"And what is Mr. Burley, and what has he written?" asked Leonard of
Mr. Prickett when he returned to the shop. Let us reply to that
question in our own words, for we know more about Mr. Burley than Mr.
Prickett does.
John Burley was the only son of a poor clergyman, in a village near
Ealing, who had scraped and saved and pinched, to send his son to an
excellent provincial school in a northern country, and thence to
college. At the latter, during his first year, young Burley was
remarked by the undergraduates for his thick shoes and coarse linen,
and remarkable to the authorities for his assiduity and learning. The
highest hopes were entertained of him by the tutors and examiners. At
the beginning of the second year his high animal spirits, before kept
down by study, broke out. Reading had become easy to him. He knocked
off his tasks with a facile stroke, as it were. He gave up his leisure
hours to symposia by no means Socratical. He fell into an idle
hard-drinking set. He got into all kinds of scrapes. The authorities
were at first kind and forbearing in their admonitions, for they
respected his abilities, and still hoped he might become an honor to
the university. But at last he went drunk into a formal examination,
and sent in papers after the manner of Aristophanes, containing
capital jokes upon the Dons and Bigwigs themselves. The offence was
the greater, and seemed the more premeditated, for being clothed in
Greek. John Burley was expelled. He went home to his father's a
miserable man, for with all his follies he had a good heart. Removed
from ill example, his life for a year was blameless. He got admitted
as usher into the school in which he had received instruction as a
pupil. This school was in a large town. John Burley became member of
a club formed among the tradesmen, and spent three evenings a week
there. His astonishing convivial and conversational powers began to
declare themselves. He grew the oracle of the club; and from being the
most sober peaceful assembly in which grave fathers of a family ever
smoked a pipe or sipped a glass, it grew under Mr. Burley's auspices
the parent of revels as frolicking and frantic as those out of which
the old Greek Goat Song ever tipsily rose. This would not do. There
was a great riot in the streets one night, and the next morning the
usher was dismissed. Fortunately for John Burley's conscience, his
father had died before this happened--died believing in the reform of
his son. During his ushership Mr. Burley had scraped acquaintance with
the editor of the county newspaper, and given him some capital
political articles; for Burley was like Parr and Porson, a notable
politician. The editor furnished him with letters to the journalists
in London, and John came to the metropolis and got employed on a very
respectable newspaper. At college he had known Audley Egerton, though
but slightly; that gentleman was then just rising into repute in
Parliament. Burley sympathized with some questions on which Audley had
distinguished himself, and wrote a very good article thereon--an
article so good that Egerton inquired into the authorship, found out
Burley, and resolved in his own mind to provide for him whenever he
himself came into office. But Burley was a man whom it was impossible
to provide for. He soon lost his connection with the newspaper. First,
he was so irregular that he could never be depended upon. Secondly, he
had strange honest eccentric twists of thinking, that could coalesce
with the thoughts of no party in the long run. An article of his,
inadvertently admitted, had horrified all the proprietors, staff, and
readers of the paper. It was diametrically opposite to the principles
the paper advocated, and compared its pet politician to Catiline. Then
John Burley shut himself up and wrote books. He wrote two or three
books, very clever, but not at all to the popular taste--abstract and
learned, full of whims that were _caviare_ to the multitude, and
larded with Greek. Nevertheless, they obtained for him a little money,
and among literary men some reputation.
Now Audley Egerton came into power, and got him, though with great
difficulty--for there were many prejudices against this scampish
harum-scarum son of the Muses--a place in a public office. He kept it
about a month, and then voluntarily resigned it. "My crust of bread
and liberty!" quoth John Burley, and he vanished into a garret. From
that time to the present he lived--Heaven knows how. Literature is a
business, like everything else; John Burley grew more and more
incapable of business. "He could not do task-work," he said; he wrote
when the whim seized him, or when the last penny was in his pouch, or
when he was actually in the spunging-house or the Fleet--migrations
which occurred to him, on an average, twice a year. He could generally
sell what he had positively written, but no one would engage him
beforehand. Magazines and other periodicals were very glad to have his
articles, on the condition that they were anonymous; and his style was
not necessarily detected, for he could vary it with the facility of a
practised pen. Audley Egerton continued his best supporter, for there
were certain questions on which no one wrote with such force as John
Burley--questions connected with the metaphysics of politics, such as
law reform and economical science. And Audley Egerton was the only man
John Burley put himself out of the way to serve, and for whom he would
give up a drinking-bout and do _task-work_; for John Burley was
grateful by nature, and he felt that Egerton had really tried to
befriend him. Indeed, it was true, as he had stated to Leonard by the
Brent, that, even after he had resigned his desk in the London office,
he had had the offer of an appointment in Jamaica, and a place in
India from the Minister. But probably there were other charms then
than those exercised by the one-eyed perch, that kept him to the
neighborhood of London. With all his grave faults of character and
conduct, John Burley was not without the fine qualities of a large
nature. He was most resolutely his own enemy, it is true, but he could
hardly be said to be any one else's. Even when he criticised some more
fortunate writer, he was good-humored in his very satire; he had no
bile, no envy. And as for freedom from malignant personalities, he
might have been a model to all critics. I must except politics,
however, for in these he could be rabid and savage. He had a passion
for independence, which, though pushed to excess, was not without
grandeur. No lick-platter, no parasite, no toadeater, no literary
beggar, no hunter after patronage and subscriptions; even in his
dealings with Audley Egerton, he insisted on naming the price for his
labors. He took a price, because, as the papers required by Audley
demanded much reading and detail, which was not at all to his taste,
he considered himself entitled fairly to something more than the
editor of the journal, wherein the papers appeared, was in the habit
of giving. But he assessed this extra price himself, and as he would
have done to a bookseller. And, when in debt and in prison, though he
knew a line to Egerton would have extricated him, he never wrote that
line. He would depend alone on his pen, dipped it hastily in the ink,
and scrawled himself free. The most debased point about him was
certainly the incorrigible vice of drinking, and with it the usual
concomitant of that vice--the love of low company. To be King of the
Bohemians--to dazzle by his wild humor, and sometimes to exalt, by his
fanciful eloquence, the rude gross nature that gathered round
him--this was a royalty that repaid him for all sacrifice of solid
dignity; a foolscap crown that he would not have changed for an
emperor's diadem. Indeed, to appreciate rightly the talents of John
Burley, it was necessary to hear him talk on such occasions. As a
writer, after all, he was only capable now of unequal desultory
efforts. But as a talker, in his own wild way, he was original and
matchless. And the gift of talk is one of the most dangerous gifts a
man can possess for his own sake--the applause is so immediate, and
gained with so little labor. Lower, and lower, and lower, had sunk
John Burley, not only in the opinion of all who knew his name, but in
the habitual exercise of his talents. And this seemed wilfully--from
choice. He would write for some unstamped journal of the populace, out
of the pale of the law, for pence, when he could have got pounds from
journals of high repute. He was very fond of scribbling off penny
ballads, and then standing in the street to hear them sung. He
actually once made himself the poet of an advertising tailor, and
enjoyed it excessively. But that did not last long, for John Burley
was a Pittite--not a Tory, he used to say, but a Pittite. And if you
had heard him talk of Pitt, you would never have known what to make of
that great statesman. He treated him as the German commentators do
Shakspeare, and invested him with all imaginary meanings and objects,
that would have turned the grand practical man into a sybil. Well, he
was a Pittite; the tailor a fanatic for Thelwall and Cobbett. Mr.
Burley wrote a poem, wherein Britannia appeared to the tailor,
complimented him highly on the art he exhibited in adorning the
persons of her sons; and, bestowing upon him a gigantic mantle, said
that he, and he alone, might be enabled to fit it to the shoulders of
living men. The rest of the poem was occupied in Mr. Snip's unavailing
attempts to adjust this mantle to the eminent politicians of the day,
when, just as he had sunk down in despair, Britannia reappeared to
him, and consoled him with the information that he had done all mortal
man could do, and that she had only desired to convince pigmies that
no human art could adjust to _their_ proportions the mantle of William
Pitt. _Sic itur ad astra_. She went back to the stars, mantle and all.
Mr. Snip was exceedingly indignant at this allegorical effusion, and
with wrathful shears cut the tie between himself and his poet.
Thus, then, the reader has, we trust, a pretty good idea of John
Burley--a specimen of his genus, not very common in any age, and now
happily almost extinct, since authors of all degrees share in the
general improvement in order, economy, and sober decorum, which has
obtained in the national manners. Mr. Prickett, though entering into
less historical detail than we have done, conveyed to Leonard a
tolerably accurate notion of the man, representing him as a person of
great powers and learning, who had thoroughly thrown himself away.
Leonard did not, however, see how much Mr. Burley himself was to be
blamed for his waste of life; he could not conceive a man of genius
voluntarily seating himself at the lowest step in the social ladder.
He rather supposed he had been thrust down there by Necessity.
And when Mr. Prickett, concluding, said, "Well, I should think Burley
would cure you of the desire to be an author even more than
Chatterton," the young man answered gloomily, "Perhaps," and turned to
the book-shelves.
With Mr. Prickett's consent, Leonard was released earlier than usual
from his task, and a little before sunset he took his way to Highgate.
He was fortunately directed to take the new road by the Regent's Park,
and so on through a very green and smiling country. The walk, the
freshness of the air, the songs of the birds, and, above all, when he
had got half-way, the solitude of the road, served to rouse him from
his stern and sombre meditations. And when he came into the lane
overhung with chestnut trees, and suddenly caught sight of Helen's
watchful and then brightening face, as she stood by the wicket, and
under the shadow of cool murmurous boughs, the blood rushed gayly
through his veins, and his heart beat loud and gratefully.