SECTION XII.

And now, sweet friend, who put me to this task, who won my love, not

knowing how or why, come tread with me the inner-chambers of my house.

This, the portal, is well passed, and other scenes, and other pictures

far, wait eyes which kindle, though the fire be false, eyes which flow

even with the current of a fictitious wo.

[_To be continued._

* * * * *

SONG.

BY WILLIAM H. C. HOSMER.

(Air—“Homes of England.”)

The hallowed wells of Learning,

No wasting may they know,

But sparkle, fed by lucid streams,

Unceasing in their flow;

And may their waters catch no stain

Of deep and Stygian dye,

Though Error for an hour hold reign

Beneath a darkened sky.

The Sacred Bowers of Learning,

Be blight afar from them;

No tree grow up with serpent folds

Entwining round the stem;

No bud of precious promise feel

The frost of cold neglect,

And heard no solemn funeral peal

For Genius early wrecked.

The Stately Halls of Learning,

Forever may they stand,

And Truth walk down the sounding aisles

With Honor, hand in hand;

The columns that uphold the roof

Be men of noble mould,

And beauteous daughters, armed in proof,

Stern war with wrong to hold.

The Holy Shrines of Learning,

May no polluting flame

Be lighted on one altar-stone

By fiends who mock at shame,

But cloudless light be shed abroad

A guilty world to cheer,

And men forget to worship God

In superstitious fear.

* * * * *

IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND IN THE AUTUMN OF 1851.

BY FREDERIKA BREMER.

It is two years since I first found myself in England. When I was in

England in the autumn of 1849, the cholera was there. A dense,

oppressive atmosphere rested over its cities, as of a cloud pregnant

with lightning. Hearses rolled through the streets. The towns were empty

of people; for all who had the means of going had fled into the country;

they who had not were compelled to remain. I saw shadowy figures, clad

in black, stealing along the streets, more like ghosts than creatures of

flesh and blood. Never before had I seen human wretchedness in such a

form as I beheld it in Hull and in London. Wretchedness enough may be

found, God knows, even in Stockholm, and it shows itself openly enough

there in street and market. But it is there most frequently an

undisguised, an unabashed wretchedness. It is not ashamed to beg, to

show its rags, or its drunken countenance. It is a child of crime; and

that is perhaps the most extreme wretchedness. But it is less painful to

behold, because it seems to be suffering only its own deserts. One is

more easily satisfied to turn one’s head aside and pass on. One thinks,

“I cannot help that!”

In England, however, misery had another appearance; it was not so much

that of degradation as of want, pallid want. It was meagre and retiring;

it ventured not to look up, or it looked up with a glance of hopeless

beseeching—so spirit-broken! It tried to look respectable. Those men

with coats and hats brushed till the nap was gone; those pale women in

scanty, washed-out, but yet decent clothes—it was a sight which one

could hardly bear. In a solitary walk of ten minutes in the streets of

Hull, I saw ten times more want than I had seen in a ten months’

residence in Denmark.

The sun shone joyously as I traveled through the manufacturing

districts; saw their groups of towns and suburbs; saw their smoking

pillars and pyramids towering up everywhere in the wide landscape—saw

glowing gorges of fire open themselves in the earth, as if it were

burning—a splendid and wonderfully picturesque spectacle, reminding one

of fire-worshipers of ancient and modern time, and of their altars. But

I heard the mournful cry of the children from the factories; the cry

which the public voice has made audible to the world; the cry of the

children, of the little ones who had been compelled by the lust of gain

of their parents and the manufacturers, to sacrifice life, and joy, and

health, in the workshops of machinery; the children who lie down in

those beds which never are cold, the children who are driven and beaten

till they sink insensibly into death or fatuity—that living death; I

heard the wailing cry of the children, which Elizabeth Barrett

interpreted in her affecting poem; and the wealthy manufacturing

districts, with their towns, their fire-columns, their pyramids, seemed

to me like an enormous temple of Moloch, in which the mammon-worshipers

of England offered up even children to the burning arms of their

god—children, the hope of the earth, and its most delicious and most

beautiful joy!

I arrived in London. They told me there was nobody in London. It was not

the season in which the higher classes were in London. Besides which,

the cholera was there; and all well-to-do people, who were able, had

fled from the infected city. And that indeed might be the reason why

there seemed to me to be so many out of health—why that pale

countenance of want was so visible. Certain it is, that it became to me

as a Medusa’s head, which stood between me and every thing beautiful and

great in that great capital, the rich life and physiognomy of which

would otherwise have enchanted me. But as it was, the palaces, and the

statues, and the noble parks, Hampstead and Piccadilly, and Belgravia

and Westminster, and the Tower, and even the Thames itself, with all its

ever-changing life, were no more than the decorations of a great

tragedy. And when in St. Paul’s, I heard the great roar of the voice of

London—that roar, which, as it is said, never is silent, but merely

slumbers for an hour between three and four o’clock in the morning—when

I heard that voice in that empty church, where there was no divine

worship, and looked up into its beautiful cupola, which was filled by no

song of praise, but only by that resounding, roaring voice, a dark

chaotic roar, then seemed I to perceive the sound of the rivers of fate

rolling onward through time over falling kingdoms and people, and

bearing them onward down into an immeasurable grave! It was but for a

moment, but it was a horrible dream!

One sight I beheld in London which made me look up with rejoicing, which

made me think “that old Yggdrasil is still budding.” This was the

so-called metropolitan buildings; a structure of many homes in one great

mass of building, erected by a society of enlightened men for the use of

the poorer working class, to provide respectable families of that class

with excellent dwellings at a reasonable rate, where they might possess

that which is of the most indispensable importance to the rich, as well

as to the poor, if they are to enjoy health both of body and

soul—light, air, and water, pure as God created them for the use of

mankind. The sight of these homes, and of the families that inhabited

them, as well as of the newly-erected extensive public baths and

wash-houses for the same class, together with the assurance that these

institutions already, in the second year of their establishment,

returned more than full interest to their projectors, produced the

happiest impression which I at this time received of England. These were

to me as seed of the future, which gave the promise of verdant shoots in

the old tree.—

Nevertheless, when I left the shores of England, and saw thick autumnal

fog enveloping them, it was with a sorrowful feeling for the Old world;

and with an inquiring glance of longing and hope, I turned myself to the

New.

Two years passed on—a sun-bright, glowing dream, full of the vigor of

life—it was again autumn, and I was again in England. Autumn met me

there with cold, and rain, and tempest, with the most horrible weather

that can be imagined, and such as I had never seen on the other side of

the globe. But in social life, everywhere throughout the mental

atmosphere, a different spirit prevailed. There I perceived with

astonishment and joy, there it was that of spring.

The Crystal Palace was its full-blown, magnificent blossom—and like

swarms of rejoicing bees flew the human throng upon the wings of steam,

backward and forward, to the great world’s blossom; there all the

nations met together, there all manufactures, there all industry, and

every kind of product, unfolded their flowers for the observation and

the joy of all; a Cactus grandiflora, such as the world had never till

then seen.

I perceived more clearly every day of my stay in England, that this

period is one of a general awakening to a new, fresh life. In the

manufacturing districts, in Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, every

where, I heard the same conversation among all classes; prosperity was

universal and still advancing. That pale countenance of want, which had

on my first visit appeared to me so appalling, I now no longer saw as

formerly; and even where it was seen stealing along, like a gloomy

shadow near to the tables of abundance, it appeared to me no longer as a

cloud filled with the breath of cholera, darkening the face of heaven,

but rather as one of those clouds over which the wind and sun have

power, and which are swallowed up, which vanish in space, in the bright

ether. . . .

The low price of grain, the consequence of free-trade, has produced this

change: and it was universally acknowledged. The only objection I heard

brought against the low price of corn was this, “The people are become

proud and careless; I have seen great pieces of bread thrown out into

the streets!”

Yet bread alone had not really done all this; a nobler bread is required

for man in order that he may fully derive the benefit even of the

outward material bread. Nor had free-trade alone done all this either;

there is also another power besides this which has been operative in

that general awakening, in that wholesome spirit which I perceived in

England.

If this power were to be symbolized by art, it would present us with a

female figure—a beautiful woman with the child at her breast, is the

symbol which art makes use of, to express human love. And, perhaps, art

is right in so doing. And perhaps it is the female principle in human

nature, which, in the present new life in England, enables the man’s

hand to accomplish the work; because from the most remote antiquity, has

a male deity been chosen to represent trade, and navigation and mining,

and all occupation of the earth. But, so says one of the oldest sagas of

the world—when the divine life revealed itself on the earth, a divine

pair came forth. In a lotus-flower which ascended from the waters of the

Nile, were born at the same time Osiris and Isis, and together they went

forth to bless the earth.

I saw the truth of this saga confirmed by what I beheld in England. But

in speaking of this, I shall especially linger on the new proofs

thereof, in the new Institutions which promise a more beautiful future

to the human race; not upon the old and insufficient, however good they

may be, but upon the new, because it is upon the new that my eye has

been especially directed.

Let me linger, in the first place, on works of human love—the female

figure with the child at her breast; because these are they which lay

the foundation of all others.

In Liverpool, I visited the so-called Ragged-Schools—the schools where

are collected from the streets, vagabond, neglected and begging

children, who are here taught to read and so on—who here receive the

first rudiments of instruction, even in singing. These schools are, some

of them evening, others day schools, and in some of them, “the

Industrial Ragged-Schools,” children are kept there altogether; receive

food and clothing, and are taught trades. When the schools of this class

were first established in Liverpool, the number of children who

otherwise had no chance of receiving instruction, amounted to about

twenty thousand. Right-minded, thinking men, saw that in these children

were growing up in the streets, those “dangerous classes” of which so

much has been said of late times; these men met together, obtained means

to cover the most necessary outlay of expense, and then, according to

the eloquent words of Lord Ashley, that “it is in childhood that evil

habits are formed and take root; it is childhood which must be guarded

from temptation to crime;” they opened these ragged-schools with the

design of receiving the most friendless, the most wretched of society’s

young generation—properly, “the children of rags, born in beggary, and

for beggary.”

I visited the Industrial Ragged School for boys, intended for the lowest

grade of these little children, without parents, or abandoned by them to

the influences of crime. There, I saw the first class sitting in their

rags, upon benches in a cold room, arranging with their little

frost-bitten fingers bristles for the brush-maker. The faces of the boys

were clean: many of them I remarked were handsome, and almost

universally they had beautiful and bright eyes. Those little fingers

moved with extraordinary rapidity, the boys were evidently wishful to do

their best; they knew that they by that means should obtain better

clothing, and would be removed to the upper room, and more amusing

employment. I observed these “dangerous classes”—just gathered up from

the lanes and the kennels, on their way to destruction; and was

astonished when I thought that their countenances might have borne the

stamp of crime. Bright glances of childhood, for that were you never

designed by the Creator! “Suffer little children to come unto me.” These

words, from the lips of heaven, are forever sounding on earth.

In the upper room a great number of boys were busy pasting paper-bags

for various trades, confectioners, etc. who make use of such in the

rapid sale of their wares; here, also, other boys were employed in

printing upon the bags the names and residences of the various tradesmen

who had ordered them. The work progressed rapidly, and seemed very

amusing to the children. The establishment, for their residence and

their beds, were poor; but all was neat and clean, the air was fresh,

and the children were cheerful. The institution was, however, but yet in

its infancy, and its means were small.

Half-a-dozen women in wretched clothes sat in the entrance-room with

their boys, for whom they hoped to gain admittance into the school, and

were now, therefore, waiting till the directors of the establishment

made their appearance.

These gentlemen kindly invited me to be present at the examination of

these mothers. The women were brought in one at a time, and one and all

were made to tell her history and explain her circumstances. The

examination was carried on with earnestness and precision. The result of

all, however, was, that there was not one of the women now present who

had a right to the assistance which they desired. On one or two

occasions I could not help admiring the patience of the directors. Above

all, it seemed to me, that these mothers needed to go to school even

more than their children. When will people come to regard in all its

full extent the influence of the mother upon the child? When will people

come to reflect on the education of mothers in its higher sense? My

conductor in Liverpool, Mr. B——, the noble and kind Home

Missionary,[1] recognized one of these women, and related to me the

history of herself and her husband—a horrible history of drunkenness,

which had almost ended in suicide.

Later in the day I visited the evening school for girls, also of the

ragged class, and heard there a remarkably sweet and beautiful song.

Later still I accompanied my friendly conductor to a temperance meeting,

held in the same building, and which meets every Thursday, and where the

Missionary was accustomed to meet and converse with the poorest brethren

of his congregation. The wind blew and the rain poured down. I was

astonished, however, to see when we entered, that the room was filled

with people who evidently had not much to defend themselves with from

the wind and rain. The benches were filled both with men and women. It

became crowded and very hot. Mr. B—— opened the meeting with a speech

about the dangers and consequences of drunkenness, and as he warmed in

his subject he related, yet without mentioning any name, the history of

the mother whom he had this day seen, beseeching that public charity

would take charge of her son. The assembly, which during the moral

treatise they had just heard had evidently become somewhat drowsy, woke

up at once during the relation of that story, and when the narrator

arrived at the catastrophe, in which the intoxicated woman, urged on by

the madness of thirst, drank up half a bottle of oil of vitriol, a

general expression of horror might have been heard, especially from the

lips of the women.

When this relation, which was full of strong vitality, was ended, Mr.

B—— read a poem written by a working man in praise of temperance,

which had the effect of again lulling the auditors—and myself

even—into an agreeable doze. We all woke up again, however, when Mr.

B——, in a jocular manner, begged of Mr. J—— to stand up and tell us

something about “that Great Exhibition in London,” which he had lately

been to see. Mr. J—— did not however, stand up, because Mr. K——

wished to speak first. Accordingly, being encouraged to do so by Mr.

B——, a stout-built man of about sixty came forward; he was dressed in

coarse, but good clothes, and had an open countenance, over which played

a smile of humor. He mounted the platform, and was greeted by the

assembly with evident delight. He related his own history, simple, but

full of the warmth of life, in that strong-grained, wit-interspersed

style of popular eloquence, full of heart and humor at the same time,

which our cultivated orators would do well to study, if they wish to

make a living impression on the people. He related how he, in his

younger years, never tasted brandy, but he became a seaman, and began to

drink, that he might look manly among his fellows; how, by degrees, he

acquired the power of swallowing more strong liquor than any of them

all, fell into crime, misery and shame; how he became converted and

again temperate, and how he had not now for fifteen years tasted

spirits, and had ever since remained in good health and good

circumstances.

This was the substance of his story; but how the narrative was

interspersed with merry conceits, which excited universal amusement, and

with energetic proverbs—to which Mr. B——, beyond any one else, gave

the highest applause—how cleverly “Mr. Halcohol” was brought in, and

how contemptuously “the long-necked gentleman, Mr. Halcohol in the

bottle,” was treated, and with how much animation all this was done and

received—must have been heard to have been fully imagined. The speech

was concluded by recommending “total abstinence” as the only means for

insuring a perfect change of life.

After this there entered a little throng of children with joyful faces,

the same whom I had already heard sing in the upper room of the house;

these children were the so-called “Band of Hope”—children who had taken

the pledge to abstain from all strong drinks themselves, and to promote

the advancement of temperance by all the means in their power, for which

they received printed cards containing their pledge, together with

symbolical devices, proverbs, etc. That little “Band of Hope” struck up

with their clear voices, fresh as the morning, various songs, among

which one in particular, “The Spindle and Shuttle,” was received with

great delight, all present joining in the chorus. Hymns and patriotic

songs were also sung by “The Band of Hope,” and now and then the company

joined in with the children. Before the assembly separated this evening,

several went forward and took the pledge. Among these was a man and his

wife. They took each other by the hand. The woman with her other hand

held her handkerchief over her left eye; it might be seen, nevertheless,

that this eye was black, probably from the husband’s fist.

What had influenced them to this? What had operated upon these rude

natures?—induced them to break loose from habits of drunkenness—to

turn from the pleasures of hell to those of heaven? What was it that had

operated on all here so awakeningly, so livingly? Could it be the

discourse they had heard? could it be the poem in praise of temperance?

Nothing of the kind. I saw them go to sleep during these. I became

sleepy myself. No, that which operated here so livingly—was the life

itself. It was that living narrative of the unhappy woman; it was the

sailor’s history of his own life, his battles with “Mr. Halcohol;” it

was the songs of the children, the pure, dewy-fresh voices of the little

“Band of Hope.” All these it was which had operated upon, which had

awakened their minds, had animated their brains, warmed their hearts;

this it was which had impelled the husband and wife, hand in hand, to

come forward and consecrate themselves to a new marriage, to a better

life. Individual experience of suffering, of joy, of sin, of conversion,

of love and happiness, must be told, if the relation is to have any

power over the human heart; life itself must be called into action if we

would awake the dead.

I could not but remark at this meeting, how cordial and familiar an

understanding seemed to exist between the leader, Mr. B——, and the

assembly, and which arose in part from his own peculiar character, and

in part from his intimate acquaintance with his hearers. In the same

way, his continual intercourse with those people, and his knowledge of

their every-day life, is an excellent help to him in giving force to the

sermons which he preaches among them. I shall not forget the effect

produced by his story of the woman and the bottle of vitriol.

A few days later I visited, with the same friendly man, some different

classes of poor people—namely, the wicked and the idle; they who had

fallen into want through their own improvidence, but who had now raised

themselves again; and the estimable, who had honorably combated with

unavoidable poverty. In one certain quarter of Liverpool, it is that the

first class is especially met with. Of this class of poor in their

wretched rooms, with their low, brutalized expression, I will not speak;

companion-pieces to this misery may be met with every where. Most of

those whom I saw were Irish. It was a Sunday noon, after divine service.

The ale-houses were already open in this part of the town, and young

girls and men might be seen talking together before them, or sitting

upon the steps.

Of the second class I call to mind, with especial pleasure, one little

household. It was a mother and her son. Her means of support, a mangle,

stood in the little room in which she had lived since she had raised

herself up again. It was dinner-time. A table, neatly covered for two

persons, stood in the room, and upon the iron stand before the fire was

placed a dish of mashed potatoes, nicely browned, ready to be set on the

table. The mother was waiting for her son, and the dinner was waiting

for him. He was the organ-blower in a church during divine service, and

he returned whilst I was still there. He was well dressed, but was a

little, weakly man, and squinted; the mother’s eyes, however, regarded

him with love. This son was her only one, and her all. And he, to whom

mother Nature had acted as a stepmother, had a noble mother’s heart to

warm himself with, which prepared for him an excellent home, a

well-covered table, and a comfortable bed. That poor little home was not

without its wealth.

As belonging to the third and highest class, I must mention two

families, both of them shoemakers, and both of them inhabiting cellars.

The one family consisted of old, the other of young people. The old

shoemaker had to maintain his wife, who was lame and sick, from a fall

in the street, and a daughter. The young one had a young wife, and five

little children to provide for; but work was scanty and the mouths many.

At this house, also, it was dinner-time, and I saw upon the table

nothing but potatoes. The children were clean, and had remarkably

agreeable faces; but—they were pale; so was also the father of the

family. The young and pretty, but very pale mother, said, “Since I have

come into this room I have never been well, and this I know—I shall not

live long!” Her eyes filled with tears; and it was plain enough to see

that this really delicate constitution could not long sustain the

effects of the cold, damp room, into which no sunbeam entered. These two

families, of the same trade, and alike poor, had become friends in need.

When one of the fathers of the family wanted work, and was informed by

the Home-Missionary who visited them that the other had it, the

intelligence seemed a consolation to him. Gladdening sight of human

sympathy, which keeps the head erect and the heart sound under the

depressing struggle against competition! But little gladdening to me

would have been the sight of these families in their cellar-homes, had I

not at the same time been aware of the increase of those “Model

Lodging-Houses,” which may be met with in many parts of England, and

which will remove these inhabitants of cellars, they who sit in

darkness, into the blessing of the light of life—which will provide

worthy dwellings for worthy people. But of this I shall speak somewhat

later, in connection with other new institutions for the advancement of

the health, both of body and soul, of—all classes.

“For no one for himself doth live or suffer.”

For myself, I was well provided for by English hospitality, and enjoyed

an excellent home in the house of the noble and popular preacher, J.

M——. With him, and his wife (one of these beautiful, motherly natures,

who through a peculiar geniality of heart is able to accomplish so much,

and to render herself and every thing that is good twofold, in quite

another manner to that of the multiplication-table, which merely makes

two and two into four)—with them and their family I spent some

beautiful days amid conversation and music. There, in the neighborhood

of their house, I saw also one of those English parks, whose verdant,

carefully-kept sward, and groups of shrubs and flowers, give so peculiar

and so attractive a charm to the English landscape. Add to this a

river-like sheet of water; swans, groups of beautiful children and

ladies feeding them on the banks, the song of birds every where amongst

the shrubs; scattered palaces, and handsome country-houses—and every

thing looking so finished, so splendid, so beautiful and perfect, as if

nothing out of condition, nothing in tatters or shabby was to be found

in the world. Such was the impression produced by the Prince’s Park,

which was laid out by a wealthy private gentleman, Mr. J——, on the

birth of the Prince of Wales, the eldest son of Queen Victoria, and

thrown open to the public with only this single admonition exhibited, in

large letters, in various parts of the park, “it is hoped the public

will protect that which is intended for the public enjoyment.”

But I must leave this enchanting Idyll, and hasten into the

manufacturing districts; and, first of all, to Manchester:

In my imagination Manchester was like a colossal woman sitting at her

spinning-wheel, with her enormous manufactories; her subject towns,

suburbs, villages, factories, lying for many miles round, spinning,

spinning, spinning clothes for all the people on the face of the earth.

And there, as she sat, the queen of the spindle, with her masses of ugly

houses and factories, enveloped in dense rain-clouds, as if in cobwebs,

the effect she made upon me was gloomy and depressing. Yet even here,

also, I was to breathe a more refreshing atmosphere of life; even here

was I also to see light. Free-trade had brought hither her emancipating

spirit. It was a time of remarkable activity and prosperity. The

work-people were fully employed; wages were good, and food was cheap.

Even here also had ragged-schools been established, together with many

institutions for improving the condition of the poor working-classes. In

one of these ragged-schools the boys had a perfectly organized band of

music, in which they played and blew so that it was a pleasure—and

sometimes a disadvantage, to hear them. The lamenting “cry of the

children” was no longer heard from the factories. Government had put an

end to the cruelties and oppressions formerly practiced on these little

ones by the unscrupulous lust of gain. No child under ten years old can

now be employed in the factories, and even such, when employed, must of

necessity be allowed part of the day for school. Every large factory has

now generally its own school, with a paid master for the children. The

boys whom I saw in the great rooms of the factories and with whom I

conversed, looked both healthy and cheerful.

Two ideas were impressed upon my mind at this place: how dangerous it

is, even amid a high degree of social culture, to give one class of men

unrestrained power over another; and how easily a free people, with a

powerful public spirit, and accustomed to self-government, can raise

themselves out of humiliating circumstances. This spirit has done much

already in England, but it has yet more to do.

Upon one of those large, gloomy factories in Manchester, I read,

inscribed in iron letters, “The Great Beehive;” and in truth, a good

name for these enormous hives of human industrial toil, in which people

have sometimes forgotten, and still forget, that man is any thing more

than a working-bee, which lives to fill its cell in the hive, and die. I

visited several of these huge beehives. In one of them, which employed

twelve hundred work-people, I saw, in a large room, above three hundred

women sitting in rows winding cotton on reels. The room was clean, and

so also were all the women. It did not appear to be hard work; but the

steadfastly-fixed attention with which these women pursued their labor

seemed to me distressingly wearisome. They did not allow themselves to

look up, still less to turn their heads or to talk. Their life seemed to

depend upon the cotton thread.

In another of these great beehives, a long, low room, in which were six

hundred power-looms, represented an extraordinary appearance. What a

snatching to and fro, what a jingling, what an incessant stir, and what

a moist atmosphere there was between floor and ceiling, as if the limbs

of some absurd, unheard-of beast, with a thousand arms, had been

galvanized! Around us, from three to four hundred operatives, women and

men, stood among the rapid machinery watching and tending. The twelve

o’clock bell rung, and now the whole throng of work-people would go

forth to their various mid-day quarters; the greatest number to their

respective dwellings in the neighborhood of the factory. I placed

myself, together with my conductor, in the court outside the door of the

room, which was on lower ground, in order that I might have a better

view of the work-people as they came out.

Just as one sees bees coming out of a hive into the air, two, three, or

four at a time—pause, as it were, a moment from the effects of open air

and light, and then with a low hum, dart forth into space, each one his

own way, so was it in this case. Thus came they forth, men and women,

youths and girls. The greater number were well dressed, looked healthy,

and full of spirit. In many, however, might be seen the expression of a

rude life; they bore the traces of depravity about them.

As labor is now organized in the factories at Manchester, it cannot

easily be otherwise. The master-manufacturer is not acquainted with his

work-people. He hires spinners; and every spinner is master of a room,

and he it is who hires the hands. He is the autocrat of the room, and

not unfrequently is a severe and immoral one. The operatives live in

their own houses, apart from every thing belonging to the

master-manufacturer, with the exception of the raw material.

In the country it is otherwise; there the master-manufacturer may be,

and often is, a fatherly friend and guardian of his people. And where he

is so, it is in general fully acknowledged. The character which each

manufacturer bears as an employer, even in Manchester, is perfectly well

known. People mention with precision the good, the worthless, or the

wicked master. I visited factories belonging to some of these various

characters, but perceived a more marked difference in the manners and

appearance of the masters themselves, than in the appearance and

condition of the work-people. At the present moment the difference could

not be very perceptible, because the general demand for hands causes the

circumstances of the lower classes to be generally good. But, as before

remarked, the patriarchal connection between master and servant, with

its good, as well as its evil consequences, no longer exists in the

manufacturing towns of England. Employer and employed stand beside each

other, or rather opposed to each other, excepting through the

requirements of labor. The whole end and aim of the Manchester

manufacturer—when he is not subjected to machinery, and lives merely as

a screw, or portion of it—is, to get out of Manchester. He spins and

makes use of all means, good or bad, to lay by sufficient money to live

independently, or to build himself a house at a distance from the smoky,

restless town, away from the bustle—away from the throng of restless,

striving work-people. His object is to arrive at quiet in the country,

in a comfortable home; and having attained this object, he looks upon

the noisy, laboring hive, out of which he has lately come, as a

something with which he has no concern, and out of which he is glad to

have escaped with a whole skin. Such is the case with many—God forbid

that we should say, with all!

Two subjects of conversation occupied the people of Manchester very much

at this time. The one was the question—a vital question for the whole

of England—of popular education. The people of Manchester had begun to

take the subject into serious consideration, and had come to the

conclusion that there might at once be adopted a simple system of

education by which, as in the United States, every one should receive in

the people’s school practical and moral instruction, and that religious

instruction should be left for the home or for the Sunday teaching. The

willingness to thus act in concert which has been shown by the clergy of

the Established Church in Manchester, is a good omen to the various

religious sects united in this work. All things considered, it seems to

me that there is at this moment in England the most decided movement

toward a new development, a new life as well in theoretic as in

practically popular respects; and it is more apparent in the Established

Church than in any other religious body.

The second great subject of conversation, as well in Manchester as in

Liverpool, was Queen Victoria’s expected visit. The Queen had announced

her intention of visiting the great towns of the manufacturing

districts, in company with Prince Albert, in the middle of the month,

and they were accordingly expected in a few days. Several of these towns

had never before seen a crowned head within their walls, and this, in

connection with the great popularity of the Queen, and the liking and

the love which the people have for her, had perfectly enchanted the

inhabitants of Manchester. They were preparing to give a royal reception

to their lofty guests. Nothing could be too magnificent or too costly in

the eyes of the Manchester people which could testify their homage. The

whole of the district, now that the Queen was expected, was said to be

“brimful of loyalty,” and the whole of England was at this time, both in

heart and soul, monarchical. Opposition against the royal family exists

no longer in England; the former members of this opposition had become

converted. On all hands there was but one voice of devotion and praise.

Wonderful! yes, incomprehensible, thought I, when I was informed that

the Queen had requested not long since to have a grant from Parliament

of 72,000_l._ for the erection of new stables at her palace of Windsor,

and the same year 30,000_l._, for Prince Albert to repair his

dog-kennels, and now, again, just lately, 17,000_l._ for the erection of

stables at a palace which the Queen has obtained for her eldest son, and

of which he will take possession on attaining his majority. Thus

119,000_l._ for stables and dog-kennels.

What? 119,000_l._ for stables and dog-kennels; for the maintenance of

fine horses and dogs, and that at a time when Ireland is perishing of

hunger or emigrating in the deepest distress; when even in England so

infinitely much remains to be done for humanity, so much untold good

might be effected for the public with this sum. Queen Elizabeth was

accustomed to say, that she considered her money best put out when it

was in the pockets of her subjects, and she scorned to desire any great

project for her own pleasure. Queen Victoria desires, year after year,

immense grants for her stables and kennels; desires this of her people,

and yet, for all this, is homage paid to her—is she loved and supported

by the people in this extraordinary manner! Parliament grumbles, but

consents to all that the Queen desires, fully consents without a murmur,

because it loves her. Such projects would otherwise be dangerous to the

power of the monarch. Such projects overturned the throne of Louis

Philippe—have undermined many thrones. But the light foot of this

Queen—a well-beloved little foot it ought to be—dances again and again

on the brink of the dangerous abyss, and it gives not way. But how is

this possible? What is it that makes this Queen so popular, so

universally beloved by the people, spite of the desire for stables and

dog-kennels, unnecessary articles of luxury, when hundred thousands of

her subjects are in want even of the necessaries of life; want even the

means to secure a home and daily bread?

Thus I asked, and thus they replied to me:

The English people wish that their royal family should live with a

certain degree of state. They are fond of beautiful horses and dogs

themselves, and it flatters the national pride that the royal personages

should have such, and should have magnificent dwellings for them. The

character of the Queen, her domestic and public virtues, and the

influence of her example, which is of such high value to the nation,

causes it to regard no sacrifice of money as too great for the

possession of such a Queen. England is aware that under the protection

of the throne, under the shadow of the sceptre of this Queen, and the

stability which it gives to the affairs of the kingdom, she can in

freedom and peace manage her own internal concerns, and advance forward

on the path of democratic development and self-government, with a

security which other nations do not possess.

Hence it is that the reigning family now upon the English throne

presents a spectacle extraordinary upon this throne, or upon any throne

in the world. The Queen and her husband stand before the people as the

personation of every domestic and public virtue! The Queen is an

excellent wife and mother; she attends to the education of her children,

and fulfills her duties as sovereign, alike conscientiously. She is an

early riser; is punctual and regular in great as well as in small

things. She pays ready money for all that she purchases, and never is in

debt to any one. Her court is remarkable for its good and beautiful

morals. On their estates, she and Prince Albert carry every thing out in

the best manner, establish schools and institutions for the good of the

poor; these institutions and arrangements of theirs, serve as examples

to every one. Their uprightness, kindness, generosity, and the tact

which they under all circumstances display, win the heart of the nation.

They show a warm sympathy for the great interests of the people, and by

this very sympathy are they promoted. Of this, the successful carrying

out of free-trade, and the Exhibition in the Crystal Palace, projected

in the first instance by Prince Albert, and powerfully seconded by the

Queen, furnish brilliant examples. The sympathies of the Queen are those

of the heart as well as of the head. When that noble statesman, the

great promoter of free-trade, Sir Robert Peel, died, the Queen shut

herself in for several days, and wept for him as if she had lost a

father. And whenever a warm sympathy is called forth, either in public

or in private affairs, it is warmly and fully participated by Queen

Victoria and Prince Albert.

In confirmation of this opinion regarding Queen Victoria and Prince

Albert, which I heard every where, and from all parties in England, a

number of anecdotes of their life and actions were related to me, which

fully bore it out.

This universal impression, universally produced by the sovereign, who,

properly speaking, can govern nothing—because it is well known that the

monarch of England is merely a nominal executor of the wishes of the

people, a hand which subscribes that which the minister lays before it

in the name of the people; this great power, in a Queen, is without any

political power.

Monarchs and their people no longer bear the same relation to each other

as in the time when, for example, Charles the Ninth put forth his

demands, with the addition,—

“Do it, and be off with you!”

This injunction to do a thing, and then take themselves off, can no

longer be given to the people by the King, but by reason. The people

have arrived at years of discretion, and the monarch is the executor of

their laws and their wishes. He is so in England, it is said.

From Manchester I traveled to Birmingham. I saw again the land of the

fire-worshipers, their smoking altars, in tall columns and pyramids,

towering above the green fields; saw again the burning gulfs yawning in

the earth, and, saw them now with unmixed pleasure. I heard no longer,

amid their boiling roar, the lamenting cry of the children; I heard and

saw them now only as the organs of the public prosperity, and rejoiced

over them as proofs of man’s power over fire and water, over all the

powers of nature; the victory of the gods over the giants!

In Birmingham I visited a steel-pen manufactory, and followed from room

to room the whole process of those small metal tongues which go abroad

over all the world, and do so much—evil, and so much good; so much that

is great, so much that is small; so much that is important, so much that

is trivial. I saw four hundred young girls, sitting in large, light

rooms, each with her little pen-stamp, employed in a dexterous and easy

work, especially fitted for women. All were well dressed, seemed healthy

and cheerful, many were pretty: upon the whole, it was a spectacle of

prosperity which surpassed even that of the mill-girls in the celebrated

factories of Lowell, in America.

Birmingham was at this time in a most flourishing condition, and had

more orders for goods than it could supply, nor were there any male

paupers to be found in the town; there was full employment for all.

In Birmingham I saw a large school of design. Not less than two hundred

young female artists studied here in a magnificent hall or rotunda,

abundantly supplied with models of all kinds, and during certain hours

in the week, exclusively opened to these female votaries of art. A

clever, respectable, old woman, the porter of the school-house, spoke of

many of these with especial pleasure, as if she prided herself on them

in some degree.

I saw in Birmingham a beautiful park, with hot-houses, in which were

tropical plants, open to the public; saw also a large concert-room,

where twice in the week “glees” were sung, and to which the public were

admitted at a low price: all republican institutions, and which seem to

prosper more in a monarchical realm than in republics themselves.

I met with a surprise in Birmingham; that is to say, I was all at once

carried back fifteen centuries into the Syrian desert of Chalsis, and

there lived a life so unlike Birmingham and Birmingham-life, that just

for the sake of contrast, it was very refreshing. The thing was quite

simple in itself, inasmuch as one evening I accompanied an amiable

family, who resided in Birmingham, to a lecture, which was given by a

young, gifted preacher, on the old Church-father, Saint Jerome

(Hieronymus.)

The subject of the lecture, which was extempore, and delivered with much

ease and perspicuity, was evidently not intended to recommend to his

auditors, but rather to repel them from an ascetic and contemplative

life. Saint Jerome was delineated as a noble fool, a curiosity in human

nature, and was to be deplored as a sacrifice to perverted reason, by no

means to be imitated. The true end of humanity was not to be attained by

flying from city life, and burying one’s self in a desert for study and

self-mortification; that end was rather to be attained in the busy city,

than in the isolated existence of the wilderness; and so on. Such was

the lecturer’s moral. But upon me his arguments made an impression

considerably antithetical to that which he intended. I saw this warrior

of the third century devoured by a burning thirst of light and

knowledge, of purity for his whole being; saw him wander out, seeking

the wells of life; saw him, separating from the agreeable circles of

city existence, roam on amid catacombs and the tombs of martyrs; saw him

seeing in Gaul, and on the Rhine, and there finding—Christianity. Saw

him there, after being baptized, with his Bible under his arm, retire

into the deserts of Syria, and there, in the burning sands of Chalsis,

bury himself for a number of years, amid exegetic studies and severe

deeds of penance. I heard him, even at the time that he, according to

his own words, “watered his couch with his tears,” and while he was

given over, and regarded as a fool by his friends, still reproach those

friends for having chosen the worse part, that of the life of enjoyment

in the city, and break forth in transport, “O! silent wildernesses,

flower-strewn by Jesus Christ! O! wild solitudes, full of his spirit!”

I saw him, after his conflict was accomplished, go forth out of the

desert with his Bible, enter Rome publicly, and unsparingly chastise the

crimes of the proud city. I saw the haughty ladies of Rome first start,

then bow themselves to the severe judgment of the teacher; saw Marulla

and Paula renounce the dissipated life of Rome, and follow the preacher;

found convents and Christian institutions in accordance with his views;

saw him grow in the combat with the spirit of the age, till he stood as

a founder of the greatest power on earth—that of the Christian Church.

The _fool_, who had buried himself in the sands of Syria, and done

battle with himself during solitary days and nights.

Ah! this fool, this glowing sun of the desert, as he now stood forth to

view, through the veil of fifteen centuries, grew greater and greater in

my eyes, till, finally, he expanded himself over the whole of

Birmingham, with all its factories, workshops, steel-pens, and the like,

as a colossus above an ant-hill.

Birmingham is almost entirely of the class of what are called Chartists;

that is, advocates of universal suffrage. They are this, through good

and through evil; and the resistance which their just desire to be more

fully represented in the legislative body has met with from that body,

has brought them more and more into collision with the power of the

state, more and more to base their demands in opposition, even to the

higher principles of justice; for they overlook the duty of rendering

themselves worthy of the franchise by sound education. But the fault

here, in the first place, was not theirs. Growing up amid machinery and

the hum of labor, without schools, without religious or moral worth;

hardened by hard labor, in continual fight with the difficulties of

life, they have moulded themselves into a spirit little in harmony with

life’s higher educational influences, the blessings of which they had

never experienced. Atheism, radicalism, republicanism, socialism of all

kinds will and must flourish here in concealment amongst the strong and

daily augmenting masses of a population, restrained only by the fear of

the still more mighty powers which may be turned against them, and by

labor for their daily needs, so long as those powers are sufficing. And

perhaps the Americans are right where they say, in reference to this

condition of things;—“England lies at our feet—England cannot do

without our cotton. If the manufactures of England must come to a stand,

then has she a popular convulsion at her door.” Perhaps it may be so;

for these hosts of manufacturing workmen, neglected in the beginning by

society, neglected by church and state, look upon them merely as

exacting and despotic powers; and in strict opposition to them, they

have banded together, and established schools for their own children,

where only the elements of practical science are admitted, and from

which religious and moral instruction are strictly excluded. In truth, a

volcanic foundation for society, and which now, for some time past, has

powerfully arrested the attention of the most thinking men of England.

But into the midst of this menacing chaos light has already begun to

penetrate with an organizing power; and over the dark profound hovers a

spirit which can and will divide the darkness from the light, and

prepare a new creation.

From Birmingham I traveled, on the morning of the 4th of October, by a

railway to Leamington, and thence alone in a little carriage to

Stratford-on-Avon.

-----

[1] A minister paid by the community for devoting himself exclusively to

its poor, and one worthy of the confidence reposed in him.

* * * * *

OLIVER GOLDSMITH—HIS CHARACTER AND GENIUS.

BY A NEW CONTRIBUTOR.

In wit a man, simplicity a child.

Pope.

For over half a century after Goldsmith’s death, the world continued in

a state of uncertainty concerning his writings and himself. The greater

part of the task-work he had performed for the booksellers was unknown,

and Oliver spoken of, in a traditionary sort of way, as the author of

the Vicar of Wakefield and the Deserted Village, and a man of laughable

eccentricities. The majority of his readers—and no poet had more of

them or enjoyed a wider English popularity—never thought he was other

than an Englishman; and those who knew the country of his birth differed

about the place of it—some asserting he was born at Lissoy, in

Westmeath, and others contending for other localities. Even Dr. Johnson,

who has set down his native place—Pallas, in Longford—correctly in his

epitaph, makes a mistake of three years in his age. All this is

remarkable of the cotemporary of Johnson—one who ranked with that

literary colossus in his time and was so closely connected with Burke,

Reynolds, Percy and the other celebrities of that period. Resembling, in

some measure, Butler, in the obscurity of his personal history and the

popularity of his works, Goldsmith seemed to be vaguely merging into the

Vicar of Wakefield, or the Good Natured Man—just as the poet of the

Restoration had come to be confounded with his Roundhead hero—when

Prior’s life of him, twenty years ago, first threw a fair light upon the

past; indicated the great mass of his writings (poorly compensated,

anonymous and plagiarized, in his life-time,) and cleared away a large

amount of the misconceptions and fallacies that had been gathered about

his fame.

There has hardly been any author in modern times, or perhaps in the

ancient, whose personal character contrasts—is made to contrast—so

much with the genuine celebrity he has achieved. He would seem to have

been laughed at a good deal, and treated with a want of consideration

and respect, even by those who loved him and wept at his death; and the

impression generally conveyed is, that his manners were uncouth and his

conversation ridiculous. Those who have helped to create such a

character for Oliver, think they have compounded with their consciences

when they have admitted he was a charming writer, and a simple, honest

soul, who had no harm in him, and always meant well. Nevertheless, but

one half of their portrait can be received. There were no such violent

contrarieties in the elements that went to compose Oliver Goldsmith. His

biographers—to make the most lenient estimate of them—knew him

imperfectly and found it much easier to produce their effects by glaring

contrasts than by the patient and loving discrimination due to the truth

of every man’s character—especially that of a man like Goldsmith—so

marked by peculiarities of education, and so severely tried by

circumstances.

The literary character is sure to suffer, more or less, in contact with

society. Men of letters who spend half their time with the dead are not

exactly the people to be _au fait_ of all the ways of the living; and

have not always the good sense of Thomas Baker, who, for that very

reason, refused, long ago, to be introduced to the Earl of Oxford and

the polished people of his acquaintance. They generally offend against

the conventions and are not pardoned in their biographies, which are

sometimes writ by men of the world, and which, when even written by

authors, who may be supposed capable of sympathizing more with the

literary character, still show how the jealousies and prejudices of the

craft will stand in the way of honest criticism. A man’s character

depends very much on his historians—and Goldsmith, a literary

adventurer, a bookseller’s hack, and an Irishman, was

particularly—perhaps, necessarily—unfortunate in his.

There have been crowds of distinguished literary men whose peculiarities

were almost as much ridiculed as those of Goldsmith, but who have found

a more dignified appreciation, by virtue of fairer biographers. Socrates

was laughed at more than any man in Athens. But his immortal pupil has

rescued his fame from those wits and satirists who used to loiter about

the porches, and go, of a morning, to applaud the Clouds of

Aristophanes. Socrates was an ugly little man—in the midst of the

fine-faced men of Attica—generally threadbare and slovenly; and even

Plato has been obliged to allow that his honored master was like an

apothecary’s gallipot, painted outside with grotesque figures, but

containing balm within. He was as much laughed at as Goldsmith; but

nobody can think Socrates a laughable old fellow. There was the Emperor

Julian. When he sojourned at Antioch, he was ridiculed and lampooned by

the citizens for his careless dress and beard, and his simple manners.

Whereupon, instead of treating them as Sulla did those facetious Greeks

who said “his face was a mulberry sprinkled with meal,” the philosophic

apostate wrote a book against them, called “Misopogon,” in which he

pleasantly satirized himself for his literary peculiarities, justified

his critics, and happily admitted that he did not, indeed, resemble in

any thing those witty and fashionable people who made merry at his

expense. If these Antiochans were Julian’s biographers, he should cut

but a silly figure in the eyes of posterity. As it is, he has hardly

fared much better in another point of view. La Fontaine was voted

intolerably stupid in society. The gay Parisians said he merely

vegetated—and he was called the Fable Tree—bringing forth fables! Poor

Burns complained that though, when he wished, he could make himself

“beloved,” he could not make himself “respected.” He confessed that he

wanted discretion—was prone to a _lapsus linguæ_, and very apt to

offend the sense of the society he was in—in this, somewhat like

Goldsmith. We could cite a score of instances showing that famous men

have been barely tolerated in society and very much exposed to the

ridicule of it. But their biographers have done their better qualities

justice, and they are not remembered in any remarkable degree in

connection with the peculiarities which excited the satire of their

cotemporaries.

A great many things worked unfavorably for Goldsmith. His face was very

plain-favored in expression, he spoke with a brogue and hesitated a

little in his utterance. In his nature he was shy, and his manners in

society had all the simplicity and unguarded impulse of his earlier

years. Such a man, living in comparative retirement, might have passed

through the world without any disparagements. But Goldsmith was thrown

upon the great stage of London, and into the society of the most

fastidious critics and gentlemen of the age. Here his ordeal was a

severe one—as the result showed. Boswell, Hawkins, Cumberland,

Northcote, Thrale and the rest of those who either wrote memoirs or

furnished reminiscences of our author, have proved how little they could

sympathize with the plain, blunt Irishman—who was only a simple child

of nature and of genius.

Among those who have most contributed to lessen the prestige of

Goldsmith’s name was James Boswell, Dr. Johnson’s literary henchman and

biographer. In all that Boswell writes of Oliver he exhibits his desire

to disparage him. It is true he sometimes expresses partiality for

Goldsmith’s conversation. But he, doubtless, intends this as a show of

frankness to obtain the more easy credence for his general opinions of

the poet. One great cause of this feeling on Boswell’s part was his

reverent attachment to the fame of Dr. Johnson, and his jealousy of any

one who came or seemed to come into rivalry with that Ursa Major of the

British literary firmament. Boswell had the little soul of a parasite,

and always felt offense at any exhibition of independence toward

Johnson—such having the effect of rebuking his own absurd

obsequiousness. Goldsmith, though the easiest and kindliest of men,

still kept up that frank, irrespective manliness of disposition which

belongs to genius, and could not sympathize with Boswell’s extreme

notions of worship. The poet must have felt the folly and impoliteness

of trumpeting Johnson in season and out of season—often in presence of

better men than the lexicographer—and must have been offended with it,

too. On one occasion, indeed, he said to Boswell, with his usual point

and good sense—“Sir, you are for making a monarchy of that which should

be a republic.” He respected Dr. Johnson, but never bowed down to him,

nor to any one else. And the son of a Scottish lord, who venerated on

all-fours, could not forgive the poor Irish scholar for standing erect

in presence of the grim idol—as Johnson too often was, in his austere

moods. Along with all this, Boswell probably knew very well the opinion

which Goldsmith had of himself. In conversation with some one who called

Boswell a Scotch cur, Goldsmith remarked—“Not so—he is only a Scotch

bur: Tom Davies (the publisher) threw him at Johnson and he sticks to

him.” A saying which, of course, found its way to the _bur’s_ ears. All

these things are sufficient to account for the animus palpably exhibited

against Goldsmith in Boswell’s Life of Johnson.

When his book appeared, he was sharply and universally condemned for his

treatment of the dead writer. Lord Charlemont expressed his indignant

astonishment how James Boswell could affect to undervalue a man of such

genius and popularity. Burke said to Lady Crewe, on the subject—“What

sympathy could you expect to find, my dear madam, between an Irish poet

and a Scotch lawyer?” Wilkes swore two such characters were moral

antipodes. Sir Joshua Reynolds, who knew Goldsmith like a brother, and

who had heard from report how Boswell meant to depict the poet,

remonstrated earnestly with him on the subject before the biography of

Johnson came out. Bishop Percy, Mr. Stephens, Mr. Malone and others

denied that Goldsmith was guilty of the fooleries and grimaces and

unworthy feelings attributed to him by Boswell, and protested against

the low estimate he had made of Oliver’s genius and character. And yet

with all Boswell’s earnestness in the attempt to lessen Goldsmith, it is

remarkable how little he is really able to injure him in the long run.

He has created an unfavorable impression of the poet’s manners it is

true; but this is wearing away; and the fact is, that, not only the

silly Boswell himself, but the austere doctor whom he delighted to

honor, and wrote every thing to glorify, seems to be more reflected on

than Goldsmith, in most things that have been recorded to the

disparagement of the latter in connection with Johnson.

One of Boswell’s first anecdotes of Johnson and Goldsmith will show the

paltry, parasitical spirit in which he was in the habit of making his

notes and comments. They three had been supping at the Mitre tavern,

when Johnson got up to go home and take tea with his blind dependent,

Miss Williams. “Dr. Goldsmith,” says Bozzy, “being a privileged man, got

up to go with him, strutting away and calling to me, with an air of

superiority, like that of an esoteric over an exoteric disciple of a

sage of antiquity, ‘I go to Miss Williams.’” He says he envied this

“mark of distinction,” but soon had the same honor himself! Boswell

always betrays himself. For, without a grain of Oliver’s genius, he

shows himself to be as thoughtless and absurd as he would have us think

the poet to have been. If the latter did really exhibit any thing like

exultation on the occasion alluded to—the canny Scot mistook it; he

could not enter into the humorous vein of the author of the Citizen of

the World, who never let any opportunity of pleasantry of any kind

escape him, and who, doubtless, with a playful impulse, would, slily and

aside, for Boswell’s behoof, put on a comic air of loftiness, at the

idea of his own privilege. Such little _traits_ were very characteristic

of Oliver Goldsmith, at all periods of his life; and neither his own

dignity nor that of any one else was much thought of, whenever his funny

“Cynthias of the minute” came across him. With all his respect for Dr.

Johnson, he had still—though Boswell does not seem to admit it—a very

strong sense of what was odd, petulant and _grandiose_ in the doctor’s

manners, and could sport with it, too, to the bear’s face, with a rare

and child-like temerity. For instance, once at Jack’s Coffee-house,

where the pair were dining on rumps and kidneys, Johnson said—“These

rumps are pretty things; but a man must eat a great number of them.”

Goldsmith assented with pleasantry, and then, under the easy, unawed

impulse of his nature, and carried away by the thought that he was not

at his dreary desk, but at dinner with his friend, pushed on with—“But

how many of them would go to the moon?” Johnson had, doubtless, said

such small matters did not _go far_—a common expression, which would

have provoked Oliver’s pun—though the story says nothing of this.

“To the moon?” replies Johnson; “I think that exceeds your calculation.”

“Not at all, sir,” cries Goldie—looking ludicrously prepense, at the

terrible, grave face opposite—“I think I could tell.”

“Well, sir,” rejoined Ursa Major; whereupon the other comes out with:

“One, if it was long enough!”

Johnson growled angrily, and said he was a fool to provoke such an

answer. Not a fool, however, but a solemn bear, whose very grimness,

contrasted with the absurdity of the solution, was Goldsmith’s

irresistible temptation. We must, in fact, justify Oliver’s fun—though

we did not see Johnson’s face. The thing was laughter-compelling.

Goldsmith had no undue feeling of deference in his nature at all, though

he used certainly to go on all-fours to amuse the children. His

irrespective and somewhat careless humor often irritated Johnson, who

generally supped full of flattery.

“Doctor,” said Johnson one day, “I have not been quite idle; I lately

made a line of poetry.”

Instead of holding up his hands reverently, Goldsmith cried out with his

customary levity—“Come, sir, let us hear it; we will try and put a bad

one to it.”

“No, sir,” replied the petted monster, drawing in; “I have forgotten

it.”

Boswell’s attempts to depreciate Goldsmith are blunderingly made. He

always admits enough to betray his own unfair spirit. Johnson having had

in 1767, an interview with the king in the library of St. James’s

Palace, the thing was greatly talked of. Boswell says, that once at the

house of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the doctor was, by request (the henchman’s

of course), induced to repeat the circumstances of the meeting, and that

during the recital, Goldsmith was observed to be silent and

_inattentive_. He says, the latter was envious of Johnson’s luck, but he

goes on to state that at last the frankness and simplicity of his nature

prevailed, he advanced to Johnson and told him, he acquitted himself

admirably—that he (Goldsmith), “should have bowed and stammered through

the whole of it.” No sign of any very deadly envy in all this, surely.

Johnson himself, though he mostly made a point of defending Goldsmith

against attacks, could not help feeling a little pique and jealousy

toward the wit, who never refrained from arguing the matter with him,

comically or keenly as he saw fit. Johnson was truculent at times, and

would speak rudely to Goldsmith in company. One of the surly moralist’s

formulas, whenever Goldsmith would say, “I don’t see that,” was—“Nay,

my dear sir, why can you not see what everybody else sees?” On such

occasions, Goldsmith’s independence, or want of tact was against him.

Johnson at times, used to put him down in this way. During an argument,

Goldsmith having been several times contradicted, “sat in restless

agitation,” says the veracious Boswell, “from a wish to get in and

shine.” No easy matter when Johnson was cloudy. “Finding himself

excluded,” he goes on—“he had taken his hat to go away, but remained

for some time with it in his hand. Once, when beginning again to speak,

he was overpowered by the loud voice of Johnson, who was at the opposite

end of the table, and did not notice the attempt. Thus disappointed,

Goldsmith threw down his hat in a passion, and said—‘take it’—looking

angrily at Johnson. Then Toplady was about to speak, Oliver hearing

Johnson growl something, and thinking he was about to go on again,

begged he would let Toplady proceed, as the latter had heard Johnson

patiently for an hour. ‘Sir,’ roared Johnson, ‘I was not going to

interrupt the gentleman. Sir, you are impertinent!’ Goldy said nothing,

but continued in the company for some time. When they all met in the

evening at the club, Johnson said aside to Boswell, ‘I’ll make Goldsmith

forgive me:’ and then aloud—‘Doctor Goldsmith, something passed between

us, where you and I dined: I ask your pardon.’ Goldsmith answered

placidly, ‘It must be much from you, sir, that I take ill.’ After

which,” says Boswell, “Goldsmith was himself again, and rattled away as

usual.” All this exhibits the usual animus of Boswell, the coarse

tyranny of Johnson, and the fine disposition of Oliver, in a fair light.

Goldsmith knew Johnson intimately—_intus et in cute_—and used to say

of him, with that happiness of thought and fancy which his bashfulness

could, not entirely mar—“there is no arguing with Johnson; when his

pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the but-end of it.”

Johnson talked for victory—Goldsmith for enjoyment. The former came

armed at all points into the argument—the latter was but too glad to

fling off all lettered restraint, remove his harness as it were, and

enjoy himself in the midst of what he loved so cordially, the sight of

happy human faces. Johnson generally entered into conversation like an

athlete or a bull into an arena. He once said to Boswell, after some

literary reunion—“we had good talk to-night.” “Yes, sir,” returned the

admiring disciple, “you tossed and gored several persons.” A pleasant

affair, truly, one of those conversations on philosophy and polite

literature must have been in the Johnsonian times. Poor Goldsmith was

disposed to be light, discursive, and unaffected in genial society—or

if affected at all, it was in the desire to contrast his own open

pleasantry with the dread gravity of Johnson, and those who stood in awe

of him. Oliver was out of his element, in fact, among the generality of

those with whom he came into contact at the club and elsewhere. He

should have lived in the days of the loud-laughing Jerrold, and Hunt,

the old boy at all times, and the pun-elaborating Lamb; he should have

known Moore, the gayest of wits, and Maginn, who also _stammered_ forth

“his logic and his wisdom and his wit.” The simplicity of his

disposition, and the Irish impulses of his nature, led him to desire a

hearty enjoyment of his social hours in the midst of his friends. He

would have quips and cranks, and a spice of that happy frivolity which

comes as easy to the finest geniuses as their more dignified

inspirations. But such he was not to have at the Literary Club, where

Jupiter-Johnson took the chair—or rather the field, and “glowering frae

him,” kept himself perfectly ready to “toss and gore,” as usual.

“While all the clubbists trembled at his nod.”

A great deal of pedantry and paradox was mixed up with the literature of

Goldsmith’s time; men’s minds were apt to be as stiff as their costumes,

and authors were considered to have a certain professional dignity to

support.

Oliver, as we have said, was out of his element in the midst of such

circumstances; he did not admire the gravity which is too often a

mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind, but

was disposed in company

“To rattle on exactly as he’d talk

To any body in a ride or walk.”

In mixed society he seemed very unequal. He very often sat silent, and

the shyness of his disposition was thought to be an affectation of

dignity. But when the occasion grew more festive, as at after-dinner

times, and the poet’s temperament had received the stimulus of aliment

and wine, he would overflow with pleasant paradoxes, jests and all sorts

of unguarded hilarity, believing that those about him who were aware of

the intrinsic wit and worth of his intellect, would justify him against

any thought of ridicule or disparagement. In such moods, and before the

most fastidious wits of the day, he would come out intrepidly

with—“When I used to lodge among the beggars in Axe Lane.” The effect

of this on his hearers (we believe it was spoken at one of Sir Joshua

Reynold’s dinners) was something like that produced on the discomposed

sovereigns sitting round the table at Tilsit, or Erfurth—we forget

which—by Napoleon’s reminiscence, beginning—“When I was a lieutenant

in the regiment of La Fere!” These sayings seem to show a kindred

consciousness of something beyond the conventions of rank and name.

Goldsmith was not to be laughed at for that sally—which Socrates or

Zeno would have enjoyed very much. But the cankered and fastidious

Walpole, who was present on some such occasion, and found the Irishman

very blunt in his mode of argument, and very unconcerned at the rank or

pretensions of Walpole himself, could not tolerate such franknesses, and

with his usual affectation of point, called Oliver “an inspired idiot;”

just as Chesterfield had called Johnson “a respectable Hottentot”—but

indeed with greater justice; for the moralist’s manners at table,

particularly his modes of eating, were rather savage.

Goldsmith was certainly apt to blunder. But it was when in the simple

frankness of his nature he thought he was among friends and good fellows

in such moods and moments. He put his trust in those whose

conventionalities he would offend, and who must have felt the

inferiority of their own powers when in contact with his. Disraeli, the

elder, has made some just remarks on the wrong to which such men expose

themselves very often in society. He says: “One peculiar trait in the

conversation of men of genius which has often injured them when

listeners are not acquainted with the men—are certain sports of a

vacant mind; a sudden impulse to throw out opinions and take views of

things in some humor of the moment. Extravagant paradoxes and false

opinions are caught up by the humblest prosers: and the Philistines are

thus enabled to triumph over the strong and gifted man, because in an

hour of confidence and the abandonment of his mind, he laid his head in

their lap and taught them how he might be shorn of his strength.” All

this is extremely applicable to the case of Oliver Goldsmith.

Almost all the stories told of him to show his absurdity or jealousy are

palpably false and must be looked on as failures. Northcote very gravely

set down how the doctor was offended, when on his route to Paris,

accompanied by Mrs. Horneck and her daughters, to find the young ladies

receive more notice and admiration than he himself at a French hotel.

This was a stupid misconception, to say the least of it—as Miss Horneck

afterward stated, wondering at the same time how such could ever have

arisen from the fact. Goldsmith, who was always ready to laugh at

himself, for the pleasantry of the thing, in any of his playful moods,

seeing his companions pleased by the admiration they excited, and

wishing to amuse them, said, with an affectation of wounded self-love,

that doubtless produced the effect he intended—“Very well, ladies; you

may find somebody else in vogue, very shortly, as well as yourselves.”

Such sallies furnish a key to most of those things cited to the ridicule

of Goldsmith. Another story is told by Col. O’Moore. Burke and O’Moore

going to the club to dine, saw Oliver among others looking at some

foreign women in a balcony in Leicester Square. Arrived at the club,

Burke affected to be offended with Goldsmith and being questioned, said

he could hardly think of being friendly with a man who could say what

the doctor had just uttered in the public street. Goldsmith eagerly

asking to know what it was, was told he expressed surprise that the

crowd should look at these women, while he, a man of genius, was passing

by!

“Surely, I did not say so,” says Oliver.

“How should I know it then?” replies Burke.

“True,” admits Goldsmith, “I thought, indeed, something of the kind; but

I did not think I uttered it.”

All this is merely clumsy and incredible—just the sort of anecdote for

the colonel to tell. Just as preposterous was the story of Goldsmith

asking Gibbon, who came into his room while he was writing the History

of Greece, “What king was that who gave Alexander so much trouble in

India?” and on being informed it was Montezuma, writing it down at once!

Then, there is Beauclerc’s funny thing—how Goldsmith, being once

conversing with Lord Shelburne (termed “Malagrida” by some political

opponent,) told his lordship he wondered they called him Malagrida,

_for_ Malagrida was an honest man! Such were the false and stupid

reminiscences that went to compose the memory of poor Goldsmith—a man

of the finest perceptions and most excellent judgment.

Exaggerated stories are also told of his love of dress and his personal

vanity in other matters. His peach-colored coat is thought to be a good

jest. It is indeed true, that he was somewhat expensive in dress; but a

man who frequented the politest society of the time was obliged to pay

attention to his wardrobe. And if his taste in the matter of coats and

cocked-hats was not so true as it ever was in literary matters, it may

be stated that Aristotle also underwent the rebuke of Plato for his

foppishness. A great deal is made of the fact that Goldsmith once

attempted to leap from the bank to a little island in a pond, at

Versailles, and fell into the water. This is all natural enough, if we

refer it to his usual playfulness and the remembrance of the active

habits of his youth. It amounts to no more than the gravest man may have

to answer for, if all his doings were chronicled. Johnson, when quite an

old man, used to make such heavy attempts to be lively. Mrs. Thrale (we

believe) says that one day, approaching her house, the philosopher flung

himself in sport over a gate that lay in his way, and was very much

elated by his own agility.

With all his dignity and philosophy Johnson felt a little jealous of

Goldsmith, at times, and used to express disparaging opinions of him. He

said—“His genius is great, but his knowledge is small. As they say of a

generous man—it is a pity he is not rich; so we may say of

Goldsmith—it is a pity he is not knowing.” He also said no one was more

foolish than Goldsmith when he had not a pen in his hand, or wiser when

he had, thus parodying the saying applied to Charles the Second—

“Who never said a foolish thing,

And never did a wise one.”

In expressing these opinions, Dr. Johnson seems to forget what he

himself has elsewhere said, very justly—to the effect that a great deal

of the truth and correctness of a sentiment is sacrificed to the point

of it. He also says, amusingly enough—“Goldsmith should not be always

attempting to shine in conversation,” (certainly not—this would be a

sort of contumacy in Johnson’s presence!) “he has not temper for it.”

(Johnson’s own was of such a meek, philosophic stamp!) Even when the

dignity of Goldsmith’s doings was more questionable than that of his

sayings or writings, the doctor could not help entertaining some little

pique. When Oliver had chastised Evans, the publisher, for printing some

offensive observations, Johnson remarked to his _fidus Achates_: “Why,

sir, this is the first time he _has_ beaten; he may have _been_ beaten

before. This is a new pleasure to him.” He alluded to a white-bait

dinner at Blackwall, where Goldsmith, denouncing obscene novels and the

indelicacies of Tristram Shandy, created a warm argument among the

feasters, whence they fell into personalities; then into an uproar, and

thence to fisticuffs, in the midst of which, it is said, Oliver got a

smart share of what was going—before they broke up this feast of

reason—pretty fairly expressed by the _Irish_ participles, _bait_,

beating, beaten! The affair was very laughable, to be sure. But Johnson

should have remembered that he himself had knocked his own publisher

down—Osborne. He should have commented more leniently on poor Goldie.

The old feuds between authors and publishers were as lively in those

times as they were before or have been since. Goldsmith wrote a very

dignified public letter, to justify the beating, and showed that there

were certain rascalities which called for the imposition of violent

hands upon them, and that the punishment of them was sanctioned by the

sense of society, though against the letter of the law. But, as we were

saying, Johnson permitted himself on many occasions to disparage

Goldsmith. Still, in the main, he has stood up strongly for the fame of

his friend—thereby showing that such opinions as the foregoing were not

very just or generous. When his conscience got the better of his

occasional feelings, as was usually the case—for his nature was

intrinsically good (he “had nothing of the bear but the skin,” as

Goldsmith used to say,) he would do Oliver justice. In this, to be sure,

he had a consoling sense of the superiority and patronage which belong

to such a championship; and, in maintaining the cause of his friend, he

could argue vigorously for himself—for, their fortunes were very much

alike. He could express his own feelings of scorn for the conventions or

misconceptions of society, in defending the character of a man of

genius. Be this as it may, he has left on record sentiments highly

honorable to himself as well as to Goldsmith; and has had some of them

graven in his epitaph on the poet, dramatist and historian

“Who ran

Through each mode of the pen and was master of all.”

Goldsmith, in society, was not the oddity he is represented to be by

Boswell, Walpole and the others. There is no such contradictory monster

as they would have us think him. The man who was “inspired” with such

true genius—who drew the Vicar of Wakefield—could not have been the

“idiot” that the artificial Walpole would depict him. Nor could any man

who “wrote like an angel” ever come to “talk like poor Poll,” as Garrick

says with such antithetical fallacy. The fact was, Oliver’s broad

Westmeath accent, his stammering mode of speaking, and the careless

impulses of his thoroughly Irish temperament gave his manners a strange,

it may be said an intolerable originality, in an age of forms and

observances in literature and life. It was only in a stiff, artificial

age, like that in which his lot was cast, that Goldsmith would have been

so rudely treated and ridiculed. It is felt that it was not Julian but

the polished Antiochans which were ridiculous. We also know that though

they laughed at Socrates he was not _laughed at_, as he himself

expresses it. Absurdity was the cant word of Goldsmith’s day for the

good-nature, generosity, originality and independence which he brought

with him, along with that _Shibboleth_ of his from the simple and

honorable home of his childhood, and which he never lost in all the

mazes and trials of the great metropolis.

His absurdities, as they termed them, did not, after all, prevent

Goldsmith from being well received in the best society of London—a very

strong proof, in itself, that the doctor was as much a gentleman in

demeanor as he was by his birth and education, and could mingle with the

polite and the fashionable on very easy terms and without any violence

to his habits. His sayings in company—such as have been remembered—are

full of point and pleasantry, and show that he could command, even with

his shy utterance, much of the happy spirit of his written style. He was

once explaining to a friend, in Johnson’s presence, that in fables where

inferior creatures are interlocutors, these should be made to speak in

character—that animals on land, for instance, should converse

differently from little fishes. This idea, which is, after all, only

that which Shakspeare has so beautifully realized, with a difference, in

his elves of a Midsummer Night’s Dream, his Caliban and his Ariel, set

Johnson a-chuckling at its childishness, which Goldsmith perceiving, he

retorted very happily—laughing, too—“You may laugh, doctor, but if

_you_ had to make little fishes speak, they would talk like whales!” A

palpable hit at the sesquipedalian moralist.

If we come to consider Goldsmith’s influence upon the literary character

of his age, we will probably agree that it was second to that of no

other author. Indeed, it must be considered superior to that of him who

was supposed to sway most authoritatively the world of letters. Doctor

Johnson’s style, to be sure, was very impressive, and created a host of

imitators—the most remarkable of whom was Gibbon, who surpassed his

model in a certain measured splendor of rhetoric—which is,

nevertheless, very wearisome at times. But Goldsmith’s many modes of a

very simple and lucid style produced then, and since, a more permanent

effect. He wrote the best poem, the best comedy, the best novel, and the

best history—at least, the best written history of the day. Johnson

preferred his historic manner to that of Hume or Robertson. Though

Goldsmith’s literature had not the marked effect of Doctor Johnson’s

grand Latin idiom; yet being more varied, it reached the wider

popularity, such as time has confirmed and increased. Goldsmith kept to

the ancient ways of the vernacular, trod by Addison, Swift, Hume, etc.;

and contributed not a little to neutralize the Johnsonian mode—which,

after all, was recognized to be a corrupt rhetoric, and a weakening of

the genius of the Anglo-Saxon tongue. Goldsmith’s, “racy of the soil,”

was secured against fluctuations of taste, and the charm of it is as

fresh to-day as it was eighty years ago. His comedies abolished the

mawkish sentimentality which—derived partly from the Richardson

school—dulled the spirit of the stage, and asserted, very happily, the

old comic claim of setting audiences in a roar. The change was heartily

welcomed; the Londoners crowded to the comedy to be merry, and a

respected household tradition, now especially recalled for the sake of

the dear old narrator of it, has more than once informed us how George

the Third, his fresh-colored English face, full of merriment, and the

plain, little cock-nosed Charlotte by his side, in the royal box, both

joined in the hilarity of the audience during one of the first

performances of “She Stoops to Conquer,” at Covent Garden Theatre; but,

at the story of “Old Grouse in the Gun-room,” where everybody laughed on

the stage, his majesty fairly chimed in with Mr. Hardcastle, and laughed

as loud as any one in the house. Thus, in the words of Mr. Colman—

“Thus, cheered, at length, by Pleasantry’s bright ray,

Nature and mirth resumed their legal sway,

And Goldsmith’s genius basked in open day.”

Goldsmith’s prose is the sweetest and most harmonious in the language.

His narrative and historical manner is easy and expressive—more so than

Hume’s. And here, we may remark how odd it was to see a pair of

provincials—an Irishman and a Scotchman, each with the brogue or the

burr upon his tongue, and in his manner—vindicating the native purity

of the Anglo-Saxon against the subversive genius of two of the foremost

English writers—Johnson and Gibbon—and finally overcoming them on

their own ground. Goldsmith, in short, as Johnson said very well,

ornamented whatever he touched, and some of the dryest disquisitions

become in his hands as interesting as a Persian tale. An honor of

another kind belongs to Goldsmith.

Among the authors of England none did more than himself to support the

dignity and independence of British authorship, the honor of which was

so sadly smirched by the dedications of Dryden and Locke, as well as by

others before and after them. Oliver instead of thinking of the high

nobility, set a fine example to all writers—he dedicated “She Stoops to

Conquer,” to Doctor Johnson; “The Deserted Village” to his other friend,

Reynolds; and “The Traveler”—his first poem—to his brother, all

exhibiting the affectionate manliness of his disposition. And with

reference to his brother, we have a trait of Goldsmith’s character which

is worth the Vicar of Wakefield. He was once invited to call on the Duke

of Northumberland, when that nobleman was going to Ireland, as Lord

Lieutenant. Sir John Hawkins, who was leaving the duke’s presence as

Oliver was going in, tells the story with indignant reprobation of the

poet’s fatal absurdity. His grace having complimented Goldsmith on his

writings (he had just written Edwin and Angelina to amuse the duchess),

said he was going to Ireland, and would be happy to promote the doctor’s

interests in any way, etc. Whereupon the doctor told the duke that the

publishers were treating him pretty well just then; but that he had a

poor brother in Ireland, a curate on forty pounds a year, with a large

family, and begged his grace to remember _him_, etc. “In this way,”

groans Sir John Hawkins, “did Goldsmith dispose of his chance of

patronage and fortune.”

As a poet, Goldsmith at once took the rank which posterity has almost

unanimously confirmed. The finest critics in the language have honored

the claims of the poet of Auburn. Lord Byron says, “where is the poetry

of which one half is good? Is it Milton’s? Is it Dryden’s; or any one’s

except Pope’s and Goldsmith’s, of which _all_ is good?” There is no need

at this time of day, to speak of the nature, pathos and elegance of

Goldsmith’s muse. In stateliness he sometimes approaches Dryden; as in

those noble verses which Johnson could not read without a tremor and

tears of pride:—

“Stern o’er each bosom reason holds her state,

With daring aims, irregularly great:

Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,

I see the lords of human kind pass by.”

But there is one respect in which we think his poetry has not been

appreciated as it ought.

The great change which has taken place in poetry from the classic

rhythmus and Cæsural canons of Pope’s school, to the nature and fresher

phraseology of our modern period has been commonly dated from the rise

of Wordsworth and Coleridge—sometimes traced to the effect of Bishop

Percy’s ballads. There is generally an incorrectness in any attempt to

fix mutations of taste and fashions of style down to chronology. Instead

of thinking the old poetic spirit of England was revived at the close of

the eighteenth century, we believe it had not died at all; but had lived

on, in exile, while a foreign influence bore sway—as the line of Edgar

Atheling lived long ago; destined, however, in the fullness of time to

be restored to its ancient supremacy. Bishop Percy’s ballads were a

manifestation of that spirit, not a cause of it—though he might not

have known it—a necessary reaction of the national mind. At the time of

their appearance Goldsmith’s poetry was exhibiting the first tokens of

the coming change. The theme of it was human nature, with its common

feelings, hopes, and sufferings; and pouring the warmth, pathos and

earnestness of his own heart into it, he rendered it attractive and

popular. His verse had all the vernacular ease and grace of his prose,

with a polish only inferior to Pope’s. In his original hands the heroic

couplet was not “the clock-work tintinnabulum of rhyme” beaten by the

Cawthornes, Darwins, and Hayleys of the day. In his prose criticisms he

wrote against the cumbrous use of epithets, and discarded it in his own

verse. He amused himself occasionally among his friends, by reciting the

lines of several popular authors, with a dissyllable omitted. He would

read the opening of Gray’s Elegy in this way:

The curfew tolls the knell of day,

The lowing herd winds o’er the lea:

The ploughman homeward plods his way

And leaves the world to gloom and me.

In this respect he must have been rather hard on Johnson, whose poetry

in many respects is “the hubbub of words,” which Wordsworth so

scornfully terms some of it. The first couplet of the doctor’s great

satire has one superfluous line—

Let observation, with extended view,

Survey mankind from China to Peru—

The poem would have started better from “Survey.”

Johnson, indeed, used to ridicule the taste that came up with the Percy

Ballads. They had “a false gallop of verses,” in his opinion, and he

said he could go on making such stanzas for an hour together, thus:

As with my hat upon my head,

I walked along the Strand,

There I met another man

With his hat in his hand.

But in this, as in a great many other matters of literature, morals, and

taste, Johnson did not prove himself an infallible doctor. Goldsmith’s

taste, of a genuine _vates_, led him at once to appreciate the simple

lyrics of Percy’s collection; and his charming ballad of the Hermit

shows how he felt the fresh spirit of them. This excellent poem was

written for the Countess of Northumberland. And here we may remark that

three of the most attractive modern English poems were composed

especially for ladies of high rank—or at their suggestion:—The Lay of

the Last Minstrel, at the wish of Lady Anna Scott, daughter of the Duke

of Buccleuch; The Sofa, for Lady Hesketh; and Goldsmith’s Ballad for the

Countess.

Goldsmith certainly took the initiative in the change which was followed

and aided by “the manly and idiomatic simplicity of Cowper”—before

Wordsworth and Coleridge were heard of. He effected his share of the

reform quietly; he wrote no doctrinal prefaces, but went and did what he

meant. In teaching and practicing a new mode, he did not make the noise

of a reformer. He was rather more favorable to the style of Dryden and

Pope than to some of the ballad enthusiasts that talked and wrote in

extremes. He reformed without any affectation of apostleship in the

matter of words and syllables—was no literary red-republican. Thirty or

forty years later Wordsworth cried, _Heureka_! as if something were then

first done or found. He announced his theories in long didactic

prefaces, laid down doctrines which the genius of Goldsmith and Cowper

had already suggested or acted on, and fell into extravagancies which

they never dreamed of—exhibiting his muse in a very _sans culotte_

condition; the term (having a masculine reference) is somewhat

inapplicable—or should be in a well-regulated state of society—though

Mrs. Bloomer is of a contrary opinion. But, Wordsworth, in his love of

unadorned Nature, used, in fact, to pull off her _garments_, along with

her _ornaments_, as if he thought, with those other honest fanatics, the

early Quakers, that a state of nudity was a state of grace! Coleridge

and Southey were his disciples, but not such mighty prosers; and

Coleridge was a far superior spirit to the two others, in all subtle

thought and lofty expression, though some of Wordsworth’s lines are

truly fine. As for Southey, we are disposed to justify Lord Byron in his

contempt of the man and his poetry. He was of an overweening and

splenetic nature; there was nothing in his character to neutralize the

impression made by the “Vision of Judgment” and “Don Juan” respecting

him. With regard to Oliver Goldsmith, Southey is convicted of a willful

injustice to the memory of a more genuine poet and better man than

himself. In his Life of Cowper, speaking of the poets that came after

Pope, he never once alludes to the author of The Deserted Village! He

says “the school of Pope was gradually losing its influence,” in proof

of which, “almost every poem of any considerable length which obtained

any celebrity, during the half century between Pope and Cowper, was writ

in blank verse. With the single exception of Falconer’s Shipwreck, it

would be in vain to look for any rhymed poem of that age, and of equal

extent, which is held in equal estimation with the works of Young,

Thompson, Glover, Somerville, Dyer, Akenside and Armstrong.” We all know

that one cause, at least, of this studied omission of Goldsmith’s name,

was Byron’s favorable opinion of his poetry. This deliberate wrong to

the memory of a great departed poet, because of a vehement hatred of a

living one, shows Southey’s disposition to be as ungenerous, we may say

as contemptible, as his hexameters are coldly manufactured, and surely

fated to be dry upon the popular palate to the end of time. He affects

to rank Oliver among the followers of Pope and the imitators of his

style. But there is as little resemblance between Pope’s terse and

splendid rhetoric, and the graphic simplicity and nature of Goldsmith’s

poetry, as between the blank verse of Wordsworth or Southey and the

noble rhythmus of Paradise Lost. Goldsmith scorned as much to fashion

his verse after the mode of Pope as he did to detract from the great

merit of that author. He cultivated the elegance and rhyming periods of

the classic school, and so identified these with his own original

spirit, that he recommended anew what, in themselves, are genuine graces

of English poetry. They truly belong to the genius of it—as his fine

taste must have taught him—and must continue to do so, in spite of all

the sprawling Thalaba hexameters of Southey. The heroic rhyming couplet

is capable of as much force, flexibility, and beauty, as any other form

of English verse, and is never monotonous in original hands—whether of

Chaucer, Dryden, Crabbe, or Keats. Southey, in thus pretending to shut

his eyes to the claims of the author of The Traveler, must have still

felt (for he was not without a critical sense of the genuine in the

Anglo-Saxon) that the great mass of his own poetry, so like a _hortus

siccus_, with its elaborated fancies and exotic imagery, must mainly lie

upon the shelves of libraries, while Goldsmith’s is fated to be found

upon all book-stalls, and to go about to the households and hearts of

the people—to be printed in innumerable editions, ornamented with

costly engravings, and be found in all parts of the world where the

English language is spoken—read by yet unborn generations on the banks

of the Burrampooter, the Mississippi, or the Swan River, as freshly and

as feelingly as it was, at first, and still continues to be, on those of

the Thames and the Tweed and the Shannon. And so it is; and thus, as the

clown in Twelfth Night says, “does the whirligig of time bring in his

revenges.” Somebody, we forget who, says the praise of the people is a

finer thing than the homage of the critics: and, in this way, the ghost

of Oliver must be satisfied to see how posterity vindicates him against

the early and the latter detractors. He was a true English poet with an

Irish heart; and Sir Joshua Reynolds evinced the genuine prescience of

genius (though the world said it was only friendship or flattery) when

he gave the ugly face of Oliver that classic _tournure_ which should

best suit his destined rank in the peerage of Parnassus.

Goldsmith had left his mark upon the literature of his age, and plainly

indicated the character of that which was to come, when he quitted his

painful desk forever, in 1774, being then about forty-five years old. At

that age Cowper was still unmentioned in the world of letters, but was

preparing to carry out the salutary innovations which the other had

begun. Goldsmith died £2000 in debt. The booksellers had advanced him

money for works to be written. Everybody trusted him. “Was ever poet so

trusted before?” says Dr. Johnson. Burke wept when he heard Oliver was

dead. Such tears were as eloquent as Johnson’s epitaph. The eyes of the

latter were moistened, too; and in a sonorous Greek tetrastich, he

called on those who cared for Nature, for the charms of song, or the

deeds of ancient days, to weep for the historian, the naturalist, and

the poet. Poor Goldie died when he had a chance of liberating himself,

in another way, from the task-work of publishers. “Every year he lived,”

says Dr. Johnson, “he would have deserved Westminster Abbey more and

more.” But Goldsmith’s true Westminster Abbey is the _volitare per ora_

and the keeping of his honest memory by the _oi polloi_, at their

firesides, along with the _lares_—when, as Macaulay would say, a

traveler from the empire of Van Diemans Land may probably be sketching

the ruins of that British Santa Croce from a broken arch of London

Bridge:—

Nothing to them the sculptor’s art,

The funeral columns, wreaths or urns;

as Halleck so well says respecting Robert Burns, in one of the finest of

his lyrics.

* * * * *

MONA LISA.

BY MRS. MARY G. HORSFORD.

Leonardo de Vinci is said to have been four years employed upon the

portrait of Mona Lisa, a fair Florentine, without being able, after all,

to come up to the idea of her beauty.

Artist! lay the brush aside,

Twilight gathers chill and gray;

Turn the picture to the wall—

Thou hast wrought in vain to-day.

Thrice twelve months have hastened by

Since thy canvas first grew bright

With that brow’s bewitching beauty,

And that dark eye’s melting light.

Yet the early sunbeam shineth

On thy tireless labors yet,

And the portrait stands before thee,

Till the evening sun has set.

Faultless is the robe that falleth

Round that form of matchless grace;

Faultless is the softened outline

Of the fair and oval face.

Thou hast caught the wondrous beauty

Of the round cheek’s roseate hue;

And the full red lips are smiling,

As this morn they smiled on you.

To that lady thou hast given

Immortality below,

Wherefore, then, with moody glances

Dost thou from thy labor go?

From the living face of beauty

Beams the soul’s expressive ray,

And, with all thy god-like genius,

_This_ thou _never_ canst portray!

Of the countless throng around me,

Each hath labors like to thine;

Each, methinks, some Mona Lisa

In his spirit’s inmost shrine.

Visions haunt us from our childhood

Of a love so pure, so true,

Seraphs unawares might envy

As their white wings fan the Blue;

Visions that elude forever,

As the silent years depart,

Some unhappy ones and weary—

Mona Lisas of the heart!

Dreams of a divine completeness

That we struggle to attain,

’Mid the doubts and toils harassing

Of our earthly life in vain;

Poet fancies we endeavor

To imprint upon the scroll,

Yet for worded utterance failing—

Mona Lisas of the soul!

* * * * *

TO A CANARY BIRD.

BY WILLIAM GIBSON, U. S. NAVY.

Sweet little faery bird,

Gentle Canary bird,

Beats not thy tiny breast with one regret?

Is it enough for thee

Ever, as now, to be

Caged as a prisoner, kissed as a pet?

Gay is thy golden wing,

Careless thy caroling,

Thou art as happy as happy can be;

Singing so merrily,

Hast thou no memory

Of thy lost native isle o’er the sea?

Not the Hesperides,

Floating on fabled seas,

Nothing in Nature, and nothing in song,

Match with the magic smile,

Which, from thine own sweet isle,

Hushes the heaving wave all the year long.

Summer and youthful Spring,

Blooming and blossoming,

Hand-in-hand, sister-like, stray thro’ the clime;

There thou wert born, amid

Fruits colored like thee, hid

In the green groves of the orange and lime.

Then was the silver lute

Of the young maiden mute,

When, from the shade of her own cottage-eaves,

Rang first thy joyous trill,

While, with a gentle thrill,

Tho’ the breeze stirred them not, shivered the leaves.

Thou, like a spirit, come

From thy far island-home,

Seemest of spring-time and sunshine the voice.

Light-hearted is thy lay,

As, on the lemon spray,

Love, little singing bird, made thee rejoice.

For, from thy lady’s lip,

Oft is it thine to sip

Sweetness which dwells not in fruit or in flower;

And when her shaded eye

Rests on thee pensively,

Moonlight was ne’er so soft silv’ring thy bower.

Likest to thee is Love,

Never it cares to rove,

When its wild winglets feel Beauty’s control.

Would, little bird, that I

Might to thine island fly,

All, all alone with the girl of my soul!

There should’st thou sing to us,

Tender and tremulous,

Our hearts happy with love unexpressed.

Sweet little faery bird,

Gentle Canary bird,

How would’st thou be by that dear girl caressed.

* * * * *

A LIFE OF VICISSITUDES.

BY G. P. R. JAMES, ESQ.

[Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1852, by

George Payne Rainsford James, in the Clerk’s Office of the

District Court of the United States for the District of

Massachusetts.]

(_Continued from page 279._)

A STRUGGLE WITH THE WORLD.

A period of wandering and of danger, of flitting from place to place,

and land to land, of difficulties and distresses, of almost daily peril,

of constant uncertainty as to the future, would seem to furnish matter

enough for memory; but yet the period immediately succeeding my

separation from Father Bonneville, is very dim and obscure to

remembrance. I staid so short a time in any place, one event trod so

fast upon the heels of another, that neither scene nor event had time to

fix itself firmly in memory, before, like the grass upon a public

pathway, it was trodden down by passing feet.

At this time, I could speak three languages with almost equal facility:

English, French, and German; but English perhaps, I understood most

thoroughly—at all events, I know, I generally thought in that language.

This facility was of very great advantage to me, and I notice it on that

account, as I could pass wherever those tongues were spoken for a native

of the country. It is true, I had not soon occasion to see France again;

but I wandered through many parts of Switzerland, where French was in

common use.

The terrible dissensions and frightful bloodshed that were going on in

that once fair and peaceful land, soon drove me forth, however, though I

anxiously continued my inquiries for Father Bonneville, as long as there

seemed a chance of success. My steps were then turned toward the North

of Germany, without object; and more directed by accidental

circumstances, than by any predetermination of my own, I walked on foot

the whole way; for the hundred louis afforded but small means, and I had

learned the necessity, and the mode of economy. Fifty of those hundred

louis I put by with the resolution never to touch them except in the

last extremity; and no one can tell the amount of distress and privation

I submitted to, rather than violate that resolution. Every thing I could

part with, I disposed of before I set out: my beloved rifle amongst the

rest. I had a good many little trinkets, which I had purchased in the

foolish vanity of youth, but I got rid of them all, and only retained my

watch, with a seal bearing a coat of arms attached to it, (which seal I

had possessed as long as I could remember any thing) and the ring and

little gold chain which had been given to me by Madame de Salins. My

clothes were all compressed into a knapsack, and in my hunter’s garb,

with thick, coarse shoes upon my feet, I plodded on my weary way, over

mountain and moor, through field and forest, in the town and in the

country, seeking wherever opportunity seemed to present itself, for some

employment, but finding none. All I could offer to do was to teach, and

the whole of Europe was so overloaded with persons in the same

situation, who had been driven forth from France by the Revolution, that

it was hardly possible to find any profitable occupation of that kind.

Often, often at peasant’s hut, or farmer’s house, I have begged a morsel

of black bread, and a draught of water. Perhaps this was not very right,

when I had actually money in my pocket, but yet it is a common custom in

that country, and almost every artisan, before he becomes a master in

his trade, spends some years in what is called _fechting_ or in other

words, begging his way from place to place. The assistance was almost

always readily given, and sometimes the charity of woman would add a

drink of milk, or a few kreutzers.

I was within sight of the town of Hamburgh before any chance of

occupation presented itself, and then it came about in rather a singular

manner. I was walking on at a quick pace, at about three miles from the

city, on the same side of the Elbe, when I saw from a little garden

gate, close by a small summer-house, an elderly gentleman come forth, of

somewhat peculiar appearance. He was exceedingly thin, brisk and

active-looking, with powdered hair and a thick queue, an enormous white

cravat, a vast frill, and a bluish-gray cloak, somewhat threadbare.

There was a keen, sharp look about his eyes and mouth, which was not

very promising, and I walked on without taking much notion of him. His

pace, however, was as fast as my own, and we kept nearly side by side

for about half-a-mile, without speaking, till we came upon a long wooden

bridge, which every one who has been in Hamburgh must recollect. He had

eyed me, I perceived, with great attention, and at length he burst

forth.

“Well, young man,” he said, “I think you might have given me good time

of day, at least.”

“I do not know you,” I answered, “and do not like to take liberties with

strangers.”

“Mighty modest,” rejoined he. “What’s your trade?”

I explained to him, that I was seeking employment as a teacher, having

been driven out of my own country by Revolution. That seemed to touch

him; for he had a great abhorrence of Revolutions, and he asked me what

I could teach.

I told him that I was competent to give instruction in Latin, Greek,

Mathematics, French, English and German.