The Countess of Hertford and Mrs. Rowe.
One of the most considerable of Watts’ correspondents and apparently
intimate friends, was Frances, Countess of Hertford, afterwards Duchess
of Somerset. This lady was the daughter of the Honourable Mr. Thynne,
brother to Lord Weymouth; she married Algernon, Earl of Hertford, son
of Charles Seymour, Duke of Somerset, who succeeded to the honours and
estates of his father on December 2nd, 1748, _i.e._ about a week after
the death of Dr. Watts. The Countess appears to have been a woman of
great piety, amiability, and accomplishments. Thomson, in his “Seasons,”
addresses her:
“O Hertford, fitted or to shine in courts
With unaffected grace, or walk the plain
With innocence and meditation joined
In soft assemblage, listen to my song,
Which thy own season paints; when Nature all
Is blooming, and benevolent like thee.”
A collection of select letters, published by Mr. Hull, in two volumes,
includes eleven written by the Duchess, and they have been well
characterized as exhibiting rectitude of heart, delicacy of sentiment,
and a truly classic ease and elegance of style; tinged with an air of
melancholy, occasioned by the loss of her only son, Lord Beauchamp,
to whom she so frequently refers in her letters to Dr. Watts. His
death at Bologna, in 1744, cast a settled gloom over her mind, for he
was a youth who seemed to give evidences of superiority and worth of
character calculated to confer honour on the exalted station to which
he was destined, had his life been spared. Her letters all breathe the
spirit of unaffected simple piety and resignation; and from the time of
her husband’s elevation to the dukedom, her life was subjected to the
experience of intense troubles, first, in the death of her own son, and
very shortly after, in 1750, the death of the Duke, her husband; and it
is with reference to these occasions of grief that she writes to Lady
Luxbrough, September 9th, 1750: “You are very obliging in the concern you
express for the scenes of sorrow I have passed through. I have indeed
suffered deeply, but, when I consider it is the will of God, who never
chastises His poor creatures but for their good, and reflect at the same
time how unworthy I was of these blessings, which I now lament the loss
of, I lay my hand upon my mouth, and dare not repine, but hope I can with
truth appeal to Him in the following words: ‘Such sorrow is sent that
none may oppose His holy will. Let me sigh and offer up all my sighs to
Him! Let me mourn, and in the meantime bless His name in the midst of my
sorrow.’”
She did not herself long survive, only till July 7th, 1754, leaving an
only daughter, who subsequently became Duchess of Northumberland. The
Countess herself was the great and intimate friend likewise of Mrs. Rowe;
and when this lady died, to the Countess and to Dr. Watts she left those
confidential letters to which reference may be made in subsequent pages
of the present volume. How far she drew the Doctor from his retreat, how
often he visited the lady at her various houses, we have no means of
knowing; the friendship continued certainly from 1729 to the close of
Watts’ life, and it was probably commenced some time before this date,
for the terms of the first letters are those of warm friendship. In 1731
she refers to her children, especially to the son, who was to be in
after years a source of such grief to the mother’s heart, and she says,
“My young people send their services to you; I assure you my little boy
has grown a great proficient in your ‘Songs for Children,’ and sings
them with great pleasure.” The lady herself secretly cultivated the
recreation of verse, and sometimes forwarded her fancies in this way to
the Doctor, but she says, “I beg the favour of you not to give any copy
of the enclosed verses, for I would wish my excursions of this kind to
be a secret from everybody but you, and a friend or two more, who know
that I do not aim at the character of a genius by any attempt of this
nature, but am led to them merely to amuse a leisure hour, and speak
the sentiments of my heart.” She wrote, however, an elegy on Mrs. Rowe,
which called forth an epigram from the Doctor, which was published in his
posthumous volume of Miscellanies, “Remnants of Time, employed in Prose
and Verse”:
Struck with a sight of Philomela’s urn,
Eusebia weeps and calls the Muse to mourn;
While from her lips the tuneful sorrows fell,
The groves confess a rising Philomel.
Writing from the Hermitage on St. Leonard’s Hill, she says: “I return
you thanks for the epigram you were so good as to send me, and should
think myself very happy if anything of mine could deserve to show the
joy I should feel in being able to imitate Mrs. Rowe in the smallest
instance. I have only two meditations of hers, which she gave me with
the strongest injunctions not to let anybody see them, lest they should
be thought too rapturous; but as I conclude she would not have included
_you_ among those from whom she meant they should be concealed, I will
have them copied if you desire it.” There are in her letters very
pleasing indications of an amiable mind and heart; she writes to him
of the books which have met her in the course of her reading, and her
remarks are characterized by a quiet wisdom and judgment: “My Lord and
Betty (the future Duchess of Northumberland) are in London, so that my
son and his governor are my only companions at present; but we pass our
time agreeably enough between reading, walking, and such other amusements
as this place in which we are and the season of the year afford us; we
have been lately reading ‘Leonidas,’[29] in which I think there are many
fine thoughts; but I hear the town are much divided in their sentiments
about it, since one part are for preferring it to Milton, and others for
levelling it to the lowest rank of poetry. I confess neither of these
appear to me a just representation of it. If you have read it, I shall be
glad to know your thoughts of it.” In another letter she remarks upon the
poet Pope: “I think everybody must wish a muse like Mr. Pope’s were more
inclined to exert itself on Divine and good-natured subjects; but I am
afraid satire is his highest talent, for I think his ‘Universal Prayer’
is by no means equal to some other of his works, and I think his tenth
stanza:
Teach me to feel another’s woe,
To hide the faults I see;
That mercy I to others show,
That mercy show to me:
an instance how blind the wisest men may be to the errors of their own
hearts, for he certainly did not mean to imprecate such a proportion
of vengeance on himself as he is too apt to load those with whom he
dislikes; nor would he wish to have his own failings exposed to the eye
of the world with all the invective and ridicule with which he publishes
those of his fellow creatures.” The following is one of the most
interesting and favourable letters from the many which Dr. Gibbons has
preserved of the correspondence extending over so many years:
“_Jan. 17, 1739._
“SIR,
“I am truly sorry to find you complain of any decay, but I
am sure if you have any it must he bodily, and has no other
effect than that which both Mr. Waller[30] and yourself have
so happily described as letting in light upon the soul. I
never read anything in life that pleased me better than your
meditations on Revelation x., and I hope I shall not only
delight in reading the words, but lay the substance of it
to my heart, to which end allow me to beg your prayers as an
assistance.
“My lord’s state of suffering—for he is again confined to
his bed by the gout—gives me little opportunity and less
inclination to lose much time in the gay amusements which
are apt to divert other people from the thoughts of their
dissolution; but I am not sure that a life of care and anxiety
has not as bad an effect by fixing the mind too attentively
on the present gloom, which obscures every cheerful ray which
would otherwise enliven one’s spirits. I wish I had anything
to send more worth your reading than the following verses, but
I have so little leisure that I can scarce get time to write
letters to the few friends I correspond with. These lines were
written one morning in October as I was sitting in a bow-window
in my chamber at St. Leonard’s Hill, which looks on a little
grove in the garden, and beyond was an extensive view of the
forest:
How lately was yon russet grove
The seat of harmony and love!
How beauteous all the sylvan scene!
The flowers how gay, the trees how green!
But now it no such charms can boast,
Its music gone, its verdure lost;
The changing leaves fall fast away,
And all its pride is in decay;
Where blossoms deckt the pointed thorn
Now hangs the wintry drop forlorn;
No longer from the fragrant bush
Odours exhale, nor roses blush.
Along the late enamelled mead
No golden cowslip lifts its head,
Scarce can the grass its spires sustain,
Chilled by the frost, or drenched with rain.
Alas! just thus with life it fares.
Our youth like smiling spring appears,
Allied to joy, unbroke with cares;
But swiftly fly those cheerful hours,
Like falling leaves, or fading flowers;
We quickly hasten to decline,
And ev’ry sprightly joy resign:
Then be our heart prepared to leave
Those joys, nor at their absence grieve;
Sublimer pleasures let us prove,
And fix our thoughts on those above,
By the bright eye of sacred truth
Review the dangers of our youth,
Think how by turns wild passions raged,
By calm reflection now assuaged,
And bless the gentle ev’ning hour,
When reason best exerts its power,
And drives those tyrants from our breast,
Whose empire they too long possest:
Devotion comes with grace divine,
Around them heavenly glories shine,
While ev’ry gloom their rays dispel,
And banish the deceits of hell;
Ambition now no more aspires,
Contentment mod’rates our desires,
From envy free we can behold
Another’s honours, or his gold,
Nor jealousy our rest alarms,
No longer slaves to mortal charms.
With prudence, patience comes along,
Who smiles beneath oppressive wrong:
If then such peaceful heav’nly guests
Age introduces to our breasts,
Can we his soft approaches fear,
Or heave a sigh, or drop a tear,
Because our outward forms decay,
And time our vigour steals away?
Should we regret our short-lived bloom,
Which, could it last us to the tomb,
Must quickly there to dust consume?
If thus life’s progress we survey,
View what it gives, what takes away,
We shall with thankful hearts declare,
It leaves us all that’s worth our care.
“I am importuned by a very valuable old woman, who is declining
apace, to beg your prayers. She took me from my nurse, and
if I have any good in me I owe it to her. She was trusted
by my mother with the care both of my sister and myself, and
has lived with me ever since. But now, though past seventy,
she cannot meet death without terror, and yet I believe I may
venture to answer that she has always lived under the strictest
sense of religion; but lowness of spirit, joined to many bodily
infirmities, will shed darkness on the most cheerful minds, and
hers never was of that cast. I fear she has very few months, if
weeks, to come on earth, and a notice that you will grant her
request would make her, I believe, pass them with some comfort.
I am forced to take another page to assure you of my lord’s
compliments, and those of my young people; the two latter are
very well. I have no other view in sending the above verses but
to prove that my confidence in your friendship has received no
alteration from the length of time which has passed since I had
an opportunity of assuring you in person with how true a regard
“I am, Sir,
“Your most faithful humble servant,
“F. HERTFORD.”
It is pleasant in these letters to notice the indications of a quiet and
retreating spirit. Upon her return, after a considerable absence, to the
family seat near Marlborough, she says: “I have the pleasure of finding
my garden extremely improved in the two years I have been absent from it,
some little alterations I had ordered are completed; the trees which I
left small ones are grown to form an agreeable shade, and I have reason
to bless God for the pleasantness of the place which is allotted me to
pass many of my retired hours in; may I make use of them to fit me for
my last, and that I may do so, allow me to beg the continuation of your
prayers.” She several times refers to her “dear old nurse,” the “very
valuable old woman” mentioned in the lengthy letter quoted above: “Your
good prayers for poor Rothery have met with unexpected success, she is
so much recovered that I begin to think she will get entirely well, and
if she does I think nothing of that kind has since I can remember looked
more like a miraculous operation of the healing power of the Almighty.
I hope the same Divine mercy will long preserve you a blessing to the
age, and that you will find your strength return with the warm weather.”
This was written from Windsor Forest; the next month she writes from
Marlborough: “My poor old woman has got hither, contrary to her own and
all our expectations; she has the deepest gratitude for your goodness to
her, and begs you will accept her thanks; she is still very weak, and I
fancy will hardly get over the autumn.”
This lady’s letters exhibit a vein of intelligence and interesting
reading in pleasant contrast to the frivolity of most of the courtly
ladies of that age. “I have just had the oddest pamphlet sent me I ever
saw in my life, called ‘Amusemens Philosophiques sur le Language des
Bêtes.’ It was burnt by the hands of the common executioner at Paris, and
the priest who wrote it banished till he made a formal retraction of it,
and yet I think it very plain by the style that the man was either in
jest or crazed. It is by no means wanting of wit, but extremely far from
a system of probability.” Again, in another letter: “I have forgotten
whether in any of my later letters I ever named to you a little book
newly translated from the Italian, by the same Mrs. Carter who has a
copy of verses printed in the beginning of Mrs. Rowe’s works, occasioned
by her death. The book she has now translated is Sir Isaac Newton’s
‘Doctrine of Light and Colours made easy for the Ladies.’ My daughter
and I have both read it with great pleasure, and flatter ourselves that
we at least understand some parts of it.” It would be interesting to know
who was the lady referred to in the following letter—it was probably Mrs.
Elizabeth Carter; the work of the Doctor’s to which so marked a reference
is made was undoubtedly his discourses “On the World to Come,” which had
only just been published, a copy of which he had forwarded to her, and
which had been acknowledged two or three weeks before in a letter from
his “faithfully affectionate servant, F. Hertford.”
“MARLBOROUGH, _July 30, 1739_.
“SIR,
“I would much sooner have written to you to thank you for the
favour of your last letter, had I enjoyed more leisure; but I
have had a friend with me this last month who has engrossed a
good many of those hours which I used to employ in writing to
my correspondents. She is a very pious and religious, as well
as agreeable woman, and has seen enough of the world in her
younger years to teach her to value its enjoyments and fear its
vexations no more than they deserve, by which happy knowledge
she has brought her mind and spirits to the most perfect
state of calmness I ever saw; and her conversation seems to
impart the blessing to all who partake of her discourse. By
this you will judge that I have passed my time very much to
my satisfaction while she was with me; and, though I have not
written to you, you have shared my time with her, for almost
all the hours I passed alone I have employed in reading your
works, which for ever represent to my imagination the idea of
a ladder or flight of steps, since every volume seems to rise
a step nearer the language of heaven, and there is a visible
progression toward that better country through every page; so
that, though all breathe piety and just reason, the last seems
to crown the whole, till you shall again publish something to
enlighten a dark and obstinate age, for I must believe that
the manner in which you treat Divine subjects is more likely
to reform and work upon the affections of your readers than
that of any other writer now living. I hope God will in mercy
to many thousands, myself in particular, prolong your life
many years. I own this does not seem a kind wish to you, but I
think you will be content to bear the infirmities of flesh some
years longer to be an instrument in the hands of God toward the
salvation of your weak and distressed brethren. The joys of
heaven cannot fade, but will be as glorious millions of ages to
come as they are now, and what a moment will the longest life
appear when it comes to be compared with eternity!”
Upon the death of Mrs. Rowe, as she had left her meditations for the
hands of Dr. Watts, when he proposed to publish the volume with his
preface, he also very naturally proposed to dedicate it to their friend
the Countess. With extraordinary modesty, however, she shrunk from
this. She writes: “The sincere esteem I have for you makes it very
difficult for me to oppose anything you desire, and it is doubly so in an
instance where I might have an opportunity of indulging so justifiable
a pride as I should feel in letting the public see this fresh mark of
your partiality to me, but as I am apprehensive that the envy such a
distinction would raise against me might draw some vexation with it, I
hope you will have the goodness to change the dedication into a letter
to a friend, without giving me any such appellation.” In another letter,
with characteristic modesty, she says: “I can, with the strictest truth,
affirm that I do not know any distinction upon earth that I could feel a
truer pleasure in receiving were I deserving of it, but as I am forced to
see how much I fall below the idea which the benevolence of your nature
has formed of me, it teaches me to humble myself by that very incident
which might administer a laudable pride to a more worthy person. If I
am constrained to acknowledge this mortifying truth, you may believe
there are many people in the world who look upon me with more impartial
eyes than self-love will allow me to do; and others, who perhaps think
I enjoy more of this world’s goods than I either merit or than falls to
the common lot, look at me with envious and malignant views, and are glad
of every opportunity to debase me or those who they believe entertain a
favourable opinion of me. I would hope that I have never done anything,
wilfully I am sure I have not, to raise any such sentiments in the breast
of the meanest person upon earth, but yet experience has convinced me
that I have not been happy enough to escape them. For these reasons, sir,
I must deny myself the pleasure and the pride I should have in so public
a mark of your friendship and candour, and beg that if you will design
me the honour of joining any address to me with those valuable remains
of Mrs. Rowe, that you will either retrench the favourable expressions
you intended to insert, or else give me no other title at the top of it
than that of a friend of yours and hers, an appellation which, in the
sincerity of my soul, I am prouder of than I could be of the most pompous
name that human grandeur can lay claim to.”
She shrunk from all observation, and in another letter says, “I will
trespass so far on your good nature as to beg you will leave out whatever
will imply my attempting to write poetry; but if there be any among the
things you have of mine which you think worth placing among yours I
shall have just cause to be pleased at seeing them come abroad in such
company, if you will have the goodness to conceal my name, either under
that of Eusebia or A Friend, a title which I shall think myself happy
to deserve.” This letter enables us to identify four poetical pieces,
entitled “A Rural Meditation,” “A Penitential Thought,” “A Midnight
Hymn,” and the “Dying Christian’s Hope,” inserted in Watts’ Miscellanies,
and attributed to Eusebia, as the compositions of the Countess. It may
not be unpleasant to the reader to have brought before him some of these
verses, which will show that the modesty of the Countess need not have
been dictated by the poverty of her expression:
A RURAL MEDITATION.
Here in the tuneful groves and flow’ry fields,
Nature a thousand various beauties yields:
The daisy and tall cowslip we behold
Arrayed in snowy white, or freckled gold.
The verdant prospect cherishes our sight,
Affording joy unmixed, and calm delight
The forest-walk, and venerable shade,
Wide-spreading lawns, bright rills, and silent glade,
With a religious awe our souls inspire,
And to the heav’ns our raptured thoughts aspire,
To Him who sits in majesty on high,
Who turned the starry arches of the sky;
Whose word ordained the silver Thames to flow,
Raised all the hills, and laid the valleys low;
Who taught the nightingale in shades to sing,
And bade the skylark warble on the wing;
Makes the young steer obedient till the land,
And lowing heifers own the milker’s hand;
Calms the rough sea, and stills the raging wind,
And rules the passions of the human mind.
This correspondence sets in a very beautiful light the character of this
amiable and excellent lady, no doubt one of Watts’ attached friends, and
intercourse with whom, through the long period of twenty years, must have
been to him a frequent source of rest and enjoyment. When their intimacy
commenced she was in immediate attendance on the Queen Caroline, wife of
George I. In those days the attempts which subsequently were made by the
Countess of Huntingdon to create a feeling of piety and purity in the
neighbourhood of the court had not been commenced, the manners of the
great were not favourable to goodness and virtue, and the general spirit
of the time brings out into strong relief the character of this gentle
and noble lady; seldom apparently free from illness, her thoughts usually
move round those loftiest sources of consolation in which the highest or
the humblest equally find the surest and most abiding alleviation and
repose.
In 1737 Watts sustained a loss in the innermost and most intimate circle
of his acquaintance by the death of Mrs. Rowe. His early relations
with this lady have round them some traditions of a tender mystery; it
is generally supposed that upon his side at one time his feelings for
Miss Singer, her maiden name, were something more than those of mere
friendship. The charms of the lady appear to have been considerable, and
procured her previous to marriage many admirers, among others Prior, the
poet, who sought the lady’s hand in vain, and in his poem on “Love and
Friendship” expresses himself after the most approved fashion of the
disconsolate Werthers of that day, informing her that—
He dies in woe, that thou mayst live in peace.
It would seem that Watts’ attachment was some time talked about
extensively, for Young refers to it in one of his satires:
What angels would those be, who thus excel
In theologies, could they sew as well!
Yet why should not the fair her text pursue?
Can she more decently the Doctor woo?
Isaac, a brother of the canting strain,
When he has knocked at his own skull in vain,
To beauteous Marcia often will repair,
With a dark text to light it at the fair.
Oh how his pious soul exults to find
Such love for holy men in womankind!
Charmed with her learning, with what rapture he
Hangs on her bloom, like an industrious bee;
Hums round about her, and with all his power,
Extracts sweet wisdom from so fair a flower.
More respectfully, Mrs. Barbauld appears to allude to the circumstance
when addressing Mrs. Rowe, she says:
Thynne, Carteret, Blackmore, Orrery approved,
And Prior praised, and noble Hertford loved,
Seraphic Ken, and tuneful Watts were thine,
And virtue’s noblest champions filled the line.
But there is no reason, beyond the idle chatter of the town, to suppose
that there was more than ardent friendship between the two; Watts was not
a man ever likely to have been refused in marriage, and the talk appears
only to have originated from the fact that people in general suppose
that there can be no community of taste, and intellectual intercourse,
and high and even ardent friendship between opposite sexes without
its pointing to marriage. That it was not so in this instance appears
certain, not only from the very high regard Mrs. Rowe always entertained
for Watts, but from the terms of the letter addressed to him to be
delivered after her death; we would rather suppose it possible, although
we do not assert it, that Elizabeth Singer might have been not indisposed
to a relationship the idea of which was not encouraged by the Doctor, and
which he deferred to the calmer communion of intimate friendship and
high esteem. The proofs that this was the case are not very clear if the
circumstance is probable. However it might be, it never interfered with
their friendship which continued not only unbroken to death, but beyond
death.
Mrs. Rowe was a lady quite famous in her own time; to an elevated piety
she united in her style of composition many of the faults of the age in
which she lived; her works were tinctured by an ardent mode of expression
little in harmony with the more frigid expressions of our own day. For
Dr. Watts she entertained the highest esteem. She died suddenly, but
in her cabinet were found letters for two or three of the friends who
held the highest place in her affections, especially for the Countess
of Hertford and Dr. Watts; the letter to the Doctor was accompanied
by the manuscript of her “Devout Exercises,” which she requested him
to publish after a complete and thorough revision. A portion of his
correspondence with the Countess upon this we have already quoted; the
volume is dedicated to the Countess as Mrs. Rowe’s intimate friend,
and Watts, whose mind and heart were now in a state of quiet and holy
calm, dispassionately reviews the merits of her various works; he does
not altogether vindicate her ardent style, on the other hand, he is
far from severely reprehending it; he remarks how in former years even
grave divines had expressed the fervours of devout love to the Saviour
much in the style of the Song of Solomon, and says, “I must confess that
several of my compositions in verse written in younger life were led by
those examples unwarily into this track.” Indeed, many of his hymns,
especially those which are paraphrases of the Song of Solomon, are quite
as ardent as anything we meet with in the writings of Mrs. Rowe. The love
of Christ is a principle, but we should be sorry to think that in the
heart of the believer it may not glow with all the fervour and force of
a great passion; the language of the Apostle Paul shows us that it may,
but his language is not coloured by the singular ecstasy of the Oriental
mind; it is fervid, but the line is very distinctly marked between the
expressions of a merely human passion, which, however pure upon the
heart which utters them, may by hearts less holy and elevated seem to
be almost the utterance of license, and even to colder though not less
holy natures may seem to border on profanity. There are Christians still
who delight in this doubtful method of expressing and setting forth the
holiest affections. Watts in all his religious works had at all times
the ardent and fervent words of a poetic and imaginative nature, but he
considerably pruned both thought and speech as the years passed in study
and seclusion brought a riper wisdom; he did not repress the ardours
of the heart, but he gave to their expression a chastened and colder
form; he was not satisfied indeed by light without love, but he clothed
that love with a more sacred reticence. Mrs. Rowe’s writings have all
an exceedingly unreticent character, but she lived apparently a holy
life, realizing very greatly the ardours which gushed so glowingly from
her pen, and it says much for all that she was in herself, that through
so many long years she retained a close and intimate friendship with a
judgment so wisely balanced, and a nature so simple and domestic, as that
which evidently shines in the character of the Countess of Hertford.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]