The Project Gutenberg eBook, Men, Women, and Books, by Augustine Birrell

ESSAYS ABOUT
MEN, WOMEN, AND BOOKS

MEN, WOMEN, AND
BOOKS

BY

AUGUSTINE BIRRELL

AUTHOR OF ‘OBITER DICTA,’ ETC.

LONDON: ELLIOT STOCK
62, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C.
1910

CONTENTS

DEAN SWIFT.

Of writing books about Dean Swift there is no end. I make no complaint, because I find no fault; I express no wonder, for I feel none. The subject is, and must always remain, one of strange fascination. We have no author like the Dean of St. Patrick’s. It has been said of Wordsworth that good-luck usually attended those who have written about him. The same thing may be said, with at least equal truth, about Swift. There are a great many books about him, and with few exceptions they are all interesting.

A man who has had his tale told both by Johnson and by Scott ought to be comprehensible. Swift has been, on the whole, lucky with his more recent biographers. Dr. Craik’s is a judicious life, Mitford’s an admirable sketch, Forster’s a valuable fragment; Mr. Leslie Stephen never fails to get to close quarters with his subject. Then there are anecdotes without end—all bubbling with vitality—letters, and journals. And yet, when you have read all that is to be read, what are you to say—what to think?

No fouler pen than Swift’s has soiled our literature. His language is horrible from first to last. He is full of odious images, of base and abominable allusions. It would be a labour of Hercules to cleanse his pages. His love-letters are defaced by his incurable coarseness. This habit of his is so inveterate that it seems a miracle he kept his sermons free from his blackguard phrases. It is a question not of morality, but of decency, whether it is becoming to sit in the same room with the works of this divine. How the good Sir Walter ever managed to see him through the press is amazing. In this matter Swift is inexcusable.

Then his unfeeling temper, his domineering brutality—the tears he drew, the discomfort he occasioned.

‘Swift, dining at a house, where the part of the tablecloth which was next him happened to have a small hole, tore it as wide as he could, and ate his soup through it; his reason for such behaviour was, as he said, to mortify the lady of the house, and to teach her to pay a proper attention to housewifery.’

One is glad to know he sometimes met his match. He slept one night at an inn kept by a widow lady of very respectable family, Mrs. Seneca, of Drogheda. In the morning he made a violent complaint of the sheets being dirty.

‘Dirty, indeed!’ exclaimed Mrs. Seneca; ‘you are the last man, doctor, that should complain of dirty sheets.’

And so, indeed, he was, for he had just published the ‘Lady’s Dressing-room,’ a very dirty sheet indeed.

Honour to Mrs. Seneca, of Drogheda!

This side of the account needs no vouching; but there is another side.

In 1705 Addison made a present of his book of travels to Dr. Swift, in the blank leaf of which he wrote the following words:

‘To Dr. Jonathan Swift,
The most agreeable companion,
The truest friend,
And the greatest genius of his age.’

Addison was not lavish of epithets. His geese, Ambrose Philips excepted, were geese, not swans. His testimony is not to be shaken—and what a testimony it is!

Then there is Stella’s Swift. As for Stella herself, I have never felt I knew enough about her to join very heartily in Thackeray’s raptures: ‘Who has not in his mind an image of Stella? Who does not love her? Fair and tender creature! Pure and affectionate heart.... Gentle lady! so lovely, so loving, so unhappy.... You are one of the saints of English story.’ This may be so, but all I feel I know about Stella is, that Swift loved her. That is certain, at all events.

‘If this be error, and upon we proved,

I never writ, and no man ever loved.’

The verses to Stella are altogether lovely:

‘But, Stella, say what evil tongue

Reports you are no longer young,

That Time sits with his scythe to mow

Where erst sat Cupid with his bow,

That half your locks are turned to gray

I’ll ne’er believe a word they say.

’Tis true, but let it not be known,

My eyes are somewhat dimmish grown.’

And again:

‘Oh! then, whatever Heaven intends,

Take pity on your pitying friends!

Nor let your ills affect your mind

To fancy they can be unkind.

Me, surely me, you ought to spare

Who gladly would your suffering share,

Or give my scrap of life to you

And think it far beneath your due;

You, to whose care so oft I owe

That I’m alive to tell you so.’

We are all strangely woven in one piece, as Shakespeare says. These verses of Swift irresistibly remind their readers of Cowper’s lines to Mrs. Unwin.

Swift’s prose is famous all the world over. To say anything about it is superfluous. David Hume indeed found fault with it. Hume paid great attention to the English language, and by the time he died had come to write it with much facility and creditable accuracy; but Swift is one of the masters of English prose. But how admirable also is his poetry—easy, yet never slipshod! It lacks one quality only—imagination. There is not a fine phrase, a magical line to be found in it, such as may occasionally be found in—let us say—Butler. Yet, as a whole, Swift is a far more enjoyable poet than Butler.

Swift has unhappily written some abominable verses, which ought never to have been set up in type; but the ‘Legion Club,’ the verses on his own death, ‘Cadenus and Vanessa,’ the ‘Rhapsody on Poetry,’ the tremendous lines on the ‘Day of Judgment,’ and many others, all belong to enjoyable poetry, and can never lose their freshness, their charm, their vitality. Amongst the poets of the eighteenth century Swift sits secure, for he can never go out of fashion.

His hatred of mankind seems genuine; there is nothing falsetto about it. He is always in sober, deadly earnest when he abuses his fellow-men. What an odd revenge we have taken! His gospel of hatred, his testament of woe—his ‘Gulliver,’ upon which he expended the treasures of his wit, and into which he instilled the concentrated essence of his rage—has become a child’s book, and has been read with wonder and delight by generations of innocents. After all, it is a kindly place, this planet, and the best use we have for our cynics is to let them amuse the junior portion of our population.

I only know one good-humoured anecdote of Swift; it is very slight, but it is fair to tell it. He dined one day in the company of the Lord Keeper, his son, and their two ladies, with Mr. Cæsar, Treasurer of the Navy, at his house in the City. They happened to talk of Brutus, and Swift said something in his praise, and then, as it were, suddenly recollecting himself, said:

‘Mr. Cæsar, I beg your pardon.’

One can fancy this occasioning a pleasant ripple of laughter.

There is another story I cannot lay my hands on to verify, but it is to this effect: Faulkner, Swift’s Dublin publisher, years after the Dean’s death, was dining with some friends, who rallied him upon his odd way of eating some dish—I think, asparagus. He confessed Swift had told him it was the right way; therefore, they laughed the louder, until Faulkner, growing a little angry, exclaimed:

‘I tell you what it is, gentlemen: if you had ever dined with the Dean, you would have eaten your asparagus as he bade you.’

Truly a wonderful man—imperious, masterful. Yet his state is not kingly like Johnson’s—it is tyrannical, sinister, forbidding.

Nobody has brought out more effectively than Mr. Churton Collins[A] Swift’s almost ceaseless literary activity. To turn over Scott’s nineteen volumes is to get some notion of it. It is not a pleasant task, for Swift was an unclean spirit; but he fascinates and makes the reader long to peep behind the veil, and penetrate the secret of this horrible, yet loveable, because beloved, man. Mr. Collins is rather short with this longing on the part of the reader. He does not believe in any secret; he would have us believe that it is all as plain as a pikestaff. Swift was never mad, and was never married. Stella was a well-regulated damsel, who, though she would have liked very much to have been Mrs. Dean, soon recognised that her friend was not a marrying man, and was, therefore, well content for the rest of her days to share his society with Mrs. Dingley. Vanessa was an ill-regulated damsel, who had not the wit to see that her lover was not a marrying man, and, in the most vulgar fashion possible, thrust herself most inconveniently upon his notice, received a snubbing, took to drink, and died of the spleen. As for the notion that Swift died mad, Mr. Collins conceives himself to get rid of that by reprinting a vague and most inconclusive letter of Dr. Bucknill’s. The mystery and the misery of Swift’s life have not been got rid of by Mr. Collins. He has left them where he found them—at large. He complains, perhaps justly, that Scott never took the trouble to form any clear impression of Swift’s character. Yet we must say that we understand Sir Walter’s Swift better than we do Mr. Collins’. Whether the Dean married Stella can never be known. For our part, we think he did not; but to assert positively that no marriage took place, as Mr. Collins does, is to carry dogmatism too far.

A good deal of fault has lately been found with Thackeray’s lecture on Swift. We still think it both delightful and just. The rhapsody about Stella, as I have already hinted, is not to our mind. Rhapsodies about real women are usually out of place. Stella was no saint, but a quick-witted, sharp-tongued hussy, whose fate it was to win the love and pacify the soul of the greatest Englishman of his time—for to call Swift an Irishman is sheer folly. But, apart from this not unnatural slip, what, I wonder, is the matter with Thackeray’s lecture, regarded, not as a storehouse of facts, or as an estimate of Swift’s writings, but as a sketch of character? Mr. Collins says quite as harsh things about Swift as are to be found in Thackeray’s lecture, but he does not attempt, as Thackeray does, to throw a strong light upon this strange and moving figure. It is a hard thing to attempt—failure in such a case is almost inevitable; but I do not think Thackeray did fail. An ounce of mother-wit is often worth a pound of clergy. Insight is not always the child of study. But here, again, the matter should be brought to the test by each reader for himself. Read Thackeray’s lecture once again.

What can be happier or truer than his comparison of Swift with a highwayman disappointed of his plunder?

‘The great prize has not come yet. The coach with the mitre and crosier in it, which he intends to have for his share, has been delayed on the way from St. James’s. The mails wait until nightfall, when his runners come and tell him that the coach has taken a different road and escaped him. So he fires his pistols into the air with a curse, and rides away in his own country.’

Thackeray’s criticism is severe, but is it not just? Are we to stand by and hear our nature libelled, and our purest affections beslimed, without a word of protest? ‘I think I would rather have had a potato and a friendly word from Goldsmith than have been beholden to the Dean for a guinea and a dinner.’ So would I. But no one of the Dean’s numerous critics was more keenly alive than Thackeray to the majesty and splendour of Swift’s genius, and to his occasional flashes of tenderness and love. That amazing person, Lord Jeffrey, in one of his too numerous contributions to the Edinburgh Review, wrote of the poverty of Swift’s style. Lord Jeffrey was, we hope, a professional critic, not an amateur.

FOOTNOTE:

[A] ‘Jonathan Swift,’ by J. Churton Collins: Chatto & Windus, 1893.

LORD BOLINGBROKE.

The most accomplished of all our political rascals, Lord Bolingbroke, who once, if the author of ‘Animated Nature’ is to be believed, ran naked through the Park, has, in his otherwise pinchbeck ‘Reflections in Exile,’ one quaint fancy. He suggests that the exile, instead of mourning the deprivation of the society of his friends, should take a pencil (the passage is not before me) and make a list of his acquaintances, and then ask himself which of the number he wants to see at the moment. It is, no doubt, always wise to be particular. Delusion as well as fraud loves to lurk in generalities.

As for this Bolingbroke himself, that he was a consummate scoundrel is now universally admitted; but his mental qualifications, though great, still excite differences of opinion. Even those who are comforted by his style and soothed by the rise and fall of his sentences, are fain to admit that had his classic head been severed from his shoulders a rogue would have met with his deserts. He has been long since stripped of all his fine pretences, and, morally speaking, runs as naked through the pages of history as erst he did (according to Goldsmith) across Hyde Park.

That Bolingbroke had it in him to have been a great Parliamentarian is certain. He knew ‘the nature of that assembly,’ and that ‘they grow, like hounds, fond of the man who shows them sport, and by whose halloo they are used to be encouraged.’ Like the rascally lawyer in ‘Guy Mannering,’ Mr. Gilbert Glossin, he could do a good piece of work when so minded. But he was seldom so minded, and consequently he failed to come up to the easy standard of his day, and thus brought it about that by his side Sir Robert Walpole appears in the wings and aspect of an angel.

St. John has now nothing to wear but his wit and his style; these still find admirers amongst the judicious.

Mr. Churton Collins, who has written a delightful book about Bolingbroke, and also about Voltaire in England, has a great notion of Bolingbroke’s literary merits, and extols them with ardour. He is not likely to be wrong, but, none the less, it is lawful to surround yourself with the seven stately quartos which contain Bolingbroke’s works and letters, and ask yourself whether Mr. Collins is right.

Of all Lord Bolingbroke’s published writings, none is better than his celebrated Letter to Wyndham, recounting his adventures in France, whither he betook himself hastily after Queen Anne’s death, and where he joined the Pretender. Here he is not philosophizing, but telling a tale, varnished it may be, but sparkling with malice, wit, and humour. Well may Mr. Collins say, ‘Walpole never produced a more amusing sketch than the picture of the Pretender’s Court at Paris and of the Privy Council in the Bois de Boulogne’; but when he proceeds further and adds, ‘Burke never produced anything nobler than the passage which commences with the words “The ocean which environs us is an emblem of our government,”’ I am glad to ejaculate, ‘Indeed he did!’

Here is the passage:

‘The ocean which environs us is an emblem of our government, and the pilot and the Minister are in similar circumstances. It seldom happens that either of them can steer a direct course, and they both arrive at their ports by means which frequently seem to carry them from it. But, as the work advances, the conduct of him who leads it on with real abilities clears up, the appearing inconsistencies are reconciled, and, when it is once consummated, the whole shows itself so uniform, so plain, and so natural, that every dabbler in politics will be apt to think he could have done the same. But, on the other hand, a man who proposes no such object, who substitutes artifice in the place of ability, who, instead of leading parties and governing accidents, is eternally agitated backwards and forwards, who begins every day something new and carries nothing on to perfection, may impose a while on the world, but, a little sooner or later, the mystery will be revealed, and nothing will be found to be couched under it but a thread of pitiful expedients, the ultimate end of which never extended farther than living from day to day.’

A fine passage, most undoubtedly, and an excellent homily for Ministers. No one but a dabbler in literature will be apt to think he could have done the same—but noble with the nobility of Burke? A noble passage ought to do more for a reader than compel his admiration or win his assent; it should leave him a little better than it found him, with a warmer heart and a more elevated mind.

Mr. Collins also refers with delight to a dissertation on Eloquence, to be found in the ‘Letter on the Spirit of Patriotism,’ and again expresses a doubt whether it would be possible to select anything finer from the pages of Burke.

The passage is too long to be quoted; it begins thus:

‘Eloquence has charms to lead mankind, and gives a nobler superiority than power that every dunce may use, or fraud that every knave may employ.’

And then follows a good deal about Demosthenes and Cicero, and other talkers of old time.

This may or may not be a fine passage; but if we allow it to be the former, we cannot admit that as it flows it fertilizes.

Bolingbroke and Chesterfield are two of the remarkable figures of the first half of the last century. They are both commonly called ‘great,’ to distinguish them from other holders of the same titles. Their accomplishments were as endless as their opportunities. They were the most eloquent men of their time, and both possessed that insight into things, that distinction of mind, we call genius. They were ready writers, and have left ‘works’ behind them full of wit and gracious expressions; but neither the one nor the other has succeeded in lodging himself in the general memory. The ill-luck which drove them out of politics has pursued them down the path of letters, though the frequenters of that pleasant track are wisely indifferent to the characters of dead authors who still give pleasure.

No shrewder men ever sat upon a throne than the first two Georges, monarchs of this realm. The second George hated Chesterfield, and called him ‘a tea-table scoundrel.’ The phrase sticks. There is something petty about this great Lord Chesterfield. The first George, though wholly illiterate, yet took it upon himself to despise Bolingbroke, philosopher though he was, and dismissed an elaborate effusion of his as ‘bagatelles.’ Here again the phrase sticks, and not even the beautiful type and lordly margins of Mallet’s edition of Lord Bolingbroke’s writings, or the stately periods of that nobleman himself, can drive the royal verdict out of my ears. There is nothing real about these writings save their colossal impudence, as when, for example, in his letter on the State of Parties on the accession of George I., he solemnly denies that there was any design during the four last years of Queen Anne’s reign to set aside the Hanover succession, and, in support of his denial, quotes himself as a man who, if there had been anything of the sort, must have known of it. By the side of this man the perfidy of Thurlow or of Wedderburn shows white as wool.

By the aid of his own wits and a cunning wife, and assisted by the growing hatred of corruption, Bolingbroke, towards the close of his long life, nearly succeeded in securing some measure of oblivion of his double-dyed treachery. He managed to inflame the ‘Young England’ of the period with his picture of a ‘Patriot King,’ and if he had only put into the fire his lucubrations about Christianity he might have accomplished his exit from a world he had made worse for seventy-five years with a show of decency. But he did not do so; the ‘cur Mallet’ was soon ready with his volumes, and then the memory of Bolingbroke was exposed to the obloquy which in this country is (or was) the heritage of the heterodox.

Horace Walpole, who hated Bolingbroke, as he was in special duty bound to do, felt this keenly. He was glad Bolingbroke was gibbeted, but regretted that he should swing on a wrong count in the indictment.

Writing to Sir Horace Mann, Walpole says:

‘You say you have made my Lord Cork give up my Lord Bolingbroke. It is comical to see how he is given up here since the best of his writings, his metaphysical divinity, has been published. While he betrayed and abused every man who trusted him, or who had forgiven him, or to whom he was obliged, he was a hero, a patriot, a philosopher, and the greatest genius of the age; the moment his “Craftsmen” against Moses and St. Paul are published we have discovered he was the worst man and the worst writer in the world. The grand jury have presented his works, and as long as there are any parsons he will be ranked with Tindal and Toland—nay, I don’t know whether my father won’t become a rubric martyr for having been persecuted by him.’

My sympathies are with Walpole, although, when he pronounces Bolingbroke’s metaphysical divinity to be the best of his writings, I cannot agree.

Mr. Collins’ book is a most excellent one, and if anyone reads it because of my recommendation he will owe me thanks. Mr. Collins values Pope not merely for his poetry, but for his philosophy also, which he cadged from Bolingbroke. The ‘Essay on Man’ is certainly better reading than anything Bolingbroke ever wrote—though what may be the value of its philosophy is a question which may well stand over till after the next General Election, or even longer.

STERNE.

No less pious a railway director than Sir Edward Watkin once prefaced an oration to the shareholders of one of his numerous undertakings by expressing, in broken accents, the wish that ‘He who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb might deal gently with illustrious personages in their present grievous affliction.’ The wish was a kind one, and is only referred to here as an illustration of the amazing skill of the author of the phrase quoted in so catching the tone, temper, and style of King James’s version, that the words occur to the feeling mind as naturally as any in Holy Writ as the best expression of a sorrowful emotion.

The phrase itself is, indeed, an excellent example of Sterne’s genius for pathos. No one knew better than he how to drive words home. George Herbert, in his selection of ‘Outlandish Proverbs,’ to which he subsequently gave the alternate title ‘Jacula Prudentum,’ has the following: ‘To a close-shorn sheep God gives Wind by measure’; but this proverb in that wording would never have succeeded in making the chairman of a railway company believe he had read it somewhere in the Bible. It is the same thought, but the words which convey it stop far short of the heart. A close-shorn sheep will not brook comparison with Sterne’s ‘shorn lamb’; whilst the tender, compassionate, beneficent ‘God tempers the wind’ makes the original ‘God gives wind by measure’ wear the harsh aspect of a wholly unnecessary infliction.

Sterne is our best example of the plagiarist whom none dare make ashamed. He robbed other men’s orchards with both hands; and yet no more original writer than he ever went to press in these isles.

He has been dogged, of course; but, as was befitting in his case, it has been done pleasantly. Sterne’s detective was the excellent Dr. Ferriar, of Manchester, whose ‘Illustrations of Sterne,’ first published in 1798, were written at an earlier date for the edification of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. Those were pleasant days, when men of reading were content to give their best thoughts first to their friends and then—ten years afterwards—to the public.

Dr. Ferriar’s book is worthy of its subject. The motto on the title-page is delightfully chosen. It is taken from the opening paragraph of Lord Shaftesbury’s ‘Miscellaneous Reflections’: ‘Peace be with the soul of that charitable and Courteous Author who for the common benefit of his fellow-Authors introduced the ingenious way of Miscellaneous Writing.’ Here Dr. Ferriar stopped; but I will add the next sentence: ‘It must be owned that since this happy method was established the Harvest of Wit has been more plentiful and the Labourers more in number than heretofore.’ Wisely, indeed, did Charles Lamb declare Shaftesbury was not too genteel for him. No pleasanter penance for random thinking can be devised than spending an afternoon turning over Shaftesbury’s three volumes and trying to discover how near he ever did come to saying that ‘Ridicule was the test of truth.’

Dr. Ferriar’s happy motto puts the reader in a sweet temper to start with, for he sees at once that the author is no pedantic, soured churl, but a good fellow who is going to make a little sport with a celebrated wit, and show you how a genius fills his larder.

The first thing that strikes you in reading Dr. Ferriar’s book is the marvellous skill with which Sterne has created his own atmosphere and characters, in spite of the fact that some of the most characteristic remarks of his characters are, in the language of the Old Bailey, ‘stolen goods.’ ‘“There is no cause but one,” replied my Uncle Toby, “why one man’s nose is longer than another’s, but because God pleases to have it so.” “That is Grangousier’s solution,” said my father. “’Tis he,” continued my Uncle Toby, looking up and not regarding my father’s interruption, “who makes us all, and frames and puts us together in such forms and proportions and for such ends as is agreeable to His infinite wisdom.”’

‘“Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh”; and if those are not the words of my Uncle Toby, it is idle to believe in anything’: and yet we read in Rabelais—as, indeed, Sterne suggests to us we should—‘“Pourquoi,” dit Gargantua, “est-ce que frère Jean a si beau nez?” “Parce,” répondit Grangousier, “qu’ainsi Dieu l’a voulu, lequel nous fait en telle forme et à telle fin selon son divin arbitre, que fait un potier ses vaisseaux.”’

To create a character and to be able to put in his mouth borrowed words which yet shall quiver with his personality is the supreme triumph of the greatest ‘miscellaneous writer’ who ever lived.

Dr. Ferriar’s book, after all, but establishes this: that the only author whom Sterne really pillaged is Burton, of the ‘Anatomy of Melancholy,’ a now well-known writer, but who in Sterne’s time, despite Dr. Johnson’s partiality, appears to have been neglected. Sir Walter Scott, an excellent authority on such a point, says, in his ‘Life of Sterne,’ that Dr. Ferriar’s essay raised the ‘“Anatomy of Melancholy” to double price in the book market.’

Sir Walter is unusually hard upon Sterne in this matter of the ‘Anatomy.’ But different men, different methods. Sir Walter had his own way of cribbing. Sterne’s humorous conception of the character of the elder Shandy required copious illustration from learned sources, and a whole host of examples and whimsicalities, which it would have passed the wit of man to invent for himself. He found these things to his hand in Burton, and, like our first parent, ‘he scrupled not to eat.’ It is not easy to exaggerate the extent of his plunder. The well-known chapter with its refrain, ‘The Lady Baussiere rode on,’ and the chapter on the death of Brother Bobby, are almost, though not altogether, pure Burton.

The general effect of it all is to raise your opinion immensely—of Burton. As for your opinion of Sterne as a man of conduct, is it worth while having one? It is a poor business bludgeoning men who bore the brunt of life a long century ago, and whose sole concern now with the world is to delight it. Laurence Sterne is not standing for Parliament. ‘Eliza’ has been dead a dozen decades. Nobody covers his sins under the cloak of this particular parson. Our sole business is with ‘Tristram Shandy’ and ‘The Sentimental Journey’; and if these books are not matters for congratulation and joy, then the pleasures of literature are all fudge, and the whole thing a got-up job of ‘The Trade’ and the hungry crew who go buzzing about it.

Mr. Traill concludes his pleasant ‘Life of Sterne’ in a gloomy vein, which I cannot for the life of me understand. He says: ‘The fate of Richardson might seem to be close behind him’ (Sterne). Even the fate of ‘Clarissa’ is no hard one. She still numbers good intellects, and bears her century lightly. Diderot, as Mr. Traill reminds us, praised her outrageously—but Mr. Ruskin is not far behind; and from Diderot to Ruskin is a good ‘drive.’ But ‘Tristram’ is a very different thing from ‘Clarissa.’ I should have said, without hesitation, that it was one of the most popular books in the language. Go where you will amongst men—old and young, undergraduates at the Universities, readers in our great cities, old fellows in the country, judges, doctors, barristers—if they have any tincture of literature about them, they all know their ‘Shandy’ at least as well as their ‘Pickwick.’ What more can be expected? ‘True Shandeism,’ its author declares, ‘think what you will against it, opens the heart and lungs.’ I will be bound to say Sterne made more people laugh in 1893 than in any previous year; and, what is more, he will go on doing it—‘“that is, if it please God,” said my Uncle Toby.’

DR. JOHNSON.

Dr. Johnson’s massive shade cannot complain of this generation. We are not all of us—or, indeed, many of us—much after his mind, but, for all that, we worship his memory. Editions of Boswell, old or new, are on every shelf; but more than this, there is a healthy and commendable disposition to recognise that great, surpassingly great, as are the merits of Boswell, still there is such a thing as a detached and separate Johnson.

It is a good thing every now and again to get rid of Boswell. It is a little ungrateful, but we have Johnson’s authority for the statement that we hate our benefactors. After all, even had there been no Boswell, there would have been a Johnson. I will always stick to it that Hawkins’s Life is a most readable book. Dr. Birkbeck Hill stands a good chance of being hated some day. We owed him a debt of gratitude already. He has lately added to it by publishing at the Clarendon Press, in two stately volumes, uniform with his great edition of the Life, the ‘Letters of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.’

For a lazy man who loathed writing Dr. Johnson did not do badly—his letters to Mrs. Thrale exceed three hundred. It is not known that he ever wrote a letter to Burke. I cannot quite jump with the humour of Dr. Hill’s comment on this fact. He observes: ‘So far as we know, he did not write a single letter to Edward Burke—he wrote more than three hundred to the wife of a Southwark brewer.’ What has the beer got to do with it? and why drag in Southwark? Every man knows, without being told, why Johnson wrote three hundred letters to Mrs. Thrale; and as for his not writing to Burke, it is notorious that the Doctor never could be got to write to anybody for information.

Dr. Hill’s two volumes are as delightful books as ever issued from the press. In them Dr. Johnson is to be seen in every aspect of his character, whilst a complete study may be made from them of the enormous versatility of his style. It is hard to say what one admires most—the ardour of his affection, the piety of his nature, the friendliness of his disposition, the playfulness of his humour, or his love of learning and of letters.

What strikes one perhaps most, if you assume a merely critical attitude, is the glorious ease and aptitude of his quotations from ancient and modern writings. Of pedantry there is not a trace. Nothing is forced or dragged in. It is all, apparently, simply inevitable. You do not exclaim as you read, ‘What a memory the fellow has!’ but merely, ‘How charming it all is!’

It is not difficult to construct from these two volumes alone the gospel—the familiar, the noble gospel according to Dr. Johnson. It reads somewhat as follows:

‘Your father begot you and your mother bore you. Honour them both. Husbands, be faithful to your wives. Wives, forgive your husbands’ unfaithfulness—once. No grown man who is dependent on the will, that is the whim, of another can be happy, and life without enjoyment is intolerable gloom. Therefore, as money means independence and enjoyment, get money, and having got it keep it. A spendthrift is a fool.

‘Clear your mind of cant and never debauch your understanding. The only liberty worth turning out into the street for, is the liberty to do what you like in your own house and to say what you like in your own inn. All work is bondage.

‘Never get excited about causes you do not understand, or about people you have never seen. Keep Corsica out of your head.

‘Life is a struggle with either poverty or ennui; but it is better to be rich than to be poor. Death is a terrible thing to face. The man who says he is not afraid of it lies. Yet, as murderers have met it bravely on the scaffold, when the time comes so perhaps may I. In the meantime I am horribly afraid. The future is dark. I should like more evidence of the immortality of the soul.

‘There is great solace in talk. We—you and I—are shipwrecked on a wave-swept rock. At any moment one or other of us, perhaps both, may be carried out to sea and lost. For the time being we have a modicum of light and warmth, of meat and drink. Let us constitute ourselves a club, stretch out our legs and talk. We have minds, memories, varied experiences, different opinions. Sir, let us talk, not as men who mock at fate, not with coarse speech or foul tongue, but with a manly mixture of the gloom that admits the inevitable, and the merriment that observes the incongruous. Thus talking we shall learn to love one another, not sentimentally but fundamentally.

‘Cultivate your mind, if you happen to have one. Care greatly for books and literature. Venerate poor scholars, but don’t shout for “Wilkes and Liberty!” The one is a whoremonger, the other a flatulency.

‘If any tyrant prevents your goings out and your comings in, fill your pockets with large stones and kill him as he passes. Then go home and think no more about it. Never theorize about Revolution. Finally, pay your score at your club and your final debt to Nature generously and without casting the account too narrowly. Don’t be a prig like Sir John Hawkins, or your own enemy like Bozzy, or a Whig like Burke, or a vile wretch like Rousseau, or pretend to be an atheist like Hume, but be a good fellow, and don’t insist upon being remembered more than a month after you are dead.’

This is but the First Lesson. To compose the Second would be a more difficult task and must not be here attempted. These two volumes of Dr. Hill are endless in their variety. Johnson was gloomy enough, and many of his letters may well move you to tears, but his was ever a human gloom. The year before his death he writes to Mrs. Thrale:

‘The black dog I hope always to resist and in time to drive, though I am deprived of almost all those that used to help me. The neighbourhood is impoverished. I had once Richardson and Lawrence in my reach. Mrs. Allen is dead. My house has lost Levet, a man who took interest in everything and therefore ready at conversation. Mrs. Williams is so weak that she can be a companion no longer. When I rise my breakfast is solitary—the black dog waits to share it; from breakfast to dinner he continues barking, except that Dr. Brocklesby for a little keeps him at a distance. Dinner with a sick woman you may venture to suppose not much better than solitary. After dinner, what remains but to count the clock and hope for that sleep which I can scarce expect? Night comes at last, and some hours of restlessness and confusion bring me again to a day of solitude. What shall exclude the black dog from an habitation like this? If I were a little richer I would perhaps take some cheerful female into the house.’

It is a melancholy picture, but the ‘cheerful female’ shoots a ray of light across the gloom. Everyone should add these two volumes to his library, and if he has not a library, let him begin making one with them.

RICHARD CUMBERLAND.

‘He has written comedies at which we have cried and tragedies at which we have laughed; he has composed indecent novels and religious epics; he has pandered to the public lust for personal anecdote by writing his own life and the private history of his acquaintances.’ Of whom is this a portrait, and who is the limner? What are the names of the comedies and the tragedies and the novels thus highly recommended to the curious reader? These are questions, I flatter myself, wholly devoid of public interest.

The quotation is from a review in the Quarterly, written by Sir Walter Scott, of old Richard Cumberland’s last novel, ‘John de Lancaster,’ published in 1809, when its author, ‘the Terence of England,’ was well-nigh eighty years of age. The passage is a fierce one, but Scott’s good-nature was proof against everything but affectation. No man minded a bad novel less than the author of ‘Guy Mannering’ and ‘The Heart of Midlothian.’ I am certain he could have pulled Bishop Thirlwall through ‘The Wide, Wide World,’ in the middle of which, for some unaccountable reason, that great novel-reading prelate stuck fast. But an author had only to pooh-pooh the public taste, to sneer at popularity, to discourse solemnly on his function as a teacher of his age and master of his craft, to make Sir Walter show his teeth, and his fangs were formidable; and the storm of his wrath all the more tremendous because bursting from a clear sky.

I will quote a few words from the passage in ‘John de Lancaster’ which made Scott so angry, and which he pronounced a doleful lamentation over the ‘praise and pudding which Cumberland alleges have been gobbled up by his contemporaries’:

‘If in the course of my literary labours I had been less studious to adhere to nature and simplicity, I am perfectly convinced I should have stood higher in estimation with the purchasers of copyright, and probably have been read and patronized by my contemporaries in the proportion of ten to one.’

It seems a harmless kind of bleat after all, but it was enough to sting Scott to fury, and make him fall upon the old man in a manner somewhat too savage and tartarly. Some years later, and after Cumberland was dead, Sir Walter wrote a sketch of his life in the vein we are better accustomed to associate with the name of Scott.

Cumberland was a voluminous author, having written two epics, thirty-eight dramatic pieces, including a revised version of ‘Timon of Athens’—of which Horace Walpole said, ‘he has caught the manners and diction of the original so exactly that I think it is full as bad a play as it was before he corrected it’—a score or two of fugitive poetical compositions, including some verses to Dr. James, whose powders played almost as large a part in the lives of men of that time as Garrick himself, numerous prose publications and three novels, ‘Arundel,’ ‘Henry,’ and ‘John de Lancaster.’ Of the novels, ‘Henry’ is the one to which Sir Walter’s epitaph is least inapplicable—but Cumberland meant no harm. Were I to be discovered on Primrose Hill, or any other eminence, reading ‘Henry,’ I should blush no deeper than if the book had been ‘David Grieve.’

Cumberland has, of course, no place in men’s memories by virtue of his plays, poems, or novels. Even the catholic Chambers gives no extracts from Cumberland in the ‘Encyclopedia.’ What keeps him for ever alive is—first, his place in Goldsmith’s great poem, ‘Retaliation’; secondly, his memoirs, to which Sir Walter refers so unkindly; and thirdly, the tradition—the well-supported tradition—that he was the original ‘Sir Fretful Plagiary.’

On this last point we have the authority of Croker, and there is none better for anything disagreeable. Croker says he knew Cumberland well for the last dozen years of his life, and that to his last day he resembled ‘Sir Fretful.’

The Memoirs were first published in 1806, in a splendidly printed quarto. The author wanted money badly, and Lackington’s house gave him £500 for his manuscript. It is an excellent book. I do not quarrel with Mr. Leslie Stephen’s description of it in the ‘National Dictionary of Biography’: ‘A very loose book, dateless, inaccurate, but with interesting accounts of men of note.’ All I mean by excellent is excellent to read. The Memoirs touch upon many points of interest. Cumberland was born in the Master’s Lodge, at Trinity, Cambridge, in the Judge’s Chamber—a room hung round with portraits of ‘hanging judges’ in their official robes,and where a great Anglican divine and preacher told me he had once passed a sleepless night, so scared was he by these sinful emblems of human justice. There is an admirable account in Cumberland’s Memoirs of his maternal grandfather, the famous Richard Bentley, and of the Vice-Master, Dr. Walker, fit to be read along with De Quincey’s spirited essay on the same subject. Then the scene is shifted to Dublin Castle, where Cumberland was Ulster-Secretary when Halifax was Lord-Lieutenant, and Single-speech Hamilton had acquired by purchase (for a brief season) the brains of Edmund Burke. There is a wonderful sketch of Bubb Dodington and his villa ‘La Trappe,’ on the banks of the Thames, whither one fair evening Wedderburn brought Mrs. Haughton in a hackney-coach. You read of Dr. Johnson and Dr. Goldsmith, of Garrick and Foote, and participate in the bustle and malice of the play-house. Unluckily, Cumberland was sent to Spain on a mission, and came home with a grievance. This part is dull, but in all other respects the Memoirs are good to read.

Cumberland’s father, who became an Irish bishop, is depicted by his son as a most pleasing character; and no doubt of his having been so would ever have entered a head always disposed to think well of fathers had not my copy of the Memoirs been annotated throughout in the nervous, scholarly hand of a long-previous owner who, for some reason or another, hated the Cumberlands, the Whig clergy, and the Irish people with a hatred which found ample room and verge enough in the spacious margins of the Memoirs.

I print one only of these splenetic notes:

‘I forget whether I have noticed this elsewhere, therefore I will make sure. In the novel “Arundel,” Cumberland has drawn an exact picture of himself as secretary to Halifax, and has made the father of the hero a clergyman and a keen electioneerer—the vilest character in fiction. The laborious exculpation of Parson Cumberland in these Memoirs does not wipe out the scandal of such a picture. In spite of all he says, we cannot help suspecting that Parson Cumberland and Joseph Arundel had a likeness. N.B.—In both novels (i.e., “Arundel” and “Henry”) the portrait of a modern clergyman is too true. But it is strange that Cumberland, thus hankering after the Church, should have volunteered two such characters as Joseph Arundel and Claypole.’

‘Whispering tongues can poison truth,’ and a persistent annotator who writes a legible hand is not easily shaken off.

Perhaps the best story in the book is the one about which there is most doubt. I refer to the well-known and often-quoted account of the first night of ‘She Stoops to Conquer,’ and of the famous band of claqueurs who early took their places, determined to see the play through. Cumberland tells the story with the irresistible verve of falsehood—of the early dinner at the ‘Shakespeare Tavern,’ ‘where Samuel Johnson took the chair at the head of a long table, and was the life and soul of the corps’; of the guests assembled, including Fitzherbert (who had committed suicide at an earlier date), of the adjournment to the theatre with Adam Drummond of amiable memory, who ‘was gifted by Nature with the most sonorous and at the same time the most contagious laugh that ever echoed from the human lungs. The neighing of the horse of the son of Hystaspes was a whisper to it; the whole thunder of the theatre could not drown it’; and on the story rolls.

It has to be given up. There was a dinner, but it is doubtful whether Cumberland was at it; and as for the proceedings at the theatre, others who were there have pronounced Cumberland’s story a bit of blague. According to the newspapers of the day, Cumberland, instead of sitting by Drummond’s side and telling him when to laugh in his peculiar manner, was visibly chagrined by the success of the piece, and as wretched as any man could well be. But Adam Drummond must have been a reality. His laugh still echoes in one’s ears.

ALEXANDER KNOX AND THOMAS DE QUINCEY.

Amongst the many bizarre things that attended the events which led up to the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland, was the circumstance that Lord Castlereagh’s private secretary during the period should have been that Mr. Alexander Knox whose Remains in four rather doleful volumes were once cherished by a certain school of theologians.

Mr. Knox was a man of great piety, some learning, and of the utmost simplicity of life and manners. He was one of the first of our moderns to be enamoured of primitive Christian times, and to seek to avoid the claims of Rome upon the allegiance of all Catholic-minded souls by hooking himself on to a period prior to the full development of those claims.

It is no doubt true that, for a long time past, Nonconformists of different kinds have boldly asserted that they were primitive; but it must be owned that they have never taken the least pains to ascertain the actual facts of the case. Now, Mr. Knox took great pains to be primitive. Whether he succeeded it is not for me to say, but at all events he went so far on his way to success as to leave off being modern both in his ways of thought and in his judgments of men and books.

English Nonconformity has produced many hundreds of volumes of biography and Remains, but there is never a primitive one amongst them. To anyone who may wish to know what it is to be primitive, there is but one answer: Read the Remains of Alexander Knox. Be careful to get the right Knox. There was one Vicesimus, who is much better known than Alexander, and at least as readable, but (and this is the whole point) not at all primitive.

And it was this primitive, apostolic Mr. Knox who is held by some to be the real parent of the Tractarian movement, whose correspondence is almost entirely religious, and whose whole character stands revealed in his Remains as that of a man without guile, and as obstinate as a mule, who was chosen at a most critical moment of political history to share the guilty secrets of Mr. Pitt and Lord Castlereagh. It seems preposterous.

The one and only thing in Knox’s Remains of the least interest to people who are not primitive, is a letter addressed to him by Lord Castlereagh, written after the completion of the Union, and suggesting to him the propriety of his undertaking the task of writing the history of that event—the reason being his thorough knowledge of all the circumstances of the case.

Such a letter bids us pause.

By this time we know well enough how the Act of Union was carried. By bribery and corruption. Nobody has ever denied it for the last fifty years. It has been in the school text-books for generations. But the point is, Did Mr. Knox know? If he did, it must seem to all who have read his Remains—and it is worth while reading them only to enjoy the sensation—a most marvellous thing. It would not be more marvellous had we learnt from Canon Liddon’s long-looked-for volumes that Mr. Pusey was Mr. Disraeli’s adviser in all matters relating to the disposition of the secret service money and the Tory election funds. If Knox did not know anything about it, how was he kept in ignorance, how was he sheltered from the greedy Irish peers and borough-mongers and all the other impecunious rascals who had the vending of a nation? And what are we to think of the foresight of Castlereagh, who secured for himself such a secretary in order that, after all was over, Mr. Knox might sit down and in all innocence become the historian of proceedings of which he had been allowed to know nothing, but which sorely needed the cloak of a holy life and conversation to cover up their sores?

It is an odd problem. For my part, I believe in Knox’s innocence. Trying very hard to be worthy of the second century was not good training for seeing his way through the fag-end of the eighteenth. Apart from this, it is amazing what some men will not see. I recall but will not quote the brisk retort of Mrs. Saddletree at her husband’s expense, which relates to the incapacity of that learned saddler to see what was going on under his nose. The test was a severe one, but we have no doubt whatever that Alexander Knox could have stood it as well as Mr. Bartoline Saddletree.

Another strange incident connected with the same event is that the final ratification of the Act of Union in Dublin was witnessed by, and made, as it could not fail to do, a great impression upon, the most accomplished rhetorical writer of our time. De Quincey, then a precocious boy of fifteen, happened by a lucky chance to be in Ireland at the time, and as the guest of Lord Altamount, an Irish peer, he had every opportunity both of seeing the sight and acquainting himself with the feelings of some of the leading actors in the play, call it tragedy, comedy, or farce, as you please.

De Quincey’s account of the scene, and his two chapters on the Irish Rebellion, are to be found in the first volume of his ‘Autobiographic Sketches.’

De Quincey hints that both Lord Altamount and his son, ‘who had an Irish heart,’ would have been glad if at the very last moment the populace had stepped in between Mr. Pitt and the Irish peers and commoners and compelled the two Houses to perpetuate themselves. Internally, says De Quincey, they would have laughed. But it was written otherwise in Heaven’s Chancery, and ‘the Bill received the Royal assent without a muttering or a whispering or the protesting echo of a sigh.... One person only I remarked whose features were suddenly illuminated by a smile—a sarcastic smile, as I read it—which, however, might be all fancy. It was Lord Castlereagh.’ Can it possibly be that this was the very moment when it occurred to his lordship’s mind that Mr. Knox was the man to be the historian of the event thus concluded?

The new edition of De Quincey’s writings has naturally provoked many critics to attempt to do for him what he was fond enough of doing for others, often to their dismay—to give some account, that is, of the author and the man. De Quincey does not lend himself to this familiar treatment. He eludes analysis and baffles description. His great fault as an author is best described, in the decayed language of the equity draughtsman, as multifariousness. His style lacks the charm of economy, and his workmanship the dignity of concentration.

A literary spendthrift is, however, a very endurable sinner in these stingy days. Mr. Mill speaks somewhere (I think in his ‘Political Economy’) almost sorrowfully of De Quincey’s strange habit of scattering fine thoughts up and down his merely miscellaneous writings. The habit has ceased to afflict the reader. The fine maxim ‘Waste not, want not,’ is now inscribed over the desks of our miscellaneous writers. Such extravagance as De Quincey’s, as it is not likely to be repeated, need not be too severely reprobated.

De Quincey’s magnificence, the apparent boundlessness of his information, the liberties he takes, relying upon his mastery of language, his sportiveness and freakish fancies, make him the idol of all hobbledehoys of a literary turn. By them his sixteen volumes are greedily devoured. Happy the country, one is tempted to exclaim, that has such reading to offer its young men and maidens!

The discovery that De Quincey wrote something else besides the ‘Opium Eater’ marks a red-letter day in many a young life. The papers on ‘The Twelve Cæsars’; on the ‘Essenes and Secret Societies’; on ‘Judas Iscariot,’ ‘Cicero,’ and ‘Richard Bentley’; ‘The Spanish Nun,’ the ‘Female Infidel,’ the ‘Tartars,’ seemed the very climax of literary well-doing, and to unite the learning of the schools with all the fancy of the poets and the wit of the world.

As one grows older, one grows sterner—with others.

‘Prune thou thy words, the thoughts control

That o’er thee swell and throng;

They will condense within thy soul,

And change to purpose strong.’

The lines have a literary as well as a moral value.

But though paradox may cease to charm, and a tutored intellect seem to sober age a better guide than a lawless fancy, and a chastened style a more comfortable thing than impassioned prose and pages of bravura, still, after all, ‘the days of our youth are the days of our glory,’ and for a reader who is both young and eager the Selections Grave and Gay of Thomas de Quincey will always be above criticism, and belong to the realm of rapture.

HANNAH MORE.

An ingenious friend of mine, who has collected a library in which every book is either a masterpiece of wit or a miracle of rarity, found great fault with me the other day for adding to my motley heap the writings of Mrs. Hannah More. In vain I pleaded I had given but eight shillings and sixpence for the nineteen volumes, neatly bound and lettered on the back. He was not thinking, so he protested, of my purse, but of my taste, and he went away, spurning the gravel under his feet, irritated that there should be such men as I.

I, however, am prepared to brazen it out. I freely admit that the celebrated Mrs. Hannah More is one of the most detestable writers that ever held a pen. She flounders like a huge conger-eel in an ocean of dingy morality. She may have been a wit in her youth, though I am not aware of any evidence of it—certainly her poem, ‘Bas Bleu,’ is none—but for all the rest of her days, and they were many, she was an encyclopædia of all literary vices. You may search her nineteen volumes through without lighting upon one original thought, one happy phrase. Her religion lacks reality. Not a single expression of genuine piety, of heart-felt emotion, ever escapes her lips. She is never pathetic, never terrible. Her creed is powerless either to attract the well-disposed or make the guilty tremble. No naughty child ever read ‘The Fairchild Family’ or ‘Stories from the Church Catechism’ without quaking and quivering like a short-haired puppy after a ducking; but, then, Mrs. Sherwood was a woman of genius, whilst Mrs. Hannah More was a pompous failure.

Still, she has a merit of her own, just enough to enable a middle-aged man to chew the cud of reflection as he hastily turns her endless pages. She is an explanatory author, helping you to understand how sundry people who were old when you were young came to be the folk they were, and to have the books upon their shelves they had.

Hannah More was the first, and I trust the worst, of a large class—‘the ugliest of her daughters Hannah,’ if I may parody a poet she affected to admire. This class may be imperfectly described as ‘the well-to-do Christian.’ It inhabited snug places in the country, and kept an excellent, if not dainty, table. The money it saved in a ball-room it spent upon a greenhouse. Its horses were fat, and its coachman invariably present at family prayers. Its pet virtue was Church twice on Sunday, and its peculiar horrors theatrical entertainments, dancing, and threepenny points. Outside its garden wall lived the poor who, if virtuous, were for ever curtsying to the ground or wearing neat uniforms, except when expiring upon truckle-beds beseeching God to bless the young ladies of The Grange or the Manor House, as the case might be.

As a book ‘Cœlebs in Search of a Wife’ is as odious as it is absurd—yet for the reason already assigned it may be read with a certain curiosity—but as it would be cruelty to attempt to make good my point by quotation, I must leave it as it is.

It is characteristic of the unreality of Hannah More that she prefers Akenside to Cowper, despite the latter’s superior piety. Cowper’s sincerity and pungent satire frightened her; the verbosity of Akenside was much to her mind:

‘Sir John is a passionate lover of poetry, in which he has a fine taste. He read it

‘“Mind—mind alone; bear witness, earth and heaven,

The living fountains in itself contains

Of Beauteous and Sublime; here hand in hand

Sit paramount the graces; here enthroned

Celestial Venus, with divinest airs,

Invites the soul to never-fading joy.”

‘“The reputation of this exquisite passage,” said he, laying down the book, “is established by the consenting suffrage of all men of taste, though, by the critical countenance you are beginning to put on you look as if you had a mind to attack it.”

‘“So far from it,” said I [Cœlebs], “that I know nothing more splendid in the whole mass of our poetry.”’

Miss More had an odd life before she underwent what she calls a ‘revolution in her sentiments,’ a revolution, however, which I fear left her heart of hearts unchanged. She consorted with wits, though always, be it fairly admitted, on terms of decorum. She wrote three tragedies, which were not rejected as they deserved to be, but duly appeared on the boards of London and Bath with prologues and epilogues by Garrick and by Sheridan. She dined and supped and made merry. She had a prodigious flirtation with Dr. Johnson, who called her a saucy girl, albeit she was thirty-seven; and once, for there was no end to his waggery, lamented she had not married Chatterton, ‘that posterity might have seen a propagation of poets.’ The good doctor, however, sickened of her flattery, and one of the rudest speeches even he ever made was addressed to her.

After Johnson’s death Hannah met Boswell, full of his intended book which she did her best to spoil with her oily fatuity. Said she to Boswell, ‘I beseech your tenderness for our virtuous and most revered departed friend; I beg you will mitigate some of his asperities,’ to which diabolical counsel the Inimitable replied roughly, ‘He would not cut off his claws nor make a tiger a cat to please anybody.’

The most moving incident in Hannah More’s life occurred near its close, and when she was a lone, lorn woman—her sisters Mary, Betty, Sally, and Patty having all predeceased her. She and they had long lived in a nice house or ‘place’ called Barley Wood, in the neighbourhood of Bristol, and here her sisters one after another died, leaving poor Hannah in solitary grandeur to the tender mercies of Mrs. Susan, the housekeeper; Miss Teddy, the lady’s-maid; Mrs. Rebecca, the housemaid; Mrs. Jane, the cook; Miss Sally, the scullion; Mr. Timothy, the coachman; Mr. John, the gardener; and Mr. Tom, the gardener’s man. Eight servants and one aged pilgrim—of such was the household of Barley Wood!

Outwardly decorum reigned. Poor Miss More fondly imagined her domestics doted on her, and that they joyfully obeyed her laws. It was the practice at family prayer for each of the servants to repeat a text. Visitors were much impressed, and went away delighted. But like so many other things on this round world, it was all hollow. These menials were not what they seemed.

After Miss More had heard them say their texts and had gone to bed, their day began. They gave parties to the servants and tradespeople of the vicinity (pleasing word), and at last, in mere superfluity of naughtiness, hired a large room a mile off and issued invitations to a great ball. This undid them. There happened to be at Barley Wood on the very night of the dance a vigilant visitor who had her suspicions, and who accordingly kept watch and ward. She heard the texts, but she did not go to bed, and from her window she saw the whole household, under cover of night, steal off to their promiscuous friskings, leaving behind them poor Miss Sally only, whose sad duty it was to let them in the next morning, which she duly performed.

Friends were called in, and grave consultations held, and in the end Miss More was told how she had been wounded in her own household. It was sore news; she bore it well, wisely determined to quit Barley Wood once and for ever, and live, as a decent old lady should, in a terrace in Clifton. The wicked servants were not told of this resolve until the actual moment of departure had arrived, when they were summoned into the drawing-room, where they found their mistress, and a company of friends. In feeling tones Miss Hannah More upbraided them for their unfaithfulness. ‘You have driven me,’ said she, ‘from my own home, and forced me to seek a refuge among strangers.’ So saying, she stepped into her carriage and was driven away. There is surely something Miltonic about this scene, which is, at all events, better than anything in Akenside’s ‘Pleasures of Imagination.’

The old lady was of course much happier at No. 4, Windsor Terrace, Clifton, than she had been at Barley Wood. She was eighty-three years of age when she took up house there, and eighty-nine when she died, which she did on the 1st of September, 1833. I am indebted for these melancholy—and, I believe, veracious—particulars to that amusing book of Joseph Cottle’s called ‘Early Recollections, chiefly relating to the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge during his long residence in Bristol.’

I still maintain that Hannah More’s works in nineteen volumes are worth eight shillings and sixpence.

MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF.

Miss Mathilde Blind, in the introduction to her animated and admirable translation of the now notorious ‘Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff,’ asks an exceedingly relevant question—namely, ‘Is it well or is it ill done to make the world our father confessor?’ Miss Blind does not answer her own question, but passes on her way content with the observation that, be it well or ill done, it is supremely interesting. Translators have, indeed, no occasion to worry about such inquiries. It is hard enough for them to make their author speak another language than his own, without stopping to ask whether he ought to have spoken at all. Their business is to make their author known. As for the author himself, he, of course, has a responsibility; but, as a rule, he is only thinking of himself, and only anxious to excite interest in that subject. If he succeeds in doing this, he is indifferent to everything else. And in this he is encouraged by the world.

Burns, in his exuberant generosity, was sure that it could afford small pleasure

‘Even to a deil

To skelp and scaud poor dogs like me,

And hear us squeal;’

but whatever may be the devil’s taste, there is nothing the reading public like better than to hear the squeal of some self-torturing atom of humanity. And, as the atoms have found this out, a good deal of squealing may be confidently anticipated.

The eclipse of faith has not proved fatal by any means to the instinct of confession. There is a noticeable desire to make humanity or the reading public our residuary legatee, to endow it with our experiences, to enrich it with our egotisms, to strip ourselves bare in the market-place—if not for the edification, at all events for the amusement, of man. All this is accomplished by autobiography. We then become interesting, probably for the first time, as, to employ Mlle. Bashkirtseff’s language, ‘documents of human nature.’

The metaphor carries us far. To falsify documents by addition, or to garble them by omission, is an offence of grave character, though of frequent occurrence. Is there, then, to be no reticence in autobiography? Are the documents of human nature to be printed at length?

These are questions which each autobiographer must settle for himself. If what is published is interesting for any reason whatsoever, be it the work of pious sincerity or diseased self-consciousness, the world will read it, and either applaud the piety or ridicule the absurdity of the author. If it is not interesting it will not be read.

Therefore, to consider the ethics of autobiography is to condemn yourself to the academy. ‘Rousseau’s Confessions’ ought never to have been written; but written they were, and read they will ever be. But as a pastime moralizing has a rare charm. We cannot always be reading immoral masterpieces. A time comes when inaction is pleasant, and when it is soothing to hear mild accents murmuring ‘Thou shalt not.’ For a moment, then, let the point remain under consideration.

The ethics of autobiography are, in my judgment, admirably summed up by George Eliot, in a passage in ‘Theophrastus Such,’ a book which, we were once assured, well-nigh destroyed the reputation of its author, but which would certainly have established that of most living writers upon a surer foundation than they at present occupy. George Eliot says:

‘In all autobiography there is, nay, ought to be, an incompleteness which may have the effect of falsity. We are each of us bound to reticence by the piety we owe to those who have been nearest to us, and have had a mingled influence over our lives—by the fellow-feeling which should restrain us from turning our volunteered and picked confessions into an act of accusation against others who have no chance of vindicating themselves, and, most of all, by that reverence for the higher efforts of our common nature which commands us to bury its lowest faculties, its invincible remnants of the brute, its most agonizing struggle with temptation, in unbroken silence.’

All this is surely sound morality and good manners, but it is not the morality or the manners of Mlle. Marie Bashkirtseff, who was always ready to barter everything for something she called Fame.

‘If I don’t win fame,’ says she over and over again, ‘I will kill myself.’

Miss Blind is, no doubt, correct in her assertion that, as a painter, Mlle. Bashkirtseff’s strong point was expression. Certainly, she had a great gift that way with her pen. Amidst a mass of greedy utterances, esurient longings, commonplace ejaculations, and unlovely revelations, passages occur in this journal which bid us hold. For all her boastings, her sincerity is not always obvious, but it speaks plainly through each one of the following words:

‘What is there in us, that, in spite of plausible arguments—in spite of the consciousness that all leads to nothing—we should still grumble? I know that, like everyone else, I am going on towards death and nothingness. I weigh the circumstances of life, and, whatever they may be, they appear to me miserably vain, and, for all that, I cannot resign myself. Then, it must be a force; it must be a something—not merely “a passage,” a certain period of time, which matters little whether it is spent in a palace or in a cellar; there is, then, something stronger, truer, than our foolish phrases about it all. It is life, in short; not merely a passage—an unprofitable misery—but life, all that we hold most dear, all that we call ours, in short.

‘People say it is nothing, because we do not possess eternity. Ah! the fools. Life is ourselves, it is ours, it is all that we possess; how, then, is it possible to say that it is nothing? If this is nothing, show me something.’

To deride life is indeed foolish. Prosperous people are apt to do so, whether their prosperity be of this world or anticipated in the next. The rich man bids the poor man lead an abstemious life in his youth, and scorn delights, in order that he may have the wherewithal to spend a dull old age; but the poor man replies:

‘Your arrangements have left me nothing but my youth. I will enjoy that, and you shall support me in a dull old age.’

To deride life, I repeat, is foolish; but to pity yourself for having to die is to carry egotism rather too far. This is what Mlle. Bashkirtseff does.

‘I am touched myself when I think of my end. No, it seems impossible! Nice, fifteen years, the three Graces, Rome, the follies of Naples, painting, ambition, unheard-of hopes—to end in a coffin, without having had anything, not even love.’

Impossible, indeed! There is not much use for that word in the human comedy.

Never, surely, before was there a lady so penetrated with her own personality as the writer of these journals. Her arms and legs, hips and shoulders, hopes and fears, pictures and future glory, are all alike scanned, admired, stroked, and pondered over. She reduces everything to one vast common denominator—herself. She gives two francs to a starving family.

‘It was a sight to see the joy, the surprise of these poor creatures. I hid myself behind the trees. Heaven has never treated me so well; heaven has never had any of these beneficent fancies.’

Heaven had, at all events, never heard the like of this before. Here is a human creature brought up in what is called the lap of luxury, wearing purple and fine linen, and fur cloaks worth 2,000 francs, eating and drinking to repletion, and indulging herself in every fancy; she divides a handful of coppers amongst five starving persons, and then retires behind a tree, and calls God to witness that no such kindness had ever been extended to her.

When Mlle. Elsnitz, her long-suffering companion—‘young, only nineteen, unfortunate, in a strange house without a friend’—at last, after suffering many things, leaves the service, it is recorded:

‘I could not speak for fear of crying, and I affected a careless look, but I hope she may have seen.’

Seen what? Why, that the carelessness was unreal. A quite sufficient reparation for months of insolence, in the opinion of Miss Marie.

It is said that Mlle. Bashkirtseff had a great faculty of enjoyment. If so, except in the case of books, she hardly makes it felt. Reading evidently gave her great pleasure; but, though there is a good deal of rapture about Nature in her journals, it is of an uneasy character.

‘The silence that is in the starry sky,

The sleep that is amongst the lonely hills,’

do not pass into the souls of those whose ambition it is to be greeted with loud cheers by the whole wide world.

Whoever is deeply interested in himself always invents a God whom he can apostrophize on suitable occasions. The existence of this deity feeds his creator’s vanity. When the world turns a deaf ear to his broken cries he besieges heaven. The Almighty, so he flatters himself, cannot escape him. When there is no one else to have recourse to, when all other means fail, there still remains—God. When your father, and your mother, and your aunt, and your companion, and your maid, are all wearied to death by your exhaustless vanity, you have still another string to your bow. Sometimes, indeed, the strings may get entangled.

‘Just now, I spoke harshly to my aunt, but I could not help it. She came in just when I was weeping with my hands over my face, and was summoning God to attend to me a little.’

A book like this makes one wonder what power, human or divine, can exorcise such a demon of vanity as that which possessed the soul of this most unhappy girl. Carlyle strove with great energy in ‘Sartor Resartus’ to compose a spell which should cleave this devil in three. For a time it worked well and did some mischief, but now the magician’s wand seems broken. Religion, indeed, can still show her conquests, and, when we are considering a question like this, seems a fresher thing than it does when we are reading ‘Lux Mundi.’

‘Do you want,’ wrote General Gordon in his journal, ‘to be loved, respected, and trusted? Then ignore the likes and dislikes of man in regard to your actions; leave their love for God’s, taking Him only. You will find that as you do so men will like you; they may despise some things in you, but they will lean on you, and trust you, and He will give you the spirit of comforting them. But try to please men and ignore God, and you will fail miserably and get nothing but disappointment.’

All those who have not yet read these journals, and prefer doing so in English, should get Miss Blind’s volumes. There they will find this ‘human document’ most vigorously translated into their native tongue. It, perhaps, sounds better in French.

One remembers George Eliot’s tale of the lady who tried to repeat in English the pathetic story of a French mendicant—‘J’ai vu le sang de mon père’—but failed to excite sympathy, owing to the hopeless realism of Saxon speech. But though better in French, the journal is interesting in English. Whether, like the dreadful Dean, you regard man as an odious race of vermin, or agree with an erecter spirit that he is a being of infinite capacity, you will find food for your philosophy, and texts for your sermons, in the ‘Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff.’

SIR JOHN VANBRUGH.

Jeremy Collier begins his famous and witty, though dreadfully overdone, ‘Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage’ with the following spirited words:

‘The business of Plays is to recommend Virtue and discountenance Vice; to show the Uncertainty of Human Greatness, the sudden turns of Fate, and the unhappy conclusions of Violence and Injustice; ’tis to expose the singularities of Pride and Fancy, to make Folly and Falsehood contemptible, and to bring everything that is ill under Infamy and Neglect.’

He then adds: ‘This design has been oddly pursued by the English Stage;’ and so he launches his case.

Sir John Vanbrugh, who fared very badly at the doctor’s hands, replied—and, on the whole, with great spirit and considerable success—in a pamphlet entitled ‘A Short Vindication of “The Relapse” and “The Provok’d Wife” from Immorality and Profaneness.’ In this reply he strikes out this bold apophthegm:

‘The business of Comedy is to show people what they should do, by representing them upon the stage, doing what they should not.’

He continues with much good sense:

‘Nor is there any necessity a philosopher should stand by, like an interpreter at a puppet-show, to explain the moral to the audience. The mystery is seldom so deep but the pit and boxes can dive into it, and ’tis their example out of the playhouse that chiefly influences the galleries. The stage is a glass for the world to view itself in; people ought, therefore, to see themselves as they are; if it makes their faces too fair, they won’t know they are dirty, and, by consequence, will neglect to wash them. If, therefore, I have showed “Constant” upon the stage what generally the thing called a fine gentleman is off it, I think I have done what I should do. I have laid open his vices as well as his virtues; ’tis the business of the audience to observe where his flaws lessen his value, and, by considering the deformity of his blemishes, become sensible how much a finer thing he would be without them.’

It is impossible to improve upon these instructions; they are admirable. The only pity is that, as, naturally enough, Sir John wrote his plays first, and defended them afterwards, he had not bestowed a thought upon the subject until the angry parson gave him check. Vanbrugh, like most dramatists of his calibre, wrote to please the town, without any thought of doing good or harm. The two things he wanted were money and a reputation for wit. To lecture and scold him as if he had degraded some high and holy office was ridiculous. Collier had an excellent case, for there can be no doubt that the dramatists he squinted at were worse than they had any need to be. But it is impossible to read Collier’s two small books without a good many pishes and pshaws! He was a clericalist of an aggressive type. You cannot withhold your sympathy from Vanbrugh’s remark:

‘The reader may here be pleased to take notice what this gentleman would construe profaneness if he were once in the saddle with a good pair of spurs upon his heels.’

Now that Evangelicalism has gone out of fashion, we no longer hear denunciations of stage-plays. High Church parsons crowd the Lyceum, and lead the laughter in less dignified if more amusing resorts. But, for all that, there is a case to be made against the cheerful playhouse, but not by me.

As for Sir John Vanbrugh, his two well-known plays, ‘The Relapse’ and ‘The Provok’d Wife,’ are most excellent reading, Jeremy Collier notwithstanding. They must be read with the easy tolerance, the amused benignity, the scornful philosophy of a Christian of the Dr. Johnson type. You must not probe your laughter deep; you must forget for awhile your probationary state, and remember that, after all, the thing is but a play. Sir John has a great deal of wit of that genuine kind which is free from modishness. He reads freshly. He also has ideas. In ‘The Provok’d Wife,’ which was acted for the first time in the early part of 1697, there appears the Philosophy of Clothes (thus forestalling Swift), and also an early conception of Carlyle’s stupendous image of a naked House of Lords. This occurs in a conversation between Heartfree and Constant, which concludes thus:

Heartfree. Then for her outside—I consider it merely as an outside—she has a thin, tiffany covering over just such stuff as you and I are made on. As for her motion, her mien, her air, and all those tricks, I know they affect you mightily. If you should see your mistress at a coronation, dragging her peacock’s train, with all her state and insolence, about her, ’twould strike you with all the awful thoughts that heaven itself could pretend to from you; whereas, I turn the whole matter into a jest, and suppose her strutting in the selfsame stately manner, with nothing on but her stays and her under, scanty-quilted petticoat.

Constant. Hold thy profane tongue! for I’ll hear no more.

‘The Relapse’ must, I think, be pronounced Vanbrugh’s best comedy. Lord Foppington is a humorous conception, and the whole dialogue is animated and to the point. One sees where Sheridan got his style. There are more brains, if less sparkle, in Vanbrugh’s repartees than in Sheridan’s.

Berenthia. I have had so much discourse with her, that I believe, were she once cured of her fondness to her husband, the fortress of her virtue would not be so impregnable as she fancies.

Worthy. What! she runs, I’ll warrant you, into that common mistake of fond wives, who conclude themselves virtuous because they can refuse a man they don’t like when they have got one they do.

Berenthia. True; and, therefore, I think ’tis a presumptuous thing in a woman to assume the name of virtuous till she has heartily hated her husband and been soundly in love with somebody else.

A handsome edition of Vanbrugh’s Plays has recently appeared, edited by Mr. W. C. Ward (Lawrence and Bullen), who has prepared an excellent Life of his author.

Vanbrugh was, as all the world knows, the architect of Blenheim Palace, as he also was of Castle Howard. He became Comptroller of Works in the reign of Queen Anne, and was appointed by King George Surveyor of the Works at Greenwich Hospital, in the neighbourhood of which he had property of his own. His name is still familiar in the ears of the respectable inhabitants of Blackheath. But what is mysterious is how and where he acquired such skill as he possessed in his profession. His father, Giles Vanbrugh, had nineteen children, of whom thirteen appear to have lived for some length of time, and of John’s education nothing precise is known. When nineteen he went into France, where he remained some years.

During this period, observes Mr. Ward, ‘it may be presumed he laid the foundation of that skill in architecture he afterwards so eminently displayed; at least, there is no subsequent period of his life to which we can, with equal probability, ascribe his studies in that art.’

Later on, Mr. Ward says:

‘The year 1702 presents our author in a new character. Of his architectural studies we know absolutely nothing, unless we may accept Swift’s account, who pretends that Vanbrugh acquired the rudiments of the art by watching children building houses of cards or clay. But this was probably ironical. However he came by his skill, in 1702 he stepped into sudden fame as the architect of Castle Howard.’

It is indeed extraordinary that a man should have undertaken such big jobs as Castle Howard and Blenheim without leaving any trace whatever of the means by which he became credited with the power to execute them. Mr. Pecksniff got an occasional pupil and premium, but, so far as I know, he never designed so much as a parish pump. Blenheim is exposed to a good deal of criticism, but nobody can afford to despise either it or Castle Howard, and it seems certain that the original plans and elevations of both structures were prepared by the author of ‘The Relapse’ and ‘The Provok’d Wife’ himself. Of course, there may have been a ghost, but if there had been, the Duchess of Marlborough, who was soon at loggerheads with her architect, would probably have dragged it into the light of day.

The wits made great fun of their distinguished colleague’s feats in brick and mortar. It was not usually permissible for a literary gentleman to be anything else, unless, indeed, a divine like Dr. Swift, whose satirical verses on the small house Vanbrugh built for himself in Whitehall are well known. They led to a coolness, and no one need wonder. After the architect’s death the divine apologized and expressed regret.

The well-known epigram—

‘Under this stone, reader, survey

Dead Sir John Vanbrugh’s house of clay

Lie heavy on him, Earth, for he

Laid many heavy loads on thee’—

is the composition of another doctor of divinity—Dr. Abel Evans—and was probably prompted by envy.

Amongst other things, Vanbrugh was a Herald, and in that capacity visited Hanover in 1706, and helped to invest the Electoral Prince, afterwards George II., with the Order of the Garter. Vanbrugh’s personality is not clearly revealed to us anywhere, but he appears to have been a pleasant companion and witty talker. He married late in life, and of three children only one survived, to be killed at Fontenoy. He himself died in 1726, in his sixty-third year, of a quinsy. His widow survived him half a century, thus affording another proof, if proof be needed, that no man is indispensable.

JOHN GAY.

The first half of the eighteenth century was in England the poet’s playground. These rhyming gentry had then a status, a claim upon private munificence and the public purse which has long since been hopelessly barred. A measure of wit, a tincture of taste, and a perseverance in demand would in those days secure for the puling Muse slices of solid pudding whilst in the flesh, and (frequently) sepulture in the Abbey when all was over.

What silk-mercer’s apprentice in these hard times, finding a place behind Messrs. Marshall and Snelgrove’s counter not jumping with his genius, dare hope by the easy expedient of publishing a pamphlet on ‘The Present State of Wit’ to become domestic steward to a semi-royal Duchess, and the friend of Mr. Lewis Morris and Mr. Lecky, who are, I suppose, our nineteenth-century equivalents for Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift? Yet such was the happy fate of Gay, who, after an idle life of undeserved good-fortune and much unmanly repining, died of an inflammation, in spite of the skilled care of Arbuthnot and the unwearying solicitude of the Duchess of Queensberry, and was interred like a peer of the realm in Westminster Abbey, having for his pall-bearers the Earl of Chesterfield, Viscount Cornbury, the Hon. Mr. Berkeley, General Dormer, Mr. Gore, and Mr. Pope. Such a recognition of the author of ‘Fables’ and ‘The Beggars’ Opera’ must make Mr. Besant’s mouth water. Nor did Gay, despite heavy losses in the South Sea Company, die a pauper; he left £6,000 behind him, which, as he was wise enough to die intestate, was divided equally between his two surviving sisters.

Gay’s good luck has never forsaken him. He enjoys, if, indeed, the word be not the hollowest of mockeries, an eternity of fame. It is true he is not read much, but he is always read a little. He has been dead more than a century and a half, so it seems likely that a hundred and fifty years hence he will be read as much as he is now, and, like a cork, will be observed bobbing on the surface of men’s memories. Better men and better poets than he have been, and will be, entirely submerged; but he was happy in his hour, happy even in his name (which lent itself to rhyme), happy in his nature; and so (such at least is our prognostication) new editions of Gay’s slender remains will at long intervals continue to appear and to attract a moment’s attention, even as Mr. Underhill’s admirable edition of the poems has lately done; new anthologies will contain his name, the biographical dictionaries will never quite forget him, his tomb in the Abbey will be stared at by impressionable youngsters, Pope’s striking epitaph will invite the fault-finding of the critical, and his own jesting couplet incur the censure of the moralist, until the day dawns when men cease to forget themselves in trifles. As soon as they do this, Gay will be forgotten once and for ever.

Gay’s one real achievement was ‘The Beggars’ Opera,’ which sprang from a sprout of Swift’s great brain. A ‘Newgate pastoral might make an odd, pretty sort of thing,’ so the Dean once remarked to Gay; and as Mr. Underhill, in his admirable Life of our poet, reminds us, Swift repeated the suggestion in a letter to Pope: ‘What think you of a Newgate pastoral among the whores and thieves there?’ But Swift’s ‘Beggars’ Opera’ would not have hit the public taste between wind and water as did Gay’s. It would have been much too tremendous a thing—its sincerity would have damned it past redemption. Even in Gay’s light hands the thing was risky—a speculation in the public fancy which could not but be dangerous. Gay knew this well enough, hence his quotation from Martial (afterwards adopted by the Tennysons as the motto for ‘Poems by Two Brothers’), Nos hæc novimus esse nihil. Congreve, resting on his laurels, declared it would either take greatly, or be damned confoundedly. It took, and, indeed, we cannot wonder. There was a foretaste of Gilbert about it quite enough to make its fortune in any century. Furthermore, it drove out of England, so writes an early editor, ‘for that season, the Italian opera, which had carried all before it for several years.’ It was a triumph for the home-bred article, and therefore dear to the souls of all true patriots.

The piece, though as wholly without sincerity as a pastoral by Ambrose Philips, a thing merely of the footlights, entirely shorn of a single one of the rays which glorify lawlessness in Burns’s ‘Jolly Beggars,’ yet manages through the medium of the songs to convey a pleasing though absurd sentimentality; and there is, perhaps, noticeable throughout a slight—a very slight—flavour of what is cantingly but conveniently called ‘the Revolution,’ which imparts a slender interest.

‘The Beggars’ Opera’ startled the propriety of that strange institution, the Church of England—a seminary of true religion which had left the task of protesting against the foulness of Dryden and Wycherley and the unscrupulous wit of Congreve and Vanbrugh to the hands of non-jurors like Collier and Law, but which, speaking, we suppose, in the interests of property, raised a warning voice when a comic opera made fun, not of marriage vows, but of highway robbery. Dr. Herring, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, plucked up courage to preach against ‘The Beggars’ Opera’ before the Court, but the Head of the Church paid no attention to the divine, and, with the Queen and all the princesses, attended the twenty-first representation. The piece brought good luck all round. ‘Everybody,’ so Mr. Underhill assures us, ‘connected with the theatre (Lincoln’s Inn Fields), from the principal performer down to the box-keepers, got a benefit,’ and Miss Lavinia Fenton, who played Polly Peachum, lived to become Duchess of Bolton; whilst Hogarth painted no less than three pictures of the celebrated scene, ‘How happy could I be with either—were t’other dear charmer away.’

Dr. Johnson, in his ‘Life of Gay,’ deals scornfully with the absurd notion that robbers were multiplied by the popularity of ‘The Beggars’ Opera.’ ‘It is not likely to do good,’ says the Doctor, ‘nor can it be conceived, without more speculation than life requires or admits, to be productive of much evil.’ The Church of England might as well have held its tongue.

Gay, flushed with success, was not long in producing a sequel called ‘Polly,’ which, however, as it was supposed to offend, not against morality, which it undoubtedly did, but against Sir Robert Walpole, was prohibited. ‘Polly’ was printed, and, being prohibited, had a great sale. It is an exceedingly nasty piece, not unworthy of one of the three authors who between them produced that stupidest of farces, ‘Three Hours after Marriage.’

Gay’s third opera, ‘Achilles,’ was produced at Covent Garden after his death. One does not need to be a classical purist to be offended at the sight of ‘Achilles’ upon a stage, singing doggerel verses to the tune of ‘Butter’d Pease,’ or at hearing Ajax exclaim:

‘Honour called me to the task,

No matter for explaining,

’Tis a fresh affront to ask

A man of honour’s meaning.’

This vulgar and idiotic stuff ran twenty nights.