an answer to her prayer. Years before, when she was at the centre of
fashion in the Court of James II., she had written in an epistle to
the Countess of Thanet:
_Give me, O indulgent Fate,
Give me yet, before I die,
A sweet, but absolute retreat,
'Mongst paths so lost, and trees so high,
That the world may ne'er invade,
Through such windings and such shade,
My unshaken liberty_.
This was a sentiment rarely expressed and still more rarely felt by
English ladies at the close of the seventeenth century. What their
real opinion usually was is clothed in crude and ready language by
the heroines of Wycherley and Shadwell. Like Lucia, in the comedy of
_Epsom Wells_, to live out of London was to live in a wilderness, with
bears and wolves as one's companions. Alone in that age Anne Finch
truly loved the country, for its own sake, and had an eye to observe
its features.
She had one trouble, constitutional low spirits: she was a terrible
sufferer from what was then known as "The Spleen." She wrote a long
pindaric Ode on the Spleen, which was printed in a miscellany in 1701,
and was her first introduction to the public. She talks much about
her melancholy in her verses, but, with singular good sense, she
recognised that it was physical, and she tried various nostrums.
Neither tea, nor coffee, nor ratafia did her the least service:
_In vain to chase thee every art I try,
In vain all remedies apply,
In vain the Indian leaf infuse,
Or the parched eastern berry bruise,
Or pass, in vain, those bounds, and nobler liquors use_.
Her neurasthenia threw a cloud over her waking hours, and took sleep
from her eyelids at night:
_How shall I woo thee, gentle Rest,
To a sad mind, with cares oppress'd?
By what soft means shall I invite
Thy powers into my soul to-night?
Yet, gentle Sleep, if thou wilt come,
Such darkness shall prepare the room
As thy own palace overspreads,--
Thy palace stored with peaceful beds,--
And Silence, too, shall on thee wait
Deep, as in the Turkish State;
Whilst, still as death, I will be found,
My arms by one another bound,
And my dull limbs so clos'd shall be
As if already seal'd by thee_.
She tried a course of the waters at Tunbridge Wells, but without
avail. When the abhorred fit came on, the world was darkened to her.
Only two things could relieve her--the soothing influence of solitude
with nature and the Muses, or the sympathetic presence of her husband.
She disdained the little feminine arts of her age:
_Nor will in fading silks compose
Faintly the inimitable rose,
Fill up an ill-drawn bird, or paint on glass
The Sovereign's blurr'd and indistinguished face,
The threatening angel and the speaking ass_.
But she will wander at sundown through the exquisite woods of
Eastwell, and will watch the owlets in their downy nest or
the nightingale silhouetted against the fading sky. Then her
constitutional depression passes, and she is able once more to be
happy:
_Our sighs are then but vernal air,
But April-drops our tears_,
as she says in delicious numbers that might be Wordsworth's own. In
these delightful moments, released from the burden of her tyrant
malady, her eyes seem to have been touched with the herb euphrasy,
and she has the gift, denied to the rest of her generation, of seeing
nature and describing what she sees. In these moods, this contemporary
of Dryden and Congreve gives us such accurate transcripts of country
life as the following:
_When the loos'd horse now, as his pasture leads,
Comes slowly grazing through the adjoining meads,
Whose stealing face and lengthened shade we fear,
Till torn-up forage in his teeth we hear;
When nibbling sheep at large pursue their food,
And unmolested kine rechew the cud:
When curlews cry beneath the village-walls,
And to her straggling brood the partridge calls_.
In Eastwell Park there was a hill, called Parnassus, to which she was
particularly partial, and to this she commonly turned her footsteps.
Melancholy as she was, however, and devoted to reverie, she could
be gay enough upon occasion, and her sprightly poems have a genuine
sparkle. Here is an anacreontic--written "for my brother Leslie
Finch"--which has never before been printed:
_From the Park, and the Play,
And Whitehall, come away
To the Punch-bowl by far more inviting;
To the fops and 'the beaux
Leave those dull empty shows,
And see here what is truly delighting.
The half globe 'tis in figure,
And would it were bigger,
Yet here's the whole universe floating;
Here's titles and places,
Rich lands, and fair faces,
And all that is worthy our doting.
'Twas a world like to this
The hot Grecian did miss,
Of whom histories keep such a pother;
To the bottom he sunk,
And when he had drunk,
Grew maudlin, and wept for another_.
At another point, Anne Finch bore very little likeness to her
noisy sisterhood of fashion. In an age when it was the height of
ill-breeding for a wife to admit a partiality for her husband, Ardelia
was not ashamed to confess that Daphnis--for so she styled the
excellent Heneage Finch--absorbed every corner of her mind that was
not occupied by the Muses. It is a real pleasure to transcribe, for
the first time since they were written on the 2nd of April, 1685,
these honest couplets:
_This, to the crown and blessing of my life,
The much-loved husband of a happy wife;
To him whose constant passion found the art
To win a stubborn and ungrateful heart;
And to the world by tenderest proof discovers
They err who say that husbands can't be lovers.
With such return of passion as is due,
Daphnis I love, Daphnis my thoughts pursue,
Daphnis, my hopes, my joys are bounded all in you_!
Nearly thirty years later the same accent is audible, thinned a little
by advancing years, and subdued from passion to tenderness, yet as
genuine as at first. When at length the Earl began to suffer from the
gout, his faithful family songster recorded that also in her amiable
verse, and prayed that "the bad disease"
_May you but brief unfrequent visits find
To prove you patient, your Ardelia kind_.
No one can read her sensitive verses, and not be sure that she was the
sweetest and most soothing of bed-side visitants.
It was a quiet life which Daphnis and Ardelia spent in the recesses of
Eastwell Park. They saw little company and paid few visits. There
was a stately excursion now and then, to the hospitable Thynnes at
Longleat, and Anne Finch seldom omitted to leave behind her a metrical
tribute to the beauties of that mansion. They seem to have kept up
little connection with the Court or with London. There is no trace of
literary society in this volume. Nicholas Rowe twice sent down for
their perusal translations which he had made; and from another source
we learn that Lady Winchilsea had a brisk passage of compliments with
Pope. But these were rare incidents. We have rather to think of
the long years spent in the seclusion of Eastwell, by these gentle
impoverished people of quality, the husband occupied with his
mathematical studies, his painting, the care of his garden; the wife
studying further afield in her romantic reverie, watching the birds in
wild corners of her park, carrying her Tasso, hidden in a fold of her
dress, to a dell so remote that she forgets the way back, and has to
be carried home "in a Water-cart driven by one of the Underkeepers in
his green Coat, with a Hazle-bough for a Whip." It is a little
oasis of delicate and pensive refinement in that hot close of the
seventeenth century, when so many unseemly monsters were bellowing in
the social wilderness.
AMASIA
AMASIA: _or, The Works of the Muses. A Collection of Poems. In three
volumes. By Mr. John Hopkins. London: Printed by Tho. Warren,
for Bennet Banbury, at the Blue-Anchor, in the Lower-Walk of the
New-Exchange_, 1700.
It has often been remarked that if the author of the poorest
collection of minor verse would accurately relate in his quavering
numbers what his personal observations and adventures have been, his
book would not be entirely without value. But ninety-nine times out of
a hundred, this is precisely what he cannot do. His rhymes carry him
whither he would not, and he is lost in a fog of imitated phrases and
spurious sensations. The very odd and very rare set of three little
volumes, which now come before us, offer a curious exception to this
rule. The author of _Amasia_ was no poet, but he possessed the faculty
of writing with exactitude about himself. He prattled on in heroic
couplets from hour to hour, recording the tiny incidents of his life.
At first sight, his voluble miscellany seems a mere wilderness of tame
verses, but when we examine it closely a story gradually evolves. We
come to know John Hopkins, and live in the intimacy of his circle.
His poems contain a novelette in solution. So far as I can discover,
nothing whatever is known of him save what he reveals of himself, and
no one, I think, has ever searched his three uninviting volumes. In
the following paragraphs I have put together his story as it is to be
found in the pages of _Amasia_.
By a single allusion to the _Epistolary Poems_ of Charles Hopkins,
"very well perform'd by my Brother," in 1694, we are able to identify
the author of _Amasia_ with certainty. He was the second son of the
Right Rev. Ezekiel Hopkins, Lord Bishop of Derry. The elder brother
whom we have mentioned, Charles, was considerably his senior; for
six years the latter occupied a tolerably prominent place in London
literary society, was the intimate friend of Dryden and Congreve,
published three or four plays not without success, and possessed a
name which is pretty frequently met with in books of the time. But to
John Hopkins I have discovered scarcely an allusion. He does not seem
to have moved in his brother's circle, and his society was probably
more courtly than literary. If we may trust his own account the author
of _Amasia_ was born, doubtless at Londonderry, on the 1st of January,
1675. He was, therefore, only twenty-five when his poems were
published, and the exquisitely affected portrait which adorns the
first volume must represent him as younger still, since it was
executed by the Dutch engraver, F.H. van Hove, who was found murdered
in October, 1698.
Pause a moment, dear reader, and observe Mr. John Hopkins, _alias_
Sylvius, set out with all the artillery of ornament to storm the heart
of Amasia. Notice his embroidered silken coat, his splendid lace
cravat, the languishment of his large foolish eyes, the indubitable
touch of Spanish red on those smooth cheeks. But, above all
contemplate the wonders of his vast peruke. He has a name, be sure,
for every portion of that killing structure. Those sausage-shaped
curls, close to the ears, are _confidants_; those that dangle round
the temples, _favorites_; the sparkling lock that descends alone over
the right eyebrow is the _passagère_; and, above all, the gorgeous
knot that unites the curls and descends on the left breast, is aptly
named the _meurtrière_. If he would but turn his head, we should see
his _crèves-coeur_, the two delicate curled locks at the nape of his
neck. The escutcheon below his portrait bears, very suitably, three
loaded muskets rampant. Such was Sylvius, conquering but, alas! not to
conquer.
The youth of John Hopkins was passed in the best Irish society. His
father, the Bishop, married--apparently in second nuptials, for John
speaks not of her as a man speaks of his mother--the daughter of the
Earl of Radnor. Lady Araminta Hopkins seems to have been a friend of
Isabella, Duchess of Grafton, the exquisite girl who, at the age of
five, had married a bridegroom of nine, and at twenty-three was left
a widow, to be the first toast in English society. The poems of John
Hopkins are dedicated to this Dowager-duchess, who, when they were
published, had already for two years been the wife of Sir Thomas
Hanmer. At the age of twelve, and probably in Dublin, Hopkins met the
mysterious lady who animates these volumes under the name of Amasia.
Who was Amasia? That, alas! even the volubility of her lover does
not reveal. But she was Irish, the daughter of a wealthy and perhaps
titled personage, and the intimate companion for many years of the
beautiful Duchess of Grafton.
Love did not begin at first sight. Sylvius played with Amasia when
they both were children, and neither thought of love. Later on, in
early youth, the poet was devoted only to a male friend, one Martin.
To him ecstatic verses are inscribed:
_O Martin! Martin! let the grateful sound
Reach to that Heav'n which has our Friendship crown'd,
And, like our endless Friendship, meet no bound_.
But alas! one day Martin came back, after a long absence, and,
although he still
_With generous, kind, continu'd Friendship burn'd_,
he found Sylvius entirely absorbed by Amasia. Martin knew better than
to show temper; he accepted the situation, and
_the lov'd Amasia's Health flew round,
Amasia's Health the Golden Goblets crown'd_.
Now began the first and happiest portion of the story. Amasia had no
suspicion of the feelings of the poet, and he was only too happy to be
permitted to watch her movements. He records, in successive copies of
verses, the various things she did. He seems to have been on terms of
delightful intimacy with the lady, and he calls all sorts of people of
the highest position to witness how he suffered. To Lady Sandwich are
dedicated poems on "Amasia, drawing her own Picture," on "Amasia,
playing with a Clouded Fan," on "Amasia, singing, and sticking pins in
a Red Silk Pincushion." We are told how Amasia "looked at me through a
Multiplying-Glass," how she was troubled with a redness in her eyes,
how she danced before a looking-glass, how her flowered muslin
nightgown (or "night-rail," as he calls it) took fire, and how, though
she promised to sing, yet she never performed. We have a poem on the
circumstance that Amasia, "having prick'd me with a Pin, accidentally
scratched herself with it;" and another on her "asking me if I slept
well after so tempestuous a night." But perhaps the most intimate of
all is a poem "To Amasia, tickling a Gentleman." It was no perfunctory
tickling that Amasia administered:
_While round his sides your nimble Fingers played,
With pleasing softness did they swiftly rove,
While, at each touch, they made his Heart-strings move.
As round his Breast, his ravish'd Breast they crowd,
We hear their Musick when he laughs aloud_.
This is probably the only instance in literature in which a gentleman
has complacently celebrated in verse the fact that his lady-love has
tickled some other gentleman.
But this generous simplicity was not long to last. In 1690 Hopkins's
father, the Bishop, had died. We may conjecture that Lady Araminta
took charge of the boy, and that his home, in vacation time, was with
her in Dublin or London. He writes like a youth who has always been
petted; the _frou-frou_ of fine ladies' petticoats is heard in all his
verses. But he had no fortune and no prospects; he was utterly, he
confesses, without ambition. The stern papa of Amasia had no notion of
bestowing her on the penniless Sylvius, and when the latter began to
court her in earnest, she rebuffed him. She tore up his love-letters,
she teased him by sending her black page to the window when he was
ogling for her in the street below, she told him he was too young for
her, and although she had no objection to his addressing verses to
her, she gave him no serious encouragement. She was to be married, he
hints, to some one of her own rank--some rich "country booby."
At last, early in 1698, in company with the Duchess of Grafton, and
possibly on the occasion of the second marriage of the latter, Amasia
was taken off to France, and Hopkins never saw her again. A year later
he received news of her death, and his little romance was over. He
became ill, and Dr. Gibbons, the great fashionable physician of the
day, was called in to attend him. The third volume closes by his
summoning the faithful and unupbraiding Martin back to his heart:
_Love lives in Sun-Shine, or that Storm, Despair,
But gentler Friendship Breathes a Mod'rate Air_.
And so Sylvius, with all his galaxy of lovely Irish ladies, his
fashionable Muses, and his trite and tortured fancy, disappears into
thin air.
The only literary man whom he mentions as a friend is George Farquhar,
himself a native of Londonderry, and about the same age as Hopkins.
This playwright seems to be sometimes alluded to as Daphnis, sometimes
under his own name. Before the performance of _Love and a Bottle_,
Hopkins prophesied for the author a place where
_Congreve, Vanbrook, and Wicherley must sit,
The great Triumvirate of Comick Wit_,
and later on he thought that even Collier himself ought to commend the
_Constant Couple, or A Trip to the Jubilee_. At the first performance
of this play, towards the close of 1699, Hopkins was greatly perturbed
by the presence of a lady who reminded him of Amasia, and when he
visited the theatre next he was less pleased with the play. He had a
vague and infelicitous scheme for turning _Paradise Lost_ into rhyme.
These are the only traces of literary bias. In other respects Hopkins
is interested in nothing more serious than a lock of Amasia's hair;
the china cup she had, "round the sides of which were painted Trees,
and at the bottom a Naked Woman Weeping;" her box of patches, in which
she finds a silver penny; or the needlework embroidered on her gown.
When Amasia died there was no reason why Sylvius should continue to
exist, and he fades out of our vision like a ghost.
LOVE AND BUSINESS
LOVE AND BUSINESS: _in a Collection of occasionary Verse and
epistolary Prose not hitherto published. By Mr. George Farquhar_. En
Orenge il n'y a point d'oranges. _London, printed for B. Lintott, at
the Post-House, in the Middle Temple-Gate, Fleet Street_. 1702.
There are some books, like some people, of whom we form an indulgent
opinion without finding it easy to justify our liking. The young man
who went to the life-insurance office and reported that his father
had died of no particular disease, but just of "plain death," would
sympathise with the feeling I mention. Sometimes we like a book, not
for any special merit, but just because it is what it is. The rare,
and yet not celebrated, miscellany of which I am about to write
has this character. It is not instructive, or very high-toned, or
exceptionally clever, but if it were a man, all people that are not
prigs would say that it was a very good sort of fellow. If it be, as
it certainly is, a literary advantage for a nondescript collection of
trifles, to reproduce minutely the personality of its writer, then
_Love and Business_ has one definite merit. Wherever we dip into its
pages we may use it as a telephone, and hear a young Englishman, of
the year 1700, talking to himself and to his friends in the most
unaffected accents.
Captain George Farquhar, in 1702, was four-and-twenty years of age.
He was a smart, soldier-like Irishman, of "a splenetic and amorous
complexion," half an actor, a quarter a poet, and altogether a very
honest and gallant gentleman. He had taken to the stage kindly enough,
and at twenty-one had written _Love and a Bottle_. Since then, two
other plays, _The Constant Couple_ and _Sir Harry Wildair_, had proved
that he had wit and fancy, and knew how to knit them together into
a rattling comedy. But he was poor, always in pursuit of that timid
wild-fowl, the occasional guinea, and with no sort of disposition to
settle down into a heavy citizen. In order to bring down a few brace
of golden game, he shovels into Lintott's hands his stray verses of
all kinds, a bundle of letters he wrote from Holland, a dignified
essay or discourse upon Comedy, and, with questionable taste perhaps,
a set of copies of the love-letters he had addressed to the lady
who became his wife. All this is not very praiseworthy, and as a
contribution to literature it is slight indeed; but, then, how genuine
and sincere, how guileless and picturesque is the self-revelation of
it! There is no attempt to make things better than they are, nor any
pandering to a cynical taste by making them worse. Why should he
conceal or falsify? The town knows what sort of a fellow George
Farquhar is. Here are some letters and some verses; the beaux at
White's may read them if they will, and then throw them away.
As we turn the desultory pages, the figure of the author rises before
us, good-natured, easygoing, high-coloured, not bad-looking, with an
air of a gentleman in spite of his misfortunes. We do not know
the exact details of his military honours. We may think of him as
swaggering in scarlet regimentals, but we have his own word for it
that he was often in _mufti_. His mind is generally dressed, he says,
like his body, in black; for though he is so brisk a spark in company,
he suffers sadly from the spleen when he is alone. We can follow him
pretty closely through his day. He is a queer mixture of profanity and
piety, of coarseness and loyalty, of cleverness and density; we do not
breed this kind of beau nowadays, and yet we might do worse, for this
specimen is, with all his faults, a man. He dresses carefully in the
morning, in his uniform or else in his black suit. When he wants to
be specially smart, as, for instance, when he designs a conquest at a
birthday-party, he has to ferret among the pawnbrokers for scraps of
finery, or secure on loan a fair, full-bottom wig. But he is not so
impoverished that he cannot on these occasions give his valet and his
barber plenty of work to do preparing his face with razors, perfumes
and washes. He would like to be Sir Fopling Flutter, if he could
afford it, and gazes a little enviously at that noble creature in his
French clothes, as he lounges luxuriantly past him in his coach with
six before and six behind.
Poor Captain Farquhar begins to expect that he himself will never be
"a first-rate Beau." So, on common mornings, a little splenetic, he
wanders down to the coffee-houses and reads the pamphlets, those which
find King William glorious, and those that rail at the watery Dutch.
He will even be a little Jacobitish for pure foppery, and have a fling
at the Church, but in his heart he is with the Ministry. He meets a
friend at White's, and they adjourn presently to the Fleece Tavern,
where the drawer brings them a bottle of New French and a neat's
tongue, over which they discuss the doctrine of predestination so
hotly that two mackerel-vendors burst in, mistaking their lifted
voices for a cry for fish. His friend has business in the city, and so
our poet strolls off to the Park, and takes a turn in the Mall with
his hat in his hand, prepared for an adventure or a chat with a
friend. Then comes the play, the inevitable early play, still, even
in 1700, apt to be so rank-lipped that respectable ladies could only
appear at it in masks. It was the transition period, and poor Comedy,
who was saying good-bye to literature, was just about to console
herself with modesty.
However, a domino may slip aside, and Mr. George Farquhar notices
a little lady in a deep mourning mantua, whose eyes are not to be
forgotten. She goes, however; it is useless to pursue her; but the
music raises his soul to such a pitch of passion that he is almost
melancholy. He strolls out into Spring Garden, but there, "with
envious eyes, I saw every Man pick up his Mate, whilst I alone walked
like solitary Adam before the Creation of his Eve; but the place was
no Paradise to me; nothing I found entertaining but the Nightingale."
So that in those sweet summer evenings of 1700, over the laced and
brocaded couples promenading in Spring Garden, as over good Sir Roger
twelve years later, the indulgent nightingale still poured her notes.
To-day you cannot hear the very bells of St. Martin's for the roar of
the traffic. So lonely, and too easily enamoured, George has to betake
himself to the tavern, and a passable Burgundy. There is no idealism
about him. He is very fit for repentance next morning. "The searching
Wine has sprung the Rheumatism in my Right Hand, my Head aches, my
Stomach pukes." Our poor, good-humoured beau has no constitution for
this mode of life, and we know, though happily he dreams not of it,
that he is to die before he reaches thirty.