We parted company, in our last chapter, with Dr. Johnson, of whose work
and career every educated person should know; we parted company also,
with that more lovable, though less important man, Dr. Goldsmith--of
whom it would have been easy and pleasant to talk by the hour; we all
know him so well; we all would have wished him so well--if wishes could
have counted. And as we sidle into the Poets' corner of Westminster
Abbey--on whatever visit we make there--we put a friendly eagerness
into our search for the medallion effigy of Goldsmith over the door,
which we do not put into our search for a great many entombed under
much greater show of marble. But Goldsmith's bones do not lie in the
Abbey; he was buried somewhere under the wing of the Old Temple
Church--the particular locality {145} being subject of much doubt;
while the memorial statue of Johnson--his body lying in
Westminster--must be sought for, still farther down in the city, under
the arches of St. Paul's Cathedral.
Garrick has what we might almost call melodramatic monument among the
marbles of the Poets' corner; Reynolds has abiding memorials in the
dashes of mellowed coloring and in the tender graces of those cherished
portraits, some of which belong to every considerable gallery of
England; Burke and Gibbon lie in quiet country places--the first near
to his old home of Beaconsfield; and the historian among those southern
downs of Sussex which look upon the Channel waters; his books may never
have touched us to tenderness; but he bows his way out of our presence,
with the grandest history belonging to the eighteenth century for a
memorial.
_A Scottish Historian._
[Sidenote: David Hume.]
We must not forget that hard-headed man who wrote Hume's History of
England, who was born twenty-two years before the historian of Rome,
{146} and died in the year in which Gibbon was reaping his first
rewards. He[1] was a sceptic too of even more aggressive type than
Gibbon--was, like him, somewhat ungainly in person, and though of
larger build and of coarser mould, possessed a cheery good humor, and a
bright colloquial wit which made him sure of good friends and many.
Like Gibbon he lived and died a bachelor: like him, he leaned toward
continental ways of living, and like him garnered some of his highest
honors in France. Of course you know his History of England--where it
begins, where it ends--but we do not press examination on these points.
In most editions you will find--(it should be found in all)--among the
foreleaves, a short autobiographic sketch, written in his most neat,
perspicuous, and engaging manner, which is well worth the close
attention of every reader, even if he do not wade through the royal
extensions of the History. You will learn there that David Hume was
born in that pleasant border land of Scotland which is watered {147} by
the Tweed, the Yarrow, and the Teviot--where we found the poet Thomson.
North of his boyish home stretched Lammermoor, and westward within easy
tramping distance lay Lauderdale; but in that day these names had not
been illuminated by a touch of the magician's wand, nor was his mind
ever keenly alive to the beauties of landscape. Hume's childhood knew
only great stretches of brown heather, bounded by bare bluish-gray
heights, with the waves of the German Sea pounding on the rocky,
desolate shores--where stands the ruin of Fast Castle, the original of
"Wolf's Crag" of the Master of Ravenswood.
You will learn further from that precious bit of autobiography--which
he calls with a naive directness, "My Own Life"--that he was younger
son of a good family; that he came to fairish education thereabout, and
in Edinboro'; that his family would have pushed him to the study of
law; but he--loving philosophy and literature better, and in search of
some method of increasing his means for their pursuit--wandered
southward to study business in the city of Bristol. This was a place
of much greater commercial importance, {148} relatively, then than now:
but Bristol merchandizing presently disgusts him; and husbanding
carefully his small moneys, he goes across the Channel--to study
philosophy, while practising the economies of French provincial life in
a small town of central France. A few years thereafter he prints his
first book in London on _Human Nature_; and he says it fell "dead-born"
from the press; but he is still sanguine and cheery; writes other
essays after his return from France--hovering between Edinboro' and his
old Berwickshire home; studying Greek the while, and for a year
serving, as secretary, the crazy Marquis of Annandale. Shortly
thereafter (1746) began his official connection with the General St.
Clair, involving a new and pleasanter experience of European life. On
his return, after three years, he goes to cover again in his old
Berwickshire home, where he elaborates the _Political
Discourses_--setting forth those broad views of trade and commerce,
which came to larger illustration later, under the pen of his good
friend Adam Smith.[2]
{149}
[Sidenote: Hume's England.]
In 1751 he removed from country to town--the true scene he says "for a
man of letters," and established himself in a small flat of one of
those lofty houses which still look down over the New City and the
valley gardens, and lived there comfortably--with his sister for help
mate--on some L50 a year. He tried vainly for a professorship in one
of the Scottish universities, but was counted too unsafe a man. As
Custodian of the Advocates' Library of Edinboro', a place which he
secured shortly after--largely through the influence of lady
friends--he came to that familiar fellowship with books which prompted
him to the making of his History of England. He does not begin at the
beginning: he tells of the Stuarts first; then goes back to the Tudors;
and then back of these to the dull (dull to him and dull to us)
Anglo-saxon start point: Stubbs and Freeman had not in that {150} day
made their explorative forays and set up their scaffoldings.
Hume's ambition was high and sensitive: he was intensely disappointed
with the reception of the earlier volumes of his history. "I was
discouraged," he says, "and had not the war been at that time breaking
out between France and England, I had certainly retired to some
provincial town of the former kingdom, have changed my name, and never
more have returned to my native country."
But his writings had qualities which were sure in the end to provoke
the reading and discussion of them by thoughtful men and women. He is
known wider than he thinks; his books have been translated; Montesquieu
has corresponded with him; so has a certain Mme. de Boufflers--a pet of
the Paris salons--who has written gushingly of her admiration; and the
stolid, good-humored, cool-blooded Hume has responded in his awkward
manner; other missives, with growing confidences have passed; she
always clever, and witty and full of adulation; and he clumsy and
clever, and with such tenderness as an elephant might show toward {151}
a gazelle. And the shining side of life opens bewitchingly upon him
when he goes to Paris in 1763 as an attache to the Embassy of Lord
Hertford.
[Sidenote: Hume in Paris.]
In place of Scotch kerseys, his square, massive figure is set off with
the golden broidery of a diplomat. His reputation as a philosopher and
as a historian had been confirmed by all the literary magnates of
Paris; and the queens of society in that gay capital, Mme. de Boufflers
among them, pounced upon the big Scotch David, to be led away through
the pretty martyrdoms of the salon. And he bore it bravely; he had
feared, indeed, that his inaptitudes and inexperience would have made
such a life irksome to one of his quiet habits; but he good-humoredly
and complacently accepted the sacrifice and came to love the
intoxicating incense. Sterne, who happened in Paris in those days,
says that Hume was the lion of the city; no assemblage was complete
without his presence. Yet he did not lose his cool philosophic poise.
He carried his good humor everywhere, and an indifference that made him
engaging; if arrows of Cupid were launched at him, they did not pierce
through the wrappings of his thick Scotch phlegm.
{152}
Mme. d'Epinay tells a good story of these times about his taking part
in some tableau where he was to personate an Eastern sovereign, seated
between two beautiful Circassian damsels, to whom he was expected to
show devotional assiduities of speech. But the frigid philosopher,
banked in between those feminine piles of silk and jewels, only rubs
his hands, slaps his knees, purses up his mouth, and says over and
over, in his inconsequent French,--"Eh bien, Mesdemoiselles, vous
voila! vous voila donc! Eh bien, nous voici!" Whereat we may be sure
that his pretty companions let fall slily a disparaging "_qu'il est
bete!_"--As if the man who had traced to their ultimate issues the
subtleties of the _Principles of Morals_ could parry and thrust with
the pretty conversational foils of a Pompadour!
[Sidenote: David Hume.]
It chanced that by the unexpected withdrawal of Lord Hertford, Hume was
for a time chief of the Embassy, and for the first and last time (in so
full a sense) did a historian of England thus become British Ambassador
to the Court of France. But Hume does not love the English or England;
he resents their neglect of him; he never {153} forgets that he is a
Scotsman; it twangs in his speech; it twangs louder in his heart; he
would like to live in that pleasant country of France:--"They are all
kind to me here," he says; "but not one of a thousand in all England
would care a penny's worth if I broke my neck to-morrow." And though
his reputation is now largely upon the growth at home, still he is not
pleasantly _lie_ with the masters. Somewhat later, when by another
unexpected good turn he is made Under-Secretary of State and has
official position in London, he writes to Dr. Blair, of Edinboro', who
has offered to give him a letter to Bishop Percy--"I thank you, but it
would be impracticable for me to cultivate his friendship, as men of
letters have here no place of rendezvous; and are indeed sunk and
forgot in the general torrent of the world." And yet this was at a
date (1763), when the Turk's Head gathering was all alive, when Sterne
had recently published the last volume of his _Tristram_; when poor
Smollett[3] (of {154} _Roderick Random_ fame) has won success by a
flimsy, but popular continuation of Hume's History; when the _Vicar of
Wakefield_ was fresh (though as yet unprinted); when Mason and Gray and
Warburton and Johnson were all sounding their trumpets. With such
feelings of alienation it is not strange that Hume did not nestle into
the hearts of great Londoners as he had nestled into the good-will of
Parisians.
Under the influences of Mme. de Boufflers he tried to make a home in
England for that strange creature, Rousseau, who had become an exile,
and who brought with him--to the torment of Hume--all his
eccentricities, his peevishness, his inhuman vanities, his abnormal
sensitiveness, his wild jealousies, and his exaltations of genius.
These things work a rupture between the two in the end--as they should
and ought to do,--and the next good sight we have of the Scotch
philosopher is in a new home of his own (1772), which he has built in
the new part of Edinboro'. Twenty odd years before he had lived in the
old city on an income of L50 a year; and now he lives in the new with
an income of L1,000 a year. In {155} the old times he had hardly
secured place as Custodian of the mouldy Library of the Advocates; now
he is the marked potentate in the literary world of Scotland. Stanch
Presbyterians do indeed look at him askance, and shake their heads at
his uncanny beliefs, or rather lack of beliefs. Old nurses put
hobgoblin wings upon him to frighten good children; but he has stanch,
loving friends among the best and the clearest sighted. Dr. Blair is
his friend; excellent Dr. Robertson is his friend; his good nature, his
kindness of heart, his rectitude of life, his intellectual charities,
won even those who shuddered at his disbeliefs; that sceptical
miasma--born in his blood--and harmful to many (as it was to himself),
seemed to lose its malarious taint in the large, free, intellectual
atmosphere in which the philosopher lived. Honest doubts were then,
and always will be, better than dishonest beliefs; just as honest
beliefs are a thousand fold better than dishonest doubts.
[Sidenote: Death of Hume.]
It was in our year of 1776--when his reputation was brightening and
widening month by month, that David Hume, the author of the first
scholarly History of England, died, and was buried {156} on a shoulder
of the Calton Hill, from which one may look eastward across the valley
(where lies Holyrood Palace) to the Salisbury Crags on the left and to
the Castle Rock on the right.
It is probable that his History will long hold place on our library
shelves; its style might almost be counted a model historic style--if
we were to have models (of which the wisdom is doubtful). It is clear,
it is precise, it is perspicuous, it is neat to a fault. It might
almost be called a reticent style, in its neglect of those wrappings of
wordy illustration and amplification which so many historians employ.
He makes us see his meaning as if we looked through crystal; and if the
crystal is toned by his prejudices--as it is and very largely--it is
altogether free from the impertinent decorative arabesques of the
rhetorician. Many of the periods of which he gives the record, have
had new light thrown upon them by the searching inquiries of late days.
Old reputations with which he dealt reverently have suffered collapse;
political horizons which were limited and gave smallness consequence,
have widened; but for good, straightforward, lucid, {157} logical
setting forth of the main facts of which he undertook the record, Hume
will long remain the reference book. There will be never a time when
lovers of good literature will not be attracted by his pathetic picture
of the career of Charles I.; and never a time when the judicious reader
will accept it as altogether worthy of trust.
The life of the historian--by Dr. Huxley--is rather a history of his
philosophy than of his life; in which the eminent scientist--with due
apology for intrusion upon literary ground--sets his logic to an easy
canter all around the soberer paces of the great Scotch
charger--showing nice agreement in the paces of the two, and commending
and illustrating the metaphysics of the Historian, with a pretty
fanfaronade of Exposition and Applause.
_A Pair of Poets._
[Sidenote: Two poets.]
Were it only to change the current of our talk, I bring now a brace of
poets to your notice; not well paired indeed, as you will find: but
each one in his own way giving us music that strongly {158} contrasts
with _The Deserted Village_, and the ponderous Satires of Johnson.
[Sidenote: Shenstone.]
Shenstone[4] is a name not very much known--not very much worth
knowing: he was a big, somewhat scholarly, fastidious, indolent,
rhyme-haunted man, who had studied at Oxford, and who, when the muses
were buzzing about his ears, came into possession of a pretty farm in
that bit of Shropshire which (by queer English fashion) is planted
within the northern borders of Worcestershire; and it was there that he
wrote--what is typical of all that he ever wrote, and what has his
current and favorite sing-song in it:--
"Since Phyllis vouchsafed me a look
I never once dreamt of my vine.
May I lose both my pipe and my crook
If I knew of a kid that was mine!
I prized every hour that went by
Beyond all that had pleased me before;
But now they are past, and I sigh;
And I grieve that I prized them no more."
And again--
"When forced the fair nymph to forego
What anguish I felt at my heart!
{159}
Yet I thought--but it might not be so--
'Twas with pain that she saw me depart.
She gazed as I slowly withdrew.
My path I could hardly discern;
So sweetly she bade me Adieu
I thought that she bade me return!"
What should we think of that if we encountered it fresh in a corner of
one of our Sunday newspapers? We should hardly reckon its author among
our boasted treasures; yet Burns says "his elegies do honor to our
language," and a great deal of the same guileless tintinnabulum did
have its admirers all over England a century ago; and some of
Shenstone's pretty wares have come drifting down on the wings of albums
and anthologies fairly into our day.
Yet I should rather have encountered him in his fields, than in his
garret; for he made those fields very beautiful. He was a bad farmer,
to be sure; and sacrificed turnips to marigolds; and wheat to primroses
and daisies, fast as the season went round; but his home at Leasowes
was a place worth visiting for its charming graces of every rural sort;
even our staid John Adams, when he was in England in those days,
looking after American {160} colonial interests--must needs coach it in
company with Jefferson from Cirencester to Leasowes, for a sight of
this charming homestead. Goldsmith too gave its beauties the
embalmment of his language; and Dr. Johnson sat down upon it, with the
weight of his ponderous sentences. One echo more we will have of him,
as it comes fresh from his pet paradise of that corner of
Shropshire--and certainly carrying a honeyed rhythmic flow:--
"My banks they are furnished with bees,
Whose murmur invites one to sleep;
My grottoes are shaded with trees,
And my hills are white over with sheep.
I seldom have met with a loss,
Such health do my fountains bestow;
My fountains all bordered with moss
Where the hare-bells and violets grow."
[Sidenote: William Collins.]
William Collins[5] was a man of a totally different stamp--better worth
your knowing--yet maybe with the general public not so well known.
{161} There is the chink of true and rare poetic metal in his verse,
and it is fused by an imagination capable of intense heat and wonderful
flame. He was only a hatter's boy from Chichester, in the South of
England; was at Oxford for a while, and left there in a huff--though
securing a degree, 1743; afterward went to London; wrote and printed
some odes, which he knew were better than most current poetry, but
which nobody bought or read. He sulked under that neglect, and his
rage ran--sometimes to verse--sometimes to drink; he had known Thomson
and Johnson, and both befriended him; but the world did not; indeed he
never met the world half way; the poetic phrenzy in him so fined his
sensibilities that he could not and would not put out a feeling hand
for promiscuous greetings. Poverty, too, came in the wake of his
poetic cultures, to aggravate his mental inaptitudes and his moral
distractions--all ending at last in a mad-house. He was not, to be
sure, continuously under restraint--such terrific restraints as
belonged to treatment of the insane in that day; but for a half dozen
or more years of the latter part of his life--wandering all
awry--saying {162} weak and pointless things, in place of the odes
which had coruscated under his fine fancy; lingering about his
childhood's home; stealing under the cathedral vaults of Chichester
(where his body rests now), and lifting up a vacant and wild treble of
sound in dreary sing-song to mingle with the music from the choir.
There are accomplished critics who insist that the odes of Collins
carry in them the finest and the loftiest strains which go to marry the
music of the nineteenth century poets to the music of the days of
Elizabeth. Certain it is, that he loomed far above the ding-dong of
such as Shenstone--that he scorned the classic trammels of the empire
of Pope--certain that there were fires in him which were lighted by
poets who lived before the time of the Stuarts, and which gave
foretaste and promise of the freedom and the graces that shine
to-day.[6]
I cannot quote better to show his quality than {163} from that "Ode to
Evening" which is so often cited:--
"For when thy folding star arising, shows
His paly circlet at his warning lamp,
The fragrant hours and elves
Who slept in flowers the day,
"And many a nymph who wreathes her brows with
And sheds the freshning dew, and, lovelier still,
The pensive pleasures sweet,
Prepare thy shadowy car.
"Then lead, calm votress, where some sheety lake
Cheers the lone heath, or some time hallowed pile,
Or upland fallows gray
Reflect its last cool gleam.
"But when chill, blustering winds or driving rain
Forbid my willing feet, be mine the hut
That from the mountain's side,
Views wilds and swelling floods,
"And hamlets brown and dim discovered spires,
And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all
Thy dewy fingers draw
The gradual dusky veil."
This is poetry that goes without help of rhyme; even its halts are big
with invitations to the "upland fallows gray," and to the "pensive
pleasures sweet." Swinburne says, with piquancy and truth, {164}
"Corot, on canvas, might have signed the 'Ode to Evening.'"
Dr. Johnson, who was a strong friend of Collins, tells us, in his
_Lives of the Poets_, that he died in 1756; and that story is repeated
by most early biographies; the truth is, however, that after that date
he was living--only a sort of death in life, under the care of his
sister at Chichester; and it was not until 1759, when--his moral and
physical wreck complete--the end came.
_Miss Burney._
[Sidenote: Miss Burney.]
We have next to bring to your notice, a clever, somewhat frisky,
_debonnaire_ young person of the other sex, whom you should know--whom
perhaps you do know; I mean Miss Frances Burney.[7] You will remember
that we have encountered her once before pushing her kindly way into
old Dr. Johnson's ante-room when he was near to death. The old
gentleman had known intimately her {165} father, Dr. Burney, and had
always shown for her a strong attachment; so did a great many of Dr.
Burney's acquaintances, Garrick among them and Burke; and it was
probably from such men and their talk that she caught the literary bee
in her bonnet and wrote her famous story of _Evelina_. You should read
that story--whatever you may do with _Cecilia_ and other later ones--if
only to see how good and cleanly a piece of work in the way of a
society novel can come out of those broiling times, when _Humphrey
Clinker_ and _Tom Jones_ and the prurient and sentimental languors of
Richardson were on the toilette tables of the clever and the honest.
The book of _Evelina_ is, all over, Miss Burney; that gives it the
rarest and best sort of realism. Through all her work indeed, we have
this over-jubilant and gushing, yet timid and diffident young lady,
writing her stories--with all her timidities and large, unspoken hopes,
tumbling and twittering in the bosoms of her heroines: if my lady has
the fidgets, the fidgets come into her books; and you can always chase
back the tremors that smite from time to time the fair Evelina, to
{166} the kindred tremors that afflict the clever and sensitive
daughter of old Dr. Burney.
The book was published anonymously at first, and the secret of
authorship tolerably well kept; she says her papa did not know; but
young ladies are apt to put too small a limit to the knowledge of their
papas! It is very certain that her self-consciousness, and tremulous,
affected, simpers of ignorance, were not good to stave away suspicion.
It was not long before the world, confounding book and person, came to
call her "Evelina."
A pretty picture with this motif comes into her Diary: On a certain
morning, our Dr. Franklin--being then in London on colonial
business--makes a call upon Dr. Burney:--and in absence of her father,
meets the daughter: a big, square-shouldered man, very formal, very
stout, but very kindly, approaches her and says--"I think I have the
pleasure of speaking with Evelina."
"Oh, no," she replies, "I am Frances Burney," and he--"Ah--indeed! I
thought it had been Evelina:" and there it ends, and we lose sight of
our broad-shouldered Dr. Franklin, with only this "Ah!" upon his lips.
{167}
She had a modesty that was vain by its excess, and was awkward when
caught unexpectedly or with strangers; in great trepidation lest her
books might be talked of--yet with her books and her authorship always
tormentingly uppermost in her thought. Her Diary and letters are full
of them. Yet she is attractive--strangely so--by her sympathetic
qualities; so responsive to every shade of sorrow or of joy; winning,
because so tell-tale of heart; and with a tongue that could prattle
gracefully when at ease; Evelina, in short, without Evelina's beauty or
expectations.
I have read the book over again after a gap of many years--with a view
to this talk of the authoress, and find myself wondering more than
ever, how so many of great and commanding intellect should have so
heartily admired it. Burke read it with most eager attention and
largest praise; old Dr. Johnson delighted in it, and declared it
superior in many points to Richardson (which for him was extravagant
commendation). Even Mme. de Stael, some few years later, gave it her
applause; and the quick and swift-witted Mrs. Thrale was in raptures
with it; {168} and Mrs. Thrale knew a dunce, and detested dunces.
There must have been a deftness in her touch of things local,--of
which, I think, she was but half conscious; there was beside a pretty
dramatic art which found play in many pages of her Diary, and in all
she did and all she spoke. For her third novel of _Camilla_, which
scarce ever comes off the shelf of old libraries now--where it survives
in deserved retirement--she received, according to the rumors current
in those days, the sum of L3,000; such rumors, very likely exaggerated
the amount; they are apt to do so--in all times.
Her Diary[8] is of special interest; particularly the portion which
takes one into the domestic life of Royalty. For one of the bitter
fruits of her celebrity, was her appointment as Lady of the Robes (or
other such title), to the Queen. The service indeed did not last many
years, but long enough to give us a good sight of the well-disposed,
{169} fussy, indolent, kind-hearted Queen, and of the inquisitive,
obstinate, good-natured King.
[Sidenote: Trials of the Queen.]
She was at the palace, indeed, when one of the earlier attacks of that
mental ailment which at last slew George III.--fell upon him. She sees
the poor Queen growing wild with dread--disturbed and trembling under
those flashes of disorderly talk which smite upon her ear. She watches
the King as he goes out to his drive on a certain fatal day;--hears the
hushed, muffled steps and the babel of uncertain sounds, as he comes
back late at night,--waits hour on hour for her usual summons to the
Queen's presence, which does not come. At last, midnight being long
past (and she meantime having hint of some great calamity) goes to the
Queen's chamber; two other lady attendants were with her, she says; and
the Queen, ghostly pale and shuddering--puts her hand kindly upon that
of the poor little trembling Miss Burney and says "I am like ice--so
cold--so cold!"
"I tried to speak," says Miss Burney in her Diary, "but burst into
tears: then the Queen did." And there was cause: for from beyond the
chamber--along the corridor,--came the idle {170} jabbering of King
George; and the intellectual power (such as there was of it) "thro'
words and things went sounding on its dim and perilous way."
I tell this not to test the reader's capability for sympathy, but to
fasten poor little Miss Burney, the author of _Evelina_ and _Cecilia_,
in mind; and to connect her service in the palace of St. James, in the
year 1788, with the first threat and the first real attack of the
King's insanity. I am afraid we must set down, as one helping cause to
the King's affliction, the American obstinacy in maintaining their
Independence.
Miss Burney shortly after, with a pension of L100, retired from the
royal duties, which had tried her sadly; and some years later
encountering and greatly admiring General d'Arblay, who had come over
an exile from France, in company with other distinguished emigrants, on
the outbreak of the French Revolution, she married him (1793), and gave
him a home that grew up out of the moneys received from her
_Camilla_--hence called by old Dr. Burney, "Camilla Cottage."
She survived her husband and a son (a clergyman {171} of the
Established Church), and lived to so great an age as to find all her
conquests in fiction over-run at last by the brilliant successes of
Miss Austen, of Miss Edgeworth, and the more splendid triumphs of
Walter Scott. She died almost in our day (1840) and was buried in
Bath; but her best monument you can see without going there; it is her
book of _Evelina_ and her Diary.
_Hannah More._
[Sidenote: Mistress More.]
Over-fine literary people will, I suppose, hardly recognize Hannah
More--or Mistress Hannah More,[9] as I prefer to call her, in virtue of
a good old English, and a good old New Englandish custom, too, which
gave this title of dignity to matronly women--married or unmarried, of
mature age, and of worthy lives.
We must go into the neighborhood of that picturesque old city of
Bristol, in the West of England, to find her. She was one of the five
daughters of a respectable schoolmaster in Gloucestershire. Hannah,
though among the youngest, {172} proved the clever one, and had written
poems, more than passably good, before she was fifteen; and had
completed a pastoral drama, when only seventeen. She was, moreover,
comely; she was witty and alert of mind, and had so won upon the
affections of a neighbor landholder, and wealthy gentleman of culture,
that a marriage between the two came after a while to be arranged for;
but this affair never went beyond the arrangement,--for reasons which
do not clearly appear. It does appear that the parties remained
friendly, and that Mistress Hannah More was in receipt of an annual
pension of L200--in the way of _amende_ perhaps--her life through, from
the backsliding but friendly groom. I am sorry to tell this story of
her (about the L200). I think so well of her as to wish she had put it
in an envelope, and returned it with her compliments--year after
year--if need were. However, it went, as did many another hundred
pounds and thousand pounds of her earnings, in the line of those great
charities which illustrated and adorned her life.
Her elder sisters as early as 1757 established in Bristol a school for
young ladies, which became {173} one of the most popular and favorite
schools of the West of England; and when Hannah, some fifteen years
later, went up to London, to look after the publication of her _Search
after Happiness_, one or two of the sisters accompanied her; and Miss
Hannah, who was "taken off her feet" by the acting of Garrick, was met
most kindly by the great tragedian--was taken to his house, indeed, and
became thereafter one of the most intimate of the friends of Mrs.
Garrick. Dr. Johnson, too, was enchanted by the brisk humor and lively
repartee in these clever West-of-England girls; and we have on record a
bit of his talk to one of them. He said, in his leviathan way: "I have
heard that you are engaged in the useful and honorable employment of
teaching young ladies." Whereupon they tell the story of it all, in
their bright, full, eager way, and of their successes: and the Doctor,
softened and made jolly and companionable, says, "What, five women live
happily together in the same house! Bless me! I never was in
Bristol--but I will come and see you. I'll come; I love you all five!"
One of the sisters wrote home that {174} she thought--"perhaps--the big
Doctor might marry Hannah; for 'twas nothing but--'My love,' and 'My
little Kitten,' between them all the evening."
Shortly thereafter Mistress More wrote her tragedy of _Percy_; nobody,
I think, reads it now; but Garrick became sponsor for it--writing both
prologue and epilogue; and by reason perhaps of his sponsorship it ran
some twenty nights successively; the tale of her stage profits running
up to L600, which would pay for a good many trips from London to
Bristol. When she came to treat for the publication of a poem which
she wrote at that period--she being ignorant of rates,--it was arranged
with her publisher that she should receive the sum, whatever it might
have been, which was paid Goldsmith for _The Deserted Village_!
In those early years she was the lively one, and the gay one, and the
worldly one of the family; but with the death of Garrick, which came
upon her like a blow, life and all its colors seemed to change. She
haunted London and the theatres no more; she went up to weep indeed at
her home {175} on the Adelphi Terrace[10] with the disconsolate Mrs.
Garrick; but all phases of life have now, for Miss More, taken on a
soberer hue; she teaches; she founds schools for the poor; she founds
chapels; she writes tracts; her forward and sturdy evangelical
proclivities involve her indeed in difficulties with the local church
authorities; for her charities go vaulting over their canons; whereupon
she relents and abases herself--and then sins in the same holy and
beneficent ways of charity again--canons or no canons.
As a worker she is indefatigable; she drives, rides, and walks over her
missionary ground near to Bristol, with the zeal of a gold-hunter.
There were those who questioned her wisdom and who questioned the
quality of her wit, but never one, I think, anywhere, who questioned
her goodness. She wrote a novel called _Coelebs in Search of a Wife_.
Do you happen to have read it? I hardly know whether to advise it, or
not; there is so much to read! But if you do, you will find most
excellent English in it, and a great deal of {176} very good preaching;
and many hints about the social habits of that time--trustworthy even
to the dinner hour and the lunch hour; and maxims good enough for a
copy book, or a calendar; and you will find--what you will not find in
all stories nowadays--a definite beginning and a definite end. I know
what you may say, if you do read it. You would say that the sermons
are too long, and that the hero is a prig; and that you would never
marry him if he were worth twice his fortune, and were to offer himself
ten times over. Well--perhaps not; but he had a deal of money. And
that book of _Coelebs_--whatever you may choose to say of it, had a
tremendous success; it ran over Europe like wildfire; was translated
into French, into German, into Dutch, into Polish, and I know not what
language besides; and across the Atlantic--in those colonial days, when
book-shops were not, as now, at every corner--over thirty thousand
copies were sold. Those of us who can remember forty and fifty years
back, and who knew anything of the inner side of an old-fashioned New
England homestead, must recall the saintship that invested good
Mistress Hannah More! What unfailing {177} Sunday books her books did
make! and with what child-like awe we looked upon her good, kind, old,
peaked face as it looked out from the frontispiece--with soberly
frilled hair all about the forehead, and over this a muslin cap with
huge ruffles hemming in the face, and above this circumambient ruffle
and in the lee of the great puff of muslin--which gave place, I
suppose, to the old lady's comb--a portentous bow, constructed of an
awful quantity of ribbon and crowning that saintly, kindly, homely face
of Hannah More.
Do you remember--I wonder--that in the early pages of "The
Newcomes"--the Colonel tells Olive Newcome, how he used in his boy days
to steal the reading of some of Fielding's famous novels; and how
_Joseph Andrews_, in that forbidden series, had a very sober binding;
so that his mamma, Mrs. Newcome, when she observed the boy reading it,
thought--deceived by that grave binding--that the boy might be regaling
himself with some work of Mistress Hannah More's; and how, under this
belief, she took up the book when he had laid it by; and read and read,
and flung it down all on a sudden with such a killing, scornful {178}
look at the young Colonel, as he never, never forgot in all his life.
It was unfair of Thackeray to poke fun in this way at good Mistress
Hannah More! We may smile at her quaintness--her primness--her starch;
but there is that in her industry, her courage, her mental range, her
wide Christian beneficence which we must always venerate.
We have run on so far, that we have no words to-day for the sturdy old
King George. We turn him over to another chapter, when we will speak
too of Sterne--whom we had almost forgotten--and of Chatterton and of
some writing men who sometimes lifted up their voices in the British
Parliament.
[1] David Hume, b. 1711; d. 1776. Best edition of his works edited by
Green and Grose, 4 vols., 1874. For life, see Burton and Huxley.
[2] Adam Smith, b. 1723; d. 1790. A Fifeshire man, and author of that
famous book--_The Wealth of Nations_; a good book to read in these
times, or in any times. He may indeed say rash things about "that
crafty animal called a Politician," and the mean rapacity of
capitalists; but he is full of sympathy for the poor, and for those who
labor; and is everywhere large in his thought and healthy and generous.
I am glad to pay this tribute, though only in a note.
[3] George Tobias Smollett, b. 1721; d. 1771. A Scottish physician,
author of various popular novels, of which _The Expedition of Humphrey
Clinker_ is, by many, counted the best.
[4] William Shenstone, b. 1714; d. 1763. His works (verse and prose)
were published in 1764-69.
[5] William Collins, b. 1731; d. 1759. Interesting memoir by Moy
Thomas, published in 1858.
[6] Swinburne says, with something more than his usual
exaggeration--"the only man of his time who had in him a note of pure
lyric song";--excluding Gray, and both the Wesleys!
[7] Frances Burney, b. 1752; d. 1840. She is perhaps better known as
Mme. D'Arblay; though she married somewhat late in life, and after her
reputation had been won.
[8] The newest and most faithful copy of her _Diary and Letters_ has
been published by George Bell & Sons, London, 1889, 2 vols., 8vo.
[9] Hannah More, b. 1745; d. 1833.
[10] Near present London "Embankment"; John Adams was in that day
stopping at a tavern near by.
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