Reynolds were Burke, Goldsmith, Garrick, Fox, Gibbon, and Sheridan. Of
these Gibbon is not the least distinguished. He is an illustrious
example of what an ordinary personality can accomplish by reason of an
extraordinary devotion to one purpose. Some few men achieve fame by
their brilliant versatility; some, as in the case of Samuel Johnson,
by their commanding personal force; Gibbon has won a permanent place
in literary history by spending his life in doing one thing. That one
thing he did so well that E.A. Freeman, one of the prominent
historians of the nineteenth century, has truthfully said,--"He
remains the one historian of the eighteenth century whom modern
research has neither set aside nor threatened to set aside."
In his memoirs Gibbon reveals himself as a man with little dignity or
heroism. There is a droll story that is apt to suggest itself when one
thinks of Gibbon. At one time, when asking a dignified lady for her
hand in marriage, he fell upon his knees in proper lover-like manner.
Unfortunately Gibbon was so stout that upon her refusal he found
himself in the embarrassing need of calling in a servant to help him
to his feet again. Memories such as these, however, cannot blind us to
the essential worth in the character of the great historian. In the
light of his consecration to a worthy purpose his life is not without
its heroism. To write _The History of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire_ is a monumental achievement. To bend every energy to the
fulfilling of a high resolve is heroic. From 1764 to 1787 his one aim
in life was to write a scholarly history that should cover the vast
field that he had chosen. He may lack that spiritual insight which
enables one to estimate world movements in the upper regions of
religion, but he did not lack unfaltering devotion to his purpose. So
well did he do his work that his six volumes can be found in the
library of every student of the past. The story is told of a great
German who learned English in order to read Gibbon in the original.
In the following extract from his Autobiography is found his own
explanation of the circumstances under which he conceived his vast
project "amid the ruins of the Capitol," in 1764:
"My temper is not very susceptible of enthusiasm; and the enthusiasm
which I do not feel, I have ever scorned to affect. But, at the
distance of twenty-five years, I can neither forget nor express the
strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first approached and
entered the eternal city. After a sleepless night, I trod, with a
lofty step, the ruins of the Forum; each memorable spot where Romulus
stood, or Tully spoke, or Caesar fell, was at once present to my eye;
and several days of intoxication were lost or enjoyed before I could
descend to a cool and minute investigation. My guide was Mr. Byers, a
Scotch antiquary of experience and taste; but in the daily labor of
eighteen weeks, the powers of attention were sometimes fatigued, till
I was myself qualified, in a last review, to select and study the
capital works of ancient and modern art. Six weeks were borrowed for
my tour of Naples, the most populous of cities, relative to its size,
whose luxurious inhabitants seem to dwell on the confines of paradise
and hell-fire. I was presented to the boy-king by our new envoy, Sir
William Hamilton, who, wisely diverting his correspondence from the
Secretary of State to the Royal Society and British Museum, has
elucidated a country of such inestimable value to the naturalist and
antiquarian. On my return, I fondly embraced, for the last time, the
miracles of Rome.... In my pilgrimage from Rome to Loretto I again
crossed the Apennine; from the coast of the Adriatic I traversed a
fruitful and populous country, which could alone disprove the paradox
of Montesquieu, that modern Italy is a desert....
"The use of foreign travel has been often debated as a general
question; but the conclusion must be finally applied to the character
and circumstances of each individual. With the education of boys,
where or how they may pass over some juvenile years with the least
mischief to themselves or others, I have no concern. But after
supposing the previous and indispensable requisites of age, judgment,
a competent knowledge of men and books, and a freedom from domestic
prejudices, I will briefly describe the qualifications which I deem
most essential to a traveler. He should be endowed with an active,
indefatigable vigor of mind and body, which can seize every mode of
conveyance, and support, with a careless smile, every hardship of the
road, the weather, or the inn. The benefits of foreign travel will
correspond with the degrees of these qualifications; but, in this
sketch, those to whom I am known will not accuse me of framing my own
panegyric. It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat
musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars
were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of
writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind."
XI
BURNS FALLS IN LOVE
When Robert Burns and his brother were working hard on the Mount
Oliphant farm, Robert fell in love. This experience, alas, in after
years became too frequent an occurrence to occasion much comment, for
the ease with which the poet fell in and out of love was the chief
fault in a faulty life. But when this episode occurred the boy was
still an innocent country lad in his fifteenth year, a lad perhaps
somewhat rude and clownish, at least such is an unfounded tradition.
Out of the monotony of this life of prosaic toil and drudgery, Burns
is lifted by the romance which fortunately he has himself described.
"You know," he says, "our country custom of coupling a man and woman
together as partners in the labors of the harvest. In my fifteenth
summer my partner was a bewitching creature, a year younger than
myself. My scarcity of English denies me the power of doing her
justice in that language, but you know the Scottish idiom. She was a
bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass. In short, she, altogether unwittingly to
herself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which in spite of
acid disappointment, gin-house prudence, and book-worm philosophy,
I hold to be the first of human joys here below! How she caught the
contagion I cannot tell.... Indeed, I did not know myself why I liked
so much to loiter behind with her, when returning in the evening from
our labors; why the tones of her voice made my heartstrings thrill
like an AEolian harp; and especially why my pulse beat such a furious
ratan when I looked and fingered over her little hand, to pick out the
cruel nettle-stings and thistles. Among her love-inspiring qualities,
she sung sweetly; and it was her favorite reel to which I attempted
giving an embodied vehicle in rhyme. I was not so presumptuous as to
imagine that I could make verses like printed ones, composed by men
who read Greek and Latin; but my girl sung a song which was said to be
composed by a country laird's son, on one of his father's maids, with
whom he was in love; and I saw no reason why I might not rhyme as well
as he; for, excepting that he could shear sheep and cast peats, his
father living in the moorlands, he had no more scholar-craft than
myself. Thus with me began love and poetry."
[Illustration: ROBERT BURNS
From the portrait by Nasmyth]
The song that was due to this boyish passion is called "Handsome
Nell," and is said to be the first he wrote. It can be found in any
complete edition of the poet's work. In after years he himself calls
it puerile and silly, but, while lacking the exquisite perfection of
Burns' later lyrics, it is far superior to the usual first attempts of
poets. The last two stanzas run thus:
A gaudy dress and gentle air
May slightly touch the heart;
But it's Innocence and Modesty
That polishes the dart.
'Tis this in Nelly pleases me,
'Tis this enchants my soul!
For absolutely in my breast
She reigns without control.
"I composed it," says Burns, "in a wild enthusiasm of passion, and to
this hour I never recollect it but my heart melts, my blood sallies at
the remembrance."
Poor Burns! How much happier he would have been had all his loves been
as innocent as this first experience! In one of Tennyson's most
vigorous passages in the _Idylls_ we read,
... for indeed I knew
Of no more subtle master under heaven
Than is the maiden passion for a maid,
Not only to keep down the base in man,
But teach high thoughts, and amiable words
And courtliness, and the desire of fame,
And love of truth, and all that makes a man.
Perhaps, if Burns in a later love affair had been successful in his
suit, his life and reputation would not have suffered as they have,
for the most culpable trait in the character of the famous Scotch poet
is the ease with which he abandoned one lover for another. He was
forever falling in love, and there is some evidence to the effect that
he loved two or three at the same time. There is only too much truth
in Burns' own lines,
Where'er I gaed, where'er I rade,
A mistress still I had aye.
But perhaps all this would have been different had Ellison Begbie, the
daughter of a small farmer, smiled favorably upon the advances of the
young farmer from Lochlea. She is said to have been a young woman of
great charm and liveliness of mind, though not a beauty. In after
years Burns always spoke of her with the greatest of respect and as
the one woman, of the many upon whom he had lavished his fickle
affection, who most likely would have made a pleasant partner for
life.
His love affair with this young lady took place near the close of his
twenty-second year. Her refusal seems to have had a malign influence
upon the career of our poet. Up to this time his love affairs,
although numerous, were innocent. As his brother Gilbert says, they
were "governed by the strictest rules of virtue and modesty." But
henceforth there is a change in the character of Burns. Shortly after
the fair Ellison had turned a deaf ear to the letters and love-songs
of the importunate wooer, Robert and his brother Gilbert went to
Irvine, hoping that in this flax-dressing center they could increase
their income by dressing the flax raised on their own farm. Here
Burns, always very susceptible to new influences,--he would not be the
poet he is had he not been keenly alive and susceptible,--fell under
the malignant charm of a wild sailor-lad whose habits were loose and
irregular. "He was," says Burns, "the only man I ever knew who was a
greater fool than myself, where woman was the presiding star; but he
spoke of lawless love with levity, which hitherto I had regarded with
horror. _Here his friendship did me a mischief._"
XII
BURNS' FIRST BOOK OF POEMS
Burns was in trouble; he had failed as a farmer, and as a young man he
had wounded the sensibilities of his family. It seemed best to try a
new life in a new land, so he promised a Mr. Douglas to go to Jamaica
and become a bookkeeper on his estate there. But where should he get
the money to pay his passage? There were the poems lying in his
table-drawer--might they not be published and money be raised by the
sale? His friends encouraged him to publish them, and what is more to
the point, they subscribed in advance for a number of the copies. John
Wilson of Kilmarnock was to do the printing. During May, June, and
July of 1786 the printer was doing his work. At the end of July the
volume appeared, and soon the fame of the Ayrshire Plowman was
established. Let us hear Burns himself give his account of the
venture:
"I gave up my part of the farm to my brother, and made what little
preparation was in my power for Jamaica. But, before leaving my native
country forever, I resolved to publish my poems. I weighed my
productions as impartially as was in my power; I thought they had
merit; and it was a delicious idea that I should be called a clever
fellow, even though it should never reach my ears--a poor
negro-driver, or perhaps a victim to that inhospitable clime, and gone
to the world of spirits! I can truly say that _pauvre inconnu_ as I
then was, I had pretty nearly as high an idea of my works as I have at
this moment, when the public has decided in their favor....
"I threw off about six hundred copies, of which I got subscriptions
for about three hundred and fifty. My vanity was highly gratified by
the reception I met with from the public; and besides, I pocketed, all
expenses deducted, nearly twenty pounds. This sum came very
seasonably, as I was thinking of indenting myself, for want of money,
to procure a passage. As soon as I was master of nine guineas, the
price of wafting me to the torrid zone, I took a steerage passage in
the first ship that was to sail from the Clyde, for
'Hungry ruin had me in the wind.'
"I had been for some days skulking from covert to covert, under all
the terrors of a jail, as some ill-advised people had uncoupled the
merciless pack of the law at my heels. I had taken the last farewell
of my friends; my chest was on the way to Greenock; I had composed the
last song I should ever measure in Caledonia, '_The gloomy night is
gathering fast_,' when a letter from Dr. Blackwood to a friend of mine
overthrew all my schemes, by opening up new prospects to my poetic
ambition."
The success of the first edition of his poems was so pronounced that
Burns soon gave up the idea of going away to Jamaica. Ayrshire was
flattered to discover that within its borders lived a genuine poet.
Robert Heron, a young literary man living in that neighborhood, gives
us an account of the reception of the little book of poems: "Old and
young, high and low, grave and gay, learned or ignorant, were alike
delighted, agitated, transported. I was at that time resident in
Galloway, contiguous to Ayrshire, and I can well remember how even
plowboys and maidservants would have gladly bestowed the wages they
earned most hardly, and which they wanted to purchase necessary
clothing, if they might procure the works of Burns."
When Burns wished a second edition of his poems, he had a very poor
offer from his printer. So he went to Edinburgh to see whether he
could not make a more advantageous bargain in the Scottish capital. He
reached that famous city on the 28th of November, 1786. Here he was
feted and banqueted, admired and criticised. In April, 1787, the
second edition appeared. The volume was a handsome octavo. The
Scottish public had subscribed very liberally, and eventually Burns
received 500 pounds, but Creech, his publisher, was so slow in making
payments that Burns had to wait a long time before he received his
due.
Walter Scott was among the many who met Burns during his stay in
Edinburgh. Scott was but a boy of fifteen, but he never forgot the
glance of approval bestowed upon him by the poet. We are especially
fortunate in having Scott's own account of the incident: "As for
Burns, I may truly say, '_Virgilium vidi tantum_.' I was a lad of
fifteen when he came to Edinburgh. I saw him one day at the late
venerable Professor Adam Fergusson's. Of course we youngsters sat
silent, looked, and listened. The only thing I remember which was
remarkable in Burns' manner, was the effect produced upon him by a
print of Bunbury's, representing a soldier lying dead on the snow, his
dog sitting in misery on one side--on the other his widow, with her
child in her arms. These lines were written beneath:
Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain,
Perhaps that parent wept her soldier slain--
Bent o'er the babe, her eye dissolved in dew,
The big drops mingling with the milk he drew,
Gave the sad presage of his future years,
The child of misery baptized in tears.
"Burns seemed much affected by the print: he actually shed tears. He
asked whose the lines were, and it chanced that nobody but myself
remembered that they occur in a half-forgotten poem of Langhorne's,
called by the unpromising title of _The Justice of Peace_. I whispered
my information to a friend present, who mentioned it to Burns, who
rewarded me with a look and a word, which though of mere civility, I
then received with very great pleasure. His person was strong and
robust; his manner rustic, not clownish; a sort of dignified plainness
and simplicity. His countenance was more massive than it looks in any
of the portraits. I would have taken the poet, had I not known who he
was, for a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch school--the
_douce gudeman_ who held his own plow. There was a strong expression
of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments; the eye alone, I think,
indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and
of a dark cast, which glowed (I say literally, glowed) when he spoke
with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human
head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time."
XIII
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE IN SCHOOL AND COLLEGE
The following affecting narrative, written in Coleridge's person by
the tender-hearted Elia, gives the best view possible of Coleridge's
scanty and suffering commencement of life. At that time, it may be
premised, the dietary of Christ's Hospital was of the lowest:
breakfast consisting of a "quarter of penny loaf, moistened with
attenuated small beer in wooden piggins, smacking of the pitched
leathern jack it was poured from," and the weekly rule giving "three
banyan-days to four meat days."
"I was a poor, friendless boy; my parents, and those who should have
cared for me, were far away. Those few acquaintances of theirs, whom
they could reckon upon being kind to me in the great city, after a
little forced notice, which they had the grace to take of me on my
first arrival in town, soon grew tired of my holiday visits. They
seemed to them to recur too often, though I thought them few enough.
One after another they all failed me, and I felt myself alone among
six hundred playmates. Oh the cruelty of separating a poor lad from
his early homestead! The yearnings which I used to have towards it in
those unfledged years!... The warm, long days of summer never return
but they bring with them a gloom from the haunting memory of those
_whole days' leave_, when, by some strange arrangement, we were turned
out for the livelong day, upon our own hands, whether we had friends
to go to or none. I remember those bathing excursions to the New River
which Lamb recalls with so much relish, better, I think, than he
can--for he was a home-seeking lad, and did not care much for such
water-parties. How we would sally forth into the fields, and strip
under the first warmth of the sun, and wanton like young dace in the
streams, getting appetites for the noon; which those of us that were
penniless (our scanty morning crust long since exhausted) had not the
means of allaying--while the cattle and the birds and the fishes were
at feed about us, and we had nothing to satisfy our cravings; the very
beauty of the day and the exercise of the pastime, and the sense of
liberty setting a keener edge upon them! How faint and languid,
finally, we would return toward nightfall to our desired morsel, half
rejoicing, half reluctant, that the hours of uneasy liberty had
expired!
"It was worse in the days of winter, to go prowling about the streets
objectless, shivering at cold windows of printshops, to extract a
little amusement; or haply, as a last resort, in the hope of a little
novelty, to pay a fifty-times-repeated visit (where our individual
faces would be as well known to the warden as those of his own
charges) to the lions in the Tower, to whose _levee_, by courtesy
immemorial, we had a prescriptive right of admission."
This melancholy and harsh life was, however, ameliorated by some
curious personal incidents. Once, for example, the solitary boy,
moving along the crowded streets, fancied, in the strange vividness of
his waking dream, that he was Leander swimming across the Hellespont.
His hand "came in contact with a gentleman's pocket" as he pursued
this visionary amusement, and for two or three minutes Coleridge was
in danger of being taken into custody as a pickpocket. On finding out
how matters really stood, however, this stranger--genial, nameless
soul--immediately gave to the strange boy the advantage of a
subscription to a library close by, thus setting him up, as it were,
in life. On another occasion, one of the higher boys, a
"deputy-Grecian," found him seated in a corner reading Virgil. "Are
you studying your lesson?" he asked. "No, I am reading for pleasure,"
said the boy, who was not sufficiently advanced to read Virgil in
school. This introduced him to the favorable notice of the head-master
Bowyer, and made of the elder scholar, Middleton by name, a steady
friend and counselor for years. Yet at this time Coleridge was
considered by the lower-master, under whom he was, "a dull and inept
scholar who could not be made to repeat a single rule of syntax,
although he would give a rule in his own way." The life, however, of
this great school, with all its injudicious liberties and
confinements, must have been anything but a healthy one. Starved and
solitary, careless of play as play, and already full of that consuming
spiritual curiosity which never left him, Coleridge's devotion to the
indiscriminate stores of the circulating library gave the last
aggravation to all the unwholesome particulars of his life. "Conceive
what I must have been at fourteen," he exclaims. "I was in a continual
low fever. My whole being was, with eyes closed to every object of
present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner and read, read,
read; fancy myself on Robinson Crusoe's island finding a mountain of
plum-cake, and eating a room for myself, and then eating it into the
shapes of tables and chairs--hunger, and fancy!" ...
A droll incident occurred about this period of his life, which shows
... his absolute want of ambition. The friendless boy had made
acquaintance with a shoemaker and his wife, who had a shop near the
school, and who were kind to him; and thereupon he conceived the
extraordinary idea of getting himself apprenticed to his friend, whom
he persuaded to go to the head-master to make this wonderful proposal.
"Od's, my life, man, what d'ye mean?" cried the master, with not
unnatural indignation mingling with his amazement; and notwithstanding
Coleridge's support of the application, the shoemaker was turned out
of the place, and the would-be apprentice chosen, "against my will,"
he says, "as one of those destined for the university." The same
irascible yet excellent master flogged the boy severely on hearing
that he boasted of being an infidel....
His next stage in life was not a shoemaker's shop in Newgate Street,
but Jesus College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1791 at the age of
nineteen--the object of many high prophecies and hopes on the part of
his school and schoolfellows, who had unanimously determined that he
was to be great and do them honor. The first thing he did, however,
was alas! too common an incident: he got into debt, though not, it
would appear, for an overwhelming sum, or in any discreditable way. So
long as his friend of Christ's Hospital, Middleton, remained in
Cambridge, Coleridge pursued his studies with a great deal of
regularity and in his first year won the prize for a Greek ode. But
after awhile his industry slackened, and a kind of dreamy
idleness--implying no languor of the soul or common reluctance to
mental work, but rather, it would seem, a disinclination to work in
the usual grooves, and do what was expected of him--took possession of
the young scholar. "He was very studious, but his reading was
desultory and capricious," writes a fellow-student. "He was ready at
any time to shed his mind in conversation, and for the sake of this
his rooms were a constant rendezvous of conversation-loving friends.
What evenings I have spent in these rooms! What little suppers, or
_sizings_, as they were called, have I enjoyed; when Aeschylus and
Plato and Thucydides were pushed aside with a pile of lexicons and the
like, to discuss the pamphlets of the day! Ever and anon a pamphlet
issued from the pen of Burke. There was no need of having the book
before us; Coleridge had read it in the morning and in the evening he
would repeat whole pages _verbatim_."
--Adapted from _Blackwood's Magazine_.
XIV
BYRON AS SWIMMER AND FEASTER