THE DOCTOR'S CONTEMPORARIES AT LEYDEN. EARLY FRIENDSHIP. COWPER'S
MELANCHOLY OBSERVATION THAT GOOD DISPOSITIONS ARE MORE LIKELY TO BE
CORRUPTED THAN EVIL ONES TO BE CORRECTED. YOUTHFUL CONNECTIONS
LOOSENED IN THE COMMON COURSE OF THINGS. A FINE FRAGMENT BY WALTER
LANDOR.
_Lass mich den Stunde gedenken, und jedes kleineren umstands.
Ach, wer ruft nicht so gern unwiederbringliches an!
Jenes süsse Gedränge der leichtesten irdischen Tage,
Ach, wer schätzt ihn genug, diesen vereilenden Werth!
Klein erscheinet es nun, doch ach! nicht kleinlich dem Herzen;
Macht die Liebe, die Kunst, jegliches Kleine doch gross._
GOETHE.
The circumstances of my friend's boyhood and early youth, though
singularly favourable to his peculiar cast of mind, in many or indeed
most respects, were in this point disadvantageous, that they afforded
him little or no opportunity of forming those early friendships,
which, when they are well formed, contribute so largely to our future
happiness. Perhaps the greatest advantage of public education, as
compared with private, is, that it presents more such opportunities
than are ever met with in any subsequent stage of human life. And yet
even then in friendship, as afterwards in love, we are for the most
part less directed by choice than by what is called chance.
Daniel Dove never associated with so many persons of his own age at
any other time as during his studies at Leyden. But he was a foreigner
there, and this is almost as great an obstacle to friendship as to
matrimony; and there were few English students among whom to choose.
Dr. Brocklesby took his degree, and left the University the year
before he entered it; Brocklesby was a person in whose society he
might have delighted; but he was a cruel experimentalist, and the
dispathy which this must have excited in our friend, whose love of
science, ardent as it was, never overcame the sense of humanity, would
have counteracted the attraction of any intellectual powers however
brilliant. Akenside, with whom in many respects he would have felt
himself in unison, and by whose society he might have profited,
graduated also there just before his time.
He had a contemporary more remarkable than either in his countryman
John Wilkes, who was pursuing his studies there, not without some
diligence, under the superintendence of a private tutor; and who
obtained much notice for those lively and agreeable talents which were
afterwards so flagrantly abused. But the strict and conscientious
frugality which Dove observed rendered it unfit for him to associate
with one who had a liberal allowance, and expended it lavishly: and
there was also a stronger impediment to any intimacy between them; for
no talents however companionable, no qualities however engaging, could
have induced him to associate with a man whose irreligion was of the
worst kind, and who delighted in licentious conversation.
There was one of his countrymen indeed there (so far as a Scotchman
may be called so) with whom he formed an acquaintance that might have
ripened into intimacy, if their lots had fallen near to each other in
after life. This was Thomas Dickson, a native of Dumfries; they
attended the same lectures, and consorted on terms of friendly
familiarity. But when their University course is completed men
separate, like stage-coach travellers at the end of a journey, or
fellow passengers in a ship when they reach their port. While Dove
“pursued the noiseless tenor of his way” at Doncaster, Dickson tried
his fortune in the metropolis, where he became Physician to the London
Hospital, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He died in the year 1784,
and is said in his epitaph to have been “a man of singular probity,
loyalty and humanity; kind to his relations, beloved by all who knew
him, learned and skilful in his profession. Unfeed by the poor, he
lived to do good, and died a christian believer.” For awhile some
intercourse between him and the Doctor had been kept up by letters;
but the intervals in their correspondence became longer and longer as
each grew more engaged in business; and new connections gradually
effaced an impression which had not been made early, nor had ever been
very deep. The friendship that with no intercourse to nourish it,
keeps itself alive for years, must have strong roots in a good soil.
Cowper regarded these early connections in an unfavourable and
melancholy mood. “For my own part,” says he, “I found such
friendships, though warm enough in their commencement, surprisingly
liable to extinction; and of seven or eight whom I had selected for
intimates out of about three hundred, in ten years time not one was
left me. The truth is that there may be, and often is, an attachment
of one boy to another, that looks very like a friendship; and while
they are in circumstances that enable them mutually to oblige and to
assist each other, promises well and bids fair to be lasting. But they
are no sooner separated from each other, by entering into the world at
large, than other connexions and new employments in which they no
longer share together, efface the remembrance of what passed in
earlier days, and they become strangers to each other for ever. Add to
this the _man_ frequently differs so much from the _boy_,—his
principles, manners, temper, and conduct, undergo so great an
alteration,—that we no longer recognize in him our old play-fellow,
but find him utterly unworthy and unfit for the place he once held in
our affections.” These sentiments he has also expressed in verse.—
——-school-friendships are not always found,
Though fair in promise, permanent and sound;
The most disinterested and virtuous minds,
In early years connected, time unbinds;
New situations give a different cast
Of habit, inclination, temper, taste;
And he that seem'd our counterpart at first,
Soon shews the strong similitude reversed.
Young heads are giddy, and young hearts are warm,
And make mistakes for manhood to reform.
Boys are, at best, but pretty buds unblown,
Whose scent and hues are rather guessed than known;
Each dreams that each is just what he appears,
But learns his error in maturer years,
When disposition, like a sail unfurled,
Shews all its rents and patches to the world.
Disposition however is the one thing which undergoes no other change
than that of growth in after life. The physical constitution, when any
morbid principle is innate in it, rarely alters; the moral
constitution—(except by a miracle of God's mercy,) never.
ἀνθρώποις δ᾽ ἀεὶ
Ὁ μὲν πονηρὸς, οὐδὲν ἄλλο πλὴν κακὸς.[1]
“Believe if you will,” say the Persians, “that a mountain has removed
from one place to another, but if you are told that a man has changed
his nature, believe it not!”
[Footnote 1: EURIPIDES.]
The best of us have but too much cause for making it part of our daily
prayer that we fall into no sin! But there is an original pravity
which deserves to be so called in the darkest import of the term,—an
inborn and incurable disease of the moral being, manifested as soon as
it has strength to show itself; and wherever this is perceived in
earliest youth, it may too surely be predicted what is to be expected
when all controul of discipline is removed. Of those that bring with
them such a disposition into the world, it cannot be said that they
fall into sin, because it is too manifest that they seek and pursue it
as the bent of their nature. No wonder that wild theories have been
devised to account for what is so mysterious, so aweful, and yet so
incontestable! Zephaniah Holwell, who will always be remembered for
his sufferings in the Black Hole, wrote a strange book in which he
endeavoured to prove that men were fallen angels, that is, that human
bodies are the forms in which fallen angels are condemned to suffer
for the sins which they have committed in their former state. Akin to
this is the Jewish fancy, held by Josephus, as well as his less
liberalized countrymen, that the souls of wicked men deceased, got
into the bodies of the living and possessed them; and by this agency
they accounted for all diseases. Holwell's theory is no doubt as old
as any part of the Oriental systems of philosophy and figments; it is
one of the many vain attempts to account for that fallen nature of
which every man who is sincere enough to look into his own heart,
finds there what may too truly be called an indwelling witness.
Something like the Jewish notion was held by John Wesley and Adam
Clarke; and there are certain cases in which it is difficult not to
admit it, especially when the question of the demoniacs is considered.
Nor is there any thing that shocks us in supposing this to be possible
for the body, and the mind also, as depending upon the bodily
organs.—But that the moral being, the soul itself, the life of life,
the immortal part, should appear, as so often it undoubtedly does, to
be thus possessed, this indeed is of all mysterious things the
darkest.
For a disposition thus evil in its nature it almost seems as if there
could be no hope. On the other hand there is no security in a good
one, if the support of good principles, (that is to say, of
religion—of christian faith—) be wanting. It may be soured by
misfortunes, it may be corrupted by wealth, it may be blighted by
neediness, it may lose “all its original brightness.”
School friendships arise out of sympathy of disposition at an age when
the natural disposition is under little controul and less disguise;
and there are reasons enough, of a less melancholy kind than Cowper
contemplated, why so few of these blossoms set, and of those which
afford a promise of fruit, why so small a proportion should bring it
to maturity. “The amity that wisdom knits not, folly may easily
untie;”[2] and even when not thus dissolved, the mutual attachment
which in boyhood is continually strengthened by similarity of
circumstance and pursuits, dies a natural death in most cases when
that similarity ceases. If one goes north in the intellectual bearings
of his course in life, and the other south, they will at last be far
as the poles asunder. If their pursuits are altogether different, and
their opinions repugnant, in the first case they cease to think of
each other with any warm interest; in the second, if they think of
each other at all, it is with an uncomfortable feeling, and a painful
sense of change.
[Footnote 2: SHAKESPEAR.]
The way in which too many ordinary minds are worsened by the mere
course of time is finely delineated by Landor, in some verses which he
designed as an imitation, not of a particular passage in a favourite
Greek author, but of his manner and style of thought.
Friendship, in each successive stage of life,
As we approach him, varies to the view;
In youth he wears the face of Love himself,
Of Love without his arrows and his wings.
Soon afterwards with Bacchus and with Pan
Thou findest him; or hearest him resign,
To some dog-pastor, by the quiet fire,
With much good will and jocular adieu,
His age-worn mule, or broken-hearted steed.
Fly not, as thou wert wont, to his embrace;
Lest, after one long yawning gaze, he swear
Thou art the best good fellow in the world,
But he had quite forgotten thee, by Jove!
Or laughter wag his newly bearded chin
At recollection of his childish hours.
But wouldst thou see, young man, his latest form,
When e'en this laughter, e'en this memory fails,
Look at yon fig-tree statue! golden once,
As all would deem it, rottenness falls out
At every little hole the worms have made;
And if thou triest to lift it up again
It breaks upon thee! Leave it! touch it not!
Its very lightness would encumber thee.
Come—thou has seen it: 'tis enough; be gone!
The admirable writer who composed these verses in some melancholy
mood, is said to be himself one of the most constant and affectionate
of friends. It may indeed safely be affirmed, that generous minds when
they have once known each other, never can be alienated as long as
both retain the characteristics which brought them into union. No
distance of place, or lapse of time can lessen the friendship of those
who are thoroughly persuaded of each other's worth. There are even
some broken attachments in friendship as well as in love which nothing
can destroy, and it sometimes happens that we are not conscious of
their strength till after the disruption.
There are a few persons known to me in years long past, but with whom
I lived in no particular intimacy then, and have held no
correspondence since, whom I could not now meet without an emotion of
pleasure deep enough to partake of pain, and who, I doubt not,
entertain for me feelings of the same kind and degree; whose eyes
sparkle when they hear, and glisten sometimes when they speak of me;
and who think of me as I do of them, with an affection that increases
as we advance in years. This is because our moral and intellectual
sympathies have strengthened; and because, though far asunder, we know
that we are travelling the same road toward our resting place in
heaven. “There is such a pleasure as this,” says Cowper, “which would
want explanation to some folks, being perhaps a mystery to those whose
hearts are a mere muscle, and serve only for the purposes of an even
circulation.”