dante in the <i>Italian
+Poets</i>. For flashes of crass insensibility to great poetry it is
+difficult to match anywhere, and impossible to match in Leigh Hunt. His
+favourite theological doctrine, like that of Béranger's hero, was, <i>Ne
+damnons personne</i>. He did not like monarchy, and he did not understand
+metaphysics. So the great poet, who, more than any other great poet
+except Shakespeare, grows on those who read him, receives from Leigh
+Hunt not an honest confession, like Sir Walter's, that he does not like
+him, which is perhaps the first honest impression of the majority of
+Dante's readers, but tirade upon tirade of abuse and bad criticism.
+Further, Leigh Hunt's unfortunate necessity of preserving his own
+journalism has made him keep a thousand things that he ought to have
+left to the kindly shade of the newspaper files&mdash;a cemetery where, thank
+Heaven, the tombs are not open as in the other city of Dis. The book
+called <i>Table<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">{219}</a></span> Talk</i>, for instance, contains, with a little better
+matter, chiefly mere rubbish like this section:</p>
+
+
+<h3>BEAUMARCHAIS</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Beaumarchais, author of the celebrated comedy of "Figaro," an
+abridgment of which has been rendered more famous by the music of
+Mozart, made a large fortune by supplying the American
+republicans with arms and ammunition, and lost it by speculations
+in salt and printing. His comedy is one of those productions
+which are accounted dangerous, from developing the spirit of
+intrigue and gallantry with more gaiety than objection; and they
+would be more unanimously so, if the good humour and
+self-examination to which they excite did not suggest a spirit of
+charity and inquiry beyond themselves.</p></div>
+
+<p>Leigh Hunt tried almost every conceivable kind of literature, including
+a historical novel, <i>Sir Ralph Esher</i>, several dramas (one or two of
+which, the "Legend of Florence" being the chief, got acted), and at
+nearly the beginning and nearly the end of his career two religious
+works, or works on religion, an attack on Methodism and "The Religion of
+the Heart." All this we may not unkindly brush away, and consider him
+first as a poet, secondly as a critic, and thirdly as what can be best,
+though rather unphilosophically, called a miscellanist.</p>
+
+<p>Few good judges nowadays, I think, would deny that Leigh Hunt had a
+certain faculty for poetry, and fewer still would rank it very high. To
+something like, but less than, the tunefulness of Moore, he joined a
+very much better taste in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">{220}</a></span> models and an infinitely wider and deeper
+study of them. There is no doubt that his versification in "Rimini"
+(which may be described as Chaucerian in basis with a strong admixture
+of Dryden, further crossed and dashed slightly with the peculiar music
+of the followers of Spenser, especially Browne and Wither) had a very
+strong influence both on Keats and on Shelley, and that it drew from
+them music much better than itself. This fluent, musical, many-coloured
+verse was a capital medium for tale-telling, and Leigh Hunt is always at
+his best when he employs it. The more varied measures and the more
+ambitious aim of "Captain Sword and Captain Pen" seem to me very much
+less successful. Not only was Leigh Hunt far from strong enough for a
+serious argument, but the cheery, sentimental optimism of which he was
+one of the most persevering exponents&mdash;the kind of thing which
+vehemently protests that in the good time coming nobody shall be damned,
+or starved, or put in prison, or subjected to the perils of villainous
+saltpetre, or prevented from doing just what he likes, and that all
+existence ought to be and shortly will be a vaguely refined beer and
+skittles&mdash;did not lend itself very well to verse. Nor are Hunt's lyrics
+particularly strong. His best thing by far is the charming trifle (the
+heroine being, it has been said and also denied, Mrs. Carlyle) which he
+called a "rondeau," though it is not one.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">{221}</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Jenny kissed me when we met,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Jumping from the chair she sat in:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Time, you thief, who love to get<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sweets into your list, put <i>that</i> in!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Say that health and wealth have missed me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Say I'm growing old&mdash;but add,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Jenny kissed me.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Even here it may be noticed that though the last four lines could hardly
+be bettered, the second couplet is rather weak. Some of Leigh Hunt's
+sonnets, especially that which he wrote on the Nile in rivalry with
+Shelley and Keats, are very good.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And times and things, as in that vision, seem<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Keeping along it their eternal stands;&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd-bands<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That roamed through the young earth, the glory extreme<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands.</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then comes a mightier silence, stern and strong,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As of a world left empty of its throng,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the void weighs on us; and then we wake,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Twixt villages, and think how we shall take<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Our own calm journey on for human sake.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This was written in 1818, and I think it will be admitted that the
+italicised line is a rediscovery of a cadence which had been lost for
+centuries, and which has been constantly borrowed and imitated since.</p>
+
+<p>Every now and then he had touches of something<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">{222}</a></span> much above his usual
+style, as in the concluding lines of the whimsical "flyting," as the
+Scotch poets of the fifteenth century would have called it, between the
+Man and the Fish:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Man's life is warm, glad, sad, 'twixt loves and graves,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Boundless in hope, honoured with pangs austere,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Heaven-gazing; and his angel-wings he craves:<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The fish is swift, small-needing, vague yet clear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A cold, sweet, silver life, wrapped in round waves,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Quickened with touches of transporting fear.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>As a rule, however, his poetry has little or nothing of this kind, and
+he will hold his place in the English <i>corpus poetarum</i>, first, because
+he was an associate of better poets than himself; secondly, because he
+invented a medium for the poetic tale which was as poetical as Crabbe's
+was prosaic; thirdly, because of all persons perhaps who have ever
+attempted English verse on their own account, he had the most genuine
+affection for, and the most intimate and extensive acquaintance with,
+the triumphs of his predecessors in poetry. Of prose he was a much less
+trustworthy judge, as may be instanced once for all by his pronouncing
+Gibbon's style to be bad; but of poetry he could tell with an
+extraordinary mixture of sympathy and discretion. And this will
+introduce us to his second faculty, the faculty of literary criticism,
+in which he is, with all his drawbacks, on a level with Coleridge, with
+Lamb, and with Hazlitt, his defects as compared with them being in each
+case made<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">{223}</a></span> up by compensatory, or more than compensatory, merits.</p>
+
+<p>How considerable a critic Leigh Hunt was, may be judged from the fact
+that he himself confesses the great critical fault of his principal
+poem&mdash;the selection, for amplification and paraphrase, of a subject
+which has once for all been treated with imperial and immortal brevity
+by a great poet. With equal ingenuousness and equal truth he further
+confesses that, at the time, he not only did not see this fault, but was
+critically incapable of seeing it. For there is that one comfort about
+this discomfortable and discredited art of ours, that age at any rate
+does not impair it. The first sprightly runnings of criticism are never
+the best; and in the case of all really great critics, from Dryden to
+Sainte-Beuve, the critical faculty has gone on constantly increasing.
+The chief examples of Leigh Hunt's critical accomplishment are to be
+found in the two books called respectively, <i>Wit and Humour</i>, and
+<i>Imagination and Fancy</i>, both being selections from the English poets,
+with critical remarks interspersed as a sort of running commentary. But
+hardly any book of his is quite barren of such examples; for he neither
+would, nor indeed apparently could, restrain his desultory fancy from
+this as from other indulgences. His criticism is very distinct in kind.
+It is almost purely and in the strict and proper sense æsthetic&mdash;that is
+to say, it does hardly anything but reproduce the sensations produced<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">{224}</a></span>
+upon Hunt himself by the reading of his favourite passages. As his sense
+of poetry was extraordinarily keen and accurate, there is perhaps no
+body of "beauties" of English poetry to be found anywhere in the
+language which is selected with such uniform and unerring judgment as
+this or these. Even Lamb, in his own favourite subjects and authors,
+misses treasure-trove which Leigh Hunt unfailingly discovers, as in the
+now pretty generally acknowledged case of the character of De Flores in
+Middleton's "Changeling." And Lamb had a much less wide and a much more
+crotchety system of admissions and exclusions. Macaulay was perfectly
+right in fixing, at the beginning of his essay on the dramatists of the
+Restoration, upon this catholicity of Hunt's taste as the main merit in
+it; and it is really a great pity that the two volumes referred to were
+not, as they were intended to be, followed up by others respectively
+devoted to Action and Passion, Contemplation, and Song. But Leigh Hunt
+was sixty when he planned them, and age, infirmity, perhaps also the
+less pressing need which the comparative affluence of his later years
+brought, prevented the completion. It has also to be remarked that Hunt
+is much better as a taster than as a professor or expounder. He says
+indeed many happy things about his favourite passages, but they
+evidently represent rather afterthought than forethought. He is not good
+at generalities, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">{225}</a></span> when he tries them is apt, instead of flying (as
+an Ariel of criticism should do), to sprawl. Yet it was impossible for a
+man who was so almost invariably right in particulars, to go very wrong
+in general; and the worst that can be said of Leigh Hunt's general
+critical axioms and conclusions is that they are much better than the
+reasons that support them. For instance, he is probably right in calling
+the famous "intellectual" and "henpecked you all" in "Don Juan," "the
+happiest triple rhyme ever written." But when he goes on to say that
+"the sweepingness of the assumption completes the flowing breadth of the
+effect," he goes very near to talking nonsense. For most people,
+however, a true opinion persuasively stated is of much more consequence
+than the most elaborate logical justification of it; and it is this that
+makes Leigh Hunt's criticism such excellent good reading. It is
+impossible not to feel that when a guide (which after all a critic
+should be) is recommended with cautions that, though an invaluable
+fellow for the most part, he is not unlikely in certain places to lead
+the traveller over a precipice, it is a very dubious kind of
+recommendation. Yet this is the way in which one has to speak of Jeffrey
+and Hazlitt, of Wilson and De Quincey. Of Leigh Hunt it need hardly ever
+be said; for in the unlucky diatribes on Dante above cited, the most
+unwary reader can see that his author has lost his temper and with it
+his head. As a rule he avoids<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">{226}</a></span> the things that he is not qualified to
+judge, such as the rougher and sublimer parts of poetry. Of its
+sweetness and its music, of its grace and its wit, of its tenderness and
+its fancy, no better judge ever existed than Leigh Hunt. He jumped at
+such things, when he came near them, almost as involuntarily as a needle
+to a magnet.</p>
+
+<p>He was, however, perhaps most popular in his own time, and certainly he
+gained most of the not excessive share of pecuniary profit which fell to
+his lot, as what I have called a miscellanist. One of the things which
+have not yet been sufficiently done in the criticism of English literary
+history, is a careful review of the successive steps by which the
+periodical essay of Addison and his followers during the eighteenth
+century passed into the magazine-paper of our own days. The later
+examples of the eighteenth century, the "Observers" and "Connoisseurs,"
+the "Loungers" and "Mirrors" and "Lookers-On," are fairly well worth
+reading in themselves, especially as the little volumes of the "British
+Essayists" go capitally in a travelling-bag; but the gap between them
+and the productions of Leigh Hunt, of Lamb, and of the <i>Blackwood</i> men,
+with Praed's schoolboy attempts not left out, is a very considerable
+one. Leigh Hunt is himself entitled to a high place in the new school so
+far as mere priority goes, and to one not low in actual merit. He
+relates himself, more than once, with the childishness which is the good
+side of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">{227}</a></span> Skimpolism, how not merely his literary friends but persons
+of quality had special favourites among the miscellaneous papers of the
+<i>Indicator</i>, like (he would certainly have used the parallel himself if
+he had known it or thought of it) the Court of France with Marot's
+Psalms. This miscellaneous work of his extends, as it ought to do, to
+all manner of subjects. The pleasantest example to my fancy is the book
+called <i>The Town</i>, a gossiping description of London from St. Paul's to
+St. James's, which he afterwards followed up with books on the West End
+and Kensington, and which, though of course second-hand as to its facts,
+is by no means uncritical, and by far the best reading of any book of
+its kind. Even the Autobiography might take rank in this class; and the
+same kind of stuff made up the staple of the numerous periodicals which
+Leigh Hunt edited or wrote, and of the still more numerous books which
+he compounded out of the dead periodicals. It may be that a severe
+criticism will declare that, here as well as elsewhere, he was more
+original than accomplished; and that his way of treating subjects was
+pursued with better success by his imitators than by himself. Such a
+paper, for instance, as "On Beds and Bedrooms" suggests (and is dwarfed
+by the suggestion) Lamb's "Convalescent" and other similar work. "Jack
+Abbott's Breakfast," which is, or was, exceedingly popular with Hunt's
+admirers, is an account of the misfortunes of a luckless young<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">{228}</a></span> man who
+goes to breakfast with an absent-minded pedagogue, and, being turned
+away empty, orders successive refreshments at different coffee-houses,
+each of which proves a feast of Tantalus. The idea is not bad; but the
+carrying out suits the stage better than the study, and is certainly far
+below such things as Maginn's adventures of Jack Ginger and his friends,
+with the tale untold that Humphries told Harlow. "A Few Remarks on the
+Rare Vice called Lying" is a most promising title; he must be a very
+good-natured judge who finds appended to it a performing article. "The
+Old Lady" and "The Old Gentleman" were once great favourites; they seem
+to have been studied from Earle's <i>Microcosmography</i>, not the least
+excellent of the books that have proceeded from foster-children of
+Walter de Merton, but they are over-laboured in particulars. So too are
+"The Adventures of Carfington Blundell" and "Inside of an Omnibus."
+Leigh Hunt's humour is so devoid of bitterness that it sometimes becomes
+insipid; his narrative so fluent and gossiping that it sometimes becomes
+insignificant. His enemies called him immoral, which appears to have
+been a gross calumny so far as his private life was concerned, and is
+certainly a gross exaggeration as regards his writing. But he was rather
+too much given to dally about voluptuous subjects with a sort of
+chuckling epicene triviality. He is so far from being passionate that he
+sometimes becomes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">{229}</a></span> almost offensive. He is terribly apt to labour a
+conceit or a prettiness till it becomes vapid; and his "Criticism on
+Female Beauty," though it contains some extremely sensible remarks, also
+contains much which is suggestive of Mr. Tupman. Yet his miscellaneous
+writing has one great merit (besides its gentle playfulness and its
+untiring variety) which might procure pardon for worse faults. With no
+one perhaps are those literary memories which transform and vivify life
+so constantly present as with Leigh Hunt. Although the world was a
+perfectly real thing to him, and not by any means seen only through the
+windows of a library, he took everywhere with him the remembrances of
+what he had read, and they helped him to clothe and colour what he saw
+and what he wrote. Between him, therefore, and readers who themselves
+have read a good deal, and loved what they have read not a little, there
+is always something in common; and yet probably no bookish writer has
+been less resented by his unbookish readers as a thruster of the
+abominable things&mdash;superior knowledge and superior scholarship&mdash;upon
+them. Some vices of the snob Leigh Hunt undoubtedly had, but he was
+never in the least a pretentious snob. He quotes his books not in the
+spirit of a man who is looking down on his fellows from a proper
+elevation, but in the spirit of a kindly host who is anxious that his
+guests should enjoy the good things on his table.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">{230}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is this sincere and unostentatious love of letters, and anxiety to
+spread the love of letters, that is the redeeming point of Leigh Hunt
+throughout: he is saved <i>quia multum amavit</i>. It was this which prompted
+that rather grandiose but still admirable palinode of Christopher North,
+in August 1834,&mdash;"the Animosities are mortal: but the Humanities live
+for ever,"&mdash;an apology which naturally enough pleased Hunt very much. He
+is one of those persons with whom it is impossible to be angry, or at
+least to be angry long. "The bailiff who took him was fond of him," it
+is recorded of Captain Costigan; and in milder moments the same may be
+said of the critical bailiffs who are compelled to "take" Leigh Hunt.
+Even in his least happy books (such as the "Jar of Honey from Mount
+Hybla," where all sorts of matter, some of it by no means well known to
+the writer, have been hastily cobbled together) this love, and for the
+most part intelligent and animated love, for literature appears. If in
+another of his least happy attempts, the critical parts of the already
+mentioned <i>Stories from the Italian Poets</i>, he is miles below the great
+argument of Dante, and if he is even guilty to some extent of
+vulgarising the lesser but still great poets with whom he deals, he
+never comes, even in Dante, to any passage he can understand without
+exhibiting such a warmth of enthusiasm and enjoyment that it softens the
+stoniest readers. He can gravely call Dante's Hell "geologically
+speaking a most<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">{231}</a></span> fantastical formation" (which it certainly is), and
+joke clumsily about the poet's putting Cunizza and Rahab in Paradise. He
+can write, in the true spirit of vulgarising, that "the Florentine is
+thought to have been less strict in his conduct in regard to the sex
+than might be supposed from his platonical aspirations," heedless of the
+great confessions implied in the swoon at Francesca's story, and the
+passage through the fire at the end of the seventh circle of Purgatory.
+But when he comes to things like "Dolce color d'oriental zaffiro," and
+"Era già l'ora," it is hardly possible to do more justice to the
+subject. The whole description of his Italian sojourn in the
+Autobiography is an example of the best kind of such writing. Again, of
+all the people who have rejoiced in Samuel Pepys, Leigh Hunt "does it
+most natural," being indeed a kind of nineteenth-century Pepys himself,
+whom the gods had made less comfortable in worldly circumstances and no
+man of business, but to whom as a compensation they had given the
+feeling for poetry which Samuel lacked. At different times Dryden,
+Spenser, and Chaucer were respectively his favourite English poets; and
+as there was nothing faithless in his inconstancy, he took up his new
+loves without ceasing to love the old. It is perhaps rather more
+surprising that he should have liked Spenser than that he should have
+liked the other two; and we must suppose that the profusion of beautiful
+pictures in the "Faerie Queen" enabled him, not to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">{232}</a></span> appreciate (for he
+never could have done that), but to tolerate or pass over the deep
+melancholy and the occasional philosophisings of the poet. But the
+attraction of Dryden and Chaucer for him is very easily understood. Both
+are eminently cheerful poets, Dryden with the cheerfulness born of manly
+sense, Chaucer with that of youth and abounding animal spirits. Leigh
+Hunt seems to have found this cheerfulness as akin to his own, as the
+vigour of both was complementary and satisfactory to his own, I shall
+not say weakness, but fragility. Add yet again to this that Hunt
+seems&mdash;a thing very rarely to be said of critics&mdash;never to have disliked
+a thing simply because he could not understand it. If he sometimes
+abused Dante, it was not merely because he could not understand him,
+though he certainly could not, but because Dante trod (and when Dante
+treads he treads heavily) on his most cherished prejudices. Now he had
+not very many prejudices, and so he had an advantage here also.</p>
+
+<p>Lastly, as he may be read with pleasure, so he may be skipped without
+shame. There are some writers whom to skip may seem to a conscientious
+devotee of letters both wicked and unwise&mdash;wicked because it is
+disrespectful to them, unwise because it is quite likely to inflict loss
+on the reader. Now nobody can ever think of respecting Leigh Hunt; he is
+not unfrequently amiable, but never in the least venerable. Even at his
+best he seldom or never affects the reader with admiration, only with a
+mild pleasure. It is at once a penalty for his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">{233}</a></span> sins and a compliment to
+his good qualities, that to make any kind of fuss over him would be
+absurd. Nor is there any selfish risk run by treating him, in the
+literary sense, in an unceremonious manner. His writing of all kinds
+carries desultoriness to the height, and may be begun at the beginning,
+or at the end, or in the middle, and left off at any place, without the
+least risk of serious loss. He is excellent good company for half an
+hour, sometimes for much longer; but the reader rarely thinks very much
+of what he has said when the interview is over, and never experiences
+any violent hunger or thirst for its renewal, though such renewal is
+agreeable enough in its way. Such an author is a convenient possession
+on the shelves: a possession so convenient that occasionally a blush of
+shame may suggest itself at the thought that he should be treated so
+cavalierly. But this is quixotic. The very best things that he has done
+hardly deserve more respectful treatment, for they are little more than
+a faithful and fairly lively description of his own enjoyments; the
+worst things deserve treatment much less respectful. Yet let us not
+leave him with a harsh mouth; for, as has been said, he loved the good
+literature of others very much, and he wrote not a little that was good
+literature of his own.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">{234}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>VIII<br />
+<br />
+PEACOCK</h2>
+
+
+<p>In the year 1875 Mr. Bentley conferred no small favour upon lovers of
+English literature by reprinting, in compact form and good print, the
+works of Thomas Love Peacock, up to that time scattered and in some
+cases not easily obtainable. So far as the publisher was concerned,
+nothing more could reasonably have been demanded; it is not easy to say
+quite so much of the editor, the late Sir Henry Cole. His editorial
+labours were indeed considerably lightened by assistance from other
+hands. Lord Houghton contributed a critical preface, which has the ease,
+point, and grasp of all his critical monographs. Miss Edith Nicolls, the
+novelist's granddaughter, supplied a short biography, written with much
+simplicity and excellent good taste. But as to editing in the proper
+sense&mdash;introduction, comment, illustration, explanation&mdash;there is next
+to none of it in the book. The principal thing, however, was to have
+Peacock's delightful work<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">{235}</a></span> conveniently accessible, and that the issue
+of 1875 accomplished. The author is still by no means universally or
+even generally known; though he has been something of a critic's
+favourite. Almost the only dissenter, as far as I know, among critics,
+is Mrs. Oliphant, who has not merely confessed herself, in her book on
+the literary history of Peacock's time, unable to comprehend the
+admiration expressed by certain critics for <i>Headlong Hall</i> and its
+fellows, but is even, if I do not mistake her, somewhat sceptical of the
+complete sincerity of that admiration. There is no need to argue the
+point with this agreeable practitioner of Peacock's own art. A certain
+well-known passage of Thackeray, about ladies and <i>Jonathan Wild</i>, will
+sufficiently explain her own inability to taste Peacock's persiflage. As
+for the genuineness of the relish of those who can taste him there is no
+way that I know to convince sceptics. For my own part I can only say
+that, putting aside scattered readings of his work in earlier days, I
+think I have read the novels through on an average once a year ever
+since their combined appearance. Indeed, with Scott, Thackeray, Borrow,
+and Christopher North, Peacock composes my own private Paradise of
+Dainty Devices, wherein I walk continually when I have need of rest and
+refreshment. This is a fact of no public importance, and is only
+mentioned as a kind of justification for recommending him to others.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">{236}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Peacock was born at Weymouth on 18th October 1785. His father (who died
+a year or two after his birth) was a London merchant; his mother was the
+daughter of a naval officer. He seems during his childhood to have done
+very much what he pleased, though, as it happened, study always pleased
+him; and his gibes in later life at public schools and universities lose
+something of their point when it is remembered that he was at no
+university, at no school save a private one, and that he left even that
+private school when he was thirteen. He seems, however, to have been
+very well grounded there, and on leaving it he conducted his education
+and his life at his own pleasure for many years. He published poems
+before he was twenty, and he fell in love shortly after he was
+twenty-two. The course of this love did not run smooth, and the lady,
+marrying some one else, died shortly afterwards. She lived in Peacock's
+memory till his death, sixty years later, which event is said to have
+been heralded (in accordance with not the least poetical of the many
+poetical superstitions of dreaming) by frequent visions of this shadowy
+love of the past. Probably to distract himself, Peacock, who had
+hitherto attempted no profession, accepted the rather unpromising post
+of under-secretary to Admiral Sir Home Popham on board ship. His mother,
+in her widowhood, and he himself had lived much with his sailor
+grandfather, and he was always<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">{237}</a></span> fond of naval matters. But it is not
+surprising to find that his occupation, though he kept it for something
+like a year, was not to his taste. He gave it up in the spring of 1809,
+and returned to leisure, poetry, and pedestrianism. The "Genius of the
+Thames," a sufficiently remarkable poem, was the result of the two
+latter fancies. A year later he went to Wales and met his future wife,
+Jane Griffith, though he did not marry her for ten years more. He
+returned frequently to the principality, and in 1812 made, at Nant
+Gwillt, the acquaintance of Shelley and his wife Harriet. This was the
+foundation of a well-known friendship, which has supplied by far the
+most solid and trustworthy materials existing for the poet's biography.
+It was Wales, too, that furnished the scene of his first and far from
+worst novel <i>Headlong Hall</i>, which was published in 1816. From 1815 to
+1819 Peacock lived at Marlow, where his intercourse with Shelley was
+resumed, and where he produced not merely <i>Headlong Hall</i> but
+<i>Melincourt</i> (the most unequal, notwithstanding many charming sketches,
+of his works), the delightful <i>Nightmare Abbey</i> (with a caricature, as
+genius caricatures, of Shelley for the hero), and the long and
+remarkable poem of "Rhododaphne."</p>
+
+<p>During the whole of this long time, that is to say up to his
+thirty-fourth year, with the exception of his year of secretaryship,
+Peacock had been his own master. He now, in 1819, owed curtailment<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">{238}</a></span> of
+his liberty but considerable increase of fortune to a long-disused
+practice on the part of the managers of public institutions, of which
+Sir Henry Taylor gave another interesting example. The directors of the
+East India Company offered him a clerkship because he was a clever
+novelist and a good Greek scholar. He retained his place ("a precious
+good place too," as Thackeray with good-humoured envy says of it in "The
+Hoggarty Diamond") with due promotion for thirty-seven years, and
+retired from it in 1856 with a large pension. He had married Miss
+Griffith very shortly after his appointment; in 1822 <i>Maid Marian</i>
+appeared, and in 1823 Peacock took a cottage, which became after a time
+his chief and latterly his only residence, at Halliford, near his
+beloved river. For some years he published nothing, but 1829 and 1831
+saw the production of perhaps his two best books, <i>The Misfortunes of
+Elphin</i> and <i>Crotchet Castle</i>. After <i>Crotchet Castle</i>, official duties
+and perhaps domestic troubles (for his wife was a helpless invalid)
+interrupted his literary work for more than twenty years, an almost
+unexampled break in the literary activity of a man so fond of letters.
+In 1852 he began to write again as a contributor to <i>Fraser's Magazine</i>.
+It is rather unfortunate that no complete republication, nor even any
+complete list of these articles, has been made. The papers on Shelley
+and the charming story of <i>Gryll Grange</i> were the chief of them. The
+author was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">{239}</a></span> an old man when he wrote this last, but he survived it six
+years, and died on 23d January 1866, having latterly lived very much
+alone. Indeed, after Shelley's death he seems never to have had any very
+intimate friend except Lord Broughton, with whose papers most of
+Peacock's correspondence is for the present locked up.</p>
+
+<p>There is a passage in Shelley's "Letter to Maria Gisborne" which has
+been often quoted before, but which must necessarily be quoted again
+whenever Peacock's life and literary character are discussed:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">And there<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is English P&mdash;&mdash;, with his mountain Fair<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Turned into a flamingo, that shy bird<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That gleams i' the Indian air. Have you not heard<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindoo,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His best friends hear no more of him? But you<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Will see him, and will like him too, I hope,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With his milk-white Snowdonian Antelope<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Matched with his Camelopard. <i>His fine wit</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A strain too learnèd for a shallow age,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Too wise for selfish bigots; let his page<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which charms the chosen spirits of his time,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fold itself up for a serener clime<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of years to come, and find its recompense<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In that just expectation.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The enigmas in this passage (where it is undisputed that "English P&mdash;&mdash;"
+is Peacock) have much exercised the commentators. That Miss Griffith,
+after her marriage, while still remaining a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">{240}</a></span> Snowdonian antelope, should
+also have been a flamingo, is odd enough; but this as well as the
+"camelopard" (probably turning on some private jest then intelligible
+enough to the persons concerned, but dark to others) is not particularly
+worth illuminating. The italicised words describing Peacock's wit are
+more legitimate subjects of discussion. They seem to me, though not
+perhaps literally explicable after the fashion of the duller kind of
+commentator, to contain both a very happy description of Peacock's
+peculiar humour, and a very sufficient explanation of the causes which
+have, both then and since, made that humour palatable rather to the few
+than to the many. Not only is Peacock peculiarly liable to the charge of
+being too clever, but he uses his cleverness in a way peculiarly
+bewildering to those who like to have "This is a horse" writ large under
+the presentation of the animal. His "rascally comparative" fancy, and
+the abundant stores of material with which his reading provided it, lead
+him perpetually to widen "the wound," till it is not surprising that
+"the knife" (the particular satirical or polemical point that he is
+urging) gets "lost in it." This weakness, if it be one, has in its
+different ways of operation all sorts of curious results. One is, that
+his personal portraits are perhaps farther removed from faithful
+representations of the originals than the personal sketches of any other
+writer, even among the most deliberate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">{241}</a></span> misrepresenters. There is,
+indeed, a droll topsy-turvy resemblance to Shelley throughout the
+Scythrop of <i>Nightmare Abbey</i>, but there Peacock was hardly using the
+knife at all. When he satirises persons, he goes so far away from their
+real personalities that the libel ceases to be libellous. It is
+difficult to say whether Mr. Mystic, Mr. Flosky, or Mr. Skionar is least
+like Coleridge; and Southey, intensely sensitive as he was to criticism,
+need not have lost his equanimity over Mr. Feathernest. A single point
+suggested itself to Peacock, that point suggested another, and so on and
+so on, till he was miles away from the start. The inconsistency of his
+political views has been justly, if somewhat plaintively, reflected on
+by Lord Houghton in the words, "the intimate friends of Mr. Peacock may
+have understood his political sentiments, but it is extremely difficult
+to discover them from his works." I should, however, myself say that,
+though it may be extremely difficult to deduce any definite political
+sentiments from Peacock's works, it is very easy to see in them a
+general and not inconsistent political attitude&mdash;that of intolerance of
+the vulgar and the stupid. Stupidity and vulgarity not being
+(fortunately or unfortunately) monopolised by any political party, and
+being (no doubt unfortunately) often condescended to by both, it is not
+surprising to find Peacock&mdash;especially with his noble disregard of
+apparent consistency and the inveterate habit of pillar-to-post joking,
+which has been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">{242}</a></span> commented on&mdash;distributing his shafts with great
+impartiality on Trojan and Greek; on the opponents of reform in his
+earlier manhood, and on the believers in progress during his later; on
+virtual representation and the telegraph; on barouche-driving as a
+gentleman's profession, and lecturing as a gentleman's profession. But
+this impartiality (or, if anybody prefers it, inconsistency) has
+naturally added to the difficulties of some readers with his works. It
+is time, however, to endeavour to give some idea of the gay variety of
+those works themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Although there are few novelists who observe plot less than Peacock,
+there are few also who are more regular in the particular fashion in
+which they disdain plot. Peacock is in fiction what the dramatists of
+the school of Ben Jonson down to Shadwell are in comedy&mdash;he works in
+"humours." It ought not to be, but perhaps is, necessary to remind the
+reader that this is by no means the same thing in essence, though
+accidentally it very often is the same, as being a humourist. The dealer
+in humours takes some fad or craze in his characters, some minor ruling
+passion, and makes his profit out of it. Generally (and almost always in
+Peacock's case) he takes if he can one or more of these humours as a
+central point, and lets the others play and revolve in a more or less
+eccentric fashion round it. In almost every book of Peacock's there is a
+host who is possessed by the cheerful mania for collecting other maniacs
+round<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">{243}</a></span> him. Harry Headlong of Headlong Hall, Esquire, a young Welsh
+gentleman of means, and of generous though rather unchastened taste,
+finding, as Peacock says, in the earliest of his gibes at the
+universities, that there are no such things as men of taste and
+philosophy in Oxford, assembles a motley host in London, and asks them
+down to his place at Llanberis. The adventures of the visit (ending up
+with several weddings) form the scheme of the book, as indeed
+repetitions of something very little different form the scheme of all
+the other books, with the exception of <i>The Misfortunes of Elphin</i>, and
+perhaps <i>Maid Marian</i>. Of books so simple in one way, and so complex in
+others, it is impossible and unnecessary to give any detailed analysis.
+But each contains characteristics which contribute too much to the
+knowledge of Peacock's idiosyncrasy to pass altogether unnoticed. The
+contrasts in <i>Headlong Hall</i> between the pessimist Mr. Escot, the
+optimist Mr. Foster, and the happy-mean man Mr. Jenkison (who inclines
+to both in turn, but on the whole rather to optimism), are much less
+amusing than the sketches of Welsh scenery and habits, the passages of
+arms with representatives of the <i>Edinburgh</i> and <i>Quarterly Reviews</i>
+(which Peacock always hated), and the satire on "improving," craniology,
+and other passing fancies of the day. The book also contains the first
+and most unfriendly of those sketches of clergymen of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">{244}</a></span> Church of
+England which Peacock gradually softened till, in Dr. Folliott and Dr.
+Opimian, his curses became blessings altogether. The Reverend Dr. Gaster
+is an ignoble brute, though not quite life-like enough to be really
+offensive. But the most charming part of the book by far (for its women
+are mere lay figures) is to be found in the convivial scenes. <i>Headlong
+Hall</i> contains, besides other occasional verse of merit, two
+drinking-songs&mdash;"Hail to the Headlong," and the still better "A
+Heel-tap! a heel-tap! I never could bear it"&mdash;songs not quite so good as
+those in the subsequent books, but good enough to make any reader think
+with a gentle sigh of the departure of good fellowship from the earth.
+Undergraduates and Scotchmen (and even in their case the fashion is said
+to be dying) alone practise at the present day the full rites of Comus.</p>
+
+<p><i>Melincourt</i>, published, and indeed written, very soon after <i>Headlong
+Hall</i>, is a much more ambitious attempt. It is some three times the
+length of its predecessor, and is, though not much longer than a single
+volume of some three-volume novels, the longest book that Peacock ever
+wrote. It is also much more ambitiously planned; the twice attempted
+abduction of the heiress, Anthelia Melincourt, giving something like a
+regular plot, while the introduction of Sir Oran Haut-ton (an
+orang-outang whom the eccentric hero, Forester, has domesticated and
+intends to introduce to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">{245}</a></span> parliamentary life) can only be understood as
+aiming at a regular satire on the whole of human life, conceived in a
+milder spirit than "Gulliver," but belonging in some degree to the same
+class. Forester himself, a disciple of Rousseau, a fervent anti-slavery
+man who goes to the length of refusing his guests sugar, and an
+ideologist in many other ways, is also an ambitious sketch; and Peacock
+has introduced episodes after the fashion of eighteenth-century fiction,
+besides a great number of satirical excursions dealing with his enemies
+of the Lake school, with paper money, and with many other things and
+persons. The whole, as a whole, has a certain heaviness. The
+enthusiastic Forester is a little of a prig, and a little of a bore; his
+friend the professorial Mr. Fax proses dreadfully; the Oran Haut-ton
+scenes, amusing enough of themselves, are overloaded (as is the whole
+book) with justificative selections from Buffon, Lord Monboddo, and
+other authorities. The portraits of Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth,
+Canning, and others, are neither like, nor in themselves very happy, and
+the heroine Anthelia is sufficiently uninteresting to make us extremely
+indifferent whether the virtuous Forester or the <i>roué</i> Lord Anophel
+Achthar gets her. On the other hand, detached passages are in the
+author's very best vein; and there is a truly delightful scene between
+Lord Anophel and his chaplain Grovelgrub, when the athletic Sir Oran has
+not only foiled their attempt on Anthelia, but has mast-headed them on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">{246}</a></span>
+the top of a rock perpendicular. But the gem of the book is the election
+for the borough of One-Vote&mdash;a very amusing farce on the subject of
+rotten boroughs. Mr. Forester has bought one of the One-Vote seats for
+his friend the Orang, and, going to introduce him to the constituency,
+falls in with the purchaser of the other seat, Mr. Sarcastic, who is a
+practical humorist of the most accomplished kind. The satirical
+arguments with which Sarcastic combats Forester's enthusiastic views of
+life and politics, the elaborate spectacle which he gets up on the day
+of nomination, and the free fight which follows, are recounted with
+extraordinary spirit. Nor is the least of the attractions of the book an
+admirable drinking-song, superior to either of those in <i>Headlong Hall</i>,
+though perhaps better known to most people by certain Thackerayan
+reminiscences of it than in itself:&mdash;</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">The Ghosts</span></h3>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">In life three ghostly friars were we,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And now three friendly ghosts we be.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Around our shadowy table placed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The spectral bowl before us floats:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With wine that none but ghosts can taste<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We wash our unsubstantial throats.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Three merry ghosts&mdash;three merry ghosts&mdash;three merry ghosts are we:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let the ocean be port and we'll think it good sport<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To be laid in that Red Sea.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">With songs that jovial spectres chaunt,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Our old refectory still we haunt.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">{247}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The traveller hears our midnight mirth:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">"Oh list," he cries, "the haunted choir!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The merriest ghost that walks the earth<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is now the ghost of a ghostly friar."<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Three merry ghosts&mdash;three merry ghosts&mdash;three merry ghosts are we:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let the ocean be port and we'll think it good sport<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To be laid in that Red Sea.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In the preface to a new edition of <i>Melincourt</i>, which Peacock wrote
+nearly thirty years later, and which contains a sort of promise of
+<i>Gryll Grange</i>, there is no sign of any dissatisfaction on the author's
+part with the plan of the earlier book; but in his next, which came
+quickly, he changed that plan very decidedly. <i>Nightmare Abbey</i> is the
+shortest, as <i>Melincourt</i> is the longest, of his tales; and as
+<i>Melincourt</i> is the most unequal and the most clogged with heavy matter,
+so <i>Nightmare Abbey</i> contains the most unbroken tissue of farcical,
+though not in the least coarsely farcical, incidents and conversations.
+The misanthropic Scythrop (whose habit of Madeira-drinking has made some
+exceedingly literal people sure that he really could not be intended for
+the water-drinking Shelley); his yet gloomier father, Mr. Glowry; his
+intricate entanglements with the lovely Marionetta and the still more
+beautiful Celinda; his fall between the two stools; his resolve to
+commit suicide; the solution of that awkward resolve&mdash;are all simply
+delightful. Extravagant as the thing is, its brevity and the throng of
+incidents and jokes prevent it from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">{248}</a></span> becoming in the least tedious. The
+pessimist-fatalist Mr. Toobad, with his "innumerable proofs of the
+temporary supremacy of the devil," and his catchword "the devil has come
+among us, having great wrath," appears just enough, and not too much.
+The introduced sketch of Byron as Mr. Cypress would be the least happy
+thing of the piece if it did not give occasion for a capital serious
+burlesque of Byronic verse, the lines, "There is a fever of the spirit,"
+which, as better known than most of Peacock's verse, need not be quoted.
+Mr. Flosky, a fresh caricature of Coleridge, is even less like the
+original than Mr. Mystic, but he is much more like a human being, and in
+himself is great fun. An approach to a more charitable view of the
+clergy is discoverable in the curate Mr. Larynx, who, if not extremely
+ghostly, is neither a sot nor a sloven. But the quarrels and
+reconciliations between Scythrop and Marionetta, his invincible
+inability to make up his mind, the mysterious advent of Marionetta's
+rival, and her residence in hidden chambers, the alternate sympathy and
+repulsion between Scythrop and those elder disciples of pessimism, his
+father and Mr. Toobad&mdash;all the contradictions of Shelley's character, in
+short, with a suspicion of the incidents of his life brought into the
+most ludicrous relief, must always form the great charm of the book. A
+tolerably rapid reader may get through it in an hour or so, and there is
+hardly a more delightful hour's reading of anything like the same kind
+in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">{249}</a></span> the English language, either for the incidental strokes of wit and
+humour, or for the easy mastery with which the whole is hit off. It
+contains, moreover, another drinking-catch, "Seamen Three," which,
+though it is, like its companion, better known than most of Peacock's
+songs, may perhaps find a place:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Seamen three! What men be ye?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Gotham's three wise men we be.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whither in your bowl so free?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To rake the moon from out the sea.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The bowl goes trim, the moon doth shine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And our ballast is old wine;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And your ballast is old wine.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Who art thou so fast adrift?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I am he they call Old Care.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Here on board we will thee lift.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No: I may not enter there.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wherefore so? 'Tis Jove's decree<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In a bowl Care may not be;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In a bowl Care may not be.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Fear ye not the waves that roll?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No: in charmèd bowl we swim.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What the charm that floats the bowl?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Water may not pass the brim.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The bowl goes trim, the moon doth shine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And our ballast is old wine;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And your ballast is old wine.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>A third song sung by Marionetta, "Why are thy looks so blank, Grey
+Friar?" is as good in another way; nor should it be forgotten that the
+said Marionetta, who has been thought to have some features of the
+luckless Harriet Shelley, is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">{250}</a></span> Peacock's first lifelike study of a girl,
+and one of his pleasantest.</p>
+
+<p>The book which came out four years after, <i>Maid Marian</i>, has, I believe,
+been much the most popular and the best known of Peacock's short
+romances. It owed this popularity, in great part, doubtless, to the fact
+that the author has altered little in the well-known and delightful old
+story, and has not added very much to its facts, contenting himself with
+illustrating the whole in his own satirical fashion. But there is also
+no doubt that the dramatisation of <i>Maid Marian</i> by Planché and Bishop
+as an operetta helped, if it did not make, its fame. The snatches of
+song through the novel are more frequent than in any other of the books,
+so that Mr. Planché must have had but little trouble with it. Some of
+these snatches are among Peacock's best verse, such as the famous
+"Bramble Song," the great hit of the operetta, the equally well-known
+"Oh, bold Robin Hood," and the charming snatch:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">For the tender beech and the sapling oak,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That grow by the shadowy rill,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You may cut down both at a single stroke,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">You may cut down which you will;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But this you must know, that as long as they grow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Whatever change may be,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You never can teach either oak or beech<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To be aught but a greenwood tree.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This snatch, which, in its mixture of sentiment, truth, and what may be
+excusably called "rollick,"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">{251}</a></span> is very characteristic of its author, and
+is put in the mouth of Brother Michael, practically the hero of the
+piece, and the happiest of the various workings up of Friar Tuck,
+despite his considerable indebtedness to a certain older friar, whom we
+must not call "of the funnels." That Peacock was a Pantagruelist to the
+heart's core is evident in all his work; but his following of Master
+Francis is nowhere clearer than in <i>Maid Marian</i>, and it no doubt helps
+us to understand why those who cannot relish Rabelais should look
+askance at Peacock. For the rest, no book of Peacock's requires such
+brief comment as this charming pastoral, which was probably little less
+in Thackeray's mind than <i>Ivanhoe</i> itself when he wrote <i>Rebecca and
+Rowena</i>. The author draws in (it would be hardly fair to say drags in)
+some of his stock satire on courts, the clergy, the landed gentry, and
+so forth; but the very nature of the subject excludes the somewhat
+tedious digressions which mar <i>Melincourt</i>, and which once or twice
+menace, though they never actually succeed in spoiling, the unbroken fun
+of <i>Nightmare Abbey</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Misfortunes of Elphin</i>, which followed after an interval of seven
+years, is, I believe, the least generally popular of Peacock's works,
+though (not at all for that reason) it happens to be my own favourite.
+The most curious instance of this general unpopularity is the entire
+omission, as far as I am aware, of any reference to it in any of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">{252}</a></span>
+popular guide-books to Wales. One piece of verse, indeed, the "War-song
+of Dinas Vawr," a triumph of easy verse and covert sarcasm, has had some
+vogue, but the rest is only known to Peacockians. The abundance of Welsh
+lore which, at any rate in appearance, it contains, may have had
+something to do with this; though the translations or adaptations,
+whether faithful or not, are the best literary renderings of Welsh known
+to me. Something also, and probably more, is due to the saturation of
+the whole from beginning to end with Peacock's driest humour. Not only
+is the account of the sapping and destruction of the embankment of
+Gwaelod an open and continuous satire on the opposition to Reform, but
+the whole book is written in the spirit and manner of <i>Candide</i>&mdash;a
+spirit and manner which Englishmen have generally been readier to
+relish, when they relish them at all, in another language than in their
+own. The respectable domestic virtues of Elphin and his wife Angharad,
+the blameless loves of Taliesin and the Princess Melanghel, hardly serve
+even as a foil to the satiric treatment of the other characters. The
+careless incompetence of the poetical King Gwythno, the coarser vices of
+other Welsh princes, the marital toleration or blindness of Arthur, the
+cynical frankness of the robber King Melvas, above all, the drunkenness
+of the immortal Seithenyn, give the humorist themes which he caresses
+with inexhaustible affection, but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">{253}</a></span> in a manner no doubt very puzzling,
+if not shocking, to matter-of-fact readers. Seithenyn, the drunken
+prince and dyke-warden, whose carelessness lets in the inundation, is by
+far Peacock's most original creation (for Scythrop, as has been said, is
+rather a humorous distortion of the actual than a creation). His
+complete self-satisfaction, his utter fearlessness of consequences, his
+ready adaptation to whatever part, be it prince or butler, presents
+itself to him, and above all, the splendid topsy-turviness of his
+fashion of argument, make Seithenyn one of the happiest, if not one of
+the greatest, results of whimsical imagination and study of human
+nature. "They have not"&mdash;says the somewhile prince, now King Melvas's
+butler, when Taliesin discovers him twenty years after his supposed
+death&mdash;"they have not made it [his death] known to me, for the best of
+all reasons, that one can only know the truth. For if that which we
+think we know is not truth, it is something which we do not know. A man
+cannot know his own death. For while he knows anything he is alive; at
+least, I never heard of a dead man who knew anything, or pretended to
+know anything: if he had so pretended I should have told him to his face
+that he was no dead man." How nobly consistent is this with his other
+argument in the days of his princedom and his neglect of the embankment!
+Elphin has just reproached him with the proverb, "Wine speaks in the
+silence of reason." "I am very sorry," said Seithenyn,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">{254}</a></span> "that you see
+things in a wrong light. But we will not quarrel, for three reasons:
+first, because you are the son of the king, and may do and say what you
+please without any one having a right to be displeased; second, because
+I never quarrel with a guest, even if he grows riotous in his cups;
+third, because there is nothing to quarrel about. And perhaps that is
+the best reason of the three; or rather the first is the best, because
+you are the son of the king; and the third is the second, that is the
+second best, because there is nothing to quarrel about; and the second
+is nothing to the purpose, because, though guests will grow riotous in
+their cups in spite of my good orderly example, God forbid that I should
+say that is the case with you. And I completely agree in the truth of
+your remark that reason speaks in the silence of wine."</p>
+
+<p><i>Crotchet Castle</i>, the last but one of the series, which was published
+two years after <i>Elphin</i> and nearly thirty before <i>Gryll Grange</i>, has
+been already called the best; and the statement is not inconsistent with
+the description already given of <i>Nightmare Abbey</i> and of <i>Elphin</i>. For
+<i>Nightmare Abbey</i> is chiefly farce, and <i>The Misfortunes of Elphin</i> is
+chiefly sardonic persiflage. <i>Crotchet Castle</i> is comedy of a high and
+varied kind. Peacock has returned in it to the machinery of a country
+house with its visitors, each of whom is more or less of a crotcheteer;
+and has thrown in a little romantic interest in the suit of a certain
+unmoneyed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">{255}</a></span> Captain Fitzchrome to a noble damsel who is expected to marry
+money, as well as in the desertion and subsequent rescue of Susannah
+Touchandgo, daughter of a levanting financier. The charm of the book,
+however, which distinguishes it from all its predecessors, is the
+introduction of characters neither ridiculous nor simply good in the
+persons of the Rev. Dr. Folliott and Lady Clarinda Bossnowl,
+Fitzchrome's beloved. "Lady Clarinda," says the captain, when the said
+Lady Clarinda has been playing off a certain not unladylike practical
+joke on him, "is a very pleasant young lady;" and most assuredly she is,
+a young lady (in the nineteenth century and in prose) of the tribe of
+Beatrice, if not even of Rosalind. As for Dr. Folliott, the author is
+said to have described him as his amends for his earlier clerical
+sketches, and the amends are ample. A stout Tory, a fellow of infinite
+jest, a lover of good living, an inveterate paradoxer, a pitiless
+exposer of current cants and fallacies, and, lastly, a tall man of his
+hands, Dr. Folliott is always delightful, whether he is knocking down
+thieves, or annihilating, in a rather Johnsonian manner, the economist,
+Mr. McQuedy, and the journalist, Mr. Eavesdrop, or laying down the law
+as to the composition of breakfast and supper, or using strong language
+as to "the learned friend" (Brougham), or bringing out, partly by
+opposition and partly by irony, the follies of the transcendentalists,
+the fops, the doctrinaires, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">{256}</a></span> the mediævalists of the party. The
+book, moreover, contains the last and not the least of Peacock's
+admirable drinking-songs:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">If I drink water while this doth last,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">May I never again drink wine;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For how can a man, in his life of a span,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Do anything better than dine?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We'll dine and drink, and say if we think<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That anything better can be;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And when we have dined, wish all mankind<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">May dine as well as we.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And though a good wish will fill no dish,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And brim no cup with sack,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet thoughts will spring as the glasses ring<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To illumine our studious track.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O'er the brilliant dreams of our hopeful schemes<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The light of the flask shall shine;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And we'll sit till day, but we'll find the way<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To drench the world with wine.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The song is good in itself, but it is even more interesting as being the
+last product of Peacock's Anacreontic vein. Almost a generation passed
+before the appearance of his next and last novel, and though there is
+plenty of good eating and drinking in <i>Gryll Grange</i>, the old fine
+rapture had disappeared in society meanwhile, and Peacock obediently
+took note of the disappearance. It is considered, I believe, a mark of
+barbarian tastes to lament the change. But I am not certain that the Age
+of Apollinaris and lectures has yet produced anything that can vie as
+literature with the products of the ages of Wine and Song.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">{257}</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>Gryll Grange</i>, however, in no way deserves the name of a dry stick. It
+is, next to <i>Melincourt</i>, the longest of Peacock's novels, and it is
+entirely free from the drawbacks of the forty-years-older book. Mr.
+Falconer, the hero, who lives in a tower alone with seven lovely and
+discreet foster-sisters, has some resemblances to Mr. Forester, but he
+is much less of a prig. The life and the conversation bear, instead of
+the marks of a young man's writing, the marks of the writing of one who
+has seen the manners and cities of many other men, and the personages
+throughout are singularly lifelike. The loves of the second hero and
+heroine, Lord Curryfin and Miss Niphet, are much more interesting than
+their names would suggest. And the most loquacious person of the book,
+the Rev. Dr. Opimian, if he is somewhat less racy than Dr. Folliott, is
+not less agreeable. One main charm of the novel lies in its vigorous
+criticism of modern society in phases which have not yet passed away.
+"Progress" is attacked with curious ardour; and the battle between
+literature and science, which in our days even Mr. Matthew Arnold waged
+but as one <i>cauponans bellum</i>, is fought with a vigour that is a joy to
+see. It would be rather interesting to know whether Peacock, in planning
+the central incident of the play (an "Aristophanic comedy," satirising
+modern ways), was aware of the existence of Mansel's delightful parody
+of the "Clouds." But "Phrontisterion" has never been widely known<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">{258}</a></span> out
+of Oxford, and the bearing of Peacock's own performance is rather social
+than political. Not the least noteworthy thing in the book is the
+practical apology which is made in it to Scotchmen and political
+economists (two classes whom Peacock had earlier persecuted) in the
+personage of Mr. McBorrowdale, a candid friend of Liberalism, who is
+extremely refreshing. And besides the Aristophanic comedy, <i>Gryll
+Grange</i> contains some of Peacock's most delightful verse, notably the
+really exquisite stanzas on "Love and Age."</p>
+
+<p>The book is the more valuable because of the material it supplies, in
+this and other places, for rebutting the charges that Peacock was a mere
+Epicurean, or a mere carper. Independently of the verses just named, and
+the hardly less perfect "Death of Philemon," the prose conversation
+shows how delicately and with how much feeling he could think on those
+points of life where satire and jollification are out of place. For the
+purely modern man, indeed, it might be well to begin the reading of
+Peacock with <i>Gryll Grange</i>, in order that he may not be set out of
+harmony with his author by the robuster but less familiar tones, as well
+as by the rawer though not less vigorous workmanship, of <i>Headlong Hall</i>
+and its immediate successors. The happy mean between the heart on the
+sleeve and the absence of heart has scarcely been better shown than in
+this latest novel.</p>
+
+<p>I have no space here to go through the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">{259}</a></span> miscellaneous work which
+completes Peacock's literary baggage. His regular poems, all early, are
+very much better than the work of many men who have won a place among
+British poets. His criticism, though not great in amount, is good; and
+he is especially happy in the kind of miscellaneous trifle (such as his
+trilingual poem on a whitebait dinner), which is generally thought
+appropriate to "university wits." But the characteristics of these
+miscellanies are not very different from the characteristics of his
+prose fiction, and, for purposes of discussion, may be included with
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Lord Houghton has defined and explained Peacock's literary idiosyncrasy
+as that of a man of the eighteenth century belated and strayed in the
+nineteenth. It is always easy to improve on a given pattern, but I
+certainly think that this definition of Lord Houghton's (which, it
+should be said, is not given in his own words) needs a little
+improvement. For the differences which strike us in Peacock&mdash;the easy
+joviality, the satirical view of life, the contempt of formulas and of
+science&mdash;though they certainly distinguish many chief literary men of
+the eighteenth century from most chief literary men of the nineteenth,
+are not specially characteristic of the eighteenth century itself. They
+are found in the seventeenth, in the Renaissance, in classical
+antiquity&mdash;wherever, in short, the art of letters and the art of life
+have had comparatively free play. The chief differentia of Peacock<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">{260}</a></span> is a
+differentia common among men of letters; that is to say, among men of
+letters who are accustomed to society, who take no sacerdotal or
+singing-robe view of literature, who appreciate the distinction which
+literary cultivation gives them over the herd of mankind, but who by no
+means take that distinction too seriously. Aristophanes, Horace, Lucian,
+Rabelais, Montaigne, Saint-Evremond, these are all Peacock's literary
+ancestors, each, of course, with his own difference in especial and in
+addition. Aristophanes was more of a politician and a patriot, Lucian
+more of a freethinker, Horace more of a simple <i>pococurante</i>. Rabelais
+may have had a little inclination to science itself (he would soon have
+found it out if he had lived a little later), Montaigne may have been
+more of a pure egotist, Saint-Evremond more of a man of society, and of
+the verse and prose of society. But they all had the same <i>ethos</i>, the
+same love of letters as letters, the same contempt of mere progress as
+progress, the same relish for the simpler and more human pleasures, the
+same good fellowship, the same tendency to escape from the labyrinth of
+life's riddles by what has been called the humour-gate, the same
+irreconcilable hatred of stupidity and vulgarity and cant. The
+eighteenth century has, no doubt, had its claim to be regarded as the
+special flourishing time of this mental state urged by many others
+besides Lord Houghton; but I doubt whether the claim can be sustained,
+at any<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">{261}</a></span> rate to the detriment of other times, and the men of other
+times. That century took itself too seriously&mdash;a fault fatal to the
+claim at once. Indeed, the truth is that while this attitude has in some
+periods been very rare, it cannot be said to be the peculiar, still less
+the universal, characteristic of any period. It is a personal not a
+periodic distinction; and there are persons who might make out a fair
+claim to it even in the depths of the Middle Ages or of the nineteenth
+century.</p>
+
+<p>However this may be, Peacock certainly held the theory of those who take
+life easily, who do not love anything very much except old books, old
+wine, and a few other things, not all of which perhaps need be old, who
+are rather inclined to see the folly of it than the pity of it, and who
+have an invincible tendency, if they tilt at anything at all, to tilt at
+the prevailing cants and arrogances of the time. These cants and
+arrogances of course vary. The position occupied by monkery at one time
+may be occupied by physical science at another; and a belief in graven
+images may supply in the third century the target, which is supplied by
+a belief in the supreme wisdom of majorities in the nineteenth. But the
+general principles&mdash;the cult of the Muses and the Graces for their own
+sake, and the practice of satiric archery at the follies of the
+day&mdash;appear in all the elect of this particular election, and they
+certainly appear in Peacock. The results no doubt are distasteful, not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">{262}</a></span>
+to say shocking, to some excellent people. It is impossible to avoid a
+slight chuckle when one thinks of the horror with which some such people
+must read Peacock's calm statement, repeated I think more than once,
+that one of his most perfect heroes "found, as he had often found
+before, that the more his mind was troubled, the more madeira he could
+drink without disordering his head." I have no doubt that the United
+Kingdom Alliance, if it knew this dreadful sentence (but probably the
+study of the United Kingdom Alliance is not much in Peacock), would like
+to burn all the copies of <i>Gryll Grange</i> by the hands of Mr. Berry, and
+make the reprinting of it a misdemeanour, if not a felony. But it is not
+necessary to follow Sir Wilfrid Lawson, or to be a believer in
+education, or in telegraphs, or in majorities, in order to feel the
+repulsion which some people evidently feel for the manner of Peacock.
+With one sense absent and another strongly present it is impossible for
+any one to like him. The present sense is that which has been rather
+grandiosely called the sense of moral responsibility in literature. The
+absent sense is that sixth, seventh, or eighth sense, called a sense of
+humour, and about this there is no arguing. Those who have it, instead
+of being quietly and humbly thankful, are perhaps a little too apt to
+celebrate their joy in the face of the afflicted ones who have it not;
+the afflicted ones, who have it not, only follow a general law in
+protesting that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">{263}</a></span> the sense of humour is a very worthless thing, if not a
+complete humbug. But there are others of whom it would be absurd to say
+that they have no sense of humour, and yet who cannot place themselves
+at the Peacockian point of view, or at the point of view of those who
+like Peacock. His humour is not their humour; his wit not their wit.
+Like one of his own characters (who did not show his usual wisdom in the
+remark), they "must take pleasure in the thing represented before they
+can take pleasure in the representation." And in the things that Peacock
+represents they do not take pleasure. That gentlemen should drink a
+great deal of burgundy and sing songs during the process, appears to
+them at the best childish, at the worst horribly wrong. The
+prince-butler Seithenyn is a reprobate old man, who was unfaithful to
+his trust and shamelessly given to sensual indulgence. Dr. Folliott, as
+a parish priest, should not have drunk so much wine; and it would have
+been much more satisfactory to hear more of Dr. Opimian's sermons and
+district visiting, and less of his dinners with Squire Gryll and Mr.
+Falconer. Peacock's irony on social and political arrangements is all
+sterile, all destructive, and the sentiment that "most opinions that
+have anything to be said for them are about two thousand years old" is a
+libel on mankind. They feel, in short, for Peacock the animosity,
+mingled with contempt, which the late M. Amiel felt for "clever
+mockers."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">{264}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is probably useless to argue with any such. It might, indeed, be
+urged in all seriousness that the Peacockian attitude is not in the
+least identical with the Mephistophelian; that it is based simply on the
+very sober and arguable ground that human nature is always very much the
+same, liable to the same delusions and the same weaknesses; and that the
+oldest things are likely to be best, not for any intrinsic or mystical
+virtue of antiquity, but because they have had most time to be found out
+in, and have not been found out. It may further be argued, as it has
+often been argued before, that the use of ridicule as a general
+criterion can do no harm, and may do much good. If the thing ridiculed
+be of God, it will stand; if it be not, the sooner it is laughed off the
+face of the earth the better. But there is probably little good in
+urging all this. Just as a lover of the greatest of Greek dramatists
+must recognise at once that it would be perfectly useless to attempt to
+argue Lord Coleridge out of the idea that Aristophanes, though a genius,
+was vulgar and base of soul, so to go a good deal lower in the scale of
+years, and somewhat lower in the scale of genius, everybody who rejoices
+in the author of "Aristophanes in London" must see that he has no chance
+of converting Mrs. Oliphant, or any other person who does not like
+Peacock. The middle term is not present, the disputants do not in fact
+use the same language. The only thing to do is to recommend this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">{265}</a></span>
+particular pleasure to those who are capable of being pleased by it, and
+to whom, as no doubt it is to a great number, it is pleasure yet
+untried.</p>
+
+<p>It is well to go about enjoying it with a certain caution. The reader
+must not expect always to agree with Peacock, who not only did not
+always agree with himself, but was also a man of almost ludicrously
+strong prejudices. He hated paper money; whereas the only feeling that
+most of us have on that subject is that we have not always as much of it
+as we should like. He hated Scotchmen, and there are many of his readers
+who without any claim to Scotch blood, but knowing the place and the
+people, will say,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">That better wine and better men<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We shall not meet in May,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>or for the matter of that in any other month. Partly because he hated
+Scotchmen, and partly because in his earlier days Sir Walter was a
+pillar of Toryism, he hated Scott, and has been guilty not merely of an
+absurd and no doubt partly humorous comparison of the Waverley novels to
+pantomimes, but of more definite criticisms which will bear the test of
+examination as badly. His strictures on a famous verse of "The Dream of
+Fair Women" are indefensible, though there is perhaps more to be said
+for the accompanying gibe at Sir John Millais's endeavour to carry out
+the description of Cleopatra in black (chiefly black)<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">{266}</a></span> and white. The
+reader of Peacock must never mind his author trampling on his, the
+reader's, favourite corns; or rather he must lay his account with the
+agreeable certainty that Peacock will shortly afterwards trample on
+other corns which are not at all his favourites. For my part I am quite
+willing to accept these conditions. And I do not find that my admiration
+for Coleridge, and my sympathy with those who opposed the first Reform
+Bill, and my inclination to dispute the fact that Oxford is only a place
+of "unread books," make me like Peacock one whit the less. It is the law
+of the game, and those who play the game must put up with its laws. And
+it must be remembered that, at any rate in his later and best books,
+Peacock never wholly "took a side." He has always provided some
+personage or other who reduces all the whimsies and prejudices of his
+characters, even including his own, under a kind of dry light. Such is
+Lady Clarinda, who regards all the crotcheteers of Crotchet Castle with
+the same benevolent amusement; such Mr. McBorrowdale, who, when he is
+requested to settle the question of the superiority or inferiority of
+Greek harmony and perspective to modern, replies, "I think ye may just
+buz that bottle before you." (Alas! to think that if a man used the word
+"buz" nowadays some wiseacre would accuse him of vulgarity or of false
+English.) The general criticism in his work is always sane and vigorous,
+even though there may<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">{267}</a></span> be flaws in the particular censures; and it is
+very seldom that even in his utterances of most flagrant prejudice
+anything really illiberal can be found. He had read much too widely and
+with too much discrimination for that. His reading had been corrected by
+too much of the cheerful give-and-take of social discussion, his dry
+light was softened and coloured by too frequent rainbows, the Apollonian
+rays being reflected on Bacchic dew. Anything that might otherwise seem
+hard and harsh in Peacock's perpetual ridicule is softened and mellowed
+by this pervading good fellowship which, as it is never pushed to the
+somewhat extravagant limits of the <i>Noctes Ambrosianæ</i>, so it
+distinguishes Peacock himself from the authors to whom in pure style he
+is most akin, and to whom Lord Houghton has already compared him&mdash;the
+French tale-tellers from Anthony Hamilton to Voltaire. In these, perfect
+as their form often is, there is constantly a slight want of geniality,
+a perpetual clatter and glitter of intellectual rapier and dagger which
+sometimes becomes rather irritating and teasing to ear and eye. Even the
+objects of Peacock's severest sarcasm, his Galls and Vamps and
+Eavesdrops, are allowed to join in the choruses and the bumpers of his
+easy-going symposia. The sole nexus is not cash payment but something
+much more agreeable, and it is allowed that even Mr. Mystic had "some
+super-excellent madeira." Yet how far the wine is from getting above the
+wit in these merry books<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">{268}</a></span> is not likely to escape even the most
+unsympathetic reader. The mark may be selected recklessly or unjustly,
+but the arrows always fly straight to it.</p>
+
+<p>Peacock, in short, has eminently that quality of literature which may be
+called recreation. It may be that he is not extraordinarily instructive,
+though there is a good deal of quaint and not despicable erudition
+wrapped up in his apparently careless pages. It may be that he does not
+prove much; that he has, in fact, very little concern to prove anything.
+But in one of the only two modes of refreshment and distraction possible
+in literature, he is a very great master. The first of these modes is
+that of creation&mdash;that in which the writer spirits his readers away into
+some scene and manner of life quite different from that with which they
+are ordinarily conversant. With this Peacock, even in his professed
+poetical work, has not very much to do; and in his novels, even in <i>Maid
+Marian</i>, he hardly attempts it. The other is the mode of satirical
+presentment of well-known and familiar things, and this is all his own.
+Even his remotest subjects are near enough to be in a manner familiar,
+and <i>Gryll Grange</i>, with a few insignificant changes of names and
+current follies, might have been written yesterday. He is, therefore,
+not likely for a long time to lose the freshness and point which, at any
+rate for the ordinary reader, are required in satirical handlings of
+ordinary life; while his purely literary merits, especially his grasp<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">{269}</a></span>
+of the perennial follies and characters of humanity, of the <i>ludicrum
+humani generis</i> which never varies much in substance under its
+ever-varying dress, are such as to assure him life even after the
+immediate peculiarities which he satirised have ceased to be anything
+but history.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">{270}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IX" id="IX"></a>IX<br />
+<br />
+WILSON</h2>
+
+
+<p>Among those judgments of his contemporaries which make a sort of Inferno
+of the posthumous writings of Thomas Carlyle, that passed upon
+"Christopher North" has always seemed to me the most interesting, and
+perhaps on the whole the fairest. There is enough and to spare of
+onesidedness in it, and of the harshness which comes from onesidedness.
+But it is hardly at all sour, and, when allowance is made for the point
+of view, by no means unjust. The whole is interesting from the literary
+side, but as it fills two large pages it is much too long to quote. The
+personal description, "the broad-shouldered stately bulk of the man
+struck me: his flashing eye, copious dishevelled head of hair, and rapid
+unconcerned progress like that of a plough through stubble," is
+characteristically graphic, and far the best of the numerous pen
+sketches of "the Professor." As for the criticism, the following is the
+kernel passage of it:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">{271}</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Wilson had much nobleness of heart and many traits of noble
+genius, but the central tie-beam seemed wanting always; very long
+ago I perceived in him the most irreconcilable contradictions:
+Toryism with sansculottism; Methodism of a sort with total
+incredulity; a noble loyal and religious nature not strong enough
+to vanquish the perverse element it is born into. Hence a being
+all split into precipitous chasms and the wildest volcanic
+tumults; rocks over-grown indeed with tropical luxuriance of leaf
+and flower but knit together at the bottom&mdash;that was my old
+figure of speech&mdash;only by an ocean of whisky punch. On these
+terms nothing can be done. Wilson seems to me always by far the
+most <i>gifted</i> of our literary men either then or still. And yet
+intrinsically he has written nothing that can endure. The central
+gift was wanting.</p></div>
+
+<p>Something in the unfavourable part of this must no doubt be set down to
+the critic's usual forgetfulness of his own admirable dictum, "he is not
+thou, but himself; other than thou." John was quite other than Thomas,
+and Thomas judged him somewhat summarily as if he were a failure of a
+Thomas. Yet the criticism, if partly harsh and as a whole somewhat
+incomplete, is true enough. Wilson has written "intrinsically nothing
+that can endure," if it be judged by any severe test. An English
+Diderot, he must bear a harder version of the judgment on Diderot, that
+he had written good pages but no good book. Only very rarely has he even
+written good pages, in the sense of pages good throughout. The almost
+inconceivable haste with which he wrote (he is credited with having on
+one occasion actually written fifty-six pages of print for <i>Blackwood</i>
+in two days, and in the years<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">{272}</a></span> of its double numbers he often
+contributed from a hundred to a hundred and fifty pages in a single
+month)&mdash;this prodigious haste would not of itself account for the
+puerilities, the touches of bad taste, the false pathos, the tedious
+burlesque, the more tedious jactation which disfigure his work. A man
+writing against time may be driven to dulness, or commonplace, or
+inelegance of style; but he need never commit any of the faults just
+noticed. They were due beyond doubt, in Wilson's case, to a natural
+idiosyncrasy, the great characteristic of which Carlyle has happily hit
+off in the phrase, "want of a tie-beam," whether he has or has not been
+charitable in suggesting that the missing link was supplied by whisky
+punch. The least attractive point about Wilson's work is undoubtedly
+what his censor elsewhere describes as his habit of "giving a kick" to
+many men and things. There is no more unpleasant feature of the <i>Noctes</i>
+than the apparent inability of the writer to refrain from sly "kicks"
+even at the objects of his greatest veneration. A kind of mania of
+detraction seizes him at times, a mania which some of his admirers have
+more kindly than wisely endeavoured to shuffle off as a humorous
+dramatic touch intentionally administered to him by his Eidolon North.
+The most disgraceful, perhaps the only really disgraceful, instance of
+this is the carping and offensive criticism of Scott's <i>Demonology</i>,
+written and published at a time when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">{273}</a></span> Sir Walter's known state of health
+and fortunes might have protected him even from an enemy, much more from
+a friend, and a deeply obliged friend such as Wilson. Nor is this the
+only fling at Scott. Wordsworth, much more vulnerable, is also much more
+frequently assailed; and even Shakespeare does not come off scot-free
+when Wilson is in his ugly moods.</p>
+
+<p>It need hardly be said that I have no intention of saying that Scott or
+Wordsworth or Shakespeare may not be criticised. It is the way in which
+the criticism is done which is the crime; and for these acts of literary
+high treason, or at least leasing-making, as well as for all Wilson's
+other faults, nothing seems to me so much responsible as the want of
+bottom which Carlyle notes. I do not think that Wilson had any solid
+fund of principles, putting morals and religion aside, either in
+politics or in literature. He liked and he hated much and strongly, and
+being a healthy creature he on the whole liked the right things and
+hated the wrong ones; but it was for the most part a merely instinctive
+liking and hatred, quite un-coördinated, and by no means unlikely to
+pass the next moment into hatred or liking as the case might be.</p>
+
+<p>These are grave faults. But for the purpose of providing that pleasure
+which is to be got from literature (and this, like one or two other
+chapters here, is partly an effort in literary hedonism) Wilson stands
+very high, indeed so high that he can be ranked only below the highest.
+He who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">{274}</a></span> will enjoy him must be an intelligent voluptuary, and especially
+well versed in the art of skipping. When Wilson begins to talk fine,
+when he begins to wax pathetic, and when he gets into many others of his
+numerous altitudes, it will behove the reader, according to his own
+tastes, to skip with discretion and vigour. If he cannot do this, if his
+eye is not wary enough, or if his conscience forbids him to obey his
+eyes' warnings, Wilson is not for him. It is true that Mr. Skelton has
+tried to make a "Comedy of the <i>Noctes Ambrosianæ</i>," in which the
+skipping is done ready to hand. But, with all the respect due to the
+author of <i>Thalatta</i>, the process is not, at least speaking according to
+my judgment, successful. No one can really taste that eccentric book
+unless he reads it as a whole; its humours arbitrarily separated and
+cut-and-dried are nearly unintelligible. Indeed Professor Ferrier's
+original attempt to give Wilson's work only, and not all of that work
+when it happened to be mixed with others, seems to me to have been a
+mistake. But of that further, when we come to speak of the <i>Noctes</i>
+themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Wilson's life, for more than two-thirds of it a very happy one and not
+devoid of a certain eventfulness, can be summarised pretty briefly,
+especially as a full account of it is available in the very delightful
+work of his daughter Mrs. Gordon. Born in 1785, the son of a rich
+manufacturer of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">{275}</a></span> Paisley and a mother who boasted gentle blood, he was
+brought up first in the house of a country minister (whose parish he has
+made famous in several sketches), then at the University of Glasgow, and
+then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was early left possessor of a
+considerable fortune, and his first love, a certain "Margaret," having
+proved unkind, he established himself at Elleray on Windermere and
+entered into all the Lake society. Before very long (he was twenty-six
+at the time) he married Miss Jane Penny, daughter of a Liverpool
+merchant, and kept open house at Elleray for some years. Then his
+fortune disappeared in the keeping of a dishonest relation, and he had,
+in a way, his livelihood to make. I say "in a way," because the wind
+appears to have been considerably tempered to this shorn but robust
+lamb. He had not even to give up Elleray, though he could not live there
+in his old style. He had a mother who was able and willing to entertain
+him at Edinburgh, on the sole understanding that he did not "turn Whig,"
+of which there was very little danger. He was enabled to keep not too
+exhausting or anxious terms as an advocate at the Scottish bar; and
+before long he was endowed, against the infinitely superior claims of
+Sir William Hamilton, and by sheer force of personal and political
+influence, with the lucrative Professorship of Moral Philosophy in the
+University of Edinburgh. But even before this he had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">{276}</a></span> been exempted from
+the necessity of cultivating literature on a little oatmeal by his
+connexion with <i>Blackwood's Magazine</i>. The story of that magazine has
+often been told; never perhaps quite fully, but sufficiently. Wilson was
+not at any time, strictly speaking, editor; and a statement under his
+own hand avers that he never received any editorial pay, and was
+sometimes subject to that criticism which the publisher, as all men know
+from a famous letter of Scott's, was sometimes in the habit of
+exercising rather indiscreetly. But for a very great number of years,
+there is no doubt that he held a kind of quasi-editorial position, which
+included the censorship of other men's work and an almost, if not quite,
+unlimited right of printing his own. For some time the even more
+masterful spirit of Lockhart (against whom by the way Mrs. Gordon seems
+to have had a rather unreasonable prejudice) qualified his control over
+"Maga." But Lockhart's promotion to the <i>Quarterly</i> removed this
+influence, and from 1825 (speaking roughly) to 1835 Wilson was supreme.
+The death of William Blackwood and of the Ettrick Shepherd in the
+last-named year, and of his own wife in 1837 (the latter a blow from
+which he never recovered), strongly affected not his control over the
+publication but his desire to control it; and after 1839 his
+contributions (save in the years 1845 and 1848) were very few. Ill
+health and broken spirits disabled him, and in 1852 he had to resign<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">{277}</a></span>
+his professorship, dying two years later after some months of almost
+total prostration. Of the rest of the deeds of Christopher, and of his
+pugilism, and of his learning, and of his pedestrian exploits, and of
+his fishing, and of his cock-fighting, and of his hearty enjoyment of
+life generally, the books of the chronicles of Mrs. Gordon, and still
+more the twelve volumes of his works and the unreprinted contributions
+to <i>Blackwood</i>, shall tell.</p>
+
+<p>It is with those works that our principal business is, and some of them
+I shall take the liberty of at once dismissing. His poems are now
+matters of interest to very few mortals. It is not that they are bad,
+for they are not; but that they are almost wholly without distinction.
+He came just late enough to have got the seed of the great romantic
+revival; and his verse work is rarely more than the work of a clever man
+who has partly learnt and partly divined the manner of Burns, Scott,
+Campbell, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, and the rest. Nor, to my fancy,
+are his prose tales of much more value. I read them many years ago and
+cared little for them. I re-read, or attempted to re-read, them the
+other day and cared less. There seems, from the original prospectus of
+the edition of his works, to have been an intention of editing the
+course of moral philosophy which, with more or fewer variations,
+obtained him the agreeable income of a thousand a year or so for thirty
+years. But whether (as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">{278}</a></span> Mrs. Gordon seems to hint) the notes were in too
+dilapidated and chaotic a condition for use, or whether Professor
+Ferrier, his son-in-law and editor (himself, with Dean Mansel, the last
+of the exact philosophers of Britain), revolted at the idea of printing
+anything so merely literary, or what it was, I know not&mdash;at any rate
+they do not now figure in the list. This leaves us ten volumes of
+collected works, to wit, four of the <i>Noctes Ambrosianæ</i>, four of
+<i>Essays Critical and Imaginative</i>, and two of <i>The Recreations of
+Christopher North</i>, all with a very few exceptions reprinted from
+<i>Blackwood</i>. Mrs. Gordon filially groans because the reprint was not
+more extensive, and without endorsing her own very high opinion of her
+father's work, it is possible to agree with her. It is especially
+noteworthy that from the essays are excluded three out of the four chief
+critical series which Wilson wrote&mdash;that on Spenser, praised by a writer
+so little given to reckless praise as Hallam, the <i>Specimens of British
+Critics</i>, and the <i>Dies Boreales</i>,&mdash;leaving only the series on Homer
+with its quasi-Appendix on the Greek dramatists, and the <i>Noctes</i>
+themselves.</p>
+
+<p>It must be confessed that the <i>Noctes Ambrosianæ</i> are not easy things to
+commend to the modern reader, if I may use the word commend in its
+proper sense and with no air of patronage. Even Scotchmen (perhaps,
+indeed, Scotchmen most of all) are wont nowadays to praise them rather
+apologetically, as may be seen in the case<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">{279}</a></span> of their editor and abridger
+Mr. Skelton. Like most other very original things they drew after them a
+flock of imbecile imitations; and up to the present day those who have
+lived in the remoter parts of Scotland must know, or recently remember,
+dreary compositions in corrupt following of the <i>Noctes</i>, with
+exaggerated attempts at Christopher's worst mannerisms, and invariably
+including a ghastly caricature of the Shepherd. Even in themselves they
+abound in stumbling-blocks, which are perhaps multiplied, at least at
+the threshold, by the arbitrary separation in Ferrier's edition of
+Wilson's part, and not all his part, from the whole series; eighteen
+numbers being excluded bodily to begin with, while many more and parts
+of more are omitted subsequently. The critical mistake of this is
+evident, for much of the machinery and all the characters of the
+<i>Noctes</i> were given to, not by, Wilson, and in all probability he
+accepted them not too willingly. The origin of the fantastic personages,
+the creation of which was a perfect mania with the early contributors to
+<i>Blackwood</i>, and who are, it is to be feared, too often a nuisance to
+modern readers, is rather dubious. Maginn's friends have claimed the
+origination of the <i>Noctes</i> proper, and of its well-known motto
+paraphrased from Phocylides, for "The Doctor," or, if his chief
+<i>Blackwood</i> designation be preferred, for the Ensign&mdash;Ensign O'Doherty.
+Professor Ferrier, on the other hand,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">{280}</a></span> has shown a not unnatural but by
+no means critical or exact desire to hint that Wilson invented the
+whole. There is no doubt that the real original is to be found in the
+actual suppers at "Ambrose's." These Lockhart had described, in <i>Peter's
+Letters</i>, before the appearance of the first <i>Noctes</i> (the reader must
+not be shocked, the false concord is invariable in the book itself) and
+not long after the establishment of "Maga." As was the case with the
+magazine generally, the early numbers were extremely local and extremely
+personal. Wilson's glory is that he to a great extent, though not
+wholly, lifted them out of this rut, when he became the chief if not the
+sole writer after Lockhart's removal to London, and, with rare
+exceptions, reduced the personages to three strongly marked and very
+dramatic characters, Christopher North himself, the Ettrick Shepherd,
+and "Tickler." All these three were in a manner portraits, but no one is
+a mere photograph from a single person. On the whole, however, I suspect
+that Christopher North is a much closer likeness, if not of what Wilson
+himself was, yet at any rate of what he would have liked to be, than
+some of his apologists maintain. These charitable souls excuse the
+egotism, the personality, the violence, the inconsistency, the absurd
+assumption of omniscience and Admirable-Crichtonism, on the plea that
+"Christopher" is only the ideal Editor and not the actual Professor. It
+is quite<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">{281}</a></span> true that Wilson, who, like all men of humour, must have known
+his own foibles, not unfrequently satirises them; but it is clear from
+his other work and from his private letters that they <i>were</i> his
+foibles. The figure of the Shepherd, who is the chief speaker and on the
+whole the most interesting, is a more debatable one. It is certain that
+many of Hogg's friends, and, in his touchy moments he himself,
+considered that great liberty was taken with him, if not that (as the
+<i>Quarterly</i> put it in a phrase which evidently made Wilson very angry)
+he was represented as a mere "boozing buffoon." On the other hand it is
+equally certain that the Shepherd never did anything that exhibited half
+the power over thought and language which is shown in the best passages
+of his <i>Noctes</i> eidolon. Some of the adventures described as having
+happened to him are historically known as having happened to Wilson
+himself, and his sentiments are much more the writer's than the
+speaker's. At the same time the admirably imitated patois and the subtle
+rendering of Hogg's very well known foibles&mdash;his inordinate and
+stupendous vanity, his proneness to take liberties with his betters, his
+irritable temper, and the rest&mdash;give a false air of identity which is
+very noteworthy. The third portrait is said to have been the farthest
+from life, except in some physical peculiarities, of the three.
+"Tickler," whose original was Wilson's maternal uncle Robert Sym, an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">{282}</a></span>
+Edinburgh "writer," and something of a humorist in the flesh, is very
+skilfully made to hold the position of common-sense intermediary between
+the two originals, North and the Shepherd. He has his own peculiarities,
+but he has also a habit of bringing his friends down from their
+altitudes in a Voltairian fashion which is of great benefit to the
+dialogues, and may be compared to Peacock's similar use of some of his
+characters. The few occasional interlocutors are of little moment, with
+one exception; and the only female characters, Mrs. and Miss Gentle,
+would have been very much better away. They are not in the least
+lifelike, and usually exhibit the namby-pambiness into which Wilson too
+often fell when he wished to be refined and pathetic. The "English" or
+half-English characters, who come in sometimes as foils, are also rather
+of the stick, sticky. On the other hand, the interruptions of Ambrose,
+the host, and his household, though a little farcical, are well judged.
+And of the one exception above mentioned, the live Thomas De Quincey,
+who is brought in without disguise or excuse in some of the very best of
+the series, it can only be said that the imitation of his written style
+is extraordinary, and that men who knew his conversation say that the
+rendering of that is more extraordinary still.</p>
+
+<p>The same designed exaggeration which some uncritical persons have called
+Rabelaisian (not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">{283}</a></span> noticing that the very fault of the <i>Noctes</i> is that,
+unlike Rabelais, their author mixes up probabilities and improbabilities
+so that there is a perpetual jarring) is maintained throughout the
+scenery and etceteras. The comfortable but modest accommodations of
+Ambrose's hotels in Gabriel's Road and Picardy Place are turned into
+abodes of not particularly tasteful luxury which put Lord Beaconsfield's
+famous upholstery to shame, and remind one of what they probably
+suggested, Edgar Poe's equally famous and much more terrible sketch of a
+model drawing-room. All the plate is carefully described as "silver"; if
+it had been gold there might have been some humour in it. The "wax"
+candles and "silken" curtains (if they had been <i>Arabian Nights</i> lamps
+and oriental drapery the same might be said) are always insisted on. If
+there is any joke here it seems to lie in the contrast with Wilson's
+actual habits, which were very simple. For instance, he gives us a
+gorgeous description of the apparatus of North's solitary confinement
+when writing for <i>Blackwood</i>; his daughter's unvarnished account of the
+same process agrees exactly as to time, rate of production, and so
+forth, but substitutes water for the old hock and "Scots pint" (magnum)
+of claret, a dirty little terra-cotta inkstand for the silver utensil of
+the <i>Noctes</i>, and a single large tallow candle for Christopher's "floods
+of light." He carried the whim so far as to construct for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">{284}</a></span> himself&mdash;his
+<i>Noctes</i> self&mdash;an imaginary hall-by-the-sea on the Firth of Forth, which
+in the same way seems to have had an actual resemblance, half of
+likeness, half of contrast, to the actual Elleray, and to enlarge his
+own comfortable town house in Gloucester Place to a sort of fairy palace
+in Moray Place. But that which has most puzzled and shocked readers are
+the specially Gargantuan passages relating to eating and drinking. The
+comments made on this seem (he was anything but patient of criticism) to
+have annoyed Wilson very much; and in some of the later <i>Noctes</i> he
+drops hints that the whole is mere Barmecide business. Unfortunately the
+same criticism applies to this as to the upholstery&mdash;the exaggeration is
+"done too natural." The Shepherd's consumption of oysters not by dozens
+but by fifties, the allowance of "six common kettles-full of water" for
+the night's toddy ration of the three, North's above-mentioned bottle of
+old hock at dinner and magnum of claret after, the dinners and suppers
+and "whets" which appear so often;&mdash;all these stop short of the actually
+incredible, and are nothing more than extremely convivial men of the
+time, who were also large eaters, would have actually consumed. Lord
+Alvanley's three hearty suppers, the exploits of the old member of
+Parliament in Boz's sketch of Bellamy's (I forget his real name, but he
+was not a myth), and other things might be quoted to show that there is
+a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">{285}</a></span> fatal verisimilitude in the Ambrosian feasts which may, or may not,
+make them shocking (they don't shock me), but which certainly takes them
+out of the category of merely humorous exaggeration. The Shepherd's
+"jugs" numerous as they are (and by the way the Shepherd propounds two
+absolutely contradictory theories of toddy-making, one of which,
+according to the instructions of my preceptors in that art, who lived
+within sight of the hills that look down on Glenlivet, is a damnable
+heresy) are not in the least like the <i>seze muiz, deux bussars, et six
+tupins</i> of tripe that Gargamelle so rashly devoured. There are men now
+living, and honoured members of society in Scotland, who admit the soft
+impeachment of having drunk in their youth twelve or fourteen "double"
+tumblers at a sitting. Now a double tumbler, be it known to the
+Southron, is a jorum of toddy to which there go two wineglasses (of
+course of the old-fashioned size, not our modern goblets) of whisky.
+"Indeed," said a humorous and indulgent lady correspondent of Wilson's,
+"indeed, I really think you eat too many oysters at the <i>Noctes</i>;" and
+any one who believes in distributive justice must admit that they did.</p>
+
+<p>If, therefore, the reader is of the modern cutlet-and-cup-of-coffee
+school of feeding, he will no doubt find the <i>Noctes</i> most grossly and
+palpably gluttonous. If he be a very superior person he will smile at
+the upholstery. If he objects to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">{286}</a></span> horseplay he will be horrified at
+finding the characters on one occasion engaging in a regular "mill," on
+more than one corking each other's faces during slumber, sometimes
+playing at pyramids like the bounding brothers of acrobatic fame, at
+others indulging in leap-frog with the servants, permitting themselves
+practical jokes of all kinds, affecting to be drowned by an explosive
+haggis, and so forth. Every now and then he will come to a passage at
+which, without being superfine at all, he may find his gorge rise;
+though there is nothing quite so bad in the <i>Noctes</i> as the picture of
+the ravens eating a dead Quaker in the <i>Recreations</i>, a picture for
+which Wilson offers a very lame defence elsewhere. He must put all sorts
+of prejudice, literary, political, and other, in his pocket. He must be
+prepared not only for constant and very scurrilous flings at "Cockneys"
+(Wilson extends the term far beyond the Hunt and Hazlitt school, an
+extension which to this day seems to give a strange delight to Edinburgh
+journalists), but for the wildest heterodoxies and inconsistencies of
+political, literary, and miscellaneous judgment, for much bastard
+verse-prose, for a good many quite uninteresting local and ephemeral
+allusions, and, of course, for any quantity of Scotch dialect. If all
+these allowances and provisos are too many for him to make, it is
+probably useless for him to attempt the <i>Noctes</i> at all. He will pretty
+certainly, with the <i>Quarterly</i> reviewer, set their characters down as
+boozing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">{287}</a></span> buffoons, and decline the honour of an invitation to Ambrose's
+or The Lodge, to Southside or the tent in Ettrick Forest.</p>
+
+<p>But any one who can accommodate himself to these little matters, much
+more any one who can enter into the spirit of days merrier, more
+leisurely, and if not less straitlaced than our own, yet lacing their
+laces in a different fashion, will find the <i>Noctes</i> very delightful
+indeed. The mere high jinks, when the secret of being in the vein with
+them has been mastered, are seldom unamusing, and sometimes (notably in
+the long swim out to sea of Tickler and the Shepherd) are quite
+admirable fooling. No one who has an eye for the literary-dramatic can
+help, after a few <i>Noctes</i> have been read, admiring the skill with which
+the characters are at once typified and individualised, the substance
+which they acquire in the reader's mind, the personal interest in them
+which is excited. And to all this, peculiarly suited for an alterative
+in these solemn days, has to be added the abundance of scattered and
+incomplete but remarkable gems of expression and thought that come at
+every few pages, sometimes at every page, of the series.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the burlesque narratives (such as the Shepherd's Mazeppa-like
+ride on the Bonassus) are inimitably good, though they are too often
+spoilt by Wilson's great faults of prolixity and uncertainty of touch.
+The criticisms, of which there are many, are also extremely unequal,
+but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">{288}</a></span> not a few very fine passages may be found among them. The politics,
+it must be owned, are not good for much, even from the Tory point of
+view. But the greatest attraction of the whole, next to its sunshiny
+heartiness and humour, is to be found in innumerable and indescribable
+bits, phrases, sentences, short paragraphs, which have, more than
+anything out of the dialogues of the very best novels, the character and
+charm of actual conversation. To read a <i>Noctes</i> has, for those who have
+the happy gift of realising literature, not much less than the effect of
+actually taking part in one, with no danger of headache or indigestion
+after, and without the risk of being playfully corked, or required to
+leap the table for a wager, or forced to extemporise sixteen stanzas
+standing on the mantelpiece. There must be some peculiar virtue in this,
+for, as is very well known, the usual dialogue leaves the reader more
+outside of it than almost any other kind of literature.</p>
+
+<p>This peculiar charm is of necessity wanting to the rest of Wilson's
+works, and in so far they are inferior to the <i>Noctes</i>; but they have
+compensatory merits of their own, while, considered merely as
+literature, there are better things in them than anything that is to be
+found in the colloquies of those men of great gormandising
+abilities&mdash;Christopher North, James Hogg, and Timothy Tickler. Of the
+four volumes of <i>Essays Critical and Imaginative</i>, the fourth, on Homer
+and his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">{289}</a></span> translators, with an unfinished companion piece on the Greek
+drama, stands by itself, and has indeed, I believe, been separately
+published. It is well worth reading through at a sitting, which cannot
+be said of every volume of criticism. What is more, it may, I think, be
+put almost first in its own division of the art, though whether that
+division of the art is a high or low one is another question. I should
+not myself rank it very high. With Wilson, criticism, at least here, is
+little more than the eloquent expression of likes and dislikes. The long
+passages in which he deals with the wrath of Achilles and with the love
+of Calypso, though subject to the general stricture already more than
+once passed, are really beautiful specimens of literary enthusiasm; nor
+is there anything in English more calculated to initiate the reader,
+especially the young reader, in the love at least, if not the
+understanding, of Homer. The same enthusiastic and obviously quite
+genuine appreciation appears in the essay on the "Agamemnon." But of
+criticism as criticism&mdash;of what has been called tracing of literary
+cause and effect, of any coherent and co-ordinated theory of the good
+and bad in verse and prose, and the reasons of their goodness or
+badness, it must be said of this, as of Wilson's other critical work,
+that it is to be found <i>nusquam nullibi nullimodis</i>. He can preach
+(though with too great volubility, and with occasional faults of taste)
+delightful sermons about<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">{290}</a></span> what he likes at the moment&mdash;for it is by no
+means always the same; and he can make formidable onslaughts with
+various weapons on what he dislikes at the moment&mdash;which again is not
+always the same. But a man so certain to go off at score whenever his
+likes or dislikes are excited, and so absolutely unable to check himself
+whenever he feels tempted thus to go off, lacks the very first
+qualifications of the critic:&mdash;lacks them, indeed, almost as much as the
+mere word-grinder who looks to see whether a plural substantive has a
+singular verb, and is satisfied if it has not, and horrified if it has.
+His most famous sentence "The Animosities are mortal, but the Humanities
+live for ever" is certainly noble. But it would have been better if the
+Humanities had oftener choked the Animosities at their birth.</p>
+
+<p>Wilson's criticism is to be found more or less everywhere in his
+collected writings. I have said that I think it a pity that, of his
+longest critical attempts, only one has been republished; and the reason
+is simple. For with an unequal writer (and Wilson is a writer unequalled
+in his inequality) his best work is as likely to be found in his worst
+book as his worst work in his best book; while the constant
+contemplation for a considerable period of one subject is more likely
+than anything else to dispel his habits of digression and padding. But
+the ubiquity of his criticism through the ten volumes was, in the
+circumstances<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">{291}</a></span> of their editing, simply unavoidable. He had himself
+superintended a selection of all kinds, which he called <i>The Recreations
+of Christopher North</i>, and this had to be reprinted entire. It followed
+that, in the <i>Essays Critical and Imaginative</i>, an equally miscellaneous
+character should be observed. Almost everything given, and much not
+given, in the Works is worth consideration, but for critical purposes a
+choice is necessary. Let us take the consolidated essay on Wordsworth
+(most of which dates before 1822), the famous paper on Lord, then Mr.,
+Tennyson's poems in 1832, and the generous palinode on Macaulay's "Lays"
+of 1842. No three papers could better show Wilson in his three literary
+stages, that of rather cautious tentative (for though he was not a very
+young man in 1818, the date of the earliest of the Wordsworth papers, he
+was a young writer), that of practised and unrestrained vigour (for 1832
+represents about his literary zenith), and that of reflective decadence,
+for by 1842 he had ceased to write habitually, and was already bowed
+down by mental sorrows and physical ailments.</p>
+
+<p>In the first paper, or set of papers, it is evident that he is
+ambitiously groping after a more systematic style of criticism than he
+found in practice to be possible for him. Although he elsewhere scoffs
+at definitions, he tries to formulate very precisely the genius of
+Scott, of Byron, and of Wordsworth; he does his best to connect his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">{292}</a></span>
+individual judgments with these formulas; he shuns mere verbal
+criticism, and (to some extent) mere exaltation or depreciation of
+particular passages. But it is quite evident that he is ill at ease; and
+I do not think that any one now reading the essay can call it a
+successful one, or can attempt to rank it with those which, from
+different points of view, Hazlitt and De Quincey (Hazlitt nearly at the
+same time) wrote about Wordsworth. Indeed, Hazlitt is the most valuable
+of all examples for a critical comparison with Wilson; both being
+violent partisans and crotcheteers, both being animated with the truest
+love of poetry, but the one possessing and the other lacking the
+"tie-beam" of a consistent critical theory.</p>
+
+<p>A dozen years later Wilson had cast his slough, and had become the
+autocratic, freespoken, self-constituted dictator, Christopher North. He
+was confronted with the very difficult problem of Mr. Tennyson's poems.
+He knew they were poetry; that he could not help seeing and knowing. But
+they seemed to him to be the work of a "cockney" (it would be
+interesting to know whether there ever was any one less of a cockney
+than the author of "Mariana"), and he was irritated by some silly praise
+which had been given to them. So he set to work, and perpetrated the
+queerest jumble of sound and unsound criticism that exists in the
+archives of that art, so far as a humble but laborious student and
+practitioner thereof knoweth.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">{293}</a></span> He could not for the life of him help
+admiring "Adeline," "Oriana," "Mariana," "The Ode to Memory." Yet he had
+nothing but scorn for the scarcely less exquisite "Mermaid" and "Sea
+Fairies"&mdash;though the first few lines of the latter, excluded by this and
+other pseudo-criticism from the knowledge of half a generation of
+English readers, equal almost anything that the poet has ever done. And
+only the lucky memory of a remark of Hartley Coleridge's (who never went
+wrong in criticism, whatever he did in life) saved him from explicitly
+damning "The Dying Swan," which stands at the very head of a whole class
+of poetry. In all this essay, to borrow one of his own favourite words,
+he simply "plouters"&mdash;splashes and flounders about without any guidance
+of critical theory. Compare, to keep up the comparative method, the
+paper with the still more famous and far more deadly attack which
+Lockhart made a little later in the <i>Quarterly</i>. There one finds little,
+if any, generosity; an infinitely more cold-blooded and deliberate
+determination to "cut up." But the critic (and how quaint and pathetic
+it is to think that the said critic was the author of "I ride from land
+to land" and "When youthful hope is fled") sees his theory of poetry
+straight before him, and never takes his eye off it. The individual
+censures may be just or unjust, but they fit together like the
+propositions of a masterpiece of legal judgment. The poet is condemned<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">{294}</a></span>
+under the statute,&mdash;so much the worse for the statute perhaps, but that
+does not matter&mdash;and he can only plead No jurisdiction; whereas with
+Christopher it is quite different. If he does not exactly blunder right
+(and he sometimes does that), he constantly blunders wrong&mdash;goes wrong,
+that is to say, without any excuse of theory or general view. That is
+not criticism.</p>
+
+<p>We shall not find matters much mended from the strictly critical point
+of view, when we come, ten years later, to the article on the "Lays."
+Here Christopher, as I hold with all respect to persons of distinction,
+is absolutely right. He does not say one word too much of the fire and
+life of those wonderful verses, of that fight of all fights&mdash;as far as
+English verse goes, except Drayton's "Agincourt" and the last canto of
+"Marmion"; as far as English prose goes, except some passages of Mallory
+and two or three pages of Kingsley's&mdash;the Battle of the Lake Regillus.
+The subject and the swing attracted him; he liked the fight, and he
+liked the ring as of Sir Walter at his very best. But he goes
+appallingly wrong all through on general critical points.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, according to his own perverse fashion, he never goes wrong without
+going right. Throughout his critical work there are scattered the most
+intelligent ideas, the neatest phrases, the most appreciative judgments.
+How good is it to say that "the battle of Trafalgar, though in some
+sort<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">{295}</a></span> it neither began nor ended anything, was a kind of consummation of
+national prowess." How good again in its very straightforwardness and
+simplicity is the dictum "it is not necessary that we should understand
+fine poetry in order to feel and enjoy it, any more than fine music."
+Hundreds and thousands of these things lie about the pages. And in the
+next page to each the critic probably goes and says something which
+shows that he had entirely forgotten them. An intelligent man may be
+angry with Christopher&mdash;I should doubt whether any one who is not
+occasionally both angry and disgusted with him can be an intelligent
+man. But it is impossible to dislike him or fail to admire him as a
+whole.</p>
+
+<p>There is a third and very extensive division of Wilson's work which may
+not improbably be more popular, or might be if it were accessible
+separately, with the public of to-day, than either of those which have
+been surveyed. His "drunken <i>Noctes</i>," as Carlyle unkindly calls them,
+require a certain peculiar attitude of mind to appreciate them. As for
+his criticisms, it is frequently said, and it certainly would not become
+me to deny it, that nobody reads criticism but critics. But Wilson's
+renown as an athlete, a sportsman, and a lover of nature, who had a
+singular gift in expressing his love, has not yet died; and there is an
+ample audience now for men who can write about athletics, about sport,
+and about scenery. Nor is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">{296}</a></span> it questionable that on these subjects he is
+seen, on the whole, at his best. True, his faults pursue him even here,
+and are aggravated by a sort of fashion of the time which made him
+elaborately digress into politics, into literature, even (God rest his
+soul!) into a kind of quasi-professional and professorial sermonising on
+morals and theology, in the midst of his sporting articles. But the
+metal more attractive of the main subject would probably recommend these
+papers widely, if they were not scattered pell-mell about the <i>Essays
+Critical and Imaginative</i>, and the <i>Recreations of Christopher North</i>.
+Speaking generally they fall into three divisions&mdash;essays on sport in
+general, essays on the English Lakes, and essays on the Scottish
+Highlands. The best of the first class are the famous papers called
+"Christopher North in his Sporting Jacket," and the scattered reviews
+and articles redacted in the <i>Recreations</i> under the general title of
+"Anglimania." In the second class all are good; and a volume composed of
+"Christopher at the Lakes," "A Day at Windermere," "Christopher on
+Colonsay" (a wild extravaganza which had a sort of basis of fact in a
+trotting-match won on a pony which Wilson afterwards sold for four
+pounds), and "A Saunter at Grasmere," with one or two more, would be a
+thing of price. The best of the third class beyond all question is the
+collection, also redacted by the author for the <i>Recreations</i>, entitled
+"The Moors." This last is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">{297}</a></span> perhaps the best of all the sporting and
+descriptive pieces, though not the least exemplary of its authors
+vagaries; for before he can get to the Moors, he gives us heaven knows
+how many pages of a criticism on Wordsworth, which, in that place at any
+rate, we do not in the least want; and in the very middle of his
+wonderful and sanguinary exploits on and near Ben Cruachan, he
+"interrupts the muffins" in order to deliver to a most farcical and
+impertinent assemblage a quite serious and still more impertinent
+sermon. But all these papers are more or less delightful. For the
+glowing description of, and the sneaking apology for, cat-worrying which
+the "Sporting Jacket" contains, nothing can be said. Wilson deliberately
+overlooks the fact that the whole fun of that nefarious amusement
+consists in the pitting of a plucky but weak animal against something
+much more strongly built and armed than itself. One may regret the P.R.,
+and indulge in a not wholly sneaking affection for cock-fighting,
+dog-fighting, and anything in which there is a fair match, without
+having the slightest weakness for this kind of brutality. But, generally
+speaking, Wilson is a thoroughly fair sportsman, and how enthusiastic he
+is, no one who has read him can fail to know. Of the scenery of loch or
+lake, of hill or mountain, he was at once an ardent lover and a
+describer who has never been equalled. His accustomed exaggeration and
+false emphasis are nowhere so little perceptible as when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">{298}</a></span> he deals with
+Ben Cruachan or the Old Man of Coniston, with the Four Great Lakes of
+Britain, East and West (one of his finest passages), or with the glens
+of Etive and Borrowdale. The accursed influence of an unchastened taste
+is indeed observable in the before-mentioned "Dead Quaker of Helvellyn,"
+a piece of unrelieved nastiness which he has in vain tried to excuse.
+But the whole of the series from which this is taken ("Christopher in
+his Aviary") is in his least happy style, alternately grandiose and low,
+relieved indeed by touches of observation and feeling, as all his work
+is, but hardly redeemed by them. The depths of his possible fall may
+also be seen from a short piece which Professor Ferrier, obligingly
+describing it as "too lively to be omitted," has adjoined to
+"Christopher at the Lakes." But, on the whole, all the articles
+mentioned in the list at the beginning of this paragraph, with the
+capital "Streams" as an addition, with the soliloquies on "The Seasons,"
+and with part (<i>not</i> the narrative part) of "Highland Storms," are
+delightful reading. The progress of the sportsman has never been better
+given than in "Christopher North in his Sporting Jacket." In "The Moors"
+the actual sporting part is perhaps a little spoilt by the affectation
+of infallibility, qualified it is true by an aside or two, which so
+often mars the Christopherian utterances. But Wilson's description has
+never been bettered. The thunderstorm on the hill, the rough
+conviviality at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">{299}</a></span> the illicit distillery, the evening voyage on the loch,
+match, if they do not beat, anything of the kind in much more recent
+books far better known to the present generation. A special favourite of
+mine is the rather unceremonious review of Sir Humphry Davy's strangely
+over-praised "Salmonia." The passage of utter scorn and indignation at
+the preposterous statement of the chief personage in the dialogues, that
+after an exceptionally hard day's walking and fishing "half a pint of
+claret per man is enough," is sublime. Nearly the earliest, and
+certainly the best, protest against some modern fashions in shooting is
+to be found in "The Moors." In the same series, the visit to the hill
+cottage, preceding that to the still, has what it has since become the
+fashion to call the idyllic flavour, without too much of the rather
+mawkish pathos with which, in imitation of Mackenzie and the
+sensibility-writers of the last century, Wilson is apt to daub his
+pictures of rural and humble life. The passages on Oxford, to go to a
+slightly different but allied subject, in "Old North and Young North" (a
+paper not yet mentioned), may have full appeal to Oxford men, but I can
+hardly be mistaken in thinking that outsiders must see at least some of
+the beauty of them. But the list of specially desirable things in these
+articles is endless; hardly one of them can be taken up without
+discovering<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">{300}</a></span> many such, not one of them without discovering some.<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a></p>
+
+<p>And, throughout the whole collection, there is the additional
+satisfaction that the author is writing only of what he thoroughly knows
+and understands. At the Lakes Wilson lived for years, and was familiar
+with every cranny of the hills, from the Pillar to Hawes Water, and from
+Newby Bridge to Saddleback. He began marching and fishing through the
+Highlands when he was a boy, enticed even his wife into perilous
+pedestrian enterprises with him, and, though the extent of his knowledge
+was perhaps not quite so large as he pretends, he certainly knew great
+tracts as well as he knew Edinburgh. Nor were his qualifications as a
+sportsman less authentic, despite the somewhat Munchausenish appearance
+which some of the feats narrated in the <i>Noctes</i> and the <i>Recreations</i>
+wear, and are indeed intended to wear. His enormous baskets of trout
+seem to have been, if not quite so regular as he sometimes makes them
+out, at any rate fully historical as occasional feats. As has been
+hinted, he really did win the trotting-match on the pony, Colonsay,
+against a thoroughbred, though it was only on the technical point of the
+thoroughbred breaking his pace. His walk from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">{301}</a></span> London to Oxford in a
+night seems to have been a fact, and indeed there is nothing at all
+impossible in it, for the distance through Wycombe is not more than
+fifty-three miles; while the less certainly authenticated feat of
+walking from Liverpool to Elleray (eighty miles at least), without more
+than a short rest, also appears to be genuine. Like the heroes of a song
+that he loved, though he seems to have sung it in a corrupt text, he
+could wrestle and fight and jump out anywhere; and, until he was
+thoroughly broken by illness, he appears to have made the very most of
+the not inconsiderable spare time of a Scotch professor who has once got
+his long series of lectures committed to paper, and has nothing to do
+for the rest of his life but collect bundles of pound notes at the
+beginning of each session. All this, joined to his literary gifts, gives
+a reality to his out-of-door papers which is hardly to be found
+elsewhere except in some passages of Kingsley, between whom and Wilson
+there are many and most curious resemblances, chequered by national and
+personal differences only less curious.</p>
+
+<p>I do not think he was a good reviewer, even after making allowance for
+the prejudices and partisanships of the time, and for the monkey tricks
+of mannerism, which, at any rate in his earlier days, were incumbent on
+a reviewer in "Maga." He is too prone to the besetting sins of
+reviewing&mdash;the right hand defections and left hand fallings off, which,
+being interpreted, consist<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">{302}</a></span> first in expressing agreement or
+disagreement with the author's views, and secondly in digressing into
+personal statements of one's own views of things connected with them
+instead of expounding more or less clearly what the book is, and
+addressing oneself to the great question, Is it a good or a bad piece of
+work according to the standard which the author himself strove to reach?
+I have said that I do not think he was on the whole a good critic (for a
+man may be a good critic and a bad reviewer, though the reverse will
+hardly stand), and I have given my reasons. That he was neither a great,
+nor even a very good poet or tale-teller, I have no doubt whatever. But
+this leaves untouched the attraction of his miscellaneous work, and its
+suitableness for the purpose of recreation. For that purpose I think it
+to be among the very best work in all literature. Its unfailing life and
+vigour, its vast variety, the healthy and inspiriting character of the
+subjects with which in the main it deals, are the characteristics which
+make its volumes easy-chair books of the best order. Its beauty no doubt
+is irregular, faulty, engaging rather than exquisite, attractive rather
+than artistically or scientifically perfect. I do not know that there is
+even any reason to join in the general lament over Wilson as being a
+gigantic failure, a monument of wasted energies and half-developed
+faculty. I do not at all think that there was anything in him much
+better than he actually did, or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">{303}</a></span> that he ever could have polished and
+sand-papered the faults out of his work. It would pretty certainly have
+lost freshness and vigour; it would quite certainly have been less in
+bulk, and bulk is a very important point in literature that is to serve
+as recreation. It is to me not much less certain that it never would
+have attained the first rank in symmetry and order. I am quite content
+with it as it is, and I only wish that still more of it were easily
+accessible.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">{304}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="X" id="X"></a>X<br />
+<br />
+DE QUINCEY<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>In not a few respects the literary lot of Thomas De Quincey, both during
+his life and after it, has been exceedingly peculiar. In one respect it
+has been unique. I do not know that any other author of anything like
+his merit, during our time, has had a piece of work published for fully
+twenty years as his, only for it to be excluded as somebody else's at
+the end of that time. Certainly <i>The Traditions of the Rabbins</i> was very
+De Quinceyish; indeed, it was so De Quinceyish that the discovery, after
+such a length of time, that it was not De Quincey's at all, but
+"Salathiel" Croly's, must have given unpleasant qualms to more than one
+critic accustomed to be positive on internal evidence. But if De Quincey
+had thus attributed to him work that was not his, he has also had the
+utmost difficulty in getting attributed to him, in any accessible form,
+work that was his own. Three, or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">{305}</a></span> nominally four, editions&mdash;one in the
+decade of his death, superintended for the most part by himself; another
+in 1862, whose blue coat and white labels dwell in the fond memory; and
+another in 1878 (reprinted in 1880) a little altered and enlarged, with
+the Rabbins turned out and more soberly clad, but identical in the
+main&mdash;put before the British public for some thirty-five years a certain
+portion of his strange, long-delayed, but voluminous work. This work had
+occupied him for about the same period, that is to say for the last and
+shorter half of his extraordinary and yet uneventful life. Now, after
+much praying of readers, and grumbling of critics, we have a fifth and
+definitive edition from the English critic who has given most attention
+to De Quincey, Professor Masson.<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> I may say, with hearty
+acknowledgment of Mr. Masson's services to English literature, that I do
+not very much like this last edition. De Quincey, never much favoured by
+the mechanical producers of books, has had his sizings, as Byron would
+say, still further stinted in the matter of print, margins, and the
+like; and what I cannot but regard as a rather unceremonious tampering
+with his own arrangement has taken place, the new matter being not added
+in supplementary volumes or in appendices to the reprinted volumes, but
+thrust into or between the separate essays, sometimes to the destruction
+of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">{306}</a></span> De Quincey's "redaction" altogether, and always to the confusion and
+dislocation of his arrangement, which has also been neglected in other
+ways. Still the actual generation of readers will undoubtedly have
+before them a fuller and completer edition of De Quincey than even
+Americans have yet had; and they will have it edited by an accomplished
+scholar who has taken a great deal of pains to acquaint himself
+thoroughly with the subject.</p>
+
+<p>Will they form a different estimate from that which those of us who have
+known the older editions for a quarter of a century have formed, and
+will that estimate, if it is different, be higher or lower? To answer
+such questions is always difficult; but it is especially difficult here,
+for a certain reason which I had chiefly in mind when I said just now
+that De Quincey's literary lot has been very peculiar. I believe that I
+am not speaking for myself only; I am quite sure that I am speaking my
+own deliberate opinion when I say that on scarcely any English writer is
+it so hard to strike a critical balance&mdash;to get a clear definite opinion
+that you can put on the shelf and need merely take down now and then to
+be dusted and polished up by a fresh reading&mdash;as on De Quincey. This is
+partly due to the fact that his merits are of the class that appeals to,
+while his faults are of the class that is excused by, the average boy
+who has some interest in literature.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">{307}</a></span> To read the <i>Essay on Murder</i>, the
+<i>English Mail Coach</i>, <i>The Spanish Nun</i>, <i>The Cæsars</i>, and half a score
+other things at the age of about fifteen or sixteen is, or ought to be,
+to fall in love with them. And there is nothing more unpleasant for <i>les
+âmes bien nées</i>, as the famous distich has it, than to find fault in
+after life with that with which you have fallen in love at fifteen or
+sixteen. Yet most unfortunately, just as De Quincey's merits, or some of
+them, appeal specially to youth, and his defects specially escape the
+notice of youth, so age with stealing steps especially claws those
+merits into his clutch and leaves the defects exposed to derision. The
+most gracious state of authors is that they shall charm at all ages
+those whom they do charm. There are others&mdash;Dante, Cervantes, Goethe are
+instances&mdash;as to whom you may even begin with a little aversion, and go
+on to love them more and more. De Quincey, I fear, belongs to a third
+class, with whom it is difficult to keep up the first love, or rather
+whose defects begin before long to urge themselves upon the critical
+lover (some would say there are no critical lovers, but that I deny)
+with an even less happy result than is recorded in one of Catullus's
+finest lines. This kind of discovery</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Cogit amare <i>minus</i>, <i>nec</i> bene velle <i>magis</i>.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>How and to what extent this is the case, it must be the business of this
+paper to attempt to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">{308}</a></span> show. But first it is desirable to give, as usual,
+a brief sketch of De Quincey's life. It need only be a brief one, for
+the external events of that life were few and meagre; nor can they be
+said to be, even after the researches of Mr. Page and Professor Masson,
+very accurately or exhaustively known. Before those researches "all was
+mist and myth" about De Quincey. I remember as a boy, a year or two
+after his death, hearing a piece of scandal about his domestic
+relations, which seems to have had no foundation whatever, but which
+pretty evidently was an echo of the "libel" (published in a short-lived
+newspaper of the kind which after many years has again risen to infest
+London) whereof he complains with perhaps more acrimony than dignity in
+a paper for the first time exhumed and reprinted in Professor Masson's
+edition. Many of the details of the <i>Confessions</i> and the
+<i>Autobiography</i> have a singular unbelievableness as one reads them; and
+though the tendency of recent biographers has been to accept them as on
+the whole genuine, I own that I am rather sceptical about many of them
+still. Was the ever-famous Malay a real Malay, or a thing of shreds and
+patches? Did De Quincey actually call upon the awful Dean Cyril Jackson
+and affably discuss with him the propriety of entering himself at
+Christ-church? Did he really journey pennilessly down to Eton on the
+chance of finding a casual peer of the realm of tender years who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">{309}</a></span> would
+back a bill for him? These are but a few out of a large number of
+questions which in idle moods (for the answer to hardly one of them is
+of the least importance) suggest themselves; and which have been very
+partially answered hitherto even of late years, though they have been
+much discussed. The plain and tolerably certain facts which are
+important in connection with his work may be pretty rapidly summed up.</p>
+
+<p>Thomas de Quincey, or Quincey, was born in Manchester&mdash;but apparently
+not, as he himself thought, at the country house of Greenhay which his
+parents afterwards inhabited&mdash;on 15th August 1785. His father was a
+merchant, well to do but of weak health, who died when Thomas was seven
+years old. Of his childhood he has left very copious reminiscences, and
+there is no doubt that reminiscences of childhood do linger long after
+later memories have disappeared. But to what extent De Quincey gave
+"cocked hats and canes" to his childish thoughts and to his relations
+with his brothers and sisters, individual judgment must decide. I should
+say, for my part, that the extent was considerable. It seems, however,
+pretty clear that he was as a child, very much what he was all his
+life&mdash;emphatically "old-fashioned," retiring without being exactly shy,
+full of far-brought fancies and yet intensely concentrated upon himself.
+In 1796 his mother moved to Bath, and Thomas was educated first at the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">{310}</a></span>
+Grammar School there and then at a private school in Wiltshire. It was
+at Bath, his headquarters being there, that he met various persons of
+distinction&mdash;Lord Westport, Lord and Lady Carbery, and others&mdash;who
+figure largely in the <i>Autobiography</i>, but are never heard of
+afterwards. It was with Lord Westport, a boy somewhat younger than
+himself, that he took a trip to Ireland, the only country beyond Great
+Britain that he visited. In 1800 he was sent by his guardians to the
+Manchester Grammar School in order to obtain, by three years' boarding
+there, one of the Somerset Exhibitions to Brasenose. As a separate
+income of £150 had been left by De Quincey's father to each of his sons,
+as this income, or part of it, must have been accumulating, and as the
+mother was very well off, this roundabout way of securing for him a
+miserable forty or fifty pounds a year seems strange enough. But it has
+to be remembered that for all these details we have little security but
+De Quincey himself. However, that he did go to Manchester, and did,
+after rather more than two of his three years' probation, run away is
+indisputable. His mother was living at Chester, and the calf was not
+killed for this prodigal son; but he had liberty given him to wander
+about Wales on an allowance of a guinea a week. That there is some
+mystery, or mystification, about all this is nearly certain. If things
+really went as he represents them, his mother ought to have been
+ashamed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">{311}</a></span> of herself, and his guardians ought to have had, to say the
+least, an experience of the roughest side of Lord Eldon's tongue. The
+wanderings in Wales were followed by the famous sojourn in Soho, with
+its waitings at money-lenders' doors, and its perambulations of Oxford
+Street. Then, by another sudden revolution, we find De Quincey with
+two-thirds of his allowance handed over to him and permission to go to
+Oxford as he wished, but abandoned to his own devices by his mother and
+his guardians, as surely no mother and no guardians ever abandoned an
+exceptionally unworldly boy of eighteen before. They seem to have put
+fifty guineas in his pocket and sent him up to Oxford, without even
+recommending him a college, and with an income which made it practically
+certain that he would once more seek the Jews. When he had spent so much
+of his fifty guineas that there was not enough left to pay caution-money
+at most colleges, he went to Worcester, where it happened to be low. He
+seems to have stayed there, on and off, for nearly six years. But he
+took no degree, his eternal caprices making him shun <i>vivâ voce</i> (then a
+much more important part of the examination than it is now) after
+sending in unusually good written papers. Instead of taking a degree, he
+began to take opium, and to make acquaintance with the "Lakers" in both
+their haunts of Somerset and Westmoreland. He entered himself at the
+Middle<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">{312}</a></span> Temple, he may have eaten some dinners, and somehow or other he
+"came into his property," though there are dire surmises that it was by
+the Hebrew door. At any rate in November 1809 he gave up both Oxford and
+London (which he had frequented a good deal, chiefly, he says, for the
+sake of the opera of which he was very fond), and established himself at
+Grasmere. One of the most singular things about his singular life&mdash;an
+oddity due, no doubt, in part to the fact that he outlived his more
+literary associates instead of being outlived by them&mdash;is that though we
+hear much from De Quincey of other people we hear extremely little from
+other people about De Quincey. Indeed what we do so hear dates almost
+entirely from the last days of his life.</p>
+
+<p>As for the autobiographic details in his <i>Confessions</i> and elsewhere,
+anybody who chooses may put those Sibylline leaves together for himself.
+It would only appear certain that for ten years he led the life of a
+recluse student and a hard laudanum-drinker, varied by a little society
+now and then; that in 1816 he married Margaret Simpson, a dalesman's
+daughter, of whom we have hardly any personal notices save to the effect
+that she was very beautiful, and who seems to have been almost the most
+exemplary of wives to almost the most eccentric of husbands; that for
+most of the time he was in more or less ease and affluence (ease and
+affluence still, it would seem, of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">{313}</a></span> a treacherous Hebraic origin); and
+that about 1819 he found himself in great pecuniary difficulties. Then
+at length he turned to literature, started as editor of a little Tory
+paper at Kendal, went to London, and took rank, never to be cancelled,
+as a man of letters by the first part of <i>The Confessions of an
+Opium-Eater</i>, published in the <i>London Magazine</i> for 1821. He began as a
+magazine-writer, and he continued as such till the end of his life; his
+publications in book-form being, till he was induced to collect his
+articles, quite insignificant. Between 1821 and 1825 he seems to have
+been chiefly in London, though sometimes at Grasmere; between 1825 and
+1830 chiefly at Grasmere, but much in Edinburgh, where Wilson (whose
+friendship he had secured, not at Oxford, though they were
+contemporaries, but at the Lakes) was now residing, and where he was
+introduced to Blackwood. In 1830 he moved his household to the Scotch
+capital, and lived there, and (after his wife's death in 1837) at
+Lasswade, or rather Polton, for the rest of his life. His affairs had
+come to their worst before he lost his wife, and it is now known that
+for some considerable time he lived, like Mr. Chrystal Croftangry, in
+the sanctuary of Holyrood. But De Quincey's way of "living" at any place
+was as mysterious as most of his other ways; and, though he seems to
+have been very fond of his family and not at all put out by them, it was
+his constant<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">{314}</a></span> habit to establish himself in separate lodgings. These he
+as constantly shifted (sometimes as far as Glasgow) for no intelligible
+reason that has ever been discovered or surmised, his pecuniary troubles
+having long ceased. It was in the latest and most permanent of these
+lodgings, 42 Lothian Street, Edinburgh, not at Lasswade, that he died on
+the 8th of December 1859. He had latterly written mainly, though not
+solely, for <i>Tait's Magazine</i> and <i>Hogg's Instructor</i>. But his chief
+literary employment for at least seven years before this, had been the
+arrangement of the authorised edition of his works, the last or
+fourteenth volume of which was in the press at the time of his death.</p>
+
+<p>So meagre are the known facts in a life of seventy-four years, during
+nearly forty of which De Quincey, though never popular, was still
+recognised as a great name in English letters, while during the same
+period he knew, and was known to, not a few distinguished men. But
+little as is recorded of the facts of his life, even less is recorded of
+his character, and for once it is almost impossible to discover that
+character from his works. The few persons who met him all agree as to
+his impenetrability,&mdash;an impenetrability not in the least due to posing,
+but apparently natural and fated. De Quincey was at once egotistic and
+impersonal, at once delighted to talk and resolutely shunning society.
+To him, one is tempted to say, reading and writing did come by nature,
+and nothing else<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">{315}</a></span> was natural at all. With books he is always at home. A
+De Quincey in a world where there was neither reading nor writing of
+books, would certainly either have committed suicide or gone mad. Pope's
+theory of the master-passion, so often abused, justified itself here.</p>
+
+<p>The quantity of work produced during this singular existence, from the
+time when De Quincey first began, unusually late, to write for
+publication, was very large. As collected by the author, it filled
+fourteen volumes; the collection was subsequently enlarged to sixteen,
+and though the new edition promises to restrict itself to the older and
+lesser number, the contents of each volume have been very considerably
+increased. But this printed and reprinted total, so far as can be judged
+from De Quincey's own assertions and from the observations of those who
+were acquainted with him during his later years, must have been but the
+smaller part of what he actually wrote. He was always writing, and
+always leaving deposits of his manuscripts in the various lodgings where
+it was his habit to bestow himself. The greater part of De Quincey's
+writing was of a kind almost as easily written by so full a reader and
+so logical a thinker as an ordinary newspaper article by an ordinary
+man; and except when he was sleeping, wandering about, or reading, he
+was always writing. It is, of course, true that he spent a great deal of
+time, especially in his last years of all, in re-writing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">{316}</a></span> and
+re-fashioning previously executed work; and also that illness and opium
+made considerable inroads on his leisure. But I should imagine that if
+we had all that he actually wrote during these nearly forty years, forty
+or sixty printed volumes would more nearly express its amount than
+fourteen or sixteen.</p>
+
+<p>Still what we have is no mean bulk of work for any man to have
+accomplished, especially when it is considered how extraordinarily good
+much of it is. To classify it is not particularly easy; and I doubt,
+myself, whether any classification is necessary. De Quincey himself
+tried, and made rather a muddle of it. Professor Masson is trying also.
+But, in truth, except those wonderful purple patches of "numerous"
+prose, which are stuck all about the work, and perhaps in strictness not
+excepting them, everything that De Quincey wrote, whether it was dream
+or reminiscence, literary criticism or historical study, politics or
+political economy, had one characteristic so strongly impressed on it as
+to dwarf and obscure the differences of subject. It is not very easy to
+find a description at once accurate and fair, brief and adequate, of
+this peculiarity; it is best hinted at in a remark on De Quincey's
+conversation which I have seen quoted somewhere (whether by Professor
+Masson or not I hardly know), that it was, with many interesting and
+delightful qualities, a kind of "rigmarole." So far as I remember, the
+remark was not applied in any unfriendly spirit, nor is it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">{317}</a></span> adduced here
+in any such. But both in the printed works, in the remembrances of De
+Quincey's conversation which have been printed, in his letters which are
+exactly like his articles, and in those astonishing imaginary
+conversations attributed to him in the <i>Noctes Ambrosianæ</i>, which are
+said, by good authorities, exactly to represent his way of talk, this
+quality of rigmarole appears. It is absolutely impossible for him to
+keep to his subject, or any subject. It is as impossible for him to pull
+himself up briefly in any digression from that subject. In his finest
+passages, as in his most trivial, he is at the mercy of the
+will-o'-the-wisp of divagation. In his later re-handlings of his work,
+he did to some extent limit his followings of this will-o'-the-wisp to
+notes, but by no means always; and both in his later and in his earlier
+work, as it was written for the first time, he indulged them freely in
+the text.</p>
+
+<p>For pure rigmarole, for stories, as Mr. Chadband has it, "of a cock and
+of a bull, and of a lady and of a half-crown," few things, even in De
+Quincey, can exceed, and nothing out of De Quincey can approach, the
+passages about the woman he met on the "cop" at Chester, and about the
+Greek letter that he did not send to the Bishop of Bangor, in the
+preliminary part of the <i>Confessions</i>. The first is the more teasing,
+because with a quite elvish superfluity of naughtiness he has here
+indulged in a kind of double rigmarole<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">{318}</a></span> about the woman and the "bore"
+in the river, and flits from one to the other, and from the other to the
+one (his main story standing still the while), for half a dozen pages,
+till the reader feels as Coleridge's auditors must have felt when he
+talked about "Ball and Bell, Bell and Ball." But the Greek letter
+episode, or rather, the episode about the Greek letter which never was
+written, is, if possible, more flagrantly rigmarolish.
+The-cop-and-bore-and-woman digression contains some remarkable
+description as a kind of solace to the Puck-led traveller; the other is
+bare of any such comfort. The Bishop's old housekeeper, who was De
+Quincey's landlady, told him, it seems, that the Bishop had cautioned
+her against taking in lodgers whom she did not know, and De Quincey was
+very angry. As he thought he could write Greek much better than the
+Bishop, he meditated expostulation in that language. He did not
+expostulate, but he proceeds instead to consider the possible effect on
+the Bishop if he had. There was a contemporary writer whom we can
+imagine struck by a similar whimsy: but Charles Lamb would have given us
+the Bishop and himself "quite natural and distinct" in a dozen lines,
+and then have dropped the subject, leaving our sides aching with
+laughter, and our appetites longing for more. De Quincey tells us at
+great length who the Bishop was, and how he was the Head of Brasenose,
+with some remarks on the relative status of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">{319}</a></span> Oxford Colleges. Then he
+debates the pros and cons on the question whether the Bishop would have
+answered the letter or not, with some remarks on the difference between
+strict scholarship and the power of composing in a dead language. He
+rises to real humour in the remark, that as "Methodists swarmed in
+Carnarvonshire," he "could in no case have found pleasure in causing
+mortification" to the Bishop, even if he had vanquished him. By this
+time we have had some three pages of it, and could well, especially with
+this lively touch to finish, accept them, though they be something
+tedious, supposing the incident to be closed. The treacherous author
+leads us to suppose that it is closed; telling us how he left Bangor,
+and went to Carnarvon, which change gradually drew his thoughts away
+from the Bishop. So far is this from being the case, that he goes back
+to that Reverend Father, and for two mortal pages more, speculates
+further what would happen if he had written to the Bishop, what the
+Bishop would have said, whether he would not have asked him (De Quincey)
+to the Palace, whether, in his capacity of Head of a House, he would not
+have welcomed him to that seat of learning, and finally smoothed his way
+to a fellowship. By which time, one is perfectly sick of the Bishop, and
+of these speculations on the might-have-been, which are indeed by no
+means unnatural, being exactly what every man indulges in now and then
+in his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">{320}</a></span> own case, which, in conversation, would not be unpleasant, but
+which, gradually and diffusedly set down in a book, and interrupting a
+narrative, are most certainly "rigmarole."</p>
+
+<p>Rigmarole, however, can be a very agreeable thing in its way, and De
+Quincey has carried it to a point of perfection never reached by any
+other rigmaroler. Despite his undoubted possession of a kind of humour,
+it is a very remarkable thing that he rigmaroles, so far as can be made
+out by the application of the most sensitive tests, quite seriously, and
+almost, if not quite, unconsciously. These digressions or deviations are
+studded with quips and jests, good, bad, and indifferent. But the writer
+never seems to suspect that his own general attitude is at least
+susceptible of being made fun of. It is said, and we can very well
+believe it, that he was excessively annoyed at Lamb's delightful parody
+of his <i>Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected</i>; and,
+on the whole, I should say that no great man of letters in this century,
+except Balzac and Victor Hugo, was so insensible to the ludicrous aspect
+of his own performances. This in the author of the <i>Essay on Murder</i> may
+seem surprising, but, in fact, there are few things of which there are
+so many subdivisions, or in which the subdivisions are marked off from
+each other by such apparently impermeable lines, as humour. If I may
+refine a little I should say that there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">{321}</a></span> was very frequently, if not
+generally, a humorous basis for these divagations of De Quincey's; but
+that he almost invariably lost sight of that basis, and proceeded to
+reason quite gravely away from it, in what is (not entirely with
+justice) called the scholastic manner. How much of this was due to the
+influence of Jean Paul and the other German humorists of the last
+century, with whom he became acquainted very early, I should not like to
+say. I confess that my own enjoyment of Richter, which has nevertheless
+been considerable, has always been lessened by the presence in him, to a
+still greater degree, of this same habit of quasi-serious divagation. To
+appreciate the mistake of it, it is only necessary to compare the manner
+of Swift. The <i>Tale of a Tub</i> is in appearance as daringly discursive as
+anything can be, but the author in the first place never loses his way,
+and in the second never fails to keep a watchful eye on himself, lest he
+should be getting too serious or too tedious. That is what Richter and
+De Quincey fail to do.</p>
+
+<p>Yet though these drawbacks are grave, and though they are (to judge from
+my own experience) felt more seriously at each successive reading, most
+assuredly no man who loves English literature could spare De Quincey
+from it; most assuredly all who love English literature would sooner
+spare some much more faultless writers. Even that quality of his which
+has been already noted, his extraordinary<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">{322}</a></span> attraction for youth, is a
+singular and priceless one. The Master of the Court of the Gentiles, or
+the Instructor of the Sons of the Prophets, he might be called in a
+fantastic nomenclature, which he would have himself appreciated, if it
+had been applied to any one but himself. What he somewhere calls his
+"extraordinary ignorance of daily life" does not revolt youth. His
+little pedantries, which to the day of his death were like those of a
+clever schoolboy, appeal directly to it. His best fun is quite
+intelligible; his worst not wholly uncongenial. His habit (a certain
+most respected professor in a northern university may recognise the
+words) of "getting into logical coaches and letting himself be carried
+on without minding where he is going" is anything but repugnant to brisk
+minds of seventeen. They are quite able to comprehend the great if
+mannered beauty of his finest style&mdash;the style, to quote his own words
+once more, as of "an elaborate and pompous sunset." Such a schoolmaster
+to bring youths of promise, not merely to good literature but to the
+best, nowhere else exists. But he is much more than a mere schoolmaster,
+and in order that we may see what he is, it is desirable first of all to
+despatch two other objections made to him from different quarters, and
+on different lines of thought. The one objection (I should say that I do
+not fully espouse either of them) is that he is an untrustworthy critic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">{323}</a></span>
+of books; the other is that he is a very spiteful commentator on men.</p>
+
+<p>This latter charge has found wide acceptance and has been practically
+corroborated and endorsed by persons as different as Southey and
+Carlyle. It would not in any case concern us much, for when a man is
+once dead it matters uncommonly little whether he was personally
+unamiable or not. But I think that De Quincey has in this respect been
+hardly treated. He led such a wholly unnatural life, he was at all times
+and in all places so thoroughly excluded from the natural contact and
+friction of society, that his utterances hardly partake of the ordinary
+character of men's speech. In the "vacant interlunar caves" where he hid
+himself, he could hardly feel the restraints that press on those who
+move within ear-shot and jostle of their fellows on this actual earth.
+This is not a triumphant defence, no doubt; but I think it is a defence.
+And further, it has yet to be proved that De Quincey set down anything
+in malice. He called his literary idol, Wordsworth, "inhumanly
+arrogant." Does anybody&mdash;not being a Wordsworthian and therefore out of
+reach of reason&mdash;doubt that Wordsworth's arrogance was inhuman? He, not
+unprovoked by scant gratitude on Coleridge's part for very solid
+services, and by a doubtless sincere but rather unctuous protest of his
+brother in opium-eating against the <i>Confessions</i>, told some home truths
+against that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">{324}</a></span> magnificent genius but most unsatisfactory man. A sort of
+foolish folk has recently arisen which tells us that because Coleridge
+wrote "The Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan," he was quite entitled to
+leave his wife and children to be looked after by anybody who chose, to
+take stipends from casual benefactors, and to scold, by himself or by
+his next friend Mr. Wordsworth, other benefactors, like Thomas Poole,
+who were not prepared at a moment's notice to give him a hundred pounds
+for a trip to the Azores. The rest of us, though we may feel no call to
+denounce Coleridge for these proceedings, may surely hold that "The
+Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan" are no defence to the particular
+charges. I do not see that De Quincey said anything worse of Coleridge
+than any man who knew the then little, but now well-known facts of
+Coleridge's life, was entitled to say if he chose. And so in other
+cases. That he was what is called a thoughtful person&mdash;that is to say
+that he ever said to himself, "Will what I am writing give pain, and
+ought I to give that pain?"&mdash;I do not allege. In fact, the very excuse
+which has been made for him above is inconsistent with it. He always
+wrote far too much as one in another planet for anything of the kind to
+occur to him, and he was perhaps for a very similar reason rather too
+fond of the "personal talk" which Wordsworth wisely disdained. But that
+he was in any proper sense spiteful, that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">{325}</a></span> is to say that he ever wrote
+either with a deliberate intention to wound or with a deliberate
+indifference whether he wounded or not, I do not believe.</p>
+
+<p>The other charge, that he was a bad or rather a very untrustworthy
+critic of books, cannot be met quite so directly. He is indeed
+responsible for a singularly large number of singularly grave critical
+blunders&mdash;by which I mean of course not critical opinions disagreeing
+with my own, but critical opinions which the general consent of
+competent critics, on the whole, negatives. The minor classical writers
+are not much read now, but there must be a sufficient jury to whom I can
+appeal to know what is to be done with a professed critic of style&mdash;at
+least asserting himself to be no mean classical scholar&mdash;who declares
+that "Paganism had no more brilliant master of composition to show
+than"&mdash;Velleius Paterculus! Suppose this to be a mere fling or freak,
+what is to be thought of a man who evidently sets Cicero, as a writer,
+if not as a thinker, above Plato? It would be not only possible but easy
+to follow this up with a long list of critical enormities on De
+Quincey's part, enormities due not to accidental and casual crotchet or
+prejudice, as in Hazlitt's case, but apparently to some perverse
+idiosyncrasy. I doubt very much, though the doubt may seem horribly
+heretical to some people, whether De Quincey really cared much for
+poetry as poetry. He liked philosophical poets:&mdash;Milton,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">{326}</a></span> Wordsworth,
+Shakespeare (inasmuch as he perceived Shakespeare to be the greatest of
+philosophical poets), Pope even in a certain way. But read the
+interesting paper which late in life he devoted to Shelley. He treats
+Shelley as a man admirably, with freedom alike from the maudlin
+sentiment of our modern chatterers and from Puritanical preciseness. He
+is not too hard on him in any way, he thinks him a pleasing personality
+and a thinker distorted but interesting. Of Shelley's strictly poetical
+quality he says nothing, if he knew or felt anything. In fact, of
+lyrical poetry generally, that is to say of poetry in its most purely
+poetical condition, he speaks very little in all his extensive critical
+dissertations. His want of appreciation of it may supply explanation of
+his unpardonable treatment of Goethe. That he should have maltreated
+<i>Wilhelm Meister</i> is quite excusable. There are fervent admirers of
+Goethe at his best who acknowledge most fully the presence in <i>Wilhelm</i>
+of the two worst characteristics of German life and literature, bad
+taste and tediousness. But it is not excusable that much later, and
+indeed at the very height of his literary powers and practice, he should
+have written the article in the <i>Encyclopædia Britannica</i> on the author
+of <i>Faust</i>, of <i>Egmont</i>, and above all of the shorter poems. Here he
+deliberately assents to the opinion that <i>Werther</i> is "superior to
+everything that came after it, and for mere power, Goethe's paramount
+work,"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">{327}</a></span> dismisses <i>Faust</i> as something that "no two people have ever
+agreed about," sentences <i>Egmont</i> as "violating the historic truth of
+character," and mentions not a single one of those lyrics, unmatched, or
+rather only matched by Heine, in the language, by which Goethe first
+gave German rank with the great poetic tongues. His severity on Swift is
+connected with his special "will-worship" of ornate style, of which more
+presently, and in general it may be said that De Quincey's extremely
+logical disposition of mind was rather a snare to him in his criticism.
+He was constantly constructing general principles and then arguing
+downwards from them; in which case woe to any individual fact or person
+that happened to get in the way. Where Wilson, the "only intimate male
+friend I have had" (as he somewhere says with a half-pathetic touch of
+self-illumination more instructive than reams of imaginative
+autobiography), went wrong from not having enough of general principle,
+where Hazlitt went wrong from letting prejudices unconnected with the
+literary side of the matter blind his otherwise piercing literary sight,
+De Quincey fell through an unswervingness of deduction more French than
+English. Your ornate writer must be better than your plain one, <i>ergo</i>,
+let us say, Cicero must be better than Swift.</p>
+
+<p>One other curious weakness of his (which has been glanced at already)
+remains to be noticed. This is the altogether deplorable notion of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">{328}</a></span>
+jocularity which he only too often exhibits. Mr. Masson, trying to
+propitiate the enemy, admits that "to address the historian Josephus as
+'Joe,' through a whole article, and give him a black eye into the
+bargain, is positively profane." I am not sure as to the profanity,
+knowing nothing particularly sacred about Josephus. But if Mr. Masson
+had called it excessively silly, I should have agreed heartily; and if
+any one else denounced it as a breach of good literary manners, I do not
+know that I should protest. The habit is the more curious in that all
+authorities agree as to the exceptional combination of scholarliness and
+courtliness which marked De Quincey's colloquial style and expression.
+Wilson's daughter, Mrs. Gordon, says that he used to address her
+father's cook "as if she had been a duchess"; and that the cook, though
+much flattered, was somewhat aghast at his <i>punctilio</i>. That a man of
+this kind should think it both allowable and funny to talk of Josephus
+as "Joe," and of Magliabecchi as "Mag," may be only a new example of
+that odd law of human nature which constantly prompts people in various
+relations of life, and not least in literature, to assume most the
+particular qualities (not always virtues or graces) that they have not.
+Yet it is fair to remember that Wilson and the <i>Blackwood</i> set, together
+with not a few writers in the <i>London Magazine</i>&mdash;the two literary
+coteries in connexion with whom De Quincey started as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">{329}</a></span> a writer&mdash;had
+deliberately imported this element of horse-play into literature, that
+it at least did not seem to interfere with their popularity, and that De
+Quincey himself, after 1830, lived too little in touch with actual life
+to be aware that the style was becoming as unfashionable as it had
+always, save on very exceptional subjects, been ungraceful. Even on
+Wilson, who was to the manner born of riotous spirits, it often sits
+awkwardly; in De Quincey's case it is, to borrow Sir Walter's admirable
+simile in another case, like "the forced impudence of a bashful man."
+Grim humour he can manage admirably, and he also&mdash;as in the passage
+about the fate which waited upon all who possessed anything which might
+be convenient to Wordsworth, if they died&mdash;can manage a certain kind of
+sly humour not much less admirably. But "Joe" and "Mag," and, to take
+another example, the stuff about Catalina's "crocodile papa" in <i>The
+Spanish Nun</i>, are neither grim nor sly, they are only puerile. His
+stanchest defender asks, "why De Quincey should not have the same
+license as Swift and Thackeray?" The answer is quick and crushing. Swift
+and Thackeray justify their license by their use of it; De Quincey does
+not. After which it is hardly necessary to add, though this is almost
+final in itself, that neither Swift nor Thackeray interlards perfectly
+and unaffectedly serious work with mere fooling of the "Joe" and "Mag"
+kind. Swift<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">{330}</a></span> did not put <i>mollis abuti</i> in the <i>Four last years of Queen
+Anne</i>, nor Thackeray his <i>Punch</i> jokes in the death-scene of Colonel
+Newcome. I can quite conceive De Quincey doing both.</p>
+
+<p>And now I have done enough in the fault-finding way, and nothing shall
+induce me to say another word of De Quincey in this article save in
+praise. For praise he himself gives the amplest occasion; he might
+almost remain unblamed altogether if his praisers had not been
+frequently unwise, and if his <i>exemplar</i> were not specially <i>vitiis
+imitabile</i>. Few English writers have touched so large a number of
+subjects with such competence both in information and in power of
+handling. Still fewer have exhibited such remarkable logical faculty.
+One main reason why one is sometimes tempted to quarrel with him is that
+his play of fence is so excellent that one longs to cross swords. For
+this and for other reasons no writer has a more stimulating effect, or
+is more likely to lead his readers on to explore and to think for
+themselves. In none is that incurable curiosity, that infinite variety
+of desire for knowledge and for argument which age cannot quench, more
+observable. Few if any have the indefinable quality of freshness in so
+large a measure. You never quite know, though you may have a shrewd
+suspicion, what De Quincey will say on any subject; his gift of sighting
+and approaching new facets of it is so immense.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">{331}</a></span> Whether he was in truth
+as accomplished a classical scholar as he claimed to be I do not know;
+he has left few positive documents to tell us. But I should think that
+he was, for he has all the characteristics of a scholar of the best and
+rarest kind&mdash;the scholar who is exact as to language without failing to
+comprehend literature, and competent in literature without being
+slipshod as to language. His historical insight, of which the famous
+<i>Cæsars</i> is the best example, was, though sometimes coloured by his
+fancy, and at other times distorted by a slight tendency to
+<i>supercherie</i> as in <i>The Tartars</i> and <i>The Spanish Nun</i>, wonderfully
+powerful and acute. He was not exactly as Southey was, "omnilegent"; but
+in his own departments, and they were numerous, he went farther below
+the surface and connected his readings together better than Southey did.
+Of the two classes of severer study to which he specially addicted
+himself, his political economy suffered perhaps a little, acute as his
+views in it often are, from the fact that in his time it was practically
+a new study, and that he had neither sufficient facts nor sufficient
+literature to go upon. In metaphysics, to which he gave himself up for
+years, and in which he seems really to have known whatever there was to
+know, I fear that the opium fiend cheated the world of something like
+masterpieces. Only three men during De Quincey's lifetime had anything
+like his powers in this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">{332}</a></span> department. Of these three men, Sir William
+Hamilton either could not or would not write English. Ferrier could and
+did write English; but he could not, as De Quincey could, throw upon
+philosophy the play of literary and miscellaneous illustration which of
+all the sciences it most requires, and which all its really supreme
+exponents have been able to give it. Mansel could do both these things;
+but he was somewhat indolent, and had many avocations. De Quincey could
+write perfect English, he had every resource of illustration and relief
+at command, he was in his way as "brazen-bowelled" at work as he was
+"golden-mouthed" at expression, and he had ample leisure. But the
+inability to undertake sustained labour, which he himself recognises as
+the one unquestionable curse of opium, deprived us of an English
+philosopher who would have stood as far above Kant in exoteric graces,
+as he would have stood above Bacon in esoteric value. It was not
+entirely De Quincey's fault. It seems to be generally recognised now
+that whatever occasional excesses he may have committed, opium was
+really required in his case, and gave us what we have as much as it took
+away what we have not. But if any one chose to write in the antique
+style a debate between Philosophy, Tar-water, and Laudanum, it would be
+almost enough to put in the mouth of Philosophy, "This gave me Berkeley
+and that deprived me of De Quincey."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">{333}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>De Quincey is, however, first of all a writer of ornate English, which
+was never, with him, a mere cover to bare thought. Overpraise and
+mispraise him as anybody may, he cannot be overpraised for this. Mistake
+as he chose to do, and as others have chosen to do, the relative value
+of his gift, the absolute value of it is unmistakable. What other
+Englishman, from Sir Thomas Browne downwards, has written a sentence
+surpassing in melody that on Our Lady of Sighs: "And her eyes, if they
+were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor subtle; no man could read
+their story; they would be found filled with perishing dreams and with
+wrecks of forgotten delirium"? Compare that with the masterpieces of
+some later practitioners. There are no out-of-the-way words; there is no
+needless expense of adjectives; the sense is quite adequate to the
+sound; the sound is only what is required as accompaniment to the sense.
+And though I do not know that in a single instance of equal length&mdash;even
+in the still more famous, and as a whole justly more famous, <i>tour de
+force</i> on Our Lady of Darkness&mdash;De Quincey ever quite equalled the
+combined simplicity and majesty of this phrase, he has constantly come
+close to it. The <i>Suspiria</i> are full of such passages&mdash;there are even
+some who prefer <i>Savannah la Mar</i> to the <i>Ladies of Sorrow</i>. Beautiful
+as it is I do not, because the accursed superfluous adjective appears
+there. The famous passages of the <i>Confessions</i> are in every one's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">{334}</a></span>
+memory; and so I suppose is the <i>Vision of Sudden Death</i>. Many passages
+in <i>The Cæsars</i>, though somewhat less florid, are hardly less good; and
+the close of <i>Joan of Arc</i> is as famous as the most ambitious attempts
+of the <i>Confessions</i> and the <i>Mail Coach</i>. Moreover, in all the sixteen
+volumes, specimens of the same kind may be found here and there,
+alternating with very different matter; so much so, that it has no doubt
+often occurred to readers that the author's occasional divergence into
+questionable quips and cranks is a deliberate attempt to set off his
+rhetoric, as dramatists of the noblest school have often set off their
+tragedy, with comedy, if not with farce. That such a principle would
+imply confusion of the study and the stage is arguable enough, but it
+does not follow that it was not present. At any rate the contrast,
+deliberate or not, is very strong indeed in De Quincey&mdash;stronger than in
+any other prose author except his friend, and pupil rather than master,
+Wilson.</p>
+
+<p>The great advantage that De Quincey has, not only over this friend of
+his but over all practitioners of the ornate style in this century, lies
+in his sureness of hand in the first place, and secondly in the
+comparative frugality of means which perhaps is an inseparable
+accompaniment of sureness of hand. To mention living persons would be
+invidious; but Wilson and Landor are within the most scrupulous critic's
+right of comparison. All<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">{335}</a></span> three were contemporaries; all three were
+Oxford men&mdash;Landor about ten years senior to the other two&mdash;and all
+three in their different ways set themselves deliberately to reverse the
+practice of English prose for nearly a century and a half. They did
+great things, but De Quincey did, I think, the greatest and certainly
+the most classical in the proper sense, for all Landor's superior air of
+Hellenism. Voluble as De Quincey often is, he seems always to have felt
+that when you are in your altitudes it is well not to stay there too
+long. And his flights, while they are far more uniformly high than
+Wilson's, which alternately soar and drag, are much more merciful in
+regard of length than Landor's, as well as for the most part much more
+closely connected with the sense of his subjects. There is scarcely one
+of the <i>Imaginary Conversations</i> which would not be the better for very
+considerable thinning, while, with the exception perhaps of <i>The English
+Mail Coach</i>, De Quincey's surplusage, obvious enough in many cases, is
+scarcely ever found in his most elaborate and ornate passages. The total
+amount of such passages in the <i>Confessions</i> is by no means large, and
+the more ambitious parts of the <i>Suspiria</i> do not much exceed a dozen
+pages. De Quincey was certainly justified by his own practice in
+adopting and urging as he did the distinction, due, he says, to
+Wordsworth, between the common and erroneous idea of style as the
+<i>dress</i> of thought,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">{336}</a></span> and the true definition of it as the <i>incarnation</i>
+of thought. The most wizened of coxcombs may spend days and years in
+dressing up his meagre and ugly carcass; but few are the sons of men who
+have sufficient thought to provide the soul of any considerable series
+of avatars. De Quincey had; and therefore, though the manner (with
+certain exceptions heretofore taken) in him is always worth attention,
+it never need or should divert attention from the matter. And thus he
+was not driven to make a little thought do tyrannous duty as lay-figure
+for an infinite amount of dress, or to hang out frippery on a
+clothes-line with not so much as a lay-figure inside it. Even when he is
+most conspicuously "fighting a prize," there is always solid stuff in
+him.</p>
+
+<p>Few indeed are the writers of whom so much can be said, and fewer still
+the miscellaneous writers, among whom De Quincey must be classed. On
+almost any subject that interested him&mdash;and the number of such subjects
+was astonishing, curious as are the gaps between the different groups of
+them&mdash;what he has to say is pretty sure, even if it be the wildest
+paradox in appearance, to be worth attending to. And in regard to most
+things that he has to say, the reader may be pretty sure also that he
+will not find them better said elsewhere. It has sometimes been
+complained by students, both of De Quincey the man and of De Quincey the
+writer, that there is something not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">{337}</a></span> exactly human in him. There is
+certainly much in him of the dæmonic, to use a word which was a very
+good word and really required in the language, and which ought not to be
+exiled because it has been foolishly abused. Sometimes, as has also been
+complained, the demon is a mere familiar with the tricksiness of Puck
+rather than the lightness of Ariel. But far oftener he is a more potent
+spirit than any Robin Goodfellow, and as powerful as Ariel and Ariel's
+master. Trust him wholly you may not; a characteristic often noted in
+intelligences that are neither exactly human, nor exactly diabolic, nor
+exactly divine. But he will do great things for you, and a little wit
+and courage on your part will prevent his doing anything serious against
+you. To him, with much greater justice than to Hogg, might Wilson have
+applied the nickname of Brownie, which he was so fond of bestowing upon
+the author of "Kilmeny." He will do solid work, conjure up a concert of
+aerial music, play a shrewd trick now and then, and all this with a
+curious air of irresponsibility and of remoteness of nature. In ancient
+days when kings played experiments to ascertain the universal or
+original language, some monarch might have been tempted to take a very
+clever child, interest him so far as possible in nothing but books and
+opium, and see whether he would turn out anything like De Quincey. But
+it is in the highest degree<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">{338}</a></span> improbable that he would. Therefore let us
+rejoice, though according to the precepts of wisdom and not too
+indiscriminately, in our De Quincey as we once, and probably once for
+all, received him.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">{339}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XI" id="XI"></a>XI<br />
+<br />
+LOCKHART</h2>
+
+
+<p>In every age there are certain writers who seem to miss their due meed
+of fame, and this is most naturally and unavoidably the case in ages
+which see a great deal of what may be called occasional literature.
+There is, as it seems to me, a special example of this general
+proposition in the present century, and that example is the writer whose
+name stands at the head of this chapter. No one, perhaps, who speaks
+with any competence either of knowledge or judgment, would say that
+Lockhart made an inconsiderable figure in English literature. He wrote
+what some men consider the best biography on a large scale, and what
+almost every one considers the second best biography on a large scale,
+in English. His <i>Spanish Ballads</i> are admitted, by those who know the
+originals, to have done them almost more than justice; and by those who
+do not know those originals, to be charming in themselves. His novels,
+if not masterpieces, have kept the field<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">{340}</a></span> better than most: I saw a very
+badly printed and flaringly-covered copy of <i>Reginald Dalton</i> for sale
+at the bookstall at Victoria Station the day before writing these words.
+He was a pillar of the <i>Quarterly</i>, of <i>Blackwood</i>, of <i>Fraser</i>, at a
+time when quarterly and monthly magazines played a greater part in
+literature than they have played since or are likely to play again. He
+edited one of these periodicals for thirty years. "Nobody," as Mr.
+Browning has it, "calls him a dunce." Yet there is no collected edition
+of his works; his sober, sound, scholarly, admirably witty, and, with
+some very few exceptions, admirably catholic literary criticism, is
+rarely quoted; and to add to this, there is a curious prepossession
+against him, which, though nearly a generation has passed since his
+death, has by no means disappeared.<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> Some years ago, in a periodical
+where I was, for the most part, allowed to say exactly what I liked in
+matters literary, I found a sentence laudatory of Lockhart, from the
+purely literary point of view, omitted between proof and publication. It
+so happened that the editor of this periodical could not even have known
+Lockhart personally, or have been offended by his management of the
+<i>Quarterly</i>, much less by his early <i>fredaines</i> in <i>Blackwood</i> and
+<i>Fraser</i>. It was this circumstance that first suggested to me the notion
+of trying to supply something like a criticism of this remarkable
+critic, which nobody has yet<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">{341}</a></span> (1884) done, and which seems worth doing.
+For while the work of many of Lockhart's contemporaries, famous at the
+time, distinctly loses by re-reading, his for the most part does not;
+and it happens to display exactly the characteristics which are most
+wanting in criticism, biographical and literary, at the present day. If
+any one at the outset desires a definition, or at least an enumeration
+of those characteristics, I should say that they are sobriety of style
+and reserve of feeling, coupled with delicacy of intellectual
+appreciation and æsthetic sympathy, a strong and firm creed in matters
+political and literary, not excluding that catholicity of judgment which
+men of strong belief frequently lack, and, above all, the faculty of
+writing like a gentleman without writing like a mere gentleman. No one
+can charge Lockhart with dilettantism: no one certainly can charge him
+with feebleness of intellect, or insufficient equipment of culture, or
+lack of humour and wit.</p>
+
+<p>His life was, except for the domestic misfortunes which marked its
+close, by no means eventful; and the present writer, if he had access to
+any special sources of information (which he has not), would abstain
+very carefully from using them. John Gibson Lockhart was born at the
+Manse of Cambusnethan on 14th July 1794, went to school early, was
+matriculated at Glasgow at twelve years old, transferred himself by
+means of a Snell exhibition to Balliol at fifteen, and took a first
+class in 1813. They said he caricatured the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">{342}</a></span> examiners: this was,
+perhaps, not the unparalleled audacity which admiring commentators have
+described it as being. Very many very odd things have been done in the
+Schools. But if there was nothing extraordinary in his Oxford life
+except what was, even for those days, the early age at which he began
+it, his next step was something out of the common; for he went to
+Germany, was introduced to Goethe, and spent some time there. An odd
+coincidence in the literary history of the nineteenth century is that
+both Lockhart and Quinet practically began literature by translating a
+German book, and that both had the remarkably good luck to find
+publishers who paid them beforehand. There are few such publishers now.
+Lockhart's book was Schlegel's <i>Lectures on History</i>, and his publisher
+was Mr. Blackwood. Then he came back to Scotland and to Edinburgh, and
+was called to the bar, and "swept the outer house with his gown," after
+the fashion admirably described in <i>Peter's Letters</i>, and referred to by
+Scott in not the least delightful though one of the most melancholy of
+his works, the Introduction to the <i>Chronicles of the Canongate</i>.
+Lockhart, one of whose distinguishing characteristics throughout life
+was shyness and reserve, was no speaker. Indeed, as he happily enough
+remarked in reply to the toast of his health at the farewell dinner
+given to celebrate his removal to London, "I cannot speak; if I could, I
+should not have left you." But if he could not speak he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">{343}</a></span> could write,
+and the establishment of <i>Blackwood's Magazine</i>, after its first
+abortive numbers, gave him scope. "The scorpion which delighteth to
+sting the faces of men," as he or Wilson describes himself in the
+<i>Chaldee Manuscript</i> (for the passage is beyond Hogg's part), certainly
+justified the description. As to this famous <i>Manuscript</i>, the late
+Professor Ferrier undoubtedly made a blunder (in the same key as those
+that he made in describing the <i>Noctes</i>, in company with which he
+reprinted it) as "in its way as good as <i>The Battle of the Books</i>." <i>The
+Battle of the Books</i>, full of mistakes as it is, is literature, and the
+<i>Chaldee Manuscript</i> is only capital journalism. But it is capital
+journalism; and the exuberance of its wit, if it be only wit of the
+undergraduate kind (and Lockhart at least was still but an undergraduate
+in years), is refreshing enough. The dreadful manner in which it
+fluttered the dovecotes of Edinburgh Whiggism need not be further
+commented on, till Lockhart's next work (this time an almost though not
+quite independent one) has been noticed. This was <i>Peter's Letters to
+his Kinsfolk</i>, an elaborate book, half lampoon, half mystification,
+which appeared in 1819. This book, which derived its title from Scott's
+account of his journey to Paris, and in its plan followed to some extent
+<i>Humphrey Clinker</i>, is one of the most careful examples of literary
+hoaxing to be found. It purported to be the work of a certain Dr. Peter
+Morris, a Welshman, and it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">{344}</a></span> is hardly necessary to say that there was no
+such person. It had a handsome frontispiece depicting this Peter Morris,
+and displaying not, like the portrait in Southey's <i>Doctor</i>, the occiput
+merely, but the full face and features. This portrait was described, and
+as far as that went it seems truly described, as "an interesting example
+of a new style of engraving by Lizars." Mr. Bates, who probably knows,
+says that there was no first edition, but that it was published with
+"second edition" on the title-page. My copy has the same date, 1819, but
+is styled the <i>third</i> edition, and has a postscript commenting on the
+to-do the book made. However all this may be, it is a very handsome
+book, excellently printed and containing capital portraits and
+vignettes, while the matter is worthy of the get-up. The descriptions of
+the Outer-House, of Craigcrook and its high jinks, of Abbotsford, of the
+finding of "Ambrose's," of the manufacture of Glasgow punch, and of many
+other things, are admirable; and there is a charming sketch of Oxford
+undergraduate life, less exaggerated than that in <i>Reginald Dalton</i>,
+probably because the subject was fresher in the author's memory.</p>
+
+<p>Lockhart modestly speaks of this book in his <i>Life of Scott</i> as one that
+"none but a very young and thoughtless person would have written." It
+may safely be said that no one but a very clever person, whether young
+or old, could have written it, though it is too long and has occasional
+faults of a specially youthful kind. But it made, coming<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">{345}</a></span> as it did upon
+the heels of the <i>Chaldee Manuscript</i>, a terrible commotion in
+Edinburgh. The impartial observer of men and things may, indeed, have
+noticed in the records of the ages, that a libelled Liberal is the man
+in all the world who utters the loudest cries. The examples of the
+Reformers, and of the eighteenth-century <i>Philosophes</i>, are notorious
+and hackneyed; but I can supply (without, I trust, violating the
+sanctity of private life) a fresh and pleasing example. Once upon a
+time, a person whom we shall call A. paid a visit to a person whom we
+shall call B. "How sad," said A., "are those personal attacks of the
+&mdash;&mdash; on Mr. Gladstone."&mdash;"Personality," said B., "is always disgusting;
+and I am very sorry to hear that the &mdash;&mdash; has followed the bad example
+of the personal attacks on Lord Beaconsfield."&mdash;"Oh! but," quoth A.,
+"that was <i>quite</i> a different thing." Now B. went out to dinner that
+night, and sitting next to a distinguished Liberal member of Parliament,
+told him this tale, expecting that he would laugh. "Ah! yes," said he
+with much gravity, "it is <i>very</i> different, you know."</p>
+
+<p>In the same way the good Whig folk of Edinburgh regarded it as very
+different that the <i>Edinburgh Review</i> should scoff at Tories, and that
+<i>Blackwood</i> and <i>Peter</i> should scoff at Whigs. The scorpion which
+delighted to sting the faces of men, probably at this time founded a
+reputation which has stuck to him for more than seventy years after Dr.
+Peter Morris drove his shandrydan through<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">{346}</a></span> Scotland. Sir Walter (then
+Mr.) Scott held wisely aloof from the extremely exuberant Toryism of
+<i>Blackwood</i>, and, indeed, had had some quarrels with its publisher and
+virtual editor. But he could not fail to be introduced to a man whose
+tastes and principles were so closely allied to his own. A year after
+the appearance of <i>Peter's Letters</i>, Lockhart married, on 29th April
+1820 (a perilous approximation to the unlucky month of May), Sophia
+Scott, the Duke of Buccleuch's "Little Jacobite," the most like her
+father of all his children. Every reader of the <i>Life</i> knows the
+delightful pictures, enough for interest and not enough for vulgar
+obtrusion, given by Lockhart of life at Chiefswood, the cottage near
+Abbotsford which he and his wife inhabited for nearly six years.</p>
+
+<p>They were very busy years for Lockhart. He was still active in
+contributing to <i>Blackwood</i>; he wrote all his four novels, and he
+published the <i>Spanish Ballads</i>. <i>Valerius</i> and <i>Adam Blair</i> appeared in
+1821, <i>Reginald Dalton</i> and the <i>Ballads</i> in 1823, <i>Matthew Wald</i> in
+1824.</p>
+
+<p>The novels, though containing much that is very remarkable, are not his
+strongest work; indeed, any critic who speaks with knowledge must admit
+that Lockhart had every faculty for writing novels, except the faculty
+of novel-writing. <i>Valerius</i>, a classical story of the visit of a
+Roman-Briton to Rome, and the persecution of the Christians in the days
+of Trajan, is, like everything of its author's,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">{347}</a></span> admirably written, but,
+like every classical novel without exception, save only <i>Hypatia</i> (which
+makes its interests and its personages daringly modern), it somehow
+rings false and faint, though not, perhaps, so faint or so false as most
+of its fellows. <i>Adam Blair</i>, the story of the sudden succumbing to
+natural temptation of a pious minister of the kirk, is unquestionably
+Lockhart's masterpiece in this kind. It is full of passion, full of
+force, and the characters of Charlotte Campbell and Adam Blair himself
+are perfectly conceived. But the story-gift is still wanting. The reader
+finds himself outside: wondering why the people do these things, and
+whether in real life they would have done them, instead of following the
+story with absorption, and asking himself no questions at all. The same,
+in a different way, is the case with Lockhart's longest book, <i>Reginald
+Dalton</i>; and this has the additional disadvantage that neither hero nor
+heroine are much more than lay-figures, while in <i>Adam Blair</i> both are
+flesh and blood. The Oxford scenes are amusing but exaggerated&mdash;the
+obvious work of a man who supplies the defects of a ten years' memory by
+deepening the strokes where he does remember. <i>Matthew Wald</i>, which is a
+novel of madness, has excellent passages, but is conventional and wooden
+as a whole. Nothing was more natural than that Lockhart, with the
+example of Scott immediately before him, should try novel-writing; not
+many things are more<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">{348}</a></span> indicative of his literary ability than that,
+after a bare three years' practice, he left a field which certainly was
+not his.</p>
+
+<p>In the early autumn of 1825, just before the great collapse of his
+affairs, Scott went to Ireland with Lockhart in his company. But very
+early in the following year, before the collapse was decided, Lockhart
+and his family moved to London, on his appointment as editor of the
+<i>Quarterly</i>, in succession to Gifford. Probably there never was a better
+appointment of the kind. Lockhart was a born critic: he had both the
+faculty and the will to work up the papers of his contributors to the
+proper level; he was firm and decided in his literary and political
+views, without going to the extreme Giffordian acerbity in both; and his
+intelligence and erudition were very wide. "He could write," says a
+phrase in some article I have somewhere seen quoted, "on any subject
+from poetry to dry-rot;" and there is no doubt that an editor, if he
+cannot exactly write on any subject from poetry to dry-rot, should be
+able to take an interest in any subject between and, if necessary,
+beyond those poles. Otherwise he has the choice of two undesirables;
+either he frowns unduly on the dry-rot articles, which probably interest
+large sections of the public (itself very subject to dry-rot), or he
+lets the dry-rot contributor inflict his hobby, without mercy and
+unedited, on a reluctant audience. But Lockhart, though he is said (for
+his contributions are not, as far as I know,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">{349}</a></span> anywhere exactly
+indicated) to have contributed fully a hundred articles to the
+<i>Quarterly</i>, that is to say one to nearly every number during the
+twenty-eight years of his editorship, by no means confined himself to
+this work. It was, indeed, during its progress that he composed not
+merely the <i>Life of Napoleon</i>, which was little more than an abridgment,
+though a very clever abridgment, of Scott's book, but the <i>Lives</i> of
+Burns and of Scott himself. Before, however, dealing with these, his
+<i>Spanish Ballads</i> and other poetical work may be conveniently disposed
+of.</p>
+
+<p>Lockhart's verse is in the same scattered condition as his prose; but it
+is evident that he had very considerable poetical faculty. The charming
+piece, "When youthful hope is fled," attributed to him on Mrs. Norton's
+authority; the well-known "Captain Paton's Lament," which has been
+republished in the <i>Tales from Blackwood</i>; and the mono-rhymed epitaph
+on "Bright broken Maginn," in which some wiseacres have seen ill-nature,
+but which really is a masterpiece of humorous pathos, are all in very
+different styles, and are all excellent each in its style. But these
+things are mere waifs, separated from each other in widely different
+publications; and until they are put together no general impression of
+the author's poetical talent, except a vaguely favourable one, can be
+derived from them. The <i>Spanish Ballads</i> form something like a
+substantive work, and one of nearly as great merit as is possible to
+poetical translations of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">{350}</a></span> poetry. I believe opinions differ as to their
+fidelity to the original. Here and there, it is said, the author has
+exchanged a vivid and characteristic touch for a conventional and feeble
+one. Thus, my friend Mr. Hannay points out to me that in the original of
+"The Lord of Butrago" the reason given by Montanez for not accompanying
+the King's flight is not the somewhat <i>fade</i> one that</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Castile's proud dames shall never point the finger of disdain,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>but the nobler argument, showing the best side of feudal sentiment, that
+the widows of his tenants shall never say that he fled and left their
+husbands to fight and fall. Lockhart's master, Sir Walter, would
+certainly not have missed this touch, and it is odd that Lockhart
+himself did. But such things will happen to translators. On the other
+hand, it is, I believe, admitted (and the same very capable authority in
+Spanish is my warranty) that on the whole the originals have rather
+gained than lost; and certainly no one can fail to enjoy the <i>Ballads</i>
+as they stand in English. The "Wandering Knight's Song" has always
+seemed to me a gem without flaw, especially the last stanza. Few men,
+again, manage the long "fourteener" with middle rhyme better than
+Lockhart, though he is less happy with the anapæst, and has not fully
+mastered the very difficult trochaic measure of "The Death of Don
+Pedro." In "The Count Arnaldos," wherein, indeed, the subject lends
+itself better to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">{351}</a></span> that cadence, the result is more satisfactory. The
+merits, however, of these <i>Ballads</i> are not technical merely, or rather,
+the technical merits are well subordinated to the production of the
+general effect. About the nature of that effect much ink has been shed.
+It is produced equally by Greek hexameters, by old French assonanced
+<i>tirades</i>, by English "eights and sixes," and by not a few other
+measures. But in itself it is more or less the same&mdash;the stirring of the
+blood as by the sound of a trumpet, or else the melting of the mood into
+or close to tears. The ballad effect is thus the simplest and most
+primitive of all poetical effects; it is Lockhart's merit that he seldom
+fails to produce it. The simplicity and spontaneity of his verse may, to
+some people, be surprising in a writer so thoroughly and intensely
+literary; but Lockhart's character was as complex as his verse is
+simple, and the verse itself is not the least valuable guide to it.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said that his removal to London and his responsible office
+by no means reduced his general literary activity. Whether he continued
+to contribute to <i>Blackwood</i> I am not sure; some phrases in the <i>Noctes</i>
+seem to argue the contrary. But he not only, as has been said, wrote for
+the <i>Quarterly</i> assiduously, but after a short time joined the new
+venture of <i>Fraser</i>, and showed in that rollicking periodical that the
+sting of the "scorpion" had by no means been extracted. He produced,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">{352}</a></span>
+moreover, in 1828, his <i>Life of Burns</i>, and in 1836-37 his <i>Life of
+Scott</i>. These, with the sketch of Theodore Hook written for the
+<i>Quarterly</i> in 1843, and separately published later, make three very
+remarkable examples of literary biography on very different scales,
+dealing with very different subjects, and, by comparison of their
+uniform excellence, showing that the author had an almost unique genius
+for this kind of composition. The <i>Life of Scott</i> fills seven capacious
+volumes; the <i>Life of Burns</i> goes easily into one; the <i>Life of Hook</i>
+does not reach a hundred smallish pages. But they are all equally
+well-proportioned in themselves and to their subjects; they all exhibit
+the same complete grasp of the secret of biography; and they all have
+the peculiarity of being full of facts without presenting an undigested
+appearance. They thus stand at an equal distance from biography of the
+fashion of the old academic <i>Eloge</i> of the last century, which makes an
+elegant discourse about a man, but either deliberately or by accident
+gives precise information about hardly any of the facts of the man's
+life; and from modern biography, which tumbles upon the devoted reader a
+cataract of letters, documents, and facts of all sorts, uncombined and
+undigested by any exercise of narrative or critical skill on the part of
+the author. Lockhart's biographies, therefore, belong equally (to borrow
+De Quincey's useful, though, as far as terminology goes, not very happy
+distinction) to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">{353}</a></span> the literature of knowledge and the literature of
+power. They are storehouses of information; but they are, at the same
+time, works of art, and of very great art. The earliest of the three,
+the <i>Life of Burns</i>, is to this day by far the best book on the subject;
+indeed, with its few errors and defects of fact corrected and
+supplemented as they have been by the late Mr. Douglas, it makes all
+other Lives quite superfluous. Yet it was much more difficult,
+especially for a Scotchman, to write a good book about Burns then than
+now; though I am told that, for a Scotchman, there is still a
+considerable difficulty in the matter. Lockhart was familiar with
+Edinburgh society&mdash;indeed, he had long formed a part of it&mdash;and
+Edinburgh society was still, when he wrote, very sore at the charge of
+having by turns patronised and neglected Burns. Lockhart was a decided
+Tory, and Burns, during the later part of his life at any rate, had
+permitted himself manifestations of political opinion which Whigs
+themselves admitted to be imprudent freaks, and which even a
+good-natured Tory might be excused for regarding as something very much
+worse. But the biographer's treatment of both these subjects is
+perfectly tolerant, judicious, and fair, and the same may be said of his
+whole account of Burns. Indeed, the main characteristic of Lockhart's
+criticism, a robust and quiet sanity, fitted him admirably for the task
+of biography. He is never in extremes,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">{354}</a></span> and he never avoids extremes by
+the common expedient of see-sawing between two sides, two parties, or
+two views of a man's character. He holds aloof equally from <i>engouement</i>
+and from depreciation, and if, as a necessary consequence, he failed,
+and fails, to please fanatics on either side, he cannot fail to please
+those who know what criticism really means.</p>
+
+<p>These good qualities were shown even to better advantage in a pleasanter
+but, at the same time, far more difficult task, the famous <i>Life of
+Scott</i>. The extraordinary interest of the subject, and the fashion, no
+less skilful than modest, in which the biographer keeps himself in the
+background, and seems constantly to be merely editing Scott's words,
+have perhaps obscured the literary value of the book to some readers. Of
+the perpetual comparison with Boswell, it may be said, once for all,
+that it is a comparison of matter merely; and that from the properly
+literary point of view, the point of view of workmanship and form, it
+does not exist. Perhaps the most surprising thing is that, even in
+moments of personal irritation, any one should have been found to accuse
+Lockhart of softening Scott's faults. The other charge, of malice to
+Scott, is indeed more extraordinary still in a certain way; but, being
+merely imbecile, it need not be taken into account. A delightful
+document informs us that, in the opinion of the Hon. Charles Sumner,
+Fenimore Cooper (who,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">{355}</a></span> stung by some references to him in the book,
+attacked it) administered "a proper castigation to the vulgar minds of
+Scott and Lockhart." This is a jest so pleasing that it almost puts one
+in good temper with the whole affair. But, in fact, Lockhart,
+considering his relationship to Scott, and considering Scott's
+greatness, could hardly have spoken more plainly as to the grave fault
+of judgment which made a man of letters and a member of a learned
+profession mix himself up secretly, and almost clandestinely, with
+commercial speculations. On this point the biographer does not attempt
+to mince matters; and on no other point was it necessary for him to be
+equally candid, for this, grave as it is, is almost the only fault to be
+found with Scott's character. This candour, however, is only one of the
+merits of the book. The wonderfully skilful arrangement of so vast and
+heterogeneous a mass of materials, the way in which the writer's own
+work and his quoted matter dovetail into one another, the completeness
+of the picture given of Scott's character and life, have never been
+equalled in any similar book. Not a few minor touches, moreover, which
+are very apt to escape notice, enhance its merit. Lockhart was a man of
+all men least given to wear his heart upon his sleeve, yet no one has
+dealt with such pitiful subjects as his later volumes involve, at once
+with such total absence of "gush" and with such noble and pathetic
+appreciation.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">{356}</a></span> For Scott's misfortunes were by no means the only matters
+which touched him nearly, in and in connection with the chronicle. The
+constant illness and sufferings of his own child form part of it; his
+wife died during its composition and publication, and all these things
+are mentioned with as little parade of stoicism as of sentiment. I do
+not think that, as an example of absolute and perfect good taste, the
+account of Scott's death can be surpassed in literature. The same
+quality exhibits itself in another matter. No biographer can be less
+anxious to display his own personality than Lockhart; and though for six
+years he was a constant, and for much longer an occasional, spectator of
+the events he describes, he never introduces himself except when it is
+necessary. Yet, on the other hand, when Scott himself makes
+complimentary references to him (as when he speaks of his party "having
+Lockhart to say clever things"), he neither omits the passage nor stoops
+to the missish <i>minauderie</i>, too common in such cases, of translating
+"spare my blushes" into some kind of annotation. Lockhart will not talk
+about Lockhart; but if others, whom the public likes to hear, talk about
+him, Lockhart does not put his fan before his face.</p>
+
+<p>This admirable book, however, is both well enough known (if not so well
+known as it deserves) and large enough to make it both unnecessary and
+impossible to criticise it at length here. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">{357}</a></span> third work noticed
+above, the sketch of the life of Theodore Hook, though it has been
+reprinted more than once, and is still, I believe, kept in print and on
+sale, is probably less familiar to most readers. It is, however, almost
+as striking an example, though of course an example in miniature only,
+of Lockhart's aptitude for the great and difficult art of literary
+biography as either of the two books just mentioned. Here the difficulty
+was of a different kind. A great many people liked Theodore Hook, but it
+was nearly impossible for any one to respect him; yet it was quite
+impossible for Lockhart, a political sympathiser and a personal friend,
+to treat him harshly in an obituary notice. There was no danger of his
+setting down aught in malice; but there might be thought to be a
+considerable danger of over-extenuation. The danger was the greater,
+inasmuch as Lockhart himself had certainly not escaped, and had perhaps
+to some extent deserved, one of Hook's reproaches. No man questioned his
+integrity; he was not a reckless spendthrift; he was not given to
+excesses in living, or to hanging about great houses; nor was he
+careless of moral and social rules. But the scorpion which had delighted
+to sting the faces of men might have had some awkwardness in dealing
+with the editor of <i>John Bull</i>. The result, however, victoriously
+surmounts all difficulties without evading one. Nothing that is the
+truth about Hook is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">{358}</a></span> omitted, or even blinked; and from reading Lockhart
+alone, any intelligent reader might know the worst that is to be said
+about him. Neither are any of his faults, in the unfair sense,
+extenuated. His malicious and vulgar practical jokes; his carelessness
+at Mauritius; the worse than carelessness which allowed him to shirk,
+when he had ample means of discharging it by degrees, a debt which he
+acknowledged that he justly owed; the folly and vanity which led him to
+waste his time, his wit, and his money in playing the hanger-on at
+country houses and town dinner-tables; his hard living, and the laxity
+which induced him not merely to form irregular connections, but
+prevented him from taking the only step which could, in some measure,
+repair his fault, are all fairly put, and blamed frankly. Even in that
+more delicate matter of the personal journalism, Lockhart's procedure is
+as ingenuous as it is ingenious; and the passage of the sketch which
+deals with "the blazing audacity of invective, the curious delicacy of
+persiflage, the strong caustic satire" (expressions, by the way, which
+suit Lockhart himself much better than Hook, though Lockhart had not
+Hook's broad humour), in fact, admits that the application of these
+things was not justifiable, nor to be justified. Yet with all this, the
+impression left by the sketch is distinctly favourable on the whole,
+which, in the circumstances, must be admitted to be a triumph of
+advocacy obtained<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">{359}</a></span> not at the expense of truth, but by the art of the
+advocate in making the best of it.</p>
+
+<p>The facts of Lockhart's life between his removal to London and his death
+may be rapidly summarised, the purpose of this notice being rather
+critical than biographical. He had hardly settled in town when, as he
+himself tells, he had to attempt, fruitlessly enough, the task of
+mediator in the financial disasters of Constable and Scott; and his own
+share of domestic troubles began early. His eldest son, after repeated
+escapes, died in 1831; Scott followed shortly; Miss Anne Scott, after
+her father's death, came in broken health to Lockhart's house, and died
+there only a year later; and in the spring of 1837 his wife likewise
+died. Then Fortune let him alone for a little, to return in no better
+humour some years later.</p>
+
+<p>It is, however, from the early "thirties" that one of the best known
+memorials of Lockhart dates; that is to say, the portrait, or rather the
+two portraits, in the Fraser Gallery. In the general group of the
+Fraserians he sits between Fraser himself and Theodore Hook, with the
+diminutive figure of Crofton Croker half intercepted beyond him; and his
+image forms the third plate in Mr. Bates's republication of the gallery.
+It is said to be the most faithful of the whole series, and it is
+certainly the handsomest, giving even a more flattering representation
+than the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">{360}</a></span> full-face portrait by Pickersgill which serves as frontispiece
+to the modern editions of the <i>Ballads</i>. In this latter the curious
+towzled mop of hair, in which our fathers delighted, rather mars the
+effect; while in Maclise's sketch (which is in profile) it is less
+obtrusive. In this latter, too, there is clearly perceivable what the
+Shepherd in the <i>Noctes</i> calls "a sort of laugh aboot the screwed-up
+mouth of him that fules ca'd no canny, for they couldna thole the
+meaning o't." There is not much doubt that Lockhart aided and abetted
+Maginn in much of the mischief that distinguished the early days of
+<i>Fraser</i>, though his fastidious taste is never likely to have stooped to
+the coarseness which was too natural to Maginn. It is believed that to
+him is due the wicked wresting of Alaric Watts' second initial into
+"Attila," which gave the victim so much grief, and he probably did many
+other things of the same kind. But Lockhart was never vulgar, and
+<i>Fraser</i> in those days very often was.</p>
+
+<p>In 1843 Lockhart received his first and last piece of political
+preferment, being appointed, says one of the authorities before me,
+Chancellor of the Duchy of Cornwall, and (says another) Chancellor of
+the Duchy of Lancaster. Such are biographers; but the matter is not of
+the slightest importance, though I do not myself quite see how it could
+have been Lancaster. A third and more trustworthy<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">{361}</a></span> writer gives the post
+as "Auditorship" of the Duchy of Lancaster, which is possible enough.</p>
+
+<p>In 1847, the death of Sir Walter Scott's last surviving son brought the
+title and estate to Lockhart's son Walter, but he died in 1853.
+Lockhart's only other child had married Mr. Hope&mdash;called, after his
+brother-in-law's death, Mr. Hope Scott, of whom an elaborate biography
+has been published. Little in it concerns Lockhart, but the admirable
+letter which he wrote to Mr. Hope on his conversion to the Roman Church.
+This step, followed as it was by Mrs. Hope, could not but be, and in
+this letter is delicately hinted to be, no small grief to Lockhart, who
+saw Abbotsford fall under influences for which certainly neither he nor
+its founder had any respect. His repeated domestic losses, and many
+years of constant work and excitement, appear to have told on him, and
+very shortly after his son's death in April 1853 he resigned the
+editorship of the <i>Quarterly</i>. He then visited Italy, a visit from
+which, if he had been a superstitious man, the ominous precedent of
+Scott might have deterred him. His journey did him no good, and he died
+at Abbotsford on the 25th of November. December, says another authority,
+for so it is that history gets written, even in thirty years.</p>
+
+<p>The comparatively brief notices which are all that have been published
+about Lockhart,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">{362}</a></span> uniformly mention the unpopularity (to use a mild word)
+which pursued him, and which, as I have remarked, does not seem to have
+exhausted itself even yet. It is not very difficult to account for the
+origin of this; and the neglect to supply any collection of his work,
+and any authoritative account of his life and character, will quite
+explain its continuance. In the first place, Lockhart was well known as
+a most sarcastic writer; in the second, he was for nearly a lifetime
+editor of one of the chief organs of party politics and literary
+criticism in England. He might have survived the <i>Chaldee Manuscript</i>,
+and <i>Peter's Letters</i>, and the lampoons in <i>Fraser</i>: he might even have
+got the better of the youthful imprudence which led him to fix upon
+himself a description which was sure to be used and abused against him
+by the "fules," if he had not succeeded to the chair of the <i>Quarterly</i>.
+Individual and, to a great extent, anonymous indulgence of the luxury of
+scorn never gave any man a very bad character, even if he were, as
+Lockhart was, personally shy and reserved, unable to make up for written
+sarcasm with verbal flummery, and, in virtue of an incapacity for
+gushing, deprived of the easiest and, by public personages, most
+commonly practised means of proving that a man has "a good heart after
+all." But when he complicated his sins by editing the <i>Quarterly</i> at a
+time when everybody attacked everybody else in exactly such terms as
+pleased<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">{363}</a></span> them, the sins of his youth were pretty sure to be visited on
+him. In the first place, there was the great army of the criticised, who
+always consider that the editor of the paper which dissects them is
+really responsible. The luckless Harriet Martineau, who, if I remember
+rightly, gives in her autobiography a lurid picture of Lockhart "going
+down at night to the printer's" and inserting dreadful things about her,
+and who, I believe, took the feminine plan of revenging herself in an
+obituary article, was only one of a great multitude.</p>
+
+<p>Lockhart does not seem to have taken over from Gifford quite such a
+troublesome crew of helpers as Macvey Napier inherited from Jeffrey, and
+he was also free from the monitions of his predecessor. But in Croker he
+had a first lieutenant who could not very well be checked, and who
+(though he, too, has had rather hard measure) had no equal in the art of
+making himself offensive. Besides, those were the days when the famous
+"Scum condensed of Irish bog" lines appeared in a great daily newspaper
+about O'Connell. Imagine the <i>Times</i> addressing Mr. Parnell as "Scum
+condensed of Irish bog," with the other amenities that follow, in this
+year of grace!</p>
+
+<p>But Lockhart had not only his authors, he had his contributors. "A'
+contributors," says the before-quoted Shepherd, in a moment of such<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">{364}</a></span>
+preternatural wisdom that he must have been "fou," "are in a manner
+fierce." They are&mdash;it is the nature and essence of the animal to be so.
+The contributor who is not allowed to contribute is fierce, as a matter
+of course; but not less fierce is the contributor who thinks himself too
+much edited, and the contributor who imperatively insists that his
+article on Chinese metaphysics shall go in at once, and the contributor
+who, being an excellent hand at articles on the currency, wants to be
+allowed to write on dancing; and, in short, as the Shepherd says, all
+contributors. Now it does not appear (for, as I must repeat, I have no
+kind of private information on the subject) that Lockhart was by any
+means an easy-going editor, or one of that kind which allows a certain
+number of privileged writers to send in what they like. We are told in
+many places that he "greatly improved" his contributors' articles; and I
+should say that if there is one thing which drives a contributor to the
+verge of madness, it is to have his articles "greatly improved." A hint
+in the <i>Noctes</i> (and it may be observed that though the references to
+Lockhart in the <i>Noctes</i> are not very numerous, they are valuable, for
+Wilson's friendship seems to have been mixed with a small grain of
+jealousy which preserves them from being commonplace) suggests that his
+friends did not consider him as by any means too ready to accept their
+papers. All this,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">{365}</a></span> added to his early character of scoffer at Whig
+dignities, and his position as leader <i>en titre</i> of Tory journalism, was
+quite sufficient to create a reputation partly exaggerated, partly quite
+false, which has endured simply because no trouble has been taken to
+sift and prove it.</p>
+
+<p>The head and front of Lockhart's offending, in a purely literary view,
+seems to be the famous <i>Quarterly</i> article on Lord Tennyson's volume of
+1832. That article is sometimes spoken of as Croker's, but there can be
+no manner of doubt that it is Lockhart's; and, indeed, it is quoted as
+his by Professor Ferrier, who, through Wilson, must have known the
+facts. Now I do not think I yield to any man living in admiration of the
+Laureate, but I am unable to think much the worse, or, indeed, any the
+worse, of Lockhart because of this article. In the first place, it is
+extremely clever, being, perhaps, the very best example of politely
+cruel criticism in existence. In the second, most, if not all, of the
+criticism is perfectly just. If Lord Tennyson himself, at this safe
+distance of time, can think of the famous strawberry story and its
+application without laughing, he must be an extremely sensitive Peer.
+And nobody, I suppose, would now defend the wondrous stanza which was
+paralleled from the <i>Groves of Blarney</i>. The fact is that criticism of
+criticism after some time is apt to be doubly unjust. It is wont to
+assume, or rather to imagine, that the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">{366}</a></span> critic must have known what the
+author was going to do, as well as what he had actually done; and it is
+wont to forget that the work criticised was very often, as it presented
+itself to the critic, very different from what it is when it presents
+itself to the critic's critic. The best justification of Lockhart's
+verdict on the volume of 1832 is what Lord Tennyson himself has done
+with the volume of 1832. Far more than half the passages objected to
+have since been excised or altered. But there are other excuses. In the
+first place, Mr. Tennyson, as he then was, represented a further
+development of schools of poetry against which the <i>Quarterly</i> had
+always, rightly or wrongly, set its face, and a certain loyalty to the
+principles of his paper is, after all, not the worst fault of a critic.
+In the second, no one can fairly deny that some points in Mr. Tennyson's
+early, if not in his later, manner must have been highly and rightly
+disgustful to a critic who, like Lockhart, was above all things
+masculine and abhorrent of "gush." In the third, it is, unfortunately,
+not given to all critics to admire all styles alike. Let those to whom
+it is given thank God therefor; but let them, at the same time, remember
+that they are as much bound to accept whatever is good in all kinds of
+critics as whatever is good in all kinds of poets.</p>
+
+<p>Now Lockhart, within his own range, and it was for the time a very wide
+one, was certainly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">{367}</a></span> not a narrow critic, just as he certainly was not a
+feeble one. In the before-mentioned <i>Peter's Letters</i> (which, with all
+its faults, is one of his best, and particularly one of his most
+spontaneous and characteristic works) the denunciation of the "facetious
+and rejoicing ignorance" which enabled contemporary critics to pooh-pooh
+Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, and Coleridge is excellent. And it must be
+remembered that in 1819, whatever might be the case with Coleridge,
+Wordsworth and Lamb were by no means taken to the hearts of Tories on
+their merits, and that in this very passage <i>Blackwood</i> is condemned not
+less severely than the <i>Edinburgh</i>. Another point in which Lockhart made
+a great advance was that he was one of the first (Lamb himself is, in
+England, his only important forerunner) to unite and combine criticism
+of different branches of art. He never has the disgusting technical
+jargon, or the undisciplined fluency, of the mere art critic, any more
+than he has the gabble of the mere connoisseur. But it is constantly
+evident that he has a knowledge of and a feeling for the art of line and
+colour as well as of words. Nothing can be better than the fragments of
+criticism which are interspersed in the Scott book; and if his estimate
+of Hook as a novelist seems exaggerated, it must be remembered, as he
+has himself noted, that Thackeray was, at the time he spoke, nothing
+more than an amusing contributor of remarkably<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">{368}</a></span> promising trifles to
+magazines, and that, from the appearance of <i>Waverley</i> to that of
+<i>Pickwick</i>, no novelist of the first class had made an appearance. It
+is, moreover, characteristic of Lockhart as a critic that he is, as has
+been noted, always manly and robust. He was never false to his own early
+protest against "the banishing from the mind of a reverence for feeling,
+as abstracted from mere questions of immediate and obvious utility." But
+he never allowed that reverence to get the better of him and drag him
+into the deplorable excesses of gush into which, from his day to ours,
+criticism has more and more had a tendency to fall. If he makes no
+parade of definite æsthetic principles, it is clear that throughout he
+had such principles, and that they were principles of a very good kind.
+He had a wide knowledge of foreign literature without any taint of
+"Xenomania," sufficient scholarship (despite the unlucky false quantity
+of <i>Janua</i>, which he overlooked) in the older languages, and a thorough
+knowledge and love of English literature. His style is, to me at any
+rate, peculiarly attractive. Contrasted with the more brightly coloured
+and fantastically-shaped styles, of which, in his own day, De Quincey,
+Wilson, Macaulay, and Carlyle set the fashion, it may possibly seem tame
+to those who are not satisfied with proportion in form and harmony in
+tint; it will certainly not seem so to those who are more fortunately
+gifted. Indeed, compared either with Wilson's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">{369}</a></span> welter of words, now
+bombastic, now gushing, now horse-playful, or with the endless and
+heartbreaking antitheses of what Brougham ill-naturedly but truly called
+"Tom's snip-snap," it is infinitely preferable. The conclusion of the
+essay on Theodore Hook is not easily surpassable as an example of solid
+polished prose, which is prose, and does not attempt to be a hybrid
+between prose and poetry. The last page of the Tennyson review is
+perfect for quiet humour.</p>
+
+<p>But there is no doubt that though Lockhart was an admirable critic
+merely as such, a poet, or at least a song-writer, of singular ability
+and charm within certain limits, and a master of sharp light raillery
+that never missed its mark and never lumbered on the way, his most
+unique and highest merit is that of biographer. Carlyle, though treating
+Lockhart himself with great politeness, does not allow this, and
+complains that Lockhart's conception of his task was "not very
+elevated." That is what a great many people said of Boswell, whom
+Carlyle thought an almost perfect biographer. But, as it happens, the
+critic here has fallen into the dangerous temptation of giving his
+reasons. Lockhart's plan was not, it seems, in the case of his <i>Scott</i>,
+very elevated, because it was not "to show Scott as he was by nature, as
+the world acted on him, as he acted on the world," and so forth. Now,
+unfortunately, this is exactly what it seems to me that Lockhart,
+whether he meant to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">{370}</a></span> do it or not, has done in the very book which
+Carlyle was criticising. And it seems to me, further, that he always
+does this in all his biographical efforts. Sometimes he appears (for
+here another criticism of Carlyle's on the <i>Burns</i>, not the <i>Scott</i>, is
+more to the point) to quote and extract from other and much inferior
+writers to an extent rather surprising in so excellent a penman,
+especially when it is remembered that, except to a dunce, the extraction
+and stringing together of quotations is far more troublesome than
+original writing. But even then the extracts are always luminous. With
+ninety-nine out of a hundred biographies the total impression which
+Carlyle demands, and very properly demands, is, in fact, a total absence
+of impression. The reader's mind is as dark, though it may be as full,
+as a cellar when the coals have been shot into it. Now this is never the
+case with Lockhart's biographies, whether they are books in half a dozen
+volumes, or essays in half a hundred pages. He subordinates what even
+Carlyle allowed to be his "clear nervous forcible style" so entirely to
+the task of representing his subject, he has such a perfect general
+conception of that subject, that only a very dense reader can fail to
+perceive the presentment. Whether it is the right or whether it is the
+wrong presentment may, of course, be a matter of opinion, but, such as
+it is, it is always there.</p>
+
+<p>One other point of interest about Lockhart has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">{371}</a></span> to be mentioned. He was
+an eminent example, perhaps one of the most eminent, of a "gentleman of
+the press." He did a great many kinds of literary work, and he did all
+of them well; novel-writing, perhaps (which, as has been said, he gave
+up almost immediately), least well. But he does not seem to have felt
+any very strong or peculiar call to any particular class of original
+literary work, and his one great and substantive book may be fairly
+taken to have been much more decided by accident and his relationship to
+Scott than by deliberate choice. He was, in fact, eminently a
+journalist, and it is very much to be wished that there were more
+journalists like him. For from the two great reproaches of the craft to
+which so many of us belong, and which seems to be gradually swallowing
+up all other varieties of literary occupation, he was conspicuously
+free. He never did work slovenly in form, and he never did work that was
+not in one way or other consistent with a decided set of literary and
+political principles. There is a great deal of nonsense talked about the
+unprincipled character of journalism, no doubt; and nobody knows better
+than those who have some experience of it, that if, as George Warrington
+says, "too many of us write against our own party," it is the fault
+simply of those who do so. If a man has a faculty of saying anything, he
+can generally get an opportunity of saying what he likes, and avoid
+occasions of saying what he does<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">{372}</a></span> not like. But the mere journalist
+Swiss of heaven (or the other place), is certainly not unknown, and by
+all accounts he was in Lockhart's time rather common. No one ever
+accused Lockhart himself of being one of the class. A still more
+important fault, undoubtedly, of journalism is its tendency to slovenly
+work, and here again Lockhart was conspicuously guiltless. His actual
+production must have been very considerable, though in the absence of
+any collection, or even any index, of his contributions to periodicals,
+it is impossible to say exactly to how much it would extend. But, at a
+rough guess, the <i>Scott</i>, the <i>Burns</i>, and the <i>Napoleon</i>, the
+<i>Ballads</i>, the novels, and <i>Peter</i>, a hundred <i>Quarterly</i> articles, and
+an unknown number in <i>Blackwood</i> and <i>Fraser</i>, would make at least
+twenty or five-and-twenty volumes of a pretty closely printed library
+edition. Yet all this, as far as it can be identified, has the same
+careful though unostentatious distinction of style, the same admirable
+faculty of sarcasm, wherever sarcasm is required, the same depth of
+feeling, wherever feeling is called for, the same refusal to make a
+parade of feeling even where it is shown. Never trivial, never vulgar,
+never feeble, never stilted, never diffuse, Lockhart is one of the very
+best recent specimens of that class of writers of all work, which since
+Dryden's time has continually increased, is increasing, and does not
+seem likely to diminish. The growth may or may not be matter for
+regret;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">{373}</a></span> probably none of the more capable members of the class itself
+feels any particular desire to magnify his office. But if the office is
+to exist, let it at least be the object of those who hold it to perform
+its duties with that hatred of commonplace and cant and the <i>popularis
+aura</i>, with, as nearly as may be in each case, that conscience and
+thoroughness of workmanship, which Lockhart's writings uniformly
+display.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">{374}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XII" id="XII"></a>XII<br />
+<br />
+PRAED</h2>
+
+
+<p>It was not till half a century after his death that Praed, who is loved
+by those who love him perhaps as sincerely as most greater writers, had
+his works presented to the public in a form which may be called
+complete.<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a> This is of itself rather a cautious statement in
+appearance, but I am not sure that it ought not to be made more cautious
+still. The completeness is not complete, though it is in one respect
+rather more than complete; and the form is exceedingly informal. Neither
+in size, nor in print, nor in character of editing and arrangement do
+the two little fat volumes which were ushered into the world by Derwent
+Coleridge in 1864, and the one little thin volume which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">{375}</a></span> appeared in
+1887 under Sir George Young's name with no notes and not much
+introduction, and the very creditable edition of the political poems
+which appeared a year later under the same care but better cared for,
+agree together. But this, though a nuisance to those who love not a set
+of odd volumes, would matter comparatively little if the discrepancies
+were not equally great in a much more important matter than that of mere
+externals. Only the last of the four volumes and three books just
+enumerated can be said to have been really edited, and though that is
+edited very well, it is the least important. Sir George Young, who has
+thus done a pious work to his uncle's memory, was concerned not merely
+in the previous cheap issue of the prose, but in the more elaborate
+issue of the poems in 1864. But either his green unknowing youth did not
+at that time know what editing meant, or he was under the restraint of
+some higher powers. Except that the issue of 1864 has that well-known
+page-look of "Moxon's," which is identified to all lovers of poetry with
+associations of Shelley, of Lord Tennyson, and of other masters, and
+that the pieces are duly dated, it is difficult to say any good thing of
+the book. There are no notes; and Praed is an author who is much in need
+of annotation. With singular injudiciousness, a great deal of album and
+other verse is included which was evidently not intended for
+publication, which does not display<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">{376}</a></span> the writer at his best, or even in
+his characteristic vein at all, while the memoir is meagre in fact and
+decidedly feeble in criticism. As for the prose, though Sir George Young
+has prefixed an introduction good as far as it goes, there is no index,
+no table even of contents, and the separate papers are not dated, nor is
+any indication given of their origin&mdash;a defect which, for reasons to be
+indicated shortly, is especially troublesome in Praed's case.
+Accordingly anything like a critical study of the poet is beset with
+very unusual difficulties, and the mere reading of him, if it were less
+agreeable in itself, could not be said to be exactly easy. Luckily Praed
+is a writer so eminently engaging to the mere reader, as well as so
+interesting in divers ways to the personage whom some one has politely
+called "the gelid critic," that no sins or shortcomings of his editors
+can do him much harm, so long as they let him be read at all.</p>
+
+<p>Winthrop Mackworth was the third son of Serjeant Praed, Chairman of the
+Board of Audit, and, though his family was both by extraction and by
+actual seat Devonian, he was born in John Street, Bedford Row, on 26th
+June 1802, the year of the birth of Victor Hugo, who was perhaps about
+as unlike Praed in every conceivable point, except metrical mastery, as
+two men possessing poetic faculty can be unlike one another. John Street
+may not appear as meet a nurse for a poetic child as Besançon,
+especially now when it has settled<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">{377}</a></span> down into the usual
+office-and-chambers state of Bloomsbury. But it is unusually wide for a
+London street; it has trees&mdash;those of the Foundling Hospital and those
+of Gray's Inn&mdash;at either end, and all about it cluster memories of the
+Bedford Row conspiracy, and of that immortal dinner which was given by
+the Briefless One and his timid partner to Mr. Goldmore, and of Sydney
+Smith's sojourn in Doughty Street, and of divers other pleasant things.
+In connection, however, with Praed himself, we do not hear much more of
+John Street. It was soon exchanged for the more cheerful locality of
+Teignmouth, where his father (who was a member of the old western family
+of Mackworth, Praed being an added surname) had a country house.
+Serjeant Praed encouraged, if he did not positively teach, the boy to
+write English verse at a very early age: a practice which I should be
+rather slow to approve, but which has been credited, perhaps justly,
+with the very remarkable formal accuracy and metrical ease of Praed's
+after-work. Winthrop lost his mother early, was sent to a private school
+at eight years old, and to Eton in the year 1814. Public schools in
+their effect of allegiance on public schoolboys have counted for much in
+English history, literary and other, and Eton has counted for more than
+any of them. But hardly in any case has it counted for so much with the
+general reader as in Praed's. A friend of mine, who, while entertaining
+high and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">{378}</a></span> lofty views on principle, takes low ones by a kind of natural
+attraction, says that the straightforward title of <i>The Etonian</i> and
+Praed's connection with it are enough to account for this. There you
+have a cardinal fact easy to seize and easy to remember. "Praed? Oh!
+yes, the man who wrote <i>The Etonian</i>; he must have been an Eton man,"
+says the general reader. This is cynicism, and cannot be too strongly
+reprehended. But unluckily, as in other cases, a kind of critical
+deduction or reaction from this view has also taken place, and there are
+persons who maintain that Praed's merit is a kind of coterie-merit, a
+thing which Eton men are bound, and others are not bound but the
+reverse, to uphold. This is an old, but apparently still effective
+trick. I read not long ago a somewhat elaborate attempt to make out that
+the people who admire Mr. Matthew Arnold's poems admire them because
+they, the people, are Oxford men. Now this form of "ruling out" is
+undoubtedly ingenious. "You admire Mr. Arnold's poems?"&mdash;"Yes, I
+do."&mdash;"You are an Oxford man?"&mdash;"Yes, I am."&mdash;"Ah! I see." And it is
+perfectly useless for the victim to argue that his admiration of the
+poet and his allegiance to the University have nothing to do with each
+other. In the present case I, at least, am free from this illogical but
+damaging disqualification. I do not think that any one living admires
+Praed more than I do;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">{379}</a></span> and neither Eton nor Cambridge, which may be said
+to have divided influence on him, claims any allegiance from me. On
+Praed himself, however, the influence of Eton was certainly great, if
+not of the greatest. Here he began in school periodicals ("Apis Matina"
+a bee buzzing in manuscript only, preceded <i>The Etonian</i>) his prose and,
+to some though a less extent, his verse-exercises in finished
+literature. Here he made the beginnings of that circle of friends
+(afterwards slightly enlarged at Cambridge by the addition of
+non-Etonians and including one or two Oxford men who had been at Eton)
+which practically formed the staff of <i>The Etonian</i> itself and of the
+subsequent <i>Knight's Quarterly</i> and <i>Brazen Head</i>. The greatest of them
+all, Macaulay, belonged to the later Trinity set; but the Etonians
+proper included divers men of mark. There has been, I believe, a
+frequent idea that boys who contribute to school-magazines never do
+anything else. Praed certainly could not be produced as an instance. He
+was not a great athlete, partly because his health was always weak,
+partly because athletics were then in their infancy. But he is said to
+have been a good player at fives and tennis, an amateur actor of merit,
+expert at chess and whist, and latterly a debater of promise, while, in
+the well-known way of his own school and University, he was more than a
+sufficient scholar. He went to Trinity in October 1821, and in the three
+following years won the Browne<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">{380}</a></span> Medals for Greek verse four times and
+the Chancellor's Medal for English verse twice. He was third in the
+Classical Tripos, was elected to a Fellowship at his college in 1827,
+and in 1830 obtained the Seatonian Prize with a piece, "The Ascent of
+Elijah," which is remarkable for the extraordinary facility with which
+it catches the notes of the just published <i>Christian Year</i>. He was a
+great speaker at the Union, and, as has been hinted, he made a fresh
+circle of literary friends for himself, the chief ornaments whereof were
+Macaulay and Charles Austin. It was also during his sojourn at Cambridge
+that the short-lived but brilliant venture of <i>Knight's Quarterly</i> was
+launched. He was about four years resident at Trinity in the first
+instance; after which, according to a practice then common enough but
+now, I believe, obsolete, he returned to Eton as private and particular
+tutor to Lord Ernest Bruce. This employment kept him for two years. He
+then read law, was called to the Bar in 1829, and in 1830 was elected to
+Parliament for the moribund borough of St. Germans. He was re-elected
+next year, contested St. Ives, when St. Germans lost its members, but
+was beaten, was elected in 1834 for Great Yarmouth, and in 1837 for
+Aylesbury, which last seat he held to his death. During the whole of
+this time he sat as a Conservative, becoming a more thorough one as time
+went on; and as he had been at Cambridge a very decided<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">{381}</a></span> Whig, and had
+before his actual entrance on public life written many pointed and some
+bitter lampoons against the Tories, the change, in the language of his
+amiable and partial friend and biographer, "occasioned considerable
+surprise." Of this also more presently: for it is well to get merely
+biographical details over with as little digression as possible.
+Surprise or no surprise, he won good opinions from both sides, acquired
+considerable reputation as a debater and a man of business, was in the
+confidence both of the Duke of Wellington and of Sir Robert Peel, was
+made Secretary of the Board of Control in 1834, married in 1835, was
+appointed Deputy-High Steward of his University (a mysterious
+appointment, of the duties of which I have no notion), and died of
+disease of the lungs on 15th July 1839. Not very much has been published
+about Praed personally; but in what has been published, and in what I
+have heard, I cannot remember a single unfriendly sentence.</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding his reputation as an "inspired schoolboy," I do not know
+that sober criticism would call him a really precocious writer,
+especially in verse. The pieces by which he is best known and which have
+most individuality, date in no case very early, and in almost all cases
+after his five-and-twentieth year. What does date very early (and
+unluckily it has been printed with a copiousness betokening more
+affection than judgment,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">{382}</a></span> considering that the author had more sense
+than to print it at all) is scarcely distinguishable from any other
+verses of any other clever boy. It is impossible to augur any future
+excellence from such stuff as</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Emilia often sheds the tear<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">But affectation bids it flow,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>or as</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">From breasts which feel compassion's glow<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Solicit mild the kind relief;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and, for one's own part, one is inclined to solicit mild the kind relief
+of not having to read it. Even when Praed had become, at least
+technically, a man, there is no very great improvement as a whole,
+though here and there one may see, looking backwards from the finished
+examples, faint beginnings of his peculiar touches, especially of that
+pleasant trick of repeating the same word or phrase with a different and
+slightly altered sense which, as Mr. Austin Dobson has suggested, may
+have been taken from Burns. The Cambridge prize poems are quite
+authentic and respectable examples of that style which has received its
+final criticism in</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Ply battleaxe and hurtling catapult:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Jerusalem is ours! <i>Id Deus vult</i>,&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>though they do not contain anything so nice as that, or as its great
+author's more famous couplet respecting Africa and the men thereof. The
+longer romances of the same date, "Gog," "Lilian,"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">{383}</a></span> "The Troubadour,"
+are little more than clever reminiscences sometimes of Scott, Byron,
+Moore, and other contemporaries, sometimes of Prior and the <i>vers de
+société</i> of the eighteenth century. The best passage by far of all this
+is the close of "How to Rhyme with Love," and this, as it seems to me,
+is the only passage of even moderate length which, in the poems dating
+before Praed took his degree, in the least foretells the poet of "The
+Red Fisherman," "The Vicar," the "Letters from Teignmouth," the
+"Fourteenth of February" (earliest in date and not least charming fruit
+of the true vein), "Good-night to the Season," and best and most
+delightful of all, the peerless "Letter of Advice," which is as much the
+very best thing of its own kind as the "Divine Comedy."</p>
+
+<p>In prose Praed was a little earlier, but not very much. <i>The Etonian</i>
+itself was, even in its earliest numbers, written at an age when many,
+perhaps most, men have already left school; and the earlier numbers are
+as imitative, of the <i>Spectator</i> and its late and now little read
+followers of the eighteenth century, as is the verse above quoted. The
+youthful boisterousness of <i>Blackwood</i> gave Praed a more congenial
+because a fresher cue; and in the style of which Maginn, as Adjutant
+O'Doherty, had set the example in his Latinisings of popular verse, and
+which was to be worked to death by Father Prout, there are few things
+better than the "Musæ O'Connorianæ" which celebrates the great fight of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">{384}</a></span>
+Mac Nevis and Mac Twolter. But there is here still the distinct
+following of a model the taint of the school-exercise. Very much more
+original is "The Knight and the Knave:" indeed I should call this the
+first original thing, though it be a parody, that Praed did. To say that
+it reminds one in more than subject of <i>Rebecca and Rowena</i>, and that it
+was written some twenty years earlier, is to say a very great deal. Even
+here, however, the writer's ground is rented, not freehold. It is very
+different in such papers as "Old Boots" and "The Country Curate," while
+in the later prose contributed to <i>Knight's Quarterly</i> the improvement
+in originality is marked. "The Union Club" is amusing enough all
+through: but considering that it was written in 1823, two years before
+Jeffrey asked the author of a certain essay on Milton "where he got that
+style," one passage of the speech put in the mouth of Macaulay is
+positively startling. "The Best Bat in the School" is quite delightful,
+and "My First Folly," though very unequal, contains in the introduction
+scene, between Vyvian Joyeuse and Margaret Orleans, a specimen of a kind
+of dialogue nowhere to be found before, so far as I know, and giving
+proof that, if Praed had set himself to it, he might have started a new
+kind of novel.</p>
+
+<p>It does not appear, however, that his fancy led him with any decided
+bent to prose composition, and he very early deserted it for verse;
+though<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">{385}</a></span> he is said to have, at a comparatively late period of his short
+life, worked in harness as a regular leader-writer for the <i>Morning
+Post</i> during more than a year. No examples of this work of his have been
+reprinted, nor, so far as I know, does any means of identifying them
+exist, though I personally should like to examine them. He was still at
+Cambridge when he drifted into another channel, which was still not his
+own channel, but in which he feathered his oars under two different
+flags with no small skill and dexterity. Sir George Young has a very
+high idea of his uncle's political verse, and places him "first among
+English writers, before Prior, before Canning, before the authors of the
+'Rolliad,' and far before Moore or any of the still anonymous
+contributors to the later London press." I cannot subscribe to this.
+Neither as Whig nor as Tory, neither as satirist of George the Fourth
+nor as satirist of the Reform Bill, does Praed seem to me to have been
+within a hundred miles of that elder schoolfellow of his who wrote</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">All creeping creatures, venomous and low,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Still blasphemous or blackguard, praise Lepaux.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He has nothing for sustained wit and ease equal to the best pieces of
+the "Fudge Family" and the "Two-penny Postbag"; and (for I do not know
+why one should not praise a man because he happens to be alive and one's
+friend) I do not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">{386}</a></span> think he has the touch of the true political satirist
+as Mr. Traill has it in "Professor Baloonatics Craniocracs," or in that
+admirable satire on democracy which is addressed to the "Philosopher
+Crazed, from the Island of Crazes."</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, by mentioning Prior, Sir George seems to put himself rather out
+of court. Praed <i>is</i> very nearly if not quite Prior's equal, but the
+sphere of neither was politics. Prior's political pieces are thin and
+poor beside his social verse, and with rare exceptions I could not put
+anything political of Praed's higher than the shoe-string of "Araminta."
+Neither of these two charming poets seems to have felt seriously enough
+for political satire. Matthew, we know, played the traitor; and though
+Mackworth ratted to my own side, I fear it must be confessed that he did
+rat. I can only discover in his political verse two fixed principles,
+both of which no doubt did him credit, but which hardly, even when taken
+together, amount to a sufficient political creed. The one was fidelity
+to Canning and his memory: the other was impatience of the cant of the
+reformers. He could make admirable fun of Joseph Hume, and of still
+smaller fry like Waithman; he could attack Lord Grey's nepotism and
+doctrinairism fiercely enough. Once or twice, or, to be fair, more than
+once or twice, he struck out a happy, indeed a brilliant flash. He was
+admirable at what Sir George Young calls, justly enough, "political
+patter songs" such as,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">{387}</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Young widowhood shall lose its weeds,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Old kings shall loathe the Tories,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And monks be tired of telling beads,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And Blues of telling stories;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And titled suitors shall be crossed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And famished poets married,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Canning's motion shall be lost,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And Hume's amendment carried;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Chancery shall cease to doubt,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And Algebra to prove,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And hoops come in, and gas go out<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Before I cease to love.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He hit off an exceedingly savage and certainly not wholly just "Epitaph
+on the King of the Sandwich Islands" which puts the conception of George
+the Fourth that Thackeray afterwards made popular, and contains these
+felicitous lines:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The people in his happy reign,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Were blessed beyond all other nations:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Unharmed by foreign axe and chain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Unhealed by civic innovations;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They served the usual logs and stones,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With all the usual rites and terrors,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And swallowed all their fathers' bones,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And swallowed all their fathers' errors.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">When the fierce mob, with clubs and knives,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">All swore that nothing should prevent them,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But that their representatives<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Should actually represent them,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He interposed the proper checks,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">By sending troops, with drums and banners,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To cut their speeches short, and necks,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And break their heads, to mend their manners.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Occasionally in a sort of middle vein between<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">{388}</a></span> politics and society he
+wrote in the "patter" style just noticed quite admirable things like
+"Twenty-eight and Twenty-nine." Throughout the great debates on Reform
+he rallied the reformers with the same complete and apparently useless
+superiority of wit and sense which has often, if not invariably, been
+shown at similar crises on the losing side. And once, on an
+ever-memorable occasion, he broke into those famous and most touching
+"Stanzas on seeing the Speaker Asleep" which affect one almost to tears
+by their grace of form and by the perennial and indeed ever-increasing
+applicability of their matter.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Sleep, Mr. Speaker: it's surely fair,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If you don't in your bed, that you should in your chair:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Longer and longer still they grow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Tory and Radical, Aye and No;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Talking by night and talking by day;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Sleep, Mr. Speaker: slumber lies<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Light and brief on a Speaker's eyes&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fielden or Finn, in a minute or two,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Some disorderly thing will do;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Riot will chase repose away;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Sleep, Mr. Speaker; Cobbett will soon<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Move to abolish the sun and moon;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hume, no doubt, will be taking the sense<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the House on a saving of thirteen-pence;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Grattan will growl or Baldwin bray;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">{389}</a></span><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Sleep, Mr. Speaker: dream of the time<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When loyalty was not quite a crime,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When Grant was a pupil in Canning's school,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Palmerston fancied Wood a fool.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lord, how principles pass away!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sweet to men<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is the sleep that comes but now and then;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sweet to the sorrowful, sweet to the ill,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sweet to the children who work in a mill.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You have more need of sleep than they,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But the chief merit of Praed's political verse as a whole seems to me to
+be that it kept his hand in, and enabled him to develop and refine the
+trick, above referred to, of playing on words so as to give a graceful
+turn to verse composed in his true vocation.</p>
+
+<p>Of the verse so composed there are more kinds than one; though perhaps
+only in two kinds is the author absolutely at his best. There is first a
+certain class of pieces which strongly recall Macaulay's "Lays" and may
+have had some connexion of origin with them. Of course those who are
+foolish enough to affect to see nothing good in "The Battle of the Lake
+Regillus," or "Ivry," or "The Armada," will not like "Cassandra," or
+"Sir Nicholas at Marston Moor," or the "Covenanter's Lament for Bothwell
+Brigg," or "Arminius." Nevertheless they are fine in their way.
+"Arminius" is too long, and it suffers from the obvious<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">{390}</a></span> comparison with
+Cowper's far finer "Boadicea." But its best lines, such as the
+well-known</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I curse him by our country's gods,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The terrible, the dark,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The scatterers of the Roman rods,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The quellers of the bark,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>are excellent in the style, and "Sir Nicholas" is charming. But not here
+either did Apollo seriously wait for Praed. The later romances or tales
+are far better than the earlier. "The Legend of the Haunted Tree" shows
+in full swing that happy compound and contrast of sentiment and humour
+in which the writer excelled. And "The Teufelhaus" is, except "The Red
+Fisherman" perhaps, the best thing of its kind in English. These lines
+are good enough for anything:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But little he cared, that stripling pale,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For the sinking sun or the rising gale;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For he, as he rode, was dreaming now,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Poor youth, of a woman's broken vow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the cup dashed down, ere the wine was tasted,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of eloquent speeches sadly wasted,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of a gallant heart all burnt to ashes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the Baron of Katzberg's long moustaches.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And these:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Swift as the rush of an eagle's wing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or the flight of a shaft from Tartar string,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Into the wood Sir Rudolph went:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not with more joy the schoolboys run<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To the gay green fields when their task is done;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not with more haste the members fly,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When Hume has caught the Speaker's eye.<br /></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">{391}</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>But in "The Red Fisherman" itself there is nothing that is not good. It
+is very short, ten small pages only of some five-and-twenty lines each.
+But there is not a weak place in it from the moment when "the Abbot
+arose and closed his book" to the account of his lamentable and yet
+lucky fate and punishment whereof "none but he and the fisherman could
+tell the reason why." Neither of the two other practitioners who may be
+called the masters of this style, Hood and Barham, nor Praed himself
+elsewhere, nor any of his and their imitators has trodden the
+breadthless line between real terror and mere burlesque with so steady a
+foot.</p>
+
+<p>Still not here was his "farthest," as the geographers say, nor in the
+considerable mass of smaller poems which practically defy
+classification. In them, as so often elsewhere in Praed, one comes
+across odd notes, stray flashes of genius which he never seems to have
+cared to combine or follow out, such as the unwontedly solemn "Time's
+Song," the best wholly serious thing that he has done, and the charming
+"L'Inconnue." But we find the perfect Praed, and we find him only, in
+the verses of society proper, the second part of the "Poems of Life and
+Manners" as they are headed, which began, as far as one can make out, to
+be written about 1826, and the gift of which Praed never lost, though he
+practised it little in the very last years of his life. Here, in a
+hundred pages, with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">{392}</a></span> a few to be added from elsewhere, are to be found
+some of the best-bred and best-natured verse within the English
+language, some of the most original and remarkable metrical experiments,
+a profusion of the liveliest fancy, a rush of the gayest rhyme. They
+begin with "The Vicar," <i>vir nullâ non donandus lauru</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">[Whose] talk was like a stream, which runs<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With rapid change from rocks to roses:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It slipped from politics to puns,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">It passed from Mahomet to Moses;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Beginning with the laws which keep<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The planets in their radiant courses,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And ending with some precept deep<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">For dressing eels, or shoeing horses.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Three of the Vicar's companion "Everyday Characters" are good, but I
+think not so good as he; the fifth piece, however, "The Portrait of a
+Lady," is quite his equal.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">You'll be forgotten&mdash;as old debts<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">By persons who are used to borrow;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Forgotten&mdash;as the sun that sets,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">When shines a new one on the morrow;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Forgotten&mdash;like the luscious peach<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That blessed the schoolboy last September;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Forgotten&mdash;like a maiden speech,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Which all men praise, but none remember.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Yet ere you sink into the stream<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That whelms alike sage, saint, and martyr,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And soldier's sword, and minstrel's theme,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And Canning's wit, and Gatton's charter,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Here, of the fortunes of your youth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">My fancy weaves her dim conjectures,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">{393}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which have, perhaps, as much of truth<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">As passion's vows, or Cobbett's lectures.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Here, and perhaps here first, at least in the order of the published
+poems, appears that curious mixture of pathos and quizzing, sentiment
+and satire, which has never been mastered more fully or communicated
+more happily than by Praed. But not even yet do we meet with it in its
+happiest form: nor is that form to be found in "Josephine" which is much
+better in substance than in manner, or in the half-social,
+half-political patter of "The Brazen Head," or in "Twenty-eight and
+Twenty-nine." It sounds first in the "Song for the Fourteenth of
+February." No one, so far as I know, has traced any exact original<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a>
+for the altogether admirable metre which, improved and glorified later
+in "The Letter of Advice," appears first in lighter matter still like
+this:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Shall I kneel to a Sylvia or Celia,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Whom no one e'er saw, or may see,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A fancy-drawn Laura Amelia,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">An <i>ad libit</i> Anna Marie?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shall I court an initial with stars to it,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Go mad for a G. or a J.,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Get Bishop to put a few bars to it,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And print it on Valentine's Day?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But every competent critic has seen in it the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">{394}</a></span> origin of the more
+gorgeous and full-mouthed, if not more accomplished and dexterous,
+rhythm in which Mr. Swinburne has written "Dolores," and the even more
+masterly dedication of the first "Poems and Ballads." The shortening of
+the last line which the later poet has introduced is a touch of genius,
+but not perhaps greater than Praed's own recognition of the
+extraordinarily vivid and ringing qualities of the stanza. I profoundly
+believe that metrical quality is, other things being tolerably equal,
+the great secret of the enduring attraction of verse: and nowhere, not
+in the greatest lyrics, is that quality more unmistakable than in the
+"Letter of Advice." I really do not know how many times I have read it;
+but I never can read it to this day without being forced to read it out
+loud like a schoolboy and mark with accompaniment of hand-beat such
+lines as</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Remember the thrilling romances<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">We read on the bank in the glen:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Remember the suitors our fancies<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Would picture for both of us then.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They wore the red cross on their shoulder,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">They had vanquished and pardoned their foe&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sweet friend, are you wiser or colder?<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">My own Araminta, say "No!"<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;·<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He must walk&mdash;like a god of old story<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Come down from the home of his rest;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He must smile&mdash;like the sun in his glory,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">On the buds he loves ever the best;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">{395}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And oh! from its ivory portal<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Like music his soft speech must flow!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If he speak, smile, or walk like a mortal,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">My own Araminta, say "No!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There are, metrically speaking, few finer couplets in English than the
+first of that second stanza. Looked at from another point of view, the
+mixture of the comic and the serious in the piece is remarkable enough;
+but not so remarkable, I think, as its extraordinary metrical
+accomplishment. There is not a note or a syllable wrong in the whole
+thing, but every sound and every cadence comes exactly where it ought to
+come, so as to be, in a delightful phrase of Southey's, "necessary and
+voluptuous and right."</p>
+
+<p>It is no wonder that when Praed had discovered such a medium he should
+have worked it freely. But he never impressed on it such a combination
+of majesty and grace as in this letter of Medora Trevilian. As far as
+the metre goes I think the eight-lined stanzas of this piece better
+suited to it than the twelve-lined ones of "Good Night to the Season"
+and the first "Letter from Teignmouth," but both are very delightful.
+Perhaps the first is the best known of all Praed's poems, and certainly
+some things in it, such as</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The ice of her ladyship's manners,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The ice of his lordship's champagne,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>are among the most quoted. But this antithetical trick, of which Praed
+was so fond, is repeated a little often in it; and it seems to me to
+lack the freshness as well as the fire of the "Advice." On<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">{396}</a></span> the other
+hand, the "Letter from Teignmouth" is the best thing that even Praed has
+ever done for combined grace and tenderness.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">You once could be pleased with our ballads&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To-day you have critical ears;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You once could be charmed with our salads&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Alas! you've been dining with Peers;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You trifled and flirted with many&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">You've forgotten the when and the how;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There was one you liked better than any&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Perhaps you've forgotten her now.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But of those you remember most newly,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Of those who delight or enthral,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">None love you a quarter so truly<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">As some you will find at our Ball.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">They tell me you've many who flatter,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Because of your wit and your song:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They tell me&mdash;and what does it matter?&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">You like to be praised by the throng:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They tell me you're shadowed with laurel:<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">They tell me you're loved by a Blue:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They tell me you're sadly immoral&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Dear Clarence, that cannot be true!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But to me, you are still what I found you,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Before you grew clever and tall;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And you'll think of the spell that once bound you;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And you'll come&mdash;won't you come?&mdash;to our Ball!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Is not that perfectly charming?</p>
+
+<p>It is perhaps a matter of mere taste whether it is or is not more
+charming than pieces like "School and Schoolfellows" (the best of
+Praed's purely Eton poems) and "Marriage Chimes," in which, if not Eton,
+the Etonian set also comes in.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">{397}</a></span> If I like these latter pieces less, it
+is not so much because of their more personal and less universal
+subjects as because their style is much less individual. The resemblance
+to Hood cannot be missed, and though I believe there is some dispute as
+to which of the two poets actually hit upon the particular style first,
+there can be little doubt that Hood attained to the greater excellence
+in it. The real sense and savingness of that doctrine of the "principal
+and most excellent things," which has sometimes been preached rather
+corruptly and narrowly, is that the best things that a man does are
+those that he does best. Now though</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I wondered what they meant by stock,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I wrote delightful Sapphics,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">With no hard work but Bovney stream,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">No chill except Long Morning,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>are very nice things, I do not think they are so good in their kind as
+the other things that I have quoted; and this, though the poem contains
+the following wholly delightful stanza in the style of the "Ode on a
+Distant Prospect of Clapham Academy":</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Tom Mill was used to blacken eyes<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Without the fear of sessions;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Charles Medlar loathed false quantities<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">As much as false professions;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Now Mill keeps order in the land,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">A magistrate pedantic;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">{398}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Medlar's feet repose unscanned<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Beneath the wide Atlantic.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The same may even be said of "Utopia," a much-praised, often-quoted, and
+certainly very amusing poem, of "I'm not a Lover now," and of others,
+which are also, though less exactly, in Hood's manner. To attempt to
+distinguish between that manner and the manner which is Praed's own is a
+rather perilous attempt; and the people who hate all attempts at
+reducing criticism to principle, and who think that a critic should only
+say clever things about his subject, will of course dislike me for it.
+But that I cannot help. I should say then that Hood had the advantage of
+Praed in purely serious poetry; for Araminta's bard never did anything
+at all approaching "The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies," "The Haunted
+House," or a score of other things. He had also the advantage in pure
+broad humour. But where Praed excelled was in the mixed style, not of
+sharp contrast as in Hood's "Lay of the Desert Born" and "Demon Ship,"
+where from real pity and real terror the reader suddenly stumbles into
+pure burlesque, but of wholly blended and tempered humour and pathos. It
+is this mixed style in which I think his note is to be found as it is to
+be found in no other poet, and as it could hardly be found in any but
+one with Praed's peculiar talent and temper combined with his peculiar
+advantages of education, fortune, and social atmosphere. He never had to
+"pump out sheets of fun" on a sick-bed for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">{399}</a></span> printer's devil, like
+his less well-fated but assuredly not less well-gifted rival; and as his
+scholarship was exactly of the kind to refine, temper, and adjust his
+literary manner, so his society and circumstances were exactly of the
+kind to repress, or at least not to encourage, exuberance or
+boisterousness in his literary matter. There are I believe who call him
+trivial, even frivolous; and if this be done sincerely by any careful
+readers of "The Red Fisherman" and the "Letter of Advice" I fear I must
+peremptorily disable their judgment. But this appearance of levity is in
+great part due exactly to the perfect modulation and adjustment of his
+various notes. He never shrieks or guffaws: there is no horse-play in
+him, just as there is no tearing a passion to tatters. His slight
+mannerisms, more than once referred to, rarely exceed what is justified
+by good literary manners. His points are very often so delicate, so
+little insisted on or underlined, that a careless reader may miss them
+altogether; his "questionings" are so little "obstinate" that a careless
+reader may think them empty.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Will it come with a rose or a brier?<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Will it come with a blessing or curse?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Will its bonnets be lower or higher?<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Will its morals be better or worse?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The author of this perhaps seems to some a mere jesting Pilate, and if
+he does, they are quite right not to even try to like him.</p>
+
+<p>I have seen disdainful remarks on those critics<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">{400}</a></span> who, however warily,
+admire a considerable number of authors, as though they were coarse and
+omnivorous persons, unfit to rank with the delicates who can only relish
+one or two things in literature. But this is a foolish mistake. "One to
+one" is not "cursedly confined" in the relation of book and reader; and
+a man need not be a Don Juan of letters to have a list of almost <i>mille
+e tre</i> loves in that department. He must indeed love the best or those
+among the best only, in the almost innumerable kinds, which is not a
+very severe restriction. And Praed is of this so fortunately numerous
+company. I do not agree with those who lament his early death on the
+ground of its depriving literature or politics of his future greatness.
+In politics he would most probably not have become anything greater than
+an industrious and respectable official; and in letters his best work
+was pretty certainly done. For it was a work that could only be done in
+youth. In his scholarly but not frigidly correct form, in his irregular
+sallies and flashes of a genius really individual as far as it went but
+never perhaps likely to go much farther, in the freshness of his
+imitations, in the imperfection of his originalities, Praed was the most
+perfect representative we have had or ever are likely to have of what
+has been called, with a perhaps reprehensible parody on great words,
+"the eternal undergraduate within us, who rejoices before life." He is
+thus at the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">{401}</a></span> very antipodes of Wertherism and Byronism, a light but
+gallant champion of cheerfulness and the joy of living. Although there
+is about him absolutely nothing artificial&mdash;the curse of the lighter
+poetry as a rule&mdash;and though he attains to deep pathos now and then, and
+once or twice (notably in "The Red Fisherman") to a kind of grim
+earnestness, neither of these things is his real <i>forte</i>. Playing with
+literature and with life, not frivolously or without heart, but with no
+very deep cares and no very passionate feeling, is Praed's attitude
+whenever he is at his best. And he does not play at playing as many
+writers do: it is all perfectly genuine. Even Prior has not excelled
+such lines as these in one of his early and by no means his best poems
+(an adaptation too), for mingled jest and earnest&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But Isabel, by accident,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Was wandering by that minute;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She opened that dark monument<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And found her slave within it;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>The clergy said the Mass in vain,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>The College could not save me:</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>But life, she swears, returned again</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>With the first kiss she gave me.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Hardly, if at all, could he have kept up this attitude towards life
+after he had come to forty year; and he might have become either a
+merely intelligent and respectable person, which is most probable, or an
+elderly youth, which is of all things<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">{402}</a></span> most detestable, or a
+caterwauler, or a cynic, or a preacher. From all these fates the gods
+mercifully saved him, and he abides with us (the presentation being but
+slightly marred by the injudicious prodigality of his editors) only as
+the poet of Medora's musical despair lest Araminta should derogate, of
+the Abbot's nightmare sufferings at the hands of the Red Fisherman, of
+the plaintive appeal after much lively gossip&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And you'll come&mdash;won't you come?&mdash;to our Ball,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>of all the pleasures, and the jests, and the tastes, and the studies,
+and the woes, provided only they are healthy and manly, of Twenty-five.
+Unhappy is the person of whom it can be said that he neither has been,
+is, nor ever will be in the temper and circumstances of which Praed's
+verse is the exact and consummate expression; not much less unhappy he
+for whom that verse does not perform the best perhaps of all the offices
+of literature, and call up, it may be in happier guise than that in
+which they once really existed, the many beloved shadows of the past.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403">{403}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIII" id="XIII"></a>XIII<br />
+<br />
+GEORGE BORROW</h2>
+
+
+<p>In this paper I do not undertake to throw any new light on the
+little-known life of the author of <i>Lavengro</i>. Among the few people who
+knew Borrow intimately, surely some one will soon be found who will give
+to the world an account of his curious life, and perhaps some specimens
+of those "mountains of manuscript" which, as he regretfully declares,
+never could find a publisher&mdash;an impossibility which, if I may be
+permitted to offer an opinion, does not reflect any great credit on
+publishers. For the present purpose it is sufficient to sum up the
+generally-known facts that Borrow was born in 1803 at East Dereham in
+Norfolk, his father being a captain in the army, who came of Cornish
+blood, his mother a lady of Norfolk birth and Huguenot extraction. His
+youth he has himself described in a fashion which nobody is likely to
+care to paraphrase. After the years of travel chronicled in <i>Lavengro</i>,
+he seems to have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404">{404}</a></span> found scope for his philological and adventurous
+tendencies in the rather unlikely service of the Bible Society; and he
+sojourned in Russia and Spain to the great advantage of English
+literature. This occupied him during the greater part of the years from
+1830 to 1840. Then he came back to his native country&mdash;or, at any rate,
+his native district&mdash;married a widow of some property at Lowestoft, and
+spent the last forty years of his life at Oulton Hall, near the piece of
+water which is thronged in summer by all manner of sportsmen and others.
+He died but a few years ago; and even since his death he seems to have
+lacked the due meed of praise which the Lord Chief Justice of the equal
+foot usually brings, even to persons far less deserving than Borrow.</p>
+
+<p>There is this difficulty in writing about him, that the audience must
+necessarily consist of fervent devotees on the one hand, and of complete
+infidels, or at least complete know-nothings, on the other. To any one
+who, having the faculty to understand either, has read <i>Lavengro</i> or
+<i>The Bible in Spain</i>, or even <i>Wild Wales</i>, praise bestowed on Borrow is
+apt to seem impertinence. To anybody else (and unfortunately the anybody
+else is in a large majority) praise bestowed on Borrow is apt to look
+like that very dubious kind of praise which is bestowed on somebody of
+whom no one but the praiser has ever heard. I cannot think of any single
+writer (Peacock himself<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">{405}</a></span> is not an exception) who is in quite parallel
+case. And, as usual, there is a certain excuse for the general public.
+Borrow kept himself, during not the least exciting period of English
+history, quite aloof from English politics, and from the life of great
+English cities. But he did more than this. He is the only really
+considerable writer of his time in any modern European nation who seems
+to have taken absolutely no interest in current events, literary and
+other. Putting a very few allusions aside, he might have belonged to
+almost any period. His political idiosyncrasy will be noticed presently;
+but he, who lived through the whole period from Waterloo to Maiwand, has
+not, as far as I remember, mentioned a single English writer later than
+Scott and Byron. He saw the rise, and, in some instances, the death, of
+Tennyson, Thackeray, Macaulay, Carlyle, Dickens. There is not a
+reference to any one of them in his works. He saw political changes such
+as no man for two centuries had seen, and (except the Corn Laws, to
+which he has some half-ironical allusions, and the Ecclesiastical Titles
+Bill, which stirred his one active sentiment) he has referred to never a
+one. He seems in some singular fashion to have stood outside of all
+these things. His Spanish travels are dated for us by references to Doña
+Isabel and Don Carlos, to Mr. Villiers and Lord Palmerston. But cut
+these dates out, and they might be travels of the last century. His
+Welsh book proclaims<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">{406}</a></span> itself as written in the full course of the
+Crimean War; but excise a few passages which bear directly on that
+event, and the most ingenious critic would be puzzled to "place" the
+composition. Shakespeare, we know, was for all time, not of one age
+only; but I think we may say of Borrow, without too severely or
+conceitedly marking the difference, that he was not of or for any
+particular age or time at all. If the celebrated query in Longfellow's
+<i>Hyperion</i>, "What is time?" had been addressed to him, his most
+appropriate answer, and one which he was quite capable of giving, would
+have been, "I really don't know."</p>
+
+<p>To this singular historical vagueness has to be added a critical
+vagueness even greater. I am sorry that I am unable to confirm or to
+gainsay at first hand Borrow's wonderfully high estimate of certain
+Welsh poets. But if the originals are anything like his translations of
+them, I do not think that Ab Gwilym and Lewis Glyn Cothi, Gronwy Owen
+and Huw Morris can have been quite such mighty bards as he makes out.
+Fortunately, however, a better test presents itself. In one book of his,
+<i>Wild Wales</i>, there are two estimates of Scott's works. Borrow finds in
+an inn a copy of <i>Woodstock</i> (which he calls by its less known title of
+<i>The Cavalier</i>), and decides that it is "trashy": chiefly, it would
+appear, because the portrait therein contained of Harrison, for whom
+Borrow seems, on one of his inscrutable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">{407}</a></span> principles of prejudice, to
+have had a liking, is not wholly favourable. He afterwards informs us
+that Scott's "Norman Horseshoe" (no very exquisite song at the best, and
+among Scott's somewhat less than exquisite) is "one of the most stirring
+lyrics of modern times," and that he sang it for a whole evening;
+evidently because it recounts a defeat of the Normans, whom Borrow, as
+he elsewhere tells us in sundry places, disliked for reasons more or
+less similar to those which made him like Harrison, the butcher. In
+other words, he could not judge a work of literature as literature at
+all. If it expressed sentiments with which he agreed, or called up
+associations which were pleasant to him, good luck to it; if it
+expressed sentiments with which he did not agree, and called up no
+pleasant associations, bad luck.</p>
+
+<p>In politics and religion this curious and very John Bullish unreason is
+still more apparent. I suppose Borrow may be called, though he does not
+call himself, a Tory. He certainly was an unfriend to Whiggery, and a
+hater of Radicalism. He seems to have given up even the Corn Laws with a
+certain amount of regret, and his general attitude is quite Eldonian.
+But he combined with his general Toryism very curious Radicalisms of
+detail, such as are to be found in Cobbett (who, as appeared at last,
+and as all reasonable men should have always known, was really a Tory of
+a peculiar type), and in several other English persons. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">{408}</a></span> Church, the
+Monarchy, and the Constitution generally were dear to Borrow, but he
+hated all the aristocracy (except those whom he knew personally) and
+most of the gentry. Also, he had the odd Radical sympathy for anybody
+who, as the vernacular has it, was "kept out of his rights." I do not
+know, but I should think, that Borrow was a strong Tichbornite. In that
+curious book <i>Wild Wales</i>, where almost more of his real character
+appears than in any other, he has to do with the Crimean War. It was
+going on during the whole time of his tour, and he once or twice reports
+conversations in which, from his knowledge of Russia, he demonstrated
+beforehand to Welsh inquirers how improbable, not to say impossible, it
+was that the Russian should be beaten. But the thing that seems really
+to have interested him most was the case of Lieutenant P&mdash;&mdash; or
+Lieutenant Parry, whom he sometimes refers to in the fuller and
+sometimes in the less explicit manner. My own memories of 1854 are
+rather indistinct, and I confess that I have not taken the trouble to
+look up this celebrated case. As far as I can remember, and as far as
+Borrow's references here and elsewhere go, it was the doubtless
+lamentable but not uncommon case of a man who is difficult to live with,
+and who has to live with others. Such cases occur at intervals in every
+mess, college, and other similar aggregation of humanity. The person
+difficult to live with gets, to use an Oxford<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409">{409}</a></span> phrase, "drawn." If he is
+reformable he takes the lesson, and very likely becomes excellent
+friends with those who "drew" him. If he is not, he loses his temper,
+and evil results of one kind or another follow. Borrow's Lieutenant
+P&mdash;&mdash; seems unluckily to have been of the latter kind, and was, if I
+mistake not, recommended by the authorities to withdraw from a situation
+which, to him, was evidently a false and unsuitable one. With this
+Borrow could not away. He gravely chronicles the fact of his reading an
+"excellent article in a local paper on the case of Lieutenant P&mdash;&mdash;";
+and with no less gravity (though he was, in a certain way, one of the
+first humorists of our day) he suggests that the complaints of the
+martyred P&mdash;&mdash; to the Almighty were probably not unconnected with our
+Crimean disasters. This curious parochialism pursues him into more
+purely religious matters. I do not know any other really great man of
+letters of the last three-quarters of a century of whose attitude
+Carlyle's famous words, "regarding God's universe as a larger patrimony
+of Saint Peter, from which it were well and pleasant to hunt the Pope,"
+are so literally true. It was not in Borrow's case a case of <i>sancta
+simplicitas</i>. He has at times flashes of by no means orthodox sentiment,
+and seems to have fought, and perhaps hardly won, many a battle against
+the army of the doubters. But when it comes to the Pope, he is as
+single-minded an enthusiast as John Bunyan<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410">{410}</a></span> himself, whom, by the way,
+he resembles in more than one point. The attitude was, of course, common
+enough among his contemporaries; indeed any man who has reached middle
+life must remember numerous examples among his own friends and kindred.
+But in literature, and such literature as Borrow's, it is rare.</p>
+
+<p>Yet again, the curiously piecemeal, and the curiously arbitrary
+character of Borrow's literary studies in languages other than his own,
+is noteworthy in so great a linguist. The entire range of French
+literature, old as well as new, he seems to have ignored altogether&mdash;I
+should imagine out of pure John Bullishness. He has very few references
+to German, though he was a good German scholar&mdash;a fact which I account
+for by the other fact, that in his earlier literary period German was
+fashionable, and that he never would have anything to do with anything
+that fashion favoured. Italian, though he certainly knew it well, is
+equally slighted. His education, if not his taste for languages, must
+have made him a tolerable (he never could have been an exact) classical
+scholar. But it is clear that insolent Greece and haughty Rome possessed
+no attraction for him. I question whether even Spanish would not have
+been too common a toy to attract him much, if it had not been for the
+accidental circumstances which connected him with Spain.</p>
+
+<p>Lastly (for I love to get my devil's advocate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411">{411}</a></span> work over), in Borrow's
+varied and strangely attractive gallery of portraits and characters,
+most observers must perceive the absence of the note of passion. I have
+sometimes tried to think that miraculous episode of Isopel Berners and
+the Armenian verbs, with the whole sojourn of Lavengro in the dingle, a
+mere wayward piece of irony&mdash;a kind of conscious ascetic myth. But I am
+afraid the interpretation will not do. The subsequent conversation with
+Ursula Petulengro under the hedge might be only a companion piece; even
+the more wonderful, though much less interesting, dialogue with the
+Irish girl in the last chapters of <i>Wild Wales</i> might be so rendered by
+a hardy exegete. But the negative evidence in all the books is too
+strong. It may be taken as positively certain that Borrow never was "in
+love," as the phrase is, and that he had hardly the remotest conception
+of what being in love means. It is possible that he was a most cleanly
+liver&mdash;it is possible that he was quite the reverse: I have not the
+slightest information either way. But that he never in all his life
+heard with understanding the refrain of the "Pervigilium,"</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit eras amet,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>I take as certain.</p>
+
+<p>The foregoing remarks have, I think, summed up all Borrow's defects, and
+it will be observed that even these defects have for the most part the
+attraction of a certain strangeness and oddity. If<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412">{412}</a></span> they had not been
+accompanied by great and peculiar merits, he would not have emerged from
+the category of the merely bizarre, where he might have been left
+without further attention. But, as a matter of fact, all, or almost all,
+of his defects are not only counterbalanced by merits, but are
+themselves, in a great degree, exaggerations or perversions of what is
+intrinsically meritorious. With less wilfulness, with more attention to
+the literature, the events, the personages of his own time, with a more
+critical and common-sense attitude towards his own crotchets, Borrow
+could hardly have wrought out for himself (as he has to an extent hardly
+paralleled by any other prose writer who has not deliberately chosen
+supernatural or fantastic themes) the region of fantasy, neither too
+real nor too historical, which Joubert thought proper to the poet.
+Strong and vivid as Borrow's drawing of places and persons is, he always
+contrives to throw in touches which somehow give the whole the air of
+being rather a vision than a fact. Never was such a John-a-Dreams as
+this solid, pugilistic John Bull. Part of this literary effect of his is
+due to his quaint habit of avoiding, where he can, the mention of proper
+names. The description, for instance, of Old Sarum and Salisbury itself
+in <i>Lavengro</i> is sufficient to identify them to the most careless
+reader, even if the name of Stonehenge had not occurred on the page
+before; but they are not named. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413">{413}</a></span> description of Bettws-y-Coed in
+<i>Wild Wales</i>, though less poetical, is equally vivid. Yet here it would
+be quite possible for a reader, who did not know the place and its
+relation to other named places, to pass without any idea of the actual
+spot. It is the same with his frequent references to his beloved city of
+Norwich, and his less frequent references to his later home at Oulton. A
+paraphrase, an innuendo, a word to the wise he delights in, but anything
+perfectly clear and precise he abhors. And by this means and others,
+which it might be tedious to trace out too closely, he succeeds in
+throwing the same cloudy vagueness over times as well as places and
+persons. A famous passage&mdash;perhaps the best known, and not far from the
+best he ever wrote&mdash;about Byron's funeral, fixes, of course, the date of
+the wondrous facts or fictions recorded in <i>Lavengro</i> to a nicety. Yet
+who, as he reads it and its sequel (for the separation of <i>Lavengro</i> and
+<i>The Romany Rye</i> is merely arbitrary, though the second book is, as a
+whole, less interesting than the former), ever thinks of what was
+actually going on in the very positive and prosaic England of 1824-25?
+The later chapters of <i>Lavengro</i> are the only modern <i>Roman d'Aventures</i>
+that I know. The hero goes "overthwart and endlong," just like the
+figures whom all readers know in Malory, and some in his originals. I do
+not know that it would be more surprising if Borrow had found Sir<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414">{414}</a></span> Ozana
+dying at the chapel in Lyonesse, or had seen the full function of the
+Grail, though I fear he would have protested against that as popish.
+Without any apparent art, certainly without the elaborate apparatus
+which most prose tellers of fantastic tales use, and generally fail in
+using, Borrow spirits his readers at once away from mere reality. If his
+events are frequently as odd as a dream, they are always as perfectly
+commonplace and real for the moment as the events of a dream are&mdash;a
+little fact which the above-mentioned tellers of the above-mentioned
+fantastic stories are too apt to forget. It is in this natural romantic
+gift that Borrow's greatest charm lies. But it is accompanied and nearly
+equalled, both in quality and in degree, by a faculty for dialogue.
+Except Defoe and Dumas, I cannot think of any novelists who contrive to
+tell a story in dialogue and to keep up the ball of conversation so well
+as Borrow; while he is considerably the superior of both in pure style
+and in the literary quality of his talk. Borrow's humour, though it is
+of the general class of the older English&mdash;that is to say, the
+pre-Addisonian&mdash;humorists, is a species quite by itself. It is rather
+narrow in range, a little garrulous, busied very often about curiously
+small matters, but wonderfully observant and true, and possessing a
+quaint dry savour as individual as that of some wines. A characteristic
+of this kind probably accompanies the romantic <i>ethos</i> more commonly
+than superficial judges both<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415">{415}</a></span> of life and literature are apt to suppose;
+but the conjunction is nowhere seen better than in Borrow. Whether
+humour can or cannot exist without a disposition to satire co-existing,
+is one of those abstract points of criticism for which the public of the
+present day has little appetite. It is certain (and that is what chiefly
+concerns us for the present) that the two were not dissociated in
+Borrow. His purely satirical faculty was very strong indeed, and
+probably if he had lived a less retired life it would have found fuller
+exercise. At present the most remarkable instance of it which exists is
+the inimitable portrait-caricature of the learned Unitarian, generally
+known as "Taylor of Norwich." I have somewhere (I think it was in Miss
+Martineau's <i>Autobiography</i>) seen this reflected on as a flagrant
+instance of ingratitude and ill-nature. The good Harriet, among whose
+numerous gifts nature had not included any great sense of humour,
+naturally did not perceive the artistic justification of the sketch,
+which I do not hesitate to call one of the most masterly things of the
+kind in literature.</p>
+
+<p>Another Taylor, the well-known French baron of that name, is much more
+mildly treated, though with little less skill of portraiture. As for
+"the publisher" of <i>Lavengro</i>, the portrait there, though very clever,
+is spoilt by rather too much evidence of personal animus, and by the
+absence of redeeming strokes; but it shows the same satiric<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416">{416}</a></span> power as
+the sketch of the worthy student of German who has had the singular
+ill-fortune to have his books quizzed by Carlyle, and himself quizzed by
+Borrow. It is a strong evidence of Borrow's abstraction from general
+society that with this satiric gift, and evidently with a total freedom
+from scruple as to its application, he should have left hardly anything
+else of the kind. It is indeed impossible to ascertain how much of the
+abundant character-drawing in his four chief books (all of which, be it
+remembered, are autobiographic and professedly historical) is fact and
+how much fancy. It is almost impossible to open them anywhere without
+coming upon personal sketches, more or less elaborate, in which the
+satiric touch is rarely wanting. The official admirer of "the grand
+Baintham" at remote Corcubion, the end of all the European world; the
+treasure-seeker, Benedict Mol; the priest at Cordova, with his
+revelations about the Holy Office; the Gibraltar Jew; are only a few
+figures out of the abundant gallery of <i>The Bible in Spain</i>. <i>Lavengro</i>,
+besides the capital and full-length portraits above referred to, is
+crowded with others hardly inferior, among which only one failure, the
+disguised priest with the mysterious name, is to be found. Not that even
+he has not good strokes and plenty of them, but that Borrow's prejudices
+prevented his hand from being free. But Jasper Petulengro, and Mrs.
+Hearne, and the girl Leonora, and Isopel, that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417">{417}</a></span> vigorous and slighted
+maid, and dozens of minor figures, of whom more presently, atone for
+him. <i>The Romany Rye</i> adds only minor figures to the gallery, because
+the major figures have appeared before; while the plan and subject of
+<i>Wild Wales</i> also exclude anything more than vignettes. But what
+admirable vignettes they are, and how constantly bitten in with satiric
+spirit, all lovers of Borrow know.</p>
+
+<p>It is, however, perhaps time to give some more exact account of the
+books thus familiarly and curiously referred to; for Borrow most
+assuredly is not a popular writer. Not long before his death <i>Lavengro</i>,
+<i>The Romany Rye</i>, and <i>Wild Wales</i> were only in their third edition,
+though the first was nearly thirty, and the last nearly twenty, years
+old. <i>The Bible in Spain</i> had, at any rate in its earlier days, a wider
+sale, but I do not think that even that is very generally known. I
+should doubt whether the total number sold, during some fifty years, of
+volumes surpassed in interest of incident, style, character and
+description by few books of the century, has equalled the sale, within
+any one of the last few years, of a fairly popular book by any fairly
+popular novelist of to-day. And there is not the obstacle to Borrow's
+popularity that there is to that of some other writers, notably the
+already-mentioned author of <i>Crotchet Castle</i>. No extensive literary
+cultivation is necessary to read him. A good deal even of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418">{418}</a></span> his peculiar
+charm may be missed by a prosaic or inattentive reader, and yet enough
+will remain. But he has probably paid the penalty of originality, which
+allows itself to be mastered by quaintness, and which refuses to meet
+public taste at least half-way. It is certainly difficult at times to
+know what to make of Borrow. And the general public, perhaps excusably,
+is apt not to like things or persons when it does not know what to make
+of them.</p>
+
+<p>Borrow's literary work, even putting aside the "mountains of manuscript"
+which he speaks of as unpublished, was not inconsiderable. There were,
+in the first place, his translations, which, though no doubt not without
+value, do not much concern us here. There is, secondly, his early
+hackwork, his <i>Chaines de l'Esclavage</i>, which also may be neglected.
+Thirdly, there are his philological speculations or compilations, the
+chief of which is, I believe, his <i>Romano-Lavo-Lil</i>, the latest
+published of his works. But Borrow, though an extraordinary linguist,
+was a somewhat unchastened philologer, and the results of his life-long
+philological studies appear to much better advantage from the literary
+than from the scientific point of view. Then there is <i>The Gypsies in
+Spain</i>, a very interesting book of its kind, marked throughout with
+Borrow's characteristics, but for literary purposes merged to a great
+extent in <i>The Bible in Spain</i>. And, lastly, there are the four original
+books,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_419" id="Page_419">{419}</a></span> as they may be called, which, at great leisure, and writing
+simply because he chose to write, Borrow produced during the twenty
+years of his middle age. He was in his fortieth year when, in 1842, he
+published <i>The Bible in Spain</i>. <i>Lavengro</i> came nearly ten years later,
+and coincided with (no doubt it was partially stimulated by) the ferment
+over the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. Its second part, <i>The Romany Rye</i>,
+did not appear till six afterwards, that is to say, in 1857, and its
+resuscitation of quarrels, which the country had quite forgotten (and
+when it remembered them was rather ashamed of), must be pronounced
+unfortunate. Last, in 1862, came <i>Wild Wales</i>, the characteristically
+belated record of a tour in the principality during the year of the
+Crimean War. On these four books Borrow's literary fame rests. His other
+works are interesting because they were written by the author of these,
+or because of their subjects, or because of the effect they had on other
+men of letters, notably Longfellow and Mérimée, on the latter of whom
+Borrow had an especially remarkable influence. These four are
+interesting of themselves.</p>
+
+<p>The earliest has been, I believe, and for reasons quite apart from its
+biblical subject perhaps deserves to be, the greatest general favourite,
+though its literary value is a good deal below that of <i>Lavengro</i>. <i>The
+Bible in Spain</i> records the journeys, which, as an agent of the Bible
+Society,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_420" id="Page_420">{420}</a></span> Borrow took through the Peninsula at a singularly interesting
+time, the disturbed years of the early reign of Isabel Segunda. Navarre
+and Aragon, with Catalonia, Valencia, and Murcia, he seems to have left
+entirely unvisited; I suppose because of the Carlists. Nor did he
+attempt the southern part of Portugal; but Castile and Leon, with the
+north of Portugal and the south of Spain, he quartered in the most
+interesting manner, riding everywhere with his servant and his
+saddle-bag of Testaments at, I should suppose, a considerable cost to
+the subscribers of the Society and at, it may be hoped, some gain to the
+propagation of evangelical principles in the Peninsula, but certainly
+with the results of extreme satisfaction to himself and of a very
+delightful addition to English literature. He was actually imprisoned at
+Madrid, and was frequently in danger from Carlists, and brigands, and
+severely orthodox ecclesiastics. It is possible to imagine a more
+ideally perfect missionary; but it is hardly possible to imagine a more
+ideally perfect traveller. His early habits of roughing it, his gipsy
+initiation, his faculties as a linguist, and his other faculties as a
+born vagrant, certain to fall on his feet anywhere, were all called into
+operation. But he might have had all these advantages and yet lacked the
+extraordinary literary talent which the book reveals. In the first
+chapter there is a certain stiffness; but the passage of the Tagus in
+the second must have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_421" id="Page_421">{421}</a></span> told every competent reader in 1842 that he had to
+deal with somebody quite different from the run of common writers, and
+thenceforward the book never flags till the end. How far the story is
+rigidly historical I should be very sorry to have to decide. The author
+makes a kind of apology in his preface for the amount of fact which has
+been supplied from memory. I daresay the memory was quite trustworthy,
+and certainly adventures are to the adventurous. We have had daring
+travellers enough during the last half-century, but I do not know that
+any one has ever had quite such a romantic experience as Borrow's ride
+across the Hispano-Portuguese frontier with a gipsy <i>contrabandista</i>,
+who was at the time a very particular object of police inquiry. I
+daresay the interests of the Bible Society required the adventurous
+journey to the wilds of Finisterra. But I feel that if that association
+had been a mere mundane company and Borrow its agent, troublesome
+shareholders might have asked awkward questions at the annual meeting.
+Still, this sceptical attitude is only part of the official duty of the
+critic, just as, of course, Borrow's adventurous journeys into the most
+remote and interesting parts of Spain were part of the duty of the
+colporteur. The book is so delightful that, except when duty calls, no
+one would willingly take any exception to any part or feature of it. The
+constant change of scene, the romantic episodes of adventure, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_422" id="Page_422">{422}</a></span>
+kaleidoscope of characters, the crisp dialogue, the quaint reflection
+and comment relieve each other without a break. I do not know whether it
+is really true to Spain and Spanish life, and, to tell the exact truth,
+I do not in the least care. If it is not Spanish it is remarkably human
+and remarkably literary, and those are the chief and principal things.</p>
+
+<p><i>Lavengro</i>, which followed, has all the merits of its predecessor and
+more. It is a little spoilt in its later chapters by the purpose, the
+antipapal purpose, which appears still more fully in <i>The Romany Rye</i>.
+But the strong and singular individuality of its flavour as a whole
+would have been more than sufficient to carry off a greater fault. There
+are, I should suppose, few books the successive pictures of which leave
+such an impression on the reader who is prepared to receive that
+impression. The word picture is here rightly used, for in all Borrow's
+books more or less, and in this particularly, the narrative is anything
+but continuous. It is a succession of dissolving views which grow clear
+and distinct for a time and then fade off into vagueness before once
+more appearing distinctly; nor has this mode of dealing with a subject
+ever been more successfully applied than in <i>Lavengro</i>. At the same time
+the mode is one singularly difficult of treatment by any reviewer. To
+describe <i>Lavengro</i> with any chance of distinctness to those who have
+not read it, it would be necessary to give a series<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_423" id="Page_423">{423}</a></span> of sketches in
+words, like those famous ones of the pictures in <i>Jane Eyre</i>. East
+Dereham, the Viper Collector, the French Prisoners at Norman Cross, the
+Gipsy Encampment, the Sojourn in Edinburgh (with a passing view of
+Scotch schoolboys only inferior, as everything is, to Sir Walter's
+history of Green-breeks), the Irish Sojourn (with the horse whispering
+and the "dog of peace,") the settlement in Norwich (with Borrow's
+compulsory legal studies and his very uncompulsory excursions into
+Italian, Hebrew, Welsh, Scandinavian, anything that obviously would not
+pay), the new meeting with the gipsies in the Castle Field, the
+fight&mdash;only the first of many excellent fights&mdash;these are but a few of
+the memories which rise to every reader of even the early chapters of
+this extraordinary book, and they do not cover its first hundred pages
+in the common edition. Then his father dies and the born vagrant is set
+loose for vagrancy. He goes to London, with a stock of translations
+which is to make him famous, and a recommendation from Taylor of Norwich
+to "the publisher." The publisher exacted something more than his pound
+of flesh in the form of Newgate Lives and review articles, and paid,
+when he did pay, in bills of uncertain date which were very likely to be
+protested. But Borrow won through it all, making odd acquaintances with
+a young man of fashion (his least lifelike sketch); with an apple-seller
+on London Bridge, who was something of a "fence"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_424" id="Page_424">{424}</a></span> and had erected Moll
+Flanders (surely the oddest patroness ever so selected) into a kind of
+patron saint; with a mysterious Armenian merchant of vast wealth, whom
+the young man, according to his own account, finally put on a kind of
+filibustering expedition against both the Sublime Porte and the White
+Czar, for the restoration of Armenian independence. At last, out of
+health with perpetual work and low living, out of employ, his friends
+beyond call, he sees destruction before him, writes <i>The Life and
+Adventures of Joseph Sell</i> (name of fortunate omen!) almost at a heat
+and on a capital, fixed and floating, of eighteen-pence, and disposes of
+it for twenty pounds by the special providence of the Muses. With this
+twenty pounds his journey into the blue distance begins. He travels,
+partly by coach, to somewhere near Salisbury, and gives the first of the
+curiously unfavourable portraits of stage coachmen, which remain to
+check Dickens's rose-coloured representations of Mr. Weller and his
+brethren. I incline to think that Borrow's was likely to be the truer
+picture. According to him, the average stage coachman was anything but
+an amiable character, greedy, insolent to all but persons of wealth and
+rank, a hanger-on of those who might claim either; bruiser enough to be
+a bully but not enough to be anything more; in short, one of the worst
+products of civilisation. From civilisation itself, however, Borrow soon
+disappears, as far as any traceable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_425" id="Page_425">{425}</a></span> signs go. He journeys, not farther
+west but northwards, into the West Midlands and the marches of Wales. He
+buys a tinker's beat and fit-out from a feeble vessel of the craft, who
+has been expelled by "the Flaming Tinman," a half-gipsy of robustious
+behaviour. He is met by old Mrs. Hearne, the mother-in-law of his gipsy
+friend Jasper Petulengro, who resents a Gorgio's initiation in gipsy
+ways, and very nearly poisons him by the wily aid of her grand-daughter
+Leonora. He recovers, thanks to a Welsh travelling preacher and to
+castor oil. And then, when the Welshman has left him, comes the climax
+and turning-point of the whole story, the great fight with Jem Bosvile,
+"the Flaming Tinman." The much-abused adjective Homeric belongs in sober
+strictness to this immortal battle, which has the additional interest
+not thought of by Homer (for goddesses do not count) that Borrow's
+second and guardian angel is a young woman of great attractions and
+severe morality, Miss Isopel (or Belle) Berners, whose extraction,
+allowing for the bar sinister, is honourable, and who, her hands being
+fully able to keep her head, has sojourned without ill fortune in the
+Flaming Tinman's very disreputable company. Bosvile, vanquished by pluck
+and good fortune rather than strength, flees the place with his wife.
+Isopel remains behind and the couple take up their joint residence, a
+residence of perfect propriety, in this dingle, the exact locality of
+which I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_426" id="Page_426">{426}</a></span> have always longed to know, that I might make an autumnal
+pilgrimage to it. Isopel, Brynhild as she is, would apparently have had
+no objection to be honourably wooed. But her eccentric companion
+confines himself to teaching her "I love" in Armenian, which she finds
+unsatisfactory; and she at last departs, leaving a letter which tells
+Mr. Borrow some home truths. And, even before this catastrophe has been
+reached, <i>Lavengro</i> itself ends with a more startling abruptness than
+perhaps any nominally complete book before or since.</p>
+
+<p>It would be a little interesting to know whether the continuation, <i>The
+Romany Rye</i>, which opens as if there had been no break whatever, was
+written continuously or with a break. At any rate its opening chapters
+contain the finish of the lamentable history of Belle Berners, which
+must induce every reader of sensibility to trust that Borrow, in writing
+it, was only indulging in his very considerable faculty of perverse
+romancing. The chief argument to the contrary is, that surely no man,
+however imbued with romantic perversity, would have made himself cut so
+poor a figure as Borrow here does without cause. The gipsies reappear to
+save the situation, and a kind of minor Belle Berners drama is played
+out with Ursula, Jasper's sister. Then the story takes another of its
+abrupt turns. Jasper, half in generosity it would appear, half in
+waywardness, insists on Borrow purchasing a thorough-bred horse which is
+for sale, advances<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_427" id="Page_427">{427}</a></span> the money, and despatches him across England to
+Horncastle Fair to sell it. The usual Le Sagelike adventures occur, the
+oddest of them being the hero's residence for some considerable time as
+clerk and storekeeper at a great roadside inn. At last he reaches
+Horncastle, and sells the horse to advantage. Then the story closes as
+abruptly and mysteriously almost as that of <i>Lavengro</i>, with a long and
+in parts, it must be confessed, rather dull conversation between the
+hero, the Hungarian who has bought the horse, and the dealer who has
+acted as go-between. This dealer, in honour of Borrow, of whom he has
+heard through the gipsies, executes the wasteful and very meaningless
+ceremony of throwing two bottles of old rose champagne, at a guinea
+apiece, through the window. Even this is too dramatic a finale for
+Borrow's unconquerable singularity, and he adds a short dialogue between
+himself and a recruiting sergeant. And after this again there comes an
+appendix containing an <i>apologia</i> for <i>Lavengro</i>, a great deal more
+polemic against Romanism, some historical views of more originality than
+exactness, and a diatribe against gentility, Scotchmen, Scott, and other
+black beasts of Borrow's. This appendix has received from some professed
+admirers of the author a great deal more attention than it deserves. In
+the first place, it was evidently written in a fit of personal pique; in
+the second, it is chiefly argumentative, and Borrow had absolutely no
+argumentative<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_428" id="Page_428">{428}</a></span> faculty. To say that it contains a great deal of quaint
+and piquant writing is only to say that its writer wrote it, and though
+the description of "Charlie-over-the-waterism" probably does not apply
+to any being who ever lived, except to a few school-girls of both sexes,
+it has a strong infusion of Borrow's satiric gift. As for the diatribes
+against gentility, Borrow has only done very clumsily what Thackeray had
+done long before without clumsiness. It can escape nobody who has read
+his books with a seeing eye that he was himself exceedingly proud, not
+merely of being a gentleman in the ethical sense, but of being one in
+the sense of station and extraction&mdash;as, by the way, the decriers of
+British snobbishness usually are, so that no special blame attaches to
+Borrow for the inconsistency. Only let it be understood, once for all,
+that to describe him as "the apostle of the ungenteel" is either to
+speak in riddles or quite to misunderstand his real merits and
+abilities.</p>
+
+<p>I believe that some of the small but fierce tribe of Borrovians are
+inclined to resent the putting of the last of this remarkable series,
+<i>Wild Wales</i>, on a level with the other three. With such I can by no
+means agree. <i>Wild Wales</i> has not, of course, the charm of unfamiliar
+scenery and the freshness of youthful impression which distinguish <i>The
+Bible in Spain</i>; it does not attempt anything like the novel-interest of
+<i>Lavengro</i> and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_429" id="Page_429">{429}</a></span> <i>The Romany Rye</i>; and though, as has been pointed out
+above, something of Borrow's secret and mysterious way of indicating
+places survives, it is a pretty distinct itinerary over great part of
+the actual principality. I have followed most of its tracks on foot
+myself, and nobody who wants a Welsh guide-book can take a pleasanter
+one, though he might easily find one much less erratic. It may thus
+have, to superficial observers, a positive and prosaic flavour as
+compared with the romantic character of the other three. But this
+distinction is not real. The tones are a little subdued, as was likely
+to be the case with an elderly gentleman of fifty, travelling with his
+wife and stepdaughter, and not publishing the record of his travels till
+he was nearly ten years older. The localities are traceable on the map
+and in Murray, instead of being the enchanted dingles and the
+half-mythical woods of <i>Lavengro</i>. The personages of the former books
+return no more, though, with one of his most excellent touches of art,
+the author has suggested the contrast of youth and age by a single gipsy
+interview in one of the later chapters. Borrow, like all sensible men,
+was at no time indifferent to good food and drink, especially good ale;
+but the trencher plays in <i>Wild Wales</i> a part, the importance of which
+may perhaps have shocked some of our latter-day delicates, to whom
+strong beer is a word of loathing, and who wonder how on earth our
+grandfathers and fathers used to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_430" id="Page_430">{430}</a></span> dispose of "black strap." A very
+different set of readers may be repelled by the strong literary colour
+of the book, which is almost a Welsh anthology in parts. But those few
+who can boast themselves to find the whole of a book, not merely its
+parts, and to judge that whole when found, will be not least fond of
+<i>Wild Wales</i>. If they have, as every reader of Borrow should have, the
+spirit of the roads upon them, and are never more happy than when
+journeying on "Shanks his mare," they will, of course, have in addition
+a peculiar and personal love for it. It is, despite the interludes of
+literary history, as full of Borrow's peculiar conversational gift as
+any of its predecessors. Its thumbnail sketches, if somewhat more
+subdued and less elaborate, are not less full of character. John Jones,
+the Dissenting weaver, who served Borrow at once as a guide and a
+whetstone of Welsh in the neighbourhood of Llangollen; the "kenfigenous"
+Welshwoman who first, but by no means last, exhibited the curious local
+jealousy of a Welsh-speaking Englishman; the doctor and the Italian
+barometer-seller at Cerrig-y-Druidion; the "best Pridydd of the world"
+in Anglesey, with his unlucky addiction to beer and flattery; the waiter
+at Bala; the "ecclesiastical cat" (a cat worthy to rank with those of
+Southey and Gautier); the characters of the walk across the hills from
+Machynlleth to the Devil's Bridge; the scene at the public-house on the
+Glamorgan Border,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_431" id="Page_431">{431}</a></span> where the above-mentioned jealousy comes out so
+strongly; the mad Irishwoman, Johanna Colgan (a masterpiece by herself);
+and the Irish girl, with her hardly inferior history of the
+faction-fights of Scotland Road (which Borrow, by a mistake, has put in
+Manchester instead of in Liverpool); these make a list which I have
+written down merely as they occurred to me, without opening the book,
+and without prejudice to another list, nearly as long, which might be
+added. <i>Wild Wales</i>, too, because of its easy and direct opportunity of
+comparing its description with the originals, is particularly valuable
+as showing how sober, and yet how forcible, Borrow's descriptions are.
+As to incident, one often, as before, suspects him of romancing, and it
+stands to reason that his dialogue, written long after the event, must
+be full of the "cocked-hat-and-cane" style of narrative. But his
+description, while it has all the vividness, has also all the
+faithfulness and sobriety of the best landscape-painting. See a place
+which Kingsley or Mr. Ruskin, or some other master of our decorative
+school, has described&mdash;much more one which has fallen into the hands of
+the small fry of their imitators&mdash;and you are almost sure to find that
+it has been overdone. This is never, or hardly ever, the case with
+Borrow, and it is so rare a merit, when it is found in a man who does
+not shirk description where necessary, that it deserves to be counted to
+him at no grudging rate.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_432" id="Page_432">{432}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But there is no doubt that the distinguishing feature of the book is its
+survey of Welsh poetical literature. I have already confessed that I am
+not qualified to judge the accuracy of Borrow's translations, and by no
+means disposed to over-value them. But any one who takes an interest in
+literature at all, must, I think, feel that interest not a little
+excited by the curious Old-Mortality-like peregrinations which the
+author of <i>Wild Wales</i> made to the birth-place, or the burial-place as
+it might be, of bard after bard, and by the short but masterly accounts
+which he gives of the objects of his search. Of none of the numerous
+subjects of his linguistic rovings does Borrow seem to have been fonder,
+putting Romany aside, than of Welsh. He learnt it in a peculiarly
+contraband manner originally, which, no doubt, endeared it to him; it
+was little known to and often ridiculed by most Englishmen, which was
+another attraction; and it was extremely unlikely to "pay" in any way,
+which was a third. Perhaps he was not such an adept in it as he would
+have us believe&mdash;the respected Cymmrodorion Society or Professor Rhys
+must settle that. But it needs no knowledge of Welsh whatever to
+perceive the genuine enthusiasm, and the genuine range of his
+acquaintance with the language from the purely literary side. When he
+tells us that Ab Gwilym was a greater poet than Ovid or Chaucer I feel
+considerable doubts whether he was quite competent to understand<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_433" id="Page_433">{433}</a></span> Ovid
+and little or no doubt that he has done wrong to Chaucer. But when,
+leaving these idle comparisons, he luxuriates in details about Ab Gwilym
+himself, and his poems, and his lady loves, and so forth, I have no
+doubt about Borrow's appreciation (casual prejudices always excepted) of
+literature. Nor is it easy to exaggerate the charm which he has added to
+Welsh scenery by this constant identification of it with the men, and
+the deeds, and the words of the past.</p>
+
+<p>Little has been said hitherto of Borrow's more purely literary
+characteristics from the point of view of formal criticism. They are
+sufficiently interesting. He unites with a general plainness of speech
+and writing, not unworthy of Defoe or Cobbett, a very odd and
+complicated mannerism, which, as he had the wisdom to make it the
+seasoning and not the main substance of his literary fare, is never
+disgusting. The secret of this may be, no doubt, in part sought in his
+early familiarity with a great many foreign languages, some of whose
+idioms he transplanted into English: but this is by no means the whole
+of the receipt. Perhaps it is useless to examine analytically that
+receipt's details, or rather (for the analysis may be said to be
+compulsory on any one who calls himself a critic), useless to offer its
+results to the reader. One point which can escape no one who reads with
+his eyes open is the frequent, yet not too abundant, repetition of the
+same or very similar<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_434" id="Page_434">{434}</a></span> words&mdash;a point wherein much of the secret of
+persons so dissimilar as Carlyle, Borrow, and Thackeray consists. This
+is a well-known fact&mdash;so well known indeed that when a person who
+desires to acquire style hears of it, he often goes and does likewise,
+with what result all reviewers know. The peculiarity of Borrow, as far
+as I can mark it, is that, despite his strong mannerism, he never relies
+on it as too many others, great and small, are wont to do. The character
+sketches, of which, as I have said, he is so abundant a master, are
+always put in the plainest and simplest English. So are his flashes of
+ethical reflection, which, though like all ethical reflections often
+one-sided, are of the first order of insight. I really do not know that,
+in the mint-and-anise-and-cummin order of criticism, I have more than
+one charge to make against Borrow. That is that he, like other persons
+of his own and the immediately preceding time, is wont to make a most
+absurd misuse of the word individual. With Borrow "individual" means
+simply "person": a piece of literary gentility of which he, of all
+others, ought to have been ashamed.</p>
+
+<p>But such criticism has but very little propriety in the case of a
+writer, whose attraction is neither mainly nor in any very great degree
+one of pure form. His early critics compared him to Le Sage, and the
+comparison is natural. But if it is natural, it is not extraordinarily
+critical. Both men wrote of vagabonds, and to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_435" id="Page_435">{435}</a></span> some extent of picaroons;
+both neglected the conventionalities of their own language and
+literature; both had a singular knowledge of human nature. But Le Sage
+is one of the most impersonal of all great writers, and Borrow is one of
+the most personal. And it is undoubtedly in the revelation of his
+personality that great part of his charm lies. It is, as has been fully
+acknowledged, a one-sided, wrong-headed, not always quite right-hearted
+personality. But it is intensely English, possessing at the same time a
+certain strain of romance which the other John Bulls of literature
+mostly lack, and which John Bunyan, the king of them all, only reached
+within the limits, still more limited than Borrow's, of purely
+religious, if not purely ecclesiastical, interests. A born grumbler; a
+person with an intense appetite for the good things of this life;
+profoundly impressed with, and at the same time sceptically critical of,
+the bad or good things of another life; apt, as he somewhere says
+himself, "to hit people when he is not pleased"; illogical; constantly
+right in general, despite his extremely roundabout ways of reaching his
+conclusion; sometimes absurd, and yet full of humour; alternately
+prosaic and capable of the highest poetry; George Borrow, Cornishman on
+the father's side and Huguenot on the mother's, managed to display in
+perfection most of the characteristics of what once was, and let us hope
+has not quite ceased to be, the English<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_436" id="Page_436">{436}</a></span> type. If he had a slight
+overdose of Celtic blood and Celtic peculiarity, it was more than made
+up by the readiness of literary expression which it gave him. He, if any
+one, bore an English heart, though, as there often has been in
+Englishmen, there was something perhaps more as well as something less
+than English in his fashion of expression.</p>
+
+<p>To conclude, Borrow has&mdash;what after all is the chief mark of a great
+writer&mdash;distinction. "Try to be like somebody," said the unlucky
+critic-bookseller to Lamartine; and he has been gibbeted for it, very
+justly, for the best part of a century. It must be admitted that "try
+not to be like other people," though a much more fashionable, is likely
+to be quite as disastrous a recommendation. But the great writers,
+whether they try to be like other people or try not to be like them (and
+sometimes in the first case most of all), succeed only in being
+themselves, and that is what Borrow does. His attraction is rather
+complex, and different parts of it may, and no doubt do, apply with
+differing force to this and that reader. One may be fascinated by his
+pictures of an unconventional and open-air life, the very possibilities
+of which are to a great extent lost in our days, though patches of
+ground here and there in England (notably the tracts of open ground
+between Cromer and Wells in Borrow's own county) still recall them. To
+others he may be attractive for his sturdy patriotism, or his
+adventurous and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_437" id="Page_437">{437}</a></span> wayward spirit, or his glimpses of superstition and
+romance. The racy downrightness of his talk; the axioms, such as that to
+the Welsh alewife, "The goodness of ale depends less upon who brews it
+than upon what it is brewed of"; or the sarcastic touches as that of the
+dapper shopkeeper, who, regarding the funeral of Byron, observed, "I,
+too, am frequently unhappy," may each and all have their votaries. His
+literary devotion to literature would, perhaps, of itself attract few;
+for, as has been hinted, it partook very much of the character of
+will-worship, and there are few people who like any will-worship in
+letters except their own; but it adds to his general attraction, no
+doubt, in the case of many. That neither it, nor any other of his
+claims, has yet forced itself as it should on the general public is an
+undoubted fact; a fact not difficult to understand, though rather
+difficult fully to explain, at least without some air of superior
+knowingness and taste. Yet he has, as has been said, his devotees, and I
+think they are likely rather to increase than to decrease. He wants
+editing, for his allusive fashion of writing probably makes a great part
+of him nearly unintelligible to those who have not from their youth up
+devoted themselves to the acquisition of useless knowledge. There ought
+to be a good life of him. The great mass of his translations, published
+and unpublished, and the smaller mass of his early hackwork, no<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_438" id="Page_438">{438}</a></span> doubt
+deserve judicious excerption. If professed philologers were not even
+more ready than most other specialists each to excommunicate all the
+others except himself and his own particular Johnny Dods of Farthing's
+Acre, it would be rather interesting to hear what some modern men of
+many languages have to say to Borrow's linguistic achievements. But all
+these things are only desirable embellishments and assistances. His real
+claims and his real attractions are comprised in four small volumes, the
+purchase of which, under modern arrangements of booksellers, leaves some
+change out of a sovereign, and which will about half fill the ordinary
+bag used for briefs and dynamite. It is not a large literary baggage,
+and it does not attempt any very varied literary kinds. If not exactly a
+novelist in any one of his books, Borrow is a romancer, in the true and
+not the ironic sense of the word, in all of them. He has not been
+approached in merit by any romancer who has published books in our days,
+except Charles Kingsley; and his work, if less varied in range and charm
+than Kingsley's, has a much stronger and more concentrated flavour.
+Moreover, he is the one English writer of our time, and perhaps of times
+still farther back, who seems never to have tried to be anything but
+himself; who went his own way all his life long with complete
+indifference to what the public or the publishers liked, as well as to
+what canons of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_439" id="Page_439">{439}</a></span> literary form and standards of literary perfection
+seemed to indicate as best worth aiming at. A most self-sufficient
+person was Borrow, in the good and ancient sense, as well as, to some
+extent, in the sense which is bad and modern. And what is more, he was
+not only a self-sufficient person, but is very sufficient also to the
+tastes of all those who love good English and good literature.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_440" id="Page_440">{440}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="APPENDIX_A" id="APPENDIX_A"></a>APPENDIX A<br />
+<br />
+DE QUINCEY</h2>
+
+
+<p>A short time after the publication of my essay on De Quincey I learnt,
+to my great concern, that it had given offence to his daughter Florence,
+the widow of one of the heroes of the Indian Mutiny, Colonel Baird
+Smith. Mrs. Baird Smith complained, in a letter to the newspapers, that
+I had accused her father of untruthfulness, and requested the public to
+suspend their judgment until the publication of certain new documents,
+in the form of letters, which had been discovered. I might have replied,
+if my intent had been hostile, that little fault could be justly found
+with a critic of the existing evidence if new evidence were required to
+confute him. But as the very last intention that I had in writing the
+paper was to impute anything that can be properly called untruthfulness
+to De Quincey, I thought it better to say so and to wait for the further
+documents. In a subsequent private correspondence with Mrs. Baird Smith,
+I found that what had offended her (her complaints being at first quite
+general) was certain remarks on De Quincey's aristocratic acquaintances
+as appearing in the <i>Autobiography</i> and "not heard of afterwards,"
+certain comments on the Malay incident and others like it, some on the
+mystery of her father's money affairs, and the passage on his general
+"impenetrability." The matter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_441" id="Page_441">{441}</a></span> is an instance of the difficulty of
+dealing with recent reputations, when the commentator gives his name.
+Some really unkind things have been said of De Quincey; my intention was
+not to say anything unkind at all, but simply to give an account of the
+thing "as it strikes" if not "a contemporary" yet a well-willing junior.
+Take for instance the Malay incident. We know from De Quincey himself
+that, within a few years, the truth of this famous story was questioned,
+and that he was accused of having borrowed it from something of Hogg's.
+He disclaimed this, no doubt truly. He protested that it was a
+faithfully recorded incident: but though the events were then fresh, he
+did not produce a single witness to prove that any Malay had been near
+Grasmere at the time. And so elsewhere. As I have remarked about Borrow,
+there are some people who have a knack of recounting truth so that it
+looks as if it never had been true. I have been informed by Mr. James
+Runciman that he himself once made considerable inquiries on the track
+of <i>Lavengro</i>, and found that that remarkable book is, to some extent at
+any rate, apparently historic. On the other hand I have been told by
+another Borrovian who knew Borrow (which I never did) that the <i>Life of
+Joseph Sell</i> never existed. In such cases a critic can only go on
+internal evidence, and I am sure that the vast majority of critics would
+decide against most of De Quincey's stories on that. I do not suppose
+that he ever, like Lamb, deliberately begat "lie-children": but
+opium-eating is not absolutely repugnant to delusion, and literary
+mystification was not so much the exception as the rule in his earlier
+time. As to his "impenetrability," I can only throw myself on the
+readers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_442" id="Page_442">{442}</a></span> of such memoirs and reminiscences as have been published
+respecting him. The almost unanimous verdict of his acquaintances and
+critics has been that he was in a way mysterious, and though no doubt
+this mystery did not extend to his children, it seems to have extended
+to almost every one else. I gather from Mrs. Baird Smith's own remarks
+that from first to last all who were concerned with him treated him as a
+person unfit to be trusted with money, and while his habit of solitary
+lodging is doubtless capable of a certain amount of explanation, it
+cannot be described as other than curious. I had never intended to throw
+doubt on his actual acquaintance with Lord Westport or Lady Carbery.
+These persons or their representatives were alive when the
+<i>Autobiography</i> was published, and would no doubt have protested if De
+Quincey had not spoken truly. But I must still hold that their total
+disappearance from his subsequent life is peculiar. Some other points,
+such as his mentioning Wilson as his "only intimate male friend" are
+textually cited from himself, and if I seem to have spoken harshly of
+his early treatment by his family I may surely shelter myself behind the
+touching incident, recorded in the biographies, of his crying on his
+deathbed, "My dear mother! then I was greatly mistaken." If this does
+not prove that he himself had entertained on the subject ideas which,
+whether false or true, were unfavourable, then it is purely meaningless.</p>
+
+<p>In conclusion, I have only to repeat my regret that I should, by a
+perhaps thoughtless forgetfulness of the feelings of survivors, have
+hurt those feelings. But I think I am entitled to say that the view of
+De Quincey's character and cast of thought given in the text, while
+imputing nothing discreditable in intention, is founded<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_443" id="Page_443">{443}</a></span> on the whole
+published work and all the biographical evidence then accessible to me,
+and will not be materially altered by anything since published or likely
+to be so in future. The world, though often not quite right, is never
+quite wrong about a man, and it would be almost impossible that it
+should be wrong in face of such autobiographic details as are furnished,
+not merely by the <i>Autobiography</i> itself, but by a mass of notes spread
+over seven years in composition and full of personal idiosyncrasy. I not
+only acquit De Quincey of all serious moral delinquency,&mdash;I declare
+distinctly that no imputation of it was ever intended. It is quite
+possible that some of his biographers and of those who knew him may have
+exaggerated his peculiarities, less possible I think that those
+peculiarities should not have existed. But the matter, except for my own
+regret at having offended De Quincey's daughter, will have been a happy
+one if it results in a systematic publication of his letters, which,
+from the specimens already printed, must be very characteristic and very
+interesting. In almost all cases a considerable collection of letters is
+the most effective, and especially the most truth-telling, of all
+possible "lives." No letters indeed are likely to increase the literary
+repute of the author of the <i>Confessions</i> and of the <i>Cæsars</i>; but they
+may very well clear up and fill in the hitherto rather fragmentary and
+conjectural notion of his character, and they may, on the other hand,
+confirm that idea of both which, however false it may seem to his
+children, and others who were united to him by ties of affection, has
+commended itself to careful students of his published works.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_444" id="Page_444">{444}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="APPENDIX_B" id="APPENDIX_B"></a>APPENDIX B<br />
+<br />
+LOCKHART</h2>
+
+
+<p>The most singular instance of the floating dislike to Lockhart's memory,
+to which I have more than once referred in the text, occurred
+subsequently to the original publication of my essay, and not very long
+ago, when my friend Mr. Louis Stevenson thought proper to call Lockhart
+a "cad." This extraordinary <i>obiter dictum</i> provoked, as might have been
+expected, not a few protests, but I do not remember that Mr. Stevenson
+rejoined, and I have not myself had any opportunity of learning from him
+what he meant. I can only suppose that the ebullition must have been
+prompted by one of two things, the old scandal about the duel in which
+John Scott the editor of the <i>London</i> was shot, and a newer one, which
+was first bruited abroad, I think, in Mr. Sidney Colvin's book on Keats.
+Both of these, and especially the first, may be worth a little
+discussion.</p>
+
+<p>I do not think that any one who examines Mr. Colvin's allegation, will
+think it very damaging. It comes to this, that Keats's friend Bailey met
+Lockhart in the house of Bishop Greig at Stirling, told him some
+particulars about Keats, extracted from him a promise that he would not
+use them against the poet, and afterwards thought he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_445" id="Page_445">{445}</a></span> recognised some of
+the details in the <i>Blackwood</i> attack which ranks next to the famous
+<i>Quarterly</i> article. Here it is to be observed, first, that there is no
+sufficient evidence that Lockhart wrote this <i>Blackwood</i> article;
+secondly, that it is by no means certain that if he did, he was making,
+or considered himself to be making, any improper use of what he had
+heard; thirdly, that for the actual interview and its tenor we have only
+a vague <i>ex parte</i> statement made long after date.</p>
+
+<p>The other matter is much more important, and as the duel itself has been
+mentioned more than once or twice in the foregoing pages, and as it is
+to this day being frequently referred to in what seems to me an entirely
+erroneous manner, with occasional implications that Lockhart showed the
+white feather, it may be well to give a sketch of what actually
+happened, as far as can be made out from the most trustworthy accounts,
+published and unpublished.</p>
+
+<p>One of Lockhart's signatures in <i>Blackwood</i>&mdash;a signature which, however,
+like others, was not, I believe, peculiar to him&mdash;was "Zeta," and this
+Zeta assailed the Cockney school in a sufficiently scorpion-like manner.
+Thereupon Scott's magazine, the <i>London</i>, retorted, attacking Lockhart
+by name. On this Lockhart set out for London and, with a certain young
+Scotch barrister named Christie as his second, challenged Scott. But
+Scott refused to fight, unless Lockhart would deny that he was editor of
+<i>Blackwood</i>. Lockhart declared that Scott had no right to ask this, and
+stigmatised him as a coward. He then published a statement, sending at
+the same time<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_446" id="Page_446">{446}</a></span> a copy to Scott. In the published form the denial of
+editorship was made, in the one sent to Scott it was omitted. Thereupon
+Scott called Lockhart a liar. Of this Lockhart took no notice, but
+Christie his second did, and, an altercation taking place between them,
+Scott challenged Christie and they went out, Scott's second being Mr. P.
+G. Patmore, Christie's Mr. Traill, afterwards well known as a London
+police magistrate. Christie fired in the air, Scott fired at Christie
+and missed. Thereupon Mr. Patmore demanded a second shot, which, I am
+informed, could and should, by all laws of the duello, have been
+refused. Both principal and second on the other side were, however,
+inexperienced and probably unwilling to baulk their adversaries. Shots
+were again exchanged, Christie this time (as he can hardly be blamed for
+doing) taking aim at his adversary and wounding him mortally. Patmore
+fled the country, Christie and Traill took their trial and were
+acquitted.</p>
+
+<p>I have elsewhere remarked that this deplorable result is said to have
+been brought on by errors of judgment on the part of more than one
+person. Hazlitt, himself no duellist and even accused of personal
+timidity, is said to have egged on Scott, and to have stung him by some
+remark of his bitter tongue into challenging Christie, and there is no
+doubt that Patmore's conduct was most reprehensible. But we are here
+concerned with Lockhart, not with them. As far as I understand the
+imputations made on him, he is charged either with want of
+straightforwardness in omitting part of his explanation in the copy sent
+to Scott, or with cowardice in taking no<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_447" id="Page_447">{447}</a></span> notice of Scott's subsequent
+lie direct, or with both. Let us examine this.</p>
+
+<p>At first sight the incident of what, from the most notorious action of
+Lord Clive, we may call the "red and white treaties" seems odd. But it
+is to be observed, first, that Lockhart could not be said to conceal
+from Scott what he published to all the world; secondly, that his
+conduct was perfectly consistent throughout. He had challenged Scott,
+who had declined to go out. Having offered his adversary satisfaction,
+he was not bound to let him take it with a proviso, or to satisfy his
+private inquisitiveness. But if not under menace, but considering Scott
+after his refusal as unworthy the notice of a gentleman, and not further
+to be taken into account, he chose to inform the public of the truth, he
+had a perfect right to do so. And it is hardly necessary to say that it
+was the truth that he was not editor of <i>Blackwood</i>.</p>
+
+<p>This consideration will also account for his conduct in not renewing his
+challenge after Scott's offensive words. He had offered the man
+satisfaction and had been refused. No one is bound to go on challenging
+a reluctant adversary. At all times Lockhart seems to have been
+perfectly ready to back his opinion, as may be seen from a long affair
+which had happened earlier, in connection with the "Baron Lauerwinkel"
+matter. There he had promptly come forward and in his own name
+challenged the anonymous author of a pamphlet bearing the title of
+"Hypocrisy Unveiled." The anonym had, like Scott, shirked, and had
+maintained his anonymity. (Lord Cockburn says it was an open secret, but
+I do not know who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_448" id="Page_448">{448}</a></span> he was.) Thereupon Lockhart took no further notice,
+just as he did in the later matter, and I do not believe that a court of
+honour in any country would find fault with him. At any rate, I think
+that we are entitled to know, much more definitely than I have ever seen
+it stated, what the charge against him is. We may indeed blame him in
+both these matters, and perhaps in others, for neglecting the sound rule
+that anonymous writing should never be personal. If he did this,
+however, he is in the same box with almost every writer for the press in
+his own generation, and with too many in this. I maintain that in each
+case he promptly gave the guarantee which the honour of his time
+required, and which is perhaps the only possible guarantee, that of
+being ready to answer in person for what he had written impersonally.
+This was all he could do, and he did it.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_449" id="Page_449">{449}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a>INDEX</h2>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Allen, Thomas, <a href="#Page_113">113</a></li>
+
+<li>Arnold, Matthew, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_378">378</a></li>
+
+<li>Austen, Jane, <a href="#Page_29">29</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li><i>Blackwood's Magazine</i>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a> <i>sqq.</i>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a> <i>sqq.</i>, <a href="#Page_343">343</a> <i>sqq.</i></li>
+
+<li>Borrow, George, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>-<a href="#Page_439">439</a>;</li>
+<li><ul><li>  his life, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>, <a href="#Page_404">404</a>;</li>
+<li>  his excessive oddity, <a href="#Page_404">404</a>-<a href="#Page_411">411</a>;</li>
+<li>  his satiric and character-drawing faculty, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>-<a href="#Page_417">417</a>;</li>
+<li>  sketches of his books, <a href="#Page_417">417</a>-<a href="#Page_433">433</a>;</li>
+<li>  his general literary character, <a href="#Page_433">433</a>-<a href="#Page_439">439</a></li></ul></li>
+
+
+<li>Brougham, Lord, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a></li>
+
+<li>Burke, Edmund, <a href="#Page_10">10</a> <i>sqq.</i></li>
+
+<li>Burns, Robert, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_353">353</a></li>
+
+<li>Byron, Lord, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_393">393</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Canning, George, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_385">385</a></li>
+
+<li>Carlyle, Thomas, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>-<a href="#Page_272">272</a>, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>, <a href="#Page_370">370</a></li>
+
+<li>Coleridge, S. T., <a href="#Page_141">141</a></li>
+
+<li>Colvin, Mr. Sidney, <a href="#Page_445">445</a></li>
+
+<li>Courthope, Mr. W. J., <a href="#Page_4">4</a></li>
+
+<li>Crabbe, George, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>-<a href="#Page_32">32</a>;</li>
+<li><ul><li>  the decline of his popularity, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>-<a href="#Page_5">5</a>;</li>
+<li>  sketch of his life, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>-<a href="#Page_12">12</a>;</li>
+<li>  his works and their characteristics, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>-<a href="#Page_20">20</a>;</li>
+<li>  their prosaic element, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>-<a href="#Page_25">25</a>;</li>
+<li>  was he a poet?, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>-<a href="#Page_32">32</a></li></ul></li>
+
+
+<li>Cunningham, Allan, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Dante, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>, <a href="#Page_231">231</a></li>
+
+<li>Douglas, Scott, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_353">353</a></li>
+
+<li>Dryden, John, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Fitzgerald, Edward (translator of Omar Khayyám), <a href="#Page_4">4</a></li>
+
+<li>Flaubert, Gustave, <a href="#Page_19">19</a></li>
+
+<li><i>Fraser's Magazine</i>, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>, <a href="#Page_360">360</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Gifford, William, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Hannay, Mr. David, <a href="#Page_350">350</a></li>
+
+<li>Hazlitt, William, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>-<a href="#Page_169">169</a>;</li>
+<li><ul><li>  differing estimates of him, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>-<a href="#Page_140">140</a>;</li>
+<li>  his life, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>-<a href="#Page_146">146</a>;</li>
+<li>  his works, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>-<a href="#Page_169">169</a></li>
+<li>  &mdash;&mdash;<a href="#Page_xxi">xxi</a>, <a href="#Page_xxii">xxii</a>, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a></li></ul></li>
+
+
+<li>Hogg, James, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>-<a href="#Page_66">66</a>;</li>
+<li><ul><li>  his special interest, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>;</li>
+<li>  his life, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>-<a href="#Page_37">37</a>;</li>
+<li>  anecdotes and estimates of him, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>-<a href="#Page_47">47</a>;</li>
+<li>  his poems, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>-<a href="#Page_54">54</a>;</li>
+<li>  his general prose, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>;</li>
+<li>  <i>The Confessions of a Sinner</i>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>-<a href="#Page_64">64</a></li></ul></li>
+
+
+<li>Hood and Praed, <a href="#Page_397">397</a>-<a href="#Page_399">399</a></li>
+
+<li>Hook, Theodore, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>-<a href="#Page_359">359</a></li>
+
+<li>Howells, Mr. W. D., <a href="#Page_xvii">xvii</a></li>
+
+<li>Hunt, Leigh, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>-<a href="#Page_233">233</a>;</li>
+<li><ul><li>  scattered condition of his work, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>-<a href="#Page_203">203</a>;</li>
+<li>  his life, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>-<a href="#Page_213">213</a>;</li>
+<li>  the "Skimpole" matter, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>-<a href="#Page_216">216</a>;</li>
+<li>  his vulgarity, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>-<a href="#Page_219">219</a>;</li>
+<li>  his poems, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>-<a href="#Page_223">223</a>;</li>
+<li>  his critical and miscellaneous work, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>-<a href="#Page_233">233</a></li></ul></li></ul>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_450" id="Page_450">{450}</a></span></p>
+
+<ul><li>Jeffrey, Francis, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>-<a href="#Page_134">134</a>;</li>
+<li><ul><li>  a critic pure and simple, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>;</li>
+<li>  his life, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>-<a href="#Page_114">114</a>;</li>
+<li>  the foundation of the <i>Edinburgh Review</i>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>-<a href="#Page_109">109</a>;</li>
+<li>  his criticism, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a></li>
+<li>  &mdash;&mdash;<a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a></li></ul></li>
+
+
+<li>Johnson, Samuel, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a></li>
+
+<li>Joubert, Joseph, <a href="#Page_26">26</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Lang, Mr. Andrew, <a href="#Page_xxii">xxii</a></li>
+
+<li>Lockhart, John Gibson, <a href="#Page_339">339</a>-<a href="#Page_373">373</a>, and <a href="#APPENDIX_B">Appendix B</a>;</li>
+<li><ul><li>  his literary fate, <a href="#Page_339">339</a>-<a href="#Page_341">341</a>;</li>
+<li>  his life, <a href="#Page_341">341</a>-<a href="#Page_346">346</a>, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>-<a href="#Page_361">361</a>;</li>
+<li>  <i>The Chaldee MS.</i> and <i>Peter's Letters</i>, <a href="#Page_343">343</a>-<a href="#Page_345">345</a>;</li>
+<li>  the novels, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>-<a href="#Page_349">349</a>;</li>
+<li>  the poems, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>-<a href="#Page_351">351</a>;</li>
+<li>  <i>Life of Burns</i>, <a href="#Page_353">353</a>;</li>
+<li>  <i>Life of Scott</i>, <a href="#Page_354">354</a>-<a href="#Page_356">356</a>;</li>
+<li>  <i>Life of Hook</i>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>-<a href="#Page_359">359</a>;</li>
+<li>  his editorship of the <i>Quarterly</i> and his criticism generally, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>-<a href="#Page_373">373</a>;</li>
+<li>  charges against him, <a href="#Page_445">445</a>-<a href="#Page_448">448</a></li>
+<li>  &mdash;&mdash;<a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>-<a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a></li></ul></li></ul>
+
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Macaulay, Lord, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>, <a href="#Page_384">384</a></li>
+
+<li>Maguire, W., <a href="#Page_279">279</a>, <a href="#Page_360">360</a></li>
+<li> [Transcriber's Note: The alternative form of Maguire, Maginn, is used in
+ the main body of the text.]</li>
+
+<li>Masson, Professor, <a href="#Page_305">305</a> <i>sqq.</i></li>
+
+<li>Moore, Thomas, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>-<a href="#Page_200">200</a>;</li>
+<li><ul><li>  a French critic on him, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>-<a href="#Page_172">172</a>;</li>
+<li>  his miscellaneous work, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>-<a href="#Page_174">174</a>;</li>
+<li>  his life, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>-<a href="#Page_183">183</a>;</li>
+<li>  his character, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>-<a href="#Page_185">185</a>;</li>
+<li>  survey of his poetry, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>-<a href="#Page_200">200</a></li>
+<li>  &mdash;&mdash;<a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.</li></ul></li>
+
+
+<li>Morley, Mr. John, <a href="#Page_27">27</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Newman, Cardinal, <a href="#Page_4">4</a></li>
+
+<li>North, Christopher. <i>See</i> Wilson, John</li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Peacock, Thomas Love, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>-<a href="#Page_269">269</a>;</li>
+<li><ul><li>  his literary position, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>;</li>
+<li>  his life, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>-<a href="#Page_239">239</a>;</li>
+<li>  some difficulties in him, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>-<a href="#Page_242">242</a>;</li>
+<li>  survey of his work, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>-<a href="#Page_259">259</a>;</li>
+<li>  its special characteristics, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>-<a href="#Page_269">269</a></li></ul></li>
+
+
+<li>Pope, Alexander, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a></li>
+
+<li>Praed, W. M., <a href="#Page_374">374</a>-<a href="#Page_402">402</a>;</li>
+<li><ul><li>  editions of him, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>-<a href="#Page_376">376</a>;</li>
+<li>  his life, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>-<a href="#Page_381">381</a>;</li>
+<li>  his early writings, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>-<a href="#Page_384">384</a>;</li>
+<li>  his poetical work, <a href="#Page_385">385</a>-<a href="#Page_398">398</a>;</li>
+<li>  Hood and Praed, <a href="#Page_397">397</a>-<a href="#Page_399">399</a>;</li>
+<li>  his special charm, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>-<a href="#Page_402">402</a></li></ul></li></ul>
+
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Quincey, Thomas de, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>-<a href="#Page_338">338</a>, and <a href="#APPENDIX_A">Appendix A</a>;</li>
+<li><ul><li>  editions of him, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>-<a href="#Page_309">309</a>;</li>
+<li>  his life, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>-<a href="#Page_314">314</a>;</li>
+<li>  his faculty of rigmarole, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>-<a href="#Page_321">321</a>;</li>
+<li>  defects and merits of his work, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>-<a href="#Page_338">338</a></li>
+<li>  &mdash;&mdash;<a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_282">282</a></li></ul></li></ul>
+
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Rogers, Samuel, <a href="#Page_12">12</a> <i><a href="#Footnote_5_5">note</a></i></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Scott, John, his duel and death, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>; <a href="#APPENDIX_B">Appendix B</a></li>
+
+<li>Scott, Sir Walter, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>-<a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>, <a href="#Page_354">354</a>-<a href="#Page_359">359</a>, <a href="#Page_406">406</a>, <a href="#Page_407">407</a></li>
+
+<li>Shelley, P. B., <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>-<a href="#Page_250">250</a></li>
+
+<li>Smith, Bobus, <a href="#Page_69">69</a></li>
+
+<li>Smith, Mr. Goldwin, <a href="#Page_xi">xi</a>, <a href="#Page_xiv">xiv</a></li>
+
+<li>Smith, Sydney, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>-<a href="#Page_99">99</a>;</li>
+<li><ul><li>  the beneficence of his biographers, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>-<a href="#Page_69">69</a>;</li>
+<li>  his life, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>-<a href="#Page_80">80</a>;</li>
+<li>  his letters, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>-<a href="#Page_84">84</a>;</li>
+<li>  his published work, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>-<a href="#Page_99">99</a></li></ul></li>
+
+
+<li>Staël, Madame de, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a></li>
+
+<li>Stephen, Mr. Leslie, <a href="#Page_4">4</a></li>
+
+<li>Stevenson, Mr. R. L., <a href="#Page_445">445</a></li>
+
+<li>Sully, Mr. James, <a href="#Page_xxvii">xxvii</a> <i><a href="#Footnote_1_1">note</a></i></li>
+
+<li>Swift, Jonathan, Jeffrey on, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Tennyson, Lord, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>, <a href="#Page_365">365</a>, <a href="#Page_366">366</a></li>
+
+<li>Thackeray, W. M., on Hazlitt, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_451" id="Page_451">{451}</a></span></li>
+
+<li>Thomson, James, <a href="#Page_27">27</a></li>
+
+<li>Thurlow, Lord, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>-<a href="#Page_12">12</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Vallat, M. Jules, <a href="#Page_171">171</a> <i>sqq.</i></li>
+
+<li>Veitch, Professor, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a></li>
+
+<li>Voltaire, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Walker, Sarah, <a href="#Page_139">139</a> <i>sqq.</i></li>
+
+<li>Wilson, John, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>-<a href="#Page_303">303</a>;</li>
+<li><ul><li>  Carlyle's judgment of him and another, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>-<a href="#Page_274">274</a>;</li>
+<li>  his life, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>-<a href="#Page_277">277</a>;</li>
+<li>  the <i>Noctes</i>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>-<a href="#Page_288">288</a>;</li>
+<li>  his miscellaneous work, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>-<a href="#Page_303">303</a></li></ul></li>
+
+
+<li>Wilson, John, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>-<a href="#Page_47">47</a>.</li>
+<li><ul><li>  <i>See</i> also Essays on <a href="#APPENDIX_A">De Quincey</a> and <a href="#APPENDIX_B">Lockhart</a></li></ul></li>
+
+
+<li>Wordsworth, William, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_323">323</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>Young, Sir George, <a href="#Page_375">375</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+<ul><li>"Zeta," <a href="#Page_446">446</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+
+<p class="center">THE END</p>
+
+
+
+<p class='center'><i>Printed by <span class="smcap">R. &amp; R. Clark</span>, Edinburgh.</i></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+
+<h3>FOOTNOTES</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Only by dint of this constant comparison, can the critic
+save himself from the besetting error which makes men believe that there
+is some absolute progress in life and art, instead of, for the most
+part, mere eddyings-round in the same circle. I am tempted to glance at
+this, because of a passage which I read while this Essay was a-writing,
+a passage signed by a person whom I name altogether for the sake of
+honour, Mr. James Sully. "If we compare," says Mr. Sully, "Fielding for
+example with Balzac, Thackeray, or one of the great Russian novelists,
+we see at once what a simple toylike structure used to serve art for a
+human world. A mind versed in life as contemporary fiction depicts it,
+feels, on turning to the already antiquated forms of the eighteenth
+century, that it has to divest itself for the nonce of more than half
+its equipment of habitual thought and emotion." This might serve as text
+for a long sermon, I only cite it in passing as an interesting example
+of the <i>idola specus</i> which beset a clever man who loses the power of
+comparative vision, and sees <i>Tom Jones</i> as a toylike structure with the
+<i>Kreutzer Sonata</i> beside it as a human world.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> In 1834, after Crabbe's death, Wordsworth wrote to his son:
+"Your father's works ... will last, from their combined merit as poetry
+and truth, full as long as anything that has been expressed in verse
+since the date of their first appearance." A very different estimate by
+Wordsworth of Crabbe has been published in Mr. Clayden's <i>Rogers and his
+Contemporaries</i>. Here he argues at great length that "Crabbe's verses
+can in no sense be called poetry," and that "nineteen out of twenty of
+his pictures are mere matter of fact." It is fair to say that this was
+in 1808, before the appearance of "The Borough" and of almost all
+Crabbe's best work.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> <i>Great Writers; Crabbe</i>: by T. E. Kebbel. London, 1888.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Although constantly patronised by the Rutland family in
+successive generations, and honoured by the attentions of "Old Q." and
+others, his poems are full of growls at patrons. These cannot be mere
+echoes of Oldham and Johnson, but their exact reason is unknown. His
+son's reference to it is so extremely cautious that it has been read as
+a confession that Crabbe was prone to his cups, and quarrelsome in
+them&mdash;a signal instance of the unwisdom of not speaking out.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> Rogers told Ticknor in 1838 that "Crabbe was nearly ruined
+by grief and vexation at the conduct of his wife for above seven years,
+at the end of which time she proved to be insane." But this was long
+after her death and Crabbe's, and it is not clear that while she was
+alive Rogers knew Crabbe at all. Nor is there the slightest reason for
+attaching to the phrase "vexation at the conduct" the sense which it
+would usually have. A quatrain found after Crabbe's death wrapped round
+his wife's wedding-ring is touching, and graceful in its old-fashioned
+way.
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The ring so worn, as you behold,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So thin, so pale, is yet of gold:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The passion such it was to prove;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Worn with life's cares, love yet was love.<br /></span>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> See below, <a href="#V">Essay on Hazlitt</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> For something more, however, see the <a href="#XI">Essay on Lockhart</a>
+below.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> To speak of him in this way is not impertinence or
+familiarity. He was most generally addressed as "Mr. Sydney," and his
+references to his wife are nearly always to "Mrs. Sydney," seldom or
+never to "Mrs. Smith."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> See next <a href="#IV">Essay</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> To prevent mistakes it may be as well to say that
+Jeffrey's <i>Contributions to the Edinburgh Review</i> appeared first in four
+volumes, then in three, then in one.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> In the following remarks, reference is confined to the
+<i>Contributions to the Edinburgh Review</i>, 1 vol. London, 1853. This is
+not merely a matter of convenience; the selection having been made with
+very great care by Jeffrey himself at a time when his faculties were in
+perfect order, and including full specimens of every kind of his work.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> For some further remarks on this duel as it concerns
+Lockhart see <a href="#APPENDIX_B">Appendix</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> Since this paper was first published Mr. Alexander Ireland
+has edited a most excellent selection from Hazlitt.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> <i>Etude sur la Vie et les &OElig;uvres de Thomas Moore</i>; by
+Gustave Vallat. Paris: Rousseau. London: Asher and Co. Dublin: Hodges,
+Figgis, and Co. 1887.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> If I accepted (a rash acceptance) the challenge to name
+the three very best things in Wilson I should, I think, choose the
+famous Fairy's Funeral in the <i>Recreations</i>, the Shepherd's account of
+his recovery from illness in the <i>Noctes</i>, and, in a lighter vein, the
+picture of girls bathing in "Streams."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> See Appendix A&mdash;<a href="#APPENDIX_A">De Quincey</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> <i>The Collected Writings of Thomas de Quincey</i>; edited by
+David Masson. In fourteen volumes; Edinburgh, 1889-90.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> See Appendix B&mdash;<a href="#APPENDIX_B">Lockhart</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> 1. <i>The Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, with a Memoir
+by the Rev. Derwent Coleridge.</i> In two volumes. London, 1864. 2. <i>Essays
+by Winthrop Mackworth Praed, collected and arranged by Sir George Young,
+Bart.</i> London, 1887. 3. <i>The Political and Occasional Poems of Winthrop
+Mackworth Praed, edited, with Notes, by Sir George Young.</i> London,
+1888.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> Since I wrote this I have been reminded by my friend Mr.
+Mowbray Morris of Byron's
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I enter thy garden of roses,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Beloved and fair Haidee.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+It is not impossible that this <i>is</i> the immediate original. But Praed
+has so improved on it as to deserve a new patent.</p></div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860, by 
+George Saintsbury
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860, by
+George Saintsbury
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860
+
+Author: George Saintsbury
+
+Release Date: November 12, 2009 [EBook #30455]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS IN ENGLISH LIT., 1780-1860 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Susan Skinner, Jonathan Ingram and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ESSAYS
+
+IN
+
+ENGLISH LITERATURE
+
+1780-1860
+
+
+BY
+
+GEORGE SAINTSBURY
+
+PERCIVAL AND CO.
+_KING STREET, COVENT GARDEN_
+
+LONDON
+
+1890
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+Of the essays in this volume, the introductory paper on "The Kinds of
+Criticism" has not before appeared in print. All the rest, with one
+exception (the Essay on Lockhart which appeared in the _National
+Review_), were originally published in _Macmillan's Magazine_. To the
+Editors and Publishers of both these periodicals I owe my best thanks
+for permission to reprint the articles. To the Editor of _Macmillan's
+Magazine_ in particular (to whom, if dedications were not somewhat in
+ill odour, I should, in memory of friendship old and new, have dedicated
+the book), I am further indebted for suggesting several of the subjects
+as well as accepting the essays. These appear in the main as they
+appeared; but I have not scrupled to alter phrase or substance where it
+seemed desirable, and I have in a few places restored passages which had
+been sacrificed to the usual exigencies of space. In two cases, those of
+Lockhart and De Quincey, I have thought it best to discuss, in a brief
+appendix, some questions which have presented themselves since the
+original publications. In consequence of these alterations and additions
+as well as for other reasons, it may be convenient to give the dates and
+places of the original appearance of each essay. They are as follows:--
+
+    Lockhart, _National Review_, Aug. 1884. Borrow, _Macmillan's
+    Magazine_, Jan. 1886. Peacock, do. April 1886. Wilson (under the
+    title of "Christopher North"), do. July 1886. Hazlitt, do. March
+    1887. Jeffrey, do. August 1887. Moore, do. March 1888. Sydney
+    Smith, do. May 1888. Praed, do. Sept. 1888. Leigh Hunt, do.
+    April 1889. Crabbe, do. June 1889. Hogg, do. Sept. 1889. De
+    Quincey, do. June 1890.
+
+The present order is chronological, following the birth-years of the
+authors discussed.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+INTRODUCTORY ESSAY--
+
+  THE KINDS OF CRITICISM                                              ix
+
+   I. CRABBE                                                           1
+
+  II. HOGG                                                            33
+
+ III. SYDNEY SMITH                                                    67
+
+  IV. JEFFREY                                                        100
+
+   V. HAZLITT                                                        135
+
+  VI. MOORE                                                          170
+
+ VII. LEIGH HUNT                                                     201
+
+VIII. PEACOCK                                                        234
+
+  IX. WILSON                                                         270
+
+   X. DE QUINCEY                                                     304
+
+  XI. LOCKHART                                                       339
+
+ XII. PRAED                                                          374
+
+XIII. BORROW                                                         403
+
+
+APPENDIX--A. DE QUINCEY                                              440
+
+          B. LOCKHART                                                444
+
+
+INDEX                                                                449
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+THE KINDS OF CRITICISM
+
+
+It is probably unnecessary, and might possibly be impertinent, to renew
+here at any length the old debate between reviewers as reviewers, and
+reviewers as authors--the debate whether the reissue of work contributed
+to periodicals is desirable or not. The plea that half the best prose
+literature of this century would be inaccessible if the practice had
+been forbidden, and the retort that anything which can pretend to keep
+company with the best literature of the century will be readily relieved
+from the objection, at once sum up the whole quarrel, and leave it
+undecided. For my own part, I think that there is a sufficient
+connection of subject in the following chapters, and I hope that there
+is a sufficient uniformity of treatment. The former point, as the least
+important, may be dismissed first. All the literature here discussed
+is--with the exception of Crabbe's earliest poems, and the late
+aftermath of Peacock and Borrow--work of one and the same period, the
+first half of the present century. The authors criticised were all
+contemporaries; with only one exception, if with one, they were all
+writing more or less busily within a single decade, that of 1820 to
+1830. And they have the further connection (which has at least the
+reality of having been present to my mind in selecting them), that while
+every one of them was a man of great literary power, hardly one has been
+by general consent, or except by private crotchet would be, put among
+the very greatest. They stand not far below, but distinctly below,
+Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats. Yet again, they
+agree in the fact that hardly one of them has yet been securely set in
+the literary niche which is his due, all having been at some time either
+unduly valued or unduly neglected, and one or two never having yet
+received even due appreciation. The greatest of all critics was accused,
+unjustly, of having a certain dislike of clear, undoubted supremacy. It
+would be far more fair to say that Sainte-Beuve had eminently, what
+perhaps all critics who are not mere carpers on the one hand, or mere
+splashers of superlatives on the other, have more or less--an affection
+for subjects possessing but qualified merit, and so giving to criticism
+a certain additional interest in the task of placing and appraising
+them.
+
+This last sentence may not meet with universal assent, but it will bring
+me conveniently to the second part of my subject. I should not have
+republished these essays if I had not thought that, whatever may be
+their faults (and a man who does not see the faults of his own writing
+on revising it a second time for the press after an interval, must be
+either a great genius or an intolerable fool), they possess a certain
+unity of critical method. Nor should I have republished them if it had
+seemed to me that this method was exactly identical with that of any
+other critic of the present day in England. I have at least endeavoured
+to wear my rue with a difference, and that not merely for the sake of
+differing.
+
+Mr. Goldwin Smith, whose work is not likely to be impeached for defect
+either in form or in substance, wrote but a few months ago, in
+melancholy mood, that the province of criticism appeared to be now
+limited to the saying of fine things. I agree with him that this is one
+vicious extreme of the popular conception of the art; but in order to
+define correctly, we cannot be contented with one only. The other, as it
+seems to me, is fixed by the notion, now warmly championed by some
+younger critics both at home and abroad, that criticism must be of all
+things "scientific." For my own part, I have gravely and strenuously
+endeavoured to ascertain from the writings both of foreign critics (the
+chief of whom was the late M. Hennequin in France), and of their
+disciples at home, what "scientific" criticism means. In no case have I
+been able to obtain any clear conception of its connotation in the
+mouths or minds of those who use the phrase. The new heaven and the new
+earth which they promise are no doubt to be very different from our own
+old earth and heaven; of that they are sure, and their sureness does not
+fail to make itself plain. But what the flora and fauna, the biology and
+geology of the new heaven and earth are to be, I have never succeeded in
+ascertaining. The country would appear to be like that Land of Ignorance
+which, as Lord Brooke says, "none can describe until he be past it."
+Only I have perceived that when this "scientific" criticism sticks
+closest to its own formulas and ways, it appears to me to be very bad
+criticism; and that when, as sometimes happens, it is good criticism,
+its ways and formulas are not perceptibly distinguishable from those of
+criticism which is not "scientific." For the rest, it is all but
+demonstrable that "scientific" literary criticism is impossible, unless
+the word "scientific" is to have its meaning very illegitimately
+altered. For the essential qualities of literature, as of all art, are
+communicated by the individual, they depend upon idiosyncrasy: and this
+makes science in any proper sense powerless. _She_ can deal only with
+classes, only with general laws; and so long as these classes are
+constantly reduced to "species of one," and these laws are set at nought
+by incalculable and singular influences, she must be constantly baffled
+and find all her elaborate plant of formulas and generalisations
+useless. Of course, there are generalisations possible in literature,
+and to such I may return presently; but scientific criticism of
+literature must always be a contradiction in terms. You may to some
+considerable extent ascertain the general laws of language, of metre, of
+music, as applied to verbal rhythm and cadence; you may classify the
+subjects which appeal to the general, and further classify their
+particular manners of appeal; you may arrange the most ingenious
+"product-of-the-circumstances" theories about race, climate, religion.
+But always sooner or later, and much more often sooner than later, the
+mocking demon of the individual, or, if a different phrase be preferred,
+the great and splendid mystery of the idiosyncrasy of the artist, will
+meet and baffle you. You will find that on the showing of this science
+falsely so called, there is no reason why Chapelain should not be a
+poet, and none why Shakespeare is. You will ask science in vain to tell
+you why some dozen or sixteen of the simplest words in language arranged
+by one man or in one fashion, why a certain number of dabs of colour
+arranged by another man or in another fashion, make a permanent addition
+to the delight of the world, while other words and other dabs of colour,
+differently arranged by others, do not. To put the matter yet otherwise,
+the whole end, aim, and object of literature and the criticism of
+literature, as of all art, and the criticism of all art, is beauty and
+the enjoyment of beauty. With beauty science has absolutely nothing to
+do.
+
+It is no doubt the sense, conscious or unconscious, of this that has
+inclined men to that other conception of criticism as a saying of fine
+things, of which Mr. Goldwin Smith complains, and which certainly has
+many votaries, in most countries at the present day. These votaries have
+their various kinds. There is the critic who simply uses his subject as
+a sort of springboard or platform, on and from which to display his
+natural grace and agility, his urbane learning, his faculty of pleasant
+wit. This is perhaps the most popular of all critics, and no age has
+ever had better examples of him than this age. There is a more serious
+kind who founds on his subject (if indeed founding be not too solemn a
+term) elaborate descants, makes it the theme of complicated variations.
+There is a third, closely allied to him, who seeks in it apparently
+first of all, and sometimes with no further aim, an opportunity for the
+display of style. And lastly (though as usual all these kinds pervade
+and melt into one another, so that, while in any individual one may
+prevail, it is rare to find an individual in whom that one is alone
+present) there is the purely impressionist critic who endeavours in his
+own way to show the impression which the subject has, or which he
+chooses to represent that it has, produced on him. This last is in a
+better case than the others; but still he, as it seems to me, misses
+the full and proper office of the critic, though he may have an
+agreeable and even useful function of his own.
+
+For the full and proper office of the critic (again as it seems to me)
+can never be discharged except by those who remember that "critic" means
+"judge." Expressions of personal liking, though they can hardly be kept
+out of criticism, are not by themselves judgment. The famous "J'aime
+mieux Alfred de Musset," though it came from a man of extraordinary
+mental power and no small specially critical ability, is not criticism.
+Mere _obiter dicta_ of any kind, though they may be most agreeable and
+even most legitimate sets-off to critical conversation, are not
+criticism. The most admirable discourses from the merely literary point
+of view on taste, Shakespeare, and the musical glasses, with some
+parenthetic reference to the matter in hand, are not criticism. There
+must be at least some attempt to take in and render the whole virtue of
+the subjects considered, some effort to compare them with their likes in
+other as well as the same languages, some endeavour to class and value
+them. And as a condition preliminary to this process, there must, I
+think, be a not inconsiderable study of widely differing periods, forms,
+manners, of literature itself. The test question, as I should put it, of
+the value of criticism is "What idea of the original would this critic
+give to a tolerably instructed person who did not know that original?"
+And again, "How far has this critic seen steadily and seen whole, the
+subject which he has set himself to consider? How far has he referred
+the main peculiarities of that subject to their proximate causes and
+effects? How far has he attempted to place, and succeeded in placing,
+the subject in the general history of literature, in the particular
+history of its own language, in the collection of authors of its own
+department?" How far, in short, has he applied what I may perhaps be
+excused for calling the comparative method in literature to the
+particular instance? I have read very famous and in their way very
+accomplished examples of literature ostensibly critical, in which few if
+any of these questions seem to have been even considered by the critic.
+He may have said many pretty things; he may have shown what a clever
+fellow he is; he may have in his own person contributed good literature
+to swell the literary sum. But has he done anything to aid the general
+grasp of that literary sum, to place his man under certain lights and in
+certain aspects, with due allowance for the possibility of other aspects
+and other lights? Very often, I think, it must be admitted that he has
+not. I should be the first to admit that my own attempts to do this are
+unsuccessful and faulty; and I only plead for them that they are such
+attempts, and that they have been made on the basis of tolerably wide
+and tolerably careful reading.
+
+For, after all, it is this reading which is the main and principal
+thing. It will not of course by itself make a critic; but few are the
+critics that will ever be made without it. We have at this moment an
+awful example of an exceedingly clever writer who has commenced critic,
+disdaining this preparation. Some of my friends jeer or comminate at Mr.
+Howells; for my part I only shudder and echo the celebrated "There, but
+for the grace of God." Here is a clever man, a very clever man, an
+excellent though of late years slightly depraved practitioner in one
+branch of art, who, suddenly and without preparation, takes to another,
+and becomes a spectacle to men and angels. I hope that we shall one day
+have a collection of Mr. Howells's critical _dicta_ on novels and other
+things; they will be one of the most valuable, one of the most terrible
+of books as showing what happens when a man speaks without knowledge. To
+read what Mr. Howells says of Mr. Thackeray is almost an illiberal
+education. The reason of the error is quite obvious. It is simply that
+the clever American does not know; he has not sufficient range of
+comparison. For my own part, I should not dare to continue criticising
+so much as a circulating library novel, if I did not perpetually pay my
+respects to the classics of many literatures: and I am not sure that I
+do not appreciate the classics of many literatures all the better from
+my not infrequent reading of circulating library novels.
+
+The only objection of validity that I have ever seen taken to what I
+have ventured to call comparative criticism, is that it proceeds too
+much, as the most learned of living French critics once observed of an
+English writer, _par cases et par compartiments_, that is to say, as I
+understand M. Brunetiere, with a rather too methodical classification.
+This, however, was written some seven or eight years ago, and since then
+I have found M. Brunetiere speaking about critical method as
+distinguished from the science of criticism, and insisting on the
+necessity of comparison, not less positively, and no doubt with far more
+authority, than I have done myself. Yet I half think that M. Brunetiere,
+like most of us, does not practise quite up to the level of his
+preaching; and I should say that on mediaeval literature, on Romantic
+literature, and on some other things, his own excellent censorship might
+be further improved by a still more catholic sympathy, and a still more
+constant habit of looking at everything and every writer in conjunction
+with their analogues and their opposites in the same and other
+literatures. This constant reference of comparison may indeed stand in
+the way of those flowing deliverances of personal opinion, in more or
+less agreeable language, which are perhaps, or rather certainly, what is
+most popular in criticism; I do not think that they will ever stand in
+the way of criticism proper. As I understand that long and difficult
+art, its end, as far as the individual is concerned, is to provide the
+mind with a sort of conspectus of literature, as a good atlas thoroughly
+conned provides a man with a conspectus of the _orbis terrarum_. To the
+man with a geographical head, the mention of a place at once suggests
+its bearings to other places, its history, its products, all its
+relations in short; to the man with a critical head, the mention of a
+book or an author should call up a similar mental picture. The picture,
+indeed, will never be as complete in the one instance as in the other,
+because the intellect and the artistic faculty of man are far vaster
+than this planet, far more diverse, far more intricately and
+perplexingly arranged than all its abundant material dispositions and
+products. The life of Methuselah and the mind of Shakespeare together
+could hardly take the whole of critical knowledge to be their joint
+province. But the area of survey may be constantly increased; the
+particularity of knowledge constantly made more minute.
+
+Another objection, more fantastic in appearance but rather attractive in
+its way, is that the comparative critic becomes too much of a universal
+lover, and too little of an enthusiast, that he has an irritating and
+ungentlemanly habit of seeing blemishes in the greatest, a pottering and
+peddling fancy for discovering beauties in the most insignificant; that
+he lacks the exclusiveness and the fastidiousness of intellectual
+aristocracy, the fervour and rapture of aesthetic passion. To this, one
+can answer little more than, "It may be so." Certainly the critic of
+this kind will very rarely be able to indulge in the _engouement_ which
+is the apparent delight of some of his class. He will deal very
+cautiously in superlatives, and his commendations, when he gives them,
+will sometimes have, to more gushing persons, the slightly ludicrous air
+which attached to the modest boast of somebody that he was "the third
+best authority in England on gray shirtings." On the other hand, the
+critic of this kind will not be able to neglect the uninteresting with
+the serene nonchalance of some of his fellows. He will sometimes have to
+look back on days and months and years of laborious reading and say to
+himself, "Were it not well for us, as others use, to take all this for
+granted?" But to say this is to say no more than that the thorough-going
+practice of any art and mystery involves a great deal of tedious,
+thankless, and even positively fruitless work, brushes away a good many
+illusions, and interferes a good deal with personal comfort. Cockaigne
+is a delightful country, and the Cockaigne of criticism is as agreeable
+as the other provinces. But none of these provinces has usually been
+accounted a wise man's paradise.
+
+It may be asked, "What is the end which you propose for this comparative
+reading? A method must lead somewhere; whither does this method lead? or
+does it lead only to statistics and classifications?" Certainly it does
+not, or at least should not. It leads, like all method, to
+generalisations which, though as I have said I do not believe that they
+have attained or ever will attain the character of science, at least
+throw no small light and interest on the study of literature as a whole,
+and of its examples as particulars. It gives, I think (speaking as a
+fool), a constantly greater power of distinguishing good work from bad
+work, by giving constantly nearer approach (though perhaps it may never
+wholly and finally attain) to the knowledge of the exact characteristics
+which distinguish the two. And the way in which it does this is by a
+constant process of weakening or strengthening, as the case may be, the
+less or more correct generalisations with which the critic starts, or
+which he forms in the early days of his reading. There has often been
+brought against some great critics the charge that their critical
+standards have altered at different times of their career. This simply
+means that they have been constantly applying the comparative method,
+and profiting by the application. After all, there are few, though there
+are some, absolute truths in criticism; and a man will often be
+relatively right in condemning, from certain aspects and in certain
+combinations, work which, under other aspects and in other combinations,
+he has been relatively quite as right in admiring. Occasionally, no
+doubt, there will be an apparent exception to the rule of critical
+development, as in the case of Hazlitt: but that remarkable exception
+does not fail to justify the rule. For in truth, Hazlitt's critical
+range was not so wide as his penetration was deep; and he avows, almost
+exultingly, that after a comparatively early time of life, he
+practically left off reading. That is to say, he carefully avoided
+renewing his plant, and he usually eschewed new material--conditions
+which, no doubt, conduce to the uniformity, and, within obvious limits,
+are not prejudicial to the excellence of the product.
+
+It is possible that the title "The Kinds of Criticism" may have excited
+in some readers expectations of the discussion of a subject which has
+not yet been handled. We have recently seen revived the sempiternal
+argument between authors and critics--an argument in which it may be as
+well to say that the present writer has not yet taken part either
+anonymously or otherwise. The authors, or some of them, have remarked
+that they have never personally benefited by criticism; and the critics,
+after their disagreeable way, have retorted that this was obvious. A
+critic of great ingenuity, my friend Mr. Andrew Lang, has, with his
+usual humour, suggested that critics and reviewers are two different
+kinds, and have nothing to do with each other essentially, though
+accidentally, and in the imperfect arrangements of the world, the
+discharge of their functions may happen to be combined in the same
+person. As a matter of practice, this is no doubt too often the case; as
+a matter of theory, nothing ought much less to be the case. I think
+that if I were dictator, one of the first non-political things that I
+should do, would be to make the order of reviewers as close a one, at
+least, as the bench of judges, or the staff of the Mint, or of any
+public establishment of a similar character. That any large amount of
+reviewing is determined by fear or favour is a general idea which has
+little more basis than a good many other general ideas. But that a very
+large amount of reviewing is determined by doubtless well-meaning
+incompetence, there is no doubt whatever. It is on the whole the most
+difficult kind of newspaper writing, and it is on the whole the most
+lightly assigned and the most irresponsibly performed. I have heard of
+newspapers where the reviews depended almost wholly on the accident of
+some of the staff taking a holiday, or being laid for a time on the
+shelf, or being considered not up to other work; of others, though this
+I own is scarcely credible, where the whole reviewing was farmed out to
+a manager, to be allotted to devils as good to him seemed; of many where
+the reviews were a sort of exercising-ground on which novices were
+trained, broken-down hacks turned out to grass, and invalids allowed a
+little gentle exercise. And I know of not a few papers and not a few
+reviewers in which and by whom, errors and accidents excepted, the best
+work possible is given to one of the most important kinds of work. Of
+common mistakes on the subject, which are not merely silly crazes, such
+as the log-rolling craze and the five-pound note craze and the like, the
+worst known to me, though it is shared by some who should know better,
+is that a specialist is the best reviewer. I do not say that he is
+always the worst; but that is about as far as my charity, informed by
+much experience, can go. Even if he has no special craze or megrim, and
+does not decide offhand that a man is hopeless because he calls Charles
+the Great Charlemagne, or _vice versa_, he is constantly out of focus.
+The perfect reviewer would be (and the only reviewer whose reviews are
+worth reading is he who more or less approximates to this ideal) the
+Platonic or pseudo-Platonic philosopher who is "second best in
+everything," who has enough special knowledge not to miss merits or
+defects, and enough general knowledge to estimate the particular subject
+at, and not above, its relative value to the whole. There have been good
+critics who were unable to bring themselves down to the mere reading of
+ephemeral work, but I do not think they were the better for this; I am
+sure that there never was a good reviewer, even of the lowest trash, who
+was not _in posse_ or _in esse_ a good critic of the highest and most
+enduring literature. The writer of funny articles, and the "slater," and
+the intelligent _compte-rendu_ man, and the person who writes six
+columns on the general theory of poetry when he professes to review Mr.
+Apollo's last book, may do all these things well and not be good
+critics; but then all these things may be done, and done well, and yet
+not be good reviews.
+
+Whether the reviewer and the critic are valuable members of society or
+useless encumbrances, must be questions left to the decision of the
+world at large, which apparently is not in a hurry to decide either way.
+There are, no doubt, certain things that the critic, whether he be
+critic major or critic minor, Sainte-Beuve or Mr. Gall, cannot do. He
+cannot certainly, and for the present, sell or prevent the sale of a
+book. "You slated this and it has gone through twenty editions" is not a
+more uncommon remark than the other, "They slated that and you extol it
+to the skies." Both, as generally urged, rest on fallacy. In the first
+case, nothing was probably farther from the critic's intention than to
+say "this book is not popular"; the most that he intended was "this book
+is not good." In the second case, it has been discovered of late (it is
+one of the few things that we have discovered) that very rarely has any
+really good thing, even in the most famous or infamous attacks on it,
+been attacked, even with a shadow of success, for its goodness. The
+critics were severe on Byron's faults, on Keats's faults, and on the
+present Laureate's faults; they were seldom severe on their goodness,
+though they often failed to appreciate it fully.
+
+This, however, is in one sense a digression, for there is no criticism
+of contemporary work in this volume. I think, however, as I have just
+endeavoured to point out, that criticism of contemporary work and
+criticism of classics should proceed on the same lines, and I think that
+both require the same qualities and the same outfit. Nor am I certain
+that if narrow inquiry were made, some of the best criticism in all
+times and in all languages would not be found in the merest casual
+reviewing. That in all cases the critic must start from a wide
+comparative study of different languages and literatures, is the first
+position to be laid down. In the next place he must, I think, constantly
+refer back his sensations of agreement and disagreement, of liking and
+disliking, in the same comparative fashion. "Why do I like the
+_Agamemnon_ and dislike Mr. Dash's five-act tragedy?" is a question to
+be constantly put, and to be answered only by a pretty close personal
+inquiry as to what "I" really do like in the _Agamemnon_ and do dislike
+in Mr. Dash. And in answering it, it will hardly be possible to consider
+too large a number of instances of all degrees of merit, from Aeschylus
+himself to Mr. Dash himself, of all languages, of all times. Let
+Englishmen be compared with Englishmen of other times to bring out this
+set of differences, with foreigners of modern times to bring out that,
+with Greeks and Romans to bring out the other. Let poets of old days be
+compared with poets of new, classics with romantics, rhymed with
+unrhymed. Let the straitest doctrinaire criticism of men of talent like
+Boileau and simpletons like Rymer be compared with the fullest
+appreciations of Coleridge and Hazlitt, of Sainte-Beuve and Mr. Arnold.
+"Compare, always compare" is the first axiom of criticism.[1]
+
+The second, I think, is "Always make sure, as far as you possibly can,
+that what you like and dislike is the literary and not the
+extra-literary character of the matter under examination." Make sure,
+that is to say, that admiration for the author is not due to his having
+taken care that the Whig dogs or the Tory dogs shall not have the best
+of it, to his having written as a gentleman for gentlemen, or as an
+uneasy anti-aristocrat for uneasy anti-aristocrats, as a believer
+(fervent or acquiescent) in the supernatural, or as a person who lays
+it down that miracles do not happen, as an Englishman or a Frenchman, a
+classic or a romantic. Very difficult indeed is the chase and discovery
+of these enemies: for extra-literary prejudices are as cunning as winter
+hares or leaf-insects, in disguising themselves by simulating literary
+forms.
+
+Lastly, never be content without at least endeavouring to connect cause
+and effect in some way, without giving something like a reason for the
+faith that is in you. No doubt the critic will often be tempted, will
+sometimes be actually forced to say, "'J'aime mieux Alfred de Musset,'
+and there's an end of it." All the imperfect kinds, as they seem to me,
+of criticism are recommended by the fact that they are, unlike some
+other literary matter, not only easier writing but also easier reading.
+The agreeable exercises of style where adjectives meet substantives to
+whom they never thought they could possibly be introduced (as a certain
+naughty wit has it), the pleasant chatter about personal reminiscences,
+the flowers of rhetoric, the fruits of wit, may not be easy, but they
+are at any rate easier than fashioning some intelligent and intelligible
+response to the perpetual "Why?" the _quare stans_ of criticism.
+
+In the following pages, I shall no doubt be found, like other people, to
+have come very far short of my own ideal, and my own precepts. I may
+even say that I have knowingly and intentionally come short of them to
+some extent. Biographical and anecdotic detail has, I believe, much
+less to do with the real appreciation of the literary value of an author
+than is generally thought. In rare instances, it throws a light, but the
+examples in which we know practically nothing at all, as in that of
+Shakespeare, or only a few leading facts as in that of Dante, are not
+those in which criticism is least useful or least satisfactory. At the
+same time biographical and anecdotic details please most people, and if
+they are not allowed to shoulder out criticism altogether, there can be
+no harm in them. For myself, I should like to have the whole works of
+every author of merit, and I should care little to know anything
+whatever about his life; but that is a mere private opinion and possibly
+a private crotchet. Accordingly some space has been given in most of
+these Essays to a sketch of the life of the subject. Nor has it seemed
+advisable (except as a matter of necessary, but very occasional,
+digression) to argue at length upon abstract and general questions such
+as the definition of poetry, or the kinds and limits of the novel. Large
+as is the body of criticism so-called which the last hundred years have
+seen, it may be doubted whether there is even yet accumulated a
+sufficient _corpus_ of really critical discussion of individuals. If I
+have in these Essays contributed even a very little to such an
+accumulation, I shall have done that which I purposed.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Only by dint of this constant comparison, can the critic save
+himself from the besetting error which makes men believe that there is
+some absolute progress in life and art, instead of, for the most part,
+mere eddyings-round in the same circle. I am tempted to glance at this,
+because of a passage which I read while this Essay was a-writing, a
+passage signed by a person whom I name altogether for the sake of
+honour, Mr. James Sully. "If we compare," says Mr. Sully, "Fielding for
+example with Balzac, Thackeray, or one of the great Russian novelists,
+we see at once what a simple toylike structure used to serve art for a
+human world. A mind versed in life as contemporary fiction depicts it,
+feels, on turning to the already antiquated forms of the eighteenth
+century, that it has to divest itself for the nonce of more than half
+its equipment of habitual thought and emotion." This might serve as text
+for a long sermon, I only cite it in passing as an interesting example
+of the _idola specus_ which beset a clever man who loses the power of
+comparative vision, and sees _Tom Jones_ as a toylike structure with the
+_Kreutzer Sonata_ beside it as a human world.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+CRABBE
+
+
+There is a certain small class of persons in the history of literature
+the members of which possess, at least for literary students, an
+interest peculiar to themselves. They are the writers who having
+attained, not merely popular vogue, but fame as solid as fame can ever
+be, in their own day, having been praised by the praised, and having as
+far as can be seen owed this praise to none of the merely external and
+irrelevant causes--politics, religion, fashion or what not--from which
+it sometimes arises, experience in a more or less short time after their
+death the fate of being, not exactly cast down from their high place,
+but left respectfully alone in it, unvisited, unincensed, unread. Among
+these writers, over the gate of whose division of the literary Elysium
+the famous, "Who now reads Bolingbroke?" might serve as motto, the
+author of "The Village" and "Tales of the Hall" is one of the most
+remarkable. As for Crabbe's popularity in his own day there is no
+mistake about that. It was extraordinarily long, it was extremely wide,
+it included the select few as well as the vulgar, it was felt and more
+or less fully acquiesced in by persons of the most diverse tastes,
+habits, and literary standards. His was not the case, which occurs now
+and then, of a man who makes a great reputation in early life and long
+afterwards preserves it because, either by accident or prudence, he does
+not enter the lists with his younger rivals, and therefore these rivals
+can afford to show him a reverence which is at once graceful and cheap.
+Crabbe won his spurs in full eighteenth century, and might have boasted,
+altering Landor's words, that he had dined early and in the best of
+company, or have parodied Goldsmith, and said, "I have Johnson and
+Burke: all the wits have been here." But when his studious though barren
+manhood was passed, and he again began, as almost an old man, to write
+poetry, he entered into full competition with the giants of the new
+school, whose ideals and whose education were utterly different from
+his. While "The Library" and "The Village" came to a public which still
+had Johnson, which had but just lost Goldsmith, and which had no other
+poetical novelty before it than Cowper, "The Borough" and the later
+Tales entered the lists with "Marmion" and "Childe Harold," with
+"Christabel" and "The Excursion," even with "Endymion" and "The Revolt
+of Islam." Yet these later works of Crabbe met with the fullest
+recognition both from readers and from critics of the most opposite
+tendencies. Scott, the most generous, and Wordsworth,[2] the most
+grudging, of all the poets of the day towards their fellows, united in
+praising Crabbe; and unromantic as the poet of "The Village" seems to us
+he was perhaps Sir Walter's favourite English bard. Scott read him
+constantly, he quotes him incessantly; and no one who has read it can
+ever forget how Crabbe figures in the most pathetic biographical pages
+ever written--Lockhart's account of the death at Abbotsford. Byron's
+criticism was as weak as his verse was powerful, but still Byron had no
+doubt about Crabbe. The utmost flight of memory or even of imagination
+can hardly get together three contemporary critics whose standards,
+tempers, and verdicts, were more different than those of Gifford,
+Jeffrey, and Wilson. Yet it is scarcely too much to say that they are
+all in a tale about Crabbe. In this unexampled chorus of eulogy there
+rose (for some others who can hardly have admired him much were simply
+silent) one single note, so far as I know, or rather one single rattling
+peal of thunder on the other side. It is true that this was significant
+enough, for it came from William Hazlitt.
+
+Yet against this chorus, which was not, as has sometimes happened, the
+mere utterance of a loud-voiced few, but was echoed by a great multitude
+who eagerly bought and read Crabbe, must be set the almost total
+forgetfulness of his work which has followed. It is true that of living
+or lately living persons in the first rank of literature some great
+names can be cited on his side; and what is more, that these great names
+show the same curious diversity in agreement which has been already
+noticed as one of Crabbe's triumphs. The translator of Omar Khayyam, his
+friend the present Laureate, and the author of "The Dream of Gerontius,"
+are men whose literary ideals are known to be different enough; yet they
+add a third trinity as remarkable as those others of Gifford, Jeffrey,
+and Wilson, of Wordsworth, Byron, and Scott. Much more recently Mr.
+Courthope has used Crabbe as a weapon in that battle of his with
+literary Liberalism which he has waged not always quite to the
+comprehension of his fellow-critics; Mr. Leslie Stephen has discussed
+him as one who knows and loves his eighteenth century. But who reads
+him? Who quotes him? Who likes him? I think I can venture to say, with
+all proper humility, that I know Crabbe pretty well; I think I may say
+with neither humility nor pride, but simply as a person whose business
+it has been for some years to read books, and articles, and debates,
+that I know what has been written and said in England lately. You will
+find hardly a note of Crabbe in these writings and sayings. He does not
+even survive, as "Matthew Green, who wrote 'The Spleen,'" and others
+survive, by quotations which formerly made their mark, and are retained
+without a knowledge of their original. If anything is known about Crabbe
+to the general reader, it is the parody in "Rejected Addresses," an
+extraordinarily happy parody no doubt, in fact rather better Crabbe in
+Crabbe's weakest moments than Crabbe himself. But naturally there is
+nothing of his best there; and it is by his best things, let it be
+repeated over and over in face of all opposition, that a poet must be
+judged.
+
+Although Crabbe's life, save for one dramatic revolution, was one of the
+least eventful in our literary history, it is by no means one of the
+least interesting. Mr. Kebbel's book[3] gives a very fair summary of it;
+but the Life by Crabbe's son which is prefixed to the collected editions
+of the poems, and on which Mr. Kebbel's own is avowedly based, is
+perhaps the more interesting of the two. It is written with a curious
+mixture of the old literary state and formality, and of a feeling on
+the writer's part that he is not a literary man himself, and that not
+only his father, but Mr. Lockhart, Mr. Moore, Mr. Bowles and the other
+high literary persons who assisted him were august beings of another
+sphere. This is all the more agreeable, in that Crabbe's sons had
+advantages of education and otherwise which were denied to their father,
+and might in the ordinary course of things have been expected to show
+towards him a lofty patronage rather than any filial reverence. The poet
+himself was born at Aldborough, a now tolerably well-known
+watering-place (the fortune of which was made by Mr. Wilkie Collins in
+_No Name_) on Christmas Eve, 1754. That not uncommon infirmity of noble
+minds which seeks to prove distinguished ancestry seems to have had no
+hold on the plain common sense of the Crabbe family, who maintained
+themselves to be at the best Norfolk yeomen, and though they possessed a
+coat-of-arms, avowed with much frankness that they did not know how they
+got it. A hundred and forty years ago they had apparently lost even the
+dignity of yeomanhood, and occupied stations quite in the lower rank of
+the middle class as tradesmen, non-commissioned officers in the navy or
+the merchant service, and so forth. George Crabbe, the grandfather, was
+collector of customs at Aldborough, but his son, also a George, was a
+parish schoolmaster and a parish clerk before he returned to the
+Suffolk port as deputy collector and then as salt-master, or collector
+of the salt duties. He seems to have had no kind of polish, and late in
+life was a mere rough drinking exciseman; but his education, especially
+in mathematics, appears to have been considerable, and his ability in
+business not small. The third George, his eldest son, was also fairly
+though very irregularly educated for a time, and his father, perceiving
+that he was "a fool about a boat," had the rather unusual common sense
+to destine him to a learned profession. Unluckily his will was better
+than his means, and while the profession which Crabbe chose or which was
+chosen for him--that of medicine--was not the best suited to his tastes
+or talents, the resources of the family were not equal to giving him a
+full education, even in that. He was still at intervals employed in the
+Customs warehouses at "piling up butter and cheese" even after he was
+apprenticed at fourteen to a country surgeon. The twelve years which he
+spent in this apprenticeship, in an abhorred return for a short time to
+the cheese and butter, in a brief visit to London, where he had no means
+to walk the hospitals, and in an attempt to practise with little or no
+qualification at Aldborough itself, present a rather dismal history of
+apprenticeship which taught nothing. But Love was, for once, most truly
+and literally Crabbe's solace and his salvation, his master and his
+patron. When he was barely eighteen, still an apprentice, and
+possessed, as far as can be made out, of neither manners nor prospects,
+he met a certain Miss Sarah Elmy. She was three or four years older than
+himself and much better connected, being the niece and eventual
+co-heiress of a wealthy yeoman squire. She was, it is said, pretty; she
+was evidently accomplished, and she seems to have had access to the
+country society of those days. But Mira, as Crabbe called her, perhaps
+merely in the fashion of the eighteenth century, perhaps in remembrance
+of Fulke Greville's heroine (for he knew his Elizabethans rather well
+for a man of those days), and no doubt also with a secret joy to think
+that the last syllables of her Christian name and surname in a way spelt
+the appellation, fell in love with the boy and made his fortune. But for
+her Crabbe would probably have subsided, not contentedly but stolidly,
+into the lot of a Doctor Slop of the time, consoling himself with snuff
+(which he always loved) and schnaps (to which we have hints that in his
+youth he was not averse). Mira was at once unalterably faithful to him
+and unalterably determined not to marry unless he could give her
+something like a position. Their long engagement (they were not married
+till he was twenty-nine and she was thirty-three) may, as we shall see,
+have carried with it some of the penalties of long engagements. But it
+is as certain as any such thing can be that but for it English
+literature would have lacked the name of Crabbe.
+
+There is no space here to go through the sufferings of the novitiate. At
+last, at the extreme end of 1779, Crabbe made up his mind once more to
+seek his fortune, this time by aid of literature only, in London. His
+son too has printed rare scraps of a very interesting Journal to Mira
+which he kept during at least a part of the terrible year of struggle
+which he passed there. He saw the riots of '80; he canvassed, always
+more or less in vain, the booksellers and the peers; he spent
+three-and-sixpence of his last ten shillings on a copy of Dryden; he was
+much less disturbed about imminent starvation than by the delay of a
+letter from Mira ("my dearest Sally" she becomes with a pathetic lapse
+from convention, when the pinch is sorest) or by the doubt whether he
+had enough left to pay the postage of one. He writes prayers (but not
+for the public eye), abstracts of sermons for Mira, addresses (rather
+adulatory) to Lord Shelburne, which received no answer. All this has the
+most genuine note that ever man of letters put into his work, for
+whatever Crabbe was or was not, now or at any time, he was utterly
+sincere; and his sincerity makes his not very abundant letters and
+journals unusually interesting. At last, after a year, during which his
+means of subsistence are for the most part absolutely unknown, he, as he
+says himself, fixed "by some propitious influence, in some happy moment"
+on Edmund Burke as the subject of a last appeal.
+
+Nothing in all literary history is, in a modest way and without pearls
+and gold, quite so like a fairy tale as the difference in Crabbe's
+fortunes which this propitious influence brought about. On the day when
+he wrote to Burke he was, as he said in the letter, "an outcast, without
+friends, without employment, without bread." In some twenty-four hours
+(the night-term of which he passed in ceaselessly pacing Westminster
+Bridge to cheat the agony of expectation) he was a made man. It was not
+merely that, directly or indirectly, Burke procured him a solid and an
+increasing income. He did much more than that. Crabbe, like most
+self-educated men, was quite uncritical of his own work: Burke took him
+into his own house for months, encouraged him to submit his poems,
+criticised them at once without mercy and with judgment, found him
+publishers, found him a public, turned him from a raw country boy into a
+man who at least had met society of the best kind. It is a platitude to
+say that for a hundred persons who will give money or patronage there is
+scarcely one who will take trouble of this kind; and if any devil's
+advocate objects the delight of producing a "lion," it may be answered
+that for Burke at least this delight would not have been delightful at
+all.
+
+The immediate form which the patronage of Burke and that, soon added, of
+Thurlow took, is one which rather shocks the present day. They made
+Crabbe turn to the Church, and got a complaisant bishop to ordain him.
+They sent him (a rather dangerous experiment) to be curate in his own
+native place, and finally Burke procured him the chaplaincy at Belvoir.
+The young Duke of Rutland, who had been made a strong Tory by Pitt, was
+fond of letters, and his Duchess Isabel, who was,--like her elder
+kinswoman, Dryden's Duchess of Ormond--
+
+    A daughter of the rose, whose cheeks unite
+    The varying beauties of the red and white,
+
+in other words, a Somerset, was one of the most beautiful and gracious
+women in England. Crabbe, whose strictly literary fortunes I postpone
+for the present, was apparently treated with the greatest possible
+kindness by both; but he was not quite happy,[4] and his ever-prudent
+Mira still would not marry him. At last Thurlow's patronage took the
+practical form (it had already taken that, equally practical, of a
+hundred pounds) of two small Chancellor's livings in Dorsetshire,
+residence at which was dispensed with by the easy fashions of the day.
+The Duke of Rutland, when he was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland,
+did not take Crabbe with him, a circumstance which has excited some
+unnecessary discussion; but he gave him free quarters at Belvoir, where
+he and his wife lived for a time before they migrated to a neighbouring
+curacy--his wife, for even Mira's prudence had yielded at last to the
+Dorsetshire livings, and they were married in December 1783. They lived
+together for nearly thirty years, in, as it would seem, unbroken mutual
+devotion, but Mrs. Crabbe's health seems very early to have broken down,
+and a remarkable endorsement of Crabbe's on a letter of hers has been
+preserved. I do not think Mr. Kebbel quotes it; it ends, "And yet
+happiness was denied"--a sentence fully encouraging to Mr. Browning and
+other good men who have denounced long engagements.[5] The story of
+Crabbe's life after his marriage may be told very shortly. His first
+patron died in Ireland, but the duchess with some difficulty prevailed
+on Thurlow to exchange his former gifts for more convenient and rather
+better livings in the neighbourhood of Belvoir, at the chief of which,
+Muston, Crabbe long resided. The death of his wife's uncle made him
+leave his living and take up his abode for many years at Glemham, in
+Suffolk, only to find, when he returned, that (not unnaturally, though
+to his own great indignation) dissent had taken bodily possession of the
+parish. His wife died in 1813, and the continued kindness, after nearly
+a generation, of the house of Rutland, gave him the living of
+Trowbridge, in Wiltshire, with a small Leicestershire incumbency near
+Belvoir added, instead of Muston. At Trowbridge he lived nearly twenty
+years, revisiting London society, making the acquaintance personally (he
+had already known him by letter) of Sir Walter, paying a memorable visit
+to Edinburgh, flirting in an elderly and simple fashion with many
+ladies, writing much and being even more of a lion in the society of
+George the Fourth's reign than he had been in the days of George the
+Third. He died on 3rd February 1832.
+
+Crabbe's character is not at all enigmatical, and emerges as clearly in
+those letters and diaries of his which have been published, as in
+anecdotes of him by others. Perhaps the famous story of his politely
+endeavouring to talk French to divers Highlanders, during George the
+Fourth's visit to Edinburgh, is slightly embroidered--Lockhart, who
+tells it, was a mystifier without peer. If he did gently but firmly
+extinguish a candle-snuff while Wordsworth and Sir George Beaumont were
+indulging in poetic ecstasies over the beautiful undulations of the
+smoke, there may have been something to say for him as Anne Scott, to
+whom Wordsworth told the story, is said to have hinted, from the side of
+one of the senses. His life, no less than his work, speaks him a man of
+amiable though by no means wholly sweet temper, of more common sense
+than romance, and of more simplicity than common sense. His nature and
+his early trials made him not exactly sour, but shy, till age and
+prosperity mellowed him; but simplicity was his chief characteristic in
+age and youth alike.
+
+The mere facts of his strictly literary career are chiefly remarkable
+for the enormous gap between his two periods of productiveness. In early
+youth he published some verses in the magazines and a poem called
+"Inebriety," which appeared at Ipswich in 1775. His year of struggle in
+London saw the publication of another short piece "The Candidate," but
+with the ill-luck which then pursued him, the bookseller who brought it
+out became bankrupt. His despairing resort to Burke ushered in "The
+Library," 1781, followed by "The Village," 1783, which Johnson revised
+and improved not a little. Two years later again came "The Newspaper,"
+and then twenty-two years passed without anything appearing from
+Crabbe's pen. It was not that he was otherwise occupied, for he had
+little or nothing to do, and for the greater part of the time, lived
+away from his parish. It was not that he was idle, for we have his son's
+testimony that he was perpetually writing, and that holocausts of
+manuscripts in prose and verse used from time to time to be offered up
+in the open air, for fear of setting the house on fire by their mass. At
+last, in 1807, "The Parish Register" appeared, and three years later
+"The Borough"--perhaps the strongest division of his work. The
+miscellaneous Tales came in 1812, the "Tales of the Hall" in 1819.
+Meanwhile and afterwards, various collected editions appeared, the last
+and most complete being in 1829--a very comely little book in eight
+volumes. His death led to the issue of some "Posthumous Tales" and to
+the inclusion by his son of divers fragments both in the Life and in the
+Works. It is understood, however, that there are still considerable
+remains in manuscript; perhaps they might be published with less harm to
+the author's fame and with less fear of incurring a famous curse than in
+the case of almost any other poet.
+
+For Crabbe, though by no means always at his best, is one of the most
+curiously equal of verse-writers. "Inebriety" and such other very
+youthful things are not to be counted; but between "The Village" of 1783
+and the "Posthumous Tales" of more than fifty years later, the
+difference is surprisingly small. Such as it is, it rather reverses
+ordinary experience, for the later poems exhibit the greater play of
+fancy, the earlier the exacter graces of form and expression. Yet there
+is nothing really wonderful in this, for Crabbe's earliest poems were
+published under severe surveillance of himself and others, and at a time
+which still thought nothing of such value in literature as correctness,
+while his later were written under no particular censorship, and when
+the Romantic revival had already, for better or worse, emancipated the
+world. The change was in Crabbe's case not wholly for the better. He
+does not in his later verse become more prosaic, but he becomes
+considerably less intelligible. There is a passage in "The Old
+Bachelor," too long to quote but worth referring to, which, though it
+may be easy enough to understand it with a little goodwill, I defy
+anybody to understand in its literal and grammatical meaning. Such
+welters of words are very common in Crabbe, and Johnson saved him from
+one of them in the very first lines of "The Village." Yet Johnson could
+never have written the passages which earned Crabbe his fame. The great
+lexicographer knew man in general much better than Crabbe did; but he
+nowhere shows anything like Crabbe's power of seizing and reproducing
+man in particular. Crabbe is one of the first and certainly one of the
+greatest of the "realists" who, exactly reversing the old philosophical
+signification of the word, devote themselves to the particular only. Yet
+of the three small volumes by which he, after his introduction to
+Burke, made his reputation, and on which he lived for a quarter of a
+century, the first and the last display comparatively little of this
+peculiar quality. "The Library" and "The Newspaper" are characteristic
+pieces of the school of Pope, but not characteristic of their author.
+The first catalogues books as folio, quarto, octavo, and so forth, and
+then cross-catalogues them as law, physic, divinity, and the rest, but
+is otherwise written very much in the air. "The Newspaper" suited Crabbe
+a little better, because he pretty obviously took a particular newspaper
+and went through its contents--scandal, news, reviews, advertisements--in
+his own special fashion: but still the subject did not appeal to him. In
+"The Village," on the other hand, contemporaries and successors alike
+have agreed to recognise Crabbe in his true vein. The two famous
+passages which attracted the suffrages of judges so different as Scott
+and Wordsworth, are still, after more than a hundred years, fresh,
+distinct, and striking. Here they are once more:--
+
+    Theirs is yon House that holds the parish poor,
+    Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door;
+    There, where the putrid vapours, flagging, play,
+    And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;--
+    There children dwell who know no parents' care;
+    Parents who know no children's love dwell there!
+    Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed,
+    Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed;
+    Dejected widows, with unheeded tears,
+    And crippled age with more than childhood fears;
+    The lame, the blind, and, far the happiest they!
+    The moping idiot and the madman gay.
+
+           .       .       .       .       .
+
+    Anon, a figure enters, quaintly neat,
+    All pride and business, bustle and conceit;
+    With looks unaltered by these scenes of woe,
+    With speed that, entering, speaks his haste to go,
+    He bids the gazing throng around him fly,
+    And carries fate and physic in his eye:
+    A potent quack, long versed in human ills,
+    Who first insults the victim whom he kills;
+    Whose murderous hand a drowsy Bench protect,
+    And whose most tender mercy is neglect.
+    Paid by the parish for attendance here,
+    He wears contempt upon his sapient sneer;
+    In haste he seeks the bed where Misery lies,
+    Impatience marked in his averted eyes;
+    And some habitual queries hurried o'er,
+    Without reply he rushes on the door:
+    His drooping patient, long inured to pain,
+    And long unheeded, knows remonstrance vain,
+    He ceases now the feeble help to crave
+    Of man; and silent, sinks into the grave.
+
+The poet executed endless variations on this class of theme, but he
+never quite succeeded in discovering a new one, though in process of
+time he brought his narrow study of the Aldborough fishermen and
+townsfolk down still more narrowly to individuals. His landscape is
+always marvellously exact, the strokes selected with extraordinary skill
+_ad hoc_ so as to show autumn rather than spring, failure rather than
+hope, the riddle of the painful earth rather than any joy of living.
+Attempts have been made to vindicate Crabbe from the charge of being a
+gloomy poet, but I cannot think them successful; I can hardly think that
+they have been quite serious. Crabbe, our chief realist poet, has an
+altogether astonishing likeness to the chief prose realist of France,
+Gustave Flaubert, so far as his manner of view goes, for in point of
+style the two have small resemblance. One of the most striking things in
+Crabbe's biography is his remembrance of the gradual disillusion of a
+day of pleasure which, as a child, he enjoyed in a new boat of his
+father's. We all of us, except those who are gifted or cursed with the
+proverbial duck's back, have these experiences and these remembrances of
+them. But most men either simply grin and bear it, or carrying the grin
+a little farther, console themselves by regarding their own
+disappointments from the ironic and humorous point of view. Crabbe,
+though not destitute of humour, does not seem to have been able or
+disposed to employ it in this way. Perhaps he never quite got over the
+terrible and, for the most part unrecorded, year in London: perhaps the
+difference between the Mira of promise and the Mira of possession--the
+"happiness denied"--had something to do with it: perhaps it was a
+question of natural disposition with him. But when, years afterwards, as
+a prosperous middle-aged man, he began his series of published poems
+once more with "The Parish Register," the same manner of seeing is
+evident, though the minute elaboration of the views themselves is
+almost infinitely greater. Nor did he ever succeed in altering this
+manner, if he ever tried to do so.
+
+With the exception of his few Lyrics, the most important of which, "Sir
+Eustace Grey" (one of his very best things), is itself a tale in
+different metre, and a few other occasional pieces of little importance,
+the entire work of Crabbe, voluminous as it is, is framed upon a single
+pattern, the vignettes of "The Village" being merely enlarged in size
+and altered in frame in the later books. The three parts of "The Parish
+Register," the twenty-four Letters of "The Borough," some of which have
+single and others grouped subjects, and the sixty or seventy pieces
+which make up the three divisions of Tales, consist almost exclusively
+of heroic couplets, shorter measures very rarely intervening. They are
+also almost wholly devoted to narratives, partly satirical, partly
+pathetic, of the lives of individuals of the lower and middle class
+chiefly. Jeffrey, who was a great champion of Crabbe and allotted
+several essays to him, takes delight in analysing the plots or stories
+of these tales; but it is a little amusing to notice that he does it for
+the most part exactly as if he were criticising a novelist or a
+dramatist. "The object," says he, in one place, "is to show that a man's
+fluency of speech depends very much upon his confidence in the
+approbation of his auditors": "In Squire Thomas we have the history of a
+mean, domineering spirit," and so forth. Gifford in one place actually
+discusses Crabbe as a novelist. I shall make some further reference to
+this curious attitude of Crabbe's admiring critics. For the moment I
+shall only remark that the singularly mean character of so much of
+Crabbe's style, the "style of drab stucco," as it has been unkindly
+called, which is familiar from the wicked wit that told how the youth at
+the theatre
+
+    Regained the felt and felt what he regained,
+
+is by no means universal. The most powerful of all his pieces, the
+history of Peter Grimes, the tyrant of apprentices, is almost entirely
+free from it, and so are a few others. But it is common enough to be a
+very serious stumbling-block. In nine tales out of ten this is the
+staple:--
+
+    Of a fair town where Dr. Rack was guide,
+    His only daughter was the boast and pride.
+
+Now that is unexceptionable verse enough, but what is the good of
+putting it in verse at all? Here again:--
+
+    For he who makes me thus on business wait,
+    Is not for business in a proper state.
+
+It is obvious that you cannot trust a man who, unless he is intending a
+burlesque, can bring himself to write like that. Crabbe not only brings
+himself to it, but rejoices and luxuriates in the style. The tale from
+which that last luckless distich is taken, "The Elder Brother," is full
+of pathos and about equally full of false notes. If we turn to a far
+different subject, the very vigorously conceived "Natural Death of
+Love," we find a piece of strong and true satire, the best thing of its
+kind in the author, which is kept up throughout. Although, like all
+satire, it belongs at best but to the outer courts of poetry, it is so
+good that none can complain. Then the page is turned and one reads:--
+
+    "I met," said Richard, when returned to dine,
+    "In my excursion with a friend of mine."
+
+It may be childish, it may be uncritical, but I own that such verse as
+that excites in me an irritation which destroys all power of enjoyment,
+except the enjoyment of ridicule. Nor let any one say that pedestrian
+passages of the kind are inseparable from ordinary narrative in verse
+and from the adaptation of verse to miscellaneous themes. If it were so
+the argument would be fatal to such adaptation, but it is not. Pope
+seldom indulges in such passages, though he does sometimes: Dryden never
+does. He can praise, abuse, argue, tell stories, make questionable
+jests, do anything in verse that is still poetry, that has a throb and a
+quiver and a swell in it, and is not merely limp, rhythmed prose. In
+Crabbe, save in a few passages of feeling and a great many of mere
+description--the last an excellent setting for poetry but not
+necessarily poetical--this rhythmed prose is everywhere. The matter
+which it serves to convey is, with the limitations above given, varied,
+and it is excellent. No one except the greatest prose novelists has such
+a gallery of distinct, sharply etched characters, such another gallery
+of equally distinct scenes and manner-pieces, to set before the reader.
+Exasperating as Crabbe's style sometimes is, he seldom bores--never
+indeed except in his rare passages of digressive reflection. It has, I
+think, been observed, and if not the observation is obvious, that he has
+done with the pen for the neighbourhood of Aldborough and Glemham what
+Crome and Cotman have done for the neighbourhood of Norwich with the
+pencil. His observation of human nature, so far as it goes, is not less
+careful, true, and vivid. His pictures of manners, to those who read
+them at all, are perfectly fresh and in no respect grotesque or faded,
+dead as the manners themselves are. His pictures of motives and of
+facts, of vice and virtue, never can fade, because the subjects are
+perennial and are truly caught. Even his plays on words, which horrified
+Jeffrey--
+
+    Alas! your reverence, wanton thoughts I grant
+    Were once my motive, now the thoughts of want,
+
+and the like--are not worse than Milton's jokes on the guns. He has
+immense talent, and he has the originality which sets talent to work in
+a way not tried by others, and may thus be very fairly said to turn it
+into genius. He is all this and more. But despite the warnings of a
+certain precedent, I cannot help stating the case which we have
+discussed in the old form, and asking, was Crabbe a poet?
+
+And thus putting the question, we may try to sum up. It is the gracious
+habit of a summing-up to introduce, if possible, a dictum of the famous
+men our fathers that were before us. I have already referred to
+Hazlitt's criticism on Crabbe in _The Spirit of the Age_, and I need not
+here urge at very great length the cautions which are always necessary
+in considering any judgment of Hazlitt's.[6] Much that he says even in
+the brief space of six or eight pages which he allots to Crabbe is
+unjust; much is explicably, and not too creditably, unjust. Crabbe was a
+successful man, and Hazlitt did not like successful men: he was a
+clergyman of the Church of England, and Hazlitt did not love clergymen
+of the Church of England: he had been a duke's chaplain, and Hazlitt
+loathed dukes: he had been a Radical, and was still (though Hazlitt does
+not seem to have thought him so) a Liberal, but his Liberalism had been
+Torified into a tame variety. Again, Crabbe, though by no means
+squeamish, is the most unvoluptuous and dispassionate of all describers
+of inconvenient things; and Hazlitt was the author of _Liber Amoris_.
+Accordingly there is much that is untrue in the tissue of denunciation
+which the critic devotes to the poet. But there are two passages in this
+tirade which alone might show how great a critic Hazlitt himself was.
+Here in a couple of lines ("they turn, one and all, on the same sort of
+teasing, helpless, unimaginative distress") is the germ of one of the
+most famous and certainly of the best passages of the late Mr. Arnold;
+and here again is one of those critical taps of the finger which shivers
+by a touch of the weakest part a whole Rupert's drop of misapprehension.
+Crabbe justified himself by Pope's example. "Nothing," says Hazlitt,
+"can be more dissimilar. Pope describes what is striking: Crabbe would
+have described merely what was there.... In Pope there was an appeal to
+the imagination, you see what was passing _in a poetical point of
+view_."
+
+Even here (and I have not been able to quote the whole passage) there is
+one of the flaws, which Hazlitt rarely avoided, in the use of the word
+"striking"; for, Heaven knows, Crabbe is often striking enough. But the
+description of Pope as showing things "in a poetical point of view" hits
+the white at once, wounds Crabbe mortally, and demolishes realism, as we
+have been pleased to understand it for the last generation or two.
+Hazlitt, it is true, has not followed up the attack, as I shall hope to
+show in an instant; but he has indicated the right line of it. As far as
+mere treatment goes, the fault of Crabbe is that he is pictorial rather
+than poetic, and photographic rather than pictorial. He sees his subject
+steadily, and even in a way he sees it whole; but he does not see it in
+the poetical way. You are bound in the shallows and the miseries of the
+individual; never do you reach the large freedom of the poet who looks
+at the universal. The absence of selection, of the discarding of details
+that are not wanted, has no doubt a great deal to do with this--Hazlitt
+seems to have thought that it had everything to do. I do not quite agree
+with him there. Dante, I think, was sometimes quite as minute as Crabbe;
+and I do not know that any one less hardy than Hazlitt himself would
+single out, as Hazlitt expressly does, the death-bed scene of Buckingham
+as a conquering instance in Pope to compare with Crabbe. We know that
+the bard of Twickenham grossly exaggerated this. But suppose he had not?
+Would it have been worse verse? I think not. Although the faculty of
+selecting instead of giving all, as Hazlitt himself justly contends, is
+one of the things which make _poesis non ut pictura_, it is not all, and
+I think myself that a poet, if he is a poet, could be almost absolutely
+literal. Shakespeare is so in the picture of Gloucester's corpse. Is
+that not poetry?
+
+The defect of Crabbe, as it seems to me, is best indicated by reference
+to one of the truest of all dicta on poetry, the famous maxim of
+Joubert--that the lyre is a winged instrument and must transport. There
+is no wing in Crabbe, there is no transport, because, as I hold (and
+this is where I go beyond Hazlitt), there is no music. In all poetry,
+the very highest as well as the very lowest that is still poetry, there
+is something which transports, and that something in my view is always
+the music of the verse, of the words, of the cadence, of the rhythm, of
+the sounds superadded to the meaning. When you get the best music
+married to the best meaning, then you get, say, Shakespeare: when you
+get some music married to even moderate meaning, you get, say, Moore.
+Wordsworth can, as everybody but Wordsworthians holds, and as some even
+of Wordsworthians admit, write the most detestable doggerel and
+platitude. But when any one who knows what poetry is reads--
+
+    Our noisy years seem moments in the being
+    Of the eternal silence,
+
+he sees that, quite independently of the meaning, which disturbs the
+soul of no less a person than Mr. John Morley, there is one note added
+to the articulate music of the world--a note that never will leave off
+resounding till the eternal silence itself gulfs it. He leaves
+Wordsworth, he goes straight into the middle of the eighteenth century,
+and he sees Thomson with his hands in his dressing-gown pockets biting
+at the peaches, and hears him between the mouthfuls murmuring--
+
+    So when the shepherd of the Hebrid Isles,
+    Placed far amid the melancholy main,
+
+and there is another note, as different as possible in kind yet still
+alike, struck for ever. Yet again, to take example still from the less
+romantic poets, and in this case from a poet, whom Mr. Kebbel specially
+and disadvantageously contrasts with Crabbe, when we read the old
+schoolboy's favourite--
+
+    When the British warrior queen,
+    Bleeding from the Roman rods,
+
+we hear the same quality of music informing words, though again in a
+kind somewhat lower, commoner, and less. In this matter, as in all
+matters that are worth handling at all, we come of course _ad
+mysterium_. Why certain combinations of letters, sounds, cadences,
+should almost without the aid of meaning, though no doubt immensely
+assisted by meaning, produce this effect of poetry on men no man can
+say. But they do; and the chief merit of criticism is that it enables us
+by much study of different times and different languages to recognise
+some part of the laws, though not the ultimate and complete causes, of
+the production.
+
+Now I can only say that Crabbe does not produce, or only in the rarest
+instances produces, this effect on me, and what is more, that on ceasing
+to be a patient in search of poetical stimulant and becoming merely a
+gelid critic, I do not discover even in Crabbe's warmest admirers any
+evidence that he produced this effect on them. Both in the eulogies
+which Mr. Kebbel quotes, and in those that he does not quote, I observe
+that the eulogists either discreetly avoid saying what they mean by
+poetry, or specify for praise something in Crabbe that is not distinctly
+poetical. Cardinal Newman said that Crabbe "pleased and touched him at
+thirty years' interval," and pleaded that this answers to the
+"accidental definition of a classic." Most certainly; but not
+necessarily to that of a poetical classic. Jeffrey thought him
+"original and powerful." Granted; but there are plenty of original and
+powerful writers who are not poets. Wilson gave him the superlative for
+"original and vivid painting." Perhaps; but is Hogarth a poet? Jane
+Austen "thought she could have married him." She had not read his
+biography; but even if she had would that prove him to be a poet? Lord
+Tennyson is said to single out the following passage, which is certainly
+one of Crabbe's best, if not his very best:--
+
+    Early he rose, and looked with many a sigh
+    On the red light that filled the eastern sky;
+    Oft had he stood before, alert and gay,
+    To hail the glories of the new-born day;
+    But now dejected, languid, listless, low,
+    He saw the wind upon the water blow,
+    And the cold stream curled onward as the gale
+    From the pine-hill blew harshly down the vale;
+    On the right side the youth a wood surveyed,
+    With all its dark intensity of shade;
+    Where the rough wind alone was heard to move
+    In this, the pause of nature and of love
+    When now the young are reared, and when the old,
+    Lost to the tie, grow negligent and cold:
+    Far to the left he saw the huts of men,
+    Half hid in mist that hung upon the fen:
+    Before him swallows gathering for the sea,
+    Took their short flights and twittered o'er the lea;
+    And near the bean-sheaf stood, the harvest done,
+    And slowly blackened in the sickly sun;
+    All these were sad in nature, or they took
+    Sadness from him, the likeness of his look
+    And of his mind--he pondered for a while,
+    Then met his Fanny with a borrowed smile.
+
+It is good: it is extraordinarily good: it could not be better of its
+kind. It is as nearly poetry as anything that Crabbe ever did--but is it
+quite? If it is (and I am not careful to deny it) the reason, as it
+seems to me, is that the verbal and rhythmical music here, with its
+special effect of "transporting" of "making the common as if it were
+uncommon," is infinitely better than is usual with Crabbe, that in fact
+there is music as well as meaning. Hardly anywhere else, not even in the
+best passages of the story of Peter Grimes, shall we find such music;
+and in its absence it may be said of Crabbe much more truly than of
+Dryden (who carries the true if not the finest poetical undertone with
+him even into the rant of Almanzor and Maximin, into the interminable
+arguments of "Religio Laici" and "The Hind and the Panther") that he is
+a classic of our prose.
+
+Yet the qualities which are so noteworthy in him are all qualities which
+are valuable to the poet, and which for the most part are present in
+good poets. And I cannot help thinking that this was what actually
+deceived some of his contemporaries and made others content for the most
+part to acquiesce in an exaggerated estimate of his poetical merits. It
+must be remembered that even the latest generation which, as a whole and
+unhesitatingly, admired Crabbe, had been brought up on the poets of the
+eighteenth century, in the very best of whom the qualities which Crabbe
+lacks had been but sparingly and not eminently present. It must be
+remembered too, that from the great vice of the poetry of the eighteenth
+century, its artificiality and convention, Crabbe is conspicuously free.
+The return to nature was not the only secret of the return to poetry;
+but it was part of it, and that Crabbe returned to nature no one could
+doubt. Moreover he came just between the school of prose fiction which
+practically ended with _Evelina_ and the school of prose fiction which
+opened its different branches with _Waverley_ and _Sense and
+Sensibility_. His contemporaries found nowhere else the narrative power,
+the faculty of character-drawing, the genius for description of places
+and manners, which they found in Crabbe; and they knew that in almost
+all, if not in all the great poets there is narrative power, faculty of
+character-drawing, genius for description. Yet again, Crabbe put these
+gifts into verse which at its best was excellent in its own way, and at
+its worst was a blessed contrast to Darwin or to Hayley. Some readers
+may have had an uncomfortable though only half-conscious feeling that if
+they had not a poet in Crabbe they had not a poet at all. At all events
+they made up their minds that they had a poet in him.
+
+But are we bound to follow their example? I think not. You could play on
+Crabbe that odd trick which used, it is said, to be actually played on
+some mediaeval verse chroniclers and unrhyme him--that is to say, put
+him into prose with the least possible changes--and his merits would,
+save in rare instances, remain very much as they are now. You could put
+other words in the place of his words, keeping the verse, and it would
+not as a rule be much the worse. You cannot do either of these things
+with poets who are poets. Therefore I shall conclude that save at the
+rarest moments, moments of some sudden gust of emotion, some happy
+accident, some special grace of the Muses to reward long and blameless
+toil in their service, Crabbe was not a poet. But I have not the least
+intention of denying that he was great, and all but of the greatest
+among English writers.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] In 1834, after Crabbe's death, Wordsworth wrote to his son: "Your
+father's works ... will last, from their combined merit as poetry and
+truth, full as long as anything that has been expressed in verse since
+the date of their first appearance." A very different estimate by
+Wordsworth of Crabbe has been published in Mr. Clayden's _Rogers and his
+Contemporaries_. Here he argues at great length that "Crabbe's verses
+can in no sense be called poetry," and that "nineteen out of twenty of
+his pictures are mere matter of fact." It is fair to say that this was
+in 1808, before the appearance of "The Borough" and of almost all
+Crabbe's best work.
+
+[3] _Great Writers; Crabbe_: by T. E. Kebbel. London, 1888.
+
+[4] Although constantly patronised by the Rutland family in successive
+generations, and honoured by the attentions of "Old Q." and others, his
+poems are full of growls at patrons. These cannot be mere echoes of
+Oldham and Johnson, but their exact reason is unknown. His son's
+reference to it is so extremely cautious that it has been read as a
+confession that Crabbe was prone to his cups, and quarrelsome in them--a
+signal instance of the unwisdom of not speaking out.
+
+[5] Rogers told Ticknor in 1838 that "Crabbe was nearly ruined by grief
+and vexation at the conduct of his wife for above seven years, at the
+end of which time she proved to be insane." But this was long after her
+death and Crabbe's, and it is not clear that while she was alive Rogers
+knew Crabbe at all. Nor is there the slightest reason for attaching to
+the phrase "vexation at the conduct" the sense which it would usually
+have. A quatrain found after Crabbe's death wrapped round his wife's
+wedding-ring is touching, and graceful in its old-fashioned way.
+
+    The ring so worn, as you behold,
+    So thin, so pale, is yet of gold:
+    The passion such it was to prove;
+    Worn with life's cares, love yet was love.
+
+[6] See below, Essay on Hazlitt.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+HOGG
+
+
+"What on earth," it was once asked "will you make of Hogg?" I think that
+there is something to be made of Hogg, and that it is something worth
+the making. In the first place, it is hardly possible, without studying
+"the Shepherd" pretty close, fully to appreciate three other persons,
+all greater, and one infinitely greater, than himself; namely, Wilson,
+Lockhart, and Scott. To the two first he was a client in the Roman
+sense, a plaything, something of a butt, and an invaluable source of
+inspiration or at least suggestion. Towards the last he occupied a very
+curious position, never I think quite paralleled elsewhere--the position
+of a Boswell who would fain be a Boswell and is not allowed to be, who
+has wild notions that he is really a greater man than Johnson and
+occasionally blasphemes against his idol, but who in the intervals is
+truly Boswellian. In the second place, he has usually hitherto been not
+criticised at all, but either somewhat sneered at or else absurdly
+over-praised. In the third place, as both Scott and Byron recognised, he
+is probably the most remarkable example we have of absolute
+self-education, or of no education: for Burns was an academically
+instructed student in comparison with Hogg. In the fourth, he produced,
+amid a mass of rubbish, some charming verse and one prose-story which,
+though it is almost overlooked by the general, some good judges are, I
+believe, agreed with me in regarding as one of the very best things of
+its kind, while it is also a very curious literary puzzle.
+
+The anecdotic history, more or less authentic, of the Ettrick Shepherd
+would fill volumes, and I must try to give some of the cream of it
+presently. The non-anecdotic part may be despatched in a few sentences.
+The exact date of his birth is not known, but he was baptized on 9th
+December 1770. His father was a good shepherd and a bad farmer--a
+combination of characteristics which Hogg himself inherited unimpaired
+and unimproved. If he had any early education at all, he forgot it so
+completely that he had, as a grown-up man, to teach himself writing if
+not reading a second time. He pursued his proper vocation for about
+thirty years, during the latter part of which time he became known as a
+composer of very good songs, "Donald Macdonald" being ranked as the
+best. He printed a few as a pamphlet in the first year of the century,
+but met with little success. Then he fell in with Scott, to whom he had
+been introduced as a purveyor of ballads, not a few of which his
+mother, Margaret Laidlaw, knew by heart. This old lady it was who gave
+Scott the true enough warning that the ballads were "made for singing
+and no for reading." Scott in his turn set Hogg on the track of making
+some money by his literary work, and Constable published _The Mountain
+Bard_ together with a treatise called _Hogg on Sheep_, which I have not
+read, and of which I am not sure that I should be a good critic if I
+had. The two books brought Hogg three hundred pounds. This sum he poured
+into the usual Danaids' vessel of the Scotch peasant--the taking and
+stocking of a farm, which he had neither judgment to select, capital to
+work, nor skill to manage; and he went on doing very much the same thing
+for the rest of his life. The exact dates of that life are very sparely
+given in his own _Autobiography_, in his daughter's _Memorials_, and in
+the other notices of him that I have seen. He would appear to have spent
+four or five years in the promising attempt to run, not one but two
+large stock-farms. Then he tried shepherding again, without much
+success; and finally in 1810, being forty years old and able to write,
+he went to Edinburgh and "commenced," as the good old academic phrase
+has it, literary man. He brought out a new book of songs called _The
+Forest Minstrel_, and then he started a periodical, _The Spy_. On this,
+as he tells us, Scott very wisely remonstrated with him, asking him
+whether he thought he could be more elegant than Addison or Mackenzie.
+Hogg replied with his usual modesty that at any rate he would be "mair
+original." The originality appears to have consisted in personality; for
+Hogg acknowledges one exceedingly insolent attack on Scott himself,
+which Scott seems, after at first resenting it (and yet Hogg tells us
+elsewhere that he never resented any such thing), to have forgiven. He
+had also some not clearly known employments of the factorship or
+surveyorship kind; he was much patronised by two worthy hatters, Messrs.
+Grieve and Scott, and in 1813 the book which contains all his best
+verse, _The Queen's Wake_, was published. It was deservedly successful;
+but, by a species of bad luck which pursued Hogg with extraordinary
+assiduity, the two first editions yielded nothing, as his publisher was
+not solvent. The third, which Blackwood issued, brought him in good
+profit. Two years later he became in a way a made man. He had very
+diligently sought the patronage of Harriet, Duchess of Buccleuch, and,
+his claims being warmly supported by Scott and specially recommended by
+the Duchess on her deathbed to her husband, Hogg received rent free, or
+at a peppercorn, the farm of Mossend, Eltrive or Altrive. It is agreed
+even by Hogg's least judicious admirers that if he had been satisfied
+with this endowment and had then devoted himself, as he actually did, to
+writing, he might have lived and died in comfort, even though his
+singular luck in not being paid continued to haunt him. But he must
+needs repeat his old mistake and take the adjacent farm of Mount Benger,
+which, with a certain reckless hospitable way of living for which he is
+not so blamable, kept him in difficulties all the rest of his life and
+made him die in them. He lived twenty years longer; married a
+good-looking girl much his superior in rank and twenty years his junior,
+who seems to have made him an excellent wife; engaged in infinite
+magazine- and book-writing, of which more presently; became the
+inspirer, model and butt of _Blackwood's Magazine_; constantly
+threatened to quarrel with it for traducing him, and once did so; loved
+Edinburgh convivialities more well than wisely; had the very ill luck to
+survive Scott and to commit the folly of writing a pamphlet (more silly
+than anything else) on the "domestic manners" of that great man, which
+estranged Lockhart, hitherto his fast friend; paid a visit to London in
+1832, whereby hang tales; and died himself on 21st November 1835.
+
+Such, briefly but not I think insufficiently given, is the Hogg of
+history. The Hogg of anecdote is a much more considerable and difficult
+person. He mixes himself up with or becomes by turns (whichever phrase
+may be preferred) the Shepherd of the _Noctes_ and the Hogg who is
+revealed to us, say his panegyrists, with "uncalled-for malignity" in
+Lockhart's _Life of Scott_. But these panegyrists seem to forget that
+there are two documents which happen not to be signed either "John
+Gibson Lockhart" or "Christopher North," and that these documents are
+Hogg's _Autobiography_, published by himself, and the _Domestic Manners
+of Sir Walter Scott_, likewise authenticated. In these two we have the
+Hogg of the _ana_ put forward pretty vividly. For instance, Hogg tells
+us how, late in Sir Walter's life, he and his wife called upon Scott.
+"In we went and were received with all the affection of old friends. But
+his whole discourse was addressed to my wife, while I was left to shift
+for myself.... In order to attract his attention from my wife to one who
+I thought as well deserved it, I went close up to him with a
+scrutinising look and said, 'Gudeness guide us, Sir Walter, but ye hae
+gotten a braw gown.'" The rest of the story is not bad, but less
+characteristic. Immediately afterwards Hogg tells his own speech about
+being "not sae yelegant but mair original" than Addison. Then there is
+the other capital legend, also self-told, how he said to Scott, "Dear
+Sir Walter, ye can never suppose that I belang to your school of
+chivalry! Ye are the king of that school, but I'm the king of the
+mountain and fairy school, which is a far higher ane than yours!"
+"This," says Professor Veitch, a philosopher, a scholar, and a man of
+letters, "though put with an almost sublime egotism, is in the main
+true." Almost equally characteristic is the fact that, after beginning
+his pamphlet by calling Lockhart "the only man thoroughly qualified for
+the task" of writing Scott's life, Hogg elsewhere, in one of the
+extraordinary flings that distinguish him, writes: "Of Lockhart's genius
+and capabilities Sir Walter always spoke with the greatest enthusiasm:
+more than I thought he deserved. For I knew him a great deal better than
+Sir Walter did, and, whatever Lockhart may pretend, I knew Sir Walter a
+thousand times better than he did."
+
+Now be it remembered that these passages are descriptive of Hogg's Hogg,
+to use the always useful classification of Dr. Holmes. To complete them
+(the actual texts are too long to give here) it is only necessary to
+compare the accounts of a certain dinner at Bowhill given respectively
+by Hogg in the _Domestic Manners_ and by Lockhart in his biography, and
+also those given in the same places of the one-sided quarrel between
+Scott and Hogg, because the former, according to his almost invariable
+habit, refused to collaborate in Hogg's _Poetic Mirror_. In all this we
+have the man's own testimony about himself. It is not in the least
+incompatible with his having been, as his panegyrists contend, an
+affectionate friend, husband, and father; a very good fellow when his
+vanity or his whims were not touched; and inexhaustibly fertile in the
+kind of rough profusion of flower and weed that uncultivated soil
+frequently produces. But it most certainly is also not inconsistent, but
+on the contrary highly consistent, with the picture drawn by Lockhart in
+his great book; and it shows how, to say the least and mildest, the
+faults and foibles of the curious personage known as "the Shepherd of
+the _Noctes_" were not the parts of the character on which Wilson need
+have spent, or did spend, most of his invention. Even if the "boozing
+buffoon" had been a boozing buffoon and nothing more, Hogg, who
+confesses with a little affected remorse, but with evident pride, that
+he once got regularly drunk every night for some six weeks running, till
+"an inflammatory fever" kindly pulled him up, could not have greatly
+objected to this part of the matter. The wildest excesses of the
+_Eidolon_-Shepherd's vanity do not exceed that speech to Scott which
+Professor Veitch thinks so true; and the quaintest pranks played by the
+same shadow do not exceed in quaintness the immortal story of Hogg being
+introduced to Mrs. Scott for the first time, extending himself on a sofa
+at full length (on the excuse that he "thought he could never do wrong
+to copy the lady of the house," who happened at the time to be in a
+delicate state of health), and ending by addressing her as "Charlotte."
+This is the story that Mrs. Garden, Hogg's daughter, without attempting
+to contest its truth, describes as told by Lockhart with "uncalled-for
+malignity." Now when anybody who knows something of Lockhart comes
+across "malignant," "scorpion," or any term of the kind, he, if he is
+wise, merely shrugs his shoulders. All the literary copy-books have got
+it that Lockhart was malignant, and there is of course no more to be
+said.[7] But something may be done by a little industrious clearing
+away of fiction in particulars. It may be most assuredly and confidently
+asserted that no one reading the _Life of Scott_ without knowing what
+Hogg's friends have said of it would dream of seeing malignity in the
+notices which it contains of the Shepherd. Before writing this paper I
+gave myself the trouble, or indulged myself in the pleasure (for perhaps
+that is the more appropriate phrase in reference to the most delightful
+of biographies, if not of books), of marking with slips of paper all the
+passages in Lockhart referring to Hogg, and reading them consecutively.
+I am quite sure that any one who does this, even knowing little or
+nothing of the circumstances, will wonder where on earth the "ungenerous
+assaults," the "virulent detraction," the "bitter words," the "false
+friendship," and so forth, with which Lockhart has been charged, are to
+be found. But any one who knows that Hogg had, just before his own
+death, and while the sorrow of Sir Walter's end was fresh, published the
+possibly not ill-intentioned but certainly ill-mannered pamphlet
+referred to--a pamphlet which contains among other things, besides the
+grossest impertinences about Lady Scott's origin, at least one
+insinuation that Scott wrote Lockhart's books for him--if any one
+further knows (I think the late Mr. Scott Douglas was the first to point
+out the fact) that Hogg had calmly looted Lockhart's biography of Burns,
+then he will think that the "scorpion," instead of using his sting,
+showed most uncommon forbearance. This false friend, virulent detractor
+and ungenerous assailant describes Hogg as "a true son of nature and
+genius with a naturally kind and simple character." He does indeed
+remark that Hogg's "notions of literary honesty were exceedingly loose."
+But (not to mention the Burns affair, which gave me some years ago a
+clue to this sentence) the remark is subjoined to a letter in which Hogg
+placidly suggests that he shall write an autobiographic sketch, and that
+Scott, transcribing it and substituting the third person for the first,
+shall father it as his own. The other offence I suppose was the remark
+that "the Shepherd's nerves were not heroically strung." This perhaps
+might have been left out, but if it was the fact (and Hogg's defenders
+never seem to have traversed it) it suggested itself naturally enough in
+the context, which deals with Hogg's extraordinary desire, when nearly
+forty, to enter the militia as an ensign. Moreover the same passage
+contains plenty of kindly description of the Shepherd. Perhaps there is
+"false friendship" in quoting a letter from Scott to Byron which
+describes Hogg as "a wonderful creature," or in describing the
+Shepherd's greeting to Wilkie, "Thank God for it! I did not know you
+were so young a man" as "graceful," or in the citation of Jeffrey's
+famous blunder in selecting for special praise a fabrication of Hogg's
+among the "Jacobite Ballads," or in the genial description, without a
+touch of ridicule, of Hogg at the St. Ronan's Games. The sentence on
+Hogg's death is indeed severe: "It had been better for his memory had
+his end been of earlier date; for he did not follow his benefactor until
+he had insulted his dust." It is even perhaps a little too severe,
+considering Hogg's irresponsible and childlike nature. But Lockhart
+might justly have retorted that men of sixty-four have no business to be
+irresponsible children; and it is certainly true that in this unlucky
+pamphlet Hogg distinctly accuses Scott of anonymously puffing himself at
+his, Hogg's, expense, of being over and over again jealous of him, of
+plagiarising his plots, of sneering at him, and, if the passage has any
+meaning, of joining a conspiracy of "the whole of the aristocracy and
+literature of the country" to keep Hogg down and "crush him to a
+nonentity." Neither could Lockhart have been exactly pleased at the
+passage where Scott is represented as afraid to clear the character of
+an innocent friend to the boy Duke of Buccleuch.
+
+    He told me that which I never knew nor suspected before; that a
+    certain gamekeeper, on whom he bestowed his maledictions without
+    reserve, had prejudiced my best friend, the young Duke of
+    Buccleuch, against me by a story; and though he himself knew it
+    to be a malicious and invidious lie, yet seeing his grace so
+    much irritated, he durst not open his lips on the subject,
+    further than by saying, "But, my lord duke, you must always
+    remember that Hogg is no ordinary man, although he may have shot
+    a stray moorcock." And then turning to me he said, "Before you
+    had ventured to give any saucy language to a low scoundrel of an
+    English gamekeeper, you should have thought of Fielding's tale
+    of Black George."
+
+    "I never saw that tale," said I, "and dinna ken ought about it.
+    But never trouble your head about that matter, Sir Walter, for
+    it is awthegither out o' nature for our young chief to entertain
+    ony animosity against me. The thing will never mair be heard of,
+    an' the chap that tauld the lees on me will gang to hell, that's
+    aye some comfort."
+
+Part of my reason for quoting this last passage is to recall to those
+who are familiar with the _Noctes Ambrosianae_ the extraordinary felicity
+of the imitation. This, which Hogg with his own pen represents himself
+as speaking with his own mouth, might be found textually in any page of
+the _Noctes_ without seeming in the least out of keeping with the ideal
+Hogg.
+
+And this brings me to the second charge of Hogg's friends, that Wilson
+wickedly caricatured his humble friend, if indeed he did not manufacture
+a Shepherd out of his own brain. This is as uncritical as the other, and
+even more surprising. That any one acquainted with Hogg's works,
+especially his autobiographic productions, should fail to recognise the
+resemblance is astonishing enough; but what is more astonishing is that
+any one interested in Hogg's fame should not perceive that the Shepherd
+of the _Noctes_ is Hogg magnified and embellished in every way. He is
+not a better poet, for the simple reason that the verses put in his
+mouth are usually Hogg's own and not always his best. But out of the
+_Confessions of a Sinner_, Hogg has never signed anything half so good
+as the best prose passages assigned to him in the _Noctes_. They are
+what he might have written if he had taken pains: they are in his key
+and vein; but they are much above him. Again, unless any reader is so
+extraordinarily devoid of humour as to be shocked by the mere
+horse-play, it must be clear to him that the Shepherd's manners are
+dressed up with extraordinary skill, so as to be just what he would have
+liked them to be. As for the drinking and so forth, it simply comes to
+this--that the habits which were fashionable when the century was not
+yet in its teens, or just in them, were getting to be looked on askance
+when it was entering or had entered on its thirties. But, instead of
+being annoyed at this Socrates-Falstaff, as somebody has called it, one
+might have thought that both Hogg himself and his admirers would have
+taken it as an immense compliment. The only really bad turn that Wilson
+seems to have done his friend was posthumous and pardonable. He
+undertook the task of writing the Shepherd's life and editing his
+_Remains_ for the benefit of his family, who were left very badly off;
+and he not only did not do it but appears to have lost the documents
+with which he was entrusted. It is fair to say that after the deaths,
+which came close together, of his wife, of Blackwood, and of Hogg
+himself, Wilson was never fully the same man; and that his strongly
+sentimental nature, joined to his now inveterate habit of writing
+rapidly as the fancy took him, would have made the task of hammering out
+a biography and of selecting and editing _Remains_ so distasteful from
+different points of view as to be practically impossible. But in that
+case of course he should not have undertaken it, or should have
+relinquished it as soon as he found out the difficulties. Allan
+Cunningham, it is said, would have gladly done the business; and there
+were few men better qualified.
+
+And now, having done a by no means unnecessary task in this preliminary
+clearance of rubbish, let us see what sort of a person in literature and
+life this Ettrick Shepherd really was--the Shepherd whom Scott not only
+befriended with unwearied and lifelong kindness, but ranked very high as
+an original talent, whom Byron thought Scott's only second worth
+speaking of, whom Southey, a very different person from either, esteemed
+highly, whom Wilson selected as the mouthpiece and model for one of the
+most singular and (I venture to say despite a certain passing wave of
+unpopularity) one of the most enduring of literary character-parts, and
+to whom Lockhart was, as Hogg himself late in life sets down, "a warm
+and disinterested friend." We have seen what Professor Veitch thinks of
+him--that he is the king of a higher school than Scott's. On the other
+hand, I fear the general English impression of him is rather that given
+by no Englishman, but by Thomas Carlyle, at the time of Hogg's visit to
+London in 1832. Carlyle describes him as talking and behaving like a
+"gomeril," and amusing the town by walking about in a huge gray plaid,
+which was supposed to be an advertisement, suggested by his publisher.
+
+The king of a school higher than Scott's and the veriest gomeril--these
+surely, though the judges be not quite of equal competence, are
+judgments of a singularly contradictory kind. Let us see what middle
+term we can find between them.
+
+The mighty volume (it has been Hogg's ill-fortune that the most
+accessible edition of his work is in two great double-columned royal
+octavos, heavy to the hand and not too grateful to the eye) which
+contains the Shepherd's collected poetical work is not for every reader.
+"Poets? where are they?" Wordsworth is said, on the authority of De
+Quincey, to have asked, with a want of graciousness of manners uncommon
+even in him and never forgiven by Hogg, when the latter used the plural
+in his presence, and in that of Wilson and Lloyd. It was unjust as well
+as rude, but endless allowance certainly has to be made for Hogg as a
+poet. I do not know to whom the epigram that "everything that is written
+in Scotch dialect is not necessarily poetry" is originally due, but
+there is certainly some justice in it. Scotch, as a language, has grand
+accommodations; it has richer vowels and a more varied and musical
+arrangement of consonants than English, while it falls not much short of
+English in freedom from that mere monotony which besets the
+richly-vowelled continental languages. It has an almost unrivalled
+provision of poetical _cliches_ (the sternest purist may admit a French
+word which has no English equivalent), that is to say, the stock phrases
+which Heaven knows who first minted and which will pass till they are
+worn out of all knowledge. It has two great poets--one in the
+vernacular, one in the literary language--who are rich enough to keep a
+bank for their inferiors almost to the end of time. The depreciation of
+it by "glaikit Englishers" (I am a glaikit Englisher who does not
+depreciate), simply because it is unfamiliar and rustic-looking, is
+silly enough. But its best practitioners are sometimes prone to forget
+that nothing ready-made will do as poetry, and that you can no more take
+a short cut to Parnassus by spelling good "guid" and liberally using
+"ava," than you can execute the same journey by calling a girl a nymph
+and a boy a swain. The reason why Burns is a great poet, and one of the
+greatest, is that he seldom or never does this in Scots. When he takes
+to the short cut, as he does sometimes, he usually "gets to his
+English." Of Hogg, who wrote some charming things and many good ones,
+the same cannot be said. No writer known to me, not even the eminent Dr.
+Young, who has the root of the poetical matter in him at all, is so
+utterly uncritical as Hogg. He does not seem even to have known when he
+borrowed and when he was original. We have seen that he told Scott that
+he was not of his school. Now a great deal that he wrote, perhaps
+indeed actually the major part of his verse, is simply imitation and not
+often very good imitation of Scott. Here is a passage:--
+
+    Light on her airy steed she sprung,
+    Around with golden tassels hung.
+    No chieftain there rode half so free,
+    Or half so light and gracefully.
+    How sweet to see her ringlets pale
+    Wide-waving in the southland gale,
+    Which through the broom-wood odorous flew
+    To fan her cheeks of rosy hue!
+    Whene'er it heaved her bosom's screen
+    What beauties in her form were seen!
+    And when her courser's mane it swung,
+    A thousand silver bells were rung.
+    A sight so fair, on Scottish plain,
+    A Scot shall never see again.
+
+I think we know where this comes from. Indeed Hogg had a certain
+considerable faculty of conscious parody as well as of unconscious
+imitation, and his _Poetic Mirror_, which he wrote as a kind of humorous
+revenge on his brother bards for refusing to contribute, is a fair
+second to _Rejected Addresses_. The amusing thing is that he often
+parodied where he did not mean parody in the least, and nowadays we do
+not want Scott-and-water. Another vein of Hogg's, which he worked
+mercilessly, is a similar imitation, not of Scott, but of the weakest
+echoes of Percy's _Reliques_:--
+
+    O sad, sad, was young Mary's plight:
+      She took the cup, no word she spake,
+    She had even wished that very night
+      To sleep and never more to wake.
+
+Sad, sad indeed is the plight of the poet who publishes verses like
+this, of which there are thousands of lines to be found in Hogg. And
+then one comes to "Kilmeny," and the note changes with a vengeance:--
+
+    Bonny Kilmeny gaed up the glen;
+    But it wasna to meet Duneira's men,
+    Nor the rosy monk of the isle to see,
+    For Kilmeny was pure as pure could be.
+    It was only to hear the yorlin sing,
+    And pu' the cress-flower round the spring,
+    The scarlet hip and the hindberry,
+    For Kilmeny was pure as pure could be.
+
+           .       .       .       .       .
+
+    Kilmeny looked up with a lovely grace,
+    But nae smile was seen on Kilmeny's face;
+    As still was her look and as still was her ee
+    As the stillness that lay on the emeraut lea,
+    Or the mist that sleeps on a waveless sea.
+    For Kilmeny had been she kent not where,
+    And Kilmeny had seen what she could not declare;
+    Kilmeny had been where the cock never crew,
+    Where the rain never fell and the wind never blew.
+
+No matter that it is necessary even here to make a cento, that the
+untutored singer cannot keep up the song by natural force and has not
+skill enough to dissemble the lapses. "Kilmeny" at its best is
+poetry--such poetry as, to take Hogg's contemporaries only, there is
+none in Rogers or Crabbe, little I fear in Southey, and not very much in
+Moore. Then there is no doubt at all that he could write ballads. "The
+Witch of Fife" is long and is not improved by being written (at least
+in one version) in a kind of Scots that never was on land or sea, but it
+is quite admirable of its class. "The Good Grey Cat," his own imitation
+of himself in the _Poetic Mirror_, comes perhaps second to it, and "The
+Abbot McKinnon" (which is rather close to the imitations of Scott)
+third. But there are plenty of others. As for his poems of the more
+ambitious kind, "Mador of the Moor," "Pilgrims of the Sun," and even
+"Queen Hynde," let blushing glory--the glory attached to the literary
+department--hide the days on which he produced those. She can very well
+afford it, for the hiding leaves untouched the division of Hogg's
+poetical work which furnishes his highest claims to fame except
+"Kilmeny," the division of the songs. These are numerous and unequal as
+a matter of course. Not a few of them are merely variations on older
+scraps and fragments of the kind which Burns had made popular; some of
+them are absolute rubbish; some of them are mere imitations of Burns
+himself. But this leaves abundance of precious remnants, as the
+Shepherd's covenanting friends would have said. The before-mentioned
+"Donald Macdonald" is a famous song of its kind: "I'll no wake wi'
+Annie" comes very little short of Burns's "Green grow the rashes O!" The
+piece on the lifting of the banner of Buccleuch, though a curious
+contrast with Scott's "Up with the Banner" does not suffer too much by
+the comparison: "Cam' ye by Athole" and "When the kye comes hame"
+everybody knows, and I do not know whether it is a mere delusion, but
+there seems to me to be a rare and agreeable humour in "The Village of
+Balmaquhapple."
+
+    D'ye ken the big village of Balmaquhapple?
+    The great muckle village of Balmaquhapple?
+    'Tis steeped in iniquity up to the thrapple,
+    An' what's to become o' poor Balmaquhapple?
+
+Whereafter follows an invocation to St. Andrew, with a characteristic
+suggestion that he may spare himself the trouble of intervening for
+certain persons such as
+
+    Geordie, our deacon for want of a better,
+    And Bess, wha delights in the sins that beset her--
+
+ending with the milder prayer:
+
+    But as for the rest, for the women's sake save them,
+    Their bodies at least, and their sauls if they have them.
+
+           .       .       .       .       .
+
+    And save, without word of confession auricular,
+    The clerk's bonny daughters, and Bell in particular;
+    For ye ken that their beauty's the pride and the stapple
+    Of the great wicked village of Balmaquhapple!
+
+"Donald McGillavry," which deceived Jeffrey, is another of the
+half-inarticulate songs which have the gift of setting the blood
+coursing;
+
+    Donald's gane up the hill hard an' hungry;
+    Donald's come down the hill wild an' angry:
+    Donald will clear the gowk's nest cleverly;
+    Here's to the King and Donald McGillavry!
+
+           .       .       .       .       .
+
+    Donald has foughten wi' reif and roguery,
+    Donald has dinnered wi' banes and beggary;
+    Better it war for Whigs an' Whiggery
+    Meeting the deevil than Donald McGillavry.
+    Come like a tailor, Donald McGillavry,
+    Come like a tailor, Donald McGillavry,
+    Push about, in an' out, thimble them cleverly.
+    Here's to King James an' Donald McGillavry!
+
+"Love is Like a Dizziness," and the "Boys' Song,"
+
+    Where the pools are bright and deep,
+    Where the grey trout lies asleep,
+    Up the river and over the lea,
+    That's the way for Billy and me--
+
+and plenty more charming things will reward the explorer of the
+Shepherd's country. Only let that explorer be prepared for pages on
+pages of the most unreadable stuff, the kind of stuff which hardly any
+educated man, however great a "gomeril" he might be, would ever dream of
+putting to paper, much less of sending to press. It is fair to repeat
+that the educated man who thus refrained would probably be a very long
+time before he wrote "Kilmeny," or even "Donald McGillavry" and "The
+Village of Balmaquhapple."
+
+Still (though to say it is enough to make him turn in his grave) if Hogg
+had been a verse-writer alone he would, except for "Kilmeny" and his
+songs, hardly be worth remembering, save by professed critics and
+literary free-selectors. A little better than Allan Cunningham, he is
+but for that single, sudden, and unsustained inspiration of "Kilmeny,"
+and one or two of his songs, so far below Burns that Burns might enable
+us to pay no attention to him and not lose much. As for Scott, "Proud
+Maisie" (an unapproachable thing), the fragments that Elspeth Cheyne
+sings, even the single stanza in _Guy Mannering_, "Are these the Links
+of Forth? she said," any one of a thousand snatches that Sir Walter has
+scattered about his books with a godlike carelessness will "ding" Hogg
+and all his works on their own field. But then it is not saying anything
+very serious against a man to say that he is not so great as Scott. With
+those who know what poetry is, Hogg will keep his corner ("not a
+polished corner," as Sydney Smith would say) of the temple of Apollo.
+
+Hogg wrote prose even more freely than he wrote verse, and after the
+same fashion--a fashion which he describes with equal frankness and
+truth by the phrases, "dashing on," "writing as if in desperation,"
+"mingling pathos and absurdity," and so forth. Tales, novels, sketches,
+all were the same to him; and he had the same queer mixture of
+confidence in their merits and doubt about the manner in which they were
+written. _The Brownie of Bodsbeck_, _The Three Perils of Man_ (which
+appears refashioned in the modern editions of his works as _The Siege of
+Roxburgh_), _The Three Perils of Woman_, _The Shepherd's Calendar_ and
+numerous other uncollected tales exhibit for the most part very much the
+same characteristics. Hogg knew the Scottish peasantry well, he had
+abundant stores of unpublished folklore, he could invent more when
+wanted, he was not destitute of the true poetic knowledge of human
+nature, and at his best he could write strikingly and picturesquely. But
+he simply did not know what self-criticism was, he had no notion of the
+conduct or carpentry of a story, and though he was rather fond of
+choosing antique subjects, and prided himself on his knowledge of old
+Scots, he was quite as likely to put the baldest modern touches in the
+mouth of a heroine of the fourteenth or fifteenth century as not. If
+anybody takes pleasure in seeing how a good story can be spoilt, let him
+look at the sixth chapter of the _Shepherd's Calendar_, "The Souters of
+Selkirk;" and if any one wants to read a novel of antiquity which is not
+like Scott, let him read _The Bridal of Polmood_.
+
+In the midst, however, of all this chaotic work, there is still to be
+found, though misnamed, one of the most remarkable stories of its kind
+ever written--a story which, as I have said before, is not only
+extraordinarily good of itself, but insists peremptorily that the reader
+shall wonder how the devil it got where it is. This is the book now
+called _The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Fanatic_, but by its
+proper and original title, _The Confessions of a Justified Sinner_.
+Hogg's reference to it in his _Autobiography_ is sufficiently odd. "The
+next year (1824)," he says, "I published _The Confessions of a Fanatic
+[Sinner]_, but, it being a story replete with horrors, after I had
+written it I durst not venture to put my name to it, so it was
+published anonymously, and of course did not sell very well--so at least
+I believe, for I do not remember ever receiving anything for it, and I
+am sure if there had been a reversion [he means return] I should have
+had a moiety. However I never asked anything, so on that point there was
+no misunderstanding." And he says nothing more about it, except to
+inform us that his publishers, Messrs. Longman, who had given him for
+his two previous books a hundred and fifty pounds each "as soon as the
+volumes were put to press," and who had published the _Confessions_ on
+half profits, observed, when his next book was offered to them, that
+"his last publication (the _Confessions_) had been found fault with in
+some very material points, and they begged leave to decline the present
+one until they consulted some other persons." That is all. But the
+Reverend Thomas Thomson, Hogg's editor, an industrious and not
+incompetent man of letters, while admitting that it is "in excellence of
+plot, concentration of language and vigorous language, one of the best
+and most interesting [he might have said the best without a second] of
+Hogg's tales," observes that it "alarmed the religious portion of the
+community who hastily thought that the author was assailing
+Christianity." "Nothing could be more unfounded," says the Reverend
+Thomas Thomson with much justice. He might have added that it would have
+been much more reasonable to suspect the author of practice with the
+Evil One in order to obtain the power of writing anything so much better
+than his usual work.
+
+For, in truth, _The Confessions of a Justified Sinner_, while it has all
+Hogg's merits and more, is quite astoundingly free from his defects. His
+tales are generally innocent of the most rudimentary notions of
+construction: this goes closely ordered, with a few pardonable enough
+digressions, from beginning to end. He has usually little concentrated
+grasp of character: the few personages of the _Confessions_ are
+consistent throughout. His dialogue is, as a rule, extraordinarily
+slipshod and unequal: here there is no fault to find with it. His
+greatest lack, in short, is the lack of form: and here, though the story
+might perhaps have been curtailed, or rather "cut" in the middle, with
+advantage, the form is excellent. As its original edition, though an
+agreeable volume, is rare, and its later ones are buried amidst
+discordant rubbish, it may not be improper to give some account of it.
+The time is pitched just about the Revolution and the years following,
+and, according to a common if not altogether praiseworthy custom, the
+story consists of an editor's narrative and of the _Confessions_ proper
+imbedded therein. The narrative tells how a drinking Royalist laird
+married an exceedingly precise young woman, how the dissension which was
+probable broke out between them, how a certain divine, the Reverend
+Robert Wringhim, endeavoured to convert the sinner at the instances of
+the saint, and perhaps succeeded in consoling the saint at the expense
+of the sinner; how the laird sought more congenial society with a
+certain cousin of his named Arabella Logan, and how, rather out of
+jealousy than forgiveness, such a union or quasi-union took place
+between husband and wife that they had two sons, George and Robert, the
+elder of whom was his father's favourite and like, while the younger was
+pretty much left to the care of Mr. Wringhim. The tale then tells how,
+after hardly seeing one another in boyhood, the brothers met as young
+men at Edinburgh, where on extreme provocation the elder was within an
+ace of killing the younger. The end of it was that, after Robert had
+brought against George a charge of assaulting him on Arthur's Seat,
+George himself was found mysteriously murdered in an Edinburgh close.
+His mother cared naught for it; his father soon died of grief; the
+obnoxious Robert succeeded to the estates, and only Arabella Logan was
+left to do what she could to clear up the mystery, which, after certain
+strange passages, she did. But when warrants were made out against
+Robert he had disappeared, and the whole thing remained wrapped in more
+mystery than ever.
+
+To this narrative succeed the confessions of Robert himself. He takes of
+course the extreme side both of his mother and of her doctrines, but for
+some time, though an accomplished Pharisee, he is not assured of
+salvation, till at last his adopted (if not real) father Wringhim
+announces that he has wrestled sufficiently in prayer and has received
+assurance.
+
+Thereupon the young man sallies out in much exaltation of feeling and
+full of contempt for the unconverted. As he goes he meets another young
+man of mysterious appearance, who seems to be an exact double of
+himself. This wraith, however, presents himself as only a humble admirer
+of Robert's spiritual glory, and holds much converse with him. He meets
+this person repeatedly, but is never able to ascertain who he is. The
+stranger says that he may be called Gil Martin if Robert likes, but
+hints that he is some great one--perhaps the Czar Peter, who was then
+known to be travelling incognito about Europe. For a time Robert's
+Illustrious Friend (as he generally calls him) exaggerates the extremest
+doctrines of Calvinism, and slips easily from this into suggestions of
+positive crime. A minister named Blanchard, who has overheard his
+conversation, warns Robert against him, and Gil Martin in return points
+out Blanchard as an enemy to religion whom it is Robert's duty to take
+off. They lay wait for the minister and pistol him, the Illustrious
+Friend managing not only to avert all suspicion from themselves, but to
+throw it with capital consequences on a perfectly innocent person. After
+this initiation in blood Robert is fully reconciled to the "great work"
+and, going to Edinburgh, is led by his Illustrious Friend without
+difficulty into the series of plots against his brother which had to
+outsiders so strange an appearance, and which ended in a fresh murder.
+When Robert in the course of events above described becomes master of
+Dalchastel, the family estate, his Illustrious Friend accompanies him
+and the same process goes on. But now things turn less happily for
+Robert. He finds himself, without any consciousness of the acts charged,
+accused on apparently indubitable evidence, first of peccadillos, then
+of serious crimes. Seduction, forgery, murder, even matricide are hinted
+against him, and at last, under the impression that indisputable proofs
+of the last two crimes have been discovered, he flies from his house.
+After a short period of wandering, in which his Illustrious Friend
+alternately stirs up all men against him and tempts him to suicide, he
+finally in despair succumbs to the temptation and puts an end to his
+life. This of course ends the _Memoir_, or rather the _Memoir_ ends just
+before the catastrophe. There is then a short postscript in which the
+editor tells a tale of a suicide found with some such legend attaching
+to him on a Border hillside, of an account given in _Blackwood_ of the
+searching of the grave, and of a visit to it made by himself (the
+editor), his friend Mr. L----t of C----d [Lockhart of Chiefswood], Mr.
+L----w [Scott's Laidlaw] and others. The whole thing ends with a very
+well written bit of rationalisation of the now familiar kind,
+discussing the authenticity of the _Memoirs_, and concluding that they
+are probably the work of some one suffering from religious mania, or
+perhaps a sort of parable or allegory worked out with insufficient
+skill.
+
+Although some such account as this was necessary, no such account,
+unless illustrated with the most copious citation, could do justice to
+the book. The first part or Narrative is not of extraordinary, though it
+is of considerable merit, and has some of Hogg's usual faults. The
+_Memoirs_ proper are almost wholly free from these faults. In no book
+known to me is the grave treatment of the topsy-turvy and improbable
+better managed; although, by an old trick, it pleases the "editor" to
+depreciate his work in the passage just mentioned. The writer, whoever
+he was, was fully qualified for the task. The possibility of a young man
+of narrow intellect--his passion against his brother already excited,
+and his whole mind given to the theology of predestination--gliding into
+such ideas as are here described is undoubted; and it is made thoroughly
+credible to the reader. The story of the pretended Gil Martin,
+preposterous as it is, is told by the unlucky maniac exactly in the
+manner in which a man deluded, but with occasional suspicions of his
+delusion, would tell it. The gradual change from intended and successful
+rascality and crime into the incurring or the supposed incurring of the
+most hideous guilt without any actual consciousness of guilty action may
+seem an almost hopeless thing to treat probably. Yet it is so treated
+here. And the final gathering and blackening of the clouds of despair
+(though here again there is a very slight touch of Hogg's undue
+prolongation of things) exhibits literary power of the ghastly kind
+infinitely different from and far above the usual raw-head-and-bloody-bones
+story of the supernatural.
+
+Now, who wrote it?
+
+No doubt, so far as I know, has been generally entertained of Hogg's
+authorship, though, since I myself entertained doubts on the subject, I
+have found some good judges not unwilling to agree with me. Although
+admitting that it appeared anonymously, Hogg claims it, as we have seen,
+not only without hesitation but apparently without any suspicion that it
+was a particularly valuable or meritorious thing to claim, and without
+any attempt to shift, divide, or in any way disclaim the responsibility,
+though the book had been a failure. His publishers do not seem to have
+doubted then that it was his; nor, I have been told, have their
+representatives any reason to doubt it now. His daughter, I think, does
+not so much as mention it in her _Memorials_, but his various
+biographers have never, so far as I know, hinted the least hesitation.
+At the same time I am absolutely unable to believe that it is Hogg's
+unadulterated and unassisted work. It is not one of those cases where a
+man once tries a particular style, and then from accident, disgust, or
+what not, relinquishes it. Hogg was always trying the supernatural, and
+he failed in it, except in this instance, as often as he tried it. Why
+should he on this particular occasion have been saved from himself? and
+who saved him?--for that great part of the book at least is his there
+can be no doubt.
+
+By way of answer to these questions I can at least point out certain
+coincidences and probabilities. It has been seen that Lockhart's name
+actually figures in the postscript to the book. Now at this time and for
+long afterwards Lockhart was one of the closest of Hogg's literary
+allies; and Hogg, while admitting that the author of _Peter's Letters_
+hoaxed him as he hoaxed everybody, is warm in his praise. He describes
+him in his _Autobiography_ as "a warm and disinterested friend." He
+tells us in the book on Scott how he had a plan, even later than this,
+that Lockhart should edit all his (the Shepherd's) works, for
+discouraging which plan he was very cross with Sir Walter. Further, the
+vein of the _Confessions_ is very closely akin to, if not wholly
+identical with, a vein which Lockhart not only worked on his own account
+but worked at this very same time. It was in these very years of his
+residence at Chiefswood that Lockhart produced the little masterpiece of
+"Adam Blair" (where the terrors and temptations of a convinced
+Presbyterian minister are dwelt upon), and "Matthew Wald," which is
+itself the history of a lunatic as full of horrors, and those of no very
+different kind, as the _Confessions_ themselves. That editing, and
+perhaps something more than editing, on Lockhart's part would have been
+exactly the thing necessary to prune and train and direct the Shepherd's
+disorderly luxuriance into the methodical madness of the Justified
+Sinner--to give Hogg's loose though by no means vulgar style the dress
+of his own polished manner--to weed and shape and correct and straighten
+the faults of the Boar of the Forest--nobody who knows the undoubted
+writing of the two men will deny. And Lockhart, who was so careless of
+his work that to this day it is difficult, if not impossible, to
+ascertain what he did or did not write unassisted, would certainly not
+have been the man to claim a share in the book, even had it made more
+noise; though he may have thought of this as well as of other things
+when, in his wrath over the foolish blethering about Scott, he wrote
+that the Shepherd's views of literary morality were peculiar. As for
+Hogg himself, he would never have thought of acknowledging any such
+editing or collaboration if it did take place; and that not nearly so
+much from vanity or dishonesty as from simple carelessness, dashed
+perhaps with something of the habit of literary _supercherie_ which the
+society in which he lived affected, and which he carried as far at least
+as any one of its members.
+
+It may seem rather hard after praising a man's ewe lamb so highly to
+question his right in her. But I do not think there is any real
+hardship. I should think that the actual imagination of the story is
+chiefly Hogg's, for Lockhart's forte was not that quality, and his own
+novels suffer rather for want of it. If this be the one specimen of what
+the Shepherd's genius could turn out when it submitted to correction and
+training, it gives us a useful and interesting explanation why the mass
+of his work, with such excellent flashes, is so flawed and formless as a
+whole. It explains why he wished Lockhart to edit the others. It
+explains at the same time why (for the Shepherd's vanity was never far
+off) he set apparently little store by the book. It is only a hypothesis
+of course, and a hypothesis which is very unlikely ever to be proved,
+while in the nature of things it is even less capable of disproof. But I
+think there is good critical reason for it.
+
+At any rate, I confess for myself, that I should not take anything like
+the same interest in Hogg, if he were not the putative author of the
+_Confessions_. The book is in a style which wearies soon if it be
+overdone, and which is very difficult indeed to do well. But it is one
+of the very best things of its kind, and that is a claim which ought
+never to be overlooked. And if Hogg in some lucky moment did really
+"write it all by himself," as the children say, then we could make up
+for him a volume composed of it, of "Kilmeny," and of the best of the
+songs, which would be a very remarkable volume indeed. It would not
+represent a twentieth part of his collected work, and it would probably
+represent a still smaller fraction of what he wrote, while all the rest
+would be vastly inferior. But it would be a title to no inconsiderable
+place in literature, and we know that good judges did think Hogg, with
+all his personal weakness and all his literary shortcomings, entitled to
+such a place.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[7] For something more, however, see the Essay on Lockhart below.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+SYDNEY SMITH
+
+
+The hackneyed joke about biographers adding a new terror to death holds
+still as good as ever. But biography can sometimes make a good case
+against her persecutors; and one of the instances which she would
+certainly adduce would be the instance of Sydney Smith. I more than
+suspect that his actual works are less and less read as time goes on,
+and that the brilliant virulence of _Peter Plymley_, the even greater
+brilliance, not marred by virulence at all, of the _Letters to
+Archdeacon Singleton_, the inimitable quips of his articles in the
+_Edinburgh Review_, are familiar, if they are familiar at all, only to
+the professed readers of the literature of the past, and perhaps to some
+intelligent newspaper men who find Sydney[8] to be what Fuseli
+pronounced Blake, "d----d good to steal from." But the _Life_ which
+Lady Holland, with her mother's and Mrs. Austin's aid, produced more
+than thirty years ago has had a different fate; and a fresh lease of
+popularity seems to have been secured by another _Life_, published by
+Mr. Stuart Reid in 1883. This was partly abridged from the first, and
+partly supplied with fresh matter by a new sifting of the documents
+which Lady Holland had used. Nor do the authors of these works, however
+great must be our gratitude to them, take to themselves any such share
+of the credit as is due to Boswell in the case of Johnson, to Lockhart
+in the case of Scott, to Carlyle in the case of Sterling. Neither can
+lay claim to the highest literary merit of writing or arrangement; and
+the latter of the two contains digressions, not interesting to all
+readers, about the nobility of Sydney's cause. It is because both books
+let their subject reveal himself by familiar letters, scraps of journal,
+or conversation, and because the revelation of self is so full and so
+delightful, that Sydney Smith's immortality, now that the generation
+which actually heard him talk has all but disappeared, is still secured
+without the slightest fear of disturbance or decay. With a few
+exceptions (the Mrs. Partington business, the apologue of the dinners at
+the synod of Dort, "Noodle's Oration," and one or two more), the things
+by which Sydney is known to the general, all come, not from his works,
+but from his _Life_ or _Lives_. No one with any sense of fun can read
+the Works without being delighted; but in the Life and the letters the
+same qualities of wit appear, with other qualities which in the Works
+hardly appear at all. A person absolutely ignorant of anything but the
+Works might possibly dismiss Sydney Smith as a brilliant but bitter and
+not too consistent partisan, who fought desperately against abuses when
+his party was out, and discovered that they were not abuses at all when
+his party was in. A reader of his Life and of his private utterances
+knows him better, likes him better, and certainly does not admire him
+less.
+
+He was born in 1771, the son of an eccentric and apparently rather
+provoking person, who for no assigned reason left his wife at the church
+door in order to wander about the world, and who maintained his vagabond
+principles so well that, as his granddaughter ruefully records, he
+bought, spent money on, and sold at a loss, no less than nineteen
+different houses in England and Wales. Sydney was also the second of
+four clever brothers, the eldest and cleverest being the somewhat famous
+"Bobus," who co-operated in the _Microcosm_ with Canning and Frere,
+survived his better known brother but a fortnight, founded a family, and
+has left one of those odd reputations of immense talent not justified by
+any producible work, to which our English life of public schools,
+universities, and Parliament gives peculiar facilities. Bobus and Cecil
+the third brother were sent to Eton: Sydney and Courtenay, the fourth,
+to Winchester, after a childhood spent in precocious reading and arguing
+among themselves. From Winchester Sydney (of whose school-days some
+trifling but only trifling anecdotes are recorded,) proceeded in regular
+course to New College, Oxford, and being elected of right to a
+Fellowship, then worth about a hundred pounds a year, was left by his
+father to "do for himself" on that not extensive revenue. He did for
+himself at Oxford during the space of nine years; and it is supposed
+that his straitened circumstances had something to do with his dislike
+for universities, which however was a kind of point of conscience among
+his Whig friends. It is at least singular that this residence of nearly
+a decade has left hardly a single story or recorded incident of any
+kind; and that though three generations of undergraduates passed through
+Oxford in his time, no one of them seems in later years to have had
+anything to say of not the least famous and one of the most sociable of
+Englishmen. At that time, it is true, and for long afterwards, the men
+of New College kept more to themselves than the men of any other college
+in Oxford; but still it is odd. Another little mystery is, Why did
+Sydney take orders? Although there is not the slightest reason to
+question his being, according to his own standard, a very sincere and
+sufficient divine, it obviously was not quite the profession for him.
+He is said to have wished for the Bar, but to have deferred to his
+father's wishes for the Church. That Sydney was an affectionate and
+dutiful son nobody need doubt: he was always affectionate, and in his
+own way dutiful. But he is about the last man one can think of as likely
+to undertake an uncongenial profession out of high-flown dutifulness to
+a father who had long left him to his own resources, and who had neither
+influence nor prospects in the Church to offer him. The Fellowship would
+have kept him, as it had kept him already, till briefs came. However, he
+did take orders; and the later _Life_ gives more particulars than the
+first as to the incumbency which indirectly determined his career. It
+was the curacy of Netheravon on Salisbury Plain; and its almost complete
+seclusion was tempered by a kindly squire, Mr. Hicks-Beach,
+great-grandfather of the present Sir Michael Hicks-Beach. Mr.
+Hicks-Beach offered Sydney the post of tutor to his eldest son; Sydney
+accepted it, started for Germany with his pupil, but (as he
+picturesquely though rather vaguely expresses it) "put into Edinburgh
+under stress of war" and stayed there for five years.
+
+The sojourn at Edinburgh began in June 1798: it ended in August 1803. It
+will thus be seen that Sydney was by no means a very young man even when
+he began reviewing, the year before leaving the Scotch capital. Indeed
+the aimless prolongation of his stay at Oxford, which brought him
+neither friends, money, nor professional experience of any kind, threw
+him considerably behindhand all his life; and this delay, much more than
+Tory persecution or Whig indifference, was the cause of the comparative
+slowness with which he made his way. His time at Edinburgh was, however,
+usefully spent even before that invention of the _Review_, over which
+there is an amicable and unimportant dispute between himself and
+Jeffrey. His tutorship was so successful that Mr. Hicks-Beach rewarded
+it with a cheque for a thousand pounds: he did duty in the Episcopal
+churches of Edinburgh: he made friends with all the Whigs and many of
+the Tories of the place: he laughed unceasingly at Scotchmen and liked
+them very much. Also, about the middle of his stay, he got married, but
+not to a Scotch girl. His wife was Miss Catherine Pybus, of Cheam, and
+the marriage was as harebrained a one, from the point of view of
+settlements, as Jeffrey's own.[9] Sydney's settlement on his wife is
+well known: it consisted of "six small silver teaspoons much worn," with
+which worldly goods he did her literally endow by throwing them into her
+lap. It would appear that there never was a happier marriage; but it
+certainly seemed for some years as if there might have been many more
+prosperous in point of money. When Sydney moved to London he had no
+very definite prospect of any income whatever; and had not Mrs. Smith
+sold her mother's jewels (which came to her just at the time), they
+would apparently have had some difficulty in furnishing their house in
+Doughty Street. But Horner, their friend (the "parish bull" of Scott's
+irreverent comparison), had gone to London before them, and impressed
+himself, apparently by sheer gravity, on the political world as a good
+young man. Introduced by him, Sydney Smith soon became one of the circle
+at Holland House. It is indeed not easy to live on invitations and your
+mother-in-law's pearls; but Sydney reviewed vigorously, preached
+occasionally, before very long received a regular appointment at the
+Foundling Hospital, and made some money by lecturing very agreeably at
+the Royal Institution on Moral Philosophy--a subject of which he
+honestly admits that he knew, in the technical sense, nothing. But his
+hearers did not want technical ethics, and in Sydney Smith they had a
+moral philosopher of the practical kind who could hardly be excelled
+either in sense or in wit. One little incident of this time, however,
+throws some light on the complaints which have been made about the delay
+of his promotion. He applied to a London rector to license him to a
+vacant chapel, which had not hitherto been used for the services of the
+Church. The immediate answer has not been preserved; but from what
+followed it clearly was a civil and rather evasive but perfectly
+intelligible request to be excused. The man was of course quite within
+his right, and a dozen good reasons can be guessed for his conduct. He
+may really have objected, as he seems to have said he did, to take a
+step which his predecessors had refused to take, and which might
+inconvenience his successors. But Sydney would not take the refusal, and
+wrote another very logical, but extremely injudicious, letter pressing
+his request with much elaboration, and begging the worthy Doctor of
+Divinity to observe that he, the Doctor, was guilty of inconsistency and
+other faults. Naturally this put the Doctor's back up, and he now
+replied with a flat and very high and mighty refusal. We know from
+another instance that Sydney was indisposed to take "No" for an answer.
+However he obtained, besides his place at the Foundling, preacherships
+in two proprietary chapels, and seems to have had both business and
+pleasure enough on his hands during his London sojourn, which was about
+the same length as his Edinburgh one. It was, however, much more
+profitable, for in three years the ministry of "All the Talents" came
+in, the Holland House interest was exerted, and the Chancellor's living
+of Foston, near York, valued at five hundred pounds a year, was given to
+Sydney. He paid for it, after a fashion which in a less zealous and
+convinced Whig might seem a little dubious, by the famous lampoons of
+the _Plymley Letters_, advocating the claims of Catholic emancipation,
+and extolling Fox and Grenville at the expense of Perceval and Canning.
+Very edifying is it to find Sydney Smith objecting to this latter that
+he is a "diner out," a "maker of jokes and parodies," a trifler on
+important subjects--in fact each and all of the things which the Rev.
+Sydney Smith himself was, in a perfection only equalled by the object of
+his righteous wrath. But of Peter more presently.
+
+Even his admiring biographers have noticed, with something of a chuckle,
+the revenge which Perceval, who was the chief object of Plymley's
+sarcasm, took, without in the least knowing it, on his lampooner. Had it
+not been for the Clergy Residence Bill, which that very respectable, if
+not very brilliant, statesman passed in 1808, and which put an end to
+perhaps the most flagrant of all then existing abuses, Sydney, the enemy
+of abuses, would no doubt have continued with a perfectly clear
+conscience to draw the revenues of Foston, and while serving it by a
+curate, to preach, lecture, dine out, and rebuke Canning for making
+jokes, in London. As it was he had to make up his mind, though he
+obtained a respite from the Archbishop, to resign (which in the
+recurring frost of Whig hopes was not to be thought of), to exchange,
+which he found impossible, or to bury himself in Yorkshire. This was a
+real hardship upon him, because Foston, as it was, was uninhabitable,
+and had had no resident clergyman since the seventeenth century. But
+whatever bad things could be said of Sydney (and I really do not know
+what they are, except that the combination of a sharp wit, a ready pen,
+and strong political prejudices sometimes made him abuse his talents),
+no one could say that he ever shirked either a difficulty or a duty.
+When his first three years' leave expired, he went down in 1809 with his
+family to York, and established himself at Heslington, a village near
+the city and not far from his parish. And when a second term of
+dispensation from actual residence was over, he set to work and built
+the snuggest if the ugliest parsonage in England, with farm-buildings
+and all complete, at the cost of some four thousand pounds. Of the
+details of that building his own inimitable account exists, and is or
+ought to be well known. The brick-pit and kiln on the property, which
+were going to save fortunes and resulted in nothing but the production
+of exactly a hundred and fifty thousand unusable bricks: the four oxen,
+Tug, Lug, Haul and Crawl, who were to be the instruments of another
+economy and proved to be, at least in Sydneian language, equal to
+nothing but the consumption of "buckets of sal volatile:" the entry of
+the distracted mother of the household on her new domains with a baby
+clutched in her arms and one shoe left in the circumambient mud: the
+great folks of the neighbourhood (Lord and Lady Carlisle) coming to call
+graciously on the strangers, and being whelmed, coach and four,
+outriders and all, in a ploughed field of despond: the "universal
+scratcher" in the meadows, inclined so as to let the brute creation of
+all heights enjoy that luxury: Bunch the butler, a female child of
+tender years but stout proportions: Annie Kay the factotum: the
+"Immortal," a chariot which was picked up at York in the last stage of
+decay, and carried the family for many years half over England--all
+these things and persons are told in divers delightful scraps of
+autobiography and in innumerable letters, after a fashion impossible to
+better and at a length too long to quote.
+
+Sydney Smith was for more than twenty years rector of Foston, and for
+fully fifteen actually resided there. During this time he made the
+acquaintance of Lord and Lady Grey, next to Lord and Lady Holland his
+most constant friends, visited a little, entertained in his own
+unostentatious but hearty fashion a great deal, wrote many articles for
+the _Edinburgh Review_, found himself in a minority of one or two among
+the clergy of Yorkshire on the subject of Emancipation and similar
+matters, but was on the most friendly terms possible with his diocesan,
+Archbishop Vernon Harcourt. Nor was he even without further preferment,
+for he held for some years (on the then not discredited understanding of
+resignation when one of the Howards was ready for it) the neighbouring
+and valuable living of Londesborough. Then the death of an aunt put an
+end to his monetary anxieties, which for years had been considerable, by
+the legacy of a small but sufficient fortune. And at last, when he was
+approaching sixty, the good things of the Church, which he never
+affected to despise, came in earnest. The Tory Chancellor Lyndhurst gave
+him a stall at Bristol, which carried with it a small Devonshire living,
+and soon afterwards he was able to exchange Foston (which he had greatly
+improved), for Combe Florey near Taunton. When his friend Lord Grey
+became Prime Minister, the stall at Bristol was exchanged for a much
+more valuable one at St. Paul's; Halberton, the Devonshire vicarage, and
+Combe Florey still remaining his. These made up an ecclesiastical
+revenue not far short of three thousand a year, which Sydney enjoyed for
+the last fifteen years of his life. He never got anything more, and it
+is certain that for a time he was very sore at not being made a bishop,
+or at least offered a bishopric. Lord Holland had rather rashly
+explained the whole difficulty years before, by reporting a conversation
+of his with Lord Grenville, in which they had hoped that when the Whigs
+came into power they would be more grateful to Sydney than the Tories
+had been to Swift. Sydney's acuteness must have made him wince at the
+omen. For my part I do not see why either Harley or Grey should have
+hesitated, as far as any scruples of their own went. But I think any
+fair-minded person must admit the possibility of a scruple, though he
+may not share it, about the effect of seeing either the _Tale of a Tub_
+or _Peter Plymley's Letters_, with "By the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop
+of----" on the title-page. The people who would have been shocked might
+in each case have been fools: there is nothing that I at least can see,
+in either book, inconsistent with sound religion and churchmanship. But
+they would have been honest fools, and of such a Prime Minister has to
+take heed. So Amen Corner (or rather, for he did not live there, certain
+streets near Grosvenor Square) in London, and Combe Florey in the
+country, were Sydney Smith's abodes till his death. In the former he
+gave his breakfasts and dinners in the season, being further enabled to
+do so by his share (some thirty thousand pounds) of his brother
+Courtenay's Indian fortune. The latter, after rebuilding it,--for he had
+either a fate or a passion for bricks and mortar,--he made on a small
+scale one of the most beautiful and hospitable houses in the West of
+England.
+
+To Combe Florey, as to Foston, a sheaf of fantastic legends attaches
+itself; indeed, as Lady Holland was not very fond of dates, it is
+sometimes not clear to which of the two residences some of them apply.
+At both Sydney had a huge store-room, or rather grocer's and chemist's
+shop, from which he supplied the wants, not merely of his household, but
+of half the neighbourhood. It appears to have been at Combe Florey (for
+though no longer poor he still had a frugal mind), that he hit upon the
+device of "putting the cheapest soaps in the dearest papers," confident
+of the result upon the female temper. It was certainly there that he
+fitted up two favourite donkeys with a kind of holiday-dress of antlers,
+to meet the objection of one of his lady-visitors that he had no deer;
+and converted certain large bay-trees in boxes into the semblance of an
+orangery, by fastening some dozens of fine fruit to the branches. I like
+to think of the mixed astonishment and disgust of a great Russian, and a
+not very small Frenchman, both not long deceased, M. Tourguenieff and M.
+Paul de Saint-Victor, if they had heard of these pleasing tomfooleries.
+But tomfoolery, though, when properly and not inordinately indulged, one
+of the best things in life, must, like the other good things of life,
+come to an end. After an illness of some months Sydney Smith died at his
+house in Green Street, of heart disease, on 22nd February 1845, in the
+seventy-fourth year of his age.
+
+The memorials and evidences of his peculiar if not unique genius consist
+of three different kinds; reported or remembered conversations and
+jokes, letters, and formal literary work. He was once most famous as a
+talker; but conversation is necessarily the most perishable of all
+things, and its recorded fragments bear keeping less than any other
+relics. Some of the verbal jests assigned to him (notably the famous
+one about the tortoise, which, after being long known by the initiated
+not to be his, has at last been formally claimed by its rightful owner),
+are certainly or probably borrowed or falsely attributed, as rich
+conversationalists always borrow or receive. And always the things have
+something of the mangled air which sayings detached from their context
+can hardly escape. It is otherwise with the letters. The best letters
+are always most like the actual conversation of their writers, and
+probably no one ever wrote more as he talked than Sydney Smith. The
+specially literary qualities of his writing for print are here too in
+great measure; and on the whole, though of course the importance of
+subject is nearly always less, and the interest of sustained work is
+wholly absent, nowhere can the entire Sydney be better seen. Of the
+three satirists of modern times with whom he may not unfairly claim to
+rank--Pascal, Swift, and Voltaire--he is most like Voltaire in his
+faculty of presenting a good thing with a preface which does not in the
+least prepare you for it, and then leaving it without the slightest
+attempt to go back on it, and elaborate it, and make sure that his
+hearer has duly appreciated it and laughed at it. And of the two, though
+the palm of concentration must be given to Voltaire, the palm of
+absolute simplicity must be given to Sydney. Hardly any of his letters
+are without these unforced flashes of wit, from almost his first
+epistle to Jeffrey (where, after rallying that great little man on being
+the "only male despondent he has met," he adds the postscript, "I beg to
+except the Tuxford waiter, who desponds exactly as you do") to his very
+last to Miss Harcourt, in which he mildly dismisses one of his brethren
+as "anything but a _polished_ corner of the Temple." There is the "usual
+establishment for an eldest landed baby:" the proposition, advanced in
+the grave and chaste manner, that "the information of very plain women
+is so inconsiderable, that I agree with you in setting no store by it:"
+the plaintive expostulation with Lady Holland (who had asked him to
+dinner on the ninth of the month, after previously asking him to stay
+from the fifth to the twelfth), "it is like giving a gentleman an
+assignation for Wednesday when you are going to marry him on the
+previous Sunday--an attempt to combine the stimulus of gallantry with
+the security of connubial relations:" the simple and touching
+information that "Lord Tankerville has sent me a whole buck. This
+necessarily takes up a good deal of my time;" that "geranium-fed bacon
+is of a beautiful colour, but it takes so many plants to fatten one pig
+that such a system can never answer;" that "it is a mistake to think
+that Dr. Bond could be influenced by partridges. He is a man of very
+independent mind, with whom pheasants at least, or perhaps even turkeys,
+are necessary;" and scores more with references to which I find the
+fly-leaves of my copy of the letters covered. If any one wants to see
+how much solid there is with all this froth, let him turn to the
+passages showing the unconquerable manliness, fairness, and good sense
+with which Sydney treated the unhappy subject of Queen Caroline, out of
+which his friends were so ready to make political capital; or to the
+admirable epistle in which he takes seriously, and blunts once for all,
+the points of certain foolish witticisms as to the readiness with which
+he, a man about town, had taken to catechisms and cabbages in an almost
+uninhabited part of the despised country. In conversation he would seem
+sometimes to have a little, a very little, "forced the note." The Quaker
+baby, and the lady "with whom you might give an assembly or populate a
+parish," are instances in point. But he never does this in his letters.
+I take particular pleasure in the following passage written to Miss
+Georgiana Harcourt within two years of his death: "What a charming
+existence! To live in the midst of holy people; to know that nothing
+profane can approach you; to be certain that a Dissenter can no more be
+found in the Palace than a snake can exist in Ireland, or ripe fruit in
+Scotland! To have your society strong, and undiluted by the laity; to
+bid adieu to human learning; to feast on the Canons and revel in the
+Thirty-Nine Articles! Happy Georgiana!" Now if Sydney had been what some
+foolish people think him, merely a scoffer, there would be no fun in
+this; it would be as impertinent and in as bad taste as the stale jokes
+of the eighteenth century about Christianity. But he was much else.
+
+Of course, however, no rational man will contend that in estimating
+Sydney Smith's place in the general memory, his deliberate literary
+work, or at least that portion of it which he chose to present on
+reflection, acknowledged and endorsed, can be overlooked. His _Life_
+contains (what is infinitely desirable in all such Lives and by no means
+always or often furnished) a complete list of his contributions to the
+_Edinburgh Review_, and his works contain most of them. To these have to
+be added the pamphlets, of which the chief and incomparably the best
+are, at intervals of thirty years, _Peter Plymley_ and the _Letters to
+Archdeacon Singleton_, together with sermons, speeches, and other
+miscellaneous matter. The whole, except the things which he did not
+himself care to reprint, can be obtained now in one volume; but the
+print is not to be recommended to aged or weakly sight.
+
+Sydney Smith had no false modesty, and in not a few letters to Jeffrey
+he speaks of his own contributions to the _Edinburgh_ with the greatest
+freedom, combating and quite refusing to accept his editor's suggestion
+as to their flippancy and fantasticality, professing with much frankness
+that this is the way he can write and no other, and more than once
+telling Jeffrey that whatever they may think in solemn Scotland, his,
+Sydney's, articles are a great deal more read in England and elsewhere
+than any others. Although there are maxims to the contrary effect, the
+judgment of a clever man, not very young and tolerably familiar with the
+world, on his own work, is very seldom far wrong. I should say myself
+that, putting aside the historic estimate, Sydney Smith's articles are
+by far the most interesting nowadays of those contributed by any one
+before the days of Macaulay, who began just as Sydney ceased to write
+anonymously in 1827, on his Bristol appointment. They are also by far
+the most distinct and original. Jeffrey, Brougham, and the rest wrote,
+for the most part, very much after the fashion of the ancients: if a
+very few changes were made for date, passages of Jeffrey's criticism
+might almost be passages of Dryden, certainly passages of the better
+critics of the eighteenth century, as far as manner goes. There is
+nobody at all like Sydney Smith before him in England, for Swift's style
+is wholly different. To begin with, Sydney had a strong prejudice in
+favour of writing very short articles, and a horror of reading long
+ones--the latter being perhaps less peculiar to himself than the former.
+Then he never made the slightest pretence at systematic or dogmatic
+criticism of anything whatever. In literature proper he seems indeed to
+have had no particular principles, and I cannot say that he had very
+good taste. He commits the almost unpardonable sin of not merely
+blaspheming Madame de Sevigne, but preferring to her that second-rate
+leader-writer in petticoats, Madame de Stael. On the other hand, if he
+had no literary principles, he had (except in rare cases where politics
+came in, and not often then) few literary prejudices, and his happily
+incorrigible good sense and good humour were proof against the frequent
+bias of his associates. Though he could not have been very sensible,
+from what he himself says, of their highest qualities, he championed
+Scott's novels incessantly against the Whigs and prigs of Holland House.
+He gives a most well-timed warning to Jeffrey that the constant
+running-down of Wordsworth had very much the look of persecution, though
+with his usual frankness he avows that he has not read the particular
+article in question, because the subject is "quite uninteresting to
+him." I think he would, if driven hard, have admitted with equal
+frankness that poetry, merely as poetry, was generally uninteresting.
+Still he had so many interests of various kinds, that few books failed
+to appeal to one or the other, and he, in his turn, has seldom failed to
+give a lively if not a very exact or critical account of his subject.
+But it is in his way of giving this account that the peculiarity,
+glanced at above as making a parallel between him and Voltaire, appears.
+It is, I have said, almost original, and what is more, endless as has
+been the periodical writing of the last eighty years, and sedulously as
+later writers have imitated earlier, I do not know that it has ever
+been successfully copied. It consists in giving rapid and apparently
+business-like summaries, packed, with apparent negligence and real art,
+full of the flashes of wit so often noticed and to be noticed. Such are,
+in the article on "The Island of Ceylon," the honey-bird "into whose
+body the soul of a common informer seems to have migrated," and "the
+chaplain of the garrison, all in black, the Rev. Mr. Somebody or other
+whose name we have forgotten," the discovery of whose body in a serpent
+his ruthless clerical brother pronounces to be "the best history of the
+kind he remembers." Very likely there may be people who can read this,
+even the "all in black," without laughing, and among them I should
+suppose must be the somebody or other, whose name we too have forgotten,
+who is said to have imagined that he had more than parried Sydney's
+unforgiven jest about the joke and the surgical operation, by retorting,
+"Yes! an _English_ joke." I have always wept to think that Sydney did
+not live to hear this retort. The classical places for this kind of
+summary work are the article just named on Ceylon, and that on Waterton.
+But the most inimitable single example, if it is not too shocking to
+this very proper age, is the argument of Mat Lewis's tragedy: "Ottilia
+becomes quite furious from the conviction that Caesario has been sleeping
+with a second lady called Estella; whereas he has really been sleeping
+with a third lady called Amelrosa."
+
+Among the most important of these essays are the two famous ones on
+Methodism and on Indian missions, which gave far more offence to the
+religious public of evangelical persuasion than all Sydney's jokes on
+bishops, or his arguments for Catholic emancipation, and which (owing to
+the strong influence which then, as now, Nonconformists possessed in the
+counsels of the Liberal party) probably had as much to do as anything
+else with the reluctance of the Whig leaders, when they came into power,
+to give their friend the highest ecclesiastical preferment. These
+subjects are rather difficult to treat in a general literary essay, and
+it may perhaps be admitted that here, as in dealing with poetry and
+other subjects of the more transcendental kind, Sydney showed a touch of
+Philistinism, and a distinct inability to comprehend exaltation of
+sentiment and thought. But the general sense is admirably sound and
+perfectly orthodox; and the way in which so apparently light and
+careless a writer has laboriously supported every one of his charges,
+and almost every one of his flings, with chapter and verse from the
+writings of the incriminated societies, is very remarkable. Nor can it,
+I think, be doubted that the publication, in so widely read a
+periodical, of the nauseous follies of speech in which well-meaning
+persons indulged, had something to do with the gradual disuse of a style
+than which nothing could be more prejudicial to religion, for the simple
+reason that nothing else could make religion ridiculous. The medicine
+did not of course operate at once, and silly people still write silly
+things. But I hardly think that the Wesleyan body or the Church
+Missionary Society would now officially publish such stuff as the
+passage about Brother Carey, who, while in the actual paroxysm of
+sea-sickness, was "wonderfully comforted by the contemplation of the
+goodness of God," or that about Brother Ward "in design clasping to his
+bosom" the magnanimous Captain Wickes, who subsequently "seemed very
+low," when a French privateer was in sight. Jeffrey was, it seems, a
+little afraid of these well-deserved exposures, which, from the
+necessity of abundant quotation, are an exception to the general
+shortness of Sydney's articles. Sydney's interest in certain subjects
+led him constantly to take up fresh books on them; and thus a series of
+series might be made out of his papers, with some advantage to the
+reader perhaps, if a new edition of his works were undertaken. The chief
+of such subjects is America, in dealing with which he pleased the
+Americans by descanting on their gradual emancipation from English
+prejudices and abuses, but infuriated them by constant denunciations of
+slavery, and by laughing at their lack of literature and cultivation.
+With India he also dealt often, his brothers' connection with it giving
+him an interest therein. Prisons were another favourite subject, though,
+in his zeal for making them uncomfortable, he committed himself to one
+really atrocious suggestion--that of dark cells for long periods of
+time. It is odd that the same person should make such a truly diabolical
+proposal, and yet be in a perpetual state of humanitarian rage about
+man-traps and spring-guns, which were certainly milder engines of
+torture. It is odd, too, that Sydney, who was never tired of arguing
+that prisons ought to be made uncomfortable, because nobody need go
+there unless he chose, should have been furiously wroth with poor Mr.
+Justice Best for suggesting much the same thing of spring-guns. The
+greatest political triumph of his manner is to be found no doubt in the
+article "Bentham on Fallacies," in which the unreadable diatribes of the
+apostle of utilitarianism are somehow spirited and crisped up into a
+series of brilliant arguments, and the whole is crowned by the famous
+"Noodle's Oration," the summary and storehouse of all that ever has been
+or can be said on the Liberal side in the lighter manner. It has not
+lost its point even from the fact that Noodle has now for a long time
+changed his party, and has elaborated for himself, after his manner, a
+similar stock of platitudes and absurdities in favour of the very things
+for which Sydney was fighting.
+
+The qualities of these articles appear equally in the miscellaneous
+essays, in the speeches, and even in the sermons, though Sydney Smith,
+unlike Sterne, never condescended to buffoonery or theatrical tricks in
+the pulpit. In _Peter Plymley's Letters_ they appear concentrated and
+acidulated: in the _Letters to Archdeacon Singleton_, in the
+_Repudiation Letters_, and the _Letters on Railways_ which date from his
+very last days, concentrated and mellowed. More than one good judge has
+been of the opinion that Sydney's powers increased to the very end of
+his life, and it is not surprising that this should have been the case.
+Although he did plenty of work in his time, the literary part of it was
+never of an exhausting nature. Though one of the most original of
+commentators, he was a commentator pure and simple, and found, but did
+not supply, his matter. Thus there was no danger of running dry, and as
+his happiest style was not indignation but good-natured raillery, his
+increasing prosperity, not chequered, till quite the close of his life,
+by any serious bodily ailment, put him more and more in the right
+atmosphere and temper for indulging his genius. _Plymley_, though very
+amusing, and, except in the Canning matter above referred to, not
+glaringly unfair for a political lampoon, is distinctly acrimonious, and
+almost (as "almost" as Sydney could be) ill-tempered. It is possible to
+read between the lines that the writer is furious at his party being out
+of office, and is much more angry with Mr. Perceval for having the ear
+of the country than for being a respectable nonentity. The main
+argument, moreover, is bad in itself, and was refuted by facts. Sydney
+pretends to be, as his friend Jeffrey really was, in mortal terror lest
+the French should invade England, and, joined by rebellious Irishmen
+and wrathful Catholics generally, produce an English revolution. The
+Tories replied, "We will take good care that the French shall _not_
+land, and that Irishmen shall _not_ rise." And they did take the said
+good care, and they beat the Frenchmen thorough and thorough while
+Sydney and his friends were pointing their epigrams. Therefore, though
+much of the contention is unanswerable enough, the thing is doubtfully
+successful as a whole. In the _Letters to Archdeacon Singleton_ the tone
+is almost uniformly good-humoured, and the argument, whether quite
+consistent or not in the particular speaker's mouth, is absolutely
+sound, and has been practically admitted since by almost all the best
+friends of the Church. Here occurs that inimitable passage before
+referred to.
+
+    I met the other day, in an old Dutch chronicle, with a passage
+    so apposite to this subject, that, though it is somewhat too
+    light for the occasion, I cannot abstain from quoting it. There
+    was a great meeting of all the clergy at Dordrecht, and the
+    chronicler thus describes it, which I give in the language of
+    the translation: "And there was great store of Bishops in the
+    town, in their robes goodly to behold, and all the great men of
+    the State were there, and folks poured in in boats on the Meuse,
+    the Merse, the Rhine, and the Linge, coming from the Isle of
+    Beverlandt and Isselmond, and from all quarters in the Bailiwick
+    of Dort; Arminians and Gomarists, with the friends of John
+    Barneveldt and of Hugh Grote. And before my Lords the Bishops,
+    Simon of Gloucester, who was a Bishop in those parts, disputed
+    with Vorstius and Leoline the Monk, and many texts of Scripture
+    were bandied to and fro; and when this was done, and many
+    propositions made, and it waxed towards twelve of the clock, my
+    Lords the Bishops prepared to set them down to a fair repast, in
+    which was great store of good things--and among the rest a
+    roasted peacock, having in lieu of a tail the arms and banners
+    of the Archbishop, which was a goodly sight to all who favoured
+    the Church--and then the Archbishop would say a grace, as was
+    seemly to do, he being a very holy man; but ere he had finished,
+    a great mob of townspeople and folks from the country, who were
+    gathered under the windows, cried out _Bread! bread!_ for there
+    was a great famine, and wheat had risen to three times the
+    ordinary price of the _sleich_; and when they had done crying
+    _Bread! bread!_ they called out _No Bishops!_ and began to cast
+    up stones at the windows. Whereat my Lords the Bishops were in a
+    great fright, and cast their dinner out of the window to appease
+    the mob, and so the men of that town were well pleased, and did
+    devour the meats with a great appetite; and then you might have
+    seen my Lords standing with empty plates, and looking wistfully
+    at each other, till Simon of Gloucester, he who disputed with
+    Leoline the Monk, stood up among them and said, _Good my Lords,
+    is it your pleasure to stand here fasting, and that those who
+    count lower in the Church than you do should feast and fluster?
+    Let us order to us the dinner of the Deans and Canons which is
+    making ready for them in the chamber below._ And this speech of
+    Simon of Gloucester pleased the Bishops much; and so they sent
+    for the host, one William of Ypres, and told him it was for the
+    public good, and he, much fearing the Bishops, brought them the
+    dinner of the Deans and Canons; and so the Deans and Canons went
+    away without dinner, and were pelted by the men of the town,
+    because they had not put any meat out of the windows like the
+    Bishops; and when the Count came to hear of it, he said it was a
+    pleasant conceit, _and that the Bishops were right cunning men,
+    and had ding'd the Canons well_."
+
+Even in the Singleton Letters, however, there are some little lapses of
+the same kind (worse, indeed, because these letters were signed) as the
+attack on Canning in the Plymley Letters. Sydney Smith exclaiming
+against "derision and persiflage, the great principle by which the world
+is now governed," is again edifying. But in truth Sydney never had the
+weakness (for I have known it called a weakness) of looking too
+carefully to see what the enemy's advocate is going to say. Take even
+the famous, the immortal apologue of Mrs. Partington. It covered, we are
+usually told, the Upper House with ridicule, and did as much as anything
+else to carry the Reform Bill. And yet, though it is a watery apologue,
+it will not hold water for a moment. The implied conclusion is, that the
+Atlantic beat Mrs. Partington. Did it? It made, no doubt, a great mess
+in her house, it put her to flight, it put her to shame. But when I was
+last at Sidmouth the line of high-water mark was, I believe, much what
+it was before the great storm of 1824, and though the particular Mrs.
+Partington had no doubt been gathered to her fathers, the Mrs.
+Partington of the day was, equally without doubt, living very
+comfortably in the house which the Atlantic had threatened to swallow
+up.
+
+It was, however, perhaps part of Sydney's strength that he never cared
+to consider too curiously, or on too many sides. Besides his inimitable
+felicity of expression (the Singleton Letters are simply crammed with
+epigram), he had the sturdiest possible common sense and the liveliest
+possible humour. I have known his claim to the title of "humourist"
+called in question by precisians: nobody could deny him the title of
+good-humourist. Except that the sentimental side of Toryism would never
+have appealed to him, it was chiefly an accident of time that he was a
+polemical Liberal. He would always and naturally have been on the side
+opposite to that on which most of the fools were. When he came into the
+world, as the straitest Tory will admit, there were in that world a
+great many abuses as they are called, that is to say, a great many
+things which, once useful and excellent, had either decayed into
+positive nuisances, or dried up into neutral and harmless but
+obstructive rubbish. There were also many silly and some mischievous
+people, as well as some wise and useful ones, who defended the abuses.
+Sydney Smith was an ideal soldier of reform for his time, and in his
+way. He was not extraordinarily long-sighted--indeed (as his famous and
+constantly-repeated advice to "take short views of life" shows) he had a
+distinct distrust of taking too anxious thought for political or any
+other morrows. But he had a most keen and, in many cases, a most just
+scent and sight for the immediate inconveniences and injustices of the
+day, and for the shortest and most effective ways of mending them. He
+was perhaps more destitute of romance and of reverence (though he had
+too much good taste to be positively irreverent) than any man who ever
+lived. He never could have paralleled, he never could have even
+understood, Scott's feelings about the Regalia, or that ever-famous
+incident of Sir Walter's life, when returning with Jeffrey and other
+Whig friends from some public meeting, he protested against the
+innovations which, harmless or even beneficial individually and in
+themselves, would by degrees destroy every thing that made Scotland
+Scotland. I am afraid that his warmest admirers, even those of his own
+political complexion, must admit that he was, as has been said, more
+than a little of a Philistine; that he expressed, and expressed
+capitally in one way, that curious middle-class sentiment, or denial of
+sentiment, which won its first triumph in the first Reform Bill and its
+last in the Exhibition of twenty years later, which destroyed no doubt
+much that was absurd, and some things that were noxious, but which
+induced in England a reign of shoddy in politics, in philosophy, in art,
+in literature, and, when its own reign was over, left England weak and
+divided, instead of, as it had been under the reign of abuses, united
+and strong. The bombardment of Copenhagen may or may not have been a
+dreadful thing: it was at any rate better than the abandonment of
+Khartoum. Nor can Sydney any more than his friends be acquitted of
+having held the extraordinary notion that you can "rest and be thankful"
+in politics, that you can set Demos at bishops, but stave and tail him
+off when he comes to canons; that you can level beautifully down to a
+certain point, and then stop levelling for ever afterwards; that because
+you can laugh Brother Ringletub out of court, laughter will be equally
+effective with Cardinal Newman; and that though it is the height of
+"anility" (a favourite word of his) to believe in a country gentleman,
+it is the height of rational religion to believe in a ten-pound
+householder.
+
+But however open to exception his principles may be, and that not merely
+from the point of view of highflying Toryism, his carrying out of them
+in life and in literature had the two abiding justifications of being
+infinitely amusing, and of being amusing always in thoroughly good
+temper. It is, as I have said, impossible to read Sydney Smith's _Life_,
+and still more impossible to read his letters, without liking him warmly
+and personally, without seeing that he was not only a man who liked to
+be comfortable (that is not very rare), that he was not only one who
+liked others to be comfortable (that is rarer), but one who in every
+situation in which he was thrown, did his utmost to make others as well
+as himself comfortable (which is rarest of all). If the references in
+_Peter Plymley_ to Canning were unjustifiable from him, there is little
+or no reason to think that they were prompted by personal jealousy; and
+though, as has been said, he was undoubtedly sore, and unreasonably
+sore, at not receiving the preferment which he thought he had deserved,
+he does not seem to have been personally jealous of any man who had
+received it. The parson of Foston and Combe Florey may not have been
+(his latest biographer, admiring though he be, pathetically laments that
+he was not) a spiritually minded man. But happy beyond almost all other
+parishioners of the time were the parishioners of Combe Florey and
+Foston, though one of them did once throw a pair of scissors at his
+provoking pastor. He was a fast and affectionate friend; and though he
+was rather given to haunting rich men, he did it not only without
+servility, but without that alternative of bearishness and freaks which
+has sometimes been adopted. As a prince of talkers he might have been a
+bore to a generation which (I own I think in that perhaps single point),
+wiser than its fathers, is not so ambitious as they were to sit as a
+bucket and be pumped into. But in that infinitely happier system of
+conversation by books, which any one can enjoy as he likes and interrupt
+as he likes at his own fireside, Sydney is still a prince. There may be
+living somewhere some one who does not think so very badly of slavery,
+who is most emphatically of opinion that "the fools were right," in the
+matters of Catholic emancipation and Reform, who thinks well of public
+schools and universities, who even, though he may not like spring-guns
+much, thinks that John Jones had only himself to blame if, after ample
+warning and with no business except the business of supplying a London
+poulterer with his landlord's game, he trespassed and came to the worst.
+Yet even this monster, if he happened to be possessed of the sense of
+fun and literature, (which is perhaps impossible), could not read even
+the most acrid of Sydney's political diatribes without shrieking with
+laughter, if, in his ogreish way, he were given to such violent
+demonstrations; could certainly not read the _Life_ and the letters
+without admitting, in a moment of unwonted humanity, that here was a man
+who, for goodness as well as for cleverness, for sound practical wisdom
+as well as for fantastic verbal wit, has had hardly a superior and very
+few equals.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[8] To speak of him in this way is not impertinence or familiarity. He
+was most generally addressed as "Mr. Sydney," and his references to his
+wife are nearly always to "Mrs. Sydney," seldom or never to "Mrs.
+Smith."
+
+[9] See next Essay.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+JEFFREY
+
+
+"Jeffrey and I," says Christopher North in one of his more malicious
+moments, "do nothing original; it's porter's work." A tolerably
+experienced student of human nature might almost, without knowing the
+facts, guess the amount of truth contained in this fling. North, as
+North, had done nothing that the world calls original: North, as Wilson,
+had done a by no means inconsiderable quantity of such work in verse and
+prose. But Jeffrey really did underlie the accusation contained in the
+words. A great name in literature, nothing stands to his credit in
+permanent literary record but a volume (a sufficiently big one, no
+doubt[10]) of criticisms on the work of other men; and though this
+volume is only a selection from his actual writings, no further gleaning
+could be made of any different material. Even his celebrated, or once
+celebrated, "Treatise on Beauty" is but a review article, worked up into
+an encyclopaedia article, and dealing almost wholly with pure criticism.
+Against him, if against any one, the famous and constantly repeated gibe
+about the fellows who have failed in literature and art, falls short and
+harmless. In another of its forms, "the corruption of a poet is the
+generation of a critic," it might be more appropriate. For Jeffrey, as
+we know from his boyish letters, once thought, like almost every boy who
+is not an idiot, that he might be a poet, and scribbled verses in
+plenty. But the distinguishing feature in this case was, that he waited
+for no failure, for no public ridicule or neglect, not even for any
+private nipping of the merciful, but so seldom effective, sort, to check
+those sterile growths. The critic was sufficiently early developed in
+him to prevent the corruption of the poet from presenting itself, in its
+usual disastrous fashion, to the senses of the world. Thus he lives (for
+his political and legal renown, though not inconsiderable, is
+comparatively unimportant) as a critic pure and simple.
+
+His biographer, Lord Cockburn, tells us that "Francis Jeffrey, the
+greatest of British critics, was born in Edinburgh on 23d October 1773."
+It must be at the end, not the beginning, of this paper that we decide
+whether Jeffrey deserves the superlative. He seems certainly to have
+begun his critical practice very early. He was the son of a depute-clerk
+of the Court of Session, and respectably, though not brilliantly,
+connected. His father was a great Tory, and, though it would be
+uncharitable to say that this was the reason why Jeffrey was a great
+Liberal, the two facts were probably not unconnected in the line of
+causation. Francis went to the High School when he was eight, and to the
+College at Glasgow when he was fourteen. He does not appear to have been
+a prodigy at either; but he has an almost unequalled record for early
+work of the self-undertaken kind. He seems from his boyhood to have been
+addicted to filling reams of paper, and shelves full of note-books, with
+extracts, abstracts, critical annotations, criticisms of these
+criticisms, and all manner of writing of the same kind. I believe it is
+the general experience that this kind of thing does harm in nineteen
+cases, for one in which it does good; but Jeffrey was certainly a
+striking exception to the rule, though perhaps he might not have been so
+if his producing, or at least publishing, time had not been unusually
+delayed. Indeed, his whole mental history appears to have been of a
+curiously piecemeal character; and his scrappy and self-guided education
+may have conduced to the priggishness which he showed early, and never
+entirely lost, till fame, prosperity, and the approach of old age
+mellowed it out of him. He was not sixteen when his sojourn at Glasgow
+came to an end; and, for more than two years, he seems to have been left
+to a kind of studious independence, attending only a couple of law
+classes at Edinburgh University. Then his father insisted on his going
+to Oxford: a curious step, the reasons for which are anything but clear.
+For the paternal idea seems to have been that Jeffrey was to study not
+arts, but law; a study for which Oxford may present facilities now, but
+which most certainly was quite out of its way in Jeffrey's time, and
+especially in the case of a Scotch boy of ordinary freshman's age.
+
+It is painful to have to say that Jeffrey hated Oxford, because there
+are few instances on record in which such hatred does not show the hater
+to have been a very bad man indeed. There are, however, some special
+excuses for the little Scotchman. His college (Queen's) was not perhaps
+very happily selected; he had been sent there in the teeth of his own
+will, which was a pretty strong will; he was horrified, after the free
+selection of Scotch classes, to find a regular curriculum which he had
+to take or leave as a whole; the priggishness of Oxford was not his
+priggishness, its amusements (for he hated sport of every kind) were not
+his amusements; and, in short, there was a general incompatibility. He
+came up in September and went down in July, having done nothing except
+having, according to a not ill-natured jest, "lost the broad Scotch, but
+gained only the narrow English,"--a peculiarity which sometimes brought
+a little mild ridicule on him both from Scotchmen and Englishmen.
+
+Very soon after his return to Edinburgh, he seems to have settled down
+steadily to study for the Scotch bar, and during his studies
+distinguished himself as a member of the famous Speculative Society,
+both in essay-writing and in the debates. He was called on 16th December
+1794.
+
+Although there have never been very quick returns at the bar, either of
+England or Scotland, the smaller numbers of the latter might be thought
+likely to bring young men of talent earlier to the front. This
+advantage, however, appears to have been counterbalanced partly by the
+strong family interests which made a kind of aristocracy among Scotch
+lawyers, and partly by the influence of politics and of Government
+patronage. Jeffrey was, comparatively speaking, a "kinless loon"; and,
+while he was steadily resolved not to put himself forward as a candidate
+for the Tory manna of which Dundas was the Moses, his filial reverence
+long prevented him from declaring himself a very violent Whig. Indeed,
+he gave an instance of this reverence which might serve as a pretty text
+for a casuistical discussion. Henry Erskine, Dean of the Faculty of
+Advocates, was in 1796 deprived by vote of that, the most honourable
+position of the Scotch bar, for having presided at a Whig meeting.
+Jeffrey, like Gibbon, sighed as a Whig, but obeyed as a son, and stayed
+away from the poll. His days were certainly long in the land; but I am
+inclined to think that, in a parallel case, some Tories at least would
+have taken the chance of shorter life with less speckled honour.
+However, it is hard to quarrel with a man for obeying his parents; and
+perhaps, after all, the Whigs did not think the matter of so much
+importance as they affected to do. It is certain that Jeffrey was a
+little dashed by the slowness of his success at the bar. Towards the end
+of 1798, he set out for London with a budget of letters of introduction,
+and thoughts of settling down to literature. But the editors and
+publishers to whom he was introduced did not know what a treasure lay
+underneath the scanty surface of this Scotch advocate, and they were
+either inaccessible or repulsive. He returned to Edinburgh, and, for
+another two years, waited for fortune philosophically enough, though
+with lingering thoughts of England, and growing ones of India. It was
+just at the turn of the century, that his fortunes began, in various
+ways, also to take a turn. For some years, though a person by no means
+given to miscellaneous acquaintances, he had been slowly forming the
+remarkable circle of friends from whose combined brains was soon to
+start the _Edinburgh Review_. He fell in love, and married his second
+cousin, Catherine Wilson, on 1st November 1801--a bold and by no means
+canny step, for his father was ill-off, the bride was tocherless, and he
+says that he had never earned a hundred pounds a year in fees. They did
+not, however, launch out greatly, and their house in Buccleuch Place
+(not the least famous locality in literature) was furnished on a scale
+which some modern colleges, conducted on the principles of enforced
+economy, would think Spartan for an undergraduate. Shortly afterwards,
+and very little before the appearance of the Blue and Yellow, Jeffrey
+made another innovation, which was perhaps not less profitable to him,
+by establishing a practice in ecclesiastical causes; though he met with
+a professional check in his rejection, on party principles, for the
+so-called collectorship, a kind of reporter's post of some emolument and
+not inconsiderable distinction.
+
+The story of the _Edinburgh Review_ and its foundation has been very
+often told on the humorous, if not exactly historical, authority of
+Sydney Smith. It is unnecessary to repeat it. It is undoubted that the
+idea was Sydney's. It is equally undoubted that, but for Jeffrey, the
+said idea might never have taken form at all, and would never have
+retained any form for more than a few months. It was only Jeffrey's
+long-established habit of critical writing, the untiring energy into
+which he whipped up his no doubt gifted but quite untrained
+contributors, and the skill which he almost at once developed in editing
+proper,--that is to say in selecting, arranging, adapting, and, even to
+some extent, re-writing contributions--which secured success. Very
+different opinions have been expressed at different times on the
+intrinsic merits of this celebrated production; and perhaps, on the
+whole, the principal feeling of explorers into the long and dusty
+ranges of its early volumes, has been one of disappointment. I believe
+myself that, in similar cases, a similar result is very common indeed,
+and that it is due to the operation of two familiar fallacies. The one
+is the delusion as to the products of former times being necessarily
+better than those of the present; a delusion which is not the less
+deluding because of its counterpart, the delusion about progress. The
+other is a more peculiar and subtle one. I shall not go so far as a very
+experienced journalist who once said to me commiseratingly, "My good
+sir, I won't exactly say that literary merit hurts a newspaper." But
+there is no doubt that all the great successes of journalism, for the
+last hundred years, have been much more due to the fact of the new
+venture being new, of its supplying something that the public wanted and
+had not got, than to the fact of the supply being extraordinarily good
+in kind. In nearly every case, the intrinsic merit has improved as the
+thing went on, but it has ceased to be a novel merit. Nothing would be
+easier than to show that the early _Edinburgh_ articles were very far
+from perfect. Of Jeffrey we shall speak presently, and there is no doubt
+that Sydney at his best was, and is always, delightful. But the
+blundering bluster of Brougham, the solemn ineffectiveness of Horner (of
+whom I can never think without also thinking of Scott's delightful
+Shandean jest on him), the respectable erudition of the Scotch
+professors, cannot for one single moment be compared with the work
+which, in Jeffrey's own later days, in those of Macvey Napier, and in
+the earlier ones of Empson, was contributed by Hazlitt, by Carlyle, by
+Stephen, and, above all, by Macaulay. The _Review_ never had any one who
+could emulate the ornateness of De Quincey or Wilson, the pure and
+perfect English of Southey, or the inimitable insolence, so polished and
+so intangible, of Lockhart. But it may at least claim that it led the
+way, and that the very men who attacked its principles and surpassed its
+practice had, in some cases, been actually trained in its school, and
+were in all, imitating and following its model. To analyse, with
+chemical exactness, the constituents of a literary novelty is never
+easy, if it is ever possible. But some of the contrasts between the
+style of criticism most prevalent at the time, and the style of the new
+venture are obvious and important. The older rivals of the _Edinburgh_
+maintained for the most part a decent and amiable impartiality; the
+_Edinburgh_, whatever it pretended to be, was violently partisan,
+unhesitatingly personal, and more inclined to find fault, the more
+distinguished the subject was. The reviews of the time had got into the
+hands either of gentlemen and ladies who were happy to be thought
+literary, and only too glad to write for nothing, or else into those of
+the lowest booksellers' hacks, who praised or blamed according to
+orders, wrote without interest and without vigour, and were quite
+content to earn the smallest pittance. The _Edinburgh_ started from the
+first on the principle that its contributors should be paid, and paid
+well, whether they liked it or not, thus establishing at once an
+inducement to do well and a check on personal eccentricity and
+irresponsibility; while whatever partisanship there might be in its
+pages, there was at any rate no mere literary puffery.
+
+From being, but for his private studies, rather an idle person, Jeffrey
+became an extremely busy one. The _Review_ gave him not a little
+occupation, and his practice increased rapidly. In 1803 the institution,
+at Scott's suggestion, of the famous Friday Club, in which, for the
+greater part of the first half of this century, the best men in
+Edinburgh, Johnstone and Maxwell, Whig and Tory alike, met in peaceable
+conviviality, did a good deal to console Jeffrey, who was now as much
+given to company as he had been in his early youth to solitude, for the
+partial breaking up of the circle of friends--Allen, Horner, Smith,
+Brougham, Lord Webb Seymour--in which he had previously mixed. In the
+same year he became a volunteer, an act of patriotism the more
+creditable, that he seems to have been sincerely convinced of the
+probability of an invasion, and of the certainty of its success if it
+occurred. But I have no room here for anything but a rapid review of the
+not very numerous or striking events of his life. Soon, however, after
+the date last mentioned, he met with two afflictions peculiarly trying
+to a man whose domestic affections were unusually strong. These were the
+deaths of his favourite sister in May 1804, and of his wife in October
+1805. The last blow drove him nearly to despair; and the extreme and
+open-mouthed "sensibility" of his private letters, on this and similar
+occasions, is very valuable as an index of character, oddly as it
+contrasts, in the vulgar estimate, with the supposed cynicism and
+savagery of the critic. In yet another year occurred the somewhat
+ludicrous duel, or beginning of a duel, with Moore, in which several
+police constables did perform the friendly office which Mr. Winkle
+vainly deprecated, and in which Jeffrey's, not Moore's, pistol was
+discovered to be leadless. There is a sentence in a letter of Jeffrey's
+concerning the thing which is characteristic and amusing: "I am glad to
+have gone through this scene, both because it satisfies me that my
+nerves are good enough to enable me to act in conformity to my notions
+of propriety without any suffering, and because it also assures me that
+I am really as little in love with life as I have been for some time in
+the habit of professing." It is needless to say that this was an example
+of the excellence of beginning with a little aversion, for Jeffrey and
+Moore fraternised immediately afterwards and remained friends for life.
+The quarrel, or half quarrel, with Scott as to the review of "Marmion,"
+the planning and producing of the _Quarterly Review, English Bards and
+Scotch Reviewers_, not a few other events of the same kind, must be
+passed over rapidly. About six years after the death of his first wife,
+Jeffrey met, and fell in love with, a certain Miss Charlotte Wilkes,
+great-niece of the patriot, and niece of a New York banker, and of a
+Monsieur and Madame Simond, who were travelling in Europe. He married
+her two years later, having gone through the very respectable probation
+of crossing and re-crossing the Atlantic (he was a very bad sailor) in a
+sailing ship, in winter, and in time of war, to fetch his bride. Nor had
+he long been married before he took the celebrated country house of
+Craigcrook, where, for more than thirty years, he spent all the spare
+time of an exceedingly happy life. Then we may jump some fifteen years
+to the great Reform contest which gave Jeffrey the reward, such as it
+was, of his long constancy in opposition, in the shape of the Lord
+Advocateship. He was not always successful as a debater; but he had the
+opportunity of adding a third reputation to those which he had already
+gained in literature and in law. He had the historical duty of piloting
+the Scotch Reform Bill through Parliament, and he had the, in his case,
+pleasurable and honourable pain of taking the official steps in
+Parliament necessitated by the mental incapacity of Sir Walter Scott.
+Early in 1834 he was provided for by promotion to the Scotch Bench. He
+had five years before, on being appointed Dean of Faculty, given up the
+editorship of the _Review_, which he had held for seven-and-twenty
+years. For some time previous to his resignation, his own contributions,
+which in early days had run up to half a dozen in a single number, and
+had averaged two or three for more than twenty years, had become more
+and more intermittent. After that resignation he contributed two or
+three articles at very long intervals. He was perhaps more lavish of
+advice than he need have been to Macvey Napier, and after Napier's death
+it passed into the control of his own son-in-law, Empson. Long, however,
+before the reins passed from his own hands, a rival more galling if less
+formidable than the _Quarterly_ had arisen in the shape of _Blackwood's
+Magazine_. The more ponderous and stately publication always affected,
+to some extent, to ignore its audacious junior; and Lord Cockburn
+(perhaps instigated not more by prudence than by regard for Lockhart and
+Wilson, both of whom were living) passes over in complete silence the
+establishment of the magazine, the publication of the Chaldee
+manuscript, and the still greater hubbub which arose around the supposed
+attacks of Lockhart on Playfair, and the _Edinburgh_ reviewers
+generally, with regard to their religious opinions. How deep the
+feelings really excited were, may be seen from a letter of Jeffrey's,
+published, not by Cockburn, but by Wilson's daughter in the life of her
+father. In this Jeffrey practically drums out a new and certainly most
+promising recruit for his supposed share in the business, and inveighs
+in the most passionate terms against the imputation. It is undesirable
+to enter at length into any such matters here. It need only be said that
+Allen, one of the founders of the _Edinburgh_, and always a kind of
+standing counsel to it, is now acknowledged to have been something
+uncommonly like an atheist, that Sydney Smith (as I believe most
+unjustly) was often, and is sometimes still, regarded as standing
+towards his profession very much in the attitude of a French _abbe_ of
+the eighteenth century, that almost the whole staff of the _Review_,
+including Jeffrey, had, as every Edinburgh man of position knew,
+belonged to the so-called Academy of Physics, the first principle of
+which was that only three facts (the words are Lord Cockburn's) were to
+be admitted without proof: (1) Mind exists; (2) matter exists; (3) every
+change indicates a cause. Nowadays the most orthodox of metaphysicians
+would admit that this limitation of position by no means implied
+atheism. But seventy years ago it would have been the exception to find
+an orthodox metaphysician who did admit it; and Lockhart, or rather
+Baron von Lauerwinkel, was perfectly justified in taking the view which
+ordinary opinion took.
+
+These jars, however, were long over when Jeffrey became Lord Jeffrey,
+and subsided upon the placid bench. He lived sixteen years longer,
+alternating between Edinburgh, Craigcrook, and divers houses which he
+hired from time to time, on Loch Lomond, on the Clyde, and latterly at
+some English watering-places in the west. His health was not
+particularly good, though hardly worse than any man who lives to nearly
+eighty, with constant sedentary and few out-of-door occupations, and
+with a cheerful devotion to the good things of this life, must expect.
+And he was on the whole singularly happy, being passionately devoted to
+his wife, his daughter, and his grandchildren; possessing ample means,
+and making a cheerful and sensible use of them; seeing the increasing
+triumph of the political principles to which he had attached himself;
+knowing that he was regarded by friends and foes alike, as the chief
+living English representative of an important branch of literature; and
+retaining to the last an almost unparalleled juvenility of tastes and
+interests. His letters to Dickens are well known, and, though I should
+be very sorry to stake his critical reputation upon them, there could
+not be better documents for his vivid enjoyment of life. He died on 26th
+January 1850, in his seventy-seventh year, having been in harness almost
+to the very last. He had written a letter the day before to Empson,
+describing one of those curious waking visions known to all sick folk,
+in which there had appeared part of a proof-sheet of a new edition of
+the Apocrypha, and a new political paper filled with discussions on Free
+Trade.
+
+In reading Jeffrey's work[11] nowadays, the critical reader finds it
+considerably more difficult to gain and keep the author's own point of
+view than in the case of any other great English critic. With Hazlitt,
+with Coleridge, with Wilson, with Carlyle, with Macaulay, we very soon
+fall into step, so to speak, with our author. If we cannot exactly
+prophesy what he will say on any given subject, we can make a pretty
+shrewd guess at it; and when, as it seems to us, he stumbles and shies,
+we have a sort of feeling beforehand that he is going to do it, and a
+decided inkling of the reason. But my own experience is, that a modern
+reader of Jeffrey, who takes him systematically, and endeavours to trace
+cause and effect in him, is liable to be constantly thrown out before he
+finds the secret. For Jeffrey, in the most puzzling way, lies between
+the ancients and the moderns in matter of criticism, and we never quite
+know where to have him. It is ten to one, for instance, that the novice
+approaches him with the idea that he is a "classic" of the old rock.
+Imagine the said novice's confusion, when he finds Jeffrey not merely
+exalting Shakespeare to the skies, but warmly praising Elizabethan
+poetry in general, anticipating Mr. Matthew Arnold almost literally, in
+the estimate of Dryden and Pope as classics of our prose, and hailing
+with tears of joy the herald of the emancipation in Cowper. Surely our
+novice may be excused if, despite certain misgiving memories of such
+reviews as that of "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," he concludes that
+Jeffrey has been maligned, and that he was really a Romantic before
+Romanticism. Unhappy novice! he will find his new conclusion not less
+rapidly and more completely staggered than his old. Indeed, until the
+clue is once gained, Jeffrey must appear to be one of the most
+incomprehensibly inconsistent of writers and of critics. On one page he
+declares that Campbell's extracts from Chamberlayne's "Pharonnida" have
+made him "quite impatient for an opportunity of perusing the whole
+poem,"--Romantic surely, quite Romantic. "The tameness and poorness of
+the serious style of Addison and Swift,"--Romantic again, quite
+Romantic. Yet when we come to Jeffrey's own contemporaries, he
+constantly appears as much bewigged and befogged with pseudo-classicism
+as M. de Jouy himself. He commits himself, in the year of grace 1829, to
+the statement that "the rich melodies of Keats and Shelley, and the
+fantastical emphasis of Wordsworth are melting fast from the field of
+our vision," while he contrasts with this "rapid withering of the
+laurel" the "comparative absence of marks of decay" on Rogers and
+Campbell. The poets of his own time whom he praises most heartily, and
+with least reserve, are Campbell and Crabbe; and he is quite as
+enthusiastic over "Theodric" and "Gertrude" as over the two great
+war-pieces of the same author, which are worth a hundred "Gertrudes" and
+about ten thousand "Theodrics." Reviewing Scott, not merely when they
+were personal friends (they were always that), but when Scott was a
+contributor to the _Edinburgh_, and giving general praise to "The Lay,"
+he glances with an unmistakable meaning at the "dignity of the subject,"
+regrets the "imitation and antiquarian researches," and criticises the
+versification in a way which shows that he had not in the least grasped
+its scheme. It is hardly necessary to quote his well-known attacks on
+Wordsworth; but, though I am myself anything but a Wordsworthian, and
+would willingly give up to chaos and old night nineteen-twentieths of
+the "extremely valooable chains of thought" which the good man used to
+forge, it is in the first place quite clear that the twentieth ought to
+have saved him from Jeffrey's claws; in the second, that the critic
+constantly selects the wrong things as well as the right for
+condemnation and ridicule; and in the third, that he would have praised,
+or at any rate not blamed, in another, the very things which he blames
+in Wordsworth. Even his praise of Crabbe, excessive as it may now
+appear, is diversified by curious patches of blame which seem to me at
+any rate, singularly uncritical. There are, for instance, a very great
+many worse jests in poetry than,
+
+    Oh, had he learnt to make the wig he wears!
+
+--which Jeffrey pronounces a misplaced piece of buffoonery. I cannot
+help thinking that if Campbell instead of Southey had written the lines,
+
+    To see brute nature scorn him and renounce
+    Its homage to the human form divine,
+
+Jeffrey would, to say the least, not have hinted that they were "little
+better than drivelling." But I do not think that when Jeffrey wrote
+these things, or when he actually perpetrated such almost unforgivable
+phrases as "stuff about dancing daffodils," he was speaking away from
+his sincere conviction. On the contrary, though partisanship may
+frequently have determined the suppression or the utterance, the
+emphasising or the softening, of his opinions, I do not think that he
+ever said anything but what he sincerely thought. The problem,
+therefore, is to discover and define, if possible, the critical
+standpoint of a man whose judgment was at once so acute and so purblind;
+who could write the admirable surveys of English poetry contained in the
+essays on Mme. de Stael and Campbell, and yet be guilty of the stuff (we
+thank him for the word) about the dancing daffodils; who could talk of
+"the splendid strains of Moore" (though I have myself a relatively high
+opinion of Moore) and pronounce "The White Doe of Rylstone" (though I
+am not very fond of that animal as a whole) "the very worst poem he ever
+saw printed in a quarto volume"; who could really appreciate parts even
+of Wordsworth himself, and yet sneer at the very finest passages of the
+poems he partly admired. It is unnecessary to multiply inconsistencies,
+because the reader who does not want the trouble of reading Jeffrey must
+be content to take them for granted, and the reader who does read
+Jeffrey will discover them in plenty for himself. But they are not
+limited, it should be said, to purely literary criticism; and they
+appear, if not quite so strongly, in his estimates of personal
+character, and even in his purely political arguments.
+
+The explanation, as far as there is any, (and perhaps such explanations,
+as Hume says of another matter, only push ignorance a stage farther
+back), seems to me to lie in what I can only call the Gallicanism of
+Jeffrey's mind and character. As Horace Walpole has been pronounced the
+most French of Englishmen, so may Francis Jeffrey be pronounced the most
+French of Scotchmen. The reader of his letters, no less than the reader
+of his essays, constantly comes across the most curious and multiform
+instances of this Frenchness. The early priggishness is French; the
+effusive domestic affection is French; the antipathy to dogmatic
+theology, combined with general recognition of the Supreme Being, is
+French; the talk (I had almost said the chatter) about virtue and
+sympathy, and so forth, is French; the Whig recognition of the rights
+of man, joined to a kind of bureaucratical distrust and terror of the
+common people (a combination almost unknown in England), is French.
+Everybody remembers the ingenious argument in _Peter Simple_ that the
+French were quite as brave as the English, indeed more so, but that they
+were extraordinarily ticklish. Jeffrey, we have seen, was very far from
+being a coward, but he was very ticklish indeed. His private letters
+throw the most curious light possible on the secret, as far as he was
+concerned, of the earlier Whig opposition to the war, and of the later
+Whig advocacy of reform. Jeffrey by no means thought the cause of the
+Revolution divine, like the Friends of Liberty, or admired Napoleon like
+Hazlitt, or believed in the inherent right of Manchester and Birmingham
+to representation like the zealots of 1830. But he was always dreadfully
+afraid of invasion in the first place, and of popular insurrection in
+the second; and he wanted peace and reform to calm his fears. As a young
+man he was, with a lack of confidence in his countrymen probably
+unparalleled in a Scotchman, sure that a French corporal's guard might
+march from end to end of Scotland, and a French privateer's boat's crew
+carry off "the fattest cattle and the fairest women" (these are his very
+words) "of any Scotch seaboard county." The famous, or infamous,
+Cevallos article--an ungenerous and pusillanimous attack on the Spanish
+patriots, which practically founded the _Quarterly Review_, by finally
+disgusting all Tories and many Whigs with the _Edinburgh_--was, it
+seems, prompted merely by the conviction that the Spanish cause was
+hopeless, and that maintaining it, or assisting it, must lead to mere
+useless bloodshed. He felt profoundly the crime of Napoleon's rule; but
+he thought Napoleon unconquerable, and so did his best to prevent him
+being conquered. He was sure that the multitude would revolt if reform
+was not granted; and he was, therefore, eager for reform. Later, he got
+into his head the oddest crotchet of all his life, which was that a
+Conservative government, with a sort of approval from the people
+generally, and especially from the English peasantry, would scheme for a
+_coup d'etat_, and (his own words again) "make mincemeat of their
+opponents in a single year." He may be said almost to have left the
+world in a state of despair over the probable results of the Revolutions
+of 1848-49; and it is impossible to guess what would have happened to
+him if he had survived to witness the Second of December. Never was
+there such a case, at least among Englishmen, of timorous pugnacity and
+plucky pessimism. But it would be by no means difficult to parallel the
+temperament in France; and, indeed, the comparative frequency of it
+there, may be thought to be no small cause of the political and military
+disasters of the country.
+
+In literature, and especially in criticism, Jeffrey's characteristics
+were still more decidedly and unquestionably French. He came into the
+world almost too soon to feel the German impulse, even if he had been
+disposed to feel it. But, as a matter of fact, he was not at all
+disposed. The faults of taste of the German Romantic School, its
+alternate homeliness and extravagance, its abuse of the supernatural,
+its undoubted offences against order and proportion, scandalised him
+only a little less than they would have scandalised Voltaire and did
+scandalise the later Voltairians. Jeffrey was perfectly prepared to be
+Romantic up to a certain point,--the point which he had himself reached
+in his early course of independent reading and criticism. He was even a
+little inclined to sympathise with the reverend Mr. Bowles on the great
+question whether Pope was a poet; and, as I have said, he uses, about
+the older English literature, phrases which might almost satisfy a
+fanatic of the school of Hazlitt or of Lamb. He is, if anything, rather
+too severe on French as compared with English drama. Yet, when he comes
+to his own contemporaries, and sometimes even in reference to earlier
+writers, we find him slipping into those purely arbitrary severities of
+condemnation, those capricious stigmatisings of this as improper, and
+that as vulgar, and the other as unbecoming, which are the
+characteristics of the pseudo-correct and pseudo-classical school of
+criticism. He was a great admirer of Cowper, and yet he is shocked by
+Cowper's use, in his translation of Homer, of the phrases, "to entreat
+Achilles to a calm" (evidently he had forgotten Shakespeare's "pursue
+him and entreat him to a peace"), "this wrangler here," "like a fellow
+of no worth." He was certainly not likely to be unjust to Charles James
+Fox. So he is unhappy, rather than contemptuous, over such excellent
+phrases as "swearing away the lives," "crying injustice," "fond of
+ill-treating." These appear to Mr. Aristarchus Jeffrey too "homely and
+familiar," too "low and vapid"; while a harmless and rather agreeable
+Shakespearian parallel of Fox's seems to him downright impropriety. The
+fun of the thing is that the passage turns on the well-known misuse of
+"flat burglary"; and if Jeffrey had had a little more sense of humour
+(his deficiency in which, for all his keen wit, is another Gallic note
+in him), he must have seen that the words were ludicrously applicable to
+his own condemnation and his own frame of mind. These settings-up of a
+wholly arbitrary canon of mere taste, these excommunicatings of such and
+such a thing as "low" and "improper," without assigned or assignable
+reason, are eminently Gallic. They may be found not merely in the older
+school before 1830, but in almost all French critics up to the present
+day: there is perhaps not one, with the single exception of
+Sainte-Beuve, who is habitually free from them. The critic may be quite
+unable to say why _tarte a la creme_ is such a shocking expression, or
+even to produce any important authority for the shockingness of it. But
+he is quite certain that it is shocking. Jeffrey is but too much given
+to protesting against _tarte a la creme_; and the reasons for his error
+are almost exactly the same as in the case of the usual Frenchman; that
+is to say, a very just and wholesome preference for order, proportion,
+literary orthodoxy, freedom from will-worship and eccentric divagations,
+unfortunately distorted by a certain absence of catholicity, by a
+tendency to regard novelty as bad, merely because it is novelty, and by
+a curious reluctance, as Lamb has it of another great man of the same
+generation, to go shares with any newcomer in literary commerce.
+
+But when these reservations have been made, when his standpoint has been
+clearly discovered and marked out, and when some little tricks, such as
+the affectation of delivering judgments without appeal, which is still
+kept up by a few, though very few, reviewers, have been further allowed
+for, Jeffrey is a most admirable essayist and critic. As an essayist, a
+writer of _causeries_, I do not think he has been surpassed among
+Englishmen in the art of interweaving quotation, abstract, and comment.
+The best proof of his felicity in this respect is that in almost all the
+books which he has reviewed, (and he has reviewed many of the most
+interesting books in literature) the passages and traits, the anecdotes
+and phrases, which have made most mark in the general memory, and which
+are often remembered with very indistinct consciousness of their origin,
+are to be found in his reviews. Sometimes the very perfection of his
+skill in this respect makes it rather difficult to know where he is
+abstracting or paraphrasing, and where he is speaking outright and for
+himself; but that is a very small fault. Yet his merits as an essayist,
+though considerable, are not to be compared, even to the extent to which
+Hazlitt's are to be compared, with his merits as a critic, and
+especially as a literary critic. It would be interesting to criticise
+his political criticism; but it is always best to keep politics out
+where it can be managed. Besides, Jeffrey as a political critic is a
+subject of almost exclusively historical interest, while as a literary
+critic he is important at this very day, and perhaps more important than
+he was in his own. For the spirit of merely aesthetic criticism, which
+was in his day only in its infancy, has long been full grown and
+rampant; so that, good work as it has done in its time, it decidedly
+needs chastening by an admixture of the dogmatic criticism, which at
+least tries to keep its impressions together and in order, and to
+connect them into some coherent doctrine and creed.
+
+Of this dogmatic criticism Jeffrey, with all his shortcomings, is
+perhaps the very best example that we have in English. He had addressed
+himself more directly and theoretically to literary criticism than
+Lockhart. Prejudiced as he often was, he was not affected by the wild
+gusts of personal and political passion which frequently blew Hazlitt a
+thousand miles off the course of true criticism. He keeps his eye on the
+object, which De Quincey seldom does. He is not affected by that desire
+to preach on certain pet subjects which affects the admirable critical
+faculty of Carlyle. He never blusters and splashes at random like
+Wilson. And he never indulges in the mannered and rather superfluous
+graces which marred, to some tastes, the work of his successor in
+critical authority, if there has been any such, the author of _Essays in
+Criticism_.
+
+Let us, as we just now looked through Jeffrey's work to pick out the
+less favourable characteristics which distinguish his position, look
+through it again to see those qualities which he shares, but in greater
+measure than most, with all good critics. The literary essay which
+stands first in his collected works is on Madame de Stael. Now that good
+lady, of whom some judges in these days do not think very much, was a
+kind of goddess on earth in literature, however much she might bore them
+in life, to the English Whig party in general; while Jeffrey's French
+tastes must have made her, or at least her books, specially attractive
+to him. Accordingly he has written a great deal about her, no less than
+three essays appearing in the collected works. Writing at least partly
+in her lifetime and under the influences just glanced at, he is of
+course profuse in compliments. But it is very amusing and highly
+instructive to observe how, in the intervals of these compliments, he
+contrives to take the good Corinne to pieces, to smash up her ingenious
+Perfectibilism, and to put in order her rather rash literary judgments.
+It is in connection also with her, that he gives one of the best of not
+a few general sketches of the history of literature which his work
+contains. Of course there are here, as always, isolated expressions as
+to which, however much we admit that Jeffrey was a clever man, we cannot
+agree with Jeffrey. He thinks Aristophanes "coarse" and "vulgar" just as
+a living pundit thinks him "base," while (though nobody of course can
+deny the coarseness) Aristophanes and vulgarity are certainly many miles
+asunder. We may protest against the chronological, even more than
+against the critical, blunder which couples Cowley and Donne, putting
+Donne, moreover, who wrote long before Cowley was born, and differs from
+him in genius almost as the author of the _Iliad_ does from the author
+of the _Henriade_, second. But hardly anything in English criticism is
+better than Jeffrey's discussion of the general French imputation of
+"want of taste and politeness" to English and German writers, especially
+English. It is a very general, and a very mistaken notion that the
+Romantic movement in France has done away with this imputation to a
+great extent. On the contrary, though it has long been a kind of
+fashion in France to admire Shakespeare, and though since the labours of
+MM. Taine and Montegut, the study of English literature generally has
+grown and flourished, it is, I believe, the very rarest thing to find a
+Frenchman who, in his heart of hearts, does not cling to the old "pearls
+in the dung-heap" idea, not merely in reference to Shakespeare, but to
+English writers, and especially English humorists, generally. Nothing
+can be more admirable than Jeffrey's comments on this matter. They are
+especially admirable because they are not made from the point of view of
+a _Romantique a tous crins_; because, as has been already pointed out,
+he himself is largely penetrated by the very preference for order and
+proportion which is at the bottom of the French mistake; and because he
+is, therefore, arguing in a tongue understanded of those whom he
+censures. Another essay which may be read with especial advantage is
+that on Scott's edition of Swift. Here, again, there was a kind of test
+subject, and perhaps Jeffrey does not come quite scatheless out of the
+trial: to me, at any rate, his account of Swift's political and moral
+conduct and character seems both uncritical and unfair. But here, too,
+the value of his literary criticism shows itself. He might very easily
+have been tempted to extend his injustice from the writer to the
+writings, especially since, as has been elsewhere shown, he was by no
+means a fanatical admirer of the Augustan age, and thought the serious
+style of Addison and Swift tame and poor. It is possible of course, here
+also, to find things that seem to be errors, both in the general sketch
+which Jeffrey, according to his custom, prefixes, and in the particular
+remarks on Swift himself. For instance, to deny fancy to the author of
+the _Tale of a Tub_, of _Gulliver_, and of the _Polite Conversation_, is
+very odd indeed. But there are few instances of a greater triumph of
+sound literary judgment over political and personal prejudice than
+Jeffrey's description, not merely of the great works just mentioned (it
+is curious, and illustrates his defective appreciation of humour, that
+he likes the greatest least, and is positively unjust to the _Tale of a
+Tub_), but also of those wonderful pamphlets, articles, lampoons, skits
+(libels if any one likes), which proved too strong for the generalship
+of Marlborough and the administrative talents of Godolphin; and which
+are perhaps the only literary works that ever really changed, for a not
+inconsiderable period, the government of England. "Considered," he says,
+"with a view to the purposes for which they were intended, they have
+probably never been equalled in any period of the world." They certainly
+have not; but to find a Whig, and a Whig writing in the very moment of
+Tory triumph after Waterloo, ready to admit the fact, is not a trivial
+thing. Another excellent example of Jeffrey's strength, by no means
+unmixed with examples of his weakness, is to be found in his essays on
+Cowper. I have already given some of the weakness: the strength is to be
+found in his general description of Cowper's revolt, thought so daring
+at the time, now so apparently moderate, against poetic diction. These
+instances are to be found under miscellaneous sections, biographical,
+historical, and so forth; but the reader will naturally turn to the
+considerable divisions headed Poetry and Fiction. Here are the chief
+rocks of offence already indicated, and here also are many excellent
+things which deserve reading. Here is the remarkable essay, quoted
+above, on Campbell's _Specimens_. Here is the criticism of Weber's
+edition of Ford, and another of those critical surveys of the course of
+English literature which Jeffrey was so fond of doing, and which he did
+so well, together with some remarks on the magnificently spendthrift
+style of our Elizabethan dramatists which would deserve almost the first
+place in an anthology of his critical beauties. The paper on Hazlitt's
+_Characters of Shakespeare_ (Hazlitt was an _Edinburgh_ reviewer, and
+his biographer, not Jeffrey's, has chronicled a remarkable piece of
+generosity on Jeffrey's part towards his wayward contributor) is a
+little defaced by a patronising spirit, not, indeed, of that memorably
+mistaken kind which induced the famous and unlucky sentence to Macvey
+Napier about Carlyle, but something in the spirit of the schoolmaster
+who observes, "See this clever boy of mine, and only think how much
+better I could do it myself." Yet it contains some admirable passages on
+Shakespeare, if not on Hazlitt; and it would be impossible to deny that
+its hinted condemnation of Hazlitt's "desultory and capricious
+acuteness" is just enough. On the other hand, how significant is it of
+Jeffrey's own limitations that he should protest against Hazlitt's
+sympathy with such "conceits and puerilities" as the immortal and
+unmatchable
+
+    Take him and cut him out in little stars,
+
+with the rest of the passage. But there you have the French spirit. I do
+not believe that there ever was a Frenchman since the seventeenth
+century (unless perchance it was Gerard de Nerval, and he was not quite
+sane), who could put his hand on his heart and deny that the little
+stars seemed to him puerile and conceited.
+
+Jeffrey's dealings with Byron (I do not now speak of the article on
+_Hours of Idleness_, which was simply a just rebuke of really puerile
+and conceited rubbish) are not, to me, very satisfactory. The critic
+seems, in the rather numerous articles which he has devoted to the
+"noble Poet," as they used to call him, to have felt his genius unduly
+rebuked by that of his subject. He spends a great deal, and surely an
+unnecessarily great deal, of time in solemnly, and no doubt quite
+sincerely, rebuking Byron's morality; and in doing so he is sometimes
+almost absurd. He calls him "not more obscene perhaps than Dryden or
+Prior," which is simply ludicrous, because it is very rare that this
+particular word can be applied to Byron at all, while even his
+staunchest champion must admit that it applies to glorious John and to
+dear Mat Prior. He helps, unconsciously no doubt, to spread the very
+contagion which he denounces, by talking about Byron's demoniacal power,
+going so far as actually to contrast _Manfred_ with Marlowe to the
+advantage of the former. And he is so completely overcome by what he
+calls the "dreadful tone of sincerity" of this "puissant spirit," that
+he never seems to have had leisure or courage to apply the critical
+tests and solvents of which few men have had a greater command. Had he
+done so, it is impossible not to believe that, whether he did or did not
+pronounce Byron's sentiment to be as theatrical, as vulgar, and as false
+as it seems to some later critics, he would at any rate have substituted
+for his edifying but rather irrelevant moral denunciations some exposure
+of those gross faults in style and metre, in phrase and form, which now
+disgust us.
+
+There are many essays remaining on which I should like to comment if
+there were room enough. But I have only space for a few more general
+remarks on his general characteristics, and especially those which, as
+Sainte-Beuve said to the altered Jeffrey of our altered days, are
+"important to us." Let me repeat then that the peculiar value of Jeffrey
+is not, as is that of Coleridge, of Hazlitt, or of Lamb, in very subtle,
+very profound, or very original views of his subjects. He is neither a
+critical Columbus nor a critical Socrates; he neither opens up
+undiscovered countries, nor provokes and stimulates to the discovery of
+them. His strength lies in the combination of a fairly wide range of
+sympathy with an extraordinary shrewdness and good sense in applying
+that sympathy. Tested for range alone, or for subtlety alone, he will
+frequently be found wanting; but he almost invariably catches up those
+who have thus outstripped him, when the subject of the trial is shifted
+to soundness of estimate, intelligent connection of view, and absence of
+eccentricity. And it must be again and again repeated that Jeffrey is by
+no means justly chargeable with the Dryasdust failings so often
+attributed to academic criticism. They said that on the actual Bench he
+worried counsel a little too much, but that his decisions were almost
+invariably sound. Not quite so much perhaps can be said for his other
+exercise of the judicial function. But however much he may sometimes
+seem to carp and complain, however much we may sometimes wish for a
+little more equity and a little less law, it is astonishing how weighty
+Jeffrey's critical judgments are after three quarters of a century which
+has seen so many seeming heavy things grow light. There may be much
+that he does not see; there may be some things which he is physically
+unable to see; but what he does see, he sees with a clearness, and
+co-ordinates in its bearings on other things seen with a precision,
+which are hardly to be matched among the fluctuating and diverse race of
+critics.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[10] To prevent mistakes it may be as well to say that Jeffrey's
+_Contributions to the Edinburgh Review_ appeared first in four volumes,
+then in three, then in one.
+
+[11] In the following remarks, reference is confined to the
+_Contributions to the Edinburgh Review_, 1 vol. London, 1853. This is
+not merely a matter of convenience; the selection having been made with
+very great care by Jeffrey himself at a time when his faculties were in
+perfect order, and including full specimens of every kind of his work.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+HAZLITT
+
+
+The following paper was in great part composed, when I came across some
+sentences on Hazlitt, written indeed before I was born, but practically
+unpublished until the other day. In a review of the late Mr. Horne's
+_New Spirit of the Age_, contributed to the _Morning Chronicle_ in 1845
+and but recently included in his collected works, Thackeray writes thus
+of the author of the book whose title Horne had rather rashly borrowed:
+
+    The author of the _Spirit of the Age_ was one of the keenest and
+    brightest critics that ever lived. With partialities and
+    prejudices innumerable, he had a wit so keen, a sensibility so
+    exquisite, an appreciation of humour, or pathos, or even of the
+    greatest art, so lively, quick, and cultivated, that it was
+    always good to know what were the impressions made by books or
+    men or pictures on such a mind; and that, as there were not
+    probably a dozen men in England with powers so varied, all the
+    rest of the world might be rejoiced to listen to the opinions of
+    this accomplished critic. He was of so different a caste to the
+    people who gave authority in his day--the pompous big-wigs and
+    schoolmen, who never could pardon him his familiarity of manner
+    so unlike their own--his popular--too popular habits--and
+    sympathies so much beneath their dignity; his loose, disorderly
+    education gathered round those bookstalls or picture galleries
+    where he laboured a penniless student, in lonely journeys over
+    Europe tramped on foot (and not made, after the fashion of the
+    regular critics of the day, by the side of a young nobleman in a
+    postchaise), in every school of knowledge from St. Peter's at
+    Rome to St. Giles's in London. In all his modes of life and
+    thought, he was so different from the established authorities,
+    with their degrees and white neck-cloths, that they hooted the
+    man down with all the power of their lungs, and disdained to
+    hear truth that came from such a ragged philosopher.
+
+Some exceptions, no doubt, must be taken to this enthusiastic, and in
+the main just, verdict. Hazlitt himself denied himself wit, yet if this
+was mock humility, I am inclined to think that he spoke truth
+unwittingly. His appreciation of humour was fitful and anything but
+impartial, while, biographically speaking, the hardships of his
+apprenticeship are very considerably exaggerated. It was not, for
+instance, in a penniless or pedestrian manner that he visited St.
+Peter's at Rome; but journeying with comforts of wine, _vetturini_, and
+partridges, which his second wife's income paid for. But this does not
+matter much, and, on the whole, the estimate is as just as it is
+generous. Perhaps something of its inspiration may be set down to
+fellow-feeling, both in politics and in the unsuccessful cultivation of
+the arts of design. But as high an estimate of Hazlitt is quite
+compatible with the strongest political dissent from his opinions, and
+with a total freedom from the charge of wearing the willow for painting.
+
+There is indeed no doubt that Hazlitt is one of the most absolutely
+unequal writers in English, if not in any, literature, Wilson being
+perhaps his only compeer. The term absolute is used with intention and
+precision. There may be others who, in different parts of their work,
+are more unequal than he is; but with him the inequality is pervading,
+and shows itself in his finest passages, in those where he is most at
+home, as much as in his hastiest and most uncongenial taskwork. It could
+not, indeed, be otherwise, because the inequality itself is due less to
+an intellectual than to a moral defect. The clear sunshine of Hazlitt's
+admirably acute intellect is always there; but it is constantly obscured
+by driving clouds of furious prejudice. Even as the clouds pass, the
+light may still be seen on distant and scattered parts of the landscape;
+but wherever their influence extends, there is nothing but thick
+darkness, gusty wind and drenching rain. And the two phenomena, the
+abiding intellectual light, and the fits and squalls of moral darkness,
+appear to be totally independent of each other, or of any single will or
+cause of any kind. It would be perfectly easy, and may perhaps be in
+place later, to give a brief collection of some of the most absurd and
+outrageous sayings that any writer, not a mere fool, can be charged
+with: of sentences not representing quips and cranks of humour, or
+judgments temporary and one-sided, though having a certain relative
+validity, but containing blunders and calumnies so gross and palpable,
+that the man who set them down might seem to have forfeited all claim to
+the reputation either of an intelligent or a responsible being. And yet,
+side by side with these, are other passages (and fortunately a much
+greater number) which justify, and more than justify, Hazlitt's claims
+to be as Thackeray says, "one of the keenest and brightest critics that
+ever lived"; as Lamb had said earlier, "one of the wisest and finest
+spirits breathing."
+
+The only exception to be taken to the well-known panegyric of Elia is,
+that it bestows this eulogy on Hazlitt "in his natural and healthy
+state." Unluckily, it would seem, by a concurrence of all testimony,
+even the most partial, that the unhealthy state was quite as natural as
+the healthy one. Lamb himself plaintively wishes that "he would not
+quarrel with the world at the rate he does"; and De Quincey, in his
+short, but very interesting, biographical notice of Hazlitt (a notice
+entirely free from the malignity with which De Quincey has been
+sometimes charged), declares with quite as much truth as point, that
+Hazlitt's guiding principle was, "Whatever is, is wrong." He was the
+very ideal of a literary Ishmael; and after the fullest admission of the
+almost incredible virulence and unfairness of his foes, it has to be
+admitted, likewise, that he was quite as ready to quarrel with his
+friends. He succeeded, at least once, in forcing a quarrel even upon
+Lamb. His relations with Leigh Hunt (who, whatever his faults were, was
+not unamiable) were constantly strained, and at least once actually
+broken by his infernal temper. Nor were his relations with women more
+fortunate or more creditable than those with men. That the fault was
+entirely on his side in the rupture with his first wife is, no doubt,
+not the case; for Mrs. Hazlitt's, or Miss Stoddart's, own friends admit
+that she was of a peculiar and rather trying disposition. It is indeed
+evident that she was the sort of person (most teasing of all others to a
+man of Hazlitt's temperament) who would put her head back as he was
+kissing her, to ask if he would like another cup of tea, or interrupt a
+declaration to suggest shutting the window. As for the famous and almost
+legendary episode of Sarah Walker, the lodging-house keeper's daughter,
+and the _Liber Amoris_, the obvious and irresistible attack of something
+like erotic madness which it implies absolves Hazlitt partly--but only
+partly, for there is a kind of shabbiness about the affair which shuts
+it out from all reasonable claim to be regarded as a new act of the
+endless drama of _All for Love, or The World Well Lost!_ Of his second
+marriage, the only persons who might be expected to give us some
+information either can or will say next to nothing. But when a man with
+such antecedents marries a woman of whom no one has anything bad to
+say, lives with her for a year, chiefly on her money, and is then
+quitted by her with the information that she will have nothing more to
+do with him, it is not, I think, uncharitable to conjecture that most of
+the fault is his.
+
+It is not, however, only of Hazlitt's rather imperfectly known life, or
+of his pretty generally acknowledged character, that I wish to speak
+here. His strange mixture of manly common-sense and childish prejudice,
+the dislike of foreigners which accompanied his Liberalism and his
+Bonapartism, and other traits, are very much more English than Irish.
+But Irish, at least on the father's side, his family was, and had been
+for generations. He was himself the son of a Unitarian minister, was
+born at Maidstone in 1778, accompanied his parents as a very little boy
+to America, but passed the greater part of his youth at Wem in
+Shropshire, where the interview with Coleridge, which decided his fate,
+took place. Yet for some time after that, he was mainly occupied with
+studies, not of literature, but of art. He had been intended for his
+father's profession, but had early taken a disgust to it. At such
+schools as he had been able to frequent, he had gained the character of
+a boy rather insusceptible of ordinary teaching; and his letters (they
+are rare throughout his life) show him to us as something very like a
+juvenile prig. According to his own account, he "thought for at least
+eight years" without being able to pen a line, or at least a page; and
+the worst accusation that can truly be brought against him is that, by
+his own confession, he left off reading when he began to write. Those
+who (for their sins or for their good) are condemned to a life of
+writing for the press know that such an abstinence as this is almost
+fatal. Perhaps no man ever did good work in periodical writing, unless
+he had previously had a more or less prolonged period of reading, with
+no view to writing. Certainly no one ever did other than very faulty
+work if, not having such a store to draw on, when he began writing he
+left off reading.
+
+The first really important event in Hazlitt's life, except the visit
+from Coleridge in 1798, was his own visit to Paris after the Peace of
+Amiens in 1802--a visit authorised and defrayed by certain commissions
+to copy pictures at the Louvre, which was then, in consequence of French
+conquests, the picture-gallery of Europe. The chief of these
+commissioners was a Mr. Railton, a person of some fortune at Liverpool,
+and the father of a daughter who, if she was anything like her portrait,
+had one of the most beautiful faces of modern times. Miss Railton was
+one of Hazlitt's many loves: it was, perhaps, fortunate for her that the
+course of the love did not run smooth. Almost immediately on his return,
+he made acquaintance with the Lambs, and, as Mr. W. C. Hazlitt, his
+grandson and biographer, thinks, with Miss Stoddart, his future wife.
+Miss Stoddart, there is no doubt, was an elderly coquette, though
+perfectly "proper." Besides the "William" of her early correspondence
+with Mary Lamb, we hear of three or four other lovers of hers between
+1803 and 1808, when she married Hazlitt. It so happens that one, and
+only one, letter of his to her has been preserved. His biographer seems
+to think it in another sense unique; but it is, in effect, a very
+typical letter from a literary lover of a rather passionate temperament.
+The two were married, in defiance of superstition, on Sunday, the first
+of May; and certainly the superstition had not the worst of it.
+
+At first, however, no evil results seemed likely. Miss Stoddart had a
+certain property settled on her at Winterslow, on the south-eastern
+border of Salisbury Plain, and for nearly four years the couple seem to
+have dwelt there (once, at least, entertaining the Lambs), and producing
+children, of whom only one lived. It was not till 1812 that they removed
+to London, and that Hazlitt engaged in writing for the newspapers. From
+this time till the end of his life, some eighteen years, he was never at
+a loss for employment--a succession of daily and weekly papers, with
+occasional employment on the _Edinburgh Review_, providing him, it would
+seem, with sufficiently abundant opportunities for copy. The _London_,
+the _New Monthly_ (where Campbell's dislike did him no harm), and other
+magazines also employed him. For a time, he seems to have joined "the
+gallery," and written ordinary press-work. During this time, which was
+very short, and this time only, his friends admit a certain indulgence
+in drinking, which he gave up completely, but which was used against him
+with as much pitilessness as indecency in _Blackwood_; though heaven
+only knows how the most Tory soul alive could see fitness of things in
+the accusation of gin-drinking brought against Hazlitt by the
+whiskey-drinkers of the _Noctes_. For the greater part of his literary
+life he seems to have been almost a total abstainer, indulging only in
+the very strongest of tea. He soon gave up miscellaneous press-work, as
+far as politics went; but his passion for the theatre retained him as a
+theatrical critic almost to the end of his life. He gradually drifted
+into the business really best suited to him, that of essay-writing, and
+occasionally lecturing on literary and miscellaneous subjects. During
+the greatest part of his early London life, he was resident in a famous
+house, now destroyed, in York Street, Westminster, next door to Bentham
+and reputed to have once been tenanted by Milton; and he was a constant
+attendant on Lamb's Wednesday evenings. The details of his life, it has
+been said, are not much known. The chief of them, besides the breaking
+out of his lifelong war with _Blackwood_ and the _Quarterly_, was,
+perhaps, his unlucky participation in the duel which proved fatal to
+Scott, the editor of the _London_. It is impossible to imagine a more
+deplorable muddle than this affair. Scott, after refusing the challenge
+of Lockhart,[12] with whom he had, according to the customs of those
+days, a sufficient ground of quarrel, accepted that of Christie,
+Lockhart's second, with whom he had no quarrel at all. Moreover, when
+his adversary had deliberately spared him in the first fire, he insisted
+(it is said owing to the stupid conduct of his own second) on another,
+and was mortally wounded. Hazlitt, who was more than indirectly
+concerned in the affair, had a professed objection to duelling, which
+would have been more creditable to him if he had not been avowedly of a
+timid temper. But, most unfortunately, he was said, and believed, to
+have spurred Scott on to the acceptance of the challenge, nor do his own
+champions deny it. The scandal is long bygone, but is, unluckily, a fair
+sample of the ugly stories which cluster round Hazlitt's name, and which
+have hitherto prevented that justice being done to him which his
+abilities deserve and demand.
+
+This wretched affair occurred in February 1821, and, shortly afterwards,
+the crowning complications of Hazlitt's own life, the business of the
+_Liber Amoris_ and the divorce with his first wife, took place. The
+first could only be properly described by an abundance of extracts, for
+which there is here no room. Of the second, which, it must be
+remembered, went on simultaneously with the first, it is sufficient to
+say that the circumstances are nearly incredible. It was conducted under
+the Scotch law with a blessed indifference to collusion: the direct
+means taken to effect it were, if report may be trusted, scandalous; and
+the parties met during the whole time, and placidly wrangled over money
+matters, with a callousness which is ineffably disgusting. I have
+hinted, in reference to Sarah Walker, that the tyranny of "Love
+unconquered in battle" may be taken by a very charitable person to be a
+sufficient excuse. In this other affair there is no such palliation;
+unless the very charitable person should hold that a wife, who could so
+forget her own dignity, justified any forgetfulness on the part of her
+husband; and that a husband, who could haggle and chaffer about the
+terms on which he should be disgracefully separated from his wife,
+justified any forgetfulness of dignity on the wife's part.
+
+Little has to be said about the rest of Hazlitt's life. Miss Sarah
+Walker would have nothing to say to him; and it has been already
+mentioned that the lady whom he afterwards married, a Mrs. Bridgewater,
+had enough of him after a year's experience. He did not outlive this
+last shock more than five years; and unfortunately his death was
+preceded by a complete financial break-down, though he was more
+industrious during these later years than at any other time, and though
+he had abundance of well-paid work. The failure of the publishers, who
+were to have paid him five hundred pounds for his _magnum opus_, the
+partisan and almost valueless _Life of Napoleon_, had something to do
+with this, and the dishonesty of an agent is said to have had more, but
+details are not forthcoming. He died on the eighteenth of September
+1830, saying, "Well, I have had a happy life"; and despite his son's
+assertion that, like Goldsmith, he had something on his mind, I believe
+this to have been not ironical but quite sincere. He was only fifty-two,
+so that the infirmities of age had not begun to press on him. Although,
+except during the brief duration of his second marriage, he had always
+lived by his wits, it does not appear that he was ever in any want, or
+that he had at any time to deny himself his favourite pleasures of
+wandering about and being idle when he chose. If he had not been
+completely happy in his life, he had lived it; if he had not seen the
+triumph of his opinions, he had been able always to hold to them. He was
+one of those men, such as an extreme devotion to literature now and then
+breeds, who, by the intensity of their enjoyment of quite commonplace
+delights--a face passed in the street, a sunset, a quiet hour of
+reflection, even a well-cooked meal--make up for the suffering of not
+wholly commonplace woes. I do not know whether even the joy of literary
+battle did not overweigh the pain of the dishonest wounds which he
+received from illiberal adversaries. I think that he had a happy life,
+and I am glad that he had. For he was in literature a great man. I am
+myself disposed to hold that, for all his accesses of hopelessly
+uncritical prejudice, he was the greatest critic that England has yet
+produced; and there are some who hold (though I do not agree with them)
+that he was even greater as a miscellaneous essayist than as a critic.
+It is certainly upon his essays, critical and other, that his fame must
+rest; not on the frenzied outpourings of the _Liber Amoris_ (full as
+these are of flashes of genius), or upon the one-sided and ill-planned
+_Life of Napoleon_; still less on his clever-boy essay on the
+_Principles of Human Action_, or on his attempts in grammar, in literary
+compilation and abridgment, and the like. Seven volumes of Bonn's
+Standard Library, with another published elsewhere containing his
+writings on Art, contain nearly all the documents of Hazlitt's fame: a
+few do not seem to have been yet collected from his _Remains_ and from
+the publications in which they originally appeared.
+
+These books--the _Spirit of the Age_, _Table Talk_, _The Plain Speaker_,
+_The Round Table_ (including the _Conversations with Northcote_ and
+_Characteristics_), _Lectures on the English Poets and Comic Writers_,
+_Elizabethan Literature_ and _Characters of Shakespeare_, _Sketches and
+Essays_ (including _Winterslow_)--represent the work, roughly speaking,
+of the last twenty years of Hazlitt's life; for in the earlier and
+longer period he wrote very little, and, indeed, declares that for a
+long time he had a difficulty in writing at all. They are all singularly
+homogeneous in general character, the lectures written as lectures
+differing very little from the essays written as essays, and even the
+frantic diatribes of the "Letter to Gifford" bearing a strong family
+likeness to the good-humoured _reportage_ of "On going to a Fight," or
+the singularly picturesque and pathetic egotism of the "Farewell to
+Essay-writing." This family resemblance is the more curious because,
+independently of the diversity of subject, Hazlitt can hardly be said to
+possess a style or, at least, a manner--indeed, he somewhere or other
+distinctly disclaims the possession. Yet, irregular as he is in his
+fashion of writing, no less than in the merit of it, the germs of some
+of the most famous styles of this century may be discovered in his
+casual and haphazard work. Everybody knows Jeffrey's question to
+Macaulay, "Where the devil did you get that style?" If any one will read
+Hazlitt (who, be it remembered, was a contributor to the _Edinburgh_)
+carefully, he will see where Macaulay got that style, or at least the
+beginning of it, much as he improved on it afterwards. Nor is there any
+doubt that, in a very different way, Hazlitt served as a model to
+Thackeray, to Dickens, and to many not merely of the most popular, but
+of the greatest, writers of the middle of the century. Indeed, in the
+_Spirit of the Age_ there are distinct anticipations of Carlyle. He had
+the not uncommon fate of producing work which, little noted by the
+public, struck very strongly those of his juniors who had any literary
+faculty. If he had been, just by a little, a greater man than he was, he
+would, no doubt, have elaborated an individual manner, and not have
+contented himself with the hints and germs of manners. As it was, he had
+more of seed than of fruit. And the secret of this is, undoubtedly, to
+be found in the obstinate individuality of thought which characterised
+him all through. Hazlitt may sometimes have adopted an opinion partly
+because other people did not hold it, but he never adopted an opinion
+because other people did hold it. And all his opinions, even those which
+seem to have been adopted simply to quarrel with the world, were genuine
+opinions. He has himself drawn a striking contrast in this point,
+between himself and Lamb, in one of the very best of all his essays, the
+beautiful "Farewell to Essay-writing" reprinted in _Winterslow_. The
+contrast is a remarkable one, and most men, probably, who take great
+interest in literature or politics, or indeed in any subject admitting
+of principles, will be able to furnish similar contrasts from their own
+experience.
+
+    In matters of taste and feeling, one proof that my conclusions
+    have not been quite shallow and hasty, is the circumstance of
+    their having been lasting. I have the same favourite books,
+    pictures, passages that I ever had; I may therefore presume
+    that they will last me my life--nay, I may indulge a hope that
+    my thoughts will survive me. This continuity of impression is
+    the only thing on which I pride myself. Even Lamb, whose relish
+    of certain things is as keen and earnest as possible, takes a
+    surfeit of admiration, and I should be afraid to ask about his
+    select authors or particular friends after a lapse of ten years.
+    As for myself, any one knows where to have me. What I have once
+    made up my mind to, I abide by to the end of the chapter.
+
+This is quite true if we add a proviso to it--a proviso, to be sure, of
+no small importance. Hazlitt is always the same when he is not
+different, when his political or personal ails and angers do not obscure
+his critical judgment. His uniformity of principle extends only to the
+two subjects of literature and of art; unless a third may be added, to
+wit, the various good things of this life, as they are commonly called.
+He was not so great a metaphysician as he thought himself. He "shows to
+the utmost of his knowledge, and that not deep"; a want of depth not
+surprising when we find him confessing that he had to go to Taylor, the
+Platonist, to tell him something of Platonic ideas. It may be more than
+suspected that he had read little but the French and English
+philosophers of the eighteenth century; a very interesting class of
+persons, but, except Condillac, Hume, and Berkeley, scarcely
+metaphysicians. As for his politics, Hazlitt seems to me to have had no
+clear political creed at all. He hated something called "the hag
+legitimacy," but for the hag despotism, in the person of Bonaparte, he
+had nothing but love. How any one possessed of brains could combine
+Liberty and the first Napoleon in one common worship is, I confess, a
+mystery too great for me; and I fear that any one who could call
+"Jupiter Scapin" "the greatest man who ever lived," must be entirely
+blind to such constituents of greatness as justice, mercy, chivalry, and
+all that makes a gentleman. Indeed, I am afraid that "gentleman" is
+exactly what cannot be predicated of Hazlitt. No gentleman could have
+published the _Liber Amoris_, not at all because of its so-called
+voluptuousness, but because of its shameless kissing and telling. But
+the most curious example of Hazlitt's weaknesses is the language he uses
+in regard to those men with whom he had both political and literary
+differences. That he had provocation in some cases (he had absolutely
+none from Sir Walter Scott) is perfectly true. But what provocation will
+excuse such things as the following, all taken from one book, the
+_Spirit of the Age_? He speaks of Scott's "zeal to restore the spirit of
+loyalty, of passive obedience, and of non-resistance," as an
+acknowledgment for his having been "created a baronet by a prince of the
+House of Brunswick." Alas for dates and circumstances, for times and
+seasons, when they stand in the way of a fling of Hazlitt's! In the
+character of Scott himself an entire page and a half is devoted to an
+elaborate peroration in one huge sentence, denouncing him in such terms
+as "pettifogging," "littleness," "pique," "secret and envenomed blows,"
+"slime of rankling malice and mercenary scorn," "trammels of servility,"
+"lies," "garbage," etc. etc. The Duke of Wellington he always speaks of
+as a brainless noodle, forgetting apparently that the description does
+not make his idol's defeat more creditable to the vanquished. As for the
+character of Gifford, and the earlier "Letter to Gifford," I should have
+to print them entire to show the state of Hazlitt's mind in regard to
+this notorious, and certainly not very amiable person. His own words,
+"the dotage of age and the fury of a woman," form the best short
+description of both. He screams, he foams at the mouth, he gnashes and
+tears and kicks, rather than fights. Nor is it only on living authors
+and living persons (as some of his unfavourable critics have said) that
+he exercises his spleen. His remarks on Burke (_Round Table_, p. 150)
+suggest temporary insanity. Sir Philip Sidney (as Lamb, a perfectly
+impartial person who had no politics at all, pointed out) was a kind of
+representative of the courtly monarchist school in literature. So down
+must Sir Philip go; and not only the _Arcadia_, that "vain and
+amatorious poem" which Milton condemned, but the sonnets which one would
+have thought such a lover of poetry as Hazlitt must have spared, go down
+also before his remorseless bludgeon.
+
+But there is no need to say any more of these faults of his, and there
+is no need to say much of another and more purely literary fault with
+which he has been charged--the fault of excessive quotation. In him the
+error lies rather in the constant repetition of the same, than in a too
+great multitude of different borrowings. Almost priding himself on
+limited study, and (as he tells us) very rarely reading his own work
+after it was printed, he has certainly abused his right of press most
+damnably in some cases. "Dry as a remainder biscuit," and "of no mark or
+likelihood," occur to me as the most constantly recurrent tags; but
+there are many others.
+
+These various drawbacks, however, only set off the merits which almost
+every lover of literature must perceive in him. In most writers, in all
+save the very greatest, we look for one or two, or for a few special
+faculties and capacities, and we know perfectly well that other
+(generally many other) capacities and faculties will not be found in
+them at all. We do not dream of finding rollicking mirth in Milton, or
+gorgeous embroidery of style in Swift, or unadorned simplicity in
+Browne. But in Hazlitt you may find something of almost everything,
+except the finer kinds of wit and humour; to which last, however, he
+makes a certain side-approach by dint of his appreciation of the irony
+of Nature and Fate. Almost every other grace of matter and form that can
+be found in prose may be found at times in his. He is generally thought
+of as, and for the most part is, a rather plain and straightforward
+writer, with few tricks and frounces of phrase and style. Yet most of
+the fine writing of these latter days is but as crumpled tarlatan to
+brocaded satin beside the passage on Coleridge in the _English Poets_,
+or the description of Winterslow and its neighbourhood in the "Farewell
+to Essay-writing," or "On a Landscape of Nicolas Poussin" in the
+_Table-Talk_. Read these pieces and nothing else, and an excusable
+impression might be given that the writer was nothing if not florid. But
+turn over a dozen pages, and the most admirable examples of the grave
+and simple manner occur. He is an inveterate quoter, yet few men are
+more original. No man is his superior in lively, gossiping description,
+yet he could, within his limits, reason closely and expound admirably.
+It is, indeed, almost always necessary, when he condemns anything, to
+inquire very carefully as to the reasons of the condemnation. But
+nothing that he likes (except Napoleon) is ever bad: everything that he
+praises will repay the right man who, at the right time, examines it to
+see for what Hazlitt likes it. I have, for my part, no doubt that Miss
+Sarah Walker was a very engaging young woman; but (though the witness is
+the same) I have the gravest doubts as to Hazlitt's charges against her.
+
+We shall find this same curious difference everywhere in Hazlitt. He has
+been talking, for instance, with keen relish of the "Conversation of
+Authors" (it is he, be it remembered, who has handed down to us the
+immortal debate at one of Lamb's Wednesdays on "People one would Like
+to have Seen"), and saying excellent things about it. Then he changes
+the key, and tells us that the conversation of "Gentlemen and Men of
+Fashion" will not do. Perhaps not; but the wicked critic stops and asks
+himself whether Hazlitt had known much of the conversation of "Gentlemen
+and Men of Fashion"? We can find no record of any such experiences of
+his. In his youth he had no opportunity: in his middle age he was
+notoriously recalcitrant to all the usages of society, would not dress,
+and scarcely ever dined out except with a few cronies. This does not
+seem to be the best qualification for a pronouncement on the question.
+Yet this same essay is full of admirable things, the most admirable
+being, perhaps, the description of the man who "had you at an advantage
+by never understanding you." I find, indeed, in looking through my
+copies of his books, re-read for the purpose of this paper, an
+innumerable and bewildering multitude of essays, of passages, and of
+short phrases, marked for reference. In the seven volumes above referred
+to (to which, as has been said, not a little has to be added) there must
+be hundreds of separate articles and conversations; not counting as
+separate the short maxims and thoughts of the _Characteristics_, and one
+or two other similar collections, in which, indeed, several passages are
+duplicated from the Essays. At least two out of every three are
+characteristic of Hazlitt: not one in any twenty is not well worth
+reading and, if occasion served, commenting on. They are, indeed, as far
+from being consecutive as (according to the Yankee) was the conversation
+of Edgar Poe; and the multitude and diversity of their subjects fit them
+better for occasional than for continuous reading.[13] Perhaps, if any
+single volume deserves to be recommended to a beginner in Hazlitt it had
+better be _The Plain Speaker_, where there is the greatest range of
+subject, and where the author is seen in an almost complete repertory of
+his numerous parts. But there is not much to choose between it and _The
+Round Table_ (where, however, the papers are shorter as a rule),
+_Table-Talk_, and the volume called, though not by the author, _Sketches
+and Essays_. I myself care considerably less for the _Conversations with
+Northcote_, the personal element in which has often attracted readers;
+and the attempts referred to above as _Characteristics_, avowedly in the
+manner of La Rochefoucauld, are sometimes merely extracts from the
+essays, and rarely have the self-containedness, the exact and chiselled
+proportion, which distinguishes the true _pensee_ as La Rochefoucauld
+and some other Frenchmen, and as Hobbes perhaps alone of Englishmen,
+wrote it. But to criticise these numerous papers is like sifting a
+cluster of motes, and the mere enumeration of their titles would fill
+up more than half the room which I have to spare. They must be
+criticised or characterised in two groups only, the strictly critical
+and the miscellaneous, the latter excluding politics. As for art, I do
+not pretend to be more than a connoisseur according to Blake's
+definition, that is to say, one who refuses to let himself be
+connoisseured out of his senses. I shall only, in reference to this last
+subject, observe that the singularly germinal character of Hazlitt's
+work is noticeable here also; for no one who reads the essay on Nicolas
+Poussin will fail to add Mr. Ruskin to Hazlitt's fair herd of literary
+children.
+
+His criticism is scattered through all the volumes of general essays;
+but is found by itself in the series of lectures, or essays (they are
+rather the latter than the former), on the characters of Shakespeare, on
+Elizabethan Literature, on the English Poets, and on the English Comic
+Writers. I cannot myself help thinking that in these four Hazlitt is at
+his best; though there may be nothing so attractive to the general, and
+few such brilliant passages as may be found in the "Farewell to
+Essay-writing," in the paper on Poussin, in "Going to a Fight," in
+"Going a Journey," and others of the same class. The reason of the
+preference is by no means a greater interest in the subject of one
+class, than in the subject of another. It is that, from the very nature
+of the case, Hazlitt's unlucky prejudices interfere much more seldom
+with his literary work. They interfere sometimes, as in the case of
+Sidney, as in some remarks about Coleridge and Wordsworth, and
+elsewhere; but these instances are rare indeed compared with those that
+occur in the other division. On the other hand, there are always present
+Hazlitt's enthusiastic appreciation of what is good in letters, his
+combination of gusto with sound theory as to what is excellent in prose
+and verse, his felicitous method of expression, and the acuteness that
+kept him from that excessive and paradoxical admiration which both Lamb
+and Coleridge affected, and which has gained many more pupils than his
+own moderation. Nothing better has ever been written as a general view
+of the subject than his introduction to his Lectures on Elizabethan
+Literature; and almost all the faults to be found in it are due merely
+to occasional deficiency of information, not to error of judgment. He is
+a little paradoxical on Jonson; but not many critics could furnish a
+happier contrast than his enthusiastic praise of certain passages of
+Beaumont and Fletcher, and his cool toning down of Lamb's extravagant
+eulogy on Ford. He is a little unfair to the Caroline poets; but here
+the great disturbing influence comes in. If his comparison of ancient
+and modern literature is rather weak, that is because Hazlitt was
+anything but widely acquainted with either; and, indeed, it may be said
+in general that wherever he goes wrong, it is not because he judges
+wrongly on known facts, but because he either does not know the facts,
+or is prevented from seeing them by distractions of prejudice. To go
+through his Characters of Shakespeare would be impossible, and besides,
+it is a point of honour for one student of Shakespeare to differ with
+all others. I can only say that I know no critic with whom on this point
+I differ so seldom as with Hazlitt. Even better, perhaps, are the two
+sets of lectures on the Poets and Comic Writers. The generalisations are
+not always sound, for, as must be constantly repeated, Hazlitt was not
+widely read in literatures other than his own, and his standpoint for
+comparison is therefore rather insufficient. But take him where his
+information is sufficient, and how good he is! Of the famous four
+treatments of the dramatists of the Restoration--Lamb's, Hazlitt's,
+Leigh Hunt's, and Macaulay's--his seems to me by far the best. In regard
+to Butler, his critical sense has for once triumphed over his political
+prejudice; unless some very unkind devil's advocate should suggest that
+the supposed ingratitude of the King to Butler reconciled Hazlitt to
+him. He is admirable on Burns; and nothing can be more unjust or sillier
+than to pretend, as has been pretended, that Burns's loose morality
+engaged Hazlitt on his side. De Quincey was often a very acute critic,
+but anything more uncritical than his attack on Hazlitt's comparison of
+Burns and Wordsworth in relation to passion, it would be difficult to
+find. Hazlitt "could forgive Swift for being a Tory," he tells us--which
+is at any rate more than some other people, who have a better reputation
+for impartiality than his, seem to have been able to do. No one has
+written better than he on Pope, who still seems to have the faculty of
+distorting some critical judgments. His chapter on the English novelists
+(that is to say, those of the last century) is perhaps the best thing
+ever written on the subject; and is particularly valuable nowadays when
+there is a certain tendency to undervalue Smollett in order to exalt
+Fielding, who certainly needs no such illegitimate and uncritical
+leverage. I do not think that he is, on the whole, unjust to Campbell;
+though his Gallican, or rather Napoleonic mania made him commit the
+literary crime of slighting "The Battle of the Baltic." But in all his
+criticism of English literature (and he has attempted little else,
+except by way of digression) he is, for the critic, a study never to be
+wearied of, always to be profited by. His very aberrations are often
+more instructive than other men's right-goings; and if he sometimes
+fails to detect or acknowledge a beauty, he never praises a defect.
+
+It is less easy to sum up the merits of the miscellaneous pieces, for
+the very obvious reason that they can hardly be brought under any
+general form or illustrated by any small number of typical instances.
+Perhaps the best way of "sampling" this undisciplined multitude is to
+select a few papers by name, so as to show the variety of Hazlitt's
+interests. The one already mentioned, "On Going to a Fight," which
+shocked some proprieties even in its own day, ranks almost first; but
+the reader should take care to accompany it with the official record of
+that celebrated contest between Neate and the Gasman. All fights are
+good reading; but this particular effort of Hazlitt's makes one sigh for
+a _Boxiana_ or _Pugilistica_ edited by him. Next, I think, must be
+ranked "On Going a Journey," with its fine appreciation of solitary
+travelling which does not exclude reminiscences of pleasant journeys in
+company. But these two, with the article on Poussin and the "Farewell to
+Essay-writing," have been so often mentioned that it may seem as if
+Hazlitt's store were otherwise poor. Nothing could be farther from the
+truth. The "Character of Cobbett" is the best thing the writer ever did
+of the kind, and the best thing known to me on Cobbett. "Of the Past and
+the Future" is perhaps the height of the popular metaphysical style--the
+style from which, as was noted, Hazlitt may never have got free as far
+as philosophising is concerned, but of which he is a master. "On the
+Indian Jugglers" is a capital example of what may be called improving a
+text; and it contains some of the most interesting and genial examples
+of Hazlitt's honest delight in games such as rackets and fives, a
+delight which (heaven help his critics) was frequently regarded at the
+time as "low." "On Paradox and Commonplace" is less remarkable for its
+contribution to the discussion of the subject, than as exhibiting one of
+Hazlitt's most curious critical megrims--his dislike of Shelley. I wish
+I could think that he had any better reason for this than the fact that
+Shelley was a gentleman by birth and his own contemporary. Most
+disappointing of all, perhaps, is "On Criticism," which the reader (as
+his prophetic soul, if he is a sensible reader, has probably warned him
+beforehand) soon finds to be little but an open or covert diatribe
+against the contemporary critics whom Hazlitt did not like, or who did
+not like Hazlitt. The apparently promising "On the Knowledge of
+Character" chiefly yields the remark that Hazlitt could not have admired
+Caesar if he had resembled (in face) the Duke of Wellington. But "My
+first Acquaintance with Poets" is again a masterpiece; and to me, at
+least, "Merry England" is perfect. Hazlitt is almost the only person up
+to his own day who dared to vindicate the claims of nonsense, though he
+seems to have talked and written as little of it as most men. The
+chapter "On Editors" is very amusing, though perhaps not entirely in the
+way in which Hazlitt meant it; but I cannot think him happy "On
+Footmen," or on "The Conversation of Lords," for reasons already
+sufficiently stated. A sun-dial is a much more promising subject than a
+broomstick, yet many essays might be written on sun-dials without there
+being any fear of Hazlitt's being surpassed. Better still is "On Taste,"
+which, if the twenty or thirty best papers in Hazlitt were collected
+(and a most charming volume they would make), would rank among the very
+best. "On Reading New Books" contains excellent sense, but perhaps is,
+as Hazlitt not seldom is, a little deficient in humour; while the
+absence of any necessity for humour makes the discussion "Whether Belief
+is Voluntary" a capital one. Hazlitt is not wholly of the opinion of
+that Ebrew Jew who said to M. Renan, "_On fait ce qu'on veut mais on
+croit ce qu'on peut._"
+
+The shorter papers of the _Round Table_ yield perhaps a little less
+freely in the way of specially notable examples. They come closer to a
+certain kind of Addisonian essay, a short lay-sermon, without the
+charming divagation of the longer articles. To see how nearly Hazlitt
+can reach the level of a rather older and cleverer George Osborne, turn
+to the paper here on Classical Education. He is quite orthodox for a
+wonder: perhaps because opinion was beginning to veer a little to the
+side of Useful Knowledge; but he is as dry as his own favourite biscuit,
+and as guiltless of freshness. He is best in this volume where he notes
+particular points such as Kean's Iago, Milton's versification (here,
+however, he does not get quite to the heart of the matter), "John
+Buncle," and "The Excursion." In this last he far outsteps the scanty
+confines of the earlier papers of the _Round Table_, and allows himself
+that score of pages which seems to be with so many men the normal limit
+of a good essay. Of his shortest style one sample from "Trifles light as
+Air" is so characteristic, in more ways than one, that it must be quoted
+whole.
+
+    I am by education and conviction inclined to Republicanism and
+    Puritanism. In America they have both. But I confess I feel a
+    little staggered as to the practical efficacy and saving grace
+    of first principles, when I ask myself, Can they throughout the
+    United States from Boston to Baltimore, produce a single head
+    like one of Titian's Venetian Nobles, nurtured in all the pride
+    of aristocracy and all the blindness of popery? Of all the
+    branches of political economy the human face is perhaps the best
+    criterion of value.
+
+If I were editing Hazlitt's works I should put these sentences on the
+title-page of every volume; for, dogmatist as he thought himself, it is
+certain that he was in reality purely aesthetic, though, I need hardly
+say, not in the absurd sense, or no-sense, which modern misuse of
+language has chosen to fix on the word. Therefore he is very good (where
+few are good at all) on Dreams; and, being a great observer of himself,
+singularly instructive on Application to Study. "On Londoners and
+Country People" is one of his liveliest efforts; and the pique at his
+own inclusion in the Cockney School fortunately evaporates in some
+delightful reminiscences, including one of the few classic passages on
+the great game of marbles. His remarks on the company at the
+Southampton coffee-house, which have been often and much praised, please
+me less: they are too much like attempts in the manner of the Queen Anne
+men, and Hazlitt is always best when he imitates nobody. "Hot and Cold"
+(which might have been more intelligibly called "North and South") is
+distinctly curious, bringing out again what may be called Hazlitt's
+fanciful observation; and it may generally be said that, however
+alarming and however suggestive of commonplace the titles "On
+Respectable People," "On People of Sense," "On Novelty and Familiarity,"
+may be, Hazlitt may almost invariably be trusted to produce something
+that is not commonplace, that is not laboured paradox, that is eminently
+literature.
+
+I know that a haphazard catalogue of the titles of essays (for it is
+little more) such as fills the last paragraph or two may not seem very
+succulent. But within moderate space there is really no other means of
+indicating the author's extraordinary range of subject, and at the same
+time the pervading excellence of his treatment. To exemplify a
+difference which has sometimes been thought to require explanation, his
+work as regards system, connection with anything else, immediate
+occasion (which with him was generally what his friend, Mr. Skimpole,
+would have called "pounds") is always Journalism: in result, it is
+almost always Literature. Its staple subjects, as far as there can be
+said to be any staple where the thread is so various, are very much
+those which the average newspaper-writer since his time has had to deal
+with--politics, book-reviewing, criticism on plays and pictures, social
+etceteras, the minor morals, the miscellaneous incidents of daily life.
+It is true that Hazlitt was only for a short time in the straitest
+shafts, the most galling traces, of periodical hack-work. His practice
+was rather that of George Warrington, who worked till he had filled his
+purse, and then lay idle till he had emptied it. He used (an indulgence
+agreeable in the mouth, but bitter in the belly) very frequently to
+receive money beforehand for work which was not yet done. Although
+anything but careful, he was never an extravagant man, his tastes being
+for the most part simple; and he never, even during his first married
+life, seems to have been burdened by an expensive household. Moreover,
+he got rid of Mrs. Hazlitt on very easy terms. Still he must constantly
+have had on him the sensation that he lived by his work, and by that
+only. It seems to be (as far as one can make it out) this sensation
+which more than anything else jades and tires what some very
+metaphorical men of letters are pleased to call their Pegasus. But
+Hazlitt, though he served in the shafts, shows little trace of the
+harness. He has frequent small carelessnesses of style, but he would
+probably have had as many or more if he had been the easiest and
+gentlest of easy-writing gentlemen. He never seems to have allowed
+himself to be cramped in his choice of his subjects, and wrote for the
+editors, of whom he speaks so amusingly, with almost as much freedom of
+speech as if he had had a private press of his own, and had issued
+dainty little tractates on Dutch paper to be fought for by bibliophiles.
+His prejudices, his desultoriness, his occasional lack of correctness of
+fact (he speaks of "Fontaine's Translation" of AEsop, and makes use of
+the extraordinary phrase, "The whole Council of Trent with Father Paul
+at their head," than which a more curious blunder is hardly
+conceivable), his wayward inconsistencies, his freaks of bad taste,
+would in all probability have been aggravated rather than alleviated by
+the greater freedom and less responsibility of an independent or an
+endowed student. The fact is that he was a born man of letters, and that
+he could not help turning whatsoever he touched into literature, whether
+it was criticism on books or on pictures, a fight or a supper, a game at
+marbles, a political diatribe, or the report of a literary conversation.
+He doubtless had favourite subjects; but I do not know that it can be
+said that he treated one class of subjects better than another, with the
+exception that I must hold him to have been first of all a literary
+critic. He certainly could not write a work of great length; for the
+faults of his _Life of Napoleon_ are grave even when its view of the
+subject is taken as undisputed, and it holds among his productions about
+the same place (that of longest and worst) which the book it was
+designed to counterwork holds among Scott's. Nor was he, as it seems to
+me, quite at home in very short papers--in papers of the length of the
+average newspaper article. What he could do, as hardly any other man has
+ever done it in England, was a _causerie_ of about the same length as
+Sainte-Beuve's or a little shorter, less limited in range, but also less
+artfully proportioned than the great Frenchman's literary and historical
+studies, giving scope for considerable digression, but coming to an end
+before the author was wearied of his subject, or had exhausted the fresh
+thoughts and the happy borrowings and analogies which he had ready for
+it. Of what is rather affectedly called "architectonic," Hazlitt has
+nothing. No essay of his is ever an exhaustive or even a symmetrical
+treatment of its nominal, or of any, theme. He somewhere speaks of
+himself as finding it easy to go on stringing pearls when he has once
+got the string; but, for my part, I should say that the string was much
+more doubtful than the pearls. Except in a very few set pieces, his
+whole charm consists in the succession of irregular, half-connected, but
+unending and infinitely variegated thoughts, fancies, phrases,
+quotations, which he pours forth not merely at a particular "Open
+Sesame," but at "Open barley," "Open rye," or any other grain in the
+corn-chandler's list. No doubt the charm of these is increased by the
+fact that they are never quite haphazard, never absolutely promiscuous,
+despite their desultory arrangement; no doubt also a certain additional
+interest arises from the constant revelation which they make of
+Hazlitt's curious personality, his enthusiastic appreciation flecked
+with spots of grudging spite, his clear intellect clouded with
+prejudice, his admiration of greatness and nobility of character
+co-existing with the faculty of doing very mean and even disgraceful
+things, his abundant relish of life contrasted with almost constant
+repining. He must have been one of the most uncomfortable of all English
+men of letters, who can be called great, to know as a friend. He is
+certainly, to those who know him only as readers, one of the most
+fruitful both in instruction and in delight.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[12] For some further remarks on this duel as it concerns Lockhart see
+Appendix.
+
+[13] Since this paper was first published Mr. Alexander Ireland has
+edited a most excellent selection from Hazlitt.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+MOORE
+
+
+It would be interesting, though perhaps a little impertinent, to put to
+any given number of well-informed persons under the age of forty or
+fifty the sudden query, who was Thomas Brown the Younger? And it is very
+possible that a majority of them would answer that he had something to
+do with Rugby. It is certain that with respect to that part of his work
+in which he was pleased so to call himself, Moore is but little known.
+The considerable mass of his hack-work has gone whither all hack-work
+goes, fortunately enough for those of us who have to do it. The vast
+monument erected to him by his pupil, friend, and literary executor,
+Lord Russell, or rather Lord John Russell, is a monument of such a
+Cyclopean order of architecture, both in respect of bulk and in respect
+of style, that most honest biographers and critics acknowledge
+themselves to have explored its recesses but cursorily. Less of him,
+even as a poet proper, is now read than of any of the brilliant group
+of poets of which he was one, with the possible exceptions of Crabbe and
+Rogers; while, more unfortunate than Crabbe, he has had no Mr. Courthope
+to come to his rescue. But he has recently had what is an unusual thing
+for an English poet, a French biographer.[14] I shall not have very much
+to say of the details of M. Vallat's very creditable and useful
+monograph. It would be possible, if I were merely reviewing it, to pick
+out some of the curious errors of hasty deduction which are rarely
+wanting in a book of its nationality. If (and no shame to him) Moore's
+father sold cheese and whisky, _le whisky d'Irlande_ was no doubt his
+staple commodity in the one branch, but scarcely _le fromage de Stilton_
+in the other. An English lawyer's studies are not even now, except at
+the universities and for purposes of perfunctory examination, very much
+in "Justinian," and in Moore's time they were still less so. And if
+Bromham Church is near Sloperton, then it will follow as the night the
+day that it is not _dans le Bedfordshire_. But these things matter very
+little. They are found, in their different kinds, in all books; and if
+we English bookmakers (at least some of us) are not likely to make a
+Bordeaux wine merchant sell Burgundy as his chief commodity, or say that
+a village near Amiens is _dans le Bearn_, we no doubt do other things
+quite as bad. On the whole, M. Vallat's sketch, though of moderate
+length, is quite the soberest and most trustworthy sketch of Moore's
+life and of his books, as books merely, that I know. In matters of pure
+criticism M. Vallat is less blameless. He quotes authorities with that
+apparent indifference to, or even ignorance of, their relative value
+which is so yawning a pit for the feet of the foreigner in all cases;
+and perhaps a wider knowledge of English poetry in general would have
+been a better preparation for the study of Moore's in particular.
+"Never," says M. Renan very wisely, "never does a foreigner satisfy the
+nation whose history he writes"; and this is as true of literary history
+as of history proper. But M. Vallat satisfies us in a very considerable
+degree; and even putting aside the question whether he is satisfactory
+altogether, he has given us quite sufficient text in the mere fact that
+he has bestowed upon Moore an amount of attention and competence which
+no compatriot of the author of "Lalla Rookh" has cared to bestow for
+many years.
+
+I shall also here take the liberty of neglecting a very great--as far as
+bulk goes, by far the greatest--part of Moore's own performance. He has
+inserted so many interesting autobiographical particulars in the
+prefaces to his complete works, that visits to the great mausoleum of
+the Russell memoirs are rarely necessary, and still more rarely
+profitable. His work for the booksellers was done at a time when the
+best class of such work was much better done than the best class of it
+is now; but it was after all work for the booksellers. His _History of
+Ireland_, his _Life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald_, etc., may be pretty
+exactly gauged by saying that they are a good deal better than Scott's
+work of a merely similar kind (in which it is hardly necessary to say
+that I do not include the _Tales of a Grandfather_ or the introductions
+to the Dryden, the Swift, and the Ballantyne novels), not nearly so good
+as Southey's, and not quite so good as Campbell's. The Life of Byron
+holds a different place. With the poems, or some of them, it forms the
+only part of Moore's literary work which is still read; and though it is
+read much more for its substance than for its execution, it is still a
+masterly performance of a very difficult task. The circumstances which
+brought it about are well known, and no discussion of them would be
+possible without plunging into the Byron controversy generally, which
+the present writer most distinctly declines to do. But these
+circumstances, with other things among which Moore's own comparative
+faculty for the business may be not unjustly mentioned, prevent it from
+taking rank at all approaching that of Boswell's or Lockhart's
+inimitable biographies. The chief thing to note in it as regards Moore
+himself, is the help it gives in a matter to which we shall have to
+refer again, his attitude towards those whom his time still called "the
+great."
+
+And so we are left with the poems--not an inconsiderable companion
+seeing that its stature is some seven hundred small quarto pages closely
+packed with verses in double columns. Part of this volume is, however,
+devoted to the "Epicurean," a not unremarkable example of ornate prose
+in many respects resembling the author's verse. Indeed, as close readers
+of Moore know, there exists an unfinished verse form of it which, in
+style and general character, is not unlike a more serious "Lalla Rookh."
+As far as poetry goes, almost everything that will be said of "Lalla
+Rookh" might be said of "Alciphron": this latter, however, is a little
+more Byronic than its more famous sister, and in that respect not quite
+so successful.
+
+Moore's life, which is not uninteresting as a key to his personal
+character, is very fairly treated by M. Vallat, chiefly from the poet's
+own authority; but it need not detain us very long. He was born at
+Dublin on 28th May 1779. There is no mystery about his origin. His
+father, John Moore, was a small grocer and liquor-shop keeper who
+received later the place of barrack-master from a patron of his son. The
+mother, Anastasia Codd, was a Wexford girl, and seems to have been well
+educated and somewhat above her husband in station. Thomas was sent to
+several private schools, where he appears to have attained to some
+scholarship and to have early practised composition in the tongue of
+the hated Saxon. When he was fourteen, the first measure of Catholic
+Emancipation opened Trinity College to him, and that establishment, "the
+intellectual eye of Ireland" as Sir William Harcourt has justly called
+it, received him a year later. The "silent sister" has fostered an
+always genial, if sometimes inexact, fashion of scholarship, in which
+Moore's talents were well suited to shine, and a pleasant social
+atmosphere wherein he was also not misplaced. But the time drew near to
+'98, and Moore, although he had always too much good sense to dip deeply
+into sedition, was, from his sentimental habits, likely to run some risk
+of being thought to have dipped in it. Although it is certain that he
+would have regarded what is called Nationalism in our days with disgust
+and horror, he cannot be acquitted of using, to the end of his life, the
+loosest of language on subjects where precision is particularly to be
+desired. Robert Emmet was his contemporary, and the action which the
+authorities took was but too well justified by the outbreak of the
+insurrection later. A Commission was named for purifying the college.
+Its head was Lord Clare, one of the greatest of Irishmen, the base or
+ignorant vilifying of whom by some persons in these days has been one of
+the worst results of the Home Rule movement. It had a rather comic
+assessor in Dr. Duigenan, the same, I believe, of whom it has been
+recorded that, at an earlier stage of his academic career and when a
+junior Fellow, he threatened to "bulge the Provost's eye." The oath was
+tendered to each examinate, and on the day before Moore's appearance
+Emmet and others had gone by default, while it was at least whispered
+that there had been treachery in the camp. Moore's own performance was,
+by his own account, heroic and successful: by another, which he very
+fairly gives, a little less heroic but still successful. Both show
+clearly that Clare was nothing like the stage-tyrant which the
+imagination of the seditious has chosen to represent him as being. That
+M. Vallat should talk rather foolishly about Emmet was to be expected;
+for Emmet's rhetorical rubbish was sure to impose, and has always
+imposed, on Frenchmen. The truth of course is that this young
+person--though one of those whom every humane man would like to keep
+mewed up till they arrived, if they ever did arrive, which is
+improbable, at years of discretion--was one of the most mischievous of
+agitators. He was one of those who light a bonfire and then are shocked
+at its burning, who throw a kingdom into anarchy and misery and think
+that they are cleared by a reference to Harmodius and Aristogeiton. It
+is one of the most fearful delights of the educated Tory to remember
+what the grievance of Harmodius and Aristogeiton really was. Moore (who
+had something of the folly of Emmet, but none of his reckless conceit)
+escaped, and his family must have been exceedingly glad to send him
+over to the Isle of Britain. He entered at the Middle Temple in 1799,
+but hardly made even a pretence of reading law. His actual experience is
+one of those puzzles which continually meet the student of literary
+history in the days when society was much smaller, the makers of
+literature fewer, and the resources of patronage greater. Moore toiled
+not, neither did he spin. He slipped, apparently on the mere strength of
+an ordinary introduction, into the good graces of Lord Moira, who
+introduced him to the exiled Royal Family of France, and to the richest
+members of the Whig aristocracy--the Duke of Bedford, the Marquis of
+Lansdowne and others, not to mention the Prince of Wales himself. The
+young Irishman had indeed, as usual, his "proposals" in his
+pocket--proposals for a translation of Anacreon which appeared in May
+1800. The thing which thus founded one of the easiest, if not the most
+wholly triumphant, of literary careers is not a bad thing. The original,
+now abandoned as a clever though late imitation, was known even in
+Moore's time to be in parts of very doubtful authenticity, but it still
+remains, as an original, a very pretty thing. Moore's version is not
+quite so pretty, and is bolstered out with paraphrase and amplification
+to a rather intolerable extent. But there was considerable
+fellow-feeling between the author, whoever he was, and the translator,
+and the result is not despicable. Still there is no doubt that work as
+good or better might appear now, and the author would be lucky if he
+cleared a hundred pounds and a favourable review or two by the
+transaction. Moore was made for life. These things happen at one time
+and do not happen at another. We are inclined to accept them as ultimate
+facts into which it is useless to inquire. There does not appear to be
+among the numerous fixed laws of the universe any one which regulates
+the proportion of literary desert to immediate reward, and it is on the
+whole well that it should be so. At any rate the publication increased
+Moore's claims as a "lion," and encouraged him to publish next year the
+_Poems of the late Thomas Little_ (he always stuck to the Christian
+name), which put up his fame and rather put down his character.
+
+In later editions Thomas Little has been so much subjected to the
+fig-leaf and knife that we have known readers who wondered why on earth
+any one should ever have objected to him. He was a good deal more
+uncastrated originally, but there never was much harm in him. It is true
+that the excuse made by Sterne for Tristram Shandy, and often repeated
+for Moore, does not quite apply. There is not much guilt in Little, but
+there is certainly very little innocence. He knows that a certain amount
+of not too gross indecency will raise a snigger, and, like Voltaire and
+Sterne himself, he sets himself to raise it. But he does not do it very
+wickedly. The propriety of the nineteenth century, moreover, had not
+then made the surprisingly rapid strides of a few years later, and some
+time had to pass before Moore was to go out with Jeffrey, and nearly
+challenge Byron, for questioning his morality. The rewards of his
+harmless iniquity were at hand; and in the autumn of 1803 he was made
+Secretary of the Admiralty in Bermuda. Bermuda, it is said, is an
+exceedingly pleasant place; but either there is no Secretary of the
+Admiralty there now, or they do not give the post to young men
+four-and-twenty years old who have written two very thin volumes of
+light verses. The Bermoothes are not still vexed with that kind of Civil
+Servant. The appointment was not altogether fortunate for Moore,
+inasmuch as his deputy (for they not only gave nice berths to men of
+letters then, but let them have deputies) embezzled public and private
+moneys, with disastrous results to his easy-going principal. But for the
+time it was all, as most things were with Moore, plain sailing. He went
+out in a frigate, and was the delight of the gun-room. As soon as he got
+tired of the Bermudas, he appointed his deputy and went to travel in
+America, composing large numbers of easy poems. In October 1804 he was
+back in England, still voyaging at His Majesty's expense, and having
+achieved his fifteen months' trip wholly on those terms. Little is heard
+of him for the next two years, and then the publication of his American
+and other poems, with some free reflections on the American character,
+brought down on him the wrath of _The Edinburgh_, and provoked the
+famous leadless or half-leadless duel at Chalk Farm. It was rather hard
+on Moore, if the real cause of his castigation was that he had offended
+democratic principles, while the ostensible cause was that, as Thomas
+Little, he had five years before written loose and humorous verses. So
+thinks M. Vallat, with whom we are not wholly disposed to agree, for
+Jeffrey, though a Whig, was no Democrat, and he was a rather strict
+moralist. However, no harm came of the meeting in any sense, though its
+somewhat burlesque termination made the irreverent laugh. It was indeed
+not fated that Moore should smell serious powder, though his courage
+seems to have been fully equal to any such occasion. The same year
+brought him two unquestioned and unalloyed advantages, the friendship of
+Rogers and the beginning of the Irish Melodies, from which he reaped not
+a little solid benefit, and which contain by far his highest and most
+lasting poetry. It is curious, but by no means unexampled, that, at the
+very time at which he was thus showing that he had found his right way,
+he also diverged into one wholly wrong--that of the serious and very
+ineffective Satires, "Corruption," "Intolerance," and others. The year
+1809 brought "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" with a gibe from
+Byron and a challenge from Moore. But Moore's challenges were fated to
+have no other result than making the challenged his friends for life.
+All this time he had been more or less "about town." In 1811 he married
+Elizabeth Dyke ("Bessy"), an actress of virtue and beauty, and wrote the
+very inferior comic opera of "The Blue Stocking." Lord Moira gave the
+pair a home first in his own house, then at Kegworth near Donington,
+whence they moved to Ashbourne. Moore was busy now. The politics of "The
+Two-penny Postbag" are of course sometimes dead enough to us; but
+sometimes also they are not, and then the easy grace of the satire,
+which is always pungent and never venomed, is not much below Canning.
+Its author also did a good deal of other work of the same kind, besides
+beginning to review for _The Edinburgh_. Considering that he was in a
+way making his bread and butter by lampooning, however good-humouredly,
+the ruler of his country, he seems to have been a little unreasonable in
+feeling shocked that Lord Moira, on going as viceroy to India, did not
+provide for him. In the first place he was provided for already; and in
+the second place you cannot reasonably expect to enjoy the pleasures of
+independence and those of dependence at the same time. At the end of
+1817 he left Mayfield (his cottage near Ashbourne) and Lord Moira, for
+Lord Lansdowne and Sloperton, a cottage near Bowood, the end of the one
+sojourn and the beginning of the other being distinguished by the
+appearance of his two best works, next to the Irish Melodies--"Lalla
+Rookh" and "The Fudge Family at Paris." His first and almost his only
+heavy stroke of ill-luck now came on him: his deputy at Bermuda levanted
+with some six thousand pounds, for which Moore was liable. Many friends
+came to his aid, and after some delay and negotiations, during which he
+had to go abroad, Lord Lansdowne paid what was necessary. But Moore
+afterwards paid Lord Lansdowne, which makes a decided distinction
+between his conduct and that of Theodore Hook in a similar case.
+
+Although the days of Moore lasted for half an ordinary lifetime after
+this, they saw few important events save the imbroglio over the Byron
+memoirs. They saw also the composition of a great deal of literature and
+journalism, all very well paid, notwithstanding which, Moore seems to
+have been always in a rather unintelligible state of pecuniary distress.
+That he made his parents an allowance, as some allege in explanation,
+will not in the least account for this; for, creditable as it was in him
+to make it, this allowance did not exceed one hundred pounds a year. He
+must have spent little in an ordinary way, for his Sloperton
+establishment was of the most modest character, while his wife was an
+excellent manager, and never went into society. Probably he might have
+endorsed, if he had been asked, the great principle which somebody or
+other has formulated, that the most expensive way of living is staying
+in other peoples houses. At any rate his condition was rather precarious
+till 1835, when Lord John Russell and Lord Lansdowne obtained for him a
+Civil List pension of three hundred pounds a year. In his very last days
+this was further increased by an additional hundred a year to his wife.
+His end was not happy. The softening of the brain, which set in about
+1848, and which had been preceded for some time by premonitory symptoms,
+can hardly, as in the cases of Scott and Southey, be set down to
+overwork, for though Moore had not been idle, his literary life had been
+mere child's play to theirs. He died on 26th February 1852.
+
+Of Moore's character not much need be said, nor need what is said be
+otherwise than favourable. Not only to modern tastes, but to the
+sturdier tastes of his own day, and even of the days immediately before
+his, there was a little too much of the parasite and the hanger-on about
+him. It is easy to say that a man of his talents, when he had once
+obtained a start, might surely have gone his own way and lived his own
+life, without taking up the position of a kind of superior gamekeeper or
+steward at rich men's gates. But race, fashion, and a good many other
+things have to be taken into account; and it is fair to Moore to
+remember that he was, as it were from the first, bound to the
+chariot-wheels of "the great," and could hardly liberate himself from
+them without churlishness and violence. Moreover, it cannot possibly be
+denied by any fair critic that if he accepted to some extent the awkward
+position of led-poet, he showed in it as much independence as was
+compatible with the function. Both in money matters, in his language to
+his patrons, and in a certain general but indefinable tone of behaviour,
+he contrasts not less favourably than remarkably, both with the
+ultra-Tory Hook, to whom we have already compared him, and with the
+ultra-Radical Leigh Hunt. Moore had as little of Wagg as he had of
+Skimpole about him; though he allowed his way of life to compare in some
+respects perilously with theirs. It is only necessary to look at his
+letters to Byron--always ready enough to treat as spaniels those of his
+inferiors in station who appeared to be of the spaniel kind--to
+appreciate his general attitude, and his behaviour in this instance is
+by no means different from his behaviour in others. As a politician
+there is no doubt that he at least thought himself to be quite sincere.
+It may be that, if he had been, his political satires would have galled
+Tories more than they did then, and could hardly be read by persons of
+that persuasion with such complete enjoyment as they can now. But the
+insincerity was quite unconscious, and indeed can hardly be said to have
+been insincerity at all. Moore had not a political head, and in English
+as in Irish politics his beliefs were probably not founded on any
+clearly comprehended principles. But such as they were he held to them
+firmly. Against his domestic character nobody has ever said anything;
+and it is sufficient to observe that not a few of the best as well as of
+the greatest men of his time, Scott as well as Byron, Lord John Russell
+as well as Lord Moira, appear not only to have admired his abilities and
+liked his social qualities, but to have sincerely respected his
+character. And so we may at last find ourselves alone with the plump
+volume of poems in which we shall hardly discover with the amiable M.
+Vallat "the greatest lyric poet of England," but in which we shall find
+a poet certainly, and if not a very great poet, at any rate a poet who
+has done many things well, and one particular thing better than anybody
+else.
+
+The volume opens with "Lalla Rookh," a proceeding which, if not
+justified by chronology, is completely justified by the facts that Moore
+was to his contemporaries the author of that poem chiefly, and that it
+is by far the most considerable thing not only in mere bulk, but in
+arrangement, plan, and style, that he ever did. Perhaps I am not quite a
+fair judge of "Lalla Rookh." I was brought up in what is called a strict
+household where, though the rule was not, as far as I can remember,
+enforced by any penalties, it was a point of honour that in the nursery
+and school-room none but "Sunday books" should be read on Sunday. But
+this severity was tempered by one of the easements often occurring in a
+world which, if not the best, is certainly not the worst of all possible
+worlds. For the convenience of servants, or for some other reason, the
+children were much more in the drawing-room on Sundays than on any other
+day, and it was an unwritten rule that any book that lived in the
+drawing-room was fit Sunday-reading. The consequence was that from the
+time I could read, till childish things were put away, I used to spend a
+considerable part of the first day of the week in reading and re-reading
+a collection of books, four of which were Scott's poems, "Lalla Rookh,"
+_The Essays of Elia_ (First Edition,--I have got it now), and Southey's
+_Doctor_. Therefore it may be that I rank "Lalla Rookh" rather too high.
+At the same time, I confess that it still seems to me a very respectable
+poem indeed of the second rank. Of course it is artificial. The parade
+of second, or third, or twentieth-hand learning in the notes makes one
+smile, and the whole reminds one (as I daresay it has reminded many
+others before) of a harp of the period with the gilt a little tarnished,
+the ribbons more than a little faded, and the silk stool on which the
+young woman in ringlets used to sit much worn. All this is easy
+metaphorical criticism, if it is criticism at all. For I am not sure
+that, when the last age has got a little farther off from our
+descendants, they will see anything more ludicrous in such a harp than
+we see in the faded spinets of a generation earlier still. But much
+remains to Lalla if not to Feramorz. The prose interludes have lost none
+of their airy grace. Even Mr. Burnand has not been able to make Mokanna
+ridiculous, nor have the recent accounts of the actual waste of desert
+and felt huts banished at least the poetical beauty of "Merou's bright
+palaces and groves." There are those who laugh at the bower of roses by
+Bendemeer's stream: I do not. "Paradise and the Peri" is perhaps the
+prettiest purely sentimental poem that English or any other language can
+show. "The Fire Worshippers" are rather long, but there is a famous
+fight--more than one indeed--in them to relieve the monotony. For "The
+Light of the Harem" alone I have never been able to get up much
+enthusiasm; but even "The Light of the Harem" is a great deal better
+than Moore's subsequent attempt in the style of "Lalla Rookh," or
+something like it, "The Loves of the Angels." There is only one good
+thing that I can find to say of that: it is not so bad as the poem which
+similarity of title makes one think of in connection with
+it--Lamartine's disastrous "Chute d'un Ange."
+
+As "Lalla Rookh" is far the most important of Moore's serious poems, so
+"The Fudge Family in Paris" is far the best of his humorous poems. I do
+not forget "The Two-penny Postbag," nor many capital later verses of the
+same kind, the best of which perhaps is the Epistle from Henry of Exeter
+to John of Tchume. But "The Fudge Family" has all the merits of these,
+with a scheme and framework of dramatic character which they lack. Miss
+Biddy and her vanities, Master Bob and his guttling, the eminent
+turncoat Phil Fudge, Esq. himself and his politics, are all excellent.
+But I avow that Phelim Connor is to me the most delightful, though he
+has always been rather a puzzle. If he is intended to be a satire on the
+class now represented by the O'Briens and the McCarthys he is exquisite,
+and it is small wonder that Young Ireland has never loved Moore much.
+But I do not think that Thomas Brown the Younger meant it, or at least
+wholly meant it, as satire, and this is perhaps the best proof of his
+unpractical way of looking at politics. For Phelim Connor is a much more
+damning sketch than any of the Fudges. Vanity, gluttony, the scheming
+intrigues of eld, may not be nice things, but they are common to the
+whole human race. The hollow rant which enjoys the advantages of liberty
+and declaims against the excesses of tyranny is in its perfection Irish
+alone. However this may be, these lighter poems of Moore are great fun,
+and it is no small misfortune that the younger generation of readers
+pays so little attention to them. For they are full of acute observation
+of manners, politics, and society by an accomplished man of the world,
+put into pointed and notable form by an accomplished man of letters. Our
+fathers knew them well, and many a quotation familiar enough at second
+hand is due originally to the Fudge Family in their second appearance
+(not so good, but still good) many years later, to "The Two-penny
+Postbag" and to the long list of miscellaneous satires and skits. The
+last sentence is however to be taken as most strictly excluding
+"Corruption," "Intolerance," and "The Sceptic." "Rhymes on the Road,"
+travel-pieces out of Moore's line, may also be mercifully left aside:
+and "Evenings in Greece;" and "The Summer Fete" (any universal provider
+would have supplied as good a poem with the supper and the rout-seats)
+need not delay the critic and will not extraordinarily delight the
+reader. Not here is Moore's spur of Parnassus to be found.
+
+For that domain of his we must go to the songs which, in extraordinary
+numbers, make up the whole of the divisions headed Irish Melodies,
+National Airs, Sacred Songs, Ballads and Songs, and some of the finest
+of which are found outside these divisions in the longer poems from
+"Lalla Rookh" downwards. The singular musical melody of these pieces has
+never been seriously denied by any one, but it seems to be thought,
+especially nowadays, that because they are musically melodious they are
+not poetical. It is probably useless to protest against a prejudice
+which, where it is not due to simple thoughtlessness or to blind
+following of fashion, argues a certain constitutional defect of the
+understanding powers. But it may be just necessary to repeat pretty
+firmly that any one who regards, even with a tincture of contempt, such
+work (to take various characteristic examples) as Dryden's lyrics, as
+Shenstone's, as Moore's, as Macaulay's Lays, because he thinks that, if
+he did not contemn them, his worship of Shakespeare, of Shelley, of
+Wordsworth would be suspect, is most emphatically not a critic of poetry
+and not even a catholic lover of it. Which said, let us betake ourselves
+to seeing what Moore's special virtue is. It is acknowledged that it
+consists partly in marrying music most happily to verse; but what is not
+so fully acknowledged as it ought to be is, that it also consists in
+marrying music not merely to verse, but to poetry. Among the more
+abstract questions of poetical criticism few are more interesting than
+this, the connection of what may be called musical music with poetical
+music; and it is one which has not been much discussed. Let us take the
+two greatest of Moore's own contemporaries in lyric, the two greatest
+lyrists as some think (I give no opinion on this) in English, and
+compare their work with his. Shelley has the poetical music in an
+unsurpassable and sometimes in an almost unapproached degree, but his
+verse is admittedly very difficult to set to music. I should myself go
+farther and say that it has in it some indefinable quality antagonistic
+to such setting. Except the famous Indian Serenade, I do not know any
+poem of Shelley's that has been set with anything approaching to
+success, and in the best setting that I know of this the honeymoon of
+the marriage turns into a "red moon" before long. That this is not
+merely due to the fact that Shelley likes intricate metres any one who
+examines Moore can see. That it is due merely to the fact that Shelley,
+as we know from Peacock, was almost destitute of any ear for music is
+the obvious and common explanation. But neither will this serve, for we
+happen also to know that Burns, whose lyric, of a higher quality than
+Moore's, assorts with music as naturally as Moore's own, was quite as
+deficient as Shelley in this respect. So was Scott, who could yet write
+admirable songs to be sung. It seems therefore almost impossible, on the
+comparison of these three instances, to deny the existence of some
+peculiar musical music in poetry, which is distinct from poetical music,
+though it may coexist with it or may be separated from it, and which is
+independent both of technical musical training and even of what is
+commonly called "ear" in the poet. That Moore possessed it in probably
+the highest degree, will I think, hardly be denied. It never seems to
+have mattered to him whether he wrote the words for the air or altered
+the air to suit the words. The two fit like a glove, and if, as is
+sometimes the case, the same or a similar poetical measure is heard set
+to another air than Moore's, this other always seems intrusive and
+wrong. He draws attention in one case to the extraordinary irregularity
+of his own metre (an irregularity to which the average pindaric is a
+mere jog-trot), yet the air fits it exactly. Of course the two feet
+which most naturally go to music, the anapaest and the trochee, are
+commonest with him; but the point is that he seems to find no more
+difficulty, if he does not take so much pleasure, in setting
+combinations of a very different kind. Nor is this peculiar gift by any
+means unimportant from the purely poetical side, the side on which the
+verse is looked at without any regard to air or accompaniment. For the
+great drawback to "songs to be sung" in general since Elizabethan days
+(when, as Mr. Arber and Mr. Bullen have shown, it was very different)
+has been the constant tendency of the verse-writer to sacrifice to his
+musical necessities either meaning or poetic sound or both. The climax
+of this is of course reached in the ineffable balderdash which usually
+does duty for the libretto of an opera, but it is quite as noticeable in
+the ordinary songs of the drawing-room. Now Moore is quite free from
+this blame. He may not have the highest and rarest strokes of poetic
+expression; but at any rate he seldom or never sins against either
+reason or poetry for the sake of rhythm and rhyme. He is always the
+master not the servant, the artist not the clumsy craftsman. And this I
+say not by any means as one likely to pardon poetical shortcomings in
+consideration of musical merit, for, shameful as the confession may be,
+a little music goes a long way with me; and what music I do like, is
+rather of the kind opposite to Moore's facile styles. Yet it is easy,
+even from the musical view, to exaggerate his facility. Berlioz is not
+generally thought a barrel-organ composer, and he bestowed early and
+particular pains on Moore.
+
+To many persons, however, the results are more interesting than the
+analysis of their qualities and principles; so let us go to the songs
+themselves. To my fancy the three best of Moore's songs, and three of
+the finest songs in any language, are "Oft in the stilly Night," "When
+in Death I shall calm recline," and "I saw from the Beach." They all
+exemplify what has been pointed out above, the complete adaptation of
+words to music and music to words, coupled with a decidedly high quality
+of poetical merit in the verse, quite apart from the mere music. It can
+hardly be necessary to quote them, for they are or ought to be familiar
+to everybody; but in selecting these three I have no intention of
+distinguishing them in point of general excellence from scores, nay
+hundreds of others. "Go where Glory waits thee" is the first of the
+Irish melodies, and one of those most hackneyed by the enthusiasm of
+bygone Pogsons. But its merit ought in no way to suffer on that account
+with persons who are not Pogsons. It ought to be possible for the
+reader, it is certainly possible for the critic, to dismiss Pogson
+altogether, to wave Pogson off, and to read anything as if it had never
+been read before. If this be done we shall hardly wonder at the delight
+which our fathers, who will not compare altogether badly with ourselves,
+took in Thomas Moore. "When he who adores thee" is supposed on pretty
+good evidence to have been inspired by the most hollow and senseless of
+all pseudo-patriotic delusions, a delusion of which the best thing that
+can be said is that "the pride of thus dying for" it has been about the
+last thing that it ever did inspire, and that most persons who have
+suffered from it have usually had the good sense to take lucrative
+places from the tyrant as soon as they could get them, and to live
+happily ever after. But the basest, the most brutal, and the bloodiest
+of Saxons may recognise in Moore's poem the expression of a possible, if
+not a real, feeling given with infinite grace and pathos. The same
+string reverberates even in the thrice and thousand times hackneyed Harp
+of Tara. "Rich and rare were the Gems she wore" is chiefly comic opera,
+but it is very pretty comic opera; and the two pieces "There is not in
+the wide world" and "How dear to me" exemplify, for the first but by no
+means for the last time, Moore's extraordinary command of the last
+phase of that curious thing called by the century that gave him birth
+Sensibility. We have turned Sensibility out of doors; but he would be a
+rash man who should say that we have not let in seven worse devils of
+the gushing kind in her comparatively innocent room.
+
+Then we may skip not a few pieces, only referring once more to "The
+Legacy" ("When in Death I shall calm recline"), an anacreontic quite
+unsurpassable in its own kind. We need dwell but briefly on such pieces
+as "Believe me if all those endearing young Charms," which is typical of
+much that Moore wrote, but does not reach the true devil-may-care note
+of Suckling, or as "By the Hope within us springing," for Moore's
+war-like pieces are seldom or never good. But with "Love's Young Dream"
+we come back to the style of which it is impossible to say less than
+that it is quite admirable in its kind. Then after a page or two we come
+to the chief _cruces_ of Moore's pathetic and of his comic manner, "The
+Last Rose of Summer," "The Young May Moon," and "The Minstrel Boy." I
+cannot say very much for the last, which is tainted with the unreality
+of all Moore's Tyrtean efforts; but "The Young May Moon" could not be
+better, and I am not going to abandon the Rose, for all her perfume be
+something musty--a _pot-pourri_ rose rather than a fresh one. The song
+of O'Ruark with its altogether fatal climax--
+
+    On our side is virtue and Erin,
+    On theirs is the Saxon and guilt--
+
+(which carries with it the delightful reflection that it was an Irishman
+running away with an Irishwoman that occasioned this sweeping moral
+contrast) must be given up; but surely not so "Oh had we some bright
+little Isle of our own." For indeed if one only had some bright little
+isle of that kind, some _rive fidele ou l'on aime toujours_, and where
+things in general are adjusted to such a state, then would Thomas Moore
+be the Laureate of that bright and tight little island.
+
+But it is alarming to find that we have not yet got through twenty-five
+pages out of some hundred or two, and that the Irish Melodies are not
+yet nearly exhausted. Not a few of the best known of Moore's songs,
+including "Oft in the stilly Night," are to be found in the division of
+National Airs, which is as a whole a triumph of that extraordinary
+genius for setting which has been already noticed. Here is "Flow on thou
+shining River," here the capital "When I touch the String," on which
+Thackeray loved to make variations. But "Oft in the stilly Night" itself
+is far above the others. We do not say "stilly" now: we have been taught
+by Coleridge (who used to use it freely himself before he laughed at it)
+to laugh at "stilly" and "paly" and so forth. But the most acrimonious
+critic may be challenged to point out another weakness of the same kind,
+and on the whole the straightforward simplicity of the phrase equals
+the melody of the rhythm.
+
+The Sacred Songs need not delay us long; for they are not better than
+sacred songs in general, which is saying remarkably little. Perhaps the
+most interesting thing in them is the well-known couplet,
+
+    This world is but a fleeting show
+    For man's illusion given--
+
+which, as has justly been observed, contains one of the most singular
+estimates of the divine purpose anywhere to be found. But Moore might,
+like Mr. Midshipman Easy, have excused himself by remarking, "Ah! well,
+I don't understand these things." The miscellaneous division of Ballads,
+Songs, etc., is much more fruitful. "The Leaf and the Fountain,"
+beginning "Tell me, kind seer, I pray thee," though rather long, is
+singularly good of its kind--the kind of half-narrative ballad. So in a
+lighter strain is "The Indian Bark." Nor is Moore less at home after his
+own fashion in the songs from the Anthology. It is true that the same
+fault which has been found with his Anacreon may be found here, and that
+it is all the more sensible because at least in some cases the originals
+are much higher poetry than the pseudo-Teian. To the form and style of
+Meleager Moore could not pretend; but as these are rather songs on Greek
+motives than translations from the Greek, the slackness and dilution
+matter less. But the strictly miscellaneous division holds some of the
+best work. We could no doubt dispense with the well-known ditty (for
+once very nearly the "rubbish" with which Moore is so often and so
+unjustly charged) where Posada rhymes of necessity to Granada, and
+where, quite against the author's habit, the ridiculous term "Sultana"
+is fished out to do similar duty in reference to the Dulcinea, or rather
+to the Maritornes, of a muleteer. But this is quite an exception, and as
+a rule the facile verse is as felicitous as it is facile. Perhaps no one
+stands out very far above the rest; perhaps all have more or less the
+mark of easy variations on a few well-known themes. The old comparison
+that they are as numerous as motes, as bright, as fleeting, and as
+individually insignificant, comes naturally enough to the mind. But then
+they are very numerous, they are very bright, and if they are fleeting,
+their number provides plenty more to take the place of that which passes
+away. Nor is it by any means true that they lack individual
+significance.
+
+This enumeration of a few out of many ornaments of Moore's muse will of
+course irritate those who object to the "brick-of-the-house" mode of
+criticism; while it may not be minute enough, or sufficiently bolstered
+by actual quotation, to please those who hold that simple extract is the
+best, if not the only tolerable form of criticism. But the critic is not
+alone in finding that, whether he carry his ass or ride upon it, he
+cannot please all his public. What has been said is probably enough, in
+the case of a writer whose work, though as a whole rather unjustly
+forgotten, survives in parts more securely even than the work of greater
+men, to remind readers of at least the outlines and bases of his claim
+to esteem. And the more those outlines are followed up, and the
+structure founded on those bases is examined, the more certain, I think,
+is Moore of recovering, not the position which M. Vallat would assign to
+him of the greatest lyrist of England (a position which he never held
+and never could hold except with very prejudiced or very incompetent
+judges), not that of the equal of Scott or Byron or Shelley or
+Wordsworth, but still a position high enough and singularly isolated at
+its height. Viewed from the point of strictly poetical criticism, he no
+doubt ranks only with those poets who have expressed easily and
+acceptably the likings and passions and thoughts and fancies of the
+average man, and who have expressed these with no extraordinary cunning
+or witchery. To go further in limitation, the average man, of whom he is
+thus the bard, is a rather sophisticated average man, without very deep
+thoughts or feelings, without a very fertile or fresh imagination or
+fancy, with even a touch--a little touch--of cant and "gush" and other
+defects incident to average and sophisticated humanity. But this
+humanity is at any time and every time no small portion of humanity at
+large, and it is to Moore's credit that he sings its feelings and its
+thoughts so as always to get the human and durable element in them
+visible and audible through the "trappings of convention." Again, he has
+that all-saving touch of humour which enables him, sentimentalist as he
+is, to be an admirable comedian as well. Yet again, he has at least
+something of the two qualities which one must demand of a poet who is a
+poet, and not a mere maker of rhymes. His note of feeling, if not full
+or deep, is true and real. His faculty of expression is not only
+considerable, but it is also distinguished; it is a faculty which in the
+same measure and degree nobody else has possessed. On one side he had
+the gift of singing those admirable songs of which we have been talking.
+On the other, he had the gift of right satiric verse to a degree which
+only three others of the great dead men of this century in
+England--Canning, Praed, and Thackeray--have reached. Besides all this,
+he was a "considerable man of letters." But your considerable men of
+letters, after flourishing, turn to dust in their season, and other
+considerable or inconsiderable men of letters spring out of it. The true
+poets and even the true satirists abide, and both as a poet and a
+satirist Thomas Moore abides and will abide with them.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[14] _Etude sur la Vie et les Oeuvres de Thomas Moore_; by Gustave
+Vallat. Paris: Rousseau. London: Asher and Co. Dublin: Hodges, Figgis,
+and Co. 1887.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+LEIGH HUNT
+
+
+To compare the peaceful and home-keeping art of criticism to the
+adventurous one of lighthouse-building may seem an excursion into the
+heroi-comic, if not into the tragic-burlesque. Neither is it in the
+least my intention to dwell on a tolerably obvious metaphorical
+resemblance between the two. It is certainly the business of the critic
+to warn others off from the mistakes which have been committed by his
+forerunners, and perhaps (for let us anticipate the crushing wit) from
+his own. But that is not my reason for the suggestion. There is a story
+of I forget what lighthouse which Smeaton, or Stevenson, or somebody
+else, had unusual difficulty in establishing. The rock was too near the
+surface for it to be safe or practicable to moor barges over it; and it
+was uncovered for too short a time to enable any solid foundations to be
+laid or even begun during one tide. So the engineer, with other
+adventurous persons, got himself landed on it, succeeded after a vain
+attempt or two in working an iron rod into the middle, and then hung on
+bodily while the tide was up, that he and his men might begin again as
+soon as it receded. In a mild and unexciting fashion, that is what the
+critic has to do--to dig about till he makes a lodgment in his author,
+hang on to it, and then begin to build. It is not always very easy work,
+and it is never less easy than in the case of the author whom somebody
+has kindly called "the Ariel of criticism." Leigh Hunt is an extremely
+difficult person upon whom to make any critical lodgment, for the reason
+that (I do not intend any disrespect by the comparison) he has much less
+of the rock about him than of the shifting sand. I do not now speak of
+the great Skimpole problem--we shall come to that presently--but merely
+of the writer as shown in his works.
+
+The works themselves are not particularly easy to get together in any
+complete form, some of them being almost inextricably entangled in
+defunct periodicals, and others reappearing in different guises in the
+author's many published volumes. Mr. Kent's bibliography gives forty-six
+different entries; Mr. Alexander Ireland's (to which he refers) gives, I
+think, over eighty. Some years ago I remember receiving the catalogue of
+a second-hand bookseller who offered what he very frankly confessed to
+be far from a complete collection of the first editions, at the price of
+a score or two of pounds; and here at least the first are in some cases
+the only issues. Probably this is one reason why selections from Leigh
+Hunt, of which Mr. Kent's is the latest and best, have been frequent. I
+have seen two certainly, and I think three, within as many years.
+Luckily, however, quite enough for the reader's if not for the critic's
+purpose is easily obtainable. The poems can be bought in more forms than
+one; Messrs. Smith and Elder have reprinted cheaply the "Autobiography,"
+"Men, Women, and Books," "Imagination and Fancy," "The Town," "Wit and
+Humour," "Table Talk," and "A Jar of Honey." Other reprints of "One
+Hundred Romances of Real Life" (one of his merest pieces of book-making)
+and of his "Stories from the Italian Poets," one of his worst pieces of
+criticism, but agreeably reproduced in every respect save the hideous
+American spelling, have recently appeared. The complete and uniform
+issue, the want of which to some lovers of books (I own myself among
+them) is never quite made up by a scratch company of volumes of all
+dates, sizes, and prints, is indeed wanting. But still you can get a
+working Leigh Hunt together.
+
+It is when you have got him that your trouble begins; and before it is
+done the critic, if he be one of those who are not satisfied with a mere
+_compte rendu_, is likely to acknowledge that Leigh Hunt, if "Ariel" be
+in some respects too complimentary a name for him, is at any rate a
+most tricksy spirit. The finest taste in some ways, contrasting with
+what can only be called the most horrible vulgarity in others; a light
+hand tediously boring again and again at obviously miscomprehended
+questions of religion, philosophy, and politics; a keen appetite for
+humour condescending to thin and repeated jests; a reviler of kings
+going out of his way laboriously to beslaver royalty; a man of letters,
+of talent almost touching genius, who seldom writes a dozen consecutive
+good pages:--these are only some of the inconsistencies that meet us in
+Leigh Hunt.
+
+He has related the history of his immediate and remoter forbears with
+considerable minuteness--with more minuteness indeed by far than he has
+bestowed upon all but a few passages of his own life. For the general
+reader, however, it is quite sufficient to know that his father, the
+Reverend Isaac Hunt, who belonged to a clerical family in Barbados, went
+for his education to the still British Provinces of North America,
+married a Philadelphia girl, Mary Shewell, practised as a lawyer till
+the Revolution broke out, and then being driven from his adopted country
+as a loyalist, settled in England, took orders, drifted into
+Unitarianism or anythingarianism, and ended his days, after not
+infrequent visits to the King's Bench, comfortably enough, but hanging
+rather loose on society, his friends, and a pension. Leigh Hunt (his
+godfathers and godmothers gave him also the names of James Henry, which
+he dropped) was the youngest son, and was born on 19th October 1784. His
+best youthful remembrance, and one of the most really humorous things he
+ever said, was that he used, after a childish indulgence in bad
+language, to think to himself with a shudder when he received any mark
+of favour, "Ah! they little suspect I'm the boy who said 'd----n.'" But
+at seven years old he went to Christ's Hospital, and continued there for
+another seven. His reminiscences of that seminary, put down pretty
+early, and afterwards embodied in the "Autobiography," are even better
+known from the fact that they served as a text, and as the occasion of a
+little gentle raillery, to Elia's famous essay than in themselves. For
+some years after leaving school he did nothing definite but write
+verses, which his father (who seems to have been gifted with a plentiful
+lack of judgment in most incidents and relations of life) published when
+the boy was but sixteen. They are as nearly as possible valueless, but
+they went through three editions in a very short time. It ought to be
+remembered that except Cowper, who was just dead, and Crabbe, who had
+for years intermitted writing, the public had only Rogers and Southey
+for poets, for it would none of the "Lyrical Ballads," and the "Lay of
+the Last Minstrel" had not yet been published. So that it did not make
+one of its worst mistakes in taking up Leigh Hunt, who certainly had
+poetry in him, if he did not put it forth quite so early as this. He was
+made a kind of lion, but, fortunately or unfortunately for him, only in
+middle-class circles where there were no patrons. He was quite an old
+man--nearly twenty--when he made regular entry into the periodical
+writing which kept him (with the aid of his friends) for nearly sixty
+years. "Mr. Town, Junior" (altered from an old signature of Colman's)
+contributed theatrical criticisms, which do not seem to have been paid
+for, to an evening paper, the _Traveller_, now surviving as a second
+title to the _Globe_. His bent in this direction was assisted by the
+fact that his elder brother John had been apprenticed to a printer, and
+had desires to be a publisher. In January 1808 the two brothers started
+the _Examiner_, and Leigh Hunt edited it with a great deal of courage
+for fourteen years. He threw away for this the only piece of solid
+preferment that he ever had, a clerkship in the War Office which
+Addington gave him. The references to this act of recklessness or
+self-sacrifice in the Autobiography are rather enigmatical. His two
+functions were no doubt incompatible at best, especially considering the
+violent Opposition tone which the _Examiner_ took. But Leigh Hunt,
+whatever faults he had, was not quite a hypocrite; and he hints pretty
+broadly that if he had not resigned he might have been asked to do so,
+not from any political reasons, but simply because he did his work very
+badly. He was much more at home in the _Examiner_ (with which for a
+short time was joined the quarterly _Reflector_), though his warmest
+admirers candidly admit that he knew nothing about politics. In 1809 he
+married a Miss Marianne Kent, whose station was not very exalted, and
+whose son admits with unusual frankness that she was "the reverse of
+handsome, and without accomplishments," adding rather whimsically that
+this person, "the reverse of handsome," had "a pretty figure, beautiful
+black hair and magnificent eyes," and though "without accomplishments"
+had "a very strong natural turn for plastic art." At any rate she seems
+to have suited Leigh Hunt admirably. The _Examiner_ soon became
+ill-noted with Government, but it was not till the end of 1812 that a
+grip could be got of it. Leigh Hunt's offence is in the ordinary books
+rather undervalued. That he (or his contributor) called the Prince
+Regent, as is commonly said, "a fat Adonis of fifty" (the exact words
+are, "this Adonis in loveliness is a corpulent man of fifty") may have
+been the chief sting, but was certainly not the chief legal offence.
+Leigh Hunt called the ruler of his country "a violator of his word, a
+libertine over head and ears in disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties,
+the companion of demi-reps, a man who had just closed half a century
+without one single claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect
+of posterity." It might be true or it might be false; but certainly
+there was then not a country in Europe where it would have been allowed
+to be said of the chief of the state. And I am not sure that it could be
+said now anywhere but in Ireland, where considerably worse things were
+said with impunity of Lord Spencer and Sir George Trevelyan. At any rate
+the brothers were prosecuted and fined five hundred pounds each, with
+two years' imprisonment. The sentence was carried out; but Leigh Hunt's
+imprisonment in Horsemonger Lane Gaol was the merest farce of
+incarceration. He could not indeed go beyond the prison walls. But he
+had a comfortable suite of rooms which he was permitted to furnish and
+decorate just as he liked; he was allowed to have his wife and family
+with him; he had a tiny garden of his own, and free access to that of
+the prison; there was no restriction on visitors, who brought him
+presents just as they chose; and he became a kind of fashion with the
+Opposition. Jeremy Bentham came and played at battledore and shuttlecock
+with him--an almost appalling idea, for it will not do to trust too
+implicitly to Leigh Hunt's declaration that Jeremy's object was to
+suggest "an improvement in the constitution of shuttlecocks." The
+_Examiner_ itself continued undisturbed, and except for the "I can't get
+out" feeling, which even of itself cannot be compared for one moment to
+that of a modern prisoner condemned to his cell and the
+exercising-ground, it is rather difficult to see much reason for Leigh
+Hunt's complaints. The imprisonment may have affected his health, but it
+certainly brought him troops of friends, and gave him leisure to do not
+only his journalist's work, but things much more serious. Here he wrote
+and published his first poem since the Juvenilia, "A Feast of the Poets"
+(not much of a thing), and here he wrote, though he did not publish it
+till his liberation, the "Story of Rimini," by far his most important
+poem, both for intrinsic character and for influence on others. He had
+known Lamb from boyhood, and Shelley some years; he now made the
+acquaintance of Keats, Hazlitt, and Byron.
+
+In the next five years after his liberation he did a great deal of work,
+the best by far being the periodical called the _Indicator_, a weekly
+paper which ran for sixty-six numbers. The _Indicator_ was the first
+thing that I ever read of Hunt's, and, by no means for that reason only,
+I think it the best. Its buttonholing papers, of a kind since widely
+imitated, were the most popular; but there are romantic things in it,
+such as "The Daughter of Hippocrates" (paraphrased and expanded from Sir
+John Mandeville with Hunt's peculiar skill), which seem to me better. It
+was at the end of these five years that Leigh Hunt resolved upon the
+second adventure (his imprisonment being the first and involuntary) of
+his otherwise easy-going life--an adventure the immediate consequences
+of which were unfortunate in many ways, but which supplied him with a
+good deal of literary material. This was his visit to Italy as a kind of
+literary _attache_ to Lord Byron, and editor of a quarterly magazine,
+the _Liberal_. The idea was Shelley's, and if Shelley had lived, it
+might not have resulted quite so disastrously, for Shelley was
+absolutely untiring as a helper of lame dogs over stiles. As it was, the
+excursion distinctly contradicted the saying (condemned by some as
+immoral) that a bad beginning makes a good ending. The Hunt family,
+which now included several children, embarked, in November of all months
+in the year, on a small ship bound for Italy. They were something like a
+month getting down the Channel in tremendous weather, and at last when
+their ship had to turn tail from near Scilly and run into Dartmouth,
+Hunt, whose wife was extremely ill of lung-disease, made up his mind to
+stay for the winter in Devonshire. He passed the time pleasantly enough
+at Plymouth, which they left once more in May 1822, reaching Leghorn at
+the end of June. Shelley's death happened within ten days of their
+arrival, and Byron and Leigh Hunt were left to get on together. How
+badly they got on is pretty generally known, might have been foreseen
+from the beginning, and is not very profitable to dwell on. Leigh Hunt's
+mixture of familiarity and "airs" could not have been worse mixed to
+suit the taste of Byron. The "noble poet" too was not a person who liked
+to be spunged upon; and his coolest admirers may sympathise with his
+disgust when he found that he had upon his hands a man of letters with a
+large family whom he was literally expected to keep, whose society was
+disagreeable to him, who lampooned his friends, who differed with him on
+every point of taste, and who did not think it necessary to be grateful.
+For Leigh Hunt, somewhat on Lamb's system of compensation for coming
+late by going away early, combined his readiness to receive favours with
+a practice of not acknowledging the slightest obligation for them.
+Byron's departure for Greece was in its way lucky, but it left Hunt
+stranded. He remained in Italy for rather more than three years and then
+returned home across the Continent. The _Liberal_, which contains work
+of his, of Byron's, of Shelley's, and of Hazlitt's, is interesting
+enough and worth buying in its original form, but it did not pay. Of the
+unlucky book on his relations with Byron which followed--the worst act
+by far of his life--I shall not say much. No one has attempted to defend
+it, and he himself apologises for it frankly and fully in his
+Autobiography. It is impossible, however, not to remark that the offence
+was much aggravated by its deliberate character. For the book was not
+published in the heat of the moment, but three years after Hunt's return
+to England and four after Byron's death.
+
+The remaining thirty years of Hunt's life were wholly literary. As for
+residences, he hovered about London, living successively at Highgate,
+Epsom, Brompton, Chelsea, Kensington, and divers other places. At
+Chelsea he was very intimate with the Carlyles, and, while he was
+perhaps of all living men of letters most leniently judged by those not
+particularly lenient judges, we have nowhere such vivid glimpses of
+Hunt's peculiar weaknesses as in the memoirs of Carlyle and his wife.
+Why Leigh Hunt was always in such difficulties is not at first obvious,
+for he was the reverse of an idle man; he seems, though thriftless, to
+have been by no means very sumptuous in his way of living; everybody
+helped him, and his writing was always popular. He appears to have felt
+not a little sore that nothing was done for him when his political
+friends came into power after the Reform Bill--and remained there for
+almost the whole of the rest of his life. He had certainly in some
+senses borne the burden and heat of the day for Liberalism. But he was
+one of those reckless people who, without meaning to offend anybody in
+particular, offend friends as well as foes; the days of sinecures were
+even then passing or passed; and it is very difficult to conceive any
+office, even with the lightest duties, in which Leigh Hunt would not
+have come to grief. As for his writing, his son's earnest plea as to his
+not being an idle man is no doubt true enough, but he never seems to
+have reconciled himself to the regular drudgery of miscellaneous
+article writing for newspapers which is almost the only kind of
+journalism that really pays, and his books did not sell very largely. In
+his latter days, however, things became easier for him. The unfailing
+kindness of the Shelley family gave him (in 1844 when Sir Percy Shelley
+came into his property) a regular annuity of L120; two royal gifts of
+L200 each and in 1847 a pension of the same amount were added; and two
+benefit nights of Dickens's famous amateur company brought him in
+something like a cool thousand, as Dickens himself would have said. Of
+his last years Mr. Kent, who was intimate with him, gives much the
+pleasantest account known to me. He died on 28th August 1859, surviving
+his wife only two years.
+
+I can imagine some one, at the name of Dickens in the preceding
+paragraph, thinking or saying, that if the author of _Bleak House_
+raised a thousand pounds for his old friend, he took the value of it and
+infinitely more out of him. It is impossible to shirk the Skimpole
+affair in any really critical notice of Leigh Hunt. To put unpleasant
+things briefly, that famous character was at once recognised by every
+one as a caricature, perhaps ill-natured but certainly brilliant, of
+what an enemy might have said of the author of "Rimini." Thornton Hunt,
+the eldest of Leigh Hunt's children, and a writer of no small power,
+took the matter up and forced from Dickens a contradiction, or
+disavowal, with which I am afraid the recording angel must have had
+some little difficulty. Strangely enough the last words of Macaulay's
+that we have concern this affair; and they may be quoted as Sir George
+Trevelyan gives them, written by his uncle in those days at Holly Lodge
+when the shadow of death was heavy on him.
+
+    _December 23, 1859._ An odd declaration by Dickens that he did
+    not mean Leigh Hunt by Harold Skimpole. Yet he owns that he took
+    the light externals of the character from Leigh Hunt, and surely
+    it is by those light externals that the bulk of mankind will
+    always recognise character. Besides, it is to be observed that
+    the vices of H. S. are vices to which L. H. had, to say the
+    least, some little leaning, and which the world generally
+    attributed to him most unsparingly. That he had loose notions of
+    _meum_ and _tuum_; that he had no high feeling of independence;
+    that he had no sense of obligation; that he took money wherever
+    he could get it; that he felt no gratitude for it; that he was
+    just as ready to defame a person who had relieved his distress
+    as a person who had refused him relief--these were things which,
+    as Dickens must have known, were said, truly or falsely, about
+    L. H., and had made a deep impression on the public mind.
+
+Now Macaulay has not always been leniently judged; but I do not think
+that, with the single exception of Croker's case, he can be accused of
+having borne hardly on the moral character of any one of his
+contemporaries. He had befriended Leigh Hunt in every way; he had got
+him into the _Edinburgh_; he had lent (that is to say given) him money
+freely, and I do not think that his fiercest enemy can seriously think
+that he bore Hunt a grudge for having told him, as he himself records,
+that the "Lays" were not so good as Spenser, whom Macaulay in one of the
+rare lapses of his memory had unjustly blasphemed, and whom Leigh Hunt
+adored. To my mind, if there were any doubt about Dickens's intention,
+or about the fitting in a certain sense of the cap, this testimony of
+Macaulay's would settle it. But I cannot conceive any doubt remaining in
+the mind of any person who has read Leigh Hunt's works, who has even
+read the Autobiography. Of the grossest faults in Skimpole's character,
+such as the selling of Jo's secret, Leigh Hunt was indeed incapable, and
+the insertion of these is at once a blot on Dickens's memory and a kind
+of excuse for his disclaimer; but as regards the lighter touches the
+likeness is unmistakable. Skimpole's most elaborate jests about "pounds"
+are hardly an exaggeration of the man who gravely and more than once
+tells us that his difficulties and irregularities with money came from a
+congenital incapacity to appreciate arithmetic, and who admits that
+Shelley (whose affairs he knew very well) once gave him no less than
+fourteen hundred pounds (that is to say some sixteen months of Shelley's
+income at his wealthiest) to clear him, and that he was not cleared,
+though apparently he gave Shelley to understand that he was.
+
+There are many excuses for him which Skimpole had not. His own pleas of
+tropical blood and so forth will not greatly avail. But the old
+patron-theory and its more subtle transformation (the influence of
+which is sometimes shown even by Thackeray in the act of denouncing it),
+to the effect that the State or the public, or somebody, is bound to
+look after your man of genius, had bitten deep into the being of the
+literary man of our grandfathers' time. Anybody who has read _Thomas
+Poole and his Friends_ must have seen how not merely Coleridge, of whose
+known liability to the weakness the book furnished new proofs, but even,
+to some extent and vicariously, the austere Wordsworth, cherished the
+idea. But for the most part, men kept it to themselves. Leigh Hunt never
+could keep anything to himself, and he has left record on record of the
+easy manner in which he acted on his beliefs.
+
+For this I own that I care little, especially since he never borrowed
+money of me. There is a Statute of Limitations for all such things in
+letters as well as in law. What is much harder to forgive is the
+ill-bred pertness, often if not always innocent enough in intention, but
+rather the worse than the better for that, which mars so much of his
+actual literary work. When almost an old man he wrote--when a very old
+man he quotes, with childlike surprise that any one should see anything
+objectionable in them--the following lines:
+
+    Perhaps you have known what it is to feel longings,
+    To pat buxom shoulders at routs and mad throngings--
+    Well--think what it was at a vision like that!
+    A grace after dinner! a Venus grown fat!
+
+It would be almost unbelievable of any man but Leigh Hunt that he
+placidly remarks in reference to this impertinence that "he had not the
+pleasure of Lady Blessington's acquaintance," as if that did not make
+things ten times worse. He had laid the foundation of not a few of the
+literary enmities he suffered from, by writing, thirty years earlier, a
+"Feast of the Poets," on the pattern of Suckling, in which he took,
+though much more excusably, the same kind of ill-bred liberties; and
+similar things abound in his works. It is scarcely surprising that the
+good Macvey Napier (rather awkwardly, and giving Macaulay much trouble
+to patch things up) should have said that he would like a
+"gentleman-like" article from Mr. Hunt for the _Edinburgh_; and the
+taunt about the Cockney School undoubtedly derived its venom from this
+weakness of his. Lamb was not descended from the kings that long the
+Tuscan sceptre swayed, and had some homely ways; Keats had to do with
+livery-stables, Hazlitt with shady lodging-houses and lodging-house
+keepers. But Keats might have been, whatever his weaknesses, his own and
+Spenser's Sir Calidore for gentle feeling and conduct; the man who
+called Lamb vulgar would only prove his own vulgarity; and Hazlitt,
+though he had some darker stains on his character than any that rest on
+Hunt, was far too potent a spirit for the fire within him not to burn
+out mere vulgarity. Leigh Hunt I fear must be allowed to be now and
+then merely vulgar--a Pogson of talent, of genius, of immense
+amiability, of rather hard luck, but still of the Pogsons, Pogsonic.
+
+As I shall have plenty of good to say of him, I may as well despatch at
+once whatever else I have to say that is bad, which is little. The
+faults of taste which have just been noticed passed easily into
+occasional, though only occasional, faults of criticism. I do not
+recommend anybody who has not the faculty of critical adjustment, and
+who wants to like Leigh Hunt, to read his essay on Dante in the _Italian
+Poets_. For flashes of crass insensibility to great poetry it is
+difficult to match anywhere, and impossible to match in Leigh Hunt. His
+favourite theological doctrine, like that of Beranger's hero, was, _Ne
+damnons personne_. He did not like monarchy, and he did not understand
+metaphysics. So the great poet, who, more than any other great poet
+except Shakespeare, grows on those who read him, receives from Leigh
+Hunt not an honest confession, like Sir Walter's, that he does not like
+him, which is perhaps the first honest impression of the majority of
+Dante's readers, but tirade upon tirade of abuse and bad criticism.
+Further, Leigh Hunt's unfortunate necessity of preserving his own
+journalism has made him keep a thousand things that he ought to have
+left to the kindly shade of the newspaper files--a cemetery where, thank
+Heaven, the tombs are not open as in the other city of Dis. The book
+called _Table Talk_, for instance, contains, with a little better
+matter, chiefly mere rubbish like this section:
+
+    BEAUMARCHAIS
+
+    Beaumarchais, author of the celebrated comedy of "Figaro," an
+    abridgment of which has been rendered more famous by the music
+    of Mozart, made a large fortune by supplying the American
+    republicans with arms and ammunition, and lost it by
+    speculations in salt and printing. His comedy is one of those
+    productions which are accounted dangerous, from developing the
+    spirit of intrigue and gallantry with more gaiety than
+    objection; and they would be more unanimously so, if the good
+    humour and self-examination to which they excite did not suggest
+    a spirit of charity and inquiry beyond themselves.
+
+Leigh Hunt tried almost every conceivable kind of literature, including
+a historical novel, _Sir Ralph Esher_, several dramas (one or two of
+which, the "Legend of Florence" being the chief, got acted), and at
+nearly the beginning and nearly the end of his career two religious
+works, or works on religion, an attack on Methodism and "The Religion of
+the Heart." All this we may not unkindly brush away, and consider him
+first as a poet, secondly as a critic, and thirdly as what can be best,
+though rather unphilosophically, called a miscellanist.
+
+Few good judges nowadays, I think, would deny that Leigh Hunt had a
+certain faculty for poetry, and fewer still would rank it very high. To
+something like, but less than, the tunefulness of Moore, he joined a
+very much better taste in models and an infinitely wider and deeper
+study of them. There is no doubt that his versification in "Rimini"
+(which may be described as Chaucerian in basis with a strong admixture
+of Dryden, further crossed and dashed slightly with the peculiar music
+of the followers of Spenser, especially Browne and Wither) had a very
+strong influence both on Keats and on Shelley, and that it drew from
+them music much better than itself. This fluent, musical, many-coloured
+verse was a capital medium for tale-telling, and Leigh Hunt is always at
+his best when he employs it. The more varied measures and the more
+ambitious aim of "Captain Sword and Captain Pen" seem to me very much
+less successful. Not only was Leigh Hunt far from strong enough for a
+serious argument, but the cheery, sentimental optimism of which he was
+one of the most persevering exponents--the kind of thing which
+vehemently protests that in the good time coming nobody shall be damned,
+or starved, or put in prison, or subjected to the perils of villainous
+saltpetre, or prevented from doing just what he likes, and that all
+existence ought to be and shortly will be a vaguely refined beer and
+skittles--did not lend itself very well to verse. Nor are Hunt's lyrics
+particularly strong. His best thing by far is the charming trifle (the
+heroine being, it has been said and also denied, Mrs. Carlyle) which he
+called a "rondeau," though it is not one.
+
+    Jenny kissed me when we met,
+    Jumping from the chair she sat in:
+    Time, you thief, who love to get
+    Sweets into your list, put _that_ in!
+    Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
+    Say that health and wealth have missed me,
+    Say I'm growing old--but add,
+        Jenny kissed me.
+
+Even here it may be noticed that though the last four lines could hardly
+be bettered, the second couplet is rather weak. Some of Leigh Hunt's
+sonnets, especially that which he wrote on the Nile in rivalry with
+Shelley and Keats, are very good.
+
+    It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands,
+    Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream;
+    And times and things, as in that vision, seem
+    Keeping along it their eternal stands;--
+    Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd-bands
+    That roamed through the young earth, the glory extreme
+    Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam,
+    _The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands._
+    Then comes a mightier silence, stern and strong,
+    As of a world left empty of its throng,
+    And the void weighs on us; and then we wake,
+    And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along
+    'Twixt villages, and think how we shall take
+    Our own calm journey on for human sake.
+
+This was written in 1818, and I think it will be admitted that the
+italicised line is a rediscovery of a cadence which had been lost for
+centuries, and which has been constantly borrowed and imitated since.
+
+Every now and then he had touches of something much above his usual
+style, as in the concluding lines of the whimsical "flyting," as the
+Scotch poets of the fifteenth century would have called it, between the
+Man and the Fish:
+
+    Man's life is warm, glad, sad, 'twixt loves and graves,
+      Boundless in hope, honoured with pangs austere,
+    Heaven-gazing; and his angel-wings he craves:
+      The fish is swift, small-needing, vague yet clear,
+    A cold, sweet, silver life, wrapped in round waves,
+      Quickened with touches of transporting fear.
+
+As a rule, however, his poetry has little or nothing of this kind, and
+he will hold his place in the English _corpus poetarum_, first, because
+he was an associate of better poets than himself; secondly, because he
+invented a medium for the poetic tale which was as poetical as Crabbe's
+was prosaic; thirdly, because of all persons perhaps who have ever
+attempted English verse on their own account, he had the most genuine
+affection for, and the most intimate and extensive acquaintance with,
+the triumphs of his predecessors in poetry. Of prose he was a much less
+trustworthy judge, as may be instanced once for all by his pronouncing
+Gibbon's style to be bad; but of poetry he could tell with an
+extraordinary mixture of sympathy and discretion. And this will
+introduce us to his second faculty, the faculty of literary criticism,
+in which he is, with all his drawbacks, on a level with Coleridge, with
+Lamb, and with Hazlitt, his defects as compared with them being in each
+case made up by compensatory, or more than compensatory, merits.
+
+How considerable a critic Leigh Hunt was, may be judged from the fact
+that he himself confesses the great critical fault of his principal
+poem--the selection, for amplification and paraphrase, of a subject
+which has once for all been treated with imperial and immortal brevity
+by a great poet. With equal ingenuousness and equal truth he further
+confesses that, at the time, he not only did not see this fault, but was
+critically incapable of seeing it. For there is that one comfort about
+this discomfortable and discredited art of ours, that age at any rate
+does not impair it. The first sprightly runnings of criticism are never
+the best; and in the case of all really great critics, from Dryden to
+Sainte-Beuve, the critical faculty has gone on constantly increasing.
+The chief examples of Leigh Hunt's critical accomplishment are to be
+found in the two books called respectively, _Wit and Humour_, and
+_Imagination and Fancy_, both being selections from the English poets,
+with critical remarks interspersed as a sort of running commentary. But
+hardly any book of his is quite barren of such examples; for he neither
+would, nor indeed apparently could, restrain his desultory fancy from
+this as from other indulgences. His criticism is very distinct in kind.
+It is almost purely and in the strict and proper sense aesthetic--that is
+to say, it does hardly anything but reproduce the sensations produced
+upon Hunt himself by the reading of his favourite passages. As his sense
+of poetry was extraordinarily keen and accurate, there is perhaps no
+body of "beauties" of English poetry to be found anywhere in the
+language which is selected with such uniform and unerring judgment as
+this or these. Even Lamb, in his own favourite subjects and authors,
+misses treasure-trove which Leigh Hunt unfailingly discovers, as in the
+now pretty generally acknowledged case of the character of De Flores in
+Middleton's "Changeling." And Lamb had a much less wide and a much more
+crotchety system of admissions and exclusions. Macaulay was perfectly
+right in fixing, at the beginning of his essay on the dramatists of the
+Restoration, upon this catholicity of Hunt's taste as the main merit in
+it; and it is really a great pity that the two volumes referred to were
+not, as they were intended to be, followed up by others respectively
+devoted to Action and Passion, Contemplation, and Song. But Leigh Hunt
+was sixty when he planned them, and age, infirmity, perhaps also the
+less pressing need which the comparative affluence of his later years
+brought, prevented the completion. It has also to be remarked that Hunt
+is much better as a taster than as a professor or expounder. He says
+indeed many happy things about his favourite passages, but they
+evidently represent rather afterthought than forethought. He is not good
+at generalities, and when he tries them is apt, instead of flying (as
+an Ariel of criticism should do), to sprawl. Yet it was impossible for a
+man who was so almost invariably right in particulars, to go very wrong
+in general; and the worst that can be said of Leigh Hunt's general
+critical axioms and conclusions is that they are much better than the
+reasons that support them. For instance, he is probably right in calling
+the famous "intellectual" and "henpecked you all" in "Don Juan," "the
+happiest triple rhyme ever written." But when he goes on to say that
+"the sweepingness of the assumption completes the flowing breadth of the
+effect," he goes very near to talking nonsense. For most people,
+however, a true opinion persuasively stated is of much more consequence
+than the most elaborate logical justification of it; and it is this that
+makes Leigh Hunt's criticism such excellent good reading. It is
+impossible not to feel that when a guide (which after all a critic
+should be) is recommended with cautions that, though an invaluable
+fellow for the most part, he is not unlikely in certain places to lead
+the traveller over a precipice, it is a very dubious kind of
+recommendation. Yet this is the way in which one has to speak of Jeffrey
+and Hazlitt, of Wilson and De Quincey. Of Leigh Hunt it need hardly ever
+be said; for in the unlucky diatribes on Dante above cited, the most
+unwary reader can see that his author has lost his temper and with it
+his head. As a rule he avoids the things that he is not qualified to
+judge, such as the rougher and sublimer parts of poetry. Of its
+sweetness and its music, of its grace and its wit, of its tenderness and
+its fancy, no better judge ever existed than Leigh Hunt. He jumped at
+such things, when he came near them, almost as involuntarily as a needle
+to a magnet.
+
+He was, however, perhaps most popular in his own time, and certainly he
+gained most of the not excessive share of pecuniary profit which fell to
+his lot, as what I have called a miscellanist. One of the things which
+have not yet been sufficiently done in the criticism of English literary
+history, is a careful review of the successive steps by which the
+periodical essay of Addison and his followers during the eighteenth
+century passed into the magazine-paper of our own days. The later
+examples of the eighteenth century, the "Observers" and "Connoisseurs,"
+the "Loungers" and "Mirrors" and "Lookers-On," are fairly well worth
+reading in themselves, especially as the little volumes of the "British
+Essayists" go capitally in a travelling-bag; but the gap between them
+and the productions of Leigh Hunt, of Lamb, and of the _Blackwood_ men,
+with Praed's schoolboy attempts not left out, is a very considerable
+one. Leigh Hunt is himself entitled to a high place in the new school so
+far as mere priority goes, and to one not low in actual merit. He
+relates himself, more than once, with the childishness which is the good
+side of his Skimpolism, how not merely his literary friends but persons
+of quality had special favourites among the miscellaneous papers of the
+_Indicator_, like (he would certainly have used the parallel himself if
+he had known it or thought of it) the Court of France with Marot's
+Psalms. This miscellaneous work of his extends, as it ought to do, to
+all manner of subjects. The pleasantest example to my fancy is the book
+called _The Town_, a gossiping description of London from St. Paul's to
+St. James's, which he afterwards followed up with books on the West End
+and Kensington, and which, though of course second-hand as to its facts,
+is by no means uncritical, and by far the best reading of any book of
+its kind. Even the Autobiography might take rank in this class; and the
+same kind of stuff made up the staple of the numerous periodicals which
+Leigh Hunt edited or wrote, and of the still more numerous books which
+he compounded out of the dead periodicals. It may be that a severe
+criticism will declare that, here as well as elsewhere, he was more
+original than accomplished; and that his way of treating subjects was
+pursued with better success by his imitators than by himself. Such a
+paper, for instance, as "On Beds and Bedrooms" suggests (and is dwarfed
+by the suggestion) Lamb's "Convalescent" and other similar work. "Jack
+Abbott's Breakfast," which is, or was, exceedingly popular with Hunt's
+admirers, is an account of the misfortunes of a luckless young man who
+goes to breakfast with an absent-minded pedagogue, and, being turned
+away empty, orders successive refreshments at different coffee-houses,
+each of which proves a feast of Tantalus. The idea is not bad; but the
+carrying out suits the stage better than the study, and is certainly far
+below such things as Maginn's adventures of Jack Ginger and his friends,
+with the tale untold that Humphries told Harlow. "A Few Remarks on the
+Rare Vice called Lying" is a most promising title; he must be a very
+good-natured judge who finds appended to it a performing article. "The
+Old Lady" and "The Old Gentleman" were once great favourites; they seem
+to have been studied from Earle's _Microcosmography_, not the least
+excellent of the books that have proceeded from foster-children of
+Walter de Merton, but they are over-laboured in particulars. So too are
+"The Adventures of Carfington Blundell" and "Inside of an Omnibus."
+Leigh Hunt's humour is so devoid of bitterness that it sometimes becomes
+insipid; his narrative so fluent and gossiping that it sometimes becomes
+insignificant. His enemies called him immoral, which appears to have
+been a gross calumny so far as his private life was concerned, and is
+certainly a gross exaggeration as regards his writing. But he was rather
+too much given to dally about voluptuous subjects with a sort of
+chuckling epicene triviality. He is so far from being passionate that he
+sometimes becomes almost offensive. He is terribly apt to labour a
+conceit or a prettiness till it becomes vapid; and his "Criticism on
+Female Beauty," though it contains some extremely sensible remarks, also
+contains much which is suggestive of Mr. Tupman. Yet his miscellaneous
+writing has one great merit (besides its gentle playfulness and its
+untiring variety) which might procure pardon for worse faults. With no
+one perhaps are those literary memories which transform and vivify life
+so constantly present as with Leigh Hunt. Although the world was a
+perfectly real thing to him, and not by any means seen only through the
+windows of a library, he took everywhere with him the remembrances of
+what he had read, and they helped him to clothe and colour what he saw
+and what he wrote. Between him, therefore, and readers who themselves
+have read a good deal, and loved what they have read not a little, there
+is always something in common; and yet probably no bookish writer has
+been less resented by his unbookish readers as a thruster of the
+abominable things--superior knowledge and superior scholarship--upon
+them. Some vices of the snob Leigh Hunt undoubtedly had, but he was
+never in the least a pretentious snob. He quotes his books not in the
+spirit of a man who is looking down on his fellows from a proper
+elevation, but in the spirit of a kindly host who is anxious that his
+guests should enjoy the good things on his table.
+
+It is this sincere and unostentatious love of letters, and anxiety to
+spread the love of letters, that is the redeeming point of Leigh Hunt
+throughout: he is saved _quia multum amavit_. It was this which prompted
+that rather grandiose but still admirable palinode of Christopher North,
+in August 1834,--"the Animosities are mortal: but the Humanities live
+for ever,"--an apology which naturally enough pleased Hunt very much. He
+is one of those persons with whom it is impossible to be angry, or at
+least to be angry long. "The bailiff who took him was fond of him," it
+is recorded of Captain Costigan; and in milder moments the same may be
+said of the critical bailiffs who are compelled to "take" Leigh Hunt.
+Even in his least happy books (such as the "Jar of Honey from Mount
+Hybla," where all sorts of matter, some of it by no means well known to
+the writer, have been hastily cobbled together) this love, and for the
+most part intelligent and animated love, for literature appears. If in
+another of his least happy attempts, the critical parts of the already
+mentioned _Stories from the Italian Poets_, he is miles below the great
+argument of Dante, and if he is even guilty to some extent of
+vulgarising the lesser but still great poets with whom he deals, he
+never comes, even in Dante, to any passage he can understand without
+exhibiting such a warmth of enthusiasm and enjoyment that it softens the
+stoniest readers. He can gravely call Dante's Hell "geologically
+speaking a most fantastical formation" (which it certainly is), and
+joke clumsily about the poet's putting Cunizza and Rahab in Paradise. He
+can write, in the true spirit of vulgarising, that "the Florentine is
+thought to have been less strict in his conduct in regard to the sex
+than might be supposed from his platonical aspirations," heedless of the
+great confessions implied in the swoon at Francesca's story, and the
+passage through the fire at the end of the seventh circle of Purgatory.
+But when he comes to things like "Dolce color d'oriental zaffiro," and
+"Era gia l'ora," it is hardly possible to do more justice to the
+subject. The whole description of his Italian sojourn in the
+Autobiography is an example of the best kind of such writing. Again, of
+all the people who have rejoiced in Samuel Pepys, Leigh Hunt "does it
+most natural," being indeed a kind of nineteenth-century Pepys himself,
+whom the gods had made less comfortable in worldly circumstances and no
+man of business, but to whom as a compensation they had given the
+feeling for poetry which Samuel lacked. At different times Dryden,
+Spenser, and Chaucer were respectively his favourite English poets; and
+as there was nothing faithless in his inconstancy, he took up his new
+loves without ceasing to love the old. It is perhaps rather more
+surprising that he should have liked Spenser than that he should have
+liked the other two; and we must suppose that the profusion of beautiful
+pictures in the "Faerie Queen" enabled him, not to appreciate (for he
+never could have done that), but to tolerate or pass over the deep
+melancholy and the occasional philosophisings of the poet. But the
+attraction of Dryden and Chaucer for him is very easily understood. Both
+are eminently cheerful poets, Dryden with the cheerfulness born of manly
+sense, Chaucer with that of youth and abounding animal spirits. Leigh
+Hunt seems to have found this cheerfulness as akin to his own, as the
+vigour of both was complementary and satisfactory to his own, I shall
+not say weakness, but fragility. Add yet again to this that Hunt
+seems--a thing very rarely to be said of critics--never to have disliked
+a thing simply because he could not understand it. If he sometimes
+abused Dante, it was not merely because he could not understand him,
+though he certainly could not, but because Dante trod (and when Dante
+treads he treads heavily) on his most cherished prejudices. Now he had
+not very many prejudices, and so he had an advantage here also.
+
+Lastly, as he may be read with pleasure, so he may be skipped without
+shame. There are some writers whom to skip may seem to a conscientious
+devotee of letters both wicked and unwise--wicked because it is
+disrespectful to them, unwise because it is quite likely to inflict loss
+on the reader. Now nobody can ever think of respecting Leigh Hunt; he is
+not unfrequently amiable, but never in the least venerable. Even at his
+best he seldom or never affects the reader with admiration, only with a
+mild pleasure. It is at once a penalty for his sins and a compliment to
+his good qualities, that to make any kind of fuss over him would be
+absurd. Nor is there any selfish risk run by treating him, in the
+literary sense, in an unceremonious manner. His writing of all kinds
+carries desultoriness to the height, and may be begun at the beginning,
+or at the end, or in the middle, and left off at any place, without the
+least risk of serious loss. He is excellent good company for half an
+hour, sometimes for much longer; but the reader rarely thinks very much
+of what he has said when the interview is over, and never experiences
+any violent hunger or thirst for its renewal, though such renewal is
+agreeable enough in its way. Such an author is a convenient possession
+on the shelves: a possession so convenient that occasionally a blush of
+shame may suggest itself at the thought that he should be treated so
+cavalierly. But this is quixotic. The very best things that he has done
+hardly deserve more respectful treatment, for they are little more than
+a faithful and fairly lively description of his own enjoyments; the
+worst things deserve treatment much less respectful. Yet let us not
+leave him with a harsh mouth; for, as has been said, he loved the good
+literature of others very much, and he wrote not a little that was good
+literature of his own.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+PEACOCK
+
+
+In the year 1875 Mr. Bentley conferred no small favour upon lovers of
+English literature by reprinting, in compact form and good print, the
+works of Thomas Love Peacock, up to that time scattered and in some
+cases not easily obtainable. So far as the publisher was concerned,
+nothing more could reasonably have been demanded; it is not easy to say
+quite so much of the editor, the late Sir Henry Cole. His editorial
+labours were indeed considerably lightened by assistance from other
+hands. Lord Houghton contributed a critical preface, which has the ease,
+point, and grasp of all his critical monographs. Miss Edith Nicolls, the
+novelist's granddaughter, supplied a short biography, written with much
+simplicity and excellent good taste. But as to editing in the proper
+sense--introduction, comment, illustration, explanation--there is next
+to none of it in the book. The principal thing, however, was to have
+Peacock's delightful work conveniently accessible, and that the issue
+of 1875 accomplished. The author is still by no means universally or
+even generally known; though he has been something of a critic's
+favourite. Almost the only dissenter, as far as I know, among critics,
+is Mrs. Oliphant, who has not merely confessed herself, in her book on
+the literary history of Peacock's time, unable to comprehend the
+admiration expressed by certain critics for _Headlong Hall_ and its
+fellows, but is even, if I do not mistake her, somewhat sceptical of the
+complete sincerity of that admiration. There is no need to argue the
+point with this agreeable practitioner of Peacock's own art. A certain
+well-known passage of Thackeray, about ladies and _Jonathan Wild_, will
+sufficiently explain her own inability to taste Peacock's persiflage. As
+for the genuineness of the relish of those who can taste him there is no
+way that I know to convince sceptics. For my own part I can only say
+that, putting aside scattered readings of his work in earlier days, I
+think I have read the novels through on an average once a year ever
+since their combined appearance. Indeed, with Scott, Thackeray, Borrow,
+and Christopher North, Peacock composes my own private Paradise of
+Dainty Devices, wherein I walk continually when I have need of rest and
+refreshment. This is a fact of no public importance, and is only
+mentioned as a kind of justification for recommending him to others.
+
+Peacock was born at Weymouth on 18th October 1785. His father (who died
+a year or two after his birth) was a London merchant; his mother was the
+daughter of a naval officer. He seems during his childhood to have done
+very much what he pleased, though, as it happened, study always pleased
+him; and his gibes in later life at public schools and universities lose
+something of their point when it is remembered that he was at no
+university, at no school save a private one, and that he left even that
+private school when he was thirteen. He seems, however, to have been
+very well grounded there, and on leaving it he conducted his education
+and his life at his own pleasure for many years. He published poems
+before he was twenty, and he fell in love shortly after he was
+twenty-two. The course of this love did not run smooth, and the lady,
+marrying some one else, died shortly afterwards. She lived in Peacock's
+memory till his death, sixty years later, which event is said to have
+been heralded (in accordance with not the least poetical of the many
+poetical superstitions of dreaming) by frequent visions of this shadowy
+love of the past. Probably to distract himself, Peacock, who had
+hitherto attempted no profession, accepted the rather unpromising post
+of under-secretary to Admiral Sir Home Popham on board ship. His mother,
+in her widowhood, and he himself had lived much with his sailor
+grandfather, and he was always fond of naval matters. But it is not
+surprising to find that his occupation, though he kept it for something
+like a year, was not to his taste. He gave it up in the spring of 1809,
+and returned to leisure, poetry, and pedestrianism. The "Genius of the
+Thames," a sufficiently remarkable poem, was the result of the two
+latter fancies. A year later he went to Wales and met his future wife,
+Jane Griffith, though he did not marry her for ten years more. He
+returned frequently to the principality, and in 1812 made, at Nant
+Gwillt, the acquaintance of Shelley and his wife Harriet. This was the
+foundation of a well-known friendship, which has supplied by far the
+most solid and trustworthy materials existing for the poet's biography.
+It was Wales, too, that furnished the scene of his first and far from
+worst novel _Headlong Hall_, which was published in 1816. From 1815 to
+1819 Peacock lived at Marlow, where his intercourse with Shelley was
+resumed, and where he produced not merely _Headlong Hall_ but
+_Melincourt_ (the most unequal, notwithstanding many charming sketches,
+of his works), the delightful _Nightmare Abbey_ (with a caricature, as
+genius caricatures, of Shelley for the hero), and the long and
+remarkable poem of "Rhododaphne."
+
+During the whole of this long time, that is to say up to his
+thirty-fourth year, with the exception of his year of secretaryship,
+Peacock had been his own master. He now, in 1819, owed curtailment of
+his liberty but considerable increase of fortune to a long-disused
+practice on the part of the managers of public institutions, of which
+Sir Henry Taylor gave another interesting example. The directors of the
+East India Company offered him a clerkship because he was a clever
+novelist and a good Greek scholar. He retained his place ("a precious
+good place too," as Thackeray with good-humoured envy says of it in "The
+Hoggarty Diamond") with due promotion for thirty-seven years, and
+retired from it in 1856 with a large pension. He had married Miss
+Griffith very shortly after his appointment; in 1822 _Maid Marian_
+appeared, and in 1823 Peacock took a cottage, which became after a time
+his chief and latterly his only residence, at Halliford, near his
+beloved river. For some years he published nothing, but 1829 and 1831
+saw the production of perhaps his two best books, _The Misfortunes of
+Elphin_ and _Crotchet Castle_. After _Crotchet Castle_, official duties
+and perhaps domestic troubles (for his wife was a helpless invalid)
+interrupted his literary work for more than twenty years, an almost
+unexampled break in the literary activity of a man so fond of letters.
+In 1852 he began to write again as a contributor to _Fraser's Magazine_.
+It is rather unfortunate that no complete republication, nor even any
+complete list of these articles, has been made. The papers on Shelley
+and the charming story of _Gryll Grange_ were the chief of them. The
+author was an old man when he wrote this last, but he survived it six
+years, and died on 23d January 1866, having latterly lived very much
+alone. Indeed, after Shelley's death he seems never to have had any very
+intimate friend except Lord Broughton, with whose papers most of
+Peacock's correspondence is for the present locked up.
+
+There is a passage in Shelley's "Letter to Maria Gisborne" which has
+been often quoted before, but which must necessarily be quoted again
+whenever Peacock's life and literary character are discussed:--
+
+                                  And there
+    Is English P----, with his mountain Fair
+    Turned into a flamingo, that shy bird
+    That gleams i' the Indian air. Have you not heard
+    When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindoo,
+    His best friends hear no more of him? But you
+    Will see him, and will like him too, I hope,
+    With his milk-white Snowdonian Antelope
+    Matched with his Camelopard. _His fine wit
+    Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it;_
+    A strain too learned for a shallow age,
+    Too wise for selfish bigots; let his page
+    Which charms the chosen spirits of his time,
+    Fold itself up for a serener clime
+    Of years to come, and find its recompense
+    In that just expectation.
+
+The enigmas in this passage (where it is undisputed that "English P----"
+is Peacock) have much exercised the commentators. That Miss Griffith,
+after her marriage, while still remaining a Snowdonian antelope, should
+also have been a flamingo, is odd enough; but this as well as the
+"camelopard" (probably turning on some private jest then intelligible
+enough to the persons concerned, but dark to others) is not particularly
+worth illuminating. The italicised words describing Peacock's wit are
+more legitimate subjects of discussion. They seem to me, though not
+perhaps literally explicable after the fashion of the duller kind of
+commentator, to contain both a very happy description of Peacock's
+peculiar humour, and a very sufficient explanation of the causes which
+have, both then and since, made that humour palatable rather to the few
+than to the many. Not only is Peacock peculiarly liable to the charge of
+being too clever, but he uses his cleverness in a way peculiarly
+bewildering to those who like to have "This is a horse" writ large under
+the presentation of the animal. His "rascally comparative" fancy, and
+the abundant stores of material with which his reading provided it, lead
+him perpetually to widen "the wound," till it is not surprising that
+"the knife" (the particular satirical or polemical point that he is
+urging) gets "lost in it." This weakness, if it be one, has in its
+different ways of operation all sorts of curious results. One is, that
+his personal portraits are perhaps farther removed from faithful
+representations of the originals than the personal sketches of any other
+writer, even among the most deliberate misrepresenters. There is,
+indeed, a droll topsy-turvy resemblance to Shelley throughout the
+Scythrop of _Nightmare Abbey_, but there Peacock was hardly using the
+knife at all. When he satirises persons, he goes so far away from their
+real personalities that the libel ceases to be libellous. It is
+difficult to say whether Mr. Mystic, Mr. Flosky, or Mr. Skionar is least
+like Coleridge; and Southey, intensely sensitive as he was to criticism,
+need not have lost his equanimity over Mr. Feathernest. A single point
+suggested itself to Peacock, that point suggested another, and so on and
+so on, till he was miles away from the start. The inconsistency of his
+political views has been justly, if somewhat plaintively, reflected on
+by Lord Houghton in the words, "the intimate friends of Mr. Peacock may
+have understood his political sentiments, but it is extremely difficult
+to discover them from his works." I should, however, myself say that,
+though it may be extremely difficult to deduce any definite political
+sentiments from Peacock's works, it is very easy to see in them a
+general and not inconsistent political attitude--that of intolerance of
+the vulgar and the stupid. Stupidity and vulgarity not being
+(fortunately or unfortunately) monopolised by any political party, and
+being (no doubt unfortunately) often condescended to by both, it is not
+surprising to find Peacock--especially with his noble disregard of
+apparent consistency and the inveterate habit of pillar-to-post joking,
+which has been commented on--distributing his shafts with great
+impartiality on Trojan and Greek; on the opponents of reform in his
+earlier manhood, and on the believers in progress during his later; on
+virtual representation and the telegraph; on barouche-driving as a
+gentleman's profession, and lecturing as a gentleman's profession. But
+this impartiality (or, if anybody prefers it, inconsistency) has
+naturally added to the difficulties of some readers with his works. It
+is time, however, to endeavour to give some idea of the gay variety of
+those works themselves.
+
+Although there are few novelists who observe plot less than Peacock,
+there are few also who are more regular in the particular fashion in
+which they disdain plot. Peacock is in fiction what the dramatists of
+the school of Ben Jonson down to Shadwell are in comedy--he works in
+"humours." It ought not to be, but perhaps is, necessary to remind the
+reader that this is by no means the same thing in essence, though
+accidentally it very often is the same, as being a humourist. The dealer
+in humours takes some fad or craze in his characters, some minor ruling
+passion, and makes his profit out of it. Generally (and almost always in
+Peacock's case) he takes if he can one or more of these humours as a
+central point, and lets the others play and revolve in a more or less
+eccentric fashion round it. In almost every book of Peacock's there is a
+host who is possessed by the cheerful mania for collecting other maniacs
+round him. Harry Headlong of Headlong Hall, Esquire, a young Welsh
+gentleman of means, and of generous though rather unchastened taste,
+finding, as Peacock says, in the earliest of his gibes at the
+universities, that there are no such things as men of taste and
+philosophy in Oxford, assembles a motley host in London, and asks them
+down to his place at Llanberis. The adventures of the visit (ending up
+with several weddings) form the scheme of the book, as indeed
+repetitions of something very little different form the scheme of all
+the other books, with the exception of _The Misfortunes of Elphin_, and
+perhaps _Maid Marian_. Of books so simple in one way, and so complex in
+others, it is impossible and unnecessary to give any detailed analysis.
+But each contains characteristics which contribute too much to the
+knowledge of Peacock's idiosyncrasy to pass altogether unnoticed. The
+contrasts in _Headlong Hall_ between the pessimist Mr. Escot, the
+optimist Mr. Foster, and the happy-mean man Mr. Jenkison (who inclines
+to both in turn, but on the whole rather to optimism), are much less
+amusing than the sketches of Welsh scenery and habits, the passages of
+arms with representatives of the _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly Reviews_
+(which Peacock always hated), and the satire on "improving," craniology,
+and other passing fancies of the day. The book also contains the first
+and most unfriendly of those sketches of clergymen of the Church of
+England which Peacock gradually softened till, in Dr. Folliott and Dr.
+Opimian, his curses became blessings altogether. The Reverend Dr. Gaster
+is an ignoble brute, though not quite life-like enough to be really
+offensive. But the most charming part of the book by far (for its women
+are mere lay figures) is to be found in the convivial scenes. _Headlong
+Hall_ contains, besides other occasional verse of merit, two
+drinking-songs--"Hail to the Headlong," and the still better "A
+Heel-tap! a heel-tap! I never could bear it"--songs not quite so good as
+those in the subsequent books, but good enough to make any reader think
+with a gentle sigh of the departure of good fellowship from the earth.
+Undergraduates and Scotchmen (and even in their case the fashion is said
+to be dying) alone practise at the present day the full rites of Comus.
+
+_Melincourt_, published, and indeed written, very soon after _Headlong
+Hall_, is a much more ambitious attempt. It is some three times the
+length of its predecessor, and is, though not much longer than a single
+volume of some three-volume novels, the longest book that Peacock ever
+wrote. It is also much more ambitiously planned; the twice attempted
+abduction of the heiress, Anthelia Melincourt, giving something like a
+regular plot, while the introduction of Sir Oran Haut-ton (an
+orang-outang whom the eccentric hero, Forester, has domesticated and
+intends to introduce to parliamentary life) can only be understood as
+aiming at a regular satire on the whole of human life, conceived in a
+milder spirit than "Gulliver," but belonging in some degree to the same
+class. Forester himself, a disciple of Rousseau, a fervent anti-slavery
+man who goes to the length of refusing his guests sugar, and an
+ideologist in many other ways, is also an ambitious sketch; and Peacock
+has introduced episodes after the fashion of eighteenth-century fiction,
+besides a great number of satirical excursions dealing with his enemies
+of the Lake school, with paper money, and with many other things and
+persons. The whole, as a whole, has a certain heaviness. The
+enthusiastic Forester is a little of a prig, and a little of a bore; his
+friend the professorial Mr. Fax proses dreadfully; the Oran Haut-ton
+scenes, amusing enough of themselves, are overloaded (as is the whole
+book) with justificative selections from Buffon, Lord Monboddo, and
+other authorities. The portraits of Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth,
+Canning, and others, are neither like, nor in themselves very happy, and
+the heroine Anthelia is sufficiently uninteresting to make us extremely
+indifferent whether the virtuous Forester or the _roue_ Lord Anophel
+Achthar gets her. On the other hand, detached passages are in the
+author's very best vein; and there is a truly delightful scene between
+Lord Anophel and his chaplain Grovelgrub, when the athletic Sir Oran has
+not only foiled their attempt on Anthelia, but has mast-headed them on
+the top of a rock perpendicular. But the gem of the book is the election
+for the borough of One-Vote--a very amusing farce on the subject of
+rotten boroughs. Mr. Forester has bought one of the One-Vote seats for
+his friend the Orang, and, going to introduce him to the constituency,
+falls in with the purchaser of the other seat, Mr. Sarcastic, who is a
+practical humorist of the most accomplished kind. The satirical
+arguments with which Sarcastic combats Forester's enthusiastic views of
+life and politics, the elaborate spectacle which he gets up on the day
+of nomination, and the free fight which follows, are recounted with
+extraordinary spirit. Nor is the least of the attractions of the book an
+admirable drinking-song, superior to either of those in _Headlong Hall_,
+though perhaps better known to most people by certain Thackerayan
+reminiscences of it than in itself:--
+
+    THE GHOSTS
+
+    In life three ghostly friars were we,
+    And now three friendly ghosts we be.
+    Around our shadowy table placed,
+    The spectral bowl before us floats:
+    With wine that none but ghosts can taste
+    We wash our unsubstantial throats.
+    Three merry ghosts--three merry ghosts--three merry ghosts are we:
+    Let the ocean be port and we'll think it good sport
+      To be laid in that Red Sea.
+
+    With songs that jovial spectres chaunt,
+    Our old refectory still we haunt.
+    The traveller hears our midnight mirth:
+    "Oh list," he cries, "the haunted choir!
+    The merriest ghost that walks the earth
+    Is now the ghost of a ghostly friar."
+    Three merry ghosts--three merry ghosts--three merry ghosts are we:
+    Let the ocean be port and we'll think it good sport
+      To be laid in that Red Sea.
+
+In the preface to a new edition of _Melincourt_, which Peacock wrote
+nearly thirty years later, and which contains a sort of promise of
+_Gryll Grange_, there is no sign of any dissatisfaction on the author's
+part with the plan of the earlier book; but in his next, which came
+quickly, he changed that plan very decidedly. _Nightmare Abbey_ is the
+shortest, as _Melincourt_ is the longest, of his tales; and as
+_Melincourt_ is the most unequal and the most clogged with heavy matter,
+so _Nightmare Abbey_ contains the most unbroken tissue of farcical,
+though not in the least coarsely farcical, incidents and conversations.
+The misanthropic Scythrop (whose habit of Madeira-drinking has made some
+exceedingly literal people sure that he really could not be intended for
+the water-drinking Shelley); his yet gloomier father, Mr. Glowry; his
+intricate entanglements with the lovely Marionetta and the still more
+beautiful Celinda; his fall between the two stools; his resolve to
+commit suicide; the solution of that awkward resolve--are all simply
+delightful. Extravagant as the thing is, its brevity and the throng of
+incidents and jokes prevent it from becoming in the least tedious. The
+pessimist-fatalist Mr. Toobad, with his "innumerable proofs of the
+temporary supremacy of the devil," and his catchword "the devil has come
+among us, having great wrath," appears just enough, and not too much.
+The introduced sketch of Byron as Mr. Cypress would be the least happy
+thing of the piece if it did not give occasion for a capital serious
+burlesque of Byronic verse, the lines, "There is a fever of the spirit,"
+which, as better known than most of Peacock's verse, need not be quoted.
+Mr. Flosky, a fresh caricature of Coleridge, is even less like the
+original than Mr. Mystic, but he is much more like a human being, and in
+himself is great fun. An approach to a more charitable view of the
+clergy is discoverable in the curate Mr. Larynx, who, if not extremely
+ghostly, is neither a sot nor a sloven. But the quarrels and
+reconciliations between Scythrop and Marionetta, his invincible
+inability to make up his mind, the mysterious advent of Marionetta's
+rival, and her residence in hidden chambers, the alternate sympathy and
+repulsion between Scythrop and those elder disciples of pessimism, his
+father and Mr. Toobad--all the contradictions of Shelley's character, in
+short, with a suspicion of the incidents of his life brought into the
+most ludicrous relief, must always form the great charm of the book. A
+tolerably rapid reader may get through it in an hour or so, and there is
+hardly a more delightful hour's reading of anything like the same kind
+in the English language, either for the incidental strokes of wit and
+humour, or for the easy mastery with which the whole is hit off. It
+contains, moreover, another drinking-catch, "Seamen Three," which,
+though it is, like its companion, better known than most of Peacock's
+songs, may perhaps find a place:--
+
+    Seamen three! What men be ye?
+    Gotham's three wise men we be.
+    Whither in your bowl so free?
+    To rake the moon from out the sea.
+    The bowl goes trim, the moon doth shine,
+    And our ballast is old wine;
+    And your ballast is old wine.
+
+    Who art thou so fast adrift?
+    I am he they call Old Care.
+    Here on board we will thee lift.
+    No: I may not enter there.
+    Wherefore so? 'Tis Jove's decree
+    In a bowl Care may not be;
+    In a bowl Care may not be.
+
+    Fear ye not the waves that roll?
+    No: in charmed bowl we swim.
+    What the charm that floats the bowl?
+    Water may not pass the brim.
+    The bowl goes trim, the moon doth shine,
+    And our ballast is old wine;
+    And your ballast is old wine.
+
+A third song sung by Marionetta, "Why are thy looks so blank, Grey
+Friar?" is as good in another way; nor should it be forgotten that the
+said Marionetta, who has been thought to have some features of the
+luckless Harriet Shelley, is Peacock's first lifelike study of a girl,
+and one of his pleasantest.
+
+The book which came out four years after, _Maid Marian_, has, I believe,
+been much the most popular and the best known of Peacock's short
+romances. It owed this popularity, in great part, doubtless, to the fact
+that the author has altered little in the well-known and delightful old
+story, and has not added very much to its facts, contenting himself with
+illustrating the whole in his own satirical fashion. But there is also
+no doubt that the dramatisation of _Maid Marian_ by Planche and Bishop
+as an operetta helped, if it did not make, its fame. The snatches of
+song through the novel are more frequent than in any other of the books,
+so that Mr. Planche must have had but little trouble with it. Some of
+these snatches are among Peacock's best verse, such as the famous
+"Bramble Song," the great hit of the operetta, the equally well-known
+"Oh, bold Robin Hood," and the charming snatch:--
+
+    For the tender beech and the sapling oak,
+      That grow by the shadowy rill,
+    You may cut down both at a single stroke,
+      You may cut down which you will;
+
+    But this you must know, that as long as they grow,
+      Whatever change may be,
+    You never can teach either oak or beech
+      To be aught but a greenwood tree.
+
+This snatch, which, in its mixture of sentiment, truth, and what may be
+excusably called "rollick," is very characteristic of its author, and
+is put in the mouth of Brother Michael, practically the hero of the
+piece, and the happiest of the various workings up of Friar Tuck,
+despite his considerable indebtedness to a certain older friar, whom we
+must not call "of the funnels." That Peacock was a Pantagruelist to the
+heart's core is evident in all his work; but his following of Master
+Francis is nowhere clearer than in _Maid Marian_, and it no doubt helps
+us to understand why those who cannot relish Rabelais should look
+askance at Peacock. For the rest, no book of Peacock's requires such
+brief comment as this charming pastoral, which was probably little less
+in Thackeray's mind than _Ivanhoe_ itself when he wrote _Rebecca and
+Rowena_. The author draws in (it would be hardly fair to say drags in)
+some of his stock satire on courts, the clergy, the landed gentry, and
+so forth; but the very nature of the subject excludes the somewhat
+tedious digressions which mar _Melincourt_, and which once or twice
+menace, though they never actually succeed in spoiling, the unbroken fun
+of _Nightmare Abbey_.
+
+_The Misfortunes of Elphin_, which followed after an interval of seven
+years, is, I believe, the least generally popular of Peacock's works,
+though (not at all for that reason) it happens to be my own favourite.
+The most curious instance of this general unpopularity is the entire
+omission, as far as I am aware, of any reference to it in any of the
+popular guide-books to Wales. One piece of verse, indeed, the "War-song
+of Dinas Vawr," a triumph of easy verse and covert sarcasm, has had some
+vogue, but the rest is only known to Peacockians. The abundance of Welsh
+lore which, at any rate in appearance, it contains, may have had
+something to do with this; though the translations or adaptations,
+whether faithful or not, are the best literary renderings of Welsh known
+to me. Something also, and probably more, is due to the saturation of
+the whole from beginning to end with Peacock's driest humour. Not only
+is the account of the sapping and destruction of the embankment of
+Gwaelod an open and continuous satire on the opposition to Reform, but
+the whole book is written in the spirit and manner of _Candide_--a
+spirit and manner which Englishmen have generally been readier to
+relish, when they relish them at all, in another language than in their
+own. The respectable domestic virtues of Elphin and his wife Angharad,
+the blameless loves of Taliesin and the Princess Melanghel, hardly serve
+even as a foil to the satiric treatment of the other characters. The
+careless incompetence of the poetical King Gwythno, the coarser vices of
+other Welsh princes, the marital toleration or blindness of Arthur, the
+cynical frankness of the robber King Melvas, above all, the drunkenness
+of the immortal Seithenyn, give the humorist themes which he caresses
+with inexhaustible affection, but in a manner no doubt very puzzling,
+if not shocking, to matter-of-fact readers. Seithenyn, the drunken
+prince and dyke-warden, whose carelessness lets in the inundation, is by
+far Peacock's most original creation (for Scythrop, as has been said, is
+rather a humorous distortion of the actual than a creation). His
+complete self-satisfaction, his utter fearlessness of consequences, his
+ready adaptation to whatever part, be it prince or butler, presents
+itself to him, and above all, the splendid topsy-turviness of his
+fashion of argument, make Seithenyn one of the happiest, if not one of
+the greatest, results of whimsical imagination and study of human
+nature. "They have not"--says the somewhile prince, now King Melvas's
+butler, when Taliesin discovers him twenty years after his supposed
+death--"they have not made it [his death] known to me, for the best of
+all reasons, that one can only know the truth. For if that which we
+think we know is not truth, it is something which we do not know. A man
+cannot know his own death. For while he knows anything he is alive; at
+least, I never heard of a dead man who knew anything, or pretended to
+know anything: if he had so pretended I should have told him to his face
+that he was no dead man." How nobly consistent is this with his other
+argument in the days of his princedom and his neglect of the embankment!
+Elphin has just reproached him with the proverb, "Wine speaks in the
+silence of reason." "I am very sorry," said Seithenyn, "that you see
+things in a wrong light. But we will not quarrel, for three reasons:
+first, because you are the son of the king, and may do and say what you
+please without any one having a right to be displeased; second, because
+I never quarrel with a guest, even if he grows riotous in his cups;
+third, because there is nothing to quarrel about. And perhaps that is
+the best reason of the three; or rather the first is the best, because
+you are the son of the king; and the third is the second, that is the
+second best, because there is nothing to quarrel about; and the second
+is nothing to the purpose, because, though guests will grow riotous in
+their cups in spite of my good orderly example, God forbid that I should
+say that is the case with you. And I completely agree in the truth of
+your remark that reason speaks in the silence of wine."
+
+_Crotchet Castle_, the last but one of the series, which was published
+two years after _Elphin_ and nearly thirty before _Gryll Grange_, has
+been already called the best; and the statement is not inconsistent with
+the description already given of _Nightmare Abbey_ and of _Elphin_. For
+_Nightmare Abbey_ is chiefly farce, and _The Misfortunes of Elphin_ is
+chiefly sardonic persiflage. _Crotchet Castle_ is comedy of a high and
+varied kind. Peacock has returned in it to the machinery of a country
+house with its visitors, each of whom is more or less of a crotcheteer;
+and has thrown in a little romantic interest in the suit of a certain
+unmoneyed Captain Fitzchrome to a noble damsel who is expected to marry
+money, as well as in the desertion and subsequent rescue of Susannah
+Touchandgo, daughter of a levanting financier. The charm of the book,
+however, which distinguishes it from all its predecessors, is the
+introduction of characters neither ridiculous nor simply good in the
+persons of the Rev. Dr. Folliott and Lady Clarinda Bossnowl,
+Fitzchrome's beloved. "Lady Clarinda," says the captain, when the said
+Lady Clarinda has been playing off a certain not unladylike practical
+joke on him, "is a very pleasant young lady;" and most assuredly she is,
+a young lady (in the nineteenth century and in prose) of the tribe of
+Beatrice, if not even of Rosalind. As for Dr. Folliott, the author is
+said to have described him as his amends for his earlier clerical
+sketches, and the amends are ample. A stout Tory, a fellow of infinite
+jest, a lover of good living, an inveterate paradoxer, a pitiless
+exposer of current cants and fallacies, and, lastly, a tall man of his
+hands, Dr. Folliott is always delightful, whether he is knocking down
+thieves, or annihilating, in a rather Johnsonian manner, the economist,
+Mr. McQuedy, and the journalist, Mr. Eavesdrop, or laying down the law
+as to the composition of breakfast and supper, or using strong language
+as to "the learned friend" (Brougham), or bringing out, partly by
+opposition and partly by irony, the follies of the transcendentalists,
+the fops, the doctrinaires, and the mediaevalists of the party. The
+book, moreover, contains the last and not the least of Peacock's
+admirable drinking-songs:--
+
+    If I drink water while this doth last,
+      May I never again drink wine;
+    For how can a man, in his life of a span,
+      Do anything better than dine?
+    We'll dine and drink, and say if we think
+      That anything better can be;
+    And when we have dined, wish all mankind
+      May dine as well as we.
+
+    And though a good wish will fill no dish,
+      And brim no cup with sack,
+    Yet thoughts will spring as the glasses ring
+      To illumine our studious track.
+    O'er the brilliant dreams of our hopeful schemes
+      The light of the flask shall shine;
+    And we'll sit till day, but we'll find the way
+      To drench the world with wine.
+
+The song is good in itself, but it is even more interesting as being the
+last product of Peacock's Anacreontic vein. Almost a generation passed
+before the appearance of his next and last novel, and though there is
+plenty of good eating and drinking in _Gryll Grange_, the old fine
+rapture had disappeared in society meanwhile, and Peacock obediently
+took note of the disappearance. It is considered, I believe, a mark of
+barbarian tastes to lament the change. But I am not certain that the Age
+of Apollinaris and lectures has yet produced anything that can vie as
+literature with the products of the ages of Wine and Song.
+
+_Gryll Grange_, however, in no way deserves the name of a dry stick. It
+is, next to _Melincourt_, the longest of Peacock's novels, and it is
+entirely free from the drawbacks of the forty-years-older book. Mr.
+Falconer, the hero, who lives in a tower alone with seven lovely and
+discreet foster-sisters, has some resemblances to Mr. Forester, but he
+is much less of a prig. The life and the conversation bear, instead of
+the marks of a young man's writing, the marks of the writing of one who
+has seen the manners and cities of many other men, and the personages
+throughout are singularly lifelike. The loves of the second hero and
+heroine, Lord Curryfin and Miss Niphet, are much more interesting than
+their names would suggest. And the most loquacious person of the book,
+the Rev. Dr. Opimian, if he is somewhat less racy than Dr. Folliott, is
+not less agreeable. One main charm of the novel lies in its vigorous
+criticism of modern society in phases which have not yet passed away.
+"Progress" is attacked with curious ardour; and the battle between
+literature and science, which in our days even Mr. Matthew Arnold waged
+but as one _cauponans bellum_, is fought with a vigour that is a joy to
+see. It would be rather interesting to know whether Peacock, in planning
+the central incident of the play (an "Aristophanic comedy," satirising
+modern ways), was aware of the existence of Mansel's delightful parody
+of the "Clouds." But "Phrontisterion" has never been widely known out
+of Oxford, and the bearing of Peacock's own performance is rather social
+than political. Not the least noteworthy thing in the book is the
+practical apology which is made in it to Scotchmen and political
+economists (two classes whom Peacock had earlier persecuted) in the
+personage of Mr. McBorrowdale, a candid friend of Liberalism, who is
+extremely refreshing. And besides the Aristophanic comedy, _Gryll
+Grange_ contains some of Peacock's most delightful verse, notably the
+really exquisite stanzas on "Love and Age."
+
+The book is the more valuable because of the material it supplies, in
+this and other places, for rebutting the charges that Peacock was a mere
+Epicurean, or a mere carper. Independently of the verses just named, and
+the hardly less perfect "Death of Philemon," the prose conversation
+shows how delicately and with how much feeling he could think on those
+points of life where satire and jollification are out of place. For the
+purely modern man, indeed, it might be well to begin the reading of
+Peacock with _Gryll Grange_, in order that he may not be set out of
+harmony with his author by the robuster but less familiar tones, as well
+as by the rawer though not less vigorous workmanship, of _Headlong Hall_
+and its immediate successors. The happy mean between the heart on the
+sleeve and the absence of heart has scarcely been better shown than in
+this latest novel.
+
+I have no space here to go through the miscellaneous work which
+completes Peacock's literary baggage. His regular poems, all early, are
+very much better than the work of many men who have won a place among
+British poets. His criticism, though not great in amount, is good; and
+he is especially happy in the kind of miscellaneous trifle (such as his
+trilingual poem on a whitebait dinner), which is generally thought
+appropriate to "university wits." But the characteristics of these
+miscellanies are not very different from the characteristics of his
+prose fiction, and, for purposes of discussion, may be included with
+them.
+
+Lord Houghton has defined and explained Peacock's literary idiosyncrasy
+as that of a man of the eighteenth century belated and strayed in the
+nineteenth. It is always easy to improve on a given pattern, but I
+certainly think that this definition of Lord Houghton's (which, it
+should be said, is not given in his own words) needs a little
+improvement. For the differences which strike us in Peacock--the easy
+joviality, the satirical view of life, the contempt of formulas and of
+science--though they certainly distinguish many chief literary men of
+the eighteenth century from most chief literary men of the nineteenth,
+are not specially characteristic of the eighteenth century itself. They
+are found in the seventeenth, in the Renaissance, in classical
+antiquity--wherever, in short, the art of letters and the art of life
+have had comparatively free play. The chief differentia of Peacock is a
+differentia common among men of letters; that is to say, among men of
+letters who are accustomed to society, who take no sacerdotal or
+singing-robe view of literature, who appreciate the distinction which
+literary cultivation gives them over the herd of mankind, but who by no
+means take that distinction too seriously. Aristophanes, Horace, Lucian,
+Rabelais, Montaigne, Saint-Evremond, these are all Peacock's literary
+ancestors, each, of course, with his own difference in especial and in
+addition. Aristophanes was more of a politician and a patriot, Lucian
+more of a freethinker, Horace more of a simple _pococurante_. Rabelais
+may have had a little inclination to science itself (he would soon have
+found it out if he had lived a little later), Montaigne may have been
+more of a pure egotist, Saint-Evremond more of a man of society, and of
+the verse and prose of society. But they all had the same _ethos_, the
+same love of letters as letters, the same contempt of mere progress as
+progress, the same relish for the simpler and more human pleasures, the
+same good fellowship, the same tendency to escape from the labyrinth of
+life's riddles by what has been called the humour-gate, the same
+irreconcilable hatred of stupidity and vulgarity and cant. The
+eighteenth century has, no doubt, had its claim to be regarded as the
+special flourishing time of this mental state urged by many others
+besides Lord Houghton; but I doubt whether the claim can be sustained,
+at any rate to the detriment of other times, and the men of other
+times. That century took itself too seriously--a fault fatal to the
+claim at once. Indeed, the truth is that while this attitude has in some
+periods been very rare, it cannot be said to be the peculiar, still less
+the universal, characteristic of any period. It is a personal not a
+periodic distinction; and there are persons who might make out a fair
+claim to it even in the depths of the Middle Ages or of the nineteenth
+century.
+
+However this may be, Peacock certainly held the theory of those who take
+life easily, who do not love anything very much except old books, old
+wine, and a few other things, not all of which perhaps need be old, who
+are rather inclined to see the folly of it than the pity of it, and who
+have an invincible tendency, if they tilt at anything at all, to tilt at
+the prevailing cants and arrogances of the time. These cants and
+arrogances of course vary. The position occupied by monkery at one time
+may be occupied by physical science at another; and a belief in graven
+images may supply in the third century the target, which is supplied by
+a belief in the supreme wisdom of majorities in the nineteenth. But the
+general principles--the cult of the Muses and the Graces for their own
+sake, and the practice of satiric archery at the follies of the
+day--appear in all the elect of this particular election, and they
+certainly appear in Peacock. The results no doubt are distasteful, not
+to say shocking, to some excellent people. It is impossible to avoid a
+slight chuckle when one thinks of the horror with which some such people
+must read Peacock's calm statement, repeated I think more than once,
+that one of his most perfect heroes "found, as he had often found
+before, that the more his mind was troubled, the more madeira he could
+drink without disordering his head." I have no doubt that the United
+Kingdom Alliance, if it knew this dreadful sentence (but probably the
+study of the United Kingdom Alliance is not much in Peacock), would like
+to burn all the copies of _Gryll Grange_ by the hands of Mr. Berry, and
+make the reprinting of it a misdemeanour, if not a felony. But it is not
+necessary to follow Sir Wilfrid Lawson, or to be a believer in
+education, or in telegraphs, or in majorities, in order to feel the
+repulsion which some people evidently feel for the manner of Peacock.
+With one sense absent and another strongly present it is impossible for
+any one to like him. The present sense is that which has been rather
+grandiosely called the sense of moral responsibility in literature. The
+absent sense is that sixth, seventh, or eighth sense, called a sense of
+humour, and about this there is no arguing. Those who have it, instead
+of being quietly and humbly thankful, are perhaps a little too apt to
+celebrate their joy in the face of the afflicted ones who have it not;
+the afflicted ones, who have it not, only follow a general law in
+protesting that the sense of humour is a very worthless thing, if not a
+complete humbug. But there are others of whom it would be absurd to say
+that they have no sense of humour, and yet who cannot place themselves
+at the Peacockian point of view, or at the point of view of those who
+like Peacock. His humour is not their humour; his wit not their wit.
+Like one of his own characters (who did not show his usual wisdom in the
+remark), they "must take pleasure in the thing represented before they
+can take pleasure in the representation." And in the things that Peacock
+represents they do not take pleasure. That gentlemen should drink a
+great deal of burgundy and sing songs during the process, appears to
+them at the best childish, at the worst horribly wrong. The
+prince-butler Seithenyn is a reprobate old man, who was unfaithful to
+his trust and shamelessly given to sensual indulgence. Dr. Folliott, as
+a parish priest, should not have drunk so much wine; and it would have
+been much more satisfactory to hear more of Dr. Opimian's sermons and
+district visiting, and less of his dinners with Squire Gryll and Mr.
+Falconer. Peacock's irony on social and political arrangements is all
+sterile, all destructive, and the sentiment that "most opinions that
+have anything to be said for them are about two thousand years old" is a
+libel on mankind. They feel, in short, for Peacock the animosity,
+mingled with contempt, which the late M. Amiel felt for "clever
+mockers."
+
+It is probably useless to argue with any such. It might, indeed, be
+urged in all seriousness that the Peacockian attitude is not in the
+least identical with the Mephistophelian; that it is based simply on the
+very sober and arguable ground that human nature is always very much the
+same, liable to the same delusions and the same weaknesses; and that the
+oldest things are likely to be best, not for any intrinsic or mystical
+virtue of antiquity, but because they have had most time to be found out
+in, and have not been found out. It may further be argued, as it has
+often been argued before, that the use of ridicule as a general
+criterion can do no harm, and may do much good. If the thing ridiculed
+be of God, it will stand; if it be not, the sooner it is laughed off the
+face of the earth the better. But there is probably little good in
+urging all this. Just as a lover of the greatest of Greek dramatists
+must recognise at once that it would be perfectly useless to attempt to
+argue Lord Coleridge out of the idea that Aristophanes, though a genius,
+was vulgar and base of soul, so to go a good deal lower in the scale of
+years, and somewhat lower in the scale of genius, everybody who rejoices
+in the author of "Aristophanes in London" must see that he has no chance
+of converting Mrs. Oliphant, or any other person who does not like
+Peacock. The middle term is not present, the disputants do not in fact
+use the same language. The only thing to do is to recommend this
+particular pleasure to those who are capable of being pleased by it, and
+to whom, as no doubt it is to a great number, it is pleasure yet
+untried.
+
+It is well to go about enjoying it with a certain caution. The reader
+must not expect always to agree with Peacock, who not only did not
+always agree with himself, but was also a man of almost ludicrously
+strong prejudices. He hated paper money; whereas the only feeling that
+most of us have on that subject is that we have not always as much of it
+as we should like. He hated Scotchmen, and there are many of his readers
+who without any claim to Scotch blood, but knowing the place and the
+people, will say,
+
+    That better wine and better men
+    We shall not meet in May,
+
+or for the matter of that in any other month. Partly because he hated
+Scotchmen, and partly because in his earlier days Sir Walter was a
+pillar of Toryism, he hated Scott, and has been guilty not merely of an
+absurd and no doubt partly humorous comparison of the Waverley novels to
+pantomimes, but of more definite criticisms which will bear the test of
+examination as badly. His strictures on a famous verse of "The Dream of
+Fair Women" are indefensible, though there is perhaps more to be said
+for the accompanying gibe at Sir John Millais's endeavour to carry out
+the description of Cleopatra in black (chiefly black) and white. The
+reader of Peacock must never mind his author trampling on his, the
+reader's, favourite corns; or rather he must lay his account with the
+agreeable certainty that Peacock will shortly afterwards trample on
+other corns which are not at all his favourites. For my part I am quite
+willing to accept these conditions. And I do not find that my admiration
+for Coleridge, and my sympathy with those who opposed the first Reform
+Bill, and my inclination to dispute the fact that Oxford is only a place
+of "unread books," make me like Peacock one whit the less. It is the law
+of the game, and those who play the game must put up with its laws. And
+it must be remembered that, at any rate in his later and best books,
+Peacock never wholly "took a side." He has always provided some
+personage or other who reduces all the whimsies and prejudices of his
+characters, even including his own, under a kind of dry light. Such is
+Lady Clarinda, who regards all the crotcheteers of Crotchet Castle with
+the same benevolent amusement; such Mr. McBorrowdale, who, when he is
+requested to settle the question of the superiority or inferiority of
+Greek harmony and perspective to modern, replies, "I think ye may just
+buz that bottle before you." (Alas! to think that if a man used the word
+"buz" nowadays some wiseacre would accuse him of vulgarity or of false
+English.) The general criticism in his work is always sane and vigorous,
+even though there may be flaws in the particular censures; and it is
+very seldom that even in his utterances of most flagrant prejudice
+anything really illiberal can be found. He had read much too widely and
+with too much discrimination for that. His reading had been corrected by
+too much of the cheerful give-and-take of social discussion, his dry
+light was softened and coloured by too frequent rainbows, the Apollonian
+rays being reflected on Bacchic dew. Anything that might otherwise seem
+hard and harsh in Peacock's perpetual ridicule is softened and mellowed
+by this pervading good fellowship which, as it is never pushed to the
+somewhat extravagant limits of the _Noctes Ambrosianae_, so it
+distinguishes Peacock himself from the authors to whom in pure style he
+is most akin, and to whom Lord Houghton has already compared him--the
+French tale-tellers from Anthony Hamilton to Voltaire. In these, perfect
+as their form often is, there is constantly a slight want of geniality,
+a perpetual clatter and glitter of intellectual rapier and dagger which
+sometimes becomes rather irritating and teasing to ear and eye. Even the
+objects of Peacock's severest sarcasm, his Galls and Vamps and
+Eavesdrops, are allowed to join in the choruses and the bumpers of his
+easy-going symposia. The sole nexus is not cash payment but something
+much more agreeable, and it is allowed that even Mr. Mystic had "some
+super-excellent madeira." Yet how far the wine is from getting above the
+wit in these merry books is not likely to escape even the most
+unsympathetic reader. The mark may be selected recklessly or unjustly,
+but the arrows always fly straight to it.
+
+Peacock, in short, has eminently that quality of literature which may be
+called recreation. It may be that he is not extraordinarily instructive,
+though there is a good deal of quaint and not despicable erudition
+wrapped up in his apparently careless pages. It may be that he does not
+prove much; that he has, in fact, very little concern to prove anything.
+But in one of the only two modes of refreshment and distraction possible
+in literature, he is a very great master. The first of these modes is
+that of creation--that in which the writer spirits his readers away into
+some scene and manner of life quite different from that with which they
+are ordinarily conversant. With this Peacock, even in his professed
+poetical work, has not very much to do; and in his novels, even in _Maid
+Marian_, he hardly attempts it. The other is the mode of satirical
+presentment of well-known and familiar things, and this is all his own.
+Even his remotest subjects are near enough to be in a manner familiar,
+and _Gryll Grange_, with a few insignificant changes of names and
+current follies, might have been written yesterday. He is, therefore,
+not likely for a long time to lose the freshness and point which, at any
+rate for the ordinary reader, are required in satirical handlings of
+ordinary life; while his purely literary merits, especially his grasp
+of the perennial follies and characters of humanity, of the _ludicrum
+humani generis_ which never varies much in substance under its
+ever-varying dress, are such as to assure him life even after the
+immediate peculiarities which he satirised have ceased to be anything
+but history.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+WILSON
+
+
+Among those judgments of his contemporaries which make a sort of Inferno
+of the posthumous writings of Thomas Carlyle, that passed upon
+"Christopher North" has always seemed to me the most interesting, and
+perhaps on the whole the fairest. There is enough and to spare of
+onesidedness in it, and of the harshness which comes from onesidedness.
+But it is hardly at all sour, and, when allowance is made for the point
+of view, by no means unjust. The whole is interesting from the literary
+side, but as it fills two large pages it is much too long to quote. The
+personal description, "the broad-shouldered stately bulk of the man
+struck me: his flashing eye, copious dishevelled head of hair, and rapid
+unconcerned progress like that of a plough through stubble," is
+characteristically graphic, and far the best of the numerous pen
+sketches of "the Professor." As for the criticism, the following is the
+kernel passage of it:--
+
+    Wilson had much nobleness of heart and many traits of noble
+    genius, but the central tie-beam seemed wanting always; very
+    long ago I perceived in him the most irreconcilable
+    contradictions: Toryism with sansculottism; Methodism of a sort
+    with total incredulity; a noble loyal and religious nature not
+    strong enough to vanquish the perverse element it is born into.
+    Hence a being all split into precipitous chasms and the wildest
+    volcanic tumults; rocks over-grown indeed with tropical
+    luxuriance of leaf and flower but knit together at the
+    bottom--that was my old figure of speech--only by an ocean of
+    whisky punch. On these terms nothing can be done. Wilson seems
+    to me always by far the most _gifted_ of our literary men either
+    then or still. And yet intrinsically he has written nothing that
+    can endure. The central gift was wanting.
+
+Something in the unfavourable part of this must no doubt be set down to
+the critic's usual forgetfulness of his own admirable dictum, "he is not
+thou, but himself; other than thou." John was quite other than Thomas,
+and Thomas judged him somewhat summarily as if he were a failure of a
+Thomas. Yet the criticism, if partly harsh and as a whole somewhat
+incomplete, is true enough. Wilson has written "intrinsically nothing
+that can endure," if it be judged by any severe test. An English
+Diderot, he must bear a harder version of the judgment on Diderot, that
+he had written good pages but no good book. Only very rarely has he even
+written good pages, in the sense of pages good throughout. The almost
+inconceivable haste with which he wrote (he is credited with having on
+one occasion actually written fifty-six pages of print for _Blackwood_
+in two days, and in the years of its double numbers he often
+contributed from a hundred to a hundred and fifty pages in a single
+month)--this prodigious haste would not of itself account for the
+puerilities, the touches of bad taste, the false pathos, the tedious
+burlesque, the more tedious jactation which disfigure his work. A man
+writing against time may be driven to dulness, or commonplace, or
+inelegance of style; but he need never commit any of the faults just
+noticed. They were due beyond doubt, in Wilson's case, to a natural
+idiosyncrasy, the great characteristic of which Carlyle has happily hit
+off in the phrase, "want of a tie-beam," whether he has or has not been
+charitable in suggesting that the missing link was supplied by whisky
+punch. The least attractive point about Wilson's work is undoubtedly
+what his censor elsewhere describes as his habit of "giving a kick" to
+many men and things. There is no more unpleasant feature of the _Noctes_
+than the apparent inability of the writer to refrain from sly "kicks"
+even at the objects of his greatest veneration. A kind of mania of
+detraction seizes him at times, a mania which some of his admirers have
+more kindly than wisely endeavoured to shuffle off as a humorous
+dramatic touch intentionally administered to him by his Eidolon North.
+The most disgraceful, perhaps the only really disgraceful, instance of
+this is the carping and offensive criticism of Scott's _Demonology_,
+written and published at a time when Sir Walter's known state of health
+and fortunes might have protected him even from an enemy, much more from
+a friend, and a deeply obliged friend such as Wilson. Nor is this the
+only fling at Scott. Wordsworth, much more vulnerable, is also much more
+frequently assailed; and even Shakespeare does not come off scot-free
+when Wilson is in his ugly moods.
+
+It need hardly be said that I have no intention of saying that Scott or
+Wordsworth or Shakespeare may not be criticised. It is the way in which
+the criticism is done which is the crime; and for these acts of literary
+high treason, or at least leasing-making, as well as for all Wilson's
+other faults, nothing seems to me so much responsible as the want of
+bottom which Carlyle notes. I do not think that Wilson had any solid
+fund of principles, putting morals and religion aside, either in
+politics or in literature. He liked and he hated much and strongly, and
+being a healthy creature he on the whole liked the right things and
+hated the wrong ones; but it was for the most part a merely instinctive
+liking and hatred, quite un-coordinated, and by no means unlikely to
+pass the next moment into hatred or liking as the case might be.
+
+These are grave faults. But for the purpose of providing that pleasure
+which is to be got from literature (and this, like one or two other
+chapters here, is partly an effort in literary hedonism) Wilson stands
+very high, indeed so high that he can be ranked only below the highest.
+He who will enjoy him must be an intelligent voluptuary, and especially
+well versed in the art of skipping. When Wilson begins to talk fine,
+when he begins to wax pathetic, and when he gets into many others of his
+numerous altitudes, it will behove the reader, according to his own
+tastes, to skip with discretion and vigour. If he cannot do this, if his
+eye is not wary enough, or if his conscience forbids him to obey his
+eyes' warnings, Wilson is not for him. It is true that Mr. Skelton has
+tried to make a "Comedy of the _Noctes Ambrosianae_," in which the
+skipping is done ready to hand. But, with all the respect due to the
+author of _Thalatta_, the process is not, at least speaking according to
+my judgment, successful. No one can really taste that eccentric book
+unless he reads it as a whole; its humours arbitrarily separated and
+cut-and-dried are nearly unintelligible. Indeed Professor Ferrier's
+original attempt to give Wilson's work only, and not all of that work
+when it happened to be mixed with others, seems to me to have been a
+mistake. But of that further, when we come to speak of the _Noctes_
+themselves.
+
+Wilson's life, for more than two-thirds of it a very happy one and not
+devoid of a certain eventfulness, can be summarised pretty briefly,
+especially as a full account of it is available in the very delightful
+work of his daughter Mrs. Gordon. Born in 1785, the son of a rich
+manufacturer of Paisley and a mother who boasted gentle blood, he was
+brought up first in the house of a country minister (whose parish he has
+made famous in several sketches), then at the University of Glasgow, and
+then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was early left possessor of a
+considerable fortune, and his first love, a certain "Margaret," having
+proved unkind, he established himself at Elleray on Windermere and
+entered into all the Lake society. Before very long (he was twenty-six
+at the time) he married Miss Jane Penny, daughter of a Liverpool
+merchant, and kept open house at Elleray for some years. Then his
+fortune disappeared in the keeping of a dishonest relation, and he had,
+in a way, his livelihood to make. I say "in a way," because the wind
+appears to have been considerably tempered to this shorn but robust
+lamb. He had not even to give up Elleray, though he could not live there
+in his old style. He had a mother who was able and willing to entertain
+him at Edinburgh, on the sole understanding that he did not "turn Whig,"
+of which there was very little danger. He was enabled to keep not too
+exhausting or anxious terms as an advocate at the Scottish bar; and
+before long he was endowed, against the infinitely superior claims of
+Sir William Hamilton, and by sheer force of personal and political
+influence, with the lucrative Professorship of Moral Philosophy in the
+University of Edinburgh. But even before this he had been exempted from
+the necessity of cultivating literature on a little oatmeal by his
+connexion with _Blackwood's Magazine_. The story of that magazine has
+often been told; never perhaps quite fully, but sufficiently. Wilson was
+not at any time, strictly speaking, editor; and a statement under his
+own hand avers that he never received any editorial pay, and was
+sometimes subject to that criticism which the publisher, as all men know
+from a famous letter of Scott's, was sometimes in the habit of
+exercising rather indiscreetly. But for a very great number of years,
+there is no doubt that he held a kind of quasi-editorial position, which
+included the censorship of other men's work and an almost, if not quite,
+unlimited right of printing his own. For some time the even more
+masterful spirit of Lockhart (against whom by the way Mrs. Gordon seems
+to have had a rather unreasonable prejudice) qualified his control over
+"Maga." But Lockhart's promotion to the _Quarterly_ removed this
+influence, and from 1825 (speaking roughly) to 1835 Wilson was supreme.
+The death of William Blackwood and of the Ettrick Shepherd in the
+last-named year, and of his own wife in 1837 (the latter a blow from
+which he never recovered), strongly affected not his control over the
+publication but his desire to control it; and after 1839 his
+contributions (save in the years 1845 and 1848) were very few. Ill
+health and broken spirits disabled him, and in 1852 he had to resign
+his professorship, dying two years later after some months of almost
+total prostration. Of the rest of the deeds of Christopher, and of his
+pugilism, and of his learning, and of his pedestrian exploits, and of
+his fishing, and of his cock-fighting, and of his hearty enjoyment of
+life generally, the books of the chronicles of Mrs. Gordon, and still
+more the twelve volumes of his works and the unreprinted contributions
+to _Blackwood_, shall tell.
+
+It is with those works that our principal business is, and some of them
+I shall take the liberty of at once dismissing. His poems are now
+matters of interest to very few mortals. It is not that they are bad,
+for they are not; but that they are almost wholly without distinction.
+He came just late enough to have got the seed of the great romantic
+revival; and his verse work is rarely more than the work of a clever man
+who has partly learnt and partly divined the manner of Burns, Scott,
+Campbell, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, and the rest. Nor, to my fancy,
+are his prose tales of much more value. I read them many years ago and
+cared little for them. I re-read, or attempted to re-read, them the
+other day and cared less. There seems, from the original prospectus of
+the edition of his works, to have been an intention of editing the
+course of moral philosophy which, with more or fewer variations,
+obtained him the agreeable income of a thousand a year or so for thirty
+years. But whether (as Mrs. Gordon seems to hint) the notes were in too
+dilapidated and chaotic a condition for use, or whether Professor
+Ferrier, his son-in-law and editor (himself, with Dean Mansel, the last
+of the exact philosophers of Britain), revolted at the idea of printing
+anything so merely literary, or what it was, I know not--at any rate
+they do not now figure in the list. This leaves us ten volumes of
+collected works, to wit, four of the _Noctes Ambrosianae_, four of
+_Essays Critical and Imaginative_, and two of _The Recreations of
+Christopher North_, all with a very few exceptions reprinted from
+_Blackwood_. Mrs. Gordon filially groans because the reprint was not
+more extensive, and without endorsing her own very high opinion of her
+father's work, it is possible to agree with her. It is especially
+noteworthy that from the essays are excluded three out of the four chief
+critical series which Wilson wrote--that on Spenser, praised by a writer
+so little given to reckless praise as Hallam, the _Specimens of British
+Critics_, and the _Dies Boreales_,--leaving only the series on Homer
+with its quasi-Appendix on the Greek dramatists, and the _Noctes_
+themselves.
+
+It must be confessed that the _Noctes Ambrosianae_ are not easy things to
+commend to the modern reader, if I may use the word commend in its
+proper sense and with no air of patronage. Even Scotchmen (perhaps,
+indeed, Scotchmen most of all) are wont nowadays to praise them rather
+apologetically, as may be seen in the case of their editor and abridger
+Mr. Skelton. Like most other very original things they drew after them a
+flock of imbecile imitations; and up to the present day those who have
+lived in the remoter parts of Scotland must know, or recently remember,
+dreary compositions in corrupt following of the _Noctes_, with
+exaggerated attempts at Christopher's worst mannerisms, and invariably
+including a ghastly caricature of the Shepherd. Even in themselves they
+abound in stumbling-blocks, which are perhaps multiplied, at least at
+the threshold, by the arbitrary separation in Ferrier's edition of
+Wilson's part, and not all his part, from the whole series; eighteen
+numbers being excluded bodily to begin with, while many more and parts
+of more are omitted subsequently. The critical mistake of this is
+evident, for much of the machinery and all the characters of the
+_Noctes_ were given to, not by, Wilson, and in all probability he
+accepted them not too willingly. The origin of the fantastic personages,
+the creation of which was a perfect mania with the early contributors to
+_Blackwood_, and who are, it is to be feared, too often a nuisance to
+modern readers, is rather dubious. Maginn's friends have claimed the
+origination of the _Noctes_ proper, and of its well-known motto
+paraphrased from Phocylides, for "The Doctor," or, if his chief
+_Blackwood_ designation be preferred, for the Ensign--Ensign O'Doherty.
+Professor Ferrier, on the other hand, has shown a not unnatural but by
+no means critical or exact desire to hint that Wilson invented the
+whole. There is no doubt that the real original is to be found in the
+actual suppers at "Ambrose's." These Lockhart had described, in _Peter's
+Letters_, before the appearance of the first _Noctes_ (the reader must
+not be shocked, the false concord is invariable in the book itself) and
+not long after the establishment of "Maga." As was the case with the
+magazine generally, the early numbers were extremely local and extremely
+personal. Wilson's glory is that he to a great extent, though not
+wholly, lifted them out of this rut, when he became the chief if not the
+sole writer after Lockhart's removal to London, and, with rare
+exceptions, reduced the personages to three strongly marked and very
+dramatic characters, Christopher North himself, the Ettrick Shepherd,
+and "Tickler." All these three were in a manner portraits, but no one is
+a mere photograph from a single person. On the whole, however, I suspect
+that Christopher North is a much closer likeness, if not of what Wilson
+himself was, yet at any rate of what he would have liked to be, than
+some of his apologists maintain. These charitable souls excuse the
+egotism, the personality, the violence, the inconsistency, the absurd
+assumption of omniscience and Admirable-Crichtonism, on the plea that
+"Christopher" is only the ideal Editor and not the actual Professor. It
+is quite true that Wilson, who, like all men of humour, must have known
+his own foibles, not unfrequently satirises them; but it is clear from
+his other work and from his private letters that they _were_ his
+foibles. The figure of the Shepherd, who is the chief speaker and on the
+whole the most interesting, is a more debatable one. It is certain that
+many of Hogg's friends, and, in his touchy moments he himself,
+considered that great liberty was taken with him, if not that (as the
+_Quarterly_ put it in a phrase which evidently made Wilson very angry)
+he was represented as a mere "boozing buffoon." On the other hand it is
+equally certain that the Shepherd never did anything that exhibited half
+the power over thought and language which is shown in the best passages
+of his _Noctes_ eidolon. Some of the adventures described as having
+happened to him are historically known as having happened to Wilson
+himself, and his sentiments are much more the writer's than the
+speaker's. At the same time the admirably imitated patois and the subtle
+rendering of Hogg's very well known foibles--his inordinate and
+stupendous vanity, his proneness to take liberties with his betters, his
+irritable temper, and the rest--give a false air of identity which is
+very noteworthy. The third portrait is said to have been the farthest
+from life, except in some physical peculiarities, of the three.
+"Tickler," whose original was Wilson's maternal uncle Robert Sym, an
+Edinburgh "writer," and something of a humorist in the flesh, is very
+skilfully made to hold the position of common-sense intermediary between
+the two originals, North and the Shepherd. He has his own peculiarities,
+but he has also a habit of bringing his friends down from their
+altitudes in a Voltairian fashion which is of great benefit to the
+dialogues, and may be compared to Peacock's similar use of some of his
+characters. The few occasional interlocutors are of little moment, with
+one exception; and the only female characters, Mrs. and Miss Gentle,
+would have been very much better away. They are not in the least
+lifelike, and usually exhibit the namby-pambiness into which Wilson too
+often fell when he wished to be refined and pathetic. The "English" or
+half-English characters, who come in sometimes as foils, are also rather
+of the stick, sticky. On the other hand, the interruptions of Ambrose,
+the host, and his household, though a little farcical, are well judged.
+And of the one exception above mentioned, the live Thomas De Quincey,
+who is brought in without disguise or excuse in some of the very best of
+the series, it can only be said that the imitation of his written style
+is extraordinary, and that men who knew his conversation say that the
+rendering of that is more extraordinary still.
+
+The same designed exaggeration which some uncritical persons have called
+Rabelaisian (not noticing that the very fault of the _Noctes_ is that,
+unlike Rabelais, their author mixes up probabilities and improbabilities
+so that there is a perpetual jarring) is maintained throughout the
+scenery and etceteras. The comfortable but modest accommodations of
+Ambrose's hotels in Gabriel's Road and Picardy Place are turned into
+abodes of not particularly tasteful luxury which put Lord Beaconsfield's
+famous upholstery to shame, and remind one of what they probably
+suggested, Edgar Poe's equally famous and much more terrible sketch of a
+model drawing-room. All the plate is carefully described as "silver"; if
+it had been gold there might have been some humour in it. The "wax"
+candles and "silken" curtains (if they had been _Arabian Nights_ lamps
+and oriental drapery the same might be said) are always insisted on. If
+there is any joke here it seems to lie in the contrast with Wilson's
+actual habits, which were very simple. For instance, he gives us a
+gorgeous description of the apparatus of North's solitary confinement
+when writing for _Blackwood_; his daughter's unvarnished account of the
+same process agrees exactly as to time, rate of production, and so
+forth, but substitutes water for the old hock and "Scots pint" (magnum)
+of claret, a dirty little terra-cotta inkstand for the silver utensil of
+the _Noctes_, and a single large tallow candle for Christopher's "floods
+of light." He carried the whim so far as to construct for himself--his
+_Noctes_ self--an imaginary hall-by-the-sea on the Firth of Forth, which
+in the same way seems to have had an actual resemblance, half of
+likeness, half of contrast, to the actual Elleray, and to enlarge his
+own comfortable town house in Gloucester Place to a sort of fairy palace
+in Moray Place. But that which has most puzzled and shocked readers are
+the specially Gargantuan passages relating to eating and drinking. The
+comments made on this seem (he was anything but patient of criticism) to
+have annoyed Wilson very much; and in some of the later _Noctes_ he
+drops hints that the whole is mere Barmecide business. Unfortunately the
+same criticism applies to this as to the upholstery--the exaggeration is
+"done too natural." The Shepherd's consumption of oysters not by dozens
+but by fifties, the allowance of "six common kettles-full of water" for
+the night's toddy ration of the three, North's above-mentioned bottle of
+old hock at dinner and magnum of claret after, the dinners and suppers
+and "whets" which appear so often;--all these stop short of the actually
+incredible, and are nothing more than extremely convivial men of the
+time, who were also large eaters, would have actually consumed. Lord
+Alvanley's three hearty suppers, the exploits of the old member of
+Parliament in Boz's sketch of Bellamy's (I forget his real name, but he
+was not a myth), and other things might be quoted to show that there is
+a fatal verisimilitude in the Ambrosian feasts which may, or may not,
+make them shocking (they don't shock me), but which certainly takes them
+out of the category of merely humorous exaggeration. The Shepherd's
+"jugs" numerous as they are (and by the way the Shepherd propounds two
+absolutely contradictory theories of toddy-making, one of which,
+according to the instructions of my preceptors in that art, who lived
+within sight of the hills that look down on Glenlivet, is a damnable
+heresy) are not in the least like the _seze muiz, deux bussars, et six
+tupins_ of tripe that Gargamelle so rashly devoured. There are men now
+living, and honoured members of society in Scotland, who admit the soft
+impeachment of having drunk in their youth twelve or fourteen "double"
+tumblers at a sitting. Now a double tumbler, be it known to the
+Southron, is a jorum of toddy to which there go two wineglasses (of
+course of the old-fashioned size, not our modern goblets) of whisky.
+"Indeed," said a humorous and indulgent lady correspondent of Wilson's,
+"indeed, I really think you eat too many oysters at the _Noctes_;" and
+any one who believes in distributive justice must admit that they did.
+
+If, therefore, the reader is of the modern cutlet-and-cup-of-coffee
+school of feeding, he will no doubt find the _Noctes_ most grossly and
+palpably gluttonous. If he be a very superior person he will smile at
+the upholstery. If he objects to horseplay he will be horrified at
+finding the characters on one occasion engaging in a regular "mill," on
+more than one corking each other's faces during slumber, sometimes
+playing at pyramids like the bounding brothers of acrobatic fame, at
+others indulging in leap-frog with the servants, permitting themselves
+practical jokes of all kinds, affecting to be drowned by an explosive
+haggis, and so forth. Every now and then he will come to a passage at
+which, without being superfine at all, he may find his gorge rise;
+though there is nothing quite so bad in the _Noctes_ as the picture of
+the ravens eating a dead Quaker in the _Recreations_, a picture for
+which Wilson offers a very lame defence elsewhere. He must put all sorts
+of prejudice, literary, political, and other, in his pocket. He must be
+prepared not only for constant and very scurrilous flings at "Cockneys"
+(Wilson extends the term far beyond the Hunt and Hazlitt school, an
+extension which to this day seems to give a strange delight to Edinburgh
+journalists), but for the wildest heterodoxies and inconsistencies of
+political, literary, and miscellaneous judgment, for much bastard
+verse-prose, for a good many quite uninteresting local and ephemeral
+allusions, and, of course, for any quantity of Scotch dialect. If all
+these allowances and provisos are too many for him to make, it is
+probably useless for him to attempt the _Noctes_ at all. He will pretty
+certainly, with the _Quarterly_ reviewer, set their characters down as
+boozing buffoons, and decline the honour of an invitation to Ambrose's
+or The Lodge, to Southside or the tent in Ettrick Forest.
+
+But any one who can accommodate himself to these little matters, much
+more any one who can enter into the spirit of days merrier, more
+leisurely, and if not less straitlaced than our own, yet lacing their
+laces in a different fashion, will find the _Noctes_ very delightful
+indeed. The mere high jinks, when the secret of being in the vein with
+them has been mastered, are seldom unamusing, and sometimes (notably in
+the long swim out to sea of Tickler and the Shepherd) are quite
+admirable fooling. No one who has an eye for the literary-dramatic can
+help, after a few _Noctes_ have been read, admiring the skill with which
+the characters are at once typified and individualised, the substance
+which they acquire in the reader's mind, the personal interest in them
+which is excited. And to all this, peculiarly suited for an alterative
+in these solemn days, has to be added the abundance of scattered and
+incomplete but remarkable gems of expression and thought that come at
+every few pages, sometimes at every page, of the series.
+
+Some of the burlesque narratives (such as the Shepherd's Mazeppa-like
+ride on the Bonassus) are inimitably good, though they are too often
+spoilt by Wilson's great faults of prolixity and uncertainty of touch.
+The criticisms, of which there are many, are also extremely unequal,
+but not a few very fine passages may be found among them. The politics,
+it must be owned, are not good for much, even from the Tory point of
+view. But the greatest attraction of the whole, next to its sunshiny
+heartiness and humour, is to be found in innumerable and indescribable
+bits, phrases, sentences, short paragraphs, which have, more than
+anything out of the dialogues of the very best novels, the character and
+charm of actual conversation. To read a _Noctes_ has, for those who have
+the happy gift of realising literature, not much less than the effect of
+actually taking part in one, with no danger of headache or indigestion
+after, and without the risk of being playfully corked, or required to
+leap the table for a wager, or forced to extemporise sixteen stanzas
+standing on the mantelpiece. There must be some peculiar virtue in this,
+for, as is very well known, the usual dialogue leaves the reader more
+outside of it than almost any other kind of literature.
+
+This peculiar charm is of necessity wanting to the rest of Wilson's
+works, and in so far they are inferior to the _Noctes_; but they have
+compensatory merits of their own, while, considered merely as
+literature, there are better things in them than anything that is to be
+found in the colloquies of those men of great gormandising
+abilities--Christopher North, James Hogg, and Timothy Tickler. Of the
+four volumes of _Essays Critical and Imaginative_, the fourth, on Homer
+and his translators, with an unfinished companion piece on the Greek
+drama, stands by itself, and has indeed, I believe, been separately
+published. It is well worth reading through at a sitting, which cannot
+be said of every volume of criticism. What is more, it may, I think, be
+put almost first in its own division of the art, though whether that
+division of the art is a high or low one is another question. I should
+not myself rank it very high. With Wilson, criticism, at least here, is
+little more than the eloquent expression of likes and dislikes. The long
+passages in which he deals with the wrath of Achilles and with the love
+of Calypso, though subject to the general stricture already more than
+once passed, are really beautiful specimens of literary enthusiasm; nor
+is there anything in English more calculated to initiate the reader,
+especially the young reader, in the love at least, if not the
+understanding, of Homer. The same enthusiastic and obviously quite
+genuine appreciation appears in the essay on the "Agamemnon." But of
+criticism as criticism--of what has been called tracing of literary
+cause and effect, of any coherent and co-ordinated theory of the good
+and bad in verse and prose, and the reasons of their goodness or
+badness, it must be said of this, as of Wilson's other critical work,
+that it is to be found _nusquam nullibi nullimodis_. He can preach
+(though with too great volubility, and with occasional faults of taste)
+delightful sermons about what he likes at the moment--for it is by no
+means always the same; and he can make formidable onslaughts with
+various weapons on what he dislikes at the moment--which again is not
+always the same. But a man so certain to go off at score whenever his
+likes or dislikes are excited, and so absolutely unable to check himself
+whenever he feels tempted thus to go off, lacks the very first
+qualifications of the critic:--lacks them, indeed, almost as much as the
+mere word-grinder who looks to see whether a plural substantive has a
+singular verb, and is satisfied if it has not, and horrified if it has.
+His most famous sentence "The Animosities are mortal, but the Humanities
+live for ever" is certainly noble. But it would have been better if the
+Humanities had oftener choked the Animosities at their birth.
+
+Wilson's criticism is to be found more or less everywhere in his
+collected writings. I have said that I think it a pity that, of his
+longest critical attempts, only one has been republished; and the reason
+is simple. For with an unequal writer (and Wilson is a writer unequalled
+in his inequality) his best work is as likely to be found in his worst
+book as his worst work in his best book; while the constant
+contemplation for a considerable period of one subject is more likely
+than anything else to dispel his habits of digression and padding. But
+the ubiquity of his criticism through the ten volumes was, in the
+circumstances of their editing, simply unavoidable. He had himself
+superintended a selection of all kinds, which he called _The Recreations
+of Christopher North_, and this had to be reprinted entire. It followed
+that, in the _Essays Critical and Imaginative_, an equally miscellaneous
+character should be observed. Almost everything given, and much not
+given, in the Works is worth consideration, but for critical purposes a
+choice is necessary. Let us take the consolidated essay on Wordsworth
+(most of which dates before 1822), the famous paper on Lord, then Mr.,
+Tennyson's poems in 1832, and the generous palinode on Macaulay's "Lays"
+of 1842. No three papers could better show Wilson in his three literary
+stages, that of rather cautious tentative (for though he was not a very
+young man in 1818, the date of the earliest of the Wordsworth papers, he
+was a young writer), that of practised and unrestrained vigour (for 1832
+represents about his literary zenith), and that of reflective decadence,
+for by 1842 he had ceased to write habitually, and was already bowed
+down by mental sorrows and physical ailments.
+
+In the first paper, or set of papers, it is evident that he is
+ambitiously groping after a more systematic style of criticism than he
+found in practice to be possible for him. Although he elsewhere scoffs
+at definitions, he tries to formulate very precisely the genius of
+Scott, of Byron, and of Wordsworth; he does his best to connect his
+individual judgments with these formulas; he shuns mere verbal
+criticism, and (to some extent) mere exaltation or depreciation of
+particular passages. But it is quite evident that he is ill at ease; and
+I do not think that any one now reading the essay can call it a
+successful one, or can attempt to rank it with those which, from
+different points of view, Hazlitt and De Quincey (Hazlitt nearly at the
+same time) wrote about Wordsworth. Indeed, Hazlitt is the most valuable
+of all examples for a critical comparison with Wilson; both being
+violent partisans and crotcheteers, both being animated with the truest
+love of poetry, but the one possessing and the other lacking the
+"tie-beam" of a consistent critical theory.
+
+A dozen years later Wilson had cast his slough, and had become the
+autocratic, freespoken, self-constituted dictator, Christopher North. He
+was confronted with the very difficult problem of Mr. Tennyson's poems.
+He knew they were poetry; that he could not help seeing and knowing. But
+they seemed to him to be the work of a "cockney" (it would be
+interesting to know whether there ever was any one less of a cockney
+than the author of "Mariana"), and he was irritated by some silly praise
+which had been given to them. So he set to work, and perpetrated the
+queerest jumble of sound and unsound criticism that exists in the
+archives of that art, so far as a humble but laborious student and
+practitioner thereof knoweth. He could not for the life of him help
+admiring "Adeline," "Oriana," "Mariana," "The Ode to Memory." Yet he had
+nothing but scorn for the scarcely less exquisite "Mermaid" and "Sea
+Fairies"--though the first few lines of the latter, excluded by this and
+other pseudo-criticism from the knowledge of half a generation of
+English readers, equal almost anything that the poet has ever done. And
+only the lucky memory of a remark of Hartley Coleridge's (who never went
+wrong in criticism, whatever he did in life) saved him from explicitly
+damning "The Dying Swan," which stands at the very head of a whole class
+of poetry. In all this essay, to borrow one of his own favourite words,
+he simply "plouters"--splashes and flounders about without any guidance
+of critical theory. Compare, to keep up the comparative method, the
+paper with the still more famous and far more deadly attack which
+Lockhart made a little later in the _Quarterly_. There one finds little,
+if any, generosity; an infinitely more cold-blooded and deliberate
+determination to "cut up." But the critic (and how quaint and pathetic
+it is to think that the said critic was the author of "I ride from land
+to land" and "When youthful hope is fled") sees his theory of poetry
+straight before him, and never takes his eye off it. The individual
+censures may be just or unjust, but they fit together like the
+propositions of a masterpiece of legal judgment. The poet is condemned
+under the statute,--so much the worse for the statute perhaps, but that
+does not matter--and he can only plead No jurisdiction; whereas with
+Christopher it is quite different. If he does not exactly blunder right
+(and he sometimes does that), he constantly blunders wrong--goes wrong,
+that is to say, without any excuse of theory or general view. That is
+not criticism.
+
+We shall not find matters much mended from the strictly critical point
+of view, when we come, ten years later, to the article on the "Lays."
+Here Christopher, as I hold with all respect to persons of distinction,
+is absolutely right. He does not say one word too much of the fire and
+life of those wonderful verses, of that fight of all fights--as far as
+English verse goes, except Drayton's "Agincourt" and the last canto of
+"Marmion"; as far as English prose goes, except some passages of Mallory
+and two or three pages of Kingsley's--the Battle of the Lake Regillus.
+The subject and the swing attracted him; he liked the fight, and he
+liked the ring as of Sir Walter at his very best. But he goes
+appallingly wrong all through on general critical points.
+
+Yet, according to his own perverse fashion, he never goes wrong without
+going right. Throughout his critical work there are scattered the most
+intelligent ideas, the neatest phrases, the most appreciative judgments.
+How good is it to say that "the battle of Trafalgar, though in some
+sort it neither began nor ended anything, was a kind of consummation of
+national prowess." How good again in its very straightforwardness and
+simplicity is the dictum "it is not necessary that we should understand
+fine poetry in order to feel and enjoy it, any more than fine music."
+Hundreds and thousands of these things lie about the pages. And in the
+next page to each the critic probably goes and says something which
+shows that he had entirely forgotten them. An intelligent man may be
+angry with Christopher--I should doubt whether any one who is not
+occasionally both angry and disgusted with him can be an intelligent
+man. But it is impossible to dislike him or fail to admire him as a
+whole.
+
+There is a third and very extensive division of Wilson's work which may
+not improbably be more popular, or might be if it were accessible
+separately, with the public of to-day, than either of those which have
+been surveyed. His "drunken _Noctes_," as Carlyle unkindly calls them,
+require a certain peculiar attitude of mind to appreciate them. As for
+his criticisms, it is frequently said, and it certainly would not become
+me to deny it, that nobody reads criticism but critics. But Wilson's
+renown as an athlete, a sportsman, and a lover of nature, who had a
+singular gift in expressing his love, has not yet died; and there is an
+ample audience now for men who can write about athletics, about sport,
+and about scenery. Nor is it questionable that on these subjects he is
+seen, on the whole, at his best. True, his faults pursue him even here,
+and are aggravated by a sort of fashion of the time which made him
+elaborately digress into politics, into literature, even (God rest his
+soul!) into a kind of quasi-professional and professorial sermonising on
+morals and theology, in the midst of his sporting articles. But the
+metal more attractive of the main subject would probably recommend these
+papers widely, if they were not scattered pell-mell about the _Essays
+Critical and Imaginative_, and the _Recreations of Christopher North_.
+Speaking generally they fall into three divisions--essays on sport in
+general, essays on the English Lakes, and essays on the Scottish
+Highlands. The best of the first class are the famous papers called
+"Christopher North in his Sporting Jacket," and the scattered reviews
+and articles redacted in the _Recreations_ under the general title of
+"Anglimania." In the second class all are good; and a volume composed of
+"Christopher at the Lakes," "A Day at Windermere," "Christopher on
+Colonsay" (a wild extravaganza which had a sort of basis of fact in a
+trotting-match won on a pony which Wilson afterwards sold for four
+pounds), and "A Saunter at Grasmere," with one or two more, would be a
+thing of price. The best of the third class beyond all question is the
+collection, also redacted by the author for the _Recreations_, entitled
+"The Moors." This last is perhaps the best of all the sporting and
+descriptive pieces, though not the least exemplary of its authors
+vagaries; for before he can get to the Moors, he gives us heaven knows
+how many pages of a criticism on Wordsworth, which, in that place at any
+rate, we do not in the least want; and in the very middle of his
+wonderful and sanguinary exploits on and near Ben Cruachan, he
+"interrupts the muffins" in order to deliver to a most farcical and
+impertinent assemblage a quite serious and still more impertinent
+sermon. But all these papers are more or less delightful. For the
+glowing description of, and the sneaking apology for, cat-worrying which
+the "Sporting Jacket" contains, nothing can be said. Wilson deliberately
+overlooks the fact that the whole fun of that nefarious amusement
+consists in the pitting of a plucky but weak animal against something
+much more strongly built and armed than itself. One may regret the P.R.,
+and indulge in a not wholly sneaking affection for cock-fighting,
+dog-fighting, and anything in which there is a fair match, without
+having the slightest weakness for this kind of brutality. But, generally
+speaking, Wilson is a thoroughly fair sportsman, and how enthusiastic he
+is, no one who has read him can fail to know. Of the scenery of loch or
+lake, of hill or mountain, he was at once an ardent lover and a
+describer who has never been equalled. His accustomed exaggeration and
+false emphasis are nowhere so little perceptible as when he deals with
+Ben Cruachan or the Old Man of Coniston, with the Four Great Lakes of
+Britain, East and West (one of his finest passages), or with the glens
+of Etive and Borrowdale. The accursed influence of an unchastened taste
+is indeed observable in the before-mentioned "Dead Quaker of Helvellyn,"
+a piece of unrelieved nastiness which he has in vain tried to excuse.
+But the whole of the series from which this is taken ("Christopher in
+his Aviary") is in his least happy style, alternately grandiose and low,
+relieved indeed by touches of observation and feeling, as all his work
+is, but hardly redeemed by them. The depths of his possible fall may
+also be seen from a short piece which Professor Ferrier, obligingly
+describing it as "too lively to be omitted," has adjoined to
+"Christopher at the Lakes." But, on the whole, all the articles
+mentioned in the list at the beginning of this paragraph, with the
+capital "Streams" as an addition, with the soliloquies on "The Seasons,"
+and with part (_not_ the narrative part) of "Highland Storms," are
+delightful reading. The progress of the sportsman has never been better
+given than in "Christopher North in his Sporting Jacket." In "The Moors"
+the actual sporting part is perhaps a little spoilt by the affectation
+of infallibility, qualified it is true by an aside or two, which so
+often mars the Christopherian utterances. But Wilson's description has
+never been bettered. The thunderstorm on the hill, the rough
+conviviality at the illicit distillery, the evening voyage on the loch,
+match, if they do not beat, anything of the kind in much more recent
+books far better known to the present generation. A special favourite of
+mine is the rather unceremonious review of Sir Humphry Davy's strangely
+over-praised "Salmonia." The passage of utter scorn and indignation at
+the preposterous statement of the chief personage in the dialogues, that
+after an exceptionally hard day's walking and fishing "half a pint of
+claret per man is enough," is sublime. Nearly the earliest, and
+certainly the best, protest against some modern fashions in shooting is
+to be found in "The Moors." In the same series, the visit to the hill
+cottage, preceding that to the still, has what it has since become the
+fashion to call the idyllic flavour, without too much of the rather
+mawkish pathos with which, in imitation of Mackenzie and the
+sensibility-writers of the last century, Wilson is apt to daub his
+pictures of rural and humble life. The passages on Oxford, to go to a
+slightly different but allied subject, in "Old North and Young North" (a
+paper not yet mentioned), may have full appeal to Oxford men, but I can
+hardly be mistaken in thinking that outsiders must see at least some of
+the beauty of them. But the list of specially desirable things in these
+articles is endless; hardly one of them can be taken up without
+discovering many such, not one of them without discovering some.[15]
+
+And, throughout the whole collection, there is the additional
+satisfaction that the author is writing only of what he thoroughly knows
+and understands. At the Lakes Wilson lived for years, and was familiar
+with every cranny of the hills, from the Pillar to Hawes Water, and from
+Newby Bridge to Saddleback. He began marching and fishing through the
+Highlands when he was a boy, enticed even his wife into perilous
+pedestrian enterprises with him, and, though the extent of his knowledge
+was perhaps not quite so large as he pretends, he certainly knew great
+tracts as well as he knew Edinburgh. Nor were his qualifications as a
+sportsman less authentic, despite the somewhat Munchausenish appearance
+which some of the feats narrated in the _Noctes_ and the _Recreations_
+wear, and are indeed intended to wear. His enormous baskets of trout
+seem to have been, if not quite so regular as he sometimes makes them
+out, at any rate fully historical as occasional feats. As has been
+hinted, he really did win the trotting-match on the pony, Colonsay,
+against a thoroughbred, though it was only on the technical point of the
+thoroughbred breaking his pace. His walk from London to Oxford in a
+night seems to have been a fact, and indeed there is nothing at all
+impossible in it, for the distance through Wycombe is not more than
+fifty-three miles; while the less certainly authenticated feat of
+walking from Liverpool to Elleray (eighty miles at least), without more
+than a short rest, also appears to be genuine. Like the heroes of a song
+that he loved, though he seems to have sung it in a corrupt text, he
+could wrestle and fight and jump out anywhere; and, until he was
+thoroughly broken by illness, he appears to have made the very most of
+the not inconsiderable spare time of a Scotch professor who has once got
+his long series of lectures committed to paper, and has nothing to do
+for the rest of his life but collect bundles of pound notes at the
+beginning of each session. All this, joined to his literary gifts, gives
+a reality to his out-of-door papers which is hardly to be found
+elsewhere except in some passages of Kingsley, between whom and Wilson
+there are many and most curious resemblances, chequered by national and
+personal differences only less curious.
+
+I do not think he was a good reviewer, even after making allowance for
+the prejudices and partisanships of the time, and for the monkey tricks
+of mannerism, which, at any rate in his earlier days, were incumbent on
+a reviewer in "Maga." He is too prone to the besetting sins of
+reviewing--the right hand defections and left hand fallings off, which,
+being interpreted, consist first in expressing agreement or
+disagreement with the author's views, and secondly in digressing into
+personal statements of one's own views of things connected with them
+instead of expounding more or less clearly what the book is, and
+addressing oneself to the great question, Is it a good or a bad piece of
+work according to the standard which the author himself strove to reach?
+I have said that I do not think he was on the whole a good critic (for a
+man may be a good critic and a bad reviewer, though the reverse will
+hardly stand), and I have given my reasons. That he was neither a great,
+nor even a very good poet or tale-teller, I have no doubt whatever. But
+this leaves untouched the attraction of his miscellaneous work, and its
+suitableness for the purpose of recreation. For that purpose I think it
+to be among the very best work in all literature. Its unfailing life and
+vigour, its vast variety, the healthy and inspiriting character of the
+subjects with which in the main it deals, are the characteristics which
+make its volumes easy-chair books of the best order. Its beauty no doubt
+is irregular, faulty, engaging rather than exquisite, attractive rather
+than artistically or scientifically perfect. I do not know that there is
+even any reason to join in the general lament over Wilson as being a
+gigantic failure, a monument of wasted energies and half-developed
+faculty. I do not at all think that there was anything in him much
+better than he actually did, or that he ever could have polished and
+sand-papered the faults out of his work. It would pretty certainly have
+lost freshness and vigour; it would quite certainly have been less in
+bulk, and bulk is a very important point in literature that is to serve
+as recreation. It is to me not much less certain that it never would
+have attained the first rank in symmetry and order. I am quite content
+with it as it is, and I only wish that still more of it were easily
+accessible.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[15] If I accepted (a rash acceptance) the challenge to name the three
+very best things in Wilson I should, I think, choose the famous Fairy's
+Funeral in the _Recreations_, the Shepherd's account of his recovery
+from illness in the _Noctes_, and, in a lighter vein, the picture of
+girls bathing in "Streams."
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+DE QUINCEY[16]
+
+
+In not a few respects the literary lot of Thomas De Quincey, both during
+his life and after it, has been exceedingly peculiar. In one respect it
+has been unique. I do not know that any other author of anything like
+his merit, during our time, has had a piece of work published for fully
+twenty years as his, only for it to be excluded as somebody else's at
+the end of that time. Certainly _The Traditions of the Rabbins_ was very
+De Quinceyish; indeed, it was so De Quinceyish that the discovery, after
+such a length of time, that it was not De Quincey's at all, but
+"Salathiel" Croly's, must have given unpleasant qualms to more than one
+critic accustomed to be positive on internal evidence. But if De Quincey
+had thus attributed to him work that was not his, he has also had the
+utmost difficulty in getting attributed to him, in any accessible form,
+work that was his own. Three, or nominally four, editions--one in the
+decade of his death, superintended for the most part by himself; another
+in 1862, whose blue coat and white labels dwell in the fond memory; and
+another in 1878 (reprinted in 1880) a little altered and enlarged, with
+the Rabbins turned out and more soberly clad, but identical in the
+main--put before the British public for some thirty-five years a certain
+portion of his strange, long-delayed, but voluminous work. This work had
+occupied him for about the same period, that is to say for the last and
+shorter half of his extraordinary and yet uneventful life. Now, after
+much praying of readers, and grumbling of critics, we have a fifth and
+definitive edition from the English critic who has given most attention
+to De Quincey, Professor Masson.[17] I may say, with hearty
+acknowledgment of Mr. Masson's services to English literature, that I do
+not very much like this last edition. De Quincey, never much favoured by
+the mechanical producers of books, has had his sizings, as Byron would
+say, still further stinted in the matter of print, margins, and the
+like; and what I cannot but regard as a rather unceremonious tampering
+with his own arrangement has taken place, the new matter being not added
+in supplementary volumes or in appendices to the reprinted volumes, but
+thrust into or between the separate essays, sometimes to the destruction
+of De Quincey's "redaction" altogether, and always to the confusion and
+dislocation of his arrangement, which has also been neglected in other
+ways. Still the actual generation of readers will undoubtedly have
+before them a fuller and completer edition of De Quincey than even
+Americans have yet had; and they will have it edited by an accomplished
+scholar who has taken a great deal of pains to acquaint himself
+thoroughly with the subject.
+
+Will they form a different estimate from that which those of us who have
+known the older editions for a quarter of a century have formed, and
+will that estimate, if it is different, be higher or lower? To answer
+such questions is always difficult; but it is especially difficult here,
+for a certain reason which I had chiefly in mind when I said just now
+that De Quincey's literary lot has been very peculiar. I believe that I
+am not speaking for myself only; I am quite sure that I am speaking my
+own deliberate opinion when I say that on scarcely any English writer is
+it so hard to strike a critical balance--to get a clear definite opinion
+that you can put on the shelf and need merely take down now and then to
+be dusted and polished up by a fresh reading--as on De Quincey. This is
+partly due to the fact that his merits are of the class that appeals to,
+while his faults are of the class that is excused by, the average boy
+who has some interest in literature. To read the _Essay on Murder_, the
+_English Mail Coach_, _The Spanish Nun_, _The Caesars_, and half a score
+other things at the age of about fifteen or sixteen is, or ought to be,
+to fall in love with them. And there is nothing more unpleasant for _les
+ames bien nees_, as the famous distich has it, than to find fault in
+after life with that with which you have fallen in love at fifteen or
+sixteen. Yet most unfortunately, just as De Quincey's merits, or some of
+them, appeal specially to youth, and his defects specially escape the
+notice of youth, so age with stealing steps especially claws those
+merits into his clutch and leaves the defects exposed to derision. The
+most gracious state of authors is that they shall charm at all ages
+those whom they do charm. There are others--Dante, Cervantes, Goethe are
+instances--as to whom you may even begin with a little aversion, and go
+on to love them more and more. De Quincey, I fear, belongs to a third
+class, with whom it is difficult to keep up the first love, or rather
+whose defects begin before long to urge themselves upon the critical
+lover (some would say there are no critical lovers, but that I deny)
+with an even less happy result than is recorded in one of Catullus's
+finest lines. This kind of discovery
+
+    Cogit amare _minus_, _nec_ bene velle _magis_.
+
+How and to what extent this is the case, it must be the business of this
+paper to attempt to show. But first it is desirable to give, as usual,
+a brief sketch of De Quincey's life. It need only be a brief one, for
+the external events of that life were few and meagre; nor can they be
+said to be, even after the researches of Mr. Page and Professor Masson,
+very accurately or exhaustively known. Before those researches "all was
+mist and myth" about De Quincey. I remember as a boy, a year or two
+after his death, hearing a piece of scandal about his domestic
+relations, which seems to have had no foundation whatever, but which
+pretty evidently was an echo of the "libel" (published in a short-lived
+newspaper of the kind which after many years has again risen to infest
+London) whereof he complains with perhaps more acrimony than dignity in
+a paper for the first time exhumed and reprinted in Professor Masson's
+edition. Many of the details of the _Confessions_ and the
+_Autobiography_ have a singular unbelievableness as one reads them; and
+though the tendency of recent biographers has been to accept them as on
+the whole genuine, I own that I am rather sceptical about many of them
+still. Was the ever-famous Malay a real Malay, or a thing of shreds and
+patches? Did De Quincey actually call upon the awful Dean Cyril Jackson
+and affably discuss with him the propriety of entering himself at
+Christ-church? Did he really journey pennilessly down to Eton on the
+chance of finding a casual peer of the realm of tender years who would
+back a bill for him? These are but a few out of a large number of
+questions which in idle moods (for the answer to hardly one of them is
+of the least importance) suggest themselves; and which have been very
+partially answered hitherto even of late years, though they have been
+much discussed. The plain and tolerably certain facts which are
+important in connection with his work may be pretty rapidly summed up.
+
+Thomas de Quincey, or Quincey, was born in Manchester--but apparently
+not, as he himself thought, at the country house of Greenhay which his
+parents afterwards inhabited--on 15th August 1785. His father was a
+merchant, well to do but of weak health, who died when Thomas was seven
+years old. Of his childhood he has left very copious reminiscences, and
+there is no doubt that reminiscences of childhood do linger long after
+later memories have disappeared. But to what extent De Quincey gave
+"cocked hats and canes" to his childish thoughts and to his relations
+with his brothers and sisters, individual judgment must decide. I should
+say, for my part, that the extent was considerable. It seems, however,
+pretty clear that he was as a child, very much what he was all his
+life--emphatically "old-fashioned," retiring without being exactly shy,
+full of far-brought fancies and yet intensely concentrated upon himself.
+In 1796 his mother moved to Bath, and Thomas was educated first at the
+Grammar School there and then at a private school in Wiltshire. It was
+at Bath, his headquarters being there, that he met various persons of
+distinction--Lord Westport, Lord and Lady Carbery, and others--who
+figure largely in the _Autobiography_, but are never heard of
+afterwards. It was with Lord Westport, a boy somewhat younger than
+himself, that he took a trip to Ireland, the only country beyond Great
+Britain that he visited. In 1800 he was sent by his guardians to the
+Manchester Grammar School in order to obtain, by three years' boarding
+there, one of the Somerset Exhibitions to Brasenose. As a separate
+income of L150 had been left by De Quincey's father to each of his sons,
+as this income, or part of it, must have been accumulating, and as the
+mother was very well off, this roundabout way of securing for him a
+miserable forty or fifty pounds a year seems strange enough. But it has
+to be remembered that for all these details we have little security but
+De Quincey himself. However, that he did go to Manchester, and did,
+after rather more than two of his three years' probation, run away is
+indisputable. His mother was living at Chester, and the calf was not
+killed for this prodigal son; but he had liberty given him to wander
+about Wales on an allowance of a guinea a week. That there is some
+mystery, or mystification, about all this is nearly certain. If things
+really went as he represents them, his mother ought to have been
+ashamed of herself, and his guardians ought to have had, to say the
+least, an experience of the roughest side of Lord Eldon's tongue. The
+wanderings in Wales were followed by the famous sojourn in Soho, with
+its waitings at money-lenders' doors, and its perambulations of Oxford
+Street. Then, by another sudden revolution, we find De Quincey with
+two-thirds of his allowance handed over to him and permission to go to
+Oxford as he wished, but abandoned to his own devices by his mother and
+his guardians, as surely no mother and no guardians ever abandoned an
+exceptionally unworldly boy of eighteen before. They seem to have put
+fifty guineas in his pocket and sent him up to Oxford, without even
+recommending him a college, and with an income which made it practically
+certain that he would once more seek the Jews. When he had spent so much
+of his fifty guineas that there was not enough left to pay caution-money
+at most colleges, he went to Worcester, where it happened to be low. He
+seems to have stayed there, on and off, for nearly six years. But he
+took no degree, his eternal caprices making him shun _viva voce_ (then a
+much more important part of the examination than it is now) after
+sending in unusually good written papers. Instead of taking a degree, he
+began to take opium, and to make acquaintance with the "Lakers" in both
+their haunts of Somerset and Westmoreland. He entered himself at the
+Middle Temple, he may have eaten some dinners, and somehow or other he
+"came into his property," though there are dire surmises that it was by
+the Hebrew door. At any rate in November 1809 he gave up both Oxford and
+London (which he had frequented a good deal, chiefly, he says, for the
+sake of the opera of which he was very fond), and established himself at
+Grasmere. One of the most singular things about his singular life--an
+oddity due, no doubt, in part to the fact that he outlived his more
+literary associates instead of being outlived by them--is that though we
+hear much from De Quincey of other people we hear extremely little from
+other people about De Quincey. Indeed what we do so hear dates almost
+entirely from the last days of his life.
+
+As for the autobiographic details in his _Confessions_ and elsewhere,
+anybody who chooses may put those Sibylline leaves together for himself.
+It would only appear certain that for ten years he led the life of a
+recluse student and a hard laudanum-drinker, varied by a little society
+now and then; that in 1816 he married Margaret Simpson, a dalesman's
+daughter, of whom we have hardly any personal notices save to the effect
+that she was very beautiful, and who seems to have been almost the most
+exemplary of wives to almost the most eccentric of husbands; that for
+most of the time he was in more or less ease and affluence (ease and
+affluence still, it would seem, of a treacherous Hebraic origin); and
+that about 1819 he found himself in great pecuniary difficulties. Then
+at length he turned to literature, started as editor of a little Tory
+paper at Kendal, went to London, and took rank, never to be cancelled,
+as a man of letters by the first part of _The Confessions of an
+Opium-Eater_, published in the _London Magazine_ for 1821. He began as a
+magazine-writer, and he continued as such till the end of his life; his
+publications in book-form being, till he was induced to collect his
+articles, quite insignificant. Between 1821 and 1825 he seems to have
+been chiefly in London, though sometimes at Grasmere; between 1825 and
+1830 chiefly at Grasmere, but much in Edinburgh, where Wilson (whose
+friendship he had secured, not at Oxford, though they were
+contemporaries, but at the Lakes) was now residing, and where he was
+introduced to Blackwood. In 1830 he moved his household to the Scotch
+capital, and lived there, and (after his wife's death in 1837) at
+Lasswade, or rather Polton, for the rest of his life. His affairs had
+come to their worst before he lost his wife, and it is now known that
+for some considerable time he lived, like Mr. Chrystal Croftangry, in
+the sanctuary of Holyrood. But De Quincey's way of "living" at any place
+was as mysterious as most of his other ways; and, though he seems to
+have been very fond of his family and not at all put out by them, it was
+his constant habit to establish himself in separate lodgings. These he
+as constantly shifted (sometimes as far as Glasgow) for no intelligible
+reason that has ever been discovered or surmised, his pecuniary troubles
+having long ceased. It was in the latest and most permanent of these
+lodgings, 42 Lothian Street, Edinburgh, not at Lasswade, that he died on
+the 8th of December 1859. He had latterly written mainly, though not
+solely, for _Tait's Magazine_ and _Hogg's Instructor_. But his chief
+literary employment for at least seven years before this, had been the
+arrangement of the authorised edition of his works, the last or
+fourteenth volume of which was in the press at the time of his death.
+
+So meagre are the known facts in a life of seventy-four years, during
+nearly forty of which De Quincey, though never popular, was still
+recognised as a great name in English letters, while during the same
+period he knew, and was known to, not a few distinguished men. But
+little as is recorded of the facts of his life, even less is recorded of
+his character, and for once it is almost impossible to discover that
+character from his works. The few persons who met him all agree as to
+his impenetrability,--an impenetrability not in the least due to posing,
+but apparently natural and fated. De Quincey was at once egotistic and
+impersonal, at once delighted to talk and resolutely shunning society.
+To him, one is tempted to say, reading and writing did come by nature,
+and nothing else was natural at all. With books he is always at home. A
+De Quincey in a world where there was neither reading nor writing of
+books, would certainly either have committed suicide or gone mad. Pope's
+theory of the master-passion, so often abused, justified itself here.
+
+The quantity of work produced during this singular existence, from the
+time when De Quincey first began, unusually late, to write for
+publication, was very large. As collected by the author, it filled
+fourteen volumes; the collection was subsequently enlarged to sixteen,
+and though the new edition promises to restrict itself to the older and
+lesser number, the contents of each volume have been very considerably
+increased. But this printed and reprinted total, so far as can be judged
+from De Quincey's own assertions and from the observations of those who
+were acquainted with him during his later years, must have been but the
+smaller part of what he actually wrote. He was always writing, and
+always leaving deposits of his manuscripts in the various lodgings where
+it was his habit to bestow himself. The greater part of De Quincey's
+writing was of a kind almost as easily written by so full a reader and
+so logical a thinker as an ordinary newspaper article by an ordinary
+man; and except when he was sleeping, wandering about, or reading, he
+was always writing. It is, of course, true that he spent a great deal of
+time, especially in his last years of all, in re-writing and
+re-fashioning previously executed work; and also that illness and opium
+made considerable inroads on his leisure. But I should imagine that if
+we had all that he actually wrote during these nearly forty years, forty
+or sixty printed volumes would more nearly express its amount than
+fourteen or sixteen.
+
+Still what we have is no mean bulk of work for any man to have
+accomplished, especially when it is considered how extraordinarily good
+much of it is. To classify it is not particularly easy; and I doubt,
+myself, whether any classification is necessary. De Quincey himself
+tried, and made rather a muddle of it. Professor Masson is trying also.
+But, in truth, except those wonderful purple patches of "numerous"
+prose, which are stuck all about the work, and perhaps in strictness not
+excepting them, everything that De Quincey wrote, whether it was dream
+or reminiscence, literary criticism or historical study, politics or
+political economy, had one characteristic so strongly impressed on it as
+to dwarf and obscure the differences of subject. It is not very easy to
+find a description at once accurate and fair, brief and adequate, of
+this peculiarity; it is best hinted at in a remark on De Quincey's
+conversation which I have seen quoted somewhere (whether by Professor
+Masson or not I hardly know), that it was, with many interesting and
+delightful qualities, a kind of "rigmarole." So far as I remember, the
+remark was not applied in any unfriendly spirit, nor is it adduced here
+in any such. But both in the printed works, in the remembrances of De
+Quincey's conversation which have been printed, in his letters which are
+exactly like his articles, and in those astonishing imaginary
+conversations attributed to him in the _Noctes Ambrosianae_, which are
+said, by good authorities, exactly to represent his way of talk, this
+quality of rigmarole appears. It is absolutely impossible for him to
+keep to his subject, or any subject. It is as impossible for him to pull
+himself up briefly in any digression from that subject. In his finest
+passages, as in his most trivial, he is at the mercy of the
+will-o'-the-wisp of divagation. In his later re-handlings of his work,
+he did to some extent limit his followings of this will-o'-the-wisp to
+notes, but by no means always; and both in his later and in his earlier
+work, as it was written for the first time, he indulged them freely in
+the text.
+
+For pure rigmarole, for stories, as Mr. Chadband has it, "of a cock and
+of a bull, and of a lady and of a half-crown," few things, even in De
+Quincey, can exceed, and nothing out of De Quincey can approach, the
+passages about the woman he met on the "cop" at Chester, and about the
+Greek letter that he did not send to the Bishop of Bangor, in the
+preliminary part of the _Confessions_. The first is the more teasing,
+because with a quite elvish superfluity of naughtiness he has here
+indulged in a kind of double rigmarole about the woman and the "bore"
+in the river, and flits from one to the other, and from the other to the
+one (his main story standing still the while), for half a dozen pages,
+till the reader feels as Coleridge's auditors must have felt when he
+talked about "Ball and Bell, Bell and Ball." But the Greek letter
+episode, or rather, the episode about the Greek letter which never was
+written, is, if possible, more flagrantly rigmarolish.
+The-cop-and-bore-and-woman digression contains some remarkable
+description as a kind of solace to the Puck-led traveller; the other is
+bare of any such comfort. The Bishop's old housekeeper, who was De
+Quincey's landlady, told him, it seems, that the Bishop had cautioned
+her against taking in lodgers whom she did not know, and De Quincey was
+very angry. As he thought he could write Greek much better than the
+Bishop, he meditated expostulation in that language. He did not
+expostulate, but he proceeds instead to consider the possible effect on
+the Bishop if he had. There was a contemporary writer whom we can
+imagine struck by a similar whimsy: but Charles Lamb would have given us
+the Bishop and himself "quite natural and distinct" in a dozen lines,
+and then have dropped the subject, leaving our sides aching with
+laughter, and our appetites longing for more. De Quincey tells us at
+great length who the Bishop was, and how he was the Head of Brasenose,
+with some remarks on the relative status of Oxford Colleges. Then he
+debates the pros and cons on the question whether the Bishop would have
+answered the letter or not, with some remarks on the difference between
+strict scholarship and the power of composing in a dead language. He
+rises to real humour in the remark, that as "Methodists swarmed in
+Carnarvonshire," he "could in no case have found pleasure in causing
+mortification" to the Bishop, even if he had vanquished him. By this
+time we have had some three pages of it, and could well, especially with
+this lively touch to finish, accept them, though they be something
+tedious, supposing the incident to be closed. The treacherous author
+leads us to suppose that it is closed; telling us how he left Bangor,
+and went to Carnarvon, which change gradually drew his thoughts away
+from the Bishop. So far is this from being the case, that he goes back
+to that Reverend Father, and for two mortal pages more, speculates
+further what would happen if he had written to the Bishop, what the
+Bishop would have said, whether he would not have asked him (De Quincey)
+to the Palace, whether, in his capacity of Head of a House, he would not
+have welcomed him to that seat of learning, and finally smoothed his way
+to a fellowship. By which time, one is perfectly sick of the Bishop, and
+of these speculations on the might-have-been, which are indeed by no
+means unnatural, being exactly what every man indulges in now and then
+in his own case, which, in conversation, would not be unpleasant, but
+which, gradually and diffusedly set down in a book, and interrupting a
+narrative, are most certainly "rigmarole."
+
+Rigmarole, however, can be a very agreeable thing in its way, and De
+Quincey has carried it to a point of perfection never reached by any
+other rigmaroler. Despite his undoubted possession of a kind of humour,
+it is a very remarkable thing that he rigmaroles, so far as can be made
+out by the application of the most sensitive tests, quite seriously, and
+almost, if not quite, unconsciously. These digressions or deviations are
+studded with quips and jests, good, bad, and indifferent. But the writer
+never seems to suspect that his own general attitude is at least
+susceptible of being made fun of. It is said, and we can very well
+believe it, that he was excessively annoyed at Lamb's delightful parody
+of his _Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected_; and,
+on the whole, I should say that no great man of letters in this century,
+except Balzac and Victor Hugo, was so insensible to the ludicrous aspect
+of his own performances. This in the author of the _Essay on Murder_ may
+seem surprising, but, in fact, there are few things of which there are
+so many subdivisions, or in which the subdivisions are marked off from
+each other by such apparently impermeable lines, as humour. If I may
+refine a little I should say that there was very frequently, if not
+generally, a humorous basis for these divagations of De Quincey's; but
+that he almost invariably lost sight of that basis, and proceeded to
+reason quite gravely away from it, in what is (not entirely with
+justice) called the scholastic manner. How much of this was due to the
+influence of Jean Paul and the other German humorists of the last
+century, with whom he became acquainted very early, I should not like to
+say. I confess that my own enjoyment of Richter, which has nevertheless
+been considerable, has always been lessened by the presence in him, to a
+still greater degree, of this same habit of quasi-serious divagation. To
+appreciate the mistake of it, it is only necessary to compare the manner
+of Swift. The _Tale of a Tub_ is in appearance as daringly discursive as
+anything can be, but the author in the first place never loses his way,
+and in the second never fails to keep a watchful eye on himself, lest he
+should be getting too serious or too tedious. That is what Richter and
+De Quincey fail to do.
+
+Yet though these drawbacks are grave, and though they are (to judge from
+my own experience) felt more seriously at each successive reading, most
+assuredly no man who loves English literature could spare De Quincey
+from it; most assuredly all who love English literature would sooner
+spare some much more faultless writers. Even that quality of his which
+has been already noted, his extraordinary attraction for youth, is a
+singular and priceless one. The Master of the Court of the Gentiles, or
+the Instructor of the Sons of the Prophets, he might be called in a
+fantastic nomenclature, which he would have himself appreciated, if it
+had been applied to any one but himself. What he somewhere calls his
+"extraordinary ignorance of daily life" does not revolt youth. His
+little pedantries, which to the day of his death were like those of a
+clever schoolboy, appeal directly to it. His best fun is quite
+intelligible; his worst not wholly uncongenial. His habit (a certain
+most respected professor in a northern university may recognise the
+words) of "getting into logical coaches and letting himself be carried
+on without minding where he is going" is anything but repugnant to brisk
+minds of seventeen. They are quite able to comprehend the great if
+mannered beauty of his finest style--the style, to quote his own words
+once more, as of "an elaborate and pompous sunset." Such a schoolmaster
+to bring youths of promise, not merely to good literature but to the
+best, nowhere else exists. But he is much more than a mere schoolmaster,
+and in order that we may see what he is, it is desirable first of all to
+despatch two other objections made to him from different quarters, and
+on different lines of thought. The one objection (I should say that I do
+not fully espouse either of them) is that he is an untrustworthy critic
+of books; the other is that he is a very spiteful commentator on men.
+
+This latter charge has found wide acceptance and has been practically
+corroborated and endorsed by persons as different as Southey and
+Carlyle. It would not in any case concern us much, for when a man is
+once dead it matters uncommonly little whether he was personally
+unamiable or not. But I think that De Quincey has in this respect been
+hardly treated. He led such a wholly unnatural life, he was at all times
+and in all places so thoroughly excluded from the natural contact and
+friction of society, that his utterances hardly partake of the ordinary
+character of men's speech. In the "vacant interlunar caves" where he hid
+himself, he could hardly feel the restraints that press on those who
+move within ear-shot and jostle of their fellows on this actual earth.
+This is not a triumphant defence, no doubt; but I think it is a defence.
+And further, it has yet to be proved that De Quincey set down anything
+in malice. He called his literary idol, Wordsworth, "inhumanly
+arrogant." Does anybody--not being a Wordsworthian and therefore out of
+reach of reason--doubt that Wordsworth's arrogance was inhuman? He, not
+unprovoked by scant gratitude on Coleridge's part for very solid
+services, and by a doubtless sincere but rather unctuous protest of his
+brother in opium-eating against the _Confessions_, told some home truths
+against that magnificent genius but most unsatisfactory man. A sort of
+foolish folk has recently arisen which tells us that because Coleridge
+wrote "The Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan," he was quite entitled to
+leave his wife and children to be looked after by anybody who chose, to
+take stipends from casual benefactors, and to scold, by himself or by
+his next friend Mr. Wordsworth, other benefactors, like Thomas Poole,
+who were not prepared at a moment's notice to give him a hundred pounds
+for a trip to the Azores. The rest of us, though we may feel no call to
+denounce Coleridge for these proceedings, may surely hold that "The
+Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan" are no defence to the particular
+charges. I do not see that De Quincey said anything worse of Coleridge
+than any man who knew the then little, but now well-known facts of
+Coleridge's life, was entitled to say if he chose. And so in other
+cases. That he was what is called a thoughtful person--that is to say
+that he ever said to himself, "Will what I am writing give pain, and
+ought I to give that pain?"--I do not allege. In fact, the very excuse
+which has been made for him above is inconsistent with it. He always
+wrote far too much as one in another planet for anything of the kind to
+occur to him, and he was perhaps for a very similar reason rather too
+fond of the "personal talk" which Wordsworth wisely disdained. But that
+he was in any proper sense spiteful, that is to say that he ever wrote
+either with a deliberate intention to wound or with a deliberate
+indifference whether he wounded or not, I do not believe.
+
+The other charge, that he was a bad or rather a very untrustworthy
+critic of books, cannot be met quite so directly. He is indeed
+responsible for a singularly large number of singularly grave critical
+blunders--by which I mean of course not critical opinions disagreeing
+with my own, but critical opinions which the general consent of
+competent critics, on the whole, negatives. The minor classical writers
+are not much read now, but there must be a sufficient jury to whom I can
+appeal to know what is to be done with a professed critic of style--at
+least asserting himself to be no mean classical scholar--who declares
+that "Paganism had no more brilliant master of composition to show
+than"--Velleius Paterculus! Suppose this to be a mere fling or freak,
+what is to be thought of a man who evidently sets Cicero, as a writer,
+if not as a thinker, above Plato? It would be not only possible but easy
+to follow this up with a long list of critical enormities on De
+Quincey's part, enormities due not to accidental and casual crotchet or
+prejudice, as in Hazlitt's case, but apparently to some perverse
+idiosyncrasy. I doubt very much, though the doubt may seem horribly
+heretical to some people, whether De Quincey really cared much for
+poetry as poetry. He liked philosophical poets:--Milton, Wordsworth,
+Shakespeare (inasmuch as he perceived Shakespeare to be the greatest of
+philosophical poets), Pope even in a certain way. But read the
+interesting paper which late in life he devoted to Shelley. He treats
+Shelley as a man admirably, with freedom alike from the maudlin
+sentiment of our modern chatterers and from Puritanical preciseness. He
+is not too hard on him in any way, he thinks him a pleasing personality
+and a thinker distorted but interesting. Of Shelley's strictly poetical
+quality he says nothing, if he knew or felt anything. In fact, of
+lyrical poetry generally, that is to say of poetry in its most purely
+poetical condition, he speaks very little in all his extensive critical
+dissertations. His want of appreciation of it may supply explanation of
+his unpardonable treatment of Goethe. That he should have maltreated
+_Wilhelm Meister_ is quite excusable. There are fervent admirers of
+Goethe at his best who acknowledge most fully the presence in _Wilhelm_
+of the two worst characteristics of German life and literature, bad
+taste and tediousness. But it is not excusable that much later, and
+indeed at the very height of his literary powers and practice, he should
+have written the article in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ on the author
+of _Faust_, of _Egmont_, and above all of the shorter poems. Here he
+deliberately assents to the opinion that _Werther_ is "superior to
+everything that came after it, and for mere power, Goethe's paramount
+work," dismisses _Faust_ as something that "no two people have ever
+agreed about," sentences _Egmont_ as "violating the historic truth of
+character," and mentions not a single one of those lyrics, unmatched, or
+rather only matched by Heine, in the language, by which Goethe first
+gave German rank with the great poetic tongues. His severity on Swift is
+connected with his special "will-worship" of ornate style, of which more
+presently, and in general it may be said that De Quincey's extremely
+logical disposition of mind was rather a snare to him in his criticism.
+He was constantly constructing general principles and then arguing
+downwards from them; in which case woe to any individual fact or person
+that happened to get in the way. Where Wilson, the "only intimate male
+friend I have had" (as he somewhere says with a half-pathetic touch of
+self-illumination more instructive than reams of imaginative
+autobiography), went wrong from not having enough of general principle,
+where Hazlitt went wrong from letting prejudices unconnected with the
+literary side of the matter blind his otherwise piercing literary sight,
+De Quincey fell through an unswervingness of deduction more French than
+English. Your ornate writer must be better than your plain one, _ergo_,
+let us say, Cicero must be better than Swift.
+
+One other curious weakness of his (which has been glanced at already)
+remains to be noticed. This is the altogether deplorable notion of
+jocularity which he only too often exhibits. Mr. Masson, trying to
+propitiate the enemy, admits that "to address the historian Josephus as
+'Joe,' through a whole article, and give him a black eye into the
+bargain, is positively profane." I am not sure as to the profanity,
+knowing nothing particularly sacred about Josephus. But if Mr. Masson
+had called it excessively silly, I should have agreed heartily; and if
+any one else denounced it as a breach of good literary manners, I do not
+know that I should protest. The habit is the more curious in that all
+authorities agree as to the exceptional combination of scholarliness and
+courtliness which marked De Quincey's colloquial style and expression.
+Wilson's daughter, Mrs. Gordon, says that he used to address her
+father's cook "as if she had been a duchess"; and that the cook, though
+much flattered, was somewhat aghast at his _punctilio_. That a man of
+this kind should think it both allowable and funny to talk of Josephus
+as "Joe," and of Magliabecchi as "Mag," may be only a new example of
+that odd law of human nature which constantly prompts people in various
+relations of life, and not least in literature, to assume most the
+particular qualities (not always virtues or graces) that they have not.
+Yet it is fair to remember that Wilson and the _Blackwood_ set, together
+with not a few writers in the _London Magazine_--the two literary
+coteries in connexion with whom De Quincey started as a writer--had
+deliberately imported this element of horse-play into literature, that
+it at least did not seem to interfere with their popularity, and that De
+Quincey himself, after 1830, lived too little in touch with actual life
+to be aware that the style was becoming as unfashionable as it had
+always, save on very exceptional subjects, been ungraceful. Even on
+Wilson, who was to the manner born of riotous spirits, it often sits
+awkwardly; in De Quincey's case it is, to borrow Sir Walter's admirable
+simile in another case, like "the forced impudence of a bashful man."
+Grim humour he can manage admirably, and he also--as in the passage
+about the fate which waited upon all who possessed anything which might
+be convenient to Wordsworth, if they died--can manage a certain kind of
+sly humour not much less admirably. But "Joe" and "Mag," and, to take
+another example, the stuff about Catalina's "crocodile papa" in _The
+Spanish Nun_, are neither grim nor sly, they are only puerile. His
+stanchest defender asks, "why De Quincey should not have the same
+license as Swift and Thackeray?" The answer is quick and crushing. Swift
+and Thackeray justify their license by their use of it; De Quincey does
+not. After which it is hardly necessary to add, though this is almost
+final in itself, that neither Swift nor Thackeray interlards perfectly
+and unaffectedly serious work with mere fooling of the "Joe" and "Mag"
+kind. Swift did not put _mollis abuti_ in the _Four last years of Queen
+Anne_, nor Thackeray his _Punch_ jokes in the death-scene of Colonel
+Newcome. I can quite conceive De Quincey doing both.
+
+And now I have done enough in the fault-finding way, and nothing shall
+induce me to say another word of De Quincey in this article save in
+praise. For praise he himself gives the amplest occasion; he might
+almost remain unblamed altogether if his praisers had not been
+frequently unwise, and if his _exemplar_ were not specially _vitiis
+imitabile_. Few English writers have touched so large a number of
+subjects with such competence both in information and in power of
+handling. Still fewer have exhibited such remarkable logical faculty.
+One main reason why one is sometimes tempted to quarrel with him is that
+his play of fence is so excellent that one longs to cross swords. For
+this and for other reasons no writer has a more stimulating effect, or
+is more likely to lead his readers on to explore and to think for
+themselves. In none is that incurable curiosity, that infinite variety
+of desire for knowledge and for argument which age cannot quench, more
+observable. Few if any have the indefinable quality of freshness in so
+large a measure. You never quite know, though you may have a shrewd
+suspicion, what De Quincey will say on any subject; his gift of sighting
+and approaching new facets of it is so immense. Whether he was in truth
+as accomplished a classical scholar as he claimed to be I do not know;
+he has left few positive documents to tell us. But I should think that
+he was, for he has all the characteristics of a scholar of the best and
+rarest kind--the scholar who is exact as to language without failing to
+comprehend literature, and competent in literature without being
+slipshod as to language. His historical insight, of which the famous
+_Caesars_ is the best example, was, though sometimes coloured by his
+fancy, and at other times distorted by a slight tendency to
+_supercherie_ as in _The Tartars_ and _The Spanish Nun_, wonderfully
+powerful and acute. He was not exactly as Southey was, "omnilegent"; but
+in his own departments, and they were numerous, he went farther below
+the surface and connected his readings together better than Southey did.
+Of the two classes of severer study to which he specially addicted
+himself, his political economy suffered perhaps a little, acute as his
+views in it often are, from the fact that in his time it was practically
+a new study, and that he had neither sufficient facts nor sufficient
+literature to go upon. In metaphysics, to which he gave himself up for
+years, and in which he seems really to have known whatever there was to
+know, I fear that the opium fiend cheated the world of something like
+masterpieces. Only three men during De Quincey's lifetime had anything
+like his powers in this department. Of these three men, Sir William
+Hamilton either could not or would not write English. Ferrier could and
+did write English; but he could not, as De Quincey could, throw upon
+philosophy the play of literary and miscellaneous illustration which of
+all the sciences it most requires, and which all its really supreme
+exponents have been able to give it. Mansel could do both these things;
+but he was somewhat indolent, and had many avocations. De Quincey could
+write perfect English, he had every resource of illustration and relief
+at command, he was in his way as "brazen-bowelled" at work as he was
+"golden-mouthed" at expression, and he had ample leisure. But the
+inability to undertake sustained labour, which he himself recognises as
+the one unquestionable curse of opium, deprived us of an English
+philosopher who would have stood as far above Kant in exoteric graces,
+as he would have stood above Bacon in esoteric value. It was not
+entirely De Quincey's fault. It seems to be generally recognised now
+that whatever occasional excesses he may have committed, opium was
+really required in his case, and gave us what we have as much as it took
+away what we have not. But if any one chose to write in the antique
+style a debate between Philosophy, Tar-water, and Laudanum, it would be
+almost enough to put in the mouth of Philosophy, "This gave me Berkeley
+and that deprived me of De Quincey."
+
+De Quincey is, however, first of all a writer of ornate English, which
+was never, with him, a mere cover to bare thought. Overpraise and
+mispraise him as anybody may, he cannot be overpraised for this. Mistake
+as he chose to do, and as others have chosen to do, the relative value
+of his gift, the absolute value of it is unmistakable. What other
+Englishman, from Sir Thomas Browne downwards, has written a sentence
+surpassing in melody that on Our Lady of Sighs: "And her eyes, if they
+were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor subtle; no man could read
+their story; they would be found filled with perishing dreams and with
+wrecks of forgotten delirium"? Compare that with the masterpieces of
+some later practitioners. There are no out-of-the-way words; there is no
+needless expense of adjectives; the sense is quite adequate to the
+sound; the sound is only what is required as accompaniment to the sense.
+And though I do not know that in a single instance of equal length--even
+in the still more famous, and as a whole justly more famous, _tour de
+force_ on Our Lady of Darkness--De Quincey ever quite equalled the
+combined simplicity and majesty of this phrase, he has constantly come
+close to it. The _Suspiria_ are full of such passages--there are even
+some who prefer _Savannah la Mar_ to the _Ladies of Sorrow_. Beautiful
+as it is I do not, because the accursed superfluous adjective appears
+there. The famous passages of the _Confessions_ are in every one's
+memory; and so I suppose is the _Vision of Sudden Death_. Many passages
+in _The Caesars_, though somewhat less florid, are hardly less good; and
+the close of _Joan of Arc_ is as famous as the most ambitious attempts
+of the _Confessions_ and the _Mail Coach_. Moreover, in all the sixteen
+volumes, specimens of the same kind may be found here and there,
+alternating with very different matter; so much so, that it has no doubt
+often occurred to readers that the author's occasional divergence into
+questionable quips and cranks is a deliberate attempt to set off his
+rhetoric, as dramatists of the noblest school have often set off their
+tragedy, with comedy, if not with farce. That such a principle would
+imply confusion of the study and the stage is arguable enough, but it
+does not follow that it was not present. At any rate the contrast,
+deliberate or not, is very strong indeed in De Quincey--stronger than in
+any other prose author except his friend, and pupil rather than master,
+Wilson.
+
+The great advantage that De Quincey has, not only over this friend of
+his but over all practitioners of the ornate style in this century, lies
+in his sureness of hand in the first place, and secondly in the
+comparative frugality of means which perhaps is an inseparable
+accompaniment of sureness of hand. To mention living persons would be
+invidious; but Wilson and Landor are within the most scrupulous critic's
+right of comparison. All three were contemporaries; all three were
+Oxford men--Landor about ten years senior to the other two--and all
+three in their different ways set themselves deliberately to reverse the
+practice of English prose for nearly a century and a half. They did
+great things, but De Quincey did, I think, the greatest and certainly
+the most classical in the proper sense, for all Landor's superior air of
+Hellenism. Voluble as De Quincey often is, he seems always to have felt
+that when you are in your altitudes it is well not to stay there too
+long. And his flights, while they are far more uniformly high than
+Wilson's, which alternately soar and drag, are much more merciful in
+regard of length than Landor's, as well as for the most part much more
+closely connected with the sense of his subjects. There is scarcely one
+of the _Imaginary Conversations_ which would not be the better for very
+considerable thinning, while, with the exception perhaps of _The English
+Mail Coach_, De Quincey's surplusage, obvious enough in many cases, is
+scarcely ever found in his most elaborate and ornate passages. The total
+amount of such passages in the _Confessions_ is by no means large, and
+the more ambitious parts of the _Suspiria_ do not much exceed a dozen
+pages. De Quincey was certainly justified by his own practice in
+adopting and urging as he did the distinction, due, he says, to
+Wordsworth, between the common and erroneous idea of style as the
+_dress_ of thought, and the true definition of it as the _incarnation_
+of thought. The most wizened of coxcombs may spend days and years in
+dressing up his meagre and ugly carcass; but few are the sons of men who
+have sufficient thought to provide the soul of any considerable series
+of avatars. De Quincey had; and therefore, though the manner (with
+certain exceptions heretofore taken) in him is always worth attention,
+it never need or should divert attention from the matter. And thus he
+was not driven to make a little thought do tyrannous duty as lay-figure
+for an infinite amount of dress, or to hang out frippery on a
+clothes-line with not so much as a lay-figure inside it. Even when he is
+most conspicuously "fighting a prize," there is always solid stuff in
+him.
+
+Few indeed are the writers of whom so much can be said, and fewer still
+the miscellaneous writers, among whom De Quincey must be classed. On
+almost any subject that interested him--and the number of such subjects
+was astonishing, curious as are the gaps between the different groups of
+them--what he has to say is pretty sure, even if it be the wildest
+paradox in appearance, to be worth attending to. And in regard to most
+things that he has to say, the reader may be pretty sure also that he
+will not find them better said elsewhere. It has sometimes been
+complained by students, both of De Quincey the man and of De Quincey the
+writer, that there is something not exactly human in him. There is
+certainly much in him of the daemonic, to use a word which was a very
+good word and really required in the language, and which ought not to be
+exiled because it has been foolishly abused. Sometimes, as has also been
+complained, the demon is a mere familiar with the tricksiness of Puck
+rather than the lightness of Ariel. But far oftener he is a more potent
+spirit than any Robin Goodfellow, and as powerful as Ariel and Ariel's
+master. Trust him wholly you may not; a characteristic often noted in
+intelligences that are neither exactly human, nor exactly diabolic, nor
+exactly divine. But he will do great things for you, and a little wit
+and courage on your part will prevent his doing anything serious against
+you. To him, with much greater justice than to Hogg, might Wilson have
+applied the nickname of Brownie, which he was so fond of bestowing upon
+the author of "Kilmeny." He will do solid work, conjure up a concert of
+aerial music, play a shrewd trick now and then, and all this with a
+curious air of irresponsibility and of remoteness of nature. In ancient
+days when kings played experiments to ascertain the universal or
+original language, some monarch might have been tempted to take a very
+clever child, interest him so far as possible in nothing but books and
+opium, and see whether he would turn out anything like De Quincey. But
+it is in the highest degree improbable that he would. Therefore let us
+rejoice, though according to the precepts of wisdom and not too
+indiscriminately, in our De Quincey as we once, and probably once for
+all, received him.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[16] See Appendix A--De Quincey.
+
+[17] _The Collected Writings of Thomas de Quincey_; edited by David
+Masson. In fourteen volumes; Edinburgh, 1889-90.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+LOCKHART
+
+
+In every age there are certain writers who seem to miss their due meed
+of fame, and this is most naturally and unavoidably the case in ages
+which see a great deal of what may be called occasional literature.
+There is, as it seems to me, a special example of this general
+proposition in the present century, and that example is the writer whose
+name stands at the head of this chapter. No one, perhaps, who speaks
+with any competence either of knowledge or judgment, would say that
+Lockhart made an inconsiderable figure in English literature. He wrote
+what some men consider the best biography on a large scale, and what
+almost every one considers the second best biography on a large scale,
+in English. His _Spanish Ballads_ are admitted, by those who know the
+originals, to have done them almost more than justice; and by those who
+do not know those originals, to be charming in themselves. His novels,
+if not masterpieces, have kept the field better than most: I saw a very
+badly printed and flaringly-covered copy of _Reginald Dalton_ for sale
+at the bookstall at Victoria Station the day before writing these words.
+He was a pillar of the _Quarterly_, of _Blackwood_, of _Fraser_, at a
+time when quarterly and monthly magazines played a greater part in
+literature than they have played since or are likely to play again. He
+edited one of these periodicals for thirty years. "Nobody," as Mr.
+Browning has it, "calls him a dunce." Yet there is no collected edition
+of his works; his sober, sound, scholarly, admirably witty, and, with
+some very few exceptions, admirably catholic literary criticism, is
+rarely quoted; and to add to this, there is a curious prepossession
+against him, which, though nearly a generation has passed since his
+death, has by no means disappeared.[18] Some years ago, in a periodical
+where I was, for the most part, allowed to say exactly what I liked in
+matters literary, I found a sentence laudatory of Lockhart, from the
+purely literary point of view, omitted between proof and publication. It
+so happened that the editor of this periodical could not even have known
+Lockhart personally, or have been offended by his management of the
+_Quarterly_, much less by his early _fredaines_ in _Blackwood_ and
+_Fraser_. It was this circumstance that first suggested to me the notion
+of trying to supply something like a criticism of this remarkable
+critic, which nobody has yet (1884) done, and which seems worth doing.
+For while the work of many of Lockhart's contemporaries, famous at the
+time, distinctly loses by re-reading, his for the most part does not;
+and it happens to display exactly the characteristics which are most
+wanting in criticism, biographical and literary, at the present day. If
+any one at the outset desires a definition, or at least an enumeration
+of those characteristics, I should say that they are sobriety of style
+and reserve of feeling, coupled with delicacy of intellectual
+appreciation and aesthetic sympathy, a strong and firm creed in matters
+political and literary, not excluding that catholicity of judgment which
+men of strong belief frequently lack, and, above all, the faculty of
+writing like a gentleman without writing like a mere gentleman. No one
+can charge Lockhart with dilettantism: no one certainly can charge him
+with feebleness of intellect, or insufficient equipment of culture, or
+lack of humour and wit.
+
+His life was, except for the domestic misfortunes which marked its
+close, by no means eventful; and the present writer, if he had access to
+any special sources of information (which he has not), would abstain
+very carefully from using them. John Gibson Lockhart was born at the
+Manse of Cambusnethan on 14th July 1794, went to school early, was
+matriculated at Glasgow at twelve years old, transferred himself by
+means of a Snell exhibition to Balliol at fifteen, and took a first
+class in 1813. They said he caricatured the examiners: this was,
+perhaps, not the unparalleled audacity which admiring commentators have
+described it as being. Very many very odd things have been done in the
+Schools. But if there was nothing extraordinary in his Oxford life
+except what was, even for those days, the early age at which he began
+it, his next step was something out of the common; for he went to
+Germany, was introduced to Goethe, and spent some time there. An odd
+coincidence in the literary history of the nineteenth century is that
+both Lockhart and Quinet practically began literature by translating a
+German book, and that both had the remarkably good luck to find
+publishers who paid them beforehand. There are few such publishers now.
+Lockhart's book was Schlegel's _Lectures on History_, and his publisher
+was Mr. Blackwood. Then he came back to Scotland and to Edinburgh, and
+was called to the bar, and "swept the outer house with his gown," after
+the fashion admirably described in _Peter's Letters_, and referred to by
+Scott in not the least delightful though one of the most melancholy of
+his works, the Introduction to the _Chronicles of the Canongate_.
+Lockhart, one of whose distinguishing characteristics throughout life
+was shyness and reserve, was no speaker. Indeed, as he happily enough
+remarked in reply to the toast of his health at the farewell dinner
+given to celebrate his removal to London, "I cannot speak; if I could, I
+should not have left you." But if he could not speak he could write,
+and the establishment of _Blackwood's Magazine_, after its first
+abortive numbers, gave him scope. "The scorpion which delighteth to
+sting the faces of men," as he or Wilson describes himself in the
+_Chaldee Manuscript_ (for the passage is beyond Hogg's part), certainly
+justified the description. As to this famous _Manuscript_, the late
+Professor Ferrier undoubtedly made a blunder (in the same key as those
+that he made in describing the _Noctes_, in company with which he
+reprinted it) as "in its way as good as _The Battle of the Books_." _The
+Battle of the Books_, full of mistakes as it is, is literature, and the
+_Chaldee Manuscript_ is only capital journalism. But it is capital
+journalism; and the exuberance of its wit, if it be only wit of the
+undergraduate kind (and Lockhart at least was still but an undergraduate
+in years), is refreshing enough. The dreadful manner in which it
+fluttered the dovecotes of Edinburgh Whiggism need not be further
+commented on, till Lockhart's next work (this time an almost though not
+quite independent one) has been noticed. This was _Peter's Letters to
+his Kinsfolk_, an elaborate book, half lampoon, half mystification,
+which appeared in 1819. This book, which derived its title from Scott's
+account of his journey to Paris, and in its plan followed to some extent
+_Humphrey Clinker_, is one of the most careful examples of literary
+hoaxing to be found. It purported to be the work of a certain Dr. Peter
+Morris, a Welshman, and it is hardly necessary to say that there was no
+such person. It had a handsome frontispiece depicting this Peter Morris,
+and displaying not, like the portrait in Southey's _Doctor_, the occiput
+merely, but the full face and features. This portrait was described, and
+as far as that went it seems truly described, as "an interesting example
+of a new style of engraving by Lizars." Mr. Bates, who probably knows,
+says that there was no first edition, but that it was published with
+"second edition" on the title-page. My copy has the same date, 1819, but
+is styled the _third_ edition, and has a postscript commenting on the
+to-do the book made. However all this may be, it is a very handsome
+book, excellently printed and containing capital portraits and
+vignettes, while the matter is worthy of the get-up. The descriptions of
+the Outer-House, of Craigcrook and its high jinks, of Abbotsford, of the
+finding of "Ambrose's," of the manufacture of Glasgow punch, and of many
+other things, are admirable; and there is a charming sketch of Oxford
+undergraduate life, less exaggerated than that in _Reginald Dalton_,
+probably because the subject was fresher in the author's memory.
+
+Lockhart modestly speaks of this book in his _Life of Scott_ as one that
+"none but a very young and thoughtless person would have written." It
+may safely be said that no one but a very clever person, whether young
+or old, could have written it, though it is too long and has occasional
+faults of a specially youthful kind. But it made, coming as it did upon
+the heels of the _Chaldee Manuscript_, a terrible commotion in
+Edinburgh. The impartial observer of men and things may, indeed, have
+noticed in the records of the ages, that a libelled Liberal is the man
+in all the world who utters the loudest cries. The examples of the
+Reformers, and of the eighteenth-century _Philosophes_, are notorious
+and hackneyed; but I can supply (without, I trust, violating the
+sanctity of private life) a fresh and pleasing example. Once upon a
+time, a person whom we shall call A. paid a visit to a person whom we
+shall call B. "How sad," said A., "are those personal attacks of the
+---- on Mr. Gladstone."--"Personality," said B., "is always disgusting;
+and I am very sorry to hear that the ---- has followed the bad example
+of the personal attacks on Lord Beaconsfield."--"Oh! but," quoth A.,
+"that was _quite_ a different thing." Now B. went out to dinner that
+night, and sitting next to a distinguished Liberal member of Parliament,
+told him this tale, expecting that he would laugh. "Ah! yes," said he
+with much gravity, "it is _very_ different, you know."
+
+In the same way the good Whig folk of Edinburgh regarded it as very
+different that the _Edinburgh Review_ should scoff at Tories, and that
+_Blackwood_ and _Peter_ should scoff at Whigs. The scorpion which
+delighted to sting the faces of men, probably at this time founded a
+reputation which has stuck to him for more than seventy years after Dr.
+Peter Morris drove his shandrydan through Scotland. Sir Walter (then
+Mr.) Scott held wisely aloof from the extremely exuberant Toryism of
+_Blackwood_, and, indeed, had had some quarrels with its publisher and
+virtual editor. But he could not fail to be introduced to a man whose
+tastes and principles were so closely allied to his own. A year after
+the appearance of _Peter's Letters_, Lockhart married, on 29th April
+1820 (a perilous approximation to the unlucky month of May), Sophia
+Scott, the Duke of Buccleuch's "Little Jacobite," the most like her
+father of all his children. Every reader of the _Life_ knows the
+delightful pictures, enough for interest and not enough for vulgar
+obtrusion, given by Lockhart of life at Chiefswood, the cottage near
+Abbotsford which he and his wife inhabited for nearly six years.
+
+They were very busy years for Lockhart. He was still active in
+contributing to _Blackwood_; he wrote all his four novels, and he
+published the _Spanish Ballads_. _Valerius_ and _Adam Blair_ appeared in
+1821, _Reginald Dalton_ and the _Ballads_ in 1823, _Matthew Wald_ in
+1824.
+
+The novels, though containing much that is very remarkable, are not his
+strongest work; indeed, any critic who speaks with knowledge must admit
+that Lockhart had every faculty for writing novels, except the faculty
+of novel-writing. _Valerius_, a classical story of the visit of a
+Roman-Briton to Rome, and the persecution of the Christians in the days
+of Trajan, is, like everything of its author's, admirably written, but,
+like every classical novel without exception, save only _Hypatia_ (which
+makes its interests and its personages daringly modern), it somehow
+rings false and faint, though not, perhaps, so faint or so false as most
+of its fellows. _Adam Blair_, the story of the sudden succumbing to
+natural temptation of a pious minister of the kirk, is unquestionably
+Lockhart's masterpiece in this kind. It is full of passion, full of
+force, and the characters of Charlotte Campbell and Adam Blair himself
+are perfectly conceived. But the story-gift is still wanting. The reader
+finds himself outside: wondering why the people do these things, and
+whether in real life they would have done them, instead of following the
+story with absorption, and asking himself no questions at all. The same,
+in a different way, is the case with Lockhart's longest book, _Reginald
+Dalton_; and this has the additional disadvantage that neither hero nor
+heroine are much more than lay-figures, while in _Adam Blair_ both are
+flesh and blood. The Oxford scenes are amusing but exaggerated--the
+obvious work of a man who supplies the defects of a ten years' memory by
+deepening the strokes where he does remember. _Matthew Wald_, which is a
+novel of madness, has excellent passages, but is conventional and wooden
+as a whole. Nothing was more natural than that Lockhart, with the
+example of Scott immediately before him, should try novel-writing; not
+many things are more indicative of his literary ability than that,
+after a bare three years' practice, he left a field which certainly was
+not his.
+
+In the early autumn of 1825, just before the great collapse of his
+affairs, Scott went to Ireland with Lockhart in his company. But very
+early in the following year, before the collapse was decided, Lockhart
+and his family moved to London, on his appointment as editor of the
+_Quarterly_, in succession to Gifford. Probably there never was a better
+appointment of the kind. Lockhart was a born critic: he had both the
+faculty and the will to work up the papers of his contributors to the
+proper level; he was firm and decided in his literary and political
+views, without going to the extreme Giffordian acerbity in both; and his
+intelligence and erudition were very wide. "He could write," says a
+phrase in some article I have somewhere seen quoted, "on any subject
+from poetry to dry-rot;" and there is no doubt that an editor, if he
+cannot exactly write on any subject from poetry to dry-rot, should be
+able to take an interest in any subject between and, if necessary,
+beyond those poles. Otherwise he has the choice of two undesirables;
+either he frowns unduly on the dry-rot articles, which probably interest
+large sections of the public (itself very subject to dry-rot), or he
+lets the dry-rot contributor inflict his hobby, without mercy and
+unedited, on a reluctant audience. But Lockhart, though he is said (for
+his contributions are not, as far as I know, anywhere exactly
+indicated) to have contributed fully a hundred articles to the
+_Quarterly_, that is to say one to nearly every number during the
+twenty-eight years of his editorship, by no means confined himself to
+this work. It was, indeed, during its progress that he composed not
+merely the _Life of Napoleon_, which was little more than an abridgment,
+though a very clever abridgment, of Scott's book, but the _Lives_ of
+Burns and of Scott himself. Before, however, dealing with these, his
+_Spanish Ballads_ and other poetical work may be conveniently disposed
+of.
+
+Lockhart's verse is in the same scattered condition as his prose; but it
+is evident that he had very considerable poetical faculty. The charming
+piece, "When youthful hope is fled," attributed to him on Mrs. Norton's
+authority; the well-known "Captain Paton's Lament," which has been
+republished in the _Tales from Blackwood_; and the mono-rhymed epitaph
+on "Bright broken Maginn," in which some wiseacres have seen ill-nature,
+but which really is a masterpiece of humorous pathos, are all in very
+different styles, and are all excellent each in its style. But these
+things are mere waifs, separated from each other in widely different
+publications; and until they are put together no general impression of
+the author's poetical talent, except a vaguely favourable one, can be
+derived from them. The _Spanish Ballads_ form something like a
+substantive work, and one of nearly as great merit as is possible to
+poetical translations of poetry. I believe opinions differ as to their
+fidelity to the original. Here and there, it is said, the author has
+exchanged a vivid and characteristic touch for a conventional and feeble
+one. Thus, my friend Mr. Hannay points out to me that in the original of
+"The Lord of Butrago" the reason given by Montanez for not accompanying
+the King's flight is not the somewhat _fade_ one that
+
+    Castile's proud dames shall never point the finger of disdain,
+
+but the nobler argument, showing the best side of feudal sentiment, that
+the widows of his tenants shall never say that he fled and left their
+husbands to fight and fall. Lockhart's master, Sir Walter, would
+certainly not have missed this touch, and it is odd that Lockhart
+himself did. But such things will happen to translators. On the other
+hand, it is, I believe, admitted (and the same very capable authority in
+Spanish is my warranty) that on the whole the originals have rather
+gained than lost; and certainly no one can fail to enjoy the _Ballads_
+as they stand in English. The "Wandering Knight's Song" has always
+seemed to me a gem without flaw, especially the last stanza. Few men,
+again, manage the long "fourteener" with middle rhyme better than
+Lockhart, though he is less happy with the anapaest, and has not fully
+mastered the very difficult trochaic measure of "The Death of Don
+Pedro." In "The Count Arnaldos," wherein, indeed, the subject lends
+itself better to that cadence, the result is more satisfactory. The
+merits, however, of these _Ballads_ are not technical merely, or rather,
+the technical merits are well subordinated to the production of the
+general effect. About the nature of that effect much ink has been shed.
+It is produced equally by Greek hexameters, by old French assonanced
+_tirades_, by English "eights and sixes," and by not a few other
+measures. But in itself it is more or less the same--the stirring of the
+blood as by the sound of a trumpet, or else the melting of the mood into
+or close to tears. The ballad effect is thus the simplest and most
+primitive of all poetical effects; it is Lockhart's merit that he seldom
+fails to produce it. The simplicity and spontaneity of his verse may, to
+some people, be surprising in a writer so thoroughly and intensely
+literary; but Lockhart's character was as complex as his verse is
+simple, and the verse itself is not the least valuable guide to it.
+
+It has been said that his removal to London and his responsible office
+by no means reduced his general literary activity. Whether he continued
+to contribute to _Blackwood_ I am not sure; some phrases in the _Noctes_
+seem to argue the contrary. But he not only, as has been said, wrote for
+the _Quarterly_ assiduously, but after a short time joined the new
+venture of _Fraser_, and showed in that rollicking periodical that the
+sting of the "scorpion" had by no means been extracted. He produced,
+moreover, in 1828, his _Life of Burns_, and in 1836-37 his _Life of
+Scott_. These, with the sketch of Theodore Hook written for the
+_Quarterly_ in 1843, and separately published later, make three very
+remarkable examples of literary biography on very different scales,
+dealing with very different subjects, and, by comparison of their
+uniform excellence, showing that the author had an almost unique genius
+for this kind of composition. The _Life of Scott_ fills seven capacious
+volumes; the _Life of Burns_ goes easily into one; the _Life of Hook_
+does not reach a hundred smallish pages. But they are all equally
+well-proportioned in themselves and to their subjects; they all exhibit
+the same complete grasp of the secret of biography; and they all have
+the peculiarity of being full of facts without presenting an undigested
+appearance. They thus stand at an equal distance from biography of the
+fashion of the old academic _Eloge_ of the last century, which makes an
+elegant discourse about a man, but either deliberately or by accident
+gives precise information about hardly any of the facts of the man's
+life; and from modern biography, which tumbles upon the devoted reader a
+cataract of letters, documents, and facts of all sorts, uncombined and
+undigested by any exercise of narrative or critical skill on the part of
+the author. Lockhart's biographies, therefore, belong equally (to borrow
+De Quincey's useful, though, as far as terminology goes, not very happy
+distinction) to the literature of knowledge and the literature of
+power. They are storehouses of information; but they are, at the same
+time, works of art, and of very great art. The earliest of the three,
+the _Life of Burns_, is to this day by far the best book on the subject;
+indeed, with its few errors and defects of fact corrected and
+supplemented as they have been by the late Mr. Douglas, it makes all
+other Lives quite superfluous. Yet it was much more difficult,
+especially for a Scotchman, to write a good book about Burns then than
+now; though I am told that, for a Scotchman, there is still a
+considerable difficulty in the matter. Lockhart was familiar with
+Edinburgh society--indeed, he had long formed a part of it--and
+Edinburgh society was still, when he wrote, very sore at the charge of
+having by turns patronised and neglected Burns. Lockhart was a decided
+Tory, and Burns, during the later part of his life at any rate, had
+permitted himself manifestations of political opinion which Whigs
+themselves admitted to be imprudent freaks, and which even a
+good-natured Tory might be excused for regarding as something very much
+worse. But the biographer's treatment of both these subjects is
+perfectly tolerant, judicious, and fair, and the same may be said of his
+whole account of Burns. Indeed, the main characteristic of Lockhart's
+criticism, a robust and quiet sanity, fitted him admirably for the task
+of biography. He is never in extremes, and he never avoids extremes by
+the common expedient of see-sawing between two sides, two parties, or
+two views of a man's character. He holds aloof equally from _engouement_
+and from depreciation, and if, as a necessary consequence, he failed,
+and fails, to please fanatics on either side, he cannot fail to please
+those who know what criticism really means.
+
+These good qualities were shown even to better advantage in a pleasanter
+but, at the same time, far more difficult task, the famous _Life of
+Scott_. The extraordinary interest of the subject, and the fashion, no
+less skilful than modest, in which the biographer keeps himself in the
+background, and seems constantly to be merely editing Scott's words,
+have perhaps obscured the literary value of the book to some readers. Of
+the perpetual comparison with Boswell, it may be said, once for all,
+that it is a comparison of matter merely; and that from the properly
+literary point of view, the point of view of workmanship and form, it
+does not exist. Perhaps the most surprising thing is that, even in
+moments of personal irritation, any one should have been found to accuse
+Lockhart of softening Scott's faults. The other charge, of malice to
+Scott, is indeed more extraordinary still in a certain way; but, being
+merely imbecile, it need not be taken into account. A delightful
+document informs us that, in the opinion of the Hon. Charles Sumner,
+Fenimore Cooper (who, stung by some references to him in the book,
+attacked it) administered "a proper castigation to the vulgar minds of
+Scott and Lockhart." This is a jest so pleasing that it almost puts one
+in good temper with the whole affair. But, in fact, Lockhart,
+considering his relationship to Scott, and considering Scott's
+greatness, could hardly have spoken more plainly as to the grave fault
+of judgment which made a man of letters and a member of a learned
+profession mix himself up secretly, and almost clandestinely, with
+commercial speculations. On this point the biographer does not attempt
+to mince matters; and on no other point was it necessary for him to be
+equally candid, for this, grave as it is, is almost the only fault to be
+found with Scott's character. This candour, however, is only one of the
+merits of the book. The wonderfully skilful arrangement of so vast and
+heterogeneous a mass of materials, the way in which the writer's own
+work and his quoted matter dovetail into one another, the completeness
+of the picture given of Scott's character and life, have never been
+equalled in any similar book. Not a few minor touches, moreover, which
+are very apt to escape notice, enhance its merit. Lockhart was a man of
+all men least given to wear his heart upon his sleeve, yet no one has
+dealt with such pitiful subjects as his later volumes involve, at once
+with such total absence of "gush" and with such noble and pathetic
+appreciation. For Scott's misfortunes were by no means the only matters
+which touched him nearly, in and in connection with the chronicle. The
+constant illness and sufferings of his own child form part of it; his
+wife died during its composition and publication, and all these things
+are mentioned with as little parade of stoicism as of sentiment. I do
+not think that, as an example of absolute and perfect good taste, the
+account of Scott's death can be surpassed in literature. The same
+quality exhibits itself in another matter. No biographer can be less
+anxious to display his own personality than Lockhart; and though for six
+years he was a constant, and for much longer an occasional, spectator of
+the events he describes, he never introduces himself except when it is
+necessary. Yet, on the other hand, when Scott himself makes
+complimentary references to him (as when he speaks of his party "having
+Lockhart to say clever things"), he neither omits the passage nor stoops
+to the missish _minauderie_, too common in such cases, of translating
+"spare my blushes" into some kind of annotation. Lockhart will not talk
+about Lockhart; but if others, whom the public likes to hear, talk about
+him, Lockhart does not put his fan before his face.
+
+This admirable book, however, is both well enough known (if not so well
+known as it deserves) and large enough to make it both unnecessary and
+impossible to criticise it at length here. The third work noticed
+above, the sketch of the life of Theodore Hook, though it has been
+reprinted more than once, and is still, I believe, kept in print and on
+sale, is probably less familiar to most readers. It is, however, almost
+as striking an example, though of course an example in miniature only,
+of Lockhart's aptitude for the great and difficult art of literary
+biography as either of the two books just mentioned. Here the difficulty
+was of a different kind. A great many people liked Theodore Hook, but it
+was nearly impossible for any one to respect him; yet it was quite
+impossible for Lockhart, a political sympathiser and a personal friend,
+to treat him harshly in an obituary notice. There was no danger of his
+setting down aught in malice; but there might be thought to be a
+considerable danger of over-extenuation. The danger was the greater,
+inasmuch as Lockhart himself had certainly not escaped, and had perhaps
+to some extent deserved, one of Hook's reproaches. No man questioned his
+integrity; he was not a reckless spendthrift; he was not given to
+excesses in living, or to hanging about great houses; nor was he
+careless of moral and social rules. But the scorpion which had delighted
+to sting the faces of men might have had some awkwardness in dealing
+with the editor of _John Bull_. The result, however, victoriously
+surmounts all difficulties without evading one. Nothing that is the
+truth about Hook is omitted, or even blinked; and from reading Lockhart
+alone, any intelligent reader might know the worst that is to be said
+about him. Neither are any of his faults, in the unfair sense,
+extenuated. His malicious and vulgar practical jokes; his carelessness
+at Mauritius; the worse than carelessness which allowed him to shirk,
+when he had ample means of discharging it by degrees, a debt which he
+acknowledged that he justly owed; the folly and vanity which led him to
+waste his time, his wit, and his money in playing the hanger-on at
+country houses and town dinner-tables; his hard living, and the laxity
+which induced him not merely to form irregular connections, but
+prevented him from taking the only step which could, in some measure,
+repair his fault, are all fairly put, and blamed frankly. Even in that
+more delicate matter of the personal journalism, Lockhart's procedure is
+as ingenuous as it is ingenious; and the passage of the sketch which
+deals with "the blazing audacity of invective, the curious delicacy of
+persiflage, the strong caustic satire" (expressions, by the way, which
+suit Lockhart himself much better than Hook, though Lockhart had not
+Hook's broad humour), in fact, admits that the application of these
+things was not justifiable, nor to be justified. Yet with all this, the
+impression left by the sketch is distinctly favourable on the whole,
+which, in the circumstances, must be admitted to be a triumph of
+advocacy obtained not at the expense of truth, but by the art of the
+advocate in making the best of it.
+
+The facts of Lockhart's life between his removal to London and his death
+may be rapidly summarised, the purpose of this notice being rather
+critical than biographical. He had hardly settled in town when, as he
+himself tells, he had to attempt, fruitlessly enough, the task of
+mediator in the financial disasters of Constable and Scott; and his own
+share of domestic troubles began early. His eldest son, after repeated
+escapes, died in 1831; Scott followed shortly; Miss Anne Scott, after
+her father's death, came in broken health to Lockhart's house, and died
+there only a year later; and in the spring of 1837 his wife likewise
+died. Then Fortune let him alone for a little, to return in no better
+humour some years later.
+
+It is, however, from the early "thirties" that one of the best known
+memorials of Lockhart dates; that is to say, the portrait, or rather the
+two portraits, in the Fraser Gallery. In the general group of the
+Fraserians he sits between Fraser himself and Theodore Hook, with the
+diminutive figure of Crofton Croker half intercepted beyond him; and his
+image forms the third plate in Mr. Bates's republication of the gallery.
+It is said to be the most faithful of the whole series, and it is
+certainly the handsomest, giving even a more flattering representation
+than the full-face portrait by Pickersgill which serves as frontispiece
+to the modern editions of the _Ballads_. In this latter the curious
+towzled mop of hair, in which our fathers delighted, rather mars the
+effect; while in Maclise's sketch (which is in profile) it is less
+obtrusive. In this latter, too, there is clearly perceivable what the
+Shepherd in the _Noctes_ calls "a sort of laugh aboot the screwed-up
+mouth of him that fules ca'd no canny, for they couldna thole the
+meaning o't." There is not much doubt that Lockhart aided and abetted
+Maginn in much of the mischief that distinguished the early days of
+_Fraser_, though his fastidious taste is never likely to have stooped to
+the coarseness which was too natural to Maginn. It is believed that to
+him is due the wicked wresting of Alaric Watts' second initial into
+"Attila," which gave the victim so much grief, and he probably did many
+other things of the same kind. But Lockhart was never vulgar, and
+_Fraser_ in those days very often was.
+
+In 1843 Lockhart received his first and last piece of political
+preferment, being appointed, says one of the authorities before me,
+Chancellor of the Duchy of Cornwall, and (says another) Chancellor of
+the Duchy of Lancaster. Such are biographers; but the matter is not of
+the slightest importance, though I do not myself quite see how it could
+have been Lancaster. A third and more trustworthy writer gives the post
+as "Auditorship" of the Duchy of Lancaster, which is possible enough.
+
+In 1847, the death of Sir Walter Scott's last surviving son brought the
+title and estate to Lockhart's son Walter, but he died in 1853.
+Lockhart's only other child had married Mr. Hope--called, after his
+brother-in-law's death, Mr. Hope Scott, of whom an elaborate biography
+has been published. Little in it concerns Lockhart, but the admirable
+letter which he wrote to Mr. Hope on his conversion to the Roman Church.
+This step, followed as it was by Mrs. Hope, could not but be, and in
+this letter is delicately hinted to be, no small grief to Lockhart, who
+saw Abbotsford fall under influences for which certainly neither he nor
+its founder had any respect. His repeated domestic losses, and many
+years of constant work and excitement, appear to have told on him, and
+very shortly after his son's death in April 1853 he resigned the
+editorship of the _Quarterly_. He then visited Italy, a visit from
+which, if he had been a superstitious man, the ominous precedent of
+Scott might have deterred him. His journey did him no good, and he died
+at Abbotsford on the 25th of November. December, says another authority,
+for so it is that history gets written, even in thirty years.
+
+The comparatively brief notices which are all that have been published
+about Lockhart, uniformly mention the unpopularity (to use a mild word)
+which pursued him, and which, as I have remarked, does not seem to have
+exhausted itself even yet. It is not very difficult to account for the
+origin of this; and the neglect to supply any collection of his work,
+and any authoritative account of his life and character, will quite
+explain its continuance. In the first place, Lockhart was well known as
+a most sarcastic writer; in the second, he was for nearly a lifetime
+editor of one of the chief organs of party politics and literary
+criticism in England. He might have survived the _Chaldee Manuscript_,
+and _Peter's Letters_, and the lampoons in _Fraser_: he might even have
+got the better of the youthful imprudence which led him to fix upon
+himself a description which was sure to be used and abused against him
+by the "fules," if he had not succeeded to the chair of the _Quarterly_.
+Individual and, to a great extent, anonymous indulgence of the luxury of
+scorn never gave any man a very bad character, even if he were, as
+Lockhart was, personally shy and reserved, unable to make up for written
+sarcasm with verbal flummery, and, in virtue of an incapacity for
+gushing, deprived of the easiest and, by public personages, most
+commonly practised means of proving that a man has "a good heart after
+all." But when he complicated his sins by editing the _Quarterly_ at a
+time when everybody attacked everybody else in exactly such terms as
+pleased them, the sins of his youth were pretty sure to be visited on
+him. In the first place, there was the great army of the criticised, who
+always consider that the editor of the paper which dissects them is
+really responsible. The luckless Harriet Martineau, who, if I remember
+rightly, gives in her autobiography a lurid picture of Lockhart "going
+down at night to the printer's" and inserting dreadful things about her,
+and who, I believe, took the feminine plan of revenging herself in an
+obituary article, was only one of a great multitude.
+
+Lockhart does not seem to have taken over from Gifford quite such a
+troublesome crew of helpers as Macvey Napier inherited from Jeffrey, and
+he was also free from the monitions of his predecessor. But in Croker he
+had a first lieutenant who could not very well be checked, and who
+(though he, too, has had rather hard measure) had no equal in the art of
+making himself offensive. Besides, those were the days when the famous
+"Scum condensed of Irish bog" lines appeared in a great daily newspaper
+about O'Connell. Imagine the _Times_ addressing Mr. Parnell as "Scum
+condensed of Irish bog," with the other amenities that follow, in this
+year of grace!
+
+But Lockhart had not only his authors, he had his contributors. "A'
+contributors," says the before-quoted Shepherd, in a moment of such
+preternatural wisdom that he must have been "fou," "are in a manner
+fierce." They are--it is the nature and essence of the animal to be so.
+The contributor who is not allowed to contribute is fierce, as a matter
+of course; but not less fierce is the contributor who thinks himself too
+much edited, and the contributor who imperatively insists that his
+article on Chinese metaphysics shall go in at once, and the contributor
+who, being an excellent hand at articles on the currency, wants to be
+allowed to write on dancing; and, in short, as the Shepherd says, all
+contributors. Now it does not appear (for, as I must repeat, I have no
+kind of private information on the subject) that Lockhart was by any
+means an easy-going editor, or one of that kind which allows a certain
+number of privileged writers to send in what they like. We are told in
+many places that he "greatly improved" his contributors' articles; and I
+should say that if there is one thing which drives a contributor to the
+verge of madness, it is to have his articles "greatly improved." A hint
+in the _Noctes_ (and it may be observed that though the references to
+Lockhart in the _Noctes_ are not very numerous, they are valuable, for
+Wilson's friendship seems to have been mixed with a small grain of
+jealousy which preserves them from being commonplace) suggests that his
+friends did not consider him as by any means too ready to accept their
+papers. All this, added to his early character of scoffer at Whig
+dignities, and his position as leader _en titre_ of Tory journalism, was
+quite sufficient to create a reputation partly exaggerated, partly quite
+false, which has endured simply because no trouble has been taken to
+sift and prove it.
+
+The head and front of Lockhart's offending, in a purely literary view,
+seems to be the famous _Quarterly_ article on Lord Tennyson's volume of
+1832. That article is sometimes spoken of as Croker's, but there can be
+no manner of doubt that it is Lockhart's; and, indeed, it is quoted as
+his by Professor Ferrier, who, through Wilson, must have known the
+facts. Now I do not think I yield to any man living in admiration of the
+Laureate, but I am unable to think much the worse, or, indeed, any the
+worse, of Lockhart because of this article. In the first place, it is
+extremely clever, being, perhaps, the very best example of politely
+cruel criticism in existence. In the second, most, if not all, of the
+criticism is perfectly just. If Lord Tennyson himself, at this safe
+distance of time, can think of the famous strawberry story and its
+application without laughing, he must be an extremely sensitive Peer.
+And nobody, I suppose, would now defend the wondrous stanza which was
+paralleled from the _Groves of Blarney_. The fact is that criticism of
+criticism after some time is apt to be doubly unjust. It is wont to
+assume, or rather to imagine, that the critic must have known what the
+author was going to do, as well as what he had actually done; and it is
+wont to forget that the work criticised was very often, as it presented
+itself to the critic, very different from what it is when it presents
+itself to the critic's critic. The best justification of Lockhart's
+verdict on the volume of 1832 is what Lord Tennyson himself has done
+with the volume of 1832. Far more than half the passages objected to
+have since been excised or altered. But there are other excuses. In the
+first place, Mr. Tennyson, as he then was, represented a further
+development of schools of poetry against which the _Quarterly_ had
+always, rightly or wrongly, set its face, and a certain loyalty to the
+principles of his paper is, after all, not the worst fault of a critic.
+In the second, no one can fairly deny that some points in Mr. Tennyson's
+early, if not in his later, manner must have been highly and rightly
+disgustful to a critic who, like Lockhart, was above all things
+masculine and abhorrent of "gush." In the third, it is, unfortunately,
+not given to all critics to admire all styles alike. Let those to whom
+it is given thank God therefor; but let them, at the same time, remember
+that they are as much bound to accept whatever is good in all kinds of
+critics as whatever is good in all kinds of poets.
+
+Now Lockhart, within his own range, and it was for the time a very wide
+one, was certainly not a narrow critic, just as he certainly was not a
+feeble one. In the before-mentioned _Peter's Letters_ (which, with all
+its faults, is one of his best, and particularly one of his most
+spontaneous and characteristic works) the denunciation of the "facetious
+and rejoicing ignorance" which enabled contemporary critics to pooh-pooh
+Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, and Coleridge is excellent. And it must be
+remembered that in 1819, whatever might be the case with Coleridge,
+Wordsworth and Lamb were by no means taken to the hearts of Tories on
+their merits, and that in this very passage _Blackwood_ is condemned not
+less severely than the _Edinburgh_. Another point in which Lockhart made
+a great advance was that he was one of the first (Lamb himself is, in
+England, his only important forerunner) to unite and combine criticism
+of different branches of art. He never has the disgusting technical
+jargon, or the undisciplined fluency, of the mere art critic, any more
+than he has the gabble of the mere connoisseur. But it is constantly
+evident that he has a knowledge of and a feeling for the art of line and
+colour as well as of words. Nothing can be better than the fragments of
+criticism which are interspersed in the Scott book; and if his estimate
+of Hook as a novelist seems exaggerated, it must be remembered, as he
+has himself noted, that Thackeray was, at the time he spoke, nothing
+more than an amusing contributor of remarkably promising trifles to
+magazines, and that, from the appearance of _Waverley_ to that of
+_Pickwick_, no novelist of the first class had made an appearance. It
+is, moreover, characteristic of Lockhart as a critic that he is, as has
+been noted, always manly and robust. He was never false to his own early
+protest against "the banishing from the mind of a reverence for feeling,
+as abstracted from mere questions of immediate and obvious utility." But
+he never allowed that reverence to get the better of him and drag him
+into the deplorable excesses of gush into which, from his day to ours,
+criticism has more and more had a tendency to fall. If he makes no
+parade of definite aesthetic principles, it is clear that throughout he
+had such principles, and that they were principles of a very good kind.
+He had a wide knowledge of foreign literature without any taint of
+"Xenomania," sufficient scholarship (despite the unlucky false quantity
+of _Janua_, which he overlooked) in the older languages, and a thorough
+knowledge and love of English literature. His style is, to me at any
+rate, peculiarly attractive. Contrasted with the more brightly coloured
+and fantastically-shaped styles, of which, in his own day, De Quincey,
+Wilson, Macaulay, and Carlyle set the fashion, it may possibly seem tame
+to those who are not satisfied with proportion in form and harmony in
+tint; it will certainly not seem so to those who are more fortunately
+gifted. Indeed, compared either with Wilson's welter of words, now
+bombastic, now gushing, now horse-playful, or with the endless and
+heartbreaking antitheses of what Brougham ill-naturedly but truly called
+"Tom's snip-snap," it is infinitely preferable. The conclusion of the
+essay on Theodore Hook is not easily surpassable as an example of solid
+polished prose, which is prose, and does not attempt to be a hybrid
+between prose and poetry. The last page of the Tennyson review is
+perfect for quiet humour.
+
+But there is no doubt that though Lockhart was an admirable critic
+merely as such, a poet, or at least a song-writer, of singular ability
+and charm within certain limits, and a master of sharp light raillery
+that never missed its mark and never lumbered on the way, his most
+unique and highest merit is that of biographer. Carlyle, though treating
+Lockhart himself with great politeness, does not allow this, and
+complains that Lockhart's conception of his task was "not very
+elevated." That is what a great many people said of Boswell, whom
+Carlyle thought an almost perfect biographer. But, as it happens, the
+critic here has fallen into the dangerous temptation of giving his
+reasons. Lockhart's plan was not, it seems, in the case of his _Scott_,
+very elevated, because it was not "to show Scott as he was by nature, as
+the world acted on him, as he acted on the world," and so forth. Now,
+unfortunately, this is exactly what it seems to me that Lockhart,
+whether he meant to do it or not, has done in the very book which
+Carlyle was criticising. And it seems to me, further, that he always
+does this in all his biographical efforts. Sometimes he appears (for
+here another criticism of Carlyle's on the _Burns_, not the _Scott_, is
+more to the point) to quote and extract from other and much inferior
+writers to an extent rather surprising in so excellent a penman,
+especially when it is remembered that, except to a dunce, the extraction
+and stringing together of quotations is far more troublesome than
+original writing. But even then the extracts are always luminous. With
+ninety-nine out of a hundred biographies the total impression which
+Carlyle demands, and very properly demands, is, in fact, a total absence
+of impression. The reader's mind is as dark, though it may be as full,
+as a cellar when the coals have been shot into it. Now this is never the
+case with Lockhart's biographies, whether they are books in half a dozen
+volumes, or essays in half a hundred pages. He subordinates what even
+Carlyle allowed to be his "clear nervous forcible style" so entirely to
+the task of representing his subject, he has such a perfect general
+conception of that subject, that only a very dense reader can fail to
+perceive the presentment. Whether it is the right or whether it is the
+wrong presentment may, of course, be a matter of opinion, but, such as
+it is, it is always there.
+
+One other point of interest about Lockhart has to be mentioned. He was
+an eminent example, perhaps one of the most eminent, of a "gentleman of
+the press." He did a great many kinds of literary work, and he did all
+of them well; novel-writing, perhaps (which, as has been said, he gave
+up almost immediately), least well. But he does not seem to have felt
+any very strong or peculiar call to any particular class of original
+literary work, and his one great and substantive book may be fairly
+taken to have been much more decided by accident and his relationship to
+Scott than by deliberate choice. He was, in fact, eminently a
+journalist, and it is very much to be wished that there were more
+journalists like him. For from the two great reproaches of the craft to
+which so many of us belong, and which seems to be gradually swallowing
+up all other varieties of literary occupation, he was conspicuously
+free. He never did work slovenly in form, and he never did work that was
+not in one way or other consistent with a decided set of literary and
+political principles. There is a great deal of nonsense talked about the
+unprincipled character of journalism, no doubt; and nobody knows better
+than those who have some experience of it, that if, as George Warrington
+says, "too many of us write against our own party," it is the fault
+simply of those who do so. If a man has a faculty of saying anything, he
+can generally get an opportunity of saying what he likes, and avoid
+occasions of saying what he does not like. But the mere journalist
+Swiss of heaven (or the other place), is certainly not unknown, and by
+all accounts he was in Lockhart's time rather common. No one ever
+accused Lockhart himself of being one of the class. A still more
+important fault, undoubtedly, of journalism is its tendency to slovenly
+work, and here again Lockhart was conspicuously guiltless. His actual
+production must have been very considerable, though in the absence of
+any collection, or even any index, of his contributions to periodicals,
+it is impossible to say exactly to how much it would extend. But, at a
+rough guess, the _Scott_, the _Burns_, and the _Napoleon_, the
+_Ballads_, the novels, and _Peter_, a hundred _Quarterly_ articles, and
+an unknown number in _Blackwood_ and _Fraser_, would make at least
+twenty or five-and-twenty volumes of a pretty closely printed library
+edition. Yet all this, as far as it can be identified, has the same
+careful though unostentatious distinction of style, the same admirable
+faculty of sarcasm, wherever sarcasm is required, the same depth of
+feeling, wherever feeling is called for, the same refusal to make a
+parade of feeling even where it is shown. Never trivial, never vulgar,
+never feeble, never stilted, never diffuse, Lockhart is one of the very
+best recent specimens of that class of writers of all work, which since
+Dryden's time has continually increased, is increasing, and does not
+seem likely to diminish. The growth may or may not be matter for
+regret; probably none of the more capable members of the class itself
+feels any particular desire to magnify his office. But if the office is
+to exist, let it at least be the object of those who hold it to perform
+its duties with that hatred of commonplace and cant and the _popularis
+aura_, with, as nearly as may be in each case, that conscience and
+thoroughness of workmanship, which Lockhart's writings uniformly
+display.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[18] See Appendix B--Lockhart.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+PRAED
+
+
+It was not till half a century after his death that Praed, who is loved
+by those who love him perhaps as sincerely as most greater writers, had
+his works presented to the public in a form which may be called
+complete.[19] This is of itself rather a cautious statement in
+appearance, but I am not sure that it ought not to be made more cautious
+still. The completeness is not complete, though it is in one respect
+rather more than complete; and the form is exceedingly informal. Neither
+in size, nor in print, nor in character of editing and arrangement do
+the two little fat volumes which were ushered into the world by Derwent
+Coleridge in 1864, and the one little thin volume which appeared in
+1887 under Sir George Young's name with no notes and not much
+introduction, and the very creditable edition of the political poems
+which appeared a year later under the same care but better cared for,
+agree together. But this, though a nuisance to those who love not a set
+of odd volumes, would matter comparatively little if the discrepancies
+were not equally great in a much more important matter than that of mere
+externals. Only the last of the four volumes and three books just
+enumerated can be said to have been really edited, and though that is
+edited very well, it is the least important. Sir George Young, who has
+thus done a pious work to his uncle's memory, was concerned not merely
+in the previous cheap issue of the prose, but in the more elaborate
+issue of the poems in 1864. But either his green unknowing youth did not
+at that time know what editing meant, or he was under the restraint of
+some higher powers. Except that the issue of 1864 has that well-known
+page-look of "Moxon's," which is identified to all lovers of poetry with
+associations of Shelley, of Lord Tennyson, and of other masters, and
+that the pieces are duly dated, it is difficult to say any good thing of
+the book. There are no notes; and Praed is an author who is much in need
+of annotation. With singular injudiciousness, a great deal of album and
+other verse is included which was evidently not intended for
+publication, which does not display the writer at his best, or even in
+his characteristic vein at all, while the memoir is meagre in fact and
+decidedly feeble in criticism. As for the prose, though Sir George Young
+has prefixed an introduction good as far as it goes, there is no index,
+no table even of contents, and the separate papers are not dated, nor is
+any indication given of their origin--a defect which, for reasons to be
+indicated shortly, is especially troublesome in Praed's case.
+Accordingly anything like a critical study of the poet is beset with
+very unusual difficulties, and the mere reading of him, if it were less
+agreeable in itself, could not be said to be exactly easy. Luckily Praed
+is a writer so eminently engaging to the mere reader, as well as so
+interesting in divers ways to the personage whom some one has politely
+called "the gelid critic," that no sins or shortcomings of his editors
+can do him much harm, so long as they let him be read at all.
+
+Winthrop Mackworth was the third son of Serjeant Praed, Chairman of the
+Board of Audit, and, though his family was both by extraction and by
+actual seat Devonian, he was born in John Street, Bedford Row, on 26th
+June 1802, the year of the birth of Victor Hugo, who was perhaps about
+as unlike Praed in every conceivable point, except metrical mastery, as
+two men possessing poetic faculty can be unlike one another. John Street
+may not appear as meet a nurse for a poetic child as Besancon,
+especially now when it has settled down into the usual office-and-chambers
+state of Bloomsbury. But it is unusually wide for a London street; it
+has trees--those of the Foundling Hospital and those of Gray's Inn--at
+either end, and all about it cluster memories of the Bedford Row
+conspiracy, and of that immortal dinner which was given by the Briefless
+One and his timid partner to Mr. Goldmore, and of Sydney Smith's sojourn
+in Doughty Street, and of divers other pleasant things. In connection,
+however, with Praed himself, we do not hear much more of John Street. It
+was soon exchanged for the more cheerful locality of Teignmouth, where
+his father (who was a member of the old western family of Mackworth,
+Praed being an added surname) had a country house. Serjeant Praed
+encouraged, if he did not positively teach, the boy to write English
+verse at a very early age: a practice which I should be rather slow to
+approve, but which has been credited, perhaps justly, with the very
+remarkable formal accuracy and metrical ease of Praed's after-work.
+Winthrop lost his mother early, was sent to a private school at eight
+years old, and to Eton in the year 1814. Public schools in their effect
+of allegiance on public schoolboys have counted for much in English
+history, literary and other, and Eton has counted for more than any of
+them. But hardly in any case has it counted for so much with the general
+reader as in Praed's. A friend of mine, who, while entertaining high
+and lofty views on principle, takes low ones by a kind of natural
+attraction, says that the straightforward title of _The Etonian_ and
+Praed's connection with it are enough to account for this. There you
+have a cardinal fact easy to seize and easy to remember. "Praed? Oh!
+yes, the man who wrote _The Etonian_; he must have been an Eton man,"
+says the general reader. This is cynicism, and cannot be too strongly
+reprehended. But unluckily, as in other cases, a kind of critical
+deduction or reaction from this view has also taken place, and there are
+persons who maintain that Praed's merit is a kind of coterie-merit, a
+thing which Eton men are bound, and others are not bound but the
+reverse, to uphold. This is an old, but apparently still effective
+trick. I read not long ago a somewhat elaborate attempt to make out that
+the people who admire Mr. Matthew Arnold's poems admire them because
+they, the people, are Oxford men. Now this form of "ruling out" is
+undoubtedly ingenious. "You admire Mr. Arnold's poems?"--"Yes, I
+do."--"You are an Oxford man?"--"Yes, I am."--"Ah! I see." And it is
+perfectly useless for the victim to argue that his admiration of the
+poet and his allegiance to the University have nothing to do with each
+other. In the present case I, at least, am free from this illogical but
+damaging disqualification. I do not think that any one living admires
+Praed more than I do; and neither Eton nor Cambridge, which may be said
+to have divided influence on him, claims any allegiance from me. On
+Praed himself, however, the influence of Eton was certainly great, if
+not of the greatest. Here he began in school periodicals ("Apis Matina"
+a bee buzzing in manuscript only, preceded _The Etonian_) his prose and,
+to some though a less extent, his verse-exercises in finished
+literature. Here he made the beginnings of that circle of friends
+(afterwards slightly enlarged at Cambridge by the addition of
+non-Etonians and including one or two Oxford men who had been at Eton)
+which practically formed the staff of _The Etonian_ itself and of the
+subsequent _Knight's Quarterly_ and _Brazen Head_. The greatest of them
+all, Macaulay, belonged to the later Trinity set; but the Etonians
+proper included divers men of mark. There has been, I believe, a
+frequent idea that boys who contribute to school-magazines never do
+anything else. Praed certainly could not be produced as an instance. He
+was not a great athlete, partly because his health was always weak,
+partly because athletics were then in their infancy. But he is said to
+have been a good player at fives and tennis, an amateur actor of merit,
+expert at chess and whist, and latterly a debater of promise, while, in
+the well-known way of his own school and University, he was more than a
+sufficient scholar. He went to Trinity in October 1821, and in the three
+following years won the Browne Medals for Greek verse four times and
+the Chancellor's Medal for English verse twice. He was third in the
+Classical Tripos, was elected to a Fellowship at his college in 1827,
+and in 1830 obtained the Seatonian Prize with a piece, "The Ascent of
+Elijah," which is remarkable for the extraordinary facility with which
+it catches the notes of the just published _Christian Year_. He was a
+great speaker at the Union, and, as has been hinted, he made a fresh
+circle of literary friends for himself, the chief ornaments whereof were
+Macaulay and Charles Austin. It was also during his sojourn at Cambridge
+that the short-lived but brilliant venture of _Knight's Quarterly_ was
+launched. He was about four years resident at Trinity in the first
+instance; after which, according to a practice then common enough but
+now, I believe, obsolete, he returned to Eton as private and particular
+tutor to Lord Ernest Bruce. This employment kept him for two years. He
+then read law, was called to the Bar in 1829, and in 1830 was elected to
+Parliament for the moribund borough of St. Germans. He was re-elected
+next year, contested St. Ives, when St. Germans lost its members, but
+was beaten, was elected in 1834 for Great Yarmouth, and in 1837 for
+Aylesbury, which last seat he held to his death. During the whole of
+this time he sat as a Conservative, becoming a more thorough one as time
+went on; and as he had been at Cambridge a very decided Whig, and had
+before his actual entrance on public life written many pointed and some
+bitter lampoons against the Tories, the change, in the language of his
+amiable and partial friend and biographer, "occasioned considerable
+surprise." Of this also more presently: for it is well to get merely
+biographical details over with as little digression as possible.
+Surprise or no surprise, he won good opinions from both sides, acquired
+considerable reputation as a debater and a man of business, was in the
+confidence both of the Duke of Wellington and of Sir Robert Peel, was
+made Secretary of the Board of Control in 1834, married in 1835, was
+appointed Deputy-High Steward of his University (a mysterious
+appointment, of the duties of which I have no notion), and died of
+disease of the lungs on 15th July 1839. Not very much has been published
+about Praed personally; but in what has been published, and in what I
+have heard, I cannot remember a single unfriendly sentence.
+
+Notwithstanding his reputation as an "inspired schoolboy," I do not know
+that sober criticism would call him a really precocious writer,
+especially in verse. The pieces by which he is best known and which have
+most individuality, date in no case very early, and in almost all cases
+after his five-and-twentieth year. What does date very early (and
+unluckily it has been printed with a copiousness betokening more
+affection than judgment, considering that the author had more sense
+than to print it at all) is scarcely distinguishable from any other
+verses of any other clever boy. It is impossible to augur any future
+excellence from such stuff as
+
+    Emilia often sheds the tear
+      But affectation bids it flow,
+
+or as
+
+    From breasts which feel compassion's glow
+      Solicit mild the kind relief;
+
+and, for one's own part, one is inclined to solicit mild the kind relief
+of not having to read it. Even when Praed had become, at least
+technically, a man, there is no very great improvement as a whole,
+though here and there one may see, looking backwards from the finished
+examples, faint beginnings of his peculiar touches, especially of that
+pleasant trick of repeating the same word or phrase with a different and
+slightly altered sense which, as Mr. Austin Dobson has suggested, may
+have been taken from Burns. The Cambridge prize poems are quite
+authentic and respectable examples of that style which has received its
+final criticism in
+
+    Ply battleaxe and hurtling catapult:
+    Jerusalem is ours! _Id Deus vult_,--
+
+though they do not contain anything so nice as that, or as its great
+author's more famous couplet respecting Africa and the men thereof. The
+longer romances of the same date, "Gog," "Lilian," "The Troubadour,"
+are little more than clever reminiscences sometimes of Scott, Byron,
+Moore, and other contemporaries, sometimes of Prior and the _vers de
+societe_ of the eighteenth century. The best passage by far of all this
+is the close of "How to Rhyme with Love," and this, as it seems to me,
+is the only passage of even moderate length which, in the poems dating
+before Praed took his degree, in the least foretells the poet of "The
+Red Fisherman," "The Vicar," the "Letters from Teignmouth," the
+"Fourteenth of February" (earliest in date and not least charming fruit
+of the true vein), "Good-night to the Season," and best and most
+delightful of all, the peerless "Letter of Advice," which is as much the
+very best thing of its own kind as the "Divine Comedy."
+
+In prose Praed was a little earlier, but not very much. _The Etonian_
+itself was, even in its earliest numbers, written at an age when many,
+perhaps most, men have already left school; and the earlier numbers are
+as imitative, of the _Spectator_ and its late and now little read
+followers of the eighteenth century, as is the verse above quoted. The
+youthful boisterousness of _Blackwood_ gave Praed a more congenial
+because a fresher cue; and in the style of which Maginn, as Adjutant
+O'Doherty, had set the example in his Latinisings of popular verse, and
+which was to be worked to death by Father Prout, there are few things
+better than the "Musae O'Connorianae" which celebrates the great fight of
+Mac Nevis and Mac Twolter. But there is here still the distinct
+following of a model the taint of the school-exercise. Very much more
+original is "The Knight and the Knave:" indeed I should call this the
+first original thing, though it be a parody, that Praed did. To say that
+it reminds one in more than subject of _Rebecca and Rowena_, and that it
+was written some twenty years earlier, is to say a very great deal. Even
+here, however, the writer's ground is rented, not freehold. It is very
+different in such papers as "Old Boots" and "The Country Curate," while
+in the later prose contributed to _Knight's Quarterly_ the improvement
+in originality is marked. "The Union Club" is amusing enough all
+through: but considering that it was written in 1823, two years before
+Jeffrey asked the author of a certain essay on Milton "where he got that
+style," one passage of the speech put in the mouth of Macaulay is
+positively startling. "The Best Bat in the School" is quite delightful,
+and "My First Folly," though very unequal, contains in the introduction
+scene, between Vyvian Joyeuse and Margaret Orleans, a specimen of a kind
+of dialogue nowhere to be found before, so far as I know, and giving
+proof that, if Praed had set himself to it, he might have started a new
+kind of novel.
+
+It does not appear, however, that his fancy led him with any decided
+bent to prose composition, and he very early deserted it for verse;
+though he is said to have, at a comparatively late period of his short
+life, worked in harness as a regular leader-writer for the _Morning
+Post_ during more than a year. No examples of this work of his have been
+reprinted, nor, so far as I know, does any means of identifying them
+exist, though I personally should like to examine them. He was still at
+Cambridge when he drifted into another channel, which was still not his
+own channel, but in which he feathered his oars under two different
+flags with no small skill and dexterity. Sir George Young has a very
+high idea of his uncle's political verse, and places him "first among
+English writers, before Prior, before Canning, before the authors of the
+'Rolliad,' and far before Moore or any of the still anonymous
+contributors to the later London press." I cannot subscribe to this.
+Neither as Whig nor as Tory, neither as satirist of George the Fourth
+nor as satirist of the Reform Bill, does Praed seem to me to have been
+within a hundred miles of that elder schoolfellow of his who wrote
+
+    All creeping creatures, venomous and low,
+    Still blasphemous or blackguard, praise Lepaux.
+
+He has nothing for sustained wit and ease equal to the best pieces of
+the "Fudge Family" and the "Two-penny Postbag"; and (for I do not know
+why one should not praise a man because he happens to be alive and one's
+friend) I do not think he has the touch of the true political satirist
+as Mr. Traill has it in "Professor Baloonatics Craniocracs," or in that
+admirable satire on democracy which is addressed to the "Philosopher
+Crazed, from the Island of Crazes."
+
+Indeed, by mentioning Prior, Sir George seems to put himself rather out
+of court. Praed _is_ very nearly if not quite Prior's equal, but the
+sphere of neither was politics. Prior's political pieces are thin and
+poor beside his social verse, and with rare exceptions I could not put
+anything political of Praed's higher than the shoe-string of "Araminta."
+Neither of these two charming poets seems to have felt seriously enough
+for political satire. Matthew, we know, played the traitor; and though
+Mackworth ratted to my own side, I fear it must be confessed that he did
+rat. I can only discover in his political verse two fixed principles,
+both of which no doubt did him credit, but which hardly, even when taken
+together, amount to a sufficient political creed. The one was fidelity
+to Canning and his memory: the other was impatience of the cant of the
+reformers. He could make admirable fun of Joseph Hume, and of still
+smaller fry like Waithman; he could attack Lord Grey's nepotism and
+doctrinairism fiercely enough. Once or twice, or, to be fair, more than
+once or twice, he struck out a happy, indeed a brilliant flash. He was
+admirable at what Sir George Young calls, justly enough, "political
+patter songs" such as,
+
+    Young widowhood shall lose its weeds,
+      Old kings shall loathe the Tories,
+    And monks be tired of telling beads,
+      And Blues of telling stories;
+    And titled suitors shall be crossed,
+      And famished poets married,
+    And Canning's motion shall be lost,
+      And Hume's amendment carried;
+    And Chancery shall cease to doubt,
+      And Algebra to prove,
+    And hoops come in, and gas go out
+      Before I cease to love.
+
+He hit off an exceedingly savage and certainly not wholly just "Epitaph
+on the King of the Sandwich Islands" which puts the conception of George
+the Fourth that Thackeray afterwards made popular, and contains these
+felicitous lines:
+
+    The people in his happy reign,
+      Were blessed beyond all other nations:
+    Unharmed by foreign axe and chain,
+      Unhealed by civic innovations;
+    They served the usual logs and stones,
+      With all the usual rites and terrors,
+    And swallowed all their fathers' bones,
+      And swallowed all their fathers' errors.
+
+    When the fierce mob, with clubs and knives,
+      All swore that nothing should prevent them,
+    But that their representatives
+      Should actually represent them,
+    He interposed the proper checks,
+      By sending troops, with drums and banners,
+    To cut their speeches short, and necks,
+      And break their heads, to mend their manners.
+
+Occasionally in a sort of middle vein between politics and society he
+wrote in the "patter" style just noticed quite admirable things like
+"Twenty-eight and Twenty-nine." Throughout the great debates on Reform
+he rallied the reformers with the same complete and apparently useless
+superiority of wit and sense which has often, if not invariably, been
+shown at similar crises on the losing side. And once, on an
+ever-memorable occasion, he broke into those famous and most touching
+"Stanzas on seeing the Speaker Asleep" which affect one almost to tears
+by their grace of form and by the perennial and indeed ever-increasing
+applicability of their matter.
+
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker: it's surely fair,
+    If you don't in your bed, that you should in your chair:
+    Longer and longer still they grow,
+    Tory and Radical, Aye and No;
+    Talking by night and talking by day;
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.
+
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker: slumber lies
+    Light and brief on a Speaker's eyes--
+    Fielden or Finn, in a minute or two,
+    Some disorderly thing will do;
+    Riot will chase repose away;
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.
+
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker; Cobbett will soon
+    Move to abolish the sun and moon;
+    Hume, no doubt, will be taking the sense
+    Of the House on a saving of thirteen-pence;
+    Grattan will growl or Baldwin bray;
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.
+
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker: dream of the time
+    When loyalty was not quite a crime,
+    When Grant was a pupil in Canning's school,
+    And Palmerston fancied Wood a fool.
+    Lord, how principles pass away!
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.
+
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sweet to men
+    Is the sleep that comes but now and then;
+    Sweet to the sorrowful, sweet to the ill,
+    Sweet to the children who work in a mill.
+    You have more need of sleep than they,
+    Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.
+
+But the chief merit of Praed's political verse as a whole seems to me to
+be that it kept his hand in, and enabled him to develop and refine the
+trick, above referred to, of playing on words so as to give a graceful
+turn to verse composed in his true vocation.
+
+Of the verse so composed there are more kinds than one; though perhaps
+only in two kinds is the author absolutely at his best. There is first a
+certain class of pieces which strongly recall Macaulay's "Lays" and may
+have had some connexion of origin with them. Of course those who are
+foolish enough to affect to see nothing good in "The Battle of the Lake
+Regillus," or "Ivry," or "The Armada," will not like "Cassandra," or
+"Sir Nicholas at Marston Moor," or the "Covenanter's Lament for Bothwell
+Brigg," or "Arminius." Nevertheless they are fine in their way.
+"Arminius" is too long, and it suffers from the obvious comparison with
+Cowper's far finer "Boadicea." But its best lines, such as the
+well-known
+
+    I curse him by our country's gods,
+      The terrible, the dark,
+    The scatterers of the Roman rods,
+      The quellers of the bark,
+
+are excellent in the style, and "Sir Nicholas" is charming. But not here
+either did Apollo seriously wait for Praed. The later romances or tales
+are far better than the earlier. "The Legend of the Haunted Tree" shows
+in full swing that happy compound and contrast of sentiment and humour
+in which the writer excelled. And "The Teufelhaus" is, except "The Red
+Fisherman" perhaps, the best thing of its kind in English. These lines
+are good enough for anything:
+
+    But little he cared, that stripling pale,
+    For the sinking sun or the rising gale;
+    For he, as he rode, was dreaming now,
+    Poor youth, of a woman's broken vow,
+    Of the cup dashed down, ere the wine was tasted,
+    Of eloquent speeches sadly wasted,
+    Of a gallant heart all burnt to ashes,
+    And the Baron of Katzberg's long moustaches.
+
+And these:
+
+    Swift as the rush of an eagle's wing,
+    Or the flight of a shaft from Tartar string,
+    Into the wood Sir Rudolph went:
+    Not with more joy the schoolboys run
+    To the gay green fields when their task is done;
+    Not with more haste the members fly,
+    When Hume has caught the Speaker's eye.
+
+But in "The Red Fisherman" itself there is nothing that is not good. It
+is very short, ten small pages only of some five-and-twenty lines each.
+But there is not a weak place in it from the moment when "the Abbot
+arose and closed his book" to the account of his lamentable and yet
+lucky fate and punishment whereof "none but he and the fisherman could
+tell the reason why." Neither of the two other practitioners who may be
+called the masters of this style, Hood and Barham, nor Praed himself
+elsewhere, nor any of his and their imitators has trodden the
+breadthless line between real terror and mere burlesque with so steady a
+foot.
+
+Still not here was his "farthest," as the geographers say, nor in the
+considerable mass of smaller poems which practically defy
+classification. In them, as so often elsewhere in Praed, one comes
+across odd notes, stray flashes of genius which he never seems to have
+cared to combine or follow out, such as the unwontedly solemn "Time's
+Song," the best wholly serious thing that he has done, and the charming
+"L'Inconnue." But we find the perfect Praed, and we find him only, in
+the verses of society proper, the second part of the "Poems of Life and
+Manners" as they are headed, which began, as far as one can make out, to
+be written about 1826, and the gift of which Praed never lost, though he
+practised it little in the very last years of his life. Here, in a
+hundred pages, with a few to be added from elsewhere, are to be found
+some of the best-bred and best-natured verse within the English
+language, some of the most original and remarkable metrical experiments,
+a profusion of the liveliest fancy, a rush of the gayest rhyme. They
+begin with "The Vicar," _vir nulla non donandus lauru_.
+
+    [Whose] talk was like a stream, which runs
+      With rapid change from rocks to roses:
+    It slipped from politics to puns,
+      It passed from Mahomet to Moses;
+    Beginning with the laws which keep
+      The planets in their radiant courses,
+    And ending with some precept deep
+      For dressing eels, or shoeing horses.
+
+Three of the Vicar's companion "Everyday Characters" are good, but I
+think not so good as he; the fifth piece, however, "The Portrait of a
+Lady," is quite his equal.
+
+    You'll be forgotten--as old debts
+      By persons who are used to borrow;
+    Forgotten--as the sun that sets,
+      When shines a new one on the morrow;
+    Forgotten--like the luscious peach
+      That blessed the schoolboy last September;
+    Forgotten--like a maiden speech,
+      Which all men praise, but none remember.
+
+    Yet ere you sink into the stream
+      That whelms alike sage, saint, and martyr,
+    And soldier's sword, and minstrel's theme,
+      And Canning's wit, and Gatton's charter,
+    Here, of the fortunes of your youth,
+      My fancy weaves her dim conjectures,
+    Which have, perhaps, as much of truth
+      As passion's vows, or Cobbett's lectures.
+
+Here, and perhaps here first, at least in the order of the published
+poems, appears that curious mixture of pathos and quizzing, sentiment
+and satire, which has never been mastered more fully or communicated
+more happily than by Praed. But not even yet do we meet with it in its
+happiest form: nor is that form to be found in "Josephine" which is much
+better in substance than in manner, or in the half-social,
+half-political patter of "The Brazen Head," or in "Twenty-eight and
+Twenty-nine." It sounds first in the "Song for the Fourteenth of
+February." No one, so far as I know, has traced any exact original[20]
+for the altogether admirable metre which, improved and glorified later
+in "The Letter of Advice," appears first in lighter matter still like
+this:
+
+    Shall I kneel to a Sylvia or Celia,
+      Whom no one e'er saw, or may see,
+    A fancy-drawn Laura Amelia,
+      An _ad libit_ Anna Marie?
+    Shall I court an initial with stars to it,
+      Go mad for a G. or a J.,
+    Get Bishop to put a few bars to it,
+    And print it on Valentine's Day?
+
+But every competent critic has seen in it the origin of the more
+gorgeous and full-mouthed, if not more accomplished and dexterous,
+rhythm in which Mr. Swinburne has written "Dolores," and the even more
+masterly dedication of the first "Poems and Ballads." The shortening of
+the last line which the later poet has introduced is a touch of genius,
+but not perhaps greater than Praed's own recognition of the
+extraordinarily vivid and ringing qualities of the stanza. I profoundly
+believe that metrical quality is, other things being tolerably equal,
+the great secret of the enduring attraction of verse: and nowhere, not
+in the greatest lyrics, is that quality more unmistakable than in the
+"Letter of Advice." I really do not know how many times I have read it;
+but I never can read it to this day without being forced to read it out
+loud like a schoolboy and mark with accompaniment of hand-beat such
+lines as
+
+    Remember the thrilling romances
+      We read on the bank in the glen:
+    Remember the suitors our fancies
+      Would picture for both of us then.
+    They wore the red cross on their shoulder,
+      They had vanquished and pardoned their foe--
+    Sweet friend, are you wiser or colder?
+      My own Araminta, say "No!"
+
+           .       .       .       .       .
+
+    He must walk--like a god of old story
+      Come down from the home of his rest;
+    He must smile--like the sun in his glory,
+      On the buds he loves ever the best;
+    And oh! from its ivory portal
+      Like music his soft speech must flow!
+    If he speak, smile, or walk like a mortal,
+      My own Araminta, say "No!"
+
+There are, metrically speaking, few finer couplets in English than the
+first of that second stanza. Looked at from another point of view, the
+mixture of the comic and the serious in the piece is remarkable enough;
+but not so remarkable, I think, as its extraordinary metrical
+accomplishment. There is not a note or a syllable wrong in the whole
+thing, but every sound and every cadence comes exactly where it ought to
+come, so as to be, in a delightful phrase of Southey's, "necessary and
+voluptuous and right."
+
+It is no wonder that when Praed had discovered such a medium he should
+have worked it freely. But he never impressed on it such a combination
+of majesty and grace as in this letter of Medora Trevilian. As far as
+the metre goes I think the eight-lined stanzas of this piece better
+suited to it than the twelve-lined ones of "Good Night to the Season"
+and the first "Letter from Teignmouth," but both are very delightful.
+Perhaps the first is the best known of all Praed's poems, and certainly
+some things in it, such as
+
+    The ice of her ladyship's manners,
+    The ice of his lordship's champagne,
+
+are among the most quoted. But this antithetical trick, of which Praed
+was so fond, is repeated a little often in it; and it seems to me to
+lack the freshness as well as the fire of the "Advice." On the other
+hand, the "Letter from Teignmouth" is the best thing that even Praed has
+ever done for combined grace and tenderness.
+
+    You once could be pleased with our ballads--
+      To-day you have critical ears;
+    You once could be charmed with our salads--
+      Alas! you've been dining with Peers;
+    You trifled and flirted with many--
+      You've forgotten the when and the how;
+    There was one you liked better than any--
+      Perhaps you've forgotten her now.
+    But of those you remember most newly,
+      Of those who delight or enthral,
+    None love you a quarter so truly
+      As some you will find at our Ball.
+
+    They tell me you've many who flatter,
+      Because of your wit and your song:
+    They tell me--and what does it matter?--
+      You like to be praised by the throng:
+    They tell me you're shadowed with laurel:
+      They tell me you're loved by a Blue:
+    They tell me you're sadly immoral--
+      Dear Clarence, that cannot be true!
+    But to me, you are still what I found you,
+      Before you grew clever and tall;
+    And you'll think of the spell that once bound you;
+      And you'll come--won't you come?--to our Ball!
+
+Is not that perfectly charming?
+
+It is perhaps a matter of mere taste whether it is or is not more
+charming than pieces like "School and Schoolfellows" (the best of
+Praed's purely Eton poems) and "Marriage Chimes," in which, if not Eton,
+the Etonian set also comes in. If I like these latter pieces less, it
+is not so much because of their more personal and less universal
+subjects as because their style is much less individual. The resemblance
+to Hood cannot be missed, and though I believe there is some dispute as
+to which of the two poets actually hit upon the particular style first,
+there can be little doubt that Hood attained to the greater excellence
+in it. The real sense and savingness of that doctrine of the "principal
+and most excellent things," which has sometimes been preached rather
+corruptly and narrowly, is that the best things that a man does are
+those that he does best. Now though
+
+    I wondered what they meant by stock,
+      I wrote delightful Sapphics,
+
+and
+
+    With no hard work but Bovney stream,
+      No chill except Long Morning,
+
+are very nice things, I do not think they are so good in their kind as
+the other things that I have quoted; and this, though the poem contains
+the following wholly delightful stanza in the style of the "Ode on a
+Distant Prospect of Clapham Academy":
+
+    Tom Mill was used to blacken eyes
+      Without the fear of sessions;
+    Charles Medlar loathed false quantities
+      As much as false professions;
+    Now Mill keeps order in the land,
+      A magistrate pedantic;
+    And Medlar's feet repose unscanned
+      Beneath the wide Atlantic.
+
+The same may even be said of "Utopia," a much-praised, often-quoted, and
+certainly very amusing poem, of "I'm not a Lover now," and of others,
+which are also, though less exactly, in Hood's manner. To attempt to
+distinguish between that manner and the manner which is Praed's own is a
+rather perilous attempt; and the people who hate all attempts at
+reducing criticism to principle, and who think that a critic should only
+say clever things about his subject, will of course dislike me for it.
+But that I cannot help. I should say then that Hood had the advantage of
+Praed in purely serious poetry; for Araminta's bard never did anything
+at all approaching "The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies," "The Haunted
+House," or a score of other things. He had also the advantage in pure
+broad humour. But where Praed excelled was in the mixed style, not of
+sharp contrast as in Hood's "Lay of the Desert Born" and "Demon Ship,"
+where from real pity and real terror the reader suddenly stumbles into
+pure burlesque, but of wholly blended and tempered humour and pathos. It
+is this mixed style in which I think his note is to be found as it is to
+be found in no other poet, and as it could hardly be found in any but
+one with Praed's peculiar talent and temper combined with his peculiar
+advantages of education, fortune, and social atmosphere. He never had to
+"pump out sheets of fun" on a sick-bed for the printer's devil, like
+his less well-fated but assuredly not less well-gifted rival; and as his
+scholarship was exactly of the kind to refine, temper, and adjust his
+literary manner, so his society and circumstances were exactly of the
+kind to repress, or at least not to encourage, exuberance or
+boisterousness in his literary matter. There are I believe who call him
+trivial, even frivolous; and if this be done sincerely by any careful
+readers of "The Red Fisherman" and the "Letter of Advice" I fear I must
+peremptorily disable their judgment. But this appearance of levity is in
+great part due exactly to the perfect modulation and adjustment of his
+various notes. He never shrieks or guffaws: there is no horse-play in
+him, just as there is no tearing a passion to tatters. His slight
+mannerisms, more than once referred to, rarely exceed what is justified
+by good literary manners. His points are very often so delicate, so
+little insisted on or underlined, that a careless reader may miss them
+altogether; his "questionings" are so little "obstinate" that a careless
+reader may think them empty.
+
+    Will it come with a rose or a brier?
+      Will it come with a blessing or curse?
+    Will its bonnets be lower or higher?
+      Will its morals be better or worse?
+
+The author of this perhaps seems to some a mere jesting Pilate, and if
+he does, they are quite right not to even try to like him.
+
+I have seen disdainful remarks on those critics who, however warily,
+admire a considerable number of authors, as though they were coarse and
+omnivorous persons, unfit to rank with the delicates who can only relish
+one or two things in literature. But this is a foolish mistake. "One to
+one" is not "cursedly confined" in the relation of book and reader; and
+a man need not be a Don Juan of letters to have a list of almost _mille
+e tre_ loves in that department. He must indeed love the best or those
+among the best only, in the almost innumerable kinds, which is not a
+very severe restriction. And Praed is of this so fortunately numerous
+company. I do not agree with those who lament his early death on the
+ground of its depriving literature or politics of his future greatness.
+In politics he would most probably not have become anything greater than
+an industrious and respectable official; and in letters his best work
+was pretty certainly done. For it was a work that could only be done in
+youth. In his scholarly but not frigidly correct form, in his irregular
+sallies and flashes of a genius really individual as far as it went but
+never perhaps likely to go much farther, in the freshness of his
+imitations, in the imperfection of his originalities, Praed was the most
+perfect representative we have had or ever are likely to have of what
+has been called, with a perhaps reprehensible parody on great words,
+"the eternal undergraduate within us, who rejoices before life." He is
+thus at the very antipodes of Wertherism and Byronism, a light but
+gallant champion of cheerfulness and the joy of living. Although there
+is about him absolutely nothing artificial--the curse of the lighter
+poetry as a rule--and though he attains to deep pathos now and then, and
+once or twice (notably in "The Red Fisherman") to a kind of grim
+earnestness, neither of these things is his real _forte_. Playing with
+literature and with life, not frivolously or without heart, but with no
+very deep cares and no very passionate feeling, is Praed's attitude
+whenever he is at his best. And he does not play at playing as many
+writers do: it is all perfectly genuine. Even Prior has not excelled
+such lines as these in one of his early and by no means his best poems
+(an adaptation too), for mingled jest and earnest--
+
+    But Isabel, by accident,
+      Was wandering by that minute;
+    She opened that dark monument
+      And found her slave within it;
+    _The clergy said the Mass in vain,
+      The College could not save me:
+    But life, she swears, returned again
+      With the first kiss she gave me._
+
+Hardly, if at all, could he have kept up this attitude towards life
+after he had come to forty year; and he might have become either a
+merely intelligent and respectable person, which is most probable, or an
+elderly youth, which is of all things most detestable, or a
+caterwauler, or a cynic, or a preacher. From all these fates the gods
+mercifully saved him, and he abides with us (the presentation being but
+slightly marred by the injudicious prodigality of his editors) only as
+the poet of Medora's musical despair lest Araminta should derogate, of
+the Abbot's nightmare sufferings at the hands of the Red Fisherman, of
+the plaintive appeal after much lively gossip--
+
+    And you'll come--won't you come?--to our Ball,
+
+of all the pleasures, and the jests, and the tastes, and the studies,
+and the woes, provided only they are healthy and manly, of Twenty-five.
+Unhappy is the person of whom it can be said that he neither has been,
+is, nor ever will be in the temper and circumstances of which Praed's
+verse is the exact and consummate expression; not much less unhappy he
+for whom that verse does not perform the best perhaps of all the offices
+of literature, and call up, it may be in happier guise than that in
+which they once really existed, the many beloved shadows of the past.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[19] 1. _The Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, with a Memoir by the
+Rev. Derwent Coleridge._ In two volumes. London, 1864. 2. _Essays by
+Winthrop Mackworth Praed, collected and arranged by Sir George Young,
+Bart._ London, 1887. 3. _The Political and Occasional Poems of Winthrop
+Mackworth Praed, edited, with Notes, by Sir George Young._ London, 1888.
+
+[20] Since I wrote this I have been reminded by my friend Mr. Mowbray
+Morris of Byron's
+
+    I enter thy garden of roses,
+    Beloved and fair Haidee.
+
+It is not impossible that this _is_ the immediate original. But Praed
+has so improved on it as to deserve a new patent.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+GEORGE BORROW
+
+
+In this paper I do not undertake to throw any new light on the
+little-known life of the author of _Lavengro_. Among the few people who
+knew Borrow intimately, surely some one will soon be found who will give
+to the world an account of his curious life, and perhaps some specimens
+of those "mountains of manuscript" which, as he regretfully declares,
+never could find a publisher--an impossibility which, if I may be
+permitted to offer an opinion, does not reflect any great credit on
+publishers. For the present purpose it is sufficient to sum up the
+generally-known facts that Borrow was born in 1803 at East Dereham in
+Norfolk, his father being a captain in the army, who came of Cornish
+blood, his mother a lady of Norfolk birth and Huguenot extraction. His
+youth he has himself described in a fashion which nobody is likely to
+care to paraphrase. After the years of travel chronicled in _Lavengro_,
+he seems to have found scope for his philological and adventurous
+tendencies in the rather unlikely service of the Bible Society; and he
+sojourned in Russia and Spain to the great advantage of English
+literature. This occupied him during the greater part of the years from
+1830 to 1840. Then he came back to his native country--or, at any rate,
+his native district--married a widow of some property at Lowestoft, and
+spent the last forty years of his life at Oulton Hall, near the piece of
+water which is thronged in summer by all manner of sportsmen and others.
+He died but a few years ago; and even since his death he seems to have
+lacked the due meed of praise which the Lord Chief Justice of the equal
+foot usually brings, even to persons far less deserving than Borrow.
+
+There is this difficulty in writing about him, that the audience must
+necessarily consist of fervent devotees on the one hand, and of complete
+infidels, or at least complete know-nothings, on the other. To any one
+who, having the faculty to understand either, has read _Lavengro_ or
+_The Bible in Spain_, or even _Wild Wales_, praise bestowed on Borrow is
+apt to seem impertinence. To anybody else (and unfortunately the anybody
+else is in a large majority) praise bestowed on Borrow is apt to look
+like that very dubious kind of praise which is bestowed on somebody of
+whom no one but the praiser has ever heard. I cannot think of any single
+writer (Peacock himself is not an exception) who is in quite parallel
+case. And, as usual, there is a certain excuse for the general public.
+Borrow kept himself, during not the least exciting period of English
+history, quite aloof from English politics, and from the life of great
+English cities. But he did more than this. He is the only really
+considerable writer of his time in any modern European nation who seems
+to have taken absolutely no interest in current events, literary and
+other. Putting a very few allusions aside, he might have belonged to
+almost any period. His political idiosyncrasy will be noticed presently;
+but he, who lived through the whole period from Waterloo to Maiwand, has
+not, as far as I remember, mentioned a single English writer later than
+Scott and Byron. He saw the rise, and, in some instances, the death, of
+Tennyson, Thackeray, Macaulay, Carlyle, Dickens. There is not a
+reference to any one of them in his works. He saw political changes such
+as no man for two centuries had seen, and (except the Corn Laws, to
+which he has some half-ironical allusions, and the Ecclesiastical Titles
+Bill, which stirred his one active sentiment) he has referred to never a
+one. He seems in some singular fashion to have stood outside of all
+these things. His Spanish travels are dated for us by references to Dona
+Isabel and Don Carlos, to Mr. Villiers and Lord Palmerston. But cut
+these dates out, and they might be travels of the last century. His
+Welsh book proclaims itself as written in the full course of the
+Crimean War; but excise a few passages which bear directly on that
+event, and the most ingenious critic would be puzzled to "place" the
+composition. Shakespeare, we know, was for all time, not of one age
+only; but I think we may say of Borrow, without too severely or
+conceitedly marking the difference, that he was not of or for any
+particular age or time at all. If the celebrated query in Longfellow's
+_Hyperion_, "What is time?" had been addressed to him, his most
+appropriate answer, and one which he was quite capable of giving, would
+have been, "I really don't know."
+
+To this singular historical vagueness has to be added a critical
+vagueness even greater. I am sorry that I am unable to confirm or to
+gainsay at first hand Borrow's wonderfully high estimate of certain
+Welsh poets. But if the originals are anything like his translations of
+them, I do not think that Ab Gwilym and Lewis Glyn Cothi, Gronwy Owen
+and Huw Morris can have been quite such mighty bards as he makes out.
+Fortunately, however, a better test presents itself. In one book of his,
+_Wild Wales_, there are two estimates of Scott's works. Borrow finds in
+an inn a copy of _Woodstock_ (which he calls by its less known title of
+_The Cavalier_), and decides that it is "trashy": chiefly, it would
+appear, because the portrait therein contained of Harrison, for whom
+Borrow seems, on one of his inscrutable principles of prejudice, to
+have had a liking, is not wholly favourable. He afterwards informs us
+that Scott's "Norman Horseshoe" (no very exquisite song at the best, and
+among Scott's somewhat less than exquisite) is "one of the most stirring
+lyrics of modern times," and that he sang it for a whole evening;
+evidently because it recounts a defeat of the Normans, whom Borrow, as
+he elsewhere tells us in sundry places, disliked for reasons more or
+less similar to those which made him like Harrison, the butcher. In
+other words, he could not judge a work of literature as literature at
+all. If it expressed sentiments with which he agreed, or called up
+associations which were pleasant to him, good luck to it; if it
+expressed sentiments with which he did not agree, and called up no
+pleasant associations, bad luck.
+
+In politics and religion this curious and very John Bullish unreason is
+still more apparent. I suppose Borrow may be called, though he does not
+call himself, a Tory. He certainly was an unfriend to Whiggery, and a
+hater of Radicalism. He seems to have given up even the Corn Laws with a
+certain amount of regret, and his general attitude is quite Eldonian.
+But he combined with his general Toryism very curious Radicalisms of
+detail, such as are to be found in Cobbett (who, as appeared at last,
+and as all reasonable men should have always known, was really a Tory of
+a peculiar type), and in several other English persons. The Church, the
+Monarchy, and the Constitution generally were dear to Borrow, but he
+hated all the aristocracy (except those whom he knew personally) and
+most of the gentry. Also, he had the odd Radical sympathy for anybody
+who, as the vernacular has it, was "kept out of his rights." I do not
+know, but I should think, that Borrow was a strong Tichbornite. In that
+curious book _Wild Wales_, where almost more of his real character
+appears than in any other, he has to do with the Crimean War. It was
+going on during the whole time of his tour, and he once or twice reports
+conversations in which, from his knowledge of Russia, he demonstrated
+beforehand to Welsh inquirers how improbable, not to say impossible, it
+was that the Russian should be beaten. But the thing that seems really
+to have interested him most was the case of Lieutenant P---- or
+Lieutenant Parry, whom he sometimes refers to in the fuller and
+sometimes in the less explicit manner. My own memories of 1854 are
+rather indistinct, and I confess that I have not taken the trouble to
+look up this celebrated case. As far as I can remember, and as far as
+Borrow's references here and elsewhere go, it was the doubtless
+lamentable but not uncommon case of a man who is difficult to live with,
+and who has to live with others. Such cases occur at intervals in every
+mess, college, and other similar aggregation of humanity. The person
+difficult to live with gets, to use an Oxford phrase, "drawn." If he is
+reformable he takes the lesson, and very likely becomes excellent
+friends with those who "drew" him. If he is not, he loses his temper,
+and evil results of one kind or another follow. Borrow's Lieutenant
+P---- seems unluckily to have been of the latter kind, and was, if I
+mistake not, recommended by the authorities to withdraw from a situation
+which, to him, was evidently a false and unsuitable one. With this
+Borrow could not away. He gravely chronicles the fact of his reading an
+"excellent article in a local paper on the case of Lieutenant P----";
+and with no less gravity (though he was, in a certain way, one of the
+first humorists of our day) he suggests that the complaints of the
+martyred P---- to the Almighty were probably not unconnected with our
+Crimean disasters. This curious parochialism pursues him into more
+purely religious matters. I do not know any other really great man of
+letters of the last three-quarters of a century of whose attitude
+Carlyle's famous words, "regarding God's universe as a larger patrimony
+of Saint Peter, from which it were well and pleasant to hunt the Pope,"
+are so literally true. It was not in Borrow's case a case of _sancta
+simplicitas_. He has at times flashes of by no means orthodox sentiment,
+and seems to have fought, and perhaps hardly won, many a battle against
+the army of the doubters. But when it comes to the Pope, he is as
+single-minded an enthusiast as John Bunyan himself, whom, by the way,
+he resembles in more than one point. The attitude was, of course, common
+enough among his contemporaries; indeed any man who has reached middle
+life must remember numerous examples among his own friends and kindred.
+But in literature, and such literature as Borrow's, it is rare.
+
+Yet again, the curiously piecemeal, and the curiously arbitrary
+character of Borrow's literary studies in languages other than his own,
+is noteworthy in so great a linguist. The entire range of French
+literature, old as well as new, he seems to have ignored altogether--I
+should imagine out of pure John Bullishness. He has very few references
+to German, though he was a good German scholar--a fact which I account
+for by the other fact, that in his earlier literary period German was
+fashionable, and that he never would have anything to do with anything
+that fashion favoured. Italian, though he certainly knew it well, is
+equally slighted. His education, if not his taste for languages, must
+have made him a tolerable (he never could have been an exact) classical
+scholar. But it is clear that insolent Greece and haughty Rome possessed
+no attraction for him. I question whether even Spanish would not have
+been too common a toy to attract him much, if it had not been for the
+accidental circumstances which connected him with Spain.
+
+Lastly (for I love to get my devil's advocate work over), in Borrow's
+varied and strangely attractive gallery of portraits and characters,
+most observers must perceive the absence of the note of passion. I have
+sometimes tried to think that miraculous episode of Isopel Berners and
+the Armenian verbs, with the whole sojourn of Lavengro in the dingle, a
+mere wayward piece of irony--a kind of conscious ascetic myth. But I am
+afraid the interpretation will not do. The subsequent conversation with
+Ursula Petulengro under the hedge might be only a companion piece; even
+the more wonderful, though much less interesting, dialogue with the
+Irish girl in the last chapters of _Wild Wales_ might be so rendered by
+a hardy exegete. But the negative evidence in all the books is too
+strong. It may be taken as positively certain that Borrow never was "in
+love," as the phrase is, and that he had hardly the remotest conception
+of what being in love means. It is possible that he was a most cleanly
+liver--it is possible that he was quite the reverse: I have not the
+slightest information either way. But that he never in all his life
+heard with understanding the refrain of the "Pervigilium,"
+
+    Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit eras amet,
+
+I take as certain.
+
+The foregoing remarks have, I think, summed up all Borrow's defects, and
+it will be observed that even these defects have for the most part the
+attraction of a certain strangeness and oddity. If they had not been
+accompanied by great and peculiar merits, he would not have emerged from
+the category of the merely bizarre, where he might have been left
+without further attention. But, as a matter of fact, all, or almost all,
+of his defects are not only counterbalanced by merits, but are
+themselves, in a great degree, exaggerations or perversions of what is
+intrinsically meritorious. With less wilfulness, with more attention to
+the literature, the events, the personages of his own time, with a more
+critical and common-sense attitude towards his own crotchets, Borrow
+could hardly have wrought out for himself (as he has to an extent hardly
+paralleled by any other prose writer who has not deliberately chosen
+supernatural or fantastic themes) the region of fantasy, neither too
+real nor too historical, which Joubert thought proper to the poet.
+Strong and vivid as Borrow's drawing of places and persons is, he always
+contrives to throw in touches which somehow give the whole the air of
+being rather a vision than a fact. Never was such a John-a-Dreams as
+this solid, pugilistic John Bull. Part of this literary effect of his is
+due to his quaint habit of avoiding, where he can, the mention of proper
+names. The description, for instance, of Old Sarum and Salisbury itself
+in _Lavengro_ is sufficient to identify them to the most careless
+reader, even if the name of Stonehenge had not occurred on the page
+before; but they are not named. The description of Bettws-y-Coed in
+_Wild Wales_, though less poetical, is equally vivid. Yet here it would
+be quite possible for a reader, who did not know the place and its
+relation to other named places, to pass without any idea of the actual
+spot. It is the same with his frequent references to his beloved city of
+Norwich, and his less frequent references to his later home at Oulton. A
+paraphrase, an innuendo, a word to the wise he delights in, but anything
+perfectly clear and precise he abhors. And by this means and others,
+which it might be tedious to trace out too closely, he succeeds in
+throwing the same cloudy vagueness over times as well as places and
+persons. A famous passage--perhaps the best known, and not far from the
+best he ever wrote--about Byron's funeral, fixes, of course, the date of
+the wondrous facts or fictions recorded in _Lavengro_ to a nicety. Yet
+who, as he reads it and its sequel (for the separation of _Lavengro_ and
+_The Romany Rye_ is merely arbitrary, though the second book is, as a
+whole, less interesting than the former), ever thinks of what was
+actually going on in the very positive and prosaic England of 1824-25?
+The later chapters of _Lavengro_ are the only modern _Roman d'Aventures_
+that I know. The hero goes "overthwart and endlong," just like the
+figures whom all readers know in Malory, and some in his originals. I do
+not know that it would be more surprising if Borrow had found Sir Ozana
+dying at the chapel in Lyonesse, or had seen the full function of the
+Grail, though I fear he would have protested against that as popish.
+Without any apparent art, certainly without the elaborate apparatus
+which most prose tellers of fantastic tales use, and generally fail in
+using, Borrow spirits his readers at once away from mere reality. If his
+events are frequently as odd as a dream, they are always as perfectly
+commonplace and real for the moment as the events of a dream are--a
+little fact which the above-mentioned tellers of the above-mentioned
+fantastic stories are too apt to forget. It is in this natural romantic
+gift that Borrow's greatest charm lies. But it is accompanied and nearly
+equalled, both in quality and in degree, by a faculty for dialogue.
+Except Defoe and Dumas, I cannot think of any novelists who contrive to
+tell a story in dialogue and to keep up the ball of conversation so well
+as Borrow; while he is considerably the superior of both in pure style
+and in the literary quality of his talk. Borrow's humour, though it is
+of the general class of the older English--that is to say, the
+pre-Addisonian--humorists, is a species quite by itself. It is rather
+narrow in range, a little garrulous, busied very often about curiously
+small matters, but wonderfully observant and true, and possessing a
+quaint dry savour as individual as that of some wines. A characteristic
+of this kind probably accompanies the romantic _ethos_ more commonly
+than superficial judges both of life and literature are apt to suppose;
+but the conjunction is nowhere seen better than in Borrow. Whether
+humour can or cannot exist without a disposition to satire co-existing,
+is one of those abstract points of criticism for which the public of the
+present day has little appetite. It is certain (and that is what chiefly
+concerns us for the present) that the two were not dissociated in
+Borrow. His purely satirical faculty was very strong indeed, and
+probably if he had lived a less retired life it would have found fuller
+exercise. At present the most remarkable instance of it which exists is
+the inimitable portrait-caricature of the learned Unitarian, generally
+known as "Taylor of Norwich." I have somewhere (I think it was in Miss
+Martineau's _Autobiography_) seen this reflected on as a flagrant
+instance of ingratitude and ill-nature. The good Harriet, among whose
+numerous gifts nature had not included any great sense of humour,
+naturally did not perceive the artistic justification of the sketch,
+which I do not hesitate to call one of the most masterly things of the
+kind in literature.
+
+Another Taylor, the well-known French baron of that name, is much more
+mildly treated, though with little less skill of portraiture. As for
+"the publisher" of _Lavengro_, the portrait there, though very clever,
+is spoilt by rather too much evidence of personal animus, and by the
+absence of redeeming strokes; but it shows the same satiric power as
+the sketch of the worthy student of German who has had the singular
+ill-fortune to have his books quizzed by Carlyle, and himself quizzed by
+Borrow. It is a strong evidence of Borrow's abstraction from general
+society that with this satiric gift, and evidently with a total freedom
+from scruple as to its application, he should have left hardly anything
+else of the kind. It is indeed impossible to ascertain how much of the
+abundant character-drawing in his four chief books (all of which, be it
+remembered, are autobiographic and professedly historical) is fact and
+how much fancy. It is almost impossible to open them anywhere without
+coming upon personal sketches, more or less elaborate, in which the
+satiric touch is rarely wanting. The official admirer of "the grand
+Baintham" at remote Corcubion, the end of all the European world; the
+treasure-seeker, Benedict Mol; the priest at Cordova, with his
+revelations about the Holy Office; the Gibraltar Jew; are only a few
+figures out of the abundant gallery of _The Bible in Spain_. _Lavengro_,
+besides the capital and full-length portraits above referred to, is
+crowded with others hardly inferior, among which only one failure, the
+disguised priest with the mysterious name, is to be found. Not that even
+he has not good strokes and plenty of them, but that Borrow's prejudices
+prevented his hand from being free. But Jasper Petulengro, and Mrs.
+Hearne, and the girl Leonora, and Isopel, that vigorous and slighted
+maid, and dozens of minor figures, of whom more presently, atone for
+him. _The Romany Rye_ adds only minor figures to the gallery, because
+the major figures have appeared before; while the plan and subject of
+_Wild Wales_ also exclude anything more than vignettes. But what
+admirable vignettes they are, and how constantly bitten in with satiric
+spirit, all lovers of Borrow know.
+
+It is, however, perhaps time to give some more exact account of the
+books thus familiarly and curiously referred to; for Borrow most
+assuredly is not a popular writer. Not long before his death _Lavengro_,
+_The Romany Rye_, and _Wild Wales_ were only in their third edition,
+though the first was nearly thirty, and the last nearly twenty, years
+old. _The Bible in Spain_ had, at any rate in its earlier days, a wider
+sale, but I do not think that even that is very generally known. I
+should doubt whether the total number sold, during some fifty years, of
+volumes surpassed in interest of incident, style, character and
+description by few books of the century, has equalled the sale, within
+any one of the last few years, of a fairly popular book by any fairly
+popular novelist of to-day. And there is not the obstacle to Borrow's
+popularity that there is to that of some other writers, notably the
+already-mentioned author of _Crotchet Castle_. No extensive literary
+cultivation is necessary to read him. A good deal even of his peculiar
+charm may be missed by a prosaic or inattentive reader, and yet enough
+will remain. But he has probably paid the penalty of originality, which
+allows itself to be mastered by quaintness, and which refuses to meet
+public taste at least half-way. It is certainly difficult at times to
+know what to make of Borrow. And the general public, perhaps excusably,
+is apt not to like things or persons when it does not know what to make
+of them.
+
+Borrow's literary work, even putting aside the "mountains of manuscript"
+which he speaks of as unpublished, was not inconsiderable. There were,
+in the first place, his translations, which, though no doubt not without
+value, do not much concern us here. There is, secondly, his early
+hackwork, his _Chaines de l'Esclavage_, which also may be neglected.
+Thirdly, there are his philological speculations or compilations, the
+chief of which is, I believe, his _Romano-Lavo-Lil_, the latest
+published of his works. But Borrow, though an extraordinary linguist,
+was a somewhat unchastened philologer, and the results of his life-long
+philological studies appear to much better advantage from the literary
+than from the scientific point of view. Then there is _The Gypsies in
+Spain_, a very interesting book of its kind, marked throughout with
+Borrow's characteristics, but for literary purposes merged to a great
+extent in _The Bible in Spain_. And, lastly, there are the four original
+books, as they may be called, which, at great leisure, and writing
+simply because he chose to write, Borrow produced during the twenty
+years of his middle age. He was in his fortieth year when, in 1842, he
+published _The Bible in Spain_. _Lavengro_ came nearly ten years later,
+and coincided with (no doubt it was partially stimulated by) the ferment
+over the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. Its second part, _The Romany Rye_,
+did not appear till six afterwards, that is to say, in 1857, and its
+resuscitation of quarrels, which the country had quite forgotten (and
+when it remembered them was rather ashamed of), must be pronounced
+unfortunate. Last, in 1862, came _Wild Wales_, the characteristically
+belated record of a tour in the principality during the year of the
+Crimean War. On these four books Borrow's literary fame rests. His other
+works are interesting because they were written by the author of these,
+or because of their subjects, or because of the effect they had on other
+men of letters, notably Longfellow and Merimee, on the latter of whom
+Borrow had an especially remarkable influence. These four are
+interesting of themselves.
+
+The earliest has been, I believe, and for reasons quite apart from its
+biblical subject perhaps deserves to be, the greatest general favourite,
+though its literary value is a good deal below that of _Lavengro_. _The
+Bible in Spain_ records the journeys, which, as an agent of the Bible
+Society, Borrow took through the Peninsula at a singularly interesting
+time, the disturbed years of the early reign of Isabel Segunda. Navarre
+and Aragon, with Catalonia, Valencia, and Murcia, he seems to have left
+entirely unvisited; I suppose because of the Carlists. Nor did he
+attempt the southern part of Portugal; but Castile and Leon, with the
+north of Portugal and the south of Spain, he quartered in the most
+interesting manner, riding everywhere with his servant and his
+saddle-bag of Testaments at, I should suppose, a considerable cost to
+the subscribers of the Society and at, it may be hoped, some gain to the
+propagation of evangelical principles in the Peninsula, but certainly
+with the results of extreme satisfaction to himself and of a very
+delightful addition to English literature. He was actually imprisoned at
+Madrid, and was frequently in danger from Carlists, and brigands, and
+severely orthodox ecclesiastics. It is possible to imagine a more
+ideally perfect missionary; but it is hardly possible to imagine a more
+ideally perfect traveller. His early habits of roughing it, his gipsy
+initiation, his faculties as a linguist, and his other faculties as a
+born vagrant, certain to fall on his feet anywhere, were all called into
+operation. But he might have had all these advantages and yet lacked the
+extraordinary literary talent which the book reveals. In the first
+chapter there is a certain stiffness; but the passage of the Tagus in
+the second must have told every competent reader in 1842 that he had to
+deal with somebody quite different from the run of common writers, and
+thenceforward the book never flags till the end. How far the story is
+rigidly historical I should be very sorry to have to decide. The author
+makes a kind of apology in his preface for the amount of fact which has
+been supplied from memory. I daresay the memory was quite trustworthy,
+and certainly adventures are to the adventurous. We have had daring
+travellers enough during the last half-century, but I do not know that
+any one has ever had quite such a romantic experience as Borrow's ride
+across the Hispano-Portuguese frontier with a gipsy _contrabandista_,
+who was at the time a very particular object of police inquiry. I
+daresay the interests of the Bible Society required the adventurous
+journey to the wilds of Finisterra. But I feel that if that association
+had been a mere mundane company and Borrow its agent, troublesome
+shareholders might have asked awkward questions at the annual meeting.
+Still, this sceptical attitude is only part of the official duty of the
+critic, just as, of course, Borrow's adventurous journeys into the most
+remote and interesting parts of Spain were part of the duty of the
+colporteur. The book is so delightful that, except when duty calls, no
+one would willingly take any exception to any part or feature of it. The
+constant change of scene, the romantic episodes of adventure, the
+kaleidoscope of characters, the crisp dialogue, the quaint reflection
+and comment relieve each other without a break. I do not know whether it
+is really true to Spain and Spanish life, and, to tell the exact truth,
+I do not in the least care. If it is not Spanish it is remarkably human
+and remarkably literary, and those are the chief and principal things.
+
+_Lavengro_, which followed, has all the merits of its predecessor and
+more. It is a little spoilt in its later chapters by the purpose, the
+antipapal purpose, which appears still more fully in _The Romany Rye_.
+But the strong and singular individuality of its flavour as a whole
+would have been more than sufficient to carry off a greater fault. There
+are, I should suppose, few books the successive pictures of which leave
+such an impression on the reader who is prepared to receive that
+impression. The word picture is here rightly used, for in all Borrow's
+books more or less, and in this particularly, the narrative is anything
+but continuous. It is a succession of dissolving views which grow clear
+and distinct for a time and then fade off into vagueness before once
+more appearing distinctly; nor has this mode of dealing with a subject
+ever been more successfully applied than in _Lavengro_. At the same time
+the mode is one singularly difficult of treatment by any reviewer. To
+describe _Lavengro_ with any chance of distinctness to those who have
+not read it, it would be necessary to give a series of sketches in
+words, like those famous ones of the pictures in _Jane Eyre_. East
+Dereham, the Viper Collector, the French Prisoners at Norman Cross, the
+Gipsy Encampment, the Sojourn in Edinburgh (with a passing view of
+Scotch schoolboys only inferior, as everything is, to Sir Walter's
+history of Green-breeks), the Irish Sojourn (with the horse whispering
+and the "dog of peace,") the settlement in Norwich (with Borrow's
+compulsory legal studies and his very uncompulsory excursions into
+Italian, Hebrew, Welsh, Scandinavian, anything that obviously would not
+pay), the new meeting with the gipsies in the Castle Field, the
+fight--only the first of many excellent fights--these are but a few of
+the memories which rise to every reader of even the early chapters of
+this extraordinary book, and they do not cover its first hundred pages
+in the common edition. Then his father dies and the born vagrant is set
+loose for vagrancy. He goes to London, with a stock of translations
+which is to make him famous, and a recommendation from Taylor of Norwich
+to "the publisher." The publisher exacted something more than his pound
+of flesh in the form of Newgate Lives and review articles, and paid,
+when he did pay, in bills of uncertain date which were very likely to be
+protested. But Borrow won through it all, making odd acquaintances with
+a young man of fashion (his least lifelike sketch); with an apple-seller
+on London Bridge, who was something of a "fence" and had erected Moll
+Flanders (surely the oddest patroness ever so selected) into a kind of
+patron saint; with a mysterious Armenian merchant of vast wealth, whom
+the young man, according to his own account, finally put on a kind of
+filibustering expedition against both the Sublime Porte and the White
+Czar, for the restoration of Armenian independence. At last, out of
+health with perpetual work and low living, out of employ, his friends
+beyond call, he sees destruction before him, writes _The Life and
+Adventures of Joseph Sell_ (name of fortunate omen!) almost at a heat
+and on a capital, fixed and floating, of eighteen-pence, and disposes of
+it for twenty pounds by the special providence of the Muses. With this
+twenty pounds his journey into the blue distance begins. He travels,
+partly by coach, to somewhere near Salisbury, and gives the first of the
+curiously unfavourable portraits of stage coachmen, which remain to
+check Dickens's rose-coloured representations of Mr. Weller and his
+brethren. I incline to think that Borrow's was likely to be the truer
+picture. According to him, the average stage coachman was anything but
+an amiable character, greedy, insolent to all but persons of wealth and
+rank, a hanger-on of those who might claim either; bruiser enough to be
+a bully but not enough to be anything more; in short, one of the worst
+products of civilisation. From civilisation itself, however, Borrow soon
+disappears, as far as any traceable signs go. He journeys, not farther
+west but northwards, into the West Midlands and the marches of Wales. He
+buys a tinker's beat and fit-out from a feeble vessel of the craft, who
+has been expelled by "the Flaming Tinman," a half-gipsy of robustious
+behaviour. He is met by old Mrs. Hearne, the mother-in-law of his gipsy
+friend Jasper Petulengro, who resents a Gorgio's initiation in gipsy
+ways, and very nearly poisons him by the wily aid of her grand-daughter
+Leonora. He recovers, thanks to a Welsh travelling preacher and to
+castor oil. And then, when the Welshman has left him, comes the climax
+and turning-point of the whole story, the great fight with Jem Bosvile,
+"the Flaming Tinman." The much-abused adjective Homeric belongs in sober
+strictness to this immortal battle, which has the additional interest
+not thought of by Homer (for goddesses do not count) that Borrow's
+second and guardian angel is a young woman of great attractions and
+severe morality, Miss Isopel (or Belle) Berners, whose extraction,
+allowing for the bar sinister, is honourable, and who, her hands being
+fully able to keep her head, has sojourned without ill fortune in the
+Flaming Tinman's very disreputable company. Bosvile, vanquished by pluck
+and good fortune rather than strength, flees the place with his wife.
+Isopel remains behind and the couple take up their joint residence, a
+residence of perfect propriety, in this dingle, the exact locality of
+which I have always longed to know, that I might make an autumnal
+pilgrimage to it. Isopel, Brynhild as she is, would apparently have had
+no objection to be honourably wooed. But her eccentric companion
+confines himself to teaching her "I love" in Armenian, which she finds
+unsatisfactory; and she at last departs, leaving a letter which tells
+Mr. Borrow some home truths. And, even before this catastrophe has been
+reached, _Lavengro_ itself ends with a more startling abruptness than
+perhaps any nominally complete book before or since.
+
+It would be a little interesting to know whether the continuation, _The
+Romany Rye_, which opens as if there had been no break whatever, was
+written continuously or with a break. At any rate its opening chapters
+contain the finish of the lamentable history of Belle Berners, which
+must induce every reader of sensibility to trust that Borrow, in writing
+it, was only indulging in his very considerable faculty of perverse
+romancing. The chief argument to the contrary is, that surely no man,
+however imbued with romantic perversity, would have made himself cut so
+poor a figure as Borrow here does without cause. The gipsies reappear to
+save the situation, and a kind of minor Belle Berners drama is played
+out with Ursula, Jasper's sister. Then the story takes another of its
+abrupt turns. Jasper, half in generosity it would appear, half in
+waywardness, insists on Borrow purchasing a thorough-bred horse which is
+for sale, advances the money, and despatches him across England to
+Horncastle Fair to sell it. The usual Le Sagelike adventures occur, the
+oddest of them being the hero's residence for some considerable time as
+clerk and storekeeper at a great roadside inn. At last he reaches
+Horncastle, and sells the horse to advantage. Then the story closes as
+abruptly and mysteriously almost as that of _Lavengro_, with a long and
+in parts, it must be confessed, rather dull conversation between the
+hero, the Hungarian who has bought the horse, and the dealer who has
+acted as go-between. This dealer, in honour of Borrow, of whom he has
+heard through the gipsies, executes the wasteful and very meaningless
+ceremony of throwing two bottles of old rose champagne, at a guinea
+apiece, through the window. Even this is too dramatic a finale for
+Borrow's unconquerable singularity, and he adds a short dialogue between
+himself and a recruiting sergeant. And after this again there comes an
+appendix containing an _apologia_ for _Lavengro_, a great deal more
+polemic against Romanism, some historical views of more originality than
+exactness, and a diatribe against gentility, Scotchmen, Scott, and other
+black beasts of Borrow's. This appendix has received from some professed
+admirers of the author a great deal more attention than it deserves. In
+the first place, it was evidently written in a fit of personal pique; in
+the second, it is chiefly argumentative, and Borrow had absolutely no
+argumentative faculty. To say that it contains a great deal of quaint
+and piquant writing is only to say that its writer wrote it, and though
+the description of "Charlie-over-the-waterism" probably does not apply
+to any being who ever lived, except to a few school-girls of both sexes,
+it has a strong infusion of Borrow's satiric gift. As for the diatribes
+against gentility, Borrow has only done very clumsily what Thackeray had
+done long before without clumsiness. It can escape nobody who has read
+his books with a seeing eye that he was himself exceedingly proud, not
+merely of being a gentleman in the ethical sense, but of being one in
+the sense of station and extraction--as, by the way, the decriers of
+British snobbishness usually are, so that no special blame attaches to
+Borrow for the inconsistency. Only let it be understood, once for all,
+that to describe him as "the apostle of the ungenteel" is either to
+speak in riddles or quite to misunderstand his real merits and
+abilities.
+
+I believe that some of the small but fierce tribe of Borrovians are
+inclined to resent the putting of the last of this remarkable series,
+_Wild Wales_, on a level with the other three. With such I can by no
+means agree. _Wild Wales_ has not, of course, the charm of unfamiliar
+scenery and the freshness of youthful impression which distinguish _The
+Bible in Spain_; it does not attempt anything like the novel-interest of
+_Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_; and though, as has been pointed out
+above, something of Borrow's secret and mysterious way of indicating
+places survives, it is a pretty distinct itinerary over great part of
+the actual principality. I have followed most of its tracks on foot
+myself, and nobody who wants a Welsh guide-book can take a pleasanter
+one, though he might easily find one much less erratic. It may thus
+have, to superficial observers, a positive and prosaic flavour as
+compared with the romantic character of the other three. But this
+distinction is not real. The tones are a little subdued, as was likely
+to be the case with an elderly gentleman of fifty, travelling with his
+wife and stepdaughter, and not publishing the record of his travels till
+he was nearly ten years older. The localities are traceable on the map
+and in Murray, instead of being the enchanted dingles and the
+half-mythical woods of _Lavengro_. The personages of the former books
+return no more, though, with one of his most excellent touches of art,
+the author has suggested the contrast of youth and age by a single gipsy
+interview in one of the later chapters. Borrow, like all sensible men,
+was at no time indifferent to good food and drink, especially good ale;
+but the trencher plays in _Wild Wales_ a part, the importance of which
+may perhaps have shocked some of our latter-day delicates, to whom
+strong beer is a word of loathing, and who wonder how on earth our
+grandfathers and fathers used to dispose of "black strap." A very
+different set of readers may be repelled by the strong literary colour
+of the book, which is almost a Welsh anthology in parts. But those few
+who can boast themselves to find the whole of a book, not merely its
+parts, and to judge that whole when found, will be not least fond of
+_Wild Wales_. If they have, as every reader of Borrow should have, the
+spirit of the roads upon them, and are never more happy than when
+journeying on "Shanks his mare," they will, of course, have in addition
+a peculiar and personal love for it. It is, despite the interludes of
+literary history, as full of Borrow's peculiar conversational gift as
+any of its predecessors. Its thumbnail sketches, if somewhat more
+subdued and less elaborate, are not less full of character. John Jones,
+the Dissenting weaver, who served Borrow at once as a guide and a
+whetstone of Welsh in the neighbourhood of Llangollen; the "kenfigenous"
+Welshwoman who first, but by no means last, exhibited the curious local
+jealousy of a Welsh-speaking Englishman; the doctor and the Italian
+barometer-seller at Cerrig-y-Druidion; the "best Pridydd of the world"
+in Anglesey, with his unlucky addiction to beer and flattery; the waiter
+at Bala; the "ecclesiastical cat" (a cat worthy to rank with those of
+Southey and Gautier); the characters of the walk across the hills from
+Machynlleth to the Devil's Bridge; the scene at the public-house on the
+Glamorgan Border, where the above-mentioned jealousy comes out so
+strongly; the mad Irishwoman, Johanna Colgan (a masterpiece by herself);
+and the Irish girl, with her hardly inferior history of the
+faction-fights of Scotland Road (which Borrow, by a mistake, has put in
+Manchester instead of in Liverpool); these make a list which I have
+written down merely as they occurred to me, without opening the book,
+and without prejudice to another list, nearly as long, which might be
+added. _Wild Wales_, too, because of its easy and direct opportunity of
+comparing its description with the originals, is particularly valuable
+as showing how sober, and yet how forcible, Borrow's descriptions are.
+As to incident, one often, as before, suspects him of romancing, and it
+stands to reason that his dialogue, written long after the event, must
+be full of the "cocked-hat-and-cane" style of narrative. But his
+description, while it has all the vividness, has also all the
+faithfulness and sobriety of the best landscape-painting. See a place
+which Kingsley or Mr. Ruskin, or some other master of our decorative
+school, has described--much more one which has fallen into the hands of
+the small fry of their imitators--and you are almost sure to find that
+it has been overdone. This is never, or hardly ever, the case with
+Borrow, and it is so rare a merit, when it is found in a man who does
+not shirk description where necessary, that it deserves to be counted to
+him at no grudging rate.
+
+But there is no doubt that the distinguishing feature of the book is its
+survey of Welsh poetical literature. I have already confessed that I am
+not qualified to judge the accuracy of Borrow's translations, and by no
+means disposed to over-value them. But any one who takes an interest in
+literature at all, must, I think, feel that interest not a little
+excited by the curious Old-Mortality-like peregrinations which the
+author of _Wild Wales_ made to the birth-place, or the burial-place as
+it might be, of bard after bard, and by the short but masterly accounts
+which he gives of the objects of his search. Of none of the numerous
+subjects of his linguistic rovings does Borrow seem to have been fonder,
+putting Romany aside, than of Welsh. He learnt it in a peculiarly
+contraband manner originally, which, no doubt, endeared it to him; it
+was little known to and often ridiculed by most Englishmen, which was
+another attraction; and it was extremely unlikely to "pay" in any way,
+which was a third. Perhaps he was not such an adept in it as he would
+have us believe--the respected Cymmrodorion Society or Professor Rhys
+must settle that. But it needs no knowledge of Welsh whatever to
+perceive the genuine enthusiasm, and the genuine range of his
+acquaintance with the language from the purely literary side. When he
+tells us that Ab Gwilym was a greater poet than Ovid or Chaucer I feel
+considerable doubts whether he was quite competent to understand Ovid
+and little or no doubt that he has done wrong to Chaucer. But when,
+leaving these idle comparisons, he luxuriates in details about Ab Gwilym
+himself, and his poems, and his lady loves, and so forth, I have no
+doubt about Borrow's appreciation (casual prejudices always excepted) of
+literature. Nor is it easy to exaggerate the charm which he has added to
+Welsh scenery by this constant identification of it with the men, and
+the deeds, and the words of the past.
+
+Little has been said hitherto of Borrow's more purely literary
+characteristics from the point of view of formal criticism. They are
+sufficiently interesting. He unites with a general plainness of speech
+and writing, not unworthy of Defoe or Cobbett, a very odd and
+complicated mannerism, which, as he had the wisdom to make it the
+seasoning and not the main substance of his literary fare, is never
+disgusting. The secret of this may be, no doubt, in part sought in his
+early familiarity with a great many foreign languages, some of whose
+idioms he transplanted into English: but this is by no means the whole
+of the receipt. Perhaps it is useless to examine analytically that
+receipt's details, or rather (for the analysis may be said to be
+compulsory on any one who calls himself a critic), useless to offer its
+results to the reader. One point which can escape no one who reads with
+his eyes open is the frequent, yet not too abundant, repetition of the
+same or very similar words--a point wherein much of the secret of
+persons so dissimilar as Carlyle, Borrow, and Thackeray consists. This
+is a well-known fact--so well known indeed that when a person who
+desires to acquire style hears of it, he often goes and does likewise,
+with what result all reviewers know. The peculiarity of Borrow, as far
+as I can mark it, is that, despite his strong mannerism, he never relies
+on it as too many others, great and small, are wont to do. The character
+sketches, of which, as I have said, he is so abundant a master, are
+always put in the plainest and simplest English. So are his flashes of
+ethical reflection, which, though like all ethical reflections often
+one-sided, are of the first order of insight. I really do not know that,
+in the mint-and-anise-and-cummin order of criticism, I have more than
+one charge to make against Borrow. That is that he, like other persons
+of his own and the immediately preceding time, is wont to make a most
+absurd misuse of the word individual. With Borrow "individual" means
+simply "person": a piece of literary gentility of which he, of all
+others, ought to have been ashamed.
+
+But such criticism has but very little propriety in the case of a
+writer, whose attraction is neither mainly nor in any very great degree
+one of pure form. His early critics compared him to Le Sage, and the
+comparison is natural. But if it is natural, it is not extraordinarily
+critical. Both men wrote of vagabonds, and to some extent of picaroons;
+both neglected the conventionalities of their own language and
+literature; both had a singular knowledge of human nature. But Le Sage
+is one of the most impersonal of all great writers, and Borrow is one of
+the most personal. And it is undoubtedly in the revelation of his
+personality that great part of his charm lies. It is, as has been fully
+acknowledged, a one-sided, wrong-headed, not always quite right-hearted
+personality. But it is intensely English, possessing at the same time a
+certain strain of romance which the other John Bulls of literature
+mostly lack, and which John Bunyan, the king of them all, only reached
+within the limits, still more limited than Borrow's, of purely
+religious, if not purely ecclesiastical, interests. A born grumbler; a
+person with an intense appetite for the good things of this life;
+profoundly impressed with, and at the same time sceptically critical of,
+the bad or good things of another life; apt, as he somewhere says
+himself, "to hit people when he is not pleased"; illogical; constantly
+right in general, despite his extremely roundabout ways of reaching his
+conclusion; sometimes absurd, and yet full of humour; alternately
+prosaic and capable of the highest poetry; George Borrow, Cornishman on
+the father's side and Huguenot on the mother's, managed to display in
+perfection most of the characteristics of what once was, and let us hope
+has not quite ceased to be, the English type. If he had a slight
+overdose of Celtic blood and Celtic peculiarity, it was more than made
+up by the readiness of literary expression which it gave him. He, if any
+one, bore an English heart, though, as there often has been in
+Englishmen, there was something perhaps more as well as something less
+than English in his fashion of expression.
+
+To conclude, Borrow has--what after all is the chief mark of a great
+writer--distinction. "Try to be like somebody," said the unlucky
+critic-bookseller to Lamartine; and he has been gibbeted for it, very
+justly, for the best part of a century. It must be admitted that "try
+not to be like other people," though a much more fashionable, is likely
+to be quite as disastrous a recommendation. But the great writers,
+whether they try to be like other people or try not to be like them (and
+sometimes in the first case most of all), succeed only in being
+themselves, and that is what Borrow does. His attraction is rather
+complex, and different parts of it may, and no doubt do, apply with
+differing force to this and that reader. One may be fascinated by his
+pictures of an unconventional and open-air life, the very possibilities
+of which are to a great extent lost in our days, though patches of
+ground here and there in England (notably the tracts of open ground
+between Cromer and Wells in Borrow's own county) still recall them. To
+others he may be attractive for his sturdy patriotism, or his
+adventurous and wayward spirit, or his glimpses of superstition and
+romance. The racy downrightness of his talk; the axioms, such as that to
+the Welsh alewife, "The goodness of ale depends less upon who brews it
+than upon what it is brewed of"; or the sarcastic touches as that of the
+dapper shopkeeper, who, regarding the funeral of Byron, observed, "I,
+too, am frequently unhappy," may each and all have their votaries. His
+literary devotion to literature would, perhaps, of itself attract few;
+for, as has been hinted, it partook very much of the character of
+will-worship, and there are few people who like any will-worship in
+letters except their own; but it adds to his general attraction, no
+doubt, in the case of many. That neither it, nor any other of his
+claims, has yet forced itself as it should on the general public is an
+undoubted fact; a fact not difficult to understand, though rather
+difficult fully to explain, at least without some air of superior
+knowingness and taste. Yet he has, as has been said, his devotees, and I
+think they are likely rather to increase than to decrease. He wants
+editing, for his allusive fashion of writing probably makes a great part
+of him nearly unintelligible to those who have not from their youth up
+devoted themselves to the acquisition of useless knowledge. There ought
+to be a good life of him. The great mass of his translations, published
+and unpublished, and the smaller mass of his early hackwork, no doubt
+deserve judicious excerption. If professed philologers were not even
+more ready than most other specialists each to excommunicate all the
+others except himself and his own particular Johnny Dods of Farthing's
+Acre, it would be rather interesting to hear what some modern men of
+many languages have to say to Borrow's linguistic achievements. But all
+these things are only desirable embellishments and assistances. His real
+claims and his real attractions are comprised in four small volumes, the
+purchase of which, under modern arrangements of booksellers, leaves some
+change out of a sovereign, and which will about half fill the ordinary
+bag used for briefs and dynamite. It is not a large literary baggage,
+and it does not attempt any very varied literary kinds. If not exactly a
+novelist in any one of his books, Borrow is a romancer, in the true and
+not the ironic sense of the word, in all of them. He has not been
+approached in merit by any romancer who has published books in our days,
+except Charles Kingsley; and his work, if less varied in range and charm
+than Kingsley's, has a much stronger and more concentrated flavour.
+Moreover, he is the one English writer of our time, and perhaps of times
+still farther back, who seems never to have tried to be anything but
+himself; who went his own way all his life long with complete
+indifference to what the public or the publishers liked, as well as to
+what canons of literary form and standards of literary perfection
+seemed to indicate as best worth aiming at. A most self-sufficient
+person was Borrow, in the good and ancient sense, as well as, to some
+extent, in the sense which is bad and modern. And what is more, he was
+not only a self-sufficient person, but is very sufficient also to the
+tastes of all those who love good English and good literature.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX A
+
+DE QUINCEY
+
+
+A short time after the publication of my essay on De Quincey I learnt,
+to my great concern, that it had given offence to his daughter Florence,
+the widow of one of the heroes of the Indian Mutiny, Colonel Baird
+Smith. Mrs. Baird Smith complained, in a letter to the newspapers, that
+I had accused her father of untruthfulness, and requested the public to
+suspend their judgment until the publication of certain new documents,
+in the form of letters, which had been discovered. I might have replied,
+if my intent had been hostile, that little fault could be justly found
+with a critic of the existing evidence if new evidence were required to
+confute him. But as the very last intention that I had in writing the
+paper was to impute anything that can be properly called untruthfulness
+to De Quincey, I thought it better to say so and to wait for the further
+documents. In a subsequent private correspondence with Mrs. Baird Smith,
+I found that what had offended her (her complaints being at first quite
+general) was certain remarks on De Quincey's aristocratic acquaintances
+as appearing in the _Autobiography_ and "not heard of afterwards,"
+certain comments on the Malay incident and others like it, some on the
+mystery of her father's money affairs, and the passage on his general
+"impenetrability." The matter is an instance of the difficulty of
+dealing with recent reputations, when the commentator gives his name.
+Some really unkind things have been said of De Quincey; my intention was
+not to say anything unkind at all, but simply to give an account of the
+thing "as it strikes" if not "a contemporary" yet a well-willing junior.
+Take for instance the Malay incident. We know from De Quincey himself
+that, within a few years, the truth of this famous story was questioned,
+and that he was accused of having borrowed it from something of Hogg's.
+He disclaimed this, no doubt truly. He protested that it was a
+faithfully recorded incident: but though the events were then fresh, he
+did not produce a single witness to prove that any Malay had been near
+Grasmere at the time. And so elsewhere. As I have remarked about Borrow,
+there are some people who have a knack of recounting truth so that it
+looks as if it never had been true. I have been informed by Mr. James
+Runciman that he himself once made considerable inquiries on the track
+of _Lavengro_, and found that that remarkable book is, to some extent at
+any rate, apparently historic. On the other hand I have been told by
+another Borrovian who knew Borrow (which I never did) that the _Life of
+Joseph Sell_ never existed. In such cases a critic can only go on
+internal evidence, and I am sure that the vast majority of critics would
+decide against most of De Quincey's stories on that. I do not suppose
+that he ever, like Lamb, deliberately begat "lie-children": but
+opium-eating is not absolutely repugnant to delusion, and literary
+mystification was not so much the exception as the rule in his earlier
+time. As to his "impenetrability," I can only throw myself on the
+readers of such memoirs and reminiscences as have been published
+respecting him. The almost unanimous verdict of his acquaintances and
+critics has been that he was in a way mysterious, and though no doubt
+this mystery did not extend to his children, it seems to have extended
+to almost every one else. I gather from Mrs. Baird Smith's own remarks
+that from first to last all who were concerned with him treated him as a
+person unfit to be trusted with money, and while his habit of solitary
+lodging is doubtless capable of a certain amount of explanation, it
+cannot be described as other than curious. I had never intended to throw
+doubt on his actual acquaintance with Lord Westport or Lady Carbery.
+These persons or their representatives were alive when the
+_Autobiography_ was published, and would no doubt have protested if De
+Quincey had not spoken truly. But I must still hold that their total
+disappearance from his subsequent life is peculiar. Some other points,
+such as his mentioning Wilson as his "only intimate male friend" are
+textually cited from himself, and if I seem to have spoken harshly of
+his early treatment by his family I may surely shelter myself behind the
+touching incident, recorded in the biographies, of his crying on his
+deathbed, "My dear mother! then I was greatly mistaken." If this does
+not prove that he himself had entertained on the subject ideas which,
+whether false or true, were unfavourable, then it is purely meaningless.
+
+In conclusion, I have only to repeat my regret that I should, by a
+perhaps thoughtless forgetfulness of the feelings of survivors, have
+hurt those feelings. But I think I am entitled to say that the view of
+De Quincey's character and cast of thought given in the text, while
+imputing nothing discreditable in intention, is founded on the whole
+published work and all the biographical evidence then accessible to me,
+and will not be materially altered by anything since published or likely
+to be so in future. The world, though often not quite right, is never
+quite wrong about a man, and it would be almost impossible that it
+should be wrong in face of such autobiographic details as are furnished,
+not merely by the _Autobiography_ itself, but by a mass of notes spread
+over seven years in composition and full of personal idiosyncrasy. I not
+only acquit De Quincey of all serious moral delinquency,--I declare
+distinctly that no imputation of it was ever intended. It is quite
+possible that some of his biographers and of those who knew him may have
+exaggerated his peculiarities, less possible I think that those
+peculiarities should not have existed. But the matter, except for my own
+regret at having offended De Quincey's daughter, will have been a happy
+one if it results in a systematic publication of his letters, which,
+from the specimens already printed, must be very characteristic and very
+interesting. In almost all cases a considerable collection of letters is
+the most effective, and especially the most truth-telling, of all
+possible "lives." No letters indeed are likely to increase the literary
+repute of the author of the _Confessions_ and of the _Caesars_; but they
+may very well clear up and fill in the hitherto rather fragmentary and
+conjectural notion of his character, and they may, on the other hand,
+confirm that idea of both which, however false it may seem to his
+children, and others who were united to him by ties of affection, has
+commended itself to careful students of his published works.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX B
+
+LOCKHART
+
+
+The most singular instance of the floating dislike to Lockhart's memory,
+to which I have more than once referred in the text, occurred
+subsequently to the original publication of my essay, and not very long
+ago, when my friend Mr. Louis Stevenson thought proper to call Lockhart
+a "cad." This extraordinary _obiter dictum_ provoked, as might have been
+expected, not a few protests, but I do not remember that Mr. Stevenson
+rejoined, and I have not myself had any opportunity of learning from him
+what he meant. I can only suppose that the ebullition must have been
+prompted by one of two things, the old scandal about the duel in which
+John Scott the editor of the _London_ was shot, and a newer one, which
+was first bruited abroad, I think, in Mr. Sidney Colvin's book on Keats.
+Both of these, and especially the first, may be worth a little
+discussion.
+
+I do not think that any one who examines Mr. Colvin's allegation, will
+think it very damaging. It comes to this, that Keats's friend Bailey met
+Lockhart in the house of Bishop Greig at Stirling, told him some
+particulars about Keats, extracted from him a promise that he would not
+use them against the poet, and afterwards thought he recognised some of
+the details in the _Blackwood_ attack which ranks next to the famous
+_Quarterly_ article. Here it is to be observed, first, that there is no
+sufficient evidence that Lockhart wrote this _Blackwood_ article;
+secondly, that it is by no means certain that if he did, he was making,
+or considered himself to be making, any improper use of what he had
+heard; thirdly, that for the actual interview and its tenor we have only
+a vague _ex parte_ statement made long after date.
+
+The other matter is much more important, and as the duel itself has been
+mentioned more than once or twice in the foregoing pages, and as it is
+to this day being frequently referred to in what seems to me an entirely
+erroneous manner, with occasional implications that Lockhart showed the
+white feather, it may be well to give a sketch of what actually
+happened, as far as can be made out from the most trustworthy accounts,
+published and unpublished.
+
+One of Lockhart's signatures in _Blackwood_--a signature which, however,
+like others, was not, I believe, peculiar to him--was "Zeta," and this
+Zeta assailed the Cockney school in a sufficiently scorpion-like manner.
+Thereupon Scott's magazine, the _London_, retorted, attacking Lockhart
+by name. On this Lockhart set out for London and, with a certain young
+Scotch barrister named Christie as his second, challenged Scott. But
+Scott refused to fight, unless Lockhart would deny that he was editor of
+_Blackwood_. Lockhart declared that Scott had no right to ask this, and
+stigmatised him as a coward. He then published a statement, sending at
+the same time a copy to Scott. In the published form the denial of
+editorship was made, in the one sent to Scott it was omitted. Thereupon
+Scott called Lockhart a liar. Of this Lockhart took no notice, but
+Christie his second did, and, an altercation taking place between them,
+Scott challenged Christie and they went out, Scott's second being Mr. P.
+G. Patmore, Christie's Mr. Traill, afterwards well known as a London
+police magistrate. Christie fired in the air, Scott fired at Christie
+and missed. Thereupon Mr. Patmore demanded a second shot, which, I am
+informed, could and should, by all laws of the duello, have been
+refused. Both principal and second on the other side were, however,
+inexperienced and probably unwilling to baulk their adversaries. Shots
+were again exchanged, Christie this time (as he can hardly be blamed for
+doing) taking aim at his adversary and wounding him mortally. Patmore
+fled the country, Christie and Traill took their trial and were
+acquitted.
+
+I have elsewhere remarked that this deplorable result is said to have
+been brought on by errors of judgment on the part of more than one
+person. Hazlitt, himself no duellist and even accused of personal
+timidity, is said to have egged on Scott, and to have stung him by some
+remark of his bitter tongue into challenging Christie, and there is no
+doubt that Patmore's conduct was most reprehensible. But we are here
+concerned with Lockhart, not with them. As far as I understand the
+imputations made on him, he is charged either with want of
+straightforwardness in omitting part of his explanation in the copy sent
+to Scott, or with cowardice in taking no notice of Scott's subsequent
+lie direct, or with both. Let us examine this.
+
+At first sight the incident of what, from the most notorious action of
+Lord Clive, we may call the "red and white treaties" seems odd. But it
+is to be observed, first, that Lockhart could not be said to conceal
+from Scott what he published to all the world; secondly, that his
+conduct was perfectly consistent throughout. He had challenged Scott,
+who had declined to go out. Having offered his adversary satisfaction,
+he was not bound to let him take it with a proviso, or to satisfy his
+private inquisitiveness. But if not under menace, but considering Scott
+after his refusal as unworthy the notice of a gentleman, and not further
+to be taken into account, he chose to inform the public of the truth, he
+had a perfect right to do so. And it is hardly necessary to say that it
+was the truth that he was not editor of _Blackwood_.
+
+This consideration will also account for his conduct in not renewing his
+challenge after Scott's offensive words. He had offered the man
+satisfaction and had been refused. No one is bound to go on challenging
+a reluctant adversary. At all times Lockhart seems to have been
+perfectly ready to back his opinion, as may be seen from a long affair
+which had happened earlier, in connection with the "Baron Lauerwinkel"
+matter. There he had promptly come forward and in his own name
+challenged the anonymous author of a pamphlet bearing the title of
+"Hypocrisy Unveiled." The anonym had, like Scott, shirked, and had
+maintained his anonymity. (Lord Cockburn says it was an open secret, but
+I do not know who he was.) Thereupon Lockhart took no further notice,
+just as he did in the later matter, and I do not believe that a court of
+honour in any country would find fault with him. At any rate, I think
+that we are entitled to know, much more definitely than I have ever seen
+it stated, what the charge against him is. We may indeed blame him in
+both these matters, and perhaps in others, for neglecting the sound rule
+that anonymous writing should never be personal. If he did this,
+however, he is in the same box with almost every writer for the press in
+his own generation, and with too many in this. I maintain that in each
+case he promptly gave the guarantee which the honour of his time
+required, and which is perhaps the only possible guarantee, that of
+being ready to answer in person for what he had written impersonally.
+This was all he could do, and he did it.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+ Allen, Thomas, 113
+
+ Arnold, Matthew, 116, 257, 378
+
+ Austen, Jane, 29
+
+
+ _Blackwood's Magazine_, 37 _sqq._, 276 _sqq._, 343 _sqq._
+
+ Borrow, George, 403-439;
+   his life, 403, 404;
+   his excessive oddity, 404-411;
+   his satiric and character-drawing faculty, 414-417;
+   sketches of his books, 417-433;
+   his general literary character, 433-439
+
+ Brougham, Lord, 107, 109
+
+ Burke, Edmund, 10 _sqq._
+
+ Burns, Robert, 34, 48, 53, 159, 160, 353
+
+ Byron, Lord, 3, 131, 132, 393
+
+
+ Canning, George, 75, 97, 200, 385
+
+ Carlyle, Thomas, 47, 270-272, 323, 369, 370
+
+ Coleridge, S. T., 141
+
+ Colvin, Mr. Sidney, 445
+
+ Courthope, Mr. W. J., 4
+
+ Crabbe, George, 1-32;
+   the decline of his popularity, 1-5;
+   sketch of his life, 6-12;
+   his works and their characteristics, 13-20;
+   their prosaic element, 20-25;
+   was he a poet?, 25-32
+
+ Cunningham, Allan, 46, 53
+
+
+ Dante, 26, 218, 230, 231
+
+ Douglas, Scott, 41, 353
+
+ Dryden, John, 22, 30, 85, 232
+
+
+ Fitzgerald, Edward (translator of Omar Khayyam), 4
+
+ Flaubert, Gustave, 19
+
+ _Fraser's Magazine_, 359, 360
+
+
+ Gifford, William, 3, 21, 152
+
+
+ Hannay, Mr. David, 350
+
+ Hazlitt, William, 135-169;
+   differing estimates of him, 135-140;
+   his life, 140-146;
+   his works, 146-169
+   ----xxi, xxii, 4, 24, 25, 130, 131, 217
+
+ Hogg, James, 33-66;
+   his special interest, 33, 34;
+   his life, 34-37;
+   anecdotes and estimates of him, 37-47;
+   his poems, 47-54;
+   his general prose, 54, 55;
+   _The Confessions of a Sinner_, 55-64
+
+ Hood and Praed, 397-399
+
+ Hook, Theodore, 357-359
+
+ Howells, Mr. W. D., xvii
+
+ Hunt, Leigh, 201-233;
+   scattered condition of his work, 201-203;
+   his life, 204-213;
+   the "Skimpole" matter, 213-216;
+   his vulgarity, 217-219;
+   his poems, 219-223;
+   his critical and miscellaneous work, 223-233
+
+
+ Jeffrey, Francis, 100-134;
+   a critic pure and simple, 100, 101;
+   his life, 101-114;
+   the foundation of the _Edinburgh Review_, 106-109;
+   his criticism, 115, 134
+   ----3, 4, 21, 24, 29
+
+ Johnson, Samuel, 2, 11, 14, 16
+
+ Joubert, Joseph, 26
+
+
+ Lang, Mr. Andrew, xxii
+
+ Lockhart, John Gibson, 339-373, and Appendix B;
+   his literary fate, 339-341;
+   his life, 341-346, 359-361;
+   _The Chaldee MS._ and _Peter's Letters_, 343-345;
+   the novels, 346-349;
+   the poems, 349-351;
+   _Life of Burns_, 353;
+   _Life of Scott_, 354-356;
+   _Life of Hook_, 357-359;
+   his editorship of the _Quarterly_ and his criticism generally, 361-373;
+   charges against him, 445-448
+   ----3, 6, 13, 33, 37, 39-44, 60, 63, 64, 108, 112, 113, 293, 294
+
+
+ Macaulay, Lord, 294, 384
+
+ Maguire, W., 279, 360
+ [Transcriber's Note: The alternative form of Maguire, Maginn, is used in
+ the main body of the text.]
+
+ Masson, Professor, 305 _sqq._
+
+ Moore, Thomas, 170-200;
+   a French critic on him, 170-172;
+   his miscellaneous work, 172-174;
+   his life, 174-183;
+   his character, 183-185;
+   survey of his poetry, 185-200
+   ----6, 27, 110.
+
+ Morley, Mr. John, 27
+
+
+ Newman, Cardinal, 4
+
+ North, Christopher. _See_ Wilson, John
+
+
+ Peacock, Thomas Love, 234-269;
+   his literary position, 234, 235;
+   his life, 236-239;
+   some difficulties in him, 239-242;
+   survey of his work, 242-259;
+   its special characteristics, 257-269
+
+ Pope, Alexander, 22, 25
+
+ Praed, W. M., 374-402;
+   editions of him, 374-376;
+   his life, 376-381;
+   his early writings, 381-384;
+   his poetical work, 385-398;
+   Hood and Praed, 397-399;
+   his special charm, 399-402
+
+
+ Quincey, Thomas de, 304-338, and Appendix A;
+   editions of him, 304-309;
+   his life, 309-314;
+   his faculty of rigmarole, 314-321;
+   defects and merits of his work, 321-338
+   ----47, 282
+
+
+ Rogers, Samuel, 12 _note_
+
+
+ Scott, John, his duel and death, 143, 144; Appendix B
+
+ Scott, Sir Walter, 34-36, 49, 54, 63, 111, 151, 265, 273, 354-359, 406, 407
+
+ Shelley, P. B., 190, 191, 210, 247-250
+
+ Smith, Bobus, 69
+
+ Smith, Mr. Goldwin, xi, xiv
+
+ Smith, Sydney, 67-99;
+   the beneficence of his biographers, 67-69;
+   his life, 69-80;
+   his letters, 81-84;
+   his published work, 84-99
+
+ Stael, Madame de, 126, 127
+
+ Stephen, Mr. Leslie, 4
+
+ Stevenson, Mr. R. L., 445
+
+ Sully, Mr. James, xxvii _note_
+
+ Swift, Jonathan, Jeffrey on, 128, 129
+
+
+ Tennyson, Lord, 4, 29, 292, 293, 365, 366
+
+ Thackeray, W. M., on Hazlitt, 135, 136
+
+ Thomson, James, 27
+
+ Thurlow, Lord, 10-12
+
+
+ Vallat, M. Jules, 171 _sqq._
+
+ Veitch, Professor, 38, 40, 46
+
+ Voltaire, 81
+
+
+ Walker, Sarah, 139 _sqq._
+
+ Wilson, John, 270-303;
+   Carlyle's judgment of him and another, 270-274;
+   his life, 274-277;
+   the _Noctes_, 278-288;
+   his miscellaneous work, 288-303
+
+ Wilson, John, 3, 4, 29, 44-47.
+   _See_ also Essays on De Quincey and Lockhart
+
+ Wordsworth, William, 3, 27, 117, 323
+
+
+ Young, Sir George, 375
+
+
+ "Zeta," 446
+
+
+THE END
+
+_Printed by R. & R. CLARK, Edinburgh._
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860, by
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