I/./ 
 
 OJortteU Hniuersitg Sltbrarg 
 
 Jttfata, Nm ^nrk 
 
 WORDSWORTH COLLECTION 
 
 Made by 
 
 CYNTHIA MORGAN ST. JOHN 
 
 ITHACA, N. Y. 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 VICTOR EMANUEL 
 
 CLASS OF 1919 
 1925 
 
STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
All rights reserved 
 
STUDIES OF 
 A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 By LESLIE STEPHEN 
 
 VOL, I 
 
 New York: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 London: DUCKWORTH ^ CO. 
 
 1898 
 

 /\(ho a J^O/ 
 
 
I HAVE to acknowledge with many thanks 
 the permission of the proprietors of the 
 National Review (in which most of the 
 following articles appeared), of the Fort- 
 nightly Review^ and of the Cornhill Maga- 
 zine, to republish these studies. 
 
 Leslie Stephen. 
 
 June 1898. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY .... i 
 
 THE EVOLUTION OF EDITORS . . 37 
 
 JOHN BYROM 74 
 
 JOHNSONIANA .105 
 
 GIBBON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY ... 147 
 
 ARTHUR YOUNG 188 
 
 WORDSWORTH'S YOUTH .... 227 
 
STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY 
 
 Mr. Sidney Lee has recently (February 1896) 
 delivered at the Royal Institution a lecture upon 
 National Biography. No one has a better right 
 to speak upon the subject. He has been sole 
 editor of the later volumes of the Dictionary of 
 National Biography^ and, as I can testify, had a 
 very important share in preparing every previous 
 volume. He spoke, therefore, from considerable 
 experience, and if I were to deal with his subject 
 from the same point of view, I should have little 
 more to do than say ' ditto ' to most of his remarks. 
 I would not contradict even his statistics, although, 
 as a matter of fact, they differ to some extent from 
 my own calculations — I put that down to the 
 known perversity of arithmetic in general. But I 
 also think that in dealing briefly with a large 
 subject, he left untouched certain considerations 
 which are a necessary complement to his argument. 
 I shall venture from this point of view to say 
 
 VOL. I. A 
 
2 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 something of a matter in which I have some 
 personal interest. 
 
 When the old Biographia Britannica was coming 
 out, Cowper made the unpleasant remark that it 
 was 
 
 A fond attempt to give a deathless lot 
 To names ignoble, born to be forgot. 
 
 If that was a fair judgment, what are we to say 
 to the modern work, which includes thousands of 
 names too obscure for mention in its predecessor ? 
 When Mr, Lee speaks of the ' commemorative 
 instinct ' as justifying his undertaking, the enemy 
 replies that a very small minority of the names 
 deserve commemoration. To appeal to instinct 
 is to repudiate reason and to justify monomania. 
 Admitting, as we all admit, the importance of 
 keeping alive the leading names in history, what 
 is the use of this long procession of the hopelessly 
 insignificant .? Why repeat the familiar formula 
 about the man who was born on such a day, was 
 ' educated at the grammar school of his native 
 town,' graduated in such a year, became fellow 
 of his college, took a hving, married, published 
 a volume of sermons which nobody has read for a 
 century or two, and has been during all that time 
 in his churchyard .? Can he not be left in peace. 
 
NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY 3 
 
 side by side with the ' rude forefathers of the 
 hamlet/ who are content to lie beneath their 
 quiet mounds of grass ? Is it not almost a mockery 
 to persist in keepmg up some faint and flickering 
 image of him aboveground ? There is often 
 some good reading to be found in country church- 
 yards ; but, on the whole, if one had to choose, 
 one would perhaps rather have the good old 
 timber crosspiece, with ' afflictions sore long time 
 he bore,' than the ambitious monuments where 
 History and its attendant cherubs are eternally 
 poring over the list of the squire's virtues and 
 honours. Why struggle against the inevitable ? 
 Better oblivion than a permanent admission that 
 you were thoroughly and hopelessly commonplace. 
 I confess that I sometimes thought as much when 
 I was toiling on my old treadmill, now Mr. Lee's. 
 Much of the work to be done was uninteresting, 
 if not absolutely repulsive. I was often inclined 
 to sympathise with the worthy Simon Browne, a 
 Nonconformist divine of the last century. Poor 
 Browne had received a terrible shock. Some 
 accounts say that he had lost his wife and only 
 son ; others that he had ' accidentally strangled a 
 highwayman,' — not, one would think, so painful a 
 catastrophe. Anyhow, his mind became affected ; 
 
4 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 he fancied that his ' spiritual substance ' had been 
 annihilated ; he was a mere empty shell, a body- 
 without a soul ; and, under these circumstances, 
 as he tells us, he took to an employment which 
 did not require a soul : he became a dictionary- 
 maker. Still, we should, as he piously adds, 
 ' thank God for everything, and therefore for 
 dictionary-makers.' Though Browne's dictionary 
 was not of the biographical kind, the remark 
 seemed to be painfully applicable. Browne was 
 only giving in other words the pith of Carlyle's 
 constant lamentations when struggling amidst the 
 vast dust-heaps accumulated by Dryasdust and his 
 fellows. Could any good come of these painful 
 toilings among the historical ' kitchen middens ' .? 
 If here and there you disinter some precious coin, 
 does the rare success repay the endless sifting of 
 the gigantic mounds of shot rubbish ? And yet, 
 by degrees, I came to think that there was really 
 a justification for toils not of the most attractive 
 kind. When our first volume appeared, one of 
 our critics complained of me for not starting with 
 a preface. A preface saves much trouble to a 
 reviewer — sometimes the whole trouble of reading 
 the book. I do not, however, much regret the 
 omission, for the real utility of our undertaking. 
 
NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY 5 
 
 as it now presents itself to my mind, had not then 
 become fully evident. I am not about to write a 
 preface now, but I wish to give a hint or two of 
 what I might or ought to have said in such a per- 
 formance had I clearly perceived what has been 
 gradually forced upon me by experience. 
 
 The ' commemorative instinct ' to which Mr. 
 Lee refers has, undoubtedly, much to do with the 
 undertaking ; but, like other instincts, it requires 
 to be regulated by more explicit reason. The 
 thoroughbred Dryasdust is a very harmless, and 
 sometimes a very amiable, creature. He may 
 urge that his hobby is at least a very innocent one, 
 and that we have no more call to condemn a man 
 who has a passion for vast accumulations of dates, 
 names, and facts than to condemn another for a 
 love of art or natural history. The specialist who 
 is typified in O. W. Holmes's Scarahee^ the man 
 who devotes a lifetime to acquiring abnormal 
 familiarity with the minutest peculiarities of some 
 obscure tribe of insects, does no direct harm to 
 his fellows, and incidentally contributes some- 
 thing, however minute the contribution may be, to 
 scientific progress. We must respect the zeal 
 which enables a man to expend the superabundant 
 energy, which might have led to fame or fortune, 
 
6 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 upon achievements of which, perhaps, not half 
 a dozen living men will appreciate either the 
 general value or the cost to the worker. Dryas- 
 dust deserves the same sort of sympathy. He has, 
 no doubt, his weaknesses. His passion becomes a 
 monomania. He spends infinite toil upon work 
 which has no obvious interest, and he often comes 
 to attach an absurd importance to his results. 
 Such studies as genealogy or bibliography have 
 but a remote bearing upon any of the vital problems 
 suggested by the real historian. We shudder 
 when we read that the excellent Colonel Chester 
 spent years upon investigating the genealogy of 
 Washington, and accumulated, among many other 
 labours, eighty-seven folio volumes, each of more 
 than 400 pages of extracts from parish registers. 
 He died, it is added, of ' incessant work.' The 
 late Mr. Bradshaw, again, a man of most admir- 
 able character, and very fine intellectual qualities, 
 acquired, by unremitting practice, an astonishing 
 power of identifying at a glance the time and 
 place of printing of old books. He could 
 interpret minute typographical indications as the 
 Red Indian can read on a dead leaf or blade of 
 grass the sign of the traveller who made it. 
 Certainly one is tempted to regret at first sight 
 
NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY 7 
 
 that such abilities were not applied in more 
 obviously useful fields. What do we care whether 
 one or another obscure country squire in the 
 sixteenth or seventeenth century had the merit of 
 being progenitor of Washington ? Can it really 
 matter whether a particular volume was printed at 
 Rotterdam or at Venice — in the year 1600 or ten 
 years sooner or later ? I will not discuss the 
 moral question. At any rate, one may perhaps 
 urge, it is better than spending brain-power upon 
 chess problems, which is yet an innocent form of 
 amusement. Such a labourer may incidentally 
 provide data of real importance to the political or 
 literary historian : he reduces, once for all, one 
 bit of chaos to order, and helps to raise the general 
 standard of accurate research. He is pretty 
 certain to confer a benefit, if not a very important 
 benefit, upon mankind ; whereas, if he fancied 
 himself a philosopher, he might be wasting his 
 labour as hopelessly as in squaring the circle. He 
 is at least laying bricks, not blowing futile soap- 
 bubbles. 
 
 The labours of innumerable inquirers upon 
 obscure topics have, as a matter of fact, ac- 
 cumulated vast stores of knowledge. A danger 
 has shown itself that the historian may be over- 
 
8 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 whelmed by the bulk of his materials. A century 
 or two ago we were content with histories after 
 the fashion of Hume. In a couple of years he was 
 apparently not only to write, but to accumulate 
 the necessary knowledge for writing, a history 
 stretching from the time of Julius Caesar to the 
 time of Henry vii. A historian who now does his 
 work conscientiously has to take about the same 
 time to narrate events as the events themselves 
 occupied in happening. Innumerable sources of 
 knowledge have been opened, and he will be 
 regarded as superficial if he does not more or 
 less avail himself of every conceivable means of 
 information. He cannot be content simply with 
 the old chroniclers or with the later writers who 
 summarised them. Ancient charters, official re- 
 cords of legal proceedings, manor rolls, and the 
 archives of towns have thrown light upon the 
 underlying conditions of history. Local historians 
 have unearthed curious facts, whose significance is 
 only beginning to be perceived. Calendars of 
 State papers enable us to trace the opinions of the 
 great men who were most intimately concerned 
 in the making of history. The despatches of 
 ambassadors occupied in keenly watching con- 
 temporary events have been partly printed, and 
 
NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY 9 
 
 still lie in vast masses at Simancas and Venice and 
 the Vatican, The Historical Manuscripts Com- 
 mission has made known to us something of the 
 vast stores of old letters and papers which had 
 been accumulating dust in the libraries of old 
 country mansions. When we go to the library 
 of the British Museum, and look at the gigantic 
 catalogue of printed books, and remember the 
 huge mass of materials which can be inspected in 
 the manuscript department, we — I can speak for 
 myself at least — have a kind of nightmare sensa- 
 tion, A merciful veil of oblivion has no doubt 
 covered a great deal. Yet we may feel inclined 
 to imagine that no fact which has happened within 
 the last few centuries has been so thoroughly 
 hidden that we can be quite sure that it is irre- 
 coverable. Over two centuries ago a lad unknown 
 to fame wrote a thesis in a Dutch University. I 
 stumbled upon it one day and discovered a bio- 
 graphical date of the smallest conceivable interest 
 to anybody. But it gives one a queer shock 
 when one realises that even so trumpery and 
 antiquated a document has not been allowed to 
 find its way to oblivion. Happily some Uni- 
 versity theses have been lost, but as the process of 
 commemorating proceeds with accelerated rapidity, 
 
10 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 it almost seems as though we had made up our 
 minds that nothing was ever to be forgotten. 
 
 It may be doubted whether this huge accumula- 
 tion of materials has been an unmixed benefit to 
 history. Undoubtedly we know many things 
 much more thoroughly than our ancestors. Still, 
 in reading, for example, the later volumes of 
 Macaulay or Froude, we feel sometimes that it is 
 possible to have too much State-paper. The main 
 outlines, which used to be the whole of history, 
 are still the most important, and instead of being 
 filled up and rendered more precise and vivid, 
 they sometimes seem to disappear behind an 
 elaborate account of what statesmen and diplo- 
 matists happened to think about them at the time 
 — and, sometimes, what such persons thought 
 implied a complete misconception of the real 
 issues. But in any case one conclusion is very 
 obvious, namely, that with the accumulation of 
 material there should be a steady elaboration of 
 the contrivances for making it accessible. The 
 growth of a great library converts the library into 
 a hopeless labyrinth, unless it is properly cata- 
 logued as it grows. To turn it to full account, 
 you require not only a catalogue, but some kind of 
 intelligent guide to the stores which it contains. 
 
NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY ii 
 
 You are like a man wandering in a vast wilder- 
 ness, which is springing up in every direction 
 with tropical luxuriance ; and you feel the 
 necessity of having paths carried through it upon 
 some intelligible system which will enable you to 
 find your way to the required place and tell you 
 in what directions further research would probably 
 be thrown away. 
 
 Now it is to this want, or to provide the means 
 of satisfying one part of this want, that the 
 dictionary is intended in the first place to corre- 
 spond. It ought to be — it is not for me to say 
 how far it has succeeded in becoming — an 
 indispensable guide to persons who would other- 
 wise feel that they were hewing their way through 
 a hopelessly intricate jungle. Every student 
 ought, I will not say to have it in his library, but 
 to carry it about with him (metaphorically speak- 
 ing) in his pocket. It is true that, in a physical 
 sense, it is rather large for that purpose, though 
 fifty or sixty volumes represent but a small 
 fragment of a decent library ; but the judicious 
 person can always manage to have it at hand. 
 And then, though in its first intention it should 
 be useful as an auxiliary in various researches, I 
 shall venture to assert that it may also be not only 
 
12 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 useful for the more exalted purpose of satisfying 
 the commemorative instinct, but — I do not fear 
 to say so, though my friends sometimes laugh at 
 my saying — it may turn out to be one of the most 
 amusing works in the language. 
 
 I will start, however, by saying something of 
 the assertion which is more likely to meet with 
 acceptance. The utility of having this causeway 
 carried through the vast morass of antiquarian 
 accumulation is obvious in a general way. The 
 remark, however, upon which Mr. Lee has in- 
 sisted, indicates a truth not quite so clearly recog- 
 nised as might be desirable. The provinces of 
 the historian and the biographer are curiously 
 distinct, although they are closely related. History 
 is of course related to biography inasmuch as most 
 events are connected with some particular person. 
 Even the most philosophical of historians cannot 
 describe the Norman Conquest without reference 
 to William and to Harold. And, on the other 
 side, every individual life is to some extent an 
 indication of the historical conditions of his time. 
 The most retired recluse is the product at least of 
 his parents and his schooling, and is affected by 
 contemporary thought. And yet, the curious 
 thing is the degree in which this fact can be 
 
NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY 13 
 
 ignored on both sides. If we look at any of the 
 ordinary collections of biographical material, we 
 shall constantly be struck by the writer's uncon- 
 sciousness of the most obvious inferences. He will 
 mention a fact which in the hands of the historian 
 might clear up a political problem, or which may 
 be strikingly characteristic of the social conditions 
 of the time, without, as Mr. Herbert Spencer 
 would say, noting the ' necessary implication.' A 
 contemporary of course takes things for granted 
 which we see to be exceptional ; or he may supply, 
 without knowing it, evidence that will be useful 
 in settling a controversy which has not yet come 
 to light. In the ordinary books such facts, again, 
 have often been repeated mechanically, and readers 
 are not rarely half asleep when they look at their 
 manual. Thus I have sometimes noticed that a 
 man may be in one sense a most accomplished 
 biographer ; that is, that he can tell you off-hand 
 a vast number of facts, genealogical, official, and 
 so forth, and yet has never, as we say, put two 
 and two together. I have read lives giving 
 minute details about the careers of authors, which 
 yet prove unmistakably that the writers had no 
 general knowledge of the literature of the period. 
 A man will know every fact about all the people 
 
14 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 mentioned, say, in Boswell, and yet have no con- 
 ception of the general position of Johnson, or 
 Burke, or Goldsmith in English literature. He 
 seems to have walked through a great gallery 
 blindfold, or rather with some strange affection of 
 the eyes which enabled him to make a catalogue 
 without receiving any general impression of the 
 pictures. The great Mr. Sherlock Holmes has 
 insisted upon the value of the most insignificant 
 facts : and if Mr. Holmes had turned his mind to 
 history instead of modern criminal cases, he would 
 have found innumerable little incidents which only 
 require to be skilfully dovetailed together to 
 throw a new light upon many important questions. 
 More can be done by the man of true historical 
 imagination — the man who appreciates the great 
 step made by Scott when he observed that our 
 ancestors were once as really alive as we are now — 
 and who finds in those countless neglected and 
 apparently barren facts, vivid illustrations of the 
 conditions of life and thought of our predecessors. 
 We all know how Macaulay, with his love of castle- 
 building, found in obscure newspapers and the 
 fugitive literature of the period the materials for a 
 picture which, with whatever shortcomings, was at 
 least incomparably brilhant and lifelike. Now, 
 
NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY 15 
 
 the first office of the biographer is to facilitate what 
 I may call the proper reaction between biography 
 and history ; to make each study throw all possible 
 light on the other ; and so to give fresh vitality to 
 two different lines of study, which, though their 
 mutual dependence is obvious, can yet be divorced 
 so effectually by the mere Dryasdust. And this 
 remark supplies a sufficient answer to one question 
 which has often been put to me. What entitles a 
 man to a place in the dictionary ? Why should it 
 include 30,000 instead of 3000 or 300,000 names .^ 
 Mr. Lee has given an answer which is, I think, 
 correct in its proper place ; but, before referring to 
 it, I must point out that there is another, and what 
 would be called a more 'objective' criterion which 
 necessarily governs the solution In the first instance. 
 In order, that is, to secure the proper correlation 
 between the biographer and the historian, it Is 
 plainly necessary to include every one who is 
 sufficiently noticed In the ordinary histories to 
 make some further inquiry probable. To give the 
 first Instance that occurs, Macaulay tells a very 
 curious story about a certain intrigue which led 
 to the final abolition of licensing the Press in 
 England. The fact itself is one of great Interest 
 in the history of English literature. The two 
 
i6 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 people chiefly concerned were utterly obscure : 
 Charles Blount and Edmund Bohun necessarily 
 vanish from Macaulay's pages as soon as they have 
 played their little drama. But it is natural to 
 inquire what these two men otherwise were, who 
 were incidentally involved in a really critical turn- 
 ing-point. A reference to the dictionary will not 
 only answer the question, but help to make more 
 distinct the conditions under which English writers 
 won a most important privilege. The historian 
 can only deal with the particular stage at which an 
 obscure person emerges into public, but the signi- 
 ficance of the event may start out more vividly 
 when we can trace his movements below the 
 surface. Now to help in this search the bio- 
 grapher has before him an immense mass of 
 material already partially organised. Nobody 
 who has dipped into the subject is ignorant of the 
 immense service rendered by Anthony a Ward in 
 the famous Athene^ Oxonienses. It gives brief, 
 but very shrewd, accounts of all men connected 
 with Oxford, and records the results of a laborious 
 personal inquiry during his own period, which, 
 but for him, would have been forgotten. For the 
 same period we have all the collections due to the 
 zeal of various religious sects ; the lives of the 
 
NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY 17 
 
 Nonconformists ejected in 1662 ; the opposition 
 work upon the ' sufferings of the clergy ' under the 
 Commonwealth ; the lives of the Jesuits who were 
 martyred by the penal laws ; and the lives of the 
 Quakers, who have always been conspicuous for 
 preserving records of their brethren. Besides 
 these, there are, of course, many old biographical 
 collections, including the dictionaries devoted to 
 some special class — the artists, the physicians, the 
 judges, the admirals, and so forth. The first 
 simple rule, therefore, is that every name which 
 appears in these collections has at least a pre- 
 sumptive right to admission. An ideal dictionary 
 would be a complete codification or summary of 
 all the previously existing collections. It must 
 aim at such an approximation to that result as 
 human frailty will permit ; in other words, it is 
 bound first to include all the names which have 
 appeared in any respectable collection of hves, and, 
 in the next place, to supplement this by including 
 a great many names which, for one reason or 
 another, have dropped out, but which appear to be 
 approximately of the same rank. The rule, it is 
 obvious, must be in part the venerable ' rule of 
 thumb,' but it gives a kind of test which is a 
 suflicient guide in discreet hands. 
 
 VOL. I. 
 
i8 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 The advantage of this does not, I hope, require 
 much exposition. I will only make one remark. 
 Every student knows the vast difference which is 
 made when you have some right to assume the 
 completeness of any research. I may look into 
 books, and search libraries on the chance of finding 
 information indefinitely. But if I have a book or 
 a library of which I can say with some confidence 
 that, if it is not there, the presumption is that it 
 does not exist, my labour has a definite, even 
 though it be a negative, result. That, for example, 
 is the sufficient justification of the collection of 
 every kind of printed matter in the British 
 Museum. It is not only that nobody can say 
 beforehand what bit of knowledge may not turn 
 out to be useful, but that one has the immense 
 satisfaction of knowing that a fact not recorded 
 somewhere or other on those crowded shelves 
 must be, in all probability, a fact for which it is 
 idle to search further. No biographical dictionary 
 can be in the full sense exhaustive ; an exhaustive 
 dictionary would involve a reprint of all the parish 
 registers, to mention nothing else ; but it may be 
 approximately exhaustive for the purposes of all 
 serious students of any of the various departments 
 of history. In a great number of cases, moreover, 
 
NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY 19 
 
 this can be achieved with a tolerable approximation 
 to completeness. We take, for example, any of 
 the more important names around which has been 
 raised a lasting dust of controversy. A dictionary 
 ought, in the first place, to supply you with a 
 sufficient indication of all that has been written 
 upon the subject ; it should state briefly the result 
 of the last researches ; explain what appears to be 
 the present opinion among the most qualified 
 experts, and what are the points which seem still to 
 be open ; and, above all, should give a full reference 
 to all the best and most original sources of infor- 
 mation. The most important and valuable part of 
 a good dictionary is often that dry list of authorities 
 which frequently costs an amount of skilled labour 
 not apparent on the surface, and not always, it is 
 to be feared, recognised with due gratitude. The 
 accumulation of material makes this a most essen- 
 tial part of the work ; for we are daily more in 
 want of a guide through the wilderness, and a 
 judicious indication of the right method of inquiry 
 gives often what it may be hard to find elsewhere, 
 and is always a useful check upon our unassisted 
 efforts. When you plunge into the antiquarian 
 bog you are glad to have signposts, showing where 
 previous adventurers have been engulphed ; where 
 
n 
 
 20 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 some sort of feasible track has been constructed, 
 and who are the trustworthy guides. Moreover, 
 for a vast variety of purposes, the dictionary, 
 though only second-hand authority, may be quite 
 sufficient for all that is required. In following 
 any of the countless tracks that may lead through 
 history, you meet at every step with persons and 
 events intruding from different regions. The man 
 of letters may be affected by a political intrigue ; 
 a soldier may come into contact with men whose 
 chief activity belongs to literature or science. The 
 most thoroughgoing inquirer has to take a vast 
 number of collateral facts upon trust ; and it may 
 save him infinite trouble to get the results of special 
 knowledge upon what are to him collateral points. 
 This, to which I might add indefinitely, 
 corresponds to what I may call the utilitarian 
 aspect of a dictionary : the immediate purpose 
 to which it may be turned to account by students 
 in any historical inquiry. It should be a con- 
 fidential friend constantly at their elbow, giving 
 them a summary of the knowledge of antiquaries, 
 genealogists, bibhographers, as well as historians, 
 upon every collateral point which may happen for 
 the moment to be relevant. But, so far, however 
 well done, it must be admitted that it is bound to 
 
NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY 21 
 
 be rather dry. To be reduced to a specimen put 
 in a museum is not a very cheering prospect, and 
 offers little satisfaction for the commemorative 
 instinct. Now I have to add that within certain 
 limits the dictionary may be of importance in that 
 direction too. I do not expect that a future 
 Nelson will exclaim, 'Victory, or an article in 
 'The Biographical Dictionary ! ' I have never 
 found my own appetite for labour stimulated by 
 the flattering hope that I might some day be the 
 subject instead of the author of an article. If I 
 thought that my posthumous wishes would be 
 respected, I should beg to be omitted from the 
 supplement. But, for all that, the dictionary 
 article may do much to keep alive the memory 
 of people whom it is good to remember. Nobody 
 will expect the poor dictionary-maker to be a 
 substitute for Boswell or Lockhart. The judicious 
 critic is well aware that it is not upon the lives 
 of the great men that the value of the book 
 really depends. It is the second-rate people — the 
 people whose lives have to be reconstructed from 
 obituary notices, or from references in memoirs 
 and collections of letters ; or sought in prefaces 
 to posthumous works ; or sometimes painfully 
 dug out of collections of manuscripts, and who 
 
22 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 really become generally accessible through the 
 dictionary alone — that provide the really useful 
 reading. There are num.bers of such people 
 whom one first discovers to be really interesting 
 when the scattered materials are for the first time 
 pieced together. Nobody need look at Addison 
 or Byron or Milton in a dictionary. He can find 
 fuller and better notices in every library ; and 
 the biographer must be satisfied if he has put 
 together a useful compendium of all the relevant 
 literature. The conditions of his work are suf- 
 ficiently obvious, and of course exclude anything 
 like rhetoric or disquisition in criticism. He may 
 indicate but cannot expatiate. He has before him 
 an ideal which he very well knows is never quite 
 realised. Condensation is not only the cardinal 
 virtue of his style, but the virtue to which all 
 others must be sacrificed. He must be content 
 sometimes to toil for hours with the single result 
 of having to hold his tongue. I used rigidly to 
 excise the sentence, ' Nothing is known of his 
 birth or parentage,' which tended to appear in half 
 the lives, because where nothing is known it seems 
 simpler that nothing should be said ; and yet a 
 man might have to consult a whole series of books 
 before discovering even that negative fact. The 
 
NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY 23 
 
 poor biographer, again, has to compress his work 
 even at the cost of much clumsiness of style. I 
 am painfully aware of the hideous sentences which 
 I have constructed in trying to say in ten words 
 what, as I fancied, might make quite a pretty 
 passage if spread over a hundred. I have groaned 
 over some charming anecdote which seemed to beg 
 for a few little dramatic accessories, and wedged 
 it remorselessly into its allotted corner, grievously 
 perplexed by the special difficulty in our language 
 of making the ' he's ' and ' she's ' refer to the proper 
 people without the help of the detestable ' latter ' 
 and 'former.' Perhaps — so one thinks when 
 looking at some modern biographies — the training 
 in condensation is not altogether bad. But the 
 problem is to condense without squeezing out the 
 real interest. The dictionary-writer cannot dilate; 
 but he is bound so far as he can to make the facts 
 tell their own story. He is not to pronounce a 
 panegyric upon heroism, but he ought so to 
 arrange his narrative that the reader may be 
 irresistibly led to say bravo ! It is possible to 
 make a story more pathetic by judicious reticence, 
 though the writer who depends upon such a 
 method needs especially appreciative readers. He 
 must tell a good story so as to bring out the 
 
24 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 humorous side without indulging in open hilarity, 
 though he knows painfully that many readers will 
 not take a joke unless it is labelled 'funny,' and 
 some will not take it till it has been hammered 
 into their heads by repeated strokes. It follows 
 that the ideal article should not be condensed in 
 the sense of being reduced to the bare dates and 
 facts capable of being arranged in mechanical 
 order. The aim should be to give whatever 
 would be really interesting to the most cultivated 
 reader, though leaving it to the reader to put the 
 dots over the i's. The writer must often make 
 the sacrifice of keeping his most important reflec- 
 tion to himself; but it is not the less important 
 that they should be in his mind. Imagine a mere 
 antiquary and a competent student to tell within 
 the same limits the life of some eminent 
 philosopher or divine. The difference may be 
 enormous between the writer who sees what are 
 the really cardinal facts and the writer to whom 
 any and every fact is of the same importance : 
 and yet both narratives may appear at first sight 
 to be equally dry and barren. I remember how 
 a life was ridiculed by a literary critic because it 
 explained a certain vote at the Salter's Hall Con- 
 ference. The critic, who probably knew all about 
 
NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY 25 
 
 Denis and Curll and the pettiest squabbles of 
 authors, had never heard of Salter's Hall, and 
 asked who cared for such trifles, or what it could 
 possibly matter how anybody had voted on the 
 occasion ? Yet the conference marks a very im- 
 portant point in the religious history of the day, 
 and to know how a man voted may be to define his 
 position in a very serious controversy. The writer, 
 that is, must give the significant facts, but has often 
 to leave the discovery of their significance to 
 the reader. But in order that he should appreciate 
 their significance, he must have far wider know- 
 ledge than he can expound. The dry antiquary 
 will often omit the vital and Insert the merely 
 accidental : he will fail to arrange them in the 
 order or connection which makes them explain 
 their meaning. He will resemble the witness who 
 should fail to mention a bit of evidence which may 
 be incidentally conclusive of a case because he is 
 not able to appreciate its bearing. And, there- 
 fore, though the two lives might be in appearance 
 equally dry, one may teem with useful indications 
 to the intelligent, while the other may be as barren 
 as it looks. The life of the divine, for example, 
 should be given by one who has studied the 
 theology or ecclesiastical history of the day, and 
 
26 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 who therefore knows the significance conferred 
 upon a particular action or expression of opinion by- 
 time and place. He must abstain from exposition 
 beyond narrow limits, and, of course, from con- 
 troversy. He must not expatiate upon the bad 
 influence of the heresy ; or attempt to show that 
 it was a heresy. He must content himself with 
 a pithy indication of its historical position on 
 the development of the time ; give a sufficient 
 summary to show how the doctrine is to be classed 
 in its relation to the main currents of thought ; 
 and indicate the way in which it has since been 
 judged by competent writers, and what is the view 
 now taken by experts. All this, which might, of 
 course, be illustrated in other departments of 
 biography, shows that the writer ought to be full 
 of knowledge, which he must yet hold in reserve, 
 or of which he must content himself with using to 
 suggest serviceable hints. He will show incident- 
 ally why, and in what relations, certain books are 
 worth reading or certain events worth further 
 study ; and often, no doubt, will feel the restraint 
 decidedly painful. 
 
 Lives well written under these conditions may, 
 I hold, really satisfy the commemorative instinct. 
 For the great names we shall look elsewhere : the 
 
NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY 27 
 
 minute names, the mere rank and file of the great 
 army, are constantly of great use ; but rather 
 because they come into the narratives of other lives 
 or supply data for broader histories, than because 
 of the intrinsic interest of the story itself. But 
 there is also an immense number of second-rate 
 people whose lives are full of suggestion to any 
 intelligent reader. The life in such cases should 
 have the same kind of merit as an epitaph, though 
 under less exacting conditions. The epitaph 
 should give in the smallest possible number of 
 words the very essence of a man's character and of 
 his claims upon the memory of posterity. The 
 life which may spread over two or three pages 
 should aim at producing the same effect : and 
 very frequently may give adequate expression to 
 everything that we can really afford to remember 
 of the less prominent actions. I will venture one 
 illustration. There is no class of lives which has a 
 more distinctive character than the lives of our 
 naval heroes, from the Elizabethan days to our 
 own. As I am not criticising the execution of the 
 dictionary, but only indicating its main purpose, I 
 will say nothing in praise of the particular con- 
 tributor who has imbedded in its pages something 
 like a complete naval history of the country. But 
 
28 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 I may say this : to the mere literary reader, the ideal 
 of a sailor is represented by such books as Southey's 
 Life of Nelson ; or still more vividly perhaps by 
 the novels of Captain Marryat or Smollett, or by 
 Kingsley's Westward Ho ! or possibly Miss Austen's 
 Persuasion. We are all supposed to know some- 
 thing of the great admirals, upon whom R. L. 
 Stevenson wrote a charming article. But any one 
 who is attracted by the type, would do well to turn 
 over the dictionary and look up the long list of 
 minor heroes, who stood for their portraits to 
 Marryat and his fellows ; the men who cut out 
 ships in harbour, and fought men-of-war with 
 merchantmen ; and lay in wait for galleons and sup- 
 pressed mutinies, and had desperate single combats 
 with French or American frigates : the Trunnions 
 and Amyas Leighs and Peter Simples of real Hfe, 
 who certainly are to the full as interesting as their 
 imaginary representatives. Many of them have 
 hitherto only existed, as it were, in fragments: 
 their lives have to be put together from despatches 
 and incidental references in memoirs and histories ; 
 but when reconstructed, these lives form a gallery 
 more interesting than that at Greenwich Hospital. 
 They have got into a little Walhalla ; and I think 
 that no one will doubt who makes the experiments 
 
NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY 29 
 
 either as to their deserving their places, or as to the 
 fact that the commemoration gives a very real 
 satisfaction to our desire to keep the memory of 
 our worthies in tolerable repair/ 
 
 And, finally, this may help to justify my daring 
 remark that the dictionary is an amusing work. 
 This, of course, is true only upon certain condi- 
 tions. The reader, as I have intimated, must 
 supply something for himself; he has to take up 
 the dry specimens in this great herbarium, and to 
 expand them partly by the help of his own imagi- 
 nation till they take something of the form and 
 colouring of life. Perhaps, too, it must be added, 
 that he should know the great art of skipping, 
 though some excellent friends of mine have told 
 me that they read through every volume as it 
 appears. Their state is the more gracious. Yet 
 no man is a real reading enthusiast until he is 
 sensible of the pleasure of turning over some 
 miscellaneous collection, and lying like a trout in 
 a stream snapping up, with the added charm of 
 
 1 I am glad to see that, In this observation, I coincide with the 
 author of Admirals All, who has been good enough to say a word 
 for the dictionary in this respect. I am happy that the poetic has 
 confirmed the prosaic judgment. Only I must add that the com- 
 pliment which he pays to the editor of the dictionary is rather due to 
 Professor Laughton, the author of the lives in question. 
 
30 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 unsuspectedness, any of the queer little morsels of 
 oddity or pathos that may drift past him. The 
 old Gentleman s Magazine is charming in that way, 
 but I do not know that one can find a much 
 better hunting-ground than the dictionary. I 
 take down a volume — honestly at random — and 
 simply dip into it to see what will turn up. I 
 range, as it happens, over all the centuries from 
 Caradoc (Caractacus, the Romans called him), 
 who fought against a Roman army backed by an 
 elephant corps, before a.d. 50, to a gentleman of 
 the same name, who became Lord Howden, and 
 died in 1873; from Carausius, who was a bit 
 of a pirate and something of an emperor, in the 
 third century, and whose biographer pathetically 
 observes that the exact dates of his life and 
 adventures are ' not absolutely certain,' to Carlyle, 
 in whose case the full blaze of modern biography 
 has left not even the minutest detail untouched. 
 There is Canute, who is not here introduced to 
 the tide — the biographer finds out, by the way, 
 that an anecdote is simply the poHte name of a He 
 — and mediaeval churchmen, like the admirable 
 Chad, thanks to whom, according to Scott, the 
 fanatic Brooke got his deserts at Lichfield, and 
 William de St, Carilef, whose character, we regret 
 
NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY 31 
 
 to say, is still puzzling, though exactly eight 
 hundred years have passed since he became a fair 
 subject for discussion. Let us hope that it will be 
 cleared up in time. We have that Catesby who 
 to most of us is known by that famous doggerel 
 so much more impressive than the orthodox 
 historical phrases about ' the cat, the rat, and 
 Lovel our dog,' and the other Catesby who wished 
 to try what would certainly have been a most 
 interesting philosophical experiment of blowing 
 King and Parliament into the air and seeing what 
 the country would think of it. In Tudor times 
 are the three Catherines who had the satisfac- 
 tion of calling Henry viii. husband, and three 
 Carolines to match them in the eighteenth century. 
 There is the Elizabethan statesman Cecil, the 
 great Lord Burghley, and the Robert Carr (Earl 
 of Somerset) who introduces us to the darkest 
 tragedy of the time of James i., and Lucius Cary 
 (Lord Falkland), who still goes about ' ingeminat- 
 ing peace ' to remind us of the great civil war ; 
 and John Carteret (Earl Granville), who, in the 
 jovial Hanoverian days, was at the head of the 
 'drunken administration.' Though some of these 
 are sufficiently celebrated figures to be set forth in 
 the standard histories, they have all, I think, a 
 
32 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 personal interest which repays a visit to them in 
 their homes. At the opposite end of the scale we 
 have the names which, though they primarily re- 
 present mere oddities, incidentally light up odd 
 social phases. Here is Margaret Catchpole, a real 
 heroine of romance, who stole a horse and rode 
 seventy miles to visit her lover, and after being 
 transported for an offence which excited the com- 
 passion of her judges, became one of the ' matri- 
 archs ' to whom our Australian cousins trace their 
 descent. There is Bampfylde Moore Carew, the 
 volunteer gypsy, who anticipated Borrow in the 
 previous generation, and gives us a passing glimpse 
 into the vagrant life in old English lanes and 
 commons. There is John Case, astrologer, who, 
 as Addison tells us, made more money by his 
 poetry than Dryden had done in a lifetime. It 
 consisted of the couplet, 
 
 ' Within this place 
 Lives Doctor Case,' 
 
 and is apparently an early triumph of the great 
 art of advertising. There is the worthy Cat, who 
 had an ' educated and thoughtful mind,' whose 
 N^tory illustrates the early growth of clubs, and 
 whose name has been preserved by the new style 
 of portraits. There is the modern hero, Ben 
 
NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY 33 
 
 Caunt, to illustrate the halo which lingered round 
 the last days of prize-fighting. I venture to con- 
 tribute a fresh anecdote to his life. I once made 
 a pilgrimage to the place where Milton wrote the 
 Allegro and Penseroso. The name of the poet 
 seemed to have vanished, but a bust of the great 
 Ben Caunt showed that the spirit of hero-worship 
 was not extinct. Its possessor told us the story 
 with legitimate pride. A son of the hero had 
 brought it in a cart to an admirer after the 
 original's death. He stopped at an inn to refresh 
 himself ' with a bottle of soda-water,' with the 
 result that he upset the cart at the next turning, 
 and the bust fell upon him and killed him on the 
 spot. The bust happily survived, and remains to 
 kindle the enthusiasm of the villagers. Should 
 not a Caunt be remembered as well as a Milton .? 
 He represents a type which had been character- 
 istic, at least, of the days of the men of Trafalgar 
 and Waterloo. A more respectable memorial of 
 that time was the sturdy Carew (Hallowell was his 
 name at the time) who gave to Nelson a coffin 
 made from the mainmast of the Orient, to remind 
 the great man (it was suggested) that he was still 
 mortal. The reminder was hardly needful, one 
 would think, just after the battle of the Nile. 
 
 VOL. I. C 
 
34 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 Perhaps a more interesting glimpse of the same 
 period is given by the history of Richard Carhle, 
 the freethinker, who suffered over nine years' 
 imprisonment for spreading opinions offensive to 
 most of his neighbours, but of whom it is said — 
 and, I think, justly — that he did more than any 
 man of his time to promote the freedom of the 
 Press. His career, at any rate, is curiously illus- 
 trative of the final struggle in that cause. If you 
 prefer a martyrdom in a different cause, you may 
 look at the hfe of Edmund Castle, who made ' an 
 epoch in Semitic scholarship.' He was a man of 
 property who chose to labour eighteen or nine- 
 teen hours a day at a lexicon — a dictionary-maker 
 again ! He lost his health, suffered (it does not 
 quite appear how) fractures and contusions of his 
 limbs, almost lost his sight, and spent all his 
 money. He published his immortal work by 
 subscription, and had to wait for months at the 
 place of sale before he could get a small part of 
 his edition sold. The poor man got a little 
 preferment at last towards the end of his life ; 
 but certainly scholars will not grudge him some 
 sympathy. I will, however, go no further. I see 
 many more suggestive names. The Cartwrights, 
 for example, include an important inventor of 
 
NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY 35 
 
 machinery, a famous dentist, a great Puritan 
 divine, a Romanising bishop, the Colonel New- 
 come of the old reformers, and a once brilliant 
 dramatist. I do not think that my dip into one 
 volume has produced a result differing much from 
 the average. My readers must judge whether it 
 goes to justify my statement. To me it seems 
 that at every haul one finds some specimens 
 which, though they require the reader to do his 
 part, are full of suggestions to the moderately 
 thoughtful reader. ' What a knowledge of human 
 nature you must have acquired ! ' has been said to 
 me, with a touch, I know, of sarcasm. Perhaps 
 I might, if the B's had not tended to turn the A's 
 out of my head, and if a succinct record of a 
 man's main performances were the same thing as 
 a knowledge of the man himself. But this I may 
 say ; that I have received innumerable suggestions 
 for thought, and had many vignettes presented to 
 my imagination, which to a man of any thought 
 or imagination should have been full of interest. 
 If, that is, I had been a Macaulay, I should have 
 approximated to that word perception of the 
 historical panorama which he had to construct 
 by assimilating the raw materials of history. 
 Macaulay had faults which have been so fre- 
 
36 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 quently exposed, that the critic should perhaps 
 be now chiefly anxious to insist upon his astonish- 
 ing power in his own province. And certainly, I 
 think that, though we should wish to see many 
 aspects of history to which Macaulay was blind, 
 nothing could be more delightful than to see 
 the past as clearly, brightly, and graphically as 
 Macaulay saw it. Nothing but a prodigious 
 memory and a keen imagination could enable 
 us to do that. But the dictionary well used, read 
 thoughtfully, with the constant attempt to put 
 flesh and blood upon the dry skeleton of facts, 
 will, I believe, be the best help to enable any one 
 to get as near as his faculties will permit to that 
 desirable consummation. And, though the com- 
 memorative instinct may not be fully gratified, I 
 think that no one can ramble through this long 
 gallery without storing up a number of vivid 
 images of the lesser luminaries, which will have 
 the same eff'ect upon his conceptions of history as 
 a really good set of illustrations upon a narrative 
 of travels. And, finally, I will say, what has 
 often been a comfort to me to remember, that 
 great as is the difl^erence between a good and a 
 bad work of the kind, even a very defective 
 performance is immensely superior to none at all. 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF EDITORS 
 
 What is an editor ? If we turn, as our fathers 
 would have turned, to Johnson's Dictionary, we 
 shall find in the last edition published during his 
 life that the word in 1785 meant either ' publisher ' 
 simply, or editor in the sense in which the name 
 describes Bentley's relation to Horace or War- 
 burton's to Pope. The editor, that is as implying 
 the commander of a periodical, is not yet recog- 
 nised, and Johnson, if any one, would not have 
 overlooked him. Dr. Murray's great dictionary 
 gives 1802 as the date of the earliest recorded use 
 of the word in the now familiar sense. The 
 editor is regarded by most authors as a person 
 whose mission is the suppression of rising genius, 
 or as a traitor who has left their ranks to help 
 their natural enemy, the publisher. Hateful as 
 he may be in himself, he is an interesting figure 
 in the annals of literature. The main facts are 
 
 familiar enough, and are given in various histories 
 
 37 
 
38 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 of the Press. -^ Yet I have found even in such 
 books phrases which seem to imply a misconcep- 
 tion — allusions, for example, to the ' editor and 
 staff* of a newspaper in the days of Queen Anne. 
 Such a slip occurs in the most perfect presentment 
 of the spirit of that period, Thackeray's Esmond. 
 Esmond goes to see the printer of 'The Postboy^ 
 and in the house encounters Swift. ' I presume 
 you are the editor of The Postboy^ sir .? ' says Swift. 
 ' I am but a contributor,' replies Esmond. The 
 scene is otherwise quite accurate, but Esmond, in 
 his anxiety to be smart upon Swift, makes an 
 anachronism. I do not know who wrote The 
 Postboy at this period (17 12), but it was shortly 
 before written by Abel Boyer. Boyer was a 
 French refugee who had to toil in Grub Street for 
 his living. Some of his painful compilations are still 
 known to antiquarians, and his French dictionary, 
 or a dictionary which continued to pass under his 
 name, survived till quite recently, if it be not still 
 extant. He was employed by one Roper ^ to 
 write The Postboy, but was turned off in 1709. 
 
 1 I may especially refer to the last of these, Mr. Fox Bourne's 
 History of Neivspapers, from whicli I have appropriated some facts. 
 
 2 In Esmond, the printer of T/ie Postboy is Leach, who really printed 
 The Postman. Whether Kemp, the writer mentioned by Thackeray, 
 was a real person, I do not know. 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF EDITORS 39 
 
 He then published a pathetic appeal to the public, 
 pointing out that the wicked Roper had made 
 money by his paper, and was dismissing him 
 without just cause. He tried, like other men in 
 the same position, to carry on a ' true ' Postboy^ 
 which, if ever fairly started, has vanished from 
 the world. What kind of interviews Boyer was 
 likely to have with Swift may be guessed from 
 The Journal to Stella. Swift calls him a ' French 
 dog who has abused me in a pamphlet ' ; orders a 
 messenger to take him in charge, and requests St. 
 John to ' swinge him.' Whoever wrote it after- 
 wards, The Postboy itself was a ' tri-weekly ' sheet 
 which would go comfortably into a column of 
 The Times. Its speciality, due probably to Boyer's 
 French origin, was its foreign correspondence, 
 and it had little else. The whole, as a rule, seems 
 to have been made up of little paragraphs extracted 
 from letters giving remarks about the war, and 
 the remaining space was eked out by half a dozen 
 advertisements. Boyer's ' editing ' was all done 
 with a pair of scissors. He was hardly more than 
 a clerk employed by Roper to select bits of news, 
 and probably to arrange for a supply of the 
 necessary material. 
 
 We can make a tolerably distinct picture of the 
 
^ 
 
 40 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 Grub Street of this period. The street, which 
 not long ago exchanged its ill-omened name for 
 Milton Street, had become famous in the days of 
 the Civil War, when the abolition of the Star 
 Chamber gave a chance to unlicensed printers, and 
 the appetite for news was naturally at its keenest. 
 When order was restored it was put under 
 restraint, and languished dismally through the 
 Restoration period. Roger Lestrange was in- 
 trusted, not only with the superintending of the 
 one official organ, but with power of suppressing 
 every rival. He acted as a kind of detective, and 
 he declares that he spent £s^'^ ^ Y^^^ '^^ main- 
 taining ' spies for information.' One night in 
 1663 he showed his zeal by arresting a wretched 
 printer called Twyn. Twyn, whose only excuse 
 was that he was the father of three poor children, 
 was caught in the act of printing what he called 
 'some mettlesome stuiF.' Though the stuff was 
 too outrageous to be fully quoted even in the 
 reports of his trial, it appears to have asserted that 
 even kings should be responsible to their people, 
 a doctrine which might be taken to hint at a 
 popular rising. Twyn was sent to the gallows to 
 clear his views of the law of libel. That law, so 
 Scroggs declared in 1680, was that to 'publish 
 
■^ 
 
 THE EVOLUTION OF EDITORS 41 
 
 any newspaper whatsoever was illegal, and showed 
 a manifest intent to the breach of the peace/ 
 Although this doctrine and the practice which 
 it sanctioned are startling enough to us, they 
 suggest one significant remark. The accounts of 
 Twyn's and other trials at the time prove the 
 infamy of Scroggs and his like, but they indirectly 
 prove also the advent of a change. The reporter 
 had come into existence, and was doing his work 
 admirably. The proceedings are taken down 
 word for word, and the scenes are often so vividly 
 described that they are more amusing, because 
 less long-winded, than accounts of modern trials. 
 Macaulay remarks that Jeffreys was awed at the 
 trial of the seven bishops by the ' thick rows 
 of earls and barons.' The reporter contributed 
 equally to the remarkable change in fairness of 
 trials which took place at the Revolution. It 
 was to be a long time before he could force his 
 way into the gallery of the House of Commons ; 
 but his influence in the law-courts was percept- 
 ible. ^ The Grub Street of Boyer's time contained 
 many of the waifs and strays from this period of 
 persecution. In wandering through that dismal 
 
 * In 1764 the reporters were liable to be turned out of court. 
 See XIV. State Trials, p. 35. 
 
42 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 region we get the most distinct of our few 
 glimpses of light as from a tallow-candle held 
 by the crazy scribbler John Dunton. Dunton, a 
 descendant of clergymen, had become a book- 
 seller, and got into various intricate troubles, till, 
 as he tells us, he ' stooped so low as to become an 
 author,' and sank in time to be a ' willing and 
 everlasting drudge to the quill'! In 1705 he 
 published his Life and Errors^ a book which 
 makes one long to ask him a few questions. He 
 had seen many people of whom he could have 
 given interesting 'reminiscences.' Unluckily he 
 did not know in what posterity would be interested. 
 We do not much care to know at the present day 
 that Richard Sault was in all probabihty the true 
 author of the Second Spira, a book of which 
 Dunton sold 30,000 copies in six weeks, and 
 which he now requests his readers to burn if they 
 meet it. I have never had the chance of burning 
 it, and cannot account for his remorse, though I 
 hope that the sale was some consolation. But, 
 besides this, Dunton had published the Athenian 
 Mercury^ a sort of anticipatory Notes and Queries, 
 and to it not only this famous Sault, but John 
 Wesley's father and Sir William Temple and Swift 
 had sent contributions. He had known, too, all 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF EDITORS 43 
 
 the booksellers, printers, binders, engravers, and 
 hackney authors of the time, and gives us tantalis- 
 ing glimpses of some familiar names. He has 
 short descriptions of considerably over a hundred 
 booksellers, and from his account we are glad 
 to observe that they already showed their main 
 characteristic — the possession, namely, of all the 
 cardinal virtues. He enumerates and compliments 
 all the writers of weekly sheets. Among them is 
 Boyer, whom he praises for the ' matchless beauties 
 of his style ' ; Defoe, with whom he had unluckily 
 a running quarrel, and who is therefore men- 
 tioned with less warmth than inferior rivals ; and 
 Tutchin, whose Observator is ' noways inferior ' to 
 Defoe's Review. Tutchin was the famous person 
 who was sentenced by Jeffreys, for his share in 
 Monmouth's revolt, to a punishment of such 
 severity that he petitioned the king to be hanged 
 instead. His petition is supposed to be unique, 
 and his prayer was not granted. Tutchin escaped 
 to see Jeffreys in the Tower, and was reported 
 to have sent him a halter concealed in a barrel 
 of oysters. Tutchin was tried in 1704 for some 
 of his Observators, in which he seems to have 
 obscurely hinted that there might be some corrup- 
 tion in the navy. He escaped in consequence of 
 
44 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 a technical blunder in the indictment unintelligible 
 to the lay reader, but, we are told, was afterwards 
 assaulted in consequence of some of his writings, 
 and so cruelly beaten that he died of his wounds. 
 The evidence on his trial shows clearly what a 
 leading newspaper was in those days. Tutchin 
 had agreed with the printer to write a weekly 
 paper for which he was to receive los. 6d. a time. 
 The number printed was 266, and we are glad to 
 hear that the printer raised the price in time to 20s, 
 The printer incidentally admits that he had himself 
 done such ' editing ' as was necessary ; that is, had 
 struck out phrases which seemed to be Hbellous, 
 
 Defoe and his rival Tutchin differed from 
 Boyer in this, that their papers were in reahty 
 weekly pamphlets, or consisted mainly of the 
 matter which would now be made into leading 
 articles. Tutchin and Defoe were sound Whigs, 
 though Defoe's Whiggism had to make awkward 
 compromises with his interests. Their chief oppo- 
 nent was the vigorous nonjuror and voluminous 
 controversialist Charles Leslie, a martyr to High 
 Church principles, who had to live partly by his 
 pen, and from 1706 to 1709 pubhshed The 
 Rehearsal on the side of unflinching Jacobitism. 
 He escaped a trial for treason by retiring to St. 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF EDITORS 45 
 
 Germains. The author had always to keep one 
 
 eye upon the Attorney-General, and Grub Street 
 
 was a Cave of Adullam for broken men, ruined in 
 
 trade or political troubles, who could just keep 
 
 body and soul together by these productions. 
 
 They were ' authors,' not ' editors ' of their papers, 
 
 and The Review, or Ohservator, or Rehear sal yR^no. 
 
 simply the personal utterances of Defoe, Tutchin, 
 
 and Leslie. Whether Defoe, like Tutchin, was 
 
 paid by his printer, or whether, as seems more 
 
 probable in so keen a man of business, he employed 
 
 the printer, is more than I know. In the later 
 
 years of his troublesome life, he was at one time 
 
 in a position of respectability, with a comfortable 
 
 house and garden, and able to provide a portion 
 
 for his daughter. But Defoe was exceptional. 
 
 Meanwhile the plan had been adopted in a higher 
 
 sphere. Steele is distinguished in one of the lists 
 
 of authors as a 'gentleman born.' The official 
 
 Gazette had been intrusted to him with a liberal 
 
 salary of ;^300 a year, and, as we all know, in 
 
 1709 he started 'The Tatler, which became the 
 
 lineal ancestor of The Spectator and the long series 
 
 of British Essayists. All the best-known authors 
 
 of the eighteenth century tried their hands at this 
 
 form of composition, as our grandmothers and 
 
46 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 great-grandmothers had good cause to know. 
 The essays were lay sermons, whose authors con- 
 descended, it was supposed, to turn from grave 
 studies of philosophy or politics to topics at once 
 edifying and intelligible to the weaker sex. Many 
 of these series implied joint-stock authorship, and 
 therefore some kind of editing. We know, for 
 example, how Steele was ill-advised enough to 
 insert in 'The Guardian a paper by his young 
 admirer Pope, which ostensibly puffed their 
 common friend Philips's Pastorals, but under a 
 thin cover of irony contrived to compare them 
 very unfavourably with his own rival performances. 
 Pope and Philips lived afterwards, as Johnson 
 puts it, in a perpetual ^ reciprocation of malevo- 
 lence ' ; and the editor no doubt had already 
 discovered that there might be thorns in his 
 pillow. In those happy days, too, when the 
 ' Rev. Mr, Grove ' could win immortality on the 
 strength of three or four papers in The Spectator, 
 Steele must no doubt have had to deal in some of 
 the diplomacy which is a modern editor's defence 
 against unwelcome volunteers. But he held no 
 recognised office. When he got Addison to help 
 him in The Tatler, he resembled, according to his 
 familiar phrase, the ' distressed prince who calls in 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF EDITORS 47 
 
 a powerful neighbour to his aid.' To use a 
 humbler comparison, he was more like the 
 preacher who asks a friend to occupy his pulpit 
 for a Sunday or two, and finds his assistant's 
 sermons more popular than his own. Addison 
 and Steele appear to have started 'The Spectator in 
 alliance, and they sold the right of publication 
 when it was collected in a new form. The 
 precedent was often followed by little knots of 
 friends, and some one, of course, would have to do 
 such editing as was wanted. One result is character- 
 istic. There was as yet no ' We.' The writer of an 
 essay had therefore to speak of himself in the first 
 person ; and as the first person was not the indivi- 
 dual writer, but the writer in his capacity as essayist, 
 an imaginary author was invented. Hence arose the 
 Spectator himself, and Nestor Ironside and Caleb 
 Dan vers and their like. The last representatives of 
 the fashion were Sylvanus Urban of The Gentleman's 
 Magazine and Oliver Yorke of Frasers, if indeed 
 ' Mr. Punch ' is not a legitimate descendant. The 
 fictitious author was a kind of mask to be worn 
 by each actor in turn. But of course periodicals 
 of this kind, which consisted of nothing but an 
 essay supplied by some author with occasional 
 help from his friends, required no definite editor. 
 
48 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 Afterwards they frequently appeared as a series 
 of articles in one of the magazines, and had less of 
 an independent existence. For the main origin of 
 the editor we must, then, go back to Grub Street. 
 One point must be noticed. Between Grub Street 
 and these higher circles of elegant authorship 
 there was little communication, and certainly no 
 love lost. The modern author has sometimes 
 looked fondly back to the period of Queen Anne 
 as a golden epoch when literature received its 
 proper reward. Macaulay speaks of the next 
 years as a time when the author fell, as it 
 were, between two stools — when he had lost the 
 patron and not been taken up by the puMic. 
 This, I think, suggests an inaccurate view. 
 Grub Street had never basked in the sunshine of 
 patronage. Its denizens had few interviews with 
 great men, unless they were such as Boyer had 
 with Swift or Twyn with Lestrange. The 
 ' hackney author,' as Dunton already calls him, 
 was simply a nuisance to be suppressed unless he 
 could be used as a spy. A few men of education 
 drifted into the miserable street ; royalist divines 
 (like Fuller) under the Commonwealth, and 
 ejected ministers such as Baxter under Charles ii. 
 Baxter tells us that he managed by ceaseless 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF EDITORS 49 
 
 writing to make ^{70 a year, and, now and then, 
 such men were helped by some sympathetic friend 
 in power. But patronage, beyond an occasional 
 bribe, or possibly a payment of hush-money, 
 generally descended, if it descended at all, upon 
 others than the true Grub Street author. The 
 great men of the seventeenth century now and 
 then acted as patrons ; the two greatest English 
 thinkers of the time, Hobbes and Locke, were 
 supported by the Earls of Devonshire and 
 Shaftesbury. Some patronage was bestowed 
 upon Dryden and the poets, though they do not 
 seem to have considered it over-liberal. Butler 
 and Otway are the typical examples of their fate. 
 Still, a nobleman often felt bound to send his 
 twenty guineas in return for a dedication. 
 Learned men, too, in the Church might of course 
 hope for professional preferment. But all this 
 was no comfort to the bookseller's drudge, and 
 he got no benefits of this kind from the Revolu- 
 tion. What then happened was, I take it, very 
 simple. The great man, thanks to the growth 
 of parliamentary power, suddenly found himself 
 enabled to be a patron at the public expense. 
 Naturally he was suddenly seized with a fit of 
 liberality. The famous writers of Que^n Anne's 
 
 VOL. I. 
 
50 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 day — Addison, and Congreve, and Prior, and 
 
 their friends — became commissioners of excise, of 
 
 hackney coaches, and so forth, or found shelter in 
 
 other pleasant little offices, then newly created, of 
 
 which Ministers could dispose. Such patronage 
 
 was, of course, not given for abstruse learning ; 
 
 scholars and antiquaries were not sought out in 
 
 their studies or college lecture-rooms, or enabled 
 
 to pursue recondite researches. Still less did it 
 
 come to Grub Street. The recipients of the 
 
 golden shower were ' wits,' or men known in ' the 
 
 town,' which was no longer overshadowed by the 
 
 Court. They were selected from the agreeable 
 
 companions at one of the newly invented clubs, 
 
 where statesmen could relax over their claret and 
 
 brush up their schoolboy recollections of Horace 
 
 and Homer. Halifax, Harley, and St. John 
 
 could give a few crumbs from their table to the 
 
 men whom they met at the Kitcat or the 
 
 Brothers' Club. Swift hoped to be the founder of 
 
 an academy which should direct patronage to men 
 
 of letters, and the anecdotes of his attempts to help 
 
 his poorer brethren show the most creditable side 
 
 of his character. The pleasant time disappeared 
 
 for an obvious reason. In the reign of Queen 
 
 Anne the system of Party Government was 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF EDITORS 51 
 
 substantially got into working order. That 
 meant that offices were no longer to be given 
 away for ornamental purposes, but used for 
 practical business. Swift called Walpole ' Bob, the 
 poet's foe/ for his indifference to literary merit ; 
 but Walpole was the name of a system. Places 
 were wanted to exchange for votes, and a writer 
 of plays and essays was not worth buying unless 
 he were proprietor or hanger-on of the proprietor 
 of a borough. As soon as this was clearly under- 
 stood, the patronage of men of letters went out of 
 fashion, and I greatly doubt whether literature was 
 any the worse for the change. 
 
 Grub Street, at any rate, had been little affected 
 by the gleam of good fortune which came to the 
 upper circles, and was not hurt by its disappearance. 
 The prizes bestowed upon the gentlemen and 
 scholars who could write ' Spectator ' were above 
 the reach of Tutchin or Defoe. They had, indeed, 
 reaped some rather questionable advantages from 
 the political change besides the abolition of 
 licensing. Harley was the first English statesman 
 to use the Press systematically. Under his 
 management the Grub Street authors ceased to be 
 simply vermin to be hunted down ; they might be 
 themselves used in the chase. Harley's name 
 
52 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 constantly turns up in this dismal region ; he 
 saved Boyer from Swift's wrath ; he appears in 
 the background of other obscure careers, such as 
 that of the deist Toland ; and he is specially 
 memorable for his connection with two of the 
 greatest of English journalists, Swift and Defoe. 
 Swift, of course, was petted as an equal, and 
 flattered by hopes of a bishopric ; while Defoe 
 was treated as an ' underspurleather,' a mere agent 
 who could be handed over by Whig to Tory and 
 Tory to Whig as the Ministry changed. Each of 
 them, however, wrote what passed for his own 
 individual utterance. 'The Examiner^ while Swift 
 wrote it, represented Swift, as The Review repre- 
 sented Defoe. The papers were not like modern 
 party newspapers, complex organisms with editors 
 and proprietors and contributors, but simply 
 periodical pamphlets by a single author, though 
 their utterances might be more or less inspired by 
 the Government. The system was carried on 
 through the Walpole period, but a change soon 
 begins dimly to show itself. A new race is arising, 
 called by Ralph, one of themselves, ' authors by 
 profession/ most of whose names are familiar only 
 to profound commentators upon the Dunciad. 
 The notes to that work were, as was said, the 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF EDITORS 53 
 
 regular place of execution for the victims of Pope 
 and the blustering Warburton. Ralph, says War- 
 burton in one of them, ' ended in the common 
 sink of all such writers, a political newspaper.' 
 Although that represented the lowest stage of 
 human existence, there were some pickings to be 
 had even there. The statement made by a 
 Committee of the House of Commons is often 
 quoted, that in ten years Walpole spent over 
 ;^50,ooo upon the Press; over ^10,000 going 
 to one Arnall, probably in part to be transmitted 
 to others. That, as we are told, was the flourishing 
 period of corruption, and if authors got their 
 share of it their morals doubtless suffered. And 
 yet we may say, if we will not be too puritanical, 
 that even a capacity for receiving bribes may imply 
 a relative improvement. A man who can be bribed 
 can generally make a bargain ; he is something 
 more than a simple spy. Defoe was a slave to 
 Ministers, who kept his conviction hanging over 
 his head, and just gave him scraps enough to 
 support him in the dirty work which he tried, very 
 hard it seems, but not quite successfully, to re- 
 concile to his conscience. Ralph was evidently 
 treated with relative respect. His moral standard 
 is defined by Bubb Dodington. Ralph, says that 
 
54 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 type of political jobbery, was ' a very honest man.' 
 This, as Dodington's account of him shows — ^with 
 no sense of incongruity — was quite compatible with 
 a readiness to sell himself to any party. It only 
 meant that he kept the bargain for the time. 
 Honesty, that is, did not imply so quixotic a 
 principle as adherence to political principles, but 
 adherence for the time being to the man who had 
 bought you ; and even that naturally appeared an 
 exceptionally lofty strain to Dodington. Ralph 
 himself complains bitterly of the niggardly patron- 
 age of literature, but he ended with a pension of 
 £600 a year. Among his allies and enemies were 
 men like Amhurst and Arnall and Concanen and 
 others, who, chiefly again through references in the 
 Dunciad, have got their names into biographical 
 dictionaries. Some of them gained humble 
 rewards. Amhurst, a clever writer, who began, 
 like Shelley, by expulsion from Oxford, seems to 
 represent the nearest approach to the modern 
 editor. As ' Caleb Danvers,' imaginary author of 
 The Craftsman, he received the most brilliant 
 political writing of the day from Bolingbroke, 
 Pulteney, and the ' patriots ' ; and Ralph declares 
 that he died of a broken heart when, upon 
 Walpole's fall, his services met with no reward 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF EDITORS 55 
 
 from his friends. 'The Craftsman was itself on 
 l^he Spectator or Examiner model ; but, as a party- 
 organ, inspired and partly written by the leaders 
 of the Opposition, it had something of the position 
 of a modern newspaper ; and Amhurst, no doubt, 
 though in a very dependent position, may be 
 regarded as a humble forerunner of the full-blown 
 editor of later days. 
 
 Meanwhile, however, the comparative calm of 
 the political atmosphere under Walpole was fa- 
 vourable to another direction of literary develop- 
 ment. Defoe found time for the multitudinous 
 activities which entitle him to be a great-grand- 
 father of all modern journalism. He helped to 
 start newspapers ; he published secret documents ; 
 he interviewed Jack Sheppard at the foot of the 
 gallows ; he collected ghost stories ; he wrote 
 accounts of worthy dissenting divines recently 
 deceased; he wrote edifying essays upon the devil 
 and things in general ; he described tours in the 
 country ; he passed Robinson Crusoe through a 
 journal like a modern feuilleton, and, in short, he 
 opened almost every vein of periodical literature 
 that has been worked by his successors. As the 
 time goes on we find authors who really make a 
 decent living by their pens. There is John Camp- 
 
^ 
 
 56 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 bell, for example, the richest author, according to 
 Johnson, ^ who ever grazed the common of 
 literature ' ; the ' pious ' gentleman on the same 
 authority, who, though he never entered a church, 
 never passed one without taking off his hat. And 
 to speak of still living names, we have Richardson, 
 who had the good luck to be printer as well as 
 author, and Fielding, forced to choose between 
 being a hackney author or a hackney coachman, 
 and Johnson, who was presently to proclaim, as 
 Carlyle puts it, the ' blast of doom ' of patronage. 
 The profession, or at least the trade, is beginning 
 to be established, and there will naturally be a 
 demand for editing. The author of the loftier 
 sphere still laboured under the delusion that it was 
 unworthy of him to take money for his works. 
 Swift, as he tells us, never made anything, till the 
 judicious advice of Pope brought something for his 
 Miscellanies. Pope himself, though he made his 
 fortune by his Homer, is hardly an exception. 
 The sums which he received, indeed, enabled him 
 to live at his ease, but they were the product of 
 a subscription, and, I fancy, of such a subscription 
 as has never been surpassed. The good society of 
 those days held, and deserves credit for holding, 
 that it would do well to give a kind of national 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF EDITORS 57 
 
 commission to the most rising young poet of the 
 day to produce a worthy translation of the accepted 
 masterpiece of poetry. It was a piece of joint- 
 stock patronage, and not a successful publishing 
 speculation — though it succeeded in that sense 
 also — by which Pope made his fortune. Grub 
 Street, therefore, would rejoice little in a success 
 which scarcely suggested even a precedent for 
 imitation, and which fell to the man who was its 
 deadliest enemy. Pope, with his excessive sensi- 
 bility, was stung by its taunts to that war with the 
 dunces which led to his most elaborate and least 
 creditable piece of work. Though the bulk of 
 his adversaries was obscure enough, the body 
 collectively is beginning to raise its head a little. 
 The booksellers, from Lintot to Tonson down to 
 the disreputable Curll, are indulging in a variety 
 of speculations from which the form of modern 
 periodical literature begins to emerge distinctly. 
 One symptom is remarkable. At the beginning 
 of 1 73 1 the ingenious Cave, having bought a 
 small printing - office, started The Gentleman s 
 Magazine, destined to have a long life and to 
 be followed by many imitators. It had various 
 obscure precursors, such as The Historical 
 Register^ and at first was a humble affair enough. 
 
58 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 Most of its pages were filled with reproductions 
 of articles from the weekly journals ; but it 
 included brief notices of books, and occasional 
 poems and records of events and miscellaneous 
 literature ; and, in short, was complex enough to 
 require a judicious editor. Johnson tells how 
 Cave, when he had heard that one subscriber out 
 of the 10,000 whom he speedily attracted was 
 likely to drop the magazine, would say, ' Let us 
 have something good in the next number.'- No- 
 thing more could be required to prove that Cave 
 had the true editorial spirit. Still, however, the 
 editor was not, and for a long time he was not to 
 be, differentiated from the proprietor. Cave him- 
 self looked after every detail. He arranged for 
 the parliamentary reports (a plan in which his 
 first predecessor appears to have been our old 
 friend Boyer in his monthly Political State), and 
 employed the famous reporter who clothed the 
 utterances of every orator of those days in 
 sonorous Johnsonese. The success of 'The Gentle- 
 man s Magazine probably led to The Monthly 
 Review, started by Ralph Griffiths in 1749, and 
 as this was of a Whiggish turn, it was opposed 
 by The Critical Review, started by Archibald 
 Hamilton in 1756, and supported by Smollett; 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF EDITORS 59 
 
 a sequence like that of T!he Edinburgh and 
 Quarterly Reviews. These two were the first, 
 and till l^he Edinburgh Review^ the leading repre- 
 sentatives of literary criticism. Both of them were 
 edited by the publishers. Griffiths, in particular, 
 is famous as the taskmaster of Goldsmith. When 
 a publisher has to do with a man of genius, 
 especially with a man of genius over whom it is 
 proper to be sentimental, he may be pretty certain 
 of contemptuous treatment by the biographers of 
 his client. Yet it is possible than even Griffiths 
 had something to say for himself, and that if he 
 was a hard master. Goldsmith may not have been a 
 very business-like subordinate. Still, as Griffiths 
 is said to have made £1000 a year by a venture 
 to which Goldsmith only owed a bare escape 
 from starvation, the printer may have been of 
 opinion that the immediate profit was worth a 
 good deal of posthumous abuse. However this 
 may be, it is noticeable that the men of letters 
 who appear in Boswell's great portrait gallery had 
 no haven of editorship to drift into. They might 
 be employed by the publisher of a magazine, and 
 no doubt their drudgery would involve some of 
 the work of a modern editor. But there was no 
 such pillow for the wearied author as a regular 
 
6o STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 office with a fixed income and the occupation of 
 trimming other people's works instead of painfully 
 straining matter from your own brain. Good 
 service to a political patron, or very rarely some 
 other merit, might be paid by a pension ; but, 
 without one, even Johnson, the acknowledged 
 dictator of letters in his time, would apparently 
 have never escaped from the writer's treadmill. 
 He was never, it would seem, more than a month 
 or two ahead of the friends who have become 
 types of the Grub Street author : Smart, who let 
 himself for ninety-nine years to a bookseller, or 
 Boyse, whose only clothing was a blanket with 
 holes in it through which his hands protruded to 
 manufacture verses. Perhaps the Secretary of the 
 Literary Fund could produce parallels even at the 
 present day, and the increase in the prizes has 
 certainly not diminished the number of blanks. 
 Meanwhile, political journalism was coming to 
 fresh life with the agitation of the early days of 
 George iii. "the North Briton, in which Wilkes 
 began his warfare, was a weekly periodical 
 pamphlet after The Craftsman fashion, started 
 at a week's notice to meet Smollett's Briton, 
 and written chiefly by Wilkes with help from 
 Churchill. It had a short and stormy life, and 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF EDITORS 6i 
 
 was not properly a newspaper. But when Wilkes 
 fought his later campaign, and was backed by 
 Junius, we have at last a genuine example of a 
 newspaper warfare of the modern kind. The 
 Public Advertiser had a significant history. It 
 was the new form of "The Daily Post, started in 
 17 19 by (or with the help of) Defoe, The 
 Woodfall family, well known till the end of the 
 century, came to have the chief share in it ; and 
 in 1752 gave it a new name and form, when 
 Fielding seems to have acted more or less as 
 sponsor. Upon dropping a periodical of his own, 
 he advised his subscribers to transfer their favours 
 to this paper, to which, moreover, he sent all his 
 own advertisements, one as Justice of the Peace. 
 Probably the recommendation means that it had 
 somehow been made worth Fielding's while to let 
 the paper have a monopoly of these notices. It 
 seems that fifteen years previously, the value of 
 the paper was about £^4^0. By the Junius period, 
 twenty years later, this had considerably increased. 
 The property was held in shares, chiefly by well- 
 known booksellers and printers. A tenth be- 
 longed to Henry Sampson Woodfall, who took 
 the management from 1758, when his father died, 
 and acted as editor for thirty-five years. The 
 
62 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 circulation in the Junius period was about 3000 
 daily, and in 1774 (just after Junius had ceased) 
 the profits were ^1740. The accounts which 
 have been preserved show the general nature of 
 the business. The expenses, other than printing, 
 included ;{^200 paid to the theatres for advertise- 
 ments of plays, an item which has long got to the 
 other side of the account ; ;!^2 8o for home news ; 
 and smaller sums for foreign intelligence, and so 
 forth. Nothing is set down for editor or con- 
 tributors, and the obvious reason is that neither 
 class existed. The contributors were some of 
 the poor scribblers of Grub Street who collected 
 material for paragraphs, or at times indulged in 
 small political squibs. Contemporary portraits 
 of the professional journalists of those days may 
 be found in Foote's farces.-^ They are poor 
 wretches, dependent upon ' Vamp ' the bookseller, 
 or ' Index ' the printer ; living in garrets, em- 
 ployed as hawkers of scandal, domestic and 
 official, rising during the parliamentary session 
 to political abuse, and in the recess picking up 
 accounts of ' remarkable effects of thunder and 
 lightning.' ' All is filth that comes to their net,' 
 
 1 See The Author (1757), and The Bankrupt (1776). 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF EDITORS 63 
 
 observes one of the characters, and, in any case, 
 they represent the class of labour which now 
 fills up the interstices of more serious writing. 
 T'he Public Advertiser, however, was by no 
 means composed of such matter. If Woodfall 
 had to pay the theatres instead of being paid 
 by them, he got his contributors for nothing. 
 The volunteer correspondent was apparently as 
 abundant then as now, and the paper is chiefly 
 filled by his lucubrations. Woodfall, who seems 
 to have been a worthy man, prided himself 
 especially upon his impartiality. He accepted 
 letters from all sides, and the paper, though 
 without leading articles, was full of lively con- 
 troversy upon all the leading topics of the day ; 
 Junius, of course, during his short career, being 
 the most effective writer. Naturally, the paper 
 required editing, and in a very serious sense. 
 Woodfall was responsible when Junius assailed 
 George in., and had to keep a very sharp eye 
 upon the performances of his anonymous con- 
 tributors. Still, however, though in point of fact 
 an editor, he was primarily the managing partner 
 of a business. Probably, he would receive some 
 extra share of the profits in that capacity, and 
 would come very near to being an editor in the 
 
64 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 modern sense.^ We are told about this time that 
 William Dodd, the popular preacher who was 
 hanged for forgery in 1777, had 'descended so 
 low as to become editor of a newspaper' — a 
 degrading position which would account for a 
 clergyman reaching the gallows. Still the genuine 
 editor has not as yet become a distinct personage. 
 Between this time and the revolutionary period 
 several of the papers were started which were to 
 be the main organs of public opinion down to our 
 own day. On November 13th, 1776, Horace 
 Walpole looked out of his window and saw a body 
 of men marching down Piccadilly — volunteers, he 
 guessed, for service in the American troubles. 
 He was more astonished than we should be on 
 discovering that they were simply ' sandwich men,' 
 or at least men with papers in their caps or bills 
 in their hands, advertising a newspaper. Henry 
 Bate Dudley, the ' fighting parson,' who lived to 
 become a baronet and a canon of Ely, was at this 
 time chaplain to Lord Lyttelton and employing 
 his leisure in writing plays, fighting duels, or 
 carrying on 'The Morning Post. It had begun 
 four years earlier, and Bate was now appealing for 
 
 1 A ledger of The Public Advertiser, from 1766 to 1771, is now in 
 the Free Library at Chelsea, to which it was presented by Sir C. Dilke. 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF EDITORS 65 
 
 support against a rival who was starting a new 
 Morning Post. Bate, as Walpole says, is ' author ' 
 (still not editor) of the old Morning Post ; and in 
 1780 he left it to set up 'The Morning Herald m 
 opposition. A duel or two and a confinement for 
 a year in the King's Bench prison varied his 
 amusements, Walpole moralises after his fashion 
 upon the ' expensive masquerade exhibited by a 
 clergyman in defence of daily scandal against 
 women of the highest rank, in the midst of a civil 
 war ' ! I do not know how far The Morning Post 
 deserved this imputation ; but its history shortly 
 afterwards brings us within reach of the modern 
 system. Three men in particular played a great 
 part in the transformation of the newspaper ; two 
 of them, as might be anticipated, were energetic 
 young Scots, and one of these came from Aberdeen, 
 the centre, as many of its inhabitants have told 
 me, whence spread all good things. Perry, Stuart, 
 and Walter were these creators of the modern 
 newspaper, and their history shows how the ' able 
 editor ' finally came to life. The first Walter 
 was a bookseller, who thought that he could turn 
 to account an invention called ' logography ' (the 
 types were to be whole words instead of letters) 
 by printing a newspaper. Though the invention 
 
 VOL. I. E 
 
66 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 failed, the newspaper lived for a short time as 
 The Universal Register, and became The Times 
 on January i, 1788. Walter's first declarations 
 show how accurately he had devised the conditions 
 of success. His ideal paper was to give some- 
 thing for all tastes ; it was not to be merely 
 commercial nor merely political, it was to represent 
 public opinion generally, not any particular party, 
 and it was never ' to offend the ear of delicacy.' 
 When it had survived logography and obtained its 
 incomparable monosyllabic name, it was fitted for 
 a successful career. The war was an ill wind 
 enough, but it blew prosperity to newspapers as 
 the wars of the Great Rebellion and of Queen 
 Anne's day had given fresh impulse to its infancy 
 and boyhood. Walter, too, and his son, who 
 took the helm in 1802, were keen in applying 
 mechanical improvements and organising the new 
 machinery. The Times seems to have invented 
 the foreign correspondent, its representative, Henry 
 Crabb Robinson, being probably the first specimen 
 of the genus : it beat the Government in getting 
 the first news of battles, and defeated a strike of 
 the printers in order to introduce a new method 
 of printing. The younger Walter, however, 
 seems still to have combined the functions of 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF EDITORS 67 
 
 editor and proprietor until 1810, when Sir John 
 Stoddart became editor. Stoddart was succeeded 
 by Barnes in 18 17, and Barnes in 1841 by Delane, 
 when editorship had become not only a separate 
 function, but a position of high political im- 
 portance. James Perry, meanwhile, had come into 
 the profession from a different side. He had 
 been early thrown upon his own resources, and 
 about 1777 sent some articles to a newspaper 
 which gained him employment at the rate of a 
 guinea and a half a week. He soon rose to a 
 better position. T!he Morning Chronicle had been 
 started in 1769 by William Woodfall (younger 
 brother of Henry Sampson), who gained the nick- 
 name ' Memory Woodfall ' from his powers of bring- 
 ing back debates in his head. His reports became 
 the great feature of The Chronicle ; but Perry, who 
 was getting four guineas a week for editing 'The 
 Gazetteer, succeeded in beating Woodfall by 
 employing a staff of reporters. The Chronicle 
 began to decline. Perry, managing with the help 
 of a friend to scrape together about ^1000, 
 bought the paper and made it the accepted organ 
 of the Whig Party. It soon became a leading 
 paper, and was for a time at the head of the 
 London Press. It was ultimately sold after 
 
68 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 Perry's death in 1821 for ^42,000. Perry 
 appears to have edited it himself until 18 17, when 
 his mantle fell upon another vigorous Scot, John 
 Black, who had joined it as a reporter. Black 
 and Barnes thus started simultaneously, Black 
 representing the opinions of the 'philosophical 
 Radicals,' and being steadily inspired by James 
 Mill. Thus Perry, like Walter, marks the end of 
 the period in which the proprietor still habitually 
 acted as editor. 
 
 Perry at various times received contributions 
 from many of the most eminent writers of the 
 time. Coleridge got a guinea out of him at a 
 critical moment. Thomas Campbell pubhshed 
 Te Mariners of England in The Chronicle 
 Charles Lamb sent him paragraphs ; Sheridan, 
 Mackintosh, Hazlitt, Tom Moore were among his 
 contributors ; and Lord Campbell, better known 
 as The Chancellor, was for a time both law 
 reporter and theatrical critic. The last of the 
 three rulers of the Press, Daniel Stuart, is still 
 often mentioned for a similar reason. Stuart, like 
 Perry, a vigorous Scot, had joined his brothers, 
 who were settled as printers in London. They 
 printed The Morning Post, which had fallen into 
 difficulties ; and in 1795, when its circulation was 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF EDITORS 69 
 
 only 350 copies daily, Daniel Stuart bought the 
 paper, land, and plant for £600. He raised 
 the circulation to 4500 in 1803, when it was 
 surpassed in popularity by The Chronicle alone. 
 He soon afterwards became the owner of 'The 
 Courier in partnership with one Street, gave up 
 The Post, and in 182,2 retired, having made a 
 fortune. Stuart was specially connected with 
 Mackintosh, who married his sister when they were 
 both struggling young men. His fame, however, 
 rests more upon his connection with Coleridge, 
 and he incurred the danger which comes to all 
 publishers of works of men of genius. Certain 
 phrases in Coleridge's Biographia Libraria and 
 Table Talk gave rise to the impression that Stuart 
 was one of the conventional bloodsuckers, who 
 make their money out of rising genius and repay 
 them with the scantiest pittance. Stuart defended 
 himself effectively ; and any doubts which might 
 remain have been dispersed by the (privately 
 printed) Letters from the Lake Poets. Stuart, in 
 fact, was one of the most helpful of Coleridge's 
 many friends, and Coleridge to the end of his 
 life spoke of him and to him with warm and 
 generous gratitude. Coleridge, it is clear enough, 
 and certainly very natural, took at times an 
 
70 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 exaggerated view of his services to The Morning 
 Chronicle. His surprising statement that Stuart 
 in 1800 offered him ^2000 a year if he would 
 devote himself to journalism, that he declined on 
 the ground that he would not give up ' the reading 
 of old folios ' for twenty times £1000, and that he 
 considered any pay beyond ;^ 3 50 as a real evil, is 
 obviously impossible. Stuart had probably tried 
 to spur his indolent contributor by saying that his 
 services would be worth some such sum if they 
 could be made regular. But the statement is 
 only worth notice here in illustration of the 
 state of the literary market at the time. Southey 
 acknowledges his gratitude for the guinea a week 
 which he received as Stuart's ' laureate.' Poetry, 
 by the way, appears to have been more in demand 
 then than at the present day. Both Perry and 
 Stuart's elder brother offered to employ Burns ; 
 and Coleridge, Southey, Campbell, and Moore all 
 published poems in the newspapers. Lamb tried 
 his hand at 'jokes.' ' Sixpence a joke,' he says, 
 'and it was thought pretty high, too, was Dan 
 Stuart's settled remuneration in these cases ' 
 {Newspapers 'Thirty -five Tears .^go), and no 
 paragraph was to exceed seven lines. In a letter 
 of 1803, Lamb says that he has given up his 'two 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF EDITORS 71 
 
 guineas a week ' from The Post. The high-water 
 mark of a journalist's earnings at the end of the 
 last century is probably marked by the achieve- 
 ment of Mackintosh, who earned ten guineas in a 
 week. ' No paper could stand it ! ' exclaimed 
 the proprietor, and the bargain had to be revised. 
 A few years later, however, we are told that 
 Sterling, the father of Carlyle's friend, was receiv- 
 ing the sum which Coleridge supposed himself 
 to have refused, namely, ^2000 a year for 
 writing leading articles in The Times. Stuart, 
 it would seem, in the earlier period was paying 
 the fair value of their wares to Coleridge, 
 Southey, and their like ; but in the days of Scott 
 and Byron the price of popular writing was going 
 up by leaps and bounds. 
 
 The normal process of the evolution ot editors 
 was what I have tried to sketch, simply, that is, 
 the gradual delegation of powers by the printer or 
 bookseller who had first employed some inhabitant 
 of Grub Street as a drudge, and when the work 
 became too complex and delicate, had handed over 
 the duties to men of special literary training. 
 Two very important periodicals, however, of this 
 period show a certain reversion to the older type. 
 The Edinburgh Review owed part of its success to 
 
72 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 its independence of publishers. It was started, 
 not by a speculator who might wish to puff his 
 own wares, but by a little knot of audacious 
 youths, who combined as Steele and Addison 
 combined in 'The Spectator. It seems that at first 
 they scarcely even contemplated the necessity of 
 an editor, and Sydney Smith was less editor than 
 president of the little committee of authors at the 
 start. When Jeffrey took up the duty, he was 
 careful to make it understood that his work was to 
 be strictly subordinate to his professional labours, 
 and had no inkling that his fame would come to 
 depend upon his editorship. 'The Edinburgh, how- 
 ever, soon became a review of the normal kind. 
 Cobbett, on the other hand, started his Political 
 Register as a kind of rival to The Annual Register. 
 It was to be mainly a collection of State papers 
 and official documents ; but it soon changed in his 
 hands into the likeness of Defoe's old Review. It 
 became a personal manifesto of Cobbett himself, 
 and, as such, held a most important place in the 
 journalism of the time. But Cobbett was, and 
 in some ways remains, unique, and, as the news- 
 paper has developed, the ' we ' has superseded the 
 ' I,' and the organism become too complex to 
 represent any single person. The history, indeed. 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF EDITORS 73 
 
 would help to explain various peculiarities 
 characteristic of English newspapers, especially 
 the bad odour which long adhered to the profes- 
 sion, and made even Warrington ashamed to 
 confess to Pendennis that he was a contributor to 
 a leading newspaper. The author by profession 
 of the time of Ralph had excellent reasons for 
 concealing his name, and the desire for anonymity 
 long survived the old justification. But I have 
 said enough to leave that and other considerations 
 untouched for the present. 
 
JOHN BYROM 
 
 Who was John Byrom? That is a question to 
 which, if it were set in an examination for students 
 of English literature, an answer might reasonably 
 be expected, but which, if put to less omniscient 
 persons, might not improbably receive a rather 
 vague reply. And yet an answer might be given 
 which would awake some familiar associations. 
 John Byrom was the author of two or three 
 epigrams which for some reason have retained 
 their vitality well into a second century of exist- 
 ence. The unmusical are still happy to recall 
 the comparison between Handel and Buononcini, 
 and to wonder that there should be such a differ- 
 ence between ' tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee,' 
 though they are apt to assign to Swift instead of 
 Byrom the credit of being the first worm to turn 
 against the contempt of more happily endowed 
 natures. There is the still more familiar verse, 
 ending : — 
 
 But who Pretender is, and who is King, 
 God bless us all, that 's quite another thing. 
 
 74 
 
JOHN BYROM 75 
 
 And there is a certain assault upon ' Bone and 
 Skin, two millers thin,' which — though the real 
 names of the millers and the circumstances which 
 induced the declaration that flesh and blood could 
 not bear them have long vanished out of all but 
 antiquarian memories — have somehow continued 
 to go on jingling in men's ears ever since 17th 
 December 1728. I have said enough to suggest 
 more than one problem. What is the salt which 
 has kept these fragments of rhyme so long alive ? 
 Is it due to the sound or the sense ? Survival for 
 a century has been given as the test which entitles 
 a man to be called a classic. Does the survival of 
 these little impromptus entitle Byrom to be a 
 classic ? May we call them jewels five lines long, 
 that are to sparkle for ever on the stretched fore- 
 finger of all time ? That seems to be too lofty a 
 claim. The thought is not by itself very subtle 
 or very keen. And yet when we think how few 
 are the writers who can blow even the frailest of 
 word-bubbles which shall go floating down five 
 or six generations, we must admit the fact to be 
 remarkable. What is the quality which it indi- 
 cates in the author ? And here I might affect to 
 take up the psychological method : show what are 
 the peculiarities necessarily implied by success in 
 
1 
 
 76 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 these little achievements ; deduce from them what 
 must have been the characteristics of Byrom's 
 mind and temperament ; and finally, by appealing 
 to facts, show how strikingly the a priori reason- 
 ing would be confirmed by experience. I think 
 that a little ingenuity might enable an ambitious 
 critic to give plausibility to such a procedure ; but 
 I prefer to take a humbler method, for which 
 sufficient materials have been lately provided. 
 Byrom, I may remark, in the first place, is hardly 
 thought, even by his warm admirers, to be other 
 than a second-rate poet : nor need I appeal to the 
 Latin grammar to prove that second-rate poetry 
 is not generally worth reading. The reason is, I 
 suppose, that a second-rate poet only does badly 
 what has been done well, whereas even a tenth-rate 
 historian or philosopher may be giving something 
 new. That reason, at least, will do sufficiently 
 well to suggest why an exception may be made 
 in favour of some second-rate poetry. There are 
 cases in which poetry not of the highest class 
 reveals a charm of character peculiar to itself, 
 though not of the highest kind. We cannot 
 help loving the writer, though we admit that he 
 was not a Dante, or a Shakespeare, nor even — in 
 this case the comparison is more to the purpose — 
 
JOHN BYROM 77 
 
 a Pope. The first condition of this kind of 
 charm is, of course, perfect simplicity. The poet 
 must be really showing us his heart, not getting 
 upon stilts and trying to pour out epic poems 
 and Pindaric odes, after the fashion of some of 
 Byrom's contemporaries. Glover's Leonidas and 
 Mason's odes have long been swept into the 
 limbo where such things go ; but the excellent 
 Byrom, who is content to be himself, and whose 
 self happened to be a very attractive one, may 
 be still read with pleasure. Indeed, and this 
 is what prompts me to speak of him just now, 
 he has found an editor who reads him with en- 
 thusiasm as well as pleasure. Four handsome 
 volumes^ have recently been published by the 
 Chetham Society under the care of Dr. Ward, 
 Principal of the Owens College. Dr. Ward has 
 done his work in the most loving spirit ; he has 
 pointed out with affectionate solicitude everything 
 that strikes him as admirable in Byrom's poetry ; 
 he has not been so blinded by zeal as to try to 
 force upon us admiration for the weaker pieces 
 at the point of the critical bayonet ; and he has 
 given with overflowing learning everything that 
 a reader can possibly require for the due apprecia- 
 
 1 Two volumes, each in two parts, properly. 
 
78 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 tion of incidental circumstances. I fear that I am 
 not quite a worthy follower; my admiration of 
 Byrom's poetry stops a little further this side of 
 idolatry ; and, therefore, I frankly admit that Dr. 
 Ward is likely to be a better guide than I to 
 those who are accessible to Byrom's charm. In 
 such cases excess of zeal is far less blamable than 
 defect. Still, I hope that in a liking for Byrom 
 himself I am not altogether unworthy to follow 
 in his admirer's steps ; and it is of the man him- 
 self that I propose chiefly to speak. Byrom, as 
 I think, is a very attractive example of a charming 
 type of humanity ; and shows qualities really 
 characteristic of the period, though too often over- 
 looked in our popular summaries. He flourished 
 during the literary reigns of Addison and Pope ; 
 and the splendour of their fame is too often 
 allowed to blind us to the peculiarities of some of 
 the secondary luminaries. 
 
 Byrom has already been made known to us by 
 his 'remains,' pubHshed for the Chetham Society 
 some forty years ago. Of this. Dr. Ward says 
 that, were it more widely known, it would be ' one 
 of the most popular works of English biographi- 
 cal literature.' It is, I think, only fair to warn 
 any one who is tempted to rush at once to a 
 
JOHN BYROM 79 
 
 library to procure this fascinating work, that it 
 will not yield up its charm — a charm there cer- 
 tainly is — without a certain amount of persever- 
 ance. A good deal of it is a skeleton diary — 
 mere statements of small facts, which, if interest- 
 ing at all, are interesting only when you have 
 enabled yourself to read a good deal between the 
 actually written lines — and, moreover, Byrom is 
 apt to be t ntaHsing, and to confine himself to 
 brief notes just where we should be glad of 
 a little more expansion. He meets Laurence 
 Sterne, for example, and repeats not a word of 
 his talk. After making this reservation, I can 
 fully agree with Dr. Ward, that it is impossible 
 to read through the book without deriving a 
 charming impression of Byrom himself, and of 
 the circle in which he especially delighted. 
 
 And now I will try to answer briefly the 
 question from which I started. Who was Byrom ? 
 Byrom was the descendant of an old family long 
 settled near Manchester. The Byroms of Byrom 
 had dwindled down till they were represented 
 by one Beau Byrom, who, in the time of his 
 cousin, was consuming the last fragments of the 
 ancestral estates, was subsiding into a debtor's 
 prison, and was not above accepting a half-crown 
 
8o STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 from his more prosperous relative. The Byroms 
 of Manchester were meanwhile prospering in 
 business. Manchester was then a country town 
 of some 30,000 inhabitants, beginning to take a 
 certain interest in a Bill permitting a freer use 
 of cotton ; but not, as yet, feeling itself aggrieved 
 by exclusion from a Parliamentary representation. 
 The upper classes had a strong tincture of the 
 Jacobitism prevalent in the Lancashire of those 
 days; and John, born in 1692, was clearly 
 brought up in this faith. He was sent to Trinity 
 College, Cambridge, then under the rule of the 
 great Bentley, who was at the time beginning the 
 famous legal warfare which was to display his 
 boundless pugnacity and fertility of resource in 
 litigation. Nobody was less inclined to sympa- 
 thise with excessive quarrelsomeness than Byrom ; 
 but the young man, who became scholar and 
 fellow of his college, was always on most friendly 
 terms with the master. Bentley could be good 
 company when his antipathies were not aroused; 
 and Byrom was welcomed to the great man's 
 domestic circle. Incidentally this led to the per- 
 formance which made him in a modest way 
 famous for years to come. 'The Spectator had 
 been revived in 17 14, when Byrom was about 
 
JOHN BYROM 8i. 
 
 to gain his fellowship. The young man sent to 
 it a couple of papers which were published in the 
 famous journal — a success sufficient to give him 
 a kind of patent of authorship. He followed it 
 up by the more successful ' pastoral,' addressed to 
 Phebe. Phebe was Joanna or ' Jug ' Bentley, the 
 master's youngest daughter. She was destined to 
 be the mother of the Cumberland described by 
 Goldsmith as ' The Terence of England, the 
 mender of hearts,' but perhaps better known as 
 Sheridan's Sir Fretful Plagiary. She was, as her 
 son intimates, a witty young lady, sometimes coy 
 and silent, and sometimes a little too smart in her 
 satire. More than one of t^e college fellows 
 were fascinated by her in later days, and even 
 brought to take her father's side in his disputes. 
 One of the superseded laments ^ her 
 
 haughtiness of mien, 
 And all the father in the daughter seen. 
 
 At this period, though she was only eleven, she 
 probably showed symptoms enough of these 
 characteristics to suggest the tone of Byrom's 
 famous verses. Famous they certainly were in his 
 day, for his friends constantly ask him for copies ; 
 
 1 See his poem In Nichol's Literary Anecdotes, i. 244. 
 VOL. I. F 
 
82 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 but perhaps they are not so famous now as to 
 forbid a specimen. Colin is terribly put out by 
 Phebe's absence. 
 
 My dog I was ever well pleased to see 
 Come wagging his tail to my fair one and me : 
 And Phebe was pleased too, and to my dog said, 
 ' Come hither, poor fellow,' and patted his head. 
 But now, when he 's fawning, I with a sour look 
 Cry ' Sirrah,' and give him a blow with my crook ; 
 And I '11 give him another ; for why should not Tray 
 Be as dull as his master when Phebe 's away ? 
 
 * 1 11 give him another' is a phrase for which I 
 have often been grateful to the excellent Byrom. 
 It gives a pleasant sanction to one's own humours. 
 Though the metre limps a little in this stanza, it 
 is often very dexterously used by Byrom ; and the 
 poem is worthy of a high place in the age of 
 Mat Prior. Probably, though an absurd con- 
 struction has been put upon the facts, the master 
 was not the less friendly towards the young fellow 
 for this compliment to his bright little daughter. 
 ' Mr. Spectator' judged rightly that it would divert 
 his readers ; and a Mr. Mills, years afterwards, 
 ' kissed the book ' when he read it. 
 
 Byrom had some difficulty at the time in taking 
 the oaths to the new family ; and he made a rather 
 mysteriousjourney soon afterwards to Montpellier. 
 
JOHN BYROM 83 
 
 He professed to be studying medicine, and was 
 afterwards often called ' doctor.' It was, however, 
 strongly suspected that his journey had a political 
 purpose. He certainly kissed the Pretender's 
 hand at Avignon. He returned after a time to 
 Manchester, where, in 1 7 2 1 , he married his cousin, 
 Elizabeth Byrom. His father was dead ; and the 
 family property had gone to his elder brother. 
 Byrom was therefore in want of money, and the 
 measure which he took for obtaining supplies was 
 characteristic, and led him into a peculiar career. 
 Byrom would not have been the man he was with- 
 out a hobby. In fact, he so far shared the spirit 
 of the Shandy family that he had a whole stable of 
 hobbies. He belongs on one side to the species 
 which has been celebrated by so many of the 
 eighteenth-century humorists. He would have 
 appreciated Sir Roger de Coverley, or Parson 
 Adams, or Uncle Toby, or the Vicar of Wakefield. 
 The kindly simplicity which takes a different 
 colouring in each of those friends of our ima- 
 gination was fully realised in Byrom. He was 
 evidently overflowing with the milk of human 
 kindness ; attaching himself to every variety of 
 person, from the great Bentley to the burlesque 
 Sam Johnson, author oi Hurlothrumbo ; appreciating 
 
84 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 them as cordially as Boswell, and alienated by 
 nothing but censorious harshness. But, through 
 all, he has a quaint turn of mind which shows 
 alternately the two aspects of genuine humour — a 
 perception of the absurd side of other people's 
 crotchets, or an addiction to some pet crotchet 
 of his own. Now the great discovery upon which 
 he prided himself was a system of shorthand. He 
 had, it seems, invented a system in combination 
 with a friend at college ; and he now bethought 
 himself of turning this invention to account. 
 Shorthand was by no means a novelty; and we all 
 remember how Pepys had employed the invention ; 
 but Byrom's was, so he believed, the very per- 
 fection of shorthand — ' Beauty, Brevity, and 
 Perspicuity ' were, he says, its characteristics. He 
 set about propagating the true faith with infinite 
 zeal. In London he found a rival, one Weston, 
 who was making a living by giving lessons in the 
 art. Weston challenged him to display his skill, 
 and put bragging advertisements in the papers to 
 claim superiority. Byrom felt that his dignity 
 might be compromised by a contest with a 
 commonplace teacher. His own shorthand was 
 founded on scientific principles, and was a mystery 
 to be imparted to the nobility and gentry ; whereas 
 
JOHN BYROM 85 
 
 Weston was a mere empiric, and, moreover, a 
 vulgar person who talked broad Scotch. Byrom, 
 therefore, retorted only by some humorous 
 remarks, and apparently made peace with his 
 humble rival. He served as umpire at a contest 
 between Weston and another pretender to the 
 art, and laid down the law with the lofty superi- 
 ority of a fellow of the Royal Society. When in- 
 vited to take notes at a famous law-case in those 
 days he doubts his own ability and even recom- 
 mends a trial of Weston, His own shorthand 
 was too good, he seems to imply, to be exposed to 
 the vulgar test of mere speed of writing. Experts, 
 in fact, say that its defects in this respect led to its 
 being superseded in the next generation. Mean- 
 while, however, Byrom not only believed himself, 
 but collected a body of believers. They formed a 
 shorthand society ; they had periodical meetings, 
 and addressed each other as ' brothers in shorthand.' 
 Byrom was greeted as Grand Master, and pro 
 nounced a solemn oration at their first gathering. 
 Its preparation during two or three previous weeks 
 is noted in his journal. He takes the highest 
 possible tone. He humorously traces back his art 
 to the remotest antiquity ; he intimates that Plato 
 probably used shorthand to take down the conver- 
 
86 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 sation of Socrates, and finds shorthand even in 
 Egyptian hieroglyphics. The divine Tully, how- 
 ever, is his great model, and he shows by an 
 ingenious emendation {notare for nature) that the 
 Emperor Augustus taught his nephews, not to 
 swim, but to take notes. He points out that 
 amidst all the vices of Caligula, one which was 
 thought to deserve notice was his ignorance of 
 shorthand. Making a rapid bound over the 
 intervening period, with one brief touch at the 
 Abbot Trithemius, he appeals to the patriotism of 
 his hearers to support what was at this time held 
 to be a specially English art. A formal paper 
 is drawn up, beginning, ^od felix faustumque 
 sit, and declaring that the signers will form a 
 society, ad tachygraphiam no s tram ediscendam, pro- 
 movendam, et perpetuandam, in secula seculorum^ 
 Amen. 
 
 The meetings of the shorthanders naturally took 
 place at taverns, and they formed a kind of club 
 after the fashion of the day. Byrom took five 
 guineas from each aspirant to the art, and a 
 promise not to divulge the secret. They had 
 apparently very pleasant meetings, and diverged 
 from shorthand into discussions of politics, 
 theology, free-will, and things in general. On one 
 
JOHN BYROM 87 
 
 occasion, for example, when Byrom observes that 
 he was in ' a talking humour,' which was certainly 
 not rare, he discusses the Babylonian and Coptic 
 letters, the probabilities of the devil being saved, 
 and ' Dr. Dens' drawer of daggers.' Unluckily, 
 the remarks which threw light upon these topics 
 are not reported. The society seems to have done 
 its duty in loyally spreading its president's fame. 
 Great men became his pupils. The most famous 
 in early years was Lord Chesterfield ; Horace 
 Walpole afterwards took some lessons. His 
 warmest friend was the amiable philosopher, 
 David Hartley, who cordially supported him 
 in efforts to raise a subscription for a publica- 
 tion of his method once for all. Although this 
 came to nothing, Byrom, in 1742, obtained 
 an Act of Parliament which gave him the 
 right of publishing and teaching for twenty-one 
 years. 
 
 It was while he was engaged upon this pro- 
 paganda that most of the diary was written. 
 Manchester, of course, did not afford aspirants 
 enough to maintain a teacher. Byrom had, 
 therefore, to leave his family and pass months 
 together in London and at Cambridge, where he had 
 kept up many friendships. Travelling, of course, 
 
88 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 was a serious business. He generally makes two 
 days of the fifty miles from London to Cambridge, 
 though he once does it without an upset in less 
 than nine hours. Now and then there is mention 
 of a coach, but he is generally on horseback. 
 Sometimes he rides post on ' little hobbling horses,' 
 which leave him with aching arms after forty or 
 fifty miles, Oftener it seems that he buys a horse 
 at Manchester for five pounds or so, and sells it 
 when he gets to London, and his horses are apt to 
 turn out blind or lame. Once he collects a party 
 of half a dozen friends and makes a walking tour 
 from London, through Oxford, Worcester, and 
 Shrewsbury to Manchester, It is to be regretted 
 that he scarcely gives more than glimpses of these 
 little tours. They suggest dimly the days when 
 the wanderer had to plunge through labyrinths of 
 muddy lanes ; when he had to take a guide from 
 one halting-place to another, and make inquiries 
 of knowing persons as to the proper turning where 
 you should leave the great northern road to diverge 
 to Manchester. I see no indications, either here 
 or in the poems, that the excellent Byrom cared 
 for * nature ' in the shape of scenery. He had 
 none of the love for field-sports which in those 
 days might serve as an excuse for enjoying the 
 
JOHN BYROM 89 
 
 country. ' Nay,' he observes, when some one sends 
 him a hare, 
 
 Nay, should one reflect upon cruelty's course, 
 In the gentlemen butchers, the Hunt, and the Course, 
 'Twere enough to prevent either pudding or jelly 
 From storing such carcass within a man's belly ! 
 
 Here and there he has an adventure. He has a 
 gift for falHng in with the most deserving beggars, 
 poor soldiers who have been ' in slavery ' some- 
 where, and the like, and gives them money and 
 letters to his friends. Once, in Epping Forest, on 
 the way to Cambridge, he has the proper meeting 
 with a highwayman. Of course, he takes it good- 
 humouredly, as an excellent pretext for a copy of 
 verses. The highwayman's bad language runs 
 spontaneously into rhyme ; and in proper epical 
 style the ruffian is put to flight by the mock-heroic 
 vision of the ' Goddess Shorthand, bright, celestial 
 maid ' ! In sober prose, the highwayman goes off 
 with a guinea of Byrom's, and Byrom expects to 
 see him again in the neighbourhood of Tyburn. 
 Byrom, however, is really happy when he is in the 
 full stream of society. One of his friends describes 
 a typical London day from imagination, which, as 
 the diary shows, is very nearly correct. He 
 generally gets up late, we are sorry to observe, 
 
90 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 but he has often been sitting up at a club, or some- 
 times studying Hebrew till two or three in the 
 morning. He has a meagre dish of tea, reads the 
 equally meagre papers, and groans over his absence 
 from Mrs. Byrom and his family. Then he turns 
 out to give a lesson in shorthand. He is tempted 
 to ^a hedge-booksellers in some bye-lane.' He is 
 in the habit of denouncing the love of book-buying 
 as a vanity, but he cannot resist it. He buys some 
 queer old volume — mystical divinity if possible — 
 and, to do him justice, seldom gets to a pound and 
 often descends to fourpence. Afterwards he drops 
 in upon friendly Dr. Hartley and his charming 
 wife, and discusses the chances of a subscription for 
 his book. He fills up time by an interview with 
 a member of some eccentric sect ; and, finally, 
 meets a knot of friends at a tavern. Byrom, of 
 course, was strictly temperate, though he seems to 
 have tried his digestion by some rather odd 
 mixtures (such as cream and ale), and equally of 
 course, he is, though not quite systematically, a 
 vegetarian. He would have been an anti-vaccina- 
 tionist, and already denounces inoculation. His 
 friends dearly like to pay him little compliments 
 by asking for a copy of 'My time, O ye Muses,' 
 or his epigram on Handel and Buononcini. Now 
 
JOHN BYROM 91 
 
 and then he extemporises a copy of verses on the 
 appearance of the president of a club, for example, 
 in ' a black bob-wig.' What can be the cause ? 
 
 A phrenzy ? or a periwigmanee 
 That overruns his pericranie ? 
 
 That he could enjoy some amusements which 
 seem scarcely in character is proved by the verses on 
 Figg and Sutton, done into prose in Thackeray's 
 Virginians^ and Dr. Ward has to remind us that 
 this was ' not a brutal prize-fight,' but an ultra- 
 vigorous ' assault-at-arms.' The line seems rather 
 hard to draw. Byrom at least sympathises with 
 the familiar sentiment about the ' British Grenadier.' 
 
 Were Hector himself, with Apollo to back him, 
 
 To encounter with Sutton, — zooks ! how he would thwack 
 
 him ! 
 Or Achilles, though old Mother Thetis had dipt him, 
 With Figg — odds my life ! how he would have unript him ! 
 
 Another of Byrom's characteristic performances 
 was prompted by his interest in his fellow-towns- 
 man, Samuel Johnson, a fiddler and dancing- 
 master, who produced a strange medley called 
 Hurlothrumbo. Dr. Ward, who has read it, as in 
 duty bound, says that it is sheer burlesque, though 
 some critics seem to be haunted by an uncomfort- 
 able suspicion that its apparent madness conceals 
 
92 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 some sparks of genius. Anyhow, Byrom took it 
 as farce, and, partly for the fun of the thing, and 
 partly from a good-natured wish to be of use to 
 the author, contributed an amusing epilogue and 
 attended the first performance in London. There 
 were seven or eight ' garters ' in the pit ; Byrom 
 led the claque. The audience took the joke. The 
 play ran for thirty nights ; the name got a place 
 in popular slang, and Johnson appears to have 
 been grateful, whether he quite perceived or not 
 that Byrom was laughing in his sleeve. ' For my 
 part,' says Byrom to his wife, ' who think all stage 
 entertainments stuff and nonsense, I consider this 
 as a joke upon 'em all.' 
 
 This, indeed, marks Byrom's peculiar vein. 
 Hitherto I have spoken of him as an admirably 
 good-natured humorist and lover of harmless fun. 
 He can go to a tavern or Figg's ' amphitheatre,' 
 and, to all appearance, throw himself into the 
 spirit of the performances as heartily as any of his 
 companions. Yet, at the same time, he was a 
 man of very deep and peculiar religious sentiments. 
 In this matter of the play, he gradually came, it 
 seems, to take a stricter view. The denunciation 
 of the stage by the nonjuror Jeremy Collier had 
 become famous. Arthur Bedford, an orthodox 
 
JOHN BYROM 93 
 
 clergyman, had (in 1719) collected 7000 ' immoral 
 sentiments from British dramatists ' to prove the 
 same point, and William Law, Byrom's great 
 teacher, had demonstrated in a treatise the absolute 
 unlawfulness of stage entertainments (1726), 
 and had elsewhere declared that ' the playhouse 
 was as certainly the house of the devil as the 
 church was the house of God.' Byrom was, 
 perhaps, one of those people who could not be too 
 hard even upon the 'puir de'il.' He was, at 
 least, willing to try the effect of good-humoured 
 raillery on the evil one before proceeding to 
 stronger measures. When one of his friends 
 complains of Law's severity in this matter, Byrom 
 is evidently puzzled. His reverence for Law 
 struggles with a sense that the oracle was rather 
 harsh. But in other matters Byrom's loyalty was 
 boundless. Byrom's interest in various represen- 
 tatives of the religious speculations of the time 
 is shown constantly in his diaries. He meets 
 William Whiston, the successor to Newton's 
 professorship, who had been deprived of his place 
 as a heretic, and went about in all societies (he 
 appears in the well-known picture of Tunbridge 
 Wells with Richardson, Chesterfield, and the rest) 
 trying to propagate what he took to be primitive 
 
94 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 Christianity. Dr. Primrose, as we know, was 
 unlucky enough to be converted to his doctrine 
 of monogamy. In simplicity and honesty he was 
 worthy to make friends with Byrom ; but, to say 
 the truth, he appears in the diary rather in the 
 character of a conceited bore. He had not 
 Byrom's saving sense of humour. Then there 
 was Edward Elwall, who was tried for blasphemy 
 because he taught the ' perpetual obligation ' of the 
 Jewish law, and consequently wore a beard and a 
 Turkish habit (the ' habit ' out of respect, we are 
 told, for the Mohammedans), and shut his shop 
 on Saturdays. King George, he said, according to 
 Dr. Johnson, if he were afraid to dispute with a 
 poor old man, might bring a thousand of his 
 blackguards with him ; and, if that would not do, 
 a thousand of his red guards. He seems, how- 
 ever, to have got out of his troubles, and was duly 
 interviewed by Byrom. Byrom met more re- 
 markable personages. He knew something of 
 the Wesley s, and he had one of the few recorded 
 interviews with Bishop Butler. They had a long 
 discussion as to the claims of reason and authority. 
 The bishop, one may guess, got rather the best 
 of it, as Byrom admits that he was himself too 
 warm, while the bishop was conspicuously mild 
 
JOHN BYROM 95 
 
 and candid. Unluckily, Byrom was an inadequate 
 Boswell, and is so anxious to record his own 
 argument on behalf of authority that he does not 
 quite let us know what Butler had to say for 
 reason. Law, however, is by far the most con- 
 spicuous figure. Law, when Byrom first went to 
 see him (4th March 1729), was living in the 
 house of old Mr. Gibbon at Putney, and acting 
 as tutor to the younger Gibbon, afterwards father 
 of the historian. He had been at Cambridge in 
 Byrom's time, had got into difficulties for his 
 Jacobite proclivities, and, by refusing to take the 
 oaths, had cut himself off from an active clerical 
 career. Byrom would sympathise with him upon 
 this ground ; but it was the recently published 
 Serious Call which led to the new connection. 
 Byrom bought the book in February 1729, and 
 at once felt the influence, which made its perusal 
 a turning-point in the lives of many eminent men 
 of the day. To him it was especially congenial. 
 Law afterwards became a disciple of Jacob Bohme, 
 and Byrom, though he accepted the later utter- 
 ances with reverence, confessed that they were 
 above his comprehension. Of such matters, I may 
 say that at a later period Law might probably 
 have been, like Coleridge, a follower of Schelling, 
 
96 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 and have clothed his thought in the language of 
 transcendental metaphysics rather than of the old 
 theosophy. He was no mere dreamer or word- 
 maker. If to his contemporaries he seemed to be 
 talking mere jargon, later critics have thought that 
 his position showed a real insight into the intel- 
 lectual deficiencies of the time. But, in any case, 
 he was, as Gibbon declares, ' a wit and a scholar ' ; 
 had not his mind been ' clouded with enthusiasm ' 
 he would have been one of the most agreeable 
 authors of the day ; and his portraits in the 
 Serious Call are ' not unworthy of the pen of La 
 Bruyere.' These compliments from Gibbon are 
 significant. Neither Law nor Byrom were con- 
 temporaries of Addison and Pope for nothing. 
 However far they were from the ordinary tone of 
 religion and philosophy, they could both mix in 
 the society of the day, and write as brightly and 
 observe as keenly as the ordinary frequenter of 
 clubs and coffee-houses. Their mysticism was 
 not mere muddle. They show that a man may 
 have the sparkle and clearness of the wits of 
 Queen Anne allied with a steady flow of sweet 
 and tender sentiment. 
 
 Byrom had already shown his fitness to be a 
 disciple of Law. One of his pleasantest copies of 
 
JOHN BYROM 97 
 
 verses tells how, in 1727, he bought a picture of 
 Malebranche, a philosopher naturally revered by 
 both. Byrom describes his eagerness in going to 
 the auction, his palpitations when the portrait of 
 the great teacher was brought out, the haste with 
 which he advanced his biddings, and how he gets 
 the picture for three pounds five shillings. His 
 ecstasy is indescribable ! Let your duchesses 
 throw away ten times as many guineas on pictures 
 of nobodies by famous artists. Byrom has got 
 his Malebranche, ^ the greatest divine that e'er 
 lived upon earth/ whips into a coach, calls to the 
 driver to go as fast as he can spin ; deposits the 
 treasure at his chambers, and summons his friend 
 to come and rejoice ; let him bring a friend or 
 two to ^mix metaphysics, and shorthand, and 
 port.' What, he exclaims, can ' be more clever ' ? 
 
 Huzza ! Father Malebranche, and Shorthand for ever ! 
 
 The Serious Call inspired another poem. When 
 Byrom, a few days after reading it, made his first 
 call upon the author, he had in his pocket a versi- 
 fication of a quaint parable which it contains. 
 Law compares the man whose heart is set upon 
 the world to a person with a monomania about a 
 pond. He passes his life in trying to keep the 
 
 VOL. I. G 
 
98 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 pond full, and is finally drowned in it. This 
 struck Byrom's fancy. He expands it into a fable 
 in verse, and ventures to show his performance to 
 Law himself. Law laughed, and begged him not 
 to turn the whole book into verse, ' for then it 
 would not sell in prose — so the good man can 
 joke.' This was before the rise of the Authors' 
 Society, and the value of a copyright was still a sub- 
 ject for 'joking.' In later days Law encouraged 
 Byrom to versify other works, and seems to have 
 thought that the effect would be to advertise the 
 prose. He calls Byrom his laureate ; but Byrom, I 
 suspect, did not contribute much to Law's popu- 
 larity. The poems had not a large circulation. 
 
 Some of his other religious poems have great 
 merits. Of an early paraphrase of the 23rd Psalm 
 I will only say that Dr. Ward endorses the state- 
 ment of a Mr. Hedges, that he ' would give all 
 the world to have been able to have done them.' 
 It is in the same metre as the pastoral, and like 
 that poem owes its charm to the entire simplicity 
 which enables Byrom as a reverential interpreter 
 to catch the charm of that masterpiece of Hebrew 
 poetry. Another poem, 
 
 Christians, awake ! salute the happy morn. 
 Whereon the Saviour of the world was born, 
 
JOHN BYROM 99 
 
 has been often reprinted, and is given in Hymns 
 Ancient and Modern. I may infer that it is at 
 least as familiar to my readers as to myself. It 
 probably marks Byrom's highest level, though 
 some other of his religious poems, especially 
 those in which he celebrates his favourite virtue, 
 contentment, have the same charm. They 
 breathe, at least, the sweetness and simplicity of 
 the writer's own character, I will quote one 
 little fragment as at once brief and character- 
 istic : — 
 
 O happy Resignation ! 
 
 Tliat rises by its fall ! 
 That seeks no exaltation, 
 
 But wins by losing all ; 
 That conquers by complying. 
 
 Triumphing in its lot ; 
 That lives when it 's a-dying, 
 
 And is when it is not ! 
 
 The longer pieces, in which Byrom versified 
 Law's works with more or less closeness, come 
 nearer to the conventional style of the period, 
 and drop pretty frequently into the flat of mere 
 rhymed prose. One of the longer, upon ' Enthu- 
 siasm,' may be mentioned as symptomatic of an 
 often noticed transformation of meaning. Our 
 ancestors understood by ' enthusiasm ' the state 
 
100 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 of mind of the fanatical sects of the Common- 
 wealth, or of the ^ French Prophets ' of the 
 eighteenth century. An enthusiast meant a 
 believer in a sham inspiration. The gradual 
 change of the word to a complimentary meaning 
 marks the familiar change which was also shown 
 by the development of sentimentalism in litera- 
 ture, Byrom, following Law pretty closely, takes 
 ' enthusiasm ' to mean devotion to some end, and 
 is good or bad according to the goodness or 
 badness of the end. Everybody must have some 
 aim. The enthusiasm which Byrom shared with 
 Law meant a serious belief in Christianity, and 
 the worldly only scoffed because they were equally 
 enthusiastic about some really inferior aim. A 
 few verses will show how far Byrom could follow 
 in the steps of Pope. Expanding a sentence of 
 Law's, he compares the classical enthusiast with 
 the Christian. The mere scholar is grieved when 
 he sees 
 
 Time, an old Goth, advancing to consume 
 Immortal Gods and once eternal Rome ; 
 When the plain Gospel spread its artless ray. 
 And rude, uncultured Fishermen had sway : 
 Who spared no Idol, tho' divinely carved, 
 Tho' Art and Muse and Shrine-engraver starved; 
 Who ssLVQdpoor zaretcbes and destroyed, alas ! 
 The vital marble and the breathing brass. 
 
JOHN BYROM loi 
 
 Where does all Sense to him and Reason shine ? 
 
 Behold, in Tully's rhetoric divine ! 
 
 ' TuUy ! ' Enough ; high o'er the Alps he 's gone, 
 
 To tread the ground that Tully trod upon ; 
 
 Haply, to find his statue or his bust. 
 
 Or medal green'd with Ciceronian rust ; 
 
 Perchance, the Rostrum — yea, the very wood 
 
 Whereon this elevated genius stood. 
 
 When forth on Catiline, as erst he spoke, 
 
 The thunder of ' Quousque tandem ' broke. 
 
 Byrom is beginning to forget even Tully's 
 merits as a shorthand writer. He follows Law 
 towards the condemnation, not only of the stage, 
 but of classical scholarship and art in general. 
 
 It does not appear, however, that Byrom ever 
 got quite so far. Law retired to his curious 
 hermitage at King's Cliffe, where he could 
 abandon himself to pious meditation and the 
 demoralisation of the neighbourhood by profuse 
 charity. Byrom was held fast by his domestic 
 ties ; and took an interest in the local politics 
 of Manchester. His talent for versification gave 
 him frequent employment. He contributed a 
 number of verses, in the nature of election squibs, 
 to a newspaper of the period, and whenever he 
 has an argument with a friend, he twists his logic 
 into verse. Some of the results are quaint 
 enough. Tempted, apparently, by Bentley's 
 
102 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 example, he had made a variety of conjectural 
 emendations of Horace, obviously rash, if not 
 altogether absurd. But it could have entered 
 into no less whimsical head to put the arguments 
 for them into rhyme. He suggests tmum for 
 nonum in the familiar passage, 
 
 I take the correction, unumque prematur, 
 'Let it lie for one twelvemonth' — Ah, that may 
 hold water ! 
 
 and argues the point through twelve eight-lined 
 stanzas. Another ' poem ' is an antiquarian dis- 
 cussion, showing that St. Gregory and not St. 
 George was the patron saint of England ; he 
 proves in another that the locusts eaten by the 
 Baptist were fruit, not insects ; in a third, that 
 the miracle at the Pentecost was worked upon the 
 hearers, not the speakers. 
 
 'Are not these,' said the men, the devout of each land, 
 ' Galileans that speak, whom we all understand ? ' 
 As much as to say, ' By what wonderful powers 
 Does the tongue Galilean become to us ours ? ' 
 
 With equal readiness he enters into an elaborate 
 exegetical discussion, defending Sherlock against 
 Conyers Middleton ; expounds the orthodox 
 doctrine of the fall of man and justification by 
 faith ; condemns Jonathan Edwards's arguments 
 
JOHN BYROM 103 
 
 upon free-will, or versifies some prayer or letter 
 that has struck him in reading memoirs or 
 treatises of mystical divinity. The worthy 
 Byrom, it must be added, did not take his own 
 performances in this line too seriously. They 
 were an amusement — a quaint whim characteristic 
 of an oddly constituted brain ; and one fancies 
 that when he forces even Hebrew and Greek into 
 the fetters of his ' cantering rhymes,' and twists 
 dry grammatical discussion into comic metres, 
 he feels that the process takes the bitterness out 
 of controversy and. enables him to treat thorny 
 subjects in a vein of pleasantry. It is character- 
 istic that he came into collision with the colossal 
 Warburton, who had treated Law with his usual 
 brutality, and that even Warburton found it 
 desirable for once to be civil to so amiable an 
 antagonist. 
 
 Byrom's activity in the shorthand business 
 declined after the death of his brother in 1740 
 gave him the family estates. In 1745 he was 
 presented to the Chevalier in Manchester ; but 
 luckily did not commit himself in any dangerous 
 way to answering his own question, Which was 
 King and which was Pretender.'' Byrom was 
 very near the Quakers in such matters. In a 
 
104 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 poem on the occasion his hero, representing 
 Lancashire in dialect and common-sense, decides, 
 in spite of patriotic taunts, to look after his own 
 carcass and leave Highlanders and redcoats to 
 fight it out. Byrom obviously approves. No- 
 body, as other poems prove, could be less given 
 to the worship of Jingo. He tried vainly to save 
 some young friends, less prudent than himself, 
 convicted of joining the rebels — and, of course, 
 wrote his petition in verse. He protested, too, 
 in verse, and with equal want of success, against 
 the denunciators of Admiral Byng. He died a 
 few years later (1763). He was not buried as 
 the law directed, in woollen. His executors had 
 to pay ^5 as a fine. As Byrom does not appear 
 to have left any verses to justify the failure, we 
 may perhaps assume that the omission was not due 
 to any final whim of his own. He would hardly 
 have missed such a chance for a poem. Few 
 kindlier men have been buried either in woollen 
 or linen. 
 
JOHNSONIANA ' 
 
 Dr. Birkbeck Hill has completed his labours 
 upon Johnson's life by publishing this collection 
 of Johnsonian Miscellanies. He thanks only too 
 warmly the person who had the good fortune to 
 suggest this scheme. The suggestion, it must be 
 said, needed very little originality. When Croker 
 published his edition of Boswell's life, he saw that 
 it would be desirable to gather the anecdotes from 
 other sources. With curious infelicity, he at first 
 thrust them into Boswell's text ; but in later issues 
 they appeared in a separate volume. For that 
 performance Croker, in spite of the criticisms of 
 Macaulay and Carlyle, deserves the thanks of all 
 true Boswellians. Dr. Birkbeck Hill has now 
 given his own collection, which necessarily coin- 
 cides in great part with Croker's. He has, more- 
 over, added to it a full apparatus of notes, 
 indexes, and references to the original sources. 
 
 1 Johnsonian Miscellanies, arranged and edited by George Birkbeck 
 Hill, D.C.L., LL.D, Oxford, 1897, 2 vols. 8vo. 
 
 106 
 
io6 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 He is, like every conscientious workman, incom- 
 pletely satisfied with his own performance : he 
 utters a kind of groan when he reflects upon the 
 improvements which he might make even now 
 if the book had not been definitively printed off. 
 Undoubtedly every piece of human composition 
 has its faults ; and a critic has excellent reasons 
 for not contradicting a confession of shortcoming : 
 it would be to admit that he may perhaps be 
 blinder than the author. I will, therefore, not 
 commit myself to the very unprofessional declara- 
 tion that I have detected no shortcomings : but 
 I will venture to say that the contributors to 
 Johnson's biography would be bound to admit, if 
 they could still take an interest in the subject, 
 that their performances have been treasured up 
 and annotated with a care and intelligence unsur- 
 passed in any similar performance. To have 
 Dr. Birkbeck Hill's ten volumes on one's shelves 
 is not only to have one of those delightfial 
 collections into which one can dip at any moment 
 with a certainty of bringing up some quaint and 
 fascinating anecdote, but also to have it so well 
 arranged that one can be sure of regaining any 
 half-remembered passage. In regard to his last 
 instalment, I will only venture to express one 
 
JOHNSONIANA 107 
 
 doubt. Dr. Birkbeck Hill had thought, he tells 
 uSj of giving extracts from Mme. d'Arblay's Diary. 
 Reflection soon convinced him that the diary was 
 ' too excellent a piece of work to be hacked in 
 pieces ' ; he accordingly exhorts readers to go to 
 the lady's book for themselves, especially if they 
 wish to see Johnson's ' fun and comical humour 
 and love of nonsense, of which,' as she says, ' he 
 had about him more than almost anybody she ever 
 saw.' Now Jowett, a most appreciative John- 
 sonian, told Dr. Birkbeck Hill that if Boswell 
 had misrepresented Johnson upon any point it 
 was precisely upon this : Boswell had, perhaps, 
 made Johnson too much of the sage and 
 philosopher, and too little of the ' rollicking King 
 of Society.' If Boswell be really guilty of this 
 omission, it is surely rather unfortunate not to 
 have passages from the writer who has best 
 supplied the deficiency. Mme. d'Arblay's Diary 
 is undoubtedly a very charming book ; but, after 
 all, a diary by its nature lends itself to being read 
 in fragments. Perhaps a closer examination 
 might justify Dr. Birkbeck Hill's conclusion ; 
 but one would be inclined to say on the first 
 impression that room might have been found for 
 Mme. d'Arblay by excising some heavier and less 
 
io8 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 relevant matter. Perhaps Johnson's ' Prayers and 
 Meditations/ not here quite in their place, might 
 have made way for samples of his fun. 
 
 The problem indeed which the book principally 
 suggests concerns this question of the completeness 
 of the BoswcUian Johnson. To some of us — I 
 suspect, indeed, to a good many — Boswell repre- 
 sents the original source not only of knowledge 
 about Johnson, but of our knowledge of English 
 literature in general. He was our introducer 
 to the great anonymous club formed by English 
 men of letters from the days when Shakespeare 
 met Ben Jonson to the days when Carlyle dis- 
 coursed to Froude. We became members of the 
 craft in spirit under Boswell's guidance, whether 
 we have or have not become actually identified 
 with it in the flesh. It therefore becomes next 
 to impossible to abstract from Boswell : all our 
 later knowledge has been more or less ingrafted 
 upon him, however far we may have travelled from 
 the source : Boswell gave the nucleus : and more 
 or less consciously we have used his world as a 
 standard inevitably taken into account in all later 
 judgments. To suppose Boswell non-existent is 
 for such readers to suppose a kind of organic 
 change in our whole estimate of literary charac- 
 
JOHNSONIANA 109 
 
 teristics. When reading, especially about some of 
 the other famous talkers, Coleridge's monologues 
 or Sydney Smith's explosions of fun, I find myself 
 thinking how they would have sounded at the 
 Mitre or the Turk's Head. Thanks to Boswell, I 
 take the Johnsonian article to be a fixed datum 
 like the official yard at the Tower ; and to be 
 asked to put that out of my head is to be invited 
 to deprive myself of my only measuring-rod. It 
 is exceedingly difficult, at any rate, to put oneself 
 outside of Boswell and to construct a portrait of 
 Johnson simply out of such other materials as are 
 here put together. I have read Hawkins and 
 Mrs. Piozzi and the rest, but always with the 
 help of the preconceived notions. Where they 
 could be fitted into Boswell, I have accepted them 
 as corroborations ; but when they differed, I have 
 probably rejected the uncongenial elements, with 
 a perhaps careless assumption that they must be 
 inaccurate. And yet, it seems only justice to 
 these respectable persons to consider whether we 
 ought not to reopen the point. If Mme. 
 d'Arblay saw something of Johnson which was 
 not revealed to Boswell, may we not discover 
 similar supplementary hints in the other attempts 
 at portraiture ? 
 
no STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 Johnson's life confirms one remark which is 
 painfully impressed upon most readers of bio- 
 graphy. A really first-rate biography ought, one 
 may plausibly argue, to be the rarest of books, 
 A man can write a poem by himself; but a 
 biography requires not only a capable artist and 
 a good subject, but the rare combination of 
 circumstances which brings them together under 
 the proper conditions. The most interesting part 
 of most men's lives — and Johnson was no excep- 
 tion — is the early struggle in which their faculties 
 were developing and the victory being won. A 
 man, too, as Johnson said to Mrs. Piozzi, 
 ' commonly grows wickeder as he grows older ' ; 
 he would always, he declared, take the side of the 
 young in a dispute, ' for you have at least a chance 
 of virtue till age has withered its very root.' So 
 far as my personal experience has gone, I think 
 that Johnson was too nearly right. At any rate, 
 the period of aspirations and illusions is the most 
 interesting. Yet if a man lives to a full age, the 
 companions of his youth are mostly dead ; and 
 the survivors, if by some fortunate chance there be 
 any who are capable of articulate story-telling, 
 look back too sadly and too bitterly on the old 
 days to restore the old impressions to life. 
 
JOHNSONIANA 
 
 III 
 
 Happy, in this respect at least, are those who 
 die young. Die before you are forty and you 
 may have friends capable of describing you at 
 your best and freshest. But, as generally happens, 
 Johnson's early friends had passed away long 
 before his death. Except from incidental sugges- 
 tions in his life of Savage and a few stray 
 anecdotes, we have no vivid impressions of the 
 period in which he was struggling for employ- 
 ment on 'The Gentlemaris Magazine or slaving at 
 the Dictionary^ and still cheered by the presence of 
 his wife. Johnson himself once suggested the 
 names of one or two friends who could tell his 
 future biographers about his early life. They 
 were such as that worthy ' squarson ' (in Sydney 
 Smith's phrase), Dr. Taylor, in whom even Boswell 
 could only once detect something like a sparkle 
 of wit, and that of most doubtful quality. The 
 professional biographer knows too well by sad 
 experience what is the kind of information to 
 be extracted from such sources : probably a 
 couple of utterly pointless anecdotes, which he is 
 forced to insert because he has asked for them, 
 and which introduce some hopeless jumble of 
 dates and facts. Johnson would not have been 
 more than actually unfortunate if his sole official 
 
112 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 biographer had been such a one as Sir John 
 Hawkins, of whom it is recorded by his venerated 
 friend that he was ' an honest man at bottom ' ; 
 though, ' to be sure, he is penurious, and he is 
 mean, and it must be owned he has a degree 
 of brutality and a tendency to savageness that 
 cannot easily be defended.' His rivals, who 
 agreed in little else, agree in their judgment of 
 Hawkins. We may explain away Boswell's 
 antipathy : ' Hawkins,' he writes to his friend 
 Temple, ' is, no doubt, very malevolent. Observe 
 how he talks of me ''''as quite unknown " / ' 
 Boswell, according to Miss Hawkins, wished to 
 be described as ' The Boswell/ whereas he had 
 only appeared as 'a native of Scotland.' Hawkins's 
 meanness and mahgnity, however, are asserted on 
 less suspicious evidence. He was turned out of 
 the club for rudeness to Burke. Jeremy Bentham 
 calls him a 'good-for-nothing fellow,' who was 
 always wondering — which Bentham oddly seems 
 to regard as an inconsistency — at the depravity of 
 other people. The amiable Bishop Percy called 
 him a * most detestable fellow ' : and the suave 
 Reynolds told Malone that he was not only ' mean 
 and grovelling' but * absolutely dishonest.' He 
 tried to cheat Johnson's black servant. Barber, 
 
JOHNSONIANA 113 
 
 out of a watch which his master had given to him 
 when dying ; and thereby came in for some 
 stinging ridicule from Porson. Hawkins, indeed, 
 was grievously scandalised by Johnson's liberal 
 bequest of an annuity to Barber ; and the more 
 so, one guesses, because it seems to have been 
 only through Hawkins's importunity that Johnson 
 was induced to make a will at the last moment. 
 A man who succeeded in combining the censures 
 of Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, Bentham, and 
 Porson, to say nothing of Boswell, Malone, and 
 Murphy, must certainly have had his weaknesses. 
 Yet Johnson had a kindness for him ; and one 
 rather guesses that, after all, he was nothing worse 
 than an unusually dull, censorious, and self- 
 righteous specimen of the British middle-class of 
 his time. His most characteristic saying is that 
 Fielding was the ' inventor of a cant phrase, 
 goodness of heart, which means little more than 
 the virtue of a horse or a dog.' A good man is 
 one who can see the wickedness of Tom Jones 
 and fully appreciate the virtues of Bhfil. Now, if 
 Johnson had died at the age of fifty-four or fifty- 
 five, Hawkins, had he condescended to undertake 
 the task, would have had no rivals in writing a 
 biography, and we should have been duly grateful 
 
 VOL. I. H 
 
114 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 to him. For even in his very dingy and distort- 
 ing mirror we should have caught sight of a 
 grotesque, but impressive figure, an uncouth 
 Dominie Sampson, who, without Boswell, would 
 indeed be puzzling but v/ould still show touches 
 of the familiar qualities. Hawkins was dimly 
 aware, for example, though he cannot give proofs, 
 that Johnson could be humorous, and tells one 
 anecdote of the ' high jinks ' which, by Boswell's 
 era, had become impossible. When Mrs. Lennox 
 published one of her immortal novels in 1751, 
 Johnson induced Hawkins — with a shudder — to 
 ' spend a whole night in festivity.' A party of 
 twenty sat up at the Devil's Tavern : where there 
 was a ' magnificent hot apple-pye ' stuck with 
 bay leaves — ' because, forsooth, Mrs. Lennox had 
 written verses ' — nay, ' Johnson encircled her 
 brows ' with laurel, and performed ceremonies of 
 his own invention, and kept it up till morning. 
 At the dawn of day, his face ' still shone with 
 meridian splendour ' — reminding us of a famous 
 performance of Socrates, though Johnson sup- 
 ported his spirits by lemonade instead of wine, 
 and the conversation was more proper than that 
 at the Platonic Symposium, if hardly so briUiant. 
 Poor Hawkins, however, slunk off about eight 
 
JOHNSONIANA 115 
 
 with a ' sensation of shame ' at the resemblance 
 which the night's entertainment bore to a 'debauch.' 
 He had the strength of mind to overcome these 
 misgivings, and even to give this little narrative, 
 and defy any doubts which it might suggest as to 
 his own dignity. There was nothing, he is anxious 
 to make us understand, which would have shocked 
 even that reverent admirer of the ' dixonary,' 
 Miss Pinkerton of Chiswick Mall. For the most 
 part, it must be admitted, Hawkins has such 
 readers before his eyes, and Johnson is with him 
 the great moralist and author of the Rambler, 
 whom M. Taine found — no wonder — to be 
 unreadable. From Hawkins taken alone, we 
 might have dimly divined aspects of the Bos- 
 wellian Johnson ; but, on the whole, the lexico- 
 grapher would have been little more than a fine 
 specimen of the old denizens of Grub Street. 
 His discourse, says Hawkins, was of the 
 ' didactic kind, replete with original sentiments 
 expressed in the strongest and most correct 
 terms.* Yet even Hawkins cannot quite damp 
 the genuine fire in a few specimens which he has 
 preserved. 
 
 Among the earlier friends we must reckon one 
 incomparably superior person, Reynolds knew 
 
ii6 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 Johnson from about 1754, and gives his impres- 
 sions in two imaginary conversations. These, 
 which were first published by Croker, are of very 
 great interest. One would like to know, indeed, 
 whether they were written in complete independ- 
 ence of Boswell ; for the coincidence is close and 
 curious. They are meant to illustrate Reynolds's 
 own remark, that Johnson considered Garrick to 
 be his property, and would allow no one either to 
 praise or to blame him without contradiction. 
 No doubt Reynolds and Boswell had heard 
 Johnson's comments often enough to account for 
 a common element ; and, in any case, the simi- 
 larity implies a valuable corroboration of Boswell's 
 perspicuity. Reynolds, we may be sure, had a 
 good eye for character, and looked at Johnson 
 from the position of an equal, not a hero- 
 worshipper. Yet the general result is the same, 
 though the sharpness of the impression is naturally 
 much greater in Boswell's verbal report. So, 
 speaking of Garrick's being unspoilt by the atten- 
 tions of great men, Johnson is made to say by 
 Reynolds, that ' it is to the credit of Garrick that 
 he never laid claim to this distinction. It was as 
 voluntarily allowed as if it had been his birthright. 
 In this I confess I looked on David with some 
 
JOHNSONIANA 117 
 
 degree of envy, not so much for the respect he 
 received as for the manner of its being acquired. 
 What fell into his lap unsought, I have been 
 forced to claim,' and so on. In Boswell, Johnson 
 remarks that Garrick had had applause 'dashed 
 in his face, sounded in his ears, and went home 
 every night with the plaudits of a thousand in his 
 cranium. Then, Mr. Garrick did not find but 
 made his way to the tables, the lives, and almost 
 the bedchambers, of the great. If all this had 
 happened to me, I should have had a couple of 
 fellows with long poles walking before me, to 
 knock down everybody that stood in the way.' 
 Obviously the substance is the same ; but 
 Johnson's words, in passing through the medium 
 of Reynolds's bland and decorous interpretation, 
 have lost all the vivid concrete imagery that fixes 
 them in our memory. Johnson's only recorded 
 blush was on the occasion of having said some- 
 thing rude to Reynolds ; and we can easily 
 believe that the Reynolds atmosphere would 
 soften and occasionally emasculate the pithy 
 utterances of his friend. Reynolds's painted 
 portraits of ' Blinking Sam ' show a power of 
 interpreting the outward appearance which no 
 doubt indicates a keen perception of the character 
 
ii8 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 beneath. But on reading his portrait in words, 
 we feel that in some cases a photographic likeness 
 is incomparably more effective than a judiciously- 
 toned and harmonised study by an ambitious 
 artist. An interesting appendage to this paper 
 gives the recollections of Sir Joshua's poor tremb- 
 ling sister Frances, When Boswell tried to get 
 some of Johnson's letters from her, her ' too nice 
 delicacy' prevented her compliance. She was 
 ambitious enough to write some little poems, 
 which Johnson assured her were ' very pretty,' 
 and had much moved him. Considering that in 
 the ten first lines she makes ' come ' rhyme to 
 ' prolong,' ' steep ' to ' meet,' and ' averse ' to 
 ' redress,' one is not surprised that, though 
 Johnson advised her not to burn them, he did 
 not persuade her to publish them. The Recollec- 
 tions, though prepared for publication, also stayed 
 in her desk. They show quaintly the impression 
 made by Johnson on the nerves of the shrinking 
 poetess. She was pleased at their first interview 
 by hearing him tell how, when he went home at 
 two in the morning, he would put pennies into 
 the hands of children sleeping in the streets, that 
 they might buy a breakfast when they awoke. 
 She gives various anecdotes of kindness which he 
 
JOHNSONIANA 119 
 
 had showed — as in giving her advice in such a 
 delicate matter as her difficulties with her famous 
 brother. But she had a struggle. He was, she 
 says, ' in affections mild,' but could not be called 
 ' in manners gentle.' His celebrity, she thinks, 
 was ' sublimated, as one may say, with terror and 
 with love.' He was very rarely or never ' inten- 
 tionally asperous' (Miss Reynolds has some 
 delightful phrases), unless in defence of religion 
 or morality : but he ' inverted the common forms 
 of civilised society.' Miss Reynolds looks upon 
 him as a monstrous combination — a sage, if not a 
 saint, confined by a strange freak of nature in the 
 outside of a Caliban. Nobody, accordingly, has 
 given more singular accounts of his amazing 
 appearance : especially his performance of what 
 she calls his ' straddles.' She tells how he would 
 suddenly contort his feet into a geometrical 
 diagram, while his hands were raised as high as 
 possible above his head, or apparently meant to 
 imitate a jockey at full speed ; how, when he 
 passed through a door, he would whirl poor blind 
 Miss Williams about as he whirled and twisted in 
 his gesticulation, or else leave her groping outside 
 while he made a spring across the threshold, 
 apparently attempting (in modern phrase) to 
 
120 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 establish a record for jumping. When Miss 
 Reynolds took a walk with him in Twickenham 
 meadows, he collected a crowd by these 'extra- 
 ordinary antics,' and afterwards seesawed so 
 violently while reading Grotius's De Veritate that 
 people came up to ask what was the matter. Dr. 
 Campbell also declares that Johnson looked like 
 an idiot, without a rag of sense, and was ' for ever 
 dancing the devil's jig,' or making a drivelHng 
 effort to ' whistle in his absent paroxysms.' No 
 other biographer speaks so strongly of these 
 amazing performances ; and probably they had 
 got upon Miss Reynolds's nerves. She amiably 
 wishes to explain his apparently ^asperous' 
 conduct; and certainly a man who was half 
 deaf, so blind, as she declared, that he could not 
 recognise a friend's face half a yard off, and, more- 
 over, liable to become at any moment a mere 
 bundle of automatic contortions, might be ex- 
 pected to tread on other people's toes, literally 
 and metaphorically, without bad intentions. The 
 ' two primasval causes,* as Miss Reynolds has it, 
 his ' intellectual excellence ' and his ' corporeal 
 defects,' made him apparently harsh. The cor- 
 poreal defects ' tended to darken his perceptions 
 of what may be called propriety and impropriety 
 
JOHNSONIANA 121 
 
 in general conversation,' and the intellectual force 
 made him hit hard. Miss Reynolds, no doubt, is 
 speaking to the point ; but it is plain, too, that 
 she would be horror-struck rather than amused 
 whenever Johnson descended from his pedestal of 
 the Rambler. He is still with her a heap of 
 contradictory qualities. 
 
 Murphy was another friend of about the same 
 period, whose essay is very properly reproduced 
 here. It would make a respectable article in a 
 biographical dictionary ; but does not get beyond 
 the humble merits attainable in such works. It 
 was not till Johnson had emerged from his 
 struggles and was reposing under the shelter of his 
 passion that he at last met the predestined bio- 
 grapher, Boswell met him on i6th May 1763, and 
 Mrs. Piozzi (Mrs, Thrale) nth January 1765. 
 Of the two, Mrs. Piozzi had certainly the best 
 opportunities, and, indeed, opportunities better 
 than those which have come to the most famous of 
 biographers, Lockhart had not seen so much ot 
 Scott nor Froude of Carlyle, Both Lockhart and 
 Froude, however, had the advantage of abundant 
 material. They could tell the earlier story in the 
 words of their own heroes ; though in both cases 
 the literary skill which turned the materials to 
 
122 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 account was of the highest order. Johnson's later 
 correspondence is characteristic enough, but only 
 a few fragments survive to cast an occasional gleam 
 of light upon the earlier period. In the main, 
 therefore, the interest has to depend, not upon the 
 narrative, but upon the fully developed character. 
 We have to infer what Johnson was by our know- 
 ledge of what he became. Mrs. Piozzi, naturally, 
 did not attempt a biography. She was with her 
 second husband in Italy when she put together 
 from memory the collection of anecdotes which, 
 after Boswell, is, with all shortcomings, the nearest 
 approach to a satisfactory portrait of Johnson. 
 Mrs. Piozzi's book was a thorn in the flesh to 
 Boswell, who, however, has frequently the pleasure 
 of chuckling over some demonstrable inaccuracy. 
 She has been made into a kind of devil's advocate 
 in the case of Johnson's canonisation. Hayward, 
 in his life of her, took her part in the famous 
 quarrel. He had, of course, no difficulty in 
 pointing out that the British prejudices roused by 
 her second marriage were not justifiable in the 
 court of pure reason. An Italian musician is 
 certainly not in the nature of things inferior to an 
 English brewer. Piozzi appears moreover to have 
 been a real gentleman though he was a fiddler and 
 
JOHNSONIANA 123 
 
 a foreigner ; and, therefore, it must be fully 
 granted that the wrath of Johnson and other 
 friends, including her own daughters, at Mrs. 
 Thrale becoming Mrs. Piozzi was absurd from a 
 philosophical point of view. How far it was 
 excusable, when we consider the social atmosphere 
 of the time, need not be considered. The fact 
 remains that the anecdotes are coloured by the 
 intention. Nobody, I think, can doubt that the 
 real cause of alienation was Mrs. Piozzi's know- 
 ledge that the marriage, rightly or wrongly, would 
 offend her own circle, and, above all, would shock 
 her revered monitor. She is, therefore, inclined to 
 dwell upon the ' asperous ' side of Johnson's per- 
 formances, and to argue that the yoke which had 
 been bearable when it was shared by Thrale became 
 altogether intolerable when she had to support it by 
 herself. Comparison with her own journals shows 
 that this view, which is insinuated throughout, did 
 not really correspond to the facts. It was not 
 Johnson's mode of devouring his ' pudden,' or his 
 rough speeches about Mrs.Thrale's sentimentalisms, 
 which became suddenly inexcusable, but the way 
 in which he showed his contempt for Piozzi. 
 Granting this, however, the book, if a book ' with 
 a tendency,' is still an admirable supplement to 
 
124 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 Boswell ; though it is now chiefly interesting as a 
 measure of Boswell's skill. We need not inquire 
 whether the anecdotes told by both are given most 
 accurately by one or the other ; whether he told 
 Hannah More to consider what her flattery was 
 worth, before she choked him with it, or more 
 gently entreated the 'dearest lady,' after many 
 deprecations, to consider its value before she 
 ' bestowed it so freely ' ; or whether he told Mrs. 
 Piozzi that the world would be none the worse, 
 or that she would not herself be much concerned, 
 if all her relations were spitted like larks and 
 roasted for Presto's supper. Was he ridiculing 
 her feeling or reproving her levity ? We can 
 never know for certain, but we can see clearly 
 enough in other cases which reporter can tell a 
 story most artistically. Some of Boswell's critics 
 speak as though his only merit were In his 
 accuracy. He had the courage, though his con- 
 temporaries gave it uglier names, to take out his 
 notebook and set down the words at the instant 
 when they dropped from Johnson's lips. He 
 realised, though in a queer way, the immense 
 value of a contemporary note, and was as great 
 a reformer in biography as Gibbon in history. 
 That undoubtedly was a merit, especially at the 
 
JOHNSONIANA 125 
 
 time when biographers in general thought it a duty 
 even to alter such contemporary documents as 
 they had ; and to give without warning, as Mason 
 did in the case of Gray, or even Lord Sheffield in 
 the case of Gibbon, not the actual letter, but a 
 compound of different letters. Even Boswell 
 indeed, as appears from his notebook, thought 
 himself at liberty to touch up phrases, though 
 he may have thought that he was bringing 
 rough notes nearer to the truth. But it is plain 
 that this was only one condition of his success. 
 Most proverbial good sayings, one is inclined to 
 suspect, are partly due to the reporters, or rather 
 to generations of reporters. They have been 
 smoothed and polished like pebbles on a beach by 
 continuous attrition in the mouths of men, and if 
 we could see them in their original enunciation 
 they would be comparatively rough and clumsy. 
 On the other hand, the detached witticism loses, 
 and may entirely change, its significance when 
 taken as an isolated gem. The special skill of 
 Boswell is in his power of giving, not the felicitous 
 phrase by itself, but the dramatic situation in 
 which it was struck out, and to which, even in its 
 unpolished state, it owed its impressiveness. In 
 that he is not only superlative but, I fancy, 
 
126 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 unique. There are countless collections of ' anas ' 
 and 'table-talks' from which we get some im- 
 pression of the good things said by famous men. 
 There are imaginary conversations which are 
 sometimes admirable, even though we perceive, 
 as we read them, that no real conversation was 
 ever so continuous, or logical, or poHshed. 
 Boswell seems to be alone in the art of presenting 
 us in a few lines with a conversation which is 
 obviously as real as it is dramatic. We listen to 
 Johnson, but to Johnson surrounded by Garrick 
 and Goldsmith and Burke and Wilkes, and 
 appreciate not only the thing that was said, but 
 what gave it point and appropriateness at the time, 
 and under the circumstances. The fact was, of 
 course, made possible by the nature of the John- 
 sonian circle. There are many admirable sayings 
 in the table-talk of Coleridge, but a report of the 
 whole would have obviously given us nothing but 
 a diluted and discursive lecture. Carlyle's talk 
 would have been in the same relation to his 
 Reminiscences or his Latter-day Pamphlets. But 
 Johnson's talk was superior to his writings, just 
 because it was struck out in the heat of 'wit 
 combats ' with a circle which, even if it took the 
 passive part of mere sounding-board, was essential 
 
JOHNSONIANA 127 
 
 to the effect. No one, however, except the 
 inimitable Boswell clearly saw this or was able to 
 turn the remark to account. Mrs. Piozzi gives 
 us good things, but they are detached and discon- 
 tinuous. She reports the phrases which for one 
 reason or other had happened to stick in her 
 memory. She is evidently eking out her recol- 
 lections by bits of written Johnsonese. Johnson 
 might perhaps have written in the Rambler^ but 
 could never have said in talk, that certain people 
 are ' forced to linger life away in tasteless stupidity, 
 and choose to count the moments by remembrance 
 of pain instead of enjoyment of pleasure.* She 
 probably gives an unintentionally false colouring 
 to some of the sayings ; and, in any case, is unable 
 to make a harmonious blending of the various 
 elements. She remembers every now and then 
 that Johnson was, on her showing, to be a man 
 of the highest virtue ; and she proceeds to tell us 
 how much he felt for the poor ; or how sorry 
 he could be when he found that he had wounded a 
 man's feelings unintentionally, or what excellent 
 advice and help he would give to friends who were 
 really in want of it. Mrs. Piozzi, however, being a 
 singularly quick and vivacious lady, with a sarcastic 
 and occasionally cynical turn, and no very profound 
 
128 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 appreciation of character, just stitches her anecdotes 
 together as they come, and does not trouble her- 
 self to blend them into a consistent whole. 
 
 The more we read, in short, the more sensible 
 we become of the unique merits of our old friend. 
 He is far too familiar to justify any elaborate 
 analysis of character, but a word or two may 
 help to explain how his superiority to his rivals 
 arose from his strange idiosyncrasy. The letters 
 to Temple, first published in 1857, show the man 
 even more distinctly than the life of Johnson ; 
 and I have sometimes wondered that so curious a 
 book has not been more generally read. As a 
 self-revelation it is almost equal to a fragment of 
 Pepys. Pepys was secretive enough to keep his 
 diary to himself, whereas Boswell seems to have 
 been equally willing to confide all his weaknesses 
 to a friend. That quality, whatever it may be, 
 seems to have been omitted from his composition 
 which makes most people feel the absolute neces- 
 sity of a veil of privacy. They have feelings of 
 which they are not ashamed, but which it would 
 be agony to expose to the gaze of their neigh- 
 bours. Boswell seems to have enjoyed laying 
 bare everything that he felt ; he would apparently 
 
JOHNSONIANA 129 
 
 have wished his confessor, if he had had one, to 
 pubhsh his avowals in the papers. ' Not a bent 
 sixpence cares he,' as he says of himself in a 
 boyish song, ' whether with him or at him you 
 laugh.' To good-natured people there was some- 
 thing attractive in the confidingness which is 
 implied in all his absurdities. Whether he intro- 
 duces himself to the hero Paoli, the moralist 
 Johnson, or to Mitchell, then the English 
 Ambassador at the Court of Frederick, he 
 immediately proceeds to give him full informa- 
 tion as to the state of his soul. No other human 
 being could have proposed that the great Chatham 
 should ' honour him with a letter now and then,' 
 in order to keep him ' ardent in the pursuit of 
 virtuous fame.' He was at the time only known 
 to Chatham as the author of the book upon 
 Corsica, but thought it perfectly natural that 
 the magnificent statesman should become his 
 confidential adviser. Many distinguished people 
 besides Johnson seem to have been flattered by 
 his almost pathetic trust in their benevolence. 
 His simplicity and good-nature were so unmis- 
 takable that, as Burke put it, they scarcely 
 seemed to be virtuous. People overlooked the 
 VOL. r. I 
 
t30 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 impudence in consideration of the genuine good- 
 will. David Hume and Wilkes seem to have felt 
 the charm as much as Johnson and Burke. A 
 man who takes you into his confidence so frankly 
 is at least paying you a compliment. It was only 
 such fine gentlemen as Walpole and Gibbon, 
 who stood upon their dignity and would not take 
 liberties even upon invitation^ lest liberties should 
 be taken with them, whom Bos well found intoler- 
 able. Gibbon in particular was an ' ugly, affected, 
 disgusting fellow,' who ' poisoned ' the club for 
 him. Still worse, indeed, were the people who 
 saw in Boswell's simplicity a chance of making 
 him a butt for rough practical jokes. The 
 sycophants who surrounded his patron. Lord 
 Lowther, and the Bar of the Northern Circuit 
 seem to have embittered the poor man's last years 
 by using him in that capacity. His disposition, 
 in fact, was not conducive to success in practical 
 life. Boswell was far too easy-going and too apt 
 to snatch at any indulgences which came in his 
 way to play an effective part in a game of rough- 
 and-tumble. The characteristic result was that 
 Boswell became a kind of interested looker-on, 
 like a delicate boy at a rough public school, 
 who admires the games, though he cannot take 
 
JOHNSONIANA 131 
 
 part in them, and worships the heroes. To his 
 own fancy he was a kind of Hamlet. He ex- 
 plains to Paoli, as he had already explained to 
 Mitchell, that he had 'intensely apphed himself 
 to metaphysical research,' and got ' beyond his 
 depth.' He had thus become for ever incapable 
 of taking a part in active life. He was proud, as 
 we know, of his hypochondria ; and though he 
 frankly confesses to less refined causes of most of 
 his fits, he always cherishes the belief that they 
 imply a philosophical temperament. He delights 
 in supposing himself to be puzzHng over the 
 problems of fate and freewill. But he has not 
 the courage to be a thorough sceptic or pessimist. 
 At bottom, he feels the world to be infinitely too 
 enjoyable to admit of a gloomy solution ; and so 
 his real solace is in day-dreaming. He is always 
 in imagination overcoming his difiiculties and 
 rising to fame and fortune. In a very character- 
 istic letter (in 1789), he explains all his troubles: 
 Pitt had been ' ill-advised enough ' not to 
 patronise a ' man of my popular and pleasant 
 talents.' His wife was dying ; his property 
 embarrassed ; and he was induced to adopt John- 
 son's melancholy view of the vanity of human 
 wishes. And yet he is still full of ' projects to 
 
132 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 attain wealth and eminence ' ; and observes that 
 he is always * looking back and looking forward,' 
 and wondering *how he will feel in situations 
 which he anticipates in fancy.' In Corsica he 
 sang Hearts of Oak to the natives, and fancied 
 himself ' a recruiting sea-ofHcer, with his chorus 
 of Corsicans aboard the British fleet.' He rode 
 Paoli's own horse, decked with ' crimson velvet ' 
 and ^ broad gold lace,' and fancied himself for a 
 moment to be the idol of an enthusiastic popula- 
 tion. He is always playing at being something 
 delightful. He makes a vow * under a solemn 
 yew-tree,' in the garden of his friend Temple, 
 and becomes straightway a model of all the 
 virtues. True, he did not keep it 'religiously,' 
 but that was because ' a little wine hurried him on 
 too much.' He promises Paoli, however, that he 
 will take no wine for a year, and, having kept his 
 promise for three weeks at the time of writing, 
 feels that he is virtually a reformed character. 
 The queerest result of this strange muddle 
 between the ideal and the practical appears in 
 his letters to Temple upon his love affairs. He 
 writes an admirable panegyric upon marriage to 
 his friend, and remarks that he ' looks with horror 
 on adultery.' This, however, is part of a passage 
 
JOHNSONIANA 133 
 
 in which he explains that he has an amiable 
 mistress who, unfortunately, has also a husband. 
 His clerical friend hereupon seems to have blamed 
 him for 'keeping another man's wife.' Boswell 
 is startled at the phrase. That was literally his 
 scheme, as he admits, but * imagination repre- 
 sented it just as being fond of a pretty, lively 
 black little lady, who, to oblige me, stayed in 
 Edinburgh, and I very genteelly paid her expenses.' 
 A year later Temple gives him a ' moral lecture ' 
 for some scrape into which he has fallen, and gets 
 for answer that Boswell's ' warm imagination 
 looks forward with great complacency on the 
 sobriety, the healthfulness, and the worth of his 
 future life.' His imagination retained this in- 
 estimable power up to the last, and it must be 
 admitted, would be an admirable consoler to a 
 feeble conscience. It told him one truth, how- 
 ever, in 1790 : namely, that he was writing what 
 would be, ' without exception, the most enter- 
 taining book ' that his correspondent had ever 
 read. Too characteristically he had realised his 
 aspirations just when success became valueless. 
 But, as a rule, he is in the odd position of one 
 who lives in a dream world, and yet one whose 
 dreams are always a version of realities. 
 
134 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 Boswell is thus always playing at being some- 
 thing else, a melancholy philosopher or a virtuous 
 judge or patriot ; when he heard music, as he told 
 Johnson, he felt himself ' plunging into the thick 
 of the battle ' ; and after too convivial an even- 
 ing, he retired in imagination to the deserts and 
 adopted Rousseau's ideal ' savage state,' Still, as 
 nobody appreciated more heartily the actual and 
 solid pleasures of life, he could never detach 
 himself from the world, though he did become 
 disqualified for success. He could always restore 
 his complacency by virtuous resolutions, and the 
 friendship of good-natured people, and roamed 
 through Vanity Fair lingering at every booth 
 and distracted between the charms of every 
 variety of enjoyment. He was precisely in the 
 humour, therefore, to become a disciple of John- 
 son. For Johnson was the professor of a science 
 which at that period was most flourishing. He 
 was devoted, as he and his friends would have 
 said, to the study of human nature. He was a 
 ' moralist,* not meaning, as we might now mean, 
 that he held any particular theories about 
 ' hedonism ' or ' self-realisation,' but that he was 
 always observing concrete human beings, their 
 eccentricities and miseries and varieties of char- 
 
JOHNSONIANA 135 
 
 acter, with the eagerness of a scientific student. 
 His favourite quotation, according to Mrs. 
 Piozzi, was Pope's saying about the 'proper 
 study of mankind.' The phrase, however, was 
 taking a meaning rather different from that which 
 it had borne in the days of Pope. The typical 
 man of Pope's circle was to be found in Courts 
 and at Ministers' levees. He was the person to 
 be lectured upon manners by Chesterfield and in- 
 itiated into Machiavellian worldly wisdom. John- 
 son, as the famous letter to Chesterfield shows, 
 expressed among other things the intrusion of a 
 new social element ; the rise of Grub Street to 
 consideration, if not respect. He and his com- 
 panions had known the world upon which Pope 
 and his friends looked down with scorn, the world 
 of sponging-houses and bailiffs and translators 
 kept in Curll's garrets. The study of * human 
 nature,' as Johnson, and Fielding, and Hogarth, 
 and their contemporaries understood it, had to 
 take into account the life of London slums, and 
 to consider a good many bald facts, coarse and 
 repulsive enough, which their predecessors had 
 regarded as beneath the notice of a gentleman. 
 Dimly, too, they became aware of the passions 
 which were leading, though they knew it not, to 
 
136 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 a great social upheaval, and beginning to be 
 sentimental and denounce luxury and believe in 
 the state of nature or the rights of man. Johnson 
 was rich in such experience, and his best sayings 
 are summaries of the reflections which it sug- 
 gested. His reading and his criticism had all 
 the same purpose. He loved biography and such 
 history as deals with individual character. He 
 could not bear to talk about the ' Punic War,' as 
 he told Mrs. Piozzi — formal accounts of cam- 
 paigns and conquests ; but he loved the history 
 which showed ' how our ancestors Hved.' He 
 was even modern in his approval of early attempts 
 to give accounts of ' common manners ' rather 
 than political events. He always estimates books, 
 from Shakespeare to Richardson, by the * know- 
 ledge of the human heart' which he considers 
 them to contain. He loves London as a botanist 
 might love a fertile country, on account of the 
 abundance of the material for his favourite study. 
 He sent Boswell and Windham to ' explore 
 Wapping ' on account of the variety of ^ modes 
 of life ' to be found there. Boswell is generally 
 ridiculed for his willingness to visit even such 
 people as the famous Mrs. Rudd, who was pro- 
 bably guilty of forgery and something very like 
 
JOHNSONIANA 137 
 
 murder. Johnson would have visited her too, 
 he said, if they had not already got into the 
 habit of putting things into the papers ; and both 
 would have justified themselves on the pretext 
 that they were studying ' human nature.' When 
 people go to Wapping now it is generally to carry 
 out Mr. Charles Booth's admirable method of 
 investigating great social problems. They deal 
 with criminals by statistical tables, not by seek- 
 ing the society of eminent murderers, or looking 
 on at executions. We talk about sociology, not 
 the study of human nature, and investigate the 
 manners and customs of primitive savages in- 
 stead of generalising our private personal ex- 
 perience. The speciality of Johnson's period is 
 precisely this desire to consider the concrete 
 human being, from Wapping to St. James's, as 
 the subject-matter of a separate and intensely in- 
 teresting science. 
 
 This, not to go further, characterises Boswell's 
 view of Johnson. Boswell, already inclined to 
 study life after a quaint and desultory fashion 
 enough, to put himself in contact with all 
 manner of famous people and to play their parts 
 in imagination, imagined, not without excuse, 
 that he had found in Johnson an embodiment of 
 
138 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 all the wisdom to be extracted from manifold ex- 
 perience of life, guided by profound penetration 
 into character. Johnson's conversation is de- 
 lightful because it is full of the pithy aphorisms 
 which concentrate the results of the experience. 
 Johnson is the half-inspired prophet who can tell 
 him what fruit to grow in his garden, what pro- 
 fession he should adopt, and how he should 
 behave to his wife or his father. If there were 
 such a thing as a scientific knowledge of the 
 human heart, and if Johnson had possessed it, 
 there would be much sense in this ; and so far as 
 strong common sense could be a substitute for 
 science, Boswell was perhaps not so far wrong 
 in his choice of an oracle. It helps to explain — 
 not Boswell's skill, for that is as inexphcable as 
 all genius — but the special distinction between 
 Boswell and his rivals. Boswell, that is, had not 
 only sat at the feet of the prophet, but had really 
 imbibed his method. The others, from Hawkins 
 up to Mrs. Piozzi, simply take the point of view 
 of the ordinary biographer. They assume that 
 their readers have studied The Rambler or 
 Rasselas or the Dictionary, and want to know 
 something about the author. They collect as 
 many good sayings and characteristic anecdotes 
 
JOHNSONIAN A 139 
 
 as they can, and argue as to the justice of the 
 various charges of rudeness and so forth. Some 
 of them, who, from no fault of Dr. Hill's, fill 
 rather more pages than we could wish, think that 
 a great man ought to be mainly the hero of a 
 religious tract, and treat us simply to minute and 
 painful descriptions of the poor man's last days. 
 In any case, the real Johnson is for them the 
 author, and their function is simply to satisfy the 
 curiosity of his readers. Boswell being, in how- 
 ever quaint a fashion, a man of real genius, saw 
 instinctively something more. Johnson was, in the 
 first place, his oracle — the man who has extracted 
 the truth implicitly written in the book of human 
 life. But then, besides this, Johnson might also 
 be considered as himself a page in the book. To 
 understand his significance we must take not 
 merely his utterances, but their whole setting, 
 the ' environment ' as well as the individual. 
 Boswell has to study the Johnson circle as he was 
 sent to study Wapping. Charing Cross is pro- 
 foundly interesting because through it flows a full 
 tide of humanities. The biography is not merely 
 an account of Johnson, but what we should call 
 a study of human life. Johnson himself is, of 
 course, in the foreground — he was, so to speak. 
 
HO STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 a great nugget, a gigantic mass of 'human 
 nature.' He had that article, like Carlyle, in so 
 much abundance as to shock and alienate a good 
 many people who shrink from the rough ore, 
 however full it may be of precious metal. To 
 study him, therefore, was to study a type of sur- 
 passing interest, and nobody was really freer than 
 Boswell from what Macaulay, erroneously, I 
 should say, called the lues Boswelliana, the un- 
 qualified admiration even of a hero's faihngs. He 
 would not, as he told Hannah More, make his 
 lion a cat to please anybody, and perceived that 
 the shadows were necessary to do justice to the 
 lights. But the point in which he is even more 
 unique is the perception that Johnson, though 
 always in the foreground, is still to be only in the 
 foreground of a group of living and moving 
 human beings. The dramatic skill displayed in 
 such descriptions as the famous scene with Wilkes 
 enables him to do what is not even approached 
 by his rivals. It makes us incidentally share 
 Boswell's own feeling. He comes up from Edin- 
 burgh with such a * gust ' for London society as 
 excited even Johnson's wonder. It is not a mere 
 search for pleasure or amusement, but a kind of 
 scientific zeal, that animates him. He has a 
 
JOHNSONIANA 141 
 
 genuine desire to see life at its fullest, all human 
 passions stimulated to the utmost by the conflict 
 of multitudes, and shown in the greatest variety 
 by the mixture of men of all ranks and condi- 
 tions, to see the keenest intellects of the day 
 roused to activity by constant intercourse, and to 
 have before his eyes every variety of incident, 
 from a change of Ministry to a procession of 
 criminals to Tyburn tree. The insatiable curiosity 
 is only stimulated by the circumstance that he is 
 jostled aside by men of stronger fibre and obliged 
 to look on or to play his part by ' a warm ima- 
 gination ' instead of actual participation. This, I 
 take it, is why Boswell's rivals seem to give us 
 merely a collection of detached anecdotes, while in 
 Boswell all the persons seem to come suddenly to 
 life and give us a real insight into the whole social 
 sphere instead of being mere lay figures. Mme. 
 d'Arblay perhaps deserves the exception made in 
 her favour, in so far as she has the real novelist's 
 instinct, and gives us lively accounts of incidents, 
 instead of isolated facts. But Mme. d'Arblay 
 scarcely sees more than one aspect of Johnson — 
 the famous old moralist who hkes to make a pet 
 of a charming young woman, and relaxes into 
 more than usual playfulness in course of adminis- 
 
142 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 tering delightful doses of pardonable flattery. Of 
 the others, even of Mrs. Piozzi, we can hardly 
 say more than that they become amusing by the 
 light of Boswell. He has revealed the actors to 
 us with such skill that even the dry and pompous 
 narratives enable us to supply what was wanting, 
 as in the dullest of reports we can sometimes 
 hear the accents of a familiar friend. 
 
 Note. — Mr. Percy Fitzgerald has recently published a 
 'Critical Examination' of Dr. Birkbeck Hill's Johnsonian 
 editions. Mr. Fitzgerald refers more than once to the fact 
 that I have been ' beguiled ' into speaking of the edition 
 of Boswell's Life of Johnson as the best known to me. 
 Indeed, it seems that the edition has been very generally 
 welcomed ; and Mr. Fitzgerald's severe criticism comes as 
 a rather surprising discord in a general chorus of praise. In 
 any case, I feel it right to say a few words in defence of an 
 opinion to which I confess that I still adhere without hesita- 
 tion. My reason is simple. I have for years made constant 
 use of the Life of Johnson, and have found Dr. Birkbeck Hill's 
 notes exceedingly useful. Whenever I am in want of infor- 
 mation about any of the Johnson circle, I regularly turn for 
 help to this edition, and I very seldom open it without 
 gaining some light upon the matter in hand. I think that I 
 should have been ungrateful if I had not acknowledged so 
 much ; and I will briefly state why I cannot retract my 
 acknowledgment. Mr. Fitzgerald criticises Dr. Birkbeck 
 Hill for giving a great deal of irrelevant information, for 
 frequently misunderstanding his author, and for frequent 
 inaccuracy. The first count depends more or less upon 
 what seems to me to be a matter for fair difference of opinion. 
 
JOHNSONIANA 143 
 
 I quite admit that Dr. Birkbeck Hill has given a quantity of 
 information in his notes which has little or no direct bearing 
 upon Johnson himself, or upon Boswell's discharge of his 
 biographical duties. But I also confess that I have found 
 such notes very pleasant reading, and been grateful for them. 
 I like an occasional excursion into matters suggested by the 
 text and illustrative of the period. If Mr. Fitzgerald does 
 not like them, he has after all the simple remedy of not 
 reading them. To give an example : Mr. Fitzgerald ridicules 
 a note (Hill's Boswell, iii. 241) in which Dr. Birkbeck Hill 
 illustrates by several quotations the curious change in the 
 meaning of the word ' respectable.' Chesterfield speaks, for 
 example, of the hour of death as 'at least a very respectable 
 one,' and Hannah More thinks a roomful of portraits of 
 admirals a 'respectable sight.' The note is certainly super- 
 fluous, but I am grateful for the knowledge conveyed in a 
 few lines as to a really curious instance of the shifting of 
 meaning in a familiar word. Dr. Birkbeck Hill, again, defends 
 Johnson against Macaulay's statement that he knew nothing 
 of the country, and despised travelling. In the course of his 
 remarks he gives the populations of Lichfield, Oxford, and 
 Birmingham, where Johnson spent most of his early life, to 
 show that they were then small country towns, and points 
 out that a boyish perusal of Martin's account of the Hebrides 
 had stimulated the curiosity long afterwards satisfied by the 
 journey with Boswell. Mr. Fitzgerald ridicules these state- 
 ments, which occur in a disquisition in Appendix B to the 
 third volume. No doubt they are not strictly necessary, but 
 to me they really illustrate some of Johnson's characteristic 
 prejudices, and qualify one of Macaulay's slashing assaults. 
 I was again innocent enough to be grateful for them. 
 
 This suggests another point. Mr. Fitzgerald ridicules 
 Dr. Birkbeck Hill's enormous and self-made index. Un- 
 doubtedly it errs, if anything, by excess. That is a very rare 
 fault, and a fault on the right side. I have found the index 
 
144 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 exceedingly useful on very many occasions, and been grateful 
 for the labour bestowed, which has often saved me a great 
 deal of trouble. The present occasion is an instance. Mr. 
 Fitzgerald has given hardly any references to the passages 
 which he criticises ; and I have had to find them by the help 
 of Dr. Birkbeck Hill himself. In some cases, I have been 
 unable to verify Mr. Fitzgerald's references even with that 
 help, and I am forced to suspend my judgment of his 
 criticisms. Thus (p. 13) he accuses Dr. Birkbeck Hill of 
 giving '■ sixteen passages ' to illustrate the meaning of 'Hockley 
 in the Hole.' In the only passage which T can find about 
 'Hockley in the Hole' (vol. iii. 134), Dr. Birkbeck Hill 
 illustrates the meaning by quotations from the Spectator^ 
 Fielding's "Jonathan Wild, and the Beggars' Opera. That is, 
 there are only three passages cited, and, as it seems to me, not 
 one too many. But the absence of a reference leaves a bare 
 possibility that Dr. Birkbeck Hill has quoted other passages 
 elsewhere. Considering, however, the completeness of the 
 index, I believe that Mr. Fitzgerald has somehow made an 
 odd mistake in counting. 
 
 This is the more probable because I find other singular 
 mistakes, which show that Mr. Fitzgerald, in accusing his 
 author of inaccuracy — doubtless the worst of faults in an 
 editor — has himself been inaccurate with the passages before 
 his eyes, and his attention, one supposes, fully awake. At 
 page 4 he says that Dr. Birkbeck Hill's index proves that the 
 editor had never seen Boswell's first production — 'certainly 
 never read it.' The ' proof is that in the index it is mentioned 
 in italics as ' The Club ' at Newmarket. In the text, he adds, 
 it is again written 'the Club.' Now the real title was the 
 Cub, as any one must perceive who has read the book. I turn 
 to the index (vol. vi. p. 25), and there find Cub at Newmarket 
 correctly entered between 'critics' and 'curiosity.' I look 
 back to the text (vol. i. 383, n. 3), and there, it is true, the 
 word is written ' Club.' But as Dr. Birkbeck Hill quotes a 
 
JOHNSONIANA 145 
 
 phrase from the preface, in which the Jockey Club at New- 
 market is mentioned, I am charitable enough to believe that he 
 had really seen the book, and that ' Club ' in the text is probably 
 a correction introduced by the excessive zeal of a reader misled 
 by the reference to the Club. At page 1 1, Mr. Fitzgerald com- 
 ments upon a note in which Dr. Birkbeck Hill explains a pas- 
 sage in Johnson's letter on receiving the M.A. degree at Oxford 
 by referring to a seditious placard published during the period of 
 excitement over the famous Oxfordshire election of 1754. The 
 letter, says Mr. Fitzgerald, was written in February 1755, and 
 the placard appeared in 'July, five or six months later. So the 
 whole speculation topples over ! ' It would, were it not that the 
 placard appeared in July 1754 (not 1755), as is indeed obvious 
 from Dr. Birkbeck Hill's reference to the Gentleman's Magazine 
 of that year (vol. i. 282). At p. 16, Mr.Fitzgerald attacks Dr. 
 Birkbeck Hill's dates. Dr. Birkbeck Hill (vol. i. 146) says that 
 Johnson had his first interview with Hogarth ' sixteen years ' 
 after coming to London. ' This cannot be accurate,' says 
 Mr. Fitzgerald. Why } The date of the interview is fixed 
 by its happening soon after the execution of Dr. Cameron 
 for his share in the '45. Therefore, Mr. Fitzgerald assumes, 
 it took place in 1745-6. If he had not been aware of 
 Cameron's well-known story, he might have found it in the 
 note before his eyes, where the date of the execution is 
 stated, namely, 7th June 1753. As Johnson came to London 
 in 1737, Dr. Birkbeck Hill is again quite right. I will 
 give one other strange proof of Mr. Fitzgerald's carelessness. 
 In the collection of Johnson's letters. Dr. Birkbeck Hill speaks 
 of Reynolds's prosperity in 1758. He gives, says Mr. Fitz- 
 gerald, an 'odd proof of it, namely, that in 1758 Reynolds 
 had ' 150 letters' : certainly this would be an odd proof of 
 prosperity ; but in Dr. Birkbeck Hill's notes (vol. i. 76 n.) the 
 words are ' 150 sitters' — a fact which most portrait-painters 
 would regard as a pretty good proof of prosperity. 
 
 I do not say that all Mr. Fitzgerald's criticisms are of this 
 
 VOL. I. K 
 
146 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 kind. He has discovered some real mistakes. The man 
 who should publish ten volumes, elaborately annotated, 
 without a mistake would be a wonder, and Mr. Fitzgerald 
 is well qualiiied to find them. But I confess that to my 
 mind the number discovered is so small as to confirm my 
 belief in Dr. Birkbeck Hill's general accuracy ; and, in 
 any case, Mr. Fitzgerald has made too many slips to allow 
 us to accept his opinion without careful examination. On 
 some other points, I admit that Mr. Fitzgerald has a stronger 
 case. I could not in any short space give my reasons for 
 disputing many even of his more plausible remarks ; but he 
 has, no doubt, pointed to a weakness in the edition. The 
 simple truth is, I take it, that Dr. Birkbeck Hill has ridden 
 his hobby rather too hard. He has sometimes indulged in 
 real irrelevance ; remarks have occurred to him which he has 
 inserted too hastily, and which he might have expunged on a 
 more careful consideration of the text; he has made some 
 wrong identifications ; and has been led by associations, not 
 shared by most of his readers, to expatiate here and there on 
 needless topics. All this is the weakness of an enthusiast, and 
 of a commentator who sometimes is over eager to say some- 
 thing when there is nothing to be said ; or to discover diffi- 
 culties which do not really exist. But, to my mind, the 
 enthusiasm has also had invaluable results ; it has given us an 
 edition in which almost everything is to be found, though mixed 
 with some superfluities. I wish that Mr. Fitzgerald had 
 recognised this more warmly, and that all true lovers of 
 Johnson and Boswell, to which class he undoubtedly belongs, 
 could take advantage of what is good in each other's labours 
 without being too anxious to dwell upon immaterial short- 
 comings. 
 
GIBBON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 
 
 We are all grateful to Lord Sheffield for the 
 publication of the original documents out of which 
 Gibbon's Memoirs of my Life and Writings was 
 constructed. It is curious to see a great work in 
 its early stages, and the new matter thus presented 
 helps to fill out and complete a picture sufficiently 
 familiar in outline. The first Lord Sheffield had 
 indeed done his work of editing and piecing 
 together so well that there is little that amounts to 
 a fresh revelation of character. The new volumes 
 rather justify or strengthen than modify in any 
 sensible degree the impression of the familiar book. 
 Gibbon's characteristic good fortune has followed 
 him even now. We see that the temporary 
 suppression of the documents was as right as their 
 ultimate publication. What would once have 
 been superfluous or improper for publication is 
 now interesting material for explaining the claim 
 of a classical biography. 
 
 U7 
 
148 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 All critics agree that Gibbon's autobiography- 
 is a model in its way. Every autobiography is 
 interesting, even when it unveils a mere time- 
 server and hypocrite like Bubb Dodington. It is 
 curious to know how a thoroughly mean nature 
 is justified to itself. Other memoirs, Coleridge's 
 Biographia Literaria for example, have a higher 
 interest, because they record the aspirations of men 
 of genius, who have yet wasted half their energy 
 through the caprices of fortune or misjudgment of 
 their own powers. But Gibbon's has the very 
 rare and peculiar charm of recording complete 
 success and what may in one sense be called 
 perfection of character. I do not mean to 
 attribute to Gibbon moral perfection in an absolute 
 sense. He had his little weaknesses, and anybody 
 who pleases may expatiate upon them for our 
 edification. By perfection I only intend perfection 
 relatively to a given purpose, and consequently 
 that peculiar balance or harmony of all the faculties 
 which enables a man to get the very greatest possible 
 result out of given abilities. Moralists may perhaps 
 maintain that there is properly only one ideal. I 
 will not argue the point. But as a matter of fact, 
 we may also say that there are many moral types, 
 each of which has its value, and may play a useful 
 
GIBBON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 149 
 
 part in the whole order of society. A career 
 which is a systematic application of a single 
 governing principle has at least an aesthetic, if 
 not a purely ethical, charm. It represents a 
 successful experiment worth noting in the great 
 art of life. The subject may not be a saint or a 
 hero — Gibbon certainly was neither — but under 
 some conditions he may achieve results of which 
 the saint and hero would be incapable. We may 
 prefer Chatham or Clive or Wesley to Gibbon ; 
 but if he had followed any of their examples, we 
 should have lost something which the whole 
 generation could not have supplied without him. 
 The course of intellectual development would 
 have been sensibly different. Gibbon's type, no 
 doubt, was the epicurean. Pleasure, he would 
 have frankly admitted, is the true end of life. 
 But pleasure to him, though it did not entirely 
 exclude the grosser elements, and might occasion- 
 ally be sought even at a militia mess-table, or in 
 the more elegant dissipation at Almack's, included 
 a strenuous and ceaseless exertion of the intellect 
 upon worthy ends. It included, too, if not 
 romantic devotion, yet fidelity in friendship, and 
 the hearty enjoyment of the society of philosophers 
 and statesmen. A higher as well as a lower strain 
 
150 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 of moral purpose would have disqualified Gibbon 
 for the one great work which he achieved. Had, 
 in short, a superhuman being been required to fit 
 such an intellect with the character best able to 
 turn it to account or to fit the character with the 
 most appropriate intellect, he could not have 
 devised a better combination. Comte prefixes to 
 his system of philosophy the motto from Alfred 
 de Vigny : Qiu'est-ce quune grande vie ? Une 
 pensee de la jeunesse executee par I' age mur. Judged 
 by that test. Gibbon's life was of the greatest. How 
 rare is the realisation of the maxim in any 
 department of life need hardly be said. We have 
 just been congratulating Mr. Herbert Spencer 
 upon the conclusion of the labours of a lifetime 
 devoted to a single purpose. There cannot, I 
 think, be too hearty a recognition of the great 
 moral qualities implied. A retrospect of the his- 
 tory of philosophy would show how few are the 
 careers to be compared to it. In poetry, Dante is 
 of course the great instance of complete achieve- 
 ment ; Milton too may be said to have carried 
 out in Paradise Lost the purpose of his youth ; 
 but the works even of our greatest poets are 
 mainly a collection of short flights instead of a 
 continuous evolution of a lifelong scheme. In 
 
GIBBON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 151 
 
 history, Gibbon's great book stands almost alone in 
 English Hterature. The one British author of his 
 own day whose work could in any department 
 stand a comparison in these qualities was Adam 
 Smith, whose Wealth of Nations appeared in the 
 same year with the first volume of the Decline and 
 Fall. That, too, was the product of many years' 
 concentrated effort upon a task early taken up. 
 At the present day, if we take for granted the 
 conventional lamentations, the chances of such 
 achievement are smaller than ever. We are, our 
 sentimentalists complain, too hurried and jaded by 
 the excitement of modern society to devote our- 
 selves to a single purpose. We ' fluctuate idly 
 without term or scope ' ; and ' each half lives a 
 hundred different lives,' Our works are frag- 
 mentary because we live in a perpetual hurry. 
 We also suffer, indeed, from the opposite evil. 
 Modern authors often contrive to write books 
 quite long enough ; and undertake sufficiently 
 gigantic tasks. Unfortunately, the vast accumu- 
 lation of materials and the demand for exhaustive 
 inquiry overpowers the conscientious writer, unless 
 he be a German professor, and then is rather apt 
 to extinguish his vivacity. 
 
 I am, I confess, rather suspicious of these 
 
152 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 lamentations, but, without suggesting possible 
 answers or qualifications, they no doubt explain 
 one cause of the peculiar pleasure of transporting 
 ourselves to the middle of the eighteenth century, 
 when political revolutions and mechanical in- 
 ventions had not yet turned things topsy-turvy. 
 When I indulge in day-dreams, I take flight with 
 the help of Gibbon, or Boswell, or Horace 
 Walpole, to that delightful period. I take the 
 precaution, of course, to be born the son of a 
 prime minister, or, at least, within the charmed 
 circle where sinecure offices may be the reward of 
 a judicious choice of parents. There, methinks, 
 would be enjoyment, more than in this march of 
 mind, as well as more than in the state of nature 
 on the islands where one is mated with a squalid 
 savage. There I can have philosophy enough to 
 justify at once my self-complacency in my wisdom 
 and acquiescence in established abuses. I make 
 the grand tour for a year or two on the Continent, 
 and find myself at once recognised as a philosopher 
 and statesman, simply because I am an English- 
 man. I become an honorary member of the tacit 
 cosmopolitan association of philosophers, which 
 formed Parisian salons^ or collected round Voltaire 
 at Ferney. I bring home a sufficient number of 
 
GIBBON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 153 
 
 pictures to ornament a comfortable villa on the 
 banks of the Thames ; and form a good solid 
 library in which I write books for the upper 
 circle, without bothering myself about the Social 
 Question or Bimetallism, or swallowing masses of 
 newspaper and magazine articles to keep myself 
 up to date. I belong to a club or two in London, 
 with Johnson and Charles Fox, the authors and 
 the men of fashion, in which I can ' fold my legs 
 and have my talk out,' and actually hear talk 
 which is worth writing down. If I do not aspire 
 to be one of the great triumvirate, of which 
 Gibbon was proud to be a member, I fancy at 
 least that I can allow my thoughts to ripen and 
 mellow into something as neat and rounded as 
 becomes a fine gentleman. 
 
 It is true, of course, that this plan involves 
 certain postulates. It might be that in the 
 real eighteenth century I should have turned 
 my opportunities to bad account. I might be- 
 come a mere dilettante or a mere sensualist. 
 What is remarkable in Gibbon is the felicity with 
 which his peculiar talents and temperament fitted 
 in with the accidents of his life, as though by a 
 specially devised arrangement. It may be worth 
 while to note in some detail the curious play of 
 
154 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 external circumstance and mental and moral con- 
 stitution which went to produce this unique result ; 
 to observe how dexterously fortune combined 
 all the external elements which were necessary to 
 mould and direct a great historian. Much that 
 looked like misfortune was an essential blessing in 
 disguise ; a fact which does not diminish Gibbon's 
 credit for taking the hints in the right way. In his 
 own summary he admits that he has ' drawn a 
 high prize in the lottery of life.' A cheerful 
 temper, equable though not vigorous health, and 
 a ' golden mediocrity of fortune,' are the chief 
 advantages which he enumerates. On the last 
 circumstance he makes an instructive comment 
 elsewhere. Wretched, he says, is the work of the 
 man whose daily diligence has to be stimulated 
 by daily hunger. The author of the splendid 
 eulogium upon Fielding, the friend of Goldsmith 
 and associate of Johnson, should perhaps have 
 admitted that poverty was not of necessity para- 
 lysing. Yet it is true that no denizen of Grub 
 Street could have produced such a work as the 
 Decline and Fall, and that with Gibbon's delicacy 
 of constitution life in that region would have been 
 ruinous. A combination of wide research and 
 leisurely reduction of chaotic materials into a well- 
 
GIBBON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 155 
 
 ordered whole would have been impossible for him 
 with a printer's devil always round the corner. 
 Had he had greater wealth, on the other hand — 
 had his grandfather not been ruined by the South 
 Sea speculation, or his father been capable of 
 retrieving instead of damaging his fortunes- — 
 Gibbon would have been exposed to possibly fatal 
 temptations. He might have dissipated his 
 powers, and become a luxurious ' virtuoso,' like 
 Horace Walpole ; and he still more probably might 
 have been swept into the political vortex, the 
 temptations of which, as it was, were almost 
 fatal to the conclusion of the History. The class, 
 again, to which he belonged was, with all its faults, 
 accessible to the culture of the time ; and had 
 some excuse for considering itself to be leading 
 the van of European civilisation. England was 
 still held on the Continent to be the model land of 
 political and religious freedom ; and the French 
 philosophers who ruled the world of thought were 
 still sitting at the feet of Locke and Newton. It 
 is true that the education which a young Briton 
 received was not exactly calculated to produce 
 philosophers. Gibbon observes that ' a finished 
 scholar may emerge from the head of Westminster 
 or Eton in total ignorance of the business and 
 
156 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 conversation of English gentlemen ' of the period. 
 All that was positively done was to instil a little 
 grammar, at the expense of ' many tears and some 
 blood.' A lad of spirit got some useful know- 
 ledge, as Gibbon thinks, and some, it is to be 
 feared, by no means useful, from the rough 
 freedom of the public schools. Gibbon's dehcacy 
 forced him to supplement his grammatical studies, 
 not by boxing or cricket, but by reading. The 
 grammar at least taught a thoughtful lad the value 
 of accurate knowledge within a very narrow sphere. 
 Meanwhile, at twelve he knew Pope's Homer and 
 The Arabian Nights by heart ; and at fourteen 
 the future historian was already swallowing ' crude 
 lumps ' of Speed, Rapin, and many standard works 
 on history and travel. He tells us how, at that 
 period, he was ' immersed in the passage of 
 the Goths over the Danube ' when the dinner- 
 bell dragged him from his intellectual feast. By 
 the age of sixteen he had ' exhausted all that 
 could be learnt in English of the Arabs and 
 Persians, the Tartars and the Turks ' ; he was 
 ' guessing at the French of d'Herbelot and con- 
 struing the barbarous Latin of Pocock's Albu- 
 faragius' A neglect which might have been fatal 
 to others was just what Gibbon required; and the 
 
GIBBON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 157 
 
 incapacity of his schoolmasters was one of the first 
 fortunate elements in his surroundings. It gives 
 one a pang to think of the probable fate of a 
 modern Gibbon. Even ill-health would hardly 
 save him from the clutches of the crammer ; or 
 prevent so promising a victim from being forced 
 upon the reflection that a knowledge of Turks 
 and Tartars would not pay in a competitive 
 examination. 
 
 Feeble health and the absence of all judicious 
 training had thus enabled Gibbon to recognise, 
 however dimly, the career for which he was 
 predestined. At first sight it would seem that the 
 merits of Oxford in the way of neglect would be 
 carried to excess. Even here, such was the 
 singular felicity of his life, the result was exactly 
 what was required. What would have happened 
 to Gibbon if the tutor who ' remembered that he 
 had a salary to receive, and only forgot that he had 
 a duty to perform,' had put his memory to the 
 proper use ? Gibbon, who was essentially docile 
 and placid by temperament, might easily have been 
 made into a model pedant — a Dr. Parr or Tom 
 Warton of monstrous erudition and inadequate 
 performance. He might have cherished a de- 
 caying Jacobitism in comfortable, common rooms ; 
 
158 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 and, as he puts it, have sunk into the ' fat slumbers 
 of the Church.' The deliverance came by the 
 most apparently unfavourable turn of fortune. 
 Gibbon's conversion to Catholicism appeared in 
 later life to himself and to others to be a mere 
 boyish freak. He could only wonder how he had 
 ever believed such nonsense. Of course the con- 
 version of a lad just sixteen was a superficial pro- 
 cess. His imagination had not been swayed by 
 the aesthetic charm of the Church, nor did he 
 come as one wearied by sceptical wanderings and 
 longing for spiritual slavery. He was apparently 
 the victim of a single argument, and convictions 
 so produced are easily modified. But the argu- 
 ment was also curiously characteristic. The lad 
 had been left to wander rough in theological as 
 other literature, guided only ' by the dim light 
 of his catechism,' and his omnivorous appetite for 
 all knowledge was stimulated by a contemporary 
 controversy. Conyers Middleton was then making 
 a sensation resembling that created about a century 
 afterwards by Essays and Reviews. The old 
 deistical movement in his hands was becoming 
 mainly historical instead of metaphysical. It 
 raised, therefore, the great problem to which 
 Gibbon was substantially to devote his Hfe, 
 
GIBBON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 159 
 
 The freethinker held that the Church had not, 
 and had never had, miraculous powers ; the 
 Catholic that it had such powers formerly, and 
 possessed them still ; and the Protestant that the 
 powers had disappeared at some date which it was 
 rather difficult to fix. To Gibbon the Protestant 
 view seemed to be in any case illogical. So it 
 still seemed when he wrote the fifteenth chapter of 
 his History. As, however, he was not prepared to 
 give up the miraculous power altogether, and as he 
 knew enough to see that it was claimed long after 
 some of the Catholic dogmas were current, he 
 adopted the Church which held at least a consistent 
 position. Of the logic of this argument I say 
 nothing ; but its power over Gibbon is one more 
 proof that he was a heaven-born historian. He 
 tells us that his own memory convinced him of 
 the fallacy of the opinion held by Johnson and 
 Reynolds that a man of ability could turn his 
 powers in any direction. His own idiosyncrasy 
 was too unequivocal. A poet may perhaps be 
 content to think of the past as a region of romance 
 and wonder ; the born historian is one who feels 
 instinctively that the men of old were governed by 
 the laws which are operative now ; he takes for 
 granted, though unconsciously, the great doctrine of 
 
i6o STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 the continuity of history. Both the consummation 
 and the start of Gibbon's career represented this 
 instinctive conviction. He was already not only 
 reading ecclesiastical history, but reading it as a 
 record of real events, not as a mere compendium 
 of dates and names. His great work was to bridge 
 the interval between ancient and modern history ; 
 and his boyish understanding had already been 
 impressed by the identity of the great institution 
 which connects the two periods. 
 
 The most fortunate, perhaps, of all the turns 
 of fate now followed. Gibbon's father was 
 apparently not a great philosopher nor a very 
 wise man ; but he took, by a kind of dumb 
 instinct, or through occult influence of the son's 
 presiding star, the very best course that could 
 have been taken. Gibbon's exile to Lausanne 
 was meant to break ofF his old connections. It 
 succeeded, and it placed him in a frugal and 
 industrious circle, with no such distractions as 
 tempted luxurious youths at Oxford. He could 
 fairly devote his whole time to intellectual em- 
 ployment. The father had counted, apparently, 
 upon the dialectical skill of the Swiss tutor. The 
 • intermixture of sects ' had, as Gibbon remarks, 
 made the Swiss clergy acute controversialists, and 
 
GIBBON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY i6i 
 
 the worthy Pavillard pointed out to him the errors 
 of the Church of Rome, proved that it could 
 derive no authority from St. Peter, and that 
 ' transubstantion ' (as Gibbon calls it) was a 
 modern fiction. This may have been all very 
 well ; but Pavillard, spite of a little vanity, was 
 also a man of excellent sense, and saw that the 
 true remedy was to stimulate Gibbon to reflect 
 for himself, without obtrusively guiding his 
 thoughts. Gibbon expresses his wonder that no 
 Catholic priest had been told off to keep the 
 young convert from deserting the fold. He 
 might have been induced to make constancy to 
 his creed a point of honour. Fortunately, he had 
 been touched by a more stimulating influence. 
 The clergy of the Pays-de-Vaud had, as Gibbon 
 says, become liberal under the influence of 
 Crousaz, known to Englishmen chiefly as the 
 assailant of Pope, a ponderous writer upon logic 
 and a disciple of Locke. Gibbon read Crousaz's 
 logic and Locke's essay, and imbibed ideas un- 
 known to, or dreaded by, the Jacobite dons at 
 Oxford. At Lausanne, moreover, he had the 
 honour of introduction to the great Voltaire. 
 Voltaire, indeed, appeared to him chiefly in the 
 character of dramatist and actor. Gibbon speaks 
 
 VOL. I. L 
 
i62 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 with moderate enthusiasm of a man who, con- 
 sidered as a historian, necessarily seemed superficial 
 and inaccurate to his critic. The names thus 
 mentioned are enough to suggest what had really- 
 happened. Gibbon had ceased, as he tells us, to 
 be an Englishman. French had become more 
 natural to him than his own language ; and his 
 friends held that he had suffered ' a serious 
 and irreparable' mischief. Gibbon had, however, 
 become not a Swiss nor a Frenchman, but a 
 cosmopolitan. He had been initiated into the 
 freemasonry of the most enlightened circles of 
 Europe, ' Whatever have been the fruits of his 
 education,' he says, they ^ must be ascribed ' to his 
 * fortunate banishment,' Instead of being ' steeped 
 in port and prejudice among the monks of Oxford/ 
 he had breathed a larger air and had become 
 familiar with the thoughts which were shaking the 
 whole intellectual fabric of the time. He could 
 look at history, not from an insular point of view, 
 or in the interests of some narrow set of dogmas, 
 but from the widest philosophical standing-ground 
 of the period. For the present, indeed, history 
 seems to have been rather in the background. He 
 threw himself upon classical literature with an 
 appetite which never failed him in later years. 
 
GIBBON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 163 
 
 He read the great authors, though his Greek still 
 remained imperfect ; not for any narrow purpose, 
 but as one who is to make them bosom com- 
 panions for life. Cicero's writings first fascinated 
 him, and he read not only to appreciate the style, 
 but for the ' admirable lessons ' of conduct ' applic- 
 able to almost every situation of public and private 
 life.' Then, in twenty-seven months, he read 
 through nearly the whole of the Latin classics : 
 and, what is characteristic, his review ' though 
 rapid was neither hasty nor superficial' He 
 made abstracts, worked hard at difficult passages, 
 and followed out every subsidiary line of inquiry 
 which suggested itself. He tells us at a later time 
 how, before reading a new book, he took a solitary 
 walk and reflected carefully upon the state of his 
 knowledge, that he might judge what benefit he 
 received from his author. So he prepared himself 
 afterwards for his Italian journey, not by buying a 
 Murray's handbook — the reason is obvious — but 
 by writing a handbook for himself, in which were 
 collected all the classical passages bearing upon 
 the geography of the country. To have all your 
 existing knowledge well arranged and thoroughly 
 in hand was, he felt, the best way to add to it. 
 Omnivorous reader as he was, he accepts the 
 
i64 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 principle non multa^ sed multum, and made his 
 ground sure at every step. In other words, he 
 had the true scholar's instinct, but duly controlled 
 by the philosophic turn for meditation upon 
 general principles. He would indulge in minute 
 researches, but would never lose himself in the 
 multiplicity of details. His mode of writing 
 shows the same perception. He used, as he tells 
 us, to ' cast a long paragraph in a single mould,' 
 to ' try it by his ear,' and to ' suspend the action 
 of the pen till he had given the last polish to his 
 work.' Most of us, I fear, think that we have 
 done enough when we begin a single sentence 
 with an approximate guess at the way of getting 
 out of it. The man who composes by paragraphs 
 will also frame his chapters with a view to their 
 position in an organic whole. The philosophy 
 into which Gibbon was initiated was congenial to 
 his method. The great writers of the day asked, 
 above all things, for good, sweeping formulas, and 
 they preferred such as could be packed into an 
 epigram. The French influence, as Mr. Cotter 
 Morison remarks, was especially valuable. A 
 Frenchman, whatever his faults, always recognises 
 the truth, too often forgotten elsewhere, that every 
 chapter of a book should be written with reference 
 
GIBBON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 165 
 
 to the whole. There should be a central, animat- 
 ing idea. Gibbon's own view is indicated in his 
 very interesting though crude French essay on the 
 study of literature, written (1758-59) at the 
 beginning of his literary career. It was intended 
 to defend the doctrine — less needed, one might 
 have supposed, then than now — that literature 
 should not be dethroned by the mathematical and 
 physical sciences. But he argues that a true 
 appreciation of literature demands wide knowledge 
 and thorough study. He insists upon the close 
 connection of all branches of knowledge, and 
 declares that if a philosopher is not always a 
 historian, a historian should always be a philo- 
 sopher. He should be tracing the operation of 
 general causes. He should deal with apparent 
 trifles ; not out of mere curiosity or love of the 
 picturesque, but because they are often the clearest 
 indications of principles of wide application. He 
 should inquire, for example, into the origin of 
 grotesque mythologies, and might even, as he 
 points out, find valuable hints in the moral 
 notions of an ' Iroquois.' Though ill-arranged 
 and disjointed, the essay thus shows keen glimpses 
 into methods which have since assumed greater 
 importance. 
 
1 66 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 So far, fate, acting upon Gibbon's idiosyncrasies, 
 had prepared him for his great work. But his 
 presiding genius had still to guard against various 
 dangers. Gibbon might have rivalled the erudi- 
 tion of a German professor, and polished it with 
 some of the skill of a French literary artist. But 
 the historian wants something more : the infusion 
 of practical instinct which comes from familiarity 
 with actual affairs, and should give reality to his 
 narrative. Gibbon was in a fair way to become a 
 ' book in breeches ' ; his detachment from his own 
 country had made him cosmopolitan, but it had 
 left him a secluded student. He had formed his 
 lifelong and invaluable friendship with Deyverdun, 
 one of those rare and delightful associations which 
 are only formed in youth and by close community 
 of intellectual tastes. But Deyverdun ' hung 
 loose upon society ' ; he and his friend aspired 
 to be members of the literary world of Europe — 
 but only as authors of a learned journal. They 
 had no points of contact with business. How 
 was Gibbon to be brought into contact with the 
 real world, the world of passion and active 
 interests, in which literature is a mere surface 
 phenomenon, and yet to be initiated without 
 being absorbed ? That represents a delicate 
 
GIBBON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 167 
 
 problem which his fortune solved with singular 
 felicity. 
 
 In the first place, of course, Gibbon must have 
 the great experience of falling in love. It must 
 be a passion strong and exalted enough to let him 
 into the great secret of human happiness, and yet 
 it must not be such as to entangle him too deeply 
 in the active duties of life. A man who has never 
 been stirred to such passion must look too much 
 from outside upon the great drama of life ; and 
 yet the passion, if sufficiently powerful, may lead 
 him too far from his predestined functions. Mile. 
 Curclod was the appointed instrument of fate for 
 solving this problem. She was beautiful and in- 
 telligent enough to rouse Gibbon to an apparently 
 genuine devotion ; and yet as she was a foreigner, 
 without a penny, it was quite clear that the elder 
 Gibbon would never take her for a daughter-in- 
 law. The famous ' sighed as a lover and obeyed 
 as a son ' sums up the situation so far as Gibbon 
 was concerned. It must, I fear, be granted that 
 Gibbon did not behave very prettily, and even 
 leaves us with a vague impression that, if the 
 paternal interdict had been wanting, some other 
 obstacle would have turned up at the last moment. 
 Modern readers will probably agree with Rous- 
 
i68 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 seau's judgment of the case. Rousseau pitied 
 
 poor Susanne, but thought that Gibbon had shown 
 
 himself unworthy of her, and would only have 
 
 made her ' rich and miserable ' in England. As 
 
 Mile. Curclod soon became Mme. Necker, and 
 
 forgave the lover who had jilted her, we may 
 
 forgive a misdoing which caused no permanent 
 
 misery. This passing collocation of the two great 
 
 men, the sentimentalist who represents the passion, 
 
 and the calm, not to say cynical, historian who 
 
 represents the reflection of the period, is curiously 
 
 characteristic ; and I leave the ethical question to 
 
 be settled by my readers. Perhaps Gibbon was 
 
 not of the finest human clay ; but the problem, 
 
 I repeat, was not how to make a perfect man, but 
 
 how to make a great historian. Had Gibbon 
 
 become a husband there can be little doubt as 
 
 to the material consequences. He had difficulties 
 
 enough in keeping up a bachelor establishment; 
 
 and with a wife by his side, he would have been 
 
 forced to accept an appointment — such as he 
 
 actually contemplated — in the Excise, and to 
 
 labour five days a week in official routine. Julian 
 
 and Athanasius and Justinian must have waited 
 
 to be appreciated by somebody else. The effect 
 
 upon Gibbon's character was exactly what was 
 
GIBBON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 169 
 
 wanted from the same point of view. He made 
 up his mind soon afterwards, as appears from his 
 letters to his father, that he should never marry. 
 He was to be henceforth in that attitude of ' de- 
 tachment' which constitutes the true historical 
 frame of mind — an interested looker-on, not an 
 active performer, in the great tragi-comedy. It 
 may, perhaps, be suggested — with too much 
 plausibility — that the tone in which Gibbon 
 generally refers to love affairs in his history is not 
 altogether edifying, and hardly implies that his 
 passion had purified or ennobled his mind. The 
 best arrangements will not work quite perfectly. 
 In any case, however, though Gibbon for sufficient 
 reasons treats the matter rather lightly, he had, as 
 he intimates, gone through one of the painful 
 crises which form epochs in the development of 
 character. He was certainly not soured as some 
 men have been, but he henceforward cultivated 
 affections of a more tepid kind. No man, it must 
 be always remembered, was a more thoroughly 
 faithful friend ; he showed very unusual gener- 
 osity and good-feeling to his father, his step- 
 mother, and the aunt who had protected his 
 childhood. It is impossible, for example, without 
 a very warm feeling of posthumous regard, to read 
 
170 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 his letter to Lord Sheffield upon Lady Sheffield's 
 death, and to remember how the gouty and 
 preposterously fat old gentleman (old in con- 
 stitution though not in years) bundled himself 
 into his carriage, and set off to travel through 
 the midst of armies to bring such solace to his 
 friend as was possible. Meanwhile, he had been 
 taught by a sharp enough lesson to know himself. 
 He was not suited to come upon the stage as a 
 Romeo, and must be content to play Horatio, a 
 good, honest friend of more romantic and passionate 
 characters. Henceforward it was to be his destiny 
 to renounce the stronger impulses, and to devote 
 himself in his little circle of friends to the great 
 work for which so many forces within and without 
 had been moulding him. 
 
 Before his love affair was over, Gibbon had 
 been forced into experience of a different kind. 
 He, has told us himself how the captain of 
 Hampshire grenadiers was of some use to the 
 historian of the Roman Empire. Later critics 
 have told us that, in fact, his narratives of 
 military events show that he had profited by 
 seeing a real flesh-and-blood army, on however 
 small a scale, instead of only reading about armies 
 in books. Of that I am an incompetent judge, 
 
GIBBON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 171 
 
 but on this and on his political career there is at 
 least an obvious remark to be made. Gibbon 
 tells us himself how his service in the militia 
 made him an ' Englishman and a soldier,' and 
 how, in spite of all the waste of time, he still 
 travelled with a Horace ' always in his pocket and 
 often in his hand,' and, when the enforced fast 
 from literature came to an end, fell upon the old 
 feast with sharpened appetite, and rushed off as 
 rapidly as he could to find the inspiration for his 
 great book in Rome. In other words, he was 
 brought into close contact with actual affairs, and 
 yet not diverted from the true aim of his life. 
 The political career had the same felicity. He 
 found himself too slow and unready to speak, and 
 was content to be a quiet looker-on. It must, 
 indeed, be admitted that he looked on with 
 superlative calmness. His political career, says 
 Mr. Morison, is the ' side of his history from 
 which a friendly biographer would most readily 
 turn away.' ' I went into Parliament,' he says 
 himself, ' without patriotism and without ambi- 
 tion, and all my views tended to the convenient 
 and respectable place of a lord of trade.' That, 
 certainly, is not an exalted view. Moreover, 
 Gibbon's way of referring to contemporary events 
 
1 
 
 172 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 shows apparent levity and even want of penetra- 
 tion. He is less sagacious than Horace Walpole, 
 whose extraordinary cleverness was wasted by 
 frivolity. As an outside observer, he might have 
 recognised the importance of the great issues, and 
 shown himself at least on a level with the higher 
 judges of his own time. He was apparently 
 conscious of the gross blunders of George iir. 
 and Lord North, but was content to support 
 Ministers, with a lazy indifference to the result. 
 His letters, when they contain any reference to 
 the American War, treat the matter almost as a 
 jest, and plainly betray that his real interest was 
 much more with Alaric than with Washington, 
 He lived through the most exciting period of 
 the century; he even took an actual, though a 
 very subordinate, part in the operations which 
 involved the foundation of the British Empire in 
 the East and the expulsion of our rivals from 
 the West, He supported the political course 
 which led to the separation of our greatest 
 colonies a few years later ; and both at these 
 periods and on the outbreak of the French 
 Revolution afterwards, he seems to have regarded 
 the greatest events of the time chiefly as they 
 affected the comfort of a fat historian in his 
 
GIBBON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 173 
 
 library. What defence can be made? None 
 truly, if we are measuring Gibbon by a lofty 
 moral standard ; but if we are asking the 
 question now under consideration, how a great 
 historian was to be turned out, we shall have to 
 make a very different judgment. 
 
 The obvious reproach is summed up by the 
 statement that Gibbon was a cynic. The name 
 suggests the selfish indifference to human welfare 
 which permits a man to treat politics simply as a 
 game played for the stakes of place and pension. 
 It is generally added, though I hardly know 
 whether it is regarded by way of apology, or as 
 a proof of the offence, that all our great-grand- 
 fathers were corrupt borough-mongers, forming 
 cliques for the distribution of plunder, and caring 
 nothing for the welfare of the people. We 
 ought, we are often told, to judge a man by 
 the standard of his period. Whatever the period, 
 it can always be plausibly added that it was the 
 most immoral period ever known in history. 
 The argument is familiar, and I cannot attempt 
 to consider its precise application here. But I 
 may try briefly to indicate how it would have 
 struck Gibbon. What would he have said if he 
 could have foreseen the judgment of the coming 
 
174 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 generation ? You call me a cynic, he might have 
 replied, but at least you must admit that I was an 
 honest cynic ; I never professed to believe in 
 humbug, though I had to accept it. If you 
 are less cynical, you have made up for it by 
 being more hypocritical. Our party politics 
 meant adherence to some little aristocratic ring. 
 Yours mean servility to a caucus. You cover a 
 real cynicism as deep as mine by shouting with 
 the largest mob. We at least dared to despise 
 a demagogue ; you dare not openly deny his 
 inspiration. You manage to use fine phrases 
 so as to cover the desertion of all your principles : 
 you use old war-cries in favour of the very 
 doctrines which you used to condemn, and 
 declare all the time that you are impelled by 
 * enthusiasm ' and sensibility to the voice of the 
 people. Is it not rather subservience to their 
 narrowest prejudices ? In my day, he would add, 
 we had examples of the genuine demagogue 
 revealing himself without a blush. When in the 
 militia, in 1762, I saw Colonel Wilkes, the best 
 of companions, at a drunken dinner, full of 
 blasphemy and indecency, glorying in his 
 profligacy, and openly declaring that he had 
 resolved to make his fortune. You have found 
 
GIBBON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 175 
 
 out that because he made it by flattering the 
 winning side he must have been a saint in 
 disguise. You sneer at my want of ' enthusiasm.' 
 You shudder when you make the remark that 
 enthusiasm was once actually a term of reproach. 
 When we denounced ' enthusiasts,' we denounced 
 a very bad thing. We thought that the false 
 claimants of supernatural powers must be knaves 
 or fools, and we ventured to say so openly. 
 You think that even a charlatan deserves respect 
 if his stock-in-trade is a comfortable superstition. 
 I, too, could claim enthusiasm in your sense. It 
 was in a moment of ' enthusiasm ' that I joined 
 the Church of Rome ; and though I always scorned 
 to affect what I did not fte.], it was with true 
 ' enthusiasm ' that I entered Rome, heard the 
 bare-footed friars singing vespers in the Temple 
 of Jupiter, and conceived the first crude idea of 
 my great work. Enthusiasm, in my version, 
 lifted me to the regions of philosophy, and 
 separated me from the vulgar herd. It did not 
 mean the discovery of the mx del in every plat- 
 form intended to catch the votes of the majority. 
 We did not think ignorance and poverty a 
 sufficient guarantee for political or religious 
 infallibility. But we were not, therefore, as you 
 
176 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 infer, indifferent to the happiness of mankind. 
 We thought that their happiness was best secured 
 in the ages when a benevolent despotism main- 
 tained peace and order throughout the world ; 
 when philosophers could rule and the lower 
 orders be confined to the work for which they 
 were really competent. We held in religion 
 pretty much what you hold, only that you try 
 to cover your real meaning under a cloud of 
 words. We accepted my great maxim : To the 
 philosopher all religions are equally false ; and to 
 the magistrate equally useful. You try to spin 
 theories which will combine the two opinions — 
 which will allow you to use the most edifying 
 language, while explaining that it means nothing ; 
 and to base arguments for ' faith ' on the admis- 
 sion that nobody can possibly know anything. 
 We were content to say that it was too much 
 honour to the vulgar to argue as to the truth of 
 their beliefs. We were content to belong to the 
 upper circle of enlightenment in which it was 
 understood that the creeds were meaningless, but 
 without attempting the hopeless task of enlight- 
 ening the uncultivated mind. Some such retort 
 might be made to the nineteenth century by the 
 eighteenth ; and Gibbon is a typical example of 
 
GIBBON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 177 
 
 the qualities which were denounced in the next 
 generation when they called their immediate pre- 
 decessors cold, heartless, and materiahstic, and 
 looked upon the whole preceding century as a 
 sort of mysterious intercalation, an eclipse of all 
 that was heroic and romantic, and a sudden 
 paralysis of the progressive forces of humanity. 
 Nothing, as I believe, can be more unjust ; but 
 rightly or wrongly, there are times when one 
 regrets the reign of cool common sense and of 
 freedom from fads and fussiness. At such 
 moments there is an incidental charm about the 
 intellectual position of our grandfathers. Philo- 
 sophical problems can hardly be discussed now 
 without suggesting some immediate practical 
 application. Dogmas have become explosive, 
 and suggest at once a reconstruction of society, 
 a revolutionary or a reactionary movement ; they 
 are caught up by popular leaders on one side or the 
 other, and abstract speculations are made at once 
 into party watchwords. It must have been pleasant 
 to philosophise in the days when your audience 
 was select, when you could feel that your opinions 
 would be discussed only by a few enlightened 
 people, or would at most spread gradually and 
 slowly force away old prejudices without pro- 
 
 VOL, I. M 
 
178 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 yoking internecine struggles. You could boast 
 of being a philosopher, and yet be content to 
 allow error to die out among the vulgar without 
 trying to force new ideas upon minds totally 
 incapable of appreciating them. To speak freely 
 and openly is no doubt the best rule in the long- 
 run ; but there is, it must be admitted, a real 
 difficulty in proclaiming truth with the knowledge 
 that it will be perverted by the vulgar inter- 
 preters. To Gibbon, in his earlier days, that 
 difficulty scarcely presented itself. He fancied 
 that even his chapters upon Christianity would 
 be accepted by all cultivated people, while there 
 should be a faint understanding that the old 
 language should still be kept up * for the use 
 of the poor.' 
 
 Gibbon, indeed, had in time to confess that this 
 view involved an important practical mistake. 
 Philosophy, political and religious, could not 
 permanently remain the esoteric doctrine of a 
 narrow circle ; and when hot-headed Rousseaus 
 and the like spread its tents among the vulgar, 
 it produced an explosion which took the calm 
 philosophers by surprise. Gibbon began to see 
 a good side even in the superstition, the vitality of 
 which had astonished him so much on the publica- 
 
GIBBON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 179 
 
 tion of his first volume. This suggests the 
 obvious weakness of his position ; nor do I mean 
 to adopt the sentiments which I have ventured to 
 attribute to him. What I desire to indicate is 
 the necessity of this position to the discharge of 
 his function as a historian. We can no doubt 
 conceive of a more excellent way ; of a great 
 thinker, who should at once be capable of 
 philosophical detachment, of looking at passing 
 events in their relations to the vast drama of 
 human history on the largest scale without losing 
 his interest in the history actually passing under 
 his eyes. He might take not less but more 
 interest in processes which he saw to be the 
 continuation of the great evolution of thought 
 and society. But the phrase indicates the concep- 
 tion which was necessarily obscure to Gibbon. 
 To have reached that view would in his time 
 have required almost superhuman attributes. 
 Gibbon's merits were at the time inconsistent 
 with the virtues of which we regret the absence. 
 He had to choose, one may say, between two 
 alternatives. If he were to take an active part in 
 the politics of the day, he would have had to be a 
 Wilkes on condition of not being a Wilkeite, or 
 at least, with Burke, to give up to party what was 
 
i8o STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 meant for mankind. To save him from such a 
 fate, which would have been a hopeless waste of 
 power, he required to be endowed with an excess 
 of indifference, and a deficiency of close and 
 spontaneous sympathy with men outside of his 
 little inner circle. Of this, I fear, he cannot 
 be acquitted. Indeed, his qualification in this 
 respect went a little too far, for he appears to 
 have been on the very point of accepting a post 
 which would have cut short the History half-way. 
 Even his best friends, strangely as it seems to us, 
 pressed him to commit this semi-suicide. Here, 
 therefore, his good genius had once more to 
 interfere by external circumstances. The task 
 was not difficult. A happy dulness to his claims 
 was infused into the minds of the dispensers of 
 patronage ; and Gibbon was compelled to retire 
 philosophically to the house at Lausanne, where in 
 due time he was to take the famous stroll in the 
 covered walk of acacias which on 27th June 1787 
 succeeded the completion of the ' last lines of the 
 last page ' of his unique achievement. 
 
 We see how strangely Gibbon had been fitted 
 for his task ; how fate had first turned him out 
 of the quiet grooves down which he might have 
 spun to obscurity, and then applied the goad 
 
GIBBON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY i8i 
 
 judiciously whenever he tried to bolt from the 
 predestined course. The task itself was obviously- 
 demanded by the conditions of the time, and its 
 importance recognised by other, and in some 
 respects acuter or more powerful, intellects. 
 History was to emerge from the stage of mere 
 personal memoirs and antiquarian annals. A 
 survey from a higher point of view was wanted : 
 a general map or panoramic view of the great 
 field of human progress must be laid down as 
 preparatory to further progress. Such men as 
 Hume and Voltaire, for instance, had clearly seen 
 the need, and had endeavoured in their way to 
 supply it. Gibbon's superiority was, of course, 
 due in the first place to the high standard of 
 accuracy and research which has enabled his work 
 to stand all the tests applied by later critics. 
 His instinctive perception of this necessity, 
 combined with the intellectual courage implied 
 in his choice of so grand a subject, enabled him 
 to combine width of view and fulness of detail 
 with unsurpassed felicity. All this is unani- 
 mously granted. But other qualities were equally 
 required, though from a later point of view they 
 account rather for the limitations than the suc- 
 cesses of his work. There must be a division 
 
i82 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 of labour between generations as well as between 
 individuals. Kepler had to describe the actual 
 movements of the planets before Newton could 
 determine the nature of the forces implied by 
 the movements. In Gibbon's generation it was 
 necessary to describe the evolutions of the puppets 
 which move across the stage of history. His 
 successors could then, and not till then, attempt 
 to show what were the hidden strings that moved 
 them. Gibbon, it has been said, ' adheres to the 
 obvious surface of events, with little attempt to 
 place them beneath the deeper sky of social 
 evolution.' He appreciates, it is suggested, 
 neither the great spiritual forces nor the economic 
 conditions which lie beneath the surface. He 
 calmly surveys the great stream of history, its 
 mingling currents and deluges and regurgitations, 
 the struggles of priests and warriors and legis- 
 lators, without suggesting any adequate concep- 
 tions of what is called the social dynamics implied. 
 To him history appears to be simply a * register 
 of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of man- 
 kind.' The criticism, taking its truth for 
 granted, amounts to saying that Gibbon had 
 only gone as far as was in his time possible. 
 He must be philosopher enough to sympathise 
 
GIBBON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 183 
 
 with the great intellectual movement of his time. 
 Otherwise he could not have risen above the 
 atmosphere of Oxford common-rooms, and could 
 only have written annals or narratives on one side 
 or the other of some forgotten apologetic thesis. 
 But had the philosophic taste predominated, had 
 his passions and his sympathies been more fervid, 
 he must have fallen into the fallacies of his time. 
 The enthusiastic or militant philosopher was, as I 
 certainly think, doing an inestimable service in 
 attacking superstition and bigotry. But he was 
 thereby disqualified as a writer not only of philo- 
 sophical history, but even of such a record of facts 
 as would serve for later historians. Such a man 
 as d'Alembert was inclined to wish that history 
 in general could be wiped out of human memory. 
 From the point of view characteristic of the 
 eighteenth-century philosophers, history could be 
 nothing but a record of the tyranny of kings and 
 the imposture of priests, Voltaire's Essai sur les 
 Mceurs is delightful reading, but a caricature of 
 history. Gibbon might sympathise with this 
 sentiment so far as to look with calm impartiality 
 upon all forms of faith and government, but not 
 so far as to pervert his History into a series of 
 party pamphlets. To him the American War, or 
 
1 84 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 the early democratic movements in England, 
 were simply incidents in his great panorama : like 
 the rise of the Christian Church, or the barbarian 
 Moslems or the Crusades, they were eddies in the 
 great confused gulf-stream of humanity. He 
 could not believe in a sudden revelation of 
 Reason, or the advent of a new millennium any 
 more than in the second coming anticipated by 
 the early Christians. To condemn his coldness 
 may be right ; but it is to condemn him for 
 taking the only point of view from which his 
 task could be achieved. He was philosopher 
 enough to be impartial, not enough to be subject 
 to the illusions, useful illusions possibly, of a 
 sudden regeneration of mankind by philosophy. 
 His political position was the necessary comple- 
 ment of his historical position. A later philo- 
 sophy may have taught us how to see a process 
 of evolution, a gradual working-out of great 
 problems, even in the blind, instinctive aspirations 
 and crude faiths of earlier ages. At Gibbon's 
 time, he had to choose between rejecting them 
 in the mass as mere encumbrances or renouncing 
 them altogether. That is to admit that the one 
 point of view which makes a reasonable estimate 
 possible was practically excluded. On the other 
 
GIBBON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 185 
 
 hand, his historical instinct forced him at last 
 to set forth the material facts both impartially 
 and so grouped and related as to bring out the 
 great issues. It is easy now both for positivists 
 and believers to show, for example, that his 
 account of the origins of Christianity was entirely 
 insufficient. He explains, as has been remarked, 
 the success of the Church by the zeal of the early 
 disciples, and forgets to explain how they came 
 to be zealous. Undoubtedly that is an omission 
 of importance. What, however. Gibbon did was 
 not the less effectively to bring out the real 
 conditions of any satisfactory solution of the 
 greatest of historical problems. Newman observed 
 how, in a later period, ' Athanasius stands out 
 more grandly in Gibbon than in the pages of 
 the orthodox ecclesiastical historians.' That is 
 because he places all events in their true historical 
 setting. In the writings of the apologists of the 
 time, the spread of Christianity was treated as 
 though converts had been made by producing 
 satisfactory evidence of miracles in a court of 
 justice. Gibbon's famous chapters, however in- 
 adequate, showed at least that the development 
 of the new creed required for its expansion a 
 calm consideration of all the multitudinous forces 
 
i86 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 that go to building up a great ecclesiastical 
 hierarchy, and a testing by careful examination of 
 all the entries about saints and martyrs which 
 flowed so easily from the pens of enthusiastic 
 historians. That his judgment should be final or 
 even coherent was impossible ; but it was an 
 essential step towards any such judgment as 
 could pass muster with a historian equipped with 
 the results of later thought and inquiry. 
 
 Upon this, however, it would be idle to say more. 
 I have only tried to point an obvious moral; to 
 show what a rare combination of circumstances 
 with character and intellect is required to produce 
 a really monumental work ; to show how easy it 
 generally is even for the competent man of genius 
 to mistake his path at starting or to be distracted 
 from it by tempting accidents; how necessary 
 may be not only the intervention of fortunate 
 accidents, but even the presence of qualities 
 which, in other relations, must be regarded as 
 defects. Happily for us, the man came when 
 he was wanted, and just such as he was wanted ; 
 but after studying his career, we understand better 
 than ever why great works are so rare. We may 
 probably have known of men — many instances 
 might easily be suggested — who might be com- 
 
GIBBON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 187 
 
 pared to Gibbon in natural endowments, and who 
 have left nothing but fragments, or been confined 
 to obscure tasks, the value of which will never be 
 sufficiently recognised. It is only when the right 
 player comes, and the right cards are judiciously 
 dealt to him by fortune, that the great successes 
 can be accomplished. 
 
 Note. — It may be worth while to explain Lord Sheffield's 
 mode of constructing Gibbon's autobiography, as it is not 
 explicitly set out in the recent publication. Gibbon wrote 
 six Mss., marked A to F. A is confined to an account of 
 previous Gibbons, and D is a brief account of his own life 
 down to 1770. Lord Sheffield only used these for the open- 
 ing paragraphs. Gibbon then wrote E, giving his life down 
 to 1789; then C, a fuller redaction of E down to 1770; then 
 B, a fuller redaction of C down to 1 764 ; and finally F, a fuller 
 redaction of B down to 1753. Lord Sheffield follows the 
 last version in each case, F to 1753, B from 1753 to 1764, C 
 from 1764 to 1770, and E from 1770 to 1789. He prefers 
 the shorter account of the militia, however, in C to that in B; 
 and restores a phrase or two dropped by Gibbon. So the 
 ' sighed as a lover and obeyed as a son,' and the description of 
 Adam Smith as a 'master of moral and political wisdom ' come 
 from C. 
 
ARTHUR YOUNG 
 
 The name of Arthur Young suggests to most 
 readers a discussion of the causes of the French 
 Revolution. The importance of the famous 
 Travels in France is in fact sufficiently shown by 
 the frequent references of the most competent 
 writers, both French and English. Mr. Morley, 
 for example, declares that Young's evidence is of 
 more value than all the speculations of Burke and 
 Paine and Mackintosh — the English protagonists 
 in the great controversy of the time. Young, 
 again, had a great deal to say upon the state of 
 Ireland in his day, besides being a leading authority 
 upon the agricultural development of England. 
 No one, however, need fear that this paper will 
 lead him into profound economical, or political, 
 or historical discussions. For the present purpose, 
 I have rather to protest against a too probable 
 inference suggested by these topics. Young's con- 
 
 188 
 
ARTHUR YOUNG 189 
 
 nection with them may probably lead those who 
 know only his name to put him down summarily 
 in the great class bore ; to assume that he was only 
 a ponderous professor of the dismal science, or an 
 early example of that most estimable but not 
 always lively species, the highly intelligent poli- 
 tician who travels in vacation-time, storing his 
 mind with useful information to be radiated forth 
 in lectures and essays, and excite the admiration 
 of parliamentary constituencies. Young, no 
 doubt, deserves that kind of glory in a high 
 degree. What I wish to do is to call attention to 
 the fact that he was also a human being — or what 
 in our disagreeable modern slang is called a * per- 
 sonality ' — of great interest. He was not a 
 walking blue-book, but a highly sensitive, enthusi- 
 astic, impulsive, and affectionate man of flesh and 
 blood, whose acquaintance every sensible man 
 would have been glad to cultivate. His last 
 biographer congratulates the world upon the fact 
 that he did not, as he was tempted to do, become 
 a clergyman or a soldier. In either capacity his 
 peculiar talents would no doubt have been com- 
 paratively wasted. As a soldier, he would probably 
 have been known only by some ingenious but futile 
 enterprise. Had he taken orders he might have 
 
190 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 rivalled the charm of some of his amiable con- 
 temporaries — Gilbert White of Selborne, for 
 example, — and would have been a model clergyman 
 of the good old patriarchal type ; but he would 
 hardly have made a mark upon theological specu- 
 lation. Yet his actual career, however appropriate 
 to his talent, was such as to draw a certain shade 
 over his personal qualities ; and as unfortunately 
 he was not commemorated at his death in an 
 adequate biography, they have, perhaps, not been 
 sufficiently recognised. That a fuller recognition 
 is possible is due in great part to Miss Betham- 
 Edwards, who prefixed a short memoir to the last 
 edition of his 'Travels in France (1892). Miss 
 Betham-Edwards did her duty excellently ; she 
 not only appreciates his qualities but had access to 
 unpublished sources, including diaries and letters 
 of great interest. The necessary limits of a preface 
 prevented her from doing more than drawing a 
 sketch, life-like as far as it goes, which tantalises 
 the reader by brief glimpses of possible filHng up 
 of details. These details are partly supplied by 
 her more recent publication of Young's auto- 
 biography (i 898). Young was not a Gibbon, and 
 did not correct and rewrite four times over. Miss 
 
ARTHUR YOUNG 191 
 
 Betham-Edwards appears to have done her best by 
 omitting superfluous digressions ; and in any case, 
 has given us a life full of interesting indications of 
 character,! 
 
 Arthur Young was born on 1 1 th September 
 1741. He was the son of a respectable prebendary, 
 who was chaplain to Speaker Onslow, and both 
 squire and rector of the parish of Bradfield, near 
 Bury St. Edmunds. His mother, whose maiden 
 name was Cousmaker, was the descendant of a 
 Dutchman who had followed William in. to 
 England. Miss Betham-Edwards suggests that 
 the pleasant rural district in which Young passed 
 his infancy may account for his love of scenery. 
 Something more would be required to explain 
 whence a man, descended from Dutch and East 
 
 1 Here and there the notes might be a little fuller, and some in- 
 formation might have been gleaned from a biographical dictionary. 
 Thus, for example, the Anti-Jacobin mentioned at page 362 was not 
 the famous journal edited by GIfford of the S^uarterly, but its suc- 
 cessor, a monthly magazine edited by a different GIfford. Readers 
 might have been reminded that the ' Porcupine ' mentioned in the same 
 place was the famous Cobbett, still in his unregenerate days, and 
 supposed to be inspired by the Tories. Young himself appears to 
 have confused the two GifFords. ' Peter Pindar ' did so, when he, 
 to his cost, ti-led to horsewhip W. Gilford for an attack really made 
 in the magazine of John GIfford. This confusion constantly re- 
 appears, and may be just worth a warning word. 
 
192 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 Anglian ancestry, derived the mercurial tempera- 
 ment which we do not generally associate with 
 either country. Both father and mother, however, 
 were handsome and intelligent, and we do not 
 know enough of the laws of heredity to account 
 for the appearance of this brilliant contrast to the 
 ponderous squires of Suffolk and the three-breeched 
 merchants of Holland. Anyhow, Arthur Young 
 showed his qualities early. He learned little at his 
 school, Lavenham — partly, he thinks, because he 
 became so much a favourite with his teacher as 
 to be spared the usual discipline. When he was 
 about ten, however, he was already ' writing a 
 history of England,' and at thirteen learning to 
 dance and falling in love with the beautiful daugh- 
 ter of a village grocer. He was taken from school 
 at the age of sixteen and apprenticed to a mercan- 
 tile firm at King's Lynn. There he again fell in 
 love, his first idol being the black-eyed daughter 
 of a partner in the firm, who was taking music- 
 lessons from Burney, then organist of Lynn, and 
 best known to most of us as Mme. d'Arblay's 
 father. He was already writing pamphlets and 
 getting them published, receiving payment in 
 ' books,' but apparently learned nothing of his 
 proper business. At any rate, on his father's death 
 
ARTHUR YOUNG 193 
 
 in 1759, he left Lynn, ^without education, pro- 
 fession, pursuits, or employment,' and for want of 
 other occupation, took a farm belonging to his 
 mother at Bradfield. To improve his prospects, 
 he married at the age of twenty-four (in 1765) a 
 Miss Martha Allen of Lynn, neither the first nor 
 second object of his adorations, which apparently 
 it would not be easy to enumerate. He might 
 have made a better choice. Mrs. Young is said to 
 have been shrewish, and Young certainly regretted 
 his precipitance. The marriage was unhappy from 
 the first ; and Young records that, even when his 
 wife was in good health, she became all the more 
 ' irritable,' and life a mere ' scene of worrying.' 
 The lady was sister-in-law of Mrs. Stephen Allen, 
 Burney's second wife, and stepmother of Miss 
 Burney, who has left some characteristic touches. 
 Young confided to Miss Burney a few years later, 
 either from confidence in her prudence, she says, 
 or from his general ' carelessness of consequences,' 
 that he was the ' most miserable fellow breathing,' 
 and that ' if he were to begin the world again, no 
 earthly thing should prevail with him to marry.' 
 On the whole, one might expect that a youth, who 
 is bound to an uncongenial wife and proposes to 
 make his living by farming, chiefly because he 
 
 VOL. I. N 
 
194 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 knows as little of any other employment as he does 
 of agriculture, has made an unpromising start in 
 life. But those who may have made such a 
 prophecy had not taken into account Young's 
 marvellous elasticity. He was one of the men 
 who, if in the depths of depression at one moment, 
 are sure to be at the height of exhilaration in the 
 next. Nothing could permanently suppress or 
 daunt him. Compensations were sure to turn up. 
 If his wife was for the most part a thorn in his 
 flesh, he was at least a most affectionate father. 
 His own farming operations were as little successful 
 as though his lot had been cast in the worst days of 
 depression ; but they entitled him to set up almost 
 at once as an authority upon the theory of agri- 
 culture. He made tours, and published accounts of 
 his observations. The result of his own experience 
 was, as he puts it, ' nothing but ignorance, folly, 
 presumption, and rascality ' (the rascality, we hope, 
 in spite of the grammar, was that of his neighbours); 
 but he learned to judge of other people's farms, 
 and his books were of most singular ' utility to the 
 general agriculture of the kingdom.' He failed at 
 his native place, after a short time, and immediately 
 took a larger farm, and had to pay ;^ioo to 
 another man to take it off his hands, when his 
 
ARTHUR YOUNG 195 
 
 successor made a fortune out of it. At a third farm 
 he spent nine years, with the sensation of having 
 been all the time ' in the jaws of a wolf.'^ He 
 had, he says, tried 3000 experiments ; and must 
 therefore be reckoned wise if we may invert 
 Darwin's criterion that a fool is a man who never 
 tried an experiment. There is, however, such a 
 thing as being wise for others instead of for one- 
 self. Whether Young's general views were sound 
 is more than I know. They were at least stimu- 
 lating. He was becoming well known to agri- 
 cultural reformers, and from 1773 to 1776 he 
 travelled in Ireland, where he was, for a short time, 
 agent to Lord Kingsborough's estates in County 
 Cork. Whatever was the result to Lord Kings- 
 borough, Young's experience was embodied in a 
 book upon Ireland second only in value to the 
 French travels. He settled again at Bradfield 
 upon his mother's property, and there, after a time, 
 started a new project. Next to the farming with- 
 out experience, one of the most promising roads to 
 ruin that can be suggested is starting a serious 
 and scientific periodical. Young accordingly in 
 1738 set up the Annals of Agriculture^ which was 
 
 1 See also Young's statement in Annals of Agriculture, vol. xv. 
 
196 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 to be the organ of all benevolent men and good 
 farmers. It certainly succeeded in so far as it 
 attracted notice ; and it is worth turning over, 
 not only for Young's own articles, but because it 
 contains contributions from many of the most 
 distinguished men of the time upon important 
 topics. The poor-laws, for example, are discussed 
 by Jeremy Bentham and Sir F. Eden, the author 
 of the leading book upon the subject. Another 
 contributor, who conceals himself under the modest 
 name of ' Ralph Robinson, farmer at Windsor,' was 
 no less a person, as Young tells us, than George rii. 
 himself.^ Young, however, has still to complain 
 of his financial results. His circulation only 
 amounts after seven years to 350 ; and he is still en- 
 gaged in the familiar employment of flogging a dead 
 horse. The Annals only just paid their way ; but 
 they spread his fame. His name on the title-page 
 is followed by a list of titles which shows that he had 
 received honours in France, Russia, Germany, Italy, 
 and Switzerland. Among his admirers was the phil- 
 
 1 George iii. was believed by Bentham to have been his anony- 
 mous antagonist In a newspaper controversy, and to this circumstance 
 the philosopher attributed the king's lasting antipathy to the famous 
 ' Panopticon.' Bentham, I guess, was the victim of a practical joke 
 in this instance ; but Young appears to speak from knowledge. — 
 Autobiography, p. 112. 
 
ARTHUR YOUNG 197 
 
 anthropic Duke de Liancourt — the Anglomaniac 
 French nobleman who announced to Louis xvi. 
 that the fall of the Bastlle was not a revolt but 
 a revolution. On Liancourt's invitation Young 
 made his famous French tours from 1787 to 1790. 
 The travels are most deservedly famous, but 
 they have hardly been popular in the same pro- 
 portion. In French, indeed, they have had a very 
 large circulation ; but in England they brought 
 more fame than profit. They owe such popu- 
 larity as they achieved to the advice of a very 
 sensible friend. The tour in Ireland, said this 
 adviser, had no great success, because it was chiefly 
 a ^ farming diary.' It was filled with elaborate 
 statistics and tables of prices which presupposed 
 a strong appetite for information in the reader. 
 The right plan to gain readers was to put down 
 the notes made at the moment as they occurred to 
 him. The book might lose in solidity, but would 
 gain in vivacity. Young fortunately took this 
 advice, which deserves to be recorded as one of the 
 few known instances of advice by which an author 
 has actually profited. It was, in fact, singularly 
 appropriate, for Young was essentially a man 
 whose first impressions were the most valuable, 
 as well as the most amusing. It is often better to 
 
198 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 know what a man thought than to know what he 
 afterwards thought that he ought to have thought. 
 ' I was totally mistaken in my prediction/ as he 
 quaintly remarks in a note to his Travels ^ 'and 
 yet, on a revision, I think that I was right in it.' 
 That is, the facts which really happened were 
 those which, at the time, were the most unlikely 
 to happen. Few historical facts, indeed, are more 
 interesting than the visions, never to be precisely 
 realised, which animated the imagination of the 
 first observers of great movements. Young, too, 
 was better at observation than at reflection. When 
 he revised his journals of former tours and cut out 
 the personal elements, he was substituting a set 
 of statistical diagrams for a concrete picture ; and 
 he filled the vacant space by economic specula- 
 tions often of very inferior merit. Miss Betham- 
 Edwards, indeed, declares, as it is natural for an 
 enthusiastic biographer to declare, that Young in- 
 stinctively anticipated Adam Smith, and Mill, and 
 Cobden, and all the pundits of pohtical economy. 
 He was, if I may be pardoned for saying so, 
 much too charming a person to deserve that 
 equivocal praise. He is delightful by reason of 
 his vivacity, his amiable petulance, and uncon- 
 scious inconsistencies. The wisest philosopher, if 
 
ARTHUR YOUNG 199 
 
 he honestly put down his first thoughts, would 
 be always contradicting himself. We get the 
 appearance of consistency only because we take 
 time to " correct, and qualify, and compare, and 
 extenuate, and very often we spoil our best 
 thoughts in the process. What would not Mr. 
 Ruskin lose if he cared for consistency ? The 
 price of suppressing first thoughts may be worth 
 paying by a man whose strength lies in logic ; 
 but with a keen, rapid, impetuous observer like 
 Arthur Young we would rather do the correct- 
 ing for ourselves. His best phrases are im- 
 promptu ejaculations, ' Oh, if I were Legislator 
 of France for a day,' he exclaims, at the sight of 
 estates left waste for game-preserving, ' I would 
 make such great lords skip again ! ' These senti- 
 ments, he assures the reader, were ' those of the 
 moment,' and he was half inclined to strike out 
 many such passages. It was because they were 
 ' of the moment ' that they are so impressive. 
 Had he omitted them he would have taken off 
 the edge of his best passages, though he might 
 have expressed his later views more correctly. 
 
 This temperament, I need hardly argue, is not 
 the ideal one for a political economist. His 
 views should be expressible in columns of figures, 
 
200 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 and he should never let a vivid impression guide 
 him till he has reduced it to tangible statements of 
 loss and gain. He must deal in sober black and 
 white, and be on his guard against the brilliant 
 shifting colours which are apt to generate illusions 
 as to the real proportions of the objects of vision. 
 Young, indeed, was a sound economist, and that, 
 no doubt, is what Miss Betham-Edwards means, 
 in so far as he was a thorough Free-Trader. The 
 ' whole system of monopoly,' he declares, ' is 
 rotten to the core, and the true principle and 
 vital spring and animating soul of commerce is 
 Liberty ! ' That, however sound may be the 
 doctrine, is the utterance of an enthusiast, not of 
 a sober, logical reasoner. He was animated by 
 the spirit of the contemporary philosophy. The 
 great object of his idolatry was Rousseau. In 
 his French travels he visits the tomb of that ' im- 
 mortal' and 'splendid genius' whose 'magic' is 
 teaching French mothers to nurse their children, 
 and French nobles to love a country life. He de- 
 nounces the ' vile spirit of bigotry ' which hunted 
 Rousseau during his life as though he had been a 
 mad dog. At Chambery he turns even from 
 his economical speculation to something still more 
 interesting, the house of the ^ deHciously amiable ' 
 
ARTHUR YOUNG 201 
 
 Mme. de Warens, and described ' by the inimit- 
 able pencil of Rousseau.' He sought for infor- 
 mation about the lady, and could only discover 
 that she was ' certainly dead.' In fact, as he 
 produces a certificate of the occurrence of that 
 event some thirty years before, there seems to be 
 no reason for doubting it. With this enthusiasm 
 Young found a keen interest in the writings of 
 the French economists, whose theory of the sur- 
 passing importance of agriculture was more con- 
 genial to him than Adam Smith's rival doctrines. 
 One of the most amusing episodes in his French 
 travels records his visit to the scene of the labours 
 of the great Marquis de Turbilly. The reader 
 who is ashamed of not remembering the name 
 may be comforted by finding that even in his own 
 country the great man's memory had faded within 
 twelve years of his death. Young, however, 
 boldly introduced himself to the new proprietor 
 of the estates, was introduced to one of Turbilly's 
 old labourers, and went off happy with an auto- 
 graph of the great marquis to be placed among 
 his curiosities. Other pilgrimages of the same 
 kind, to places connected with names faintly re- 
 membered, it is to be feared, in England, prove 
 the keenness of Young's interest in the literature 
 
202 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 of his favourite subject. Young's belief in Free 
 Trade implies his acceptance of the chief doctrine 
 of the Economists, and his sympathy with the 
 general movement of the time. Any one who 
 should be surprised that Young as the staunchest 
 of agriculturists was not a Protectionist would, 
 of course, be guilty of an anachronism. In those 
 days Adam Smith observes that the landowning 
 classes are far more liberal than the manufacturers. 
 England was only just ceasing to export corn, 
 and Young was roused to his most indignant 
 mood by the desire of the clothmakers to main- 
 tain restrictions upon the exports of English 
 wool. What he really illustrates, indeed, is the 
 spirit which we generally associate with the great 
 revolution of manufactures, as applied to the 
 contemporary development of agriculture. 
 
 Another variety of Young's enthusiasm makes 
 a pleasant and characteristic contrast to his dis- 
 cussions as to the prices of corn and rates of 
 wages. A genuine love of scenery breaks out 
 in his English tours, though it is generally con- 
 signed to the notes, the text being preserved for 
 the graver purposes of statistical information. It 
 has, too, a peculiar turn which marks the man. 
 It may be doubted whether our admiration for 
 
ARTHUR YOUNG 203 
 
 ' Nature ' is really so new as we sometimes fancy. 
 The old squire or country parson may have loved 
 the forest or the moor as well as his descendants, 
 though his love was unconscious. The scenery 
 may have given a charm to his favourite pursuits, 
 his fishing or his hunting, though he did not talk 
 about it, or even know it. Scenery, even in 
 poetry, was kept in the background of human 
 figures, but was not less distinctly present. In 
 Young's time, however, the country gentleman 
 was becoming civilised and polished ; he was 
 building mansions with classical porticoes, filling 
 them with pictures bought on the ^ grand tour,' 
 and laying out grounds with the help of Kent or 
 a ' capability ' Brown. He was beginning, that 
 is, to appreciate the advantage of adapting the 
 environment to his dwelling-place ; and the new 
 art of ^ landscape gardening ' was putting the old 
 formal gardens out of fashion. Pope's garden at 
 Twickenham had become famous, and Shenstone, 
 as Johnson puts it, had ' begun to point his 
 prospects, to diversify his surface, to entangle his 
 walks, and to wind his waters ; which he did with 
 such judgment and such fancy, as made his little 
 domain the envy of the great and the admiration 
 of the skilful.' Johnson will not inquire whether 
 
204 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 this ' demands any great powers of mind,' but he 
 admits that * to embellish the form of nature is an 
 innocent amusement.' Young, who was a most 
 determined and indefatigable sightseer, had no 
 misgivings about the * powers of mind ' required. 
 He visits the houses of the nobility most conscien- 
 tiously, gives little criticisms of their pictures, 
 which have at least the merit of perfect simplicity, 
 and falls into ecstasies over the * embellishments 
 of the form of nature.' He visited the Lakes 
 at the time when Gray was writing his now 
 celebrated letters, and his descriptions are equally 
 enthusiastic, if not of equal literary excellence. 
 He * does ' the neighbourhood of Keswick in the 
 most systematic way ; and, I am glad to say it to 
 his honour, is not content without climbing to the 
 top of Skiddaw. He complains gently, however, 
 that art has not been properly called in to the aid 
 of nature. He would like winding walks and 
 properly-fenced seats, which should enable him 
 to look comfortably from the edge of precipices, 
 and be led to them as a well-arranged surprise. 
 His eloquence is stimulated to the highest flights 
 when he visits Persfield on the * Why ' (as he 
 spells the river's name). There a judicious im- 
 prover has laid out an estate in the most skilful 
 
ARTHUR YOUNG 205 
 
 way, so as to display the glories of the Wyndcliff 
 and its neighbourhood. Young is almost carried 
 off his feet by his delight, but he recovers suf- 
 ficiently to intimate some gentle and apologetic 
 criticisms. He gives us an aesthetic discussion as 
 to the correct method of mixing the sublime with 
 the beautiful in due proportions. Young's con- 
 temporary, Gilpin, remarks of the same place that 
 it is not ^ picturesque,' but extremely romantic, 
 and gives a loose to the ' most pleasing riot of the 
 imagination.' Nothing in the way of literature 
 seems to keep so ill as aesthetic criticism ; and we 
 must not be hard upon these poor old gentlemen. 
 They held that nature wanted a little judicious 
 arranging and dramatising. At Wentworth he 
 pronounces that the woods and waters are 
 ' sketched with great taste,' and that the woods 
 in particular have a ' solemn brownness ' which is 
 gratifying to the connoisseur. Young had not 
 read Wordsworth, for obvious reasons, and when 
 he wants a bit of poetry has generally to resort 
 to Pope's ' breathes a browner horror o'er the 
 woods.' He much approves of a statue of Ceres 
 and ' a Chinese temple ' which temper the rawness 
 of nature at Wentworth ; and elsewhere he gives 
 another of his artless aesthetic disquisitions upon 
 
2o6 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 the proper theory of sham ruins. They ought, 
 he thinks, to represent the real thing, and should 
 not be made into mere places for tea-drinking. 
 Whatever may be Young's Hmitations, however, 
 it is impossible to doubt that his enthusiasm for 
 the beauties of nature is as hearty and genuine as 
 that of Gray or of any of the generation which 
 learned its canons of taste from Wordsworth. At 
 Killarney, for example, he is thrown into raptures 
 of the most orthodox variety, and when he comes 
 within sight of the Pyrenees Mr. Ruskin himself 
 could not accuse him of deficient feeling. ' This 
 prospect' (from Montauban), he says, 'which 
 contains a semicircle of a hundred miles in 
 diameter, has an oceanic vastness in which the 
 eye loses itself; an almost boundless scene of 
 cultivation ; an animated, but confused, mass of 
 infinitely varied parts, melting gradually into the 
 distant obscure, from which emerges the amazing 
 frame of the Pyrenees, rearing their silvered heads 
 far above the clouds.' Young, one cannot doubt 
 after reading this and other passages, would have 
 been in these days an honorary member of the 
 Alpine Club, as well as of his numerous foreign 
 agricultural societies. 
 
 There is, indeed, one exception to his enthu- 
 
ARTHUR YOUNG 207 
 
 siasm. He would not have accepted Scott's love 
 of the heather. He always speaks of ' heather 
 and ling ' with a kind of personal animosity. 
 They are signs of the abomination of desolation. 
 His criticism of French chateaux shows both 
 sentiments. He is shocked, and with sufficient 
 reason, at the game-preserving wastes which sur- 
 round them ; but he is also disgusted, in a minor 
 degree, by the want of proper landscape-garden- 
 ing. Their great houses are often built in the 
 purlieus of a town ; and what might be made 
 into beautiful grounds abandoned to the baser 
 purposes of stables or other utilitarian erections. 
 Young naturally has the eye of the country 
 gentleman, as his successor Cobbett had the eye 
 of the practical farmer. Neither could take the 
 simply sentimental view ; and in each, therefore, 
 a most genuine love of country scenery is com- 
 bined with an almost fanatical horror of a waste. 
 Young would have sympathised with Cobbett's 
 denunciation of the ' accursed hill ' of Hindhead, 
 which some of us now find to possess certain 
 charms ; or have approved Defoe's remark, that 
 Bagshot Heath had been placed by Providence so 
 near to London in order to rebuke the pride of 
 Englishmen by showing that the heart of their 
 
2o8 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 own country could be as desolate as a Scottish 
 moor. Young, however, approved what Cobbett 
 has begun to dread, the application to agriculture 
 of the same spirit which was creating the manu- 
 facturing system. His ideal was the improving 
 landlord. He accepts Gulliver's maxim that the 
 man who could make two blades of grass grow 
 where one had grown before, could deserve more 
 of his country than all the politicians put to- 
 gether. Young had, as he said, passed his hfe 
 up to fifty in trying to fulfil that duty ; and he 
 was not less energetic afterwards. It sums up 
 his whole code of conduct. Every political and 
 economical project was to be estimated by its 
 tendency to increase the produce of agriculture. 
 Other ends are secondary. The sight of land 
 which might bear corn and only produced ling 
 vexes his very soul. He regarded Enfield Chase 
 as a simple ' nuisance ' — a scandal to the Govern- 
 ment of the country, — and he calculates that 
 Salisbury Plain might be made to grow food for 
 the whole population. For sympathy, again, he 
 looked to the country gentleman. Not one farmer 
 in five thousand, he complains, ever read a book ; 
 he is not foolish enough to waste his missionary 
 zeal upon them ; but the country happily abounds 
 
ARTHUR YOUNG 209 
 
 with gentlemen-farmers, and they are the sources 
 of all improvement. His heroes are Tull, who 
 introduced turnips ; and Weston, who introduced 
 clover ; and Lord Townshend and Mr. Allen, 
 who introduced marling into Norfolk. Wher- 
 ever he sees a gentleman who has the sense to 
 devote himself to such labours, he pours out 
 blessings on his head. I do not know whether 
 he is most enthusiastic over the Marquis of 
 Rockingham, who had taught the farmers of 
 Yorkshire to grow better crops ; or over the 
 Duke of Bridgewater, whose great canal was 
 among the first symptoms of the great manu- 
 facturing development of Lancashire. He has 
 an incarnation of the spirit of improvement 
 which was transforming England in his days ; 
 and there is something pleasant in his sanguine 
 optimism as to public ajffairs, when his own little 
 enterprises were anything but prosperous. The 
 darker side of the great industrial revolution 
 which was to alarm Cobbett was still hidden 
 from him. The growth of pauperism, which 
 began with war and famine at the end of the 
 century, was still in the future. In the earlier 
 period all patriots were still lamenting over an 
 imaginary decline of the population, which could 
 
 VOL. I, o 
 
210 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 not be disproved by the imperfect statistics of the 
 time. Young has to meet their jeremiads by 
 rather conjectural figures, as well as by his own 
 observations of growing prosperity on all sides. 
 His views are often oddly different from those 
 which came up with the next generation. He 
 denounces the poor-laws partly on the familiar 
 ground that they are demoralising incentives to 
 idleness. But he hates them still more because 
 they were, as he puts it, ' framed in the very 
 spirit of depopulation.' He reckons it as one of 
 the great advantages of Ireland that the absence 
 of poor-laws encourages a rapid increase of the 
 numbers of the people. No one could speak 
 more warmly of the importance of improving 
 the condition of the poor in Ireland and else- 
 where, but he has no thought of the dangers 
 which alarmed Malthus and the later economists. 
 The one merit of the old poor-laws according to 
 them was that the parishes had an interest in 
 checking the growth of the population. That, 
 according to Young, was the cardinal vice of the 
 system. The great aim of the statesman should 
 be an increase of population. The way to 
 increase population is to take all fetters from 
 industry. Cultivate waste lands ; turn Salisbury 
 
ARTHUR YOUNG 211 
 
 Plain into arable fields ; carry cultivation, as 
 Macaulay hoped we should do, to the top of 
 Helvellyn and Ben Nevis ; make roads and 
 canals ; introduce threshing-machines and steam- 
 engines, and population will increase with the 
 means of employment. He is a little puzzled at 
 times by the conflict of interests. Low wages, 
 he remarks, are good for the employer ; and he 
 observes that, in London, wages are high. 
 Therefore, he argues, the statesman should limit 
 the size of London. There are other reasons for 
 this. London is a devouring gulf; the deaths 
 greatly exceed the births ; it is actually eating 
 away population, and should somehow be kept 
 down in the interests of agriculture. Another 
 symptom which vexes Young's soul is the 
 enormous consumption of tea. Tea, in the first 
 place, is debilitating generally, and therefore tends 
 to diminish numbers ; and, in the second place, 
 it is unfavourable to agriculture. If all the 
 money spent upon tea were spent upon corn, 
 enough corn could be raised, as he calculates, to 
 support four millions of people. Finally, the 
 money spent upon tea is all thrown away upon 
 the Chinese instead of supporting British indus- 
 try. He is following the lead of Jonas Hanway, 
 
212 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 whose arguments to the same effect had pro- 
 voked Johnson's famous eulogy upon his favourite 
 beverage. Young was evidently rather vague in 
 his political economy ; though it would be unfair 
 to take some of these obiter dicta^ thrown out on 
 the spur of the moment, as his definite conclu- 
 sions. In another respect, Young is very unlike 
 his followers. How are we to get rich? he asks; 
 and his answer is, by increasing our debt of 140 
 millions to 200 millions. The additional sum, 
 he explains, is to be spent on reclaiming waste 
 lands. He wishes Government to interfere ener- 
 getically, and complains bitterly that English 
 statesmen have always neglected agriculture. 
 England, as he tells a French friend, ' has had 
 many Colberts but not one Sully.' Our hus- 
 bandry has flourished in the teeth of our 
 Ministers, and is far from what it would be 
 had it received the same attention as trade and 
 manufactures. Once more, to make two blades 
 grow in the place of one is the ultimate object 
 of all rational conduct, the tendency to produce 
 that result the criterion of all policy, and energy 
 in bringing it about the duty of all ministers, 
 politicians, and private persons. All good things 
 will follow. 
 
ARTHUR YOUNG 213 
 
 Young's devoted and unflagging zeal, and his 
 sanguine confidence in his principles is equally 
 attractive, whatever the inconsistencies or rashness 
 of his speculations. This must be remembered in 
 reading his French travels. Young is generally 
 cited as justifying the Revolution, and his later 
 recantation regarded as one of the many instances 
 of inconsistency due to the Reign of Terror. It 
 must be observed, however, and it certainly does 
 not diminish the value of his evidence, that Young 
 was never a thorough political follower of the 
 revolutionists. His real sympathy was with his 
 Anglomaniac friends, Liancourt and his like. 
 The question is, as he says in 1789, whether the 
 French will adopt the British Constitution with 
 improvements, or listen to speculative theorists. 
 The result in the latter case would be ' inextric- 
 able confusion and civil wars.' Young's great 
 merit is precisely that he records his impressions 
 of fact so vividly and candidly that the value of 
 his evidence is quite independent of the correct- 
 ness of his political conclusions. I will not ask 
 what those conclusions should be. Young's point 
 of view is the characteristic point for us. The 
 French conditions inverted his English experience. 
 In England he has to be constantly lamenting the 
 
214 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 want of roads ; but what roads there were were 
 thronged. In France there are magnificent roads, 
 but 'circulation is stagnant.' In Languedoc he 
 passes ' an incredible number of splendid bridges 
 and many superb causeways,' but a certain Croix 
 Blanche is an ' execrable receptacle of filth, vermin, 
 impudence, and imposition,' presided over by 'a 
 withered hag, the demon of beastliness.' Not a 
 carriage is to be had. In England you have towns 
 of 3000 people cut oiF from all high-roads, yet 
 with clean inns, civil hosts, and a postchaise 
 ready at a moment's notice. Young wishes to 
 have both the energetic Government and the 
 energy of private enterprise. He admires the 
 great public works of France, but is stirred to 
 wrath by the apathy of the individual Frenchman. 
 Though he is constantly acknowledging the 
 courtesy of Frenchmen, and their superiority in 
 many points of refinement, he is oddly annoyed 
 by their taciturnity. He can never get any 
 adequate conversation at a table d'hote. Possibly 
 the excellent Young, who was clearly ready to 
 talk to anybody, was a little impeded in France 
 by the fact that (as we learn from Miss Burney) 
 his knowledge of the language was limited, and 
 he filled up any gaps by inserting English words 
 
ARTHUR YOUNG 215 
 
 with an imitation of the French accent. He 
 could certainly make a speech under pressure, for 
 he describes how he once pacified a suspicious 
 mob, which thought that the inquisitive traveller 
 must be devising schemes for taxation. He 
 pointed out that in his own country the rich 
 were taxed for the poor, — there was some good in 
 the poor-laws, after all ! But a further explana- 
 tion is suggested by his lamentation over the 
 surprising ignorance of their own affairs in the 
 provinces. There were no newspapers and no 
 political talk, even at the exciting times of the 
 Revolution. Petty English tradesmen, he declares, 
 were talking about the last news from France all 
 over the country, before any interest in the 
 matter had spread to the people directly affected. 
 In English counties the newspaper circulated from 
 the squire's hall to the farmer or the small artisan ; 
 but the French seigneurs formed no centres of 
 superior enlightenment. They crowded into the 
 towns and spent their rents upon the theatres ; 
 they only visited the country when they were 
 banished ; and then they turned great districts 
 into mere wildernesses to be roamed over by 
 boars, wolves, and deer. They made one blade 
 grow where two had grown before. Young 
 
2i6 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 admired the English country gentleman as the 
 active supporter and originator of all improve- 
 ments. His French rival was a mere incubus, an 
 effete ' survival.' In France, according to Young, 
 half, if not two-thirds of the land was already in 
 the hands of small proprietors. Peasants supplied 
 the industry, and carried out what improvements 
 there were. They illustrated his famous phrase, 
 ' The magic of property turns sand to gold.' 
 Meanwhile the great seigneurs do nothing ; they 
 receive quit-rents and enforce tallies and corvees^ 
 and all the oppressive incidents of feudal tenure. 
 Young accordingly transfers to the peasantry the 
 sympathy which in England he felt for the 
 country gentleman. He did not object to the 
 large proprietor as such ; but to the proprietor, 
 large or small, who did not do his duty by his 
 property. He draws up an indictment against the 
 French nobility, which is all the more impressive 
 because it does not imply any preconceived 
 political theories. At one moment he even 
 approves of the French peasantry for seizing 
 waste lands by force, and even wishes that the 
 English peasantry were authorised to take similar 
 steps. After all, waste land is the great evil of the 
 world. But it is quite intelligible that from his 
 
ARTHUR YOUNG 217 
 
 point of view the actual course of affairs in France 
 should have convinced him that too high a price 
 might be paid even for the appropriation of a 
 waste. In England, Young's zeal for agricultural 
 improvements was never qualified. It must, he 
 was clear, be good for everybody. He tells land- 
 lords that they are foolish for boasting of not 
 raising their rents. To raise rents (within limits, 
 he admits) is the best way of stimulating industry. 
 His ideal person is a certain wonderful collier. 
 The owner of the property had tried to improve 
 the condition of his workmen by giving them 
 small allotments of waste land. One of them 
 worked from midnight till noon in the mine, and 
 after his twelve hours spent eight more upon im- 
 proving his bit of land, removing gigantic stones, 
 and finally turning nine or ten acres into cultivated 
 fields. Young celebrates this extraordinary feat 
 of labouring twenty hours a day for several years 
 with characteristic enthusiasm, and offers to receive 
 subscriptions for the hero, which, we will hope, 
 enabled the poor man to be less industrious. 
 
 At a splenetic moment during his French 
 travels. Young, riding on a blind mare, just 
 misses a meeting with Charles Fox, who had 
 excited the wonder of the natives by his modesty 
 
2i8 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 in travelling with nothing but a postchaise, a 
 cabriolet for his servants, and a courier to order 
 horses, ' A plague on a blind mare ! ' exclaims 
 Young ; ' but I have worked through life, and he 
 (that is, Fox) talks ! ' Young had talked a good 
 deal too, especially on paper ; but his momentary 
 grumble was pardonable. His ' 3000 experiments,' 
 and his various attempts to get out of perpetual 
 anxiety had brought him little but reputation. 
 George iii., indeed, sent him a merino ram, much 
 to his satisfaction ; it proved that the king had 
 just views of glory, and that a period was coming 
 when ' more homage ' would be paid to a prince 
 for giving ' a ram to a farmer than for wielding 
 a sceptre.' George iii. soon found it necessary to 
 devote more time to his sceptre than to his rams ; 
 but Young's career was more affected, happily or 
 otherwise, by another influence. Sir John Sinclair 
 was an ideal representative of the dismal science. 
 He atoned for being an intolerable bore by doing 
 some excellent work. He inherited a large estate 
 in Caithness, and began his reign by assembling 
 his tenants and making in one day a road over an 
 inaccessible hill ; and he set to work enclosing, 
 rearranging farms, introducing fisheries, and 
 generally rousing the primitive Gaelic population 
 to a sense of the advantages of civilisation. He 
 
ARTHUR YOUNG 219 
 
 promoted agricultural societies, and introduced 
 the 'long sheep' into the Highlands. His son 
 tells us that due regard was paid in his improve- 
 ments to the interests of the poor ; that a tide of 
 prosperity set in, and population increased rapidly. 
 At any rate, Sinclair translated into practice 
 Young's most cherished principles. Sinclair sat 
 at the feet of Adam Smith ; and travelled to 
 Sweden and Russia in search of information ; and 
 wrote a History of the Revenue ; and became a 
 Member of Parliament. He began, in 1 791, to 
 publish a book of great value, the Statistical 
 Account of Scotland. He is said to have been the 
 first person to introduce the word ' statistical ' into 
 English ; and this book, a collection of reports 
 from the ministers of all the Scottish parishes, 
 was of great importance at a time when people 
 did not even know for certain whether population 
 was increasing or declining. Sinclair, in 1793, 
 persuaded Pitt to start the ' Board of Agriculture.' 
 Arthur Young had bet the nineteen volumes of 
 his Annals against the twenty-one of Sinclair's 
 Statistical Account that Pitt would not consent.-^ 
 He lost the bet, to his great satisfaction; for, 
 though the Minister would only allow ^3000 a 
 
 1 A brief and interesting History of the Board of Agriculture has just 
 been published by Sir Ernest Clarke, secretary to the Royal Agri- 
 cultural Society. 
 
220 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 year, Young was made secretary with a salary of 
 ;^400. Now, with the help of Sinclair, he could 
 set to work and, on however modest a scale, 
 Government would at last set about producing 
 those two blades of grass. Their first aim was to 
 do in England what Sinclair had done in Scotland. 
 The English clergy were to be asked to rival the 
 Scottish ministers. But here occurred a significant 
 difficulty. One of Young's pet theories was that 
 tithes were an intolerable burthen to agriculture. 
 He would not confiscate them, but would 
 commute them for an increase of glebe. The 
 English clergy, he explains, had so little to do 
 that they naturally took to dancing and sporting, 
 if not to still less decorous pursuits. Agriculture 
 was the natural employment for them, as, indeed, 
 it was the ideal occupation for every one. The 
 clergy, however, suspected, not unnaturally, that 
 gentlemen of these views might be insidiously 
 attacking the tithes, and would probably be putting 
 awkward questions. The Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury protested ; and the Board had to be less 
 inquisitive, and confined itself in this direction to 
 publishing a number of reports upon the agricul- 
 ture of counties. They tried, however, to promote 
 their grand object by other means. The worthy 
 
ARTHUR YOUNG 221 
 
 Sinclair once made a joke — not, it is true, of the 
 first water ; but still, as it was his only joke, he 
 naturally repeated it as often as possible. This 
 was to give as a toast, ' May commons become 
 uncommon ! ' He fully shared Young's mania. 
 What is the use, he would inquire, of conquering 
 colonies ? Let us first conquer Finchley Common, 
 and compel Epping Forest to ' submit to the yoke 
 of improvement.' His son claims for him the 
 merit of actually making the suggestion which led 
 to the enclosure of Hounslow Heath. With all 
 their energy, Sinclair and Young could never 
 persuade Parliament to pass a General Enclosure 
 Bill ; but they claimed to have facilitated the 
 process which went on so rapidly in their time. 
 The common field system, the source of all 
 slovenly agriculture according to him, was very 
 rapidly broken up. Meanwhile, it is to be feared, 
 the Board became rather a nuisance. It was a 
 rather anomalous body, with no very definite 
 functions ; and it went about like an intrusive 
 busybody, trying to stir up people in general by 
 every means in its power. It ofi^ered premiums 
 for inventions, and encouraged scientific writers 
 to give lectures and produce books, and held 
 meetings where good agriculturists might make 
 
222 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 each other's acquaintance ; but it is said to have 
 ultimately become a kind of political debating 
 society, and finally expired (1822) two years after 
 Young's death. In spite of their agreement upon 
 the main point, Young soon found the chief of the 
 new board to be far from congenial. Sinclair was 
 a pushing, self-seeking person, stingy in money 
 matters, industrious in the wrong direction, and 
 as anxious to establish his own claims as to 
 promote the true interests of agriculture. Young 
 was relieved when for a time Sinclair was super- 
 seded. He returned to be tried, however, ' under 
 promises of good behaviour,' at a time (1805) 
 when Young was threatened with blindness and 
 falling into melancholy. 
 
 Sinclair about 1 8 1 o returned to Scotland, where 
 he got a good appointment and leisure for liberally 
 bestowing his tediousness upon his countrymen 
 and the world. He got up Highland games ; 
 promoted the use of the bagpipes, and defended 
 the authenticity of Ossian. He gave advice to 
 Scott in literary matters. He expounded his 
 opinions in numerous pamphlets — his son gives 
 a list of 367 of these productions, — and, finding 
 the employment insufficient, spent his spare time 
 in composing four gigantic cyclopasdias, which 
 
ARTHUR YOUNG 223 
 
 were to codify all human knowledge upon health, 
 agriculture, religion, and political economy. The 
 first two alone were published, and I confess that 
 I have, not read nor even seen them. It appears, 
 however, from The Edinburgh Review (October 
 1807) that the first fills four volumes of 800 
 closely printed pages apiece ; marked, as the 
 reviewer asserts, in the good old style, by ' in- 
 distinctness,' ' incredible credulity,' ' mawkish 
 morality,' ' marvellous ignorance,' and a ' display 
 of the most diffuse, clumsy, and superficial 
 reasoning.' The reviewer gives as specimens 
 Sinclair's remarks upon the advantage of taking 
 butter with fish ; and his proof that, although the 
 stomach is an organ not remarkable for external 
 elegance, it not the less requires careful attention 
 in consequence of its delicate structure. Sinclair 
 probably opposed a good solid stolidity to this 
 heartless levity. He proposed that his work 
 should be translated into the principal languages 
 of Europe, and promised that it should add from 
 ten to thirty years to the life of every attentive 
 reader. Apparently he had the reward appropriate 
 to gentle dulness, for it is said that five editions 
 were sold — a sufficient answer to any review. 
 Sinclair survived till 1835. 
 
224 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 Meanwhile Arthur Young had a more pathetic 
 end. His secretaryship had taken him to London, 
 there his handsome presence and open-hearted, 
 cordial ways made him acceptable in society, which 
 he heartily enjoyed. But his life was cruelly 
 darkened. He was tenderly attached to his 
 youngest daughter ' Bobbin,' to whom, in her 
 infancy, he wrote pleasant little letters, and whom 
 he never forgot in his travels. 'I have more 
 pleasure,' he says at the end of his first tour in 
 France, ' in giving my little girl a French doll 
 than in viewing Versailles,' and ' viewing Ver- 
 sailles ' was no small pleasure to him. Her death 
 in 1797 struck a blow after which he never quite 
 recovered his cheerfulness. His friends thought 
 that a blindness which soon followed was due to 
 ' excess of weeping.' I do not know whether 
 physicians would regard this as a possible cause of 
 cataract. An operation for this disease was per- 
 formed eleven years later, and recovery promised 
 on condition of calmness. Wilberforce, coming 
 to see him, told him of the death of the Duke of 
 Grafton, now chiefly remembered by the abuse 
 of Junius. The duke, however, became serious 
 in his later years, and was one of Young's 
 improving landlords. Anyhow, the news, or 
 
ARTHUR YOUNG 225 
 
 Wilberforce's comments, provoked a burst of 
 tears which was fatal to Young's hopes of recovery. 
 He retired to his native village, and sought for 
 consolation in religious practices. He had upon 
 the loss of his daughter studied religious books 
 for sixteen or seventeen hours a day, and had been 
 profoundly affected by Wilberforce's Practical 
 View of Christianity. As he was forced to retire 
 from business, he became a more zealous disciple, 
 and tried to propagate his faith. He published 
 little selections from the works of Baxter and 
 Owen, and preached on Sunday evenings in a 
 hall at Bradfield. 'There is still living (1889) a 
 nonagenarian at Bradfield,' writes Miss Betham, 
 ' who remembers his sermons.' The blind old 
 man ' would get his back turned to his audience, 
 and have to be put straight by his daughter and 
 secretary.' He still worked at his favourite 
 pursuit, and left ten folio volumes in manuscript 
 of a History of Agriculture. He died 20th April 
 1820. The nonagenarian of 1889 is by this time, 
 if he survives, probably a centenarian ; but it is 
 curious to reflect that we have still among us men 
 of active minds whose careers overlap Young's. 
 His enthusiasm refers to a strangely altered state 
 of things. What he would think of the present 
 
 VOL. I. p 
 
226 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 state of England, of modern London, of the 
 imports of tea, of the growth of population, and 
 of agricultural depression, it is needless to con- 
 jecture. No doubt he would admit that some 
 of his predictions have turned out badly, but he 
 would perhaps hold not the less that he was 
 right in making them. The short-sightedness 
 of the most intelligent observers suggests comfort 
 when one studies some modern prophets. 
 
WORDSWORTH'S YOUTH ^ 
 
 A Fren-ch critic, M. Emile Legouis, has written 
 a singularly interesting study of Wordsworth's 
 youth. Of M. Legouis's general qualifications, 
 it need only be said that he has a thorough 
 knowledge of English literature, and a minute 
 acquaintance with all the special literature bearing 
 upon Wordsworth's early career. He fully ap- 
 preciates the qualities which, though they have 
 endeared Wordsworth's poetry to his own 
 countrymen, have hardly made him one of the 
 cosmopolitan poets. I do not, however, propose 
 to say anything of Wordsworth's general merits. 
 M. Legouis's study is concerned with one stage 
 in Wordsworth's development. Wordsworth was 
 in France at the crisis of the Revolution, and 
 there, as we know from the Trelude^ became the 
 enthusiastic admirer of Michel Beaupuy, after- 
 wards a general and an incarnation of republican 
 
 1 La Jeunesse de Wordsivorth. Par Emile Legouis. Paris, 1896. 
 An English translation appeared in 1897. 
 
 227 
 
228 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 virtue. Wordsworth compares him to Dion as 
 the philosophic assailant of a tyrant.^ M. 
 Legouis has already given an account of 
 Beaupuy,^ and has now pointed out the nature 
 of his influence upon his young English disciple. 
 
 Browning's Lost Leader represented a view 
 of Wordsworth which seemed strange to most 
 readers. The name of Wordsworth had come 
 to suggest belief in the Thirty-nine Articles, 
 capital punishment, and rotten boroughs. Some 
 of us can still remember the venerable grey head 
 bowed in the little church at Grasmere, and typi- 
 fying complete acquiescence in orthodox tradition. 
 This ^ lost leader,' however, had once defended the 
 principles of Paine's Rights of Man ; had con- 
 demned the crusade against the Revolution as a 
 great national crime ; and, so far from being 
 orthodox, had been described by his intimate 
 friend, Coleridge, as a * semi -atheist.' How 
 was this brand snatched from the burning, or 
 what, as others will say, led to this lamentable 
 apostasy.^ There is, of course, no question of 
 moral blame. As Browning observes, the real 
 
 1 See Wordsworth's poem upon Dion, written 1 8 1 6. 
 
 2 Le General Michel Beaupuy. Par G. Bulssieres et Emile 
 Legouis. Paris, 1891. 
 
WORDSWORTH'S YOUTH 229 
 
 Wordsworth was certainly not seduced by a ' bit 
 of ribbon.' His change of attitude only suggested 
 in a general way the theme of the poem. But a 
 fair account of the way in which his change 
 actually came about is interesting, both as ex- 
 plaining some of his literary tendencies and as 
 illustrating a similar change in many of his 
 contemporaries. Such an account may naturally 
 be sought in Wordsworth's autobiographical 
 poem, the Trelude^ and there, indeed, it is im- 
 plicitly given. Yet its significance is brought 
 out by M. Legouis's careful study of the poem 
 in connection with other documents and some 
 of the earlier writings. M. Legouis has, I think, 
 thrown new light upon the whole process ; and 
 in what I have to say I shall be mainly following 
 his lead, though I may be making a slightly 
 different estimate of certain elements of the 
 question. 
 
 The Trelude, though it gives the clue, has one 
 characteristic which obscures the self-revelation. 
 Wordsworth describes facts till some of his 
 readers are sick of them. Still, a fact is for 
 him mainly a peg upon which to hang some 
 poetical or philosophical conclusion. When, for 
 example, he is crossing the Simplon, he supposes 
 
230 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 — rather oddly, it seems to an Alpine traveller — 
 that the path is inviting him to ' ascend a lofty 
 mountain,' A peasant, luckily, informs him that 
 he has crossed the Alps already, and must go down 
 hill thenceforwards. This remark does not (in 
 the poem at least) suggest a prospect of dinner, 
 but a series of reflections upon ' that awful power' 
 Imagination. It convinces, or reminds, him that 
 ' our being's ' heart and home 
 
 Is with infinitude and only there. 
 
 When a trivial incident starts a man at once upon 
 such distant reveries, serving as a mere taking-off 
 place for a flight into the clouds, we see that we 
 must not count upon definite, concrete informa- 
 tion. We pass at a bound from the common 
 earth into a world lying beyond political or 
 historical circumstance. Even when he speaks, 
 not of external facts, but of the history of his own 
 opinions, he generally plunges into generalities so 
 wide that their precise application is not very easy 
 to discover. We can see that Wordsworth was 
 deeply moved by the Revolution, but the reflec- 
 tions stirred in him are beyond, or beneath, any 
 tangible political issue. They seem at first sight 
 as if they might be adopted with equal facility 
 
WORDSWORTH'S YOUTH 231 
 
 by men of all political creeds. If a man tells 
 us that morality is, on the whole, a good thing, 
 we cannot infer whether he thinks this or that 
 political institution moral. Between the general 
 truth and the particular application there are 
 certain * middle axioms ' which Wordsworth 
 leaves us to supply for ourselves. And, in fact, 
 to follow his sentiments about the Revolution, we 
 must fill in a good deal that is not directly 
 stated. The generalities have to be clothed in 
 circumstance. 
 
 To understand Wordsworth himself we must 
 seek to reproduce him in the concrete. What 
 manner of man was this youth in the first flush 
 of enthusiasm ? Wordsworth tells us how he 
 came to Cambridge, ' and at The Hoop alighted, 
 famous inn ! ' We can guess pretty well how 
 the freshman then impressed his tutor, or the 
 ' chattering popinjays ' whom men called fellow- 
 commoners. He was, he says, a ' stripling of the 
 hills, a Northern villager,' and probably uncouth 
 enough, even in the powdered hair and silk 
 stockings which he commemorates. The type 
 is familiar to all Cambridge men. Paley and 
 Bishop Watson had represented it in the previous 
 generation. A long procession of hard-headed 
 
232 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 North-countrymen came up from the grammar- 
 schools of their district, and were among the 
 toughest competitors in the tripos. Wordsworth, 
 no doubt, looked like a senior wrangler in 
 embryo. He had not, indeed, the special taste 
 for mathematics. There is an entry, it is said, 
 in one of the Cambridge registers about a youth 
 who applied for admission : W, Euclide viso, 
 cohorruit et evasit. Wordsworth did not pre- 
 cisely adopt that course ; but he neglected his 
 Euclid, and took to learning Itahan and reading 
 Spenser. His poetical genius, however, was not 
 revealed to others, and not shown by the ordinary 
 symptoms. He was not, like Coleridge, who was 
 to follow him to Cambridge, sensitive, emotional, 
 and sentimental. However strong his feelings, 
 he was stern and little given to expansive 
 utterance. He formed no intimate friendships. 
 Proud independence and power of standing on 
 his own sturdy legs would be his most con- 
 spicuous qualities, and went naturally with the 
 outside of a country bumpkin. His boyhood 
 had stimulated these tendencies. He had been 
 happy at his school at Hawkshead, and had 
 found congenial masters ; but their great merit 
 had been that they had cared nothing for modern 
 
WORDSWORTH'S YOUTH 233 
 
 methods of drill and competition. They had left 
 him free to take long rambles over the fells, 
 scampers upon ponies, birds'-nesting expeditions, 
 and skating parties on the frozen lakes. He had 
 neither been trimmed into a model boy nor forced 
 into rebellion, but had grown up after his own 
 fashion. The early deaths of his parents had 
 thrown him still more upon his own resources, 
 and detached him from any close domestic ties. 
 Every Englishman is an island, it is said, and 
 Wordsworth was thoroughly insular or self- 
 contained by temperament and circumstance. 
 On the other hand, he was in thorough harmony 
 with his social surroundings. He was on the 
 friendliest terms with the old mistress of the 
 dame-school, the ' statesmen,' and the country 
 parsons of the district, whom he has idealised 
 in his poetry. Wordsworth, in short, was as 
 thorough a representative of the Cumbrian type 
 as Scott of the Scottish borderers, though with 
 a characteristic difference. He never cared, as 
 he remarks in the Trelude, for history or tradi- 
 tion. While Scott's memory had recorded every 
 legend and song connected with his beloved hills, 
 Wordsworth was curiously indifferent to all the 
 charm of historical association. He loved the 
 
234 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 lakes and mountains, it might seem, for their 
 own sakes, not for the local heroes whose fame 
 was accidentally connected with them. But he 
 had not the less imbibed the spirit of his own 
 district ; and loved the Pillar or Scawfell, if not 
 as the scene of any particular events, yet as the 
 natural guardian of the social order from which 
 he sprang. This, again, had predisposed him to 
 a kind of old-fashioned republicanism. At this 
 period, indeed, he was still unconscious of the 
 true nature of his own feelings. He thought, 
 he says, at this time of nature, not of man. But 
 he tells us, too, how when he went to France he 
 was a republican already, because he had been 
 brought up in a homely district where he had 
 never seen a man of rank or wealth, and how, 
 even at Cambridge, with all its faults, he had 
 found a community in which men were respected 
 for their own character and abilities, and all 
 ' scholars and gentlemen ' regarded as equals. 
 At Cambridge, it is true, Wordsworth seems to 
 have been amused rather than edified by the dons 
 of his time, the queer old humorists and port 
 wine drinking bachelors, who ought to have been 
 described by Charles Lamb. Wordsworth passes 
 them by, observing only that he compared them 
 
WORDSWORTH'S YOUTH 235 
 
 — with what results does not appear — to his own 
 'shepherd swains.' M. Legouis has formed a 
 low — I am afraid not too low — estimate of the 
 intellectual position of Cambridge in those days. 
 It may, however, be noticed that there was a 
 certain stir in the minds of its inhabitants even 
 then; Cambridge held itself to be the Whig 
 university, studying Locke and despising the 
 Aristotelian logic of Oxford. One symptom 
 was the development of certain free-thinking 
 tendencies, and the proceedings against Frend 
 for avowing Unitarianism were rousing an ex- 
 citement which soon afterwards led Coleridge 
 into some trouble. Young men, therefore, who 
 aimed at enlightenment, as clever young men 
 ought to do, were not without temptations to 
 break bounds. Especially the uncouth young 
 Cumberland student, 
 
 Child of the mountains, among shepherds reared, 
 
 despising the stupid old dons with their mechanical 
 disciplines, conscious of great abilities, though not 
 yet conscious of their proper aim, was disposed to 
 cast the dust off his shoes and strike out a path of 
 his own. 
 
 What it was to be, did not appear for some time. 
 
236 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 His unsympathetic guardians naturally wanted him 
 to settle to a profession, and their desire was, if 
 anything, a reason for going against it. To be- 
 come a clergyman or a tutor was his only apparent 
 chance, and yet either position involved concession, 
 if not absolute subservience, to commonplaces and 
 respectability. For some years, accordingly, 
 Wordsworth lived what he calls an ' undomestic 
 wanderer's life,' Travelling was congenial to his 
 state of mind, A youth rambling with a knap- 
 sack on his back and a few pounds in his pocket 
 can enjoy a sense of independence of the most ex- 
 quisitely delightful kind, Wordsworth, before 
 leaving Cambridge, had managed a tour in the 
 Alps, and afterwards spent some time in London. 
 He was equally in both cases a looker-on. 
 The Swiss tour prompted a poem which (with the 
 previous Evening Walk) shows that he was still in 
 search of himself. He already shows his minute 
 and first-hand observance of nature, but the form 
 and the sentiment are imitative and partly fictitious. 
 He is working the vein of Beattie's Minstrel and 
 Goldsmith's Traveller ; with some impulse, per- 
 haps, from Rousseau,^ M. Legouis observes very 
 truly that the sentimental sadness which he thinks 
 proper to affect is in odd contrast with the hearty 
 
WORDSWORTH'S YOUTH 237 
 
 enjoyment betrayed in a letter of the same period 
 to his sister. The Swiss tour took him through 
 France during the early enthusiasm of the Revolu- 
 tion, and his sympathy was the natural expansion 
 of the crude republicanism of the Cumberland shep- 
 herd and Cambridge undergraduate. His London 
 experience is characteristic. He is essentially the 
 countryman wondering at the metropolis. In the 
 seventh book of the Prelude he gives a list of all 
 the sights which bewildered him, from Burke in 
 the House of Commons and Mrs. Siddons on the 
 stage, down to waxworks and blind beggars in the 
 streets and shameless women using bad language 
 in public-houses. He passes from his quaint bits of 
 prose — unconsciously humorous — to pathetic and 
 elevating thoughts. But the spectacle passes before 
 him without involving him ; he has no talks, 
 like Coleridge's, at the Cat and Salutation to 
 record ; he picks up no chums and joins no clubs ; 
 his proper position is that of the famous sonnet on 
 Westminster Bridge, when he alone wakes and 
 meditates on the * mighty heart ' that is ' lying still.' 
 London is part of that vast machinery, including 
 the universe in general, of which it sometimes 
 seems to be the final cause that it is to mould the 
 central object, William Wordsworth. It suggests 
 
238 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 to him, for a wonder, that there are other people 
 in the world besides himself. It impresses upon 
 him, in his own words, *the unity of man.' As 
 he approaches on his ' itinerant vehicle ' — a coach, 
 to wit — ' a weight of ages ' descends at once upon 
 ' his heart.' He becomes aware, shall we say, that, 
 besides the mountains and the lakes, there is a 
 vast drama of human joy and suffering constantly 
 developing itself, and that, though he still looks 
 upon it from the outside, it means a great process 
 in which he is to play his part — if only he can find 
 his appropriate function. 
 
 This brings us to Wordsworth's important visit 
 to France in 179 1. He went there, it seems, on 
 some vague pretext that a knowledge of the lan- 
 guage might qualify him for a tutorship. His re- 
 volutionary fervour was still comparatively mild. 
 He picked up a stone on the site of the Bastille, 
 ' in guise of an enthusiast,' but * in honest truth,' 
 he affected ' more emotion than he felt,' and was 
 more moved by the sight of Le Brun's ' Magdalene' 
 than by relics of the great events. Passing on to 
 Orleans, however, he made acquaintance with some 
 officers, and among them with Beaupuy, upon 
 whom his comrades of royalist sympathies turned a 
 cold shoulder. Wordsworth soon attached himself 
 
WORDSWORTH'S YOUTH 239 
 
 to Beaupuy, and one main secret of their sympathy 
 is revealed in an anecdote. They met a ' hunger- 
 bitten girl ' leading a heifer by a cord tied to her 
 arm, while she was ^ knitting in a heartless mood 
 of solitude.' ' Tis against that that we are 
 fighting,' said his friend. Wordsworth took the 
 Revolution to mean the destruction of ' abject 
 poverty ' by the abolition of exclusive privileges 
 and the elevation of human beings intrusted with 
 power over their own lives. He caught the con- 
 tagion of the patriotic enthusiasm with which the 
 French rose to meet their invaders in 1792. He 
 became so hearty a sympathiser that he was almost 
 inclined to join in some active movement, and 
 might, he remarks, have ended his career by the 
 guillotine. He was forced, probably by stress of 
 money, to return to England, passing through 
 Paris soon after the September massacres ; and 
 might have said afterwards, as Bolingbroke said to 
 Atterbury, that he was being exchanged for Paine, 
 who had just crossed in the opposite direction. 
 
 So far Wordsworth's case was not peculiar. 
 He shared the sentiments of most generous and 
 intelligent young men at the dawn of a new era. 
 
 Bliss was it at that time to be alive, 
 But to be young was very Heaven ! 
 
240 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 He had not to part from early convictions, but 
 simply to develop his old feelings : to diffuse 
 more widely, as he puts it, the affections which 
 had ' grown up with him from the cradle.' His 
 ready-made republicanism did not clash as yet 
 with his patriotism. Rather the two principles 
 were in harmony. The good old conviction 
 that Britons never would be slaves like the 
 wretched beings who wore wooden shoes and had 
 never heard of trial by jury, was enough to bear 
 him out. It only wanted to be mellowed by a 
 little philosophy and wider humanity. The poor 
 girl towing her heifer was to be raised to the level 
 of the hearty young Cumberland lasses with 
 whom he had danced and flirted. The clumsy 
 story of VaudracQur and Julia^ derived, it seems, 
 from Beaupuy's illustrations of the arbitrary 
 tyranny of the French noblesse^ could be told 
 without suggesting any EngHsh parallel. It is 
 true that Wordsworth had realised in the case 
 of Lord Lowther how difficult it might be to 
 force a great English noble to pay his just debts. 
 But even Lord Lowther could not imprison his 
 dependants by a lettre de cachet or make Cumber- 
 land peasants pay crushing taxes and flog the 
 meres at night to silence the frogs. All that was 
 
WORDSWORTH'S YOUTH 241 
 
 wanted at home was to put down jobbery and 
 rotten boroughs; and if reform was desired, there 
 was not in Wordsworth's class at any rate any 
 accumulated mass of palpable tyranny to give 
 rancour to the demand, or mingle it with a thirst 
 for revenge. The Whiggism of Fox or Sheridan, 
 in his view as in theirs, implied sympathy with 
 the French Revolution, so long as the Revolution 
 could be regarded merely as an application of 
 Mr. Locke's principles and a copy of our glorious 
 achievement of 1688. 
 
 Wordsworth, however, had to discover, like 
 his contemporaries, that the millennium was not to 
 come so cheaply. The English war with France 
 and the Reign of Terror in France roused a painful 
 conflict of feeling. It has been suggested that 
 Wordsworth was alienated from the Revolution, 
 not by the horrors of 1793, but by his patriotic 
 sentiment. He could pardon the Jacobins for 
 their crimes in France, but not for opposing 
 British interests. A closer observation shows 
 that this partly misrepresents the facts. The war, 
 indeed, as Wordsworth tells us, first broke up 
 his placid optimism. He was in the Isle of 
 Wight in 1793, listened with painful forebodings 
 to the sunset gun, and watched the fleet gather- 
 
 VOL. I. Q^ 
 
242 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 ing to join in 'the unworthy service' of sup- 
 pressing hberty abroad. He even 'exulted,' he 
 tells us, when the first attempts of Enghshmen 
 to resist the revolutionary armies met with shame- 
 ful defeat ; and sat gloomily in church when 
 prayers were offered for victory, feeding on the 
 day of vengeance yet to come. Some people 
 were cosmopolitan enough to find no difficulty in 
 suppressing patriotic compunctions ; but Words- 
 worth, solitary and recluse as he was, was pene- 
 trated to the core by the sentiments of which 
 patriotism is the natural growth. He only, he 
 says, who '■ loves the sight of a village steeple as I 
 do ' can judge of ' the conflict of sensations without 
 name' with which he joined such congregations. 
 His private and public sympathies were now 
 clashing in the crudest way. Meanwhile, he felt 
 the taunts of those who were echoing Madame 
 Roland's cry, ' O liberty, what crimes are com- 
 mitted in thy name ! ' It was well that the 
 infant republic had ' throttled the snakes about its 
 cradle' with the might of a Hercules; but his 
 soul was sick at thought of the odium that was 
 being incurred by liberty. His thoughts by day 
 were ' most melancholy,' and ' for months and 
 years, after the last beat of those atrocities,' he 
 
WORDSWORTH'S YOUTH 243 
 
 could not sleep without hideous nightmares of 
 cruel massacre and vain pleadings in unjust tribu- 
 nals. The argument from atrocities, however, 
 though the most popular, was ambiguous. Words- 
 worth had been profoundly affected by the Sep- 
 tember massacres when passing through Paris on 
 his return ; but he could still argue that such 
 crimes were the natural fruit of the ignorance 
 and misery of the people under the old system, 
 and that when the wretches who had seized upon 
 power were suppressed, the true reign of peace 
 and reason would begin. The hope seemed to 
 be justified by the fall of Robespierre (July 
 1794), and Wordsworth describes minutely how 
 he heard the news in Morecambe Bay ; what 
 ecstasy it caused him, and how he now called 
 upon the ' golden times ' to appear. It became 
 sufficiently clear, however, that, whatever else was 
 to happen, the new rulers of France were not to 
 be pure philanthropists, propagating a gospel of 
 humanity by peaceful means. The French, he 
 began to fear, were changing a war of self-defence 
 for one of conquest. Yet he stuck resolutely to 
 his opinions as long as he could. He adhered 
 * more firmly to old tenets ' — that is, to his re- 
 volutionary creed — tried to * hide the wounds 
 
244 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 of mortified presumption,' and, in fact, had to 
 construct a theory to show that he had been 
 right all along. Such theories are essential to 
 one's comfort, but sometimes troublesome to 
 construct. ' Opinions,' as he put it, grew ' into 
 consequence,' and for instinctive sympathy he 
 wished to substitute a reasoned system of prin- 
 ciples. 
 
 Wordsworth was thus set down to a problem, 
 and his solution was characteristic. In such 
 mental crises the real process of decision is often 
 very different from that of which the subject of 
 the process is himself conscious. He fancies, in 
 all sincerity, that he is considering a logical or 
 philosophical question. He is asking whether 
 reason, impartially consulted, will order him to 
 accept one or the other of two conflicting 
 systems ; though hoping that it will enable him 
 to decide at the smallest possible cost to his belief 
 in his own consistency. He would prefer a 
 theory which would enable him to think that 
 the opinions which he has to abandon represent 
 a merely superficial aberration. But this may 
 practically come to asking what are his own 
 strongest feelings, and assuming that they repre- 
 sent eternal truths. Wordsworth supposed him- 
 
WORDSWORTH'S YOUTH 245 
 
 self to be asking simply, What is the true philo- 
 sophy of the political creeds at issue ? He was 
 unconsciously asking, On what side are my really 
 deepest sympathies ? The last question might 
 be put thus : A Cumberland ' statesman ' could 
 develop into a Girondin (or what he took to be 
 a Girondin) by simply widening his sympathies. 
 That might be a case of natural development, 
 involving no shock or laceration of old ties ; but, 
 could he continue the process and grow into 
 a Jacobin ? That involved a strain upon his 
 patriotism, painful but not absolutely coercive. 
 He could manage to desire the defeat of British 
 armies, and all the more readily when the 
 British Government was alienating him by trying 
 to suppress freedom of thought and language 
 at home. Still, this position required an effort ; 
 and another trial was behind it. Could the 
 ' statesman ' sympathise with men who used such 
 weapons as massacre and the guillotine ^ To 
 that, of course, there could be only one answer — 
 Wordsworth had been wayward and indepen- 
 dent, but never a rebel against society or morality. 
 He was thoroughly in harmony with the simple, 
 homely society from which he sprang. Violence 
 and confiscation were abhorrent to him. 'I recoil,' 
 
246 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 he tells a friend at the time, ' from the very 
 idea of a revolution. I am a determined enemy 
 to every species of violence.' Lord Lowther, 
 let us say, should be made to pay his debts and 
 give up his boroughs ; but he certainly should 
 not have his head placed on the walls of Car- 
 lisle, while his estates were divided among the 
 peasantry. Wordsworth, however, could still hope 
 that the Terrorists were a passing phenomenon, 
 an ' ephemeral monster,' as he puts it ; and was 
 still firmly persuaded of this upon the fall of 
 Robespierre. It was, however, essential to his 
 peace of mind that the facts should confirm this 
 view : and that the French people, freed from 
 the incubus, should show themselves clearly in 
 favour of peaceful progress at home, and free 
 from thought of conquest abroad. 
 
 The mental crisis thus brought about is indi- 
 cated by some remarkable writings. Wordsworth 
 had been provoked to an utterance of his senti- 
 ments when the English declaration of war was 
 stimulating his wrath. Watson — who, being 
 Bishop of Llandaff^ and Professor of Divinity at 
 Cambridge, passed his time as an intelligent 
 country gentleman at Windermere — had preached 
 the doctrine that every Englishman should be 
 
WORDSWORTH'S YOUTH 247 
 
 thoroughly contented with his lot. They could 
 not all be non-resident bishops, but they had no 
 grievances to speak of. Wordsworth hereupon 
 wrote a letter in which he is, at least, unmistakably 
 on the side of Paine against Burke. He had at 
 this time adopted the opinions of Beaupuy. He 
 objects on principle to monarchy and to privileged 
 orders of nobility. At most it may be said that 
 his argument is not so much that of the theorist 
 arguing from abstract rights, as of the indepen- 
 dent Briton who will not humble himself to a 
 lord, and whose republicanism resembles Milton's 
 rather than Rousseau's. But now, when he was 
 roused by later developments to look into his 
 first principles, he found himself in a cruel diffi- 
 culty. In the first place, Wordsworth, though he 
 was a philosophical poet, was not at home in 
 metaphysical or logical subtleties. He is the 
 antithesis of Coleridge, who combined in so 
 singular a degree the poetical and the reasoning 
 faculties, Coleridge could keep the two faculties 
 apart ; and his poems — the really exquisite poems, 
 at least — are as free from any admixture of philo- 
 sophy as if he had never heard of ' object ' and 
 ' subject.' The cause of the difference is simple, 
 namely, that Wordsworth's philosophy, such as it 
 
248 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 is, represents intuitions or convictions ; it em- 
 bodies his faith as to the world and human 
 nature, without reference to the logical justifica- 
 tions. Coleridge held, as a metaphysician 
 naturally does, that his philosophic creed required 
 to be justified by a whole apparatus of dialectics 
 which would be out of place in verse. Whether 
 this apparatus was really the base of his con- 
 victions, or represents the after-thought by which 
 he justified them, does not matter. Wordsworth, 
 in any case, is content to expound his philosophy 
 as self-evident. He speaks as from inspiration, 
 not as the builder of a logical system. One 
 result was that when he tried to argue, he got, 
 as he admits with his usual naivete, ^ endlessly 
 perplexed ' (p. 307). He wanted ' formal proof,' 
 and could not find it. He did not, of course, 
 join the 'scoffers' ; a sufficient reason was, as the 
 scoffers would say, that he was incompetent to 
 appreciate them. When, in the Excursion, he 
 audaciously calls Voltaire ' dull,' he is tacitly 
 admitting that he could never see a joke. Any- 
 how, after bothering himself with metaphysics till 
 his head turned, he fortunately resolved to be 
 a poet ; and here had a short cut to his conclu- 
 sions. I do not mean to scoff at Wordsworth. 
 
WORDSWORTH'S YOUTH 249 
 
 My own belief is that he took more simply 
 and openly the path which most of us take, and 
 that impartial inquiry with him, as with nearly 
 every one, meant simply discovering what he had 
 really thought all along. 
 
 Another influence must be noticed here. M. 
 Legouis dwells upon Wordsworth's relations to 
 Godwin. There is not much direct evidence 
 upon this matter ; and I have some doubt whether 
 M. Legouis does not rather overstate the case. 
 But, in the main, I think that he is substantially 
 right. That is to say, when Wordsworth set about 
 what he called thinking, I suppose that Godwin's 
 philosophy would represent political theory for him. 
 Godwin's philosophy was transmuted by Shelley 
 into something very exquisite if rather nonsensical, 
 and probably is now remembered, when remem- 
 bered at all, chiefly for that reason. Hazlitt, 
 however, in his slashing way tells us that Godwin 
 was at this period the ' very god of our idolatry ' ; 
 Tom Paine was considered for a time a fool to 
 him; Paley an old woman; Edmund Burke 'a 
 flashy sophist ' {Spirit of the Age, p. 33). Words- 
 worth, in particular, he adds, told a student to 
 ' throw aside his books of chemistry and read 
 Godwin on Necessity ' ! Both Wordsworth and 
 
250 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 Coleridge were in various ways connected with 
 the Godwin circle. Now, Godwinism, presented 
 as the gospel of the Revolution, indicates Words- 
 worth's difficulty with curious precision. Godwin, 
 of course, appeals to Reason, and in general 
 terms Wordsworth, like every one on his side of 
 the question, agreed. Their essential aim was to 
 get rid of superstition and obsolete tradition. 
 Godwin, too, held Reason to be a peaceable 
 goddess, whose only weapon was persuasion, not 
 force. Godwin never erred from excess of 
 passion, and was by no means the kind of wood 
 of which martyrs or fanatics are made. Man, 
 he thought, was perfectible, and a little calm 
 argument would make him perfect. So far 
 Wordsworth might agree during his early 
 enthusiasm. The people, freed from the domina- 
 tion of their false guides, were to come to their 
 senses and establish the reign of peace and liberty. 
 But Godwin went a step further. Reason, 
 according to him, leads straight to anarchy. 
 Rulers, of course, will not be wanted when men 
 are perfectly reasonable. But, moreover, rules in 
 general will not be wanted. Men will not tie 
 their hands by custom or prejudice. They will 
 act in each case for the best, that is, for the 
 
. WORDSWORTH'S YOUTH 251 
 
 happiness of the greatest number, without slavery 
 to formulas. His political ideal is, therefore, 
 individualism, or atomism ; the doctrine of liberty- 
 raised to the highest terms. Thus, for example, 
 marriage is an absurdity. If two people agree to 
 live together, they are ' unreasonable ' to enslave 
 themselves to a tie which may become irksome. 
 They should be free to part at any moment. 
 Society should be nothing but an aggregate of 
 independent units, bound together by no rules 
 whatever. A rule should never survive its 
 reason, and the only reason for a rule is the 
 calculation that it will make us happy. 
 
 The doctrine had an apparent consistency, at 
 least, which served to show Wordsworth whither 
 he was going. Two curious poems of this period 
 illustrate his feelings. After leaving the Isle of 
 Wight, Wordsworth had rambled over Salisbury 
 Plain and been profoundly impressed by the 
 scenery. There, too, he had apparently heard the 
 story which is told in one of the last Ingoldsby 
 Legends. In 1786,^ one Jarvis Matcham had 
 been startled by a thunderstorm, and confessed to 
 a companion that he had committed a murder 
 
 1 The story, which Barham says came to him from Sir Walter 
 Scott, is told in the A^'^w Annual Register for 1786. 
 
252 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 (' scuttled a poor little drummer-boy's nob,' as 
 Barham puts it) some years before. In Words- 
 worth's version, the murderer is not a ^blood- 
 thirsty swab,' but an amiable person, who ^ would 
 not have robbed the raven of its food.' He had 
 been seized by a press gang, and, finding on his 
 return that his family were in distress, had robbed 
 and murdered a miscellaneous traveller for their 
 benefit ; an act possibly excusable on Godwin's 
 principles. With this story Wordsworth com- 
 bined another of the ' female vagrant,' whose 
 cruel sufferings were due to her husband having 
 been forced into the army. This represents, as 
 he tells us, foreboding thoughts which came to 
 him when watching the British Fleet at Spithead. 
 He foresaw that the war was leading to ' misery 
 beyond all possible calculation.' Wretched men 
 were being forcibly torn from their families, and 
 plunged not only into misery, but into crime. 
 The horrors of war are bad enough, but they 
 involve also a difficult moral problem when the 
 victims not only suffer, but are demoralised : and 
 painful forebodings were combined with bewilder- 
 ment as to ethical puzzles. Was the murderer 
 most to blame, or the tyrants who had crushed his 
 life ? and what are we to think of the Providential 
 
WORDSWORTH'S YOUTH 253 
 
 government under which such things are possible 
 and even natural ? The moral problem is more 
 prominent in the curious tragedy, The Borderers. 
 That tragedy, received with rapture by his new 
 friend, Coleridge, was written, he says, to be read, 
 not to be acted ; and, like most tragedies so 
 written, has almost failed to find readers, as it 
 quite failed to find actors. Had he written it 
 later, he says, he should have introduced a more 
 complex plot and a greater variety of characters. 
 He might have tried ; but nobody could have a 
 less dramatic genius than Wordsworth, who could 
 never describe any character except his own. 'The 
 Borderers, however, is noticeable here only as an 
 illustration of his state of mind. It was meant to 
 embody a theory, upon which at the time he 
 wrote a prose essay, namely, how we are to 
 explain the ' apparently motiveless actions of bad 
 men.' His villain is a man who erroneously 
 supposed that he was joining in an act of justice 
 when he was really becoming accomplice in an 
 atrocious crime. Having found out his mistake, 
 he resolves, not to repent, but in future to 
 commit any number of crimes on his own account. 
 Conscience is a nuisance and remorse a mistake. 
 The villain not only acts upon his principles, but 
 
254 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 endeavours to subject the hero of the piece to a 
 similar process of conversion. The hero, in fact, 
 is induced by his machinations to cause the death 
 of a virtuous old gentleman, under specially- 
 atrocious circumstances. The villain calculates 
 that, having thus become an unconscious sinner, 
 the hero will in future be a systematic and de- 
 liberate sinner, and a convenient subordinate. I 
 do not feel much clearer, I confess, as to apparently 
 motiveless actions after reading the play than 
 before. The villain's sophistry does not strike 
 me as very plausible, nor his motives, on his own 
 showing, as very intelligible. Wordsworth's own 
 state of mind, however, is clearer. He had, he 
 says, seen many such cases during the advance 
 of the French Revolutionists 'to the extreme 
 of wickedness.' Men are led into crime from 
 originally good motives, and there is then no limit 
 to the consequent ' hardening of the heart and 
 perversion of the understanding.' Robespierre, 
 whose fall had rejoiced him, had started from most 
 benevolent principles, and ended by becoming the 
 typical monster. The temporary success, too, of 
 the villainy, and the perversion of power granted 
 in the name of human liberty to a crushing and 
 bloodthirsty tyranny, were bewildering. ' Often,' 
 
WORDSWORTH'S YOUTH 255 
 
 says Coleridge in "the Friend, ' have I reflected 
 with awe on the great and disproportionate power 
 which an individual of no extraordinary talents or 
 attainments may exert, by merely throwing off all 
 restraints of conscience,' And what, he adds, 
 must not be the power of an individual of consum- 
 mate wickedness who can organise all the forces 
 of a nation ? Robespierre, or Napoleon, would 
 have found conscience a great impediment ; 
 Godwin's theory seemed to Wordsworth to make 
 it superfluous. Godwin would suppress conscience, 
 and substitute calculation. No doubt for him the 
 calculation was to include the happiness of all. 
 Only, when you have suppressed all ties and 
 associations, it becomes rather puzzling to say 
 what reason you have for caring for others. If 
 husbands and wives may part when it is agreeable 
 to both, will they not part when it is agreeable to 
 either.? If a statesman may break through all 
 laws when they oppose a useful end, will he not 
 most simply define useful as useful to himself.? 
 Take leave, in other words, of all prejudices and 
 all respect for social bonds, and are you not on 
 the high road to become such a one as the villain 
 of l^he Borderers ? These are, in fact, the problems 
 which Wordsworth tells us brought him into 
 
256 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 endless perplexity. What, after all, was the 
 meaning of right and wrong, and obligation ? (p. 
 307). What was the lordly ' attribute ' of freewill 
 but a mockery, if we have neither any real know- 
 ledge of what will do good, nor of why we should 
 do it? He could, he says, 'unsoul by syllogistic 
 words ' the ' mysteries of being ' which make ' of 
 the whole human race one brotherhood.' It was 
 in the name of the brotherhood that the revolu- 
 tionary teachers appealed to him ; and yet 
 Godwin, as a prophet, ended by dissolving all 
 society into a set of unconnected atoms. M. 
 Legouis remarks that Wordsworth ^ purged 
 himself of his pessimism ' after the fashion of 
 Goethe, by putting it into a book. This, how- 
 ever, must not be taken to imply that Wordsworth 
 ever shared the atrocious sentiments of his 
 imaginary villain. The Borderers naturally recalls 
 Schiller's Robbers, which had just been translated, 
 and was not without influence upon Wordsworth. 
 Wordsworth's villain and hero are contrasted 
 much as Schiller's two Moors. But it could 
 never have been expected that any young English- 
 man would, like the alleged German baron, have 
 taken to the highway to realise Wordsworth's 
 imaginary personages. The Borderers is not only 
 
WORDSWORTH'S YOUTH 257 
 
 without the imaginative vigour which at the time 
 made Schiller's bombast excusable — the product 
 of a contemplative speculation instead of youthful 
 passion, — but it is plain enough that the poet 
 loathes his villain too much to allow him the least 
 attractiveness. The play represents the kind of 
 moral spasm by which a man repels a totally un- 
 congenial element of thought. He had found 
 that what he took for a wholesome food contained 
 a deadly poison, and to become conscious of its 
 nature is to expel it with disgust. 
 
 What was the influence, then, which opened 
 Wordsworth's eyes and caused what seemed, at 
 least, to be a change of front ? He answers that 
 question himself by referring to two influences. 
 The first was the influence of the devoted sister 
 who now came to live with him. She pointed out 
 to him that his ' office upon earth ' was to be a 
 poet. She persuaded him, one may say, to cease 
 to bother himself with Godwin's metaphysics, with 
 puzzles as to Freewill and Necessity and the 
 ground of moral obligation, and to return to his 
 early aspirations. If this bit of advice fell in with 
 his own predisposition, the influence of Dorothy 
 Wordsworth was something far more than could 
 be summed up in any advice, however judicious. 
 
 VOL. I. 
 
258 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 It meant, in brief, that Wordsworth had by his 
 side a woman of high enthusiasm and cognate 
 genius, thoroughly devoted to him and capable 
 of sharing his inspiration ; and that thus the 
 ' undomestic wanderer ' was to be bound by one 
 of the sweetest and purest of human ties. His 
 early affections, hitherto deprived of any outlet, 
 could now revive, and his profound sense of their 
 infinite value encouraged him to break the chains 
 of logic, or rather to set down the logic as 
 sophistry. Godwinism meant a direct assault 
 upon the family tie ; and that tie was now 
 revealing its value by direct experience of its 
 power. The friendship with Coleridge, then in 
 the full flush of youthful genius, and the most 
 delightful and generous of admirers, came to 
 encourage the growth of such feelings; while 
 Coleridge's mystical tendencies in philosophy 
 probably suggested some solution of the Godwin 
 * syllogising.' Perhaps, after all, Godwin might 
 be a humbug, and the true key to the great 
 problems was to be found in Germany, where 
 both the young men were soon to go for initia- 
 tion. Meanwhile, however, another influence was 
 afi^ecting Wordsworth. His sister had led him 
 back to nature, and he now found that nature 
 
WORDSWORTH'S YOUTH 259 
 
 should include the unsophisticated human being. 
 He rambled as of old, and in his rambles found 
 that the ' lonely roads were open schools ' in 
 which he might study the passions and thoughts 
 of unsophisticated human beings. The result 
 was remarkable. He found nobiUty and sense 
 in the humble friends. The ' wealthy few ' see 
 by ' artificial lights,' and ' neglect the universal 
 heart.' Nature is equally corrupted in the ' close 
 and overcrowded haunts of cities.' But in the 
 poor men, who reminded him of his early friends, 
 of the schoolmaster ' Matthew,' and old Dame 
 Tyson, he found the voice of the real man ; and 
 observed ' how oft high service is performed 
 within ' men's hearts which resemble not pompous 
 temples, but the ' mere mountain chapel.' Was 
 not this to go back to Rousseau, to denunciations 
 of luxury and exaltations of the man of nature ? 
 Wordsworth had been converted to the Revolution 
 by the sight of the poor peasant girl, the victim 
 of feudal privileges — why should he renounce the 
 Revolution by force of sympathy with the same 
 class in England ? 
 
 Before answering, I may remark that in any 
 case the impression was deep and lasting. It shows 
 how Wordsworth reached his famous theory that 
 
26o STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 the language of poetry should be indistinguishable 
 from that of ordinary life. That is merely the 
 literary translation of his social doctrine. He and 
 Coleridge have both told us how they agreed to 
 divide labour, and, while Coleridge was to give 
 human interest to the romantic, Wordsworth was 
 to show the romance which is incorporated in 
 commonplace things. Wordsworth proceeded to 
 write the poems which appeared in the Lyrical 
 Ballads ; and, if his theory tripped him up some- 
 times, wrote some of those exquisite and pathetic 
 passages which amply redeem intervening tracts of 
 quaintly prosaic narrative and commonplace moral- 
 ising — some of the passages, in short, which make 
 one love Wordsworth, and feel his unequalled 
 power of soothing and humanising sorrow. Simon 
 Lee — to mention only one — was the portrait of an 
 old man at Alfoxden. If you are apt to yawn in 
 the middle, you recognise the true Wordsworth at 
 the conclusion : 
 
 I 've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds 
 
 With coldness still returning ; 
 Alas ! the gratitude of man 
 
 Hath oftener left me mourning ! 
 
 I must not, however, speak of Wordsworth's 
 
WORDSWORTH'S YOUTH 261 
 
 pathetic power, which, in its way, seems to me to 
 
 be unapproachable. Henceforward, he found in 
 
 such themes the inspiration of his truest poetry. 
 
 The principle is given in the Song at the Feast at 
 
 Brougham Castle^ where he says of the shepherd 
 
 lord : 
 
 Love had he found in huts where poor men lie, 
 His daily teachers had been fields and rills, 
 
 and in countless other utterances of the same 
 sentiment. A change, indeed, took place, of 
 which M. Legouis gives a curious illustration. 
 About the beginning of 1798, Wordsworth, as he 
 shows, wrote the story of the ruined cottage which 
 is now imbedded in the fifth book of the Excursion. 
 M. Legouis translates the story, omitting the 
 subsequent interpolations. Coleridge, long after- 
 wards, declared it to be the finest poem of the 
 same length in our language. The poem, as 
 originally written, is a painfully pathetic story of 
 undeserved misery patiently borne, and ending in 
 the destruction of a peasant's household. In the 
 later form the narrator has to interrupt himself by 
 apologies for the sadness of the story and edifying 
 remarks upon the ways of Providence. Words- 
 worth, somehow or other, had become reconciled. 
 
262 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 I'he change was not the abandonment of his old 
 sentiments, but the indication that they were again 
 coming to the surface and casting off a hetero- 
 geneous element. The superficial change, indeed, 
 was marked enough. To Wordsworth, the revolu- 
 tionary movement now represented not progress 
 — the natural expansion of his sympathies — but 
 social disintegration and the attack upon all that 
 he held to be the most valuable. The secret is 
 revealed by his remarkable letter to Fox in 1801. 
 There he calls the statesman's attention to two 
 of his most significant poems, 'The Brothers and 
 Michael. These poems are intended to describe the 
 domestic affections ' as they exist among a class of 
 men now almost confined to the North of England.' 
 He observes that the little holdings of the ' states- 
 men ' serve to strengthen the family tie, and thus 
 protect a ' fountain of affection pure as his heart 
 was intended for.' This class, he adds, is rapidly 
 disappearing, and its disappearance indicates the 
 greatest of our national dangers. These most 
 touching poems, written in 1 800, represent Words- 
 worth's final solution of his problem, and embody 
 a sentiment which runs through his later work. 
 Its meaning is clear enough. Wordsworth had 
 
WORDSWORTH'S YOUTH 263 
 
 begun to feel that Godwin's anti-social logic had 
 an embodiment in facts. What he now saw 
 behind it was not Rousseau's sentimentalism, but 
 the harsh doctrinaire system of the economists. 
 The theorists who professed to start from the 
 rights of man were really attacking the essential 
 social duties. Godwinism meant the ' indivi- 
 dualism ' of the later economists. Individualism 
 meant the reckless competition and race for 
 wealth which were destroying the very framework 
 of peaceful society. The English Radical repre- 
 sented Adam Smith ; and Wordsworth now 
 perceived 
 
 How dire a thing, 
 Is worshipped in that idol, proudly named 
 The 'Wealth of Nations.' 
 
 The evils which now impressed him were the 
 absorption of small freeholds by large estates, and 
 the growth of the factory system in the place of 
 domestic manufacture. He dwells upon these 
 evils in the Excursion in language which gives a 
 foretaste of much modern Socialism. Wordsworth 
 had plenty of allies in this view of the case. 
 While he was renouncing the principle of Indivi- 
 dualism, Owen was beginning to put in practice the 
 
264 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 schemes suggested by the same evils, and leading 
 to his later Socialism. Cobbett was lamenting the 
 demoralisation of the agricultural labourer, and 
 taking up his curious position of Radicalism in- 
 spired by regret for the 'good old times.' There 
 is no need, at the present day, for expounding 
 such views or explaining why it should appear to 
 Wordsworth that the revolutionary movement 
 which had started by taking up the cause of the 
 poor had ended by assailing the very basis of 
 order and morality. The foreign developments, 
 the growth of a military despotism, and the 
 oppression of Switzerland by France in the name 
 of fraternity, no doubt seemed clear justifications 
 of his attitude. But he had sufficient reasons at 
 home. The Radical, with whom he had been allied, 
 was attacking what he held dearest, — not only 
 destroying the privileges of nobles, but breaking 
 up the poor man's home, and creating a vast ' pro- 
 letariat ' — a mass of degraded humanity — instead 
 of encouraging ' plain living and high thinking,' 
 and destroying the classes whose simplicity and 
 independence had made them the soundest element 
 of mutual prosperity. I do not, of course, inquire 
 how far Wordsworth's estimate of the situation 
 
WORDSWORTH'S YOUTH 265 
 
 was sound. I only say that this explains how he 
 reached it naturally and consistently. It was, as 1 
 have said, anything but a purely logical process, 
 though it may be said that it was guided by an 
 implicit logic. It really meant that he became 
 aware of the fact that his instincts had led him into 
 the camp of his real enemies. When he realised 
 the fact, he stuck to his instincts, and, indeed, re- 
 garded them as due to divine inspiration. They 
 were attacked by the revolutionary party. He 
 would find in them not only the source of happi- 
 ness, but the ultimate revelation of religion and 
 morality : 
 
 The primal duties sliine aloft like stars ; 
 The charities that soothe and heal and bless 
 Are scattered at the feet of men like flowers. 
 
 Wordsworth's ultimate doctrine, one may say, 
 is the duty of cherishing the ' intimations of im- 
 mortality ' which visit our infancy, to transmute 
 sorrow into purifying and strengthening influence: 
 and so to 'build up our moral being.' In his 
 particular case, this, no doubt, meant that the boy 
 of Hawkshead was to be the father of the man who 
 could not be permanently held by the logical toils 
 of Godwin. It meant, too, a certain self-com- 
 
 VOL. I. S 
 
266 STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER 
 
 placency and an optimistic tendency which, how- 
 ever pleasant, dulled his poetic fervour, and made 
 him acquiesce in much that he would once have 
 rejected. But it was also the source of a power 
 which should be recognised by men of a different 
 behef. When J. S. Mill went through the mental 
 crisis described in his Autobiography^ he thought 
 that he had injured his powers of feeling by the 
 habit of constant analysis. He had so destroyed 
 the associations and with them the sympathies 
 which make life desirable. In this state of mind 
 he found an admirable restorative in Wordsworth's 
 poetry. 'Analysis' represents just the intellectual 
 habit which Wordsworth denounces. It is the 
 state of mind in which his imaginary man of science 
 botanises on his mother's grave ; picks the flowers 
 to pieces and drops the sentiment. Mill, ac- 
 cordingly, tried and tried, he says, successfully, 
 to adopt Wordsworth's method ; and to find 
 happiness in ' tranquil contemplation,' while yet 
 strengthening his interest in the ' common feelings 
 and common destiny of human beings.' With 
 ^ culture of this sort,' he says, ' there v/as nothing to 
 dread from the most confirmed habit of analysis ' 
 (146-9). If Mill's great aim was to 'humanise' 
 
WORDSWORTH'S YOUTH 267 
 
 political economy, he drew from Wordsworth 
 encouragement for the task. This point of con- 
 tact between two men, each of whom represents 
 much that was most antipathetic to the other, is 
 significant. It suggests much upon which I can- 
 not dwell ; but it may hint to the Radical that 
 Wordsworth, in giving up a doctrine which he 
 never really assimilated, was faithful to convictions 
 which, partial or capable of perversion as they may 
 be, represent a very important aspect of truth. 
 
 Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty 
 at the Edinburgh University Press 
 
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