A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY
AND OTHER ESSAYS

A
HAPPY HALF-CENTURY
AND OTHER ESSAYS

BY
AGNES REPPLIER, Litt. D.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1908

COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY AGNES REPPLIER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published September 1908

TO
J. WILLIAM WHITE

PREFACE

The half-century, whose more familiar aspects this little book is designed to illustrate, has spread its boundary lines. Nothing is so hard to deal with as a period. Nothing is so unmanageable as a date. People will be born a few years too early; they will live a few years too long. Events will happen out of time. The closely linked decades refuse to be separated, and my half-century, that I thought so compact, widened imperceptibly while I wrote.

I have filled my canvas with trivial things, with intimate details, with what now seem the insignificant aspects of life. But the insignificant aspects of life concern us mightily while we live; and it is by their help that we understand the insignificant people who are sometimes reckoned of importance. A hundred years ago many men and women were reckoned of importance, at whose claims their successors to-day smile scornfully. Yet they and their work were woven into the tissue of things, into the warp and woof of social conditions, into the literary history of England. An hour is not too precious to waste upon them, however feeble their pretensions. Perhaps some idle reader in the future will do as much by us.

A. R.

CONTENTS

“A Happy Half-Century,” “The Perils of Immortality,” and “The Correspondent” appeared first in Harper’s Magazine, “Our Accomplished Great-Grandmother” in Harper’s Bazar, and “On the Slopes of Parnassus” in the Atlantic Monthly; they are here reprinted by permission of the publishers of those magazines.

A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY

This damn’d unmasculine canting age!

Charles Lamb.

There are few of us who do not occasionally wish we had been born in other days, in days for which we have some secret affinity, and which shine for us with a mellow light in the deceitful pages of history. Mr. Austin Dobson, for example, must have sighed more than once to see Queen Anne on Queen Victoria’s throne; and the Rt. Hon. Cecil Rhodes must have realized that the reign of Elizabeth was the reign for him. There is a great deal lost in being born out of date. What freak of fortune thrust Galileo into the world three centuries too soon, and held back Richard Burton’s restless soul until he was three centuries too late?

For myself, I confess that the last twenty-five years of the eighteenth century and the first twenty-five years of the nineteenth make up my chosen period, and that my motive for so choosing is contemptible. It was not a time distinguished—in England at least—for wit or wisdom, for public virtues or for private charm; but it was a time when literary reputations were so cheaply gained that nobody needed to despair of one. A taste for platitudes, a tinge of Pharisaism, an appreciation of the commonplace,—and the thing was done. It was in the latter half of this blissful period that we find that enthusiastic chronicler, Mrs. Cowley, writing in “Public Characters” of “the proud preëminence which, in all the varieties of excellence produced by the pen, the pencil, or the lyre, the ladies of Great Britain have attained over contemporaries in every other country in Europe.”

When we search for proofs of this proud preëminence, what do we find? Roughly speaking, the period begins with Miss Burney, and closes with Miss Terrier and Miss Jane Porter. It includes—besides Miss Burney—one star of the first magnitude, Miss Austen (whose light never dazzled Mrs. Cowley’s eyes), and one mild but steadfast planet, Miss Edgeworth. The rest of Great Britain’s literary ladies were enjoying a degree of fame and fortune so utterly disproportionate to their merits that their toiling successors to-day may be pardoned for wishing themselves part of that happy sisterhood. Think of being able to find a market for an interminable essay entitled “Against Inconsistency in our Expectations”! There lingers in all our hearts a desire to utter moral platitudes, to dwell lingeringly and lovingly upon the obvious; but alas! we are not Mrs. Barbaulds, and this is not the year 1780. Foolish and inconsequent we are permitted to be, but tedious, never! And think of hearing one’s own brother burst into song, that he might fondly eulogize our

Sacred gifts whose meed is deathless praise,

Whose potent charm the enraptured soul can raise.

There are few things more difficult to conceive than an enthusiastic brother tunefully entreating his sister to go on enrapturing the world with her pen. Oh, thrice-favoured Anna Letitia Barbauld, who could warm even the calm fraternal heart into a glow of sensibility.

The publication of “Evelina” was the first notable event in our happy half-century. Its freshness and vivacity charmed all London; and Miss Burney, like Sheridan, had her applause “dashed in her face, sounded in her ears,” for the rest of a long and meritorious life. Her second novel, “Cecilia,” was received with such universal transport, that in a very moral epilogue of a rather immoral play we find it seriously commended to the public as an antidote to vice:—

Let sweet Cecilia gain your just applause,

Whose every passion yields to nature’s laws.

Miss Burney, blushing in the royal box, had the satisfaction of hearing this stately advertisement of her wares. Virtue was not left to be its own reward in those fruitful and generous years.

Indeed, the most comfortable characteristic of the period, and the one which incites our deepest envy, is the universal willingness to accept a good purpose as a substitute for good work. Even Madame d’Arblay, shrewd, caustic, and quick-witted, forbears from unkind criticism of the well-intentioned. She has nothing but praise for Mrs. Barbauld’s poems, because of “the piety and worth they exhibit”; and she rises to absolute enthusiasm over the anti-slavery epistle, declaring that its energy “springs from the real spirit of virtue.” Yet to us the picture of the depraved and luxurious West Indian ladies—about whom it is safe to say good Mrs. Barbauld knew very little—seems one of the most unconsciously humorous things in English verse.

Lo! where reclined, pale Beauty courts the breeze,

Diffused on sofas of voluptuous ease.

With languid tones imperious mandates urge,

With arm recumbent wield the household scourge.

There are moments when Mrs. Barbauld soars to the inimitable, when she reaches the highest and happiest effect that absurdity is able to produce.

With arm recumbent wield the household scourge

is one of these inspirations; and another is this pregnant sentence, which occurs in a chapter of advice to young girls: “An ass is much better adapted than a horse to show off a lady.”

To point to Hannah More as a brilliant and bewildering example of sustained success is to give the most convincing proof that it was a good thing to be born in the year 1745. Miss More’s reputation was already established at the dawning of my cherished half-century, and, for the whole fifty years, her life was a series of social, literary, and religious triumphs. In her youth, she was mistaken for a wit. In her old age, she was revered as a saint. In her youth, Garrick called her “Nine,”—gracefully intimating that she embodied the attributes of all the Muses. In her old age, an acquaintance wrote to her: “You who are secure of the approbation of angels may well hold human applause to be of small consequence.” In her youth, she wrote a play that everybody went to see. In her old age, she wrote tracts that everybody bought and distributed. Prelates composed Latin verses in her honour; and when her “Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World” was published anonymously, the Bishop of London exclaimed in a kind of pious transport, “Aut Morus, aut Angelus!” Her tragedy, “Percy,” melted the heart of London. Men “shed tears in abundance,” and women were “choked with emotion” over the “affecting circumstances of the Piece.” Sir William Pepys confessed that “Percy” “broke his heart”; and that he thought it “a kind of profanation” to wipe his eyes, and go from the theatre to Lady Harcourt’s assembly. Four thousand copies of the play were sold in a fortnight; and the Duke of Northumberland sent a special messenger to Miss More to thank her for the honour she had done his historic name.

As a novelist, Hannah was equally successful. Twenty thousand copies of “Cœlebs in Search of a Wife” were sold in England, and thirty thousand in America. “The Americans are a very approving people,” acknowledged the gratified authoress. In Iceland “Cœlebs” was read—so Miss More says—“with great apparent profit”; while certain very popular tracts, like “Charles the Footman” and “The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain,” made their edifying way to Moscow, and were found by the missionary Gericke in the library of the Rajah of Tanjore. “All this and Heaven, too!” as a reward for being born in 1745. The injustice of the thing stings us to the soul. Yet it was the unhesitating assumption of Heaven’s co-partnership which gave to Hannah More the best part of her earthly prestige, and made her verdicts a little like Protestant Bulls. When she objected to “Marmion” and “The Lady of the Lake” for their lack of “practical precept,” these sinless poems were withdrawn from Evangelical book-shelves. Her biographer, Mr. Thompson, thought it necessary to apologize for her correspondence with that agreeable worldling, Horace Walpole, and to assure us that “the fascinations of Walpole’s false wit must have retired before the bright ascendant of her pure and prevailing superiority.” As she waxed old, and affluent, and disputatious, it was deemed well to encourage a timid public with the reminder that her genius, though “great and commanding,” was still “lovely and kind.” And when she died, it was recorded that “a cultivated taste for moral scenery was one of her distinctions”;—as though Nature herself attended a class of ethics before venturing to allure too freely the mistress of Barley Wood.

It is in the contemplation of such sunlight mediocrity that the hardship of being born too late is felt with crushing force. Why cannot we write “Letters on the Improvement of the Mind,” and be held, like Mrs. Chapone, to be an authority on education all the rest of our lives; and have people entreating us, as they entreated her, to undertake, at any cost, the intellectual guidance of their daughters? When we consider all that a modern educator is expected to know—from bird-calls to metric measures—we sigh over the days which demanded nothing more difficult than the polite expression of truisms.

“Our feelings are not given us for our ornament, but to spur us on to right action. Compassion, for instance, is not impressed upon the human heart, only to adorn the fair face with tears, and to give an agreeable languor to the eyes. It is designed to excite our utmost endeavour to relieve the sufferer.”

Was it really worth while to say this even in 1775? Is it possible that young ladies were then in danger of thinking that the office of compassion was to “adorn a face with tears”? and did they try to be sorry for the poor and sick, only that their bright eyes might be softened into languor? Yet we know that Mrs. Chapone’s little volume was held to have rendered signal service to society. It has the honour to be one of the books which Miss Lydia Languish lays out ostentatiously on her table—in company with Fordyce’s sermons—when she anticipates a visit from Mrs. Malaprop and Sir Anthony. Some halting verses of the period exalt it as the beacon light of youth; and Mrs. Delany, writing to her six-year-old niece, counsels the little girl to read the “Letters” once a year until she is grown up. “They speak to the heart as well as to the head,” she assures the poor infant; “and I know no book (next to the Bible) more entertaining and edifying.”

Mrs. Montagu gave dinners. The real and very solid foundation of her reputation was the admirable manner in which she fed her lions. A mysterious halo of intellectuality surrounded this excellent hostess. “The female Mæcenas of Hill Street,” Hannah More elegantly termed her, adding,—to prove that she herself was not unduly influenced by gross food and drink,—“But what are baubles, when speaking of a Montagu!” Dr. Johnson praised her conversation,—especially when he wanted to tease jealous Mrs. Thrale,—but sternly discountenanced her attempts at authorship. When Sir Joshua Reynolds observed that the “Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare” did its authoress honour, Dr. Johnson retorted contemptuously: “It does her honour, but it would do honour to nobody else,”—which strikes me as a singularly unpleasant thing to hear said about one’s literary masterpiece. Like the fabled Caliph who stood by the Sultan’s throne, translating the flowers of Persian speech into comprehensible and unflattering truths, so Dr. Johnson stands undeceived in this pleasant half-century of pretence, translating its ornate nonsense into language we can too readily understand.

But how comfortable and how comforting the pretence must have been, and how kindly tolerant all the pretenders were to one another! If, in those happy days, you wrote an essay on “The Harmony of Numbers and Versification,” you unhesitatingly asked your friends to come and have it read aloud to them; and your friends—instead of leaving town next day—came, and listened, and called it a “Miltonic evening.” If, like Mrs. Montagu, you had a taste for letter-writing, you filled up innumerable sheets with such breathless egotisms as this:—

“I come, a happy guest, to the general feast Nature spreads for all her children, my spirits dance in the sunbeams, or take a sweet repose in the shade. I rejoice in the grand chorus of the day, and feel content in the silent serene of night, while I listen to the morning hymn of the whole animal creation, I recollect how beautiful it is, sum’d up in the works of our great poet, Milton, every rivulet murmurs in poetical cadence, and to the melody of the nightingale I add the harmonious verses she has inspired in many languages.”

So highly were these rhapsodies appreciated, and so far were correspondents from demanding either coherence or punctuation, that four volumes of Mrs. Montagu’s letters were published after her death; and we find Miss More praising Mrs. Boscawen because she approached this standard of excellence: “Mrs. Palk tells me her letters are hardly inferior to Mrs. Montagu’s.”

Those were the days to live in, and sensible people made haste to be born in time. The close of the eighteenth century saw quiet country families tearing the freshly published “Mysteries of Udolpho” into a dozen parts, because no one could wait his turn to read the book. All England held its breath while Emily explored the haunted chambers of her prison-house. The beginning of the nineteenth century found Mrs. Opie enthroned as a peerless novel-writer, and the “Edinburgh Review” praising “Adeline Mowbray, or Mother and Daughter,” as the most pathetic story in the English language. Indeed, one sensitive gentleman wrote to its authoress that he had lain awake all night, bathed in tears, after reading it. About this time, too, we begin to hear “the mellow tones of Felicia Hemans,” whom Christopher North reverently admired; and who, we are assured, found her way to all hearts that were open to “the holy sympathies of religion and virtue.” Murray’s heart was so open that he paid two hundred guineas for the “Vespers of Palermo”; and Miss Edgeworth considered that the “Siege of Valencia” contained the most beautiful poetry she had read for years. Finally Miss Jane Porter looms darkly on the horizon, with novels five volumes long. All the Porters worked on a heroic scale. Anna Maria’s stories were more interminable than Jane’s; and their brother Robert painted on a single canvas, “The Storming of Seringapatam,” seven hundred life-sized figures.

“Thaddeus of Warsaw” and “The Scottish Chiefs” were books familiar to our infancy. They stretched vastly and vaguely over many tender years,—stories after the order of Melchisedec, without beginning and without end. But when our grandmothers were young, and my chosen period had still years to run, they were read on two continents, and in many tongues. The King of Würtemberg was so pleased with “Thaddeus” that he made Miss Porter a “lady of the Chapter of St. Joachim,”—which sounds both imposing and mysterious. The badge of the order was a gold cross; and this unusual decoration, coupled with the lady’s habit of draping herself in flowing veils like one of Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroines, so confused an honest British public that it was deemed necessary to explain to agitated Protestants that Miss Porter had no Popish proclivities, and must not be mistaken for a nun. In our own country her novels were exceedingly popular, and her American admirers sent her a rose-wood armchair in token of appreciation and esteem. It is possible she would have preferred a royalty on her books; but the armchair was graciously accepted, and a pen-and-ink sketch in an album of celebrities represents Miss Porter seated majestically on its cushions, “in the quiet and ladylike occupation of taking a cup of coffee.”

And so my happy half-century draws to its appointed end. A new era, cold, critical, contentious, deprecated the old genial absurdities, chilled the old sentimental outpourings, questioned the old profitable pietism. Unfortunates, born a hundred years too late, look back with wistful eyes upon the golden age which they feel themselves qualified to adorn.

THE PERILS OF IMMORTALITY

Peu de génie, point de grâce.

There is no harder fate than to be immortalized as a fool; to have one’s name—which merits nothing sterner than obliteration—handed down to generations as an example of silliness, or stupidity, or presumption; to be enshrined pitilessly in the amber of the “Dunciad”; to be laughed at forever because of Charles Lamb’s impatient and inextinguishable raillery. When an industrious young authoress named Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger—a model of painstaking insignificance—invited Charles and Mary Lamb to drink tea with her one cold December night, she little dreamed she was achieving a deathless and unenviable fame; and that, when her half dozen books should have lapsed into comfortable oblivion, she herself should never be fortunate enough to be forgotten. It is a cruel chance which crystallizes the folly of an hour, and makes it outlive our most serious endeavours. Perhaps we should do well to consider this painful possibility before hazarding an acquaintance with the Immortals.

Miss Benger did more than hazard. She pursued the Immortals with insensate zeal. She bribed Mrs. Inchbald’s servant-maid into lending her cap, and apron, and tea-tray; and, so equipped, penetrated into the inmost sanctuary of that literary lady, who seems to have taken the intrusion in good part. She was equally adroit in seducing Mary Lamb—as the Serpent seduced Eve—when Charles Lamb was the ultimate object of her designs. Coming home to dinner one day, “hungry as a hunter,” he found to his dismay the two women closeted together, and trusted he was in time to prevent their exchanging vows of eternal friendship, though not—as he discovered later—in time to save himself from an engagement to drink tea with the stranger (“I had never seen her before, and could not tell who the devil it was that was so familiar”), the following night.

What happened is told in a letter to Coleridge; one of the best-known and one of the longest letters Lamb ever wrote,—he is so brimful of his grievance. Miss Benger’s lodgings were up two flights of stairs in East Street. She entertained her guests with tea, coffee, macaroons, and “much love.” She talked to them, or rather at them, upon purely literary topics,—as, for example, Miss Hannah More’s “Strictures on Female Education,” which they had never read. She addressed Mary Lamb in French,—“possibly having heard that neither Mary nor I understood French,”—and she favoured them with Miss Seward’s opinion of Pope. She asked Lamb, who was growing more miserable every minute, if he agreed with D’Israeli as to the influence of organism upon intellect; and when he tried to parry the question with a pun upon organ—“which went off very flat”—she despised him for his feeble flippancy. She advised Mary to carry home two translations of “Pizarro,” so that she might compare them verbatim (an offer hastily declined), and she made them both promise to return the following week—which they never did—to meet Miss Jane Porter and her sister, “who, it seems, have heard much of Mr. Coleridge, and wish to meet us because we are his friends.” It is a comédie larmoyante. We sympathize hotly with Lamb when we read his letter; but there is something piteous in the thought of the poor little hostess going complacently to bed that night, and never realizing that she had made her one unhappy flight to fame.

There were people, strange as it may seem, who liked Miss Benger’s evenings. Miss Aikin assures us that “her circle of acquaintances extended with her reputation, and with the knowledge of her excellent qualities, and she was often enabled to assemble as guests at her humble tea-table names whose celebrity would have insured attention in the proudest salons of the metropolis.” Crabb Robinson, who was a frequent visitor, used to encounter large parties of sentimental ladies; among them, Miss Porter, Miss Landon, and the “eccentric but amiable” Miss Wesley,—John Wesley’s niece,—who prided herself upon being broad-minded enough to have friends of varying religions, and who, having written two unread novels, remarked complacently to Miss Edgeworth: “We sisters of the quill ought to know one another.”

The formidable Lady de Crespigny of Campion Lodge was also Miss Benger’s condescending friend and patroness, and this august matron—of insipid mind and imperious temper—was held to sanctify in some mysterious manner all whom she honoured with her notice. The praises lavished upon Lady de Crespigny by her contemporaries would have made Hypatia blush, and Sappho hang her head. Like Mrs. Jarley, she was the delight of the nobility and gentry. She corresponded, so we are told, with the literati of England; she published, like a British Cornelia, her letters of counsel to her son; she was “courted by the gay and admired by the clever”; and she mingled at Campion Lodge “the festivity of fashionable parties with the pleasures of intellectual society, and the comforts of domestic peace.”

To this array of feminine virtue and feminine authorship, Lamb was singularly unresponsive. He was not one of the literati honoured by Lady de Crespigny’s correspondence. He eluded the society of Miss Porter, though she was held to be handsome,—for a novelist. (“The only literary lady I ever knew,” writes Miss Mitford, “who didn’t look like a scarecrow to keep birds from cherries.”) He said unkindly of Miss Landon that, if she belonged to him, he would lock her up and feed her on bread and water until she left off writing poetry. And for Miss Wesley he entertained a cordial animosity, only one degree less lively than his sentiments towards Miss Benger. Miss Wesley had a lamentable habit of sending her effusions to be read by reluctant men of letters. She asked Lamb for Coleridge’s address, which he, to divert the evil from his own head, cheerfully gave. Coleridge, very angry, reproached his friend for this disloyal baseness; but Lamb, with the desperate instinct of self-preservation, refused all promise of amendment. “You encouraged that mopsey, Miss Wesley, to dance after you,” he wrote tartly, “in the hope of having her nonsense put into a nonsensical Anthology. We have pretty well shaken her off by that simple expedient of referring her to you; but there are more burs in the wind.”... “Of all God’s creatures,” he cries again, in an excess of ill-humour, “I detest letters-affecting, authors-hunting ladies.” Alas for Miss Benger when she hunted hard, and the quarry turned at bay!

An atmosphere of inexpressible dreariness hangs over the little coterie of respectable, unilluminated writers, who, to use Lamb’s priceless phrase, encouraged one another in mediocrity. A vapid propriety, a mawkish sensibility were their substitutes for real distinction of character or mind. They read Mary Wollstonecraft’s books, but would not know the author; and when, years later, Mrs. Gaskell presented the widowed Mrs. Shelley to Miss Lucy Aikin, that outraged spinster turned her back upon the erring one, to the profound embarrassment of her hostess. Of Mrs. Inchbald, we read in “Public Characters” for 1811: “Her moral qualities constitute her principal excellence; and though useful talents and personal accomplishments, of themselves, form materials for an agreeable picture, moral character gives the polish which fascinates the heart.” The conception of goodness then in vogue is pleasingly illustrated by a passage from one of Miss Elizabeth Hamilton’s books, which Miss Benger in her biography of that lady (now lost to fame) quotes appreciatively:—

“It was past twelve o’clock. Already had the active and judicious Harriet performed every domestic task; and, having completely regulated the family economy for the day, was quietly seated at work with her aunt and sister, listening to Hume’s ‘History of England,’ as it was read to her by some orphan girl whom she had herself instructed.”

So truly ladylike had the feminine mind grown by this time, that the very language it used was refined to the point of ambiguity. Mrs. Barbauld writes genteelly of the behaviour of young girls “to the other half of their species,” as though she could not bear to say, simply and coarsely, men. So full of content were the little circles who listened to the “elegant lyric poetess,” Mrs. Hemans, or to “the female Shakespeare of her age,” Miss Joanna Baillie (we owe both these phrases to the poet Campbell), that when Crabb Robinson was asked by Miss Wakefield whether he would like to know Mrs. Barbauld, he cried enthusiastically: “You might as well ask me whether I should like to know the Angel Gabriel!”

In the midst of these sentimentalities and raptures, we catch now and then forlorn glimpses of the Immortals,—of Wordsworth at a literary entertainment in the house of Mr. Hoare of Hampstead, sitting mute and miserable all evening in a corner,—which, as Miss Aikin truly remarked, was “disappointing and provoking;” of Lamb carried by the indefatigable Crabb Robinson to call on Mrs. Barbauld. This visit appears to have been a distinct failure. Lamb’s one recorded observation was that Gilbert Wakefield had a peevish face,—an awkward remark, as Wakefield’s daughter sat close at hand and listening. “Lamb,” writes Mr. Robinson, “was vexed, but got out of the scrape tolerably well,”—having had, indeed, plenty of former experiences to help him on the way.

There is a delightful passage in Miss Jane Porter’s diary which describes at length an evening spent at the house of Mrs. Fenwick, “the amiable authoress of ‘Secrecy.’” (Everybody was the amiable authoress of something. It was a day, like our own, given over to the worship of ink.) The company consisted of Miss Porter and her sister Maria, Miss Benger and her brother, the poet Campbell, and his nephew, a young man barely twenty years of age. The lion of the little party was of course the poet, who endeared himself to Mrs. Fenwick’s heart by his attentions to her son, “a beautiful boy of six.”

“This child’s innocence and caresses,” writes Miss Porter gushingly, “seemed to unbend the lovely feelings of Campbell’s heart. Every restraint but those which the guardian angels of tender infancy acknowledge was thrown aside. I never saw Man in a more interesting point of view. I felt how much I esteemed the author of the ‘Pleasures of Hope.’ When we returned home, we walked. It was a charming summer night. The moon shone brightly. Maria leaned on Campbell’s arm. I did the same by Benger’s. Campbell made some observations on pedantic women. I did not like it, being anxious for the respect of this man. I was jealous about how nearly he might think we resembled that character. When the Bengers parted from us, Campbell observed my abstraction, and with sincerity I confessed the cause. I know not what were his replies; but they were so gratifying, so endearing, so marked with truth, that when we arrived at the door, and he shook us by the hand, as a sign of adieu immediately prior to his next day’s journey to Scotland, we parted with evident marks of being all in tears.”

It is rather disappointing, after this outburst of emotion, to find Campbell, in a letter to his sister, describing Miss Porter in language of chilling moderation: “Among the company was Miss Jane Porter, whose talents my nephew adores. She is a pleasing woman, and made quite a conquest of him.”

Miss Benger was only one of the many aspirants to literary honours whose futile endeavours vexed and affronted Charles Lamb. In reality she burdened him far less than others who, like Miss Betham and Miss Stoddart, succeeded in sending him their verses for criticism, or who begged him to forward the effusions to Southey,—an office he gladly fulfilled. Perhaps Miss Benger’s vivacity jarred upon his taste. He was fastidious about the gayety of women. Madame de Staël considered her one of the most interesting persons she had met in England; but the approval of this “impudent clever” Frenchwoman would have been the least possible recommendation to Lamb. If he had known how hard had been Miss Benger’s struggles, and how scanty her rewards, he might have forgiven her that sad perversity which kept her toiling in the field of letters. She had had the misfortune to be a precocious child, and had written at the age of thirteen a poem called “The Female Geniad,” which was dedicated to Lady de Crespigny, and published under the patronage of that honoured dame. Youthful prodigies were then much in favour. Miss Mitford comments very sensibly upon them, being filled with pity for one Mary Anne Browne, “a fine tall girl of fourteen, and a full-fledged authoress,” who was extravagantly courted and caressed one season, and cruelly ignored the next. The “Female Geniad” sealed Miss Benger’s fate. When one has written a poem at thirteen, and that poem has been printed and praised, there is nothing for it but to keep on writing until Death mercifully removes the obligation.

It is needless to say that the drama—which then, as now, was the goal of every author’s ambition—first fired Miss Benger’s zeal. When we think of Miss Hannah More as a successful playwright, it is hard to understand how any one could fail; yet fail Miss Benger did, although we are assured by her biographer that “her genius appeared in many ways well adapted to the stage.” She next wrote a mercilessly long poem upon the abolition of the slave-trade (which was read only by anti-slavery agitators), and two novels,—“Marian,” and “Valsinore: or, the Heart and the Fancy.” Of these we are told that “their excellences were such as genius only can reach”; and if they also missed their mark, it must have been because—as Miss Aikin delicately insinuates—“no judicious reader could fail to perceive that the artist was superior to the work.” This is always unfortunate. It is the work, and not the artist, which is offered for sale in the market-place. Miss Benger’s work is not much worse than a great deal which did sell, and she possessed at least the grace of an unflinching and courageous perseverance. Deliberately, and without aptitude or training, she began to write history, and in this most difficult of all fields won for herself a hearing. Her “Life of Anne Boleyn,” and her “Memoirs of Mary, Queen of Scots,” were read in many an English schoolroom; their propriety and Protestantism making them acceptable to the anxious parental mind. A single sentence from “Anne Boleyn” will suffice to show the ease of Miss Benger’s mental attitude, and the comfortable nature of her views:—

“It would be ungrateful to forget that the mother of Queen Elizabeth was the early and zealous advocate of the Reformation, and that, by her efforts to dispel the gloom of ignorance and superstition, she conferred on the English people a benefit of which, in the present advanced state of knowledge and civilization, it would be difficult to conceive or to appreciate the real value and importance.”

The “active and judicious Harriet” would have listened to this with as much complacence as to Hume.

In “La Belle Assemblée” for April, 1823, there is an engraving of Miss Smirke’s portrait of Miss Benger. She is painted in an imposing turban, with tight little curls, and an air of formidable sprightliness. It was this sprightliness which was so much admired. “Wound up by a cup of coffee,” she would talk for hours, and her friends really seem to have liked it. “Her lively imagination,” writes Miss Aikin, “and the flow of eloquence it inspired, aided by one of the most melodious of voices, lent an inexpressible charm to her conversation, which was heightened by an intuitive discernment of character, rare in itself, and still more so in combination with such fertility of fancy and ardency of feeling.”

This leaves little to be desired. It is not at all like the Miss Benger of Lamb’s letter, with her vapid pretensions and her stupid insolence. Unhappily, we see through Lamb’s eyes, and we cannot see through Miss Aikin’s. Of one thing only I feel sure. Had Miss Benger, instead of airing her trivial acquirements, told Lamb that when she was a little girl, bookless and penniless, at Chatham, she used to read the open volumes in the booksellers’ windows, and go back again and again, hoping that the leaves might be turned, she would have touched a responsive chord in his heart. Who does not remember his exquisite sympathy for “street-readers,” and his unlikely story of Martin B——, who “got through two volumes of ‘Clarissa,’” in this desultory fashion. Had he but known of the shabby, eager child, staring wistfully at the coveted books, he would never have written the most amusing of his letters, and Miss Benger’s name would be to-day unknown.

WHEN LALLA ROOKH WAS YOUNG

And give you, mixed with western sentimentalism,

Some glimpses of the finest orientalism.

“Stick to the East,” wrote Byron to Moore, in 1813. “The oracle, Staël, told me it was the only poetic policy. The North, South, and West have all been exhausted; but from the East we have nothing but Southey’s unsaleables, and these he has contrived to spoil by adopting only their most outrageous fictions. His personages don’t interest us, and yours will. You will have no competitors; and, if you had, you ought to be glad of it. The little I have done in that way is merely a ‘voice in the wilderness’ for you; and if it has had any success, that also will prove that the public are orientalizing, and pave the way for you.”

There is something admirably business-like in this advice. Byron, who four months before had sold the “Giaour” and the “Bride of Abydos” to Murray for a thousand guineas, was beginning to realize the commercial value of poetry; and, like a true man of affairs, knew what it meant to corner a poetic market. He was generous enough to give Moore the tip, and to hold out a helping hand as well; for he sent him six volumes of Castellan’s “Mœurs des Ottomans,” and three volumes of Toderini’s “De la Littérature des Turcs.” The orientalism afforded by text-books was the kind that England loved.

From the publication of “Lalla Rookh” in 1817 to the publication of Thackeray’s “Our Street” in 1847, Byron’s far-sighted policy continued to bear golden fruit. For thirty years Caliphs and Deevs, Brahmins and Circassians, rioted through English verse; mosques and seraglios were the stage properties of English fiction; the bowers of Rochnabed, the Lake of Cashmere, became as familiar as Richmond and the Thames to English readers. Some feeble washings of this great tidal wave crossed the estranging sea, to tint the pages of the New York “Mirror,” and kindred journals in the United States. Harems and slave-markets, with beautiful Georgians and sad, slender Arab girls, thrilled our grandmothers’ kind hearts. Tales of Moorish Lochinvars, who snatch away the fair daughters—or perhaps the fair wives—of powerful rajahs, captivated their imaginations. Gazelles trot like poodles through these stories, and lend colour to their robust Saxon atmosphere. In one, a neglected “favourite” wins back her lord’s affection by the help of a slave-girl’s amulet; and the inconstant Moslem, entering the harem, exclaims, “Beshrew me that I ever thought another fair!”—which sounds like a penitent Tudor.

A Persian’s Heaven is easily made,

’Tis but black eyes and lemonade;

and our oriental literature was compounded of the same simple ingredients. When the New York “Mirror,” under the guidance of the versatile Mr. Willis, tried to be impassioned and sensuous, it dropped into such wanton lines as these to a “Sultana”:—

She came,—soft leaning on her favourite’s arm,

She came, warm panting from the sultry hours,

To rove mid fragrant shades of orange bowers,

A veil light shadowing each voluptuous charm.

And for this must Lord Byron stand responsible.

The happy experiment of grafting Turkish roses upon English boxwood led up to some curious complications, not the least of which was the necessity of stiffening the moral fibre of the Orient—which was esteemed to be but lax—until it could bear itself in seemly fashion before English eyes. The England of 1817 was not, like the England of 1908, prepared to give critical attention to the decadent. It presented a solid front of denial to habits and ideas which had not received the sanction of British custom; which had not, through national adoption, become part of the established order of the universe. The line of demarcation between Providence and the constitution was lightly drawn. Jeffrey, a self-constituted arbiter of tastes and morals, assured his nervous countrymen that, although Moore’s verse was glowing, his principles were sound.

“The characters and sentiments of ‘Lalla Rookh’ belong to the poetry of rational, honourable, considerate, and humane Europe; and not to the childishness, cruelty, and profligacy of Asia. So far as we have yet seen, there is no sound sense, firmness of purpose, or principled goodness, except among the natives of Europe and their genuine descendants.”

Starting with this magnificent assumption, it became a delicate and a difficult task to unite the customs of the East with the “principled goodness” of the West; the “sound sense” of the Briton with the fervour and fanaticism of the Turk. Jeffrey held that Moore had effected this alliance in the most tactful manner, and had thereby “redeemed the character of oriental poetry”; just as Mr. Thomas Haynes Bayly, ten years later, “reclaimed festive song from vulgarity.” More carping critics, however, worried their readers a good deal on this point; and the nonconformist conscience cherished uneasy doubts as to Hafed’s irregular courtship and Nourmahal’s marriage lines. From across the sea came the accusing voice of young Mr. Channing in the “North American,” proclaiming that “harlotry has found in Moore a bard to smooth her coarseness and veil her effrontery, to give her languor for modesty, and affectation for virtue.” The English “Monthly Review,” less open to alarm, confessed with a sigh “a depressing regret that, with the exception of ‘Paradise and the Peri,’ no great moral effect is either attained or attempted by ‘Lalla Rookh.’ To what purpose all this sweetness and delicacy of thought and language, all this labour and profusion of Oriental learning? What head is set right in one erroneous notion, what heart is softened in one obdurate feeling, by this luxurious quarto?”

It is a lamentable truth that Anacreon exhibits none of Dante’s spiritual depth, and that la reine Margot fell short of Queen Victoria’s fireside qualities. Nothing could make a moralist of Moore. The light-hearted creature was a model of kindness, of courage, of conjugal fidelity; but—reversing the common rule of life—he preached none of the virtues that he practised. His pathetic attempts to adjust his tales to the established conventions of society failed signally of their purpose. Even Byron wrote him that little Allegra (as yet unfamiliar with her alphabet) should not be permitted to read “Lalla Rookh”; partly because it wasn’t proper, and partly—which was prettily said—lest she should discover “that there was a better poet than Papa.” It was reserved for Moore’s followers to present their verses and stories in the chastened form acceptable to English drawing-rooms, and permitted to English youth. “La Belle Assemblée” published in 1819 an Eastern tale called “Jahia and Meimoune,” in which the lovers converse like the virtuous characters in “Camilla.” Jahia becomes the guest of an infamous sheik, who intoxicates him with a sherbet composed of “sugar, musk, and amber,” and presents him with five thousand sequins and a beautiful Circassian slave. When he is left alone with this damsel, she addresses him thus: “I feel interested in you, and present circumstances will save me from the charge of immodesty, when I say that I also love you. This love inspires me with fresh horror at the crimes that are here committed.”

Jahia protests that he respectfully returns her passion, and that his intentions are of an honourable character, whereupon the circumspect maiden rejoins: “Since such are your sentiments, I will perish with you if I fail in delivering you”; and conducts him, through a tangle of adventures, to safety. Jahia then places Meimoune under the chaperonage of his mother until their wedding day; after which we are happy to know that “they passed their lives in the enjoyment of every comfort attending on domestic felicity. If their lot was not splendid or magnificent, they were rich in mutual affection; and they experienced that fortunate medium which, far removed from indigence, aspires not to the accumulation of immense wealth, and laughs at the unenvied load of pomp and splendour, which it neither seeks, nor desires to obtain.”

It is to be hoped that many obdurate hearts were softened, and many erroneous notions were set right by the influence of a story like this. In the “Monthly Museum” an endless narrative poem, “Abdallah,” stretched its slow length along from number to number, blooming with fresh moral sentiments on every page; while from an arid wilderness of Moorish love songs, and Persian love songs, and Circassian love songs, and Hindu love songs, I quote this “Arabian” love song, peerless amid its peers:—

Thy hair is black as the starless sky,

And clasps thy neck as it loved its home;

Yet it moves at the sound of thy faintest sigh,

Like the snake that lies on the white sea-foam.

I love thee, Ibla. Thou art bright

As the white snow on the hills afar;

Thy face is sweet as the moon by night,

And thine eye like the clear and rolling star.

But the snow is poor and withers soon,

While thou art firm and rich in hope;

And never (like thine) from the face of the moon

Flamed the dark eye of the antelope.

The truth and accuracy of this last observation should commend the poem to all lovers of nature.

It is the custom in these days of morbid accuracy to laugh at the second-hand knowledge which Moore so proudly and so innocently displayed. Even Mr. Saintsbury says some unkind things about the notes to “Lalla Rookh,”—scraps of twentieth-hand knowledge, he calls them,—while pleasantly recording his affection for the poem itself, an affection based upon the reasonable ground of childish recollections. In the well-ordered home of his infancy, none but “Sunday books” might be read on Sundays in nursery or schoolroom. “But this severity was tempered by one of those easements often occurring in a world, which, if not the best, is certainly not the worst of all possible worlds. For the convenience of servants, or for some other reason, the children were much more in the drawing-room on Sundays than on any other day; and it was an unwritten rule that any book that lived in the drawing-room was fit Sunday reading. The consequence was that from the time I could read until childish things were put away, I used to spend a considerable part of the first day of the week in reading and re-reading a collection of books, four of which were Scott’s poems, ‘Lalla Rookh,’ ‘The Essays of Elia,’ and Southey’s ‘Doctor.’ Therefore it may be that I rank ‘Lalla Rookh’ too high.”

Blessed memories, and thrice blessed influences of childhood! But if “Lalla Rookh,” like “Vathek,” was written to be the joy of imaginative little boys and girls (alas for those who now replace it with “Allan in Alaska,” and “Little Cora on the Continent”), the notes to “Lalla Rookh” were, to my infant mind, even more enthralling than the poem. There was a sketchiness about them, a detachment from time and circumstance—I always hated being told the whole of everything—which led me day after day into fresh fields of conjecture. The nymph who was encircled by a rainbow, and bore a radiant son; the scimitars that were so dazzling they made the warriors wink; the sacred well which reflected the moon at midday; and the great embassy that was sent “from some port of the Indies”—a welcome vagueness of geography—to recover a monkey’s tooth, snatched away by some equally nameless conqueror;—what child could fail to love such floating stars of erudition?

Our great-grandfathers were profoundly impressed by Moore’s text-book acquirements. The “Monthly Review” quoted a solid page of the notes to dazzle British readers, who confessed themselves amazed to find a fellow countryman so much “at home” in Persia and Arabia. Blackwood authoritatively announced that Moore was familiar, not only “with the grandest regions of the human soul,”—which is expected of a poet,—but also with the remotest boundaries of the East; and that in every tone and hue and form he was “purely and intensely Asiatic.” “The carping criticism of paltry tastes and limited understandings faded before that burst of admiration with which all enlightened spirits hailed the beauty and magnificence of ‘Lalla Rookh.’”

Few people care to confess to “paltry tastes” and “limited understandings.” They would rather join in any general acclamation. “Browning’s poetry obscure!” I once heard a lecturer say with scorn. “Let us ask ourselves, ‘Obscure to whom?’ No doubt a great many things are obscure to long-tailed Brazilian apes.” After which his audience, with one accord, admitted that it understood “Sordello.” So when Jeffrey—great umpire of games whose rules he never knew—informed the British public that there was not in “Lalla Rookh” “a simile, a description, a name, a trait of history, or allusion of romance that does not indicate entire familiarity with the life, nature, and learning of the East,” the public contentedly took his word for it. When he remarked that “the dazzling splendours, the breathing odours” of Araby were without doubt Moore’s “native element,” the public, whose native element was neither splendid nor sweet-smelling, envied the Irishman his softer joys. “Lalla Rookh” might be “voluptuous” (a word we find in every review of the period), but its orientalism was beyond dispute. Did not Mrs. Skinner tell Moore that she had, when in India, translated the prose interludes into Bengali, for the benefit of her moonshee, and that the man was amazed at the accuracy of the costumes? Did not the nephew of the Persian ambassador in Paris tell Mr. Stretch, who told Moore, that “Lalla Rookh” had been translated into Persian; that the songs—particularly “Bendemeer’s Stream”—were sung “everywhere”; and that the happy natives could hardly believe the whole work had not been taken originally from a Persian manuscript?

I’m told, dear Moore, your lays are sung

(Can it be true, you lucky man?)

By moonlight, in the Persian tongue,

Along the streets of Ispahan.

And not of Ispahan only; for in the winter of 1821 the Berlin court presented “Lalla Rookh” with such splendour, such wealth of detail, and such titled actors, that Moore’s heart was melted and his head was turned (as any other heart would have been melted, and any other head would have been turned) by the reports thereof. A Grand Duchess of Russia took the part of Lalla Rookh; the Duke of Cumberland was Aurungzebe; and a beautiful young sister of Prince Radzivil enchanted all beholders as the Peri. “Nothing else was talked about in Berlin” (it must have been a limited conversation); the King of Prussia had a set of engravings made of the noble actors in their costumes; and the Crown Prince sent word to Moore that he slept always with a copy of “Lalla Rookh” under his pillow, which was foolish, but flattering. Hardly had the echoes of this royal fête died away, when Spontini brought out in Berlin his opera “The Feast of Roses,” and Moore’s triumph in Prussia was complete. Byron, infinitely amused at the success of his own good advice, wrote to the happy poet: “Your Berlin drama is an honour unknown since the days of Elkanah Settle, whose ‘Empress of Morocco’ was presented by the court ladies, which was, as Johnson remarks, ‘the last blast of inflammation to poor Dryden.’”

Who shall say that this comparison is without its dash of malice? There is a natural limit to the success we wish our friends, even when we have spurred them on their way.

If the English court did not lend itself with much gayety or grace to dramatic entertainments, English society was quick to respond to the delights of a modified orientalism. That is to say, it sang melting songs about bulbuls and Shiraz wine; wore ravishing Turkish costumes whenever it had a chance (like the beautiful Mrs. Winkworth in the charades at Gaunt House); and covered its locks—if they were feminine locks—with turbans of portentous size and splendour. When Mrs. Fitzherbert, aged seventy-three, gave a fancy dress ball, so many of her guests appeared as Turks, and Georgians, and sultanas, that it was hard to believe that Brighton, and not Stamboul, was the scene of the festivity. At an earlier entertainment, “a rural breakfast and promenade,” given by Mrs. Hobart at her villa near Fulham, and “graced by the presence of royalty,” the leading attraction was Mrs. Bristow, who represented Queen Nourjahad in the “Garden of Roses.” “Draped in all the magnificence of Eastern grandeur, Mrs. Bristow was seated in the larger drawing-room (which was very beautifully fitted up with cushions in the Indian style), smoking her hookah amidst all sorts of the choicest perfumes. Mrs. Bristow was very profuse with otto of roses, drops of which were thrown about the ladies’ dresses. The whole house was scented with the delicious fragrance.”

The “European Magazine,” the “Monthly Museum,” all the dim old periodicals published in the early part of the last century for feminine readers, teem with such “society notes.” From them, too, we learn that by 1823 turbans of “rainbow striped gauze frosted with gold” were in universal demand; while “black velvet turbans, enormously large, and worn very much on one side,” must have given a rakish appearance to stout British matrons. “La Belle Assemblée” describes for us with tender enthusiasm a ravishing turban, “in the Turkish style,” worn in the winter of 1823 at the theatre and at evening parties. This masterpiece was of “pink oriental crêpe, beautifully folded in front, and richly ornamented with pearls. The folds are fastened on the left side, just above the ear, with a Turkish scimitar of pearls; and on the right side are tassels of pearls, surmounted by a crescent and a star.”

Here we have Lady Jane or Lady Amelia transformed at once into young Nourmahal; and, to aid the illusion, a “Circassian corset” was devised, free from encroaching steel or whalebone, and warranted to give its English wearers the “flowing and luxurious lines” admired in the overfed inmates of the harem. When the passion for orientalism began to subside in London, remote rural districts caught and prolonged the infection. I have sympathized all my life with the innocent ambition of Miss Matty Jenkyns to possess a sea-green turban, like the one worn by Queen Adelaide; and have never been able to forgive that ruthlessly sensible Mary Smith—the chronicler of Cranford—for taking her a “neat middle-aged cap” instead. “I was most particularly anxious to prevent her from disfiguring her small gentle mousy face with a great Saracen’s head turban,” says the judicious Miss Smith with a smirk of self-commendation; and poor Miss Matty—the cap being bought—has to bow to this arbiter of fate. How much we all suffer in life from the discretion of our families and friends!

Thackeray laughed the dim ghost of “Lalla Rookh” out of England. He mocked at the turbans, and at the old ladies who wore them; at the vapid love songs, and at the young ladies who sang them.

I am a little brown bulbul. Come and listen in the moonlight. Praise be to Allah! I am a merry bard.

He derided the “breathing odours of Araby,” and the Eastern travellers who imported this exotic atmosphere into Grosvenor Square. Yonng Bedwin Sands, who has “lived under tents,” who has published a quarto, ornamented with his own portrait in various oriental costumes, and who goes about accompanied by a black servant of most unprepossessing appearance, “just like another Brian de Bois Guilbert,” is only a degree less ridiculous than Clarence Bulbul, who gives Miss Tokely a piece of the sack in which an indiscreet Zuleika was drowned, and whose servant says to callers: “Mon maître est au divan,” or “Monsieur trouvera Monsieur dans son sérail.... He has coffee and pipes for everybody. I should like you to have seen the face of old Bowly, his college tutor, called upon to sit cross-legged on a divan, a little cup of bitter black mocha put into his hand, and a large amber-muzzled pipe stuck into his mouth before he could say it was a fine day. Bowly almost thought he had compromised his principles by consenting so far to this Turkish manner.” Bulbul’s sure and simple method of commending himself to young ladies is by telling them they remind him of a girl he knew in Circassia,—Ameena, the sister of Schamyle Bey. “Do you know, Miss Pim,” he thoughtfully observes, “that you would fetch twenty thousand piastres in the market at Constantinople?” Whereupon Miss Pim is filled with embarrassed elation. An English girl, conscious of being in no great demand at home, was naturally flattered as well as fluttered by the thought of having market value elsewhere. And perhaps this feminine instinct was at the root of “Lalla Rookh’s” long popularity in England.

THE CORRESPONDENT

Correspondences are like small-clothes before the invention of suspenders; it is impossible to keep them up.—Sydney Smith to Mrs. Crowe.

In this lamentable admission, in this blunt and revolutionary sentiment, we hear the first clear striking of a modern note, the first gasping protest against the limitless demands of letter-writing. When Sydney Smith was a little boy, it was not impossible to keep a correspondence up; it was impossible to let it go. He was ten years old when Sir William Pepys copied out long portions of Mrs. Montagu’s letters, and left them as a legacy to his heirs. He was twelve years old when Miss Anna Seward—the “Swan of Lichfield”—copied thirteen pages of description which the Rev. Thomas Sedgwick Whalley had written her from Switzerland, and sent them to her friend, Mr. William Hayley. She called this “snatching him to the Continent by Whalleyan magic.” What Mr. Hayley called it we do not know; but he had his revenge, for the impartial “Swan” copied eight verses of an “impromptu” which Mr. Hayley had written upon her, and sent them in turn to Mr. Whalley;—thus making each friend a scourge to the other, and widening the network of correspondence which had enmeshed the world.

It is impossible not to feel a trifle envious of Mr. Whalley, who looms before us as the most petted and accomplished of clerical bores, of “literary and chess-playing divines.” He was but twenty-six when the kind-hearted Bishop of Ely presented him with the living of Hagworthingham, stipulating that he should not take up his residence there,—the neighbourhood of the Lincolnshire fens being considered an unhealthy one. Mr. Whalley cheerfully complied with this condition; and for fifty years the duties were discharged by curates, who could not afford good health; while the rector spent his winters in Europe, and his summers at Mendip Lodge. He was of an amorous disposition,—“sentimentally pathetic,” Miss Burney calls him,—and married three times, two of his wives being women of fortune. He lived in good society, and beyond his means, like a gentleman; was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds (who has very delicately and maliciously accentuated his resemblance to the tiny spaniel he holds in his arms); and died of old age, in the comfortable assurance that he had lost nothing the world could give. A voluminous correspondence—afterwards published in two volumes—afforded scope for that clerical diffuseness which should have found its legitimate outlet in the Hagworthingham pulpit.

The Rev. Augustus Jessup has recorded a passionate admiration for Cicero’s letters, on the ground that they never describe scenery; but Mr. Whalley’s letters seldom do anything else. He wrote to Miss Sophia Weston a description of Vaucluse, which fills three closely printed pages. Miss Weston copied every word, and sent it to Miss Seward, who copied every word of her copy, and sent it to the long-suffering Mr. Hayley, with the remark that Mr. Whalley and Petrarch were “kindred spirits.” Later on this kinship was made pleasantly manifest by the publication of “Edwy and Edilda,” which is described as a “domestic epic,” and which Mr. Whalley’s friends considered to be a moral bulwark as well as an epoch-making poem. Indeed, we find Miss Seward imploring him to republish it, on the extraordinary ground that it will add to his happiness in heaven to know that the fruits of his industry “continue to inspire virtuous pleasure through passing generations.” It is animating to contemplate the celestial choirs congratulating the angel Whalley at intervals on the “virtuous pleasure” inspired by “Edwy and Edilda.” “This,” says Mr. Kenwigs, “is an ewent at which Evin itself looks down.”

There was no escape from the letter-writer who, a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five years ago, captured a coveted correspondent. It would have been as easy to shake off an octopus or a boa-constrictor. Miss Seward opened her attack upon Sir Walter Scott, whom she had never seen, with a long and passionate letter, lamenting the death of a friend whom Scott had never seen. She conjured him not to answer this letter, because she was “dead to the world.” Scott gladly obeyed, content that the lady should be at least dead to him, which was the last possibility she contemplated. Before twelve months were out they were in brisk correspondence, an acquaintance was established, and when she died in earnest, some years later, he found himself one of her literary executors, and twelve quarto manuscript volumes of her letters waiting to be published. These Scott wisely refused to touch; but he edited her poems,—a task he much disliked,—wrote the epitaph on her monument in Lichfield Cathedral, and kindly maintained that, although her sentimentality appalled him, and her enthusiasm chilled his soul, she was a talented and pleasing person.

The most formidable thing about the letters of this period—apart from their length—is their eloquence. It bubbles and seethes over every page. Miss Seward, writing to Mrs. Knowles in 1789 upon the dawning of the French Revolution, of which she understood no more than a canary, pipes an ecstatic trill. “So France has dipped her lilies in the living stream of American freedom, and bids her sons be slaves no longer. In such a contest the vital sluices must be wastefully opened; but few English hearts I hope there are that do not wish victory may sit upon the swords that freedom has unsheathed.” It sounds so exactly like the Americans in “Martin Chuzzlewit” that one doubts whether Mr. Jefferson Brick or the Honourable Elijah Pogram really uttered the sentiment; while surely to Mrs. Hominy, and not to the Lichfield Swan, must be credited this beautiful passage about a middle-aged but newly married couple: “The berries of holly, with which Hymen formed that garland, blush through the snows of time, and dispute the prize of happiness with the roses of youth;—and they are certainly less subject to the blights of expectation and palling fancy.”

It is hard to conceive of a time when letters like these were sacredly treasured by the recipients (our best friend, the waste-paper basket, seems to have been then unknown); when the writers thereof bequeathed them as a legacy to the world; and when the public—being under no compulsion—bought six volumes of them as a contribution to English literature. It is hard to think of a girl of twenty-one writing to an intimate friend as Elizabeth Robinson, afterwards the “great” Mrs. Montagu, wrote to the young Duchess of Portland, who appears to have ventured upon a hope that they were having a mild winter in Kent.

“I am obliged to your Grace for your good wishes of fair weather; sunshine gilds every object, but, alas! December is but cloudy weather, how few seasons boast many days of calm! April, which is the blooming youth of the year, is as famous for hasty showers as for gentle sunshine. May, June, and July have too much heat and violence, the Autumn withers the Summer’s gayety, and in the Winter the hopeful blossoms of Spring and fair fruits of Summer are decayed, and storms and clouds arise.”

After these obvious truths, for which the almanac stands responsible, Miss Robinson proceeds to compare human life to the changing year, winding up at the close of a dozen pages: “Happy and worthy are those few whose youth is not impetuous, nor their age sullen; they indeed should be esteemed, and their happy influence courted.”

Twenty-one, and ripe for moral platitudes! What wonder that we find the same lady, when crowned with years and honours, writing to the son of her friend, Lord Lyttelton, a remorselessly long letter of precept and good counsel, which that young gentleman (being afterwards known as the wicked Lord Lyttelton) seems never to have taken to heart.

“The morning of life, like the morning of the day, should be dedicated to business. Give it therefore, dear Mr. Lyttelton, to strenuous exertion and labour of mind, before the indolence of the meridian hour, or the unabated fervour of the exhausted day, renders you unfit for severe application.”

“Unabated fervour of the exhausted day” is a phrase to be commended. We remember with awe that Mrs. Montagu was the brightest star in the chaste firmament of female intellect;—“the first woman for literary knowledge in England,” wrote Mrs. Thrale; “and, if in England, I hope I may say in the world.” We hope so, indeed. None but a libertine would doubt it. And no one less contumelious than Dr. Johnson ever questioned Mrs. Montagu’s supremacy. She was, according to her great-grandniece, Miss Climenson, “adored by men,” while “purest of the pure”; which was equally pleasant for herself and for Mr. Montagu. She wrote more letters, with fewer punctuation marks, than any Englishwoman of her day; and her nephew, the fourth Baron Rokeby, nearly blinded himself in deciphering the two volumes of undated correspondence which were printed in 1810. Two more followed in 1813, after which the gallant Baron either died at his post or was smitten with despair; for sixty-eight cases of letters lay undisturbed for the best part of a century, when they passed into Miss Climenson’s hands. This intrepid lady received them—so she says—with “unbounded joy”; and has already published two fat volumes, with the promise of several others in the near future. “Les morts n’écrivent point,” said Madame de Maintenon hopefully; but of what benefit is this inactivity, when we still continue to receive their letters?

Miss Elizabeth Carter, called by courtesy Mrs. Carter, was the most vigorous of Mrs. Montagu’s correspondents. Although a lady of learning, who read Greek and had dipped into Hebrew, she was far too “humble and unambitious” to claim an acquaintance with the exalted mistress of Montagu House; but that patroness of literature treated her with such true condescension that they were soon on the happiest terms. When Mrs. Montagu writes to Miss Carter that she has seen the splendid coronation of George III, Miss Carter hastens to remind her that such splendour is for majesty alone.

“High rank and power require every external aid of pomp and éclat that may awe and astonish spectators by the ideas of the magnificent and sublime; while the ornaments of more equal conditions should be adapted to the quiet tenour of general life, and be content to charm and engage by the gentler graces of the beautiful and pleasing.”

Mrs. Montagu was fond of display. All her friends admitted, and some deplored the fact. But surely there was no likelihood of her appropriating the coronation services as a feature for the entertainments at Portman Square.

Advice, however, was the order of the day. As the excellent Mrs. Chapone wrote to Sir William Pepys: “It is a dangerous commerce for friends to praise each other’s Virtues, instead of reminding each other of duties and of failings.” Yet a too robust candour carried perils of its own, for Miss Seward having written to her “beloved Sophia Weston” with “an ingenuousness which I thought necessary for her welfare, but which her high spirits would not brook,” Sophia was so unaffectedly angry that twelve years of soothing silence followed.

Another wonderful thing about the letter-writers, especially the female letter-writers, of this engaging period is the wealth of hyperbole in which they rioted. Nothing is told in plain terms. Tropes, metaphors, and similes adorn every page; and the supreme elegance of the language is rivalled only by the elusiveness of the idea, which is lost in an eddy of words. Marriage is always alluded to as the “hymeneal torch,” or the “hymeneal chain,” or “hymeneal emancipation from parental care.” Birds are “feathered muses,” and a heart is a “vital urn.” When Mrs. Montagu writes to Mr. Gilbert West, that “miracle of the Moral World,” to condole with him on his gout, she laments that his “writing hand, first dedicated to the Muses, then with maturer judgment consecrated to the Nymphs of Solyma, should be led captive by the cruel foe.” If Mr. West chanced not to know who or what the Nymphs of Solyma were, he had the intelligent pleasure of finding out. Miss Seward describes Mrs. Tighe’s sprightly charms as “Aonian inspiration added to the cestus of Venus”; and speaks of the elderly “ladies of Llangollen” as, “in all but the voluptuous sense, Armidas of its bowers.” Duelling is to her “the murderous punctilio of Luciferian honour.” A Scotch gentleman who writes verse is “a Cambrian Orpheus”; a Lichfield gentleman who sketches is “our Lichfield Claude”; and a budding clerical writer is “our young sacerdotal Marcellus.” When the “Swan” wished to apprise Scott of Dr. Darwin’s death, it never occurred to her to write, as we in this dull age should do: “Dr. Darwin died last night,” or, “Poor Dr. Darwin died last night.” She wrote: “A bright luminary in this neighbourhood recently shot from his sphere with awful and deplorable suddenness”;—thus pricking Sir Walter’s imagination to the wonder point before descending to facts. Even the rain and snow were never spoken of in the plain language of the Weather Bureau; and the elements had a set of allegories all their own. Miss Carter would have scorned to take a walk by the sea. She “chased the ebbing Neptune.” Mrs. Chapone was not blown by the wind. She was “buffeted by Eolus and his sons.” Miss Seward does not hope that Mr. Whalley’s rheumatism is better; but that he has overcome “the malinfluence of marine damps, and the monotonous murmuring of boundless waters.” Perhaps the most triumphant instance on record of sustained metaphor is Madame d’Arblay’s account of Mrs. Montagu’s yearly dinner to the London chimney-sweeps, in which the word sweep is never once used, so that the editor was actually compelled to add a footnote to explain what the lady meant. The boys are “jetty objects,” “degraded outcasts from society,” and “sooty little agents of our most blessed luxury.” They are “hapless artificers who perform the most abject offices of any authorized calling”; they are “active guardians of our blazing hearth”; but plain chimney-sweeps, never! Madame d’Arblay would have perished at the stake before using so vulgar and obvious a term.

How was this mass of correspondence preserved? How did it happen that the letters were never torn up, or made into spills,—the common fate of all such missives when I was a little girl. Granted that Miss Carter treasured Mrs. Montagu’s letters (she declared fervidly she could never be so barbarous as to destroy one), and that Mrs. Montagu treasured Miss Carter’s. Granted that Miss Weston treasured Mr. Whalley’s, and that Mr. Whalley treasured Miss Weston’s. Granted that Miss Seward provided against all contingencies by copying her own letters into fat blank books before they were mailed, elaborating her spineless sentences, and omitting everything she deemed too trivial or too domestic for the public ear. But is it likely that young Lyttelton at Oxford laid sacredly away Mrs. Montagu’s pages of good counsel, or that young Franks at Cambridge preserved the ponderous dissertations of Sir William Pepys? Sir William was a Baronet, a Master in Chancery, and—unlike his famous ancestor—a most respectable and exemplary gentleman. His innocent ambition was to be on terms of intimacy with the literary lights of his day. He knew and ardently admired Dr. Johnson, who in return detested him cordially. He knew and revered, “in unison with the rest of the world,” Miss Hannah More. He corresponded at great length with lesser lights,—with Mrs. Chapone, and Mrs. Hartley, and Sir Nathaniel Wraxall. He wrote endless commentaries on Homer and Virgil to young Franks, and reams of good advice to his little son at Eton. There is something pathetic in his regret that the limitations of life will not permit him to be as verbose as he would like. “I could write for an hour,” he assures poor Franks, “upon that most delightful of all passages, the Lion deprived of its Young; but the few minutes one can catch amidst the Noise, hurry and confusion of an Assize town will not admit of any Classical discussions. But was I in the calm retirement of your Study at Acton, I have much to say to you, to which I can only allude.”

The publication of scores and scores of such letters, all written to one unresponsive young man at Cambridge (who is repeatedly reproached for not answering them), makes us wonder afresh who kept the correspondence; and the problem is deepened by the appearance of Sir William’s letters to his son. This is the way the first one begins:—

“My dear Boy,—I cannot let a Post escape me without giving you the Pleasure of knowing how much you have gladdened the Hearts of two as affectionate Parents as ever lived; when you tell us that the Principles of Religion begin already to exert their efficacy in making you look down with contempt on the wretched grovelling Vices with which you are surrounded, you make the most delightful Return you can ever make for our Parental Care and Affection; you make Us at Peace with Ourselves; and enable us to hope that our dear Boy will Persevere in that Path which will ensure the greatest Share of Comfort here, and a certainty of everlasting Happiness hereafter.”

I am disposed to think that Sir William made a fair copy of this letter and of others like it, and laid them aside as models of parental exhortation. Whether young Pepys was a little prig, or a particularly accomplished little scamp (and both possibilities are open to consideration), it seems equally unlikely that an Eton boy’s desk would have proved a safe repository for such ample and admirable discourses.

The publication of Cowper’s letters in 1803 and 1804 struck a chill into the hearts of accomplished and erudite correspondents. Poor Miss Seward never rallied from the shock of their “commonness,” and of their popularity. Here was a man who wrote about beggars and postmen, about cats and kittens, about buttered toast and the kitchen table. Here was a man who actually looked at things before he described them (which was a startling innovation); who called the wind the wind, and buttercups buttercups, and a hedgehog a hedgehog. Miss Seward honestly despised Cowper’s letters. She said they were without “imagination or eloquence,” without “discriminative criticism,” without “characteristic investigation.” Investigating the relations between the family cat and an intrusive viper was, from her point of view, unworthy the dignity of an author. Cowper’s love of detail, his terrestrial turn of mind, his humour, and his veracity were disconcerting in an artificial age. When Miss Carter took a country walk, she did not stoop to observe the trivial things she saw. Apparently she never saw anything. What she described were the sentiments and emotions awakened in her by a featureless principle called Nature. Even the ocean—which is too big to be overlooked—started her on a train of moral reflections, in which she passed easily from the grandeur of the elements to the brevity of life, and the paltriness of earthly ambitions. “How vast are the capacities of the soul, and how little and contemptible its aims and pursuits.” With this original remark, the editor of the letters (a nephew and a clergyman) was so delighted that he added a pious comment of his own.

“If such be the case, how strong and conclusive is the argument deduced from it, that the soul must be destined to another state more suitable to its views and powers. It is much to be lamented that Mrs. Carter did not pursue this line of thought any further.”

People who bought nine volumes of a correspondence like this were expected, as the editor warns them, to derive from it “moral, literary, and religious improvement.” It was in every way worthy of a lady who had translated Epictetus, and who had the “great” Mrs. Montagu for a friend. But, as Miss Seward pathetically remarked, “any well-educated person, with talents not above the common level, produces every day letters as well worth attention as most of Cowper’s, especially as to diction.” The perverseness of the public in buying, in reading, in praising these letters, filled her with pained bewilderment. Not even the writer’s sincere and sad piety, his tendency to moralize, and the transparent innocence of his life could reconcile her to plain transcripts from nature, or to such an unaffecting incident as this:—

“A neighbour of mine in Silver End keeps an ass; the ass lives on the other side of the garden wall, and I am writing in the greenhouse. It happens that he is this morning most musically disposed; either cheered by the fine weather, or by some new tune which he has just acquired, or by finding his voice more harmonious than usual. It would be cruel to mortify so fine a singer, therefore I do not tell him that he interrupts and hinders me; but I venture to tell you so, and to plead his performance in excuse of my abrupt conclusion.”

Here is not only the “common” diction which Miss Seward condemned, but a very common casualty, which she would have naturally deemed beneath notice. Cowper wrote a great deal about animals, and always with fine and humorous appreciation. He sought relief from the hidden torment of his soul in the contemplation of creatures who fill their place in life without morals, and without misgivings. We know what safe companions they were for him when we read his account of his hares, of his kitten dancing on her hind legs,—“an exercise which she performs with all the grace imaginable,”—and of his goldfinches amorously kissing each other between the cage wires. When Miss Seward bent her mind to “the lower orders of creation,” she did not describe them at all; she gave them the benefit of that “discriminative criticism” which she felt that Cowper lacked. Here, for example, is her thoughtful analysis of man’s loyal servitor, the dog:—

“That a dog is a noble, grateful, faithful animal we must all be conscious, and deserves a portion of man’s tenderness and care;—yet, from its utter incapacity of more than glimpses of rationality, there is a degree of insanity, as well as of impoliteness to his acquaintance, and of unkindness to his friends, in lavishing so much more of his attention in the first instance, and of affection in the latter, upon it than upon them.”

It sounds like a parody on a great living master of complex prose. By its side, Cowper’s description of Beau is certainly open to the reproach of plainness.

“My dog is a spaniel. Till Miss Gunning begged him, he was the property of a farmer, and had been accustomed to lie in the chimney corner among the embers till the hair was singed from his back, and nothing was left of his tail but the gristle. Allowing for these disadvantages, he is really handsome; and when nature shall have furnished him with a new coat, a gift which, in consideration of the ragged condition of his old one, it is hoped she will not long delay, he will then be unrivalled in personal endowments by any dog in this country.”

No wonder the Lichfield Swan was daunted by the inconceivable popularity of such letters. No wonder Miss Hannah More preferred Akenside to Cowper. What had these eloquent ladies to do with quiet observation, with sober felicity of phrase, with “the style of honest men”!

THE NOVELIST

Soft Sensibility, sweet Beauty’s soul!

Keeps her coy state, and animates the whole.

Hayley.

Readers of Miss Burney’s Diary will remember her maidenly confusion when Colonel Fairly (the Honourable Stephen Digby) recommends to her a novel called “Original Love-Letters between a Lady of Quality and a Person of Inferior Station.” The authoress of “Evelina” and “Cecilia”—then thirty-six years of age—is embarrassed by the glaring impropriety of this title. In vain Colonel Fairly assures her that the book contains “nothing but good sense, moral reflections, and refined ideas, clothed in the most expressive and elegant language.” Fanny, though longing to read a work of such estimable character, cannot consent to borrow, or even discuss, anything so compromising as love-letters; and, with her customary coyness, murmurs a few words of denial. Colonel Fairly, however, is not easily daunted. Three days later he actually brings the volume to that virginal bower, and asks permission to read portions of it aloud, excusing his audacity with the solemn assurance that there was no person, not even his own daughter, in whose hands he would hesitate to place it. “It was now impossible to avoid saying that I should like to hear it,” confesses Miss Burney. “I should seem else to doubt either his taste or his delicacy, while I have the highest opinion of both.” So the book is produced, and the fair listener, bending over her needlework to hide her blushes, acknowledges it to be “moral, elegant, feeling, and rational,” while lamenting that the unhappy nature of its title makes its presence a source of embarrassment.

This edifying little anecdote sheds light upon a palmy period of propriety. Miss Burney’s self-consciousness, her superhuman diffidence, and the “delicious confusion” which overwhelmed her upon the most insignificant occasions, were beacon lights to her “sisters of Parnassus,” to the less distinguished women who followed her brilliant lead. The passion for novel-reading was asserting itself for the first time in the history of the world as a dominant note of femininity. The sentimentalities of fiction expanded to meet the woman’s standard, to satisfy her irrational demands. “If the story-teller had always had mere men for an audience,” says an acute English critic, “there would have been no romance; nothing but the improving fable, or the indecent anecdote.” It was the woman who, as Miss Seward sorrowfully observed, sucked the “sweet poison” which the novelist administered; it was the woman who stooped conspicuously to the “reigning folly” of the day.

The particular occasion of this outbreak on Miss Seward’s part was the extraordinary success of a novel, now long forgotten by the world, but which in its time rivalled in popularity “Evelina,” and the well-loved “Mysteries of Udolpho.” Its plaintive name is “Emmeline; or the Orphan of the Castle,” and its authoress, Charlotte Smith, was a woman of courage, character, and good ability; also of a cheerful temperament, which we should never have surmised from her works. It is said that her son owed his advancement in the East India Company solely to the admiration felt for “Emmeline,” which was being read as assiduously in Bengal as in London. Sir Walter Scott, always the gentlest of critics, held that it belonged to the “highest branch of fictitious narrative.” The Queen, who considered it a masterpiece, lent it to Miss Burney, who in turn gave it to Colonel Fairly, who ventured to observe that it was not “piquant,” and asked for a “Rambler” instead.

“Emmeline” is not piquant. Its heroine has more tears than Niobe. “Formed of the softest elements, and with a mind calculated for select friendship and domestic happiness,” it is her misfortune to be loved by all the men she meets. The “interesting languor” of a countenance habitually “wet with tears” proves their undoing. Her “deep convulsive sobs” charm them more than the laughter of other maidens. When the orphan leaves the castle for the first time, she weeps bitterly for an hour; when she converses with her uncle, she can “no longer command her tears, sobs obliged her to cease speaking”; and when he urges upon her the advantages of a worldly marriage, she—as if that were possible—“wept more than before.” When Delamere, maddened by rejection, carries her off in a post-chaise (a delightful frontispiece illustrates this episode), “a shower of tears fell from her eyes”; and even a rescue fails to raise her spirits. Her response to Godolphin’s tenderest approaches is to “wipe away the involuntary betrayers of her emotion”; and when he exclaims in a transport: “Enchanting softness! Is then the safety of Godolphin so dear to that angelic bosom?” she answers him with “audible sobs.”

The other characters in the book are nearly as tearful. When Delamere is not striking his forehead with his clenched fist, he is weeping at Emmeline’s feet. The repentant Fitz-Edward lays his head on a chair, and weeps “like a woman.” Lady Adelina, who has stooped to folly, naturally sheds many tears, and writes an “Ode to Despair”; while Emmeline from time to time gives “vent to a full heart” by weeping over Lady Adelina’s infant. Godolphin sobs loudly when he sees his frail sister; and when he meets Lord Westhaven after an absence of four years, “the manly eyes of both brothers were filled with tears.” We wonder how Scott, whose heroines cry so little and whose heroes never cry at all, stood all this weeping; and, when we remember the perfunctory nature of Sir Walter’s love scenes,—wedged in any way among more important matters,—we wonder still more how he endured the ravings of Delamere, or the melancholy verses with which Godolphin from time to time soothes his despondent soul.

In deep depression sunk, the enfeebled mind

Will to the deaf cold elements complain;

And tell the embosomed grief, however vain,

To sullen surges and the viewless wind.

It was not, however, the mournfulness of “Emmeline” which displeased Miss Seward, but rather the occasional intrusion of “low characters”; of those underbred and unimpassioned persons who—as in Miss Burney’s and Miss Ferrier’s novels—are naturally and almost cheerfully vulgar. That Mr. William Hayley, author of “The Triumphs of Temper,” and her own most ardent admirer, should tune his inconstant lyre in praise of Mrs. Smith was more than Miss Seward could bear. “My very foes acquit me of harbouring one grain of envy in my bosom,” she writes him feelingly; “yet it is surely by no means inconsistent with that exemption to feel a little indignant, and to enter one’s protest, when compositions of mere mediocrity are extolled far above those of real genius.” She then proceeds to point out the “indelicacy” of Lady Adelina’s fall from grace, and the use of “kitchen phrases,” such as “she grew white at the intelligence.” “White instead of pale,” comments Miss Seward severely, “I have often heard servants say, but never a gentleman or a gentlewoman.” If Mr. Hayley desires to read novels, she urges upon him the charms of another popular heroine, Caroline de Lichtfield, in whom he will find “simplicity, wit, pathos, and the most exalted generosity”; and the history of whose adventures “makes curiosity gasp, admiration kindle, and pity dissolve.”

Caroline, “the gay child of Artless Nonchalance,” is at least a more cheerful young person than the Orphan. Her story, translated from the French of Madame de Montolieu, was widely read in England and on the Continent; and Miss Seward tells us that its author was indebted “to the merits and graces of these volumes for a transition from incompetence to the comforts of wealth; from the unprotected dependence of waning virginity to the social pleasures of wedded friendship.” In plain words, we are given to understand that a rich and elderly German widower read the book, sought an acquaintance with the writer, and married her. “Hymen,” exclaims Miss Seward, “passed by the fane of Cytherea and the shrine of Plutus, to light his torch at the altar of genius”;—which beautiful burst of eloquence makes it painful to add the chilling truth, and say that “Caroline de Lichtfield” was written six years after its author’s marriage with M. de Montolieu, who was a Swiss, and her second husband. She espoused her first, M. de Crousaz, when she was eighteen, and still comfortably remote from the terrors of waning virginity. Accurate information was not, however, a distinguishing characteristic of the day. Sir Walter Scott, writing some years later of Madame de Montolieu, ignores both marriages altogether, and calls her Mademoiselle.

No rich reward lay in wait for poor Charlotte Smith, whose husband was systematically impecunious, and whose large family of children were supported wholly by her pen. “Emmeline, or the Orphan of the Castle” was followed by “Ethelinda, or the Recluse of the Lake,” and that by “The Old Manor House,” which was esteemed her masterpiece. Its heroine bears the interesting name of Monimia; and when she marries her Orlando, “every subsequent hour of their lives was marked by some act of benevolence,”—a breathless and philanthropic career. By this time the false-hearted Hayley had so far transferred to Mrs. Smith the homage due to Miss Seward that he was rewarded with the painful privilege of reading “The Old Manor House” in manuscript,—a privilege reserved in those days for tried and patient friends. The poet had himself dallied a little with fiction, having written, “solely to promote the interests of religion,” a novel called “The Young Widow,” which no one appears to have read, except perhaps the Archbishop of Canterbury, to whom its author sent a copy.

In purity of motive Mr. Hayley was rivalled only by Mrs. Brunton, whose two novels, “Self-Control” and “Discipline,” were designed “to procure admission for the religion of a sound mind and of the Bible where it cannot find access in any other form.” Mrs. Brunton was perhaps the most commended novelist of her time. The inexorable titles of her stories secured for them a place upon the guarded book-shelves of the young. Many a demure English girl must have blessed these deluding titles, just as, forty years later, many an English boy blessed the inspiration which had impelled George Borrow to misname his immortal book “The Bible in Spain.” When the wife of a clergyman undertook to write a novel in the interests of religion and the Scriptures; when she called it “Discipline,” and drew up a stately apology for employing fiction as a medium for the lessons she meant to convey, what parent could refuse to be beguiled? There is nothing trivial in Mrs. Brunton’s conception of a good novel, in the standard she proposes to the world.

“Let the admirable construction of fable in ‘Tom Jones’ be employed to unfold characters like Miss Edgeworth’s; let it lead to a moral like Richardson’s; let it be told with the elegance of Rousseau, and with the simplicity of Goldsmith; let it be all this, and Milton need not have been ashamed of the work.”

How far “Discipline” and “Self-Control” approach this composite standard of perfection it would be invidious to ask; but they accomplished a miracle of their own in being both popular and permitted, in pleasing the frivolous, and edifying the devout. Dedicated to Miss Joanna Baillie, sanctioned by Miss Hannah More, they stood above reproach, though not without a flavour of depravity. Mrs. Brunton’s outlook upon life was singularly uncomplicated. All her women of fashion are heartless and inane. All her men of fashion cherish dishonourable designs upon female youth and innocence. Indeed the strenuous efforts of Laura, in “Self-Control,” to preserve her virginity may be thought a trifle explicit for very youthful readers. We find her in the first chapter—she is seventeen—fainting at the feet of her lover, who has just revealed the unworthy nature of his intentions; and we follow her through a series of swoons to the last pages, where she “sinks senseless” into—of all vessels!—a canoe; and is carried many miles down a Canadian river in a state of nicely balanced unconsciousness. Her self-control (the crowning virtue which gives its title to the book) is so marked that when she dismisses Hargrave on probation, and then meets him accidentally in a London print-shop after a four months’ absence, she “neither screamed nor fainted”; only “trembled violently, and leant against the counter to recover strength and composure.” It is not until he turns, and, “regardless of the inquisitive looks of the spectators, clasped her to his breast,” that “her head sunk upon his shoulder, and she lost all consciousness.” As for her heroic behaviour when the same Hargrave (having lapsed from grace) shoots the virtuous De Courcy in Lady Pelham’s summer-house, it must be described in the author’s own words. No others could do it justice.

“To the plants which their beauty had recommended to Lady Pelham, Laura had added a few of which the usefulness was known to her. Agaric of the oak was of the number; and she had often applied it where many a hand less fair would have shrunk from the task. Nor did she hesitate now. The ball had entered near the neck; and the feminine, the delicate Laura herself disengaged the wound from its covering; the feeling, the tender Laura herself performed an office from which false sensibility would have recoiled in horror.”

Is it possible that anybody except Miss Burney could have shrunk modestly from the sight of a lover’s neck, especially when it had a bullet in it? Could a sense of decorum be more overwhelmingly expressed? Yet the same novel which held up to our youthful great-grandmothers this unapproachable standard of propriety presented to their consideration the most intimate details of libertinism. There was then, as now, no escape from the moralist’s devastating disclosures.

One characteristic is common to all these faded romances, which in their time were read with far more fervour and sympathy than are their successors to-day. This is the undying and undeviating nature of their heroes’ affections. Written by ladies who took no count of man’s proverbial inconstancy, they express a touching belief in the supremacy of feminine charms. A heroine of seventeen (she is seldom older), with ringlets, and a “faltering timidity,” inflames both the virtuous and the profligate with such imperishable passions, that when triumphant morality leads her to the altar, defeated vice cannot survive her loss. Her suitors, reversing the enviable experience of Ben Bolt,—

weep with delight when she gives them a smile,

And tremble with fear at her frown.

They grow faint with rapture when they enter her presence, and, when she repels their advances, they signify their disappointment by gnashing their teeth, and beating their heads against the wall. Rejection cannot alienate their faithful hearts; years and absence cannot chill their fervour. They belong to a race of men who, if they ever existed at all, are now as extinct as the mastodon.

It was Miss Jane Porter who successfully transferred to a conquering hero that exquisite sensibility of soul which had erstwhile belonged to the conquering heroine,—to the Emmelines and Adelinas of fiction. Dipping her pen “in the tears of Poland,” she conveyed the glittering drops to the eyes of “Thaddeus of Warsaw,” whence they gush in rills,—like those of the Prisoner of Chillon’s brother. Thaddeus is of such exalted virtue that strangers in London address him as “excellent young gentleman,” and his friends speak of him as “incomparable young man.” He rescues children from horses’ hoofs and from burning buildings. He nurses them through small-pox, and leaves their bedsides in the most casual manner, to mingle in crowds and go to the play. He saves women from insult on the streets. He is kind even to “that poor slandered and abused animal, the cat,”—which is certainly to his credit. Wrapped in a sable cloak, wearing “hearse-like plumes” on his hat, a star upon his breast, and a sabre by his side, he moves with Hamlet’s melancholy grace through the five hundred pages of the story. “His unrestrained and elegant conversation acquired new pathos from the anguish that was driven back to his heart: like the beds of rivers which infuse their own nature with the current, his hidden grief imparted an indescribable interest and charm to all his sentiments and actions.”

What wonder that such a youth is passionately loved by all the women who cross his path, but whom he regards for the most part with “that lofty tranquillity which is inseparable from high rank when it is accompanied by virtue.” In vain Miss Euphemia Dundas writes him amorous notes, and entraps him into embarrassing situations. In vain Lady Sara Roos—married, I regret to say—pursues him to his lodgings, and wrings “her snowy arms” while she confesses the hopeless nature of her infatuation. The irreproachable Thaddeus replaces her tenderly but firmly on a sofa, and as soon as possible sends her home in a cab. It is only when the “orphan heiress,” Miss Beaufort, makes her appearance on the scene, “a large Turkish shawl enveloping her fine form, a modest grace observable in every limb,” that the exile’s haughty soul succumbs to love. Miss Beaufort has been admirably brought up by her aunt, Lady Somerset, who is a person of great distinction, and who gives “conversaziones,” as famous in their way as Mrs. Proudie’s.—“There the young Mary Beaufort listened to pious divines of every Christian persuasion. There she gathered wisdom from real philosophers; and, in the society of our best living poets, cherished an enthusiasm for all that is great and good. On these evenings, Sir Robert Somerset’s house reminded the visitor of what he had read or imagined of the School of Athens.”

Never do hero and heroine approach each other with such spasms of modesty as Thaddeus and Miss Beaufort. Their hearts expand with emotion, but their mutual sense of propriety keeps them remote from all vulgar understandings. In vain “Mary’s rosy lips seemed to breathe balm while she spoke.” In vain “her beautiful eyes shone with benevolence.” The exile, standing proudly aloof, watches with bitter composure the attentions of more frivolous suitors. “His arms were folded, his hat pulled over his forehead; and his long dark eye-lashes shading his downcast eyes imparted a dejection to his whole air, which wrapped her weeping heart round and round with regretful pangs.” What with his lashes, and his hidden griefs, the majesty of his mournful moods, and the pleasing pensiveness of his lighter ones, Thaddeus so far eclipses his English rivals that they may be pardoned for wishing he had kept his charms in Poland. Who that has read the matchless paragraph which describes the first unveiling of the hero’s symmetrical leg can forget the sensation it produces?

“Owing to the warmth of the weather, Thaddeus came out this morning without boots; and it being the first time the exquisite proportion of his limb had been seen by any of the present company excepting Euphemia” (why had Euphemia been so favoured?), “Lascelles, bursting with an emotion which he would not call envy, measured the count’s fine leg with his scornful eye.”

When Thaddeus at last expresses his attachment for Miss Beaufort, he does so kneeling respectfully in her uncle’s presence, and in these well-chosen words: “Dearest Miss Beaufort, may I indulge myself in the idea that I am blessed with your esteem?” Whereupon Mary whispers to Sir Robert: “Pray, Sir, desire him to rise. I am already sufficiently overwhelmed!” and the solemn deed is done.

“Thaddeus of Warsaw” may be called the “Last of the Heroes,” and take rank with the “Last of the Mohicans,” the “Last of the Barons,” the “Last of the Cavaliers,” and all the finalities of fiction. With him died that noble race who expressed our great-grandmothers’ artless ideals of perfection. Seventy years later, D’Israeli made a desperate effort to revive a pale phantom of departed glory in “Lothair,” that nursling of the gods, who is emphatically a hero, and nothing more. “London,” we are gravely told, “was at Lothair’s feet.” He is at once the hope of United Italy, and the bulwark of the English Establishment. He is—at twenty-two—the pivot of fashionable, political, and clerical diplomacy. He is beloved by the female aristocracy of Great Britain; and mysterious ladies, whose lofty souls stoop to no conventionalities, die happy with his kisses on their lips. Five hundred mounted gentlemen compose his simple country escort, and the coat of his groom of the chambers is made in Saville Row. What more could a hero want? What more could be lavished upon him by the most indulgent of authors? Yet who shall compare Lothair to the noble Thaddeus nodding his hearse-like plumes,—Thaddeus dedicated to the “urbanity of the brave,” and embalmed in the tears of Poland? The inscrutable creator of Lothair presented his puppet to a mocking world; but all England and much of the Continent dilated with correct emotions when Thaddeus, “uniting to the courage of a man the sensibility of a woman, and the exalted goodness of an angel” (I quote from an appreciative critic), knelt at Miss Beaufort’s feet.

Ten years later “Pride and Prejudice” made its unobtrusive appearance, and was read by that “saving remnant” to whom is confided the intellectual welfare of their land. Mrs. Elwood, the biographer of England’s “Literary Ladies,” tells us, in the few careless pages which she deems sufficient for Miss Austen’s novels, that there are people who think these stories “worthy of ranking with those of Madame d’Arblay and Miss Edgeworth”; but that in their author’s estimation (and, by inference, in her own), “they took up a much more humble station.” Yet, tolerant even of such inferiority, Mrs. Elwood bids us remember that although “the character of Emma is perhaps too manœuvring and too plotting to be perfectly amiable,” that of Catherine Morland “will not suffer greatly even from a comparison with Miss Burney’s interesting Evelina”; and that “although one is occasionally annoyed by the underbred personages of Miss Austen’s novels, the annoyance is only such as we should feel if we were actually in their company.”

It was thus that our genteel great-grandmothers, enamoured of lofty merit and of refined sensibility, regarded Elizabeth Bennet’s relations.

ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS

Perhaps no man ever thought a line superfluous when he wrote it. We are seldom tiresome to ourselves.—Dr. Johnson.

It is commonly believed that the extinction of verse—of verse in the bulk, which is the way in which our great-grandfathers consumed it—is due to the vitality of the novel. People, we are told, read rhyme and metre with docility, only because they wanted to hear a story, only because there was no other way in which they could get plenty of sentiment and romance. As soon as the novel supplied them with all the sentiment they wanted, as soon as it told them the story in plain prose, they turned their backs upon poetry forever.

There is a transparent inadequacy in this solution of a problem which still confronts the patient reader of buried masterpieces. Novels were plenty when Mr. William Hayley’s “Triumphs of Temper” went through twelve editions, and when Dr. Darwin’s “Botanic Garden” was received with deferential delight. But could any dearth of fiction persuade us now to read the “Botanic Garden”? Were we shipwrecked in company with the “Triumphs of Temper,” would we ever finish the first canto? Novels stood on every English book-shelf when Fox read “Madoc” aloud at night to his friends, and they stayed up, so he says, an hour after their bedtime to hear it. Could that miracle be worked to-day? Sir Walter Scott, with indestructible amiability, reread “Madoc” to please Miss Seward, who, having “steeped” her own eyes “in transports of tears and sympathy,” wrote to him that it carried “a master-key to every bosom which common good sense and anything resembling a human heart inhabit.” Scott, unwilling to resign all pretensions to a human heart, tried hard to share the Swan’s emotions, and failed. “I cannot feel quite the interest I would like to do,” he patiently confessed.

If Southey’s poems were not read as Scott’s and Moore’s and Byron’s were read (give us another Byron, and we will read him with forty thousand novels knocking at our doors!); if they were not paid for out of the miraculous depths of Murray’s Fortunatus’s purse, they nevertheless enjoyed a solid reputation of their own. They are mentioned in all the letters of the period (save and except Lord Byron’s ribald pages) with carefully measured praise, and they enabled their author to accept the laureateship on self-respecting terms. They are at least, as Sir Leslie Stephen reminds us, more readable than Glover’s “Leonidas,” or Wilkie’s “Epigoniad,” and they are shorter, too. Yet the “Leonidas,” an epic in nine books, went through four editions; whereupon its elate author expanded it into twelve books; and the public, undaunted, kept on buying it for years. The “Epigoniad” is also in nine books. It is on record that Hume, who seldom dallied with the poets, read all nine, and praised them warmly. Mr. Wilkie was christened the “Scottish Homer,” and he bore that modest title until his death. It was the golden age of epics. The ultimatum of the modern publisher, “No poet need apply!” had not yet blighted the hopes and dimmed the lustre of genius. “Everybody thinks he can write verse,” observed Sir Walter mournfully, when called upon for the hundredth time to help a budding aspirant to fame.

With so many competitors in the field, it was uncommonly astute in Mr. Hayley to address himself exclusively to that sex which poets and orators call “fair.” There is a formal playfulness, a ponderous vivacity about the “Triumphs of Temper,” which made it especially welcome to women. In the preface of the first edition the author gallantly laid his laurels at their feet, observing modestly that it was his desire, however “ineffectual,” “to unite the sportive wildness of Ariosto and the more serious sublime painting of Dante with some portion of the enchanting elegance, the refined imagination, and the moral graces of Pope; and to do this, if possible, without violating those rules of propriety which Mr. Cambridge has illustrated, by example as well as by precept, in the ‘Scribleriad,’ and in his sensible preface to that elegant and learned poem.”

Accustomed as we are to the confusions of literary perspective, this grouping of Dante, Ariosto, and Mr. Cambridge does seem a trifle foreshortened. But our ancestors had none of that sensitive shrinking from comparisons which is so characteristic of our timid and thin-skinned generation. They did not edge off from the immortals, afraid to breathe their names lest it be held lèse-majesté; they used them as the common currency of criticism. Why should not Mr. Hayley have challenged a contrast with Dante and Ariosto, when Miss Seward assured her little world—which was also Mr. Hayley’s world—that he had the “wit and ease” of Prior, a “more varied versification” than Pope, and “the fire and the invention of Dryden, without any of Dryden’s absurdity”? Why should he have questioned her judgment, when she wrote to him that Cowper’s “Task” would “please and instruct the race of common readers,” who could not rise to the beauties of Akenside, or Mason, or Milton, or of his (Mr. Hayley’s) “exquisite ‘Triumphs of Temper’”? There was a time, indeed, when she sorrowed lest his “inventive, classical, and elegant muse” should be “deplorably infected” by the growing influence of Wordsworth; but, that peril past, he rose again, the bright particular star of a wide feminine horizon.

Mr. Hayley’s didacticism is admirably adapted to his readers. The men of the eighteenth century were not expected to keep their tempers; it was the sweet prerogative of wives and daughters to smooth the roughened current of family life. Accordingly the heroine of the “Triumphs,” being bullied by her father, a fine old gentleman of the Squire Western type, maintains a superhuman cheerfulness, gives up the ball for which she is already dressed, wreathes her countenance in smiles, and

with sportive ease,

Prest her Piano-forte’s favourite keys.

The men of the eighteenth century were all hard drinkers. Therefore Mr. Hayley conjures the “gentle fair” to avoid even the mild debauchery of siruped fruits,—

For the sly fiend, of every art possest,

Steals on th’ affection of her female guest;

And, by her soft address, seducing each,

Eager she plies them with a brandy peach.

They with keen lip the luscious fruit devour,

But swiftly feel its peace-destroying power.

Quick through each vein new tides of frenzy roll,

All evil passions kindle in the soul;

Drive from each feature every cheerful grace,

And glare ferocious in the sallow face;

The wounded nerves in furious conflict tear,

Then sink in blank dejection and despair.

All this combustle, to use Gray’s favourite word, about a brandy peach! But women have ever loved to hear their little errors magnified. In the matter of poets, preachers and confessors, they are sure to choose the denunciatory.

Dr. Darwin, as became a scientist and a sceptic, addressed his ponderous “Botanic Garden” to male readers. It is true that he offers much good advice to women, urging upon them especially those duties and devotions from which he, as a man, was exempt. It is true also that when he first contemplated writing his epic, he asked Miss Seward—so, at least, she said—to be his collaborator; an honour which she modestly declined, as not “strictly proper for a female pen.” But the peculiar solidity, the encyclopædic qualities of this masterpiece, fitted it for such grave students as Mr. Edgeworth, who loved to be amply instructed. It is a poem replete with information, and information of that disconnected order in which the Edgeworthian soul took true delight. We are told, not only about flowers and vegetables, but about electric fishes, and the salt mines of Poland; about Dr. Franklin’s lightning rod, and Mrs. Damer’s bust of the Duchess of Devonshire; about the treatment of paralytics, and the mechanism of the common pump. We pass from the death of General Wolfe at Quebec to the equally lamented demise of a lady botanist at Derby. We turn from the contemplation of Hannibal crossing the Alps to consider the charities of a benevolent young woman named Jones.

Sound, Nymphs of Helicon! the trump of Fame,

And teach Hibernian echoes Jones’s name;

Bind round her polished brow the civic bay,

And drag the fair Philanthropist to day.

Pagan divinities disport themselves on one page, and Christian saints on another. St. Anthony preaches, not to the little fishes of the brooks and streams, but to the monsters of the deep,—sharks, porpoises, whales, seals and dolphins, that assemble in a sort of aquatic camp-meeting on the shores of the Adriatic, and “get religion” in the true revivalist spirit.

The listening shoals the quick contagion feel,

Pant on the floods, inebriate with their zeal;

Ope their wide jaws, and bow their slimy heads,

And dash with frantic fins their foamy beds.

For a freethinker, Dr. Darwin is curiously literal in his treatment of hagiology and the Scriptures. His Nebuchadnezzar (introduced as an illustration of the “Loves of the Plants”) is not a bestialized mortal, but a veritable beast, like one of Circe’s swine, only less easily classified in natural history.

Long eagle plumes his arching neck invest,

Steal round his arms and clasp his sharpened breast;

Dark brindled hairs in bristling ranks behind,

Rise o’er his back and rustle in the wind;

Clothe his lank sides, his shrivelled limbs surround,

And human hands with talons print the ground.

Lolls his red tongue, and from the reedy side

Of slow Euphrates laps the muddy tide.

Silent, in shining troups, the Courtier throng

Pursue their monarch as he crawls along;

E’en Beauty pleads in vain with smiles and tears,

Not Flattery’s self can pierce his pendant ears.

The picture of the embarrassed courtiers promenading slowly after this royal phenomenon, and of the lovely inconsiderates proffering their vain allurements, is so ludicrous as to be painful. Even Miss Seward, who held that the “Botanic Garden” combined “the sublimity of Michael Angelo, the correctness and elegance of Raphael, with the glow of Titian,” was shocked by Nebuchadnezzar’s pendant ears, and admitted that the passage was likely to provoke inconsiderate laughter.

The first part of Dr. Darwin’s poem, “The Economy of Vegetation,” was warmly praised by critics and reviewers. Its name alone secured for it esteem. A few steadfast souls, like Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, refused to accept even vegetation from a sceptic’s hands; but it was generally conceded that the poet had “entwined the Parnassian laurel with the balm of Pharmacy” in a very creditable manner. The last four cantos, however,—indiscreetly entitled “The Loves of the Plants,”—awakened grave concern. They were held unfit for female youth, which, being then taught driblets of science in a guarded and muffled fashion, was not supposed to know that flowers had any sex, much less that they practised polygamy. The glaring indiscretion of their behaviour in the “Botanic Garden,” their seraglios, their amorous embraces and involuntary libertinism, offended British decorum, and, what was worse, exposed the poem to Canning’s pungent ridicule. When the “Loves of the Triangles” appeared in the “Anti-Jacobin,” all England—except Whigs and patriots who never laughed at Canning’s jokes—was moved to inextinguishable mirth. The mock seriousness of the introduction and argument, the “horrid industry” of the notes, the contrast between the pensiveness of the Cycloid and the innocent playfulness of the Pendulum, the solemn headshake over the licentious disposition of Optics, and the description of the three Curves that requite the passion of the Rectangle, all burlesque with unfeeling delight Dr. Darwin’s ornate pedantry.

Let shrill Acoustics tune the tiny lyre,

With Euclid sage fair Algebra conspire;

Let Hydrostatics, simpering as they go,

Lead the light Naiads on fantastic toe.

The indignant poet, frigidly vain, and immaculately free from any taint of humour, was as much scandalized as hurt by this light-hearted mockery. Being a dictator in his own little circle at Derby, he was naturally disposed to consider the “Anti-Jacobin” a menace to genius and to patriotism. His criticisms and his prescriptions had hitherto been received with equal submission. When he told his friends that Akenside was a better poet than Milton,—“more polished, pure, and dignified,” they listened with respect. When he told his patients to eat acid fruits with plenty of sugar and cream, they obeyed with alacrity. He had a taste for inventions, and first made Mr. Edgeworth’s acquaintance by showing him an ingenious carriage of his own contrivance, which was designed to facilitate the movements of the horse, and enable it to turn with ease. The fact that Dr. Darwin was three times thrown from this vehicle, and that the third accident lamed him for life, in no way disconcerted the inventor or his friends, who loved mechanism for its own sake, and apart from any given results. Dr. Darwin defined a fool as one who never in his life tried an experiment. So did Mr. Day, of “Sandford and Merton” fame, who experimented in the training of animals, and was killed by an active young colt that had failed to grasp the system.

The “Botanic Garden” was translated into French, Italian, and Portuguese, to the great relief of Miss Seward, who hated to think that the immortality of such a work depended upon the preservation of a single tongue. “Should that tongue perish,” she wrote proudly, “translations would at least retain all the host of beauties which do not depend upon felicities of verbal expression.”

If the interminable epics which were so popular in these halcyon days had condescended to the telling of stories, we might believe that they were read, or at least occasionally read, as a substitute for prose fiction. But the truth is that most of them are solid treatises on morality, or agriculture, or therapeutics, cast into the blankest of blank verse, and valued, presumably, for the sake of the information they conveyed. Their very titles savour of statement rather than of inspiration. Nobody in search of romance would take up Dr. Grainger’s “Sugar Cane,” or Dyer’s “Fleece,” or the Rev. Richard Polwhele’s “English Orator.” Nobody desiring to be idly amused would read the “Vales of Weaver,” or a long didactic poem on “The Influence of Local Attachment.” It was not because he felt himself to be a poet that Dr. Grainger wrote the “Sugar Cane” in verse, but because that was the form most acceptable to the public. The ever famous line,

“Now Muse, let’s sing of rats!”

which made merry Sir Joshua Reynolds and his friends, is indicative of the good doctor’s struggles to employ an uncongenial medium. He wanted to tell his readers how to farm successfully in the West Indies; how to keep well in a treacherous climate; what food to eat, what drugs to take, how to look after the physical condition of negro servants, and guard them from prevalent maladies. These were matters on which the author was qualified to speak, and on which he does speak with all a physician’s frankness; but they do not lend themselves to lofty strains. Whole pages of the “Sugar Cane” read like prescriptions and dietaries done into verse. It is as difficult to sing with dignity about a disordered stomach as about rats and cockroaches; and Dr. Grainger’s determination to leave nothing untold leads him to dwell with much feeling, but little grace, on all the disadvantages of the tropics.

Musquitoes, sand-flies, seek the sheltered roof,

And with fell rage the stranger guest assail,

Nor spare the sportive child; from their retreats

Cockroaches crawl displeasingly abroad.

The truthfulness and sobriety of this last line deserve commendation. Cockroaches in the open are displeasing to sensitive souls; and a footnote, half a page long, tells us everything we could possibly desire—or fear—to know about these insects. As an example of Dr. Grainger’s thoroughness in the treatment of such themes, I quote with delight his approved method of poisoning alligators.

With Misnian arsenic, deleterious bane,

Pound up the ripe cassada’s well-rasped root,

And form in pellets; these profusely spread

Round the Cane-groves where skulk the vermin-breed.

They, greedy, and unweeting of the bait,

Crowd to the inviting cates, and swift devour

Their palatable Death; for soon they seek

The neighbouring spring; and drink, and swell, and die.

Then follow some very sensible remarks about the unwholesomeness of the water in which the dead alligators are decomposing,—remarks which Mr. Kipling has unconsciously parodied:—

But ’e gets into the drinking casks, and then o’ course we dies.

The wonderful thing about the “Sugar Cane” is that it was read;—nay, more, that it was read aloud at the house of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and though the audience laughed, it listened. Dodsley published the poem in handsome style; a second edition was called for; it was reprinted in Jamaica, and pirated (what were the pirates thinking about!) in 1766. Even Dr. Johnson wrote a friendly notice in the London “Chronicle,” though he always maintained that the poet might just as well have sung the beauties of a parsley-bed or of a cabbage garden. He took the same high ground when Boswell called his attention to Dyer’s “Fleece.”—“The subject, Sir, cannot be made poetical. How can a man write poetically of serges and druggets?”

It was not for the sake of sentiment or story that the English public read “The Fleece.” Nor could it have been for practical guidance; for farmers, even in 1757, must have had some musty almanacs, some plain prose manuals to advise them. They could never have waited to learn from an epic poem that

the coughing pest

From their green pastures sweeps whole flocks away,

or that

Sheep also pleurisies and dropsies know,

or that

The infectious scab, arising from extremes

Of want or surfeit, is by water cured

Of lime, or sodden stave-acre, or oil

Dispersive of Norwegian tar.

Did the British woolen-drapers of the period require to be told in verse about

Cheyney, and bayse, and serge, and alepine,

Tammy, and crape, and the long countless list

Of woolen webs.

Surely they knew more about their own dry-goods than did Mr. Dyer. Is it possible that British parsons read Mr. Polwhele’s “English Orator” for the sake of his somewhat confused advice to preachers?—

Meantime thy Style familiar, that alludes

With pleasing Retrospect to recent Scenes

Or Incidents amidst thy Flock, fresh graved

On Memory, shall recall their scattered Thoughts,

And interest every Bosom. With the Voice

Of condescending Gentleness address

Thy kindred People.

It was Miss Seward’s opinion that the neglect of Mr. Polwhele’s “poetic writings” was a disgrace to literary England, from which we conclude that the reverend author outwore the patience of his readers. “Mature in dulness from his earliest years,” he had wisely adopted a profession which gave his qualities room for expansion. What his congregation must have suffered when he addressed it with “condescending gentleness,” we hardly like to think; but free-born Englishmen, who were so fortunate as not to hear him, refused to make good their loss by reading the “English Orator,” even after it had been revised by a bishop. Miss Seward praised it highly; in return for which devotion she was hailed as a “Parnassian sister” in six benedictory stanzas.

Still gratitude her stores among,

Shall bid the plausive poet sing;

And, if the last of all the throng

That rise on the poetic wing,

Yet not regardless of his destined way,

If Seward’s envied sanction stamps the lay.

The Swan, indeed, was never without admirers. Her “Louisa; a Poetical Novel in four Epistles,” was favourably noticed; Dr. Johnson praised her ode on the death of Captain Cook; and no contributor to the Bath Easton vase received more myrtle wreaths than she did. “Warble” was the word commonly used by partial critics in extolling her verse. “Long may she continue to warble as heretofore, in such numbers as few even of our favourite bards would be shy to own.” Scott sorrowfully admitted to Miss Baillie that he found these warblings—of which he was the reluctant editor—“execrable”; and that the despair which filled his soul on receiving Miss Seward’s letters gave him a lifelong horror of sentiment; but for once it is impossible to sympathize with Sir Walter’s sufferings. If he had never praised the verses, he would never have been called upon to edit them; and James Ballantyne would have been saved the printing of an unsalable book. There is no lie so little worth the telling as that which is spoken in pure kindness to spare a wholesome pang.

It was, however, the pleasant custom of the time to commend and encourage female poets, as we commend and encourage a child’s unsteady footsteps. The generous Hayley welcomed with open arms these fair competitors for fame.

The bards of Britain with unjaundiced eyes

Will glory to behold such rivals rise.

He ardently flattered Miss Seward, and for Miss Hannah More his enthusiasm knew no bounds.

But with a magical control,

Thy spirit-moving strain

Dispels the languor of the soul,

Annihilating pain.

“Spirit-moving” seems the last epithet in the world to apply to Miss More’s strains; but there is no doubt that the public believed her to be as good a poet as a preacher, and that it supported her high estimate of her own powers. After a visit to another lambent flame, Mrs. Barbauld, she writes with irresistible gravity:

“Mrs. B. and I have found out that we feel as little envy and malice towards each other, as though we had neither of us attempted to ‘build the lofty rhyme’; although she says this is what the envious and the malicious can never be brought to believe.”

Think of the author of “The Search after Happiness” and the author of “A Poetical Epistle to Mr. Wilberforce” loudly refusing to envy each other’s eminence! There is nothing like it in the strife-laden annals of fame.

Finally there stepped into the arena that charming embodiment of the female muse, Mrs. Hemans; and the manly heart of Protestant England warmed into homage at her shrine. From the days she “first carolled forth her poetic talents under the animating influence of an affectionate and admiring circle,” to the days when she faded gracefully out of life, her “half-etherealized spirit” rousing itself to dictate a last “Sabbath Sonnet,” she was crowned and garlanded with bays. In the first place, she was fair to see,—Fletcher’s bust shows real loveliness; and it was Christopher North’s opinion that “no really ugly woman ever wrote a truly beautiful poem the length of her little finger.” In the second place, she was sincerely pious; and the Ettrick Shepherd reflected the opinion of his day when he said that “without religion, a woman’s just an even-down deevil.” The appealing helplessness of Mrs. Hemans’s gentle and affectionate nature, the narrowness of her sympathies, and the limitations of her art were all equally acceptable to critics like Gifford and Jeffrey, who held strict views as to the rounding of a woman’s circle. Even Byron heartily approved of a pious and pretty woman writing pious and pretty poems. Even Wordsworth flung her lordly words of praise. Even Shelley wrote her letters so eager and ardent that her very sensible mamma, Mrs. Browne, requested him to cease. And as for Scott, though he confessed she was too poetical for his taste, he gave her always the honest friendship she deserved. It was to her he said, when some tourists left them hurriedly at Newark Tower: “Ah, Mrs. Hemans, they little know what two lions they are running away from.” It was to her he said, when she was leaving Abbotsford: “There are some whom we meet, and should like ever after to claim as kith and kin; and you are of this number.”

Who would not gladly have written “The Siege of Valencia” and “The Vespers of Palermo,” to have heard Sir Walter say these words?