1. in_ernet_dli_2015_166364_2015_166364_English-Literature-An-Illustrated-Record-Volume-Iv-From-The-Age-Of-Johnson-To-The-Age-Of-Tennyson

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ENGLISH

LITERATURE

AN

ILLUSTRATED

RECORD

BY

RICHARD

GARNETT,

C.B.,

LL.D.

AND

EDMUND

GOSSE,

M.A.,

LL.D.

VOL.

IV

The

Arco

LORD BYRON,

After the Portrait by T.Phillips in the possession of John Murray Esq.

ENGLISH LITERATURE

AN ILLUSTRATED RECORD

IN FOUR VOLUMES

VOLUME IV

FROM THE AGE OF JOHNSON TO THE

AGE OF TENNYSON

BY

EDMUND GOSSE

HON. M.A. OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

HON. LL.D. OF ST. ANDREWS UNIVERSITY

SIR WALTER SCOTT, AS A CHILD

FROM A MINIATURE IN THE POSSESSION OF JOHN MURRAY, ESQ.

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.

1905

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1904,

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1904. Reprinted

October, 1905.

Norwood Press

J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith Co.

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

PREFACE TO THE FOURTH VOLUME

The principles of selection which were followed in the earlier volumes of this work have been adhered to in this also, except in the last chapter, where it was found necessary in some degree to modify them. The age through which we have just passed is still too close to us to enable us to decide with any confidence which, among the many names which were prominent in the second rank of its literature, will continue to interest posterity. Instead, therefore, of crowding the page with eminent names, certain leading figures have been taken as unquestionably in themselves attractive, and as probably representative of the time. This portion of the work, it is obvious, must be peculiarly liable, in future editions, to extension and alteration. At present, its limit is the death of Queen Victoria, and it deals with no living person, except with one famous and venerable philosopher, whose work, we must regretfully suppose, is finished.

So far as the illustration of this volume is concerned, we descend through grades of picturesque decline to the period, not merely of the frock-coat and of the top-hat, but of that most inæsthetic instrument, the photographer's lens. We may claim, perhaps, to make up in copiousness for a lack of beauty which is no fault of ours. Among those whose kindness and generosity have enabled us to enrich this volume, my particular thanks are due to Mr. William Archer, to Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson, to Mr. Ernest H. Coleridge, to Mr. Coningsby D'Israeli, to Mr. Warwick Draper, to Mrs. John Richard Green, to Miss Gaskell, to Mr. John Murray, to Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, to Mr. Clement Shorter, to Mr. M. H. Spielmann, to Mrs. Baird Smith, to Messrs. Smith, Elder and Co., and to Mr. Butler Wood of Bradford. As before, I have to thank my friend Mr. A. H. Bullen for his kindness in reading the proofs and Mrs. Sydney Pawling for her valuable help in obtaining matter for illustration.

E. G.

November 1903.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH—1780—1815

Cowper—Table Talk—John Gilpin—The Task—Crabbe—The Parish Register—The Borough —Tales of the Hall—Blake—Songs of Innocence—His Visions—Burns—Early Life—Poems in the Scottish Dialect—Tam o' Shanter—His Friendships and Love-affairs—Scotch Doric Verse—The Four Great Poets of the Eighties—Minor Poets—Erasmus Darwin—Thomas Russell—W. L. Bowles—The Publication of Lyrical Ballads —One of the Greatest Events in Literature—Wordsworth and Coleridge—The Importance of their Influence—The Wordsworths at Grasmere—Friendship with Scott and Sir George Beaumont—Later Life and Work—Death in 1850— Coleridge—Friendship with Wordsworth and Southey—The Ancient Mariner—Christabel —His Troubles in Old Age—Southey—The Beauties of his Character not always reflected in his Poetry—Campbell—The Pleasures of Hope—Lord Ullin's Daughter— Scott—Considered as a Poet—The Lay of the Last Minstrel—Marmion—The Lady of the Lake—Early Life and Education—Friendship with Ballantyne—His Tremendous Activity and Tireless Brain—His Death in 1832—Burke—The Extraordinary Ardour and Enthusiasm of his Writings—Inquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful—Letters to a Noble Lord—The Regicide Peace—Godwin—Mary Wollstonecraft—The Rights of Women —Mrs. Radcliffe—M. G. Lewis—Beckford—Holcroft—Hannah More—Fanny Burney— Maria Edgeworth—Jane Austen—Her Place in Literature—Pride and Prejudice—Sense and Sensibility—Emma—Scott's article in the Quarterly Review—The Reviews—Lord Jeffrey —Napier—Sydney Smith—Cobbett—Combe—Bentham—Isaac D'Israeli—Mackintosh —Dugald Stewart—Scott's Novels—Their Perennial Freshness and Variety—A Heritage of the English-speaking Race

Pp. 1—106

CHAPTER II

THE AGE OF BYRON, 1815—1840

Innocence and Purity of the Age of Wordsworth—Revolutionary Tendency of the later Generation—Poetry of Crime and Chaos—Byron—His Fascinating and Mysterious Personality—The Merits and Defects of his Writings—His Life and Unhappy Marriage —Travels Abroad—The Countess Guiccioli—Journey to Greece—His Death at Missolonghi—Shelley—His Short and Feverish Life—His Proper Place among the Great Poets—Friendship with Byron—His Marriage—His Life Abroad—His Death—The Cockney School—Leigh Hunt—His Writings and Friendships—Keats—His Short Life —The Extraordinary Perfection of his Production—One of the Greatest Poets of any Country—His many Interesting Friendships—His Death—Reynolds—Wells—Thomas Moore—Irish Melodies—Rogers—The Pleasures of Memory—Italy—A New School of Critics —Lamb—One of the most Beloved of English Authors—His Sufferings and Sorrows—

viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Early Writings—His Humour and Cheerful Philosophy—Elia—Death in 1834—De Quincey—His Career and Characteristics—The Opium Eater—His Eccentricities—Hazlitt—Friendship with Wordsworth, Coleridge and the Lambs—His Essays—Landor—English Romanticism—His Passion and Self-sufficiency—The Imaginary Conversations—A Unique Position in Literature—The Historians—Mitford—Sharon Turner—Lingard—Sir William Napier—Hallam—Constitutional History of England—The Novelists—Mary Brunton—Susan Ferrier—Jane Porter—Lockhart—Maturin—Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley—Galt—Moore—Thomas Hope—Lytton—Disraeli—Peacock—Poetry at the Close of the Century—Hood—Joanna Baillie—Hartley Coleridge—Praed—Beddoes—Horne . . . . . . Pp. 107-199

CHAPTER III

THE EARLY VICTORIAN AGE—1840-1870

Literature in England at the Accession of Queen Victoria—Tennyson—The peculiar Magic of his Style—His Early Life—Idylls of the King—In Memoriam—His other Poetry—His Dramatic Productions—Mrs. Browning—Her Style and Work—Marriage with Robert Browning—Her Life Abroad—Sonnets from the Portuguese—Robert Browning—His Position among the great Poets—Pauline—Paracelsus—Pippa Passes—The Ring and the Book—His Personality—Reason and Enthusiasm—Henry Taylor—Philip James Bailey—Barry Cornwall—Monckton Milnes—Keble—Dickens—His Genius—Power of Invention and Boundless Merriment—His Early Struggles—The Pickwick Papers—His wonderful Energy and Vitality—The Novelists—Lever—Marryat—Ainsworth—Jerrold—Wilkie Collins—Carlyle—Characteristics of the Man and of his Work—Peculiarities of his Style—Sartor Resartus—His Marriage—The French Revolution—Hero Worship—Macaulay—Lays of Ancient Rome—The History of England—Newman—The Oxford Movement—Borrow—Thackeray—Fielding's Influence—Barry Lyndon—Vanity Fair—Es mond—Thackeray's lovable Character—His Humour—The Bröntes—Shirley—Jane Eyre—Mrs. Gaskell—Cranford—Ruskin—The Perfection of his Style—Modern Painters—Seven Lamps of Architecture—Stones of Venice—His Essays and minor Works—Fors Clavigera—His personal Eminence—Mill—Grote—Darwin—The Origin of Species—The Descentof Man

Pp. 200-302

CHAPTER IV

THE AGE OF TENNYSON, 1870-1900

Tennyson's and Browning's Influence—Matthew Arnold as a poet and as a prose writer—George Eliot, the most prominent novelist in England between Dickens and Mr. George Meredith—Adam Bede—The Mill on the Floss—Her Sympathetic Nature—George Henry Lewes—The Trollopes—Charles Reade—The Kingsleys—Stanley—The Historians—Froude—Freeman—J. R. Green—Stubbs—Gardiner—Sir John Seeley—The Philosophers—Mr. Herbert Spencer—T. H. Green—Sidgwick—Martineau—Tyndall—Huxley—The Poetic Revival—Fitzgerald—Omar Khayyam—D. G. Rossetti—Christina Rossetti—William Morris—The Critics—Walter Pater—John Addington Symonds—R. L. Stevenson . . . . . . 303-366

EPILOGUE . . . . . . . 367-371

APPENDIX AND INDEX . . . . . . . 373-

LIST OF THE ILLUSTRATIONS

CONTAINED IN THIS VOLUME

Lord Byron (Phillips) . . Frontispiece

Sir Walter Scott as a Child (from a miniature) . . Title-page

George III. . . page 2

Cowper's Mother . . " 3

William Cowper (Lawrence) . . " 3

Cowper's Birthplace . . " 4

Weston Lodge . . " 4

Letter from Cowper . . to face page 4

Cowper in his Study . . page 5

MS. of Bellman Verses . . " 6

William Cowper (Romney) . . to face page 6

Cowper's House at Weston . . page 7

Cowper's Summer House . . " 8

View of Olney . . . " 9

Birthplace of Crabbe . . " 10

George Crabbe (Phillips) . . " 11

George Crabbe (from a drawing) . " 12

Parham Hall, Suffolk . . " 13

Aldborough Town Hall . . " 14

Letter from Crabbe . . " 15

MS. of Crabbe's "Family of Friends" . . . " 16

William Blake . . . " 18

A Page from "Songs cf Innocence" to face page 18

Letter from Blake . . page 19

Birthplace of Burns . . " 21

Mrs. Burns and one of her Grand-children . . . " 22

Robert Burns (Nasmyth) . . to face page 22

Title-page of Kilmarnock Edition of Burns's Poems . . page 23

Title-page of Edinburgh Edition of Burns's Poems . . " 23

Robert Burns (Skirving) . . " 24

Mrs. Dunlop . . . . " 25

Alloway Kirk . . . " 26

Fragment of a MS. Poem of Burns " 26

House at Dumfries where Burns died . . . " 28

Extract from a Letter from Burns to Mrs. Dunlop . . " 29

Greyfriars Churchyard . . " 29

Dr. Blacklock . . . " 30

Mrs. Thomson . . . " 30

Letter from Burns to Mrs. Dunlop to face page 30

Erasmus Darwin . . . page 32

William Lise Bowles . . " 34

William Wordsworth (Hancock) . . " 35

Cottage at Nether Stowey . . " 36

Title-page of First Edition of "Lyrical Ballads" . . " 37

S. T. Coleridge (Vandyke) . . " 38

William Wordsworth (Pickersgill) to face page 38

S. T. Coleridge (J. Kayser) . . page 40

Rydal Mount . . . . " 41

William Wordsworth (Carruthers) " 42

Dove Cottage . . . " 43

Title-page of Wordsworth's "Evening Walk" . . . " 44

Peel Castle . . . . " 45

Wordsworth's Lodging at Hawks-head . . . " 45

William Wordsworth (Maclise) . . " 46

Letter from Wordsworth . . to face page 46

S. T. Coleridge (from a pastel) . page 50

The Cottage at Clevedon . . " 50

S. T. Coleridge (Leslie) . . " 51

Mrs. S. T. Coleridge . . . " 52

S. T. Coleridge (Hancock) . . to face page 52

MS. of Opeaning Stanzas of "Love" page 54

Extract from a Diary of S. T. Coleridge . . . " 56

MS. of an unpublished Poem by Coleridge . . . to face page 56

Programme of Coleridge's Lectures of 1808 . . . page 57

Robert Southey (Edridge) . . " 58

Greta Hall . . . . " 59

Robert Southey (Phillips) . . " 60

Robert Southey (Hancock) . . to face page 60

Letter from Southey . . page 61

Thomas Campbell (Lawrence) . " 63

Thomas Campbell (Maclise) . . " 64

Letter from Campbell . . . " 65

Sir Walter Scott (Raeburn) . . " 67

Sir Walter Scott (Newton) . . " 68

Letter from Scott . . to face page 68

Abbotsford . . . . page 69

Entrance Hall at Abbotsford . . " 70

X

LIST OF THE ILLUSTRATIONS

Scott's Study at Abbotsford . . . page 71

Ruins of Dryburgh Abbey . . . " 72

Sir Walter Scott (Allan) . . . to face page 72

Title-page of First Edition of

"Waverley" . . . . page 73

Sir Walter Scott (bust by Chantrey) " 74

Edmund Burke (Romney) . . " 78

Warren Hastings . . . " 79

Beaconsfield Church . . . " 80

Edmund Burke (Reynolds) . . . to face page 80

MS. Note by Burke . . . page 81

William Godwin , . . " 83

Mary Wollstonecraft . . " 84

Extract from the MS. of "Caleb Williams" . . . " 85

M. G. Lewis . . . . " 86

William Beckford (Sauvage) . . " 87

William Beckford (a caricature) . " 88

Thomas Holcroft . . . " 89

Hannah More . . . . " 89

Frances Burney . . . . " 90

Jane Austen . . . . " 91

Letter from Maria Edgeworth . " 92

Maria Edgeworth . . . " 93

Steventon Parsonage . . . " 94

The Parlour in Chawton Cottage . " 95

House in College Street, Winchester . . . " 96

Letter from Jane Austen . . to face page 96

Francis, Lord Jeffrey . . . page 97

Sydney Smith . . . . " 98

William Cobbett . . . " 99

Jeremy Bentham . . . " 100

Isaac Disraeli . . . . " 100

Ruins of Kenilworth Castle . . " 101

Sir Walter Scott (Landseer) . . " 102

A Page of the MS. of "Kenilworth" . to face page 102

Sketch by Cruikshank for "Meg Merrilies" . . . page 103

MS. Verses of Scott . . . " 104

Letter from Scott . . . . " 105

Lord Byron (artist unknown) . . " 107

Mrs. Byron . . . . " 108

Lady Caroline Lamb . . . " 109

Lord Byron (Westall) . . . " 110

Lord Byron (D'Orsay) . . . " 111

Mary Ann Chaworth . . . " 112

Lady Noel Byron . . . . " 112

Augusta Ada Byron . . . " 113

John Cam Hobhouse . . . " 113

Newstead Abbey . . . . " 114

The Countess Guiccioli . . . " 114

Palazzo Guiccioli, Ravenna . . " 115

Byron's House at Ravenna . . " 116

Pine Forest at Ravenna . . " 116

Palazzo Lanfranchi, Pisa . . " 117

Missolonghi . . . . " 117

Letter from Byron . . . to face page 118

Percy Bysshe Shelley . . . page 122

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley . . " 123

Field Place, Horsham . . . " 125

Title-page of "Queen Mab" . . " 126

Title-page of "Adonais" . . " 127

The Gulf of Spezia . . . " 128

Shelley's Grave in Rome . . " 128

Letter from Shelley . . . to face page 128

Leigh Hunt (Haydon) . . . page 134

Leigh Hunt (Gillies) . . . " 135

Leigh Hunt's House, Chelsea . . " 136

Leigh Hunt (Maclise) . . . " 137

John Keats (a bust) . . . " 138

MS. of Keats's "Eve of Saint Mark" " 139

John Keats (Haydon) . . . " 140

John Keats (Severn) . . . to face page 140

Title-page of "Endymion" . . page 141

Keats's House in Hampstead . . " 142

Joseph Severn . . . . " 142

Keats's Grave in Rome . . . " 143

Memorial to Severn in Rome . " 143

Mask of Keats . . . . " 144

MS. of Keats's last Sonnet . . " 144

Letter from Keats . . . to face page 144

Thomas Moore . . . . page 149

Moore's Birthplace in Dublin . . " 149

A View of Bermuda . . . " 150

Moore's Cottage at Sloperton . " 150

Samuel Rogers (Richmond) . . " 151

Samuel Rogers (a caricature) . " 152

Illustrations from "The Pleasures of Memory" . . . " 152

Charles Lamb (Hancock) . . . " 155

Title-page of "Rosamund Gray" . " 156

Charles Lamb (Hazlitt) . . . to face page 156

East India House . . . . page 157

Charles and Mary Lamb (Cary) . " 157

Charles Lamb (Pulham) . . . " 158

The Cottage at Edmonton where Lamb died . . . . " 158

MS. of "Mackery End" . . . to face page 158

The Grave of Charles and Mary Lamb. . . . page 159

Mackery End in Hertfordshire . " 160

Letter from Lamb . . . . " 160

Thomas De Quincey (Watson Gordon) . . . . " 161

Thomas De Quincey (Archer) to face page 162

Thomas De Quincey (a miniature) page 163

Mrs. Thomas De Quincey . . . " 163

MS. of "Daughter of Lebanon" . " 164

MS. of "The Dark Interpreter" . to face page 164

William Hazlitt . . . . page 166

Hazlitt's House in Westminster . " 167

Admission Ticket in Hazlitt's Handwriting . . . . " 168

Letter from Hazlitt . . . . " 169

Walter Savage Landor (Fisher) . " 171

Landor's Birthplace . . . . " 172

LIST OF THE ILLUSTRATIONS

The Ruins of Llanthony Abbey . page 172

Walter Savage Landor (Boxall) . ,, 173

Landor's Villa at Fiesole . ,, 174

MS. of " Eldon and Encombe," from "Imaginary Conversations" to face page 174

William Mitford . . . page 176

John Lingard . . . ,, 176

Henry Hallam . . . ,, 177

Mary Brunton . . . ,, 179

Jane Porter . . . ,, 180

T. G. Lockhart . . . ,, 181

C. R. Maturin . . . ,, 182

John Galt . . . ,, 183

Thomas Hope . . . ,, 184

Edward Bulwer-Lytton . . ,, 185

MS. Verses by Lytton . . ,, 186

Letter from Lytton . to face page 186

Benjamin Disraeli . page 187

The Supposed Birthplace of Disraeli in Islington . . ,, 188

Thomas Love Peacock . . ,, 190

MS. of Peacock . . to face page 190

Thomas Hood . . page 192

Mrs. T. Hood . . ,, 193

MS. Verses of Hood to Charles Dickens . . ,, 194

Joanna Baillie . . ,, 195

Richard Horne . . ,, 196

Hartley Coleridge . . ,, 197

Sonnet of Hartley Coleridge to Tennyson . . ,, 198

Lord Tennyson (Watts) . . to face page 200

Alfred Tennyson (Laurence) . page 201

Somersby Rectory . . ,, 202

Somersby Church . . ,, 203

Clevedon Church . . ,, 203

Tennyson's Rooms in Cambridge . ,, 204

Shiplake Rectory . . ,, 205

Farringford . . ,, 205

Lord Tennyson (photo. Mayall) . ,, 206

Aldworth . . ,, 207

MS. of Tennyson's " Throstle " . ,, 209

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Gordigiani) . ,, 212

Miss Mitford . . ,, 213

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Talfourd) . . to face page 214

The Sitting-room in Casa Guidi . page 215

A Page from "Poems Before Congress" with MS. Corrections . . ,, 216

MS. of Sonnet XIX. from "Sonnets from the Portuguese" . to face page 219

Robert Browning (Talfourd) . to face page 220

Robert Browning (Armytage) . page 221

Robert Browning (Watts) . ,, 222

Title-page of "Pauline" . . ,, 223

Browning's House in Warwick Crescent . . . ,, 223

Robert Browning (photo. Grove) . page 224

The Palazzo Rezzonico, Venice . ,, 225

MS. Note of Browning's on Fly-leaf of "Pauline" . ,, 226

Browning's Study in De Vere Gardens . . . ,, 227

MS. Verses by Robert and E. B. Browning . . ,, 228

Letter from Browning . . to face page 228

Philip James Bailey . . page 231

B. W. Proctor . . . ,, 232

R. Monckton Milnes . . ,, 233

John Keble . . . ,, 233

Charles Dickens (Armytage) . . ,, 234

George Cruikshank . . ,, 235

Charles Dickens (Laurence) . . ,, 236

Illustration by Cruikshank to "Oliver Twist" . to face page 236

Dickens's House in Furnival's Inn . page 237

Title-page of "The Cricket on the Hearth" . . ,, 238

Charles Dickens (Maclise) . . to face page 238

"Public Dinners" . . . page 239

Gadshill Place . . . ,, 240

1 Devonshire Terrace . . . ,, 241

Charles Dickens with his Wife and Sister-in-Law (Maclise) . ,, 242

MS. of the last page of "Edwin Drood" . . to face page 242

Dickens reading "The Chimes" to his Friends . . . page 243

Letter from Dickens . . ,, 244

Dickens's Study at Gadshill . . ,, 245

Frederick Marryat . . . ,, 245

Harrison Ainsworth . . . ,, 246

Sketch by Cruikshank for "The Tower of London" . . ,, 246

Drawing by Thackeray to illustrate "Men of Character" . . to face page 246

Douglas Jerrold . . . page 247

Wilkie Collins . . . ,, 248

Thomas Carlyle (a photograph) . ,, 249

Margaret A. Carlyle . . ,, 249

Thomas Carlyle (Millais) . . ,, 250

Letter from Carlyle . . to face page 250

Thomas Carlyle (Laurence) . . page 251

Arch House, Ecclefechan . . ,, 251

Mainhill Farm . . . ,, 252

Craigenputtock . . . ,, 252

Thomas Carlyle (a photograph) . ,, 253

Jane Welsh Carlyle . . ,, 253

Thomas Carlyle (a caricature) . ,, 254

Death Mask of Carlyle . . ,, 255

24 Cheyne Row, Chelsea . ,, 256

Thomas Carlyle (Whistler) . . to face page 256

Thomas Babington Macaulay . page 260

Holly Lodge, Campden Hill . . ,, 261

MS. page of Macaulay's "History of England" . . . ,, 263

xii

LIST OF THE ILLUSTRATIONS

E. B. Pusey . . . . page 266

John Henry Newman (Richmond). , 267

MS. page of "The Dream of Gerontius" . . . ,, 268

Cardinal Newman (Deane) . to face page 268

George Borrow . . . page 270

Portion of a Letter from Borrow . to face page 270

Borrow's House at East Dereham . page 271

William Makepeace Thackeray (Laurence) . . . ,, 272

Title-page of "Mrs. Perkins's Ball" to face page 272

W. M. Thackeray (Doyle) . . page 273

Thackeray among the Frasiers . ,, 274

William Makepeace Thackeray (Laurence) . . . to face page 274

Thackeray's House in Kensington . page 275

"Mr. M. A. Titmarsh in the Character of Mr. Thackeray" . . ,, 276

W. M. Thackeray (Millais) . . ,, 277

Letter from Thackeray . . . to face page 278

Charlotte Brontë . . . page 279

Rev. P. Brontë . . . ,, 280

Roe Head School . . . ,, 281

Gatehouse of the Old Priory, Kirk-lees Park . . ,, 281

Haworth Village . . . ,, 282

Letter from Charlotte Brontë . to face page 282

Haworth Church . . . page 283

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (Richmond) . . . ,, 285

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (from a bust) . . . ,, 286

Church House, Knutsford . ,, 286

Portion of a Letter from Mrs. Gaskell ,, 287

Mrs. Gaskell's Grave . . . ,, 288

John Ruskin (artist unknown) . ,, 289

The Birthplace of John Ruskin . ,, 290

John Ruskin (Millais) . . . to face page 290

John Ruskin (photo. Holyer) . page 291

Brantwood . . . ,, 292

MS. of "The Lamp of Memory" . to face page 292

Ruskin's Grave . . . page 293

Water-colour Drawing by Ruskin . to face page 294

John Stuart Mill . . . page 296

George Grote . . . ,, 298

Charles Darwin . . . ,, 300

MS. of Darwin . . . ,, 301

Matthew Arnold . . . to face page 306

Title-page of "Alaric at Rome" . page 308

Matthew Arnold's House at Cobham ,, 309

Matthew Arnold's Grave . . ,, 310

Rugby School . . . ,, 310

Letter from Matthew Arnold . ,, 311

George Eliot (pencil drawing) . ,, 314

George Eliot (Rajon) . . . to face page 314

Arbury . . . page 315

George Eliot (Lady Alma-Tadema) ,, 316

4 Cheyne Wall, Chelsea . . ,, 317

A Page of the MS. of "Adam Bede" to face page 318

Anthony Trollope . . . . page 319

Trollope's House in Montague Square . . . ,, 320

Letter from Trollope . . . ,, 321

Charles Reade . . . . ,, 322

The Birthplace of Charles Reade . ,, 322

Charles Kingsley . . . . ,, 323

Eversley Vicarage . . . ,, 324

Dean Stanley . . . . ,, 326

University College, Oxford . . ,, 327

James Anthony Froude . . . ,, 328

Exeter College, Oxford . . . ,, 330

Edward Augustus Freeman . . ,, 332

Trinity College, Oxford . . ,, 333

John Richard Green . . . ,, 334

Bishop Stubbs . . . . ,, 334

A Page of Green's MS. . to face page 334

Samuel Rawson Gardiner . . page 335

Sir John Seeley . . . ,, 335

Mr. Herbert Spencer . . . 336

Mr. Spencer's House at Brighton . . . ,, 337

James Martineau . . . . ,, 338

John Tyndall . . . . ,, 339

Tyndall's House at Haslemere . ,, 339

Letter from Tyndall . . . ,, 340

Thomas Henry Huxley . . . 342

Edward FitzGerald . . . ,, 343

FitzGerald's Grave . . . ,, 344

Portion of a Letter from FitzGerald . . . to face page 344

The Birthplace of D. G. Rossetti . page 346

John Ruskin and D. G. Rossetti (photo. Downey) . . page 347

Rossetti's House at Chelsea . . ,, 348

Christina Rossetti and her Mother ,, 350

MS. Poem by Christina Rossetti to face page 350

William Morris . . . page 353

Sussex House, Hammersmith . ,, 354

Kelmscott House, Hammersmith . ,, 355

Walter Horatio Pater . . . ,, 358

MS. of Pater's "Pascal" . to face page 358

Brasenose College, Oxford . . page 359

John Addington Symonds . . ,, 360

Magdalen College, Oxford . . ,, 360

Robert Louis Stevenson (photo.) . ,, 361

Swanston Cottage . . . ,, 362

Woodcut by Stevenson . . . ,, 362

Robert Louis Stevenson (Saint Gaudens) . . . to face page 362

Robert Louis Stevenson (photo) . page 363

Stevenson's House at Vailima . ,, 364

Letter from Stevenson . . . to face page 364

A Note found among Stevenson's Papers . . . . page 365

Apia Harbour, Samoa . . . ,, 366

Mr. George Meredith . . . ,, 368

Mr. Algernon Charles Swinburne . ,, 369

ENGLISH

LITERATURE

AN

ILLUSTRATED

RECORD

CHAPTER I

THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH

1780-1815

The period which immediately preceded and accompanied the French Revolution was one of violent and complete transition in English literature. The long frost of classicism broke up; the sealed fountains of romantic expression forced their way forth, and then travelled smoothly on upon their melodious courses. The act of release, then, is the predominant interest to us in a general survey, and the progress of liberated romance the main object of our study. Poetry once more becomes the centre of critical attention, and proves the most important branch of literature cultivated in England. The solitary figure of Burke attracts towards the condition of prose an observation otherwise riveted upon the singularly numerous and varied forms in which poetry is suddenly transforming itself. As had been the case two hundred years before, verse came abruptly to the front in England, and absorbed all public attention.

Among the factors which led to the enfranchisement of the imagination, several date from the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Johnson's famous and diverting Lives of the Poets was raised as a bulwark against forces which that sagacious critic had long felt to be advancing, and which he was determined to withstand. The Aristotelian rules, the monotony of versification, the insistence on abstract ideas and conventional verbiage—the whole panoply of classicism under which poetry had gone forth to battle in serried ranks since 1660 was now beginning to be discredited. The Gallic code was found insufficient, for Gray had broken up the verse; Collins had introduced a plaintive, flute-like note; Thomson had looked straight at nature; then the

George III.

After the Portrait by Allan Ramsay

VOL. IV.

A

2

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

timid protest had given scandal, while Churchill and Goldsmith had gone

back to the precise tradition. But 1760-70 produced a second and stronger

effort in revolt, founded on archaistic research. Antiquaries had gone dimly

searching after the sources of Middle English, and Chatterton had forged

the Rowley poems; Warton had glorified Spenser, and Percy had edited

his inspiring Reliques. Most of all, the pent-up spirit of lyricism, that instinct

for untrammelled song which the eighteenth century had kept so closely

caged, had been stimulated to an eager beating of its wings by the mysterious

deliverances of the pseudo-Ossian.

The Re-

vival of

Nature.

On the whole, this last, although now so tarnished and visibly so spurious,

seems to have been at that time

the most powerful of all the in-

fluences which made for the re-

vival of romanticism in England.

Thousands of readers, accustomed

to nothing more stimulating than

Young and Blair, reading the Deso-

lation of Balclutha and Ossian's

Address to the Sun with rapture,

found a new hunger for song

awakened in their hearts, and felt

their pulses tingling with mystery

and melody. They did not ask

themselves too closely what the

rhapsody was all about, nor quibble

at the poorness of the ideas and

the limited range of the images.

What Gessner gave and Rousseau,

what the dying century longed for

in that subdued hysteria which was

Cowper's Mother

From an Engraving by Finden

presently to break forth in political

violence, was produced to excess by the vibrations of those shadowy harp-

strings which unseen fingers plucked above the Caledonian graves of Fingal

and Malvina. Ossian had nothing of position and solid value to present to

Europe; but it washed away the old order of expression, and it prepared a

clear field for Goethe, Wordsworth, and Chateaubriand.

But in the meantime, four poets of widely various talent arrest our attention

during the last years of the century. Of these, two, Cowper and Crabbe,

endeavoured to support the old tradition; Burns and Blake were entirely

indifferent to it–such, at least, is the impression which their work produces

on us, whatever may have been their private wish or conviction. Certain

dates are of value in emphasising the practically simultaneous appearance of

these poets of the transition. Cowper's Table Talk was published in 1782,

and the Task in 1785. Crabbe's clearly defined first period opens with the

Candidate of 1780, and closes with the Newspaper of 1785. Blake's Poetical

Sketches date from 1783, and the Songs of Innocence from 1787. If the

world in general is acquainted with a single bibliographical fact, it is

aware that the Kilmarnock Burns was issued in 1786. Here, then, is a

solid body of poetry evidently marked out for the notice of the historian,

a definite group of verse inviting his inspection and his classification.

Unfortunately, attractive and interesting as each of these poets is, it is

exceedingly difficult to persuade ourselves that they form anything like a

school, or are proceeding in approximately the same direction. If a writer

less like Crabbe than Burns is to be found in literature, it is surely Blake,

and a parallel between Cowper and Burns would reduce a critic to despair.

At first sight we simply

see the following general

phenomena. Here is WIL-

LIAM COWPER, a writer of

great elegance and amenity,

the soul of gentle wit and

urbane grace, engaged in

continuing and extending

the work of Thomson, ad-

vancing the exact obser-

vation of natural objects,

without passion, without

energy, without a trace of

lyrical effusion, yet distin-

guished from his eighteenth

century predecessors by a

resistance to their affected,

rhetorical diction ; a very

pure, limpid, tender talent,

all light without fire or

vapour.

William Cowper

After the Picture by Sir Thomas Lawrence

William Cowper (1731-

1800. was the son of the

Rev. John Cowper and his wife Ann Donne, of good family on both sides. His

father was chaplain to George II. and rector of Great Berkhamstead, where the

poet was born on the 15th of November 1731. He was a very delicate child,

much neglected at home after his mother's death in 1737, when he was sent

for two years to a school in Market Street, Herts, where his nervous strength

was permanently undermined by the bullying of one of his school-fellows. His

eyes became painfully inflamed, and for two years (1739-41) he was under medical

care in the house of an oculist. About the age of ten he grew stronger, and was

able to be sent to Westminster School, where he played cricket and football,

and, under the celebrated Latinist, Vincent Bourne, became a competent scholar.

Among his friends and associates at school were Churchill, Colman, Cumberland, and

Warren Hastings. Cowper remained at Westminster until 1749, when he was entered

4

HISTORY

OF

ENGLISH

LITERATURE

of

the

Middle

Temple,

and

articled

for

three

years

to

a

solicitor.

During

this

time

he

was

intimate

with

the

family

of

his

uncle,

Ashley

Cowper,

with

whose

daughters,

Harriet

and

Theodora,

he

was

to

be

found

"from

morning

to

night,

giggling

and

making

giggle."

This

was

well

enough,

but

when

in

1752

he

went

to

reside

alone

in

the

Temple,

solitude

made

him

morbid,

and

his

old

melancholy

returned,

in

a

religious

form.

He

was

called

to

the

Bar

in

June

The

very

proper

refusal

of

Ashley

Cowper

to

allow

an

engagement

between

the

first

cousins,

William

and

Theodora,

could

not

fail

to

render

the

life

of

the

poet

miserable

;

but

this

impossible

courtship

should

have

been

nipped

in

its

earlier

stages.

Cowper's

Birthplace

at

Berkhampstead

At

the

death

of

his

father,

in

1756,

Cowper

bought

chambers

in

the

Middle

Temple,

and

began

to

contribute

to

current

literature.

He

says

that

he

"produced

several

half-penny

ballads,

two

or

three

of

which

had

the

honour

to

become

popular,"

but

these

have

never

been

identified.

A

variety

of

causes,

however,

of

which

the

dread

of

poverty

was

one,

exasperated

his

neurosis,

and

in

October

1763,

just

after

his

appointment

to

be

Clerk

of

the

Journals

of

the

House

of

Lords,

he

became

suicidally

insane

;

on

the

7th

of

December

he

was

placed

in

an

asylum

at

St.

Albans,

kept

by

a

minor

poet

of

some

grace

and

an

excellent

physician,

Dr.

Nathaniel

Cotton.

His

terrible

Sapphics

were

written

during

this

confinement.

In

the

summer

of

1765

he

was

considered

to

be

so

far

cured

that

he

was

removed

to

lodgings

in

Huntingdon.

Here

he

renewed

his

correspondence

with

a

charming

cousin,

Lady

Hesketh,

and

made

some

pleasant

acquaintances,

in

particular

that

of

a

cultivated

family

of

Unwins,

into

whose

house

he

was

taken

as

a

paying

guest

later

in

the

same

year.

In

1767

the

elder

Mr.

Unwin

was

thrown

from

his

horse,

the

children

were

dispersed,

and

it

became

natural

for

Mrs.

Unwin

and

Cowper

to

take

house

together.

Accordingly

in

September

they

removed

to

Orchard

Side

in

Olney

in

Bucks.

Here

Cowper

was

greatly

impressed

by

the

character

and

conversation

of

the

curate,

John

Newton,

who

persuaded

the

poet

to

help

him

in

his

parochial

duties

:

Olney

was

a

poor

parish,

without

gentry,

"and

the

poor

poet

was

the

only

squire."

Weston

Lodge

From

a

Drawing

by

John

Greig

Newton,

however,

had

no

sense

of

moderation

;

a

young

man

of

fiery

From a letter of Cowper's

I

hope

when

you

concert

many

of

the

weekly

which

have

taken

together

and

of

them

of

you

I

share

through

delicacy

and

doubt

thoughts

of

you

not

a

good

harmony

in

general

yet

a

good

deal

by

the

help

of

a

key

I

heard

you

say

or

a

stile

that

you

practiced

with

such

particular

shot

for

this

reason

in

your

purpose

in

the

leisure

is

come

to

walk

with

a

cook

in

my

pocket

what

I

read

under

a

hedge

at

the

side

of

a

lone

or

at

the

foot

of

a

hat

hedge

this

is

letting

my

fancy

run

into

a

sort

of

mania

a

technique

which

I

creep

ere

long

into

it

and

what

hurts

you

have

no

need

for

it

strength and zeal himself, he had no pity upon his friend's nervous weakness, and

under the strain of violent religious excitement Cowper went mad again. But before

this Newton had persuaded Cowper to join him in the composition of the hymns

which were first collected eight years later. In 1772 Cowper and Mrs. Unwin had

determined to marry, but an outbreak of suicidal mania was the signal for an ob-

scuration of his intellect for sixteen months, during all which time Mrs. Unwin nursed

him with untiring devotion. It was found that nothing amused him so much as looking

after animals, and his friends collected quite a menagerie round him at Old Orchard,

and in particular the three classic hares. In 1779 the Olney Hymns were published,

and with recovering mental serenity a new bloom seems to come over the intellect of

Cowper, and he wrote, for the first time, with ease and fluency.

There was little to be said in favour of an anonymous satire in verse, Antithelyphthora, but

he was now, as he approached his fiftieth year, about to become a poet. His first volume

of Poems, indeed, including Table Talk and many of his best shorter pieces, was not

published until 1782. John Gilpin followed anonymously in 1783. By this time Lady

Austen, a vivacious and cultivated widow, had made her appearance in Olney, and at

her persuasion Cowper now began to write a poem "upon a sofa" : it turned into The Task,

which was published in 1785.

Cowper in his Study, with his favourite hare

From a Drawing by Richard Westall

But, meanwhile, Cowper had been painfully forced to choose between an old friend and a new one ; he renounced

Lady Austen, and Mrs. Unwin regained her supremacy. The Task placed its author,

with a bound, at the head of the poets of the age ; it introduced many new friends to

him, and it placed him in communication once more with his cousin, Lady Hesketh.

She now became the most trusted of his correspondents, and, encouraged by her

sympathy, Cowper began to translate Homer. His "dearest coz," Lady Hesketh,

visited him in the summer of 1786, and with infinite delicacy helped him and Mrs.

Unwin in the way of money, for they were now again threatened with poverty. It was

at her instigation that they left Olney, and took a house at Weston-Underwood. Here

the fanatic harshness of Newton and grief at the sudden death of William Unwin, his

friend's son, brought on a fresh attack of insanity. Delayed by illness and melancholy,

it was not until 1791 that the Homer saw the light. Cowper began to write once more

with ardour, but the decline of Mrs. Unwin's faculties, ending in paralysis, clouded

his intelligence again. He fought a losing battle against insanity, but for the

6

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

remainder of his life he was practically a lunatic. In 1795 he was moved to Dunham

Lodge,1 near Swaffham, and then into the town of East Dereham, where Mrs. Unwin

died on the 17th of December 1796. Cowper lived on, with occasionally gleams of

sanity, his occasional translations, done during these last days, showing no failure of

The flinty soil is dead their feet around,

and Natures sorrow wipes their springing joys,

an envious wind will intercept its frowns,

So more delighting superior to its own,

and in a languid experienced still within,

Reminds them of their hated suns atc, Jits,

But Jell of every shape and every name,

Yeas formed to blessings with their cruel aim,

and wry in moments calm that soothes the breast,

giggles in earnest of eternal rest.

Ah he not sad! although they lost the cast

to far from the forth and in a distant waftes;

ho Shepherds tents within they were appear,

Is ut the chief shepherd is for ever dear,

They tender sorrows and they placative strain

i Cow is a foreign land, but not in vain,

They tears all iprew from a source divine

and wry drop befpeaks a sacred whine —

'Twas thus in Gideon flee the dews were found,

and drought on all the drooping herbs around.

Pray remember the poor this winter

Your humble Bellmanate

Decr. 15. 1791.

MS. of the Bellman Verses

Preserved in the British Museum

power, until the 25th of April 1800. He was buried in Dereham Church, “named

softly, as the household name of one whom God hath taken.” His incomparably

witty, tender, and graceful Letters were published, with his life, by Hayley in 1803.

THE POPLAR FIELD.

The poplars are fell'd ; farewell to the shade

And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade !

The winds play no longer and sing in the leaves,

Nor Ouse on his bosom their image receives.

1 Erroneously called Dereham Lodge in the Dictionary of National Biography.

WILLIAM COWPER.

AFTER THE PORTRAIT BY GEORGE ROMNEY

COWPER

Twelve years have elapsed since I last took a view

Of my favourite field, and the bank where they grew ;

And now in the grass behold they are laid,

And the tree is my seat that once lent me a shade !

The blackbird has fled to another retreat,

Where the hazels afford him a screen from the heat.

And the scene where his melody charm'd me before

Resounds with his sweet-flowing ditty no more.

My fugitive years are all hasting away,

And I must ere long lie as lowly as they,

With a turf on my breast, and a stone at my head,

Ere another such grove shall arise in its stead.

Cowper's House at Weston

From a Drawing by J. D. Harding

'Tis a sight to engage me, if anything can,

To muse on the perishing pleasures of man ;

Though his life be a dream, his enjoyments, I see,

Have a being less durable even than he.

From "The Task" : Book IV.

Hark ! 'tis the twanging horn o'er yonder bridge,

That with its wearisome but needful length

Bestrides the wintry flood, in which the moon

Sees her unwrinkled face lumbering reflected bright !—

He comes, the herald of a noisy world,

With spatter'd boots, strapp'd waist, and frozen locks ;

News from all nations lumbering at his back.

8

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

True to his charge, the close-pack'd load behind,

Yet, careless what he brings, his one concern

Is to conduct it to the destined inn,

And, having dropp'd the expected bag, pass on.

He whistles as he goes, light-hearted wretch,

Cold and yet cheerful : messenger of grief

Perhaps to thousands, and of joy to some ;

To him indifferent whether grief or joy.

Houses in ashes, and the fall of stocks,

Births, deaths, and marriages, epistles wet

With tears, that trickled down the writer's cheeks

Fast as the periods from his fluent quill,

Or charged with amorous sighs of absent swains,

Or nymphs responsive, equally affect

His horse and him, unconscious of them all.

Cowper's Summer House

From a Drawing by J. D. Harding

But O the important budget ! usher'd in

With such heart-shaking music, who can say

What are its tidings ? have our troops awak'd ?

Or do they still, as if with opium drugg'd,

Snore to the murmurs of the Atlantic wave ?

Is India free ? and does she wear her plumed

And jewell'd turban with a smile of peace ?

Or do we grind her still ? The grand debate,

The popular harangue, the tart reply,

The logic, and the wisdom, and the wit,

And the loud laugh—I long to know them all :

I burn to set the imprison'd wranglers free,

And give them voice and utterance once again.

Now stir the fire and close the shutters fast,

Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,

And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn

Throws up a steamy column, and the cups,

That cheer, but not inebriate, wait on each,

So let us welcome peaceful evening in.

COWPER

To Mrs. Unwin.

[May 1793.]

Mary ! I want a lyre with other strings,

Such aid from heaven as some have feigned they drew,

An eloquence scarce given to mortals, new

And undebased by praise of meaner things,

That, ere through age or woe I shed my wings,

I may record thy worth with honour due,

In verse as musical as thou art true,

And that immortalises whom it sings.

But thou hast little need. There is a book

By seraphs writ with beams of heavenly light,

On which the eyes of God not rarely look,

A chronicle of actions just and bright ;

There all thy deeds, my faithful Mary, shine,

And, since thou own'st that praise, I spare thee mine.

View of Olney

From a Drawing by J. D. Harding

The Colubriad.

Close by the threshold of a door nail'd fast

Three kittens sat ; each kitten look'd aghast ;

I passing swift and inattentive by,

At the three kittens cast a careless eye,

Not much concern'd to know what they did there,

Not deeming kittens worth a poet's care.

But presently a loud and furious hiss

Caused me to stop, and to exclaim, "What's this ?"

When lo ! upon the threshold met my view,

With head erect and eyes of fiery hue,

A viper, long as Count de Grasse's queue.

Forth from his head his forked tongue he throws,

Darting it full against a kitten's nose,

Who having never seen in field or house

The like, sat still and silent as a mouse ;

Only projecting with attention due.

Her whisper'd face, she ask'd him, "Who are you?"

10

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

On to the hall went I, with pace not slow.

But swift as lightning, for a long Dutch hoe,

With which, well-arm'd, I hasten'd to the spot,

To find the viper,—but I found him not.

And, turning up the leaves and shrubs around,

Found only—that he was not to be found.

But still the kittens, sitting as before,

Sat watching close the bottom of the door.

"I hope," said I, "the villain I would kill

Has slipp'd between the door and the door-sill;

And if I make despatch and follow hard,

No doubt but I shall find him in the yard:"

For long ere now it should have been rehearsed,

'Twas in the garden that I found him first.

Even there I found him, there the full-grown cat

His head, with velvet paw, did gently pat,

As curious as the kittens erst had been

To learn what this phenomenon might mean.

Fill'd with heroic ardour at the sight,

And fearing every moment he would bite,

And rob our household of our only cat

That was of age to combat with a rat,

With outstretch'd hoe I slew him at the door,

And taught him NEVER TO COME THERE NO MORE.

George Crabbe. Then, here is GEORGE CRABBE, whom Byron would have done better to

call "Dryden in worsted stockings," a dense, rough, strongly vitalised nar-

rator, without a touch of revolt against the conven-

tions of form, going back, indeed—across Goldsmith

and Pope—to the precise prosody used by Dryden

at the close of his life for telling tragical stories;

a writer absolutely retro-

gressive, as it at first seems, rejecting all sugges-

tion of change, and com-

pletely satisfied with the old media for his pecu-

liar impressions, which are often vehement, often

sinister, sometimes very prosaic and dull, but

generally sincere and direct—Crabbe, a great, solid talent, without grace, or flexibility, or sensitiveness.

The Birthplace of Crabbe

From a Drawing by C. Stanfield

George Crabbe (1754-1832) was the son of the salt-master, or collector of salt-

dues, at Aldeborough, in Suffolk, where he was born on Christmas Eve, 1754. His

childhood was one of pinching poverty, but his father, whose ambition exceeded his

means, contrived to send him to fairly good schools at Bungay and at Stowmarket.

He was apprenticed at the age of fourteen as errand-boy to a doctor near Bury St.

Edmunds, and at seventeen to a surgeon at Woodbridge. In 1774 he published

the rhymed anonymous satire called Inebriety. He studied medicine, and set up in

practice in Aldeborough, but the profession was so distasteful to him, and his success

in it so improbable, that in his twenty-fifth year he abandoned it, and came up to

London with a capital of £3 to try his fortune in literature. His poem, The Candidate,

was published anonymously in 1780, but brought with

it neither fame nor money.

Reduced to absolute distress,

the young poet wrote, without

an introduction, to Edmund

Burke, who saw him, took a

fancy to him, and generously

befriended him. Under the

genial patronage of Burke,

who introduced him to Rey-

nolds, Thurlow, and Fox,

Crabbe published anony-

mously The Library in 1781,

and, with his name, what is

one of his best productions,

The Village, in 1783. By

Burke's advice, Crabbe quali-

fied himself for holy orders,

and returned to Aldeborough

as curate ; in 1782 he was

ordained priest, and appointed

chaplain to the Duke of Rut-

land at Belvoir. His troubles

were now over, and still through

the goodness of Burke, he

became a pluralist after the

fashion of his time, exchang-

ing two poor livings in Dor-

setshire for two of greater val:e in the Vale of Belvoir. When the Duke of Rutland

died in 1788, the duchess presented him with two rectories in Leicestershire. Crabbe

had by this time abandoned poetry, his latest publication of note having been The

Newspaper, 1785. Lord Thurlow had told him that he was like Parson Adams as

twelve to a dozen. He carried out the parallel: he married and settled down as a

comfortable country clergyman, without any ambition, and it was more than twenty

years before the world heard of him again. Meanwhile he had added to his clerical

incumbencies, and in 1796 he had taken a mansion in Suffolk, Great Glenham Hall.

Here he lived for nearly ten years, and then returned to one of his incumbencies,

Muston, where he had not lived since 1792, in consequence of a warning from his

bishop that he had grown too lax about parochial residence. The general awakening

12

HISTORY

OF

ENGLISH

LITERATURE

of

a

public

interest

in

poetry

seems

to

have

roused

Crabbe

in

his

seclusion.

In

1807

he

published

the

Poems,

which

he

had

written

during

his

long

retirement

;

they

pleased,

and

in

the

same

year

Crabbe

was

encouraged

to

bring

out

a

long

poem,

The

Parish

Register,

parts

of

which

had

already

been

seen

and

admired

by

Fox.

We

are

told

that

these

passages

were

the

last

specimens

of

literature

which

"engaged

and

amused

the

capacious,

the

candid,

the

benevolent

mind

of

this

great

man."

The

success

of

The

Parish

Register

was

beyond

all

probable

expectation,

and

Crabbe

found

himself

suddenly

famous

at

the

age

of

fifty-three.

He

published

The

Borough,

perhaps

the

best

of

his

compositions,

in

1810;

Tales

in

Verse

in

1812;

and

finally,

in

1819,

Tales

of

the

Hall.

During

these

years

he

had

the

gratification

of

seeing

himself

habitually

named

among

the

first

poets

of

the

age.

When

the

sale

of

his

works

had

already

flagged

a

little,

he

was

still

able

to

dispose

of

his

entire

copyright

for

£3000,

a

sum

which,

according

to

an

amusing

story

of

Moore's,

he

characteristically

carried

loose

in

notes

in

his

waistcoat-pocket

from

London

to

Trow-bridge

in

Wiltshire,

of

which

parish

he

had

been

the

rector

since

His

celebrity,

his

genial

simplicity,

and

the

gentleness

of

his

humour

made

Crabbe

a

very

general

favourite,

and

entertaining

stories

of

his

unworldly

manners

were

commonly

current.

He

was

now

widely

invited

to

great

Rev.

George

Crabbe

From

an

original

Drawing

houses,

and

enjoyed

his

fame,

but

never

quite

woke

up

from

his

bewilderment

at

finding

himself

a

fashionable

genius.

Walter

Scott

esteemed

and

liked

Crabbe,

and

had

often

urged

him

to

come

and

stay

with

him

in

Edinburgh.

He

was,

nevertheless,

a

little

disconcerted

to

see

the

Suffolk

poet

quietly

arrive,

unannounced,

in

the

very

midst

of

the

celebration

of

George

IV's

visit

in

August

1822,

and

take

a

dignified

part

in

the

proceedings.

Crabbe,

already

an

elderly

man,

was

to

live

nearly

ten

years

more.

He

died

at

Trowbridge

on

the

3rd

of

February

1832,

having

published

nothing

since

the

Tales

of

the

Hall.

His

works

and

letters

were

given

to

the

world

in

1834

by

his

son,

George

Crabbe

the

younger.

CRABBE

Fanny's Dream.

They feel the calm delight, and thus proceed

Through the green lane,—then linger in the mead,—

Stray o'er the heath in all its purple bloom,—

And pluck the blossom where the wild bees hum ;

Then through the broomy bound with ease they pass,

And press the sandy sheep-walk's slender grass,

Where dwarf-fish flowers among the gorse are spread,

And the lamb browses by the linnet's bed ;

Then 'cross the bounding brook they make their way

O'er its rough bridge—and there behold the bay !—

The ocean smiling to the fervid sun—

The waves that faintly fall and slowly run—

Parham Hall, Suffolk (the Moat House of Crabbe)

From a Water-colour Drawing by Clarkson Stanfield

The ships at distance and the boats at hand ;

And now they walk upon the seaside sand,

Counting the number and what kind they be,

Ships softly sinking in the sleepy sea :

Now arm in arm, now parted, they behold

The glitt'ring waters on the shingles roll'd :

The timid girls, half dreading their design,

Dip the small foot in the retarded brine,

And search for crimson weeds, which spreading flow,

Or lie like pictures on the sand below ;

With all those bright red pebbles, that the sun

Through the small waves so softly shines upon ;

And those live lucid jellies which the eye

Delights to trace as they swim glittering by :

Pearl-shells and rubied star-fish they admire,

And will arrange above the parlour-fire,—

14

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Tokens of bliss !—“ Oh ! horrible ! a wave

Roars as it rises—save me, Edward ! save !”

She cries ;—Alas ! the watchman on his way

Calls, and lets in—truth, terror, and the day !

Dwellings of the Poor.

All our poor to know,

Let's seek the winding Lane, the narrow Row,

Suburban prospects, where the traveller stops

To see the sloping tenement on props,

With building yards immix'd, and humble sheds and shops ;

Where the Cross-keys and Plumbers' Arms invite

Laborious men to taste their coarse delight ;

Aldborough Town Hall

From a Drawing by C. Stanfield

Where the low porches, stretching from the door,

Gave some distinction in the days of yore,

Yet now neglected, more offend the eye,

By gloom and ruin, than the cottage by :

Places like these the noblest town endures,

The gayest palace has its sinks and sewers.

Here is mo pavement, no inviting shop,

To give us shelter when compell'd to stop ;

But plashy puddles stand along the way,

Fill'd by the rain of one tempestuous day ;

And these so closely to the buildings run,

That you must ford them, for you cannot shun ;

Though here and there convenient bricks are laid,

And door-side heaps afford their dubious aid.

Lo ! yonder shed ; observe its garden-ground,

With the low paling, form'd of wreck, around :

There dwells a fisher ; if you view his boat,

With bed and barrel—'tis his house afloat ;

Look at his house, where ropes, nets, blocks, abound,

Tar, pitch, and oakum—'tis his boat aground :

CRABBE

That space inclosed, but little he regards,

Spread o'er with relics of masts, sails, and yards :

Fish by the wall, on spit of elder, rest,

Of all his food, the cheapest and the best,

By his own labour caught, for his own hunger dress'd.

Sir

Painful as it is to me to leave my House at this Time, yet the Fear of having my Absence imputed to me, in very different from that which would have been the real one, induces me to undergo the Journey to Wickham & Soney with the Hope that if I be not at The White Hall by the Time appointed (which is unpardonable) you would nevertheless expect me till 2 after 12. If I should not then be with you, you will be so good as to conclude that I am detained by Impediments which cannot be removed. I shall take Mercy with me, but I fear that you have sufficient, or I shall look for Payment of my Expenses of every kind; between this & that I wish not to make myself a Judge of that. They should be by the Work left 12 Copies Hot (Bobbin is told that I am obliged to control this affair with some carey.

Facsimile Letter from Crabbe

THE WIDOW.

From "Tales of the Hall."

Now came the time, when in her husband's face

Care, and concern, and caution she could trace;

His troubled features gloom and sadness bore,

Less he resisted, but he suffer'd more;

Grief and confusion seized him in the day,

And the night passed in agony away.

"My ruin comes !" was his awakening thought,

And vainly through the day was comfort sought;

"There, take my all !" he said, and in his dream,

Heard the door bolted, and his children scream.

16

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Fretful herself, he of his wife in vain

For comfort sought—“He would be well again ;

Time would disorders of such nature heal—

O ! if he felt what she was doom'd to feel !

The Family of Friends.

In a large Town, a weary thriving Place

Where heaps of Guum excite an anxious Race

Which dark'nd hasl Breaths of cloudy Volumes cloak

And mark for daungu around the Place of Smokes.

Where Fird to Maker Lord is powerfil Aid

And Stamp produces, Strong Ally to Trade

Arrived a Stranger whom no Merchant knew

Nor could conjecture what he came to do

He took his Sted as Fortune neard to win

Nor did he shew a Prospect to begin

And there was somthing in his Air that told

This man was not as old

Of Fortune gained before he was old

He brought us Servants within The Laughing.

Were some to Habits and tisfaunices taught

His Manner easy and kind to few

His Habit such as aged Men's will be

To Self indulgént, weakly Men like this

Plead for these Failings — to their Way, their Wish

Beginning of the MS. of Crabbe's “Family of Friends”

Such sleepless nights ! such broken rest ! her frame

Rack'd with diseases that she could not name!

With pangs like her's no other was oppress'd !

Weeping, she said, and sigh'd herself to rest.

The suffering husband look'd the world around,

And saw no friend ; on him misfortune frown'd;

Him self-reproach tormented ; sorely tried,

By threats he mourn'd, and by disease he died.

As weak as wailing infancy or age,

How could the widow with the world engage ?

" Her debts would overwhelm her, that was sure !"

But one privation would she not endure ;

" We shall want bread ! the thing is past a doubt !"

" Then part with Cousins !" " Can I do without ?"

" Dismiss your servants." " Spare me them, I pray !"

" At least your carriage !" " What will people say ?"

" That useless boat, that Folly on the lake !"

" Oh ! but what cry and scandal it will make."

For ever begging all to be sincere,

And never willing any truth to hear.

" It was so hard on her, who not a thing

Had done such mischief on their heads to bring ;

This was her comfort, this she would declare,"—

And then slept soundly in her pillow'd chair.

Then here is William Blake, for whom the classic forms and traditions

have nothing to say at all ; whose ethereal imagination and mystic mind have

taken their deepest impressions from the Elizabethan dramatists and from

Ossian ; whose aim, fitfully and feverishly accomplished, is to fling the

roseate and cerulean fancies of his brain on a gossamer texture woven out of

the songs of Shakespeare and the echoes of Fingal's airy hall ; a poet this for

whom time, and habit, and the conventions of an age do not exist ; who is no

more nor less at home in 1785 than he would be in 1585 or 1985 ; on whom

his own epoch, with its tastes and limitations, has left no mark whatever ; a

being all sensitiveness and lyric passion and delicate, aerial mystery.

William Blake (1757-1827) was the second son of James Blake, a hosier of

Broad Street, Golden Square, where he was born on the 28th of November 1787. He

was scarcely educated at all, beyond learning to read and write, but at ten years of age

he began to copy prints, and at eleven years to write verses. He became at fourteen

apprenticed to Basire, the engraver, and later worked in the schools of the Royal

Academy. It is not here to the purpose to follow stage by stage the artistic career of

Blake. In 1783 Flaxman the sculptor, in combination with another friend, caused

Blake's juvenile poems, Poetical Sketches, to pass through the press. This volume,

all written before 1777, with much very crude and feeble work, contained some of the

poet's most perfect songs. His father died in 1784, and Blake set up next door to

the paternal shop as a printseller, in partnership with a fellow-student. This arrange-

ment lasted three years. Blake then started alone in Poland Street, and his first act

was to bring out the Songs of Innocence, engraved, in a manner invented by the painter-

poet, on copper, with a symbolic design in many colours, and finished by hand. The

interest awakened by these astonishing productions was small, but Blake was not

dejected. In 1789 he engraved The Book of Thel, and in 1790, in prose, The

Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In 1791 he published in the usual way the least

important of his poetical books, The French Revolution. In 1794 the exquisite Songs

VOL. IV.

18

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

of Experience followed. By this time he had moved again from Poland Street to

Lambeth, where he continued to produce his rainbow-coloured rhapsodies. Among

these, The Gates of Paradise, The Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and America, a

Prophecy, were finished within a few months. Europe and Urizen also belong to 1794.

At this period Blake's apocalyptic splendour of invention was at its height. There

was a distinct decline in clearness of intellectual presentment in The Song of Los and

Ahania (both 1795). Blake now turned mainly to painting and picture-engraving. In

1800 he left London for Felpham, near Bognor, to be near Hayley, who wanted Blake's

constant services as an engraver. He was greatly delighted with Felpham : " Heaven

opens here on all sides her golden gates." Here he lived in peace until 1803, when

occurred the very strange incident of his being arrested on a charge of sedi-

tion brought against him in revenge by a spiteful sergeant of dragoons.

Blake was acquitted at Chichester in

1804, but he was excessively disturbed. " The visions were angry with him,"

he believed, and he returned to London. From lodgings in South

Molton Street he began once more to issue prophetic " poems " of vast size

and mysterious import—Jerusalem and Milton, both engraved in 1804. These

he declared to be dictated to him supernaturally, " without premedita-

tion, and even against my will." After this, although he continued to write

masses of wild rhythm, The Ghost of

Abel (1822) was the only literary work which he could be said, by any strain-

ing of the term, to " publish." By this

time he had moved (1821) to the late-t

of his tenements, Fountain Court, in

the Temple. In 1825 his health began

William Blake

After the Portrait by T. Phillips

to fail, and he was subject to painful and weakening recurrences of dysentery. He

retained the habit of draughtsmanship, however, until a few days before his death

on the 12th of August 1827, when he passed away smiling, after an ecstatic vision of

Paradise. He had been a seer of luminous wonders from his very infancy, when he had

beheld the face of God at a window and had watched shining angels walking amongst

the hay-makers. In his early manhood he was habitually visited by the souls of the

great dead, " all majestic shadows, grey but luminous, and superior to the common

height of man." The question how far Blake believed in the objective actuality of his

visions has never been answered; but it is evident that in his trances he did not dis-

tinguish or attempt to distinguish between substance and phantom. Blake was, in

early life, a robust and courageous little man, active, temperate, and gentle, with

extraordinary eyes. Of his unworldliness many tales are told, humorous and pathetic.

His faith was like that of a little child, boundless and unreasoning. His wife, Catherine

A

PAGE

FROM

"SONGS

OF

INNOCENCE."

Designed

and

written

by

William

Blake.

The Lamb

Little Lamb who made thee

Dost thou know who made thee

Gave thee life & bid thee feed

By the stream & o'er the mead;

Gave thee clothing of delight;

Softest clothing wooly bright;

Gave thee such a tender voice,

Making all the vales rejoice:

Little Lamb who made thee

Dost thou know who made thee

Little Lamb I'll tell thee,

Little Lamb I'll tell thee:

He is called by thy name,

For he calls himself a Lamb :

He is meek & he is mild,

He became a little child :

I a child & thou a lamb

We are called by his name .

Little Lamb God bleſs thee,

Little Lamb God bleſs thee.

BLAKE

19

Dear Cumberland

I have lately had some pieces of conversation on account

of acknowledging your friendship to me which immediately

on the receipt of your beautiful book. Your letter had by

me all the Summer 6 Plates which you desired me to get

made for you. they have laid on my shelf. without speaking

to tell me whore they were or that they were there at all I

was some time after I found them I before I sent during

where they came or whether they were lost or whether they

were to be there to eternity. I have now sent them to you

to be transmitted, those real Alchymists!

Go on Go on. such works as yours Nature &

Providence the Eternal Parents demand from their children

how few produces them in such perfection how Nature

tumbles on them. how Providence rewards them. How all

your Brothers say, The Lord of this World by his Angels torn

from his secret forests clear into the labours of Life &

we flow a sea forgetting our Labours.

Let us see you sometimes as well as sometimes hear

from you & let us often see your Works,

Compliments to M

Cumberland & Family

yours in head & heart

Lindh

23 Dec

1796

a Merry Christmas

Will

Blake

Facsimile Letter from Blake to Richard Cumberland

20

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Sophia Boucher (1761-1831), was ignorant and youthful when he married her, and

was trained by him to be the docile partner in his artistic and poetic workmanship,

to sit helpfully beside him, as he would have put it, in the onset of "the chariot of

genius." His life was one of poverty and obscurity, endured with heroic cheerfulness.

Ah ! Sunflower.

Ah, Sunflower, weary of time,

Who countest the steps of the sun ;

Seeking after that sweet golden clime

Where the traveller's journey is done ;

Where the youth, pined away with desire,

And the pale virgin, shrouded in snow,

Arise from their graves and aspire

Where my Sunflower wishes to go !

Holy Thursday.

'Twas on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean,

Came children walking two and two, in red, and blue, and green :

Grey-headed beadles walked before, with wands as white as snow,

Till into the high dome of Paul's they like Thames waters flow.

Oh what a multitude they seemed, these flowers of London town !

Seated in companies they sit, with radiance all their own.

The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs,

Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands.

Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song,

Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among :

Beneath them sit the aged men, wise guardians of the poor.

Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.

The Wild Flower's Song.

As I wandered in the forest

The green leaves among,

I heard a wild flower

Singing a song--

"I slept in the earth

In the silent night ;

I murmured my thoughts

And I felt delight.

"In the morning I went,

As rosy as morn

To seek for new joy,

But I met with scorn."

Robert Burns. And finally, here is Robert Burns, the incarnation of natural song, the

embodiment of that which is most spontaneous, most ebullient in the lyrical

part of nature. With Burns the reserve and quietism of the eighteenth

century broke up. There were no longer Jesuit rules of composition, no

longer dread of enthusiasm, no longer a rigorous demand that reason or

intellect should take the first place in poetical composition. Intellect, it must

be confessed, counts for little in this amazing poetry, where instinct claims

the whole being, and yields only to the imagination. After more than a

century of sober, thoughtful writers, Burns appears, a song-intoxicated man,

exclusively inspired by emotion and the stir of the blood. He cannot tell

why he is moved. He uses the old conventional language to describe the

new miracle of his sensations. " I never hear," he says, "the loud, solitary

whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a

troop of grey plovers in an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of

The Birthplace of Robert Burns

soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry." This is the prose of the

eighteenth century ; but when the same ideas burst forth into metre :-

" The Muse, nae poet ever fand her,

Till by himsel' he learned to wander,

Adown some trotting burn's meander,

And no think lang ;

O sweet to stray, and pensive ponder

A heart-felt sang "-

we start to discover that here is something quite novel, a mode of writing

unparalleled in its easy buoyant emotion since the days of Elizabeth.

Robert Burns (1759-1796), the son of William Burnes or Burness and his wife

Agnes Brown, was born in a cottage in the parish of Alloway, in Ayrshire, on the 25th

of January 1759. Robert was the eldest of seven children ; his father, who had been a

gardener, was now a farmer, and "a very poor man." In 1765 Robert went to school

in his native village, being, he says, already "a good deal noted for a retentive memory,

a stubborn, sturdy something in my disposition, and an enthusiastic idiot-piety." He was

taught the elements of style in prose and verse by a remarkable youth, John Murdoch,

whose highly-strung emotional eagerness unquestionably did much to awaken the boy's

22

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

genius for poetry. About 1772 Burns was sent to a parish school at Dalrymple, all

the time cultivating an extraordinarily avid and general taste for such masterpieces of

literature as fell in his way. William Burness, however, was now farming a place called

Mount Oliphant, close to Alloway, a piece of “the poorest land in Ayrshire,” and

Robert must leave his books to work in the fields. The boy's life combined “the

cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing toil of a galley-slave.” This picture

darkened in 1775, when the family fell into the hands of a factor, but brightened again

in 1777, when William Burness moved to a better farm, Lochlea, in the parish of

Tarbolton. Here the Burnesses enjoyed four comfortable years, and here the joyous

temperament of Robert began to assert itself. He was now writing verses with the

greatest activity, and beginning to prosecute the earliest of his multifarious

and celebrated love-affairs. With the design of marriage, indeed, he went in

1781 to Irvine to learn the flax-dressing business; the business of life, too, he

was now learning with infinite address,

and was in that first stage of his maturity in which, as Mr. Henley puts

it, he appears before us “a peasant resolute to be a buck.” He went back

early in 1782 to Lochlea, to find his father's affairs in confusion. A few

months later William Burness died, but before this event Robert and the ablest

of his brothers, Gilbert, had taken another farm, Mossgiel, at Mauchline.

From a financial point of view this enterprise was not lucky; but as a poet

Burns was simply made at Mossgiel. Here rose into lush maturity and faded

Mrs. Burns (Jean Armour) and one of her grandchildren

After a Picture by S. M'Kenzie

away as quickly his famous passions for Jean Armour and Mary Campbell

(the very shadowy “Highland Lassie” of sentiment); these, and others, in their inceptions served as fuel for the lyric fire that

now burned impetuously in the heart of Burns, and found vent in some of the most

exquisite poetry he ever composed. In July 1786 his Poems chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was published at Kilmarnock; its success was instant, “old and young, high and low,

grave and gay, all were alike delighted, agitated, transported.” Ploughboys and maid-

servants spent the money, “which they wanted to purchase necessary clothing,” on the

irresistible volume. The poet, however, made no money by it, for the profits were

more than eaten up by the costs of printing a second edition. Breaking from Jean

Armour, Burns now proposed to Mary Campbell that he and she should emigrate to

Jamaica. He seems to have actually started for Greenock, when Mary Campbell was

taken ill and died (October 1786). Burns, with surprising elasticity of temperament,

changed all his plans, and determined on a raid upon Edinburgh. He arrived in that

capital with conquest in his ey† on the 28th of November. His advent was celebrated

ROBERT BURNS.

AFTER THE PORTRAIT BY ALEXANDER NASMYTH.

with a blare of trumpets ; the strong, fresh countryman, “looking like a farmer dressed

to dine with the laird,” was at once the rage, and sported every night with earls and

duchesses. Burns bore his triumph outwardly with “a sort of dignified plainness and

simplicity” which did him much credit ; inwardly it inflicted an irreparable hurt upon

his temperament. No man of his years, least of all the ardent Rab of Mossgiel, could

yield to “such solicitations and allurements to convivial enjoyment” as were now forced

upon the fashionable poet without being ultimately the worse for them. His poems

P

O

E

M

S,

CHIEFLY IN THE

SCOTTISH DIALECT,

B Y

ROBERT BURNS.

THE Simple Bard, unbroke by rule of Art,

He pours the wild effusions of the heart.

And if inspir’d ’tis Nature’s pow’r inspire;

Her’s all the melting thoils, and her’ the kindling fire

A NONYMOUS.

KILMARNOCK:

PRINTED BY JOHN WILSON.

M,DCC,LXXVI.

Title-page of First, or Kilmarnock

Edition, of Burns’s Poems

P

O

E

M

S,

CHIEFLY IN THE

SCOTTISH DIALECT.

B Y

ROBERT BURNS.

EDINBURGH:

PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR,

AND SOLD BY WILLIAM CREECH.

M,DCC,LXXXVII.

Title-page of the Edinburgh Edition

of Burns’s Poems

were reprinted with additions in Edinburgh in April 1787 ; this time Burns received

something substantial, perhaps £500, but he very foolishly sold the copyright for another

£100, and his publisher was a tardy paymaster. At last, in June 1787, Burns was back

at Mossgiel for a month, and then he started, by Edinburgh, for his famous tour in the

Highlands with Nicol, a neighbour. Two very important friendships with women of

the educated class are now to be noted, that with Mrs. Dunlop (1786-95) and that

with Mrs. “Clarinda” M’Lehose (1787-91) ; these were both, in their ways, excellent

ladies, to the first of whom the poet was like a son, and to the second like a sort of

amatory china shepherd. To the animalism which mainly pursued the adventures of

Burns, the sentimental affection of these two correspondents offers a contrast at which

we may smile, but which was full of benefit to his better nature. Burns cultivated

24

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

their friendship "with the enthusiasm of religion," and in the vocabulary of the younger

lady he was always aptly termed "Sylvander." Far less sentimental were Burns's

relations with the agreeable females of Mauchline, and early in 1788 Jean Armour, who

had forgiven him only too easily for past negligence, was turned by her parents out of

house and home, and forced on the poet's protection. Presently—we do not quite know

when or how—he married her privately, and in August publicly; in order to break

with the past, Burns took charge at the same time of the farmstead of Ellisland in

Dumfriesshire (which, however, never belonged to him), and thither, or at first to a

Robert Burns

After the Portrait by Skirving

thirty years of age, his constitution was undermined by the fierce zest with which

he had drained the bowl of life, greedily, rashly, with lips sucked at the brim. To

be colloquial, he had pre-eminently "eaten his cake," and he took no warning

—what there was left of it he was eating still. He never cared for Ellisland, or to

till another man's acres; he was therefore little disappointed when that charge came

to an end. It was thought best that Burns should give up farming and come up to

Dumfries, a more convenient centre than Ellisland for his excursions on behalf of the

Excise. Accordingly, in December 1791, his wife and he settled in a town house in

the Mill Vennel. He was now not writing much poetry, although in 1789 he had

printed anonymously The Prayer of Holy Willie, in 1790 had indited the immortal

Tam o' Shanter, and ever since 1787 and until his death was contributing songs,

some original and some adapted, to "The Scots Musical Museum." Of the last years

of Burns's life there is little to record that is agreeable. It was by the worst of mischances

that he was led to settle in a little county-town where there was everything to tempt

his weaknesses and nothing to stimulate his genius. His discontent found voice in a

very unwise championship of the principles of the French Revolution; these Jacobin

sentiments alienated him still further from those whose companionship might have been

useful to him. He grew moody and hypochondriacal. He forgot that life had ever

been fire in his veins; he wrote, "I have only known existence by the pressure of

sickness and counted time by the repercussions of pain." Yet, as late as 1794, he

could write the Address to the Deil, and his songs were tuneable to the very last.

But he drank himself into degradation; the vitality in him was "burned to a

cinder." His last days were darkened

with the fear of being sent to gaol for

debt. On the 21st of July 1796 this

great poet and delightful man was re-

leased from a world in which he had

no longer any place for happiness.

The personal appearance of Burns in

his prime was manly and attractive,

without much refinement of feature,

but glowing with health and the ardour

of the instincts. Sir Walter Scott, who,

when a boy of fifteen, saw Burns—

"Virgilium vidi tantum,"—has pre-

served a very fine description of him.

"His person was robust, his manners

rustic, not clownish. There was a

strong expression of shrewdness in his

lineaments; the eye alone indicated

the poetic character and temperament.

It was large and of a dark cast, and

literally glowed when he spoke with

feeling or interest. I never saw such

another eye in a human head," not even

in that of Byron. His manners to women

were exceeding insinuating; the Duchess

of Gordon remarked that "his address to

females was always deferential, and always with a turn to the pathetic or humorous,

which engaged their attention particularly." Both these tributes date from 1786,

when the powers and graces of Burns were at their fullest expansion, and had not

begun to decay.

Mrs. Dunlop

After a Portrait by J. Irvine

From "Tam o' Shanter."

The wind blew as 'twad blawn its last ;

The rattlin' showers rose on the blast :

The speedy gleams the darkness swallow'd ;

Loud, deep, and lang, the thunder bellow'd ;

That night a child might understand,

The deil had business on his hand.

Weel mounted on his grey mare, Meg—

A better never lifted leg—

Tam skelpit thro' dub and mire,

Despising wind, and rain, and fire ;

Whiles holding fast his guid blue bonnet ;

Whiles crooning o'er some auld Scots sonnet ;

Whiles glow'ring round wi' prudent cares,

Lest bogles catch him unawares ;

26

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Kirk-Alloway was drawing nigh,

Where ghaists and houlets nightly cry—

By this time he was cross the ford,

Where in the snaw the chapman smoor'd ;

And past the birks and meikle stane,

Where drunken Charlie brak's neck-bane ;

And thro' the whins, and by the cairn,

Where hunters fand the murder'd bairn ;

Alloway Kirk

And near the thorn, aboon the well,

Where Mungo's mither hang'd hersel—

Before him Doon pours all his floods ;

The doubling storm roars through the woods ;

The lightnings flash from pole to pole ;

Near and more near the thunders roll ;

When glimmering thro' the groaning trees,

Kirk-Alloway seem'd in a breeze ;

Thro' ilka bore the beams were glancing,

And loud resounded mirth and dancing.

Sweet Thou art, pledge o' muckle love,

And ward o' mony a fray,

That heart o' stone wad thou ma move,

The helpless, sweet & fair

November hieples o'er the lea,

Chill on thy lovely form,

And gane, alas! the sheltering tree,

Shall shield thee frae the storm.

Fragment of a MS. Poem by Robert Burns

BURNS

27

From "Address to the Deil."

O thou ! whatever title suit thee,

Auld Hornie, Satan, Nick, or Clootie,

Wha in yon cavern grim and sootie,

Closed under hatches,

Spairges about the brunstane cootie,

To scaud poor wretches !

Hear me, auld Hangie, for a wee,

An' let poor damned bodies be :

I'm sure sma' pleasure it can gie,

E'en to a deil,

To skelp an' scauld poor dogs like me,

An' hear us squeel !

Great is thy pow'r, an' great thy fame ;

Far ken'd and noted is thy name ;

An' tho' yon lowin' heugh's thy hame,

Thou travels far ;

An' faith ! thou's neither lag nor lame,

Nor blate nor scaur.

Whiles, ranging like a roarin' lion,

For prey, a' holes and corners tryin' ;

Whyles on the strong-wing'd tempest flyin',

Tirlin' the kirks ;

Whyles, in the human bosom pryin',

Unseen thou lurks.

I've heard my reverend grannie say,

In lanely glens ye like to stray ;

Or where auld ruin'd castles gray

Nod to the moon,

Ye fright the nightly wand'rer's way,

Wi' eldritch croon.

When twilight did my grannie summon,

To say her prayers, douce, honest woman !

Aft yont the dyke she's heard you bumm'in',

Wi' eerie drone ;

Or, rustlin', thro' the boortries comin',

Wi' heavy groan.

Ae dreary, windy, winter night,

The stars shot down wi' sklentint' light,

Wi' you, mysel', I gat a fright,

Ayont the lough ;

Ye, like a rash-bush stood in sight,

Wi' waving sough.

The cudgel in my nieve did shake,

Each bristl'd hair stood like a stake,

When wi' an eldritch stour, quaick—quaick—

Amang the springs,

Awa ye squatter'd like a drake,

On whistling wings.

28

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

WHISTLE AND I'LL COME TO YOU, MY LAD.

Oh whistle, and I'll come to you, my lad,

Oh whistle, and I'll come to you, my lad ;

'Tho' father and mither and a' should gae mad,

Oh whistle, and I'll come to you, my lad.

But warily tent, when ye come to court me,

And come na unless the back-yett be a-jee ;

Syne up the back stile, and let naebody see,

And come as ye were na comin' to me.

And come, &c.

Oh whistle, &c.

At kirk, or at market, whence'er ye meet me,

Gang by me as tho' that ye cared nae a flíc ;

But steal me a blink o' your bonnie black e'e,

Yet look as ye were na lookin' at me.

Yet look, &c.

Oh whistle, &c.

Aye wow and protest that ye care na for me,

And whiles ye may lightly my beauty a wee ;

But court nae anither, tho' jokin' ye be,

For fear that she wile your fancy frae me.

For fear, &c.

Oh whistle, &c.

House at Dumfries where Burns Died

A RED, RED ROSE.

O my love's like a red, red rose,

That's newly sprung in June :

O my love's like the melody

That's sweetly played in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,

So deep in love am I ;

And I will love thee still, my dear,

'Till a' the seas gang dry.

'Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,

And the rocks melt wi' the sun,

I will love thee still, my dear,

While the sands o' life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only love !

And fare thee weel a while !

And I will come again, my love,

Though it were ten thousand mile.

BURNS

Your book is dear, on the road to reach me. As to printing of Poetry, when you prepare it for the Press, you have only to see it right, & place the capital letters properly: as to the punctuation, the Printers do that themselves.

I have a copy of 'Tam o' Shanter ready to send you by the first opportunity: it is too heavy to send by Post

I heard of M.r Colbet lately. - He, in consequence of your recommendation is most zealous to serve me - Please favour me soon with an account of your good folks; & M.r

Hervie is recovering, & the young gentleman doing well

I amever, my dear Friend honoured Botany,

yours sincerely

Rob.t Burns

Extract from Letter from Burns to Mrs. Dunlop

JOHN ANDERSON, MY JO.

John Anderson, my jo, John,

When we were first acquent,

Your locks were like the raven,

Your bonnie brow was brent ;

But now your brow is bled, John,

Your locks are like the snaw ;

But blessings on your frosty pow,

John Anderson, my jo.

John Anderson, my jo, John,

We clamb the hill thegither ;

And many a canty day, John,

We've had wi' ane anither.

Now we maun totter down, John,

But hand in hand we'll go :

And sleep thegither at the foot,

John Anderson, my jo.

We have spoken of Burns as he comes to us in the sequence of the great poets of Britain. In Scottish poetry he takes a somewhat different place. Here he seems not one in a chain, but the supreme artist to whom all others are merely subsidiary. Scotch Doric verse appears to us like a single growth, starting from the rich foliage of Dunbar and his compeers,

Greyfriars' Churchyard

From a Drawing by W. H. Bartlett

Scotch Doric Verse.

30

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

up the slender stem of Alexander Scott, of Sempills, of Montgomery, of Allan

Ramsay, of the song-writers of the eighteenth cen-

tury, swelling into the fine opening bud of Fergus-

son, only to break into the single aloe-blossom of

the perfect Burns. All local Scottish verse, from

the early sixteenth century until to-day, pre-

supposes Burns; it all expands towards him or

dwindles from him. If his works were entirely

to disappear, we could re-create some idea of

his genius from the light that led to it and from

the light that withdraws from it. This absolute

supremacy of Burns, to perfect whose amazing

art the Scottish race seemed to suppress and to

despoil itself, is a very remarkable phenomenon.

Burns is not merely the national poet of Scot-

land; he is, in a certain sense, the country

itself : all elements of Scotch life and manners,

all peculiarities of Scotch temperament and conviction, are found embroidered

somewhere or other on Burns's

variegated singing-robes.

Dr. Blacklock

After an original Portrait

The Poets

of the

Eighties.

It is obvious that these four great

poets of the eighties are not merely

"great" in very various degree, but

are singularly unlike one another.

Cowper so literary, Crabbe so

conventional, Blake so transcen-

dental, Burns so spontaneous and

passionate-there seems no sort of

relation between them. The first

two look backward resolutely, the

third resolutely upward, the fourth

broadly stretches himself on the

impartial bosom of nature, careless

of all rules and conventions. It

appears impossible to bring them

into line, to discover a direction in

which all four can be seen to move

together. But in reality there is to

be discovered in each of them a

protest against rhetoric which was

to be the keynote of revolt, the

protest already being made by

Goethe and Wieland, and so soon

to be echoed by Alfieri and André

Chenier. There was in each of the four British poets, who illuminated this

darkest period just before the dawn, the determination to be natural and

Mrs. Thomson (Jessie Lewers)

After a Portrait by J. Irvine

Marshline

13th

Nov.

1788

Madam

I

had

the

very

great

pleasure

of

dining

at

Dunlop

yesterday.

Men

are

said

to

flatter

women

because

they

are

weak,

't

is

so;

Poets

must

be

weaker

still;

for

Misses

Rachel

&

Reith

&

Miss

georgina

M'Kay,

with

their

flattering

attentions

&

artful

compliments,

absolutely

turned

my

head.

I

own

they

did

not

lord

me

over

as

a

Poet

does

his

Patron

or

still

more

his

Patroness,

nor

did

they

cogal

me

up

as

an

american

Breach'd

does

L

brandy;

but

they

so

intoxicated

me

with

their

sly

innuendations

&

delicate

nuendoes

of

Compliment

that

if

it

had

not

been

for

a

lucky

recollection

how

much

additional

weight

I

lust

to

your

good

opinion

&

friendship

must

give

me

in

that

circle,

I

had

certainly

looked

on

my

self

as

a

person

of

no

small

consequence

I

dare

not

say

one

word

how

much

I

was

charmed

with

the

Major's

friendly

welcome,

elegant

manner

&

acute

remark,

lest

I

should

be

thought

to

balance

my

Letter

from

Burns

to

Mrs.

Dunlop

anecdotes of applause over against the finest Quay in Ayrshire which he made a present of to help adorn my farm-stock. — As it was on Hallowda.

I am determined annually as that day returns to decorate her horns with an Ode of gratitude to the family of Dunlop.

The songs in the 2d Vol. of the Museum, marked D are D. Blacklock's; but as I am sorry to say they are far short of his other works, I, who only know the cyphers of them all, shall never let it be known.

Those marked T, are the work of an obscure, wiling, but extraordinary body of the name of Tytler: a mortal, who though he drudges about Edin

is a common printer, with leaky shoes, a dirty-lighted hat, & knee-buckles as unlike as George-by-the-grace-of-god & Solomon-the-son-of-David, yet that same unknown drunken Mortal is author & compiler

three fourths of Elliot's pompous Encyclopedia! By those marked, D, I have given to the world as old verses to their respective tunes; but in fact,

of a good many of them, little more than the known

ancient; tho' there is no reason for telling every body

this piece of intelligence. — Next letter I write you, I shall

send one or two sheets of verses I intend for Johnson's

3d Volume. —

What you mention of the thanksgiving

day is inspiration from above — Is it not

remarkable, oddly remarkable, that tho'

manners are more civilized, & the rights

of mankind better understood, by an Augustan

century's improvement, yet in this very reign of

heavenly Hanoverianism, & almost in this very year,

an empire beyond the Atlantic has had its Revo-

lution too; & for the very same maladministration &

legislative misdemeanors in the illustrious Sapient

ipotent Family of H — as was complained of

in the tyrannical & bloody house of Stuart."

So soon as I know of your arrival at Dunlop, I

shall take the first conveniency to dedicate a day of hap-

piness to you & Friendship, under the guarantes

of the Mayor's hospitality. - There will soon be three

score & ten miles of permanent distance between us; & now

that your friendship & friendly correspondence is entwined with

the heart-strings of my enjoyment of life, I must indulge

myself in a feast-day of the feast of reason & the flow. of soul.

I have the honor to be Madam, your grateful humble servt

Robt. Burns

THE PROTEST AGAINST RHETORIC

31

sincere. It was this that gave Cowper his directness and his delicacy;

it was this which stamps with the harsh mark of truth the sombre vignettes

of Crabbe, just as truly as it gave voluptuous ecstasy to the songs of Blake,

and to the strong, homely verse of Burns its potent charm and mastery.

It was reality that was rising to drive back into oblivion the demons of

conventionality, of "regular diction," of the proprieties and machinery of

composition, of all the worn-out bogies with which poetical old women

frightened the baby talents of the end of the eighteenth century. Not all was

done, even by these admirable men: in Burns himself we constantly hear

the verbiage grating and grinding on; in his slow movements Crabbe is not

to be distinguished from his predecessors of a hundred years; Cowper is for

ever showing qualities of grace and elegant amenity which tempt us to call

him, not a forerunner of the nineteenth, but the finest example of the

eighteenth-century type. Yet the revolt against rhetorical convention is

uppermost, and that is which is really the characteristic common feature of

this singularly dissimilar quartette; and when the least inspired, the least

revolutionary of the four takes us along the dismal coast that his childhood

knew so well, and bids us mark how

"Here on its wiry stem, in rigid bloom,

Grows the salt lavender that lacks perfume;

Here the dwarf sallows creep, the septfoil harsh,

And the soft, shiny mallow of the marsh,"

we observe that the reign of empty verbiage is over, and that the poets

who shall for the future wish to bring concrete ideas before us will do

so in sincere and exact language. That position once regained, the revival

of imaginative writing is but a question of time and of opportunity.

A very singular circumstance was the brevity of duration of this school

of the eighties, if school it can be called. Burns was unknown until 1786,

and in 1796 he died. Cowper's original productions, so far as they were

not posthumous, were presented to the world in 1782 and 1785, and for nine

years before his death in 1800 he had been removed from human inter-

course. Blake remained as completely invisible as any one of his own

elemental angels, and his successive collections can scarcely be said to

have done more than exist, since even those which were not, like the

Prophetic Books, distributed in a species of manuscript were practically

unobserved. Crabbe had a very curious literary history: his career was

divided into two distinct portions, the one extending from 1780 to 1785,

the other continued from 1807; from his thirty-first to his fifty-third year

Crabbe was obstinately silent. We may say, therefore, that the transi-

tional period in English poetry, hanging unattached between the classical

and the romantic age, lasted from 1780 to 1786. During these seven years

a great deal of admirable verse was brought before the observation of

English readers, who had to make the best they could of it until the real

romantic school began in 1798. In Cowper, Crabbe, Burns, and Blake,

we look in vain for any exotic influence of any importance. Cowper was

32

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

a good scholar and translated Homer, but Greek poetry left no mark on his

style; the others were innocent of ancient learning, and they were united in

this also, that they are exclusively, almost provincially, British.

Minor

Poets.

Meanwhile, the old classical tradition did not perceive itself to be

undermined. If criticism touched these poets at all—Blake evaded it, by

Burns it was bewildered—it judged them complacently by the old canons.

They did not possess, in the eyes of contemporaries, anything of the

supreme isolation which we now award to them. The age saw them

accompanied by a crowd of bards of the old class, marshalled under the

laureateship of Whitehead, and of these several had an air of import-

ance. Among these minnows, Erasmus Darwin was a triton who threw

his preposterous scientific visions

into verse of metallic brilliance,

and succeeded in finishing what

Dryden had begun. But with this

partial and academic exception,

everything that was written, except

in the form of satire, between

1780 and 1798, in the old manner,

merely went further to prove the

absolute decadence and wretched-

ness to which the classical school

of British poetry was reduced.

Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802),

was born at Elston Hall, in Nottinghamshire, on the 12th of December

1731. He was educated at Chesterfield

School, and proceeded to St. John's,

Cambridge, in 1750. He studied

medicine at Edinburgh, and settled as

a physician in Lichfield towards the

close of 1756. Here he became a

Erasmus Darwin

After the Portrait by Joseph Wright of Derby

useful and prominent man, gradually extending his reputation as a philanthropist as

well as a doctor. Darwin built himself a villa just outside Lichfield, with fountains

and a grotto, and here he carried on the botanical studies of his middle life. Here,

also, he turned to the composition of poetry, but for a long time in secret, lest it

should damage his practice. He was nearly fifty years of age before he ventured to

publish, anonymously, his earliest work, The Loves of the Plants (1789). Some

years before this he had married a wealthy widow, Mrs. Chandos-Pole, and had moved

to her estate, Redbourne Hall, near Derby. He afterwards moved into Derby itself,

and finally to Breadsall Priory. In 1792 he published The Economy of Vegetation,

which, with The Loves of the Plants, formed the poem since called The Botanic

Garden. Darwin now turned to prose and produced several theoretical treatises, in

particular, Zoonomia (1794) and Phytologia (1800); he also wrote a very curious

work on Female Education in Boarding Schools (1797). A final poem The

ERASMUS DARWIN

33

Temple of Nature, was posthumous (1803). Erasmus Darwin died at Breadsall on

the 18th of April 1802, and a highly entertaining life of him—one of the curiosities of

biographical literature—was published soon afterwards by another Lichfield poet, Anna

Seward (1747-1809), who seems to have wished to revenge the spretae injuria formae.

Darwin was the centre of a curious provincial society of amiable pedants and blue

stockings, to all of whom he was vastly superior in intellect and character. He was

an amateur in philosophy, in verse a tasteless rhetorician, but he was a man of very

remarkable force of personal character, amiable, vigorous, and eccentric. It is

never to be forgotten that he was the worthy grandfather of a far more eminent

contributor to human knowledge, Charles Darwin.

From “The Botanic Garden.”

And now, Philanthropy, thy beams divine

Dart round the globe from Zembla to the Line;

O'er each dark prison plays the cheering light,

As northern lustres o'er the vault of night;

From realm to realm, by cross or crescent crown'd,

Where'er mankind and misery are found,

O'er burning sands, deep waves, or wilds of snow,

Thy Howard, journeying, seeks the house of woe;

Down many a winding step to dungeons dark,

Where anguish wails, and galling fetters clank;

To caves bestrew'd with many a mould'ring bone,

And cells, whose echoes only learn to groan;

Where no kind bars a whispering friend disclose,

No sunbeam enters, and no zephyr blows,

He treads inemulous of fame or wealth,

Profuse of toil, and prodigal of health;

With soft persuasive eloquence expands

Power's rigid heart, and opes his clenching hands;

Leads stern-ey'd Justice to the dark domains,

If not to sever, to relax the chains;

Or guides awaken'd Mercy through the gloom,

And shows the prison sister to the tomb;

Gives to her babes the self-devoted wife,

To her fond husband liberty and life!

The spirits of the good, who bend from high,

Wide o'er these earthly scenes, their partial eye,

When first, arrayed in Virtue's purest robe,

They saw her Howard traversing the globe;

Saw round his brow, the sun-bright glory blaze

In arroy circles of unwearied rays,

Mistook a mortal for an angel guest,

And asked what seraph-foot the earth imprest.

Onward he moves, Disease and Death retire,

And murmuring Demons hate him, and admire.

It was a happy instinct to turn once more to foreign forms of poetic

utterance, and a certain credit attaches to those who now began to cultivate

the sonnet. Two slender collections, the one by Thomas Russell, and the

other by William Lisle Bowles, both of which appeared in 1789, exhibited

VOL. IV.

C

34

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

the results of the study of Petrarch. Of these two men, Russell, who died prematurely in 1788, was the better as well as the more promising poet; his Philoctetes in Lemnos is doubtless the finest English sonnet of the century.

But he attracted little notice ; while Bowles was fortunate enough to extend a powerful and, to say the truth, an unaccountable spell over Coleridge, who doubtless brought to

William Lisle Bowles

the mild quatorzains of Bowles much more than he found there. Russell was the first English imitator of the budding romantic poetry of Germany. It is necessary to mention here the pre-Wordsworthian, or, more properly, pre-Byronic, publications of Samuel Rogers-the Poems of 1786, the accomplished and mellifluous Pleasures of Memory of 1792, the Epistle to a Friend of 1798. These were written in a style, or in a neutral tint of all styles mingled, that elegantly recalls the easier parts of Goldsmith. Here, too, there was some faint infusion of Italian influence. But truly the early Rogers survives so completely on traditional sufferance that it is not needful to say more about it here ; a much later Rogers will demand a word a little further on.

Of the two clergymen who divide the credit of having re-introduced the sonnet into general practice in England, the Rev. William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850), was born at King's Sutton, where his father was vicar. He went to Winchester, where Dr. Joseph Warton (1722-1800), himself a graceful poet, was head-master, and gave a literary character to the school. Bowles proceeded to Trinity College, Oxford, in 1781. In 1789 he published a pamphlet of Fourteen Sonnets, which "delighted and inspired" the youthful S. T. Coleridge, and which were widely read and admired. Bowles rose in the Church, and became in 1828 a canon residentiary of Salisbury Cathedral. In 1806 an edition of Pope, which he brought out, engaged him in a lively public controversy with Byron. Bowles died at Salisbury in April 1850. The career of the Rev. Thomas Russell (1762-1788) began in close parallelism with that of Bowles, but was soon cut short. Russell was the son of an attorney at Beaminster. He also went to Winchester, and came under the influence of Joseph Warton. He was a precocious and excellent scholar, and, proceeding to Oxford, was elected a Fellow of New College in his nineteenth year. He made a special study of the modern continental literatures of his time. He was attacked by phthisis, and rapidly succumbed to it, dying at Bristol Hot Wells on the 31st of July 1788. Russell published nothing in his life-time, but his posthumous Sonnets were collected in 1789, the same year as Bowles's appeared; some miscellaneous lyrics were appended to the little volume. Russell's great sonnet on Philoctetes has been universally admired.

WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

35

SONNET.

(Supposed to be written at Lemnos.)

On this lone Isle, whose rugged rocks affright

The cautious Pilot, ten revolving years

Great Pæan's son, unwonted erst to tears,

Wept o'er his wound : alike each rolling light

Of heaven he watch'd, and blam'd its lingering flight;

By day the sea-mew screaming round his cave

Drove slumber from his eyes, the chiding wave

And savage howlings chas'd his dreams by night.

Hope still was his : in each low breeze, that sigh'd

Thro' his rude grot, he heard a coming oar,

In each white cloud a coming sail he spied;

Nor seldom listen'd to the fancied roar

Of Oeta's torrents, or the hoarser tide

That parts fam'd Trachis from th' Euboic shore.

But an event was now preparing of an importance in the history of English literature so momentous that all else appears insignificant by its side. In June 1797 a young Cambridge man named SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, who was devoted to poetry, paid a visit to another young Cambridge man named WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, who was then settled with his sister Dorothy near Crewkerne, in Dorset.

The Wordsworths had been deeply concerned in poetical experiment, and William showed to his guest a fragment which he had lately composed in blank verse; we may read it now as the opening of the first book of the Excursion. Coleridge was overwhelmed; he pronounced 'the poem "superior to anything in our language which in any way resembled it," and he threw in his lot unreservedly with Wordsworth. The brother and sister were then just in the act to move to a house called Alfoxden, in West Somerset, where they settled in July 1797. Coleridge was then living at Nether Stowey, close by, a spur of the Quantocks and two romantic coombes lying between them.

On these delicious hills, in sight of the yellow Bristol Channel, English poetry was born again during the autumn months of 1797, in the endless walks and talks of the three enthusiasts—three, since Dorothy Wordsworth, though she wrote not, was a sharer, if not an originator, in all their audacities and inspirations.

Wordsworth and Coleridge had each published collections of verses, containing some numbers of a certain merit, founded on the best descriptive masters of the eighteenth century. But what they had hitherto given to the public appeared to them mere dross by the glow of their new illumina-

William Wordsworth

After the Portrait by Robert Hancock

36

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

tion. Dorothy Wordsworth appears to have long been drawn towards the

minute and sensitive study of natural phenomena; William Wordsworth

already divined his philosophy of landscape; Coleridge was thus early an

impassioned and imaginative metaphysician. They now distributed their

gifts to one another, and kindled in each a hotter fire of impulse. A year

went by, and the enthusiasts of the Quantocks published, in September 1798,

the little volume of Lyrical Ballads which put forth in modest form the

results of their combined lucubrations. Mrs. S. T. Coleridge, who was not

admitted to the meditations of the poetic three, gaily announced that "the

Lyrical Ballads are not liked at all by any," and this was, rather crudely put,

the general first opinion of the public. It is proper that we should

remind ourselves what this epoch-making volume contained.

It was anonymous, and nothing indicated the authorship, although the adver-

tisements might reveal that Southey, Lamb,

Lloyd, and Coleridge himself were of the

confraternity to which its author or authors

belonged. The contributions of Words-

worth were nineteen, of Coleridge only

four; but among these last, one, the Rime

of the Ancyent Marincre, was of prepon-

derating length and value, "professedly

written," so the preface said, "in imitation

of the style as well as of the spirit of the

elder poets." This very wonderful poem,

Coleridge's acknowledged masterpiece, had

been composed in November 1797, and

Cottage at Nether Stowey occupied

by S. T. Coleridge, 1797-1800

finished, so Dorothy records, on "a beauti-

ful evening, very starry, the horned moon

shining." A little later Christabel was

begun, and, in "a lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Lynton "

(probably early in 1798), Kubla Khan. Neither of these, however, nor

the magnificent Ode to France, nor Fears in Solitude, make their appear-

ance in the Lyrical Ballads of 1798. In this volume Wordsworth is

predominant, and his contributions exemplify two of his chief aims in

poetical revolution. He desired to destroy the pompous artificiality of verse-

diction and to lower the scale of subjects deemed worthy of poetical

treatment; in this he was but partly judicious, and such experiments as

"Anecdote for Fathers" and the "Idiot Boy" gave scoffers an occasion

to blaspheme. But Wordsworth also designed to introduce into verse an

impassioned consideration of natural scenes and objects as a reflection of the

complex life of man, and in this he effected a splendid revolution. To

match such a lyric as the "Tables Turn'd" it was necessary to return to the

age of Milton, and in the "Lines written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,"

THE

"LYRICAL

BALLADS"

37

Wordsworth somewhat shyly slipped in at the end of the volume a statement

of his literary creed, and an example of the new manner of writing so noble,

so full, and so momentous, that it has never been excelled, even by himself.

Thus, in a little russet volume published at Bristol, and anonymously put

forth by two struggling lads of extreme social obscurity, the old order of

things literary was finally and completely changed. The romantic school

began, the classic school disappeared, in the autumn of 1798. It would be

a great error, of course, to suppose that this revolution was patent to the

world: the incomparable originality and value of "Tintern Abbey" was

noted, as is believed, by one solitary reader; the little book passed as a

collection of irregular and somewhat mediocre verse, written by two eccentric

young men suspected of political disaffection. But the change was made, never-the-

less; the marvellous verses were circulated, and everywhere they created disciples. So

stupendous was the importance of the verse written on the Quantocks in 1797 and 1798,

that if Wordsworth and Coleridge had died at the close of the latter year we should

indeed have lost a great deal of valuable poetry, especially of Wordsworth's; but the

direction taken by literature would scarcely have been modified in the slightest degree.

The association of these intensely brilliant and inflammatory minds at what we call

the psychological moment, produced full-blown and perfect the exquisite new flower

of romantic poetry.

LYRICAL BALLADS,

WITH

A FEW OTHER POEMS.

BRISTOL:

PRINTED BY BIGGS AND COTTLE,

FOR T. N. LONGMAN, PATERNOSTER-ROW, LONDON

Title-page of First Edition of

"Lyrical Ballads"

Burns had introduced "a natural delineation of human passions;" Cowper

had rebelled against "the gaudiness and inane phraseology" of the

eighteenth century in its decay; Crabbe had felt that "the language of

conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the

purposes of poetic pleasure." These phrases, from the original preface of

1798, did not clearly enough define the objects of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

To the enlarged second edition, therefore, of 1800, the former prefixed a

more careful and lucid statement of their distinguishing principles. This

preface, extending to nearly fifty pages, is the earliest of those disquisitions

on the art of verse which would give Wordsworth high rank among critics

if the lustre of his prose were not lost in the blaze of his poetry.

During these last two years of the century the absolute necessity for a

radical reform of literature had impressed itself upon many minds. Words-

worth found himself the centre of a group of persons, known to him or

unknown, who were anxious that "a class of poetry should be produced"

on the lines indicated in "Tintern Abbey," and who believed that it would

38

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

be "well adapted to interest mankind permanently," which the poetry of the

older school had manifestly ceased to do. It was to these observers, these

serious disciples, that the important manifesto of 1800 was addressed. This

was no case of genius working without consciousness of its own aim; there

was neither self-delusion nor mock-modesty about Wordsworth. He con-

sidered his mission to be one of extreme solemnity. He had determined

that no "indolence" should "prevent him from endeavouring to ascertain

what was his duty," and he was convinced that that duty was called to

redeem poetry in England from a state of "depravity," and to start the

composition of "poems materially different from those upon which general

approbation is [in 1800] at present bestowed." He was determined to build up

a new art on precept and example, and this is what he did achieve with astonishing

completeness.

In the neighbourhood of the Quantocks,

where he arrived at the very moment that

his powers were at their ripest and his

genius eager to expand, Wordsworth found

himself surrounded by rustic types of a

pathetic order, the conditions of whose life

were singularly picturesque. He was in

the state of transition between the ignor-

ance of youth and that hardness and

density of apprehension which invaded

his early middle life. His observation

was keen and yet still tender and ductile.

He was accompanied and stimulated in

his investigations by his incomparable

sister. To them came Coleridge, swim-

ming in a lunar radiance of sympathy

and sentimental passion, casting over

the more elementary instincts of the Wordsworths the distinction of

his elaborate intellectual experience. Together on the ferny hills, in the

deep coombes, by "Kilve's sounding shore," the wonderful trio dis-

cussed, conjectured, planned; and from the spindles of their talk there

was swiftly spun the magic web of modern romantic poetry. They

determined, as Wordworth says, that "the passions of men should be

incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature." All

elements were there—the pathetic peasants, the pure solitudes of hill and

wood and sky, the enthusiastic perception of each of these, the moment

in the history of the country, the companionship and confraternity which

circulate the tongues of fire—and accordingly the process of combination

and creation was rapid and conclusive.

There are, perhaps, no two other English poets of anything like the

S. T. Coleridge

After the Portrait by Peter Vandyke

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

AFTER THE PORTRAIT BY HENRY W.PICKERSGILL.

WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

same importance who resemble one another so closely as do Wordsworth and Coleridge at the outset of their career. They were engaged together to a degree which it is difficult for us to estimate to-day, in breaking down the false canons of criticism which rhetorical writers had set up, and in recurring to a proper and beautiful use of common English. In so doing and writing in close companionship, interested in the same phenomena, immersed in the same scenery, it is not extraordinary that the style that each adopted strictly resembled the style of the other. This is especially true of their blank verse, a form which both sedulously cultivated, in which both enshrined some of their most characteristic thoughts, and in which both were equally engaged in destroying that wooden uniformity of pause and cadence with which Akenside had corrupted the cold but stately verse of Thomson. Who was to decide by whom the “Nightingale” and by whom the “Night-Piece” of 1798 were written ? The accent, the attitude, were almost precisely identical.

Yet distinctions there were, and as we become familiar with the two poets these predominate more and more over the superficial likeness. Coleridge is conspicuous, to a degree beyond any other writer between Spenser and Rossetti, for a delicate, voluptuous languor, a rich melancholy, and a pitying absorption without vanity in his own conditions and frailties, carried so far that the natural objects of his verse take the qualities of the human Coleridge upon themselves. In Wordsworth we find a purer, loftier note, a species of philosophical severity which is almost stoic, a freshness of atmosphere which contrasts with Coleridge’s opaline dream-haze, magnifying and distorting common things. Truth, sometimes pursued to the confines or past the confines of triviality, is Wordsworth’s first object, and he never stoops to self-pity, rarely to self-study. Each of these marvellous poets is pre-eminently master of the phrase that charms and intoxicates, the sequence of simple words so perfect that it seems at once inevitable and miraculous. Yet here also a very distinct difference may be defined between the charm of Wordsworth and the magic of Coleridge. The former is held more under the author’s control than the latter, and is less impulsive. It owes its impressiveness to a species of lofty candour which kindles at the discovery of some beautiful truth not seen before, and gives the full intensity of passion to its expression. The latter is a sort of Æolian harp (such as that with which he enlivened the street of Nether Stowey) over which the winds of emotion play, leaving the instrument often without a sound or with none but broken murmurs, yet sometimes dashing from its chords a melody, vague and transitory indeed, but of a most unearthly sweetness. Wordsworth was not a great metrist ; he essayed comparatively few and easy forms, and succeeded best when he was at his simplest. Coleridge, on the other hand, was an innovator ; his Christabel revolutionised English prosody and opened the door to a thousand experiments ; in Kubla Khan and in some of the lyrics, Coleridge attained a splendour of verbal melody which places him near the summit of the English Parnassus.

40

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

In an historical survey such as the present, it is necessary to insist on the

fact that although Coleridge survived until 1834, and Wordsworth until 1850,

the work which produced the revolution in poetic art was done before the

close of 1800. It was done, so far as we can see, spontaneously. But in that

year the Wordsworths and their friend proceeded to Germany, for the stated

purpose of acquainting themselves with what the Teutonic world was achiev-

ing in literature. In Hamburg they visited the aged Klopstock, but felt them-

S. T. Coleridge

From a Drawing by J. Kayser in the possession of E. H. Coleridge, Esq.

selves far more cordially drawn towards the work of Bürger and Schiller, in

whom they recognised poets of nature, who, like themselves, were fighting

the monsters of an old, outworn classicism. Wordsworth was but cautiously

interested; he had just spoken scornfully of "sickly and stupid German trage-

dies." Coleridge, on the other hand, was intoxicated with enthusiasm, and

plunged into a detailed study of the history, language, and philosophy of

Germany. Bürger, whose Lenore (1774) had started European romanticism, was

now dead; but Goethe and Schiller were at the height of their genius. The last-

mentioned had just produced his Wallenstein, and Coleridge translated or

paraphrased it in two parts; these form one of the very few versions

from any one language into another which may plausibly be held to excel

the original. In the younger men, with whom he should have been in

more complete harmony—in Tieck, in the young, yet dying Novalis, in the

Schlegels—Coleridge at this time took but little interest. The fact is that,

tempting as was to himself and Wordsworth then, and to us now, the idea of

linking the German to the English revival, it was not very easy to contrive.

The movements were parallel, not correlated; the wind of revolt, passing

over European poetry, struck Scandinavia and Germany first, then England,

then Italy and France, but each in a manner which forced it to be independent

of the rest.

WORDSWORTH

41

For the next fifteen years poetry may be said to have been stationary in

England. It was not, for that reason, sluggish or unprolific; on the con-

trary, it was extremely active. But its activity took the form of the gradual

acceptance of the new romantic ideas, the slow expulsion of the old classic

taste, and the multiplication of examples of what had once for all been

supremely accomplished in the hollows of the Quantocks. The career of

the founders of the school during these years of settlement and accepta-

tion may be briefly given. At the very close of 1799 Wordsworth went back

to his own Cumbrian county, and for the next half-century he resided, prac-

tically without intermission,

beside the little lakes which

he has made so famous–

Grasmere and Rydal. Here,

after marrying in 1802, he

lived in great simplicity and

dignity, gradually becoming

the centre of a distinguished

company of admirers. From

1799 to 1805 he was at

work on the Prelude, a did-

actic poem in which he

elaborated his system of

natural religion ; and he

began at Grasmere to use

the sonnet with a pers'stent

mastery and with a freedom

such as it had not known

since the days of Milton.

In 1814 the publication

of the Excursion made a

great sensation, at first not

wholly favourable, and gave

to the service of Wordsworth some of

the pleasures of martyrdom. In 1815 the poet collected his lyrical

writings.

Rydal Mount, occupied by Wordsworth from 1813

to his death in 1850

This date, 1814–15, therefore, is critical in the career of Wordsworth.

It forced his admirers and detractors alike to consider what was the real

nature of the innovation which he had introduced, and to what extreme it

could be pushed. In 1815 he once more put forth his views on the art of

verse in a brilliant prose essay, which may be regarded as his final, or at least

maturest utterance on the subject. At this moment a change came over the

aspect of his genius : he was now forty-five years of age, and the freshness

of his voice, which had lasted so long, was beginning to fail. He had a brief

Virgilian period, when he wrote Laodamia and Dion, and then the beautiful

talent hardened into rhetoric and sing-song. Had Wordsworth passed away

in 1815 instead of 1850, English literature had scarcely been the poorer. Of

Coleridge there is even less to be said. His career was a miserable tissue of

irregularity, domestic discord, and fatal indulgence in opium. In 1812 he

recast his old drama of Osorio as Remorse, a fine romantic tragedy on Jacobean

lines. He was occasionally adding a few lines to the delicious pamphlet of

poetry which at length found a publisher in 1817 as Sibylline Leaves. Yet

even here, all that was really important had been composed before

the end of the eighteenth century. Save for one or two pathetic and

momentary revivals of lyric power, Coleridge died as a poet before he was

thirty.

The name of ROBERT SOUTHEY has scarcely been mentioned yet,

although it is customary to connect it indissolubly with those of

his great friends. He was slightly younger than they, but more

precocious, and as early as 1793 he somewhat dazzled them by the

success of his Joan of Arc. From that time forth until shortly before

his death, in 1843, Southey never ceased to write. He was always

closely identified in domestic relations with Wordsworth, whose

neighbour he was in the Lakes for forty years, and with Coleridge,

who was his brother-in-law. He early accepted what we may call

the dry bones of the romantic system, and he published a series of

ambitious epics—Thalaba, Madoc, Kehama, Roderick—which he intended as

contributions to the new poetry. His disciple and latest unflinching

admirer, Sir Henry Taylor, has told us that Southey “took no pleasure in

poetic passion”—a melancholy admission. We could have guessed as much

from his voluminous and vigorous writing, from which imagination is

conspicuously absent, though eloquence, vehemence, fluency, and even fancy

are abundant. The best part of Southey was his full admiration of some

aspects of good literature, and his courageous support of unpopular

specimens of these. When Wordsworth was attacked, Southey said, in his

authoritative way, “A greater poet than Wordsworth there never has been,

nor ever will be.” He supported the original romantic movement by his

praise, his weighty personality, the popular character of his contributions.

But he added nothing to it; he could not do so, since, able and effective

man of letters as he was, Southey was not, in any intelligible sense, himself

a poet.

William Wordsworth

After the Portrait by Carruthers

WORDSWORTH

43

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), the second son of John Wordsworth and

Anne Cookson-Crackanthorp, his wife, was born at Cockermouth, in Cumberland, on

the 7th of April 1770. His father, an attorney, was confidential agent to Sir James

Lowther, afterwards Earl of Lonsdale. His mother, who died when he was eight,

remarked that the only one of her five children about whose future life she was

anxious was William, who was of "a stiff, moody, and violent temper." After a period

of schooling at Cockermouth, Wordsworth lived from 1778 to 1783, when his father

died, at Penrith, and went to school at Hawkshead. Mr. John Wordsworth had been

crippled by the extraordinary tyranny of Lord Lonsdale, who had forced him to lend

him his whole fortune—£5000—and who refused to repay it. The orphans were,

however, brought up by their paternal uncles, who, in 1787, sent William to St. John's

College, Cambridge. Here his intellectual nature developed to a degree which made

him henceforth, as he said, "a dedicated spirit." In the Prelude long afterwards

he describes a visit to the Continent which he paid in 1790, a vacation ramble in

Switzerland being then so unhackneyed an event that

he is justified in calling it

"an unprecedented course."

Wordsworth took his degree

early in 1791, and left Cambridge without having selected a profession. He lived

for some months, vaguely, in London, with no expressed

purpose; in the following winter he crossed over to France, arriving in Paris when

the Revolution, with which he entirely sympathised, was at its height. The year 1792 was spent at Orleans and at Blois, and after the massacres

of September Wordsworth returned, full of Girondist enthusiasm, to Paris. He was

prevented from taking an active part in French politics only by the ignominious but

most happy circumstance that his uncles cut off his allowance. The execution of Louis

XVI. was a tremendous shock to his moral nature, and his exultation over France was

turned to miserable grief. Between William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy there

had subsisted from infancy the tenderest bond of sympathy; she was keeping house at

Penrith when William rejoined his family early in 1793. Already they had formed the

design of living together alone in some cottage. Meanwhile, upon his return from

France, two thin pamphlets of Wordsworth's verse had been published—The Evening

Walk and Descriptive Sketches, which were in the old Poesque manner, and which

attracted no attention. In 1793 and 1794, when Wordsworth was not with his family,

he was with Raisley Calvert, a young man of great intelligence. Calvert now died and

left his friend a legacy of £900, on which he and his sister just contrived to live until

the new Lord Lonsdale redeemed his father's pledges. In this way Wordsworth was

able to devote himself entirely to meditation and poetry. In 1795 he persuaded his

sister to join him in a small house at Racedown, near Crewkerne, in Dorset, where at

last, in his twenty-sixth year, his genius began to display its true bent. Here he wrote

Dove Cottage

From a Photograph

44

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

the tragedy of The Borderers, and began, perhaps in 1796, The Excursion. Coleridge, who had met with An Evening Walk, was enthusiastically anxious to know its author, and a visit which he paid to the Wordsworths in June 1797 revealed to himself and to them their splendid vocation.

In July the Wordsworths were allowed to rent, for a nominal sum, the fine manor-house of Alfoxden, at the northern foot of the Quantocks, where they were within a walk of Coleridge's cottage at Nether Stowey.

Here the friends wrote that amazing collection, the Lyrical Ballads, which, in its first one-volume form, was published by Cottle in 1798.

William and Dorothy spent the ensuing winter months at Goslar, in Germany, and here the former wrote some of his most exquisite lyrics.

Here, too, he planned and began The Prelude, which remained unpublished until 1850.

The Wordsworths returned to England in 1799, and after some hesitation settled at Townend, near Grasmere.

He thus returned, at the age of thirty, to the scenes of his childhood, scenes which were to accompany him for the remainder of his life.

His sailor brother, John, shared the cottage with William and Dorothy during the greater part of 1800 : this brother it was—“a deep distress hath humanised my soul ”—who died so tragically within sight of shore five years afterwards.

Up to this time Wordsworth had lived mainly on Calvert's bequest, which was now reaching its end.

He would have been forced to seek for employment, but most happily, at the critical moment, in 1801, Lord Lonsdale recognised the claim upon him, and returned the £5000 which his father had borrowed, with £3500 as full interest on the debt.

On the interest of their shares of this money, together with a small annuity, William and Dorothy were now able to subsist, with strict frugality still, but without anxiety.

In 1802 Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson, of Penrith, a companion of the most delicate and appreciative susceptibility—Dorothy, of course, remaining a member of the household.

In the summer of 1803 the three travelled through Scotland—a tour commemorated in several of William's best poems, especially The Highland Girl.

In this year they formed the acquaintance of Walter Scott and of the painter, Sir George Beaumont, of Coleorton, who bought a little estate at Applethwaite, which he presented to Wordsworth, but the poet did not take it up.

The friendship with Beaumont, however, became one of the closest of his life.

The war with France, culminating in the battle of Trafalgar, excited the patriotism of Wordsworth, who wrote his Happy Warrior in 1805 as a requiem over Nelson, and his prose Convention of Cintra in 1808 as a contribution to practical politics.

In 1807 a valuable collection of his Poems appeared, containing much of what he had written since 1800.

Four children were born to him at Townend, when, in 1808, he moved to a larger house at the other end of Grasmere, where his last child, William, was born.

In 1811 the Wordsworths moved again to the parsonage of

AN

EVENING WALK.

An EPISTLE;

In VERSE.

ADDRESSED TO A YOUNG LADY,

FROM THE

I A K E S

OF THE

NORTH of ENGLAND.

BY

W. WORDSWORTH, B. A.

Of St. JOHN's, CAMBRIDGE.

LONDON:

Printed for J. Johnson, St. Paul's Church-Yard.

Title-page of Wordsworth's "Evening Walk," 1793

Grasmere. The deaths of two of his children in 1812 made it impossible to stay

in a place which, standing quite close to the churchyard, was to the parents an

hourly reminder of their loss. In the early months of 1813, then, they moved

to Rydal Mount, close to Ambleside, which was to be Wordsworth's home for the

remainder of his long life. He was at the same time appointed Distributor of Stamps

for the county of Westmoreland. Wordsworth now resided at Rydal as in a “Sabine

valley,” void of care and disturbance, with a few neighbours whom he distinguished

with his friendship, and who deserved it. He became more and more conservative

in his attitude towards life, and it is obvious that rather early what is called progress

passed him by. After 1810, moreover, he grew gradually fossilised, or at least

unbending, in his attitude to literature also, and the most fruitful portion of his

career closes with the publication of The Excursion in 1814. In 1815 he published

The White Doe of Rylstone, his only long poem with a story ; and in a famous

brace of essays, in which a reissue of his minor lyrics was set, he summed up his

practical theory of poetics. In 1820 he issued his Sonnets on the River Duddon,

and in 1820 he wrote a great deal of verse during a prolonged visit to Switzerland

and Italy. The Ecclesiastical Sketches and Memorials of a Tour on the Continent

belong to 1822. After this the years passed in great uniformity and stillness, broken

only by the somewhat frequent visits which Wordsworth, who loved to travel,

paid to the Continent and to Scotland. Of these, perhaps the most interesting

was that to Abbotsford in 1831, to part from the dying Sir Walter Scott. In 1832

his sister Dorothy, whose companionship had been so precious a birthright to him,

failed in mental health, and in 1834 he was called upon to bear the death of Coleridge.

In 1835 he published Yarrow Revisited. All this time his reputation was steadily increasing,

and he was seen magnified in that “celestial light” which Keble attributed to

Peel Castle, the subject of Wordsworth's Poem After the Picture by Sir George Beaumont

Wordsworth's Lodging at Hawkshead From a Photograph

46

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

his genius. When Southey died in 1843, Wordsworth was with difficulty persuaded

to yield to the Queen's personal wish, and accept the post of Poet Laureate. In

1847 his daughter, Dora Quillinan, died at Rydal, and

never healed. He sank from weakness, resulting on an

William Wordsworth

From a Drawing by "Alfred Croquis" [Daniel Maclise]

attack of pleurisy, on the 23rd of April 1850, and his last

Dora?" He had just entered his eighty-first year.

Wordsworth possessed a temperament of rare concentration, and he had the

power of retiring to the inner fount of his own being,

and resting there, to a degree scarcely paralleled in literary

history. A heroic inward happiness, founded upon

exalted reflection, is the keynote of Wordsworth's

character. "Fits of poetic inspiration," as Aubrey de

Vere has told us, "descended on him like a cloud, and,

till the cloud had drifted, he could see nothing beyond."

In these fits Wordsworth was, in his own words, "ex-

alted to the highest pitch of delight by the joyousness

and beauty of nature." The personal appearance of this most spiritual of poets

was apt to disappoint his hasty admirers. He looked a tall, bony, Cumbrian

yeoman, with a hard-featured countenance, honest and grave, but in no sense, and

at no time of life, beautiful.

From "Tintern Abbey."

O sylvan Wye ! Thou wanderer through the woods,

How often has my spirit turn'd to thee !

And now, with gleams of half-extinguish'd thought,

With many recognitions dim and faint,

And somewhat of a sad perplexity,

The picture of the mind revives again :

While here I stand, not only with the sense

Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts

That in this moment there is life and food

For future years. And so I dare to hope,

Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first

My dear Cottle,

I received your letter enclosing a £5 Bank note. I am in want of money. I shall therefore be obliged to you if you will remit to me (not to my Brother as I before requested) the remaining £5 as soon as you can without inconvenience. That probably your statement is accurate for myself I nowadays know nothing about it. What I told you was from Dorothy's memory & she is by no means certain about it.

You tell me the poems have not sold ill. I am —— probable I should wish to know what number have been sold.

Letter from Wordsworth to Cottle

From what I can gather it seems That The Caynuck Measure has run the whole beer as injurious to the sales volume , I mean that the Doctors & the Strangers , if it has deterred anybody from going on . If the volume should come to a second edition I would put in its place two things which would be more likely to sink the common talk . When you send the money they look over this letter & reply to this part of it . I shall be obliged to you if you will send me three copies of the Ballads enclosed in your parcel to Charles Hay & I shall easily get them from Tenreth . We are highly gratified by the affections which you obligingly to see us as we are somewhat . We are as yet not deter - mined where we shall settle have as

particular love in men, so it is impossible for us to say when we shall have The pleasure of meeting you.

God send his very kind love to you - God bless you, my dear Colle

your affectionate Jd

M Wordsworth

P.S.

I thank you for your care of our box. We do not wish want any of its contents.

R

22d June. Cockburn near Northallerton Yorkshire.

To be left at Smeaton

I have never heard from Colridge since our arrival in England. We are anxious for news of him. I hope he is coming home as he said write to us

WORDSWORTH

47

I came among these hills ; when like a roe

I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides

Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,

Wherever Nature led ; more like a man

Flying from something that he dreads, than one

Who sought the thing he loved. For Nature then

(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,

And their glad animal movements all gone by)

To me was all in all. I cannot paint

What then I was. The sounding cataract

Haunted me like a passion ; the tall rock,

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,

Their colours and their forms, were then to me

An appetite : a feeling and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm,

By thought supplied, or any interest

Unborrow'd from the eye. That time is past,

And all its aching joys are now no more,

And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this

Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur ; other gifts

Have follow'd, for such loss, I would believe,

Abundant recompense. For I have learn'd

To look on Nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth ; but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity,

Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean, and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man :

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows, and the woods,

And mountains ; and of all that we behold

From this green earth : of all the mighty world

Of eye and ear, both what they half create,

And what perceive ; well-pleased to recognise

In Nature and the language of the sense,

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.

LUCY.

She dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dove,

A maid whom there were none to praise

And very few to love.

A violet by a mossy stone

Half hidden from the eye !

Fair as a star, when only one

Is shining in the sky.

48

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be ;

But she is in her grave, and, oh,

The difference to me !

FROM "LAODAMIA."

He spake of love, such love as spirits feel

In worlds whose course is equable and pure ;

No fears to beat away-no strife to heal-

The past unsigh'd for, and the future sure ;

Spake, as a witness, of a second birth

For all that is most perfect upon earth :

Of all that is most beauteous-imaged there

In happier beauty ; more pellucid streams,

An ampler ether, a diviner air,

And fields invested with purpurea gleams ;

Climes which the sun, that sheds the brightest day

Earth knows, is all unworthy to survey.

SONNET.

The shepherd, looking eastward, softly said,

" Bright is thy veil, O moon, as thou art bright !"

Forthwith, that little cloud, in ether spread,

And penetrated all with tender light,

She cast away, and shew'd her fulgent head

Uncover'd ; dazzling the beholder's sight

As if to vindicate her beauty's right,

Her beauty thoughtlessly disparag'd.

Meanwhile that veil, removed or thrown aside,

Went floating from her, dark'ning as it went ;

And a huge mass, to bury or to hide,

Approach'd this glory of the firmament ;

Who monthly yields, and is obscured ; content

With one calm triumph of a modest pride.

LINES

Written in early Spring.

I heard a thousand blended notes,

While in a grove I sat reclined,

In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts

Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link

The human soul that through me ran ;

And much it griev'd my heart to think

What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that sweet bower,

The periwinkle trail'd its wreaths ;

And 'tis my faith that every flower

Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopp'd and play'd ;

Their thoughts I cannot measure ;

But the least motion which they made,

It seem'd a thrill of pleasure.

WORDSWORTH : COLERIDGE

49

The budding twigs spread out their fan,

To catch the breezy air ;

And I must think, do all I can,

That there was pleasure there.

If I these thoughts may not prevent,

If such be of my creed the plan,

Have I not reason to lament

What man has made of man?

FROM THE “ODE: INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY.

Then sing, ye birds, sing, sing a joyous song !

And let the young lambs bound

As to the tabor's sound !

We , in thought, will join your throng,

Ye that pipe and ye that play,

Ye that through your hearts to-day

Feel the gladness of the May !

What though the radiance which was once so bright

Be now for ever taken from my sight,

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower ;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind,

In the primal sympathy

Which having been, must ever be :

In the soothing thoughts that spring

Out of human suffering !

In the faith that looks through death,

In years that bring the philosophic mind.

And O ye fountains, meadows, hills, and groves,

Think not of any severing of our lives !

Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;

I only have relinquish'd one delight,

To live beneath your more habitual sway.

I love the brooks, which down their channels fret,

Even more than when I tripp'd lightly as they :

The innocent brightness of a new-born day

Is lovely yet ;

The clouds that gather round the setting sun

Do take a sober colouring from an eye

That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality !

Another race hath been, and other palms are won.

Thanks to the human heart by which we live ;

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears ;

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was the youngest of the thirteen

children of the Rev. John Coleridge, Vicar of Ottery St. Mary, in the east of Devon-

shire, where the poet was born on the 21st of October 1772. His mother, Anne

Bowden, was the vicar's second wife. He was an odd, dreamy child, “fretful and

inordinately passionate,” isolated by his love of reading and by his visions. He entered

the grammar school at Ottery, of which his father was the master, in 1778. Soon after

VOL. IV.

D

50

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

his father's death S. T. Coleridge was placed at Christ's Hospital at the age of nearly

ten. Here he made acquaintance with Lamb. "A poor friendless boy;" Coleridge

seems to have stayed in London seven

years without once revisiting his family.

In 1789 the publication of the Sonnets

of Bowles awakened him to attempt

serious poetic composition. In Feb-

ruary 1791 Coleridge left school and

went into residence as a sizar at Jesus

College, Cambridge. Of his early life

at the university not much is known,

nor of the causes which led him to

run away to London and enlist in the

King's Light Dragoons in December

1793. He adopted the appropriate

name of Comberback, for he could

not ride. For better or worse, how-

ever, Coleridge had to continue to be

a trooper for nearly four months. He

was brought back to Jesus and ad-

monished, but no further notice was

taken of the escapade. At Oxford in

the ensuing summer he met Southey,

who converted him to the romantic

scheme of a "pantisocratic" settlement

on the banks of the Susquehana, and

they wrote together and published at

S. T. Coleridge

After a Pastel taken in Germany

Cambridge a drama, The Fall of Robespierre (1794). Coleridge left Cambridge in

December without a degree, and went to stay through the winter near Lamb in

London, presently joining Southey at Bristol, where he lectured on politics.

In 1795 he married Sara

Fricker, and lived first at

Clevedon, and then at various

other places, feebly endeav-

ouring to earn a living.

An interesting volume of

Poems marked the season

of 1796, and in this year

Coleridge published a very

dull magazine, The Watch-

man. He also accepted, in

June 1796, the sub-editorship

of The Morning Chronicle,

but whether he ever took

up this post seems to

be doubtful. Nervous and

anxious, Coleridge suffered much from neuralgia, which left him "languid even

to an inward perishing," and it was at this time that he had recourse to laudanum,

The Cottage at Clevedon occupied by Coleridge

to which he became more or less a slave for the remainder of his life.

From the winter of 1796 to July 1800 the home of the Ccleridges was Nether Stowey, a little

remote town at the head of the Quantocks, in Somerset. Here, as has been said, he

was close to Wordsworth, whom he had visited at Racedown in June, and who settlcd

with his sister at Alfoxden in July 1797. At Stowey many—indeed, almost all—of

Coleridge's best poems were composed. In 1798 he published his Fears in Solitude,

and France, and in September of that year there appeared the famous anonymous

volume of Lyrical Ballads. A day or two later Coleridge and Wordsworth sailed for

Germany, where the former remained, wandering about, until June 1799, when he

returned to Stowey. In 1800 he published his version of Wallenstein, and went to

live with Wordsworth in the Lakes, at Dove Cottage. From July 24, 1800, to

1804, Greta Hall, at Keswick, was the residence of the Coleridges, although S. T. C.,

being now in a very depressed and morbid

condition of mind and body, was seldom

to be found there. In April 1804 he

started alone for Malta, where he was

appointed to act as private secretary to the

Governor, Sir Alexander Ball. He visited

Sicily, Naples, and Rome, and did not

return to England until August 1806, when

remorse for his neglect of his family and

of his own interests justified him in describing himself as "ill, penniless, and

worse than homeless." Coleridge, however, was received at Greta Hall with great

indulgence, but it was soon found necessary to arrange a separation between him

and his wife, followed, however, by a partial

reconciliation. With one person, however,

he had remained so long on good terms,

that his quarrel with Wordsworth in 1810

seemed to mark the lowest stage of his

degradation. Coleridge now occupied himself with a philosophical journal called

The Friend, "an endless preface to an imaginary work." He came up to London,

and lived obscurely, keeping up no correspondence with his family and friends

in Cumberland. In 1812 he delivered his first series of "Lectures on Shake-

speare," which were brilliantly attended; in the autumn he returned to Greta Hall,

and became reconciled with Wordsworth. Byron, who had attended the lectures

with great courtesy induced the managers of the new Drury Lane to accept Cole-

ridge's tragedy of Remorse. It was produced early in 1813, and Coleridge received

£400, the only occasion during his whole life when he earned a substantial sum

of money with his pen. This is perhaps the place at which to remark that Coleridge's

life had been made possible only by the generosity of Josiah Wedgwood, who had paid

him a pension of £150 a year since 1798. Of this £75 was arbitrarily withdrawn

in 1812, and his wife and family would have been sharply pinched but for the opportune

S. T. Ccleridge

From an original Drawing by C. R. Leslie in the

possession of E. H. Coleridge, Esq.

52

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

success of Remorse. Coleridge now sank very low under the dominion of laudanum.

In his delirious self-abasement he desired, in 1814, to be placed in a private

madhouse. He promised to go back with Southey to Greta Hall, but he failed

to do so, and finally abandoned his wife and children to Southey's care. From

1314 to 1816 he was living at Calne in Wilts. He went up to London in March

of that year, bringing with him several important MSS. It was now that Charles

Lamb described him as "an archangel—a little damaged." His friends recom-

mended that he should submit himself to the charge of a physician, Mr. Gillman,

in whose house at Highgate he became

a boarder in April 1816. Coleridge now

published his Christabel, Kubla Khan,

The Pains of Sleep, a slender volume of

exquisite poetry, written many years before.

The results of the retirement at High-

gate were at first favourable : Coleridge

managed to do a good deal of work.

He published the Biographia Literaria,

Sibylline Leaves, and Zapolya, all in 1817.

But even lectures now ceased to be a re-

source. "From literature," he wrote in

1818, "I cannot gain even bread," for his

publisher became bankrupt, owing him

his returns on all his recent looks. In 1820

his eldest son, Hartley, forfeited his fel-

lowship at Oriel College, Oxford, mainly

on the ground of intemperance ; this last

very heavy affliction bowed S. T. Coleridge

to the ground, and threw him back upon

excessive laudanum. The next few years

were sad and almost empty, but in 1825

he published Aids to Reflection, and he received until the death of George III. a

royal annuity of £100 a year, which prevented his having to scribble for bread

Carlyle now described him as "a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle,"

and drew the celebrated portrait beginning, "Coleridge sat on the brow of High-

gate Hill." He increased in bodily weakness, but with a mind always powerful

and more and more serene. He took a tour up the Rhine, in the charge of

the Wordsworths, in 1828. In the winter of 1833 he wrote his beautiful Epitaph

for S. T. C., and prepared himself for death. It came painlessly and in sleep on

the morning of the 25th of July 1834.

Mrs. S. T. Coleridge

From a Miniature in the possession of Ernest

Hartley Coleridge, Esq.

FROM "FRANCE—AN ODE."

Ye Clouds ! that far above me float and pause,

Whose pathless march no mortal may control !

Ye Ocean-Waves ! that, wheresoe'er ye roll

Yield homage only to eternal laws !

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

AFTER THE PORTRAIT BY ROBERT HANCOCK

COLERIDGE

53

Ye Woods ! that listen to the night-birds singing,

Midway the smooth and perilous slope reclined,

Save when your own imperious branches, swinging,

Have made a solemn music of the wind !

Where, like a man belov'd of God,

Through glooms, which never woodman trod,

How oft, pursuing fancies holy,

My moonlight way o'er flowering weeds I wound,

Inspired, beyond the guess of folly,

By each rude shape and wild unconquerable sound !

O ye loud Waves ! and O ye Forests high !

And O ye Clouds that far above me soared !

Thou rising Sun ! thou blue rejoicing Sky !

Yea, everything that is and will be free !

Bear witness for me, wheresoe'er ye be,

With what deep worship I have still adored

The spirit of divinest Liberty.

From "Youth and Age."

Flowers are lovely ! Love is flower-like ;

Friendship is a sheltering tree ;

O ! the joys, that came down shower-like,

Of Friendship, Love, and Liberty,

Ere I was old !

Ere I was old ? Ah, woful Ere,

Which tells me, Youth's no longer here !

O Youth ! for years so many and sweet,

'Tis known, that Thou and I were once,

I'll think it but a fond conceit—

It cannot be, that Thou art gone !

Thy vesper-bell hath not yet toll'd—

And thou wert aye a masker bold !

What strange disguise hast now put on,

To make believe, that Thou art gone ?

I see these locks in silvery slips,

This drooping gait, this altered size :

But springtide blossoms on thy lips,

And tears take sunshine from thine eyes !

Life is but thought : so think I will

That Youth and I are house-mates still.

Dew-drops are the gems of morning,

But the tears of mournful eve !

Where no hope is, life's a warning

That only serves to make us grieve

When we are old !

That only serves to make us grieve

With oft and tedious taking-leave,

Like some poor nigh-related guest,

That may not rudely be dismist,

Yet hath outstay'd his welcome while,

And tells the jest without the smile.

54

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

All thoughts, all passions, all delights,

All, all that stir the mortal frame,

All. are his ministers of Love

And feed his sacred flame.

O ever in my waking dreams

I feed upon that happy hour

When midway on The moonlit State

Beside the ruined tower.

The moonshine stealing o'er the Scene

Had blended with the lights of eve;

And he was there, my Hope, my Joy,

My own dear Genevese!

She learnt against the armed man,

The Tale of the armed Knight;

She stood and listend to my Heart

Utter the lingering light.

I play'd a soft and idle air,

I sang an old and moving story;

And did rude song than fitted well

The ruin wild and hoary.

MS. of the opening stanzas of "Love"

COLERIDGE

KUBLA KHAN.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree :

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round.

And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !

A savage place ! as holy and enchanted

As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover !

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced ;

Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail :

And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean :

And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war.

The shadow of the dome of pleasure

Floated midway on the waves ;

Where was heard the mingled measure

Of the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw ;

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of Mount Abora.

Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,

To such deep delight 'twould win me,

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry Beware ! Beware !

His flashing eyes ! his floating hair !

56

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

John

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Coleridge

Extract from a Diary of S. T. Coleridge

An unpublished poem by S. T. Coleridge. In the possession of E. H. Coleridge, Esq.

COLERIDGE

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed

And drank the milk of Paradise.

LONDON PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY,

SCOT'S CORPORATION HALL,

CRANE COURT, FLEET STREET,

(ENTRANCE FROM FLEET LANE.)

MR. COLERIDGE

WILL COMMENCE

ON MONDAY, NOV. 18th,

A COURSE OF LECTURES ON SHAKESPEAR AND MILTON,

IN ILLUSTRATION OF

THE PRINCIPLES OF POETRY,

AND THEIR

Application as Grounds of Criticism to the most popular Works of later English

Poets, those of the Living included.

After an introductory Lecture on False Criticism, (especially in Poetry,) and

on its Causes ; two thirds of the remaining course, will be assigned, 1st, to a philosophic Analysis

and Explanation of all the principal Characters of our great Dramatist, as Othello, Falstaff,

Richard 3d, Iago, Hamlet, &c. : and 2nd, to a critical Comparison of SHAKESPEAR, in respect

of Diction, Imagery, management of the Passions, Judgment in the construction of his Dramas, in

short, of all that belongs to him as a Poet, and as a dramatic Poet, with his contemporaries, or

immediate successors, Jonson, Beaumont and FletCHER, Tund. Massinger, &c. in the

endeavour to determine what of SHAKESPEAR's Merits and Defects are common to him with

other Writers of the same age, and what remain peculiar to his own Genus.

The Course will extend to fifteen Lectures, which will be given on Monday

and Thursday evenings successively. The Lectures to commence at ½ past 7 o'clock.

Single Tickets for the whole Course, 2 Guineas; or 3 Guineas with the priv-

lege of introducing a Lady; may be procured at J. Hutcliards, 190, Piccadilly, J. Murray's,

Fleet Street; J. and A. Arch's, Booksellers and Stationers, Cornhill. Godwin's Juvenile Library,

Skinner Street; W. Puple's, 67, Chancery Lane; or by Letter (post paid) to Mr. S. T. Coleridge,

J. J. Morgan's, Esq. No. 7, Portland Place, Hammersmith.

Programme of Cicero's Lectures of 1800

WORK WITHOUT HOPE.

Lines Composed 21st February 1827.

All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair—

The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing—

And Winter slumbering in the open air

Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring !

And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing,

Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,

Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.

Bloom, O ye amaranths ! bloom for whom ye may,

For me ye bloem not ! Glide, rich streams, away !

With lips unbrighten'd, wreathless brow, I stroll :

And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?

Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,

And Hope without an object cannot live.

58

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

BOATMEN'S SONG FROM "REMORSE."

Hear, sweet spirit, hear the spell,

Lest a blacker charm compel !

So shall the midnight breezes swell

With thy deep long-lingering knell.

And at evening evermore,

In a chapel on the shore,

Shall the chaunter, sad and saintly,

Yellow tapers burning faintly,

Doleful masses chaunt for thee,

Miserere Domine !

Hark ! the cadence dies away

On the quiet moonlight sea :

The boatmen rest their oars and say,

Miserere Domine !

Robert Southey (1774-1843) was the eldest son of a linen-draper in Bristol,

where, in a house in Wine Street, he was born on the 12th of August 1774. He was a

sensitive child, whose idiosyncracies were encouraged by

his being brought up, after the fashion of Rousseau's

Emile, by an eccentric maiden aunt at Bath. He went to

a school at Corston and elsewhere, and then at the age of fourteen to Westminster,

already dreaming of becoming a poet. Here he stayed until 1792, when he was expelled

for a literary jocosity at the expense of the headmaster.

He returned to Bristol to find his father's business bankrupt ; still, some months

later he was able, at an uncle's cost, to proceed to Balliol College. He was now

on fire with the principles of the French Republic ; all he learned at Oxford, he

says, was "a little swimming and boating." In 1793 he wrote in a few weeks the

epic of Joan of Arc, and then "another epic poem and

then another." His terrible fluency had already taken hold of him. In June

of 1794 he met and was instantly fascinated by S. T. Coleridge, who communicated

to him the dream of pantisocracy ; the lads agreed to emigrate together to

America. This was prevented by their extreme poverty, but in 1795 they found a

publisher in Bristol as enthusiastic as themselves, and a poet to boot, Joseph Cottle

(1770–1853), who consented to publish their poems and give them money too.

Jo.in of Arc was not issued until 1796, but in November Southey had married

his boyhood's love, Mrs. Coleridge's sister, Edith Fricker, and a few days later

had started alone for Madrid by sea. from Falmouth to Corunna. In Spain he

threw himself with ardour into the study of Spanish life and literature. Returning

by Lisbon to Bristol, he tried in vain to live by journalism. The next months were

vaguely spent, but in 1797–98 the Southeys are found residing in a little house

at Westbury, Wilts, where he produced poetry with vehemence and volume, cheered

by the companionship of Humphry Davy (1778–1829), the natural philosopher.

His health broke down under excess of cerebral excitement, and in 1800 he went with

his wife to Portugal to rest ; but Southey could never be still, and at Lisbon and

Cintra he wrote reams of verses. Next year Southey returned to England, published

Thalaba, and presently visited

the Coleridges at Keswick,

but not at this time to stay

there long. After fitful wan-

derings and many domestic

changes, in 1802 he was back

again in London and then in

Bristol. Still he wandered ;

still, as he said, he had “no

symptoms of root-striking.”

But in the autumn of 1803

he took Greta Hall, near

Keswick, and this was his

home for the next thirty-six

years. As if the incessant

journeys of his youth had awakened in him a passion for stability, Southey settled

himself into Greta Hall like a tree. He filled it with his possessions and his interests,

the fibres of his heart fitted into it and became part of it. It was not, however, until

he had been its tenant for some four years that he realised that this was to be his final

resting-place. It was also the home of the deserted wife and children of Coleridge, to

whom Southey showed a most unselfish devotion. He sat down at his desk to punc-

tual and almost mechanical literary labour, publishing many epics—Madoc in 1805,

The Curse of Kehama in 1810, Roderick in 1814—and becoming, as he said, “a

quiet, patient, easy-going hack of the mule breed, regular as clockwork in my pace,” but

cheerful and happy at all times. In a luckier age he would have soon been rich, but

for few, and those the least important, of his works was Southey even decently paid.

His only extravagance was books, of which he made an enormous and miscellaneous

collection, especially rich in the Spanish and Portuguese languages. He was of all the

men of letters of that age the most sedulous and deliberate craftsman ; he made

literature the trade of his life, and his multitude of books were his tools. He made

many acquaintances, few friends ; one of the most important of the latter being Landor,

whom he met at Bristol in 1808—“the only man living,” Southey declared, “of whose

praise I was ambitious, or whose censure would have humbled me.” Their sympathy

Greta Hall, occupied by Southey, 1803–1839

60

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

was mutually invaluable to both until the death of Southey. About this time Southey,

who had refused to write for the Edinburgh Review, began his long course of contri-

butions to the newly founded Quarterly; he had become quite a politician now,

and a droll description is preserved of Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge laying

down the law in conversation about the Convention of Cintra, like three Wise Men of

the East. Southey became an effective political writer, and for some time the Quarterly

Review and he were supposed to represent exactly the same views. In 1813 Southey

succeeded a poetaster called Pye as Poet Laureate, thus raising the office from the

Robert Southey

After the Portrait by T. Phillips in the possession of John Murray, Esq.

ridiculous obscurity in which it had lain since the days of

Dryden. In 1816 he suffered

the terrible anguish of losing

his son Herbert, the only

being on whom he had dared

to dote without restraint. He

was never quite the same

man again; he said he was

to make "no more great

attempts, only a few autum-

nal flowers, like second

primroses." He went on

steadily, however, with his

tale of bricks, and the vast

heap of his writings mounted

up in prose and verse.

Already it began to be seen

by the clairvoyant that his

genius lay in the former, not

in the latter. Byron, who

met him in 1813, and who

boldly mocked at Southey's

poetry, confessed "his prose

is perfect." With certain

exceptions, and these not

fortunate ones, the remainder

of Southey's life was devoted

to prose, and mainly to his-

tory and biography. He abandoned the vast scheme of a History of Portugal, at which

he had been working for many years, but in 1819 he completed a History of Brazil.

His History of the Peninsular War extended over from 1822 to 1832. Meanwhile his

admirable lives of Nelson (1813) and of John Wesley (1820) were being read with

universal pleasure. His Book of the Church (1824) and his Naval History (Lives of

the British Admirals), (1833–40) were more ambitious. In 1834 another great sorrow

attacked him—his wife became insane, and in 1837 she died. In 1835 Southey

refused a baronetcy, an honour foolishly offered to so poor a man, but he accepted

a further pension of £300 a year. His only other production of importance was

The Doctor, the seven volumes of which appeared between 1834 and 1847. Southey

did not see its completion. Reduced to absolute loneliness at Greta Hall, he

ROBERT SOUTHEY.

AFTER THE PORTRAIT BY ROBERT HANCOCK.

married an old cultivated friend, the gentle poetess, Caroline Bowles (1787–1854);

but her care could not save a brain and a body which had been overstrained. In

1839 his health broke down, and on the 21st of March 1843 he died. He was

buried, in the presence of the venerable Wordsworth, in the churchyard of Crosthwaite.

The moral nature of Southey had a beauty which is not reflected in his poetry. He

Keswick. 3 May. 1824

My dear Sir,

I will not let: post paid without? acknowledge

it except of your future encumny Coleridge. What can I say when is not

e subject? - What but that I always looked on with great joy & interest

to the brotherhood which was to make after his death by one brother in

men reaching adoration, by those in waker, & by some, or a few call

it brother self defence! In his work entitled 'Omniana' with which you find

This is our unsatisfactory encumy curself. My experiment of your

Poet Laureate to with commence edit 1798, & it greatly that I supplied

bar never indulge to it, conducted as itaky up of Colendyer infancy

I never think of that Laureateship without recollection. The process

e which that I had the time, being necessarily in and it to render anxious

of a very eruditeable. part of those other Poets that I have singly

both personally, & upon those kind careful correction he. recently been

fitted, and better, not that you may, & otherwise not you may have been

in'flu.

Present my kind regards to dear Sirent.

I deher as always

yrs very truly

Robert Southey.

Facsimile Letter from Southey to Daniel Stuart

was reserved—he “covered,” he said, “his feelings with a bear-skin”—and his austerity

and abruptness made him many enemies ; but he was a man of the finest rectitude

and the most practical generosity of heart, without jealousy, without littleness, bearing

sorrow and pain with equanimity, nobly desirous to preserve intact the dignity of life

and literature. His lifelong attitude to Wordsworth, to Coleridge and his family, to

Scott, to Landor, to Davy, attests the constancy and the unselfishness of his character.

62

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

But he was hard in later life, and without any of the suppleness which makes social

intercourse agreeable, while it is impossible to deny that he grew both arrogant and

priggish. He had so handsome a presence in middle life that Byron declared that, to

possess it, he would even have consented to write Southey's Sapphics.

From "The Curse of Kehama."

Midnight, and yet no eye

Through all the Imperial City closed in sleep !

Behold her streets a-blaze

With light that seems to kindle the red sky;

Her myriads swarming through the crowded ways !

Master and slave, old age and infancy

All, all abroad to gaze;

House-top and balcony

Clustered with women, who throw back their veils

With unimpeded and insatiate sight

To view the funeral pomp which passes by,

As if the mournful rite

Were but to them a scene of joyance and delight.

Vainly, ye blessed twinklers of the night

Your feeble beams ye shed.

Quench'd in the unnatural light which might out-stare

Even the broad eye of day;

And thou from thy celestial way

Pourest, O Moon, an ineffectual ray !

For lo ! ten thousand torches flame and flare

Upon the midnight air,

Blotting the lights of heaven

With one portentous glare.

Behold the fragrant smoke in many a fold

Ascending, floats along the fiery sky,

And hangeth visible on high,

A dark and waving canopy.

What effect the new ideas could produce on a perfectly ductile fancy may

be observed in a very interesting way in the case of THOMAS CAMPBELL. This

young Scotchman, born in 1777, had evidently seen no poetry more modern

than that of Johnson, Goldsmith, and Rogers, when he published his Pleasures

of Hope. The very name of this work discovered its adhesion to eighteenth-

century tradition. It was a tame, "correct" essay, in a mode already en-

tirely outworn. As a student it had been Campbell's pride to be styled "the

Pope of Glasgow." When he became aware of them, he rejected all the

proposed reforms of Wordsworth, whose work he continued to detest

throughout his life; but in 1800 he proceeded to Germany, where he fell

completely under the spell of the romantic poets of that nation, and presently

gave to the world Lochiel, Hohenlinden, and the Battle of Erin. These were

succeeded by other spirited ballads, amatory and martial, and by a romantic

epic in Spenserian stanza, Gertrude of Wyoming, in which Campbell's style is

wholly Teutonised. After this Campbell wrote little that was readable, and

his fame, once far greater than that of Coleridge and Wordsworth, has now

dwindled to an unjust degree. He had a remarkable gift for lucid, rapid, and

yet truly poetical narrative; his naval odes or descants, the Battle of the Baltic

and Ye Mariners of England, are without rivals in their own class, and

Campbell deserves recognition as a true romanticist and revolutionary force

in poetry, although fighting for his own hand, and never under the flag of

Wordsworth and Coleridge. For the time being, however, Campbell did

more than they—more, perhaps, than any other writer save one—to break

down in popular esteem the didactic convention of the classic school.

Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) was the eighth son and eleventh child of

Alexander Campbell, a Virginia merchant of Glasgow, who had recently been ruined

by the American War when the future poet was born on the 27th of July 1777. He

was a precocious scholar and an early rhymester, and at the age of fourteen he entered

the University of Glasgow with credit. His student

verses were unusually spirited,

his student speeches were

delivered “with remarkable

fluency and in a strong Glas-

gow brogue.” In 1794 the

poverty of his parents obliged

him, though not yet seven-

teen, to accept a clerkship in

a merchant’s office, but his

notion was to escape from

this drudgery to America. In

the summer of 1795, however,

he obtained a tutorship at

Sunipol, in the island of Mull,

and started for the Western

Highlands in company with a

friend. “The wide world con-

tained not two merrier boys;

we sang and recited poetry

through the long, wild High-

land glens.” This visit to Mull

left an indelible impression

on Campbell’s imagination.

It was followed in 1796 by a

similar appointment on the

Sound of Jura. In the year

Thomas Campbell

After the Portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence

1797 Campbell published,

perhaps in a broadsheet, the

earliest of his characteristic battle-poems, The Wounded Hussar, and was encouraged

to look to literature as a profession. He moved his headquarters from Glasgow to

Edinburgh, and in 1798 he began to compose The Pleasures of Hope. This poem

appeared the following year, and “the demand for copies was unprecedented.” The

coteries of Edinburgh opened their arms to welcome the young poet, and among the

64

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

friends his book brought him was the still youthful Walter Scott. The Pleasures of Hope

exactly suited the taste of the day, and Campbell was "very much noticed and invited

out." He spent the money which his poem brought him in foreign travel, and on

1st June 1800 left Leith for Hamburg. He had some stirring adventures, acquainted

himself with much German literature, and returned to London in something less than

a year. It was in Germany that several of his famous patriotic poems were composed.

He settled again in Edinburgh, until in 1802 he accepted an invitation from Lord

Minto to be his guest, and perhaps secretary, in his London house. A description of

Campbell taken at this time, when he was in his twenty-sixth year, brings him before

us as "scrupulously neat in his dress, . . . a blue coat, with bright gilt buttons, a

white waistcoat and cravat, buff nankins and white stockings, with shoes and silver

buckles. His hair was already falling off ; and he adopted the peruke, which he never

afterwards laid aside." In 1803 appeared

Thomas Campbell

From a Drawing by Daniel Maclise

a subscription edition of Campbell's collected poems, which brought him in some

money, and he was emboldened to marry

his lively and elegant cousin, Miss Matilda Sinclair. The young couple took a house

at Sydenham, which remained their home

until 1820. Unfortunately, Campbell was,

as he said, "always ready to shoot himself when he came to the subject of

cash accounts," and his life became as

a nightmare of financial embarrassment.

In 1804 he wrote The Battle of the Baltic

and Lord Ullin's Daughter, and this may

be considered the highwater mark of his

career as a poet. In 1805 his distresses

were relieved by a pension of £200 a

year. The remainder of Campbell's life

was not very interesting. In 1809 he

published, with universal approbation, his

Gertrude of Wyoming, a poem, as was

then considered, instinct with "the soft and skyish tints of purity and truth," arranged

in the Spenserian stanza as employed in The Castle of Indolence. In 1815 the Camp-

bells, always wretched managers, were again in pecuniary distress, when a remote and

eccentric Highland connection, who had heard of his piety to his mother and sister,

remarked that "little Tommy the Poet ought to have a legacy," and then died, leaving

him nearly £5000. Campbell became prominent as a lecturer on poetry, and he

showed a broad sympathy in dealing with the treasures of our early literature. In

1820 he became editor of the New Monthly Magazine, an easy post with a handsome

salary, which he held for ten years. His narrative poem, Theodric, appeared in 1824,

and was a failure. Troubles now gathered upon Campbell ; his only surviving child

became insane, his excellent wife died, and he himself became the victim of irritable

melancholia. He wrote much, in prose, but he did his work badly; his old fas-

tidiousness and care seemed to have left him. His Life of Mrs. Siddons (1834),

from which great things were expected, proved to be a deplorable piece of shirked

hack-work. Campbell had lost the healthy gusto of life. He was still, however, a

CAMPBELL

65

popular figure in society, and prominent at club meetings and public dinners. In

1834 he went to Algeria, with excellent results to his health. In this renewal of

activity he composed his poem of The Pilgrim of Glencoe, and published it in 1842.

It is worth while for the sake of News to send a friend to live in town like

Liverpool - but really Edinburgh is so gray gloomy dull & obsolete that

surely I was not fit for a few streets of it I could not excite any public

loquacity by relating - Forty Noviciates in Medicine have been lately let

loose upon the Public but the College is now shut up they are departed and

their deeds are to be heard of in other quarters - The only distinction of

Society at present are a gang of dreadful drabs who have fought duels

skimishes with the night sergeants of the North Bridge & brawls among that

article of the sex the head of loathsome writer which before were

thought impenetrable - During the random history of such

nocturnal events which comes like the voice of one crying in

the wilderness we are all still reefs & seventy - Our New town might be

safely cannonaded without danger of killing a human being - loath to & loath

to that - Tis as the pulse of life stood still "& Nature made a pause -

I have returned from Minto I believe since I wrote you - My great

fainter must be great I believe in Edin - for by the continental & protracted

emaciation it suffers falling in price my book will be delayed I fear yet

a little longer - In Feby - I hope to be in Dunferm - Remember

me most kindly to Sir George & Mr Wallace - & believe me dearest

Doctor yours with great esteem

Thos Campbell

Extract from a Letter of Campbell to Dr. James Currie

No success attended this belated work. Campbell grew tired of London and settled

at Boulogne, with a niece who now kept house for him. Here he died, on the 15th

of June 1844, and was buried on the 3rd of July with great pomp in Westminster

Abbey.

From "GERTRUDE OF WYOMING"

O love ! in such a wilderness as this,

Where transport and security entwine,

Here is the empire of thy perfect bliss,

And here thou art a god indeed divine.

VOL. IV.

66

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Here shall no forms abridge, no hours confine

The views, the walks, that boundless joy inspire !

Roll on, ye days of raptured influence, shine !

Nor, blind with ecstasy's celestial fire,

Shall love behold the spark of earth-born time expire.

Three little moons, how short ! amidst the grove

And pastoral savannahs they consume !

While she, beside her buskined youth to rove,

Delights, in fancifully wild costume,

Her lovely brow to shade with Indian plume;

And forth in hunter-seeming vest they fare;

But not to chase the deer in forest gloom;

'Tis but the breath of heaven—the blessed air—

And interchange of hearts unknown, unseen to share.

What though the sportive dog oft round them note,

Or fawn, or wild bird bursting on the wing;

Yet who, in love's own presence, would devote

To death those gentle throats that wake the spring,

Or writhing from the brook its victim bring ?

No !—nor let fear one little warbler rouse;

But, fed by Gertrude's hand, still let them sing,

Acquaintance of her path, amidst the boughs,

That shade e'en now her love, and witnessed first her vows.

Song.—To the Evening Star.

Star that bringest home the bee,

And sett'st the weary labourer free !

If any star shed peace, 'tis thou,

That send'st it from above,

Appearing when Heaven's breath and brow

Are sweet as hers we love.

Come to the luxuriant skies,

Whilst the landscape's odours rise,

Whilst far-off lowing herds are heard,

And songs, when toil is done,

From cottages whose smoke unstirred

Curls yellow in the sun.

Star of love's soft interviews,

Parted lovers on thee muse;

Their remembrancer in Heaven

Of thrilling vows thou art,

Too delicious to be riven

By absence from the heart.

The Soldier's Dream.

Our bugles sang truce—for the night-cloud had lowered,

And the sentinel stars set their watch in the sky;

And thousands had sunk on the ground overpowered,

The weary to sleep, and the wounded to die.

When reposing that night on my pallet of straw,

By the wolf-scaring faggot that guarded the slain;

At the dead of the night a sweet vision I saw,

And thrice ere the morning I dreamt it again.

SCOTT

67

Methought from the battle-field's dreadful array,

Far, far I had roamed on a desolate track :

'Twas Autumn—and sunshine arose on the way

To the home of my fathers, that welcomed me back.

I flew to the pleasant fields traversed so oft

In life's morning march, when my bosom was young ;

I heard my own mountain-goats bleating aloft,

And knew the sweet strain that the corn-reapers sung.

Then pledged we the wine-cup, and fondly I swore,

From my home and my weeping friends never to part ;

My little ones kissed me a thousand times o'er,

And my wife sobbed aloud in her fulness of heart,

"Stay, stay with us—rest, thou art weary and worn ;"

And fain was their war-broken soldier to stay—

But sorrow returned with the dawning of morn,

And the voice in my dreaming ear melted away.

A still greater force in popularising and fixing the romantic tradition

was Sir Walter Scott

in the poetry of his

early middle life—that is to say, from 1799 to

1814. From the dawn of childhood he had

shown an extraordinary passion for listening to

chivalrous and adventu-

rous tales, and for com-

posing the like. He was

fortunate enough to see

and to be greatly moved

by Burns; and as he

advanced, the intense

Scotticism of his nature

was emphasised by the

longing to enshrine

Scotch prowess and na-

ture in picturesque verse.

The mode in which this

was to be done had not

even dimly occurred to

him, when he met with

that lodestar of roman-

ticism, the Lenore of

Bürger ; he translated

it, and was led to make

Sir Walter Scott

After the Portrait by Sir Henry Raeburn

fresh eager inroads into German poetry, with which he was much more

in sympathy than Wordsworth was, or even Coleridge. Even Goethe,

68

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

however, did not at this time persuade Scott to make a deep study of

literature; he was still far more eager to learn in the open school of

experience. He imitated a few German ballads, and he presently began

to collect the native songs of his own country; the far-reaching result was

the publication of the Scottish Minstrelsy.

Still, nothing showed that Walter Scott was likely to become an original

writer, and he was thirty-four when Europe was electrified with the appear-

Sir Walter Scott

After the Portrait by Stewart Newton

ance of the Lay of the Last Minstrel. Then followed Marmion, the Lady of the

Lake, and the Lord of the Isles, not to speak of other

epical narratives which were not so successful.

Meanwhile, the publication of Waverley opened

another and a still more splendid door to the genius

of Scott, and he bade fare-

well to the Muses. But

from 1805 to 1815 he was

by far the most prominent

British poet; as Words-

worth put it, Scott was

" the whole world's dar-

ling," and no one, perhaps,

before or since, has ap-

proached the width and

intensity of his popularity.

While Wordsworth distri-

buted a few hundreds of

his books, and Coleridge

could not induce his to

move at all, Scott's poetry sold in tens of thousands, and gave the tone to

society. At the present day something of the charm of Scott's verse-narratives

has certainly evaporated; they are read for the story, a fatal thing to confess

about poetry. The texture of Scott's prosody is thinner and looser than that

of his great contemporaries, nor are his reflections so penetrating or so

exquisite as the best of theirs. Nevertheless, the divine freshness and

exuberance of Scott are perennial in several of his episodes, and many of his

songs are of the highest positive excellence. Perhaps if he had possessed a

more delicate ear, a subtler sense of the phases of landscape, something of that

mysticism and passion which we unwillingly have to admit that we miss in

his poetry, he might not have interpreted so lucidly to millions of readers the

principles of the romantic revival. With his noble disregard of self, he bade

Dear Sir

I have been long remembering your letter for my friend get first but Collectors here do not like an old fashioned dress. I have been looking out for pretty aboriginal and I came finally to one which I met my accurate measures and then I knew which envelopes should which compleat a Nancy Cooper saying not to tell God condescending and warm information. If you would lend me and Cork old clothes my world give me nice pleasure I have been a Merchant lying day purchasing a superb Brother in law every time I need to have clear views here on our assigned settle for yours. In my great agust.

I have worn and old black broad Brong Points supplied me by the Cypers when I have allured to me the ballad. In which you apply your mind Nunr drivers.

I have a plan to spend the winter of and Daniel Day Ferry of the Adelphia Hunter wheresoever; from the vicinity of Abots for successing

Letter from Scott to Cooper, the Artist

of the few curiosities of curiosity

Merriwether Lewis

their

The

curiosly by

the

No

the

does

I will

or

obviin

Edin. 1

1830

your

Pray

many

your

those who sought the higher qualities find them in Wordsworth ; but Scott also, with his vigour of invention and his masculine sense of flowing style, took a prominent and honourable part in the reformation of English poetry.

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) was one of the twelve children of Mr. Walter Scott, Writer to the Signet, and of Anne Rutherford his wife. Six died in infancy, and he was the fourth of the survivors. He was born on the 15th of August 1771,

Abbotsford, Scott's residence from 1811 to his death in 1832

in a house at the head of the College Wynd in Edinburgh. He showed, he tells us, every sign of health and strength until he was about eighteen months old, when, as the result of a fever, he lost for life all power in his right leg. He was taken into the country, where he was placed under the care of a nurse, who afterwards proved to be a lunatic, and who, just in time to be prevented, confessed an intention to cut the child's throat with her scissors and bury him in the moss on the Craigs. He was early instructed in literature by his aunt, Mrs. Janet Scott, who encouraged the romantic bent of his temper. In 1778 Scott was sent to the High School of Edinburgh, without brilliant results : “ I was never a dunce, nor thought to be so, but an incorrigibly idle imp, who was always longing to something else than what was enjoined him.” As he grew fast, his health became delicate, and after leaving school, before proceeding to college, it was thought well

70

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

that he should spend half a year in his aunt's house at Kelso. To this episode Scott attributed the awakening in his soul of an appreciation of natural beauty, "especially when combined with ancient ruins." For some months of 1782–83 he was taught at the grammar-school of Kelso. On the lad's return to Edinburgh he began to throw himself with great ardour into the study of the romantic literature of Europe, especially Italian. It was in the midst of these emotions, in 1786, that Scott, a boy of fifteen, saw Burns at the height of his renown. At this time Scott had left college, and had entered into indentures with his father with a view

The Entrance Hall at Abbotsford

to becoming a Writer to the Signet. He disliked the drudgery, although he worked hard at the business out of pride in and love for his father, but in the spring of 1788 he broke a blood-vessel, and a lengthy illness was the result. From this, strange to say, he rose to health far more robust than he had ever before enjoyed, tall, muscular, and active both on foot and on horseback. About this time Scott began to "take his ground" in society; he displayed an ardour, a flow of agreeable spirits, and an acute perception which rendered him noticeably welcome in any company. From 1789 to 1792 he studied assiduously for the Bar, and these were "the only years of his life which he applied to learning with stern, steady, and undeviating industry." He passed his examinations in Civil Law in June 1791, and in Scots Law in July 1792, and a week later assumed the gown of a barrister. Walter Scott was now, as the Duchess of Sutherland said, "a comely creature,"

remarkably vigorous, but never clumsy, in form and movement, brilliant in colour and complexion. He fell in love with Miss Williamina Belches of Invermay, whom he courted for several years, but without success, for she became Lady Forbes of Pitsligo. In the autumn of 1792 Scott made his earliest study of the wild country of the Border, and in the following year he explored, in the spirit of a romantic antiquarian, great part of the central portion of Scotland. In 1796 he translated Bürger's Lenore, and published this anonymously with one or two other fragments of the new German poetry in a thin quarto; this was Scott's first appearance in

Scott's Study at Abbotsford

print. He was now attracted to a young French lady of great beauty, Miss Charlotte Margaret Carpenter (or rather Charpentier), whom he married in December 1797, after a very brief courtship. The young couple settled in Edinburgh, at lodgings in George Street, until the house he had taken in South Castle Street was ready for them; a few months later he supplemented this by a cottage six miles out of the city, at Lasswade. Under the influence of "Monk" Lewis, Scott began imitating and translating more busily from the German, and in 1799 he published a version of Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen. He now began the serious composition of English verse, and he formed, or reopened, a friendship with James Ballantyne, the printer of Kelso, which was destined to lead to great results. At the end of this year, 1799, Scott was appointed Sheriff of Selkirkshire, an office which brought him into close relations with a romantic part of Scotland to which his poetic atten-

72

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

tion had already been called. He began to contribute in 1803 to the Edin-

burgh Review, but his chief occupation now became the collection of the

Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, of which three volumes appeared in 1802 and

1803. Scott was now fairly launched on the flood of his romantic work, and in

the first days of 1805 the Lay of the Last Minstrel was brought out in London

with a success so encouraging that Scott determined henceforth to make literature

his principal profession. This determination became the more fixed as he saw his

chances of success at the Scotch Bar to be very scanty, "for more than ten years he

Ruins of Dryburgh Abbey

had persisted in surveying the floor of the Parliament House, without meeting with

any employment but what would have suited the dullest drudge." He therefore

quitted the law, and secretly entered into partnership with James Ballantyne as a printer-

publisher. In this same eventful year, 1805, he began to write Waverley, although

he soon dropped it. Ashestiel, a small house most romantically situated close to

the Tweed, was now his home, and he had settled down with ardour into the life of

an active country squire and sportsman. At Edinburgh he added to his emoluments

by being Clerk of Session, a post which he held from 1806 to 1830. He was now

engaged in editing Dryden, in writing Marmion, which appeared in 1808, in starting

Ballantyne on vast schemes as a publisher, and in encouraging the foundation of the

Quarterly Review. He then turned to the task of editing Swift, and completed an

unfinished historical romance by Joseph Strutt (1749-1802), called Queenhoo Hall, which

SIR WALTER SCOTT.

After the Portrait by Sir William Allan.

has been described as the forerunner of the Waverley novels. The accounts which have

come down to us of the breezy, wholesome domestic life at Ashestiel, lead us to regard

these as the very happiest years in the career of Walter Scott. He pushed on with the

publication of his successive poems; The Lady of the Lake followed in 1810, and The Vision

of Don Roderick in 1811. The first of these was successful beyond all precedent, but

there was already a financial cloud on Scott's horizon ; Ballantyne was doing very badly

with other of his speculations, and if Scott was making money, he was losing it too.

Nevertheless, so excellent seemed his prospects in other quarters, that in 1811 he was

emboldened—the lease of Ashestiel having run out—to buy the estate of Abbotsford on

the Tweed. It must be recollected, before charging him with rashness, that from 1812

his professional income was £1600 a year, besides what he might earn by literature.

At this moment, however, Byron sprang upon the

world, and it became evident that he would form

a most serious rival to Scott as a popular poet.

Moreover, Scott's ventures in '1813, Rokeby and The

Bridal of Triermain, were coldly received by the

public. The publishing business with Ballantyne

was wound up, with help from the Duke of Buc-

cleuch, and Constable was much mixed up with

starting again what is still a puzzling business.

Scott was now offered the appointment of Poet

Laureate ; he declined it, but suggested Southey,

to whom it was then given. Scott, however, had

now completed his first novel, Waverley, and in

July 1814, with every circumstance of secrecy, this

book was published. Scott was “not sure that it

would be considered quite decorous for a Clerk of

Session to write novels ;” he was also, no doubt,

anxious to see whether he could whistle the public

to him by his mere charm and fashion of delivery.

The result was extremely gratifying ; the success of

Waverley was instant and enormous. Scott's life

now became one of unceasing activity, book follow-

ing book with rapid regularity. In 1815 he pub-

lished the last of his important narrative poems, The Lord of the Isles, and the

novel of Guy Mannering. The series of Tales of my Landlord began in 1816.

It is impossible, and quite needless, to register here the names of all the deathless

succession of Scott's novels, a series unbroken up to 1829. In 1817 Scott had the

first warning that his health could not support for ever the violent strain which

he was always putting upon it. He was created a baronet early in 1820, the first

creation of George IV.'s reign. Sir Walter came up to London for this purpose, and

stayed to sit for his picture to Lawrence, and for his bust to Chantrey. Two years

later the king came to Scotland, and was welcomed by Scott, who innocently loved a

pageant, "in the Garb of old Gaul," and with a loyalty which knew no bounds.

He founded the Ballantyne Club in 1823, but in the winter of this year

the illness of which he died began to make itself felt ; this was almost

coincident with the completion of Abbotsford. By this time, however, Scott's

unfortunate and secret connection with Constable and with the Ballantyne firm

Title-page of First Edition

of "Waverley"

74

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

had become a distinct cloud upon his horizon, and this grew and darkened. The

ruin of these enterprises became certain at the close of 1825, and the bankruptcy of

Sir Walter Scott was the result. It was presently settled that he should be left

in undisturbed possession of Abbotsford, but

should part with all his other property, live

within his official salary, and pay his debt by

continuing his literary labours with his best

diligence. With noble courage he began to

write at once, and pursued his work in spite of

the further shock of his wife's death in May

1826. By June 1827 he had diminished his

debt by £28,000, and would soon have cleared

himself from all his encumbrances had moderate

health been spared him. But he worked far

too hard, and he was checked in 1828 by a

threatening of apoplexy. His work was not

received with so much public favour as he had

been accustomed to, and he was a good deal

discouraged. But more of his debts were paid;

he was passionately eager to be free; through

the last year of his labour he was "a writing

automaton." His latest romance was Anne of

Geierstein, 1829, but he went on writing history.

In 1830 a paralytic seizure warned him to desist, but in vain; not until October 1831 would

he consent to rest. He was taken to Malta and to Naples, but his health steadily

declined. His family were barely able, in July, to bring him back alive to Abbotsford,

where, on the 21st of September 1832, he died, within "the sound of all others most

delicious to his ear, the gentle ripple of the Tweed over its pebbles." He was buried

five days later in the Abbey of Dryburgh.

Sir Walter Scott

From the Bust by Chantrey

BOAT SONG FROM "THE LADY OF THE LAKE."

Hail to the chief who in triumph advances!

Honoured and blessed be the ever-green Pine!

Long may the Tree in his banner that glances,

Flourish the shelter and grace of our line!

Heaven send it happy dew,

Earth lend it sap anew,

Gaily to bourgeon, and broadly to grow,

While every highland glen

Sends our shout back agen,

"Roderigh Vich Alpine dhu, ho! ieroe!"

Ours is no sapling, chance-sown by the fountain,

Blooming at Beltane, in winter to fade;

When the whirlwind has stripped every leaf on the mountain,

The more shall Clan-Alpine exult in her shade.

Mooed in the rifted rock,

Proof to the tempest's shock,

SCOTT

75

Firmer he roots him the ruder it blow ;

Menteith and Breadalbane, then,

Echo his praise agen,

"Roderigh Vich Alpine dhu, ho ! ieroe !"

Proudly our pibroch has thrilled in Glen Fruin,

And Banochar's groans to our slogan replied ;

Glen Luss and Ross-dhu, they are smoking in ruin,

And the best of Loch-Lomond lies dead on her side.

Widow and Saxon maid

Long shall lament our raid,

Think of Clan-Alpine with fear and with woe ;

Lennox and Leven-glen

Shake when they hear agen,

"Roderigh Vich Alpine dhu, ho ! ieroe !"

Row, vassals, row, for the pride of the Highlands !

Stretch to your oars, for the ever-green Pine !

O ! that the rosebud that graces yon islands,

Were wreathèd in a garland around him to twine !

O that some seedling gem,

Worthy such noble stem,

Honoured and blessed in their shadow might grow !

Loud shou'd Clan-Alpine then

Ring from her deepmost glen,

"Roderigh Vich Alpine dhu, ho ! ieroe !"

LADY HERON'S SONG IN "MARMION."

Oh ! young Lochinvar is come out of the west,

Through all the wide Border his steed was the best ;

And, save his good broadsword, he weapon had none,

He rode all unarmed, and he rode all alone.

So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war,

There never was knight like the young Lochinvar.

He staid not for brake, and he stopped not for stone,

He swam the Eske river where ford there was none ;

But, ere he alighted at Netherby gate,

The bride had consented, the gallant came late ;

For a laggard in love, and a dastard in war,

Was to wed the fair Ellen of brave Lochinvar.

So boldly he entered the Netherby Hall,

Among bride's-men, and kinsmen, and brothers, and all.

Then spoke the bride's father, his hand on his sword

(For the poor craven bridegroom said never a word),

"Oh ! come ye in peace here, or come ye in war,

Or to dance at our bridal, young Lord Lochinvar?"

"I long wooed your daughter, my suit you denied ;—

Love swells like the Solway, but ebbs like its tide—

And now I am come, with this lost love of mine,

To lead but one measure, drink one cup of wine,

There are maidens in Scotland more lovely by far,

That would gladly be bride to the young Lochinvar."

The bride kissed the goblet ; the knight took it up,

He quaffed off the wine, and threw down the cup.

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HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

She looked down to blush, and she looked up to sigh,

With a smile on her lips, and a tear in her eye.

He took her soft hand, ere her mother could bar,—

“Now tread we a measure,” said young Lochinvar.

So stately his form, so lovely her face,

That never a hall such a galliard did grace ;

While her mother did fret, and her father did fume,

And the bridegroom stood dangling his bonnet and plume :

And the bridemaidens whispered, “'Twere better by far

To have matched our fair cousin with young Lochinvar.”

One touch to her hand, and one word in her ear,

When they reached the hall-door, and the charger stood near ;

So light to the croupe the fair lady he swung,

So light to the saddle before her he sprung ;

“She is won ! we are gone ! over bank, bush, and scaur ;

They'll have fleet steeds that follow,” quoth young Lochinvar.

There was mounting 'mong Græmes of the Netherby clan ;

Forsters, Fenwicks, and Musgraves, they rode and they ran :

There was racing and chasing on Cannobie Lee,

But the lost bride of Netherby ne'er did they see.

So daring in love, and so dauntless in war,

Have ye e'er heard of gallant like young Lochinvar?

From “The Lay of the Last Minstrel”

Hushed is the harp—the Minstrel gone,

And did he wander forth alone ?

Alone, in indigence and age,

To linger out his pilgrimage ?

No :—close beneath proud Newark's tower,

Arose the Minstrel's lowly bower ;

A simple hut ; but there was seen

The little garden edged with green,

The cheerful hearth, and lattice clean.

There, sheltered wanderers, by the blaze,

Oft heard the tale of other days ;

For much he loved to ope his door,

And give the aid he begged before.

So passed the winter's day ! but still

When summer smiled on sweet Bowhill

And July's eve, with balmy breath,

Waved the blue-bells on Newark heath ;

When throstles sung in Hare-head shaw,

And corn was green on Carterhaugh,

And flourished, broad, Blackandro's oak,

The aged Harper's soul awoke !

Then would he sing achievements high,

And circumstance of chivalry,

Till the rapt traveller would stay,

Forgetful of the closing day ;

And noble youths, the strain to hear,

Forsook the hunting of the deer ;

And Yarrow, as he rolled along,

Bore burden to the Minstrel's song.

BURKE

These, then, were the influences at work during the fifteen years with which the century opened, and so completely was the old tradition overcome that poetry of the class of Johnson and Pope abruptly ceased, not, indeed, to be admired, but to be composed. A little group of pious writers, of whom Robert Bloomfield (1766-1823), and James Grahame (1765-1811) may be named, endeavoured to keep blank verse and the heroic couplet as they had received it from their Thomsonian forefathers. But although the Farmer's Boy (1798) and the Sabbath (1802) had many imitators and enjoyed a preposterous popularity, their influence was quite outside the main channels of literary activity. The critics stormed against the reforms introduced by Wordsworth, and ridiculed his splendid experiments. But after the preface of 1800 nobody who had any genuine poetic gift could go on writing in the eighteenth-century way, and, as a curious matter of fact, no one except the satirists did attempt to do so.

But it is time to turn to the condition of prose, which, however, offers us at this juncture in our history fewer phenomena of importance. The one great prose-writer of the close of the eighteenth century was EDMUND Burke, and his peculiarities are to be studied to best effect in what he wrote between 1790 and his death in 1797. Burke is, therefore, strictly transitional, and it is not less rational to consider him as the forerunner of De Quincey than as the successor of Robertson and Gibbon. He is really alone in the almost extravagant splendour of his oratory, too highly coloured for the eighteenth century, too hard and resonant for the nineteenth. When Burke is at his best, as for instance in the Letter to a Noble Lord, it is difficult to admit that any one has ever excelled him in the melody of his sentences, the magnificence of his invective, the trumpet-blast of his sonorous declamation. It is said that Burke endeavoured to mould his style on that of Dryden. No resemblance between the richly-brocade robes of the one and the plain russet of the other can be detected. It is not quite certain that the influence of Burke on succeeding prose has been altogether beneficial; he has seemed to encourage a kind of hollow vehemence, an affectation of the "grand style" which in less gifted rhetoricians has covered poverty of thought. We must take Burke as he is, without comparing him with others; he is the great exception, the man essentially an orator whose orations were yet literature. There is an absence of emotional imagination, however, in Burke which is truly typical of the rhetor. In this, as in so much else, Burke is seen still to belong to the eighteenth century. He died just when the young folks in Western Somerset were working out their revolutionary formulas in verse; he missed even the chance of having these presented to his attention. We may be absolutely certain, however, that he would have rejected them with as much scorn and anger as he evinced for the political principles of the French Revolution. Whoever might have smiled on Goody Blake and Betty Foy, it would not have been the fierce and inflexible author of the letters On a Regicide Peace.

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HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

It was, perhaps, a fortunate thing for literature that Burke should die

at that juncture and at the meridian of his powers. His last Tracts sum

up the prose of the century with a magnificent burst of sincere and trans-

cendent ardour. He retains the qualities which had adorned the dying

age, its capacity in the manipulation of abstract ideas, its desire for the

attainment of intellectual truth, its elegant and persuasive sobriety, its

limited but exquisitely balanced sense of literary form.

But Burke was a statesman

too, and here he turns away

from his eighteenth-century

predecessors; he will be

bound by no chains of ab-

stract reasoning. Theories

of politics were to him “the

great Serbonian bog”; he

refused to listen to meta-

physical discussions; when

he was dealing with Ameri-

can taxation, “I hate the

very sound of them,” he

said. As he grew older, his

mind, always moving in the

train of law and order,

grew steadily more and

more conservative. He re-

jected the principles of

Rousseau with scorn, and

when there arose before

him a “vast, tremendous,

unformed spectre” in the

far more terrific guise of

the French Revolution,

Burke lost not a little of

his self-command. He died with the prophetic shrieks of the Regicide Peace

or for Europe, his intellect blazing at its highest incandescence in what

he believed to be the deepening twilight of the nations.

Edmund Burke

After the Portrait by George Romney

Edmund Burke (1729-1797) was the son of a respectable solicitor of Dublin, where

he is believed to have been born on the 12th of January 1729. His mother was a Nagle,

and an earnest Catholic, but he himself and his two brothers were brought up as

Protestants. Burke went to school at Ballitore from 1741 to 1743, when he became a

student of Trinity College, Dublin. He stayed there five years, engaged in desultory

and violent studies, without a system. He preferred, however, to become a lawyer,

and in 1750 he went across to London, and entered the Middle Temple. He was

never called to the Bar, and his neglect of his profession was so scandalous that in 1755

his father withdrew the small allowance on which he lived. Of the events which

followed, Burke was never in after years willing to give a detailed account. He “ broke

all rules, neglected all decorums ;” he was “ sometimes in London, sometimes in

remote parts of the country ; sometimes in France, and shortly, please God, to be in

America.” In 1756, at all events, he married a wife and became an author ; this

being the date of publication of A Vindication of Natural Society, and 1757 of the

Inquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. The sources of his livelihood now appear very

dim to us, but from 1759 onwards Burke was certainly paid £100 a year to edit The

Annual Register. At this juncture, too, he found at last a patron in “ Single-speech ”

Hamilton, who employed him as his private secretary in London and Dublin for six

years. During this period Burke was lost to literature ; “ Hamilton took me,” he says,

“ from every pursuit of my literary reputation or

of improvement of my fortune.” The secretary

called his master an infamous scoundrel, and

found himself in the street. But a better patron

was at hand, and in July 1765 Burke became

private secretary to Lord Rockingham, and was

returned to the House of Commons in December

as M.P. for Wendover. A month later he made

his maiden speech, and was complimented by

Pitt. He gained, Johnson records, more repu-

tation than any man at his first appearance had

ever gained before. After his long obscuration,

Burke, at thirty-seven, was successful at last.

In 1769, returning to literature, he published his

Observations on the Present State of the Nation.

About the same time he bought the estate of

Gregories, near Beaconsfield, in Bucks, and

Warren Hastings

After a Portrait by Ozias Humphrey

how the man, so lately penniless and still with-

out fortune or office, continued to pay for or

to live in such a place is the bewilderment of all

biographers. Burke must have secured some source of wealth the nature of which we

are unable even to conjecture. The Beaconsfield property had been the seat of the poet

Waller ; Burke—wherever he got the money—paid £22,000 for it. Mr. John Morley,

who has inquired closely into the mystery of Burke’s income, has put together a number

of possibilities. He is obliged to add “ when all these resources have been counted

up, we cannot but see the gulf of a great yearly deficit.” Unhappily the result is patent ;

Burke was never henceforth free from heavy debts and anxiety about money. It is

said that when Rockingham died in 1782 he ordered that Burke’s bonds should be

destroyed, and that these alone amounted to £30,000. In the constitutional crisis

which culminated in the loss of our American Colonies, Burke took a prominent part

both with his voice and with his pen. A whole series of brilliant pamphlets opened in

1770 with the anonymous Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents ; this was

suspected of being written by Junius, who had glared across the night of time in 1769.

During Lord North’s administration (1770–1782) it has been well said that “ Burke’s

was as the voice of one crying in the wilderness.” He kept the Rockingham connection

together, he was appointed agent to the Province of New York (1771), he was urged,

80

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

but in vain, to go out to India to examine into the affairs of the East India Company.

In 1773 he took his only son over to Auxerre, in Burgundy, to be educated; he lingered for some time in Paris on his way back, welcomed in society, but with eyes critically open to the momentous signs of the times.

After the dissolution of Parliament in 1774, Burke reappeared as M.P. for Malton, a Yorkshire borough, which he returned to represent for the last years of his life, but which he now immediately abandoned in favour of Bristol, where he sat from 1774 to 1780.

It is interesting that the only years which Burke spent in Parliament as the member for a genuinely independent borough were those of the gigantic struggle with the American Colonies.

On this subject he published three admirable pamphlets, On American Taxation (1774), On Conciliation with America (1775), and A Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777).

He now turned his thoughts to the amendment of the popular system of economics, and in particular to bringing to an end the shocking corruption of the House of Commons by Ministers and by the Court.

In this project and especially in his daring onslaught upon the monstrous waste of the royal household, Burke rose to his height.

But he was reminded of the dangers of reform by losing his seat at Bristol, and it was now that he exclaimed "What shadows we are!

What shadows we pursue!"

Beaconsfield Church, where Burke is Buried

many vicissitudes, which it would be out of place to chronicle here, Burke lost office with the ministers of the Coalition in December 1783 at the final collapse of the Whigs.

Once out of place, Burke had time to concentrate his thoughts on a subject which had long attracted them, namely, the notorious abuses of government in India.

The recall of Warren Hastings gave him at length his opportunity, and in June 1785 Burke asked a question in the House "respecting the conduct of a gentleman lately returned from India."

This was the beginning of his ten years' campaign against that spirit of lawless Indian adventure of which Warren Hastings was the flower and symbol.

In May 1787, in consequence of Burke's untiring efforts, Hastings was impeached; in February 1788 he was tried at Westminster; in 1795, in spite of all Burke's eloquence and ardour, he was acquitted.

But though the man escaped, the shameful system was doomed; the conscience of the English people was at length awakened.

Burke's health suffered from the strain, and after the first trial he went down to Beaconsfield for a needed rest.

In 1789 his attention began to be closely drawn to the events of the French Revolution, and in the midst of the general gratulations which first attended that struggle for liberty, Burke gravely doubted and then strenuously disapproved.

He sat down to the composition of the most carefully executed of all his works, the Reflections

EDMUND BURKE,

After the Portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds

BURKE

on the Revolution in France, which appeared very late in 1790, and produced an

unparalleled sensation. At the moment of its conception Burke had been extremely

MS. Note by Burke on Sir Joshua Reynolds

unpopular; this book made him the darling of the nation. King George III, now

quite recovered from his madness, pronounced the Reflections to be "a good book, a

very good book, a book every gentleman ought to read." Another king, Louis XVI,

VOL. IV.

F

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HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

translated it into French with his own hand. Some Whigs in England, however, dis-

approved and regretted Burke's attitude, and Fox in particular was hostile. It was not,

however, until May 1791, that the actual and public rupture took place between these

friends so long allied by mutual admiration. Burke published his Appeal from the New

to the Old Whigs in August, and early in 1792 his Thoughts on French Affairs, tracts

in which his violence was seen steadily rising in volume. He was now so habitually

excited by apprehension that Frances Burney, who met him at this time, saw on his

face "the expression of a man who is going to defend himself from murderers." How

little command of his feelings Burke now possessed is proved by the scene in which he

threw a dagger on the floor of the House in December 1792. He announced his

intention of leaving Parliament, and in the summer of 1794 he did so, in favour of his

only son, Richard. But this darling of his age suddenly died, and Burke lay like an

old oak torn up by a hurricane. He was to have been raised to the peerage, as Lord

Beaconsfield, but this was now abandoned. The first thing which roused the stricken

statesman was the action of the Duke of Bedford in the matter of royal pensions.

Burke poured forth the splendid invective of his Letters to a Noble Lord (1795), and

he passed on to the still more gorgeous rhetoric of his Thoughts on the Prospect of

a Regicide Peace (1796-7), in four public Letters. To the end he was excited beyond

all sobriety of judgment by the mere thought of "that putrid carcass, that mother of all

evil—the French Revolution." But he was now dying, and he presently passed away

at Beaconsfield on the 9th July 1797, being buried in the parish church. Burke's

magnificent gifts of private conversation and of public oratory greatly impressed all the

best judges during his own generation, and have remained a tradition ever since.

FROM "A Vindication of Natural Society."

There are in Great Britain upwards of a hundred thousand people employed in lead,

tin, iron, copper, and coal mines; these unhappy wretches never see the light of the sun;

they are buried in the bowels of the earth; and here they work at a severe and dismal

task without the least prospect of being delivered from it; they subsist upon the coarsest

and worst sort of fare; they have their health miserably impaired and their lives cut short

by being perpetually confined in the close vapour of these malignant minerals. A hundred

thousand more at least are tortured without remission by the suffocating smoke, intense

fires, and constant drudgery necessary in refining and managing the products of those

mines. If any man informed us that two hundred thousand innocent persons were con-

demned to so intolerable slavery, how should we pity the unhappy sufferers, and how

great would be our indignation against those who inflicted so cruel and ignominious a

punishment!

FROM "Thoughts on a Regicide Peace."

In wishing this nominal peace not to be precipitated, I am sure no man living is less

disposed to blame the present Ministry than I am. Some of my oldest friends (and I wish

I could say it of more of them) make a part in that Ministry. There are some indeed

"whom my dim eyes in vain explore." In my mind a greater calamity could not have

fallen on the public than their exclusion. But I drive away that with other melancholy

thoughts. As to the distinguished persons to whom my friends who remain are joined, if

benefits, nobly and generously conferred, ought to procure good wishes, they are entitled

to my best vows; and they have them all. They have administered to me the only con-

solation I am capable of receiving, which is to know that no individual will suffer by my

thirty years' service to the public. If things should give us the comparative happiness of

a struggle, I shall be found, I was going to say, fighting (that would be foolish), but dying

by the side of Mr. Pitt. I must add that if anything defensive in our domestic system can

possibly save us from the disasters of a regicide peace, he is the man to save us. If the

finances in such a case can be repaired, he is the man to repair them. If I should lament

any of his acts, it is only when they appear to me to have no resemblance to acts of his.

But let him have a confidence in himself which no human abilities can warrant. His

abilities are fully equal (and that is to say much for any man) to those that are opposed

to him. But if we look to him as our security against the consequences of a regicide

peace, let us be assured that a regicide peace and a constitutional Ministry are terms that

will not agree. With a regicide peace the King cannot long have a Minister to serve him,

nor the Minister a King to serve. If the Great Disposer, in reward of the royal and the

private virtues of our Sovereign, should call him from the calamitous spectacles which

will attend a state of amity with regicide, his successor will sure'y see them, unless the

same Providence greatly anticipates the course of nature.

Against Burke there wrote the revolutionary rhetoricians, those who saw

the colours of dawn, not of sunset, in the blood-red excesses of the French.

Richard Price (1723-1791) and Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) were the leaders

of this movement in idea; but in style they remained heavy and verbose,

handing down the heritage

of Locke to Bentham and

Godwin. Priestley, after,

in 1791, having his house

wrecked and his scientific

instruments destroyed, as a

popular punishment for his

sympathy with the Revolu-

tion, lived on until 1804 to

see something like a justifi-

cation of his prophecies.

These men were the pathetic

victims of Burke's splendid

indignation, but in 1791 a

direct attack on the Reflec-

tions took up the cudgels

in defence. This was the

once-famous Rights of Man,

by Tom Paine (1737-1809),

an audacious work, the cir-

culation of which was so

enormous that it had a dis-

tinct effect in colouring

public opinion. A sturdier

and more modern writer of

the same class was WILLIAM

GODWIN, whose Political Justice shows a great advance in lucidity and com-

mand of logical language. He has been compared, but surely to his own

moral advantage, with Condorcet; yet there is no question that he was

curiously related to the French precursors of the Revolution, and particu-

larly to Rousseau and Helvetius, from whom he caught, with their re-

publican ardour, not a little of the clear merit of their style.

GODWIN

William Godwin

After the Portrait by John Opie

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HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

William Godwin (1756-1836), who professed to descend from the great Earl Godwin, of the West Saxons, was really the son of a Nonconformist minister at Wisbeach, where he was born on the 3rd of March 1756. In early life he joined the sect of the Sandemanians, and became a preacher amongst them until the year 1783, when his mind became imbued with sceptical ideas, and resigning his ministry he came up to London to live by literature. Ten years later he published his first important work, the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, which introduced into English society the ideas of the Revolution, and produced a vast sensation. In 1794 this was followed by the powerful novel of Caleb Williams. He now formed the acquaintance of

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), a woman of high intellect and talent, greatly in advance of her time, who suffered a speci us sort of social martyrdom for her Radical ideas, and who has scarcely received her due from posterity. She was the author of Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, 1787, and of Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1794, the latter dedicated to Talleyrand. Godwin met her when, deserted by a man called Gilbert Imlay, whom she had loved, she was in deep distress, and when she had recently attempted to drown herself by leaping from Putney Bridge. He consoled her, and early in 1797 he persuaded her to marry him. She died five months later after giving birth to a daughter, Mary, afterwards the second wife of Shelley.

Mary Wollstonecraft

After the Portrait by J. Opie

Jane Clairmont, afterwards so prominent in the lives of Byron and Shelley. Under the influence of his second wife the moral character of Godwin degenerated. It was in 1811 that he began to know Shelley in conditions only too familiar to us. His financial difficulties culminated in his bankruptcy in 1822. Much in Godwin's later life was sordid and unpleasing, although in 1833 his poverty was relieved by his appointment to be Yeoman Usher of the Exchequer on a small salary. He died in his official residence in New Palace Yard on the 7th of April 1836. It is somewhat difficult to reconcile the squalid anecdotes which have been preserved in regard to Godwin with the enthusiastic respect which was paid him by young men of brilliant gifts from Canning down to Lytton Bulwer. We are less indulgent to him, and we are more inclined to dwell upon "Godwin's house of sordid horror, and Godwin preaching and holding the hat—what a set!" as Matthew Arnold ejaculates.

The Close of "Caleb Williams."

I record the praises bestowed on me by Falkland, not because I deserve them, but because they serve to aggravate the baseness of my cruelty. He survived but three days this dreadful scene. I have been his murderer. It was fit that he should praise

my patience, who had fallen a victim, life and fame, to my precipitation! It would

have been merciful, in comparison, if I had planted a dagger in his heart. He would

have thanked me for my kindness. But atrocious, execrable wretch that I have been,

I wantonly inflicted on him an anguish a thousand times worse than death. Meanwhile

I endure the penalty of my crime. His figure is ever in imagination before me. Waking

or sleeping, I still behold him. He seems mildly to expostulate with me for my un-

feeling behaviour. I live the devoted victim of conscious reproach. Alas! I am the

This Intheile complied with the Inggetion of

her mamma. One morning immediately after breakfasthe took

to her harpsichord, & played one after another several of those

airs that were most the favourites of Mr. Tyrsel. Mr. Takemas

was retired; the servants were gone to their respective employ-

ments. Mrs. Tyrsel would have gone also; his mind was withdrawn,

if he did not take the pleasure he had been accustomed to take

in the musical performance of Emily. But he fingers was how

more tasteful than usual. He was probably brought to

in a manner to take some of the recollection of the cause the

was going to plead, at the same time that it was exempt from

those incapacitations & tremors which would have been felt by

one that does not look forward in the face. Mrs. Tyrsel was

unable to leave the apartment. Sometimes he favoured it with

impatient sighs; then he hung over the poor innocent whole

powers were exerted to please him; at length he threw him-

self in a chair opposite, with his eyes fixed towards Emily.

It was easy to trace the progress of his emotions. The passions

into which his countenance was distorted were gradually obated;

his features were brightened into a smile; the kind ness with

which he had now & then occasions contemplated Emily seemed

to revive in his breast.

Extract from the MS. of "Caleb Williams"

same Caleb Williams that so short a time ago boasted that, however great were the

calamities I endured, I was still innocent.

Such has been the result of a project I formed for delivering myself from the evils

that had so long attended me. I thought that if Falkland were dead, I should return

once again to all that makes life worth possessing. I thought that if the guilt of

Falkland were established, fortune and the world would smile upon my efforts. Both

these events are accomplished, and it is now only that I am truly miserable.

Why should my reflections perpetually centre upon myself, an overweening regard

to which has been the source of my errors! Falkland, I will think only of thee, and

from that thought will draw ever fresh nourishment for my sorrows! One generous,

one disinterested tear I will consecrate to thy ashes! A nobler spirit lived not among

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HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

the sons of men. Thy intellectual powers were truly sublime, and thy bosom burned

with a godlike ambition. But of what use are talents and sentiments in the corrupt

wilderness of human society ! It is a rank and rotten soil, from which every finer

shrub draws poison as it grows. All that, in a happier field and a purer air, would

expand into virtue and germinate into usefulness, is thus converted into henbane and

deadly nightshade.

Supernatural

Fiction

The spirit of change was everywhere in the air, and it showed itself

in the field of diverting literature no less than in that of political con-

troversy. The growth of mediævalism in fiction has been traced back

to Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764), where the supernatural was

boldly introduced into pseudo-

Gothic romance. This innovation

was greatly admired, and presently,

having been reinforced by the influ-

ence of German neo-mediæval narra-

tive, was copiously imitated. In the

last decade of the eighteenth cen-

tury, Mrs. Radcliffe, M. G. Lewis,

and Beckford, presently followed by

Matthew Gregory Lewis

After the Portrait by H. W. Pickersgill

Maturin, founded what has been

called the School of Terror, in the

form of romantic novels in which

fear was treated as the dominant

passion. These "bogey" stories

were very widely appreciated, and

they served both to free the public

mind from the fetters of conven-

tional classic imagery, and to pre-

pare it to receive impressions of

enthusiasm and wonder. After

having been shut up for more than

a hundred years in the cage of a

sort of sceptical indifferentism, the nature of man was blinded by the light

of liberty, and staggered about bewildered by very strange phenomena.

These crude romance-writers had a definite and immediate influence on

the poets with whom the beginning of the next chapter will deal, but

they also affected the whole future of English prose romance.

The Revolutionists created, mainly in order to impress their ideas

more easily upon the public, a school of fiction which is interesting as

leading in the opposite direction from Mrs. Radcliffe and Maturin, namely,

towards the realistic and philosophical novel as we know it to-day. Bage,

Hannah More, Holcroft, and even Godwin are not read any longer, and

may be considered as having ceased to occupy any prominent position

in our literature. But they form a valuable link between Fielding and

Smollett on the one hand, and Jane Austen and the modern naturalistic

school on the other. When the age was suddenly given over to sliding

panels and echoing vaults, and the touch in the dark of "the mealy and

carious bones of a skeleton," these humdrum novelists restored the

balance of common-sense and waited for a return to sanity. The most

difficult figure to fit in to any progressive scheme of English fiction is

Frances Burney, who was actually alive with Samuel Richardson and

with Mr. George Meredith. She wrote seldom, and published at long

intervals; her best novels, founded on a judicious study of Marivaux

and Rousseau, implanted on a strictly British soil, were produced a little

earlier than the moment we have now reached. Yet the Wanderer was

published simultaneously with Waverley. She is a social satirist of a

very sprightly order, whose early Evelina and Cecilia were written with

an ease which she afterwards unluckily abandoned for an aping of the

pomposity of her favourite lexicographer. Miss Burney was a delightful

novelist in her youth, but, unless she influenced Miss Austen, she took

no part in the progressive development of English literature.

Ann Ward (1764-1823), who became Mrs. Radcliffe in 1787, was the author

of six or seven hyper-romantic novels, of which The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794, a

book of real power and value in spite of its extravagance, is the most famous. After

a brief and rather brilliant career as a romance-writer, Mrs. Radcliffe withdrew from

literature after publishing The Italian in 1797. Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-

1818), a prominent figure in the

theatrical and social life of his time,

was the author of numerous plays,

and of the too scandalously famous

romance of The Monk, published

anonymously in 1796. The close of

"Monk" Lewis' life was mainly spent

in the West Indies; he died at sea

on the 14th of May 1818. More

than twenty years later the picturesque circumstances of his career

were revived by the publication of

his Life and Letters. A still more

singular figure was that of William

Beckford(1760–1844), whose Vathek

was published, under circumstances

of curious mystery, in English in

London, and in French at Paris and

Lausanne in 1786–7. Beckford was a

man of great wealth and of fantastic

eccentricity. He spent an immense fortune upon his estate of Fonthill in Wiltshire,

where he had been born on the 1st of October 1760, and where he continued to

live, half hermit, half rajah, until in 1822 ruin fell on him and he was obliged to

sell the property and the dream-fabric he had piled upon it. Beckford retired to

Bath, where he lived until his death on the 2nd of May 1844. Robert Bage

(1728–1801) and Thomas Holcroft (1744–1809) were Quakers by birth who

William Beckford

From a Medalion by P. Sauvage

88

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

became Jacobins by persuasion, and who supported the principles of the French Revolution. Bage's best novel is Barham Downs (1784); Holcroft's romances are forgatten, but his tragi-comedy of The Road to Ruin (1792) is remarkable as the earliest English melodrama, and his excellent Memoirs are still read. Holcroft's life was singularly eventful; he was the son of a London cobbler whose mother "dealt in greens and oysters," and he was brought up to be a pedlar, then a stable-boy, then a jockey, then a strolling actor. It was not until the age of five-and-thirty that he turned his attention, with marked success, to literature.

Violent, crabbed, distressingly energetic, a furious democrat, a sour and satirical moral pedant, there was yet something in the independence and simplicity of Holcroft which was very taking. In 1794 he voluntarily surrendered, in company with Horne Tooke, and others, to the charge of high treason, but was discharged. He was the author of four novels and of more than thirty plays. Holcroft died on the 23rd of March 1809. Finally,

William Beckford walking in his Estate at Fonthill From a Caricature

Hannah More (1745-1833), the friend of Johnson, Garrick, Burke, and Reynolds, was a religious and moral writer of extreme popularity; who in 1808 published a very diverting, although didactic novel, Coelebs in Search of a Wife. Hannah More, who was one of the best-paid authors of her age, distributed more than one fortune in profuse benefactions, and is among the quaintest and most charming figures of her class in the eighteenth century.

Fanny

Frances Burney, afterwards Madame D'Arblay (1752-1840), was the third child and second daughter of the historian of music, Dr. Charles Burney (1726-1814), and his first wife, Esther Sleepe, a Frenchwoman. She was born at King's Lynn on June 13, 1752. When she was eight years old the family removed to London; her mother died in 1761, and five years later her father married again. She was an odd child, and, when her sisters were carefully educated, she for some reason escaped all schooling; "I was never placed under any governess or instructor whatsoever." On the other hand, from a very early age she was incessantly teaching herself by reading and scribbling, and she enjoyed to the full the advantages of the brilliant social circle in which her father moved, with Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, and the rest. She began her famous diary in 1768. It was long, however, before she could persuade

FANNY BURNEY

herself to venture on publicity, and her first novel, Evelina, did not appear until 1778, and then anonymously, and with every circumstance of secrecy. When the book was traced to her pen, she received an ovation from her father's friends and from the public; in 1782 she was persuaded to make a second essay, with Cecilia, although still anonymously. She was now a celebrity, and was introduced by Mrs. Delany to the King and Queen, both of whom were strongly attracted to her. She was in 1786 offered the appointment of Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte, with a salary of £200 a year, a footman, lodgings in the palace, and half the use of a coach. She was averse to accepting the post, which involved tedium and an appalling stiffness of prolonged etiquette, but her friends were dazzled, and they prevailed. Her duties centred around the Queen's snuff-box and her lap-dog, and her relaxation was to preside over the tea-equipage of the gentlemen-in-waiting.

Thomas Holcroft

After the Portrait by John Opie

After five years of this paralysing bondage, her health broke down under the strain of ennui, and she retired on a small pension. In July 1793 she married General D'Arblay, an emigré artillery officer, then living with Mme. de Staël at Juniper Hall, Dorking. A son was born to her in 1794, and in 1796 she published her third novel, Camilla. From 1802 until the death of General D'Arblay in 1818, they lived principally in France and afterwards at Bath. In 1814 she brought out her fourth and last novel, The Wanderer. Madame D'Arblay lived into her eighty-eighth year, and having removed from Bath to London, died there on the 6th of January 1840. Her Diary, full of gossip of the most amusing kind, and covering a space of more than seventy years, was published in seven volumes between 1842 and 1846.

Hannah More

After the Portrait by John Opie

in seven volumes between 1842 and 1846. Fanny Burney was not remarkable for

90

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

beauty, being rather small, shrewd, and prim, but "with a pleasing expression of countenance and apparently quick feelings," as Sir Walter Scott observed.

From Madame D'Arblay's "Diary"

The King went up to the table, and looked at a book of prints, from Claude Lorraine, which had been brought down for Miss Dewes; but Mrs. Delany, by mistake, told him they were for me. He turned over a leaf or two, and then said :-

"Pray, does Miss Burney draw too?"

The too was pronounced very civilly.

"I believe not, sir," answered Mrs. Delany; "at least she does not tell."

"Oh," cried he, laughing, "that's nothing; she is not apt to tell; she never does tell, you know. Her father told me that himself. He told me the whole history of her Evelina. And I shall never forget his face when he spoke of his feelings at first taking up the book; he looked quite frightened, just as if he was doing it that moment. I never can forget his face while I live." Then coming up close to me he said: "But what! what! how was it?"

"Sir," cried I, not well understanding him.

"How came you—how happened it—what—what?" "I—I only wrote, sir, for my own amusement—only in some idle hours."

Frances Burney

After the Portrait by F. Burney

"But your publishing—your printing—how was that?" "That was only, sir—only because——"

I hesitated most abominably, not knowing how to tell him a long story, and growing terribly confused at these questions; besides, to say the truth, his own "what! what!" so reminded me of those vile Probationary Odes, that, in the midst of all my flutter, I was really hardly able to keep my countenance.

The what! was then repeated with so earnest a look that, forced to say something, I stammeringly answered: "I thought, sir, it would look very well in print."

I do really flatter myself this is the silliest speech I ever made. I am quite provoked with myself for it: but a fear of laughing made me eager to utter anything, and by no means conscious till I had spoken of what I was saying.

He laughed very heartily himself—well he might—and walked away to enjoy it, crying out: "Very fair indeed; that's being very fair and honest."

In 1800 Maria Edgeworth opened, with Castle Rackrent, the long series of her popular, moral, and fashionable tales. Their local colouring and dis-

tinctively Irish character made them noticeable; but even the warm praise of

Scott and the more durable value of her stories for children have not pre-

vented Miss Edgeworth from becoming obsolete. She prepares the way for

the one prose-writer of this period whose genius has proved absolutely per-

durable, who holds no lower a place in her own class than is held in theirs by

Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Scott—for that impeccable Jane Austen, whose

fame becomes every day more inaccessible to the devastating forces of time

and shifting fashion. It has long been seen, it was noted even by Macaulay,

that the only writer with whom Jane Austen can fairly be

compared is Shake-

speare. It is obvious

that she has nothing

of his width of range

or sublimity of ima-

gination; she keeps

herself to that two-

inch square of ivory

of which she spoke in

her proud and simple

way. But there is no

other English writer

who possesses so

much of Shakespeare's

inevitability, or who

produces such evi-

dence of a like omni-

science. Like Balzac,

like Tourgenieff at

his best, Jane Austen

gives the reader an

impression of know-

ing everything there

was to know about

her creations, of being incapable of error as to their acts, thoughts, or emo-

tions. She presents an absolute illusion of reality; she exhibits an art so

consummate that we mistake it for nature. She never mixes her own tem-

perament with those of her characters, she is never swayed by them, she

never loses for a moment her perfect, serene control of them. Among

the creators of the world, Jane Austen takes a place that is with the highest

and that is purely her own.

Jane Austen as a Girl

The dates of publication of Miss Austen's novels are misleading if we wish

to discover her exact place in the evolution of English literature. Astounding

as it appears to-day, these incomparable books were refused by publishers

92

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

from whose shops deciduous trash was pouring week by week. The vulgar novelists of the Minerva Press, the unspeakable Musgraves and Roches and Rosa Matildas, sold their incredible romances in thousands, while Pride and Prejudice went a-begging in MS. for nearly twenty years. In point of fact the six immortal books were written between 1796 and 1810, although their

Extract from a Letter from Maria Edgeworth to Mrs. Hoffland

dates of issue range from 1811 to 1818. In her time of composition, then, she is found to be exactly the contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge in their reform of poetry, instead of impinging on the career of Sir Walter Scott as a romance-writer. Her methods however, in no degree resemble those of the poets, and she has no conscious lesson of renaissance to teach. She does not share their interest in landscape ; with her the scenery is a mere accessory. If she is with them at all, it is in her minute adherence to truth, in her instinctive abhorrence of anything approaching rhetoric, in her

minute observation and literary employment of the detail of daily life. It is

difficult to say that she was influenced by any predecessor, and, most unfortu-

nately, of the history of her mind we know almost nothing. Her reserve

was great, and she died before she had become an object of curiosity even to

her friends. But we see that she is of the race of Richardson and Marivaux

although she leaves their clumsy construction far behind. She was a satirist,

however, not a sentimentalist. One of the few anecdotes preserved about

her relates that she refused to meet Madame de Staël, and the Germanic

spirit was evidently as foreign to her taste as the lyricism born of Rousseau.

She was the exact opposite of all which the cosmopolitan critics of Europe

were deciding that English prose fiction was and always would be. Lucid,

gay, penetrating, exquisite, Jane Austen possessed precisely the qualities that

English fiction needed to drag it out of the Slough of Despond and start it

wholesomely on a new and vigorous career.

Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) was the daughter of Richard Lovell Edge-

worth, an eccentric Irish gentleman of good family, and of the second of his

five wives (if we recognise

the freak of his boyish

matrimony). She was born

at Black Bourton, Oxford-

shire, in the house of her

mother's father, a German,

on the 1st of January 1767.

She was put to school at

Derby in 1775. It was

noticed quite early that she

had an extraordinary gift

for story-telling, and at the

age of thirteen she was

urged by her father to begin

the composition of tales.

During an illness, she came

much under the influence

of the humanitarian, Thomas

Day (1748-1789), the author

of the didactic novel, Sand-

ford and Merton (1783-9);

but in 1782 Mr. Edgeworth,

now already, at thirty-eight,

the husband of a fourth

wife, took his complex

family over to Ireland, and

settled on his estates at

Edgeworthstown in County

Longford. This was Maria's home during the remainder of her long life. After

publishing Letters to Literary Ladies in 1795, her real work began with her

Maria Edgeworth

From a Drawing by Joseph Slater

94

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

first novel, Castle Rackrent, published in 1800. This is perhaps the best of her

writings, because the least interfered with; most of her books had to undergo

the revision and general tinkering of her conceited and pedantic father. Belinda

followed in 1801, and Irish Bulls in 1802. Their success made her famous

not in this country alone, but on the Continent, and when the Edgeworths went

to Paris in 1802-3 they found the best society eagerly opened to them. Occa-

sional visits to London, Paris, Switzerland, and Scotland were the diversions of

the remainder of her life, mainly spent in her Irish home. In so quiet an exist-

ence, the arrival of Sir Walter Scott, as a guest at Edgeworthstown in 1823,

formed an epoch. She published two series of Fashionable Tales, 1809-12, of a

didactic and hortatory nature, which were eagerly read by her large public. Towards

the end of her life she gave herself to practical philanthropy, and in spite of

her great age was untiring throughout the famine of 1846. She died at Edge-

worthstown, after a few hours' illness, on the 22nd of May 1849. Byron's descrip-

tion of Maria Edgeworth could not be improved: "She was (in 1813) a nice

little unassuming 'Jeanie Deans'-looking body,' and if not handsome, certainly

not ill-looking; her

conversation was as

quiet as herself—one

would never have

guessed she could

write her name."

Steventon Parsonage, the Birthplace of Jane Austen

Jane Austen

(1775-1817) was the

seventh child and

second daughter of

the Rev. George

Austen, rector of

Deane and Steven-

ton. She was born

in the parsonage of the latter village, half-way between the towns of Whitchurch and

Basington in Hampshire, on the 16th of December 1775. Her mother's name

was Cassandra Leigh, a witty member of a family of wits. Jane and her elder

sister, another Cassandra, were educated at home. Nothing could exceed the

quietness of her existence, which was, however, cheerful, easy, and surrounded

by mirth and affection. At a very early age she began to write "stories of a

slight and flimsy texture, intended to be nonsensical." This was followed by a

period of burlesque imitation of the extravagant romances of the day. The earliest

of her writings which we possess is the short tale, in letters, called Lady Susan,

written when she was about seventeen. A novel called Elinor and Marianne

has not survived, but is understood to have been a first sketch for Sense and

Sensibility. Finally, when in her twenty-first year she began Pride and Prejudice, which

she finished in August 1797, Sense and Sensibility, as we now know, immediately

followed, and Northanger Abbey belongs to 1798. But none of these admirable books

was at that time published. Pride and Prejudice was offered to a publisher of novels,

who refused even to look at it; while Northanger Abbey was bought for £10 by a

bookseller at Bath, who locked it up in a drawer and forgot it. Jane Austen seems to

have taken her disappointment—which is one of the most extraordinary in the history

of literature—with perfect composure, but she ceased to write. In May 1801 her

father resigned his livings to his son, and moved into Bath, where for nearly four years

the Austens lived at 4 Sydney Place. There is very little evidence of the novelist's

state of mind or of her occupations during these years ; we only know that she wrote

nothing at Bath, except the fragment called The Watsons. After the death of her

father, in 1805, she went to Southampton, where she, her mother, and her sister

occupied “a commodious, old-fashioned house in a corner of Castle Square.” Four

more years passed in silence, and it was not until they went to live at

Chawton Cottage, a little house about a mile from Alton, and close to the parish of

her birth, that Jane Austen's faculty revived. In 1811, at the age of thirty-six,

she made her first appearance as an author, with her old Sense and Sen-

sibility, for which she was now paid £150. While this book was going through the press,

she was writing a new one, Mansfield Park, which she does not seem to have finished

until 1814. Meanwhile Pride and Prejudice had at last been pub-

lished. Mansfield Park followed, and Jane Austen was now actively employed in the composition

of Emma, which appeared in the winter of 1815. This was made the occasion for an article

on Miss Austen's novels, now four in number, in the Quarterly Review, an article which

did more than anything else to lift her name into celebrity, and which it has only lately

(1898) been discovered was written by no less celebrated a reviewer than Sir Walter Scott. Amusingly

enough, Jane Austen records, just about this time, that she too is writing “a critique on Walter Scott ;”

but these two illustrious persons never came into any personal relation. In 1815 Miss

The Parlour in Chawton Cottage, with Jane Austen's Desk

96

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Austen's health began to fail, but she continued to write, and Persuasion is the work of

the last year of her life. In the summer of 1817 she was so ill, that she was persuaded

to go to Winchester for medical advice ;

the sisters took lodg-

ings then in College

Street. There Jane died on the 18th of July 1817, and six days later was buried

in Winchester Cathedral. Jane Austen had a vivacious face, with brilliant eyes

and hair ; her "whole appearance expressed health and animation."

She had no literary affectations ; her novels were written and re-

vised at a small mahogany desk in the general sitting-room at

Chawton, a covering being merely thrown over the MS. if a visitor called. No critical

phrase expresses the character of her apparatus so fully as her

own famous one of "the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory."

She liked the best authors of her day, and in particular

Crabbe, with whose genius her own had

an obvious affinity. She is recorded to have said in joke, "that if she ever married,

she could fancy being Mrs. Crabbe." No love-affair less Platonic than this is believed

to have disturbed her heart.

House in College Street, Winchester, where Jane Austen died

FROM "EMMA."

A very little quiet reflection was enough to satisfy Emma as to the nature of her

agitation on hearing this news of Frank Churchill. She was soon convinced that it was

not for herself she was feeling at all apprehensive or embarrassed—it was for him. Her

own attachment had really subsided into a mere nothing—it was not worth thinking of ;

but if he, who had undoubtedly been always so much the most in love of the two, were to

P.S. You are very good in d to me this morning, may I have many

such days as this & many a one may be - It affords me great joy

to hear of your amusement is equal to my own - I amused my

dear Martha Lapanda & myself too from your recommending or may be

I can return the compliment, by thanking you for the

unexpected pleasure of your letter yesterday, as & like unexpected pleasure

it made one very happy; and indeed, you need not apologize for your

letter in any respect, for it is all very fine, but not too fine. I hope

to be written again, or something like it. - I think Edward will not

suffer much longer from heat; by the look of things this morning.

I suspect the weather is arising into the balmy bottmash. It has been

hot here, as you may suppose, since it was so with you, but I

have not suffered from it at all, nor felt it in such a degree as to

make one imagine it would be anything in the country. Everybody

has talked of the heat, but I felt it all down to London. - I guess

you joy of our new Overseer, I hope if he ever comes to be hanged,

it will not be till we are too old to care about it. - It is a great

comfort to have it so safely & speedily over. The Ship Curlings

must be hard worked in writing so many letters, but the novelty

of it may recommend it to them; - Marie was from this Eliza,

as she says that my Brother may arrive today. - No indeed, I

am never too busy to think of you & Lizzy - I can no more forget it, than

a mother can forget her sucking child; I am much obliged to you

for your enquiries. I have had two sheets to correct, but the last

only brings us to the first appearance. - M r K. regrets in this

most flattering manner that she must wait till May, but I

have scarcely a hope of it's being out in June. - Henry does

not neglect it; he has harried the Printer, & says he will see

him again today. - It will not stand still during his absence

7

Letter from Jane Austen to her sister Cassandra

be returning with the same warmth of sentiment which he had taken away, it would be

very distressing. If a separation of two months should not have cooled him, there were

dangers and evils before her ; caution for him and for herself would be necessary. She

did not mean to have her own affections entangled again, and it would be incumbent on

her to avoid any encouragement of his.

She wished she might be able to keep him from an absolute declaration. That would

be so very painful a conclusion of their present acquaintance ; and yet, she could not help

rather anticipating something decisive. She felt as if the spring would not pass without

bringing a crisis, an event, a something to alter her present composed and tranquil state.

It was not very long, though rather longer than Mr. Weston had foreseen, before she had

the power of forming some opinion of Frank Churchill's feelings. The Enscombe family

were not in town quite so soon as had been imagined, but he was at Highbury very soon

afterwards. He rode down for a couple of hours ; he could not yet do more ; but as he

came from Randalls immediately to Hartfield, she could then exercise all her quick observa-

tion, and speedily determine how he was influenced, and how she must act. They met

with the utmost friendliness. There could be no doubt of his great pleasure in seeing her.

But she had an almost instant doubt of his caring for her as he had done, of his feeling

the same tenderness in the same degree. She watched him well. It was a clear thing he

was less in love than he had been. Absence, with the conviction probably of her indiffer-

ence, had produced this very natural and very desirable effect.

One curious result of the revolution in literary taste was the creation of

an official criticism mainly intended to resist the new ideas, and, if pos-

sible, to rout them. The foundation of the Edinburgh Review in

1802 is a remarkable landmark in the history of English literature.

The proposition that a literary journal should be started which

should take the place of the colour-

less Monthly Review was made by Sydney Smith, but FRANCIS

JEFFREY, a young Scotch advocate, was editor from the first, and held

the post for six-and-twenty years. He was a half-hearted supporter of

the Scoto-Teutonic reformers, but a vehement opponent, first of Coleridge and afterwards of Shelley. It

is, however, to be put to his credit that he recognised the genius of

both Wordsworth and Keats, in a manner not wholly unsympathetic ;

his strictures on The Excursion were severe, but there was good sense in

them. The finer raptures of poetry, however, were not revealed to

Jeffrey, and in the criticism of their contemporaries he and his staff were often

Francis, Lord Jeffrey

After the Bust by Patrick Park

VOL. IV.

98

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

guilty of extraordinary levity. Yet, on the whole, and where the prejudices of

the young reviewers were not involved, the Edinburgh did good work, and

it created quite a new standard of merit in periodical writing. To counteract

its Whiggishness the Ministerial party founded in 1809 the Tory Quarterly

Review, and put that bitter pedant and obscurantist, William Gifford, in

the editorial chair. This periodical also enjoyed a great success without

injuring its rival, which latter, at the close of the period with which we are

dealing, had reached the summit of its popularity

and a circulation in those days quite unparalleled.

Readers of the early num-

bers of the Edinburgh and

the Quarterly will to-day

be surprised at the emotion

they caused and the power

they wielded. They are

often smart, sometimes

witty, rarely sound, and the

style is, as a rule, pompous

and diffuse. The modern

reader is irritated by the

haughty assumption of

these boyish reviewers, who

treat genius as a prisoner

at the bar, and as in all

probability a guilty prisoner.

The Quarterly was in this

respect a worse sinner even

than the Edinburgh ; if

Jeffrey worried the authors,

Gifford positively bit them.

This unjust judging of lite-

rature, and particularly of

poetry—what is called the

Sydney Smith

After the Portrait by Sir G. Hayter

'slashing' style of criticism—when it is now revived, is usually still prose-

cuted on the lines laid down by Jeffrey and Gifford. It gives satisfaction to

the reviewer, pain to the author, and a faint amusement to the public. It

has no effect whatever on the ultimate position of the book reviewed, but,

exercised on occasion, it is doubtless a useful counter-irritant to thoughtless

or venal eulogy. If so, let the credit be given to the venerable Blue-and-

yellow and Brown Reviews.

Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey (1773-1850), was son of a depute-clerk in the

Supreme Court of Scotland, and was born in Edinburgh on the 23rd of October 1773.

He was educated at the High School in Edinburgh and at the Universities of Glasgow

REV.

SYDNEY

SMITH

99

and

Oxford.

When

the

Edinburgh

Review

was

founded

in

1802,

Jeffrey

was

settled

in

practice

in

his

native

city.

He

was

invited

to

conduct

the

Review,

and

he

continued

to

be

the

editor

until

1829,

when

he

was

appointed

Dean

of

the

Faculty

of

Advocates,

and

resigned

the

Review

into

the

hands

of

Macvey

Napier

(1777-1847).

Jeffrey

was

made

Lord

Advocate

of

Scotland

in

1830,

but

the

labour

of

politics—for

the

post

involved

attendance

in

Parliament—was

irksome

to

him.

He

was

still

M.P.

for

Edinburgh,

however,

when

in

1834

he

was

made

a

judge

of

the

Court

of

Session,

with

the

title

of

Lord

Jeffrey.

His

health

began

to

fail

in

1841,

but

he

continued

to

perform

his

duties

on

the

bench

until

a

few

days

before

his

death,

which

occurred

at

Edinburgh

on

the

26th

of

January

Jeffrey

exercised

a

sort

of

dictatorship

in

English

criticism

during

a

period

of

great

importance

for

our

literature,

but

posterity

has

reversed

the

majority

of

his

obiter

dicta.

He

had

fine

social

gifts,

and

filled

a

very

important

position

in

Edinburgh,

when

that

city

was

still

a

centre

of

hospitality

and

cultivation.

He

collected

his

scattered

writings

in

four

volumes

in

1844,

but

already

those

who

had

been

astonished

at

his

essays

when

they

appeared

anonymously

discovered

that

much

of

the

splendour

had

departed.

Those

who

turn

to

his

volumes

to-day

will

probably

say

of

them,

as

Jeffrey

himself

had

the

temerity

to

exclaim

of

The

Excursion,

"This

will

never

do!

"

But

he

was

a

man

of

light

and

even

of

leading

in

his

day,

and

did

his

honest

best

to

put

an

extinguisher

on

the

later

lights

of

letters.

William Cobbett

Engraved by William Ward after a Portrait by J. R. Smith

The

Rev.

Sydney

Smith

(1771-1845)

was

the

second

of

the

four

sons

of

a

gentleman

at

Woodford,

Essex,

where

he

was

born

on

the

3rd

of

June

His

father

had

been

a

spendthrift,

but

he

contrived

to

give

his

children

a

sound

education,

and

Sydney

went

to

Winchester

and

to

New

College,

Oxford.

From

1794

to

1797

he

was

a

curate

in

Wiltshire,

and

afterwards

a

tutor

in

Edinburgh,

but

he

suffered

much

from

poverty,

until

the

production

of

the

Edinburgh

Review

supplied

him

with

regular

literary

employment.

He

moved

to

London

in

1803,

and

in

1806

he

got

at

last

a

100

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

living, the rectory of Foston-le-Clay, in Yorkshire. At this time he was discharging

his clerical duties (at Foston-le-Clay) by deputy, and writing his brilliant Peter

Plymley letters (1807-8). Later on

he exchanged Foston for the beautiful

rectory of Combe Florey, in Somerset,

where he loved to entertain his friends.

In 1831 he was made a canon resi-

dentiary of St. Paul's. In his grand

climacteric, 1839, as he said, he

became by the death of a relative

"unexpectedly a rich man." He died

in London on the 22nd of February

1845. Sydney Smith was pre-emi-

ently witty both in writing and in

speech, a droll and delightful com-

panion, a perfectly honest man, and a

genuine lover of liberty and truth.

Jeremy Bentham

After the Portrait by W. Derby

Minor Prose

Writers

of Literature, by Isaac D'Israeli, was not a masterpiece, but its storehouses

of anecdote and cultivated reflection must have familiarised with the out-

lines of literary history thousands who

would have been repelled by a more

formal work. We dare not speak here at

any length of Cobbett and Combe, of

Bentham and Dugald Stewart, of Horner

and Mackintosh and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Of all these writers, in their various ways,

it may safely be said that their ideas were

of more importance than their style, and

that, interesting as they may severally be,

they do not illustrate the evolution of

English literature.

William Cobbett (1762-1835) was born

at Farnham. He was originally a farm labourer,

then (1783) an attorney's clerk in London. From

1784 to 1791 he served as a private soldier in

Nova Scotia. Under the pseudonym of Peter

Porcupine, he became a mordant satiric pam-

phleteer. He is best remembered now by his Rural Rides (1830). He was an exces-

sively prolific occasional writer. William Combe (1741-1823) is famous as the

Isaac D'Israeli

After the Portrait by Denning

WALTER SCOTT

101

author of The Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque (1812-21), and of a daring forgery, Lord Lyttelton's Letters (1782). The great champion of pure utilitarianism,

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), was the son of a solicitor in Houndsditch. He was excessively precocious, and known as "the philosopher" at the age of thirteen. He

invented, or first made general, the formula of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." The uncouthness of Bentham's

style did injustice to his learning and to the freshness of his mind. He bequeathed his body to be dissected and preserved in University College, where it may still be seen,

dressed in the last suit of clothes which Bentham had made for him. Another octogenarian was Isaac D'Israeli (1766-1848),

best known as the father of Lord Beaconsfield. He came of a family of Venetian Jews who settled in England about twenty

years before the birth of Isaac ; and he was educated in Amsterdam. He made the by-paths of literary history the subject of

his life's study, and he wrote two anecdotal miscellanies which are still among our minor classics, Curiosities of Literature, 1791-1834,

and The Calamities and Quarrels of Authors, 1812-14. His life was serene and his temperament placid, "and amid joy or sorrow, the philosophic vein was ever evident." Sir

James Mackintosh (1765-1832) was an ambitious but upright public man, whose legal and political responsibilities-he lived

to be Commissioner of the Board of Control -left him leisure for considerable literary activity, the results of which were mainly

not given to the public until several years after his death. Dugald Stewart (1753-1828) was the principal metaphysician of his time, a disciple of Reid and commentator on his philosophy. He was a brilliant lecturer and a graceful writer : he

was considered the finest didactic orator of his age.

During the later years of this period romantic fiction fell into great Scott's Novels decay. Out of its ashes sprang the historical novel, the invention of which

was boldly claimed by Miss Jane Porter (1776-1850), whose Thaddeus of Warsaw, 1803, long cherished by our great-grandfathers, and not entirely un-

known to our fathers, had some faint merit. Other ladies, with the courage of their sex, but with remarkably little knowledge of the subject, attacked the

muse of history. But nothing was really done of importance until Sir Walter Scott turned his attention from poetry to prose romance. Waverley was

not published till 1814, and the long series of novels really belong to the subsequent chapter. They had, however, long been prepared for, and it

will be convenient to consider them here. Scott had written a fragment

Ruins of Kenilworth Castle

102

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

of an historical novel (afterwards Waverley) in 1805, and in 1808 he had

taken up the useful task of preparing for the press an antiquarian story

by Strutt, called Queenhoo Hall. His long poems of the same decade had

necessitated the approach to historical study in a romantic and yet human

spirit. From his earliest

years Scott had been laying up, from Scot-

tish and from German sources, impressions

which were to be defi-

nitely useful to him in

the creation of his great

novels. At last, in the

maturity of forty-three

years, he began the

gigantic work which he

was not to abandon

until his death in 1832.

It is difficult to speak

of the novels of Sir

Walter Scott in a per-

fectly critical spirit.

They are a cherished

part of the heritage of

the English-speaking

race, and in discussing

them we cannot bring

ourselves to use regard-

ing them anything but

what to foreign critics

seems the language of

hyperbole. The noble

geniality of attitude

which they discover in

the author, their peren-

nial freshness, their

variety, their "magnifi-

Sir Walter Scott

From a Sketch by Sir Edwin Landseer

cent train of events," make us impatient of the briefest reference to their

shortcomings in execution. But it is, perhaps, not the highest loyalty to

Scott to attempt to deny that his great books have patent faults : that the

conduct of the story in Rob Roy is primitive, that the heroines of Ivanhoe are

drawn with no psychological subtlety, that there is a great deal that is terribly

heavy and unexhilarating in the pages of Peveril of the Peak. It is best,

surely, to admit all this, to allow that Scott sometimes wrote too rapidly and

too loosely, that his antiquarianism sometimes ran away with him, that his

& me redder as yf theyr were muth of delus ore and ly dych feithers so yfhape yowrscrctype menforth wrothern wich al hem auturne y to wryt & wille tacklyng or continuinr bryngcums as ye be mertrustyng myng for in a surer peaceablles. Why ye ow it me - and to wichir yowr chumber and yowr auterni brodenbrun londe - thecalen e Mikelandbermi 'Mekir wrygthir' saith On pleare wille dell huskypentim 'yowr hanr hew yowrge': 'Uni' seyn Lumbarme makyng yowr plure hurrow whil he takely mutted Obarmi his hals uphealyng Euphemour wrothe 'makir wry and yowr hanr hed opin for et enclos as y lendyowr y am widdyng re thecalype - wrounth that' he yow londirflornyngs Euphuism by there he felt himsylf orrawnd get fulhere and furthere of yfiermy 'Lave wrodyng the menpece - but dell incresyng ebet nedhere-mynthewe Mekir Eupheleuce - And thole hanra fygat this wend within ye hanr queldors neely wedir del hundred wroce - ofdry ghestlydihwene wend we wellyght delstane - y d furthere now we shalbe and paske, the went Into thepupurs Colleytu the hener and heru flegd- bundele henedure Hair the a turip- asy and yowr wluwergundlamur wile shalwyng prowlyg arrwroke are dellere upot sswardys of yow seuns - whil y hanr dry hurin Euphelour heddusile my lyf by thilacky dmescay this is owr Muy circulme and dell bay lw get a syplyf this disalutryles ofthis studee and: thus

Chapter.III. Leir An wuthor Cloumke Fgour was be the duphe wroth - the cums the cums - berfoldyng Spent an us Palle spende for shalke tornyd'l tucked ahis to Us. Meant to they lustock. guinto be the cundum Peng suete a peuk arlyh, a peynum for cari abated to peuk arlyh, to shown the occupiers we sall hane peyants we - but thai crewn count Ane J'ne a wrygh. hewn osteume

The Vergen deum a trage Com: Tepulyn wrothe-ende the calde becauce kenning whil to thunhing kylde' grewing botarde the on uncroped diwderw wale Any, Rotred and clubriw of he budderm wale bewy untrustd walle the laylyd authonty ofper fader to fop he wartgo cotentmly to londur be his orw guidemne to so meryng fowr. Yll hind cared howr clement for augment. Defiurw delus the Nurfprobably therd bursly open Varwyng, and wro his textualr necesury the keppyng of his quinel lyf myghte deputed upon his dyt dowrungm to extremytye and rew purifyng Euphelour cend exaltes hew from the power of the gretu keppyng hewre to as knowlyg ledynys to his wryf whil dell he to distroy the hole of demestic perew stonde ryght apt and redy to be O, felyng enmely blamyd tham. fa thowld thorughler derogotonly botarde his word. Both Creton it hadtrom fowen and becauce as he dell thowght whate he cow 'dredand decorcylsd this eltraordynably wdersarym it corld and with prstble or papuly symp One repured N't Incess ephim hadt he kend wrodyng begynnyng offendly proddelew for this wnderlyng and dell blamyd object ofliddersty effek on. beryy wro hanghtyly and belyng relent in the charge of puritly of smotyte reputaciun. Thuera unthe lyght of the byghe thame da the tyme the fyrst angew of volemee and hate to be prekelc and frawd. The zetheken the gret eugmenty. Men were creynotlyow whil coud our his epe quylle the effek myghte hone recaen to se we herthuld N't. whil by was thus ffoldeyng till alwryngs and forul, whil alhald the unexplekt proysenum Thus wreith. Euphelwhe Das furdey munt ancesslylly byghund the aftechydly expendyng 'Munch and yowr worshyp' fforwrd to wnd brothlik ewdeke to purchd hiwrethe unhefed thet the dedlyme enqafne from Lumbarme - place theis at lrebetde the Cote 'and Euphelour I knowe itand I knew whin. was obyeynt thein the ferend yfage in my epyrlt: 'No 'answrd Wrawnd 'but! corld Mekir of the Mynde of depels, betwenyng his aud was but to happy to fynde Eupdy wher who knew whin ye were quendrd. we joly, wrouly the halden therke his' 'Meke hay is mtheuyn of feythyng 'an: word Eupheleen smly 'I wot thowld wro deathe the Artit I hame flettere Mwndeypas y I had un halle womany awthe -the lady kenws and his condyciun. the lath hame many yowr and counselyng yowr not to be secusd to the shado purchasyng of wle the hyght of gladydon I shal dewe get the defensy and wchylmyn hyrde of it - y's epythablis?' deum Eupheleuce 'But onely hew hyephylturkalle exthyrwpekune in thur

Page of the MS. of 'Kenilworth'

pictures of mediæval manners are not always quite convincing. He has not the inevitable perfection of Jane Austen; he makes no effort to present himself to us as so fine an artist.

When this is admitted, let the enemy make the best they can of it. We may challenge the literatures of the world to produce a purer talent, or a writer who has with a more brilliant and sustained vivacity combined the novel with the romance, the tale of manners with the tale of wonder.

Scott's early ideal was Fielding, and he began the Waverley series in rivalry with Tom Jones, but he soon left his master. If Scott has not quite the intense sympathy with humanity, nor quite the warm blood of Fielding, he

Original Sketch by Cruikshank for "Meg Merrilees"

has resources which the earlier novelist never dreamed of. His design was to please the modern world by presenting a tale of the Middle Ages, and to do this he had to combat a wide ignorance of and lack of sympathy with history; to create, without a model, homely as well as histrionic scenes of ancient life; to enliven and push on the narrative by incessant contrasts, high with low, tragic with facetious, philosophical with adventurous.

His first idea was, to dwell as exclusively as possible with Scottish chivalry. But Guy Mannering, once severely judged by the very admirers of Scott, now esteemed as one of his best books, showed what genius for humorous portraiture was possessed by the creator of Dandie Dinmont and Dominie Sampson; while the Antiquary, in its pictures of seaside life in a fishing-town of Scotland, showed how close and how vivid was to be his observation of rustic society.

104

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

In all the glorious series there are but two which a lover of Scott would

wish away. It is needless to mention them ; their very names recall to us

Sunset

The sun upon the Weirdlaw hill

In Ettrick's vale is sinking sent

The weary world is hushed and still

The lake lies sleeping as my fate

Yre was the sunshine in munyier

Bearsthe dark brayer hye's that even a love

Through evening the rich elye

Grumsen the hidden Ettrick's shur

With lirday eye along the glen

I see Tweed silver current glith

Amidst colleyarsth the holy face

Of Melrose are the moon's pride

The gale lure the balmy air

The hill the stream the tower the tree

Are mystic such aserne through

Are as the drawing change we the

Alas.' the warpland broken braw

How can it be the fountainye

Has the burh of dreain'd and bultiphens

How to the mustrels chile reply

To aching eyes such lands cake lowers

The furnastfuleu eutigale blew chill

and Aralby's en elumer Clowns

over barren arthus movelend hill -

Facsimile of MS. Verses of Scott

that honourable tragedy of over-strain, of excessive imaginative labour,

which bowed his head at length to the ground. The life of Scott, with its

splendeurs et misères—the former so hospitably shared, the latter so heroically borne—forms a romance as thrilling as any of his fictions, and one necessary to our perfect comprehension of his labours. Great as had been the vogue of his poems, it was far exceeded by that of his novels, and when Scott died his was doubtless the strongest naturalistic influence then being exercised in Europe. All the romances of Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo sprang

My dear Mrs Slade

I have just seen the copy with which you have honoured me. I am not the Author of Waverley nor am I in any way connected with Miss or theceptful worlds. I am not the step Mark will be anxious that I should every desire to oblige or forward him it is quite impossible Mrs I dare have the honour of accepting the flattering insinuation in which the purpose of this letter is conveyed I have also the pleasure to grant a refusal which she prefers. I beg leave to do the wholsome thing by agreeing able to be friendly so odd too. Violenter juvencf I am with great regard yours sincerely faithfully

Facsimile Letter from Scott to Mrs. Slade denying the authorship of "Waverley"

directly from him; he had inspired Fouqué in Germany, Manzoni in Italy, and Fernan Caballero in Spain. Wherever historical fiction of a picturesque and chivalrous order was produced, it bore the stamp of Walter Scott upon its margin. Nor with the decline of the imitations is it found that the original ceases to retain its hold on the interest of the English race.

Bloodhounds.

The pursuit of Border marauders was followed by the injured party and his friends with bloodhounds and bugle-horn, and was called the hot-trod. He was entitled, if his dog could trace the scent, to follow the invaders into the opposite kingdom; a privilege

106

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

which often occasioned bloodshed. In addition to what has been said of the bloodhound,

I may add, that the breed was kept up by the Buccleuch family on their Border estates

till within the eighteenth century. A person was alive in the memory of man, who remem-

bered a bloodhound being kept at Eldinhope, in Ettricke Forest, for whose maintenance

the tenant had an allowance of meal. At the time the sheep were always watched at

night. Upon one occasion, when the duty had fallen on the narrator, then a lad, he

became exhausted with fatigue, and fell asleep upon a bank near sunrising. Suddenly he

was awakened by the tread of horses, and saw five men, well mounted and armed, ride

briskly over the edge of the hill. They stopped and looked at the flock ; but the day was

too far broken to admit the chance of their carrying any of them off. One of them, in

spite, leaped from his horse, and, coming to the shepherd, seized him by the belt he wore

round his waist ; and, setting his foot upon his body, pulled it till it broke, and carried

it away with him. They rode off at the gallop; and, the shepherd giving the alarm, the

bloodhound was turned loose, and the people in the neighbourhood alarmed. The

marauders, however, escaped, notwithstanding a sharp pursuit. This circumstance serves

to show how very long the license of the Borderers continued in some degree to manifest

itself.

HUMANITY OF BRITISH SOLDIERS.

Even the unexampled gallantry of the British army in the campaign of 1810-11,

although they never fought but to conquer, will do them less honour in history than their

humanity, attentive as often to the utmost of their power the horrors which war, in its

mildest aspect, must always inflict upon the defenceless inhabitants of the country in

which it is waged, and which, on this occasion, were tenfold augmented by the barbarous

cruelties of the French. Soup-kitchens were established by subscription among the

officers, wherever the troops were quartered for any length of time. The commissaries

contributed the heads, feet, &c., of the cattle slaughtered for the soldiery : rice, vegetables,

and bread, where it could be had, were purchased by the officers. Fifty or sixty starving

peasants were daily fed at one of these regimental establishments, and carried home the

relics to their famished households. The emaciated wretches, who could not crawl from

weakness, were speedily employed in pruning their vines. While pursuing Massena,

the soldiers evinced the same spirit of humanity, and in many instances, when reduced them-

selves to short allowance, from having outmarched their supplies, they shared their

pittance with the starving inhabitants, who had ventured back to view the ruins of their

habitations, burnt by the retreating enemy, and to bury the bodies of their relations whom

they had butchered. Is it possible to know such facts without feeling a sort of confidence,

that those who so well deserve victory are most likely to attain it?-It is not the least of

Lord Wellington's military merits, that the slightest disposition towards marauding meets

immediate punishment. Independently of all moral obligation, the army which is most

orderly in a friendly country, has always proved most formidable to an armed enemy.

Walter Scott, so long a European force, has now, foiled by the victory

of the school of Balzac, retired once more to the home he came from, but

on British soil there is as yet no sign of any diminution of his honour or

popularity. Continental criticism is bewildered at our unshaken loyalty to

a writer whose art can be easily demonstrated to be obsolete in many of its

characteristics. But English readers confess the perennial attractiveness

of a writer whose " tone " is the most perfect in our national literature, who

has left not a phrase which is morbid or petulant or base, who is the very

type of that generous freedom of spirit which we are pleased to identify

with the character of an English gentleman. Into the persistent admiration

of Sir Walter Scott there enters something of the militant imperialism of

our race.

CHAPTER II

THE AGE OF BYRON

1815-1840

It is noticeable that the early manifestations of the reforming spirit in English literature had been accompanied by nothing revolutionary in morals or conduct. It is true that, at the very outset, Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge had been inclined to a "pantisocratic" sympathy with the principles of the French Revolution, and had leaned to the radical side in politics. But the spirit of revolt was very mildly awakened in them, and when the Reign of Terror came, their aspirations after democratic freedom were nipped in the bud. Early in the century Wordsworth had become, what he remained, a Church and State Tory of the extreme type; Southey, who in 1794 had, "shocking to say, wavered between deism and atheism," promptly developed a horror for every species of liberal speculation, and contributed with gusto to the Quarterly Review. Temperament and circumstance combined to make Scott a conservative in politics and manners.

Meanwhile, it was in the hands of these peaceful men that the literary revolution was proceeding, and we look back from 1815 with a sense of the extraordinary modesty and wholesome law-abiding morality of the generation which introduced romanticism in this country.

Lord Byron

(Circa 1804-1806)

After a Portrait in the possession of A. C. Benson, Esq.

107

108

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

No section of English literature is, we will not say more innocent merely,

but more void of the appearance of offence than that which was produced

by the romantic reformers of our poetry. The audacity of Wordsworth

and Coleridge was purely artistic; it was bounded by the determination to

destroy certain conventions of style, and to introduce new elements and

new aspects into the treatment of poetry. But these novelties included

nothing that could unsettle, or even excite, the conscience of the least

mature of readers. Both these great writers spoke much of passion, and

insisted on its resumption by an art which had permitted it to escape too

long. But by passion Wordsworth understood no unruly turbulence of

the senses, no revolt against conventional manners, no disturbance

of social custom. He conceived the term, and illustrated his con-

ception in his poetry, as intense emotion concentrated upon some

object of physical or pathetic beauty

-such as a mountain, a child, a

flower-and led directly by it into

the channel of imaginative expres-

sion. He saw that there were aspects

of beauty which might lead to dan-

ger, but from these he and Scott,

and even Coleridge, resolutely turned

away their eyes.

Mrs. Byron

After a Portrait by Thomas Stewardson in the

possession of John Murray, Esq.

To all the principal writers of

this first generation, not merely vice,

but coarseness and licence were

abhorrent, as they had been to no

earlier race of Englishmen. The

rudeness of the eighteenth century

gave way to a cold refinement, ex-

quisitely crystal in its highest expressions, a little empty and inhuman in its

lower ones. What the Continental nations unite to call our 'hypocrisy,'

our determination not to face the ugly side of nature at all, to deny the

very existence of the unseemly instincts, now came to the front. In con-

trast to the European riot, England held her garments high out of the

mire, with a somewhat mincing air of excessive virtue. The image was

created of Britannia, with her long teeth, prudishly averting her elderly eyes

from the cancan of the nations. So far as this refinement was genuine it

was a good thing-the spotless purity of Wordsworth and Scott is matter

for national pride-but so far as it was indeed hypocritical, so far as it was

an exhibition of empty spiritual arrogance, it was hateful. In any case, the

cord was drawn so tight that it was bound to snap, and to the generation of

intensely proper, conservative poets and novelists there succeeded a race

of bards who rejoiced to be thought profligates, socialists, and atheists.

Our literature was to become "revolutionary" at last.

In the sixth Lord BYRON the pent-up animal spirits of the new era

found the first channel for their violence, and England positively revelled

in the poetry of crime and chaos. The representative of a race of lawless and

turbulent men, proud as Lucifer, beautiful as Apollo, sinister as Loki, Byron

appeared on the scenes arrayed in every quality which could dazzle the

youthful and alarm the mature. His lovely curly head moved all the women

to adore him; his melancholy attitudes were mysteriously connected

with stories of his appalling wicked-

ness; his rank and ostentation of

life, his wild exotic tastes, his defi-

ance of restraint, the pathos of his

physical infirmity, his histrionic

gifts as of one, half mountebank,

half archangel, all these combined

to give his figure, his whole legend,

a matchless fascination. Nor,

though now so much of the gold

is turned to tinsel, though now the

lights are out upon the stage where

Byron strutted, can we cease to be

fascinated. Even those who most

strenuously deny him imagination,

style, the durable parts of literature,

cannot pretend to be unmoved by

the unparalleled romance of his

career. Goethe declared that a man

so pre-eminent for character had

never existed in literature before,

and would probably never appear

again. This should give us the note

for a comparative estimate of Byron: in quality of style he is most un-

equal, and is never, perhaps, absolutely first-rate; but as an example of

the literary temperament at its boiling-point, history records no more brilliant

name.

Byron was in haste to be famous, and wrote before he had learned his art.

His intention was to resist the incursion of the romantic movement, and at

the age of twenty-one he produced a satire, the aim of which, so far as it was

not merely splenetic, was the dethronement of Wordsworth and Coleridge in

favour of Dryden and Pope. In taste and conviction he was reactionary

to the very last; but when he came to write, the verse poured forth like lava,

and took romantic forms in spite of him. His character was formed

during the two wild years of exile (June 1809 till July 1811), when, a prey

to a frenzied restlessness, he scoured the Mediterranean, rescued Turkish

110

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

women, visited Lady Hester Stanhope, swam across the Hellespont, rattled

at the windows of seraglios, and even—so Goethe and the world believed

—murdered a man with a yataghan and captured an island of the Cyclades.

Before he began to sing of Lara and the Giaour he was himself a Giaour,

himself Lara and Conrad; he had travelled with a disguised Gulnare, he

had been beloved by Medora, he had stabbed Hassan to the heart, and fought

by the side of Alp the renegade; or, if he had not done quite all this, people

insisted that he had, and he was too melancholy to deny the impeachment.

Languid as Byron affected to be, and haughtily indolent,

he wrote with extraordinary persistence and rapidity. Few

poets have composed so much in so short a time. The

first two cantos of Childe

Harold in 1812 lead off the

giddy masque of his produc-

tions, which for the next few

years were far too numerous

to be mentioned here in detail.

Byron's verse romances,

somewhat closely modelled

in form on those of Scott,

began with the Giaour, and

each had a beautiful, fatal

hero "of one virtue and a

thousand crimes," in whom

tens of thousands of awe-

struck readers believed they

recognised the poet himself

in masquerade. All other

poetry instantly paled before

the astounding success of

Byron, and Scott, who had

reigned unquestioned as the

Lord Byron

After a Portrait by W. Westall in the possession of

Coningsby D'Israeli, Esq.

popular minstrel of the age, "gave over writing verse-romances" and took

to prose. Scott's courtesy to his young rival was hardly more exquisite

than the personal respect which Byron showed to one whom he insisted in

addressing as "the Monarch of Parnassus"; but Scott's gentle chieftains

were completely driven out of the field by the Turkish bandits and pirates.

All this time Byron was writing exceedingly little that has stood the test of

time; nor, indeed, up to the date of his marriage in 1815, can it be said

that he had produced much of any real poetical importance. He was now,

however, to be genuinely unhappy and candidly inspired.

Adversity drove him in upon himself, and gave him something of creative

sincerity. Perhaps, if he had lived, and had found peace with advancing

years, he might have become a great artist. But that he never contrived

to be. In 1816 he left England, shaking its dust from his feet, no longer

a pinchbeck pirate, but a genuine outlaw, in open enmity with society.

This enfranchisement acted upon his genius like a tonic, and in the last eight

years of his tempestuous and lawless life he wrote many things of extra-

ordinary power and even splendour. Two sections of his work approach,

nearer than any others, perfection in their kind. In a species of magnificent

invective, of which the Vision of Judgment is the finest example,

Byron rose to the level of Dryden and Swift ; in the picturesque satire

of social life-where he boldly imi-

tated the popular poets of Italy, and in particular Casti and Pulci-his

extreme ease and versatility, his masterly blending of humour and

pathos, ecstasy and misanthropy,

his variegated knowledge of men and manners, gave him, as Scott

observed, something of the univer-

sality of Shakespeare. Here he is to be studied in Beppo and in the

unmatched Don Juan of his last six years. It is in these and the related

works that we detect the only per-

durable Byron, the only poetry that remains entirely worthy of the

stupendous fame of the author.

It is the fatal defect of Byron that his verse is rarely exquisite.

That indescribable combination of harmony in form with inevitable

propriety in language which thrills the reader of Milton, of Wordsworth,

of Shelley, of Tennyson -this is scarcely to be discerned in Byron. We are, in exchange, presented with

a rapid volume of rough melody, burning words which are torches rather

than stars, a fine impetuosity, a display of personal temperament which it has

nowadays become more interesting to study in the poet than in the poetry, a

great noise of trumpets and kettledrums in which the more delicate melodies

of verse are drowned. These refinements, however, are imperceptible to

all but native ears, and the lack of them has not prevented Byron from

seeming to foreign critics to be by far the greatest and the most powerful

of our poets. There was no difficulty in comprehending his splendid,

Lord Byron

From a Drawing by Count D'Orsay, taken in 1823.

112

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

rolling rhetoric; and wherever a European nation stood prepared to in-

reigh against tyranny and conventionality,

the spirit of Byron was ready to set its

young poets ablaze.

Hence, while in England the influence

of Byron on poetry was not in the least

degree commensurate with his fame, and

while we have here to look to prose-writers,

such as Bulwer and Disraeli, as his most

direct disciples, his verse inspired a whole

galaxy of poets on the Continent. The re-

rival of Russian and Polish literature dates

from Byron; his spirit is felt in the entire

attitude and in not a few of the accents

of Heine and of Leopardi; while to the

romantic writers of France he seemed the

final expression of all that was magnificent

and intoxicating. Neither Lamartine nor

Vigny; Victor Hugo nor Musset, was inde-

pendent of Byron's influence, and in the

last-mentioned we have the most exact

reproduction of the peculiar Byronic

gestures and passionate self-abandonment which the world has seen.

Mary Ann Chaworth

From an Engraving by Stone after an Original

Drawing

In Don Juan Byron had said that "poetry is but passion." This was

a heresy, which it would be easy to refute,

since by passion he intended little more than

a relinquishing of the will to the instincts.

But it was also a prophecy, for it was the

reassertion of the right of the individual

imagination to be a law to itself, and all sub-

sequent emancipation of the spirit may be

traced back to the ethical upheaval of which

Byron was the storm-thrush. He finally

broke up the oppressive silence which the

pure accents of Wordsworth and Coleridge

had not quite been able to conquer. With

Byron the last rags of the artificiality which

had bound European expression for a cen-

tury and a half were torn off and flung to

the winds. He taught roughly, melodrama-

tically, inconsistently; but he taught a lesson

of force and vitality. He was full of techni-

cal faults, drynesses, flatnesses; he lacked the

power to finish; he offended by a hundred

careless impertinences; but his whole being

was an altar on which the flame of personal genius flared like a conflagration.

Lady Noel Byron

From an Engraving by Finden after an Original

Drawing

BYRON

113

George Gordon Byron, the sixth Lord Byron (1788-1824), was the only child

of Captain John Byron by his second wife, Miss

Catherine Gordon of Gight. He was born on

the 22nd of January 1788, in London. The

father, who had led a life of the wildest reckless-

ness, died at Valenciennes in 1791. He had

abandoned his wife, who, with her infant son,

settled in lodgings in Aberdeen. From his

father, and his father's line, the poet inherited

his spirit of adventurous eccentricity, and from

his mother his passionate temper and amenity

to tenderness. In 1794 the sudden death of

his cousin in Corsica made "the little boy who

lives at Aberdeen" the heir to the title, and in

1798 the poet succeeded his grand-uncle, the

"wicked Lord Byron" who had killed Mr.

Chaworth in 1765, and who had survived at

Newstead to extreme old age in a wretched

defiance of society. After going to school at

Nottingham, the boy was brought to London in

1799 to be treated, but in vain, for a club-foot.

In 1800 Byron made his first "dash into poetry,"

inspired by the "transparent" beauty of his

cousin, Margaret Parker. He was at this time

Augusta Ada Byron

From an Engraving by Stone after an

Original Drawing

at school at Dulwich, where his studies

were so absurdly interfered with by his mother's indulgence, that in 1801 he was re-

moved by his guardian, Lord Carlisle, to

Harrow. Here Byron was greatly benefited,

morally and intellectually, by the discipline of

Dr. Drury. At Harrow he was turbulent and

capricious, yet irregularly ardent in his studies

and civilised by warm and valuable friendships.

In his holidays, which were commonly spent

with his mother, he became intimate with Mary

Ann Chaworth of Annesley, to whom in 1803

he became passionately attached; but in the

summer of 1805 she married a local squire.

Byron, a few weeks later, was removed to

Trinity College, Cambridge, where in July 1803

he took his degree. At the university he deve-

loped more athletic tastes than at school, and

John Cam Hobhouse

From an Engraving after a Portrait by

Wivell

shot, rode, and boxed with skill: he had the

reputation of being "a young man of tumultuous

passions." After a false start in November

1806, Byron collected his juvenile poems again

and issued them privately in January 1807; two

months later he published from the Newark

press the Hours of Idleness. He was now

nominally at Cambridge, and fitfully hard at work, but between whiles sowing wild oats

VOL. IV.

H

114

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

with much parade and effrontery, and posing as "a perfect Timon, not nineteen."

In 1808 Byron left Cambridge for good, and settled at Newstead, and in 1809

made his first appearance, not a favourable one, in the

House of Lords. English Bards and Scotch Reviewers

was now published, and proved an instant success.

A final revel at Newstead

Abbey was suddenly broken up in June 1809, and Byron

left England with Hobhouse, intending to travel in Persia

and India. The friends saw

something of Portugal and

Spain, and in the autumn ar-

rived in Turkey, to spend the

Newstead Abbey

From a Drawing by W. Westall

winter in Greece. The poem of Childe Harold accompanied the wanderings of which

it became the record; the second canto was finished at Smyrna in March 1810,

and Byron passed on to Constantinople. The next twelve months were spent in travel

and adventure, and in the composition of

masses of verse : in July 1811, with "a

collection of marbles and skulls and hem-

lock and tortoises and servants," Byron re-

turned to England. Before he could reach

Newstead his mother was dead. For the

next eighteen months the life of Byron offers

no points of signal interest, but in February

1812 his active literary career began with the

first instalment of Childe Harold; it was

followed, in 1813, by The Waltz, The Giaour,

and The Bride of Abydos; in 1814 by The

Corsair, Lara, and the Ode to Napoleon;

and in 1815 by Hebrew Melodies; and in

1816 by The Siege of Corinth and Parisina.

These dates mark the first outbreak of

Byron's immense popularity. He became at

once the only possible competitor of Scott,

with whom this rivalry did not prevent his

forming a friendship highly to the credit of

both, though they did not actually meet

until the spring of 1815, when, "like the

old heroes in Homer, we exchanged gifts;

I [says Scott] gave Byron a beautiful dagger

mounted with gold, . . . and Byron sent

me a large sepulchral vase of silver full of dead men's bones." Women were

not so platonically moved by the "pale, proud" poet; they noted him as

"mad, bad, and dangerous to know." With all his fame and all his conquests

The Countess Guiccioli

From a Bust in the Palazzo Gamba, Ravenna

BYRON

115

Byron was profoundly unhappy, and it was to find happiness that he plunged, without reflection, into his luckless marriage with Miss Millbanke, to whom he had proposed and been rejected in 1813. She now accepted him, and in January 1815 they were married. For a year the ill-assorted couple lived together in tolerable comfort; then, suddenly, Lady Byron took advantage of a visit she was paying to her family in Leicestershire, to announce to her husband in London that she should not return to him. She demanded a legal separation, but doggedly refused to state her reasons, and in spite of reams of commentary and conjecture we are as much in the dark to-day. as regards the real causes of the separation, as the gossips were eighty years ago. It is certain that, at first, the poet was patient and conciliatory, but, under his wife's obtuseness, his temper broke down, and with extraordinary want of tact he made the public his confidants. His violent popularity had for some time been waning, and this want of prudence destroyed it-the whole British nation went over in sympathy to the insulted wife. On what grounds the public formed their opinion it is still difficult to discover, but, as Byron said, "it was general and it was decisive."

The poet was accused of every crime, and before the storm of obloquy his pride and his sensitiveness recoiled; he turned and fled from England, settling himself "by the waves of the Adriatic, like the stag at bay, who betakes himself to the waters." In April 1816 he left London for Ostend, and he never set foot in his native land again. He brought with him a coach and a retinue; in Brussels the former was exchanged for a calèche, in which he travelled to Geneva. Here he formed an intimacy with Shelley, with whom he took many excursions on the lake, being nearly wrecked on one occasion. The Shelleys left Geneva for England in September, and Byron set out on a journey through Switzerland, of which Manfred was the result. This first year of exile was highly productive of poetry; to 1816 belong The Prisoner of Chillon, The Dream, Childe Harold, Canto III, and many of Byron's finest lyrics. In October he started for Italy, and settled in Venice for several months. The year 1817 was spent either in that city or in restless wanderings over the length and breadth of Italy; in the autumn he rented a small villa at Este. His life now became absolutely reckless and wildly picturesque; a whole romantic legend gathered around it, which Byron himself was at no pains to reprove. He became, as one of his own servants said, "a good gondolier, spoiled by being a poet and a lord." Intellectually and imaginatively, it is plain that this romantic, lawless life suited Byron's temperament admirably. It was at this time that he wrote with the greatest vigour. Early in 1818 he finished Beppo, later he composed Mazeppa, and

Palazzo Guiccioli, Ravenna

116

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

in the winter of that year he began

Don Juan. At this time he had the charge of

his little daughter Allegra, whom in the

summer of 1820 he put to school with

the nuns at Cavalli Bagni; in April

1822 she died, to Byron's bitter sorrow,

at the age of five years. Early in 1819

the poet began his liaison with Theresa,

Countess Guiccioli, a beautiful young

woman of the Romagna, who fell

violently in love with him. Byron came

over to Ravenna to visit her in June,

and stayed with her there and at

Bologna till nearly the end of the year.

After a brief cessation of their loves

he joined her again at Ravenna early

in 1820; this was a period of com-

parative quietude, and Byron wrote

Marino Faliero, The Prophecy of Dante,

and the fourth and fifth cantos of Don

Juan. "This connection with La

Guiccioli," as Shelley clearly observed,

was "an inestimable benefit " to Byron ;

the younger poet conceived the idea

of bringing the lovers over to Pisa, a

safer town for them than Ravenna.

Byron's House at Ravenna, with a Tablet

over the door relating to him

Shelley secured the Palazzo Lanfranchi, and Byron took up his abode there in

November 1821. He brought with him three dramas composed in Ravenna,

The Two Foscari, Sardanapalus,

and Cain. At Pisa Byron re-

sumed his eager poetic activity,

and in 1822 finished Werner,

The Deformed Transformed,

and Heaven and Earth, more

or less daring examples of his

new passion for romantic drama.

Cain, in particular, awakened a

storm of hostility among the

orthodox in England, and the

name of Byron became ana-

thema; there was even a sug-

gestion that the publishershould

be proceeded against. It was

in the midst of this fanatic storm

that Byron still more audaci-

ously outraged British respectability with what is perhaps the finest of all his

writings, The Vision of Judgment (1822), and this time the printer was prosecuted

and fined. Byron's breach with all that was respectable in England was now

The Pine Forest at Ravenna, a favourite

ride of Byron's

BYRON

117

complete; he gave up any idea of returning. In July the drowning of Shelley was a

great shock to Byron, and, the Tuscan

police about this time becoming very

troublesome, he left Pisa and settled

with La Guiccioli near Genoa, at the

Villa Saluzzo; this was his last Italian

home. Here he took up Don Juan

once more, and here he wrote The Island and The Age of Bronze. Byron

now became greatly interested in the

war of Greek independence; he was

elected a member of the Greek committee of government, and began to

think that he might be useful in the

Morea. In July 1823 he started from

Genoa with money, arms, and medicines

for the revolutionaries. After landing at

Leghorn, where he received an epistle

in verse from Goethe, Byron reached

Kephalonia in August and stayed there

until December. There was a suggestion that the Greeks should make him

their king, and he said, "If they make

me the offer, I will perhaps not reject

it." In the last days of 1823 he arrived

with all his retinue at Missolonghi,

received "as if he were the Messiah."

But he was soon attacked by an illness, which took the form of rheumatic fever.

Palazzo Lanfranchi, Pisa

From a Photograph

On the 19th of April 1824

he died at Missolonghi—

"England had lost her brightest genius, Greece her noblest

friend." His body was embalmed and sent to England,

where burial in Westminster

Abbey was applied for and

refused to it; on the 16th of

July Byron was buried at

Hucknall Torkard. In 1830,

when the scandal caused by

his adventures had begun to

die away, Moore published

his Life and Letters of Byron,

which revealed the poet as

a brilliant and racy writer of

easy prose. Without question,

Byron is among the most admirable of English letter-writers, and his correspondence

offers a valuable commentary on his works in verse. In the final edition of his works

Missolonghi

From a Drawing by Clarkson Stanfield

118

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

brought out by Mr. R. E. Prothero between 1898 and 1903, the mass of Byron’s

letters is almost doubled. The beauty of Byron was proverbial ; he had dark curled

hair, a pale complexion, great elegance, and, notwithstanding his slight deformity,

activity of figure, with eyes the most lustrous ever seen. His restlessness, his self-

consciousness, his English pride, his Italian passion, the audacity and grandeur of his

dreams, his “fatal” fascination, made him, and make him still, the most interesting

personality in the history of English literature.

From “Prometheus.”

Titan ! to thee the strife was given

Between the suffering and the will,

Which torture where they cannot kill ;

And the inexorable Heaven,

And the deaf tyranny of Fate,

The ruling principle of Hate,

Which for its pleasure doth create

The things it may annihilate,

Refused thee even the boon to die :

The wretched gift Eternity

Was thine—and thou hast borne it well.

All that the Thunderer wrung from thee

Was but the menace which flung back

On him the torments of thy rack ;

The fate thou didst so well foresee,

But would not to appease him tell ;

And in thy Silence was his Sentence,

And in his soul a vain repentance,

And evil dread so ill dissembled,

That in his hand the lightnings trembled.

Thy godlike crime was to be kind,

To render with thy precepts less

The sum of human wretchedness,

And strengthen Man with his own mind ;

But baffled as thou wert from high,

Still in thy patient energy,

In the endurance, and repulse

Of thine impenetrable Spirit,

Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,

A mighty lesson we inherit :

Thou art a symbol and a sign

To mortals of their fate and force ;

Like thee Man is in part divine,

A troubled stream from a pure source ;

And Man in portions can foresee

His own funereal destiny ;

His wretchedness, and his resistance,

And his sad unallied existence :

To which his Spirit may oppose

Itself—and equal to all woes,

And a firm will, and a deep sense,

Which even in torture can descry

Its own concentred recompense,

Triumphant where it dares defy,

And making Death a Victory !

BYRON

119

Stanzas for Music.

There be none of Beauty's daughters

With a magic like thee ;

And like music on the waters

Is thy sweet voice to me,

When, as if its sound were causing

The charmed ocean's pausing,

The waves lie still and gleaming,

And the lull'd winds seem dreaming ;

And the midnight moon is weaving

Her bright chain o'er the deep,

Whose breast is gently heaving,

As an infant's asleep :

So the spirit bows before thee,

To listen and adore thee,

With a full but soft emotion,

Like the swell of Summer's ocean.

Description of Haidee from "Don Juan."

Her brow was overhung with coins of gold,

That sparkled o'er the auburn of her hair,

Her clustering hair, whose longer locks were roll'd

In braids behind ; and though her stature were

Even of the highest for a female mould,

They nearly reached her heel ; and in her air

There was a something which bespoke command,

As one who was a lady in the land.

Her hair, I said, was auburn ; but her eyes

Were black as death, their lashes the same hue,

Of downcast length, in whose silk shadow lies

Deepest attraction ; for when to the view

Forth from its raven fringe the full glance flies,

Ne'er with such force the swiftest arrow flew :

'Tis as the snake late coil'd, who pours his length,

And hurls at once his venom and his strength.

Her brow was white and low, her cheek's pure dye

Like twilight, rosy still with the set sun ;

Short upper lip—sweet lips that make us sigh

Ever to have seen such : for she was one

Fit for the model of a statuary

(A race of mere impostors, when all's done

I've seen much finer women, ripe and real,

Than all the nonsense of their stone ideal).

From "Stanzas."

Could Love for ever

Run like a river,

And Time's endeavour

Be tried in vain—

120

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

No other pleasure

With this could measure,

And like a treasure

We'd hug the chain;

But since our sighing

Ends not in dying,

And, formed for flying,

Love plumes his wing;

Then for this reason

Let's love a season,—

But let that season be only Spring.

When lovers parted

Feel broken-hearted,

And, all hopes thwarted,

Expect to die,—

A few years older,

Ah ! how much colder

They might behold her

For whom they sigh !

When link'd together,

In every weather,

They pluck Love's feather

From out his wing—

He'll stay for ever,

But sadly shiver

Without his plumage, when past the spring.

From "The Vision of Judgment."

Saint Peter sat by the celestial gate :

His keys were rusty, and the lock was dull,

So little trouble had been given of late :

Not that the place by any means was full,

But since the Gallic era "eighty-eight,"

The devils had ta'en a longer, stronger pull,

And "a pull all together," as they say

At sea—which drew most souls another way.

The angels all were singing out of tune,

And hoarse with having little else to do,

Excepting to wind up the sun and moon,

Or curb a runaway young star or two,

Or wild colt of a comet, which too soon

Broke out of bounds o'er the ethereal blue,

Splitting some planet with its playful tail,

As boats are sometimes by a wanton whale.

The guardian seraphs had retired on high,

Finding their charges past all care below;

Terrestrial business fill'd nought in the sky

Save the recording angel's black bureau ;

Who found, indeed, the facts to multiply

With such rapidity of vice and woe,

That he had stripp'd off both his wings in quills,

And yet was in arrear of human ills.

BYRON

His business so augmented of late years,

That he was forced, against his will no doubt

(Just like those cherubs, earthly ministers),

For some resource to turn himself about,

And claim the help of his celestial peers,

To aid him ere he should be quite worn out,

By the increased demand for his remarks :

Six angels and twelve saints were named his clerks.

This was a handsome board—at least for heaven ;

And yet they had even then enough to do,

So many conquerors' cars were daily driven,

So many kingdoms fitted up anew ;

Each day, too, slew its thousands six or seven,

Till at the crowning carnage, Waterloo,

They threw their pens down in divine disgust,

The page was so besmear'd with blood and dust.

ON THIS DAY I COMPLETE MY THIRTY-SIXTH YEAR.

MISSOLONGHI, January 22, 1824.

'Tis time this heart should be unmoved,

Since others it hath ceased to move :

Yet, though I cannot be beloved,

Still let me love !

My days are in the yellow leaf ;

The flowers and fruits of love are gone :

The worm, the canker, and the grief

Are mine alone.

The fire that on my bosom preys

Is lone as some volcanic isle ;

No torch is kindled at its blaze—

A funeral pile.

The hope, the fear, the jealous care,

The exalted portion of the pain

And power of love, I cannot share,

But wear the chain.

But 'tis not thus—and 'tis not here—

Such thoughts should shake my soul, nor now,

Where glory decks the hero's bier,

Or binds his brow.

The sword, the banner, and the field,

Glory and Greece, around me see !

The Spartan, borne upon his shield,

Was not more free.

Awake ! (not Greece—she is awake !)

Awake, my spirit ! Think through whom

Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake,

And then strike home !

Tread those reviving passions down

Unworthy manhood !—unto thee

Indifferent should the smile or frown

Of beauty be.

122

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

If thou regrett'st thy youth, why liv'st

The land of honourable death

Is here :—up to the field, and give

Away thy breath.

Seek out—less often sought than found—

A soldier's grave, for thee the best ;

Then look around, and choose thy ground,

And take thy rest.

Shelley

The experiment which Byron made was repeated with a more exquisite sincerity by Percy Bysshe Shelley, who resembled him in belonging to the aristocratic class, and in having a strong instinctive passion for liberty and toleration.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

After the Portrait by Miss Curran

The younger poet, however, showed still less caution than the elder, and while yet a boy gained a dangerous reputation for violent radical prejudices and anti-social convictions.

Partly on this account, and partly because the transcendental imagination of Shelley was less easy than Byron's piratical romance for common minds to appreciate, the poetry of the former was almost completely unrecognised until many years after his death, and Byron's deference to Shelley was looked upon as a fantastic whim of friendship.

The younger poet was erratic at Eton and Oxford, being expelled from the university for a puerile outburst of atheism.

The productions of Shelley were already numerous when, in his Alastor, he first showed any definite disposition for the higher parts of poetry.

This majestic study in blank verse was superior in melody and in imaginative beauty to anything that had been written in English, other than by Wordsworth and Coleridge in their youth, since the romantic age began.

The scholarship of Milton and Wordsworth was obvious, but Alastor contains passages

descriptive of the transport of the soul in the presence of natural loveliness

in which a return to the Hellenic genius for style is revealed.

Shelley lived only six years longer, but these were years of feverish

composition, sustained, in spite of almost complete want of public sympathy,

at a fiery height of intensity. He left England, and in that exile was brought

immediately into contact with Byron, with whom he formed an intimacy

which no eccentricity on either side sufficed to dissolve. That he was

serviceable to Byron no one will deny; that Byron depressed him he did

not attempt to conceal from himself; yet the esteem of the more popular

poet was valuable to the

greater one. The terror

caused by the vague rumour

of Shelley's rebellious con-

victions was not allayed by

the publication of Laon and

Cythna, a wild narrative of

an enthusiastic brother and

sister, martyrs to liberty. In

1818 was composed, but not

printed, the singularly per-

fect realistic poem of Julian

and Maddalo. Shelley was

now saturating himself with

the finest Greek and Italian

classic verse–wearing out

of his thoughts and intellec-

tual experiences a pure and

noble system of æsthetics.

This he illustrated by his

majestic, if diffuse and some-

times overstrained lyrical

drama of Prometheus Un-

bound, with which he pub-

lished a few independent

lyrics which scarcely have their peer in the literature of the world;

among these the matchless Ode to the West Wind must be named. The

same year saw the publication of the Cenci, the most dramatic poetic play

written in English since the tragedy of Venice Preserved. Even here, where

Shelley might expect to achieve popularity, something odious in the essence

of the plot warned off the public.

He continued to publish, but without an audience; nor did his Epipsy-

chidion, a melodious rhapsody of Platonic love, nor his Adonais, an elegy

of high dignity and splendour, in the manner of Moschus and in com-

memoration of Keats, nor the crystalline lyrics with which he eked out

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

After the Portrait by Richard Rothwell

124

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

his exiguous publications, attract the slightest interest. Shelley was, more

than any other English poet has been, le banni de l'icsse. Then, without

warning, he was drowned while yachting in the Gulf of Spezzia. He left

behind him unrevised, amid a world of exquisite fragments, a noble but

vague gnomic poem, The Triumph of Life, in which Petrarch's Trionfi are

summed up and sometimes excelled.

A life of disappointment and a death in obscurity were gradually followed

by the growth of an almost exaggerated reputation. Fifty years after his

death Shelley had outshone all his contemporaries—nay, with the exception

of Shakespeare, was probably the most passionately admired of all the

English poets. If this extremity of fame has once more slightly receded,

if Shelley holds his place among the sovereign minstrels of England, but

rather abreast of than in front of them, it is because time has reduced

certain of his violent paradoxes to commonplaces, and because the world,

after giving several of his axioms of conduct full and respectful considera-

tion, has determined to refrain from adopting them. Shelley, when he was

not inspired and an artist, was a prophet vaguely didactic or neurotically

prejudiced; his is the highest ideal of poetic art produced by the violence

of the French Revolution, but we are too constantly reminded of that moral

parentage, and his sans-culottism is no longer exhilarating, it is merely

tiresome. There are elements, then, even in Shelley, which have to be

pared away; but, when these are removed, the remainder is beautiful

beyond the range of praise — perfect in aerial, choral melody, perfect in

the splendour and purity of its imagery, perfect in the divine sweetness

and magnetic tenderness of its sentiment. He is probably the English

writer who has achieved the highest successes in pure lyric, whether of

an elaborate and antiphonal order, or of that which springs in a stream

of soaring music straight from the heart.

Closely allied as he was with Byron in several respects, both of tempera-

ment and circumstance, it is fortunate that Shelley was very little affected

by the predominance of his vehement rival. His intellectual ardour threw

out, not puffs of smoke, as Byron's did, but a white vapour. He is not

always transparent, but always translucent, and his mind moves ethereally

among incorporeal images and pantheistic attributes, dimly at times, yet

always clothed about with radiant purity. Of the gross Georgian mire

not a particle stuck to the robes of Shelley. His diction is curiously

compounded of forcible, fresh mintages, mingled with the verbiage of the

lyric poets of the eighteenth century, so that at his best he seems like

Æschylus, and at his worst merely like Akenside. For all his excessive

attachment to revolutionary ideas, Shelley retains much more of the age

of Gray than either Keats, Coleridge, or Wordsworth; his style, carefully

considered, is seen to rest on a basis built about 1760, from which it is

every moment springing and sparkling like a fountain in columns of ebullient

lyricism. But sweep away from Shelley whatever gives us exquisite pleasure,

and the residuum will be found to belong to the eighteenth century. Hence,

paradoxical as it sounds, the attitude of Shelley to style was in the main

retrograde ; he was, for instance, no admirer of the arabesques of the

Cockney school. He was, above all else, a singer, and in the direction

of song he rises at his best above all other English, perhaps above all

other modern European poets. There is an ecstasy in his best lyrics

and odes that claps its wings and soars until it is lost in the empyrean

of transcendental melody. This rhapsodical charm is entirely inimitable ;

and in point of fact Shelley, passionately admired, has been very little

followed, and with success, perhaps, only by Mr. Swinburne. His genius

lay outside the general trend of our poetical evolution ; he is exotic and

unique, and such influence as he has had, apart from the effect on the pulse

of the individual of the rutilant beauty of his strophes, has not been very

Field Place, Horsham, the Birthplace of Shelley

From a Photograph

advantageous. He is often hectic, and sometimes hysterical, and, to use

his own singular image, those who seek for mutton-chops will discover

that Shelley keeps a gin-palace.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was the eldest son of Timothy Shelley

and his wife, Elizabeth Pilfold ; his grandfather, Bysshe Shelley, a man of brilliant

gifts, was the head of one branch of a wealthy and ancient Sussex family, and was

made a baronet in 1806. The poet was born at Field Place, Horsham, on the

4th of August 1792. In 1798 he was sent, with his sisters, to a private school

at Warnham, and in 1802 to Sion House, Brentford ; in 1805 he proceeded to

Eton. Here the peculiarities of his nature began to be felt ; "tamed by affection,

but unconquered by blows, what chance was there that Shelley should be happy at a

public school?" He gave himself to the study of chemistry under Dr. Lind, but

towards the end of his Etonian life he seems to have turned to literature. During

126

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

the winter of 1809 he first began seriously to write, and to this date belong

The Wandering Jew in verse, and the romance of Zastrozzi in prose. The latter absurdity

was actually published early in 1810, and a little later in the same year appeared Original

Poetry by Victor and Cazire (which was long lost, and was rediscovered in 1898), and

a Republican hoax, the Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson. Shelley was

therefore an experienced author when he matriculated at University College, Oxford,

on the 10th of April 1810; he took up his residence in the following term. Here he

immediately made acquaintance with T. J. Hogg, who has left us invaluable memories

of this period in Shelley's life. During his brief stay at Oxford, Shelley was keen in

the pursuit of miscellaneous knowledge ;

"no student ever read more assiduously.

He was to be found, book in hand, at all

hours, reading in season and out of season." But he hated the prescribed curriculum, and

indulged already in speculations which were outside the range of Oxford daring. One of

them was the paramount importance of liberty and of toleration. In February 1811, Shelley

printed and circulated a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism, to which the attention

of the Master of his college was presently drawn, and on the 25th of March he and

Hogg were expelled from the University. His father forbade him to return to Field Place,

and the friends settled in lodgings at No. 15 Poland Street, London. After a short period

of pinching poverty, Shelley was reconciled to his father, and received an allowance of £200

a year. Late in the summer of 1811 a foolish schoolgirl, Harriet Westbrook, threw herself on

Shelley's protection, and, without loving her, he married her in Edinburgh. The eccentric

movements of the next few months have occupied the biographers of the poet somewhat

in excess of their real importance. The absurd young couple went to York, to Keswick, to

Dublin, in each place proposing to stay "for ever." In February 1812 they issued their revolutionary Address to the Irish People, and

Title-page of the First Edition of Shelley's "Queen Mab."

other pamphlets. They were warned to leave Dublin, and in April we find them settled

at Nantgwilt in North Wales, and a little later at Lynmouth. Their movements now

became incessant, but in April 1813 they were again in London, where in June their first

child, Ianthe, was born. In this year was published Queen Mab, the last and best of the

works of Shelley's crude first period. Meanwhile he had made the acquaintance of

Godwin, with whose family he formed a violent friendship, culminating in love

for Godwin's daughter Mary, a girl of sixteen, with whom he eloped to France in

QUEEN MAB : A PHILOSOPHICAL POEM : WITH NOTES. BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

ECRASEZ L'INFAME ! Correspondance de Voltaire.

Avia Pieridum peragro loca, nullius ante Trita solo ; juvat integros accedere fontes ; Atque haurire : juvatque novos decerpere flores.

• • • Unde prius nulli velarint tempora musæ. Primum quod magnis doceo de rebus ; et arctis Religionum animos nodis exsolvere pergo.

Lucret. lib. iv. Δος σu γũ, καì κόσμος xivηθήσεται Archimedes.

LONDON : PRINTED BY P. B. SHELLEY, 22, Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square. 1813.

SHELLEY

127

July 1814; he never saw Harriet again, and in December 1816 she committed

suicide, not, however, it is only just to say, from any apparent disappointment at

ceasing to live with Shelley. The poet, Mary Godwin, and her cousin Jane Claire-

mont, crossed France partly on foot, entered Switzerland over the Jura, and stayed

at Brunnen till their money was exhausted, when they returned to England by

the Rhine in September. In 1815 Sir Timothy succeeded to the title and estates,

and an arrangement was made by which the poet received £1000 a year. The

wanderings were now resumed on a bolder scale, and Shelley gained that know-

ledge of natural scenery which was in future to be so prominent a feature of his

work. Up to this time he had written hardly anything which was of real merit; his

genius now woke up, and the first-fruits of

it was Alastor, published in 1816. In May

of that year Shelley and Byron met for the

first time at Geneva, and were thrown into

mutual daily intercourse. Returning to Eng-

land in the autumn, Shelley took a cottage at

Great Marlow, and in December he married

Mary Godwin. In 1817, although worried

with a Chancery suit about the custody of

his children by his first wife, Shelley wrote

his long poem of Laon and Cythna (The

Revolt of Islam). His health now began to

give him much apprehension, and in the

winter of 1817 he seemed to be sinking in a

consumption. In March 1818, to find a warmer

climate, the Shelleys left England in company

with Jane Claremont and Byron's child Allegra.

The rest of the year was spent wandering

through Italy in search of a home to suit them.

During this year they saw much of Byron. The

winter of 1818 was spent by Shelley at Naples

in "constant and poignant physical suffering,"

and in deep depression of spirits. His health

was, notwithstanding, steadily tending towards

recovery; there was no organic disease, and if Shelley had escaped drowning he might

have become a tough old man. The Shelleys lived in Italy almost without other

acquaintances than Byron, and an agreeable family at Leghorn, the Gisbornes. In 1819

he published Rosalind and Helen and The Cenci; in June he lost in Rome his dearly-loved

son William, who now lies buried beside his father and Keats. In November another

son, afterwards Sir Percy Florence Shelley, was born to them in Florence. The poet

was now at the very height of his genius, composing continuously, and before 1819

was closed he had finished Prometheus Unbound, which, with some of the most splendid

of all Shelley's lyrics, was published the following year. None of these publications,

however, attracted either the critics or the public, and in the summer of 1819 Shelley

was violently attacked by the Quarterly Review. He was branded as a dangerous

atheist, and, as Trelawney records, was now universally shunned by English visitors

ADONAIS

AN ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF JOHN KEATS,

AUTHOR OF ENDYMION, HYPERION ETC.

BY

PERCY. B. SHELLEY

Ἀεί τῳ μὲν ἰλαρὴν ἐν Ζαθέῃσι λίποι.

Νοῦν ἔχων, ἄγαν ἔρχεται ἐς φθορὰν.

PLATO.

PISA

WITH THE TYPES OF DIDOT

MDCCCXXI.

Title-page of the First Edition of

Sinelley's "Adonais"

128

HISTORY

OF

ENGLISH

LITERATURE

to

Italy,

and

treated

as

a

monster.

It

is

even

said

that

a

brute

of

an

Englishman

knocked

him

down

with

his

fist

on

hearing

his

name

in

the

post-office

at

Pisa,

where

the

Shelleys

settled

early

in

January

Byron

came

to

the

Villa

Lanfranchi

to

be

near

them,

and

here

they

enjoyed

the

friendship

of

Trelawney,

Medwin,

and

the

Williamses.

Shelley's

publications

during

the

year

were

Prometheus

Unbound

and

the

anonymous

satirico-political

drama

of

Œdipus

Tyrannus.

At

Pisa,

however,

his

faculties

were

blunted

and

depressed,

and

it

is

far

from

certain

that

constant

intercourse

with

so

mannered

a

character

as

that

of

Byron

was

beneficial

to

Shelley.

In

the

beginning

of

1821,

however,

he

was

greatly

roused

by

his

Platonic

attachment

to

the

imprisoned

novice,

Emilia

Viviani,

about

whom

he

composed

Epipsychidion,

and

published

it

anonymously

as

the

work

of

a

man

who

"died

at

Florence

as

he

was

preparing

for

a

voyage

to

the

Cyclades."

The

death

of

Keats

also

deeply

moved

Shelley,

and

he

wrote

the

elegy

of

Adonais,

which

he

printed

at

Pisa

in

A

visit

of

Prince

Mavrocordato

to

the

Shelleys

in

April

roused

the

poet

to

a

ferment

of

enthusiasm

for

the

cause

of

Greek

liberty,

and

he

sat

down

to

the

composition

of

his

chora!

drama

of

Hellas.

He

wrote,

"Our

roots

never

struck

so

deeply

as

at

Pisa;"

and

this

continued

his

real

home

to

the

last,

although

in

April

1822,

in

order

to

escape

the

heat,

the

whole

circle

of

friends

transported

themselves

to

the