This is fairly and candidly stated,--only I could wish that on one point

you had been a little more explicit. In the mean time, I will take it

for granted, that by a "knowledge of the alphabetic characters," you

confine your meaning to the single powers only, as you are silent on the

subject of the diphthongs, and harder combinations.

Why truly, Sir, when I consider the vast circle of sciences--it is not

here worth while to trouble you with the distinction between learning

and science--which a man must be understood to have made the tour of in

these days, before the world will be willing to concede to him the title

which you aspire to, I am almost disposed to reply to your inquiry by a

direct answer in the negative.

However, where all cannot be compassed, a great deal that is truly

valuable may be accomplished. I am unwilling to throw out any remarks

that should have a tendency to damp a hopeful genius; but I must not in

fairness conceal from you, that you have much to do. The consciousness

of difficulty is sometimes a spur to exertion. Rome--or rather, my dear

Sir, to borrow an illustration from a place, as yet more familiar to

you--Rumford--Rumford--was not built in a day.

Your mind as yet, give me leave to tell you, is in the state of a sheet

of white paper. We must not blot or blur it over too hastily. Or, to use

an opposite simile, it is like a piece of parchment all be-scrawled and

be-scribbled over with characters of no sense or import, which we must

carefully erase and remove, before we can make way for the authentic

characters or impresses, which are to be substituted in their stead by

the corrective hand of science.

Your mind, my dear Sir, again resembles that same parchment, which we

will suppose a little hardened by time and disuse. We may apply the

characters, but are we sure that the ink will sink?

You are in the condition of a traveller, that has all his journey to

begin. And again, you are worse off than the traveller which I have

supposed--for you have already lost your way.

You have much to learn, which you have never been taught; and more, I

fear, to unlearn, which you have been taught erroneously. You have

hitherto, I dare say, imagined, that the sun moves round the earth. When

you shall have mastered the true solar system, you will have quite a

different theory upon that point, I assure you. I mention but this

instance. Your own experience, as knowledge advances, will furnish you

with many parallels.

I can scarcely approve of the intention, which Mr. Grierson informs me

you had contemplated, of entering yourself at a common seminary, and

working your way up from the lower to the higher forms with the

children. I see more to admire in the modesty, than in the expediency,

of such a resolution. I own I cannot reconcile myself to the spectacle

of a gentleman at your time of life seated, as must be your case at

first, below a Tyro of four or five--for at that early age the rudiments

of education usually commence in this country. I doubt whether more

might not be lost in the point of fitness, than would be gained in the

advantages which you propose to yourself by this scheme.

You say, you stand in need of emulation; that this incitement is no

where to be had but at a public school; that you should be more sensible

of your progress by comparing it with the daily progress of those around

you. But have you considered the nature of emulation; and how it is

sustained at those tender years, which you would have to come in

competition with? I am afraid you are dreaming of academic prizes and

distinctions. Alas! in the university, for which you are preparing, the

highest medal would be a silver penny, and you must graduate in nuts and

oranges.

I know that Peter, the Great Czar--or Emperor--of Muscovy, submitted

himself to the discipline of a dock-yard at Deptford, that he might

learn, and convey to his countrymen, the noble art of shipbuilding. You

are old enough to remember him, or at least to talk about him. I call to

mind also other great princes, who, to instruct themselves in the

theory and practice of war, and set an example of subordination to their

subjects, have condescended to enrol themselves as private soldiers;

and, passing through the successive ranks of corporal, quarter-master,

and the rest, have served their way up to the station, at which most

princes are willing enough to set out--of General and Commander-in-Chief

over their own forces. But--besides that there is oftentimes great sham

and pretence in their show of mock humility--the competition which they

stooped to was with their co-evals, however inferior to them in birth.

Between ages so very disparate, as those which you contemplate, I fear

there can no salutary emulation subsist.

Again, in the other alternative, could you submit to the ordinary

reproofs and discipline of a day-school? Could you bear to be corrected

for your faults? Or how would it look to see you put to stand, as must

be the case sometimes, in a corner?

I am afraid the idea of a public school in your circumstances must be

given up.

But is it impossible, by dear Sir, to find some person of your own

age--if of the other sex, the more agreeable perhaps--whose information,

like your own, has rather lagged behind their years, who should be

willing to set out from the same point with yourself, to undergo the

same tasks--thus at once inciting and sweetening each other's labours in

a sort of friendly rivalry. Such a one, I think, it would not be

difficult to find in some of the western parts of this island--about

Dartmoor for instance.

Or what if, from your own estate--that estate which, unexpectedly

acquired so late in life, has inspired into you this generous thirst

after knowledge, you were to select some elderly peasant, that might

best be spared from the land; to come and begin his education with you,

that you might till, as it were, your minds together--one, whose heavier

progress might invite, without a fear of discouraging, your emulation?

We might then see--starting from an equal post--the difference of the

clownish and the gentle blood.

A private education then, or such a one as I have been describing, being

determined on, we must in the next place look out for a preceptor:--for

it will be some time before either of you, left to yourselves, will be

able to assist the other to any great purpose in his studies.

And now, my dear Sir, if in describing such a tutor as I have imagined

for you, I use a style a little above the familiar one in which I have

hitherto chosen to address you, the nature of the subject must be my

apology. _Difficile est de scientiis inscienter loqui_, which is as much

as to say that "in treating of scientific matters it is difficult to

avoid the use of scientific terms." But I shall endeavour to be as plain

as possible. I am not going to present you with the _ideal_ of a

pedagogue, as it may exist in my fancy, or has possibly been realized in

the persons of Buchanan and Busby. Something less than perfection will

serve our turn. The scheme which I propose in this first or introductory

letter has reference to the first four or five years of your education

only; and in enumerating the qualifications of him that should undertake

the direction of your studies, I shall rather point out the _minimum_,

or _least_, that I shall require of him, than trouble you in the search

of attainments neither common nor necessary to our immediate purpose.

He should be a man of deep and extensive knowledge. So much at least is

indispensable. Something older than yourself, I could wish him, because

years add reverence.

To his age and great learning, he should be blest with a temper and a

patience, willing to accommodate itself to the imperfections of the

slowest and meanest capacities. Such a one in former days Mr. Hartlib

appears to have been, and such in our days I take Mr. Grierson to be;

but our friend, you know, unhappily has other engagements. I do not

demand a consummate grammarian; but he must be a thorough master of

vernacular orthography, with an insight into the accentualities and

punctualities of modern Saxon, or English. He must be competently

instructed (or how shall he instruct you?) in the tetralogy, or first

four rules, upon which not only arithmetic, but geometry, and the pure

mathematics themselves, are grounded. I do not require that he should

have measured the globe with Cook, or Ortelius, but it is desirable that

he should have a general knowledge (I do not mean a very nice or

pedantic one) of the great division of the earth into four parts, so as

to teach you readily to name the quarters. He must have a genius capable

in some degree of soaring to the upper element, to deduce from thence

the not much dissimilar computation of the cardinal points, or hinges,

upon which those invisible phenomena, which naturalists agree to term

_winds_, do perpetually shift and turn. He must instruct you, in

imitation of the old Orphic fragments (the mention of which has possibly

escaped you), in numeric and harmonious responses, to deliver the number

of solar revolutions, within which each of the twelve periods, into

which the _Annus Vulgaris_, or common year, is divided, doth usually

complete and terminate itself. The intercalaries, and other subtle

problems, he will do well to omit, till riper years, and course of

study, shall have rendered you more capable thereof. He must be capable

of embracing all history, so as from the countless myriads of individual

men, who have peopled this globe of earth--_for it is a globe_--by

comparison of their respective births, lives, deaths, fortunes, conduct,

prowess, &c. to pronounce, and teach you to pronounce, dogmatically and

catechetically, who was the richest, who was the strongest, who was the

wisest, who was the meekest man, that ever lived; to the facilitation of

which solution, you will readily conceive, a smattering of biography

would in no inconsiderable degree conduce. Leaving the dialects of men

(in one of which I shall take leave to suppose you by this time at least

superficially instituted), you will learn to ascend with him to the

contemplation of that unarticulated language, which was before the

written tongue; and, with the aid of the elder Phrygian or Æsopic key,

to interpret the sounds by which the animal tribes communicate their

minds--evolving moral instruction with delight from the dialogue of

cocks, dogs, and foxes. Or marrying theology with verse, from whose

mixture a beautiful and healthy offspring may be expected, in your own

native accents (but purified) you will keep time together to the

profound harpings of the more modern or Wattsian hymnics.

Thus far I have ventured to conduct you to a "hill-side, whence you may

discern the right path of a virtuous and noble education; laborious

indeed at the first ascent, but else so smooth, so green, so full of

goodly prospects and melodious sounds on every side, that the harp of

Orpheus was not more charming."[42]

With my best respects to Mr. Grierson, when you see him,

I remain, dear Sir, your obedient servant,

ELIA.

_April 1, 1823._

[42] Milton's Tractate on Education, addressed to Mr. Hartlib.

RITSON _VERSUS_ JOHN SCOTT THE QUAKER

(1823)

Critics I read on other men,

And Hypers upon them again.--_Prior._

I have in my possession Scott's "Critical Essays on some of the Poems of

several English Poets,"--a handsome octavo, bought at the sale of

Ritson's books; and enriched (or deformed, as some would think it) with

MS. annotations in the handwriting of that redoubted Censor. I shall

transcribe a few, which seem most characteristic of both the

writers--Scott, feeble, but amiable--Ritson, coarse, caustic, clever;

and, I am to suppose, not amiable. But they have proved some amusement

to me; and, I hope, will produce some to the reader, this rainy season,

which really damps a gentleman's wings for any original flight, and

obliges him to ransack his shelves, and miscellaneous reading, to

furnish an occasional or make-shift paper. If the sky clears up, and the

sun dances this Easter (as they say he is wont to do), the town may be

troubled with something more in his own way the ensuing month from its

poor servant to command.

ELIA.

DYER'S RUINS OF ROME

----The pilgrim oft

At dead of night 'mid his oraison hears

Aghast the voice of time disparting towers,

Tumbling all precipitate down-dashed,

Rattling around, loud-thund'ring to the moon;

While murmurs sooth each awful interval

Of ever-falling waters.

_Scott_

There is a very bold transposition in this passage. A superficial

reader, not attending to the sense of the epithet _ever_, might be ready

to suppose that the _intervals_ intended were those between the _falling

of the waters_, instead of those between the _falling of the towers_.

_Ritson_

A beauty, as in Thomson's Winter--

----Cheerless towns, far distant, never blest,

Save when its annual course the caravan

Bends to the golden coast of rich Cathay,

With news of human kind.[43]

----Where the broad-bosom'd hills,

Swept with perpetual clouds, of Scotland rise,

Me fate compels to tarry.

A superficial person--Mr. Scott, for instance, would be apt to connect

the last clause in this period with the line foregoing--"bends to the

coast of Cathay with news," &c. But has a reader nothing to do but to

sit passive, while the connexion is to glide into his ears like oil?

[43] May I have leave to notice an instance of the same agreeable

discontinuity in my friend Lloyd's admirable poem on Christmas?

DENHAM'S COOPER'S HILL

The stream is so transparent, pure, and clear,

That, had the self-enamour'd youth gaz'd here,

So fatally deceived he had not been,

While he the bottom, not his face had seen.

_Scott_

The last two lines have more music than Denham's can possibly boast.

_Ritson_

May I have leave to conjecture, that in the very last line of all, the

word "the" has erroneously crept in? I am persuaded that the poet wrote

"his." To my mind, at least, this reading, in a surprising degree,

heightens the idea of the extreme clearness and transparency of the

stream, where a man might see _more than his face_ (as it were) in it.

COLLINS'S ORIENTAL ECLOGUES

_Scott_

The second of these little pieces, called Hassan, or the Camel Driver,

is of superior character. This poem contradicts history in one principal

instance; the merchants of the east travel in numerous caravans, but

Hassan is introduced travelling alone in the desart. But this

circumstance detracts little from our author's merit; adherence to

historical fact is _seldom_ required in poetry.

_Ritson_

It is _always_, where the poet unnecessarily transports you to the ends

of the world. If he must plague you with exotic scenery, you have a

right to exact strict local imagery and costume. Why must I learn

Arabic, to read nothing after all but Gay's Fables in another language?

_Scott_

Abra is introduced in a grove, wreathing a flowery chaplet for her hair.

Shakspeare himself could not have devised a more natural and pleasing

incident, than that of the monarch's attention being attracted by her

song:

Great Abbas chanced that fated morn to stray,

By love conducted from the chace away.

Among the vocal vales he heard her song----

_Ritson_

Ch--t?

* * * * *

O stay thee, Agib, for my feet deny,

No longer friendly to my life, to fly----

_Scott_

From the pen of Cowley, such an observation as Secander's, "that his

feet were no longer friendly to his life," might have been expected; but

Collins rarely committed such violations of simplicity.

_Ritson_

Pen of Cowley! impudent goose-quill, how darest thou guess what Cowley

would have written?

GRAY'S CHURCH-YARD ELEGY

Save where the beetle wheels----

_Scott_

The beetle was introduced in poetry by Shakspeare * * *. Shakspeare has

made the most of his description; indeed, far too much, considering the

occasion:

----to black Hecate's summons

The shard-born beetle with his drowsy hum

Hath rung night's yawning peal.----

The imagination must be indeed fertile, which could produce this

ill-placed exuberance of imagery. The poet, when composing this passage,

must have had in his mind all the remote ideas of Hecate, a heathen

Goddess, of a beetle, of night, of a peal of bells, and of that action

of the muscles, commonly called a gape or yawn.

_Ritson_

Numbscull! that would limit an infinite head by the square contents of

thy own numbscull.

_Scott_

The great merit of a poet is not, like Cowley, Donne, and Denham, to say

what no man but himself has thought, but what every man besides himself

has thought; but no man expressed, or, at least, expressed so well.

_Ritson_

In other words, all _that_ is poetry, which Mr. Scott has thought, as

well as the poet; but _that_ cannot be poetry, which was not obvious to

Mr. Scott, as well as to Cowley, Donne, and Denham.

_Scott_

Mr. Mason observes of the language in this part [the Epitaph], that it

has a Doric delicacy. It has, indeed, what I should rather term a _happy

rusticity_.

_Ritson_

Come, see

Rural felicity.

GOLDSMITH'S DESERTED VILLAGE

No busy steps the grass-grown footway tread,

But all the bloomy flush of life is fled--

All but yon widow'd solitary thing,

That feebly bends beside the plashy spring;

She, wretched matron, forced, in age, for bread,

To strip the brook with mantling cresses spread,

_Scott_

Our author's language, in this place, is very defective in correctness.

After mentioning the general privation of the "bloomy flush of life,"

the exceptionary "all but" includes, as part of that "bloomy flush," an

aged decrepit matron; that is to say, in plain prose, "the bloomy flush

of life is all fled but one old woman."

_Ritson_

Yet Milton could write:

Far from all resort of mirth,

Save the cricket on the hearth,

Or the bell-man's drowsy charm--

and I dare say he was right. O never let a quaker, or a woman, try their

hand at being witty, any more than a Tom Brown affect to speak by the

spirit!

_Scott_

----Aaron Hill, who, although, in general, a bombastic writer, produced

some pieces of merit, particularly the Caveat, an allegorical satire on

Pope.

_Ritson_

Say rather his verses on John Dennis, beginning "Adieu, unsocial

excellence!" which are implicitly a finer satire on Pope than twenty

Caveats. All that Pope could or did say against Dennis, is there

condensed; and what he should have said, and did not, for him, is there

too.[44]

[44]

ON THE DEATH OF MR. DENNIS

Adieu, unsocial excellence! at last

Thy foes are vanquish'd, and thy fears are past:

Want, the grim recompense of truth like thine,

Shall now no longer dim thy destined shrine.

The impatient envy, the disdainful air,

The front malignant, and the captious stare,

The furious petulance, the jealous start,

The mist of frailties that obscured thy heart--

Veil'd in thy grave shall unremember'd lie;

For these were parts of Dennis born to die.

But there's a nobler deity behind;

His reason dies not, and has friends to find:

THOMSON'S SEASONS

_Address to the Angler to spare the young fish_

If yet too young, and easily deceived,

A worthless prey scarce bends your pliant rod,

Him, piteous of his youth, and the short space

He has enjoy'd the vital light of heaven,

Soft disengage, and back into the stream

The speckled infant throw.----

_Scott_

The praise bestowed on a preceding passage, cannot be justly given to

this. There is in it an attempt at dignity above the occasion. Pathos

seems to have been intended, but affectation only is produced.

_Ritson_

It is not affectation, but it is the mock heroic of pathos, introduced

purposely and wisely to attract the reader to a proposal, which from the

unimportance of the subject--a poor little fish--might else have escaped

his attention--as children learn, or may learn, humanity to animals from

the mock romantic "Perambulations of a Mouse."

HAYMAKING

----Infant hands

Trail the long rake; or, with the fragrant load

O'er-charged, amid the kind oppression roll.

_Scott_

"Kind oppression" is a phrase of that sort, which one scarcely knows

whether to blame or praise: it consists of two words, directly opposite

in their signification; and yet, perhaps, no phrase whatever could have

better conveyed the idea of an easy uninjurious weight--

_Ritson_

--and yet he does not know whether to blame or praise it!

Though here revenge and pride withheld his praise,

No wrongs shall reach him through his future days;

The rising ages shall redeem his name,

And nations read him into lasting fame.

In his defects untaught, his labour'd page

Shall the slow gratitude of Time engage.

Perhaps some story of his pitied woe,

Mix'd in faint shades, may with his memory go,

To touch fraternity with generous shame,

And backward cast an unavailing blame

On times too cold to taste his strength of art,

Yet warm contemners of too weak a heart.

Rest in thy dust, contented with thy lot,

Thy good remember'd, and thy bad forgot.

* * * * * * *

SHEEP-SHEARING

----By many a dog

Compell'd----

* * * * *

The clamour much of men, and boys, and dogs----

* * * * *

_Scott_

The mention of _dogs_ twice was superfluous; it might have been easily

avoided.

_Ritson_

Very true--by mentioning them only once.

_Scott_

Nature is rich in a variety of minute but striking circumstances; some

of which engage the attention of one observer, and some that of another.

_Ritson_

This lover of truth never uttered a truer speech. Give me a lie wth a

spirit in it.

* * * * *

Air, earth, and ocean, smile immense.----

_Scott_

The bombastic "immense smile of air, &c.," better omitted.

_Ritson_

Qute Miltonic--"enormous bliss"--and both, I presume, alike _caviare_ to

the Quaker.

* * * * *

He comes! he comes! in every breeze the power

Of philosophic melancholy comes!

His near approach, the sudden-starting tear,

The glowing cheek, the mild dejected air,

The soften'd feature, and the beating heart,

Pierced deep with many a virtuous pang, declare.

_Scott_

This fine picture is greatly injured by a few words. The power should

have been said to come "upon the breeze;" not "in every breeze;" an

expression which indicates a multiplicity of approaches. If he came "in

every breeze," he must have been always coming--

_Ritson_

--and so he was.

* * * * *

----The branching Oronoque

Rolls a brown deluge, and the native drives

To dwell aloft on life-sufficing trees,

At once his dome, his robe, his food, and arms.

Swell'd by a thousand streams, impetuous hurl'd

From all the roaring Andes, huge descends

The mighty Orellana. _Scarce the Muse

Dares stretch her wing_ o'er this enormous mass

Of rushing water: _scarce she dares attempt_

The sea-like Plata; to whose dread expanse,

Continuous depth, and wond'rous length of course,

Our floods are rills. With unabated force

In silent dignity they sweep along,

And traverse realms unknown, and blooming wilds,

And fruitful desarts, worlds of solitude,

Where the sun smiles, and seasons teem, in vain,

Unseen and unenjoy'd. Forsaking these,

O'er peopled plains they fair-diffusive flow,

And many a nation feed, and circle safe

In their fair bosom many a happy isle,

The seat of blameless Pan, yet undisturb'd

By Christian crimes, and Europe's cruel sons.

Thus pouring on, they proudly seek the deep,

Whose vanquish'd tide, recoiling from the shock,

Yields to this liquid weight of half the globe,

And Ocean trembles for his green domain.

_Scott_

Poets not unfrequently aim at aggrandising their subject, by avowing

their inability to describe it. This is a puerile and inadequate

expedient. Thomson has here, perhaps inadvertently, descended to this

feeble art of exaggeration.

_Ritson_

A magnificent passage, in spite of Duns Scotus! The poet says not a word

about his "inability to describe," nor seems to be thinking about his

readers at all. He is confessing his own feelings, awe-struck with the

contemplation of such o'erwhelming objects; in the same spirit with

which he designates the den of the "green serpent" in another place--

--Which ev'n imagination fears to tread----

* * * * *

----A dazzling deluge reigns, and all

From pole to pole is undistinguish'd blaze.----

_Scott_

From pole to pole, strictly speaking, is improper. _The poet_ meant,

"from one part of the horizon to the other."

_Ritson_

From _his_ pole to _thy_ pole was a more downward declension than "from

the centre thrice," &c.

_Ohe! jam satis_.

LETTER OF ELIA TO ROBERT SOUTHEY

(1823)

Sir,--You have done me an unfriendly office, without perhaps much

considering what you were doing. You have given an ill name to my poor

Lucubrations. In a recent Paper on Infidelity, you usher in a

conditional commendation of them with an exception; which, preceding the

encomium, and taking up nearly the same space with it, must impress your

readers with the notion, that the objectionable parts in them are at

least equal in quantity to the pardonable. The censure is in fact the

criticism; the praise--a concession merely. Exceptions usually follow,

to qualify praise or blame. But there stands your reproof, in the very

front of your notice, in ugly characters, like some bugbear, to frighten

all good Christians from purchasing. Through you I am become an object

of suspicion to preceptors of youth, and fathers of families. "_A book,

which wants only a sounder religious feeling to be as delightful as it

is original._" With no further explanation, what must your readers

conjecture, but that my little volume is some vehicle for heresy or

infidelity? The quotation, which you honour me by subjoining, oddly

enough, is of a character, which bespeaks a temperament in the writer

the very reverse of _that_ your reproof goes to insinuate. Had you been

taxing me with superstition, the passage would have been pertinent to

the censure. Was it worth your while to go so far out of your way to

affront the feelings of an old friend, and commit yourself by an

irrelevant quotation, for the pleasure of reflecting upon a poor child,

an exile at Genoa?

I am at a loss what particular Essay you had in view (if my poor

ramblings amount to that appellation) when you were in such a hurry to

thrust in your objection, like bad news, foremost.--Perhaps the Paper on

"Saying Graces" was the obnoxious feature. I have endeavoured there to

rescue a voluntary duty--good in place, but never, as I remember,

literally commanded--from the charge of an undecent formality. Rightly

taken, Sir, that Paper was not against Graces, but Want of Grace; not

against the ceremony, but the carelessness and slovenliness so often

observed in the performance of it.

Or was it _that_ on the "New Year"--in which I have described the

feelings of the merely natural man, on a consideration of the amazing

change, which is supposable to take place on our removal from this

fleshly scene?--If men would honestly confess their misgivings (which

few men will) there are times when the strongest Christians of us, I

believe, have reeled under questionings of such staggering obscurity. I

do not accuse you of this weakness. There are some who tremblingly reach

out shaking hands to the guidance of Faith--Others who stoutly venture

into the dark (their Human Confidence their leader, whom they mistake

for Faith); and, investing themselves beforehand with Cherubic wings, as

they fancy, find their new robes as familiar, and fitting to their

supposed growth and stature in godliness, as the coat they left off

yesterday--Some whose hope totters upon crutches--Others who stalk into

futurity upon stilts.

The contemplation of a Spiritual World,--which, without the addition of

a misgiving conscience, is enough to shake some natures to their

foundation--is smoothly got over by others, who shall float over the

black billows, in their little boat of No-Distrust, as unconcernedly as

over a summer sea. The difference is chiefly constitutional.

One man shall love his friends and his friends' faces; and, under the

uncertainty of conversing with them again, in the same manner and

familiar circumstances of sight, speech, &c., as upon earth--in a moment

of no irreverent weakness--for a dream-while--no more--would be almost

content, for a reward of a life of virtue (if he could ascribe such

acceptance to his lame performances), to take up his portion with those

he loved, and was made to love, in this good world, which he

knows--which was created so lovely, beyond his deservings. Another,

embracing a more exalted vision--so that he might receive indefinite

additaments of power, knowledge, beauty, glory, &c.--is ready to forego

the recognition of humbler individualities of earth, and the old

familiar faces. The shapings of our heavens are the modifications of our

constitution; and Mr. Feeble Mind, or Mr. Great Heart, is born in every

one of us.

Some (and such have been accounted the safest divines) have shrunk from

pronouncing upon the final state of any man; nor dare they pronounce the

case of Judas to be desperate. Others (with stronger optics), as plainly

as with the eye of flesh, shall behold a _given king_ in bliss, and a

_given chamberlain_ in torment; even to the eternising of a cast of the

eye in the latter, his own self-mocked and good-humouredly-borne

deformity on earth, but supposed to aggravate the uncouth and hideous

expression of his pangs in the other place. That one man can presume so

far, and that another would with shuddering disclaim such confidences,

is, I believe, an effect of the nerves purely.

If in either of these Papers, or elsewhere, I have been betrayed into

some levities--not affronting the sanctuary, but glancing perhaps at

some of the out-skirts and extreme edges, the debateable land between

the holy and the profane regions--(for the admixture of man's

inventions, twisting themselves with the name of religion itself, has

artfully made it difficult to touch even the alloy, without, in some

men's estimation, soiling the fine gold)--If I have sported within the

purlieus of serious matter--it was, I dare say, a humour--be not

startled, Sir--which I have unwittingly derived from yourself. You have

all your life been making a jest of the Devil. Not of the scriptural

meaning of that dark essence--personal or allegorical; for the nature is

no where plainly delivered. I acquit you of intentional irreverence. But

indeed you have made wonderfully free with, and been mighty pleasant

upon, the popular idea and attributes of him. A noble Lord, your brother

Visionary, has scarcely taken greater liberties with the material keys,

and merely Catholic notion of St. Peter.--You have flattered him in

prose: you have chanted him in goodly odes. You have been his Jester;

Volunteer Laureat, and self-elected Court Poet to Beëlzebub.

You have never ridiculed, I believe, what you thought to be religion,

but you are always girding at what some pious, but perhaps mistaken

folks, think to be so. For this reason I am sorry to hear, that you are

engaged upon a life of George Fox. I know you will fall into the error

of intermixing some comic stuff with your seriousness. The Quakers

tremble at the subject in your hands. The Methodists are shy of you,

upon account of _their_ founder. But, above all, our Popish brethren are

most in your debt. The errors of that church have proved a fruitful

source to your scoffing vein. Their Legend has been a Golden one to you.

And here, your friends, Sir, have noticed a notable inconsistency. To

the imposing rites, the solemn penances, devout austerities of that

communion; the affecting though erring piety of their hermits; the

silence and solitude of the Chartreux--their crossings, their holy

waters--their Virgin, and their saints--to these, they say, you have

been indebted for the best feelings, and the richest imagery, of your

Epic poetry. You have drawn copious drafts upon Loretto. We thought at

one time you were going post to Rome--but that in the facetious

commentaries, which it is your custom to append so plentifully, and

(some say) injudiciously, to your loftiest performances in this kind,

you spurn the uplifted toe, which you but just now seemed to court;

leave his holiness in the lurch; and show him a fair pair of Protestant

heels under your Romish vestment. When we think you already at the

wicket, suddenly a violent cross wind blows you transverse--

ten thousand leagues awry.

Then might we see

Cowls, hoods, and habits, with their wearers, tost

And flutter'd into rags; then reliques, beads,

Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls,

The sport of winds.

You pick up pence by showing the hallowed bones, shrine, and crucifix;

and you take money a second time by exposing the trick of them

afterwards. You carry your verse to Castle Angelo for sale in a morning;

and, swifter than a pedlar can transmute his pack, you are at Canterbury

with your prose ware before night.

Sir, is it that I dislike you in this merry vein? The very reverse. No

countenance becomes an intelligent jest better than your own. It is your

grave aspect, when you look awful upon your poor friends, which I would

deprecate.

In more than one place, if I mistake not, you have been pleased to

compliment me at the expence of my companions. I cannot accept your

compliment at such a price. The upbraiding a man's poverty naturally

makes him look about him, to see whether he be so poor indeed as he is

presumed to be. You have put me upon counting my riches. Really, Sir, I

did not know I was so wealthy in the article of friendships. There

is----, and----, whom you never heard of, but exemplary characters both,

and excellent church-goers; and N., mine and my father's friend for

nearly half a century; and the enthusiast for Wordsworth's poetry, T. N.

T., a little tainted with Socinianism, it is to be feared, but constant

in his attachments, and a capital critic; and----, a sturdy old

Athanasian, so that sets all to rights again; and W., the light, and

warm-as-light hearted, Janus of the London; and the translator of Dante,

still a curate, modest and amiable C.; and Allan C., the large-hearted

Scot; and P----r, candid and affectionate as his own poetry; and A----p,

Coleridge's friend; and G----n, his more than friend; and Coleridge

himself, the same to me still, as in those old evenings, when we used to

sit and speculate (do you remember them, Sir?) at our old Salutation

tavern, upon Pantisocracy and golden days to come on earth; and W----th,

(why, Sir, I might drop my rent-roll here; such goodly farms and manors

have I reckoned up already. In what possessions has not this last name

alone estated me!--but I will go on)--and M., the noble-minded kinsman,

by wedlock, of W----th; and H. C. R., unwearied in the offices of a

friend; and Clarkson, almost above the narrowness of that relation, yet

condescending not seldom heretofore from the labours of his

world-embracing charity to bless my humble roof; and the gall-less and

single-minded Dyer; and the high-minded associate of Cook, the veteran

Colonel, with his lusty heart still sending cartels of defiance to old

Time; and, not least, W. A., the last and steadiest left to me of that

little knot of whist-players, that used to assemble weekly, for so many

years, at the Queen's Gate (you remember them, Sir?) and called Admiral

Burney friend.

I will come to the point at once. I believe you will not make many

exceptions to my associates so far. But I have purposely omitted some

intimacies, which I do not yet repent of having contracted, with two

gentlemen, diametrically opposed to yourself in principles. You will

understand me to allude to the authors of Rimini and of the Table Talk.

And first, of the former.----

It is an error more particularly incident to persons of the correctest

principles and habits, to seclude themselves from the rest of mankind,

as from another species; and form into knots and clubs. The best people,

herding thus exclusively, are in danger of contracting a narrowness.

Heat and cold, dryness and moisture, in the natural world, do not fly

asunder, to split the globe into sectarian parts and separations; but

mingling, as they best may, correct the malignity of any single

predominance. The analogy holds, I suppose, in the moral world. If all

the good people were to ship themselves off to Terra Incognitas, what,

in humanity's name, is to become of the refuse? If the persons, whom I

have chiefly in view, have not pushed matters to this extremity yet,

they carry them as far as they can go. Instead of mixing with the

infidel and the freethinker--in the room of opening a negociation, to

try at least to find out at which gate the error entered--they huddle

close together, in a weak fear of infection, like that pusillanimous

underling in Spenser--

This is the wandering wood, this Error's den;

A monster vile, whom God and man does hate:

Therefore, I reed, beware. Fly, fly, quoth then

The fearful Dwarf,

and, if they be writers in orthodox journals--addressing themselves

only to the irritable passions of the unbeliever--they proceed in a safe

system of strengthening the strong hands, and confirming the valiant

knees; of converting the already converted, and proselyting their own

party. I am the more convinced of this from a passage in the very

Treatise which occasioned this letter. It is where, having recommended

to the doubter the writings of Michaelis and Lardner, you ride

triumphant over the necks of all infidels, sceptics, and dissenters,

from this time to the world's end, upon the wheels of two unanswerable

deductions. I do not hold it meet to set down, in a Miscellaneous

Compilation like this, such religious words as you have thought fit to

introduce into the pages of a petulant Literary Journal. I therefore beg

leave to substitute _numerals_, and refer to the Quarterly Review (for

July) for filling of them up. "Here," say you, "as in the history of 7,

if these books are authentic, the events which they relate must be true;

if they were written by 8, 9 is 10 and 11." Your first deduction, if it

means honestly, rests upon two identical propositions; though I suspect

an unfairness in one of the terms, which this would not be quite the

proper place for explicating. At all events _you_ have no cause to

triumph; you have not been proving the premises, but refer for

satisfaction therein to very long and laborious works, which may well

employ the sceptic a twelvemonth or two to digest, before he can

possibly be ripe for your conclusion. When he has satisfied himself

about the premises, he will concede to you the inference, I dare say,

most readily.--But your latter deduction, _viz_. that because 8 has

written a book concerning 9, therefore 10 and 11 was certainly his

meaning, is one of the most extraordinary conclusions _per saltum_ that

I have had the good fortune to meet with. As far as 10 is verbally

asserted in the writings, all sects must agree with you; but you cannot

be ignorant of the many various ways in which the doctrine of the

* * * * * * * * * has been understood, from a low figurative expression

(with the Unitarians) up to the most mysterious actuality; in which

highest sense alone you and your church take it. And for 11, that there

is _no other possible conclusion_--to hazard this in the face of so many

thousands of Arians and Socinians, &c., who have drawn so opposite a

one, is such a piece of theological hardihood, as, I think, warrants me

in concluding that, when you sit down to pen theology, you do not at all

consider your opponents; but have in your eye, merely and exclusively,

readers of the same way of thinking with yourself, and therefore have no

occasion to trouble yourself with the quality of the logic, to which you

treat them.

Neither can I think, if you had had the welfare of the poor child--over

whose hopeless condition you whine so lamentably and (I must think)

unseasonably--seriously at heart, that you could have taken the step of

sticking him up by name--T. H. is as good as _naming_ him--to perpetuate

an outrage upon the parental feelings, as long as the Quarterly Review

shall last.--Was it necessary to specify an individual case, and give to

Christian compassion the appearance of personal attack? Is this the way

to conciliate unbelievers, or not rather to widen the breach

irreparably?

I own I could never think so considerably of myself as to decline the

society of an agreeable or worthy man upon difference of opinion only.

The impediments and the facilitations to a sound belief are various and

inscrutable as the heart of man. Some believe upon weak principles.

Others cannot feel the efficacy of the strongest. One of the most

candid, most upright, and single-meaning men, I ever knew, was the late

Thomas Holcroft. I believe he never said one thing and meant another, in

his life; and, as near as I can guess, he never acted otherwise than

with the most scrupulous attention to conscience. Ought we to wish the

character false, for the sake of a hollow compliment to Christianity?

Accident introduced me to the acquaintance of Mr. L. H.--and the

experience of his many friendly qualities confirmed a friendship between

us. You, who have been misrepresented yourself, I should hope, have not

lent an idle ear to the calumnies which have been spread abroad

respecting this gentleman. I was admitted to his household for some

years, and do most solemnly aver that I believe him to be in his

domestic relations as correct as any man. He chose an ill-judged subject

for a poem; the peccant humours of which have been visited on him

tenfold by the artful use, which his adversaries have made, of an

_equivocal term_. The subject itself was started by Dante, but better

because brieflier treated of. But the crime of the Lovers, in the

Italian and the English poet, with its aggravated enormity of

circumstance, is not of a kind (as the critics of the latter well knew)

with those conjunctions, for which Nature herself has provided no

excuse, because no temptation.--It has nothing in common with the black

horrors, sung by Ford and Massinger. The familiarising of it in tale or

fable may be for that reason incidentally more contagious. In spite of

Rimini, I must look upon its author as a man of taste, and a poet. He is

better than so, he is one of the most cordial-minded men I ever knew,

and matchless as a fire-side companion. I mean not to affront or wound

your feelings when I say that, in his more genial moods, he has often

reminded me of you. There is the same air of mild dogmatism--the same

condescending to a boyish sportiveness--in both your conversations. His

hand-writing is so much the same with your own, that I have opened more

than one letter of his, hoping, nay, not doubting, but it was from you,

and have been disappointed (he will bear with my saying so) at the

discovery of my error. L. H. is unfortunate in holding some loose and

not very definite speculations (for at times I think he hardly knows

whither his premises would carry him) on marriage--the tenets, I

conceive, of the Political Justice, carried a little further. For any

thing I could discover in his practice, they have reference, like those,

to some future possible condition of society, and not to the present

times. But neither for these obliquities of thinking (upon which my own

conclusions are as distant as the poles asunder)--nor for his political

asperities and petulancies, which are wearing out with the heats and

vanities of youth--did I select him for a friend; but for qualities

which fitted him for that relation. I do not know whether I flatter

myself with being the occasion, but certain it is, that, touched with

some misgivings for sundry harsh things which he had written aforetime

against our friend C.,--before he left this country he sought a

reconciliation with that gentleman (himself being his own introducer),

and found it.

L. H. is now in Italy; on his departure to which land with much regret I

took my leave of him and of his little family--seven of them, Sir, with

their mother--and as kind a set of little people (T. H. and all), as

affectionate children, as ever blessed a parent. Had you seen them, Sir,

I think you could not have looked upon them as so many little

Jonases--but rather as pledges of the vessel's safety, that was to bear

such a freight of love.

I wish you would read Mr. H.'s lines to that same T. H., "six years old,

during a sickness:"

Sleep breaks [breathes] at last from out thee,

My little patient boy--

(they are to be found on the 47th page of "Foliage")--and ask yourself

how far they are out of the spirit of Christianity. I have a letter from

Italy, received but the other day, into which L. H. has put as much

heart, and as many friendly yearnings after old associates, and native

country, as, I think, paper can well hold. It would do you no hurt to

give that the perusal also.

From the _other gentleman_ I neither expect nor desire (as he is well

assured) any such concessions as L. H. made to C. What hath soured him,

and made him to suspect his friends of infidelity towards him, when

there was no such matter, I know not. I stood well with him for fifteen

years (the proudest of my life), and have ever spoke my full mind of him

to some, to whom his panegyric must naturally be least tasteful. I never

in thought swerved from him, I never betrayed him, I never slackened in

my admiration of him, I was the same to him (neither better nor worse)

though he could not see it, as in the days when he thought fit to trust

me. At this instant, he may be preparing for me some compliment, above

my deserts, as he has sprinkled many such among his admirable books, for

which I rest his debtor; or, for any thing I know, or can guess to the

contrary, he may be about to read a lecture on my weaknesses. He is

welcome to them (as he was to my humble hearth), if they can divert a

spleen, or ventilate a fit of sullenness. I wish he would not quarrel

with the world at the rate he does; but the reconciliation must be

effected by himself, and I despair of living to see that day. But,

protesting against much that he has written, and some things which he

chooses to do; judging him by his conversation, which I enjoyed so long,

and relished so deeply; or by his books, in those places where no

clouding passion intervenes--I should belie my own conscience, if I said

less, than that I think W. H. to be, in his natural and healthy state,

one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing. So far from being

ashamed of that intimacy, which was betwixt us, it is my boast that I

was able for so many years to have preserved it entire; and I think I

shall go to my grave without finding, or expecting to find, such another

companion. But I forget my manners--you will pardon me, Sir--I return to

the correspondence.----

Sir, you were pleased (you know where) to invite me to a compliance with

the wholesome forms and doctrines of the Church of England. I take your

advice with as much kindness, as it was meant. But I must think the

invitation rather more kind than seasonable. I am a Dissenter. The last

sect, with which you can remember me to have made common profession,

were the Unitarians. You would think it not very pertinent, if (fearing

that all was not well with you), I were gravely to invite you (for a

remedy) to attend with me a course of Mr. Belsham's Lectures at Hackney.

Perhaps I have scruples to some of your forms and doctrines. But if I

come, am I secure of civil treatment?--The last time I was in any of

your places of worship was on Easter Sunday last. I had the satisfaction

of listening to a very sensible sermon of an argumentative turn,

delivered with great propriety, by one of your bishops. The place was

Westminster Abbey. As such religion, as I have, has always acted on me

more by way of sentiment than argumentative process, I was not

unwilling, after sermon ended, by no unbecoming transition, to pass over

to some serious feelings, impossible to be disconnected from the sight

of those old tombs, &c. But, by whose order I know not, I was debarred

that privilege even for so short a space as a few minutes; and turned,

like a dog or some profane person, out into the common street; with

feelings, which I could not help, but not very genial to the day or the

discourse. I do not know that I shall ever venture myself again into one

of your Churches.

You had your education at Westminster; and doubtless among those dim

aisles and cloisters, you must have gathered much of that devotional

feeling in those young years, on which your purest mind feeds still--and

may it feed! The antiquarian spirit, strong in you, and gracefully

blending ever with the religious, may have been sown in you among those

wrecks of splendid mortality. You owe it to the place of your education;

you owe it to your learned fondness for the architecture of your

ancestors; you owe it to the venerableness of your ecclesiastical

establishment, which is daily lessened and called in question through

these practices--to speak aloud your sense of them; never to desist

[from] raising your voice against them, till they be totally done away

with and abolished; till the doors of Westminster Abbey be no longer

closed against the decent, though low-in-purse, enthusiast, or blameless

devotee, who must commit an injury against his family economy, if he

would be indulged with a bare admission within its walls. You owe it to

the decencies, which you wish to see maintained in its impressive

services, that our Cathedral be no longer an object of inspection to the

poor at those times only, in which they must rob from their attendance

on the worship every minute which they can bestow upon the fabrick. In

vain the public prints have taken up this subject, in vain such poor

nameless writers as myself express their indignation. A word from you,

Sir--a hint in your Journal--would be sufficient to fling open the doors

of the Beautiful Temple again, as we can remember them when we were

boys. At that time of life, what would the imaginative faculty (such as

it is) in both of us, have suffered, if the entrance to so much

reflection had been obstructed by the demand of so much silver!--If we

had scraped it up to gain an occasional admission (as we certainly

should have done) would the sight of those old tombs have been as

impressive to us (while we had been weighing anxiously prudence against

sentiment) as when the gates stood open, as those of the adjacent Park;

when we could walk in at any time, as the mood brought us, for a shorter

or longer time, as _that_ lasted? Is the being shown over a place the

same as silently for ourselves detecting the genius of it? In no part of

our beloved Abbey now can a person find entrance (out of service time)

under the sum of _two shillings_. The rich and the great will smile at

the anticlimax, presumed to lie in these two short words. But you can

tell them, Sir, how much quiet worth, how much capacity for enlarged

feeling, how much taste and genius, may coexist, especially in youth,

with a purse incompetent to this demand.--A respected friend of ours,

during his late visit to the metropolis, presented himself for admission

to Saint Paul's. At the same time a decently clothed man, with as decent

a wife, and child, were bargaining for the same indulgence. The price

was only two-pence each person. The poor but decent man hesitated,

desirous to go in; but there were three of them, and he turned away

reluctantly. Perhaps he wished to have seen the tomb of Nelson. Perhaps

the Interior of the Cathedral was his object. But in the state of his

finances, even sixpence might reasonably seem too much. Tell the

Aristocracy of the country (no man can do it more impressively);

instruct them of what value these insignificant pieces of money, these

minims to their sight, may be to their humbler brethren. Shame these

Sellers out of the Temple. Show the poor, that you can sometimes think

of them in some other light than as mutineers and mal-contents.

Conciliate them by such kind methods to their superiors, civil and

ecclesiastical. Stop the mouths of the railers; and suffer your old

friends, upon the old terms, again to honour and admire you. Stifle not

the suggestions of your better nature with the stale evasion, that an

indiscriminate admission would expose the Tombs to violation. Remember

your boy-days. Did you ever see, or hear, of a mob in the Abbey, while

it was free to all? Did the rabble come there, or trouble their heads

about such speculations? It is all that you can do to drive them into

your churches; they do not voluntarily offer themselves. They have,

alas! no passion for antiquities; for tomb of king or prelate, sage or

poet. If they had, they would be no longer the rabble.

For forty years that I have known the Fabrick, the only well-attested

charge of violation adduced, has been--a ridiculous dismemberment

committed upon the effigy of that amiable spy Major André. And is it for

this--the wanton mischief of some school-boy, fired perhaps with raw

notions of Transatlantic Freedom--or the remote possibility of such a

mischief occurring again, so easily to be prevented by stationing a

constable within the walls, if the vergers are incompetent to the

duty--is it upon such wretched pretences, that the people of England are

made to pay a new Peter's Pence, so long abrogated; or must content

themselves with contemplating the ragged Exterior of their Cathedral?

The mischief was done about the time that you were a scholar there. Do

you know any thing about the unfortunate relic?--can you help us in this

emergency to find the nose?--or can you give Chantry a notion (from

memory) of its pristine life and vigour? I am willing for peace' sake to

subscribe my guinea towards a restoration of the lamented feature.

I am, Sir,

Your humble servant,

ELIA.

GUY FAUX

(1811 and 1823)

A very ingenious and subtle writer, whom there is good reason for

suspecting to be an Ex-Jesuit, not unknown at Douay some five-and-twenty

years since (he will not obtrude himself at M----th again in a hurry),

about a twelvemonth back, set himself to prove the character of the

Powder Plot conspirators to have been that of heroic self-devotedness

and true Christian martyrdom. Under the mask of Protestant candour, he

actually gained admission for his treatise into a London weekly paper,

not particularly distinguished for its zeal towards either religion.

But, admitting Catholic principles, his arguments are shrewd and

incontrovertible. He says--

Guy Faux was a fanatic, but he was no hypocrite. He ranks among

_good haters_. He was cruel, bloody-minded, reckless of all

considerations but those of an infuriated and bigoted faith; but he

was a true son of the Catholic Church, a martyr and a confessor,

for all that. He who can prevail upon himself to devote his life

for a cause, however we may condemn his opinions or abhor his

actions, vouches at least for the honesty of his principles and the

disinterestedness of his motives. He may be guilty of the worst

practices, but he is capable of the greatest. He is no longer a

slave, but free. The contempt of death is the beginning of virtue.

The hero of the Gunpowder-Plot was, if you will, a fool, a madman,

an assassin; call him what names you please: still he was neither

knave nor coward. He did not propose to blow up the Parliament and

come off scot-free, himself; he showed that he valued his own life

no more than theirs in such a cause--where the integrity of the

Catholic faith and the salvation of perhaps millions of souls was

at stake. He did not call it a murder, but a sacrifice which he was

about to achieve: he was armed with the Holy Spirit and with fire:

he was the Church's chosen servant and her blessed martyr. He

comforted himself as "the best of cut-throats." How many wretches

are there who would have undertaken to do what he intended for a

sum of money, if they could have got off with impunity! How few are

there who would have put themselves in Guy Faux's situation to save

the universe! Yet in the latter case we affect to be thrown into

greater consternation than at the most unredeemed acts of villany,

as if the absolute disinterestedness of the motive doubled the

horror of the deed! The cowardice and selfishness of mankind are in

fact shocked at the consequences to themselves (if such examples

are held up for imitation,) and they make a fearful outcry against

the violation of every principle of morality, lest they too should

be called on for any such tremendous sacrifices--lest they in their

turn should have to go on the forlorn hope of extra-official duty.

_Charity begins at home_, is a maxim that prevails as well in the

courts of conscience as in those of prudence. We would be thought

to shudder at the consequences of crime to others, while we tremble

for them to ourselves. We talk of the dark and cowardly assassin;

and this is well, when an individual shrinks from the face of an

enemy, and purchases his own safety by striking a blow in the dark:

but how the charge of cowardly can be applied to the public

assassin, who, in the very act of destroying another, lays down his

life as the pledge and forfeit of his sincerity and boldness, I am

at a loss to devise. There may be barbarous prejudice, rooted

hatred, unprincipled treachery, in such an act; but he who resolves

to take all the danger and odium upon himself, can no more be

branded with cowardice, than Regulus devoting himself for his

country, or Codrus leaping into the fiery gulf. A wily Father

Inquisitor, coolly and with plenary authority condemning hundreds

of helpless, unoffending victims, to the flames or to the horrors

of a living tomb, while he himself would not suffer a hair of his

head to be hurt, is to me a character without any qualifying trait

in it. Again; the Spanish conqueror and hero, the favourite of his

monarch, who enticed thirty thousand poor Mexicans into a large

open building, under promise of strict faith and cordial good-will,

and then set fire to it, making sport of the cries and agonies of

these deluded creatures, is an instance of uniting the most

hardened cruelty with the most heartless selfishness. His plea was

keeping no faith with heretics: this was Guy Faux's too; but I am

sure at least that the latter kept faith with himself: he was in

earnest in his professions. _His_ was not gay, wanton, unfeeling

depravity; he did not murder in sport; it was serious work that he

had taken in hand. To see this arch-bigot, this heart-whole

traitor, this pale miner in the infernal regions, skulking in his

retreat with his cloak and dark lanthorn, moving cautiously about

among his barrels of gunpowder loaded with death, but not yet ripe

for destruction, regardless of the lives of others, and more than

indifferent to his own, presents a picture of the strange

infatuation of the human understanding, but not of the depravity of

the human will, without an equal. There were thousands of pious

Papists privy to and ready to applaud the deed when done:--there

was no one but our old fifth-of-November friend, who still flutters

in rags and straw on the occasion, that had the courage to attempt

it. In him stern duty and unshaken faith prevailed over natural

frailty.

It is impossible, upon Catholic principles, not to admit the force of

this reasoning; we can only not help smiling (with the writer) at the

simplicity of the gulled editor, swallowing the dregs of Loyola for the

very quintessence of sublimated reason in England at the commencement of

the nineteenth century. We will just, as a contrast, show what we

Protestants (who are a party concerned) thought upon the same subject,

at a period rather nearer to the heroic project in question.

The Gunpowder Treason was the subject which called forth the earliest

specimen which is left us of the pulpit eloquence of Jeremy Taylor. When

he preached the Sermon on that anniversary, which is printed at the end

of the folio edition of his Sermons, he was a young man just commencing

his ministry, under the auspices of Archbishop Laud. From the learning,

and maturest oratory, which it manifests, one should rather have

conjectured it to have proceeded from the same person after he was

ripened by time into a Bishop and Father of the Church.--"And, really,

these _Romano-barbari_ could never pretend to any precedent for an act

so barbarous as theirs. Adramelech, indeed, killed a king, but he spared

the people; Haman would have killed the people, but spared the king; but

that both king and people, princes and judges, branch and rush and root,

should die at once (as if Caligula's wish were actuated, and all England

upon one head), was never known till now, that all the malice of the

world met in this as in a centre. The Sicilian even-song, the matins of

St. Bartholomew, known for the pitiless and damned massacres, were but

[Greek: kapnou skias onar], the dream of the shadow of smoke, if

compared with this great fire. _In tam occupato sæculo fabulas vulgares

nequitia non invenit._ This was a busy age; Herostratus must have

invented a more sublimed malice than the burning of one temple, or not

have been so much as spoke of since the discovery of the powder treason.

But I must make more haste, I shall not else climb the sublimity of this

impiety. Nero was sometimes the _populare odium_, was popularly hated,

and deserved it too, for he slew his master, and his wife, and all his

family, once or twice over,--opened his mother's womb,--fired the city,

laughed at it, slandered the Christians for it; but yet all these were

but _principia malorum_, the very first rudiments of evil. Add, then, to

these, Herod's master-piece at Ramah, as it was deciphered by the tears

and sad threnes of the matrons in an universal mourning for the loss of

their pretty infants; yet this of Herod will prove but an infant

wickedness, and that of Nero the evil but of one city. I would willingly

have found out an example, but see I cannot; should I put into the scale

the extract of all the old tyrants famous in antique stories,--

Bistonii stabulum regis, Busiridis aras,

Antiphatæ mensas, et Taurica regna Thoantis;--

should I take for true story the highest cruelty as it was fancied by

the most hieroglyphical Egyptian, this alone would weigh them down, as

if the Alps were put in a scale against the dust of a balance. For had

this accursed treason prospered, we should have had the whole kingdom

mourn for the inestimable loss of its chiefest glory, its life, its

present joy, and all its very hopes for the future. For such was their

destined malice, that they would not only have inflicted so cruel a

blow, but have made it incurable, by cutting off our supplies of joy,

the whole succession of the Line Royal. Not only the vine itself, but

all the _gemmulæ_, and the tender olive branches, should either have

been bent to their intentions, and made to grow crooked, or else been

broken.

"And now, after such a sublimity of malice, I will not instance in the

sacrilegious ruin of the neighbouring temples, which needs must have

perished in the flame,--nor in the disturbing the ashes of our intombed

kings, devouring their dead ruins like sepulchral dogs,--these are but

minutes, in respect of the ruin prepared for the living temples:--

Stragem sed istam non tulit

Christus cadentum Principum

Impune, ne forsan sui

Patris periret fabrica.

Ergo quæ poterit lingua retexere

Laudes, Christe, tuas, qui domitum struis

Infidum populum cum Duce perfido!"

In such strains of eloquent indignation did Jeremy Taylor's young

oratory inveigh against that stupendous attempt, which he truly says had

no parallel in ancient or modern times. A century and a half of European

crimes has elapsed since he made the assertion, and his position remains

in its strength. He wrote near the time in which the nefarious project

had like to have been completed. Men's minds still were shuddering from

the recentness of the escape. It must have been within his memory, or

have been sounded in his ears so young by his parents, that he would

seem, in his maturer years, to have remembered it. No wonder then that

he describes it in words that burn. But to us, to whom the tradition has

come slowly down, and has had time to cool, the story of Guido Vaux

sounds rather like a tale, a fable, and an invention, than true history.

It supposes such gigantic audacity of daring, combined with such more

than infantile stupidity in the motive,--such a combination of the fiend

and the monkey,--that credulity is almost swallowed up in contemplating

the singularity of the attempt. It has accordingly, in some degree,

shared the fate of fiction. It is familiarized to us in a kind of

serio-ludicrous way, like the story of _Guy of Warwick_, or _Valentine

and Orson_. The way which we take to perpetuate the memory of this

deliverance is well adapted to keep up this fabular notion. Boys go

about the streets annually with a beggarly scarecrow dressed up, which

is to be burnt, indeed, at night, with holy zeal; but, meantime, they

beg a penny for _poor Guy_: this periodical petition, which we have

heard from our infancy,--combined with the dress and appearance of the

effigy, so well calculated to move compassion,--has the effect of quite

removing from our fancy the horrid circumstances of the story which is

thus commemorated; and in _poor Guy_ vainly should we try to recognize

any of the features of that tremendous madman in iniquity, Guido Vaux,

with his horrid crew of accomplices, that sought to emulate earthquakes

and bursting volcanoes in their more than mortal mischief.

Indeed, the whole ceremony of burning Guy Faux, or _the Pope_, as he is

indifferently called, is a sort of _Treason Travestie_, and admirably

adapted to lower our feelings upon this memorable subject. The printers

of the little duodecimo _Prayer Book_, printed by T. Baskett,[45] in

1749, which has the effigy of his sacred Majesty George II. piously

prefixed, have illustrated the service (a very fine one in itself) which

is appointed for the Anniversary of this Day, with a print, which it is

not very easy to describe, but the contents appear to be these:--The

scene is a room, I conjecture, in the king's palace. Two persons,--one

of whom I take to be James himself, from his wearing his hat while the

other stands bareheaded,--are intently surveying a sort of speculum, or

magic mirror, which stands upon a pedestal in the midst of the room, in

which a little figure of Guy Faux with his dark lantern approaching the

door of the Parliament House is made discernible by the light proceeding

from a _great eye_ which shines in from the topmost corner of the

apartment, by which eye the pious artist no doubt meant to designate

Providence. On the other side of the mirror, is a figure doing

something, which puzzled me when a child, and continues to puzzle me

now. The best I can make of it is, that it is a conspirator busy laying

the train,--but then, why is he represented in the king's

chamber?--Conjecture upon so fantastical a design is vain, and I only

notice the print as being one of the earliest graphic representations

which woke my childhood into wonder, and doubtless combined with the

mummery before-mentioned, to take off the edge of that horror which the

naked historical mention of Guido's conspiracy could not have failed of

exciting.

[45] The same, I presume, upon whom the clergyman in the song of the

_Vicar and Moses_, not without judgment, passes this memorable

censure--

Here, Moses, the King:--

'Tis a scandalous thing

That this Baskett should print for the Crown.

Now that so many years are past since that abominable machination was

happily frustrated, it will not, I hope, be considered a profane

sporting with the subject, if we take no very serious survey of the

consequences that would have flowed from this plot if it had had a

successful issue. The first thing that strikes us, in a selfish point of

view, is the material change which it must have produced in the course

of the nobility. All the ancient peerage being extinguished, as it was

intended, at one blow, the _Red-Book_ must have been closed for ever, or

a new race of peers must have been created to supply the deficiency; as

the first part of this dilemma is a deal too shocking to think of, what

a fund of mouth-watering reflections does this give rise to in the

breast of us plebeians of A.D. 1823. Why you or I, reader, might have

been Duke of ---- or Earl of ----: I particularize no titles, to avoid

the least suspicion of intention to usurp the dignities of the two

noblemen whom I have in my eye:--but a feeling more dignified than envy

sometimes excites a sigh, when I think how the posterity of Guido's

Legion of Honour (among whom you or I might have been) might have rolled

down "dulcified," as Burke expresses it, "by an exposure to the

influence of heaven in a long flow of generations, from the hard,

acidulous, metallic tincture of the spring."[46] What new orders of

merit, think you, this English Napoleon would have chosen? Knights of

the Barrel, or Lords of the Tub, Grand Almoners of the Cellar, or

Ministers of Explosion. We should have given the Train _couchant_, and

the Fire _rampant_ in our arms; we should have quartered the dozen white

matches in our coats;--the Shallows would have been nothing to us.

[46] Letter to a Noble Lord.

Turning away from these mortifying reflections, let us contemplate its

effects upon the _other house_, for they were all to have gone

together,--King, Lords, Commons.----

To assist our imagination, let us take leave to suppose,--and we do it

in the harmless wantonness of fancy,--to suppose that the tremendous

explosion had taken place in our days;--we better know what a House of

Commons is in our days, and can better estimate our loss;--let us

imagine, then, to ourselves, the United Members sitting in full conclave

above--Faux just ready with his train and matches below; in his hand a

"reed tipt with fire"--he applies the fatal engine----

To assist our notions still further, let us suppose some lucky dog of a

reporter, who had escaped by miracle upon some plank of St. Stephen's

benches, and came plump upon the roof of the adjacent Abbey, from whence

descending, at some neighbouring coffee-house, first wiping his clothes

and calling for a glass of lemonade, he sits down and reports what he

had heard and seen (quorum pars magna fuit) for the _Morning Post_ or

the _Courier_,--we can scarcely imagine him describing the event in any

other words but some such as these:--

"A _Motion_ was put and carried, That this House do _adjourn_: That the

Speaker do _quit the Chair_. The House ROSE amid clamours for Order."

In some such way the event might most technically have been conveyed to

the public. But a poetical mind, not content with this dry method of

narration, cannot help pursuing the effects of this tremendous blowing

up, this adjournment in the air _sine die_. It sees the benches

mount,--the Chair first, and then the benches, and first the Treasury

Bench, hurried up in this nitrous explosion; the Members, as it were,

pairing off; Whigs and Tories taking their friendly apotheosis together,

(as they did their sandwiches below in Bellamy's room). Fancy, in her

flight, keeps pace with the aspiring legislators, she sees the awful

seat of order mounting till it becomes finally fixed a constellation,

next to Cassiopeia's chair,--the wig of him that sat in it taking its

place near Berenice's curls. St. Peter, at Heaven's wicket,--no, not St.

Peter,--St. Stephen, with open arms, receives his own.----

While Fancy beholds these celestial appropriations, Reason, no less

pleased, discerns the mighty benefit which so complete a renovation must

produce below. Let the most determined foe to corruption, the most

thorough-paced redresser of abuses, try to conceive a more absolute

purification of the House than this was calculated to produce;--why,

Pride's Purge was nothing to it;--the whole borough-mongering system

would have been got rid of, fairly _exploded_;--with it, the senseless

distinctions of party must have disappeared; faction must have vanished;

corruption have expired in air. From Hundred, Tything, and Wapentake,

some new Alfred would have convened, in all its purity, the primitive

Wittenagemot,--fixed upon a basis of property or population, permanent

as the poles----

From this dream of universal restitution, Reason and Fancy with

difficulty awake to view the real state of things. But, blessed be

Heaven, St. Stephen's walls are yet standing, all her seats firmly

secured; nay, some have doubted (since the Septennial Act) whether

gunpowder itself, or any thing short of a _Committee above stairs_,

would be able to shake any one member from his seat;--that great and

final improvement to the Abbey, which is all that seems wanting,--the

removing Westminster-hall and its appendages, and letting in the view of

the Thames,--must not be expected in our days. Dismissing, therefore,

all such speculations as mere tales of a tub, it is the duty of every

honest Englishman to endeavour, by means less wholesale than Guido's, to

ameliorate, without extinguishing, Parliaments; to hold the _lantern_ to

the dark places of corruption; to apply the _match_ to the rotten parts

of the system only; and to wrap himself up, not in the muffling mantle

of conspiracy, but in the warm, honest _cloak_ of integrity and

patriotic intention.

ELIA.

NUGÆ CRITICÆ

ON A PASSAGE IN "THE TEMPEST"

(1823)

As long as I can remember the play of the Tempest, one passage in it has

always set me upon wondering. It has puzzled me beyond measure. In vain

I strove to find the meaning of it. I seemed doomed to cherish infinite

hopeless curiosity.

It is where Prospero, relating the banishment of Sycorax from Argier,

adds--

--For one thing that she did

They would not take her life--

how have I pondered over this, when a boy! how have I longed for some

authentic memoir of the witch to clear up the obscurity!--Was the story

extant in the Chronicles of Algiers? Could I get at it by some fortunate

introduction to the Algerine ambassador? Was a voyage thither

practicable? The Spectator (I knew) went to Grand Cairo, only to measure

a pyramid. Was not the object of my quest of at least as much

importance?--The blue-eyed hag--could _she_ have done any thing good or

meritorious? might that Succubus relent? then might there be hope for

the devil. I have often admired since, that none of the commentators

have boggled at this passage--how they could swallow this camel--such a

tantalising piece of obscurity, such an abortion of an anecdote.

At length I think I have lighted upon a clue, which may lead to show

what was passing in the mind of Shakspeare when he dropped this

imperfect rumour. In the "accurate description of Africa, by John Ogilby

(Folio), 1670," page 230, I find written, as follows. The marginal title

to the narrative is--

_Charles the Fifth besieges Algier_

In the last place, we will briefly give an Account of the Emperour

_Charles_ the Fifth, when he besieg'd this City; and of the great

Loss he suffer'd therein.

This Prince in the Year One thousand five hundred forty one, having

Embarqued upon the Sea an Army of Twenty two thousand Men aboard

Eighteen Gallies, and an hundred tall Ships, not counting the

Barques and Shallops, and other small Boats, in which he had

engaged the principal of the _Spanish_ and _Italian_ Nobility, with

a good number of the Knights of _Maltha_; he was to Land on the

Coast of _Barbary_, at a Cape call'd _Matifou_. From this place

unto the City of _Algier_ a flat Shore or Strand extends it self

for about four Leagues, the which is exceeding favourable to

Gallies. There he put ashore with his Army, and in a few days

caused a Fortress to be built, which unto this day is call'd _The

Castle of the Emperor_.

In the meantime the City of _Algier_ took the Alarm, having in it

at that time but Eight hundred _Turks_, and Six thousand _Moors_,

poorspirited men, and unexercised in Martial affairs; besides it

was at that time Fortifi'd onely with Walls, and had no Out-works:

Insomuch that by reason of its weakness, and the great Forces of

the Emperour, it could not in appearance escape taking. In fine, it

was Attaqued with such Order, that the Army came up to the very

Gates, where _the Chevalier de Sauignac_, a _Frenchman_ by Nation,

made himself remarkable above all the rest, by the miracles of his

Valour. For having repulsed the _Turks_, who having made a Sally at

the Gate call'd _Babason_, and there desiring to enter along with

them, when he saw that they shut the Gate upon him, he ran his

Ponyard into the same, and left it sticking deep therein. They next

fell to Battering the City by the Force of Cannon; which the

Assailants so weakened, that in that great extremity the Defendants

lost their Courage, and resolved to surrender.

But as they were thus intending, there was a Witch of the Town,

whom the History doth not name, which went to seek out _Assam Aga_,

that Commanded within, and pray'd him to make it good yet nine Days

longer, with assurance, that within that time he should infallibly

see _Algier_ delivered from that Siege, and the whole Army of the

Enemy dispersed, so that _Christians_ should be as cheap as Birds.

In a word, the thing did happen in the manner as foretold; for upon

the Twenty first day of _October_ in the same Year, there fell a

continual Rain upon the Land, and so furious a Storm at Sea, that

one might have seen Ships hoisted into the Clouds, and in one

instant again precipitated into the bottom of the Water: insomuch

that that same dreadful Tempest was followed with the loss of

fifteen Gallies, and above an hundred other Vessels; which was the

cause why the Emperour, seeing his Army wasted by the bad Weather,

pursued by Famine, occasioned by wrack of his Ships, in which was

the greatest part of his Victuals and Ammunition, he was

constrain'd to raise the Siege, and set Sail for _Sicily_, whither

he Retreated with the miserable Reliques of his Fleet.

In the mean time that Witch being acknowledged the Deliverer of

_Algier_, was richly remunerated, and the Credit of her Charms

authorized. So that ever since Witchcraft hath been very freely

tolerated; of which the Chief of the Town, and even those who are

esteem'd to be of greatest Sanctity among them, such as are the

Marabou's, a Religious Order of their Sect, do for the most part

make Profession of it, under a goodly Pretext of certain

Revelations which they say they have had from their Prophet

_Mahomet_.

And hereupon those of _Algier_, to palliate the shame and the

reproaches that are thrown upon them for making use of a Witch in

the danger of this Siege, do say, that the loss of the Forces of

_Charles_ V., was caused by a Prayer of one of their _Marabou's_,

named _Cidy Utica_, which was at that time in great Credit, not

under the notion of a _Magitian_, but for a person of a holy life.

Afterwards in remembrance of their success, they have erected unto

him a small mosque without the _Babason_ Gate, where he is buried,

and in which they keep sundry Lamps burning in honour of him: nay

they sometimes repair thither to make their _Sala_, for a testimony

of greater Veneration.

Can it be doubted for a moment, that the dramatist had come fresh from

reading some _older narrative_ of this deliverance of Algier by a witch,

and transferred the merit of the deed to his Sycorax, exchanging only

the "rich remuneration," which did not suit his purpose, to the simple

pardon of her life? Ogilby wrote in 1670; but the authorities to which

he refers for his Account of Barbary are--Johannes de Leo, or

Africanus--Louis Marmol--Diego de Haedo--Johannes Gramaye--Bræves--Cel.

Curio--and Diego de Torres--names totally unknown to me--and to which I

beg leave to refer the curious reader for his fuller satisfaction.

L.

ORIGINAL LETTER OF JAMES THOMSON

(1824)

The following very interesting letter has been recovered from oblivion,

or at least from neglect, by our friend Elia, and the public will no

doubt thank him for the deed. It is without date or superscription in

the manuscript, which (as our contributor declares) was in so

"fragmentitious" a state as to perplex his transcribing faculties in the

extreme. The poet's love of nature is quite evident from one part of it;

and the "poetical posture of his affairs" from another. Whether regarded

as elucidating the former or the latter, it is a document not a little

calculated to excite the attention of the curious as well as the

critical. We could ourselves write an essayful of conjectures from the

grounds it affords both with respect to the author's poems and his

pride. But we must take another opportunity, or leave it to his next

biographer.

DEAR SIR,

I would chide you for the slackness of your correspondence; but having

blamed you wrongeously[47] last time, I shall say nothing till I hear

from you, which I hope will be soon.

[47] _Sic in MS._

There's a little business I would communicate to you before I come to

the more entertaining part of our correspondence.

I'm going (hard task) to complain, and beg your assistance. When I came

up here I brought very little money along with me; expecting some more

upon the selling of Widehope, which was to have been sold that day my

mother was buried. Now it is unsold yet, but will be disposed of as soon

as can be conveniently done; though indeed it is perplexed with some

difficulties. I was a long time living here at my own charges, and you

know how expensive that is; this, together with the furnishing of myself

with clothes, linen, one thing and another, to fit me for any business

of this nature here, necessarily obliged me to contract some debts.

Being a stranger, it is a wonder how I got any credit; but I cannot

expect it will be long sustained, unless I immediately clear it. Even

now, I believe it is at a crisis--my friends have no money to send me,

till the land is sold; and my creditors will not wait till then. You

know what the consequence would be. Now the assistance I would beg of

you, and which I know, if in your power, you will not refuse me, is a

letter of credit on some merchant, banker, or such like person in

London, for the matter of twelve pounds; till I get money upon the

selling of the land, which I am at last certain of, if you could either

give it me yourself, or procure it: though you owe it not to my merit,

yet you owe it to your own nature, which I know so well as to say no

more upon the subject: only allow me to add, that when I first fell upon

such a project, (the only thing I have for it in my present

circumstances,) knowing the selfish inhumane temper of the generality of

the world, you were the first person that offered to my thoughts, as one

to whom I had the confidence to make such an address.

* * * * *

Now I imagine you are seized with a fine romantic kind of melancholy on

the fading of the year--now I figure you wandering, philosophical and

pensive, amidst brown withered groves; whilst the leaves rustle under

your feet, the sun gives a farewell parting gleam, and the birds--

Stir the faint note, and but attempt to sing.

Then again, when the heavens wear a more gloomy aspect, the winds

whistle and the waters spout, I see you in the well-known cleugh,

beneath the solemn arch of tall, thick, embowering trees, listening to

the amusing lull of the many steep, moss-grown cascades; while deep,

divine contemplation, the genius of the place, prompts each swelling,

awful thought. I am sure you would not resign your place in that scene

at an easy rate:--None ever enjoyed it to the height you do, and you are

worthy of it. There I walk in spirit, and disport in its beloved gloom.

This country I am in is not very entertaining; no variety but that of

woods, and them we have in abundance. But where is the living stream?

the airy mountain? or the hanging rock? with twenty other things that

elegantly please the lover of Nature. Nature delights me in every form.

I am just now painting her in her most luxurious dress; for my own

amusement, describing winter as it presents itself. After my first

proposal of the subject--

I sing of winter, and his gelid reign;

Nor let a ryming insect of the spring

Deem it a barren theme, to me 'tis full

Of manly charms: to me, who court the shade,

Whom the gay seasons suit not, and who shun

The glare of summer. Welcome, kindred glooms!

Drear awful wintry horrors, welcome all! &c.

After this introduction, I say, which insists for a few lines further, I

prosecute the purport of the following ones:--

Nor can I, O departing Summer! choose

But consecrate one pitying line to you:

Sing your last temper'd days and sunny balms,

That cheer the spirits and serene the soul.

Then terrible floods, and high winds, that usually happen about this

time of the year, and have already happened here (I wish you have not

felt them too dreadfully); the first produced the enclosed lines; the

last are not completed. Mr. Rickleton's poem on Winter, which I still

have, first put the design into my head--in it are some masterly strokes

that awakened me--being only a present amusement, it is ten to one but I

drop it whenever another fancy comes across. I believe it had been much

more for your entertainment, if in this letter I had cited other people

instead of myself; but I must refer that till another time. If you have

not seen it already, I have just now in my hands an original of Sir

Alexander Brands (the crazed Scots knight of the woeful countenance),

you would relish. I believe it might make Mis[48] John catch hold of his

knees, which I take in him to be a degree of mirth, only inferior, to

fall back again with an elastic spring. It is very [here a word is

waggishly obliterated] printed in the Evening Post: so, perhaps you have

seen these panegyrics of our declining bard; one on the Princess's

birth-day; the other on his Majesty's, in [obliterated] cantos, they are

written in the spirit of a complicated craziness. I was lately in London

a night, and in the old play-house saw a comedy acted, called Love makes

a Man, or the Fop's Fortune, where I beheld Miller and Cibber shine to

my infinite entertainment. In and about London this month of September,

near a hundred people have died by accident and suicide. There was one

blacksmith tired of the hammer, who hung himself, and left written

behind him this concise epitaph:--

I, Joe Pope,

Lived without hope

And died by a rope.

Or else some epigrammatic Muse has belied him.

Mr. Muir has ample fund for politics in the present posture of affairs,

as you will find by the public news. I should be glad to know that great

minister's frame just now. Keep it to yourself--you may whisper it too

in Mis John's ear. Far otherwise is his lately mysterious brother, Mr.

Tait, employed. Started a superannuated fortune, and just now upon the

full scent. It is comical enough to see him amongst the rubbish of his

controversial divinity and politics, furbishing up his antient rusty

gallantry.

Yours, sincerely, J. T.

Remember me to all friends, Mr. Rickle, Mis John, Br. John, &c.

[48] _Mas?_

BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF MR. LISTON

(1825)

The subject of our Memoir is lineally descended from Johan De L'Estonne

(see Doomesday Book, where he is so written) who came in with the

Conqueror, and had lands awarded him at Lupton Magna, in Kent. His

particular merits or services, Fabian, whose authority I chiefly follow,

has forgotten, or perhaps thought it immaterial, to specify. Fuller

thinks that he was standard-bearer to Hugo De Agmondesham, a powerful

Norman Baron, who was slain by the hand of Harold himself at the fatal

battle of Hastings. Be this as it may, we find a family of that name

flourishing some centuries later in that county. John Delliston, Knight,

was high sheriff for Kent, according to Fabian, _quinto Henrici Sexti_;

and we trace the lineal branch flourishing downwards--the orthography

varying, according to the unsettled usage of the times, from Delleston

to Leston, or Liston, between which it seems to have alternated, till,

in the latter end of the reign of James I, it finally settled into the

determinate and pleasing dissyllabic arrangement which it still retains.

Aminadab Liston, the eldest male representative of the family of that

day, was of the strictest order of Puritans. Mr. Foss, of Pall Mall, has

obligingly communicated to me an undoubted tract of his, which bears the

initials only, A. L. and is entitled, "the Grinning Glass: or Actor's

Mirrour, wherein the vituperative Visnomy of vicious Players for the

Scene is as virtuously reflected back upon their mimetic Monstrosities

as it has viciously (hitherto) vitiated with its vile Vanities her

Votarists." A strange title, but bearing the impress of those

absurdities with which the title pages of that pamphlet-spawning age

abounded. The work bears date 1617. It preceded the Histriomastix by

fifteen years; and as it went before it in time, so it comes not far

short of it in virulence. It is amusing to find an ancestor of Liston's

thus bespattering the players at the commencement of the seventeenth

century. "Thinketh He (the actor), with his costive countenances, to wry

a sorrowing soul out of her anguish, or by defacing the divine

denotement of destinate dignity (daignely described in the face humane

and no other) to reinstamp the Paradice-plotted similitude with a novel

and naughty approximation (not in the first intention) to those abhorred

and ugly God-forbidden correspondences, with flouting Apes' jeering

gibberings, and Babion babbling-like, to hoot out of countenance all

modest measure, as if our sins were not sufficing to stoop our backs

without He wresting and crooking his members to mistimed mirth (rather

malice) in deformed fashion, leering when he should learn, prating for

praying, goggling his eyes (better upturned for grace), whereas in

Paradice (if we can go thus high for His profession) that devilish

Serpent appeareth his undoubted Predecessor, first induing a mask like

some roguish roistering Roscius (I spit at them all) to beguile with

Stage shows the gaping Woman, whose Sex hath still chiefly upheld these

Mysteries, and are voiced to be the chief Stage-haunters, where, as I am

told, the custom is commonly to mumble (between acts) apples, not

ambiguously derived from that pernicious Pippin (worse in effect than

the Apples of Discord) whereas sometimes the hissing sounds of

displeasure, as I hear, do lively reintonate that snake-taking-leave,

and diabolical goings off, in Paradice."

The puritanic effervescence of the early Presbyterians appears to have

abated with time, and the opinions of the more immediate ancestors of

our subject to have subsided at length into a strain of moderate

Calvinism. Still a tincture of the old leaven was to be expected among

the posterity of A. L.

Our hero was an only son of Habakuk Liston, settled as an Anabaptist

minister upon the patrimonial soil of his ancestors. A regular

certificate appears, thus entered in the church book at Lupton Magna.

"_Johannes, filius Habakuk et Rebeccæ Liston, Dissentientium, natus

quinto Decembri, 1780, baptizatus sexto Februarii sequentis; Sponsoribus

J. et W. Woollaston, unâ cum Maria Merryweather._" The singularity of an

Anabaptist minister conforming to the child rites of the church, would

have tempted me to doubt the authenticity of this entry, had I not been

obliged with the actual sight of it, by the favour of Mr. Minns, the

intelligent and worthy parish clerk of Lupton. Possibly some expectation

in point of worldly advantages from some of the sponsors, might have

induced this unseemly deviation, as it must have appeared, from the

practice and principles of that generally rigid sect. The term

_Dissentientium_ was possibly intended by the orthodox clergyman as a

slur upon the supposed inconsistency. What, or of what nature, the

expectations we have hinted at, may have been, we have now no means of

ascertaining. Of the Wollastons no trace is now discoverable in the

village. The name of Merryweather occurs over the front of a grocer's

shop at the western extremity of Lupton.

Of the infant Liston we find no events recorded before his fourth year,

in which a severe attack of the measles bid fair to have robbed the

rising generation of a fund of innocent entertainment. He had it of the

confluent kind, as it is called, and the child's life was for a week or

two despaired of. His recovery he always attributes (under Heaven) to

the humane interference of one Doctor Wilhelm Richter, a German empiric,

who, in this extremity, prescribed a copious diet of _Saur Kraut_, which

the child was observed to reach at with avidity, when other food

repelled him; and from this change of diet his restoration was rapid and

complete. We have often heard him name the circumstance with gratitude;

and it is not altogether surprising, that a relish for this kind of

aliment, so abhorrent and harsh to common English palates, has

accompanied him through life. When any of Mr. Liston's intimates invite

him to supper, he never fails of finding, nearest to his knife and fork,

a dish of _Saur Kraut_.

At the age of nine we find our subject under the tuition of the Rev. Mr.

Goodenough (his father's health not permitting him probably to instruct

him himself), by whom he was inducted into a competent portion of Latin

and Greek, with some mathematics, till the death of Mr. Goodenough, in

his own seventieth, and Master Liston's eleventh year, put a stop for

the present to his classical progress.

We have heard our hero with emotions, which do his heart honour,

describe the awful circumstances attending the decease of this worthy

old gentleman. It seems they had been walking out together, master and

pupil, in a fine sunset, to the distance of three quarters of a mile

west of Lupton, when a sudden curiosity took Mr. Goodenough to look down

upon a chasm, where a shaft had been lately sunk in a mining speculation

(then projecting, but abandoned soon after, as not answering the

promised success, by Sir Ralph Shepperton, Knight, and member for the

county). The old clergyman leaning over, either with incaution, or

sudden giddiness (probably a mixture of both), suddenly lost his

footing, and, to use Mr. Liston's phrase, disappeared; and was

doubtless broken into a thousand pieces. The sound of his head, &c.

dashing successively upon the projecting masses of the chasm, had such

an effect upon the child, that a serious sickness ensued, and even for

many years after his recovery he was not once seen so much as to smile.

The joint death[s] of both his parents, which happened not many months

after this disastrous accident, and were probably (one or both of them)

accelerated by it, threw our youth upon the protection of his maternal

great aunt, Mrs. Sittingbourn. Of this aunt we have never heard him

speak but with expressions amounting almost to reverence. To the

influence of her early counsels and manners, he has always attributed

the firmness with which, in maturer years, thrown upon a way of life,

commonly not the best adapted to gravity and self-retirement, he has

been able to maintain a serious character, untinctured with the levities

incident to his profession. Ann Sittingbourn (we have seen her portrait

by Hudson) was stately, stiff, tall, with a cast of features strikingly

resembling the subject of this memoir. Her estate in Kent was spacious

and well-wooded; the house, one of those venerable old mansions which

are so impressive in childhood, and so hardly forgotten in succeeding

years. In the venerable solitudes of Charnwood, among thick shades of

the oak and beech (this last his favourite tree), the young Liston

cultivated those contemplative habits which have never entirely deserted

him in after years. Here he was commonly in the summer months to be met

with, with a book in his hand--not a play-book--meditating. Boyle's

Reflections was at one time the darling volume, which in its turn was

superseded by Young's Night Thoughts, which has continued its hold upon

him through life. He carries it always about him; and it is no uncommon

thing for him to be seen, in the refreshing intervals of his occupation,

leaning against a side scene, in a sort of Herbert of Cherbury posture,

turning over a pocket edition of his favourite author.

But the solitudes of Charnwood were not destined always to obscure the

path of our young hero. The premature death of Mrs. Sittingbourn, at the

age of 70, occasioned by incautious burning of a pot of charcoal in her

sleeping chamber, left him in his 19th year nearly without resources.

That the stage at all should have presented itself as an eligible scope

for his talents, and, in particular, that he should have chosen a line

so foreign to what appears to have been his turn of mind, may require

some explanation.

At Charnwood then we behold him thoughtful, grave, ascetic. From his

cradle averse to flesh meats, and strong drink; abstemious even beyond

the genius of the place; and almost in spite of the remonstrances of his

great aunt, who, though strict, was not rigid; water was his habitual

drink, and his food little beyond the mast, and beech nuts, of his

favourite groves. It is a medical fact, that this kind of diet, however

favourable to the contemplative powers of the primitive hermits, &c., is

but ill adapted to the less robust minds and bodies of a later

generation. Hypochondria almost constantly ensues. It was so in the case

of the young Liston. He was subject to sights, and had visions. Those

arid beech nuts, distilled by a complexion naturally adust, mounted into

an occiput, already prepared to kindle by long seclusion, and the

fervour of strict Calvinistic notions. In the glooms of Charnwood he was

assailed by illusions, similar in kind to those which are related of the

famous Anthony of Padua. Wild antic faces would ever and anon protrude

themselves upon his _sensorium_. Whether he shut his eyes, or kept them

open, the same illusions operated. The darker and more profound were his

cogitations, the droller and more whimsical became the apparitions. They

buzzed about him thick as flies, flapping at him, flouting him, hooting

in his ear, yet with such comic appendages, that what at first was his

bane, became at length his solace; and he desired no better society than

that of his merry phantasmata. We shall presently find in what way this

remarkable phenomenon influenced his future destiny.

On the death of Mrs. Sittingbourn, we find him received into the family

of Mr. Willoughby, an eminent Turkey merchant, resident in Birchin-lane,

London. We lose a little while here the chain of his history; by what

inducements this gentleman was determined to make him an inmate of his

house. Probably he had had some personal kindness for Mrs. Sittingbourn

formerly; but however it was, the young man was here treated more like a

son than a clerk, though he was nominally but the latter. Different

avocations, the change of scene, with that alternation of business and

recreation, which in its greatest perfection is to be had only in

London, appear to have weaned him in a short time from the

hypochondriacal affections which had beset him at Charnwood. In the

three years which followed his removal to Birchin-lane, we find him

making more than one voyage to the Levant, as chief factor for Mr.

Willoughby, at the Porte. We could easily fill our biography with the

pleasant passages which we have heard him relate as having happened to

him at Constantinople, such as his having been taken up on suspicion of

a design of penetrating the seraglio, &c.; but, with the deepest

convincement of this gentleman's own veracity, we think that some of the

stories are of that whimsical, and others of that romantic nature,

which, however diverting, would be out of place in a narrative of this

kind, which aims not only at strict truth, but at avoiding the very

appearance of the contrary.

We will now bring him over the seas again, and suppose him in the

counting-house in Birchin-lane, his protector satisfied with the returns

of his factorage, and all going on so smoothly that we may expect to

find Mr. Liston at last an opulent merchant upon 'Change, as it is

called. But see the turns of destiny! Upon a summer's excursion into

Norfolk, in the year 1801, the accidental sight of pretty Sally Parker,

as she was called (then in the Norwich company), diverted his

inclinations at once from commerce; and he became, in the language of

common-place biography, stage-struck. Happy for the lovers of mirth was

it, that our hero took this turn; he might else have been to this hour

that unentertaining character, a plodding London merchant.

We accordingly find him shortly after making his _debut_, as it is

called, upon the Norwich boards, in the season of that year, being then

in the 22d year of his age. Having a natural bent to tragedy, he chose

the part of Pyrrhus in the Distressed Mother, to Sally Parker's

Hermione. We find him afterwards as Barnwell, Altamont, Chamont, &c.;

but, as if nature had destined him to the sock, an unavoidable infirmity

absolutely discapacitated him for tragedy. His person at this latter

period, of which I have been speaking, was graceful, and even

commanding; his countenance set to gravity; he had the power of

arresting the attention of an audience at first sight almost beyond any

other tragic actor. But he could not hold it. To understand this

obstacle we must go back a few years to those appalling reveries at

Charnwood. Those illusions, which had vanished before the dissipation

of a less recluse life, and more free society, now in his solitary

tragic studies, and amid the intense calls upon feeling incident to

tragic acting, came back upon him with tenfold vividness. In the midst

of some most pathetic passage, the parting of Jaffier with his dying

friend, for instance, he would suddenly be surprised with a fit of

violent horse laughter. While the spectators were all sobbing before him

with emotion, suddenly one of those grotesque faces would peep out upon

him, and he could not resist the impulse. A timely excuse once or twice

served his purpose, but no audiences could be expected to bear

repeatedly this violation of the continuity of feeling. He describes

them (the illusions) as so many demons haunting him, and paralysing

every effect. Even now, I am told, he cannot recite the famous soliloquy

in Hamlet, even in private, without immoderate bursts of laughter.

However, what he had not force of reason sufficient to overcome, he had

good sense enough to turn into emolument, and determined to make a

commodity of his distemper. He prudently exchanged the buskin for the

sock, and the illusions instantly ceased; or, if they occurred for a

short season, by their very co-operation added a zest to his comic vein;

some of his most catching faces being (as he expresses it) little more

than transcripts and copies of those extraordinary phantasmata.

We have now drawn out our hero's existence to the period when he was

about to meet for the first time the sympathies of a London audience.

The particulars of his success since have been too much before our eyes

to render a circumstantial detail of them expedient. I shall only

mention that Mr. Willoughby, his resentments having had time to subside,

is at present one of the fastest friends of his old renegado factor; and

that Mr. Liston's hopes of Miss Parker vanishing along with his

unsuccessful suit to Melpomene, in the autumn of 1811 he married his

present lady, by whom he has been blest with one son, Philip; and two

daughters, Ann, and Angustina [ ? Augustina].

A VISION OF HORNS

(1825)

My thoughts had been engaged last evening in solving the problem, why in

all times and places the _horn_ has been agreed upon as the symbol, or

honourable badge, of married men. Moses' horn, the horn of Ammon, of

Amalthea, and a cornucopia of legends besides, came to my recollection,

but afforded no satisfactory solution, or rather involved the question

in deeper obscurity. Tired with the fruitless chase of inexplicant

analogies, I fell asleep, and dreamed in this fashion.

Methought certain scales or films fell from my eyes, which had hitherto

hindered these little tokens from being visible. I was somewhere in the

Cornhill (as it might be termed) of some Utopia. Busy citizens jostled

each other, as they may do in our streets, with care (the care of making

a penny) written upon their foreheads; and _something else_, which is

rather imagined, than distinctly imaged, upon the brows of my own

friends and fellow-townsmen.

In my first surprise I supposed myself gotten into some forest--Arden,

to be sure, or Sherwood; but the dresses and deportment, all civic,

forbade me to continue in that delusion. Then a scriptural thought

crossed me (especially as there were nearly as many Jews as Christians

among them), whether it might not be the children of Israel going up to

besiege Jericho. I was undeceived of both errors by the sight of many

faces which were familiar to me. I found myself strangely (as it will

happen in dreams) at one and the same time in an unknown country, with

known companions. I met old friends, not with new faces, but with their

old faces oddly adorned in front, with each man a certain corneous

excrescence. Dick Mitis, the little cheesemonger in St. * * * *'s

Passage, was the first that saluted me, with his hat off--you know

Dick's way to a customer--and, I not being aware of him, he thrust a

strange beam into my left eye, which pained and grieved me exceedingly;

but, instead of apology, he only grinned and fleered in my face, as much

as to say, "it is the custom of the country," and passed on.

I had scarce time to send a civil message to his lady, whom I have

always admired as a pattern of a wife,--and do indeed take Dick and her

to be a model of conjugal agreement and harmony,--when I felt an ugly

smart in my neck, as if something had gored it behind, and turning

round, it was my old friend and neighbour, Dulcet, the confectioner,

who, meaning to be pleasant, had thrust his protuberance right into my

nape, and seemed proud of his power of offending.

Now I was assailed right and left, till in my own defence I was obliged

to walk sideling and wary, and look about me, as you guard your eyes in

London streets; for the horns thickened, and came at me like the ends of

umbrellas poking in one's face.

I soon found that these towns-folk were the civillest best-mannered

people in the world, and that if they had offended at all, it was

entirely owing to their blindness. They do not know what dangerous

weapons they protrude in front, and will stick their best friends in the

eye with provoking complacency. Yet the best of it is, they can see the

beams on their neighbours' foreheads, if they are as small as motes, but

their own beams they can in no wise discern.

There was little Mitis, that I told you I just encountered--he has

simply (I speak of him at home in his own shop) the smoothest forehead

in his own conceit--he will stand you a quarter of an hour together

contemplating the serenity of it in the glass, before he begins to shave

himself in a morning--yet you saw what a desperate gash he gave me.

Desiring to be better informed of the ways of this extraordinary people,

I applied myself to a fellow of some assurance, who (it appeared) acted

as a sort of interpreter to strangers--he was dressed in a military

uniform, and strongly resembled Colonel----, of the guards;--and "pray,

Sir," said I, "have all the inhabitants of your city these troublesome

excrescences? I beg pardon, I see you have none. You perhaps are

single." "Truly, Sir," he replied with a smile, "for the most part we

have, but not all alike. There are some, like Dick, that sport but one

tumescence. Their ladies have been tolerably faithful--have confined

themselves to a single aberration or so--these we call Unicorns. Dick,

you must know, is my Unicorn. [He spoke this with an air of invincible

assurance.] Then we have Bicorns, Tricorns, and so on up to Millecorns.

[Here me-thought I crossed and blessed myself in my dream.] Some again

we have--there goes one--you see how happy the rogue looks--how he walks

smiling, and perking up his face, as if he thought himself the only man.

He is not married yet, but on Monday next he leads to the altar the

accomplished widow Dacres, relict of our late sheriff."

"I see, Sir," said I, "and observe that he is happily free from the

national _goitre_ (let me call it), which distinguishes most of your

countrymen."

"Look a little more narrowly," said my conductor.

I put on my spectacles, and observing the man a little more diligently,

above his forehead I could mark a thousand little twinkling shadows

dancing the horn-pipe, little hornlets and rudiments of horn, of a soft

and pappy consistence (for I handled some of them), but which, like

coral out of water, my guide informed me would infallibly stiffen and

grow rigid within a week or two from the expiration of his bachelorhood.

Then I saw some horns strangely growing out behind, and my interpreter

explained these to be married men, whose wives had conducted themselves

with infinite propriety since the period of their marriage, but were

thought to have antedated their good men's titles, by certain liberties

they had indulged themselves in, prior to the ceremony. This kind of

gentry wore their horns backwards, as has been said, in the fashion of

the old pig-tails; and as there was nothing obtrusive or ostentatious in

them, nobody took any notice of it.

Some had pretty little budding antlers, like the first essays of a young

faun. These, he told me, had wives, whose affairs were in a hopeful way,

but not quite brought to a conclusion.

Others had nothing to show, only by certain red angry marks and

swellings in the foreheads, which itched the more they kept rubbing and

chafing them; it was to be hoped that something was brewing.

I took notice that every one jeered at the rest, only none took notice

of the sea-captains; yet these were as well provided with their tokens

as the best among them. This kind of people, it seems, taking their

wives upon so contingent tenures, their lot was considered as nothing

but natural,--so they wore their marks without impeachment, as they

might carry their cockades, and nobody respected them a whit the less

for it.

I observed, that the more sprouts grew out of a man's head, the less

weight they seemed to carry with them; whereas, a single token would now

and then appear to give the wearer some uneasiness. This shows that use

is a great thing.

Some had their adornings gilt, which needs no explanation; while others,

like musicians, went sounding theirs before them--a sort of music which

I thought might very well have been spared.

It was pleasant to see some of the citizens encounter between

themselves; how they smiled in their sleeves at the shock they received

from their neighbour, and none seemed conscious of the shock which their

neighbour experienced in return.

Some had great corneous stumps, seemingly torn off and bleeding. These,

the interpreter warned me, were husbands who had retaliated upon their

wives, and the badge was in equity divided between them.

While I stood discerning these things, a slight tweak on my cheek

unawares, which brought tears into my eyes, introduced to me my friend

Placid, between whose lady and a certain male cousin, some idle

flirtations I remember to have heard talked of; but that was all. He saw

he had somehow hurt me, and asked my pardon with that round unconscious

face of his, and looked so tristful and contrite for his no-offence,

that I was ashamed for the man's penitence. Yet I protest it was but a

scratch. It was the least little hornet of a horn that could be framed.

"Shame on the man," I secretly exclaimed, "who could thrust so much as

the value of a hair into a brow so unsuspecting and inoffensive. What

then must they have to answer for, who plant great, monstrous,

timber-like, projecting antlers upon the heads of those whom they call

their friends, when a puncture of this atomical tenuity made my eyes to

water at this rate. All the pincers at Surgeons' Hall cannot pull out

for Placid that little hair."

I was curious to know what became of these frontal excrescences, when

the husbands died; and my guide informed me that the chemists in their

country made a considerable profit by them, extracting from them certain

subtle essences:--and then I remembered, that nothing was so efficacious

in my own for restoring swooning matrons, and wives troubled with the

vapours, as a strong sniff or two at the composition, appropriately

called hartshorn--far beyond _sal volatile_.

Then also I began to understand, why a man, who is the jest of the

company, is said to be the butt--as much as to say, such a one butteth

with the horn.

I inquired if by no operation these wens were ever extracted; and was

told, that there was indeed an order of dentists, whom they call

canonists in their language, who undertook to restore the forehead to

its pristine smoothness; but that ordinarily it was not done without

much cost and trouble; and when they succeeded in plucking out the

offending part, it left a painful void, which could not be filled up;

and that many patients who had submitted to the excision, were eager to

marry again, to supply with a good second antler the baldness and

deformed gap left by the extraction of the former, as men losing their

natural hair substitute for it a less becoming periwig.

Some horns I observed beautifully taper, smooth, and (as it were)

flowering. These I understand were the portions brought by handsome

women to their spouses; and I pitied the rough, homely, unsightly

deformities on the brows of others, who had been deceived by plain and

ordinary partners. Yet the latter I observed to be by far the most

common--the solution of which I leave to the natural philosopher.