phrases are like their gowns, old remnants cut and turned”; and it
is painful to know that in these ribald words he is alluding to the
Swan of Lichfield, and to the “glowing daughter of Apollo,” Miss Helen
Maria Williams. The Swan probably never did have her gowns cut and
turned, for she was a well-to-do lady with an income of four hundred
pounds; and she lived very grandly in the bishop’s palace at Lichfield,
where her father (“an angel, but an ass,” according to Coleridge) had
been for many years a canon. But Apollo having, after the fashion of
gods, bequeathed nothing to his glowing daughter but the gift of song,
Miss Williams might occasionally have been glad of a gown to turn.
Her juvenile poem “Edwin and Eltruda” enriched her in fame only; but
“Peru,” being published by subscription (blessed days when friends
could be turned into subscribers!), must have been fairly remunerative;
and we hear of its author in London giving “literary breakfasts,” a
popular but depressing form of entertainment. If ever literature be
“alien to the natural man,” it is at the breakfast hour. Miss Williams
subsequently went to Paris, and became an ardent revolutionist,
greatly to the distress of poor Miss Seward, whose enthusiasm for the
cause of freedom had suffered a decline, and who kept imploring her
friend to come home. “Fly, my dear Helen, that land of carnage!” she
wrote beseechingly. But Helen couldn’t fly, being then imprisoned by
the ungrateful revolutionists, who seemed unable, or unwilling, to
distinguish friends from foes. She had moreover by that time allied
herself to Mr. John Hurford Stone, a gentleman of the strictest
religious views, but without moral prejudices, who abandoned his lawful
wife for Apollo’s offspring, and who, as a consequence, preferred
living on the Continent. Therefore Miss Williams fell forever from the
bright circle of literary stars; and Lady Morgan, who met her years
afterwards in Paris, had nothing more interesting to record than that
she had grown “immensely fat,”--an unpoetic and unworthy thing to do.
“For when corpulence, which is a gift of evil, cometh upon age, then
are vanished the days of romance and of stirring deeds.”
Yet sentiment, if not romance, clung illusively to the literary lady,
even when she surrendered nothing to persuasion. Strange shadowy
stories of courtship are told with pathetic simplicity. Miss Carter,
“when she had nearly attained the mature age of thirty,” was wooed
by a nameless gentleman of unexceptionable character, whom “she was
induced eventually to refuse, in consequence of his having written
some verses, of the nature of which she disapproved.” Whether these
verses were improper (perish the thought!) or merely ill-advised, we
shall never know; but as the rejected suitor “expressed ever after a
strong sense of Miss Carter’s handsome behaviour to him,” there seems
to have been on his part something perilously akin to acquiescence. “I
wonder,” says the wise Elizabeth Bennet, “who first discovered the
efficacy of poetry in driving away love.” It is a pleasure to turn from
such uncertainties to the firm outlines and providential issues of
Miss Hannah More’s early attachment. When the wealthy Mr. Turner, who
had wooed and won the lady, manifested an unworthy reluctance to marry
her, she consented to receive, in lieu of his heart and hand, an income
of two hundred pounds a year, which enabled her to give up teaching,
and commence author at the age of twenty-two. The wedding day had been
fixed, the wedding dress was made, but the wedding bells were never
rung, and the couple--like the lovers in the story-books--lived happily
ever after. The only measure of retaliation which Miss More permitted
herself was to send Mr. Turner a copy of every book and of every tract
she wrote; while that gentleman was often heard to say, when the tracts
came thick and fast, that Providence had overruled his desire to make
so admirable a lady his wife, because she was destined for higher
things.
It was reserved for the Lichfield Swan to work the miracle of
miracles, and rob love of inconstancy. She was but eighteen when she
inspired a passion “as fervent as it was lasting” in the breast of
Colonel Taylor, mentioned by discreet biographers as Colonel T. The
young man being without income, Mr. Seward, who was not altogether
an ass, declined the alliance; and when, four years later, a timely
inheritance permitted a renewal of the suit, Miss Seward had wearied of
her lover. Colonel Taylor accordingly married another young woman; but
the remembrance of the Swan, and an unfortunate habit he had acquired
of openly bewailing her loss, “clouded with gloom the first years of
their married life.” The patient Mrs. Taylor became in time so deeply
interested in the object of her husband’s devotion that she opened a
correspondence with Miss Seward,--who was the champion letter-writer
of England,--repeatedly sought to make her acquaintance, and “with
melancholy enthusiasm was induced to invest her with all the charms
imagination could devise, or which had been lavished upon her by
description.”
This state of affairs lasted thirty years, at the end of which time
Colonel Taylor formed the desperate resolution of going to Lichfield,
and seeing his beloved one again. He went, he handed the parlour-maid
a prosaic card; and while Miss Seward--a stoutish, middle-aged, lame
lady--was adjusting her cap and kerchief, he strode into the hall, cast
one impassioned glance up the stairway, and rapidly left the house.
When asked by his wife why he had not stayed, he answered solemnly:
“The gratification must have been followed by pain and regret that
would have punished the temerity of the attempt. I had no sooner
entered the house than I became sensible of the perilous state of my
feelings, and fled with precipitation.”
And the Swan was fifty-two! Well may we sigh over the days when the
Literary Lady not only was petted and praised, not only was the bulwark
of Church and State; but when she accomplished the impossible, and
kindled in man’s inconstant heart an inextinguishable flame.
THE CHILD
I was not initiated into any rudiments ’till near four years of
age.--JOHN EVELYN.
The courage of mothers is proverbial. There is no danger which they
will not brave in behalf of their offspring. But I have always thought
that, for sheer foolhardiness, no one ever approached the English lady
who asked Dr. Johnson to read her young daughter’s translation from
Horace. He did read it, because the gods provided no escape; and he
told his experience to Miss Reynolds, who said soothingly, “And how
was it, Sir?” “Why, very well for a young Miss’s verses,” was the
contemptuous reply. “That is to say, as compared with excellence,
nothing; but very well for the person who wrote them. I am vexed at
being shown verses in that manner.”
The fashion of focussing attention upon children had not in Dr.
Johnson’s day assumed the fell proportions which, a few years later,
practically extinguished childhood. It is true that he objected to
Mr. Bennet Langton’s connubial felicity, because the children were
“too much about”; and that he betrayed an unworthy impatience when the
ten little Langtons recited fables, or said their alphabets in Hebrew
for his delectation. It is true also that he answered with pardonable
rudeness when asked what was the best way to begin a little boy’s
education. He said it mattered no more how it was begun, that is,
what the child was taught first, than it mattered which of his little
legs he first thrust into his breeches,--a callous speech, painful to
parents’ ears. Dr. Johnson had been dead four years when Mrs. Hartley,
daughter of Dr. David Hartley of Bath, wrote to Sir William Pepys:--
“Education is the rage of the times. Everybody tries to make their
children more wonderful than any children of their acquaintance. The
poor little things are so crammed with knowledge that there is scant
time for them to obtain by exercise, and play, and _vacancy of mind_,
that strength of body which is much more necessary in childhood than
learning.”
I am glad this letter went to Sir William, who was himself determined
that his children should not, at any rate, be less wonderful than
other people’s bantlings. When his eldest son had reached the mature
age of six, we find him writing to Miss Hannah More and Mrs. Chapone,
asking what books he shall give the poor infant to read, and explaining
to these august ladies his own theories of education. Mrs. Chapone,
with an enthusiasm worthy of Mrs. Blimber, replies that she sympathizes
with the rare delight it must be to him to teach little William Latin;
and that she feels jealous for the younger children, who, being yet
in the nursery, are denied their brother’s privileges. When the boy
is ten, Sir William reads to him “The Faerie Queene,” and finds
that he grasps “the beauty of the description and the force of the
allegory.” At eleven he has “an animated relish for Ovid and Virgil.”
And the more the happy father has to tell about the precocity of his
child, the more Mrs. Chapone stimulates and confounds him with tales
of other children’s prowess. When she hears that the “sweet Boy” is
to be introduced, at five, to the English classics, she writes at
once about a little girl, who, when “rather younger than he is” (the
bitterness of that!), “had several parts of Milton by heart.” These
“she understood so well as to apply to her Mother the speech of the
Elder Brother in ‘Comus,’ when she saw her uneasy for want of a letter
from the Dean; and began of her own accord with
‘Peace, Mother, be not over exquisite
To cast the fashion of uncertain evils’”;--
advice which would have exasperated a normal parent to the boxing point.
There were few normal parents left, however, at this period, to stem
the tide of infantile precocity. Child-study was dawning as a new and
fascinating pursuit upon the English world; and the babes of Britain
responded nobly to the demands made upon their incapacity. Miss Anna
Seward lisped Milton at three, “recited poetical passages, with eyes
brimming with delight,” at five, and versified her favourite psalms at
nine. Her father, who viewed these alarming symptoms with delight, was
so ill-advised as to offer her, when she was ten, a whole half-crown,
if she would write a poem on Spring; whereupon she “swiftly penned”
twenty-five lines, which have been preserved to an ungrateful world,
and which shadow forth the painful prolixity of future days. At four
years of age, little Hannah More was already composing verses with
ominous ease. At five, she “struck mute” the respected clergyman of
the parish by her exhaustive knowledge of the catechism. At eight,
we are told her talents “were of such a manifestly superior order
that her father did not scruple to combine with the study of Latin
some elementary instruction in mathematics; a fact which her readers
might very naturally infer from the clear and logical cast of her
argumentative writings.”
It is not altogether easy to trace the connection between Miss More’s
early sums and her argumentative writings; but, as an illustration of
her logical mind, I may venture to quote a “characteristic” anecdote,
reverently told by her biographer, Mr. Thompson. A young lady,
whose sketches showed an unusual degree of talent, was visiting in
Bristol; and her work was warmly admired by Miss Mary, Miss Sally,
Miss Elizabeth, and Miss Patty More. Hannah alone withheld all word
of commendation, sitting in stony silence whenever the drawings were
produced; until one day she found the artist hard at work, putting a
new binding on a petticoat. _Then_, “fixing her brilliant eyes with
an expression of entire approbation upon the girl, she said: ‘Now, my
dear, that I find you can employ yourself usefully, I will no longer
forbear to express my admiration of your drawings.’”
Only an early familiarity with the multiplication table could have made
so ruthless a logician.
If Dr. Johnson, being childless, found other people’s children in
his way, how fared the bachelors and spinsters who, as time went on,
were confronted by a host of infant prodigies; who heard little Anna
Letitia Aikin--afterwards Mrs. Barbauld--read “as well as most women”
at two and a half years of age; and little Anna Maria Porter declaim
Shakespeare “with precision of emphasis and firmness of voice” at
five; and little Alphonso Hayley recite a Greek ode at six. We wonder
if anybody ever went twice to homes that harboured childhood; and we
sympathize with Miss Ferrier’s bitterness of soul, when she describes a
family dinner at which Eliza’s sampler and Alexander’s copy-book are
handed round to the guests, and Anthony stands up and repeats “My name
is Norval” from beginning to end, and William Pitt is prevailed upon to
sing the whole of “God save the King.” It was also a pleasant fashion
of the time to write eulogies on one’s kith and kin. Sisters celebrated
their brothers’ talents in affectionate verse, and fathers confided to
the world what marvellous children they had. Even Dr. Burney, a man of
sense, poetizes thus on his daughter Susan:--
Nor did her intellectual powers require
The usual aid of labour to inspire
Her soul with prudence, wisdom, and a taste
Unerring in refinement, sound and chaste.
This was fortunate for Susan, as most young people of the period were
compelled to labour hard. There was a ghastly pretence on the part
of parents that children loved their tasks, and that to keep them
employed was to keep them happy. Sir William Pepys persuaded himself
without much difficulty that little William, who had weak eyes and
nervous headaches, relished Ovid and Virgil. A wonderful and terrible
letter written in 1786 by the Baroness de Bode, an Englishwoman
married to a German and living at Deux-Ponts, lays bare the process by
which ordinary children were converted into the required miracles of
precocity. Her eldest boys, aged eight and nine, appear to have been
the principal victims. The business of their tutor was to see that they
were “fully employed,” and this is an account of their day.
“In their walks he [the tutor] teaches them natural history and botany,
not dryly as a task, but practically, which amuses them very much. In
their hours of study come drawing, writing, reading, and summing. Their
lesson in writing consists of a theme which they are to translate into
three languages, and sometimes into Latin, for they learn that a little
also. The boys learn Latin as a recreation, and not as a task, as is
the custom in England. Perhaps _one or two hours a day_ is at most all
that is given to that study. ’Tis certainly not so dry a study, when
learnt like modern languages. We have bought them the whole of the
Classical Authors, so that they can instruct themselves if they will;
between ninety and a hundred volumes in large octavo. You would be
surprised,--even Charles Auguste, who is only five, reads German well,
and French tolerably. They all write very good hands, both in Roman and
German texts. Clem and Harry shall write you a letter in English, and
send you a specimen of their drawing. Harry (the second) writes musick,
too. He is a charming boy, improves very much in all his studies, plays
very prettily indeed upon the harpsichord, and plays, too, all tunes
by ear. Clem will, I think, play well on the violin; but ’tis more
difficult in the beginning than the harpsichord. He is at this moment
taking his lesson, the master accompanying him on the pianoforte; and
when Henry plays that, the master accompanies on the violin, which
forms them both, and pleases them at the same time. In the evening
their tutor generally recounts to them very minutely some anecdote from
history, which imprints it on the memory, amuses them, and hurts no
eyes.”
There is nothing like it on record except the rule of life which
Frederick William the First drew up for little Prince Fritz, when that
unfortunate child was nine years old, and which disposed of his day,
hour by hour, and minute by minute. But then Frederick William--a
truth-teller if a tyrant--made no idle pretence of pleasing and amusing
his son. The unpardonable thing about the Baroness de Bode is her
smiling assurance that one or two hours of Latin a day afforded a
pleasant pastime for children of eight and nine.
This was, however, the accepted theory of education. It is faithfully
reflected in all the letters and literature of the time. When Miss
More’s redoubtable “Cœlebs” asks Lucilla Stanley’s little sister why
she is crowned with woodbine, the child replies: “Oh, sir, it is
because it is my birthday. I am eight years old to-day. I gave up all
my gilt books with pictures this day twelvemonth; and to-day I give
up all my story-books, and I am now going to read such books as men
and women read.” Whereupon the little girl’s father--that model father
whose wisdom flowers into many chapters of counsel--explains that he
makes the renouncing of baby books a kind of epoch in his daughters’
lives; and that by thus distinctly marking the period, he wards off
any return to the immature pleasures of childhood. “We have in our
domestic plan several of these artificial divisions of life. These
little celebrations are eras that we use as marking-posts from which we
set out on some new course.”
Yet the “gilt books,” so ruthlessly discarded at eight years of age,
were not all of an infantile character. For half a century these famous
little volumes, bound in Dutch gilt paper--whence their name--found
their way into every English nursery, and provided amusement and
instruction for every English child. They varied from the “histories”
of Goody Two-Shoes and Miss Sally Spellwell to the “histories” of Tom
Jones and Clarissa Harlowe, “abridged for the amusement of youth”; and
from “The Seven Champions of Christendom” to “The First Principles
of Religion, and the Existence of a Deity; Explained in a Series
of Conversations, Adapted to the Capacity of the Infant Mind.” The
capacity of the infant mind at the close of the eighteenth century must
have been something very different from the capacity of the infant mind
to-day. In a gilt-book dialogue (1792) I find a father asking his tiny
son: “Dick, have you got ten lines of Ovid by heart?”
“Yes, Papa, and I’ve wrote my exercise.”
“Very well, then, you shall ride with me. The boy who does a little at
seven years old, will do a great deal when he is fourteen.”
This was poor encouragement for Dick, who had already tasted the sweets
of application. It was better worth while for Miss Sally Spellwell to
reach the perfection which her name implies, for _she_ was adopted by
a rich old lady with a marriageable son,--“a young Gentleman of such
purity of Morals and good Understanding as is not everywhere to be
found.” In the breast of this paragon “strange emotions arise” at sight
of the well-informed orphan; his mother, who sets a proper value on
orthography, gives her full consent to their union; and we are swept
from the contemplation of samplers and hornbooks to the triumphant
conclusion: “Miss Sally Spellwell now rides in her coach and six.” Then
follows the unmistakable moral:--
If Virtue, Learning, Goodness are your Aim,
Each pretty Miss may hope to do the same;
an anticipation which must have spurred many a female child to
diligence. There was no ill-advised questioning of values in our
great-grandmothers’ day to disturb this point of view. As the excellent
Mrs. West observed in her “Letters to a young Lady,” a book sanctioned
by bishops, and dedicated to the Queen: “We unquestionably were created
to be the wedded mates of man. Nature intended that man should sue, and
woman coyly yield.”
The most appalling thing about the precocious young people of this
period was the ease with which they slipped into print. Publishers were
not then the adamantine race whose province it is now to blight the
hopes of youth. They beamed with benevolence when the first fruits of
genius were confided to their hands. Bishop Thirlwall’s first fruits,
his “Primitiæ,” were published when he was eleven years old, with a
preface telling the public what a wonderful boy little Connop was;--how
he studied Latin at three, and read Greek with ease and fluency at
four, and wrote with distinction at seven. It is true that the parent
Thirlwall appears to have paid the costs, to have launched his son’s
“slender bark” upon seas which proved to be stormless. It is true also
that the bishop suffered acutely in later years from this youthful
production, and destroyed every copy he could find. But there was no
proud and wealthy father to back young Richard Polwhele, who managed,
when he was a schoolboy in Cornwall, to get his first volume of verse
published anonymously. It was called “The Fate of Llewellyn,” and was
consistently bad, though no worse, on the whole, than his maturer
efforts. The title-page stated modestly that the writer was “a young
gentleman of Truro School”; whereupon an ill-disposed critic in the
“Monthly Review” intimated that the master of Truro School would do
well to keep his young gentlemen out of print. Dr. Cardew, the said
master, retorted hotly that the book had been published without his
knowledge, and evinced a lack of appreciation, which makes us fear that
his talented pupil had a bad half-hour at his hands.
Miss Anna Maria Porter--she who delighted “critical audiences” by
reciting Shakespeare at five--published her “Artless Tales” at
fifteen; and Mrs. Hemans was younger still when her “Blossoms of
Spring” bloomed sweetly upon English soil. Some of the “Blossoms” had
been written before she was ten. The volume was a “fashionable quarto,”
was dedicated to that hardy annual, the Prince Regent, and appears to
have been read by adults. It is recorded that an unkind notice sent the
little girl crying to bed; but as her “England and Spain; or Valour
and Patriotism” was published nine months later, and as at eighteen
she “beamed forth with a strength and brilliancy that must have shamed
her reviewer,” we cannot feel that her poetic development was very
seriously retarded.
And what of the marvellous children whose subsequent histories have
been lost to the world? What of the two young prodigies of Lichfield,
“Aonian flowers of early beauty and intelligence,” who startled Miss
Seward and her friends by their “shining poetic talents,” and then
lapsed into restful obscurity? What of the wonderful little girl (ten
years old) whom Miss Burney saw at Tunbridge Wells; who sang “like
an angel,” conversed like “an informed, cultivated, and sagacious
woman,” played, danced, acted with all the grace of a comédienne, wept
tears of emotion without disfiguring her pretty face, and, when asked
if she read the novels of the day (what a question!), replied with a
sigh: “But too often! I wish I did not.” Miss Burney and Mrs. Thrale
were so impressed--as well they might be--by this little Selina Birch,
that they speculated long and fondly upon the destiny reserved for one
who so easily eclipsed the other miraculous children of this highly
miraculous age.
“Doubtful as it is whether we shall ever see the sweet Syren again,”
writes Miss Burney, “nothing, as Mrs. Thrale said to her” (this, too,
was well advised), “can be more certain than that we shall hear of her
again, let her go whither she will. Charmed as we all were, we agreed
that to have the care of her would be distraction. ‘She seems the girl
in the world,’ Mrs. Thrale wisely said, ‘to attain the highest reach
of human perfection as a man’s mistress. As such she would be a second
Cleopatra, and have the world at her command.’
“Poor thing! I hope to Heaven she will escape such sovereignty and such
honours!”
She did escape scot-free. Whoever married--let us hope he married--Miss
Birch, was no Mark Antony to draw fame to her feet. His very name
is unknown to the world. Perhaps, as “Mrs.--Something--Rogers,” she
illustrated in her respectable middle age that beneficent process by
which Nature frustrates the educator, and converts the infant Cleopatra
or the infant Hypatia into the rotund matron, of whom she stands
permanently in need.
THE EDUCATOR
The Schoolmaster is abroad.--LORD BROUGHAM.
It is recorded that Boswell once said to Dr. Johnson, “If you had had
children, would you have taught them anything?” and that Dr. Johnson,
out of the fulness of his wisdom, made reply: “I hope that I should
have willingly lived on bread and water to obtain instruction for them;
but I would not have set their future friendship to hazard for the
sake of thrusting into their heads knowledge of things for which they
might have neither taste nor necessity. You teach your daughters the
diameters of the planets, and wonder, when you have done it, that they
do not delight in your company.”