"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 honor to the university. But at last he
went drunk into a formal examination, and sent in papers, after the
manner of Aristophanes, containing capital jokes upon the Dons and
Big-wigs themselves. The offense 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 convival 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 newspaper. First, he was so
irregular that he could never be depended upon. Secondly, he had strange
honest eccentric twists of thinking, that could coalesce with the
thoughts of no party in the long run. An article of his, inadvertently
admitted, had horrified all the proprietors, staff, and readers of the
paper. It was diametrically opposite to the principles the paper
advocated, and compared its pet politician to Catiline. Then John Burley
shut himself up and wrote books. He wrote two or three books, very
clever, but not at all to the popular taste--abstract and learned, full
of whims that were _caviare_ to the multitude, and larded with Greek.
Nevertheless they obtained for him a little money, and among literary
men some reputation. Now Audley Egerton came into power, and got him,
though with great difficulty--for there were many prejudices against
this scampish, harum-scarum son of the Muses--a place in a public
office. He kept it about a month, and then voluntarily resigned it. "My
crust of bread and liberty!" quoth John Burley, and he vanished into a
garret. From that time to the present he lived--Heaven knows how.
Literature is a business, like every thing else; John Burley grew more
and more incapable of business. "He could not do task-work," he said; he
wrote when the whim seized him, or when the last penny was in his pouch,
or when he was actually in the spunging-house or the Fleet--migrations
which occurred to him, on an average, twice a year. He could generally
sell what he had positively written, but no one would engage him
beforehand. Magazines and other periodicals were very glad to have his
articles, on the condition that they were anonymous; and his style was
not necessarily detected, for he could vary it with the facility of a
practiced pen. Audley Egerton continued his best supporter, for there
were certain questions on which no one wrote with such force as John
Burley--questions connected with the metaphysics of politics, such as
law reform and economical science. And Audley Egerton was the only man
John Burley put himself out of the way to serve, and for whom he would
give up a drinking bout and do _task-work_; for John Burley was grateful
by nature, and he felt that Egerton had really tried to befriend him.
Indeed, it was true, as he had stated to Leonard by the Brent, that,
even after he had resigned his desk in the London office, he had had the
offer of an appointment in Jamaica, and a place in India from the
Minister. But probably there were other charms then than those exercised
by the one-eyed perch that kept him to the neighborhood of London. With
all his grave faults of character and conduct, John Burley was not
without the fine qualities of a large nature. He was most resolutely his
own enemy, it is true, but he could hardly be said to be any one else's.
Even when he criticised some more fortunate writer, he was good-humored
in his very satire: he had no bile, no envy. And as for freedom from
malignant personalities, he might have been a model to all critics. I
must except politics, however, for in these he could be rabid and
savage. He had a passion for independence, which, though pushed to
excess, was not without grandeur. No lick-platter, no parasite, no
toadeater, no literary beggar, no hunter after patronage and
subscriptions; even in his dealings with Audley Egerton, he insisted on
naming the price for his labors. He took a price, because, as the papers
required by Audley demanded much reading and detail, which was not at
all to his taste, he considered himself entitled fairly to something
more than the editor of the journal, wherein the papers appeared, was in
the habit of giving. But he assessed this extra price himself, and as he
would have done to a bookseller. And when in debt and in prison, though
he knew a line to Egerton would have extricated him, he never wrote that
line. He would depend alone on his pen--dipped it hastily in the ink,
and scrawled himself free. The most debased point about him was
certainly the incorrigible vice of drinking, and with it the usual
concomitant of that vice--the love of low company. To be King of the
Bohemians--to dazzle by his wild humor, and sometimes to exalt by his
fanciful eloquence, the rude gross 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 only capable now of unequal desultory efforts. But as a talker, in
his own wild way, he was original and matchless. And the gift of talk is
one of the most dangerous gifts a man can possess for his own sake--the
applause is so immediate, and gained with so little labor. Lower, and
lower, and lower had sunk John Burley, not only in the opinion of all
who knew his name, but in the habitual exercise of his talents. And this
seemed willfully--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.