The famous set of pictures called “Marriage à la Mode”, and which are

exhibited at Marlborough House [1853], in London, contains the most

important and highly wrought of the Hogarth comedies. The care and method

with which the moral grounds of these pictures are laid is as remarkable

as the wit and skill of the observing and dexterous artist. He has to

describe the negotiations for a marriage pending between the daughter of a

rich citizen Alderman and young Lord Viscount Squanderfield, the

dissipated son of a gouty old earl. Pride and pomposity appear in every

accessory surrounding the earl. He sits in gold lace and velvet—as how

should such an earl wear anything but velvet and gold lace? His coronet is

everywhere: on his footstool on which reposes one gouty toe turned out; on

the sconces and looking-glasses; on the dogs; on his lordship’s very

crutches; on his great chair of state and the great baldaquin behind him;

under which he sits pointing majestically to his pedigree, which shows

that his race is sprung from the loins of William the Conqueror, and

confronting the old alderman from the City, who has mounted his sword for

the occasion, and wears his alderman’s chain, and has brought a bag full

of money, mortgage-deeds, and thousand-pound notes, for the arrangement of

the transaction pending between them. Whilst the steward (a Methodist,

therefore a hypocrite and cheat, for Hogarth scorned a Papist and a

Dissenter) is negotiating between the old couple, their children sit

together, united but apart. My lord is admiring his countenance in the

glass, while his bride is twiddling her marriage ring on her

pocket-handkerchief; and listening with rueful countenance to Counsellor

Silvertongue, who has been drawing the settlements. The girl is pretty,

but the painter, with a curious watchfulness, has taken care to give her a

likeness to her father, as in the young viscount’s face you see a

resemblance to the earl, his noble sire. The sense of the coronet pervades

the picture, as it is supposed to do the mind of its wearer. The pictures

round the room are sly hints indicating the situation of the parties about

to marry. A martyr is led to the fire; Andromeda is offered to sacrifice;

Judith is going to slay Holofernes. There is the ancestor of the house (in

the picture it is the earl himself as a young man), with a comet over his

head, indicating that the career of the family is to be brilliant and

brief. In the second picture, the old lord must be dead, for madam has now

the countess’s coronet over her bed and toilet-glass, and sits listening

to that dangerous Counsellor Silvertongue, whose portrait now actually

hangs up in her room, whilst the counsellor takes his ease on the sofa by

her side, evidently the familiar of the house, and the confidant of the

mistress. My lord takes his pleasure elsewhere than at home, whither he

returns jaded and tipsy from the “Rose”, to find his wife yawning in her

drawing-room, her whist-party over, and the daylight streaming in; or he

amuses himself with the very worst company abroad, whilst his wife sits at

home listening to foreign singers, or wastes her money at auctions, or,

worse still, seeks amusement at masquerades. The dismal end is known. My

lord draws upon the counsellor, who kills him, and is apprehended whilst

endeavouring to escape. My lady goes back perforce to the alderman in the

City, and faints upon reading Counsellor Silvertongue’s dying speech at

Tyburn, where the counsellor has been executed for sending his lordship

out of the world. Moral:—Don’t listen to evil silver-tongued counsellors:

don’t marry a man for his rank, or a woman for her money: don’t frequent

foolish auctions and masquerade balls unknown to your husband: don’t have

wicked companions abroad and neglect your wife, otherwise you will be run

through the body, and ruin will ensue, and disgrace, and Tyburn. The

people are all naughty, and Bogey carries them all off.

In the _Rake’s Progress_, a loose life is ended by a similar sad

catastrophe. It is the spendthrift coming into possession of the wealth of

the paternal miser; the prodigal surrounded by flatterers, and wasting his

substance on the very worst company; the bailiffs, the gambling-house, and

Bedlam for an end. In the famous story of Industry and Idleness, the moral

is pointed in a manner similarly clear. Fair-haired Frank Goodchild smiles

at his work, whilst naughty Tom Idle snores over his loom. Frank reads the

edifying ballads of Whittington and the London ’Prentice, whilst that

reprobate Tom Idle prefers Moll Flanders, and drinks hugely of beer. Frank

goes to church of a Sunday, and warbles hymns from the gallery; while Tom

lies on a tombstone outside playing at halfpenny-under-the-hat, with

street blackguards, and is deservedly caned by the beadle; Frank is made

overseer of the business, whilst Tom is sent to sea. Frank is taken into

partnership and marries his master’s daughter, sends out broken victuals

to the poor, and listens in his nightcap and gown with the lovely Mrs.

Goodchild by his side, to the nuptial music of the City bands and the

marrow-bones and cleavers; whilst idle Tom, returned from sea, shudders in

a garret lest the officers are coming to take him for picking pockets. The

Worshipful Francis Goodchild, Esq., becomes Sheriff of London, and

partakes of the most splendid dinners which money can purchase or alderman

devour; whilst poor Tom is taken up in a night-cellar, with that one-eyed

and disreputable accomplice who first taught him to play chuck-farthing on

a Sunday. What happens next? Tom is brought up before the justice of his

country, in the person of Mr. Alderman Goodchild, who weeps as he

recognizes his old brother ’prentice, as Tom’s one-eyed friend peaches on

him, and the clerk makes out the poor rogue’s ticket for Newgate. Then the

end comes. Tom goes to Tyburn in a cart with a coffin in it; whilst the

Right Honourable Francis Goodchild, Lord Mayor of London, proceeds to his

Mansion House, in his gilt coach with four footmen and a sword-bearer,

whilst the Companies of London march in the august procession, whilst the

trainbands of the City fire their pieces and get drunk in his honour; and

O crowning delight and glory of all, whilst his Majesty the King looks out

from his royal balcony, with his ribbon on his breast, and his Queen and

his star by his side, at the corner house of St. Paul’s Churchyard, where

the toy-shop is now.

How the times have changed! The new Post Office now not disadvantageously

occupies that spot where the scaffolding is in the picture, where the

tipsy trainband-man is lurching against the post, with his wig over one

eye, and the ’prentice-boy is trying to kiss the pretty girl in the

gallery. Passed away ’prentice-boy and pretty girl! Passed away tipsy

trainband-man with wig and bandolier! On the spot where Tom Idle (for whom

I have an unaffected pity) made his exit from this wicked world, and where

you see the hangman smoking his pipe as he reclines on the gibbet and

views the hills of Harrow or Hampstead beyond—a splendid marble arch, a

vast and modern city—clean, airy, painted drab, populous with

nursery-maids and children, the abodes of wealth and comfort—the elegant,

the prosperous, the polite Tyburnia rises, the most respectable district

in the habitable globe!

In that last plate of the London Apprentices, in which the apotheosis of

the Right Honourable Francis Goodchild is drawn, a ragged fellow is

represented in the corner of the simple kindly piece, offering for sale a

broadside, purporting to contain an account of the appearance of the ghost

of Tom Idle, executed at Tyburn. Could Tom’s ghost have made its

appearance in 1847, and not in 1747, what changes would have been remarked

by that astonished escaped criminal! Over that road which the hangman used

to travel constantly, and the Oxford stage twice a week, go ten thousand

carriages every day: over yonder road, by which Dick Turpin fled to

Windsor, and Squire Western journeyed into town, when he came to take up

his quarters at the Hercules Pillars on the outskirts of London, what a

rush of civilization and order flows now! What armies of gentlemen with

umbrellas march to banks, and chambers, and counting-houses! What

regiments of nursery-maids and pretty infantry; what peaceful processions

of policemen, what light broughams and what gay carriages, what swarms of

busy apprentices and artificers, riding on omnibus-roofs, pass daily and

hourly! Tom Idle’s times are quite changed: many of the institutions gone

into disuse which were admired in his day. There’s more pity and kindness

and a better chance for poor Tom’s successors now than at that simpler

period when Fielding hanged him and Hogarth drew him.

To the student of history, these admirable works must be invaluable, as

they give us the most complete and truthful picture of the manners, and

even the thoughts, of the past century. We look, and see pass before us

the England of a hundred years ago—the peer in his drawing-room, the lady

of fashion in her apartment, foreign singers surrounding her, and the

chamber filled with gewgaws in the mode of that day; the church, with its

quaint florid architecture and singing congregation; the parson with his

great wig, and the beadle with his cane: all these are represented before

us, and we are sure of the truth of the portrait. We see how the Lord

Mayor dines in state; how the prodigal drinks and sports at the bagnio;

how the poor girl beats hemp in Bridewell; how the thief divides his booty

and drinks his punch at the night-cellar, and how he finishes his career

at the gibbet. We may depend upon the perfect accuracy of these strange

and varied portraits of the bygone generation: we see one of Walpole’s

Members of Parliament chaired after his election, and the lieges

celebrating the event, and drinking confusion to the Pretender: we see the

grenadiers and trainbands of the City marching out to meet the enemy; and

have before us, with sword and firelock, and white Hanoverian horse

embroidered on the cap, the very figures of the men who ran away with

Johnny Cope, and who conquered at Culloden.

Posterity has not quite confirmed honest Hogarth’s opinion about his

talents for the sublime. Although Swift could not see the difference

between tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum, posterity has not shared the Dean’s

contempt for Handel; the world has discovered a difference between

tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum, and given a hearty applause and admiration to

Hogarth, too, but not exactly as a painter of scriptural subjects, or as a

rival of Correggio. It does not take away from one’s liking for the man,

or from the moral of his story, or the humour of it—from one’s admiration

for the prodigious merit of his performances, to remember that he

persisted to the last in believing that the world was in a conspiracy

against him with respect to his talents as an historical painter, and that

a set of miscreants, as he called them, were employed to run his genius

down. They say it was Liston’s firm belief, that he was a great and

neglected tragic actor; they say that every one of us believes in his

heart, or would like to have others believe, that he is something which he

is not. One of the most notorious of the “miscreants”, Hogarth says, was

Wilkes, who assailed him in the _North Briton_; the other was Churchill,

who put the _North Briton_ attack into heroic verse, and published his

_Epistle to Hogarth_. Hogarth replied by that caricature of Wilkes, in

which the patriot still figures before us, with his Satanic grin and

squint, and by a caricature of Churchill, in which he is represented as a

bear with a staff, on which, “Lie the first”, “Lie the second”, “Lie the

tenth”, are engraved in unmistakable letters. There is very little mistake

about honest Hogarth’s satire: if he has to paint a man with his throat

cut, he draws him with his head almost off; and he tried to do the same

for his enemies in this little controversy. “Having an old plate by me,”

says he, “with some parts ready, such as the background, and a dog, I

began to consider how I could turn so much work laid aside to some

account, and so patched up a print of Master Churchill, in the character

of a bear; the pleasure and pecuniary advantage which I derived from these

two engravings, together with occasionally riding on horseback, restored

me to as much health as I can expect at my time of life.”

And so he concludes his queer little book of _Anecdotes_: “I have gone

through the circumstances of a life which till lately passed pretty much

to my own satisfaction, and I hope in no respect injurious to any other

man. This I may safely assert, that I have done my best to make those

about me tolerably happy, and my greatest enemy cannot say I ever did an

intentional injury. What may follow, God knows.”

A queer account still exists of a holiday jaunt taken by Hogarth and four

friends of his, who set out, like the redoubted Mr. Pickwick and his

companions, but just a hundred years before those heroes; and made an

excursion to Gravesend, Rochester, Sheerness; and adjacent places.(145)

One of the gentlemen noted down the proceedings of the journey, for which

Hogarth and a brother artist made drawings. The book is chiefly curious at

this moment from showing the citizen life of those days, and the rough,

jolly style of merriment, not of the five companions merely, but of

thousands of jolly fellows of their time. Hogarth and his friends,

quitting the “Bedford Arms”, Covent Garden, with a song, took water to

Billingsgate, exchanging compliments with the bargemen as they went down

the river. At Billingsgate, Hogarth made a “caracatura” of a facetious

porter, called the Duke of Puddledock, who agreeably entertained the party

with the humours of the place. Hence they took a Gravesend boat for

themselves; had straw to lie upon, and a tilt over their heads, they say,

and went down the river at night, sleeping and singing jolly choruses.

They arrived at Gravesend at six, when they washed their faces and hands,

and had their wigs powdered. Then they sallied forth for Rochester on

foot, and drank by the way three pots of ale. At one o’clock they went to

dinner with excellent port, and a quantity more beer, and afterwards

Hogarth and Scott played at hopscotch in the town hall. It would appear

that they slept most of them in one room, and the chronicler of the party

describes them all as waking at seven o’clock, and telling each other

their dreams. You have rough sketches by Hogarth of the incidents of this

holiday excursion. The sturdy little painter is seen sprawling over a

plank to a boat at Gravesend; the whole company are represented in one

design, in a fisherman’s room, where they had all passed the night. One

gentleman in a nightcap is shaving himself; another is being shaved by the

fisherman; a third, with a handkerchief over his bald pate, is taking his

breakfast; and Hogarth is sketching the whole scene.

They describe at night how they returned to their quarters, drank to their

friends, as usual, emptied several cans of good flip, all singing merrily.

It is a jolly party of tradesmen engaged at high-jinks. These were the

manners and pleasures of Hogarth, of his time very likely, of men not very

refined, but honest and merry. It is a brave London citizen, with John

Bull habits, prejudices, and pleasures.(146)

Of SMOLLETT’S associates and manner of life the author of the admirable

_Humphry Clinker_ has given us an interesting account, in that most

amusing of novels.(147)

I have no doubt that the above picture is as faithful a one as any from

the pencil of his kindred humourist, Hogarth.

We have before us, and painted by his own hand, Tobias Smollett, the

manly, kindly, honest, and irascible; worn and battered, but still brave

and full of heart, after a long struggle against a hard fortune. His brain

had been busied with a hundred different schemes; he had been reviewer and

historian, critic, medical writer, poet, pamphleteer. He had fought

endless literary battles; and braved and wielded for years the cudgels of

controversy. It was a hard and savage fight in those days, and a niggard

pay. He was oppressed by illness, age, narrow fortune; but his spirit was

still resolute, and his courage steady; the battle over, he could do

justice to the enemy with whom he had been so fiercely engaged, and give a

not unfriendly grasp to the hand that had mauled him. He is like one of

those Scotch cadets, of whom history gives us so many examples, and whom,

with a national fidelity, the great Scotch novelist has painted so

charmingly. Of gentle birth(148) and narrow means, going out from his

northern home to win his fortune in the world, and to fight his way, armed

with courage, hunger, and keen wits. His crest is a shattered oak-tree,

with green leaves yet springing from it. On his ancient coat-of-arms there

is a lion and a horn; this shield of his was battered and dinted in a

hundred fights and brawls,(149) through which the stout Scotchman bore it

courageously. You see somehow that he is a gentleman, through all his

battling and struggling, his poverty, his hard-fought successes, and his

defeats. His novels are recollections of his own adventures; his

characters drawn, as I should think, from personages with whom he became

acquainted in his own career of life. Strange companions he must have had;

queer acquaintances he made in the Glasgow College—in the country

apothecary’s shop; in the gun-room of the man-of-war where he served as

surgeon, and in the hard life on shore, where the sturdy adventurer

struggled for fortune. He did not invent much, as I fancy, but had the

keenest perceptive faculty, and described what he saw with wonderful

relish and delightful broad humour. I think Uncle Bowling, in _Roderick

Random_, is as good a character as Squire Western himself; and Mr. Morgan,

the Welsh apothecary, is as pleasant as Dr. Caius. What man who has made

his inestimable acquaintance—what novel-reader who loves Don Quixote and

Major Dalgetty—will refuse his most cordial acknowledgements to the

admirable Lieutenant Lismahago? The novel of _Humphry Clinker_ is, I do

think, the most laughable story that has ever been written since the

goodly art of novel-writing began. Winifred Jenkins and Tabitha Bramble

must keep Englishmen on the grin for ages yet to come; and in their

letters and the story of their loves there is a perpetual fount of

sparkling laughter, as inexhaustible as Bladud’s well.

-------------------------------------

Fielding, too, has described, though with a greater hand, the characters

and scenes which he knew and saw. He had more than ordinary opportunities

for becoming acquainted with life. His family and education, first—his

fortunes and misfortunes afterwards, brought him into the society of every

rank and condition of man. He is himself the hero of his books: he is wild

Tom Jones, he is wild Captain Booth, less wild, I am glad to think, than

his predecessor, at least heartily conscious of demerit, and anxious to

amend.

When Fielding first came upon the town in 1727, the recollection of the

great wits was still fresh in the coffee-houses and assemblies, and the

judges there declared that young Harry Fielding had more spirits and wit

than Congreve or any of his brilliant successors. His figure was tall and

stalwart; his face handsome, manly, and noble-looking; to the very last

days of his life he retained a grandeur of air, and, although worn down by

disease, his aspect and presence imposed respect upon the people round

about him.

A dispute took place between Mr. Fielding and the captain(150) of the ship

in which he was making his last voyage, and Fielding relates how the man

finally went down on his knees and begged his passenger’s pardon. He was

living up to the last days of his life, and his spirit never gave in. His

vital power must have been immensely strong. Lady Mary Wortley

Montagu(151) prettily characterizes Fielding and this capacity for

happiness which he possessed, in a little notice of his death, when she

compares him to Steele, who was as improvident and as happy as he was, and

says that both should have gone on living for ever. One can fancy the

eagerness and gusto with which a man of Fielding’s frame, with his vast

health and robust appetite, his ardent spirits, his joyful humour, and his

keen and hearty relish for life, must have seized and drunk that cup of

pleasure which the town offered to him. Can any of my hearers remember the

youthful feats of a college breakfast—the meats devoured and the cups

quaffed in that Homeric feast? I can call to mind some of the heroes of

those youthful banquets, and fancy young Fielding from Leyden rushing upon

the feast, with his great laugh and immense healthy young appetite, eager

and vigorous to enjoy. The young man’s wit and manners made him friends

everywhere: he lived with the grand Man’s society of those days; he was

courted by peers and men of wealth and fashion. As he had a paternal

allowance from his father, General Fielding, which, to use Henry’s own

phrase, any man might pay who would; as he liked good wine, good clothes,

and good company, which are all expensive articles to purchase, Harry

Fielding began to run into debt, and borrow money in that easy manner in

which Captain Booth borrows money in the novel: was in nowise particular

in accepting a few pieces from the purses of his rich friends, and bore

down upon more than one of them, as Walpole tells us only too truly, for a

dinner or a guinea. To supply himself with the latter, he began to write

theatrical pieces, having already, no doubt, a considerable acquaintance

amongst the Oldfields and Bracegirdles behind the scenes. He laughed at

these pieces and scorned them. When the audience upon one occasion began

to hiss a scene which he was too lazy to correct, and regarding which,

when Garrick remonstrated with him, he said that the public was too stupid

to find out the badness of his work;—when the audience began to hiss,

Fielding said, with characteristic coolness—“They have found it out, have

they?” He did not prepare his novels in this way, and with a very

different care and interest laid the foundations and built up the edifices

of his future fame.

Time and shower have very little damaged those. The fashion and ornaments

are, perhaps, of the architecture of that age; but the buildings remain

strong and lofty, and of admirable proportions—masterpieces of genius and

monuments of workmanlike skill.

I cannot offer or hope to make a hero of Harry Fielding. Why hide his

faults? Why conceal his weaknesses in a cloud of periphrases? Why not show

him, like him as he is, not robed in a marble toga, and draped and

polished in a heroic attitude, but with inked ruffles, and claret stains

on his tarnished laced coat, and on his manly face the marks of good

fellowship, of illness, of kindness, of care, and wine. Stained as you see

him, and worn by care and dissipation, that man retains some of the most

precious and splendid human qualities and endowments. He has an admirable

natural love of truth, the keenest instinctive antipathy to hypocrisy, the

happiest satirical gift of laughing it to scorn. His wit is wonderfully

wise and detective; it flashes upon a rogue and lightens up a rascal like

a policeman’s lantern. He is one of the manliest and kindliest of human

beings: in the midst of all his imperfections, he respects female

innocence and infantine tenderness, as you would suppose such a

great-hearted, courageous soul would respect and care for them. He could

not be so brave, generous, truth-telling as he is, were he not infinitely

merciful, pitiful, and tender. He will give any man his purse—he can’t

help kindness and profusion. He may have low tastes, but not a mean mind;

he admires with all his heart good and virtuous men, stoops to no

flattery, bears no rancour, disdains all disloyal arts, does his public

duty uprightly, is fondly loved by his family, and dies at his work.(152)

If that theory be—and I have no doubt it is—the right and safe one, that

human nature is always pleased with the spectacle of innocence rescued by

fidelity, purity, and courage; I suppose that of the heroes of Fielding’s

three novels, we should like honest Joseph Andrews the best, and Captain

Booth the second, and Tom Jones the third.(153)

Joseph Andrews, though he wears Lady Booby’s cast-off livery, is, I think,

to the full as polite as Tom Jones in his fustian suit, or Captain Booth

in regimentals. He has, like those heroes, large calves, broad shoulders,

a high courage, and a handsome face. The accounts of Joseph’s bravery and

good qualities; his voice, too musical to halloo to the dogs; his bravery

in riding races for the gentlemen of the county, and his constancy in

refusing bribes and temptation, have something affecting in their

_naiveté_ and freshness, and prepossess one in favour of that handsome

young hero. The rustic bloom of Fanny, and the delightful simplicity of

Parson Adams are described with a friendliness which wins the reader of

their story; we part with them with more regret than from Booth and Jones.

Fielding, no doubt, began to write this novel in ridicule of _Pamela_, for

which work one can understand the hearty contempt and antipathy which such

an athletic and boisterous genius as Fielding’s must have entertained. He

couldn’t do otherwise than laugh at the puny Cockney bookseller, pouring

out endless volumes of sentimental twaddle, and hold him up to scorn as a

moll-coddle and a milksop. _His_ genius had been nursed on sack-posset,

and not on dishes of tea. _His_ muse had sung the loudest in tavern

choruses, had seen the daylight streaming in over thousands of emptied

bowls, and reeled home to chambers on the shoulders of the watchman.

Richardson’s goddess was attended by old maids and dowagers, and fed on

muffins and bohea. “Milksop!” roars Harry Fielding, clattering at the

timid shop-shutters. “Wretch! Monster! Mohock!” shrieks the sentimental

author of _Pamela_;(154) and all the ladies of his court cackle out an

affrighted chorus. Fielding proposes to write a book in ridicule of the

author, whom he disliked and utterly scorned and laughed at; but he is

himself of so generous, jovial, and kindly a turn that he begins to like

the characters which he invents, can’t help making them manly and pleasant

as well as ridiculous, and before he has done with them all loves them

heartily every one.

Richardson’s sickening antipathy for Harry Fielding is quite as natural as

the other’s laughter and contempt at the sentimentalist. I have not

learned that these likings and dislikings have ceased in the present day:

and every author must lay his account not only to misrepresentation but to

honest enmity among critics, and to being hated and abused for good as

well as for bad reasons. Richardson disliked Fielding’s works quite

honestly: Walpole quite honestly spoke of them as vulgar and stupid. Their

squeamish stomachs sickened at the rough fare and the rough guests

assembled at Fielding’s jolly revel. Indeed the cloth might have been

cleaner: and the dinner and the company were scarce such as suited a

dandy. The kind and wise old Johnson would not sit down with him.(155) But

a greater scholar than Johnson could afford to admire that astonishing

genius of Harry Fielding: and we all know the lofty panegyric which Gibbon

wrote of him, and which remains a towering monument to the great

novelist’s memory. “Our immortal Fielding,” Gibbon writes, “was of the

younger branch of the Earls of Denbigh, who drew their origin from the

Counts of Hapsburgh. The successors of Charles V may disdain their

brethren of England: but the romance of _Tom Jones_, that exquisite

picture of human manners, will outlive the palace of the Escurial and the

Imperial Eagle of Austria.”

There can be no gainsaying the sentence of this great judge. To have your

name mentioned by Gibbon, is like having it written on the dome of St.

Peter’s. Pilgrims from all the world admire and behold it.

As a picture of manners, the novel of _Tom Jones_ is indeed exquisite: as

a work of construction quite a wonder: the by-play of wisdom; the power of

observation; the multiplied felicitous turns and thoughts; the varied

character of the great Comic Epic keep the reader in a perpetual

admiration and curiosity.(156) But against Mr. Thomas Jones himself we

have a right to put in a protest, and quarrel with the esteem the author

evidently has for that character. Charles Lamb says finely of Jones, that

a single hearty laugh from him “clears the air”—but then it is in a

certain state of the atmosphere. It might clear the air when such

personages as Blifil or Lady Bellaston poison it. But I fear very much

that (except until the very last scene of the story), when Mr. Jones

enters Sophia’s drawing-room, the pure air there is rather tainted with

the young gentleman’s tobacco-pipe and punch. I can’t say that I think Mr.

Jones a virtuous character; I can’t say but that I think Fielding’s

evident liking and admiration for Mr. Jones, shows that the great

humourist’s moral sense was blunted by his life, and that here in Art and

Ethics, there is a great error. If it is right to have a hero whom we may

admire, let us at least take care that he is admirable: if, as is the plan

of some authors (a plan decidedly against their interests, be it said), it

is propounded that there exists in life no such being, and therefore that

in novels, the picture of life, there should appear no such character;

then Mr. Thomas Jones becomes an admissible person, and we examine his

defects and good qualities, as we do those of Parson Thwackum, or Miss

Seagrim. But a hero with a flawed reputation; a hero spunging for a

guinea; a hero who can’t pay his landlady, and is obliged to let his

honour out to hire, is absurd, and his claim to heroic rank untenable. I

protest against Mr. Thomas Jones holding such rank at all. I protest even

against his being considered a more than ordinary young fellow,

ruddy-cheeked, broad-shouldered, and fond of wine and pleasure. He would

not rob a church, but that is all; and a pretty long argument may be

debated, as to which of these old types, the spendthrift, the hypocrite,

Jones and Blifil, Charles and Joseph Surface,—is the worst member of

society and the most deserving of censure. The prodigal Captain Booth is a

better man than his predecessor Mr. Jones, in so far as he thinks much

more humbly of himself than Jones did: goes down on his knees, and owns

his weaknesses, and cries out, “Not for my sake, but for the sake of my

pure and sweet and beautiful wife Amelia, I pray you, O critical reader,

to forgive me.” That stern moralist regards him from the bench (the

judge’s practice out of court is not here the question), and says,

“Captain Booth, it is perfectly true that your life has been disreputable,

and that on many occasions you have shown yourself to be no better than a

scamp—you have been tippling at the tavern, when the kindest and sweetest

lady in the world has cooked your little supper of boiled mutton and

awaited you all the night; you have spoilt the little dish of boiled

mutton thereby, and caused pangs and pains to Amelia’s tender heart.(157)

You have got into debt without the means of paying it. You have gambled

the money with which you ought to have paid your rent. You have spent in

drink or in worse amusements the sums which your poor wife has raised upon

her little home treasures, her own ornaments, and the toys of her

children. But, you rascal! you own humbly that you are no better than you

should be; you never for one moment pretend that you are anything but a

miserable weak-minded rogue. You do in your heart adore that angelic

woman, your wife, and for her sake, sirrah, you shall have your discharge.

Lucky for you and for others like you, that in spite of your failings and

imperfections, pure hearts pity and love you. For your wife’s sake you are

permitted to go hence without a remand; and I beg you, by the way, to

carry to that angelical lady the expression of the cordial respect and

admiration of this court.” Amelia pleads for her husband Will Booth:

Amelia pleads for her reckless kindly old father, Harry Fielding. To have

invented that character, is not only a triumph of art but it is a good

action. They say it was in his own home that Fielding knew her and loved

her: and from his own wife that he drew the most charming character in

English fiction—Fiction! why fiction? why not history? I know Amelia just

as well as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. I believe in Colonel Bath almost as

much as in Colonel Gardiner or the Duke of Cumberland. I admire the author

of _Amelia_, and thank the kind master who introduced me to that sweet and

delightful companion and friend. _Amelia_ perhaps is not a better story

than _Tom Jones_, but it has the better ethics; the prodigal repents at

least, before forgiveness,—whereas that odious broad-backed Mr. Jones

carries off his beauty with scarce an interval of remorse for his manifold

errors and shortcomings; and is not half punished enough before the great

prize of fortune and love falls to his share. I am angry with Jones. Too

much of the plum-cake and rewards of life fall to that boisterous,

swaggering young scapegrace. Sophia actually surrenders without a proper

sense of decorum; the fond, foolish, palpitating little creature,—“Indeed,

Mr. Jones,” she says,—“it rests with you to appoint the day.” I suppose

Sophia is drawn from life as well as Amelia; and many a young fellow, no

better than Mr. Thomas Jones, has carried by a _coup de main_ the heart of

many a kind girl who was a great deal too good for him.

What a wonderful art! What an admirable gift of nature, was it by which

the author of these tales was endowed, and which enabled him to fix our

interest, to waken our sympathy, to seize upon our credulity, so that we

believe in his people—speculate gravely upon their faults or their

excellences, prefer this one or that, deplore Jones’s fondness for drink

and play, Booth’s fondness for play and drink, and the unfortunate

position of the wives of both gentlemen—love and admire those ladies with

all our hearts, and talk about them as faithfully as if we had breakfasted

with them this morning in their actual drawing-rooms, or should meet them

this afternoon in the Park! What a genius! what a vigour! what a

bright-eyed intelligence and observation! what a wholesome hatred for

meanness and knavery! what a vast sympathy! what a cheerfulness! what a

manly relish of life! what a love of human kind! what a poet is

here!—watching, meditating, brooding, creating! What multitudes of truths

has that man left behind him! What generations he has taught to laugh

wisely and fairly! What scholars he has formed and accustomed to the

exercise of thoughtful humour and the manly play of wit! What a courage he

had!(158) What a dauntless and constant cheerfulness of intellect, that

burned bright and steady through all the storms of his life, and never

deserted its last wreck! It is wonderful to think of the pains and misery

which the man suffered; the pressure of want, illness, remorse which he

endured; and that the writer was neither malignant nor melancholy, his

view of truth never warped, and his generous human kindness never

surrendered.(159)

In the quarrel mentioned before, which happened on Fielding’s last voyage

to Lisbon, and when the stout captain of the ship fell down on his knees

and asked the sick man’s pardon—“I did not suffer,” Fielding says, in his

hearty, manly way, his eyes lighting up as it were with their old fire—“I

did not suffer a brave man and an old man to remain a moment in that

posture, but immediately forgave him.” Indeed, I think, with his noble

spirit and unconquerable generosity, Fielding reminds one of those brave

men of whom one reads in stories of English shipwrecks and disasters—of

the officer on the African shore, when disease has destroyed the crew, and

he himself is seized by fever, who throws the lead with a death-stricken

hand, takes the soundings, carries the ship out of the river or off the

dangerous coast, and dies in the manly endeavour—of the wounded captain,

when the vessel founders, who never loses his heart, who eyes the danger

steadily, and has a cheery word for all, until the inevitable fate

overwhelms him, and the gallant ship goes down. Such a brave and gentle

heart, such an intrepid and courageous spirit, I love to recognize in the

manly, the English Harry Fielding.

Lecture The Sixth. Sterne And Goldsmith

Roger Sterne, Sterne’s father, was the second son of a numerous race,

descendants of Richard Sterne, Archbishop of York, in the reign of James

II; and children of Simon Sterne and Mary Jaques, his wife, heiress of

Elvington, near York.(160) Roger was a lieutenant in Handyside’s regiment,

and engaged in Flanders in Queen Anne’s wars. He married the daughter of a

noted sutler—“N.B., he was in debt to him,” his son writes, pursuing the

paternal biography—and marched through the world with this companion

following the regiment and bringing many children to poor Roger Sterne.

The captain was an irascible but kind and simple little man, Sterne says,

and informs us that his sire was run through the body at Gibraltar, by a

brother officer, in a duel, which arose out of a dispute about a goose.

Roger never entirely recovered from the effects of this rencontre, but

died presently at Jamaica, whither he had followed the drum.

Laurence, his second child, was born at Clonmel, in Ireland, in 1713, and

travelled for the first ten years of his life, on his father’s march, from

barrack to transport, from Ireland to England.(161)

One relative of his mother’s took her and her family under shelter for ten

months at Mullingar: another collateral descendant of the Archbishop’s

housed them for a year at his castle near Carrickfergus. Larry Sterne was

put to school at Halifax in England, finally was adopted by his kinsman of

Elvington, and parted company with his father, the Captain, who marched on

his path of life till he met the fatal goose, which closed his career. The

most picturesque and delightful parts of Laurence Sterne’s writings, we

owe to his recollections of the military life. Trim’s montero cap, and Le

Fevre’s sword, and dear Uncle Toby’s roquelaure, are doubtless

reminiscences of the boy, who had lived with the followers of William and

Marlborough, and had beat time with his little feet to the fifes of

Ramillies in Dublin barrack-yard, or played with the torn flags and

halberds of Malplaquet on the parade-ground at Clonmel.

Laurence remained at Halifax school till he was eighteen years old. His

wit and cleverness appear to have acquired the respect of his master here:

for when the usher whipped Laurence for writing his name on the newly

whitewashed schoolroom ceiling, the pedagogue in chief rebuked the

under-strapper, and said that the name should never be effaced, for Sterne

was a boy of genius, and would come to preferment.

His cousin, the Squire of Elvington, sent Sterne to Jesus College,

Cambridge, where he remained five years, and taking orders, got, through

his uncle’s interest, the living of Sutton and the prebendary of York.

Through his wife’s connexions, he got the living of Stillington. He

married her in 1741; having ardently courted the young lady for some years

previously. It was not until the young lady fancied herself dying, that

she made Sterne acquainted with the extent of her liking for him. One

evening when he was sitting with her, with an almost broken heart to see

her so ill (the Rev. Mr. Sterne’s heart was a good deal broken in the

course of his life), she said—“My dear Laurey, I never can be yours, for I

verily believe I have not long to live, but I have left you every shilling

of my fortune,” a generosity which overpowered Sterne: she recovered: and

so they were married, and grew heartily tired of each other before many

years were over. “Nescio quid est materia cum me,” Sterne writes to one of

his friends (in dog-Latin, and very sad dog-Latin too), “sed sum fatigatus

et aegrotus de mea uxore plus quam unquam,” which means, I am sorry to

say, “I don’t know what is the matter with me: but I am more tired and

sick of my wife than ever.”(162)

This to be sure was five-and-twenty years after Laurey had been overcome

by her generosity and she by Laurey’s love. Then he wrote to her of the

delights of marriage, saying—“We will be as merry and as innocent as our

first parents in Paradise, before the arch-fiend entered that

indescribable scene. The kindest affections will have room to expand in

our retirement—let the human tempest and hurricane rage at a distance, the

desolation is beyond the horizon of peace. My L. has seen a polyanthus

blow in December?—Some friendly wall has sheltered it from the biting

wind—no planetary influence shall reach us, but that which presides and

cherishes the sweetest flowers. The gloomy family of care and distrust

shall be banished from our dwelling, guarded by thy kind and tutelar

deity—we will sing our choral songs of gratitude and rejoice to the end of

our pilgrimage. Adieu, my L. Return to one who languishes for thy

society!—As I take up my pen, my poor pulse quickens, my pale face glows,

and tears are trickling down on my paper as I trace the word L.”

And it is about this woman, with whom he finds no fault, but that she

bores him, that our philanthropist writes, “Sum fatigatus et

aegrotus”—_Sum mortaliter in amore_ with somebody else! That fine flower

of love, that polyanthus over which Sterne snivelled so many tears, could

not last for a quarter of a century!

Or rather it could not be expected that a gentleman with such a fountain

at command, should keep it to _arroser_ one homely old lady, when a score

of younger and prettier people might be refreshed from the same gushing

source.(163)

It was in December, 1767, that the Rev. Laurence Sterne, the famous

Shandean, the charming Yorick, the delight of the fashionable world, the

delicious divine, for whose sermons the whole polite world was

subscribing,(164) the occupier of Rabelais’s easy chair, only fresh

stuffed and more elegant than when in possession of the cynical old curate

of Meudon(165)—the more than rival of the Dean of St. Patrick’s, wrote the

above-quoted respectable letter to his friend in London: and it was in

April of the same year, that he was pouring out his fond heart to Mrs.

Elizabeth Draper, wife of “Daniel Draper, Esq., Counsellor of Bombay, and,

in 1775, chief of the factory of Surat—a gentleman very much respected in

that quarter of the globe”.

“I got thy letter last night, Eliza,” Sterne writes, “on my return from

Lord Bathurst’s, where I dined” (the letter has this merit in it that it

contains a pleasant reminiscence of better men than Sterne, and introduces

us to a portrait of a kind old gentleman)—“I got thy letter last night,

Eliza, on my return from Lord Bathurst’s; and where I was heard—as I

talked of thee an hour without intermission—with so much pleasure and

attention, that the good old lord toasted your health three different

times; and now he is in his 85th year, says he hopes to live long enough

to be introduced as a friend to my fair Indian disciple, and to see her

eclipse all other Nabobesses as much in wealth, as she does already in

exterior, and what is far better” (for Sterne is nothing without his

morality)—“and what is far better, in interior merit. This nobleman is an

old friend of mine. You know he was always the protector of men of wit and

genius, and has had those of the last century, Addison, Steele, Pope,

Swift, Prior, &c., always at his table. The manner in which his notice

began of me was as singular as it was polite. He came up to me one day as

I was at the Princess of Wales’s court, and said, ‘I want to know you, Mr.

Sterne, but it is fit you also should know who it is that wishes this

pleasure. You have heard of an old Lord Bathurst, of whom your Popes and

Swifts have sung and spoken so much? I have lived my life with geniuses of

that cast; but have survived them; and, despairing ever to find their

equals, it is some years since I have shut up my books and closed my

accounts; but you have kindled a desire in me of opening them once more

before I die: which I now do: so go home and dine with me.’ This nobleman,

I say, is a prodigy, for he has all the wit and promptness of a man of

thirty; a disposition to be pleased, and a power to please others, beyond

whatever I knew: added to which a man of learning, courtesy, and feeling.”

“He heard me talk of thee, Eliza, with uncommon satisfaction—for there was

only a third person, _and of sensibility_, with us: and a most sentimental

afternoon till nine o’clock have we passed!(166) But thou, Eliza! wert the

star that conducted and enlivened the discourse! And when I talked not of

thee, still didst thou fill my mind, and warm every thought I uttered, for

I am not ashamed to acknowledge I greatly miss thee. Best of all good

girls!—the sufferings I have sustained all night in consequence of thine,

Eliza, are beyond the power of words.... And so thou hast fixed thy

Bramin’s portrait over thy writing desk, and will consult it in all doubts

and difficulties?—Grateful and good girl! Yorick smiles contentedly over

all thou dost: his picture does not do justice to his own complacency. I

am glad your shipmates are friendly beings” (Eliza was at Deal, going back

to the Counsellor at Bombay, and indeed it was high time she should be

off). “You could least dispense with what is contrary to your own nature,

which is soft and gentle, Eliza; it would civilize savages—though pity

were it thou shouldst be tainted with the office. Write to me, my child,

thy delicious letters. Let them speak the easy carelessness of a heart

that opens itself anyhow, every how. Such, Eliza, I write to thee!” (The

artless rogue, of course he did!) “And so I should ever love thee, most

artlessly, most affectionately, if Providence permitted thy residence in

the same section of the globe: for I am all that honour and affection can

make me ‘THY BRAMIN’.”

The Bramin continues addressing Mrs. Draper until the departure of the

_Earl of Chatham_, Indiaman, from Deal, on the 2nd of April, 1767. He is

amiably anxious about the fresh paint for Eliza’s cabin; he is uncommonly

solicitous about her companions on board: “I fear the best of your

shipmates are only genteel by comparison with the contrasted crew with

which thou beholdest them. So was—you know who—from the same fallacy which

was put upon your judgement when—but I will not mortify you!”

“You know who” was, of course, Daniel Draper, Esq., of Bombay—a gentleman

very much respected in that quarter of the globe, and about whose probable

health our worthy Bramin writes with delightful candour.

“I honour you, Eliza, for keeping secret some things which, if explained,

had been a panegyric on yourself. There is a dignity in venerable

affliction which will not allow it to appeal to the world for pity or

redress. Well have you supported that character, my amiable, my

philosophic friend! And indeed, I begin to think you have as many virtues

as my Uncle Toby’s widow. Talking of widows—pray, Eliza, if ever you are

such, do not think of giving yourself to some wealthy Nabob, because I

design to marry you myself. My wife cannot live long, and I know not the

woman I should like so well for her substitute as yourself. ’Tis true I am

ninety-five in constitution, and you but twenty-five; but what I want in

youth, I will make up in wit and good humour. Not Swift so loved his

Stella, Scarron his Maintenon, or Waller his Saccharissa. Tell me, in

answer to this, that you approve and honour the proposal.”

Approve and honour the proposal! The coward was writing gay letters to his

friends this while, with sneering allusions to this poor foolish

_Bramine_. Her ship was not out of the Downs, and the charming Sterne was

at the “Mount” Coffee-house, with a sheet of gilt-edged paper before him,

offering that precious treasure his heart to Lady P——, asking whether it

gave her pleasure to see him unhappy? whether it added to her triumph that

her eyes and lips had turned a man into a fool?—quoting the Lord’s Prayer,

with a horrible baseness of blasphemy, as a proof that he had desired not

to be led into temptation, and swearing himself the most tender and

sincere fool in the world. It was from his home at Coxwould that he wrote

the Latin letter, which, I suppose, he was ashamed to put into English. I

find in my copy of the _Letters_, that there is a note of I can’t call it

admiration, at Letter 112, which seems to announce that there was a No. 3

to whom the wretched worn-out old scamp was paying his addresses;(167) and

the year after, having come back to his lodgings in Bond Street, with his

_Sentimental Journey_ to launch upon the town, eager as ever for praise

and pleasure; as vain, as wicked, as witty, as false as he had ever been,

death at length seized the feeble wretch, and, on the 18th of March, 1768,

that “bale of cadaverous goods”, as he calls his body, was consigned to

Pluto.(168) In his last letter there is one sign of grace—the real

affection with which he entreats a friend to be a guardian to his daughter

Lydia.(169) All his letters to her are artless, kind, affectionate, and

_not_ sentimental; as a hundred pages in his writings are beautiful, and

full, not of surprising humour merely, but of genuine love and kindness. A

perilous trade, indeed, is that of a man who has to bring his tears and

laughter, his recollections, his personal griefs and joys, his private

thoughts and feelings to market, to write them on paper, and sell them for

money. Does he exaggerate his grief, so as to get his reader’s pity for a

false sensibility? feign indignation, so as to establish a character for

virtue? elaborate repartees, so that he may pass for a wit? steal from

other authors, and put down the theft to the credit side of his own

reputation for ingenuity and learning? feign originality? affect

benevolence or misanthropy? appeal to the gallery gods with claptraps and

vulgar baits to catch applause?

How much of the paint and emphasis is necessary for the fair business of

the stage, and how much of the rant and rouge is put on for the vanity of

the actor? His audience trusts him: can he trust himself? How much was

deliberate calculation and imposture—how much was false sensibility—and

how much true feeling? Where did the lie begin, and did he know where? and

where did the truth end in the art and scheme of this man of genius, this

actor, this quack? Some time since, I was in the company of a French

actor, who began after dinner, and at his own request, to sing French

songs of the sort called _des chansons grivoises_, and which he performed

admirably, and to the dissatisfaction of most persons present. Having

finished these, he commenced a sentimental ballad—it was so charmingly

sung that it touched all persons present, and especially the singer

himself, whose voice trembled, whose eyes filled with emotion, and who was

snivelling and weeping quite genuine tears by the time his own ditty was

over. I suppose Sterne had this artistical sensibility; he used to blubber

perpetually in his study, and finding his tears infectious, and that they

brought him a great popularity, he exercised the lucrative gift of

weeping; he utilized it, and cried on every occasion. I own that I don’t

value or respect much the cheap dribble of those fountains. He fatigues me

with his perpetual disquiet and his uneasy appeals to my risible or

sentimental faculties. He is always looking in my face, watching his

effect, uncertain whether I think him an impostor or not; posture-making,

coaxing, and imploring me. “See what sensibility I have—own now that I’m

very clever—do cry now, you can’t resist this.” The humour of Swift and

Rabelais, whom he pretended to succeed, poured from them as naturally as

song does from a bird; they lose no manly dignity with it, but laugh their

hearty great laugh out of their broad chests as nature bade them. But this

man—who can make you laugh, who can make you cry, too—never lets his

reader alone, or will permit his audience repose: when you are quiet, he

fancies he must rouse you, and turns over head and heels, or sidles up and

whispers a nasty story. The man is a great jester, not a great humourist.

He goes to work systematically and of cold blood; paints his face, puts on

his ruff and motley clothes, and lays down his carpet and tumbles on it.

For instance, take the _Sentimental Journey_, and see in the writer the

deliberate propensity to make points and seek applause. He gets to

Dessein’s Hotel, he wants a carriage to travel to Paris, he goes to the

inn-yard, and begins what the actors call “business” at once. There is

that little carriage the _désobligeant_. “Four months had elapsed since it

had finished its career of Europe in the corner of Monsieur Dessein’s

courtyard, and having sallied out thence but a vamped-up business at

first, though it had been twice taken to pieces on Mount Sennis, it had

not profited much by its adventures, but by none so little as the standing

so many months unpitied in the corner of Monsieur Dessein’s coachyard.

Much, indeed, was not to be said for it—but something might—and when a few

words will rescue misery out of her distress, I hate the man who can be a

churl of them.”

_Le tour est fait!_ Paillasse has tumbled! Paillasse has jumped over the

_désobligeant_, cleared it, hood and all, and bows to the noble company.

Does anybody believe that this is a real Sentiment? that this luxury of

generosity, this gallant rescue of Misery—out of an old cab, is genuine

feeling? It is as genuine as the virtuous oratory of Joseph Surface when

he begins, “The man who,” &c. &c., and wishes to pass off for a saint with

his credulous, good-humoured dupes.

Our friend purchases the carriage—after turning that notorious old monk to

good account, and effecting (like a soft and good-natured Paillasse as he

was, and very free with his money when he had it), an exchange of

snuff-boxes with the old Franciscan, jogs out of Calais; sets down in

immense figures on the credit side of his account the sous he gives away

to the Montreuil beggars; and, at Nampont, gets out of the chaise and

whimpers over that famous dead donkey, for which any sentimentalist may

cry who will. It is agreeably and skilfully done—that dead jackass; like

M. de Soubise’s cook, on the campaign, Sterne dresses it, and serves it up

quite tender and with a very piquante sauce. But tears, and fine feelings,

and a white pocket-handkerchief, and a funeral sermon, and horses and

feathers, and a procession of mutes, and a hearse with a dead donkey

inside! Psha! Mountebank! I’ll not give thee one penny more for that

trick, donkey and all!

This donkey had appeared once before with signal effect. In 1765, three

years before the publication of the _Sentimental Journey_, the seventh and

eighth volumes of _Tristram Shandy_ were given to the world, and the

famous Lyons donkey makes his entry in those volumes (pp. 315, 316):—

“’Twas by a poor ass, with a couple of large panniers at his back, who had

just turned in to collect eleemosynary turnip-tops and cabbage-leaves, and

stood dubious, with his two forefeet at the inside of the threshold, and

with his two hinder feet towards the street, as not knowing very well

whether he was to go in or no.

“Now ’tis an animal (be in what hurry I may) I cannot bear to strike;

there is a patient endurance of suffering wrote so unaffectedly in his

looks and carriage which pleads so mightily for him, that it always

disarms me, and to that degree that I do not like to speak unkindly to

him: on the contrary, meet him where I will, whether in town or country,

in cart or under panniers, whether in liberty or bondage, I have ever

something civil to say to him on my part; and, as one word begets another

(if he has as little to do as I), I generally fall into conversation with

him; and surely never is my imagination so busy as in framing responses

from the etchings of his countenance; and where those carry me not deep

enough, in flying from my own heart into his, and seeing what is natural

for an ass to think—as well as a man, upon the occasion. In truth, it is

the only creature of all the classes of beings below me with whom I can do

this.... With an ass I can commune for ever.

“ ‘Come, Honesty,’ said I, seeing it was impracticable to pass betwixt him

and the gate, ‘art thou for coming in or going out?’

“The ass twisted his head round to look up the street.

“ ‘Well!’ replied I, ‘we’ll wait a minute for thy driver.’

“He turned his head thoughtful about, and looked wistfully the opposite

way.

“ ‘I understand thee perfectly,’ answered I: ‘if thou takest a wrong step

in this affair, he will cudgel thee to death. Well! a minute is but a

minute; and if it saves a fellow creature a drubbing, it shall not be set

down as ill spent.’

“He was eating the stem of an artichoke as this discourse went on, and, in

the little peevish contentions between hunger and unsavouriness, had

dropped it out of his mouth half a dozen times, and had picked it up

again. ‘God help thee, Jack!’ said I, ‘thou hast a bitter breakfast

on’t—and many a bitter day’s labour, and many a bitter blow, I fear, for

its wages! ’Tis all, all bitterness to thee—whatever life is to others!

And now thy mouth, if one knew the truth of it, is as bitter. I dare say,

as soot’ (for he had cast aside the stem), ‘and thou hast not a friend

perhaps in all this world that will give thee a macaroon.’ In saying this,

I pulled out a paper of ’em, which I had just bought, and gave him

one;—and, at this moment that I am telling it, my heart smites me that

there was more of pleasantry in the conceit of seeing _how_ an ass would

eat a macaroon than of benevolence in giving him one, which presided in

the act.

“When the ass had eaten his macaroon, I pressed him to come in. The poor

beast was heavy loaded—his legs seemed to tremble under him—he hung rather

backward, and, as I pulled at his halter, it broke in my hand. He looked

up pensive in my face: ‘Don’t thrash me with it: but if you will you may.’

‘If I do,’ said I, ‘I’ll be d——.’ ”

A critic who refuses to see in this charming description wit, humour,

pathos, a kind nature speaking, and a real sentiment, must be hard indeed

to move and to please. A page or two farther we come to a description not

less beautiful—a landscape and figures, deliciously painted by one who had

the keenest enjoyment and the most tremulous sensibility:—

“’Twas in the road between Nismes and Lunel, where is the best Muscatto

wine in all France: the sun was set, they had done their work; the nymphs

had tied up their hair afresh, and the swains were preparing for a

carousal. My mule made a dead point. ‘’Tis the pipe and tambourine,’ said

I—‘I never will argue a point with one of your family as long as I live;’

so leaping off his back, and kicking off one boot into this ditch and

t’other into that, ‘I’ll take a dance,’ said I, ‘so stay you here.’

“A sunburnt daughter of labour rose up from the group to meet me as I

advanced towards them; her hair, which was of a dark chestnut approaching

to a black, was tied up in a knot, all but a single tress.

“ ‘We want a cavalier,’ said she, holding out both her hands, as if to

offer them. ‘And a cavalier you shall have,’ said I, taking hold of both

of them. ‘We could not have done without you,’ said she, letting go one

hand, with self-taught politeness, and leading me up with the other.

“A lame youth, whom Apollo had recompensed with a pipe, and to which he

had added a tambourine of his own accord, ran sweetly over the prelude, as

he sat upon the bank. ‘Tie me up this tress instantly,’ said Nannette,

putting a piece of string into my hand. It taught me to forget I was a

stranger. The whole knot fell down—we had been seven years acquainted. The

youth struck the note upon the tambourine, his pipe followed, and off we

bounded.

“The sister of the youth—who had stolen her voice from Heaven—sang

alternately with her brother. ’Twas a Gascoigne roundelay. ‘_Viva la joia,

fidon la tristessa!_’—the nymphs joined in unison, and their swains an

octave below them.

“_Viva la joia_ was in Nannette’s lips, _viva la joia_ in her eyes. A

transient spark of amity shot across the space betwixt us. She looked

amiable. Why could I not live and end my days thus? ‘Just Disposer of our

joys and sorrows!’ cried I, ‘why could not a man sit down in the lap of

content here, and dance, and sing, and say his prayers, and go to heaven

with this nut-brown maid?’ Capriciously did she bend her head on one side,

and dance up insidious. ‘Then ’tis time to dance off,’ quoth I.”

And with this pretty dance and chorus, the volume artfully concludes. Even

here one can’t give the whole description. There is not a page in Sterne’s

writing but has something that were better away, a latent corruption—a

hint, as of an impure presence.(170)

Some of that dreary _double entendre_ may be attributed to freer times and

manners than ours, but not all. The foul Satyr’s eyes leer out of the

leaves constantly: the last words the famous author wrote were bad and

wicked—the last lines the poor stricken wretch penned were for pity and

pardon. I think of these past writers and of one who lives amongst us now,

and am grateful for the innocent laughter and the sweet and unsullied page

which the author of _David Copperfield_ gives to my children.

-------------------------------------

Jeté sur cette boule,

Laid, chétif et souffrant;

Étouffé dans la foule,

Faute d’être assez grand;

Une plainte touchante

De ma bouche sortit;

Le bon Dieu me dit: Chante,

Chante, pauvre petit!

Chanter, ou je m’abuse,

Est ma tâche ici-bas.

Tous ceux qu’ainsi j’amuse,

Ne m’aimeront-ils pas?

In those charming lines of Béranger, one may fancy described the career,

the sufferings, the genius, the gentle nature of GOLDSMITH, and the esteem

in which we hold him. Who, of the millions whom he has amused, doesn’t

love him? To be the most beloved of English writers, what a title that is

for a man!(171) A wild youth, wayward, but full of tenderness and

affection, quits the country village where his boyhood has been passed in

happy musing, in idle shelter, in fond longing to see the great world out

of doors, and achieve name and fortune—and after years of dire struggle,

and neglect and poverty, his heart turning back as fondly to his native

place, as it had longed eagerly for change when sheltered there, he writes

a book and a poem, full of the recollections and feelings of home—he

paints the friends and scenes of his youth, and peoples Auburn and

Wakefield with remembrances of Lissoy. Wander he must, but he carries away

a home-relic with him, and dies with it on his breast. His nature is

truant; in repose it longs for change: as on the journey it looks back for

friends and quiet. He passes to-day in building an air-castle for

to-morrow, or in writing yesterday’s elegy; and he would fly away this

hour, but that a cage and necessity keep him. What is the charm of his

verse, of his style, and humour? His sweet regrets, his delicate

compassion, his soft smile, his tremulous sympathy, the weakness which he

owns? Your love for him is half pity. You come hot and tired from the

day’s battle, and this sweet minstrel sings to you. Who could harm the

kind vagrant harper? Whom did he ever hurt? He carries no weapon—save the

harp on which he plays to you; and with which he delights great and

humble, young and old, the captains in the tents, or the soldiers round

the fire, or the women and children in the villages, at whose porches he

stops and sings his simple songs of love and beauty. With that sweet story

of the _Vicar of Wakefield_,(172) he has found entry into every castle and

every hamlet in Europe. Not one of us, however busy or hard, but once or

twice in our lives has passed an evening with him, and undergone the charm

of his delightful music.

Goldsmith’s father was no doubt the good Doctor Primrose, whom we all of

us know.(173) Swift was yet alive, when the little Oliver was born at

Pallas, or Pallasmore, in the county of Longford, in Ireland. In 1730, two

years after the child’s birth, Charles Goldsmith removed his family to

Lissoy, in the county Westmeath, that sweet “Auburn” which every person

who hears me has seen in fancy. Here the kind parson(174) brought up his

eight children; and loving all the world, as his son says, fancied all the

world loved him. He had a crowd of poor dependants besides those hungry

children. He kept an open table; round which sat flatterers and poor

friends, who laughed at the honest rector’s many jokes, and ate the

produce of his seventy acres of farm. Those who have seen an Irish house

in the present day can fancy that one of Lissoy. The old beggar still has

his allotted corner by the kitchen turf; the maimed old soldier still gets

his potatoes and buttermilk; the poor cottier still asks his honour’s

charity, and prays God bless his Reverence for the sixpence; the ragged

pensioner still takes his place by right and sufferance. There’s still a

crowd in the kitchen, and a crowd round the parlour-table, profusion,

confusion, kindness, poverty. If an Irishman comes to London to make his

fortune, he has a half-dozen of Irish dependants who take a percentage of

his earnings. The good Charles Goldsmith(175) left but little provision

for his hungry race when death summoned him; and one of his daughters

being engaged to a squire of rather superior dignity, Charles Goldsmith

impoverished the rest of his family to provide the girl with a dowry.

The small-pox, which scourged all Europe at that time, and ravaged the

roses off the cheeks of half the world, fell foul of poor little Oliver’s

face, when the child was eight years old, and left him scarred and

disfigured for his life. An old woman in his father’s village taught him

his letters, and pronounced him a dunce: Paddy Byrne, the

hedge-schoolmaster, took him in hand; and from Paddy Byrne, he was

transmitted to a clergyman at Elphin. When a child was sent to school in

those days, the classic phrase was that he was placed under Mr.

So-and-so’s _ferule_. Poor little ancestors! It is hard to think how

ruthlessly you were birched; and how much of needless whipping and tears

our small forefathers had to undergo! A relative—kind Uncle Contarine,

took the main charge of little Noll; who went through his school-days

righteously doing as little work as he could: robbing orchards, playing at

ball, and making his pocket-money fly about whenever fortune sent it to

him. Everybody knows the story of that famous “Mistake of a Night”, when

the young schoolboy, provided with a guinea and a nag, rode up to the

“best house” in Ardagh, called for the landlord’s company over a bottle of

wine at supper, and for a hot cake for breakfast in the morning; and

found, when he asked for the bill, that the best house was Squire

Featherstone’s, and not the inn for which he mistook it. Who does not know

every story about Goldsmith? That is a delightful and fantastic picture of

the child dancing and capering about in the kitchen at home, when the old

fiddler gibed at him for his ugliness—and called him Aesop, and little

Noll made his repartee of “Heralds proclaim aloud this saying—See Aesop

dancing and his monkey playing”. One can fancy a queer pitiful look of

humour and appeal upon that little scarred face—the funny little dancing

figure, the funny little brogue. In his life, and his writings, which are

the honest expression of it, he is constantly bewailing that homely face

and person; anon, he surveys them in the glass ruefully; and presently

assumes the most comical dignity. He likes to deck out his little person

in splendour and fine colours. He presented himself to be examined for

ordination in a pair of scarlet breeches, and said honestly that he did

not like to go into the Church, because he was fond of coloured clothes.

When he tried to practise as a doctor, he got by hook or by crook a black

velvet suit, and looked as big and grand as he could, and kept his hat

over a patch on the old coat: in better days he bloomed out in

plum-colour, in blue silk, and in new velvet. For some of those splendours

the heirs and assignees of Mr. Filby, the tailor, have never been paid to

this day; perhaps the kind tailor and his creditor have met and settled

the little account in Hades.(176)

They showed until lately a window at Trinity College, Dublin, on which the

name of O. Goldsmith was engraved with a diamond. Whose diamond was it?

Not the young sizar’s, who made but a poor figure in that place of

learning. He was idle, penniless, and fond of pleasure:(177) he learned

his way early to the pawnbroker’s shop. He wrote ballads, they say, for

the street-singers, who paid him a crown for a poem: and his pleasure was

to steal out at night and hear his verses sung. He was chastised by his

tutor for giving a dance in his rooms, and took the box on the ear so much

to heart, that he packed up his all, pawned his books and little property,

and disappeared from college and family. He said he intended to go to

America, but when his money was spent, the young prodigal came home

ruefully, and the good folks there killed their calf—it was but a lean

one—and welcomed him back.

After college, he hung about his mother’s house, and lived for some years

the life of a buckeen—passed a month with this relation and that, a year

with one patron, a great deal of time at the public-house.(178) Tired of

this life, it was resolved that he should go to London, and study at the

Temple; but he got no farther on the road to London and the woolsack than

Dublin, where he gambled away the fifty pounds given to him for his

outfit, and whence he returned to the indefatigable forgiveness of home.

Then he determined to be a doctor, and Uncle Contarine helped him to a

couple of years at Edinburgh. Then from Edinburgh he felt that he ought to

hear the famous professors of Leyden and Paris, and wrote most amusing

pompous letters to his uncle about the great Farheim, Du Petit, and

Duhamel du Monceau, whose lectures he proposed to follow. If Uncle

Contarine believed those letters—if Oliver’s mother believed that story

which the youth related of his going to Cork, with the purpose of

embarking for America, of his having paid his passage-money, and having

sent his kit on board; of the anonymous captain sailing away with Oliver’s

valuable luggage in a nameless ship, never to return; if Uncle Contarine

and the mother at Ballymahon believed his stories, they must have been a

very simple pair; as it was a very simple rogue indeed who cheated them.

When the lad, after failing in his clerical examination, after failing in

his plan for studying the law, took leave of these projects and of his

parents, and set out for Edinburgh, he saw mother, and uncle, and lazy

Ballymahon, and green native turf, and sparkling river for the last time.

He was never to look on old Ireland more, and only in fancy revisit her.

But me not destined such delights to share,

My prime of life in wandering spent and care,

Impelled, with step unceasing, to pursue

Some fleeting good that mocks me with the view;

That like the circle bounding earth and skies

Allures from far, yet, as I follow, flies:

My fortune leads to traverse realms unknown,

And find no spot of all the world my own.

I spoke in a former lecture of that high courage which enabled Fielding,

in spite of disease, remorse, and poverty, always to retain a cheerful

spirit and to keep his manly benevolence and love of truth intact, as if

these treasures had been confided to him for the public benefit, and he

was accountable to posterity for their honourable employ; and a constancy

equally happy and admirable I think was shown by Goldsmith, whose sweet

and friendly nature bloomed kindly always in the midst of a life’s storm,

and rain, and bitter weather.(179) The poor fellow was never so friendless

but he could befriend some one; never so pinched and wretched but he could

give of his crust, and speak his word of compassion. If he had but his

flute left, he could give that, and make the children happy in the dreary

London court. He could give the coals in that queer coal-scuttle we read

of to his poor neighbour: he could give away his blankets in college to

the poor widow, and warm himself as he best might in the feathers: he

could pawn his coat to save his landlord from gaol: when he was a

school-usher, he spent his earnings in treats for the boys, and the

good-natured schoolmaster’s wife said justly that she ought to keep Mr.

Goldsmith’s money as well as the young gentlemen’s. When he met his pupils

in later life, nothing would satisfy the Doctor but he must treat them

still. “Have you seen the print of me after Sir Joshua Reynolds?” he asked

of one of his old pupils. “Not seen it? not bought it? Sure, Jack, if your

picture had been published, I’d not have been without it half an hour.”

His purse and his heart were everybody’s, and his friends’ as much as his

own. When he was at the height of his reputation, and the Earl of

Northumberland, going as Lord Lieutenant to Ireland, asked if he could be

of any service to Dr. Goldsmith, Goldsmith recommended his brother, and

not himself, to the great man. “My patrons,” he gallantly said, “are the

booksellers, and I want no others.”(180) Hard patrons they were, and hard

work he did; but he did not complain much: if in his early writings some

bitter words escaped him, some allusions to neglect and poverty, he

withdrew these expressions when his works were republished, and better

days seemed to open for him; and he did not care to complain that printer

or publisher had overlooked his merit, or left him poor. The Court face

was turned from honest Oliver, the Court patronized Beattie; the fashion

did not shine on him—fashion adored Sterne.(181)

Fashion pronounced Kelly to be the great writer of comedy of his day. A

little—not ill humour, but plaintiveness—a little betrayal of wounded

pride which he showed render him not the less amiable. The author of the

_Vicar of Wakefield_ had a right to protest when Newbery kept back the MS.

for two years; had a right to be a little peevish with Sterne; a little

angry when Colman’s actors declined their parts in his delightful comedy,

when the manager refused to have a scene painted for it, and pronounced

its damnation before hearing. He had not the great public with him; but he

had the noble Johnson, and the admirable Reynolds, and the great Gibbon,

and the great Burke, and the great Fox—friends and admirers illustrious

indeed, as famous as those who, fifty years before, sat round Pope’s

table.

Nobody knows, and I dare say Goldsmith’s buoyant temper kept no account of

all the pains which he endured during the early period of his literary

career. Should any man of letters in our day have to bear up against such,

Heaven grant he may come out of the period of misfortune with such a pure

kind heart as that which Goldsmith obstinately bore in his breast. The

insults to which he had to submit are shocking to read of—slander,

contumely, vulgar satire, brutal malignity perverting his commonest

motives and actions: he had his share of these, and one’s anger is roused

at reading of them, as it is at seeing a woman insulted or a child

assaulted, at the notion that a creature so very gentle and weak, and full

of love, should have had to suffer so. And he had worse than insult to

undergo—to own to fault, and deprecate the anger of ruffians. There is a

letter of his extant to one Griffiths, a bookseller, in which poor

Goldsmith is forced to confess that certain books sent by Griffiths are in

the hands of a friend from whom Goldsmith had been forced to borrow money.

“He was wild, sir,” Johnson said, speaking of Goldsmith to Boswell, with

his great, wise benevolence and noble mercifulness of heart, “Dr.

Goldsmith was wild, sir; but he is so no more.” Ah! if we pity the good

and weak man who suffers undeservedly, let us deal very gently with him

from whom misery extorts not only tears, but shame; let us think humbly

and charitably of the human nature that suffers so sadly and falls so low.

Whose turn may it be tomorrow? What weak heart, confident before trial,

may not succumb under temptation invincible? Cover the good man who has

been vanquished—cover his face and pass on.

For the last half-dozen years of his life, Goldsmith was far removed from

the pressure of any ignoble necessity: and in the receipt, indeed, of a

pretty large income from the booksellers, his patrons. Had he lived but a

few years more, his public fame would have been as great as his private

reputation, and he might have enjoyed alive a part of that esteem which

his country has ever since paid to the vivid and versatile genius who has

touched on almost every subject of literature, and touched nothing that he

did not adorn. Except in rare instances, a man is known in our profession,

and esteemed as a skilful workman, years before the lucky hit which

trebles his usual gains, and stamps him a popular author. In the strength

of his age, and the dawn of his reputation, having for backers and friends

the most illustrious literary men of his time,(182) fame and prosperity

might have been in store for Goldsmith, had fate so willed it; and, at

forty-six, had not sudden disease carried him off. I say prosperity rather

than competence, for it is probable that no sum could have put order into

his affairs or sufficed for his irreclaimable habits of dissipation. It

must be remembered that he owed 2,000_l._ when he died. “Was ever poet,”

Johnson asked, “so trusted before?” As has been the case with many another

good fellow of his nation, his life was tracked and his substance wasted

by crowds of hungry beggars, and lazy dependants. If they came at a lucky

time (and be sure they knew his affairs better than he did himself, and

watched his pay-day), he gave them of his money: if they begged on

empty-purse days he gave them his promissory bills: or he treated them to

a tavern where he had credit; or he obliged them with an order upon honest

Mr. Filby for coats, for which he paid as long as he could earn, and until

the shears of Filby were to cut for him no more. Staggering under a load

of debt and labour, tracked by bailiffs and reproachful creditors, running

from a hundred poor dependants, whose appealing looks were perhaps the

hardest of all pains for him to bear, devising fevered plans for the

morrow, new histories, new comedies, all sorts of new literary schemes,

flying from all these into seclusion, and out of seclusion into

pleasure—at last, at five-and-forty, death seized him and closed his

career.(183) I have been many a time in the chambers in the Temple which

were his, and passed up the staircase, which Johnson, and Burke, and

Reynolds trod to see their friend, their poet, their kind Goldsmith—the

stair on which the poor women sat weeping bitterly when they heard that

the greatest and most generous of all men was dead within the black oak

door.(184) Ah, it was a different lot from that for which the poor fellow

sighed, when he wrote with heart yearning for home those most charming of

all fond verses, in which he fancies he revisits Auburn—

Here as I take my solitary rounds,

Amidst thy tangled walks and ruined grounds,

And, many a year elapsed, return to view

Where once the cottage stood, the hawthorn grew,

Remembrance wakes, with all her busy train,

Swells at my heart, and turns the past to pain.

In all my wanderings round this world of care

In all my griefs—and God has given my share,

I still had hopes my latest hours to crown,

Amidst these humble bowers to lay me down;

To husband out life’s taper at the close,

And keep the flame from wasting by repose;

I still had hopes—for pride attends us still—

Amidst the swains to show my book-learned skill,

Around my fire an evening group to draw,

And tell of all I felt and all I saw;

And, as a hare, whom hounds and horns pursue.

Pants to the place from whence at first she flew—

I still had hopes—my long vexations past,

Here to return, and die at home at last.

O blest retirement, friend to life’s decline!

Retreats from care that never must be mine—

How blest is he who crowns in shades like these,

A youth of labour with an age of ease;

Who quits a world where strong temptations try,

And, since ’tis hard to combat, learns to fly!

For him no wretches born to work and weep

Explore the mine or tempt the dangerous deep;

No surly porter stands in guilty state

To spurn imploring famine from his gate:

But on he moves to meet his latter end,

Angels around befriending virtue’s friend;

Sinks to the grave with unperceived decay,

Whilst resignation gently slopes the way;

And all his prospects brightening at the last,

His heaven commences ere the world be past.

In these verses, I need not say with what melody, with what touching

truth, with what exquisite beauty of comparison—as indeed in hundreds more

pages of the writings of this honest soul—the whole character of the man

is told—his humble confession of faults and weakness; his pleasant little

vanity, and desire that his village should admire him; his simple scheme

of good in which everybody was to be happy—no beggar was to be refused his

dinner—nobody in fact was to work much, and he to be the harmless chief of

the Utopia, and the monarch of the Irish Yvetôt. He would have told again,

and without fear of their failing, those famous jokes(185) which had hung

fire in London; he would have talked of his great friends of the Club—of

my Lord Clare and my Lord Bishop, my Lord Nugent—sure he knew them

intimately, and was hand and glove with some of the best men in town—and

he would have spoken of Johnson and of Burke, from Cork, and of Sir Joshua

who had painted him—and he would have told wonderful sly stories of

Ranelagh and the Pantheon, and the masquerades at Madame Cornelys’; and he

would have toasted, with a sigh, the Jessamy Bride—the lovely Mary

Horneck.

The figure of that charming young lady forms one of the prettiest

recollections of Goldsmith’s life. She and her beautiful sister, who

married Bunbury, the graceful and humorous amateur artist of those days,

when Gilray had but just begun to try his powers, were among the kindest

and dearest of Goldsmith’s many friends, cheered and pitied him, travelled

abroad with him; made him welcome at their home, and gave him many a

pleasant holiday. He bought his finest clothes to figure at their country

house at Barton—he wrote them droll verses. They loved him, laughed at

him, played him tricks and made him happy. He asked for a loan from

Garrick, and Garrick kindly supplied him, to enable him to go to

Barton—but there were to be no more holidays, and only one brief struggle

more for poor Goldsmith—a lock of his hair was taken from the coffin and

given to the Jessamy Bride. She lived quite into our time. Hazlitt saw her

an old lady, but beautiful still, in Northcote’s painting-room, who told

the eager critic how proud she always was that Goldsmith had admired her.

The younger Colman has left a touching reminiscence of him (vol. i. 63,

64).

“I was only five years old,” he says, “when Goldsmith took me on his knee

one evening whilst he was drinking coffee with my father, and began to

play with me, which amiable act I returned, with the ingratitude of a

peevish brat, by giving him a very smart slap on the face: it must have

been a tingler, for it left the marks of my spiteful paw on his cheek.

This infantile outrage was followed by summary justice, and I was locked

up by my indignant father in an adjoining room to undergo solitary

imprisonment in the dark. Here I began to howl and scream most abominably,

which was no bad step towards my liberation, since those who were not

inclined to pity me might be likely to set me free for the purpose of

abating a nuisance.

“At length a generous friend appeared to extricate me from jeopardy, and

that generous friend was no other than the man I had so wantonly molested

by assault and battery—it was the tender-hearted Doctor himself, with a

lighted candle in his hand, and a smile upon his countenance, which was

still partially red from the effects of my petulance. I sulked and sobbed

as he fondled and soothed, till I began to brighten. Goldsmith seized the

propitious moment of returning good humour, when he put down the candle

and began to conjure. He placed three hats, which happened to be in the

room, and a shilling under each. The shillings he told me were England,

France, and Spain. ‘Hey presto cockalorum!’ cried the Doctor, and lo, on

uncovering the shillings, which had been dispersed each beneath a separate

hat, they were all found congregated under one. I was no politician at

five years old, and therefore might not have wondered at the sudden

revolution which brought England, France, and Spain all under one crown;

but, as also I was no conjurer, it amazed me beyond measure.... From that

time, whenever the Doctor came to visit my father, ‘I plucked his gown to

share the good man’s smile’; a game at romps constantly ensued, and we

were always cordial friends and merry playfellows. Our unequal

companionship varied somewhat as to sports as I grew older; but it did not

last long: my senior playmate died in his forty-fifth year, when I had

attained my eleventh.... In all the numerous accounts of his virtues and

foibles, his genius and absurdities, his knowledge of nature and ignorance

of the world, his ‘compassion for another’s woe’ was always predominant;

and my trivial story of his humouring a froward child weighs but as a

feather in the recorded scale of his benevolence.”

Think of him reckless, thriftless, vain if you like—but merciful, gentle,

generous, full of love and pity. He passes out of our life, and goes to

render his account beyond it. Think of the poor pensioners weeping at his

grave; think of the noble spirits that admired and deplored him; think of

the righteous pen that wrote his epitaph—and of the wonderful and

unanimous response of affection with which the world has paid back the

love he gave it. His humour delighting us still: his song fresh and

beautiful as when first he charmed with it: his words in all our mouths:

his very weaknesses beloved and familiar—his benevolent spirit seems still

to smile upon us: to do gentle kindnesses: to succour with sweet charity:

to soothe, caress, and forgive: to plead with the fortunate for the

unhappy and the poor.

His name is the last in the list of those men of humour who have formed

the themes of the discourses which you have heard so kindly.

-------------------------------------

Long before I had ever hoped for such an audience, or dreamed of the

possibility of the good fortune which has brought me so many friends, I

was at issue with some of my literary brethren upon a point—which they

held from tradition I think rather than experience—that our profession was

neglected in this country; and that men of letters were ill-received and

held in slight esteem. It would hardly be grateful of me now to alter my

old opinion that we do meet with goodwill and kindness, with generous

helping hands in the time of our necessity, with cordial and friendly

recognition. What claim had any one of these of whom I have been speaking,

but genius? What return of gratitude, fame, affection, did it not bring to

all?

What punishment befell those who were unfortunate among them, but that

which follows reckless habits and careless lives? For these faults a wit

must suffer like the dullest prodigal that ever ran in debt. He must pay

the tailor if he wears the coat; his children must go in rags if he spends

his money at the tavern; he can’t come to London and be made Lord

Chancellor if he stops on the road and gambles away his last shilling at

Dublin. And he must pay the social penalty of these follies too, and

expect that the world will shun the man of bad habits, that women will

avoid the man of loose life, that prudent folks will close their doors as

a precaution, and before a demand should be made on their pockets by the

needy prodigal. With what difficulty had any one of these men to contend,

save that eternal and mechanical one of want of means and lack of capital,

and of which thousands of young lawyers, young doctors, young soldiers and

sailors, of inventors, manufacturers, shopkeepers, have to complain?

Hearts as brave and resolute as ever beat in the breast of any wit or

poet, sicken and break daily in the vain endeavour and unavailing struggle

against life’s difficulty. Don’t we see daily ruined inventors,

grey-haired midshipmen, balked heroes, blighted curates, barristers pining

a hungry life out in chambers, the attorneys never mounting to their

garrets, whilst scores of them are rapping at the door of the successful

quack below? If these suffer, who is the author, that he should be exempt?

Let us bear our ills with the same constancy with which others endure

them, accept our manly part in life, hold our own, and ask no more. I can

conceive of no kings or laws causing or curing Goldsmith’s improvidence,

or Fielding’s fatal love of pleasure, or Dick Steele’s mania for running

races with the constable. You never can outrun that sure-footed

officer—not by any swiftness or by dodges devised by any genius, however

great; and he carries off the Tatler to the spunging-house, or taps the

Citizen of the World on the shoulder as he would any other mortal.

Does society look down on a man because he is an author? I suppose if

people want a buffoon they tolerate him only in so far as he is amusing;

it can hardly be expected that they should respect him as an equal. Is

there to be a guard of honour provided for the author of the last new

novel or poem? how long is he to reign, and keep other potentates out of

possession? He retires, grumbles, and prints a lamentation that literature

is despised. If Captain A. is left out of Lady B.’s parties he does not

state that the army is despised: if Lord C. no longer asks Counsellor D.

to dinner, Counsellor D. does not announce that the Bar is insulted. He is

not fair to society if he enters it with this suspicion hankering about

him; if he is doubtful about his reception, how hold up his head honestly,

and look frankly in the face that world about which he is full of

suspicion? Is he place-hunting, and thinking in his mind that he ought to

be made an Ambassador, like Prior, or a Secretary of State, like Addison?

his pretence of equality falls to the ground at once: he is scheming for a

patron, not shaking the hand of a friend, when he meets the world. Treat

such a man as he deserves; laugh at his buffoonery, and give him a dinner

and a _bon jour_; laugh at his self-sufficiency and absurd assumptions of

superiority, and his equally ludicrous airs of martyrdom: laugh at his

flattery and his scheming, and buy it, if it’s worth the having. Let the

wag have his dinner and the hireling his pay, if you want him, and make a

profound bow to the _grand homme incompris_, and the boisterous martyr,

and show him the door. The great world, the great aggregate experience,

has its good sense, as it has its good humour. It detects a pretender, as

it trusts a loyal heart. It is kind in the main: how should it be

otherwise than kind, when it is so wise and clear-headed? To any literary

man who says, “It despises my profession,” I say, with all my might—no,

no, no. It may pass over your individual case—how many a brave fellow has

failed in the race, and perished unknown in the struggle!—but it treats

you as you merit in the main. If you serve it, it is not unthankful; if

you please it, it is pleased; if you cringe to it, it detects you, and

scorns you if you are mean; it returns your cheerfulness with its good

humour; it deals not ungenerously with your weaknesses; it recognizes most

kindly your merits; it gives you a fair place and fair play. To any one of

those men of whom we have spoken was it in the main ungrateful? A king

might refuse Goldsmith a pension, as a publisher might keep his

masterpiece and the delight of all the world in his desk for two years;

but it was mistake, and not ill will. Noble and illustrious names of

Swift, and Pope, and Addison! dear and honoured memories of Goldsmith and

Fielding! kind friends, teachers, benefactors! who shall say that our

country, which continues to bring you such an unceasing tribute of

applause, admiration, love, sympathy, does not do honour to the literary

calling in the honour which it bestows upon _you!_

THE GEORGES

The Poems

[_Punch_, October 11, 1845]

As the statues of these beloved Monarchs are to be put up in the

Parliament palace—we have been favoured by a young lady (connected with

the Court) with copies of the inscriptions which are to be engraven under

the images of those Stars of Brunswick.

GEORGE I—STAR OF BRUNSWICK

He preferred Hanover to England,

He preferred two hideous Mistresses

To a beautiful and innocent Wife.

He hated Arts and despised Literature;

But He liked train-oil in his salads,

And gave an enlightened patronage to bad oysters.

And he had Walpole as a Minister:

Consistent in his Preference for every kind of Corruption.

GEORGE II

In most things I did as my father had done,

I was false to my wife and I hated my son:

My spending was small and my avarice much,

My kingdom was English, my heart was High Dutch:

At Dettingen fight I was known not to blench

I butchered the Scotch, and I bearded the French:

I neither had morals, nor manners, nor wit;

I wasn’t much missed when I died in a fit.

Here set up my statue, and make it complete—With

Pitt on his knees at my dirty old feet.

GEORGE III

Give me a royal niche—it is my due,

The virtuousest king the realm e’er knew.

I, through a decent reputable life,

Was constant to plain food and a plain wife.

Ireland I risked, and lost America;

But dined on legs of mutton every day.

My brain, perhaps, might be a feeble part;

But yet I think I had an English heart.

When all the kings were prostrate, I alone

Stood face to face against Napoleon;

Nor ever could the ruthless Frenchman forge

A fetter for Old England and Old George:

I let loose flaming Nelson on his fleets;

I met his troops with Wellesley’s bayonets.

Triumphant waved my flag on land and sea:

Where was the king in Europe like to me?

Monarchs exiled found shelter on my shores;

My bounty rescued kings and emperors.

But what boots victory by land or sea?

What boots that kings found refuge at my knee?

I was a conqueror, but yet not proud;

And careless, even though Napoleon bow’d.

The rescued kings came kiss my garments’ hem:

The rescued kings I never heeded them.

My guns roar’d triumph, but I never heard:

All England thrilled with joy, I never stirred.

What care had I of pomp, or fame, or power,—

A crazy old blind man in Windsor Tower?

GEORGIUS ULTIMUS

He left an example for age and for youth

To avoid.

He never acted well by Man or Woman,

And was as false to his Mistress as to his Wife.

He deserted his Friends and his Principles.

He was so ignorant that he could scarcely Spell;

But he had some Skill in Cutting out Coats,

And an undeniable Taste for Cookery.

He built the Palaces of Brighton and of Buckingham,

And for these Qualities and Proofs of Genius,

An admiring Aristocracy

Christened him the “First Gentleman in Europe”.

Friends, respect the King whose Statue is here,

And the generous Aristocracy who admired him.

Sketches Of Manners, Morals, Court And Town Life

[_Cornhill Magazine_, 1860; first edition in book form, 1861]

George The First

A very few years since, I knew familiarly a lady, who had been asked in

marriage by Horace Walpole, who had been patted on the head by George I.

This lady had knocked at Johnson’s door; had been intimate with Fox, the

beautiful Georgina of Devonshire, and that brilliant Whig society of the

reign of George III; had known the Duchess of Queensberry, the patroness

of Gay and Prior, the admired young beauty of the Court of Queen Anne. I

often thought as I took my kind old friend’s hand, how with it I held on

to the old society of wits and men of the world. I could travel back for

sevenscore years of time—have glimpses of Brummell, Selwyn, Chesterfield

and the men of pleasure; of Walpole and Conway; of Johnson, Reynolds,

Goldsmith; of North, Chatham, Newcastle; of the fair maids of honour of

George II’s Court; of the German retainers of George I’s; where Addison

was secretary of state; where Dick Steele held a place; whither the great

Marlborough came with his fiery spouse; when Pope, and Swift, and

Bolingbroke yet lived and wrote. Of a society so vast, busy, brilliant, it

is impossible in four brief chapters to give a complete notion; but we may

peep here and there into that bygone world of the Georges, see what they

and their Courts were like; glance at the people round about them; look at

past manners, fashions, pleasures, and contrast them with our own. I have

to say thus much by way of preface, because the subject of these lectures

has been misunderstood, and I have been taken to task for not having given

grave historical treatises, which it never was my intention to attempt.

Not about battles, about politics, about statesmen and measures of state,

did I ever think to lecture you: but to sketch the manners and life of the

old world; to amuse for a few hours with talk about the old society; and,

with the result of many a day’s and night’s pleasant reading, to try and

wile away a few winter evenings for my hearers.

-------------------------------------

Among the German princes who sat under Luther at Wittenberg, was Duke

Ernest of Celle, whose younger son, William of Lüneburg, was the

progenitor of the illustrious Hanoverian house at present reigning in

Great Britain. Duke William held his Court at Celle, a little town of ten

thousand people that lies on the railway line between Hamburg and Hanover,

in the midst of great plains of sand, upon the river Aller. When Duke

William had it, it was a very humble wood-built place, with a great brick

church, which he sedulously frequented, and in which he and others of his

house lie buried. He was a very religious lord, and called William the

Pious by his small circle of subjects, over whom he ruled till fate

deprived him both of sight and reason. Sometimes, in his latter days, the

good duke had glimpses of mental light, when he would bid his musicians

play the psalm-tunes which he loved. One thinks of a descendant of his,

two hundred years afterwards, blind, old, and lost of wits, singing Handel

in Windsor Tower.

William the Pious had fifteen children, eight daughters and seven sons,

who, as the property left among them was small, drew lots to determine

which one of them should marry, and continue the stout race of the

Guelphs. The lot fell on Duke George, the sixth brother. The others

remained single, or contracted left-handed marriages after the princely

fashion of those days. It is a queer picture—that of the old prince dying

in his little wood-built capital, and his seven sons tossing up which

should inherit and transmit the crown of Brentford. Duke George, the lucky

prizeman, made the tour of Europe, during which he visited the Court of

Queen Elizabeth; and in the year 1617, came back and settled at Zell, with

a wife out of Darmstadt. His remaining brothers all kept their house at

Zell, for economy’s sake. And presently, in due course, they all died—all

the honest dukes; Ernest, and Christian, and Augustus, and Magnus, and

George, and John—and they are buried in the brick church of Brentford

yonder, by the sandy banks of the Aller.

Dr. Vehse gives a pleasant glimpse of the way of life of our dukes in

Zell. “When the trumpeter on the tower has blown,” Duke Christian

orders—viz. at nine o’clock in the morning, and four in the evening, every

one must be present at meals, and those who are not must go without. None

of the servants, unless it be a knave who has been ordered to ride out,

shall eat or drink in the kitchen or cellar; or, without special leave,

fodder his horses at the prince’s cost. When the meal is served in the

Court-room, a page shall go round and bid every one be quiet and orderly,

forbidding all cursing, swearing, and rudeness; all throwing about of

bread, bones, or roast, or pocketing of the same. Every morning, at seven,

the squires shall have their morning soup, along with which, and dinner,

they shall be served with their under-drink—every morning, except Friday

morning, when there was sermon, and no drink. Every evening they shall

have their beer, and at night their sleep-drink. The butler is especially

warned not to allow noble or simple to go into the cellar: wine shall only

be served at the prince’s or councillor’s table; and every Monday, the

honest old Duke Christian ordains the accounts shall be ready, and the

expenses in the kitchen, the wine and beer cellar, the bakehouse and

stable, made out.

Duke George, the marrying duke, did not stop at home to partake of the

beer and wine, and the sermons. He went about fighting wherever there was

profit to be had. He served as general in the army of the circle of Lower

Saxony, the Protestant army; then he went over to the emperor, and fought

in his armies in Germany and Italy; and when Gustavus Adolphus appeared in

Germany, George took service as a Swedish general, and seized the Abbey of

Hildesheim, as his share of the plunder. Here, in the year 1641, Duke

George died, leaving four sons behind him, from the youngest of whom

descend our royal Georges.

Under these children of Duke George, the old God-fearing, simple ways of

Zell appear to have gone out of mode. The second brother was constantly

visiting Venice, and leading a jolly, wicked life there. It was the most

jovial of all places at the end of the seventeenth century; and military

men, after a campaign, rushed thither, as the warriors of the Allies

rushed to Paris in 1814, to gamble, and rejoice, and partake of all sorts

of godless delights. This prince, then, loving Venice and its pleasures,

brought Italian singers and dancers back with him to quiet old Zell; and,

worse still, demeaned himself by marrying a French lady of birth quite

inferior to his own—Eleanor d’Olbreuse, from whom our queen is descended.

Eleanor had a pretty daughter, who inherited a great fortune, which

inflamed her cousin, George Louis of Hanover, with a desire to marry her;

and so, with her beauty and her riches, she came to a sad end.

It is too long to tell how the four sons of Duke George divided his

territories amongst them, and how, finally, they came into possession of

the son of the youngest of the four. In this generation the Protestant

faith was very nearly extinguished in the family: and then where should we

in England have gone for a king? The third brother also took delight in

Italy, where the priests converted him and his Protestant chaplain too.

Mass was said in Hanover once more; and Italian soprani piped their Latin

rhymes in place of the hymns which William the Pious and Dr. Luther sang.

Louis XIV gave this and other converts a splendid pension. Crowds of

Frenchmen and brilliant French fashions came into his Court. It is

incalculable how much that royal bigwig cost Germany. Every prince

imitated the French king, and had his Versailles, his Wilhelmshöhe or

Ludwigslust; his court and its splendours; his gardens laid out with

statues; his fountains, and waterworks, and Tritons; his actors, and

dancers, and singers, and fiddlers; his harem, with its inhabitants; his

diamonds and duchies for these latter; his enormous festivities, his

gaming-tables, tournaments, masquerades, and banquets lasting a week long,

for which the people paid with their money, when the poor wretches had it;

with their bodies and very blood when they had none; being sold in

thousands by their lords and masters, who gaily dealt in soldiers, staked

a regiment upon the red at the gambling-table; swapped a battalion against

a dancing-girl’s diamond necklace; and, as it were, pocketed their people.

As one views Europe, through contemporary books of travel in the early

part of the last century, the landscape is awful—wretched wastes, beggarly

and plundered; half-burned cottages and trembling peasants gathering

piteous harvests; gangs of such tramping along with bayonets behind them,

and corporals with canes and cats-of-nine-tails to flog them to barracks.

By these passes my lord’s gilt carriage floundering through the ruts, as

he swears at the postilions, and toils on to the Residenz. Hard by, but

away from the noise and brawling of the citizens and buyers, is

Wilhelmslust or Ludwigsruhe, or Monbijou, or Versailles—it scarcely

matters which—near to the city, shut out by woods from the beggared

country, the enormous, hideous, gilded, monstrous marble palace, where the

prince is, and the Court, and the trim gardens, and huge fountains, and

the forest where the ragged peasants are beating the game in (it is death

to them to touch a feather); and the jolly hunt sweeps by with its uniform

of crimson and gold; and the prince gallops ahead puffing his royal horn;

and his lords and mistresses ride after him; and the stag is pulled down;

and the grand huntsman gives the knife in the midst of a chorus of bugles;

and ’tis time the Court go home to dinner; and our noble traveller, it may

be the Baron of Pöllnitz, or the Count de Königsmarck, or the excellent

Chevalier de Seingalt, sees the procession gleaming through the trim

avenues of the wood, and hastens to the inn, and sends his noble name to

the marshal of the Court. Then our nobleman arrays himself in green and

gold, or pink and silver, in the richest Paris mode, and is introduced by

the chamberlain, and makes his bow to the jolly prince, and the gracious

princess; and is presented to the chief lords and ladies, and then comes

supper and a bank at faro, where he loses or wins a thousand pieces by

daylight. If it is a German Court, you may add not a little drunkenness to

this picture of high life; but German, or French, or Spanish, if you can

see out of your palace-windows beyond the trim-cut forest vistas, misery

is lying outside; hunger is stalking about the bare villages, listlessly

following precarious husbandry; ploughing stony fields with starved

cattle; or fearfully taking in scanty harvests. Augustus is fat and jolly

on his throne; he can knock down an ox, and eat one almost; his mistress

Aurora von Königsmarck is the loveliest, the wittiest creature; his

diamonds are the biggest and most brilliant in the world, and his feasts

as splendid as those of Versailles. As for Louis the Great, he is more

than mortal. Lift up your glances respectfully, and mark him eyeing Madame

de Fontanges or Madame de Montespan from under his sublime periwig, as he

passes through the great gallery where Villars and Vendôme, and Berwick,

and Bossuet, and Massillon are waiting. Can Court be more splendid; nobles

and knights more gallant and superb; ladies more lovely? A grander

monarch, or a more miserable starved wretch than the peasant his subject,

you cannot look on. Let us bear both these types in mind, if we wish to

estimate the old society properly. Remember the glory and the chivalry?

Yes! Remember the grace and beauty, the splendour and lofty politeness;

the gallant courtesy of Fontenoy, where the French line bids the gentlemen

of the English guard to fire first; the noble constancy of the old king

and Villars his general, who fits out the last army with the last

crown-piece from the treasury, and goes to meet the enemy and die or

conquer for France at Denain. But round all that royal splendour lies a

nation enslaved and ruined: there are people robbed of their

rights—communities laid waste—faith, justice, commerce trampled upon, and

wellnigh destroyed—nay, in the very centre of royalty itself, what

horrible stains and meanness, crime and shame! It is but to a silly harlot

that some of the noblest gentlemen, and some of the proudest women in the

world, are bowing down; it is the price of a miserable province that the

king ties in diamonds round his mistress’s white neck. In the first half

of the last century, I say, this is going on all Europe over. Saxony is a

waste as well as Picardy or Artois; and Versailles is only larger and not

worse than Herrenhausen.

[Illustration]

Two Portraits

It was the first Elector of Hanover who made the fortunate match which

bestowed the race of Hanoverian Sovereigns upon us Britons. Nine years

after Charles Stuart lost his head, his niece Sophia, one of many children

of another luckless dethroned sovereign, the Elector Palatine, married

Ernest Augustus of Brunswick, and brought the reversion to the crown of

the three kingdoms in her scanty trousseau. One of the handsomest, the

most cheerful, sensible, shrewd, accomplished of women was Sophia,(186)

daughter of poor Frederick, the winter king of Bohemia. The other

daughters of lovely, unhappy Elizabeth Stuart went off into the Catholic

Church; this one, luckily for her family, remained, I cannot say faithful

to the Reformed Religion, but at least she adopted no other. An agent of

the French king’s, Gourville, a convert himself, strove to bring her and

her husband to a sense of the truth; and tells us that he one day asked

madame the Duchess of Hanover, of what religion her daughter was, then a

pretty girl of thirteen years old. The duchess replied that the princess

_was of no religion as yet_. They were waiting to know of what religion

her husband would be, Protestant or Catholic, before instructing her! And

the Duke of Hanover having heard all Gourville’s proposal, said that a

change would be advantageous to his house, but that he himself was too old

to change.

This shrewd woman had such keen eyes that she knew how to shut them upon

occasion, and was blind to many faults which it appeared that her husband

the Bishop of Osnaburg and Duke of Hanover committed. He loved to take his

pleasure like other sovereigns—was a merry prince, fond of dinner and the

bottle; liked to go to Italy, as his brothers had done before him; and we

read how he jovially sold 6,700 of his Hanoverians to the seigniory of

Venice. They went bravely off to the Morea, under command of Ernest’s son,

Prince Max, and only 1,400 of them ever came home again. The German

princes sold a good deal of this kind of stock. You may remember how

George III’s Government purchased Hessians, and the use we made of them

during the War of Independence.

The ducats Duke Ernest got for his soldiers he spent in a series of the

most brilliant entertainments. Nevertheless, the jovial prince was

economical, and kept a steady eye upon his own interests. He achieved the

electoral dignity for himself: he married his eldest son George to his

beautiful cousin of Zell; and sending his sons out in command of armies to

fight—now on this side, now on that—he lived on, taking his pleasure, and

scheming his schemes, a merry, wise prince enough, not, I fear, a moral

prince, of which kind we shall have but very few specimens in the course

of these lectures.

Ernest Augustus had seven children in all, some of whom were scapegraces,

and rebelled against the parental system of primogeniture and non-division

of property which the Elector ordained. “Gustchen,” the Electress writes

about her second son:—“Poor Gus is thrust out, and his father will give

him no more keep. I laugh in the day, and cry all night about it; for I am

a fool with my children.” Three of the six died fighting against Turks,

Tartars, Frenchmen. One of them conspired, revolted, fled to Rome, leaving

an agent behind him, whose head was taken off. The daughter, of whose

early education we have made mention, was married to the Elector of

Brandenburg, and so her religion settled finally on the Protestant side.

A niece of the Electress Sophia—who had been made to change her religion,

and marry the Duke of Orleans, brother of the French king; a woman whose

honest heart was always with her friends and dear old Deutschland, though

her fat little body was confined at Paris or Marly, or Versailles—has left

us, in her enormous correspondence (part of which has been printed in

German and French), recollections of the Electress, and of George her son.

Elizabeth Charlotte was at Osnaburg when George was born (1660). She

narrowly escaped a whipping for being in the way on that auspicious day.

She seems not to have liked little George, nor George grown up; and

represents him as odiously hard, cold, and silent. Silent he may have

been: not a jolly prince like his father before him, but a prudent, quiet,

selfish potentate, going his own way, managing his own affairs, and

understanding his own interests remarkably well.

In his father’s lifetime, and at the head of the Hanover forces of 8,000

or 10,000 men, George served the Emperor, on the Danube against Turks, at

the siege of Vienna, in Italy, and on the Rhine. When he succeeded to the

Electorate, he handled its affairs with great prudence and dexterity. He

was very much liked by his people of Hanover. He did not show his feelings

much, but he cried heartily on leaving them; as they used for joy when he

came back. He showed an uncommon prudence and coolness of behaviour when

he came into his kingdom; exhibiting no elation; reasonably doubtful

whether he should not be turned out some day; looking upon himself only as

a lodger, and making the most of his brief tenure of St. James’s and

Hampton Court; plundering, it is true, somewhat, and dividing amongst his

German followers; but what could be expected of a sovereign who at home

could sell his subjects at so many ducats per head, and made no scruple in

so disposing of them? I fancy a considerable shrewdness, prudence, and

even moderation in his ways. The German Protestant was a cheaper, and

better, and kinder king than the Catholic Stuart in whose chair he sat,

and so far loyal to England, that he let England govern herself.

Having these lectures in view I made it my business to visit that ugly

cradle in which our Georges were nursed. The old town of Hanover must look

still pretty much as in the time when George Louis left it. The gardens

and pavilions of Herrenhausen are scarce changed since the day when the

stout old Electress Sophia fell down in her last walk there, preceding but

by a few weeks to the tomb James II’s daughter, whose death made way for

the Brunswick Stuarts in England.

The two first royal Georges, and their father, Ernest Augustus, had quite

royal notions regarding marriage; and Louis XIV and Charles II scarce

distinguished themselves more at Versailles or St. James’s, than these

German sultans in their little city on the banks of the Leine. You may see

at Herrenhausen the very rustic theatre in which the Platens danced and

performed masques, and sang before the Elector and his sons. There are the

very fauns and dryads of stone still glimmering through the branches,

still grinning and piping their ditties of no tone, as in the days when

painted nymphs hung garlands round them; appeared under their leafy

arcades with gilt crooks, guiding rams with gilt horns; descended from

“machines” in the guise of Diana or Minerva; and delivered immense

allegorical compliments to the princes returned home from the campaign.

That was a curious state of morals and politics in Europe; a queer

consequence of the triumph of the monarchical principle. Feudalism was

beaten down. The nobility, in its quarrels with the crown, had pretty well

succumbed, and the monarch was all in all. He became almost divine: the

proudest and most ancient gentry of the land did menial service for him.

Who should carry Louis XIV’s candle when he went to bed? What prince of

the blood should hold the king’s shirt when his Most Christian Majesty

changed that garment?—the French memoirs of the seventeenth century are

full of such details and squabbles. The tradition is not yet extinct in

Europe. Any of you who were present, as myriads were, at that splendid

pageant, the opening of our Crystal Palace in London, must have seen two

noble lords, great officers of the household, with ancient pedigrees, with

embroidered coats, and stars on their breasts and wands in their hands,

walking backwards for near the space of a mile, while the royal procession

made its progress. Shall we wonder—shall we be angry—shall we laugh at

these old-world ceremonies? View them as you will, according to your mood;

and with scorn or with respect, or with anger and sorrow, as your temper

leads you. Up goes Gesler’s hat upon the pole. Salute that symbol of

sovereignty with heartfelt awe; or with a sulky shrug of acquiescence, or

with a grinning obeisance; or with a stout rebellious No—clap your own

beaver down on your pate, and refuse to doff it, to that spangled velvet

and flaunting feather. I make no comment upon the spectators’ behaviour;

all I say is, that Gesler’s cap is still up in the market-place of Europe,

and not a few folks are still kneeling to it.

Put clumsy, High Dutch statues in place of the marbles of Versailles:

fancy Herrenhausen waterworks in place of those of Marly: spread the

tables with _Schweinskopf_, _Specksuppe_, _Leberkuchen_, and the like

delicacies, in place of the French _cuisine_; and fancy Frau von

Kielmansegge dancing with Count Kammerjunker Quirini, or singing French

songs with the most awful German accent: imagine a coarse Versailles, and

we have a Hanover before us. “I am now got into the region of beauty,”

writes Mary Wortley, from Hanover in 1716; “all the women have literally

rosy cheeks, snowy foreheads and necks, jet eyebrows, to which may

generally be added coal-black hair. These perfections never leave them to

the day of their death, and have a very fine effect by candlelight; but I

could wish they were handsome with a little variety. They resemble one

another as Mrs. Salmon’s Court of Great Britain, and are in as much danger

of melting away by too nearly approaching the fire.” The sly Mary Wortley

saw this painted seraglio of the first George at Hanover, the year after

his accession to the British throne. There were great doings and feasts

there. Here Lady Mary saw George II too. “I can tell you, without flattery

or partiality,” she says, “that our young prince has all the

accomplishments that it is possible to have at his age, with an air of

sprightliness and understanding, and a something so very engaging in his

behaviour that needs not the advantage of his rank to appear charming.” I

find elsewhere similar panegyrics upon Frederick Prince of Wales, George

II’s son; and upon George III, of course, and upon George IV in an eminent

degree. It was the rule to be dazzled by princes, and people’s eyes winked

quite honestly at that royal radiance.

The Electoral Court of Hanover was numerous—pretty well paid, as times

went; above all, paid with a regularity which few other European Courts

could boast of. Perhaps you will be amused to know how the Electoral Court

was composed. There were the princes of the house in the first class; in

the second, the single field-marshal of the army (the contingent was

18,000, Pöllnitz says, and the Elector had other 14,000 troops in his

pay). Then follow, in due order, the authorities civil and military, the

working privy councillors, the generals of cavalry and infantry, in the

third class; the high chamberlain, high marshals of the Court, high

masters of the horse, the major-generals of cavalry and infantry, in the

fourth class; down to the majors, the Hofjunkers or pages, the secretaries

or assessors, of the tenth class, of whom all were noble.

We find the master of the horse had 1,090 thalers of pay; the high

chamberlain, 2,000—a thaler being about three shillings of our money.

There were two chamberlains, and one for the princess; five gentlemen of

the chamber, and five gentlemen ushers; eleven pages and personages to

educate these young noblemen—such as a governor, a preceptor, a

_Fechtmeister_, or fencing-master, and a dancing ditto, this latter with a

handsome salary of 400 thalers. There were three body and Court

physicians, with 800 and 500 thalers; a Court barber, 600 thalers; a Court

organist; two _Musikanten_; four French fiddlers; twelve trumpeters, and a

bugler; so that there was plenty of music, profane and pious, in Hanover.

There were ten chamber waiters, and twenty-four lackeys in livery; a

_maitre-d’hôtel_, and attendants of the kitchen; a French cook; a body

cook; ten cooks; six cooks’ assistants; two _Braten_ masters, or masters

of the roast—(one fancies enormous spits turning slowly, and the honest

masters of the roast beladling the dripping); a pastry baker; a pie baker;

and finally, three scullions, at the modest remuneration of eleven

thalers. In the sugar-chamber there were four pastry-cooks (for the

ladies, no doubt); seven officers in the wine and beer cellars; four bread

bakers; and five men in the plate-room. There were 600 horses in the

Serene stables—no less than twenty teams of princely carriage horses,

eight to a team; sixteen coachmen; fourteen postilions; nineteen ostlers;

thirteen helps, besides smiths, carriage-masters, horse-doctors, and other

attendants of the stable. The female attendants were not so numerous: I

grieve to find but a dozen or fourteen of them about the Electoral

premises, and only two washerwomen for all the Court. These functionaries

had not so much to do as in the present age. I own to finding a pleasure

in these small-beer chronicles. I like to people the old world, with its

everyday figures and inhabitants—not so much with heroes fighting immense

battles and inspiring repulsed battalions to engage; or statesmen locked

up in darkling cabinets and meditating ponderous laws or dire

conspiracies—as with people occupied with their every-day work or

pleasure: my lord and lady hunting in the forest, or dancing in the Court,

or bowing to their serene highnesses as they pass in to dinner; John Cook

and his procession bringing the meal from the kitchen; the jolly butlers

bearing in the flagons from the cellar; the stout coachman driving the

ponderous gilt wagon, with eight cream-coloured horses in housings of

scarlet velvet and morocco leather; a postilion on the leaders, and a pair

or a half-dozen of running footmen scudding along by the side of the

vehicle, with conical caps, long silver-headed maces, which they poised as

they ran, and splendid jackets laced all over with silver and gold. I

fancy the citizens’ wives and their daughters looking out from the

balconies; and the burghers over their beer and mumm, rising up, cap in

hand, as the cavalcade passes through the town with torchbearers,

trumpeters blowing their lusty cheeks out, and squadrons of jack-booted

life-guardsmen, girt with shining cuirasses, and bestriding thundering

chargers, escorting his highness’s coach from Hanover to Herrenhausen: or

halting, mayhap, at Madame Platen’s country house of Monplaisir, which

lies half-way between the summer palace and the Residenz.

In the good old times of which I am treating, whilst common men were

driven off by herds, and sold to fight the emperor’s enemies on the

Danube, or to bayonet King Louis’s troops of common men on the Rhine,

noblemen passed from Court to Court, seeking service with one prince or

the other, and naturally taking command of the ignoble vulgar of soldiery

which battled and died almost without hope of promotion. Noble adventurers

travelled from Court to Court in search of employment; not merely noble

males, but noble females too; and if these latter were beauties, and

obtained the favourable notice of princes, they stopped in the Courts,

became the favourites of their serene or royal highnesses; and received

great sums of money and splendid diamonds; and were promoted to be

duchesses, marchionesses, and the like; and did not fall much in public

esteem for the manner in which they won their advancement. In this way

Mdlle. de Querouailles, a beautiful French lady, came to London on a

special mission of Louis XIV, and was adopted by our grateful country and

sovereign, and figured as Duchess of Portsmouth. In this way the beautiful

Aurora of Königsmarck travelling about found favour in the eyes of

Augustus of Saxony, and became the mother of Marshal Saxe, who gave us a

beating at Fontenoy; and in this manner the lovely sisters Elizabeth and

Melusina of Meissenbach (who had actually been driven out of Paris,

whither they had travelled on a like errand, by the wise jealousy of the

female favourite there in possession) journeyed to Hanover, and became

favourites of the serene house there reigning.

That beautiful Aurora von Königsmarck and her brother are wonderful as

types of bygone manners, and strange illustrations of the morals of old

days. The Königsmarcks were descended from an ancient noble family of

Brandenburgh, a branch of which passed into Sweden, where it enriched

itself and produced several mighty men of valour.