We have still in our mind's eye, and very pleasantly, that quaint old
clergyman of Hampshire, who wrote about the daws, and the swallows, and
the fern-owl, in a way that has kept the name of Gilbert White alive,
for a great many years. And who that has read them can ever forget the
stories of that winning Hampshire lady, whose fame takes on new
greenness with every spring-time? Following upon our talk of this
charming authoress, we had a little discursive mention, in our last
chapter, of certain books which at the close of the last century, or
early in this, were written for boys and girls; chiefest among these we
noted those written by that excellent woman, Miss Edgeworth. We spoke
of Miss Roche, who gushed over in the loves of Amanda and
Mortimer--those fond and sentimental _Children {301} of the Abbey_; and
of Miss Porter, with her gorgeous heroics about Poland and Scotland,
and of Mrs. Radcliffe's stunning _Mysteries of Udolpho_. We had a
glimpse of the strange work and life of William Beckford--son of the
rich Lord Mayor Beckford; and we closed our chapter over the grave of
that brilliant poet and wrecked man Robert Burns.
That grewsome death of the great Scotch singer occurred in a miserable
house of a disorderly street in Dumfries, within four years of the
close of the last century; his children--without any mastership to
control, and the love that should have guided dumb--wandering in and
out; no home comforts about them; the very necessities of life
uncertain and precarious; all hopes narrowed for them, and all memories
of theirs full of wildest alternations of joyousness and fright.
_A Banker Poet._
[Sidenote: Samuel Rogers.]
You have perhaps read and enjoyed a poem called _The Pleasures of
Memory_. It has tender passages in it; it has an easy, melodious
swing:--
{302}
"Twilight's soft dews steal o'er the village green,
With magic tints to harmonize the scene;
Stilled is the hum that thro' the hamlet broke,
When round the ruins of their ancient oak
The peasants flocked to hear the minstrel play
And games and carols closed the busy day.
* * * * *
Up springs, at every step--to claim a tear,
Some little friendship formed and cherished here;
And not the lightest leaf, but trembling teems
With golden visions and romantic dreams.
This poem, with echoes of Goldsmith in it, with echoes of Dryden, with
echoes of Cowper--all caught together by a hand that was most deft, and
by a taste that was most fastidious--was written and published in
London, four years before Burns died, by the poet-banker Samuel
Rogers.[1] It is not a name that I feel inclined to glorify very much,
or that should be honored with any large reverence; but it is brought
specially to the reader's notice here, because the life, career, and
accomplishment of the man offers so striking a contrast to that of the
Scottish poet who was his contemporary. They were born within four
years {303} of each other. One under the bare roof of an Ayrshire
cottage, the other amid the luxuries of a banker's home in London; one
caught inspiration amongst the hills and the woods; the other was
taught melody in the drawing-rooms and libraries of London; one wrested
his conquests in the kingdom of song, single-handed; and the other, his
lesser and feebler ones, bolstered with all the appliances that wealth
could give, or long culture suggest. The poetry of the one is rich,
individual, and spirited, with sources in nature and in the passions of
the man; the poetry of the other has only those congruous and tamer
harmonies, whose sources lie in the utterance of deeper and stronger
singers before him. Yet the life of that Ayrshire poet was a miserable
failure; and the life of this other, Samuel Rogers, was--as the world
counts things--a complete success. No half-starved children pulled at
his skirts for bread. All luxuries were about him, and from the
beginning life flowed with him as calmly as a river.
Of his early history there is not much to be said. We know that he was
born at Newington Green--an old suburb lying directly north of the
city, {304} toward Stamford Hill--and now engulfed by the tide of
London houses; we know he studied at good schools there, and under
careful teachers at home; we know that he used to read and love Dr.
Beattie's minstrel; we know that once, in boyhood (he tells the story
himself), craving a sight of the great Dr. Johnson, he went to his
door, but scared by the first tap of the knocker, sidled away, and so
never saw that literary magnate. It was a timidity that did not cling
to Mr. Rogers; in all his later years no man in London was less afraid
of the pounding of a knocker.
His first volume was printed in the very year on which the poor thin
book of Burns's first poems saw the light at Kilmarnock. This,
however, did not make his reputation; _that_ came six years later with
the _Pleasures of Memory_, of which I cited a fragment; and thereafter,
all down through the earlier half of the present century, there was
hardly a better known man in London than Samuel Rogers, banker and
poet. He voyaged widely and brought back many spoils of travel; he had
luxurious tastes and fed them with the utmost discretion. He had
social ambition, and rare sagacity in {305} selecting his companions,
and in timing his courtesies; he flattered critics, and was obsequious
to men with titles.
His house in St. James's--with its broad upper double window, looking
out upon the Green Park--was known of all men. Before yet the days of
bric-a-brac had come, it was filled with beautiful things and with
trophies of art. It was not large nor pretentious; but on its walls
were paintings, or sketches by Raphael, by Rubens, by Titian, by
Gainsborough, by Rembrandt, and by Reynolds; and in its ante-rooms,
marbles by Thorwaldsen and Canova. There were no children of the
house, nor was there ever a wife there to aid, or to lord the master.
Yet many a lady, ranking by title, or by cleverness, has enjoyed the
dinners and the breakfasts for which the house was famous. The cooking
was always of the best; the wines the rarest; the meats and fruits the
choicest, and the porcelain superb. Like most who have richly equipped
houses, he loved to have his fine things admired; and he loved to have
his fine words echoed. Few foreigners of any literary distinction
visited London from 1815 to 1850, without coming to a taste {306} of
the poet's hospitality, and to a taste too, very likely, of his pretty
satire. His wit flashed more sharply in his talk than in his verse;
and his dinner stories were fabulous in number, in piquancy, and in
sting. Like all accomplished _raconteurs_, he must needs tell his good
stories over and over, so that Rogers's butler, it was wittily said,
was next best to Rogers.
He could hardly have been called a good-natured man, and was always, I
think, keener for a good thing to say, than for a good thing to do. He
gave, it is true, largely in charities; but in orderly, business-like
ways and with none of the unction and kindly indirectness[2] which
doubles the {307} warmth of the best giving. All London knew him as a
diner out, as a connoisseur, as an opera-goer, as a patron of clever
people, as a friend to those in place, as a _flaneur_ along Piccadilly.
He was cool, unimpassioned, blase in look, never doing openly
discreditable things; and he carried his reputation for unmitigated
respectability, for wealth, for sharp speeches, for cleverness, for
sagacious charities, down to extreme age; dying as late as 1855,
ninety-three years old.
[Sidenote: Rogers' poems.]
Though the poem entitled _The Pleasures of Memory_ made his fame, a
later descriptive poem, embodying the gleanings from a trip in Italy,
is perhaps better known; and it enjoys the distinction of having been
illustrated and printed at a cost of $70,000 of the banker's money.
Fragments of that poem you must know; the story of Ginevra, perhaps,
best of all; so daintily told that it is likely to live and be
cherished as long as any of the bric-a-brac which the banker poet
gathered in his travels. 'Tis a story of a picture that he saw--a
"lady in her earliest youth."
{308}
"She sits inclining forward as to speak,
Her lips half open, and her finger up
As though she said--Beware! Her vest of gold
Broidered with flowers, and clasped from head to foot,
An emerald stone in every golden clasp,
And on her brow, fairer than alabaster,
A coronet of pearls.... Alone it hangs
Over a mouldering heirloom, its companion,
An oaken chest, half eaten by the worms.
* * * * *
Just as she looks there in her bridal dress
She was all gentleness and gaiety.
* * * * *
And in the lustre of her youth, she gave
Her hand with her heart in it, to Francesco.
Great was the joy; but at the bridal feast
When all sat down, the bride was wanting there,
Nor was she to be found! Her father cried
"'Tis but to make a trial of our love!"
And filled his glass to all; _but his hand shook_,
And soon from guest to guest the panic spread.
'Twas but that instant she had left Francesco
Laughing, and looking back and flying still,
Her ivory tooth imprinted on his finger.
But now, alas, she was not to be found;
Nor from that hour could anything be guessed
But that she was not! Weary of his life
Francesco flew to Venice, and forthwith
Flung it away in battle with the Turk.
Orsini lived; and long mightest thou have seen
An old man wandering as in quest of something--
Something he could not find--he knew not what
{309}
When he was gone, the house remained awhile
Silent and tenantless; then, went to strangers.
Full fifty years were past, and all forgot,
When on an idle day--a day of search
Mid the old lumber in the gallery--
That mouldering chest was noticed; and 'twas said
By one as young, as thoughtless, as Ginevra,
Why not remove it from its lurking-place?
'Twas done, as soon as said; but on the way
It burst--it fell; and lo, a skeleton,
With here and there a pearl, an emerald stone,
A golden clasp--clasping a shred of gold.
All else had perished, save a nuptial ring
And a small seal--her mother's legacy,
Engraven with a name--the name of both--
"Ginevra."
A pretty delicacy certainly goes to the telling of that story; but in
the tale of Christabel and of the Ancient Mariner there is something
more than delicacy--more of brain and passion and far-reaching poetic
insight in the poet Coleridge, than in ten such men as Samuel Rogers.
_Coleridge._
[Sidenote: Coleridge.]
Yet what a sad life we have to tell you of now! A life without any
repose in it;--a life haunted and goaded by its own ambitions--a life
put to {310} wreck by lack of resolute governance--a life going out at
last under the shadows of great clouds.
Coleridge[3] was the son of a humble, quiet, self-forgetting, earnest
clergyman in the West of England; and the boy, having no other
opportunity, came to be billeted upon that famous Christ Hospital
school in London--whose boys in their ancient uniform of yellow
stockings and blue coats, and bare heads, still provoke the curiosity
of those western travellers who wander down Newgate Street, and gaze
through the iron grill upon the paved approach-way.
He knew Lamb there--Charles Lamb, who in the Essays of Elia addresses
to him that famous apostrophe: "Come back into memory, like as thou
wert in the dayspring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column
before thee--the dark pillar not yet turned--Samuel Taylor
Coleridge--Logician, Metaphysician, Bard!" Yet this pale-faced
metaphysician and friend of Lamb gets {311} severe beatings at the
hands of the Greek master, though his sweet intonations make the
corridors resound with the verse of Homer. At Cambridge, where he goes
afterward for a time, he is cheated and bullied; his far-off and dreamy
look upon the symphonies of a poetic world not qualifying him for the
every-day contests of the cloisters; in the haze in which he lives, he
loses scent of the honors he had hoped to win; there is no prospective
fellowship and no establishment for him there. Disappointed and
despairing he goes up to London and enlists as private in the dragoons
under a feigned name; but friends detect and prevent the military
sacrifice.
A little later, we find him in his own West of England again, at
Bristol--whither we have wandered so often in search of poets--and he
encounters Southey thereabout, whom he had met for the first time on a
visit to Oxford in 1794; this brother poet being as hazy, and dreamy,
and theosophic, and hopeful in those days as Coleridge himself. The
two form a sort of garret partnership--lecture to the savages of
surrounding towns--are inoculated both with the {312} "fraternity and
equality" fever which had grown out of the French Revolution--they
believing that this French car of Juggernaut is to be dragged with its
bloody wheels over the whole brotherhood of nations. In this faith
they plot a settlement, in the new region--of which they know nothing,
but the sweetly sounding name of Wyoming--upon the banks of the
Susquehanna. There they would dig, and build cottages, and
philosophize, and found Arcadia. With kindred poetic foresight,
Coleridge marries in these days a bride as inexperienced and as poor as
himself; and for a little time there is a one-volumed Arcadia on the
banks of the Bristol Channel, with a lovely and pensive Sara for its
presiding nymph. Only for those few early years does this nymph enter
for much into the career of Coleridge. Domesticity[4] was never a
{313} shining virtue in him; and wife, and cottage, and Arcadia somehow
fade out from the story of his life--as pointless, unsaving, and
ineffective for him, all these, as the blurred lines with which we
begin a story, and cross them out. Southey, with a practical old aunt
to look sharply after his youngness, is quickly driven from his
Arcadian feeding ground and for the present disappears.
But Coleridge is still in the wallow of his wild vain hopes and wild
discourse, when he encounters another poet--his elder by a few years
and of a cooler temperament--William Wordsworth; who about that time
had established himself, with his sister Dorothy, upon the borders of
Somersetshire. These two men, so unlike, cleave together from the
beginning; there is a flagging now in the Unitarian discourses of
Coleridge in country chapels; and instead, wanderings with the brother
poets over the fair country ways that border upon the Bristol
straits--looking off upon the green flats of Somerset, the tufted banks
of the Avon, the shining of the sea, with trafficking ships, to the
west. Out of these, and of their meditations grow the first book--a
joint one--of {314} _Lyrical Ballads_; its issue not making a ripple on
the tide where Crabbe and Cowper were then afloat; and yet creating an
epoch in the history of British verse. For in it was the story of the
Ancient Mariner, and words therein that will never grow old:
"Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou wedding guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast;
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us
He made and loveth all!"
Yet the poet does still--from time to time wandering into country
chapels--hammer at strange, irregular sermons, with a mixed metaphysics
and poetry; and theologies of a dim vague sort which beat on ear and
hearts, like sleet on slated roofs, and bring never a beam of that
warming sunshine which lies in the lines I have quoted from the Mariner.
One wonders how he lived in those times; with no moneys coming from
books; only driblets from his preachments; and with not enough of {315}
commercial aptitude in him to audit a grocer's bill. The
Wedgewoods--so well known by their pottery--who have a quick eye for
fine wares of all sorts--recognize his rare brain, and send him over to
Germany, bestowing upon him an annuity, which enables him to forego his
travelling priesthood, and gives him the means of visiting various
cities of the continent.
The Wordsworths make the trip with him; and after a stay of a
twelve-month--mostly in Gottingen--Coleridge returns, with his
translation of Wallenstein; but this counts for little. A year later,
he finds his way to Keswick--to a beautiful, wooded bay, where Southey
ultimately established his anchorage for life;[5] the Wordsworths were
not far off, at Grasmere; and Coleridge plans that weekly paper--_The
Friend_ (finding issue some years later) with wonderful things in it,
which few people read then; and so fine-drawn, that few read them now.
The damps of Keswick give him {316} rheumatic pains, for which he uses
protective stimulants; good Dorothy Wordsworth has fears thereanent,
and regards hopefully his appointment to some civil station at Malta.
But his impracticabilities lose him the place after a very short
incumbency; he crosses to Italy; sees Naples, Amain, and Vesuvius;
sees, and knows well at Rome, our American painter, Washington Allston.
There are bonds of sympathy we might have looked for between the author
of _Monaldi_ and the author of _Christabel_.
In England again, the fogs bring back old rheumatic pains; the
alienation from his wife is declaring itself in more unmistakable ways;
and then, or thereabout,[6] begins that terrible slavery to opium,
whose chains he wore thenceforth, some twenty years, and was not
entirely free until death broke his bonds. There is a dreary, yet
touching pathos in this confession of his--"Alas, it is with a bitter
smile, a laugh of gall and bitterness, that I recall that period of
unsuspecting delusion, and how I first became aware of the {317}
maelstrom, the fatal whirlpool to which I was drawing, just when the
current was already beyond my strength to stem."
But against the circling terrors of that maelstrom he does make now and
then gallant struggle--goes to the house of that kindly surgeon,
Gillman, at Highgate, who is charged to guard him--does guard him with
exceeding kindness; the servants have orders to watch him--to follow
him in the street on his lecture days. But the cunning of a man crazed
by his insatiate appetite outwits them; and over and over the turbid
roll of his speech--with flashing splendors in it, that give no
light--betrays him. And yet it was in those very days of alternate
heroic struggle and of devilish yielding that he re-vamps and extends
and retouches that sweet, serene poem of Christabel, with the pure,
innocent, loving, trustful, winning, blue-eyed daughter of Sir Leoline
praying under the oaks, and contrasted with her that graceful, mocking,
radiant Geraldine--with smiles that enchant, and alabaster front, and
undying graces, and wiles of the serpent, and the damps of the pit in
her breath--as if the demon that pursued and {318} pushed him to the
wall had foreshadowed himself in that mocking and most beautiful
Geraldine.
In those days, too, it was that the young Carlyle used to come to
Highgate and watch those bulging eyes--pressed out with excess of brain
substance behind them--and listen to his poetic convolutions of speech.
"The eyes," he says, "were as full of sorrow as of inspiration. I have
heard him talk with eager, musical energy two stricken hours, his face
radiant and moist, and communicate no meaning whatsoever to any
individual of his hearers, certain of whom--I for one--still kept
eagerly listening in hope."
The very children of the neighborhood stood in awe of this wildish
man--who seemed talking to the trees at times; and yet their awe was
broken by fits of mocking courage, and they made faces at him across
the high road. He died there at last--1834 was the year; within sight
of the smoke of London and the dome of St. Paul's, toward which from
Highgate there stretched in that day a long line of suburban houses,
with scattered open fields, hedges, trees, flowers, and the hum of bees.
{319}
_Charles Lamb._
[Sidenote: Essays of Elia.]
Among those who used to come somewhiles to follow that fine, confused
stream of poetic talk which poured from Coleridge's lips, was Charles
Lamb,[7] his old school-fellow and friend in the blue-coat days of
Christ's Hospital. And what a strange, odd friendship it seems when we
contrast the tender and delicious quietude of the Essays of Elia with
the portentous flow of Coleridge's speech! A quiet little stream,
purling with gentle bendings and doublings along its own meadows--mated
against a river that whirls in mad career, flinging foam high into
trees that border it, and only losing its turbidness when it is tided
away into the sea, where both brook and river end.
[Sidenote: Charles Lamb.]
I love Charles Lamb and his writings so much, that I think everybody
else ought to love them. There is not great weight in those essays of
his; you cannot learn from them what the capital of Hindostan is, or
what Buddhism is, nor the date of the capture of Constantinople.
Measured by {320} the Dry-as-Dust standard, and there is scarce more in
them than in a field of daisies, over which the sunshine and the summer
breezes are at play. But what delicacy there is! what a tender humor;
what gentle and regaling lapses of quaint thought that beguiles and
invites and is soothing and never wearies.
Lamb's poems are not of the best; they have a haltingness--like that in
his speech,--with none of Rogers's glibness and currency, and none of
his shallowness either. Constraint of rhyme sat on Elia no easier than
a dress-coat. But in prose he was all at home; it purled from his pen
like a river. It was quaint, kindly, utterly true--with little yaws of
humor in it, filling his sails of a sudden, and stirring you to smiling
outbreak--then falling away and leaving him to a gently undulating
forward movement which charms by its quietude, serenities, and
cheerfulness.
There was not much in his life to tell you of; no cannon firing, no
drum beats, no moving splendors. A thin, kindly face he had, and thin
figure too; in dark or grayish clothes ordinarily, that a clerk might
wear; threadbare perhaps at the {321} elbows; not a presentable man
amongst swell people; never aspiring to be;--as distinct indeed as a
brown hermit-thrush amongst chattering parrots. He has a stammer, too,
as I have hinted, in his voice, which may annoy but never makes this
quiet man ashamed; in fact, he deploys that stammering habit so as to
allow of coy advance, and opportunity for pouncing with tremulous
iteration upon his little jokelets, in a way to double their execution;
he put it to service, too, in some of his tenderer stories, so as to
make, by his very hesitancies, an added and most touching pathos.
He was of humble origin, his father a servitor about Temple
Courts--only long gunshot away from Newgate Street; and when the
son--through with his Christ Hospital schooling--came to have a small
stipend (first, from the South Sea House and later from the East India
Company), he had his little family--the only one that ever belonged to
Charles Lamb--all about him in his lodgings in Little Queen Street.
There was Mary, his sister, ten years older; his poor, bedridden
mother, and his father, lapsing into dotage and only happy with
cribbage-board at his elbow, and {322} Charles or other good friend to
make count. It was this quiet household on which a thunderbolt fell
one day. This is Lamb's mention of it in a letter to Coleridge:--
"My poor dear, dearest sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death
of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife
out of her grasp. She is at present in a mad-house, from whence I fear
she must be moved to a hospital. My poor father was slightly wounded.
God has preserved to me my senses. Write as religious a letter as
possible, but no mention of what is gone and done with."
And only a day after this, the weak old father, with his plastered
head, is playing cribbage; and again, on another day, friends having
come in--very many for those small rooms--and the last ceremonies not
yet over, and they all sitting down at some special repast--Lamb
bethinks himself of all that has happened, of what lies in the next
room (he tells this in a letter to Coleridge), and rushes thither to
kiss once more the cold face and to pray forgiveness that he has
forgotten her so soon.
Poor Mary recovers; she lives for years with her brother; the horror of
the past staying like a {323} black dream in their thought--of which
they dare not speak. And when new visitations of estrangement
threaten, they two, brother and sister, walk away out from the
streets--on to Edmonton, through green fields, by hedges, under trees
which they much enjoy, to the doctor's strong guardianship and ward,
until repose comes again and a return. Lamb at last goes to live at
Enfield, which is close by Edmonton, north of London, that he may be
near her prison-house at all times and seasons.
Yet in all these days when the pains and fears of that distracting life
are resting on him, he is putting those tender and playful touches into
the pleasant essays we know so well; conjuring for himself and for
thousands everywhere a world of sunshine that shall overlap the dreary
one in which he lives, and spend its graces and cheeriness upon the
mind of the poor forlorn one, who with sisterly affection cleaves there
and journeys meekly and obediently and sadly beside him.
I do not know how to trust myself to make a citation from those essays
which shall carry to those not over-familiar some good hint of their
{324} qualities; but I venture upon a bit from his _Dream-Children_:--
"Then I told how for seven long years, in hope sometimes, sometimes in
despair, yet persisting ever, I courted the fair Alice W----; and as
much as children could understand, I explained to them what coyness,
and difficulty, and denial, meant in maidens--when suddenly, turning to
little Alice, the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with
such a reality of re-presentment that I became in doubt which of them
stood there before me, or whose that bright hair was; and while I stood
gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding,
and still receding, till nothing at last but two mournful features were
seen in the uttermost distance, which--without speech--strangely
impressed upon me the effects of speech:--We are not of Alice, not of
thee, nor are we children at all. The children of Alice call Bartram
father, we are nothing--less than nothing and dreams. We are only what
might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe,
millions of ages, before we have existence and a name; and immediately
awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my arm-chair--where I had
fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged by my side."
Lamb was not deep-thoughted; he would have lost the trail in those
meditations and searchings to which Coleridge in his cooler and clearer
moments invited and led the way; but there was about him an
individuality, a delicacy of thought, {325} a quaint play of airy
fancies, a beguiling inconsequence, that have made his path in letters
a delightful one for thousands to follow.
I cannot leave his name without calling attention to the charming
little stories of Mrs. Leicester's School--written by Charles Lamb and
his sister jointly. They are--or profess to be--the tales told by
school children themselves of their memories--whether sorrows or joys;
and are so artless in their narrative, so pathetic often, that you
cannot help but follow the trend of their simple language as you would
follow a story which an older sister might tell you about your own
homes and your own father and mother.
Those essays of Lamb may sometimes show a liking for things we cannot
like; in his dealings with the old dramatists he may pour chirrupy
praises where we cannot follow with ours. We may not be won over,
though we see Marston through those pitiful eyes and the lens of that
always tender heart. And why should we? That criticism is not the
best which serves to put us in agreeing herds, and to leash us in a
bundled cohesion of opinion; but it is better worth if it {326}
stimulate us by putting beside our individuality of outlook the warming
or the chafing or the contesting individuality of another mind. There
is never a time when Lamb's generous, kindly, witty opinions--whether
about men or books, or every-day topics--will not find a great company
of delighted readers, if not of ardent sponsors. Then, for style--what
is to be said, except that it is so gracious, so winning, we are
delighted with its flow, its cadences, its surprises, its charming
lapses--like waves on summer beaches--or like an August brook,
prattling, babbling, and finding spread and pause in some pellucid,
overshadowed pool--where we rest in fulness of summery content.
He was never a strong man physically, and his poor thin form vanished
from the sight of men in 1834, six months after Coleridge died; and the
poor sister--unaware what helplessness and loneliness had fallen on
her, lingered for years in blessed ignorance; she then died; and so we
turn over that page of English letters on which are scored _Elia_ and
the _Tales of Shakespeare_ and pass to others.
{327}
_Wordsworth._
[Sidenote: A lake poet.]
On the 29th day of June, just half a century ago, upon a beautiful
sunny afternoon--most rare in the Lake Counties of England--I had one
of the outside places upon an English coach, which was making its daily
trip from Kendal, along the borders of Lake Windermere, and on by
Grasmere and under the flank of Helvellyn, to Derwent-Water and
Keswick. I stopped halfway at the good inn of the "Salutation" in
Ambleside, with the blue of Windermere stretching before me; and in the
twilight took a row upon the lake--the surface being scarce ruffled,
and the shores, with their copses of wood, and their slopes of green
lawn, as beautiful as a dream.
"I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
And as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving thro' the water like a swan."
[Sidenote: Wordsworth.]
The words were Wordsworth's[8] own; and this was his country; and he
who was counted the {328} King-poet in those College Days which were
not then long behind me, was living only a little way off. From
different points in the embowered roads I could catch a glimpse of the
light in his window, at Rydal Mount. Stratford had been seen indeed,
but there were only memories there; and Abbotsford, but Scott and the
last of his family were gone; and Olney, but Cowper had been silent a
matter of forty years; and here, at last, I was to come into near
presence of one of the living magicians of English verse--in his own
lair, with his mountains and his lakes around him. But I did not
interview him: no thought of such audacity came nigh me: there was more
modesty in those days than now. Yet it has occurred to me since--with
some relentings--that I might have won a look of benediction from the
old man of seventy-five, if I had sought his door, and told him--as I
might truthfully have {329} done--that within a twelvemonth of their
issue his beautiful sextette of "Moxon" volumes were lying, thumb-worn,
on my desk, in a far-off New England college-room; and that within the
month I had wandered up the Valley of the Wye, with his _Tintern Abbey_
pulsing in my thought more stirringly than the ivy-leaves that wrapped
the ruin; and that only the week before I had followed lovingly his
White Doe of Rylstone along the picturesque borders of Wharfdale, and
across the grassy glades of Bolton Priory and among the splintered
ledges
"Where Rylstone Brook with Wharf is blended."
Poets love to know that they have laid such trail for even the youngest
of followers; and though the personal benedictions were missed, I did
go around next morning--being Sunday--to the little chapel on the
heights of Rydal, where he was to worship; and from my seat saw him
enter; knowing him on the instant; tall (to my seeming), erect, yet
with step somewhat shaky; his coat closely buttoned; his air serious,
and self-possessed; his features large, mouth almost coarse; {330} hair
white as the driven snow, fringing a dome of baldness; an eye with a
dreamy expression in it, and seeming to look--beyond, and still beyond.
He carried, too, his serious air into his share of the service, and
made his successive responses of "Good Lord deliver us!" and "Amen!"
with an emphasis that rung throughout the little chapel.
I trust the reader will excuse these personal reminiscences, which I
write down to fix in mind more distinctly the poet, whose work and life
we have only space to glance at now, and whose name will close the roll
of poets for the present volume.
_His Poems._
There is, and always has been, on the part of too many admirers of
Wordsworth a disposition to resent any depreciation or expression of
dissent from fullest praise, which has counted against his reputation.
We do not like--any of us--to be forced into our admiration of this or
that poet, and will not be, for long whiles together. There is no
{331} bolstering of bad work that will make it permanently sound; so,
too, what good things are done--whatever opposing sneers or silence may
do--will surely, some day or other, be found out. A book or a poem
that needs careful and insistent pilotage by critics, into the harbor
of a great Fame, will not be so sure of safe anchorage and good
holding-ground as one that drifts thither under stress of the unbroken,
quiet, resistless tide of a cultivated popular judgment. Wordsworth's
place is a very high one; some things he has done are incomparable;
some altitudes of thought he has reached range among the Miltonic
heights. But he has printed--as so many people have--too much. His
vanities--which were excellently well developed--seem to have made him
insensible to any demerits in his own work and incapable of believing
that hand or brain of his could do aught that was not so far above
common level as to warrant its acceptance by the world. I think he was
conscientious in this; I do not believe that, like many an author, he
put before us what he knew or suspected to be inferior, simply because
he knew it would be devoured. There was {332} none of that dishonesty
in Wordsworth. He religiously believed that even "Peter Bell" and the
dreariest lines of the "Idiot Boy" had a mission.
If Wordsworth had possessed Browning's sense of humor, he would have
withdrawn an eighth of his published works; if he had possessed Hood's
sense of humor, I think he would have withdrawn a third. Humor is a
great and good shortener. Humor seeks to provoke mirth and ripples of
cheery satisfaction, so it shuns length and prosiness. Humor is a
charming quality in either preacher or poet; and brevity is one of the
best parts of humor; indeed brevity and humor always lock hands.
Unfortunately, Wordsworth had no humor. Again, that too free and lax
play of language in Wordsworth--that told nothing vital, but only
served to tie together, by loose and swaying looplets, the flashing
jewels wherein his real genius coruscated and crystallized--not only
fatigued us who followed and wanted to follow, but it filled the
master's time and books and thought to the neglect of that large
entertainment of some systematized purpose--some great, balanced, and
concreted scheme of poetic story, {333} which he always hinted at, but
never made good. Take that budget of verse which went toward the
making of the "Recluse"--how incomplete; how unfinished even in detail;
yet splashed up and down with brilliancies of thought and fancy; with
here and there noble, statuesque, single figures; like a great
antechamber, detaining us with its diverting objects, with interposed,
wearisome, official talk--we all the while hoping to fare through to
some point where we shall see the grandeur of the house and take in
reverently its great proportions, and pay homage to the master. But we
never come to those Arcana; we end in waiting; great, fine bursts of
song, and of glowing narrative--sun, mountains, and clouds giving us
august attendance--but no mapping of a whole, whose scheme is fitly
balanced, and whose foundations bear up a completed body and dome, with
cross and crown. But though his languors of language, his prosiness,
his self-satisfaction do madden one to damnatory speech, yet when his
song breaks out at its best--seeming to tie the upper mysterious world
to this mundane level--to make steps of melody and of heavenly lift to
{334} invite and charm as toward the Infinite, we are ashamed of our
too easy discomfiture:--
"Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
"O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That Nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: nor indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest;
"But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which be they what they may,
Are yet a fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the Eternal silence: truths that wake,
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor,
Nor man, nor boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy.
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
{335}
Which brought us hither,
Can, in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore."
These verses belong to an ode that should never be forgotten when we
reckon up the higher reaches of the poetic tides of this generation.
I am disposed to think that all of us, as we grow older, come into
larger and fuller appreciation of the wonderful intuitions of this poet
and of his marvellous grasp of all the subtler meanings in Nature's
aspects. Certainly those lines composed above _Tintern Abbey_, do not
offer food for babes. Only older ones know that--
"Nature never did betray
The heart that loves her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy; for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings."
{336}
So, too, in the Excursion, whose mention we perhaps dwelt upon too
lightly--that grand Wordsworthian mating of man with Nature is always
shining through the poet's purpose, and gleaming along his lines: a
deep and radical purpose it is; all else sways to it; all else is
dwarfed and made small in the comparison. Hence, poor Mary Lamb is
half-justified in her outcry--that under its dominance a poor dweller
in town has hardly "a soul to be saved."[9] Grand, surely, are many of
his utterances, morally and intellectually, and carrying richest
adornments of poesy to their livery; immortal--yes; yet not favorites
for these many generations: too encumbered; sheathed about with tamer
things, that will not let the sword of his intent gleam with a vital
keenness and poignancy. Always the great lesson which the stars and
the mountains and rolling rivers sing--sing in his lines; but
buttressed with over-much building up of supporting and flanking words.
Always the grand appeal to man's moral nature and instincts is
imminent; always the verse radiant with the {337} beguiling lights
which he has set to burn upon the hills and in the skies; but, too
often, even the sunset glories pall, and weary with their over-painting
and golden suffusions of language.
If one is tempted to go back to the contemporary criticism of the
_Excursion_, he should temper the matter-of-fact admeasurement and
antipathies of Jeffrey in the _Edinburgh_, with the kindlier and more
feeling discourse of Charles Lamb in the _Quarterly_ (1814). And of
this latter, it is to be remembered that its warm unction and
earnestness were very much abated by editorial jugglery. Lamb never
forgave Gifford for putting "his d----d shoemaker phraseology instead
of mine;" and in an explanatory letter to Wordsworth he tells him that
many passages are cut out altogether, and "what is left is of course
the worse for their having been there," and in a wonderful figure
continues,--"the eyes are pulled out, and the bleeding sockets are
left."
_Personal History._
Wordsworth was a Cumberland man by birth, and from the very first
opened his young eyes {338} upon such scenes as lay along the Derwent.
His father was an attorney-at-law and agent for the Lonsdale estates;
nor does the poet fail to assure us in his autobiographic notes--with a
pride that is only half veiled--of the gentle blood that flowed in his
mother's veins. But the family purse was not plethoric; and--his
father dying, when Wordsworth was only fourteen--it was through the
kindness of his uncles that he had his "innings" at Trinity College,
Cambridge, and felt his poetic pulses stirred by the memory of such old
Cambridge men as Milton, and Waller, and Gray. The flat meadows
bordering the Cam were doubtless tame to his Cumberland eyes, nor do
University memories count for much in irradiating his future work;
perhaps the brightest gleam that comes from those cloistered sources
upon his verse is that which is reflected from the wondrous vaulted
ceiling of King's College Chapel:--
"That branching roof
Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells
Where light and shade repose, where music dwells,
Lingering and wandering on as loth to die."
{339}
A vacation passed in the mountains of Switzerland sharpened an appetite
for travel upon the Continent; and thither he went shortly after taking
his degree (1791); was in Orleans and in Paris the succeeding year;
caught the fever of those revolutionary times, and for a while
seriously entertained the purpose of throwing himself into the swirl of
that tide of Girondism which was to fall away so shortly after, leaving
tracks of blood.
There was a short stay in London on his return--counting for very
little in the story of his life. _Westminster Bridge_ and _A Farmer of
Tilsbury Vale_ are all that bring a glimmer of remembrance to the lover
of his books, out of the tumult and roar of "Lothbury" and Cheapside.
Thereafter came the quiet life in Dorsetshire with his good sister
Dora--where his poetic moods first came to print--and where Coleridge
found him (1796) and cemented that friendship which drew him next year
into Somersetshire--a friendship, which, with one brief interruption,
that promised a bitter quarrel--lasted throughout their lives.
There--at Alfoxden, in Somersetshire--was forged that little book of
_Lyrical Ballads_, containing the _Ancient {340} Mariner_ and _Tintern
Abbey_--the best possible types of the respective powers of the two
poets.
In 1799 Wordsworth established himself at Grasmere, in Westmoreland,
his sister remaining--as she always did--a beloved inmate of his home.
In 1802 he married, most fortunately, a woman who was always
sympathetic and kindly, as well as an excellent and devoted mother of
the children born to them;[10] moreover, she was exceptionally endowed
to stimulate and give range to his poetic ambitions. Between Grasmere
or its neighborhood, and the better-known home of Rydal Mount, the poet
passed the remainder of his life. There were, indeed, frequent
interludes of travel--to Scotland, to Leicestershire, to Southern
England, to Ireland, and the Continent--from all which places he came
back with an unabated love for the lakes and mountains which bounded
his home. Never did there live a more exalted lover of {341} Nature;
and specially for those scenes of Nature which cradled him in infancy
and which cheered his manhood. Without being largely experienced in
the devices of gardening craft, he yet gave frequent and profitable
advice to those among his friends who were building up homes in the
surrounding lake district; and the Beaumont family of Leicestershire
show with pride a winter garden at Coleorton, which is an evergreen
remembrancer of the poet's skill and taste. He resented all undue
interference with natural surfaces; his art was the larger art of
winning one to the reasonableness and beauty of nature's own purposes.
Not a resident in the neighborhood of Ambleside but knew his gaunt
figure stalking up and down the hills; yet not counted over-affable;
the villagers report him--"distant, vera distant. As for his habits he
had none--niver knew him wi' a pot i' his hand or a pipe i' his mouth."
And another says--"As for fishing, he hadn't a bit of fish in him,
hadn't Wordsworth--not a bit o' fish in him!"[11] This sounds
strangely to one familiar {342} with _Lines to gold and silver fish in
a glass globe_.
Certainly he did not love babble nor little persiflage; he had neither
the art to coin it nor the humor to redeem it. But he was capable of
sensible, heavily-charged talk, even upon practical themes, showing a
capacity for, and a habit of, consecutive and logical thinking. Often
reading and discoursing on poets and their work, but chary of any
exuberance of praise; if ever cynical, tending that way under such
provocation. Not indisposed--for small cause--to recite from
Wordsworth (as Emerson tells us in the story of his first visit to
Rydal Mount); but reciting well, and putting large, dashing movement
into the verse--as of faraway rebounding water-falls. His egotism,
though not easily kept under, was not riotously exacting or audacious;
one could see at the bottom of it--not the little vanities of a
flibbertigibbet, but respect and reverence for his inborn seership and
for his long priesthood at the altar of the Muses.
He had no musical ear, no power of distinguishing tunes, yet was rapt
into ecstatic fervor by the {343} near and sweet warbling of a bird.
Books he loved only for their uses; he favored no finical "keeping" of
them, but plunged into an uncut volume with a smeared fruit-knife--if
need were. Southey dreaded his visits to his Keswick library, saying
he was "like a bear in a tulip garden." He was parsimonious too;
generosity in praise, or in purse, was unknown to him; and he had stiff
school-mastery ways with youngish men--craving oblation and large
tokens of respect. De Quincey said he never offered to carry a lady's
shawl; hardly offered a hand to help her over a stile. He was not
mobile, not adaptive, not gossipy; last of men for a picnic or a
tea-party. His shaking of hands was "feckless;" which to a Scottish
ear means a hand-shake not to be run after and with no heartiness in
its grip. That home of Rydal Mount was a modest and charming one;
within--severely simple; in abstemiousness the poet was almost an
anchorite: without--a terrace walk, a velvety stretch of turf, mossy
vases, a dial, a few patches of flowers, grayish house-walls on which
the clambering vines took hold, quaint stone chimney-tops on which the
{344} lichens clung and around which the swallows played, views of
Rydal Water, glimpses of Windermere, of Nab-scar, and of nearer heights
crowned with foliage.
Wordsworth was never a man of large means; his poems gave only small
moneyed returns; nor did he care overmuch for expensive indulgences;
travelling was his greatest and most coveted luxury. All new scenes in
nature came to his eye as so many new phases of his oldest and
tenderest friend.
For a considerable period he was in receipt of a small revenue from a
local Commissionership of Stamps, and during the last eight years of
his life received a pension of L300 from the Government. A year after
the grant, upon the death of Dr. Southey, he was, through the urgence
of friends, and at the solicitation of Sir Robert Peel, induced to
accept the post of Poet Laureate--going up to London, at the age of
seventy-three, to kiss the hand of the young Queen, in recognition of
that honor. This young Queen, then in her twenty-fourth year, was her
present gracious lady, Victoria, who had succeeded to her bluff
sailor-uncle, {345} William IV., in 1837, and to her sorrier uncle,
George IV., who had died in 1830.
Wordsworth was among those stately country gentlemen who believed that
with the passage of the great Reform Bill of 1832, England was about to
enter upon her decadence. Like many another poet, he had faith in
established privileges, and faith in grand traditions. He bestirred
himself, too, in the latter years of his life, to defeat--if it might
be--the scheme for pushing railways across his quiet and beautiful
region among the lakes of Westmoreland and Cumberland. Happily he did
not live to see the desecration of his charming solitudes; it would
have made him wroth to watch the wreaths of vapor from the engines
floating around the chimney-tops of Rydal Mount.[12] The lines he
wrote fifty years before his death, he lived by to the last:--
"To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that thro' me ran;
{346}
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.
The budding twigs spread out their fan
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there."
He had not only a poet's, but a Briton's love for that old England--of
mossy roofs, and park lands, and smoking chimneys, and great old
houses, and gnarled oaks, and way-side cottages. He cherished all
Raskin's antipathy to huge manufacturing centres, and the din of
machinery and trip-hammers; he would have no pounding to fright the
cuckoos, and no reservoirs among the hills to choke the rills; but
everywhere the brooks purling their own murmurous ways through leafy
solitudes and sweet, open valleys.
Well, those are the sights that win most, I think, toward the celestial
visions which the good poet always cherished, and which symbolized best
the "dear Jerusalem,"--
"Along whose streets, with pleasing sound,
The living waters flow,
And on the banks, on either side.
The trees of life do grow."
{347}
Only the name--William Wordsworth--is graven upon the simple stone
which marks the poet's grave, in a corner of the church-yard at
Grasmere; and the bodies of wife and children lie grouped there beside
him.
[1] Samuel Rogers, b. 1768; d. 1855. His _Pleasures of Memory_,
published 1792; _Italy_, 1822-28.
[2] Crabb Robinson, chap. ix., 1881, p. 165, vol. ii., says he "was
noted for his generosity toward poor artists." The story he tells in
confirmation is, that Sir Thomas Lawrence appeared at his door and
begged him to save the president of the Royal Academy from disgrace,
which must follow except a few thousands were raised next day; he (Sir
Thomas) offering his paintings, drawings, etc., in guarantee. Crabb
Robinson continues that "Rogers saw Lord Ward [a nobleman of great
wealth] next day and arranged for the advance by him;" an advance that
never brought loss to either Ward or Rogers. The latter's
"generosities" were a good many of them of this color; _i.e._, securing
advances which were pretty sure to be repaid.
[3] S. T. Coleridge, b. 1772; d. 1834. Many of his works edited by H.
N. Coleridge, husband of his only daughter Sara. Special mention
should be made of the Coleridgean labors of that indefatigable worker,
the late J. Dykes Campbell.
[4] He had a son Hartley, whom Crabb Robinson describes in 1816 as "one
of the strangest boys I ever saw. He has the features of a foreign
Jew, with starched and affected manners." He also speaks of the other
son, Derwent, as a "hearty boy, with a good-natured expression." The
daughter--afterward Mrs. Henry Nelson Coleridge, editress of many of
her father's works (continues Robinson), "has a face of great
sweetness."
[5] Southey did not go to Keswick to reside until 1803-4. Coleridge,
however, was there as an occupant of a portion of the future Southey
home in 1800. Southey paid him a visit in the summer of 1801. See
Traill, chap. v. See also _Memorials of Coleorton_, passim.
[6] Probably some time between 1803 and 1806.
[7] Charles Lamb, b. 1775; d. 1834.
[8] William Wordsworth, b. 1770; d. 1850. _Evening Walk_ published
1793; _Lyrical Ballads_ (in conjunction with Coleridge), 1798;
_Excursion_, 1814; _White Doe of Rylstone_, 1815; first collected
edition of poems, 1836-37; _Life_ by W. H. Myers; a much fuller, but
somewhat muddled one, by William Knight, 3 vols,, 8vo, 1889. Dowden's
edition of Wordsworth's poems (Aldine Series) is latest and best.
[9] See Lamb's Letters, cited in Knight, vol. ii., p. 235.
[10] His wife was Mary Hutchinson, of Penrith. Their children were
John, b. 1803; Dorothy, b. 1804 (became Mrs. Quinlan and died before
her father); Thomas, b. 1806; Catharine, b. 1808; and William, b.
1810--the last being the only one who survived the poet.
[11] This based on "Mr. Rawnsley's Gleanings amongst the Villagers."
See _Athenaeum_, February 23, 1889.
[12] There is a very interesting account of Wordsworth's home life,
etc., in Miss Martineau's _Autobiography_, vol. i., p. 504 _et
seq._--but very much colored, as all her pictures are, by her own
megrims and disposition to sneer at all the world--except Miss
Martineau.
{349}
INDEX.
Adams, John, 187.
Addison, Joseph, 4.
Aikin, Dr., 273-276.
Allston, Washington, 316.
Anne, Queen, the times of, 1-3.
Austen, Jane, her life and personality, 265-267; opinions of Walter
Scott, Macaulay, and Miss Mitford concerning, 266, 267; her _Pride and
Prejudice_, 268; _Persuasion_ and _Northanger Abbey_, 268, 269; her
qualities, 270, 271; burial-place, 270.
Austen, Lady, and William Cowper, 246, 247.
Barbauld, Mrs., 273-276.
Beauclerk, Topham, 114-116.
Beckford, William, and his _Vathek_, 285-291.
Bentley, Richard, his _Siris: A chain of Philosophical Reflections and
Inquiries concerning the Virtues of Tarwater_, 9; writes on the
_Epistles of Phalaris_, 9-11; his family, 10; portrait of, 10, 11; as a
writer and as a man, 11, 12.
Berkeley, George, his _Theory of Vision_, 4; his career, 4-9; his
verse, 5; his sermons, 6; _The Minute Philosopher_, 7; his family, 7;
his philosophy, 9.
Blair, Hugh, 230.
Blounts, Alexander Pope and the, 34.
Boswell, James, and his _Life of Dr. Johnson_, 118-122.
Boufflers, Madame de, and David Hume, 150.
Burke, Edmund, 112, 113; his words concerning Beauclerk's widow, 115;
his burial-place, 145.
Burney, Frances, and Dr. Johnson, 138, 142, 164, 165; her stories, 165;
_Evelina_, 165-168; _Camilla_, 168; her Diary, 168-169; last years,
170, 171.
Burns, Robert, his poetry, 291; his career, 292-297; his death, 298,
301; compared with Samuel Rogers, 302, 303.
_Camilla_, Miss Burney's, 170.
Carlyle, Thomas, his words concerning Coleridge, 318.
_Castle of Otranto_, The, Walpole's, 84.
Chatterton, Thomas, the young poet, 202-205; his end, 205, 206, 209;
and Horace Walpole, 206-209; the Rowley Poems, 207, 208; compared with
Poe, 210.
Chesterfield, Lord, and Dr. Johnson, 97, 98.
_Children of the Abbey_, Miss Roche's, 282, 283.
_Christabel_, Coleridge's, 317, 318.
Coach, the Venetian, 3.
_C[oe]lebs_, Hannah More's, 175, 176.
Coleridge, S. T., 298, 299; his life, 309-317; Lamb's apostrophe to,
310; and Southey, 311, 312; and Wordsworth, 313; his _Ancient Mariner_,
314, and Washington Allston, 316; his opium habit, 316, 317; his
_Christabel_, 317; Carlyle's words concerning, 318; his death, 318.
Collins, William, 100-163; his _Ode to Evening_, 163, 180.
Coverley, Sir Roger de, 2.
Cowper, William, his family and education, 239, 240; his love affair,
240; mental trouble, 241, 242; and Mrs. Unwin, 243-245, and Rev. John
Newton, 245; _John Gilpin's Ride_, 245, 246, and Lady Austen, 246; _The
Task_, 240, 247; on American affairs, 248; later life, 249-253; his
Homer, 250, 251; his place as a poet, 254-256.
Crabbe, George, compared with Pope, 232, 233; his birth and early work,
233-235; private chaplain to the Duke of Rutland, 235, 236; his life
and character, 237, 238.
Curchod, Mademoiselle, afterward Madame Necker, 123.
Day, Thomas, and _Sandford and Merton_, 271-273.
_Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, Gibbons's History of, 125, 127,
130.
Edgeworth, Maria, 277-281.
Ernest, Augustus, Duke of Brunswick, 57.
_Evelina_, Miss Burney's, 165-168.
_Evenings at Home_, by Dr. Aikin and Mrs. Barbauld, 273-276.
Ferguson, Robert, 229.
Fielding, Henry, his coarseness, 67, 68; his character and ancestry,
68; his schooling, 69; his dramatic work, 69, 70; his _Joseph Andrews_,
_Amelia_, and _Tom Jones_, 71, 72; his marriage, 70, 71; his death, 72.
Fox, Charles James, 188-192.
Franklin, Benjamin, and Miss Burney, 166; his words concerning George
III., 184.
Freeman, Edward, his words concerning Gibbon, 128.
Garrick, David, at Dr. Johnson's school, 91, 92; as a boy, 116; a
member of the "Literary Club, " 116; as an actor, 117, 118; his death,
138; Hannah More and, 173, 174.
George I., ancestry, 57; comes to England, 58; his character, 58; his
wife, 58, 59.
George II., 59-61; his reign, 61.
George III., character and personality of, 181-187.
Gibbon, Edward, birth, parentage, and education, 122; his love for
Mlle. Curchod, afterward Madame Necker, 133, 124; a member of the
"Literary Club, " 124, 127; as an author, 124, 125; his _Decline and
fall of the Roman Empire_, 125, 127-130; as a man, 125, 126; in Paris,
126; his burial-place, 145.
Goldsmith, Oliver, a member of the "Literary Club, " 130, 131; as a
writer, 132, 133; his death, 133, 134; his burial-place, 144, 145.
Gray, Thomas, birth, parentage, and education, 79, 80; opinions of his
work, 80; his fastidious refinement, 80-82; the _Elegy_ churchyard, 82;
and the Rowley Poems, 208.
Halket, George, 229.
Hayley, William, a friend of Cowper's, 249.
Hesketh, Lady, her interest in Cowper, 250, 252.
Homer, Pope's translation of, 43-45; Cowper's translation, 250, 251.
Honeycomb, Will, 2.
Hume, David, compared with Gibbon, 145, 146; his birth and early years,
146-148; his _Political Discourses_, 148; his _History of England_,
146, 149, 150, 156, 157; and Madame de Boufflers, 150; in Paris,
151-154; ambassador to the Court of France, 152; did not love England,
152, 153; his home in Edinboro', 154, 155; his death, 155, 156, 179;
his words concerning James Macpherson, 226.
_John Gilpin's Ride_, Cowper's, 245, 246.
Johnson, Samuel, his birth, parentage, and early career, 88-90; his
marriage, 90, 91; his boarding-school, 91; his personal appearance, 91;
goes to London, 91, 92; his _Irene_, 90, 92, 96, 97; and Richard
Savage, 92-94; his _London_, 94, 95; his _Vanity of Human Wishes_, 95,
96; his Prologue spoken at Drury Lane, 96; his Dictionary, 97, 98; his
letter to Lord Chesterfield, 98; in poverty, 102; death of his wife,
104; and Miss Williams, 104, 105; his power felt, 105; his _Rasselas_,
105-108; his friendship with Sir Joshua Reynolds, 108, 109; Boswell's
Life of, 118-122; and the Thrales, 135-137, 139, 140; his journey to
the Hebrides, 137, 138; his last years, 137-143; his burial-place, 145;
Hannah More and, 173; his reply to James Macpherson, 225, 226.
_Joseph Andrews_, Fielding's, 177.
Kames, Lord, 230.
Lamb, Charles, his words on Burns, 299; his apostrophe to Coleridge,
310; his writings, 319, 320, 323-326; his personality, 320, 321; his
family afflictions, 321-323; his death, 326.
Lamb, Mary, 321-323, 326.
"Literary Club, " the, 111.
London Bridge, 103.
Macaulay, T. B., on Boswell, 119; his opinion of Jane Austen, 266.
Mackenzie, Henry, 230.
Macpherson, James, and the Ossian poems, 221-227; his life, 224, 225;
his habits and disposition, 226, 227.
Mitford, Miss, her words concerning Jane Austen, 266, 267.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, her birth, parentage, and early life, 21,
22; her marriage, 22; her letters, 21, 23, 28; has her son inoculated
for smallpox, 23, 24; Pope's admiration for, 23-25; quarrels with Pope,
25, 26; a favorite of George I., 26; her later life, 27-30; Horace
Walpole's words concerning, 30, 52, 53.
More, Hannah, her words concerning Dr. Edward Young, 20; her youth,
171, 172; her pension, 172; acquaintance with Garrick and Johnson, 173,
174; her tragedy of _Percy_, 174; as a worker, 175; her _C[oe]lebs_,
175, 176; her goodness, 175-178; Thackeray's reference to, in _The
Newcomes_, 177, 178; her age, 180.
_Mysteries of Udolpho_, Radcliffe's, 284, 285.
Necker, Madame, 123, 124.
Newton, Rev. John, of Olney, and William Cowper, 245.
_Night Thoughts_, Young's, 15, 16, 18-30.
_Northanger Abbey_, Jane Austen's, 269.
Nugent, Dr., 114.
_Ode to Evening_, Collins's, 163.
Ossian's Poems, 221-227; the Ossianic Hermitage, 257, 258.
_Percy_, Hannah More's tragedy, 174.
_Persuasion_, Jane Austen's, 268, 269.
Pitt, William, 192-195.
Pope, Alexander, his admiration for Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 23-25;
familiar couplets of, 31; his infirmity and personal appearance, 31,
32; his birth and early years, 33, 34; and the Blounts, 34; his poetic
methods, 35-39: his _Essay on Criticism_, 36; his _Windsor Forest_, 36;
his _Rape of the Lock_, 36, 39-42; writes for the _Spectator_, 38, 39;
his translation of Homer, 43-45; his house and friends at Twickenham,
45-50; his last days, 48-51, 53.
Porter, Jane, her _Thaddeus of Warsaw_, 283, 284; her _Scottish
Chiefs_, 284.
_Pride and Prejudice_, Jane Austen's, 268.
Radcliffe, Ann Ward, her _Mysteries of Udolpho_, 284, 285.
_Rambler, The_, 98.
Ramsay, Allan, 228.
_Rape of the Lock_, Pope's, 36, 39-42.
_Rasselas_, Dr. Johnson's, 105-108.
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 108-111.
Richardson, Samuel, a printer and book-seller, 62; his friends, 63, 64;
as a writer of letters, 63-66; the father of the novel, 66, 67; assists
Dr. Johnson, 102.
Robertson, Dr., 230.
Roche, Maria Regina, her _Children of the Abbey_, 282, 283.
Rogers, Samuel, his _Pleasures of Memory_, 301, 302, 307-309; compared
with Burns, 302, 303; his career and character, 303-307.
Rousseau, J. J., 154.
Rowley Poems, The, 208.
Ruskin, John, on Gibbon's style, 128.
_Sandford and Merton_, Day's, 271-273.
Savage, Richard, and Dr. Johnson, 92, 94.
Scott, Walter, his opinion of Jane Austen, 266; his translation of
_Leonora_, 298.
_Scottish Chiefs_, Jane Porter's, 284.
_Selborne, Natural History of_, White's, 260-262.
Shenstone, William, 158-160, 180.
Sheridan, Thomas Brinsley, 195-202; as an orator, 199, 200; his end,
201, 202, 219.
Smibert, John, his painting of Berkeley and family, 7.
Smith, Adam, 230.
Sophia, grand-daughter of James I. and mother of George I., 57.
Southey, Robert, and Coleridge, 311, 312.
Sterne, Laurence, his death, 211, 212; his style, 212-214; his
burial-place, 215; his character and habit, 215, 216; his literary
pilferings, 216, 217; pathos of his life, 217, 218, 220.
Stoke-Pogis Churchyard and Gray's _Elegy_, 82.
Stuart, Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, 55, 56.
Stuart, Elizabeth, daughter of James I., 57.
Stuart, Henry, 56.
Stuart, James Edward, the Pretender, 53-55.
Swift, Dean, and Pope's Homer, 44.
Thackeray, W. M., and Hannah More, 177, 178.
_Thaddeus of Warsaw_, Jane Porter's, 283, 284.
Thomson, James, his boyhood, 73; brings his poetry to London, 73, 74;
his _Winter_, 74, 75; befriended by Pope, 76; his _Liberty_ and _Castle
of Indolence_, 77, 78; his burial-place, 101.
Thrales, The, and Dr. Johnson, 135-137, 139, 140.
Turk's Head Club, The, 111 _et seq._
Unwin, Mrs., and William Cowper, 243-245, 252, 253.
Vanhomrigh, Miss, 4, 5.
_Vathek_, Beckford's, 285-288.
Walpole, Horace, his words concerning Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 30;
his parentage and life at Twickenham, 83, 84, 87, 88; his _Castle of
Otranto_, 84; his letters, 85-87; his words concerning Gibbon, 125; and
the poet Chatterton, 206-209.
Watts, Isaac, associations of the name, 12, 13; birth, parentage, and
education, 13, 14; Bryant's admiration for, 14; his hymns, 14, 15;
endowed with a home, 15.
Westminster Bridge, 103.
White, Gilbert, and the _Natural History of Selborne_, 259-264; his
house, 264.
Williams, Miss, and Dr. Johnson, 104, 105.
Wordsworth, William, 298; and Coleridge, 313; the author's personal
reminiscence of, 327-330; his poetry, 330-337; his parentage and early
years, 337-340; his marriage, 340; his love of Nature, 340, 341;
personal traits, 341-343; his home at Rydal Mount, 343, 344; his
pension, 344; made Poet Laureate, 344; opposed to railways and
manufactures, 345, 346; his burial-place, 347.
Young, Dr. Edward, his _Night Thoughts_, 15, 16, 18-20; his birth,
parentage, and early work, 16; his _Last Day_, 17; his marriage, 18;
back at court, 19, 20; Hannah More's words concerning, 20.
[Transcriber's note: the source book's odd-numbered pages had varying
headers. In this etext, they have been converted to sidenotes and
placed where appropriate.]