attention he paid to public opinion, in regard to his modes and habits
of life. During his long residence in his paternal seat of Eartham,
though he occasionally received friends from a distance, and especially
the votaries of literature and the fine arts, yet to the families in his
vicinity he was not easily accessible. He seems, indeed, to have been
almost an insulated mortal among them; and one who, discharging himself
from the obligation of what is commonly called _etiquette_, made it
impossible to maintain with him the reciprocities of intercourse. It is
true, indeed, that the attention of the possessor of Eartham was
considerably engrossed by meditation and study; but this increased
rather than lessened his adaptation to society, and made the effect of
his seclusion the more to be lamented." Hayley's Memoirs, vol. ii. p.
220.
As Hayley was too much extolled at the beginning of his poetical course,
so was he undeservedly neglected or ridiculed at the close of it. The
excessive admiration he at first met with, joined to that flattering
self-opinion which a solitary life is apt to engender, made him too
easily satisfied with what he had done. Perhaps he wrote worse after his
acquaintance with Cowper; for, aiming at a simplicity which he had not
power to support, he became flat and insipid. He had at no time much
force of conception or language. Yet if he never elevates he frequently
amuses his reader. His chief attraction consists in setting off some
plain and natural thought or observation, by a sparkling and ingenious
similitude, such as we commonly find in the Persian poets. To this may
be added a certain sweetness of numbers peculiar to himself, without the
spirit and edge of Pope, or the boldness of Dryden, and fashioned as I
think to his own recitation, which though musical, was somewhat too
pompous and monotonous. He was desirous that all his rhymes should be
exact; but they are sometimes so only according to his own manner of
pronouncing them. He holds about the same rank among our poets that
Bertaut does among the French; but differs from him in this; that,
whereas Bertaut was the earliest of a race analogous to the school of
Dryden and Pope, so Hayley was the latest of the correspondent class
amongst ourselves.
In one respect he is deserving of most honourable notice. During the
course of a long literary life, I doubt whether he was ever provoked to
use a single word of asperity or sarcasm towards any of his
contemporaries. This was praise which alone ought to have exempted him
from the harsh and unmerited censure of Porson, by whom he was called
Criticorum et Poetarum pessimus. He sometimes on the other hand,
indulged himself too much in a lavish and indiscriminate commendation of
contemporary writers. But from whatever might appear like flattery of
the great, he scrupulously abstained. When the Princess Charlotte
visited him at Felpham, he would not present some verses he had written
on her, lest he should be thought capable of that meanness.
His Essays on Painting, History, and Poetry, contain much information
that may be useful to young artists and students. That on Sculpture is
very inferior to the rest; as the Triumph of Music is to the Triumphs of
Temper. The last of these is a poem that still continues to interest a
class of readers, whose studies are intimately connected with the
happiness and well being of society. The design of it, which is to shew
the advantages of self-control to the mind of a well-educated girl, is
much to be commended. The machinery though it required no great effort
in the production, yet suffices to give some relief to the story. It has
been remarked that the trials of the Heroine are too insignificant. But
of one of them, at least, the calumny in the newspaper, this cannot
properly be said. Nor would the purpose of the writer have been so well
answered, if he had been more serious, and had uttered his oracles from
behind a graver mask.
The taste which has been lately excited amongst us for Spanish and
Italian literature, after having slept nearly since the age of
Elizabeth, may be attributed in a great measure to the influence of his
example. Gray, Hurd, and the two Wartons, had done something towards
awakening it, but the spell was completed by him. The decisive impulse
was given by the copious extracts from the great poets in those
languages, which he inserted in the notes to his Essay on Epic Poetry,
and which he accompanied by spirited translations. Lord Holland, the
best informed and most elegant of our writers on the subject of the
Spanish theatre, declared that he had been induced to learn that
language by what Hayley had written concerning the poet Ercilla.
I have heard his Greek scholarship questioned in consequence of an error
which, in his Epistles on History, he has made in the quantity of the
word Olorus, the name of the father of Thucydides; but from a casual
mistake of this sort, no decisive inference can be drawn.
There is little knowledge of human life and character to be gained from
his writings. He had seen mankind chiefly through the medium of books,
and those such as did not represent them very faithfully to him, that
is, in ordinary plays and novels. Indeed he appeared to consider the
real affairs of life in which he was concerned much in the light of a
romance, and himself and his friends as so many personages acting in it,
all meeting with marvellous adventures at every turn, and all endowed
with admirable qualities, to which their petty frailties served only as
foils. It is impossible in reading his memoirs to avoid smiling at the
importance he attaches to very ordinary occurrences. I am not sure
whether it was not this propensity that led him to magnify his own
distresses in living with his first wife. That lady I well recollect to
have been lively and elegant in her manners, and much addicted to
literary pursuits, of which she gave a proof in translating Madame de
Lambert's Essay on Friendship. Her excessive zeal for her husband's
reputation as an author, he has bantered with some humour in the play of
the Mausoleum, where Mrs. Rumble, the wife of a poet is introduced:
Who crows o'er her husband's poetical eggs.
The character of Rumble in the same play appeared so evidently designed
for Johnson, though the author disclaimed that intention, that Boswell,
when he read it on its first coming out, at Anna Seward's, exclaimed,
"It is we. It is we." Trope, who
Talks in a high strutting style of the stars,
Of the eagle of Jove, and the chariot of Mars,
was meant for Mason; and by Facil,
Whose verse is the thread of tenuity,
A fellow distinguish'd by flippant fatuity,
Who nonsense and rhyme can incessantly mingle,
A poet--if poetry's only a jingle,
he intended to represent himself.
The name of Facil was but too appropriate. The slender thread of his
verse was hastily and slightly spun.
His comedies are adapted to the entertainment of those readers only who
have formed their taste on the French drama. His tragedies are some of
the most endurable we have in what a lively modern critic[4] has termed
the rhetorical style. Yet he had some skill in moving compassion.
His diction, both in poetry and prose, is vitiated by the frequent
recurrence of certain hyperbolical expressions, which he applies on
almost all occasions.
He was particularly fond of composing epitaphs, of which, as I remember,
he shewed me a manuscript book full. One of these on Henry Hammond, the
parish clerk at Eartham, is among the best in the language. It is
inserted in the Memoirs which Hayley wrote of his son.
An active spirit in a little frame,
This honest man the path of duty trod;
Toil'd while he could, and, when death's darkness came,
Sought in calm hope his recompense from God.
His sons, who loved him, to his merit just,
Raised this plain stone to guard their parent's dust.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Nichols's Illustrations of Literature, vol. iv. p. 742.
[2] In a similar sketch from the pen of the Rev. Samuel Greatheed,
referring to an earlier period, it is stated that "he usually rose
and took a dish of coffee at four A.M.," and that "while dressing, he
most frequently composed a few stanzas of a devotional turn." This
practice of early rising he continued many years after the Editor
became acquainted with him, walking in his garden, even in winter,
and when the ground was covered with snow, with a lantern in his
hand, some hours before daylight; and repeatedly throwing up the
sash of his friend's sleeping room, on the ground floor, to give him
the benefit of the morning air. _Note by Doctor Johnson_.
[3] To the best of his recollection, the Editor never saw him abroad
without an umbrella; which in fine weather he used as a parasol, to
preserve his eyes. He even rode with it on horseback, a very awkward
operation, considering the high-spirited animals that composed his
stud, and the constitutional malady in his hip-joint, which, in
addition to his weight (for he was a remarkably strong-built man),
and his never riding without military spurs, reduced his danger of
falling almost to a certainty, when he opened his umbrella without
due precaution. But he was a stranger to fear in equestrian matters,
and always mounted his horse again, as soon as he could be caught.
The Editor was once riding gently by his side, on the stony beach of
Bognor, when the wind suddenly reversing his umbrella, as he
unfolded it, his horse, with a sudden but desperate plunge, pitched
him on his head in an instant. Providentially he received no hurt,
and some fishermen being at hand, the plunging steed was stopped at
a gate, and being once more subjected to his rider, took him home in
safety. On another occasion, in the same visit of the Editor, he was
tost into the air on the Downs, at the precise moment when an
interesting friend, whom they had just left, being apprehensive of
what would happen, was anxiously viewing him from her window through
a telescope.
These anecdotes may serve to illustrate that _determined_ feature of
his character, which has been already noticed, and which impelled
him, contrary to the advice of his friends, to persevere in a
favourite, though perilous exercise, even at the manifest hazard of
his life. At length, however, they prevailed; and for some years
before he died, he gave up riding on horseback altogether. _Note by
Dr. Johnson_.
[4] My friend Mr. Darley, _MS. addition_.--ED.
* * * * *
SIR WILLIAM JONES.
The life of Sir William Jones has been written by his friend Lord
Teignmouth with that minuteness which the character of so illustrious
and extraordinary a man deserved. He was born in London, on the
twenty-eighth of September, 1746. His father, whose Christian name he
bore, although sprung immediately from a race of yeomen in Anglesea,
could yet, like many a Cambro-Briton beside, have traced his descent, at
least in a maternal line, from the ancient princes of Wales. But what
distinguished him much more was, that he had attained so great a
proficiency in the study of mathematics as to become a teacher of that
branch of science in the English metropolis, under the patronage of Sir
Isaac Newton, and rose to such reputation by his writings, that he
attracted the notice and esteem of the powerful and the learned, and was
admitted to the intimacy of the Earls of Hardwicke, and Macclesfield;
Lord Parker, President of the Royal Society; Halley; Mead; and Samuel
Johnson. By his wife, Mary, the daughter of a cabinet-maker in London,
he had two sons, one of whom died an infant, and a daughter. In three
years after the birth of the remaining son, the father himself died, and
left the two children to the protection of their mother. An
extraordinary mark of her presence of mind, sufficiently indicated how
capable this mother was of executing the difficult duty imposed on her
by his decease. Dr. Mead had pronounced his case, which was a polypus on
the heart, to be a hopeless one; and her anxious precautions to hinder
the fatal intelligence from reaching him were on the point of being
defeated by the arrival of a letter of condolence and consolation from
an injudicious but well-meaning friend, when, on discovering its
purport, she had sufficient address to substitute the lively dictates of
her own invention for the real contents of the epistle, and by this
affectionate delusion not merely to satisfy the curiosity but to cheer
the spirits of her dying husband.
So great was her solicitude for the improvement of her son, that she
declined the pressing instances of the Countess of Macclesfield to
reside under her roof, lest she should be hindered from attending
exclusively to that which was now become her main concern. To the many
inquiries which the early vivacity of the boy prompted him to put to
her, the invariable answer she returned was, _read and you will know_.
This assurance, added to the other means of instruction, from which her
fondness, or more probably her discernment, induced her to exclude every
species of severity, were so efficacious that in his fourth year he was
able to read at sight any book in his own language. Two accidents
occurred to hinder this rapid advancement from proceeding. Once he
narrowly escaped being consumed by flames from having fallen into the
fire, while endeavouring to scrape down some soot from the chimney of a
room in which he had been left alone; and was rescued only in
consequence of the alarm given to the servants by his shrieks. At
another time, his eye was nearly put out by one of the hooks of his
dress, as he was struggling under the hands of the domestic who was
putting on his clothes. From the effects of this injury his sight never
completely recovered.
In his fifth year he received a strong impression from reading the
twentieth chapter of the Apocalypse. The man must have a cold
imagination who would deny that this casual influence might have first
disclosed not only the lofty and ardent spirit, but even that insatiable
love of learning, by which he was afterwards distinguished above all his
contemporaries. Amidst the general proscription of reading adapted to
excite wonder, that germ of knowledge, in the minds of our children, it
is lucky that the Bible is still left them.
At the end of his seventh year he was placed under the tuition of Dr.
Thackeray, the master of Harrow school; but had not been there two years
before a fracture of his thigh bone, that happened in a scramble among
his play-fellows, occasioned another suspension of his studies. During
the twelvemonth which he now passed at home with his mother, he became
so conversant with several writers in his own language, especially
Dryden and Pope, that he set himself about making imitations of them.
On his return to Harrow, no allowance was made for the inevitable
consequences of this interruption; he was replaced in the class with
those boys whose classical learning had been progressive while his was
stationary, or rather retrograde, and unmerited chastisement was
inflicted on him for his inferiority to those with whom he had wanted
the means of maintaining an equality. Impelled either by fear, by shame,
or by emulation, he laboured hard in private to repair his losses: of
his own accord recurred to the rudiments of the grammar; and was so
diligent that he speedily outstripped all his juvenile competitors.
In his twelfth year he entered into a scheme for representing a play in
conjunction with his schoolfellows; but instead of seeking his Dramatis
Personae among the heroes of Homer, as Pope had done in his boyhood,
Jones, by a remarkable effort of memory, committed to paper what he
retained of Shakspeare's Tempest, which he had read at his mother's; and
himself sustained the part of Prospero in that Comedy. Meanwhile, his
poetical faculty did not lie dormant. He turned into English verse all
Virgil's Eclogues and several of Ovid's Epistles; and wrote a Tragedy on
the fable of Meleager, which was acted during the holidays by himself
and his comrades, and in which he sustained the character of the hero. A
short specimen of the drama is preserved. The language brings to our
recollection that of the Mock Tragedy in Hamlet.
When the other boys were at their sports, Jones continued to linger over
his book, or, if he mingled in their diversions, his favourite objects
were still uppermost in his thoughts; he directed his playmates to
divide the fields into compartments to which he gave the names of the
several Grecian republics; allotted to each their political station; and
"wielding at will the fierce democracies," arranged the complicated
concerns of peace and war, attack and defence, councils, harangues, and
negociations. Dr. Thackeray was compelled to own that "if his pupil were
left naked and friendless on Salisbury plain, he would yet find his way
to fame and riches."
On the resignation of that master, the management of the school devolved
on Dr. Sumner, by whom Jones, then in his fifteenth year, was
particularly distinguished. Such was his zeal, that he devoted whole
nights to study; and not contented with applying himself at school to
the classical languages, and during the vacations to the Italian and
French, he attained Hebrew enough to enable him to read the Psalms in
the original, and made himself acquainted with the Arabic character.
Strangers, who visited Harrow, frequently inquired for him by the
appellation of the great scholar.
Some of his compositions from this time to his twentieth year, which he
collected and entitled Limon,[1] in imitation of the ancients, are
printed among his works. A young scholar who should now glance his eye
over the first chapter, containing speeches from Shakspeare and
Addison's Cato translated into Greek iambics on the model of the Three
Tragedians, would put aside the remainder with a smile of complacency at
the improvement which has since been made in this species of task under
the auspices of Porson.
His mother was urged by several of the legal profession, who interested
themselves in his welfare, to place him in the office of a special
pleader: but considerations of prudence, which represented to her that
the course of education necessary to qualify him for the practice of the
law was exceedingly expensive and the advantages remote, hindered her
from acquiescing in their recommendation; at the same time that his own
inclination and the earnest wishes of his master concurred in favour of
prosecuting his studies at college. Which of the two universities should
have the credit of perfecting instruction thus auspiciously commenced
was the next subject of debate. But the advice of Dr. Glasse, then a
private tutor at Harrow, prevailing over that of the head master, who,
by a natural partiality for the place of his own education would have
given the preference to Cambridge, he was in 1764 admitted of University
College in Oxford, whither his mother determined to remove her
residence, either for the purpose of superintending his health and
morals, or of enjoying the society of so excellent a son.
Before quitting school he presented to his friend Parnell, nephew of the
poet, and afterwards Chancellor of the Exchequer in Ireland, a
manuscript volume of English verses, consisting, among other pieces, of
that essay which some years after he moulded into his Arcadia; and of
translations from Sophocles, Theocritus, and Horace. If the
encouragement of Dr. Sumner had not been overruled by the dissuasion of
his more cautious friends, he would have committed to the press his
Greek and Latin compositions, among which was a Comedy in imitation of
the style of Aristophanes, entitled Mormo. Like many other lads whose
talents have unfolded in all their luxuriance under the kindness of an
indulgent master, he experienced a sudden chill at his first
transplantation into academic soil. His reason was perplexed amid the
intricacies of the school logic, and his taste revolted by the barbarous
language that enveloped it.
On the 31st of October he was unanimously elected to one of the four
scholarships founded by Sir Simon Bennet. But as he had three seniors,
his prospect of a fellowship was distant; and he was anxious to free his
mother from the inconvenience of contributing to his support. His
disgust for the University, however, was fortunately not of long
continuance. The college tutors relieved him from an useless and irksome
attendance on their lectures, and judiciously left the employment of his
time at his own disposal. He turned it to a good account in perusing the
principal Greek historians and poets, together with the whole of Lucian
and of Plato; writing notes, and exercising himself in imitations of his
favourite authors as he went on. In order to facilitate his acquisition
of the Arabic tongue, more particularly with regard to its
pronunciation, he engaged a native of Aleppo, named Mirza, whom he met
with in London, to accompany him to Oxford, and employed him in
re-translating the Arabian Nights' Entertainments into their original
language, whilst he wrote out the version himself as the other dictated,
and corrected the inaccuracies by the help of a grammar and lexicon. The
affinity which he discovered between this language and the modern
Persian, induced him to extend his researches to the latter dialect; and
he thus laid the foundation of his extraordinary knowledge in oriental
literature.
During the vacations he usually resorted to London, where he was
assiduous in his attendance on the schools of Angelo, for the sake of
accomplishing himself in the manly exercises of fencing and riding; and,
at home, directed his attention to modern languages; and familiarised
himself with the best writers in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese:
"thus," he observed, "with the fortune of a peasant, he gave himself the
education of a prince."
The year after his entrance at college, he accepted a proposal that was
made him to undertake the education of Lord Althorpe, then a child about
seven years old; and for that purpose spent much of his time at
Wimbledon, where he composed many of his English poems, and studied
attentively the Hebrew Bible, particularly the prophetical writings, and
the book of Job.
In the summer of 1766, a fellowship of University College unexpectedly
became vacant; and being conferred on Jones, secured him the enjoyment
of that independence which he had so much desired. With independence he
seems to have been satisfied; for, on his return to Wimbledon, he
declined an offer made him by the Duke of Grafton, then first Lord of
the Treasury, of the place of interpreter for eastern languages. The
same answer which conveyed his refusal recommended in earnest terms his
friend Mirza as one fitted to perform the duties of the office, but the
application remained unnoticed; and he regretted that his inexperience
in such matters had prevented him from adopting the expedient of
nominally accepting the employment for himself, and consigning the
profits of it to the Syrian.
In 1767 he began his treatise De Poesi Asiatica, on the plan of Lowth's
Praelectiones, and composed a Persian grammar for the use of a
school-fellow, who was about to go to India. His usual course of study was
for a short time interrupted by an attendance on Earl Spencer, the father
of his pupil, to Spa. The ardour of his curiosity as a linguist made him
gladly seize the opportunity afforded him by this expedition of
obtaining some knowledge of German. Nor was he so indifferent to
slighter accomplishments as not to avail himself of the instructions of
a celebrated dancing master at Aix-la-Chapelle. He had before taken
lessons from Gallini in that trifling art. From a pensioner at Chelsea
he had learnt the use of the broadsword. He afterwards made an attempt,
in which, however, he does not seem to have persevered, to become a
performer on the national instrument of his forefathers, the harp.
Ambition of such various attainments reminds us of what is related
concerning the Admirable Crichton, and Pico of Mirandola.