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