SSSgBSSSSSSSK: SS&SSSSSSS^ S^^m^^^^^WSmsm I /<\, \ v - wrote c. i2bo. Rhymer) J Robert of Gloucester wrote e. 1300. Robert de Brunne (or Manning) wrote !33S- John Barbour from c. 1320 to c. 1395. John Gower from c. 1325 to 140S. William Langland wrote c. 1^62. GEOFFREY CHAUCER. Up to the time of Chaucer, and of his older contemporary William Langland, the author of the Vision of Piers Plough- man, there was not a single authentically great writer in the English tongue, whether in poetry or in prose. Scholars and antiquarians will cite various authors whom they view with predilection, Caedmon more' especially, and this not without reason ; but not one was of the rank of those men who found a literature, who raise a language from the spoken and written to the literary condition, who give it a name and a place among the languages which promote, and which partly constitute, civi- lization. Chaucer achieved this glory for his country, and for himself. Along with him we have just now named William (more commonly, but without warrant, called Robert) Lang- land; not indeed as indicating that Langland shares with Chaucer in so great a splendour, but in order that we might not leave unmentioned the writer who, before Chaucer's prime, and in so close proximity to him and to the influences which moulded him, had already succeeded in distancing all predeces- sors, and in leaving a lasting bequest to his posterity of English readers, and to ours. Of the life of Geoffrey Chaucer several particulars have been put on record from time to time by successive enquirers : un- fortunately it happens that what one man propounds as a fact, or advances as an ingenious suggestion, is found by another to 2 * LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. be fictitious or gratuitous. The most recent investigations 1 have been amongst the most cautious, and the richest as well as safest in results. For Chaucer's birth two widely severed dates have been assigned — 1328, and 1340 or thereabouts. For the first there is no authority, worthy to be so called. For the second there is the authority of Chaucer himself, who, having to make a deposition in 1386 as a witness in a cause of chivalry between Lord Scrope and Sir Robert Grosvenor, averred that he was then "forty years old and upwards", and had borne arms for twenty-seven years. Considering that, if born in 1328, he would in 1386 have been fifty-eight, it is difficult to suppose that he would under those conditions have called himself " forty years old and upwards " ; and difficult consequently to imagine that he really was born in 1328. The force of this objection is indeed to some extent diminished by the fact that other witnesses in the same cause were equally and proveably loose in stating their ages — loose to the extent of ten or even twenty years. But, on the whole, it is safer to believe that Chaucer told the truth unprecisely than that he affirmed what would amount to a practical falsehood ; and I shall without much hesitation, assume 1340 as near the right date of birth. His grandfather was Richard Chaucer, vintner • his father John Chaucer, vintner, of Thames Street, London, where in all likelihood Geoffrey was born ; his mother, Agnes heiress of Hamo de Copton, a citizen and moneyer ("monetarius ") of London. Geoffrey was probably the eldest son of the mar- riage. His surname is properly French— Chaucier, or Chaus- sier (or Le Chaussier, as one sometimes finds it), pointing to some ancestral shoemaker or hosier. He received the ed tion of a gentleman, and may perhaps have studied at Cam- bridge. He was versed in astronomy, and in the other sciences and scholarship of his time. It is probable that from i 357 t0 1 For which we owe a debt of special^tk^Ttol^. F. J. F^h^ll GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 1359 he was a page to the Countess of Ulster, wife of Lionel, third son of King Edward III. He is said to have been at first, but only for a brief while, a member of the legal pro- fession, and of the Inner Temple ; but this also is dubious. A record of that Inn of Court is cited showing that " Geoffrey Chaucer " was fined two shillings for having beaten a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street. One need not discredit the story : but whether this Geoffrey Chaucer was the prospective author of the Canterbury Tales is a separate and undetermined question. Indisputably the poet was closely connected with John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, another of the king's sons. In 1359 he served in the French war under Edward III., and was made prisoner by the enemy near " the town of Retters " (which is perhaps the village of Retiers, near Rennes in Brit- tany). Not long afterwards — in 1360 — he was ransomed, and returned to England, the king having paid ^16 as a part (not probably the whole) of the stipulated sum. In 1366, or pos- sibly even at an earlier date, he was an Esquire of the King, or " squire of less estate " ; and in the following year he is termed a Valet of the King's Chamber, with a stipend of twenty marks for life. At some time or other Chaucer married a lady named Philippa. The date and the person are both uncertain. Some biographers say that the marriage took place probably as early as 1360, and certainly before September 1366. It is seemingly in the latter year that Geoffrey Chaucer, and Philippa Chaucer a " damoiselle," were set down for Christmas gifts from the king; again, in September T369, both of them were to have mourning for the queen. " Damoiselle " might be supposed to indicate an unmarried woman ; but this is not a necessary infer- ence, for at a much later date the term was still applied to wives as well as maids. Then, in 1372, we find a pension of ^10 yearly granted by John of Gaunt to Philippa Chaucer for life. Certainly, at the first blush, one assumes that this Philippa LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. Chaucer was already the wife of Geoffrey Chaucer the poet. Yet this is but a surmise : she may, it is said, have been the same person, but not as yet married to Geoffrey, and may have borne the maiden name of Chaucer either as a fortuitous coincidence or as being Geoffrey's cousin. Possible, but hardly probable, were a not unnatural verdict on such a theory. Perhaps the chief reason for adopting this view— the view that Chaucer was not married to Philippa at the date when the latter is first recorded as Philippa Chaucer — is the assumption that the poet had, during eight years ending towards 1368, been in love with some other lady, as indicated in his Complaint to Pity, of which I make mention further on : but this, after all, is a little arbitrary, for we know nothing precise about that love-affair, and Chaucer may have been at once the husband of Philippa and the unaccepted gallant of a different lady. Apparent facts should not be strained or ignored to suit the requirements of morals ; a caveat which a candid biographer is continually forced by his predecessors to bear in mind. However this may be, the likely date of Chaucer's marriage has recently been put a good deal further on, and 13 June 1374 is proposed. That is the date of a document whereby John of Gaunt assigned ^10 per annum for life to the poet, in terms which modern enquirers consider to intimate that the latter had now quitted his patron's service. Philippa the wife of Chaucer, it used to be affirmed, was a maid of honour, daughter of Sir Payne Roet, a native of Hainault, and Guienne King of Arms. She was afterwards attached to the Duchess Constance second wife of John of Gaunt, and was the sister of Catharine Lady Swynford, who became the mistress and eventually the wife of the same prince. But all this is now denied as mere matter of conjecture, and of convenient but unwarranted as- sociation of recorded names : and obviously, if Philippa's maiden no less than married name was Chaucer, it would have to be decisively set aside. In 1369-70 Chaucer served again in a second invasion of France. Soon afterwards, 1372, he visited Italy by commission from the king, with a view to assigning some port in England for the use of Genoese merchants. He stayed at Florence and Genoa, and at Padua is supposed to have held personal con- ference with Petrarch. By November 1373 he was back in England. Marks of the royal favour were not wanting to him. On the 23rd of April 1374 a pitcher of wine per day was assigned him, afterwards commuted to a money-payment. This amounted to ^7. 6s. 2 *^d. in eight months — then no inconsider- able sum. In the same year he was appointed Controller of the Customs, and Subsidy of Wools, Skins, and Tanned Hides, at the port of London, with a stipulation that the duties of the post should not be discharged by deputy ; and other emolu- ments followed. In 1377 he went to Flanders on a secret mission — the last which he performed for Edward III., who died in June of that year. This, however, was no interruption to Chaucer's official employment. The new boy-king, Richard II., continued his annual twenty marks, along with a like sum in lieu of wine. In January 1378 the poet, together with others, negotiated the king's marriage with Mary of France; and in May he went to Lombardy on an embassy to Bernabb Visconti, Lord of Milan, and the renowned condottiere Sir John Hawkwood, " on certain matters touching Richard's expedition of war." His amicable connexion with his brother-poet, John Gower, to whom he afterwards dedicated his poem of Troilus and Cryseide, becomes apparent on this occasion — Gower being now made one of his representatives, to appear for him if ne- cessary in the English courts of law during his absence abroad. Chaucer returned to England early in 1379. In 1382 he was made Controller of the Petty Customs in the port of London, in addition to his former office of nearly similar name ; and in February 1385 was released from the heavier work of his appointments, being empowered to nominate a permanent LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. deputy, — although, indeed, the earlier obligation to act person- ally, and not by deputy, may have been more formal than prac- tically operative. A singular and very obscurely explained incident in the career of Chaucer pertains to the year 1380. On the 1st of May in that year Cecilia Chaumpaigne — a lady of whom we know nothing further distinctly — executed a deed of release (in the Latin language) relieving the poet from any proceedings at law " de raptu meo" — or, as the words would ordinarily be translated, " on account of my ravishing. " Is it then to be understood that Chaucer had really " ravished " the fair Cecilia ? or that he had illegally abducted her, she being a ward or minor ? Neither supposition squares well with the facts. If Chaucer had truly committed the heinous crime above suggested, that would have been a capital felony, and no legal instrument could have been executed having the effect of compromising a felony. If he had abducted a ward or minor, the latter would have been per- sonally disqualified for executing any legal deed whatever. So at least it has hitherto been said ; although we should not over- look the possibility that Chaucer might have abducted Cecilia while a minor, and she, after attaining her majority, might have executed the deed. We must therefore set aside, at any rate, the first of these two interpretations of "de raptu meo" ; heartily glad, for Chaucer's credit, to do this, yet hesitating to reduce his act to what might, under readily conceivable conditions be a very venial irregularity — the abduction of a minor. What the poet really did remains problematical. It may perhaps be concluded either that he had carried off an heiress or woman of full age, to marry her to a friend, or else that, too oblivious of his marriage-vow, he had himself formed an illicit connexion with Cecilia under circumstances entitling her to sustain against him some civil action, which, by the document in question she consented to forego. Returning now to the course of Chaucer's public life, we GE OFFRE Y CHA UCER. find another conspicuous distinction befalling him in 1386, but one which soon led to his greatest outward mishaps. He was elected one of the members for Kent in the Parliament which met in October of that year. His political aims and personal interests were bound up with those of the Duke of Lancaster, John of Gaunt, one of the present king's uncles : but the in- fluence of this prince was now on the wane. He and his party were adverse to the overgrown temporal power of the Church in this country, and to any encroachments of papal authority : they were on the side of the reformer John Wiclif, or Wiclif was on theirs. As to Chaucer himself, there is nothing to show that he was in any distinct sense a Wiclifite : but his writings supply abundant evidence of his slighting estimate of monks and friars, and of ecclesiastical pretenders and pretensions in general. The Court was hostile to Wiclif, and the influence of the Duke of Gloucester, another of the king's uncles, was rapidly supplanting that of Lancaster : Gloucester succeeded to power in this same autumn. Though the precise details have not come down to us, the result speaks forcibly enough for itself, and persuades us that Chaucer, in his parliamentary and political or party demeanour, must have opposed and offended the Court and the Gloucester faction. In December 1386, only two months after the meeting of Parliament, he was dismissed from his offices in the Customs. His two pensions, however, remained unrevoked, and were still received by himself up to 1388 : then, probably hard-pressed for ready money, he assigned them to one John Scalby, who had most likely paid him their value. Between these two dates, 1386 and 1388, it appears that a calamity of another kind afflicted him : his wife died in 1387- In May 1389 Chaucer got another chance of worldly pro- sperity, but it proved a delusive one. His friends then returned to power, among them the son of the Duke of Lancaster ; and in July the poet was made Clerk of the King's Works, com- LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. prising the Tower of London, the Palace at Westminster, and many other places and manors : his salary was two shillings a day, and he was permitted to act by deputy. He had also a separate appointment as Clerk of the Works at St. George's Chapel, Windsor. The Chapel was then ruinous, and ready to fall (the now existing Chapel is on a different site); and Chaucer seems to have done nothing for it during two years, beyond buying some stone for repairs, and paying for the unloading of this. Perhaps his remissness caused his discharge from the office — remissness aggravated, by his having had the ill-luck, on the 3rd of September 1390, to lose ^20 of the king's money, along with his horse and other belongings, by robberies com- mitted by notorious thieves, partly at a spot designated as "the Foul Oak," near Hatcham in Surrey, and partly at Westminster. At any rate he was ousted from both his architectural employ- ments in 1391, and, although Richard II. relieved him from the debt of ^20, his monetary position relapsed into precari- ousness. He was undoubtedly in straits, and was badgered by law-suits ; but the king, not wholly forgetting the ancient kind- ness with which so illustrious and fascinating a man had been regarded, exempted him from liability to arrest. And in Feb- ruary 1394 his distresses were once more relieved by a royal grant of ^20 per annum for life. To this, in 1398, was added a tun of wine yearly. Generally speaking, it should be under- stood that Chaucer was decidedly a thriving man, according to the standard of those times. To say — as some have done that his income corresponded to ^1000 per annum is possibly excessive : but for many years his pensions, irrespective of his offices, equalled the then salary of the Chief Baron of the Exchequer, or the Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas. The reign of Richard II. — weak, shifting, and unsettled barren of foreign glory or of national well-being— was now drawing to a close : Henry of Lancaster, son of the lately GEOFFREY CHAUCER. deceased Duke, John of Gaunt, returned from exile, showed a bold front of remonstrance and resistance, and extinguished the royalty of Richard like the snuff of a candle. Henry had only been four days on the throne when, on the 3rd of October 1399, he recognized the long-standing, and probably never- tarnished, attachment of Chaucer to his house by adding to the pension of ,£20 per annum granted by Richard another of ^26. 13s. 4d. I say "probably never tarnished," because, in some of the older biographies of the poet, a series of supposed facts is set down which, were we compelled to credit it, would materially diminish our respect for his firmness and consistency, and would show that he had little to expect from the justice, whatever he might have received from the pity and indulgence, of the head of his party when seated on his easily won but as yet far from strongly established throne. It has been said that Chaucer, in the most active period of his political life, got im- plicated in the manoeuvres of the Wiclifite Comberton, or John ■of Northampton, one of the competitors for the Lord-Mayoralty of London ; that he was driven in consequence to take refuge in Hainault, and afterwards in Zealand ; and, on returning to England, was imprisoned in the Tower, whence he obtained his release only by making pusillanimous disclosures, compromis- ing to his confederates. All this used to be doubtful, and may now be safely pronounced a romance void of foundation. Chaucer, in his advanced age, honourable, honoured, and serene, was destined to enjoy but for a few months the well- earned bounties of his new sovereign. At the close of his life he leased a house in Westminster, standing nearly on the site now occupied by Henry the Seventh's Chapel. Here on the 25th of October 1400 he died — aged, it would seem, hardly sixty, and not (as the older accounts ran) seventy-two. He lies buried in Westminster Abbey, with fame great in his own time, and dwarfing, as the centuries pass, that of almost all other denizens of this gorgeous and venerable house of tombs. LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. The present monument of grey marble was erected many years after his death, in 1556, by Nicholas Brigham. I have said as yet nothing about Chaucer's poems, but have only given details of the external events of his life, which are nevertheless, in comparison, of very slight importance to any of us at this time of day. The probable sequence of the poems is given thus by Mr. Furnivall, whose authority, founded upon diligent investigations and earnest zeal, may fairly be preferred to that of all previous British enquirers. Following Professor Bernhard Ten Brink, he divides Chaucer's poetic activity into three periods — 1, preceding his Italian travels commenced in December 1372 ; 2, from his return in November 1373 up to 1384; and 3, his greatest power and ultimate decline. Pre- mising this, and leaving out of count some minor works, we obtain the following results. 1st Period. — The A. B. C, freely translated from Guillaume de 1 Guilleville, being a prayer to the Virgin Mary, arranged in the order of the letters of the alphabet. 1366-68, the Complaint to Pity, which points, in tolerably clear language not lightly to be dismissed as other than substantially true, to an unre- ciprocated love which Chaucer nurtured during eight years for some lady whom it is not given to us to identify. 1369, the Death of Blanche the Duchess, first wife of John of Gaunt (sometimes called The Dream of Chaucer, but not to be con- founded with another poem, Chaucer's Dream, or the Isle of Ladies, now rejected as spurious). 2nd Period. — 1373, the Life of Saint Cecile (or Second Nun 's Tale in the Canterbury Tales). 1374 or thereabouts, the Parliament of Fowls ; Complaint of Mars ; Anelida and Arctic • Troilus and Cryseidc. 1384, the House of Fame. 3rd Period.— The Legend of Good Women ; The Canterbury Tales — the central date of which maybe towards 1386, while the entire work covers a number of his best years ; Flee fro the Press (commonly termed Good Counsel of Chaucer, to which is. GE OFFRE Y CHA UCER. 1 3 tagged-on the legend that he wrote the lines on his deathbed). 1392 (from which year his gradual decline may be dated), the Complaint of Venus, founded upon a French poem by Granson. 1399, September, Chaucer's Complaint to his Purse, an appeal to Henry IV. for assistance. In this list it will be observed that several poems ordinarily ascribed to Chaucer do not figure at all. Such are the Testa- ment of Love, the Lamentation of Mary Magdalene, the Assembly of Ladies — all three now definitely rejected; also the Cuckoo and the Nightingale; the Court of Love ; the Flower and the Leaf ; the Romaunt of the Rose, translated and abridged from the famous work of Guillaume de Loris and Jean de Meun, (for, though it is admitted that Chaucer did make some translation of this work, the particular version printed among his poems is, by some critics, regarded as not adequately verified); the Complaint of the Black Knight (or of a Lover's Life). The treatise on the Astrolabe, in prose, is undeniably authentic; and as to the various poems last men- tioned much controversy, based on valid considerations, still prevails. Chaucer presents to us the perfection of the English lan- guage under the transformation which, during the course of three- hundred years, it had undergone from association with the French ; and of English poetry under the long-standing influ- ence of romantic French models, and the now commencing modification of this from Italian sources. Rhymed verse, it should be remarked, was already usual in Chaucer's time, although the Piers Ploughman is merely alliterative : he is con- sidered, however, to have been the first who used the heroic metre (the rhymed decasyllabic couplets) in English, a metre previously in use in French and Italian. For absolute origin- ality of invention Chaucer does not stand high ; he continually borrows his subjects and fables, takes the work of other men as his starting-point, and translates or paraphrases ad libitum. Yet 14 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. for originality of spirit he rises in the highest degree con- spicuous ; he introduces into poetry — not only English but European poetry — a breadth and variety in the pourtrayal of social life, a play of passion and emotion, a sweetness and rich- ness of colouring, a genuine thorough humanity, which cannot, be matched in any preceding author. He draws everything with the touch of a poet and a master, sings his perceptions into shape, and brightens his delineations with kindly and enjoying humour — the humour of a man who knows life in its multiform aspects, from observing it with mingled keenness and sympathy, and mixing in it personally. A charming freshness forms the atmosphere of all his work • he is perpetually new. The age of chivalry is obsolete, and the tongue with which he has expressed it archaic ; but in his pages it is living and young to us for ever, and will continue to survive in every succeeding age, side by side with the aspects of the passing time, as long as Chaucer's poems themselves live, and of these dateless indeed is the appointed date. Of course by far the greatest of Chaucer's works is the Can- terbury Talcs — a wellspring of pathos, pleasantry, and delight, a mine of character and social life. The most adequate because the largest and most inclusive criticism of this incomparable performance — the criticism which most fully expresses the essentials, and pauses least over the surface of it — is that given by another of our exalted poets, William Blake, who has written of it thus : — " The characters of Chaucer's Pilgrims are the characters which compose all ages and nations. As one age falls, another rises, different to mortal eyes, but to immortals only the same • for we see the same characters repeated again and again in animals, vegetables, minerals, and in men. Nothing new occurs in identical existence : Accident ever varies, Substance can never suffer change nor decay. Of Chaucer's characters, as described in the Canterbury Tales, some of the names or GE OFFRE Y CHA UCER. 1 5 titles are altered by time; but the characters themselves for ever remain unaltered, and consequently they are the physiog- nomies or lineaments of universal human life, beyond which Nature never steps. Names alter ; things never alter. I have known multitudes of those who would have been monks in the age of monkery, who in this deistical age are deists. 1 As Newton numbered the stars, and as Linnaeus numbered the plants, so Chaucer numbered the classes of men. ... It is necessary here to speak of Chaucer's own character, that I may set certain mistaken critics right in their conception of the humour and fun that occur on the journey. Chaucer is himself the great poetical observer of men, who in every age is born to record and eternize its acts. This he does as a master, as a father and superior, who looks down on their little follies, from the emperor to the miller; sometimes with severity, oftener with joke and sport. . . . Chaucer's characters live age after age. Every age is a Canterbury Pilgrimage : we all pass on, each sustaining one or other of these characters, nor can a child be born who is not one of these characters of Chaucer. . . . The reader will observe that Chaucer makes every one of his characters perfect in his kind; every one is an antique statue — the image of a class, and not of an imperfect individual." The Canterbury Tales is an uncompleted work ; its scheme would properly include, not only the journey from the Tabard Inn, Southwark, to Canterbury, but also the return-journey, and a second set of tales, told in the latter, should have supple- 1 Blake's observations correspond with considerable closeness to those of Dryden ; who, after doing Chaucer the sorry service of turning some of his poems into the English of the time of William the Third, made up for this to a certain extent by his manly and enthusiastic prefatory eulogium. For instance : ' ' We have [in the Ca.7iterbziry Tales] our forefathers and great grand-dames all before us, as they were in Chaucer's days. Their general characters are still remaining in mankind, and even in England, though they are called by other names than those of monks and friars and canons and lady-abbesses and nuns ; for mankind is ever the same, and nothing lost out of Nature though every- thing is aUered." 1 6 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. merited those which belong to the former. It has been suggested that the connexion of these several stories by a general framework may have been suggested to Chaucer less by the Decameron of Boccaccio than by the Disciplina Cleri- calis of Peter Alfonsi, or the Romance of the Seven Sages — both works of popular repute in mediaeval times. Among the other poems of Chaucer — some of them marked by the easy and too monotonous fiction of a dream, indicating a certain sterility of invention as to form, admirable as was his moulding power in narrative and in detail — I may single out one- — the Troilus and Cryseide — for a few additional remarks. This poem, lovely in sentiment, and with magical touches of character, is founded upon the Filostrato of Boccaccio, and is in fact, to a great extent, a direct and even a faithful translation of that poem, itself replete with excellence and flowing with facility. The Filostrato is written in the octave stanza, which Boccaccio is believed to have invented, and which afterwards became so famous in Italian literature in the hands of Ariosto and of Tasso (as in ours also in the Don Juan of Byron or the Witch of Atlas of Shelley) : the Troilus and Cryseide is in a singularly beautiful seven-line stanza, known in French poetry before Chaucer's adoption of it. As to the substance of the Filostrato, Chaucer has so far added, curtailed, and modified, that, on a close comparison, we find him to have taken from the Italian less than a third of the total of his own verses. He amplifies and moralizes — or, as one might say without dis- respect, proses — far more than Boccaccio ; and in especial his transmuting hand, and his highly original and acute sense of character, are to be traced in the personage of Pandarus, whom, without departing greatly from his Italian original so far as incident and function are concerned, he essentially recreates. By this process he shifts the story from a quality partly romantic, partly licentious, and partly satirical, as in Boccaccio to one in which narrative is more nearly allied to drama ■ chi- GE OFFRE V CHA UCER. 1 7 valric lustre, high-flown passion, the many enticements of the main story, streaked with sharp and living traits of character- painting. And the character-painting of Chaucer is, in its way, though less various and abounding, hardly inferior to that of Shakespeare. This mode of dealing with the Filostrato of Boccaccio may be taken as indicating generally the relation of Chaucer's poems to those which he worked from and adapted. He used them freely, borrowing, translating, and re- furbishing : under his hand they came out riper with meaning and more intimately human. The poems of Chaucer, as they will always be famous and revered, so were they exceedingly popular in and immediately after his own time : the great number of MSS. attests this, and his renown spread beyond the insular limits of his own land, and on the introduction of printing into England his works were among the first books that appeared in type. What is still more significant of his greatness, he left no poetic successor in England who could so much as tread in his steps, even " 11011 passibus cequis " : the fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries are almost a blank in English, though partially com- pensated by some leading figures in Scottish, poetry. In his prime of manhood Chaucer is said to have been of fair and beautiful complexion, of middle height and graceful bearing. His portrait was limned by Occleve from memory, and represents him at an advanced age, with a forked grey beard, in a dark-coloured dress and hood ; a black case, con- taining a knife or writing materials, is in his vest, his right hand extended, and in his left a string of beads. The eyes are well set, the mouth full ; the countenance (supposing the expression to have been fairly well caught in this unpretending but seemly miniature) is at once grave and debonair — the countenance of a man of prolonged experience, thoughtful and lenient, chastened, not hardened, by the furrowing hand of Time. The portly Host in the Canterbury Tales is made to address Chaucer in the following terms, supplying some hints as to his demeanour : — 3 " And than at erst he looked' upon me, And saide thus : ' What man art thou ? ' quod he. ' Thou lookest as thou wouldest find an hare, For ever upon the ground I see thee stare. Approache near, and looke merrily. He in the waist is shape as well as I : This were a popet in an arm to embrace For any woman small and fair of face ! He seemeth elvish by his countenance, For unto no wight doth he dalliance.' " The reference here to the poet's abstracted air is confirmed in the House of Fame, where he speaks of himself as sitting at his book till his look becomes dazed. It has been said that the great-grandson of this illustrious poet came near to succeeding to the crown of England. This is made out by representing that his surviving son, Thomas, Speaker of the Commons in 1414, who married the daughter and coheiress of Sir John Burghersh, and became a man of large property, left a daughter, Alice, who married as her second husband the Duke of Suffolk, the same who was attainted and extrajudicially beheaded in 1450. Her eldest son married the Princess Elizabeth, sister of Edward IV. ; and his son, the Earl of Lincoln, nephew of Richard III., was declared by the latter heir apparent to the throne in the event of the death of his own son without issue. This event ensued ; but the Earl of Lincoln was of course set aside by the conquest and accession of Henry VII. But a chain is no stronger than its weakest link. Here the weakest link is the first — the assumption, namely, that Thomas Chaucer was son to the poet Geoffrey Chaucer. No one really knows that he was so, or can prove that he was ; and in default of any such evidence we are bound to dis- miss this diverting figment, and to abide in the conviction that Chaucer was the sovereign of English poesy in his oWn time and for some two centuries following, and not to be ever wholly dethroned, but was not the great-grandfather of a possible sovereign of the English body-politic. POETS BORN BETWEEN CHAUCER AND SPENSER. John Lydgate from c. 1370 to c. 1450. James I. of Scotland from 1394 to 1437. Thomas Occleve (or Hoccleve) wrote c. 1420. Robert Henryson from c 1425 to c. 1500. Henry the Minstrel (Blind) wrote c 1471; Harry) ) ' n ' William Dunbar from c. 1465 to c. 1530. John Skelton from 1469 to 1529. Gawin Douglas from 1475 to 1521 or 1522. Alexander Barklay died in 1552. Sir David Lindsay from 1490 to c. 1557. John Bale from 1495 to 1563. Sir Thomas Wyatt from 150310 1542. Nicholas Udall wrote c 1532 to 1564. Earl of Surrey from <\ 1517 to 1547- Thomas Sackville Lord } f T „„„ ,-„«♦ t ^q Buckhurst from ^ 1530 or 1536 to 1608. EDMUND SPENSER. The second of our great English poets, Spenser, is a some- what more obscure figure to us personally than the first of them, Chaucer. Of Chaucer as a man we all entertain a definite, and perhaps nearly the same, conception, founded mainly on the fact that he was the author of the Cajiterbury Tales; for the writer of that book must infallibly have been gifted with a spirit of observation, of humour, of enjoyment, of sympathy, of pathos, and with a warm-blooded and full-bodied sense of life, and a varied experience of it, which furnish us with a very human, loveable, and individual Chaucer, as the producer of the whole. But Spenser, as the author of the Faery Queen, is by no means equally real to us — he does not become to us equally a man. We find in this, and subordinately in his other works, a mind of uncommon exaltation, with great con- tinuity and self-consistency, and an earnest love of virtue and nobleness, and we surmise a character to correspond — a character indeed more sustained and more untarnished than Chaucer's. But after all we remain in the region of supposi- tions — we do not strongly identify Spenser, though we appre- ciate and honour him. His poems are far less real to us than Chaucer's, and himself less real than his poems. Of the facts of his life, however, we know fully as much as of the elder poet's ; and such facts as have come down to us are mostly of an important kind for the outer record, though not equally so LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. for the inner biography, connecting Spenser as they do with the public events of his time. While we cannot doubt that he was, by nature as well as by position, a man of thought far rather than of action, we find him nevertheless, during the great majority of his adult career, intermixing capably and vigorously in the nation's work. The earlier period of Edmund Spenser's life is the most uncertain. Hitherto it had not been exactly settled what family he belonged to— perhaps to a Lancashire branch of the ennobled race of Spenser. It seemed, and still seems, a fair presumption that he was connected with Sir John Spenser ; to whose two daughters, Anne and Elizabeth, who married Lord Mounteagle and Lord Hunsdon, he addressed some poems. Now at last it is definitely affirmed x that both his parents can be proved to have been Lancashire people. He was born in London, perhaps in East Smithfield near the Tower. Upon his monument in Westminster Abbey the date of birth is given as 15 10 : but this is beyond doubt extravagantly untrue. On the other hand, the ordinarily accepted date, 1553, seems to be some years too late. He was a "poor scholar" of Mer- chant Tailors' School, London ; thence, on the 20th of May 1569, he entered as a poor scholar or sizar in Pembroke Hall, Cambridge; taking his degree as B.A. in 1572, and as M.A. in 1576. He tried for a fellowship, but failed; and this ill- success, combined with narrow circumstances, is believed to have been his motive for leaving the University. He then retired for some while to the North of England, and lived there with friends, without adopting, and it might seem without being minded to adopt, any sort of profession. One conjecture is that he lived with his own parents at Burnley in Lancashire; the parents being, according to this theory, Edmund and Isabel Spenser, residents in that town. During this northern sojourn, : By the Rev. A. B. Grosart, who has projected a new edition of Spenser. EDMUND SPENSER. pursuant to traditionary guesswork, he fell in love with the lady whom he has celebrated under the name of Rosalind, com- plaining, in the Shepherd's Calendar, of her cruelty, indifference, and those other vices of maidenly virtue which poets and poet- asters equally spin off into such a superfetation of verse. On this subject we can say nothing precise : there may have been a Rosalind, and she may have been as like the Rosalind of the poems as the* undefined nature of that portraiture permits, and Spenser may have been in love with her, or minded to re- present himself as in love ; but, if a negative answer to these surmises would be rash, an affirmative is also insecure. At any rate, with respect to Rosalind, we do not know who she was, nor even whether she was. Another of the personages of the same poem is properly identified — Hobbinol, who stands for the poet's friend Gabriel Harvey. It is probable that Spenser wrote in the north most of the Shepherd's Calendar: he published it in London in 1579. This work, the most an- tiquated in style among all his writings, is much concerned with polemical or party divinity under a pastoral exterior, and has the tone which is known by the term " puritanical " : it obtained a large share of popularity. The Shepherd's Calendar was not, however, the first of Spenser's poems, nor indeed of his publications. The year 1569 is the earliest landmark both of his literary and of his official career. In that year were included in Vander Noodt's Theatre of Worldlings some sonnets translated from Petrarch, which were afterwards reissued as the performance of Spenser ; and in that year also, under the date of 18 October, a payment is recorded to " Edmund Spenser " who had brought over letters from the English Ambassador in France. This, as we have seen, is the same year when he entered Cambridge University, and when, according to the ordinarily received date of his birth, he was but sixteen years of age ; a period of life more consistent with the dabbling in Petrarch than with the 24 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. carriage of ambassadorial despatches. We are left to guess whether the Edmund Spenser who returned from France was the same person as the Cambridge sizar; and, if so, whether we must not finally reject 1553 as' the date of birth. Another of his early essays in writing was a series of no less than nine comedies — a highly remarkable enterprise for that epoch of our literature : of these no record now remains. At the beginning of August 1580, on the appointment of Arthur Lord Grey of Wilton as Lord Deputy of Ireland, Spenser accompanied that nobleman thither as his secretary. That he could and did work under him with satisfaction is evident from an interesting passage in his View of the State of Ireland, written in the form of dialogue after Lord Grey had been recalled, and had died. Here Irenaeus (representing Spenser himself) is made to say : — " In the mean time, all that was formerly done, with long labour and great toil, was, as you say, in a moment undone, and that good lord blotted with the name of a bloody man, whom who that well knew knew to be most gentle, affable, loving, and temperate, but that the neces- sity of that present state of things enforced him to that violence, and almost changed his natural disposition. But otherwise he was so far from delighting in blood that oftentimes he suffered not just vengeance to fall where it was deserved; and even •some of them which were afterwards his accusers had tasted too much of his mercy, and were from the gallows brought to be his accusers. But his course indeed was this — that he spared not the heads and principals of any mischievous practices and rebellion, but showed sharp judgment on them, chiefly for ensample sake, that all the meaner sort, which also were generally then infected with that evil, might, by terror thereof, be reclaimed and saved if it were possible." To this and other observations of Irenseus the other speaker Eudoxus replies : " He was always known to be a most just, sincere, godly, and right noble man, far from such sternness, far from such unrighteousness. But, in that EDMUND SPENSER. 25 sharp, execution of the Spaniards at the Fort of Smerwick, I heard it specially noted ; and, if it were true (as some reported), surely it was a great touch to him in honour, — for some say that he promised them life, — others, at least he did put them in hope thereof." And Irenseus replies, giving us an important glimpse into Spenser's own Irish experiences, which here, and no doubt in many another instance, were far different from the peaceful cabinet-duties which one mostly associates with the name of secretary : — " Both the one and the other is most untrue ; for this I can assure you, myself being as near them as any, that he was so far either from promising or putting them in hope that first their secretary (called, as I remember, Signor Jeffrey, an Italian), being sent to treat with the Lord Deputy for grace, was flatly refused. And afterwards their colonel, named Don Sebastian, came forth to entreat that they might part with their arms like soldiers, at least with their lives, according to the custom of war and law of nations. It was strongly denied him, and told him by the Lord Deputy himself that they could not justly plead either custom of war or law of nations, for that they were not any lawful enemies ; and, if they were, he willed them to show by what commission they came thither into another prince's dominions to war, whether from the Pope, or the King of Spain, or any other. The which when they said they had not, but were only adventurers that came to seek fortune abroad, and to serve in wars amongst the Irish who desired to entertain them, it was then told them that the Irish themselves— as the Earl, and John of Desmond, with the rest — were no lawful enemies, but rebels and traitors, and therefore they that came to succour them no better than rogues and runagates, specially coming with no license nor commission from their own king, so as it should be dishonour- able for him, in the name of the Queen, to condition or make .any terms with such rascals ; but left them to their choice to yield and submit themselves or no. Whereupon the said 26 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. colonel did absolutely yield himself and the fort, with all therein, and craved only mercy; which it being not thought good to show them (for danger of them if, being saved, they should afterward join with the Irish — and also for terror to the Irish, who are much emboldened by those foreign succours, and also put in hope of more ere long), there was no way but to make that short end of them as was made. Therefore most untruly and maliciously do these evil tongues backbite and slander the sacred ashes of that most just and honourable per- sonage, whose least virtue, of many most excellent that abounded in his heroic spirit, they were never able to aspire unto." In March 1581 Spenser received another appointment, that of Clerk in the Irish Court of Chancery. This lasted but a short while : Lord Grey being recalled in 1582, Spenser, to all appearance, returned with him to England, and nothing is known of him for three or four years ensuing. He and his patrons however still kept an eye on Ireland. On the 27th of July 1586 Spenser obtained from the Crown a grant of about three-thousand acres of forfeited land in that country, a portion of the former domain of the Earl of Desmond, in the county of Cork : perhaps his chief friend Sir Philip Sidney (who died in October of this same year, and who was well seconded by his relative the Earl of Leicester in his zeal for Spenser) may have been foremost in procuring him this advantage. Spenser then went back to Ireland, and lived in the mansion which had been the Earl of Desmond's Castle of Kilcolman, near a lake amid scenery of uncommon beauty; in 1588 he was appointed Clerk to the Council of Munster. Here he remained till 1589, when he once more came over to England, and published in London the first three books of the Faery Queen, a poem which he had begun towards 1579 — the same date (as we have already seen) as that of the publication of the Shepherd's Calendar. There are two amusing anecdotes of Spenser's literary life, which, though probably apocryphal, may nevertheless find a EDMUND SPENSER. 27 place here, and be read for what they are worth. The first story is that the poet, when he revisited London from the North of England, in 1579, introduced himself to Sidney, pre- senting to him the ninth Canto of the First Book of the Faery Queen, containing the renowned description of the Cave of Despair. Sidney, admiring (as he well might do) the first stanza that he read, ordered Spenser a gratuity of ^50, and, reading another stanza, another ^50. At the third stanza, he raised the total to £200, and he enjoined his steward to pay the money down at once, lest in the sequel he should be tempted to give away his whole estate. — The second story is that Queen Elizabeth on one occasion, upon receiving some poems from Spenser, ordered him ^"ioo. The minister Lord Burghley exclaimed in dismay, " What ! all this for a song ? " Elizabeth rejoined, " Then give him what is reason." No money however reached the itching "palm of Spenser; who at length adventured to remind his, royal mistress of her promised bounty, by addressing to her the following quatrain (quoted in Henslowe's Diary, which is dated 1602) : — " It pleased your Grace upon a time To grant me reason for my rhyme : But from that time until this season I heard of neither rhyme nor reason. " This brought the matter to a head : Elizabeth reproved the grudging Burghley, and once more awarded to Spenser the original ,£100. Some colour is lent to this latter anecdote by the authenticated fact that Spenser had a great antipathy to Burghley. His poem named Prosopopoeia, or Mother Hubbard's Tale, contains many severe causticities directed, according to the general consent of commentators, against that potent minister. This apologue was published with other poems after the appearance of the first part of the Faery Queen, but had, pursuant to his own account, been written " in the raw con- ceit of my youth " — a statement which may possibly have been 28 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. merely a device to smooth matters down, although in all likeli- hood the date of the work is really anterior to the grant of land in Ireland. As to Queen Elizabeth, it would not appear that Spenser had any persojial acquaintance with his sovereign until he was preparing to publish the Faery Queen: Raleigh, it is said, then introduced him to her, and was urgent for the publication, and Elizabeth accepted the dedication of the poem. In February 1591 she granted Spenser a pension of ,£50 per annum, and the title of Poet Laureate. The Faery Queen gave its author a high degree of celebrity. The publisher then collected together the poet's previous com- positions, under the name of Complaints, containing sundry small Poems of the World's Vanity. This comprises (besides Mother Hubbard's Tale already mentioned) the Ruins of Time, the Tears of the Muses, and other verses, among which are all those that had been previously published — namely, the Shepherd's Calendar, and (it would seem) the poem, of four to five hundred lines, named Muiopotmos, or the Fate of the Butterfly. Many others had been written, but could not be recovered for this publication. Spenser probably remained in England till the beginning of 1592 : he then brought out his elegy entitled Daphnaida, and next returned to Ireland. He probably composed in 1592-93 the eighty-eight sonnets develop- ing his courtship of the lady whom he afterwards married: this fair one, named Elizabeth, was traditionally reputed to have been a peasant-girl, but she is now known to have been a gentlewoman, equal in station to Spenser himself. One of the most splendid of his compositions, the Epithalamium, celebrates his own wedding. In 1595 he published Colin Clout's come home again (the ugly name of Colin Clout, as well as the slightly more genial one of " Young Cuddy," de- signating himself) ; also Astrophel, an elegy on his well-loved and honoured Sir Philip Sidney, and the Mourning Muse of Thestylis, on the same theme : and ere the year closed he EDMUND SPENSER. 29 printed likewise his Amoretti — the sonnets and epithalamium just mentioned. In 1596 he came over to England, bringing with him Books IV., V., and VI., of the Faery Queen; these, with a reprint of the three preceding books, were published. This was followed in the same year by a reprint of Daphnaida, along with the Prothalamion, and the four Hymns of Love, Beauty, Heavenly Love, and Heavenly Beauty : the two former Hymns being notified as composed " in the greener time of his youth," and many copies of them "formerly scattered abroad." It is likely that he now wrote, and presented to Queen Elizabeth, his important treatise (from which we have already quoted) A View of the State of Lreland ; a work which may still be read with much interest, on historical as well as literary grounds, and which is not unimbued with a solid sense of justice and equitable consideration for the Irish population, although its main thesis is the necessity for quelling, by sovereign authority and unresting force, all demonstrations of treason, sedition, or disaffection. Spenser shows in this work the temper of a statesmanly official, with breadth of mind for embracing the subject generally, and an active mastery and ready manipulation of ways and means : there is nothing in it of the unpractical dreamer, or the vaguely discursive smatterer. The treatise remained unpublished until 1633. It was probably at an early date in 1597 that Spenser re- turned for the last time to Ireland : in the following year he was recommended by Elizabeth for the office of Sheriff of Cork. Soon after the breaking-out of Tyrone's rebellion, in October 1598, his house at Kilcolman was attacked and burned by the rebels, and one child perished in the conflagration. The poet, with his wife and two surviving sons, escaped with difficulty, and arrived in England destitute. Ben Jonson gave the follow- ing account of this woeful catastrophe to Drummond of Haw- thornden: "The Irish having robbed Spenser's goods, and burnt his house and a little child newborn, he and his wife LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. escaped ; and after he died for lack of bread in King Street, and refused twenty pieces sent to him by my Lord of Essex, adding, He was sorry he had no time to spend them." The probability is however that Spenser died, not of actual starva- tion or destitution, but worn-out with the hardships and agita- tions of the terrible days he had just passed through. After a certain period of illness, his death took place at a hostelry in King Street, Westminster, on the 13th of January 1599. His own request was that he might be buried in Westminster Abbey, hard by Chaucer. This was done at the charge of Lord Essex, with a Latin inscription which spoke of him as "Anglicorum poetarum nostri scecnli facile princeps." Thirty years afterwards the Countess of Dorset erected the existing monument : here the inscription is in English, and follows the original lead in terming Spenser " the prince of poets in his time." The author left two sons, Sylvanus and Peregrine. The son of the latter, named Hugolin, was restored by Charles II. to the Irish estates of his grandfather ; but, adhering at a later date to James II, he was outlawed, and the lands reverted to the Crown. They were afterwards conferred upon another scion of the family/, named William Spenser. The poet, at his death, left behind him two cantos of an additional book of the Faery Queen, and two stanzas of a third canto. These have been published, and it is doubtful whether much more had ever been written. He is said to have com- posed also a prose treatise named the English Poet, but of this no trace appears. There are two very diverse portraits extant, each of which has been said to represent Edmund Spenser. One which is generally recognized as genuine, shows a long face, with a well- sized straight nose, brown eyes, short curling hair, a full mous- tache, and close-clipped beard; a thoughtful and rather sad- dened face, corresponding to what we understand his nature to have been— reserved and gentle. The other portrait cannot EDMUND SPENSER. 31 certainly have been taken from the same original : it is a physiognomy altogether keener — more active, bustling, and mundane. The poet was no doubt not wanting in a certain irritable self-opinion, discernible passim in his writings of the secondary rank ; this was tempered by an earnest sense of gratitude, and by a religious habit of mind which, as was natural for a loyal Englishman of those days, took a strong tinge of anti- Catholicism. He was a man of most extensive knowledge, master of all the learning of his age. Founding his poetical style chiefly on Italian models, he greatly confirmed, if he did not even initiate, the pastoral mode in English verse. He was cunning in metrical refinements, and made the great invention which continues to be named from him the Spenserian stanza — sonorous, majestic, gathering and refluent like the waves of a profound and musical sea. Intentionally archaic in his diction, he heightened the stature of English as a poetic language, and raised it to a pitch of exaltation which had not previously been approached, and has hardly since been rivalled by the few noblest amongst his successors. There are considerable differences of degree in the excellence of Spenser's compositions ; but, broadly speaking, whatever he did has the authentic poetic stamp, and can be read as a choice and finished example of its kind. The Faery Queen, on which alone we need dwell in concluding, is an unmatched and unique work for a quality which might be defined under the name " moral gorgeousness "; the sphere and substance of the poem being constantly moral, its forms are all imaginative and sump- tuous — an embattled cloudland lit by the most transfiguring tints of the rising and the setting sun. The splendours which enkindle and subserve passion in other writers are marshalled by Spenser into the train of ethics. Hence comes the fascina- tion, and also, it may be allowed, much of the fatiguing effect, of Spenser's gracious and grand creation; we feel that the means are coerced into the service of the end rather than LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. natively germane to that : they are made by the master's hand to grow into it, instead of growing out of it in natural and spontaneous development. They form an alien though magnificent grafting, not a free efflorescence. We need not dwell further on this side of the question. Among very great poems, the Divina Commedia of Dante and the Faery Queen of Spenser stand alone in taking as their direct theme moral or spiritual virtue, to be exhibited, enforced, and illustrated : Dante supplied his own designation as the Poet of Rectitude. The Florentine developed his theme with all resources of the sublime, the stupendous, the awful, with the mysteries of human loveliness and the pangs of human pathos. The Englishman works out his subject with the allurements of romance; chivalric adventure, beauty, noble and gloomy imagery, are the ministers of his will. As we read, we clearly appreciate his central in- tention, and can estimate his scheme as a formative whole ; but the romance it is that from first to last usurps upon us, and the separate episodes usurp upon the entire romance. Spenser himself, in a letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, set forth the purport of the Faery Queen, which is, he tells us, " a con- tinued allegory or dark conceit." He says — (I condense con- siderably) — " The general end of all the book is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline ; which for that I conceived should be most plausible and pleas- ing being coloured with an historical fiction, I chose the history of King Arthur. I labour to pourtraict in Arthur, before he was king, the image of a brave knight perfected in the twelve private moral virtues, as Aristotle hath devised ; the which is the purpose of these first twelve Books. Which if I find]to be well accepted, I may be perhaps encouraged to" k frame the other part of politic virtues in his person after that he came to be king. Arthur I conceive to have seen in a dream or vision the Faery Queen ; with whose excellent beauty ravished, he awak- ing resolved to seek her out. In that Faery Queen I mean EDMUND SPENSER. 33 Glory in my general intention ; but, in my particular, I conceive the most excellent and glorious person of our sovereign the Queen, — and her kingdom, in Faery -land. And yet, in some parts else, I do otherwise shadow her ; for, considering she beareth two persons — the one of a most royal queen or empress, the other of a most virtuous lady— this latter part, in some places, I do express in Belphcebe. So, in the person of Prince Arthur, I set forth Magnificence in particular ; which virtue for that (according to Aristotle and the rest) it is the perfection of all the rest, and co ntaineth in it them, all, therefore in the whole course I mention the deeds of Arthur appliable to that virtue which I write of in that Book. But of the twelve other virtues I make twelve other knights the patrons, for the more variety of the history ; of which these three Books contain three. The first, of the Knight of the Red Cross, in whom I express Holi- ness ; the second, of Sir Guyon, in whom I set forth Temperance . the third, of Britomartis a lady-knight, in whom I picture Chastity. The method of a poet historical is not such as of an historiographer. The beginning of my history, if it were to be told by an historiographer, should be the twelfth Book, which is the last ; where I devise that the Faery Queen kept her annual feast twelve days ; upon which twelve several days the occasions of the twelve several adventures happened which, being undertaken by twelve several knights, are in these twelve books severally handled and discoursed." Such, in Spenser's own mind, were the plan and purport of the vast poetical work which remains to all time a model of the loftiness of imaginative and inventive narration, and of the greatness of verse. POETS BORN BETWEEN SPENSER AND SHAKESPEARI Sir Walter Raleigh 1552 to 1618. George Peele c. 1552 to 1598. Toiin Lyly - f I553 ° r I554 t0 far!y -' (in the 17th century. Sir Philip Sidney 155410 15S6. Fulke Greville Lord Brooke.. 1554 to 1628. George Chapman 1557 to 1634. Sir John Harington c. 1561 to 1612. . Samuel Daniel 1562 to 161c. Joshua Sylvester 1563 to 1618. Michael Drayton 1563 to 1631. Christopher Marlqw c. 1565 to 1593. Sir Henry Wotton 156S to 1639. Edward Fairfax died c. 1632. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. What shall be said about Shakespeare ? What shall not be said ? How could one adequately express the sense of his greatness ? How word anything on this subject which has not been worded, and better worded, before? The mind bows down before this supreme embodiment of human intellect and of the universality of human character, and confesses its incom- petence to estimate him, or to express even such estimate as it can attain to forming. Analysis has long been exhausted, and praise along with that : enthusiasm and reverence remain ; but the terms in which they could be imparted show colourless and dull, sound thin and hollow. I shall attempt little beyond summarizing the known or presumed facts of Shakespeare's life, and then supplying in translation a few of the things which have been greatly said about him — said by the foremost poet of our epoch, Victor Hugo ; whose book on the mightiest of dramatists is little known to English readers, and has somehow been mostly supposed in this country to be worthy rather of raillery than study. William Shakespeare came of a family of decent credit on the paternal side, and on the maternal of some dignity and position. John Shakespeare, his father, was son of a substantial farmer at Snitterfield, a village three or four miles distant from Stratford-on-Avon in Warwickshire. Mary Arden, the poet's mother, was grand-niece to a gentleman who had been Groom of the Chamber to Henry VII., and who was a brother of Sir 4 :;: 36 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. John Arden : this family was connected with that which pro- duced the Hampden so famous in the time of Charles I. Mary's father was an opulent yeoman at Wilmecote, and she herself heiress to a small farm named Ashbies ; she married John Shakespeare presumably about 1557. The latter, towards 155 1, had opened a shop in Henley Street, Stratford, for the sale of gloves, and probably of meat, wool, and barley. He prospered, and bought two small copyhold properties ; became a burgess and an alderman of the town — which may at this time have numbered some twelve-hundred inhabitants — and held other local offices. He was not only an ordinary alderman, but in 1568, four years after the poet's birth, bailiff or chief magistrate of Stratford, and in September 1 5 7 1 chief alderman : this clearly stamps him as a person of eminent credit in his locality, or, as we should now say, of " the highest respect- ability." A grant of arms was made to him in 1569, and con- firmed in 1599. The instrument of confirmation recites that the great grandfather of John Shakespeare had been rewarded with lands and tenements for services rendered to Henry VII. Thus we see that, both on the father's and on the mother's side, the dramatist had special reasons for bearing the first Tudor sovereign in loyal memory; and his play of Richard III. indicates that so he did. It is universally, and we may say correctly, assumed that in that world-famous house in Henley Street the poet was born in April 1564. The day of his baptism was the 26th of that month. The exact natal day is fixed at the 23rd, St. George's Day, by the tradition (supposing it to be true) that he died on the very anniversary of his birth. There were seven other children of the marriage, two of them preceding and dying before the birth of William; four younger ones, three brothers named Gilbert, Richard, and Edmund, and a sister Joan, grew up. Edmund, who died in 1607, became, like Shakespeare himself, an actor in London. Joan married a Mr. Hart • and WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 37 to the Hart family the house in Henley Street continued to belong up to 1806. William was probably sent at an early age to the Free School of Stratford : it is to be presumed that he here learned the rudiments of Latin, but not any Greek. He is said to have left school prematurely, owing to the narrowing circumstances of his father; who in 1578 had to mortgage the farm of Ashbies, and can in other respects be traced to have declined. What Shakespeare did upon leaving school is matter of conjecture, or at best of obscure tradition. Aubrey retails a story indicating that he was apprenticed to a butcher, or perhaps served his own father in the butchering branch (if such existed) of the paternal business. " When he killed a calf," says Aubrey, " he would do it in a high style, and make a speech ; " a story which was indeed easy to invent, but which is also not particularly difficult to believe. Another story, also from Aubrey, is that he acted as a country schoolmaster; a third supposition — founded on the intimate acquaintance with legal terms apparent in so many of his writings — that he entered a lawyer's office. In his nineteenth year Shakespeare married ; and the facts suggest that the bride-elect had been liberal of her favours to her boy-wooer in anticipation of the nuptial ceremony. The damsel, about eight years his senior, was Anne, daughter of Richard Hathaway, a well-to-do yeoman at Shottery, a village distant about a mile or so from Stratford. There was only one asking of the banns of marriage, instead of the prescribed and customary three ; and, to save the licensing bishop and his officers harmless for such an irregularity and against other contingencies, two friends of the Hathaways, Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, had to enter beforehand into a bond, dated 28 November 1582, taking all the responsibility on themselves. The wedding ensued; and only about six months thereafter, on the 26th of May 1583, the firstborn child, Susanna, was baptized. It should be understood that Anne LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. Hathaway's indiscretion, if any there was, was not a very grave one according to the standard of those times, for betrothal or precontract carried the privileges of marriage; in order to legitimize the offspring, however, actual preceding marriage Avas requisite. At Charlecote, in the neighbourhood of Stratford, resided a magistrate, Sir Thomas Lucy, who for various reasons was by no means in good odour with the townsmen. There was no park at Charlecote, and therefore many modern scrutinizers of well-worn old stories say there were not any deer; nevertheless it is possible that there were deer although there was not a park. It is highly conceivable that the ruffling boon-com- panions and mounting young spirits of Stratford thought it a fine sort of thing to harass the public enemy Sir Thomas by any means they could, and among others by appropriating his deer, if any existed — an act which should rather be regarded under the circumstances as retaliatory poaching than as strictly criminal deer-stealing. And it is equally possible that Shakespeare may have borne his part in expeditions of this kind. No proof to any such effect is, or ever has been, adduced ; but an old and constant tradition purports that he stole deer from Sir Thomas Luc}', and was prosecuted for so doing. The tradition does not add that he was convicted, nor, if convicted, what his sentence was — the offence was a trespass, and the maximum punishment, even for deer-stealing in a park, would have been limited to three months' imprison- ment and triple damages. One infers rather that the prosecution lapsed in consequence of his decamping — for that is the most essential part of the whole tale : Shakespeare " made himself scarce," and came up to London, and many a thing ensued which otherwise might not have ensued. The tale seems credible enough ; to be accepted or not " as you like it." Shakespeare is said to have finished-off this adventure by writ- ing, and affixing to the gate of Charlecote, the following abusive stave on Sir Thomas Lucy : — WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 39 "A parliament-member, a justice of peace, At home a poor scarecrow, at London an ass : If ' lousy ' is ' lucy ' (as some volk miscall it), Then Lucy is lousy, whatever befall it. He thinks.himself great ; Yet an ass in his state We allow by his ears but with asses to mate. If ' lucy' is ' lousy ' (as some volk miscall it), Sing lousy Lucy, whatever befall it." I This rhyming peccadillo may or may not be Shakespeare's* one cannot say for certain. Along with it, as bearing on the main question of the deer-stealing, we have to take count of the first scene in the Merry Wives of Windsor. Here Justice Shallow accuses Falstaff of having " beaten my men, killed my deer, and broken open my lodge"'; and he and his ancestors, are said by his Cousin Slender to have " the dozen white luces in their coat " [coat of arms], and the parson Sir Hugh Evans puns or blunders upon this observation, " The dozen white louses do become an old coat well." The luce (pike-fish or jack) was the crest of the Lucy family. — A different motive suggested for Shakespeare's going to London is the decrease of his father's means, and the necessity for doing what he could for his own growing family: two twins, Hamnet and Judith, had succeeded Susanna, and had been christened in February 1585. These however were in fact the last of his children, to all appearance. How did Shakespeare fare in London ? It is certain that at some time, perhaps in 1586, he became an actor in Lord Strange's (afterwards the Lord Chamberlain's) company at one of the two theatres in Shoreditch ; but whether this was his first employment is questioned. A member of an Inn of Court, writing about 1693, says that Shakespeare Avas originally received into the playhouse as a "servitor" ; and the story runs that he used to hold the horses of the gentlemen who 1 Two other verses of this ballad have been given ; they are probably forgeries by Chetwood. , 4Q LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. came to see the performances, and that he got noted for expertness in his humble vocation. Leaving this dubious preliminary, we behold William Shakespeare initiated into his immortality by the fact of his becoming an actor — various companies of players had visited Stratford in his boyhood, and had possibly excited in him some emulous longings and apti- tudes — and by his being thus put in the way, not only of acting, but also of revising and re-adapting plays written by other authors, and hence in the sequel undertaking plays of his own ; how different from all that had preceded, and how supreme over all, even if we look only to his earliest original productions, the world has sufficiently found out. — I will divide Shakespeare's London career into three sections, and consider him — ist, as the Actor; 2nd, as the Author; 3rd, as the Man. 1. Shakespeare the Actor. There is a famous passage (which will be quoted further on) in the work which Robert Greene wrote on his deathbed in 1592, A Groatsworth of Wit, attacking Shakespeare savagely ; this work was edited by Henry Chettle, stationer (i.e. printer or compositor) and playwright, who a few months afterwards apologized for the attack, and averred Shakespeare to be " excellent " in his vocation ; and, though there is nothing to show that he ever made a great sensation as an actor, we may reasonably assume that he was a creditable, and even a distinguished, member of his company. It is said that he played the part of a king in various pieces, and some part or other in Ben Jonson's Scjanus, and (among other characters) the Ghost in Hamlet. Whether he played the part like " an oyster-wife " would be matter of opinion. Thomas Lodge was entitled to his opinion, and he, in his Wit's Misery, dated 1596, has a funny passage applicable to some actor of the Ghost, possibly (though this is the merest conjecture) Shake- speare : " He [the fiend Hate-Virtue] looks as pale as the visard of the Ghost which cried so miserably at the Theatre like an oyster-wife, ' Hamlet, revenge ! ' " The facts of Shakespeare's, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 41 subsequent connexion with the Blackfriars Theatre, and after- wards with the Globe (or Bankside) Theatre, have been involved in great confusion by definite mis-statements, worse than a free confession of simple uncertainty ; it has been said, for instance, and repeated times out of number, that he was a sharer in the Blackfriars Theatre as early as 1589, and concurred in the building of the Globe. The contrary is apparent from documents recently published, and seemingly unimpugnable. Richard Burbage (who became the most celebrated actor of the time) and his brother, Cuthbert Burbage, built the Globe Theatre in 1599. They placed Shakespeare in the theatre, and made him and some others partners in the profits of " the House " (so-called) — a term which may at that time have designated the money paid at the doors, and perhaps something more. At a later date — later certainly than May 1603, when James I. came to the throne — the Burbages re-entered upon the Blackfriars Theatre, which had been built by their father years before the Globe ; and here also they placed Shakespeare and other actors. The date when he left the stage is not certainly known : " after 1603" used to be the date assigned, but it is now clear that his retirement must have been some considerable while after 1603, which, as we have just seen, is the year when he was transferred (or retransferred) to the Blackfriars boards. Mani- festly he did not wholly like his occupation. He felt that it lowered him in the eyes of others ; perhaps too even in his own, for Shakespeare, it may be abundantly inferred from his writings, always accounted himself a gentleman by birth and breeding, and the associates of his choice were gentlemen. Witness the following passages from his sonnets (no, in) : — "Alas, 'tis true I have gone here and there, And made myself a motley to the view. Oh for my sake do you with Fortune chide, The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide Than public means which public manners breeds. 42 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. Thence comes it that my name receives a brand ; And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer's hand. Pity me then, and wish I were renewed." 2. Shakespeare the Author. If we except the doggrel effusions dubiously ascribed to his youth, before he came to London, — the verses on Sir Thomas Lucy, and a still more juvenile quat- rain ridiculing the neighbouring villages where he had drunk. 1 — we know of nothing written by Shakespeare earlier for certain than 1593 and 1594, at which dates he must have been at least twenty-eight and twenty-nine years of age. In 1593 he pub- lished his poem of Venus and Adonis; which, in the dedication addressed to Henry Wriothesly, Earl of Southampton, he terms " the first heir of my invention " (some critics suppose it to have been written years before): and in 1594 the Rape of Lucrece, dedicated to the same nobleman. The latter enter- tained a warm friendship for Shakespeare : one anecdote (which greatly needs verification however) is that the Earl on one occasion gave the actor ^1000. Venus and Adonis made an impression, running rapidly through several editions : the seventh (or perhaps sixth) appeared in 1602. The date when the greatest dramatist of the world first wrote a play cannot be fixed; but it must have been not later at any rate than 1597, when the texts of his RicJiard II, Richard III, and Romeo and Juliet, were published. He himself had nothing apparently to do with the publication in this instance, or in the instance of any other of his plays whatsoever : he wrote for the stage, acted in his own plays, pleased the audience as dramatist and player, distanced all writing competitors in this form of public favour, excited little notice and less enthusiasm among brother 1 Here are the verses : — " Piping Pebworth, dancing Marston, Haunted Hillborough, and hungry Grafton, With dodging Exhall, papist Wixford, Beggarly Broom, and drunken Bid ford." WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 43 authors, knew his own worth, and (seemingly with the most reckless indifference) abandoned his poetic offspring to their fate. Perhaps he had gone to the cuckoo's school for policy, and felt pretty sure that the eggs deposited by the cuckoo in the sparrow's nest would he hatched, if not by itself, by the sparrow. It remains none the less astonishing to all lovers of art that any such artist as Shakespeare should have tolerated the haphazard and harumscarum mode of publication of his dramas which alone he lived to see effected. In 1598 were published Love s Labour's Lost, and Henry IK, Part I. ; in 1600 Midsummer A T ighfs Dream, the Merchant of Venice, Henry IV., Part II., Henry V., Much Ado about Nothing, and (in a second edition) Titus Androniats ; z in 1602 the Merry Wives of Windsor ; in 1603 Hamlet, an unauthorized edition, followed in 1604 by a more correct one; in 1608 King Lear; in 1609 Troilus and Cressida, and Pericles. Moreover before 1598, the Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Won (which is probably identical with All's Well that ends Well), and King John, had been produced on the stage. The other plays, not distinctly accounted for as to year of writing and first representation, are As You Like Lt (towards 1600), Julius Ccesar and Twelfth Night (towards 1602), Measure for Measure and Othello (towards 1604), Macbeth (towards 16 10), Winters Tale (towards 161 1), the Taming of the Shrew, Henry VI., 2 Antony and Cleopatra, limon of Athens, Coriolanus, Cymbelinc, Henry VIII, and The Tempest. The last-named play, or else the Winter's Tale, is generally regarded as the latest of all in date. Then there are the sonnets pub- lished in the Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, and the general body 1 Some play under this title, not then ascribed to Shakespeare, was entered at Stationers' Hall in 1593. 2 Parts II. and III. of Henry VI, in their original form, which was probably not the work of Shakespeare, appeared in 1594 and 1595. Part I. is sus- pected not to be his at all. 44 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. of the sonnets in 1609. These compositions, or some not now definable portion of them, were spoken of as " his sugared sonnets among his private friends " in the Palladis Tamia of Meres, published in 1598, and must therefore be assigned to a date much earlier than 1609. The particular form of the sonnet adopted by Shakespeare had been exemplified by Samuel Daniel in a work issued in 1592, and before him by Lord Surrey and others. When we speak of those greatest dramatic and intellectual master-strokes of the world's literature, we should not forget the material condition, to modern notions ludicrously primitive, of the theatres in which they were presented. That the female characters were all acted by boys is not so much to the pur- pose ; though we can hardly doubt that such immaturely juvenile actors were always mediocre actors, and we must think accordingly of the Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra, Rosalind, Juliet, or Desdemona, of those days. A pair of crossed swords, or sometimes two lathes, symbolized a battle ; the shirt worn out- side the dress showed a knight ; the housekeeper's petticoat over a broomstick stood for a caparisoned horse. In 1598 one theatre possessed as its properties the limbs of a Moor, a dragon, a large horse with its legs, a cage, a rock, four heads of Turks and one of Mahound, a wheel, and hell's-mouth. Another owned a sun, a target, the triple plume of the Prince of Wales with motto, six devils, and the pope astride of a mule. Shakespeare's supreme genius, and the hearty public ac- ceptance of his dramas, were not likely to pass unbespattered by envy ; Greene, in his Groats-worth of Wit (already referred to), in enforcing the general text that play-writing had become a work unfit for gentlemen, and that actors were presumptuous, and ungrateful, adverted malignantly to "an upstart crow beautified in our feathers, that, with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast-out a blank verse as the best of you ; and, being an absolute WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 45 Johannes Factotum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shake- scene in a country." This was confuted however by Greene's own editor Chettle, who is the earliest known eulogist of Shakespeare, and who speaks (among other more strictly personal merits) of his " facetious grace in writing." Here "facetious" is probably not to be taken in its modern meaning of "witty" or "humorous," but rather in a more general sense — " ingenious, felicitous " ; nevertheless it might seem that contemporaries were more especially struck, in the earlier work of Shakespeare at any rate, with his brilliancy in wit and re- partee. His plays became the town-talk ; Queen Elizabeth had them represented at court, and, being charmed with the Falstaff of Henry IV., is said to have wished to see the carnal knight on the boards in love — which gave the hint for writing the Merry Wives of Windsor. Her successor was not less discerning, and Shakespeare was the favourite playwright of James I. Ward's Diary (dating from 1648 to 1679) records a report that Shakespeare, living in his later days at Stratford, supplied the stage with two plays every year, and for this received an allowance so large that he spent at the rate of ^1000 per annum. The diarist was vicar of Stratford, and not unlikely to have some knowledge of his facts ; yet the state- ment can hardly be accepted in detail. The richness of Shakespeare's vocabulary is partly the rich- ness of his mind : it has been computed that he uses about 15,000 words, while even so great a poetic successor as Milton numbers only about 8000. We find in him the technical phraseology, not alone of law as previously mentioned, but equally of medicine, surgery, chemistry, war, navigation, field- sports, music, necromancy, printing. He seems to have known French and Italian : some of his plays are founded on Italian originals whereof no contemporary translation can be traced. I have said that he knew his own worth ; his conviction that his writings are imperishable — even such minor writings as the 46 LTVES OF FAMOUS POETS. sonnets — is amply proveable from passages in the latter. As for instance — " So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." " Yet do thy worst, old Time ! Despite thy wrong, My love shall in my verse ever live young." " Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme : But you shall shine more bright in these contents Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time. When wasteful war shall statues overturn, And broils root out the work of masonry, Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn The living record of your memory. 'Gainst death and all oblivious enmity Shall you pace forth : your praise shall still find room Even in the eyes of all posterity That wear this world out to the ending doom. So, till the Judgment that yourself arise, You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes." " For such a time do I now fortify Against confounding Age's cruel knife, That he shall never cut from memory My sweet love's beauty, though my lover's life. His beauty shall in these black lines be seen ; And they shall live, and he in them still green." " Your monument shall be my gentle verse, Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read, And tongues to-be your being shall rehearse When all the breathers of this world are dead. You still shall live — such virtue hath my pen — Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men." " Make answer, Muse ! Wilt thou not haply say ' Truth needs no colour, with his colour fixed ' ? Excuse not silence so : for 't lies in thee To make him much outlive a gilded tomb, And to be praised of ages yet to be." " Now with the drops of this most balmy time My love looks fresh ; and Death to me subscribes, Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme, While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes : And thou in this shalt find thy monument When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent." WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 47 The trumpet-tone of all these lines is wondrously inspiriting: they express a perfect and splendid confidence. 1 That Shake- speare, who led an inconspicuous life, and took no heed for the preservation of any of his writings later than the Venus and Adorns and the Lucrecc, should yet have known with such entire certainty that they would outlive the perishing body of men and things till the Resurrection of the Dead — this is the most moving fact in his extant history ; the one which informs with grandeur of being, and reconciles into a potent unity, the resi- dual elements of his career, sparse and disparate at best, some- times insignificant or incongruous-looking. I will here make only one observation regarding Shake- speare's dramas, and glance at one phase, and only one, of his position in the world of mind. The observation is simply this: That, whatever may be his imperfections (and they are chiefly imperfections deriving from excess of power, and exuberance of resource and performance), there is scarcely a sentence in the dramas which does not challenge admiration on one or other of three grounds — either for depth or fineness of thought or imagery, or for beauty or force of diction, or for true character and dramatic appropriateness. Then, as to Shake- speare's position in the world of mind, it may be said that, though few writers could be named who less belong than he, in a direct sense, to what may be called the Party of Modern Progress, few from whom the watchwords of modern ideas 2 are less expressly audible, few who pertain more dis- tinctly to the aristocratic constitution of society, with a defined order in state and government, monarchical and hieratic, there is nevertheless none to whom, in the long run, the emancipated movement of mind is more deeply indebted. He is, of all 1 It should not be concealed, however, that somewhat similar expressions were used by other sonneteers, and they formed almost a commonplace of sonnet- literature. 2 I mean for instance such watchwords as " Liberty, Equality, and Frater- nity," or " Civil and Religious Liberty," or "Am I not a man and a brother?" LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. writers, the one who works in the region of man's multiform nature — who fixes our attention upon man as the prime factor in all combinations which we have to contemplate and to deal with. In comparison with the impulses and acts of the human spirit, all else is to him vague, alien, and remote. Religion, supernaturalism, are for Shakespeare potent imaginative means — possibly sincere personal convictions : but they are not his subject-matter, are barely a part of his working apparatus. In the strife of faiths and of sects at the close of the sixteenth century and opening of the seventeenth, his creed is undis- coverable ; catholic or protestant we know not, christian or non-christian we cannot pronounce. He affirms nothing of the origin or destiny of the soul : what he fathoms is its nature, and what he exhibits its phenomena. If we call to memory, along with Shakespeare, the greatest preceding poet of the modern world, Dante, we shall see the immensity of the contrast ; and this not alone in the choice of subject and mode of develop- ment, but in the very essence of the thing developed, and of the intellectual forces at work upon it : and the same, with differences of degree, may be said of all previous writers x as pitted against Shakespeare. In him only we find this positive starting-point — the mind, spirit, character, passions, faculties, physical personality, of man, without prepossessions or premiss suppositions on the author's part : he is committed to nothing, except to telling us what he discerns and divines, and that with a universality of perception for great and for little, and a radiant splendour of interpretation and presentment, actual and imaginative, to which no parallel exists. He fixes our mind upon realities, not upon suppositions : he shows us that the facts of the world are such and such, not that the reasons for these facts are so and so. He compels us to attend to man and his nature — a microcosm in a macrocosm : the microcosm 1 Chaucer, I think, approaches nearer than any other European writer to Shakespeare, in this respect. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 49 open to our perception and worthy of our knowledge, the macrocosm not known, and not ascertained to be knowable. A new literature begins with Shakespeare ; begins and in some sense ends with him, for he (it might almost be averred) exhausts its possibilities in suggestion and function, though of course not at all in formative growth and sequence. 3. Shakespeare the Man. Beyond the few matter-of-fact details that we know concerning the dramatist's life after he came to the capital, we must turn to his sonnets for informa- tion. We know, for instance, that he had not been many years in London before he began providing for his ultimate re- settlement in Stratford -on- Avon. Early in 1597 he bought for £60 (a sum which may be roughly computed as equal to ^600 at the present day) the house named New Place, about the very best in Stratford. In 1602 he bought for ^320 some arable land, 107 acres, in the parish of Old Stratford ; and in the same year some property in the town. In 1605 ensued his largest purchase — £aA° f° r the remainder of a lease, thirty-one years, of the tithes of Stratford, Old Stratford, Bishopton, and Welcombe. In 1604, when he must still have been a London actor, he prosecuted one Rogers, who had bought a quantity of malt from him, and left the debt unpaid; and in 1608 he sued John Addenbrooke for a small debt, and, on Addenbrooke's absconding, proceeded against his security : trivial facts which have been cited, and no doubt truly so as far as they go, as showing that the author of Julius Ccesar and King Lear was a business-man looking sharply, like others, after his own material interests. Some other facts of similar bearing will be mentioned in the sequel. He was in the practice of visiting Stratford re- gularly, perhaps even once every year, during his London career. The exact state of his family relations is open to con- jecture. It is presumed that, on first coming to the capital, he left his wife and three children in Stratford : they may or may not have rejoined him at a later date. He lived near the Bear 5 50 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. Garden, Southwark, in 1596: in 1609 he occupied a good house within the Liberty of the Clink. He frequented the Mermaid Tavern in Cheapside, close to Bread Street, as a member of a club founded by Sir Walter Raleigh: here he waged his famous "wit-combats" with Ben Jonson (ten years his junior), graphically described by Fuller. " Many were the wit- combats betwixt him and Ben Jonson, which two I beheld like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war. Master Jonson, like the former, was built far higher in learning ; solid, but slow in his performances. Shakespeare, like an English man-of-war, lesser in bulk but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention." Jonson himself has left a pleasant record of "gentle Shakespeare," saying : " I loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side idolatry, as much as any : he was indeed honest, and of an open and free nature." This accords with the testimony of Chettle, who (in addition to expressions already quoted) speaks of Shakespeare's " civil demeanour," and his "honesty," by which we should under- stand well-bred straightforwardness, the distinctive mark of a gentleman. And now for the sonnets. This series, numbering 154 items, has, as we all know, been the object of all sorts of disquisitions and commentaries; some aiming to show that the sonnets con- tribute nothing, or next to nothing, to Shakespeare's biography; others, that they are written as in the person of a different speaker; others, that their main object is literary satire, a " take-off" of the excesses of amorous sonneteers. Others again, accepting the sonnets as substantially autobiographical, debate to whom they are addressed, whence originating, and why presenting the poet to us in the light in which they do present him ; and one frequent attempt has been to explain away such prima facie appearances in the sonnets as might induce us to think that Shakespeare was fond to fatuity of a WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 51 male friend, and illicitly enamoured of a female inveigler. For my part, having given the sonnets the best consideration in my power, I can come to but one conclusion — namely, that these are the very points which must not be explained away ; that the sonnets pourtray to us Shakespeare himself, and such as he really was in sentiment and environment. The sonnets fall into two main divisions. The first and longer division consists of verses addressed to a male friend, expressing a rapturous self-devotion and self-abnegation of amity, and in especial enlarging upon the young man's per- sonal beauty, and the obligation, incumbent on him from this and other circumstances, to marry, and prolong his race. Another point clearly indicated is the competition of some other writer with Shakespeare for the affection and good offices of his friend : this other writer has with some likelihood been surmised to be Spenser. The attachment expressed by Shake- speare for his friend, manifestly a person of social rank far supe- rior to his own, is, as I have said, " rapturous," — no fainter word would be adequate : it has even been thought by many to savour so strongly of passionate love as well-nigh to overbalance the evidence, patent though this is on the face of numerous sonnets, that their subject is really a man, and not a woman. On this point I shall only say that the person in question is clearly and certainly a man ; that the feelings expressed are those of friendship, sublimated indeed and unmeasured, yet not transmuted or perverted out of its own nature ; and that what is excessive in these feelings may apparently be ascribed partly to the genuine fervour of the writer's sentiment, and partly to extravagances of diction, such as Shakespeare was assuredly not alone in his time in adopting. Conscious and censurable adulation of a valuable patron may also perhaps be allowed as counting for something; not, I would with sin- cerity infer, for very much : this also would be only too con- formable to the manners of the age. The second and shorter 5 * 52 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. division of the sonnets sets forth (in terms that are quite un- mistakeable to any one who is not prepared to go the extreme length of rejecting the poems altogether in their primary and professed meaning) that the writer was infatuated and enslaved, against his own better knowledge and sense of right, by a dark- complexioned woman, unworthy of the love of a high-soul ed man ; and further that she intrigued, not only with the writer himself in violation of the general canons of social morals, but also with his friend — to all appearance the same friend to whom the other sonnets are addressed — in violation of the bonds of personal love and honour. I can discover no reason why the sonnets, in this their twofold aspect, should not be a faithful picture of a certain stage in Shakespeare's life ; and I therefore firmly believe that he entertained a long-standing and most ardent attachment for a youth of high rank and eminent en- dowments of person and spirit, and that he got entangled with a paramour of some fascination and no character. Why indeed should we disbelieve either or both of these plainly intimated facts ? The only reason appears to be that we, or some of us, would rather not believe them if we could help. Who the woman may have been is totally obscure — sonnet 152 shows her to have been a married woman: but the man has been searched for with diligence, and with some dim semblance of successful result. The sonnets were never published by Shakespeare himself; but in 1609 they were printed and issued by a bookseller, Thomas Thorpe, whose few words of introductory inscription 1 seem to imply that the male friend to whom most of the poems relate was a certain " Mr. W. H." I say " seem to imply" ; for the syntactic construction of the words, no less than the meaning of one 'The words are as follows (I modernize the spelling) : "To the only be- getter of these ensuing sonnets Mr. W. H. all happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living Poet wisheth The well-wishing adventurei in setting forth T. T. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 53 phrase "only begetter," is undoubtedly ambiguous, and has excited endless discussion. Assuming then that Mr. W. H. is the young man celebrated in the sonnets, we have to enquire who is represented by these initials. Henry Wriothesly Earl of Southampton, and William Herbert Earl of Pembroke, are the only two probable competitors started by name. Each of these men was in 1609 a peer, and not a "Mr.": but it is allowed on all hands that the application of the term " Mr." to a peer would be an anomaly not unexampled at that period. Both Wriothesly and Herbert were personally well known to Shakespeare : the former, so far as all records go, was certainly the better known of the two, and was, as we have already seen, a specially attached friend of his. The inversion of the initials "W. H." if Wriothesly is meant, whereas there is no in- version if Herbert is meant, counts for a little in favour of Herbert ; not for very much, for the inscription is obviously reticent to some extent, and may have been purposely reticent even to the extent of such an inversion. Wriothesly was born in 1573, and would at the presumed date of the earliest among the sonnets — say 1597 — have been twenty-four years of age. Herbert, who is known to have been a handsome young man, was born in 1580, and would in 1597 have been but seventeen ; an age which, youthful as it is, need not be deemed absolutely inconsistent with the tone of the sonnets, especially in the mind of Shakespeare who had himself married at eighteen. Besides, if the earliest sonnets may be dated about 1597, many others are of course later than that : one of them seemingly refers to the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, and the accession of James I. — No. 107, beginning " Not mine own fears nor the prophetic soul." Altogether it seems that the claim of Herbert is rather the pre- ferable one of the two. To me, accepting the sonnets as fairly autobiographical, it appears pretty clear that the friend who intrigued with Shakespeare's mistress, and whom I plainly un- 54 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. derstand to be the same person as the friend mentioned in the earlier sonnets, must have been named William, not Henry; and, if so, Herbert Earl of Pembroke, not Wriothesly Earl of Southampton. I found this opinion on the following three sonnets (135, 136, and 143) addressed to the woman. It has been observed time out of mind that these sonnets pun upon the word "will," as meaning firstly "will, volition," and secondly "Will, William Shakespeare." I am not the first to point out that a third " Will " — i.e. a second man named William — is also in question. To emphasize this interpretation I print the sonnets with a triple typography for the word "will" ; viz. will when volition is meant, Will (italics) when Shakespeare is meant, and Will (capitals) when the interloping friend is meant. " Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy will, And Will to boot, and Will in overplus : More than enough am I that vex thee still, To thy sweet will making addition thus. Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious, Not once vouchsafe to hide my Will in thine ? Shall Will in others seem right gracious, And in my Will no fair acceptance shine ? The sea, all water, yet receives rain still, And in abundance addeth to his store : So thou, being rich in will, add to thy will One Will of mine, to make thy large will more. Let no unkind, no fair beseechers kill : r Think all but one, and me in that one Will. "If thy soul check thee that I come so near, Swear to thy blind soul that I was thy Will, — And will, thy soul knows, is admitted there ; Thus far for love my love-suit, sweet, fulfil. 1 I do not understand this line. It seems to me that " kill " can hardly be right, and ' ' skill " would make more sense : ' ' skill " in the signification of "avail, succeed" — as in the expression "it skills not." — Since I wrote this note, Professor Dowden (to whose friendliness and eminent endowments as a Shakespearean scholar I am indebted for some guidance and confirmation in this my trivial essay in the poet's biography) has suggested to me a very diffe- rent emendation of the line — perhaps a better one. Will will fulfil the treasure of thy love, — Ay, fill it full with wills, and my Will one. In things of great receipt, with ease we prove Among a number one is reckoned none. Then in the number let me pass untold, Though in thy store's account I one must be : For nothing hold me, so it please thee hold That nothing, me, a something sweet to thee. , Make but my name thy love, and love that still, And then thou lov'st me, for my name is Will. ' ' Lo ! as a careful housewife runs to catch One of her feathered creatures broke away, Sets down her babe, and makes all swift dispatch In pursuit of the thing she would have stay, — Whilst her neglected child holds her in chase, Cries to catch her, whose busy care is bent To follow that which flies before her face, Not prizing her poor infant's discontent : — So runn'st thou after that which flies from thee, Whilst I, thy babe, chase thee afar behind : But, if thou catch thy hope, turn back to me, And play the mother's part, kiss me, be kind. So will I pray that thou mayst have thy Will, If thou turn back, and my loud crying still." Another point in favour of Pembroke as against Southamp- ton — and this, I fancy, has received little or no attention — arises from a phrase in sonnet 3 — "Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee Calls back the lovely April of her prime " — a manifest and admitted assertion that the person addressed bore a strong resemblance to his mother. Now Pembroke really was very like the "Sidney's sister,. Pembroke's mother," of Ben Jonson's famous verse ; whereas there is not, so far as I can learn, any evidence to a like effect in the case of South- ampton. 1 It may be said— and to me has been said by two 1 Mr. Scharf, of the National Portrait-Gallery, has kindly given me his valuable aid on this point. He says (July 1876) : " I do not call to mind any representation of the mother of Henry Wriothesly Earl of Southampton, and 56 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. friends most worthy of hearing — that "thou art thy mother's glass" means practically no more than "thou are thy parents glass," the mother being selected for mention merely as the sole surviving parent. This, however, does not convince me ; more especially considering that, as the entire passage in the sonnet is an argument that the young man ought to marry, and become a father, the natural thing to say by way of illustration, if only it could have been said with entire or partial truth, would be " thou art thy father's glass " — and, when the " mother " is substituted, I infer that this is done under the dictation of the actual fact. I must now leave the sonnets, and revert to the general course of Shakespeare's life. — He was probably still resident in London in 1611 : by 161 2 he is known to have been resettled at Stratford, which continued to be his home for the few remaining years of his life. The alderman's truant son re- turned to his native town a man of more worldly consequence, even in the eyes of his solid, humdrum, provincial fellow- citizens, than his father had ever been ; he occupied the best house in Stratford, and was in all likelihood the " greatest man" in that small town, as well as in " the great globe itself." His •only son Hamnethad died in 1596, his father in 1601, his mother in 1608. His eldest daughter Susanna had in 1607 married Dr. Hall, a local physician of some eminence, and they already had a daughter, Elizabeth, born in 1608. Shakespeare's wife, and his younger daughter Judith, kept house with him. That he continued attentive to his own minor interests is shown by his having, in 161 2, joined in a petition to the Court of Chancery to compel certain sharers with himself in the farming of the tithes Shakespeare's great friend. But between William Earl of Pembroke, and his mother ' Sidney's sister,' the portraits exhibit a marked resemblance. I think more particularly of the one of Mary Sidney in this gallery, and the many re- petitions of William Herbert by D. Mytens, especially those at Hardwick and Gorhambury." WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 57 to pay their quota of a general burden; and by his having resisted, in 1614, a proposed enclosure of some common-lands, detri- mental to his property. In February 1616 he married his daughter Judith to Mr. Thomas Quiney. It may have been in preparation for this event that on the 25th of January he had drawn-up his will ; in that instrument, which was finally executed on the 25th of March, he professes himself to be "in perfect health and memory," so that there is nothing to indicate that he was then sensible of his closely impending death. By the will he left all his lands, tenements, &c, to Susanna ; only ^300 to Judith ; and (by interlineation) his second-best bed with its furniture to his wife ; and some trifling legacies were added. The insignificant bequest to his wife has often been commented upon, as showing that the poet held her in slight regard : to this it is replied that, as almost all his estates were freehold, she was adequately provided for out of these by law, in the form of dower. It would seem that Shakespeare died worth no large sum in actual money ; another inference is that he must, at some time or other, have disposed of his theatrical property, which does not figure at all in his will. In another month Shakespeare was no more ; he died on the 23rd of April 1616. The only record of the cause of death, real or fictitious, is in Ward's Diary : " Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson, had a merry meeting, and, it seems, drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there con- tracted." On the 25 th he was buried in the Parish-church of Stratford, with the following epitaph — not, we may reasonably suppose, the composition of such a brain and hand as were now for ever at rest within his grave : " Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear To dig the dust enclosed here : Blest be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he that moves my bones." Shakespeare's widow survived him seven years, dying in 58 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. August 1623. His daughter Susanna Hall (the inheritor of the bulk of his property, and obviously therefore the person through whom he had hoped to "found a family," if that, as has some- times been supposed, was really an object he had at heart) had but one child, Elizabeth. This lady married Thomas Nash Esquire, and after his death John Barnard Esquire, knighted by Charles II. in 1661 ;she had no children, and died in 1670. Shakespeare's second daughter, Judith Quiney, had three sons, who died unmarried. And so, in brief space, the race of William Shakespeare was extinct. " What, will the aspiring blood of Lancaster Sink in the ground? I thought it would have mounted ! " — It may be added that the poet Sir William Davenant, author of Gondibert, was regarded by some contemporaries as an illegitimate son of Shakespeare, and was himself not averse to countenancing this surmise. The principal portraits representing Shakespeare, or supposed to represent him, are the Stratford bust adjacent to his grave, the Droeshout engraving, the Chandos painting, the Jansen painting, and the Felton Head ; also a mask, taken apparently after death, belonging to Herr Becker, and at one time depo- sited with Professor Owen. The first two alone are certainly known to pourtray Shakespeare : they correspond closely enough, while the others deviate considerably in one respect or another. The bust was praised in 1623 as a faithful likeness ; it was executed by Gerard Johnson, a Hollander, after the author's decease ; the authority from which he worked is dubious, but is believed to have been a cast taken after death — not (the internal evidence suggests as much) the one above-mentioned belonging to Herr Becker. This bust was originally (and is now again) coloured, and shows light hazel eyes, and auburn hair and beard. I need not enlarge upon other details in a matter so well known to all my readers. The Droeshout portrait was also produced in 1623, in the first collected edition WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 59 of Shakespeare's plays. It was eulogized by Ben Jonson ; and has been accepted as a true likeness by the idealist poet and painter William Blake, who professed to have seen Shakespeare's ghost, and who was at any rate better qualified than ninety-nine persons out of a hundred to infer from a man's spiritual product what his outer semblance might fittingly have been. I conclude, as premised, by translating a few passages from Victor Hugo's book published in 1864, William Shakespeare : passages which I present in a very condensed form, omitting many of the intermediate and connecting details. " What is Shakespeare ? One might almost reply, He is the Earth, the Globe. On the Globe is Man : hence the swarming in Shakespeare. Space, " the blue " (as the Germans say), is certainly not wanting in Shakespeare. The earth sees and traverses the heaven : knows this under its twofold aspect, darkness and azure, doubt and hope. Life comes and goes within death. All life is a secret ; a sort of enigmatic paren- thesis between birth and dissolution, between the eye that opens and the eye that closes. Of this secret Shakespeare feels the disquiet. In Shakespeare, the birds sing, the thickets are green, hearts love, souls suffer, the cloud roams, heat and cold succeed, night falls, time passes, the forests and the crowds speak, the vast eternal dream floats on. Sap and blood, all forms of the multiple fact, actions and ideas, man and mankind, livers and life, solitudes, towns, religions, diamonds, pearls, laystalls, charnels, the flux and reflux of being, the step of the comers and goers, — all this is present to Shakespeare and in Shakespeare : and, this genius being the earth, the dead rise therefrom. Certain sinister recesses of Shakespeare are haunted by spectres. Shakespeare gives a glimpse of the twilight horizon of conjecture : the possible, that casement of trance opened on the real. As to the real x Shakespeare brims with it : everywhere live flesh. Shakespeare has emotion, instinct, true 60 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. tone, right accent, the whole human multitude with its hum. His poetry is himself, and is, at the same time, you. Shake- speare marks the termination of the middle ages. This closing of the middle ages is wrought by Rabelais and Cervantes as well : but they, being solely banterers, present only a partial aspect : the mind of Shakespeare is a total. " To say ' Poet ' is to say — at the same time and of necessity — ' Historian and Philosopher.' Shakespeare is this threefold man. He is moreover the Painter, and what a painter ! — the colossal painter. Shakespeare has tragedy, comedy, fairy-tale, hymn, farce, the vast divine laughter, terror, and horror ; and, to say all in one word, drama. He touches the two poles. He belongs to Olympus and to the strolling theatre. No possi- bility eludes him. When he holds you, you are captive ; look for no mercy from him. He has the pathos of cruelty. He shows you a mother — Constance, mother of Arthur ; and, after he has brought you to that point of emotion when you have the same heart as herself, he kills her boy. No respite to the agony. Genius is inexorable; it has its own law, and follows that. The mind also has its inclined planes, and the slope determines its direction. Sheakespeare leans towards the terrible. The poet recognizes no limit save his goal ; he considers only the thought to be worked out. He allows no other sovereignty, no other necessity, than the idea ; for, as art emanates from the absolute, so, in art as in the absolute, the end justifies the means. Art, like the infinite, has a Because superior to every Why. Shakespeare's sovereign horrors reign and dominate. He mingles with them, when he chooses, fascination ■ that august fascination of strong natures — as superior to the weakly sweet- ness, the slim attraction, the charm, of Ovid or Tibullus, as the Venus of Melos is to the Venus de' Medici. The things of the unknown, metaphysical problems past fathoming, the enigmas of the soul, and of Nature which is also a soul, the remote intuitions of the eventual included in destiny, the amal- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 61 gams of thought and of event, can be translated into delicate contours, and can fill poesy with mysterious and exquisite types all the more ravishing for being a little dolorous, half inhering in the invisible, and at the same time most real, preoccupied with the shadow which is behind them, and essaying neverthe- less to affect you with pleasure. The grace of depth exists. Modern geniuses alone have that profundity in a smile which notifies at once an elegance and an abyss. Shakespeare possesses this grace. Hamlet, Doubt, is at the centre of his work; and at the two extremes, Romeo and Othello, the heart in its totality. Shakespeare is above all an imagination. Imagination is depth. No faculty of mind penetrates and delves more than imagination : it is the supreme diver. Science, arrived at the ultimate gulfs, encounters with it. The Poet philosophizes because he imagines. Hence Shakespeare owns that sovereign manipulation of reality which permits him to have out his whim with her. And this whim is itself a variety of truth — a variety which claims to be pondered. Whereto shall we compare fate unless to a fantasy ? Nothing more in- coherent in seeming, nothing more loosely linked, nothing more mis-deduced. Why crown that monster John ? why kill that child Arthur? But why Joan of Arc burned? why Monk triumphant? why impunity to Louis Quinze, and punishment to Louis Seize? Room for the logic of God! That is the logic wherein the fancy of the poet is nurtured. One of the characteristics of genius is the singular combining of the most far-away faculties. The inner tribunal of man belongs to Shakespeare. This he takes at unaware every moment. He draws from the conscience all the unforeseen that it contains. In this psychical exquisiteness few poet surpass him. Measure- less force, delicious charm, epic ferocity, pity, creative faculty, mirth, that high mirth unintelligible to narrow capacities, sar- casm, the puissant scourge-stroke to the wicked, starry grandeur, miscroscopic tenuity, an unlimited poesy which has a zenith 62 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. and a nadir, the vast whole, the profound detail — nothing is wanting to this mind. In approaching this man's work, one feels the enormous blast which might come from the opening of a world. The irradiation of genius in all directions — that is Shakespeare. " If ever a man has scantly deserved that schoolboy enco- mium " He is well-behaved," certainly it is Shakespeare. Shakespeare is one of the greatest 'ne'er-do-weels ' that right-minded aesthetics have ever had to catechize. Shake- speare is fertility, force, exuberance, the swollen breast, the foaming goblet, the brimming vat, sap in excess, lava in tor- rents, whirling germs, the vast rain of life, all in thousands, all in millions; no reticence, no binding-in, no parsimony, the insensate and tranquil prodigality of the creator. Will he soon be leaving off? Never. Shakespeare sows dazzlements broad- cast. At each word, an image ; at each word, a contrast ; at each word, day and night. The Poet is Nature. Subtle, minute, delicate, microscopic, like her : immense. Not dis- creet, not reserved, not thrifty. Magnificent in simplicity. Whatever may be the abundance, whatever may be the en- tanglements — even perplexed, intermixed, and inextricable- all that is true is simple. A root is simple. This simplicity, which is profound, is the only one known to art. Simplicity, being true, is ingenuous. Ingenuousness is the countenance of truth. Shakespeare is simple with the grand simplicity : he is even a simpleton in that. The petty sort he ignores. But likewise this Shakespeare respects nothing, he goes straight ahead, he leaves his followers breathless ; he overstrides the convenances, he hustles Aristotle. Shakespeare has no reserve, no retention, no frontier, no hiatus. Deficiency is the thing wherein he is deficient. No savings-bank, no Lent, for him. He overflows, like vegetation, like germination, like light, like flame. Othello, Romeo, Iago, Macbeth, Shylock, Richard the Third, Julius Caesar, Oberon, Puck, Ophelia, Desdemona, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 63 Juliet, Titania ; men, women, witches, fairies, ghosts ; Shake- speare is open-armed — Take, take, take ! More would you have ? Here are Ariel, Parolles, Macduff, Prospero, Viola, Miranda, Caliban. More still? Here are Jessica, Cordelia, Cressida, Portia, Brabantio, Polonius, Horatio, Mercutio, Imogen, Pandarus of Troy, Bottom, Theseus. Ecce Deus. It is the Poet : he proffers himself : who will have me ? He gives himself away, he spends himself abroad, he is prodigal of himself: he never empties. Why? He cannot. To him ex- haustion is impossible. He is bottomless: he fills and pours, then recommences : it is the riddled pannier of genius. The drama of Shakespeare marches with a sort of frenzied rhythm ; it is so vast that it totters ; it is dizzy, and makes you dizzy : yet nothing is so solid as this quaking grandeur. Inspiration being a prodigy, a sacred stupor mingles in it. A certain majesty of soul resembles the wilderness, and astonishment is born thereof. Shakespeare, like all great poets and all great things, is steeped in trance. His own vegetation thrills him, his own tempest unnerves him. One would say at some moments that Shakespeare affrights Shakespeare. He feels the horror of his own depth. This is the mark of the supreme in- tellects. It is his own very area which stirs him, and com- municates to him enormous indefinable oscillations. From time to time there comes upon the globe one of these spirits. Their passage renews art, science, philosophy, or society. They fill a century, then disappear. Then it is not a century alone that their light illumes ; it is humanity from one end of time to the other : and one discerns that each of these men was the Human Spirit itself contained whole in one brain, and coming, at a given instant, to set on earth its hand and seal to Progression." POETS BORN BETWEEN SHAKESPEARE AND MILTON. Sir John Davies 1570 to 1626. „ TT f wrote in the earlier part Thomas Heywood | of th e I7 th century. John Donne 1573 to 1631. Ben Jonson 1574 to 1637. Bishop Joseph Hall 1574 to 1656. Thomas Dekker wrote c. 1600. John Fletcher 1576 to 1625. John Webster wrote c. 1600 — died c. 1650. Phineas Fletcher 1582 tor. 1660. Cyril Tourneur wrote c. 1610. Bishop Richard Corbet 1582 to 1635. Philip Massinger 158410 1640. Giles Fletcher c. 1585 to 1623. Sir William Drummond 1585 to 1649. Francis Beaumont 1586 to 1615. John Ford 1586 to c 1635. George Wither 1588 to 1667. Thomas Carew c. 1589 to 1639. William Browne 1590 to c. 1645. Robert Herrick 1591 to 1674. Francis Quarles 1592 to 1644. George Herbert 1593 to 1632. James Shirley c. 1594 to 1666, William Habington 1605 to 1654. Edmund Waller 1605 to 1687. Sir William Davenant 1605 to 1668. Richard Crashaw c. 1605 to 1650. JOHN MILTON. In the latter part of the sixteenth century a Mr. John Milton (or Mylton, for thus was the name spelled in the baptismal register of the poet at a subsequent date) held the appointment of Under-Ranger of the Royal Forest of Shotover, near Oxford. The family, which was one of very creditable standing, traced its origin from a town bearing the same name in Oxfordshire. This Mr. John Milton was a zealous Roman-Catholic ; and his son John, having embraced the reformed religion at an early age, was disinherited, and left to shift for himself. The son came to London, and entered on the profession of a scrivener — much the same sort of thing as the " Notaire " so familiar to us in the French comedy of Moliere and others ; a position com- bining something of what we now call a notary with a good deal of the attorney. The junior Milton throve in his profes- sion, and amassed a competent estate, on which he lived in his later years. He had received his education at Oxford, and was a man a man of superior acquirements, especially in music : some specimens of his compositions are given in Burney ; s History of Music. Nor did he entirely abstain from dabbling in verse. He had turned the age of forty when he married a lady of good Welsh family, Sarah Jeffreys (or perhaps bearing at this date the name of Bradshaw, from a previous marriage). Two sons and three daughters were the fruit of this union. It is to the second child and first son that the name of Milton owes its immortality. 6 66 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. John Milton the future poet was born in Bread Street London, on the 9th of December 1608. Nature had done her choicest for him, both in person and in mind ; and at a very early age he began to raise in his father uncommon hopes of his destined capabilities. Some symptoms of poetic gifts were discernible when he was but ten years old. The father engaged a domestic tutor for his instruction, Mr. Thomas Young : the boy entered from the first into study with extraordinary ardour, and thus began that course of overstraining and weakening of the eyes which ended in total blindness. Next he went to St. Paul's School, under the tuition of Dr. Gill ; and was soon afterwards, on the 12th of February 1625, transferred to Christ College, Cambridge. Here he distinguished himself in many ways, including the writing of Latin verses : he took his degree as M.A. in 1632. Milton's father had now quitted his profession and London, to pass the evening of life in comfortable retirement at Horton in Buckinghamshire. Hither the son returned upon leaving college. He continued his studies, reading-over all the Greek and Latin classics. The choice of a vocation in life was before him. Both the church and the bar were meditated and rejected; the former because Milton, a young man already of a severe rectitude of mind, intolerant of all snug expediences and shifty compromises, considered the yoke of the church, as then established, tyrannous, and the oaths to be taken unendurable. It was apparently at Horton that he wrote his first poems plainly fated not to die — the Allegro, Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas. These poems had, however, had various forerunners still hold- ing their place amid the body of Milton's works. His para phrases of the 114th and 126th Psalms were done at the age of fifteen : his earliest known original verses were those On the Death of a Fair Infant, dating in 1625, his seventeenth year. There is something very pleasurable to contemplate in the earnest studiousness, and leisurely rounded productivity, of JOHN MILTON. 67 Milton's early manhood. He is in no hurry to live through his career, — only to lay the solid foundations of an exalted structure of work, and to make each successive portion of it clearly and unmistakeably right, not needing re-doing or repent- ance. It is indeed highly probable that in these early years he wrote many poems, of a less positive measure of excellence, which have not come down to us : but whatever has come down from the Horton period is of its class a masterpiece. For stately discrimination of language, Lycidas is a model un- superseded to the present day; the Allegro and Penscroso are almost the first-fruits of descriptive poetry in English ; Comus is both unlike and higher than any work that had preceded it under the designation of a " masque." This semi-dramatic work was performed in 1634 at Ludlow Castle before the Earl of Ludlow, then Lord President of Wales. It was printed in 1637, and Lycidas in 1638. From about this time, therefore, we may assume that, by the cultivated among his reading countrymen, Milton was understood to be a preeminent poet ■ although for many years thence ensuing his work, and his con- sequent general celebrity, lay in very different directions. Soon after the death of his mother, Milton in 1638 went abroad. Lie was absent about a year and a quarter. His journey lay through France and Italy : he had intended to visit Sicily and Greece as well, but this purpose remained still unfulfilled when events recalled him to England. In Paris he was introduced to Grotius ; in Florence, to Galileo, then kept under the custody of the Inquisition ; in Naples, to Manso, Marquis of Villa, now a very aged man, who had been the admirer and friend, and partly the biographer, of Tasso. He saw also Venice and Geneva. In all these cities — some of them conspicuously luxurious— he lived, as he afterwards solemnly asseverated in one of his controversial writings, free from all vice. He was back in England in August 16393 having expedited his return through a patriotic reluctance to be abroad 6 * when events of such vital importance to the future of his country, in religion and politics, were in progress. He now engaged a house in Aldersgate Street, and undertook the education of the two sons of his sister, married to a Mr. Philips ; and soon afterwards he received also some other youths as pupils, all of them seemingly the sons of his friends. He boarded and lodged them, and subjected them to a strict course of discipline. The books which he used in teaching them the classical languages were such as conveyed some solid instruction, and they form a list very extraordinary to modern eyes, especially as being the selection of so great a poet and master of written style. There is no Homer and no Vergil ; but there are Oppian, ./Elian's Tactics, Palladius, Celsus, Vitru- vius, and the Stratagems of Frontinus. The only poets of the first order are Hesiod and Lucretius. Hebrew, mathematics, and astronomy, were also included in the range of instruction, with French and Italian (these, along with Spanish, were the modern languages known to Milton) ; nor was he lax in pre- scribing martial and other exercises subsidiary to the full scope of life of a well-trained citizen. In 1 641 he stepped into the lists of controversy as a prose- writer, beginning the series of works which, far more than his poetry, gave him his conspicuous public standing during his lifetime, and have doubtless bereft the world of many an im- mortal verse which it would otherwise have to treasure. His first prose work was a treatise on the Reformation of England ; followed by three other treatises, the chief of which was The Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty, In the succeeding year, 1642, he continued the same controversy with his Apology for Smectymnuus — the name Smectymnuus being the pseudonym under which five puritan ministers had already published a book of cognate subject-matter. The initials of their names (Stephen Marshall, {Edmund Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew Newcomen, and William [Uuilliam] Spurstow) made up this formidable vocable. JOHN MILTON. 69 Milton had nearly reached the typical mid age of man, thirty- five, before he entered the state of marriage. In the year 1643 he wedded Mary, the daughter of Richard Powell, of Forest Hill, Oxfordshire, a gentleman of some estate, whose political principles and connexions were wholly contrary to the poet's. The marriage soon became an obviously unhappy one ; and, though the differences were shortly patched up, it probably never altered very much in essential character. A cohabitation of about a month seems to have been enough to convince Mrs. Milton that her bridegroom was not quite the man for her, nor she the woman for him. She went to her father's house, to spend there the residue of the summer : then, when Milton requested her return, she paid no attention to his applications. This was not Milton's notion of the matrimonial relation. He turned up his Bible, and soon discovered that divorce is lawful to an extent and under conditions not theretofore ratified by English or other christian legislation. In 1644 he published Tlie Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce ; and in 1645, Tetra- chordon, or Expositions upon the Four chief Places in Scripture which treat of Marriage, and another pamphlet besides. Nor did he stop here, but proceeded without more ado to court a young lady of great sense and beauty, the daughter of Dr. Davies, and would no doubt (supposing her consent obtained) have made a match of it, unindebted to any sort of church authorization. But a timely submission on his wife's part dis- persed these bold schemes. One day, when Milton was at the house of a relative, she made her appearance, and implored forgiveness. Milton relented. However austere and un- bending may have been his tone of character and mind in some relations, one cannot but recognize here a noble leonine clemency ; and, when one considers his legitimate grounds of complaint against his wife, and how far his feelings and plans stood committed with Miss Davies, a lofty spirit of self-denial as well. Milton would not be generous by halves. Having received back his absentee wife, he treated her kindly; and soon afterwards, in 1646, her loyalist father being involved in the catastrophe of the monarchy, and exposed to sequestra- tions, he received both this gentleman and his sons into his own house, and kept them there till their affairs were ac- commodated. This act is the more striking when we reflect that the paternal influence had probably been freely exerted to disgust Alary Milton with her marital home, and to retain her away from her wifely duties ; the household of Mr. Powell was presumably a good deal livelier and more jovial than that of the scholastic puritan. Milton's own father had been already domesticated with him some little while — from about the time when his wife quitted London. His death, and also that of Mr. Powell, took place in 1647 ; and it is to be surmised that the junior Powells then ceased to be inmates of Milton's house. In 1644 the latter published the now most famous of his prose works, named Areopagitica, a Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing. The title explains the important thesis of this essay. The author held that truth could not be too widely diffused ; that publicity was its best protection against intermixture with error ; and that anything like a preliminary censorship of the press was noxious and unworthy of freemen. He was now hostile to the Presbyterian party, probably on account of their general religious intolerance. He was growing in political estimation. There had been an idea of making him adjutant -general to Sir William Waller; but on the re-modelling of the army this commander was set aside, and the project fell through. In 1645 he reappeared as a poet, but not on any extensive scale, publishing a collection of the English and Latin verses of his youth. His first child, Anne, was born in July 1646; the second, Mary, in October 164S. The year 1649 was well calculated to try the mettle of JOHN MILTON. 71 thinkers and republicans : it found Milton equal to the oc- casion. He approved the execution of that far worse than useless monarch, Charles the First. Early in this year he published, in connexion with these stirring questions, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates , followed by Eikonoclastes ; an answer to the famous Eikon Basilike. The French writer, De Saumaise (latinized into Salmasius) issued a Defensio jRegia, in behalf of Charles the Second ; to this Milton, in 165 1, replied with his Latin work Defensio pro Populo Anglicano, an eloquent performance, freely indulging in those acerbities with which every sort of disputation was then seasoned. It earned great applause, and was remunerated by the English government with the large sum of ^"iooo. To Milton himselr it was in fact a priceless effort, for it cost him his sight. He had been warned by physicians that, in the then condition ot his eyes, the labour of writing such "a book might result in blindness : with majestic intrepidity he undertook the task at the bidding of the Council of State, accomplished it, and paid the forecast forfeit. Most pages in the annals of patriotic heroism grow dim before this one. Milton was now an officer of high position in the English Commonwealth; having, on the 15th of March 1649, been appointed, without solicitation, Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council of State, a post chiefly concerned with the relations of England in continental affairs. He was a very distinguished person in the eyes of eminent foreigners. He continued to occupy a like position under the protectorship of Oliver Cromwell ; and again under Richard Cromwell, and on to the Restoration of Charles the Second. The salary of his office was nearly ,£300 per annum ; but during the protector- ship it was reduced, and an assistant appointed— at first (it would seem) Philip Meadows, and afterwards the celebrated Andrew Marvell. For a while Milton lived in Whitehall ; after- wards in lodgings in Petty France opening on St. James's Park. 72 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. A son was born to him in March 1650, but soon died; his youngest daughter Deborah came into the world in May 1652, and the confinement proved fatal to his wife Mary. The exact date when total blindness overtook the poet is uncertain : it was probably later than the early part of 1653, but before the beginning of 1654. The disease has generally been termed gutta serena : paralysis of the optic nerve might be a more accurate and explicit term. This calamity, while it oppressed Milton, did not overwhelm him : he continued his official and controversial labours. A Defensio secunda pro Populo Anglicano appeared from his pen in 1654, being a reply to Pierre du Moulin junior : it distinctly expressed the author's adhesion to Cromwell's cause. Losing his wife in 1652, when absolute blindness was im- minent, the poet passed a wifeless man through many long months of "total eclipse," not marrying again till the 12th ot November 1656 — which looks like a rather strong symptom that the yoke of marriage had not proved an altogether easy one to his shoulders. His second bride was Katharine, the daughter of Captain Woodcock, of Hackney. With her (as one of the loveliest of his unequalled sonnets assures us) he was happy • but Death soon put an end to his contentment — she died, also in childbirth, in February 1658. Milton again went through a rather long term of widowerhood ; eventually, perhaps in the year 1663, on the recommendation of his friend Dr. Paget, he married Elizabeth Minshull, the daughter of a gentleman in Cheshire, about thirty years younger than him- self. There was no issue of this marriage. Milton, as one of his writings shows, was not inclined to espouse a widow : and in all his three nuptials he avoided doing so. His eldest daughter was now grown up — about seventeen years of age — only five or six years younger than her new stepmother : the other two daughters were also living. The two elder are recorded to have been very serviceable to their father's studies, JOHN MILTON. 73 but in a mode which must have been irksome and grievous in an extreme degree even to the most dutiful children. They had been somehow taught to pronounce the principal modern languages, and also Latin, Greek, and Hebrew ; and they read Milton the various authors in these tongues, without at all knowing the meaning of what they articulated. He is reported nevertheless to have said that the two elder daughters were not attentive to him : — perhaps flesh and blood failed under such an ordeal as the above-named, or perhaps the blind and aging Milton, strict even in youth, was a little rigid and un- attaching to the blooming girls. His third wife tended him with assiduity, and secured his affectionate good-will. Milton was by this time not only blind and aging, but also disappointed — if disappointment can indeed be affirmed of so lofty and severe a soul — in all his most cherished hopes and expectations for the public weal. The despicable profligate, Charles the Second, reoccupied the throne of England in May 1660, soon after Milton had published A Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, opposing monarchy; and every- thing noblest in the nation recoiled from the pollution of the royal presence. Milton, still residing in Petty France, quitted his home, and lay concealed in a friend's house : the two parts of his Defensio, and the Eikonoclastes, were appropriately burned by the common hangman. The poet Davenant is said to have interested himself for Milton, who had done the like for him in the very diverse days of 1657 : there is moreover a curious story that a mock funeral was enacted, so as to elude pursuers. The indemnity for heroes and patriots published in August of this year did not exclude Milton ; but it would seem that he remained awhile in the custody of the sergeant-at-arms. He then returned to the neighbourhood of his former house in the city ; and, though inevitably distinguished by the disfavour of the people in power, suffered no further molestation of any importance. 74 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. Before these troubles began — perhaps in 1658, or even earlier — the poet had commenced the great work of his life Paradise Lost. He had entertained a project of writing on the same theme a tragedy according to the antique model; but this scheme was laid aside, and the narrative poem undertaken and completed in or about 1665. It consisted originally of only ten Books (instead of twelve as now) : the larger number was made up in 1674, in the second edition, by dividing the 7th and 10th sections. The poem, after much difficulty in getting it licensed, was published by Mr. Simmons in 1667. The price paid down for it was ^5 ; to be followed by ,£15, contingent upon the sale of a second and a third large im- pression. As it turned out, the first edition, 1500 copies, sold off in two years to the extent of 1300 : the remaining 200 took five years more to sell. Before Paradise Lost, blank verse in the English language had been almost confined to dramatic works: Milton adopted this measure as alone suitable to so august a theme, and, in his preliminary notice to the poem, went so far as to denounce rhyme as trivial and bar- barous. In 1670 Michael Elwood, a well-meaning quaker admirer who acted from time to time as Milton's amanuensis, made a remark which set him upon the composition of Paradise Regained. This was published, along with Samson Agonistes, in 167 1 ; the singular perversity of authorship which led Milton to prefer Paradise Regained to Paradise Lost has often been remarked upon. There are not many more incidents to be noted in the closing years of this illustrious life. In 1665 the poet had quitted London, in which the great plague was then raging, and he lived awhile in the village of Chalfont St. Giles, in Buckinghamshire. When the epidemic was over, he returned: his last habitation was in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields. His daughters did not reside with him during the final four or five years of his life. He suffered from gout ; and an attack of JOHN MIL TON. 7 5 this malady carried him off on the 8th of November 1674. His will, which was afterwards disputed in the interest of his daughters, left everything to his wife — the total value being about ^1500. His tomb is in the Church of St. Giles Cripplegate. The principal writings of Milton not already mentioned were a Latin Grammar, published in 1661; a History of England, 1670, which he only brought down to the date of the Norman conquest; a System of Logic after the Method of Ramus, 1672 ; a Treatise of True Religion, 1673, in the course of which he inveighed against popery, and propounded, as the limit which deserved political toleration, any phase of religious thought which should recognize the Scriptures as sufficient guide ; Familiar Epistles in Latin, and some Academical Exercises, 1674. He had at one time, like his predecessor Spenser, and his successor Dryden, projected writing a poem on the story of King Arthur. In 1823 was made the important discovery of a MS. work by Milton, De Doctrind Christiana Libri duo : the copy was found in the State-paper Office, and was published without delay. Milton, during his life, was classed in a general way among the Independents, the religious body to which Cromwell also belonged : but this MS. showed him to be a christian differing considerably from the sects mostly recognized as within any pale of orthodoxy. He did not accept the ordinary dogmas of the Trinity, or of the divinity of Christ: on the latter subject he might be con- sidered an Arian rather than a Socinian. In various other respects also his opinions assumed a great latitude ; he denied, for instance, that polygamy is unlawful, and joined in no public form of worship. Milton was from childhood and all through the years of his less advanced manhood eminently handsome, and continued a fine old man to the last. His hair was light brown, and re- mained plenteous, his complexion fair and ruddy ; the features were symmetrical ; the eyes, grey in hue, suffered no perceptible alteration from his blindness. He was rather below than above the middle height, neither fat nor thin, active in person, erect in deportment, and seemly in dress. His courage was abun- dant, and he was a good swordsman. His voice was musical, as befitted a man one of whose chief relaxations consisted in music ; he played on the organ and bass-viol. Another relaxa- tion was conversation with friends, among whom he was cheer- ful, open, and an interesting talker. His temper was serene, and it is said that he made no enmities other than such as arose from public grounds : as a controversialist, indeed, Milton was sufficiently bitter, and even abusive, but he did not regard him- self as naturally controversial — rather as summoned by a loftier Muse to a calmer, deeper, and more perennial utterance. He was abstemious, and eschewed strong liquors ; he had a fine memory, and much width of reading, and in youth a predilec- tion for romance. Though never rich, he retained a sufficiency to free his declining years from any sordid discomfort. His morals were always pure — his religion deep-seated. Among Milton's personal habits, it is recorded that he smoked a pip at the close of evening ; and that he composed poetry chiefly in the winter-time, and not unfrequently while lying in bed. If ever a man lived of whom an upright and intellectua nation may be proud, it is Milton. His elevation in every aspect — of person, of character, of mind, of acquirements, o conduct, of the field for the exercise of his powers, of politica environment, and (what is here the most important of all) o poetic purpose and performance — is almost fatiguingly con spicuous and uniform. An ordinary mind contemplatinj Milton can realize to itself the feeling of the Athenian wh resented hearing Aristides for ever styled " the Just." Such mind feels a little and excusably provoked at the serene and severe loftiness of a Milton, and casts about to find him blame- worthy in his very superiority — an exacting husband and father, JOHN MILTON. 77 an over-learned writer, cumbrous or stilted in prose and scho- lastically accoutred in verse, a political and religious extremist. There may be something in these objections, or the smaller kind of souls will please themselves by supposing there is something in them. Honour is the predominant emotion naturally felt towards Milton — hardly enthusiasm — certainly not sympathy. Perhaps a decided feeling of unsympathy would affect many of us, were it not for the one great misfor- tune of the poet. Nature had forbidden him to be infirm in himself, but gave him a crown of accidental or physical infirmity, and bowed him somewhat — a little lower than the angels — towards sympathy. This Aristides was blind. Any one who has even a small inkling of self-knowledge must feel, two centuries after the death of Milton, that to pre- tend to say much about the quality of his poetry would be an impertinence. Admiration and eulogium are long ago dis- counted : objections sound insolent, and are at any rate supererogatory. One's portion is to read and reverence. Still, something remains' to be defined by an independent appreciator, however deeply respectful. I shall reduce this something to a minimum : and have indeed, in the preceding general observa- tions about Milton's personal and intellectual character, indi- cated most of the points which seem to deserve some sort of expression with regard to his poetry. Among Milton's many great attributes, his mastery of- the sublime is the one which has probably received the most fre- quent and most emphatic laudation. For my own part, I think it open to question whether, even in this preeminent possession of a most preeminent poetic gift, he shows so signal a superi- ority as he does in point of utterance (as it may be called), or sonority. His power over language, in its beauty and its majesty, his mastery of form and of verse, his dominance over all per- suasion and all stress and sustainment of sound, its music and loveliness, its resources and charms, its dignity, austerity, and 78 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. awe, — these form perhaps the most marked distinction of Milton, and his most genuinely and widely felt appeal. It seems conceivable that some readers, not strictly destitute of susceptibility to poetry, might remain cold and obtuse to the sublimity of Milton, or might acknowledge without truly admir- ing it : but anybody who has read Milton with some moderate degree of attention, and who yet fails to feel the noble delight of his diction and music — his "numbers," as an elder genera tion of critics used happily to phrase it— must be pronounced deficient in the primary sense of poetry. From a certain point of view there is ho poet more difficult to estimate than Milton — salient and unmistakeable as his leading characteristics are to the least expert student of poetry To appraise Milton is to appraise Paradise Lost ; or, conversely to appraise Paradise Lost is in the main to appraise Milton Now Paradise Lost is an enormously difficult book to give a fair account of even to one's own instincts or intuitions — much more to one's critical or reasoning faculties, or, through the medium of words, to the like faculties of the reader. The great difficulty consists in this : That Paradise Lost is so interwoven with the religion and religious associations of the people, and is written from a standard of conception so lofty and ideal m many respects, that one can hardly bring oneself to apply any different standard to it, and yet one feels that in numerous in- stances the product is not commensurate with that standard Not so much that it falls below it (though this also is indisput- ably true in a sense) as that it deviates entirely. To measure some things in the poem by the ideal standard is like trying chemical substances by the wrong test : they yield no response to the demandant. Hence, I think, some disappointment to the prepossessed reader of Paradise Post, or to the reader who being unprepossessed, has the courage also to be candid : the poem ought, he fancies, to be as true as a divine oracle unswerving from the severe and impeccable ideal line, and be JOHN MILTON. 79 hold it is considerably otherwise. The fault, or part of the fault, lies with the reader. There is no final reason why the spiritual afflatus which wrapped Milton, the atmosphere of ideas and data in which he lived, should be closer to ultimate truth and right, to the sublime of a divine equity, than those of Homer or any other great poet. The inextinguishable laughter of Olympus is alien to-us, but has a poetic value of its own not likely soon to perish : the scholastic harangues of Jehovah and Messiah, or the cannonades of Satan and Moloch, may also be alien to us, and it is only our prejudices which, perceiving them to be thus alien, refuse to allow the fair consequence- — that these things must be dismissed as having any connexion, right- ful or wrongful, with supernal truth, and must henceforth be regarded as merely so much surplusage for any save poetic ends. It remains to be judged whether they are good poetry or bad. To Milton they were as ideal and profound as to Homer the laughter of the gods, and Ares wounded by Diomed ; perhaps not more : — to us, neither need be profound or ideal. Like all other products of human mind, how great soever — and clearly it ranks among the very gxzzX.— Paradise Lost is local and temporary : it belongs to the puritan Milton, it belongs to the England of the seventeenth century, inspired by Hebrew religionists and poets, and fancying that it possessed a final criterion of truth, and almost a final interpretation of truth. Local and temporary it is in its constituent parts — only in its essence or outcome universal and undying : like the Iliad of Homer, the Corn-media of Dante, the Prometheus of Shelley, the Faust of Gothe. " Thus at the rushing loom of Time I ply, And weave for God the garment thou seest Him by." SAMUEL BUTLER. Of the author of Hudibras, we know that he wrote Hudibras, and not many facts besides. Samuel Butler (or Boteler, as the name was written during his lifetime) was born at Strensham in Worcestershire, near the river Avon, in 1612, and was christened on the 8th of February in that year. The house of his birth was standing till very recently ; but in 1873 was pulled down, as no longer tenantable. His father was certainly not rich, nor yet exactly poor ; he was a well-reputed farmer, with property of his own worth about £\o per annum, named Boteler's Tenement, and renting also a farm of the yearly value of ^300. His landlord, Sir William Russel, was a most zealous royalist ; probably the elder Butler was the same, and brought up his whole family in principles of Church and State such as we find underlying Hudibras, and expressing them- selves in a hectoring scorn and detestation of the opposite party, and in uproarious ridicule of them and theirs. There were seven children in the family altogether ; but the fortunes of all save Samuel remain wholly dark to us. Samuel was educated at the College School, Worcester, under Prebendary Bright, a very celebrated schoolmaster, who appears to have turned out, in the person of young Butler, a pupil fully equipped in all sorts of solid and miscellaneous knowledge. It has been said that the youth went afterwards to Cambridge University, or to Oxford, or to both ; the pro- bability appears to be that in fact he went to neither. The first 7 82 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. employment at which we find him working is that of clerk to Mr. Thomas Jefferies, of Earl's Croom, Worcestershire, an eminent Justice of the Peace. In this post, if not indeed by studies still closer to the date when he quitted school, he must have laid the foundation of that knowledge of legal terms and technicalities of which Hudibras furnishes such abundant evi- dence ; he is said also to have been a member of Gray's Inn, but does not appear to have ever actually practised law. Having no lack of leisure at Earl's Croom, he studied history, poetry, music, and painting. He contracted a friendship with Samuel Cooper, the excellent miniature-painter, and executed some pictures of his own — among others, it is alleged, a portrait of Cromwell. The disappearance of this record of the future Lord Protector — if indeed it ever existed, which we may pretty safely assume it did not — is probably little loss to Cromwell's memory or to Butler's, to history or to art : for his pictures are generally said to have been poor affairs. In 1774 it was men- tioned that some of them which then survived " served to stop windows, and save the tax ; indeed, they were not fit for much else." Leaving Mr. Jefferies at some undefined but probably still very early age, Butler entered the household of the Earl of Kent, at Wrest in Bedfordshire, perhaps as one of the gentle- men in the retinue of the Countess. Here the distinguished writer, John Selden, was domiciled as solicitor and steward; for him Butler wrote letters and made translations, and it has been surmised that, after the death of the Earl in 1639, Selden was secretly married to the widow. Butler remained at Wrest, where there was a good library, several years ; hence he passed into the establishment of Sir Samuel Luke, M.P., at Woodend, or Cople-Hoo Farm, also in Bedfordshire. Sir Samuel was a knight of ancient family, a colonel in the army of the Parlia- ment, scoutmaster-general for the county, and governor of Newport Pagnell. It is difficult to suppose that Luke was SAMUEL BUTLER, really so grotesque a figure, or so absurd and offensive a crea- ture, as Hudibras, although some memoirs belonging to the year 1659 describe him, both in person and in character, to a nearly corresponding effect. Yet that he was the original of that crapulous pedant-knight, and that two other competitors who have been suggested (Sir Henry Rosewell of Ford Abbey, Devonshire, and Colonel Rolls) must be set aside in his favour or disfavour, is not only evidenced by the general consent of contemporaries, but is further proved to demonstration by a quatrain put into the mouth of Hudibras in the course of the poem : — " Tis sung there is a valiant Mamaluke In foreign land, yclept Sir Sam'el Luke ; r To whom we have been oft compared For person, parts, address, and beard." At Woodend, it is believed — some writers say, even earlier at Wrest, which seems incomparably less probable — Butler began his poetic burlesque ; but we may readily guess that Sir Samuel and his political associates were not allowed to know much about it. Butler acted seemingly as clerk to Sir Samuel ; and his consistency as a royalist may have been of a standard not too severe to allow of his performing his clerkly duties regularly and accurately in public, while in private he loathed his employer, and in the secresy of his closet satirized him with 1 Part I. canto I. Instead of the name " Sir Sam'el Luke," a blank is left in the text : the necessity of the rhyme is decisive as to the correct name. Mr. Robert Bell, in his edition of Butler, calls attention (and doubtless not for the first time) to this couplet, but he says that it is " in a different measure from the rest of the poem " — i.e., in ordinary five-foot metre, instead of four-foot. This is a manifest oversight. The rhyme is the entire dactyl " Mamaluke," rhyming with the entire dactyl ' ' Sam'el Luke " — not (as Mr. Bell assumes) the final syllable "hike" rhyming with "Luke" ; and this makes the identification far more clear— or rather perfectly indisputable. Similar dactylic rhymes are not un- common in Hudibras— -as for instance (at the opening of Part I. canto 2.) : 1 ' There was an ancient sage "Philosopher That had read Alexander Boss over." 7 :;: virulent animosity, and a consummate perception of what would gall most sorely, and expose most odiously. In 1660 his sacred and debauched majesty Charles II. was reinstated on the throne ; and Butler's parliamentarian penance, with any panics naturally deriving from it, came to an end. How or why he was at once known to be a deserving man under the kingly regime is not apparent ; but very shortly he received the appointment of Secretary to the Earl of Carbery, President of Wales, and was made Steward of Ludlow Castle. This post he retained up to the close of 1661. Whether he had ceased to hold it by January 1662, or remained in office some considerable while longer, is a moot-point — items of evidence being adduced on each side of the question. Some- where about the date of his appointment to Ludlow he married Mrs. Herbert, a widow lady of good family, who is said by some writers to have been at one time the wife of a Mr. Morgan. This last point is doubtful; nor is it quite certain, as others have averred, that Butler received a competent fortune with her, upon which he lived for a while after the marriage ; one account regarding this matter is that the money was finally lost through being invested in bad securities. One day at the end of 1662 Butler exchanged provincial obscurity for metropolitan and national popularity, the applause of universal laughter, enduring fame, and the primacy in one particular form of poetic enterprise. He published Hudibras, Part I. ; the three cantos which end with the confinement of the knight and his squire in the stocks — "written," so the title- page purported, "in the time of the late wars." The Earl of Dorset is credited with being the first man to remark the book, and vent it about at court. The king, and the royalist party generally, took it up with the keenest delight, and chuckled over it in unending ripples of cachinnation. Charles, indeed, was wont to carry the volume in his pocket, and spiced his talk liberally with quotations from it; and he sent for Butler, to Samuel butler. 85 make his personal acquaintance. The name of the poem and its hero became identified with the author, and Butler was cur- rently spoken of as " Hudibras." In a month the book was sufficiently popular to be pirated ; and soon afterwards a spurious imitation of it appeared, followed at intervals by several others. There is an anecdote of Dorset and Butler which seems probable enough on the face of it, and gives us a vivid picture of the poet : I hardly know why some recent bio- graphers should regard it as a gratuitous concoction. "His lordship," it is said, " having a great desire to spend an evening as a private gentleman with the author of Hudibras, prevailed with Mr. Fleetwood Shepherd to introduce him into his com- pany at a tavern which they used, in the character only of a common friend. This being done, Mr. Butler, while the first bottle was drinking, appeared very flat and heavy ; at the second bottle, brisk and lively, full of wit and learning, and a most agreeable companion; but, before the third bottle was finished, he sunk again into such deep stupidity and dullness that hardly anybody would have believed him to be the author of a book which abounded with so much wit, learning, and pleasantry. Next morning Mr. Shepherd asked his lordship's opinion of Butler : who answered, " He is like a ninepin, little at both ends, but great in the middle.' " It is remarkable that, while multitudes of people, lively or slow-witted, found Hudi- bras so marvellously amusing, the diarist Pepys — a man of good discernment, and quite capable of appreciating a joke — looked upon the poem as tedious and rubbishy. Hounded on by the praises of others, and applying himself to the book time after time, his final estimate was still this—" I cannot, I con- fess, see where the wit lies." In 1664 was issued the Second Part of Hudibras, which had to all likehood been written before the first was published ; and not till 1678 the Third Part, which still leaves the work uncom- pleted, nor is it known what the conclusion was to have been. 85 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. In the long interval of fourteen years, Butler remained incon- spicuous ; probably however he at some time visited France and Holland. It would appear indeed that in the early flush of his renown the ball was at his foot, but he allowed his opportunity to slip ; according to Aubrey, " he might have had preferments at first, but would not accept any but very good, and so got none." There are various rumours, all uncertain, as to the details. One is that the king gave him 300 guineas, or even, pursuant to the royal intention, 3000, which was surreptitiously reduced by some underling to the lower sum ; another, that the poet became secretary to the Duke of Buck- ingham (the " Zimri " of Dryden) when his Grace was Chan- cellor of the University of Cambridge ; another, that he had a yearly pension of £1000, which may be securely pronounced false, nor can even the minor amount of ^100, which has also been mentioned, be credited. Packe relates an anecdote how Butler called upon Buckingham by appointment, with a view to some arrangement to his advantage : but the Duke, descrying two fair and frail ones of his acquaintance, flitted off after them, leaving the poet once and for all in the lurch. Certain it is that Butler, in his posthumous Remains, left un- published until 1759, speaks with great severity of Buckingham among the pieces in prose named C/iaracfers. He has con- tinually been cited as one of the many instances of the neglect of men of genius by courts and courtiers, and no doubt with too much reason ; although the neglect in his case may have been somewhat less flagrant, and less absolute and shameful, than common report gives out. His own genuine writings do not contain any distinct complaints on this head : some such appeared in compositions attributed to him, but these have long been known to be spurious. Undoubtedly, however, Butler was poor : Hudibras coined laughter for others, but for himself no worldly pelf. His close friend, William Longueville of the Inner Temple, is said to SAMUEL BUTLER. 87 have supported him at one time when he was wholly without resources. Packe terms him a " modest but unfortunate poet." The son of Longueville followed a middle course, and perhaps a right one, in affirming that Butler, though often disappointed, was never reduced to want or beggary, and did not die in any person's debt. His death, indeed, after long years of struggle and mortification, is the only other event which it remains for me to record ; he expired on the 25th of September 1680, probably in Rose Street, Covent Garden, and was buried in Covent Garden Churchyard. He was a sufferer from gout ; the immediate cause of death is said however to have been fever supervening upon consumption. About sixty years afterwards a monument was erected to him in Westminster Abbey ; also a tablet in the Covent Garden Church, destroyed in 1845. Butler comes down to us praised for uprightness as well as modesty ; presumably the depressed Commonwealth party opined that his uprightness had been made compatible with a large measure of secretiveness, not to say duplicity. He was generally retired and taciturn, though frank and hearty in his intercourse with intimate friends. Among these, besides Longueville, were Cleveland, Hobbes, and Davenant. Aubrey says of Butler : "He is of a middle stature, strong-set, high- coloured, a head of sorrel hair, a severe and sound judgment, a good fellow " : and again, " He was of a leonine-coloured hair, sanguine, choleric, middle-sized, strong." As recorded in portraiture, his physiognomy presents nothing to distinguish the author of Hudibras particularly from other men tending towards the hard-featured, of solid sense, observant, nearer to ponderousness than vivacity, yet with an under-current of that sufficiently discernible. Hudibras is the only work of importance published by Butler during his lifetime ; to this were added an Ode to Duval the Highwayman, and two pamphlets (1659 and 1672) which were ordinarily (and perchance correctly) attributed to Prynne. After his death three small volumes of his so-called Posthumous Works were issued, in 1 7 1 5 ; these, however, with the exception of two or three short pieces, were fictitious. His genuine Remains came out in 1759, under the editorship of Mr. Robert Thyer ; comprising several amusing and curious pieces, chiefly the Elephant in the Moon (a satire on the Royal Society and its investigations), yet barely, on the whole, sustaining Butler's repute for wit and wisdom. His Commonplace Book was also preserved, and shows the author's remarkable diligence in noting down at first hand all sort of thoughts and observations. One of his writings, mentioned as existing but never published, was a fragment of a tragedy on Nero. But after all Butler, as a poet, is Hudibras, and Hudibras is Butler. This long yet unfinished poem of more than 10,000 verses, is mainly founded, so far as its leading idea is con- cerned, upon Don Quixote, and partly upon the famous Satire Menippee. Cleveland, and Sir John Mennis (author of the Musarum Deliciee), may have given some hint for its mode of versification, which is nevertheless chiefly original. Hudibras himself, as we have seen, travesties Sir Samuel Luke, and through him the Presbyterian religionists and party generally : his squire Ralpho may designate one Robinson, or else Pendle, and through him burlesque the Independents, the sect (as noted in my account of Milton) to Avhich that supreme poet and Oliver Cromwell belonged. Readers of the present day will not at all agree with Pepys in failing to see in Hudibras "where the wit lies"; they, like their predecessors for two centuries, discern an abundance and superabundance of wit, as well as of boisterous animal spirits, and grotesque combi- nations of humour and fancy. But they find the poem laborious and tedious to get through — partly on account of its obsolete and operose detail of general subject-matter, fine points of doctrinal and religious casuistry which have passed far out of modern ken — partly (or indeed chiefly) on account of its perpetual tone of mock-heroics, incidents ignoble and tire- some in themselves blown up into big verbal dimensions, like the frog that would have inflated himself into bovine size — partly also (and this is indeed implied in what is premised) by the intrinsic ugliness of the whole thing. Hudibras is an ugly poem • a poem of surpassing aptness and dexterity, and even pleasantry, of execution; replete with every resource of a richly- furnished mind, and a facile and fantastic humour which knows when to play and when to strike, when to pat its mouse with velvet paws, and when to crunch it with carnivorous incisors ; yet an ugly poem after all. Many readers no doubt feel that the things and the men it satirizes are not wholly deserving of satire — that on the contrary the things and the men it im- plicitly upholds were the more worthy of the taunt, the lash, and the branding-iron. This however is not of so much im- portance: the manner of the satire repels us more than the matter. Butler degrades before he assaults : the objects of his sarcasm are treated like military poltroons, who are first stripped of their uniforms, and then, and not till then, drummed out of the regiment. We cannot accept ugly poems as positively good poems, nor ugly art of whatsoever kind as strictly fine art. Hudibras will always be admired, and will always deserve to be so ; it stands as a difficult and hardly-to- be-rivalled model of a particular kind of intellectual effort and skilled work : it is and will be decreasingly read, and such satisfaction as it yields to the reader will more and more class as literary satisfaction — the gusto of a connoisseur — an acquired taste which would be not very reluctantly relinquished even by the person who experiences and nurses it. Butler must ever retain his own plot of ground on the English Parnassus : it is a plot however which the other denizens regard as rather an excrescence and perceptibly malodorous, and, in their loftier moods, Apollo and the Muses turn a resolutely blind eye to that particular compartment. POETS BORN BETWEEN BUTLER AND DRYDEN. John Cleveland 1613 to 165S Sir John Suckling 1613 to 1641 Sir John Denham 1615 to' 1668 Abraham Cowley 1618 to 1667 Richard Lovelace 1618 to 1658 Andrew Marvell 1621 to 1678 Henry Vaughan 1622 to 1695 JOHN DRYDEN, With this great protagonist of the poetry of his time, we ■enter upon what may be regarded as the modern era of our poetic literature. Junior contemporary of Milton and of Butler, Dryden, not only in the quality of his individual genius, but in his whole intellectual atmosphere, seems to be separated from Milton by an indefinite interval of years; and even Butler, for all the free-and-easy unconcern of his verse, and its spirit of grotesque sarcasm, remains so remote from us in the subject- matter of his sectarian hair-splittings, and in the mock-chivalry of his accoutrements, as hardly to fuse into or coalesce with modernism. But in Dryden we fall-in with the man whose profession is literature, who takes up whatever comes to hand suitable for self-exhibition and the occasion of the moment, who writes different sorts of things all with a critical reference — a sense of how he himself ought to do them according to a certain standard, and how others ought to take them ; the man who dictates in the world of letters, propounds and argues, has partizans and adversaries ; the man who writes miscellaneously for a public of miscellaneous readers. Dryden assumes a position of personal combativeness and general outlook, pur- suing varied lines of attempt rather than evincing a truly versatile impulse of faculty; we feel in him the stress of modern society, the shiftings of modern thought, the modern spirit of criticism which tries, in the balance of reasoning opinion and the recognized canons of excellence, himself and 92 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. his performances in one scale, and all sorts of other writers and their performances in another, not perhaps too equitably poised. John Dryden, eldest son of Erasmus Driden (thus was the name spelled in his generation) of Tichmarsh, who was third son of Sir Erasmus Driden, of Canons Abbey, created a Baronet in 1619, was born at Aldvvinkle All Saints, near Oundle, on the 9th of August 1631, or perhaps 1632, for the point is not exactly settled. All these places are in the county of Northampton, but the family properly belonged to the neighbouring county of Huntingdon. The father was a Justice of the Peace during the interregnum, and may probably have been in religion a Presbyterian. John was sent to Westminster School as a King's Scholar, and studied under the renowned Dr. Busby. In 1650 he was elected to one of the Westminster scholarships at Cambridge, and he entered that University in May of the same year, being a student of Trinity College. That he took his degree as B.A. in 1653 is a wholly ordinary incident; perhaps somewhat less so that in the previous year, 19 July 1652, he had been put out of commons for a fortnight at least, and sentenced to read "a confession of his crime"; what the crime was we know not, but presumably not a very heinous one, seeing the mildness of his punishment. In 1654 his father died, leaving a widow and some younger children ; and John Dryden came into an estate which has been variously estimated at about ^"60 and about ^200 per annum. Allowing for the difference in the value of money, the former sum might be regarded as a moderate income to fall back upon, the latter as a fair competence. Nevertheless, and though there is nothing to show that he squandered his patrimony, Dryden seems to have been always counted poor by others ; and his poverty was a matter of frequent complaint on his own part. Three years after his father's death he left Cambridge, and was introduced into a subordinate public office by his maternal JOHN DRYDEN. 93 relative Sir Gilbert Pickering, who was a member of Cromwell's Council, and of his House of Lords. Dryden was perhaps his clerk or secretary, and it may be concluded that he adhered at the time to the same political views. The first known verses of Dryden were written in 1649, being Lines 011 the Death of Lord Hastings, a young nobleman of pro- mise who had died of smallpox on the eve of marriage : here the style is ambitious and extravagant, with many overstrained conceits like a poor imitation of Donne or Cowley. It is not known that he ever again attempted the same style, nor indeed that he resumed writing poetry for the comparatively long term of nine years ; his next verses of any consequence being the Heroic Stanzas on the Death of Oliver Cromwell, 1658. So great a subject found in Dryden a poet young indeed, and only beginning to wield his powers like a master, yet not unequal to the occasion. The year 1660 came, and with it came Charles II. to deal with the England left him by Cromwell ; to this oc- casion also Dryden was ignobly equal, and produced his Astrcea Redux. Not long afterwards he was enrolled a member of the newly founded Royal Society — probably in virtue of some verses of his on modern philosophy prefixed to Dr. Charleton's Treatise on Stonehenge. We next have to contemplate Dryden in the character of a dramatist; a character which he sustained for many years, with no little acceptance among his contemporaries, although now, and for a century or more past, his dramas barely survive in the quality of literary curiosities, unread save by the fewest, and regarded as marked examples of inflation and artificial inspira- tion, perversions of a forcible, strenuous, and rich nature. This nature asserts itself notwithstanding, and makes the works the object of active disapproval, rather than negligent unconcern, to those who will still be at the pains to examine them. Energy and capacity abound; the discipline and beauty of proportion, the authentic accent of truth, are deficient. The first of the 94 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS.. plays, printed some years after stage-performance, and probably written in 1663, was named the Wild Gallant, a comedy: it was unsuccessful on the boards, and was afterwards considerably altered. The other comedies, mostly in prose, were Sir Martin Mar-all, 1668; An Evenings Love, or the Mock Astrologer, 1671 ; Marriage a la Mode, 1673 ; the Assignation, or Love in a Nunnery, same year, summarily driven off the stage ; Limber- liam, or the Kind Keeper, 1680, prohibited after the third night as indecent, and altered in printing ; Amphitryon, after Plautus and Moliere, 1690, a stage-hit. The Royal Ladies, published in 1664, was a rhymed play. With this we may class the tragicomedies: Secret Love, or the Maiden Queen, 1668; the Tempest, 1670, done in conjunction with Sir William Davenant, and Troihcs and Cressida, 1679, both, with pre- sumptuous ruthlessness, altered from Shakespeare : the Spanish Friar, 1681, a felicitous and very popular composition, which we may reckon as Dryden's masterpiece in comedy, aimed against the Roman Catholics ; Love Triumphant, produced in 1694 without success, and, with one ultimate exception, the last of his dramatic works. Of rhymed tragedies, or (as he was wont to call them) heroic plays, we have the Lndian Queen, written in conjunction with Sir Robert Howard, towards 1665; the Lndian Emperor (Montezuma), a sequel to the preceding, 1667, containing a famous description of night; Tyrannic Love, or tJie Royal Martyr, composed in seven weeks in 1672; Almanzor, or the Conquest of Granada, in two parts, an extra- vagant but fascinating performance, much assailed by the critics of the day, 1672 ; Amboyna, in verse and prose, 1673, written even more rapidly than the Royal Martyr, for the purpose of inflaming the English against the Dutch during the war with that nation; Aurengzebe, 1675, a drama on a contemporary potentate, about the most elaborate of all Dryden's plays. Some later tragedies are in unrhymed verse : All for Love, or the World well Lost, 1678, the story of Antony and Cleopatra, JOHN DR YDEN. 95 strikingly though not pathetically treated, and the only one of Dryden's dramas which is still tolerably well remembered ; he said this was the sole play which he "wrote for himself"; (Ediflis, 1679, written in conjunction with Nathaniel Lee; the Duke of Guise, 1683, with the same cooperation, Lee being the principal writer, composed to uphold the claims of the Duke of York (James II.), whose right of succession to the crown was then attacked ; Don Sebastian, which is generally ranked next to All for Love, acted in 1690, after the author had for some years ceased writing for the stage; Cleomenes, 1692. There were also the operas, Albion and Albanius, 1685, aimed against the Republicans, and not successful in representation ; the State of Innocence and Fall of Man, written in a month ; King Arthur, 1 69 1, the music by Purcell, well received by the public. His very last work was a masque, with prologue and epilogue, written only about three weeks before his death. Altogether the number of Dryden's dramatic pieces, extending over thirty- seven years of his life, was twenty-eight : he did not, however, feel a natural vocation for the stage, and especially not for comedy, — but, as he avowed, wrote only to please, and as a means of subsistence. His profits from this form of composi- tion were not indeed particularly large : it is said that a play seldom produced him more than £,i 00 on the whole. He had contracted, soon after the Restoration, to supply three dramas to the King's Theatre for ^300 to ,£400 per annum. He certainly, however, with all his undisputed fertility, failed to meet this engagement, save in one solitary year. This led the patentees of the theatre to stint his salary, and hence his long intermission of dramatic work prior to 1690. The practice of writing rhymed tragedies had been introduced in England soon after the Restoration, apparently by Lord Orrery : it was not only adopted by Dryden, but was expressly defended by him in a preface to the Indian Emperor, and be- fore that in a. Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry, which formed part 96 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. of a controversy he sustained with Sir Robert Howard. Soon afterwards a more envenomed literary animosity arose. The playwright Elkanah Settle produced in 1673 his rhymed tragedy the Empress of Morocco, with signal applause: Dryden, nettled at the success of so disproportionate a rival, wrote a criticism on the play, containing such amenities as the follow- ing : " His being is in a twilight of sense, and some glimmering of thought which he can never fashion into wit or English. His style is boisterous and rough-hewn, his rhyme incorrigibly lewd, and his numbers perpetually harsh and ill-sounding. He has a heavy hand at fools, and a great felicity in writing non- sense for them. . . . Sure the poet writ these two lines 1 aboard some smack in a storm, and, being sea-sick, spewed up a good lump of clotted nonsense at once." We shall see as we proceed the further development of Dryden's feud with Settle. Our poet, although he did Shakespeare the disservice of recasting him according to the fashion of a degenerated time, was yet one of his most fervent admirers, as was conspicuously shown in his early Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry, recently mentioned, as well as in other writings ; he was in fact the first author after the Restoration who asserted the supremacy of Shakespeare, and, following in his vestiges, he advocated the uniting of comedy and tragedy. Most of Dryden's plays were ushered into print with dedications to men of distinction, couched in terms of skilful, sometimes of fulsome, flattery; many of them also had critical prefaces — a plan in which his contemporary Racine concurred, and which has in our own days been a dis- tinctive practice of Victor Hugo. Indeed, Dryden's disquisi- tions in prose, numerous and frequently long and elaborate, are almost all critical in substance or in scope. In his time criticism was almost a novelty in England. His method was trenchant, decisive, and broad, his perceptions fresh and vigor- 1 " To flattering lightning our feigned smiles conform, Which, backed with thunder, doth but gild a storm." JOHN DRYDEX. ■ 97 ous, his grasp solid and firm; he said many fine things finely ; and his writings of this class had what they merited, a great deal of influence. He had also a high repute for prologues, many of which he indited for other people's plays, receiving at first two, and afterwards three, guineas for the work. As a dramatist, Dryden was continually accused of plagiarism ; nor, prompt though he ordinarily was at self- vindication, self- assertion, and retaliation with compound interest, did he deci- sively repel this particular charge. The Duke of Buckingham and the Earl of Rochester (Wilmot), the two most distinguished wits in the nobility of that time, were among his foes. Buck- ingham satirized Dryden as " Bayes " in a farce named The Rehearsal, in which perhaps Samuel Butler and others assisted — rDavenant and Sir Robert Howard being also, as it seems, partly glanced at in this same character. The farce was acted in 167 1, and published in print in 1672 ; and no doubt Dryden smarted, and vowed that his tormentors should smart in their turn. In 1679 a versified Essay on Satire appeared in manu- script, and was attributed to Dryden and Lord Mulgrave ; it was however not in reality, or not chiefly, theirs, but was wholly or mainly the doing of another Duke, his Grace of Buck- inghamshire. Rochester and the Duchess of Portsmouth (one of the king's numerous mistresses) were so incensed at its sar- casms that they hired some ruffians to waylay Dryden, and give him a severe cudgelling, as he was returning home one evening from the coffeehouse. This disgraceful incident had no further direct sequel. Towards 1682, when the Patentees of the theatre were on ticklish terms with him, Dryden was in straits : and to this period probably belongs a letter which he addressed to another Earl of Rochester (Hyde), asking for some post in the Customs or Excise, or a pension for half a year : no result crowned this solicitation. In following the thread of Dryden's course as a dramatist, beginning towards 1663, and ending only with his life, I have 8 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. left aside the other events of his career, literary and personal : to these I must now revert. In 1667 he published one of his most admired poems, the Annus Mirabilis, referring to the preceding year, which had witnessed the Great Fire of London, and some national glories in naval warfare. In 1668 he succeeded Davenant as Poet Laureate, receiving a stipend of ^100 a year and a tierce of wine. His poetic masterpiece, Absalom and Achitophel, was brought out in 1681 ; aimed at Lord Shaftesbury (Achitophel) and the faction which, traitorously intriguing against Charles II. (a good enough David for the purposes of Dryden and of party- spirit), and against his heir-presumptive the Duke of York, was egging-on the Duke of Monmouth (Absalom), one of the king's illegitimate sons, to grasp at present power and future sovereignty — windy projects of ambition which, under the reign of James, brought Monmouth in 1685 to the block. In this admirable gallery of changeling portraits, travestied Hebrews and trans- muted Englishmen — some of them adulated out of likeness, others branded or traduced out of shape, all bedaubed by the hand of a consummate master — Dryden found occasion to pay-off his old score with the Duke of Buckingham, who figures with fantastic grotesqueness and perfect pencilling as Zimri; Elkanah Settle is more contemptuously assailed as Doeg ; and another poetaster, Shadwell, with supreme venom and virulence, ludi- crously excessive and sumptuously malignant, as Og. The first part of Absalom and Achitophel, which had an immense sale and a mighty resonance throughout the land, and which of course encountered fierce opposition as well as a storm of welcome, was written by Dryden in 1680, at the express desire of Charles II. ; not, as the author professed, in the interests of arbitrary power, but of legitimate and established sovereignty. Afterwards others urged him to continue the subject. This he declined, but suggested it to Tate ; and the latter executed the second part, including about 200 lines of Dryden's own, along JOHN DR YD EN. 99 with his general planning and revision. Shortly before the appearance of Dryden's first part, Lord Shaftesbury had been committed to the Tower; at a later date the grand jury found no true bill against him, and a medal was struck to com- memorate this triumph of the anti-court party; and Dryden again, in this same year 1681, came out with a satirical poem named The Medal, for which Charles II. presented him with a hundred broad pieces. His next work of importance was the Religio Laid, one of the very few poems which he wrote, apparently, for the mere purpose of self-expression, without ulterior object, or some immediate occasion. He here sets forth the sentiments of a moderate and hardly sectarian christian, with an original and still subsisting bias towards natural religion — one of his main positions being the salvability of virtuous heathens. A certain animus against priestcraft and priests is traceable in many of his writings. Charles II. died in February 1685, and his Roman- Catholic brother James II. ascended the throne : and soon after that event Dryden also announced himself a convert to Catholicism. As was natural and inevitable, a deal of satire and clamour on so opportune a change of faith ensued. At the present day we can only say that the change may have been perfectly genuine, however suspicious; and that at any rate Dryden adhered to it, with every ostensible mark of sincerity, to the close of his life, and long after a reconversion from Catholicism would have been as suitable to his then worldly interests as his original conversion had seemed when it occurred. It is said that as a boy he had been brought up an Anabaptist; which may perhaps be true, but no confirmatory evidence is adduced. It has also been alleged that he thought at one time of taking orders in the English Church— a statement expressly denied by himself in print. His emoluments increased by ^100 a year during the reign of the Catholic sovereign, the appointment of Histo- riographer being added to that of Poet Laureate. LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. About this time he translated Maimbourg's History of the League, and his name appears to a translated Life of St. Francis Xavier, also to an answer to Bishop Burnet's Remarks upon Varillas 's History of Heresies. He was for several years in such repute that something or other from his pen was regarded as almost necessary to the success of any literary undertaking : in this way he wrote prefatory Lives of Polybius., Lucian, and Plutarch, and translated (it has been said in- termediately from the French) the First Book of Tacitus. In 1687 he published the longest of all his poems, The Hind and the Panther; in which the Hind symbolizes the Roman-Catholic Church, and the Panther the Anglican. The consorting and colloquies of these two church-beasts, their theological argu- ments and historical disquisitions, their reserved courtesies and frugal meals, make up the strangest and most incongruous jumble which can well be imagined : the reasonings are in themselves speciously expressed, but void of all cogency to a mind that thinks for itself, and declines to be put-off with assumptions and beggings of the question. It is difficult to conceive how any man with the strong sense and intellectual grasp of Dryden could possibly imagine that the conflicting claims of the two churches might properly be embodied in the persons, or discussed through the gullets, of a Hind and a Panther : to narrate our national history in the form of the adventures of the Lion and the Unicorn were fully as reason- able an attempt. He cannot be acquitted of the solecism on the ground of any dictation from higher quarters, for he himself expressly averred that he wrote voluntarily, and without any pres- sure. The work was composed during the winter of 1686-7, and the beginning of the spring ; and was finished about a fortnight after the king's celebrated Declaration for Liberty of Conscience had been promulgated. The Revolution ensued in 1688; James II. vanished from the scene, and William III. was king ; and the Roman-Catholic JOHN DRYDEN. Dryden lost of course his post of Poet Laureate, and had to endure: the sight of Shadwell— Og, of all men or reptiles in the world — installed in his place. His gorge rose, and he wrote the satire entitled Mac Flecknoe— Shadwell being here affiliated intellectually upon Flecknoe, another of the bad or indifferent versifiers whom Dryden contemned. Lord Dorset* in his quality of Lord Chamberlain, had to eject Dryden from the Laureateship : he tempered this reverse of fortune by allowing the poet a certain salary at the time, but this hardly abated the sufferer's complaints. In 1693 Dryden brought out a new version of Juvenal and Persius, with a large discourse on satire prefixed; five of the satires of the former writer, and all those of the latter, being done by Dryden himself : two of his sons, John and Charles, executed one each after Juvenal. Another and more celebrated translation from the Latin soon followed. In 1694 Dryden began his version (termed by Pope "the most noble and spirited translation that I know in any language ") of all the principal works of Vergil — the Pastorals, Georgics, and ^Fneid: it was published in 1697 — a subscription, then very unusual, being got up for its production. His last volume was the one named Fables, containing (besides some works to which the title rightly applies) modernizations of Chaucer, tales versified from Boccaccio, the second Ode on St. Cecilia's Day {Alexander's Feast), the First Book of the Tliai translated, and the Parting of Hector and Andromache from the same epic. Dryden indeed contemplated translating the whole of the Iliad, and declared his preference for Homer over Vergil : yet perhaps the non-fulfilment of his project is no great loss to poetry. His Homeric specimens seem to me decidedly inferior to Pope's. The Ode on St. Cecilia's Day, certainly at the present date the most generally read and admired of all its author's compositions, occupied a fortnight in September 1697: it was reluctantly undertaken at the urgent request of the Stewards of St Cecilia's Feast. The earlier LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. Ode on a like occasion — which has not the same dramatic impulse and fire, but can hardly be pronounced inferior to the second on any other ground — had been produced in 1687. This volume of Fables was put together in fulfilment of a contract to deliver 10,000 verses for ^268. 15s., which sum was to be made up to ^300 as soon as a second impression of the work should be called for. The volume contains about 12,000 verses, and must therefore have both completed and exceeded the contract. Dryden was in fact, in his latest years, dependent on the booksellers. In the preface to this volume he avers that his faculties are as vigorous as ever, — only his memory in some degree impaired, and that not greatly : and assuredly no writer could be named whose powers continued more constantly maturing and mellowing, or whose work in advanced age exhibits more entire freedom from senility, than Dryden. He had now for some while been crippled in his limbs ; and a neglected inflammation in a toe resulted in mortification of the leg, which put a period to the poet's life on the 1st of May 1700. He was then residing in Gerard Street, Soho. On the 13th he was buried in Westminster Abbey, next to Chaucer. There is an odd story of an interference by Lord Jefferies — ostensibly the act of a well-disposed admirer, but really prompted by forward and intrusive impertinence — having led to confusion and delay in the funeral : the details however are neither very certain nor remarkably important. Of the facts of Dryden's private and domestic life not many particulars are known. Towards 1665 he married Lady Elizabeth Howard (who survived him), daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, under circumstances which (according to a satire imputed to Lord Somers) were not very honourable to either party. They had three sons. Charles became Usher of the Palace to Pope Clement XL, and was accidentally drowned in England in 1704. John was author of a comedy named The JOHN DR YDEN. 103 Husband his own Cuckold, to which the father wrote an epilogue containing (among others) the following lines : " Like some raw sophister that mounts the pulpit, So trembles a young poet at a full pit. . . . Nor is the puny poet void of care ; For authors, such as our new authors are, Have not much learning nor much wit to spare, And, as for grace, to tell the truth, there's scarce one But has as little as the very parson. . . . The poet has one disadvantage more — That, if his play be dull, he's damned all o'er, Not only a damned blockhead, but damned poor. . . . You cannot from our absent author hope He should equip the stage with such a fop. Fools change in England, and new fools arise ; For, though the immortal species never dies, Yet every year new maggots make new flies. But, where he lives abroad, he scarce can find . One fool, for million that he left behind." Erasmus Henry, the third son, born in 1669, entered a religious order, inherited the family baronetcy, and died in 17 10. — Dryden affirmed his own constitution to be saturnine, and not sprightly; he would also appear to have been reserved or even cold in manner, querulous, and somewhat addicted to boasting of his aristocratic friends. One of his enemies says that his conversation was licentious : his writings certainly were so in several instances. This he acknowledged and regretted in the preface to his Fables. " I am sensible," he says, " as I ought to be, of the scandal I have given by my loose writings ; and make what reparation I am able by this public acknowledgment. ... I shall say the less of Mr. Collier because in many things he has taxed me justly ; and I have pleaded guilty to all thoughts and expressions of mine which can be truly argued of ob- scenity, profaneness, or immorality, and retract them. If he be my enemy, let him triumph : if he be my friend, as I have given him no personal occasion to be otherwise, he will be glad of my repentance." Dryden believed in judicial astrology, i©4 LIVES OF FAMOUS: POETS. and is credited with having made, according to this system, some prognostications that were wondrously fulfilled : a letter of his, dated in September 1697, shows that he had cast the nativity of his son Charles, and up to that date all had come true. A curt and ill-natured epitaph " intended for his wife " is printed among Dryden's works: it hardly looks worthy of his hand, and was assuredly unworthy of any moderately tender heart. ' ' Here lies my wife. Here let her lie : Now she's at rest, and so am I." On the whole, however, it would appear that Dryden main- tained a fair character for moral propriety and domestic affection. Congreve, who knew him intimately, puts forward the finer side of his nature in the following observations, which are probably not only friendly but substantially fair as well. " He was of a nature exceedingly humane and compassionate, ready to forgive injuries, and capable of a sincere reconcili- ation with those who had offended him. His friendship, where he professed it, went beyond his professions. He was of a very easy, of very pleasing access, but somewhat slow, and as z&- it were diffident, in his advances to others: he had that in his nature which abhorred intrusion into any society whatever. He was therefore less known, and consequently his character became more liable to misapprehensions and misrepresenta- tions : he was very modest, and very easily to be discounte- nanced in his approaches to his equals or superiors. As his reading had been very extensive, so was he very happy in a memory tenacious of everything that he had read. He was not more possessed of knowledge than he was communicative of it : but then his communication was by no means pedantic, or imposed upon the conversation, but just such, and went so far, as, by the natural turn of the conversation in which he was engaged, it was necessarily promoted or required. He was extremely ready and gentle in his correction of the errors of JOHN DR YD EN. 105 any writer who thought fit to consult him, and full as ready and patient to admit the reprehensions of others in respect of his own oversights or mistakes." Certainly "modest" and "diffident" are not exactly the .adjectives for those qualities which one discerns as uppermost in the writings, verse and prose, of " glorious John," the master of the " full-resounding line" : on the contrary, there is a great deal of self-assertion, and an overbrimming contempt and browbeating of other men, their persons, intellects, perform- ances, and opinions. Still, we can understand that, in a certain sense and with some people, Dryden may have been diffident .and modest : that he was other than genial, manly, and attach- ing, we should find it difficult to believe. In his literary •character, susceptibility to censure was a marked trait ; but he was neither depressed nor disconcerted under such conditions, but of those who "do well to be angry," and who fly headlong to recrimination and revenge. Our poet used to be bled and purged before writing : and one may readily conjecture that there was sufficient occasion for such treatment, and no exces- sive castigation resultant from it. He dispensed favour to young authors ; frequented Will's Coffeehouse, and was arbiter ■of any literary dispute there. He must have been on terms of acquaintanceship with Milton, who, as Dryden relates, informed him " that Spenser was his original." He does not appear to have been laborious in his own work, nor very much of a scholar, although his writings display a large range of diversified knowledge appositely used : he was negligent and unequal, and perhaps never, after once publishing a poem, returned to it for revision and improvement. One great project, which Dryden never so much as began carrying out, is indicated in the dedi- cation to his play of Aurengzebe. He intended to write an epic on an English subject, of date neither close nor remote. This idea is further developed in the preface to his yuvenal and Tersius ; he had designed an epic on King Arthur or the Black io6 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. Prince, and in the supernatural mechanism of the poem (then accepted as a necessity for epical work) would have imagined the Guardian Angels of the several kingdoms — which Dr. Johnson not inaptly terms "the most reasonable scheme of celestial interposition that ever was formed." Dryden charged Blackmore with having stolen his subject from him. The poet's portrait is preserved in the Hall of Trinity Col- lege, Cambridge, and shows a face of so much masculine sanity and gentleness as predisposes us to credit all the good, and dis- regard all the evil, which could be propounded of its original. The features are well-set and comely, and the whole coun- tenance has the breadth of intellectual and personal self- possession — large resources largely and beneficially utilized. Robustness is the great characteristic of Dryden's poetry; he is often excessive, but it is the excess of faculty, not of endeavour. Whatever he does is done with solidity and superiority: he dominates his subject and his reader, and effects this by the direct unlaboured expression of himself. Animated and resolute conception finds its precise and ample equivalent in nervous diction. The Roman writers nourished his style, which took in his hands such sturdy and full-bodied dimensions as to constitute, though without any extraordinary originality to start with, the nucleus of a new school; the Roman writers far rather than those of the Romance tongues of modern Europe, so prolific in their influence upon preceding British literature. It was doubtless with surprise no less than zealous delight that in his old age Dryden discovered for him- self the magic of Chaucer, as in his youth the unapproached profusion and profundity of Shakespeare. His greatest power, hardly exercised until he had reached the maturity of his age, was in satire — satire into which he poured the whole energy of his temperament, even more than the brilliancy of his mind, and which represents chiefly vehement invective, as distinct from the sting and scintillation of epigram or lampoon. The abounding sweep and resilient strength of his versification form another of his prime excellences; and he may almost be said to have remoulded the English heroic measure — puffing it out to excess, it should fairly be admitted, with triple rhymes and rolling Alexandrines. His were essentially a mind and a hand which grasped and used their materials — educing from them the utmost for his own purposes, and leaving them to his successors drained and flaccid for further service. POETS BORN BETWEEN DRYDEN AND POPE. Katharine Philips c 1632 to 1664. Thomas Sackville Earl of) .. „ . ,' r Dorset } l6 3? to ^° 6 ' Sir Charles Sedley c. 1639 to 1701. Aphra Behn 1644 to 1689. John Wilmot Earl of Roches-) - „ . ,,0 J m - 1647 to 1680. TER J ^' Richard Blackmore c. 1650 to 1729. Thomas Otway 1651 to 1685. Nathaniel Lee c. 1655 t& c. 1690.' John Norris 1657 to 1711. Matthew Prior 1664 to 1721. Sir John Vanbrugh 1666 to 1726. Jonathan Swift 1667 to 1744. William Congreve 1670 to 1729. Colley Cibber 167 1 to 1757. Ambrose Philips 1671 to 1749. Joseph Addison 1672 to 1719. Nicholas Rowe 1673 to 1718. Isaac Watts ' 1674 to 1748. John Philips 1676 to 1708. Thomas Parnell 1679 to 1717. Edward Young 1684 to 1765. Thomas Tickell 1686 to 1740. Allan Ramsay 1686 to 1758. John Gay 1688 to 1732. ALEXANDER POPE. A poet of an artificial age, and of artificial life, who is truly a poet, is a possession to be proud of: England can claim in Pope such a poet of her own. The question whether Pope was a poet was already familiar to critical readers in the time of Dr. Johnson, and was re-debated with some acrimony about half a century ago. Some very able and acute writers of that time, such as Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb, fervid with admi- ration for our older authors, and able to appeal to so great an authority as Wordsworth, and to so strong a manifestation as Keats of very different influences in actual poetic production, were then prominent, and not inclined to allow much in favour of such conceptions and methods as Pope had more especially exemplified. The chief champion however of the anti-Pope sect was the Rev. Mr. Bowles, himself an accredited writer of verse. With him Byron did battle : and few things speak more strongly for the intrinsic health and toughness of Byron's judg- ment than the fact that he, a poet whose genius developed in such entirely different forms, stood up vigorously and unyield- ingly for the poetic name and fame of Pope. It may indeed be said that he somewhat overdid the thing, and expressed for "the little Queen Anne's man" an exceptional and enthusiastic homage which might certainly have been tendered with more absolute appropriateness to some other among the great names of England's and the world's literature. But, however this may be, Byron stemmed a flood of semi-sincere and semi-discerning LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. cavils against the object of his worship, and we should all be grateful to him for having done so, and thus vindicated — across the lapse of a century, and the inevitable changes in direction of thought and models of writing — the essential and indefeas- ible communion of poetic mind. After Byron, no one need be ashamed to confess, in the face of all idealists, subtilizers, adorers of couleur locale or " word-painting," votaries of Nature mediaeval romanticists, or classical purists (and among these classes will be found all orders of mind, from the most exalted to mere hocuspocus-mongers), that he regards Pope as a poet, and even a great one. To consider merely antecedent likeli- hood, a strong case might be made out for the probable assump- tion of Pope's being a poet. He was recognized as such by his own generation; and even the most inveterate objectors may be expected to allow that, between the days of Dryden and those of Blake and Burns, there was no one to contest the palm of supremacy with Pope. 1 Now it is prima, facie by no means likely that, in a period which we all know to have been one of great literary exertion, more than two generations of men should have passed away without producing one veritable poet ; which nevertheless we affirm to have been the case in our country, if we say that Pope beats all his verse-writing com- petitors between Dryden and Blake or Burns, and yet was him- self no poet after all. Perhaps the sum of intellect, and the 1 I suppose the names that would most nearly be put in competition are those of Allan Ramsay, Thomson, Gray, Collins, Cowper, and by some persons Chatterton (dates of birth ranging from 1686 to 1752) : scarcely Young or Goldsmith (1684, 1731). These names I must leave to the suffrages of their respective zealots, conscious that something might be said in favour of Gray, and certain that something would be said in favour of Cowper, upon whom, as the reviver of " Nature" in poetry, there has been a considerable run for many years past. For my own part, I could not at all allow the claims of Cowper as making head against those of Pope : but it may farther be observed that the period of Cowper 's poetic activity began in fact after that of Blake, and only four years before that of Burns, so that he is barely to be reckoned in the comparison, even in point of date. potentialities of its achievement, are very nearly the same in any one generation as in another ; and, after the literary sense has been thoroughly aroused in a country, and the poetic art shown forth and even consummately realized, it is difficult to suppose that the very best man of his time, practising poetry with all the ardour of a genuine' vocation, with a corresponding conviction on his own part, with boundless acceptance from his contemporaries, and with uncontested and utterly incontestable skill and mastery of both the intellectual and technical kinds, should nevertheless have been something other than a poet — devoid of that single faculty, or exquisite and inexpressible integer of faculties, which severs the poet from the many men of letters, and qualifies him to be the singer for his own time, and for long processionary years ensuing. The fact is that, in a very artificial age (and such was the age of Pope), an artificial poet is the highest poet attainable : his very artificiality of matter and style is his authentication as poet. This may sound like a paradox : yet it is hardly more paradoxical than the statement that a gold coin is equally gold whether stamped with the effigy of Alexander the Great or of Louis Quinze, of Cromwell or of Charles the Second, of Napoleon the First or Napoleon the Third. The only condition, then, on which we can have real poets in an artificial age, is that they also should be in a measure artificial : on that condition we can have them, and in Pope England had one truly supereminent. The artifi- ciality of the age he lived in was to him not wholly factitious : it was his atmosphere, and partly his nature. That he should have been as natural as Theocritus, as terrible as ^Eschylus, as austere as Lucretius, as supernal as Dante, as knightly as Chaucer, as noble as Milton, was simply and totally impossible : nay, had it even been possible, such a result would in him have been in some degree spurious, for it could only have en- sued from his prepensely and pertinaciously going out of his age and of himself— and that is not the process which makes a LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. poet, or ever did make one. There seems to be something both shortsighted and ungracious in denying the laurel to Pope: shortsighted, for the conditions which affected his poetic posi- tion are intrinsically the same which must operate in any and every highly artificial age, and to reject Pope would go far towards the temerity of banning poetry out of all such recurrent periods ; ungracious, for he gave us the best outcome of the best mind of his time, and in the best of its forms. Let us then (if I may assume to speak for the reader as well as myself) rest contentedly and gratefully in the conviction that Pope was a poet — the only sort of poet that we were likely to get out of the reigns of Anne and George the First ; and moreover, not only the sole sort forthcoming, but an amply good sort for all persons who would enlarge instead of restricting the area of the art, and would fain contemplate the mighty Poetic Spirit work- ing marvellously in all guises and disguises rather than only uttering remote inspirations in some iterated monotone. Alexander Pope was born in Lombard Street, London, on the 21st of May 1688. His father, named also Alexander, was a linen-draper in the Strand, and acquired a handsome compe- tence. It has been said that he belonged to the same family of which the Earl of Downe was the head : the connexion, how- ever, is dubious, and must at any rate have been extremely remote. The mother, Edith Turner, was a daughter of the Lord of the Manor of Towthorpe, Yorkshire : she was one of seventeen children, and survived all the others — as indeed she well might, seeing that she died at the immense age of ninety- three, living no day too long for the tender affection with which her illustrious son cherished and surrounded her. He did not slight her for being " a poor feeble-minded thing," if indeed she was such, nor count her "unworthy any one's care or esteem " : these not very feeling expressions are the description of old venerable Mrs. Pope handed down to us by Mrs. Piozzi. ALEXANDER POPE. 113 Both Pope's parents were Roman- Catholics, the father being a devout religionist ; some have alleged, but no one has furnished proof, that he was a convert to Catholicism. Of the large Turner brood, some had been brought up as Catholics, includ- ing Mrs. Pope, others as Protestants. The family had been strenuous royalists in the time of Charles I. Alexander was an exceedingly delicate boy from his birth, and in childhood noted for gentleness. He was " protuberant behind and before," and remained so stunted in stature that, when grown up, he could not sit at table without a raised seat : he was also very nearsighted. In a word, his outer man was a deplorable sample of Nature's handiwork ; and, if we stop short of calling him dwarfish and deformed, we concede as much to courtesy as to truth. Yet his face in manhood, lit up with very vivid eyes, could not be called displeasing : the atten- uated features were sufficiently harmonious, and in an eminent degree expressive and intellectual. His smile was sweet, but to see him laugh was a rarity indeed. Pope's father retired from trade on his earnings towards the date of the Revolution of 1688, still at a comparatively early age. At first he lived at Kensington, and then moved off to Binfield, in the district of Windsor Forest. His fortune was about ^20,000. As he had conscientious scruples against investing it in Government securities, now that the adversaries of Catholicism were so greatly in the ascendant, he simply kept his money by.him in a chest, and used it as occasion arose ; and a great part of it had naturally disappeared at the time of his death. The child showed extraordinary precocity : to which perhaps an aunt of his intended to bear her witness when she made him, at the age of five, the reversionary legatee of all her books, pictures, and medals. By the age of seven or eight, up to which time, it appears, he had not gone to school, he was a great devourer of books. When about eight years old he 9 U4 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. was placed under a priest named Banister, in Hampshire, and began learning Latin and Greek. Thence he went to a school at Twyford, near Winchester ; and afterwards to another near Hyde Park Corner, having left the Twyford establishment in some disgrace, caused by his writing a versified lampoon upon the master — an incident truly predictive of his after career, if the facts have been stated with unembellished accu- racy. At the London school he made a kind of play out of Ogilby's Homer, eked out with some verses of his own — another omen, as it might seem : this dramatic cento was acted by his schoolfellows. When about fifteen years old, after an interval of a couple of years at home, he returned to London for some further schooling in French and Italian : it is doubtful, however, whether at any date he fully mastered either language, although he could read a French book with ease. Indeed, it should be understood that, apt pupil as he proved under all his masters, Pope, as a grown-up man, was mainly self-educated, and was never to be called a scholar, whether in modern or classical literature, or in any other study. No doubt, the little Roman-Catholic schools to which, under the legal oppressions then in force, he was practically restricted, were far from being of such a grade as to make the utmost of his shining natural abilities. After a few more months in London he returned to his family at Binfield ; and then followed five or six years of close study, mostly of the ancient and English poets. Pope began writing verses so early that he could not after- wards remember how far back the beginning dated. Melody, indeed, seemed inborn in the mis-shapen body, for in boyhood his voice was so sweet as to earn him the appellation of " the Little Nightingale " : in later years, nevertheless, he appeared to be indifferent to music. When he returned home to Binfield from his first London school, aged about twelve, he already aimed to become a poet, making Dryden his chief model * versification : and his father seems never to have thwarted the ALEXANDER POPE. 115 lad's inclination, whatever direction of literary or other culture it may have pointed in. One of Pope's earliest poems was an epic on Akander, Prince of Rhodes, begun about his thirteenth year. He wrote some 4000 lines of this ponderous perform- ance ; then dropped it, and finally burned the manuscript. Some of the lines, however, appear, and they were good enough to appear unaltered, in the Essay on Criticism and the Dunciad. His earliest composition, preserved in a complete form, is apparently the Ode to Solitude, which is hardly distin- guished by any rawness from the mature work of Pope himself, or of poetic writers generally. This preceded rather than succeeded the Akander. Another juvenile effort was the translation of the First Book of the Thebais of Statius, executed at the age of fourteen : but even this had been forestalled by other renderings from the same poet, beginning as far back, it is stated, as Pope's ninth year ! Other works, the modernizations from Chaucer, a lost comedy and tragedy, might further be cited among the products of his precocity : but to enlarge on this matter were now superfluous. At the age of sixteen or seventeen Pope wrote his Pastorals : these were at once shown about and admired, but their publica- tion only ensued after an interval of five years (1709). Sir William Trumball, of East Hamstead near Binfield, was per- haps the first person to recognize Pope's great literary promise, in 1705 : he introduced him to the aged dramatist Wycherley, who so far valued and confided in his juvenile friend as to entrust him with the revision of his miscellaneous poems. The task was probably too faithfully executed, and the natural con- sequence followed— ruffled self-esteem and alienation. Besides Trumball, Walsh, the poetical writer and critic, encouraged Pope and his Pastorals ; also Henry Cromwell, an amateur critic and country-gentleman, partly domiciled in London, whose acquaintance Pope made towards 1708, and with whom he carried on a correspondence which afterwards had an 1m- 9 * n6 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. portant influence on the current of the poet's celebrity and conduct. It was at the age of seventeen that he preluded his public appearance among literary adventurers by frequenting the noted rendezvous of such personages — Will's Coffeehouse in Russell Street, Covent Garden. The history of Pope's writings is the history of his quarrels. He was far too conspicuously gifted to be an object of indiffer- ence to other men of letters, whether magnates, aspirants, or pretenders : those who looked down upon his person with derision had to look up to his pen with envy or trepidation. And he himself, supremely touchy, splenetic, and dauntless, and endowed with a terrific power of the lash, of which he was naturally as conscious as were all the victims who writhed beneath it, was no sooner touched than he was touched to the quick : on his thin skin a scratch was a scarification, and woe be to the wretch who, in spite, wantonness, or inadvertence, happened to inflict it. As we have seen already, he could not so much as oblige Wycherley by annotating the margins of his verse without offending him : and his first publication, the Pas- torals, soon generated an amount of bad blood such as seems to have been uniformly and surprisingly absent from the Doric competitions of Corydon and Menalchas. These poems were published in Tonson's Poetical Miscellany, which volume con- tained a few other pieces by Pope, and the Pastorals of Ambrose Philips. The last-named performances were reviewed with great applause in the Guardian, a paper with which Philips, as a zealous Whig, stood in high favour. Pope was nettled at this ; and with a delicious ingenuity of malice (which both the moralist and the prudentialist must however note with displeasure, as showing that Pope it was who took the first step, equally superfluous and irretrievable, in that lettered and personal warfare which, passing on from skirmish to skirmish, and from ambush to melee, lasted out the remainder of his life) he wrote another review of Philips, contrasting the merits of ALEXANDER POPE. 117 his Pastorals with those of Pope's own, and professing through- out to give the palm to Philips, although the contrast really- presented is manifestly, to a discerning reader, in Pope's favour. The irony was so finely masked that Steele supposed the whole thing to be bona fide, and, receiving the anonymous article, withheld it out of regard to Pope. It was however published in 17 13, also in the Guardian: and, its true drift being soon re- cognized, as well as the hand from which it came, the critique so exasperated Philips that, in an ulterior stage of the quarrel, he hung up a rod at Button's Coffeehouse, threatening to punish his detractor with it The latter, we may be sure, was not behindhand in hostilities, and incited his easy-going friend Gay to write his well-known Shepherd's Week in ridicule of his foe. The foremost critic of the day, John Dennis, is said to have regarded Pope's Pastorals slightingly. With him therefore the poet, in his next publication, the Essay on Criticism, tried a fall. This work, written in 1709, was issued in 1711, and Dennis naturally retaliated. Next came the ever fresh and fascinating masterpiece, the Rape of the Lock, written in 171 1. In its original form, this poem was in only two cantos, which Pope executed in a fortnight : its publication ensued in 1 7 1 2. It was at a later date that he conceived and carried out the poetical machinery of the sylphs and gnomes — " airy nothings" created by a fancy which has almost passed into frivolity, and all the more genuine for that, in their relation to the entire poetical scheme of the work. Addison, now the arch-ruler in the world of letters, more especially in all its Whiggish regions, to whom Pope was introduced in 171 2, and with whom he was on very friendly terms, advised him against introducing this supernatural by-play ; and (if we regard merely the structural value of the poem, without being biased by the question of its dimensions, and consequent elaboration and importance) I am not certain but that most readers of the present day would Ii8 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. agree with Addison. The author however stood firm, and. carried the public with him ; some degree of ruffled amour propre, arising from this incident, may perhaps have conduced to the after-breach of amity between the two eminent allies. The briefest reference to the facts whereon the poem of the Rape of the Lock was founded must here suffice. The real heroine of the incident, which had recently produced a few wrinkles of excitement on the surface of that shallow pool Fashionable Society, was Miss Arabella Fermor : the author of the " rape " itself was Lord Petre — both belonging to the Catholic aristocracy. Miss Fermor, who shortly afterwards became Mrs. Perkins, was naturally elated by so splendid a celebration of her charms ; elated, and yet it would seem also partly offended that a mere nobody of a poet should have made so free in print with her adventures. — In 1713 the poem of Windsor Forest, partly written at the age of sixteen, was pub- lished. It was about this time that Pope made some attempts in the art of painting, being inclined to add that accomplish- ment to his more special gift of verse. He studied under the portrait-painter Jervas, and got some of his friends to sit for their likenesses : but he never proceeded far in this occupa- tion, his nearsightedness being a serious obstacle. The great undertaking of Pope in the translation of the Iliad, which led to the most overt acts of his hostility with Addison, was preceded by some other incidents telling in the same direction. In his writing a prologue to Addison's Cato (1713) there was indeed nothing but friendliness and handsome literary support ; nor yet in his shortly afterwards, when his old enemy Dennis had fallen foul of the pompous tragedy of the Whig dramatist, writing and publishing anonymously the Narrative of Dr. Robert Norris on the Frenzy of J^o/m Dennis — Norris being a quack physician of the time, and the idea of the skit boldly borrowed from that of Swift upon the prophet Partridge. But it was not quite pleasant to Pope to find Addison A LEX A NDER POPE. 1 1 9 (who may or may not have known the real authorship of the pamphlet, and who had at any rate a right to dislike an excess of volunteered zeal which ran over into scurrility) writing to the publisher to express disapprobation of the performance. The publication of the Homeric translation was definitely projected in the same year, 17 13, the work having been commenced in 17 1 2 : the first four Books issued from the press in 17 15, and the whole came to a conclusion in 1720. The Rev. William Broome and some others helped Pope in the notes. The poet obtained 575 subscribers for his work, and received from it the large sum of ,£5320. 4 s. : this relieved him from many difficulties, and was usefully invested in annuities on his life. The year 1715, which witnessed the publication of the first four Books of Pope's version, saw also the appearance of the first Book in a translation executed by Addison's familiar friend and literary protege Tickell. A far less suspicious coincidence would have sufficed to fire Pope's mind with jealous and angry mis- givings. He attributed the rival publication to Addison's influence, and even to the latter's own pen, sneakingly active under the name of Tickell : and in fact Addison did so far espouse the cause of the less famous bard as to affirm that TickelPs Iliad "had more of Homer." 1 However, it is not now believed that Addison had any direct concern in Tickell's work. Besides this supposed cause of offence, Pope fancied that Addison had set-on a Mr. Gildon to malign him. Embit- tered by these ideas, he wrote-off the memorable lines on " Atticus " — or rather the first draft of them — now forming a portion of the Epistle to Z>r. Arbuthnot, published in 1735 \ and he sent the manuscript to his distrusted friend. Whether 1 No one perhaps knows at the present day — I at any rate do not — whether Addison was right or wrong in this assertion ; for Tickell's translation proved but an abortive embryo which, overpowered by the popularity of Pope's, lived no longer than its first Book. But, as Pope's version has little indeed of Homer, Tickell's might certainly have had more, and yet have been a very poor performance. LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. through shame, fear, or let us prefer to believe through his own substantial guiltlessness, " Mr. Addison used me " (so said Pope) "very civilly ever after " ; indeed he wrote in the Free- holder of Pope's Iliad as competing with Dryden's JEneid. The bond of cordiality however was broken, not to be re-knit. Steele endeavoured to effect a reconciliation between the two : but Addison proved to be distant in a personal interview, and Pope was haughty. The translation of the Iliad was enormously admired, and gave its writer such a position in the world of letters as perhaps none of his own original poems, however brilliant and popular, would wholly have availed to procure him. It was followed by the version of the Odyssey, completed in 1725 : the contract for this work was somewhat less advan- tageous than that for the Iliad, nor were Pope's personal labours upon it equally great. Broome and Elijah Fenton, who received between ^700 and ^800 for their work, while Pope retained about ^3700, were his confederates in the trans- lation, the former writing also the notes : twelve Books alone are the work of Pope. 1 Having achieved this task, he deter- mined to translate no more. Between these two translations he had brought out, in 172 1, his edition of Shakespeare. It was far from being the work of a thorough scholar in the litera- ture of that period, and, as a standard edition, has sunk into deserved disregard : nevertheless it contains many acute re- marks and suggestions, including several conjectural emendations which have been generally adopted. Theobald pointed out the defects of the work : this mortified Pope, and he regretted having ever engaged in so extraneous an undertaking. Neither had Theobald, after a while, much reason to con- gratulate himself upon having intermixed in it. We have reached the year 1725, the thirty-eighth of Pope's life; and will now take a brief glance at his domestic cir- 1 I.e. Books 3, 5, 7, 9, io, 13, 14, 15, 17, 21, 22, 24 : Books 2, 6, 8, n, 12, 16, 18, 23, are by Broome, and 1, 4, 19, and 20, by Fenton. ALEXANDER POPE. cumstances. In 17 15 he had persuaded his father to sell the estate at Binfield, and he himself purchased a house at Chiswick, to which he removed with both his parents; and in no great literary personage does deep unaffected filial piety, in the ordinary wear and tear of life, shine brighter and purer than in Pope, the exasperated satirist, courted associate of geniuses and of princes. The father died in October 17 17. The mother then, in 17 18, removed with the poet to a house in Twickenham of which he bought the lease — being the villa, with its grounds of five acres, which became so famous to contemporaries and to posterity. The grounds received great alterations, and the addition of a "grotto," from Pope's assiduous care; the house itself under- went but little change. Mrs. Pope, as we have already seen, survived till the age of ninety-three, expiring in 1733, when the life of Pope himself was within eleven years of its term. The other enduring affection of his life (apart from friendships with men of letters or of society, among whom he had several close intimates) was with Miss Martha Blount. His relation to this lady has been matter of much speculation, conjecture, scrutiny, and suspicion. The Blounts were a Roman-Catholic family at Mapledurham in Oxfordshire, with whom Pope had been familiar in early youth, from the year 1707. The head of the family was Mr. Lister Blount : his two daughters, Teresa and Martha, were born respectively in 1688 and 1690, and were therefore of very much the same age as the poet. He, it seems, had at first shown a predilection for the elder and handsomer sister, Teresa, and this continued for some years ; but eventually he taxed her with prudishness, and also with the very opposite misdemeanour of intriguing with a married man, and his strong liking turned into distinct aversion. Martha then ruled supreme; although indeed at one time, towards 1722-23, Pope appeared to be somewhat enamoured of Miss Judith Cowper, the niece of the Lord Chancellor. LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. cies und She married another person in the latter year. His intimacies with Martha Blount, who in his later years was to be found domiciled in his house from time to time, were a topic of scandal with many, and the opinions even of his more recent biographers have differed as to the facts, or probable facts, of the case. On the whole, the more likely opinion appears to be that the crippled valetudinarian was not in this instance either a gay Lothario or an amoureux transi : he regarded Martha Blount with a sentiment in which love coloured but did not absorb friendship, and she responded with kindred feelings — not, it may well be believed, strictly untrue or self-interested, although it has been strongly affirmed that towards the close of his life she treated him with careless, and on occasion even with callous, neglect. There seems to be no adequate ground for the story that on his deathbed he offered her marriage. What is certain is that he left her the bulk of his property, " out of sincere regard and long friendship for her," as his will said; and what is reluctantly surmised by those who tender his good name is that on one occasion, wishing to make an investment for Martha's benefit, he descended to accepting a sum of ^iooo from the Duchess of Marlborough as hush- money to escape the publication of attacks which he had written against the Duke, and probably against the Duchess herself as well. The ineffaceable lines on "Atossa" {Characters of Women) would perhaps have been cheaply bought-off by her Grace atp£iooo: they were suppressed during the author's lifetime, but at his death were found to be already in print, in preparation for a new edition. It should be added that diligent modern investigation has shown good ground for be- lieving that Atossa was not intended for the Duchess of Marlborough at all. The complicated affair of Pope's letters next demands our attention : it still remains in some degree mysterious, but un- fortunately the leading facts are now understood only too* clearly for the poet's reputation. The less the mystery, the less the respect which can be accorded to him. In 1726 Pope's early letters addressed to Mr. Cromwell were published by one of the notorieties of the day, the piratical bookseller Curll, to whom they had been consigned by Cromwell's mistress. In 1735 the same foul bibliopolical hands ushered into the world a volume of the correspondence that had passed between Pope and various friends. The poet — poor injured undesigning creature — tried the effect of 'a prosecution of the publisher before the House of Lords for breach of privilege, as letters from some of the Peers were included in the volume : but this effort failed. Then Pope, denouncing the inaccuracy of the surreptitious edition, as well as the wrongful interference with his privacy, professed that the only course open to him for self-vindication was to bring out another authorized and correct edition: and this he accordingly produced in 1737. These letters overflowed with friendship, philanthropy, moral recti- tude, and the finest sentiments in the repertory : they reflected the highest credit upon Pope in the eyes of an admiring and believing public, and subserved his literary fame as well — the publication of any series of letters, and such well-composed letters to boot, being at that time an innovation. But what if it should turn out that the whole affair of the garbled piratical edition was a got-up scheme of Pope's own — a mere device to satisfy his itch for applause, by paving the way to the pro- duction of his own nominally enforced, but in reality forecast and eagerly desired, edition— a plot conceived with as much tortuous disingenuousness as it was based on uneasy vanity, and carried out with effrontery? This, doleful to relate, is what does turn out. Curll, and the respectable bookseller Lintot who was Pope's accustomed publisher, testified that they had received simultaneous clandestine offers of the correspondence, before Curll closed with the proposal, and issued the pirated edition : and a painter named Worsdale 124 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. professed to have been the messenger who sought out Curll, and this at the instance of Pope himself. When the minutiae of the authorized edition are examined, this correspondence proves to be hardly more honourable to the writer than the petty scheming connected with the original issue : both equally evince his readiness to use any small arts which would assist him in posing for effect. For instance, Pope induced one of his friends, a Sussex squire of no particular importance named Caryll, to send back the letters which the poet had addressed to him, on the pretext of the danger of their falling into the hands of Curll or some other such pirate : and these same letters appear in the authorized edition, nominally directed to persons of greater worldly consequence than Caryll. In other letters he not only altered passages, but even changed them into the precise contrary of their original purport. The whole of this affair, in its planning, execution, and details, is alike discreditable to Pope : but, while frankly and emphatically allowing thus much, we should guard against an excess of censure, such as some of the most recent explorers of the facts seem to lapse into. Pope, it is plain, plumed him- self on his letter-writing (which indeed so good a judge as Thackeray has viewed with cordial admiration, though he does not deny its being in some degree artificial) ; he felt inclined to produce it to the world ; and, not finding any obvious straightforward grounds for doing so, he schemed and finessed until the thing was managed, traversing in the process many quaking bogs of equivocation, verbal and acted, and plunging every now and then into a too undeniable quagmire of men- dacity. The small and pertinacious trickiness, in its main purpose unharmful enough, deserved punishment, and has amply received it : for this is, of all the transactions of Pope's contentious life, the one which to the present day raises the greatest clamour of disdain and reprobation. Another unpleasant episode is his quarrel with Lady Mary ALEXANDER POPE. 125 Wortley Montague. This handsome and brilliant lady made his acquaintance soon after his removal to Chiswick in 17 15, at which date she was about twenty-five years of age. For a while they saw one another with mutual delight; and Pope ventured to address her ladyship by letter in a style more befitting a lover than a literary intimate of the infirmest physique. It was probably on account of this very personal insignificance, as well as in unison with the manners of the age, that Lady Mary tolerated such a mode of address, to which she replied with a bantering reciprocity : for at the present day no taint of real scandal clings round the con- nexion, whatever uncertainties may in earlier times have existed. She returned from abroad to England in 17 18, and the friendship continued. Finally, however, it ceased: whether brought to a sudden close (as some have intimated) by an open and mortifying repulse on some occasion when Pope's expressions of gallantry exceeded a reasonable measure, or gradually worn away by recurring collisions and contra- dictions in the commerce of society. Pope, in ceasing to be a friend, became a spiteful enemy, and no one can count to his praise the verses wherein he insulted " Sappho " (Moral Essays, Epistle 2) : nor was Lady Mary wanting in animus when she retorted. To return to the sequence of Pope's literary labours. In 1727 his prose work The Art of Sinking in Poetry was published in a volume of Miscellanies, wherein Swift also bore a part. A number of authors' names are here given under their initial letters only : those who perceived the cap to fit put it on, and complained of Pope's malicious attack— which he however denied, alleging that the initials meant nobody in particular, and had been inserted at random. It is no marvel that this plea lacked believers. The assailed became in their turn assailants, and numerous diatribes against Pope flowed from the press. The armoury of his satire now furnished forth in 126 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. revenge the most terrible of all its weapons, the Dunciad. This splendid chef-d 'ozuvre was published in 1728, and in that edition Theobald, who had censured Pope's editorship of Shakespeare, figured as the arch-Dunce: some of the notes were written by Pope's intimate friend, the highly estimable Dr. Arbuthnot. The effect of the satire was gradual, but extremely detrimental to its victims : Thackeray indeed has expressed his opinion that this work, and the others in which Pope and Swift attacked the smaller fry of writers, on whom they fixed the nickname of " Grub Street authors," caused a real direct lowering of the social position of professional literary men, reducing their emoluments, and originating the conception, till then only casual and indeterminate, of the " ragged author." The Dunciad was followed up by a series of further attacks on various persons in the paper entitled the Grub Street Journal for 1730 to 1737. In 1742 Pope added to the Dunciad a fourth Book, using certain materials which had long been in his mind, but which he now, owing to asthma and other increasing infirmities, abandoned the project of moulding into an independent poem. His idea had been to write a series of Epistles as a kind of sequel to the Essay on Man, exhibiting the limits of human reason, the different capacities and tendencies of individuals, and other the like subject-matter. This fourth Book of the Dunciad was par- ticularly severe on Colley Cibber the dramatist, now Poet Laureate. Cibber replied in a pamphlet, tracing back Pope's animosity to a somewhat remote date, 17 17, and trivial cir- cumstance. Pope had in that year been concerned in a play named Three Hours after Marriage, which found no favour with the audience, chiefly through the fiasco of an incident of two lovers disguising themselves in a mummy and a crocodile. Cibber, in afterwards acting the character of Bayes in The Rehearsal, made a sufficiently harmless allusion to this topic of the day, by way of '•' gag," and thereby roused the ire of ALEXANDER POPE. 127 Pope, who had an immediate altercation with him behind the scenes. Cibber's pamphlet now proved a fresh cause of offence ; and Pope, issuing one more edition of the Dunciad, substituted Cibber as its hero for Theobald — not however taking the trouble of re-adapting to the frivolous playwright the accessory details which had been drawn up to suit the ponderous commentator. This was the last literary act of Pope, occurring in 1743, only a year before his death. It remains for us to mention the other works of Pope, inter- mediate between the first and the last editions of the Dunciad. His poem regarding the Use of Riches (Epistle Four of the Moral Essays), published in 1731, was regarded as attacking the Duke of Chandos under the name of Timon. This would have been — or we must probably say was — an ungrateful and wanton act on the poet's part, as the Duke had been at any rate civil and obliging to him, if indeed not munificent, as there is some reason to think : severe reflections were made upon Pope's misdeed, but he denied, without convincing any one, that he had aimed his shaft at Chandos. In 1733, before the appear- ance of the surreptitious edition of his letters, Pope brought out anonymously the first Part of the Essay on Man, a grandiose undertaking which he had been meditating for probably not less than eight years. The real authorship of the poem was not at first divined, many precautions having been taken against iden- tification of it, and consequent hostility : it attained, even in its anonymous stage, a large measure of success. The second and third Epistles of this work followed, the authorship being still unavowed, but now more and more shrewdly suspected : when the fourth came out in 1734, Pope's name appeared on the title-page. Lord Bolingbroke, with whom the poet was now extremely intimate, prompted the general philosophical scheme of the poem : he is said to have laughed at Pope for not perceiving that its positions, if followed out to their logical consequences, were antagonistic to Christian revelation. This 128 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. was discerned by M. Crousaz, a Swiss professor, who wrote a criticism attacking the principles of the Essay on Man as being nothing better than natural religion. The Anglican clergyman Dr. Warburton, afterwards a Bishop, came forward unsolicited to defend Pope in the journal named The Republic of Letters. So opportune a service became the origin of a close intimacy between the two writers : Pope founded Warburton's fortunes, saw in his last years more of him than of any other friend, and left him the copyright of all such published works of his as War- burton had then already annotated, or should thereafter be con- cerned with. In 1733 Pope brought out his Epistle on the Use of Riches, the only writing which hints at his being a Catholic ; in 1734, that on the Characters of Men, followed by the singularly powerful and fine one on the Characters of Women. He projected treating in blank verse an epic subject which seems hardly adapted to his genius — the fabulous legend of King Brut of Britain : he also had an idea of composing a History of British Poetry. These designs were not to be ful- filled. At the time when Pope had first begun publishing, in 1709, the literary men of the Tory party were in favour : his own early patrons, however, were chiefly Whigs, and the Whig statesman Lord Halifax, subsequently to the fall of the Tories in 1 7 14, offered the poet a pension, which he had sufficient in- dependence of spirit to decline. In the latter portion of his life he was definitely and even closely connected with the Tories, more especially with Bolingbroke after the return of the latter in 1723 from his first exile ; and he had ready access to Frederick Prince of Wales, then the hope of all who craved after a change in the politics of George the Second's reign. It may with truth be said that Pope was more of a Tory in his later years than he had been of a Whig in his youth : but in fact he was from first to last alien from politics, and, if he adopted anything of a party tone, it came from his surroundings more than from himself, nor did he at any time commit him- self so far with either faction as to become obnoxious to those of the other with whom he was personally in contact. The year 1723, when Bolingbroke returned from exile, was the same in which Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester, was ban- ished as being concerned in a plot favouring the Pretender : on that occasion Pope, who knew him well, appeared in court as a witness in his behalf. As his political opinions, so also Pope's religious views appear to have been somewhat indistinct. A strict and unbending Roman-Catholic he assu- redly was not, and certainly at times his attitude of mind regarding the general body of christian dogma was more sceptical than orthodox : to call him a resolute unbeliever would however be going too far, and he may perhaps on the whole be termed a christian conformist, who sincerely respected and accepted " the religious idea," and aquiesced in the form which this has received from Christianity, and, in a minor degree, from the Catholic Church. Atterbury pressed him to relinquish the Catholic for the Anglican form of the faith : but this he refused, being in especial unwilling to pain his mother, then still living. On his deathbed he expressed confidence in a future state : and, being asked whether a Catholic priest should be called in, he promptly assented, though he added that he did not regard such a course as essential. In 1729 he had written to Swift : " I am of the religion of Erasmus, a Catholic : so I live, so I shall die ; and hope one day to meet ycu, Bishop Atterbury, the younger Craggs, Dr. Garth, Dean Berkeley, and Mr. Hutchenson, in heaven." This is a wide extent of comprehension. It is not ecclesiastically orthodox, but neither is it anti-religious, and it is at least charitable. In 1744 the frail unsightly frame which had for fifty-five years been kindled with so bright and mounting a spirit was visibly wearing away. Pope was always so weak that he wore stays (or, as Thackeray expresses it, "was sewed up in a buckram 10 130 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. suit every morning") : when in a boat on the river, he sat in a sedan-chair. On one occasion, being overturned into the water as his coach was crossing a bridge, he had had a narrow escape with his life. He compared his own form to a spider's : his loving friend Lord Orrery, going a step further, wrote of him one of the most ill-natured designations on record, "Mens curva in corpore curvo." He used to suffer especially severe headaches, which were somewhat mitigated by inhaling the fumes of coffee. He was extremely sensitive to cold. One of his sides was con- tracted, and he could not dress or get to bed without help. With such a person and constitution, Pope's physical enjoy- ments must necessarily have been few : it seems he took what he could get, and was too indulgent to his appetite, more particularly as regards eating. Some have even said that the immediate cause of his death was a surfeit of potted lampreys, eaten from a silver saucepan which he regarded with predilection. This is more than dubious : but Dr. King at any rate opined that Pope had shortened his days by partaking of high-seasoned dishes and by drinking spirits. In May 1 744 life was flickering down. The poet had attacks of delirium, and was peculiarly distressed by an inability to fix his thoughts. Bolingbroke viewed him with keen commiseration. Spence, the author of the well-known Anecdotes, told this sympathizer that Pope, when still rational, was always saying something kind of his friends : and Bolingbroke replied, " I never in my life knew a man that had so tender a heart for his particular friends, or more general friendship for mankind " — a judgment which should be counted as some considerable testimony to the poet's credit, as the intriguing and battered politician was not exactly the man to be hoodwinked by mere verbal platitudes of philanthropic geniality. Pope received the last sacraments according to the rites of his Church; he after- wards said, " There is nothing that is meritorious but virtue and • friendship, and indeed friendship is only a part of virtue." On he evening of the 30th of May 1744 he breathed his last,. so* ALEXANDER POPE. placidly that the precise moment was not observed. He is interred at Twickenham. Pope appointed Lord Bolingbroke and the Earl of March- mont his executors, the former being entrusted with his manusc ripts and unprinted papers. These were not given to the public ; partly, it appears, because Lord Bolingbroke took great offence at finding that Pope had caused to be printed not only, as authorized, a few copies, but an entire and copious edition, of the pamphlet written by his Lordship named The Patriot King. That Pope exceeded his instructions in the matter, and violated his promise, is undeniable : it is not how- ever apparent that he had any interested or mean, still less any hostile or treacherous, motive in this act, — which may therefore most fairly be ascribed to his secretive and scheming habit of mind, as summed up in the phrase quoted by Dr. Johnson, "He hardly drank tea without a stratagem." On the whole he was a faithful friend, and had some genuine attachments — none more so than in the cases of Gay and Swift : he survived the body of the former, and the mind of the latter. In his own family he was, and deserved to be, greatly beloved. His half-sister Mrs. Rackett spoke up for his courage, saying he knew not what fear was, nor is there anything in his career to belie this domestic attestation. Too capable though he certainly was of shuffling and circumventing to attain any aim in view, he never hung back from attacking when an object for his pugnacity presented itself: like that most gallant of small beasts, the hamster, he took all antagonists as they came— mouse, rabbit, horse, bull, wild-cat, wolf, or bear, all were equally flown at and pinned. Yet he was placable too to a fallen foe. In 1 733 poor old John Dennis, with whom he had had many a tooth-and-nail encounter, being blind and in distress, Pope wrote a prologue for his benefit- night ; the reader who refers to it will not, I think, agree with those who consider it sneering and ungenerous. Some banter, 10 * no doubt, there is : but this appears to be the kindly banter of one who pities and forgives. Notwithstanding his brilliant powers of wit and of expression, Pope was not distinguished in conversation ; nor had he the taste, so prevalent in his time, for card-playing, and other such social if trivial pastimes. He had a fine memory and great diligence, sparing no pains in the revision and polishing of his compositions. It is said that he never printed anything till some two years from the writing of it had elapsed : and in the interim he would pay heed to the suggestions of friends, as well as to his own second thoughts. He was a great admirer of Dryden, and to some extent took that poet's Mac Flecknoe as the model of his Dunciad. Frugality was one of Pope's characteristics, but certainly not miserliness. He wrote his Iliad, as he went along translating, on the backs of letters addressed to him : and there was some degree of stint in the table he spread before his ordinary guests, although at times he would give a truly handsome dinner, well supported in all respects. His income standing at ^800 a year, he systemati- cally bestowed p^ioo in charity. That in his maturer years he lived on terms of great familiarity with many men of high rank and station was no more than the fact It was open to all people to say as much, and to himself among others, although he may have proclaimed it with increasing frequency, and self- complacency rather more than needful : but he did, and most truthfully could, add the affirmation that he had purchased and secured these intimacies by no sort of servility. Disregard of his own poetry, and indifference to criticism, are two favourite themes in his letters, one as veracious as the other. Pope may be termed the Poet of the Understanding ; not merely in the limited though strictly true acceptation in which Johnson says that good-sense was the fundamental principle of his intellect, but in something of the same spirit in which ALEXANDER POPE. 133 Kant (so at least he is generally construed) distinguishes the Understanding, as the faculty for knowledge in man, from the Reason, as the primary or intuitional cognitive power. The range of the author of the Rape of the Lock, the Eloisa to Abelard, the Dunciad, the Essay on Man, and the Homeric translations, was certainly not a narrow one, though it ap- pears to the reader more restricted than it really is, seeing that the writer passed all his subject-matter through a some- what uniform and inexpansive mould of execution : but alike in these several excellent works the Understanding predomi- nates — everything is brought to the test of the judging and comparing mind. We can all say, and say with the utmost truth, that a great creative or emotional nature has a larger share in what is highest in poesy : the riches and strength of Pope were not in that direction. His it was to discern, to analyse, and to express. This he did with admirable force of mind and of speech, and with amplest possession and skilfullest use of such means of poetry as were more specially germane to his time. He will always occupy a great position — the position of that one among the Understanding Intellects who has most clearly appreciated his own true province in Poetic Art, and has wrung from a reluctant and partly a hostile goddess the largest results, conformable wholly to his own mental nature, and in no disproportionate measure to hers. POETS BORN BETWEEN POPE AND THOMSON William Somervile 1692 to 1742. Richard Savage 1698 to 1743. Robert Blair 1699 to 1746. John Dyer 1700 to 1758. David Malloch (or Mallet) ... c. 1700 to 1765. JAMES THOMSON. The Poet of the Seasons deserved to be born, if not in some scene of natural majesty or magnificence, at least in a spot of rural amenity, away from the dense turmoil of great cities. This boon was accorded him ; the place of his birth being Ednam near Kelso, and the date n September 1 1700. His father was the minister of Ednam, a man distinguished for piety. James received his earliest teaching at Jedburgh Grammar-school. Here, and even at a prior date, he at- tracted, by his taste for poetry, the attention of a neighbouring minister, the Rev. Mr. Riccaltoun, who encouraged his boyish attempts. On leaving this school he went to the University of Edinburgh, and in 17 19 became a student of divinity there — not, probably, a particularly diligent student whether in this or in other branches of the scholastic course. His chief care seems still to have been given to the cultivation of his poetical talents. He used (so the story goes) on every New-year's day to burn the verses of the previous twelvemonth, writing at the same time some lines to set forth the reasons — and doubtless of these there was no lack — that warranted the immolation. It was principally by the advice of friends that he had been swayed towards theological studies, with the prospect of afterwards entering the Scottish Church; his father having died in 1720, during the second session of Thomson's University attendance, 1 In some accounts I find 7 September ; but it is not correct. 136 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. deeply mourned by him, and his mother with her large family — there had been nine children of the union — having in con- sequence removed into Edinburgh. This mother, Beatrix Trotter, is described as a woman of no little elevation of cha- racter and mind. By birth she was allied to the Hume race, coheiress of a small estate ; an enthusiastic devotee, imagina- tive, and altogether such a person as, according to the fitness of things, might well give birth to a poet. She lived to see her son a man of celebrity. A small but significant incident is said to have determined Thomson to abandon the ministerial career, and to trust to that of a man of letters, more especially in poetry. In his probation for the Scottish Church he was called on by Dr. Hamilton, the Professor of Divinity, to expound a portion of the 119th Psalm relative to the glory of God. This he did with so much richness and loftiness of language as to entail censure no less than praise. The audience were astonished, and Dr. Hamilton complimented his diction ; but reproved it as not being generally intelligible, and so not befitting one whose office it would be to preach the gospel to the poor, and do practical work in an undistinguished sphere. The youth now paid enhanced attention to poetry, but received from his circle of acquaintance at least as much discouragement as support. One of the persons who showed the most faith in his poetical vocation was Lady Grisel Bailie, who was at this time, 1725, sojourning in London. This fact, combining with general and well-weighed considerations as to the true sphere for a poet, as yet unknown, to come forward in and secure recognition, determined Thomson to leave without further delay the Scottish, and come up to the English, capital; for not even Scotchmen had, at that early date, discovered Edin- burgh to be " the modern Athens." It does not seem to be quite clear whether Thomson had any definite employment so Ions; as he remained in Scotland : he may perhaps have been JAMES THOMSON. 137 domestic tutor in the family of Lord Binning, and he continued these duties upon his first arrival in London. He travelled by sea; and, on reaching his goal, looked-up his college-acquaint- ance David Mallet (or more properly Malloch), who was then tutor to the sons of the Duke of Montrose. Lady Grisel, it would appear, did not redeem the more or less definite promises which she had given of promoting the young adven- turer's interests; and letters of introduction to some other influential persons, which he had brought with him from Scot- land, were stolen from him in the street. Mallet, under these untoward circumstances, was the person to whom Thomson chiefly had recourse for friendly offices ; and he gave him, on one important practical point, advice which rapidly set the aspirant on the road to fame. Thomson showed Mallet the MS. of the poem which was afterwards developed into the Winter, concluding the Seasons. At present it consisted merely of various detached descriptive pieces : these Mallet advised him to connect into a continuous composition, and so to publish it. This counsel proved emi- nently judicious. The poem was published by a Mr. Millar in 1726, he having bought the MS. from Thomson at a small price : it was dedicated to Sir Spencer Compton. At first it produced little impression ; but two persons of critical repute, Mr. Whateley and Mr. Spence, admired it, and gave it vogue. Still more influential in the same cause was Aaron Hill the poet, a man of considerable position in the world : the adula- tion with which Thomson requited him, in various letters dated about this time, is beyond all credence and all toleration. At last the hitherto passive dedicatee presented Thomson with a sum of £21, and he obtained introductions to Pope, who conceived a sincere regard for him, and to other magnates of literature and society. Many editions of the Winter succeeded one another. In 1727 the author published also the Summer, and his Britannia, and the poems To the Memory of Newton LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. and On Death. The Britannia identified Thomson with the interests of the opposition : it was aimed against the ministry, on account of their not checking the Spanish aggressions in America. In his encomium of Newton, he obtained some guidance from the scientific knowledge of Mr. John Gray, afterwards Rector of Marischal College, Aberdeen. In 1728 the section of Spring followed ; and the entire poem of the Seasons was completed in 1730 by the addition of the Autumn. Meanwhile, in 1728, the tragedy of Sophonisba had been brought out, and played at Drury Lane : Mrs. Oldfield acted the heroine. The drama had excited great expectations, but secured scanty success. We have all read the anecdote of the singularly unfortunate line, "Oh Sophonisba, Sophonisba ! oh !" which (reproducing as it does a cadence in the last act of Othello) was ridiculed by the tempting parody, " Oh Jemmy Thomson, Jemmy Thomson ! oh ! " Agamemnon ensued after Sophonisba; then Edward and Eleo- nora, Tancred and Sigismunda, and finally Coriolanus : Thom- son's works in a dramatic form are completed by the masque of Alfred. Edward and Eleonora was offered for acting, but pro- hibited : the reason being that it contains various allusions appli- cable to the then Prince of Wales, and his attitude as head of the opposition. One of the ministerial writers remarked that, in this play, Thomson " had taken a Liberty which was not agree- able to Britannia in any Season." As to the dramas generally, it may be said that a Quixotically-minded reader who might make the attempt of reading these long-extinct performances would assuredly not find his enterprise in any degree repaid : words of critical comment would therefore be equally wasted. The Agamemnon was produced on the stage in 1738, Quin acting the Grecian king : it is said that Thomson attended on the first night, seated in the upper gallery, and was so in- JAMES THOMSON. 139 terested in his own production as unconsciously to follow the actors with audible recitation of the lines, until he was checked by the bystanders. In the "masque of Alfred he had the co- operation of Mallet. This composition contains the celebrated lyric of " Rule Britannia," of which it would appear that the authorship should be ascribed to Mallet rather than to Thomson himself. Tancred and Sigismunda (founded on a story in Gil Bias) was the most successful of Thomson's pieces on the stage : Garrick and Mrs. Cibber appeared in it, and it continued as an acting-piece up to 1788, if not later. Coriolanus was not produced during the author's lifetime : shortly after his death it was played for the benefit of his sisters. These brief details concerning the dramatic pieces have diverted us from the consecutive narrative of Thomson's life — which indeed presents the fewest incidents for record. The only occupation he ever took up, not immediately proper to his own work as a poet, was that, after ceasing to be domestic tutor in Lord Binning's family, he served in the like capacity to a young gentleman in Little Tower Street : this was relin- quished not later than early in 1727. In 1729 he went abroad as the travelling companion of the Honourable Charles Talbot, eldest son of the Lord Chancellor, and thus visited most of the countries and courts of Europe. On his return, the poem of Liberty formed his chief occupation for two years. Thom- son, whose patriotic feelings were lively, regarded it as his finest work : an opinion in which— as has been the case with more poets than one— the author differed from the reading public, with whom this performance never became popular. 1 It was issued in separate parts : the Italy, Greece, and Rome, * Aaron Hill, however, professed a huge admiration of the poem. He .said in a letter to Thomson : " I look upon this mighty work as the last stretched blaze of our expiring genius. It is the dying effort of despairing and indignant virtue, and will stand like one of those immortal pyramids which carry their magnificence through times that wonder to see nothing round them but uncom- fortable desert." 140 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. successively in 1735, and Britain and The Prospect in 1736. Lord Lyttelton undertook the not wholly unbefitting, yet somewhat thankless and unremunerative, task of shortening this poem ; and it has since then been mostly republished in its abridged form. About this time (perhaps in 1734) Thomson received an appointment to an office that was little more than a sinecure, that of Secretary of Briefs. His tenure, however, was of no long continuance. Lord Chancellor Talbot died in 1737, and Hardwicke succeeded him: Thomson — whether through modesty, mere inertness, or whatever other cause- failed to solicit a renewal of the nomination, and thus he lost it. After no very long interval, Frederick Prince of Wales bestowed a pension of ^"ioo per annum on our author, who had already dedicated to him the poem of Liberty: he had meanwhile been somewhat straitened in means, and found it expedient to intimate to the Prince that his affairs were "in a more poetical posture than formerly." The pension was re- voked towards 1748, in consequence probably of some pique which the Prince felt against Thomson's chief patron, Sir George (afterwards Lord) Lyttelton. Towards 1745 he obtained another post, being appointed by Lyttelton to the office of Surveyor-General of the Leeward Islands : this berth brought him in a clear annual income of ^300, after deducting the pay of his deputy — for it need hardly be said that the Leeward Islands remained to Thomson a terra incognita. There is only one other incident to be named in his career — the publication in 1746 of his Castle of Indolence, after many years' working and polishing — an amount of labour greater than he appears to have bestowed on any other of his poems, which were generally subjected to but little revision. The Castle of Indolence had at first been begun merely as a slight personal raillery upon himself and some of his friends. His death followed not very long afterwards. Returning one even- ing by water from London to his residence in Kew Lane, he JAMES THOMSON. X \\ caught cold, which led on to a fever, and he expired on the 27th of August 1748. He lies buried in Richmond Church. A monument was moreover erected to his memory in West- minster Abbey in 1762, out of the profits — which even in his lifetime were not inconsiderable — accruing from his works. Indeed he died in what might be termed a condition of affluence, though not wholly free from debts. Thomson was above the middle size, of a fat and bulky form ; with a face that might almost be called dull, and an uninviting heavy look, although in his early youth he had even been counted handsome, and his eyes were expressive. He was mostly taciturn, save in the company of his familiar friends : with them he was cheerful and pleasant, and he secured their attachment in an eminent degree : the poet Gray held a dis- tinguished place among them, though he was Thomson's junior by sixteen years. In acts of beneficence he was open-handed to the utmost extent of his means : but to intercede with others for any such purpose was a labour insupportable to his retiring sluggish temperament. Unaffected and simple, he was also to some extent self-indulgent ; he liked his ease and his pleasure, and would take of these whatever Fortune was so propitious as to allow him. Richard Savage, who was much in Thomson's company, has mentioned that a lady of his own acquaintance, to whom Thomson was personally unknown, once guessed, from an admiring perusal of his works, that he must be an ardent devoted lover, a great swimmer, and markedly abstinent. Savage, however, had to correct the inferences of enthusiasm, and to inform the fair one that the bard of the Seasons and of Liberty knew no love beyond the universal appetite of sex, had perhaps never been in cold water in his life, and cherished bodily comforts as far as his means permitted. In some other respects the testimony of Savage was wholly in favour of Thomson : he praised his social qualities, and the steadiness of his friendship, especially for old acquaintances whom he had 142 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. outstripped in the career of worldly prosperity. He was be- sides free from all literary jealousy or malignity; and preserved an unruffled temper, unless his indignation were excited by evi- dences of cruelty or hard-heartedness in others. Thomson lived unmarried. At one period of his life, however, towards 1743, he had a great desire to change his single condition, and courted the lady whom he has celebrated as "Amanda." This was Miss Young, daughter of Captain Gilbert Young, of Guly- hill, Dumfries-shire. The poet's pecuniary position was not considered sufficiently firm, and Miss Young married Vice- Admiral John Campbell. It may be added that a letter be- longing to the last year of Thomson's lifetime (4 October 1747) has been preserved, addressed to one of his sisters, in which he says that he had not married in his earlier days on account of uncertainty in his means of subsistence, and that he now felt himself to be past the matrimonial age, yet might perhaps, at no distant date, seek a wife in his native Scotland. Although the anecdote of the loftiness of his diction in his student-time might have led to a contrary surmise, and his voice was naturally effective, it is said that Thomson was a very slovenly elocutionist when he had to pronounce anything of a dignified kind : he was once perusing some of his lines to Bubb Doddington, who was reputed to excel as a reader, and who was so annoyed at the poet's deficiency as to snatch the MS. from his hands, observing that Thomson did not understand his own verses. He was fond of the fine arts, and especially of music; and would listen for an hour together to the singing of nightingales. His general mode of living was marked by sim- plicity, not uncombined with elegance. He is reported to have written better in autumn than at other seasons of the year, and at night than in the day. Thomson was not a christian in religious belief: this is plainly shown by a letter which Lord Lyttelton addressed to him in 1747; indeed, his lordship had composed his Observa- JAMES THOMSON. 143 tions on the Conversion and Apostleship of St Paul partly with a view to proselytizing the poet. After the death of the latter, Lyttelton wrote : " Thomson, I hope and believe, died a chris- tian : had he lived longer, I don't doubt but he would have openly professed his' faith." The foundation for any such confidence seems to be very scanty. It should be understood nevertheless that Thomson was a firm believer in Providence, and in the immortality of the soul, which he conceived to be destined for progressively augmenting bliss. Lord Lyttelton said of Thomson that he had written "Not One line which dying he could wish to blot." Johnson — who, speaking of the poet as a contemporary, was more likely to be struck by this point, and to estimate it rightly, than a reader of the present day — considered him very original; original both in the turn of thought, and in the form and execu- tion of his poems. At this date, the time for criticizing Thom- son is long past ; his place is well fixed, and he will retain it for so long as good poetical work of the secondary or tertiary order continues a living thing. Already, indeed, the general mass of his performance is defunct : the Seasons and the Castle of Indolence — certainly not his own favourite composition Liberty — survive with other than a galvanic life. The Castle of Indolence is generally regarded as the more finished and excel- lent production of the two : the Seasons, however, are very greatly more important, and this not only in respect of length. To have selected a subject so vast and universal, and so open to the sympathies and perceptions, and amenable to the per- sonal experience and judgment, of all sorts and conditions of readers in all times, was no small achievement, nor deserving of scantly grateful recognition. It may be even regarded as one of the privileges and distinctions of English poesy that the Poet of the Seasons should have been British in birth and tongue. Such a subject was free of access to every language 144 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. under heaven : in any nation a poet might have arisen to mould this theme into song, and give it the hues of his own nationality, but it was in British soil that he did arise. And certainly Thomson is one of the men to whom has been given that almost impossible prerogative— "To add a sweetness to the violet." For generations past, as the magic of Nature unrolls its annual recurrences and vicissitudes, some beauty or some majesty has here and there, by this person and by that, been more keenly perceived, more deeply loved, or acknowledged with a more fully realized sense of awe, because of something written by Thomson. He has been one of the concentrators and inten- sifies — one of the fixing and fashioning spirits — of that characteristically modern passion, the love of scenery. A shabby copy of the Seasons was once observed by some one laid on the window-seat of a country ale-house : " That's true fame," remarked the man. And perhaps a similar incident might even at the present day be likely enough, and bring the same words to one's lips : certainly, within living memory, it would have been altogether likely. Our progenitors, to the fourth and fifth step of ascent from our own time, have delighted in Thomson; and, notwithstanding the shifting of literary models, and of the tenor of public taste, our successors, to as remote or a remoter term, may probably do the same. POETS BORN BETWEEN THOMSON AND GRAY. Charles Wesley 1708 to 1788. Samuel Johnson , 1709 to 1785. William Shenstone 1714 to 1763. THOMAS GRAY. Of all short poems— or indeed of all poems whatsoever — in the English language, which has been, for a century and a quarter past, the one most universally, persistently, and incessantly re- produced and quoted from? I suppose, beyond rivalry and almost beyond comparison, the Elegy in a Country Churchyard of Thomas Gray. Such is the glory which has waited upon scant productiveness and relative mediocrity — though un- doubtedly nobly balanced and admirably grown and finished mediocrity — in the poetic art. The flute has overpowered the organ, the riding -horse has outstripped Pegasus, and the crescent moon has eclipsed the sun. Thomas Gray was born in Cornhill, London, on the 26th of December 17 16, the fifth child, and the only one that survived infancy, out of a large family of twelve. His father, Philip Gray, was a citizen and money-scrivener of respectable standing. His mother was sister to a Mr. Antrobus, who was an assistant master at Eton during the period which Thomas passed at that school — for there was he educated (as we all know from his Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College), staying until the autumn of 1735, when he proceeded as a pensioner to Peter- house, Cambridge. Both at school and at the university he was supported entirely from funds supplied by his mother; for his father, a violent-tempered person of little principle, refused all assistance towards his education — thinking probably that Greek and Latin, culture and intellect, had little to do with 148 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. those ascending grades in the realization of the human summum bonum, the scrivening and the pocketing of money. Gray remained at Cambridge up to September 1738; hating mathe- matics, disliking the college discipline, not very diligent as yet in any form of study, but attracted from early youth to poetry, and attending in fair measure to classics and modem languages. Here he executed a few Latin poems and English translations. His earliest verses in his native tongue were about no lines translated from Statius in 1736; and towards the same time he produced some verses on the Marriage of the Prince of "Wales, which were considered the best in the academical collection. On leaving Cambridge he came back to London, taking chambers in the Inner Temple, and intending to study law. But this purpose was speedily suspended by an invitation which he received from Horace Walpole, his friend at Eton and at Cambridge, to travel with him on the continent. The tour began in the Spring of 1739, an d they journeyed together through France and a part of Italy. At Florence, and on the road thence to Venice, they had some differences, and parted. Walpole was ready enough in after years to take the blame to himself, and he reflected upon his colleague only so far as to say that he was " too serious a companion " — Gray being all for antiquities in the tour, and Walpole for balls and plays : it seems probable however that the too serious com- panion had also been a littie inclined to lay down the law with authority, and to exhibit a cultured superciliousness towards any attempts of "Walpole to entertain and express an opinion of his own. They had been together at Florence, along with Mr. (afterwards Sir Horace) Mann, the British Envoy; at Rome, Naples, and Herculaneum, discovered but recently; and again for another eleven months at Florence. After the separation Gray went on to Venice; in September 1741 he returned to England THOMAS GRAY. 149 He had not been long back when his father died. The latter had been extravagant, and Gray found that narrow means would hamper him in pursuing the study of the law. He there- fore gave this up entirely, and not perhaps very reluctantly ; returned to Cambridge; and in 1742 took his degree as B.A. in Civil Law. One of his intimates, both at Eton and afterwards, had been Mr. Richard West, son of the Chancellor of Ireland, and author of an Ode to May ; he had dissuaded Gray from completing a projected tragedy on the story of Agrippina. This gentleman died in June 1742, greatly to the sorrow of his friend, who commemorated his loss in an admired sonnet. As it happened, Gray had already inscribed to West his Ode to Spring, before he knew of the young man's death ; and he now began to poetize with some assiduity. His Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, and the Ode to Adversity, were written soon afterwards ; and about the same time, probably, he commenced the Elegy in a Country Churchyard. He also undertook, but never completed, a Latin poem De Principiis Cogitandi : there is reason to infer, indeed, that his early ambition was to excel rather in Latin than in English verse, and he was very copious in his phraseology in the classical tongue. He was passing some weeks at Stoke Pogeis near Windsor, in the secluded dwelling-house of his aunts, at the time when the composition of the Elegy was going on most actively : hence he returned to Cambridge, and continued residing there for the great majority of his remaining years. He was at first settled in Peterhouse ; but in 1756, some of his more youthful neighbours having per- sistently annoyed him by clamorous interruptions and indecorous pranks, and no adequate redress being forthcoming from the college authorities, the poet removed to Pembroke Hall. His first published work— beyond the youthful essay already adverted to— was the Eton ode, which appeared in 1747: it excited no particular notice. At Cambridge for six years Gray applied himself to the study ISO LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. of the best Greek writers. He was displeased at the ignorance and dullness which he found rife in the University ; and he wrote a fragment, intended seemingly as a satirical hymn to Ignorance, beginning, " Hail, horrors, hail, ye ever gloomy bowers." Towards 1744 he seems to have intermitted writing altogether. Walpole, who had ere now become reconciled to Gray, endeavoured to persuade him to publish such poems as he had already produced along with those of their deceased friend West : but this project did not find favour in Gray's eyes. In 1747 he made acquaintance vuththe Rev. William Mason, then a scholar of St. John's College, the author of the Monody on the Death of Pope, the English Garden, and many other poems more acceptable to his own generation than to ours. The acquaintance ripened into a lifelong intimacy; and Mason, after his friend's death, superintended the reissue of his poems, and wrote his biography. The publication of the Elegy was at the moment, as it remains to this hour, the most salient event in the life of the studious and unbustling Gray. This poem was completed in 1750. In February 1751 the author was vexed to find that it had been published without his sanction in a serial named The Magazine of Magazines, and was already attracting some attention ; and he asked the bookseller Dodsley to reproduce it in an independent form, and anonymously. He required also that it should appear (but an affectionately admiring posterity has been deaf or callous to his wish in this respect) " without any interval between the stanzas, because the sense is in some places continued beyond them." The authorized re- publication ensued accordingly, and the poem became at once immensely popular, raising Gray, from the position of a scholar wholly unknown outside of his own academic circle, into that of a poet second to none of his contemporaries. Eleven editions followed one another in the most rapid succession. THOMAS GRAY. 151 In 1755 Gray finished his Ode on the Progress of Poetry, and about the same time he began The Bard, destined to a cele- brity only inferior to that of the Elegy : these were both intended to be " vocal to the intelligent alone " — and indeed, when he first published them, which was not done until 1757. it seemed as if they would prove highly unvocal to the unin- telligent, or in other words to ninety-nine readers out of every hundred. But Bishop Warburton and David Garrick praised the poems, and other authoritative voices followed suit from time to time ; till at last that semi-teachable and semi-believing body the general public, indifferently well convinced on the whole, found out that it too was of the same opinion. Meanwhile the gravest of the poet's personal afflictions had befallen him, in the death of his mother, which took place in March 1753 ; a loving son during her lifetime, he cherished her memory with glowing affection. In a letter addressed to the Rev. Mr. Nicholls, dated apparently in 1766, he forestalled the famous phrase of Byron under the like bereavement. " In one's whole life," he says, ''one can never have more than a single mother " ; and he adds—" I never discovered this (with full evidence and conviction, I mean) till it was too late ; it is thirteen years ago, and seems but as yesterday, and, every day I live, it sinks deeper into my heart." On the death of Colley Cibber in 1757, the Laureateship was offered to Gray by the Lord Chamberlain, the Duke of Devon- shire ; but he, opining that the office had derived small lustre from its recent incumbents, thought fit to decline. As we have seen, the only poem of much consequence that he had published before this very year was the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, itself a brief composition of not many stanzas, preceded by the Eton Ode, and followed by two other Odes, as yet in no way popularly accepted. We must therefore allow that, even in the unpoetical central years of the eighteenth century, some of the people in authority were capable of show- 152 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. ing no little amount of discernment and of opportune self- reliance, otherwise no such proffer could have been made. The Lord Chamberlain of 1757 knew upon whom to pitch as the permanently famous poet of the time. We shall thus be the less disinclined to forgive the officials if, after making the abortive proposal to such a poet as Gray, they made another and not abortive proposal to such an one as Whitehead, who, being well contented to accept, became the Laureate of our crown and nation, somewhat to the amazement of these latter days. Soon after this, Gray, for about three years, left Cambridge, and lived in London near the British Museum, studying. In 1762 he failed in an application for the Professor- ship of Modern History and Languages at Cambridge : a chair which had been founded, with a stipend of ^400 a year, as far back as 1724, but which had hitherto always remained a per- fect sinecure. His success, however, was only deferred; in 1768 the same professorship was bestowed upon him un- solicited. It is annoying to learn that, as he found the post a sinecure, so he left it : he designed to lecture, but never did so — never indeed went beyond sketching out a plan for his inauguration-speech. This was grievous to Gray himself; he blamed his own inertia, and continued to dally and procrasti- nate, until at last, after three years' tenure of the professorship, for him too did the night come when no man could work. Ill- health — he had become subject ever since 1754 to recurring attacks of gout — was no doubt partly the cause and the pallia- tion of his dilatory supineness ; a certain academical scrupulo- sity, and disinclination to set-to with vigour and resolution, also contributed to the same end. This was thoroughly ingrained in Gray's character and habits. Want of learning, insufficient equipment for the onerous undertaking, was certainly not the reason. An admirer, not unqualified to express an opinion, could even go so far as to say that Gray was perhaps the most learned man in Europe. According to the standard of his time. THOMAS GRAY. 15; he knew profoundly some sciences, such as zoology and botany —history, archaeology, heraldry, metaphysics, politics ; he was versed in moral philosophy and in criticism ; and was a man of recognized taste in the fine arts of architecture, painting, and engraving, and in gardening. His architectural studies had been particularly active towards 1758, and he assisted Bentham in his History of Ely. At one time he thought of publishing an edition of Strabo ; and he left for this object many notes and geographical disquisitions, which were afterwards edited by Mathias, along with notes on Plato and Aristophanes. Read- ing — perpetual reading — was in fact his main occupation ; to write was comparatively exceptional. The quiet life of Gray — studious, secluded though not un- social, and uneventful in the strictest sense, for he seems to have been free as well from internal throes as from external ad- venture and agitation — presents little further matter for record. In 1765 he made a tour in Scotland for health's sake, and here he knew Dr. Beattie, the author of the Essay on Truth, and of the poem The Minstrel, both published soon afterwards : Gray wrote an account of this excursion, showing that he had appre- ciated all the sources of interest it presented, in Nature, art, and historic reminiscence. In 1769 he went to Westmoreland and Cumberland, also for health. In 17 71, suffering much from violent cough and extreme depression of spirits, as well as from his hereditary gout, he came to London towards the end of May, and stayed at Kensington ; but he was soon back in Cambridge again. Dejection was indeed nothing new to Gray, as we all know as soon as we recollect his line in the Elegy— " And Melancholy marked him for her own." As far back as August 1737 we find him writing to West, with pathetic self-raillery :— " Low spirits are my true and faithful companions. They get up with me, go to bed with me, make journeys and returns as I do; nay, and pay visits, and will even 154 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. affect to be jocose and force a feeble laugh with me : but most commonly we sit alone together, and are the prettiest insipid company in the world." Now, in 1771, the end of low spirits and of all else was impending. On the 24th of July in that year he was seized with nausea, while at dinner in the College Hall ; and on the evening of the 30th an attack of gout in the stomach put a period to his life. He lies buried in a vault in Stoke Pogeis churchyard, near the chancel-door, being joined in death with his mother, and with one of the aunts in whose house he had been dwelling while the Elegy was in course of compo- sition. And so Gray rests on the scene of his greatest triumph, like a warrior on his final and victorious battlefield. Gray on Himself — he has left a few lines thus entitled — is worth quoting. " Too poor for a bribe, and too proud to importune, He had not the method of making a fortune ; Could love and could hate, so 'twas thought something odd ; No very great wit, he believed in a God. A post or a pension he did not desire, But left church and state to Charles Townshend * and Squire." Under a jocular form, these lines seem to present a very fair picture of the author, so far as they go. He was essentially a man of virtue and humanity; not eager for money or eclat; helpful to the poor; amiable, temperate, and unpresuming. Though he " could love and could hate," his affections were perhaps cool rather than otherwise, his disposition sedate. He had a healthy indifference to criticism, but it was to some extent a weakness that he wished (like Congreve) to be looked upon as a private independent gentleman who read for his amusement, rather than as a professional man of letters. His greatest defect, says the masculine Johnson, was " an affecta- J The Hon. Charles Townshend, born 1725, died 1767; Secretary at War 1 Chancellor of the Exchequer, &c. Of his deportment as a Member of Parlia- ment, Burke said : " He conformed exactly to the temper of the House, and he seemed to suide because he was always sure to follow it." THOMAS GRAY, 155 tion of delicacy, or rather effeminacy, and a visible fastidious- ness, or contempt and disdain of his inferiors in science.'' This effeminacy was indeed mostly put on in the company of people whom Gray did not wish to please : it seems however that he was careful of himself to the extent of timorousness, and we are told that, when he was in the Lake-country, this backwardness made him miss the finest views. He had also the indolence natural to a placid and unenterprising scholar. Let us enjoy here — on more accounts than one — his description of the only occasion (or he affects to speak of it as solitary) on which he saw the sun rise : he had been making a trip on the south-west coast in 1769. u I must not close my letter without giving you one principal event of my history ; which was that, in the course of my late tour. I set out one morning before five o'clock, the moon shining through a dark and mist}- autumnal air, and got to the sea-coast time enough to be at the sun's levee. I saw the clouds and dark vapours open gradually to right and left, rolling over one another in great smoky wreaths, and the tide, as it flowed gently in upon the sands, first whiten- ing, then slighdy tinged with gold and blue, and all at once a litde line of insufferable brightness that (before I can write these five words) was grown to half an orb, and now to a whole one too glorious to be distinctly seen. It is very odd it makes no figure on paper : yet I shall remember it as long as the sun, or at least as I endure. I wonder whether anybody ever saw it before : I hardly believe it." — In conversation with intimate friends Gray was learned and witty : but his talk was mostly scanty, and somewhat stilted as well. If Walpole (or his in- formant Lady Ailesbury) is to be believed, the poet, on passing a day in the society of her ladyship and others, " never opened his lips but once, and then only said, ' Yes. my lady. I believe so.'"'' His religious opinions are not very definitely known. His own expression that u he believed in a God " may suggest to some readers that he believed in not much more : one may 156 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. peruse many of his letters, and find that, though religious con- siderations are sometimes raised, the christian faith forms no element in them. None the less he appears, with the true temper of an academic scholar, conservatively indifferent and unaggressive, to have been hostile to any general dissemination of sceptical or subversive opinions. In a letter to Beattie, dated in 1770, apropos of the Essay on Truth, written in oppo- sition to Hume and the sceptical system, he says : " I have always thought David Hume a pernicious writer, and believe he has done as much mischief here as he has in his own country. A professed sceptic can be guided by nothing but his present passions (if he has any) and interests." Gray's habits of writing are however more to our purpose than his religious views. In replying, in 1758, to Mr. Wharton, who had asked him to compose an epitaph on a deceased child, he observes : "I by no means pretend to inspiration : but yet I affirm that the faculty in question is by no means voluntary ; it is the result, I suppose, of a certain disposition of mind which does not depend on oneself, and which I have not felt this long time. You, that are a witness how seldom this spirit has moved me in my life, may easily give credit to what I say." This does not amount to very much more than what we already knew — namely, that the total bulk of Gray's poetical writings is ex- tremely small; but it may serve also to satisfy us that he was contented with writing little and well, and did not attempt to force his vein when it showed no symptom of flowing spon- taneously. We are told also that his custom was not to scribble rough drafts, and correct them afterwards, but he would labour up each line from the first. Of poems so enormously well known as Gray's — few in num- ber, and none of them long, nor near to being long— it is diffi- cult to say anything that shall be true without being a truism, or that shall be new without being a paradox. The Elegy and the Bard stand foremost of all : there are also the Ode on the THOMAS GRAY. 157 Spring, on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, the Progress of Poesy, and the sportive effusions, A Long Story (fragmentary), and On the Death of a Favourite Cat, Horace Walpole's tortoise-shell puss drowned in 1747 in a tub of gold fishes. It may perhaps be said that a certain inward rapture is a distinc- tive character of Gray among poets ; but, owing to the measured, over-castigated, artificial literary tone of the period, he does not allow this rapture to soar out with fervid spontaneity and ma- jestic demonstration, and it therefore takes a form to which we might be permitted to apply the term " self-withdrawal." Gray, with a glowing mind, perceives and responds to the highest in- centives of his subject ; but, in expressing them, his aim is to abstract and mitigate — not to enforce and expand. His last word seems to be — " There is that within which passeth show." By grace of intellect, and a high refinement of scholarly and verbal polish, he indicates as much as he will trust himself to speak ; beyond that, he clenches the door of his imagery and the penetralia of his thought At the present day, when the Bard has become one of the commonplaces almost of juvenile literature, and is read and laid to heart even before the child becomes a schoolboy, it seems curious to be apprised (as for instance by Dr. Johnson, who continued in the main to adhere to this view) that, on its first appearance, it was regarded as wildly extravagant and crudely unintelligible — a fate which this ode shared with the Progress of Poesy, now less entirely familiar to all readers. And yet on reflection one can see that both of these poems are extremely bold in conception and treatment, and may well have startled the readers of that date, droned and drowsed with all sorts of comatose dead-alive verse that dubbed itself poetry. Ardent and adventurous in imagination, they are animated also in form and structure, although by this time we nave become quite as sensitive to the restrictive as to the im- passioned element in their composition. We should not forget to add that, in his love and study of Scandinavian and Cambrian 158 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. poetry, Gray, projecting himself back into the past, anticipated the feeling of more recent years than his own. As to Gray's personal appearance little is recorded. He had a keen and rather cold face, with a sharp nose, and thin straight lips — the whole form of the mouth being small and unemotional. The observant and rather supercilious scholar, more than the meditating and sympathizing poet, was traceable in his counte- nance. His Letters were first published in a collected form in 1814: they are very well and carefully written, with academic playfulness and rather studied phrase, and bear record, among other things, of the attention he paid to French literature. Kindly feeling, an indolent turn, intellectual fastidiousness, are traceable up and down the course of the correspondence, and present a genuine likeness of the man. POETS BORN BETWEEN GRAY AND GOLDSMITH: William Collins 1720 to 1756. Mark Akenside 1721 to 1770. Christopher Smart 1722 to 1771. William Mason 1725 to 1797. John Newton 1725 to 1807. OLIVER GOLDSMITH. Thackeray has termed Goldsmith "the most beloved of English writers." And indeed this is Goldsmith's great dis- tinction among them all — and markedly among those of whom the present volume furnishes so slight and inadequate an ac- count. He is the one upon whom is centred the greatest amount of affectionate indulgence, and from the widest public circle. The distinction is, in strictness, rather personal than literary; but it sufficiently bewrays the quality of his work, and that again is the record of his individual character. Burns alone, in our roll of names, might be pitted against Goldsmith as " most beloved " ; and certainly, in his own Scottish division of the kingdom at least, he excites a far intenser feeling than the Irishman does in any division. That feeling, however, amounts, and with excellent reason, to enthusiasm : it is a pas- sionate popular homage, a clinging of soul to the local god, and burning of incense to him in his high places. Such an acknowledgment of the national poet-hero entails, and could only co-exist along with, personal love, even in extreme and partizan form. It is a different thing from the hearty liking that attends upon Goldsmith from a more diffused and inter- mixed body of friends, the fellow-feeling that banters, blames, excuses, and merges all into that warmth which mantles from the warmest corner of the uncasuistic heart. Goldsmith, we are to recollect, was an Irishman : and it is no small testimony to the spontaneity and winningness of the Irish nature that on 12 1 62 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. a son of the Emerald Isle — one who, to cite his own expres- sion, " never brought anything out of it except his brogue and his blunders " — has devolved this supreme prerogative of being " the most beloved of English writers." The natal place of Oliver Goldsmith was the hamlet of Pallas, or Pallasmore, in the County of Longford, and the date of his birth the ioth of November 1728. He was the second son, and fifth child, in a family of eight. The race is understood to have come originally from Crayford in Kent ; it had been settled for some generations in Ireland, and was of very credit- able standing there. The great-great-grandfather, great-grand- father, and father, of Oliver, were all clergymen of the Protes- tant Establishment; unthriftiness and unworldliness passed from sire to son. 1 The father, the Reverend Charles Gold- smith, who obtains the credit of having furnished his son with many of the traits of character embodied in Dr. Primrose, the " Vicar of Wakefield," married very early, and without any money to spare — his whole annual incomings being at the time not more than ^40. — "And passing rich on forty pounds a year " was thus a real family reminiscence for Oliver • and both his father, and in due time his brother Henry, the eldest and favourite son, managed to realize the spiritual as well as the material conditions recorded in that endlessly quoted verse. The country about Pallas is of uncommon loveliness; the birth-house of Oliver fell in the long-run into dilapidation, and was reputed to be haunted by fairies. By the death of his wife's 1 It is amusing to find the harebrained character of the family repeated in the generation which succeeded Oliver Goldsmith. His nephew, Lieutenant Gold- smith, R.N., in 1824 resolved to try whether an ancient Cornish prophecy was true, that the famous Logan Stone would never be overturned by human strength : and, aided by a party of his seamen, he succeeded in rolling over this load of about seventy tons. The practical joke proved no joke to its per- petrator. He was ordered by the Admiralty to reinstate the Logan Stone in its proper site, and hence incurred debts which were only paid off shortly before his decease. OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 163 uncle, the Rectory of Kilkenny West came to the Reverend Charles Goldsmith, and he thereupon transferred himself to Lissoy, in County Westmeath, where he had a farm of seventy acres. Ordinary village-schooling was the tuition which little Oliver first received : from a schoolmistress he passed at the age of six to an old campaigner named Thomas Byrne. Getting pitted with the small-pox, he left that school, and went to Mr. Griffin, a clerical schoolmaster at Elphin, County Roscommon, and lived for a while with his uncle, John Goldsmith Esquire of Ballyoughter : two other and superior schools ensued, at Athlone and Edgeworthtown. Fairies, robbers, and whatsoever bore an aspect of fancy, romance, and adventure, occupied the unscholastic brain and roving imagination of the boy. Before the age of eight he began versifying ; and at nine he improvised a couplet which, not absolutely contemptible as verse, was cer- tainly neat as repartee, and is said to have so far impressed his relatives as to incite them to the necessary efforts for giving Oliver a learned education. He was dancing a hornpipe at his uncle's house on a festive occasion, and his ungainly figure pro- cured him from the violinist the nickname " my little ^Esop " ; to which he lost not a moment in retorting, — " Our herald hath proclaimed this saying, — See y£sop dancing, and his monkey playing." Oliver's paternal uncle by marriage, the Reverend Thomas Contarine of Carrick-on-Shannon, was especially liberal in sub- scribing towards the required outlay for his training at school and college, and in many an instance afterwards up to the time of his death in 1756. Indolent but quick-witted at school, impulsively generous, a leader in sports and pastimes, Oliver proceeded in June 1 744 to Trinity College, Dublin, as a sizar or poor scholar. The humiliations incident to his position pained him. The Reverend Theaker Wilder, his tutor, bullied him in the fruitless endeavour 1 64 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. t& direct his mind towards mathematics and the exact sciences, which Goldsmith continued constantly to regard with aversion. The youth was convivial and careless; and, his father having died early in 1747, he found himself in such straits that he was glad to turn-to at writing street-ballads saleable at five shillings each. He was publicly admonished by the University for taking part in a town-fracas; and afterwards, on account of another disturbance, he absconded from College, but soon returned — remaining until, in February 1749, a good while after the ordinary term, he obtained his degree as B.A. The choice of a profession was now before him. He was indisposed to enter the church, yet he made a beginning with his two-years' probation for that career, reading miscellaneously, and with a view perhaps more to amusement than to the study of divinity. The time came for his being examined by the Bishop of Elphin, and he was rejected — partly, it is averred, because he went up for examination habited in a pair of scarlet breeches. He then became tutor in the family of Mr. Flinn, a neighbouring gentleman : a quarrel at cards brought this ap- pointment to a conclusion. On leaving he had ,£30 in his pocket, and resolved to see the world. Several weeks passed, and then he reappeared destitute at his mother's house, accounting for his plight by a tale (not perhaps rigidly true) of how he had planned to sail from Cork to America, and how the ship had started without him. His friends now wanted Oliver to take to the law: at Dublin, en route to London, he lost his money by gambling, and returned to the house of his uncle Contarine. One of the three learned professions yet remained : his relative Dean Goldsmith recommended him to try medicine, and in the autumn of 1752 he reached Edinburgh (then the only school of medicine in which a degree could be taken), and, with the general surroundings of a scattered and over-social life, commenced the study of what became, every now and then, his future calling. Two winters were spent OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 165 in Edinburgh, and Goldsmith next prepared to complete his medical training on the continent, and set off with a small fund of about ^33. As usual, a blunder and an adventure ensued. He precipitately started in a ship bound for Bordeaux instead of Holland, but at Newcastle-on Tyne he was detained on sus- picion, some of his companions being tracked as Jacobites. He then made a fair start for Holland, and arrived at Leyden Uni- versity, where he studied chemistry under Gaubius, and anatomy under Albinus. Here, or as some accounts say at Louvain, he took the degree of Bachelor of Physic : and there is reason to think that the " Dr. Goldsmith " of after days never really ad- vanced beyond this degree to that of M.D., although it has been suggested that the Paduan University, which he reached not long afterwards, may have bestowed upon him this major honour of the faculty. The sojourn at Leyden lasted about a year ; and was succeeded by a continental tour — or prolonged stroll it might rather be called — -in which we may well admire the lightness of Goldsmith's spirit and his purse, and his mixed temper of scrambling and desultory yet zealous and persevering adventure. Full of resource in his own facile genius and good- nature, he needs not to be indebted to Fortune for any other. It is said that he left Leyden with only a flute, a guinea, and one spare shirt ; picking up, as he went along, a subsistence among the country-people by playing the first, rapidly exhausting the second, and retaining (let us hope), amid no little squalor of environment, his predilection for the third. He reached Paris ; met and admired Voltaire ; and had the discernment requisite for foreseeing the impending decline of monarchy in France. He rambled into Germany and Switzerland : and from the latter country he sent off to his brother Henry the first sketch of his poem of The Traveller, not completed and published until many years afterwards. At Geneva he undertook a travelling tutor- ship : like most other definite employments, this proved un- pleasant to him, and he and his pupil separated at Marseilles. 166 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. Hence Goldsmith continued his journey into France, Piedmont, and northern Italy. He held learned disputations in colleges and convents, earning by his argumentative prowess a dole of money, a meal, and a bed. Six months were spent in Padua. Here he heard of the death of his liberal uncle Contarine ; and he returned from Padua to England across France, having recourse again to his flute for aid in making his way along. Not indeed that he knew anything of music scientifically, for it is said that he could not even read a note of it. Goldsmith landed at Dover early in 1756. He had no occupation and no outlook. There is a story that one of his first attempts was to take to the stage in the county of Kent : but nothing is really known of his proceedings, except that he was in great straits, and had come to London before the close of February. He became an usher in a school ; then an assistant to a chemist near Fish Street Hill ; then, on a small scale, a practitioner of medicine in Bankside. The medical calling was recurred to on and off — more frequently off than on — up to 1765, and then finally thrown aside. He also got meagre employment from booksellers ; acted as reader and press-cor- rector for the celebrated printer-novelist Samuel Richardson ; and took charge of a good classical school at Peckham kept by Dr. Milner. By his introduction to literary labours, obscure though they were at present, he had now at length got launched on his proper career, and only time and patience were needed to give him his rights in the world of writers and readers. In April 1757 he became a contributor to a serial of Whig politics, the Monthly Review, at a fair fixed salary, with board and lodging in addition : Mr. Griffiths of Paternoster Row was the proprietor. But this position also had to be resigned in about half a year ; Griffiths resented a goodnatured indiscretion which Goldsmith had committed in pawning, to release his landlord from arrest, a coat which the publisher had supplied to him on credit, and the feud between the two was never entirely OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 167 appeased. Various literary jobs ensued, alternating with a resumption of the medical profession : he frequented the Temple Exchange Coffeehouse near Temple Bar, mixing there With various writers and others of established position, and in a letter of this period he speaks of his having "a very little reputa- tion as a poet " — founded, we are entitled to assume, upon per- formances of corresponding tenuity. Bent upon realizing the means requisite for obtaining a medical appointment in India, Goldsmith now began his first substantial and considerable work, An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe : he was in fact designated for the situation in question, that of Physician and Surgeon to a Factory at Coromandel, but finally some one else secured the post. In December 1758 another disappointment befell Goldsmith : he underwent an examination in surgery for the berth of Hospital Mate, and failed. We must now take a glance at the period of literary activity which was opening for Goldsmith towards the date when he completed his thirtieth year. First we hear of a Life of Voltaire, written for a modicum of ^"20. Then, in March 1759, his Enquiry into the State of Polite Learning was pub- lished, without any author's name on the title-page ; it sold to considerable advantage. He wrote for various magazines ; and was especially successful with his Chinese Letters, afterwards modified into the form of the Citizen of the World — they appeared originally in the Public Ledger, a paper started in 1760. Then ensued a Life of Beau Nash; and in 1762, in two volumes, A History of England, in a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to his Son, published anonymously, and compiled chiefly from Hume, Rapin, Carte, and Kennet. The Vicar of Wakefield was completed in or about 1764, but not published until March 1766, when it obtained a first instalment of that conspicuous and universal popularity which has never flagged till now. The circumstances of its sale form one of the best known among the many famous anecdotes of Goldsmith. He had been placed under arrest by his landlady for rent owing, and sent round to his cordial friend Dr. Johnson (they had now been acquainted for about four years), and, on the arrival of the latter, showed him the MS. of the novel, and asked whether it could not be turned into money : Johnson glanced over and approved it, and, issuing forth, sold it on the spot to Francis Newbery the publisher for an opportune subsidy of ^"63. While the Vicar remained as yet unprintedin Newbery's hands, Goldsmith flashed forth upon the town as a poet — The Tra- veller being published on the 19th of December 1764, and being the first production to which the author put his name. He had hitherto done no poetry of any importance : an oratorio of The Captivity (of the Jews in Babylon) is mentioned, but little of it is now traceable. The Traveller was lying by Goldsmith unfinished at the time when Johnson first saw the Vicar of Wakefield : he looked over the poem likewise, formed a high opinion of it, and even set upon it the sign-manual of his approbation by adding nine verses towards the conclusion. The success of the Traveller was signal and instantaneous : several editions appeared within the course of a year, and Gold- smith was pronounced by many —or he divided this distinction with Gray — the first poet of his time. In a pecuniary sense however the venture was of little importance to our author ; for Newbery, out of the large sums which he netted, only handed- over^2i to him. The ballad of The Hermit (originally named Edwiri and Angelina) followed soon afterwards: and in 1765 were collected from various sources and published the Essays by Mr. Goldsmith, which sold well and were translated into French, the writer's remuneration being again a sum of £>2\. The still popular nursery-tale of Goody Two-Shoes appeared in the same year, and is by many ascribed to Goldsmith's hand : it was cer- tainly not such decided hackwork as some that he still continued doing for the booksellers. One of these, Mr. Davies, proposed OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 169 to him to compile a popular History of Rome : it was published in 1769, and had an extensive sale. For this no less a sum than ^"262. 10s. was paid. Goldsmith remained as ever im- pecunious and harrassed, but he had the spirit to refuse an advantageous offer for writing pamphlets in the interest of the ministry. In the summer of 1768, when his beloved elder brother Henry died in Ireland, a curate and schoolmaster of consistently high aims and principles, to which his narrow fortunes lent a dim but pathetic lustre, Oliver — then staying out of town in Edgeware Road — was writing the Deserted Village, in which combined reminiscences of his brother and father appear with so much of engaging yet refined and well-weighed simplicity. Auburn, the " village " of the poem, is understood to represent substantially Lissoy : General Napier, the owner of the mansion named Littleton, and of much property in the neighbourhood, had turned all the tenants out of their farms, in order that he might enclose them in his own private demesne. At a more recent date the residence of Captain Hogan, about three miles distant from Ballymahon, and the village adjoining, have been distinguished by the now classical name of Auburn. This celebrated poem was published on the 5th of May 1770, and had an immense sale : by August a fifth edition had already come out. The price offered to Goldsmith was ^105 : he however thought it too much, and — rare instance of practice responsive to theory — he actually returned the money to the publisher, but was soon, through the continued demand for the poem, repaid in full. In 1769 he began the History of Ani- mated Nature, the engagement being for eight volumes at ,£105 each; this is chiefly concocted from Buffon, and was published in 1774. A Life of Parnell the Poet, and a Life of Lord JBolingbroke, were produced in 1 770 ; and in the following year the well-known History of England, in four volumes, made up, as the preface acknowledges, mostly from Rapin, Carte, Hume, and Smollett, and of as little serious value, from a strictly 170 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. historical point of view, as the other performances by our author in the same class of literature. The earlier History of England in Letters was partly laid under contribution likewise. Goldsmith was charged with being unfriendly in this work to liberty and the rights of the subject : to which censure he did not scruple to reply in a letter, with a candour which is amusing and may almost deserve to be called admirable, that he " had no thought for or against liberty in his head," but had simply executed a spell of taskwork. The last poem by Goldsmith to which I need refer here is the little snatch of humorous cha- racter-painting named Retaliation, never completed : it was provoked by an epigram of Garrick's upon our author, and Garrick in his turn retorted with another wherein Goldsmith is styled "This scholar, rake, christian, dupe, gamester, and poet." A project which never came to anything was that of a Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, in which Johnson and others were to lend their aid. This was not encouraged by the booksellers ; so Goldsmith thought, but here again without any result, of con- verting the materials he had collected into a Survey of Experi- mental Philosophy. In this slight summary of his numerous and multifarious writings, I have as yet made no mention of the two comedies — the Goodnatured Man, and She Stoops to Conquer. The former was begun in 1766, when Goldsmith was enjoying the full flush of his celebrity from the Traveller, and it was finished early in 1767. It came out in the following year at Covent Garden Theatre, and, though not particularly successful, ran for ten nights, and brought-in to its author about ^400 from the theatre, and ;£ioo from the publisher as well. She Stoops to Conquer was first performed in May 1773, and was received with the greatest applause — far greater indeed than had at all been looked for. Large profits accrued from it, but to Gold- OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 171 smith himself comparatively little. An insolent letter published in the London Packet regarding this play led the peppery and irreflective playwright to commit an assault upon Mr. Evans, the publisher of the journal, whose Welsh blood was not much more wont to bear and forbear than the Irish blood of Gold- smith. Both combatants issued mauled from the encounter ; and the aggressor had to patch up a truce by contributing ^50 to the funds of the Welsh Charity. Many and amusing are the anecdotes of Goldsmith — the friend, and not ^infrequently the butt, of Hogarth, Johnson, Burke (who had been a fellow-student with him in Dublin University), Boswell, Reynolds, Bishop Percy, Garrick, Richard Nugent Lord Clare, the Horneck family, and so many others with whom to associate was to shine at once with proper and with reflected light — the patron and the prey of all sorts of Irish waifs and strays floating on the surges of London life, hungry and rollicking, embarrassing and importunate — the boon-companion of queer fellows and company out-at-elbows —the man of tolerant sympathy for all men and all women in need of a helping hand, his purse always open if frequently empty, his heart ever warm if seldom discreet. But for mere anecdotes I have no adequate space here : and indeed some of my readers may share with myself a certain sense of relief in not going-over once again, and for the five -hundredth time, all the details of how Goldsmith ordered a bloom-coloured coat of his tailor, the long-suffering and partially-paid Filby, and how he treated three damsels to an elegant tea at the White Conduit House, and couldn't discharge the bill. Instead of my spoiling in the retailing anecdotes of this sort which have been well no less than repeatedly told aforetime, it may perhaps be pleasant to the London reader to see a list of the localities in which Goldsmith was housed in the capital. Up to the middle of 1760 he was in Green-Arbour Court; and he removed suc- cessively to decent apartments in Wine-Office Court, Fleet 172 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. Street ; to Islington, then a suburban village ; to chambers in the Temple ; and finally to a better set of chambers at No. 2 Brick Court, Middle Temple. The Horneck family, whom I have just been mentioning, were among the most cherished friends of the poet's later years, and probably gave him more liking for " good society " (in the current meaning of that term) than he was apt to acquire otherwise. The beautiful Miss Mary Horneck, who got the nickname of " the Jessamy Bride," and whose life was prolonged till 1840, was more particularly partial to Goldsmith, and he regarded her with a freshness and warmth of predilection that partook apparently almost of a lover's ardour. He became in 1764 one of the nine original members of the Literary Club, along with Johnson, Reynolds, Burke, Bennet Langton, Topham Beauclerc, Chamier, Hawkins, and Dr. Nugent; and in 1769 was appointed to the honorary post of Professor of Ancient History to the Royal Academy. Five of these eight associates have long ago vanished from the memory of ordinary men, and survive only in the minds of literary enquirers, and haunters of the byeways of society and gossip in those days : it is proportionately amusing to learn that Goldsmith, the author of the Vicar of Wakefield, and " most beloved of English writers," was regarded as hardly fit com- pany for these worthies, the predestined "alms for oblivion." The three who were really fit company for him — Johnson, Reynolds, and Burke — knew better. This leads us to say the few necessary words regarding Goldsmith's person, demeanour, and character. He was thick and short, about 5 feet 5 inches, and, according to Miss Rey- nolds when first she knew him, not unlike a journeyman tailor in externals ; somewhat awkward in refined society ; with a hesitating unattractive manner of speaking, and a loud laugh ; his complexion fair, his hair brown — so far as this was distin- guishable, for he always wore a wig, though Reynolds's famous portrait might suggest the contrary. Garrick, as we have seen, OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 173 taxed him with raking and gaming; and there seems no par- ticular reason for disbelieving this statement and others to the like effect, although some biographers, indulgent to one who was the very soul of indulgence to his fellows, seek to reduce these charges to an insignificant core of fact. That he had a large share of childish vanity is not to be denied — an uneasy itch for putting himself forward, and for affecting a facile ele- gance of dress and address for which he had the slenderest natural qualifications. This was however strictly childish vanity, and remained throughout his life — such are the inconsistencies of human character — combined with essential modesty, sim- plicity, and self-distrust. Poor at first, and afterwards, though his profits were far from trivial, harrassed with debt — a load which seems to have increased upon him more especially from the year 1768, when his first comedy was acted — he owed some ^2000 at his death : Johnson, who yielded to none in the staunchness and heartiness of his affection for Goldsmith, remarked in his sententious way that "he had raised money and squandered it by every artifice of acquisition and folly of expense." His religious views appear to have been indefinite : some writers go so far as to say that he had no particular creed. In the Holy Week of 1773 Boswell took it upon himself to sermonize the poet, and he received for reply : " Sir, as I take my shoes from the shoemaker, and my coat from the tailor, so I take my religion from the priest." Johnson's comment, when he heard of this, was — " Sir, Goldsmith knows nothing — he has made up his mind about nothing." And we may be content to think that the lexicographer, himself so zealous a believer, spoke advisedly and on sufficient grounds. In the autumn of 1772 Goldsmith returned from Edgeware to London, with many debts and broken health. Early in March 1774 he went to country-quarters at Hyde, intending to live chiefly out of town henceforward : but this was not to be. He had to come back to his chambers in the Temple, troubled 174 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. by an access of " a local complaint " (as a biographer terms it) from which he had suffered for some time past. This subsided, but was succeeded by low nervous fever. He took to his bed on the 25th of March, languished there some days, and, in reply to a question from his physician, said that his mind was ill at ease — the last words which he spoke : convulsions came on, and on the 4th of April, at the comparatively early age of forty-five, he was no more. He doctored himself to some extent, and an overdose of a very powerful medicine is reputed to have had something to do with the fatal termination. On the 9th he was interred in the burial-ground of the Temple Church. A monument by Nollekens was erected to him in Westminster Abbey, bearing that inscription by Johnson of which the most emphatic phrase remains engraved on the minds of successive generations of his countrymen, no less than on the perishing marble — " Nullum fere scribendi genus non tetigit, nullum quod tetigit non omavit. Of all the classes of writing which Goldsmith thus embel- lished, the only one which I need here deal with is the poetic ; and we find amid the small bulk of his poetry that the only two compositions of any considerable importance are The Triti Jler and The Deserted Village, — most of the residue have a playful turn. Goldsmith is remarkable among our poets for having little which can be expressly fixed upon as poetry — although there is undoubtedly an abundance of felicitous dic- tion, and glowing appositeness of thought. Good feeling, right sense, genuine observation, descriptive and expressive language, flowing, harmonious, and accomplished verse — all these are present, and avail to make the work soundly poetical, if not poetry in its ultimate essence. The genial and tender nature of the man forms the great, the paramount charm of the verse. Goldsmith did not care for elaborate art, or rules of art. In the dedication of The Traveller, addressed to his brother Henry, he says that Poetry suffers " from the mistaken efforts OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 175 of the learned to improve it. What criticisms have we not heard of late in favour of blank verse and Pindaric odes, choruses, anapsests, and iambics, alliterative care and happy- negligence ! Every absurdity has now a champion to defend it ; and, as he is generally much in the wrong, so he has always much to say, for Error is ever talkative." Goldsmith's poems are in fact matter fit for either poetry or prose, and manner which would be almost as fit for prose as for poetry, were it not for the simple consideration that they are written in excellent verse, with such elevation and refinement of method, and such turns of phrase, as verse naturally and properly entails. )ETS BORN BETWEEN GOLDSMITH AND COWPER. Bishop Thomas Percy 1728 to 1811. Charles Churchill 1731 to 1764. Erasmus Darwin 1731 to 1802. William Falconer 1731 to 1769. James Beattie 1735 to 1803. WILLIAM COWPER. The family to which the poet Cowper belonged was that which rose to the highest legal eminence in the person of Lord Chan- cellor Cowper. His lordship's nephew, the Rev. John Cowper, D.D., was rector of Great Berkhamstead, Hertfordshire ; at which place William, the future poet, was born on the 26th of November 1731. In 1737 he lost the tender mother (Anne Donne, of Ludham Hall, Norfolk) to whom some of his own tenderest verses are devoted. The boy first went to school at the age of six, and remained there two years : he was made miserable by the cruelties of an elder lad. Hence he was removed to the house of an oculist for another couple of years, as fears were entertained for his sight. At the age of ten he became a pupil in Westminster School, and stayed there till his nineteenth year : he was diligent in his studies, and entered into boyish sports with spirit. The career of law having been chosen for him, principally in consideration of the legal patronage which lay in the family, he was articled, on leaving Westminster School, to a solicitor for three years : one of his fellow-clerks in this situation was the youth who rose to be Lord Thurlow. Cowper learned but little law; removed to chambers in the Middle Temple ; and in 1754 was called to the bar. He fell into an extraordinary state of dejection soon after entering the Temple, having in fact a congenital tendency to insanity. This disorder lasted nearly a year, but received some degree of alleviation from the 13 178 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. reading of the religious poems of George Herbert. In 1759 he was appointed a Commissioner of Bankrupts. Still, however, he remained a negligent lawyer, — indifferent, or more than in- different, to his profession. This temper of mind was encouraged by the fact of his having a small patrimony, upon which he partly relied for a subsistence. Cowper continued living in the Temple for eleven years, up to 1763, by which time his private resources were nearly exhausted. According to his own subsequent account, his life in this quarter was an " uninterrupted course of sinful indulg- ence " : it appears that he joined in the ordinary drinking habits of the day, and probably enough in other youthful dissipations, but this latter point is not distinctly set forth. Within this period he courted his cousin Theodora Cowper, sister of Lady Hesketh ; but without any practical result save disappointment to himself, a marriage between the young people being objected to on prudential grounds. He also dallied with literature, con- tributing a few papers to a journal named The Connoisseur. Early in 1763 occurred the event which determined, in a way wholly different from what it appeared to promise, the entire future career of Cowper. The appointment, which he now received from his cousin, to the honourable and lucrative post of First Clerk (or Reading Clerk, and Clerk of the Com- mittees) to the House of Lords, would have seemed to be a possible turning-point in his fortunes, by way of a definite and commodious settlement in life : it proved to be a turning-point of a very different kind — the occasion of madness, religion, poetry, and literary fame. Cowper was a young man of extreme and painful nervousness — nervousness which reached the morbid stage, and was but too capable of passing beyond that into the insane stage. His new duties required him to be often in personal attendance before the House of Lords. Any such sort of publicity was, as he has phrased it, " mortal poison" to himself: hence he voluntarily solicited almost WILLIAM COW PER. 179 immediately, and obtained, a transfer from the First Clerk- ship to a somewhat inferior position, that of Clerk of the Journals, to which the same objection did not apply. But here lay another pitfall for his timorous and wavering steps. The political combinations of the time made it convenient for the Lords to suspect that Cowper's cousin, in appoint- ing him to this lower situation, and transferring the then ■occupant of it to the higher, must have entered into some cor- rupt bargain. The consequence was that Cowper was sum- moned to submit himself to an examination at the bar of their Lordships' house before commencing his functions, so as to prove his competence. For this purpose he studied the work of the Journals for about half a year, with little success, and less assistance from his destined subordinates. In October 1763 the terrible moment was impending. He could not make up his mind to resign, for that would be construed into a con- fession damaging to his relative's honour : so he would actually have to appear at the bar of the house, be examined, be badgered, probably break down and fail. What refuge but insanity? Cowper longed for insanity, but it would not come : he at least supposed that it would not and did not come, — but we, judging the facts by the light of after events, and indeed on their own showing, need scarcely hesitate to say that so monstrous a longing, founded on so trumpery a cause, was itself the longing of a lunatic. Failing insanity, what refuge but suicide? Laudanum first, and next drowning commended themselves to the judicial intellect of the future poet of Stanzas Subjoined to the Bills of Mortality : but even this was denied him — the hand of Providence immediately, and in fact miracu- lously, held him back. A penknife was but a pis alier: that proved equally ineffectual when matched against the present deity. "One way remains," as Shelley has said of a graver theologic complexity. Cowper, who could not succeed in self- poisoning, drowning, or stabbing, did succeed in hanging himself. i3 * 180 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. A garter was the sufficient means ; but still the end failed, — he fell down after losing his consciousness. He now informed his kinsman of these attempts, and received the obvious reply that he could not, under the circumstances, take up the appoint- ment which had been conferred upon him. On the very day fixed for his examination — dies ilia — he resigned. The poet (as he has left it on record) did not remember having felt any serious religious impressions earlier than this his thirty-second year — save one or two that proved altogether transitory. His time was now come. He felt a terrible con- viction of sin, and despair of salvation : he thought that he had, long before at Southampton, committed "the unpardon- able sin," by not ascribing to direct divine illumination a very sudden and strong sensation of happiness which he had then experienced. At last, early in December 1763, he became clearly and undeniably mad, immediately after feeling as if a mighty blow had struck his brain ; mad to the eyes of those about him, and mad too to his own after-knowledge. We need not, however, date Cowper's insanity so late as December, nor be very confident that it was over for the time (for it un- doubtedly returned afterwards) by the middle of July 1764, which is the date specified by himself. The man who could make up his mind to drink laudanum out of a basin, solely in order to escape an examination before the House of Lords preliminary to occupying a snug berth, may be pronounced mad at that moment as safely as at the time, shortly ensuing, when he supposed he had committed the unpardonable sin by not assuming himself to be God-inspired when he was happy, or at that other time when he had a sensation of a blow on his brain. And the man who could in after years, and believing himself entirely rational, write of his attempt with the laudanum, " With the most confirmed resolution I reached forth my hand towards .the basin, when the fingers of both hands were so closely contracted as if bound with a cord, and became entirely useless, — it had the air of a divine interposition" — was still in a state of mind that one would hardly call sane. In fact, it appears to me more than questionable whether Cowper was strictly sound-minded in any stage of his exceptional religious experiences. If he was insane when he believed himself to be secure of damnation, intermediately between the attempted suicide and the acknowledged raving madness, I do not see why we should suppose that he was perfectly sane when the religious exaltation took another turn, and he regarded himself as converted, and a monument of the invisible miracle of grace. In his autobiographical narrative he treats himself as sane at all these dates, although insane for some months betwixt his first conviction of damnation and his conviction of salvation ; and in the same narrative he relates, as real facts of divine interposition against his suicidal attempts, various details which were seemingly no more than his own hallucinations of the time, or deranged reminiscences in after years. There are clearly the strongest grounds, from the evidence of dates and otherwise, for saying that the conviction of damnation was a form of religious mania ; and I know of no very good reason why the conviction of salvation should have been an inspira- tion of unclouded intellect. The most clearly perceptible difference between the two cases is that the conviction of damnation naturally made Cowper extremely unhappy, and cul- minated in ravings ; while the conviction of salvation made him happy, and culminated in placidity and in hymn-writing. Whether the latter conviction was any more rational than the former is quite a separate question. At the present moment we have to deal with Cowper con- fessedly and violently mad. He was placed under the care of Dr. Cotton at St. Alban's ; and remained there under careful tending many months, constantly oppressed at first with the sense of everlasting reprobation. One day in July 1 7 64 he opened a Bible at the third chapter of the Epistle to the Romans— 1 82 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. "Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus : whom God hath set forth to be a pro- pitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteous- ness for the remission of sins that are past." Cowper read the words, was relieved from his load of anguish, and was from that day a converted man. Still, it was not considered expedient to discharge him as yet from the asylum — and this fact again is a weighty suggestion that his religious felicity was as much a form of mania as his religious despair : he remained under Dr. Cotton's superintendence for nearly a year ensuing. In June 1765 he did at last quit the asylum. He resigned, chiefly in order to avoid resuming a London life, his position as Com- missioner of Bankrupts, which brought him only the small income of about £60 per annum : his means thus became extremely straitened. He took up his residence at Hunt- ingdon, with a view to being near a younger brother, then at Cambridge. At Huntingdon he formed the friendship which constituted the tranquil happiness of the great majority of his remaining life : he became acquainted with the Rev. Mr. Unwin and his family. These kindly and sympathizing neighbours, observing his depressed spirits and scanty means, readily sanctioned an arrangement whereby Cowper became a boarder and inmate in their house : he entered the hospitable doors on the nth of November 1765, and seldom had any other home thenceforward than with the Unwin family. Mr. Unwin himself was soon lost from the circle, dying in 1767. Cowper and Mrs. Unwin — the " Mary " of his poems — then removed to Olney in Buckingham- shire, being attracted thither by their special esteem for the curate, Mr. Newton, the well-known evangelical clergyman. Here Cowper zealously identified himself with the religious interests of the society around him ; his charities of mind and heart expanded; and he became, as far as the interruptions of his constitutional malady allowed, a happy man. Mr. Newton WILLIAM COWPER. 183 obtained his cooperation on the volume of Hymns he was then preparing, so well-known as , the Olney Hymns, published in 1776. A fair proportion of the whole number are by Cowper, who thus, at the more than mature age of forty-four or forty-five, first took an appreciable position in the field of literature and of poetry. This daylight of his manhood was not without its clouds. Attacks of mania recurred between 1773 and 1776, consequent partly upon the death of his brother ; and they put a stop to the writing of his hymns before he had gone to any great length with the work. At another time he connected himself with the fantastic religionist Teedon ; a vagary in which again the taint of insanity is to be surmised. In this same year, 1776, and after Cowper's recovery, Mr. Newton quitted Olney : one of the mainstays of the poet's activity and cheerfulness was thus removed. At Mrs. Unwin's solicitation he now began his poem on The Progress of Error; followed by three others — Truth, Table-talk, and Expostulation. These, along with Hope, Charity, Conversation, Retirement, and some short pieces, were published in one volume in 1782, without exciting particular notice. Though no longer a young man, he entered with youthful ardour and impulse on the poetic career; for it is said that the contents of this volume, about 6000 lines of verse, were the production of a quarter of a year. It was followed in 1 785 by The Task and Tirocinimn ; and now at last, at the age of fifty-three, Cowper became a man of renown. The book was greatly admired, and raised him, in public estimation, to a level with any contemporary writer of poetry. The lady who (as intimated at the opening of The Task) pressed Cowper to undertake the writing of that work, was Lady Austen, a clever and lively widow whose society at this period possessed great attractions for him : gradually, how- ever, her hold upon him weakened — whether through a change in his own feelings, or, as has sometimes been said, through the influence of Mrs. Unwin, who apprehended that Lady Austen might be preferred even to herself. When eventually the latter quitted Olney, the Throgmorton family replaced her to some extent in Cowper's regard. The sprightly widow was the sug- gestor also of John Gilpin — which endlessly popular effusion, the delight of succeeding generations of the juvenile, and not of the juvenile only, was first published anonymously, in 1783, in a collection named The Repository. Thus Lady Austen is entitled to a considerable royalty on the gratitude which all are so ready to pay to Cowper for his poetic performances. In 1784 he began — partly in the hope of banishing his hypochon- driacal distresses — the formidable work of translating Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into blank verse. This occupied him during six years. The book was at last published in 1791, and after- wards, in deference to the views of some of his critics, remo- delled to a considerable extent in respect of poetic manner and diction, and reissued in its revised form. We all know that CoAvper was (as he resolved to be, both in letter and in spirit) a much more faithful translator of Homer than Pope, who, in his successor's opinion, had had no real relish for the Grecian poet — whatever may be the ultimate balance of merit on a comparison of the two works. His version therefore deserved a very respectful reception, and holds its own to this day against the many subsequent adventures which have been made in the same field — some of them not much unlike Cowper's own in range of attempt, others markedly dissimilar. In the way of original work, the only other leading performance by Cowper which remains to be mentioned is the A7tti-Thelyphthora, written to confute the opponents of marriage : this was not published till after his death. While his translation of Homer was in progress, the poet removed from Olney to the neighbouring village of Weston, at the recommendation of his cousin Lady Hesketh, with whom he had recently renewed a long-suspended correspondence, and who actively co-operated with Mrs. Unwin in comforting his WILLIAM COWPER. 185 later years. Hardly was the Homer completed when he under- took to superintend a new edition of Milton's works ; this in- eluded the translating of his Latin and Italian poems. In 1792 a great affliction befell him : Mrs. Unwin was affected by a paralytic seizure, and the mournful wane of her faculties be- spoke but too surely the approaches of death. Her end was delayed, however, for some while, and did not ensue till the 17th of December 1796. When this occurred, Cowper was himself already worse than dead — he was finally and without recovery insane. His mental malady had re-appeared for about six months in 1787 : in 1794 it again set in — not unconnected probably with his dejection on Mrs. Unwin's account. In the same year his services to poetical and religious literature were recognized by a pension of ^"300 per annum. He was now living with Lady Hesketh, and a young relative named Johnson paid much attention to the sufferer. He was removed, for change of scene, to North Tuddenham in Norfolk ; then to Mundsley ; then to East Dereham, in the same county. Absolute dark- ness did not as yet close-in upon him : there were intervals of lumour, in which he composed some small pieces, and attended to the revision of his Homer. The end was gloomy : religious despair was busy in tormenting his mind, and dropsy his body. He died on the 25th of April 1800. The eager, sudden-looking, large-eyed, shaven face of Cowper is familiar to us in his portraits — a face sharp-cut and suffici- ently well-moulded, without being handsome, nor particularly sympathetic. It is a high-strung, excitable face ; as of a man too susceptible and touchy to put himself forward willingly among his fellows, but who, feeling a " vocation " upon him, would be more than merely earnest — self-asserting, aggressive, and unyielding. This is in fact very much the character of his writings. He was an enthusiastic lover of Nature, and full of gentle kindliness, and of quiet pleasant good-humour, — and all these loveable qualities appear in ample proportion and measure in passages of his writings : but at the same time his narrow, exclusive, severe, and arbitrary religious creed — a creed which made him as sure that other people were wicked and marked out for damnation as that himself was elected and saved (and even as regards himself this confidence gave way sometimes to utter desperation) — this creed speaks out in his poems in unmistakeable tones of harsh judgment and un- qualified denunciation. Few writers are more steadily un- sparing of the lash than the shrinkingly sensitive Cowper. It may be that he does not lay it on with the sense of personal power, and indignant paying-off of old scores, which one finds in a Juvenal or a Pope ; but the conviction that he is the mouth- piece of Providence, and that, when William Cowper has pro- nounced a man reprobate, the smoke of his burning is certain to ascend up for ever and ever, stands in stead of much, and lends unction to the hallowed strain. In conformity with this inspiration, his writing is nervous and terse, well stored with vigorous stinging single lines ; and his power of expressive characterization, whether in moral declaiming or in descriptive work, is very considerable — and was (at any rate in the latter class of passages) even more noticeable in his own day than it is in ours. Apart from his religion, Cowper (as has just been said) was eminently humane and gentle-hearted; the interest which he took in his tame hares will perhaps be remembered when much of his wielding of the divine thunderbolts against the profane shall have been forgotten. It was in 1774, during one of his periods of great mental depression, that the first of his leverets was presented to him, in the hope of diverting his mind from more moody thoughts : two others followed after- wards ; and the diverse characters and manners of the three formed an engaging study to him for years. Puss, the latest to survive, expired in March 1786. In point of literary or poetic style, Cowper was mainly in- WILLIAM COIVPER. 187 dependent, and the pioneer of a simpler and more natural method than he found prevailing : his didactic or censorial poems may be regarded as formed on the writings of Churchill rather than of any other predecessor. Besides his merits as a poet, his excellences as a letter-writer have deserved and received very high praise. His correspondence is unaffected, facile, and often playful. Religion of course forms a sub- stantial part of this, as it so conspicuously did of the author's mind : but it has been noticed, and has been made matter of some reproach from certain quarters, that the religious tone of the letters diminishes very observably after 1785, when Cowper had become an eminent man in literature, and more open con- sequently to the entanglements of " the world." POETS BORN BETWEEN COWPER AND BURNS. James Macpherson John Wolcot Anna Letitia Barbauld Charles Dibdin Anna Seward John Logan Robert Ferguson Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Thomas Chatterton George Crabbe Robert Bloomfield William Blake 1738 to 1738 to 1743 to 1745 to 1747 to 1748 to 1751 to 1751 to 1752 to 1754 to 1756 to 1757 to 1796, 1819 1825 1814 1809 1788 1774. 1816 1770 1832 1823 1827 ROBERT BURNS. The name of Robert Burns is a well-understood signal for an overflow of all sorts of commonplaces from the right-minded critic. These commonplaces run mainly in three channels : — ecstatic astonishment at finding that a ploughman was also a poet ; wringing of hands over the admission that the plough- man and poet was likewise a drunkard, and a somewhat miscel- laneous lover; and caustic severity upon the lionizers and "admirers of native genius" who could find no employment more appropriate than that of excise-officer for the brightest and finest mind of their country and generation. All these commonplaces must stand confessed as warranted by the facts : they are truths, but they are also truisms. We have heard them very often, and have always sat in meek acquiescence and unfeigned concurrence. But the time comes when they have been repeated frequently enough to make the enlarging upon them a weariness, and the profuse and argumentative re-enforce- ment of them a superfluity. The reader of the following few observations will, I dare say, consent to understand once for all that Burns really was a ploughman — his own plough-driver on his father's or his own small farm ; and became in due course of time a great poet, and in undue course a toper ; and was fit for much loftier occupation than the gauging of ale-barrels and seizing of illicit stills. The reader and I may start from these facts as rather elementary data ; and he will perhaps not resent my stating them in such reasonable brevity as consists with my plan, and without much " improving" of the occasion. There are plenty of other books concerning Burns where powerful fountain-heads of morality, and of ardent but deprecatory enthusiasm, are kept continually on tap. Robert Burness (or Burnes) — for such was his inherited patronymic, though in after years he thought fit to condense it into Burns — was born on the 25th of January 1 1759, at a small cottage in the parish of Alloway, about two miles south- west of the town of Ayr. His father, William Burness, was son of a farmer in Kincardineshire. Owing to the poverty of his family, he had in youth come south, and had served as a gar- dener in various families. In December 1757 he had married Agnes Brown, who survived by many years her illustrious son : she died in 1820. The father, a man of superior understanding, and of the strong, upright, self-respecting character so honour- ably distinctive of the better Scotch peasantry, took, when he married, a perpetual lease of seven acres of land, which he cul- tivated as a nurseryman : here he personally built his own cottage. Robert was the eldest son of the union. His father had a dire struggle to maintain for a decent subsistence, and to educate his family. Robert was sent to a neighbouring school in the sixth year of his age, and soon showed some bookish likings : afterwards he received a little instruction at home, partly from his father. He managed to pick up a smat- tering of French (which he was not averse from airing in after years), and had a quarter of a year's practice in land-surveying, which has been dignified with the name of " practical mathe- matics." The whole amount of his tutoring, however, was in- considerable. He read with interest and attention, as the scanty chance offered, the works of some poets — Pope and Ramsay, for instance — the Spectator, and a volume of Letters by good writers. Toil and moil was the early life of Burns — hard labour, and, what is worse, anxious labour : the wolf was always at the door. A depression of spirits took possession of him, spite of a very ample share of youthful mirth and buoyancy, and darkened many hours of his later life. The family was very economical, and Burns, being as yet both thrifty and strictly temperate, in no way derogated from this creditable standard : there was no hired servant, and for years no butcher's meat in the house. Some time before the father's death, which occurred in February 1784, Robert and his brother Gilbert took another farm, stocked from the hard-wrung savings of the household : the labour of the brothers was remunerated at the rate of ^7 per annum each, and this plan continued for about four years. At another time Robert, loth to drudge on for ever as a mere labourer, tried a flax-dressing scheme in partnership at Irvine ; but this soon proved abortive. When the father died, there remained, along with his widow, five children younger than Robert and Gilbert : the failure of a lawsuit with his landlord was just bringing a crash cf ruin upon honest hardworking William Burness, when death stepped in, and for him trouble was no more. Robert was now full twenty-five years of age, and a man of great local popularity, and some note. He had shown an early susceptibility to the amorous passion. His first love, worth so calling, was at the age of fourteen : love summoned poetry to its aid, and he became a versifier. He was besides a fluent and vigorous talker ; and his gifts were too bright and attrac- tive to allow of his remaining long unknown in his own neigh- bourhood. Furiously loving the women, and loved by them in return (though it would appear that of real de facto amours he had no experience until his twenty-third year), received with acclaim wherever the men wanted to be lively, he took his fill of facile and unsettling pleasures. His habits became convivial, and all the more so after he had joined a society of Freemasons. 192 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. Still, he seems for a while to have exercised a tolerable amount of self-control as far as drinking is concerned. His brother, indeed, has left it on record that he did not remember in Robert any instance of positive intoxication until at a late date of his poetical career; and some other authorities will have it that, up to within the last few years of his life, when he had removed to Dumfries, he preserved a fair character for sobriety. His poetizing for some years made no very noticeable progression : its more important developments are to be dated from about his twenty-fourth year. Diffusive love-making has its mischances. One day Burns found himself the prospective father of a brace of twins by his sweetheart Jean Armour, the daughter of a respectable master- mason. Roused to a lively sense of his responsibilities, he agreed with Jean that they should make a legal profession of antecedent marriage, thus legitimizing the offspring ; and that he himself should then go off to Jamaica to try his fortune in the character of assistant overseer to a planter, seeing that nothing but penury appeared to be his destined lot in Scotland. He paid nine guineas for a steerage-passage ; and was indeed in a fever to be off, as he had been called upon to give security for the maintenance of his offspring, and was in dread of impri- sonment. He wrote a farewell poem to Ayrshire and to Scot- land — " The gloomy night is gathering fast." However, the tardy compensation which he was hoping to make to Jean for the imprudence and trouble into which he had betrayed her was not at present allowed to take effect. Her parents were so indignant at the affair that they absolutely refused to hear of matrimony ; and Jean consented to relinquish her lover's written declaration of marriage, and himself along with it. Burns meanwhile, regarding her as having flinched in love and faith before adverse circumstances, denounced and abjured her, and indemnified himself by making love to Mary Campbell, his "Highland Mary.'' The poet and his Mary plighted their . ROBERT BUR XS. 193 troth with much fervour : but this episode in the history of his loves came to nothing, the damsel having very soon afterwards died of a fever at Greenock. With everything prepared for his start to Jamaica, and ex- pecting to remain away from Scotland for years, if not for the remainder of his life, the consciousness of his poetic gift worked upon the mind of Burns : he resolved to leave behind him some record that the fields and streams, the lasses and humours, of Ayrshire, had been all-sufficient and immortal inspiration to a quenchless genius. Encouraged by his landlord, Mr. Gavin Hamilton, he determined to publish a small volume of his verses. This came out accordingly in the autumn of 1786. The edition, printed at Kilmarnock, was of 600 copies, of which about 350 were subscribed for : Hallowe 'en, the Cotter's Saturday Night, and several others of his now celebrated pro- ductions, were included in the volume. At once modest and distinct in self-assertion is the preface with which the plough- man-poet introduced his verses. While indulging in gratuitous self-depreciation as compared with Allan Ramsay or Fergusson, •" the author tells him [the possible critic] once for all that he certainly looks upon himself as possessed of some poetic abilities." This was the crisis of Burns's life. ''. The book was well re- ceived from the first, and cleared for its writer the small but acceptable sum of nearly ^20. A letter came from Dr. Blacklock to a friend of Burns, which entirely overthrew the poet's Jamaica scheme, enlarged his practical views, and en- couraged him to try his opportunities in Edinburgh. He arrived in the Scottish capital in November 1786, without either acquaintances there or letters of introduction : but he soon got to know all sorts of leading people, whether in litera- ture or in fashion and social rank, and surprised all by his brilliant conversational powers, though he was not forward in talking unless he had something substantial to say. His 14 194 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. demeanour was worthy of his exceptional position in its com- plicated bearings ; and he was above any of the tricks of a man who is showing off, or allowing others to show him off. He spent two winters in Edinburgh, leaving the city finally in February 1788 ; meanwhile he had been visiting various other parts of Scotland, and had crossed the English border to New- castle and Carlisle. A new edition of his poems, under the patronage of Dugald Stewart and many other celebrities, had been published in Edinburgh in April 1787; it consisted of 2800 copies, for which a subscription-list of 1500 names had been obtained, and it brought in nearly ^600 to the poet. So far all was well. But Burns, already too convivial as an' Ayr- shire peasant, naturally grew still more convivial as the cyno- sure of social gatherings in Edinburgh ; and the eclat and excitement of this episode in his history were not the natural precursors and props for retired, laborious country-life, in which hard field-work was again to be his means of subsist- ence, and the alleviator of his load was to be the rustic Jean Armour. The latter, it should be mentioned, presented her lover, in the spring of 1788, with a second pair of twins, who died almost immediately ; for she and Burns had met again during one of the intervals of his Edinburgh sojourn, when her parents naturally courted his return. Her second frailty caused her exclusion from the paternal home; but some degree of reconciliation had been attained by the time of her delivery. Burns's enamoured correspondence with Mrs. M'Lehose (the " Clarinda" of his Letters) was going on at its hottest about the same period. In the early summer of 1788 Burns returned to Ayrshire. He espoused Jean by making a public declaration of marriage; liberally advanced £ 180 to his brother Gilbert, to give him a start in life; and took for himself a somewhat considerable farm at Ellisland in Dumfries-shire. Here he was domiciled before the end of June, and resumed, among other rural . ROBERT BURNS. 195 occupations, the exercise of his skill as a ploughman, at which (it is pleasant to learn) he was a capital hand. Soon, however, he found that his income needed eking out ■ and, as nothing more congenial offered as an outlet for his energies, he applied to be appointed excise-officer for his own vicinity, and obtained this post through the interest of Mr. Graham of Fintray. His pay was at first the pittance of ^50 per annum, increased after a time to ^70. Burns an exciseman is a rather dejecting picture to contem- plate. Still, if we exclude idealisms and prejudices, and take a plain common-sense view of the practicalities of the case, it might seem that the peasant poet, married to his early sweet- heart who proved an affectionate wife ; settled on a farm of his own, the management of which he understood ; enthusiastically admired for his genius by his countrymen, from the noblest duke to the most tattered gaberlunzie ; habitually writing short pieces which he could throw off rapidly athwart a pressure of occupations, and which he could readily get published at once in some form or other, thereby keeping his name and fame in ever fresh remembrance ; and having a small settled income,, from a government post, to fall back upon — was not, as human lots go, a person worthy of mere commiseration, and altogether battered by the Fates. We hear of his having two men and two women-servants ; nine or ten milch-cows ; some young cattle ; four horses ; and several pet sheep, of which he was fond. The position looks like an endurable one to begin with, and likely to continue in a steady course of quiet pro- gressive improvement. Unfortunately this was not to be. The centre of Burns's hopes of material comfort and independence was his farm : but, after he had been there about three years and a half, he found that his duties in the excise interfered with the satisfactory conduct of husbandry work, and he gave the farm up. It may indeed be surmised that, if his habits had been steadier, and himself more faithful to the severe traditions 14* of his father's life, if he had not allowed the jolly dogs and loose fishes of his neighbourhood to prey upon his leisure, and if he had not grown a more and more helpless slave of the devil of drink, he might have sufficed for both occupations. How- ever that may be, he did not thus suffice : and we may well infer that things had come to a bad pass with the farm when Burns, having to make his option between that and a government stipend of £70 a year, chose the latter as the mainstay of his household. About the end of 179 1 he removed to a small house in the town of Dumfries (how many thousands of people have looked since then with reverence on its mean outside !) and here he remained for the brief residue of his life. Burns had a certain Jacobite and tory tone of political sentiment ; but every great and unprosperous genius, born in the lower ranks of society, is a potential democrat ; and the era of the French Revolution was not one to leave the secret places of such a soul unstirred. More than once Burns used some expressions regarding the Revolution not strictly befit- ting an officer in the excise service of King George the Third — rather suitable to a man of genius and insight : this spoiled his prospects in the excise, and very nearly resulted in his dismissal. The chances open to his aspirations were that he might within a moderate number of years rise to the posi- tion of supervisor, with about^2oo a- year, any amount of hard •work, and no leisure — and then, after another interval of years, to the post of collector, at about ^300 to ,£400. This latter promotion would have relieved him from the severer toils of business, and would have satisfied his desires. " A life of literary leisure, with a decent competence, is the summit of my wishes," he said in one of his letters. In fact, however, he never rose out of the ranks in the excise service. The majority of the songs which Burns wrote subsequently to his first Edinburgh edition were sent to Johnson's Scots Musical Museum, published in that city, and, at a later date, to ROBERT BURNS. 197 the Collection of Original Scottish Airs edited and published by Mr. George Thomson. In this work he wrote the words for many long-popular melodies — a field for the exercise of his genius which roused his heartiest and most generous sym- pathies. His first letter replying to Mr. Thomson's application is dated the 16th of September 1792, and absolutely declines the offered payment. It gives one a salutary thrill to think of this great poet, oppressed with the cares of a family, drudging through a hard, uncongenial, and most scantily paid employ- ment, the fineness of his nature dulled by drink, his strong frame beginning to feel the inroads of disease, yet rising superior to all low-hearted suggestions, and even to the per- fectly reasonable and fair promptings of his position, and with a glorious burst of patriotic love refusing to be a penny the richer in pocket for the pure ore of everlasting song with which he again and again dowered his country. For about four years he adhered to his self-denying ordinance ; and, in one in- stance, when Mr. Thomson had of his own accord sent him a small sum, Burns — although, out of consideration for his correspondent, he did not send the money back — warned him never to repeat the experiment. At last, however, he was compelled to give in. After being seriously ill for about a year, and thus almost prevented from contributing to Thomson's publication, he was obliged, on the 12th of July 1796, to ask for a payment of £$ to meet a haberdasher's bill. Ill health, mental dejection, and pecuniary straits, had indeed now encompassed Burns round on every side. He had sunk into an habitual tippler — not a contented one. Re- morse was gnawing at him continually. He had always had and still retained a strong tincture of religious feeling, though not of what passes for orthodoxy : he could hardly be regarded as a believer in revelation, but clung hard to the idea of a future life. In money matters he continued honourable, and at his decease he left no debts. Rheumatic pains, and other 198 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. maladies consequent upon his irregularities, assailed him • he became captious with his wife, whose affection had nevertheless worn well; then fever supervened, closing in delirium. The poet lay on his deathbed, while his wife, expecting another confinement, was incapable of tending him ; harassed also by the pertinacity of some lawyer, on whom one of his latest utterances bestowed a curse. The end came on the 21st of July 1796. Burns died, aged thirty-seven years and a half. The nation which had afforded him the post and the annual ^70 of an excise officer did not cease to remember him in death. On the 25th, the very day when his last child was born, a public funeral was accorded to his remains, and was attended by vast multitudes. He left behind him, with his widow, four sons ; a fifth had died in in- fancy. A considerable sum was raised for their benefit. Soon also an edition of Burns's poems — complete so far as the then known materials allowed — was brought out under the editorship of a cordial admirer, Dr. Currie, an eminent physician in Liver- pool. It fostered the poet's fame, but was not needed to establish this : for in fact there is hardly in all literature an instance of such immediate and immense popularity — per- meating the whole body politic of his countrymen — as that of Burns's poems. Everybody understood them, everybody en- joyed them ; all were proud that Scotland should have produced a Burns, that he should reflect so much and such expressly national renown on his country, and that themselves should be the sons of such a land, and compatriots of such a man. This enthusiastic acceptance of their native poet is certainly a great glory to Scotchmen : and any one who is bent upon re- membering to their discredit that they left the man Burns to live and die an exciseman should bear in mind also that they had already reposited the poet Burns in their heart of hearts, and that at this minute there are probably ten Scotchmen to whom Burns and his work are breathing and potent realities, for one R OBER T B URNS. 199 Englishman to whom Shakespeare is any more than a name. It may certainly be said that, the more they admired the poet, the less willing should his countrymen have been to leave the man huddled in obscurity : this (as I said at starting) is a point already more than sufficiently debated elsewhere. At the present time of day it would be almost a futility to analyse, in such space and in such method as I have at my disposal, the individual or characteristic merits of the poems of Burns. Every Scotchman is born to an intuition of them : which is as much as saying that whatever is strongest, deepest, broadest, and finest, in that remarkable concrete the Scotch national character, finds its quintessence in these immortal verses. The ideal Scotchman is the man to whom Burns's poems most come home. They give all his distinctive faculties and foibles ; only with this modification necessary to the excel- lence of the poetic result, that the prudential and prosaic attributes— what one might call the minus quantities — of the Scotch character are left in proportion less than the reality, while the plus quantities — the geniality, fervency, and even rampancy, of whatever kind — are thrown in with a prodigal and affectionate exuberance. But all are there — the less as well as the more kindly excesses. Burns is in fact the demi- god — the prophet, priest, and king — of Scotland : the Scotch- man who, more than any other man or men, knits together at the present moment Scotchmen all over the globe, and may prolong and intensify for ages the nationalizing work in which the Battle of Bannockburn and the anti-prelatical reformation under Knox were earlier yet it may be hardly so powerful coeffi- cients. This is after all the greatest of Burns's many and great poetic merits — that he has Scoticized poetry; J has established an unbounded ascendant over the Scottish mind, and has 1 In saying this, we are of course not to forget the precursors of Burns's poetrv — the glorious old Scottish Ballads, and more recently Allan Ramsay uets, and Trios, the 280 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. music composed and selected by Stevenson and Moore ; in 1 8 1 8, The Fudge Family in Paris, again a great hit. This work was composed in Paris, which capital Moore had been visiting in company with his friend Samuel Rogers the poet The easily earned money and easily discharged duties of the appointment in Bermuda began now to weigh heavy on Moore. Defalcations of his deputy, to the extent of ;£6ooo, were dis- covered, for which the nominal holder of the post was liable. Moore declined offers of assistance ; and, pending a legal deci- sion on the matter, he had found it apposite to revisit the Continent. In France, Lord John (the present Earl) Russell was his travelling companion : they went on together through Switzerland, and parted at Milan. Moore then, on the 8th of October 1819, joined in Venice his friend Byron, who had been absent from England since 181 6. The poets met in the best of humour, and on terms of hearty good-fellowship — Moore staying with Byron for five or six days. On taking leave of him, Byron presented the Irish lyrist with the MS. of his auto- biographical memoirs ; a sacred deposit which (as many people have thought ever since) Moore ought either to have used un- flinchingly on the understanding upon which it was tendered, or else to have at once declined. The stipulation made by Byron was that the memoirs should not be published till after his death ; but that they should be published at some time was his manifest intention. Moore sold the MS. in 182 1 to Murray for ^"2100, after some negotiations with Longman; and con- signed it to the publisher's hands in April 1824. Hardly had he done so when the news arrived of Byron's death. Murray now considered that the bad blood certain to be generated by the publishing of the memoirs rendered their suppression highly expedient. Mr. (afterwards Sir Wilmot) Horton on the part of Lady Byron, Mr. Luttrell on that of Moore, Colonel Doyle on that of Mrs. Leigh, Lord Byron's half-sister, and Mr. Hobhouse (afterwards Lord Broughton) as a friend of the deceased poet, THOMAS MOORE. 281 consulted on the subject. The result was that Murray, setting aside considerations of profit, burned the MS. (some principal portions of which nevertheless exist in print, in other forms of publication) ; and Moore immediately afterwards, also in a dis- interested spirit, repaid him the purchase-money of ^2100 with interest. It was quite fair that Moore should be reimbursed this large sum by some of the persons in whose interest he had made the sacrifice ; and there is reason to believe that this was not neglected. The upshot is that all parties concerned showed an honourable disregard of filthy lucre. Whether Murray (the prime mover in the affair) was justified in taking out of the mouth of Byron the posthumous words which he had resolved to speak, and whether his friend Moore was warranted in assisting the gagging process, are different questions, which will be diversely answered by various minds : for myself, I think the decision was both a weakness and a wrong. To resume. Bidding adieu to Byron at Venice, Moore went on to Rome with the sculptor Chantrey and the portrait-painter Jackson. His tour supplied the materials for the Rhymes on the Road, published, as being extracted from the journal of a travelling member of the Pococurante Society, in 1820, along with the Fables for the Holy Alliance. Lawrence, Turner, and Eastlake, were also much with Moore in Rome : and here he made acquaintance with Canova. Hence he returned to Paris, and made that city his home up to 1822, expecting the outcome of the Bermuda affair. He also resided partly at Butte- Coaslin, near Sevres, with a rich and hospitable Spanish family named Villamil. The debt of £6000 was eventually reduced to ^£750 : both the Marquis of Lansdowne and Lord John Russell pressed Moore with their friendly offers, and the advance which he at last accepted was soon repaid out of the profits of the Loves of the Angels — which poem, chiefly written in Paris, was published in 1823. The prose tale of The. Epicurean was composed about the same time, but did 282 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. not issue from the press till 1827 : the Memoirs of Captain Rock in 1824. He had been under an engagement to a book- seller to write a Life of Sheridan. During his stay in France the want of documents withheld him from proceeding with this work : but he ultimately took it up, and brought it out in 1825. It has not availed to give Moore any reputation as a biographer, though the reader in search of amusement will pick out of it some- thing to suit him. George the Fourth is credited with having made a neat bon mot upon this book. Some one having remarked to him that " Moore had been murdering Sheridan," — " No,"' replied his sacred majesty, "but he has certainly attempted his life." A later biographical performance, published in 1830, and one of more enduring interest to posterity, was the Life of Byron. This is a very fascinating book ; but more — which is indeed a matter of course —in virtue of the lavish amount of Byron's own writing which it embodies than on account of the Memoir-compiler's doings. However, there is a considerable share of good feeling in the book, as well as matter of permanent value from the personal knowledge that Moore had of Byron; and the avoidance of "posing " and of dealing with the subject for purposes of effect, in the case of a man whose career and genius lent themselves so insidiously to such a treatment, is- highly creditable to the biographer's good sense and taste. The Life of Byron succeeded, in the list of Moore's writings, a History of Lreland, contributed in 1827 to Lardners Cyclopaedia, and the Travels of an Lrishman in Search of a Religion, published in the same year : and was followed by a Life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, issued in 183 1. This, supplemented by some minor productions, closes the sufficiently long list of writings of an industrious literary life. In his latter years Moore resided at Sloperton Cottage, near Devizes in Wiltshire, where he was near the refined social circle of Lord Lansdowne at Bowood, as well as the lettered home of the Rev. Mr. Bowles at Bremhill. Domestic sorrows. THOMAS MOORE. 283 clouded his otherwise cheerful and comfortable retirement. One of his sons died in the French military service in Algeria ; another of consumption in 1842. For some years before his own death, which occurred on the 25th of February 1852, his mental powers had collapsed. He sleeps in Bromham Cemetery, in the neighbourhood of Sloperton. Moore had a very fair share of learning, as well as steady application, greatly as he sacrificed to the graces of life, and especially of " good society." His face was not perhaps much more impressive in its contour than his diminutive figure. His eyes, however, were dark and fine; his forehead bony, and with what a phrenologist would recognize as large bumps of wit ; the mouth pleasingly dimpled. His manner and talk were bright, abounding rather in lively anecdote and point than in wit and humour, strictly so called. To term him amiable according to any standard, and estimable too as men of an unheroic fibre go, is no more than his due. No doubt the world has already seen the most brilliant days of Moore's poetry. Its fascinations are manifestly of the more temporary sort : partly through fleetingness of subject-matter and evanescence of allusion (as in the clever and still readable satirical poems) ; partly through the aroma of sentimental patriotism, hardly strong enough in stamina to make the com- positions national, or to maintain their high level of popularity after the lyrist himself has long been at rest ; partly through the essentially commonplace sources and forms of inspiration which belong to his more elaborate and ambitious works. No poetical reader of the present day is the poorer for knowing absolutely no- thing oiLalla Rookh or the Loves of the Angels. What then will be the hold or the claim of these writings upon areader of the twenty- first century? If we except the satirical compositions, choice in a different way, the best things of Moore are to besought in the Irish Melodies, to which a considerable share of merit, and of apposite merit, is not to be denied : yet even here what deserts around 284 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. the oases, and the oases themselves how soon exhaustible and forgetable ! There are but few thoroughly beautiful and touch- ing lines in the whole of Moore's poetry : here is one — " Come rest in this bosom, mine own stricken deer." A great deal has been said upon the overpowering "lusciousness " of his poetry, and the magical " melody" of his verse : most of this is futile. There is in the former as much of fadeur as of lusciousness ; and a certain tripping or trotting exactitude, not less fully reducible to the test of scansion than of a well-at- tuned ear, is but a rudimentary form of melody — while of harmony or rhythmic volume of sound Moore is as decisively ■destitute as any correct versifier can well be. No clearer proof of the incapacity of the mass of critics and readers to appreciate the calibre of poetical work in point of musical and general execution could be given than the fact that Moore has always with them passed, and still passes, for an eminently melodious poet. What then remains? Chiefly this. In one class of writing, liveliness of witty banter, along with neatness ; and, in the other and ostensibly more permanent class, elegance, also along with neatness. Reduce these qualities to one denomina- tion, and we come to something that may be called " Propriety": a sufficiently disastrous " raw material " for the purposes of a poet, and by no means loftily to be praised or admired even when regarded as the outer investiture of a nobler poetic some- thing within. But let desert of every kind have its place, and welcome. In the cosmical diapason and august orchestra of poetry, Tom Moore's little Pan's-pipe can at odd moments be heard, and interjects an appreciable and rightly-combined twiddle or two. To be gratified with these at the instant is no more than the instrument justifies, and the executant claims : to think much about them when the organ is pealing or the violin playing (with a Shelley performing on the first, or a Mrs. Browning on the second) or to be on the watch for their recurrences, would be equally superfluous and weak-minded. POETS BORN BETWEEN MOORE AND BYRON. Ebenezer Elliott 1781 to 1849, Charles Robert Maturin 1782 to 1824, Leigh Hunt 1784 to 1859 James Sheridan Knowles 1784 to 1862 Allan Cunningham 1784 to 1842 Thomas Love Peacock 1785 to 1866 Richard Harris Barham 1788 to 1845 LORD BYRON. George Gordon Lord Byron, a Baron of the United King- dom, was born on the 22nd of January 1788, in Holies Street, London. He traced his descent from the time of the Con- quest : his ancestor Ralph de Burun is recorded in Domesday Book. The Byrons or Birons, having been Knights long before, and Baronets also, were raised to the peerage by Charles I., whose cause the family espoused. The poet was the only son of Captain John Byron, of the Guards, by his second wife, Catharine Gordon of Gight, an Aberdeen- shire heiress, belonging to the senior branch of the Gordons, and having some Stuart blood in her veins. John Byron was a nephew of William, the then Lord. A spendthrift and rake, he had aforetime eloped with Lady Carmarthen, who, on being divorced from her husband, became the first wife of Captain Byron, and bore him, about eight years prior to the poet's birth, one daughter, Augusta Mary, afterwards the Honourable Mrs. Leigh. The celebrated Admiral Byron was the poet's grandfather. Byron was born (it would appear, though the accounts are conflicting) with both feet clubbed, and, through consequent insufficiency of exercise, his legs withered or shrank as far as the knee : the right foot, owing to an accident attending birth, was more particularly distorted. In other respects he grew up extremely handsome; with light-blue or greyish eyes, dark auburn hair curling over the head, and a complexion almost 288 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. colourless. His stature was five feet eight and a half. He had a constitutional tendency to fatness, which he kept down by a diet abstemious to the point of semi-starvation, although occasionally he neglected his precautions, and paid the forfeit. Extreme sensitiveness to his lameness, even apart from the prac- tical inconvenience which it caused, embittered his entire life. Captain Byron squandered his second wife's fortune, and left her to shift for herself. Reduced to an income of ^150 a year, she retired with her infant, in 1790, to Aberdeen: a proud, impetuous, inflammable woman, who spoiled the child by frequent petting, and more frequent violences. In her moods, she would call him a "lame brat" ; an opprobrious term which rankled in his memory. Inheriting the character- istic defects of both his parents, with a gloomy heart though much superficial gaiety of spirits, with many generous impulses and passionate susceptibilities, he underwent no training that would have elicited his finer and eliminated his more perilous qualities. His father soon levanted to the continent, and died at Valenciennes in 1791. Byron's schooling began at the age of five ; he had been under three instructors before he passed to the Free-school of Aberdeen. The son of the reigning Lord Byron died before his father; the lord himself expired on the 19th of May 1798; and little ' Geordie,' aged ten, was Baron Byron of Rochdale, master of Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire, and owner of a large though embarrassed property. He was now made a ward in Chancery, under the guardianship of the Earl or Carlisle. The deceased lord had been a man of vehement passions, who had for more than thirty years lived in a grim retirement at Newstead. This was the sequel of a duel, hardly differing from a mere brawl, with his relative and neighbour Mr. Chaworth of Annesley, in which the latter was killed. Lord Byron had then undergone a trial before his peers, in 1765, in which he was acquitted. LORD BYRON. 289 A real lord, especially one whose ancestors came in with the Conquest, hardly needs to be assured that he does own that title : but Mrs. Byron, fond and foolish as ever, was much addicted to impressing the fact upon her son, and he, in after years, repaid her by uniformly addressing her in writing as "The Honourable Mrs. Byron," a distinction to which she had no title whatever. " The canker of aristocracy wants to be cut out " was Shelley's verdict upon Byron : and much more serious reasons than this childish verbal juggling — though that is symptomatic enough — justified the observation. Byron was indeed an ingrained aristocrat — a liberal-thinking one in many respects, but not the less an aristocrat. Hence some of his genuineness ; hence also much of his posing and many of his affectations. He hugged his own superiority, adventitious as well as personal, and could not be satisfied with letting other people see the latter, and learn or surmise the former. He must always be abashing them with his distinction from the herd, his scorn for the mass of men ; he could always profess to be distinct and scornful ; and, rather than leave the differ- ence unenforced, he would establish it by lowering himself. The world of readers were to contemplate him as something dark, undefined, and romantic : he must reveal himself a little, and impose upon their imaginations all the more in that the revelation was but partial and fragmentary. In all this, there is no doubt something of personal vanity, and even of that sort of vanity which, had he not been a real unquestionable aristocrat, might rather have been expected of a parvenu. But it is such vanity as rests on a deep and morbid love of arti- ficial distinctions, the corner-stone of aristocracy in its more prosaic and practical developments : and, as Byron was not a parvenu, one can but attribute his weakness in this respect to the fact that, on the subject of aristocracy, he gloated from above upon those vulgarest prepossessions which bedazzle all blinking eyes and stimulate all watering mouths below. 20 Mrs. Byron stayed something less than a year at Newstead, putting her son through a course of Latin, and also, at the hands of a local quack named Lavender, through a course of torture in the futile hope of straightening his right foot. They then removed to London, and Byron went to a boarding- school at Dulwich, where he was well instructed by Dr. Glennie. Hence, in less than two years, to Harrow; and then, in 1805, to Trinity College, Cambridge. At Harrow he was irregular and turbulent, but of generous character ; he showed no aptitude for verbal scholarship, although he read a great deal in a miscellaneous way. His mother already introduced him to some fashionable amusements, such as masquerades ; she had, at the earlier date, withdrawn him so frequently from the regulated school-attendance at Dulwich that his transference to Harrow was effected by Lord Carlisle. The emotion of love had been known to Byron even as a child, and was destined — now as lust, now as intrigue, now as passion, seldom or never perhaps as the purging and spiritual- izing flame of life — to dominate his whole career. At Aber- deen he had loved a little girl named Mary Duff; about 1800 he was enthralled by his lovely cousin Margaret Parker, who died of a decline within two or three years; in 1803 he first saw Miss Chaworth, the heiress of Annesley, and a descendant of the gentleman whom his granduncle had killed in a duel. She was a beautiful girl, two years older than Byron, whom she regarded and treated as a schoolboy. She was already en- gaged to a gentleman in the neighbourhood — Mr. Musters, whom in 1805 she married. The match proved an unhappy ■one, and the lady eventually lost her reason. Byron, from the time when he first met Miss Chaworth, fell deeply in love with her, nor was the passion a transitory one : it darkened many an after year with vain longing and yearning protest. The series of poems incribed to " Thirza " should also be studied by the investigator of Byron's amours or heart-pangs : LORD BYRON. 291 the person thus addressed has not been finally identified, but his feeling regarding her appears to have been exceptionally intense. He passed two years at Trinity College, studious by fits, but mostly idle and dissipated : swimming, boxing, fencing, and pistol-practice, were among his favourite diversions : he also showed — what he ever afterwards retained — a great love of animals, and kept at Cambridge a bear and several bull- dogs, and in later years a wolf. His love for his Newfound- land dog, Boatswain, which he finally buried in a vault at Newstead, and wrote an epitaph upon, is well known. In 1809, having shot an eaglet on the shore of the Gulf of Lepanto, he felt so much compunction that he resolved never again to shoot a bird. His great friend and admiration at college was Charles Skinner Matthews, a Herefordshire gentle- man's son, who died in 181 1, drowned while bathing in the Cam. Lord Clare and Mr. Hobhouse were also early friends for whom Byron ever afterwards entertained a warm regard. It has been said, indeed, that he never lost a friend : and no intimacy of later years, not even that with Moore or with Shelley, took such hold of him as these youthful associations. Another of his amiable traits was his kind feeling for his servants, who very generally became much attached to him. Matthews was a sceptic, or more than a sceptic — Lord Byron has termed him an atheist. His lordship also was, from a very early period of youth, a sceptic, and remained such to the end of his life. He had a certain powerful sense of re- ligion — of its majesty, its hold upon the heart, and more especially perhaps its terrors : at times even he half professed himself a christian, tending towards Roman-Catholicism, and he is said, for the last several years of his life, to have made a practice of fasting on Fridays, and kneeling at the passing of any religious procession — perhaps La Guiccioli rather than orthodoxy had to do with this result. Shelley considered that 292 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. Byron was by no means a firm unbeliever : on one occasion he shrieked to Trelawny, with the introversion of a holy horror, " By God ! he's no better than a christian ! " It is, I think, quite open to surmise that Byron, had he lived out an ordinary length of days, might have dictated or dubitated himself into Christianity : but, as a matter of fact, he was and always remained a sceptic — a non-believer or doubter, often a sar- castic and defiant, seldom a resolved and unchafing one. In truth, Byron was not a man of opinions at all, whether on religious or other subjects, but of impulses, aspirations, and a temperament at once versatile and uncertain on the surface, and doggedly obdurate at the core. There was a great deal of boyishness in his character from first to last; and he was singularly incapable of any reticence, whether himself or other people were affected. He was personally brave, free from fear of death, but somewhat easily daunted by pain. Friends and acquaintances could do anything, and also nothing, with him ; he was the slave and the despot of women, their adorer and their contemner. The twig could at most moments be bent — never the tree inclined. Byron's first recorded " poem " was written at the mature age of ten — a satire on some old lady who had raised his bile : he afterwards wrote some poetry to his cousin Miss Parker. In November 1806 he had a volume of miscellaneous verses printed, named Fugitive Pieces: but, one of the composi- tions being objected to as unchaste by the Rev. John Becher, of Southwell, a friendly Mentor whom he respected, he promptly destroyed the edition, after two, or perhaps three, copies had been issued. In January 1807 he published Poems on Various Occasions, and in the Spring of the same year Hours of Idleness ; all the three volumes containing several composi- tions in common. Some critic in the Edinburgh Review, reputed to have been Brougham, was discerning enough to^ see that the Hours of Idleness were rubbish, and Whig enough LORD BYRON. 293 to write on them a critique such as would now be termed "chaffy" rather than actually severe ; he was not discerning enough to foresee that there was the making of a real and great poet in the fledgeling author. Indeed, to have divined this would have amounted to a sort of critical second-sight; the poems being, in the amplest sense of the term, poor stuff. This was the turning-point of Byron's career, and the be- ginning of his fame. Even before the appearance of the snubbing critique, he had commenced a satire on the writers of his day: this he now took up with centupled ardour, and produced (not without considerable obligation to Gifford's Baviad and Mceviad) his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. It was published on the 16th of March 1809, three days after he had taken his seat in the House of Lords. On that oc- casion he was left entirely to his own resources, without any countenance or introduction from his late guardian the Earl of Carlisle or other noble connexions — a circumstance which long embittered his mind. About this time he had entered upon a settled residence at Newstead Abbey, and played some pranks there, with monkish costumes, skull-caps (if not skulls) as drinking-cups, and so on, which may have been more viva- cious than decorous. At one time Byron had serious thoughts of coming forward in political life. He spoke thrice in the House of Lords with no discouraging result : Sheridan even thought he would become a distinguished speaker. His first speech (on the 27th of February 1812) was on the Nottingham Frame-breaking Bill ; but he did not persevere on this tack. The English Bards and Scotch Reviewers could not fail to make a stir, consisting as it did of a rolling fire of abuse against nearly all the most conspicuous literary men of the time- Byron, however, left it very much to take care of itself. An eagerness for travelling had seized him; and on the nth of June he quitted London, and sailed from Falmouth on the 2nd of July, in company with his friend Hobhouse. He landed at 294 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. Lisbon on the 7th ; crossed Spain ; went on to Prevesa (in Albania), Solara, Arta, and Joannina. On the 12th of October he was introduced to Ali Pacha, and on the 31st began Childe Harold, tie proceeded to Missolonghi, Parnassus, Castri, Delphi : and reached Athens on Christmas-day. In this city and in Attica he spent about ten weeks. Hence he went to Smyrna; and there, on the 28th of March 18 10, finished the . second canto of Childe Harold. Next he sailed to Constanti- nople : on the 9th of May he performed his feat — much vaunted by many tongues, and especially his own — of swimming, like Leander, from Sestos to Abydos. He was in Constantinople from the middle of May to the middle of July ; then in Athens again, and in the Morea from August to October. Returning once more to Athens, he lived in the Franciscan Convent there in the early part of 181 1, writing the Hints from Horace and the Curse of Minerva. He left Athens for Malta in May, and returned to England in July. On the 1st of August his mother died — the decadent state of her health having, it is said, been fatally aggravated by a fit of rage at the amount of an upholsterer's bill presented to her. Byron was hastening to Newstead when he received the tidings. Though he was neither a dutiful nor a loving son to this injudicious parent, he was not without a deep sense of loss in her death : indeed, he spoke of her as " the only friend he had in the world." He showed the Hints from Horace and Childe Harold (limited as yet to cantos 1 and 2) to a confidential acquaintance, Mr. Dallas, and could with difficulty be persuaded that the latter of the two poems was the one to be relied on for a reputation. It came out on the 29th of February 181 2 ; every one knows the expression of the author, as written down in his memoranda — " I awoke one morning and found myself famous." In fact, Childe Harold carried everything before it, creating a rush of enthusiasm such as might barely be considered due to the complete poem, and is clearly not warranted by the two opening cantos. Byron became at once about the most famous and fashionable man in London, after remaining as yet considerably more obscure in society than might have been surmised from his rank and other numerous advantages. He now plunged into fashionable dissipation, and figured as something of a dandy and a good deal of a lady-killer. He entered into the whirl with zest, remained in it with some revulsions, and at last came out of it surfeited. This episode in his life, however, affected him for a permanence : it increased his scornful misanthropy on the one hand, and his weakness for factitious self-display on the other, and he ever after enacted as much the man of fashion as the poet. Byron is one more of the great geniuses who have found "the world" their too inimical friend. He gave Mr. Dallas the ^600 which Mr. Murray, the publisher of Childe Harold, paid for the copyright ; and for some years he pursued, despite considerable temptations to the contrary, the same gratuitously high-minded plan — absolutely refusing any payment for his writings, redounding to his own advantage. His friends benefited in some instances, and in others the amounts went to more general purposes of beneficence. Manfred and The Lament of Tas so (181 7) were, I believe, the first works for which Byron himself accepted payment : since then he continued on that system. His acquaintance with Moore, which soon ripened into intimacy, and great friendliness if not positive friendship, had begun just before the publication of Childe Harold, closing a somewhat bellicose correspondence to which, as already stated in the memoir of Moore, the English Bards and Scotch Reviewers had given rise. This last-named book, always a popular hit, became increasingly embarrassing to Byron as his acquaintance with the leaders in literary and other circles expanded ; and in March 181 2 he burned the then forthcoming new edition, and closed that entry in his accounts with the world. In March 18 13 he published The Waltz (anonymously) : in 296 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. May the Giaour, the first of his frantically admired oriental tales — then new in kind, and highly qualified to fascinate a first and to pall on a second generation of readers ; in Decem- ber, the Bride of Abydos. He began the Corsair on the 18th and finished it on the 31st of December : 14,000 copies sold in one day. An incredible hubbub was also raised by the publica- tion, in the same volume, of the few lines addressed to Princess Charlotte, " Weep, daughter of a royal line." His Ode on Napo- leon was written on the 10th of April 1814 ; on the same day, for no very distinctly apparent reason, he resolved to compose no more poetry, and to suppress such as had been already pub- lished. This resolution could not, in the nature of things, hold- The very next month he began Lara, and published it in August. The lionizing process allured but by no means delighted Byron : he sometimes retired to Newstead for longish periods. Intriguing brought little balm to his heart ; gambling or other diversion, no resources to his purse. In November 18 13 he turned his thoughts seriously to marriage, and proposed to Anna Isabella, only child of Sir Ralph Milbanke, a Baronet in the county of Durham. She was a great heiress, her mother being sister and co-heiress of Lord Wentworth ; but her wealth was as yet only in prospect, and so remained all the while that Byron was in direct personal relation with her. On the present occasion Miss Milbanke declined his offer ; but she and Byron continued corresponding on terms of friendship, not at all of courtship. The lady was, in point of age, a very appropriate choice, being a little younger than her suitor : she was highly educated, of a serious and dignified character, and a paragon of almost all the virtues under heaven. In September 18 14 the poet proposed to another lady, with whom, however, he does not appear to have been in the least in love : he was again unsuc- cessful. He then forthwith, on the 15th of the same month, re- applied to Miss Milbanke, and this time he was accepted. The marriage took place on the 2nd of January 1815. Byron, who LORD BYRON. 297 was intensely superstitious in such matters, supplied his own evil omen on the present occasion — saying to his wedded bride, as they were about to depart, "Miss Milbanke, are you ready?" For a while, Byron (to trust his own correspondence, amid other testimony) sincerely admired his wife, and perhaps almost loved her ; but this was not to endure for long. Lady Byron, in 1856, divulged to the distinguished American novelist, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, that Byron had, before his marriage, begun an incestuous intrigue with his half-sister, Mrs. Leigh, a lady not graced by any charm of person ; and that he continued this intrigue after marriage, making it no secret to his wife herself. A daughter, it is added, was the offspring of this connexion, and was looked after by Lady Byron with divine long-suffering, until death removed the morbidly wayward girl. This supposed daughter of Byron, Elizabeth Medora, born in 181 5, was the undisputed offspring (fourth child) of Mrs. Leigh, and was generally regarded and treated as one of the children of the marriage between that lady and Colonel Leigh. Medora's history 1 is itself a singular and painful one. I need not here enter into it, except to say that at some time or other, probably in or about 1831 (accord- ing to Medora's own account), her eldest sister, Mrs. Trevanion, and Mr. Trevanion as well, informed her that Colonel Leigh was not in truth her father; and in 1840 Lady Byron further announced to her that her real father had been Lord Byron. The ground for not summarily disbelieving the story narrated by her ladyship to Mrs. Stowe, and given to the world by the latter in 1869, is that Lady Byron obviously credited its truth when she communicated with her American friend, and credited it for reasons which, barring mental hallucination, must be regarded as weighty. The grounds for rejecting it are various ; and very chiefly these — that letters addressed at the time by 1 Fully set forth in the volume, Medora Leigh, A History and an Autobiography . Edited by Charles Mackay. Bent ley, 1869. LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. Lady Byron to Mrs. Leigh tell potently in the opposite direction, and that considerable cause has been shown for thinking that her ladyship may in numerous instances, including this one, have been subject to unfounded impressions, have brooded over supposititious conditions of things, and have arrived at conclusions strangely irrelevant to their assumed premises. The very high character always borne by Mrs. Leigh counts also, and deservedly, for much. Lady Byron's averments in this matter have been very generally scouted, with outpourings of indignation and scorn, doubled for the behoof of the recorder of her confidences, Mrs. Stowe. People who will not believe naturally do not believe : others, sufficiently open-minded to believe upon cause shown, joyfully allow that adequate cause has not been shown as yet. Lord Wentworth died in April 1815; Lady Byron's parents then assumed the name of Noel (which, about the beginning of 1822, Byron also, upon the death of Lady Noel, adopted, call- ing himself thenceforward Noel Byron). Soon incompati- bilities of temper or character between his wife and himself (assuming that there was nothing graver in the background) began to manifest themselves : his money - embarrassments too were grave, resulting in no less than nine executions in his house within his first and only year of married life. He sought his pleasure away from home. On the 10th of Decem- ber 1 815 his wife bore him a daughter, who was christened Augusta Ada, and who eventually became Countess of Love- lace. Ada was a family name of olden date : Augusta was (as we have seen) the name of Byron's half-sister, this very Mrs. Leigh. Of her, it should here be observed, he had known very little in early days, but he had a deep and steady affection for her in his manhood : an affection which had hitherto been regarded as fraternal only, and highly honourable to both parties — and such it undoubtedly, and with great seeming genuine- ness, appears to be in the poems which he. addressed to her. LORD BYRON. 299 On the 15th of January 181 6, Lady Byron went with her infant on a visit to her father in Leicestershire. She wrote to Byron in playful and affectionate terms ; and then on the 2nd of February announced that she would never live with him again. The full reasons alleged for this resolve had never till our own days been publicly assigned, nor were they even notified with any precision to Byron himself, if his own account is not to be discarded. It is certain, however, that, before she left for Leicestershire, Lady Byron had conceived a suspicion that her husband was insane, and sixteen heads of surmisable lunacy were drawn up ; that she set enquiries on foot, which satisfied her, both that he was sane, and also that his past con- duct, not being explicable on the ground of madness, was beyond excuse • and that her counsel, Mr. Lushington, con- sidered a separation — which was not (though Byron fancied it was) specially prompted by her own family — indispensable. Beyond this, it used to be only an individual here and another there who professed to know the exact grounds of separation. It was stated, for instance, that Byron brought into his house as a mistress an actress named Mrs. Mardyn (he was at this time connected with the management of Drury Lane Theatre) ; but Moore denies it. Byron, immediately after the catastrophe, exonerated his wife from all blame, and spoke of her in the highest terms. For about a year he ostensibly continued to contemplate reunion as possible : he then gave up the idea, and became less forbearing towards Lady Byron, though it cannot be said (after making due allowance for irritation, vin- dictiveness, badinage, and fictitious accessories) that any of his writings contains a truly serious imputation upon her. It appears that, at the very moment when he received the an- nouncement of intended separation, Byron's house was in the possession of bailiffs. His troubles were therefore great, and his exasperation may have been proportional : yet there seems little reason — however sincere may possibly have been the LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. sentiment expressed in the celebrated " Fare thee well " — to believe that his regret at the step adopted by his wife was essentially very bitter. The pettishness of society (if it was indeed pettishness and partizanship, and not, as there may now at last be some reason for surmising, deep abhorrence of abnormal libertinism) broke forth with astounding acrimony against the favourite once fondled with such frantic vehemence. Byron had not apparently made himself unpopular in any marked way before this occurrence : and, not to speak of his personal claims, his genius had continued adding poem to poem, though not quite of late. But ignorance, spite, and " swarmery " (so well named by Carlyle), or something other than all these, combined to hoot him out of sight. Had he fixed to remain, his defiant pride might have sufficed for that or a greater feat : but loathing and contempt were professedly in his heart, and a hot desire to be quit of so much turmoil and unreason. On the 25th of April he sailed for Ostend, wishing and destined never to return. His most recent writings had been the Hebrew Melodies in December 1814, and the Siege of Corinth and Parisina, published in January and February 181 6. Passing through Belgium and along the Rhine, with his tra- velling physician Dr. Polidori 1 as companion, Byron settled for a while on the banks of the Lake of Geneva, where he became acquainted with Shelley, and the two ladies who were along with him — Miss Godwin (Mrs. Shelley) and Miss Clairmont. The third canto of Childe Harold was commenced in May 181 6, and finished in July ; the Prisoner of Chi I Ion was com- posed at Ouchy ; in September Manfred was begun. In October Byron went on into Italy, and settled at Venice, where, with little intermission, he spent the succeeding three years in an alternation of poetical production and debauchery, mostly of the lowest type and most miscellaneous reckless- 1 Maternal uncle of the present writer. LORD BYRON. 301 ness. A certain turn for penuriousness began now to show itself in his character, chequering other and very opposite tendencies which were more germane to his true nature : his allusions to the love of money,, in Don Juan especially, are not to be entirely rejected as banter, nor yet accepted too seriously. At Venice he took up also the study of the Arm- enian language. The Lament of Tasso, Beppo, and the com- mencement of the 4th canto of Childe Harold, pertain to 181 7 (the last ensuing after a brief visit with Hobhouse to Rome) ; Mazeppa to 18 18. Beppo is to be marked as the first-fruits of a new poetic fertility in Byron, the most genuine and vital of all its phases, giving birth soon afterwards to the immortal, the unprecedented and unrivalled masterpiece, Don Juan. The first canto of this great work was finished in September 18 18 ; and the poem had been carried on to the completion of its fourth canto before the author removed to Ravenna. It was published in instalments, anonymously (but with well-under- stood authorship), and with an apocalyptic outpouring of all phials of right-minded wrath upon its levities and cynicisms. In April 181 9 Byron was introduced to a beautiful and quite youthful married lady, the Countess Guiccioli, wife of one of the richest noblemen of Romagna, of advanced age : her maiden name had been Teresa Gamba ; her father Count Gamba was living, as well as a brother, Pietro. She was very blonde, with rich yellow hair, and endowed with much senti- ment and sweetness of character. It was not long before she was desperately in love with Byron, and he with her. A liaison was the unfailing consequence ; and continued throughout its entire course, however censurable its concomitants, to be the love-affair in which, of all the many he engaged in, Byron showed the most constancy, feeling, and character. As far as he was affected, the Countess more than merited all the de- votion which the poet could bestow upon her : she was true to him, warmly loving, and disinterested. Her husband's conduct, LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. during the earlier and less public stages of the amour, was such as to inspire no consideration for him, and leave him no tribute of sympathy, even from a severe moralist, when the most trying crisis for him arrived : indeed, his behaviour seems to have been so inexcusable, and so inconsistent with the plainest rules of self-respect, that it was the Countess who obtained from the Pope a judicial separation from her husband, not he (as might have been anticipated) from her. She forewent all the worldly advantages of her wealthy marriage, and retained henceforward an annual income of only about ^200 per annum. This was in July 1820. Byron had removed in December 1819 from Venice to Ravenna, and had pretty soon— more especially through his connexion with Count Gamba and his son — mixed himself up in the revolutionary movements of secret societies : he was enrolled among the Carbonari. The result was that the Gambas — who at first did not favour Byron's love for the Countess Guiccioli, but did eventually countenance it — got exiled from the Papal States. They went to Tuscany, and soon selected Pisa as a residence. There Byron joined them in November 1 82 1 ; the Shelleys were also now fixed in Pisa. Meanwhile Byron had co ntinued his poetic labours. The Prophecy of Dante was written in March 1820: and followed by Marino Faliero, The Blues, Sardanapalus, the Letters on Pope (prose), The Two Foscari, Cain, The Vision of judgment, and Heaven and Earth. All this was before Byron's arrival in Pisa. Don "J^uan was for a while discontinued, in consequence of the protests of La Guiccioli, who resented so unideal a treat- ment of the passion of love : it was resumed in February 1822, under a promise from the poet that he would be bette r - behaved, and again taken up in August of that year, and in February 1823. Byron, on receiving a visit at Ravenna from Shelley in August 182 1, had started the idea of getting up a quarterly - LORD BYRON. 303 magazine, in which he and Shelley could ■ publish their future writings. Shelley availed himself of the notion in the interest of his friend Leigh Hunt, then in London editing the Examiner ; and it was ultimately arranged that Hunt should come over to Italy, and the three (according to Byron's view of the matter) share the profits. In reality, however, Shelley had resolved to have little or no connexion with the magazine as a writer, and absolutely none as a recipient of the proceeds. Hunt and his large family reached Genoa in June 1822, he having by this time relinquished his direct control over the Examiner — a fact very disappointing to Lord Byron when he learned it, as his lordship had been relying upon the close camaraderie of that weekly paper as one mainstay of the quarterly Liberal. Hunt went on to Leghorn, where Byron was staying just then, and to Pisa, where arrangements had been made for his accommo- dation. He could not have arrived at a more unfortunate moment. Street-squabbles, house-squabbles, and political com- plexities, in all of which Byron and his immediate surround- ings had some share, had determined the Tuscan Government to follow the Papal example, and oust the Gambas from the territory : and Byron — not unnaturally, though with too ready a disregard of Hunt's valid claims on his plighted word and honour- able consideration — was minded to follow his mistress and her family forthwith, and leave the Liberal very much to its own devices. This difficulty was barely patched over when a death- blow to the prospects of a smooth working of the Liberal (and to many other more important matters) occurred by the drowning of Shelley in the Mediterranean on the 8th of July : as long as he lived, even had he abstained from active connexion with the magazine, his noble nature and well-proved friendliness would have been a bond of union or a medium of conciliation be- tween the not easily coalescing requirements and characters of Byron and Hunt. With the loss of Shelley, the likelihood of a real success vanished. The Liberal went on for a year, a nucleus for the publication of the inimitable Vision of judg- ment and the Heaven and Earth of Lord Byron, along with other matter, and for the conflicting petulancies of his lordship and of Hunt to twine around, and put forth untidy tendrils and plaguing thorns. It was an ill-concocted scheme ; and, in point of commercial profit, though not a disastrous failure, by no means a handsome success. Hunt was more to be con- doled with than blamed in the matter, and perhaps Byron also. The latter was now living in Genoa, still maintaining his semi- conjugal relation to the Countess Guiccioli. An acknowledged natural daughter of his by another lady, Allegra, had died in the Spring of 1822. Before leaving Pisa, he had written Werner and The Deformed Transformed '; in Genoa, in January and February 1823, the Age of Bronze and The Island — which is his last poem of any length. Byron's life may very fairly be divided into the tragic five acts. The first comprises his boyhood and adolescence, up to his disappointment with Miss Chaworth ; the second, his coming of age, early literary vicissitudes, travels in the East of Europe, commencement of Childe Harold, and frenzies of poetic success ; the third, his marriage and separation ; the fourth, his Italian sojourn, and amour with La Guiccioli. The curtain rises for the fifth act, and we find it in striking contrast with its precursors. Greece was now in the full career of insurrection against the execrable Turkish domination. In April 1823 Byron had already begun turning his thoughts in that direction ; and in May he received overtures from the London Committee of Philhellenes. His early travels in Greece, his European name and considerable means, pointed him out as one whose cooperation would be invaluable. Byron, to his perennial honour, determined to aid the noble cause, not only with money, but in person, and with arms in his hand. It has been said that, besides the more obvious and worthy motive, he was partly influenced by two- considerations — waning ardour in his love-affair with Countess LORD BYRON. 305 Guiccioli, and a strong impression that, as a poet, he had begun to lose the public ear. This latter opinion he did un- doubtedly entertain, and now at last with some degree of war- rant for it : the statement as to the Countess rests on a more dubious surmise. At any rate, he sailed from Genoa on the 14th of July, with Count Pietro Gamba, having bespoken the very apposite companionship of Captain Trelawny, whom he had known for a year and a half, at first in connexion with Shelley. They reached the Island of Cephalonia early in August. Hence Trelawny went on to the Morea, and Byron, after some while, to Missolonghi, in western Greece, where he arrived on the 5th of January 1824. At both places the poet displayed a talent for public business that astonished people : he had some very tough work in introducing a little order into a chaos of interests, intrigues, and projects. Before reaching Missolonghi, he had, on the night of the 3rd of January, swum a long distance in rough weather : two or three days afterwards he complained of pains in all his bones, and was never wholly rid of the sensation again. The weather at Missolonghi was detestable, and the place unhealthy. At the beginning of February he got wet through, and on the evening of the 15th had a dreadful convulsive fit, which bereft him of sense for a time, and was treated by over-bleeding. The medical man who had accompanied him from Italy, Dr. Bruno, was young, and seemingly rather raw at his profession. A band of mutinous Suliotes broke into the room while Byron was in this trying situation : his firmness overawed them, and they retired. On the 30th of January he had received a regular commission from the insurrectionary Greek government, appointing him commander- in-chief for an expedition to besiege Lepanto, then held by the Turks : but he was fated never to undertake this glorious work. His fatigues were already too much for his broken health : but he would not give up, and nobly said " I will stick by the cause as long as a cause exists." The holy cause survived its 21 hero and martyr. On the 9th of April he again got wet through, and returned to Missolonghi in a violent perspiration. Fever and rheumatic pains ensued. Next day he was again able to take a ride ; but on the evening of the nth he became worse, and by the 14th was in manifest danger. For several days, cautious from his recent experience, he refused to be bled : at last he consented, but it was considered too late. Inflammation attacked the brain ; a lethargy set it, lasting twenty-four hours. Byron had made futile efforts to convey some intelligible message for his wife, child, and sister : his last words were " Now I shall go to sleep." He opened his eyes for one moment, and then closed them for ever. The great poet expired at six p.m. on the 19th of April 1824. Bitter was the mourning of his attached comrades and attendants; bitter that of Greece ; bitter the dismay of the civilized world ; bitter the self-reproaches of many Englishmen. The corpse was brought home, and buried in the family vault at Hucknall, near Newstead. The will of Lord Byron left to Mrs. Leigh the bulk of his property, beyond such as was settled on his wife and daughter. While at Venice, he had given to Moore a fragmentary autobiography (referred to in the notice of that poet), consisting principally of a narrative of his mar- ried life, with many highly-spiced details concerning friends and acquaintances. The fortunate recipient having disposed of this prize to the publisher Murray, the latter consulted Mrs. Leigh, and Byron's executor Hobhouse, and, with their ap- proval, committed the MS. to the flames. Moore has intimated that a great deal of it could not possibly have been published not even at a date remote from the writer's death ; and that the portions most material to the life of Byron himself are substan- tially reproduced in his published journals and other memoranda. Wilfulness was probably the leading characteristic of Byron as a man : himself was his centre, and a very uncertain centre too for he was not less wayward than wilful and egotistic. He had no leading principle of action, and, had he had one, would LORD BYRON. 307 have been perpetually violating it. We must take him as he stands — a dazzling and a tantalizing phenomenon. How many hearts has he not thrilled with rapture and suspense ! how many " well-regulated minds " has he not lashed or laughed into rage ! His poetry has two main constituents — passion and wit. Were we compelled rigidly to assess the value of these two constituents, according to the positive merit of their respective products, we should probably have to say that the wit was the finer power of the two. The great superiority of Don Juan (and, as a minor sample, the Vision of Judgment) to all his other work consists ultimately in this— that here the passion and the wit are perpetually interpenetrating and enhancing one another, and are both perfectly limpid and unforced. There is no overloading or attitudinizing in the passion : in the wit, no conventional standard of substance or of form. It is not, however, necessary to settle with any nicety the rival claims of passion and of wit as the informing powers of Byron's work ; nor even does the mind acquiesce in either or both of these excellent qualities as the final characteristics. The great thing in Byron is Genius — that quality so perilous to define, so evanescent in its aroma, so impossible to mistake. If ever a man breathed whom we recognize (athwart much poor and use- less work, when strictly tested) as emphatically the Genius, that man was Byron : and, if ever genius made poetry its mouthpiece, covering with its transcendent utterances a multi- tude of sins whether against art or against the full stature of perfect manhood, Byron's is that poetry. It is therefore as imperishable as genius itself. Its forms have much of the transitory, much even of the spurious : they have already been "found out" to a great extent, and, after suffering a term of more than merited depreciation by reaction, are righting themselves in rather a battered and blowzed condition. But these are the forms : the essence is the genius, and that knows no vicissitude, and acknowledges no fleeting jurisdiction. 21 * POET BORN BETWEEN BYRON AND SHELLEY. Bryan Waller Procter 1789 to 1874. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley — these are, I believe, the four sublimest sons of song that England has to boast of among the mighty dead — say rather among the undying, the never-to-die. Let us remember also two exceptional phenomena, an " inspired ploughman," Burns, and an unparallelled poetess, Mrs. Browning, and be thankful for such a national destiny. There are plenty of others : but those four are, if I mistake not, the four. Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on the 4th of August 1792 at Field Place, Sussex, the seat of his father, Mr. Timothy Shelley. The family is of high antiquity and distinction, and is at the present day represented by a peer (Lord de LTsle and Dudley) and two Baronets. Mr. Timothy Shelley was the son of Mr. (afterwards Sir) Bysshe Shelley, a man of talent, hand- some presence, varied experiences, and eccentric habits : in the latter years of his life he lived in great seclusion at Horsham. He had married two heiresses, and had families by both. The former line was represented by Mr. Timothy Shelley, of whom Percy was the eldest child and heir ; the later line was represented by Sir John Shelley-Sidney, of Penshurst. Mr. Timothy Shelley married Elizabeth, the beautiful daughter of a gentleman settled at Effingham, Surrey, Mr. Charles Pilfold. Four daughters and a son, in addition to Percy, grew up : two of the daughters are still alive. Mr. Timothy Shelley (who succeeded to the baronetcy, and died, long after his illustrious son, in 1844) was M.P. for Shoreham; a commonplace sort of 310 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. country-gentleman, kindly enough but somewhat mulish and violent-tempered — in politics, an adherent of the Whig party, and especially of the local magnates, the ducal family of Norfolk. The mother was a woman of good abilities, but not with any literary turn. Shelley grew out of infancy at home, receiving a little schooling at the neighbouring village of Warnham, and afterwards at Sion House School, Brentford. The master here was a hard Scotchman, and the pupils formed an unrefined and ungentle team. Shelley, shrinkingly sensitive and open to all delicate impressions, endured much misery at their hands, and soon found out that the world into which he was born was not exactly his sort of world. We learn from the Dedication to the Revolt of Islam how acutely he felt his isolation and dis- tresses, and how early he resolved to be " wise, and just, and free, and mild." Hence, in his fourteenth year, he passed to Eton, where things went on much the same. Shelley refused with scorn and exasperation to submit to the fagging system : his spirit was not to be bent or broken, and he had his way. A tutor of the school, Dr. James Lind, was his early friend, and the trainer of his mind towards many high achievements. In especial he inspired the youth with a vivid though transitory love for chem- ical experiment, and with enlarged ideas of toleration and free enquiry in matters of religion. The anecdote of Shelley's setting fire to a tree on the common, by gunpowder which he lit with a burning - glass, is one of the best-known in his biography. At one time, being attacked by a fever which affected the brain, he was (or supposed himself to be) in some danger of being sent by his father to a private madhouse : Dr. Lind hurried to Field Place, cured him, and averted the peril. Shelley's career at Eton under Dr. Keate, and amid school- fellows whom he was perpetually resisting, was a stormy one : at last, in 1809 (it has been said, but with uncertain authenticity), PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. he struck a penknife through the hand of one of his young persecutors, and was in consequence withdrawn from the school. He had been, not a diligent scholar, but in some respects a zealous one ; translating, for instance, half of Pliny's Natural History, and very ready, though far from scrupulously correct, at Latin verses. He had always a splendid memory and an insatiate love of reading. Shelley was already an author, and now figures as a lover as well. He wrote a number of wild romances in his boyhood, of which one, Zastrozzi, was published in 1810, and another, St. Irvync, or the Rosicrucian, at the end of the same year. The merciful hand of Time has suppressed the others, and left only these two outpourings to excite alternate hilarity at their ab- surdities, and astonishment at the condition of mind which could induce a publisher to accept — much more to invest in — either of them. Zastrozzi was actually purchased for some ^40, and obtained a certain degree of 'success ; St. Irvyne did not go down the public throat so easily. In 18 10 Shelley had also made a first appearance in print as a poet. His volume was entitled Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire, and his sister Elizabeth had really a hand in it. Somehow — but nobody now knows with whom the true responsibility rested — some com- positions by M. G. Lewis had been pirated into this volume? and it was immediately suppressed, and remains extinct. 1 Much 1 Mr. Kirby (27 Bloomsbury Street) unearthed in 1875, and kindly com- municated to me, a contemporary criticism on Victor and Cazife, which it appears was "small 8vo, pp. 64." The review is in The Poetical Register, and Repository of Fugitive Poetry, fir 1810-11. As a literary curiosity, I subjoin it here. — " There is no Original Poetry in this volume : there is nothing in it but downright scribble. It is really annoying to see the waste of paper which is made by such persons as the putters-together of these 64 pages. There is, however, one consolation for the critics who are obliged to read all this sort of trash. It is that the crime of publishing is generally followed by condign punishment in the shape of bills from the stationer and printer, and in the chilling tones of the bookseller, when, to the questions of the anxious rhymer how the book sells, he answers that not more than half-a-dozen copies have been sold." 312 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. about the same time that he left Eton, Shelley fell in love with his beautiful young cousin Harriet Grove, the daughter of a clergyman in Wiltshire. She received his homage graciously, and the two families were ready to look upon the affair as a match. Soon, however, the sceptical tone of Shelley's mind and correspondence excited alarm in Miss Grove's parents, and in her own tepid bosom as well ; and, after the catastrop he which befell Percy at Oxford in the Spring of 1811, the court- ship was broken off, and Harriet soon married another suitor — leaving her cousin to ponder suicide, to denounce bigotry, and gradually to cicatrize his wounded affections. In the autumn of 1 810 he went to University College, Oxford, and at once struck up an extreme intimacy with a fellow-student, Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg. The bond between them was a common love of intellectual enquiry and of literature. Probably also Mr. Hogg, like Shelley, had a scep- tical turn in religious matters ; but the enthusiastic and revolutionary elements of the poet's mind found no counterpart in his friend's, whose writings on the contrary exhibit him to us in the quality of a high Tory, an easy man of the world, and one habituated to regard all things from a caustic, and even a somewhat cynical, point of view. With vigorous and little supervised study, an intimate friendship, active habits, the simplest tastes, and (according to the best testimony) the purest habits in morals, Shelley greatly enjoyed the period of his Oxford studentship : but it was not to last long. Soon after his arrival at the University he showed Hogg some poems he was proposing to publish. Hogg saw that they were poor stuff, and told him as much ; and eventually he and Shelley set to work at converting their juvenilities into intentional and caricatured extravagances. In this altered form the book was published as Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, edited by John Fitzvidor ; the suppositi- tious authoress being a crazy washerwoman who had attempted the life of George the Third, and who was now not in reality- dead, but vegetating in a madhouse. This farrago of bur- lesqued revolutionary commonplaces was accepted in good- faith, and even admired, by university men. Shelley also published, there is strong reason for believing, A Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things ; but not a single copy of it is forthcoming. He had contracted at Eton, under the influence of Dr. Lind, a habit of writing pseudonymously to various literary personages on speculative and other subjects. At Oxford he continued this practice, and drew up and advertised a little syllabus which he termed The Necessity of Atheism, and which he circulated, enclosed in letters (of course not avowing his real name) wherein he professed to have come across the pam- phlet, and to be unable to refute its arguments. It is, I think, futile to deny that the author of The Necessity of Atheism was himself, when he wrote it, an atheist : he had indeed been named " Shelley the Atheist" at Eton, though some contro- versy as to the true origin of that term has arisen. A break- down was likely to ensue, and did ensue. Shelley was de- nounced to the authorities of his College as the probable author of the atheistic pamphlet ; was summoned to admit or deny the charge ; and, on refusing to do either, was expelled. Hogg, who had been his confidant and abettor, shared the same fate. Shelley and Hogg left Oxford for London on the 26th of March 181 1, and soon separated, as the latter had to go to York to study conveyancing. Shelley was in the first instance excluded from the paternal home, and lived mainly on the pocket-money which his sisters goodnaturedly hoarded, and sent round to him by a schoolfellow, Harriet Westbrook. After a short while, however, his father relented, and allowed the delinquent ^200 per annum. It must be added that Percy was the reverse of a dutiful son. Difference of ideas and of character, and the frequent conflicts of circumstance, in- 3 H LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. spired him with a strong antipathy to his father, transcending to all appearance the bounds of reason, and certainly those of filial respect and obligation. Harriet Westbrook now becomes the most important figure in Shelley's singular and chequered career. She was a very charming blonde, aged sixteen, the daughter of a retired hotel-keeper in easy circumstances. Shelley visited at her father's house, and soon talked Harriet out of the ordinary routine of religious and moral assumptions. Afterwards, while he was on a visit to a cousin in Wales, Harriet corresponded with him, alleging many horrors of petty persecution on her father's part, and she volunteered to " throw herself on his protection." Shelley returned to London ; found pretty Har- riet in a pining condition, and in all the languor of " senti- ment" for himself; and, about the beginning of September 1811, eloped with her to Edinburgh. Here he forthwith mar- ried her : which was in every respect an honourable act of youthful unworldliness, and all the more so in that his own pet theories were directly adverse to the formal institution of mar- riage. No evidence is forthcoming to show that the poet was ever strictly in love with Harriet ; while on the other hand a very strong presumption arises that she, more especially guided by her elder sister Eliza and the family generally, had " set her cap " at so highly eligible a parti as the grandson and eventual heir of the extremely wealthy Sir Bysshe Shelley, of Castle Goring. No doubt too Shelley's own genius, delicate beauty of aspect, and never-failing personal fascination, were highly impressive to the girlish Harriet ; and her many graces of face, figure, and manner, not indifferent to him. Harriet was by no means uneducated, nor wanting in those superficial likings for literature which go with education. She was a frank, kind, nice girl, and in all ways worthy of any ordinary man's love. Unfortunately, to so exceptional a man as Shelley, her attrac- tions were not made for a permanency ; the heart of a poet is PER CY B YSSHE S BELLE Y. 315 " deep calling to deep" and, if it turns out that there is only- shallow to respond, the result is too well assured — '' No song, but sad dirges, Like the wind in a ruined cell." As Mrs. Siddons said in a tragedy voice to the haberdasher's assistant, "But will it wash?" Charming Harriet's conjugal gifts of mind and character did not " wash." The income of Shelley during his married life with Harriet averaged something like ^400 a year — not too certain perhaps in its inflowing, and continually forestalled by some act of lavish generosity for public or private objects. To have rejected (as he did) ^2000 a year, tendered on the sole condition of his entailing the patrimonial estate on his eldest son, or in default on his younger brother, was, under the circumstances, a noble adhesion to principle — for Shelley abhorred the system of primogeniture. He was very migratory in his movements; and much and increasingly oppressed by the presence of Miss Westbrook in his house, wherein, almost immediately after his marriage, she established herself as general dictatress and woman of business. From Edinburgh he went to York, staying with Hogg j to Keswick in Cumberland, where he made the acquaint- ance of Southey ; to Dublin, where he agitated for Catholic emancipation and repeal of the union ; to Nantgwillt in Rad- norshire ; Lynmouth in Devonshire ; Tanyrallt in Carnarvon- shire. Lynmouth he quitted in August 181 2, because his servant had been sentenced to six months' imprisonment for distributing and posting-up a political Declaration of Rights drawn out by Shelley, and this and other circumstances made him an object of suspicion to the oppressive and timorous Tory government of the day ; and Tanyrallt he abandoned in March 1813, alleging that a twice-repeated nocturnal attempt at assassination had been made upon him. This is only one out of many wondrous stories told by Shelley as pertaining to various stages of his career. Some of them are proved untruths 3i6 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. others more than questionable ; others again may be believed without gross credulity. This tale of the assassination is of the more than questionable class : nobody could trace the assassin, or guess why assassination should have been attempted at all. Yet there are some considerations which save the allega- tion from absolute, unhesitating rejection. Why Shelley told these portentous stories is a strange problem. He had a great respect for truth, and endured much tribulation in the cause of speculative verity, as estimated by himself. In default of a better reason, one is fain to say that he had a most excitable imagination, fancied many things, and attitudinized or exag- gerated in others ; a habit which was greatly fostered by his practice (which began late in 1811) of taking laudanum, often in large doses, to mitigate the pangs of a spasmodic disease which afflicted him from an early age, and on to the conclusion of his noble and too brief life. Snapped out of Carnarvonshire by the pistol of a probably non-existent bravo, Shelley, with Harriet and Eliza, returned to Dublin, visited Killarney, and next settled awhile in London, still shifting frequently from house to house. His first child, Ianthe Eliza, was born in London in 18 13. About the same time he printed his earliest considerable poem, Queen Mab. He did not publish it : but that function was performed for him by a pirating bookseller, in 1821. Queen Mab is a work of some poetic suggestiveness, much youthfulness, and great audacity of opinion and expression : it produced a certain sensation, chiefly by dint of the last-named characteristic. Shelley was preemi- nently an enthusiast, and even (so far as a perfectly tolerant man can be one) a fanatic : he actually fancied that a performance like Queen Mab was capable of producing a change in the opinions and practices of society. Such an overweening notion may be pardoned to a youth of twenty-one ; a few years later he perceived the world of life and of custom to be made of rather tougher material. His next residence was at Bracknell PER CY B YSSHE SHELLE Y. 317 in Berkshire ; then for a short while in Edinburgh ; and back to London, broken by visits to Bracknell. We have now reached the end of 18 13, and approach the finale of Shelley's married life with Harriet. She did not respond to his demands on heart and head ; teased him some- times to act in modes inconsistent with his ideas ; and con- tinued, by active or passive concurrence, to fasten on him " the daughter of the horseleech," Eliza Westbrook. Things were in a critical state by the close of 1813, yet still so far remediable as that Shelley remarried Harriet in London on the 24th of March 18 14, in order to remove any conceivable uncertainties attaching to the Scotch marriage. The presumable early advent of a son and heir was no doubt a cogent motive. By May 1 8 14 things passed from the critical to the catastrophic stage. Shelley now became acquainted with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, then sixteen years of age, the daughter of the celebrated author of Political justice, Caleb Williams, and other works for which the young poet and speculator entertained a huge admiration. If a reunion of heart with Harriet was possible before, it now became impossible. Shelley fell helplessly in love with Mary ; quitted Harriet ; offered his heart-homage to Mary, either soon before or soon after the separation, and received an immediate and cordial response; made such arrangements for the well-being of Harriet as his circumstances allowed ; and started for a continental trip, with Mary and Miss Clairmont (a daughter of the second Mrs. Godwin by her previous marriage) on the 28th of July. Poor Harriet, who had behaved well to Shelley according to her lights and oppor- tunities, was much to be pitied, and as yet, so far as any pub- lished facts attest, in no way pointedly to be blamed. She returned to her father, now at Bath, and soon gave birth to a son, Charles Bysshe, who died in 1826. Not to revert to a sorrow- ful subject, I will here at once add the little that remains to be said concerning Harriet, which is indeed both scanty and not very 318 LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. distinctly denned. Not long after parting from Shelley she found some other protector or protectors : and, in consequence of some untoward events arising from a connexion of this sort, she drowned herself in the Serpentine on the ioth of November 1816. Returning from Switzerland in September 18 14, Shelley and Mary found themselves isolated and poor. In this latter respect, the death of Sir Bysshe on the 6th of January 181 5 brought present and substantial relief : an arrangement being made with Sir Timothy whereby Percy came into immediate possession of an allowance of ^"iooo a year, which, subject to an annual deduction of ^200 or less consequent upon the Chancery pro- ceedings soon to be mentioned, continued to be his income for the residue of his life. He now settled at Bishopgate near Windsor Forest, and wrote his first decidedly fine poem, Alastor. In January 1816 Mary bore him a son, his favourite William, who died in Rome in June 181 9. A second child, Clara, died in Venice in 1818; the last, born in Florence in November 18 19, is the present Baronet, Sir Percy Florence Shelley. In May 18 16 Shelley, with Mary and Miss Clairmont, again went abroad for a somewhat longer excursion, and stayed at or near Secheron on the Lake of Geneva, where they made acquaintance with Byron. He and Shelley prized each other's poetic genius, and Byron had besides a deep personal regard for Shelley, whom he appreciated as* the most high-minded, disinterested, and consistent man within his cognizance. Shelley did not, and could not, say anything so heartily laudatory of Byron ; but he could sympathize with him in several things, admire him deeply and self-obliviously in more, and serve him with true friendliness under all conditions. In Switzerland Mrs. Shelley began her renowned novel Frankenstein. It was during this tour that Shelley, in a not over- wise spirit of defiance, signed his name in the Album for visitors at the Chartreuse of Montanvert, with the tag E7/u J 39- Corruption, by Moore, 279. Corsair, The, 296. Cotter's Saturday Night, The, 193. Cotton, Dr., 181, 182. Courier, The, 244. Court of Love, The, 13. Cowley, 90. 396 INDEX. Cowper, Anne, 177. Deathbed, The, by Hood, Dryden, Erasmus, 92. ,, Rev. John, 177. 3 6 5- ,, Erasmus Henry, „ Judith, 121. Decameron, The, 16. 103. ,, Lord, 178, 180. Declaration of Rights, by DRYDEN, JOHN, viii, ,, Theodora, 178. Shelley, 315. JS^S. 9 1 to 107,114, 132. Cowper, William, no, Defensio pro Populo Angli- , , Epilogue 177 to 187. cano, 71, 73. quoted, 103. Crabbe, George, 188. ,, Secunda,j2, Dryden, John (Junior), 101, Craggs, 129. 73- 102. [228. Crashaw, Richard, 64. Defensio Regia, 71. Dryden, Scott's Life of, Cromwell, Henry, 115, 123. Deformed Transformed, Duddon, River, Words- Oliver, 71, 75, 82. The, 304. worth's Sonnets on, 213. ,, ,, Dryden's Dekker, Thomas, 64. Duff, Mary, 209. Stanzas on the Demonology and Witch- Dunbar, William, 20. Death of, 93. craft, by Scott, 230. Dunciad, The, 115, 126, ,, Richard, 71. Denham, Sir John, 90. 127, 132, 383. Crousaz, 128. Dennis, John, 117, 118,131. Dundee Advertiser, The, Cruikshank, 371. Deserted Village, The, 169, 366. Cuckoo ( The) and the Night- 174- Duval, Ode to, by Butler, ingale, 13. Despondency and Aspira- 87. Cuddy, Young (Spenser), tion, 343. Dyer, John, 134. 28. Devonshire, Duke of, 151. Cunningham, Allan, 286, Dialogue on Dramatic Poe- E. 368. try, by Dryden, 95, 96. Eastlake, Sir C. L., 281. Cunningham, Peter, 263. Dibdin, Charles, 188. Ecclesiastical Sonnets, by Curll, 123, 124. Dick, Professor, 221. Wordsworth, 213. Currie, Dr., 198. Dickens, 219, 371. Edgeworth, Miss, Pictures Cymbelitte, 43. Dilke, 351, 375. of Irish Life, 227. Cynthia, by Ralph, 383. Disciplina Clericalis, 16. Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, Cyrus and Cassandra, 220. Divina Commedia, 32, 79. The, 263. D. , , Translated Edinburgh Monthly Ma- by Longfellow, 386. gazine, The, 337. Dallas, 294, 295. Divine Tragedy, The, by Edinburgh Review, The, Dalziel, Dr., 222. Longfellow, 386, 387. 228, 277, 292, 358. Daniel, Samuel, 34, 44. Doctrine and Discipline cf Edward III., 5, 7. Dante, 48, in, 264. Divorce, The, 69. Edward and Eleonora, Dante, The Prophecy of, Doddington, Bubb, 142. 138. 302. Dodsley, 150. Egeria (Mrs. Hemans), 346, , Dapimaida, 28, 29. Doeg (Settle), 98. 347- Dark Ladie, The, 208. Domestic Affections, The, Eichhorn, 244. Darwin, Erasmus, 176. by Mrs. Hemans, 334. Eikonoclastes, 71, 73. Davenant, Sir William, 58, Donegal, Lady, 274. Eldon, Lord, 319. 64, 73, 87, 94, 97, 98. Donne, John, 64. Elegy in a Country Church- . David (Charles II.), 98. Dorset, Countess of, 30. yard, 147, 149, 150, 156. Davies, Miss, 69. ,, Earl of, 84, 85, 101, Elephant in the Moon, Davies, Sir John, 64. 108. The, 88. De Doctrind Christiana fey Douglas, Gawin, 20. Elizabeth, Princess (Sister Milton, 75, Dowden, Professor, 54. of Edward IV.), De Principals Cogitandi, Doyle, Colonel, 280. 18. by Gray, 149. Drayton, 34, 57. ,, Queen, 27, 28, Dead Robbery, The, by Droeshout, 58. 2 9. 45. 53- Hood, 380. Drummond,SirWilliam,64. Elliot, Dr., 375. Death of a Fair Infant, Dryden, Charles, 101, 102, Elliott, Ebenezer, 286. Milton's Lines on, 66. 104. Elliston, 357. Death, Thomson's Poem Dryden, Lady Elizabeth, Elmina, 339. on, 138. 102, 104. Elphin, Bishop of, 164. INDEX. 397 Elwood, Michael, 74. Emerson, R. W., 384. Emmet, Robert, 274. Encyclopedia Britannica, Scott's articles in, 228. Endymion, by Keats, 323, 35 2 - 353. 356, 357. 35 8 - England, History of., by Goldsmith, 167, 169. England, History of, by Milton, 75. England, The Lakes of, by Wordsworth, 213. England and Spain, by Mrs. Hemans, 333. English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 277, 293, 295. English Poet The, (by Spenser), 30. Enquiry into State of Po- lite Learning, by Gold- smith, 167. Epicurean, The, 281. Epipsychidion, 322. £pithalamium(Spenser's), 28. Epping Hunt, The, 373. Ercildoune, Thomas of, 2. Erin, The Exile of, 261. Espinasse (L'), Madame, 345- Essay on Criticism, by Pope, 115, 117. Essay on Man, 126, 127, 128. ,, Satire, by Duke of Buckingham- shire, 97. 7>«^,byBeattie, 153. i5 6 - Essex, Earl of, 30. Estray, The, 387. Eton College, Ode on a Distant Prospect of, 147, 149. Eudoxus, 24. Europe, The Poets of, by Longfellow, 387. Evangeline, 385, 386, 390, 391- Evans, Mr., 171. ,, Sir Hugh, 39. Evans's Collection of Bal- lads, 221. Evening Walk, &°c, by Wordsworth, 205. Evening's Love, An,g^. Examiner, The, 303, 351. Excelsior, 390. Excursion, The, by Words- worth, 209, 210. Expostulation, by Cow- per, 183. Fables, by Dryden, 101, 102, 103. Fables for the Holy Alli- ance, 281. [33. Faery Queen, The, 21, 26 to Fairfax, Edward, 34. Falconer, William, 176. Fare Thee Well, by Byron, 300. Faust (Gothe's), 79. Favourite Cat, Lines on the Death of, by Gray, 157- Felton, C. C., 387. Fenton, Elijah, 120. Ferguson, Professor, 222. Fergusson, Robert, 188, 193- Fermor, Arabella, 118. Filostrato, 16. Fitzgerald, Lord Edward, Moore's Life of 282. Fitz victor, John (Shelley), 312. Flecknoe, 101. Flee fro the Press, 12. Fletcher, Angus, 342. ,, Giles, 64. ,, John, 64. „ Mrs., 345, 346. ,, Phineas, 64. Flinn, Mr., 164. Florence, The Garden of, 212, 368. Flower ( The ) and the Leaf 13. Ford, John, 64. Forest Sanctuary, The, 339- Forge, The, by Hood, 380. Foscari, The Two, 302. Franck, Philip de, 371, 374. 375- Frankenstein, 318. Franklin, Benjamin, 383. Frederick the Great, Life, by Campbell, 265. Freeholder, The, 120. Frere, J. Hookham, 202. Friend, The, by Coleridge, 245, 246. Fudge Family {The) in Paris, 280. Fugitive Pieces, by Byron, 292. Fuller, 50. Fun, 370. Furnivall, F. J., 12. G. Galileo, 67. Gamba, Count, 301, 302, 3^3, 3 2 3- ,, ,, Pietro, 301, 302, 303, 305. Garrick, 139, 151, 170, 172. Garth, Dr., 129. Gaubius, 164. Gaunt, John of, 5, 6, 9. Gay, 108, 117, 131. Gem, The, 370. George III., 313. George IV., 229, 250, 274, 278, 282. Gertrude of Wyoming, 262. Giaour, The, 296. Gifford, 293, 353, 354. Gil Bias, Drama from, by Hood, 373. Gildon, 119. Gill, Dr., 66. Gillman, 247 to 250. Gilpin, fohn, 184. Glencoe, The Pilgrim of, 264. Glenfinlas, by Scott, 224. Glennie, Dr., 290. Gloucester, Duke of, 9. Godfrey, Thomas, 383. Godwin, Mrs., 317. „ William, 317, 351. Gothe's Goetz von Berlich- ingen, Scott's Transla- tion, 224. , Golden Legend, The, by Longfellow, 386. Goldsmith, Rev. Charles, 162, 163, 164. , , Dean, 164. ,, Henry, 162, 164, 169, 174. ,, John, 163. , , Lieutenant, 162. 398 INDEX. Goldsmith, Oliver, viii, Hamilton (Author of Cyril Herbert, Edward (Rey- no, 161 to 175, 270. Thornton), 341. nolds), 368. ,, Essaysby, 168. Hamilton, Dr., 136. George, 64, 178. Gonzalez, 338. ,, Gavin, 193. Herd's Collection of Scot- Good-natured Man, The, ,, Sir William Ro- tish Ballads, 221. by Goldsmith, 170. wan, 343. Herder's Stimmen der Goody Two-Shoes, 168. Hamlet, 40, 43. V'dlker in Lieder, 339. Gower, John, 2, 7. Hampden, John, 36. Hermit, The, by Gold- Graham of Fintray, 195. Hanging [The) of the smith, 168. Grahame, James, 259. Crane, 386. Hero and Leander, by Granada Conquest of, by Harold, Childe, 227, 294, Hood, 369. Scott, 222. 295- 300. 3 0I > 3°4- Hero and Leander, by Granson, 13. Harold the Dauntless, 227. Marlow and Chapman, Gray, John, 138. Harrington, Sir John, 34. 369. ,, Mrs., 147, 151, 154. Hart, Joan, 36. Herrick, 64. ,, Philip, 147, 149. ,, Mr., 36. Herrman, Zeugheer, 341. Gray, Thomas, viii, no, Hartley, 248. Hesiod, 68. 141, 147 to 158, 168. Harvey, Gabriel (Hobbi- Hesketh, Lady, 178, 184, „ Letters, 153, nol), 23. 185. 155. 158. Hastings, Lord, Dry den's Hessey, 366. Great Britain, Annals of , Lines on the Death of Heyne, Professor, 258. by Campbell, 263. 93- Heywood, Thomas, 64. Greece, Modern, by Mrs. Hathaway, Richard, 37. Hiawatha, 384, 386, 387, Hemans, 337. Hau7ited House, The, 377. 39°, 39i- Greene's (Robert), Groats- Hawkins, 172. Highland Mary, 192. worth of Wit, 40, 44. Hawkwood, Sir John, 7. Hill, Aaron, 137, 139. Grey of Wilton, Arthur Haydon, B. R., 351, 354. Hind ( The) and the Pan- Lord, 24, 26. , , Life of 349. ther, 100. Griffin, Rev., 163. Hazlitt, 263, 351. History of Animated Na- Griffiths, 166. Heaven and Earth, 302, ture, by Goldsmith, 169. Grosart, Rev. A. B., 22. 304- Hobbes, 87. Grosvenor, Sir Robert, 4. Heber, Bishop, 337. Hogan, Captain, 169. Grotius, 67. Hebrew Melodies, 300. Hogarth, 171. Grove, Miss Harriet, 312. Hellas, by Shelley, 322, Hogg, James, 236. Grub Street Journal, 3 2 3- ,, Thomas Jefferson, The, 126. Hemans, Arthur, 334. 312, 313, 315. Guardian, The, 116, 117. „ Captain.334.335. Hohenhnden, The Battle Guiccioli, Count, 301, 302. ,, Charles, 342, 344. of 261. ,, Countess, 291, ,, Claude, 344. Hood, Anne, 365. 301, 304, 305, 323. Hemans, Felicia Doro- Fanny, 365, 373. Guilleville, Guillaume de, thea, 331 to 348. ,, James, 364. 12. Hemans, Henry, 344. ,, Jane, 365, 368, 377, Guise, The Duke of, by „ Willoughby, 344. 378. Dryden, 95. Henry IV., 9, 10, n, 13. Hood,Thomas,353 to 381. Guy Mannering, 225, 228. Henry I V. , byShak espeare, ,, ,, Memorials of , Guyon, Sir, 33. 43- 45- 366, 379- ., V. „ 43 . ,, Thomas, Junior, H. „ VI. „ 43. 365. 37L 373- Habington, William, 64. Henry VII., 18, 36. Hood's Magazine, 377. Halifax, Lord, 128. Henry VIII., by Shake- Hood's Own, 375. Hall, Bishop, 64. peare, 43. Hook, Theodore, 376. „ Dr., 56. Henry the Minstrel (Blind Hope , &c. , by Cowper, 183. ,, Susanna, 37, 56, 57, Harry), 20. Hope, To, by Hood, 367. 58. Henryson, Robert, 20. Horace, 264. Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 384. Henslowe's Diary, Quota- Horace, Hints from, by .Hallowe'en, by Burns, 193. tion from, 27. Byron, 294. INDEX. 399 Home's New Spirit of the Age, 380. Horneck, Mary, 172. Horton, Sir Wilmot, 280. Houghton (Lord), Life of Keats, by, 349, 354, 358. Hours of Idleness, by Byron, 292, 293. House of Fame, The, 12, 18. Howard, Sir Robert, 94, 96, 97. Howitt, Mrs., 345. Hudibras, 81 to 85, 88, 89. Hughes, Mrs., 335, 343, 346. Hugo, Victor, 35, 96. , , Essay on Shakespeare, translated quotation, 59 to 63. Hume, David, 156, 167, 169. Humphrey Clinker, 371. Hunsdon, Elizabeth, Lady, 22. Hunt, Leigh, 109, 211, 286, 303, 304, 320, 323, 3 2 4. 32S. 3SL 3S 2 . 354. 356, 358. ,, Thornton, 325. Husband (The) his own Cuckold, 103. Hutchenson, 129. Hymn to Ignorance, by Gray, 150. Hymns for Childhood, by Mrs. Hemans, 343. Hymns of Love, &c, by Spenser, 29. Hyperion, by Keats, 356, 358- ,, by Longfellow, 384. 386. I. Iliad, The, 79. , , Chapman's Trans- lation, 350. , , Cowper's Transla- tion, 184. ,, Dryden's Transla- tions, 101. ,, Pope's Transla- tion, 118, 119, 120, 132. Tickell's Transla- tion, 119. Indian Emperor, The, 94, 95- Indian Queen, The, 94. Infant, Lines on an, by Lamb, 373. Intolerance, by Moore, 279. Ireland, Moore's History of 282. Ireland, View of the State of, 24, 29. Irenaeus, 24. Irish Melodies, 278, 283. Irishman in search of a Religion, 282. [358. Isabella, by Keats, 356, Islam, The Revolt of, 310, 320, 352. Island, The, by Byron, 304. Isle of Ladies, The, 12. Italy, The Restoration of the Works of Art to, 337. Ivanhoe, 228. J- Jackson, 281. James I. (of England), 41, 45- 53- James I. (of Scotland), 20. James II., 95, 98, 99, 100. Jansen, 58. Jefferies, Lord, 102. ,, Thomas, 81. Jefferson, 276. Jeffrey, Lord, 259, 277. Jeffrey, Signor, 25. Jennings, 349. jervas, 118. John, King, 43. John, The Eve of St., by Scott, 224. Johnson, Dr., 106, 132, 143, 146, 154, 157, 168, 170, 172, 173, 174. , , Lives of the Poets, viii. ,, Gerard, 58. ,, Rev. John, 185. Johnson's Scots Musical Museum, 196. Jones, Rev. R., 204. Jonson, Ben, 29, 50, 55, 57. 59. 64. Juan, Don, by Byron, 16, 301, 302, 307. „ (Shelley's boat), 324, 325, 326. Julian and M add alo, 321, 328. Julius CcBsar, 43. Juvenal, 186. ,, Translation by Dryden, ioi, 105. K. Kant, 133. Kavanagh, 386. Keate, Dr., 310. Keats, George, 356. Keats, John, 109, 211, 268, 320, 322, 324, 349 to 361, 367, 368, 370. Keats, Mrs. , 356. ,, Thomas, 356. Kelly, Miss, 337, 338. Kemble, Charles, 337. Kent, Countess of, 82. Keux, Le, 366. Kilmansegg, Miss, 376. King, Dr., 130. Kinnedder, Lord, 227. Kirby, 311. Kitchener, Ode to Dr., 367. Knowles, J . Sheridan, 286. Kubla Khan, 254. L. Lady ( The) of the Lake, 226. Laidlaw, 231. Lake Poets, 210, 211. Lalla Rookh, 279, 283. Lamartine, 348. Lamb, Charles, 109, 237, 243, 256, 368, 370, 371, 373- Lamia, by Hood, 367. ,, by Keats, 356, 358. Lancaster, Catharine, Duchess of, 6. Lancaster, Constance, Duchess of, 6. Landon, Letitia E, 382. Landor, 256, 370. Langland, William or Robert, 2, 3. Langton, Bennet, 172. Lansdowne, Marquis of, 281, 282. Laon and Cythna, 320. Lara, 296. Lardner's Cyclopcedia, 230, 282. 400 INDEX. . Latin Epistles, by Milton, Longfellow, Henry Macpherson, James, 188. 75- Wadsworth, 383 to Magazine ( The) of Maga- ,, Grammar ,, ,, 75. 39i- zines, 150. Lavender, 290. Longfellow, Mrs., 385. Maimbourg's History of Lawrence, Sir Thomas, ,, Stephen, 384. the League, 100. 281. Longman, 279, 280. Malagrowther, Malachi ,, Life, by Camp- Longueville, William, 86. (Scott), 228. bell, 265. ,, Junior, 87. Mallet (or Malloch), David, Lay ( The) of the Last Lonsdale, Lord, 203, 210. J 34. 137. 139- Minstrel, 224, 225, Lord of the Isles, The, 227, Manfred, 295, 300. 232. 232. Mann, Sir Horace, 148. Lay Sermons by Coleridge, Loris, Guillaume de, 13. Manrique s Coplas, trans- 250. Love, by Coleridge, 254. lated by Longfellow, 385. Layamon, 2. Love and Madness, 258. Mar-all, Sir Martin, 94. Lays of Many Lands, by Love Triumphant, 94. Marchmont, Earl of, 131. Mrs. Hemans, 335, 339. Lovel, 240. Mardyn, Mrs., 299. Lear, King, 43, 372. Lovelace, Countess of, 298. Marino Faliero, 302. Lee, Nathaniel, 95, 108. ,, Richard, 90. Marlborough, Duchess of, Legend of Good Wo?nefi, Loves Labour s Lost, 43. 122. The, 12. ,, ,, Won, 43. Marlow, Christopher, 34, Leicester, Earl of, 26. Loves ( The) of the Angels, 3 6 9- . Leigh, Colonel, 297. 281, 283. Marlow, The Hermit of ,, Elizabeth Medora, Lucian, Dryden's Life of, (Shelley), Pamphlet by, 297. 100. 320. „ Hon. Mrs., 280, Lucrece, The Rape of, 42. Marmion, 226. 287, 297, 298, 306. Lucretius, 68. Marriage a la Mode, by Letters from the South, by Lucy, Sir Thomas, 38, 39, Dryden, 94. Campbell, 265. 212. Marriage of Miles Stan- Lewis, Matthew G., 222, Ludlow, Earl of, 67. dish, The, &c. , 386. 256, 311. Luke, Sir Samuel, 82, 83. Mars, Complaint of, 12. Liberal, The, 303, 304. Lushington, 299. Marvell, Andrew, 71, 90. Liberty, by Thomson, 139, Luttrell, 280. Mary Magdalene, The 140. Lycidas, 66, 6j. Lamentation of, 13. Limberham, 94. Lycus the Centaur, 367. Mary, Queen of Richard Lincoln, Earl of, 18. Lydgate, John, 20. II., 7- Lind, Dr. James, 310, 313. Lyly, John, 34. Mason, Rev. William, 150, Lintot, 123. Lyndsay, Sir David, 20. 160. Lisle (De) and Dudley Lyrical Ballads, by Massinger, 64. Lord, 309. Wordsworth and Cole- Mathews, 373. Literary Society, The, 250, ridge, 206, 207, 208, 215, Mathias, 153. 377- 243, 244. Matthews, Charles Skin- Little, Thomas (Moore), Lyttelton, Lord, 140, 142. ner, 291. Poems by, 276. Lytton, Lord (E. B.), 382. Maturin, Rev. C. R., 286. Llanos, Mrs., 356. M. Mavrocordato, Prince Lloyd, Charles, 243. Alexander, 323. Lochiel's Warning, 261. M. P., or the Blue-Stock- May, Ode to, by West, Locke, 248. ing, 279. 149. Lockhart, Mrs., 231. Mab, Queen, 316. Mazeppa, 301. Lodge, Mr., 341. Macaulay, Lord, 382. Meadows, Philip, 71. ,, Thomas, 40. Macbeth, 43. Measure for Measure, 43. Logan, John, 188. Mac Flecknoe, 101, 132. Medal, The, 99. London Magazine, The, Mackay, Charles, Medora Medwin, 323. 367, 368. Leigh, by, 297. Melbourne, Lord, 277. London Packet, The, 171. Mackenzie, Henry, 223. Memorials of a Tour on Long Story, A.,hy Gray, McLehose, Mrs., 194. the Continent, by Words- 157- Maclise, 252. worth, 213. INDEX. 401 Mennis, Sir John, 88. Metropolitan Magazine, The, 264, 265. Meun, Jean de, 13. Midlothian, The Heart of , 228. Midsummer Night's Dream, The, 43. Milbanke, Sir Ralph, 296. Millar, 137. Milner, Dr., 166. Milton, Anne, 70, 72, 73,74. ,, Deborah, 72. ,, Elizabeth, 72, 73. Milton, John, viii, 45, 65 to 79, 105, in, 185, 3°9- Milton, John (Father and Grandfather of the Poet), 65, 66, 70. Milton, Katharine, 72. ,, Mary (Mother), 69, 72. ,, Mary (Daughter), 70, 72, 73, 74. ,, Sarah, 65, 67. Minerva, The Curse of, 294. Mitford, Miss, 345, 355. Moira, Lord, 274, 276, 277. Monmouth, Duke of, 98. Montagu, Basil, 246, 351. Montague, Lady Mary Wortley, 125. Montgomery, James, 236. Monthly Review, The, 166. Moon, To the, by Hood, 3 6 7- Moore, Bessy, 278. Moore, Thomas, 273 to 284, 291, 295, 299, 306. Moral Essays, by Pope, 125- Moreau, 261. Morgan, 246. Morning Post, The, 244, 245- Morocco, The Empress of, 96. Motherwell, William, 362. Moulin, Pierre du, 72. Mounteagle, Anne Lady, 22. Moxon's Popular Poets, vii. Much Ado about Nothing, 43- Muiopotmos, 28. Mulgrave, Lord, 97. Murray, John, 280, 281, 295, 306. Musters, 290. Mytens, D., 56. N. Nairne, Lady, 202. Napier, General, 169. Napoleon I., 219, 245. ,, Ode, by Byron, 296. , , Scott's History of, 230, 231. Nash, Thomas, 58. National Airs, by Moore, 279. National Lyrics, by Mrs. Hemans, 343. National Tales, by Hood, 369- Necessity of A theism , The, 3i3- New England Tragedies, 3 86 - New England's Crisis, 383. New Monthly Magazine, The, 263, 264, 376, 377. Newbery, Francis, 168. Newman, Professor, 387. Newton, Rev. John, 160, 182, 183. Newton, To the Memory of, by Thomson, 137,138. Nicholls, Rev., 151. Nicholson, Margaret (Shel- ley), Posthumous Frag- ments of, 312. Night, by Ralph, 383. Noel, Lady, 298. Nollekens, 174. Norfolk, Duke of, 310. Norris, John, 108. Norris o?i Frenzy of Den- nis, by Pope, 118. Nugent, Dr., 172. O. O'Connor, 274. O'Connor's Child, 262. O'Neill, Miss. 322. Occleve (or Hoccleve), 17, 20. Ode on Nothing, 274. Odes and Addresses to Great People, 369. Odes and Epistles, by Moore, 276. Odyssey, Cowper's Trans- lation of the, 184. Odyssey, Pope's Transla- tion of the, 120. CEdipus, by Drvden, 95. Og (Shad well), '98. Ogi lev's Homer, 114. Old Mortality, 228. Oldfield, Mrs., 138. Oilier, 320. Olney Hymns, The, 183. Orm (or Ormin), 2. Orrery, Lord, 95, 130. Ossian, 222. Othello, 43. Otho the Great, 357. Otway, Thomas, 108. Outremer, 384, 386. Ovid, 60. Owen, Professor, 58. P. Packe, 86, 87. Paget, Dr., 72. Palermo, The Vespers of, 337. 338, 339- Paley, 248. Palladis Tamia, by Meres, 44. Pandarus, 16. Paradise Lost, 74, 78, 79- ,, Regained, 74. Parisina, 300. Parker, Margaret, 290, 292. Parliament of Fowls, The, 12. Parnell, Thomas, 108. Life of, by Gold- smith, 169. Passionate Pilgrim, The, 43- Pastorals, by A. Philips, 116, 117. ,, by Pope, 115, 116, 117. Patriot King, The, 131. Paul, St., Epistle to the Romans, 181. Paul, St., Lyttelton on Conversion of, 143. 402 INDEX. Paul's Letters to his Kins- Political Essay (A) on Quotations : folk, 228. the Existing State of From Sir Jonah Bar^ Peacock, Thomas Love, Things, 313. rington's Memoirs, 286, 321. Political Justice, 317. 37i- Peel, Sir Robert, 344, 377, Polybius, Dryden' s Life of \ From Blake on Chaucer, 379- 100. J 4. i5- [83. Peele, George, 34. Poole, 241. FromButler's Hudibras, Pembroke, Countess of, Pope, Alexander, viii, From Chaucer's Canter- 55. 56- 101, 109 to 133, 137, bury Tales, 18. ,, Larl of, 53 to 184, 186, 190. From Coleridge's Bio- 56. Pope, Alexander, Senior, graphia Literaria, Pendle, 88. 112, 113, 114, 121. 207. Penseroso, II., 66, 67. Pope, Byron's Letters on, From Congreve on Dry- Pepys, Samuel, 85. [222. 109, 302. den, 104. Percy Ballads, The, 221, ,, Edith, H2, 121. From Dryden's Epilogue Percy, Bishop, 171, 176. Pope's Letters, 122, 123, on Play by his Son, 103. Pericles, Prince of Tyre, 124. From Mrs. Fletcher's 43- Portsmouth, Duchess of, Three Histories, 346. Persius, Translation by 97- Gray on Himself 154. Dryden, 10 1. Powell, Richard, 69, 70. From Gray's Letters, Peter Bell, 212. Power, 278. J 53. J 55- ,, the Third, 212, Prelude, The, by Words- From Henslowe's Diary, 213, 321, 322, 328. worth, 206, 209. 27. Petrarch, 7. [265. Press, The (Irish News- From Victor Hugos , , Life, by Campbell, paper), 274. William Shakespeare, Petre, Lord, 118. Prince of Parthia, The, 59 to 63. Philhellenes, Committee 383- From Longfellow ' s Di- of, 304. Prince of Wales, Gray's vine Tragedy, 387. Philips, Ambrose, 108, Lines on the Marriage From Shakespeare's Son- 116, 117. of, 148. nets, 41, 42, 46, 54, 55. ,, John, 108. Prior, Matthew, 108. From Spenser's Preface ,, Katharine, 108. Procter, B. W., 308. [183. to Faery Queen, 32, 33. Mrs., 68. Progress of Error, The, From Spenser ' s View of Pickering, Sir Gilbert, 93. Progress of Poetry , Ode on, the State of Ireland, Pickwick Papers, The, by Gray, 151, 157. 1 321. 24, 25, 26. 371- Prometheus Unbound, 79, From Swinburne on Pierpont, John, 383. Prosopopoeia, or Mother Coleridge, 252. Piers Ploughman, The Hubbard's Tale, 27. Vision of, 3, 13. Prothalamion, 29. R. Pilfold, Charles, 309. Prynne, 87. Rabelais, 60. Piozzi, Mrs., 112. Psalms Translated by Mil- Racine, 96. Plato, Gray's Notes on, ton, 66. Rackett, Mrs., 131. *53- Public Ledger, The, 167. Raleigh, Sir Walter, 28, Plea of the Midsummer Punch, 377. 32, 34, 50. Fairies, The, 369. Purcell, 95. Ralph, James, 383. Pleasures of Hope, The, Q. Ramsay, Allan, 108, no, 220, 259 to 262, 264, 190, 193, 199. Ramus, Logic after Me- thod of, by Milton, 75. 268. Quarles, 64. Pleasures of Memory, 259. Quarterly Review, The, Pliny's Natural History, 228, 323, 353, 358. Rape of the Lock, The, 310. Quin, 138. 117, 118. Plutarch, Dryden's Life Quincey, De, 214, 368. Ready(A) Way to Establish of, 100. Quiney, Judith, 39, 56, 57, a Free Commonwealth, Poetical Register, The, 58. by Milton, 73. 3 11 - ,, Thomas, 57. Real and Imaginary Polidori, Dr., 300. Quixote, Don, 88. Time, by Coleridge, 238. INDEX. 403 Reason of Church Govern- ment, by Milton, 68. Records of Woman, 339. Red Cross Knight, The, 33. Redding, Cyrus, 263. Reformation in England, Milton's Treatise on, 68. Rehearsal, The, 97, 126. Religio Laid, 99. Remorse, by Coleridge, 243, 247. Repository, The, 184. Republic of Letters, The, 128. Retaliation, by Goldsmith, 170. Reynolds, J. Hamilton, 212, 351, 368, 369, 373. Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 171, 172. Reynolds, Miss, 172. Rhine, Up the, by Hood, 375- 376. Rhymes for theTimes, 376. Rhymes on the Road, 281. Riccaltoun, Rev., 135. Richard II., 7, 10. Richard II., by Shake- speare, 42. Richard II L, 18. Richard III, by Shake- speare, 36, 42. Richardson, John, 37. ,, Samuel, 166. Rob Roy, by Scott, 228. Robert of Gloucester, 2. Roberts, Captain, 325. Robespierre, 205. ,, The Fall of , by Coleridge, 240. Robinson (Squire Ralpho), 88. Robinson, Edward, 332. Rochester, Earl of (Hyde), 97- Rochester, ,, (Wilmot), 97, 108. Rock, Captain, Memoirs of, 282. Roderick, The Vision of Don, 226. Roet, Sir Payne, 6. Rogers (of Stratford), 49. ,, Samuel, 202, 259, 280. Rokeby, 226. Rolls, Colonel, 83. Romance of the Seven Sages, The, 16. Rofnaunt of the Rose, The, x 3- Rome, History of, by Gold- smith, 169. Romeo and jfuliet, 42. Rosalind (Spenser's), 23. Rosalind and Helen, 321. Rosewell, Sir Henry, 83. Rowe, Nicholas, 108. Royal Ladies, The, 94. Ruins of Ti?ne, The, 28. Rule Britannia, 139. Ruskin, 213. Russel, Sir William. 81. Russell, Earl, 280, 281. Rustifucius {Moore), Ode on Nothing, by, 274. Rutherford, Dr., 221. Ry I stone, The White Doe of, 212. S. Sabbath Sonnet, by Mrs. Hemans, 343. Sacred Songs, &c. , by Moore, 279. Sadleir's Correspondence, 228. St. Irvyne, 311. Samson Agonistes, 74. Sandells, Fulk, 37. Sands, 364, 366. Sardanapalus, 302. Satanic School, 211. Satire, Discourse on, by Dryden, 10 1. Satire MJnippe'e, Le, 88. Saumaise, De, 71. Savage, Richard, 134, 141. Scalby, John, 9. Scenes and Hymns of Life, 343- Sceptic, The, by Mrs. Hemans, 337. Sceptic, The, by Moore, 279. Scharf, George, 55. Schelling, 249. Schiller's Song of the Bell, 387- Schlegel, 349. Scotland, The Regalia of, by Scott, 228. Scott, Miss Anne, 231. ,, Mrs. Anne, 221. „ Charles, 231. ,, John, 367. ,, Lady, 224, 231. ,, Thomas, 231. Scott, Sir Walter, 219 to 234, 265, 268, 341, 370- Scott, Sir Walter, Dramas by, 227. ,, ,, Early Es- says by, 222. Scott, Sir Walter, Junior, 231. Scottish Ballads, 199, 221. ,, Border, The Mins- trelsy of the, 224, 225. Scottish History, by Scott, 230. Scrope, Lord, 4. Seaside and Fireside, 386. Seasons, The, by Thom- son, 137, 138, 143, 144. Sebastian, Don, 25. Sebastian, Don, by Dry- den, 95. Sebastian of Portugal, by Mrs. Hemans, 339. Second Nun's Tale, 12. Secret Love, 94. Sedley, Sir Charles, 108. Sejanus, 40. Selden, John, 82. Sensitive Pla?it, The, 323. Settle, Elkanah, 96, 98, Severn, Joseph, 351, 358. Seward, Anna, 188. Shadwell, 98, 101. Shaftesbury, Lord, 98, 99. Shakespeare, Anne, 37, 38, 49. 56, 57- ,, Edmund, 36. ,, Gilbert, 36. ,, Hamnet, 39, 56. John, 35, 36, 37. 56- Mary, 35, 36, 56- ,, Richard, 36. Shakespeare, William, viii, 17, 35 to 63, 96, 212. , , Pope's Edi- tion of, 120. 404 INDEX. Shakespeare's Sonnets, 44, Solitude, Ode to, by Pope, Superstition and Revela- , 50 to 54, 360. "S- tion, by Mrs. Hemans, Shallow, Justice, 39, 212. Somers, Lord, 102. 337- - She Stoops to Conquer, 170. Somervile, William, 134. Supper Superstition, The, Shelley, Sir Bysshe, 309, Song of the Spirit, The, by Hood, 380. 314. 3 l8 - 377- Surrey, Lord, 20, 44. ,, Charles Bysshe, Songs of the Affections, 339. Swellfoot the Tyrant, 322. 3*7. 3 IQ - Sophocles, 258. Swift, 108, 118, 125, 129, ,, Clara, 318. Sophonisba, by Thomson, 131- ,, Elizabeth, 311. 138. ,, Scott's Life of, 228. ,, Harriet, 313 to Southampton, Earl of, 42, Swinburne on Coleridge, 3 r 9- 53. 55- quotation, 252. ,, Ianthe Eliza, 316, Southey, 210,211, 213, 239, Swynford, Lady, 6. 3*9- 240, 241, 244, 256, 315. Sylvester, Joshua, 34. Lady, 309, 310. Spanish Friar, The, 94. Synesius, 238. ,, Mary W., 300, Spanish Poetry, Longfel- T. 317 to 323. low's Essay on, 385. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Spanish Student {The) and Table-talk,by Cowper, 183. 16, 2ii, 212, 268, 284, Poems on Slavery, 386. Tacitus, Dryden's transla- 289, 291, 292, 300, 302, Spectator, The, 190. tion from, 100. 3°3. 3°5. 3°9 t° 3 28 - 345. Spence, 130, 137. Talbot, Charles, 139. 35 2 - 354- 358, 359. 360, Spenser, Edmund, viii, , , Lord Chancellor, 37o. 21 to 33, 75, 105, 350. 140. Shelley, Sir Percy Florence, Spenser, Edmund, Senior, Tales and Historic Scenes, 318. 22. by Mrs. Hemans, 337. ,, Sir Timothy, 309, ,, Elizabeth, 28. Tales of a Grandfather, 310, 318. ,, Hugolin, 30. 230. ,, "William, 318. ,, Isabel, 22. Tales of a Wayside Inn, Shelley-Sidney, Sir John, „ Imitation of, by 386. 3°9- Keats, 350. Tales of Wonder, 222. Shelvocke, 254. ,, Sir John, 22. Tarn O'Shanter, 200. Shenstone, 146. ,, Peregrine, 30. Taming (The) of the Shepherd, Fleetwood, 85. ,, Sylvanus, 30. Shrew, 43. Shepherd 's Calendar, The, ,, William, 36. Tancred a?id Sigismunda, 23, 26, 28. Spring, Ode to, by Gray, 138, 139. , , Week, The, 149. Task, The, by Cowper, 183. 117. Stael, Madame de, 345. Tasso, 16. Sheridan, Richard B., i8fi, State (The) of Innocence Tasso, The Lametit of, 295, 273, 293. and Fall of Man, 95. 301. ,, Moore's Life of, Statins, Gray's transla- Tate, 98. 282. tion from, 148. Tears of the Muses, The, 28. Shirley, James, 64. Steele, 117, 120. Teedon, 183. Sibylline Leaves, by Cole- Sterling, Carlyle's Life of, Tempest, The, by Shake- ridge, 247. 248. speare, 43. Siddons, Mrs., Life, by Stevenson, Sir J., 278, 280. Tempest, The, recast by Campbell, 265. [34. Stewart, Dugald, 194, 222, Drvden, 94. Sidney, Sir Philip, 26, 27, 259- Ten Brink, Professor B., Simmons, 74. Stoddart, Dr., 245. 12. Skelton, John, 20. Stothard, 371. Tennyson, 213, 266, 381, Slender, 39. Stowe, Mrs. Beecher, 297, 3 88 - Smart, Christopher, 160. 298. Tenure of Kings and Ma- Smectymnuus, Apology for, Strabo, 153. gistrates, by Milton, 71. 68. Strange, Lord, 39. Testament of Love, The,\^, Smith, Horace, 272, 320. Suckling, Sir John, 90. Tetrachordon, 69. ,, James, 256. Suffolk, Alice Duchess of, 18. Thackeray, 124, 126, 129, Soldier s Dream, Tlu, 267. ,, Duke of, 18. 161. INDEX. 405 Thebais, 115. Theobald, 120, 126, 127. Theocritus, in. Theodore M. (Hood), 370. Theodric, 264. Theory of Life, by Cole- ridge, 250. Thestylis, The Mourning Muse of, 28. Thirza, 290, 291. Thomas the Rhymer, 2. Thomson, Beatrix, 136. ,, Benjamin, 383. ,, George, 197. Thomson, James, viii,i 10, 135 to 144. Thomson's ( George) Col- lection of Scottish Airs, 197. Thorpe, Thomas, 52. Thoughts during Sickness, by Mrs. Hemans, 343. Three Books of Song, by Longfellow, 386. Three Graves, The, by Coleridge, 255. Three Histories, The, by Mrs. Fletcher, quotation from, 346. Three Hours after Mar- riage, 126. Throgmortons, 184. Thurlow, Lord, 177. Thyer, Robert, 88. Tibullus, 60. Tickell, 108, 119. Ticknor, Professor, 385. Timon of Athe?is, 43. Tirocinium, 183. Titus Andronicus, 43. To?n Jones, 371. Tonson s Poetical Miscel- lany, 116. Tourneur, Cyril, 64. Townshend, Charles, 154. Traveller, The, by Gold- smith, 163, 168, 174. Treatise of True Religion, A, by Milton, 75. Trelawny, Edward John, 212, 305, 323, 324. ,, Miss, 325, 326. Trelawny s Recollect ions of Shelley and Byron, 212. Trevanion, Mr. and Mrs., 297. Triermain, The Bridal of , 227. Tristram Sha?idy, 371. Tristrem, Sir, Scott's Edi- tion of, 225. Triumph of Life, The, 324. Troilus and Cressida, by Shakespeare, 43. ,, recast by Dryden, 94. Troilus and Cryseide, 7, 12, 16, 17. Trumball, SirWilliam,ii5. Truth, Cowper's Poem on, 183. Turner, J. M. W., 281. Turner (of Towthorpe), 112. Twelfth Night, 43. Tychsen, Professor, 244. Tylney Hall, 373. Tyrannic Love, 94. Tyrtaeus, 258. U. Udall, Nicholas, 20. Ullin's [Lord) Daughter, 262. Ulphilas, 244. Ulster, Countess of, 5. ,, Lionel, Earl of, 5. United States Literary Gazette, Tlie, 384. Unwin, Mrs., 182 to 185. Rev., 182. Use of Riches, Epistle by Pope, 127, 128. V. Valencia, The Siege of, 338. 339- Va?i der Noodt's Theatre of Worldlings, 23. Vanbrugh, Sirjohn, 108. Vaudracour and Julia, 213. Vaughan, Henry, 90. Venice, The /Merchant of, 43- Venier, 332. Ve?ius and Adonis, 42. Venus, The Complaint of, 1 3- Vergil, translated by Dry- den, 101. Vernor, Hood, and Sharpe, 363- Verona, The Two Ge?itle- men of, 43. Victor and Cazire (Shel- ley), Origin \a I Poetry by , Villa, Manso, Marquis of, 67. Villamil, 281. Visconti, Bernabo, 7. Vision of Judgment, The, 302, 304, 307. Vivian, Charles, 324. Viviani.Contessina Emilia, 322. Voices of the Night, 384. Voltaire, 164. Life of, by Gold- smith, 167. - W. W. H., 52, 53. Waggoner, The, by Words- worth, 212. Wagner, 331. Waif, The, 387. Wakefield, 7' he Vicar of, 162, 167, 168. Wales, Frederick Prince of, 128, 138, 140, 148. Walle?istei?i, Coleridge's Translation from Schil- ler, 244. Waller, Edmund, viii, 64. ,, Sir William, 70. Walpole, Horace, 148,150, !55. T-57- Walsh, ,15. Waltz, '1 he, by Byron, 295- Wanostrocht, Dr. , 364. Warburton, Bishop, 128, 151- , Ward's Diary, 45, 57. Watchman, The, 241. Waterloo, The Field of, by Scott, 227. Watts, Isaac, 108. Waverley, 227, 232. ,, Novels, The, 228. Webster, John, 64. Wedgewood, J. and T, 244. Wentworth, Lord, 296,298. Werner, 304. 406 INDEX. Wesley, Charles, 146. Williams, Lieutenant, 323, Wycherley, 115. West, Richard, 149, 150, 3 2 4. 3 2 5- 153- „ Mrs., 323, 324. X. ,, Gray's Sonnet on, Windsor Forest, by Pope, Xavier, St. Francis, Life 149. 118. of, translated by Dry- ,, William E. ( 332, ,, TheMerry Wives den, 100. 333- of, 39. 43. 45- Westbrook, Eliza, 314 to Winter's Tale, A., 43. Y. 3 r 7- Wither, George, 64. Ye Gentleme?i of England, John, 319. Wit's Misery, quotation 267, 268. Wharton, 156. from, 40. Ye Mariners of England, Whateley, 137. Wolcot, John, 188. by Campbell, 261, 267, Whately, Archbishop, 343, Wordsworth, Anne, 203. 268. 344- ,, Christopher, Young (the Actor), 337. Whims and Oddities, 369. 203. Young, Edward, 108, no. White, Rev. Blanco, 343. ,, Mary, 208. ,, Miss, 14. Whitehead, 152. ,, Miss, 206, ,, Professor, 258. Whitman, Walt, 391. 244. „ Thomas, 66. Whyte, Samuel, 273. Wordsworth, William, Youth and Age, by Cole- Wiclif, 9. 109, 203 to 218, 241, 243 ridge, 253. Wild Gallant, The, 94. to 246, 252, 254, 268, 269, Wilder, Rev.Theaker.163. 34 2 - 345. 37o. Z. Will's Coffee-house, 105, World, The, 349. Zapolya, 243, 247. 116. Worsdale, 123. Zastrozzi, 311. William III., 100. Wotton, Sir Henry, 34. Zimri (Duke of Bucking- „ IV., 251. Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 20. ham), 98. UNWIN BSotHfcftS, Tl-Ifc gRKSHaM PfcESS, CHlUVOkTM AND LONDON. E. MOXON, SON & CO.'S NEW BOOKS. Now ready, in 3 vols., cloth, price 31.J. 6d. An Entirely New Edition of Shelley's Works. THE POETICAL WORKS OF PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. The text carefully revised, with Notes, and a Memoir by WILLIAM MICHAEL ROSSETTI. The present edition will be of great value to all lovers of Shelley. Mr. Rossetti having gone carefully and de novo through the task of editorship, and introducing numerous modifications, additions, &c, into the memoir and notes, and indeed into the text itself, dependent sometimes upon more recent information (brought forward by himself among others), sometimes upon change of views, or the strictures of other critics. Now ready, crown Svo, cloth, price \os. 6d. A Companion Volume to Moxon's Popular Poets. LIVES OF FAMOUS POETS. By William Michael Rossetti. Containing the Biographies of the following Poets — Burns, Butler, Byron, Campbell, Chaucer, Coleridge, Cowper, Dryden, Gold- smith, Gray, Hemans, Hood, Keats, Longfellow, Milton, Moore, Pope, Scott, Shakespeare, Shelley, Spenser, Thomson, and Wordsworth. Brief lists of Intermediate Poets are also given, so as to afford a sort of general glance at the sequence of dates in British Poetry. Now ready, uniform with, and by the Editor of Haydn's Dictionary of Dates, in one thick volume demy Svo, 728 pages, cloth, \%s. ; half calf , 24s. ; full calf, or tree calf, 31 J. 6d. VINCENT'S DICTIONARY OF BIOGRAPHY, Past and Present, brought down to September, 1877, containing the chief Events in the Lives of Eminent Persons of all ages and Nations, preceded by the Biographies and Genealogies of the chief Representatives of the Royal Houses of the World. By Benjamin Vincent, Librarian of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and Editor of "Haydn's Dic- tionary of Dates." " It has the merit of condensing into the smallest possible compass the leading events in the career of every man and woman of eminence in literature, law, war, politics, art, or science, from the commencement of the world to the present time. ... It is very carefully edited, and must evidently be the result of constant industry, combined with good judgment and taste. It contains scarcely a line that is redundant." — The Times. LONDON : E. MOXON, SON, & CO., DORSET BUILDINGS, SALISBURY SQUARE, E.C. Demy Svo, price iSs. cloth. — Fifteenth Edition, with 80,000 Dates and Facts. HAYDN'S DICTIONARY OF DATES, Enlarged, Corrected, and Revised, by BENJAMIN VINCENT, Librarian of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. The present issue contains about 10,000 distinct Articles, alphabetically arranged, and 80,000 Dates and Facts, and from the character of its contents it must be important to every man in the British Empire, whether learned or unlearned, whether connected with literature, professions, or engaged in trade. As a Book of Reference it is as essential to students as " Bradshaw" to railway travellers, or the Directory to the merchant. " The new features in the fifteenth edition include chronological tables at the beginning of the volume, innumerable literary, scientific, topographical, and geographical facts inserted in the body of the work, and a dated index. . . . This fifteenth edition has been thoroughly revised, and includes the general history of the last three years, continued under the heads of the respective countries ; the more important events being noticed in separate articles. Especial attention has been given to the affairs of our own country, and to the political history of France, Spain, Germany, Turkey and the United States. Many small articles have been inserted relating to the topics liable to arise in general conversation, and the progress of science and its applications have been specially noticed. This edition contains above sixty more pages than the last, published in 1873." The Times says of the fifteenth edition : — "It is certainly no longer now a mere dictionary of dates, whatever it might have been at its first appear- ance, but a comprehensive dictionary or cyclopsedia of general information." "It is by far the readiest and most reliable work of the kind for the general reader within the province of our knowledge. " — Standard. " The most universal book of reference in a moderate compass that we know of In the English language." — Times. " The Glasgow Herald says : — " There is nothing new to be said about this invaluable compendium, which is familiar to every student. Thirtv- two years have elapsed since the publication of the first edition of ' Haydn's Dates. ' Every successive edition has been enlarged and considerably im- proved. The present edition has several new features." %* Nearly 100,000 copies of this important book of reference have been sold to this date. Prospectus will be forwarded on application. LONDON : E. MOXON, SON, AND CO., DORSET-BUILDINGS, SALISBURY-SQUARE, E.C. c III