CICERO and his daughter, Tullia, enjoyed an extraordinary friendship.
From all the hints left us, it is to be gathered that Tullia was a
woman of sweet and noble character. It is certain that she was most
affectionately devoted to her father; and that she had
accomplishments of knowledge and taste, qualifying her to be his
companion and his delight in his age and grief. It is affecting to
read how eagerly, on his recall from exile, she hurried to Brundusium
to throw herself into his arms. She died at about thirty-two. He was
thrown into a state of lamentable prostration. Turn where he would in
his inconsolable sorrow, engage in whatever he might, tears
constantly overtook him. His friends, Atticus, Csar, Brutus,
Sulpicius, and others, wrote letters of sympathy to him. He retired
to one of country-seats. Seeking the solace of solitude, he buried
himself every morning in the thickest of the wood, and came not out
till evening. In his former reverses, he says he could turn to one
place for shelter and peace. "A daughter I had, in whose sweet
conversation I could drop all my cares and troubles.
But now every thing is changed." "It is all over with me, Atticus: I
feel it more than ever now that I have lost the only being who still
bound me to life." He purposed to erect on a commanding site, as a
monument to his dear Tullia, a splendid temple, which, as though
dedicated to some god, should survive all the changes of ownership,
and bear to distant futurity the memory of her worth, and of his
sorrow for her. For a long time, he could think of nothing but the
details of this plan, on which he intended to lavish the bulk of his
fortune. He avoided society for almost a year, and never recovered
from the wound which the loss of her gave his heart. Margaret Roper
was the pride and darling of her father, Sir Thomas More, whom in
return she venerated and loved with the whole depth of her heart. The
beauty of their relation cannot be forgotten by those who have read
the life of the great English martyr. It was by her brave duteousness
that his mutilated body was buried in the chancel of Chelsea Church.
His head, exposed upon a pole on London Bridge for fourteen days, was
ordered to be thrown into the Thames; but Margaret rescued it,
preserved it in a leaden box, and directed that, after her death, it
should be placed with her in the grave.
One of the loveliest examples of this class of friendships is
unveiled by William Wirt in the exquisite memoir he wrote of his
daughter, Agnes, after her death at the early age of sixteen. The
example is closely parallel to that of the famous and good John
Evelyn, who, apostrophizing his daughter, Mary, in mournful memory,
says, "Thy affection, duty, and love to me was that of a friend as
well as of a child." So Wirt writes of his Agnes: "To me she was not
only the companion of my studies, but the sweetener of my toils. The
painter, it is said, relieved his aching eyes by looking on a curtain
of green. My mind, in its hour of deepest fatigue, required no other
refreshment than one glance at my beloved child, as she sat beside
me." Not many fathers and daughters have been fonder or faster
friends than Aaron and Theodosia Burr. The character and memory of
Burr, in the popular imagination, have been blackened beyond the hope
of bleaching. Of course, he was a man mixed of good and bad; and was
not such an unmitigated devil as some would paint him. But his
selfishness, sensuality, recklessness, and degradation give, in one
respect, a peculiar interest and instructiveness to the enthusiastic
friendship subsisting between him and his daughter. It is no disproof
of the need of the great virtues to serve as the basis of a true and
enduring friendship. It proves that a sincere love, even in an
unclean and depraved soul, purges it, and adorns it with meritorious
charms and real worth in that relation. However bad Burr may have
been in other relations, to his daughter he was ever good, gentle,
and wise, unwearied in his devotion, and clothed with many
fascinations. Good persons may sometimes be ill-consorted and odious
to each other, their intercourse full of jars and frictions. Bad
persons may sometimes be so related as to show each other only their
good qualities, and be happy friends, while all around are detesting
them. In one of her letters to her father, Theodosia speaks of his
wonderful fortitude, and goes on to say, "Often, after reflecting on
this subject, you appear to me so elevated above all other men; I
contemplate you with such a strange mixture of humility, admiration,
reverence, love, and pride, that very little superstition would be
necessary to make me worship you as a superior being; such enthusiasm
does your character excite in me. When I afterward revert to myself,
how insignificant do my best qualities appear! My vanity would be
greater, if I had not been placed so near you; and yet my pride is in
our relationship. I had rather not live than not be the daughter of
such a man." Burr, on the evening before his duel with Hamilton,
wrote to his daughter a long letter, in which he said, "I am indebted
to you, my dearest Theodosia, for a very great portion of the
happiness which I have enjoyed in this life. You have completely
satisfied all that my heart and affections had hoped, or even
wished." Unhappily he slew his antagonist, and himself survived to
carry a load of deadly and universal obloquy which would have crushed
to the earth almost any other man.
Theodosia set sail from Charleston in a little vessel, which was
never heard of again. It was supposed to have foundered off Cape
Hatteras. The loss of his daughter, Burr said, "severed him from the
human race." Certainly, from that time to the end of his prolonged
and dishonored life, he never was wholly what he had been before. An
inner spring had been broken, and the purest contents of his heart
had escaped through the breach. Parton very fitly dedicates to the
memory of Theodosia his highly readable and charitable life of her
father. That brilliant lawyer, the late Rufus Choate, remarked, on
reading this life, that there did not seem to have been in Burr a
single glimpse of so much as the last and poorest tribute vice pays
to virtue, not even the affectation of a noble sentiment. But we may
claim with justice, that the friendship with his daughter is one
bright place in that frightfully stained, one golden gleam on that
dismally mutilated, career. Mention should be made of Richard and
Maria Edgeworth, among those whose union as father and daughter, was
merged in a superior fellowship as friends, in a more intimate and
delightful junction of ideas, sentiments, and labors. Their united
lives, their mutual devotion, their shared counsels, pleasures, and
tasks, form one of the finest of domestic pictures, a model of a
Christian household. In the preface to the life of himself which he
left for Maria to complete and publish, he says, "If my daughter
should perceive any extenuation or any exaggeration, it would wound
her feelings, she would be obliged to alter or omit, and her
affection for me would be diminished: can the public have a better
surety than this for the accuracy of these memoirs?" And Maria says,
"Few, I believe, have ever enjoyed such happiness, or such
advantages, as I have had in the instructions, society, and unbounded
confidence and affection of such a father and such a friend. He was,
in truth, ever since I could think or feel, the first object and
motive of my mind." One of the most remarkable friendships of this
sort was that of Madame de Staël and her father. Necker was a kind,
good, and able man, who occupied a distinguished position and played
a prominent part in his time. But the genius of his impassioned
daughter transfigured him into a hero and a sage. Her attachment to
him was, in personal relations, the dominant sentiment of her life.
With distinct comprehension and glowing sympathy, she entered into
his thoughts and fortunes. She was to him an invaluable source of
strength, counsel, and consolation.
An instance, partly ludicrous, illustrates her tender solicitude for
him; and it also shows how the mere idea of an event has, with a
person of her genius, the power of the actual occurrence. The
coachman chanced to overset and considerably damage the empty family
carriage. When told of it, she was indifferent until the idea of
danger to her father struck her; then, exclaiming, "My God! had M.
Necker been in it, he might have been killed," she rushed to the
luckless driver, and burst on him with a storm of denunciations,
mixed with expostulatory precautions as to the future. When her
father died, Madame de Staël was plunged into despairing grief, from
which she aroused herself for a vain effort to make the public share
in the profound admiration and love she felt for him. It was one of
her greatest trials that she could not succeed in this fond
undertaking. Perhaps she was not so much deceived in her exalted
estimate of her father as has been supposed. But he lacked that
egotistical dash, those impulsive displays of daring and brilliancy,
which are needed to make a sensation, and to secure quickly a great
and lasting popularity. During the thirteen years that she survived
him, the thought of him seemed constantly present; and she often
said, "My father is waiting for me on the other shore." The touching
words, addressed to Chateaubriand a little while before she crossed
over, in which she summed up her life, were these: "I have always
been the same, intense and sad. I have loved God, my father, and
liberty." The unhappy Letitia Landon found a congenial friend in her
father, the early loss of whom was the first in the sad series of her
misfortunes. She closes her poem of "The Troubadour" with an
affecting tribute to his memory:
My heart hath said no name but thine
Shall be on this last page of mine.
Such examples as the foregoing, showing what a treasure of help and joy
the friendship of parent and child may yield to them, should teach us
to think more of it, and to cultivate with greater fidelity the
conditions of so blessed an experience.