Our last chapter was opened by a rather full sketch of Professor Wilson,
and a briefer one of Thomas Campbell--who though of higher repute as a
poet, was a far less interesting man. We then entered upon what may have
seemed a very inadequate account of the great author of Waverley--because
I presumed upon the reader’s full and ready knowledge; and because the
Minstrel’s grand stride over all the Scottish country that is worth the
seeing, and over all that domain in English Lands and Letters, which he
made his own, has been noted by scores of tourists, and by scores of
admiring commentators. You may believe me in saying--that his story was
not scrimped for lack of love; indeed, it would have been easy to riot in
talk about the lively drum-beat of his poems, or the livelier and more
engaging charms of his prose Romance--through two chapters or through ten.
But we must get on; there is a long road before us yet.
_A Start in Life._
It was somewhere about the year 1798, that a sharp-faced, youngish
Englishman--who had been curate of a small country parish down in
Wiltshire--drove, upon a pleasant June day, on a coach-top, into the old
city of Edinboro’. This clergyman had a young lad seated beside him, whom
he was tutoring; and this tutoring business enabled the curate to take a
respectable house in the city. And by reason of the respectable house, and
his own pleasant humor and intelligence, he came after a year or two to
know a great many of the better folk in Edinboro’, and was invited to
preach an occasional sermon at a small Episcopal chapel in his
neighborhood. But all the good people he met did not prevent his being
a-hungered after a young person whom he had left in the south of England.
So he took a vacation presently and fetched her back, a bride, to the
Scottish capital--having (as he said) thrown all his fortune in her lap.
This fortune was of maternal inheritance, and consisted of six well-worn
silver teaspoons. There was excellent society in Edinboro’ in that day,
among the ornaments of which was Henry Mackenzie,[26] a stately
gentleman--a sort of dean of the literary coteries, and the author of
books which it is well to know by name--_The Man of Feeling_ and _Julia de
Roubigné_--written with great painstaking and most exalted sentiment,
and--what we count now--much dreariness. Then there was a Rev. Archibald
Alison--he too an Episcopal clergyman, though Scotch to the backbone--and
the author of an ingenious, but not very pregnant book, still to be found
in old-fashioned libraries, labelled, _Alison on Taste_. Dugald Stewart
was then active, and did on one or two occasions bring his honored
presence to the little chapel to hear the preaching of the young English
curate I spoke of. And this young curate, poor as he is and with a young
wife, has an itch for getting into print; and does after a little time
(the actual date being 1800) publish a booklet, which you will hardly find
now, entitled _Six Sermons preached at Charlotte Chapel, Edinboro, by Rev.
Sydney Smith_.[27] But it was not so much these sermons, as his wit and
brightness and great range of information, which brought him into easy
intimacy with the most promising young men of the city. Walter Scott he
may have encountered odd whiles, though the novelist was in those days
bent on his hunt after Border Minstrelsy, and would have been shy of the
rampant liberalism ingrained with Smith.
But the curate did meet often, and most intimately, a certain prim,
delicate, short-statured, black-eyed, smug, ambitious, precocious young
advocate named Francis Jeffrey; and it was in a chamber of this latter--up
three pair of stairs in Buccleugh Place--that Sydney Smith, on a certain
occasion, proposed to the host and two or three other friends there
present, the establishment of a literary journal to be published
quarterly; and out of that proposition grew straightway that famous
_Edinburgh Review_ which in its covers of buff and blue has thrived for
over ninety years now--throwing its hot shot into all opposing camps of
politics or of letters. I have designated two of the arch plotters, Sydney
Smith and Jeffrey. Francis Horner[28] was another who was in at the start;
he, too, a young Scotch lawyer, who went to London on the very year of the
establishment of the journal, but writing for its early issues, well and
abundantly. Most people know him now only by the beautiful statue of him
by Chantrey, which stands in Westminster Abbey; it has a noble head, full
of intellect--full of integrity. Sydney Smith said the Ten Commandments
were writ all over his face. Yet the marble shows a tenderness of soul not
common to those who, like him, had made a profession of politics, and
entered upon a parliamentary career. But the career was short; he died in
1817--not yet forty--leaving a reputation that was spotless; had he lived,
he would have come, without a doubt, to the leadership of liberal opinion
in England. The mourning for him was something extraordinary in its reach,
and its sincerity; a remarkable man--whose politics never up-rooted his
affections, and whose study of the laws of trade did not spoil his temper,
or make him abusive. His example, and his repeated advices, in connection
with the early history of the _Review_, were always against the
personalities and ugly satire which were strong features of it in the
first years, and which had their source--very largely--in the influences
and pertinacity of another member of the _Review_ Syndicate; I mean Henry
Brougham.
_Henry Brougham._
This was another young lawyer--of Scottish birth, but of Cumberland stock;
ambitious like Jeffrey and equally clever, though in a different line; he
was ungainly and lank of limb; with a dogmatic and presuming manner, and a
noticeably aggressive nose which became afterward the handle (and a very
good handle it made) for those illustrative caricatures of Mr. Punch,
which lasted for a generation. Brougham[29] was always a debater from his
boy-days--and not a little of a bully and outlaw; precocious too--a
capital Latinist--writing a paper on Optics at eighteen, which found
publishment in the Philosophical Transactions; member of the Speculative
Society where Jeffrey and Mackintosh, and Alison were wont to go, and
where his disputatious spirit ran riot. He didn’t love to agree with
anybody; one of those men it would seem who hardly wished his dinner to
agree with him.
Yet Brougham was one of the master spirits in this new enterprise, and
became a great historic personage. His reputation was indeed rather
political and forensic, than literary, and in his writings he inclined to
scientific discussion. He had, however, a streak of purely literary
ambition, and wrote a novel at one period of his life--after he had
reached maturity--which he called a philosophic Romance.[30] Indeed this
bantling was so swaddled, in philosophic wrappings that it could have
made no noise. Very few knew of it; fewer still ever read it. He said, “It
had not enough of indecency and blasphemy in it to make it popular” (it
was written when Byron was in high repute). But the few who did read it
thought there were other reasons for its want of success.
He drifted quickly away from Edinboro’, though long keeping up his
connection with the _Review_; became famous as an advocate--notably in
connection with Queen Caroline’s trial; went into Parliament; was
eventually Lord High Chancellor, and won a place in the Peerage. He was
associated intimately, too, with great beneficent schemes--such as the
suppression of the slave trade, the establishment of the London
University, the founding of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Knowledge, and the urgence of the great Reform measures of 1832. Yet in
all these, he arrogated more than his share of the honor, wearying his
associates by incessant bickering and scolding, picking flaws in
everything not entirely his own; jealous, suspicious, conceited to the
last degree; never generous in praise of one living beside him; an
enormous worker, with sinews of iron, and on occasions (which are of
record) speaking and wrangling in the House of Commons until two of the
morning, and then going home--not to sleep--but to write a thirty-page
article for the _Edinburgh Review_. Such men make a place for themselves,
and keep it. He was an acrid debater, but a most thorough one--holding all
aspects of a case in view; never getting muddled; ready with facts; ready
with fallacies (if needed); ready for all and any interruptions; setting
them on fire by the stress of his argumentation--like carbons in an
electric circuit; ready with storms of irony and running into rough-edged
sarcasm with singular ease and sharpest appetite.
On a May evening of 1845 the present writer had the pleasure of watching
him for an hour or more in the House of Lords. He was lank, as I have
said; awkward, nervous, restless; twisting the great seals at his
watch-chain; intent upon everything; now and then sniffing the air, like a
terrier that has lost the scent; presenting a petition, in the course of
the session, in favor of some Newfoundland clients who were anxious for
more direct postal communication--who objected that their mails were sent
in a roundabout way _via_ Halifax. Whereupon Lord Stanley (afterward Earl
Derby), then Secretary for the Colonies, rose in explanation, “regretting
that his Lordship had not communicated with the Colonial Office, which had
considered the question raised; there was no communication by land; the
harbor was often closed by ice; therefore present methods were followed,”
etc. All of which was set forth with most charming grace and suavity; but
Lord Stanley was no sooner ended than the irascible Scotch peer, nettled,
as would seem, by the very graciousness of the explanation, was upon his
feet in an instant, with a sharp “M’ Lards,” that promised fun; and
thereafter came a fusillade of keenest, ironical speech--thanking the
honorable Secretary for “the vera impartant information, that as St.
John’s was upon an island, there could be no communication by land; and
perhaps his learned _Lardship_ supposes, with an acumen commensurate with
his _great_ geographic knowledge, that the sending of the mails by the way
of Halifax will have a tendency to _thaw_ the ice in the Harbor of St.
John’s,” and so on, for a ten minute’s storm of satiric and witty banter.
And then--an awkward plunge backward into his seat--a new, nervous
twirling of his watch-seals, a curious smile of self-approval, followed by
a lapse into the old nervous unrest.
There was no serenity in Brougham--no repose--scarce any dignity. His
petulance and angry sarcasm and frequent ill-nature made him a much hated
man in his latter days, and involved him in abusive tirades, which people
were slow to forgive.
_Francis Jeffrey._
As for Mr. Jeffrey, his associate on the _Review_, and for many years its
responsible editor, he was a very different man--of easy address,
courteous, gentlemanly--quite a master of deportment. Yet it was he who
ripped open with his critical knife Southey’s _Thalaba_ and the early
poems of Wordsworth. But even his victims forgot his severities in his
pleasantly magnetic presence and under the caressing suavities of his
manner. He was brisk, _débonnaire_, cheery--a famous talker; not given to
anecdotes or storytelling, but bubbling over with engaging book-lore and
poetic hypotheses, and eager to put them into those beautiful shapes of
language which came--as easily as water flows--to his pen or to his
tongue. He said harsh things, not for love of harsh things; but because
what provoked them grated on his tastes, or his sense of what was due to
Belles Lettres. One did not--after conversing with him--recall great
special aptness of remark or of epithet, so much as the charmingly even
flow of apposite and illustrative language--void of all extravagances and
of all wickednesses, too. Lord Cockburn says of his conversation:--
“The listeners’ pleasure was enhanced by the personal littleness of
the speaker. A large man [Jeffrey was very small] could scarcely
have thrown off Jeffrey’s conversational flowers without exposing
himself to ridicule. But the liveliness of the deep thoughts and the
flow of bright expressions that animated his talk, seemed so natural
and appropriate to the figure that uttered them, that they were
heard with something of the delight with which the slenderness of
the trembling throat and the quivering of the wings make us enjoy
the strength and clearness of the notes of a little bird.”[31]
The first Mrs. Jeffrey dying early in life, he married for second wife a
very charming American lady, Miss Wilkes;[32] having found
time--notwithstanding his engrossment with the _Review_--for an American
journey, at the end of which he carried home his bride. Some of his
letters to his wife’s kindred in America are very delightful--setting
forth the new scenes to which the young wife had been transported. He knew
just what to say and what not to say, to make his pictures perfect. The
trees, the church-towers, the mists, the mosses on walls, the gray
heather--all come into them, under a touch that is as light as a feather,
and as sharp as a diamond.
His honors in his profession of advocate grew, and he came by courtesy to
the title of Lord Jeffrey--(not to be confounded with that other murderous
Lord Jeffreys, who was judicial hangman for James II.). He is in
Parliament too; never an orator properly; but what he says, always clean
cut, sensible, picturesque, flowing smoothly--but rather over the surface
of things than into their depths. Accomplished is the word to apply to
him; accomplished largely and variously, and with all his accomplishments
perfectly in hand.
Those two hundred papers which he wrote in the _Edinburgh Review_ are of
the widest range--charmingly and piquantly written. Yet they do not hold
place among great and popular essays; not with Macaulay, or Mackintosh, or
Carlyle, or even Hazlitt. He was French in his literary aptitudes and
qualities; never heavy; touching things, as we have said, with a feather’s
point, yet touching them none the less surely.
Could he have written a book to live? His friends all thought it, and
urged him thereto. He thought not. There would be great toil, he said,
and mortification at the end; so he lies buried, where we leave him, under
a great tumulus of most happy _Review_ writing.
_Sydney Smith._
I return now to the clever English curate who was the first to propose the
establishment of that great Northern _Review_, out of which Lord Jeffrey
grew. Smith had written very much and well, and had cracked his jokes in a
way to be heard by all the good people of Edinboro’. But he was poor, and
his wife poor; he had his fortune to make; and plainly was not making it
there, tutoring his one pupil. So, in 1804, he struck out for London, to
carve his way to fortune. He knew few there; but his clever papers in the
_Review_ gave him introduction to Whig circles, and a social plant, which
he never forfeited. Lord and Lady Holland greatly befriended him; and he
early came to a place at the hospitable board of that famous Holland
House--of whose green quietudes we have had glimpses, in connection with
Addison, and in connection with Charles Fox--and whose mistress in the
days we are now upon, showed immense liking for the brilliant and witty
parson.
All this while, the Rev. Sydney was seeking preaching chances; but was
eyed doubtfully by those who had pulpits in their gift. He was too
independent--too witty--too radical--too hateful of religious
conventionalisms--too _Edinburgh Reviewish_. Neither was he a great
orator; rather scornful of explosive clap-trap or of noisy pulpit
rhetoric; yet he had a resonant voice--earnest in every note and trill;
often sparkling to his points in piquant, conversational way, but wanting
quick-witted ones for their reception and comprehension. He lacked too, in
a measure--what is another great resource for a preacher--the unction
which comes of deep, sustained, devotional feeling, and a conviction of
the unmatchable importance and efficacy of sacerdotal influences. I think
there was no time in his life when he would not rather beguile a wayward
soul by giving him a good, bright witticism to digest than by exhibit of
the terrors of the Law. His Gospel--by preference--was an intellectual
gospel; yet not one that reposed on creeds and formulas. His heart was
large, and his tolerance full. He was a proud Churchman indeed, and loved
to score dissenters; but delighted in the crack of his witticisms, more
than he mourned over their apostasy. Among the “evening meetings” that he
knew very much of, and specially relished, were those at his own little
homestead, with closed blinds, and a few friends, and hot-water,
and--lemons!
I do not at all mean to imply that he had habits of dissipation, or was
ever guilty of vulgar excesses. Of all such he had a wholesome horror; but
along with it, he had a strong and abiding fondness for what he counted
the good things of life, and the bright things, and the play of wit, and
the encounter of scholarly weapons.
One beautiful priestly quality, however, always shone in him: that was his
kindliness for the poor and feeble--his sympathy with them--his working
for their benefit; and though he trusted little in appeals to the mere
emotional nature, yet in his charity sermons he drew such vivid pictures
of the suffering poor folk who had come under his eye, as to put half his
auditors in tears.
His preaching in London at this early period was for the most part at an
out-of-the-way chapel, in connection with a Foundling Hospital; but he
gave a series of Philosophic Lectures at the Royal Institution--never
reckoned by himself with his good work--which were besieged by people who
came to enjoy his witty sayings. In a few years, however, he secured a
valuable church gift in Yorkshire, where he built a rectory--the ugliest
and “honest-est house” in the county--and entertained London and Scottish
friends there, and grew to enjoy--much as he could--the trees, flowers,
and lawns which he planted, and with which he coquetted, though only in a
half-hearted way. His supreme love was for cities and crowds; he counting
the country at its best only a kind of “healthy grave”; flowers, turf,
birds are very well in their way, he says, but not worth an hour of the
rational conversation only to be had where a million are gathered in one
spot.[33]
And he does at last come to the million--getting, after his Whig friends
came into power, and after the Reform revolution was over, the royal
appointment to a canonry in connection with St. Paul’s Cathedral.[34]
He also has the gift of a new country “living” in Somersetshire, where he
passes his later summer in another delightfully equipped home; and between
these two church holdings, and certain legacies conveniently falling due,
he has a large income at command, and enjoys it, and makes the poor of his
parishes enjoy it too.
He has taken a lusty hand in that passage of the Reform bill (1832), and
while its success seemed still to be threatened by the sullen opposition
of the House of Lords, he made that famous witty comparison in which he
likened the popular interest in Reform to a great storm and tide which had
set in from the Atlantic, and the opposition of the Lords, to the efforts
of Dame Partington, who lived upon the beach, and--
“who was seen at the door of her house with mops and pattens,
trundling her mop, squeezing out the sea-water, and vigorously
pushing away the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic was roused. Mrs.
Partington’s spirit was up. But I need not tell you the contest was
unequal. The Atlantic Ocean beat Mrs. Partington. She was excellent
at a slop or a puddle, but she should not have meddled with a
tempest.”
And this happy and droll comparison was met with a great roar of laughter
and of applause that ran all over England. The same tactics of witty
ridicule belonged also to his attacks upon Tractarianism and Puseyism,
which made stir in his latter days. Indeed, his bump of veneration was
very small; and his drollery creeps into his letters as into his speech.
He writes of a visit to Edinboro’:
“My old friends were glad to see me; some were turned Methodists,
some had lost their teeth, some had grown very fat, some were dying,
and, alas! many were dead. But the world is a coarse enough place;
so I talked away, comforted some, praised others, kissed some old
ladies, and passed a very riotous week.”[35]
He writes to Moore, the poet:
“DEAR MOORE: I have a breakfast of philosophers at ten, punctually,
to-morrow--‘muffins and metaphysics, crumpets and contradiction.’
Will you come?”
When Mrs. Smith is ailing at her new home in Somersetshire he says:
“Mrs. S---- has eight distinct illnesses, and I have nine. We take
something every hour, and pass the mixture between us.”
One part of his suffering comes of hay fever, as to which he says:
“Light, dust, contradiction--the sight of a dissenter--anything sets
me sneezing; and if I begin sneezing at twelve, I don’t leave off
till two, and am heard distinctly in Taunton (when the wind sets
that way), a distance of six miles.”
This does not show quite so large a reserve and continence of speech as we
naturally look for in the clerical profession; but this, and other such
do, I think, set the Rev. Sydney Smith before us, with his witty
proclivities, and his unreserve, and his spirit of frolic, as no citations
from his moral and intellectual philosophy could ever do. And I easily
figure to myself this portly, well-preserved gentleman of St. Paul’s,
fighting the weaknesses of the gout with a gold-headed cane, and picking
his way of an afternoon along the pavements of Piccadilly, with eye as
bright as a bird’s, and beak as sharp as a bird’s--regaling himself with
the thought of the dinner for which he is booked, and of the brilliant
talkers he is to encounter, with the old parry and thrust, at Rogers’s
rooms, or under the noble ceiling of Holland House.
_A Highlander._
Another writer--whose sympathies from the beginning were with the
Liberalism of the _Edinburgh Review_ (though not a contributor till some
years after its establishment) was Sir James Mackintosh.[36] A Highlander
by birth--he was at Aberdeen University--afterwards in Edinboro’, where he
studied medicine, and getting his Doctorate, set up in London--eking out a
support, which his medical practice did not bring, by writing for the
papers.
This was at the date when the recent French Revolution and its issues were
at the top of all men’s thoughts; and when Burke had just set up his
glittering bulwark of eloquence and of sentiment in his famous
“Reflections”; and our young Doctor (Mackintosh)--full of a bumptious
Whiggism, undertook a reply to the great statesman--a reply so shrewd, so
well-seasoned, so sound--that it brought to the young Scotchman (scarce
twenty-five in those days) a fame he never outlived. It secured him the
acquaintance of Fox and Sheridan, and the friendship of Burke, who in his
latter days invited the young pamphleteer, who had so strongly, yet
respectfully, antagonized his views, to pass a Christmas with him at his
home of Beaconsfield. Of course, such a success broke up the doctoring
business, and launched Mackintosh upon a new career. He devoted himself to
politics; was some time an accredited lecturer upon the law of nations;
was knighted presently and sent to Bombay on civil service. His friends
hoped he might find financial equipment there, but this hope was vain;
red-tape was an abomination to him always; cash-book and ledger
represented unknown quantities; he knew no difference between a shilling
and a pound, till he came to spend them. He was in straits all his life.
His friendship for Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, and Brougham was maintained by
correspondence, and on his return from India he became an occasional
contributor to the great Scotch _Review_ on various subjects.
His range of acquirements was most wide--too wide and too unceasing for
the persistency which goes with great single achievements. His histories
are fragments. His speeches are misplaced treatises; his treatises are
epitomes of didactic systems. When we weigh his known worth, his keenness
of intellect, his sound judgment, his wealth of language, his love for
thoroughness--which led him to remotest sources of information--his
amazing power in colloquial discourse, we are astonished at the little
store of good things he has left. There was a lack in him, indeed, of the
salient and electrical wit of Sydney Smith; a lack of the easy and
graceful volubility of Jeffrey; lack of the abounding and illuminating
rhetoric of Macaulay; but a greater lack was of that dogged, persistent
working habit which gave to Brougham his triumphs.
Yet Mackintosh was always plotting great literary designs; but his
fastidious taste, and his critical hunger for all certainties, kept him
forever in the search of new material and appliances. He was dilatory to
the last degree; his caution always multiplied delays; no general was ever
so watchful of his commissariat--none ever so unready for a “Forward,
march!” Among his forecasts was that of a great history of England. Madame
de Staël urged her friend to take possession of her villa on Lake Geneva
and, like Gibbon, write his way there to a great fame. He did for awhile
set himself resolutely to a beginning at the country home of Weedon Lodge
in Buckinghamshire--accumulated piles of fortifying MSS. and private
records; but for outcome we have only that clumsy torso which outlines the
Revolution of 1688.[37]
His plans wanted a hundred working years, instead of the thirty which are
only allotted to men. What Jeffrey left behind him marks, I think, the
full limit of his powers; the same is true of Brougham, and true probably
of Macaulay; and I think no tension and no incentive would have wrought
upon Sydney Smith to work greater and brighter things than he did
accomplish. A bishopric would only have set his gibes into coruscation at
greater tables, and perhaps given larger system to his charities. But
Mackintosh never worked up to the full level of his best power and large
learning, except in moments of conversational exaltation.
_Rest at Cannes._
Before closing our chapter we take one more swift glimpse at that
arch-plotter for Whiggism--in the early days of the _Edinburgh
Review_--whom we left fidgetting in the House of Lords, on a May evening
of 1845. He had a longer life by far than most of those who conspired for
the maintenance of the great blue and buff forerunner of British critical
journals. He was only twenty-three when he put his shoulder to the
quarterly revolutions of the _Edinburgh_--youngest of all the immediate
founders;[38] and he outlived them all and outvoiced them all in the
hurly-burly of the world.
He survived Macaulay too--an early contributor of whom we shall have more
to say--and though he was past eighty at the death of the historian, he
was alert still, and his brain vagrantly active; but the days of his early
glory and fame--when the young blusterer bolstered up Reform, and slew the
giants of musty privilege and sent “the schoolmaster abroad,” and
antagonized slavery, were gone;[39] so, too, were those palmy times when
he made the courts at Westminster ring with his championship of that poor
Queen (who, whatever her demerits--and they were many--was certainly
abominably maltreated by a husband far worse than she); times when the
populace who espoused her cause shouted bravos to Harry Brougham--times
when he was the best known and most admired man in England; all these, and
his chancellorship, and his wordy triumphs in the House of Lords, were far
behind him, and the inevitable loss of place and power fretted him
grievously. He quarrelled with old coadjutors; in Parliament he shifted
from bench to bench; in the weakness of age, he truckled to power; he
exasperated his friends, and for years together--his scoldings, his
tergiversations, and his plaid trousers made a mine of mockery for Mr.
Punch. As early as 1835-40, Lord Brougham had purchased an estate in the
south of France, in a beautiful nook of that mountain shore which sweeps
eastward from the neighborhood of Marseilles--along the Mediterranean,
and which so many travellers now know by the delights of the Cornice Road
and Monaco, and Mentone, and San Remo. The little fishing village where
years ago Lord Brougham set up his Villa of Louise Eléonore (after a
darling and lost child) is now a suburb of the fashionable resort of
Cannes. At his home there, amongst the olives, the oleanders and the
orange-trees, the disappointed and petulant ex-chancellor passed most of
the later years of his life.
Friends dropping in upon him--much doubting of their reception--found him
as the humors changed, peevish with strong regrets and recriminations, or
placid under the weight of his years, and perhaps narcotized by the
marvellous beauty of the scenes around him.
He was over ninety at his death in 1868. To the very last, a man not to be
reckoned on: some days as calm as the sea that rippled under his window;
other days full of his old unrest and petulancies. There are such men in
all times and in all societies--sagacious, fussy, vain, indefatigable,
immensely serviceable, cantankerous; we _can’t_ get on without them; we
are for ever wishing that we could.
* * * * *
In our next chapter we shall come upon a critic, who was a famous
editor--adroit, strong, waspish, bookish, and ignoble. We shall encounter
a king, too--of whom we have thus far only had glimpses--who was
jolly--excellently limbed and conditioned physically--a man “of an
infinite jest,” too, and yet as arrant a dastard--by all old-fashioned
moral measures of character--as Falstaff himself. Again we shall follow
traces of a great poet--but never a favorite one--who has left markings of
his career, strong and deep; a man who had a Greek’s delight in things of
beauty, and a Greek’s subtlety of touch; but one can fancy a faun’s ears
showing their tips upon his massive head, and (without fancy) grow
conscious of a heathenism clouding his great culture. Other two poets of
lighter mould we shall meet;--more gracious, lighter pinioned--prettily
flitting--iridescent--grace and sparkle in their utterances, but leaving
no strong markings “upon the sands of time.”