devoid of invention, but praised him for a very poetical choice of
expression, and for a good ear, and even thus perhaps a little over-rated
his powers. But our lyric poetry was not then what it has since
been made by Gray himself, the younger Warton, Mason, Russell, and one
or two writers now living.
If he had enjoyed more leisure, it is probable that he might have
written better; for he was solicitous not to lose any distinction to be
acquired by his poetry; and took care to reclaim a copy of humorous
verses, entitled, an Epistle from Thomas Hearne, which had been
attributed by mistake to his brother, among whose poems it is still
printed.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Mr. Crowe, in one of his Crewian Orations.
[2] Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, vol. ix.
[3] Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, vol. ix.
* * * * *
CHRISTOPHER ANSTEY.
An account of Christopher Anstey, written by his second son, is prefixed
to the handsome edition of his works, printed at London, in 1808. He was
born on the thirty-first of October, 1724, and was the son of Doctor
Anstey, rector of Brinkley, in Cambridgeshire, a living in the gift of
St. John's College, Cambridge; of which the Doctor had formerly been
fellow and tutor. His mother was Mary, daughter of Anthony Thompson,
Esq. of Trumpington, in the same county. They had no offspring but our
poet, and a daughter born some years before him.
His father was afflicted with a total deafness for so considerable a
portion of his life, as never to have heard the sound of his son's
voice; and was thus rendered incapable of communicating to him that
instruction which he might otherwise have derived from a parent endowed
with remarkable acuteness of understanding. He was, therefore, sent very
early to school at Bury St. Edmunds. Here he continued, under the
tuition of the Rev. Arthur Kinsman, till he was removed to Eton; on the
foundation of which school he was afterwards placed.
His studies having been completed with great credit to himself, under
Doctor George, the head-master of Eton, in the year 1742 he succeeded to
a scholarship of King's College, Cambridge, where his classical
attainments were not neglected. He was admitted in 1745 to a fellowship
of his college; and, in the next year, he took his degree of Bachelor of
Arts. He now resided chiefly in the University, where his resistance to
an innovation, attempted to be introduced into King's College, involved
him in a dispute which occasioned the degree of Master to be refused
him. That College had immemorially asserted for its members an exemption
from the performance of those public exercises demanded of the rest of
the University as a qualification for their degrees. This right was now
questioned; and it was required of the Bachelor Fellows of King's, that
they should compose and pronounce a Latin oration in the public schools.
Such an infringement of privilege was not to be tamely endured. After
some opposition made by Anstey, in common with the other junior Fellows,
the exercise in dispute was at lenth exacted. But Anstey, who was the
senior Bachelor of the year, and to whose lot it therefore fell first to
deliver this obnoxious declamation, contrived to frame it in such a
manner, as to cast a ridicule on the whole proceeding. He was
accordingly interrupted in the recitation of it, and ordered to compose
another; in which, at the same time that he pretended to exculpate
himself from his former offence, he continued in the same vein of
raillery. Though his degree was withheld in consequence of this
pertinacity, yet it produced the desired effect of maintaining for the
College its former freedom.
While an under-graduate, he had distinguished himself by his Latin
verses, called the Tripos Verses; and, in 1748, by a poem, in the same
language, on the Peace; printed in the Cambridge Collection.
His quarrel with the senior part of the University did not deprive him
of his fellowship. He was still occasionally an inmate of the College,
and did not cease to be a Fellow, till he came into the possession of
the family estate at his mother's death, in 1754.
In two years after he married Anne, third daughter of Felix Calvert,
Esq. of Albury-Hall, in Hertfordshire, and the sister of John Calvert,
Esq. one of his most intimate friends, who was returned to that and many
successive Parliaments, for the borough of Hertford. "By this most
excellent lady," says his biographer, with the amiable warmth of filial
tenderness, "who was allowed to possess every endowment of person, and
qualification of mind and disposition which could render her interesting
and attractive in domestic life, and whom he justly regarded as the
pattern of every virtue, and the source of all his happiness, he lived
in uninterrupted and undiminished esteem and affection for nearly half a
century; and by her (who for the happiness of her family is still
living) he had thirteen children, of whom eight only survive him."
This long period is little checquered with events. Having no taste for
public business, and his circumstances being easy and independent, he
passed the first fourteen years at his seat in Cambridgeshire, in an
alternation of study and the recreations of rural life, in which he took
much pleasure. But, at the end of that time, the loss of his sister gave
a shock to his spirits, which they did not speedily recover. That she
was a lady of superior talents is probable, from her having been
admitted to a friendship and correspondence with Mrs. Montague, then
Miss Robinson. The effect which this deprivation produced on him was
such as to hasten the approach, and perhaps to aggravate the violence,
of a bilious fever, for the cure of which by Doctor Heberden's advice,
he visited Bath, and by the use of those waters was gradually restored
to health.
In 1766 he published his Bath Guide, from the press of Cambridge; a
poem, which aiming at the popular follies of the day, and being written
in a very lively and uncommon style, rapidly made its way to the favour
of the public. At its first appearance, Gray, who was not easily
pleased, in a letter to one of his friends observed, that it was the
only thing in fashion, and that it was a new and original kind of
humour. Soon after the publication of the second edition, he sold the
copy-right for two hundred pounds to Dodsley, and gave the profits
previously accruing from the work to the General Hospital at Bath.
Dodsley, about ten years after his purchase, candidly owned that the
sale had been more productive to him than that of any other book in
which he had before been concerned; and with much liberality restored
the copy-right to the author.
In 1767 he wrote a short Elegy on the Death of the Marquis of Tavistock;
and the Patriot, a Pindaric Epistle, intended to bring into discredit
the practice of prize-fighting.
Not long after he was called to serve the office of high-sheriff for the
county of Cambridge. In 1770 he quitted his seat there for a house which
he purchased in Bath. The greater convenience of obtaining instruction
for a numerous family, the education of which had hitherto been
superintended by himself, was one of the motives that induced him to
this change of habitation.
The Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers appearing soon after his
arrival at Bath, and being by many imputed to a writer who had lately so
much distinguished himself by his talent for satire, he was at
considerable pains to disavow that publication; and by some lines
containing a deserved compliment to his sovereign, gave a sufficient
pledge for the honesty of his disclaimer.
In 1776, a poem entitled An Election Ball, founded on a theme proposed
by Lady Miller, who held a sort of little poetical court at her villa at
Batheaston, did not disappoint the expectations formed of the author of
the Bath Guide. It was at first written in the Somersetshire dialect,
but was afterwards judiciously stripped of its provincialism.
About 1786 he entertained a design of collecting his poems, and
publishing them together. But the painful recollections which this task
awakened, of those friends and companions of his youth who had been
separated from him by death during so long a period, made him relinquish
his intention. He committed, however, to the press, translations of some
of Gay's Fables, which had been made into Latin, chiefly with a view to
the improvement of his children; an Alcaic Ode to Doctor Jenner, on the
discovery of the Cowpock; and several short poems in his own language.
"His increasing years," to use the words of his son, "stole
inperceptibly on the even tenor of his life, and gradually lessened the
distance of his journey through it, without obscuring the serenity of
the prospect. Unimpeded by sickness, and unclouded by sorrow, or any
serious misfortune, his life was a life of temperance, of self-denial,
and of moderation, in all things; and of great regularity. He rose early
in the morning, _ante diem poscens chartas_, and was constant on
horseback at his usual hour, and in all seasons. His summers were
uniformly passed at Cheltenham, with his family, during the latter part
of his life; and upon his return to Bath in the autumn, he fell
habitually into the same unruffled scenes of domestic ease and
tranquillity, rendered every day more joyous and interesting to him by
the increase of his family circle, and the enlargement of his hospitable
table; and by many circumstances and occurrences connected with the
welfare of his children, which gave him infinite delight and
satisfaction."
At the beginning of 1805, he experienced a sudden and general failure of
his bodily faculties, and a correspondent depressure of mind. The little
confidence he placed in the power of medicine made him reluctantly
comply with the wishes of his friends, that he should take the opinion
of Doctor Haygarth. Yet he was not without hope of alleviation to his
complaints from change of air; and, therefore, removed from Bath to the
house of his son-in-law, Mr. Bosanquet, in Wiltshire. Here having at
first revived a little, he soon relapsed, and declining gradually,
expired in the eighty-first year of his age, without apparent suffering,
in the possession of his intellectual powers, and, according to the
tender wish of Pindar for one of his patrons--
[Greek: huion, psaumi, paristamenon,]
in the midst of his children.
He was buried in the parish church of Walcot, in the city of Bath, in
the same vault with his fourth daughter the wife of Rear-Admiral
Sotheby, and her two infant children.
A cenotaph has been erected to his memory among the poets of his country
in Westminster Abbey, by his eldest son, the Rev. Christopher Anstey,
with the following inscription:--
M.S.
Christopheri Anstey, Arm.
Alumni Etonensis,
Et Collegii Regalis apud Cantabrigienses olim Socii,
Poetae,
Literis elegantioribus adprime ornati,
Et inter principes Poetarum,
Qui in eodem genere floruerunt,
Sedem eximiam tenentis.
Ille annum circiter
MDCCLXX.
Rus suum in agro Cantabrigiensi
Mutavit Bathonia,
Quem locum ei praeter omne dudum arrisisse
Testis est, celeberrimum illud Poema,
Titulo inde ducto insignitum:
Ibi deinceps sex et triginta annos commoratus,
Obiit A.D. MDCCCV.
Et aetatis suae
Octogesimo primo.
To this there is an encomium added, which its prolixity hinders me from
inserting.
A painter and a poet were, perhaps, never more similar to each other in
their talents than the contemporaries Bunbury and Anstey. There is in
both an admirable power of seizing the ludicrous and the grotesque in
their descriptions of persons and incidents in familiar life; and this
accompanied by an elegance which might have seemed scarcely compatible
with that power. There is in both an absence of any extraordinary
elevation or vigour; which we do not regret, because we can hardly
conceive but that they would be less pleasing if they were in any
respect different from what they are. Each possesses a perfect facility
and command over his own peculiar manner, which has secured him from
having any successful imitator. Yet as they were both employed in
representing the fortuitous and transient follies, which the face of
society had put on in their own day, rather than in portraying the
broader and more permanent distinctions of character and manners, it may
be questioned whether they can be much relished out of their own
country, and whether even there, the effect must not be weakened as
fatuity and absurdity shall discover new methods of fastening ridicule
upon themselves. They border more nearly on farce than comedy. They have
neither of them any thing of fancy, that power which can give a new and
higher interest to the laughable itself, by mingling it with the
marvellous, and which has placed Aristophanes so far above all his
followers.
When Anstey ventures out of his own walk, he does not succeed so well.
It is strange that he should have attempted a paraphrase of St. Paul's
eulogium on Charity, after the same task had been so ably executed by
Prior. If there is anything, however, that will bear repetition, in a
variety of forms, it is that passage of scripture; and his verses though
not equal to Prior's, may still be read with pleasure.
The Farmer's Daughter is a plain and affecting tale.
His Latin verses might well have been spared. In the translation of
Gray's Elegy there is a more than usual crampness; occasioned, perhaps,
by his having rendered into hexameters the stanzas of four lines, to
which the elegiac measure of the Romans would have been better suited.
The Epistola Poetica Familiaris, addressed to his friend Mr. Bamfylde,
has more freedom. His scholarship did him better service when it
suggested to him passages in the poets of antiquity, which he has
parodied with singular happiness. Such is that imitated in one of
Simkin's Letters:
Do the gods such a noble ambition inspire?
Or a god do we make of each ardent desire?
from Virgil's
Dine hunc ardorem mentibus addunt,
Euryale? an sua cuique deus fit dira cupido?
a parody that is not the less diverting, from its having been before
gravely made by Tasso:
O dio l'inspira,
O l'uom del suo voler suo dio si face.
On the whole, he has the rare merit of having discovered a mode of
entertaining his readers, which belongs exclusively to himself.
* * * * *
WILLIAM MASON.
It is to be regretted that no one of Mason's friends has thought fit to
pay the same tribute of respect to his memory, which he had himself paid
to that of his two poetical friends, Gray and Whitehead. In this dearth
of authentic biography, we must be contented with such information
concerning him, as either his own writings, or the incidental mention
made of him by others, will furnish.
William Mason was born on the 23rd of February, 1725, at Hull, where his
father, who was vicar of St. Trinity, resided. Whether he had any other
preceptor in boyhood, except his parent, is not known.
That this parent was a man of no common attainments, appears from a poem
which his son addressed to him when he had attained his twenty-first
year, and in which he acknowledged with gratitude the instructions he
had received from him in the arts of painting, poetry, and music. In
1742, he was admitted of St. John's College, Cambridge; and there, in
1744, the year in which Pope died, he wrote Musaeus, a monody on that
poet; and Il Bellicoso and Il Pacifico, a very juvenile imitation, as he
properly calls it, of the Allegro and Penseroso. In 1745, he took his
degree of Bachelor of Arts; and in the ensuing year, with a heavy heart,
and with some fear lest he should grow old 'in northern clime,' bade
farewell to Granta in an Ode, which commemorates the virtues of his
tutor, Dr. Powell. He soon, however, returned; by his father's
permission visited London; and removing from St. John's College to
Pembroke Hall, was unexpectedly nominated Fellow of that society in
1747, when by the advice of Dr. Powell, he published Musaeus. His fourth
Ode expresses his delight at the prospect of being restored to the banks
of the Cam. In a letter to a friend written this year, he boasts that
his poem had already passed through three impressions. At the same time,
he wrote his Ode to a Water Nymph, not without some fancy and elegance,
in which his passion for the new style of gardening first shewed itself;
as his political bias did the year after in Isis, a poem levelled
against the supposed Toryism of Oxford, and chiefly valuable for having
called forth the Triumph of Isis, by Thomas Warton. To this he prefixed
an advertisement, declaring that it would never have appeared in print,
had not an interpolated copy, published in a country newspaper,
scandalously misrepresented the principles of the author. Now commenced
his intimacy with Gray, who was rather more than eight years his senior,
a disparity which, at that period of life, is apt to prevent men at
college from uniting very closely. His friend described him to Dr.
Wharton as having much fancy, little judgment, and a good deal of
modesty. "I take him," continued Gray, "for a good and well-meaning
creature; but then he is really in simplicity a child, and loves every
body he meets with: he reads little or nothing, writes abundance, and
that with a design to make his fortune by it." On reviewing this
character of himself twenty-five years after, he confessed, what cannot
be matter of surprise, that this interval had made a considerable
abatement in his general philanthropy; but denied having looked for more
emolument from his publications than a few guineas to take him to a play
or an opera. Gray's next report of him, after a year's farther
acquaintance, is, that he grows apace into his good graces, as he knows
him more; that "he is very ingenious, with great good nature and
simplicity; a little vain, but in so harmless and so comical a way, that
it does not offend one at all; a little ambitious, but withal so
ignorant in the world and its ways, that this does not hurt him in one's
opinion; so sincere and so undisguised, that no mind with a spark of
generosity would ever think of hurting him, he lies so open to injury;
but so indolent, that if he cannot overcome this habit, all his good
qualities will signify nothing at all." At this time, he published an
Ode on the Installation of the Duke of Newcastle, which his friend, who
was a laughing spectator of the ceremony, considers "the only
entertainment that had any tolerable elegance," and thinks it, "with
some little abatements, uncommonly well on such an occasion:" it was,
however, very inferior to that which he himself composed when the Duke
of Grafton was installed.
His next production (in 1751) was Elfrida, written on the model of the
ancient Greek Tragedy; a delicate exotic, not made to thrive in our
"cold septentrion blasts," and which, when it was long after transferred
to the theatre by Colman, was unable to endure the rough aspect of a
British audience. The poet complained of some trimming and altering that
had been thought requisite by the manager on the occasion; and Colman,
it is said, in return, threatened him with a chorus of Grecian
washerwomen. Matters were no better when Mason himself undertook to
prepare it for the stage.