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 ajarnell Mmoeraita ffiibrarg 
 
 Uttiata, JSem fork 
 
 WORDSWORTH COLLECTION 
 
 CYNTHIA MORGAN ST. JOHN 
 ITHACA. N. Y. 
 
I Cornell University 
 P Library 
 
 The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924104091693 
 
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 <^3 
 
 Artists and Sculptors. 
 
 '^® 
 
Turner 
 Ingres. 
 
 Reynolds. 
 Canova. 
 Watteau. 
 Thorwaldser 
 
 Hogarth. 
 
 Millet. 
 
 Bastien- Lepage. 
 
Standard Biooraphies 
 
 LIGHTS 
 
 OF 
 
 TWO CENTURIES 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 EDWARD EVERETT HALE 
 
 ILLUSTRATED WITH FIFTY PORTRAITS 
 
 NEW YORK • : • CINCINNATI • : • CHICAGO , 
 
 A-MHRICAN BOOK COIvlPANY 
 

 K(r^o^n 
 
 Copyright, 1887, by 
 A. S. BAENES & COMPANY 
 
 Ipcinteb b:s 
 . S. 36arnc3 & Company 
 mew JBorft, 11. S. a. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 rr^HE selection of the names of the master-minds of 
 -*~ the last two centuries in the world's progress, is in 
 itself a task of no small difficulty. Many of the noble 
 workers whose objects have been the enlightenment and 
 the happiness of the human race have been so bound 
 together in their labors that they have in a measure 
 ceased to exist as individuals. All the honors that were 
 theirs have been merged in the common stock of praise 
 due to their profession. 
 
 Any great movement either seeks its leaders, or is 
 itself caused by the energy and determination of one or 
 more master spirits ; and it is to those master spirits 
 that posterity joins in doing honor. If in these pages 
 the reader fails to find the name of some favorite writer, 
 composer, artist, or inventor, let him feel sure that the 
 omission was made with reluctance on the part of the 
 editors of this book. For example, we all know the 
 great influence of Italy upon the musical standards of 
 to-day ; but that influence belongs rather to a school of 
 composers than to individuals. So that while no names 
 have been made prominent, the excellence of Italian 
 music and its world-wide influence have received re- 
 peated acknowledgment. 
 
IV PEEFACE. 
 
 The demand for books upon special subjects is too 
 well known to need statement. Many times have we 
 found ourselves hampered by want of information such 
 as is contained in the following pages. At first, it was 
 proposed to give a brief sketch of all the great names 
 in literature and art ; but such a work proved impracti- 
 cable ; and it was decided to cull out only such names 
 as might be considered representative in their nature. 
 
 The lives and works of master-minds are of an edu- 
 cational value, and it is especially for those devoted to 
 the great cause of education that this book has been 
 prepared. At the same time, we trust that the general 
 reader may find it possible to glean valuable informa- 
 tion from its pages. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS, 
 
 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS, 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Watteau 1 
 
 Hogarth 13 
 
 Beynolds 25 
 
 Canova ..... 39 
 
 Thoewaldsen 51 
 
 TUENEE . ■ 65 
 
 Ingees 79 
 
 Baeye 93 
 
 Millet 107 
 
 Bastien-Lepage .123 
 
 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 Swift 135 
 
 Addison 149 
 
 voltaiee 161 
 
 Johnson 175 
 
 Rousseau 189 
 
 Scott 205 
 
 Caelyle ..... 217 
 
 Macaulay 231 
 
 Emeeson 245 
 
 Thackeray ...... 257 
 
 Dickens . 269 
 
 COMPOSERS. 
 
 Bach 281 
 
 Handel 293 
 
 Haydn 305 
 
VI TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 MOZAHT 319 
 
 Beethoven ....... 329 
 
 Schubert 343 
 
 Mendelssohn ........... 353 
 
 Chopin 365 
 
 Schumann ..... 377 
 
 Wagner 387 
 
 POETS. 
 
 Pope ... 399 
 
 Q-oethe 411 
 
 Burns 421 
 
 Schiller 435 
 
 ^'Wordsworth 449 
 
 Byron 461 
 
 Hugo 473 
 
 Longfellow 485 
 
 Tennyson 495 
 
 Browning 505 
 
 I N VENTORS. 
 
 Arkwright .... 515 
 
 Watt 525 
 
 The Montgolfiers 537 
 
 Fulton 549 
 
 Whitney 559 
 
 Stephenson . 569 
 
 Bessemer 577 
 
 Edison 537 
 
 Bell . 597 
 
WATTKAU. 
 
 1684-1721. 
 
 TEA^ ANTOINE WATTEAU (zhon 6ng twan' vat to') 
 ^J was the first and greatest of the French painters of 
 tiie eighteenth century. He originated a style of painting 
 entirely his own. Before his day the French artists in 
 vogue were painters of enormous and stately historical 
 subjects, which the taste of to-day finds somewhat dreary ; 
 or else they painted equally stately portraits of noblemen 
 and gentlemen, splendid in curling wigs, and full of what 
 used to be called the grand air. Watteau never seems 
 to have occupied himself about grandeur at all ; the 
 young people he paints, singing and dancing under the 
 tall dark trees on bright summer afternoons, have nothing 
 better to think about than youth and love and gayety ; 
 they are living in a fairy-land of their own, and are too 
 happy to be classical, like the heroes and heroines of Le 
 Brun (leh brung) and Rigaucl (re goO. The painters Wat- 
 teau loved to study were not the men whom Paris most 
 admired in his time ; he liked better to shut himself up 
 with a fine collection of the great masters than to join 
 in the attempts of the day in a direction which must 
 have been indifferent to him. He was much admired by 
 his contemporaries, but with an admiration which had 
 a trifle of contempt in it ; to-day his is the only name 
 among the artists of the day which most of us remem- 
 ber, and the only one which has any pretensions to a 
 place among the great painters of the world. 
 
2 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 He was born in 1684, in Vaienciennes (va long se en').* 
 The town had only been French since Louis XIV., in 
 person, had besieged it and talien it in 1677. Y\^e must 
 therefore remember that Antoine Watteau, though born 
 a Frenchman, was of that Flemish blood which has given 
 the world so many great painters, and that he was much 
 more a countryman of Van Byck (van ik'), Rubens (rc5o'- 
 benz), and Vandyck (van dik') than of Le Brun or Le 
 Sueur (leh su xxr'). Fine Flemish pictures were owned in 
 Valenciennes, and much was to be seen there which must 
 have delighted an artist ; for the Flemish towns were 
 then constantly, as they are still, celebrating festivals of 
 all kinds, which Rubens painted in his day, and Watteau, 
 after a different fashion, not so very long afterward. 
 
 His father was a slater and tiler ; he had considerable 
 contracts for work, and seems to have been well off. A 
 story is told — we hope it is true — that when Antoine was 
 a boy of sixteen, he was never tired of watching the 
 strolling players and mountebanks on an open space in 
 front of his father's house ; that when they were gone, he 
 used to draw them on the broad margins of his father's 
 copy of the " Lives of the Saints " ; and that old Monsieur 
 (mo seer') Watteau, struck by his fondness for this re- 
 ligious work, thought he intended to become a monk. 
 
 * No comments on tlie life of Watteau can be more interesting tlian extracts 
 from Mr. Walter Pater's sketch, called " A Prince of Court Painters," lately pub- 
 lished in Macmillan's Magazine, from which many of our notes on Watteau are 
 extracted. It is supposed to be made up of extracts from the journal of a sister of 
 that other Pater who was Watteau's pupil : 
 
 "Valenciennes, September, 1701. 
 
 "They have been renovating my father's large work-room. That delightful, 
 tumble-down old place has lost its moss-grown tiles and the green weather-stains 
 we have known all our lives on the high whitewashed wall, opposite which we 
 sit, in the little sculptor's yard, for the coolness, in the summer-time. Among old 
 Watteau's work-people came his son, ' the genius,' my father's godson and name- 
 sake, a dark-haired youth, whose large, unquiet eyes seemed perpetually wander- 
 ing to the various drawings which lie exposed here. My father will have it that 
 lie is a genius indeed, and a painter bom." 
 
WATTEAU. 6 
 
 "When, however," says Mr. Mollett (moi'let), in his valu- 
 able "Life of Watteau," "he discovered the illustrations 
 that Antoine had made in his book, he took them at 
 once to a local painter, who found in them so much merit 
 that he immediately asked to be allowed to instruct the 
 boy in the principles of his art." * 
 
 Whether this were the case or not, it seems very prob- 
 able that Antoine did receive some artistic education in 
 Valenciennes. His family was intimate with that of 
 Pater, the engraver. His cousin, Julien (zhu le ang') Wat- 
 teau, was a historical painter. Antoine's master was a 
 certain Gerin (zhu rang'), of considerable local reputation. 
 On his death, Watteau, then eighteen years old, went to 
 Paris. He appears to have gone there with a scene-painter, 
 who was employed on the decorations of the Opera House, 
 and to have worked under him.f The Opera was at that 
 
 * We iLavehad our September fair in the G-rande Place (j}rong pltis), a wonder- 
 ful stir of sound and color in the wide open space heneath our windows. And 
 just where the crowd was busiest, young Antony was found, hoisted into one of 
 those empty niches of the old Hotel de Ville {i;el), sketching the scene to the life, 
 but with a kind of grace (a marvelous tact of omission, as my father pointed out 
 to us, in dealing with the vulgar reality seen from one's own window) which has 
 made trite old Harlequin, Clown, and Columbine seem like people in some fairy- 
 land ; or like infinitely clever tragic actors, who, for the humor of the thing, have 
 put on motley for once, and are able to throw a world of serious innuendo into 
 their burlesque looks, with a sort of comedy which shall be but tragedy seen from 
 the other side. He brought his sketch to our house to-day, and I was present 
 when my father questioned him and commended his work. But the lad seemed 
 not greatly pleased, and left untasted the glass of old Malaga (tnal' a go) which was 
 offered to him. His father is a somewhat stern man, and will hear nothing of 
 educating him as a painter. Yet he is not ill-to-do, and has lately built himself 
 a new stone house, big, and gray, and cold. Their old plastered house with the 
 black timbers, in the Rue des Cardinaus (?•« da Mr cH nr/), was prettier, dating 
 from the time of the Spaniards, and one of the oldest in Valenciennes. 
 
 t December, 1701'.— Antony Watteau left us for Paris this morning. It came upon 
 us quite suddenly. They amuse themselves in Paris. A scene-painter we have 
 here, well known in Flanders, has been engaged to work in one of the Parisian 
 play-houses; and young Watteau, of whom he has some slight knowledge, has 
 departed in his company. He doesn't know it was I who persuaded the scene- 
 painter to take him— that he would find the lad useful. We offered him our little 
 presents— fine thread lace of our own making for his ruffles, and the like— for one 
 
4: ARTISTS AND SCULPTOBS. 
 
 time much in fashion, and one of his biographers imagines 
 Watteau to have led a gay life there, and to have been 
 much petted and admired. It is certain that, not long 
 after coming to Paris, he was so poor as to engage him- 
 self in a picture factory on the Pont Neuf (pong maf), 
 where small portraits and pictures of saints were turned 
 out in great quantities. A number of painters were em- 
 ployed there ; the work was divided up among them, and 
 one man would paint skies, one heads, and one draperies ; 
 the only quality required was great rapidity. "Watteau," 
 says Mr. MoUett, " was an ' all-round ' genius at this work, 
 and remarkably rapid." He was particularly strong upon 
 Saint Mcholas, who was a very popular saint. " I knew 
 my Saint Nicholas by heart," said he, "and used to do 
 him without the copy." Whenever he had any time, he 
 used to draw from Nature ; and some of his work fell 
 under the eye of Gillot (zhii o'), an artist of some reputa- 
 tion. He invited Watteau to come to live with him ; and 
 this was the end of his life on the Pont Neuf, where he 
 used to earn about three dollars a week. 
 
 Gillot had drawn and painted bacchanalian scenes, fan- 
 tastical pictures, and fashionable subjects, and was now con- 
 fining himself to subjects from the Italian comedy. " This 
 kind of composition," says M. de Caylus (deh ka lus'), " de- 
 termined [Watteau's] taste entirely, and the pictures of his 
 new master opened his eyes to many points of painting." 
 
 must make a figure in Paris ; and he is slim and well formed. For myself, I ijre- 
 sented him with a silken purse I had long ago embroidered for another. 
 
 March, 1713. — We have all been very happy — Jean-Baptiste (ba tist'), as if in a 
 delightful dream. Antony Watteau, being consulted with regard to the lad's 
 training as a painter, has most generously oflfered to receive him for his own pupil. 
 My father, for some reason unknown to me, seemed to hesitate at the first ; but 
 Jean-Baptiste, whose enthusiasm for Antony visibly refines and beautifies his 
 whole nature, has won the necessary permission, and this dear young brother 
 will leave us to-morrow. * * * With how small a part of my whole life shall 
 I he really living at Valenciennes I 
 
WATTEAU. 5 
 
 He and Grillot were at first intimate ; they are said to 
 have resembled each other closely in character and disposi- 
 tion, and this may have been the reason that they quar- 
 reled and parted. Watteau never wished to be questioned 
 about this friendship and the break which followed it ; if 
 it be true that Grillot had become jealous of his abilities, 
 Watteau's silence may have been caused by a delicacy in 
 speaking of so painful an affair. However this may have 
 been, Gillot gave up painting, in which his pupil had sur- 
 passed him, and devoted himself to engraving and etching. 
 
 Watteau made the acquaintance, at Gillot's studio, of 
 Lancret (long kra'), who followed him when he left it, and 
 whom he advised "to form himself on nature herself, as 
 he had done." "Lancret was entirely formed," Goncourt 
 (gong kc5or') says, " by the study of Watteau's manner and 
 by his conversation ; but his work lacks the beauty and 
 distinction of his master's." 
 
 Watteau now went to live with Claude Audran (kia^A^d 
 o drongO, the concierge (kon sarj') or guardian of the pal- 
 ace of the Luxembourg (luks ong bc5or'). Audran was one 
 of a large family of painters and engravers, and he occu- 
 pied himself in painting light and graceful Arabesque 
 (ar' a taesk) decorations, in this and several others of the 
 palaces. Watteau worked with him, and inserted small 
 figures in his designs ; the experience in decoration was 
 probably valuable to him, but the real advantages he de- 
 rived from living at the Luxembourg, were his opportuni- 
 ties for study in the Rubens Gallery, and in the beautiful 
 gardens of the palace. The series of pictures which Rubens 
 painted for Marie de Medicis (ma re' deh nied'e chee), and 
 which are now in the Louvre (ic5o'vr), had a strong influence 
 upon the young Flemish painter ; and the Luxembourg gar- 
 dens are still so beautiful, that we can form some idea of 
 
6 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 what they must have been when they were " wilder than 
 those of the other royal houses." "It is here, * * *" 
 says Mr. Mollett, " and in the gardens of M. Crozat (kro za'), 
 at Montmorency (mong mo rong se'), that we must look for 
 the earliest inspiration of Watteau's idealized landscape." 
 
 He became impatient, after a time, of working for some 
 one else, and "ventured upon a genre (zhong'r) picture, 
 which represents a departure of troops, and which he 
 painted in his leisure moments. He showed it to the Sieur 
 (se ur') Audran, to ask his opinion of it. The Sieur Audran, 
 a clever man, and able to judge of a fine thing, was 
 startled by the merit he saw in this picture," but fearing 
 to lose Watteau, advised him not to waste his time in that 
 way. Watteau had made up his mind to leave him ; 
 he wanted to go to see his parents at Valenciennes ; and 
 chance led him to sell his picture for sixty livres to a cer- 
 tain Monsieiir Serois (ser ^va'), the father-in-law of Gervaint 
 (zher vang'), to whom we owe a life of Watteau. The 
 painter went off with the money, a ridiculously small sum. 
 He was always indifferent to money, and had a very low 
 idea of the value of his work ; he was an easy man to 
 cheat, and many people cheated him. Thei'e is a story that 
 he was once so delighted with a wig which a barber made 
 for him, — it seemed to him so exactly like nature, — that he 
 gave the man two beautiful little pictures for it, and con- 
 templated painting him another. Everybody wore long 
 curly wigs in those days ; this one, says Caylus, had 
 nothing to recommend it. "I can see it now," he says, 
 "in all its length and all its flatness." Probably this flat- 
 ness was exactly what pleased the naturalistic painter. 
 
 He did not stay long at Valenciennes. Even his going 
 there at this time is imcertain. He probably, like all 
 young painters who have studied at Paris, wanted to go 
 
WATTEAU. 
 
 back there. He soon afterward applied for the Prix de 
 Rome (pree deh rom), or Prize of Rome, which then and 
 now entitles the winner to a stay of several years at Rome 
 at the expense of the government. Like many a good 
 painter after him, he took the second prize, and not the 
 first ; but he did not give up the idea of going to Rome, 
 and worked on, probably for three more years, and possi- 
 bly partly at Valenciennes, — in Paris, — we do not know 
 where or how, — with that end in view. 
 
 At last he was ready to show his work to the Acad- 
 emy once more. He went there, Avithout friends or 
 backers, and put two of his pictures in a hall where the 
 members often passed. Every one admired them ; they 
 were so vigorous in color and so harmonious, that they 
 were thought to be by some old master ; and De la Fosse 
 (deh la fos'), a celebrated painter of the time, was amazed 
 to hear that they were by a young man who was trying for 
 the Prix de Rome. He sent for Watteau, who modestly 
 explained his wishes. "My friend," said De la Posse, 
 kindly, " you do not know your own talents, and you dis- 
 trust your strength ; believe me, you know more about 
 it all than we do. We think you may be an honor to our 
 Academy" (as a member of it); "take the necessary 
 steps ; we regard you as one of us." The Academy was 
 of De la Fosse's opinion ; but Watteau did not formally 
 enter it, apparently, till some years later, as his admission- 
 picture was not finished till that time. 
 
 Directly after his election, he seems to have entered 
 upon a time of great success ; he had more orders than 
 he could fill ; but the delight other people took in his 
 charming new manner of painting gave him very little 
 pleasure ; he was a man with an endless capacity for 
 being bored, and he was endlessly persecuted by con- 
 
ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 noisseurs (kon nls sc5ors') and dealers. He occasionally re- 
 venged himself by painting these people as they appeared 
 to him, but in the long run, they wearied him so that he 
 sometimes wanted to drop every thing. The beauty of his 
 work was no consolation to him either, for he was never 
 contented with it ; he was, probably, deeply dissatisfied 
 with his artistic education, and had built upon that jour- 
 ney to Italy, which he was never to take. What did 
 console him, and what he enjoyed more than any thing 
 else, was to go off, — alone or with a friend or two, — to 
 some quiet studio, where nobody could get at him, and 
 there to draw or paint from the life. He had a collec- 
 tion of dresses which he made his models wear, — he 
 never used a lay figure, — and then he would make end- 
 less drawings, without any particular object, taking the 
 simplest and most natural action he could get. Much as 
 he loved to paint, drawing had an especial attraction for 
 him ; and it is easy to believe this, when we look at his 
 astonishing drawings in the Louvre, where charm and 
 vivacity make up for the want of his magical color. He 
 used to make these drawings in a book, which, we are 
 told, he looked over for suitable figures, when he had a 
 picture to paint. He was visually guided in the arrange- 
 ment of his groups by his idea of the landscape back- 
 ground.* This is one of the most remarkable statements 
 in Watteau's biography ; for, until the present day, most 
 
 * June, niU.—'H.e lias completed the ovals— the four seasons. Oh 1 the summer- 
 like grace, the freedom and softness of the summer,— a hay-fleld such as we visited 
 to-day, but boundless, and with touches of level Italian architecture in the hot, 
 white, elusive distance, and wreaths of flowers, fairy hay-rakes and the like, sus- 
 pended from tree to tree, with that wonderful lightness which is one of the 
 charms of his work. I can understand through this, at last, what it is he enjoys, 
 what he selects hy preference from all that various world we pass our lives in. 
 
 1 am struck by the purity of the room he has refurnished for us— a sort of rrwral 
 purity; yet in the forms and colors of things. 
 
WATTEAU. 9 
 
 figure painters have made their landscapes entirely acces- 
 sory to their figures, and it is only recently that impor- 
 tant figures have been treated from a point of view of a 
 landscapist. 
 
 He was careless, we are told, about his manual prac- 
 tice, — his biographer laments his rarely taking the trouble 
 to clean his palette, and his allowing his oil-pot to get 
 full of dust and dirt. It is easy to fancy that he disliked 
 remonstrances on these subjects as much as on his busi- 
 ness affairs, and on a certain restlessness which seldom 
 allowed him to remain long in one place. When the . 
 Count de Caylus was venturing to talk to him about all 
 this, and about the duty of his assuring his position, 
 Watteau observed, after thanking him for his kindness, 
 " If worst comes to worst, can't I go to the hospital ? 
 They don't refuse anybody there." 
 
 He lived in various places far more agreeable, but did 
 not stay long in any of them. He took refuge from the 
 bores, for a time, in the beautiful house of M. Crozat, 
 near the Rue Richelieu (ru resh le uh'). One reason for his 
 going there was M. Crozat's beautiful collection of draw- 
 ings, which were of great value to him ; he was particu- 
 larly fond of the sketches of Rubens and Vandyck. He 
 used to take great pleasure in finishing, in a few brilliant 
 strokes, copies which his friends used to bring him from 
 the drawings of the Flemish masters and of the Italian 
 landscapists. These studies may have been one reason for 
 his own fondness for drawing, and his stay at M. Crozat's 
 is thought to have had an excellent effect upon his style. 
 He left the beautiful house after a time, — he seems to 
 have longed to go where nobody could find out where he 
 was, — and afterward lived in various different places. It 
 would be wrong, however, to think that he had no friends 
 
10 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 for whom he cared ; he was intimate with M. de Julienne 
 (zhu le en'), an enlightened lover of art, and spent much 
 time, apparently, with him and his family. Glersaint and 
 the Counc de Caylus represent themselves as having been 
 intimate with him, but MoUett thinks that this intimacy 
 may not have been entirely a blessing to Watteau. What 
 strikes a reader of his life very strangely, is the thought 
 that, after his early life, he seems to have had no per- 
 sonal connection with any of the gay scenes he painted, 
 and that the Painter of Fetes Galants (fat ga long'), as the 
 Academy list calls him, was one of the shyest and most 
 melancholy of men. 
 
 He went to London, as French painters of his time 
 often did, in 1719 ; he worked hard there, and was well 
 paid. But the climate was bad for him ; his health 
 seems to have always been delicate ; and he came 
 back to France about a year after, suffering from the 
 consumption, which was soon to cause his death. There 
 is some probability of his having made a visit, at Va- 
 lenciennes on his way home, and painting some portraits 
 there. But he was not to do much more painting. A 
 beautiful sign for his old friend Gersaint, and a por- 
 trait of the Venetian pastellist, Rosalba (pos al'ba) Carriera 
 (ka re a'ra), occiipied him soon after his return to Paris, 
 but not long afterward we hear of his being sick at 
 Nogent (no zhong'), just outside Paris. He had hoped to 
 go back to Valenciennes, but it was too late. Much as 
 he suffered, he worked hard painting, and teaching his 
 pupil Pater,* whom he had dismissed some time before. 
 
 ber, J724.— Through, the driving rain, a coach, rattling across the place^ 
 stops at our door ; and, in a moment, .Tean-Baptiste is with us once again ; but 
 with bitter tears in his eyes ; dismissed ! 
 
 June, 1718 [a misdate, according to our chronology] .—And he was allowed that 
 Mademoiselle Eosalba— c« bel esprit (si bel espr?')— who can discourse upon the arts 
 
WATTEAU. 11 
 
 As death approached, his scrupiilous conscience suggested 
 that he had done him injustice, and perhaps even, as 
 , Gersaint says, that he had feared him as a rival. He 
 worked hard at this reparation, — it was only for a month, 
 but Pater said he owed all he knew to that month. Those 
 few weeks came to an end, and Watteau died. He was 
 only thirty-seven years old.* 
 
 like a master, to paint his portrait— has painted hers in return 1 She holds a lapful 
 of white roses with her two hands. Rosa Alba ! himself has inscribed it ! It 
 will be engraved, to circulate and perpetuate it the better ! 
 
 July, 1732.— Our incomparable Watteau is no more I Jean Baptiste returned 
 unexpectedly. I heard his hasty footstep on the stairs. We turned together into 
 that room ; and he told Ms story there. Antony Watteau departed suddenly, in 
 the arms of M. Gersaint, on one of the late hot days of July. At the last moment 
 he had been at work upon a cruc-iflx for the good cure (ka ra') of Nogent, liking 
 little the very rude one he possessed. He died with all the sentiments of religion. 
 He has been a sick man all his life. He was always a seeker after something in 
 the world, that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all.— From Pater^s Prince 
 of Court Painters. 
 
 * Original Letters of Watteau. 
 
 To Monsieur Gersaint, Ind. on the Bridge Notre Dame, from Watteau. 
 
 Saturday. 
 Peiend Geksaint,— Tes, as you wish it, I will go to dine with Antoiue de la 
 Roque {rok) to-morrow, at your house. I mean to go to ten-o'clock Mass at St. Q-er- 
 main de L' Auxerrois {sang zher mdng' deli lo zer rwq' ) ; and I shall certainly get to 
 your house by noon, for I shall have only one visit to make before that, on our 
 friend Molinet (mw le na'), who has had some little fever for the last fortnight. 
 In the meantime, your friend, A. Watteau. 
 
 To Monsieur de Julienne, from Watteau, by express. 
 
 From Paris, the 3d of May. 
 
 Monsieur !— I return you the large first volume of the writings of Leonardo 
 da Vinci (Id o niir'db da rm'chee), and beg you at the same time to receive my sin- 
 cere thanks. As to the manuscript letters of P. Rubens. I will keep them with 
 me still longer, if that is not too disagreeable to you, for I have not yet flnislred 
 the-^i. This pain on the left side of my head has not allowed me to sleep since 
 Tuesday, and Marcotti (war lot' fi) wishes me to take a purge to-morrow morning; 
 he says this very hot weather will be of the greatest assistance to it. You will 
 please me beyond expectation, if you will come to see me before Sunday ; I will 
 show you some trifles, like the Nogent landscapes, which you are rather fond of, 
 because I made the sketches of them before Madame de Julienne, whose hands I 
 kiss very respectfully. 
 
 I am not doing what I like, because the pierre grise {pi dr' gres) and the pierre 
 de sanguine (song ghen') are very hard just now. I can not get any other. 
 
 A. Watteau. 
 
12 AKTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 To Mr. Monsieur de Julienne, from W. 
 
 Monsieur I— By the return of Marin (md rang'), who has brought me the veni- 
 son you were so kind as to send me this morning, I send you the Canvas on which 
 I have painted the head of the hoar and the head of the hlack fox, and you wiU 
 he able to send them to M. de Losmernil {Wsnier nel'), for I have done with them 
 for the present. I can not hide it from myself but [that] this great canvas pleases 
 me, and I am waiting for some return of satisfaction from you, and from Madame 
 de JuUenne, who is as extremely fond of this hunting subject as I am. G-ersaint 
 had to bring me the worthy la Serre (sdr) to enlarge the canvas on the right side, 
 where I have put the horses under the trees, for I was embarrassed there since 
 I arranged every thing which was decided upon. 
 
 I think I shall go on with that side Monday afternoon, for in the morning 
 I occupy myself with sketches, a la sanguine. I beg you not to forget me to 
 Madame de Julienne, whose hands I kiss. A. Watteatj. 
 
 To M. Mon Sieiir de Julienne. 
 
 Monsieur !— It has pleased Mon Sieur the AbbS de Noisterre (db ha' deh nwas tar') 
 to send me that picture by P. Rubens, in which there are two heads of angels, 
 and below, on the cloud, that woman's figure plunged in contemplation. Nothing 
 could have made me happier, certainly [even], if I were not persuaded that it is 
 from the friendship he feels for you and for your nephew, that Monsieur de 
 Noisterre deprived himself, in my favor, of such a rare painting as that. 
 
 Since the moment I received it, I can not rest, and my eyes are never weary 
 of turning toward the desk where I have placed it, as if upon a tabernacle I ! It 
 is hard to persuade one's self that P. Kubens has ever made any thing more finished 
 [achieved] than this picture. You will be so Idnd, Monsieur, as to send my tme 
 thanks to Monsieur I'Abbe de Noisterre, while waiting till I can address them to 
 him myself. I will take the time of the next Orleans {dr la onrf) post to write to 
 him, and to send him the picture of "The Repose of the Holy Pamily," which I 
 mean for him as a mark of gratitude. 
 
 Your very attached friend and servant, Monsieur, A. "Watteau. 
 
 Watteau had received httle early education, but he talked well, though httle, 
 read a great deal, — reading, in fact, was his chief amusement, — and had a delicate 
 appreciation of music and of intellectual things. It would not be surprising to 
 find that his love of loneliness, and his apparently melancholy temper, were 
 largely caused by the wish to lead an uninterrupted life of work. An artist's 
 happiness in his work is often unintelligible to outsiders, especially if, as with 
 "Watteau, the pain it brings him be more obvious than the pleasure. His life 
 was singularly pure ; he was high-minded, perhaps too much so to suit his time ; 
 "his address," says M. de Julienne, "was cold and embarrassed, and he had no 
 other fault." His death was a religious one ; he not only tried to repair his injus- 
 tice to Pater, but destroyed some of his work which he thought might do harm ; 
 and this although, De Caylus says, he never painted any objectionable picture,— 
 in which respect he was widely different from the painters who followed him. 
 
 Watteau painted a few portraits, some allegorical, mythological, and religious 
 pictures, and a few domestic scenes ; but his most characteristic works represented 
 dancers and singers, lovers and nymphs, in silk and rainbow fabrics, under stately 
 trees and in wide sunny landscapes. Some fine examples of his work are to be 
 seen in the Louvre, especially in the Lacaze (la kaz') collection ; but his pictures 
 are dispersed over the world. 
 
HOGARTH. 
 
 1697-1704. 
 
 WILLIAM HOaARTH (ho'garth) was born in Lon- 
 don, on the tenth of November, 1697. His father, 
 a North-country school-master, came to London to better 
 himself ; but the literary hack-work he found to do 
 brought in but little, and his "pen," says his son, "did 
 not enable him to do more than put me in the way of 
 shifting for myself." The boy loved all sorts of shows, 
 he says, — there were plenty of them to be seen in Lon- 
 don then, — he had a turn for mimicry, and a stronger 
 turn for drawing. At fifteen or sixteen he was, accord- 
 ingly, apprenticed to a silver-plate engraver, Mr. Ellis 
 Gamble. If young Hogarth had been born in the Paris 
 of that day instead of in London, he would have found 
 plenty of good masters in the art of copper-plate engrav- 
 ing, in which he was to do so much later ; but in Lon- 
 don, it is to be supposed, at least among the London 
 towns'-folk, there were no such families of engravers as 
 the Cochins (ko shang'), where even the wives and mothers 
 could use the burin (bu'rin) ; still less, any great workroom 
 like Lebas' (leh has'), where many a clever young fellow 
 came to learn his trade. At Mr. Gramble's, the tankards 
 and salvers failed to satisfj'' Hogarth, and " engraving on 
 copper," he says, "was, at twenty years of age, my utmost 
 ambition." He knew he could not draw well enough for 
 this. Art schools were but few in London, if, in fact, 
 any existed at the end of Hogarth's apprenticeship ; 
 
14 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 Kneller (nel'er) had one in his own house some years be- 
 fore, and Thornhill had another some years after. How- 
 ever, Hogarth tells us himself that he did not take much 
 advantage of whatever opportunities lie had in this direc- 
 tion. He wanted, be confesses, to find some way of learn- 
 ing which should not too much interfere with bis pleasure ; 
 drawing from life he found too mechanical, copying use- 
 less ; and he, therefore, devoted himself to that X->ractice 
 of drawing from memory which so many artists have 
 followed from Leonardo's (la o nap'doz) time to ours. In 
 this way he Avas able to justify his amusements, which 
 were probably of a rather rough description, by making 
 drawings of them afterward ; and this method of study 
 serves to explain the strange combination of spirit, fire, 
 and effect, with childish impossibility of proportion and 
 drawing, which often strikes us in his work. 
 
 In 172 0, he seems to have set up for himself as an 
 engraver of arms and shop-bills. This was the year in 
 which Watteau (vat to'), sick and melancholy, left London 
 to go home and die. Hogarth is scarcely likely to have 
 known the great Frenchman, though he may often have 
 seen him in Leicester (les'ter) Fields, where many of his 
 countrymen lived, near Cranbourn alle}", where stood Ho- 
 garth's master's shop and his own. The young designer 
 soon began to make "plates for book-sellers," several of 
 which were caricatures, — a very amusing one being the 
 "Burlesque on Kent's Altar-piece at St. Clement's."* He 
 
 * We quote Hogarth's engraved description of it : 
 
 " This Print is exactly engraved after the celehrated Altar-piece in St. 
 Clement's Church, which has been talsen down by order of the Lord Bishop of 
 London, (as 'tis thought,) to prevent Disputes and Laying of wagers among the 
 Parishioners about the Artist's meaning in it, for public Satisfaction here is a 
 pnrticular Explanation of it humbly offered to be writ under the Original, that It 
 may be put up a^ain, by which means the Parish's 60 pounds, which theywisely 
 gave for it, may not be entirely lost. 
 
HOGARTH. 15 
 
 also made some illustrations to Butler's " Hudibras " 
 (hCi'dl bras), by which, we are told, he "first became known 
 in his profession." He did not confine himself to engrav- 
 ing and illustrating, for, beside painting many portraits 
 and pictures, he had a commission from an' upholsterer 
 for a large design, on canvas, for the "Element of Earth." 
 The patron having been told that Hogarth was "an en- 
 graver and no painter," refused to pay, and Hogarth was 
 obliged to sue in order to get his money, in which he was 
 successful. One of his witnesses was Sir James Thornhill, 
 whose school Hogarth had been attending. He was an 
 artist of considerable reputation, much employed in cover- 
 ing ceilings with the pompous allegories then in fashion ; 
 Hogarth may have been employed by him as an assistant, 
 and certainly had pleased him by various attacks he had 
 made upon Thornhill's enemy, Kent, the unlucky painter of 
 the altar-piece of St. Clement's. But Hogarth did not please 
 Sir James at all by running away with his daughter Jane, 
 a beautiful girl of twenty, whom he married a year after 
 his lawsuit. This was the one romantic event of his life. 
 Soon after his marriage, he began upon the kind of 
 work for which he is most famous. He found that por- 
 trait-painting, conscientiously pursued, was too slow and 
 unprofitable a trade for a m_arried man. " I, therefore," 
 he says, " turned my thoughts to a still more novel 
 
 " 1st. 'Tis not the Pretender's Wife and Children, as our weak brethren 
 imagine " 3d. Nor St. Cecilia, as the Connoisseurs think, 
 
 But a Choir of Angels playing in Concert. 
 
 " A, an organ. | -whether right or left is yet undiscov- 
 
 " B, an Angel playing on it. | ered. 
 
 " C, the shortest Joint of the | " G-, a hand Playing on a Lute. 
 
 Arm. , "H, the other Leg is judiciously 
 
 "D, the longest Joint. omitted to make room for the Harp. 
 
 " E, an Angel tuning an Harp. j " I and K, smaller Angels, as ap- 
 
 "F, the inside of his Leg, but > pears by their Wings." 
 
16 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 mode, viz., painting and engraving modern moral sub- 
 jects, a field not broken up in any country or any age." 
 He, therefore, first painted, and afterward engraved, the 
 six designs of " The Harlot's Progress," a series which, as 
 Mr. Dobson says, " either from the austerity of the moral, 
 or the novelty of the work, gave Hogarth at once a 
 position as a genius." Lady Thornhill and Mrs. Hogarth, 
 when the paintings were finished, managed to place them 
 in Sir James' dining-room ; he eagerly asked the artist's 
 name, and, on learning it, said: "Very well; the man 
 who can furnish representations like these, can also 
 maintain a wife without a portion." A speech which was 
 the precursor of a reconciliation with the Hogarths. 
 When the subscription-book was made out for the plates, 
 more than twelve hundred names went down ; plays 
 were written on the subject, and fans and cups and 
 saucers covered with the designs. The refinement of our 
 time is shocked by the rough openness of these six 
 prints, as by many others of Hogarth's ; it is, in fact, a 
 hard task to look through them ; but the coarseness is 
 that of a man of his time, who hates the sins he draws, 
 and who really hopes that some poor soul may be helped, 
 by his prints, to avoid the pitfalls, of which London was 
 full. If London is a better place now than it was then, 
 something must be due to William Hogarth, among 
 other good men, who loved good and hated evil. 
 
 The series was pirated ; the courageous little engraver 
 could not bear to be cheated, and managed to obtain a 
 copyright act for the benefit of designers ; a feat of which 
 he was justly proud. He followed up the first series by 
 " The Rake's Progress,"* which tells the history of a spend- 
 
 * Hogarth himself christened his chief character. In the first plate, " Tom 
 Eakewell " has entered suddenly upon his inheritance ; in a jumble of leases, 
 
HOGARTH. 17 
 
 thrift dandy, from the first piate, where he enters upon 
 his inheritance, through a decline from frantic fashion, 
 through the worst company to the mad-house. This did 
 not meet, we are told, with the success of the first 
 series, but it is now much better known. 
 
 bonds, and tlie miscellaneous hoards of avarice, he is being measured for his 
 mourning. Already his attorney plunders him ; and he himself begins badly by 
 casting off the poor girl he was engaged to at Oxford. 
 
 The next plate (" The Levee ") transforms the clumsy lad to an awkward man 
 of fashion. * * * The " dealers in dark pictures " have equipped him as a con- 
 noisseur,— witness the "Judgment of Paris" on the wall. A much-bewigged 
 musician is trying over " The Eape of the Sabines " at a harpsichord ; a French 
 horn-player preludes noisily upon his instrument. He dabbles in Bridgeman'a 
 landscape gardening ; and maintains one poet, if not two. But the majority of 
 the visitors at his reception are professors of those sterner arts, which no gentleman 
 (in 1735) could be without. He must have his cocks at Newmarket, and his races 
 at Epsom, where " Silly Tom " has won a cup. * * * * He must employ the 
 cut-throat " man-of-honor " who comes recommended by "Wm. Stab." Eoistering 
 "bloods" who finish their revels by broiling a waiter or "pinking" a chairman, 
 sometimes require the aid of henchmen like the Captain, when their humorous 
 exploits fall flat on the spectators. 
 
 One of these humorous exploits is depicted in Plate HI. He is there seen 
 drunk at a tavern in Drury Lane, at three in the morning, surrounded by the 
 trophies of a street row, largely supplemented by further devastations of the 
 apartment itself. His companions are in scarcely better case. A harper is 
 twanging at the door; a beggar-girl sings the "Black Joke." 
 
 This is his zenith ; in the next scene, he enters upon his decline. He is 
 ignominiously arrested for debt in St. James street, as he is going to Court in a 
 hired chair, on Queen Caroline's birthday, also St. David's day, as is indicated 
 by a Welshman with an enormous leek in his hat. Some temporary assistance is 
 rendered him by the unfortunate girl of Plate I. ; but it is only temporary, for 
 in the plate that follows, he is repairing his fortunes by an alliance in old Mary- 
 le-bone (mar' e bun) Church, then much used for private marriages, with an elderly 
 heiress. The bride is one-eyed, and tremuloiisly exultant ; the bridegroom non- 
 chalant, and absorbed in the good-looking lady's-maid. The church, which has 
 been recently repaired, is depicted, no doubt, as a fitting frame to the bride, 
 as extremely dilapidated. The Creed has been destroyed by damp ; a crack runs 
 through the Ninth Commandment ; and the poor-box Is covered with a cobweb. 
 
 Henceforth Tom Eakewell " progresses " at a headlong rate. Plate VI. shows 
 him in a Covent Garden gaming-house. He has lost all his recently acquired 
 wealth ; and flings himself upon the ground in a paroxysm of fury and execra- 
 tion. * * * The next scene is in " The Pleet " ; the last, in " Bedlam." In the 
 one he is a poor and distracted wretch, dunned by the jailer, pestered by the pot- 
 boy, deafened by the rancorous virago, his wife, and crushed by Mr. Manager 
 Rich's letter : " S'. I have read y Play & find it will not doe." In the other, he 
 is an incurable maniac, fettered and dangerous, who tears himself with tha 
 heart-rending laugh of the inB&ne.— Hogarth, by Austin Dobscm. 
 
18 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 Hogarth went on leading the life of a young London 
 tradesman,* and engraving the lively and brutal scenes 
 of his time, treating them with more of what artists 
 call painter's than of draughtsman's qualities. The prints 
 strike us as having much beauty and richness of light 
 and shade, and much skill in the treatment of textures ; 
 they are full of life and expression, and they are by 
 no means all caricature, for there are many charming 
 types of character to be found in them. The artist had 
 made a style of his own, doing with hearty, though 
 rough sincerity, what Greuze (gruz) was to attempt later 
 in a much smoother, though less effective manner, — ex- 
 pressing, that is, a distinct moral by pictorial means. But 
 it would appear that he was not satisfied Avith his success 
 in this direction, and longed to do large historical paint- 
 ing. He, accordingly, painted the " Pool of Bethesda " 
 (bethes'da) and the "Good Samaritan," with figures seven 
 feet high, on the great staircase of Saint Bartholomew's 
 hospital. Hogarth was made a governor of the hospital 
 by way of return for this gift, but the pictures were not 
 a success, in the opinion of his time or of our own. 
 
 * The following note gives some idea of his amusements : 
 
 On an evening at the close of May, 1732, it occurred to certain boon com- 
 panions, at the Bedford Arms Tavern, in Covent Q-arden, to improvise an expedi- 
 tion to he entered on forthwith. The travelers were Hogax'th, his brother-in-law, 
 John Thornhill, Scott, the landscape painter, Tothall, a draper in Tavistock street, 
 and Forrest, an attorney. They started, " each with a shirt in his pocket," down 
 the river to Oravesend (rjravz end'). * * * * From G-ravesend they go to Rochester, 
 from Eochester, to Chatham, TJpnor, Hov, and elsewhere ; and their doings find a 
 " faithful chronicler " in Forrest, who sets them down gravely, " as a burlesque 
 on historical writers recording a series of insignificant events wholly uninteresting 
 to the reader." When, after five days' wandering, they returned, the joui-nal was 
 promptly bound, gilt, and lettered, and read out at the Bedford Arms Club for 
 the edification of the members then present. * * * * The drawings are by 
 Hogarth and Scott, the maps by ThornhiU. The title-page runs thus: "An 
 Account ] of what seem'd most Remarkable in the Five Days Perigrination | of 
 the Five Following Persons Viz'. Messieurs | Tothall, Scott, Hogarth, Thornhill 
 and Forrest. | Begun on Saturday May the 27th 1732 | and Finish'd | on the .31st 
 of the Same Month."— Zfog'OirfA, by Austin Dobson. 
 
HOGARTH. 19 
 
 Hogarth went on with his engravings ; he published 
 in 1738, the "Four Times of the Day," four street 
 scenes of London and the suburbs ; and, at tlie same time, 
 the excellent print of the " Strolling Actresses Dressing 
 in a Barn," which is considered one of his best works ; 
 and in 1740 and 1741, the two amusing plates of "The 
 Distrest Poet " and " The Enraged Musician." * He was 
 at this time, says one of his biographers, "forty-three 
 years of age, married, but childless ; busy, cheerful, the 
 foremost man among English artists, and with another 
 kind of personal celebrity entirely and exclusively his 
 own. He never became rich, but his gains were large ; 
 and he prospered, as he deserved, exceedingly." He was 
 a kind soul, and seems to have taken a real interest in 
 the establishment of the Foundling Hospital, under the 
 lead of that excellent Captain Thomas Coram, who made 
 himself poor in accomplishing the work. Hogarth was a 
 " governor and guardian " of the hospital, and helped it 
 with his money, his time, and his art. He designed its 
 arms, he painted a fine portrait of its found er,f and of 
 one of its vice-presidents ; and he it was, who, by pro- 
 posing to ornament the building with pictures, " made a 
 visit to the Foundling the most fashionable morning 
 
 * To the years 1740 and 1741 belong two delightful single plates, "The Dis- 
 trest Poet" and "The Enraged Musician." * * * * Was G-oldsmith thinking of 
 "The Distrest Poet" when, in August, 1758, he descrihed himself as "in a garret 
 writing for bread, and expecting to be dunned for a milk-score " ? 
 
 t Hogarth considered Captain Coram the best of his single portraits, and pos- 
 terity has ratified his opinion. " The portrait which I painted with most pleasure," 
 says he, " and in which I particularly wished to excel, was that of Captain Coram, 
 for the Foundling Hospital ; and if T am so wretched an artist as my enemies 
 assert, it is somewhat strange that this, which was one of the first I painted the 
 size of life, should stand the test of twenty years' competition, and be generally 
 thought the best portrait in the place, notwithstanding the first painters in the 
 kingdom exerted all their talents to vie with it." The rivals referred to were 
 Shackleton, Hudson, Eeynolds (then plain Mr.), Cotes, Ramsay (the poet's son), 
 Highmore, and Wilson. 
 
20 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 lounge of the reign of George II." Mr. Dobson thinks 
 that to this exhibition of Enghsh works we may, prob- 
 ably, trace the germ of the Eoyal Academy. 
 
 Hogarth held at this period the first of these ingen- 
 iously arranged picture-auctions, which count as events in 
 his quiet hfe ; he sold in it the paintings for his two first 
 series, the "Four Times of the Day," and the "Strolling 
 Actresses." The prices were quite insufficient ; but " the 
 method of sale was peculiar, and little calculated to 
 attract or conciliate the limited public of purchasers." 
 Hogarth, in fact, was too independent a man to be very 
 conciliatory, even in such affairs as these. 
 
 Not long after, he published his most important series, 
 the " Marriage a-la-Mode." He employed French engrav- 
 ers to work from his own excellent paintings, some of 
 which may now be seen at the National Gallery. These 
 pictures give a modern student, especially a foreigner, the 
 best and most accessible idea of Hogarth as a painter ; 
 and an admirable painter he was. His work is excellent 
 in color and execution, and its durability is such that, 
 even in the trying climate of London, it is still fresh and 
 brilliant, while many a later artist's pictures are fast 
 becoming ruined. The story is one of a mercenary and 
 loveless marriage, in which husband and wife go their 
 own ways, and both end in ruin. "This is no three- 
 volume novel of fashionable life, written by my lord's 
 footman, or my lady's maid," says Mr. Sala (sa'la), "but 
 an actual, living drama, put on the stage by a man who 
 had seen all his characters act their part in the great 
 world." "From first to last," Mr. Dobson says, "it pro- 
 gresses steadily to its catastrophe by a gradual march of 
 skillfully linked and developed incidents. It is like a 
 novel of Fielding on canvas." Fielding, in fact, was 
 
HOGARTH. 21 
 
 Hogarth's friend ; so was Garrick ; these two are those 
 of his friendships of which we can find most certain 
 traces. They exchanged good offices in print and on cop- 
 per. But Hogarth does not seem to have had Reynolds' 
 fondness for the society of men of letters, though he saw 
 a good deal both of high and low life, as an artist must 
 who paints every thing, from lords and ladies to street 
 fights. He made acquaintance, in his capacity of portrait- 
 ist, with one very remarkable lord, indeed. This was 
 Simon, Lord Lovat (itiv'at), who had been betraying both 
 sides to each other in that struggle between the Highland 
 Jacobites and the government, which the Scotch call "The 
 Forty-five." This old villa.in was on his way up to London, 
 for trial and execution, in 174:6, when he had occasion, at 
 St. Albans (al'banz), to call in a physician, who was one of 
 Hogarth's intimate friends, and who sent for the painter 
 to come down and draw Lovat's portrait. This is one of 
 Hogarth's finest and largest etchings. It is admirably 
 drawn, and full of life and character. Its success with 
 the pu.blic was immense ; a book-seller offered to give its 
 weight in gold for the copper-plate ; the rolling-press 
 could not supply impressions fast enough, and for several 
 weeks Hogarth received payment at the rate of twelve 
 pounds a day for them, though they were sold at a shil- 
 ling apiece. 
 
 Three years after, he took a very unlucky journey to 
 France, which seems to have been prolonged no farther 
 than to Calais (ka la'), and which planted still more firmly 
 in the British painter's breast his sense of the inferiority 
 of every thing continental. As he was making his obser- 
 vations of the town, he happened to make a sketch of the 
 old English gate ; he was taken into custody, on suspicion 
 of being a spy, and confined to his lodgings till the wind 
 
22 AETISTS AND SCULPTOES 
 
 changed for England. As soon as he was safe at home, 
 he made a caricature of the scene of his arrest. 
 
 Good Briton though he was, he had no objection, as 
 Mr. Dobson points out, to making his own king's troops 
 as ridiculous as he found them. The "March of the 
 Guards towards Scotland in the year 1745," commonly 
 called the "March to Finchley," is an extremely satirical 
 version of the disorderly and amusing side of the depart- 
 ure of a body of troops. Hogarth at first thought of 
 dedicating this plate to the king, George the Second ; 
 but the brave German sovereign loved his army so well 
 that he was by no means pleased with this tribute to it, 
 and Hogarth accordingly dedicated the plate to the 
 King of Prussia as an encourager of Arts and Sciences. 
 King George afterward forgave Hogarth so far as to 
 appoint him sergeant-painter. 
 
 He engraved many other plates during these years, 
 the most important series being "Industry and Idleness," 
 which, as Hogarth says, exhiljited "the conduct of two 
 fellow 'prentices, where the one, by taking good courses, 
 and pursuing points for which he was put apprentice, 
 becomes a valuable man, and an ornament to his coun- 
 try ; the other, by giving way to idleness, naturally falls 
 into poverty, and ends fatally, as is expressed in the last 
 print." This set met with a great popularity. 
 
 He could not help going back occasionally to his 
 historical attempts, which were never successful. He 
 resented their want of popularity, and retained a firm 
 confidence in his own powers. He considered himself as 
 the champion of good art and good sense against the 
 pitchy conventionalism of the old pictures which were 
 brought indiscriminately into London by the dealers ; 
 and this was probably one reason for his undertaking to 
 
HOGARTH. 23 
 
 meet the men he called "The Black Masters" on their 
 own ground.* His last attempt of this kind was the 
 
 * Here is an extract from one of Ms newspaper letters on the subject : 
 
 "There is another set of gentry more noxious to the Art than these, and 
 those are your picture- jobbers from abroad, who are always ready to raise a 
 great cry in the prints, whenever they think their craft is in danger ; and in- 
 deed it is their interest to depreciate every English work, as hurtful to their 
 trade, of continually importing ship-loads of dead Christs, Holy Families, Ma- 
 donnas, and other dismal dark subjects, neither entertaining nor ornamental ; on 
 which they scrawl the terrible cramp names of some Italian masters, and fix on 
 us poor Englishmen the character of universal dvpes. If a man, naturally a judge 
 of Painting, not bigoted to those empirics, should cast his eye on one of their 
 sham virtuoso-pieces, he would be very apt to say, ' Mr. Bubbleman, that grand 
 Venus (as you are pleased to call it) has not beauty enough for the character of 
 an English cook-maid.' Upon which the quack answers, with a confident air, 
 ' O Lord, sir, I find that you are no connoisseur ; that picture, I assure you, is 
 in Alesso Baldo^^.netto's (ales' so Ml do iien et' toz) second and best manner, boldly 
 painted, and truly sublime ; the contour gracious ; the air of the head in the high 
 Greek taste ; and a most divine idea it is.' Then spitting on an obscure place, and 
 rubbing it with a dirty handkerchief, takes a skip to the other end of the room, 
 and screams out in raptures, ' There is an amazing touch ! a man should have this 
 picture a twelvemonth in his collection before he can discover half its beauties.' 
 The gentleman (though naturally a judge of what is beautiful, yet ashamed to be 
 out of the fashion in judging for himself) with this cant is struck dumb ; gives a 
 vast sum for the picture, very modestly confesses that he is indeed quite igno- 
 rant of Painting, and bestows a frame worth fifty pounds on a frightful thing, 
 without the hard name on it not worth as many farthings." — HorjarlU^ by A. Dobson. 
 
 Another of Hogarth's flings at the eld masters was a caricature of Rem- 
 brandt {rem' brant) ; Hogarth was making two serious designs on the subject of 
 "Paul Before Pelix," and he amused himself by treating it in what he calls "the 
 ridiculous manner of Eembrandt." Intended only for a joke, it had a great sale. 
 
 Another of these caricatures represented Time seated in front of a large 
 landscape, so indistinct that we can only make out that it is a very bad one. 
 He has a tobacco-pipe in his mouth and is smoking it right at the picture, while 
 his scji;he cuts a hole through it as it stands by his side. He has by him an 
 anmense jar of oil, which is well known to turn pictures brown. The passion 
 for a look of antiquity at the cost of beauty, and for a brown appearance which 
 has no reference to Nature, is very fairly satirized in this picture ; the carica- 
 ture of Eembrandt is by no means so fair or so amusing. He did exactly what 
 Hogarth did not ; he gave his characters, who are often extremely ugly and com- 
 mon in themselves, a wonderful quality of his own, which makes his pictures 
 neither ugly nor common. We may very truly say, in looking at his etchings, 
 that this or that character shocks us ; but we shall be very obtuse if we are not 
 moved by the picture of which they form a part. He, in fact, was one of the 
 few greatest painters of the world ; Hogarth was a very good one. Rembrandt's 
 view of character was a deep one ; Hogarth's, a clear-sighted one. Hogarth's 
 prints have amused a great many people ; but I think no one has ever laughed 
 at Rembrandt's, even after seeing Hogarth's caricature of him. 
 
24 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 picture called "Sigismonda" (slg is mun'da), which brought 
 upon him an undeserved amount of ridicule and vexation. 
 He also tried to embody his theories in a book, called "The 
 Analysis of Beauty." The plain-spoken artist was sin- 
 gularly unsuccessful in saying what he meant upon the 
 subject of his profession ; a short examination of the 
 "Analysis" leaves the reader with the vaguest ideas of 
 the book ; and this experiment of his was another great 
 joy to Hogarth's enemies. He unfortunately became in- 
 volved, two years before his death, in a quarrel with 
 John Wilkes, then editor of the opposition North Briton, 
 and Churchill, the poet. Their war had its rise in poli- 
 tics, but it became violently and brutally personal on 
 both sides. Wilkes thought at one time that he had 
 killed Hogarth, — and it would not have been surprising 
 if his attacks had caused the old luan's death, as he was 
 weak and ill at the time ; but he found himself quite 
 able to repay his enemies in his own way — by drawing 
 their portraits. 
 
 A few months before he died, he prepared a "tail- 
 piece" for his works. His subject was "The End of All 
 Things," and its treatment made it his last blow at those 
 old masters whom he had been fighting for years. He 
 died in his house in Leicester Fields. He never had any 
 children ; but he left a good and loving wife. He Was 
 nearly sixty-seven years old. 
 
REYNOLDS 
 
 JOSHUA REYNOLDS (ren'tiiz) was born at the old 
 O town of Plympton East, not far from Plymouth, the 
 Devonshire town which has given its name to the Old 
 Colony in New England. His father, the Rev. Samuel Rey- 
 nolds, taught the grammar-school of Plympton. He, at 
 first, intended his son to become a physician ; but, as the 
 boy showed a decided taste for Art,* he apprenticed him, 
 at seventeen years of age, to Thomas Hudson, the fashion- 
 able London portrait-painter of the time. Joshua went 
 to live with this artist, at his house in Great Queen 
 street, and he remained with him for nearly two years.f 
 
 * His imperfect attempts at delineation were encouraged by his father, who 
 was himself fond of d ra wings, and had a small collection of anatomical and other 
 prints. The young artist's first essays were made in copying several little things 
 done by two of his elder sisters, who had likewise a turn for the art ; and he after- 
 ward (as he himself informed me) eagerly copied such prints as he found in hia 
 father's books, particularly those which were given in the translation of " Plutarch's 
 (plU'tdrks) Lives," published by Dryden. But his principal fund of imitation was 
 Jacob Cats' book of Emblems, which his great grandmother by the father's side, a 
 Dutch woman, had brought with her from Holland. When he was but eight years 
 old, he read with great avidity and pleasure, " The Jesuits' Perspective," a book 
 which happened to lie on the window-seat in his father's parlor ; and made him- 
 self so completely master of it, that he never afterward had occasion to study any 
 other treatise on that subject. He then attempted to draw the school at Plympton, 
 a building elevated on stone pillars ; and he did it so well, that his father said, 
 "Now, this exemplifies what the author of the 'Perspective' asserts in his 
 preface, that, by observing the rules laid down in his book, a man may do won- 
 ders ; for this is wonderful."— JlfoZcme. 
 
 Mr. Reynolds does not seem to have always regarded his son's attempts with 
 as much approbation as this ; for, on one of his very early drawings, a per- 
 spective view of a book-case, he wrote : "Done by Joshua out of pure idleness." 
 It is on the back of a Latin exercise. 
 
 t Soon after young Reynolds first came to London, he was sent by his master 
 to make a purchase for him at a sale of pictures. * * * * He soon heard the 
 
26 ARTISTS AND SCULPTOBS. 
 
 At this time, William Hogarth (ho' garth) was the greatest 
 painter in England, and he could have taught the young 
 student a direct and especially durable manner of painting, 
 which, unfortunately, Reynolds' fine works were often to 
 lack ; but Hogarth's portrait-painting years were over, and 
 it is probable that to the delicate fanc}^ of the young begin- 
 ner, he appeared to be only a brutally realistic satirist. 
 Such theories as Hudson advanced to his pupil were 
 probably of the most commonplace order, with nothing 
 of the reckless severity of Hogarth's attacks of the 
 " Black Masters " ; and his practice was equally common- 
 place, consisting of what Walpole (aa^oI'poI) calls "honest 
 similitudes, with fair tied wigs, blue velvet coats, and 
 white satin waistcoats." While Reynolds remained with 
 him, he had little or no opportunity for what is called 
 life study ; but we are told that Hudson caused him to 
 make careful copies from the drawings of Gruercino 
 (gwer che' no), which he did with such skill that they 
 were often mistaken for originals. He also painted 
 various portraits, sketches, and studies. His life with 
 Hudson seems to have been happy, on the whole, but, 
 owing to some trifling disagreement, they parted before 
 two years were over. 
 
 Reynolds then went back to Devonshire, where he 
 established himself as a portrait-painter in the town of 
 Devonport, then called Plymouth Dock. He was extremely 
 successful at first, and painted all the notables of the 
 neighborhood ; but his success was but a short one, and 
 
 name of " Mr. Pope, Mr. Pope," whispered from every mouth., for it was Mr. Pope 
 himself who then entered the room. Immediately every person drew hack to 
 make a passage for the distinguished poet, and all those on each side held out 
 their hands for him to touch as he passed. Eeynolds, although not in the front 
 row, put out his hand also, under the arm of the person who stood before him, 
 and Pope took hold of his hand, as he likewise did to all as he passed. 
 
REYNOLDS. 27 
 
 he always regarded this part of his life as so much time 
 thrown away ; for, as he said, he then passed about 
 three years in company from whom little improvement 
 could be got. A part of this time he passed in London, 
 where he lived on friendly terms with his old master, 
 and was introduced by him to the Artists' Club he fre- 
 quented, — an introduction which was probably a pleasure, 
 but may not have been an advantage to him. 
 
 In December, 1746, he returned home to watch by 
 the death-bed of his father, who seems to have had the 
 amiability and simplicity which his son's friend, Gold- 
 smith, was to describe later in the "Vicar (vik'ar) of 
 Wakefield." 
 
 Joshua now established himself once more in Plym- 
 outh Dock, this time with two of his sisters. Here he 
 met a painter who had a considerable influence over 
 him, named William Grandy. He was a man of dissipated 
 habits, but of artistic mind ; his father had been a pupil 
 of Vandyke (van dik'), and he himself was a much more 
 inspiring guide than Hudson. Reynolds' painting changed 
 for the better on his acquaintance with Gandy and his 
 works. 
 
 In 1749, Reynolds was invited by the famous Keppel 
 (kep'el), then a commodore, and but twenty-four years of 
 age, to go to Italy with him in his own ship, the Cen- 
 turion. They sailed in May, but Reynolds did not arrive 
 in Italy till December, as he made a long stay at Port 
 Mahon (ma hon'), where he painted all the leading men 
 on the station. He landed at Leghorn (leg horn'), and 
 thence went to Rome. 
 
 On his arrival in the Vatican (v&t'i kan), where he had 
 expected every thing from the frescoes of Raphael (raf'ael), 
 he met with a great disappointment. "They were," he 
 
28 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 says himself, " executed upon principles with which I was 
 unacquainted." It is probable, in fact, that whatever prin- 
 ciples Reynolds had managed to get from Gandy, Hudson, 
 and London in general, bore but little resemblance to those 
 of Raphael ; but the young fellow immediately decided 
 that the fault was his own, made some copies from 
 them, and eventually became a great admirer of Raphael, 
 whom he constantly mentions in his Discourses. He re- 
 mained in Rome for two years,* studying pictures, making 
 notes of his own ideas of the methods followed by the 
 masters, and apparently doing but little original work, 
 and few copies. It was in the Vatican that he caught 
 the cold which resulted in his life-long deafness, which 
 made it necessary for him to use an ear-trumpet. 
 
 In April, 1752, he left Rome, and spent four months 
 in visiting other Italian cities. As his works bear far 
 more resemblance to those of the Venetian masters than 
 to those of Raphael and Michael Angelo (mi'kael an'jalo), 
 it is to be supposed that his stay in the North of Italy 
 had quite as great an effect upon him as the time he spent 
 in Rome, though, perhaps, a more unconscious one. He 
 made some stay, we are told, in Paris ; he passed some 
 months in Devonshire, with his old friends there, and in 
 January, 1753, he once more settled in London. 
 
 * John Astley, one of Reynolds' fellow-pupila under Hudson, was also study- 
 ing at Rome; lie was at this time quite poor. "It was a usual custom," says 
 Northcote, " with the English painters in Rome * * * * to make little eycur- 
 sions together in the country. On one of those occasions, on a summer aftern-Oon, 
 Then the season was particularly hot, the whole company threw off their coats, 
 ja being an incumbrance to them, except poor Astley, who alone showed great 
 reluctance to follow this general example ; this seemed very unaccountable to 
 his companions, when some jokes, made on his singularity, at last obliged him 
 to take his coat off also. The mystery was then immediately explained ; for it 
 appeared that the hinder part of his waistcoat was made, by way of thriftiness, 
 out of one of his own pictures, and thus displayed a tremendous water-fall on 
 his back, to the great diversion of the spectators." 
 
REYNOLDS. 29 
 
 His success as a portrait-painter was at once assured ; 
 his Devonshire friend, Lord Edgcumbe (Sj'kum), brought 
 him sitters immediately, and he delighted every one by the 
 charm and grace of his new style.* The great picture of 
 his first year in London was the portrait of his old friend. 
 Lord Keppel, a fine and spirited work, which brought 
 crowds to his studio. Reynolds lived at this time in 
 Great Newport street, with his sister Fanny, a lady of so 
 nervous and perplexing a disposition that her companion- 
 ship could hardly have been soothing to her brother. 
 But he had not been in town a year before he made the 
 acquaintance of a man whose friendship was to be more 
 to him than, perhaps, any other relation of life, — the 
 great Dr. Johnson, f 
 
 We have no list of Reynolds' sitters for 1754. In 
 1755, he had one hundred and twenty. He made friends 
 on all sides, in fashionable as well as literary society ; he 
 was of a sociable disposition, and most charming and 
 gentle manners ; and " such was the serenity of his tem- 
 per, that what he did not hear, he never troubled those 
 
 * Ellis, one of the few remaining pupils of Kneller (nel'Ier), called on Rey- 
 nolds to see a picture of a Turkish hoy, which was one of his first works on his 
 return home. "Ah, Keynolds," he exclaimed, "this will never answer; why, you 
 don't paint in the least degree in the manner of Kneller ! " And on Reynolds 
 defending his picture, Ellis cried out in a rage, "Shakespeare in poetry, and 
 Kneller in painting, damme 1 " and ran out of the room. 
 
 t On Reynolds' first meeting with Johnson, he attracted his interest hy an 
 ironical observation which is often quoted and was prohahly lightly made. The 
 Misses Cotterell (Tcof trU), mutual friends of Reynolds and Johnson, were regretting 
 the death of a friend to whom they had great ohUgations. " You have, however," 
 said Reynolds, " the comfort of heing relieved from the hurden of gratitude." 
 The ladies were shocked ; hut Johnson was amused hy the directness of the 
 remark, and went home to supper with the painter. Not long after, at the house 
 of these ladies, the Duchess of Argyle and another great lady came in. Johnson, 
 who was there with Reynolds, thought that their hostesses were neglecting him 
 and his friend for their finer company ; and said, in a loud voice to Reynolds, 
 " How much do you think you and I could get in a week, if we were to work as 
 hard as we cotild?" So as to give the idea of their being very low people, 
 indeed. 
 
30 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 with whom he conversed, to repeat/' — a sacrifice which 
 every deaf person knows to be a considerable one. We 
 have no list of his sitters for 1756; 1757 was a very 
 busy year with him ; in the month of March alone, he 
 had twenty-eight sitters and one hundred and six sittings. 
 In 1758, he painted one hundred and fifty persons, — 
 among them the Duke of Cumberland. In 1759, he 
 painted the Prince of Wales, soon to be George the Third ; 
 he also painted, for the first time, his friend, David Gar- 
 rick ; the celebrated beauty, Kitty Fisher ; and a picture 
 of Venus, one of the few pictures not portraits of this 
 time. 
 
 In 1760, George the Third came to the throne. This 
 year was memorable to Reynolds for humbler reasons, — 
 he removed from Newport street to Leicester (les'ter) 
 sqiiare, which was much more fashionable then than now ; 
 and he also set up a carriage, of the sort then known as a 
 "chariot." This year, he sent some of his pictures to an 
 exhibition for the first time. The English artists had 
 united in what was called the Society of Arts, which held 
 its first exhibition in 1760, and continued exhibiting, 
 annually, till the foundation of the Royal Academy. 
 This year brought Reynolds one hundred and twenty 
 sitters. 
 
 In 1761, Reynolds exhibited an excellent portrait of 
 Lawrence Sterne, the author of " Tristram Shandy " and 
 the "Sentimental Journey." He also painted Admiral 
 Rodney this year. In 1762, he painted Fox, the Princess 
 Amelia, and Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy, as 
 well as many other portraits. This year, he went back 
 to Devonshire with Johnson for a six-weeks Ausit. At 
 Plymouth, they met the man to whom, before his acquaint- 
 ance with Johnson, Reynolds owed the most as his guide 
 
REYNOLDS. 31 
 
 in learning to use his mind, the Reverend Zachariah 
 Mudge. Both Reynolds and Johnson had a great vener- 
 ation for this good and wise man. 
 
 In 1763, Reynolds painted, among others, that Lord 
 Bute (b€it), whose name is well known to students of the 
 causes of the American Revolution. In 1764, he painted 
 the Archbishops of York and Canterbury. In this year, 
 he and Johnson founded what was called The Club. 
 Originally, it had but nine members ; they were Reynolds 
 himself, Johnson, Q-oldsmith, Burke, Langton, Beauclerk 
 (bo'klark), Nugent, Chamiers (siia me a'), and Sir John 
 Hawkins. Garrick and other members were soon ad- 
 mitted, and in the year of Reynolds' death, The Club 
 had thirty-five members. In 17 64, neither Groldsmith 
 nor Burke was famous. They both loved Reynolds, and 
 both wrote fine descriptions of his character. Besides his 
 literary and fashionable intimacies, Reynolds cultivated 
 his old Devonshire friendships, and made his countrymen 
 welcome. His table was crowded with company, and the 
 talk was excellent, though the service may not have 
 been elegant. 
 
 In 176 6, among other sitters, Reynolds painted the 
 portrait of Angelica Kauffmann (angel'Ika kowf man).* 
 
 * Yesterday, at Mr. Coluaglie's (ko Iwd' lez), I saw a print lying on the table, the 
 engraving of one of Sir Joshua's portraits. It was the picture of a lady, some 
 five or six and twenty years of age. The face is peculiar, sprightly, tender, 
 a little ohstinate. The eyes are very charming and intelligent. The features 
 are broadly marked ; there is something at once homely and dignified in theii 
 expression The little head is charmingly set upon its frame. A few pearls are 
 mixed with, the heavy loops of hair ; two great curls fall upon the sloping 
 shoulders; the slim figure is draped in light folds fastened by jeweled bands, 
 such as those people then wore. A loose scarf is tied round the waist. Being 
 cold, perhaps, sitting in Sir Joshua's great studio, the lady has partly wrapped 
 herself in a great fur cloak. The whole effect is very good, nor is it an incon- 
 venient dress to sit still and be painted in. 
 
 * * * Mr. Reynolds came forward, dressed in his velvet coat and with a 
 bag-wig; he was of middle size, and looked young for his age. He was a little 
 
82 AETISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 This artist was then twenty-four years of age ; she had 
 been educated in Italy, and had just been brought to 
 England by her friend, Lady Wentworth. Her reputation 
 was considerable there ; her pictures were not without 
 charm and grace, though painted in a falsely classical 
 taste ; her manners were fascinating, and she delighted 
 every one she met. She has been made the heroine of 
 a charming story, in which, as in the town talk of the 
 time, she is supposed to have been loved, and loved in 
 
 deaf ; but in those days, in private, lie needed no trumpet ; Ms clear eyes shone 
 with placid benevolence under their falling lids. He had scarred hps, mobile 
 and sensitive. His voice was singularly pleasant as he spoke. 
 
 " I have brought you— guess who this is that I have brought you," Lady W. 
 said, continuing to look -so charming herself, that the painter could only make 
 another low bow, and say : " You have brought me a vision of Paradise, Madam. 
 My poor place seems illuminated by such gracious apparitions. I am sorry," he 
 continued, "to have been out when you arrived. I had been sent for to a friend 
 In difficulties, who adds to mine by taking up time that might have been better 
 spent. Was not my sister here to attend upon you?" 
 
 "Miss Reynolds was not dressed," said Marchi {mar chee'), the outspoken attend- 
 ant; "she begged me to make her excuses. She was in no fit state to appear." 
 
 Mr. EeynoldB looked vexed, and immediately began to paint out the pictures. 
 Angelica looked, listened, and thrilled with admiration and reverence. Once, 
 turning round, the painter met the expressive flash of her eager eyes. How dif- 
 ferent was that language from the languid, fine-lady criticism to which he was 
 accustomed. Something told him that this was no ordinary visitor; that one 
 instant's glance between the two, said more than half a dozen commonplaces 
 exchanged. He stopped short as he was walking by Lady W. " Can this be 
 indeed Miss Kauffmann?" He looked at Angelica, curiously and kindly. 
 
 " Yes, this is Miss Kauffmann," said Lady W., with a laugh. " You have found 
 her out at last! Did I say one word too much?" she asked, smiling. He did not 
 answer directly, but went on talking to Lady A¥. for a minute, and then turned 
 to Angelica. 
 
 " Will you honor me by permitting a visit to your studio to-morrow morn- 
 ing?" said the great painter to the quivering, smiling, charming little painter in 
 her pretty, quaint dress The satin trimmings glistened in the sloping light of 
 the window, the light just caught the turn of her white throat, and the shining 
 pearls Mrs. Betty had looped in her hair. The man's kind glances seemed also to 
 shine, Angelica thought, and she blushed up with innocent pleasure. Mr. Rey- 
 nolds accompanied them ceremoniously to the door of the house. As they 
 descended the pretty, old turning staircase, Angelica saw a figure wrapped in a sort 
 of cloak appearing in a door-way ; it was that of a little, middle-aged lady, who 
 cautiously advanced toward them; then, seeing that Mr. Eeynolds was there, 
 vanished again with extraordinary celerity.— Mss Thackeray. 
 
REYNOLDS. 33 
 
 vain, by Sir Joshua. They certainly painted each other's 
 portraits, and we know but little more about it. 
 
 In 1768, Reynolds spent some time in Paris.* It was 
 in this year that the Royal Academy was founded. 
 Attempts had been made to establish an Academy as 
 early as 1711, under Kneller ; Thornhill established one 
 in his own house in 1734. After this, a life-school, under 
 Mr. Moser (mo'zer), was held, which was joined, in 173 9, 
 by Hogarth and others, and existed in 1757. The Society 
 of Arts, which exhibited for the first time in 1760, was 
 incorporated in 1765 as the Society of Artists. This 
 body quarreled with its directors and best members, and 
 these gentlemen presented a memorial to the king pray- 
 ing for the establishment of a Royal Academy. The 
 king was favorably disposed ; the projectors of the Acad- 
 emy begged for Reynolds' assistance, and on his joining 
 them, chose him their first president by acclamation. 
 The king at once gave his consent, and the Academy 
 was founded December 18, 1768. 
 
 * Can Reynolds' journey to Paris, in 1768, have had its motive in the desire 
 to collect information to assist in founding the Eoyal Academy ? It was probably 
 during this visit that Boucher (bmi/clier), then First Painter to the King, and director 
 of the Academy, in the height of his European reputation, told him he no longer 
 found it necessary to work from a model. Reynolds thought, and very wisely, 
 that Boucher's work would have been better if he had continued to employ one. 
 Boucher's studio is described as being a wonderful place, fuU of every thing which 
 could give suggestions to a colorist,— amethysts, malachites, jaspers, rock-crystals, 
 all sorts of beautiful shells, on tables of Oriental alabaster ; Chinese porcelain, 
 which the aesthetics of to-day would rave over ; tiny models, a little gallery, a little 
 coach, all sorts of pastoral implements ; and in the midst of all these splendors, 
 and of his numberless drawings, Boucher would sit by his color-box with its clever 
 drawers, his ivory-mounted maul-stick in his hand, surrounded by Ms admiring 
 friends \_Messrs. de GoncouH (deh gong koor')]. The great Chardin (sfiardang^, a much 
 better painter, was at work, too, much admired, ill-paid, living quietly away from 
 the world in the home he loved, painting sometimes still-life, sometimes quiet 
 scenes among good towns'-people like himself. Greuze (gmz) was elected to the 
 Academy, but had not yet finished his admission picture ; and beside these 
 greater men, there were endless good draughtsmen and engravers at work, whose 
 names are now hardly remembered. 
 
34 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 The names of the first Academicians are not well 
 known to oiir generation. Our compatriot, West, was 
 one of them ; Wilson, the landscape-painter, was another ; 
 Bartolozzi (bar to lot' se), another. There were two women 
 among them ; the only two who could ever write K A. 
 after their names — Angelica Kauffmann and Mary Moser. 
 Neither Romney's (rom'nlz) nor G-ainsborough's (ganz'broz) 
 name appears on the first list. Both were greater painters 
 than any Academician except the president ; but it may 
 be supposed that Romney was excluded on account of his 
 youth, while Gainsborough's omission was probably acci- 
 dental, as he exhibited as an Academician in the first 
 exhibition. Johnson was made Professor of Ancient 
 Literature in the Academy school, and Goldsmith, Pro- 
 fessor of Ancient History. The president was knighted 
 by the king early in 1769. At the opening of the Acad- 
 emy, he delivered the first of a series of fifteen discourses 
 to the students.* These discourses were much admired 
 at the time, and are still of interest to artists ; they 
 contain much sound advice, though the authorities to 
 whom Sir Joshua refers, and many of the pictures he 
 admires, are strange and unintelligible to us at present. 
 The first exhibition of the Royal Academy took place 
 this year, and Reynolds was no less conspicuous in this 
 branch of the Academy's activity than in the other — 
 that of educating young artists, f 
 
 * Sir Joshua's manner of delivering liis discourses is said to liave "been indis- 
 tinct and difficult to follow. The Earl of C one evening came up to him, and 
 
 said, as many persons do when it is too late to be of service, " Sir Joshua, you 
 read your discourse in so low a tone that I did not distinguish one word you 
 said." "That was to my advantage," replied the president, with a smile. 
 
 t Miss T'rances Keynolds was in Paris during the year 1769. She went to a 
 picture-auction, where very fine pictures hy Titian (fish'dn), Vandyke, and Eem- 
 Ibrandt (rim'hrant), were sold for almost nothing. Poor Miss Frances, who had 
 hardly any money, looked on with inward torture, for her brother, unluckily, 
 
REYNOLDS. 35 
 
 In 1770, he visited York, and his own country. In 
 1771, he received as his pupil a young man named 
 Northcote, who has left us many interesting reminis- 
 cences of him. He was eager to encourage young artists, 
 though, perhaps, not always a judicious adviser. 
 
 In 1772, Reynolds was elected alderman of his native 
 town, an honor which gave him great pleasure. In 1773, 
 he was elected mayor of the town, which was even 
 more gratifying to him.* He was this year made Doctor 
 of Civil Law at Oxford. He exhibited at the Academy 
 his historical picture of Ugolino (Ci go le' no), on which 
 he had been at work for two or three years. He painted 
 several historical pictures, and considered it a painter's 
 noblest business to produce them ; but it is by his por- 
 traits that he is loved and remembered far more than 
 by these somewhat ambitious works. 
 
 He had a great disappointment at about this time ; he 
 had formed a scheme for the decoration of St. Paul's 
 with paintings by himself and other leading artists, 
 among them West and Angelica Kauffmann. The king, 
 the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Mayor, and the 
 dean of the cathedral had all consented, when the Bishop 
 of London refused, as he said, to "suffer the doors of the 
 Metropolitan Church to be opened for the introduction 
 of Popery." 
 
 had not felt enough confidence in her judgment to give her any commissions for 
 him ; she feared she should faint away in the auction-room, but she did manage 
 to get a few fine ones for him, at a very small price. Many a foreigner has 
 experienced similar tortures at the Hotel Drouot (droo o') in Paris ; but none of 
 us have ever seen such a collection go for such prices. 
 
 * Shortly before his election as Mayor of Plympton, he accidentally met the 
 king and a part of the royal family in Richmond Gardens. The king entered into 
 conversation with him, and told him that he had been informed of the oifice 
 he was soon to be invested with. Reynolds thanked him, and in his reply said 
 the honor had given him more pleasure than any other he ever received,— and 
 then suddenly recollecting himself, he added, " except that which your Majesty 
 was graciously pleased to bestow upon me," meaning his knighthood. 
 
36 Artists Jlnd sculptors. 
 
 In 1774, his friend Q-oldsmitli died. This was a great 
 loss to Reynolds ; he did not touch his work the day he 
 heard of it, a rare thing for him. Gainsborough moved to 
 London this year, and Romney the year after ; they were 
 both much admired and much employed as portrait- 
 painters, but with little injury to Reynolds' popularity. 
 In 1775, Nathaniel Hone tried to injure him by exhibit- 
 ing a printed caricature which represented him as a 
 plagiarist, but this design was an unsuccessful one. 
 
 In 1776, Hannah More had the opportunity to see at 
 the painter's studio that picture of the "Infant Samuel" 
 which has been reproduced so many times. He also 
 exhibited this year a portrait of the beautiful Duchess of 
 Devonshire, and a fine portrait of his friend Grarrick. In 
 1777, he painted a large family picture of the Duke and 
 Duchess of Marlborough and six of their children. The 
 next year he was occupied with designs for the west 
 window of New College Chapel at Oxford. In 1779, his 
 old master, Hudson, died, and a much dearer friend, 
 David Grarrick. 
 
 In 1780, the new rooms of the Academy in Somerset 
 House were opened ; they were decorated by many of 
 the academicians, Sir Joshua among them. The exhibi- 
 tion was a great success. In 1781, he visited the Low 
 Countries, and has left some interesting notes on the 
 journey. On his return, his own pictures seemed to him 
 to want force ; and it is said that the portraits he 
 painted after that time are even more animated and 
 brilliant than his former works. He ran over again to 
 Flanders two years after, to see pictures and to buy some 
 of Rubens' (rcSo'benz) paintings which were then for sale. 
 It was at about this time that he painted his splendid 
 portrait of Mrs. Siddons as the " Tragic Muse." This was 
 
REYNOLDS. 37 
 
 exhibited in 1784; and in tliis year, Dr. Johnson died. 
 His friends had lioped to restore his failing liealtli by 
 a joiirney to Italy, which Reynolds and Boswell had 
 arranged ; but it was too late. 
 
 The Empress Catherine of Russia, who had seen a 
 portrait by Reynolds of one of her friends, ordered a his- 
 torical picture of him, and left him the choice of the 
 subject. He f)ainted " The Infant Hercules Fighting with 
 the Serpents," as an emblem of the Russian empire. He 
 was at work upon this in 1786, and did not finish it 
 till 1788. 
 
 It was in this year that he exhibited the beautiful por- 
 trait of Miss Penelope (pe nei'o pe) Boothby, the sweet little 
 girl in a mob-cap and mittens, whom we all know by the 
 reproductions, and who was one of the most lovely of the 
 many lovely children Reynolds painted. Gainsborough 
 died this year ; Reynolds had made advances toward 
 becoming his friend, but the two men did not suit each 
 other, and Gainsborough had been on bad terms with the 
 Academy, if not with its president ; on his death-bed, 
 however, he sent for Sir Joshua, and the president paid 
 him a noble tribute in the discourse upon him which he 
 delivered that year. 
 
 On the 13th of July, 1789, in the note-book which 
 contains the list of his sitters, is one of the usual entries, 
 " 10-|- for Miss "; opposite to which is written, "Pre- 
 vented, by my eye beginning to be obscured." Sir Joshua 
 never painted again ; he lost the sight of one eye in ten 
 weeks. His life after this great affliction was not as 
 dreary as might have been expected ; he never seems to 
 have become entirely blind : his friends loved him, and 
 his niece. Miss Palmer, was constantly with him. 
 
 In 1790, Sir Joshua had his only quarrel with the 
 
38 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 Academy. He had been very desirous to appoint an 
 Italian, named Boromi (boro'me), to tlie cliair of Perspec- 
 tive ; tlie majority of the academicians preferred Fuseh 
 (fu'zeli), by a vote which Reynolds considered an insult 
 to himself, and he resigned his position as president. The 
 minority protested, and, finally, the academicians made 
 something of an apology, and requested Reynolds to with- 
 draw his resignation. He did this, attended the Academy 
 assiduously, and delivered his fifteenth and last discourse 
 there in December, 1790. 
 
 In October of the next year he began to feel great 
 pain in his eyes, and wrote to resign the presidency. 
 But the academicians insisted on retaining him. During 
 December and January he sank gradually, and on the 
 2 3d of February he died. His funeral was a splendid 
 one, and he was buried in St. Paul's. 
 
CANOVA. 
 
 1757-1833. 
 
 ANTONIO CANOVA (anto'neo kano'va) was born in 
 J~\. the village of Possagno (possan'yo), among the hills 
 of Asolo (a so'lo), at the foot of the Venetian Alps, on 
 the first of November, 175 7. His father and grand- 
 father were stone-cutters, clever at their trade ; their 
 principal business was in making church ornaments. 
 His father, Pietro (pea'tro) Canova, ched when his son 
 was a child ; his mother was married again, and he 
 remained in the care of his grandfather and grandmother, 
 Pasino (pase'no) and Caterina (ka ta re'na) Canova. 
 
 Pasino taught his grandson his own trade, so that he 
 had the advantage of a very early familiarity with the 
 more mechanical parts of stone-cutting. The boy was so 
 fortunate as to attract the attention of Q-iovanni Falier 
 (zho va'ne fa'le ar), a Venetian senator, who had estates in 
 the neighborhood. The story is, that Antonio astonished 
 Falier by making a butter lion* for a great feast at his 
 
 * Cicognara {che km yd' rS) does not mention, in his biography, the well-known 
 story of the Butter Lion ; hut a little children's book, called Le Lion de Bewre (leh 
 IS on' deh bur) de Canova, was printed at Tours (toor) in 1866, which gives a very 
 pretty account of what may have happened. The Venetian senator, G-iovanni 
 Palier, who lived near Canova's native village of Possagno, was, according to this 
 account, about to give a great feast. The cook had forgotten to provide a proper 
 center-piece for the table ; it was to have been the Lion of Saint Mark, whose 
 festival was celebrated on that day. Antonio Canova, then only a boy with 
 very little instruction, oflEered to make one, and was shut up for the purpose, 
 with some fresh butter and a little flour. 
 
 " Soon the guests of (3-iovanni Falier arrived. When he had brought them 
 into the banqueting-hall, they all admired the fine arrangement of the repast; 
 but what struck them especially, was a magnificent lion with wings displayed, 
 raised on a column in the center of the table, and imitating, on a small scale, 
 with a perfect regularity of proportions, the symboUoal lion on, the Piazza di San 
 Marco (pSdi'sd di sun mar' ko) oi Venice." 
 
40 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 castle. However Falier's interest was excited, it showed 
 itself in hearty kindness ; he placed Antonio with a 
 Venetian sculptor named Torretto (torrgt'to), and assisted 
 him during the first part of his life in Venice, where he 
 soon went. 
 
 He did not learn a great deal from Torretto, but he 
 did learn from a fine gallery of casts from the antique, 
 to which he had access ; he also studied in the Venetian 
 Academy, where, as his Italian biographer says, "the 
 new lights which were kindling had not yet penetrated." 
 These new lights were the beginnings of the so-called 
 classical revival of art. Winckelmann * (^A7ink' el man) had 
 produced, by his ardent enthusiasm for antiquity, a great 
 change in the public taste. The modern Italian art was 
 bad ; and though there had been plenty of artists and 
 
 Palier is so delighted with the hoy's cleverness that ho immediately takes 
 charge of his education. 
 
 * Johann Joachim (yo Jian' yo'd km) Winckelmann was hoiTi in Brandenhurg 
 {bran' den boorgh), 1717. His father was a poor tradesman; his son suffered much 
 in his youth. He became the assistant of his old hUnd school-master, and hungrily 
 read what few books he could get; the old man wished him to study theology, 
 but he fell in love with the Greek classics ; the past seemed far more beautiful 
 and real to him than the present, and he lived in Greece while he went up and 
 down in Brandenburg. He entered the University of Halle (hal'leh) to studj 
 theology, and instead "became the enthusiastic translator of Herodotus." His 
 professors did not satisfy him. After a time he became a school-master, biTt he 
 did not love the business; he took time for reading from his sleep, gave up all 
 literature but that of the arts, and was much influenced by the writings of Vol- 
 taire (vol ttr'). He sought and found a situation in a fine library, where he had 
 easy access to the collection of antiques at Dresden, which influenced him far 
 more. He met the papal nuncio, who held out hopes of a home in Rome, if he 
 would but become a Roman Catholic. Religious dogmas, called Christian, were 
 very little to Winckelmann ; yet it was not without a struggle that he con- 
 sented to change Ms religion. Soon after, he went to Rome, where he made 
 many friendships and lived happily, keeping constantly in view his " History of 
 Ancient Art," which appeared in 1764. In 1768, he was making a visit in Ger- 
 many, when he was seized with homesickness for Rome, and hastened back. 
 He stopped for a few days at Trieste (OT ist'), where he was robbed and murdered 
 by a fellow-traveler. His influence upon Goethe (gA'teh) was great, though the 
 two never met. The reader is referred to the article on Winckelmann in Pater's 
 " Renaissance " {riih m songs'), from which the above account is condensed. 
 
C A N O V A . 41 
 
 antiquaries who talked about the classical remains, and 
 even had possessed deep learning about them, '' no one 
 had," as Madame de Stael (ma dam' deh stal) says, " no 
 one had, if I may say so, made himself a pagan for the 
 purpose of penetrating antiquity." This Winckelmann 
 had done, — not that he offered incense to Apollo or 
 flowers to Venus ; but he had carried all his thoughts and 
 feelings back to what seemed to him a clearer and purer 
 day. He was one of the causes, — not the only cause,— 
 of a great revolution in public taste, both literary and 
 artistic. It had very strange results, which would prob- 
 ably have amazed its forerunner. It worked both good 
 and evil, as such changes always do. On the art of 
 sculpture, its effects had, at least, the advantage of remov- 
 ing something of the false and turgid taste of the fol- 
 lowers of Bernini (ber ne ' ne), their swelling draperies 
 and empty gesticulations. Men who try to copy the 
 antique may fail in originality, but are not likely to exag- 
 gerate or to commit shocking faults of taste. 
 
 When Canova entered the Venetian Academy he was 
 dissatisfied with the doctrines he was taught there, and 
 left it at the end of about a year, to try to find some 
 better way for himself, more like the way followed by 
 the ancients. He carved several figures in marble and 
 soft stone; an Orpheus (or' feus), a Eurydice (u rid'i se), a 
 group of Daedalus (ded'alus) and Icarus (ik'a rus), and 
 two statues of Esculapius (es ku la'pT us). His patron, 
 Falier, continued to interest himself in him, and, being 
 on intimate terms with the Venetian ambassador to the 
 Pope, the Cavaliere Zulian (kavalea'ra dsc5ol'ean), he 
 sent Antonio to Rome. He also obtained a small pension 
 for him from his government. 
 
 Zulian, who had received him with great friendliness 
 
42 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 in his own house, had him make a cast of his group of 
 " Daedalus and Icarus," and showed it to a number of his 
 artistic friends. They were aU silent for some time, to 
 the great embarrassment of the poor young artist ; finally, 
 Gawain (ga'^A7ln) Hamilton, a Scotch artist and connois- 
 seur (kon nis ser') living at Rome, addressed him with 
 a real and affectionate interest, and begged him to unite 
 something of the antique ideal to the fine and speaking 
 imitation of Nature which he had made. 
 
 Canova, accordingly, gave himself up to the study of 
 the antique ; but, says his biographer, without giving up 
 the constant study of Nature. His benefactor, Zulian, 
 after a time, gave him a fine piece of marble, to try the 
 result of his studies upon. He chose for his subject, 
 "Theseus (the'seus) and the Minotaur (ixiin'o tar)." It 
 was made in the palace of the ambassador himself. 
 When it was finished, Zulian again assembled his artistic 
 and learned friends, and showed them the cast of the 
 head of the Theseus, without telling them what it was. 
 They disagreed about its significance ; but they all agreed 
 that it was a piece of Greek sculpture, and the more 
 learned ones were sure they had seen it, they could not 
 fecoUect where. Then Zulian showed them the complete 
 group ; they were much delighted with it, and, says 
 Cicognara, envy, as well as the Minotaur, were seen to 
 be discomfited. The young artist was not yet twenty-five. 
 
 Before he had received his pension from Venice for 
 three years, he received an order for the tomb of 
 Clement XIV. At the same time he modeled a statue 
 of Psyche (si' ke) as a young girl ; he modeled bass- 
 reliefs as a recreation from heavier Avork.* More and 
 
 * These early successes appear to have brought him that patent of nobility 
 from his old neighbors at Asolo, to which he refers in the following letter to 
 G-iuseppe (Joo sip' pa), son of his old friend, Q-iovannl Paller : 
 
OANOVA. 43 
 
 more orders came in, — groups of Cupid and Psyche, 
 Venus and Adonis (ado'nls), a Hebe (he' be), a Penitent 
 Magdalene (mag da len'), monuments for distinguished 
 men. In twenty years, says Cicognara, the sculptor had 
 done more work than a laborious artist usually accom- 
 plishes in a long life. This is the more remarkable, he 
 goes on to say, because at that time the sculptor's art 
 was a much slower one than it is at present ; the 
 operation called pointing, which enables a mechanical 
 copy to be made from a clay or plaster statue, was 
 invented by Canova ; before that time, the scidptor was 
 often obliged to do the rough work on his own statue. 
 And while Canova was young and poor, he injured him- 
 self very much by over-exerting himself at this heavy 
 work ; in fact, he used the instrument called the trepan 
 (tre pan') SO much, leaning against it as he worked, 
 that he made a depression in his chest, which predis- 
 posed him to the illness which was to end his life. 
 
 The Senator Rezzonico (ret so ne'ko) took him away 
 from his over-work for a journey through Q-ermany, in 
 1799. This was of great benefit to him, and probably 
 made him more capable of accomplishing the labors of 
 his later life.* 
 
 " Here the Asolo people have been putting the dog-collar (the patent of nobility) 
 Dn the ]?aliers' dog. Will he be worth any more on this account ? Why, yes ; for 
 a dog-collar is always worth something. In the inclosed letter, which I beg your 
 Excellency to forward, after reading, you will find another for the noble Prorve- 
 ditori and Council of Asolo. I hope that your Excellency will be pleased with what 
 I have said, and if you are not, you will certainly excuse me, considering how 
 unfit for such things a man is who passes nearly all his life among statues, who 
 never require or pay compliments. I beg you to present my humble respects and 
 reverence to your most excellent parents and brothers, and never to forget that 
 I am, with and without the dog-collar, with the most tender, respectful attachment, 
 
 "Rome, June, 1789. ." 
 
 He became, much later, Marquis of Ischia (!.«' J5 it). 
 
 * Before this time, he had been asked to go to Russia, to make a statue of 
 the Empress Catherine. He declined this invitation, and explains his reasons in 
 a letter to G-iuseppe Ealier ; 
 
44 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 From 1792 to 1799, Canova took pleasure in paint- 
 ing ; he executed twenty-two pictures, we are told, great 
 and small. One was for his own village church at Pos- 
 sagno ; he retouched it in 1 8 2 1 , but this was the only paint- 
 ing he did in the new century. His work seems to have 
 been that of a colorist ; he remembered affectionately 
 the great Venetian masters, and sometimes deceived his 
 Roman friends by some fine and simple head which they 
 believed to be by an old Venetian. He was a man of 
 regular and uniform habits. He always rose early, and 
 began the day by drawing or modeling, afterward going 
 to work iipon the marble. His food was simple ; he 
 was accustomed to take some little rest after eating, 
 and his friends were especially careful, at his meals, not 
 to introduce grave or artistic topics, so easy was it to 
 affect his nerves. He did not go much into society, 
 doing so only early in the evening ; he had extremely 
 polite manners, without affectation. 
 
 He did not like to receive pupils in his studio ; this 
 seems to have been on account of his extreme delicacy 
 of feeling, for he used to say that any thing good in 
 their Works would very likely be attributed to him, so 
 that the artists would not have the credit they deserved 
 for their own work. Whenever he noticed a remarkably 
 
 "You certainly must have believed that I was married, and had a family, if 
 you thought I was mistaken in declining the invitation which was sent me to the 
 Court of Kussia. In my opinion, my having been invited there was as much of 
 an honor as if I had been there. I do not see how I need to better my condition, 
 whUe I do not wish to live with more luxury than I do, or to work less, free and 
 far from the endless intrigues which being at a Court would bring upon me. 
 Oh Heavens ! perhaps your Excellency does not know what a Court is ? What 
 sort of a place is it for any one who wishes to live to himself, and do what he 
 likes, and hear the truth ? I am a poor man, but I need little, so I do not fear 
 finding myself unprepared for whatever may happen to me. As for a wife, I hope 
 not to marry one, or at least, if I had to do it, I would have one old enough to 
 be able to live quietly always and attend to my art, which I love so much, and 
 which exacts the whole of a man, without the loss of a moment." 
 
CANOVA. 45 
 
 clever young artist, or if one of the workmen he em- 
 ployed showed unusual ability, he would advise him to 
 take a studio of his own, and then procure him work 
 and commissions, sometimes at his own expense. "At 
 any moment, when he was requested, he used to put 
 down his own work to look at the studies of whatever 
 artist asked him for advice ; and he did it with so much 
 discretion, that no one's pride was ever humiliated b}^ 
 it, but, on the contrary, aiways received impulse and 
 encouragement." 
 
 He took great pains in cultivating his mind ; he read, 
 and more frequently caused to be read to him while he 
 worked, all the best Italian, Greek, and Latin classics, 
 more particularly Tacitus (tas' I tus) and Polybius (po llb'- 
 1 us).* His style in writing was unaffected and good ; his 
 letters gained in elegance as his taste grew more refined. 
 
 His mind worked rapidly and easily in composing his 
 works. He would first make a few lines on paper, then 
 various little sketches in chalk or wax, till he had satis- 
 
 * The following letter to the Abate Cesarotti {dbii'tu chdsarWe)^ shows liis 
 interest in reading : 
 
 "What will you say to my troubling you with this letter? But you will 
 pardon me, I am sure, when you know that it is my heart which really forces 
 me to do it, in spite of the repugnance I have to writing. Your Homer, and your 
 Notes, call from me the expression of the warmest gratitude ; your poems capti- 
 vate me with their sublimity; your Notes confirm me more and more in braving 
 prejudices, and in only esteeming those things which really and reasonably are 
 estimable. You will tell me that it is impossible that a man who has to work all 
 day like a brute, should be able to read your works. It is true that I do work all 
 day like a brute, but it is true, on the other hand, that almost all day I listen to 
 reading, and in that way I have now heard for the third time all the eight 
 volumes on Homer, which are to me, as it were, a Sacrament of Confirmation 
 against prejudice. You know very well, that when great men have ideas which 
 further those of a little man, the little man takes courage. I do not wish to 
 waste your precious moments longer ; let it suffice me to say, that I hope you 
 will believe that my soul can not help being near you often, or making you the 
 subject of its discourse as often as possible. And full of real admiration and 
 respect, I do myself the honor of calling myself [Canova.] 
 
 " Rome, Feb. 8th, 1794." 
 
46 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 fied himself with his conception, and finally a large model. 
 He always took criticism good-naturedly ; when friends 
 wanted him to reply to some attacks in a Q-erman 
 pamphlet, he told them that it was, indeed, his part to 
 reply, but only by doing better ¥rork with his sculj^tor's 
 tools. He listened with attention to all sorts of remarks 
 on his work, even from stupid people ; and sometimes 
 he even retouched his statues because he had found 
 something good in such corrections. He was often 
 amused when his injudicious admirers found all sorts of 
 ingenious and occult meanings in his works ; he used to 
 smile, and say that he had never dreamed of what they 
 had attributed to him. 
 
 "The sympathies of love," says Cicognara, "were felt 
 by him more than once, with all the intensity of which 
 a noble soul is capable ; he himself admitted that he had 
 felt the force of that sensation to an extraordinary extent 
 when he was only five years old, of which he had the 
 clearest recollection." He did think, at two different 
 times,* of marrjdng, presumably at a more advanced age ; 
 but he feared that it might be a drawback to his pursuit 
 of art. He led a very pure life, and up to the end of his 
 life he was a devoted and tender friend. 
 
 Fortunately for him, the unsettled times in which he 
 
 * The following extract from a letter of Canova's gives some account of the 
 lady whom he thought of marrying on the second of these occasions. " This 
 Spanish lady," says Cicognara, "to an infinite c^iltivation of mind united a golden 
 character." 
 
 " * * * * And I envy you the dear companionship of Alcssandri (<'i les siin' 
 drd), of Niccolini (nik o le' ne), and especially of Minette (mdnet'ta) [the lady in 
 question]. Oh, why did I not know it in time, for I would have hegged you to 
 study and penetrate into the most intimate recesses of that spirit of Paradise ! 
 Tou, who are so passionately attached to beautiful and virtuoiis creatures, would 
 have been touched and astonished at obtaining an inner knowledge of the virtues 
 and the adorable qualities of the heart, of that dearest friend of ours. I swear 
 to you, that T have not found her equal * * * * there is not in the world a 
 matron who surpasses her iu really angelic candor and goodness." 
 
CANOVA. 47 
 
 lived, instead of interrupting liis work, gave liim furtlier 
 opportunities of distinguisliing himself. He went to Paris 
 in 1802, where he modeled the colossal statue of N'apo- 
 leon ; he went there again in 1810, to model a statue 
 of Maria Louisa (ma re' a lc5oe'sa), in the character of 
 "Concord." Beside these two journeys, he made one to 
 Vienna, where he made a beautiful monument to the 
 Archduchess Maria Christina (krlste'na). His work was 
 so admired at the Austrian court that he was induced 
 to send the Emperor his group of "Theseus and the 
 Minotaur." During his stay at Paris, he had many con- 
 versations with Napoleon, which have been reported, a.nd 
 where he is supposed to have shown neither fear nor 
 favor for the great Emperor. 
 
 He had a particular affection for delicate feminine 
 beauty, and used to be called the Sculptor of Venus and 
 the Grraces ; but he distinguished himself also in the 
 male figure, and the various tombs he designed, with 
 their figures of mourners, certainly have great dignity 
 and beauty. We may mention particularly the monument 
 of Cardinal Stuart, the last of his unfortunate family. 
 Canova was a skillful anatomist, but never paraded his 
 knowledge. He is frequently accused of an affectation 
 of softness, and to a modern observer the accusation 
 appears to have some justice ; but we must remember 
 that his subjects were frequently of too light and gay a 
 class for a very solemn mode of rendering. He is also 
 reproached for over-finish of surface, and for using 
 mechanical means to bring this about ; he was, in fact, 
 extremely particular about texture, but seldom used, 
 says his biographer, any other artifice than washing his 
 statues with acqua di rota (ak wa' de ro' ta), after polish- 
 ing them with the utmost care. 
 
48 AETISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 He was exceedingly benevolent, and gave away what 
 he gamed, in sums regularly assigned to the foundation 
 of the Roman Academy of Archaeology, to keeping up 
 monthly pensions for art students, to annual prizes for 
 the more clever among them, to the Academy of St. 
 Luke for buying artistic books, to the Academy de' Lincei 
 (len'sae) to assist it in its scarcity of resources, and to 
 an annual gift to poor artists, or to their families. All 
 these good deeds were done with the greatest modesty, 
 but with so much good-will that it was sometimes difficult 
 to restrain him from doing unwise things. 
 
 In 1811, a very hard year for art in Rome, the Pope 
 being away and few strangers there, there was much 
 suffering among the artists ; Canova was of the greatest 
 assistance to the young art-students, whose condition he 
 considered especially pitiable ; and he had his works 
 drawn and engraved, not for his own profit, but so as to 
 give work to a number of artists. 
 
 His last journey to Paris was a special mission from 
 the Pope ; he was sent to ask the assembled powers to 
 give back the works of art which Napoleon had carried 
 off from Rome. He negotiated with great courage and 
 success, and his return was a real triuinph.* This year, 
 
 * This extract from a letter, written in Paris, gives some view of tlie diillcnl- 
 ties of his mission : 
 
 "If you could know the hundredth part of the annoyances and fatigues I 
 have suffered these last days, since I first arrived in Paris, you would have con- 
 sidered such a delay [in writing] excusable. I will not be long in telling you the 
 history of my mission ; I wiU only tell you that it has been successful. And it 
 really would have been scandalous, if all of them had got back their objects of 
 art, and Rome alone had been excluded from such a number. So I am author- 
 ized by the Allied Powers to take back the greater and better part of our chef 
 Wmuvres (sha deuvr') of painting and sculpture. I say the greater and better part, 
 because I am obliged to leave some of them here, making my own selection, 
 however. I have the comfort of telling you, that our Venetian pictures have been 
 got back, and are already being packed up for Italy. The famous Supper of 
 Paolo {pa 6' 10) [Veronese] remains here. You will hear it said that H. M. the 
 
CANOVA. 49 
 
 he planned making at his own expense a colossal statue 
 of Religion, as a memorial of the Pope's return to Rome. 
 It was to be his gift to the Church he loved. But, unfort- 
 unately, the design met with obstacles; no place was 
 assigned for it ; and, after wearisome delays, it was exe- 
 cuted for an English lord. 
 
 He was anxious to spend for some religious purpose 
 the money he had meant for this gift ; and he decided 
 to build a great church in his native town, which was to 
 be embellished with his works, and might enrich the 
 inhabitants by attracting strangers there. He laid the 
 first stone in 1819, on the 11th of July. But the build- 
 ing cost eight times as much as his statue would have 
 cost ; so that he found himself obliged to constantly 
 undertake new labors in order to meet the expenses it 
 gave him. 
 
 His work is thought to have improved at this period 
 of his life, through his seeing the Elgin marbles in the 
 British Museum. 
 
 Emperor of Austria wanted to know my opinion on this point, to conflrm the 
 •reasons which were brought forward for its being left here, and making an 
 exchange ; which were, in substance, that it was necessary to cut the canvas in 
 pieces, as it could not otherwise be moved without certain ruin. I had nothing 
 to do vrtth it, for the thing was settled before I was told about it. The four 
 Horses [from St. Mark's] have been taken off the Arch [of Triumph], and are going 
 back to Venice. The Emperor told me, that he wished to have them placed where 
 I thought best ; and I replied, that they would go very well beside the entrance 
 of the Ducal Palace, two on each side, opposite San Giorgio (sd?i jor'jo). * * * * 
 The chef d^cmivres of sculpture are in my hands, in an Austrian barrack, and are 
 being packed with the best pictures which I could recover belonging to Rome 
 and to the State, without having a precise list, which was necessary, and which 
 I am expecting from Eome every moment. If any thing is left behind or lost, the 
 fault is not mine ; it is the fault of the person who sent me without a hope of suc- 
 cess, and without a single note of what was to be reclaimed. However, the best 
 part has been taken [back] ; and all by force of the Prussian, Austrian, and English 
 bayonets ; for these three powers, particularly, are protecting us, and England 
 pays the expenses of transporting them from Paris to Eome. A fine thing 1 " 
 
 [This letter, and those which precede it, are translated from a collection of 
 Canova's correspondence, published with his memoir, by the CavaUere Oicognara, 
 at Venice, 1823. The authority for our biography is mainly this memoir.] 
 
50 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 In 1821, after having inspected the progress of the 
 Possagno churcli, and made some modifications in its 
 design, he went back to Rome and modeled his group, 
 called the "Pieta" (pea'ta), or "Virgin Weeping over the 
 Dead Saviour." This was one of his finest works. He 
 went to Naples in 1822, to see about the casting of a 
 colossal statue, and in September he went again to 
 Possagno. He traveled, as was his custom, too fast ; he 
 arrived a sick man, but did not go to bed, and hoped 
 that the climate and the Recoaro (ra ko a' ro) water would 
 do him good ; he went on to Venice, and became ex- 
 tremely ill. He received with great calmness the doctor's 
 announcement that he must put his affairs in order, and 
 spoke with the greatest sweetness to the friends who sur- 
 rounded him. They were offering some restoratives, — 
 " Grive me them," he said, " that so I may prolong the 
 pleasure of staying with you." His last words, repeated 
 many times, were "Pair and pure spirit"; after which his 
 face, which had been ra.diant for some time, astonished 
 his friends by its expression. He died without a struggle, 
 at sixty-five years of age. 
 
THORWALDSBN. 
 
 1770-1844. 
 
 BERTEL* THORWALDSEN (ber teJ' tor'val zen) was 
 born in Copenhagen (ko pen ha' gen), N"ovember 19, 
 1770. His father, Grottskalk (gots'kaik) Thorwaldsen, was 
 a poor wood-carver ; he made figure-lieads for merchant 
 vessels. Bertel used to help his father at his trade,! and 
 early showed an unusual talent for sculpture. His father 
 sent him, at eleven years of age, to the free school of 
 the Royal Academy of Fine Arts ; and he made so much 
 
 * Bertel is said hy M. Plon {mo seet-' plong) to be the Danish form of Bartholo- 
 mew. The Italians changed it to Alberto. Thorwaldsen was never very par- 
 ticular about orthography, and used to sign himself so, and all Ms acquaintances 
 in Rome knew him by this name. 
 
 t See Andersen's charming account of Bertel in his story of "What the 
 Moon Saw." The child was very pretty and attractive. "The Eling's New 
 Market " was the favorite playing ground for the town boys. Near the eques- 
 trian statue a sentry-box was placed, which was only occupied during the night. 
 This proved an Immense source of attraction to the boys. The game con- 
 sisted in one of their number getting inside, while the others spun it round as 
 fast as possible, and though the guard were constantly on the alert, and were 
 kept pretty well employed the most of the day in chasing the boys away,— which 
 of course enhanced their fun in no small degree,— somehow or other they always 
 managed to escape, shouting and howling as they ran off, and returning the 
 moment the soldiers were out of sight to the forbidden spot. One day it hap- 
 pened to be Bertel's turn to be swung round ; when the soldiers approached as 
 usual, the other boys scampered off, leaving him still spinning round and unable 
 to get out. He was pounced on by the guard and led off in triumph, a prisoner, 
 to the guard-house. — Thide's Life of Thorwaldsen. 
 
 Another time his mischievous companions, surprising him in contemplation 
 before the statue, which represents Christian V. trampling under the feet of his 
 horse a monster called Envy, hoisted Bertel up on the horse, partly by force and 
 partly with the boy's consent. Off they ran and left the poor, bewildered child, 
 who kept as still as the royal cavalier himself ; and a comical spectacle it must 
 have been to see him, in his red cotton cap, mounted in such illustrious company. 
 But the gens d'armes {zhon (Pdrm'), passing that way, hastened to carry their little 
 victim off to the police station.— Pfc>/i's Life of Thorwaldsen, translated by I. M. Luyster. 
 
52 ARTISTS AND SCULPTOES. 
 
 progress in two years that he was soon able to be of 
 great use to Q-ottskalk in his business. After six years 
 at the Charlottenburg (shari6t'ten boorgh) school, he took 
 his first prize — the small silver medal. Great as were his 
 artistic abilities, he was considered as a stupid boy in 
 other respects, and probably was so. It was only as an 
 artist that he grew quickly. 
 
 His prize made him work harder than ever. Two 
 years later, in 1789, he gained the large silver medal, 
 for a bass-relief called "Love in Repose." His father now 
 concluded that his son had learned enough to devote him- 
 self to his own profession, which was what he had always 
 intended him to do. But the painter, Abildgaard (a' blld- 
 gord), begged his father to let him continue his studies ; 
 and it was finally agreed that Bertel's time should be 
 divided into two portions — one of work with his father, the 
 other of serious study. Bertel himself appears to have 
 made no objections to his father's plans, but it is probable 
 that he was much better pleased with the final arrange- 
 ment. Several works remain which he and his father 
 executed together at this time. He was also beginning to 
 make sketches in relief and to carve figures in stone. 
 He usually worked from the designs of other artists. 
 
 The next school-honor for which he competed was the 
 small gold naedal. The competition was much dreaded, 
 and while Thorwaldsen was going through the prelimi- 
 nary part of it, the competition for composition, he was 
 so discouraged that he left his workroom, came down 
 stairs, and was just about to leave the building. But he 
 met one of his friends among the professors, who per- 
 suaded him to go back to his work ; he made a beautiful 
 sketch in four hours, and in the course of two months 
 gained the medal. Two years later, he gained the great 
 
^HORWALDSEN. 5S 
 
 gold medal, which was to allow him a pension for three 
 years abroad. He was not able to take advantage of it 
 at once, and remained for some time in Copenhagen. 
 The Academy gave him some assistance, and he found 
 work to do in illustrating, teaching drawing and modeling, 
 drawing portraits, and making bass-reliefs. 
 
 At last, on the 20th of May, 1796, Thorwaldsen set 
 sail for Naples on the Thetis. The captain, Herr Fisher, 
 was kind to the young fellow during his long voyage, 
 but considered him very lazy, as he cared to do nothing 
 but sleep, eat, and play with his big dog, Hector, refusing 
 the offers he received of being taught Italian. "But," 
 says Captain Fisher, "everybody likes him because he is 
 such a good fellow."* He left the frigate at Malta and 
 went to Naples, where he fell ill. When he had some- 
 what recovered, he went to Rome, where he arrived on 
 the 8th of March, 179 7. 
 
 In after life, he always considered this date a period 
 of the greatest importance. He did not, however, become 
 all at once the man he was to be. He was so much 
 impressed by the great works he saw that he remained 
 for some time in a sort of stupor. 
 
 * From Malta he writes : " I jump on shore, the captain shows me my 
 lodgings, which will do very well. * * * I go to bed, and at last to sleep; my 
 host comes to wake me— me and Hector, my dog, who embraces me affectionately. 
 I leave the house to go on board the Spemorara (sjyemdra'ru), then back to my 
 lodgings ; on the way. Hector plays his pranks, chases the goats, which jump and 
 caper. He trips up a little girl carrying a baby, but does no harm. Then he 
 knocks over a little boy ; everybody laughs." 
 
 The captain of the Thetis did not approve of the idleness of his young charge. 
 He writes his wife from Malta: "Thorwaldsen is still here, but looking out at 
 last for an opportunity to go to Rome. God knows what will become of him. 
 He is so lazy he has no wish to write himself, and while on board he would not 
 learn a word of Italian, though the chaplain and I both offered to teach him. 
 He has a big dog whom he has christened Hector. He sleeps late in the morn- 
 ing, and thinks only about his own comforts and eating. But everybody likes 
 him because he is such a good fellow."— Pton's Life of Thorwaldsen. 
 
54 AETISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 He had received letters to Zoega * (zo a' ga), a country- 
 man of his, who was a learned archaeologist. He became 
 a sincere friend to the young man. He was shocked by 
 his utter ignorance of every thing beside art ; but he was 
 not deterred from being of great use to Bertel in giving 
 him frank criticism and judicious encouragement. 
 
 At last, as Thorwaldsen said, "the snow that he had 
 in his eyes began to melt away." He made a great num- 
 ber of copies from the antique, and did some original 
 work. He found difficulty in living at Rome, as his 
 pension was a very small one. The political difficulties 
 between France and the Pope, from 179 7 to the Concor- 
 dat in 1801, made it difficult for him to earn any thing. 
 Besides, he suffered frequently from malarial fever, which 
 recurred all his life. 
 
 After staying nearly three years in Rome, he began 
 the first model for his first important statue, the " Jason " 
 (ja'son). It did not excite much interest, and he finally 
 destroyed the model and began again. His pension was 
 renewed by the Academy for three more years ; a 
 Danish lady advanced the money to cast his statue in 
 plaster, and as soon as it was seen it made a great 
 sensation, though the name of the artist was scarcely 
 
 * Bishop Munter had furnished him with lettei's to the learned archseologist, 
 Zoega, who soon became attached to the yonng artist, without heing hlind to what 
 was wanting in him. He writes from G-enzano (zhon zu' nu) : "Our countryman, 
 Thorwaldsen, has come to pass a week with us and see the curiosities of the neigh- 
 borhood. He is an excellent artist, with a great deal of taste and sentiment, but 
 ignorant of every thing outside of art. By the bye, the Academy shows very little 
 judgment in sending such ignorant young fellows to Italy, where they must 
 necessarily lose a great deal of time in acquiring that knowledge, without which 
 they are unable to profit by their stay here, and which could have been acquired 
 more easily and rapidly before coming. Without knowing a word of Italian or 
 French, without the slightest acquaintance with history and mythology, how is 
 it possible for an artist to properly pursue his studies here ? I do not require him 
 to be learned, but he should have some faint idea of the names and meanings of 
 the things he sees."— Ptora's Life of ThorwaliUen. 
 
THORWALDSEN. 55 
 
 known. Canova (ka no'va) said, " This work of that Danish 
 youth is made in a new and grand style." And his critical 
 friend, Zoega, was really pleased with it. 
 
 Nobody gave Thorwaldsen any more orders for this 
 success, however. He had no more money left, his pen- 
 sion had come to an end, and he decided that he must 
 leave Rome. His trunks were packed, and piled upon 
 the carriage, when some trouble about passports obliged 
 him to remain another day. In a few hours, the English 
 banker, Mr. Thomas Hope, came into the studio, was 
 struck by the "Jason," and asked how much it would 
 cost to put it into marble. "Six hundred sequins," said 
 the sculptor, and the bargain was agreed upon, Mr. Hope 
 promising to increase the sum if he were satisfied with 
 the statue. This was the beginning of constant good 
 fortune as far as money went. 
 
 He was very unfortunate at this time, however, in 
 forming a connection which was to have a long and 
 hurtful influence upon his life. He had met at Zoega's 
 country-house a beautiful Italian girl, called Anna Maria 
 (ma re' a) Magnani (man yan' e). They fell in love with 
 each other, but she was a woman without principles or 
 heart ; she readily deserted Thorwaldsen for a richer ad- 
 mirer, whom she married and deserted in his turn, 
 obliging Thorwaldsen to support her. Her jealous tem- 
 per made his home very unhappy. 
 
 The friendship of the Baron von Schubart (fon shoo'bart), 
 the Danish ambassador, and of Wilham von Humboldt 
 (fon hoom'taolt), introduced him to excellent society, and 
 put him in the way of receiving many orders. He made 
 a delightful journey to Naples and to Montenero (mong- 
 ta na'ro) in 180-1, returning by Grenoa (jen'o a). This year 
 he received from Florence the diploma of professor in its 
 
56 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 Academjr. In 1805, he produced his first important bass- 
 relief, the "Abduction of Briseis (IdpI se'is)," in which many 
 persons tliougiit lie had surpassed Canova. 
 
 He now became more and more popular, and received 
 more and more commissions. The "Briseis" bass-relief, 
 and the beautiful group of "Cupid and Psyche (si'ke)," are 
 supposed to mark the full development of his talent. He 
 received many visitors, and liked to go into society. It was 
 at this time that he began his regular correspondence with 
 that Prince Ludwig (icJod'vig) of Bavaria, who afterward 
 became king, and who was such an enthusiastic patron of 
 art. Thorwaldsen was of great use to him in his purchases 
 of antiques for the Q-lyptothek (glTp to tak') at Munich. 
 
 In 1808, he modeled his statue of "Adonis." That 
 year he was made honorary member of the Roman 
 Academy of Saint Luke, and his diploma bass-relief was 
 that well-known work called "A Genio (jen'eo) Lumen," 
 representing a woman preparing to draw, and waiting for 
 genius to fill her lamp. His increasing fame made his 
 countrymen very proud of him, and he received a friendly 
 and pressing letter from the Prince of Denmark, entreat- 
 ing him to return home. But he was detained in Rome 
 by an important commission. 
 
 The Quirinal (kwiri'nal) Palace was to be splendidly 
 ornamented in preparation for a visit froixi Napoleon. 
 Thorwaldsen was asked to compose a frieze for one of 
 the halls; he chose for his subject "Alexander Entering 
 Babylon." He executed it very rapidly ; it was finished 
 in June, 1812, and was considered a great success. 
 
 In 1813, he had another attack of fever ; he was urged 
 by his friend, the Baron von Schubart, to go with him to 
 the Baths of Lucca (icScsk'ka), and his stay there was of great 
 advantage to him, It was not long after this journey 
 
THORWALDSEN. 57 
 
 that he modeled his two celebrated bass-reliefs, "Night" 
 and "Morning." 
 
 In 1816, he finished his "Venus;"* while working 
 upon this statue, he restored the Aegina (e ji'na) ixiarbles, a 
 work which required a thorough knowledge of Greek Art, 
 and which was admirably executed. His bust of Lord 
 Byron f belongs to the same period. He was so un- 
 fortunate as to fall in love once more, or, rather, twice 
 more, at this time ; biit neither affair ended in any thing 
 serious as far as he was concerned. One of these attach- 
 ments was to a well-educated Scotch woman, ;|; the other 
 
 * The "Venus" has been often reproduced. The first three copies, in marble, 
 were exposed to great risks before reaching their destination in England. The 
 left arm of the one intended for the Duchess of Devonshire was broken when 
 the vessel was unloading ; this break was concealed, by means of a gold bracelet. 
 This same statue was also broken at both ankles, and to conceal the breaks 
 anklets have been placed on them. This copy is at Chatsworth. The vessel which 
 carried that belonging to Lord Lucan iju'kan) was wrecked upon the coast of 
 England. But " Venus " rose again from the waters. She was uninjured. The 
 third statue, impatiently expected by its owner, Mr. Dabouchere (lil boo sher'), safely 
 arrived in port. The powerful crane was just lifting it from the vessel, when 
 the rope broke, and the heavy box shd through the hatchways and fell to the 
 bottom of the hold. The cargo, fortunately, was wheat ; the Goddess fell lightly 
 and was preserved. Ceres (s«';S2) had saved Venus. — Plan's Life of Thorwaldsen. 
 
 + "It was in Kome," says Thorwaldsen (1814), "that I made the bust of Lord 
 Byron. When this nobleman came to sit to me in my atelier (at It o'), he took a 
 seat opposite me, and put on directly a strange expression entirely different from 
 his natural one. ' My Lord,' said I to him, ' please keep perfectly still ; and I 
 beg of you do not look so disconsolate' ' It is my natural expression,' replied 
 Byron. ' Really I ' I said, and without paying attention to this affectation, I 
 began to work in my own way. When the bust was finished, everybody thought 
 it a striking likeness, but my lord was dissatisfied. 'This face is not mine,' he 
 said, ' I look far more unhappy than that,' for he was obstinately bent on looking 
 miserable."— Ptoft's Life of Thonoahlsen. 
 
 X In the spring of 1818, Thorwaldsen, in an excursion to Tivoli (U'voU) with 
 some friends, caught a violent cold, accompanied by fever, from viewing the falls 
 at night. He was so ill he was obliged to remain at Tivoli, and keep his bed. 
 Growing worse, he was taken to Albano (iil bd'no), where it was expected he would 
 quickly rally; but the artist had not patience to remain quiet, and insisted on 
 returning to Rome in so weak a condition that he had a return of one of his old 
 attacks of depression. Miss Mackenzie, deeply concerned at his dangerous condi- 
 tion, offered, if he went back to Albano, to go with her aunt to Genzano, which is 
 in the neighborhood. Thorwaldsen followed the two ladies, who visited him 
 
68 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 to a beautiful and ardent Viennese (ve en es'). They caused 
 considerable perplexity to Thorwaldsen, who appears to 
 have been a man with the faults and virtues of a child ; 
 and they hastened him in leaving Italy for a visit to 
 Denmark. He left Rome July 14, 1819. 
 
 On his way home he stopped in Lucerne (ic5b sern') 
 to make arrangements for the monument to the m.em- 
 ory of the Swiss Guards who died in the defense of the 
 Tuilerias (t^A^e' iSr iz) on the 10th of August, 1792. One 
 of the officers, who had escaped, had retired to Lucerne, 
 and had the idea of erecting a monument in his garden to 
 his companions in arms. There was a great subscription 
 for the purpose throughout Switzerland, and Thorwaldsen 
 was asked to execute the monument. The conception is 
 one of his noblest ; nothing could be finer than the dying 
 lion, protecting the French escutcheon till the last. One 
 of his pupils began the work from the sketch, and Thor- 
 waldsen finished it ; the plaster was sent to Lucerne, 
 where it had been intended to cast it in bronze ; instead, it 
 was decided, apparently on Thorwaldsen's advice, to cut 
 it out of the solid rock ; and there it stands, one of the 
 finest and most fortunately placed monuments in Europe. 
 
 After traveling through many German cities, he arrived 
 in Copenhagen and went at once to the Academy, where 
 he was to live. The first person he saw there was the old 
 janitor, who had been a model in Bertel's student days. 
 He was much overcome by this meeting, and embraced 
 the old man. He was warmly welcomed by all sorts of 
 people ; a great banquet was given him at the Academy ; 
 
 frequently, and who even came to live at Alljano to give him the care his health 
 required. Such affectionate attention, together with the pure air, produced a 
 happy change ; and Miss Mackenzie's joy at this result, together with his tender 
 gratitude, and the influences of spring in beautiful Italy, created a close bond 
 between them.— Pto«'s Life of Thorwaldsen. 
 
THORWALDSEN. 59 
 
 he was made Counselor of State, so as to be invited to dine 
 with the King ; he received commissions from the royal 
 family and was consulted about public artistic works. 
 The Cathedral, or Frue Kirke (frcJo'e ker'ke) [Our Lady's 
 Church] had just been rebuilt, and Thorwaldsen planned 
 for it a great series of sculptural decoration which was to 
 embrace nearly all his works on religious subjects. He exe- 
 cuted the groups of the " Preaching of St. John " and the 
 "Christ and the Apostles" during his stay at Copenhagen. 
 He left it in August, 182 0. On his way back to 
 Rome he went to Warsaw, where he had some negotia- 
 tions pending about work ; and here he met the Emperor 
 Alexander of Russia. The Emperor willingly consented 
 to allow Thorwaldsen to make his bust, and finding that 
 the artist was embarrassed by his stiff, military coat, he 
 at once uncovered not only his throat, but his chest. Thor- 
 waldsen was recommended by him to the Emperor Francis 
 of Austria, whom he met at Troppau (trop'pau), where the 
 Congress of Powers was sitting. While the sculptor was 
 in Vienna, he heard that the floor of one of his studios 
 In Rome had broken down ; but, fortunately, little of his 
 work was injured. This news, however, decided him to 
 go back to Rome at once. Not long after his return 
 there, he became intimate with Prince Ludwig of Bava- 
 ria, with whom he had long kept up a correspondence.* 
 
 * The King of Bavaria (then Prince Louis or Ludwig), writes thus to Thor- 
 waldsen, after a farewell banquet given in his honor hy the sculptor : 
 '' Herr Counselor of State, — 
 
 " No, not that,— Dear, good, and great Thorwaldsen !— Kings are indeed power- 
 less to bestow what is signified by that name. Long after military glory has 
 ceased its din, the name of the great artist still lives, pure, sublime, blessed of 
 Heaven, and his immortal works forever engender others. My last hours in Home 
 were made pleasant by the banquet kindly given me by my excellent Thorwald- 
 sen. But to say good-bye was all the more painful. Adieu, till we meet again. 
 
 "Louis, Pbince Eoyal, who sets great store by his Thorwaldsen." 
 —Plonks Life of TJiorwaldsen. 
 
60 ARTISTS AND SCULPTOES. 
 
 He was an interesting man, and entirely devoted to the 
 arts ; it is to him that Munich owes its newer galleries 
 of painting and sculpture. 
 
 Thorwaldsen gave much thought, after his return from 
 Copenhagen, to his great plans for church decoration. 
 He never could have carried on so much work at the 
 same time had it not been for the pupils he employed, 
 for he was also occupied with some of the orders he had 
 received in Poland. In 182 2, when he was at the height 
 of his faine, he was accidentally wounded by a pistol- 
 ball, but the injury vi^as a very slight one. 
 
 He was much pleased at receiving a commission from 
 Cardinal Consalvi (kon sal've) for a tomb, to be erected in 
 St. Peters, to the memory of Pius VH., for whom Consalvi 
 had a great affection. Thorwaldsen, who was no Catholic, 
 though not a very devout Protestant, was justly proud of 
 being chosen for this work. Before it was finished, he 
 was asked to design a tomb for Consalvi himself ; other 
 interruptions occurred, caused by the difficulties in the 
 arrangement of the composition, and by the immense 
 amount of other work which the sculptor had on 
 hand. Then it was discovered that a wrong estimate 
 had been made of the length of the mausoleum ; 
 and it was seven years after Cardinal Consalvi had 
 given the commission that the tomb was finally erected, 
 in 1831. 
 
 Thorwaldsen was so evidently the first sculptor in 
 Rome, that he was elected President of the Academy of 
 St. Luke, while the monument was in progress, though 
 here also his Protestantism counted against him.* In 
 
 * The lionora'ble post of President of the Academy of St. Luke was to be 
 filled by some sculptor. Thorwaldsen's superiority made him the proper person to 
 take the chair, and his enemies, who had no strong candidate to oppose to him, 
 
THORWALDSEN. 61 
 
 this position he was the object of so much jealousy, that 
 he was dehghted to lay it down at the end of his term 
 of office. He was elected Vice-President of the Depart- 
 ment of Sculpture ; but he never could be induced to 
 attend any more sittings of the Academy. 
 
 In 1830, he made another journey ; he went to Munich 
 to attend to the erection of his monument to Prince 
 Eugene Beauharnais (a zhan' bo ar na'). On his return to 
 Rome he found considerable excitement in the city ; as 
 soon as the French ambassador heard of the French Revo- 
 lution, he had left the city and gone to Naples, and Horace 
 Vernet (ver naO, the director of the French Academy, had 
 become the only representative of France in Rome. There 
 was a great deal of feeling against the French, and though 
 they were more specially threatened, all strangers in Rome 
 were uneasy, and Thorwaldsen, who was of a peaceful 
 temper, much disliked this state of things, and thought 
 of leaving Rome. The excitement subsided, however, 
 and Thorwaldsen's life became rather a gay one ; he saw 
 a great deal of the Vernets, who gave delightful parties 
 
 were in a quandary. His friends declared that it would be a disgrace to the 
 Academy to nominate any one "but him, while his opponents replied that it would 
 he a positive scandal to invest with such functions an artist who was not a 
 CathoUc. Thorwaldsen made merry with his friends over the embarrassment of 
 the opposition. But there was a difflculty in the case, which even to his parti- 
 sans looked serious. The President of the Academy, in the discharge of his 
 duties, was, on certain solemn occasions, obliged to be present in his official 
 character at the ceremonies of the Church, and the question now arose whether 
 the pontifical government would be pleased that a Protestant artist should, in 
 such cases, be called upon to represent the Academy. It was thought prudent to 
 submit the matter to the Holy Father. "Is there any doubt that he is the 
 greatest sculptor we have now in Rome ? " asked Leo XH. " The fact is incon- 
 testable," was the reply. " Then there can be no hesitation, and he must be 
 made President. Only, there are times when he will see the propriety of being 
 indisposed." The words of the Sovereign Pontiflf removed all scruples. Decem- 
 ber 16, 1825, Thorwaldsen was elected President of the Academy of St. Luke by 
 a majority of votes, for the usual term of three years. The decoration pro merito 
 belonging to this title was sent him. — Plan's Life of Thorwaldsen. 
 
62 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 at the French Academy, not far from the sculptor's 
 own studio. He was exceedingly fond of Vernet*, and 
 thought more seriously of leaving Rome after his friend 
 had left it. They made portraits of each other, and were 
 always friends. 
 
 Before Vernet departed, Thorwaldsen had finished 
 many important works, as well as his beautiful series of 
 the "Exploits of Love." He made the acquaintance of 
 Sir Walter Scott in 1831 ; but, with great good-will on 
 both sides, it could not go far, as they had no common 
 language.! 
 
 In 183 7, he left Rome ; but as the cholera was raging 
 there, he and his companions were sent back by the 
 inhabitants of the surrounding towns ; he did not suc- 
 ceed in getting away till 1838, when he sailed from 
 
 * The two masters, Thorwaldsen and Vernet, who met every evening in society, 
 often visited each other, also, in their ateliers. Mendelssohn (men' del sun) saw them 
 constantly. He thus descrihed the painter's studio : " Among alleys of evergreen, 
 now in blossom, exhaling a delicious perfume, in the midst of the shrubbery of the 
 Medici (med' e che) garden, is a small house, from which invariably issues some nols6 
 which can be heard from afar,— shouting or quarreling, or maybe an air played 
 on the trumpet, or the barking of dogs, — that is the studio. The most admirable 
 disorder reigns throughout. Guns, a hunting horn, a monkey, palettes, a brace 
 of dead hares or rabbits — every-where pictures finished or half finished." 
 
 Thorwaldsen lived in Rome, in the Plazzo Pomati (lylcit' zo fo ma' te), on the 
 Pincian (phi'cM an) Hill. When you knocked at the door, the great sculi^tor opened 
 it himself. The furniture was simple, but a multitude of fine paintings orna- 
 mented the waWs.— Plan's Life of Thonoaldsen. 
 
 t In 1831, Thorwaldsen received^a visit from Sir Walter Scott. It is reputed 
 of this celebrated novelist, that he did not manifest much interest in works of 
 art while in Rome ; at all events, he desired to be presented to the sculptor. 
 Walter Scott, well versed as he was in the tongues of the North, could only 
 speak his own ; as to Thorwaldsen, it was impossible for him to follow a conver- 
 sation in English. These two illustrious men accosted each other with touching 
 cordiality, but their conversation was fragmentary, consisting of interjections and 
 monosyllables, and such words as : conoscenza — charmd — plaisir — happy — connais- 
 sance— piaoere — delighted — heureux. Very concise language, but the two new 
 friends were so pleased, that they seemed to understand each other wonderfully. 
 They shook hands with the greatest friendliness, they clapped each other on the 
 shoulder, and when they parted, followed each other with their eyes, making aU 
 the time the most demonstrative gestures.— P/ow'*' Life of Thorwaldsen. 
 
THORW ALDSEN". 63 
 
 Leghorn in a government frigate which the King of 
 Denmark liad put at his disposal. 
 
 The welcome with which he was received at Copen- 
 hagen was one of the most enthusiastic and hearty ever 
 given, and one of the most elaborate. Splendid festivi- 
 ties were held for him, and afterward he was besieged 
 by visitors. After some time, he found that he could 
 do no work if he remained in Copenhagen, and sought 
 refuge in the family of Baron von Stampe (stam'pe), at their 
 estate of ISTysoe, where a studio was now arranged for 
 him.* After this, he divided his time between Nysoe and 
 the city. He was much liked and admired, and retained 
 to the last his simplicity of character. 
 
 He made one more journey to Rome, where he staid 
 about a year. On his return to Copenhagen, he was 
 received by the city council in the museum, which was 
 to contain his works, which he had left to the nation. 
 He continued working to the very end of his life ; he 
 had been occupied on a bust on the morning of the day 
 he died. In the evening, he went to the theater, and 
 was taken suddenly ill. He was hastily carried to his 
 
 * Christian Vm. was anxious to have a statue of his ancestor, Christian IV., 
 a prince who had distinguished himself in the Thirty Tears' War. Thorwaldsen 
 readily consented to execute this statue, hut, according to his custom, did not 
 hurry himself. One evening, at a hall, the king begged the Baroness von Stampe 
 to use her influence with the artist in his hehalf. One day, when the sculptor 
 had gone to walk, she took possession of the atelier, and hegan to model as well 
 as she could a sketch in clay, intended to represent the monarch. Upon Thor- 
 waldsen's return, he was astonished to And the haroness hard at work. "What 
 are you about there?" he asked. "The statue of the king," replied the baroness. 
 "Since I have pledged my word, and you will not do it, I must do it myself." 
 The artist laughed heartily, and began to criticise her work. " Do it better your- 
 self, then," said the baroness, pretending to be piqued. Thorwaldsen could not 
 help taking the clay to correct the proportions. When he had once begun, he 
 finished the sketch, and afterward modeled the statue. It was cast in bronze, 
 and is now in the little garden of the Rosenberg -pal&ce.— Plonks Life of Thor- 
 
64 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 own house, but he was aheady dead. It was such a 
 death as he had most wished.* 
 
 * One year, precisely, before Thorwaldsen's death, the poet Andersen came to 
 relate to Mm the news of a recent tragic occurrence. Admiral Wulff (w(X)lf) was 
 taken ill at the theater, was driven home, but upon arriving at his door, was found 
 dead in the carriage by his driver. "Well," exclaimed the sculptor, "is not that 
 an admirable way to die, and one to be envied?" Just a year from that time 
 Andersen met the artist on the way to the theater. Thorwaldsen entered alone, 
 and took his iisual seat in the parquet. A lady, coming in afterward, was obliged 
 to pass before him. In order to make room, he rose ; and the lady, turning to 
 thank him, saw him stooping down. "Have you lost any thing, sir?" she asked. 
 Thorwaldsen did not reply. It was now seen that he was ill, and people ran to 
 his assistance. He was carried in great haste to the Charlottenburg Palace, which 
 adjoins the theater, and laid on his sofa. A physician hastened to open a vein, 
 but no blood came. He had ceased to ]ive.— Plan's Life of Thorwaldsen. 
 
TURN KR. 
 
 1775-1851. 
 
 JOSEPH MALLARD WILLIAM TURNER was born 
 in London, on the 2 3d of April, in the year 1775. 
 He was to become the most celebrated of English land- 
 scapists, — a man for whose genius it is as hard to ac- 
 count, as it is to find any direct influence of his on 
 other painters. He was also a man of two natures, — of a 
 high and glorious artistic personality, acutely sensitive 
 to new forms of beauty, and at times of a low and 
 degraded personality, not only tolerant of what is not 
 morally beautiful, but taking pleasure in it. Strangely 
 silent, reserved, and incapable of expressing himself in 
 spoken or written language, he has had the advantage of 
 a champion in the world of letters who has spoken for 
 him with an eloquence which in our time has been one 
 of the glories of English speech. No one who has read 
 what Ruskin (rus'kin) has written of Turner, can ever 
 see his pictures with an indifferent eye ; and upon many 
 and many readers of English, Turner unseen is a more 
 powerful influence than he could be, seen in the place 
 where he left his work and his fame to his country. 
 
 His father was a barber, a man of honesty, industry, 
 and economy. His mother became insane toward the end 
 of her life ; their home can not have been a happy one.* 
 
 * Near the south-west corner of Covent (kov' ent) Garden, a square brick pit 
 or well is formed hy a close-set block of houses, to the back windows of which it 
 admits a few rays of light. Access to the bottom of it is obtained out of Maiden 
 Lane, through a low archway and an iron gate ; and if you stand long enough 
 
66 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 But the child was fortunate in having his talent early 
 recognized by his father, who used to exhibit his draw- 
 under the archway to accustom your eyes to the darkness, you may see on the 
 left hand a narrow door, which formerly gave quiet access to a respectable bar- 
 ber's shop, of which the front window, looking into Maiden Lane, is still extant, 
 filled in this year (1860) with a row of bottles, connected in some defunct man- 
 ner, with a brewer's shop. A more fashionable neighborhood, it is said, eighty 
 years ago than now— never certainly a cheerful one— wherein a boy being born 
 on St. Greorge's day, 1775, began soon after to take interest in the world of 
 Covent Garden, and put to service such spectacles of life as it afforded. 
 
 No knights to be seen there, nor, I imagine, many beautiful ladies ; their 
 costume at least disadvantageous, depending much on incumbency of hat and 
 feather, and short waists ; the majesty of men founded similarly on shoe-buckles 
 and wigs ; impressive enough when Reynolds will do his best for it ; but not sug- 
 gestive of much ideal dehght to a boy. 
 
 " Bello ovile doi is dormii agrello " (Pair fold where I slept, a little lamb), of 
 things beautiful, besides men and women, dusty sunbeams up or down the street 
 on summer mornings, deep-furrowed cabbage-leaves at the green-grocer's ; mag- 
 nificence of oranges in wheelbarrows round the corner ; and Thames' shore 
 within three minutes' race. 
 
 None of these things very glorious ; the best, however, that England, it seems, 
 was then able to provide for a boy of gift; who, such as they are, loves them 
 never, indeed, forgets them. The short waists modify to the last his visions of 
 Grreek ideal. His foregrounds had always a succulent cluster or two of green- 
 grocery at the corners. Enchanted oranges gleam in Covent Garden of the Hes- 
 perides (hes per' i cRz) ; and great ships go to pieces in order to scatter chests of 
 them on the waves. That mist of early sunbeams in the London dawn crosses, 
 many and many a time, the clearness of Italian air ; and by Thames' (teinz) shore, 
 with its stranded barges and glidings of red sail, dearer to us than Lucerne 
 i]M sern') Lake or "Venetian (ve ne'shan) lagoon,— by Thames' shore we will die. * * * 
 
 He attaches himself with the faitlifulest child-love to every thing that bears 
 an image of the place he was born in. * * * Hence, to the very close of life. 
 Turner could endure uglinesses which no one else of the same sensibiUty could 
 have borne with for an instant. Dead brick walls, blank square windows, old 
 clothes, market-womanly types of humanity — any thing fishy or muddy like Bil- 
 lingsgate (bV Imgz gdf) or Hungerf ord market, had great attractions for him ; black 
 barges, patched sails, and every possible condition of fog. * * * 
 
 The second great result of this Covent Garden training was, understanding 
 of and regard for the poor, whom the Venetians, we saw, despised ; whom, con- 
 trarily. Turner loved, and more than loved— understood. He got no romantic sight 
 of them, but an infallible one, as he prowled about the end of his lane, watching 
 night effects in the wintry streets ; nor sight of the poor alone, but of the poor 
 in direct relations with the rich. He knew in good and evil, what both classes 
 thought of and how they dealt with each other. 
 
 Reynolds (rln'oh) and Gainsborough, bred in country villages, learned there 
 the country boy's reverential theory of " the Squire," and kept it. They painted 
 the squire and the squire's lady as centers of the movements of the universe, to 
 the end of their lives. But Turner perceived the younger squire in other aspects 
 
TURNER. 67 
 
 ings in the shop window, marked with low prices. The 
 boy had a little schooling, which never taught him to 
 write intelligible English, or even to spell, and he had a 
 
 about his lane. * * * He also saw the working of city commerce, from endless 
 warehouses, towering over Thames, to the back shop in the lane with its stale 
 herrings— highly interesting these last ; one of his father's best friends, whom he 
 often afterward visited aflfectionately at Bristol, being a Ush-monger and glue- 
 boiler, which gives us a friendly turn of mind toward herring-fishing, whaling, 
 Calais (Jed la') poissardes {pioa sdr'), and many other of oar choicest subjects in after 
 life, all this being connected with that mysterious forest below London Bridge 
 on one side,— and, on the other, with these masses of human power and national 
 wealth which weigh upon us, at Covent Q-arden here, with strange compression, 
 and crush us into narrow Hand Court. 
 
 "That mysterious forest below London Bridge," better for the boy than wood 
 of pine, or grove of myrtle. How he must have tormented the watermen, be- 
 seeching them to crouch anywhere in the bows, quiet as a log, so only that he 
 might get floated down there among the ships, and round and round the ships, 
 and with the ships, and by the ships, and under the ships, staring and clamber- 
 ing ;— these the only beautiful things he can see in the world, except the sky ; 
 but there, when the sun is in their sails, filling or falling, endlessly disordered 
 by sway of tide and stress of anchorage, beautiful unspeakably ; which ships are 
 also inhabited by glorious creatures— red-faced sailors, with pipes, appearing over 
 the gunwales, true knights over their castle parapets— the most angelic beings in 
 the whole compass of London World. And Trafalgar {trdfal gar'), happening long 
 before we can draw ships, we, nevertheless, coax all current stories out of the 
 wounded sailors, do our best at present to show IsTelson's funeral streaming up 
 the Thames, and vow that Trafalgar shall have its tribute of memory some day. 
 Which, accordingly, is accomplished— once, with all our might, for its death ; 
 twice, with all our might, for its victory; thrice in pensive farewell to the old 
 Temeraire, and, with it, to all that order of things. * * * 
 
 And at last fortune wills that the lad's true life shall begin ; and one sum- 
 mer's evening, after various stage-coach experiences on the north road, which 
 gave him a love of stage-coaches ever after, he finds himself sitting alone among 
 the Yorkshire hills. jFor the first time, the silence of Nature round him, her 
 freedom sealed to him, her glory opened to him, peace at last ; no roll of cart- 
 wheel, nor mutter of sullen voices in the back shop ; but curlew-cry in space of 
 heaven, and welling of bell-toned streamlet by its shadowy rock. Freedom at last. 
 Dead wall, dark railing, fenced field, gated garden, aU passed away like the 
 dream of a prisoner ; and behold, far as foot or eye can race or range, the moor 
 and cloud. Loveliness at last. It is here, then, among these deserted vales. Not 
 among men. Those pale, poverty-struck, or cruel faces ;— that multitudinous, 
 marred humanity— are not the only things that Gi-od has made. Here is some- 
 thing He has made which no one has marred. Pride of purple rocks, and river 
 pools of blue, and tender wilderness of glittering trees, and misty lights of even- 
 ing on unmeasurable hills. * * * 
 
 So taught, and prepared for his life's labor, sat the boy at last alone among 
 his fair English hills ; and began to paint, with cautious toil, the rocks, and 
 fields, and trickling brooks, and soft, white clouds of heaven.— IfotZcra Painters. 
 
68 ARTISTS AKD SCULPTOES. 
 
 good deal of miscellaneous instruction from various draw- 
 ing masters. He also studied for a while in the house 
 of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and he was apprenticed to 
 an architect, who advised his entering the Royal Acad- 
 emy school. His entrance there was the beginning of 
 a long and close connection with the Academy, which 
 he loved all his life. When he first exhibited there, he 
 was but twelve years old. While his education, such as 
 it was, was in progress, the boy did not find it difficult 
 to get artistic emploj^ment of more than one sort, which 
 not only brought him in a little money, but was of some 
 advantage to him as regarded theory and practice. He 
 not only made drawings to sell, but colored prints for a 
 dealer, washed in water-color backgrounds for an archi- 
 tect's drawings, and made drawings of his own, for half 
 a crown and a supper, for Dr. Monro (mun ro'). He had 
 the great advantage, in the last named occupation, of 
 the society of a congenial friend of his own age. This 
 was Thomas Girten (gur'ten), a boy two years older 
 than he, who seems to have possessed at least equal 
 talent as a youth ; he was already an accomplished 
 water-colorist, and Turner had a great admiration for 
 him. "Had Tom Grirten lived, I should have starved," is 
 one of his reputed sayings ; and another, of a certain 
 golden effect of Girten's which he much admired, " I 
 never in my whole life could make a drawing like that ; 
 I would at any time have given one of my little fingers 
 to make such a one." The evenings the two boys passed 
 at Dr. Monro's were of great advantage to them ; for 
 not only was the master of the house a lover of art, but 
 they seem to have had the opportunity of meeting Wil- 
 son, Gainsborough (ganz'b'ro), Paul Sandby (sand'bi). 
 Cozens (kuz'Snz), and other landscapists there. Girten 
 
TURNER. by 
 
 died at twenty-seven years old, eleven years after his 
 friendship with Turner is supposed to have begun. He 
 may very fairly be reckoned among Turner's masters. 
 
 All these masters appear to have been encouraging to 
 the young fellow, with the exception of his perspective 
 teacher, who sent him back to his father as a hope- 
 less pupil.* "But he learnt more," says Mr. Monkhouse 
 (munk'hows), "from the dead — from Claude (kla^Ard) and 
 Vandervelde (van' der vel deh), from Titian (tlsh' an) and 
 Cavaletto (kav a let'to), from Cuyp (koip) and Wilson. 
 * * * There is scarcely one of his predecessors or con- 
 temporaries of any character in water-color painting that 
 he did not copy, whose style and method he did not study, 
 and in part adopt." He seems to have studied, in fact, 
 more from art than from nature, and to have early felt 
 that spirit of rivalry which never relinquished him, of 
 pitting himself against all sorts of artists, living and dead. 
 
 Most of this early work of his was in water-colors, the 
 coloring sober, the technical power great. He was all 
 his life a better and safer executant with water-colors 
 than with oils. 
 
 As he grew older, he was a good deal employed in 
 making topographical drawings ; and, as he approached 
 the age of twenty, he began upon that long series of 
 sketching journeys which was to be the principal outward 
 feature of his life. He had commissions for engravers' 
 designs which sent him traveling over England, Wales, 
 and the Isle of Wight (yvu). These journeys were of great 
 advantage to him as a "good and thorough discipline in the 
 study of nature." In the meantime he frequently exhibited 
 in the Academy, and was early noticed as a man of promise. 
 
 * Turner subsequently became Professor of Perspective in th.e Eoyal Academy, 
 and was a painstaking "but uninteresting teacher. 
 
70 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 So far, we have had to tell the story of a life which, 
 though arduous, was by no means wanting in encourage- 
 ment or opportunity. One great misfortune, however, 
 seems to have come to Turner in these early years, — an 
 unfortunate love affair. It is said,— though the whole 
 affair is involved in the mystery which Turner loved, — 
 that he engaged himself to the sister of one of his old 
 school-fellows, — that their letters were intercepted, that 
 after waiting two years she accepted another man, and 
 that on her old lover's re-appearance she considered her- 
 self too far bound in honor to the new one to break off 
 her engagement. There are improbabilities in this story ; 
 Turner was too sturdy a pedestrian to leave such an 
 affair to itself for two years, wherever his occupations 
 may have called him. "What we positively know is," 
 says Mr. Hamerton (ham' er ton), "that Turner remained 
 a bachelor ; " and he remained one all his life. He never 
 seems to have had any intimate friendship with any 
 woman whose society could have done him any good ; 
 and to this and to his early disappointment, we may 
 probably trace, in part, his morbidly secretive way of life 
 and his want of confidence in the world in general. 
 
 His journey to Yorkshire and farther North in 179 7, 
 was that one of his eai'ly tours which seems to have had 
 most effect upon him. The pictures he exhibited soon 
 after show a great change ; Yorkshire and Cumberland 
 had turned him, as Mr. Monkhouse says, frona a toilsome 
 student into a triumphant master. His work began to 
 show that power of dealing with light in which he was 
 to excel. He now painted landscape both in water-colors 
 and in oils ; and it was probably in part owing to the 
 latter fact, that at twenty-four years of age, he was 
 elected Associate of the Royal Academy. 
 
TURNER. 71 
 
 He was already superior to all living English landscap- 
 ists, who were, in fact, an inferior set of men just then. 
 Even his friend G-irten had no chance for Academy 
 honors, as he exhibited no paintings in oil. "From the 
 time that Turner became an Associate his struggles, if he 
 can ever be said to have had any, were over. * * * 
 He ceased almost entirely from making topographical 
 drawings for the engravers. * * * He had, in effect, 
 emancipated himself from 'hack-work,' * * * and 
 he showed the improvement in his position by moving 
 from Hand Court, Maiden Lane, to 64 Harley street."* 
 For his advances in his profession were often marked by 
 a change of dwelling. 
 
 He now began to paint oil pictures, in more or less 
 rivalry with other painters. He tried his hand in com- 
 petition with Vandervelde, the Poussins (pc5o sang'), and 
 Titian ; his most famous battle, however, was with 
 Claude Lorraine (l6r ran'). This was carried on by the 
 publication of the series of engravings called the Liber 
 Studiorwn (ii'taer studio' rum). He issued it in com- 
 petition with Claude's Liber Yeritatis (ver i ta' tis), a book 
 of memoranda of the effects of his pictures ; but the 
 
 * Two ladies, Mrs. E. and Mrs. H., once paid him a visit in Harley street, 
 an extremely rare (if not the only) occasion of such an occurrence, for it must 
 be known that he was not fond of parties prying, as he fancied, into the secrets 
 of his menage (men dzh'). On sending in their names, after having ascertained 
 that he was at home, they were politely requested to walk in, and were shown 
 into a large sitting-room without a fire. This was In the depth of winter ; and 
 lying ahout in various places were several cats withoiit tails. In a short time 
 our talented friend made his appearance, and asked the ladies if they felt cold. 
 The youngest replied in the negative ; her companion, more curious, wished she 
 had stated otherwise, as she hoped they might have been shown into his sanctum 
 {sdngk' turn), or studio. After a little conversation, he offered them wine and bis- 
 cuits, which they partook of for the novelty, such an event being almost unprec- 
 edented in his house. One of the ladies bestowing some notice upon the cats, 
 he was induced to make remark that he had seven, and that they came from 
 the Isle of Msai..—Monlchoiise (quoted). 
 
72 AETISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 competition was an unfair one. for Turner's book is no 
 such simple affair as Claude's. It is really a collection of 
 black-and-white, or rather brown-and-white pictures, en- 
 graved in a new combination of etching and mezzotint 
 (mSd'zo tint), and giving a very fair idea of the scope of 
 the artist's mind and the range of his power. His skill 
 in rendering atmospherical effects, and the structure and 
 growth of things, the results of his architectural study, 
 and his fondness for the Bible and Ovid (ov'Id), are all 
 to be found in the Liber Studiorum. 
 
 Turner was made a Royal Academician in 1802. He 
 made his first tour on the Continent about this time, 
 exhibiting six foreign subjects in 1803. While carrying 
 on his rivalry with other artists, he was constantly and 
 severely studying Nature. His memoranda on his jour- 
 neys were mostly made with the pencil-point, and as he 
 worked he altered every thing he drew, so that when his 
 pictures are compared with the places they are supposed 
 to represent, whatever resemblance there is proves very 
 inexact. Mr. Hamerton says that Turner's studies were 
 of general laws and general effects, and this seems to 
 have been the case. 
 
 "When Turner became an Academician," Mr. Hamer- 
 ton goes on, " he took his old father away from the busi- 
 ness of barber, and gave him a home in his own house. 
 It is said that he was kind and respectful to the old 
 man, invariably ; " and his father was helpful to his son 
 in whatever little ways occurred to him ; he stretched 
 his canvases for him, and showed visitors over the pri- 
 vate gallery of pictures which was already called the 
 Turner Gallery in 1809. 
 
 Turner went to visit some of his relatives in Devon- 
 shire, about 1811, and he seems to have been a much 
 
TUENEE. 73 
 
 more agreeable companion than usual upon this expe- 
 dition.* In 1812, he removed from Harley street to 
 Queen Anne (an) street. Not long after, in 1814, he built 
 himself a lodge at Twickenham (twik'en am), where he 
 had some intercourse with the family of the Rev. Mr. 
 Trimmer, the Vicar (vik'ar) of Heston, and is supposed 
 to have wished to marry that gentleman's sister,— a wish 
 which proved fruitless, f 
 
 It was by two pictures in the Exhibition of 1815 that 
 
 * He was looking at a seventy-four gun-sMp, which lay in the shadow under 
 Saltash. (said' tosh). The ship seemed one dark mass. 
 
 " I told you that would be the effect," said Turner, referring to some previous 
 conversation. " Now, as you observe, it Is all shade." 
 
 "Yes, I perceive it, and yet the ports are there." 
 
 "We can only take what is visible— no matter what may be there. There 
 are people in the ship. We do not see them through the planks.''— 3Ionkhoiise 
 
 t Tuesday, August 1, 1815. Queen Anns street. 
 
 Mt deae Sir :— I lament that all hope of the pleasure of seeing you, or getting 
 to Heston, must for the present wholly vanish. My father told me on Saturday 
 last when I was, as usual, compelled to return to town the same day, that you 
 and Mrs. Trimmer would leave Heston for Suffolk on to-morrow, Wednesday. 
 
 In the first place, I am glad to hear that her health is so far established as 
 to be equal to the journey, and believe me that your utmost hope for her benefit- 
 ing by the sea air being realized, will give me great pleasure to hear and the 
 earlier the better. 
 
 After next Tuesday— if you have a moment's time to spare, a line will reach 
 me at Parnley Hall, near Otley, Yorkshire, and for some time, as Mr. Pawkes 
 talks of keeping me in the north by a trip to the Lakes, &c., until November, 
 therefore I suspect I am not to see Sandycomb, Sandycomb sounds just now in 
 my ears as an act of folly, when I reflect how little I have been able to be there 
 this year, and less chance (perhaps), for the next in looking forward to a Conti- 
 nental excursion, as poor daddy seems as much plagued with the weeds as I am 
 
 with disappolntm.ents, that if Miss would waive bashfulness, or in other 
 
 words— make an offer instead of expecting one— the same might change occu- 
 piers—but not to bore you further, allow me, with most sincere respects to Mrs. 
 Trimmer and family, to conclude myself 
 
 Your most truly (or sincerelj^) obliged .J. N. W. Turkek. 
 
 But for the assurance of the present Mr. Trimmer, of Heston, that this 
 attachment of Turner to Miss Trimmer was undoubted, and that this letter has 
 always been considered in the family as a declaration thereof, we should have 
 thought the offer was one for Sandycomb liOdge and not for his hand. It is, 
 however, past doubt, that Turner was violently smitten, and, though forty years 
 old, felt it much.— iforeiftOMc. 
 
74 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 Turner showed, more than ever before, that he was not 
 only a draughtsman and a skillful painter of effect, but 
 a great and original colorist. There were " Crossing the 
 Brook" and "Dido (di'do) Building Carthage" (kar'thaj), 
 both of which he bequeathed to the nation, and both of 
 which may be seen in the National Grallery. He went to 
 Italy in 1819, and the journey seems to have confirmed 
 him in his new style ; for after some hesitation, he 
 painted, in 182 3, "The Bay of Baise" (bez), with "Apollo" 
 (apol'lo) and the "Sibyl" (sib'il), which Monkhouse calls 
 " the first of those magnificent dreams of landscape love- 
 liness with which his name will always be specially asso- 
 ciated." It is singular that Turner, who, during the mid- 
 dle and later part of his life, was something of what is now 
 called an Impressionist, — that is, a painter preferring gen- 
 eral effects of color and light and shade, to cover even ordi- 
 nary exactness in the form and placing of real objects, — 
 should have been as fond as he was of choosing poetical 
 and mythological names for his pictures, and making 
 them the expression of ideas of his own, — sadly fatalistic 
 ones usually, — which most of us would have great diffi- 
 culty in making out for ourselves. He tried to obviate 
 the difficulty by placing in the Academy Catalogue, with 
 the names of his pictures, longer or shorter extracts from 
 a manuscript poem by himself, called " The Fallacies of 
 Hope." Whether the whole of this poem ever existed, or 
 whether it merely exists in the Academy Catalogues and 
 in scattered fragments among the artist's papers, we can 
 not tell. 
 
 Turner's strongest and finest period of painting did 
 not begin to draw toward a close till about 1836. 
 During this time, his truest and best life may be seen 
 in his pictures ; the events of his outer life were very, 
 
TUENEE. 75 
 
 few. His "Coligny" (koien'ye) of 1826, his "Ulysses 
 (uiis'sez) Deriding Polyphemus" (poi I fe' mus) of 1829, 
 "Caligula's (kalig'ulaz) Palace and Bridge" of 1831, 
 " Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" of 1832, his beautiful paint- 
 ings of "Venice," the first of which he exhibited in 1883, 
 are among the finest of his pictures. The fine series of 
 water-color drawings, called " The Rivers of Prance," 
 belong to the years 1834-5. They have been well en- 
 graved. Turner had previously made a series of draw- 
 ings, called " The Rivers of England," as well as the illus- 
 trations to Rogers' Italy and his Poems, and many other 
 water-colors for the engravers. He drove hard bargains 
 with these artists, and occasionally, there is ground to 
 fear, tried to cheat them ; but this may have been owing 
 to a combination of his passion for saving money, with 
 his capacity for being entirely puzzled in regard to 
 ideas and incapable of expressing himself in intelligent 
 language. 
 
 His old father died in 1830 ; his death was a great 
 loss to his son, and so was Sir Thomas Lawrence's. 
 Turner made many Continental journeys between 1820 
 and 1836; their records are vague and few ; he did not 
 write many letters, and those he wrote are uninteresting. 
 The most lovable stories of this period which are told of 
 him are those which describe his kindness, at various 
 Academy Exhibitions, to painters who were not well hung, 
 or whose pictures he could help to look their best, even 
 at the sacrifice of his own. 
 
 "The Fighting Temeraire " (ta ma rar'), of 183 9, is 
 one of his most celebrated pictures ; it was his " last 
 picture," says Mr. Monkhouse, "at which no stone was 
 thrown." The picture represents the old Temeraire, which 
 had led the van at Trafalgar (traf ai gar'), being towed 
 
76 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 to her last moorings by a fiery little steam-tug, in a wild 
 sunset light. Turner had seen the incident and made it 
 the subject of a picture. Mr. Euskin says that the period 
 of Turner's central power, " entirely developed and entirely 
 unabated, begins with the Ulysses and closes with the 
 Temeraire." "This decade," says Mr. Hamerton, "had 
 been a time of immense industry for Turner. In that 
 space he had made more than four hundred drawings for 
 the engraver, had exhibited more than fifty pictures in 
 the Royal Academy, and had executed besides some 
 thousands of sketches, and probably many private com- 
 missions which can not easily be ascertained." 
 
 As Turner grew older, he sought for an expression of 
 blinding sunshine with such exclusive eagerness that he 
 neglected every thing else for it. His pictures grew more 
 and more incomprehensible to the world in general ; and 
 it was in answer to criticisms which now seem almost 
 childish that Ruskin published the noble defense which 
 was to become the book we know as " Modern Painters." 
 
 Turner painted a few more pictures, which were fine 
 and unique ; the " Snow-storm at Sea," the " Burial at 
 Sea," the " Rain," " Steam and Speed," and the " Slaver 
 Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying," which has 
 been brought to America. But the proportion of fine 
 works grew smaller, and of unintelligible ones greater. 
 "He appears to us, in these last days," says Mr. Monk- 
 house, "like a great ship, rudderless, but still grand and 
 with all sails set, at the mercy of the wind, which played 
 with it a little while and then cast it on the rocks." 
 
 His life was shipwrecked as well as his work. Many 
 of his friends were dead ; his home could not have been 
 a cheerful one, and he had no pursuits which interested 
 him beside his work. Not long before his death, he dis- 
 
TURNER. 77 
 
 appeared. As Mrs. Danby, liis old housekeeper, was 
 "brushing an old coat of Turner's, in turning out a 
 pocket, she found and pounced on a letter directed to 
 him, and written by a friend who lived at Chelsea (chei'se). 
 Mrs. Danby, it appears, came to the conclusion that Tur- 
 ner himself was probably at Chelsea." 
 
 He was living there, in fact, under the name of 
 Mr. Booth, in a small lodging near the river. He had 
 been living there occasionally for some time. Mrs. Danby 
 and another infirm old woman went there to look for 
 him. " From inquii'ies in a place by the river-side, where 
 gingerbread was sold, they came to the conclusion that 
 Turner was living in a certain small house close by, and 
 informed a Mr. Harper, whom she and Turner knew. 
 He went to the place and found the painter sinking. 
 This was on the 18th of December, 1851, and on the 
 following day Turner died." 
 
 He left a singular will, which, though it was not car- 
 ried out, is worth mentioning. He left most of his 
 property to found a charity for decayed artists ; he left 
 all his pictures and drawings to the nation ; he founded 
 a Turner medal, desired to be buried in St. Paul's, and 
 to have a thousand pounds expended upon his monu- 
 ment. He also left some small legacies. The will and 
 its codicils, like most of Turner's literary productions, 
 were so confused, that after years of litigation, his prin- 
 cipal object, the charity for old artists, was not carried 
 out. In his first will, he had only left two pictures to 
 the nation, — the " Sun Rising through Mist," and the 
 "Carthage," on condition that they should always be 
 hung next to two pictures of Claude's, whose rival he 
 had been so long ; and they hang as he wished in the 
 National Grallery. 
 
78 ARTISTS AND SCULPTOKS. 
 
 Constable (kun'sta bl), a contemporary of Turner's, was 
 an artist of much less scope ; but his direct influence on 
 art has been, as far as we can see, greater. It is easy to 
 see the effect which Constable and his friend Bonington 
 (bon'ing ton) had on French art, and the share which 
 they had in founding that "glorious school of Fontaine- 
 bleau" (fong tang bio'), which carried landscape art so 
 high in the middle of the century. It is too soon to see 
 Turner's direct effect. But it is most certain that sooner 
 or later, that effect will be discernible. 
 
INORES. 
 
 1780-1807. 
 
 JEAN AUGUSTE DOMINIQUE INGRES (zhon 6 gust' 
 do mm ek' anggr) was born on the 2 9th of August, 
 1780, in the Httle town of Montauban (mon to bong'), in 
 the south of France. His father was a respectahle artist, 
 who devoted himself both to iDainting and sculjDttire, and 
 who had a decided musical talent.* 
 
 He sent his son to study at the provincial Academy 
 of Art at Toulouse ; the boy studied not only with the 
 professors of the figure, but with a landscape painter of 
 the old school, and gave a considerable part of his time 
 to music ; for he was a good enough violinist, at thirteen 
 years old, to play a concerto at the theater of the town. 
 
 In 179 6, Ingres went to Paris, and became a pupil 
 of David. This singular man had already exercised an 
 immense power upon French art. He had found it 
 given over to what he considered the childish folly of 
 Boucher and Vanloo (vonglo'), the imitators of Watteau, 
 
 * "I was brought up," says Ingres laimself, "in red ch.alk ; my father, a 
 musician and painter, intended me for painting while teaching me music as a 
 pastime. This excellent man, after having given me a great portfolio which con- 
 tained three or four hundred prints after Raphael (rif a U), Titian (fish' an), Cor- 
 reggio (kor id' jS), Eubens (rob' benz), Teniers (tin'yerz), Watteau (viit to'), and Boucher 
 (Soo s/t«'),— there were aU sorts,— gave me for a master M. (mo seer') Eoques (rok), 
 a pupil of Vien " (ve OAig') [Vien was David's (da vMz') master] " living at Toulouse 
 (too looz'). * * * My progress in painting was rapid, a copy of the Virgin in the 
 Chair, brought from Italy by my master, made the veil drop from my eyes. 
 Raphael was revealed to me ; I burst into teavs^ Sketch of Ingres, by Silvestre (sel vestr'). 
 
 Ingres' tears came easily, all his life long. Long after, when he was painting 
 M. Bertin's (birr tdngz') portrait, he was so dissatisfied with it that he really sad- 
 dened his model. " He used to weep," says M. Bertin, " and I passed my time in 
 eonsoling him." 
 
80 AETISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 and the remote echoes of the old French historical style, 
 which, in its turn, was little better than an imitation of 
 the dreary late Italian schools, the Caracci (kar rat'chee) 
 and Gruido (g wee' do). David did not feel the charm 
 which, at this distance, all of us can feel in much of the 
 eighteenth century work, and its best painters, Watteau 
 and Chardin (sharr dang'), were both dead. He was 
 a. man of considerable ability as a draughtsman, and 
 threw himself with enthusiasm into the study of classical 
 art, in which a new interest had lately arisen. He 
 acknowledged no masters nearer our time than the Ro- 
 mans, who appear to have influenced him more than the 
 Greeks. His republican sentiments, which he shared 
 with half France, made him long to express the simple 
 and noble life of the early republics in the simple and 
 noble manner of the classical artists ; and archa3ology 
 had not made sufficient progress to teach him that 
 the models he admired were most of them more or 
 less clever copies, made under the deadening influence 
 of an often tasteless despotism. What David thought, 
 he taught ; and as his tendency toward classicism was 
 shared by revolutionary France, he became an excessively 
 popular teacher. It was the proper thing, in those days, 
 to wear antique robes, sandals, and curly crops of hair 
 named after Brutus, to sit in chairs of antique pattern 
 and to kindle altars to the Fatherland, or whatever 
 other divinity seemed sufficiently classical. The women 
 were most daring in their experiments on costume ; but 
 the men occasionally risked a dress but little adapted to 
 the Paris climate. When France was in such a ferment 
 about the mere externals of antiquity, what wonder that 
 a man like David, who had proved himself sternly in 
 earnest as a Regicide judge, who took the Revolution 
 
INGRES. 81 
 
 with the utmost seriousness, should have attracted to 
 himself a great following of enthusiastic young men? 
 
 David's atelier (at n a'), or work-room, as the French 
 call a studio, must have been like the great Paris class- 
 rooms of the present day, but even noisier and far more 
 exciting.* 
 
 Into such a studio as this the young southerner came. 
 He is not supposed to have been one of the celebrities 
 of the class ; his manner of working is thought to have 
 had too much exactness and unaffectedness to satisfy 
 the Roman ideas of his master. However, he gained 
 first the second "Prix de Eome " (pre deh rom'), and 
 then the first, which would ordinarily have entitled him 
 to some years' residence abroad. The government was 
 too poor at this time to give him the necessary pension, 
 and he remained in Paris from 1800 till 1806, living as 
 he could, illustrating books, making drawings from the 
 antique for a collection of prints, painting a few por- 
 traits, and already making those beautiful pencil draw- 
 ings for which he was to gain so much reputation, f 
 
 * Eor Interesting references to David and his students, see the novel of 
 "Noblesse Oblige" {noUSss' oUezh'), by the author of "Mademoiselle Mori" (mad- 
 mvia zeV mo re'). Such class-rooms nowadays, the art students tell us, are full not 
 only of hard work, but of endless jokes, good and bad, singing various in quality, 
 but always loud, and constant discussion on all subjects, occasionally ending in an 
 appeal to fists. These diilerent elements are now harmonized by a great deal of 
 tobacco-smoke ; whether that existed in David's time, we are unable to say. On 
 the appearance of the master, when he comes to criticise the class, all the noise 
 ceases ; the liveliest and most daring theoricians become as docile as children of 
 six, and nothing is heard but the low voice of the professor, occasionally rising 
 to a stUl more awful harangue, and the suppressed acquiescence of the pupils. 
 
 t One of these represents a bourgeois {boor zhwaw') parlor, with a father, a 
 mother, a visitor, and a young girl, whose hand is on the keys of the harpsichord. 
 "They had a great deal of music at that house," said Ingres; "I used to pass the 
 evening there ; the young lady played at these home concerts ; I had an inclina- 
 tion for her, which she shared. As I was just about to start for Italy, the parents 
 decided that the marriage must be put off tm I came back ; but one fine evening, 
 the evening of my farewell, the young lady contradicted my ideas on painting, and 
 held to her own opinion. That was a warning to me ; I left her forever."- 
 
82 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 He had two intimate friends at this time, Bartolini 
 (barr to le' ne) and Fetis (fa tes'), the former a sculptor, 
 the latter a musician. Ingres and Bartolini agreed in 
 their half-unconscious resistance to the classicism of the 
 day, and with Fetis, Ingres had the common ground of 
 a life-long love for music. The three lived together, and 
 Fetis conceived the idea of giving a concert for the 
 benefit of their very uncertain finances. They made 
 twelve dollars by it, and Fetis said, long afterward, that 
 he had retained the most delightful recollections of the 
 rejoicings and festivities which the three had owed to 
 this modest sum. 
 
 At last, thanks to M. Amaury-Duval (a mo re'-du val'), 
 the head of the direction of the Fine Arts, the necessary 
 monejr was paid to Ingres, and he started for Rome. 
 The record of his journey, which we find in his sketches, 
 shows that he was by no means indifferent to landscape 
 beauty. On reaching Rome, he gave himself up to the 
 admiration of Raphael, who was to become his favorite 
 master. As M. Blanc (blong) observes, David had gone 
 back to the antique without stopping at any of the mas- 
 ters of the Renaissance (r€ih na songs') ; Raphael, whom 
 Ingres had admired as a child, had scarcely been pointed 
 out to him by his master ; and it is not surprising that 
 years after, recollecting that first Roman enthusiasm for 
 a painter whose genius really did bear some relation to 
 his own, Ingres should have exclaimed, " Gentlemen, I 
 had been deceived ! " 
 
 His first " envoi " (an vwav^^'), or picture required by 
 the regulations to be sent to Paris, was a copy from 
 Raphael, " The Mercury of the Farnesina " (far ne se' na). 
 In the second year of his stay, he painted the beautiful 
 
IKGRES. 83 
 
 portrait of Mme. Devaucay (deh vo' sa), now in the 
 Louvre* (l<3o'vr). 
 
 He was all his life a consummate portraitist, com- 
 bining expression and character with great beauty of 
 rendering in form. His drawing in this work, and in 
 all his work, is his strongest point ; his sense of form 
 is exqu.isite in its delicacy and completeness. His idea 
 of art, in fact, was almost entirely limited to draw- 
 ing and modeling ; he went little further, in coloring, 
 than an unmodified representation of a general tone, 
 and paid almost no attention to the slight grada- 
 tions and subtle harmonies in which colorists take 
 pleasure. His small black and white portraits, usually 
 in lead-pencil, by which he had to live for two years 
 during his first stay in Italy, are therefore the finest 
 examples of his genius which we have ; f for it is impossible 
 
 * Long years after Ingres painted this portrait, he received a visit from an 
 old lady, poorly dressed. "You do not recognize me," she said to M. Ingres, 
 whose face visibly showed embarrassment; "and yet you have painted my por- 
 trait. But I was young then, and— they said— pretty. I am Madame Devaucjay." 
 * * * When M. Ingres had asked her the motive of her visit, she confessed to 
 him simply that being in want of almost every thing, she was really obliged, to 
 her great regret, to seU the portrait which he had painted of her. Persuaded 
 that he would be more interested than any one else in doing her this service, she 
 had thought of going to him. * * * jjg assured her of his zeal * * * and told 
 me that he had soon succeeded in selUng the portrait * * * for a sum which 
 would put her at least out of reach of want. — Amaury-Duval, U atelier d^ Ingres. 
 
 t He used to receive four dollars apiece for these beautiful portraits during 
 his early life in Home. He had no idea of confining himself to such work. He 
 once received a visit from a gentleman who, after having rung timidly, asked, 
 "Is this where the artist who draws little portraits lives?'' Ingres was furious, 
 and shut the door in his face. He was vexed when Gericault (zha re ko'), who came 
 to see him in Kome in 1817, was so fascinated by his drawings that he con- 
 tinually returned to them while praising his paintings. Long after, when 
 Amaury-Duval begged him to hang some drawings in the exhibition of his pictures 
 in 1855, his face grew dark. "Wo," he replied, " they would only look at those." 
 
 When he was quite old, he made one of these admirable sketches, which his 
 friends were admiring. " It's a very slight thing," said Ingres ; " I can't see to 
 do it,— I haven't my hand any longer ; " then, suddenly drawing himself up, 
 " Well," he said, " every thing has been taken from me, gentlemen, every thing ; " 
 then, pointing at the drawing, " I have that still I " 
 
84 AETiSTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 not to feel some disappointment before a painting which 
 gives little pleasure to our sense of color. Ingres painted, 
 after this portrait, the picture called " Ql^dipus (ed'ipus) 
 Answering the Riddle," which may also be seen in the 
 Louvre.* 
 
 It is considered a great advance on David's attempt 
 at classicism ; but the biographers take pleasure in re- 
 marking that Ingres has sought and found in this pict- 
 ure an ideal of his own, suggested by Nature, Raphael 
 or the Q-reeks, but exactly following none of the three. 
 In a realistic time like ours, we are certainly not struck 
 by the realism of the "QHdipus"; but Ingres' constant 
 directions to his pupils not to improve upon Nature as 
 they saw her, and his wrath when he was once supposed 
 to have flattered a model, make us count him, on the 
 whole, more of a realist than an idealist ; and he cer- 
 tainly shines more as a portraitist than as a historical 
 painter. 
 
 In 1812 he made a large painting in distemper for 
 the Quirinal (kwl ri'nal) palace, of Romulus with the Spo- 
 lia Opima (spo'lla opi'ma). Not long after, he began a 
 small interior of the Sistine (sis' tin) Chapel, which is 
 
 * Long after, one of his fellow-students was congratulating him upon his pict- 
 ore. It was Granger (grbiig zha'), who had been given the Prix de Rome the year 
 Ingres had the second prize. "I recognize your model," said he. "Ah, you do? 
 It is really he, is it not?" "Yes, but you've improved him immensely I" "What 
 do you mean? Improved? Why, I copied him— copied him servilely." "Perhaps 
 you did, but he wasn't as handsome as that." 
 
 Nothing was more curious than to see M. Ingres, who, before his pupils, 
 heard himself accused of not following his own doctrines. How angry he 
 was I 
 
 " Why, look here, since you remember him, it is his portrait ! " " Idealized." 
 This was the last blow, especially as G-ranger said all this very politely, as if it 
 were a compliment. 
 
 "Well," said M. Ingres, "think what you please of it; but I suppose myself 
 to copy my model, to be its very humble servant, and I don't idealize it." 
 
 This discussion threatened to have no end ; Granger finished it by saying, 
 "Idealized or not, it is very fine." And they went no tw:\h.'dT:.—Amaury-Du'oal. 
 
INGRES. 85 
 
 described as far more attractive in color than most of 
 his worli. 
 
 In 1814 he was married. Some of his friends had 
 thought it well for him to have a wife, and decided 
 upon a young lady from Champagne (shong pan'), who 
 came out to Rome for the purpose.* 
 
 Ingres saw her, liked her, and the marriage was de- 
 cided upon. His choice, if it may be called so, was a 
 most fortunate one. Madame Ingres, a woman of great 
 practical ability, made her husband very comfortable 
 at once, and through years of poverty she encouraged 
 him in faithfulness to what he considered his highest 
 calling, and in resignation to disappointments and priva- 
 tions. She was very economical, and only too anxious to 
 keep from her husband any thing which might distress 
 him.f 
 
 Ingres painted a number of small historical paintings 
 at about this time ; these are not his finest works ; his 
 hand does not seem to have felt at ease upon a small 
 
 * Some one had been speaking of the Tomb of Nero, near Kome. " Ah ! " he 
 said, "you speak of a place which has always left a strong and sweet recollection 
 in my mind * * * for it was there," he added, "that I saw Madame Ingres for 
 the first time. It's the truth, gentlemen, I didn't know her. She was sent out 
 to me from iPrance," he said, laughing, " and she didn't know me either ; that 
 is, I had sent her a little sketch which I had made of myself." 
 
 "And you had flattered yourself nicely too," said Madame Ingres, without 
 stopping her knitting. * * * Then he related to us in a few words the history of 
 his marriage. He was melancholy and lonely at Kome ; he told one of his 
 friends how out of spirits he was ; this friend happened to have in his family a 
 young lady endowed with all the qualities which could assure his happiness ; 
 every thing was arranged by correspondence. One day he was informed that his 
 fiancee {/« ling sa') was to start for Home, and that he was to expect her. The 
 date was precise. M. Ingres went to meet her at the Tomb of Nero, and there 
 he saw getting out of a vettura {vet too' rd) the woman who was to be his wife. 
 "And who has kept," he added, looking at her, "all her friend's promises, and 
 moTe."—Amanry-Duval. 
 
 t While he was director of the Academy at Rome, the cholera was raging in 
 the city without his knowing any thing about it. His wife had kept it from him, 
 and had hidden the newspapers which gave accounts of it. 
 
86 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 canvas. In 1820 he went to live at Florence, where he 
 was warmly welcomed by his old friend Bartolini, who 
 was established there as a successful sculptor. Life was 
 hard both at Florence and Rome. Ingres, as he said, 
 painted as if he had ten thousand livres income, and 
 elaborated his pictures with a most disinterested regard 
 of time and money. The principal pictures which belong 
 to this period are the "Ruggiero (poodja'ro) and An- 
 gelica" (anjel'ika), now in the Louvre, — it met with 
 some adverse criticism on its first exhibition ; the "Odal- 
 isque" (odaiisk'); the "Virgil Reading the ^neid (ene'ld) 
 to the Mother of Marcellus" (mar sel'lus) ; and the "Vow 
 of Louis XIII." This last, representing the king devot- 
 ing the Kingdom of France to the glorified Virgin, was 
 to be one of his most important pictures, and he studied 
 it with the greatest care.* Composition was never very 
 easy to him, and he changed his arrangements again 
 and again. The painting of it, too, was, as usual with 
 him, a long operation. At last it was done, and this 
 
 * A friend of Ms named Constantin {k6ng stUng tang'), an artist and a very 
 handsome and weH-made man, came to see him at this time. Ingres was hard at 
 work on his composition, and begged Constantin to pose for the Virgin. As 
 she was to be seen from below, he went up on the ladder Ingres nsed, and sat 
 there holding in his arms a bundle of linen. Ingres could not satisfy himself 
 with the pose, and as he knew exactly what he wanted, he mounted the ladder 
 in his turn, half dressed, " and posed himself for Constantin, who drew, as a Vir- 
 gin, this Uttle thick-set man, holding with majesty his bundle of linen (Ingres, 
 8a Vie et ses (Etivres par Charles Blanc). He did not always have even a ladder for 
 his work. "At the time he was painting his 'Vow of Louis XlII.,' " said 
 Madame Ingres, "not having the money to buy or hire a ladder to work at the 
 upper part of his picture, he had been obliged to arrange a chair on some boards 
 himself, and it was so uncertain that when any one came to see him, I was 
 obUged to tell him gently, for fear that too sudden a movement to receive the 
 guest might make him fall down with all his scafEolding. Yes, my friend, that 
 was the way [as regarded poverty] that we passed twenty years in Italy, and at 
 the time of our greatest distress, he refused to make an engagement which 
 would have given him a fortune on condition of going to London to draw pencil 
 portraits; and I agreed with him; he had something else to do."— Amaury- 
 Duval. 
 
INGRES. 87 
 
 time, instead of sending his picture to Paris, he took it 
 tliere himself. This was in 18 24. 
 
 It was immediately exhibited in the Salon (sa long'), 
 and much admired, and the most difficult part of Ingres' 
 life had now come to an end. He at once received a 
 great number of orders, both public and private, and 
 took hearty pleasure in all the marks of sympathy and 
 admiration he received. Art in Paris was at this time 
 no tranquil pursuit, but a battle in which there were 
 arrayed two entirely different factions. The painters 
 called classicists, — the old pupils of David and their fol- 
 lowers, — had been for some time the ruling power in the 
 exhibitions, and in the artistic section of the Institute. 
 Their works were generally considered examples of the 
 only proper and desirable style of art, and for many 
 years no principles were taught which were not theirs. 
 The pupils of a revolutionary master, they had estab- 
 lished themselves so firmly in public positions and in 
 private taste, that a new revolution was required to keep 
 French Art from falling into a new set of rules and con- 
 ventions. And the new revolution had come. A number 
 of young artists, among whom Eugene Delacroix (u zhen' 
 deh la krv^ra') was the leader, and of whom Q-ericault had 
 been the forerunner, charmed by the recent literary revival 
 of an interest in the middle ages, lovers of color and light 
 and shade, and finding poetry and art in all sorts of things 
 outside the antique, had applied themselves to putting 
 their thoughts and feelings on canvas. They admired 
 Rembrandt (rem' brant), the great colorists of Venice and 
 Flanders, the recent excellent English landscapists, and 
 found that none of these admirable artists drew in the 
 manner recommended by the Institute. Some of them, 
 therefore, committed the not unnatural mistake of paying 
 
OO ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 very little attention to drawing at all ; and others of them, 
 with really noble motives to represent, carried them out 
 with what their enemies considered intolerable eccen- 
 tricities of execution. Interesting and charming as their 
 coloring is, it often appears to a modern too overcharged 
 and exaggerated for the subtle simplicity of Nature. 
 But Nature is a goddess who is worshiped under many 
 different forms, and she may be supposed to be tolerant 
 for all her adorers ; and the Romanticists (ro man' tl sists), 
 as the new men were called, certainly had a much wider 
 and far more interesting view of Nature and of Art, too, 
 than their classical opponents. It was to them, or to 
 their principles in some form, that we owe the admira- 
 ble painters of the middle of the century — Rousseau 
 (roo so'), Corot (ko ro'), Dupre (dupra'), Dias (de'as), De- 
 camps (deh kong'), and the great Millet (me ya') himself. 
 Eugene Delacroix himself was an artist of great abilities 
 and great nobility of sentiment ; his works are splendid 
 in color and tremendous in movement and ferA^or, and 
 some of them are among the brightest ornaments of the 
 French school. He and his followers were to enlarge the 
 horizons of art ; they accomplished not perhaps exactly 
 what they meant to accomplish, but what has been of 
 immense value to France and to the world. They kindled 
 the enthusiasm of their own generation and of the next, 
 as no classicist could ever have done. 
 
 These painters welcomed Ingres and his great picture, 
 which they could see was a new step in Art. Delacroix 
 always spoke of him and his work with great respect.* 
 
 * Before the opening of the G-reat Exhibition of 1855, Delacroix was delighted 
 to have an opportunity of examining Ingres' Apotheosis (,ap o thW o sis) of Homer. 
 "I never saw such execution," said he; "it is made, as the masters painted, out 
 of nothing; and from a distance, every thing is there." 
 
 " That reminds me," said Amaury-Dvival, " of the speech which was attributed 
 
INGRES. 89 
 
 Ingres returned his kind feelings by a hearty detestation 
 which the new school, and ah its works, seldom failed to 
 inspire in him. The classicists, too, welcomed him ; they 
 could not fail to admire the purity of his drawing, while 
 they distrusted his originality ; they admitted him to the 
 Institute, where he was of great value to them for his 
 effect upon outsiders, though in iheir interior councils 
 Grirodet (zhe ro da') was more poweiful. 
 
 Not long after his return from Rome, a very young 
 man named Amaury-Duval, the son of his old benefactor, 
 begged to be received as his xjupil. Ingres had not 
 thought of teaching, but consented to take Amaury- 
 Duval, and a class was formed, of which the most dis- 
 tinguished members were later to be the brothers Flan- 
 drin (fiong dran')- Ingres was an excellent and conscien- 
 tious teacher, though a very dogmatic one. He imposed 
 his personality upon his pupils rather too much for their 
 welfare, and expected from them even more than the 
 ordinary submission given by French pupils to their pro- 
 fessor. But much of the advice he gave them is most 
 excellent, dictated, as it was, hj a hearty respect for 
 Nature as he saw it. Nothing infuriated him more than 
 to see a pupil try to show cleverness by improving upon 
 the model.* 
 
 to M. Ingres, and which, must he true, for De lacroix told me, while describing 
 this visit to the hall of Ingres, that he was surprised there by the master him- 
 self, and that he had received rather a cool how from him. Hardly had Dela- 
 croix gone out, when M. Ingres, calling an attendant, cried, ' Open all the win- 
 dows; it smells of sulphur here.'" 
 
 * M. Amaury-DuvaPs own account of Ingres' class is delightful, and we wish 
 we could copy the whole of it. He was an enthusiastic pupil of the master ; " for 
 me, and we were all, I think, alike in this," says he, " when I felt M. Ingres 
 touch me with his coat, as he stooped down to look at my drawing, when I 
 thought of the condescension of this man, of this great artist, occupying him- 
 self with a bad outline, made by me on paper, I confess, even if I make my 
 young fellow-artists laugh, I was taken with such a violent emotion that all my 
 
90 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 He painted his great picture of "The Apotheosis of 
 Homer," now in the Louvre, during the earlier days of 
 his stay in Paris. Later he painted another great pict- 
 ure, "The Martyrdom of St. Symphorian" (sim fo' ri an), 
 for the Cathedral of Autun (o tung'). This picture he in- 
 tended to strike a great blow against the new school. 
 But its success was not what he had anticipated, in spite 
 of its very noble qualities. 
 
 The picture was exhibited at the Salon of 1834. 
 Ingres was disappointed and displeased at its want of 
 success, and was probably not soon to become the director 
 of the French Academy at Rome. This Academy is sit- 
 
 blood went to my heart, so that you could hear it heat, and it would have heen 
 impossible for me to conceal what I felt, if this position had been prolonged." 
 
 They were a remarkably well-bred set of students, and though they had 
 plenty of Uf e and gayety, they did not play the usual studio tricks on each other. 
 One of them once heard this scrap of conversation between two pupils of a rival 
 studio : " Just imagine I the Ingres fellows, when they come to the class in the 
 morning, they say ' How do you do ' to each other I " This seemed to them 
 astonishingly funny. 
 
 " One young fellow had been obliged to leave the class for some time. One 
 day, on the Pont des Arts {pong dih zii'), he found himself face to face with 
 M. Ingres ; he tried to avoid him, but the master went straight up to him. 
 "Well, Lefore (llhfdr'),we don't see you any longer; have you been sick?" "No, 
 sir," stammered Lefore, blushing. "Then why are you not at work? You are no 
 longer very young. Tou have no time to lose." Pressed in his defense: "I con- 
 fess. Monsieur," said Lefore, "that I am a little behindhand with the class 
 treasurer, — I owe him two months." He had not finished, when M. Ingres started 
 violently : " What, sir, do yoix want to insult me ? Have I given you the right to 
 speak to me in this way? Am I a merchant ? Do I sell my advice, sir ? " (At these 
 times M. Ingres would grow excited as he spoke, and his head, as in artistic dis- 
 cussions, would grow admirable in expression). "You will come to the class to- 
 morrow, or I shall consider your conduct as a personal insult— and never let this 
 question rise between us again i " * * * Since that day, by M. Ingres' orders, 
 Lefore was charged nothing for his class fee. Many others were not charged for it. 
 
 This sort of generosity is by no means rare among the French professors. It 
 would be easy to mention the names of well-known Prenchmen and Americans 
 in Paris to-day, who are of the mind, in this respect at least, of M. Ingres. A 
 long list could be made of very distinguished men who give their services, week 
 after week, to large classes of young men and women, without receiving any 
 compensation but the affection, respect, and gratitude of their pupils, and the 
 slight acknowledgment which every Parisian pupil makes to his professor, by 
 writing that professor's name after his own in the Salon catalogue. 
 
uated at the Villa Medici (med'iche), on the Pincian 
 (pin' Che an) Hill, which was long ago bought by the 
 French government as a dwelling for the young artists 
 who obtained the Prix de Rome for painting, sculpture, 
 engraving, and music. It is not really a school at all. 
 Ingres made it more of a school than it was under his 
 predecessor, Horace Vernet (verna'); but the young men 
 who underwent his rather tyrannous but simple and 
 good-hearted rule, retained very kindly recollections of 
 their director. Ingres had not the time for many paint- 
 ings during his stay in Rome, for he fulfilled his duties 
 as director very conscientiously. He painted his second 
 '•Odalisque," a subject which he treated with a singular 
 grace and purity, and a small picture called "Stratonice" 
 (strat o ne' cha), which is one of his finest works. 
 
 He returned to France in 1841, full of a project for 
 decofating the Chateau (sha to') of Dampierre (dam pe ^r') 
 with mural paintings. Before going there he painted 
 his fine portrait of "Cherubine Crowned by the Muse." 
 He lived at Dampierre for several years ; he had apart- 
 ments of his own in the Chateau, and began with 
 enthusiasm on a great decoration called "The Golden 
 Age." Neither this composition nor another which 
 Ingres had projected, called " The Iron Age," was ever 
 finished. Ingres, who was usually long in painting a 
 picture, was longer than ever about these. Various 
 circumstances annoyed him ; his good and faithful wife 
 died, and he could not bear to live at Dampierre without 
 her, and finally the paintings were left unfinished, and 
 both parties agreed to breaking off the bargain in 1850. 
 
 In the meantime, Ingres had finished some fine de- 
 signs for colored windows for chapels for the Orleans 
 (6r leh ong') family. He was especially fitted for work 
 
92 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 of this kind. He mucli regretted the loss of his wife ; 
 his work was not sufficient for liim, and his friends 
 arranged a second marriage for him, which proved a 
 very happy one, especially as the lady had musical tastes 
 and could give him great pleasure by playing to him. 
 
 In the Universal Exhibition of 1855, thirty-two of his 
 pictures were exhibited together. He was the only artist 
 who had this honor. The last of his fine works, and 
 except his portraits perhaps the very finest, was "La 
 Source " (scjors), or " The Spring," now in the Louvre. 
 The picture was begun when Ingres was a young man. 
 He lived some years longer, working and loving music 
 to the last, and died January 14, 1867. 
 
1795-1875. 
 
 NO class of artists deserves more of our time, while 
 receiving less from it, than the French sculptors 
 of the present day. A painter of any unusual merit, even 
 if he has to undergo hardships and struggles in early life, 
 often acquires ease, and sometimes considerable fortune, 
 before approaching old age. It is seldom that he does 
 not produce a considerable number of pictures, many of 
 which are paid for. Though he is forced to incur many 
 and heavy expenses in producing them, far more and 
 heavier than is generally supposed ; still, after the first 
 struggles of life are over, a not unreasonable amount of 
 uncongenial drudgery and a strict attention to economy, 
 often make it possible for him to make a living which 
 is a safe, though not a brilliant one. With the sculptors, 
 it is a different affair. Their education, like that of the 
 painters, is a long one ; they, like the painters, are 
 obliged to meet the constant and wearing expense of 
 studio and model, — for no artist can work well without 
 these two costly necessities, — and they are obliged, as the 
 painters are not, to work in an enormously expensive 
 material, and unless they waste their physical strength 
 with insane recklessness, they are obliged to use assist- 
 ants for the mechanical part of any considerable work. 
 To all these disadvantages, the French sculptor adds 
 this, that the government commissions, on which he 
 must depend in part, are very unprofitable ones. This is 
 
94 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 true, also, in regard to pictures ; but the government is 
 by no means the young painter's only patron for his 
 important works. Plenty of people buy pictures ; very 
 few buy statues. A young painter's life must necessarily 
 be harder than is usually supposed ; a young sculptor's 
 is a great deal worse than that. 
 
 When this is the case in regard to the generality of 
 the profession, — a profession to which France owes, some 
 people think, even more than to her painters, — it is hard 
 to exaggerate the difficulties which must have come in 
 the way of a man who, to the disadvantage of being a 
 sculptor, joined that of being a very original sculptor, 
 not unconnected with a new and heretical artistic move- 
 ment. 
 
 Barye (ba re'), the first great sculptor of animals since 
 the Panathenaic (pan ath e na'Ik) frieze (frez), the first 
 modern to treat most of them as they really look with- 
 out referring to classical models, was not likely to be 
 treated at first with any great favor by the taste of his 
 time, or by the Institute, which affected to lead it. He 
 admired Gericault (zha re ko') and Delacroix (deh la kr^A^a'), 
 the two great leaders of their opponents, called the 
 Romanticists (ro man'ti sists) ; he was the friend of Corot 
 (ko ro'), Dias (de az'), Rousseau (rc5o so'), and the great 
 Millet (nie ya') ; and as Mr. Eckford (ek'mrd) has wisely 
 pointed out, he was much influenced and impressed by 
 that spirit of our age, in its scientific development, one 
 of whose forms is called Darwinism* (dar' win izm). 
 
 * Not that Barye was a scientific man, but that Barye sympathetically 
 expressed in art, or forecast if you will, the idea of a gradually unrolling crea- 
 tion in which the Maker sits sublime, with folded arms, needing to give but one 
 first impulse to matter, and no more. It was the artistic form of Science that 
 turned him toward the study of wild beasts ; him, the respectable, hard-working 
 citizen of a town whose sons were renowned for their ignorance of field-sports 
 
BARYE. 95 
 
 Antoine Louis (6ng t^A^an' loo e') Barye was born at 
 Paris in 1795. His parents were poor, his father a silver- 
 smith ; he liad little education, and was apprenticed at thir- 
 teen or fourteen to an engraver named Fourier (fc5o re a'), 
 who made dies for buttons and military ornaments. But 
 Fourier sometimes did very fine repousse (ruhpcSossa') 
 work ; he was employed upon some of the gold snuff- 
 boxes Napoleon used to send to other sovereigns, and 
 Barye had seen him make five or six of them, one 
 of which represented an interview between the emperors 
 Napoleon and Alexander. 
 
 After three years' apprenticeship, during which he 
 learned a great deal about fine chiseling and working in 
 gold and silver, Barye was drawn in the conscription, 
 which at that time took effect at a cruelly early age. 
 He was employed among the topographical engineers in 
 making relief maps for the emperor to study and mark 
 with points of fortification. "I worked night and day," 
 he said, " at the reliefs of Mont Cenis (mong se ne'), Cher- 
 bourg (sher'burg), and Coblentz " (kob'lents). At seven- 
 teen, he was placed in the second battalion of Sapeurs 
 du G-enie (sa pu' du zha ne') ; but he still seems to have 
 been employed in more or less independent work. " One 
 evening," he says, — "it was March 30th, 1814, — as I was 
 
 and of foreign lands. It was Science that bade him examine animals near at 
 hand, becoming intimate with them, instead of accepting the conventions decreed 
 by the Art of the past. Science made him haunt the Jardin des Plantes (zhiir- 
 ddng' da plbng') and tabulate the measures of all beasts he could lay his hands on ; 
 Science urged him to lecture to empty benches ; Science upheld him in penury ; 
 Science allowed him to stay content, though he was leaving to his family little 
 more than a great name. He felt himself in the stir of new views of the world 
 of men and beasts, in the current of a great age, and foresaw that what he had 
 done would some day, and that not far off, be recognized at its full worth.— 
 Antoine Louis Barye, an article by Henry Eckford in the " Century " for Fehruanj, 1886. 
 
 All this unconventional intelligence made him. very xmlikely to become popu- 
 lar immediately. 
 
96 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 returning very tired from a long expedition for study 
 across the fields of Montrouge (mong truzh'), the porter 
 of the military depot cried out through the railing to 
 me, ' The army has gone ; make haste and join it on the 
 banks of the Loire ' (l^A'arr) ! As I had not a cent to 
 undertake this retreat, which has since become so cele- 
 brated, on my own account, I went back to my father's 
 house. 
 
 " * * * After the capitulation of Paris, I took up 
 once more my profession of chiseler ; but I was much 
 disturbed by my desire to be a sculptor. I applied myself 
 with the greatest effort to drawing and modeling ; but 
 as I was not a stirring fellow, I knew neither how to 
 find a master nor how to live while I was studying." 
 
 He managed, however, to enter the studio of the 
 sculptor Bosio (bo'seo) in 1816, and the studio of the 
 painter Q-ros (gro), the master of Delacroix and Q-ericault, 
 a few months later.* 
 
 After a year of rapid progress, he entered the compe- 
 tition for the Prix de Rome (pre deh rom), in the sec- 
 tion of engraving in raedals and precious stones. Here 
 he gained either an honorable mention or a third prize ; 
 it is difficult to decide which. The next year he tried 
 again, in the section of sculpture, and obtained the sec- 
 
 * He succeeded, at the end of 1816, In entering the studio of Bosio. But 
 lie seems soon to have become convinced that, apart from the mere material 
 processes of the art, this master's example could only teach him what to avoid,— 
 namely, conventionality, pomposity, and false grandeur ; and so, in the spring of 
 1817, we find Barye studying painting in the studio of Gros. The painter of 
 the "Battle of AbouMr" {iiiookir') and of the "Plague of Jaffa" {ijaf'fa) can not 
 but have had a good Influence over Barye. There is a spirit, a sentiment of life, 
 a dramatic accent, in Q-ros' work, combined with a knowledge of masses, of har- 
 mony and of expression, which certainly made a profound Impression upon his 
 pupil, and served him afterward in his sculpture even better than in his paint- 
 ing.— ^Mtowie Louis Barye, an article, by Theodore Child in '■^Harper's Magazine'''' for Sep- 
 tember, 1885. 
 
BAEYE. 97 
 
 ond prize, — the frequent fate of men of genius in this 
 competition. He competed two or tliree more years in 
 the same section, but did not even receive honorable 
 mention ; and the last time he was not admitted after 
 the preliminary trial. All his attempts to go to Italy 
 proving in vain, he began once more to work at his 
 trade as a goldsmith. He entered the establishment of 
 a master-workman named Faucennier (fo sen ne a'), who 
 had a great reputation and was patronized by the Court, 
 but who was entirely ignorant of his own business, and 
 lived on the talents of the young men he employed. He 
 used to keep them in little dens in his house, send out 
 their work in his name, and try to find out what their 
 opinions were of each other. Barye would never tell 
 him any thing. Poor Faucennier died, says Silvestre 
 (sel vestr'), in consequence of reading Benvenuto Cellini's 
 (ben va ncjo'to chel le'ne) "Treatise on Q-oldsmith's Work"; 
 he was so amazed and puzzled at finding out the true 
 scope of his profession that it was too much for his 
 head. 
 
 Barye, in the meantime, had married, and settled near 
 Faucennier. He took as much time as possible from his 
 day's work for drawing, sculpture, and painting.* 
 
 In 182 7 he exhibited in the Salon (sa long') for the 
 
 * The daily hours of leisure left by his work for the daily hread of himself 
 and his family were zealously devoted to attending lectures at the Jardin des 
 Plantes, to studying human and animal anatomy in the dissecting rooms, to 
 taking measurements of lengths and proportions, and to drawing from nature 
 and after the masters in the Louvre (161/ v)-). At the same time he carefully 
 studied all the processes and details of casting in various metals, and thus ac- 
 quired a mass of ohservations and documents, and a knowledge of all the 
 branches of the sculptor's art, which enabled him finally to come forth with 
 almost a masterpiece, and thereafter to continue his career without hesitation 
 or uncertainty. But we must not imagine that Barye destined himself merely to 
 the sculpture of animals, or even to sculpture alone. — Antoine Louis Barye, an 
 article by TTieodore Child in " Barper^s Magazine " for September, 1885. 
 
98 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 first time ; he sent some medallion portraits and busts 
 which went unnoticed. In 182 9, according to Silvestre, 
 "his talent revealed itself by two busts (of a young man 
 and woman) of a fineness of modeling which is still 
 celebrated (1855) in the memory of artists and con- 
 noisseurs " (kon nis sup')- 
 
 In 1831 he had his first great success, which fol- 
 lowed upon the exhibition of his " Tiger Devouring a 
 Crocodile." The public was delighted with it ; so were 
 the critics. It was entirely new, and every one declared 
 it "the strongest and most original work in the exhibition." 
 Barye exhibited a "Saint Sebastian" (san sebast'yan) 
 at the same time ; it was not so unconventional, though 
 a fine statue. For one of these two works, — Mr. Child 
 thinks the "St. Sebastian," — Barye received a second 
 medal. 
 
 The next year, beside water-colors and medallions, 
 he exhibited eleven pieces of sculpture, among them 
 the " Lion and Serpent," which now stands on the 
 river-side terrace of the Tuileries (t^^^el're) gardens. 
 Its purchase by the government, and the decoration 
 of its author with the Cross of the Legion of Honor, 
 seemed to open up for Barye the road to success and 
 glory. He had an order for a bass-relief for the Bastile 
 (bas tel') Column. 
 
 The Duke of Orleans (or' le anz) and his brothers were 
 interested in him, and there were plans for his decorat- 
 ing the Pont de la Concorde (pon deh la kong' kord) with 
 groups of animals and adorning the top of the Arch of 
 Triumph. Thiers (te ar'), who was an admirer of his 
 genius, had devised the last two projects. Barye was 
 to make a colossal eagle, grasping the thunder-bolts, and 
 hovering over the emblems of the nations which the 
 
BARYE. 99 
 
 empire had brought low. But both projects feU through. 
 Barye received an order for a colossal lion, and nothing 
 more, at that time, was wanted of him for the public 
 works. In 1837, to the lasting disgrace of the Insti- 
 tute, which at that time acted as jury for the Salon, 
 his bronzes were refused, as not being sculpture, but 
 goldsmith's work. 
 
 For ten years, justly offended, he sent nothing to the 
 Salon. He kept his feelings to himself, and produced a 
 quantity of small bronzes, mostly animals, which he 
 himself made, published, and sold at his studio. He had 
 paid much attention to the casting of metals, and at one 
 period had come very near going into business as a sil- 
 versmith. He would probably have been glad to cast 
 his own bronzes ; but he was obliged to have recourse to 
 professional founders, who have all retained a lively re- 
 membrance of his exacting criticism. "Whenever a bad 
 lot of castings came in from the foundry," said one of 
 his workmen, " it made him ill, and he would not be seen 
 again in the shop for a week." He was anxious to get 
 perfect castings, so as to leave as little as possible to the 
 finishing by chisel ; so that he tried various experiments, 
 and especially the very costly process called a cire per- 
 due* (a ser perdu')- 
 
 He sold his work at prices which seem astonishingly 
 low to us now. In a catalogue published as late as 1855, 
 
 * Casting a cire perdue is one of tlie most difflcnlt feats of the founder's art. 
 In principle tlie operation is tlireefold : the artist first makes his model in pure 
 wax; over this model the mold is formed of a clay composition, and the wax 
 model is melted out by heat ; the liquid metal is then poured into the matrix 
 thus formed, and when the whole mass is cold, the mold is "broken off, and the 
 mold appears reproduced in bronze with the utmost fidelity, and furthermore 
 with the additional quality of rarity; for a model reproduced a cire perdue is 
 unique by the very fact that the model disappears in the making of the mold, 
 and the mold disappears in the birth of the bronze. —J-j-iicfo by Theodore Child 
 in " Harper''s." 
 
100 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 the cheapest pieces, — rabbits and turtles, — are marked at 
 sixty or seventy cents ; while the most expensive one, a 
 luster with thirty lights, ornamented with ten small fig- 
 ures, sold at two hundred and eighty dollars. He did not 
 sell a great deal ; his processes were very expensive, the 
 influence of the Institute seems to have kept away public 
 orders, and he was too modest and too proud to assert 
 himself in the least.* 
 
 It is therefore not surprising that in the troubles of 
 1848, on being called upon to return some money he 
 had borrowed, Barye should have been obliged to deposit 
 
 * Tlie ordinary impression conveyed by Barye's "bearing and manner was that 
 of a man cold, melancholy, and not easy to get on with. His look was hard and 
 slightly disdainful, and his rare utterances were made in a dry and curt tone, 
 each word issuing from his Ups with clean and trenchant enunciation. When 
 he smiled his lips parted just sufficiently to show two canine teeth, wliich gave 
 him literally a mordant (iiior' dant) air, and the older he grew the more mordant 
 and caustic he became, but only in the intimate society of tried friends, for in 
 general company he remained invariably a silent listener. But Barye was by 
 no means a recluse. * * * jjis society was much sought after, and he was 
 always surrounded by a select circle of friends and connoisseurs, for whom he 
 worked, and among whom were the Duke of Orleans and his brothers and the 
 Due de Luynes {deh loo en'). Delacroix, the great romantic painter, was one of 
 his earliest friends, and his frequent companion in study before the cages at the 
 wild-beast shows in the Jardin des Plantes. Corot, Diaz, and Theodore Rousseau 
 were also very intimate with Barj'e, and also the great Millet, whose neighbor 
 at Barbizon (bar be zbn') he afterward became. * * * Barye was fond of the 
 theater too, and his desire to study types of humanity led him into all kinds of 
 queer places of popular amusement. On Saturdays he used regularly to visit 
 the horse market; on Sundays he would often go to visit animal Ufe at the dog 
 market, and he was even a frequent spectator of the ignoble dog fights which 
 were then to be seen in the outskirts of Paris. A rule and a sketch-book were 
 his inseparable companions in these excursions, and he would frequently stop in 
 the street to measure a horse or to note a movement. * * « One of the appren- 
 tices (in Barye's studio) had reared a very fine cat to live in the workshop 
 with the chasers {chds' ers) and mounters {mount' ers), and often of an afternoon 
 Barye w*ould come in, sit down on a stool, and entice the cat to his knees. 
 "Hullo I there's the boss doing his studying 1 " one of the boys would say; and 
 there the great artist sometimes sat for an hour at a time, stroking the cat, 
 tickling her feet, in order to make her push out her talons, pulling her legs, and 
 feeling the play of the muscles and tendons as he induced her by caresses and 
 playful ruses to take all kinds of positions and to execute the most diverse move- 
 ments.— r/isot^ors Child, in '■' Harper's Magazine^ 
 
BARYE. 101 
 
 his models as a gaarantee for the debt, which he was 
 unable to pay in full till 1857. 
 
 The revolution, however, brought Barye comfort as 
 well as annoyance. This year there was no Institute in 
 charge of the Salon ; the artists at once elected him a 
 member of the jury in the section of sculpture, and he 
 was made keeper of the gallery of casts at the Louvre, 
 and director of the plaster-casting shop there. He was 
 an excellent officer, and "introduced many improvements 
 in the reproduction of the antiqiie statues " in plaster. 
 But public events prevented his stay at the Louvre from 
 being a long one. 
 
 In 1851:, he was made Professor of Drawing at the 
 Jardin des Plantes, a position he held at the time of his 
 death, though he appears to have had but few scholars 
 there. It probably was of very little pecuniary profit 
 to him, but with the honorable feeling which is almost 
 a matter of course among French artists, he was ready 
 to teach what he knew. 
 
 Monsieur Fremiet (mo ser' fra me a') is now instructor 
 in the drawing of animals in the Jardin des Plantes. 
 His course, which is free both to men and women every 
 spring, is a most valuable and interesting one ; and one 
 of his pupils is glad of this opportunity of expressing 
 her obligations to her professor. Women have so few 
 opportunities for the study of scidpture in Paris that it 
 is worth while to mention this chance of becoming the 
 pupil of one of the best sculptors of animals of the 
 present day. 
 
 Another opportunity which might be very useful to 
 women who wish to learn sculpture, is that recently 
 given by certain courses in anatomy at the Ecole de 
 ]VJ4decine (a kol' dSh mad e sen') on Sunday mornings. 
 
102 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 These lessons are especially for the benefit of women 
 students. 
 
 In 1855, at the Universal Exposition, he received the 
 grand medal of honor in the section of artistic bronzes, 
 and "was promoted to the rank of officer of the Legion 
 of Honor. At last, orders for public works began to 
 come ; Lefuel (leh foo 6V), the architect in charge of the 
 completion of the Palace of the Louvre, was prevailed 
 upon by Francais (frong'sa) and Matout (ma too') to give 
 Barye an order. They told the sculptor, but he was so 
 little used to good fortune that he would not believe 
 them. They told him again, but this time he grew 
 angry. The next morning he received the official order. 
 It was for a figure group representing War. Lefuel was 
 so much i:)leased with the sketch, that he immediately 
 ordered of Barye the three other groups. Peace, Order, 
 and Strength, which now adorn the pavilions Richelieu 
 (resh le Cih') and Denon * (deh non')- 
 
 * No sooner had Lefuel seen the group than he exclaimed, enthusiastically : 
 " I congratulate you heartily, Monsieur Barye ; the composition is admirable— 
 admirable. But you have placed me in a very embarrassing position." 
 
 " How so ? " said Barye, springing forward with an expression of mingled 
 fear and irritation. 
 
 " Mon Dieu (mtin deuh). Monsieur Barye, your group could not be finer ; it is so 
 admirable that really I am very much embarrassed." 
 
 " Monsieur, I beg you be good enough to explain yourself," said Barye, more 
 and more impatiently, and fearing some catastrophe. 
 
 "Why, I shall simply be obliged to commission you to csecute the three 
 other groups." 
 
 * * * The original models of these groups, reproduced in bronze, form part 
 of the admirable Barye monument recently presented to the town of Baltimore 
 by a great admirer of the sculptor's genius, Mr. W. T. Walters.— Article by Theodore 
 Child, in " Sarper^s Magazine.^'' 
 
 Mr. Walters' collection of the works of Barye is the finest which exists ; most 
 of the examples in it are either the original models, or proofs finished by Barye 
 himself. " The Tiger Hunt," one of the finest works in the collection, modeled 
 for the Duke of Orleans, is unique, being an example of the process a cire perdue. 
 There is also a fine collection of Barye's works in the Corcoran Q-allery, at Wash- 
 ington. Both of the collections are much larger than that of the Luxembourg 
 (looks ong boor') Museum, in Paris. 
 
BARTE. 103 
 
 Barye also designed one of the pediments of the 
 Louvre, representing "ISTapoleon dominating History and 
 the Arts," and " over the triple archway of the Quai (ka) 
 du Louvre," says Mr. Child, "he designed two recumbent 
 figures of youths, which served as supporters for the slab 
 in which was inserted his bronze bass-relief equestrian 
 portrait of Napoleon III. in the costume of a Roman 
 Emperor, his brow circled with a laurel crown." 
 
 After the Revolution of September 4, 18 70, this bass- 
 relief was hidden with plaster; now, like most emblems 
 of the Bonaparte family, it has been taken down ; but 
 the recumbent youths remain. There is also a "Seated 
 Lion," by Barye, at one of the doors of the palace on 
 the Quai du Louvre. 
 
 Barye also received various public orders from the 
 provinces. The town of Ajaccio (ayat'cho), in Corsica 
 (kor'si ka), ordered an equestrian statue of Napoleon 
 from him ; four groups were ordered from Marseilles 
 (mar salz'). Another equestrian statue was projected for 
 the town of Grenoble (gren obi')- The emperor was to 
 be represented in modern dress, and Barye not only 
 hired a costume, at great expense, but made the greatest 
 efforts to find a model who was of exactly Napoleon's 
 size and shape.* 
 
 * Barye was always strictly conscientious about these preliminary studies. 
 As Silvestre says, lie admired the great sculptors who had gone before him ; but 
 he could not follow blindly any conventional standard of measurement. * * * 
 He was so sure of himself, that he could dictate his compositions from memory 
 to any one ; he could lay out the lengths, thicknesses, and directions of the differ- 
 ent parts of a drawing by arithmetical figures so that a child could have made 
 an irreproachable drawing by following it. 
 
 Sculptors usually, in starting the wire skeletons on which they model the 
 clay, arrange them in such a manner that the action and proportion are settled 
 once for all. Barye kept his work in such a state that it was in entire subjection 
 to him, and this probably has something to do with the nobility of the action of 
 his statues. "Barye," says Silvestre, "did not imitate the Greeks, but he resem- 
 bles them naturally." 
 
104 AETISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 When the clay sketch was finished, the Mayor of 
 Grenoble came to see it. He had unfortunately seen the 
 emperor when he was a boy, and he made a suggestion to 
 Barye about the attitude of an arm. Barye replied with 
 politeness, but never touched the model again. Some 
 time after, he was told that ten thousand francs (two 
 thousand dollars) had been waiting for him several 
 months at the Ministry of the Interior. 
 
 "Yes, I know," said Barye. "It is for the Napoleon. 
 I shall not take it. The order is not regular." 
 
 "But the fact of the order having been given to pay 
 you the money?" 
 
 "No matter," replied Barye, impatiently; "I shall not 
 touch the money. Besides, I have had enough of making 
 statues of Napoleon. I shall not execute the order." 
 
 In 186 6, Barye was persuaded by his friends to present 
 himself as a candidate for the Institute. He had nine 
 votes, and vowed never to try again. In 1868, thanks 
 to a friendly stratagem of Lefuel's, he was once more 
 induced to make the necessary visits, and this time he 
 was elected. Nobody is elected to any one of the 
 five Academies which make up the Institute of France, 
 unless he first pays a visit to each member of that 
 Academy. Barye could not be persuaded to go through 
 with this again. His friend had invited him to break- 
 fast, and afterward prevailed upon him to continue their 
 talk in his carriage. They stopped at the house of a 
 member of the Institute, and Barye unsuspectingly went 
 up with Lefuel to see him. As they were coming 
 down-stairs, Lefuel said, " There ! you have made your 
 first visit ; now go and make the others — it's no harder 
 than that." 
 
 Barye's home in the latter part of his life was on the 
 
BARYE. 105 
 
 Quai des Celestins (sa les tan'). He had lost his first wife 
 and her children ; he married again and had another 
 family. He had a cottage at Barbizon, the home of 
 Millet and Rousseau, where he made landscape studies 
 in oil and water-colors. He was a painter of considerable 
 merit, and a strong colorist. Long before, in 1828, he 
 had called himself a "sculptor landscapist," and he took 
 pleasure in painting the animals he loved, among appro- 
 priate and noble scenery. During the last few years of 
 his life, he spent most of his time in this way. He had 
 already begun to suffer from gout, and handled his mod- 
 eling tools but little. At last he became seriously ill. 
 "His wife dared not tell him," says Mr. Eckford, "that 
 Corot was dead, and that * * * Millet * * * -^as 
 dangerously ill." It was not long after that Barye too 
 died, on the 25th of June, 18 75. 
 
 Grreat artists and members of the Legion of Honor 
 came to his funeral. As it passed through the quarter 
 where he lived, workmen hastened out fi-om the fac- 
 tories to do honor to a man who, as well as being one 
 of the greatest sculptors in Paris, was one of the best 
 workmen. For no man in Paris could cast bronze like 
 Barye.* 
 
 * The exhibition of Barye's work, after his deatli, comprised 350 bronzes and 
 plaster models, 100 oil paintings, 70 water-colors, and upward of 100 drawings 
 and sketches. These were only what he had in his studio at the time of his 
 death. * * * Theseus {thV si us) was seen on the point of plunging his poniard 
 into the stupid brow of the Minotaur (min' o tmor) \ in another group, Theseus, his 
 knees firmly grasping the ilanks of the Centaur Bienor {sen' tawr In e' nor), is dealing 
 a death-blow upon the human head of the strange antique monster ; here is the 
 hippogriff, half bird, half horse, straining forward over the waves in mid-air, 
 and bearing on his back the romantic hero of Ariosto's {ar I os' toz) story, who 
 holds in his stalwart arms the graceful form of Angelica (an gW % M) ; here are 
 equestrian statues that remind you of the precious bronzes of the Eenaissance 
 {ruh na songs')— Qaston da Poix {gas tong' deh fwd), Charles VII., Tartar and Arab 
 Cavaliers, and the great Csesar of our century. General Bonaparte (fio' na part) \ 
 here are the goddesses of Olympus (5 Tim' pas), Venus (W nus), Juno {jW no), and 
 
106 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 Minerva {mmir' m). Seated beneath a triple-faced chimera (lAmi' ra), from which 
 spring the twelve floriated (fio' n a ted) branches of a candelabrum (kdn de Id' brum)^ 
 around a crowning group composed of the three Graces ; here are the plaster 
 models of the groups of "War," "Peace," "Order," and "Strength," and the 
 "Xiion of the Bastile Column," that splendid bass-relief in which Barye has 
 solved the great problem of reconciling the ideal with the real and achieving 
 sublimity without abandoning truth. — ^rticfc hy Theodore Child, in '■'Harper's 
 
MILLKT. 
 
 1814-1875. 
 
 JEAN FRANgOIS MILLET (zh6n frSng swa' me ya') 
 "was born October 4, 1814, in the village of Gfruchy 
 (grob'she), not far from Cherbourg (sher'burg), in Nor- 
 mandy. His father was a farmer, an excellent man, of 
 singularly refined tastes, with a great love for music and 
 for the Nature he saw around him. His mother was an 
 industrious and pious woman, of a family of rich farmers, 
 which had had some pretensions to gentle blood. Fran- 
 9ois as a child was brought up by his grandmother, who, 
 according to the country custom, took care of the family 
 while the mother was busy with farm-work.* She was a 
 remarkable woman, full of wisdom and religious fervor ; 
 she threw her whole heart into her duties, and exerted 
 the strongest influence over her grandson, through his 
 whole life. Her family was an unusually clever one ; 
 
 * His grandmother was his godmother. She called him Jean after his father, 
 and Erancois after a saint whoin she loved, and whose protection she constantly 
 invoked. St. Prancif of Assisi, the faithful observer of the things of Nature, was 
 a happy choice of a saint for the man who, later, was to he the passionate lover 
 of the works of God. Proud of having a boy to rear, the grandmother tended 
 him as her own child and her heart's favorite. In the vague recollections of his 
 babyhood. Millet could always see her busy about him, rocking him, warming 
 him in her bosom, and singing all day long songs which delighted him. I have 
 lived more than thirty years in Millet's intimacy, and I know that the thought 
 of her face, as nurse and comforter, was an ever-recurring image in the heart of 
 her grandson. While he was still a little child, she would come to his bedside 
 in the morning, and say, gently: "Wake up, my little PranQois ; you don't know 
 how long the birds have been singing the glory of G-od ! " Her religion, as Millet 
 told me later, was mixed with her love of Nature. "It was a beautiful religion," 
 he added, "for it gave her strength to love deeply and unselfishly. She was 
 always ready to work for others, to pity and help them." 
 
108 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 they were energetic and reading people. One of her 
 brothers was a chemist of some note ; one, though only 
 a miller by occupation, spent his time in reading Mon- 
 taigne (mon tan'), Pascal (pas kal'), and the writers of 
 Port Royal ; another was a great traveler ; another was 
 a monk. Millet had another great-uncle who was in 
 orders ; this was Charles Millet, his grandfather's brother. 
 When the Revolution sent him back to his village, he 
 refused, at the risk of his life, to take the constitutional 
 oath then offered to priests ; he would not even give up 
 his clerical dress, in spite of the danger, but plowed 
 the fields in his cassock and wooden shoes. He was very 
 fond of little Francois, and took him all about with him. 
 After twelve years of life among such good and high- 
 minded people as Millet's relations, it is not surprising 
 that, when he was sent to prepare for his first com- 
 munion, the clergyman was struck by his answers, and 
 proposed his coming to the parsonage to learn Latin.* 
 He was much delighted with Virgil (ver' gil), which made 
 him think of the country he lived in. His schooling was 
 
 * " This I remember hearing about my great-uncle ; he was brother of my 
 father's father. He had been a laborer all his Ufe, and had become a priest 
 rather late. I think he had a little church in the time of the Revolution. I 
 know that he was persecuted, for I have heard that men came to search the 
 house of my grandfather, to whom he had returned, and that they made theii 
 search in the most brutal manner. He was very inventive, and had contrived a 
 hiding-place which communicated into his bed, and into which he threw himself 
 if any one came. One day they entered so sviddenly that the bed had not had 
 time to cool, and although they were told he was not there, they cried : 
 
 " 'Tes, yes, he is here; the bed is still warm, but he has found some way of 
 getting off.' 
 
 " He heard them. They turned the house upside down in their fury, and went 
 away. 
 
 "He said mass whenever he could in the house. After breakfast he went to 
 work in the fields, taking off his soutane (sod tan'), and working in shirt-sleeves 
 and breeches. He had the strength of a Hercules (Mr'TdlUz). Some great walls 
 which he built with his own strength still exist, made of immense stones and 
 Yery high." 
 
MILLET. 109 
 
 often interrupted by farm-work, and at last he had to 
 leave the good priests altogether, and give himself up to 
 his duty as eldest son. He became very expert in all 
 sorts of work, and all his life was proud of being a 
 strong and dexterous laborer. He read a great deal, 
 for his father's house was by no means empty of books ; 
 they seem to have owned the " Lives of the Saints," "Saint 
 Augustine's (sant a^A^'gus tenz) Confessions," Saint Francis 
 de Sales (deh sal), Saint Jerome, Bossuet (bo su a'), Fene- 
 Ion (fa na long'), and the Port Eoyal men. Millet's relig- 
 ion, which was sincere all his life, drew plenty of nour- 
 ishment from these good books. He was a constant reader 
 of the Bible, always in the Latin ; that and the Latin 
 Virgil were his familiar friends. 
 
 During the noonday rest, which every French work- 
 man and laborer takes, the boy tried to draw the things 
 which surrounded him. He wanted to make something- 
 like the old prints in the Bible. One day, coming home 
 from church, he met an old man walking as if he were 
 tired, with his back bent. He was struck by the figure, 
 and something in it made him understand how to ex- 
 press the retreating and advancing of its different parts. 
 As soon as he came home, he managed to express what 
 he had seen with a lump of charcoal. 
 
 His father was much struck by the sketch. He talked 
 the matter over with Fran9ois, now eighteen years old, 
 and the boy "admitted that he had some desire to be- 
 come a painter." "My poor Fran9ois," said his father, 
 "I see you are troubled by the idea. I should gladly 
 have sent you to have the trade of painting taught to 
 you, which they say is so fine, but I could not spare you ; 
 now that your brothers are older, I do not wish to pre- 
 vent you from learning that which you are so anxious 
 
110 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 to know. We will soon go to Cherbourg and find out 
 whether you have talent enough to earn your Uving by 
 this business." 
 
 They went to Cherbourg, to a painter called Mouchel 
 (mc5oshei'), an old pupil of David (daved'), but not at all 
 like him. He refused to believe that the boy had made 
 the drawings they showed him, and finally said, "Well, 
 you will go to perdition for having kept him so long, for 
 your child has the stuff of a great painter ! " 
 
 Millet stayed some time with Mouchel. He was called 
 back to Gfruchy by the death of his good father, — tried 
 to carry on the farm for a while, and then went back 
 again to Cherbourg, to the studio of a painter named 
 Langlois (long glwa'). He read a great deal at Cher- 
 bourg. His work was admired there, and his master, 
 who felt he could teach him nothing, petitioned the 
 municipal council for a little pension for his education. 
 The Council of the Department added something to it 
 later, and the young fellow went to Paris in 183 7.* 
 
 * "I never studied systematically. At school, when writing from dictation, 
 my task was better written than the others, prohably because I read constantly, 
 and the words and phrases were pictured rather in my eyes than in my mind, 
 and I instinctively reproduced tliem. I never followed programmes ; I never 
 learned a lesson by heart; all my time was spent in writing capital letters and 
 drawing. I never could get beyond addition in mathematics, and I do not under- 
 stand subtraction and the rules following. My reckoning is always in my head, 
 and by ways that I could not explain. I came to Paris with all my ideas of art 
 fixed, and I have not found it necessary to change them. I have been more or 
 less in love with this master, or that method of art, but I have not modified any 
 fundamental opinions. You have seen my first drawing made at home without 
 a master, without a model, without a guide. I have never done any thing dif- 
 ferent since. You have never seen me paint except in a low tone ; demi-tint {dSm'i- 
 iiiit) is necessary to me in order to sharpen my eyes and clear my thoughts; it 
 has been my best teacher. 
 
 " I got to Paris one Saturday evening in January, in the snow. The light of 
 the street lamps, almost put out by the fog, the immense quantities of horses 
 and wagons passing and repassing, the narrow streets, the smell and the air of 
 Paris, went to my head and my heart so that I was almost suffocated. I w&s 
 seized with a sobbing which I could not control. I wanted to get the better of 
 
MILLET. Ill 
 
 He was in no hurry, at first, to go to any of the classes 
 of the day. He wanted to go to the Louvre (loo'vr), but 
 was too shy to asls his way. At last he found it, and he 
 was not disappointed. He went nowhere else for a 
 month. Long after he used to say proudly, "I know my 
 Louvre well," and from that one gallery he learned more 
 than most travelers get from five or six. He loved 
 Michael Angelo (mi'kael an'jel o) and Mantegna (man- 
 tan' ya) and Fra Angelico (fra anjel'eko), Murillo's 
 (mc5o re'lyoz) portraits, and some of Ribera's (reba'raz) 
 pictures, Poussin (poo sang') and Lesueur (leh sci ur'), and 
 especially the "Concert in the Fields" by Giorgione 
 (jorjon'a), in front of which he once spent a whole 
 day. He did not care much for Watteau (vat to'), still 
 less for Boucher (boo sha'), though he was to unwillingly 
 imitate them later ; Delacroix (deh la krwa') was the only 
 modern painter he liked in the Luxembourg (luks 6ng- 
 b(5or'). At last he made up his mind to leave his dear 
 museums, and entered the studio of Paul Delaroche (pol 
 d'la rosh'). 
 
 The reception of a new student, or nouveau (nc5o vC), 
 in a Paris studio is apt to be a rough affair. Millet, who 
 was a strongly-built fellow, replied either by silence or 
 by his fists to the advances of his fellow-students, and 
 
 my feelings, but they overcame me with their violence. I could only stop my 
 tears by washing my face with water which I took from a street fountain. The 
 coolness gave me courage. A print-seller was there, — I looked at his prints and 
 munched my last apple. The lithographs displeased me very much ; the subjects 
 were of an unrefined character, after the style such artists as Deveria {da va,' re a) 
 and Maurin {mo rang'), then drew; they seemed to me signs of perfumery and 
 fashion-plates. Paris seemed to me dismal and tasteless. ]?or the first, I went to 
 a little hotel, where I spent the night in a sort of nightmare, in which I saw my 
 home, full of melancholy, with my mother, grandmother, and sister spinning in 
 the evening, weeping and thinking of me. Then the evil demon drove me on 
 before wonderful pictures, so beautiful and brilliant that they appeared to take 
 fire and vanish in a heavenly cloud." 
 
112 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 they decided to let him alone.* Delaroche gave him 
 some criticism, which he found hardly satisfactory ; but 
 he took an interest in the young painter, and when he 
 was too poor to remain in the studio, asked him to stay 
 on for nothing. Millet finally left the class on account 
 of Delaroche's conduct in regard to the " Prix de Rome " 
 (pre deh rom), for which he was competing. Delaroche 
 told him his figure was good, but that he wanted another 
 man to get the prize, and that next year he would use 
 
 * Paul Delaroclie was the fashionable painter of the day. His atelier (at tt a') 
 was divided into two classes,— the cast for beginners, and that of the life-models. 
 Millet found a group of young men, not unknown later : Couture {km tur'), Hehert 
 (aber'), Cavalier (kdvdlyd'), the sculptor, Gendron (zhmg drvng'), Edouard iPrere 
 (a dob dr' frdr)^ Tvon (? vong'), etc., etc. 
 
 In entering this new world, Millet Imposed upon himself the strictest silence 
 and circumspection. Like a true peasant, he let others approach him and 
 answered little. They tried to make out this puzzling countryman ; they apostro- 
 phized, joked, and teased him, but Millet answered nothing, or, with his fists, 
 threatened those who went too far, and as he was built like a Hercules, they let 
 him alone, giving him the nickname of "man of the woods." 
 
 His first drawing was from the Germanicus (jer man' % Icus) . On Monday, the 
 drawing was begun ; it had to be flinished by Saturday. On Thursday, Millet 
 had finished his figure. Delaroche came, looked at the drawing a long time, 
 and said : " You are a new-comer ; well, you know too much, and not enough." 
 That was all he said. Couture, who was in the life-class, came in to see the 
 antique class, and said to him : " Hello, nouveau 1 Do you know that your 
 drawing is good?" Some time after, he was severely criticised. The originality 
 of his studies, in which knowledge was wanting while the spirit was every 
 thing, surprised the studio, but did not make them understand him. All hut 
 one or two pupils considered him as a curious being, without a future ; an 
 obstinate fellow, who took the pose of eccentric drawing, a mutineer in the 
 academic camp. When he passed into the life-school, he had the same trial. His 
 first figure, nevertheless, was a success. Delaroche said: "It is easy to see that 
 you have painted a great deal." He had, in fact, never touched a palette before. 
 "I only tried," he said, "to express as simply as possible the attachments of the 
 muscles without occupying myself with the color-medium, of which I was entirely 
 ignorant." All wished to see the figure, and did not fail to find it "insolently 
 natural." Boisseau (bwds'i'), one of the master's pets, used to say, "Eh! Are you 
 coming here to give us some more of your fine figures? Are you going to make 
 men and women on your own plan? You know the master does not like this 
 Caen cookery ! " 
 
 "What do I care!" answered Millet. "I do not come here to please any- 
 body. I come here because there are antiques and models to teach me, that is 
 all. Do I object to your flgiu'es made of butter and honey?" 
 
MILLET. 113 
 
 his influence for him. Millet was shocked at what 
 seemed to him double-deahng, left the studio, and went 
 on studying at Suisse 's (s^A^e'sez) life-class, where most 
 of the great painters of his day worked at one time or 
 another. He set up a studio of his own with a friend 
 called MaroUe (ma rol'). 
 
 Millet's pension came irregularly, and he had not 
 enough to live on. His friend advised him to make imi- 
 tations from Watteau and Boucher. Much against his 
 will, he did this, and was glad when he could get twenty 
 francs apiece for them. 
 
 He still read and studied; and in 1840, he first ex- 
 hibited in the Salon (sa long'). The admission of pictures 
 was at that time in the hands of the Institute, and the 
 " new lights " of the day, Delacroix, Rousseau (rc5o so'), 
 Decamps (deh kong'), Jules Dupre (zhul du pra'), and 
 Corot (ko ro'), had either all or a part of the pictures they 
 sent there refused. Millet sent two portraits, one of 
 which was admitted. 
 
 Almost every year, during his early Paris life, he went 
 back to visit his mother and grandmother. He managed 
 to get some commissions in Cherbourg, — some of them 
 for portraits, some less profitable ones, for signs. In 
 1841, he was married. His wife was a Cherbourg girl, 
 whose portrait he had painted. Her health was very deli- 
 cate, and she died in little more than two years. He 
 went back to Paris in 1842. 
 
 In the years which immediately followed, his work 
 gained in charm and color. He had a great facility 
 of execution, and lacked the strong precision which we 
 find in his pictures later. He suffered horribly from 
 poverty in Paris, then went back to Cherbourg, and was 
 well received there. It was in Normandy that, some 
 
114 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 time after his first wife's death, he married the excellent 
 and devoted woman who was to strengthen and comfort 
 him through his hard life. They started for Paris in 
 1845, stopping at Havre (a'vr), where Millet did a great 
 deal of painting, and managed to get nine hundred francs 
 together. 
 
 On getting to Paris, they established themselves very 
 modestly in the Rue Rochechouart (rosh shc5o ar'), among 
 a colony of artists. Millet began to work at once. He 
 was much admired as a painter of flesh, and painted a 
 great number of nude subjects, full of a healthful beauty 
 of their own. One picture of this sort is his " CEdipus " 
 (ed'i pus), exhibited in 1847,* which was praised by 
 Theophile Q-autier (ta o fei' go te a')- Millet was taken ill 
 with a fever in 1848. He was very poor, but his friends 
 managed to get enough money together to help him 
 materially, and he recovered in time to finish two pict- 
 ures for the Salon. 
 
 The Revolution, which was then going on, had abol- 
 ished the jury of admission, and every thing sent was 
 hung. One of his pictures, the "Winnower," had a 
 
 * It was in 1847 that I saw Mm first. I went with. Troyon (trwd yong') to his 
 lodging in the Eue Rochechouart. He wore a strange garb, which gave his whole 
 person an outlandish look. A hrownstone-colored overcoat, a thick beard and 
 long hair covered with a woolen cap, like those worn by coachmen, gave his face 
 a character which made one think of the painters of the Middle Ages. His 
 reception was kind, but almost silent. On finding that I had been brought up in 
 the country and liked his painting, he began to be more expansive. "Every sub- 
 ject is good," said he, "only it must be rendered with thought and clearness. 
 In art there must be a governing thought expressed eloquently. We must have 
 it in ourselves and stamp it upon others, just as a model is stamped. Art is not 
 a pleasure trip; it is a fight,— a mill that grinds. I am not a philosopher. I do 
 not want to stop pain, or to find a formula which will make me indifferent or a 
 stoic. Pain is, perhaps, that which makes the artist express himself most dis- 
 tinctly." I saw Millet afterward in his home, beside his wife, who hid with 
 dignity the poverty of the household,— he rocking the little children, then slowly 
 returning to his work with the deliberation of one of the oxen of his own 
 country. 
 
MILLET. 115 
 
 success. But nobody bought pictures in tliose times, 
 and the Millets were in the greatest distress. Once 
 more their friends helped them,* and Ledru RoUin 
 (leh drc5o' rol lang'), the minister, was persuaded to give 
 Millet a commission for eighteen hundred francs. 
 
 He had begun a fine painting of Hagar (ha' gar) and 
 Ishmael (ish' ma el), almost nude figures, under a burning 
 light. But he suddenly stopped and painted on the same 
 canvas " Haymakers Resting Beside a Haycock." This 
 was the reason of the change : he had been looking into 
 Deforge's (deh forzh'ez) window one night, and over- 
 heard two young men talking about a picture of his 
 which was exhibited there, "Women Bathing." "Do you 
 know who painted that?" said one. "Yes," said the 
 other, "a fellow called Millet, who only paints such 
 subjects." 
 
 Millet was much shocked at what he heard. He told 
 his wife about it. "If you consent," said he, "I will do 
 no more of that sort of pictures. Living will be harder 
 than ever, and you will suffer, but I shall be free to do 
 what I have long been thinking of." Mme. Millet an- 
 swered, "I am ready; do as you will." 
 
 What he had long been thinking of, was the repre- 
 senting country life as he saw it and had known it ; not 
 as an elegant pastoral, but as a stern though often 
 
 * The Eevolution had stopped all picture-huying, and artists suffered the 
 extremest famine. Millet and his wife did not complain ; they asked for nothing, 
 but we knew their distress. One of us went to the Museum, then to the Director 
 of the Beaux Arts (hos fir'), and got a hundred francs, which we took immediately 
 to the painter. It was at twilight. Millet was in his studio, sitting on a hox, his 
 hack bent like a man who is chilled. He said " Good-day," hut did not move. 
 It was freezing cold in the miserable room. When the money was handed him, 
 he said: "Thank you; it comes in time. We have not eaten for two days, but 
 the important thing is that the children have not suffered. Until to-day they 
 have had food." He called his wife, saying, "I am going to get wood; I am very 
 cold." He did not say another word, and never spoke of it again. 
 
116 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 glorious reality. All the rest of his life was devoted to 
 this work ; and he wished to do no other till he had 
 made people listen to the message he had to give. In 
 1849, he and Jacque (zhak) went out of town to avoid 
 the cholera and the revolution. They took their families 
 to Barbizon (bar be zong'), near the Forest of Fontain- 
 bleau (fong tan bio'), and took houses there.* " We want 
 to stay here some time," says Millet, in one of his letters. 
 He stayed there twenty-seven years, — all his life. 
 
 He was delighted with the forest and the country, — 
 so delighted that at first he could not paint, and could 
 do nothing but roam about. When he grew a little more 
 accustomed to what he saw, he began to try to represent 
 the life which surrounded him. The first serious com- 
 position he made there was a beautiful harvest scene 
 called "Ruth and Boaz " (bo'az), which he drew on the 
 wall of his studio. The reapers and gleaners are real 
 peasants, and for that reason they represent the scene 
 as well as more archeeologically (ar ke o loj'i kai i:y) cor- 
 rect figures, who have not the intangible air of the fields 
 about them. 
 
 It was at this time that he produced his great picture 
 of the "Sower." It was done, says Sensier (sang ss a'), in 
 remembrance of his old life in Normandy, when he him- 
 
 * He liad taken a little peasant's lioiise with three narrow, low rooms, which 
 served as studio, kitchen, and bedroom for his wife and his three children. 
 Later, when the children increased to nine, the little house was lengthened by 
 two other rooms. A studio was built at the end of the garden, and Millet added 
 a wash-house and a chicken-yard in the middle of a garden which was leased to 
 him. He had two occupations ; in the morning he dug or planted, sowed or 
 reaped. After lunch, he went into the low, dark, cold room called a studio. He 
 did not dislike this shadowy nook, for there a great deal of his works were com- 
 posed, and all his poetic compositions, sketches, drawings. His first vision was 
 a Bible subject, "Euth and Boaz," which he drew on the wall in crayon. They 
 were real peasants,— a harvest scene where the master, as in the Scripture, finds 
 a young gleaner, and leads her blushing to the feast of the country people. 
 
MILLET. 117 
 
 self used to plant the grain which was to bring those he 
 loved their daily bread. The " Sower " was exhibited 
 and much admired by the young school ; it was seen 
 and admired by William Morris Hunt, then a pupil of 
 Couture, and became the property of Mr. Quincy A. Shaw, 
 of Boston. Mr. Hunt was fascinated by Millet's work and 
 by the man. He bought as many of his pictures as he 
 could, and established himself at Barbizon, so as to be 
 near him. 
 
 Millet gave the young man very little advice ; but 
 he taught him a great deal for all that, and became one 
 of his dearest friends and the master to whom he 
 owed the most. On the other hand, Hunt was of the 
 greatest use to Millet in finding purchasers for his pict- 
 ures ; and it is largely owing to him that America 
 possesses so much of his work. It is easier, in fact, to 
 form an idea of Millet in the Museum of Fine Arts in 
 Boston than at the Luxembourg in Paris ; and it is prob- 
 able that Mr. Shaw's collection of his pictures and draw- 
 ings is the finest which exists. 
 
 Mr. Hunt loved to describe to his pupils the tranquil 
 country life of Millet, the resolute cheerfulness with 
 which he bore his poverty and supported his large 
 family, the simple dignity he opposed to people who tried 
 to affront him, the songs which used to be sung at his 
 fireside. He never concealed the tragic side of the whole, 
 which is so painfully evident in Sensier's "Life of Mil- 
 let " ; but the Millet he described had more of the 
 hearty, uncomplaining reserve of an Englishman than 
 the Millet Sensier shows us, in passages of his letters, 
 written very frequently when the writer was in want 
 of money. That, indeed, he almost always was. 
 
 His beloved grandmother died in 1851. He was too 
 
118 ARTISTS AND SCLTLPTOKS. 
 
 poor to go and visit his mother, who waited two years 
 more and then died, too. Her son made the sl<:etch at 
 this time of the picture painted later, the " Old Tobias 
 (to bi' as) and his Wife, Waiting for the Return of their 
 Son " ; it is one of the most affecting of his works. He 
 went back to Gruchy to assist in the division of his 
 father's inheritance. He only asked for his great-uncle's 
 books and the great oaken cupboard, which had been an 
 heir-loom. Next year, having been remarkably fortunate, 
 he took all his family to Normandy. 
 
 In 1855, Millet exhibited in the Universal Exhibition 
 his "Peasant G-rafting," which met with some success, 
 and was bought by Rousseau, who pretended that it was 
 a rich American who had taken the picture. Rousseau 
 was Millet's friend, as well as his neighbor at Barbizon. 
 Diaz (de ath') and Barye (ba re'), too, loved to visit him 
 in these days. This j^ear brought him good fortune ; 
 during the years which followed it he had a very hard 
 time ; he was very poor ; he often suffered from illness, 
 and was constantly in debt ; and yet it was at this time 
 that he was able to paint his beautiful picture of the 
 " Angelus " (an' zhe lus). 
 
 His pictures of rural subjects were so full of the 
 sternness which he saw in a laborer's life, that he was 
 often supposed to be a Socialist.* This he was not, except 
 
 * He often said, "My programme is work. 'Thou shalt gain, thy bread in 
 the sweat of thy brow,' was written centuries ago. Immutable destiny, which 
 none may change 1 What every one ought to do is to find progress in his 
 profession ; to try ever to do better, to be strong and clever in his trade, and 
 he greater than his neighbor in talent and conscientiousness in his work. That 
 for me is the only path. The rest is dream or calculation. 
 
 " In the ' Woman Going to Draw Water,' I tried to show that she was- not 
 a water-carrier, or even a servant, but a woman going to draw water for the 
 house, for her husband and children ; that she should not seem to be carrying 
 any greater or less weight than the buckets full ; that under that sort of grimace 
 which the weight on her shoulders causes, and the closing of the eyes at the sun- 
 
MILLET. 119 
 
 in the broadest sense ; nor did lie consider liis pictures 
 as sad and tragic as liis critics did, wlio had uncon- 
 sciously grown up in the belief that all subjects with 
 peasants in them must needs be full of smiles and roses. 
 He only put into them the seriousness which seemed to 
 belong to life. "This is the animal," said he of one of 
 his pictures of laborers, "who gets the bread out of the 
 ground." 
 
 In 1860, Millet signed a contract giving all the pict- 
 ures and drawings he could make in three years to one 
 purchaser. He was to have a thousand francs, or two 
 hundred dollars a month. The speculation was a good 
 one for the dealer, whoever he may have been ; it did 
 not turn out so well for Millet, who owed his purchaser 
 more than a thousand dollars at the end of this time. 
 However, it must have given him a certain amount of 
 temporary tranquillity. In 1862, among other pictures, 
 he painted that "Man Resting on a Hoe," which was 
 considered altogether too tragic and sinister, and horrified 
 the critics.* 
 
 liglit, one should see a kind of homely goodness. I have avoided (as I always do 
 with horror) any thing that can verge on the sentimental. I wanted her to do 
 her work good-naturedly and simply, without thinking any thing ahout it,— as if 
 it were a part of her daily labor,— the habit of her life. I wanted to show the 
 coolness of the well, and meant that its antique form should suggest that many 
 before her had come there to draw water." 
 
 * " The gossip about my ' Man with a Hoe ' seems to me all very strange, and 
 I am obliged to you for letting me know it, as it furnishes me with another 
 opportunity to wonder at the ideas which people attribute to us. 
 
 "Is it impossible to admit that one can have some sort of an idea in seeing 
 a man devoted to gaining his bread by the sweat of his brow 1 Some tell me that 
 I deny the charms of the country. I find much more than charms,— I find infinite 
 glories. I see as well as they do the little flowers of which Christ said that Solo- 
 mon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. I see the halos of dande- 
 hons, and the sun also which spreads out beyond the world its glory in the clouds. 
 But I see as well, in the plain, the steaming horses at work, and in a rocky place 
 a man, all worn out, who tries to straighten himself a moment and breathe. The 
 drama is surrounded by beauty. 
 
120 ARTISTS AND SCULPTOES. 
 
 He took great pleasure in planning some illustrations 
 for Theocritus (the 6k' ri tus) ; but nobody dared to pub- 
 lish them. A plan which went more smoothly was an 
 order for four large subjects for the decoration of a fine 
 dining-room. The paintings were to represent the four 
 seasons. Millet took pains to see the decorative paint- 
 ings at Fontainbleau by Rosso (ros so') and Primaticcio 
 (pre ma tet' clio), whom he admired in spite of their 
 belonging to a decadent age. " But he made little use," 
 saj^s M. Paul Manz (mants), "of their extravagant les- 
 sons." * * * The Spring and Summer, eight feet 
 by four, were set into the wood-work. Autumn, into the 
 ceiling. Winter, a little smaller than the others, was 
 fixed in the chimney-piece. 
 
 In the Salon of 1864, Millet showed a shepherdess, 
 which was very successful, and some peasants carrying 
 home a young calf, which provoked a great deal of 
 ridicule. 
 
 In 1866, he went to Q-reville (gravel') to take leave 
 of a dear older sister, who was at the point of death. 
 This year he went to Vichy (vesh'e) with his wife, and 
 was much pleased with the country. 
 
 In 1867, there was another Universal Exhibition. A 
 number of Millet's pictures were shown, and he next 
 year received the Cross of the Legion of Honor. At the 
 distribution of medals, the name of Millet brought such a 
 burst of applause that the Council and its President were 
 somewhat confused ; at their confusion, the applause 
 redoubled. 
 
 " It is not my invention. This ' cry of the ground ' has been heard since long 
 ago. My critics are men of taste and education, but I can not put myself in their 
 shoes ; and as I have never seen any thing but fields ever since I was born, I try 
 to say, as best I can, what I saw and felt when I was at work. Those who want 
 to do better, have, I am sure, full chance." 
 
MILLET. 12] 
 
 Millet's success had come ; but it came late. A fe"w 
 other pleasant events occurred at this time. Millet made 
 a run through Alsace (ai sas') into Switzerland, and in 
 1870, he was chosen as one of the jurors of the Salon, 
 sixth on a list of eighteen. But his later life was sad- 
 dened by the war, which banished him from Barbizon 
 for a time, and by his failing health, which, now that 
 orders came fast, made work difficult. 
 
 Early hardships and a life devoted to sedentary work 
 were breaking down his vigorous constitution. An order 
 came from the Q-overnment in 1874 for the decoration 
 of the chapel of Sainte Grenevieve (sant zhen viev'), in the 
 Pantheon (pan the' on). 
 
 He was delighted with the task, and began to make 
 out the plan of his composition, but it was too late. 
 That summer and autumn he grew worse.* 
 
 In the first days of 1875, Millet was sleeping between 
 two attacks of fever. He was suddenly awakened ; a 
 
 * The autumn "was sad. In November, Millet was already very weak, but 
 still he worked. He finished his " Priory," which he sent to America. He 
 thought over his decorations for Sainte G-enevieve, and approved them. He 
 sketched out the " Sewing Lesson," % quiet rustic scene, in which, as usual, he 
 throws on daily labor a poetic charm, and in which an open window shows a 
 garden full of greenery. 
 
 In the month of December, the fever became more frequent, with intervals 
 of delirium, followed by long prostration. Here and there he had days of calm, 
 in which he was conscious of his state. He made his last requests, talked a great 
 deal to his children, begged his family to keep together, and said, with a touch- 
 ing melancholy, that his life was closing too soon, that he died just as he began 
 to see clearly into nature and art. 
 
 Sometimes he regained a little serenity, and believed, or pretended to believe, 
 in a possible recovery. He asked to have " Redgauntlet," which he had once 
 liked, re-read to him. But Millet could not again feel the pleasure that the book 
 had inspired in his youth. 
 
 At the end of December he went to bed and did not rise again. 
 
 [These notes are taken from Sensier's "Life of Millet," in the excellent 
 translation and condensation by Helena de Kay, published by James R. 
 Osgood & Co. The passages in quotation marks are extracts from Millet's own 
 notes or letters.] 
 
122 ARTISTS AND SCULPTOES. 
 
 stag had taken refuge in a garden close by, and the 
 hunters and dogs were close upon it. Millet was struck 
 by the event. "It is an omen," said he. 
 
 He only lived a few days after ; he died on the 2 0th 
 of January, 1875. 
 
1848-1884. 
 
 SOMEBODY asked, the other day, what had become of 
 the great French painters. ' When I go to the Lux- 
 embourg (luks ong boor') Museum,' said he, ' every thing 
 is changed, and much for the worse. Where is the noble 
 motive and feeling I used to admire there ten years ago ? 
 The pictures I loved have been carried to the Louvre, and 
 no more have come to take their places. Millet's (me yaz') 
 work, to be sure, is there ; but Millet is dead and gone. 
 Where is there an artist like him in France to-day ? 
 Where are the great artists now ? ' 
 
 " The painter to whom this question was addressed 
 * * * thought * * * that his best answer was not 
 in words, but in the exhibition of a young artist who 
 only left us a few months ago. Bastien-Lepage's (bast yen' 
 leh pazh'z) work is SO full, not only of the spirit of our time, 
 but of that strange elusive fire which we call life, that it is 
 hard to believe that he is dead. He could not believe it, 
 they say, when death was coming ; his friends could not 
 believe it either, though they knew he was under sen- 
 tence, so strong were the will and vitality which had 
 kept him alive for his thirty-six years. But all that is 
 over now, and the man who has influenced French art 
 as few of his contemporaries have influenced it, has left 
 it to take care of itself. * * * -[^ -^g certain that those 
 persons who admired him while he lived, — and they were 
 many, — admire him far more now that they have had 
 
124 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 the opportunity to see, placed together, the greater part 
 of the work of his short and most laborious life." 
 
 It was not merely the strength of his artistic per- 
 sonality which gave the young master this power ovei 
 his contemporaries, — it was the fact that his work and 
 his influence expressed many of the best tendencie.s 
 which essentially belong to our time. Of course, there 
 are many sincere, earnest, and gifted young painters in 
 Paris to-day whose work bears but little resemblance to 
 Bastien-Lepage's. The necessary individuality of every 
 original nature is strong in our time, as in every time 
 But setting the point of transcendent genius out of 
 the question, the main conditions of his artistic devel- 
 opment are the main conditions of the artistic develop- 
 ment of the typical promising French painter of the 
 day. He is not the only one of whom it may be said 
 that he came to Paris to learn his trade, — that he was 
 taught, as far as direct instruction goes, by a master 
 whose sympathies looked rather backward than forward, 
 a so-called classicist or adherent to the old rules beloved 
 by the Institute, a draughtsman rather than a painter, — 
 that his inspiration came from very different sources, 
 from Millet, Corot (ko ro'), and even the heretical Manet 
 (ma na') among the moderns, and from very unconven- 
 tional painters among the ancients,* and that from this 
 
 * Chance brought lis across each other at the Louvre {/o5' vi), and we once 
 more hegan to talk as we walked. The portraits by Clouet (kl<Xt a') and the worki 
 of primitive painters occupied us for a long hour, then the Good Samaritan of 
 "Rembrandt (rem' brant), that truthful episode of country life on a legendary sub- 
 ject captivated us. What ravished Bastien-Lepage with Clouet, was the search 
 for expression by intensity of drawing ; what entirely captivated him with the 
 primitive men, was their minute care to associate the little things of nature with 
 the great scenes of humanity, to sow the path of the virgins and martyrs with a 
 few wild-flowers, to make a place in their simple pictures for the familiar animals, 
 to begin every thing, above all, on the human side. 
 
 The Good Samaritan, of Rembrandt, drew from him these words: "This ii 
 
BASTIEN-LEPAGE. 125 
 
 education of extremes, taught one thing in school, another 
 thing outside it, he formed for himself a set of ambi- 
 tions quite different from those current ten years before. 
 All this may be said of many a young Parisian, French 
 or foreigner. But few of them made so much of such a 
 life as has Jules (zhui) Bastien-Lepage. 
 
 He was born, in 1848, at Damvillers (dom ve ya'), a 
 little town in Lorraine (lor ran'). It stands in the midst 
 of pasture-lands, in a valley with great woods above it ; 
 it was once a fortified town, and its old moat is changed 
 into orchards. " From the green foliage, you see, from a 
 distance, the red-brown roofs emerging ; you walk through 
 delightfully green fields, you cross the Tinte (tant), that 
 pretty brook which keeps all the gardens about it fresh ; 
 
 the way to treat Biblical or historical subjects. Let us merely refer them to 
 what we see every day. A traveler has been picked up, half dead, from a heap 
 of stones ; he is taken to the farm near by, where the master is not quite sure 
 about taking him in. The servants run up ; the wounded man, still fainting, is 
 pointed out, — 'Quick, quick, we must bring the poor fellow in, we must take care 
 of him ; he's in pain.' The mule stands quiet, without stirring, the good creature I 
 There must be a dog behind the wall. That's what it is, the Good Samaritan. * * *" 
 On another occasion, at about the same time, the artist spoke of some of the 
 painters of the present school whom he preferred. "Manet," he said, "has the 
 color of life ; it was a picture of his, a white woman on a green bench, which 
 really gave me my first impression of painting at Paris. Eantin Latour (J'iin tan' 
 Hi toor') carries you into the homes of his models ; you are ready to believe you 
 belong to the family of the people he paints. Corot gives you something to 
 breathe, but there Is more air in his work than earth, rocks, or trees. He is 
 dreaming of the country while he is painting it. Daubigny (do ben ye') is afraid of 
 nothing ; he paints better than anybody the green fields, the beautiful fields 
 where every thing grows ; he adores flowing water, the setting sun, the rising 
 moon ; only unlike Corot, he does not always dream enough." As he interrupted 
 himself at this point, I brought forward Courbet {/coar b<T), whom he had forgotten, 
 and I have still in my ears the hasty accent of his reply. " Courbet ! " he cried ; 
 "you are right to admire him. I have only seen, unfortunately, his 'Burial at 
 Omans ' idr ridng') in a bad reproduction, but the group of weeping women is above 
 every thing. That's the absolute truth, the truth of grief, a truth we feel. The 
 emotion you take in from such a sight makes you forever detest academical 
 paintings. Nothing is durable, eternal, eternally touching, but the sincere 
 expression of the conditions of lite."— Biography by Fourcavd prefixed to the Catatogw 
 of tJie Exhibition of the Worlai of Bcmtien- Lepage. 
 
126 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 you are at the entrance of the village. Follow the street ; 
 here is a spacious and cheerful house, a home, showing 
 ease, not wealth." This was the home of Bastien-Lepage.* 
 His parents, simple and upright people, brought him 
 up simply and uprightly. His father loved to draw, and 
 drew agreeably, without having taken lessons, and he 
 taught his son. When the time had come for sending 
 him to what is called, in France, a college, — something 
 combining what we call a college and a high-school, — 
 he was placed at Verdun (ver ddbn'), where he was under 
 no artistic influence but that of the school drawing- 
 master. This teacher was astonished at his sketches. 
 His father had merely taught him to try to represent 
 what he saw, without regard to theories or traditions ; 
 and his work must have had more originality than is 
 iisual among clever young men. The drawing-master 
 advised him to become a painter ; the advice pleased the 
 boy, and after taking his degree of bachelor of letters, 
 he went up to Paris. His family did not disapprove of 
 his choice, but they were not able to give him much 
 money to live on, so he entered, at the same time, the 
 Post-office Department and the Ecole des Beaux Arts 
 (a kol' da bo zar'). He went to his office every morning 
 at four o'clock, and went later to the Ecole des Beaux 
 Arts, where he had entered the atelier (at lea') of Mon- 
 
 * As far back as he can recollect, he perceives in his memory, only harvesters 
 scattered among the stubble ; vintagers sharing the rows of vines ; mowers shear- 
 ing the sunny meadows ; shepherdesses sheltering themselves under the trees 
 from the burning rays of noon ; shepherds shivering in winter in the folds of their 
 ragged cloaks ; peddlex's striding across the plain soaked by the storm ; women 
 washing ; scattering their laughter under the flowery April apple-trees and beating 
 the blue water bravely. Every thing has struck him ; an ill-looking beggar who 
 has stopped, one day, near his father's house ; a passer-by who has trampled 
 down the green meadow, tracing a vague path in the grass ; a sickly little girl 
 keeping a cow ; a flre which has broken out in the middle of the night, and which 
 has suddenly sent the whole village into the street.— Fourcaud. 
 
BASTIE N-LEPAGE. 127 
 
 sieur Cabanel (mo seer' ka ba nei'), who had also been the 
 master of Henri Regnault (ong re' ran yo') and other re- 
 markable painters. He has been called "A master of 
 masters, but no master himself." His work bears little 
 resemblance to that of his distinguished pupils ; he still 
 teaches at the school, and is much beloved and admired as 
 a professor ; but it may be questioned whether he is the 
 best representative of his type, the classical painter who 
 is better at teaching than painting. 
 
 Bastien-Lepage's health broke down under his double 
 work, and he had to leave the Post-office. During the 
 war he enlisted, like most of his professional brothers, 
 and entered a company of Francs tireurs (frong te rur'). 
 At the unhappy end of the war, he went back to Dam- 
 villers, sick and dispirited. His stay at home does not 
 appear to have been a very long one: in 18 75, we find 
 him still at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. He competed that 
 year for the Prix de Rome (pre deh rom). One of his 
 acquaintances asked hiiu if he cared very much to win 
 it. " Not the least in the world," said he. " If I want it, 
 it is for my people, who have luade every possible sac- 
 rifice for me, and whose pride would be flattered. On 
 their account, I have made up my mind to coinpete two 
 more times, but if I don't succeed I shall give up the 
 game." His friend talked of his school successes, and 
 some interesting work he had done outside the school. 
 "No," said he, "I am sometimes complimented about my 
 painting, but I am not yet where I wish to be. I don't 
 want to make approximations." " And what do you want 
 to do ? " said his friend. " Nothing is good but the truth," 
 said Bastien, without hesitation. " We must paint what 
 we know and what we love. I come from a village in 
 Lorraine ; I shall paint first, the country-people and the 
 
128 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 landscape of my country, as they are. I shall paint a 
 Joan (jo an') of Arc (ark), too — a real Joan of Arc, belong- 
 ing to our own home and not to my studio. Later, when 
 I have observed the Parisians enough, I shall see what I 
 can do in Paris subjects, but much later. My fellow- 
 students think well of my portraits ; I am proud of that, 
 for I think every thing ought to be treated as a portrait, 
 even a tree^even a piece of still-life. You never find 
 two things exactly alike ; talent consists in making out 
 and giving to each what is peculiar to it. That's all my 
 theory." 
 
 At this time he had already exliibited in the Salon 
 (sa long'). He exhibited his first important pictures in 
 that of 1873 and that of 18 74. His first picture has 
 been called " a sort of modern version from Watteau " 
 (vat to'). In his second Salon, he exhibited another pict- 
 ure, "The Spring Song," also " pitched on a light gay key, 
 both of color and sentiment." But in the same Salon, 
 an out-door portrait of his grandfather, one of Ihe finest 
 of his whole life, showed much better what his peculiar 
 genius was to be. This portrait we knoAV, as soon as we 
 see it, to be by Bastien-Lepage. 
 
 When he painted his picture for the Prix de Rome, it 
 was another entirely original painting. " His angel and 
 his shepherds are wonderfully unlike the properly aca- 
 demical angel and shepherds he was expected to pro- 
 duce. * * * The color is charming, the picture beau- 
 tiful, and full of feeling."* Like Watteau, a hundred and 
 
 * The angel is neither strange enough nor superhuman enough to frighten 
 the simple people to whom he is sent, but they know he is an angel, for there is 
 the golden glory round his head,— real gold this time,— and his golden belt, and 
 his great wings, or rather Tier wings, for there is something extremely feminine 
 in the type. She is pointing over her shoulder to Bethlehem, with a thoroughly 
 simple and human gesture, while the shepherds, who are overjoyed at the news, 
 are as rough and shaggy as their own sheep Aog^.— Letter in Boston. Traveler. 
 
BASTiEisr-LEP age;. 129 
 
 fifty years before, Bastien took the second prize, not the 
 first. The day after the award, says M. de Fourcaud 
 (f(Dor ko'), a palm was found, fastened to the frame by 
 two or three of his competitors.* 
 
 He tried again next year, but with even less success. 
 His picture, '' Priaiu (pri'am) at the Feet of Achilles" 
 (a kil'lez), was again beautiful and touching, but not at 
 all academical. He now seems to have gone back to his 
 own country, and to hard work there. This year, beside 
 a number of other Damvillers subjects, he made two 
 sketches for Les Foias (la fv^^fin'), or Hay-raaking,f which 
 
 * Various accounts have been given of the unauthorized honors paid to this 
 picture ; we have given II. de Pourcaud's in the text ; but we add this extract 
 from the New York Tribune^ which, beside giving a different account, adds various 
 interesting particulars : " * * * His picture was the favorite with artists, 
 but the jury refused it on a technicality. Their reason was that the appearance 
 to the shepherds was ' as they watched their flocks by night,' and Bastien-Lepage 
 had represented the scene as if late in the afternoon. Wlien the Salon doors 
 were opened, Bastien-Lepage's friends crowded in only to find that the Prix de 
 Kome had been awarded to Comerre {ko mar'). As they gathered disappointed 
 round the Shepherds, Mr. Weir {wer) placed a sprig of laurel on the frame. 
 Suddenly, Sarah Bernhardt stalked through the crowd of artists, amateurs, and 
 critics. Pausing dramatically, her eyes ran over the Shepherds and fell upon the 
 sprig of laurel. Pointing to it with a sweeping gesture, she exclaimed, ' Vest tmn 
 place ^ (It is well placed). 
 
 " That night Bastien-Lepage and Comerre, with their partisans, were assem- 
 bled in the restaurant of Mdlle. Anna (rn.ad mwq zel' an' no). Eager partisans 
 talked loudly of the two pictures which had led the competition for the Prix de 
 Rome. All around the room hung paintings by various artists, and the pictures 
 by men who had won the Prix de Borne in past years were crowned with wreaths 
 of laurel. Late in the evening, a young American artist rose from his seat at 
 Bastien-Lepage's table, and waving a laurel wreath, exclaimed that he would 
 crown the picture of the man to whom the arti.sts had awarded the Prix de 
 Kome. Instantly his comrades raised him on their shoiilders. Comerre's friends 
 sprung up to prevent them, but the American was borne aloft across the room 
 through the broken ranks of Comerre's partisans, and crowned with his laurel 
 wreath Bastien-Lepage's picture, Jeunesse Dore" {zhu ties' dora'). 
 
 t In a hay-field, of the peculiar gray-green which belongs to nothing but the 
 new-mown hay, two people who have been working hard all day are taking their 
 nooning. The man is fast asleep in the heat ; lie lies flat on his back, with his 
 hands Pying] on his chest like a child, and his old hat pulled over his eyes. The 
 woman is too tired for sleeping. She is sitting up with her empty hands on her 
 lap, staring before her. Just what her wide-open eyes mean is a question which 
 
130 ARTISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 was to appear in the Salon of 1878, and which was his 
 first large picture. This painting, though there is much 
 human interest in it, and though the figures are life-size, 
 is treated from the landscape-painter's point of view. It 
 has "the true, airy, open effect of out-of-doors." It is 
 for this effect that many of the painters of to-day 
 are trying hard. Bastien-Lepage brought to the effort 
 the result of the years passed in the arduous study of 
 that most elusive subject, the human figure ; he brought, 
 also, a remarkable and unique power as a draughtsman. 
 He took as much pains with landscape as if he had 
 been painting the figure, — he paid as much attention to 
 color and light in his figures as if he had been painting 
 landscape. He could not content himself, in a subject 
 involving figures out-of-doors, with the old fashion of 
 painting them in a studio, and then adding a suitable 
 background to them. People out-of-doors did not look 
 to him like models posing under a north window. He is, 
 therefore, one of the leaders among those painters whom 
 the French call the Plein-airistes (pian-ap ist'), or open- 
 air men ; and one of the most valuable lessons his work 
 teaches, is that a man may be a PJein-airiste with all 
 his heart, and at the same time be a consummate draughts- 
 man. The fault, if there be a fault, in his great pictures 
 is, in fact, an excess of attention to the delicate detail 
 of nature. "If he is in fault," says one of his reviewers, 
 " it is the noble fault of over-sincerity and over-work." 
 
 In 1879 he exhibited his " Potato-Gfatherers," another 
 large open-air subject ; he showed, at the same time, his 
 
 has been much discussed ; it is possible that if Bastien-Lepage had been sure of 
 it he might have found them less interesting to paint. The nearer figure is of 
 the size of life ; the drawing and painting are beautiful, and pushed here ajd 
 there to an amazing charm of execution. The hands of the young woman are, to 
 a painter, a lesson never to be tovgotten.—Corresjwiulence of Boston Traveler. 
 
BASTIEN-LEPAGE. 131 
 
 wonderful little portrait of Sarah Bernhardt (bgrn hart').* 
 He was one of the greatest portraitists of our time, per- 
 haps the greatest ; his portraits were frequently small in 
 size, but full of character and often of grandeur. 
 
 In 1880, he exhibited his picture on which he had so 
 long been meditating, — the " Joan of Arc Listening to the 
 Voices." f This picture, the most important the artist 
 ever painted, is also the best known in America. It is 
 
 * In the year that he exhibits " The Haying," he paints another out-door pict- 
 ure, "The Potato-Gatherers," which appears in the Salon of the next year, and 
 which also causes much excitement and much favorable and unfavorable criticism. 
 Some people prefer it to its predecessor. There is the same exact rendering of 
 the out-door look of things, the same obstinate fidelity in the rendering of cer- 
 tain details, and there is a beautiful autumnal scale of color ; it is, in fact, a real 
 October field at Damvillers at which we are looking, and these are two real coun 
 try- women we are looking at, but the picture is not so affecting as "The Haying." 
 
 At the same time that he exhibited this picture, he exhibited his little por- 
 trait of Sarah Bernhardt, and no better choice could have been made to show 
 the astonishing range of his talent. The portrait has been described many times, 
 but no description and no reproduction does justice to its amazing delicacy of 
 execution, its wonderful expression, and the strangeness of its whole effect. No 
 two types of character can be more distinct than the plain country-woman with 
 the sack of potatoes, and the delicate Pythoness (;«W/' n nes) in white, in whom 
 are centered all the subtleties of the Paris in which she lives. But I do not think 
 that to a close observer the artist seems to be more in sympathy with one type 
 than with the other.— Correspondence of Boston Traveler. 
 
 t It is only proper to make two observations in regard to this picture, which 
 would scarcely occur to the most enlightened American critic who was not famil- 
 iar either with European scenery or with the other works of Bastien-Lepage. 
 Its effect is that of an overcast day, with cold light falling from a cloudy sky 
 upon vegetation of a much bluer green than is ours in America. Any clear-sighted 
 American, coming upon this picture from our hot, noonday sun, shining upon 
 the warm yellow-green vegetation which we constantly see during the summer, is 
 naturally shocked by the contrast. He easily falls into the idea that the artist 
 has adopted a conventional manner of painting, none the less false for being 
 new and unusual. The fact is that a very short stay in Northern Prance, where 
 it is usually considered imprudent to undertake any important picture under an 
 effect of sun, there are so few sunny days, would familiarize us with Bastion's 
 cold effect. 
 
 And this is by no means the only efl'ect he could paint, either. The peculiar 
 range of color of a hay-field, the brilliancy of autumn, and the delicate harmony 
 of a winter landscape, are equally familiar to him. He can paint twilight, or the 
 effect of a fire at night. His power as a colorist has been disputed, but the 
 charge of conventional color, at least, is most evidently an undeserved one. 
 
1-^2 ARTISfS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 one of the finest, — the head of Joan is certainly above all 
 praise, — and yet on returning to it from a visit to Prance 
 and to the exhibition of picttires held after his death, 
 admirers of his genius have thought that this was not 
 his last work, "not the best he could do, even during the 
 few years of his life which were to follow, — not so fine 
 as what he would have done had he lived a few years 
 longer." He had always been particularly anxious to rep- 
 resent Joan as listening to the voices, — he had even 
 meant to represent her on her knees at the foot of the 
 altar. He had carefully studied the painted wooden 
 images which resembled those she would have seen there, 
 and it is the faint shapes of those images, not of the 
 glorified saints themselves, which hover among her gar- 
 den branches. The picture, says Fourcaud, was not so 
 well received as the two preceding subjects. Bastien was 
 made uneasy by this, but after two or three uncomfort- 
 able weeks, he went back to work at Damvillers. 
 
 "I have had to complain seriously of no one since I 
 came to Paris," said he at this time. "And I owe much 
 gratitude to many iTien who owed me nothing and have 
 given me much. I learned my trade at the school, and 
 I do not want to forget it ; but, really, I did not learn 
 my art there. * * * When I came from my village, I 
 knew nothing about any thing, but at least I did not 
 suspect the existence of that heap of formulas they lead 
 you astray with. You want to paint what is ; you are 
 invited to paint the unknown Ideal ; that is, to imitate 
 the old pictures, more or less. I have daubed in my 
 time sketches of gods, of goddesses, of Q-reeks, of Romans 
 whom I knew nothing about, whom I did not under- 
 stand, and for whom I did not care ; I repeated to my- 
 self that perhaps that was Great Art, and now I some- 
 
BASTIEN-LEPAfiE. 183 
 
 times ask myself if nothing of this education has remained 
 in me. I do not go so far as to pretend that one can 
 only paint every-day scenes ; but, if people paint the 
 scenes of past times, it is the least they can do to repre- 
 sent them in a thoroughly human way, with some con- 
 formity to what they have seen aroimd them. * * * It 
 would be simphr to teach you to use the brushes and 
 palette without talking to jou about Michael Angelo 
 (mi'kagl an'je lo), Raphael (raf'a el), Murillo (mc5o re'lyo), 
 or Domenichino (do men e ke' no). You would go back 
 to your own home, to Brittany (brlt'tani), or to Grascony 
 (gas' ko n^y-), to Lorraine or to Normandy ; you would 
 paint, calmly, the portrait of your own part of the world, 
 and when some morning, after reading something, you 
 wanted to paint the Prodigal Son, or Priam at the feet 
 of Achilles, or any thing hke that, you would imagine 
 the scene in your own way, without picture-gallery remi- 
 niscences, in a setting <.)f the neighboring country, with 
 the models you could get, as if the old drama had hap- 
 pened yesterday." This was his plan of work, and very 
 conscientiously he carried it out. 
 
 In 1881 he exhibited his "Beggar,'' the next year his 
 " Father Jacques " (zhak), both of them large pictures of 
 old men. The "Beggar" is a shifty old French tram[), 
 waiting at a half-open door, through which you can see 
 the kind people he imposes upon. The " Father Jacques," 
 which he once meant to call "An Honest Man," is a 
 good old man coming home with his little grandchild 
 through the open woods. And, in 1883, he exhibited 
 his last great picture, " L'Amour au Village " (la mcSor' 
 6 ve lazh'), or "Love in the Village," a sweet but unsen- 
 timental idyl, — real lovers in a real garden. But there 
 were to be no more great pictures by Bastien in the 
 
134 AETISTS AND SCULPTORS. 
 
 Salon ; no one will ever see more than half-done paint- 
 ings or studies of the " Shepherds Q-oing to Bethlehem " 
 (beth'ie hem), the "Ophelia (ofel'ya) by the Waterside," 
 the " Christ Mourned by His Disciples," the Rainbow, 
 with the poor humpback watching it, the old woman 
 looking at her fruit blossoms in the spring, or that Burial 
 of a Young Girl, for which he had made so many plans 
 and so many studies. He was too ill to work ; he went 
 and came, looking for rest, and came back to Paris to 
 die. A few weeks before his death, he tried to draw his 
 own portrait in sharp, nervous lines. But he had done 
 with all that forever. 
 
 " He went away," says his friend, " one winter's even- 
 ing, the 10th of December, 1884." 
 
 When he thought his death was still far off, he said 
 one day, while showing one of his friends his study of 
 the body of G-ambetta (gam bet' a), " I am not afraid of 
 death ; " then he added, " It's nothing to die ; but the 
 point is to survive, and who is sure of influencing pos- 
 terity ? Come, I'm talking wildly,— let us paint true, the 
 rest is nothing." 
 
@y> 
 
 '§^^<^ 
 
 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 @-^ 
 
 ('1^ 
 
 
Scott. 
 
 Thaekepay. 
 
 Rov 
 
 Carlyle. Dickens. 
 
 Jolmson, Macau lay. 
 
 Enierson. Swift. 
 Addison. 
 
SWIKT 
 
 IT will be impossible for us clearly to understand the 
 lives of Swift and Addison without a fair idea of 
 the main lines of English History during the period of 
 their lives. At no time that we recall were the literary 
 men of England so involved in politics as in the reign of 
 Anne (an). In that reign an author was almost perforce 
 a Whig or a Tory, his fortunes rose or fell with those of 
 his party, his successes were party successes, and party 
 reverses were reverses to him. The lines were drawn 
 closely. Addison, Steele, De Foe, Burnet, Garth, Tickell, 
 and Phillips were the chief Whig writers. Swift, Prior, 
 Q-ay, and Arbuthnot (ar' buth not) were the chief Tories. 
 
 The idea of party government in England became 
 fixed in the reign of Anne. Up to this time it had not 
 been thought needful that a ministry should be entirely 
 Whigs or entirely Tories. But after Anne's reign, coali- 
 tion ministeries became rare. In 1708 was the first 
 wholly Whig ministry, in 1710 the first that was wholly 
 Tory.* 
 
 * The Whigs and Tories of that day, although the direct ancestors of the 
 Liberals and Conservatives in England to-day, did not stand for exactly the same 
 principles that now divide political parties. The Whigs were the upholders of 
 the principles of the Revolution which had turned out the Stuarts in 1688, of 
 William in., whom they had made king, and of the wars against Louis XTV. 
 The Tories stood for the divine and indefeasible right of kings, and were therefore, 
 in a measure, Jacobins, desiring the return of the Stuarts. Their watchword was 
 "Church and State." The chief Whigs at this time with whom we shall have to 
 do were Marlborough (mmoVbruKs, Q-odolphin, Robert Walpole (ivhV pbl), Somers 
 {«itm' mers), Sunderland, and Halifax, while their chief literary allies were Addison, 
 
136 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland, of an old 
 English family, November 30, 1667. His father died 
 before his birth, and he himself was educated by the 
 care of his uncle at the best school in Ireland, and at 
 Trinity College, Dublin, but distinguished himself in no 
 way. He had little idea as to what he should do ; he was 
 unconscious of the direction in which his powers might 
 lie. In this state he was received into the family of Sir 
 William Temple,* a statesman in retirement, to read 
 aloud and act as secretary, at the salary of £20, with 
 board and lodging thrown in. He passed eleven years at 
 Temple's residence at Moor Park. It was a strange and 
 important period of his life. He read much, and thereby 
 made amends for much idling done in his school and 
 college days. He wrote also. Two of his most famous 
 satires, "The Tale of a Tub" and "The Battle of the 
 Books," were written here.f But he chafed terribly at 
 
 Steele, and De Poe {fo'). The Tory leaders were St. John, Viscount Bollnghroke, 
 and JHarley, Earl of Oxford, and among their literary men the greatest was 
 Jonathan Swift. 
 
 * Temple was a connection of Swift's mother. 
 
 t These two famous satires are hardly read much nowadays, though they 
 made for Swift, and deservedly, a very great reputation. "The Battle of the 
 Books " relates to a dispute — now almost forgotten — as to the comparative merits 
 of the ancients and moderns in literature. Sir William Temple had engaged in 
 this controversy, and Swift appeared on the side of his patron. The authors of 
 different ages take part in Homeric hattle ; Virgil, for instance, encounters Dry- 
 den. The modern controversialists, too, make part of the combatants. Bentley 
 and Wotton (who took the adverse side to Temple) are easily overcome hy Boyle, 
 who was more fortunate in Ms aftiliations. Swift cared little for the controversy, 
 but was pleased at an opportunity to display his very great wit and his unex- 
 ampled powers of sarcasm. 
 
 "The Tale of a Tub" (Tub, meaning a pulpit,) is in the same vein. It is a 
 satire on religious matters, and it is said that it was owing to this book that Swift 
 could never attain his life-long ambition — a bishopric. The book satirizes the 
 pedantry of the three religious systems that were then prominent in England. 
 Three brothers, Peter, Martin, and Jack, represent, respectively, the Eoman Cath- 
 olic, the Anglican, and the Puritan persuasions. Under this form some pretty 
 irreverent remarks appear. Take, for instance, this about Peter, who was seen 
 to take " three old high-crowned hats and clap them all on his head three-story 
 
SWIFT. 13 7 
 
 his position. He became aware of his intellectual powers, 
 and the idea of remaining in such a position as that in 
 which he now appeared to men of less ability to himself 
 was a terrible trial to him. He began at Moor Park td 
 have the misanthropical feeling that his hand was against 
 the world and the world's against him, which is the key 
 to much of his later life and works. 
 
 Two things of importance, however, date from Moor 
 Park. Here he first met Hester Johnson, who, under 
 the name of Stella, became so important a part of his 
 life, and here first he became conscious that he was to 
 become a man of letters, and, as it turned out, the 
 greatest of his day. 
 
 At Temple's death Swift left Moor Park, having 
 chosen the Church as his vocation.* At the age of 
 thirty-one, possessed of little else than a knowledge of 
 his own powers and the affection of a most beautiful 
 girl, and after trying in vain for greater prizes, he settled 
 back in the living of Laracor, some little way from 
 Dublin. And to Laracor he invited Hester Johnson, left 
 without a home by the death of Temple, and one Mrs. 
 Dingley, saying that they could live there more cheaply 
 than in England, and that he should thus have the 
 pleasure of their society. Swift's connection with Stella is 
 one of the most curious parts of his life, and one of which 
 the secret has never been wholly unraveled. Neither had 
 at this time any thoughts of marriage nor of love, as 
 
 high, with a huge bunch of keys at his girdle, and an angling-rod in his hand. In 
 which guise, whoever went to take him by the hand in the way of salutation, Peter, 
 with much grace, like a well-educated spaniel, would present them with his foot ; 
 and if they refused his civility, then he would raise it as high as their chops and 
 give him a damned kick on the mouth, whicL has ever since been called a salute." 
 Fancy the man who could write such things as this being made a bishop. 
 
 * He had received the degree of Master of Arts from Oxford in 1692, and 
 had, in fact, held the living of Kllroot for a short time in 1695. 
 
138 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 most people understood the word. They were simply very 
 near friends. Swift never saw her save in the presence 
 of a third person, and they always lived separately. 
 
 Swift had no very onerous duties at Laracor. He was 
 very frequently in London, where a mission on the part 
 of the Irish Church brought him much into the way of 
 statesmen, and his own great abilities and already pub- 
 lished works procured him the friendship of the wits and 
 men of letters. Bred in the household of Sir William 
 Temple, Swift was naturally in Whig circles, and at his 
 first appearances in London considered himself as a Whig 
 in politics. But it was difficult for a high churchman 
 in England to be a Whig. In Ireland the case was differ- 
 ent. In Ireland the church relied upon the maintenance 
 of the principles of the Revolution for their existence. 
 But in England the high churchmen were Tories. So 
 Swift's Whiggism was not very strong, and his change 
 afterward to the Tory party was by no means inconsistent. 
 At this time, however, he affiliated with the Whig writ- 
 ers, and sought to gain his ends by means of Whig 
 patronage. 
 
 These ends were not entirely personal. Swift hoped 
 for advancement,* but he had in hand a definite object, 
 namely, to obtain the remission of the first-fruits and 
 tenths which the Church of Ireland paid to the crown. 
 This favor had been accorded England in 1704. In 
 
 * Swift's great ambition in life was an Englisli bishopric. He never attained 
 it. Who does not recollect Thackeray's vigorous picture, in which Swift is com- 
 pared to a highwayman, who picks up one thing here and another there for one 
 or another of his friends. But "the great prize has not come yet. The coach 
 with the miter and crosier in it, which he Intends to have for his share, has been 
 delaj^ed on the way from St. James' ; and he waits and waits until nightfall, 
 when his runners come and tell him that the coach has taken a different road 
 and escaped him. So he fires his pistols into the air with a curse and rides away 
 into the country." 
 
SWIFT. 189 
 
 1707, Swift came to London to get the business through. 
 He failed. The backwardness of his Whig friends dis- 
 satisfied him, and he went back to Ireland much disgusted 
 with that party, and with no hopes for advancement in 
 that direction. 
 
 He had, however, become well known and recognized 
 in London as a man of great power. His two satires 
 and one or two pamphlets had shown his very great 
 genius, and it only needed an opportunity for him to 
 attain a fitting and noble place in the great world of his 
 day. The opportunity soon came. 
 
 In 1710 occurred a political crisis, — of which the event 
 served to bring Swift suddenly to the highest point in 
 his career. For some years the administration had been 
 Whig. Swift had not been on good terms with them, 
 but neither had he come out in full Tory colors ; and 
 had he done so nothing would have come of it, for the 
 Tories had been hopelessly down for some years. But now 
 their opportunitv had come. The Whigs, Marlborough 
 and the ministry, were turned out ; Harley, the Tory 
 chief, was made Chancellor of the Exchequer, and in 
 the fall, when a new Parliament assembled, it showed 
 a great majority on the Tory side. Swift came to town 
 while events were still unsettled. The Whigs would have 
 been glad to forget the past. But no such idea was likely 
 to be in the mind of Swift. His disposition was revenge- 
 ful, and he did not easily let slip from his mind such 
 errors as the Whig leaders had been guilty of. Besides, 
 the now triumphant Tories courted him in a most com- 
 plimentary style. It was to their advantage to strengthen 
 their position by all of the most powerful pens in England. 
 So the great Harley was ready to become the most inti- 
 mate friend of the fierce Irishman, who had been scorned 
 
140 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 and neglected by the leaders of the opposition in the 
 days of their power. 
 
 Swift was courted to the top of his bent. He received 
 no appointment, but his position was as influential a one 
 as could be desired. He became hand-in-glove with Har- 
 ley and St. John, the Tory chiefs. His business about 
 the Irish first-fruits was settled in a moment. He became 
 one of the inner circle of Tory statesmen. He dined with 
 them on their private days. They called him by his first 
 name. Swift became the close and intimate friend of 
 Harley and of St. John as well, though it is undeniable 
 that the reasons for their acquaintance were at first merely 
 that each hoped to make something out of the other. 
 Swift wanted advancement, the ministers wanted the 
 support of his pen. Swift at once took hold. The Exam- 
 iner was a series of political tracts, in which the Tory 
 principles were put forth and defended. The Examiners, 
 though not lasting pieces of literature, served their purpose 
 admirably. This was all that was wanted. Swift cared 
 nothing for producing literary masterpieces ; he wanted 
 to carry his point. He worked public opinion around to 
 believing that in the Tories lay their safety, that peace 
 Avas needful, that the Whigs had betra_yed their country 
 to serve their own selfish interests. So Swift was well in 
 the political tide, carried on from day to day, among the 
 first in a sort of wild, exciting life which gave him in 
 his time the position of one of the greatest of men, 
 though it has done little for his place with posterity. 
 
 Swift enjoyed all this. He held it with a high hand. 
 He knew the Tories needed him, could not get on with- 
 out him, and he made use of his knowledge. Harley 
 offered him a £50 note one day. Swift took the matter as 
 the most shameless insult. He could not be pacified 
 
SWIFT. 141 
 
 without much urging, and after a humble apology. He 
 carried his head high among his friends, and used his 
 position to lash his opponents with most vigorous libels. 
 In 1712, he published "The Conduct of the Allies,"* a 
 political tract setting forth the Tory position. It was 
 another triumph. The pamphlet ran through editions 
 with lightning speed; 11,000 copies were sold in two 
 months. This was the crowning-point of his career. His 
 position was most remarkable. He was courted by the 
 ministry, was possessed of immense reputation through- 
 out the country, and was at the height of his immense 
 literary powers. While it lasted. Swift could not but 
 have been satisfied. But it could not last, and at the end, 
 when the Tories were out of power, as in the nature of 
 things they must be sooner or later. Swift would have 
 nothing but recollections of greatness. For though he 
 got every thing for his friends, he could get nothing that 
 he wanted for himself. He was forced to appear con- 
 tented with the appointment as Dean of St. Patrick's ; 
 and in June, 1713, retired from the most brilliant scenes 
 he ever had seen or ever would see, to be installed in 
 Dublin. It was only a short time before it was necessary. 
 The Tory leaders were quarreling among themselves ; 
 Harley, now Earl of Oxford, was finally put out of the 
 way by his rival, St. John, Lord Bolingbroke (boi'ing- 
 brdbk), and only a day or two afterward Queen Anne 
 died. This was the end of the Tories for the time. 
 The Whigs came in, Greorge I. was proclaimed, and Swift, 
 now forty-seven years of age, was left to himself in Ireland 
 
 * The Allies were England, Holland, the Empire, Savoy (sdv' oi), and Portugal 
 against Erance and Spain. The treatise was meant to show that the Whigs urged 
 the continuance of the war for their own motives, and that the interests of 
 England demanded peace, 
 
142 PEOSE WRITERS. 
 
 with nothing to do but to be Dean of St. Patrick's to the 
 end of the chapter. 
 
 Thougli Swift's personal prospects and his hopes for 
 political advancement were utterly broken by the Tory 
 downfall,* yet some of his greatest triumphs were scored 
 in his after years. He had settled himself in his Deanery 
 a year before the crash came, and when George II. came 
 in, and the Whigs finally grasped the reins with a strong 
 hand, he seems to have felt that the active part of his 
 life was over, and all that was left him was to gather 
 together what bits of the wreck remained, and to wait 
 for his death with such grace as might be. He was now 
 forty-seven, and lived thirty years more. But the exciting 
 and brilliant period of his life was over*. " You are to 
 understand," says he, "that I live in the corner of a vast 
 unfurnished house ; my family consists of a steward, a 
 groom, a helper in the stable, a footman, and an old 
 maid, who are all at board wages, and when I do not 
 dine abroad, or make an entertainment (which last is 
 very rare), I eat a mutton-pie and drink half a pint of 
 wine ; my amusements are defending my small dominions 
 against the archbishop, and endeavoring to reduce my 
 rebellious choir." His condition was in truth gloomy, and 
 his own nature rendered it darker. 
 
 Party warfare was practically at an end in England 
 for a long time after the accession of George I. The lean- 
 ings of that monarch, as far as they were any thing, were 
 strongly Whig. And the master-hand of Sir Robert Wal- 
 pole kept his party in power for a long time. The Tory 
 party was utterly broken. Its leaders were in prison, or 
 in exile, and the organization for a time absolutely shat- 
 
 * For the Whigs on this occasion, under Sir Bohert Walpole, came in to stay 
 twenty-seven years, 
 
sWiFT. 143 
 
 tered. So that pamphleteering, in which Swift had made 
 his greatest reputation, had almost passed away. Once 
 more, however, did Swift arise in arms, but this time 
 more to crush the Whigs than with any hope of aid- 
 ing the Tories. "The Drapier's (dpa'pierz) Letters," a 
 work which, in his day, made him more famous than 
 any other of his writings, served their purpose abso- 
 hitely, and made Swift for a time the leader of public 
 opinion in Ireland. The occasion was the granting of a 
 patent for the issue of certain half-pence to one WilHam 
 Wood. There was need of copper coinage in Ireland. 
 The English government of that unhappy country, long 
 accustomed to profit by her misfortunes, had given a 
 patent for the coining of half-pennies to this Wood. 
 There were to be made about £100,000 of half-pence, 
 and Wood was to pay the crown £1,000 yearly for four- 
 teen years, for the pi'ivilege of coining them. He was 
 not unwilling to do this, because only about £60,000 
 worth of copper was to be used in the making, leaving 
 £40,000 out of which to pay the expenses, which would 
 give a fair profit. Out of this firoflt was to be paid 
 £14,000 to the crown, and, it is said, £10,000 to the 
 Duchess of Kendal (ken'dal), to whom the patent had 
 been originally given as a present. Swift seized this 
 opportunity. The Whigs were merely using Ireland as a 
 means of dirty profit. He would stir up the Irish. Un- 
 doubtedly he was deeply outraged at the disgraceful 
 transaction, feeling it to be a shameless piece of tyranny. 
 And the chance to strike a blow at his old enemies was 
 too good to be lost. He published several " letters," sup- 
 posed to be written by a draper, and known as " The 
 Drapier's Letters." They had an astounding effect on the 
 Irish. The argument was flimsy, but the grievance was 
 
144 Prose writers. 
 
 real, and the people were touched at a sore point. They 
 became inflamed. The English tried to stop the publica- 
 tion of the letters, to convict the printer of them, to 
 " force the half-pence down the throats of the Irish," as 
 Walpole is reported to have said. The outcry was so 
 great that they were forced to give way, the patent was 
 withdrawn, Wood was paid £24,000 to give it up, and 
 Swift was left triumphant. He had seized a plausible 
 opportunity to fight in a good cause. He had roused the 
 Irish to indignation at the idea that Ireland was never 
 thought of in England save as a place where a little 
 money might be made, which need not be considered 
 save from the point of view of English interests. 
 
 " The Drapier's Letters " gave Swift the position of the 
 leading man among the Irish people ; but it by no means 
 could retrieve his position in England. To England he 
 went several times, saw his old friends, but recognized 
 the impossibility of doing any thing in political life again. 
 He made one more mighty success before he relapsed 
 into the wretched state in which his life ended. " Gulli- 
 ver's Travels " was published two years after " The Dra- 
 pier's Letters." 
 
 It is an extraordinary work. Read with delight by 
 children, and with wonder and admiration by those of 
 more mature minds, it is probable that every one of our 
 readers knows much of it. Yet, though it is so universally 
 read, it is an unpleasing work. A satire on humanity, 
 written by so powerful a misanthrope as Jonathan Swift, 
 can hardly be pleasant reading for those who wish to 
 believe that there are still some things that are good and 
 pure and noble, even in the midst of so much wickedness 
 as there is in this world. 
 
 It is impossible now to fully understand Swift's rela- 
 
s'w'lPT. 146 
 
 tion to Stella, — Hester Johnson, as her real name was. A 
 most intimate and sincere friendship existed between 
 them, and they were married, some say as early as 1716,. 
 others say later. But the marriage was nothing but a 
 ceremony. They always lived apart, and, as has been 
 noted, Swift never saw Stella, as he has declared, save in 
 the presence of a third party. This third party was 
 usually Mrs. Dingley, with whom Stella lived in Ireland, 
 at a short distance from Swift, though never in the same 
 house. Swift wrote to Stella constantly, — letters, verses, 
 and so on. It is from the well-known "Journal to Stella" 
 that we obtain our best idea of the great man's life 
 while in London. It contains a record of what he did, 
 day by day, whom he saw, and where he went. It is 
 full of charming tendernesses and loving expressions, that 
 show a strange side in the nature of this fierce satirist. 
 It was in London that Swift made the acquaintance of 
 the other woman whose name is associated with his, — 
 Vanessa (vanes' sa), otherwise Esther Vanhomrigh (van'- 
 hom ri). Swift became intimate with the family as early 
 as 1708. He seems to have looked on Mrs. Vanhomrigh's 
 house as a sort of home. But it was a bad day for Va- 
 nessa when Swift came to the house. She fell in love 
 with him, and he allowed her to do so. The story is too 
 long for us * in all its details, but the outcome was that 
 
 * We may add here the story of Vanessa, which was a bit too long for 
 our text. The reader may find a piece of it told by the Dean himself, in 
 verse, in "Cadenvis (ka de' nun) and Vanessa." [Cadenus is put instead of decanus 
 [de ka' nits), the dean] . Swift, finding in Miss Vanhomrigh something more than 
 the mere young lady of fashion, took pleasure in her company, read, talked, 
 and studied with her. Vanessa fell in love with her master. When he was about 
 to leave her to go back to Ireland, she told him of her affection. He offered to 
 be her friend, and left her. The relation continued. Some time afterward Va- 
 nessa, by force of circumstances, came to Ireland to Celbridge, a place not far 
 from Stella's abode. The end of the story is quite dramatic. Vanessa becoming 
 anxious, and troubled about Swift's relation to Stella, finally wrote to her rival a 
 
146 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 Vanessa finally came to Ireland, and discovered the true 
 nature of Stella's relation to the Dean, and there died of 
 a broken heart. Stella herself died in 172 8, the year 
 after that in which " Grulliver's Travels " first saw the 
 light. 
 
 There is little to detain us in the last years of Swift's. 
 For eighteen years after " Grulliver's Travels," he lived, 
 though for the last few years of his life his intellect was 
 almost wholly destroyed, and he could hardly be said 
 even to exist. He wrote somewhat, — some one or two 
 satires which have been forgotten, and many letters to 
 his friends in England, which may still be read with 
 pleasure. But the life of the " Q-reat Irish Dean " had 
 really ended with the publication of "Gulliver" in 1727, 
 and the death of Stella the next year. He died October 
 19, 1745, glad of the relief from living, and was buried 
 in St. Patrick's church-yard. He had written his own 
 epitaph. 
 
 "Here is laid the body of Jonathan Swift, Dean of 
 this church, where cruel indignation can no longer tear 
 his heart. Q-o, traveler, and imitate if thou canst a sturdy 
 vindicator of the liberty of humankind."* 
 
 letter, in which, as it is said, she asked if Stella were truly the wife of Swift. 
 Stella replied that she was. Swift saw Vanessa's letter, and fell into a fury. He 
 could not bear that any one should not be satisfied to do as he desired. He rode 
 over to Vanessa, and entered her room in a terrible passion. Without saying a 
 word, he tossed her letter before her and departed. Vanessa could not bear it. 
 She died shortly afterward. 
 
 Such is the story. We can not be sure of its truth. But something of the 
 sort must have happened. Vanessa's relation with Swift was the more exciting 
 while it lasted, and came to a more dramatic end. But we can not think it more 
 miserable or more pathetic than was Stella's. 
 
 * In personal appearance, Swift was dark and tall ; in later years, he was 
 somewhat fat. His ej^es were blue, ar.d had a charming archness about them. 
 His cast of countenance was naturally severe, and even when he was cracking a 
 joke his face preserved its gloomy expression. And when the natur?! sternness 
 was rendered more severe by rage (for he often fell into a passion), " it is scarcely 
 possible," says a friend, " to imagine looks or features that carried in them more 
 
SWIFT. 147 
 
 The life of Swift and his character must be looked on 
 with wonder, with awe, and at times with respect, but 
 hardly ever with pleasure. His career was a disappoint- 
 ment to hiixiself, and must be to those who read of it. 
 He failed to achieve his aims, such ideals as he had 
 were unrealized, and he sunk in gloomy chagrin to a 
 most wretched end. The dififerent phases of his life, his 
 stay with Temple, his parish life in Ireland, even his 
 glittering period of triumph in London, and most espe- 
 cially his after years in Ireland, are each and all of them 
 little else than painful. His troubles and failures were 
 of a most grievous kind, and even his successes were 
 deeply colored with what must be distasteful. His rela- 
 tions with Stella and Vanessa are far more sad to think 
 of than pleasing. Even his works can hardly be read as 
 he wrote them with other feelings than amazement and 
 admiration ; there can be little pleasure in the reading, 
 and no love for the author, for so much of horror is 
 blended with the wit that we can not laugh without 
 a feeling of repulsion.* "His laughter jars on our ears," 
 says Thackeray (thak'erl), "after seven score years." True, 
 there are some bright snatches. His " Journal to Stella " 
 is at times the most delightful reading in the world, and 
 we can not think of Swift's friendship with some of the 
 greatest men of his time without feeling that there were 
 moments when he seemed the best and most delightful 
 of men. Certainly, there lay concealed in his nature infi- 
 nite greatness, honesty, nobility ; yes, and tenderness and 
 fondness as well. We are sure of it, for now and then we 
 
 terror and austerity. His manners were open, abrupt, and eccentric, but when 
 he chose he was probably a most charming companion,— witty at the expense of 
 somebody else, frank and straightforward as far as his present companion was 
 concerned, full of ideas, and great in conversation." 
 
 * We may, perhaps, except the first two books of " Gulliver." 
 
148 PROSE WRiTERS. 
 
 see such brlUialit flajshes, — but they come so very seldom, 
 and are usuahy overshadowed by his constant bitterness, 
 hatred, and misanthropy. He was a very great man ; there 
 was no littleness in his make-up. His better parts were 
 great. But the evil in his nature showed far more plainly.* 
 
 * To our mind, the most characteristic work of Swift lies in the verses on 
 liis own death. We quote a little, to give the readers who are unfamihar with 
 them a taste of their remarkable quality. 
 
 He speaks of the effect the news of his death will have on the world in 
 general. Then he speaks of his own most intimate personal friends. 
 
 "Here shift the scene to represent 
 How these I love my death lament. 
 Poor Pope wiU grieve a month, and G-ay 
 A week, and Arbuthnot a day. 
 
 St. John himself will scarce forbear 
 To bite his pen, and drop a tear. 
 The rest will give a shrug and cry, 
 'Pm sorry— but we all must die.' 
 
 "Suppose me dead, and then suppose 
 A club assembled at the Rose ; 
 Where, from discourse of this and that, 
 I grow the subject of their chat. 
 And while they toss my name about. 
 With favor some, and some without, 
 One quite indifferent in the cause, 
 My character impartial draws : 
 
 * * * ' Perhaps I may allow the Dean 
 Had too much satire in his vein ; 
 
 And seem'd determined not to starve it, 
 
 Because no age could more deserve it. 
 
 Yet malice never was his aim ; 
 
 He lashed the vice, but spared the name ; 
 
 No individual could resent. 
 
 Where thousands equally were meant ; 
 
 His satire points at no defect 
 
 But what all mortals may correct. 
 
 * * * True genuine dullness moved his pity, 
 Unless it offered to be witty. 
 
 Those who their ignorance confest. 
 He ne'er offended with a jest ; 
 But laughed to hear an idiot quote 
 A verse from Horace learned by rote. 
 
 * * * He gave the little wealth he had 
 To build a house for fools and mad ; 
 And showed by one satiric touch. 
 
 No nation wanted it so much.' " 
 
ADDISON 
 
 1673-1718 
 
 FOR a long time the name of Addison (ad'i son) has 
 been the synonym for elegant and correct prose. 
 Addison was one of the earlier of those writers of the 
 eighteenth century who, though they did but little for 
 the advancement of poetry, in their more special depart- 
 ment, formed a period which, for correctness, character, 
 and dignity, stands as the classical period in English 
 Prose. The names of Temple, Dryden, Swift, Addison, 
 Steele, Fielding, Hume, Johnson, Goldsmith, Gibbon, 
 Burke, make up a school which, for mere style, has 
 never been surpassed. 
 
 Joseph Addison was born the 1st of May, 16 72, the 
 son of Launcelot (lan'se lot) Addison, a worthy clergyman 
 of the English Church. We know but little of his child- 
 hood that is characteristic. Almost the only anecdote 
 told of his youth relates that he was the leader of a 
 "barring out" against the school-master. But this is 
 of little importance. If we note that he went to the 
 Charter-house school, and there made friends with Richard 
 Steele,* we shall remember almost all in his school life that 
 
 * Sir Rich.ard Steele deserves a few words to himself, though we can hardly 
 include him in our list of greatest names. He was the life-long friend, companion, 
 and admirer of Addison, with whom he did many a piece of work. He was an 
 easy and agreeable writer of a pure and good English style,— though but little of 
 his work has permanent value. By turns a private soldier, a captain in the Fusi- 
 leers, a pamphleteer, a member of Parliam.ent, a placeman under the Whigs, he 
 was always honest, true, faithful to his friends, loving to his wife, and though 
 often carried away by his impulses into doing what he afterward regretted, he 
 must have been one of the most kindly and charming of the literary men of his 
 
160 PROSE WRITEEg. 
 
 is of importance to an understanding of his later dayg. 
 In 1687, he entered Queen's College, Oxford, where he 
 spent some time, but in 1689 was elected a demy * (de mi') 
 at Magdalen (maud'lin), of which college he was sub- 
 sequently a Fellow. 
 
 At Oxford he read and wrote Latin poetry. Also 
 some Q-reek, though not very much, 'tis thought. But 
 ne wrote very elegant and graceful Latin verses (indeed, 
 he owed his promotion at Magdalen to a copy which fell 
 into the hands of the master), and he acquainted himself 
 very thoroughly with the Latin poets. Perhaps he knew 
 something more of the classics ; the question is open for 
 discussion, and it does not seem of the greatest conse- 
 quence. At any rate, on leaving Oxford, in 1699, he 
 carried away with him to London a good store of Latin 
 and a good reputation as a scholar and a man of letters. 
 He thought of the Church, but was persuaded to travel 
 abroad for a time, on a pension of £300, to fit himself 
 for her Majesty's service. My Lord Halifax (then Charles 
 Montague [mon'tagu]), who got him the pension, was 
 pleased to compliment him by saying that, "however 
 he himself might be represented as an enemy to the 
 Church, he would never do it any other injury than 
 keeping Mr. Addison out of it." 
 
 So Addison started to make the "Grand Tour," f as it 
 
 day. He is to be credited with the conception of the "Tatler," and he was 
 Addison's right-hand man in writing the "Spectator." 
 
 * A demy was a species of resident scholar, who was subsequently appointed 
 to be a Fellow. 
 
 t Travel on the Continent was, in those days, and for some time afterward, 
 considered as the absolutely necessary finishing touch to a young man's education. 
 "Making the Grand Tour," was the expression. Not infrequently the Continent 
 proved merely a convenient place for the sowing of wild oats, while the intel- 
 lectual benefits were but small. 
 
 This is what Pope says on the subject. The speaker is supposed to be a tutor 
 who has traveled with a young man over the greater part of Europe. 
 
ADDISON. 151 
 
 was called in those days. He saw Italy thoroughly, 
 passed through G-ermany, spent a year in France to learn 
 the language well, and, his pension failing (owing to the 
 Whigs being out of ofl&ce), returned to England and 
 established himself in London, where he had certain 
 literary acquaintances and hopes. He had written some 
 good Latin verses, a good poem, the "Letter to Lord 
 Halifax,"* some "Remarks on Italy," and a "Dialogiie on 
 Medals." He had little definite idea of a future. His 
 friends, the Whigs, were out of power, and to political 
 friends all literary men in those days looked for advance- 
 ment. It was, in truth, no very cheerful time for him ; 
 he seemed to be at the lowest point of his fortunes. 
 "When I came out of Oxford into the world," says he 
 to Esmond, in Thackeray's (thak' e rlz) most charming 
 history, " my patrons promised me great things ; and you 
 see where their promises have landed me, in a lodging 
 up two pair of stairs, with a sixpenny dinner from a 
 
 " Led by my hand, lie sauntered Europe round, 
 
 And gathered every vice on Christian ground ; 
 
 Saw every court, heard every king declare 
 
 His royal sense of operas or the fair. 
 
 Tried all hm-s (Pcmmes ijmr duvt), all liqueurs (le kers') defined, 
 
 •Judicious drank and greatly daring dined ; 
 
 Dropped the dull lumber of the Latin store. 
 
 Spoiled his own language and acquired no more, 
 
 All classic learning lost on classic ground. 
 
 And last turned air the echo of a sound." 
 Addison, however, gained some more substantial benefit from his foreign 
 travel. He went with the idea of learning whatever would better fit him ft>T her 
 Majesty's service, and did his best to improve himself. 
 
 * One thing to be remembered in connection with this period is that now, 
 as for a long time before and after, literary men were accustomed to pay thei'^ 
 court to some prominent man as patron, to whom they wrote odes, dedicatea 
 their works and what not, wherein their noble patron's praises were sounded. 
 In return, these great men would reward these clients of theirs by whatever 
 substantial services they might be able to render them. Each political party 
 strove to strengthen itself by attracting to itself as many of the literary men as 
 it could, for, in those days of secret debates in Parliament and no newspapers, 
 the strictly literary men exercised a great influence over public opinion. 
 
162 
 
 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 cook's shop.'' So they had; his friends were out of place, 
 his pension was unpaid, and for a time the world seemed 
 very dark. 
 
 It was at just this time tliat Marlborough* (ma^A^l' brah) 
 did a very good thing for himself and for Addison, in 
 winning the Battle of Blenheim (blen'im). "What it was 
 all about," as Kasper thought, is not here of so much 
 consequence as the fact that it was a famous victory. 
 A Whig victory, the people were roused, enthusiastic, the 
 ministry were eager to make the most of it. The great 
 Whig victory must be celebrated in verse. Where was 
 the man to do it. Godolphin (go dol'fin), himself the 
 Lord High Treasurer, inquires as to who can best cele- 
 brate the praises of Marlborough and the great Whig 
 party. My Lord Halifax knows the man, Init he will not 
 let him put his hand to it unless assured that the minis- 
 try will remember him. Every thing is promised. Gro- 
 dolphin himself sends t(.> Mr. Addison, the friend of My 
 Lord Halifax, with the request that he will celebrate 
 this great victory in becoming vei^se. 
 
 Such was the cause of the writing of " The Campaign," 
 a poem lauded to the skies in its day (for political causes, 
 in great measure), and now utterly forgotten save its 
 name and its one famous simile. The comparison of the 
 Duke of Marlborough overlooking the battle to such an 
 angel as had guided the furious storm which had passed 
 
 * .John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, was England's great general ot 
 those days. His renown was gained in the constant warfare against Prance, which 
 began with William III. and lasted nearly to the end of the reign of Anne (dn). 
 England, Holland, and the Empire were allied against the growing ambition of 
 Tjouis XrV., and Marlborough and Prince Eugene (ugln') were the principal gen- 
 erals on the side of the Allies. Blenheim was their greatest victory, but Eamellies 
 (r&yW e ISz), Oudenarde {oiv din dr' defi), and Malplaquet (mdl pli'i ka') made them famous 
 in their day. At first, having no decided political leanings, Marlborough finally 
 concluded that his own fortunes were best advanced by joining with the Whigs. 
 He was a man of great military powers, small principles, and great manners, 
 
ADDISON. 153 
 
 over Britain a few yearw before, was tiie success of the 
 poem.* Johnson says 'tis no simile, but an exempHfica- 
 tion. But it is, at any rate, a fine bit of verse, and worth 
 reading to-day. At that time it raised Addison to the 
 rank of the greatest of English poets, and better than 
 that, for the moment, "that good angel flew off with 
 Mr. Addison and landed him in the place of Commis- 
 sioner of Appeals," as a pledge of something more being 
 done for him in the future. 'Twas the way of the world 
 at that time. The spoils belonged to the victors, and the 
 literary men who sung the victor's praises came in for 
 their share. Just how the ability to write good verse 
 was a proof that a man would make a good Commis- 
 sioner of Appeals in the Excise is hard to see ; but the 
 work was generally done by deputy, and the lucky owner 
 took half the salary for doing nothing. 
 
 So, from this moment, Addison's fortunes began to 
 mend. In a year, from being Commissioner of Appeals 
 in the Excise, he became Under Secretary of State to Sir 
 Charles Hedges (hej'ez) — a jAace of some profit and but 
 little labor, which he held for several years, when his 
 
 * The reader may like to see this famous simile without taking the trouble 
 to turn to Addison's collected works. The moment taken is in the midst of the 
 Battle of Blenheim. 
 
 " 'Twas then great Marlborough's mighty soul was proved, 
 
 That, in the shock of charging hosts unmoved, 
 
 Amidst confusion, horror, and despair 
 
 Examined all the dreadful scenes of war ; 
 
 In peaceful thought the field of death surveyed, 
 
 To fainting squadrons sent the timely aid, 
 
 Inspired repulsed battalions to engage 
 
 And taught the doubtful battle where to rage. 
 
 So when an angel, by divine command, 
 
 With rising tempests shakes a guilty land. 
 
 Such as of late o'er pale Britannia (biU (an' i a) past, 
 
 Calm and serene he drives the furious blast; 
 
 And pleased th' Almighty's orders to perform, 
 
 Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm." 
 
154 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 chief, the Earl of Sunderland (who had succeeded Sir 
 Charles), was displaced to give way to a Tory. But almost 
 immediately another position was opened to Addison. 
 The Earl of Wharton (hAA^or' ton), Lord Lieutenant of Ire- 
 land, a great Whig and a member of the Kit-Cat Club,* 
 offered to Addison a position as his secretary. And so, 
 with his friend, Eustace (us'tas) Budgell, as private secre- 
 tary to himself, Addison quitted England for Dublin as 
 Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The office 
 was little more than nominal, and the salary was aug- 
 mented for his accommodation. 
 
 The chief thing of note during Addison's stay in Ire- 
 land, must have been his acquaintance with Swift. These 
 two great men were at this time good friends, for they 
 liked and respected each other. But they were on dif- 
 ferent sides in politics, and often fiercely opposed to each 
 other, and, unfortunately, they could hardly get over 
 their political opposition in their private acquaintance. 
 So their friendship cooled. They had no quarrel, as 
 Addison had with Pope, but they were no longer friends. 
 "We have grown common acquaintance," writes Swift 
 
 * The Kit-Cat Club was an organization started toward the beginning of 
 the 18th century, at first with the \'iew of encouraging literature and belles- 
 lettres (bel IW ter), but very shortly assuming a political turn, which soon became 
 the predominating element. It became, in fact, the Whig caucus of those days, 
 and among its members were all the most famous Whigs of the day, both political 
 and literary. The most noted members at this time were Marlborough and Godol- 
 phin, Walpole and Wharton. Halifax, Addison's early patron, was also a member. 
 So, too, was Addison himself, Steele, Congreve (kSng' grev) and Garth, with Van- 
 brugh {vdnbroo'), the architect and dramatist, and Kneller (nil' er), the painter. 
 The presiding genius, curiously enough, was Tonson, a book-seller. The Club 
 obtained its whimsical name from one Christopher Cat, who acted as victualer 
 in ordinary to the members, providing them with certain mutton-pies which 
 were highly esteemed. The portraits of the members were executed by Kneller 
 for the dining-room wherein they met. Prom the form in which they were 
 done, a three-quarters length, the name " kit-cat " has been applied to this species 
 of picture. 
 
ADDISON. 156 
 
 to Stella. I fear Swift regretted the decline of their 
 friendship more than did Addison. 
 
 It was while in Ireland that Steele started the Tatler* 
 a publication which truly marks an epoch in Addison's 
 life. Hitherto he had been known as a scholar, a grace- 
 ful writer of Latin verse, the author of an elegant dis- 
 quisition on medals, of one much praised poem, "The 
 Campaign," and various others of less repute, and indeed 
 in other ways for which posterity cares but little. He 
 was now to appear in the light in which all his later 
 admirers have loved to imagine him, the true humorist, 
 the writer of those delightful Essays in the Tatler and 
 the Spectator, which are read to-day with almost as keen 
 delight as they were by those for whom they were written. 
 He was to become the gentle castigator of public folly, 
 the encourager of public virtue, the critic who was to 
 lead Englishmen to a true appreciation of some of the 
 wonders of their own literature, the creator of a public 
 
 * The Tatler, and the Spectator after it, were the first of a famous species of 
 composition in great vogue in England in the 18th century. The Tatler was, we 
 believe, the first periodical paper containing news and comment joined thereto. 
 It lost, however, this mixed character, and shortly became a series of essays upon 
 current happenings in politics or the home, or upon literary or frivolous topics. It 
 was in this respect that the Spectator followed the TaMer. It is a series of essays 
 on all topics that wovQd be likely to interest the readers of Queen Anne's day, 
 short disquisitions on literature, satires against dress and social follies, quaint 
 descriptions of delightful character, tales of fantastic and whimsical nature, usually 
 with a moral,~such is the Spectator. And all written in the easiest and most agreea- 
 ble manner imaginable. We must remember that up to this time prose had hardly 
 been considered a medium in which to express light, graceful, and elegant ideas. 
 But little attention was paid to style. Prose was good for history, for philosophy, 
 for controversy, but few thought of making Prose a work of art in the same way 
 as had been done with Poetry. This was one of the great charms of the Spectator. 
 It treated light and agreeable themes in a pleasant, humorous, and graceful way 
 that delighted all readers, and was, indeed, something quite new in English litera- 
 ture. In another way, too, is the Spjectator remarkable. It showed that polite and 
 elegant literature could be written which was not foul and indecent in word and 
 thought, as had been almost all the light literature of the age immediately pre- 
 ceding it. For this, if for nothing more, Addison and Steele deserve the greatest 
 gratitude of all readers. 
 
156 PROSE M^KITERS. 
 
 opinion in favor of Truth and Right, the asserter of a 
 position for the gentler sex far higher than had been 
 allowed them in the century immediately preceding. 
 These Essays of Addison's, how much they call up to 
 mind ! The worthy trunkmaker who sat in the gallery 
 and applauded at the play, Tom Folio and the political 
 upholsterer, Hilpa and Shalum, the worthy inhabitants 
 of the world before the flood, the famous Fan Drill, the 
 worthy tailor who enacted the Lion at the opera, the 
 gentle wearers of the Party Patches, the Clubs and Coffee- 
 houses of the London of that day,* the Tory fox-hunter 
 and the Tory Squires in the Freeholder, and best of all, 
 good old Sir Roger de Coverley (kuv' er ll), the fine old 
 
 * It was the heyday of coffee-houses. They held the place which the club- 
 houses hold to-day. The men of fashion, the wits, the students, the lawyers, the 
 stock-brokers, the highwaymen, the drunkards, all had some resort where they 
 gathered to discuss the news of the day, and gain improvement for the mind by 
 instructive conversation. Dryden, a sort of king among the literary men before 
 Addison's time and Swift's, had established himself at Will's coflEee-house. Addison 
 set up Buttons, where he and his coterie (Ico te re') were accustomed to resort. 
 The Whigs rallied about the St. James, the Tories about the Cocoa-Tree or at 
 Ozinda's. The Grecian was the gathering place for the learned men, Serle's for 
 the lawyers. Mr. Bickerstaff (Ink' er stfif) often wrote from White's, and the Spectator 
 was often at Childs', of which the clergy were the chief frequenters. The stock- 
 jobbers were to be found at Jonathan's, in Change Alley. 
 
 The time of the Spectator was also a great time for clubs. Not the stately 
 associations in which men of the present day en.ioy the comforts of a flrst-class 
 hotel, but informal and ephemeral associations of men with some purpose, opinion, 
 whimsy in common, who usually met around about at one or another of the 
 coffee-houses or ale-houses with which London at that time was furnished. There 
 were some whose names have come down to us. Thus, there was the Kit-Cat, 
 the great Whig club, of which we have already heard ; the October Club, in which 
 the Tories meditated and consulted over good October beer. There was the Hell- 
 flre Club, organized for the perpetration of midnight deeds too horrid to be 
 thought of ; the Scriblerus (sJcn Me' rus) Club, of which Swift, Atterbury, Boling- 
 broke, and Oxford were the lights, and the Brothers' Club, to which many Tory 
 peers belonged, as well as Swift, Prior, Arbuthnot, and St. John (afterward Lord 
 Bolingbroke). And besides these were a thousand and one more informal organ- 
 izations. In fact, as the Spectator remarks, " Where a set of men find themselves 
 agree in any particular, though never so trivial, they establish themselves into a 
 kind of fraternity, and meet once or twice a week upon the account of such a 
 fantastic resemblance." 
 
ADDISON. 157 
 
 English gentleman. We don't read them much nowadays, 
 I fear, but it is to our own loss. 
 
 Shortly after the end of the first series of the Spec- 
 tator, in the year 1713, Addison brought out his trag- 
 edy of " Cato " and made another great success of the 
 same nature as his success with "The Campaign" — 
 on account in great measure of the political situation. 
 "Cato" and "The Campaign," though having many good 
 lines, could not have immortalized Addison. Without the 
 Spectator' he would have ranked perhaps with Phillips. 
 Written ten years or more before, "Cato" had lain neg- 
 lected imtil now, when the Whig leaders began to solicit 
 Addison to complete it. The spectacle of a noble Roman 
 dying in defense of his country against a usurper would, 
 they thought, arouse public sympathy for an Anti-Jaco- 
 bite party. On the other hand, the Tories proposed t(^ 
 take to themselves what credit they could find in the 
 piece, and as both political parties were in favor of the 
 play, how could it be other than a success? Addison 
 wrote a last act to it. Pope wrote a prologue, and Garth 
 an epilogue, Steele prepared to pack the house with 
 good Whig claquers. Of this last, as it turned out, there 
 was small need, for the Tories too crowded into the the- 
 ater intent to find something which should apply to 
 their own political principles, and answered Steele's 
 brave band of Whigs hand for hand. The piece was a 
 great success. The house resounded with applause. But 
 Bolingbroke (boring brdbk), the Tory leader, scored the 
 greatest success. For when the Whigs were loudly ap- 
 plauding "Cato," he called Booth, who acted the part, 
 into his box and presented him with a purse of £50 for 
 so nobly defending the cause of liberty against a per- 
 petual dictator — a palpable hit at Marlborough, the great 
 
158 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 Whig general. "The Whigs," says Pope, "design a pres- 
 ent to the same ' Cato ' very speedily ; in the meantime 
 they are getting ready as good a sentence as the former 
 on their side." So Addison scored another great success. 
 He then turned his hand to other things. He wrote part 
 of the Guardian, a publication not unlike the Spectator. 
 An eighth volume of the Spectator was published, and 
 he had thoughts of a work " On the Evidences of Chris- 
 tianity." But at this point politics claimed him again. 
 
 Queen Anne (an) died August 1, 1714. It was a great 
 moment. The Whigs (out of power) were ready for it. 
 By one or two bold strokes they utterly overthrew Bol- 
 ingbroke, who now represented the Tories (having suc- 
 ceeded in putting down Oxford), and by the Whigs 
 Greorge I. was proclaimed King of England. The Prot- 
 estant succession triumphed. All hopes of any motion 
 in favor of the Old Pretender went down with the defeat 
 of the Scots in 1715. When the Whigs came in, Sun- 
 derland, Addison's old chief, was appointed to the place 
 of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and Addison was again 
 given the place of Secretary, and for a short time lived 
 in Dublin. He had lived through the greatest triumphs 
 of his life. The Freeholder, published in 1716, has some 
 good papers, but was written for a special purpose, ren- 
 dered necessary by political affairs, which it achieved, but 
 is worth little else. A year or two later the Old Whig 
 was published, replying to certain attacks on the Whig 
 policy made by his old friend Steele. But his life was 
 nearly over. In 1716 he had married Charlotte, Countess 
 of Warwick,* and the next year was appointed one of 
 
 * 'Tis said this marriage was by no means an ideal union. Pope hints at 
 Addison's having "married discord with a noble wife." But as to this there 
 may be doubt. He had long been in love with the countess. It is hinted that 
 Sir Koger de Coverley's experience with the cruel widow may have had an auto- 
 
ADDISON. 159 
 
 the Secretaries of State under Sunderland. He resigned 
 the post on account of faihng health in March, 1718, 
 and lived only a little more than a year longer. He 
 died June 19, 1719. 
 
 Not a few writers of the greatest repute have poi"- 
 trayed Addison's life and work with the utmost love and 
 respect. Macaulay (ma ka^A^' ll) says, in an often-quoted 
 passage, "To Addison himself we are bound by a senti- 
 ment as much like affection as any sentiment can be 
 which is inspired by one who has been sleeping a hun- 
 dred and twenty years in Westminster Abbey. * * * 
 After free inquiry and impartial reflection, we have long 
 been convinced that he deserved as much love and 
 esteem as can justly be claimed by any of our infirm 
 and erring race." And Thackeray, "Commend me to 
 this dear preacher without orders, this parson in the tie- 
 wig. When this man looks from the world whose weak- 
 nesses he describes so benevolently up to the Heaven 
 which shines over us all, I can hardly fancy a human 
 face lighted up with a more serene rapture, a human 
 intellect thrilling with a purer love and adoration than 
 Joseph Addison. * * * j think [his life] was one of 
 the most enviable. A life prosperous and beautiful — a 
 calm death — an immense fame and affection aftei'ward 
 for his happy and spotless name."* 
 
 He had many of the most delightful qualities in man, 
 
 biographic test to it. Johnson remarks on the marriage that " the lady was per- 
 suaded to marry him on terms much like those on which a Turkish princess is 
 espoused, 'Daughter, I give thee this man for thy slave.'" The marriage, if 
 uncontradicted report can be credited, made no addition to his happiness ; it 
 neither found nor made them equal. 
 
 * Most characteristic of the calm and beautiful goodness of Addison's are 
 the lines of that most beautiful hymn of his, known to every one, beginning,— 
 "The spacious firmament on high." 
 
160 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 and as for his faults, if the reader will skim over Pope's 
 verses on "Atticus," he will have the most of them. For 
 he was by no means perfect.* He had traits which we 
 should call small, cowardly, jealous, mean, being unfort- 
 unately only human after all. But his virtues were 
 many, and his powers were very great. Of all the lit- 
 erary or public men of his time he seems to us to stand 
 forth as the noblest, purest, and the best. The names 
 of Swift and Pope are by no means stainless. Marlbor- 
 ough, Bolingbroke, Walpole (wol'pol) had very glaring 
 vices, and so with the others. But Addison we can 
 honor and respect, with less deprecation of his errors 
 and with more appreciation of his great qualities, than 
 we can any one of his contemporaries. 
 
 * Addison had one fault — in co)nnion, indeed, with, many of tlie gx'eatest men 
 of his day— that he was a bit too fond of wine. It was said in the time of John- 
 son, some quarter of a century or more after his death, that he shortened his 
 life by drinking. But this is probably untrue. What was probably the case was 
 that Addison's temperament was such that he needed some form of stimulant to 
 arouse him to his greatest intellectual activity, and that he coiild stand more of 
 such indulgence without being troubled by it than could his fellows. It was a 
 drinking age. Men lived in a manner that would be almost impossible nowadays. 
 And Addison's set only followed the custom of the day when they spent every 
 day five or six hours or more over the bottle at Buttons' after dinner. 
 
VOLTAI RK, 
 
 1694-1778. 
 
 FRANCOIS AROUET (frong swa' a rdb a') was born 
 in 16 94, the second son of a notary of the same 
 name living in Paris. When the boy was ten years old, 
 he was sent to the college called Louis le Q-rand (lc3o e' 
 leh gpong'), in Paris, where he was educated for the law. 
 This was one of the chief of the Jesuit colleges, con- 
 ducted by some of the best men of their order. Here 
 he was well taught in the classics, for which other 
 branches were neglected. His taste led him to make 
 verses even at the early age of twelve. He remained at 
 this college seven years, and left it, at the age of seven- 
 teen, with already a high reputation, especially for his 
 poetic gifts. 
 
 He was destined by his father for the bar, and set to 
 studying law for three years, but he detested this pur- 
 suit and early turned aside to the study of belles-lettres 
 (bel let'ter). His wit, animation, and charm of manner 
 made him at once a favorite in society. At twenty-four, 
 although thin, he was handsome, with a refined profile, 
 animated eyes, and a good-humored smile. He wrote 
 many verses, distinguished by peculiar grace, which are 
 still read with pleasure. 
 
 When Franpois was twenty-one, Louis XIV. died, and 
 his nephew, the profligate Duke of Orleans, became Re- 
 gent. Voltaire (vol ter') was accused of writing satirical 
 attacks upon this personage, one especially, in which his 
 Minister of Police was called " An enemy of the human 
 
162 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 race." Although he strenuously denied all knowledge of 
 these squibs, he was exiled from Paris, and when, with or 
 without permission, he returned thither, he was com- 
 mitted to the Bastile* (bas tel'). He took this misfort- 
 une lightly, and employed himself, though denied writ- 
 ing materials, in planning "The Henriade" (ongread'), 
 committing to memory the lines he composed. He was 
 liberated after an imprisonment of eleven months. His 
 first tragedy, the drama of " Oedipus" (ed'I pus), ran for 
 forty-five nights in succession, and brought the atten- 
 tion of the public upon its young author. At this time, 
 he abandoned the name of Arouet and took that of 
 Voltaire, a change not uncommon with French authors, 
 though why he chose that particular name is not known. 
 One explanation is that the letters V-o-l-t-a-i-r-e make an 
 anagram upon Arouet l.j. {Je jeune [leh zhCin']) ; but this 
 is far-fetched and not probable. 
 
 At this time Voltaire was poor, but happy. He fell 
 in love with a young girl, Suzanne de Livry (soo zan' 
 deh lev'r^), who consulted the author about becoming 
 an actress. He even thought of marrying her, but she 
 ran away with his particular friend. Voltaire was furi- 
 ous, pursued them in vain, fell ill, and then forgave the 
 treacherous pair, and wrote them a poetical epistle. 
 
 * His own accoTint of this, in verse, describes him as taken hy tlie hand and 
 conducted to his prison, where he is put under triple bolts. 
 * * * " The clock strikes noon ; a tray is brought. 
 With humble, frugal cheer 'tis fraught. 
 Said they who bore it when my air 
 Showed no great relish for the fare, 
 'Your diet is for health, not pleasure. 
 Pray eat in peace, — youVe ample leisure.' 
 See thus my fate distressful sealed— 
 Behold me cooped up, embastiled. 
 Sleep, food, and drink distasteful made, 
 By all, even by my love, betrayed." * * * 
 
VOLTAIRE. 163 
 
 For eight years he remained in Paris, writing trage- 
 dies which long held the stage; but witty and skillful as 
 he was, he did not succeed in comedy. His literary rep- 
 utation was altogether that of a poet, for although his 
 opinions were unorthodox, seemingly skeptical, they were 
 not yet conspicuous. 
 
 In consequence of a quarrel with a certain Chevalier 
 de Rohan (deh roong'), whom he challenged to fight, 
 Voltaire was again committed to the Bastile, where he 
 remained six months ; then liberated only on condition 
 that he should quit France. He chose England for his 
 place of exile. 
 
 He landed in England in the spring of 172 6 — the last 
 year of the reign of George I. On the voyage he was 
 depressed and gloomy, but on landing he recovered his 
 cheerfulness, and throwing himself in a transport of joy 
 on the earth, he reverently saluted it. It was a lovely 
 day, and the anniversary of the king's birthday. The 
 Thames (temz) River and the park were in holiday guise. 
 Every one appeared to him to be happy, and he believed 
 himself in a paradise of beautiful women and clear skies, 
 where no one thought of any thing but pleasure. 
 
 Voltaire was probably the guest of Lord Bolingbroke 
 (bol'ing brdbk), with whom he had already an acquaintance. 
 Thanks to him and other influential friends, he entered 
 at once the brilliant circle of London society. In about 
 three months he had picked up enough English to make 
 himself understood. He devoted himself to the systematic 
 study of the language, and came to feel so sure of his 
 knowledge of it, that he sometimes wrote in it.* Many 
 
 * During his sojourn in England, his adroitness and fluent mastery of the 
 language saved him from what might have been otherwise an unpleasant advent- 
 ure. He chanced one day to be strolling along the streets, when his peculiar 
 appearance attracted attention. A crowd collected, and some ribald fellow began 
 
164 PEOSE WRlTERt?. 
 
 of his new English acquaintances could talk with him in 
 his own tongue ; but Pope, whom he was very anxious to 
 meet, could hardly read French, and spoke it not at all. 
 He arrived in England in ill-health, which was aggra- 
 vated by ill-luck. A bill of exchange which he brought 
 with him, of the value of 20,000 francs, was lost through 
 the bankruptcy of a Jew, upon whom it had been drawn. 
 When Voltaire's misfortune came to the ears of the king, 
 he good-naturedly sent him a sum, probably a hundred 
 guineas, which relieved him from pressing embarrassment. 
 The news of the death of his sister threw him into an 
 agony of grief, but his buoyant spirits soon restored him 
 to cheerfulness, even gayety. His attenuated, eager face 
 grew familiar in fashionable society, and he was contented 
 
 with jeers and hoots to taunt him with being a Frenchman. The miscreants 
 were already preparing to pelt him with mud, and mud would no doubt have 
 been followed with missiles of a more formidable kind. But Voltaire was equal 
 to the crisis. Boldly confronting his assailants, he mounted on a stone which 
 happened to be at hand, and began an oration, of which the first sentence only 
 has been preserved. 
 
 "Brave Englishmen !" he cried, "am I not suflfliciently unhappy in not hav- 
 ing been born among you?" His harangue was so effective that the crowd was 
 not only appeased, but eager to carry him on their shoulders in triumph to his 
 lodgings. 
 
 This was not the only occasion on which he experienced the rudeness with 
 which the vulgar in those days treated his countrymen. He happened to be tak- 
 ing the air on the river, when one of the men in charge of the boat, perceiving 
 that his passenger was a Frenchman, began to boast of the superior privileges 
 enjoyed by English subjects, saying he belonged not to a land of slaves, but to 
 one of freemen. Warming with his theme, the fellow concluded his offensive 
 remarks by exclaiming, with an oath, that he would rather be a boatman on the 
 Thames than an archbishop in France. The sequel of the story was that the 
 man, within a few hours, was seized by the press-gang, and next day, Voltaire 
 saw him at the window of a prison with, his legs manacled, and his hand 
 stretched through the bars. "What think you now," said Voltaire, "of a 
 French archbishop?" 
 
 "Ah! sir!" replied the captive, "the abominable government have forced 
 me away from my wife and children to serve in a king's ship, and have thrown 
 me into prison and chained my feet for fear I should escape before the ship 
 sails I " 
 
 Voltaire was deeply grieved to think there was so little liberty on earth, 
 even in England. 
 
VOLTAIRE. 165 
 
 and happy, meeting many distinguished people, and win- 
 ning his way with them by fulsome flattery, in which he 
 was an adept. Meanwhile, he was diligently collecting 
 materials for his after-works.* 
 
 During his stay in England, he was hard at work on 
 the manuscript and proof of "The Henriade," which was 
 published, by subscription, in March, 172 8. It is a great 
 epic poem, recognized by the world of letters, when it 
 appeared, as an extraordinary production, which placed 
 its author among the first poets of his time. In its first 
 form, the poem had been dedicated to Louis XV., but 
 this was canceled, and a dedication in English was sub- 
 stituted, to Queen Caroline. The queen rewarded him in 
 a substantial manner, and the king honored him with 
 his intimacy, and invited him to private supper parties. 
 
 As soon as "The Henriade" was finished, Voltaire 
 began his " History of Charles XII." He also wrote, in 
 English prose, the first act of the tragedy of "Brutus." 
 He read almost every thing worth reading in English 
 poetry and prose, beginning with Shakespeare, whom he 
 studied with close attention. 
 
 He stayed in England about two years and eight 
 months. He never forgot the kindness and hospitality 
 he received there, and to be an Englishman, was a 
 
 * In March, he was present at the funeral of Sir Isaac Newton. The specta- 
 cle made a profound impression on him, and he ever afterward delighted to 
 recall being in a country in which the first of&cers of state contended for the 
 honor of bearing the pall of a man whose sole distinction had lain in intellectual 
 eminence. He afterward made the acquaintance of the philosopher's niece. 
 We owe to Voltaire the famous story of the fallen apple, which appears in the 
 fifteenth of his " Letters about the English," published in 1733, or possibly earlier. 
 It runs thus : 
 
 " Being in the country near Cambridge, in 1666, one day, when Newton was 
 walking in the garden, he saw fruit falling from a tree. This led him into deep 
 meditation upon the subject of weight, the cause for which philosophers had 
 long been vainly seeking. Madame Conduit (k6ndwe'), his niece, told me this." 
 
166 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 certain passport to his consideration, to the end of 
 his life. 
 
 On his return to Paris, Voltaire lived retired, and 
 devoted himself, with extraordinary talent, to financial 
 speculation. His investments were so well placed, that 
 he lived and died the richest of all eminent men of 
 letters, and was quite independent of the profits from 
 his writings. He was, however, always writing and pub- 
 lishing. His play of " Zaire " (za er') had a prodigious 
 success. This was translated into English, and long 
 remained popular upon the English stage. Voltaire con- 
 tinued to write tragedies all his life, producing twenty- 
 six in all, which were all more or less eminently suc- 
 cessful.* 
 
 The boldness of his writing was always bringing him 
 into trouble. His craving after liberty to express him- 
 self induced him to leave Paris, in order to live in com- 
 fort and security near the French frontier, so that he 
 could leave the country at any moment, if threatened 
 by government. He retired, with Madame du Chatelet (du 
 shat a la'), to her country-house, close to Lorraine (lor ran'). 
 She was disposed to pass several years in the country 
 
 * It was about this time that Voltaire, finding his former friend, Suzanne, 
 now Marquise de Gouvernet (mdrkez' cleh gd^verntV), was living in a fashionable 
 quarter of Paris, wished to renew his acquaintance with her. She had intimated 
 no such wish, but he who had made love to so many high-born ladies, thought 
 he might, without presumption, approach this butterily marquise, with whom he 
 had been so intimate in the chrysalis. When he had presented himself at the 
 door, the huge Swiss Inquired his name, and on learning it, observed, in a tone 
 by no means encouraging, that it was not on the list of visitors received. On 
 returning home, Voltaire wrote to the marquise a poetical epistle, half gay, half 
 serious, all graceful, in a style for which he is unrivaled. 
 
 Years afterward, on his last visit to Paris, he again appeared at the doors of 
 that hotel Suzanne was now a widow. The meeting was like that of two ghosts 
 in another world, when the aged pair, both past eighty-four, tottered toward 
 each other. His portrait, preserved by her for sixty years, looked down upon them 
 with a mocking smile. 
 
VOLTAIRE. 167 
 
 to cultivate her mind far from the world. She was then 
 about twenty-seven, twelve years younger than Voltaire, 
 an extremely attractive woman, tall and dark, and, 
 although undoubtedly learned, fond of pleasure. She 
 had been married young to an uncongenial mate, who 
 pursued his own course and left her to hers. Cirey (se ra') 
 was the name of the chateau to which Voltaire and 
 Madame du Chatelet retired. There, during a number of 
 years, they received and returned the visits of the great, 
 fashionable, and learned ; the brother and husband of 
 the lady both occasionally visited them. Voltaire's in- 
 come, more than £3,000 a year, furnished and embel- 
 hshed the house and gardens. 
 
 Here lived Voltaire for fifteen years, from 1734 to 
 1749, studying and writing, as did Madame du Chatelet 
 also. The diversions of the place were reading aloud, 
 private theatricals, and the magic-lantern exhibited by 
 Voltaire. They made journeys to Paris, Brussels, and 
 elsewhere, in a huge coach so crowded with trunks and 
 baggage that it sometimes broke down on the road. 
 
 The notable feature of the Cirey epoch was the inter- 
 course between Voltaire and Frederick the Great. In 
 August, 1736, Frederick, not yet king, wrote an enthu- 
 siastic letter to the poet, and thus opened a pleasant 
 correspondence, which lasted for years. In 1740, the 
 newly-made king planned a visit to Voltaire, who hap- 
 pened to be at Brussels, but afterward excusing himself 
 on account of an attack of ague, he sent for Voltaire 
 to come to him instead.* The two were delighted with 
 
 * "I saw," says Voltaire, "in a small room, by the light of a candle, a little 
 mattress, two feet and a half wide, on which lay a little man, wrapped up in a 
 dressing-gown of coarse blue stuff. This was the king, perspiring and shivering 
 under a wretched counterpane, in a violent fit of fever. Having paid my respects, 
 I began the acquaintance by feeling his pulse, as if I had been his first physician. 
 The fit over, he dressed, and placed himself at table, where we discussed, during 
 
168 P R S E W R 1 T E R S . 
 
 each other, and became, in fact, close friends. Mean- 
 while, the life at Cirey went on, Voltaire writing clever 
 things, and reading them to his guests,* making visits to 
 Paris with Madame du Chatelet, and leading an easy 
 life. The lady has pronounced it a paradise in her cor- 
 respondence, and with reason. Voltaire was devoted to 
 her. He wrote poetical epistles, alluding to her wit and 
 beauty, and complimenting her learning. He sent, in 
 her name, rhyming answers to her correspondents, and 
 was full of consideration and attention. f 
 
 supper, to the very bottom, the questions of the immortality of the soul, of 
 liberty, and the Androgynes (an drag' e nlz) of Plato." 
 
 * " La Pucelle " (Z« poo set' ), composed and read at this time, is full of adventure. 
 The people who listened to these productions, assembled in a small room where 
 they were removed from the possibility of intrusion. Madame de G-raflgny (deh 
 griifen'ye), who was a. guest at the time, was much delighted -ftath the poem, and 
 ventured, from time to time, to write a brief account of its progress in her letters 
 to one M. Devaux (de vo'). 
 
 Now, Madame du Chatelet always opened the postbag, and did not scruple 
 to open such letters as she chose, whether addressed to herself or others. Sus- 
 pecting something, she used this self -given privilege upon a letter from M. Devaux 
 to Madame Grafigny, and read these words: "Jeanne is charming." Voltaire, 
 being informed of this, was greatly excited. He immediately sought an inter- 
 view mth Madarae de Q-rafigny, and in an agitated manner besought her to 
 write at once and get back the poem. He had no intention of making public the 
 verses he had written for the diversion of a few, and feared personal injury if 
 it should be known what he had done. 
 
 The unlucky Madame de Q-rafigny was quite overcome, especially as Madame 
 du Chatelet entered in a fury, shaking the open letter in her hand. 
 
 As soon as she could find her voice and a hearing, Madame de G-raflgny explained 
 the matter. Prom the first moment, Voltaire believed her, and immediately 
 begged her to pardon him. The next day, she wished to leave the place ; she 
 was in despair, for she had no monej'. Voltaire came to her in tears, and 
 repeatedly asked her forgiveness, and afterward did all he could to make her 
 forget the scene. 
 
 t In the year 1746, Voltaire and Madame du Chatelet made a visit to the 
 Duke of Eichelieu (resh' (h ld!>), at Pontainbleau (fong tanUO'). They were playing 
 cards at the queen's table, and a run of luck set in against Madame du Chatelet, 
 who was a loser of between three and four thousand pounds. Voltaire whispered 
 to her in English to be careful, as she was playing with sharpers. These words 
 were overheard, and they perceived they were being repeated, so fearing the 
 consequences, the pair slipped quietly away, and set out for Paris at once in the 
 middle of the night. 
 
 On the road, a wheel broke ; Voltaire sent to beg an asylum from his old 
 
VOLTAIRE. 169 
 
 But the time came when this all changed. The poet 
 was flfty-flve and growing old. He was thinner than ever. 
 He lost his teeth ; he was often an invalid, and grew tired 
 of playing the lover. Madame du Chatelet became tired 
 of her hitherto satisfactory friend, and transferred her 
 attentions to Monsieur de St. Lambert (san lam ber'), wh(j 
 had long admired her. Voltaire was at first very angry 
 at the disruption of this long standing friendship, but 
 soon became reconciled to the situation and made it the 
 subject of a little comedy in verse. This was in 1748. 
 In the following year Madame du Chatelet died. Voltaire 
 was inconsolable for a long time ; nor indeed did any 
 other woman ever take the place with him of this long- 
 time friend. 
 
 After this tie was dissolved, Voltaire no longer hesi- 
 tated to accept the flattering invitations of Frederick the 
 Great, to take up his abode at the Court of Berlin. He 
 arrived there in July, 1750. His reception was most 
 gracious. He was invested with his cross and key, and 
 lived in complete intimacy with the king. Frederick, 
 himself a writer, had several works in iiie press, which 
 Voltaire corrected from time to time. He finished his 
 "Age of Louis XIV." His plays were acted at court, the 
 highest personages taking part, as well as the author. 
 
 friend, the Duchesse du Maine (doo shes' dm man' ), at Sceaux (so), near by. He was 
 welcomed at once, admitted secretly to a private set of apartments, and waited on 
 by a faithful valet, without any of the household knowing of his presence. Often- 
 times late at night the duchess had supper set in her private ajpartments and 
 inviting Voltaire to join her, the two lingered long over the dainty meal, talking 
 over old times. After supper, he sometimes read her a tale, composed during the 
 daytime for her amusement. Meantime, Madame du Chatelet hurried about to 
 pay her debts incurred at cards, and to soothe the insulted players, and at length 
 she came to Sceaux and announced that all danger for Voltaire was over. The 
 duchess kept them both to join a brilliant company assembled there, and made 
 Voltaire read to them all the little romances he had written for her. They 
 proved so delightful that he was urged to print them, and, acordingly, " Zadig " 
 {tsa,' (likh) appeared soon after. 
 
170 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 An unlucky financial enterprise, of doubtful propriety, 
 with a Jew money-lender first disturbed the harmony of 
 their relations. The Jew cheated the poet ; the poet 
 nearly throttled the Jew. The king became aware of the 
 matter, and disapproved, though the charm of the cul- 
 prit's conversation soon restored him to favor for the 
 time. But elements of distrust and suspicion crept in to 
 lessen the charm of their intercourse. Frederick is well 
 knoAvn to have been fond of saying things with the inten- 
 tion to wound, and Voltaire was singularly sensitive.* 
 Afterward, he used to designate the King of Prussia by 
 the name of a pet monkey he had, called Luc, "be- 
 cause," he said, " Frederick is like my monkey — he bites 
 those who caress him." 
 
 The friendship ended in a quarrel over a satire which 
 Voltaire wrote against Maupertuis (mo per t^^^e'), the 
 President of the Berlin Academy. The king was indig- 
 nant, and ordered the satire to be burned by the hang- 
 man. Voltaire packed up his cross and key and returned 
 them to Frederick. The king relented, and Voltaire, after 
 a brief period of apparent favor, left Berlin as if on a 
 short leave of absence, taking with him his order, his 
 key, and a volume of the king's poetry. But while he 
 was away, he could not resist a parting shot at his enemy, 
 
 * La Mettrie (Idn^ttre') reported to Mm that Frederick had said, "I still 
 want Voltaire for another year,— we suck the orange before throwing away the 
 skin." About this time another kind friend reported to the king that Voltaire, 
 on receiving some memoirs for revision, said to the author who brought them, 
 " The king sends me his dirty linen to wash, so yours must wait." Such remarks 
 irritated both parties. Voltaire wrote to his niece, " I am always thinking of the 
 orange-skin, though I try not to believe it." 
 
 Not long after, La Mettrie, the man who had reported the speech, died sud- 
 denly from eating too much of a certain pie, supposed to be of pheasant, which, 
 by way of a practical joke, had been composed of eagle, hashed with pork and 
 seasoned with ginger. Voltaire, after recording the incident, observes : " I wish 
 I could have put to La Mettrie, in articulo mortis, the question about the orange- 
 eMn. On the point of leaving this world, he would not have dared to lie." 
 
VOLTAIKE. 171 
 
 the President of the Academy ; so witty, tliat Maupertius 
 became the laughing-stock of Europe. Frederick was 
 very angry. He sent orders to Frankfort to stop Voltaire 
 from passing into France, and make him deliver up the 
 cross, the key, and the book of verses. Voltaire did not 
 surrender these without much undignified squabbling. 
 He made his final exit from Q-ermany, without them, in 
 July, 1753. 
 
 In the course of a few years an amicable correspond- 
 ence was renewed between Voltaire and Frederick, which 
 was maintained with courtesy until Voltaire died. 
 
 Louis XV., who had coldly given permission to Vol- 
 taire to go and live at Berlin, did not consent to his 
 return to Paris. He bought, in 1754, a pretty country- 
 house near Q-eneva, which he called " The Delights," from 
 the beauty of the grounds and scenery. For more than 
 twenty years he continued to live near the Lake of 
 Greneva, with more real freedom, comfort, and leisure than 
 he had ever before enjoyed. His home became a point of 
 attraction for pilgrims, who desired to do homage to his 
 fame. Among others came Goldsmith, who has described 
 the charm of his conversation with enthusiasm. 
 
 In the year 1755, occurred the great earthquake at 
 Lisbon, destroying that capital and a great many of its 
 inhabitants. Voltaire wrote a poem on "The Disaster of 
 Lisbon," depicting his profound sense of the hapless con- 
 dition of humanity. He had always been revolted by the 
 form of philosophy called optimism, which assumes every 
 thing that takes place in the universe to be inevitably 
 right, because forming part of a divine plan. He took oc- 
 casion in this poem, and in his novel of " Candide " (kan- 
 ded'), to enter a protest against this doctrine, which he 
 regarded as illogical and irreverent. Both the poem and 
 
172 
 
 PROSE WRITERS 
 
 the novel have brought upon their author the charge of 
 irreverence, as well as his share in the French "Encyclo- 
 pedia," at that time attracting public attention. The ob- 
 ject of this work was to bring together full information 
 respecting all the sciences and all the arts, as they then 
 existed, and thus depict the progress of the human mind 
 and of civilization. The most noted men of science and 
 letters in France took part in the work. Many of these 
 were free-thinkers ; and from their frank expressions of 
 opinion, they all came to be charged with being, not only 
 the enemies of Church and State, which they were, but 
 of morality and order, which they were not. 
 
 Voltaire has been called an atheist ; but his article, 
 "Atheist," which he wrote at this time, sufficiently shows 
 the title to be a wrong one. He thus sums up his con- 
 clusions : " Atheism and fanaticism are two mouths which 
 rend and devour society. The atheist, in his error, pre- 
 serves sense enough to keep his claws cut, while those 
 of the fanatic are made sharper by the madness which 
 afflicts him." 
 
 Voltaire lived at Lausanne (lo zan') in 175 7 and 1758, 
 and then acquired the estate of Ferney (ferna'), on the 
 western shore of the lake. There he built a theater, and 
 rebiiilt the tumble-down church at his own cost. He 
 built, also, a chateau at Ferney, and surrounded it with 
 gardens in the English style. He improved the town, 
 and encouraged skillful workmen to live there. His 
 charities were munificent. He received into his family 
 the grand-niece of the poet Corneille (korna'), whom he 
 thus rescued from poverty. He constituted himself the 
 champion of all who were oppressed, and endeavored, in 
 a succession of cases, to obtain justice for the victims of 
 judicial blunders, in which his sympathy with the 
 
VOLTAIRE. 173 
 
 oppressed impelled him to untiring efforts, generally suc- 
 cessful, in their behalf. 
 
 All this time the increasing weight of years by no 
 means checked his active pen. In 175 7, the whole of 
 his works were, for the first time, published in an author- 
 ized and complete edition, mider his direction. He con- 
 sidered it the mission of his life to battle against super- 
 stition, which he called " The Infamous." 
 
 In writing to d'Alembert (dfi long ber'), he says : " I 
 want you to crush the Infamous. It must be reduced to 
 the position it occupies in English. This is the greatest 
 service that can be rendered to the human race. You 
 will understand that I mean superstition only. Religion 
 I love and respect." In his time he was regarded, how- 
 ever, as a skeptic and a scoffer against religion. 
 
 As years went on, he kept himself incessantly before 
 the public by his writings. At the age of eighty-two, he 
 was in the habit of driving out in a carriage, adorned 
 with gold stars on a blue ground, with carved and gilded 
 mountings. But his visit to Paris, at the age of eighty- 
 two, ended his life. 
 
 As soon as his arrival was known, crowds of visitors 
 poured in upon him. It was a time of excitement and 
 agitation. Such unusual emotion brought on a danger- 
 ous attack of hemorrhage from the lungs. From this 
 attack, however, he recovered, and was present at the 
 representation of his new tragedy. The Avhole theater 
 rose to receive him ; his bust was crowned with laurel, 
 and he was carried to his coach on the shoulders of his 
 admirers. He entered the house never to leave it again, 
 and died on the 30th of May, 1778. He wrote before his 
 death these words : " I die adoring Gfod, loving ray friends, 
 not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition," 
 
174 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 He was held not to have reconciled himself with the 
 Church, however, and was denied sepulture by the clergy 
 of Paris. His body was taken by his nephew to Cham- 
 pagne (shong pan'), where it was interred with the rites of 
 the Church. Thirteen years afterward the Revolutionists, 
 claiming him as a champion of their cause, for which, 
 however, they found no warrant in his writings, took up 
 his body and transported it to the Pantheon (pan the' on). 
 
 His life must be studied and recorded, as that of one 
 of the men most known in his time, and largely influen- 
 tial. In the words of Father Doucet (dc5o sa'), a Cathohc 
 author of repute, "He was undoubtedly one of the makers 
 of the French Revolution, that great conflict, which, as 
 Schlegel (sla'gel) says, must be looked upon as a religious 
 war." But the intelligence of the present time will gen- 
 erally agree with Father Doucet, when he says, " that 
 there is no element in Voltaire which constitutes the 
 great man. He lacks those qualities of the heart which 
 ennoble their possessor and surround him with a halo of 
 serene splendor, even in the lowliest station. His private 
 life, from beginning to end, shows the meanness of his 
 character. He had no civic virtues. He denied his 
 country and despised the people. As a philosopher, he 
 has discovered no truth, elucidated none, and contributed 
 nothing to the advancement of knowledge." 
 
JOHNSON. 
 
 1709-1784. 
 
 NOT infrequently has the Republic of Letters in 
 England seen fit to appoint over itself a Dictator 
 armed with absolute power. Such was the position for 
 some time held by John Dryden (dri'den), whose emi- 
 nence in an age of Congreves (kong' grevz), and Wycherlys 
 (witeh'er liz), and Elkanah Settles (el'ka na set'tlz), was, 
 and is, sufficiently unquestioned. Other of these rulers 
 were Ben Jonson and Pope. Neither Shakespeare nor 
 Milton ever held the office. Perhaps the most famous 
 of these literary dictators, the one whose word was most 
 binding in his time, whose authority was the most un- 
 questioned and acknowledged by his contemporaries, was 
 Samuel Johnson. 
 
 The claims to greatness of most literary men are to 
 be found, as a usual thing, exhibited in their works. By 
 these they are judged, and they are held in repute by 
 posterity according as their works may justify. Johnson 
 is a curious exception. His works are, on the whole, for- 
 gotten, and unread even by cultivated people. The Ram- 
 bler and the Idler are by no means as popular as the 
 Spectator or the "Essays of Elia" (e'lia). The massive 
 Dictionary which he created is put aside by Worcester 
 (-wdbs'tep) or Webster. " Rasselas " (ras' se las) is hardly as 
 much read as " Vathek " (vath' gk). His poems, " London," 
 or the "Vanity of Human Wishes," are distinctly inferior to 
 the "Deserted Yillage," or the "Traveller." Yet Johnson 
 
176 
 
 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 is undoubtedly a greater figure in literary history than 
 Addison, Lamb, Worcester, Webster, Beckford, or Gold- 
 smith. The secret of this lies in the fact that it was by 
 his personal intercourse with the men of his time that 
 he attained his grea,test reputation, and that, fortunately 
 for him, as for us, that personal intercourse has been 
 preserved for us with wonderful vividness and truth in 
 what is, probably, the best biography ever written. 
 
 The life of Johnson may be divided into two periods: 
 one, a period lasting uninterruptedly until he was forty- 
 six years of age, of constant struggle for recognition and 
 for daily bread, which necessitated his writing much ; 
 and the other, a period of literary dictatorship, where his 
 absolute pre-eminence over all other English men of let- 
 ters of his day was unquestionably acknowledged, and 
 during which, being secured from actual want by a royal 
 pension, he wrote very little. It is the story of these last 
 years, as told by Boswell (boz'wel), which has gained for 
 Johnson more fame and position than have all the labors 
 of the first period. 
 
 He was born in 1709, the son of Michael Johnson, a 
 book-seller of Litchfield. Like Pope, he was shut out from 
 the constant companionship of his fellows through physical 
 inflictions, — for he was greatly troubled, even in his youth, 
 by a scrofulous disease, which led him into various phys- 
 ical or mental whimsicalities, and made him merely odd, 
 where otherwise, by means of his strong and powerful body, 
 he would have been highly esteemed among his young 
 fellows. But he held aloof from them (though compelling 
 them to recognize him as ruler,* when he happened to 
 
 * "From his earliest years," reinarks Boswell, "his superiority was perceived 
 and acknowledged. He was from the beginning an cira^ di-Spiii' (d'ndx an drm\ i. <?., 
 ruler of men). * * * His favorites used to receive very liberal assistance from 
 him, and such was the submission and deference with which he was treated, such 
 
JOHNSON. 177 
 
 be in their company), and thus had much time to him- 
 self during his youth, in wliich lie acquired a large and 
 various learning,* by himself, and in the various schools 
 to which he went. He lived for three years at Oxford, 
 but left without taking a degree, f In the same year 
 (1731) his father died, leaving him but twenty pounds, 
 and the world was before him. He might have entered 
 the ministry, but he preferred not, turned for the mo- 
 ment to school-teaching (unsuccessfully), married, and 
 finally drifted up to London. This was in 1737. He 
 had with him, when he first reached the town, very 
 little money and three acts of "Irene" (i re'ne), a tragedy. 
 He had resolved to support himself by his pen. 
 
 Literature was not at that time a very profitable pro- 
 fession in England. The reader of the lives of Addison 
 and Pope who recollects that one was Secretary of State, 
 and that the other made almost £9,000 by translating 
 the "Odyssey," inay wonder that, hardly twenty years 
 after, the man who was to be the greatest figure in 
 the literary world should have found it difficult to earn 
 
 the desire to obtain his regard, that three of the boys used to come in the morn- 
 ing as his humble attendants, and carry him to school. One in the middle 
 stooped, while he sat on his back, and one on each side supported him, and thus 
 he was borne triumphant. He never joined with the boys in their ordinary diver- 
 sions : his only amusement was in the winter, when he took a pleasure in being 
 drawn upon the ice by a boy barefooted. * * * His defective sight, indeed, pre- 
 vented him from enjoying the common sports ; and he once pleasantly remarked 
 to me, ' how wonderfully well he had contrived to be idle without them.' " 
 
 * He was accustomed to say himself that the period in which he acquired 
 the greater part of his knowledge was between the years of twelve and eighteen. 
 
 t Pembroke (2')em' brook) was his college. He was much depressed on account of 
 his poverty, and paid little enough attention to the college regulations. " I have 
 heard," said a friend, "that he was generally seen lounging at the college gate, 
 with a circle of young students round him, whom he was entertaining with wit 
 and keeping from their studies, if not spiriting them iip to rebellion against the 
 college discipline, which in his mature years he so much extoUed." "He was too 
 proud," says Boswell, "to accept of money, and somebody having set a pair of 
 new shoes at his door, he threw them away with indignation." He left college 
 on account of the pressure of his debts. 
 
178 
 
 PROSE WRITEES. 
 
 sufficient money to exist. But this was an age of change. 
 Literary men had been heretofore rewarded by particular 
 patrons. They were subsequently to be rewarded by 
 the public* But at just this time they were rewarded 
 by neither. 
 
 The literary man of Johnson's time was by no means 
 the polite and often influential wit of Queen Anne's (anz) 
 day, nor the exalted character of our own ; but, as a rule, 
 a wild species of creature, who existed without money in 
 the lowest manner possible, and whose only difference 
 from a beggar was that he had higher sensibilities, 
 whereby his difficulties were the more felt. The names 
 of Fielding, Savage, Groldsmith call up to us recollections 
 of bailiffs and debtors' prisons, of garrets and sixpenny 
 dinners, as well as of works of genius. It was in a world 
 like this that Johnson worked for twenty-five years, at 
 first for bread from day to day, and afterward, when 
 actual fear of hunger had passed by, for the fair support 
 of himself and his wife. It is not necessary to particu- 
 larize here. He wrote an immense quantity of hack 
 work, and some things that made him a reputation, f 
 
 The first of his serious attempts was "London," an 
 
 * Johnson was an influence in this change. He might have pubhshed his 
 Dictionary with a dedication to Lord Chesterfield, that that noble might play the 
 part of patron, for such was his lordship's desire. Instead, he sent him a very 
 independent letter, recalling some unpleasant incidents in their past relations, 
 and stating that he thought it a better thing to stand on his own merits. 
 
 t Among the literary labors which gave him a living, though they added 
 nothing to his reputation, was that of parliamentary reporting. Although it was 
 not at that time allowed by law to publish reports of parliamentary proceedings, 
 it was the custom to do so after a fashion. That is, the debates would be pub- 
 lished under the name of the deliberations of the " Senate of LiUiput," or some 
 other such body. These Johnson used to do. His work consisted of revising and 
 rewriting- the reports made for Cave, the book-seller, by one Guthrie. He would 
 often, however, write whole speeches out of his head, merely depending on one 
 or two hints which would be given him. He not infrequently heard gentlemen 
 praised for speeches which they were supposed to have delivered, but which in 
 reality he had written himself. 
 
JOHNSON. 179 
 
 imitation of Juvenal's (ju'venalz) Third Satire, which 
 brought him into some notice. Next, he published the 
 Bambler, a periodical of the form made popular by the 
 Spectator; and this was followed, some years later, by 
 the Idler, of the same nature. Both of these periodicals 
 added to his reputation. "The Vanity of Human Wishes," 
 an imitation of Juvenal's Tenth Satire, was his next 
 poetical work. He gained little fame from the writing 
 and publication of " Irene," his tragedy, but again in- 
 creased his reputation by "Rasselas," a moral tale on the 
 pursuit of happiness. 
 
 By these works, he made for himself a very consider- 
 able name, so that it was conceived by no means im- 
 proper that he should address himself to the composition 
 of a Dictionary of the English Language. This ponder- 
 ous work came out in 1755, and with the completion of 
 this, Johnson seems to have felt that he had done enough 
 work to last his life-time. The Dictionary was received 
 with universal admiration. A pension was granted him 
 by the king, and the necessity of writing for bread was 
 taken away. As a matter of fact, he wrote but little in 
 the twenty-nine years more that his life continued. His 
 reputation was made among his contemporaries by his 
 works written during these first years. They are to-day 
 almost forgotten, and when we say Johnson, we think 
 of the Johnson of later years, whose fame was made 
 rather by talking than by writing. 
 
 To mention, however, such literary work as he did 
 before going on to his life, as portrayed for us by the 
 genius of Boswell. In 1765, he finally issued an edition 
 of Shakespeare, — the production of which was much 
 delayed by his procrastination, and was only finally 
 brought about by the taunt from Churchill that he 
 
180 
 
 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 intended to cheat those who had already subscribed for 
 the work. He wrote, also, a few political pamphlets de- 
 fending the ministry, — the chief of which was " Taxation 
 no Tyranny," an argument in which he tried to show 
 that George Ill's American policy was constitutional. 
 And later, at the request of the London book-sellers, who 
 were bringing out a set of English Poets, he wrote what 
 is to-day, perhaps, his best known work, — " The Lives of 
 the Poets." No man was better fitted for the task than 
 he. He possessed a large knowledge of English literature, 
 and had acquired much information in regard to literary 
 men. His style was, on the whole, agreeable, and his 
 critical remarks commanded respect. The work was one 
 that pleased him, and he finished it in a much more 
 extended shape than he had at first intended. Although 
 his criticism is now held, by no means in such rever- 
 ence as it was in his day, " The Lives of the Poets " are 
 still very interesting reading. 
 
 After the granting of his pension, Johnson's life be- 
 came more bright and cheerful, and the remainder of his 
 life was a happy one. One great grief had overtaken 
 him before his good fortune came. In 1752, his wife 
 died. She was a strange, queer woman, — unlovely, older 
 than himself, and in many ways an irritating companion ; 
 but he loved her fondly, and her death was a great and 
 crushing blow to him. 
 
 For the rest, his existence takes on a certain sameness. 
 Being made independent in means, and having gained 
 a reputation second to none as a man of letters, he now 
 entered upon the reward of his labors, and for the next 
 twenty years or so he lived in London with congenial 
 friends, talking much, drinking much tea, and afford- 
 ing Boswell an opportunity to make them both immortal. 
 
JOHNSON. i8i 
 
 It was not till 1765 that Johnson made the acquaint- 
 ance of Mr. and Mrs. Thrale (thrai). Mr. Thrale was 
 the proprietor of a large brewery, Mrs. Thrale was a very 
 clever little woman, and both conceived a great affection 
 for Johnson. Finding him one day at his rooms in a 
 state of miserable melancholy, they invited him to come 
 back with them, and make their house his home for as 
 long a period as he wished. From that time a very 
 warm intimacy began. Johnson always had an apartment 
 of his own at Streatham (stref uin), where was the 
 Thrales' residence, and the connection was the greatest 
 pleasure to him. Another famous intimate of Johnson's 
 was Boswell, — his subsequent biographer. James Boswell 
 was the son of a Scotch laird, educated for the law. It 
 was in the summer of 1762, on being in London, that 
 Boswell was presented to Johnson by Davies, the book- 
 seller. It was the end of his desire. He had for a long 
 time desired to make the acquaintance, and now that he 
 had made it, he set to work to improve his advantage. 
 
 It is a singular thing that Boswell should have been led 
 to select Johnson as the object of his reverence. Although 
 by no means a man of very fine characteristics himself, 
 he had yet the good sense to see that among all the men 
 of his time, Johnson was the man who had the most of 
 what was good in him.* And he, therefore, attached him- 
 self to him as closely as he was able, was with him when- 
 ever his circumstances would allow, questioned him on 
 every conceivable subject, and, in fact, learned as much 
 of the great man as he could, in every way that he could 
 imagine. He was a curious follower, but not disagreeable 
 to Johnson, who scolded, bullied, lectured, and loved him 
 
 * He once said to Johnson, "By associating witli you, sir, I am always get- 
 ting an accession of wisdom." 
 
182 PROSE WRITEEB. 
 
 with all his heart. Together the two made a tour to the 
 Hebrides in 1773, — of which Johnson wrote an account, 
 " The Journey to the Hebrides," which excited some com- 
 plaint among the Scotch, a people against whom Johnson 
 had a violent and probably ungrounded prejudice. 
 
 The events of these last twenty years of Johnson's life 
 are by no means so important as a general idea of his 
 appearance and manners, his characteristics, and, above 
 all, his conversation. His form was large and heavy, and 
 his features large ; and his whole appearance was ren- 
 dered strange by the scars of his disease, by his odd and 
 convulsive motions and rollings, as well as by his care- 
 less dress. He was generally clad in a slovenly manner, 
 in the large wig of the period, brown clothes, and black 
 stockings. He was rough and uncourtly in his behavior 
 at table and away from it, more from carelessness, which 
 had come to be a habit, than any thing else. He was 
 often gloomy and melancholy, often gluttonous in his 
 eating and drinking, often rough and surly even to his 
 friends. But there was such a depth of right feeling, of 
 true goodness, of love for his friends, of loyalty, honesty, 
 and real charity, that we can not but love him. 
 
 As for his conversation, the only way in which one 
 can form a clear idea of it is by reading Boswell's Life. 
 The Scotchman has managed to give us the best picture 
 imaginable of the great talker ; better than a picture, for 
 we hear the talk. Johnson was a conversationalist 
 specially gifted by natui'e ; * but having made it a con- 
 
 * He said himself : " There must, in the first place, be knowledge ; there must 
 be materials ; in the second place, there must be a command of words ; — in the 
 third place, there must be imagination, to place things in such views as they are 
 not commonly seen in ;— and in the fourth place, there must be presence of mind, 
 and a resolution that is not to be overcome by failures ; this last is an essential 
 requisite; for want of it many people do not excel in conversation." 
 
JOHNSON. 183 
 
 stant rule to talk always as well as he could, he had 
 infinitely improved by practice. Immense good sense, 
 a logical head, a large command of mere words, a 
 brilliant imagination, great powers of wit and humor, an 
 utter freedom from vicious or impious tendencies, — these 
 united to make his general conversation clear, forcible, 
 and elegant, as well as entertaining and improving. He 
 had, too, a grave manner, a commanding voice, and a 
 deliberate utterance, which gave a better effect to what- 
 ever he said. And he was not unwilling to adapt his 
 conversation to the plane of his listeners. He was by no 
 means faultless. He was often pedantic in using unneces- 
 sarily long words.* He was frequently overbearing and 
 uncivil. He could not brook contradiction. He lost his 
 temper and his head when worsted.f He was too often, 
 by his desire to shine, led into deliberately assuming 
 what he knew to be the wrong side of an argument, — 
 he talked too often merely for victory, to show his in- 
 tellectual superiority. He considered talking to be a 
 fine art, and held that a mere talk, when the parties did 
 not endeavor to excel, was worth nothing. Barring these 
 faults, he would have been as fine a talker as could be 
 imagined. 
 
 We should note, also, another quality of Johnson's 
 which rendered his conversation fine. He was of most 
 truly pious disposition, having a sincere faith and trust 
 in God, and a great reverence for all matters of true 
 religion. Hence the pure and elevating tone of his con- 
 
 * The use of long words— of Latin origin— in preference to those of Anglo- 
 Saxon origin, gave rise to the characterization of his style as Johnscmese. 
 
 t He then merely bore his antagonist down by his loud rudeness. " Nay, 
 sir," he would cry, " there is no talking with a man who will dispute what every- 
 body knows. Don't you know this?" So, G-oldsmith hit the nail on the head 
 when he remarked, " There is no arguing with Johnson ; for, if his pistol misses - 
 fire, he knocks you down with the butt end," 
 
184 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 versation, which always shows a true goodness which 
 renders it more attractive to many minds, than does al] 
 its wit, learning, and kindliness. 
 
 Nor should we fail to mention the curious family 
 which Johnson collected around him in his latter years. 
 He had a house in Bolt Court, where he made welcome 
 various wretched persons who, but for him, would have 
 been in a state of absolute want. Robert Levett was a 
 sort of surgeon, who, at times, I believe, attended John- 
 son medically. At all events, he breakfasted with him, 
 for, fortunately, he preferred the crust of the rolls while 
 Johnson liked the crumb, so the two lived easily together. 
 Beside Levett was Mrs. Williams, formerly a friend of 
 his wife's, who lived with him in his house for thirty 
 years. She had herself a small income, but was glad to 
 have here a home. There were also here a Mrs. Des- 
 moulines (da'mc5oi ang) and her daughter, to whom John- 
 son allowed a small pension out of his own, none too 
 large a one. Beside these, Frank, a negro serA^ant, be- 
 queathed him by a friend, made up his family. They all 
 quarreled with each other and with Johnson, but it is 
 one of the sweetest traits in the character of the man 
 that he loved them all, treated them all kindly through 
 their lives, although it is not known that they had any 
 claims on him except those of misery. 
 
 A few words should be given to that very remarkable 
 group of men called the Literary Club, where Johnson 
 was naturally the most prominent character. The origi- 
 nal members were Sir Joshua Reynolds (ren'olz), Samuel 
 Johnson, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, Dr. Nugent, 
 Topham Beauclerk (top' ham bo'kiark), Bennet Langton, 
 Anthony Chamier (sha mer'), and John Hawkins. The 
 first four have given the Club its great fame, The last 
 
JOHNSON. 185 
 
 five have derived mucli of theirs from it. Gribbon, 
 Garricl?:, and James Boswell, of Auchinleclc (af fiek), were 
 subsequently among its members. Langton and Beau- 
 clerli were two young men of fashion who, charmed, 
 lilce Boswell, by Johnson's greatness, were glad to be 
 numbered among his friends. Reynolds was, at this 
 time, the famous painter whom we know. Garrick, Gold- 
 smith, and Burke were still making their reputation. 
 The first volume of Gibbon's " Decline and Fall of the 
 Roman Empire" was not published till 1776. 
 
 We may obtain glimpses of the members from Gold- 
 smith's " Retaliation." 
 
 Of Reynolds, 
 
 "and to tell you my mind, 
 He has not left a wiser or better behind." 
 
 Of Garrick, 
 
 " describe me who can 
 An abridgment of all that was pleasant in man. 
 * * * On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting ; 
 'Twas only that when he was off he was acting." 
 
 Of Burke, 
 
 "Our good Edmund, whose genius was such 
 We scarcely can praise it or blame it too much. 
 Who, born for the universe, narrowed his mind. 
 And to party gave up what was meant for mankind. 
 * * * Though equal to all things, for all things unfit ; 
 Too nice for a statesman, too proud for a wit. 
 For a patriot too cool, for a drudge disobedient. 
 And too fond of the right to pursue the expedient." 
 
 And we can not resist the temptation to quote Macau- 
 lay's description of the club-room. 
 
 " The club-room is before us, and the table on which 
 stands the omelet for Nugent and the lemons for John- 
 
186 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 son. There are assembled those heads which live forever 
 on the canvas of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of 
 Burke and the tall, thin form of Langton, the sneer of 
 Beauclerk and the beaming smile of Grarrick, G-ibbon 
 tapping his snuff-box, and Sir Joshua with his trumpet 
 in his ear. In the foreground is that strange figure 
 which is as familiar to us as the figures of those among 
 whom we have been brought up, the gigantic body, the 
 huge massy face, seamed with the scars of disease, the 
 brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the gray wig 
 with the scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the nails 
 bitten and pared to the quick. We see the eyes and 
 mouth moving with convulsive twitches ; we see the 
 heavy form rolling ; we hear it puffing, and then comes 
 the ' Why, sir ! ' and the ' What then, sir ? ' and the ' No, 
 sir ! ' and the ' You don't see your way through the 
 question, sir ! '" 
 
 Johnson's last few years were full of trouble and of 
 gloom. He was by constitution subject to melancholy 
 fits, and was curiously afraid of death, which he saw 
 Avas at no distance. His life was also broken into by 
 the death of friends. Mr. Thrale died in the spring of 
 1781, and Mrs. Thrale, after some little time, married 
 one Piozzi (peot'se). She loved the man, and was happy 
 with him, but the marriage was disapproved of by her 
 English friends, and it broke off her intercourse with 
 Johnson, and with her daughters as well. Of Johnson's 
 queer family, several were gone. Levett, whom he cele- 
 brated in some beautiful verses, and Miss Williams had 
 both died, the one in 1782, the other a year later. Of 
 his friends of the Club, Goldsmith, Oarrick, and Beau- 
 clerk were dead. He himself, looking forward to his end, 
 at first with terror, but afterward with resignation, be- 
 
JOHNSON. 187 
 
 came more and more feeble, and finally died, December 
 13, 1784.* 
 
 BOSVv^EIvLIANA. 
 
 Johnson's antipathy to Scotchmen was, we believe, merely a prejudice. In 
 Boswell, he is sometimes seen to unbend, but his remarks are usually anti-Scotch. 
 We quote a few extracts : 
 
 "Much," said Johnson, "may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught 
 young." 
 
 We were by no means pleased with our inn at Bristol. "Let us see, now," 
 said I, "how we should describe it?" Johnson was ready with his raillery. 
 "Describe it, sir I "Why, it was so bad that Boswell wished to be in Scotland." 
 
 Johnson, in arg^iment, could not brook being worsted. And he often had 
 recourse to what Boswell is pleased to call "some sudden mode of robust sophis- 
 try." On being pressed hard by the Scotchman, he stopped him with— "My dear 
 Boswell, let's have no more of this ; you will make nothing of it. I'd rather have 
 you whistle a Scotch tune." 
 
 Johnson's definition of oats in his dictionary is well known as a grain which 
 in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people. We 
 may judge the delight with which Boswell, traveling to Litchfield with Johnson, 
 discovered that in the great man's own town oatcakes were served for breakfast. 
 
 A certain Mr. Ogilvie once chose for a topic the praises of Scotland, at which 
 Johnson was not greatly pleased. Mr. Ogilvie observed that Scotland had a great 
 many noble, wild prospects. " I believe, sir," said .Johnson, " you have a great 
 many. Norway, too, has noble, wild prospects ; and Lapland is remarkable for 
 prodigious, noble, wild prospects. But, sir, let me tell you the noblest prospect 
 which a Scotchman ever sees is the high-road which leads him to England." 
 
 Speaking of a certain friend, Johnson remarked : " He was always saying, ' I 
 do not value you for being a lord,' which was a sure proof that he did. I never 
 say, 'I do not value Boswell more for being born to an estate, because I do not 
 care.'" Boswell : "Nor for being a Scotchman?" .Johnson : "Nay, sir, I do value 
 you more for being a Scotchman. You are a Scotchman without the faults of 
 Scotchmen. You would not have been so valuable as you are, had you not been 
 a Scotchman." 
 
 In regard to Ireland, Johnson once said that it was the last place where he 
 should wish to travel. Boswell :" Is not the Oiant's Causeway worth seeing?" 
 Johnson: "Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see." 
 
 Some of his advice is worth a good deal. He said : " Get as much peace of 
 mind as you can. Live within your income. Always have something saved at 
 the end of the year. Let your imports be more than your exports, and you'll 
 never go far wrong." 
 
 He once repeated what had been applied to him,— 
 
 "You must borrow me G-aegantua's (rjar rjanV yob az) mouth." 
 
 Miss Reynolds not at once perceiving the meaning of this, he was obliged 
 
 * He had various ailments in his latter years. Gout was one. A stroke of 
 the palsy was another. At one time he was afflicted with dropsy. 
 
loo PROSE WEITERS. 
 
 to explain It to her, which had something of an awkward and ludicrous effect. 
 "Why, madam, it has a reference to me as using big words, which require 
 the mouth of a giant to pronounce them. Gargantua is the name of a giant 
 in Rabelais" {rdbla'). 
 
 Boswell, on one occasion, talking with .Johnson and Berenger for argument's 
 sake, held that men of talents might enjoy intellectual conversation of an even- 
 ing without needing any of the exhilaration, or entertainment of food and drink. 
 Berenger joined with Johnson, and said that " without these any meeting would 
 be dull and insipid. He would, therefore, have all the slight refreshments ; nay, 
 it would not be amiss to have some cold meat, and a bottle of wine upon the side- 
 board." "Sir," said Johnson to me, with an air of triumph, "Mr. Berenger knows 
 the world. Everybody loves to have good things furnished to them without any 
 trouble. I told Mrs. Thrale once, that as she did not choose to have card-tables, 
 she should have a profusion of the best sweetmeats, and she would be sure to 
 have company enough come to her." 
 
 I suggested a doubt that if I were to reside in London, the exquisite zest 
 with which I relished it on occasional visits might go off, and I might grow tired 
 of it. Johnson : " Why, sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is wilhng 
 to leave London. No, sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for 
 there is in Loudon all that life can afford." 
 
 We walked in the evening in Greenwich (ynii'ij) Park. He asked me, I sup- 
 pose by way of trying my disposition, "Is not this very fine?" Having no ex- 
 quisite relish for the beauties of nature, and being more delighted with the busy 
 hum of men, I answered, "Yes, sir, but not equal to Tleet street." Johnson: 
 "Tou are right, sir." 
 
 On being at the Pantheon (pan the' 6n), a place of resort, BosweU said there 
 was not half a guinea's worth of seeing this place. Johnson : " But, sir, then there 
 is a half a guinea's worth of inferiority to other people in not having seen it." 
 Boswell: "I doubt, sir, whether there are many happy people here." Johnson: 
 " Yes, sir, there are many happy people here. There are many people here who 
 are watching hundreds, and who think hundreds are watching tkem." 
 
 He observed, that a gentleman of experience in literature had got into a bad 
 style of poetry of late. "He puts," said he, "a very common thing in a strange 
 dress, till he does not know it himself, and thinks other people do not know it." 
 Boswell : " That is owing to his being so much versant in old English poetry." 
 Johnson : " What is that to the purpose, sir ? If I say a man is drunk, and you 
 tell me it is owing to his taking too much drink, the matter is not mended." 
 
 Johnson and Beauclerk, discussing a matter, disagreed ; Beauclerk getting 
 rather the better, added, " This is what you don't know, and I do." There was 
 then a cessation of the dispute; and some minutes intervened, during which 
 dinner and the glass went on cheerfully ; when Johnson, suddenly and abruptly, 
 exclaimed, " Mr. Beauclerk, how came you to talk so petulantly to me as, ' This 
 is what you don't know, but what I know.' One thing I know, which you don't 
 seem to know, that you are very uncivil." Beauclerk : " Because you began by 
 being uncivil (which you always are)." But they became reconciled later in the 
 evening. 
 
ROUSSKAU. 
 
 1713-1778. 
 
 JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU (zh6n zhak rob so') was 
 born in Geneva,, on June 28, 1712. His father was 
 a watch-maker, and also for some time a dancing-master. 
 His mother died soon after tlae birth of Jean Jacques, 
 and he was cared for by an aunt. His father was a 
 frivolous, impulsive man, who troubled himself little 
 about the training of his children ; but he taught Jean 
 Jacques to read, and they used to sit together reading 
 romances aloud, by turns, far into the night.* They had 
 some books of a more serious nature, which the boy of 
 seven read to his father while the latter was busy with 
 his watches. 
 
 When Jean Jacques was ten years old, these pleasant 
 days came to an end. His father had a quarrel, which 
 made it necessary for him to leave the town abruptly. 
 He fled from Greneva, and never returned to it. His son 
 was taken in charge by his uncle, Bernard (ber nar'), an 
 engineer, who set him to learning Latin, at a village in 
 the neighborhood. He remained there for two years, and 
 
 * Before he was seven years old, Jean .Tacqnes had learned from his father 
 to indulge a passion for romances. The child and the man passed whole nights 
 in a fictitious world, reading to one another in turn, absorbed by vivid interest 
 in imaginary situations, until the morning note of the birds recalled them to a 
 sense of the conditions of more actual life, and made the elder cry in confusion 
 that he was the more childish of the two. Rousseau says, " I had no idea of 
 real things, though aU the sentiments were already familiar to me. Nothing had 
 come to me by canception. Every thing by sensation. These confused emotions 
 gave me bizarre (S5 zcir') and romantic ideas of human life, of which neither re- 
 flection nor experience has ever been able wholly to cure me." 
 
190 • PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 during this time his character was influenced by two or 
 three incidents whicli occurred there, such as boys less 
 sensitive would soon have forgotten, but which still 
 rankled in his mind fifty years afterward when he was 
 writing the story of his life.* 
 
 When Jean Jacques was thirteen, he was apprenticed 
 to a notary, much against his will. He hated his master, 
 and was called stupid by him, and sent back to his uncle 
 as utterly incapable. Then he was apprenticed to an 
 engraver, a coarse, violent man, whose ill-treatment made 
 such a coward of him that he stole and told lies out of 
 terror. He loathed service under a master so detestable, 
 and when he was sixteen years old (172 8), he ran away. 
 
 Delighted with his freedom, for some days he wan- 
 dered near the town, till he fell in with some priests of 
 Savoy (sa vol'), who, with intense Catholic fervor, pounced 
 upon him as they did upon every one, to convert him to 
 orthodox views. Their good wine made more impression 
 upon him than many arguments, and he professed him- 
 self to be exceedingly anxious to hear more about the 
 Catholic faith. To this end, he was sent to Auncey 
 (an se'), to be placed under the orthodox care of Madame 
 
 * "I was playing ball at Plain Palais (pldng pa la'), with one of my comrades 
 named Plaice (pla es'). We began to quarrel over the game. We fought, and in 
 the fight he dealt me on my bare head a stroke so well directed, that with a 
 stronger arm it would have dashed my brains out. I fell to the ground, and 
 there never was agitation like that of the poor lad, as he saw the blood in my 
 hair. He thought he had killed me. He threw himself upon me, and clasped 
 me eagerly in his arms, while his tears poured down, and he uttered thick cries. 
 I returned his embrace with all my force, weeping like him, in a state of con- 
 fused emotion, which was not without a kind of sweetness. Then he tried to 
 stop the blood, which kept flowing, and seeing that our two handkerchiefs were 
 not enough, he dragged me off to his mother's. She had a small garden hard by. 
 The good woman nearly fell sick at sight of me in this condition ; she kept 
 strength enough to dress my wound, and, after bathing it well, she applied rem- 
 edies. Her tears and those of her son went to my very heart, so that I looked 
 upon them for a long while, the one as my mother, and her son as my brother." 
 
EOUSSEAU. 191 
 
 de Warens (ma dam' dSh va rong'), that she should help 
 him to enter the true Church. He expected to find some 
 austere old person, but, to his surprise, Madame de Wa- 
 rens was a lovely young lady, with a charming smile. 
 
 He stayed with her two or three days, and then, by her 
 advice, went to a hospice (hos'pes) in Turin (tu'rin), where 
 he would be sustained, body and soul, until he should 
 enter the fold of the Church. He went there with a light 
 heart, but, after the huge iron gate of the hospice had 
 closed upon him, he discovered himself among most un- 
 congenial companions, — four or five of them scoundrels, 
 in fact, who went from monastery to monastery, pretend- 
 ing to be new converts, in order to get food and lodging. 
 
 In nine days, Jean Jacques was ready to profess his 
 conversion. He was baptized, and left on the streets of 
 Turin with twenty francs in his pocket. He found one 
 situation after another, of the most menial nature ; at 
 the end of six weeks, he was turned out-of-doors, having 
 neglected his work and been insolent to his master. 
 
 Delighted, as ever, with freedom, he found his way 
 back to Auncey, and Madame de Warens, and soon made 
 his home in her house. She was a widow, about twenty- 
 eight, eccentric, volatile, but clever. She spent much of 
 her time in a fancy she had for alchemy, on dress, 
 furnaces, and chemicals. She adopted Jean Jacques, so 
 to speak, and he was supremely happy in his nondescript 
 position of pupil, servant, and friend. He read with her, 
 walked in the woods with her, sorted herbs, and pounded 
 drugs. She called him "child," and he called her "ma- 
 man" (ma mong'). 
 
 But Rousseau was eighteen, and ought to earn his own 
 living. He had some proficiency in music, and set out 
 once, with the choir-master of the cathedral, for Lyons, 
 
192 
 
 PKOSE WRITERS. 
 
 upon a vagabond journey ; but he wearied of his com- 
 panion, left liim in the lurch, and came back to Auncey. 
 To his dismay, Madame de Warens was gone, and no 
 one knew where she was, or when she would come back. 
 Setting out on foot, Jean Jacques reached Lausanne 
 (lo zan'), pretended to be able to teach music, got one or 
 two pupils, and so managed to live. 
 
 With such vagrant adventures, he reached Paris in 
 1731, through the interest felt for him by a French am- 
 bassador, who sent him thither in attendance upon a 
 young officer. He soon wearied of the capital ; and hear- 
 ing that Madame de Warens was at home in Auncey, he 
 left Paris and joyously walked all the way back to her.* 
 
 At Chambery (shon taa re'), he found her ; and, from 
 the spring of 1732, passed in her house three or four 
 peaceful, idle years. There were three of them in the 
 family, — the volatile hostess, Rousseau, and Claude Auet 
 (klawd o a'), a peasant by birth, who acted as friend, 
 servant, and gardener to the lady of the house. They all 
 got along well together, until Claude Auet died, for Ma- 
 dame de Warens missed his careful management, and 
 debts and troubles daily increased. Rousseau began to 
 feel that he really must do something for himself ; but 
 
 * Eousseau gives this impression of his enjoymeiit of vagrant life :— 
 " Never," he says, " did I think so much, exist so much, "be myself so much, 
 as in the journeys I made alone and on foot. Walking has something about it 
 which animates and enlivens my ideas. I can hardly think while I am still; 
 my body must be in motion, to move my mind. The sight of the country, the 
 succession of agreeable views, open air, good appetite, the freedom of the ale- 
 house, the absence of every thing that could make me feel dependence, or recall 
 me to my situation, all this sets my soul free, gives me a greater boldness of 
 thought. I dispose of all nature as its sovereign lord ; my heart, wandering from 
 object to object, mingles and is one with the things that soothe it, wraps itself 
 up in charming images, and is intoxicated with delicious sentiment. When I 
 come to a place, I think only of eating ; and when I leave it, I think only of 
 walldng. I feel a new paradise awaiting me at the door, and think of nothing 
 but going in search of it." 
 
ROUSSEAU. 1^3 
 
 the years slipped by in delightful idleness, until once, 
 returning from a visit to Montpelier (niong pel le a'), he 
 found that in his absence his place had been supplied by 
 another, — a young man, who evidently felt himself much 
 at home. Rousseau was left out in the cold. He went 
 away, and found a position as tutor in Lyons. This was 
 in 1740. He was now twenty-nine, having spent nine 
 years in the society of Madame de Warens. 
 
 The Due de Richelieu (duk deh resh le tih'), in Lyons, 
 promised him his favor, and he went to Paris, to live in a 
 garret and attempt a livelihood by teaching music. At 
 that time, Paris was full of great literary men ; Voltaire 
 (vol ter'), D'Alembert (da long ber'), Montesquieu (nion tes- 
 ku'), Diderot (de dro'), and others were there. With these 
 Rousseau formed acquaintance, one or two persons now 
 assisted him, and he managed to live.* 
 
 It was there that he fell in with Therese le Vasseur 
 (ta raz' leh vas sur'), a girl about tAventy-two years old, 
 employed as a seamstress by the landlady of his dingy 
 little hotel. Jean Jacques pitied the girl, and took her 
 under his protection from the coarse jests of the guests 
 at this inn. He removed Therese from such companion- 
 ship ; and the regard he then formed for her lasted 
 throughout his life. She was stupid, she never read, and 
 could hardly write. She could not distinguish one nu- 
 meral from another. She could not name the months of 
 
 * But his various employments brouglit him in very little money, and he lived 
 very hardly. On one occasion, he returned to his room, expecting with eager im- 
 patience the arrival of a remittance, the proceeds of some small property which 
 came to him by the death of his father. He found the letter, and was opening 
 it with trembling hands, when he was suddenly smitten with shame at his want 
 of self-control ; he placed it unopened on the chimnejr-piece, undressed, slept 
 better than usual, and when he awoke the next morning, he had forgotten all 
 about the letter until it caught his eye. He was delighted to find that it con- 
 tained his money, "but I can swear," he adds, "that my liveliest delight was in 
 having conquered myself." 
 
194 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 the year in order, and she was quarrelsome, greedy, and 
 deceitful. But Rousseau liked her, and preferred his com- 
 fort with her to the most briUiant society. The mother 
 of Therese was a coarse, greedy old shop-keeper. Rousseau 
 hated her, as he did a number of other relations of 
 Th(5r^se, who imposed upon her bounty for food and 
 clothes, but such was his affection for her that he treated 
 them all with kind consideration. 
 
 Rousseau had begun to write for the stage, and his 
 pieces, though not always performed, were sometimes 
 accepted. He became the literary secretary to Madame 
 Dupin (du pang'), with a salary of nine hundred francs, 
 and an entrance into cultivated society, where, with his 
 intelligence and original conversation, he was recognized 
 as an acquisition. Rousseau, at this time, wrote the mu- 
 sical part of the " Dictionnaire Encyclopedique " (dek se 6n- 
 n^r' ong se kio pa dek'), which was in preparation by 
 Diderot and d'Alembert.* 
 
 * The daughter of Diderot gives this account of his acquaintance with 
 Rousseau : 
 
 "I was not born," she says, "when it began. They were very intimate when 
 my father was in prison at Vincennes {vdngsen'). He invited my mother to din- 
 ner, and gave her to understand that my father would do well to give up the 
 Encyclopedia to others who would undertake it, as the work would always be 
 disturbing his repose. My mother concluded that Rousseau wanted the enter- 
 prise for himself, and this gave her an aversion to him. The real subject of the 
 quarrel between Rousseau and my father is too mixed for any human being to 
 understand. All I have been able to find out is, that my father gave Rousseau 
 the whole idea for his Discourse, that he reviewed and, perhaps, corrected it; 
 that my father lent him money on several occasions, and that all the time he 
 was at Montmorency {mong mo rang se'), my father took the trouble to go once or 
 twice a week on foot, to dine with him. Rousseau was then living with Made- 
 moiselle Le Vasseur, afterward his wife. This woman allowed her mother to be 
 starving. My father made her a pension of fifty crowns, which is entered in his 
 accounts. Rousseau read the manuscript of "Heloise" (aloes') to my father, and 
 the reading lasted for three days and almost three nights. When they got through, 
 my father wanted to consult Rousseau on a piece of work with which he was occu- 
 pied. ' Let us go to bed,' said Jean Jacques ; ' it is late, and I am longing for sleep.' 
 They quarreled at last for good ; it is hard to say exactly how ; what is certain 
 
ROUSSEAU. 195 
 
 During these years, no events of importance occurred 
 to interrupt the quiet life of Rousseau. It appears cer- 
 tain that a considerable part of his time was spent upon 
 the composition of several of his most important works, 
 which were not, however, completed and published until 
 a number of years later. 
 
 In 1749, Rousseau gained fame by writing a prize 
 essay on the question, " Has the progress of the Arts 
 and Sciences helped to corrupt or to purify morals ? " 
 His Discourse was in condemnation of the Arts and 
 Sciences, censuring literature, and even academies them- 
 selves ; but the Academy was brave enough to reward 
 the author. The Discourse contains the germ of his 
 after writings, and reveals his character, with all his 
 violence against hereditary customs and social distinc- 
 tions. It is a brilliant invective, assailing society with 
 eloquent sophistry. It denounces literature, but it made 
 the fame of Rousseau as a man of letters, and brotight 
 him to the height of social popularity. He lived, busily 
 denouncing literature and constantly writing ; scoffing at 
 the fashionable world and constantly in society, but in 
 rigorous independence and poverty, with unshaven beard, 
 ill-trimmed wig, and poor attire. He achieved success 
 by an operatic piece, the " Devin du Village " (du ven' du 
 ve lazh'),* and wrote a scathing letter on French music, 
 
 Is, that my father rendered every sort of service to Jean Jacques, and that lit 
 received from him nothing but ingratitude." 
 
 * This pastoral interlude was sketched, and in three weeks virtually com 
 pleted. It was performed hefore the Court at Eontainbleau Wmg tang hW) with 
 great success, and the composer was informed that he would have the honor of 
 being presented to the most Christian king (Louis XV.), who would probably 
 mark his favor by the bestowal of a pension. Eousseau was tossed with many 
 doubts. He would fain have greeted the king with some word that should show 
 sensibility to the royal graciousness without compromising republican severity, 
 but he could not think of the right thing to say, and he feared he should be 
 overwhelmed with embarrassment. What would become of him if mind or body 
 
196 Prose writers. 
 
 deriding the music of liis own country, and extolling 
 that of Italy. 
 
 The fame of Rousseau increased with his writings, 
 which, bitter and severe as they were against society, 
 amused and pleased people, instead of offending them. 
 His "Discourse on Inequality" drew from Voltaire a 
 characteristic compliment in return for a copy of the book. 
 
 In 1754, Rousseau left Paris, with his Th^rSse, for 
 Geneva, where the citizens welcomed the fellow-towns- 
 man who left it as a vagabond apprentice, at sixteen, to 
 return famous at forty-two. To become a citizen, he 
 resumed the Protestant faith, which Avas easy for him, 
 as he had never been much of a Catholic. But after 
 four months of Greneva, he accepted from his friend, 
 Madame d'Epinay (da pe na'), the gift of a house in the 
 forest of Montmorency, not far from Paris, in a pretty 
 situation, surrounded by fruit-trees, and solitary, which 
 exactly suited him. To this place he brought Th6r6se 
 and her old mother, Madame le Vasseur, who was 
 nearly seventy years old. She had to be carried along 
 the path through the forest in a chair, and she wept 
 with pleasure. 
 
 In this quiet rural home, called the Hermitage, Jean 
 Jacques set to Avork to earn money by his writings, and 
 to develop the literary projects which crowded his brain. 
 In fine weather, he thought over his books in the open 
 air, and wrote, or copied, in the house when it was rain- 
 ing. In the summer, he saw much of Madame d'Epinay, 
 who lived in the neighborhood ; he was bored by finding 
 himself constantly at the call of his hostess, and he pre- 
 
 should fail— if either he should be driven into precipitate retreat, or else there 
 should escape him, instead of the great truth wrapped delicately round in pane- 
 gyric, a heavy, shapeless word of foolishness ? He fled in terror, escaped the 
 interview, and thus flung up the chance of pension and patronage. 
 
ROUSSEAU. 197 
 
 ferred going off by himself in tlie woods to visiting at 
 her chateau (shato'). 
 
 The Hermitage episode lasted about three years, during 
 which Jean Jacques was infatuated by a strange passion 
 for the Comtesse d'Houdetot (kong tas' doo de to'), who, 
 in her turn, was in love with the Marquis (mar ke') of 
 Saint Lambert (san long ber').* Solitude and intercourse 
 with Nature, instead of elevating Rousseau, made him 
 bitter and irritable. It must be said for him, also, that 
 he suffered from a painful disorder. His relations with 
 Madame d'Houdetot were difficult, and he quarreled, not 
 only with her, but with all his friends, who dropped off 
 one by one, even to Madame d'Epinay herself. After 
 exchanging bitter letters all round, he left in haste the 
 Hermitage, where he had hoped to pass many tranquil 
 years. In less than a week after he decided to leave, 
 his goods were carted through the snow to a dilapidated 
 house offered him by a friend.f Old Madame le Vasseur 
 
 * Madame d'Houdetot was not strikingly singular either in physical or men- 
 tal attraction. She was at that time seven-and-twenty. Her face was pitted 
 with small-pox, which had given a yellowish tinge to her complexion ; her features 
 were clumsy, and her brow low. She was short-sighted, and in old age was afflicted 
 with an excessive squint. This want of beauty was redeemed by a gentle and 
 caressing expression, and by a sincerity, a gayety of heart, and free sprightliness 
 of manner, that no trouble could restrain. Her figure was very slight, and there 
 was in all her movements at once awkwardness and grace. She was natural and 
 simple, and had fair judgment of a modest kind, in spite of the wild sallies in 
 which her spirit found vent. She occasionally composed verses of more than 
 ordinary point, but she had good sense enough not to write them down, or to set 
 up, on the strength of them, for poetess and wit. She made, sometimes, senten- 
 tious epigrams, after the manner of the time, like this: "Without women, the 
 hfe of man would be without aid at the beginning, without pleasure in the mid- 
 dle, without solace at the end." 
 
 t At this time, Diderot called on him to remonstrate with his petulance in 
 quarreling with Madame d'Epinay. He found liim alone in the garden. As soon 
 as he saw Diderot, he thundered out, with eyes all aflame, " What have you come 
 here for?" 
 
 "I want to know whether you are mad or malicious," replied Diderot. 
 
 "You have known me for fifteen years; you are well aware how little mali- 
 cious I am, and I will prove to you that I am not mad." 
 
198 PROSE WEITERS. 
 
 was sent off to Paris. Rousseau was glad enou 'h to get 
 rid of her, and provided for her wants, or allon^ed his 
 friends to do so. Tliis was in the winter of 1758. These 
 wretclied quarrels form so important a part of RO' sseau's 
 life, that they help to form an opinion of his character. 
 
 It was while he lived at the Hermitage that Jean 
 Jacques conceived the story of his novel, " The New 
 Heloise." He wrote it at Montmorency, whither he had 
 retreated, and read it aloud to the Duchess of Luxem- 
 bourg (luks 6ng bc>or') every morning at ten o'clock, while 
 in her own room, with the Duke sitting beside her. The 
 novel appeared in 1760, and was a great success. It 
 was followed by " The Contrat Social " (kong tra' so se ai'), 
 a bold utterance upon the vices of society and government, 
 and "Emile (a mel'), or Education." These books all created 
 a great sensation, especially the last. That the man who 
 had lost sight of his own children, by placing them at 
 their birth in a Foundling Hospital, should write a book 
 on Education struck the world with amused astonish- 
 ment. In "Emile," Rousseau puts forth a plan for re- 
 molding society by molding the individual. He supposes 
 himself to be the guardian of Emile, an orphan, well- 
 born and healthy, and sets forth his views upon the 
 treatment of a child at every stage of its growth. Rous- 
 seau feels that his system would accomplish the feat of 
 making man as he is meant to be. The pupil is to be 
 influenced, night and day, through more than twenty 
 years. The guardian must be, therefore, infallible ; and 
 thus it has been said, that in order to make each perfect 
 citizen, it would be necessary to sacrifice the career of 
 
 He then tried to clear himself of blame in the dispute, but was so stubborn 
 that Diderot left him very angry, and he wrote to his friend Orimm, " This 
 Eousseau fills me with trouble. It is as if I had a damned soul at my side. May 
 I never see him again. He would make me believe in devils and hell." 
 
EOUSSEAU. 199 
 
 another man who must devote twenty-five years to train 
 him. The book had a great influence in France ; it gave 
 a tone of purity and simplicity to society, and added 
 importance to the duties of teaching. It doubtless mod- 
 ified systems of education in England, while in Q-ermany 
 it was received with enthusiasm. 
 
 The boldness of these writings was dangerous, at a 
 time when the utterance of such opinions was regarded 
 as an infringement of the rights of the State, and when 
 the Church crushed every sign of free thought. Everybody 
 praised "Emile" in private, but dared not applaud it in 
 public. The book contained an Episode, especially daring, 
 — " The Confession of the Savoyard Vicar " (sa v-wa ar' 
 ve kar')) a manifesto, at once against the orthodox dog- 
 mas of the Church, and against the prevailing philosoph- 
 ical unbelief of the day, which Rousseau regarded with 
 equal dislike. This " Confession " was the source of 
 calamity. Parliament ordered " Emile " to be burned, 
 and the author to be arrested. At the same time, in 
 Geneva, both " Emile " and " The Social Contract " v/ere 
 burned. 
 
 Jean Jacques, warned in time, escaped into Switzer- 
 land, and found shelter in Metiers (mo te ar'), ISTeucha- 
 tel (nush a tel'), which then belonged to Prussia. The 
 king, Frederick the Q-reat, neither liked Rousseau nor his 
 works, but he was willing to allow him a refuge within 
 his dominions. Jean Jacques, for three years, led an ob- 
 scure but harmless life in this remote valley.* He em- 
 
 * At Motiers, Jean Jacques learned the art of making laces, as he could not 
 endure what he calls the inactive chattering of the parlor, with people sitting in 
 front of one another with folded hands, and nothing in motion but the tongue. 
 He used to carry his lace-pillow about with him, or sat at his own door working, 
 and chatting with passers-by. He made presents of his work to young women 
 about to marry, always on the condition that they should suckle their children 
 when they came to have them. 
 
200 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 ployed himself with his Dictionary of Music, and amused 
 his leisure by playing at cup-and-ball. 
 
 In Motiers, Rousseau wrote his "Letter to the Arch- 
 bishop of Paris," a trenchant, brilliant defense of his ar- 
 guments in the "Vicar's Confessions." In this powerful 
 pamphlet, he speaks his last word against the Church 
 that hated him, though many of its priests had less faith 
 than he professed. 
 
 Rumors of the warfare against him spread into the 
 quiet valley where he was secluded. He was denounced 
 as Antichrist ; he Avas hooted at by the people, who threw 
 stones at him as he passed. Anonymous letters accused 
 him of atrocious crimes. His pen was busy refuting 
 such calumnies. In September, 1764, at midnight, a 
 shower of stones was hurled against his house. He was 
 advised to leave Motiers, and took refuge, always with 
 Therese, on the little island of St. Pierre (san pear'), in 
 Lake Bienne (be en') ; but driven hence, after two happy 
 months, he finally withdrew, from place to place, till he 
 found himself in England. 
 
 In London, his fame was great. All society called on 
 him ; the theaters were crowded to gaze on him.* A 
 
 An Armenian tailor liad sometimes visited some friends at Montmorency; 
 Rousseau knew him, and reflected tliat the Armenian costume, of vest, furred 
 bonnet, caftan, and girdle, would be of singular comfort to him, on account of his 
 bodily disorder, and he adopted it. 
 
 * Garricli appointed a special occasion to play before Rousseau, and a special 
 box was set apart for him. "AVhen the time came to go, Rousseau declared that he 
 could not leave his dog behind him. "The lirst person," he said, "who opens the 
 door. Sultan will run into the streets in search of me, and will be lost." His friend 
 told him to lock Sultan up in the room, and carry away the key in his pocket. 
 This was done, but as they proceeded down-stairs, the dog began to howl ; his 
 master turned back, and avowed he had not resolution to leave him in that con- 
 dition. His friend caught him in his arms, told him that Mr. Grarrick had dis- 
 missed another company in order to make room for him, that the king and queen 
 were expecting to see him, and that without a better reason than Sultan's impa- 
 tience, it would be ridiculous to disappoint them. It was only by force, rather 
 than persuasion, that the point was yielded by Rousseau. 
 
EOUSSEAU. 201 
 
 house at Wootton, in the Peak of Derby, was placed at 
 his command by its owner, and he went there with 
 Therese. It was situated in a solitary country, high up 
 among dreary hills. 
 
 They arrived at their new residence in March, when 
 the snow was on the ground. Therese immediately made 
 herself obnoxious to the old housekeeper ; and the kind 
 neighbors who called upon them, could only look on 
 Rousseau vacantly, as he did not know English and they 
 could not speak any French. The villagers vaguely 
 thought this meager little man, in a strange dress, was 
 an exiled king. 
 
 A pension of one hundred pounds was negotiated for 
 Rousseau, who, indeed, received much kindness from his 
 friends; but his morbid nature drew him into petty quar- 
 rels with them, and angry letters were exchanged. He 
 bewailed his solitude at Wootton, and fed his imagination 
 with the idea of a dire conspiracy against him. 
 
 The autumn and winter of 176 7, he spent in writ- 
 , ing the first part of his " Confessions," from which 
 most of his early life is known. In this book, with 
 terrible frankness, he relates his failings, his hates, 
 his passions, his wrongs ; his style is always admirable, 
 and there are chapters containing scenes of exquisite 
 beauty. 
 
 Almost all his friends incur his disdain, his distrust, 
 or his dislike ; to vindicate his own character, he cares 
 not whom he crushes or wounds. To redeem his 
 dark traits, is the fidelity he shows always to Therese, 
 his ready charity to the poor, his real reverence and 
 faith, and his stubborn independence. The " Confes- 
 sions," however, turned from him his few remaining 
 friends. 
 
202 PEOSE WRITEES. 
 
 The winter at Wootton was unhappy. Th6r6se worried 
 him by her quarrels ; the weather was bad, hfe in-doors 
 was duU. Rousseau became more morose and unsettled 
 than ever. At last he fled, none knew whither, and 
 reached France, where Mirabeau (me ra bo'), who ad- 
 mired him immensely, received him with honor, and 
 settled him at Fleury-sous-Meudon (flu' re sc5o mu dong'), 
 under the name of M. Jacques. He remained there 
 about a year, but his morbid suspicions returned, and 
 he fled again with Therese, wandering from place to 
 place in a pitiful fashion, seeking rest and finding 
 none.* 
 
 In July, 1770, he returned to Paris, gave up his 
 Armenian dress, and copied music at ten sous a page. 
 His delusions left him for a time, and he was content if 
 he earned fifty sous a day. His shabby lodging was 
 besieged by people of rank. 
 
 In his little room stood his spinet, two little beds, a 
 table, and several chairs. Therese sat near liim, a canary 
 sang in a cage, while Rousseau, in an overcoat and white 
 cap, copied music. He hated the streets of Paris, but 
 loved to walk in the suburbs beneath the trees, listening 
 to the birds. He devoted little time to literature, and in 
 his latest years gave up copying music. 
 
 He became feebler and poorer; and in May, 1777, 
 he drew up a memorial, stating his condition, and beg- 
 ging that he and Therese might be received into a 
 hospital. His old delusions were yet strong, but his mind 
 had still its peaceful hours, as was shown by the fact 
 
 * One day, seated with Therese at table, ill a little inn where they were din- 
 ing, he solemnly declared she was his wife, in the presence of two guests. This 
 little ceremony he fancied enough to constitute a marriage. " This good and 
 seemly engagement was contracted," he wrote, "in all the simplicity, but also in 
 all the truth of nature, in the presence of two men of worth and honor." 
 
EOUSSEAU. 203 
 
 that what little he wrote at this time contains many 
 delicate, beautiful passages. 
 
 In 1778, M. de Q-irardin (mo ser' deh zhe rar dang') 
 offered Rousseau a pretty rustic cottage at Ermonenville 
 (er mon eng vel'), twenty miles from Paris. There, in its 
 tranquil, beautiful woods and gardens, he was at last 
 happy for a while, amusing himself with his old pursuits, 
 and in teaching the son of his host. After a few weeks, 
 however, his misery began again. He felt himself sur- 
 rounded by spies and enemies. Th6rese had lost her 
 affection for him, and this embittered the old man's last 
 days. 
 
 He died with startling suddenness on July 2, 17 78. 
 The surgeons, who made a post-mortem examination, 
 asserted that he died from apoplexy, while rumors told 
 that he had committed suicide, some saying that he had 
 poisoned himself, others that he had shot himself. 
 Though there appears to be distinct testimony that his 
 end was natural, on that death, mystery and doubt will 
 always hang. 
 
 Before he died, he said to his wife, "You weep then 
 at my happiness, — eternal happiness, — which men no 
 more can disturb ? I die in peace ; I never wished 
 harm to any one, and I can rely on the mercy of 
 God."* 
 
 * Pierre Lanfray says :— 
 
 " Was this death suicide ? It has been so established in a learned manner, but 
 what of that 1 Is it not still better established that this powerful brain had been 
 touched long before by the finger of madness? Rousseau died twice, and his 
 second decease was no more pitiful or grievous than the first." 
 
 The surgeons reported that the cause of his death was apoplexy ; but a sus- 
 picion has haunted the world ever since, that he destroyed himself by a pistol 
 shot. We can not tell. There is no inherent improbability in the fact of his 
 having committed suicide. In the "New Heloisa," he had thrown the conditions 
 which justified self-destruction into a distinct formula. Fifteen years before, he 
 declared that his own case fell within the conditions which he had prescribed. 
 
204 PROSE WKITERS. 
 
 Death, by whatever means attained, was a release to 
 him. The body of Rousseau was silently carried, one 
 summer night in the moonlight, in a boat to the island 
 in the Lake of Ermonenville, and buried among the pop- 
 lar-trees. There his body lay for some years in peace. 
 During the Revolution, however, it was borne to Paris 
 in noisy triumph, and placed there in the Pantheon 
 
 (pan the' on). 
 
 and tliat he was meditating action. Only seven years before, he had implied 
 that a man had a right to deUver himself of the burden of his own life, if its 
 miseries were intolerable and irremediable. This, however, counts for nothing in 
 the absence of some kind of positive evidence, and of that there is just enough to 
 leave the matter of his end a little doubtful. Once more, we can not tell. 
 
 By the serene moon-rise of a summer night, his body was put under the 
 ground on an island, in the midst of a small lake, where poplars throw shadows 
 over the still water, silently figuring the destiny of mortals. Here it remained 
 for sixteen years. Then, amid the roar of cannon, the crash of trumpet and 
 drum, and the wild acclamations of a populace gone mad in exultation, terror, 
 fury, it was ordered that the poor dust should be transported to the national 
 temple of great Tnen.—Morley's Sousseau. 
 
SCOTT. 
 
 nm-issa. 
 
 SIR WALTER SCOTT was the descendant of many 
 Scotts, of whom his father was the first to adopt 
 any learned profession. Walter Scott, the father of the 
 novelist, was an Edinburgh Writer to the Signet, which 
 is the Scotch term for Solicitor. His son Walter, born 
 in Edinburgh (ed'in bur ruh), August 15, 1771, was 
 destined for the same profession. In his early childhood 
 the boy was taken with a fever, the result of which was 
 a lameness, which lasted through his life ; in consequence 
 of which, he was sent to pass his boyhood at his grand- 
 father's house at Sandyknowe (sand'l no). But he re- 
 turned to Edinburgh again ; was sent to school, " where 
 he glanced like a meteor from one end of his class to 
 the other," in which direction is not stated, — not improb- 
 ably in both. Among the boys, if not among the teach- 
 ers, he was highly esteemed and respected. He was great 
 at declaiming ballads and telling stories, great also at 
 street fights, in spite of his lameness, "the first to begin 
 and the last to leave ofi"," they used to say of him. He 
 did nothing much at school, but read much to himself 
 at home, for he was never-ending in research when the 
 subject interested him. He entered the College, and be- 
 gan the study of the law, first with his father,* and later 
 
 * The readers of " Eedgauntlet " may gain a fair idea of Scott's father, by 
 recalling Mr. Saunders Fairfield of that novel, said to be a fair resemblance. 
 "He was a man of business of the old school, moderate in his charges, econom- 
 ical, and even niggardly in his expenditure ; strictly honest in conducting his 
 
206 PROSE WRITEES. 
 
 in the University. But he was never great as a lawyer ; 
 he abandoned practice after a sliort time, and although 
 he held certain legal positions through life, he was by no 
 means in the active pursuit of the profession he had 
 studied for. It was at this period of his life that he took 
 many excursions over the whole country about Edin- 
 burgh, either alone or with friends, searching out all the 
 natural scenery worthy remark, and any thing which 
 should have association for his historical and romantic 
 taste. For in this direction did all his reading turn ; and 
 whereas he had always cared little to study in such 
 directions as were pointed out to him, he delighted to 
 pore over the most dry and uninteresting records, so they 
 only gave him something to add to his historical, anti- 
 quarian, or romantic lore. These walks about the coun- 
 try brought him close to the country-people ; among 
 them he would hunt up old ballads and traditions ; his 
 tastes and inclinations had plenty of food, and grew ac- 
 
 own affairs and tliose of his clients ; but taught by long experience to be wary 
 and suspicious in observing the motives of others. Punctually as the clock of 
 St. Giles tolled nine" (the hour at which the Court of Sessions meets), " the dap- 
 per form of the hale old gentleman was seen at the threshold of the court-hall, 
 or, at faithest, at the head of the Back Stairs " (the most convenient access to 
 the Parliament House from Q-eorge's Square), "trimly dressed in a complete suit 
 of snuflf-colored brown, with stockings of silk or woolen, as suited the weather; a 
 bob-wig and a small cocked hat ; shoes blacked, as Warren would have blacked 
 them ; silver shoe- buckles, and a gold stock-buckle. His manners corresponded with 
 his attire, for they were scrupulously civil and not a little formal. * * * The 
 whole pleasure of this good old-fashioned man of method, besides that which he 
 really felt in the discharge of liis own daily business, was the hope to see his son 
 attain what, in his father's eyes, was the proudest of all distinctions— the rank 
 and fame of a well-employed lawyer. Every profession has its peculiar honors, 
 and his mind was constructed upon so limited and exclusive a plan, that he 
 valued nothing save the objects of ambition which his own presented. He would 
 have shuddered at his son's acquiring the renown of a hero, and laughed with 
 scorn at the equally barren laurels of literature ; it was by the path of the law 
 alone that he was desirous t3 see him rise to eminence ; and the probabilities of 
 success, or disajipointment, were the tlioughts of his father by day, and his dream 
 by night." 
 
SCOTT. 207 
 
 cordingly. All this was, on the whole, distasteful to his 
 father, who, having no eye that could pierce the future, 
 would have preferred that he should have acquired all 
 the legal knowledge that he could, and become a good 
 and learned Writer to the Signet, rather than that he 
 should spend his time roaming over the country collecting 
 old ballads, learning old customs and stories, meeting with 
 all sorts of people, and, in fact, taking in much that was 
 to give him material for much of his best work in after 
 life. 
 
 In spite of his love for romance, for history, and for 
 literature, Scott seems at this time to have had no idea 
 of adopting letters as a profession. He finished his legal 
 studies, was called in June, 1792, to the bar, and prac- 
 ticed there for fourteen years. This entrance on his pro- 
 fession was a great pleasure to his father, who desired 
 nothing more than to see his son succeed, and become 
 great at his own profession. But he did not practice 
 with very great vigor, preferring to make " raids," as he 
 was jjleased to term them, into Liddesdale (lid'dez dal), 
 and familiarizing himself with the whole of the Border 
 country, — its history, and its romance. Nevertheless, he 
 "crept into a tolerable share of business," through his 
 connection with his father and friends. But it is probable 
 that he became famous rather as a story-teller, and an 
 authority on any quaint questions, to which no one else 
 knew the answer, than on account of his skill in plead- 
 ing, or luck in winning cases.* 
 
 * Scott wa8 never fond of the law, and Ms early dabbling in literature was 
 not in his favor among the Edinburgh solicitors. He notices the fact that a lit- 
 erary turn was not held to be greatly to the credit of a barrister, and goes on : 
 " My profession and I, therefore, came to a stand nearly upon the footing which 
 honest Slender consoled himself on having established with Mistress Anne Page : 
 ' There was no great love between us at the beginning, and it pleased Heaven to 
 
208 Prose writers. 
 
 He had an tinfortunate love affair at about this tima 
 The facts of the case do not seem quite clear, but the 
 amount of it was that Scott was in love with a young 
 woman who preferred to marry a richer man. The affair 
 lasted for a long time, — six years passed between the 
 time when Scott first met Miss Margaret Beecher and 
 the day she married Mr. William Forbes, the banker, in 
 1776. And the next year, Scott himself married Miss 
 Carpenter (or Charpentier (shar pong tea'), for she was of 
 French family). All the feelings that had to do with 
 these affairs are a bit out of our present province, — we 
 can not speculate upon them at any length, — but such are 
 the facts. 
 
 It was a year before his marriage that Scott pub- 
 lished "Lenore" (lano'ra) and the "Wild Huntsman," 
 translations from the German of Burger (bur'ger), in a 
 small folio, — his first literary work. But in this he hardly 
 struck the true key-note. 
 
 In 1802, he published "The Minstrelsy of the Scottish 
 Border," which seemed to be the most a]3propriate form 
 in which Scott's genius could find vent. His early excur- 
 sions, his delight in antiquities, in feudalism and romance, 
 in old ballads, would all come into play here. The book 
 was a collection of old ballads, annotated and illustrated 
 by himself, to which were added new and original bal- 
 lads, written in the spirit and in imiitation of the old.* The 
 
 decrease it on further acquaintance.' I became sensible that the time was come 
 when I must either buckle myself resolutely to the 'toil by day, the lamp by 
 night,' renouncing all the Delilahs (del'iliiz) of my imagination, or bid adieu to 
 the profession of the law, and hold another course. I confess my own inclination 
 revolted from the more severe choice." 
 
 * Scott was indifferent to music : he admitted that lie had a fair ear for a jig, 
 but cared little for any thing more. Julian Young tells a characteristic anecdote 
 of a stay at Abbotsford. Two young ladies were singing exquisitely one evening, 
 and to the great pleasure of the whole company save Scott. Scott sat absent, ab- 
 
SCOTT. 209 
 
 book, though it was at once ecUpsed by Scott's later 
 poetry, and again, and utterly, by his novels, gained him 
 much immediate reputation. It showed to the world 
 much of his very varied power, historical knowledge, 
 endless research, humor, power to stir men's hearts, many 
 of the very many traits that one sees in his novels. 
 
 This was in 1808, and, as has been said, Scott's liter- 
 ary reputation was in a manner created (though after- 
 ward immeasurably raised) by these poems. Three years 
 later was published the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," a 
 poem which he had long had by him. The poem was 
 begun on the occasion of his confinement after an acci- 
 dent, and at the suggestion of Lady Dalkeith * (dal keth'), 
 afterward the Duchess of Buccleugh (buk kiu'), the 
 wife of the Duke whom Scott always loved to regard as 
 
 stracted, with lip drawn down and cMn resting on his gold-headed crutch, his 
 massy eyebrows contracted, and his countenance betokening a sad civility. At 
 last Mrs. Lockhart, thinking that she had sufficiently taxed the good nature of 
 her gifted friend, uncovered her harp and began to play the air of " Charlie is 
 My Darling." The change which instantly passed over the spirit of the poet's 
 dream was most striking. Pride of lineage, love of chivalry, strong leaning to 
 the Stuart cause were all visibly fermenting in the brain of the enthusiastic 
 bard. His light blue eyes kindled, the blood mantled in his cheek, his nos- 
 tril quivered, his big chest heaved, until, unable longer to suppress the emotion 
 evoked by his native melodies in favor of a ruined cause, he sprang from his 
 chair, limped across the room, and, to the peril of those within his reach, bran- 
 dishing his crutch as if it had been a brand of steel, shouted forth, with more of 
 vigor than of melody, " And a' the folk cam running out to greet the Chevalier 1 
 Oh ! Charlie is my darling," and so through the chorus. 
 
 * He has told us, in his Introduction of 1830, that the original plan was sug- 
 gested by the Countess of Dalkeith; that on his writing a part of the beginning 
 and reading it to his friends Erskine (ers' km) and Cranstown (Ji?-a,ns' ton), he 
 found they cared so little for it that he put it by. Shortly afterward, when 
 acting as Quartermaster of the Edinburgh Light-horse, he received a kick from a 
 horse, which confined him for some days to his lodgings. He got to work upon 
 the "Lay," and before he was able to go out had finished the first canto. The 
 rest of the poem was written with gi-eat rapidity. He himself says that, after 
 having got fairly into the vein, it proceeded at the rate of about a canto a week. 
 It had originally been intended that the "Lay" should form a part of the third 
 volume of the " Scottish Minstrelsy," but as the poem grew longer and longer this 
 seemed impossible, and it was published by itself three years after the accident. 
 
210 PROSEWRITERS. 
 
 his feudal chief. It was at the Countess' suggestion 
 that the "Lay" was put into the naouth of the Last Min- 
 strel, an idea which had much to do with the success of 
 the work, — for a very great and instant success it was. 
 The reader of our sketch of Johnson will recall that for 
 his two poems, "Loudon," and the "Vanity of Human 
 Wishes," the greatest poet of his day received £25. Scott 
 received in all for the "Lay of the Last Minstrel" £769. 
 The age of patronage by patrons had come to an end 
 when Johnson wrote. The age of patronage by the pub- 
 lic was reaching its height in the time of Scott. 
 
 The publishing of the "Lay of the Last Minstrel" 
 does not seem to have entirely opened Scott's mind to a 
 knowledge of his own powers, for it was not till 1808 
 that he published " Marmion" (mar' mi on), the second of 
 his great poems. This was received with more enthusiasm, 
 though by many it was not considered so fine as was the 
 "Lay." In 1810, he published the "Lady of the Lake." 
 These three are the greatest of his poems, — and when 
 one considers how very fine they are, one wishes that the 
 others had been as good. As a matter of fact, however, 
 they were not. "Rokeby" (rok' be), the "Lord of the 
 Isles," "Harold the Dauntless," the "Bridal of Triermain" 
 (tre'er man), though the worst of them is a fine poem, are 
 greatly inferior to those which preceded them in time. It 
 would seem as though Scott's hand was losing its cun- 
 ning in poetry. Very fortunately, he had by this time 
 discovered another field for the display of his genius, 
 wherein he was to make his greatest reputation. As a 
 poet, his fame declined before the rising star of Byron, — 
 but not till he had made himself a name as a novelist 
 that need fear no competition. 
 
 In speaking of Scott's poetry, we have advanced a 
 
SCOTT. 211 
 
 little ahead of time. He continued the practice of law, 
 after a fashion, until about 1806. In 1800, a year or so 
 after his marriage, he accepted the appointment of Sheriff 
 of Selkirkshire ; later he discharged the duties of a Clerk 
 of Seizure for five years, in order to obtain the place 
 when it should become vacant, as it did in 1811, when 
 he was himself appointed. 
 
 He lived at this time partly in Edinburgh and partly 
 in the country. From a short time after his marriage, 
 he lived until 1804 at Lass wade, a few miles from the 
 town, where he greatly delighted himself by all the little 
 plans of building, and laying out and altering, that natu- 
 rally occur to the owner of landed property. Being made 
 Sheriff of Selkirkshire, he made his summer home at 
 Ashestiel, a place some little distance from the county 
 town. And when he had finally, in 1812, obtained 
 the position of Clerk of the Seizure, he purchased his 
 famous estate of Abbotsford, to the beautiflcation of 
 which he later gave so much of his time and money. It 
 was on the Tweed, only a short distance from Ashestiel. 
 Here Scott lived the rest of his life, and here he hoped to 
 be the founder of a new clan, the Scotts of Abbotsford. 
 
 We ought to note the other literary work done by 
 Scott at this time, which has not lasted as well as his 
 poems. His services were in great request by the book- 
 sellers, who had unnumbered plans, and between 1804 
 and 1812 Scott, besides his poems and many reviews, 
 published a "Life and Edition of Dryden," " Somers' 
 Tracts," "Sadler's Life, Letters, and State Papers," "Se- 
 cret History of the Court of James I.," " Mrs. Sewall's 
 Life and Poetical Works," and had begun the edition of 
 "Swift," which he did not publish till later. The work 
 was immense, but he was a most industrious man. 
 
212 PROSE WRITERS. . 
 
 One thing that should be noted here is Walter Scott's 
 business connection with the Ballantyne Brothers. James 
 Ballantyne was a printer with a good idea of his busi- 
 ness. Scott urged his moving to Edinburgh, and aided 
 him then in various ways, and in 1805, joined himself, 
 secretly, to him in partnership. For many reasons did 
 he wish to be connected with some good commercial 
 house. He had ceased his practice of law, his legal po- 
 sitions were not very profitable, and he had a certain 
 horror of trying to exist by literature alone, — it was be- 
 fore the marvelous financial success of the Waverley 
 Novels. The partnership was the source of much trouble 
 to him, — but undoubtedly of some profit. By itself, it 
 might not have been unfortunate. But few years after 
 Scott started the publishing firm of John Ballantyne & 
 Co. (himself being the Co.), with the idea of creating busi- 
 ness for the printing house of James Ballantyne & Co. 
 But these connections were for some time kept secret. 
 
 I suppose that the Waverley Novels were and are the 
 best known books in the English language. There are a 
 few which may give them a hard rub. "Robinson Cru- 
 soe," for instance, is probably more widely known than 
 any single one of the Waverleys. The " Pilgrim's Prog- 
 ress," perhaps. Shakespeare's Plays may be more widely 
 known about, though I judge not more widely read. And 
 in their own day the popularity of the Waverleys was 
 one of the most marvelous things in literature. Every- 
 body, from the lowest to the highest, read, cried, laughed, 
 and enjoyed. To look upon them from a shamelessly 
 carnal point of view, they brought their author little less 
 than a million dollars. 
 
 It was, on the whole, by accident that Scott published 
 "Waverley" the first of the series, "a small, anonymous 
 
SCOTT. 213 
 
 sort of a novel, in three volumes," says he, writing to a 
 friend. "It was a very old attempt of mine to embody 
 some traits of those characters and manners peculiar to 
 Scotland, the last remnants of which vanished during 
 my own youth, so that few or no traces now remain. I 
 had written great part of the first volume and sketched 
 other passages, when I mislaid the MS., and only found 
 it by the merest accident as I was rummaging the draw- 
 ers of an old cabinet ; and I took the fancy of publishing 
 it, which I did so fast, that the last two volumes were 
 written in three weeks. * * * Jt j^^s made a very 
 strong impression here, and the good people of Edinburgh 
 are busied in tracing the author, and in finding out orig- 
 inals for the portraits it contains. In the first case, they 
 will find it difficult to convict the guilty author, although 
 he is far from escaping suspicion. Jeffrey has offered to 
 make oath that it is mine, and another great critic has 
 tendered his affidavit ex contrario. * * * i intend to 
 maintain my incognito T 
 
 It was in 1814, nine years after first sketching "Wa- 
 verley," that Scott took it in hand and finished it. It 
 was received with instant and remarkable success. Half 
 a dozen editions were called for before a year had passed, 
 and Constable, the publisher, might well have regretted 
 that he did not purchase the copyright outright for 
 £1,000, as Scott had desired. The authorship was un- 
 avowed, but it was practically well known by all those 
 who knew Scott well, or his style. Indeed, the object of 
 concealment does not seem very obvious, though Scott 
 notes two or three trifiing reasons. 
 
 The story of the publication of " Waverley " is (barring 
 the fact that it lay long unfinished) the story of the 
 succeeding Waverley Novels. For seventeen years, begin- 
 
214 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 ning with 1814, the Enghsh nation were to be deHghted 
 by these incomparable stories, coming out sometimes 
 one, sometimes two a year. They were, as a rule, worthy 
 successors to "Waverley." It is not till we come to 
 "Castle Dangerous," and "Count Robert of Paris," that 
 we recognize that the master's hand has lost its power. 
 These two were written after Scott had suffered a para- 
 lytic stroke, only two years before his death. 
 
 There can be but few of our readers who have not 
 read most of these delightful historical novels. To those 
 who have read them, it can be necessary only to remind 
 them of the pleasure they experienced in their first read- 
 ing ; while should there be any who have read none of 
 them, we must envy them the pleasure of reading " Ivan- 
 hoe," " Redgauntlet," "Old Mortality," or " Kenilworth," 
 for the first time. Long before I read any book on 
 English history, I knew all about Richard the Lion-hearted 
 and the Crusades ; Queen Elizabeth ; about James the 
 First ; about the great rebellion ; about the risings of 
 '15 and '45, or at least more than I should have learned 
 from many text-books. And as, luckily, my own preju- 
 dices in regard to Cavalier and Roundhead, Jacobite and 
 Hanoverian, were such as would correct the overdrawn 
 prejudices of Scott, I gathered a not unfair view of 
 English history through some imjjortant epochs. But, 
 setting aside history, who ever painted the manners of a 
 people as delightfully as Scott has painted the Scotch? 
 I do not know but if I were asked my favorites among 
 the Waverleys, I should choose "Gruy Mannering," "The 
 Antiquary," "Redgauntlet," and "Rob Roy." There is 
 something in his painting of Scotch character that one 
 never forgets. Or, to change again, perhaps it is the 
 knight and the lady, the squire and the outlaw, the 
 
SCOTT. 215 
 
 tales of chivalry or of the Crusades that we have en- 
 joyed most. It is true tha,t Scott's leading characters 
 are never very fine ; but who would not be willing to lose 
 all the heroes and heroines in the world to have that 
 admirable series of subordinate and humorous characters, 
 which we find every-where far better and more important 
 than his rather weak heroes and unreal heroines. It 
 doesn't do to criticise the Waverleys : one strings out too 
 much. Besides, every one knows them well, and has his 
 own ideas. 
 
 On the 17th of January, 182 6, Scott writes: "James 
 Ballantyne this morning, good, honest fellow, with a 
 vision as black as the crook. He hopes no salvation ; 
 has indeed taken measures to stop. It is hard after 
 having fought such a battle." This is Scott's mention of 
 the announcement of the crash which finally came of 
 his fortunes. The firm of Constable failed, and with it 
 James Ballantyne & Co., and Scott was involved with 
 them to an immense sum — £117,000. There were vari- 
 ous reasons for the bad business, — neither of the Bal- 
 lantynes was a very good business man. Scott did not 
 sufficiently oversee his accounts with them ; it was the 
 time of a commercial crisis, — various things conspired. 
 Also Scott had been living beyond his income. In his 
 fancies for Abbotsford and for acquiring land thereabouts, 
 he had spent not only what money he had, but had got 
 into the habit of spending money which he had not yet 
 earned. And he had had many and great expenses beside 
 those attending the buying and building Abbotsford. 
 
 But all such considerations were at this time vain and 
 useless. Scott was at this time fifty-five. He had done 
 an immense amount of literary work already, enough, 
 one would think, to have made him feel that he might 
 
216 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 fairly rest on his labors. The amount of the liabilities of 
 the firm with which he was connected seemed enormous. 
 Nevertheless, he set to work at once, undertaking, with 
 the aid of time, to pay off the whole indebtedness of the 
 firm of which he had been a secret member. It was an 
 immense task, and it would have been most wonderful 
 could he have carried it through. As a matter of fact, 
 Scott paid £63,000 by his own labor. Of the remainder, 
 £2 2,000 was paid from his life insurance, and the rest 
 was advanced by Cadell, his publisher, who repaid him- 
 self from the profits arising from Scott's copyright. It 
 was all paid, but Scott killed himself in trying to pay it. 
 
 The year 1826, though Scott lived five years longer, 
 was practically the end of his life. Before the failure, he 
 had been alarmed at signs of breaking in his own health ; 
 he had noticed, with grief, that his wife's health was 
 gradually failing. She died in the spring following the 
 bankruptcy, and Scott set to work to live long enough 
 to pay his debts. It is a melancholy thing to tell. In 
 two years he earned £40,000 for his creditors. If he 
 had enjoyed health and life, he would have undoubtedly 
 paid off all his indebtedness in ten years or less. 
 
 But to resume quickly. In the year 1830, he had a 
 stroke of paralysis. He continued to work while he was 
 able, but he was evidently failing ; and at last, in 1831, 
 he consented to leave Scotland for Italy, with the hope 
 of there recovering some of his broken health. He left 
 Scotland in the fall, passing through London, and sailed 
 for Italy. But he could not remain there happily, and 
 early in 1832 he turned his face homeward. He lived 
 to reach Abbotsford again, and died on the 15th of 
 September, 1832. 
 
CARIvYLE. 
 
 1795-1881. 
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE (kar iii') was bom in the parish 
 of Middlebie, near the hamlet of Ecclefechan (ek kl- 
 fekh'an), in Dumfriesshire (dum frez' sher), Scotland, on 
 the 4th of December, 1795. The reader will observe that 
 his birthplace was not far from Burns' home, and that 
 he was born the year before Burns died. The imagina- 
 tive reader will remember that the poet may have stop- 
 ped at the house where the baby was, may have taken 
 him in his arms, and crowed over him some verse of a 
 Scottish song. In after years, Carlyle made Burns the 
 hero-poet of his celebrated volume of "Essays on Heroes 
 and Hero- Worship," and passed upon him a noble eulogy, 
 well deserved. 
 
 The education of this Scotch lad, also, is a testimony to 
 the value of the Scotch system. His father, a well-read 
 man himself, gratified his wish for an education wider 
 than that which home could give, and sent him first to 
 a school at Annan, and afterward to the University at 
 Edinburgh (ed In bur'ruh). This University has never 
 lacked distinguished teachers, — but Carlyle would have 
 said, what would have been said by Groethe (ga'teh), 
 Schiller (shil'er), Tennyson, and Longfellow, — to name 
 only the authors whose lives we are tracing, — that the 
 Library of the University in which he studied proved 
 his best teacher. He made himself familiar with old 
 English literature, and with foreign languages. In the 
 
218 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 summer, he spent his hohdays in rambhng over the hills 
 and through the valleys of Scotland. His father's thought 
 and his own had been that, after he left college, he 
 would become a minister in the Scotch Kirk, — nor was 
 there any lack of religious interest which should have 
 hindered him. But, after spending two years as a private 
 tutor in the family of Mr. Charles BuUer, he determined 
 to follow the direct lead of his genius, and to rely for 
 his livmg on such rewards, or compensation, as the life 
 of an author might bring him. He was an accurate 
 mathematician ; and the first published work of his is 
 said to have been a translation of the "Elements of 
 G-eometry," by Legendre (leh zhong dr')) to which he pre- 
 fixed, an " Essay on Proportion." 
 
 But his first original essay of importance was his 
 " Life of Schiller," which was published in the London 
 Magazine, in 182 3 and 1824. He chooses to speak 
 slightly of it in a preface which he wrote in 1845 ; but, 
 none the less, it is one of the most charming of all his 
 books, as it has always been a favorite. We have re- 
 ferred to it, more than once, in our own life of Schiller, 
 and gladly recommend to young readers to study it 
 carefully. 
 
 It must be remembered that an acquaintance with the 
 German language among well-educated persons in En- 
 gland and America was not then the matter of course 
 which it is now. Whoever understood the language as 
 well as the young Carlyle did, had a mine for explora- 
 tion, in the treasures of German literature, — the wealth 
 of which, though suspected by his countrymen, was really 
 quite unknown. Almost at the same time with his 
 "Schiller," he published a translation of "Wilhelm Meis- 
 ter," one of Goethe's masterpieces, which a thousand 
 
CARLYLE. 219 
 
 Englishmen and Americans had heard of as a master- 
 piece, for one who was able to read it in its own language. 
 Carlyle, from the beginning of his hfe to the end, was a 
 master in the business of translation from one language 
 to another. It is a business only too often left to infe- 
 rior hands, — almost always intrusted to some workman 
 who really knows well, only one of the two languages 
 with which he works. But the good translator must be 
 at ease and at home in each. Carlyle was at ease and at 
 home in Q-erman and in English. While he was yet a 
 young man, indeed, he spent enough time in Q-ermany 
 to become quite familiar with the local habits, and all 
 the conversational idioms of the country. 
 
 In 182 6, he married Miss Welch, a lady herself of 
 rare genius and adiuirable education.* Through life she 
 was his helpmeet, indeed ; she encouraged him in his 
 despondency, — she worked for him when he needed help, 
 — she kept his home cheerful. To use a beautiful phrase 
 of Mrs. Browning's, " She freshened his days." She died 
 a few years before him, — suddenly, — to his deep regret. 
 He, perhaps, wondered then, whether he had in her life- 
 time done full honor to a nature so large and noble. 
 The publication of much of his and her correspondence 
 has led to much discussion, which is probably not yet 
 
 * Miss Jewsbury presents this anecdote of her childhood : 
 
 " Leaening Latin.— She was anxious to learn lessons like a boy ; and, when a 
 very little thing, she asked her father to let her ' learn Latin like a boy.' Her 
 mother did not wish her to learn so much ; her father always tried to push her 
 forward ; there was a division of opinion on the subject. Jeannie went to one of 
 the town scholars in Haddington, and made him teach her a noun of the first 
 declension Q Penna, a pen,' I think it was). Armed with this, she watched her 
 opportunity; instead of going to bed, she crept under the table, and was con- 
 cealed by the cover. In a pause of conversation, a little voice was heard, ^ Penna, 
 a pen; pmnm, of a pen,' etc., and as there was a pause of surprise, she crept out, 
 and went up to her father, saying, ' I want to learn Latin ; please let me be a 
 boy.' Of course she had her own way in the matter." 
 
220 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 finished, — as to vexed questions, whether he were just to 
 her, — and whether she were just to him. It is probably 
 true that, on the wliole, the life of both was happy, — 
 that each sincerely loved and honored the other, — and 
 that the marriage was fortunate. That is, each of them 
 lived a life far more large, and noble, and happy, than 
 either of them could have done had they not met and 
 married, as they did. 
 
 Carlyle himself ascribed much honor, among the in- 
 fluences which trained his early life, to Edward Irving.* 
 It is imderstood that this distinguislied preacher was 
 attached to Miss Welch, and would have been glad to 
 marry her. But she certainly chose more wisely. "Had I 
 
 * " I had heard much of Irving all along," he writes ; " how distinguished in 
 studies, how splendidly successful as teacher, how two professors had sent him 
 out to Haddington, and how his new Academy and new methods were illuminat- 
 ing and astonishing every thing there. (Alas ! there was one little pupil he had 
 there, with her prettiest little perma pennce from under the table, and ' Let me he a 
 boy, too, papa I ' who was to be of endless moment, and who alone was of any 
 moment to me in all that I) I don't remember any malicious envy whatever 
 toward this great Irving of the distance. For his greatness in study and learning 
 I certainly might have had a tendency, hadn't I struggled against it, and tried 
 to make it emulation : ' Do the like, do thou the like under difficulties 1 ' As to 
 his school-master success, I cared little about that, and easily flung that out when 
 it came across me. But naturally all this be-trumpeting of Irving to me (in 
 which I could sometimes trace some touch of malice to myself) had not awak- 
 ened in me any love toward this victorious man. ' Ich gonnte ihn,'' as the Ger- 
 mans phrase it; but, in all strictness, nothing more. 
 
 "About Christmas-time (1815) I had gone with great pleasure to see Edin- 
 burgh again, and read in Divinity Hall a Latin discourse—' exegesis,' they call it 
 there— on the question, ' Num detur religio naturalis ? ' It was the second, and 
 proved to be the last, of my performances on that treatise. My first, an English 
 sermon on the words, 'Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now,' etc., etc., a 
 very weak, flowery, and sentimental piece, had been achieved in 1814, a few 
 months after my leaving for Annan. Piece second, too, I suppose, was weak 
 enough, but I still remember the kind of innocent satisfaction I had in turning 
 it into Latin in my solitude, and my slight and momentary (by no means deep 
 or sincere) sense of pleasure in the bits of compliments and flimsy approbation 
 from comrades and professors on both these occasions. Before Christmas-day I 
 had got rid of my exegesis, and had still a week of holiday ahead for old acquaint- 
 ances and Edinburgh things, which was the real charm of my official errand 
 thither. " 
 
C A R L Y li E . 221 
 
 married him," she said, " tliere would have been no gift of 
 tongues." In such a remark she probably shows the sort 
 of help which she frequently gave to the husband of her 
 choice. 
 
 It is difficult to explain to most readers of to-day, the 
 effect produced by Edward Irving on a very large circle 
 of people in Scotland and in England, in the fifteen 
 years which followed 1820. The great Dr. Chalmers* 
 having met him at Edinburgh, where he was pursuing 
 his studies, invited him to join him at Glasgow (glas'go), 
 in the great religious and charitable work which he had 
 in hand there. After three years there he went to Lon- 
 don, at first as a minister of the Scotch Kirk. But hav- 
 ing offended the government of that church, which de- 
 posed him for heresy, he founded the " Catholic Apostolic 
 Church," which now has congregations in all English- 
 speaking countries. Carlyle never was a disciple of Irving 
 in his theological revelations. But, as has been said, he 
 always recognized his personal obligation to him. " But 
 for him I had never known what the communion of 
 man with man means. He was the freest, brotherliest, 
 bravest human soul that mine ever came in contact 
 
 * He was a man of muoli natural dignity, ingenvdty, honesty, and kind aflfec- 
 tion, as well as sound intellect and imagination. A very eminent vivacity lay in 
 him, which could rise to complete Impetuosity (growing conviction, passionate 
 eloquence, fiery play of heart and head), all in a kind of rustic type, one might 
 say, though wonderfully true and tender. He had a burst of genuine fun, too, 
 I have heard, of the same honest hut most plebeian broadly natural character ; 
 his laugh was a hearty low guffaw ; and his tones in preaching would rise to the 
 piercingly pathetic— no preacher ever went so into one's heart. He was a man essen- 
 tially of little culture, of narrow sphere, all his life ; such an intellect professing 
 to he educated, and yet so ill read, so ignorant in all that lay beyond the horizon 
 in place or in time, I have almost nowhere met with. A man capable of much 
 soaking indolence, lazy brooding and do-nothingism, as the first stage of his life 
 well indicated ; a man thought to be timid almost to the verge of cowardice, yet 
 capable of impetuous activity and blazing audacity, as his latter years showed. 
 
 I suppose there will never again be such a preacher in any Christian church, 
 —CarlyWs Heminincences. 
 
222 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 with : I call him, on the whole, the best man I have ever 
 found in this world, or ever hope to find." Edward 
 Irving is now scarcely remembered among those who 
 have trained the thought or life of England in the 19 th 
 century. It is, therefore, important to recall this testi- 
 mony by Carlyle, as to one of the moral forces which 
 made him what he was. 
 
 In the year after his marriage, Carlyle published a 
 collection of translations from the shorter stories of Mu- 
 saeus (mu se'iis), Tieck (tek), Jean Paul (zhon po^A^l), 
 and Hoffmann (hof'man), which did more to interest 
 English and AiTierican readers in Q-erman literature, and 
 show them that it was not at all the vague fancy which 
 had been held up to their ridicule in the poetry of the 
 Anti-Jacobin (an'tl-jak'o bin)* and similar writings. In 
 such work, Carlyle had had able coadjutors and prede- 
 cessors, both in England and in Germany. Scott and 
 Byron both had drunk at the Q-erman wells, and owed 
 their obligations to the German author's. Coleridge (kor- 
 rlj), with his immense range and resource, had opened 
 to thinking men in England and America the results of 
 German speculation. More and more people began to 
 know that they must gain the German treasures in one 
 way or another. If they did not read the German lan- 
 guage, they must use the work of those who did. Happy 
 for them if such a man as Carlyle was willing to be 
 their guide. 
 
 After his marriage Carlyle lived a little while in Edin- 
 
 * The " poetry of the Anti-Jacobin " was the work of George Canning and 
 some of his literary friends. It contains some amusing satires on Werther (?»&'- 
 tlr) and other German romances. Prom some of these some phrases have strayed 
 which are almost, or quite proverbial. Such are, " Story? God bless you, I have 
 none to tell, sir," and " Let us swear eternal friendship." The amusing song of 
 " the TJ-niversity of Gottingen " ((/ef ting en) is one of these poems. 
 
CARLYLE. 223 
 
 burgh. He then removed with his wife to Craigenput- 
 toch (kra gen ptit'tok), * in tlie wildest part of Dumfries- 
 shire. In this sequestered home f Carlyle wrote his ar- 
 ticle on Richter (rlk'ter), and the series on Q-erman au- 
 
 * Craigenputtooh will remind the readers of Burns of his enthusiastic poems 
 and songs, which have preserved, for literature, the name of Craigenburn. Car- 
 lyle thus describes his home in a letter to Q-oethe : " Our residence is not in the 
 town itself, but fifteen miles north-west of it, among the granite hills and black 
 morasses, which stretch westward through G-alloway, almost to the Irish Sea. In 
 this wilderness of health and rocks our estate stands forth a green oasis, a tract 
 of plowed, partly inclosed and planted ground, where corn ripens and trees afford 
 a shade, although surrounded by sea-mews and rough-wooled sheep. * * * 
 Piled up on the little library table are a whole cart-load of French, German, 
 American, and English periodicals, whatever they may be worth." 
 
 In 1837, Carlyle prepared a list of the papers, which he published between 
 1824 and that time. Mr. E. W. Emerson published these in 1838, in the first 
 collection made of Carlyle's essays. He says: "Mr. Carlyle's recent works have 
 made him known as a "vvTiter to numbers to whom the essays in these volumes 
 will be new. But many readers will here find pages which, in the scattered 
 anonymous sheets of the British magazines, spoke to their youthful mind with 
 an emphasis that hindered them from sleep." [Of these readers Mr. Emerson 
 was himself one.] " It is a fact worth remembering in our literary history " [in 
 America] "that his rich and cheerful genius found its earliest audience in and 
 near New England, from young men who had complained, with the first Quaker, 
 that in the multitude of teachers ' none spake to their condition.' Such will be 
 glad to trace in this collection the spiritual history of the author, the course of 
 his reading, the depth of his stnidies, and what outward materials went to the 
 edification of the man." Mr. Emerson wrote this estimate of these papers on the 
 24th of June, 1838. 
 
 t Readers of " Carlyle's Reminiscences " hear much of the details of this life. 
 Here, for Instance : " We had trouble with servants, with many paltry elements 
 and objects, and were very poor ; but I do not think our days there were sad, 
 and certainly not hers in especial, but mine rather. We read together at night, 
 one winter, through 'Don Quixote' in the original; Tasso in ditto had come be- 
 fore; but that did not last very long. I was diligently writing and reading 
 there; wrote most of the 'Miscellanies' there, for Eoreign, Edinburgh, etc.. Re- 
 views (obliged to keep several strings to my bow), and took serious thought about 
 every part of every one of them. After finishing an article, we used to get on 
 horseback or mount into our soft old gig, and drive away, either to her mother's 
 (Templand, fourteen miles off) or to my father and mother's (Scotsbrig, seven 
 or six and thirty miles)— the pleasantest journeys I ever made, and the pleasant- 
 est visits. Stay perhaps three days ; hardly ever more than four ; then back to 
 work and silence. My father she particularly loved, and recognized all the grand 
 rude worth and immense originality that lay in him. Her demeanor at Scots- 
 brig, throughout in fact, was like herself, unsurpassable ; and took captive all 
 those true souls, from oldest to youngest, who by habit and type might have 
 been so utterly foreign to her." 
 
224 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 thors which followed it in the Edinburgh Review. He 
 wrote another series for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, 
 among which are its biographies of Montaigne (mon- 
 tan'), Montesquieu (mon tes ku'), Pitt, and Nelson. 
 
 The era which changed the circumstances of his life, 
 and announced him to be the leader of men, which he 
 has proved to be, in half a century since, was the pub- 
 lication, in separate numbers, of "Sartor Resartus," in 
 Eraser's Magazine* a monthly journal then not very long 
 established in London, a wide-awake and comparatively 
 fearless magazine, not unwilling to try new adventures. 
 The words "Sartor Resartus" mean "The Tailor Patched," 
 and the book, as it proved to be, professes to be an essay 
 on the " Clothes Philosophy," as Carlyle calls it. It is 
 quite clear that he varied from his original plan as he 
 went on, — that he became almost indifferent to the 
 machinery of the beginning as he elaborated the phil- 
 osophical statements which have given to the book its 
 value. 
 
 " Sartor Resartus " is not read by the young people of 
 the end of the nineteenth century as it was by thought- 
 ful men and women entering on life when the first half 
 of that century drew to a close. But this is because its 
 lessons, then quaint and unexpected, have long since 
 
 * Mr. Carlyle, in Ms "Reminiscences," gives this account of the reception of 
 the book in England and Scotland: 
 
 "Then, when poor 'Sartor' got passed through Franer, and was done up 
 from the Fraser types as a separate thing, perhaps about fifty copies being struck 
 ofE, I sent six copies to six Edinburgh literary friends, from not one of whom did 
 I get the smallest whisper even of receipt— a thing disappointing more or less to 
 human nature, and which has silently and insensibly led me never since to send 
 any copy of a book to Edinburgh, or, indeed, to Scotland at all, except to my own 
 kindred there, and in one or two specific unliterary cases more. The Plebs of 
 literature might be divided in their verdicts about me, though, by count of heads, 
 I always suspect the ' gullties ' clean had it ; but the Conscript Fathers declined 
 to vote at all." 
 
CARLYLE. 226 
 
 taken possession of literature and science, — even of art, 
 philosophy, and religion, in England and America, — so that 
 the statement of them now seems commonplace. But in 
 the days of the birth of the book, these lessons were 
 received as a new revelation. 
 
 The book teaches the worthlessness of mere dress, or 
 outside decoration. It is a wild prophet's cry on the 
 meanness and nothingness of " Shams." This word be- 
 came a favorite word with Mr. Carlyle, and with his 
 followers. The "Clothes Philosophy," so called, is the 
 philosophy which teaches men to do the duty which 
 comes next their hand, — even to "do the thing they are 
 afraid to," — and to scorn the forms or fashions which are 
 only temporary. G-eorge Fox, the Quaker, when he put 
 off the costume of his time, and put on a stout leather 
 suit which could not be torn, but which would shield 
 him from the weather, was a favorite example, brought 
 forward a hundred times, by Mr. Carlyle. 
 
 So soon as " Sartor Resartus " was finished in Fraser, 
 it was republished in a book in America, by Mr. Ralph 
 Waldo Emerson and a group around him of Carlyle's 
 admirers. From this moment Carlyle was known and 
 recognized as a sort of prophet to his generation, who, as 
 Arthur Clough (kluf) said to Emerson, could at least lead 
 them out from the flesh-pots of Egypt. 
 
 About the time of its publication, Mr. Carlyle and his 
 wife removed to London. Here they lived, in Chelsea 
 (chel'se), in a house fronting on the Thames (temz), from 
 that time till their death. Here he had the advantages 
 of the use of large libraries, of easy travel to the Conti- 
 nent, and of intimacy with many of the most accom- 
 plished men and women of his time. 
 
 In 1837, he published his "History of the French 
 
226 PEOSE WRITERS. 
 
 Revolution."* To this book his name was given, and it 
 is said to be the first of his books which bore his name. 
 It illustrates in a terrible example, acted out under the 
 eyes of men, the philosophy of the Sartor Resartus. For 
 
 * The English, critics doubted in their welcome of the book. Mr. Carlyle 
 speaks of their verdict thus in his "Reminiscences": 
 
 " It was after I had finished the ' lYench Revolution,' and perhaps after my 
 Annandale journey to recover from this adventure, that I heard of. Southey's 
 being in town again. His collective edition was complete, his poor wife was 
 dead and at rest ; his work was done ; in fact (had he known it), all his work in 
 the world was done ; and he had determined on a few weeks of wandering, and 
 trying to repose and recreate himself, among old friends and scenes. I saw him 
 twice or thrice on this occasion; it was our second and last piece of intercourse, 
 and much the more interesting, to me at least, and for a reason that will appear. 
 My wild excitation of nerves, after finishing that grim book on 'French Revolu- 
 tion,' was something strange. The desperate nature of our circumstances and 
 outlooks while writing it, the thorough possession it had taken of me, dwelling 
 in me day and night, keeping me in constant fellowship with such a ' flamy cut- 
 throat scene of things,' infernal and celestial both in one, with no fixed prospect 
 but that of writing it, though I should die, had held me in a fever blaze for 
 three years long ; and now the blaze had ceased, problem taliter Qualiter was act- 
 ually done, and my humor and way of thought about all things was of an alto- 
 gether ghastly, dim-smoldering, and as if preternatural sort. * * * Thacke- 
 ray's laudation in the Times I also recollect the arrival of. But neither did 
 Thackeray inspire me with any emotion, stUl less with any ray of exultation. 
 'One other poor judge voting,' I said to myself; 'but what is he, or such as he? 
 The fate of that thing is fixed 1 I have written it ; that is all my result.' Koth- 
 iug now strikes me as affecting in all this but her noble attempt to cheer me on 
 my return home to her [Mrs. CarlyleJ , still sick and sad ; and how she poured 
 out on me her melodious joy, and all her bits of confirmatory anecdotes and nar- 
 ratives. ' Oh, it has had a great success, dear ! ' and not even she could irradiate 
 my darkness, beautifully as she tried for a long time, as I sat at her feet again 
 by our own parlor fire. 'Oh, you are an unbelieving nature!' said she at last, 
 starting up, probably to give me some tea. There was, and is, in all this some- 
 thing heavenly." 
 
 He writes also: "Early in January, 1837, it must have been when book on 
 ' French Revolution ' was finished. I wrote the last paragraph of it here (within 
 a yard of where I now am), in her presence, one evening after dinner. Damp, 
 tepid kind of evening, still by dayhght, read it to her or left her to read it; 
 probably with a ' Thank &od it is done, Jeannie ! ' and then walked out up the 
 Gloucester igUis' tSr) Road toward Kensington way; don't remember coming 
 back, or indeed any thing quite distinct for three or four months after. My 
 thoughts were by no means of an exultant character ; pacifically gloomy rather, 
 something of sullenly contemptuous in them, of clear hope (except in the ' des- 
 perate ' kind) not the smallest glimpse. I had said to her, perhaps that very day, 
 ' I know not whether this book is worth any thing, nor what the world will do 
 with it, or misdo, or entirely forbear to do (as is likeliest), but this I could tell 
 
CARLYLE 227 
 
 never was the VLinity of shams more terribly displayed 
 than in the failure of the elaborate Cornet Ritual which 
 surrounded Louis XVI. and Marie Antoniette (ma re' ong- 
 twa net') when the so-called Government of a country 
 was asked to govern. 
 
 At the same time, the mere narrative of the book 
 made a revolution in the habits of writing history. The 
 historian no longer conceals himself behind the scenes, 
 to work a few puppets with wires, at constant disadvan- 
 tage. He associates with his readers, and makes them 
 his confidants and friends. If he have difficulties in 
 finding the truth, he does not pretend to be omniscient. 
 If the fact is dead and really unimportant, he tells the 
 reader so frankly, and does not pretend that every peb- 
 ble he has found in his digging is a gem of the first 
 water. Above all, he makes the history entertaining. * 
 
 When such a man lives in such a city as London, 
 some arrangement follows by which the people of his 
 time can see him and hear him. It was thus that Mr. 
 Carlyle delivered, before audiences of the most thought- 
 ful men and women, his courses of lectures, some of 
 which have been published. The titles of successive 
 courses were, "Q-erman Literature," the "History of 
 
 the world : You liave not had for a hundred years any book that came more 
 direct and fiamlngly sincere from the heart of a living man ; do with it what 
 
 you like, you 1 ' My poor little Jeannie and me, hasn't it nearly killed us 
 
 both? This also I might bave said, had I liked it, for it was true. My health 
 was much spoiled ; hers too by sympathy, by daily helping me to struggle with 
 the intolerable load." 
 
 * Young readers who do not know Carlyle's skill in this first requisite of the 
 historian, will do well to read the history of the "Diamond Necklace," which was 
 written for a magazine, and is published among his Miscellanies. The frauds 
 and follies by which the purchase and sale of this jewel became a matter of 
 State importance, and involved the character of Marie Antoinette, are a most in- 
 teresting illustration of the rottenness of morals which led the way for the ter- 
 rible storms of the French Kevolution. 
 
228 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 Literature," "The Revolutions of Modern Europe," and 
 "Heroes and Hero-Worship."* The last makes but a 
 small book. But no one of his books better shows the 
 
 * Our main revenue three or four (?) years now was lectures ; in Edward 
 street, Portman Square, the only free room there was ; earnestly forwarded by 
 Miss and Thomas AVilson, of Eccleston street (who still live and are good), by 
 Miss Martineau, by Henry Taylor, Frederick Elliot, etc., etc. Brought in, on the 
 average, perhaps £200, for a month's labor ; first of them must have been in 
 1838, I think; Willis' Eooms, this. "Detestable mixture of prophecy and play- 
 actorism," as I sorrowfully defined it ; nothing could well be hatefuller to me ; but 
 I was obliged. And she [Mrs. Carlyle], oh, she was my angel, and unwearied 
 helper and comforter in all that.— C'arlyle's Reminiscences. 
 
 Of the first lecture he writes : 
 
 " Monday, May 1, 1837, in Willis' Eooms is marked as date of my first 
 lecture. It was a sad, planless jumble, as all these six were, but full enough of 
 new matter, and of a furious determination on the poor lecturer's part not to 
 break down. Plenty of incondite stuff accordingly there was ; new, and in a 
 strangely new dialect and tone ; the audience intelligent, partly fashionable, was 
 very good to me, and seemed, in spite of the jumbled state of things, to feel it 
 entertaining, even interesting. I pitied myself, so agitated, terrified, driven 
 desperate and furious. But I found I had no remedy, necessity compelling; on 
 the proceeds we were financially safe for another year, and that was my one 
 sanction in the sad enterprise." 
 
 I was myself writing " Schiller " in those months ; a task Irving had encour- 
 aged me in and prepared the way for, in the London Magazine. Three successive 
 parts there were, I know not how far advanced, at this period ; knew only that I 
 was nightly working at the thing in a serious, sad, and totally solitary way. My 
 two rooms were in the old " Mansion " of KInnaird, some three or four hundred 
 yards from the new, and on a lower level, overshadowed with wood. Thither I 
 always retired directly after tea, and for most part had the edifice all to myself; 
 good candles, good wood fire, place dry enough, tolerably clean, and such silence 
 and total absence of company, good or bad, as I never experienced before or 
 since. I remember still the grand so^igh of those woods ; or, perhaps, in the 
 stillest times, the distant ripple of Tay. Nothing else to converse with but this 
 and my own thoughts, which never for a moment pretended to be joyful, and 
 were sometimes pathetically sad. I was in the miserablest dyspeptic health, 
 uncertain whether I ought not to quit on that account, and at times almost 
 resolving to do it ; driven far away from all my loved ones. My poor " Schiller," 
 nothing considerable of a work even to my own judgment, had to be steadily 
 persisted in as the only protection and resource in this inarticulate huge " wilder- 
 ness," actual and symbolical. My editor, I think, was complimentary ; but I knew 
 better. The Ti^nes newspaper once brought me, without commentary at all, an 
 " eloquent " passage reprinted (about the tragedy of noble literary life), which I 
 remember to have read with more pleastire in this utter isolation, and as the 
 " first " public nod of approval I had ever had, than any criticism or laudation 
 that has ever come to me since. Eor about two hours it had lighted in the deso- 
 lation of my inner man a strange little glow of illumination ; but here too, on 
 
CAKLYLE. 229 
 
 power of the author, and probably no one of them has 
 had more effect on the men and women of his time. 
 
 As his hfe went on, he gave more and more time to 
 history. He edited every letter and speech of Oliver 
 Cromwell * which could be found, and his book becomes 
 the authentic history of the Puritan Revolution in En- 
 gland. Afterward, he devoted years of life to the study 
 of the life of Frederick of Prussia, called the Great, f To 
 Carlyle he was great. For he had come to believe that 
 leadership, however gained, was the test of greatness, and 
 he was eager to make the world believe that Frederick 
 
 reflection, I " knew better," and the winter afternoon was not over when I saw 
 clearly how very small this conquest was, and things were in their statu qu» 
 
 * " At this time," writes Carlyle (speaking of his wife), " I must have been in 
 the thick of ' Cromwell ' ; four years of abstruse toil, obscure speculations, futile 
 wrestling, and misery, I used to count it had cost me, before I took to editing the 
 ' Letters and Speeches ' (' to have them out of the way '), which rapidly drained 
 off the sour swamp water bodily, and left me, beyond all first expectation, quite 
 free of the matter. Often I have thought how miserable my books must have 
 been to her, and how, though they were none of her choosing, and had come 
 upon her like ill weather or iU health, she at no instant, never once I do believe, 
 made the least complaint of me or my behavior (often bad, or at least thoughtless 
 and weak) under them. Always some quizzing little lesson, the purport and effect 
 of which was to encourage me ; never once any thing worse. Oh, it was noble, 
 and I see it so well now, when it is gone from me, and no return possible. 
 
 "Cromwell was by much the worst book time, till this of ITriedrich (fred'- 
 rih), which, indeed, was infinitely worse ; in the dregs of our strength, too ; and 
 lasted for about thirteen years. She was generally in quite weak health too, and 
 was often, for long weeks or months, miserably ill." 
 
 t Mrs. Carlyle writes as follows about this book : 
 
 " Ceaigenvilla, Edinburgh, Monday, Aug. 24, 1857. 
 
 " Oh, my dear ! What a magnificent book this is going to be 1 The best of 
 all your books. I say so, who never flatter, as you are too well aware ; and who 
 am ' the only person I know that is always in the right I ' So far as it is here 
 before me, I find it forcible and vivid, and sparkling as ' The French Revolution,' 
 with the geniaUty and composure and finish of ' Cromwell '—a wonderful combi- 
 nation of merits ! And how you have contrived to fit together all those different 
 sorts of pictures, belonging to different sorts of times, as compactly and smoothly 
 as a bit of the finest mosaic 1 Eeally one may say, of these two first books at 
 least, what Helen said of the letters of her sister who died— you remember?— 
 'So splendidly put together one would have thought that hand couldn't have 
 written them ! ' " 
 
230 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 owed his success to some of the highest quahties of man- 
 hood. 
 
 The more Mr. Oarlyle expressed his interest in the 
 practical politics of his time, the more dissatisfaction did 
 he feel with men whom he called men of talk, or "wind- 
 bags " ; and the more confidence did he express in force, 
 though it were physical force, as the agent by which the 
 affairs of men must be regulated. In his personal con- 
 versations with the men and women of his time, while 
 he was never gracious and serene, he was often captious, 
 irritable, and violent. Such habits grew upon him with 
 years, and with the homage which followed on success. 
 
 ISTone the less did he make over again the habits of 
 English literature and of English thought. Every thing, 
 indeed, was tending this way. The poetry of Burns, the 
 realism which may be found in Scott's poetry, the phi- 
 losophy of Coleridge, and many tentative steps in the 
 theology of England and America, all show men's protest 
 against mere forms and formalities, and their determina- 
 tion to see and say the thing which is. For such a pro- 
 test Carlyle appeared as the leader. Men followed him 
 gladly, though "they followed him into a desert." And 
 the literature, the art, the science even, the philosophy 
 and the religion of this time, are all different from those 
 of the time to which he was born, because he lived, and 
 wrote, and spoke as he did. 
 
 His wife died in 1866. He grieved for her death with 
 sorrow which could not find language strong enough 
 for its expression. His own death followed on the 5th 
 of February, 1881. 
 
M ACAULAY. 
 
 1800-1859. 
 
 TO Addison himself," wrote Lord Macaulay (ma- 
 ka^v'll), "we are bound by a sentiment, as much 
 hke affection as any sentiment can be, which is inspired 
 by one who has been sleeping a hundred and twenty 
 years in Westminster Abbey. * * * After full inquiry 
 and impartial reflection, we have long been convinced 
 that he deserved as much love and esteem as can justly 
 be claimed by any of our inferior and erring race." We 
 wish we had genius to write as well as this is written, 
 the same thing about the writer of it. Among all the 
 authors of whom it has been our fortune to read or 
 write, Macaulay is always the one whom we seem to 
 love best. "Would we have liked to live with him?" 
 asks Thackeray (thak'eri), with respect to Swift.* It 
 seems to us that there is no one of the great masters of 
 English literature with whom we should be more glad to 
 have lived than with Macaulay. There may have been 
 some with whom we might, pei'haps, prefer to pass a 
 few hours, — to be with Byron for no long time, to talk 
 
 * "Would you have liked to be a friend of the great Dean? I should have 
 hked to have been Shakespeare's shoe-black— just to have lived in his house, just 
 to have worshiped him— to have run on his errands, and seen that serene face. 
 I should like, as a young man, to have lived on Pielding's staircase in the Tem- 
 ple, and after helping him up to bed perhaps, and opening his door vrith his 
 latch-key, to have shaken hands with him In the morning, and heard him talk 
 and crack jokes over his breakfast and his mug of small-beer. Who would not 
 give something to pass a night at the club vrith Johnson, and Q-oldsmith, and 
 James Boswell, Esq., of Auchenleck 0f' flek)"). The charm of Addison '-s com- 
 panionship and conversation has passed to us by fond tradition." 
 
232 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 with De Quincey, to have little interviews with Henry- 
 Fielding would be undoubtedly pleasant. It may be that 
 we could have lived as happily with Sir Walter Scott, 
 and perhaps, — but we fear not, — with Thackeray. But, 
 on the whole, to have been the much younger intimate 
 of Macaulay would have been, we think, one of the 
 greatest x)rivileges that could be bestowed. 
 
 And if there were to be but one book left in all this 
 world, beside the Bible, we should prefer that it should 
 be Macaulay's Essays. There is no one book known to 
 us which, to an educated man or woman, should give so 
 much pleasure. The Essays are not only the most enter- 
 taining and interesting reading by themselves, but they 
 invariably suggest so much more than any other book 
 with which we are acquainted. There are passages (for 
 instance, that in the essay on " Sir James Mackintosh," 
 beginning, "The History of England is emphatically a 
 history of progress"), which should bring to the mind of 
 the reader enough food for thought to last him a day, or 
 a week, or a month, according as he may happen to be 
 ill or well up in the subject. There is hardly one of them, 
 written on a particular period, that does not call to our 
 mind by its allusions, more great men and great works 
 than most well-considered histories would do in a whole 
 volume. We had rather have his Essay on Addison 
 than Addison's Spectator, that on the Horace Walpole's 
 Letters than all the nine volumes of that correspondence, 
 most certainly that on Mr. Robert Montgomery than 
 that gentleman's poems themselves. If a man has 
 already read much, it seems to us that Macaulay's Essays 
 is the last book he could afford to part with. So much 
 for individual opinion ; we are aware that to many such 
 views must seem ridiculous and idiotic. 
 
MACAULAY. 233 
 
 Thomas Babington Macaulay was born of a family 
 originally Scotch, November 26, 1800. His father, Zach- 
 ary Macaulay, was, at the time of his eldest son's birth, 
 a well-to-do London merchant, senior partner of the firm 
 of Macaulay, Babington & Co., a man of whom much 
 might be written. He was one of those noble m^en who 
 gave up every thing to pursue the abolishing of slavery 
 and the slave-trade. His son had for him the warmest 
 love and respect, but the two could not fully sympathize 
 in later life. The rest of the family, his mother, and his 
 brothers and sisters, all younger than himself, he loved 
 in the tenderest way, and it is the most pathetic thing 
 in the life of this really great man to see how wholly 
 his happiness lay with that family of which he was in 
 time the only support. 
 
 Macaulay through life had two very important charac- 
 teristics, and both manifested themselves in his extreme 
 youth,— an inordinate love of reading and an immense 
 memory. These, with a gift of style and of oratory 
 which developed later, are his most noticeable intellect- 
 ual peculiarities. Even in his school-days, he would 
 read and remember, any thing that took his fancy, to a 
 portentous extent. He was, therefore, a great scholar in 
 subjects in which he was interested. In other subjects 
 he does not seem to have applied himself in the least, 
 and never attained any eminence. From this it would 
 seem as though his studies were for him solely means of 
 acquiring information ; as for being mental discipline, it 
 seems evident that he never got into the habit of school- 
 ing his mind to do what he did not like. A fair ex- 
 ample of this is in his mathematical studies. For a man 
 of Macaulay's wonderful memory (if we can draw infer- 
 ences from stories told of it), it would have been not too 
 
234 PKOSE WRITERS. 
 
 great a task to commit to memory verbally the few 
 mathematical works he needed to pass a certain examina- 
 tion at Cambridge, at which, owing to his constant neglect, 
 he was conditioned, as we say, or "gulphed," as he prob- 
 ably said himself. However, fortunately enough for him, 
 he was able to interest himself in most of the tasks set 
 him at home and at school, and he went up to Trinity Col- 
 lege, Cambridge, from Mr. Preston's private school, leaving 
 behind him the impression that he was a most remark- 
 able boy, and that he would infallibly come to some- 
 thing. In truth, he was a most remarkable boy, chiefly, 
 however, for his love for reading and his memory. At 
 home he had, beside these qualities, all those which could 
 serve to make an older brother the object of most de- 
 voted worship from his younger brothers and sisters, and 
 of the fondest admiration from his father* and mother. 
 
 In the fall of 1818, Macaulay went up to Trinity Col- 
 lege, Cambridge. His career here bore much the relation 
 to the college world that his later life did to the larger 
 world outside. He read much, and remembered every 
 thing. He was admired and looked up to by his com- 
 panions for his conversation, learning, and skill in de- 
 
 * Although Mr. Macaulay thought Tom read too many novels. Macaulay and 
 his sisters were omnivorous readers of novels. Not only were they as famlhar 
 with Richardson and Jane Austin as with the friends of every-day life, hut the 
 lowest form of silly fiction was delightful at least to Macaulay. Mrs. Meeke and 
 Mrs. Kitty Cuthhertson were well known to him by their works, " Santo Sebas- 
 tiano " (sdn' tS sa bas te a' ml), " The Forest of Montalba " (mora taT ba), " The Romance 
 of the Pyrenees," and "Adelaide, or the Gountercharm," of which we make no 
 doubt our readers have heard. They would use the very language of Mr. and 
 Mrs. Bennet, of Mr. Collins,- of Sir Charles Grrandison (gran' di sun), Clarissa, or 
 Miss Howe, to express their views on every-day aifairs, and would quote these 
 worthies as we should our neighbors. The effect of all this on Trevelyan, who 
 married Hannah, was bewildering, for his "reading had lain anywhere rather 
 than among the circulating libraries " ; and he used to be consumed with wonder 
 as to who might be these strange friends of his wife and his brother-in-law, and 
 among what sort of people could they have once lived. 
 
MACAULAY. 235 
 
 bate. He seized many prizes, and passed examinations 
 with honor (though not all ; he would not apply himself 
 to mathematics). He spent his long vacations there, 
 reading from morning till night, and finally landed in a 
 Trinity Fellowship, which he held for some years. In the 
 meanwhile, he went to London, read law, and was called 
 to the Bar. 
 
 But it does not appear that he ever intended to make 
 the law his serious profession. He didn't like it, and 
 never did much in it. He did, however, join the Leeds 
 Northern Circuit, and read law in Chambers in London. 
 In 1830, he was offered by Lord Lansdowne (lanz' down) 
 a seat in Parliament as Member for Calne (kan), which 
 place that nobleman, according to the custom of the 
 time, carried, as the phrase is, in his pocket. Macaulay, 
 at the time this offer was made, was personally unknown 
 to Lord Lansdowne. 
 
 He had, however, made for himself a very great repu- 
 tation, and almost entirely by writing for the Ediiiburgh 
 Bevieiv. Shortly after leaving college, he had contributed 
 several articles to Kniglifs Quarterly Magazine, but they 
 do not seepa to have attracted general attention, al- 
 though they served to displease his father. But in 182 5 
 he began his connection with the Edinburgh Review. 
 That periodical enjoyed at that time such a reputation 
 as no other magazine has enjoyed before nor since. But 
 at this moment it needed new blood. In a happy 
 moment Macaulay was found, and in the summer of 
 1825 appeared in the Review his article on "Milton." 
 It had an instantaneous and a very great reputation. 
 From being a comjiaratively unknown and wholly brief- 
 less barrister, he became a literary man who could get 
 his own price for any thing he chose to write. He 
 
236 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 became a species of lion, well known in London. During 
 the next five years he sent several other articles to the 
 Review, which were so ixiuch read, admired, and disputed 
 over that it was by no means curious that Lord Lans- 
 downe's attention should have been called to Macaulay, 
 for he was certainly the most prominent of the younger 
 men in London intent on politics, and a good Whig. 
 
 The first few years of Macaulay's parliamentary life 
 must have been of the most exciting interest, the most 
 crammed with emotion of any of his life. The year 1830 
 was the year of revolution in France and of revolutionary 
 feeling thi^oughout Europe. England was not without her 
 excitement. The years following, in which the Reform 
 Bill was brought in, fought over, and finally passed, 
 were probably the most exciting years politically of this 
 century. It was at this time that Macaulay, young, 
 powerful, enthusiastic, conscious of his power and of an 
 already great reputation, came into the House of Com- 
 mons, which furnished at once a field for the exercise 
 of his greatest gifts and a means of making a large 
 number of very honest friends and admirers. In princi- 
 ples a Whig, and by nature a most devoted one, he could 
 not pass without recognition from the chiefs of his party ; 
 in fact, after his Reform speeches, he was undoubtedly 
 their most brilliant orator. He was elected member for 
 Oalne in the spring of 1830. Parliament shortly dis- 
 solved on the death of George IV., and Macaulay spent the 
 summer in Paris, which the Revolution had made par- 
 ticularly interesting to one about to go back to the Re- 
 form battles in England. Parliament met on the 26th of 
 October ; the Tory G-overnment under the Duke of Wel- 
 lington was shortly defeated, and Lord Grey came in. 
 On the 1st of March, Lord John Russell brought in the 
 
MACAULAY. 237 
 
 Reform Bill. In the debate which followed, Macaulay 
 made the first of his great Reform speeches, — speeches 
 that were at the time considered the best that had 
 been heard since Fox, Burke, or Canning, and which, 
 read now, fall little below the acme of forensic eloquence. 
 
 Macaulay was hard worked at this time. He was de- 
 voted in his attendance at the House. He had for some 
 time been a Commissioner of Bankruptcy, and with these 
 two he had little time for literature. He wrote some- 
 what for the Edinbiorgh Review, but his heart and mind 
 were in his political work. The Reform Bill passed ; the 
 time was approaching when the first Reformed Parlia- 
 ment was to be chosen. Macaulay was asked by the 
 Whigs of the newly enfranchised city of Leeds to stand 
 for them, and by them was returned. He had for some 
 little time now been Commissioner of the Board of Con- 
 trol,* and was shortly made its secretary. This place in 
 the Q-overnment placed him in a painful position on the 
 occasion of the West India Slavery Bill. Macaulay, on 
 account, in a measure, of his father, differed with the 
 Government. He placed his resignation in the hands of 
 the Prime Minister, voted against the Government, car- 
 ried his point, and yet, being of such value, was still re- 
 tained in his place. 
 
 It would be almost impossible to give a fair picture 
 of Macaulay's life at this time in the space at our com- 
 mand. It was made up of hard work and great suc- 
 cesses at the House of Commons, of hard work at the 
 Board of Control, and great successes on the Edinburgh 
 Review. And beside his political work, which was much 
 of it intensely interesting and exciting, his social life was 
 
 * The means by wMcli at that time England governed her East Indian posses- 
 sions. 
 
238 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 of the keenest. He was known in the best houses of 
 London, was a constant diner-out, was often a guest at 
 tlie dinners at Holland House, and not infrequently at 
 the poet Rogers' breakfasts. He read as hard as ever, 
 and as much. But the happiest part of his life was his 
 intercourse with his family. Though he himself lived 
 in chambers, and the others of his family at his father's 
 house in G-reat Ormond street, he saw them frequently, 
 and there were no persons in the city whom he loved 
 better, or in whose company he was happier. The most 
 vivid picture of his life at this time is to be found in 
 his letters to his sisters Hannah and Margaret. They 
 are letters which the interest of the narrative, the bright- 
 ness and Avit of the diversion, and, above all, the infinite 
 brotherly tenderness and love, make the most delightful 
 reading in the world.* 
 
 * There are certain poetical works of IjOrd Macaulay which are not usually 
 inserted in his collected writings. He held a light pen as far as doggerel is 
 concerned, and was constantly writing for his younger sisters and for his nephews 
 and nieces effusions which he usually attributed to a certain author whom he 
 was pleased to term "The Judicious Poet." 
 
 " A Yankee," he writes, " has written to me to say that an edition of my 
 works is about to be published in America, with my life prefixed, and that he 
 shall be obUged to me to tell him when I was born, whom I married, and so 
 forth. I guess I must answer him slick right away. 3?or, as the Judicious Poet 
 observes, — 
 
 " ' Though a New England man lolls back in his chair. 
 With a pipe in his mouth and his legs in the air, 
 Yet surely an Old England man such as I 
 To a kinsman by blood sho^ild be civil and spry.' 
 
 " How I run on in ciuotation ! But when I begin to cite the verses of our 
 great writers I never can stop." 
 
 And again : " Do you remember the beautiful Puseyite (pU' zp it) hymn on 
 Michaelmas {mik' el mas) day ? It is a great favorite with all the Traotarians. 
 You and Alice should learn it. It begins : 
 
 " 'Though Quakers scowl, though Baptists howl, 
 Though Plymouth brethren rage, 
 We Churchmen gay will wallow to-day 
 In apple-sauce, onions, and sage. 
 
MACAULAY. 239 
 
 On the 17th of August, 1833, Macaulay wrote to his 
 favorite sister Hannah, afterward Lady Trevelyan (trev- 
 el'yan), to say it was probable, indeed nearly certain, 
 that the position of member of the Supreme Council of 
 India would be offered to him. He would, if he ac- 
 cepted, be absent from England for five or six years. 
 The salary was so large that in that time he could save 
 enough money to make himself independent for life, and 
 the members of his family who were dependent on him 
 as well. He decided to go. His sister accompanied him.* 
 
 " 'Ply knife and fork, and draw the cork, 
 And have the bottle handy, 
 Eor each slice of the goose will introduce 
 A thimhleful of brandy.' 
 
 "Is it not good? I wonder who the author can be." 
 
 A longer poem commemorates the deeds of a country squire whom he knew, 
 who had the habit of detaining people by the button, and more especially 
 bishops. It begins : 
 
 " His Grace, Archbishop Manners Sutton, 
 
 Could not keep on a single button. 
 
 As for Right Reverend John of Chester, 
 
 His waistcoats open at the breast are. 
 
 Our friend has filled a mighty trunk 
 
 With trophies torn fromi Doctor Monk, 
 
 And he has really tattered foully 
 
 The vestments of Archbishop Howley. 
 
 No button could I late discern on 
 
 The garments of Archbishop Vernon, 
 
 And never had his fingers mercy 
 
 Upon the garb of Bishop Percy. 
 
 The buttons fly from Bishop Ryder 
 
 Like corks that spring from bottled cider." 
 
 These were almost invariably written for his sisters or nieces, with whom 
 throughout his life he sustained a voluminous correspondence. He sometimes 
 deplored the necessity of so employing valuable time, as in the following : 
 
 " Be you Poxes, be you Pitts, 
 You must write to silly chits ; 
 Be you Tories, be you Whigs, 
 You must write to sad young gigs." 
 *"It is now my duty," he writes to his sister Hannah, on their departure, 
 "to omit no opportunity of giving you wholesome advice. I am henceforward 
 your sole guardian. I have bought Grisborne's (g\s' Mnz) ' Duties of Women,' 
 
240 PEOSE WRITERS. 
 
 We must wholly pass over his life in India. * The 
 four years he passed there might almost be omitted from 
 his life. An immense amount of reading in the classics, 
 the Essay on Bacon, and one or two other pieces, the 
 ideas which run through the Essays on Lord Clive 
 (kliv) and Warren Hastings, are the points which are 
 of most moment. While in India, Macaulay worked hard 
 on more than his official duties ; indeed, it is almost in- 
 conceivable that a man could accomplish as much as he 
 did. The most lasting result of this work is the "Indian 
 Penal Code," drawn up hj a commission of which he was 
 President. He reached England again in the summer 
 of 1838. He was now of an independent fortune, his 
 own master in a way he had never felt before. But he 
 was in other ways not so fortunate. His father had died 
 while he was on the voyage home. His sister Margaret 
 had died while he was in India ; and his sister Hannah 
 
 Moore's 'Pables for the Female Sex,' Mrs. King's 'I?emale Scripture Characters,' 
 and Pordyoe's (for Ms ez') 'Sermons.' With, the help of these hooks, I hope to 
 keep my responsibility in order on our voyage and in India." 
 
 * One anecdote of his Indian life is whimsical. At the British Residency at 
 Mysore (ml sdr') he met an Englishman, who at once addressed him with : " Pray, 
 Mr. Macaulay, do you not think that Bonaparte was the Beast?" "No, sir, I can 
 not say that I do." " Sir, he was the Beast. I can prove it. I have found the 
 number 666 in his name (see Revelations xiii. 18). Why, sir, if he was not the 
 Beast, who was?" Macaulay at once returned: "Sir, the House of Commons is 
 the Beast. There are 658 members of the House ; and these, with their chief 
 officers, make 666." "Well, sir, that is strange. But I can assure you that, if you 
 write Napoleon Bonaparte in Arabic, leaving out only two letters, it will give 
 666." "And, pray, sir, what right have you to leave out two letters? And as St. 
 John was writing Greek and to the Greeks, is it not likely he would use the 
 Greek rather than the Arabic notation ? " " But, sir, everybody knows that the 
 Greek letters were never used to mark numbers." Macaulay answered meekly 
 that he believed that everybody did not know that; and went on to insinuate 
 that a very different opinion— erroneous, no doubt— was universally embraced 
 by all the small minority who happen to know any Greek. " So ended the con- 
 troversy," he writes. " The man looked at me as if he thought me a very wicked 
 fellow ; and, I dare say, has by this time discovered that if you write my name in 
 Tamul (tii' mul), leaving out the T in Thomas, B in Babing^n, and M in Macaulay, 
 it wiU give the number of this unfortunate Beast." 
 
MACAULAY. 241 
 
 had married. * It was his desire to write a History of 
 England during the last century or so. It was a colossal 
 task as he planned it, but he had confidence that he 
 should be able to finish it if he kept out of politics and 
 out of society. This winter he went on an Italian tour, 
 of which we may see many results in the "Lays of 
 Ancient Rome," which he published some time after. 
 
 Shortly after his return from Italy, Macaulay was 
 elected to the House of Commons from Edinburgh, and 
 was made Secretary of War in the Melbourne (mel'bam) 
 Cabinet. This was all very well, but Macaulay did little 
 good there, — the ministry fell in 1841, and Macaulay was 
 glad to be his own man again. He published the "Lays 
 of Ancient Rome," and went to work with his reviewing 
 again. "Lord Clive," "Warren Hastings," and "Addison" 
 were written at about this time. The Essay on Chatham, 
 written in 1844, was the last thing of his that appeared 
 in the Revieiv. He wanted his time for his history. He 
 still sat in Parliament. In 1846, on the fall of the Peel 
 Ministry, Macaulay was made Postmaster Greneral by Lord 
 Melbourne; but in 1847, on the dissolution of Parlia- 
 ment, his constituents at Edinburgh, dissatisfied with 
 him, for many reasons too long and involved to be par- 
 ticularized here, refused to re-elect him. After the first 
 natural disappointment, he was by no means sorry for it. 
 
 * Macaiilay, in writing t» tell his sister Margaret of Hannah's engagements, 
 writes : 
 
 " As for me, it is a tragical denouement (di tiSo' mong) of an absurd plot. I 
 remember quoting some nursery rhymes, years ago, when you left me in London 
 to join Nancy at Eothley Temple or Leamington {lem' ing tun), I forget which 
 Those foohsh lines contain the history of my life : 
 
 " ' There were two birds that sat on a stone : 
 One flew away, and there was but one. 
 The other flew away, and then there was none; 
 And the poor stone was then all alone.' " 
 
242 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 For some time, ever since his return from India, it 
 had been his sincere desire to retire from political busi- 
 ness, and indeed from every thing that would interfere 
 with his literary work, and to give himself up entirely 
 to writing a History of England. He felt that he was 
 himself, on the whole, better qualified for the task than 
 any other Englishman. His plan was one of stupendous 
 magnitude ; yet it only began with the reign of William 
 the Third. But the minuteness with which it was to be 
 written would have made it far longer than any History 
 of England from earliest times. He spent six volumes on 
 the reign of William the Third. His history complete 
 would have been near a hundred volumes. To this work 
 he gave himself up entirely. He stopped writing for the 
 Review. He was not in Parliament. His life * from this 
 point consists of the story of the writing of this great 
 history, the most famous history, probably, ever published 
 in modern times. He rummaged and examined libraries, 
 private and public ; he made journeys that he might 
 have his scenes well in his mind ; he wrote and corrected 
 with the very greatest care and diligence. In truth, he 
 thought nothing of traveling a hundred miles or recast- 
 ing a dozen pages to make one paragraph as good as it 
 could be made. He was the great master of local color, 
 
 * We must add to his work on the history another element in his life which 
 is characteristic of the man,— his intercoui-se with his younger sisters and his 
 young nephews and nieces. It is impossible to exaggerate the pleasure which 
 Macaulay took in children, or the delight which he gave them. He was, beyond 
 all comparison, the best of playfellows ; unrivaled in the invention of games, and 
 never wearied of repeating them. He had an inexhaustible repertory of small 
 dramas for the benefit of his nieces, in which he sustained an endless variety of 
 parts with a skill that, at any rate, was suflB-oient for his audience. An old friend 
 of the family writes to his niece later in life : " I well remember that there was 
 one never-failing game of building up a den with newspapers behind the sofa, 
 and of enacting robbers and tigers ; you shrieking with terror, but always fas- 
 cinated, and begging him to begin again ; and there was a daily recurring obser- 
 vation from him that, after all, children were the only true poets." 
 
MACAULAY. 243 
 
 of mise en scene, of descriptive writing, of clear narra- 
 tion. The first two volumes came toward the end of 
 1849. Macaulay was curiously timid and apprehensive 
 of failure. He need not have been. The history was 
 received with absolutely universal acclamation. His 
 friends joined to a man in congratulation, and the public 
 showed their appreciation by purchasing. Immense edi- 
 tions were (and are still) sold. All classes of society read 
 and admired. A number of workmen near Manchester 
 sent down a vote of thanks to Macaulay for having writ- 
 ten a history which workingmen can understand. * The 
 foreign publishers seized upon it, and the Americans. 
 The sole voice raised in detraction was that of John 
 Wilson Croker, Macaulay's old enemy in the House of 
 Commons, who is chiefly known to those unfamiliar with 
 modern English history from Macaulay's scarifying re- 
 view of a book he once edited. The following volumes 
 were received as they came out with the same enthusiasm. 
 " I shall not be satisfied," he wrote on his beginning the 
 work, "unless I produce something which shall for a few 
 days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables 
 of the young ladies." He was not unsuccessful. 
 
 Macaulay was in Parliament once more after his 
 defeat at Edinburgh. His former constituents in that 
 
 * This extract from Macaulay's journal is illustrative of his love of compre- 
 hensibility : 
 
 " Nov. SS, 181,8.— T received to-day a translation of ' Kant ' from Ellis' friend 
 at Liverpool. I tried to read it, but found it utterly unintelligible, just as if it 
 had been written in Sanskrit. Not one word of it gave me any thing like an idea 
 except a Latin quotation from 'Persius.' It seems to me that it ought to be 
 possible to explain a true theory of metaphysics in words which I can under- 
 stand. I can understand Locke, and Berkeley (.berk' li), and Hume, and Reid, and 
 Stewart. I can understand Cicero's ' Academics ' and most of Plato ; and it seems 
 odd that in a book on the elements of metaphysics, by a Liverpool merchant, I 
 should not be able to comprehend a word. I wrote my acknowledgments with a 
 little touch of Socratic irony." 
 
244 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 town, feeling that he had not received the treatment due 
 him, elected him once more to Parliament, with no 
 pledges on his part, and in fact without his offering him- 
 self for their votes. He took part, however, but seldom 
 in the business of the House, and resigned his seat, 
 feeling the duties to be too much for him, engrossed as 
 he was in his history. In August, 1857, he was created a 
 peer, with the title Baron Macaulay of Rothesay (roth' sa).* 
 The election was rapturously applauded by the public, 
 and Macaulay himself was much pleased at it. Indeed, 
 it could not but have been inexpressibly pleasant to him 
 in his latter years to see the very great love and esteem 
 in which he was universally held.f 
 
 He died the night of December 28, 1859,t and was 
 buried a few days later in the Poets' Corner of West- 
 minster Abbey. 
 
 There, amidst the tombs of Johnson and Glarrick and 
 Handel and Groldsmith and Gay, stands conspicuous the 
 statue of Addison ; and at the feet of Addison lies the 
 stone which bears this inscription : 
 
 " Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay." 
 
 * "I was bom there," he says; "I have hved much there; I am named 
 from the family which long had the manor. My uncle was rector there. Nobody 
 can complain of my taking a designation from a village which is nobody's prop- 
 erty now." 
 
 t Let us print here a summing up of his good and his ill, which we iind in 
 his journal : 
 
 " Oct. 25, iS49.— My birthday. Forty-nine years old. I have no cause of com- 
 plaint. Tolerable health ; competence ; liberty ; leisure ; very dear relatives and 
 friends ; a great, I may say a very great, literary reputation. 
 
 " Oct. 25, 1S50.— My birthday. I am fifty. Well, I have had a happy life. 
 I do not know that anybody, whom I have seen close, has had a happier. Some 
 things I regret ; but, on the whole, who is better off ? I have not children of my 
 own, it is true ; but I have children whom I love as if they were my own, and 
 who, I believe, love me. I wish that the next ten years may be as happy as the 
 last ten. But I rather wish it than hope it." 
 
 X For the last years of his life he had been in ill health, suffering from an 
 affection of the heart. 
 
K M K R S O N . 
 
 1803-1883. 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON was born in Boston, 
 , Mass., May 25, 1803. He died in Concord, Mass., 
 April 2 7, 1882. 
 
 The traces of his early education may be found by a 
 careful observer in the whole course of his life. Dr. 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes, his friend and contemporary, says 
 in one of his amusing discussions of education, that it is 
 always well for a man to be born of a long line of well- 
 educated men and women, and he gives as a particular 
 illustration, the good fortune of those who are born in 
 New England from a family of clergymen. By this 
 Doctor Holmes simply means to express his own grati- 
 tude that such was his own ancestry. As it happens, the 
 words describe as well the ancestry of his friend. The 
 father of Ralph Waldo Emerson was Dr. William Emer- 
 son, then the minister of the First Church of Boston. 
 His paternal grandfather was the Rev. Mr. Emerson, 
 minister of Concord, Mass. On the memorable 19 th 
 of April, 1775, when the American Revolution began, 
 he saw from the window of the old house the ad- 
 vance of the Middlesex Minute -men upon Concord 
 Bridge, — he saw the flash of the muskets of the English 
 soldiers who held it, — he trembled for a moment, as his 
 careful diary tells us, lest their fire should not be re- 
 turned, and then heard with joy the shot which those 
 " embattled farmers " fired, which was to be " heard 
 round the world." 
 
246 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 Further back in the Hneage of the Emerson family, it 
 connects with the line of Waldo. Mr. Emerson was thus 
 connected with the first reformers in Lyons and the 
 valleys of the Alps, a connection which he was glad to 
 remember and trace. 
 
 He was one of a group of boys, many of whom after- 
 ward won distinction in the history of their country, 
 who were prepared for coUege in the accurate Latin 
 scholarship then recently introduced in the Boston Latin 
 School. This was an illustration of the revival then re- 
 cent in public education in New England. The school 
 had been taken in charge by a committee of the best 
 citizens of the town. It was placed under the direction 
 of Benjamin Apthorp Grould, a competent and accurate 
 scholar, by the standard of that day. After he was well 
 satisfied with its standard, he printed for public criti- 
 cism, for several years, the prize performances of the 
 pupils ; and the prizes were given with public eclat 
 (e kla') and circumstances of dignity. 
 
 Among these boys who won early honors by the pre- 
 cision of their Q-reek and Latin, Ralph Emerson was one. 
 His brother Charles, who followed him after a few years, 
 was even more distinguished. He died young, but was 
 long remembered, in circles wider than those of school 
 companionship, as the most brilliant and promising 
 young man who for many years passed through the Uni- 
 versity of the American Cambridge.* 
 
 * Rev. William Emerson, their father, died while these boys were yet young. 
 They were brought up by an aunt, Mary Moody, a remarkable woman, to whom 
 must be credited much of the Ideal education of the philosopher. There Is an 
 anecdote which tells that the boys once stripped the larder of the house In pro- 
 viding for a beggar,— and that, on her return, she praised them for the lavlsh- 
 ness which had deprived the family of a meal. 
 
 Mr. Emerson may well have had her in mind, when, in after life, asking a 
 
EMERSON". 247 
 
 Even in a brief sketch of Mr. Emerson's life, it is 
 worth while to speak of this accurate school training. 
 For in all his literary work there is a finished precision 
 in the use of words, which belongs to the case of the well- 
 taught linguist. And while Mr. Emerson always ridicules 
 the perversity in which either a scholar or an unlearned 
 person attempts to read in a foreign language that which 
 he can better read in a translation, it is to be remem- 
 bered that he himself read other languages than his own 
 with ease, and that no man of his time knew better 
 how to use words, whether for play or for their more 
 serious purposes. 
 
 In the most regular and conventional way, he was ad- 
 mitted to Harvard College in 1817, and passed through 
 four years of its course to receive his Bachelor's degree 
 in 1821.* He then spent one or two years in the work 
 of a school-master, — after which he entered on a course 
 of theological study, under Andrew Norton and Henry 
 Ware (Senior) at the Divinity School of Cambridge. 
 This was a period when the more liberal churches of 
 New England had announced themselves as distinctively 
 " Unitarian," — as for more than a century they had been 
 known to be "Arminian " in their theology. In the enthu- 
 
 friend as to the circumstances of his home, he said, " Have you any illuminated 
 Quaker near you?" 
 
 * He wrote verses while he was in college, and was chosen by the class to 
 deliver their poem on class-day. He did not take the highest rank in his class, 
 hut was regarded as a person of very wide reading. In after life, he always 
 spoke of a great library as in itself an invaluable educator. 
 
 In the later years of his life, Mr. Emerson was an overseer of Harvard Col- 
 lege. A discussion came up in the board of overseers, as to the expediency of 
 requiring attendance at chapel from the under-graduates. In a remarkable 
 speech that he made on the subject, Mr. Emerson said that, much as he owed to 
 Harvard College in other regards, he felt that no part of its discipline had been 
 as important to him as the regular attendance at chapel on week-days and on 
 Sundays, and he hoped that the custom might not be abandoned. His Phi Beta 
 Kappa poem does not appear among his collected poems. 
 
248 PKOSE WRITERS. 
 
 siasm of what assumed the forms of a new rehgious 
 movement, Mr. Emerson entered the ministry. And 
 among his earher experiences in his new calling, after he 
 had been " licensed to preach," it is recorded that he was 
 once and again sent as a "missionary" to some places 
 where the gospel of the Unitarian Church was a novelty. 
 But such experiences of the frontier did not long con- 
 tinue. There was a charm about his presentation of di- 
 vine truth which interested all who heard him. His deli- 
 cate health required a residence in Southern States for 
 the winters of 182 7 and 182 8. But in March, 182 9, he 
 was ordained as a minister of the Second Church in 
 Boston, — as the colleague with Rev. Henry Ware, the 
 younger of that name. The reader will observe that Mr. 
 Emerson's father had been the minister at the First 
 Church. So regular and decorous were the first steps of 
 the poet-philosopher, whose utterances were eventually 
 thought to savor little of ecclesiastical form. 
 
 Q-reatly beloved by his pai'ishioners and generally ad- 
 mired as a preacher, and true to most of the traditions 
 and habits of ministerial life as they had been handed 
 down from the fathers of New England, he came to differ 
 from them before many years had passed, — in regard to 
 a form so central in Christian habits as the administra- 
 tion of the Lord's Supper. Still expressing reverence 
 and regard for the person and work of the Saviour, Mr. 
 Emerson declared his unwillingness to use the physical 
 symbols of bread and wine, — and knowing that his con- 
 gregation, or the majority of them, would not sj^mpathize 
 with him in giving up the visible sacrament, he retired, 
 on that ground, from their service. Though he some- 
 times preached on Sunday in after life, his regular work 
 as a clergyman ceased at this time, in the year 1832. 
 
EMERSON. 249 
 
 But his career as a public teacher had in fact only 
 begun. 
 
 The system of education by popular lectures, — then 
 generally called the Lyceum (Use' am) System,— had been, 
 within a few years, widely introduced in New England. 
 At that time, more than now, such lectures, — usually de- 
 livered in the winter months, — were arranged by a com- 
 mittee of public-spirited men, vitally and eagerly inter- 
 ested in public education, who studied to supply by these 
 lectures the deficiencies in other methods of popular edu- 
 cation. Such men as Daniel Webster, Dr. Channing, the 
 Everetts, and the Wares were among the "Lyceum lect- 
 urers." A "course of lectures" generally meant that spe- 
 cial sub-courses were included, each by a lecturer who 
 was particularly eminent in the matter on which he 
 spoke. Among such courses on Chemistry or Natural 
 Philosophy, would be included courses on subjects of 
 morals or history or biography. Mr. Emerson had already 
 proved himself an attractive speaker at "Lyceums" be- 
 fore his career as a minister had ended. He has one 
 course on Biography, some or all of which lectures have 
 since been printed in his collected works. So soon as his 
 duties as a minister ceased, his services were demanded 
 more and more as a lecturer before varied audiences. It 
 was soon understood, and where the thought was not ex- 
 pressed, the truth was felt that in these lectures of his 
 the hearer would gain more than a knowledge of con- 
 nected facts. While they were never of that grade of 
 lectures which long drew in large, promiscuous audiences, 
 they soon attracted the more thoughtful persons in every 
 community.* It was not to boys and girls only, to young 
 
 * Mr. Longfellow's notes on some of these lectures are Interesting. They are 
 taken from his journal. 
 
250 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 men and maidens, or to the more ignorant or those lease 
 favored in education, that they were delivered. The 
 most careful and thoughtful men and women found 
 them well worth attention. If, in any quarter, suspicions 
 were aroused as to the orthodoxy of his utterances, these 
 very suspicions made them only more attractive in a 
 community which took political form in asserting the 
 right of private judgment, and in which this right had 
 passed, long before, from being a privilege to be consid- 
 ered a duty. 
 
 Gradually the " Lyceum System " changed its form 
 and the methods of its management. It came to be un- 
 derstood that there were certain public teachers who 
 preferred this way of addressing men. If they chose, 
 they announced their own courses without the interven- 
 tion of a committee. They prepared but few discourses, 
 but these were on central themes. They did not know 
 who heard them, but they coidd rely on an intelligent 
 
 " Dec. 11, ISi5.— Went to hear Emerson's introductory lecture on ' Great Men.' 
 The Odeon (o dl' un) (as the old Boston theater was then called) was full. T. 
 [Mr. Appleton] and myself mounted to the third row. Many striMng and brill- 
 iant passages, hut not so much of that ' Sweet Ehetoricke ' (reC 5 nk) which 
 usually flows from his lips ; and many tilings to shock the sensitive ear and heart. 
 
 "Dec. 16, lSi6.—A.8 I sat in the twilight this evening, Emerson came in. He 
 came to take tea, having a lecture at the [Cambridge] Lyceum. After tea, 
 walked down with him. The lecture good, but not of his richest and rarest. His 
 subject, 'Eloquence.' By turns he was grave and jocose, and had some striking 
 views and passages. He lets in a thousand new lights, sight lights and cross 
 lights, into every subject." 
 
 And here is Mr. Longfellow's comment on Emerson's Poems : 
 
 "Keceived from Emerson a copy of his Poems. E. read it to me all the even- 
 ing and until late into the night. It gave us all the keenest pleasure ; though 
 many of the pieces present themselves Sphinx-like and ' struggling to get free their 
 hinder-parts,' offer a very bold front to challenge your answer. Throughout the 
 volume, through the golden mist and sublimation of fancy gleam bright veins 
 of purest poetry, like rivers running through meadows. Truly a rare volume; 
 with many exquisite poems in it, among which I should single out ' Monadnoc ' 
 (mo nad' n&c), 'Threnody' (thren' o dz), and the 'Humble Bee,' as containing much 
 of the quintessence of poetry." 
 
EMERSON. 251 
 
 audience. Among these teachers Mr. Emerson's name 
 was that of one of the leaders. And as the new railroad 
 system made it possible for the teachers in this new 
 University to go anywhere in the nation to meet their 
 pupils, Mr. Emerson traveled, more and more, with every 
 winter, and became a personal force with more and more 
 of the thoughtful and studious men and women of the 
 land. 
 
 The precise moment when the more ecclesiastical tra- 
 ditions of his early life dropped away, may be said to 
 have been the day when he delivered an address to the 
 divinity students of Harvard College, in the summer of 
 1835. The young men were so enthusiastic in their ad- 
 miration of his spirit and genius, that they had invited 
 him to address them, when they left the college ; an in- 
 vitation which was thought not to have been dictated by 
 their teachers. If there was any thing extravagant in 
 the address then, the extravagance was so entirely in the 
 direction of the steady advance of the time, that after 
 half a century it is difficult to discover it. But, at the 
 time, it offended the older ecclesiastics, even of the Unita- 
 rian communion ; and from that time, probably, Mr. Emer- 
 son was seldom addressed with the title of a clergyman. 
 
 The first of his essays was "Nature," in 1836. It 
 will be found, under this name, in the later collections. 
 In 1842, he became the editor of the Dial, which had 
 been published then for two years, as a quarterly period- 
 ical, which should meet the needs of the New England 
 Transcendentalists, — men and women whose work was 
 then looked upon coldly by editors not of their school. 
 In 1841, he published the first series of his essays; in 
 1844, the second series; while in 1846, he published a 
 volume of poems. 
 
252 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 He had traveled in Europe in 1832, and in the next 
 year, and had then made personal acquaintance with 
 Carlyle (kar iii'), whose writings, before he knew his name, 
 had "hindered his sleep." To his efforts and those of 
 near friends, we owe the first edition of "Sartor Resartus." 
 In 1837, he published, in four volumes, the first collec- 
 tion of " Carlyle's Miscellanies." " Sartor Resartus " was 
 from the very first welcomed with cordial approbation in 
 America, which, from the very law of its being, regards 
 old clothes with less reverence than is awarded to them 
 in Europe. The readers of Carlyle's life will remember 
 the interest and sympathy with which, for half a century, 
 the two friends regarded each other. 
 
 So far as mere systems of thought go, the philosophy 
 of Emerson and that of Carlyle are by no means the 
 same. But in a constant defiance of convention, in steady 
 appeal to the divinity in man, and proclamation that if 
 he chooses he can find out his duty and work out his 
 destiny, the two are one. 
 
 When, in the critical political year 1848, Mr. Emerson 
 visited England for the second time, he met many a 
 disappointed follower of Carlyle, who came to him for 
 the succor which the growling philosopher could not 
 or would not give. " Carlyle," they said, " has taken us 
 out into the desert, and he has left us there. Where 
 shall we go ? " On the deck of the steam-ship, which was 
 to bring him to America, Mr. Emerson said to Arthur 
 Clough (kluf), who was one of those disconcerted follow- 
 ers of Carlyle, that many of them had brought to him 
 the same complaint. He laid his hand playfully upon 
 Clough's head, and said : " I ordain you bishop of all 
 England ; you shall go out and find these dissatisfied 
 stragglers, and shaU bring them into the Promised Land." 
 
EMERSON. 253 
 
 The mission was one which needed a Joshua of more 
 nerve than Mr. Clough proved to be master of. 
 
 The correspondence between Emerson and Carlyle has 
 been published, and it should be carefully studied by 
 any person who wishes to comprehend the most impor- 
 tant movements of opinion and life in America and En- 
 gland during the half-century to which it belongs. Differ- 
 ent as they were, in habit of thought and in lines of 
 study, they never lost their respect and regard for each 
 other. When, in England, young men asked Mr. Emer- 
 son to introduce them personally to Carlyle, he would 
 say : " Why should you go ? You like him now ; you 
 reverence him, perhaps. Why should you come away, not 
 liking him, — shocked, perhaps, or displeased, by what he 
 will say to you?" "Yet, mark me," he would say again, 
 " he is good. You must not think he is not good because 
 he says these things." There could, indeed, be no con- 
 trast more sharp than that between the cross-grained 
 defiance of the Scotch critic, and the loving, sympathetic 
 cordiality with which the American poet-philosopher re- 
 ceived the most humble even, or the most ignorant of 
 the pilgrims, who came to pay their homage to him or to 
 thank him. 
 
 Mr. Emerson's philosophy is pure Idealism. Since 
 Plato there has been no prophet of the Idea more un- 
 wavering than he. The reader who follows him is made 
 to see that one Spirit pervades all Nature, and gives to 
 it its forms ; sways all men and orders History ; or, in 
 any time, controls Manners, Arts, Literature, Science, and 
 the other moods of thought. Such a philosophy is in 
 itself Poetry. For the business of the Poet, and that 
 which distinguishes him from other men, is to show that 
 the passions and experiences of men have their analogies 
 
254 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 in the life and method of what is called " Nature " ; that 
 the world outside of man and the world within him be- 
 long to each other and resemble each other, in lines which 
 the poet traces for his readers. Mr. Emerson would have 
 been recognized as a poet, therefore, by his readers, though 
 he had never forged out a line in meter or two lines in 
 rhyme. But, in fact, he was born with what is called a 
 " lyric ear " ; and his training for accuracy in language 
 helped him in precisely that epigram or conciseness, 
 which is a great help in the language of poetry. His 
 school-boy prizes were won for verses. When he left 
 college, he was soon asked to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa 
 poem; and as early as 1836, he contributed some charm- 
 ing poems to the Western Messenger, a monthly magazine 
 published by his friend, James Freeman Clarke. He never 
 afterward made a toil of poetry. To use one of his most 
 apt expressions, "he never pumped." The phrase is bor- 
 rowed from what he had seen in the oil countries. If 
 the sacred oil did not flow free, he never helped its cur- 
 rent. But when the stream did flow, it flowed bright and 
 pure. The quotations in familiar use already from his 
 poems show how perfect was his success in saying what 
 he had to say. 
 
 " He builded better than he knew." 
 
 " For what avail the plow or sail, 
 Or land or life, if freedom fail?" 
 
 "The self -same power that brought me there, brought you." 
 
 "If eyes were made for seeing. 
 Then Beauty is its own excuse for being." 
 
 These are quotations from his lyrics which have 
 become proverbs among the American people. 
 
EMERSON. 255 
 
 Mr. Emerson lived long enough to see that a com- 
 munity which at the first regarded him as an extravagant 
 fanatic, had grown up to be proud of him, as one of the 
 leaders of his time.* 
 
 In his sunny and cheerful old age, it was a privilege to 
 see him. He had a word of sympathy for every aspirant. 
 He was kind even to the most obtrusive and disagreeable 
 worshiper, and readily met the thousand appeals which 
 were made to him for the expression of his interest in 
 every movement which concerned the public good.f 
 
 The calmness and even precision of the language of 
 his essays must not make any reader suppose that his 
 manner was cold, or that he was in any sort reserved. 
 Quiet he was, and of course serene.| But his whole life 
 was instinct with affection, and those lines in his poems 
 which are treasured as showing the tenderness of his 
 
 * For many years it was the fashion of the more foolish writers to speak of 
 Mr. Emerson as unpractical and vague, ''swinging in rainbows," as if he were 
 quite unable to attend to terrestrial detail. But in truth, his life united a pure 
 ideal philosopliy with the shrewdness and interest in affairs which is supposed to 
 be characteristic of the New Englander, or of the Scotchman, who is the Yankee 
 of Old England. "V^Tien the " Town and Country Club " was formed in Boston, it 
 was soon observed that Mr. Emerson was the judicious leader of those persons 
 who wished to find In the club a convenient center for their dally work with the 
 best club conveniences, for meals and other comforts. He had no thought of 
 sinking the new organization into a mere convenience of hearing and reading 
 "papers" or talk. 
 
 t He was a good citizen of Concord, believing heartily in the New England 
 system of town government, and ready to lend his aid in any affair of public 
 spirit. The Concord Lyceum has been maintained from the beginning on the 
 systems of the lyceums of his youth, and until his death, he was always ready to 
 lecture in its annual courses. 
 
 When the crisis of the Civil War came, Mr. Emerson gave his personal sym- 
 pathy and his practical help in all measures for the encouragement of recruiting, 
 for help to the soldier, or for upholding the National government. His poem 
 "Boston," which holds a leading place in the national poetry of America, was not 
 published until he delivered It in Paneuil (fan' el) Hall in 1873, on the anniver- 
 sary of the Boston Tea-party. But many of the stanzas were written in the heat 
 of the war. 
 
 t "The gentleman is qviiet, the lady is serene."— .Essay on Manners. 
 
256 PROSEWR ITERS. 
 
 feelings give the very impression of him which those 
 who knew him cherisli habitually. 
 
 He was twice married. His first wife, Ellen Tucker, a 
 lovely young lady of Roxbury, Massachusetts, died a few 
 months only after their marriage in February, 1831. In 
 1835, he married Lidian Jackson, daughter of Charles 
 Jackson, of Plymouth. He had three children.* 
 
 * If we are to select a single poem for quotation from the shorter poems, it 
 shall be " The Khodora " (r5 do' ra), first published in the Western Messenger in 1836. 
 
 THE RHODOEA: 
 
 ON BEING ASKED, WHENCE IS THE FLOWER? 
 
 In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes, 
 
 I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods. 
 
 Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook, 
 
 To please the desert and the sluggish brook. 
 
 The purple petals, fallen in the pool. 
 
 Made the black water with their beauty gay; 
 
 Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool, 
 
 And court the flower that cheapens his array. 
 
 Rhodora ! if the sages ask thee why 
 
 This charm is wasted on the earth and sky. 
 
 Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing. 
 
 Then Beauty is its own excuse for being ; 
 
 Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose ! 
 
 I never thought to ask, I never knew ; 
 
 But in my simple ignorance, suppose 
 
 The self -same Power that brought me there, brought you. 
 
TH ACKKRAY. 
 
 1811-1863. 
 
 THE materials for a sketch of Thackeray's (thak'S riz) 
 hfe are of the smallest. Before his death, he begged 
 his daughters that no letters of his should be published, 
 that no life of him should be written, and his wish has 
 been respected. It is of less matter than in the case of 
 other men ; for we are, perhaps, more interested in study- 
 ing his mind in his works, than we should be in reading 
 the story of all his goings and comings up and down the 
 world. 
 
 William Makepeace Thackeray was born at Calcutta 
 in 1811, and in India he lived for some little time. 
 His father was in the Indian civil service. But at the 
 age of six he was brought to England. He received an 
 education at the Charter House * and at Cambridge, 
 
 * The Charter House still exists in London. And though the school has been 
 removed from the city, away into the country, the Poor Brethren still remain. 
 There are eighty of them, having each his own room, dining at the commons 
 table, and going twice a day to their little chapel to thank God for His goodness. 
 "It had been," says Thackeray, in 'Vanity Fair,' "a Cistercian (sis ter' shan) con- 
 vent. * * * Henry the Eighth seized upon the monastery and its possessions, 
 and * * * finally, a great merchant bouglit the house and land adjoining, in 
 which, with the help of other wealthy endowments of land and money, he estab- 
 Ushed a famous hospital for old men and children. An extra school grew round 
 the old, almost monastic, foundation, which subsists still, with its middle-age 
 costume and usages ; and all Christians pray that it may flourish." 
 
 "My recollection of him," we quote from a friend's remarks, in Anthony 
 Trollope'a Sketch, "though fresh enough, does not furnish much material for 
 biography. He came to school young— a pretty, gentle, and rather timid boy. I 
 think his experience there was not generally pleasant. Though' he had afterward 
 a scholar-like knowledge of Latin, he did not attain distinction in the school ; 
 and I should think that the character of the head-master, which was rigorous, 
 unsympathetic, and stern, though not severe, was uncongenial to his own. With 
 
258 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 though he took no degree at the University.* Univer- 
 sity Ufa has made small impression on his works. We 
 recall almost nothing except Pen's experiences at St. 
 Boniface (bon'e fas). But of the Charter House we hear 
 more than once. He wrote of it, at first, as the Slaughter 
 House, but afterward, his feelings softening, it was Grey- 
 friars, where Colonel Newcome went to school when 
 a boy, and afterward found a refuge as an old man. 
 Arthur Pendennis, Clive (kiiv) Newcome, George Osborne, 
 and Philip Firmin went to school there, and Thackeray 
 notes with pleasure that Addison and Steele were Charter 
 House boys. 
 
 On leaving Cambridge, Thackeray turned to the culti- 
 vation of his talent for drawing ; and, being in the pos- 
 session of a fair allowance, traveled a good deal abroad, — 
 and then he studied drawing at Rome and at Paris, 
 thinking he might become an artist.f There must be 
 
 the boys who knew him, Thackeray was popular ; but he had no skill in games, 
 and, I think, no taste for them. * * * He was already known by Ms faculty of 
 making verses, chiefly parodies. * * * He took part in a scheme, which came 
 to nothing, for a school magazine, and he wrote verses for it, of which I remem- 
 ber only that they were good of their kind. When I knew him better in later 
 years, I thought I could recognize the sensitive nature which he had as a hoy." 
 
 * We believe he was originally intended for the bar. 
 
 t " Had it not been for the direct act of my friend," said Thackeray, at a 
 dinner, speaking of Dickens, " I should most likely have never been included in 
 the toast which you have been pleased to drink ; and I should have tried to be, 
 not a painter, but a designer of pictures. This was the object of my early ambi- 
 tion; and I can remember when Mr. Dickens was a very young man, and had 
 commenced delighting the world with some charming humorous works, of which 
 I can not mention the name, but which were colored light green, and came out 
 once a month (' Pickwick ') ; and I recollect that this young man wanted an artist 
 to illustrate his writings ; and I recollect walking up to his chambers with two 
 or three drawings in my hand, which, strange to say, he did not find suitable." 
 And a good thing too, we think ; we had rather have Thackeray's novels than the 
 best illustrations that could be made to Dickens. 
 
 A word or two ought to be said, perhaps, about Thackeray's drawings, many 
 of which are in existence. As for the artistic execution of his sketches, Thacke- 
 ray was always weak, very weak. He must have spent his time in Paris, where 
 he took lessons, in doing almost any thing beside drawing. But setting aside 
 correctness of drawing, Thackeray's sketches are wonderfully good. Their humor, 
 
THACKERAY. 259 
 
 much that is autobiographical in Clive Newcome's early 
 experiences, in the Studio at London, and then away 
 with J. J., to Germany and then to Rome. But it is 
 impossible to sift the fact from the fancy, and we must 
 let it be. 
 
 On coming back to London, Thackeray shortly in- 
 herited his fortune, — no large sum, but one which would 
 have supported him comfortably could he have kept it. 
 This he did not do. He invested it in an attempt to 
 start a newspaper,* which failed, lost it, and was forced to 
 rely on himself. As he could not live by drawing pict- 
 ures, he resolved to turn his other talent to account, 
 and holding an easy pen, he began to Avrite for a living. 
 And his first regular work was for Fraser's (fra'zerz) 
 Magazine. 
 
 Fraser's Magazine, at this time, contested with Blaclc- 
 wood^s the honor of being the leading magazine in the 
 country. Less heavy and formal than the Reviews, 
 Blackwood's (and after it Fraser's), set up a peculiar tone 
 of its own, scholarly, critical, witty, partisan, reckless. 
 
 like the humor of his prose, is inimitable. How it is possible to convey more 
 exactly the precise humorous meaning of the text than is done in his illustra- 
 tions to "Pendennis" and "Vanity Pair," we are at a loss to understand. It 
 seems as though other novelists must have envied Thackeray for his ability to 
 obtain such exact delineation of his ideas. 
 
 * There is an allusion to this venture in " Level the Widower." " I dare say," 
 says Mr. Batchelor, " I gave myself airs as editor of that confounded " Museum " 
 (the name of Thackeray's paper was The National Standard), and proposed to edu- 
 cate the public taste, to diffuse morality and sound literature throughout the 
 nation, and to pocket a liberal salary in return for my services. I dare say I 
 printed my own sonnets, my own tragedy, my own verses (to a being who shall 
 be nameless, but whose conduct has caused a faithful heart to bleed not a little'i. 
 I dare say I wrote satirical articles, in which I piqued myself on the fineness of 
 my wit and criticisms, got up for the nonce, out of encyclopedias and biograph- 
 ical dictionaries ; so that I would be actually astonished at my own knowledge. 
 I dare say I made a gaby of myself to the world ; pray, my good friend, hast thou 
 never done likewise ? If thou hast never been a fool, be sure thou wilt never be 
 a wise man." 
 
260 J'KOSE WRITERS. 
 
 severe, and literary. Christopher North is the type. 
 OHver York, of Fraser's, is, we must admit, but a copy 
 of the unrivaled Kit. And Fraser's adopted its " tone 
 from Blackwood's. In truth, Maginn, the editor, was one 
 of the protagonists in the earlier " Noctes Ambrosianae " 
 (nok'tez am bro se a'ne), and was himself the carnal em- 
 bodiment of the tone of the magazine, being at once 
 scholarly, and so on as above. And Foxtser's had at this 
 time an able band of contributors. Among the Fraser- 
 ians were Lockhart (lok'art), Coleridge (kol'rlj), Southey, 
 (sowth' i), Washington Irving, The Ettrick Shepherd, Barry 
 Cornwall, Harrison Ainsworth, Count D'Orsay (dor sa'), 
 Theodore Hook, and — curiously enough — Thomas Carlyle 
 (kar 111'). Among these did Thackeray enroll himself 
 when he determined to support himself by his pen. 
 
 For Frasefs, and afterward for Punch, Thackeray wrote 
 much. It is for them that the greater part of his shorter 
 pieces were written, his tales, burlesques, and verses. And 
 he wrote some things that he did not include in his pub- 
 lished works. The most important of his contributions 
 to Fraser's were some of his shorter stories — "Catherine 
 Hayes," "A Shabby Genteel Story," "The Great Hoggarty 
 Diamond," " The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon," and also 
 " The Yellowplush Papers." And for Punch he wrote the 
 " Snob Papers," and much else. To this part of his life 
 belong the Paris, Irish, and Eastern Sketch-books and 
 some of his Christmas-books. 
 
 There was much good work in these earlier writings 
 of Thackeray.* " Barry Lyndon " is as good a thing as 
 
 * We should give a terribly incomplete picture of Thackeray if we made no 
 reference to his verse. He wrote enough to make up a good-sized little volume, 
 and a delightful volume it is. 
 
 Instead of speaking aboiit it, let us quote from one of the best of them all, 
 and also give another entire. We are sorry we can not reproduce more : 
 
THACKERAY. 261 
 
 he ever wrote. "The Yellowplush Papers" and the Bur- 
 lesques have as true a ring of genuine humor as any 
 
 "THE CANE-BOTTOMED CHAIE. 
 
 " In tattered old slippers that toast at tlie bars, 
 And a ragged old jacket perfumed with cigars, 
 Away from the world and its, toils and its cares, 
 I've a snug little kingdom up four pair of stairs. 
 
 " To mount to this realm is a toil, to be sure. 
 But the fire there Is bright and the air rather pure ; 
 And the view I behold on a sunshiny day 
 Is grand through the chimney-pots over the way. 
 
 " This snug little chamber is cramm'd in all nooks 
 "With worthless old knickknacks and silly old books. 
 And foolish old odds and foolish old ends, 
 Crack'd bargains from brokers, cheap keepsakes from friends. 
 
 " Old armor, prints, pictures, pipes, china (all crack'd). 
 Old rickety tables, and chairs broken-backed, 
 A two-penny treasury, wondrous to see ; 
 What matter? 'tis pleasant to you, friend, and me." 
 
 The poem goes on with lines full as fascinating as these, but we can not put 
 in any more. We will only add one other extract, that seems to us as fine a 
 d'.inking lyrii as we know of,— except the song about "Martin Hannigan's Aunt," 
 that we read of in one of Lever's novels : 
 
 "LAERT O'TOOLE. 
 
 " You've all heard of Larry O'Toole, 
 Of the beautiful town of Drumgoole ; 
 He had but one eye 
 To ogle ye by— 
 Oh, murtuer, but that was a jew'l, 
 
 A fool 
 He made of de girls, dis O'Toole. 
 " 'Twas he was the boy didn't fail, 
 That tuck down pataties and mail ; 
 He never would shrink 
 Erom any strong dthrink. 
 Was it whiskey or Drogheda {drW gM da) ale ; 
 
 I'm bail 
 This Larry would swallow a pail. 
 " Oh, many a night at the bowl, 
 With Larry I've sot cheek by jowl ; 
 He's gone to his rest, 
 ^Vhere there's dthrink of the best. 
 And so let us give his old sowl 
 
 A howl, 
 Eor 'twas he made the noggin to rowl.'' 
 
262 PROSE WRITEES. 
 
 thing else he ever did. But tliey did not make him a 
 general reputation. Dickens was twenty-five when he 
 sprang at once into favor with " Pickwick," " Oliver 
 Twist," and "Nicholas Nickleby." Thackeray was thirty- 
 five and had written for years when he made his first 
 great success in " Vanity Fair." 
 
 In 1846 appeared the first number of "Vanity Fair,'' 
 a long novel, to be published in monthly parts. It was 
 by this that Thackeray first made for himself a really 
 great reputation. He was previously well known by 
 many as a clever and brilliant writer in Fraser and in 
 Punch. He had published various stories and books of 
 sketches, and Christmas-books. " Vanity Fair " was his 
 first long novel. It stands rather by itself ; it is a com- 
 pendium of Thackeray's so-called cynicism — a primer of 
 his philosophy. No other of his novels has so much of 
 his philosophy, pure and simple. It is little more than 
 a study of character, — the plot is of the slightest. The 
 constant theme seems to be how stupid and ridiculous are 
 the good, how clever and successful ai"e the bad, and yet 
 how plain it must be to every one that the bad do not 
 always prosper, and that the good probably enjoy being 
 stupid and ridiculous, and so that every thing is well 
 enough. Thackeray is remorseless in " Vanity Fair." 
 There is no good trait in Becky, only cleverness and 
 wickedness ; there is no mercy for Amelia, she must be 
 plain and slow, though good and loving. Even the hero, 
 who is truly good and noble, who waits and waits, pa- 
 tiently befriending the woman he loves, till she will 
 marry him, even he, because he is good, must be ridic- 
 ulous, otherwise why is he called Dobbin? The general 
 run of the world of "Vanity Fair," is bad, and those 
 who are good hardly get their deserts. To many this is 
 
THACKERAY. 263 
 
 the best of Thackeray's books, — to us the few touches of 
 real tenderness, make even the "Shabby Q-enteel Story" 
 seem better. 
 
 At about this time Thackeray, being at last in a good 
 position, moved from Kensington, where he had been 
 hving, got him a good house in Onslow Square, and set- 
 tled himself as comfortably as might be. But his family 
 life was not of the happiest, poor man. He had married 
 some time before (183 7), and had three daughters, whom 
 he dearly loved. But his married life was made wi^etched 
 by the illness of his wife, and it was finally too apparent 
 that she was losing her mind. And in a few years it 
 seemed best for her to live quietly with one who under- 
 stood her and would care for her. Thackeray had a 
 pleasant enough position among the literary and social 
 world of London. He was known and liked by the lit- 
 erary men. He was a favorite at dinners. He was always 
 full of spontaneous humor, but he was never without, as 
 it seems, a sort of hidden melancholy.* 
 
 * Thackeray was not a great conversationalist, at least not in general com- 
 pany. Indeed, he is one of those whom we always picture to ourself as mingling 
 in the world rather more as a spectator than actor, as listening to the conversation 
 of others rather more than talking himself. But, as would perhaps be imagined, 
 he was in the company of two or three friends very delightful and charming 
 company. G-ood things were perpetually coming from his lips, and his pen was 
 not infrequently employed in concocting doggerel rhymes upon occasion. Mr. 
 Anthony Trollope preserves the following : 
 
 "In the romantic little town of Highbury, 
 
 My father kept a circulating library. 
 
 He followed in his youth that man immortal, who 
 
 Conquered the Prenchmen on the plains of Waterloo. 
 
 Mamma was an inhabitant of Drogheda, 
 
 Very good she was to darn and embroider. 
 
 In the famous Island of Jamaica, 
 
 !Por thirty years I've been a sugar-baker, 
 
 And here I sit, the Muses' 'appy vot'ry, 
 
 A oultivatin' every kind of pot'ry." 
 ITotMng very great aU this, but amusing, and indicative of a happy turn for 
 conversational humor. 
 
264 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 In the course of the next three years, Thackeray 
 wrote what are to us the most pleasing of his novels, — 
 " Pendennis," "Esmond," and "The Newcomes." " Pen- 
 dennis," unrivaled as the story of a young man ; " Es- 
 mond," certainly his best in plot and in its art. though 
 we can not take to the characters, or to the life which 
 it portrays, as we do to the others; and "The Newcomes," 
 the story of Ethel and of the Colonel. "Pendennis" is, it 
 is true, a rambling sort of story ; very little plot to it. 
 There is nothing of the direct attention paid to the de- 
 nouement (dg nc5o'm6ng), which we see in more carefully 
 conceived novels. But then life is not a carefully con- 
 ceived romance, which goes on to the end of the third 
 volume, and then takes a round turn and leaves off. The 
 plot of " Pendennis " bears very much the relation to the 
 conventional plot of a novel, that Pendennis himself 
 bears to the conventional hero. But both are more triie 
 to Nature — neither is perfect, nor is life. The story of 
 Pendennis, and the character of the man himself, are 
 both bits of life. And what fine characters are in the 
 book, — the Major, Captain Costigan, The Fotheringay 
 (foth er ing ga'), Mr. Foker, Ned Strong, Blanche Amory, 
 Lady Clavering, Laura Pendennis, and G-eorge Warring- 
 ton, as well as Arthur Pendennis himself. It is no galaxy 
 of angels ; there is as much bad as good, or more, but 
 indisputably life-like. 
 
 As for "Esmond," it is a bit different. "Pendennis" 
 and " The Newcomes " are near enough our own life for 
 us to note the closeness of the drawing; "Esmond" is 
 the picture of a century and a half, or more, ago. There 
 is nothing that seems unnatural, but it is farther from 
 us. Thackeray was well read in the literature of Queen 
 Anne's (anz) day. He was by no naeans so much at 
 
THACKERAY. 265 
 
 home in the days of Ehzabeth and the Armada (ar ma'dai, 
 or of Cavaher and Roundhead, as in the days of Marl- 
 borough (mai'bpiih) and the Chevaher (shev a ler') of St. 
 James, of Addison and Swift. Very probably the reading 
 which he did for his course of lectures on the English 
 Humorists, suggested the idea of writing " Esmond." But 
 his fondness for the time began long before. " George 
 de Barnwell" is as good a bit of burlesque as any of the 
 others, and in " Catherine Hayes " he found a period in 
 which he loved to work. He lingers more lovingly over 
 the wits of Queen Anne's day in his " Humorists," and 
 the reign of George the First is the best of his second 
 set of Lectures. But in "Esmond" he surpasses himself; 
 not only did he strive to give the air of the period to 
 the work, but he aimed at the language and style of 
 the period, and hit it well. There are, indeed, those 
 who think the mannerism never left him. The style, 
 then, of " Esmond " is nearly perfect. The plot is more 
 complete and artistic than his plots usually are, and 
 many call the book his very best. But to many it is 
 uninteresting. To us it seems as good an historical 
 novel as we can imagine. The characters are romantic, 
 not life-like ; the surroundings are the same, as far as 
 we are concerned. The impression can not be one of 
 reality, such as produced by an every-day story like 
 " Pendennis," or " The Newcomes." 
 
 In this last, Thackeray, though beginning a new book, 
 takes up some of his old characters, as he loves to do. 
 "The Newcomes" is a continuation of "Pendennis," in 
 the same way that " The Virginians " is a continuation of 
 " Esmond." To us it has the same beauties and the same 
 faults as its predecessor. It has no more plot, but it has 
 as much life. But what grieves us a little in " The New- 
 
266 PEOSEWRITERS. 
 
 comes" is, that life is a little more bitter, a little darker, 
 than in " Pendennis." 
 
 In 1851, Thackeray turned his attention to a new 
 plan, which Dickens afterward took up in a little different 
 shape. He delivered in Willis' Rooms, in London (for- 
 merly Almack's), a series of six lectures, called " The 
 English Humorists." He gave them afterward in the 
 provinces, as the expression is, and made two trips to 
 America, where he delivered them again. He wrote no 
 book about the country on his return. Beside his original 
 lectures on " The English Humorists," he wrote a second 
 set, "The Four Q-eorges," hardly so interesting as the 
 first, we should say, or so successful. There was this 
 difference between Thackeray's lectures and Dickens'. 
 Dickens read selections from his own works, while Thack- 
 eray wrote his lectures on purpose. Those who heard 
 them, probably, enjoyed Dickens the more ; but we, who 
 had not that pleasure, are probably more grateful that 
 Thackeray should have lectured than that Dickens should. 
 For these lectures are delightful reading. They are not 
 history. They do not set down all the battles fought in 
 the reign of Q-eorge the First, nor all the books written 
 by Jonathan Swift the Great ; but in a charmingly sym- 
 pathetic manner, they give us a picture of the men, or 
 the time, which they have as subjects. There are few 
 essays on literary or historical subjects that are more 
 delightful reading. 
 
 In 1867, Thackeray stood for the University of Ox- 
 ford, in the Parliamentary election of that year. He was 
 not elected, and probably it was quite as well that he 
 was not. Disraeli (diz ra'le), Bulwer (bdt)l'^A^er), and Justin 
 McCarthy are the Parliamentary novelists whose names 
 we recall at this moment, and delightful as their works 
 
THACKERAY. 267 
 
 are, we are glad that " The Virginians," " The Adventures 
 of Philip," and "The Roundabout Papers" should not 
 have been written in time snatched from duty on com- 
 mittees, or in the House. 
 
 "The Virginians," which Thackeray published next, 
 is a resumption of the story of " Esmond." We know 
 how Thackeray loved to talk over the same characters 
 in all his different novels ; you hear of Lord Steyne 
 (Stan), not only in "Vanity Pair," but in "Pendennis." 
 Pen himself and Warrington may be found in " The 
 Newcomes" and in "Philip." So Thackeray pleased him- 
 self by connecting " Esmond " with the later books. The 
 Virginians, grandsons of Henry Esmond, are named 
 Warrington, and who should they be brtt ancestors of 
 the same old G-eorge Warrington, who used to sit up in 
 Chambers with Pen, and smoke a pipe and drink porter. 
 We fancy that his characters became so real to him that, 
 long after the particular novel was done, he found him- 
 self thinking of them, and wondering what they might be 
 doing. " The Virginians "is a rambling story, — has no 
 especial plot, — but it is as good reading as one can want. 
 The two Virginians, Q-eorge and Harry Warrington, the 
 brilliant life at Tunbridge and London, Theo and Hetty 
 Lambert, Parson Sampson, the life of the prodigal at 
 London with my Lord March, — are they not things that 
 we could read over and over, again and again ? 
 
 " The Virginians " ran for two years, and ended in 
 1859. In that year, began the Cornhill Magazine, a new 
 venture, of which Thackeray was to be the editor. The 
 magazine succeeded admirably, and we may all of us be 
 thankful that it did so ; for in it, Thackeray published 
 " The Roundabout Papers," on different subjects, as they 
 came into his head. More delightful essays were, to our 
 
268 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 thinking, never written. Even the Essays of Eha seem 
 to us to be hardly so charming. Here, too, was pub- 
 Hshed "Lovel the Widower." And in the CornhiU Maga- 
 zine Thackeray published his last completed long novel, 
 "The Adventures of Philip on his Way Through the 
 World." Thackeray brings in some of our old friends. 
 There is that "Shabby G-enteel Story," he wrote some 
 time since. The Little Sister and the wild young Bran- 
 don appear in Philip. So, also, Arthur Pendennis and 
 Laura. "Philip" is, by no means, Thackeray's best. In 
 ■ fact, it is his least good ; but there is so much in it that 
 we could not bear to be without, that no one can call 
 it his worst. 
 
 In 1862, Thackeray moved into a great new house 
 he had built for himself ; but he lived there only a little 
 more than a year. On the morning before Christmas, 
 his man, bringing in his morning coffee, found him lying 
 quietly in his bed, having died before the morning. He 
 had been unwell only for a few days, and then not 
 seriously. The immediate cause of his death was effu- 
 sion on the brain. He had not seemed in ill-health ; but 
 his nearer friends had, for some time, noticed with pain 
 that he was not in the very best of health.* 
 
 * " He went out Wednesday for a little, and came home a^t ten. He went to 
 his room, suffering much, hut declining his man's offer to sit with Mm. He 
 hated to make others suffer. He was heard moaning, as if in pain, ahout twelve 
 on the eve of Christmas morning. Then all was quiet, and then he must have 
 died— in a moment. Next morning his man went in and, opening the windows, 
 found his master dead, his arms hehind his head, as if he had tried to take one 
 more breath. We think of him as of our Chalmers ; found dead in like manner : 
 the same child-Uke, unspoiled, open face ; the same gentle mouth ; the same spa- 
 ciousness and softness of nature ; the same look of power. What a thing to 
 think of,— his lying there, alone in the dark, in the midst of his own mighty 
 London ; his mother and his daughters asleep, and, it may be, dreaming of his 
 goodness, Q-od help them and us all I "—John Brown, 
 
DICKKNS. 
 
 1818-18T0. 
 
 IT is always said that to get a fair idea of the child- 
 hood of Charles Dickens, the easiest way is to read 
 "David Copperfield."* There is, in truth, much in "David 
 Copperfleld" that is drawn from Dickens' own life. Take 
 it word for word, and the two do not run together ; but 
 what is important, the atmosphere of the two is just 
 the same. Dickens lived a hard and miserable life for 
 not a few years in his youth, a life not unlike David's, 
 though incident rarely matches with incident in the two 
 stories. 
 
 He was born February 7, 1812, at Landport, in Port- 
 sea, the second son of John and Elizabeth Dickens. His 
 father, who had a place in the Government Naval Office, 
 was in a year or so ordered to London, and then to 
 Chatham, where Dickens passed much of his boyhood. 
 When he was nine years old, however, his family moved 
 back to London, and his troubles began. His father's 
 pay was cut down, the family constantly became poorer 
 
 *We may read in Foster's "Life of Charles Dickens," an autobiographic bit 
 cominiinicated to the author by Dickens himself, which shows how closely the 
 beginning of David Copperfield followed the experiences of his own childhood. 
 Dickens' father, the improvident, shiftless, and cheerful prototype of Micawber, 
 was in the Marshalsea Prison, and Dickens himself was employed in Jonathan 
 Warren's blacking warehouse. The hard work, the small pay, and the strange 
 companions that David had while he pasted labels over the beer bottles, were 
 drawn from the experiences of the author himself, as he pasted labels over 
 blacking bottles. Mrs. Micawber's boarding-place, where David lived, was drawn 
 from Dickens' own miserable lodging. On Sundays, the poor fellow used to go and 
 visit his father and family in the prison. Dickens never forgot this hard begin- 
 ning of his life. It is said that he never mentioned any portion of it till he gave 
 the piece of autobiography alluded U). to Foster, 
 
270 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 and poorer. The employment in the bottle place (they 
 were really blacking bottles, not beer bottles), the school 
 life, the Doctors Commons experiences, the parliament- 
 ary reporting for the daily papers which we remem- 
 ber in "David Copperfield," are all bits of Dickens' own 
 boyhood. The parliamentary reporting seems to have 
 been the most serious of his occupations. He began in 
 1831, and three years later he became one of the report- 
 ing staff of the Morning Chronicle* 
 
 But before this, he made his first attempt at the great 
 occupation of his life. The Monthly Magazine in Decem- 
 ber, 1833, published his first story. He sent them many 
 more in the next year or so, signed generally " Boz " (boz). 
 The Monthly Magaziiie did not pay, but Dickens was 
 fortunate enough to get an engagement with the Evening 
 Chronicle to supply them with sketches, in addition to 
 his reporting for the morning edition. He received seven 
 guineas a week, and was well off. 
 
 In the early part of 183 6, Dickens collected his 
 "Sketches by Boz," and sold the copyright. And, a little 
 later, in April, appeared the first number of the " Posthu- 
 mous Papers of the Pickwick Club," edited by Boz, to be 
 published in monthly parts. Chapman & Hall, a young 
 firm, were the publishers, and Dickens had agreed to sup- 
 
 * Readers of "David Copperfield" will remember the difficulties David had in 
 learning short-hand, "the changes that were run on dots, which In such a position 
 meant such a thing and in such another position something else entirely different," 
 the mock parliament made up of Traddles, Mr. Dick, and Miss Betsy Trotwood, 
 wherein David sought to prove himself. Later on, David progressed more favorably. 
 
 "I have tamed that savage stenographic mystery," says he. "I make a re- 
 spectable income by it. I am in high repute for my accomplishment in all pertain- 
 ing to the art, and am joined with eleven others in reporting the debates in 
 Parliament for a morning newspaper. * * * I have come out in another way. I 
 have taken with fear and trembling to authorship. I wrote a little something in 
 secret, and sent it to a magazine, and it was published in the magazine. Since 
 then I have taken heart to write a good many trifling pieces, Now I am regularly 
 paid for them. Altogether I am well off," 
 
BICKEKS. 271 
 
 ply a series of sketches, to hang together in a measure, 
 on the adventures of a Nimrod Chib (as the idea was 
 at first), the parts to have illustrations by Mr. Seymour. 
 Mr. Seymour died by his own hand before the second 
 number appeared, but the publication was continued. 
 Before the first number came out, however, "Sketches 
 by Boz," with illustrations by Cruikshank (krd&k' shank), 
 had come out, and was well received. 
 
 Shortly after the first number of "Pickwick," Dickens 
 married Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of a comrade of 
 his among the reporters. " Pickwick " was to run some 
 time. Before it was finished, Dickens began to write for 
 Bentley's Magazine his first real novel, for " Pickwick " 
 never pretended to be a connected story. "Oliver Twist" 
 is a wonderful piece of work for a young man of twenty- 
 flve. So his hands were full at the beginning of 183 7. 
 
 He did other literary work too, rather of a hack 
 nature, and had no sooner finished " Pickwick " than 
 he at once entered into an agreement with Chapman 
 & Hall whereby he agreed to write another work of 
 similar character and similar extent to "Pickwick," to 
 be ready in the spring of the next year. This was 
 "Nicholas Nickleby," which began in April, 1838, and ran 
 in monthly numbers for about a year and a half. So 
 these first novels of his sandwiched together. "Oliver 
 Twist" began as "Pickwick" drew toward a close, and 
 before "Oliver" was done he had begun on "Nicholas 
 Nickleby." He had also agreed with Bentley, in whose 
 magazine " Oliver Twist " was appearing, to produce a 
 new story, "Barnaby Rudge," in the November of the 
 year in which "Nicholas Nickleby" began. This, he felt, 
 however, would be too much for him. He made an 
 arrangement by which " Barnaby Rudge " should follow 
 
^72 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 on immediately after the completion of "Oliver Twist." 
 But even this he could not manage. Barnaby and his 
 career pursued him in his thoughts for some time, but it 
 was long before he could put them into definite shape. 
 
 As "Nicholas Nickleby" closed, Dickens had some 
 doubts as to whether it was for the best to begin at once 
 on a new novel, to be published in the same way. "Pick- 
 wick" and "Nickleby" had been published in twenty 
 monthly numbers, and Dickens had an idea that the 
 public might not take kindly to a third. So for his next 
 work was planned "Master Humphrey's Clock," which 
 was to be a sort of narration, of which "the best general 
 idea might be given, perhaps," the agreement runs, "by 
 reference to the Spectator, the Tatler, and Q-oldsmith's 
 Bee. I should propose to start, as the Spectator does, with 
 some pleasant fiction relative to the origin of the publica- 
 tion ; to introduce a little club, or knot of characters, and 
 to carry their personal histories and proceedings through 
 the work ; to introduce fresh characters ; to re-introduce 
 Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller ; and in this framework 
 to introduce stories, essays, and so on." But only a few 
 numbers were written on this plan, and his work finally 
 drifted into the novel of the " Old Curiosity Shop," which 
 ran its course, and was succeeded at once by " Barnaby 
 Eudge." At the end of this last, " Master Humphrey's 
 Clock" stopped. 
 
 Dickens had for some time had America in his mind. 
 He had a great constituency there, a multitude of ad- 
 mirers, and with a feeling which seems to have been 
 with him through life, he longed to -see the people for 
 whom he wrote. And for other reasons, too, he finally 
 determined to make the trip, and also to write a book 
 about the country when he got back, and to sell it for 
 
DICKERS. 2 7S 
 
 half a guinea. He wished to take with him his wife 
 and family ; but his children were finally left at home. 
 He sailed for America, and, after a bad passage, arrived 
 at Halifax on the 2 2d of January, and reached Boston 
 on the 28 th. He was greeted with the wildest enthusiasm. 
 We will not follow him through the country (he saw 
 much of the great cities of the East, South, and West), 
 but simply say that he came home in the beginning of 
 the summer, by way of Canada. 
 
 After he arrived home, he published his " American 
 Notes," by which his various and many friends on this 
 side the water must have felt that he returned a very 
 pretty compliment to their warm and really hearty greet- 
 ing to him. However, words break no bones, and no one 
 need read the "American Notes" who doesn't want to. 
 Fortunately, the condition of the country which he de- 
 scribed with such plainness exists now only in rather re- 
 mote spots ; in fact, the book is, on the whole, out of date. 
 With "Martin Chuzzlewit," of which the first number 
 was published about six months after his return, the 
 case is a bit different, for it is as characteristic a novel 
 as Dickens ever wrote, though not the best, by any 
 means. The satire on the Americans is, however, rather 
 too savage to suit our taste, and we fear the novel will 
 never be appreciated in this country at its true worth.* 
 
 * The question as to how far Dickens was justified in his vigorous attack on 
 American manners and customs is hardly one which we need to handle. Un- 
 doubtedly Dickens was warmly and enthusiastically received in this country, and 
 was treated in as kindly and hospitable manner as his American friends knew 
 how. In the face of this it seems a bit ungrateful to return to England and send 
 out such showers of sarcasm as may be found in the two books written im- 
 mediately after his tour. But America is a large country. Undoubtedly Dickens 
 was in a great degree just in his criticism on the remote parts which he visited, 
 and in a measure just enough in his stricture on society in general. He could 
 not help perceiving material for humorous criticism in the people at large, 
 and the fact that a large number of them had been particularly kind to him, 
 
274 PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 He loved to move about, did Dickens, and it is hard 
 to keep tlie run of him in so short a sketch as this. 
 After returning from America, he was much abroad, saw 
 Italy, and lived in Q-enoa for some little time. But before 
 leaving for Italy he wrote the " Christmas Carol," and 
 published it about Christmas time in the year 1843. 
 This, the first of those delightful Christmas stories, was a 
 great success. Dickens seems to come nearer than any 
 other to being the embodiment of our idea of the spirit 
 of the real old English Christmas, wath the beef and 
 plum-pudding and the snap-dragon. The "Carol" was 
 followed the next two years by the " Chimes," and the 
 "Battle of Life," and the "Cricket on the Hearth," and 
 later by the " Haunted Man." 
 
 Coming back from his house at Genoa, Dickens took 
 hold of the Daily News, a new daily paper, of which 
 he was to be the chief editor. But he was not cut out 
 for a journalist — his experiences in the press were chiefly 
 reportorial — and Dickens was connected with it for only a 
 short time. He was glad to be free from the confining 
 duties of the editor of a great daily, and flitting over 
 to the Continent, he passed up the Rhine, and settled 
 himself at Lausanne (lo zan'). There he spent the 
 summer, went home by way of Paris, and was in 
 London again in 1847. "Dombey and Son" was being 
 published, the first number having come out in October, 
 1846. 
 
 In the year 1848, while "Dombey" was still coming 
 out, occurred perhaps the greatest of the numerous 
 "private theatricals,"* if that be a proper name for such 
 
 was in his eyes no reason why he should abstain from criticising the rest of tlie 
 nation. 
 
 * Dickens was very fond of the stage, and of the whole theatrical profession. 
 His books are filled with kindly specimens from the many steps of the ladder. 
 
DICKEITS. 275 
 
 very public performances, which Dickens dearly loved all 
 his life. There was in his nature a very close affinity to 
 the dramatic at all bimes ; many of his characters are 
 " stagey," or farcical, many of his situations are highly 
 dramatic, and not a few of his novels have furnished 
 the plots for good plays. So all through Dickens' life 
 we find that one of his chief delights was to be stage 
 manager of private theatricals. On this occasion, they 
 were got up on a grand scale for the relief of Leigh (le) 
 Hunt, who was then in destitute circumstances. Ben 
 Jonson's comedy, "Every Man in his Humor," was given, 
 with Dickens himself, Douglas Jerrold, Mark Lemon, 
 John Leech, George Oruikshank, and others in the 
 company. Bulwer supplied a prologue to be spoken at 
 Liverpool, and Talfourd (ta^A^r fCird) wrote one for Man- 
 chester. They realized a pretty sum for Hunt, and 
 Dickens conceived the idea of writing an account of the 
 expedition from the point of view of Mrs. Sairy Gramp, 
 who, he was pleased to imagine, accompanied "the party 
 unbeknown, in a second-class carriage — ' in case.' " But 
 he never followed this up. 
 
 All this time Dickens was vigorously at work at 
 "Dombey"; and shortly after its completion, in spite of 
 all his duties and pleasures, he found time to write 
 another novel — a novel which he loved best of all that 
 he ever wrote — a novel which a majority of his readers 
 would agree on as being his best. Undoubtedly one of 
 the reasons that he looked so fondly on " David Cop- 
 
 Macready {mnh re' di) and I'echter (fish'ter) were intimate friends of his, and he 
 must have been well known to many of less eminence. As we have said, he had 
 a great turn for acting himself, and it is always said that he acted remarkably 
 well. His line was especially for melodrama and farce, it seems, and the 
 theatrical characters of his books are usually exponents of this branch of the 
 profession. But all ranks of theatrical life were dear to him, even down to 
 Mrs. Jarley's wax- work show. 
 
2 76 Prose WKiTERt?. 
 
 perfield," was because of the autobiographic parts, the. 
 bits of his own life that he put into it. But beside 
 this, there is so much in the book, it is so many-sided, 
 so multifold, and yet withal so well and skillfully 
 blended, that the plot can in no way be seriously ob- 
 jected to. The story of Little Em'ly might stand alone ; 
 there is the episode of David and his young child-wife, 
 and yet both are so well wrought into the whole story. 
 It is a compromise between the old narrative of inci- 
 dent after incident, the reminiscence of Fielding and 
 Dickens' old favorite, Smollett, between this and the 
 more complete story which he wrote so well when he 
 told "A Tale of Two Cities." 
 
 The story interests us, as well as each separate in- 
 cident and each separate character. Yet, what characters 
 they are — Micawber (ml kaw'ber), Uriah Heep, Traddles, 
 Agnes, Betsy Trotwood, Dora, Peggotty, Steerforth, Mr. 
 Peggotty, Little Em'ly, and David himself, all so natural, 
 real, life-like, that one almost wonders that Dickens 
 could have constrained himself, as for once in his life, 
 to produce nothing that was utterly and only grotesque. 
 
 Following " David Copperfield " came " Bleak House," 
 another great book, though scarcely so agreeable as its 
 immediate predecessor. More popular than "Copperfield," 
 however, at the time, so its author chronicles. But in 
 " Bleak House " Dickens fell into what all his admirers 
 must regret, as he, himself, regretted it. Lawrence Boy- 
 thorn and Harold Skimpole were at once recognized as 
 drawn from the life. Walter Savage Landor could hardly 
 have been offended, for although there were absurdities 
 in Lawrence Boythorn, they merely served to make 
 more attractive an agreeable character. But Harold 
 Skimpole! Hunt was deeply grieved, and with reasoa 
 
t)ICKENS. 277 
 
 And with equal reason was Dickens sincerely sorry that 
 he should have thoughtlessly injured a man whom he 
 had never known, save as a warm friend. 
 
 Shortly after " Copperfield " was published, Dickens had 
 reverted to his old idea for a periodical. He would have 
 started again something after the fashion of " Master 
 Humphrey's Clock." A weekly journal, he thought, should 
 contain part original and part selected matter. " Now, 
 to bind all this together, and to get a character estab- 
 lished, as it were, which any of the writers may main- 
 tain without difficulty, I want to suppose a certain 
 shadow, which may go into any place, by sunlight, 
 moonlight, starlight, firelight, candlelight, and be in all 
 homes and all nooks and corners, and be supposed to 
 be cognizant of every thing. It presents an odd, unsub- 
 stantial, whimsical, new thing, a sort of previously un- 
 thought-of power going about. I want to express in the 
 title that it is the thing at everybody's elbow and in 
 everybody's footsteps. At the window, by the fire, in 
 the street, in the house, from infancy to old age, every 
 one's inseparable companion." He could not get his 
 idea into a concrete shape, but it remains in the name. 
 Household Words, of the magazine of which the first 
 number appeared March 30, 1850. 
 
 About this time comes "A Child's History of England," 
 a curious little history, very well for children whose 
 parents desire them to imbibe the views Dickens hap- 
 pened to possess, but hardly so for others. 
 
 "Bleak House" was ended in September, 1853. The 
 next year saw the beginning of " Hard Times," and the 
 year 1855, of "Little Dorrit." Both books written with a 
 purpose — the one called forth by the evils in the cotton- 
 spinning towns near Manchester; the other, by the evils 
 
278 PROSE WRITEES. 
 
 of the Circumlocution OfSce in the Crimean War. * But 
 neither, we thinly, was equal to his former books, where 
 he gave himself up only to telhng his story, to being 
 funny or pathetic, to making his characters exist before 
 the readers. 
 
 The " Tale of Two Cities " came next, a book of 
 rather a different kind from the rest of Dickens' books. 
 It is a capital novel — there are few of Dickens' books of 
 which this could not be said justly — and by many held to 
 be the best thing he ever wrote. It is more serious ; it 
 certainly proves that Dickens could do something more 
 than make his hearers laugh. In the course of the next 
 year was published " Great Expectations," and shortly 
 afterward " Our Mutual Friend." 
 
 We can hardly go here in detail into even a small 
 part of the incidents of such a life as Dickens'. We must 
 note, however, a few of the important matters. In the 
 year 1858, occurred several things of importance. In 
 April of that year, Dickens gave the first series of his 
 Public Readings from his works. This was a favorite 
 project of his ; he had often read from his works for 
 charities, but he had never before undertaken readings 
 for his own profit. He by no means needed the money, 
 but he seems to have longed for something of the sort to 
 use up some of his inordinate energy, to get face to face 
 with those for whom he wrote, as well perhaps as to 
 
 * The evils of oflacial red tape in the English Q-overnment were brought to 
 light in a fearful manner by the shocking and miserable failure of the commis- 
 sary department in the Crimean War. It is hardly possible to imagine the hard- 
 ships and miseries undergone by the wretched men of the British army encamped 
 before Sebastopol (s? has' to put). Whether Dickens' satire of it, in " Little Dorrit," 
 had an effect we can hardly say. But it was most certainly written with a glow 
 of generous indignation. Dickens was somewhat taken to task for this attack, 
 and defended himself in Household Words. There can be little doubt, however, 
 that the satire was in the right direction, in accordance with facts, and therefore 
 beneficial. 
 
DICKENS. 279 
 
 direct his attention from painful things in his private 
 life. For in the same year, shortly after his first reading, 
 Dickens separated from his wife, and henceforth they 
 lived apart. Dickens felt the whole thing keenly ; no 
 one was to blame, was his view, but he and his wife 
 could not live happily, and the matrimonial experiment 
 had turned out a miserable failure. At this time, too, he 
 purchased his famous place at Grad's Hill, in Kent, well 
 known to the readers of Henry IV. And the year after- 
 ward his magazine, Hoiosehold Words, was discontinued 
 and a new one, to be called All the Year Round, was 
 started. There was little difference in the two, but there 
 had arisen certain misunderstandings in the management 
 of Household Words, and it was thought for the best to 
 wipe off the slate and begin again. 
 
 Dickens continued his readings for several years. He 
 had four series,— one in 1858, one in 1861, one in 1866. 
 In 1867, came his second American tour. Here were 
 Dickens' old friends and many new ones. The "American 
 Notes" and "Martin Chiizzlewit" were forgotten by the 
 Americans, and Dickens himself saw the necessity of 
 revising first impressions. He returned home in 186 8. 
 
 When Dickens returned home, he was by no means 
 the man he had been five years before. Fatigue and 
 anxiety, excitement and hard work, had told on him, 
 and he was worn, and by no means in strong health 
 and good spirits. Nevertheless, he began on a new series 
 of Readings,* introducing into them a fearful description 
 
 * Even during his second American tour, Dickens felt his readings somewhat 
 too much for him. He describes himself as being often " so dead beat," at the 
 close of a reading, " that they lay me down on a sofa, after I have been washed 
 and dressed, and I lie there extremely faint, for a quarter of an hour." He says, 
 also, that he was very sleepless at night. He had some ailment in his foot, which 
 was greatly irritated by the continual standing necessary in his lecturing. His 
 
280 P R S E W R I T E R S . 
 
 of Nancy's murder, in " Oliver Twist." It wore upon him 
 greatly. During the last few readings, he was forced to 
 have medical assistance. The end came at last, and he 
 died June 9, 1870, leaving unfinished the work then on 
 his hands, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood."* 
 
 readings were not infrequently of a very exhausting character. After his read- 
 ing of the murder of Nanoy, from "Oliver Twist," he was as tired as though he 
 had gone through a hard day's work. In spite of all this, he kept up his read- 
 ings (though they were by no means a pecuniary necessity) until he utterly and 
 entirely broke down. 
 
 * It would be pleasant if we could say more on the jjersonal relations of 
 Dickens with the other great English novelist of his time, Thackeray {thdk' e n). 
 Each was a warm and sincere admirer of the genius of the other, though they 
 utterly differed from each other in their style and in their lines of thought. 
 Thackeray was often warm in praise of Dickens (his tribute in " Pendennis " to 
 Dickens' works will occur to all his readers), and at other times he referred to 
 his supposed rival in the most becoming and appreciative manner. Dickens, 
 though he was not frequent in his remarks on Thackeray, during the life-time of 
 the great novelist, contributed to the ComhiU a most "kind and unstinting tribute 
 of admiration " after his death. They were never intimate personal friends, but, 
 we believe, there was never any disagreement between theixi, rumor to the con- 
 trary notwithstanding. 
 
 In regard to Dickens' daily habits, the following is of interest : 
 "He was an early riser, if for no other reason, because every man in whose 
 work imagination plays its part, must sometimes be alone ; and Dickens has told 
 us that there was to him something incomparably solemn in the still solitude of 
 the morning. But it was onlj' exceptionally, and when hard-pressed by the 
 necessities of his literary labors, that he wrote before breakfast; in general, he 
 was contented with the ordinary working hours of the morning, not often writing 
 after luncheon, and, except in early life, never in the evening. Ordinarily, when 
 engaged on a work of fiction, he considered three of his not very large MS. pages 
 a good, and four an excellent, day's work ; and, while very careful in making his 
 corrections clear and unmistakable, he never rewrote what a morning's labor had 
 ultimately produced. On the other hand, he was frequently slow in beginning a 
 story, being, as he himself says, affected by something like despondency at such 
 times, or, as he elsewhere humorously puts it, ' going round and round the idea, 
 as you see a bird in his cage go about and about his sugar before he touches it.' 
 A temperate liver, he was, at the same time, a zealous devotee of bodily exercise. 
 ' He was fond of riding, but walking was his particular exercise. He must have 
 walked all over London many times, joining to the physical pleasure he always 
 derived from the exercise, a species of mental photography of any thing quaint 
 or curious in the scenes through which he passed.' 'But the walks he loved best 
 were long stretches on the cliffs, or across the downs by the sea, where, following 
 the track of his " breathes," one half expects to meet him coming along against 
 the wind at four and a half miles an hour, the very embodiment of energy and 
 brimful of lifC;' " 
 
COMPOSERS. 
 
Handel. 
 Baeh. 
 
 Schubert 
 
 Haydn. 
 Chopin. 
 Mendelssohn. 
 
BAG H . 
 
 Ir>85-1T50. 
 
 We would better say here a few words on a subject which will 
 present itself to us in the lives of all the great composers of the 
 eighteenth century. That is in regard to the political system of Ger- 
 many, as far as it affected the musical development of the country. 
 
 Germany was politically very different from France, England, or 
 Italy, and for a long time had been so. France had gradually 
 grown into a kingdom, in which Paris and the Court were utterly 
 overshadowing, and the power of the monarch destroyed the indi- 
 viduality of the nobles. In England, the nobles as a body were, at 
 this time, the chief holders of j)ower, but no one of them was indi- 
 vidually great — they were great as an order. Italy and Germany 
 differed from these two, and from each other. Italy was composed 
 of small States, grown up around the large towns once republics, 
 to which the Papal dominions and the kingdom of the two Sicilies 
 should be added. Germany, or the Empire, was, till 1870, an 
 aggregation of many hereditary principalities and of various free 
 cities. Prussia and Austria were the largest and most important 
 of its members during the eighteenth century, but their importance 
 was by no means overshadowing, except politically. There were 
 electorates, archbishoprics, bishoprics, grand duchies, principalities, 
 margraviates, landgraviates, and so on, without number. And each 
 elector, archbishop, and bishop down to the smallest landgrave, felt 
 that he was by birth, tl ough perhaps no( in power, the equal of 
 any other prince in Germany. Therefore, to keep up the dignity 
 of his position, it was necessary that each princekin should have 
 his fully appointed court, as though he were the Emperor him- 
 self. Hence at every electoral or grand ducal court, must be a 
 capelle (ka pel'), and a capellmeister (ka pel'mTs ter). This was 
 naturally not so in France or England. In France, the nobles 
 were (in the time of Louis XIV. and later) nothing more than 
 ornaments of the great Court at Versailles (ver salz'), rather 
 than the centers of little Courts of their own. And, in England, 
 the effect was the same, though for different reasons. The great 
 
282 COMPOSERS. 
 
 nobles were great as a body; individually they were, by no means, 
 such supreme lords as were their German contemporaries. 
 
 Hence, there was in Germany and in Italy, during the eighteenth 
 century, a held for musicians, which did not exist in Trance or 
 England. Handel (han'del), in England, fought his way with his 
 Operas and his Oratorios, through the ups and downs of popular 
 favor and disfavor. Haydn (ha'dn), in his visits to London, relied 
 entirely on the public patronage of his concerts. Contrast this 
 with the lot of composers in Germany at the same time. Bach 
 (bak), at the very beginning of his career, was received into the 
 musical service of first one, then another of the German princes, 
 and later was musical director of one of the great free towns, while no 
 less than twenty of his near kindred held positions as capellmeisters, 
 cantors (kan'torz), or town musicians all over Germany. Handel 
 was made capellmeister to the Elector of Brunswick. Haydn to 
 Prince Esterhazy (es' ter ha ze). Mozart's (mo zartz') father was 
 subdirector of the chapel of the Archbishop of Salzburg (sa-wlts'- 
 burg), and Mozart himself, had he lived longer, would have longer 
 enjoyed his titles of Imperial Court Composer and Capellmeister of 
 St. Stephen's. Beethoven's (ba' to venz) grandfather was capell- 
 meister to the Archbishop of Cologne (ko Ion'), and Beethoven 
 himself was sought by the King of Westphalia (west fa' 11 a). 
 
 These are only a few examples from the multitude which exist to 
 show how great were the opportunities in Germany, for a musician, 
 to obtain position and the leisure necessary to a great composer. It 
 was not till, with the nineteenth century, the public stepped into the 
 place formerly held by the patron, that England or Trance produced 
 any great composers. 
 
 JOHANN SEBASTIAN (yO haiV sebast'yan) BACH 
 was one of a family which ha( . followed music as a 
 profession for many generations. Probably further back 
 than we can trace, there were musical talent and skill in 
 the family. Certain it is that, beginning with Hans (hanz) 
 Bach (about 1625), the carpet-weaver, there were few in 
 the family who had not some taste for music, and some 
 skill in playing. His father, Veit (vit) Bach, was a baker 
 and a miller, and played upon the cithara (sith'a ra). Hans 
 himself was given a musical education ; and his sons, 
 
BACH. 283 
 
 his brother, and his nephews, as a rule, were musical as 
 well. But even at this early time, the Bachs were scat- 
 tered over Q-ermany, forming a sort of musical guild. 
 They kept up their intercourse, intermarried, assisted 
 each other in difficulties; the sons of one branch learnt 
 their art of the elders of another. Every-where through 
 the seventeenth century, there were in G-ermany capell- 
 meisters, choir-masters, organists, cantors, court musi- 
 cians, town musicians, or choir boys of the name of Bach. 
 Not a few, as the custom was, composed not a little for 
 the choirs, or orchestras, or instruments over which they 
 presided. 
 
 Johann Sebastian was born at Eisenach (i' zen ak) in 
 1685— on the 21st of March, Old Style. His father was 
 Johann Ambrosiiis, who played the viol in the town 
 band at Eisenach. His grandfather was Christoph (kres'- 
 tof), town musician of Erfurt (er'fdbrt) and of Arnstadt 
 (arn'stat), who was the son of the before-mentioned 
 Hans. Others of his immediate relations had held more 
 lofty positions in the musical world. 
 
 Johann Sebastian learned of his father to play on the 
 viol, but both of his parents died while he was yet a 
 child, and he was taken charge of by his brother, some 
 years older than himself, who was town organist in Ohr- 
 druf (or'drdbf). Here he received much of his education.* 
 
 * They tell a story of Bach in his youth which is very characteristic of the 
 man's later devotion to study. His brother put before him such pieces of music 
 as he thought fit for him, but these Bach mastered with ease, and desired more. 
 There was in particular a certain manuscript which Johann Christoph kept care- 
 fully shut up behind a lattice. Sebastian could see it through the wires of the 
 book-case, but he was not allowed to take it. So he would get up on moonlight 
 nights and pull it between the wires and read it. Mnally, he copied It all off so 
 as to use it. It took him six months or more. The melancholy part of the story 
 is that his brother, on finding him with his hardly-made copy, took it away from 
 him. It is said that Bach injured his eyes by this working by moonlight, and 
 that his blindness later in life came partially from these youthful labors. 
 
284 COMPOSERS. 
 
 He learned Latin and Q-reek at the Lyceum (it se' am), 
 learned at home to play on the Clavichord, and at school 
 to sing the music in the church choir. 
 
 At fifteen, Bach left Ohrdruf, and traveled with a 
 friend to Luneburg (la' neh burg), where they joined 
 the choir of the School of St. Michael, for boys from 
 Thuringia (thu rin'ji a) were especially sought for on 
 account of their musical training, as well as their un- 
 usually fine voices. Here he applied himself almost 
 entirely to musical studies. He was not rich enough 
 to continue his other studies beyond the routine of 
 the school, and he gave up his time to music. He 
 learned much of the organ and of choral singing here. 
 But principally he worked on the organ, and became 
 a fine performer, beside learning much about the instru- 
 ment. 
 
 He left Luneburg at eighteen years of age, and for a 
 short time held a place in the band of Prince Johann 
 Ernst at Weimar (vi'msr). He did not stay here long; 
 for happening to visit the town of Arnstadt, he found 
 one of the churches about to choose an organist, and 
 offering himself as a candidate, his skill was considered 
 by the burghers such as to warrant engaging him at 
 once upon a salary which was very large for the time 
 and place. 
 
 It does not appear that his labors here were very 
 great, or such as to gain for him a very broad reputa- 
 tion. He did little beyond the regular work of the posi- 
 tion, which was small, and spent the remainder of his 
 time chiefly in studying by himself. How much he 
 composed at this time, it is hard to say; for in after- 
 years, he very carefully went over the work done here, 
 and probably much more work was done than is now 
 
BACH. 285 
 
 left to us. There are several instrumental compositions 
 which show very plainly the influence he was under of 
 Dietrich Buxtehude (de' trlk bdbks ta iiu' de), a Danish 
 organist settled in Lubeck (lu'bek), whom Bach visited, 
 and from whom he learned much. 
 
 This visit which he made at Lubeck* was to have 
 been a month in length, but Bach protracted it to three. 
 He got into difficulties, therefore, with his church people, 
 who complained not only of this, but also of various 
 other proceedings of his of which they could not approve. 
 Bach was, therefore, not sorry when the place of organist 
 in a church at Miilhausen (mui how'zen) became vacant. 
 He offered himself as a candidate, and was chosen. He 
 entered upon his duties in the summer of 1707. In 
 the fall he married. His wife was apparently, according 
 to the custom of the Bach family, one of his cousins. 
 Maria Barbara was the daughter of Johann Michael 
 Bach, . the organist at Q-ehren (ga' ren). She bore her 
 husband seven children, but beyond this we know little 
 of her. 
 
 Bach remained at Miilhausen for only a year. His 
 life there seems to have been not unpleasant. He re- 
 ceived the same salary he had enjoyed at Arnstadt (no 
 very large one, according to our ideas at present) and 
 
 * It is perhaps a little curious that Bach, at a period when the Italian mas- 
 ters were so highly esteemed, should have never seen Italy, more especially as 
 that country was, in the eighteenth century, "the Eldorado (Udord'do) of the 
 German musician," as has been well said, and also as Bach was very frequently 
 engaged in art-journeyings through various parts of Q-ermany. Handel spent 
 much time in Italy, where he was highly appreciated and greatly loved. Mozart 
 also saw Italy frequently in his youth. But Italy was not at a later time so 
 famous for its musical affairs as it was in the time of Bach. Our readers wiU 
 note that no Italian composers figure in our list of the greatest composers, 
 though many will think that there are, perhaps, two or three who ought to have 
 been included. No one will deny that in the last hundred and fifty years, 
 Italy has not been a leading country, musically. But it was not so in Bach's 
 time. 
 
286 COMPOSERS. 
 
 certain dues of corn, wood, and fish. He entered upon 
 his work with ardor, but unfortunately met with opposi- 
 tion on the part of the pastor of the church. Bach 
 could hardly venture on the production of some of his 
 compositions, for the pastor esteemed them too worldly. 
 About a year after accepting the position, Bach resigned 
 it, to enter upon the duties of organist* at the Dukes' 
 Chapel at Weimar. He had become acquainted with that 
 city some years before, as we have seen, and was now 
 apparently drawn thither both by the musical renown of 
 the place as well as for the opportunities it presented 
 for the development of his talents. 
 
 He remained at Weimar nine years — from his twenty- 
 third to his thirty-second yeai\ It was a period of great 
 use to him, though chiefly in the way of study, which 
 he conscientiously continued through his Avhole life. He 
 composed works at Weimar which are fine enough, 
 though wholly eclipsed by his later labors. The G-rand 
 Duke of Saxe- Weimar (saks a vi'naar) was a man of cul- 
 tivated tastes, and, though of a serious and gloomy 
 temper, was a good patron of the arts. He took a very 
 great pleasure in caring for the music in the ducal 
 chapel. His nephew also, the son of the prince, in 
 whose band Bach had formerly been enrolled, was mu- 
 
 * Bach became the first organist of his time, and he was often called upon to 
 give his opinion on organs throughout Germany. His biographer says : " He 
 could as little prevail upon himself to praise a bad instrument as a bad organist. 
 He was therefore very severe, but always just, in his trials of organs. As he 
 was perfectly acquainted with the constraction of the instrument, he could not 
 in any case be deceived. The first thing he did was to draw out all the stops 
 and play with the full organ. He used to say in jest, that he m^ist first of all 
 know whether the instrument had good lungs. He then proceeded to examine 
 the single parts. His justice to the organ-builders went so far that, when he 
 found the work really good, and the sum agreed upon too small, so that the 
 builder would evidently have been a loser by his work, he endeavored to induce 
 those who had it to make a suitable addition, which he, in fact, frequently 
 obtained." 
 
BACH. 287 
 
 sical, but fonder of the lighter French and Italian music 
 than of the more serious church music. 
 
 In both of these directions Bach's genius had play. 
 Besides being organist, he became concert-master. A part 
 of the duties of the office lay in supplying certain pieces 
 of church music, and in performance of this duty Bach 
 composed a series of church cantatas. He did much in 
 these years in the way of study and composition, and, as 
 far as can be made out, lived happily. In 1717, how- 
 ever, he was offered the position of capellmeister at the 
 court of the Prince of Anhalt-Ccethen (an' halt koi'ten), 
 and accepted the position. 
 
 In this new position. Bach for some time left the 
 organ and church music. His position at Coethen gave 
 him no control over any of the churches, and he turned 
 his attention chiefly to conducting and to writing for 
 stringed instruments and for the clavichord. Prince 
 Leopold, of Anhalt-Ccethen, was an enthusiastic musician, 
 and becam.e much attached to his capellmeister. 
 
 While he was in the employ of the prince — in fact, 
 when he was on a journey with him — his wife died 
 before he could return to her. This was a very great 
 grief to him. Bach loved his family and lived much 
 with them, though we have, unfortunately, little enough 
 from which to form any idea of his family life. He was 
 now left with four children — one daughter and three 
 sons. For the eldest of these latter, Bach occupied him- 
 self with a system of musical education, — a Clavier- 
 Buchlein (kia ve a' buk'lin), Inventions, and the Wohltem- 
 porirte (vol tem po rfr' te) Clavier.* 
 
 A year and a half after the death of his first wife, 
 
 * That is to say, an easy book for the piano, exercises, and the well-skilled 
 piano-player. 
 
288 COMPOSERS. 
 
 Bach married a second. Anna Magdalena Wuelkin (vul'- 
 kin) was a singer in Duke Leopold's court. Although 
 much younger than her husband, their union seems to 
 have been a very happy one. She was a fine singer, and 
 Bach loved to arrange music for her, while she aided 
 him by her copying.* 
 
 Shortly after Bach's marriage. Prince Leopold married, 
 and began to give to his wife the attention he had 
 formerly lavished upon music. The position of capell- 
 meister lost a great part of its attractiveness. Bach had 
 never been able to command a large outside audience, 
 but had been forced to depend upon the attention of 
 the court, which, while Leopold interested himself, was 
 keenly musical. With the defection of the prince came 
 lack of interest by the court, and Bach was very glad 
 to accept the position of cantor at the School of St. 
 Thomas, at Leipsic. It was in the summer of 1723 that 
 he left the ducal palace for Leipsic, where he spent the 
 remainder of his life. 
 
 The Tomasschule (to maz shdo'le), at Leipsic, was the 
 lineal descendant of an old Monkish school of the Middle 
 Ages. There the Augustine canons of the Tomaskloster 
 had trained the choir-boys at the same time that other 
 little boys were taught to become learned clerks or priests. 
 The cantor, or musical instructor, was one of the superior 
 
 * " They are all bom musicians," writes Bach of his family, " and I can 
 assure you that I can already form a concert, both vocal and instrumental, of 
 my own family, particularly as my present wife sings a very clear soprano, and 
 my eldest daughter joins in bravely." Bach himself delighted to conduct at 
 these concerts, in which his wife, his eldest daughter, his sons, and perhaps 
 some of his pupils would join in and take part. He had in his house a multitude 
 of musical instruments. They seem to have been the only luxury that he 
 allowed himself. He had five or six claviers, counting a little spinet, also a lute, 
 two lautenclaviers (low' ten Ud ve' a), a viol da gamba (ve oV da gam' hd), and violins, 
 violas, and violoncellos, in such number, that he could supply enough for any 
 of the more simple kinds of concerted music. 
 
BACH. 289 
 
 masters, and had the musical training of all the boys in 
 the school. Beside this, however, which was compara- 
 tively unattractive, the cantor had the oversight of the 
 choirs of four or, indeed, five churches in the city, and 
 all these choirs the cantor was to furnish with choir-boys 
 from the Tomasschule, and was to compose music for 
 them as well ; and beside this, he had the supervision 
 of the various organists of the churches — that is, the 
 cantor of the Tomasschule was the musical king of 
 Leipsic, or rather, he ought to have been. And, lan- 
 doubtedly, it was the idea of holding some such place 
 that caused Bach to leave what was really a dignified posi- 
 tion in his art. He thought that he needed a broader field 
 for activity than was afforded him in the ducal palace. 
 
 Unfortunately, the condition of the Tomasschule was 
 not at this time all that could be wished, and of this 
 Bach was probably aware. We must suppose that it 
 was with the idea of building up what had in a 
 measure fallen into decay, that he accepted the position 
 of cantor on the death of Kuhnau (ku'now), the former 
 holder. Be this as it may, the years spent by Bach at 
 Leipsic were troubled by constant quarreling with very 
 many persons. Bach was by nature independent and hot- 
 tempered. He was intent on raising the Tomasschule 
 to its former position of eminence, and on raising the 
 position of cantor therein to its former importance. We 
 can not well go into these disputes. He quarreled with 
 the rector, with the town council — with whom he had 
 certain relations — and, indeed, with many persons.* At 
 
 * Bacli, like a good many artists, sometimes allowed Ms temper to get tlie 
 better of Mm. at those wlio could not do tMngs as lie himseLf knew they ought to 
 be done. " The organist of St. Thomas' was one day playing the organ at a re- 
 hearsal and made some mistake. Bach snatched off his wig in a rage, flung it at 
 the criminal, and thundered out he had better have been a cobbler." Mendels- 
 
290 COMPOSERS. 
 
 one time, he thought he must give up the task set 
 before him, so disappointed was he. But though he 
 wrote to a friend asking if there were not some other 
 place to be got, he did, as a matter of fact, remain in 
 Leipsic until his death. 
 
 In his home-life, as we have noted, he was happy. 
 His second wife was an aid to him, his children were, as 
 he said, born musicians, so that he could arrange a con- 
 cert with his family "vocaliter and instrumentaliter." 
 His two elder sons played, and his eldest daughter, and 
 there were always at his house pupils to whom he was 
 teaching the theory and practice of music ; and where 
 more were needed to fill out the little orchestra or to 
 make up the desired voices, the pupils of the Tomasschule 
 might be called on. Much of his writing was done 
 for this chamber orchestra of his, and, without a doubt, 
 it kept his family busy to prepare the music, for it must 
 all be copied out by hand, as printed music was at that 
 time an expensive luxury. 
 
 For a time, while Q-esner (ges'ner) was rector at the 
 school. Bach enjoyed imixiunity from the constant bicker- 
 ing which had been kept up with his predecessor. Gesner 
 appreciated Bach and gave him sympathetic aid. These 
 years were the best years of Bach's later life. When 
 Ernesto (er nes'te) succeeded to the rectorship, the troubles 
 began again, and Bach's later years were years of declin- 
 ing influence in his own town, though in the world out- 
 side, which he sometimes saw by little journeys here and 
 there, his disciples and admirers constantly increased.* 
 
 solin {mSn'dUs son), in his teaching at the Leipsic Conservatorium, was at 
 times so irritated at a pupil as to cry out, " So spielen die katzen " (so play the 
 cats). And almost all musicians have at one time or another broken out against 
 those who were not so correct as they should have been. 
 
 * It was not at once that Bach was appreciated and loved even in his own 
 
BACH. 291 
 
 He had, very shortly after his establishment at Leipsic, 
 been made capellmeister to tlie Dulie of WeissenfeLs 
 (vi'sen felz), receiving the emoluments of the office without 
 attending the Court, and in 173 6, he was made Royal 
 Court Composer by the famous Augustus the Strong, of 
 Saxony and Poland. Late in his life, he was persuaded 
 to visit Frederick the Q-reat at Potsdam. He arrived with 
 his son just as a 'concert was about to begin at the 
 palace.. When Frederick was told of it, he had his flute 
 in hand and was about to play his part in a concerto, — 
 for he was a famous amateur. "Gentlemen," said the 
 King, laying down the instrument, " Old Bach is come," 
 and he insisted that Bach should appear before him at 
 once. The King gave up his concert and begged the 
 great musician to try his new piano-fortes, — for he had 
 just provided himself with fifteen. The musicians went 
 with him from room to room, and Bach was invited 
 every-where to try and to play unpremeditated com- 
 positions. From this visit resulted the " Musical Offering," 
 which Bach composed on returning home on themes 
 suggested by the King. 
 
 Bach died July 28, 1760. For about a year he had 
 been quite blind, owing to the unfortunate operations 
 performed to benefit a disorder in his eyes. The im- 
 mediate cause of death was a stroke of apoplexy.* 
 
 Q-ermany. But later the worsMp of the great master began, Mendelssohn being 
 in a way the high-priest. Readers of " Charles Auchester " will remember this 
 passage : " My dear and revered Sebastian Bach — of all the Baohs alone the 
 Bach, though indeed to any one Bach one of us present is not fit to hold a candle. 
 Tou do not love Bach— I do. You do not reverence him— he is my religion. You 
 do not understand him — I am very intimate with him. If you knew him, you 
 too would worship and desire of him to know more and more." Mendelssohn, as 
 we shall see, held for a great part of his life the chief musical position in Leipsic 
 as Bach had done one hundred years before, and one of his most loved tasks was 
 the diffusion of a knowledge and love of the sturdy old composer. 
 
 * As to his character and appearance, we find the following : " Bach's nature 
 
292 COMPOSERS. 
 
 was, above all, grave and earnest, and with all his politeness and consideration 
 for his fellow-men, his demeanor was dignified and commanded respect. If we 
 may trust the portraits which remain of him, his appearance answered perfectly 
 to this. To judge from them, he must have been of a powerful, broad, and stal- 
 wart build, with a full but vigorous and marked face, a wide brow, strongly 
 arched eyebrows, and a stern, or even sinister, line between them. In the nose 
 and mouth, on the contrary, we find an expression of easy humor ; the eyes are 
 keen and eager, but in his youth he was somewhat short-sighted." 
 
 If he was great as an artist, equally great was he as a man. He was an 
 affectionate husband, a good father, and a trusty friend. His modest and un- 
 assuming manners, his kindly and sympathetic disposition, his open-heartedness 
 and benevolence, made him beloved and esteemed wherever he went. Amongst 
 his friends, he numbered kings and princes, as well as men of humble rank. He 
 was a man that never traveled ; had he done so, he might have been richer and 
 have made more friends than he did, or, as some one says, " he might have gained 
 the admiration of the whole world." 
 
 Bach a^nd Handel never met, though they lived at almost exactly the same 
 time. Handel was, for the greater part of his life, in England, but there were 
 many times when he was in Germany, even after he, as well as Bach, had made 
 their great reputations. There was great ciiriosity and desire for a meeting of 
 these great masters and for a trial of skill between them. Bach several times 
 tried to arrange a meeting between them, but neither time was he successful. 
 Otherwise we get little idea of their opinion one of another, which is unfortunate. 
 We know of the beautiful and affectionate intimacy and respect existing between 
 Mozart and Haydn. We know Beethoven's opinion of Haydn, and Schubert's 
 (shoo' berts) reverence for Beethoven. It would be interesting could we learn how 
 these early masters regarded each other. From stray bits here and there, Spitta 
 (spef to), the biographer of Bach, conjectures that Handel knew and cared little 
 for Bach, while Bach had much desire and curiosity to meet his great contem- 
 porary. 
 
H A.NDKIv. 
 
 1685-1759. 
 
 GEORQE FREDERICK HANDEL (han'dSi) was the 
 son of a surgeon in the town of Halle (hal'le), a 
 man of some position in his way, but not musically. It 
 is worth noting that the two great composers of their 
 time were both born in the year 1685. Bach was of a 
 family which, for generations before him and after him, 
 was famous for its musical disposition, while Handel, who 
 in his day achieved a far more brilliant success than Bach, 
 was of a family so unmusical that his earliest efforts in 
 that direction were systematically thwarted. Bach took 
 to music as a matter of course. Handel was intended by 
 his father for the law, but was driven by the force of his 
 genius to becoming a great musician. His father, as we 
 say, opposed the musical disposition which showed itself 
 at an early age in Greorge Frederick, and forbade him 
 even to go to houses where music might be heard. It is 
 said he went to no school for fear he might hear too 
 much. But, in some way, the boy got a clavichord into 
 his room, a dumb instrument, on which very little noise 
 is made, and on this he taught himself to play at such 
 times as he could escape from his father's notice. And, 
 on one occasion, going with his father to visit a relation 
 in the service of the Duke of Weissenfels (wis'sen fels), 
 Handel was so fortunate as to be allowed to climb up 
 surreptitiously on the organ stool and play away to his 
 heart's content. The Duke, on hearing him, was struck 
 
294 COMPOSERS. 
 
 by his playing, and argued with his father to such an 
 extent that not only were all restrictions removed, but 
 he was even allowed to have some teaching in his 
 favorite art. 
 
 He still continued his legal education, however, and 
 passed through the schools of the town and entered the 
 University at Halle. His father died in 1697, but this 
 does not seem to have altered his plans. At the same time 
 that he entered the University, he was engaged as organ- 
 ist of one of the churches of Halle for a year. At the end 
 of the year, he seems to have finally decided to give up 
 any idea of a legal career, for he left the University, and 
 the town of Halle as well, and taking all his belongings 
 with him, he set out to seek his fortune in Hamburg, then 
 the musical center of Germany, the seat of Grerman opera. 
 
 At Hamburg, Handel fell in with one Mattheson 
 (math' e sun), from whom we learn the most of what 
 we know of his life at this time. He was a young 
 musician, only a few years older than Handel, but he 
 was well known in the place, and he was of good 
 service in putting Handel into the musical set in the 
 town. At first, Handel obtained a place in the Opera 
 orchestra. "He played ripieno (ripla'no) violin," says 
 Mattheson, "and affected to behave as if he could not 
 count five, being naturally inclined to dry humor. But 
 on an occasion when there happened to be no clavierist, 
 he was persuaded to take the place, and proved himself 
 such a man as no one but myself had ever suspected."* 
 
 * There are various anecdotes of Handel's life at Hamburg, of interest. 
 Having slio-mi as above that he could play the harpsichord, he frequently did so 
 at the Opera. On one occasion Handel was at the harpsichord, at the first per- 
 formance of " Cleopatra" (Meopd'tra), an opera by Mattheson, in which the composer 
 took the part of Antony. Antony died before the piece was through, and Mattheson, 
 a man of immense conceit, having finished his part for the evening, came out 
 
HANDEL. 295 
 
 Besides this orchestra playing, Handel occupied himself 
 with composing an opera, which was given in the begin- 
 ning of 1705. And the next year another opera by him 
 was produced, entitled "Nero." But neither has been 
 preserved to us, and neither seems to have been very 
 successful. 
 
 Handel also gave music lessons in Hamburg, and to 
 very good effect, we may imagine — that is to say, he must 
 have had a considerable number of pupils, for after he 
 had been in Hamburg for three years, he started for 
 Italy, to further cultivate his talents and enhance his 
 reputation. So leaving behind him an opera which was 
 produced some time after he had gone, he departed 
 from Hamburg toward the end of 1706, and, stopping at 
 Halle to see his mother, found himself, in the spring of 
 the next year, at Florence. He stayed here but a short 
 time, and passed on to Rome. 
 
 At Rome, he either composed, or didn't compose, a 
 number of pieces which pass under his name ; and this 
 brings us to a curious feature of Handel's organization 
 which we may just note here in passing, so that it will be 
 unnecessary to trouble about it again. Handel at this 
 time, and also later, very frequently introduced into his 
 compositions pieces composed previously by himself. One 
 of the things which are assigned to his stay in Rome is 
 a magnificat (mag nifi kat), which Handel subsequently 
 worked over in several of the numbers in " Israel in 
 Egypt." Whether it is Handel's own or not, is disputed. 
 "Judged by the strict modern standard," remarks one of 
 
 and wished Handel to give up his place to him. This Handel refused to do, and 
 Mattheson, much irritated, gave him a vigorous hlow on the side of the head, as 
 he was going out of the theater. A duel at once followed, in which, it is said, 
 Handel owed his life to a broad brass button on his coat, which caught the point 
 of Mattheson 's sword and interrupted an otherwise deadly thrust. 
 
296 COMPOSERS. 
 
 Handel's later biographers, " he certainly was a very great 
 thief." This is no place to discuss the question, which 
 would become too long for our limits. The fact is, all 
 that we can note, Handel reproduced his own compositions 
 without scruple, and it is not improbable that he worked 
 over other persons' compositions. 
 
 From Rome, Handel returned to Florence, where he 
 produced "Rodrigo" (ro dre'go), the first Italian opera 
 he ever wrote, and shortly afterward to Venice, where 
 his " Agrippina " (ag ri pe'na) was given with very great 
 applause ; then back again to Rome. In Rome, he spent 
 some time — a year or so — where he found favor with the 
 dilettante (dll et tan'ta) of the town, as well as with the 
 musicians there. He composed somewhat, the " Resurrec- 
 tion," a sort of oratorio, and the "Triumph of Time," a 
 cantata, which he subsequently made use of for an English 
 oratorio with the same name. 
 
 He left Rome for Naples in 1708, and there he re- 
 mained about a year, finding, as ever, many friends, and 
 writing much music, which we do not particularize on 
 account of the number of the compositions, as well as be- 
 cause they are by no means well remembered. In 1709, 
 he started to leave Italy, stopping at Rome and at Venice 
 again, and after a visit to his mother, found himself at 
 Hanover, whither he was tempted by two friends he had 
 met in Italy, one of them capellmeister to George, the 
 Elector of Brunswick, and the other. Baron Kilmansegge 
 (kil'man seg ge), a nobleman well known to the Elector. 
 Through these gentlemen Handel was offered the place of 
 capellmeister to the Electoral Court, from which his friend 
 Steffain (stef'fin) desired to retire. Handel accepted the po- 
 sition, but desiring to visit England, was granted a leave of 
 absence of one year, and in 1710 found himself in London. 
 
HANDEL. 297 
 
 Literature was at this time in a highly flourishing 
 state in England. Pope, Addison, Swift, Prior, Gay, 
 Steele, and De Foe, not to mention numbers of others, 
 have made that age a glorious one in the history of 
 English letters. Music, however, was by no means in so 
 good a condition, and it is a bit curious that Handel 
 should have been tempted from Germany and Italy, 
 where he was flattered, courted, and appreciated to the 
 full, to go to England, where he passed the remainder 
 of his life in constant difiiculties. 
 
 But Italian opera was becoming the vogue in London. 
 English noblemen, returned from the Continent, had at- 
 tracted to that metropolis musicians and singers, and it 
 is probable that it was due to the representations of the 
 English whom he met in the musical circles of Venice, 
 Florence, Rome, and Naples, that Handel crossed the 
 Channel. However this may be, Handel reached London 
 toward the end of 1710, and in February of the next year, 
 his "Rinaldo" (re nal' do) was given at the Haymarket. 
 The opera was given with great spectacular magnificence 
 and good singers, and was received with great pleasure by 
 the audience.* Handel became at once well known. He 
 met with many of the wits and art-lovers of the town, who 
 valued him highly. Curiously enough, the meeting place 
 
 * " Einaldo " is said by some to be the best of Handel's Italian operas. It 
 was certainly very successful in its time. The music was delightful, the singers 
 were excellent, the scenery was— for its day— magnificent. It was in " Einaldo " 
 that, during an aria for the soprano, accompanied by two flutes and a flageolet, 
 living birds were let loose in great numbers, which fluttered about on the stage, 
 adding to the spectacular eflfect. This proceeding, Addison— who ridiculed Italian 
 opera in every form- found to be particularly silly, and animadverted upon it 
 in the Spectator. Tradition says that, owing to the inclemency of the season 
 ("Einaldo" was first given in February), it was found impossible to obtain any 
 other birds beside English sparrows. Whether hosts of sparrows would have 
 added to the realistic efliect of a scene representing a tropical garden is, in our 
 mind, matter for doubt. 
 
298 COMPOSERS. 
 
 of these most ciiltivated ornaments of the metropohs, 
 seems to have been the house of one Thomas Britton, 
 an enthusiastic lover of music, who was known by the 
 name of the "Small-coal Man," from the fact that it 
 was his business to carry around on his back small coal, 
 which he peddled for a living all day. In the evening 
 (having washed his hands), he entertained at his concerts 
 the best known musicians of the city.* 
 
 Not to delay here too long, howcA^er, Handel left Lon- 
 don in the summer for his post at Hanover, where he 
 stayed for about a year and a half. But he seems to have 
 been thoroughly pleased with London, and in 1712, he 
 returned thither (on leave of absence for a reasonable 
 length of time), and presented his "Faithful Shepherd" 
 some time in ISTovember of that year. It was not a 
 great success, giving way shortly to "Theseus" (the'se us), 
 which, though not very much better than its predecessor, 
 was much more successful. 
 
 Handel may be now considered as settled in London. 
 He remained there, with occasional absences, until his 
 death. He seems to have utterly forgotten his position 
 at Hanover, until, as will appear later, it was brought to 
 his recollection in rather a disagreeable manner. 
 
 * A "word or two about this worthy may not be uninteresting. Although 
 " poor, low-born, and entirely self-educated, this humble amateur was one of 
 nature's truest gentlemen." All the day he spent in carrying about small coal, 
 which he peddled from a sack which he carried over his shoulder. "When his 
 day's work was done, he retired to his meanly furnished dwelling, removed all 
 trace of the morning's occupation from his person, and spent the evening either 
 in practicing on the viol da gamba, or in studying the books and MSS., of which, 
 during his long life, he contrived to amass a very valuable collection." His house 
 had been originally a stable ; it was divided, however, into two stories, of which the 
 lower served as a storehouse for his coal, while the upper made " a long, narrow 
 room, so low that a tall man could scarcely stand upright in it. In this rude 
 concert-room he was accustomed, every Thursday evening, to entertain his 
 friends with intellectual conversation and the best chamber music that London 
 could produce." 
 
HANDEL. 299 
 
 It will be impossible for us to be as particular as we 
 should desire in narrating Handel's life in the great city. 
 For the next thirty years, his chief occupation was in 
 the composing and directing Italian opera. In this time, 
 he composed no less than thirty-six operas, besides 
 writing songs and arranging others. It is manifestly 
 impossible within our limits, as it would be uninteresting 
 were it not so, to relate in detail the fortunes and mis- 
 fortunes of each one of these productions. 
 
 We will anticipate a bit to speak of Handel's connec- 
 tion with Italian opera, a connection more important to a 
 student of his life than to one of his works. At present, 
 he composed no more of them. But, beginning with 1721, 
 nearly every year saw a new opera composed by Handel, 
 and frequently more than one. In that year, was started 
 the Royal Academy of Music, an institution for the 
 performance of Italian opera, in which Handel was in- 
 terested. But things did not work altogether well. Some 
 of the operas succeeded, others failed. Finally, Handel 
 himself became manager, and in partnership with one 
 Heidegger (hi'dek er), managed the business for some 
 time. But they did not achieve in this way any very 
 great success. Handel is not remembered by his Italian 
 operas, though they occupied, perhaps, the greater part 
 of his life in England. 
 
 To go back to Handel's life where we left it. In 1713, 
 he composed two very fine pieces,— the one for Queen 
 Anne's (anz) birthday, the other in celebration of the 
 Treaty of Utrecht (u'trekt). They are the beginning of 
 his truly Enghsh works, the works to which Handel 
 owes his very great fame. He did not, however, com- 
 pose much at this time, being much sought after in 
 society, and finding the intercourse with those whom he 
 
300 
 
 COMPOSERS. 
 
 met, to be, perhaps, more congenial to him than the hard 
 work necessary to be done in writing Itahan operas and 
 such like. He enjoyed a pension from Queen Anne, had 
 many friends at whose houses he stayed, and led, on the 
 whole, a butterfly existence. 
 
 In 1714, Queen Anne died, and George I. was crowned 
 King of England. This placed Handel in a painful posi- 
 tion, for George I. was, as may be remembered, the very 
 Elector of Hanover from whose court Handel had been 
 excused "for a reasonable time," which time Handel had 
 interpreted to mean nearly two years. ■ George was justly 
 incensed at his truant capellmeister. But the genius ot 
 Handel, aided by his friend Baron Kilmansegge,* over- 
 came the monarch's dislike, and Handel was taken into 
 favor and another pension was added to that granted by 
 Queen Anne. So, when the king left England in 1716, 
 to visit his beloved Hanover, Handel went in his suite, 
 and spent some six months or so before returning to 
 England. 
 
 When he again came to England, an opportunity 
 offered itself to him, which presented many attractions, 
 and was at once accepted. The Duke of Chandos,t at his 
 
 * The means hj which Handel became reconciled to his royal patron is the 
 subject of what seems hardly more than a tradition, yet is worth telling. Han- 
 del's old friend, Baron Kilmansegge, at whose instance Handel had first come to 
 Hanover, and Lord Burlington, a musical nobleman, contrived a plan, and at 
 their suggestion Handel wrote a piece of music to be played on the occasion of 
 an excursion the king was about to make on the Thames (temz). Handel himself 
 engaged an orchestra, and followed the royal barge so closely that all on board 
 could hear the music, which being written especially to be heard across the water, 
 sounded most delightfully. The king was much pleased at the performance, and 
 asked about it. This gave Kilmansegge an opportunity to intercede for his 
 friend, and he did so with such effect that a reconciliation soon followed. 
 
 t " James Brydges, Duke of Chandos, after having served as Paymaster of the 
 British forces, under the command of the Duke of Marlborough (tm'irl' briih), 
 retired from active duty with an enormous fortune, which he spent with the 
 liberality of a monarch. In 171S, he built himself a palace at Cannons, in Mid- 
 dlesex, at an estimated cost of £230,000. In this splendid retreat, the Grand 
 
HANDEL. 301 
 
 splendid palace at Cannons, pursued many of the customs 
 of the numerous small sovereigns scattered over Grer- 
 many, and among his other magnificences had a private 
 chapel, choir, and necessarily a chapel-master. This posi- 
 tion Handel was asked to accept, and did so. He was to 
 live at Cannons, and oversee the music in the chapel. He 
 spent three years here, years of much pleasure, as it may 
 be imagined, and activity, directing the chapel choir, 
 playing the organ, and writing much music. Here were 
 composed the "Chandos Anthems" and the "Chandos Te 
 Deums," the oratorio of "Esther," and the cantata of 
 "Acis (a' SIS) and Galatea" (gal ate' a). These last two 
 are, perhaps, the most important of his compositions 
 here. " Esther " was his first attempt at what became 
 his greatest glory. And the operetta of "Acis and Gala- 
 tea" (the words by Gay), is a beautiful little thing, per- 
 haps the best piece of work Handel had yet done.* 
 
 In 1721, Handel left the household of the Duke of 
 Chandos and returned to London. The next twenty years 
 were taken up, as we have noted, in devotion to Italian 
 opera. For that time, the story of his life consists of a 
 succession of operas, more or less successful, of visits to 
 
 Duke, as he was popularly called, lived in little less than regal state ; protected 
 by a guard of veterans, selected from among the pensioners at Chelsea Hospital, 
 who attended him even to church ; and surrounded by every luxury that wealth 
 could purchase, or boundless liberality suggest. Por the services in his private 
 chapel, he maintained not only a numerous choir, but a band of instrumental 
 performers, also, on a scale as grand as that of the kapelle of a German potentate." 
 * It was at Cannons that Handel composed the well-known "Harmonious 
 Blacksmith." It is said that while walking through Edgeware, the village near 
 the Duke's palace, he was overtaken by a shower, and found refuge in a black- 
 smith's shop. There he heard the blacksmith singing a tune, to which he kept 
 time with his hammer on the anvil. On going home, Handel sat down and wrote 
 a set of variations on the blacksmith's tune. The anvil on which the smith beat 
 out the accompaniment has been traced through a hundred and fifty years. It 
 passed from hand to hand, from one blacksmith to another, till it became the 
 property of an amateur. Since that time it has passed through several hands, 
 and is now in the possession of a well-kuowu musician of Loudon. 
 
302 
 
 COMPOSERS. 
 
 the Continent to engage singers, of quarrels and bicker- 
 ings with the singers when they were engaged.* They 
 were years of alternate favor and disfavor in the eyes 
 of the general public, but toward the year 1737, Handel 
 must have felt that he had worked that vein to the 
 utmost. His last opera was written in 1740. 
 
 On January 16, 1739, Handel produced at the Hay- 
 market Theater the oratorio of "Saul." It had been com- 
 posed during the previous autumn, and was of the nature 
 of an experiment. "Esther" had been written at Can- 
 nons, while Handel was in the household of the Duke of 
 Chandos, and "Deborah" (deb'o ra) and "Athaliah" (atha- 
 li'a) had been given in 1733, the one in London, the 
 other in Ox:ford, but neither seems to have been a strik- 
 ing success. No more was " Saul," although the " Dead 
 March " by no means failed of having an effect. But the 
 importance of " Saul " lies in its being practically the 
 first of an unbroken line of oratorios, — compositions 
 which, though at first received with small favor, were in 
 
 * The most notable of these many quarrels was the rivalry between Cuzzoni 
 (kdotso'ne) and Faustina (/as «8' m), two prime-donne {pre' ma don' no) of the first rank. 
 This became a dispute of immense proportions, embroiling all of polite London. 
 The means taken to get each one to do her best are somewhat entertaining. As 
 neither would sing if she thought her rival was in any way given the precedence, 
 it was a bit difficult to arrange so that they might both sing in the same opera. In 
 "Alessandro " {it les san'dro), however, Handel arranged the two parts, so that neither 
 could possibly object. They sang song for song, duet for duet, throughout the piece, 
 and when they sang together, the parts were so artfully varied that neither could 
 be said to sing the first or the second. Lady AValpole {wol' pol) used to have 
 difficulties with the two, for she was in the habit of inviting them both to dinner 
 on Sundays, and she desired to hear them sing afterward. Neither could he asked 
 to sing first, for the other, would then have ^ leen so offended as to remain utterly 
 dumb. Lady Walpole once found a way out. She enticed Faustina into a distant 
 room to look at some rare china. Cuzzoni was told that her rival had gone, and 
 forthwith consented to sing. On some other pretense she was herself removed 
 from the music-room, and Faustina returning, favored the company herself. 
 
 But beside mere rivalries, there were other and more annoying quarrels, 
 iiitiigues, and disputes, and, on the whole, Handel's career as an impresario (imprS- 
 sd' n D) seems to have been by no means a royal road. 
 
HANDEL. 303 
 
 the end so successful that, on the whole, they make up 
 almost the whole reputation of Handel. " Saul " was 
 followed by "Israel in Egypt," but this was received with 
 even more coldness than was "Saul." It was the day of 
 Handel's failures. His operas, which he still wrote, were 
 unpopular, and it might perhaps have been expected 
 that his oratorios would not have been successful. Prob- 
 ably he was not by any means sorry to accept an invi- 
 tation to Ireland, on the part of the Duke of Devonshire. 
 The visit was quickly arranged. Handel agreed to com- 
 pose an oratorio, to be performed for the benefit of the 
 charitable societies of Dublin. This was the oratorio of 
 the "Messiah."* 
 
 With the " Messiah," which was given to the great 
 delight of a crowded audience on the evening of April 13, 
 1742, Handel seems to have reached a turning point. 
 From this moment, with times of bad luck, he was on 
 the whole successful. To the end of his career, Handel 
 turned his attention to English oratorios. He wrote thir- 
 teen after the "Messiah," about one every year, sometimes 
 two. Henceforth, his greatness was incontestable. His 
 oratorios were produced in London to appreciative audi- 
 ences, so that, though he was in 1746 reduced so low as 
 to become for the second time bankrupt, he was, at the 
 time of his death, worth a sum equal to $100,000. 
 
 * The " Messiah " was first given April 12, 1742, " for the relief of the prisoners 
 in the several gaols, and for the support of Mercers' Hospital and of the Charitable 
 Infu'mary on the Inn's Quay." Gentlemen were requested to come without their 
 swords and ladies without their hoops, and by these means, room was found for 
 one hundred more than could otherwise have been accommodated. This large 
 audience was greatly pleased with the performance. "It was allowed by the 
 greatest judges to he the finest composition of music that was ever heard." It 
 was afterward given in England, and it was on its first performance in that 
 country, March 23, 1743, that the whole assembly, with the king at their head, 
 rose to their feet at the "Hallelujah Chorus," and remained standing throughout 
 the number— a custom in England to-day, whenever the "Messiah" is given. 
 
304 
 
 COMPOSERS. 
 
 A history of his later years would consist of little else 
 than an account of the production of one after another 
 of these great works.* He wrote little else. 
 
 Toward the end of 1751, Handel began to lose his 
 sight. Although every thing that could be done for him 
 was done, the care of surgeons was unavailing, and he 
 became totally blind. His last true oratorio, "Jephtha" 
 (jef'tha), was produced early in 1752. One more did he 
 write, an adaptation of his Italian work, "Triumph of 
 Time and Truth," and this was his last work. 
 
 His strength began to fail shortly after he became 
 blind, t and finally, on Good Friday, April 13, 1759, he 
 died. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, in the Poets' 
 Corner. 
 
 * It may not be useless to add "here a list of Handel's oratorios, with the date 
 of their iirst production. The list is from Eockstro's admirable "Life." Twenty- 
 two oratorios : " 1st Passion Oratorio," 1704 ; " La Resurrezione " (7\i sdOr ret se o'lia), 
 1708; "H Trionfo del Tempo" (el trlbn'fo del tern' po), 1708; "2d Passion 
 Oratorio," 1717; "Esther," 1720; "Deborah," 173,3; "Athaliah," 1733; "Saul," 
 1739; "Israel in Egypt," 1739; " Messiah," 1742 ; " Samson," 1743 ; "Joseph," 
 1744; "Belshazzar," 1744; "Occasional," 1746; "Judas Maccabseus," 1747; 
 "Alexander Balus," 1748; " Joshua," 1748 ; " Solomon," 1749 ; "Susanna," 1749; 
 "Theodora," 1750; "Jephtha," 1752; "Triumph of Time," 1757. Handel also 
 wrote forty-seven operas In all, but as these are by no means so well known as 
 his oratorios, we conceive that we may be pardoned the omission of the hst of 
 their names. 
 
 t Handel, after he became almost totally blind, was greatly aided by John 
 Christopher Smith, an old pupil, with whose aid he found himself able to oversee 
 (if we may use the expression) the production of his works. He himself 
 frequently played the organ at these performances, sometimes playing from 
 memory, but more usually extemporizing. "To see him led to the organ," says 
 Burney, " after this calamity, at upward of seventy years of age, and then con- 
 ducted toward the audience to make his accustomed obeisance, was a sight so 
 truly affecting and deplorable, to persons of sensibility, as greatly diminished 
 their pleasure on hearing his performance." It is said, too, that when Smith 
 pJayed the organ, when Handel was first blind, the passage from "Samson": 
 
 " Total eclipse — no sun, no moon. 
 All dark, amid the blaze of noon," 
 
 would bring tears to the eyes of the whole audience. 
 
HAYDN 
 
 FRANZ (frftnts) JOSEPH HAYDN (ha'dn), like many 
 other famous m.usicians, was remarkable for his 
 talents at a very early age. Musical genius, more than 
 any other, manifests itself almost at birth. It is, as it 
 were, an extra sense. Those who have it, have it at birth. 
 Those who have it not at birth, seldom gain it. Bach 
 (bak), of a musical family, was musical from his earliest 
 years. Handel (han'del) played away on his durnb clavi- 
 chord before he was seven years old. Mozart (mo zart') 
 appeared at a public concert at six years of age ; Men- 
 delssohn (men' dels son) at eight, Chopin (sho pang') at 
 nine. Beethoven (ba'toven) took music lessons when 
 only five. Haydn, like the others, was an infant genius. 
 
 He was the son of Matthias (maththi'fis) Haydn, a 
 wheelwright of Rohrau (ro'row). He seems to have been 
 an honest and worthy, but by no means remarkable, 
 peasant. He was fond of playing the harp and of sing- 
 ing, but it does not appear that he was remarkable at 
 either of these amusements. Indeed, he played always 
 by ear, and knew nothing of music as a science. 
 
 Franz Joseph Haydn was born on the last daj^ of 
 March, 173 2. For about six years, he was allowed to 
 be a child, and at the end of that time, he went out into 
 the world to make his fortune. That is, his mother's 
 cousin, one Frankh (frank), was chorregent (kor' re gent) at 
 Hainburg (hin' botjrgh), but a few miles away, and to him 
 
306 COMPOSERS. 
 
 little Joseph, who had shown signs of musical promise, 
 was sent to gain a musical education and his living. 
 From this time till his death, fifty-nine years later, 
 Haydn lived practically alone, with little but his music 
 to interest him, and to be loved. 
 
 Under his cousin Frankh, Joseph learned to sing cor- 
 rectly and well, and learned also some things about music, 
 — notably, if we may believe an anecdote of the time, to 
 play the drum, which he did when only six years of age, 
 at a public funeral procession.* But he had not been at 
 Hainburg long (about two years), when his singing at- 
 tracted the attention of the capellmeister (ka pel' mis ter) 
 of St. Stephen's Cathedral, Vienna. The capellmeister, 
 Reutter (roi'ter) by name, was on the lookout for voices, 
 and saw at once that, although the boy's voice was 
 nothing very great, his musical talent and instinct would 
 probably do credit to any one who should befriend 
 him. An arrangement was made. Reutter offered to 
 make himself responsible for Joseph's musical education, 
 and it was agreed that the boy should shortly leave for 
 Vienna, where he should become one of the choristers at 
 the Cathedral of St. Stephen. 
 
 At the chapel of St. Stephen's, Haydn remained for 
 ten years. What he learned of music beyond the art of 
 
 * They were on one occasion about to have a procession ; in fact, several pro- 
 cessions, for it was in Passion week. Prankh was to direct them, and. among his 
 other difficulties, was the sudden death of his kettle-drummer. He was at a loss, 
 till he bethought himself of his young pupil. He showed Joseph how to use the 
 sticks, and left him to learn to drum. Joseph got hold of a basket, which had 
 been used to hold flour, and turning it upside down on a chair, he beat away the 
 whole morning, and learned to drum quite well, l^rankh, however, was displeased 
 to observe that the flour, which had sifted through the basket, had utterly ruined 
 the chair. But he was somewhat consoled to observe that Joseph had made 
 himself a fairly skillful drummer. The little fellow marched in the procession 
 behind a drum, which was carried for him by a hunchback, and though he 
 drummed well, created some amusement on account of his small size. He was, in 
 fact, only about six years old. 
 
HAYDN. 307 
 
 singing, he learned by himself. Reutter, it is said, gave 
 him two lessons in theory of music, during the whole 
 time. He did, however, learn to sing well, and he had 
 some time to himself, and this he employed in efforts at 
 conaposition, and in studying the church music, of which 
 he heard so much, and also solo singing and instru- 
 mental music. In fact, it was a remarkably good apxjren- 
 ticeship, although it was necessarily supplemented by 
 subsequent study. Even while in the chapel choii-, 
 though he learned little from Reutter, he procured one 
 or two theoretical works, and studied till he must have 
 known them almost by heart. 
 
 But this could not last. His brothers came to Vienna, 
 and were given places in the choir, but Joseph, being the 
 eldest, was the first to become superannuated. His voice 
 broke ; the Emperor declared that he sung like a crow ; 
 Haydn gave Reutter a chance, and was dismissed. He 
 found himself almost alone in Vienna, without money or 
 a home, and very little idea as to how he might get one. 
 For eight years, he lived practically from hand to mouth, 
 doing any thing musical to which he could turn his hand. 
 But in these eight years he worked hard, learned much, 
 and made himself something of a reputation. 
 
 For a time after he left the cathedral, he lived in a 
 small garret,* and supported himself by playing the violin 
 
 * In these days, he was often in want of enough to eat, and frequently strolled 
 about the country to places where he hoped he might obtain some employment. 
 On one occasion, he found himself in a cloister in Styria (stir' i a). He asked to 
 be employed, but was refused. So, he made the acquaintance of one of the sing- 
 ers, and asked him to allow him just to sing once in his place. The boy refused. 
 So, Haydn stood beside him and, as the music began, he quietly possessed him- 
 self of the boy's music-book (and gave him a bit of money in exchange), and 
 began to sing. He sang so well, though his voice was not of the best, that the 
 chorus-master was delighted with him, and was sorry he had before been uncivil 
 to him. And the priests entertained him for a week or more, during which period, 
 as he said, he filled himself up for a long time to come. 
 
BOS COMPOSERS. 
 
 at balls, or in orchestras, by arranging music, or by giv- 
 ing lessons. He was often in actual want, and, though 
 at the cathedral his life had been none of the easiest, it 
 was worse with him now. But good luck fell in his way 
 now and then.* A worthy man left him a small sum of 
 money. He attracted the notice of the Italian Metastasio 
 (ma tas ta' se o), who later introduced him to Porpora 
 (por'po ra), the then famous music-teacher. He worked 
 hard on his books of composition and theory, and prob- 
 ably found delight in his studies, although he was often 
 enough near starving. 
 
 Little by little his compositions became known to a 
 few. It is to this period belongs the tale of how Haydn 
 and a friend of his found their way into a beer-cellar, 
 where a half-drunken orchestra were rendering one of 
 Haydn's own pieces. "Whose piece is that?" inquired 
 he. "It is Haydn's," returned the fiddler. "And a mighty 
 poor thing, too," answered Haydn ; whereupon the orches- 
 
 * Among other things, he wrote an opera, of which they tell the following 
 tale : It was composed when he was ahout twenty years old. Haydn and two or 
 three of his friends were engaged in serenading the handsome daughter of Ber- 
 nadone Kurtz (ber nd do' nd IcODrts), a famous comic actor. Kurtz, on hearing the 
 music, was much struck by it, and came right down-stairs. "Who composed 
 that?" he asked. "I did," said Haydn. "What; a boy of your age?" "At my 
 age." " This is droll ; come up-stairs." Haydn came up-stairs, and then Berna- 
 done opened to him his mind. He wished an opera to be written to a libretto 
 he had,—" The Devil on Two Sticks," by name,— would Haydn write it ? Haydn 
 would, and took the libretto home with him. He met with one whimsical diffi- 
 culty. He had to compose music for a storm and, having never seen the sea at 
 all, was somewhat at a loss. Bernadone could not help him much, although he 
 tried to imagine what it must be, and to describe it to Haydn. "Imagine 
 mountains rising, and valleys sinking ; a mountain becomes a valley, and a val- 
 ley rises to a mountain ; they follow each other ; at every moment alps and abysses 
 succeed each other. Add thunder and lightning, but be sure to represent these 
 mountains and valleys." Haydn got no idea at all of what was wanted. He ran 
 his hands over the key-board, but could, by no means, reach the desired end. 
 " The devil take the tempest," he cried, slamming Ms hands on either end of the 
 key-board. " Tou have it ; you have it 1 " cried the actor, embracing him. 
 Haydn afterward, in coming to England, had a chance to see how near hia 
 description came to the reality. 
 
HAYBN. 309 
 
 tra rose upon him, and would have done something 
 serious to this Philistine had not the friend hustled 
 Haydn unceremoniously out-of-doors. 
 
 He wrote a comic opera, too, at about this time, and 
 was paid twenty-five ducats for it, with which he seemed 
 well enough satisfied, and, as the music has been lost, we 
 can not say how much more or less it may have been 
 worth. 
 
 It was about this time that Haydn began to give 
 lessons to Marianne (ma ri an'), the daughter of Nicolai 
 Martinez (ne' ko 11 mar te' nez), who was in the train of 
 the Papal representative at Vienna. The place was got 
 for him by Metastasio, the Italian poet, who was then 
 living with the Martinez family, and it had this good 
 effect. Haydn used to go with his scholar to Porpora, 
 her singing-master, to accompany her singing upon the 
 clavier. Porpora was a man of great knowledge in the 
 matter of composition, and Haydn undoubtedly gained 
 much from thus being with him. He also accompanied 
 various other of Porpora's scholars, and became in this 
 way better known. He thus fell into the way of getting 
 more pupils, and his circumstances became much brighter. 
 He devoted his time to study as well as to teaching, and 
 also composed somewhat, though this was by no means a 
 prolific period with him. 
 
 In 1759, Haydn was made capellmeister to Count 
 Morzin (mort'zen), an enthusiastic amateur. His struggles 
 for daily bread were over. He might have remained hap- 
 pily with Count Morzin, almost forever, but that he chose 
 to marry, and as this was contrary to his contract with 
 Count Morzin, he left that nobleman's service. Another 
 reason, indeed the principal one, was that Count Morzin 
 was obliged to curtail his expenses, and did so by dis- 
 
310 COMPOSERS. 
 
 charging his musical establishment. The result of this 
 was that Haydn, in the year 1760, found himself mar- 
 ried, and also capellmeister to Prince Paul Anton Ester- 
 hazy (po-wl an' ton es ter ha' ze). 
 
 The first of these seems to have been an almost un- 
 mixed evil. Why he married his wife can not be made 
 out. She was one of his pupils, the daughter of a wig- 
 maker, older than himself, and she seems to have been 
 as bad a shrew as could well be imagined. She is said 
 to have been quarrelsome, imperious, unfeeling, and 
 malicious, a spendthrift, and a bigot. But Haydn, though 
 he never loved her after his marriage, never allowed her 
 to trouble him very much, and she seems to have kept 
 as well out of his way as might be. Altogether, it was 
 a stupid thing to have married her, and Haydn seems to 
 have appreciated the fact later. 
 
 His connection with the Esterhazys was, on the con- 
 trary, one of the most fortunate events of his life. He 
 remained capellmeister to three successive princes, until 
 his death — a period of forty-nine years — with one or two 
 absences. 
 
 Haydn's position in the Esterhazy household was, 
 more properly, that of vice-capellmeister for Werner 
 {^AAer'ner). The former capellmeister was still to hold 
 the title, though Haydn was to perform the duties. 
 Prince Paul Anton died in the early part of 1762, and 
 was succeeded by his brother Nicholas,* the one of the 
 
 * Prince Esterhazy himself played the barytone, an instrument now superseded 
 by the 'cello. The prince played only in one key. Haydn practiced for six 
 months, day and night, upon the instrument, often disturbed by the abuse of his 
 wife, and upon one occasion, incurred the censure of the prince, for neglecting 
 his compositions. Thereat, impelled by a fit of vanity, he played upon the 
 instrument at one of the evening entertainments in several keys. The prince 
 was not at all disturbed, and only said, "Haydn, you ought to have known 
 better." At first he was pained by the indifference of his honored master, but 
 
HAYDN. 311 
 
 family best known to the world, in all probability. 
 For Prince Nicholas, an enthusiastic lover of music, 
 Haydn labored until the good prince died, in the year 
 1790. His life was, on the whole, unvaried for all these 
 years. The prince was a man of enormous wealth, and 
 of enormous estates, which he dearly loved. He was far 
 fonder of living at his palace of Eisenstadt (I'zen stat), or 
 later, of Esterhaz, than of visiting at Vienna. And, as a 
 natural consequence, his capellmeister remained in the 
 country, too, for it was his duty to appear before the 
 prince every day, to learn his pleasure in regard to the 
 day's music. Undoubtedly Haydn found this a little 
 painful. He would have liked to see more of Vienna. 
 But he was wonderfully loyal to his master, and perhaps 
 was, to a degree, comforted by the rule that musicians' 
 families should not reside at the princes' abode, whereby 
 he enjoyed a freedom which Vienna could not have 
 possessed. We can not easily describe his life here in 
 extenso within our limits — a few notes must be sufficient. 
 Haydn's duties at Eisenstadt were, on the whole, of a 
 somewhat stereotyped nature. He had to arrange every 
 thing, to drill his orchesti-a and chorus, to compose 
 music for them, to compose music for Prince Nicholas 
 himself, who loved to play on the barytone, to arrange 
 the mu.sic on all festal occasions, of which there were 
 various, during the thirty years that he was in active 
 service. Five of these years were passed at Eisenstadt, 
 the others at Esterhaz, the newly finished palace and 
 estate of Prince Nicholas. And shortly before the Ester- 
 hazy establishment was removed to its new abode, at 
 
 he immediately felt it was a gentle reproof, because lie had wasted so much time 
 and neglected his proper work to become a good barytone player, and turned to 
 his compositions again with renewed earnestness. For the barytone alone he 
 has written upward of one hundred and seventy-five pieces 
 
312 
 
 COMPOSEKS. 
 
 the death of the old capeUmeister, whose place Haydn 
 had filled, he was himself given the title and honor 
 which belonged to the work which lie had all along 
 done. 
 
 We can not very well make any statement of Haydn's 
 work during this period. He wrote much, however, 
 symphonies, operas, cantatas, and many other pieces, both 
 vocal and instrumental. And he began to become well 
 known and highly valued at Vienna, although he was 
 unfortunate enough to be seldom there. 
 
 It was at Esterhaz that Haydn wrote the " Toy 
 Symphony," having bought the toy instruments at a 
 fair. He brought them home secretly, wrote the sym- 
 phony, and subsequently produced them at one of the 
 regular rehearsals. Here, too, he wrote the "Surprise 
 Symphony," so called. The orchestra was in despair at 
 having to remain at Esterhaz two months longer than 
 they had expected. Haydn sympathized with them, for 
 he, too, loved Vienna. So they conveyed a hint to their 
 master by the following means : In the very midst of 
 the symphony one evening, one of the players quietly 
 arose, put out his light, and went into the anteroom; 
 so another, and another, until, to the great astonishment 
 of the audience, Haydn and Thomasini (to ma se'ne), 
 Esterhazy's favorite violinist, were the only ones left. 
 Haydn arose, put out his light, took his music, and 
 joined the rest of the orchestra. In a minute, Thomasini 
 also retired. "If all go, we may as well go, too," said 
 ISTicholas. "Haydn," he went on, "the gentlemen have 
 my consent to go to-morrow."* 
 
 * Haydn used to grieve mucli at the privations lie suflfered In being kept 
 away from his dearly-loved Vienna. "I became three pounds thinner on the 
 way," he remarks, on one occasion, speaking of a journey to Esterhaz, " because 
 
HAYDN. 313 
 
 "We should say a word or so about the friendship 
 which existed between Haydn and Mozart.* Both were 
 Freemasons, and each had for tlie otlier a great and 
 fond admiration. They probabl}^ saw eacli other but 
 little ; for Haydn was more at Esterhaz than Vienna, 
 throughout the time that Mozart was residing there. 
 Mozart died while Haydn was in London, and Haydn 
 said that his only regret in seeing Vienna again, was 
 that he should not see also the great Mozart. 
 
 This visit to London was a sudden change in Haydn's 
 routine of life. His first visit was in 1790. He had by 
 this time become well known in many foreign countries, 
 by means of his compositions, and had been invited to 
 visit many different parts of Europe. From London, he 
 had received flattering and pressing invitations. Much 
 as Haydn longed to see some other country than his 
 own, and especially Italy, he felt himself bound to the 
 Esterhazy family, and all these temptations were sternly 
 
 of the loss of my good Vienna fare. * * * Here, In Esterliaz, no one asks me, 
 ' Would you like chocolate ? ' ' Do you desire coffee with or without milk ? ' 
 ' With what can I serve you, dear Haydn ? ' ' Will you have vanilla or pine-apple 
 ice ? ' Would that I had only a piece of good Parmesan (piir me zdn') cheese, so 
 that I might the more easily swallow the black dumplings 1 Pardon me for 
 taking up your time with such piteous stuff — much allowance must be made for 
 a man spoiled by the good things in Vienna ; but I have already commenced 
 to accustom myself to the country by degrees, and yesterday I studied for the 
 first time cjuite in the Haydn manner." 
 
 * Haydn first met Mozart in the year 1781, when the latter had moved to 
 Vienna permanently. Their respect and esteem were mutual, and each had a 
 thorough admiration for the other. "Sir," said Mozart to an envious musician, 
 " if we were melted down together, we would be far from making a Haydn." 
 And he dedicated to Haydn a series of six quartets in the most respectful and 
 loving terms. As for Haydn, he declared to Leopold Mozart, that he believed 
 his son to be the greatest composer with whom he was acquainted. He also said 
 that if Mozart had composed nothing but his quartets and his requiem, he would 
 be immortal, and always heard Mozart's music whenever an opportunity offered. 
 On Mozart's death, which occurred while he was in London, he was deeply 
 moved, and afterward said, " Mozart's loss is irretrievable. I can never forget his 
 playing in my life. It went to the heart." 
 
314 COMPOSERS. 
 
 put on one side. But, in 1790, Prince Nicholas died, and 
 fciis successor decided not to keep up the musical es- 
 tablishment. Thus Haydn was free to do as he chose. 
 
 At this moment, Salomon (sal' o mon), a London violin- 
 ist, made his appearance. He was one of the most success- 
 ful impresarii (im pres sa' ri e) of London, and Haydn at 
 once acceded to his desires. Salomon guaranteed Haydn 
 £1,200 for one year, and Haydn promised an opera, six 
 symphonies, various new compositions, and so forth. In 
 December, 1790, he left Vienna, with Salomon, for London. 
 He was received with great hospitality, and arrangements 
 were at once set on foot for his concerts. It was some 
 time, however, before these could be given. In fact, the 
 first concert did not take place until March 1 5th. And, 
 before this, a strong opposition had been created, which 
 seriously threatened Haydn's success. The managers of 
 the Professional Concerts, who had themselves tried to 
 obtain Haydn, were now vigorous in depreciating him. 
 And as their concert came off first, thanks to unfortunate 
 delays in Salomon's arrangements, there was much danger 
 that Haydn might not prosper. But these apprehensions 
 were not fulfilled. The concerts were a great success. 
 Haydn played the piano, while Salomon himself played 
 first violin. At each performance, new compositions of 
 Haydn's were rendered, and the whole series was a great 
 success. And the next year, the same thing was repeated. 
 
 It was for these concerts that Haydn composed his 
 twelve grand symphonies. "You will never surpass these 
 works," remarked Salomon. "I never mean to try," re- 
 turned Haydn. In regard to his projected opera, Haydn 
 was not so successful, for Q-allini (gal le'ne), for whom it 
 was to be written, could by no means obtain a license, 
 and his new theater was therefore unopened for opera. 
 
HAYDN. 315 
 
 Haydn received many honors in England. His ben- 
 efit concert was filled to overfiowing. He was created 
 Doctor of Music at Oxford. He sat near the king at the 
 great Handel Festival, and, at London, he was feted and 
 lionized to a great degree. He was courted by the Pro- 
 fessionals, who would have given much could they have 
 seduced him into breaking his engagement with Salomon. 
 Toward the end of July, 1792, he returned to Vienna. 
 
 On his way, he stopped at Bonn (bon), to meet Prince 
 Anton Esterhazy, and here, too, he met with Beethoven, 
 then a young man of twenty-two, who was about to be 
 sent to Vienna by the Elector of Cologne (ko ion'), for a 
 musical education. It is not improbable that Haydn 
 made arrangements here to receive Beethoven as his 
 pupil, which he did the next year. The arrangement 
 was not very successful. Haydn did not devote himself 
 to Beethoven as much as would have been well. Bee- 
 thoven conceived a jealousy of the older man, and the 
 intercourse between them was, by no means, so pleasant 
 as had been the friendship between Haydn and Mozart. 
 
 Haydn used to say that he was never popular in 
 G-ermany, until he had been in England. However this 
 may be, he was certainly very popular in Vienna during 
 the year or so following his London trip. His concerts, 
 at which he produced his London compositions, were 
 well attended and much applauded, and he himself was 
 courted and lionized in a manner which could not but 
 have been very pleasing to him. 
 
 At the beginning of 1794, in accordance with an 
 agreement made with Salomon, Haydn again journeyed to 
 London * to conduct a series of concerts. His stay here 
 
 * Sir G. Smart, who was at this time a violin player with Salomon, relates a 
 good tale of Haydn's second visit to London. At one of the rehearsals, there was 
 
316 ' COMPOSERS. 
 
 was, like his first, most successful. The Professional 
 Concerts, which had offered rival attractions during his 
 former tour, no longer existed, and Haydn and Salomon 
 for two seasons delighted London with their performances. 
 The pecuniary results of the visit were most gratifying, 
 and Haydn returned to Vienna in the summer of 1795, 
 with a modest competence for the rest of his life. He 
 had received, while in London, a letter from Prince 
 Nicholas Esterhazy, the grandson of Haydn's former 
 patron, stating his desire to reconstruct his grandfather's 
 musical establishment, and asking if Haydn would act 
 as capellmeister. Haydn replied that he was now, as 
 always, devoted to the Esterhazy family. 
 
 After his return from Lond.on, Haydn lived quietly in 
 a little house he had purchased in one of the suburbs of 
 Vienna, composing, performing his duties as capell- 
 meister, and otherwise enjoying the evening of life. 
 " Grod preserve the Emperor Francis," was one of the 
 compositions of this epoch. Two others of more fame, 
 perhaps, ai-e his two oratorios, " The Creation " and " The 
 Seasons." It is said that Salomon first suggested to 
 Haydn the idea of composing an oratorio, and had shown 
 him a poem on the subject of the Creation. This poem 
 Haydn brought to light at the request of Van Suieten 
 (van swe a' ten), a Viennese connoisseur, and composed 
 
 need of a drummer ; for the regular performer failed to appear. Haydn asked the 
 orchestra if any one could play the kettle-drum. "I can," said Smart. He was 
 then eighteen years old, and though he had never before had a drumstick in his 
 hands, thought that correct time was the only thing needed. After the first 
 movement had been played , Haydn praised him for his execution, but added, with 
 mild sarcasm, that in Germany they had a way of striking the drum, so as to 
 stop the vibration after each stroke, and added that the effect was thereby 
 heightened. With a consciousness of the skill gathex'ed from his lessons on the 
 meal-tub, Haydn showed how the thing was done. Smart looked on comijosedly, 
 and remarked that, if Haydn preferred that style, they could undoubtedly do so in 
 England as weU as in Germany. 
 
HAYDN. 317 
 
 the oratorio. It was a work of eighteen months, under- 
 taken piously and seriously, and with true religious feel- 
 ing.* It was given (in 1800) in the Schwartzenburg 
 (swarf zen burg) palace, and then in public in Vienna. 
 Every-where did it achieve the greatest popularity. In 
 London, there were at once produced two versions, and 
 it long remained a favorite, although now, if we mistake 
 not, it is seldom produced. 
 
 It was in the later years of Haydn's life that Beethoven 
 came to him as a pupil. Of their intercourse, we shall 
 have more to say under our Life of Beethoven. They 
 did not get on well together, though there was no serious 
 quarrel, t 
 
 "The Seasons" was not so successful a work. It was 
 undertaken on the encouraging reception given to " The 
 Creation," but Haydn by no means felt as inspired by 
 this second subject as by his first. "In 'The Creation,' 
 angels speak of Q-od," said he. "In 'The Seasons,' no one 
 greater than Farmer Simon." 
 
 For the next few years, Haydn lived on happily, 
 though doing but little musical work. His strength had 
 been seriously drawn upon by his labors in composing 
 
 * One thing whicli should be noted ahout Haydn, was the very strongly- 
 marked religious element in his life. All his scores have marked at their beginning, 
 "In nomine Domine" ("In the name of G-od"), or "Soli Deo gloria" ("To God 
 alone be glory"). And at the end is written, "Laus Deo" ("Praise be to God"). 
 " The Creation " was a distinctly religious work, and was written by Haydn in a 
 most reverent spirit, with frequent recourse to prayer. 
 
 t "Although neither cordially liked the other, a tolerable appearance of friend- 
 ship was maintained. It was, perhaps, impossible that between two such totally 
 different natures the connection could have been otherwise. Haydn was genial 
 and affable ; from his long contest with poverty, rather obsequious ; not apt to 
 take offense, or to imagine slights ; ready to render unto Csesar his due ; in short, 
 a courtier. 
 
 " What greater contrast to all this can be imagined than our proud, reserved, 
 brusque Beethoven ? He pay court to princes, or wait with ' bated breath ' upon 
 their whims 1 He the stormy republican, who regarded all men as on the same 
 level, and would bow to nothing less than the Divine in man." 
 
318 COMPOSERS. 
 
 the oratorios, and he became weaker and weaker. The 
 political troubles of the time were trials to him, and he 
 finally died on May 31, 1809, while Vienna was in the 
 hands of the French.* 
 
 * " Haydii was slender but strong, and below the medium height, with legs 
 disproportionately short, and seeming all the shorter, owing to his old-fashioned 
 style of dress. His features were tolerably regular, his face serious and express- 
 ive, but, at the same time, attractive for its benignity. " Kindliness and gentle 
 earnestness showed themselves in his person and bearing," says G-riesinger (grez'- 
 ing er). When he was in earnest, his countenance was dignified, and in pleasant 
 conversation he had a laughing expression, though Dies (des') [a friend], says he 
 never heard him laugh aloud. His large aquiline nose, disfigured by a polypus, 
 was, like the rest of his face, deeply pitted by small-pox, so that the nostrils were 
 differently shaped. The under lip, which was strong and somewhat coarse, was 
 very prominent. His complexion was very brown. One of his biographical 
 sketches mentions that he was called a Moor. He considered himself ugly, and 
 mentioned two princes who could not endure his appearance, because he seemed 
 deformed to them. He stuck to his wig, in spite of all the changing modes 
 through two generations, even to his death ; but it concealed, to the disadvantage 
 of the general expression of his physiognomy, a large part of his broad and finely- 
 developed forehead. * * * There were great joyousness and mirth in his char- 
 acter, and in his old age he said himself, "Life is a charming affair." Joy in life 
 was the fundamental characteristic of his existence and his compositions. * * * 
 The unvarying simplicity of his life gave him good health." 
 
MOZART. 
 
 1756-1791. 
 
 LEOPOLD MOZART (mo zart'), the son of a book- 
 J binder of Augsburg (o^A^gz' burg), became in 1743 
 one of the musicians in the service of the Archbisliop of 
 Salzburg (salts' burg). In time he was made sub-director 
 of the archbishop's chapel. Besides his other duties, he 
 gave lessons on the violin. He married Anna Maria 
 Perte (n-ia re' a per' ta), a woman of much beauty. Of 
 this marriage were born seven children, but only two 
 survived — a daughter, Mary Anne, by name, and a son. 
 
 Johann Chrysostom Wolfgang Amadeus (yo ban' kris'- 
 6s ttim wvdblf gang am a de' us) Mozart was the full 
 name of the son, who was born at Salzburg, January 2 7, 
 1756. He was, in our estimation, the most remarkable 
 infant prodigy that ever existed. His father took great 
 pains with the musical education of his children. When 
 Mary was seven, her father began to give her lessons on 
 the harpsichord. Wolfgang, who was, at the time, but 
 three years of age, desired to learn also. His father, how- 
 ever, thought him rather young, and Wolfgang was re- 
 duced to finding out for himself on the piano such chords 
 as he was able to compass with his baby fingers. But in 
 a year or so, his father began to teach him also, some 
 little things, more in fun than for any other reason, and 
 the little fellow learned the simple pieces with the 
 utmost ease. He became so fond of his music, that it 
 took the place of the usual amusements of childhood. 
 
320 COMPOSERS. 
 
 For a time, he was led away from it by his love for the 
 other studies which he was pursuing, but he returned to 
 his music with the utmost vigor. When he was about 
 six, he composed a concerto for the harpsichord, or 
 rather part of one, that was so difficult that no one 
 could play it, not even himself, though it was all com- 
 posed according to rule and with very great care. 
 Whether Mozart, in after years, was able to conquer the 
 difficulties of this Frankenstein (frank' en stin) of his 
 youthful days, is nowhere recorded. 
 
 Wolfgang's proceedings seemed so remarkable to his 
 father, that it was thought a good plan to carry the 
 children around through the various courts of Germany, 
 to give exhibitions of their really wonderful powers. 
 Anna Maria was at this time ten and Wolfgang six. 
 The expedition was a most successful one. The chil- 
 dren's playing was such that it would have been remark- 
 able in an expert. They played before the Emperor 
 Francis I. at Vienna. 
 
 Returning to Salzburg, little Mozart took the violin. 
 Hitherto he had only played on the harpsichord. They 
 tell this anecdote of him at the time. A certain violin- 
 ist of note came to request the opinion of the elder 
 Mozart on some trios. They sat down to play them to- 
 gether, Mozart playing the bass, while the archbishop's 
 trumpeter was to play second violin. Wolfgang being 
 present, requested to be allowed to play second, — he had 
 his little violin with him, — but his father forbade him, 
 saying that he had had no lessons. " It does not appear 
 necessary to me," said the young man, then six years 
 old, "to take lessons in order to learn to play the second 
 violin." Finally, he was allowed to play second, together 
 with Schachtner (shakt'ner) [the ti^umpeter], on condition 
 
MOZART. 321 
 
 that he should play softly. So he began, but instead of 
 playing softly, he played in such a manner as to render 
 Schachtner's violin utterly useless. AH six of the trios 
 were played by him in this manner. He then thought 
 he could play the first violin, and was allowed to try. 
 "We could not forbear laughing," says Schachtner, "on 
 hearing him execute this part, very imperfectly, it is 
 true, but still so as never to be set fast." 
 
 The next year, Wolfgang being seven, the family set 
 forth upon another tour, and in this tour, Mozart may be 
 said to have gained a Continental reputation ; for he 
 played all over Germany, in the Low Countries, and at 
 Paris. The next year, they went to England. Both at 
 Versailles (ver salz') and at London did Mozart play the 
 organ in the royal chapel. In London, his organ per- 
 formances were thought finer than his playing on the 
 harpsichord. He remained in England some time, where 
 he met with Christian Bach (taak), the son of Sebastian, 
 who was music-master to the queen. The little fellow 
 performed the most astonishing feats in the way of play- 
 ing, and also composed several things. From this time 
 forward, — that is, from his eighth year, — he composed 
 almost as much as he played. The next few years were 
 passed in various parts of Europe, in Holland, in Paris, in 
 Germany, in Switzerland, and in Vienna, where Mozart, 
 then twelve, composed an opera for the Emperor Joseph II. 
 
 Last of all, Mozart went into Itaty. Here he was 
 every-where received with the utmost admiration and 
 enthusiasm, and here, as well as every-where else, did 
 he perform feats that would have been wonderful for 
 trained and experienced musicians. He seems never to 
 have made a false step. He developed fugues on sub- 
 jects set by the amateurs ; he set down the whole of the 
 
822 COMPOSERS. 
 
 "Sistine Miserere" from memory; he composed an opera, 
 which was performed at Milan for twenty nights run- 
 ning. All these things he did with the same sureness 
 and firmness. He was honored throughout Italy by 
 orders, diplomas, titles, and such. He left the country 
 in 1771, and returned with his father to Salzburg. For 
 the next few years, he remained here, composing much — 
 cantatas for various events, an opera, masses, an opera- 
 bouffe, and so on. He then passed a year or so in Paris, 
 and in 1779 found himself in Vienna. 
 
 He was now twenty-three. He had passed through a 
 childhood the most remarkable that child ever lived. He 
 might consider himself at the very summit of his art. 
 He had all Europe before him to choose where he would 
 go to seek his fortune, for it seemed as if he must pros- 
 per anywhere. He I'emained in Vienna. The city was 
 delightful to him for many reasons, and he lived here 
 for the remainder of his too short life. Here are dated 
 most of his compositions, operas, symphonies, instru- 
 mental pieces of all kinds. We can not name them all 
 in their place. 
 
 He was, in appearance, small and delicate. He never 
 attained his full growth. His parents had been dis- 
 tinguished for their great beauty, but he himself was by 
 no means remarkable in his appearance. He was rather 
 clumsy than otherwise with his hands, save at the piano. 
 
 But he had the most extraordinary musical sensibility. 
 Even in his childhood, a false or a rough note was pain- 
 ful to him. The noise of a trumpet blown loudly before 
 him would almost send him into convulsions. Being in 
 Berlin one evening, he learned from the waiter at the 
 inn that one of his operas was to be performed. He set 
 out at once to hear it, and got into the pit, where he 
 
MOZART. 823 
 
 might listen without being observed. But being con- 
 tinually agitated by the trifling mistakes made by one or 
 another of the pieces in the orchestra, or by variations 
 played by them, he gradually edged his way up to the 
 orchestra rail. About the time he got there, an air was 
 sung that had been slightly altered. Mozart, unable to 
 restrain himself, cried out to the orchestra the manner 
 in which it should be played. The people stared at the 
 man who thus disturbed every one, and somebody rec- 
 ognizing him, informed the actors, several of whom 
 were so troubled that they would not come on the stage, 
 whereon Mozart, learning the difficulty, went behind the 
 scenes and succeeded in restoring their complacency by 
 some compliments, so that the performance might be 
 carried through. 
 
 He loved best to work in the morning, rising, per- 
 haps, at six or seven, and working for several hours. 
 After that, he seldom desired to do any thing else. 
 He was by nature procrastinating and indolent, unless, 
 indeed, he was seized with some inspiration, in which 
 case he would work away with the utmost vigor, till 
 the fit passed away. But, as a rule, he was lazy. On 
 one occasion, he was to write something for a court con- 
 cert, but put it off so that he barely had time to write 
 out the parts for the other performers, while his own 
 remained undone. He played away, however, and the 
 Emperor Joseph, observing that he never turned the 
 page of his music, coming up behind him, was surprised 
 to see him playing from empty lines. The same thing 
 came near happening to the overture of "Don Giovanni" 
 (jo va' ne). It was written the morning of the perform- 
 ance, and played by the orchestra without a rehearsal. 
 
 Mozart composed much and easily; He made com- 
 
324 COMPOSERS. 
 
 paratively little money by his productions, for various 
 reasons. He would almost as readily write for nothing 
 as for pay, and when he was paid, he usually spent the 
 money with such looseness and lack of forethought, that 
 it was as if it never had been. He married, in 1782,* 
 Constanza Weber (kon stan' za web' er), but she was too 
 like himself, as far as money matters were concerned, to 
 regulate the household economy properly. Mozart, how- 
 ever, lived comfortably enough, though he could by no 
 means, at this time, reach the object of his ambition in 
 the matter of successes, positions, and honors. At this 
 period, there was a great and determined rivalry be- 
 tween the two schools of niusic, Italian and German, 
 and the war was waged at Vienna as well as elsewhere. 
 Joseph H., although a great admirer of Mozart and his 
 powers as a performer, was by training and taste an 
 Italianist. Mozart contributed his share in the strife by 
 the " Marriage of Figaro " (fe ga ro'), first performed in 
 Vienna in 1786, and received Math triumphant accla- 
 mation. Intrigue prevented the full measure of its suc- 
 cess, and it was given only nine nights. In Prague f (prag), 
 
 * He had for some time been much in love. His courtship was not much less 
 troubled than the proverbial course of true love. His father greatly disapproved 
 of the match. But his disapproval seems to have been general, his idea being 
 that it would interfere with the future which he had marked out for his son, to 
 have him marry at twenty-six. Then, too, the guardian of Constance was not 
 well pleased with the idea. But the two young people were deeply attached to 
 each other, and finally, as is usually the case (in romance, at least). Youth and 
 Love won the day, and they were married, and lived very happily indeed. Mo- 
 zart was utterly devoted to his wife, who knew how to appreciate not only his 
 personal qualities, but his artistic greatness. 
 
 t Mozart went to Prague at about this time as guest of a Bohemian noble- 
 man. " I went to a ball," he writes to a friend, " where we should meet all the 
 Prague beauties. I fancy I can see you hopping pfter the pretty creatures. I 
 neither danced nor flirted with them, because I was too tired for the first, and 
 my natural reserve preserved me from the latter. I watched them, however, 
 vrith great pleasure, tripping about to the miisic of my ' Figaro ' transformed 
 into various forms of dance music. Nothing is talked of here but 'Figaro,' 
 
MOZART. 325 
 
 however, it was taken up and given throughout the 
 winter with enthusiasm. Mozart was delighted. He 
 offered to compose another opera for the Prague com- 
 pany. "Don Q-iovanni"* was the result, which was given 
 at Prague in 1787,t and received with more applaxise 
 than had been offered to any other of Mozart's works. 
 About this time, the death of Q-luck (glik) left a place in 
 the imperial household at Vienna which was offered to 
 Mozart. The Viennese desired to hear " Don Giovanni," 
 and it was given in the spring of the next year, but 
 was at first coldly received. On being performed several 
 times, however, it became a very great success. 
 
 nothing whistled and hummed but ' Figaro,' and no opera so well attended as 
 'Figaro.' Very flattering, certainly." 
 
 So much was Mozart pleased with all this, that one day, in talking with 
 the manager of the theater, he said : " As the Bohemians understand me so well, 
 I must compose something expressly for them." So he went hack to Vienna, 
 thinking of " Don Q-iovanni," though he did not put pen to paper to write it, 
 till a month before its performance. 
 
 * Mozart stayed with Dussek (doos' ek), while in Prague, at the time he was 
 writing "Don Giovanni." The house was much resorted to, and all manner of 
 sports seem to have gone on while Mozart was at work, for it is said that he 
 would often leave his work when his turn came at the game they might be 
 playing, and then go back serenely to his writing as though in his own study. 
 Another story is told in regard to Boudini (boo de' »e), who sang Zerlina (Per- 
 ls' nil). She was unable to scream, according to Mozart's ideas, at that place 
 where Zerlina is seized by Don Giovanni. Time after time did she fail to suit 
 Mozart's ideas. After a while, he went up quietly on the stage, without her 
 noticing him, and when the moment came, laid hold of her himself in so vigorous 
 a manner that she cried out in good earnest. "That's the way," said he, con- 
 tentedly; "you must cry out just so." 
 
 t "Don Giovanni" was received witli enthusiasm. "I hope," wrote Mozart 
 afterward, "that it may some time be heard in Vienna." So it was, some little 
 while after. But the Viennese, who were never great at appreciating Mozart, 
 did not at first like it particularly. "This is a heavenly work,". said the Em- 
 peror; "it is even more beautiful than 'Mgaro,' but it is not a morsel for my 
 Viennese." Mozart, on hearing of this, remarked, "Only give them time and 
 they will reKsh it." He was right, for the opera increased in success with each 
 performance. It became a great subject for discussion, for the whole style was 
 to the Viennese a novelty. Haydn was asked his opinion by a number of friends, 
 who were pointing out the bad points in the piece. " I can not enter Into the 
 argument," said he, "but I do know that Mozart is the greatest composer now in 
 the world." 
 
826 ' COMPOSERS. 
 
 Mozart was now established again in Vienna,* and 
 lived a laborious but successful life, doing much work, 
 making much money, and spending or lending it with 
 reckless extravagance. He passed the summer of 1789 
 in a tour through Q-ermany, in which he was every- 
 where received with great honor and appreciation. 
 Frederick William II. of Prussia was earnest that he 
 should become his capellmeister, at a salary three times 
 as large as that which he received at Vienna, but Mozart 
 was disinclined to leave the Emperor Joseph. On the 
 death of Joseph, however, and the accession of Leopold, 
 Mozart found himself in a worse position than before, 
 for Joseph had desired and intended to befriend him, 
 and Leopold had no such idea. But Mozart's own re- 
 sources were not small. He composed about this time 
 "The Magic Flute," f and was appointed to the reversion 
 of the capellmeistership of St. Stephen's Church, one of 
 the best musical positions in Vienna. He also wrote at 
 
 * We OTiglit to note at least, if we can do nothing more, the productions of 
 the year 1788, namely, his three great symphonies, those in E flat major and G- 
 minor, and the "Jupiter Symphony" in C major. These three great pieces were 
 composed in the astonishingly short space of a month and a half. They are held 
 to be a sort of picture of his life : the first quiet, joyful calm, representing his 
 youth; the second, representing his struggles and difficulties when he had his 
 way to make in the world ; and the last, representing his triumphs and successes. 
 In the next year, he performed one of his greatest feats, the satisfactory instru- 
 mentation of Handel's " Messiah," for the resources of the orchestra had been 
 largely developed since Handel's day, when sixteen performers were the number 
 usually employed. 
 
 t In regard to "The Magic Flute," a story is told not very creditable to 
 human nature in general, but very characteristic of Mozart. Schikaneder 
 (shik a na' der), a theatrical manager in ill success, came to see him one day and 
 blandly asked Mozart to write him an opera. Mozart hearing of the wretched 
 condition of his affairs, consented to do so, and that for nothing, only asking that 
 Schikaneder should not sell it to any other theater. This was agreed to, and 
 Mozart wrote " The Magic Piute," which did much for Mozart's reputation, and 
 also for Schikaneder and his opera-house. What Mozart got from it we can not 
 say. As for Schikaneder, he sold the score to as many theaters as would take it, 
 utterly careless of his agreement with the generous composer who had saved him 
 from misfortune. 
 
MOZART. 327 
 
 this time the opera, "The Clemency of Titus," for the 
 coronation of Leopold as King of Bohemia. 
 
 Mozart was painfully apprehensive at the thought of 
 death, and was continually in fear that he should not 
 live long. In the summer of 1791, a stranger called 
 upon him, and saying that he acted for a person of con- 
 sequence, asked if Mozart could compose a "Requiem 
 (re'kwiem) Mass," by which the loss of a much loved 
 friend might be annually commemorated. Mozart con- 
 sented to compose the "Requiem." On his asking for 
 whom he was doing this work, the stranger said that his 
 friend desired his name to be kept secret ; but he left a 
 hundred ducats and promised to return in a month, by 
 which time Mozart promised to have the "Requiem" 
 completed. He worked at it with much vigor with a 
 strange ardor. One morning, he fainted while at work, 
 and shortly after he said, " It is certain that I am 
 writing this ' Requiem ' for myself ; it will do for my 
 funeral service." And this impression remained fixed 
 in his mind. 
 
 At the end of the month, the stranger called again, 
 but the Mass was not completed. Mozart was going to 
 Prague to see the production of his " Clemency of Titus." 
 He said to the stranger that he must ask further time. 
 The stranger readily accorded a longer time, but re- 
 marked that if the work was to take more time than 
 was originally agreed upon, it would be worth more 
 money, and he left fifty ducats more. But he would not 
 leave his name, and Mozart became more and more con- 
 vinced that his visitor was from the other world, and 
 that the " Requiem Mass " was to be sung over his own 
 remains. He never finished his work ; when the stranger 
 called again, the composer had died, leaving his work 
 
328 COMPOSERS. 
 
 incomplete. Mozart had worked too hard, a combination 
 of several ailments fastened on him, and after an illness 
 of only two weeks, he died December 5, 1791. 
 
 We add here a number of notes on Mozart's character and habits which did 
 not appear pertinent at any special point of the narrative. 
 
 He was short, but his figure well proportioned, his hands and feet small ; in 
 his youth, he was slender, but rather more corpulent in the last years of his 
 life. His head was rather too large for his body. His face, naturaUy pale, 
 was not unpleasing, but betrayed no particular genius. Mozart's nose only ap- 
 peared too large while he was thin ; his eyes were large and well shaped, but 
 rather languid, with good eyebrows and eyelashes ; his glance was restless and 
 wandering. 
 
 He usually was up and writing by six or seven o'clock in the morning, and yet 
 he had often come home at a very late hour from musical parties. It was his 
 invariable custom to devote the early morning hoiirs to composition, and in later 
 years, the only difference he made was, that, to be more comfortable, he wrote in 
 bed. " He wrote music as others do letters," says a ladj' in the most naive and 
 forcible manner, " and never tried over his compositions till completed ; on the 
 other hand, in his mature years, he passed half the night at the piano, and 
 these were the creative hours of his heavenly songs." Sebastian Bach used to 
 make a great point of this form of composition, insisting that his pupils should 
 compose away from the piano, and those who were acciistomed to compose at 
 the instrument, he dubbed "piano-hussars." 
 
 He was not at all business-like in liis habits, but on his marriage he set 
 out to keep accounts. But he could not keep it up very long (after the manner of 
 other unbusiness-like folk), and his wife tried her hand at it. Just what success 
 she made, we can not say, but it does not seem as if she were the best and most 
 careful housekeeper In the world. She lived with Mozart in a happy-go-lucky 
 style, of which there are many anecdotes. The very day after they were married, 
 a friend came to offer the customary congratulations, and, finding no one to 
 come to the door, went through the house himself and, after a while, discovered 
 the young couple, who had not seen fit to wake up. On being aroused by their 
 visitor, they at once invited him to breakfast. But they could not find any 
 servant of any kind in the house to get breakfast for them, so Constance herself 
 set about making coffee, Avhich she did in her wedding-dress, having no other at 
 hand. On a later occasion, the young people having allowed themselves to be- 
 come absolutely destitute of fire-wood, and having nothing to purchase it with, 
 were found by a visitor dancing with each other round the room, " in order to 
 keep warm, as there was no fire." 
 
 He was passionately fond of billiards. He had a table in his own house, 
 rather an unusual IxLxury at that time, and played constantly. It seemed to divert 
 him without taking up all his mental power. They say that it was while he was 
 playing billiards at Prague, that he composed the second quartet in " The Magic 
 Piute." 
 
BKKTHOVKN. 
 
 THE life of Beethoven (ba'to ven) has in it naore 
 romantic and artistic elements than that of any 
 other composer with whom we have to do. The element 
 of greatness is common to them all — Bach (bak), Mozart, 
 (mozarf), Mendelssohn (men'dels son), Wagner (wag'ner), 
 and the others, were all great; but even here Beethoven's 
 life has more interest, for it is that of the greatest com- 
 poser who ever lived. There is the most unspeakable 
 melancholy in his deafness, which imxjarts a shade to the 
 picture, a minor strain which transcends our feeling for 
 the unappreciated genius of Schubert (shc5o' bert), or of 
 Wagner, or even the tender melancholy of the life and 
 death of Chopin (sho pang'). After a hard fight in 
 miserable and uncongenial surroundings, and after at 
 last attaining a clear view of the goal before him, this 
 crushing blow falls on Beethoven. The greatest com- 
 poser of all time, utterly without power to hear his own 
 heavenly work, is more pathetic even than the blind 
 Milton, for Milton could hear his poems read aloud. 
 Beethoven could only read the dumb evidence of his 
 own greatness. 
 
 He was born, the son of a poor musician, in the town 
 of Bonn (bon), December 17, 1770. Johann (yo'han) van 
 Beethoven was a singei attached to the Electoral Court, 
 and by no means a great one at that, while as a man 
 he had many wretched qualities. Miserably poor, he 
 
330 COMPOSERS. 
 
 added thereto a passion for drink, which kept his whole 
 family in circumstances of almost absolute want. 
 
 Ludwig (idbt'vikh) van Beethoven was one of those 
 musicians who have their passion and genius for music 
 given them at their birth. Had he been born under 
 the same lucky star as Mozart, he might not improb- 
 ably have rivaled the youthful extravagances of that 
 prodigy. But to Beethoven's father, the gift of his son 
 seemed only a good occasion for growing rich. So his 
 musical education was at once begun, and was pressed 
 on with hard ruthlessness under such advantages as 
 could be found in his native town. He learned much 
 and well, but it does not appear that his father's 
 selfish project, of living by his son's genius, ever came 
 to any satisfactory result. 
 
 As the boy grew up, the habits of his father became 
 worse and worse. Beethoven found he could do some- 
 thing for his family in the position of assistant organist 
 to Max Franz (maks frants), the Elector. This was when 
 he was fifteen years of age. He was looking forward to 
 a journey to Vienna, then the great musical center of 
 Q-ermany. In 178 7, he was able to fulfill this dream. 
 He played before Mozart, and improvised in such a way 
 as to excite the master's amazement. "Much will one 
 day be said about him in the world," said Mozart of the 
 young fellow. But this visit to Vienna was a short one. 
 He hurried home on hearing of the illness of his mother. 
 He arrived at home only in time to see her before she 
 died. By that event, he became the head of the family, 
 for his father was worse than no one. He set about 
 supporting his younger brothers and sisters by teaching, 
 and worked hard for them at what was to him the most 
 exasperating occupation that could be devised. But, in 
 
BEETHOVEN. 331 
 
 time, he went again to Vienna. Joseph Haydn (ha'dn) 
 passed through Bonn on his return from London in the 
 year 1792. Beethoven presented to him one of his 
 compositions, of which Haydn was warm in praise. 
 Beethoven longed for good teaching, and his journey to 
 Vienna was undertaken that he might take lessons of 
 Haydn. The Elector supplied the funds, want of which 
 had been the previous difficulty, and Beethoven left 
 Bonn forever. Arrived at Vienna, he carried out his 
 plan, and became a pupil of Haydn's. As is too often 
 the way with geniuses, Beethoven and Haydn did not 
 get along well together, and soon separated. We can 
 hardly say whose was the greatest fault, probably both 
 were to blame, though Haydn seems to have been the 
 most in the wrong. He was careless and Beethoven 
 hot-headed. 
 
 After leaving Haydn, Beethoven took lessons of 
 Albrechtsburger (al brekts burg'er), and afterward of 
 Salieri (sa le a' re). With these he got on better, though 
 both thought him self-willed and obstinate. However, 
 his studies were to good purpose. He attracted the 
 notice of musical patrons by his playing, and was, on 
 the whole, started on the high-road to his later fame. 
 His father, we may add, died in 1792, very shortly 
 after he reached Vienna. About this time, Beethoven 
 made the acquaintance of the Prince and Princess 
 Lichnowski (ilk nov'skl), enthusiastic lovers of music, 
 and, at their suggestion, he made his home with them 
 in 1794, and for some years afterward. There was no 
 bargain, or any thing of the sort. Beethoven was as free 
 as though he were living by himself. But the Lich- 
 nowskis had the pleasure of feeling that they were 
 rloing something to help forward a young man whom 
 
332 
 
 COMPOSERS. 
 
 they already felt was one of the most remarkable 
 musicians of his time.* 
 
 Beethoven, now, at the age of twenty-four, found 
 himself with genius, education, and leisure. He com- 
 posed much. We can not easily particularize. "Opus 1" 
 consists of three trios dedicated to Prince Lichnowski ; 
 it was composed in 1791. "Opus 2" consists of three 
 sonatas for the piano, dedicated to Joseph Haydn, and 
 so on. Many sonatas, trios, quartets, quintets, concertos, 
 and so forth, came from his hand at this time. He 
 played much in private ; but this was a time when 
 there was by no means so much playing in public as 
 to-day. Music was cultivated by a far smaller number 
 than now enjoy it, and reputations were made by play- 
 ing at the private concerts of the great patrons of 
 music. At many of these was Beethoven heard f and 
 appreciated. He was beginning to be recognized. 
 
 * A well-known musician of the time (Czernj') thus speaks of an encounter 
 with Beethoven : 
 
 " I remember Q-elinek (gd' tm ek) telling my father one day that he was 
 invited to a party in the evening to break a lance with a new pianist. ' We will 
 make mince-meat of him,' added Gelinek. 
 
 "The nest day, my father asked how the ailair had gone off. 
 
 " ' Oh,' said G-elinek, quite crest-fallen, ' I shall never forget yesterday I The 
 devil is in the young man. I never heard such playing. He improvised on a 
 theme I gave him in such a manner as I never even heard Mozart. Then he 
 played some of his own compositions, which are wonderful and magnificent 
 beyond every thing ; he brings out of the pi,ano tones and effects we have never 
 dreamed of.' 
 
 "'Aye,' said my father, in astonishment. 'What is his name?' 'He is a 
 short, ugly, dark, cross-looking young man,' said Gelinek, ' whom Prince Lich- 
 nowsld brought here from Germany some years ago, to learn composition from 
 Haydn, Albrechtsburger, and Salieri ; his name is Beethoven.'" 
 
 + On one occasion, a new piano-forte quartet by Porster, a well-known com- 
 poser of the day, was in progress of rehearsal. The violinist was suddenly called 
 out, when Beethoven, who was at the piano-forte. Instantly began to sing the 
 missing part, in addition to going on with his own, which he read for the first 
 time. The prince, astonished, asked him how he covild sing music with which he 
 was not acquainted. Beethoven smiled and replied, " The bass must have been so, 
 otherwise the author could have known nothing whatever of composition." On 
 
BEETHOVEN. 333 
 
 Up to this time, his life had been one of constant 
 struggle through many and miserable hardships. Now, 
 the way was appearing more and more plainly before 
 him. It was at this time that premonitions of what was 
 the most fearful misfortune of his life came upon him. 
 He became conscious of approaching deafness. It was in 
 1798 that he had fears in regard to the matter. Three 
 years passed, and they were realized.* Beethoven be- 
 
 the prince remarking further, that Beethoven had taken the presto so quickly, 
 that it was impossible to have seen the notes, he answered, " That is not at all 
 necessary. A multitude of faults in the printing do not signify. If you only 
 know the language, you don't see them or pay any heed to them." 
 
 Here is another anecdote of the same kind. 
 
 "He invited me to turn over for him," says a friend, "when he played his 
 concerto ; but, good heavens 1 that was more easily said than done. I saw 
 nothing but blank leaves, with a few utterly incomprehensible Egyptian liiero- 
 glyphics, which served him as guides, for he played nearly the whole of the solo 
 part from memory ; as it generally happened, he had not time to write it out in 
 full. So he always gave me a secret sign when he was at the end of one of these 
 unintelligible passages, and the anxiety I could scarcely conceal, lest I should 
 fail at the important moment, afforded him huge merriment, and he shook with 
 laughter as he recalled it at our sociable, jovial supper." 
 
 * " I may say," writes Beethoven in 1805, " that I pass my life wretchedly ; 
 for nearly two years I have avoided all society, because I can not possibly say to 
 people, ' I am deaf ' .' If I were in any other profession, it would not so much 
 signify ; but, for a musician, it is a really frightful condition. Besides, what 
 would my enemies say to it— and they are not few I 
 
 " To give you an idea of this extraordinary deafness, I must tell you that in 
 the theater I am obliged to lean forward, quite close to the orchestra, in order to 
 understand the actors. The high tones of the instruments and voices I do not 
 hear if I am a little way off. In conversation, it is surprising that there are 
 some people who do not observe It— they attribute it to the absent fits which I 
 often have. Many a time, I can with difficulty distinguish the tones, but not 
 the words, of any person who speaks in a low voice ; and yet, directly any one 
 begins to shout, it is unendurable to me. What is to be the result, the good God 
 alone knows. Vernig says that my condition will certainly improve, though I 
 may not he perfectly restored. I have often already cursed my existence. Plu- 
 tarch has led me to resignation. I am resolved, if possible, to defy my fate, 
 although there should be moments in my life when I shall be the most unhappy 
 of all God's creatures." 
 
 We must also print Beethoven's will, so called, in which he gives a most 
 striking picture of his miserable condition : 
 
 " The Promemoria. 
 
 " Ocioher 8, IHOS. 
 "To MY BROTHERS Carl AND [.loHANw] BEETHOVEN,— O jG who cousider Or rep- 
 
834 COMPOSERS. 
 
 came finally so deaf that he could neither hear suffi- 
 ciently to play the piano nor to conduct. It was the 
 most fearful grief to him. "If I had not read some- 
 
 resent me as unfriendly, morose, and misantliropical, how unjust are you to me ! 
 You know not the secret cause of what appears thus to you. 
 
 "My heart and mind have been from childhood given up to the tender feel- 
 ing of benevolence, and I have ever been disposed to accomplish something great. 
 But only consider that for six years I have been afflicted by a wretched calamity, 
 which was aggravated by unskillful physicians — deceived from year to year by 
 the hope of amendment — now forced, at length, to the contemplation of a linger- 
 ing disease (the cure of which will, perhaps, last for years, if indeed it be not an 
 impossibility). 
 
 "Born with a passionate, lively temperament, keenly susceptible to the 
 pleasures of society, I was obliged at an early age to isolate myself, and to pass 
 my life in loneliness. 
 
 " When I at times endeavored to surmount all this, oh, how rudely was I 
 thrust back again by the experience— the doubly painful experience— of my de- 
 fective hearing I and yet it was impossible for me to say to people, ' Speak louder, 
 shout ; for I am deaf ' 1 Alas, how could I proclaim the weakness of a sense 
 which ought to have been with me in a higher degree than with others— a sense 
 which I once possessed in the greatest perfection — and to an extent which few 
 of my profession enjoy, or ever have enjoyed I Oh, this I can not do 1 Forgive 
 me, therefore, when you see me turn away, where I would gladly mingle with 
 you. My misfortune is doubly painful to me, inasmuch as it causes me to he 
 misunderstood. Por me there can be no relaxation in human society, no refined 
 conversations, no mutual outpourings of thought. Like an exile, I must hve. 
 Whenever I come near strangers, I am seized with a feverish anxietj' from my 
 dread of being exposed to the risk of betraying my condition. 
 
 "Thus it has been with me during these last six months which I have spent 
 in the country. The orders of my sensible physician, to spare my hearing as 
 much as possible, were quite in accordance with my present disposition ; although 
 often, overcome by longing for society, I have been tempted into it. But what 
 humiliation, when any one by my side heard from afar a flute, and I heard 
 nothing^ or when any one heard the shepherd singing, and I again heard imthinxj! 
 Such occurrences brought me nigh to despair ; but little was wanting, and I 
 should myself have put an end to my existence. Art — art alone— held me back. 
 Ah I it seemed impossible for me to quit the world before I had done all that I 
 felt myself destined to accomplish. And so I prolonged this miserable life ; a 
 life so truly wretched that a sudden change is sufficient to throw me from the 
 happiest condition into the worst. 
 
 "Patience! It would seem that I must now choose her for my guide I I have 
 done so. I trust that my resolve to persevere will remain firm, until it shall 
 please the inexorable Pates to cut the thread of life. Perhaps I may get better: 
 perhaps not. I am prepared. Compelled to he a philosopher in my twenty-eighth 
 year ! This is not easy— for the artist, harder than for any one else. O G-od ! 
 Thou lookest down upon my heart. Thou seest that love to man and beneficent 
 feelings have their abode in it, 
 
BEETHOVEN. 335 
 
 where that man must not take his own life, I should 
 long ere this have been no more, and that through my 
 own act." He did not commit suicide ; but his deafness 
 had on his character a distressing effect. At all times 
 somewhat brusque, obstinate, and gloomy, these qualities 
 deepened through his affliction, and he became suspicious, 
 irritable, prejudiced, and morose. One wonders that these 
 qualities did not more affect his work. He still con- 
 ducted at concerts ; but it is doubtful whether he was 
 more help than hinderance to his orchestra ; for being 
 imable to hear the effects, he would at times lose his 
 place. His conducting had at all times been peculiar.* 
 
 From this time, the greater part of Beethoven's life 
 lies in his compositions. We should like here to break 
 off from our narrative, and to speak at once of his great- 
 est works, — the Nine Symphonies, — without reference to 
 other events in his life. Then we will return to chrono- 
 logical sequence. 
 
 " Oh ye who may one day read this, reflect that ye did me injustice, and let 
 the unhappy be consoled by finding one like himself, who, in defiance of all 
 natural obstacles, has done all that lay in his power to be received into the ranks 
 of worthy artists and men." 
 
 * Spohr, who saw Beethoven conducting a concert at Vienna, was much sur- 
 prised at his methods. " Although," says he, " I had heard a great deal about 
 this, I was very much astonished with what I saw ; Beethoven had accustomed 
 himself to indicate the marks of expression by all kinds of peculiar movements. 
 Whenever a sforzando (sf6r dzdn' do) occurred, he would vehemently open both 
 arms, which had before been crossed on his chest. For a piano, he would bend 
 down, and the softer it was to be, the lower would he stoop ; for a crescendo, he 
 would draw himself up more and more, till, at the arrival of the forte, he gave a 
 leap into the air ; he would frequently scream out to increase the forte, without 
 being aware of so doing." 
 
 Another musician writes : 
 
 " He conducted the concert at which I saw him, when the music consisted 
 only of his own, or music which he knew by heart and could bear in his mind ; 
 for, although his sharp eye nearly always detects the character of the perform- 
 ance, I perceived, by a decided, though brief confusion in the time and the 
 omission by the performers in their anxiety of a piano, that he could hear nothing, 
 for both mistakes escaped him. He stood as if on a distant island, directing his 
 dark, demoniacal harmonies with the strangest movements." 
 
■5 :"^> COMPOSE R M . 
 
 These symphonies were written during the last half 
 of Beethoven's life. The First, in 1800, when he was 
 thirty; the Ninth, in 1824, only three years before his 
 death. Although generally produced (and presumably 
 composed) at an interval of three or four years, there 
 are two exceptions. The Fifth and Sixth were first per- 
 formed on the same day, and were undoubtedly com- 
 posed at almost the same time. The Seventh and Eighth 
 again were presented at an interval of less than three 
 months. And after the performance of these two, more 
 than ten years elapsed before the last came into exist- 
 ence. 
 
 Of the " First Symphony " we can say but little in so 
 short a sketch. It was first performed in 1800, at a con- 
 cert given by Beethoven in Vienna when he was already 
 a musician of high repute. But just when it was com- 
 posed can not be well stated ; sketches of different bits 
 may, however, be found in various note-books for some 
 years previous. It is perhaps the least original of all 
 Beethoven's Sonatas, though in the Minuet and Trio in 
 the third movement, Beethoven showed that he regarded 
 old rules as of very slight importance when they ran 
 counter to his views. " The ' Second Symphony,' " says 
 Sir George Grrove, "is a great advance on the First. In 
 the first place, it is bolder and broader in style. In the 
 next, it is longer. The Scherzo and Trio and the Coda to 
 the Finale are very new and original." This symphony 
 was written some time in 1802, at a time when Bee- 
 thoven seems to have been as despondent and gloomy as 
 he ever was in his whole life. His complete deafness 
 was no longer doubtful, and he himself had become 
 gloomy, morose, and morbid to a degree. It is in this 
 year that he wrote the curious letter to his brothers— 
 
BEETHOVEN. 337 
 
 from which we have quoted — m which he speaks so 
 touchingly of his depressed condition. But this low tone 
 and depression do not find their way into the "Second 
 Symphony." It is tlie only bright spot in this period of 
 Beethoven's life. 
 
 Two years afterward, was finished the "Eroica Sym- 
 phony" (the Third). It has a curious history. Beethoven, 
 like many others, was an enthusiastic admirer of the 
 earlier years of Napoleon's career. To him, the young 
 Corsican rising almost from the ranks, grasping the reins 
 of power, and quelling and guiding the diverse and dis- 
 cordant elements which had their birth in the French 
 Revolution, represented the true type of Hero. And for 
 him was written the "Third Symphony." And on its 
 completion a copy was handed to the representative of 
 Napoleon, to be given to his master, the First Consul. 
 Shortly afterward. Napoleon became Emperor. "After 
 all, he's nothing but an ordinary mortal," cried Bee- 
 thoven, seeing his former ideal change into an embryo 
 tyrant. So the name was changed. The Symphony 
 became the "Eroica," and the copy given to the French 
 ambassador was recalled, and the name of the French 
 Emperor Avas scratched out, though traces of it may 
 still be seen on the MS. copy. But the fact remains that 
 it was written for Napoleon Bonaparte. 
 
 The " Fourth Symphony " was written some two or 
 three years after the "Eroica." It was first performed 
 in March, 1807. The Third had been first given in April, 
 1805. The meantime had been taken up by the com- 
 position and production of " Fidelio " (fe da' 11 6). It is 
 lighter and more gay and cheerful than the "Eroica," 
 but is as great a work. Both were greatly cried out upon 
 on their first performance by some of the critics, who 
 
838 COMPOSEES. 
 
 had set up Handel, Gliick (giik), and Mozart as the only 
 models for composition. To such there was much in 
 these two Symphonies of Beethoven that seemed like 
 lunacy, pure and simple. 
 
 The " Fifth Symphony " and the " Sixth " have had 
 their numbers transposed since their first performance. 
 Both were performed December 22, 1808. But at that 
 Concert, the "Pastoral Symphonj^" was nuiTibered five, 
 and the present " Fifth " was numbered six. But there 
 is reason to believe that the present " Fifth " was earlier 
 in the composer's mind, and that parts of it were put to 
 paper earlier than any part of the "Pastoral Symphony," 
 and toward the end of Beethoven's life the numbering 
 was changed to that by which we now know them. 
 "The 'C Minor Symphony,'" says Sir George G-rove, "is 
 often spoken of as if it were a miracle of irregularity, 
 and almost as if, in composing it, Beethoven had aban- 
 doned all the ordinary rules which regulate the construc- 
 tion of a piece of music, put down whatever came upper- 
 most in his mind, and by the innate force of genius, 
 produced a miraculous masterpiece. Such ideas are 
 simply contrary to the facts, and highly misleading. It 
 may surprise the reader to hear that the ' C Minor Sym- 
 phony' is from beginning to end as strictly in accord- 
 ance with the rules which govern the production of 
 ordinary musical compositions as any Symphony or So- 
 nata of Haydn. It is no disobedience to laws that 
 makes the ' C Minor Symphony ' so great, no irregu- 
 larity or improvisation ; but it is the striking and 
 original nature of the thoughts, the direct manner in 
 which they are expressed, and the extraordinary energy 
 in which they are enforced and re-enforced and driven 
 into the hearer." 
 
BEETHOVEN. 339 
 
 The next Symphony, the "Pastoral," is the greatest, 
 and ahnost the earhest piece of "programme music" that 
 has ever been composed. Beetlioven ridiculed Haydn for 
 his descriptive writing in the " Creation " and the " Sea- 
 sons," and then hmiself wrote this great piece of descrip- 
 tive nmsic. There have been many written since ; but 
 none so fine as the " Pastoral Symphony." It is most 
 perfectly adapted to carrying out the programme written 
 at the beginning. To some unbelievers, it may be a ques- 
 tion as to whether the music would suggest such pictures 
 to the mind, had they not been first indicated in plain 
 black and white. 
 
 The "Seventh Symphony" was given some time after 
 the Fifth and Sixth, in the year 1813, at a concert 
 given for the benefit of the Austrian soldiers wounded 
 at Hanau (ha' now). It was a great occasion. All the 
 musicians in Vienna were desirous to aid. Beethoven 
 conducted. The greatest composers and virtuosi of the 
 day played among the strings. Hummel (hdbm'el) and 
 Meyerbeer (mi'er bar) beat the drum. Moscheles (mosh'- 
 eh les) had charge of the cymbals. Salieri (Beethoven's 
 teacher and Schubert's) marked the time for the di'ums 
 and the cannon. And only three months afterward was 
 given the "Eighth Symphony," the "little one," as 
 Beethoven sometimes called it (not because he loved it 
 especially, but because it was short). The two were 
 written in the same year. It was not until ten years 
 had elapsed that he wrote another, the Ninth, a 
 "Choral Symphony." This great work was written for 
 the London Philharmonic Society, who paid £50 for 
 it, but was first performed, we believe, in Vienna, on 
 just what principle we can not say ; for it was in the 
 agreement that it should belong to the Philharmonic 
 
340 c o M p o s E li y . 
 
 for eighteen months. Be this as it may, the " Choral 
 Symphony," like the "Pastoral," was an original and 
 extraordinary piece, and one far finer than all which 
 have been written in imitation of it. It is, we believe, 
 the first symphony written which has its finale ex- 
 tended by vocal movements. Schiller's (shil'erz) " Ode 
 to Joy" had long been a favorite with Beethoven, and 
 its use in this symphony was, undoubtedly, the real- 
 ization of a long-conceived idea. It was with immense 
 difficulty that Beethoven obtained the proper connection 
 between the instrumental and vocal. "It troixbles me at 
 the outset," he wrote; "once get into it, and it's all right." 
 Such were the nine great works which Beethoven 
 created during the latter part of his life. We must also 
 mention his opera — the only one he ever wrote — of 
 " Fidelio." This work, originally called, we believe, 
 "Leonora," was attended in its representation by all 
 manner of difficulties. In the first place, Beethoven 
 wrote four separate overtures before he could get one 
 to suit. The first was discarded as being too light and 
 trifling ; the second was set aside as giving too great 
 prominence to the wind, and the third because the 
 strings were too prominent. It was not till the fourth 
 was produced that all were satisfied. The first per- 
 formance was by no means a success ; for, either through 
 the malice or the extraordinary carelessness of those 
 concerned, it was presented only a few days after the 
 French troops had entered Vienna. At this time, Lich- 
 nowski and all Beethoven's friends and supporters had 
 fled to their country-houses, and the theater was filled 
 with French officers and soldiers, so that "Fidelio" was 
 coldly received and soon withdrawn. Not till 1814, did 
 it receive a favorable hearing. 
 
BEETHOVEN. 841 
 
 The latter part of his Hfe Beethoven passed quietly at 
 Vienna, well known and highly honored,* and, though 
 by no means wealthy, in fair circumstances. His ap- 
 pearance was characteristic of the man. He was short, 
 but thick-set, with hair once black but now gray, which 
 he threw back from his forehead ; rather a red face, 
 with small eyes, deep-set, fiery, and full of intensity." 
 His face is said by Nohl (noi) to have borne no trace of 
 happiness. All authorities agree that he was ugly, and 
 his dress was not inappropriate. It was quite a contrast 
 to the elegant attire customary in those days. He spoke 
 with a strong provincial accent, his general bearing 
 showed no signs of culture, and his behavior was very 
 unmannerly. His habits, too, were peculiar, f 
 
 * He did not himself, however, feel properly appreciated throughout the 
 musical world. Talking to a friend from Leipsic (lip'sik), in 18S2, he said, "You 
 hear nothing of mine here." "Not in the summer." "No, nor in winter either. 
 What would yo^i hear ? ' Pidelio ? ' They can not give it, and would not care to 
 hear it. The symphonies? They have no time for them. The concertos? Nobody 
 plays any thing he has not himself written. The solos? They have long been out 
 of fashion, and fashion is every thing." 
 
 t In winter, as well as In summer, it was Beethoven's practice to rise at day- 
 break, and immediately to sit down to his writing-table. There he would labor 
 till two or three o'clock, his usual dinner-time. Meanwhile, he would go out once 
 or twice in the open air, when he would work and walk. Then, after the lapse of 
 half an hour or an hour, he would return home to note down the Ideas which he 
 had collected. The habit of going abroad suddenly and as unexpectedly returning, 
 just as the whim happened to strike him, was practiced by Beethoven alike at all 
 seasons of the year; cold or heat, rain or sunshine, were all alike to him. In the 
 autumn, he used to return to town as sunburnt as though he had been sharing 
 the daily toil of the reapers and gleaners. Some of his peculiarities in the 
 matter of eating and drinking deserve to be ranked among the curiosities of 
 housekeeping. Por his breakfast he usually took coffee, which he frequently 
 prepared himself; for in this beverage he had an Oriental fastidiousness of taste. 
 He allowed sixty beans for each cup, and lest his measure should mislead him to 
 the amount of a bean or two, he made it a rule to count over the sixty for each 
 cup, especially when he had visitors. He performed this task with as much care 
 as others of greater importance. At dinner, his favorite dish was macaroni with 
 Parmesan (par me zcln') cheese. He was hkewise very fond of every kind of fish, 
 and consequently, fast days imposed no sacrifice on him. To certain guests, he 
 gave invitations only on Fridays ; for then his table was always adorned with a 
 flne schill (a kind of haddock) and potatoes. Supper was not a meal which he 
 
342 COMPOSERS. 
 
 "When fairly domiciled, Beethoven's mode of life was 
 very regular. After the day's work was over, alone, in 
 the darkening twilight, he loved to breathe to his best, 
 his only friend, his clavier^ the thoughts which met with 
 no response in human sympathy. During the evening, 
 he would smoke his pipe, and play occasionally on his 
 viola or violin, both of which must always be placed 
 ready for him on the piano-forte. 
 
 " One proceeding Beethoven never omitted, viz. : the 
 reading of the evening paper. In these stirring times, 
 the newspaper was an absolute necessity, and our mu- 
 sician would never retire to rest without previously ascer- 
 taining the state of the political horizon. Ten o'clock 
 rarely found him out of bed. Such was his simple, in- 
 nocent day. It was no mere phrase, that declaration of 
 his, 'I live only in my art.' It was, indeed, the all- 
 connecting link between him and others." 
 
 Beethoven died on March 2 7, 1827. 
 
 cared much about ; a plate of soup or something left from dinner was all he 
 partook of, and he was in bed by ten o'clock. He never -wrote in the afternoon, 
 and but very seldom in the evening. He disliked to correct what he had written. 
 This he always felt an irksome task. He preferred making a fresh copy of his 
 notes. He was never seen out-of-doors without a little note-book, in which he 
 jotted down his ideas. He observed this self-imposed rule with a firmness 
 characteristic of great spirits ; but in other respects a truly admirable disorder 
 prevailed in his household. Books and music would be scattered in all the 
 corners ; in on e place the remains of a cold snack, in another a wine bottle, on 
 the desk the hasty sketch of a new quartet, near it the fragments of the break- 
 fast, on the piano some scrawled pages containing a glorious symphony in 
 embryo, or a proof waiting for correction, private and business letters strewing 
 the floor; and then, despite this confusion, our master would take every oppor- 
 tunity of extolling with Ciceronian eloquence his accuracy and love of order, 
 quite regardless of this practical contradiction. He only changed his tone when 
 for hours, days, or even weeks, fruitless search was made for some object; then 
 he would blame the innocent, murmuring in a complaining tone— "Yes, yes, it 
 is unfortunate I Nothing will stay where I put it. All my things are mislaid. 
 Every thing is done to vex me. O, people, people I " But the servants under- 
 stood the good-natured growler, and let him grumble on to his heart's content; 
 and in a few moments the annoyance was quite forgotten. 
 
TIE 
 
 SCHUBERT 
 
 IKE Beethoven (ba' to vSn), Mozart (mo zfipt'), and 
 
 J i Haydn (ha'dn), the greater part of Schubert's 
 
 (shc5o'berts) life was passed in Vienna, which, as far as 
 famous composers go, was the leading musical capital 
 of Europe toward the end of the eighteenth f'entury and 
 the beginning of the nineteenth. 
 
 Franz (frants) Schubert was named after his father, 
 who Avas, at the time of the future composer's birth, a 
 poor school-master in one of the suburbs of Vienna.* He 
 was one of a large family ; for his father married twice 
 and had children by each marriage, though they did not 
 all live. We do not hear very much of Schubert's 
 family through his life. Mention now and then of his 
 elder brothers — Ignaz (eg mats'), Ferdinand, or Carl, or of 
 his father, is about all we know of the family. 
 
 * We have ample proof of the comparative poverty of the Schubert family 
 at this time, by the shortness of pocket-money of which Franz complains. The 
 following letter, addressed to his brother Ferdinand, illustrates this, and also 
 affords a ghmpse of the young musician's character : 
 
 " You know by experience that a fellow would like, at times, a roll and an 
 apple or two, especially if, after a frugal dinner, he has to wait for a meager 
 supper for eight hours and a half. The few groschen that I receive from my 
 father are always gone to the devil the first day, and what am I to do after- 
 ward? 'Those who hope will not be confounded,' says the Bible, and I firmly 
 believe it. Suppose, for instance, you send me a couple of krentzer a month; I 
 don't think you would notice the difference in your own purse, and I should live 
 quite content and happy in my cloister. St. Matthew says also that ' Whosoever 
 has two coats shall give one to the poor.' In the meantime, I trvist you will 
 lend your ear to the voice crying to you incessantly, to remember your poor 
 brother Franz, who loves and confides in you." 
 
344 COMPOSERS. 
 
 Franz was born January 31, 1797. He was the 
 youngest of the boys born of his father's first marriage. 
 He learned music while young from his father, who 
 understood something of the art which was then very 
 generally taught in Q-erman schools. He was somewhat 
 precocious, as have been many other famous composers, 
 but his feats in this line by no means rival the wonders 
 of Mozart or Mendelssohn (men' dels son). Nevertheless, 
 he learnt music easily, and indeed, Holzee (hoi'tsa), the 
 parish school-master who used to give him lessons, said, 
 on one occasion : " Whenever I wished to teach him any 
 thing new, I found that he had already mastered it. 
 Consequently, I can not be said to have given him any 
 lessons at all ; I merely anuised myself and regarded 
 him with dumb astonishment." We may take this with 
 a grain or two of salt, but, undoubtedly, the child showed 
 iTiusical genius at an early age. 
 
 Having a good voice and this musical taste, his father 
 obtained for him a position in the Imperial Chapel as 
 a choir-boy. Haydn, it may be remembered, and also 
 Bach (taak), served this apprenticeship to music, as well 
 as Schubert. 
 
 Schubert composed a little during his youthful years. 
 Though we hear of nothing like the wonderful harpsi- 
 chord piece of Mozart, composed at six years of age, 
 yet, among Schubert's known works are many composed 
 before his fifteenth year. Much of his work is still 
 unpublished. The only one of his earlier works that has 
 seen the light is the " Klagelied " (kia'ga let), written in 
 his fifteenth year. But beyond this, there are in ex- 
 istence in MS., many other things — overtures, qiiartets, 
 trios, and so forth. His eai'liest known -piece, written 
 when he was thirteen, bears the sufficiently romantic 
 
SCHUBERT. 345 
 
 name of " Corpse Fantasia." It is for the piano — four 
 hands. 
 
 Schubert was at this time receiving an education at 
 the Stadtcourict (stat'kcSo rlkt),* one of tlie privileges of 
 the Imperial choir-boys. But Ruczizka (rc5ok zez'ka), who 
 was to teach him harmony, said, " He has learned every 
 thing, and Grod has been his teacher." Nevertheless, 
 Schubert received the instruction of Salieri (sa le a' re), 
 an Italian, and doubtless got much good from it. 
 
 When he was seventeen, Schubert's voice deserted 
 him, and he left the Imperial choir. He left the Stadt- 
 courict also, where it does not appear that he had made 
 brilliant progress. For this, however, he did not greatly 
 care. He had done something in music, and as this was 
 the chief object of his life, he was probably not ill- 
 satisfied. 
 
 He had now no prospects at all. For a time, he 
 taught school in Vienna, and it is said that he did it 
 well. This argues no especial knowledge on his part. 
 The alphabet and elementary arithmetic seem to have 
 been the only things he was called on to teach. It must 
 have been most horrid drudgery. 
 
 One advantage of this occupation was that it left him 
 time to compose, t and during the three years that he 
 
 * At the time Sclrabert was at the Stadtcourict, his compositions were wont 
 to be performed hy an amateur quartet, which consisted of Schubert himself, 
 who played the viola, his father, who had the 'cello, and his two brothers, 
 Ferdinand and Ignaz, first and second violins respectively. l?ranz possessed 
 much artistic sensitiveness, and his quick ear detected the most trifling blunder. 
 In the instance of one of his brothers, he did not scruple to rebuke either by 
 word or look; but if his father played a wrong note, or made a false entry, he 
 would ignore the mistake once, and if it occurred again, he would say, with 
 hesitation, " Father, I fear there is a mistake somewhere." 
 
 t Schubert was one of the most prolific composers ever known. In the whole 
 history of music, we can find no parallel to this inexhaustible fertility, and even 
 if the entire mass had no art value, the mere labor expended in transferring the 
 ideas from the brain of the composer to the paper on which they were written. 
 
346 
 
 COMPOSERS. 
 
 taught school, Schubert wrote much. It will, perhaps, 
 appear curious to those who know Schubert only by his 
 pubhshed works, to learn that the branch of music to 
 which he devoted himself most ardently at this time, as 
 for some time after, was the opera. In 1814, he finished 
 the music for "Des Teufel's Lustschloss" (toi'feis icJost'- 
 shios), by Kotzebue (kot'seh boo). But the opera was not 
 acted, nor has it been published. This year, also, he 
 wrote his Mass in F, the finest of all he wrote, with the 
 exception of his last. Various other works, several of 
 dramatic form, two masses, two symphonies, and an im- 
 mense number of songs, were the amazing work of the 
 next year. But many of these have never been pub- 
 lished ; none of them were published at the time of their 
 writing. Indeed, Schubert was singularly unlucky in 
 getting his productions before the public. Not even at 
 the very end of his life would musical publishers, out- 
 side of his own city, accept his MS. without a good deal 
 of persuading, and it was only late in life that he could 
 get the Viennese to publish his pieces. As for his operas, 
 they were as likely as not never to arrive at production. 
 
 The next year, 1816, the last of Schubert's school- 
 teaching, were published his famous songs, "Der Eri- 
 konig" (arl'kia nikh) and "Der Wanderer," with many 
 others, most of which have been since that time pub- 
 lished. 
 
 A year after he had stopped school-teaching, Schubert 
 
 would testify to his industry. It is certain that it was ahsolutely no trouble to 
 Schubert to compose. The subject chosen, the ideas came naturally and super- 
 abundantly without any expenditure of thought or energy. Unlike Mozart, he 
 did not carefully perfect his works in his mind before writing them down ; unlike 
 Beethoven, he did not note his ideas in sketch-books, and build up his music, so 
 to speak, by a slow and careful process of selection, compression, and elaboration. 
 Handel, Bach, and Haydn wrote with extreme rapidity, but not one of them 
 exhibited fecundity similar to that of Schubert at the age of eighteen. 
 
SOHUBEET. 347 
 
 received an offer from Count Johann (yo'han) Esterhazy 
 (es ter hft' ze), to become music-teacher for his family.* 
 It was a very favorable position, and Schubert accepted 
 it at once with great pleasure. He was then twenty-one, 
 and it is said that he, at this time, fell in love with 
 one of his pupils, Caroline, the daughter of the Count. 
 But, as the young lady was at this time only eleven, 
 it is not improbable that this mistake of Schubert's 
 should be referred to a somewhat later period in his life 
 and hers. 
 
 The Esterhazy connection was a good one. Schubert 
 began to become better known. He had made various 
 friends of one sort and another, and there were many in 
 Vienna who recognized his genius. Among these, how- 
 ever, Schubert could number no publishers, and his works 
 continued to lie in MS. for some time still. He was not 
 the man to push his own fortunes. Of rather unprepos- 
 sessing appearance, and by no means a pleasant address 
 with those with whom he was unacquainted, he was the 
 worst hand at business that could be imagined, and his 
 affairs had to remain in the hands of his friends. 
 
 He composed about this time two more operas, which, 
 although performed in public, failed of any success. In 
 truth, Schubert's genius is not essentially dramatic. The 
 overture to one of these works, however, afterward used 
 as the overture to " Rosamunde," is remarkably beautiful. 
 
 * Schubert himself, unlike many of the most famous composers, was not a 
 great performer on the piano-forte. Bach and Handel were wonderful performers 
 on the organ; Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Chopin (^shopdng') were great 
 on the piano-forte ; hut Schubert was never celebrated as a virtuoso. He was in 
 the habit of accompanying his own songs, and did so with the most perfect feel- 
 ing and expression. But some of his own pieces were too much for him. So, 
 the great Pantasia in C, which he once attempted to play at a private party. 
 At the finale, he found it so dif&cult that he utterly broke down, and jumped up 
 from the piano, exclaiming, " The devil may play the stuff, if he likes." 
 
348 COMPOSERS. 
 
 Whether the rest of the opera be hke it, we can not say, 
 for the work has never been pubhshed. 
 
 In the j^ear 1821, a change for the better took place. 
 The efforts of Schubert's friends seemed to have, in a 
 measure, succeeded. At any rate, througli tlieir efforts, 
 the " Erlkonig " was accepted by a Viennese publisher, 
 and its sale was such that Schubert realized quite a sum 
 from it. Many other of Schubert's songs found a pub- 
 lisher this year, and many more were sung at concerts, 
 public and private. He began to be known by the world, 
 outside the little circle of his friends and admirers, as a 
 writer of songs of much genius. He played frequently 
 in private, acconipanying his own songs.* Indeed, Schu- 
 bert, though overshadowed, as far as the weightier parts 
 of his work were concerned, by the mighty genius of 
 Beethoven, then the object of great adoration, soon be- 
 came sufficiently popular through his songs, to be able 
 to support himself by the results of his publications. 
 He would have been able, that is to say, if he had not 
 been of an absolutely and utterly unbusiness-like nature, 
 so that he would sell his things, often for almost nothing 
 at all. His friends did what they could for him ; but 
 even they could not accomplish every thing. 
 
 To go on with Schubert's work — during these years, he 
 wrote another opera and another grand mass, and- also 
 
 * When visiting at the houses of the great, Schubert was reserved and shy. 
 No sooner had he fmished his exquisite playing of the accompaniment to his 
 songs, than he put on a serious face, and withdrew to an adjoining room. Indif- 
 ferent to applause, he avoided all compUments, and sought only the approbation 
 of his intimate friends. Though he never danced, he was sometimes present at 
 private parties given at fx'iends' houses, when he would obligingly seat himself 
 at the piano, and for hours together, extemporize the most beautiful dance- 
 music. When not invited out, he would spend the evening at the inn with his 
 friends. He was fond of wine ; and at these meetings at the inn, which were 
 often prolonged into the small hours, he frequently indulged in more than was 
 good for him, when he became noisy and rather unpleasant society. 
 
SCHUBERT. 349 
 
 his unfinished Symphony in B minor. This seems to us 
 the loveliest thing Schubert ever wrote. The first and 
 second movements are complete. The first few bars of 
 the scherzo are completely written, but there is not the 
 slightest sign of what is to come next. The Symphony 
 in E, also unfinished, differs from that in B in this par- 
 ticular, for that has a part written out in such a way 
 that it would be perfectly possible to complete it as 
 Schubert himself intended it should stand when finished. 
 The unfinished Symphony in B is held by some to repre- 
 sent Schubert's own life, — unfinished, mingled melody and 
 wildness, a curious thing in many ways. But of this 
 theory there is little or no proof. 
 
 Schubert went on with his dramatic efforts apparently 
 utterly careless of their lack of success. In 182 3, he 
 wrote the music to "Rosamunde" and of "Fierabas," and 
 the next year "Der Hausliche Krieg" (hows' Iich eh 
 krekh). Of this last the story is told that, having sent it 
 to the managers of the Opera House, he heard nothing 
 at all of it for a j^ear or more, when, on going to inquire 
 for it, he received it back in precisely the state in which 
 he had left it, with the string and wrapper untouched ; 
 for it had never even been opened. It is no wonder that 
 Schubert felt himself the victim of some unhappy fate, 
 as we see he did by bits here and there in his letters. 
 He seems for a time to have been miserably morbid and 
 unhappy. "Every night," he wrote, "when I go to sleep, 
 I hope never to awake, and every morning renews afresh 
 the wounds of yesterday. * * * Picture to yourself a man 
 whose health can never be re-established, who from sheer 
 despair makes matters worse instead of better ; picture to 
 yourself, I say, a man whose most brilliant hopes have 
 come to nothing," etc. But this morbid feeling did not 
 
350 COMPOSEKS. 
 
 last. Schubert's natural disposition was far too easy-going 
 for him to trouble himself greatly over the misfortunes 
 even of himself. 
 
 It seems to have been about this time that Schubert's 
 love affair with Caroline Esterhazy came to an unfort- 
 unate termination. Just when his passion for her began 
 can not be said. At their first acquaintance, in 1818, 
 when he was first engaged by Prince Esterhazy to give 
 lessons to his family, Caroline was but eleven years old, 
 while Schubert was twenty-one. In 1824, Caroline was 
 seventeen, and Schubert was twenty-seven. She could 
 not return his love, and the affair seems to have come to 
 an end at this time. 
 
 How much Schubert felt the unfortunate issue of this, 
 his only love affair, we can not say. Although of a 
 romantic disposition, he was not often in love, and usually 
 jested in an unseemly manner at any of his friends who 
 chanced to be, for the time being, hard hit. And it is 
 certain enough that the year when his love affair had 
 become a thing of the i^ast, saw a great revival in the 
 general spirits of Schubert. He made, with a friend, an 
 excursion into Upper Austria, which assisted his return to 
 a more happy and genial disposition. He was keenly 
 alive to the beauties of nature, and his letters from the 
 Austrian Tyrol are full of the spirit of the woods and 
 the mountains. 
 
 In 1826, Schubert made two attempts to better him- 
 self in a worldly point of view by obtaining some post 
 that would guarantee him a fixed income for the future. 
 He applied for the position of vice-capellmeister in the 
 Imperial Court, and also for that of conductor of the 
 orchestra at the Karnthnerthor (karn'thner tor) Theater, 
 but it was Schubert's own luck to obtain neither of these 
 
SCHUBERT. 351 
 
 places. Weigl (vi'gl) was appointed vice-capellmeister, 
 and it is said that Sclaubert lost the other place by his 
 own obstinacy in refusing to alter a piece he had just 
 composed, which it was manifestly impossible to render 
 as he wrote it.* In spite of these two disappointments, 
 however, Schubert's prospects were by no means so dis- 
 couraging as they had been some years before. His 
 reputation as a song-writer had spread to many cities 
 beside Vienna, and though his more serious work was 
 not appreciated, yet the revenue arising from the sale of 
 his published songs was sufficient for his wants, which 
 was more than it had ever been before. 
 
 The year 1828 was the last year of Schubert's life. 
 But in it, he accomplished some of his most wonderfu.1 
 
 * The story of Schubert's losing this place is told by Schindler {sMmV lev), 
 but has no other authority. Ii seems characteristic enough, and we give it in a 
 note for what it is worth. 
 
 Schubert had attracted the attention of Duport {duprtr'), the manager; but the 
 decision rested upon his success in composing some operatic scenes arranged for 
 the occasion. This was done, and Nanette Schechner (nil net' shekh'ner) was to 
 sing the soprano part. During the rehearsals, the lady called the attention of the 
 composer to some insurmountable difliculties In the principal air, and requested 
 him to make curtailments and to simplify the accompaniments, which Schubert 
 flatly refused to do. At the first orchestral rehearsal, the artist endeavored in 
 vain to master the air, and Schubert's friends begged him to make the required 
 modifications, but without result. He persisted in his determination. At the 
 last rehearsal, every thing went smoothly until the air, when it happened, as 
 everybody anticipated. The singer struggled hard with the weighty accompani- 
 ments, especially with the brass, but was fairly overpowered. She sat down on a 
 chair by the proscenium quite exhausted. No one spoke, and despair was on 
 every countenance. Meanwhile, Duport, the manager, went from group to group 
 and whispered mysteriously. As for Schubert, he sat motionless, during this 
 most unpleasant scene, like a statue, his eyes fixed on the score lying open in 
 front of him. At ■ length, Duport advanced to the orchestra, and said, very 
 politely, "Herr Schxibert, we should like to postpone the performance for a few 
 days; and I must request that you will make the requisite alterations in the 
 aria, so as to render it easier for lYaulein Schechner." Several members of the 
 orchestra now entreated Schubert to yield ; but his anger was only intensified by 
 Duport's observations and these added entrea'ies, and exclaiming, "I alter 
 nothing," he closed the book with a bang, put it under his arm, and strode away 
 quickly. All hope of his appointment was, of course, abandoned. 
 
352 COMPOSERS. 
 
 work. In March of that year, he completed his Sym- 
 phony in 0, the grandest of his works of this sort. He 
 wrote also, as always, some songs ; but especially, he did 
 his best work in church-music, in the composition of his 
 Mass in E flat. He passed the year in Vienna, longing 
 much to be able to get away into the lovely country of 
 the Austrian Tyrol, which he loved so much. But he 
 was forced to give up this idea, solely on account of his 
 want of money. He began to make up his mind to give 
 a concert. But this went no further. 
 
 Throughout the fall, he had felt unwell, at times 
 being afflicted with giddiness and headache, but he had 
 thought but little of it. Even when he became seriously 
 unwell in the beginning of November, he seems to have 
 been unable to thoroughly understand his weak state. 
 But on the 16th of November, he became rapidly worse ; 
 the doctors suspected typhus fever ; and on the 1 9th, in 
 the afternoon, he died.* 
 
 * Schubert and Beethoven lived in Vienna together for thirty years, but 
 there is no good evidence that they ever met each other. Beethoven knew little 
 of Schubert until shortly before his death, when he studied some of his songa 
 with careful attention. But Schubert had for Beethoven the greatest awe and 
 veneration. On this turns a story which is not substantiated : Schubert, it is 
 said, wrote some variations which he desired to present to Beethoven in person. 
 He had previously dedicated them to him. Being timid, and in this case awe- 
 stricken at the idea of approaching the great master, he only went to Beethoven's 
 house with much trepidation, and then with a friend whom he Implored to act 
 as spokesman. Beethoven received them in the kindest manner, but Schubert 
 was overcome with shyness. His condition became more miserable when Bee- 
 thoven, on unrolling the music and reading, discovered one or two slight errors 
 in the harmony. These he mildly poin ed out to Schubert, adding that they 
 were of but little importance. But Schubert was utterly disconcerted. He left 
 the house and never entered it again, nor did he ever see Beethoven again iintil 
 he- saw him on his death-bed. During Beethoven's last illness, Schubert was 
 frequently at the house to inquire for news ; and at the funeral, he was one of 
 the torch-bearers. After the funeral, as is often told, he, with a couple of friends, 
 went to a tavern, where they drank to the memory of Beethoven, according to 
 the G-erman fashion. The second glass was to the memory of him who should 
 first follow him to the grave. Schubert himself was the man, for he died the 
 next year. 
 
NlKNDKlvSSOHN. 
 
 1809-1847. 
 
 THAT worthy man, Abraham Mendelssohn (men' dels- 
 son), was in the habit of remarking the fact that 
 he only ceased being the son of his father on becoming 
 the father of his son ; by which he expressed the idea 
 that he no sooner emerged from the overshadowing 
 fame of Moses Mendelssohn, than he found himself again 
 overshadowed by the wonderfully rapid growth of the 
 reputation of his son, Felix Mendelssohn Barthokly (bar- 
 tol' de). 
 
 The Mendelssohns were a talented Jewish family. 
 Moses Mendelssohn, the philosopher and scholar, born 
 172 9, was the father of Abraham Mendelssohn (the 
 overshadowed one), and he in turn became, on February 
 3, 1809, the father of Jakob Ludwig Felix (ya'kop loot'- 
 vlkh fa'liks), one of the most popular, in England at least, 
 of the whole list of great composers. Felix was born at 
 Hamburg ; but the town shortly falling into the hands of 
 the French, the Mendelssohn family moved, in 1811, to 
 Berlin, where they settled themselves permanently. 
 
 A year or two after this, Abraham and his wife left 
 the Jewish faith for the Christian, as various others of 
 the family had done before. So the children were bap- 
 tized into the Lu^theran Church, and the name Bartholdy 
 was assumed in addition to that of Mendelssohn. 
 
 Very early in his life, — in fact, at three years of age, — 
 Felix began to receive lessons on the piano from his 
 
354 COMPOSERS. 
 
 mother. As in the case of Mozart, the reason for this 
 very early beginning lay in the fact that his sister, a 
 little older than himself, was beginning to learn music, 
 and it was thought as well that both should learn to- 
 gether. Although Mendelssohn's youthful performances 
 were by no means so wonderful as those of Mozart, they 
 were sufficiently remarkable ; for he played in a concert 
 at the age of nine, and also began to compose at that 
 early age. But his father and mother carefully over- 
 looked his education, and he received lessons from ex- 
 cellent teachers in piano-forte playing and on the violin, 
 in thorough-base, and in composition. In fact, it is said 
 that the children were expected to arise at five every 
 morning to prosecute their tasks. Such are some of the 
 trials of genius. 
 
 In the course of the next few years, Felix wrote 
 much, played somewhat in public, and studied hard. 
 The Mendelssohn family took a decidedly musical turn, 
 and a miniature orchestra was frequently gathered at 
 the house, Felix conducting (standing on a stool, for he 
 was, at the time, short), his sister Fanny playing the 
 piano, and his brother Paul playing the 'cello, while such 
 amateurs as were on hand, helped to make up enough to 
 perform the young artist's compositions. The house was 
 known to all musicians who passed through the town: 
 its atmosphere was truly artistic. 
 
 In the spring of 1825, began the artistic journeying 
 which forms the chief feature of Mendelssohn's youth. 
 His father took him to Paris, and here he met with all 
 the most famous of the musicians who made that city a 
 musical center. On his return to Berlin, Abraham Men- 
 delssohn took possession of the Q-artenhaus (gar' ten hows) 
 which became the center of the family life of the Men- 
 
MENDELSSOHN. 355 
 
 delssohns. The attachment existing between all tlie 
 members of tliis family is worthy of note.* Fatlier and 
 mother and children were bound together in the fondest 
 affection. In the Q-artenhaus existed the same cultivated 
 and musical atmosphere that we have just remarked. 
 Here Mendelssohn composed his overture to the "Mid- 
 summer Night's Dream," for four hands on the piano, 
 which was played by himself and Fanny. The overture 
 was given before an audience of amateurs by an orches- 
 tra, in the great central hall of the Q-artenhaus, toward 
 the end of the year 182 6, and later was given in public. 
 In this year, too, was given Mendelssohn's opera, "The 
 Wedding of Camacho" (ka ma'sho), which had but small 
 success. It was about this time that Mendelssohn began 
 to devote himself to trying to give in public the works 
 of Bach (bak)j -^vho was at that time quietly ignored, 
 even by the music-loving part of Germany. 
 
 When he reached the age of tAventy, Mendelssohn 
 began his wander jalire (van der ya' ra)^ as the phrase is — 
 years wherein he traveled over the grea,ter part of 
 Europe, playing, composing, and listening, fitting him- 
 self in every way possible, for the work of his life. 
 
 He first visited England, — a country which he saw 
 often afterward, which appreciated him to the highest 
 extent, and in which many of his finest pieces were 
 given for the first time. He conducted his own com- 
 
 * Every one knows how happy Mendelssohn was at home. His heautiful, 
 gentle, sensihle wife spread a charm over the whole household, and reminded 
 one of a Eaphael (raf'uil) Madonna. Little Carl, the eldest child, amused us 
 intensely with his first attempts at speaking. Gecile's (sc7 selz') family— charming 
 people— were in and out all day, and the whole atmosphere was a sort of rivalry 
 of amiability and affection,- it was a period of happiness which falls to the share 
 of hut few mortals. We laughed much when Cecile told us how, as she came out 
 of a concert at the Gartenhaus, she had heard two women talking about her and 
 pitying her because "her husband was so cruel, inhuman, and barbarous to her." 
 —Ferdinand HUler. 
 
356 COMPOSERS. 
 
 positions at several concerts, played much in private, saw 
 much of the best people, and delighted everybody. In 
 the summer, he went with a friend through Scotland, 
 where he obtained the impressions which we see in the 
 "Scottish Symphony" and in the "Hebrides Overture" 
 [Fingal's (flng' gaiz) Cave]. Then he passed through Lon- 
 don, where he was detained by an accident, so that he 
 could not be present at his sister's marriage, and after 
 passing the winter of 182 9-30 in Berlin, set forth again 
 on his travels. 
 
 Rome was his object. He passed through Weimar (vr- 
 mar) [hence the music of the "Walpurgis (val pdbr'gls) 
 Mght"], then Munich and Vienna, and in the fall settled 
 in Rome. Here he set to work in earnest, studying hard 
 and composing somewhat. At the Chevaher Bunsen's 
 (bdbn'senz), at Horace Vernet's (vernaz'), and at many 
 other then celebrated salons (sa long'), he met with the 
 very agreeable and cultivated society that then existed 
 in Rome. It was here that he met Liszt (list), and also 
 Berlioz (ber le o'). 
 
 In the spring, he made a tour of many of the Italian 
 and German cities, and reached Paris in December.* 
 But Paris did not please him. He met various friends— 
 Hiller (hir er), Chopin (sho pang'), and Liszt— but, on the 
 whole, he thought there was too much clap-trap, too 
 much display, and too little real art. So he was glad to 
 cross to London again, where he aroused great excite- 
 ment among music-loving people by his organ playing. 
 
 *" Toward the spring, Liszt arrived in Leipsic," writes Hiller later, "fresh 
 from his triumphs at Vienna and Prague (prdg), and revolutionized our guiet 
 town. It will he remembered that in Paris he had excited Mendelssohn's highest 
 admiration. At his first concert, as he glided along the platform of the orchestra 
 to the piano, dressed in the most elegant style, and as lithe and slender as a 
 tiger-cat, Mendelssohn said to me : ' There's a novel apparition, the virtuoso of th"? 
 nineteenth century.'" 
 
MENDELSSOHN". 357 
 
 Here, too, he published his first book of "Songs Without 
 Words." Pie reaclaed Berlin, however, in the summer. 
 
 The next year (1833), Mendelssohn, after conducting 
 at the Lower Rhine Festival, given at Dusseldorf (dus'- 
 sel dorf), was offered the position of director of the vari- 
 ous musical societies and establishments of the town for 
 three years, and this position he accepted, and entered 
 upon its duties in the fall. 
 
 At Dusseldorf, Mendelssohn can hardly be said to 
 have had a satisfactory time.* For he disagreed with 
 various people in the musical circles of the town. But 
 he composed somewhat, beginning the oratorio of "St. 
 Paul," and writing many songs (some with words, soine 
 without), as well as inuch else. But before his time had 
 elapsed, he was asked to accept the position of leader of 
 the Q-ewandhaus (ga vand'hows) concerts at Leipsic (lip'- 
 zikh). It was, perhaps, the chief musical position in 
 Germany at the time. It was practically the same po- 
 
 * " March lU, 1SS5. 
 "There is simply nothing to he done here in the way of music," he writes, 
 " and I long for a better orchestra, and shall probably accept another offer that 
 I have had. * * * You know that from the very beginning, all I wanted here 
 was a reaUy quiet time for writing some larger works, which will be finished by 
 October. Besides, it is very pleasant, for the painters are capital fellows, and 
 lead a jolly Uf e ; and there is plenty of taste and feeling for music; only the 
 means are so limited that it is unprofitable in the long run, and all one's 
 trouble goes for nothing. I assure you that at the beat, they all como in sep- 
 arately, not one with any decision, and in the jnarms, the flute is always too high, 
 and not a single Dusseldorfer can play a triplet clearly, but all play a quaver and 
 two semiquavers instead, and every allegro leaves off twice as fast as it began, 
 and the oboe plays E natural in minor, and they carry their fiddles under their 
 coats when it rains, and when it is fine, they don't cover them at all — and if you 
 once heard me conduct this overture, not even four horses could bring you there 
 a second time. * » * There is a choral society of one hundred and twenty mem- 
 bers, which I have to coach once a week, and they sing Handel (hm' del) very well 
 and correctly, and in the winter, there are six subscription concerts, and in the 
 summer, every month, a couple of masses, and all the dilettanti (<Ml et tan' te) fight 
 to the death, and nobody will sing the solos, or rather everybody wants to, and 
 they hate putting themselves forward, though they are always doing it ; but you 
 know what music is in a small Q-erman town. Heaven help us." 
 
358 COMPOSERS. 
 
 sition that Bach had held a hundred years before. Men- 
 delssohn, finding that the Dusseldorfers could spare him, 
 went to Leipsic, and established himself there for the 
 rest of his life. 
 
 His life here was a perpetual delight to him.* He 
 sprang at once into a sure place in the hearts of his 
 audience, and between himself and them existed the 
 most sympathetic feelings. He had here a position 
 which was greatly to his taste, — it was not too confin- 
 ing, — for he had at hand as concert-master his friend, 
 Ferdinand David (da ved'), on whom he could rely when- 
 ever he chose. Some time afterward, to anticipate, Mosch- 
 eles (mosh'eh les), a warm friend, came from England 
 and settled in Leipsic, and with two such able support- 
 ers, Mendelssohn must have felt that he could make the 
 Q-ewandhaus concerts the wonder of the world. 
 
 During his first year at Leipsic, occurred one of the 
 very great griefs of his life-time, the death of his father. 
 To console himself, he fell to work on the oratorio of 
 " St. Paul," in which his father had taken a great inter- 
 est, and finished it by the spring of 183 6. It had been 
 originally composed for the Frankfort Cecilia Society ; 
 but the illness of the director broke up this plan. " St. 
 Paul " was given at Dusseldorf, and afterward, Mendels- 
 
 * Mendelssohn's house was pleasantly situated, with a nice, open lookout 
 from the front upon the Leipsic boulevard, and the St. Thomas school and 
 church, once the sphere of the great Bach's labors. * * * "Our way of life was 
 regular and simple. At about eight, we breakfasted on coffee, and bread and 
 butter. Butter, Pelix never ate, but broke his bread into his coffee, ' as he had 
 been accustomed to do.' We dined at one, and though he despised butter, he 
 always liked a glass of good wine, and we often had to try some special sort, 
 which he would produce with great deUght, and swallow with immense satis- 
 faction. We generally made quick work with our dinner ; but in the evenings, 
 after supper, we used often to sit round the table for hours, chatting (not smok- 
 ing), unless we moved to the pianino (jn I'ine' no), which had been presented to 
 Madame Mendelssohn by the directors of the Q-ewandhaus." 
 
MENDELSSOHN. 359 
 
 sohn, for a time, took the place of Schelble (shel'taia), the 
 director of the Frankfort OeciHa. In the course of his 
 residence at Frankfort, he became acquainted with Mile. 
 Cecile Jeanrenaud (zhon ra no'), with whom he fell deeply 
 in love. September 9, he writes to his mother, " I can 
 settle nothing till I have written to tell you that I have 
 just been accepted by C<3cile Jeanrenaud. My head is 
 quite giddy from the events of the day, but I must 
 write to you." He Avas married at Frankfort, on the 
 17th of March, 183 7. 
 
 But he was not able to reiuain long with his wife. 
 He grieves greatly in his letters of this period that he 
 has promised to go to Birmingham to conduct his " St. 
 Paul." "Possibly," he remarks, "the death of the King 
 of England will intervene, and put a stop to the whole 
 project." William IV., however, lived along tranquilly 
 for another year, and Mendelssohn went again to En- 
 gland, was again made an idol of, conducted his " St. 
 Paul " at Birmingham, and disappeared with all haste to 
 meet his Cecile at Frankfort, whence he reached Leipsic 
 on the day of his first Gewandhaus concert for that 
 season. 
 
 The next year, there was to be celebrated at Leipsic 
 the fourth centenary of the invention of printing, and for 
 this Mendelssohn composed his splendid " Hymn of 
 Praise," the fame of which spread rapidly, and soon 
 brought him to England that he might conduct it at 
 Birmingham. 
 
 At about this time was started the idea of creating a 
 Conservatory of Music in Leipsic, and in this Mendels- 
 sohn interested himself. To go a little ahead of the 
 event, the Conservatory was founded, the bequest of a 
 certain worthy man being appropriated to it, and Men- 
 
360 COMPOSERS. 
 
 delssohn had charge of the upper classes in the study of 
 the piano-forte and composition. Beside Mendelssohn, 
 among the professors, were Schumann (shc5o' man), and 
 Moscheles,* Hauptmann (howpt'man), the successor of 
 Bach (bak) at the Toniasschule (to ma shc5o'la), and David, 
 the violinist, concert-master of the Gewandhaus. 
 
 Mendelssohn must have been an excellent teacher. 
 Thorough, clear, precise, — as willing to praise the good as 
 to blame the faulty, — he thoroughly commanded the re- 
 spect and love of his pupils. Even though he did some- 
 times go so far as to scorch a pupil by remarking sternly, 
 " So play the cats," it is noteworthy that one whose ear 
 was as sensitive as his, did not more often become 
 frightfully irritated at the mistakes of his pupils. 
 Another thing that interested him much was the busi- 
 ness set on foot in relation to a statue of Johann Sebas- 
 tian Bach. That great father of modern music was 
 greatly neglected in Germany, and it was one of the 
 most earnest aims of Mendelssohn's life to bring to light 
 the hidden genius of the mighty composer. We remem- 
 ber his efforts in Berlin ; and now, at Leipsic, the old 
 home of Bach, it was most natural that he should be 
 profoundly interested in plans to do him honor. 
 
 During the next years, Mendelssohn lived chiefly at 
 Berlin. But he was constantly called elsewhere. In the 
 faU of 1840, he went again to England— where he was 
 always fully appreciated and very highly esteemed— to 
 conduct the "Hymn of Praise" at Birmingham; and two 
 years afterward, he was there again to conduct his 
 "Scottish Symphony" at a Philharmonic concert. This 
 symphony was new, and had, indeed, only just been fin- 
 
 *Moschele3 became professor in 1846, some three years after the Conser- 
 vatory liacj been opened. 
 
MENDELSSOHK. 36] 
 
 ished, though he had been seized with the ideas of it 
 twelve years before, when he traveled through the High- 
 lands with his friend Klingemann (kllng' e man), on his 
 first visit to England. On this later visit it was that he 
 made the visit to Queen Victoria and the Prince Con- 
 sort which he describes in his letter to his mother. 
 
 During these years there was much negotiation con- 
 cerning the establishment of a Conservatory at Berlin, 
 to which the King of Prussia desired to attach Mendels- 
 sohn. It was on account of this that Mendelssohn had 
 changed his place of abode from Leipsic to Berlin. It is 
 hardly important to go into all this, save as being the 
 cause of the composition of some of his finest things. 
 For the King of Prussia, Mendelssohn composed the 
 music to the "Antigone " (an tig' o ne), which was given 
 with grand effect at Potsdam. Two years after was 
 given at the same place "A Midsummer Mght's Dream," 
 with the magnificent incidental music. Mendelssohn 
 had composed the overture when only sixteen, and now, 
 eighteen years after, he developed the ideas of his youth 
 into some of the most beautiful music that he ever 
 wrote. The music for " CEdipus (ed' i pus) at Colonus " 
 (ko lo' nus) and " Athalie " (a' ta le), was also composed as 
 a part of his duty as Professor at the Berlin Conser- 
 vatory, or, rather, Capellmeister (ka pel'nnis ter) to the 
 King of Prussia. 
 
 Besides these works, the oratorio of " Elijah " was con- 
 stantly in the composer's mind. It does not appear that 
 any part of this was, however, yet written, though Mendels- 
 sohn had conceived its idea three years or more before. 
 
 In 1845, Mile. Jenny Lind first appeared at Leipsic, 
 at the eighth Q-ewandhaus concert of that year. She 
 sang several of Mendelssohn's songs, while the composer 
 
362 COMPOSEES. 
 
 accompanied her. In several other concerts did the two 
 appear togetlier. This was the last time that Mendels- 
 sohn played in public at his favorite Leipsic. 
 
 In the spring of the next year, " Elijah " was finished 
 and sent to Birmingham for rehearsal. In the summer, 
 Mendelssohn himself crossed over to England to take 
 charge of the performances. It was first rehearsed at 
 the house of Moscheles in London. On the 24th and 
 25 th of August were two full rehearsals at Birmingham, 
 and the next day it was first given in public in the 
 Birmingham Town Hall with indescribable enthusiasm. 
 Mendelssohn returned almost at once to Leipsic, whither 
 very shortly came his friend Moscheles, who was about 
 to enter upon his duties as professor at the Conserva- 
 tory. He was busied through the winter chiefly with 
 a revisal of "Elijah," and in the spring, he went to En- 
 gland for the last time, to conduct at the performance 
 in its revised shape at Exeter Hall, London. He con- 
 ducted it at Manchester, too, and afterward at Birming- 
 ham. He played also to the Queen and the Prince Con- 
 sort, and started for home on the 8th of May. 
 
 When he reached Frankfort, he was tired and unwell. 
 His labors during the last two or three years had been 
 very great, and had told seriously on his strength. He 
 needed a long and perfect rest. But he had hardly been 
 at Frankfort for more than a day or two, when his 
 dearly-loved sister Fanny, at Berlin, was, in the very 
 midst of a music rehearsal, seized with paralysis, and the 
 day after died. The blow to Mendelssohn was crushing; 
 he was an utterly changed man from that moment. In 
 his weak state of health, he was absolutely prostrated, so 
 that for weeks he could not be moved. As the warm 
 weather came on, he was well enough to be taken to 
 
MENDELSSOHN. 363 
 
 Switzerland. He passed the summer quietly at luter- 
 laken (in'ter lakh en), writing a little upon "Christus," 
 (krls'tus), the new oratorio he had in hand, and returned 
 to Leipsic in the fall. But here he could take no active 
 interest in musical affairs. He had only been at home 
 three weeks, when he was seized by a brain attack, 
 which confined him to his bed. He recovered in a 
 measure from this, but was again prostrated by another 
 seizure. He sank rapidly, and died on Thursday, the 4th 
 of November, 1847. He was only thirty-eight years 
 of age. 
 
 On the Sunday afternoon following, he was buried. 
 The coffin was carried to the Church of St. Paul, pre- 
 ceded by the notes of one of his own " Songs Without 
 Words." Behind the band came the senior student of 
 the Conservatory, wherein he had done his best for the 
 art he loved so much, bearing on a cushion a silver 
 crown, the offering of his scholars. Around the coffin 
 walked his friends Moscheles, Schumann, David, Gade 
 (ga'deh), Hauptmann, and Rietz (rets), and before it 
 marched the members of the Q-ewandhaus orchestra, 
 which he had conducted so often, the students and pro- 
 fessors of the Conservatory, and all the choral societies 
 of the city. Behind followed his brother Paul and 
 the others of the family, and all of Leipsic as mourn- 
 ers. At the church, the choir sang from his own ora- 
 torio of "St. Paul," and from the "St. Matthseus (mat- 
 ta'd&s) Passion" of his master, Johann Sebastian Bach. 
 In the evening, the coffin was taken on the railway train 
 to Berlin. And all through the night, as the mourning 
 procession passed on to Berlin, the choirs of the towns 
 through which it moved, would gather at the railway 
 stations, to sing out in the torch-lighted darkness their 
 
364 COMPOSEBS. 
 
 loving hymns to the departed master. At daybreak, the 
 Cathedral choir received it in Berlin with a choral, 
 and to the music of Beethoven's (ba'tovenz) "Funeral 
 March," the coffin was borne to the Church of the Holy 
 Family, where the body of Mendelssohn now rests, by 
 the remains of his father and his mother and his much- 
 loved sister.* 
 
 * G-ifts were in him iinited to the most careful cultiire, tenderness of heart 
 to sharpness of understanding, playful facility in every thing that he attempted 
 to powerful energy for the highest tasks. A nohle feeling of gratitude pene- 
 trated his pure heart at every good thing which fell to his lot. This pious dis- 
 position,— pious in the best sense of the word,— was the secret of his constant 
 readiness to give pleasure and to show active sympathy. 
 
 Were it conceivable that all his works should perish, the remembrance of 
 his poetic nature would alone suface to afford the Q-erman public the great 
 satisfaction of thinking that such a being was born in their midst, and bloomed 
 and ripened there. 
 
 In society, apart from musical subjects, nothing coiild be more entertaining 
 or animated than Mendelssohn's conversation on literary topics. The works of 
 Shakespeare and other eminent British poets were quite as familiar to him as 
 those of his own country ; and although his accent was shghtly tinctured by his 
 German origin, he spoke as weU as wrote the English language with great 
 facility and purity. He drew from nature, and painted also very well, and, 
 indeed, might be said to possess every social accomplishment. 
 
CHOPIN. 
 
 1809-1848. 
 
 THE word Poland always brings to our mind a 
 throng of mingled ideas. It creates a feeling of 
 enthusiasm, of melancholy, of beauty. We think of 
 brave men, of unfortunate patriots, of lovely women. 
 Poland was the country of John Sobieski (so be es' ke), 
 who held back the Turks for so long ; of Mazeppa (ma- 
 zep'a), the Cossack hetman, who rode with Charles XII., 
 against Peter the Q-reat, at the Battle of Pultowa (pdbl- 
 to'va); of Kosciusco (kos si us' ko), Pulaski (pCilas'ke), and 
 Poniatowski (po ne a tov' ske). Its men are brave, courte- 
 ous, and unfortunate. Its women are refined and beau- 
 tiful, with a tinge of melancholy. The Polonaise ;po lo- 
 naz'), with its stately measure, the quicker bars of the 
 Mazurka (ma zdbr' ka) or the Cracovienne (kra ko ve en'), 
 bring to mind, most distinctly, the national character- 
 istics. These were Chopin's (sho pangz') favorite forms. 
 We must always remember that he was a Pole even 
 while a Parisian, — a Pole, self -exiled from a country with 
 a splendid history, which no longer existed. 
 
 Nicholas Chopin was a young Frenchman, who had 
 settled in Poland in the closing years of the last century. 
 Poland was at that time in a grievous state ; but, for 
 various reasons, Chopin jDreferred to make Warsaw his 
 home. In 1806, he married a Polish lady, Justine Krzy- 
 zanowska (zhus ten' krl ha nov'ska). In 1810, he was Pro- 
 fessor of French at the Lyceum (ii se'am). A year or 
 
366 COMPOSKRS. 
 
 two later, he undertook the same duties at the mihtary 
 school, and later still, at the Roman Catholic Academy. 
 
 He had four children, three daughters and one son. 
 This last, Frederic Francois (frong s^A^a') Chopin, a Pole 
 of French descent, was born near Warsaw, on March 1, 
 1809. In his early years, this son displayed very great 
 fondness for music, so that his parents got for him the 
 best instruction on the piano that could be found. Albert 
 Ziwna (zlv'na) was his first teacher, and must have been 
 surprised by his precocious pupil ; for the boy could com- 
 pose before he knew how to write music. And he made 
 remarkable progress upon the piano, so that all Warsaw 
 was amazed. At nine years of age, he played at a public 
 concert, and made for himself a great reputation in the 
 town which he afterward loved more dearly, perhaps, 
 than any other in the world. He became the pet of the 
 Polish nobility, and played to his heart's content, and 
 composed as well. 
 
 Fortunately, his father, seeing his great gift for com- 
 position, took care that he was instructed in the scientific 
 part of his art. He learned counterpoint from Eisner 
 (els'ner), with whom he ever after kept up a tender 
 friendship. His secular education, so to speak, was also 
 attended to ; for his father had no idea of his becoming 
 a professional musician. He went to the Lyceum in 
 Warsaw, and did his work there well. He passed his 
 boyhood happily,— playing, composing, studying, making 
 clever caricatures, of which he was very fond, and play- 
 ing practical jokes, for he was a cheerful soul, and as 
 fond of fun as his neighbors. But music was his chief 
 delight ; he would play on the organ in the church, or 
 improvise on the piano which he had up in his bed- 
 room, where he often passed much of the night, compos- 
 
CHOPIN. 367 
 
 ing mazurkas, polonaises, and marches. He had a great 
 love for the Polish melodies, which were common among 
 the people of his country. 
 
 As he grew older, he turned his attention more and 
 more to music ; * and even when a boy, was recognized 
 as the best pianist in the capital. It was not till 1827, 
 when he was eighteen years of age, that he left Warsaw 
 to see a bit more of the world. Berlin was the first 
 great city that he visited ; but he did not appear there 
 in public, having a very modest opinion of his own 
 powers. But he learned much there, and desiring to see 
 Vienna, then, as now, a musical capital, he traveled 
 
 * In 1831, jTist after tlie appearance of Ms second composition, E. Schumann 
 wrote a long article in tlie Allgemeine MusikaliscM Zeituntj {HI ga ml' nd rmX) se Ml' %sh a 
 tsi' toong), under the simple heading, " An opus 3." We quote a part of it : "Euse- 
 hius (yoo si' W, us) had just stepped softly into the room. You are familiar with 
 the ironical smile on the pale face, by which he tries to excite attention. I was 
 sitting at the piano with Morestan (M' res tan)^ who is, as you are aware, one of 
 those peculiar musicians who prejudge every thing new and extraordinary. But 
 to-day a surprise awaited him. With the words, ' Hats oflf, gentlemen : a genius ' ! 
 Eusebius laid before us a piece of music, of which we were not allowed to see 
 the title. I carelessly turned over the leaves. There is something fascinating in 
 the enjoyment of music without sound. I think, too, that every composer has 
 his own manner of writing notes ; Beethoven's (ba' to venz) looks different from 
 Mozart's, just as Jean Paul's (zhbn powlz) words do not look hke Goethe's {gu'tekz). 
 But now it seemed to me as if quite strange eyes, flowers' eyes, basilisks' eyes, 
 peacocks' eyes, were gazing at me. Light dawned in places ; I thought I saw 
 Mozart's ' La ci darem la mano ' (I 'I die liii' rem Hi md' no) entwined in a hundred 
 chords. Leperello (lep er W 10) seemed to be looking steadily at me, and Don Juan 
 {don jW an) glided past me in his white mantle. 'Now, play it,' said Elorestan. 
 Eusebius consented, and we sat squeezed in a window-niche to listen. He played 
 like one inspired, and brought forth an innumerable host of life-life forms ; as if 
 the enthusiasm of the moment had raised his fingers beyond their usual possi- 
 bihties. With the exception, however, of a happy smile, Elorestan only expressed 
 his approbation by saying that these Variations might have been Beethoven's or 
 Pranz Schubert's {/rants slim' hertz), if these composers had been piano virtuosi (ver- 
 too 0' si). But when he turned to the title-page and read, 'La ci darem la mano, 
 varie pour le piano-forte par Erederic Chopin, Oeuvre 3,' we both cried in astonish- 
 ment, ' A second work ' I We were dumfounded, and could only exclaim, ' Yes ; 
 but this is something clever. Chopin— I never heard the name, who can he be? 
 An unmistakable genius. In the variations, in the concluding movement, and in 
 the rondo, genius shines in every bar.' " 
 
368 COMPOSERS. 
 
 thither in 1829, intent on hearing, enjoying, and learning. 
 In Vienna, the amateurs who heard him, begged him to 
 play at a public concert. So, he appeared at two con- 
 certs, and at each was violently applauded. When he 
 began to improvise on popular Polish themes, the people 
 in the pit rose up upon the seats and began to dance. 
 " The only people not satisfied," he writes home, " are the 
 out-and-out Germans." From Vienna, he came home by 
 way of Prague (prag) and Dresden. It is delightful to 
 read the letters he^ writes on these journeys. Young, 
 gay, and full of life and genius, the whole world seemed 
 to him a sort of garden, where he had simply to wander 
 about listening to good music, and in his turn, ravish- 
 ing the others by his own performances of his own 
 conceptions. 
 
 He returned home with larger ideas and with broader 
 judgment. He still had the gay delight in the world and 
 in music ; but he looked at all things a little more seri- 
 ously, and his resolve to devote himself entirely to art 
 was only fixed more deeply in his mind. He had seen 
 Vienna. He now desired to see Italy, and also Paris, 
 and it was the opinion of Eisner that it would be best 
 for him to continue his musical education in this man- 
 ner. He gave two farewell concerts at AYarsaw, to realize 
 means for his journey ; and on the 2d of November, 
 1830, he said good-bye to his family and his native city, 
 and journeyed, by way of Breslau (bres'low), Dresden, and 
 Prague, to Vienna. He never went to Italy. Those who 
 remember Mozart's (mo zarts') triumphant tour through 
 the music-loving peninsula, who recall how the splendid 
 voices and orchestras, the fine opera-houses and con- 
 ductors, all tempted him to write at once an opera, may 
 find some pleasure in wondering what would have been 
 
CHOPIN. 869 
 
 the effect of an Italian tour upon Chopin. As a matter 
 of fact, he never did compose an opera, even at Paris, 
 where there were splendid opportunities for so doing. 
 His genius lay, on the whole, in an entirely different 
 direction. 
 
 In this tour through Germany to Vienna, he listened 
 much and played but little. At Breslau, he took the 
 place of one of the members of the orchestra at the 
 piano, but only at the request of an old friend. And at 
 Dresden and Prague, where he spent some little time, he 
 only played among friends. Indeed, at no time during 
 his life, was he fond of playing in public. 
 
 He stayed for some time in Vienna, but his plans 
 were all broken in upon by the Polish revolution of 
 
 1830. Warsaw was seized by Russian troops. Poles 
 were not looked upon with favor by those in authority 
 at Vienna, and Chopin, among the rest, suffered. He 
 decided that Paris would be the place for him to seek 
 his fortune ; for he could not bear the idea of being any 
 longer a burden to his father. He gave a concert in 
 Vienna, and that was by no means a great success. 
 
 He left Vienna in the summer of 1831, and went on 
 his way to Paris. At Munich, where he stayed some 
 weeks, he played at one of the Philharmonic concerts, 
 to the great delight of the people, as well as of the con- 
 noisseurs and amateurs. Then, starting again for Paris, 
 he reached that capital in the middle of the fall of 
 
 1831. Paris at that time was an interesting city for a 
 young man devoted to the arts.* The opera was then 
 
 * Eomanticism was the order of the day ; they fought with obstinacy for and 
 against it. What truce could there he between those who would not admit the 
 possibility of writing in any other than the already established manner, and 
 those who thought that the artist should be allowed to choose such forms as he 
 deemed best for the expression of his ideas ; that the rule of form should be found 
 
370 COMPOSEES. 
 
 in its glory. Auber (o bar') and Meyerbeer (mr er bar) 
 were putting on the stage their masterpieces. Rossini (ro- 
 ze'ne) was master of the glories of the Itahan opera. It 
 was the day of "Fra Diavolo " (fra dea'voio), of "Robert 
 le Diable" (ro bar' leh dea'bi), of "William Tell." Mali- 
 bran (ma le brong'), Pasta (pas' ta), and Lablache (la- 
 blash') were on the stage. It was in 1831 that Paganini 
 (pagane'ne) first appeared in Paris. At this time, too, 
 the names of Berlioz (ber'leo) and of Liszt (Hst), as of 
 many others, were beginning to be widely known.* 
 
 Literature, as well as art, was vigorous. The year 
 1880 is the year of the first production of "Ernani" (er- 
 na'ne), the gage of defiance flung down by Victor Hugo 
 to the classical in literature. And with Hugo were a 
 group of other brilhant men, notably Theophile Gautier 
 (ta o fel' go te a'), Honore de Balzac (o no ra' deh bal zak'), 
 Alexandre Dumas (a leksandr' du ma'), Alfred de Musset 
 (mo'bs'sa) were beginning to make their reputation. And 
 to these should be joined another — George Sand, a 
 woman thought second to few in the roll of contem- 
 porary French literature. In Paris, too, at this time, was 
 that ornament of German letters — then an exile from 
 his country, in a strange country — Henri Heine (6ng re' 
 
 hi' neh). 
 
 It was a time of revolution — in letters, in art, in 
 
 in the agreement of the chosen form with the sentiments to be expressed, every 
 different shade of feeling requiring, of course, a different mode of expression? 
 
 Those who saw the flames of genius devour the old worm-eaten, crumbling 
 skeletons, attached themselves to the musical school of which the most brilliant, 
 the most daring representative was Berlioz. Chopin joined this school. He per- 
 sisted most strenuously in freeing himself from the servile formulas of conven- 
 tional style, while he earnestly repudiated the charlatanism which sought to 
 replace the old abuses only by the introduction of new ones. — Liszt. 
 
 * Mendelssohn (m^n' dUs son) disapproved thoroughly of the tone of the musical 
 circles in Paris. Despite his views, however, and allowing very great truth to 
 certain of them, it is a fact that there was much musical genius in the city. 
 
CHOPIN. 871 
 
 music. Every-where was there to be felt the same break- 
 ing of old models, the same creating of new forms that 
 distinguished the earlier years of the century in the his- 
 tory of English letters. 
 
 Into all this, Chopin flung himself with ardor.* He 
 was fired to create a new era in art. He applied to 
 Kalkbrenner (kalk'bren ner), the most famous pianist of 
 the city, to find whether he had any thing to teach him. 
 Kalkbrenner found fault, declared his style unorthodox, 
 and consented to give him lessons on condition that 
 Chopin should remain under his hands three years. But 
 Chopin demurred. "Three years of study is a great deal 
 too much," he writes to his old teacher in Warsaw, "as 
 Kalkbrenner himself perceived when he had heard me 
 two or three times. I coidd make up my mind to study 
 three years, if I felt certain that would secure the end 
 I have in view. * * * in my opinion, the composer 
 who can perform his works himself is best off. * * * 
 Now that I have an opportunity of fulfilling my self- 
 made promise, should I not embrace it?" He was 
 already making arrangements for a concert. There were 
 difficulties in the way, and the first concert did not take 
 
 * In the cause of Eomanticism [Chopin] broke many a lance, and gave abun- 
 dant proof, particrdarly during the first years of his residence in Paris, of his 
 thorough devotion to the principles of that school. Its most important repre- 
 sentatives at that time were Berlioz and Liszt, the ablest, boldest, and most per- 
 severing opponents of the classical school. In 1832, Chopin, who had grown up 
 amid the clamor of this contest, adopted the views of BerUoz and Liszt, and 
 joined the party who openly discarded the old-fashioned style, from which they 
 held as much aloof as from charlatanism. All through the controversy over the 
 romantic school, some of the productions of which were real masterpieces, Chopin 
 remained stanch to his opinions. He would not make the slightest concession to 
 those who did not follow art for its own sake, but only used it as a means of 
 obtaining money, fame, or honor. Much as he enjoyed the society of fellow- 
 artists, he renounced it unhesitatingly if convinced that they were going too far 
 in their resistance to all innovation, and were endeavoring to restrict his own 
 creative efforts. To him art was sacred, and he would never praise a composition 
 or an interpretation which he did not think really worthy of being commended. 
 
372 COMPOSEKS. 
 
 place until the end of the winter. Even then, it was not 
 a success as regarded the general public. Hardly any 
 one came except Polish refugees, of whom there were 
 many in Paris. Chopin became very gloomy at this ap- 
 parent failure. He thought of emigrating to America, 
 and might have gone, but that his parents were reso- 
 lutely opposed. 
 
 But, in truth, Chopin's failure was more apparent than 
 real. He was by no means fitted for popular triumphs. 
 He never played his best at a popular concert. Fortu- 
 nately, an accidental meeting with a compatriot of high 
 social position, introduced him to a world which was 
 only too delighted to be allowed to admire his genius. 
 He played at a soiree (swa ra'), and completely con- 
 quered his audience. "From that evening, his future 
 changed as if by magic." He began to receive requests 
 to take pupils. His works became more widely and bet- 
 ter known. His finances strengthened. He no longer 
 had any idea of emigration. 
 
 His second concert* was given in 1834, and though 
 far more brilliant than his first, could hardly be called a 
 success. Chopin felt lost in a large theater like the 
 Italiens (e tal yen'). It was in the parlor among ama- 
 teurs that he was at home. 
 
 * Liszt once said to Chopin, "Do yon study much just before a concert?" 
 He answered, " It is a dreadful time for me ; I do not like public life, but it is a 
 part of my profession. I shut myself up for a fortnight and play Bach (fiak). 
 That is my preparation. I do not practice my own compositions." He said, in 
 confidence, to Liszt : " I am not adapted for giving concerts ; I feel timid in the 
 presence of the public ; their breath stifles me, their curious gaze paralyzes me ; 
 but with you it is a vocation ; for, if you do not please the public, you know how 
 to agitate and confound them." 
 
 It is said that when he was going to play in public, he would order in coats 
 from different tailors, and having tried them aU on, and found something to 
 object to in each, he would, at the last moment, borrow one of Ms pupil [Q-ut- 
 man] (gooV man), which was a great deal too large for him. 
 
CHOPijsr. 373 
 
 It was in 1834 that Chopin, in an excursion into 
 Germany with Hiller (hirer), met Mendelssohn,* whom 
 he had known in Paris before, and wlio was now just 
 settled in Leipsic, making preparations for the first of 
 the Gewandhaus (ga vand' ho^A7s) concerts, which he, for 
 so many years, conducted. And in the following year, 
 he had the joy of again seeing his much-loved father 
 and mother, who had gone to Carlsbad (karis'bad). This 
 was the last time they met. Chopin returned to Paris ; 
 his parents, to Warsaw. On his way home, he again 
 met Mendelssohn, and the two having a day, "spent the 
 whole of it together and had music," as the latter writes 
 to his sister Fanny. Robert Schumann (sh<5o'nian), too, 
 he met at Leipsic, in 183 6. 
 
 Returning to Paris, Chopin became a bit more settled 
 in a circle of friends who valued hira, and with whom 
 his life was a delightful service of the art which he 
 loved. f Franz Liszt and Ferdinand Hiller were, perhaps, 
 his most intimate. Henri Heine, he saw frequently. 
 So, Meyerbeer, and the painters Delacroix (deh la kr^A/a') 
 
 * Mendelssohn to his mother (May 23, ISSk) : — " They h.ave both made progress in 
 their playing, and Chopin is now one of the ilrst pianists ; he produces as many 
 novelties on the piano as Paganini (pagllne'ne) does on his violin, and marvels 
 that one would not have thought possible. Hiller, too, is a remarkable player, 
 with plenty of force and fancy. But both of them aim rather at Parisian sensa- 
 tionalism, and too often disregard time, repose, and true musical feeling. I, per- 
 haps, incline to the opposite extreme, and so we supplied each other's deficien- 
 cies, and all three, I believe, learned something from one another. About me 
 there was a dash of the school-master,— about them, the soupfon (sobp' s6ng) of a 
 mirleflore {m^rlShflor'), or an incroyahle^'' {dng croyu' bl). 
 
 t Material elegance was as natural to him as mental ; this was evinced in 
 the objects with which he surrounded himself, as well as in the aristocratic 
 grace of his manners. He was passionately fond of flowers. Without aiming at 
 the brilliant luxury with which, at that epoch, some of the celebrities in Paris 
 decorated their apartments, he knew how to keep upon this point, as well as in 
 his style of dress, the instinctive line of perfect propriety. He was fond of a 
 life in the country, or the life of the chateau (shd to'). He was ingenious in vary_ 
 ing its amusements, in multiplying its enioyments. He also loved to compose 
 there. 
 
374 COMPOSERS. 
 
 and Ary Schaffer (shef ' er). He had hoped while in Ger- 
 many, to marry a young compatriot, and to settle in 
 Poland. But fortune had not smiled on him, and Maria 
 Wodzyuski (vo jobs' ki) married another. How deeply 
 Chopin felt the wound, we can not say. It was shortly 
 after this disappointment that he met Q-eorge Sand. 
 
 Aurore Dudevant (o ror' dud vongO was at this time 
 at the height of her fame, the foremost woman of letters 
 in France, considered by many as the equal of such men 
 as Victor Hugo, Balzac, and Alexandre Dumas. She fell 
 in love with Chopin, and he with her. She could appre- 
 ciate him and his art, he felt, and he was pleased at it ; 
 she was passionately devoted to him, and he was proud 
 of it. He returned her love, and the connection was to 
 him a very great happiness. 
 
 In 183 7, shortly after this meeting, Chopin was seized 
 with an affection of the lungs. He was urged to go to 
 the South of France. Gfeorge Sand was about to go to 
 the Island of Majorca (major'ka), with her son Maurice 
 (mo res'), and pressed him to accompany her. The winter 
 of 183 9, he spent there; but his health did not improve. 
 The doctors treated him for consumption. His ailing 
 was, in truth, bronchitis. On his return to Paris, the 
 doctors advised him to avoid excitement, spare himself, 
 and lead as regular a life as might be. 
 
 Chopin now no longer performed in public. He gave 
 lessons, played much among his friends, and composed. 
 His lessons, he greatly enjoyed. "Play as you feel," he 
 would say; "why can not you put your soul into it?" 
 He was kind, encouraging, and usually gentle,* though 
 
 * His personal appearance was so agreealole and harmonious tliat the eye 
 rested on him with pleasure. His dark-hrown eyes were cheerful rather than 
 pensive ; his smile was kindly and perfectly good-natured ; he had a complexion 
 
CHOPIN. 375 
 
 later in life he became nervously irritable. He was loved 
 by his scholars for his kind and sympathetic manners ; 
 and also by his countrymen and countrywomen, to 
 whom he was always as serviceable as might be. 
 
 In 1844, Chopin received a blow in the death of his 
 father. His own condition was by no means favorable ; 
 his lungs were ailing, and the cold winds of the winter 
 were most grievous to him. At the time of his father's 
 death, his friends recognized that his own departure 
 could be only a question of time. His condition was 
 rendered more grievous by the close of that connection, 
 which had been to him a very great pleasure from the 
 moment of its beginning. The liaison (le a zong') be- 
 tween himself and Q-eorge Sand was broken off. Into 
 the rights and wrongs of the case, it is useless to try to 
 go here. In 1847, they had a violent scene, and parted. 
 They met but once again during their lives. George 
 Sand was not unwilling to be reconciled, but Chopin 
 turned away. 
 
 In the winter of 1848, occurred the political disturb- 
 ances, which ended in the expulsion of the dynasty of 
 Louis Philippe (looe' fe lep'). Chopin was grieved at the 
 misfortunes of a family who had been uniformly kind to 
 him, and embraced an opportunity which offered to 
 make a tour in England and Scotland. He gave a last 
 concert on February 16th, and, toward the end of April, 
 crossed to London. He remained absent for a year, and 
 returned to Paris weaker and worse in health than be- 
 
 of almost transparent delicacy, and luxuriant brown hair, as soft as silt; his 
 Eoman nose was slightly aquiline ; all his movements were graceful, and he had 
 the manners of an aristocrat of the first rank. Every one with any discernment 
 of true gentility and real genius, could not but say, on seeing Chopin, "There is 
 a distinguished man." His voice was musical and rather subdued. He was not 
 above middle height, naturally delicate, and in his general contour resembled his 
 mother (a Pole). His father was a Frenchman. 
 
376 COMPOSERS. 
 
 fore. From his return, he became rapidly worse, through 
 the spring and summer, and on the 17th of October, 
 very early in the morning (it was just as the clocks 
 were striking three), he quietly died.* 
 
 At his own request, Mozart's Requiem was performed 
 over his body, and Polish earth was scattered on his 
 coffin, and his heart was sent to the country which he 
 loved so well, and is preserved in the Church of the 
 Sacred Cross at Warsaw. 
 
 * On Sunday, the 15th of October, Ms attacks were more violent and more 
 frequent, lasting several hours in succession. He endured them with patience 
 and great strength of mind. The Countess Delphine Potocta (del fen' po tots' led), 
 who was present, was much distressed. Her tears were flowing fast when he oh- 
 served her standing at the foot of his bed, taU, slight, draped in white, re- 
 sembling the beautiful angels created by the imagination of the most devout 
 among painters. Without doubt, he supposed her to be a celestial apparition ; 
 and when the crisis left him a moment in repose, he requested her to sing. 
 They deemed him first seized with deUrlum, but he eagerly repeated his request. 
 Who could venture to oppose his wish ? The piano was rolled from his parlor to 
 the door of his chamber, while, with sobs in her voice and tears streaming down 
 her cheeks, his gifted countrywoman sang. Certainly this delightful voice had 
 never before attained an expression so full of profound pathos. He seemed to 
 suffer less as he listened. She sang that famous canticle to the Virgin, which, 
 it is said, once saved the life of Stradella (strd del' IS). " How beautiful it is 1 " he 
 exclaimed. " My God, how very beautiful ! Again, again ! " Though overwhelmed 
 with emotion, the countess had the noble courage to comply with the last wish 
 of a friend, a compatriot. She again took a seat at the piano, and sung a hymn 
 from "Marcello" {rncir set' U). Chopin again feeling worse, everybody was seized 
 by fright. By a spontaneous impulse, all who were present threw themselves on 
 their knees,— no one ventured to speak ; the sacred silence was only broken by 
 the voice of the countess, floating like a melody from heaven, above the sighs 
 and sobs which formed its heavy and mournful earth accompaniment. It was 
 the haunted hour of twilight ; a dying Ught lent its mysterious shadows to this 
 sad scene. The sister of Chopin, prostrated near his bed, wept and prayed, and 
 never quitted this attitude of supplication while the life of the brother she had 
 so cherished, lasted. 
 
SCHUNl ANN. 
 
 1810-1856. 
 
 " T WAS born at Zwickau (tsvik' ko-w), in Saxony, June 
 -L 8, 1810. My father was a book-seller, a very active 
 and intelligent man, noted for his pocket -edition of 
 foreign classics ; for ' The Leaves of Memory,' much 
 read in their day ; for many important business works ; 
 and for a translation of several of Byron's poems, pub- 
 lished shortly before his death. * * * From my earliest 
 years, I showed great taste for music. I recollect writ- 
 ing, unaided, choral and orchestral works when but 
 eleven years of age. My father wished me to study 
 music ; but the plans which he formed with C. M. von 
 Weber (fon va' ber), of Dresden, were never carried out. 
 I received the iisual grammar-school education, pursuing 
 my musical studies with perfect devotion, and compos- 
 ing according to my ability. In 1828, I entered the 
 Leipsic (lip'sik) University, chieflj^ for the purpose of 
 hearing Professor Krug's philosophical lectures." 
 
 This is Robert Schumann's (shcJo'manz) own account 
 of his early years, and it hardly seems necessary to add 
 much to it. The death of his father occurred in 1825, 
 and from this time, the " inordinately high spirits which 
 characterized his childhood " gradually faded away, and 
 his disposition became more melancholy in temper, while 
 a certain shyness and diffidence increased. He had at this 
 time already done something in music, though he was by 
 no means so forward as had been many of his illustrious 
 
378 COMPOSERS. 
 
 predecessors in the art. His musical disposition had been 
 fostered by his father, but his motlier desired him to 
 turn his attention to the law. It was at her desire that 
 he entered the University at Leipsic as a student-at-law. 
 
 At Leipsic, it can not be said that he worked very 
 hard at his legal studies. He seems to have inwardly 
 decided to become a musician. He met in Leipsic many 
 musical people, and particularly Frederick Wieck (vek), 
 whose daughter Clara, although only nine years of age, 
 was an extraordinary performer on the piano. 
 
 Leipsic was at this time an exceptionally good place 
 for a young man with musical desires. Readers will 
 remember it as connected with the names of Bach (bak) 
 and Mendelssohn (men' dels son). The Choral Society con- 
 nected with the Tomasschule (to ma shc5o' la) had long 
 been one of the most important musical societies in Ger- 
 many, and had been under the charge of some of the 
 most famous Q-erman masters of their day. It was at 
 this time more than two hundred years of age. Of 
 more recent date were the G-ewandhaus (ga vand'hows) 
 concerts, established toward the end of the 18th century, 
 under the direction of the elder Killer (hirer). There 
 were, also, other musical organizations of repute, and 
 though there was no established opera company, the 
 Italian opera company from the Royal Saxon Opera House 
 at Dresden was always to be heard at some time during 
 the year, generally at the season of the annual fair. 
 Later, in 1835, Mendelssohn's arrival and establishment 
 as leader at the Q-ewandhaus gave an additional impetus. 
 
 In the year 1829, having been at Leipsic about a 
 year, Schumann went to Heidelberg (hi' del berkh), where, 
 as before, he studied more music than law. He practiced 
 on the piano most assiduously, paying little attention to 
 
SCHUMANN. 379 
 
 theoretical studies, a fact which he afterward greatly 
 regretted. "Law," says Wasielewski (vas ei ev' ske), "was, 
 as it were, excommunicated." 
 
 During the summer, Schumann started off on a trip 
 to Italy, which he had planned with some of his college 
 friends. As it turned out, however, he went alone, and 
 wrote letters to his friends who didn't go, from which 
 it appears that he had a not unpleasing time.* It was 
 on this expedition that he first heard Paganini (pa ga- 
 ng' ne). 
 
 When the time came for his law-examinations, Schu- 
 mann well knew that his preparation had not been such 
 as to insure his passing them with any great credit. 
 Here came the final struggle between himself and his 
 mother and guardian, who had both desired to see him 
 a lawyer. "My whole life," he wrote to her, "has been 
 a twenty years' war between poetry and prose, or, let 
 us say, music and law. * * * JSTow, I stand at the 
 parting of the roads, and shudder at the question. 
 Whither ? If I truly follow out my own bent, it points — 
 and, as I believe, correctly — to music." Music carried 
 the day, and Schumann again began to take lessons in 
 piano-playing of Wieck. 
 
 As before, he gave his entire attention to practice, 
 and devised an ingeniously royal road to success, whereby 
 he absolutely disabled his right hand, so that he had to 
 give up piano-playing for the future. A great disap- 
 pointment, — ^but, perhaps, a not unfortunate one. For 
 
 * He does not say very much of music in those which we have read. The 
 most interesting topic is, perhaps, " a lovely English girl, who," he wi'ites, 
 ''^seemeit to have fallen in love with my playing rather than me." And again, 
 " Alas I my heart is heavy, and my spirit is on the staircase in the Hotel Reich- 
 mann (rlkh' mfin). She gave me a cypress-leaf when we parted there. She was 
 an English girl, right haughty and kindly, loving and hating hard, and yet so 
 tender when I played— accursed reminiscences." 
 
380 COMPOSERS. 
 
 Schumann now took to studying the theory of music 
 and to composition, and gave up the idea of becoming 
 a great performer, — a change, by which posterity has 
 gained much. 
 
 At this time, Schumann was attacked by a fit of 
 mental excitement, similar to that which darkened the 
 last days of his life. The death of one of his sisters 
 caused him the most intense emotions, so that one night 
 (it is reported, and denied), he attempted to fling him- 
 self from a high window. True or not, as this story 
 may be, Schumann had afterward a great dislike to 
 living at the top of a house. "How high do you live?" 
 he wrote to a friend, when he was thinking of removing 
 to Vienna. " I always suffer from dizziness and nauser 
 in high places, and can never remain long in the top 
 story of a house." At the time of this alleged event, he 
 was in such a state that he feared to be left alone with 
 himself. A terrible melancholy took possession of him 
 for a time, and reduced him to a most apathetic state of 
 mind. The symptoms of this attack caused him great 
 anxiety by their not infreciuent re-ajapearance. 
 
 Schumann now began his musical studies with vigor 
 under Dorn, and prosecuted them for some time, work- 
 ing and composing various things. In the year 1834, 
 Schumann added to his musical studies, those of a mu- 
 sical critic, bj^ the starting of a musical journal called 
 \he Neioe Zeitschrift fur M'usilr* (noV a tsit' shrift fir mc5o- 
 
 * Schumann himself has described to us the circumstances of the foundation 
 of this journal : 
 
 "At the close of the year '33, a number of musicians, mostly young, met in 
 Leipsic every evening, apparently by accident at iirst, for social purposes, but no 
 less for an exchange of ideas on the art that was meat and drink to them,— 
 music. It can not be said that the musical state of Q-ermany was then very 
 pleasing. Kossini {tvs s?' ne) still ruled the stage. Herz (Juirls) and Httnten (A»«'- 
 ten) were sole lords of the piano. And yet, but a few years had elapsed since 
 
SCHUMANN. 381 
 
 sek'). The paper, started by a number of enthusiasts in 
 music, was only one of the many ways in which the 
 hot blood of the young artists of that day cried out 
 against the Philistinism of their elders. 
 
 We must add here a word about the Davidsbund 
 (da vedz' bdbnt), or "League of David," a term apparently 
 derived from David, as the youthful antagonist of Goliath 
 (go II' ath), the Philistine. Under this name, Schumann 
 bound together a number of kindred souls into a most 
 informal organization, which " existed only in the head 
 of its founder." Indeed, several of the members were 
 unaware of their connection with this mystical organiza- 
 tion. The object of this brotherhood was to combat the 
 Philistinism of the present, and to work for a truer and 
 more artistic future. The members, in great part, wrote 
 for the Neue Zeitschrift under various names. Schu- 
 mann himself was sometimes Florestan (fio res' tan), 
 sometimes Eusebius (u se' be us), sometimes Meister Raro 
 (mis'ter ra'ro), sometimes Jeanquirit (zhonkere'). Felix 
 Meritis was Mendelssohn. Chiarina (kea re'na), Zilia (tsei'- 
 e a). Cecelia represented Clara "VYieck. Chopin and Ber- 
 lioz (berleo') were, also, held members of the Davids- 
 bund, as well as many others. 
 
 There are many interesting things in the life oi 
 Schumann at this time that we must slip over. He was, 
 for a great part of the time, very much in love with 
 Ernestine von Fricken (er' nSs ten fon frik' en). But this 
 passion gradually cooled. In 1835, Mendelssohn arrived 
 
 Beethoven {bcL' to I'fe), C. M. von Weber, and Franz Schubert (J'rdnts shM' bert) were 
 with us. To be sure, Mendelssohn's star was in the ascendant ; and wonderful 
 things were reported of a Pole, Chopin (sho pang'), by name; but they exercised 
 no real influence till later. One day, the young hot-heads thought, Why do we 
 look Idly on 1 Let's take hold, and make things better ; let's restore the poetry 
 of art to her ancient honor? So arose the first sheets of a new journal for 
 m\isio."— ( 
 
382 COMPOSERS. 
 
 at Leipsic as director of the Gewandhaus concerts, as 
 may be seen elsewhere. 
 
 Ill 1836, Schumann fell in love with Clara Wieck, at 
 this time seventeen years of age. This passion was far 
 deeper than the many others which Schumann had pre- 
 viously experienced ; but, for a time, its course was any 
 thing but smooth. Wieck, the father, had no desire to 
 receive the young composer as a son-in-law ; and for a 
 long time, Schumann could only communicate with his 
 love by means of such ingenious stratagems as are gen- 
 erally understood to be particularly appropriate to per- 
 sons in his situation. In order to make his worldly posi- 
 tion better, Schumann thought of removing to Vienna, 
 and of taking with him the Neue Zeitschrift, but this 
 plan came to nothing. In spite of this failure, means 
 seem to have been found for doing away with the 
 scruples of the obdurate jaarent, and Schumann was 
 married to Clara Wieck, on September 12, 1840. 
 
 His wooing had not been in vain in more directions 
 than one. " The various difficulties and disappointments 
 through which he had gone since he first declared his 
 affection, had borne fruit in his musical creations. All 
 the finest of his piano-forte works date from these 
 3^ears." In the year of his marriage, he composed 
 nothing but songs, and among them all his greatest and 
 most famous ones.* 
 
 * Of Schumann's songs (though the present is no critical work) we may note 
 one or two things. Schumann appeared at a time when the Romantic school of 
 Germany— Heine (/t^' ««/»), Ruckert if ik' ert), 0\iamiBso (shdmU' o), G-eibel (<?«' 6fO, and 
 others, were pouring forth their genius in what has been called the " German 
 Spring-time of Song." He was the first to clearly comprehend the genius of 
 Heine, and in his settings of Heine's lyrics, the words and music are so inter- 
 twined as to be Inextricable. It is " this power of putting himself on a par with 
 the poet whose words he sets, and entering so completely into his mind, that dis- 
 tinguishes Schumann from the earlier song-writers." The earlier song-writers— 
 
scHUMANJsr. 383 
 
 Some time after his marriage, Schumann was ap- 
 pointed Professor* in the Conservatory at Leipsic, re- 
 cently founded by Mendelssohn. Before his marriage, by 
 the way, he had received the degree of Doct(jr of Phi- 
 losophy from the University of Jena (ya'na). 
 
 Shortly after this, Schumann gave up his connection 
 with the Neue Zeitschrift, which had of late been occu- 
 pying biit a secondary place in his mind. And at about 
 this time, on account of his health, he left Leipsic and 
 moved to Dresden. 
 
 From this time, the story of his life is clouded by his 
 growing ill-health. His mind was almost continually 
 afflicted bv troubles of a hallucinatorv nature. " As soon 
 
 for instance, Beethoven and Schubert — at times attained this complete fusion. 
 "But what was the exception with the older composers, becomes the rule with 
 Schumann." 
 
 * As may be imagined from what we know of Schumann's reserved dis- 
 position, he was not successful as a teacher nor as a conductor. "This is 
 proved," says Waslelewskl, "by a glance at the fine sphere of action offered him 
 in the Leipsic Music School. * * « Schumann taught piano-playing, the art of 
 composition, and playing from score. The object evidently was rather to learn 
 from a remarkable musician than from a teacher. As. a teacher, he lacked that in- 
 dispensable quality — a ready power of communication and ability to explain his 
 meaning at all times with clearness and precision. * * * Being myself a pupil 
 of the Leipsic Music School, I had ample opportunity to prove this from personal 
 observation, especially as I entered one of Schumann's piano classes to play the 
 violin part in a B-flat major trio by Pranz Schubert, Op. 79, which one of the 
 scholars was to play. The lesson was given with hardly a word from Schumann ; 
 although, as I well remember, there was abundant occasion." 
 
 The same author also remarks : " He had as little talent for directing as for 
 teaching. He lacked the qualities most requisite for both, and the ability to put 
 himself in close rapport with others, and to make his meaning clear to them. 
 This was because he either was silent, or spoke so low that he could not be 
 understood. He also lacked the physical energy and endurance requisite for a 
 director. He was always easily exhausted, and was obliged to rest at intervals 
 during a rehearsal. Nor did he exercise any sort of care or oversight. On the 
 other hand, he had in his favor considerable fame, and an artistic, earnest, and 
 impressive personal presence." 
 
 It is elsewhere related that his shyness was so great that, when an error was 
 made by any one in the orchestra, he would never point it out, but merely order 
 the piece to be begun over again. So, unless the musicians would notice and 
 correct themselves, their faults remained unnoticed and uncorrected. 
 
384 COMPOSERS. 
 
 as he began to use his brain," says his doctor at this 
 time, "shivering, faintness, and cold feet set in, together 
 with great pain and a peculiar fear of death, which first 
 took the form of a dread of high hills or houses, all 
 metallic substance (even keys), medicine, and infection." 
 His memory became disordered, so that he could not re- 
 tain musical ideas. He was continually imagining that 
 he heard the note "A." He constantly imagined that 
 he heard musical sounds, from which his fancy built up 
 whole compositions. He thought that he heard the 
 voices of spirits whispering in his ear, now gently, and 
 again in loud and reproachful tones. He was sometimes 
 utterly deprived of sleep by these spiritual manifes- 
 tations. One night, he arose hurriedly and called for a 
 light. It was his fancy that he had been sent a theme 
 by Franz Schubert and Mendelssohn, and that he must 
 at once develop it. 
 
 In 1850, Schumann removed to Dusseldorf (dus'sel- 
 dorf), where he held the position of musical director for 
 some time. But his mental troubles returned now and 
 then. He was horrified at finding out that there was a 
 hinatic asylum in the town. 
 
 In Dusseldorf, Schumann lived until liis death. He 
 gave up his position as musical director, for which his 
 mental disorder had entirely disqualified him. He sev- 
 eral times left the town to give concerts, or to oversee 
 the production of his own music. The last of these 
 journeys was through Holland, of which he wrote : " To 
 my great surprise, I find that my music is almost as 
 well known in Holland as at home. Every-where there 
 were fine performances of my symphonies, even the 
 most difficult." And later, he enjoyed the performance 
 of the "Paradise and the Peri," at Hanover. But on 
 
SCHUMANN. 385 
 
 his return from this tour, his disorder came upon liim 
 with renewed force, so that on one occasion lie was in 
 such a state as to attempt suicide. He was fortunately 
 rescued from the river into which he had flung himself, 
 and, with his own concurrence, was placed in a private 
 asylum at Endenich (en'den ikh). Here he remained for 
 two years.* 
 
 He died July 2 9, 1856.t 
 
 * He liad not been unaware of his condition, and one of his constantly re- 
 curring ideas was to the effect that lie could never be cured at home ; but that 
 he must give himself up to the care of some doctor. His sufferings in this way 
 were terrible. One day he slipped away from home and attempted to drown him- 
 self in the Rhine. His life was saved by some sailors whose attention he had 
 attracted, for he had run forth from the house in a dressing-gown and without a 
 hat. On this, an arrangement was made whereby he was sent to Endenich. He 
 became more retiring, and utterly shunned society. This unhappy state con- 
 tinued for two or three years, at the end of which time he thought himself 
 better, and was more able to get on with the work which he had laid out for 
 himself. 
 
 + Robert Schumann was of middling stature, almost tall, and slightly corpu- 
 lent. His bearing, while in health, was haughty, distinguished, dignified, and 
 calm ; his gait slow, soft, and a little slovenly. * * * Jlis eyes were generally 
 downcast, half-closed, and only brightened in intercourse with intimate friends, 
 but then most pleasantly. His countenance produced an agreeable, kindly im- 
 pression ; it was without regular beauty, and not particularly intellectual. The 
 fine-cut mouth, usually puckered as if to whistle, was, next to the eyes, the most 
 attractive feature of his roimd, full, ruddy face. Above the heavy nose, rose a 
 high, bold arched brow, which broadened Aasibly at the temples. His head, cov- 
 ered with long, thick, dark-brown hair, was firm, and intensely powerful, we 
 might say square. 
 
 The expression of his face, although firm, was sweet and genial ; the rich 
 soul-life was hardly mirrored there. When he assumed a friendly, confidential 
 manner, — as he but seldom did,— he could work upon his friends at will. * * * 
 
 The nature of his intercourse with others was simple. He spoke but little, 
 and in disconnected sentences, which, however, always showed his mind to be 
 occupied with the subject discussed. There was no premeditation. His style of 
 talking resembled a soliloquy, the more so that his voice was weak and unso- 
 norous. He never conversed on common, every-day subjects (for empty chatter 
 was odious to him) ; and it was rarely and unwillingly that he expressed his 
 opinion, even on important matters most interesting to himself. One had to 
 watch for a favorable moment. If you hit upon the right time, he could be elo- 
 quent in his own way. He made significant and intellectually fine remarks, 
 which threw a strong light, from one side at least, upon the question in hand. 
 But it was only to his dear and trusty friends that he vouchsafed this favor, 
 although he sometimes spent whole hours in their company without entering 
 
386 COMPOSERS. 
 
 into conversation. But no one could argue from his silence that he liked or dis- 
 liked a person. It was merely a characteristic habit formed in early hfe.— 
 Wasielewski. 
 
 One feature of Schumann's work may be here noted which we have not spoken 
 of at length. As an author, and a musician as well, Schumann was a novelty 
 in Germany. Mendelssohn, his contemporary, would have no connection with the 
 press or with literature ; and our other composers, running back to Handel and 
 Father Bach, contented themselves with eminence in musical fields alone. "Wagner 
 follows Schumann, and goes farther than his predecessor. Schumann did not com. 
 pose words for his music, but he delighted in expressing his ideas in words as 
 well as in music. The reader will remember the Neue Zeitschrift, and aU the 
 whimsicalities of the Davidsbund. Not that Schumann endeavored to lay down 
 in prose the principles of his musical work, as Wordsworth defended his poetry 
 in his prefaces. But he delighted to exercise his creative fancy by means of prose 
 composition as well as in music. "His essays," says Spitta, "are for the most 
 part rather rhapsodies on musical works, or poetical imagery lavished on musical 
 subjects, than criticisms properly speaking." To us Americans they can be little 
 more than a curiosity ; indeed, a complete edition of his prose works has never 
 been published. It is fortunate that music is an universal language, save to those 
 who are born without the power to appreciate it, and that those who throw their 
 ideas into musical forms may find an audience ail over the world. 
 
WAGNKR. 
 
 1813-1883. 
 
 IT is rather hard to seize at once upon the main 
 thread of Wagner's (vag'nerz) young Hfe. Up to 
 the composition of " Tannhatiser " (tan' hoi zer), about 
 the year 1844, he is seen dimly througli the mist of 
 jarring and discordant events. Born in Leipsic (lip'zlk), 
 Saxony, May 22, 1813,* losing his father when very 
 young, and his step-father before he had issued from 
 boyhood, the early development of his character seems 
 to have been as much the result of chance as of any 
 thing else, aided as it was by his own enthusiastic and 
 feverish ideas. Destined, at first, for a scholar, he early 
 showed a decided bias toward the career of poet, and 
 then of composer. He loved the strains of Van Weber 
 (van va'ber), and used to look upon him, as he passed the 
 house, with reverence. 
 
 He read and studied, learned English to read Shakes- 
 
 * His father was, at tlie time, Superintendent of Police, and died soon af|,er 
 his birth. His mother married again. Louis Geyer (gl' Sr), his step-father, was an 
 actor, and with his family removed to Dresden, where Wagner's boyhood and 
 early youth were passed. He paid little attention to nmsic, though fond of it to 
 a certain extent. His attempts at poetry led him to music, and the two together 
 caused him to be but an indifferent scholar. He wrote various things of little 
 note in his youth. In 1833, he composed an opera called "The Fairies," and sub- 
 sequently another, named " The Novice of Palermo," of which the story was taken 
 from Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure. ' In 1834, he was made conductor at 
 the Magdeburg (mag' d? b&rg) Theater, where Mina Planer, whom he afterward 
 married, was an actress. In 1837, he became conductor at a theater in Riga 
 {n'gd). It was at this time that he became familiar with Bulwer's " Eienzi," 
 from which the plot of his opera is taken, and with the legend of "The Mying 
 Dutchman," as related by Henri Heine. 
 
6 Ha d M P O S E R s . 
 
 peare, wrote an immense tragedy, and though he had 
 musical ideas and desires, his first aspirations seem to 
 have been toward poetry. But on hearing the symphonies 
 of Beethoven (ba' to ven), he was fired with a desire to 
 pour forth his tragedy in such music. It was a wildly 
 enthusiastic time ; revolutionary ideas were in the air — 
 both political and artistic. It was the time of the French 
 Revolution, of the Reform Act, of "Ernani" (erna'ne), 
 and the Romantic School. 
 
 From one place to another — generally as conductor of 
 an orchestra — Wagner drifted about Grermany, his mind 
 full of ideas and fancies which had not yet crystallized 
 into the dominant theme of his life. Paris became his 
 Mecca, and a brilliant success at the G-rand Opera seemed 
 to him the highest point to be reached by human ambi- 
 tion. So, with " Rienzi " (reen'ze) in his hand and his 
 head, he journeyed from Russia (where he then was) to 
 Paris. A long and roundabout way was piirsued. He 
 sailed first to London, and in the storms and the perils 
 of his sea-voyage, he gathered much which afterward 
 came out in his development of the old-time legend of 
 "The Flying Dutchman." So to Paris; and here he had 
 no brilliant reception, though introduced by Meyerbeer 
 (mi'erbar), who was then in the height of his very brill- 
 iant reputation. "Rienzi" was not accepted at the Grand 
 Opera, and Wagner was reduced to very low straits to 
 earn his daily bread. 
 
 In Paris, he was engaged in a work which marks the 
 close of this early period of his life. With the composi- 
 tion of "The Flying Dutchman," the period of jarring 
 ideas and desires, of striving for he hardly knew what, 
 the period of storm and stress is seen to be passing 
 away. And with the production of "The Flying Dutch- 
 
WAGNER. 889 
 
 man,"* we may see Wagner fully embarked upon his 
 career, formulating his own ideas, and following out his 
 principles without care for any thing save the develop- 
 ment of his art. Up to this time, there had been no 
 ground principle — all was shifting. There was unconscious 
 pandering to public taste, and too free an acceptance of 
 preconceived models. 
 
 His works in these early years were three operas — 
 '"The Novice of Palermo," "The Fairies," and "Rienzi." 
 The first two are almost unacknowledged, and the last 
 is in a totally different strain from his later works. 
 ■' Rienzi" is an opera based upon the model of the French 
 Grrand Opera, wherein Wagner seeks to express himself 
 in the fixed forms into which dramatic music had hard- 
 ened. In his later works, he follows out his own ideas 
 resolutely, without any idea of public fame, trusting to 
 those who come after for his appreciation. Thus the 
 name, the "Music of the Future." In "The Flying Dutch- 
 man," his ideas are hardly more than suggested. It was 
 not till the "Trilogy" that we can imagine that they had 
 reached a consummation satisfactory to their master. 
 
 * The story of " The Plying Dutchman " is one form of the legend of " The 
 Wandering Jew." The opera opens with a wild scene on the coast of Norway ; a 
 Norwegian ship appears, and shortly after the blood-red sails of the Plying 
 Dutchman's craft come in sight. The Dutchman is a sea-captain who, swearing 
 long since that he would double the Cape if he tried till doomsday, has been 
 condemned to sail on and on forever. Once in seven years he comes ashore to 
 see if he can win the love of a woman who will be faithful to him till death. 
 Can he do so, the curse will be lifted from him. He comes ashore, meets Daland, 
 the Norwegian captain, and is taken by him to his home. Senta, the captain's 
 daughter, has long loved the wretched phantom sailor, whose story she has 
 heard. His picture is to be seen hanging in the captain's cottage. In her love, 
 Vanderdecken, the Dutchman, hopes he has found relief. But he is wrongfully 
 persuaded that Senta is faithless. Again he boards his red-sailed ship for 
 another weary seven years' sail. But as the ship moves off, Senta, truly faithful, 
 rushes upon an overhanging cliff, and casts herself into the sea. The spell is 
 broken, and in the final tableau, the Plying Dutchman is seen released from his 
 wanderings, reunited with his bride, in heaven. 
 
390 COMPOSERS. 
 
 " Rienzi " was not accepted at Paris, and Wagner, 
 failing in his first desire, changed his base. He no 
 longer attempted to court popularity, and, therefore, as 
 a very natural consequence, "Rienzi" was at once ac- 
 cepted at Dresden, and, as a residt of its brilliant suc- 
 cess, Wagner was engaged in that city as conductor of 
 the Royal Opera. 
 
 "Rienzi" having been performed with success in Dres- 
 den, Wagner produced " The Flying Dutchman " at the 
 same place, and though both produced under his baton 
 (ba long') were received with applause, neither was ac- 
 cepted in the other German cities where Wagner obtained 
 their performance. But Wagner was, by this time, not 
 very susceptible to popular praise. After his labors in pre- 
 paring " The Flying Dutchman " for the stage, he turned 
 his mind to seek for other subjects. Reading much in Ger- 
 man history, he came upon the legend of " Tannhaliser." * 
 On this he worked at Dresden, at the same time trying, 
 by his position as hofcapellmeister (hof ka pel'mis ter) at 
 
 * The Knight Tannhaliser, who has lived long in the delights of the Hill of 
 Venus, with its beautiful mistress, feels a longing for all that he left behind 
 when he entered the enchanted mountain. He leaves it, and is found by Count 
 Hurman (hdor' mun), of Thuringia (fhSOrm'ji a), the uncle of the beautiful EUza- 
 beth, who loved the knight some time since, before he was seduced from the 
 haunts of men to the sinful delights of the Venusburg. The hand of Elizabeth is 
 to be the prize at a test of singing among the knightly minstrels, and each sings 
 on the nature of Love. Wolfram (woblf ram) sings the beauty of unselfish de- 
 votion ; Tannhaliser, of human passion. Finally he breaks forth into a hymn in 
 praise of Venus, confessing, at the same time, his own stay in the Venusburg. 
 He is about to be put to death ; but Elizabeth intercedes for her faithless lover, 
 and he .loins a band of pilgrims to Kome, to ask pardon of the Holy Eather. 
 
 The Pope bids him despair, saying that sooner than he can be forgiven wiU 
 his scepter put forth leaves. Tannhaliser returns in gloomy despair to the 
 Venusburg and its delights. On his way back, he hears that Elizabeth, broken- 
 hearted at not meeting him among the pilgrims returning from Eome, has died. 
 Once more, he feels the most bitter remorse, and dies in the very arms of Wolf- 
 ram, his friend, with a prayer to Saint Elizabeth. And as he dies, comes from 
 Eome a young pilgrim with the Pope's staff, which has budded and brought 
 forth leaves. 
 
WAGNER. 391 
 
 the Saxon Court, to do what might be done to elevate 
 the pubhc taste by directing it more and more toward 
 the worlis of Q-luck (gilk), of Weber, and of Beethoven. 
 So far, Wagner, though by no means agreeing with the 
 musical system which he found dominant, undertook to 
 make use of it as a means of inculcating on the public 
 his own ideas. But in this he utterly failed. " Tann- 
 hatiser" received only two performances at Dresden, — 
 where it was brought out, in 1845, with immense care 
 and trouble, — and it was impossible to obtain a hearing 
 at other theaters. Undismayed by these successive fail- 
 ures (for such they practically were, as no one accepted 
 the ideas put forward), Wagner set to work upon '"Lo- 
 hengrin" (lo'engren), a legend drawn from the old myths 
 of the Holy Grail. 
 
 The years 1848 and 1849, were marked by jjolitical 
 revolutions, as had been the year 1830. The French 
 Revolution which dethroned Louis Philippe (ic5o e'fe lep'), 
 was followed by- explosions of inflammable material in 
 Gi-ermany, Austria, and Prussia. There were revolutions 
 in Vienna and Berlin, in Poland, in the Palatinate, in 
 Hungary. So also in Saxony ; and Wagner, who had 
 identified himself with the Revolutionists, was compelled 
 to fly. He retired to Switzerland, leaving behind him, 
 however, one who was willing and able to act, in a 
 measure, as his alter ego, — Franz Liszt (frants list). 
 
 By means of Liszt, in the little Court Theater at 
 Wiemar (vi'mar), was "Lohengrin"* first performed, in 
 
 *Elsa, the Princess of Brabant (hrVhmt), is accused before King Henry the 
 Fowler, of the murder of her young brother, the once-reigning "Duie. The 
 nobles of Brabant are assembled by the side of the Scheldt (shHt), to try the 
 case. Elsa, appearing before the king, relates that in a dream a champion is 
 promised her against her accuser. The champion appears in a boat on the 
 Scheldt, drawn by a white swan. Telramund is conquered, and Blsa's hand re- 
 
392 COMPOSERS. 
 
 1850, and though by no means accepted by all as a 
 work of genius, it had its effect throughout the musical 
 world. There were many who would be willing to accept 
 Wagner and his ideas in Italy, as well as in his own 
 Grermany. Wagner took advantage of his exile and his 
 exclusion from public events, to formulate the theories 
 which had found expression in " The Flj^ing Dutchman," 
 " Tannhaiiser," and "Lohengrin." In "Opera and Drama," 
 not published till 1861, is to be found the object of 
 what was, in fact, a musical revolution. 
 
 Music, it is here held, is to be made the highest and 
 the necessary method of expression of Poetry, — of the 
 Drama. It is foolish to suppose that a frame-work con- 
 sisting of arias and finales, of fixed forms and set 
 models, can be the best means of putting forth in music 
 the poetical ideas of the composer. Wagner, as we have 
 seen, was a poet as well as a composer.* In "Rienzi," he 
 
 wards the victor. Only, she must not ask his name nor whence he comes. But 
 Blsa, taunted by Ortrud, — Teh'amund's wife, — with the dark origin of her hus- 
 band, does ask the fatal question. Again the side of the Scheldt is seen; Henry 
 and his warriors are preparing for departure, when the corpse of Telramund, 
 slain by Lohengrin, is brought in, and after follow the champion and Elsa. 
 Compelled now to disclose his name, the knight tells that he is Lohengiin, son 
 of Percival, the Knight of the Holy G-rail. 
 
 He is about to depart when the swan appears. Ortrud discloses to the king 
 and others that the swan is no other than the young Prince of Brabant, changed 
 to a swan by her, and now ii'revocably so, through Elsa's curiosity. But Lohen- 
 grin kneels in prayer, and the swan is changed back to the boy, and Blsa dies in 
 his arms. And Lohengrin, in his boat, drawn by a white dove, disappears from 
 sight. 
 
 * One of the peculiarities of Wagner's compositions, which is particularly ex- 
 emplified in "Lohengrin," is the ''leitmotif (fltinotef), so called. "Por every im- 
 portant idea or passionate impulse of his characters, Wagner introduces a certain 
 striking harmonious or melodious combination, as the musical complement of 
 their dramatic force. Wherever, in the course of the drama, this impulse comes 
 into action, we hear at once its corresponding motive, either sung by the voice 
 or played by the orchestra, and in manifold variations, according to circum- 
 stances." Examples of this may be found in the overture to "Tannhaiiser," 
 where the good and evil principles are shown by separate strains. In "Lohen- 
 grin " are many of the leading motives,— the graalmotif (grcUnw tlf), the king's 
 
WAGNER. 393 
 
 accommodated his poetry to the Grand Opera ideas, and 
 the result was a performance which he was afterward 
 led to condemn. In his later works, the poem was first 
 written. The Poet poured forth his ideas without re- 
 gard to other considerations than the demands of 
 dramatic effect. There was nothing of the giving way 
 to the singers, that there might be an ojjportunity for 
 vocal gymnastics. The book was written as it should be 
 written, — as a poem. And then the Composer expressed 
 the same ideas by a different medium. Sounds took the 
 place of characters, and the orchestra and the singers 
 interpreted to the audience the thoughts which were 
 conveyed on the printed page of their librettos. The 
 poem and the draniatic action is not to be subordinated 
 to the music, but all three are to have their place in tlae 
 bringing forward of the same ideas.* 
 
 motive, the motive of warning,— each of which denotes by its introduction the 
 presence of some idea or some character. 
 
 It may be noted that many who would agree substantially with Wagner on 
 these points, are really by no means among the composer's admirers. For many 
 wiU contend that Wagner expresses his ideas in a manner bordering on insanity, 
 and that his music is nothing but a heterogeneous and noisy collection of sound?. 
 Of course, this is by no means correct. It is, however, undoubtedly true that 
 many fully a,gree with Wagner that words and music should each in their own 
 way, and at the same time, express the idea, and yet find it impossiVjle to com 
 prehend the manner in which the expression is managed. 
 
 *" Richard Wagner composed like all great musicians, in his brain, and not: 
 as is often imagined, at the piano. It is a delight to examine a manuscript com 
 position from his hand,— to see how complete and well-rounded, how ripe and 
 finished every thing sprung from his head. Changes are very rarely found in 
 such a manuscript. Even in the boldest harmonies and most difficult com- 
 binations, not a slip of the pen occurs. In the entire score of " Tannhatiser,'" 
 which Wagner wrote out himself from beginning to end in chemical ink, no( 
 one correction is to be found. One note followed the other with easy rapidity. 
 It was his habit to write the musical sketch in pencil. In Baireuth, music-paper 
 was to be found in every corner of ' Wahnfried ' (vdii'frU), on which, while wander- 
 ing about the house during sleepless nights, musing and planning, he made brief 
 jottings, often merely a new idea in instrumentation. The rest was in his head. 
 The vocal parts were added to the score without hesitation, and never needed 
 correction. In the orchestra, he employed three staves, one of which was re- 
 
394 COMPOSERS. 
 
 In Zurich (zc5o'rik), Wagner resumed labor on what 
 became finally his greatest work, the "Niebelungen (ng- 
 taeidbng'en) Trilogy." The old stories of G-erman fable 
 supplied him with subjects. The work grew on his 
 hands. During the composition of " Lohengrin," Wag- 
 ner, in thinking of subjects for his hand, had thought of 
 the old legend of Frederick the Redbearded, who was 
 asleep in the Hartz Mountains, and also had had an idea 
 of the story of Siegfried (sekh'fret), one of the very early 
 Teutonic myths. He conceived of the story of the 
 " Death of Siegfried "as a separate piece. But as it 
 seemed to need a prologue, he planned as an introduction, 
 a piece on Siegfried's youth. But again the work seemed 
 too large for him, and finally it was in four operas that 
 the legend appeared, — the "Rhinegold," the "Valkyries" 
 (vai' ke riz), " Siegfried," and the " Twilight of the Gods." 
 But the four operas were not finished till twenty years 
 afterward, though the poem was written at this time and 
 the music to the first two was composed. 
 
 In 1855, Wagner passed over to England, as con- 
 ductor of the London Philharmonic Concerts. But he 
 was not successful. Although a first-rate composer, his 
 musical theories clashed with the English ideas, and he 
 returned to Switzerland. 
 
 Here he soon began to work upon "Tristan (tres'tan) 
 and Isolde" (e sol' da), a work, on the whole, less known, 
 and, as a rule, less highly considered than the rest of his 
 later work. It is an advance on " Lohengrin," in its utter 
 freedom from established musical form. In " Tristan 
 and Isolde," is heard for the first time the uninspired 
 
 served for special notes, as, for instance, when a particular instrument was to 
 enter. lYom these sketches the vocal parts could he written out immediately, 
 although the instrumentation was hy no means finished." 
 
WAGNER. 395 
 
 language of dramatic passion, intensified by an uninter- 
 rupted flow of expressive melody, which is no longer 
 obstructed by the artificialities of aria (a' r-l a), cavatina, 
 (kavate'na), etc. It was performed first at Munich (mu'- 
 nik), under the leadership of Von Bulow (fon tau'lo), con- 
 cert-master to the King of Bavaria. By this time we can 
 easily see that Wagner was by no means the unknown 
 and uncared-for composer whose early works were re- 
 jected every-where. All over Q-ermany, in Italy, — even in ' 
 Paris, — there were groups of art lovers who looked up to 
 him as a leader of musical ideas. " Tristan and Isolde " 
 was composed first for the Grrand Duke Frederick and 
 his wife, the Princess Louisa of Prussia. At Vienna, too, 
 there were many interested. And so at Weimar, where 
 "Lohengrin" had been first produced. Paris, however, 
 remained hopelessly corrupt. Its foolish society, steeped 
 in slothful delight over the sweetness of Italian melody 
 and the delights of the ballet, utterly condemned a per- 
 formance of " Tannhatiser," of which Wagner himself 
 took the oversight.* It was given but three evenings, 
 and Wagner returned to Q-ermany. 
 
 He found in Bavaria many who understood and loved 
 him. And it was under the patronage of King Louis 
 that "Tristan and Isolde " was given under the supervision 
 of the composer. But Wagner was not universally popu- 
 lar, even here, and, much public outcry being made 
 against him for various trifling occurrences, he withdrew 
 from Bavaria to Switzerland. 
 
 * The members of the Jockey Club seem to have been the leading spirits in 
 the affair. Even during the performance of the overture, were sounded the dog- 
 whistles with which these gentlemen signified their disapproval of an opera from 
 which the ballet had been omitted. It was impossible to perform the work, and 
 the press throughout Paris subsequently declared that " Tannhaiiser " richlv de- 
 served such a fate. But there were also political reasons for the failure. 
 
396 COMPOSERS. 
 
 He had already formed the text of another opera. 
 The courtly singers of " Tannhatiser " had suggested to 
 him the citizen " Meistersingers of Nuremberg" (nu'rem- 
 berg) ; and from the idea of a sort of comic afterpiece, 
 the " Meistersingers " * developed finally into a very grand 
 opera. It was produced in 1868, in Munich, with very 
 great success. 
 
 It is seldom perhaps that an artist who has experi- 
 enced at first so much ridicule and odium as Wagner, 
 should at the end find such a realization of ideals and 
 desires as was afforded him by the production of his next 
 great work. " Tristan and Isolde " had been given at 
 Munich with great splendor and immense care. Wagner 
 sat in the box beside the king, and at the end, too much 
 moved to speak, bowed his acknowledgment of the ap- 
 plause of those who had before condemned. But this 
 was not enough. For the perfect presentation of his 
 plays, it was needful that a theater should be constructed 
 on purpose for the performance, that each one of his 
 details should be carried out in exactly the right way. 
 Wagner desired a perfect presentation of his Trilogy. He 
 greatly feared that he should die with this crowning 
 triumph unachieved, for he saw no way toward the goal 
 of his ambition. He was destined, however, to have his 
 desires satisfied. 
 
 All over Germany, Wagner was now known and ap- 
 
 *Tlie "Meistersingers of Nuremberg" was originally conceived as a sort of 
 comic afterpiece to " Tannhaiiser." The first represented the musical rivalry of 
 noble knights; the second was to have for its subject the more humorous efforts 
 of the plebeian "Meistersingers," But this original idea, conceived shortly after 
 the performance of '' Tannhatiser," was by no means held to, and the opera, as 
 completed some twenty years after, is as much a work of art by itself, as is the 
 opera to which it was to have been attached as an afterpiece. The scene is laid 
 in Nuremberg ; the characters are the worthy citizens of that town, who, about 
 the middle of the sixteenth century, were taking up with much enthusiasm the 
 musical art, which had before been the property, so to speak, of the nobles, 
 
WAGNER. 397 
 
 predated — not universally, but there were few places 
 where true artists and music lovers did not look upon him 
 as the man of his time. All over Grermany, his disciples 
 set themselves to work to raise the funds necessary for 
 the gigantic enterprise that had been conceived. "Wagner's 
 idea was nothing less than to build for himself such a 
 theater as he desired, where his great creations could be 
 given by the best musicians in Q-ermany, that he might 
 at last feel that the doctrine, of which he was the apostle, 
 was presented in a form as nearly perfect as possible. 
 Baireuth (bi'rdoth) was selected as the spot where the 
 representation should take place. A site for building was 
 given by the city, contributions flowed in from all music- 
 loving Europe ; for every-where had been started Wagner 
 Clubs with the view of aiding in the great work. The 
 corner-stone was laid, and finally, the theater* was com- 
 pleted and the rehearsals began. The best singers that 
 could be found were in the cast, and the orchestra was 
 composed of the leading players of the country. Hans 
 Richter (rlkh'ter) was the conductor,' — a musician trained 
 under the eye of Wagner and thoroughly imbued with 
 his spirit. 
 
 It was the climax of Wa,gner's life. The performance 
 must have satisfied even the critical desires of the com- 
 poser. The four plays of the " Mebelungen Lied," the 
 "Rhinegold," the "Valkyrie," the "Death of Siegfried," and 
 the "Twilight of the Gods," were finally given before a 
 
 * The Baireuth Theater " has no ornament in the style of our modem theaters. 
 Nowhere do we behold gold or dazzUng colors ; nowhere brilliancy of light or 
 splendor of any kind. The seats rise amphitheatrically, and are symmetrically in- 
 closed by a row of boxes. To the right and left, rise mighty Corinthian columns, 
 which invest the house with the character of a temple. The orchestra, like the 
 choir of the Catholic cloisters, is invisible, and every thing unpleasant and dis- 
 turbing about ordinary theaters is removed. Every thing is arranged for a solemn 
 festive effect. 'That is no longer the theater; it is divine worship.' " 
 
398 
 
 COMPOSERS. 
 
 fit audience gathered from all nations, August 13, 
 1876.* 
 
 This was the crowning point of Wagner's career. But 
 although, in the Baireuth performances, "Wagner was 
 accepted by the few, he was by no means universally 
 accepted. This became plain by the slowness of the for- 
 mation of the society of patrons for the culture and 
 maintenance of the stage festival plays of Baireuth. 
 But his reputation had spread. In 1877, Wagner visited 
 England, and his enthusiastic reception showed the ad- 
 vance made since 1855. 
 
 The last of Wagner's M^orks is " Parsifal," given for 
 the first time at the Baireuth Theater, July 2 6, 1882. 
 With this Wagner seems to have felt that he might put 
 an end to his exertions, secure in the position which he 
 had obtained. He was not enjoying the most robust 
 health at this time, and his recent labors had told upon 
 his strength. After the performance of " Parsifal," he 
 sought Italy, and made his home at Venice with variou.s 
 friends, among them the Abbe Liszt. He engaged him- 
 self here in works which it was fated should never be 
 achieved. Toward the end of the winter, — on the 13th 
 of February, — he died suddenly of heart-disease. 
 
 * It would be far beyond the limits to which we are forced to confine our- 
 Belves, to attempt any description of the plot of Wagner's great Trilogy. The 
 characters and the story are from the great German Epic, the " Niebelungen 
 Lied." The first opera, the " Ehinegold," has for subject the stealing of the 
 treasure of the Rhine-daughters and the misfortunes it brings to gods and men. 
 It is a prologue to the three later operas. In the " Valkyrie " are displayed the 
 love of Siegmund (seg'mMnd) and Sieglinde (seg Hn' da), the Volsungs (fol' aidngz), 
 children of Wotan (wo' tan). Siegfried is the son of the brother and sister, and 
 his adventures are the subject of the drama which bears his name. The last of the 
 four dramas is the "Twilight of the Gods." Its subject is the death of Siegfried 
 a-nd of Brunehild (broo' neh hilf), the restoration of the Rhinegold to the Ehine- 
 daughters, the destruction of WalhaUa (ml hHV IS), 
 
Wy^mW^' 
 
 KS^ 
 
 
 POETS 
 
 &^ 
 
 <^ 
 
■>i 
 
 •^K ^f^ 
 
 Longfelio^v. 
 Goethe. Schiller 
 
 Pope. Byron. 
 
 Bpo wiling. 
 
 Burns. 
 Words worth. 
 
POPK. 
 
 1688-1744. 
 
 THROUQ-HOUT the eighteenth century, the reign of 
 Queen Anne (an) was called the Augustan Age of 
 English Literature. At the present day, this Augustan 
 Age seems to be, in a measure, recovering from the 
 great contempt into which it fell during the gener- 
 ation which began the nineteenth century. This is but 
 right. We may prefer the Elizabethan (e liz'a beth an) 
 Age, — but we must recognize the Augustan Age. A 
 generation which can boast the names of Swift, Addison, 
 Defoe, Pope, Prior, and Q-ay, not to mention Steele, Boling- 
 broke (bSl'ing brcJbk), Atterbury, Philips, Parnell (par' nel), 
 and Garth ; which glowed with the splendors of Dryden 
 and Congreve (kong'grev) just departed, and was ruddy 
 with the anticipations of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, 
 and Sterne about to come, is an age which must challenge 
 a good share of our attention. Two of the greatest of 
 England's prose writers delighted and astonished the 
 readers of that time, and its greatest poet laid down the 
 law on versification to England for a century. 
 
 Pope stands to-day among the greatest English poets, 
 more through his historical position as the greatesi 
 master of a particular kind of poetry, which for more 
 than a century enjoyed great vogue, than from the 
 general sympathy with which the present age regards 
 his works. At the beginning of this century, the pro- 
 ductions of the school of which Pope is by far the 
 
400 ' POETS. 
 
 worthiest representative, were held as the very lowest 
 species of mechanical verse by poets and critics who are 
 still read and admired. To-day, the same opinion is by 
 no means so common, and it is not improbable that in 
 the course of a few years more, Pope will enjoy a 
 greater reputation than he does to-day. 
 
 The English heroic meter, in which almost all of 
 Pope's work is written, stands as the external token of 
 the universal idea of poetry in England in the eighteenth 
 century. A great number of English poets, among whom 
 the leading names are Dryden, Pope, and Groldsmitli, 
 made use of this form as the vehicle of their poetic 
 ideas, and besides the form, there was a certain charac- 
 teristic line of thought and treatment, from which the 
 poets of the earlier part of the century, Cowper, Burns, 
 Byron, Scott, Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats, utterly and 
 entirely dissented and broke away. 
 
 The first poet of this school, as far as can be found 
 out, was Edmund Waller. This poet, in 1625, or there- 
 about, disliking and abandoning the license, extrava- 
 gance, and fantastic whimsicality of the later Elizabeth- 
 ans, strove to improve poetry by correcting, confining, 
 and formalizing it by the adoption of an elegant and 
 fixed form, both for the verse and the sense. He was 
 followed by Denham (den'am), Cowley (kow'li), and Dry- 
 den, who devoted themselves with great zeal in a 
 measure to the cultivation of this form of poetry, and 
 afterward by Pope, who raised it to a height of great 
 excellence, gave it a very great popularity, and having 
 discovered the secret of its composition, laid it open to 
 the world. From this, it naturally resulted that hordes 
 of second-rate verse writers seized upon it as a medium 
 of expression ; so that, after Pope, the names are of less 
 
POPE. 401 
 
 note, though that of Q-oldsmith shines out later, and the 
 greatest among them are poets of minor rank, now gen- 
 erahy neglected and little read, — Parnell, Armstrong, 
 Young, Johnson, Churchill. As the chief and leader of a 
 now despised and condemned school, Pope's position, to- 
 day, is immeasurably below that given him a hundred 
 years ago. Probably neither opinion is quite just. His 
 reputation will, as we think, increase to some extent as 
 time goes on. 
 
 A papist* (pa'pist) himself, educated by himself and 
 with the assistance of four priests of his own church, 
 without a Universitj^ education, and debarred from ob- 
 taining any position in the State, it is a little remarkable 
 perhaps that, in an age Avhen Literature, Scholarship, and 
 Politics were so closely united as in that of Queen Anne, 
 Pope should have easily made himself the greatest name 
 in letters of his day, and seized the highest position in 
 the literature of his time. Such, however, was the case. 
 
 Born May 21, 1688, in the country at some little 
 distance from Windsor, of a Roman Catholic family. 
 Pope's youth was naturally spent much by himself. But 
 he was a youth of immense forwardness. At an as- 
 tonishingly early age did he acquire a taste for reading 
 and poetry. He learned all languages, f in order to read all 
 
 * Catholics in Pope's day, and indeed for many years later, were in a position 
 of political degradation, which strikes us to-day as being horribly unjust. No 
 Catholic could take office under the king, for one thing ; and besides this, there 
 were many other restrictions laid upon them. It was not till the beginning of 
 this century that the Catholic Emancipation Act restored persons of that religion 
 to a position of political freedom. In Queen Anne's day, there was more excuse. 
 Charles II. had died a Catholic, and James H., who had been expelled in 1688, 
 was a most devoted Catholic. The English people, mindful of the experiences of 
 the Reformation, a hundred and fifty years before, were determined that Roman- 
 ism should not again obtain the upper hand, and hence the very unjust rs' 
 strictive laws under which Pope labored along with other papists. 
 
 t That is three : French, natin, and Italian. 
 
402 
 
 P O E T f^ . 
 
 poetry he could lay hands on. He wrote poetry as soon 
 as he read it. He passed his youth in a constant atmos- 
 phere of letters. He was prevented by a physical de- 
 formity from joining with the boys of his own age in 
 all their games, and gave himself up utterly to his books. 
 At some earlj^ age, he had made friends with dis- 
 tinguished literary men, Wycherley (^A^ltch'gr ll) and 
 Walsh. By these, he was petted and pushed forward, 
 and finally, on the publishing of certain pastorals in a 
 miscellany of Jacob Tonson's (t6n'sunz), general attention 
 was attracted toward him, and in a marvelously short 
 time, he arrived at the very height of his ambition. It 
 is a wonderful and unexplainable thing ; but at twenty- 
 five, he was acknowledged to be the greatest poet in 
 England by many, and by all it was allowed that he had 
 few equals. 
 
 The grounds on which this opinion was based seem 
 to us weak. Undoubtedly Pope, by his translation of 
 Homer, by the " Dunciad " (dtin' se ad), by his " Essay on 
 Man," by his " Satires and Epistles," showed himself far 
 superior to his contemporaries. But his pastorals, his 
 " Windsor Forest," his " Temple of Fame," his " Essay on 
 Criticism," his "Eloisa (eloe'za) to Abelard " (ab'elard), 
 and his " Rape of the Lock " would not, to our mind, 
 give him such a reputation. Of the last of these works, 
 however, we should say a word or so, for it is one of 
 Pope's most delightful performances. 
 
 It was founded on fact. Lord Petre (pe'tSr) had 
 actually stolen a lock of hair from Miss Fermor, and a 
 family quarrel was the result. It was thought by some 
 that Pope might do something to allay the trouble by 
 a humorous poem, and "The Rape of the Lock" was 
 therefore written and sent to Miss Fermor. It does not 
 
POPE. 403 
 
 seem to have wholly effected this purpose, though it 
 was a delicious little poem. Pope published it, and then 
 thought of improving it. He applied to Addison, whose 
 friendship* he had made, and told him his plan. Addi- 
 son advised him to leave it alone. Pope rejected the 
 advice, and greatly improved his poem. But he con- 
 ceived a dislike to Addison for what he thought treach- 
 erous advice, offered in a spirit of jealous fear, and we 
 shall see what fruit it bore. 
 
 At the age of twenty-five or so. Pope had acquired 
 great reputation. He had rather attached himself, at 
 first, to Addison, — had written a prologue for his " Cato,'' 
 and so on, — but had also become acquainted with Swift, 
 and with many of the Torj^ wits. Being a Roman 
 Catholic, Pope had nothing to do with politics. He was 
 neither Whig nor Tory himself, but most of his friends 
 were in the Tory camp. Unlike most of the literary 
 men of his day, he wrote for neither party. 
 
 * Pope speaks of his connection with Addison and his friends as follows : 
 " Addison usually studied all the morning ; then met his party at Buttons' ; 
 dined there, and stayed five or six hours, and sometimes far into the night. I 
 was of the company for about a year, but found it too much for me ; it hurt my 
 health, and so I quitted it." 
 
 in truth, Pope was rather too delicate, not only for the course of existence 
 led by Addison and Steele, but for the life of most of the great literary men of 
 his day. He was physically small and weak ; he could not stand the late hours 
 and unheard-of potations of his companions. They were of a robust pattern. 
 " The pace of those ' viveurs ' of the former age was awful. Peterborough lived into 
 the very jaws of death. Q-odolphin (go dU'f%n) labored all day and gambled all 
 night. Bolingbroke, writing to Swift, from iJawley, in Ms retirement, dating 
 his letter at six o'clock in the morning, and rising, as he says, refreshed, serene, 
 and calm, calls to mind the time of his London life, when about that hour, he 
 used to be going to bed, surfeited with pleasure and jarred with business ; his head 
 often full of schemes, and his heart as often full of anxiety. It was too hard, too 
 coarse a life for the sensitive, sickly Pope. He was the only wit of the day who 
 was not fat. Swift was fat, Addison was fat, Steele was fat ; Q-ay and Thomson 
 were preposterously fat. All that fuddling and punch-drinldng, that club and 
 coffee-house boozing, shortened the lives and enlarged the waistcoats of the men 
 of that age. Pope withdrew in a great measure from this boisterous London, 
 company."— 2 
 
404 i>ORTg. 
 
 An oft-quoted passage from Bishop Kennet's diary be- 
 gins as follows : 
 
 "November 2, 1713.— Dr. Swift came into the coffee- 
 house and had a bow from everybody but me, who, I 
 confess, coiild not but despise him. When I came to 
 the ante-chamber to wait before prayers, Dr. Swift was 
 the principal man of talk and business, and acted as 
 master of requests. Then he instructed a young noble- 
 man that the best poet in England was Mr. Pope (a 
 papist), who had begun a translation of Homer into En- 
 glish verse, for which he must have them all subscribe. 
 ' For,' says he, ' the author shall not begin to print till I 
 have a thousand guineas for him.' " 
 
 So young Mr. Pope, at this time, — twenty-five years 
 old, — was the best poet in England, and was to under- 
 take a translation of Homer. Such was Swift's opinion, 
 and history has borne him out. Pope being glad to find 
 that he was the greatest poet in England (which he had 
 some time before discovered), desired to turn an honest 
 penny by it, — for he was without resources for the 
 future, — and conceived the idea of a translation of Ho- 
 mer's "Iliad." He planned to have it published by sub- 
 scription, a manner which was likely to be very profit- 
 able to a young man with as many and as great friends 
 as had Pope. Not to go into details, Pope made enough 
 on his "Homer" to make him comfortable for life. 
 
 The literary results of the venture were not less suc- 
 cessful. Pope produced a wonderful poem, and one on 
 which criticism has expended much speculation. To go 
 into the unfavorable points first : Pope did not under- 
 stand Q-reek very well, which was a difficulty in the way 
 of correctly translating a Q-reek poem of 16,000 verses. 
 "It's a pretty poem, Mr. Pope," said Bentley, who did 
 
POPE. 405 
 
 understand Q-reek, "but you must not call it Homer." 
 But beside this slight failing, — lack of fidelity to the 
 original, — it has many very great merits. 
 
 It is the greatest effort of the English classical school 
 of verse, having all the excellences of that school brought 
 out in the most effective way, and having as few of its 
 failings as practicable. It is to our mind somewhat stiff, 
 stilted, pompous, dry, and mechanical, as is most of the 
 poetry of that school. But again, it is brilliant, sensible, 
 terse, epigrammatic, exquisite and finished in versification 
 and admirable in expression, entertaining to be read, and 
 certain to produce its desired effect. There is no poem 
 wherein Pope's great genius shows to better effect than 
 in this one. 
 
 One episode in Pope's life connects itself with the 
 "Iliad," — his quarrel with Addison. It is, on the whole, a 
 distasteful thing to write the life of Pope, though not so 
 in regard to his works. But the private life of the man 
 was a strange compend of much that is good with much 
 that is bad. And his biographer must constantly gloss 
 over or explain or state plainly facts disgraceful to his 
 subject. To us it seems that Pope showed the mean and 
 malignant side of his nature in quarreling with Addison, 
 as Addison showed the small and jealous side of his. 
 
 Pope, it will be remembered, had been, more or less, 
 one of Addison's circle for some years. He was of too 
 weak a mold to go through every thing with thetn, and 
 being allied as he was to Swift and Bolingbroke, he could 
 not be utterly devoted to Addison. But they were 
 friends. At the same time with the publication of the 
 first four books of Pope's "Iliad," there was issued a 
 translation of the first book by Thomas Tickell, a 
 particular friend of Addison. Pope, who, for various 
 
406 POETS. 
 
 causes, thought he had reason, at this time, to doubt 
 Addison's friendship, at once sprung to the idea that the 
 book was written by Addison. It was not. Pope, how- 
 ever, thought Addison had done a disgraceful thing, in 
 trying in underhand manner to render unsuccessful his 
 translation. The facts seem to be that Pope had sent 
 his first book to Addison, with the request that he would 
 read and correct it, a practice then customary among 
 men of letters. Addison, however, sent it back, saying 
 that he had promised to look over a translation of the 
 book by Mr. Tickell, and could not with propriety correct 
 Pope's also ; but that if Pope would allow him to see the 
 second book, he would like to do so. This Pope did. 
 But the publication of the other version of the first book 
 drove him furious. He became convinced that Addison 
 and his set were bent on depreciating and ruining him, 
 and he broke with them all. In his " Epistle to Arbuth- 
 not " (ar'buth not), appears the famous memorial of this 
 quarrel, — written, said Pope, at this time, and sent to Ad- 
 dison, — but it was said, at the time, that it was only 
 written when Addison himself was dead and gone and 
 could not strike back. It is a fine satire, and we can not 
 but admire it. It hardly makes us love the author 
 better. 
 
 After the success of his translation of the "Iliad," 
 Pope naturally conceived the idea of doing the like by 
 the "Odyssey." But he put forward, even in his pros- 
 pectus, the fact that he was to be assisted in this by 
 friends, and in fact he wrote only twelve books out of 
 the twenty-four.* Elijah Fenton and William Broome 
 
 * As we have noted, Pope did not write tlie " Odyssey " by himself. He had 
 by this time grown to be such a mighty power in the literary world, that his 
 name alone would suffice to carry weight with it. After having finished the 
 
POPE. 407 
 
 were his colaborers, and after paying them not over 
 handsomely for their share in the work, the remainder 
 amounted to a very pretty sum. Pope made nearly 
 £9,000 out of his translation of Homer; no small sum 
 then,— nor now either. Part he laid out in annuities, 
 and part in a villa at Twickenham* (twik'en am), just 
 out of London. Here he truly enjoyed himself. Here he 
 received his friends, and received those delightful letters 
 which we may read in his correspondence ; and here he 
 wrote letters to them and also courted the muse, in a 
 style at which we can not but wonder and be pleased. 
 
 What a charming description is that given by 
 Thackeray (thak'e ri) of his friends, Swift, Arbuthnot, and 
 Grarth, Gay, Bolingbroke, Oxford, and Peterborough, " the 
 most brilliant company of friends that the world has 
 ever seen." Between Swift and Pope existed the warmest 
 and most confidential friendship, — so between Pope and 
 Bolingbroke. Everybody loved Gay, and it is very plain 
 that he loved Pope. And Peterborough, the brilliant, 
 flashing nobleman, who had traveled more miles than 
 
 "Hiad," therefore, on beginning the "Odyssey," he obtained the assistance of two 
 other poets of a certain sort, who aided him greatly. William Broome, a Cambridge 
 scholar, who, though inferior to Pope in poetical gifts, was greatly his superior 
 in Greek scholarship, wrote eight books out of the twenty-four. Elijah Fen ton 
 wrote four ; the two together wrote half the work. But Pope, though he paid 
 them the sum agreed upon, never gave them fair credit for their work ; for he 
 said in a postcript to the work, that Broome wrote but three books and Penton 
 two. He was not a strictly truthful man in certain respects. 
 
 * Pope purchased his Twickenham villa, with which his name has been so 
 frequently connected, in 1718. It was on the Thames (temz), some few miles out 
 of London. The great city did not cover so much territory as it does now, and 
 Pope's place was very secluded and rural. He enjoyed it greatly, amusing himself 
 much by laying out its gardens, with walks, lawns, and trees; arranging grot- 
 toes and arbors. He was an ardent lover of the rising art of landscape ; he was 
 familiar with the great authorities of the time, and his example and precept 
 helped to promote the development of a less formal style. At Twickenham, Pope 
 entertained his friends Swift, Arbuthnot, Bolingbroke, and G-ay, and the memory 
 of the wit an(} genius that was often gathered there has made the place famous, 
 
408 POETS. • 
 
 any postilion in Europe, and had won not a few battles 
 in as dashing a way as Marlborough could have done, this 
 meteoric celebrity had head enough to perceive what 
 there was of greatness in Pope, and to appreciate it. 
 
 Shortly after the "Odyssey," Pope published the "Dun- 
 ciad," a mock heroic poem, a satire upon all stupidity, 
 — and particularly such stupid persons as had been stupid 
 enough to trouble Pope. In this poem, he recalls Dry- 
 den's "Mac Flecknoe," and pictures Dullness choosing a 
 successor to Settle, to rule over her great empire. Theo- 
 bald, a Shakespearian scholar, was chosen for the po- 
 sition. Beside being grossly dull and stupid, Theobald 
 had been stupid enough to point out (correctly) that 
 Pope's edition of Shakespeare might have been better if 
 more care and pains had been spent on it. So he was to 
 be the chief dullard. As a matter of fact, he was de- 
 throned in a second version of the poem by CoUey Gib- 
 ber, the witty actor who had ridiculed a comedy that 
 Pope had had a hand in. Gibber was hardly dull, but he 
 had been dull enough to attack Pope. And so with all. 
 The poem is so disfigured by personal venom, spite, and 
 malice, that though we can easily enjoy the keen satire 
 and much of the humor (much of it is disgusting), — 
 though we can read the poem with pleasure, we gain 
 from it but little respect for the writer. There are fine 
 lines in it, but there is much in this world to be read 
 nowadays that is more worth one's while. It is not 
 wholly worth our pains to turn back a hundred and fifty 
 years, and rake up all the petty feuds and dirty tricks 
 which distinguish the history of Pope's War with the 
 Dunces. It created a tremendous stir, however, — the 
 scarified authors were beside themselves^ and Pope was 
 delighted. 
 
POPE. 409 
 
 There remains of his work, " The Essay on Man," his 
 "Epistles," and his "Satires." The former it would be 
 idle here to criticise ; it was written at the prompting 
 of Bolingbroke, on an utterly wrong basis, with very 
 little knowledge of the subject. This may seem curt 
 judgment of a poem from which come such phrases as 
 
 "The proper study of mankind is man." 
 
 "Whatever is, is right." 
 
 "Vindicate the ways of God to man." 
 
 "Hope springs eternal in the human breast." 
 
 " Lo the poor Indian whose untutored mind." 
 
 " Die of a rose in aromatic pain." 
 
 " Pleased at a rattle, tickled with a straw." 
 
 " Order is Heaven's first law." 
 
 "An honest man's the noblest work of God." 
 
 " The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind." 
 
 "Thou wert my guide, philosopher, and friend." 
 
 Truly this is Pope's great merit, he says so well these 
 things that any one might have said but didn't. So in 
 the " Epistles " and the " Satires " ; for here he is more 
 at home than anywhere else. We can nowhere find 
 such epigrammatic, graceful, condensed, truthful ex- 
 pression as we find there. The Satire on Addison, 
 which we have quoted, is as good as any, — but all may 
 be read with pleasure. 
 
 Pope's whole life was a striving against disease. He 
 was weak and sickly from his birth. Yet he lived to be 
 fifty-six. His death was on the 30th of May, 1744.* 
 
 Outside his works, which were the finest part of him, 
 Pope's chief virtues were loyalty and generosity. When- 
 ever he had made a friend lastingly, he stuck to him. 
 His quarrel with Addison is no exception, for between 
 
 » The aeath of Pope was imputed, by some of his friends, to a silver saucepan, 
 in which it was his delight to eat potted lampreys, 
 
410 
 
 POETS. 
 
 the two men, there was never what should be called 
 friendship. But to his true friends, to Swift, Gay, Boling- 
 broke, and the many others, he was faithful and loyal, 
 and they to him. And though he was zealous to acquire 
 money, he was generous to give it; he loved to gain, 
 but cared not to hoard his gains. 
 
 Much beyond this, it would be hard to go in pointing 
 out good moral characteristics.* A multitude of petty 
 faults seems to overpower all else. It would be un- 
 pleasant, and in this sketch we have neglected to relate 
 all the instances of cowardice, meanness, double-dealing, 
 and absolute lying which disfigure the story of his life. 
 It must be enough to hint at them. Had Pope not been 
 the greatest poet of his time, I fear his friends must have 
 thought him a man of very small pattern. But owing to 
 his brilliant intellect and his magnificent powers. Pope is 
 held, and rightly, as one of the greatest men of his day. 
 
 * Among the pleasant things which one is glad to note of Pope is his love for 
 his mother. He never speaks of her in his letters, save in the most affectionate, 
 reverent, and heautifnl manner. A few of her letters to him are preserved; 
 simple, commonplace bits, which he loved as much as the more brilliant epistles 
 of his wittier friends. '" The old lady," says Stephen in his " Life of Pope," " had 
 peculiar views of orthography; and Pope, it is said, gave her the pleasure of 
 copying out some of his 'Homer,' though the necessary corrections gave him and 
 the printers more trouble than would be saved by such an amanuensis. Even 
 in his greatest days he remembered her." "The triumph marches by," says 
 Thackeray, " and the car of the young conqueror, the hero of a hundred brilliant 
 victories— the fond mother sits in the quiet cottage at home, and says ' I send 
 you my daily prayers, and I bless you, my dear.' " 
 
 Many of Pope's evil characteristics may perhaps be directly referred to his 
 miserably weak and sickly body. " He never seems to have been thoroughly well 
 for many days together." We get a painful idea of his infirmities from Johnson. 
 " He was so weak as to be unable to rise to dress himself vrithout help. He was 
 so sensitive to cold that he had to wear a kind of fur doublet under a coarse 
 linen shirt; one of his sides was contracted, and he could scarcely stand upright 
 till he was laced into a bodice made of stiff canvas ; his legs were so slender 
 that he had to wear three pairs of stockings, which he was unable to draw on 
 and off without help. His seat had to be raised to bring him to a level with 
 common tables." It is perhaps not remarkable that one of such physical infirmity 
 should possess also rather diseased characteristics of mind. 
 
1749-1833. 
 
 TOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE (yo'han vd&lf- 
 O gang fon gCi'teh) was born ill the free city of Frank- 
 fort-on-the-Main (mm), on the 2 8th of August, 1749. 
 He died at Weimar (vi'mar), in Saxony, on the 2 2d of 
 March, 1832. 
 
 While it is sometimes said, and often fondly believed, 
 that an early life of hardship, and perhaps of social ob- 
 scurity, is needed for the training of a great man, or of 
 a successful man, it may be observed, on the other hand, 
 that the circumstances which surrounded Goethe in 
 young life were all cheerful, encouraging, and generous. 
 His father, from a rank of social life not high, had 
 raised himself to what is called an " Imperial Councilor." 
 He was fond of books, of pictures, of authors, and of 
 artists. His means were sufficient for him to give to his 
 children every external advantage of education which a 
 large, proud, and rich city afforded. In all these com- 
 forts, and in the enjoyment of these advantages, the 
 young Goethe, — who was to be the first literary man of 
 his time, and in more lines than those of mere literature, 
 the leader of its thought, — grew happily to manhood. 
 He said himself that he owed to his mother his happy 
 disposition and his love of story-telling. But he owed 
 her a great deal more. She had gained that step in life 
 which enabled her to say that she always found what is 
 good in people, and always left the bad to Him who 
 
412 
 
 POETS. 
 
 knows how to round off the angles. Once more, Goethe 
 had the priceless advantage that he grew up and was 
 educated with a sister near his own age. They were 
 tenderly, even passionately attached to each other. He 
 had her sympathy in all his boyish enthusiasms and her 
 help in all his boyish or more mature studies. It would 
 be hard for a novelist, trying to surround a hero with 
 favorable conditions for his education, to devise better 
 than did that Providence which rules the history of 
 men, in the early life of Goethe. 
 
 He was well trained in the classics. Frankfort is a 
 city where, for many generations, have lived learned 
 Hebrews, among whom, for instance, the Rothschilds 
 (rot'shilts) have won eminence in all the world. The 
 neighborhood of Jewish scholars, well known and re- 
 spected, led Goethe to the study of Hebrew in quite 
 young life. 
 
 At the age of sixteen, he was sent to Leipsic (lip'zikh) 
 for his collegiate studies. From that time, the direction 
 of his education was left mostly to his own fancy or dis- 
 cretion. His father had wished that he should study 
 jurisprudence and the kindred subjects. And the young 
 man did not fail in attention to such lectures as this 
 wish suggested. But here, and at Strasburg (stras'- 
 bdbrgh), where he joined the University in 1770, he 
 added study in natural science to his researches in law 
 and its administration. A mind as well balanced as his, 
 swaying powers of observation, so various and accurate, 
 would never satisfy itself with what the ingenuity of 
 technical educators marks out as "one line of study." 
 The literature of his own country, in his own time 
 and in the generation before, occupied him, as well as 
 studies relating to earlier periods. His facility in verse 
 
GOETHE. 413 
 
 and in the writing of Action, gave him an easy leader- 
 ship among such of his young comrades as had literary 
 tastes. With or without the idea of publication, he was 
 forever writing. And in his publications of later years, 
 some poems may be found well worthy of his reputation, 
 which belong to these early years. 
 
 Of all this period of his life, we have an entertaining 
 account, in a rambling autobiography, which he pub- 
 lished in 1813, under the name, "Dichtung und Wahr- 
 heit " (dikh'td&ng cJbnt var' hit), which Mr. Godwin has 
 rendered "Truth and Poetry." It affected to give the 
 "prose and poetry" of his life. Unfortunately for the 
 reader, in preparing this book, Groethe would sweep into 
 its compass any bit of manuscript he had left from early 
 years, which had proved too dull to be used for any 
 other purpose. But these heavy fragments are cemented 
 together, in the conglomerate, by narrative so amusing, 
 and often so gay, that, more than a hundred years after 
 their real origin, one tolerates them still. And from the 
 whole book, it is not difficult to see how this great 
 leader of thought grew to be what he was. 
 
 He took a degree at Strasburg as Doctor of Juris- 
 prudence, in 1771, and wrote a thesis which satisfied 
 his father's wishes and the demands of the University. 
 But his tastes were too pronounced, in the wider range 
 which his studies had taken, for him to restrict himself 
 to a line of thought and work on which he had entered 
 rather as a matter of form. In his residence in Stras- 
 burg, — close on the French frontier, and half French in 
 its social environments, — he had, naturally enough, re- 
 belled against that artificial and external sway which, in 
 the generation before him, the literary taste of France 
 had excited over the literary work of Germany. An 
 
■il4 POETS. 
 
 acquaintance formed there with the great poet Herder 
 (her'der), was of the first value to him. Herder turned 
 his attention more than ever to the Italian masters. 
 
 Separate poems of his, and other writings of little im- 
 portance, had been printed earlier, but it was the publi- 
 cation of "Gotz von Berlichingen " (giats fon ber'iikh- 
 ing en) which first compelled the interest and attention 
 of his countrymen.* When, in the next year, he pub- 
 
 * Gotz von Berlichingen was a German knigM who won the name of " Iron 
 Hand," who was born about the year 1480, and died in 1562. There exists a real 
 chronicle of his life, of which the central motive was his enthusiasm for the 
 peasantry and his wish to maintain their rights against the rapacity of the feudal 
 nohiUty of his time. This autobiography had been published in 1731, and 
 Goethe availed himself of it for the frame-work of incidents of his drama. The 
 play defies the critical unities of the Prench critics. At every scene, the spec- 
 tator is conducted to some new place, and the author often puts on the stage 
 actions which the old dramatists thought could only be told, and not witnessed. 
 What Goethe wanted to do was, not to make an acting play, but, in a series of 
 striking situations, to represent his hero in some of the most critical exigencies. 
 He had entire success in winning the reader's sympathy. The spirit of Liberty 
 runs through the whole play. "It is a revolutionary work," says the critic in 
 La Bousse (Id roos), " and when Gotz murmurs ' Freedom ! Freedom ! ' with his last 
 breath, no one could be unsympathetic or cold." 
 
 The following is Sir Walter Scott's translation of the last scene : 
 
 SCENE XTV. 
 
 The Garden" Belonging to the Prison. 
 
 Zirse and Mana. 
 
 Maria — Go see how it stands with them. [Exit Lirse.} 
 
 [Enter Elizabeth and Keeper.'] 
 
 Eliz. (to the Keeper)— Gco& reward your mercy and kindness to my (Exit Keeper) 
 husband 1 Maria, what bringest thou ? 
 
 jt/arja— Safety to my brother 1 But my heart is torn asunder. WeisUngen is 
 dead 1— poisoned by his wife. My husband is in danger,— the princes will be too 
 powerful for him. They say he is surrounded and besieged. 
 
 ^;is.— Hearken not to rumor ; and let not Gotz remark aught. 
 
 ilfana— How is it with him? 
 
 Eliz.— I. fear he will hardly long survive thy return,— the hand of the Lord is 
 heavy on him. And George is dead. 
 
 l/aria— George 1— the gallant boy I 
 
 .E^is.- When the miscreants were burning Miltenberg, his master sent him to 
 check their villainy. At that moment a body of cavalry charged upon them. 
 Had they all behaved as George, they would have given a good account of them. 
 Many were killed ; and poor George, he died the death of a cavalier. 
 
 Maria— Tions, Gotz know it? 
 
 Eliz.— We conceal it from him. He asks me ten times a day about him, and 
 
GOETHE. 415 
 
 lished the "Sorrows of Werther" (ver'ter), it may be said 
 that his national reputation was already won. "All the 
 reading world went mad," says a modern writer. While 
 all the Q-erman philosophers praised its depth, the com- 
 mon people read it for the story, and were delighted 
 with its sentiment and passion. Europe, indeed, was dis- 
 satisfied at that time, — in 1774, — as well she might be. 
 Europe had no such convenient, concrete way of ex- 
 pressing dissatisfaction as Anaerica found at just that 
 time. "Werther," says Caiiyle, "expressed the dim-rooted 
 pain under which thoughtful men were languishing," — 
 and the heart of Europe responded to Werther, because it 
 expressed it. If the more matter-of-fact England and 
 
 sends me as often to see what is become of George. I fear his heart will not 
 hear this last wound. 
 
 Maria— O God I what are the hopes of this world ! 
 
 [Ente?' Gotz, Lirse, and Keepe?v.] 
 
 ffofe— Almighty God 1 how well it is to he under Thy heaven 1 How free ! 
 The trees put forth their buds, and all the world hopes. !Farewell, my children ! 
 My buds are crushed ; my hope is in the grave ! 
 
 Miz. — Shall I not send Lirse to the cloister for thy son, that thou mayest see 
 and bless him? 
 
 GSte— Leave him where he is. He needs not my blessing,— he is holier than I. 
 Upon our wedding, Elizabeth, could I have thought I should die thus ! My 
 old father blessed us, and a succession of noble and gallant sons arose at his 
 prayer. Thou hast not heard him. I ain the last. — Lerse, thy countenance cheers 
 me in the hour of death, as in our most noble fights. Then my spirit encouraged 
 yours ; now yours supports mine. Oh, that I could but see George once more, — 
 to warm myself at his look ! Xou look down, and weep. He is dead 1 George is 
 dead ! Die, Gotz ; thou hast outlived thyself ,— outlived the noblest. How died 
 he? Alas, they took him at Miltenberg, and he is executed. 
 
 Miz.— No ; he was slain there I He defended his freedom like a lion. 
 
 Gotz— G-0& be praised ! He was the kindest youth under the sun, and a gal- 
 lant. Now dismiss my soul I My poor wife ! I leave thee in a wretched world. 
 Lerse, forsake her not ! Lock your hearts carefully as your doors. The age of 
 frankness and freedom is past,— that of treachery begins. The worthless will 
 gain the upper hand by cunning, and the noble will fall into their net. Maria, 
 GtoA restore thy husband to thee ! May he never fall the deeper for having risen 
 so high I Selbiss is dead,— and the good Emperor,— and my George. Give me 
 some water,— Heavenly sky !— Ereedom 1 freedom 1 
 
 Eliz.— Only above !— above with thee ! The world is a prison-house. 
 
 ifario— Gallant and gentle I Woe to this age that has lost thee I 
 
 Lirse— And woe to the future that can not know thee I 
 
416 POETS. 
 
 America have never quite joined in the estimate which 
 the continent of Europe passed upon "Werther," it may 
 possibly be because thoughtful men in those regions had 
 other causes for dissatisfaction, and other ways to ex- 
 press it.* 
 
 The Q-rand Duke of Saxe-Weimar (sak'sa) read "Wer- 
 ther," like the rest of the Grerman world. This liberal and 
 enthusiastic prince was named Charles Augustus. He 
 
 * The ciitios of England and the northern nations comprehend Q-oethe, and 
 therefore praise him much more heartily than do those of IPrance. This is natu- 
 ral enough. His own protests against the French literature of the eighteenth 
 century would not make Frenchmen love him if they had any hngering pride in 
 their own great authors of that time. But, indeed, his life is one, and theirs is 
 another. 
 
 Madame de Stael {md dlini' deh stiil) did much to acquaint French, and even 
 English leaders with the awakening of an original literature in England. But 
 her estimate of G-oethe simply shows how unequal she was to any fair estimate 
 of his power. She says : 
 
 " Goethe may he taken as the representative of all German literature. He 
 unites every thing which distinguishes Germany, and nothing is so remarkable 
 as a kind of imaginative power, in which Italians, English, or French have no 
 part. In his writings, as in his conversation, Goethe likes to destroy the weh he 
 has himself woven, — to play with the emotions he has himself roused,— to over- 
 throw the statues which he has compelled us to admire. So soon as he has drawn 
 for us a character who inspires our interest, he shows inconsistencies in him 
 which ought to disenchant us. He handles the poetical world as a conqueror 
 handles the world of fact,— and claims the right to bring into his own works the 
 spirit of destruction, as Nature does in hers." * * * Again: "I said that 
 Goethe has the principal characteristics of the genius of Germany. They are 
 found in him in an eminent degree. Great depth of thought, — that grace which 
 grows from the imagination, much more original than the grace which is in- 
 spired by society, — and, in especial, a fantastic sensitiveness which interests his 
 readers all the more because it is fantastic ; for they seek in his books some- 
 thing which shall vary their monotonous destiny, and ask poetry to take them 
 away from the events which are really passing." 
 
 The critic in La Eousse's great cyclopedia attempts to apologize for him : 
 » " Goethe passed through aU the storms raised by the French Eevolution. He 
 witnessed all the drama of the Empire of the First Napoleon ; he saw the heroic 
 efforts of people striving to be free ; and was indifferent to it all. Boerne (Mir'nd), 
 the German pubhcist, says bitterly: 'What tears have you dried? What sorrows 
 have you relieved?' But it is not fair to ask of men more than nature gave 
 them. Goethe was the powerful writer who revolutionized literature and gave it 
 a new birth. He created the Komantic School, which shone with such brilliancy 
 under Byron's pen, and which is now represented by Victor Hugo with such 
 daring." 
 
GOETHE. 417 
 
 was saved himself from being forgotten, like a thousand 
 other princes of petty German comets, by his interest in 
 literature and art, and his patronage of the men most 
 distinguished in either. He invited Goethe to his Court 
 in 1775, when he was not twenty-six years old. A 
 warm friendship, never broken, sprung up between the 
 prince and the poet. The Duke invited him to reside at 
 Weimar, and made him "Privy Councilor of Legation," 
 with a salary of nine hundred dollars a year. His chief 
 duty was a general superintendence of the artistic 
 amusements of the city. 
 
 So far as Goethe's external life goes, this little story 
 tells all its "circumstances." For in Weimar he lived, and 
 in Weimar he died. Europe was convulsed with revolu- 
 tion and war, but his place in the world was not among 
 those who fought in armies, who revised constitutions, 
 or even with those who wept for a lost national history, 
 or conspired for national unity. To say all this does not 
 imply that Goethe failed in any duty to his country. 
 Simply, he was fit for other work, and that other work 
 he did. His literary and scientific duty and fame go far 
 beyond Germany or German needs. But none the less 
 did his loyalty to the idea of German unity profoundly 
 aflfect the generations of Germans whom he swayed. 
 And the unity of the great German Empire of to-day, is 
 simply the expression in organized fact, of the necessity 
 which he and the German authors around him were 
 always asserting as an idea."* 
 
 * In 1806, after the battle of Jena {ya' nit), when Napoleon had entered Wei- 
 mar, he sent for Q-oethe The incident brought face to face the two foremost 
 men of that time. Napoleon said to him, " Voiis etes un Jwrnnie." He told Gf-oethe 
 that he had read " Werther" seven times, and interested him by his criticisms on 
 that novel and on his other works. He afterward invited him to Paris, and 
 decorated him with the Cross of the Legion of Honor. 
 
418 POETS. 
 
 The universality of his genius has, through his hfe, 
 and since his death, challenged amazement and admira- 
 tion. He handled every great subject, and he handled 
 them all with the easy simplicity of a master. The first 
 work of importance which he published after he went to 
 Weimar was the "Iphigenia (ifijeni'a) in Tauris " (ta' rls), 
 a prose drama, which he afterward versified with ex- 
 quisite success. Meanwhile, he was eagerly studying 
 natural science ; and the results of such studies appeared, 
 in after life, in his " Morphology," a botanical treatise, 
 and in other works, — essays simple enough for any in- 
 telligent reader to follow, but which have contributed 
 very materially to the development and simplicity of 
 botany and of optics. 
 
 It would be useless to repeat the names, or to give 
 the dates even, of his more important publications. 
 Under the lead of such an arch-master, G-ermany became 
 the leading literary power in the world, — even at a 
 period when her fields and towns were ravaged by war. 
 It is worth remark, for those people who believe that 
 arts are silent in the midst of arms, and that the same 
 generation which works out great problems, can not ac- 
 count for them or describe them, that the great revolu- 
 tion of Grerman literature was wrought out in the twenty 
 years of the fiercest war which has ravaged Europe in 
 two centuries. 
 
 The great work of Groethe's life was "Faust," of which 
 the first part was published in the year 1805. It has 
 been truly said, that, if he had died immediately after it 
 was pubhshed, he would already have achieved greater 
 renown than any other man of letters of modern times. 
 But he was destined to live twenty-six years longer; 
 and in the eighty-second year of his life, he published 
 
GOETHE. 419 
 
 the second part of "Faust." The jubilee, or fiftieth year 
 of his residence in Weimar, had been celebrated in the 
 year 1825. In the year 1832, in the eighty-third year 
 of his age, he took a cold, which became a fever, from 
 which he died. 
 
 The men of thought and letters in all parts of the 
 civilized world were eager to pay homage to his memory. 
 He has affected the literature, the science, and the 
 speculation of every country, and the impression which 
 the nineteenth century will leave as to its leading char- 
 acteristics, is an impression largely due to him. 
 
 "Q-oethe differs from all other great winters, except 
 perhaps Milton, in this respect, that his works can not 
 be understood without a knowledge of his life, and that 
 his life is in itself a work of art, greater than any work 
 which it created. This renders a long and circumstantial 
 biography a necessity to all who would study the poet 
 seriously. At the same time, he is so great that we are 
 even now scarcely sufficiently removed from him to be 
 able to form a correct judgment of his place in literary 
 history. He is not only the greatest poet of Germany, 
 he is one of the greatest poets of all ages. Posterity 
 must decide his exact position in that small and chosen 
 company which contains the names of Homer, Dante, 
 and Shakespeare. He was the apostle of self-culture. 
 Always after objective truth, and sometimes attaining to 
 it, he exhibited to the world every phase of his plastic 
 mind in turn, and taught, both by precept and example, 
 the husbandry of the soul. The charge of selfishness so 
 often brought against him, can not be maintained. His 
 nature responded to every influence of passing emotion. 
 Like a delicate harp, it was silent if not touched, and yet 
 gave its music to every wooing of the willful wind. The 
 
420 POETS. 
 
 charge of unsympathetic coldness roused the deep indig- 
 nation of tliose who l^new him best. He learned by sad 
 experience that the lesson of life is to renounce. Rather 
 than cavil at his statuesque repose, we should learn to 
 admire the self-conflict and self-command which molded 
 the exuberance of his impulsive nature into monumental 
 symmetry and proportion. His autobiography has done 
 him wrong. It is the story, not of his life, but of his 
 recollections. He needs no defense, nothing but sympa- 
 thetic study. As Homer concentrated in himself the 
 spirit of antiquity, Dante of the Middle Ages, and Shake- 
 speare of the Renaissance, so Goethe is the representative 
 of the Modern Spirit, the prophet of mankind under new- 
 circumstances and new conditions, the appointed teacher 
 of ages yet unborn." 
 
BURNS. 
 
 1759-1796. 
 
 ROBERT BURNS, the great poet of Scotland, was 
 born on the 2 5th of January, 1759, — in the same 
 year with Schiher (shil'er), and ten years after Goethe 
 (gu'teh). He died on the 21st of July, 179G. His birth- 
 place was near the town of Ayr (ar) and the "Kirk of 
 AUoway," which his writings recall to the memory of so 
 many readers. His father was a poor tenant farmer. 
 But the range of his education, in those lines in which 
 education can be gained from books, gives a good illus- 
 tration of the admirable system of schools which the 
 Scotch had created for themselves. It would be hard to 
 say at how early an age this farmer's boy began to 
 write verses, which were the delight of his friends. He 
 was a diligent reader ; and, in the poverty of his father's 
 home, he contrived to read many of the best books of 
 his time. When, in early life, he found himself in the 
 company of persons who had enjoyed the best education 
 of Edinburgh (ed'ln bur ruh), the poor farmer of Ayr had 
 no reason to be ashamed for his acquisitions. 
 
 He had worked for his father as a day-laborer — paid 
 seven pounds a year for his wages — until he was eight- 
 een years old. He then went to a school at Kirk-Oswald 
 (kirk 6z'^Ma]d), to learn the business of a surveyor. 
 This town is on the coast of Scotland, and while he 
 lived here, by intercourse with people who had to do 
 with foreign trade, he enlarged his knowledge of the 
 
422 POETS. 
 
 world. Perhaps he did not like his companions the less 
 that they were smugglers, or were connected with con- 
 traband business. While he was here, he printed some 
 of his shorter poems, one of which was "John Barley- 
 corn."* His instruction in surveying does not seem to 
 have led to any immediate opening in life, and in the 
 winter of 1781, he went to learn the business of a flax- 
 dresser, at Irvine (ir'vin). His father died in 1783, and, 
 to provide a home for him and for their mother, Robert 
 Burns and his brother Gilbert took a farm at Moss-giel 
 (mos gel'), but all his experiments in farming make one 
 think, either that he was a very poor farmer, or that 
 farming in Scotland at that time was a wretched reli- 
 ance. Probably both these impressions are well founded. 
 Wherever Burns was, and whatever he did for a living, 
 he was always writing poetry, and some of his poems 
 now best known, were the work of these periods of ab- 
 ject poverty. 
 
 It became at last unendurable. He determined to 
 leave all his cares behind him, by going to Jamaica. 
 This was in 1786. It was to raise money for his pas- 
 sage that he persuaded his friends to subscribe for an 
 edition of his collected poems. From the subscription he 
 obtained twenty pounds, and thus he secured a passage 
 for the island. He was hiding in one place and another, 
 
 * It begins ; 
 
 " There were three kings into the East, 
 Three Idngs both great and high, 
 And they ha'e sworn a solemn oath, 
 John Barleycorn should die." 
 
 And ends : 
 
 " Then l3t "us toast John Barleycorn, 
 Bach man to a glass in hand; 
 And may his great posterity 
 Ne'er fail in old Scotland I " 
 
BURNS. 423 
 
 that he might avoid arrest,* when a friend brought to 
 him a letter which he liad received from Dr. Thomas 
 Blacklock. This was a bhnd clergyman who lived near 
 Edinburgh. He ranked as a poet, and was highly- 
 esteemed in Scotland. As time has worked out its mir- 
 acles, it has happened that he owes his own escape from 
 being forgotten to the happy moment of kindness when 
 a word of his kept Robert Burns in Scotland. In the 
 critical letter which was brought to the discouraged 
 poet, Mr. Blacklock spoke in the highest terms of the 
 poems in the new volunae. "There is a pathos and 
 delicacy in his serious poems, a vein of wit and humor 
 in those of a more festive turn, which can not be too 
 much admired," he said. He also said that Dugald (dcjo'- 
 guid) Stewart, then at the height of his fame as a pro- 
 fessor in Edinburgh, had ajjproved of the poems, and he 
 hoped for the publication, as soon as might be, of a 
 larger edition. 
 
 *At tMs time lie wrote, as a farewell to Scotland, the poem wMch begins 
 thus : 
 
 " The gloomy night is gathering fast, 
 Loud roars the wild inconstant blast ; 
 Yon murky cloud is foul with rain,— 
 I see it driving o'er the plain ; 
 The hunter now has left the moor, 
 The scattered coveys meet secure ; 
 Wliile here I wander, pressed with care. 
 Along the lonely banks of Ayr." 
 He supposed this would be "the last song he should ever measure in Cale- 
 donia." 
 
 The last of these pathetic verses is this : 
 
 "Farewell, old Coila's (JcS'lldz) hills and dales, 
 Her heathy moors and winding vales ; 
 The scenes where wretched fancy roves, 
 Pursuing past unhappy loves I 
 Farewell my friends I farewell my foes ! 
 My peace with these,— my love with those ; 
 The bursting tears my heart declare ; 
 Farewell, the bonnie banks of Ayr," 
 
424 POETS. 
 
 So soon as Burns received this letter, he doubted as 
 to the idea of America. His " chest " had been sent to 
 the ship, as the "chest" of Ohver Goldsmith, Burns' 
 favorite poet, had been sent to another ship bound for 
 America, nearly forty years before. But after some 
 weeks of consideration. Burns now determined to aban- 
 don the West Indian plan for a time at least, and to try 
 the fortune of a new edition in Edinburgh. 
 
 Accordingly, — about two months after he saw Dr. 
 Blacklock's letter, which proved so critical a point in his 
 history, — he went to Edinburgh. His fame had gone be- 
 fore him, and he was most cordially welcomed in the 
 distinguished literary circles of that capital. An interest- 
 ing anecdote connects this happy experience of his life 
 with the early days of Walter Scott.* The learned and 
 accomplished gentlemen and ladies of Edinburgh knew 
 the real strength of Scotland so little, that they were 
 astonished to find such intelligence, such dignity, and, 
 
 * Scott was a boy of sixteen, but he had read Bums' poems, and was eager to 
 see him. The opportunity came at Dr. Adam Ferguson's, whose son — afterward 
 Sir Adam Ferguson— was Walter Scott's intimate friend. " Of course," says Scott, 
 "we youngsters sat silent, looked and listened. The only thing I remember 
 which was remarkable in Burns' manner was, the effect produced on him by a 
 print of Bunbury's, representing a soldier lying dead on the snow, his dog sitting 
 in misery on one side, — on the other, his widow with a child in her arms. These 
 lines were written underneath : 
 
 " ' Cold on Canadian hills or Minden's Plain, 
 Perhaps that parent wept her soldier slain ; — 
 Bent o'er her babe, her eyes dissolved in dew. 
 The big drops mingling with the milk he drew, — 
 CJave the sad presage of his future years, 
 The child of misery, baptized in tears.' 
 " Bums seemed much affected by the print, or, rather, by the ideas which it 
 suggested to his mind. He actually shed tears. He asked whose the lines were, 
 and it chanced that nobody but myself remembered that they occur in a half- 
 forgotten poem of Langhome's, called by the unpromising title of the 'Justice 
 of Peace.' I whispered my information to a friend present, who mentioned it to 
 Burns, who rewarded me with a look and a word, which, though in mere civility, 
 I then received, and still remember, with great pleasure." 
 
BURNS. 425 
 
 most of all, such "good-breeding" in "a peasant." Burns' 
 person "was strong and robust, his manners rustic, not 
 clownish ; a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity 
 which received part of its effect, perhaps, from one's 
 knowledge of his extraordinary talents." This is Scott's 
 recollection of him ; and again he says, " I would have 
 taken him, if I had not known what he was, for a very 
 sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch school * * * 
 the douce (dcJos) gudeman who held his own plow." 
 Another of the Edinburgh gentry said : " He was plainly, 
 but properly, dressed, in a style midway between the 
 holiday costume of a farmer and that of the company 
 with which he now associated. Upon the whole, had 1 
 met him near a sea-port, and been required to guess 
 his condition, I should probably have conjectured him to 
 be the master of a merchant vessel of the most respect- 
 able class." 
 
 He spent a considerable part of the winter in such 
 society in Edinburgh, and his biographers observe that 
 he found other society also, — less decorous, and more 
 like that which he had known among the smugglers of 
 Kirk-Oswald. He was occupied also in sittings for his 
 portrait, and in overseeing a new edition of his poems. 
 For this edition a subscription was made, in which the 
 most distinguished people in Scotland took part. The 
 poet received from it five hundred pounds, — a sum larger 
 than he had ever possessed. It lifted him above im- 
 mediate want, and enabled him to give up the idea of 
 emigration, and to establish his home in Scotland. 
 
 He spent most of the next summer, however, in a 
 journey in Scotland, the steps of which have been dili- 
 gently traced, because so many of his poems refer to 
 them. Meanwhile, he gave to his brother nearly half of 
 
426 POETS. 
 
 the money he had received for the new edition, and at 
 last invested what he had left of the other half in stock- 
 ing a new farm for himself and his bride, Jane Armour. 
 But, as one skilled in farming said, the selection of the 
 new farm, which was at EUisland, Dumfriesshire (dum- 
 frez'shir), was the selection of a poet, and not of a 
 farmer. The prospect was beautiful, but the crops were 
 poor.* 
 
 He came to the new farm to live, before it was ready 
 for his wife, on the 13th of June, 1788. In the same 
 year he had accepted from the Gfovernment, — which 
 wished, in this somewhat clumsy way, to show its ad- 
 miration of poetical genius, — an appointment as ganger 
 in the system of excise, by which the taxes on distilled 
 liquors were collected. Burns knew only too much, alas, 
 of distilled liquors. And it would, probably, be unjust 
 to say that the appointment which gave his family their 
 bread, confirmed the habits of intemperance which were 
 already formed. He had been always playing with the 
 sword wfcich has no handle. f In the autumn, the new 
 house he was building was so far finished that he occu- 
 pied it himself. But he was obliged to obtain, for the 
 
 * He announces his new purchase in this letter to Miss Chalmei-s : 
 " I know, my dear friend, that you will be pleased with the news when I tell 
 you that I have at last taken a lease of a farm. Yesternight I completed a bar- 
 gain with Mr. Miller, of Dalswinton, for the farm of EUisland, on the banks of 
 the Prith, between five and six miles above Dumfries. I begin at Whitsunday 
 to build a house, drive lime, etc. ; and Heaven be my help, for it will take a 
 strong effort to bring my mind into tho routine of business. I have discharged 
 all the army of my former pursuits, fancies, and pleasures,— a motley host,— and 
 have literally and strictly retained only the ideas of a few friends whom I have 
 incorporated into a life-guard. I trust in Dr. Johnson's observation, ' Where 
 much is attempted, something is done.'" 
 
 t Here is a passage to a letter to Mr. Tennant : " I yesterday tried my cask 
 of whiskey for the first time, and I assure you it does you great credit. It wiU 
 bear five waters, strong, or six ordinary toddy. The whiskey of this country is 
 a most rascally liquor, and, by consequence, only drunk by the most rascally part 
 cf the inhabitants." 
 
BUENS. 427 
 
 present, another house for his wife and child. His cor- 
 respondence of all this period is most spirited and en- 
 tertaining. He hardly writes a word, in prose or in 
 verse, which is not worth careful reading. And so early 
 was his eminence among his countrymen gained that, 
 fortunately for us, almost all, even of his hasty letters, 
 seem to be preserved.* 
 
 But his life, on what is called his own farm, was but 
 a short one. The American reader, used to freehold and 
 its priceless privileges, must understand that the farm 
 never was his, nor the house. He was simply a tenant ; 
 and the first product of the farm, called his by courtesy, 
 belonged to the landlord. With Burns' inefficiency as a 
 farmer, a farm which was already completely exhausted, 
 refused to meet even this demand, and after a struggle 
 of a few years with debt in its various forms, he had to 
 give up the place to the landlord and rely for the sup- 
 port of his family on the wretched fifty pounds a year 
 which the Excise Commissioners paid him, and on his 
 dealings with the publishers. Alas ! the exigencies of 
 the Excise hindered the " work " — if it must be called 
 such — of the pen. "I am a poor rascally ganger," he 
 wrote to his book-seller, "compelled to gallop at least 
 two hundred miles every week to inspect dirty ponds 
 and yeasty barrels." Yet such a man in such a service 
 
 * One of them gives the first draft of " Auld Lang Syne." With, a mystifica- 
 tion of which he was fond, he pretends that it is all an old song, which he had 
 written from an old man who was singing it. But, in truth, the second and 
 third verses are his own. The letter in which they are first written is to Mrs. 
 Dunlop : 
 
 "•Bee. 17, nss. 
 
 "There is an old song and tune which has often thriUed through my soul. 
 Pou know I am an enthusiast in old Scotch songs. I shall give you the verses on. 
 the other sheet." 
 
 His own verses are: "We twa hae run ahout the braes," and "We twa hae 
 paidlet i' the bum." 
 
"^^b" POETS. 
 
 was writing lyrics, which he did not simply dash off in 
 a moment of inspiration, but which he finished with ex- 
 quisite care, which will be, for generation after genera- 
 tion, the admiration of the world. 
 
 He was always kind to his brothers, and, as has been 
 seen, when he was richest, would divide what he had 
 with them. The youngest of them, named Wilham, de- 
 termined to go to London, to try his fortunes at his 
 trade, and wrote to Robert for advice "about behavior 
 in companies rather above my station, to which I might 
 be eventually introduced." Robert Burns answered this 
 naive (na'ev) letter as if he were himself the most 
 thoughtful and prudent of men.* 
 
 In his office. Burns had to protect the interests of the 
 Q-overnment in ten parishes. As he says, he had to ride 
 two hundred miles a week in this service. The motive, 
 as Mr. Chambers says, was to maintain his family, and 
 be beholden to nobody. He certainly showed in this 
 work diligence, perseverance, and accuracy. Mrs. Burns 
 was a prudent and frugal manager, and, " on the whole," 
 as the same critic says, his life was respectable ; the ex- 
 ception, alas I being a few evening hours over the bowl 
 with his friends. As an illustration of the externals of 
 his life, here is the recollection of one of his farm serv- 
 ants : "He kept two men and two women servants; but 
 he invariably, when at home, took his meals with his 
 wife and family in the little parlor." This man thought 
 he was as good a manager of land as most of the neigh- 
 
 * Here is a part of his prudent instruction : " Be cautious in forming connec- 
 tions witli comrades and companions. Tou can be pretty good company to your- 
 self, and you can not "be too sliy of letting anybody know you further than to 
 know you as a saddler. Another caution. * * * It is an impulse the hardest to 
 be restrained ; but if a man once accustoms himself to gratifications of that im- 
 pxdse, it is then nearly or altogether impossible to restrain it. 
 
 ^■'Feh. 10, 1796." 
 
BURNS. 429 
 
 bors. He kept nine or ten milch cows, some young 
 cattle, four horses, and several pet sheep, of which he 
 was very fond. He was a fair workman, and would hold 
 the plow himself for an hour or two at a time. He was 
 an indulgent master ; and when we judge Biirns harshly 
 for intemperance, it must be remembered that, for six 
 months, this servant of his never saw him intoxicated. 
 
 For some time, while he was living in this life, he 
 was hopeful, as he certainly was happy. At the end of 
 this year it was that he Avrote " Tam O'Shanter." And 
 the careful study of his life shows that, at least to the 
 early part of 1790, he was in comfortable pecuniary cir- 
 cumstances. To the authors, — indeed, to the readers of 
 to-day, — it seems extraordinary, that liis pen, so ready 
 and so kind a servant, should have rendered him no 
 assistance in keeping a balance on the right side of his 
 account books. But it is clear from his correspondence, 
 that, Avhile he gave away his matchless lyrics, and, in- 
 deed, all his poems, right and left, with the most cordial 
 freedom, the idea of coining them into money was 
 absolutely disagreeable to him. His friend. Dr. More, re- 
 monstrates with him for the carelessness with which he 
 parts with them. He says : "I refused every solicitation 
 for copies of that on ' Queen Mary,' but lately saw it in a 
 newspaper ; " and he begs Burns to collect these fugitive 
 pieces, and publish a second volume, by subscription, as 
 the first had been published. 
 
 But Burns "rhymed for fun," as he said. He would 
 write to oblige a friend or to obey a whim. He de- 
 lighted to improve his country's collection of songs. But 
 he would not own any mercenary motive. And while 
 the condition of things was such that really important 
 and powerful friends, who wanted to assist him, could 
 
430 POETS. 
 
 only provide for him the wretched post as a gauger, 
 wliich wasted the best hours of his hfe, literature was 
 then so little recognized as the vocation of an honest 
 man, that these priceless poems of his were valueless, as 
 well as priceless. The magician who called them into 
 being, was giving his life away as he did so. 
 
 In the latter part of March, 1791, the horse on which 
 he was riding fell, and he broke his arm. Not long after, 
 his third son was born, who rose afterward to an honor- 
 able military position.* 
 
 Burns hoped at this time, as well he might, that he 
 might be advanced in the service of the excise. He had, 
 indeed, expected a supervisor's place, but here he was 
 disappointed. But he was told that he could remove to 
 Dumfries, and rate as an "exciseman," with an addition 
 to his " salary," which would bring it up to seventy 
 pounds a year. Burns thought that, with such an ad- 
 dition as this change made to his income, he could give 
 up his farm. An opportunity occurred by which he ob- 
 tained the "privilege" — which it is hard for an American 
 to understand — of abandoning the wretched holding to 
 its owner ; and he did so gladly, although he had sunk 
 three hundred pounds of hard-earned money in the fail- 
 ure of his efforts to improve the property. 
 
 The removal to Dumfries, however, is counted by his 
 friends to have been the critical misfortune of his life. 
 By this is meant, that it was here that he was led into 
 the temptations which he could not resist. If any power, 
 human or divine, had arrested the change of life which 
 took him and his family to Dumfries, he would not have 
 
 * A letter from Dr. Currie describes a visit which two English gentlemen 
 made on him this summer. They found Burns engaged in angling. " He had a 
 cap made of a fox skin." 
 
BURNS. 431 
 
 yielded to those temptations as he did. At Dumfries, 
 there was a wretched system of tavern conviviality, into 
 which Burns fell only too easily. His death, at an early 
 age, is to be traced directly to a night of excess in one 
 of the companies who met in the revelry of these 
 taverns. Until Burns went to Dumfries to live, it seems 
 to those who know his life best, to be certain that he 
 was not fixed in intemperate habits. His punch-bowl 
 was, till then, really " dusty," as he said it was. 
 
 But, as early as 1790, when his wife made a long 
 visit to her parents, he began to give up the absolutely 
 domestic habits to which he had held since his marriage 
 Critics are so severe, that there are those who charge 
 on this unfortunate visit of the poor wife, all the con- 
 sequences of Burns' intemperance. In Dumfries, there 
 was more temptation. Home in a hired house, — of which 
 the rent was seven pounds a year, — could not have been 
 so attractive as it might have been on a farm selected by 
 a poet's eye. The tavern, too, was nearer, and the com- 
 pany more attractive than any which he had near him 
 when he was at Ellis. 
 
 The French Revolution was beginning to attract the 
 interest of all the world. Burns was interested, of course, 
 in any turn of the hopes and fears of the friends of 
 Liberty. To readers of to-day, — who have the interpreta- 
 tion which a certainty has given to those hopes and 
 fears, — his views do not appear injudicious, — -scarcely ex- 
 travagant. But they were certainly not the views of the 
 Government of which William Pitt was the chief, which, 
 even then, was feeling its blind way in the first steps of 
 that wretched policy which, for more than twenty years, 
 kept England embroiled in a war, in which, so far as 
 posterity sees, she had almost no true concern. At an 
 
432 POETS. 
 
 exciting moment, in 1791, Burns bought four carronades. 
 These were small guns, invented not long before, and 
 first cast at a foundry in the Scotch town Carron, from 
 which they took their name. They must have been very 
 small guns in this case, for the four cost Burns only 
 three pounds. 
 
 While the French Convention still had the respect of 
 intelligent men, and was regarded by the friends of 
 Liberty as the hope at least of France, and perhaps of 
 the world. Burns, by way of testifying his share in such 
 hope, sent his four little guns as a present to the Con- 
 vention. When the present had come as far as Dover, it 
 was seized, as an addition to the military strength of a 
 foreign power. True, England was not yet at war with 
 Republican France. But the incident of the seizure 
 brought forward Burns' sympathy with the Republic, and 
 was used in a way unfavorable to his personal interests 
 with the Commissioners of Excise, who were the superior 
 officers who appointed him. 
 
 He took more than one opportunity to confirm the 
 prejudices against him. On one occasion, when William 
 Pitt's health was proposed as a toast, he ofl'ered Wash- 
 ington's health, and was much displeased when the com- 
 pany declined to drink it. In 1794, he wrote "An ir- 
 regular ode for Q-eneral Washington's birthday." All of 
 these ebullitions of interest in Republics stood in the 
 way of his promotion to a supervisorship. But, so soon 
 as there was any rumor of a French invasion of En- 
 gland or Scotland, Burns joined in the national move- 
 ment in which all men volunteered for military defense. 
 He became a member of the "Dumfries Volunteers." 
 And a song which he wrote for them became very popu- 
 lar. But the poet who could write " A man's a man for 
 
BURNS. 433 
 
 a' that," could not pretend to much sympathy with the 
 absurd measures of the ohgarchy which then mis- 
 governed England. Burns would, in his songs or in his 
 talk, blurt out some vehement protest against its policy ; 
 and if he were in liquor, this protest would be extrava- 
 gant. Once and again he had to apologize for such 
 utterances. 
 
 While his habits were more and more reckless, so far 
 as indulgence in liquor went, still the tolerance which 
 Dumfries rendered toward such habits was so great, that 
 his biographers believe that in his residence there he 
 gradually gained in public estimation. 
 
 None the less, however, was he losing in health and real 
 manly vigor. His matchless constitution could not for- 
 ever withstand the attacks made on it by his indulgence. 
 Talk of "flying gout" and "rheumatic fever" begins to 
 appear in his spirited letters. And people who had not 
 seen him for many years, noted degeneracy in the aspect 
 of his face, and in his personal bearing. Chambers, to 
 whom we owe a biography admira,ble in its spirit and in 
 its detail, argues earnestly to show that his death was 
 the result of an accident, and is not fairly to be ascribed 
 to the effects produced by intemperance on his health. 
 But when one reads what the " accident " was, he feels 
 that the distinction is hardly worth drawing : " Early in 
 the month of January, 1796, when his health was in 
 the course of improvement. Burns tarried to a late hour 
 at a jovial party in the Q-lobe Tavern. Before returning 
 home, he unluckily remained for some time in the open 
 air, and, overpowered by the effects of the liquor he had 
 drunk, fell asleep. In these circumstances, and in the 
 peculiar condition to which a severe medicine had re- 
 duced his constitution, a fatal chill penetrated to his 
 
434 POETS. 
 
 bones. He reached home with the seeds of a rheumatic 
 fever akeady in possession of his weakened frame." 
 
 His disease made progress only too rapidly. He was 
 removed to a fishing hamlet near Dumfries in July, in 
 the hope that the sea-air might benefit him. The sea- 
 bath, in fact, did ease his pains, but a new attack of 
 fever came on, and on the 18th of the month he re- 
 turned to his house, where, on the 21st, he died. He 
 was buried with military honors. All question and all 
 prejudice regarding him instantly ceased, and England 
 joined with Scotland in the expression of grief, and in 
 practical measures for the relief from care or poverty of 
 his widow and his five children. 
 
 Even then Bngla,nd and Scotland did not know that 
 this was the first English-writing poet of his time. We 
 know it, and we know that in his work the revolution 
 began by which the literature of the British islands and 
 of America threw off the shackles of the most irritating 
 conventional habit, and asserted the freedom and sim- 
 plicity which have given such life as it has had to the 
 literature of the nineteenth century. 
 
sen ILIvKR. 
 
 1759-1804. 
 
 TOHANN CHRISTOPH FRIEDEICH VON SCHIL- 
 
 O LER (yo'han kres' tof fre'drikh fonshil'er) was boril 
 in Marbach (mar'bakh), a small town of Wurtemberg 
 (-wtLr' tern herg), on the lOth of November, 1759, — a few 
 months later than Robert Burns. His father had been 
 a surgeon in the Bavarian Army, and continued until 
 his death in the pay of the Duke of Wurtemberg. His 
 mother was a woman of many household virtues and 
 her hu-sband a person of great probity of character. 
 
 Schiller was intended by his parents for the Church, 
 and his school studies were regulated with this view.* 
 His studies did not firmly fix his attention ; he loved 
 rather to meditate on the splendors of the theater of 
 Ludwigsburg (icjot'vikhs boopgh), which he saw in his 
 ninth year. But the Duke of Wurtemberg offered him 
 an education in a free seminary he was just founding in 
 Stuttgart (std&t'gart). For six years the boy was kept 
 
 * Prledrich's school-fellows recollect that even his freaks had a poetic char- 
 acter. Once, it is said, during a tremendous thunder-storm, his father missed 
 him from the young group in the house. Kone of the sisters could tell what had 
 hecome of Pritz, and the old man became, at length, so anxious that he went out 
 in quest of him. The boy was scarcely past the age of infancy, and knew not 
 the dangers of a scene so awful. His father found him at last, in a solitary 
 place in the neighborhood, perched on the branch of a tree, gazing at the tem- 
 pestuous face of the sky, and watching the flashes as they spread their lurid 
 gleam over it. To the reprimands of his parent, the whimpering truant pleaded, 
 "that the lightning was very beautiful, and that he wished to see where it came 
 from." 
 
436 POETS. 
 
 under the rigid discipline* of this school, which was 
 grievous to him, studying law, for which he had no in- 
 clination. These restraints seem to have stimulated a 
 dawning taste for poetry. Before the end of his four- 
 teenth year, he had finished what he called an epic poem, 
 and had produced his first tragedy. Although brooding 
 gloomily on the restraints of his position, and longing for 
 freedom, he plodded along, writing when he snatched an 
 opportunity. When he was nineteen, he produced his 
 play, "The Robbers," which forms an era, not only in 
 his history, but in that of literature. Its publication 
 caused great excitement, not only in Germany, but else- 
 where, and translations appeared in almost all the lan- 
 guages of Europe. It brought Schiller into public notice, 
 but the Duke of Wurtemberg highly disapproved of his 
 poetical labors. He commanded him to beware of writ- 
 ing any more. However, he did not follow up this 
 course, and when Schiller became known widely, the 
 Duke ceased to persecute him.f 
 
 * Once, in 1768, Schiller and hi3 friend Blwert, liad to repeat their Cate- 
 chism together on a certain day, publicly, in the church. Their teacher had pre- 
 viously threatened them with a flogging if they missed a single word. Both the 
 hoys began their answers with dismayed hearts and faltering tongues ; but they 
 succeeded in accompUshing the task, and were, in consequence, rewarded with 
 two kreutzers (Icroif serz) apiece. Two kreutzers of ready cash was a sum of no com- 
 mon magnitude. How it should be disposed of formed a serious question for the 
 parties interested. Schiller moved that they should go to Harteneck (fiar'ten ek), 
 a hamlet in the neighborhood, and have a feast on curds-and-cream ; but, alas ! 
 in Harteneck no curds-and-cream was to be bought. Schiller then asked the 
 price of a quarter of a cheese, but this would cost the whole of their four kreut- 
 zers, without leaving any thing to pay for bread. They walked on to a hamlet 
 farther off, where, after much inquiry, they found curds-and-cream, served on a 
 painted crockery plate, with silver spoons, all for three kreutzers, which left one 
 for a bunch of grapes. Schiller was so excited by the feast, that he mounted 
 with his comrade to a height overlooking the two hamlets. In a poetical effusion 
 he pronounced his malediction on the creamless region, and bestowed his solemn 
 blessing on the one which had afforded the delicious repast. 
 
 t The Preiherr von Dalberg (fn' hdr fun ddl'Mrgh), superintendent of the 
 theater at Mannheim (mfln' him), had it brought upon the stage in 1781. With the 
 
SCHILLER. 4S7 
 
 Schiller left Stuttgart when he was in his twenty- 
 third year. The mother of two fellow-students, Madame 
 von Wolzogen (vol' tso gen), invited him to her house, on 
 her estate at Bauerbach (bo^^^'ep bakh). Here he settled 
 himself to writing with zeal and success, and produced 
 two plays,— " Fiesco " (fees' ko) and "Cabale (kaba'leh) 
 und Liebe" (le'beh), which, with "The Robbers," made 
 the first period of Schiller's literary history. In Septem- 
 ber, 1783, he went to Mannheim, as poet of the theater, 
 — a post of respectability and reasonable profit. He was 
 now relieved of all oppression, and his gloom left him. 
 He had a moderate income, was safe and free, and sur- 
 rounded by friends that loved and honored him. 
 
 The theater at Mannheim Vt^as, at that period, one of 
 the best in Germany. Schiller exerted himself to pro- 
 mote its objects. He read and studied the French clas- 
 sics, and projected translations from Shakespeare, and was 
 busy with new original compositions. He began a peri- 
 odical work, the RheiniscJie Thalia {rV msh eh ta' le a), 
 which was continued for several years. It contained 
 theatrical criticisms, essays upon the stage, its history, 
 and influence, as well as miscellaneous poetry and dis- 
 cussion. Thus busily occupied, Schiller led a happy life. 
 His mild and amiable manners made him a favorite in 
 society. He was loved and admired, and had brilliant 
 
 natural desire of a young author, Schiller ventured to go in secret to witness the 
 first representation of his tragedy. His incognito did not conceal him. He was 
 hut under arrest during a week for this offense, and as this punishment did not 
 deter him from again transgressing in a similar manner, dark hints were given 
 him of some exemplary as well as imminent severity. Schiller saw himself reduced 
 to extremity. He resolved to he free, at whatever risk ; to quit his school, and go 
 forth, friendless and alone, to seek his fortune. Some foreign Duke or Prince 
 was arriving at Stuttgart, and all the people were in movement, occupied with 
 seeing the spectacle of his entrance. SchiUer seized this opportunity of escaping 
 from the city. He got beyond the reach of turnkeys, commanding officers, and 
 G-rand Dukes. This was in October, 1783. 
 
438 POETS. 
 
 prospects before him. But Mannheim came to seem too 
 narrow a sphere for him, and he determined to remove 
 to Leipsic (lip'zlkh), as a larger center of activity and hfe. 
 But Leipsic, though pleasant, did not realize his views, 
 and he went on to Dresden, where were many persons 
 who admired his fame. He made his home with his true 
 friend, Komer (ka'mer), and it was there that "Don 
 Carlos" was completed. It was published in 1786, — the 
 first of his plays that bears the stamp of maturity. It 
 was received with immediate and universal approbation. 
 At Dresden, Schiller wrote many of his smaller pieces of 
 poetry, which may be classed as among the most finished 
 efforts of his genius. Q-rowing tired of fictitious writing, 
 he began to think of history, and began upon " The Re- 
 volt of the Netherlands." He planned other such works, 
 of which very few reached even partial execution. 
 
 Such were Schiller's occupations while at Dresden. 
 Their extent and variety are proof enough that idleness 
 was not among his vices. He wrote and thought with 
 impetuosity. His intolerance of interruptions first put 
 him on the plan of studying by night, a practice which 
 he never gave up. He loved to be alone. The banks of 
 the Elbe were his favorite resort in the mornings. Here, 
 wandering in solitude in green and beautiful places, he 
 abandoned his mind to delicious musings, watched the 
 fitful current of his thoughts as they came sweeping 
 through his soul in vague, fantastic fornis, and medi- 
 tated upon his literary schemes. At times, he went out 
 upon the water and feasted himself with the loveliness 
 of earth and sky. He delighted in tempests ; as, when a 
 boy, he felt in harmony with the wildest scene of storm. 
 
 Schiller commonly devoted a part of his day to the 
 pleasures of society. He appeared unwillingly in the 
 
SCHILLER. 439 
 
 circles of fashion, but there were congenial minds with 
 whom he could associate, with whom he was frank, un- 
 embarrassed, and lent himself to the humor of the hour. 
 His conversation was delightful, at once rare and simple ; 
 marked by a kindliness and good humor that would have 
 rendered dullness agreeable, it overflowed with intellect. 
 
 In 1787, Schiller made a visit to Weimar (vi'mar), the 
 Athens of Q-ermany. In this literary city, he found the 
 sympathy of kindred minds. On the occasion of a visit 
 to his early patroness, Madame von Wolzogen, he met at 
 Rudolstadt (roo' dol stat), where he stayed for a time, the 
 Fraiilein Lengefeld (froi'lin leng'eh felt). He came to love 
 her, and the return of her love diffused a sunshine over 
 his world. It was at this time that Schiller first met 
 Goethe (gu'teh), concerning whom his expectations had 
 been raised high by reading and report. The first im- 
 pression was not very pleasant. Q-oethe was in his thirty- 
 ninth year, and had long since found his proper rank 
 and settlement in life. Schiller was ten years younger, 
 and his individuality was less matured. Each was con- 
 strained before the other, and no great harmony sprang 
 up ; but afterward, feelings of kindness grew up between 
 them, and, in the end, of affection.* 
 
 The first volume of "The Revolt of the Netherlands" 
 came out in 1788, and added to the reputation of its 
 author. Through the special notice of Princess Amelia, 
 
 * Q-oethe's prepossessions were hostile to Schiller. He stated them himself 
 with frankness, but good humor : 
 
 " On my return from Italy," he says, " where I had been endeavoring to train 
 myself in purity and precision of writing, not heeding what was going on in 
 G-ermany, I found some recent works of poetry enjoying high esteem and wide 
 circulation, whUe, unhappily, their character to me was utterly offensive. Of 
 these, I mention Schiller's 'Robbers,' because in it, the very paradoxes, moral 
 and dramatic, from which I was struggling to free myself, had been laid hold of 
 by a powerful though an immature genius, and poured in a boundless, rushing 
 flood over all our country. * * * 
 
440 POETS. 
 
 Regent of Sachsen (sak'sen) Weimar, Schiller was ap- 
 pointed Professor at Jena (ya'na); he went thither in 
 
 1789. His wanderings were now at an end. In the 
 February following, he obtained the hand of Fratilein 
 Lengefeld, a happiness with which he had long asso- 
 ciated all the pleasures which he hoped for from the 
 future.* 
 
 Schiller then devoted himself to the writing of history, 
 upon which his views were .of the most enlarged kind. 
 His " Thirty- Years' War " is no ordinary history ; it 
 abounds in picturesque events, and is full of great 
 thoughts, and vivid descriptions of scenes and characters. 
 
 This first complete specimen of Schiller's art in the 
 department of history, though but a small fraction of 
 
 " The rumor tMs strange production had excited all over Oermany, the ap- 
 probation paid to it by every class of persons, from the wild student to the pol- 
 ished court-lady, frightened me ; for I now thought all my labor was to prove 
 vain. The objects and the way of handling them, to which I had devoted all my 
 powers, appeared defaced and set aside, and what grieved me more was, that all 
 my friends seemed in danger of the like contagion ; I was much hurt. Had 
 it been possible, I would have abandoned the study of creative art, and the 
 practice of poetry altogether; for where was the prospect of surpassing such 
 performances of genuine worth and wild form in their own direction ? It had 
 been my object and my task to cherish and impart the purest exhibitions of 
 poetic art. This was now impossible for me. I avoided Schiller, who was now 
 at Weimar, in my neighborhood. The attempts of our mutual friends I resisted, 
 and we still continued to go on our way apart." 
 
 * Charlotte von Lengefeld was born in November, 1766, in Schwartzburg- 
 Eudolstadt (.s»,>7.s' boargh rgo' dbls stiit). She became Schiller's wife in l?ehruary, 
 
 1790. For fifteen years she was his chosen companion. During this time, her 
 only gi-ief was anxiety for his health. She lived only in Schiller, and for him. 
 She followed willingly, for it was easy to follow him in his inspirations. Her 
 taste was frequently a great help to her husband. She was the wife he needed. 
 
 Charlotte's letters have a certain grace ; while earnest and serious, they give 
 the small events of every-day life in gay, often humorous, fashion, depicting the 
 present moment in a clear and cheerful light. 
 
 After the death of Schiller, his widow devoted herself to the education of 
 their four children. She lived to see both of her accomplished sons happily 
 married. In her last years, she was troubled with weak eyes, threatening blind- 
 ness. This misfortune she bore with courage and cheerfulness, in the circle of 
 her children and friends. She died at Bonn, Julj', 1826, in the arms of two of 
 her children. 
 
SCHILLER. 441 
 
 what he meant to do, and could have done, proved, in 
 fact, to be the last he ever imdertook. In 1791, a fit of 
 sickness overtook him ; he had to exchange the inspiring 
 labors of literature for the pains of physical disease. His 
 disorder- had its seat in his chest, and was violent and 
 threatening ; and though nature overcame it in the first 
 attack, the blessing of entire health never returned to 
 Mm. The causes of this disorder seem to have been his 
 unceasing toil, and, perhaps, his habit of studying at 
 night. A total cessation of all literary effort was pre- 
 scribed for him. Schiller rebelled against this. With a 
 wife depending upon him for support, it seemed impos- 
 sible to him to stop writing. In this difficulty, help came 
 from an unexpected quarter. A pension of a thousand 
 crowns a year was conferred upon him for three years 
 by two benefactors, the Prince of Holstein-Augustenberg 
 (hoi' stin ow gc5os' ten bergh) and the Count VOn Schim- 
 melman (shli-n'mel man), with the single stipulation that 
 he should take care of his health, and use every effort 
 to get well. 
 
 After this attack of illness, through the kind provision 
 he received from Denmark for his support, Schiller re- 
 laxed his labors for the Universit}' at Jena, discharged 
 the duties of his class by proxy, and forsook his histor- 
 ical studies ; he allowed himself to turn his attention to 
 more abstract subjects, among which was the philosophy 
 of Kant (kant), then spreading over Germany. In the 
 controversies excited by these doctrines, Schiller took no 
 part. The noise they made induced him to investigate 
 them, but their influence is scarcely to be traced in his 
 subsequent writings.* 
 
 * In the end of 1792, Schiller, for the only time in Ms life, seriously medi- 
 tated mingling in politics. The French Bevolution had from the first affected 
 
442 POETS. 
 
 The historical and critical studies of Schiller had en- 
 larged and enlightened his mind, his intellect was en- 
 riched by acquired thoughts, and strengthened by exer- 
 cise, but the primary vocation of his nature was poetry, 
 and the acquisitions of his other faculties served but as 
 the materials for this. The first youthful blaze of poetic 
 ardor had passed away, but gleams of ideal beauty still 
 hovered over his mind. He longed to turn them into 
 shape. Criticism had exalted his notions of art; the 
 perusal of the Greek tragedians had given rise to some 
 translations ; reading Homer, suggested to him the idea 
 of an epic poem. He felt, however, that the true home 
 of his genius was the drama, the department where its 
 powers had first been tried. The idea of Grustavus 
 Adolphus as the hero of his epic poem, he transferred to 
 the subject of a tragedy, out of which grew his "Wallen- 
 stein" (^A^ol' en stin). This task was for several years his 
 chosen occupation, though his occasional labors, besides, 
 were numerous and varied, — the editing of the Thalia 
 and the superintendence of the Musea-Almanach were 
 among these. In the latter, he had the co-operation of 
 
 him witli no ordinary hopes, which, however, the course of events fast converted 
 into fears. For the ill-fated Louis XVI., and for the cause of freedom, which 
 seemed threatened with disgrace, in the treatment that monarch was hkely to 
 receive, Schiller felt so deeply interested, that he determined, not without per- 
 sonal risk, to address an appeal on these subjects to the French people, and the 
 world at large. The voice of reason advocating order as well as liberty, might, 
 he conceived, make a salutary impression in this period of terror and delusion ; 
 the voice of a distinguished man would sound like the voice of the nation which 
 he should represent. 
 
 Schiller was stiU making inquiries for a French translator, and revolving in 
 his mind the various arguments that might be used with propriety and advan- 
 tage, when the progress of things superseded the necessity of such deliberation. 
 In those few months, Louis XVT. perished on the scaffold. The Bourbon family 
 were guillotined, or scattered over Europe, and the French government was 
 changed into a frightful chaos, through which calm truth had no longer any 
 chance of being heard. Schiller turned away from these repulsive and appalling 
 scenes into other regions, where his powers were more likely to produce effect. 
 
SCHILLEE. 448 
 
 Goethe. Their intimacy was now frank and cordial ; they 
 were in the habit of paying long visits to each other's 
 houses, and frequently used to go together from Jena to 
 Weimar. They might sometimes be seen, we are told, 
 on the road between these towns, sitting at table beneath 
 the shade of a spreading tree, talking and looking at the 
 passers-by. 
 
 Schiller had at this time little to complain of, and 
 much to rejoice in. He was happy in his family, hon- 
 ored and admired by the world ; his wants were provided 
 for. He had tasks which inspired and occupied him ; 
 friends who loved him, whom he loved. His mode of 
 life at Jena was simple and moderate, his only excess 
 being his habit of writing and studying at night. He 
 was to be found at his desk till four or even five o'clock 
 in the morning, when he went to bed, and seldom rose 
 till nine or ten."'' 
 
 " Wallenstein " was sent forth to the world in 1799, — 
 a work of anxiet}^ and labor, which had not been be- 
 stowed in vain. It m.ay safely be rated as the greatest 
 dramatic work of the eighteenth century, at the very 
 close of which it was published. 
 
 * During summer, his place of study was In a garden,— whlcli at length he 
 purchased, — in the suburbs of Jena, in a hollow defile, through which a stream 
 flows around the city. On the top of the acclivity,— from which there is a 
 beautiful prospect into the valley of the Saale {m' leJi) and the fir-clad hills of 
 the neighboring forest, — Schiller built himself a small house with a single room 
 in it. This was his favorite abode during hours of composition, and a great part 
 of his works were written there. 
 
 On sitting down at his desk at night, he was in the habit of keeping some 
 strong coffee or chocolate, or, more frequently, a flask of Rhenish wine or cham- 
 pagne, standing by him, that he might, from time to time, refresh himself. 
 Often the neighbors used to hear him declaiming aloud in the silence of the 
 night ; and, as it was very easy to watch him from the heights opposite his little 
 garden-house, he might be seen speaking aloud and walking swiftly to and fro in 
 his chamber ; then suddenly throwing himself down in his chair and writing, drink- 
 ing the while, — sometimes more than once,— from the glass standing near him. 
 
444 POETS. 
 
 Soon after its appearance, Schiller once more changed 
 his abode, and henceforth he spent his winters in Weimar, 
 partly to be near the theater there. For several years, 
 he continued to spend his summers in Jena, but at last 
 he settled constantly in Weimar. He was now, as be- 
 fore, in the pay of the Duke of Weimar, and engaged in 
 dramatic composition as the great object of his life. In 
 1802, Schiller was ennobled by the Duke, at the wish of 
 the latter, — not from any desire on the part of Schiller 
 himself, who accepted the honor from gratitude, without 
 needing or asking for it. 
 
 In return for so much kindness, he ajoplied himself to 
 a close inspection of the theater at Weimar, which was 
 the hobby of the Grand Duke, and shared with Goethe 
 the task of superintending its concerns. In 1800, he 
 published his tragedy of "Maria Stuart," and, a year 
 later, "The Maid of Orleans," one of the finest of modern 
 dramas.* Its reception was, beyond example, flattering. 
 This was followed, in 1804, by " Wilhelm (vli'helm) 
 Tell," which added still more to his fame. 
 
 Schiller's faculties had never been more brilliant than 
 at this period. Strong in mature age, in rare and varied 
 accomplishments, he was reaping the full fruits of his 
 
 * The reception of " The Maid of Orleans " was highly flattering. At the first 
 exhibition of the play in Leipsic, Schiller was in the theater, though not among 
 the audience. When the curtain dropped at the end of the first act, there arose 
 on all sides a shout of, "Long live Priedrich Schiller !" accompanied by the 
 sound of trumpets and other military music. At the conclusion of the piece, the 
 whole assembly left their places, went out, and crowded around the door through 
 which the poet was expected to come. No sooner did he show himself, than his 
 admiring spectators, uncovering their heads, made a lane for him to pass, and as 
 he walked along many held up their children, saying to them, " That is he I " 
 
 At the first production of the play in Weimar, a certain young doctor called 
 out from the gallery, " Bravo, Schiller ! " in a loud tone of voice. Offended at this 
 personality, the author hissed, and the audience joined him. Schiller afterward 
 expressed his displeasure at this conduct, and the young doctor was punished for 
 his indiscreet applause by an admonition from the police. 
 
SCHILLER. 445 
 
 earlier studies. The rapidity with which he wrote shows 
 the great riclies of his mind, and the promxjt command 
 he possessed over them.* AU that he had done seemed 
 but a fraction of his appointed task. A bold inspiration 
 was leading him into wider fields of poetry and thought, 
 where yet more triumphs were to be gained. Schemes 
 of new writings floated in his fancy ; he was surrounded 
 by a multitude of projects, and full of ardor about carry- 
 ing them out.f But Schiller's labors and triumphs wei"e 
 drawing to a close. 
 
 In 1804, he went to Berlin to witness the perform- 
 ance of "Wilhelm Tell." On his return, he was seized 
 with a paroxysm of the malady which, for many years, 
 had never wholly left him. The attack was fierce and 
 violent. It brought him to the verge of the grave, but 
 he escaped once more, was considered out of danger, and 
 again resumed his poetical employments. His mind was 
 now frequently engaged with solemn and sublime ideas. 
 The universe of human thought he had explored and 
 enjoyed. Many of his later poems indicate an incessant, 
 increasing longing for some solution of the mystery of 
 life. At tinres, it is a gloomy resignation to the want 
 
 * At Weimar, Ms way of life was like that at Jena. He might frequently be 
 seen in the park there, — which is large and beautiful, laid out with great sim- 
 phcity, like a natural woodland, — wandering about the remote paths, with a note- 
 book in his hand, now loitering slowly along, now standing still. If any one 
 appeared in sight, he would dart away into another avenue. One of his favorite 
 resorts was a shady, rocky path, which leads to a little pavilion built by the 
 Grand Duke, under the direction of Goethe. Here runs a Tittle brook over its 
 smooth channel of slate-stone. Some verses of Goethe are cut upon a stone plate 
 set into the rock. The spot is completely overgrown, and surrounded by shady 
 trees and shrubs. 
 
 t Whatever Schiller intended to write, he first entirely composed in his head 
 before putting a line on paper, and he used to call a work ready as soon as its 
 plan was complete in his mind. Prom this it happened that there were often 
 reports that he had finished a piece of composition, when, in the ordinary senso 
 of the term, it was not even begun. 
 
446 POETS. 
 
 and despair of any. His ardent spirit could not satisfy 
 itself with things seen. It soared away in search of 
 other lands, looking for some surer and brighter home 
 beyond the horizon of this world. He had no reason to 
 regard death as a near event, but the awful secrets 
 connected with it had long been familiar to his contem- 
 plation. 
 
 The spring of 1805, which Schiller had looked for- 
 ward to with hopes of enjoyment and activity, was cold, 
 bleak, and stormy, and with it his illness returned. The 
 help of physicians was vain, his disorder kept increasing; 
 on the 9th of May, it reached a crisis. Early in the 
 morning of that day, he grew insensible and, by degreeSj 
 delirious. Among his expressions, the word Lichtenberg 
 (likh'ten bergh) was frequently noticed, a word of no im- 
 port, — indicating, as some thought, the writer of that 
 name, whose works he had lately been reading. 
 
 But his friends were spared the pain of seeing him 
 depart in delirium. The physical suffering which had 
 bewildered and blinded his thinking faculties passed 
 away, and the spirit of Schiller looked forth in its wonted 
 serenity. About four o'clock in the afternoon, he fell 
 into a soft sleep, from which lie awoke in the full pos- 
 session of his senses. Feeling that his end was come, he 
 addressed himself to meet it, not with affected careless- 
 ness or superstitious fear, but with the quiet, unpretend- 
 ing manliness which had marked his life. He took a 
 touching, tranquil farewell of his family, ordering that 
 his funeral should be private, without pomp or parade. 
 Some one inquired how he felt. He replied, " Calmer 
 and calmer." About six, he sank into a deep sleep. 
 Once, for a moment, he looked up, with a lively expres- 
 sion, and said : " Many things are growing plain and 
 
SCHILLER. 447 
 
 clear to me—" Again he closed his eyes ; his sleeping 
 grew deeper and deeper, until it changed into the sleep 
 from which there is no awakening. 
 
 Schiller was forty-five years old when he died. Sick- 
 ness had long wasted his form. He was tall and thin, 
 his face was pale, the cheeks and temples rather hollow, 
 the chin deep and slightly projecting, the nose irregu- 
 larly aquiline, his hair inclined to auburn. His counte- 
 nance was attractive, and had a certain manly beauty. 
 The lips were curved and delicate, his eyes were soft, 
 and his brow high and thoughtful. 
 
 In his dress and manner, he was plain and unaffected. 
 Among strangers, something shy and retiring was to be 
 observed in him : in his own family and among his 
 chosen friends, he was kind-hearted, free, and as gay as 
 a little child. In public, his external appearance had 
 nothing in it to strike or attract ; his looks were con- 
 stantly bent on the ground as he walked, so that he 
 often failed to notice the salutation of a passing acquaint- 
 ance ; but if he heard it, he would catch hastily at his 
 hat, and give his cordial "Guten Tag" (gcjot'en takh). 
 Modesty, simplicity, and a total want of all parade or 
 affectation were conspicuous in him. 
 
 Schiller gives a fine example of the German character. 
 He has all its good qualities in a high degree, with very 
 few of its defects. He had downrightness and simplicity, 
 sincerity of heart and mind, enthusiasm, patience, and 
 earnestness ; imagination, delighting in the lofty and 
 grand ; intellect, rising into refined abstractions, grasp- 
 ing comprehensive generalizations. In his boyhood, 
 Schiller's writings were extravagant ; but in the man, 
 there is no bombast, no inflation of thought. He is the 
 poet of truth ; he satisfies the understanding and con- 
 
448 POETS. 
 
 science of his readers, wliile he moves their hearts and 
 imaginations. 
 
 The news of Schiller's death fell cold on every heart ; 
 not in Germany alone, but all over Europe, it was re- 
 garded as a public loss by all who understood its mean- 
 ing. In Weimar, the sensation was deep and universal. 
 Public places of amusement were shut, and all ranks 
 made haste to testify their feelings by tributes to his 
 memory.* 
 
 * According to Schiller's directions, the bier was to be borne by young 
 burghers of the town, but several young artists and students, out of reverence 
 for the deceased, took it upon themselves to carry it. It was between midnight 
 and one in the morning when the funeral-train approached the church-yard. 
 The overclouded sky threatened rain. But as the bier was set down beside the 
 grave, the clouds suddenly opened, and the moon coming forth peacefully, cast 
 its rays upon the cofdn. It was lowered to the grave. The moon again retired 
 behind dark clouds. A fierce wind began to howl, as If to remind the mourners 
 of their great, irreparable loss. 
 
WORDSWORTH 
 
 IN looking over the history of English poetry, no one 
 can fail to note what has been called, not very cor- 
 rectly, the school of Pope. It was not exactly a school 
 of poetry, but a Avell-nigh universal impulse of fashion. 
 During about one hundred years, the poets of England 
 were content to throw their thoughts into a single set 
 form of versification, — ^the English heroic meter, — and to 
 adopt almost absolutely a set and artificial mode of ex- 
 pression. The effect was prosaic. Neither the subject, 
 nor vrhat was said about it, rose far above ihe prose level, 
 save in exceptional cases. There was a strange delight 
 in treating didactic subjects in a curiously pompous and 
 useless way ; in writing satires in smooth antithetic verse ; 
 in mulling over certain conventional subjects in a dry, 
 hard, and often lifeless manner. 
 
 About the beginning of this century, all this was 
 done away with, and the poetry of the eighteenth century 
 fell into contempt as profound as the honor it had before 
 enjoyed. Cowper and Burns are the first of the great 
 poets in whom we can distinguish a difference of style 
 and treatment. Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, 
 Southey (sowth'i), and Wordsworth, in the course of a 
 few decades, effectually finished the work, and entirely 
 displaced the whole school of Pope. The difference is 
 very great. Instead of high-flown and conventional sen- 
 timent, we have strong and natural passion. Instead of 
 
450 POETS. 
 
 polished couplets glittering with a hard metalhc luster, 
 we have the true glow of lyric fire. In place of select- 
 ing certain stock subjects, the poets ransacked history 
 and the world for subjects. Scott went back to feudal- 
 ism ; Byron sought the East ; Keats revived old Greek 
 life ; Southey found romantic subjects every-where ; Cole- 
 ridge and Shelley crossed the line of the supernatural. 
 They turned their minds, too, to Nature, — too much 
 neglected, except in cut-and-dried garden forms, — and 
 sought out all that was wild and picturesque, — the 
 mountain, the water-fall, the ocean. 
 
 The form, too, of the eighteenth century poetry was 
 despised. Scott seized a species of galloping moss-trooper 
 meter ; Coleridge discarded every thing except the accent 
 to inai'k the rhythm. Byron and Keats revivified the old 
 Spenserian stanza. And even when they condescended 
 to employ the heroic couplet, they changed it utterlj^ 
 The old meter was a succession of smooth, polished, 
 epigrammatic couplets, saying its say in a couple of 
 lines, and then, in another couplet, saying what came 
 next. But the decasyllabics written by these new poets 
 were all cut and broken to pieces by the desire to avoid 
 monotony.* The full stop came purposely in the middle 
 
 * It is interesting to read the lines in which Keats, at the age of twenty-two, 
 characterized his predecessors. He has been speaking of all the beauties of 
 nature and of poetry, and goes on : 
 
 " Could all this be forgotten ? Yes ; a schism 
 Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, 
 Made great Apollo blush for this his land. 
 Men were thought wise who could not understand 
 His glories: with a puling infant's force 
 They swayed about upon a rocking-horse, 
 And thought it Pegasus. Oh, dismal-souled 1 
 The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd 
 Its gathering waves. Ye felt it not. The blue 
 Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew 
 
WORDSWORTH. 451 
 
 of the couplet or the raiddle of the hne. Alexandrine?., 
 which Pope had discarded, were used with reckless fre- 
 quency. Read Keats' earlier poems, and even " Lamia " 
 (la' mi a), or Leigh (le) Hunt's " Story of Rimini " (re'me ne), 
 and then read any thing of Pope's. 
 
 But these all sought the romantic, the startling, the 
 eccentric in subject and in treatment. They argued that 
 the sham sentiment, the sham passion, the absurdlj^ 
 high-flown ideas should be replaced by genuine feeling, 
 true roixiance. They carried the day with them. Scott's 
 chivalry, Byron's romance, Coleridge's supernaturalism 
 were all the fashion. Wordsworth alone put forth a 
 contrary idea. Instead of seeking true poetry in jnore 
 romantic and fantastic subjects, — in more striking and 
 vigorous meter, — he thought that the truest poetry was 
 to be found in the common life which he saw around 
 him, and that it could be expressed in the commonest 
 language of prose. And his poems are on the simplest 
 
 Of summer nights collected still to make 
 The morning precious : beauty was awake 1 
 Why were not ye awake? But ye were dead 
 To things you knew not of,— were closely wed 
 To musty laws, lined out with wretched rule 
 And compass vile : so that ye taught a school 
 Of dolts, to smooth, inlay, and clip, and lit. 
 Till, like the certain wards of Jacob's wit. 
 Their verses tallied. Easy was the task : 
 A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask 
 Of Poesy, ni-fated, impious race 1 
 That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face, 
 And did not know it. — No, they went about. 
 Holding a poor decrepit standard out. 
 Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and in large. 
 The name of one Boileaul" (bwiiW). 
 
 There is, of course, much exaggeration in all this ; but there is much that is 
 true. The eighteenth century was undoubtedly a period in which English prose 
 was finer than it had been before or has been since, and also a period when the 
 tendency of poetry was to become prosaic. 
 
452 POETS. 
 
 and most natural subjects, and his language and meter 
 are of the shnplest and most natural kind. The public 
 did not agree with him. It elevated Scott, then Byron, 
 to the very highest place, and refused to recognize 
 Wordsworth. But even in his life-time, the tide turned ; 
 and probably to-day, among the real leaders of literary 
 opinion, Wordsworth would be readily given a higher 
 place than any other English poet since Milton, except 
 Robert Browning. 
 
 The Lake Coun'ry of England* is so inseparably con- 
 nected with Wordsworth, that any lover of the poet 
 would gladly give both time and money to see it. In 
 fact, aside from grounds of poetic association, it affords as 
 many attractions to the lover of the picturesque as does 
 any other part of England. There are mountains,— Hel- 
 vellyn (hel vel'lln) and Skiddaw, for instance, — not the 
 highest in the world, but rugged and grand to the very 
 point of awfulness ; there are lakes, Derwent- Water, Win- 
 dermere, Q-rasmere, Rydal- Water (n'dal), which may rival 
 any of which we have heard. There are mountain tarns 
 
 * WordswortlL himself wrote a Guide to the Lakes. His descriptions of Lake 
 scenery are well worth reading. This is what he says of the mountain tarns : 
 
 " They are difficult of access, and naked ; yet some of them are, in their per- 
 manent forms, very grand ; and there are accidents of things which would make 
 the meanest of them interesting. At all events, one of these pools is an accept- 
 able sight to the mountain wanderer, not merely as an incident that diversifies 
 the prospect, but as forming in his mind a center or conspicuous point to which 
 objects, otherwise disconnected or insubordinated, may be referred. Some tew 
 have a varied outline, with bold, heath-clad promontories ; and, as they mostly 
 lie at the foot of a steep precipice, the water, where the sun is not shining upon 
 it, appears black and sullen, and round the margin huge stones and masses of 
 rock are scattered, some defying conjecture as to the means by which they came 
 thither, and others obviously fallen from on high,— the contributions of ages. A 
 not unpleasing sadness is induced by this perplexity and these images of decay ; 
 while the prospect of a body of pure water, unattended with groves and other 
 zheerful rural images by which fresh water is usually accompanied, and unable 
 to give furtherance to the meager vegetation around it, excites a sense of some 
 repulsive power strongly put forth, and thus deepens the melancholy natural to 
 such scenes." 
 
\V () K l)S WORTH. 453 
 
 as beautiful and gloomy as the Scottish lochs; there are 
 brooks and rivers, meadows and uplands,— all that one 
 could ask for in mountain scenery. While it is not 
 always grand and awe-inspiring, it is ever remarkably 
 picturesque. Wordsworth himself says : " But a short resi- 
 dence among the British mountains will furnish abun- 
 dant proof that, after a certain point of elevation, viz., 
 that which allows of compact and fleecy clouds settling 
 upon or sweeping over the summits, the sense of sub- 
 limity depends more upon form and relation of objects 
 to each other than upon the actual magnitude ; and that 
 an elevation of 3,000 feet is sufficient to call forth, in a 
 most impressive degree, the creative and magnifying 
 powers of the atmosphere." 
 
 The Lake Country is a tract of mountain region on 
 the borders of three counties, — Cumberland, Westmore- 
 land, and Lancashire. The sea is on the west, visible 
 from the mountains. Of these, the most famous, — Skid- 
 daw, — is on the northern part, in Cumberland, a few feet 
 over three thousand high. To the south lie Derwent- 
 Water and Keswick (kez'ik). More nearly in the center 
 of the region is Helvellyn, a bit higher than Skiddaw, 
 and farther south still are Grrasmere and Rydal Mount 
 and Rydal- Water. Beyond, and to the south-west, are 
 Coniston-Water and Furness Fells, while to the south 
 is Windermere, and to the west the River Duddon. We 
 can hardly go further in description. Wordsworth knew 
 and loved the Lake Country, so that many of its mi- 
 nutest points are celebrated in his poetry. But his 
 readers will recall the more familiar points. 
 
 At Cockermouth, in the north-eastern part of the Lake 
 region, was Wordsworth born. He went to school at 
 Hawkshead, near Windermere, in the southern part ; 
 
454 POETS. 
 
 and the greater part of his after life was passed at 
 Q-rasmere and Rydal, in the very heart of the country. 
 He knew it to its minutest corner.* 
 
 Wordsworth's Hfe was not eventful. Its chief interest 
 lies in his work. Born, as we have said, in Cockermouth, 
 in Cumberland, he lost his mother, and then his father, 
 before he was fifteen years old. He had at this time 
 been several years at school at Hawkshead. The amount 
 that he learned from books during these five years' 
 schooling is not chronicled, but the amount that he 
 learned froin Nature in term-time and vacation, — in 
 wandering about in the beautiful country near at hand, 
 — early improved his mind in a direction that is very 
 plain in his later works. 
 
 Wordsworth probably could not, of himself, have gone 
 to a University, having inherited nothing from his father 
 save a lawsuit against the Earl of Lonsdale, whose agent 
 he had been. But, thanks to his two uncles, Richard 
 Wordsworth and Christopher Crackenthorpe, means were 
 found, and in 1787, he was entered at St. John's Col- 
 lege, Cambridge, — making one more of that noble list of 
 poets who have lived there, which list was to be again 
 lengthened by the names of Coleridge and Byron. 
 
 Of Wordsworth's University life we need not say 
 much. He remained three years, took a degree, and de- 
 parted. His vacations were spent in the country, the 
 first two among the lakes and the third in a walking 
 trip in Switzerland, f 
 
 * Wordsworth, as we have mentioned before, was the author of a Guide to the 
 Lakes. It is said that on one occasion, late in his life, a clergyman, in conversa- 
 tion with him, asked politely if he had ever written any thing beside this Guide. 
 
 t This vacation excursion, most characteristic of the man, though now the 
 commonest thing in the world, was, at that time, an unheard-of proceeding. He 
 speaks of it himself as an "unprecedented course," showing "a hE^rdy sUght of 
 
WORDSWORTH. 455 
 
 On leaving Cambridge, Wordsworth had no settled 
 plan for the future. The pulpit and the bar were both 
 distasteful to him. " He did not feel himself good 
 enough for the Church," he said afterward. He had 
 some thoughts of the army. But he had no very defi- 
 nite aims. For a short time he lived in London ; but, 
 after a few months, left England for France ; then (No- 
 vember, 1791) hurrying along to the excesses of the 
 Terror, Wordsworth looked upon the Revolution with 
 satisfaction. He sympathized with its ideas, — he desired 
 to identify himself with it. He stayed but a short time 
 in Paris, but spent almost a year at Orleans {or la 6ng') 
 and Blois (blwa).* He returned to Paris in October, 
 1792,f at which time the revolutionary proceedings were 
 rushing on at such a pace as might well have alarmed 
 him. He thought of entering the struggle himself by 
 the side of the Girondists (jl rond'ists), but his friends, 
 viewing his course with dissatisfaction, recalled him to 
 England by stopping his alloAvance. 
 
 college studies and tlieir set rewards." He walked through Switzerland with his 
 friend Jones, and recoUections of the trip may he found in the "Prelude," that 
 introduction to the excursion wherein he describes much of his own life. His 
 first two vacations were passed in the company of Nature, the one among the 
 Lakes, and the second with his sister at Penrith. 
 
 * At Blois, the French language was thought to be spoken with the greatest 
 purity. Addison, it may be remembered, lived there some time, to acquire a cor- 
 rect pronunciation. 
 
 t Wordsworth returned to Paris from Blois, in October, 1793, immediately 
 after the September massacres. His enthusiasm for the ideas of the Revolution 
 was by no means checked, but his finer sensibilities were greatly shocked at the 
 thought of the destinies of freedom being in the hands of such men as had 
 seized control of affairs. It was at this time that he thought seriously of enter- 
 ing the arena himself with the leaders of the Girondists. Such a course of 
 action,— which, whatever its other results, would undoubtedly have conducted 
 him to the guillotine, with his political friends, in May, 1793,— was rendered im- 
 possible by a somewhat undignified hinderance. Wordsworth, while, in his own 
 eyes, "a patriot of the world," was, in the eyes of others, a young man of twenty- 
 two, traveling on a small allowance, and running his head into unnecessary 
 dangers. His funds were stopped, and he reluctantly returned to England at the 
 close of 1793. 
 
466 
 
 POETS. 
 
 As the Revolution went on, Wordsworth, with many 
 others, lost the sympathy with which they had watched 
 the first efforts of the French people to free themselves 
 from the burdens which had been left to them by feudal 
 times. 'Twas not unnatural ; for the principles with 
 which the Revolution started were either abandoned or 
 reduced to absurdities. 
 
 On returning home, Wordsworth found himself able 
 to adopt a life which must have come as near his ideal 
 of what life should be, as he could have asked. With 
 his sister Dorothy,* he began the simple cottage exist- 
 ence which makes up almost the whole of the rest of 
 his life. He now spent his time writing, though he 
 wrote nothing of his best at this period. He became 
 possessed of a small legacy, which, with other sums, 
 afforded him a sufficient income for himself and his 
 sister to live in a quiet, but very happy manner. 
 
 In 1797, the Wordsworths moved to Somersetshire, to 
 be near Coleridge, with whom Wordsworth had contracted 
 a close friendship. The result of this proximity was the 
 publication of " Lyrical Ballads." It had been the idea 
 that the two poets should contribute about the same 
 number of poems, Coleridge drawing his subjects from 
 the supernatural and Wordsworth from every-day cir- 
 cumstances. But Coleridge contributed only the "Ancient 
 
 * One of the most marked things in the life of Wordsworth, and one of the 
 things that most added to his pleasure, was his intimate friendship and constant 
 companionship with his sister Dorothy. An intellectual woman, keenly alive to 
 the wants and requirements of her brother's temperament, and deeply sympathiz- 
 ing with his views and aspiration, she was to him more, probably, than any 
 other woman could have been. And, doubtless, her devoted afifection, her intel- 
 ligent sympathy, and her own poetic and imaginative fancy, had much to do 
 with the drawing out and developing of her brother's more conservative nature. 
 Like him, she loved the companionship of Nature, and her highest ambition was 
 to enjoy and study with him the philosophic aspect of the beautiful scenes 
 among which they lived. 
 
WORDSWORTH. 457 
 
 Mariner" and a few other pieces. Wordsworth, in these 
 poems, struck the key-note of his poetical theory. "Lines 
 Written Above Tintern Abbey," "The Tables Turned," 
 " Expostulation and Reply " are truly Wordsworthian. 
 Some of the others have what is one of Wordsworth's 
 faults in his poorer poetry, an utter triviality, re- 
 deemed by very little else. The poems are to-day ad- 
 mired, some on account of their very great beauty; 
 others because they were written by Wordsworth. At 
 the time of their publication, they do not seem to have 
 caused a pleasing sensation.* Had the " Lyrical Ballads " 
 received much careful reading, undoubtedly Jeffreys' 
 "This will never do"f would have come much sooner. 
 
 Shoi'tly after the publication of " Lyrical Ballads," 
 Wordsworth and his sister crossed to Q-ermany, where 
 they spent a winter at Goslar (goz' lar), returning at the 
 end of the year 1799, to settle together at Grasmere, 
 in the midst of the Lake Country. 
 
 * " Every one knows that Wordsworth's early poetry was received with a 
 shout of derision such as,— except in the case of Keats,— has never attended the 
 first appearance of a great poet. Every one knows, too, that in a quarter of a 
 century, it was succeeded hy a growth of profound and enthusiastic admiration, 
 which, though it has heen limited hy the rise of new forms of deep and powerful 
 poetry, is still far from being spent or even I'educed, though it is expressed with 
 more discrimination than of old, in all who have a right to judge of English 
 poetry."— i?. W. Church. 
 
 t Jeffreys began his article on "The Excursion" in the Edinburgh Heview 
 with these words. The Eemeto was not started at this time ; but very shortly 
 aftei- its beginning. In 1800, it seized the position of critical dictator to Great 
 Britain and Ireland, and was allowed to retain it. We may imagine the spirit 
 in which good Whigs looked on it, from these lines, written by Southey some 
 time later: 
 
 " Mr. Jeffreys said so, who must certainly know, 
 Eor he was the Edinburgh Prophet ; 
 They all of them knew Mr. Jeffreys' Review, 
 
 Which vrith Holy Writ ought to be reckoned. 
 It was through thick and thin to its party true ; 
 Its back was buff and its sides were blue, 
 
 Morbleu ! Parbleu ! 
 It served them for Law and for Gospel too." 
 
458 
 
 POETS. 
 
 Wordsworth's life is not varied in incident. From this 
 time until his death, he lived among the Lakes,* with 
 occasional trips elsewhere,— to London, to the Highlands ; 
 sometimes abroad. We shall not try to particularize 
 further, for the mere recital of the bare facts would be 
 of little interest. 
 
 Wordsworth lived at G-rasmere, in two or three dif- 
 ferent houses, at different times, till 1813. In 1802, he 
 married Miss Mary Hutchinson, and with her and four 
 children who were born to them, and his much-loved 
 sister Dorothy, his household was complete. Several 
 times he varied the quietness of his life by tours in 
 Europe. But, as a rule, he lived quietly at Grasmere, and 
 afterward at Rydal Mount, among the lakes and mount- 
 ains, with relations and friends whom he loved, and not 
 infrequently visited by friends from a distance. He was 
 possessed of a modest income. Lord Lonsdale had paid 
 the debt which the poet's father had bequeathed to his 
 children. In 1813, through the interest of the same 
 nobleman, the place of distributor of stamps for West- 
 moreland, and, afterward, for Cumbeiiand as well, was 
 given him, and almost thirty years after, an annuity of 
 three hundred pounds from the Crown was offered him 
 as a mark of respect for his distingiiished literary ability. 
 
 * Wordsworth's life among the Lakes, though quiet and retired, was by no 
 means an utterly secluded existence, absolutely cut oflE from the outside world. 
 As time went on, and he was more and more recognized as a " center of spirit- 
 ual strength and illumination," there gathered around him a number of the 
 finest intellects of his day. Southey lived but a little distance away, at Keswick, 
 — a man of great learning and culture, though never one of England's greatest 
 poets. John Wilson, better known as " Christopher North," — that strange and 
 brilhant combination of scholar, man of letters, athlete, and sportsman,— lived 
 for some time near Wordsworth. De Quincy also passed some time in the I/ake 
 Country, as also did Dr. Arnold, of Eugby, known to all the readers of " Tom 
 Brown." Hartley Coleridge, the son of Wordsworth's friend, a genius of a high 
 order, was also a neighbor. 
 
WORDSWORTH. 469 
 
 A year or two before, he had received the degree of 
 D. C. L. at Oxford, amid tlie wildest enthusiasm, and the 
 year after, on the death of Southey, the Laureateship 
 was conferred upon him. He died in 1850.* 
 
 Wordsworth has occupied a curious position witli the 
 public. Born in 17 70, a little while before Scott, and a 
 long while before Byron, Wordsworth was, as far as 
 popularity is concerned, at once distanced by his younger 
 competitors. Scott, on his publishing " The Lay of the 
 Last Minstrel," "Marmion," and "The Lady of the Lake," 
 was given, by common consent, the j)lace of first among 
 English poets. Byron easily displaced Scott with his 
 " Childe Harold," and with his romantic (xreek tales. 
 Wordsworth received little else than unmixed ridicule 
 from the reviews and the reading public in general. He 
 had, however, his admirers, and by the time of the 
 death of Byron, these admirers, who had, at the begin- 
 ning of his work, been young persons, were now grown 
 up into positions of influence. The turn for Wordsworth 
 was very strong for some time, till the appearance of 
 Tennyson. Tennyson never effaced Wordsworth, but, on 
 
 * Something should, perhaps, he said about the Lake School of Poetry,— as 
 absurd a name as was ever affixed to any body of men. Wordsworth, Coleridge, 
 and Southey,— poets of very different styles, conceptions, and views of poetry,— 
 were classed together as a school of poetry by the reviewers, who pursued them 
 all with the utmost vigor. As a matter of fact, they all did, at times, live in 
 the Lake Country, and this is the only thing they had in common. To consider 
 Wordsworth and Southey as holding the same views in regard to Uterary com- 
 position would be ridiculous. Wordsworth himself, though he valued Southey's 
 friendship, probably never esteemed him a great poet. With Coleridge it 
 was different. Wordsworth was, in his earlier days, intimate with Coleridge. 
 They talked much together, and had many ideas in common. But, in their try- 
 ing to write a poem together, it was soon seen that their views and styles were 
 so utterly different that the idea of joint work was thrown aside, and the 
 "Lyrical Ballads," published conjointly, is practically made up of Wordsworth's 
 poetry, although there are one or two of Coleridge's pieces besides the "Ancient 
 Mariner." The "Lake rSchool" was a good enough nickname to fasten upon 
 political opponents, but it was foolishly absurd, and had little meaning. 
 
460 POETS. 
 
 the whole, he diminished the number of his admirers. 
 Since that time, it seems probable that the understand- 
 ing and love and admiration of Wordsworth have in- 
 creased very greatly, so that, as we have said, his place 
 among English poets is probably something above any 
 one of the three poets last named. 
 
BYRON. 
 
 1788-1834. 
 
 LORD BYRON'S father was a spendthrift, of noble 
 J family, commonly called " Mad-Jack " Byron. His 
 mother was a Miss Grordon, whom Byron married, pre- 
 sumably to get rid of his very pressing debts. The boy 
 was born in London, January, 1788, as his mother was 
 returning from France, and was born lame, — that is, the 
 heels of both feet were so formed that he could hardly 
 set them on the ground. With one foot this difficulty 
 was increased by various surgical operations. With the 
 other, it always existed, though never prominently. Lord 
 Byron, like Sir Walter Scott, was lame throughout life ; 
 but, unlike his great Scotch contemporary, was lame in 
 a painful and maddening way that was not without its 
 effect on a nervous, sensitive temperament. 
 
 Shortly after this, his mother moved to her former 
 home, Aberdeen, Scotland, and here the poet grew up. 
 On the death of his great-uncle, in 1798, he succeeded 
 to the title which his father had never enjoyed, and, 
 with his mother, moved to Newstead Abbey, the family 
 seat, in Nottinghamshire. He had attended the Aberdeen 
 Q-rammar School in Scotland ; in England, he was sent 
 to Harrow, where he remained four years, imtil the sum- 
 mer of 1805.* He was no great scholar at school; no 
 
 * It may be the duty of a biographer to chronicle the youthful loves of his 
 hero. 
 
 Lord Byron was not slow at any age to fall violently in love with a woman 
 who pleased him, and the passion, while it lasted, was all-engrossing. At Aber- 
 
462 POETS. 
 
 great figure among his fellows ; though he possessed an 
 imperious and haughty spirit, which sometimes put him 
 in the position of leader. 
 
 At Trinity College, Cambridge, whither he went in 
 1805, Byron's course, though not absolutely common- 
 place,* showed few indications by which any one could 
 form the idea that in half a dozen years he would be 
 reckoned the greatest poet in England. He did not 
 join indiscriminately with the other men, but kept rather 
 to himself and a few others who gathered around him, 
 and to these he was devotedly attached. He lived in 
 handsome chambers, in expensive style, and showed 
 from the first that he had no idea of obtaining Univer- 
 sity honors. 
 
 Perhaps we may be wrong in saying that none could 
 
 deen, when only nine years of age, he conceived a strong passion for Mary Duff. 
 TMs passion was so lasting, to no detriment of two others which followed it, that, 
 eight years afterward, the mere news of her marriage threw Byron into ^dolent 
 convulsions. On moving to Nottinghamshire, he was struck by tlie beauty of his 
 cousin, Margaret Parker, and long afterward cherished for her strong and lover- 
 like affection. But his cousin died of consumption, and Byron, still a school-boy, 
 fell in love with another cousin, Mary Chaworth (cfid,' ti'uth), but Mary Chaworth 
 did not care for the future poet, and married another. This last passion seems 
 to have been a most violent one. The poet himself, who seems, in after life, to 
 have frequently considered these questions, used to consider it, in vigor and in- 
 tensity, second only to his absorbing love for Teresa Guiccioli (gifef, chii' le). 
 
 * His life at Trinity, though not remarkable, was entertaining. Like the others 
 in his set, he had expensive chambers ; his wine parties and breakfasts ; his own 
 valet. He kept a couple of horses and a carriage, wherein he posted about the 
 country. He had with him generally two dogs, "Boatswain," the famous New- 
 foundland, and "Nelson," the bull-dog. On returning from one vacation, he 
 brought with him a bear, which he said he intended should take one ' of the 
 Trinity scholarships. His rooms afforded the materials for constant practice with 
 pistols or the small-sword (dueling was still in vogue), or with the gloves, for 
 sparring was one of the few manly exercises of which he was fond. He was un- 
 questionably great at swimming. Besides this, he went through the regular gay 
 Ufe of a wild young man in rather a wild age, and, among other things, played 
 high, and ran deeply into debt, which hampered him to a certain extent through- 
 out his life. But it does not appear that, at this time, he was wilder or wickeder 
 than the large majority of rich young men in an age when drinking and gam- 
 bling, fast living and loose living were the rule, and not the exception. 
 
BYEON. 468 
 
 have prophesied his greatness. Those who knew him 
 weU undoubtedly had extravagant expectations, which 
 were curiously carried out ; but when we consider the 
 work on which the expectations were based, we must 
 acknowledge that affection, rather than critical acumen, 
 was at the bottom of such opinions. "Hours of Idle- 
 ness," a volume of juvenile poems published when he 
 was still in residence at Cambridge, though by no means 
 worthy the contemptuous abuse poured on it by the 
 Edinburgh Revieiv, was not, to our mind, an earnest of 
 "Childe Harold" and "Don Jiian." The volume, however, 
 such as it was, fell under the notice of the Edinburgh 
 Review, then almost dictatorial in literary questions, and 
 a true slashing article of the real old style appeared, 
 in which jeers and flings at Byron for being a peer, and 
 a young one at that, are mingled with much that is 
 sensible, though ridiculously severe. Such as it was, 
 however, Byron took it greatly to heart. It filled him 
 with an almost blind rage, and in this condition he 
 wrote and shortly published a vigorous satire, " English 
 Bards and Scotch Reviewers," in which he struck wildly 
 around him against the writers of his day, known and 
 unknown alike. It was a strong and able piece of work, 
 but foolishly unjust, and Byron probably regretted it 
 afterward, when he had the opportunity to meet person- 
 ally some of those whom he had lampooned. 
 
 "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" was not pub- 
 lished till 1809. Before that, however, Byron had left 
 Trinity College, and had decided to go abroad for some 
 time. He passed some little time at ISTewstead Abbey, 
 with some of his friends, and sailed for Lisbon in the 
 summer of 1809. He was absent about two years. The 
 exact causes of this journey, as Byron desired the world 
 
464 toETS. 
 
 to imagine them, m.ay be found in the first few stanzas 
 of " Ghilde Harold." The reader may, however, if he 
 choose, doubt whether Byron was actually describing his 
 own condition in these verses, and it seems not impos- 
 sible to believe that he went abroad because he had no 
 very immediate prospects at home, because he was in 
 debt, because it was the fashion to travel in the East, or, 
 in a word, because he thought he should enjoy himself 
 by being for awhile away from home. 
 
 During the two years that he was abroad, Byron went 
 through Portugal and Spain, and thence, by way of 
 Malta, to Greece. He saw much of Greece and of Turkey, 
 interested himself much in Modern Greece, swam the 
 Hellespont (hel'les pont), and so forth, and finally returned 
 to England in the summer of 1811, having with him, — 
 written during his pilgrimage, — " Hints from Horace," a 
 satire, and the first two cantos of " Childe Harold," which 
 last was shortly published. 
 
 Byron himself preferred the former. The public (and 
 posterity has agreed with it) preferred the latter. Prob- 
 ably no reputation was made so quickly as that which 
 " Childe Harold " brought to Byron. It may be said also 
 that probably no reputation was so short-lived. The 
 poem was the rage with fashionable society at once, and 
 in London, Byron was the lion for five years, when he 
 was actually driven away by the sudden turn of popular 
 fancy which came later. But though the fashionable set 
 elevated him at once, and dethroned him as readily, we 
 can not doubt that, among the lower and middle classes, 
 Byron's reputation as a poet had mingled with it from 
 the very first much horror and detestation, on account, 
 chiefly, of the very loose views on religion that he was 
 thought to hold, amounting even to infidelity, — a mental 
 
BYftON. 466 
 
 state far more abhorred in 1810 than at present. With 
 his own class, however, it was not so. The poem and 
 the author were received with unmingled applause. By- 
 ron became the man of the day, — the man to be stared 
 at, talked of, run after, admired, and to be known. He 
 went every-where. He made his maiden speech in the 
 House of Lords, which was fairly successful. He made 
 the acquaintance of the Prince Regent, who had ex- 
 pressed a desire to know him. He met with all the 
 famous men of letters, many of whom he had lampooned 
 in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." He made the 
 rounds of all the drawing-rooms, and made love, after 
 his own fashion, to the famous beauties. Life, however, 
 was not all bright, even now. Since his return from 
 abroad, he had lost by death no less than six of his 
 early friends. His mother died, shortly after his return, 
 at Newstead, and, almost at the same time, Charles 
 Matthews, the nearest of his Cambridge friends, was 
 drowned in the Cam. He was troubled, too, by money 
 matters. But these he thought to put to rights, in a 
 measure, by the sale of Newstead Abbey, which, how- 
 ever, could not be managed at this time. As for re- 
 ceiving money for his works, he conceived that to be a 
 degradation to which he could not approach, and gave 
 the money paid him by Murray for " Childe Harold " to 
 a friend of his who had helped him put it through the 
 press.* 
 
 He was at this time the very ideal of one's youthful 
 dream of a poet. He was in the perfection of his per- 
 sonal attractiveness. His handsome, or, rather, his beau- 
 
 * Byron was not always so nice in his views. Later,— after he had left En- 
 gland,— he is very vigorous in his demands upon Murray for the uttermost far- 
 thing. 
 
466 POETS. 
 
 tiful face and head, his strong throat and powerful 
 shoulders and chest, were only rendered more romantic 
 by his unhappy lameness.* His manner, though seem- 
 ingly cold and supercilious to those at a distance, was 
 delightful and fascinating to his friends, either men or 
 women. His poems were the popular ones of the day, 
 and well deserved such a place through the noble genius 
 which showed forth in them. 
 
 About two years after his return, Byron published 
 "The Griaour" (jov^rr), a poem well calculated to keep his 
 popularity at its present height. A wild romantic anec- 
 dote forms the ground-work of the tale, which is told in 
 verse that is bold, highly colored, and lyrical to a degree. 
 The public at once identified Byron with his hero, and 
 ever since, the stock criticism of Byron is to say that he 
 merely reproduced pictures of himself over and over 
 again, in varying costumes and amid varying scenery. 
 Whether this be exactly so or not, there is no denying 
 that there is a certain family likeness in the poems 
 which followed each other rapidly during this season of 
 
 * It is "well known that Lord Byron, curiously enough, was something of an 
 adept in the art of self-defense. Jackson, the great sparring-master of his day, 
 was his master and his familiar friend. The great professor of pugilism had too 
 genuine and warm an admiration for pluck and bottom, wherever they came under 
 his observation, not to be touched to the heart by the spirit and address with which 
 the lame peer (who was said to write as fine poetry as " any man who did it for a 
 living ") handled the gloves, striking out from the shoulder, and coming upon his 
 tottering pins for round after round with the best " millers " of the school, till he 
 was forced to give in from the unendurable pain that came to his right foot 
 from the violent exercise. 
 
 Swimming was another manly art at which Byron was no mean hand. In 
 the water his lameness was by no means so much of a hinderance as on land, and 
 the sport was always a favorite diversion to him. On his first journey abroad, he 
 emulated Leander (ffi an' der) of old in swimming the Hellespont. And at home, 
 he would swim some long distance on a wager with great pleasure. On his last 
 voyage to Q-reece, his chief diversion was his noonday bath, which he took as 
 regularly as the clock struck twelve. In this trait of his, Byron reminds ua 
 Americans of our own poet, Edgar AUau Poe, who was even a greater exponent 
 of this manly art than was Lord Byron. 
 
BYRON. 467 
 
 his success. " The Bride of Abydos " (a bi' dus) was pub- 
 lished toward the end of the year, "The Corsair" in the 
 beginning of the next, and " Lara " (la' ra) before the 
 beginning of July. 
 
 In September, 1814, Byron became engaged to be 
 married to Miss Isabella Millbanke. This was the begin- 
 ning of the end. Surrounded by admiring women ever 
 since the publication of " Childe Harold," Byron had dis- 
 tinguished himself by an affair with Lady Caroline 
 Lamb, who had retired to Ireland for reasons obvious at 
 the time. But he had at the same time fallen in love 
 with Miss Millbanke, whom he had met at Melbourne 
 House, and had offered himself to her (in 1812), but had 
 been refused. But his affection for her still continued, 
 and, being fortunate enough to find another chance, he 
 asked her again, and some time in the autumn of 1814, 
 was accepted. He was married January 2, 1815. Their 
 life together was for a time happy, though Byron was 
 deeply in debt, and his bride had not at this time the 
 large fortune which she subsequently inherited. But 
 this happiness did not last long. From a number of 
 causes, which can not be here entered into, Byron and 
 his wife drifted apart. Byron's love for his wife cooled 
 rapidly, and his treatment of her became, on the whole, 
 disgraceful. He continued, however, to write. " The Siege 
 of Corinth" and "Parisina" (parise'na) were published 
 at this time, poems vigorous and full of fire, though 
 hardly equal to those they followed. 
 
 December 10, 1815, was born a daughter to Lord 
 and Lady Byron. They were at this time on no good 
 terms, though not in open quarrel. Byron was also in 
 pecuniary embarrassments, and was set on going abroad, 
 of which his wife would not hear. For these, and other 
 
468 Poets'. 
 
 reasons besides, Lady Byron left London for her father's 
 house in January of the next year, hoping, and, to some 
 extent, expecting that Lord Byron would join her there. 
 She thought that her husband's treatment of her might 
 be explained through insanity, — but Byron was by no 
 means insane. Lady Byron, through her father, inti- 
 mated to her husband her desire to live apart. He pro- 
 ceeded to distinguish himself by open unfaithfulness, 
 and they were formally separated. 
 
 The odium of this separation, and very justly, fell 
 upon Lord Byron. It is a little curious, perhaps, that 
 such a storm should have arisen as should absolutely 
 drive him from his native land. Such, however, was the 
 case. Byron was cut by his friends and hooted and 
 murmured at in the streets. The public prints teemed 
 with discussions of the matter. The most fearful accu- 
 sations were made and believed, — for it must be remem- 
 bered that the separation only was known, — probably all 
 the causes have not even now come to light. "I felt," 
 said Byron, " that, if what was whispered and muttered 
 and murmured was true, I was unfit for England ; if 
 false, England was unfit for me." He showed himself 
 little in public, — now and then at the theater, now and 
 then at the House of Lords,— and left London for Dover, 
 whence he sailed, April 25, 1816, for Ostend (os tend'), 
 looking his last on England, for he never returned. 
 
 It may appear strange to some that England, which 
 had made an idol of Byron only a few years before, 
 should now turn and make him a scapegoat. To find 
 out every reason would be difficult. But some are ap- 
 parent. Byron's excessive popularity was by no means 
 of a lasting nature. The popularity of a dandy, a sat- 
 irist, a supposed infidel, is not likely to be. Nor is the 
 
BYRON. 4 6 9 
 
 popularity of one who is young, triumphant, eccentric, 
 and supercilious. Nor is it likely that one so admired 
 by women as was Byron will always be admired by 
 the men. The admirer of Washington, the man who 
 could see any thing fine about Napoleon, was not likely 
 to find favor in England at that time. Even at the 
 publishing of " Childe Harold" there had not been want- 
 ing many to disapprove. So it was that, on the occa- 
 sion of Byron's separation from his wife, a reaction 
 swept over him which had for a time been only too 
 ready to rise. 
 
 Byron, when he left England, in 1816, was twenty- 
 eight years old. He had, within four days, eight years 
 more to live. Whether the period of his youth and of 
 his wild and short-lived triumph be the most character- 
 istic, or the period of his exile, his sufficient but exag- 
 gerated misanthropy, wickedness, infidelity, of his roman- 
 tic life and romantic death, is hard to say. For my part, 
 I think we are apt to picture Byron as the dandified 
 satirist, the romantic poet, the affected misanthrope, the 
 lion of successive London seasons, the friend of lords, 
 beauties, dandies, blue-stockings, and prize-fighters, the 
 boy who awoke to find himself famous, the Byron who 
 brought a bear to Trinity to compete for a scholarship, 
 who drank with his friends from human skulls in the 
 recesses of Newstead, who Avas successively identified 
 with " Childe Harold " and the string of picturesque 
 Grreeks and Turks which he painted one after another 
 for the world to admire. But there is another side to 
 Byron's character, in which he chose to show himself to 
 his English scorners, and what it was we shall try to put 
 down in a few words. During this later period, all his 
 evil qualities darkened, while his good ones nearly van- 
 
470 
 
 POETS. 
 
 ished. His romantic melancholy became downright mis- 
 anthropy, his none too slight immorality in England 
 became in Italy shameful dissoluteness, his tendency 
 toward irreligion became hard and pronounced infidel- 
 ity, his satire became blind, and, though no less sharp, 
 utterly unjust. The Byron of later years is no pleasant 
 character. 
 
 Crossing the Alps, after a few months' stay in Geneva 
 with Shelley, Byron reached Venice, where he almost im- 
 mediately touched the very lowest point of self-degrada- 
 tion that he ever reached. Smarting with the shame and 
 humiliation with which he had left England, his former 
 bad qualities, rendered deeper and more pronounced by 
 that resentment which often proves a sinner's vengeance 
 against himself, it is not wonderful that the excesses of 
 his life in Venice were far more shameless than those of 
 after years. Finally, he had fallen into such serious ill 
 health that of necessity he was obliged to change his 
 manner of living. He had now, as at several other times 
 before and after, some hopes of a reconciliation with his 
 wife. But they came to nothing, and, meeting with a 
 new object for his susceptible affection, he began a liaison 
 (le a zong') with Teresa Q-aniba (ta ra'za gam'ba), wife of 
 Count Guiccioli, whom he chanced to meet in Venice. 
 
 Following the Q-uiccioli, Byron left Venice for Ra- 
 venna, where the husband of the lady had a palazzo 
 (pa I at' zo), at which Byron was made welcome, and 
 where he lived for some time. In the summer of 1821, 
 Byron removed to Pisa (pe' za) on account of revolution- 
 ary difficulties at Ravenna, in which the Q-uiccioli 
 brothers were concerned, and here and at Q-enoa he lived 
 until his departure for Q-reece. At Pisa, where he was 
 the center of a group of English people, many of them 
 
BYEON. 471 
 
 well known, he distinguished himself by none of his 
 Venetian atrocities, wrote much and brilliantly, and, in 
 fact, passed a year which is perhaps the brightest of his 
 Italian life. Here was SheUey within a year of his death 
 at Spezzia (spef ze a), here was Leigh (le) Hunt, and here, 
 too, were several other men and women whose chief 
 reputation comes from being friends of Byron, — Medwin, 
 Trelawny, Lady Blessington, and also Teresa Gruiccioli, 
 and her brothers, the Glambas. We can not linger to de- 
 scribe his life here*, — we must pass on to Q-enoa, where 
 he lived, just outside the city, for a little less than a 
 year, leaving finally on the 16th of July, 1823, for Leg- 
 horn, on the way to Q-reece to join in the insurrection 
 which he fondly hoped might restore that country to her 
 old place among nations. In Q-reece he lived but nine 
 months after his arrival, and these months were full of 
 trouble, failure, and disappointment to his hopes. He 
 could do but little for the country of his enthusiasm, 
 and, finally, striick with an epileptic fit, and afterward 
 
 * Some sketcli of Byron's life at Pisa may, liowever, be of interest in a note. 
 He rose late (say at noon), breakfasted on a cup of tea, which, at times would 
 have an egg beaten into it. At two or three, he would lunch lightly and meet 
 his friends. Billiards usually came next, and after a game or so he would ride 
 out of town with any friends who happened in upon him to a place where riding 
 horses were in readiness. The party would then ride out to a certain farm-house 
 at a little distance from town, where they amused themselves in one way or an- 
 other, notably by pistol-shooting, a sport at which Byron excelled. Then back to 
 town. Dinner was sometimes at the farm, sometimes in Pisa, The evening was 
 given up to reading, writing, and so forth, often until two or three in the 
 morning. 
 
 Byron's appearance at this time was in some degree changed from that with 
 which the London public had been familiar. Leigh Hunt, who had known him 
 in England, hardly recognized "the fat gentleman dressed in a loose nankin 
 (ridn ken') jacket and white trousers, his neckcloth open, and his hair in thin 
 ringlets about his throat ; altogether presenting a very different aspect from the 
 compact, energetic, and curly-headed person " he had known in England. Half 
 an hour la' er, on going forth from his hot salmon-colored villa in the fierce sun, 
 Byron had donned a "loose riding coat of mazarine (maz a ren') blue and a velvet 
 cap, looking more lordly than before, but hardly less foreign." 
 
472 
 
 POETS. 
 
 caught in a rain-storm, lie grew weaker, and so died in 
 the afternoon of April 19, 1824.* 
 
 We have not chronicled Lord Byron's literary work 
 as it continued. During all the period of his exile, he 
 was hard at work, and, as may interest the readers of 
 "English Bards and Scotch Ee viewers," was well paid 
 for it. He added two cantos to "Childe Harold,"— per- 
 haps the most admirable things he ever Avrote : he wrote 
 the "Prisoner of Chillon" (chel yon') during a couple of 
 wet days in Geneva, he wrote "Don Juan" at Venice, 
 Ravenna, Pisa, and Clenoa, and in Italy at various times 
 he wrote his dramas, " Sardanapalus " (sar da na pa' lus), 
 "Manfred" (man' fred), "Marino Falieri " (ma re' no fa le- 
 a' re), and so on. The plays, wholly unactable perform- 
 ances, seem to us by no means so sterling in their 
 qualities as the Greek tales. But "Don Juan" and the 
 last half of "Childe Harold" are as fine as any thing 
 he ever wrote, f 
 
 * Immediately after Byron's death, it was proposed by certain of his friends 
 that his body should be interred in the Temple of Theseus (thV si us) at Athens. 
 Some of the Q-reek leaders desired that the poet should sleep at last in the no- 
 blest spot of the country for which he had given his life, and so did several of 
 the poet's English friends who were about him. But, on the whole, it was 
 thought best to embalm the body and to send it to England, that it might rest 
 with other English poets in Westminster Abbey. But on the arrival in England 
 of the remains, the Dean of Westminster refused the poet's friends the right to 
 bury there one of the greatest English poets who had ever lived, and the funeral 
 procession turned northward to Newstead Abbey, where may now be seen the 
 tomb of Lord, Byron, for which his sister Augusta wrote a proper epitaph. 
 
 + Byron left at his death, his wife, with whom he had never been reconciled, 
 a sister, Mrs. Augusta Leigh (?c), and a davighter, Ada by name. After his 
 death another reaction in his favor took place. He was, to an extent, reinstated 
 in popular favor, though by no means in the position which he had formerly 
 held. And controversy at once began as to whether he was really so much to 
 blame as had been supposed. But the feeling was by no means universal. There 
 were Byron worshipers after his death, but they were only a part of the 
 nation. The universal enthusiasm with which he had been greeted in his youth 
 could not be revived, and never can, 
 
HUGO. 
 
 1803-1883. 
 
 VICTOR HUGrO was born at Besan9on (ta'z 6ng song'), 
 in the south of France, in 1802. His father was 
 tlien a captain in the French army, and rose to the rank 
 of general. On both sides, his parents were of the me- 
 'jlranic class, and, while the great poet and novelist 
 amused himself, afterward, in tracing memorials of French 
 Hugos, he never pretended to the blood of the nobility. 
 The father was actively engaged in Italy, at one time 
 against the celebrated bandit Fra Diavolo (fra dea'voio). 
 During a part of this time, his wife, with three children, 
 of whom Victor was the second, lived in Paris ; and most 
 of his associations till he was nine years old were with 
 Paris.* 
 
 * At the beginning of tlieir residence in the Ifeuillan tines (Juydng an'), and 
 bafore tne arrival of Q-eneral Lahorie {li'ire'), Abel, the eldest boy, was placed at 
 college, the other two, up to the time of their departure to Spain, going dally to 
 a school in the Rue Saint Jacques (sang z/idk), where a worthy man, the Pere 
 Lariviere (plr Id rSv ySr'), who, in spite of his humble circumstances, was well in- 
 formed, instructed the young people of the neighborhood in reading, writing, and 
 elementary arithmetic. 
 
 Every time the two children returned from school, they had to pass through 
 groups of street-boys that were always playing in the cul-de-sac (kool deh sdt). 
 These were chiefly the sons of the cotton-workers, who were very numerous in the 
 neighborhood, as there was a factory close by, just opposite the Deaf and Dumb 
 Asylum. Wo doubt both Victor and his brother, left to themselves, would have 
 been ready enough to accept the invitation to join in the open-air sports ; but 
 their mother had forbidden it, and accordingly it was not to be thought of for an 
 instant. It was not without an effort that young Victor turned his eye away 
 from the games that were going on, and fixed it resolutely on the great blank 
 wall on the other side that extended half-way along the Impasse (dng pas' ) of the 
 Peuillan tines, being the side of an old ecclesiastical structure of the seventeenth 
 century, 
 
474 
 
 POETS. 
 
 In that year, the mother and her children went to 
 join Q-eneral Hugo in Madrid (mad rid'), where he was 
 now the major-domo in the short-Hved court of Joseph 
 Bonaparte. In a residence of nearly two years in Spam, 
 the boy gained his first enthusiasm for that country, — a 
 certain Castilian turn which the critics find in his dramas, 
 and what the French call the " Sonorite " (so no re ta') or 
 " Sonorousness," of his styles, — which reminds us of that 
 Spanish language which "lends itself to eloquence." 
 
 In 1812, they returned to France, and at the school 
 where he was placed, the young Victor showed his readi- 
 ness at writing, and especially at verse. He was hardly 
 fifteen when, in some competition, he sent an ode to the 
 French Academy, which would have been crowned but 
 that the judges thought there was some deceit in the 
 pretense that the author was so young.* His father des- 
 tined him to a military life, and arranged that his educa- 
 tion should prepare him for the Polytechnic School. But 
 his evident fitness for a literary career had already shown 
 itself. He and his brother begged that they might not 
 
 * Wlien Victor was sixteen, he won a prize, a golden lily, for a poem on the 
 subject of the erection of Henry IV.'s statue on the Pont Neuf (pong ntlf). The 
 ode was composed in a single night, and under circumstances that make it a 
 touching tribute of filial affection. Madame Hugo was suffering from inflammar 
 tion of the chest, and her two younger sons were taking their turn to sit up with 
 her at night. On the 5th of February, 1819, it was Victor's turn to remain in the 
 invalid's room. In the course of the evening, his mother, ever keenly interested 
 in his performances, and a iirm believer in his future name, and knowing that 
 the following day, according to the rules of the competition, was the latest on 
 which contributions could be received, alluded to his composition as supposing it 
 to have been duly sent off. Victor was obliged to confess that the ode had not 
 been written, and pleaded that he had had too many occupations to be able to 
 attend to It. His mother rebuked him gently; but the youth could see plainly 
 enough that she laid herself down with a feeling of sore disappointment weighing 
 on her heart. 
 
 No sooner was she asleep than Victor set to work ; he wrote diligently all 
 through the night, and when she awoke at daybreak, he had the completed ode 
 to lay before her as a morning greeting. 
 
HUGO. 475 
 
 be obliged to present themselves for examination. Gen- 
 eral Hugo unwillingly gave his consent, but he withdrew 
 the pecuniary allowance he had made for their support, 
 and Victor Hugo had to leave the " pension " where he 
 was, and go to live with his mother. But his name 
 was already known among young authors. He and his 
 brothers established a magazine, which they called the 
 Conservateur Litteraire (kong ser va tur' let te rar'), 
 and his work in this extended his acquaintance among 
 literary men. 
 
 The death of his mother in 1821, was a terrible shock 
 to him, and he now had some experience of poverty, such 
 as he has described in the early years of Marius (ma'- 
 re do3) in "Les Miserables" (la mezara'bi). He lived for 
 one year on one hundred and fifty dollars, — a small sum for 
 Paris. This was what he earned by his magazine and an 
 occasional pamphlet. At length, he published a collection 
 of his poems, encouraged by the reception which the pub- 
 lic had given to Lamartine's (la mar tenz') "Meditations." 
 They both met with success, and passed throiigh several 
 editions. Its date is 182 2, and this date is to be remem- 
 bered by the student of French literature as marking the 
 period when the Romantic school, as the writers in it 
 chose to call themselves, broke with the old classical 
 school of French art and poetry. The volume brought 
 him seven hundred francs, and the king gave him a pen- 
 sion of one thousand a year, of which wealth the first 
 result was that the young poet was able to marry his 
 love, Adele Foucher (a dal' too sha'), and to obtain the 
 consent of his parents and hers. 
 
 Up to this time, he had been a firm royalist, and had 
 maintained the cause, not then so doubtful, of the re- 
 stored Bourbons (bc5or' bunz). He had taken his opinions, 
 
476 
 
 POETS. 
 
 he says, from his mother. And, in these times, "women 
 regarded the first Napoleon as the monster who robbed 
 them of their sons, while men remembered him as the 
 hero who had given them their epaulets." The Bourbons, 
 who had returned, were not ungrateful to the young 
 poet. Charles X. made him a chevalier (shev a ler') of the 
 Legion of Honor when he was but twenty-three years old.* 
 From this time forward, the life of Victor Hugo is a 
 life of constant literary activity. His reputation was 
 established; it became fame. The "Romanticists," as they 
 called themselves, had time on their side in their contest 
 with the classical conventionalism of literature. They 
 started a magazine called La Muse Francaise (la muz 
 frong saz'). They formed a sort of literary society — of 
 twenty or more — who listened to each other's verses, and 
 "called each other by their first names." In 182 7, Victor 
 Hugo turned his attention to the stage. He wrote the 
 drama of " Cromwell," a play which rejects the "unity of 
 place" and the "unity of time." The old classical critics 
 of France insisted that a play must combine the unities 
 of time, place, and action. The whole play must pass 
 within twenty-four hours, at one place, and with but one 
 motive. Another play called "Amy Robsart," of which 
 he had written part in his boyhood, and which had been 
 finished by a friend, was, at this time, hissed from the 
 stage. 
 
 * The reader will observe that this is the same honor which Napoleon had 
 conferred on Goethe ir/A' t?/i). The circumstances under which the decoration was 
 conferred have been related by Alexander Dumas. At first, Victor Hugo and 
 Lamartine had been included among a batch of others selected for a general pro- 
 motion ; but on the list being presented to Charles X., he struck out both the 
 names. The Count de la Kochefoucauld (roslifdo W ), who had himself drawn up 
 the list, and who took a great interest in the young poet, ventured to express his 
 surprise at the two most deserving of the names being canceled. The king re- 
 plied that they were both far too illustrious to be included with the rest, and 
 that they must be assigned a special promotion by themselves. 
 
HUGO. 477 
 
 " Cromwell " was not intended for the stage. But with 
 the success of Dumas' (du msz' ) romantic drama of " Henry 
 III.," authors and actors were so encouraged that Hugo went 
 forward and wrote "Marion Delorme" (deh l6rm'). It was 
 accepted at the Odeon (o da ong'), but the censorship pro- 
 hibited its performance, because it ridiculed Louis XIII. 
 Hugo waited in person on his patron, Charles X. This 
 king, who seemed born to bring royalty into contempt, 
 wavered, refused permission, and proposed to raise Hugo's 
 pension from two thousand francs to six thousand.* Vic- 
 tor Hugo, of course, refused the pension. Fortunate was 
 the interview for him. The bigot king was tottering to 
 his fall. His refusal and Hugo's refusal were every-where 
 known, and the poet, of whose play a wrong-headed 
 Bourbon was afraid, became, almost in a moment, one of 
 the popular heroes. It is fair to add that in that moment 
 he ceased to be a Royalist. 
 
 To replace " Marion Delorme " at the theater, he wrote 
 "Hernani"t (er na'ne), and this, as it happened, therefore, 
 
 * The Mng did not understand Jacob Abbot's rule : " If you refuse, refuse ab 
 solutely ; if you grant, grant cordially." 
 
 t During the rehearsal of " Hernani," Mile. Mars one day, pausing in the mid- 
 dle of her part, suddenly said to the performer who was acting with her, " Pardon 
 me, I have a word to say to the author." 
 
 She advanced to the foot-lights, and, shading her eyes, looked round about in 
 every direction, as if trying to discover him, although she was perfectly aware 
 that he was sitting in the orchestra close to her. 
 
 "Is M. Hugo here?" she inquired. 
 
 "Here, mademoiselle, at your service," replied Hugo. 
 
 " Ah, yes ; thank you. I want to speak to you about this line— 
 
 " 'And thou, my lion, how proud and generous thou artP 
 
 that I am made to say." 
 
 "Quite right," said Hugo 
 
 "And you really like that?" inquired the actress. 
 
 "Like what?" demanded the author. 
 
 "The term 'my lion.' " 
 
 "Tes, I wrote it because I liked it best." 
 
 "And you wish me to retain itf " 
 
478 POETS. 
 
 was his first successful play. It was performed in Febru- 
 ary, just five months before Charles X. was sent into exile. 
 An appeal was made to him to stop the play. This time 
 he had the sense to say, "In affairs of letters, my place, 
 gentlemen, like yours, is with the audience." The first per- 
 formance was an occasion for a fierce conflict between the 
 old school of critics and the new.* But the stars in their 
 
 "Certainly; unless you can suggest something better." 
 
 "I am not the author; It is not my place, but yours, to find something bet- 
 ter," insisted Mile. Mars. 
 
 "Well, then, we will, if you please, leave the words as they stand," retorted 
 Hugo. 
 
 "But I feel it so odd to have to call M. Pirmin my lion." 
 
 " That is only because you want to remain Mile. Mars instead of becoming 
 Dofla Sol (dm'yd sol). Once get yourself absorbed so as to feel yourself the Cas- 
 tilian lady, the noble daughter of the sixteenth century, and the pupil of Gromez 
 de Sylva, and you will have no thought of M Krmln; you will see before you 
 none other than Hernani, the robber chief, making the monarch tremble in his 
 capital. Be such a woman, and to such a tnan you will open your soul, and say 
 my lion." 
 
 "Well, then," assented the actress, in her harsh, dry voice, "if you decide 80, 
 I will say no more. My business is to deliver what the manuscript directs ; it 
 makes no difference to me. Come, Pirmin, we will proceed: 
 
 " 'And thou, my lion, how proud and generous thou art I ' ' 
 
 The rehearsal was then resumed ; but the very next day the same contention 
 arose again, and Mile. Mars insisted upon substituting "mon seigneur" (m6ng sdn- 
 yiir') for "mon lion" {le On'). Annoyed at the interruption, Victor Hugo deter- 
 mined at once both to put an end to the grumbling, and to be himself treated 
 with proper respect ; accordingly, he requested Mile. Mars to throw up her part. 
 Accustomed though she had been to have all the writers of the world bowing 
 down to her talent. Mile. Mars soon discovered that she had now to deal with a 
 character of another kind. She forthwith became polite, and promised the author 
 that she would perform her role as no one else could. 
 
 * The fury that "Hernani" excited was quite alarming. One dramatic 
 author, whose name, in spite of his marvelous memory, Victor Hugo has quite 
 forgotten, sent him a challenge ; and the poet received many letters that were 
 not only insulting, but menacing. Madame Victor Hugo has mentioned one of 
 them which ran to this effect : "If you do not withdraw your vile play, you shall 
 soon be sent beyond the taste of bread." 
 
 Victor Hugo only smiled at all this ; but one night, after returning from a 
 stroll in which he had composed a page of the "Peuilles d'Automne" ifu'yeh dv- 
 tuni'), he lighted his lamp, and was writing, at about 2 o'clock in the morning, 
 when he heard a loud report, and immediately felt the window-pane at his side 
 shivered to atoms, In vain he looked down into the street; not a soul was visi- 
 
HUGO. 479 
 
 courses fought for the Reformers. Revolution was in the 
 air, and the piece was thoroughly successful. 
 
 Meanwhile, as early as 1831, Hugo had appeared as 
 the most successful French novelist of his time.* The 
 publication of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" (no'tr 
 dam) was an era, and made his name known among thou- 
 sands who had never read his poems. He wrote two other 
 novels, " La Quinquengrogne " (k^A^en kwan gron') and 
 "La Fille de Bossue " (la mi deh bo su'), but in fifty years 
 since, these have never been published. "Les Miserables," 
 so well known through the world, did not appear until 
 1862." 
 
 He gave a cordial assent to the movement by which 
 Louis Philippe (lc5o e'fe lep') was made king, and in 1845 
 the king made him a peer of France. The honor, such as 
 it was, shows the respect he had earned among all classes 
 by his work. But the honor was in some sort doubtful. 
 The French " House of Lords " was itself an institution 
 whose very existence was challenged by the liberal writers 
 of every school. "Have we any Peerage in France?" was 
 the title of one of the essays of the day. The old noblesse 
 
 ble; but on examining the room, he discovered that a bullet had passed only a 
 few inches above his head, making a hole right through a picture of Boulanger's 
 (boo Ihng zhdz') that was hanging on the opposite wall. He put out his lamp and 
 went to bed; but he made no report of what had happened, and took no meas- 
 ures to ascertain who was the would-be assassin. 
 
 * A picture of the poet in his home has been sketched by ^I. Xavicr Mar- 
 mier (zdv' % er mar ml a'), a young man devoted to art, and subsequently a distin- 
 guished writer in the Sevue, and an Academician. " One evening, in the winter 
 of 1831, I presented myself in the Rue Jean-Goujon (zhSn gob zhing') ; I had no 
 letter of introduction, but, convinced that any sincere lover of literature would 
 be sure of a welcome, I called to submit a book of poems to the poet, and to re- 
 quest his criticism and advice, which I knew would be equally wise and candid. 
 Ushered into a large room, furnished with simple and yet elegant taste, I was 
 struck by the womanly beauty of Madame Victor Hugo, who had one of her 
 children upon her knee : and when I saw the poet sitting reading close by at 
 the fireside, I was vividly impressed with the resemblance of the entire scene to 
 one of Van Dyck's (van (BJcs') finest pictures." 
 
480 
 
 Poets. 
 
 (no bles') of France had been swept away by the Revolu- 
 tion. The creations of Napoleon's nobility have always 
 borne the character of the paste diamonds of a theater- 
 used for coronets by a showy manager. Louis Philippe 
 was not a Napoleon, and his manufacture of noblemen, 
 when it came, was thought not to come up even to the 
 trade-mark of him who could make, if he chose, a Duke 
 of Ragusa (ragcso'sa) and a Prince of Moscow (mos'ko). 
 Hugo was severely blamed by the more radical liberals by 
 accepting an honor which could be so easily ridiculed. 
 
 He did, however, enter the House of Lords (Chambre 
 des Pairs) [sham' br da par], which had so short a life be- 
 fore it, in 1846. His first speech was on copyright, in 
 February of that year. He afterward spoke in behalf of 
 Poland, and to support Jerome Bonaparte's petition that 
 he might return to France. In 1848, he made a speech 
 on Italian unity. But in the revolution of February of 
 that year, Louis Philippe was exiled, and the "Chambre 
 des Pairs," * which had lasted but a little more than a 
 generation of men, ceased to be. Victor Hugo has pre- 
 served his not unfavorable opinion of this king in a chap- 
 ter in "Les Miserables." Their intercourse with each 
 other approached intimacy as far as a king and his sub- 
 ject can be intimate, and Hugo does not permit himself, 
 after the fall and death of the king, to speak of him dis- 
 respectfully, f 
 
 * In the stormy discussions of the other Chamber, in the last days of Guizot 
 (gl zo'}, a radical member alluded to Walpole (wSl'pol), and mispronounced the 
 name. The Chamber laughed. " I do not know how you pronounce it," stam- 
 mered the poor man. "In French it is called Guizot,'" screamed one of the 
 radicals. 
 
 t Louis Philippe's career will never be summed up better than In Sir Eobert. 
 Peel's speech In the House of Commons when he announced his death. Sir Rob- 
 ert called him "the most distinguished monarch who has ever iUled the throne 
 
 of Prance " and paused long enough to attract the attention of a wondering 
 
 House, to add, "since the fall of the First Napoleon." 
 
HUGO. 481 
 
 With the proclamation of the Second Repubhc, Hugo's 
 name was proposed as a candidate for the " Constituent 
 Assembly." On a first trial he failed, but on the second 
 he was chosen to represent Paris, and afterward he sat in 
 the "First Legislative Assembly."*' In 1849, he presided 
 over a great Peace Congress, from all the world. The 
 new President, Napoleon III., with witty courtesy, ordered 
 a guard of honor from the army to show the interest of 
 the nation in their meetings. Hugo edited a Republican 
 journal — he had supported Napoleon's candidacy for the 
 Presidency, he had himself voted for him in the first 
 Plebiscit (pie bis' sit). Napoleon had said to him, "I am 
 honest, and I shall follow in the way of Washington." 
 Hugo had believed him. When the Coup d'Etat (kc5o da ta') 
 came, by which the President became an Emperor, Hugo 
 departed into exile, f He had asked in the Assembly, 
 
 * As Victor Hugo's fame increased, the calm serenity of his early years of 
 married life was necessarily somewhat disturbed by the troubles and anxieties 
 that glory brings, but in the Place Eoyale (plds ro ydl') Madame Victor Hugo re- 
 lates that they lived in much happiness with the children, who were their pride 
 and their delight. Visitors flocked daily to the hospitable dwelling, attracted 
 both by the fascinations of the hostess and by the refinement and joyousness of 
 the poet. 
 
 After his guests had departed, however late it might be, Victor Hugo made 
 it a rule to go out for a stroll by himself ; and, armed with nothing but a cane, 
 would cross the Champ Elysees (sheriff seh le zd'), and wander as far as the Arc de 
 Triomphe (tri ongf). This was his favorite hour for work, and he has himself in- 
 formed us that some of his finest thoughts have come to him more readily in the 
 midnight hours of the silent streets, and in the shadow of the trees that line the 
 pathways, than in the solitude of his study. He continued this practice for a 
 long time without any interruption. Once, however, an accident befell him when 
 he stumbled over a pile of chairs that had been left in the avenue, and over 
 which he had to clamber ; and once he met with an adventure of a more start- 
 ling character. As he was sauntering along near the Eue des Tournelles (tOn-- 
 ngl'), he was attacked and knocked down by some pickpockets who were waiting 
 at the comer of the street, and he would certainly have been robbed if some 
 passers-by had not disturbed the ruffians, and made them take to their heels. 
 The poet immediately regained his feet, and, running after the thieves, cane in 
 hand, called out "Help ! help ! " but in so low a tone that it was plain he did not 
 want the rascals to be caught. 
 
 t A price was set upon his head ; a reward of 25,000 francs was oflfered to any 
 
482 
 
 POETS. 
 
 whether, having had a Napoleon the Q-reat, they were 
 wiUing to have a Napoleon the Little. "Napoleon le 
 Petit " (leh pa te') was the first poem which came from his 
 foreign home. On the fifth of August he landed in Jer- 
 sey, one of the Channel Islands, and, till the little Napo- 
 leon fell, twenty years after, this island, or its neighbor, 
 Guernsey (gtarn'zi), was his home. 
 
 A prophet in his own country has not the honor he 
 deserves. But it sometimes happens that a prophet in 
 exile has just the position which gives his words the 
 most frequent echo, as it wins for them the surest hear- 
 ing. Every whisper which escaped from Napoleon at St. 
 Helena (he le' na) was treasured by his adherents in 
 France as a prize all the more valued because it had been 
 brought so far. And from his island fastness of Guern- 
 sey, Hugo for twenty years issued the rallying cries of 
 the French republicans.* "I warn him," he said at the 
 
 one who would either kill him or arrest him ; but as he knew that the sacrifice of 
 his life could he of no benefit to any one, he did his best to escape the assassin's 
 hand, and, leaving his home and his family, he started off through Paris in a 
 Jiaere. Mada'.ne Drouet (droo a'), a brave and noble woman, did her utmost to 
 secure the poet a safe asylum. She applied at many doors ; and, undiscouraged 
 by the denials she received, she persevered in her attendance, and devised many 
 schemes for his escape with undaunted determination . The drive was sufficiently 
 terrible. 
 
 At last, after weary hours spent in anxiety and fatigue, the fugitives, almost 
 sinking in despair, found a retreat under the roof of a relation of Victor Hugo's, 
 who was the manager of a Legitimist journal. With generous sympathy, he took 
 the risk of receiving the proscribed man into his house, and, after keeping him 
 concealed for five days, procured a passport, by means of which the outlaw, 
 having adopted a complete disguise, was enabled to depart, on the 12th of Decem- 
 ber (1851), from the Northern Railway Station. 
 
 * It did not content Victor Hugo while he was in Guernsey to plead the cause 
 of the miserable in his books ; from the year 1861 he labored to pvit his theory 
 into practice by entertaining a number of poor children, who were brought every 
 week to his house by their mothers. At first eight, then fifteen, then twenty, and 
 afterward forty, came to sit at his table, where they were waited on by himself 
 and his household, and regaled with slices of roast beef and glasses of wine, and 
 told "to laugh and be merry." It seemed to Victor Hugo that his idea was 
 worthy of imitation ; considering it not "alms-giving," but "fraternity," and hold- 
 
HUGO. 488 
 
 beginning, speaking of Napoleon III., " that whether it be 
 from France, from Belgium, from England, or from Amer- 
 ica, my voice shall never cease to declare that he must 
 expiate the crime of the second of December. America is 
 open to me, and America is sufficiently after iny heart." 
 
 On every occasion he showed the world that he still 
 lived. Poems, letters, even pamphlets from his pen came 
 into all the discussions of the time. In 1860, he deliv- 
 ered an address in Jersey, whose citizens had invited him 
 to speak at a meeting for the liberation of Italy. In 
 1867, he made an excursion in Zealand. In the same 
 year, the ban of an old proscription had been removed, 
 " Hernani " was again produced at the Theatre Frangais 
 in Paris, and " Ruy Bias " (pc5o'e bias) at the Odeon. 
 
 The success was unbounded, and in his old age he had 
 the pleasure of hearing of the triumph of the plays of 
 his youth. 
 
 This new homage made his return to Paris an event 
 all the more dramatic, — when, after Napoleon the Little 
 had fallen, Victor Hugo was an exile no longer. The 
 third Republic was proclaimed on the 4th of September, 
 1870, and on the 5th, he entered Paris. 
 
 ing that this blending of poor families with his own was as advantageous to him 
 as it was to them ; it was all in accordance with the spirit of pure democracy, and 
 the result should he that, while we learn to serve them, they should be brought 
 to love us. At Christmas-time especially there were great festivities, and a general 
 distribution of toys, cakes, and clothing. 
 
 While they were quite young, his little grandchildren were allowed to bring 
 their cat into the sahm (sd long' ) before dinner, when the diversion in the way of 
 romping would he unlimited. The venerable gentleman whom they called their 
 " papapa " would permit them to pull his fine white beard, and to roll them- 
 selves over him, laughing heartily, as he called out : 
 
 "Ah I I see you know what a grandfather is made for: he is made to sit 
 upon I " 
 
 As an illustration of his love for domestic ,1oys, we may instance his defini- 
 tion of Paradise, as "a place where children are always little and parents are 
 always young." 
 
484 POETS. 
 
 He made no canvass as a candidate ; but he was 
 chosen to the National Assembly, which sat at Bordeaux 
 (bordo'), in February, 1871. He sat in the ranks of the 
 extreme Left. He protested there against the prelim- 
 inaries of peace ; against the session at Versailles (vgr- 
 salz'), in place of Paris ; against the refusal to receive 
 Q-aribaldi (g&r I bai' d!) as a member. After this last pro- 
 test, he resigned, and lived in private. 
 
 But when the time came, he lifted up his voice 
 against the Commune also. When the next Assembly 
 was chosen, he was a candidate. But Paris would not 
 choose him. He was not radical enough for its electors. 
 
 His last romance, "'93; or. The Civil War," was 
 published in 1874. "The History of a Crime" was pub- 
 lished in 1877. In 1876, he was chosen a senator, un- 
 der the new Constitution, and took his seat. In 1882, 
 he published his last tragedy, " Torquemada " (tor ka- 
 ma'da), and in the next year, he died. 
 
 His death was considered that of the first Frenchman 
 of his time. The charge of the funeral was assumed by 
 the government. The ceremonies were conducted with 
 the greatest pomp, and his body was buried beneath 
 the Pantheon (pan ihs' on), which was dedicated to the 
 ■'Glories of France." 
 
LONGKELLOW. 
 
 1807-1883. 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW was born 
 in the city of Portland, in Maine, on tlie 2 7th of 
 February, 1807. He died in Cambridge, on the 24th of 
 March, 1882. His father was a leader at the bar; 
 his mother, a lovely woman, from whom he seems to 
 have inherited the imaginative and romantic side of his 
 nature, was Zilpha Wadsworth, a descendant from John 
 Alden and Priscilla Mullens, whose loves her son was to 
 make famous. 
 
 In his fourteenth year, he was sent to Bowdoin 
 (bo'dn) College,* then but twenty years in existence.f His 
 
 * His brother gives some pleasant traditions of his childhood : 
 " With all his liveliness, he disliked loud noises and rude excitements. There 
 is a family tradition of his having, on some Fourth of July, privately begged the 
 maid to put cotton in his ears to deaden the sound of the cannon. But being 
 asked if he was afraid, he indignantly denied it. He was fond of all boys' games, 
 —bah, kite-flying, and swimming in summer; In winter, snow-balling, coasting, 
 and skating. His elder brother was very fond of a gun, and many were the ex- 
 cursions to the neighboring woods and shores, and to the more distant marshes, 
 in search of birds. But one day, Henry came home with his eyes full of tears, and 
 so grieved at heart because he had shot a robin, that he never tried again. 
 About fishing, he was somewhat less tender-hearted, though never a sportsman." 
 t He says of his early reading : " Every reader has his first book : I mean to 
 say, one book among all which in early youth first fascinates his imagination, and 
 at once excites and satisfies the desires of his mind. To me, this first book was 
 the Sketch-Book of Washington Irving. I was a school-boy when it was published, 
 and read each succeeding number with ever increasing wonder and delight, spell- 
 bound by its pleasant humor, its melancholy tenderness, its atmosphere of reverie, 
 nay, even by its gray-bound covers, the shaded letters of its titles, and the fair, 
 clear type, which seemed an outward symbol of its style. How many delightful 
 books the same author has given us I Yet still the charm of the Sketch-Book re- 
 mains unbroken ; the old fascination remains about it ; and whenever I open its 
 
486 POETS. 
 
 brother entered college with him, and they lived to- 
 gether.* He spent the four years of college life happily 
 and successfully. He sent verses to newspapers and peri- 
 odicals, of some of which he was not afterward ashamed. 
 His taste for literature, indeed, was so decided that he 
 could not think "nature designed him for the Bar, or the 
 Pulpit, or the dissecting-room." " Whatever I do study 
 ought to be engaged in with all my soul, for I will be 
 eminent in something." Even then he looked forward 
 to a literary life, for which, however, America at that 
 time, offered but few hopes. He was desirous to spend 
 a year at Cambridge, after concluding his course at 
 Bowdoin College, f 
 
 His college attainments, however, had interested the 
 government of his own college, and the trustees made a 
 proposal to him that he should go to Europe to prepare 
 himself to be the first " Bowdoin Professor of Modern 
 Languages." The modest foundation of one thousand dol- 
 
 pages, I open also that mysterious door whioli leads back into the haunted cham- 
 bers of youth." 
 
 * "Out of my childhood," wrote Mr. Longfellow in later years, "rises in my 
 memory the recollection of many things rather as poetic impressions than as pro- 
 saic facts. Such are the damp mornings of early spring, with the loud crowing 
 of cocks, and the cooing of pigeons on roofs of barns. Very distinct in connection 
 "wath these are the indefinite longings incident to childhood, feelings of wonder 
 and loneliness which I could not interpret, and scarcely then took cognizance of. 
 But they have remained in my mind." 
 
 t Professor Cleaveland has thus described the place in those early days: " The 
 college virtually occupied only a small clearing among the indigenous evergreens. 
 On every side but that which the river bounded the dwellings stood in close 
 proximity to the forest, which stretched out for miles a shady and unobstructed 
 promenade. The earlier graduates must have many recollections of social and 
 solitary walks through these quiet grounds. Their memories have sadly failed if 
 they do not still recall the chief features of the scene, the level earth through 
 whose slippery carpet of scanty herbage and withered pine leaves shot up, in their 
 season, the frequent blue-berry and winter-green, the air charged with resinous 
 odors ; the blackened tree-trunks, which told of former fires ; the subdued and 
 somber light ; the tinkling cow-bells ; and the gentle rustle of the breeze in the 
 branches above." 
 
LONGFELLOW. 487 
 
 lars had been given to the college by Madam Bowdoin, 
 the widow of its founder, for such a professorship.* 
 
 Accordingly, in the spring of 1826, when he was but 
 nineteen years old, he sailed for Europe. He spent sev- 
 eral months in France, eight in Spain, f a year in Italy, 
 and six months in Q-ermany. He then returned to Amer- 
 ica, and in the autumn of 182 9 entered on the duties of 
 his Professorship at Bowdoin College. 
 
 These duties were by no means light or elegant. He 
 was the personal instructor, in each of four modern lan- 
 guages, for boys and young men who had no knowledge of 
 any one of them. He had to prepare new text-books and 
 to publish them. Meanwhile he was determined to quicken 
 an interest among his pupils in the literature of Europe, 
 and he prepared and delivered courses of lectures, though 
 they were not required of him, which should stimulate 
 thought, study, and conversation. He undertook all the 
 duties which such a position required, cheerfully and suc- 
 cessfully. A very remarkable group of pupils, who have 
 been distinguished in public life, has testified to the en- 
 thusiasm which the young professor excited. It is to be 
 observed, indeed, in any study of Mr. Longfellow's career, 
 that he showed through all his life that attribute of 
 genius, which has been called the most valuable of all — 
 
 * James Bowdoin, who founded this college, was the president of the conven- 
 tion which formed the Constitution of Massachusetts. He was afterward the 
 Q-overnor of that State, which then included the district of Maine. He was in- 
 terested in all elegant studies, and left some valuable pictures and drawings to 
 Bowdoin College. We may ascribe to Madam Bowdoin's interest in European 
 art and literature the foresight which led her to estabUsh a professorship, which 
 has been filled and honored by Professor Longfellow and Charles Carroll Everett. 
 
 t Prom Spain he wrote to his sisters : " Are you studying Prench, or Spanish, 
 nowadays? If not, you should lose no time in commencing, for I assure you 
 that, by every language you learn, a new world is opened before you. It is like 
 being bom again ; and new ideas break upon the mind with all the freshness 
 and delight with which we may suppose the first dawn of intellect to be accom- 
 panied," 
 
488 POETS. 
 
 the willingness to work. Many a man destitute of the 
 finer resources which have given Mr. Longfellow his poet- 
 ical fame, might study to advantage his industry, his 
 perseverance, and that regularity in the discharge of his 
 duty which have made him one of the most useful as 
 he is one of the most attractive authors of his time.* 
 
 In one of his early letters he compares the forest sur- 
 roundings of Brunswick, which is the seat of Bowdoin 
 College, to the forlorn region of the Landes in the south- 
 western part of France. The comparison is an apt one. 
 It does not seem from his letters that he made any com- 
 plaint of a certain narrowness of life which must exist 
 in a small village, hidden in a forest, away from the 
 movement of mankind. Such a village in those days was 
 Brunswick. And it was with pleasure that, after five 
 j^ears' residence there, Mr. Longfellow received an invi- 
 tation to become the Smith Professor of Modern Litera- 
 tiire in Harvard College. In this chair he followed Q-eorge 
 Ticknor, the author of the Historj^ of Spanish Literature. 
 He was succeeded in it, in the year 1854, by James 
 Russell Lowell, who still holds this honorable post. In 
 
 * An anecdote is reported which well illustrates his relations with his pupils. 
 A student had incurred the censure of the college faculty for some slight offense 
 against the regulations, and Mr. Tiongtellow was instructed to "admonish" Mm. 
 The Professor met the youth the next day in the Library, and was addressed 
 by him with a question upon some point in French literature. An animated 
 and instructive disquisition followed upon the subject, in course of which the 
 Professor forgot his duty and was turning away, when, recollecting himself, he 
 came back, with " Ah I I was near forgetting. The Faculty voted last night that 
 I should admonish you for (naming the offense), and you will consider yourself 
 admonished." Coming from him, this was perhaps a more effective admonition 
 than a sterner and more formal one from a less friendly teacher. 
 
 Another anecdote relates that in one of his French classes a student was 
 called upon who had evidently made little or no preparation, and was prompted 
 by his classmates very audibly. The Professor took no notice of this till the 
 young man was seated ; then he quietly said : " Tour recitation reminds me of 
 the Spanish theater, where the prompter performs a more important part than 
 the actor." 
 
LONGFELLOW. 489 
 
 this chair his duties would be rather the oversight of 
 the instruction given in language by others, with the 
 delivery of such lectures as might maintain an interest 
 in the modern literature of Europe. He gladly accepted 
 the appointment, with the condition that he might travel 
 in Europe for a year or two before entering upon its duties. 
 In the year 1831, he had married Mary Storer Potter, 
 of Portland, a lovely lady, now remembered as 
 
 "the being beauteous 
 
 Who unto my youth was given 
 
 More than all things else to love me." 
 
 In 1835, being in somewhat delicate health, she 
 accompanied him on a European tour before he entered 
 upon his new duties. One of her letters from London 
 recalls with interest their meeting with " Mr. Carlyle, 
 of Craigenputtock " (kra gen put' tok), and Mrs. Carlyle. 
 Mr. Emerson had brought them all together. "He 
 passed half an hour with us, much to our delight. He 
 has very unpolished manners and a broad Scottish ac- 
 cent, but such fine language and beautiful thoughts, that 
 it is truly delightful to listen to him. He invited us to 
 take tea with them in Chelsea, where they now reside. 
 We were as much charmed with Mrs. C. as with her 
 husband. She is a lovely woman, with very simple and 
 pleasing manners. She is also very talented and accom- 
 plished; and how delightful it is to see so much mod- 
 esty combined with such power to please. On Tuesday, 
 we visit Chantrey's (chan'trlz) studio with them."* 
 
 * This will be tlie most convenient point for the imaginative reader to con- 
 struct a scene in wMch lie may suppose that some great authors of the century 
 meet each other. Let them find Chantrey engaged in modeling a bust of Robert 
 Browning, let Tennyson be reading aloud in the studio, an unpublished poem, 
 and let Victor Hugo, who has come over from Paris on a visit, look in to ask his 
 way. Mr. Emerson, having brought the party together by his letter of Introduo- 
 tion, is present in spirit. 
 
490 POETS. 
 
 Mr. Longfellow was already known in America as an 
 author. Alexander Everett was then the editor of the 
 North American Review. When he was American Min- 
 ister at Madrid, he had welcomed young Longfellow to 
 that city, and at his request Longfellow had prepared 
 several important articles for the Revieiv. He had also 
 published, in serial numbers, the essays which make up 
 "Outre-Mer" (c5o'tr mar). He now arranged for the pub- 
 lication of these in London. He traveled in Sweden, 
 Denmark, and Holland ; but his wife's health was 
 steadily declining, and on the 2 9 th of November she 
 died. He spent the next year in Germany and Switzer- 
 land until October, when he sailed for America. He 
 then established himself at Cambridge, and began the 
 discharge of the regular duties of his professorship. To 
 those duties he devoted himself with great industry and 
 regularity for nearly twenty years. He resigned his pro- 
 fessorship in 1854. 
 
 There is but little incident in such a life. But in Mr. 
 Longfellow's career, certain steps are marked by the suc- 
 cessive publication of poems, or volumes of poems, which 
 won for him, in different ways, the love of the English- 
 speaking world. The titles of these poems and stories 
 show his industry, and also the wide range of his interest 
 in topics connected with his studies. 
 
 In early life, he had printed the "Coplas de Manriques"' 
 (kop'las deh man re' kSs). In 1839, he published "Hype- 
 rion" (hipe'rlon) and the "Voices of the Night,* his first 
 
 * "In the midst of the siege of Paris," says Q-eneral Meredith Read, "a ven- 
 erable man presented himself to me, bowed with grief. He said, 'I am Monsieur 
 E.,' and named his official position. 'I have just learned that my son has been 
 arrested by the German authorities at Versailles (ver sals'), on an entirely un- 
 founded charge. He is to be sent to a German fortress, and may be condemned 
 to death. I am here [in Paris] alone and helpless I feel that my mind vtII 
 give way if I can not find occupation ; can you tell me of some English book 
 
LONGFELLOW. 491 
 
 book of original poems. In 1842, his "Poems on Slav- 
 ery" appeared. In 1845, he had completed the "Poets 
 and Poetry of Europe." In 1847, "Evangeline" was 
 published, and won, at once, the favor which it has 
 always maintained. In 1849, "Kavanagh" (kaVanah), 
 and " The Sea-side and the Fireside " were published. 
 In 1861, the "Golden Legend" appeared; and in 1854, 
 "Hiawatha" (hi a ^va' tha), which, at first, he proposed to 
 call "Manabozho" (ma na bo'zo). 
 
 At this time, as has been said, he resigned his pro- 
 fessorship. Its duties chafed upon him, because they 
 interfered with the more attractive work of composition. 
 In 1858, "Miles Standish" appeared. Mr. Longfellow was 
 steadily at work on his translation of Dante. In 1863, 
 " The Wayside Inn " was published, and in the next year, 
 Dante. " The Christus Trilogy," which he called " The 
 Divina (divi'na) Tragedia," was published in 1872. "Ul- 
 tima Thule" (ui'tima thoo' leh), the last volume pub- 
 lished under his own eye, appeared in 1880. 
 
 In 1843, he married, as his second wife, Frances 
 Elizabeth Appleton. He had first seen her, a maiden of 
 nineteen, in Switzerland, six years before. She is the 
 Mary Ashburton of his romance of "Hyperion." She 
 was the mother of all his children. She died on the 
 9th of July, 1861, in what is remembered in America 
 as the war summer.* 
 
 which I can translate into French?' I promised to do so, and he left me. 
 Within an hour or two, however, I received a line from him saying, that he 
 had found what he required. A few days afterward, he came again to see me; 
 hut now erect, his face bright wath hope, his voice clear and strong. He said, 
 'I have been translating Longfellow's "Psalm of Life," and I am a new man; I 
 feel that my mind is sound, and that faith and hope have taken the place of 
 despair. I owe it all to Longfellow.' " 
 
 * On the ninth of July, his wife was sitting in the library with her two 
 little girls, engaged in sealing up some small packages of their curls, which she 
 had just cut off. Frona a match fallen on the floor, her light summer dress took 
 
492 POETS. 
 
 In the summer of 1868, he visited England once 
 more, and was most warmly received there. He was 
 accompanied by a party of his children, grandchildren, 
 and another friend. They went together to the English 
 lakes, and afterward spent several weeks in England. 
 The -University of Cambridge gave him the honorary de- 
 gree of Doctor of Laws, and the next year the University 
 of Oxford that of Doctor of Civil Law. The Queen fixed 
 a day for his visit to Windsor, and he was most cordially 
 welcomed by men of letters. But nothing could have 
 interested him so much in this " cordial and sincere " 
 welcome as the enthusiastic and grateful expressions of 
 the rank and file of the people. This tour in Europe 
 lasted a year and a half. The party spent the winter in 
 Rome. 
 
 In the last ten years of his life, after his return from 
 Europe, though he was not pressed by any college duties, 
 he occupied his time constantly in a cordial, and, one 
 might almost say, a parental hospitality, in which he 
 
 fire. The shock was too great, and she died next morning. Three days later, her 
 burial took place at Mount Auburn. It was the anniversary of her marriage 
 day, and on her beautiful head, lovely and unmarred in death, some hand had 
 placed a wreath of orange blossoms. Her husband was not there, being con- 
 fined to his chamber by the severe burns which he had himself received. 
 
 A note from her shows pleasantly the nature of her co-operation in his 
 work : 
 
 "Now, thanks to Dr. Elliot, Henry's eyes begin to emerge from their long 
 captivity, and he is able to use his pen a little, and read a good deal,— this is, 
 comparatively. He has written lately some poems which his friends praise very 
 enthusiastically. One upon Peace ['The Arsenal'], is my favorite, and Sumner's, 
 who intends to send it to Dr. Howe by this steamer. But H. himself thinks 
 better of another, upon the ancient city of Nuremberg. This is not so spirit- 
 stirring, or so likely to inspire high hopes of humanity, and is, therefore, less 
 interesting to me ; but it is a fine picture of the olden time. * * * H. has 
 resumed his lectures, and I am sometimes tempted to disguise myself, a la Portia, 
 and be a listener. We get on bravely with the book of translations. You would 
 be amused to see how completely I have entered into league with the printer's 
 devil, and await his familiar knock. Eelton and the rest of the club flourish in 
 immortal youth, and are often with us to dine or sup." 
 
LONGFELLOW. 493 
 
 sought the good of all young authors, and of a world of 
 admirers who applied in whatever need, real or im- 
 aginary. There was not a beggar within a hundred 
 miles, whose life had been in sort connected with litera- 
 ture, but sought relief at the hospitable door of the 
 Craigie House. He never turned away from one such 
 applicant. For ten years of kindness, his hand and his 
 heart were open to every appeal ; and he had the satis- 
 faction of knowing, at the end of every year, that, as it 
 went by, he had in his kindly personal intercourse, made 
 thousands of people happy.* 
 
 In 1875, his college class celebrated the fiftieth anni- 
 versary of their graduation at the commencement at 
 Brunswick. Eleven members of the class were present. 
 Mr. Longfellow read that remarkable poem, " Morituri 
 Salutamus." 
 
 The first four lines suggest its character : 
 
 " ' O Caesar, we who are about to die, 
 Salute you ' ! was the gladiators' cry 
 In the arena, standing face to face 
 With death and with the Roman populace." 
 
 And the closing lines of the poem, which are given 
 below, indicate very distinctly the way in which the 
 
 * Of course, there continued to be other \"isitors of less distinction and of 
 less interest. On one day the journal records "fourteen visits, thirteen of them 
 Englishmen." All who came were received with unfailing kindness and court- 
 esy, and a quick, instinctive adaptation of his conversation to their measure. 
 If, as was usual, they turned the conversation to his writings, he thanked them 
 for the sympathy, which gratified him, but very quickly and easily turned the 
 talk to some other topic. Doubtless his courtesy and his kindness were often 
 subjected to a heavy strain, by some who forgot the law of limits in the dura- 
 tion or frequency of their visits, and their claims. Mr. Korton relates that he 
 once gently remonstrated with his friend for suflferins an unworthy prot^rfe to 
 impose himself so long upon him ; when he replied, with a humorous look, 
 "Charles, who will be kind to him if I am not?" 
 
^y* POETS. 
 
 poet, beloved and honored by all around him, passed his 
 closing years : 
 
 "What then? Shall we sit idly down and say,— 
 The night hath come ; it is no longer day ? 
 The night hath not yet come ; we are not quite 
 Cut off from labor by the failing light. 
 Something remains for us to do or dare ; 
 Even the oldest tree some fruit may bear ; 
 Not GBdipus Coloneus (gd'i ptis ko lo'ne us), or Greek Ode, 
 Or tales of pilgrims that one morning rode 
 Out of the gateway of the Tabard (tab'ard) Inn, 
 But other something, would we but begin ; 
 For age is opportunity no less 
 Than youth itself, though in another dress. 
 And as the evening twilight fades away. 
 The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day." 
 
 Mr. Longfellow died, after a short illness, on the 24th 
 of March, 1882.* The last lines he wrote were— 
 
 " O Bells of San Bias (san bias), in vain 
 
 Ye call back the Past again ; 
 The Past is deaf to your prayer ; 
 
 Out of the shadows of night 
 
 The world rolls into light; 
 It is daybreak every-where." 
 
 * Cardinal Wiseman says of Mr. Longfellow's poems : " There is no greater 
 lack in English literature than that of a poet of the people, of one who shall be 
 to the laboring classes of England, what Goethe (gA' tlh) is to the peasant of 
 Germany. It was a true philosopher who said, 'Let me make the songs of a 
 people, and I care not who makes their laws.' There is one writer who ap- 
 proaches nearer than any other to this standard, and has already gained such a 
 hold on our hearts that it is almost unnecessary to mention his name. Our 
 hemisphere can not claim the honor of having brought him forth ; but he still 
 belongs to us, for his works have become as household words wherever the 
 English language is spoken. And, whether we are charmed by his imagery or 
 soothed by his melodious versification, or elevated by the moral teachings of his 
 pure muse, or follow with sympathizing hearts the wanderings of Evangeline,— I 
 am sure that all who hear my voice will join me in the tribute I desire to pay 
 to the genius of Longfellow " 
 
TKK N YSON 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON, now Baron Tennyson, was born 
 b- in Somerby, England, August 5, 1809. Carlyle 
 was fourteen years older than he. Robert Browning is 
 two years younger. The group of six authors, whose lives 
 come together in these pages, — Carlyle, Hugo, Emerson, 
 Longfellow, Tennyson, and Browning,* — as they lived to 
 
 * Carlyle and Emerson, as is well known, corresponded intimately. The pub- 
 lished volumes of their letters are among the most interesting memorials of our 
 times. When Mr. Emerson visited England in 1848, Carlyle brought him and 
 Tennyson together. "Tennyson and Carlyle love to recall the days when they 
 used to sit together in the garden of the latter [behind the house in Cheyne 
 (ehan) Row], smoking their pipes, and interlarding their conversation with brill- 
 iant flashes of silence." These are Mr. Conway's words. It was proposed in 1848 
 that Tennyson and Emerson should visit Paris together, just after the revolution 
 of February ; but this plan was not carried out. Browning and Tennyson are 
 personal friends. Mr. Longfellow visited Carlyle and his wife in 1835, and 
 visited Tennyson in 1868. The intimacies of the three Englishmen and the 
 Americans with Victor Hugo were probably more formal, if indeed they existed 
 at aU. 
 
 Mr. Longfellow's notes on Tennyson, as preserved in his Journal, are in- 
 teresting. 
 
 Jvly IS, M59.— " Q-ot from the publishers Tennyson's new poem, 'Pour Idyls 
 (I' (Xilz) of the King.' Eagerly devour the first part of them, which is charming, 
 reminding one of Chaucer's {chaw' serz) ' Griselda ' (yn sW da). * * * * Finished 
 the 'Four Idyls.' The first and third could only have come from a great poet. 
 The second and fourth do not seem to me so good." Again, August 12, 1859, in 
 a letter to Mr. Fields : " ' The Idyls ' are a brilliant success. Kioh tapestries, 
 wrought as only Tennyson could have done them, and worthy to hang beside 
 'The Faerie Queene.' I believe there is no discordant voice on this side the 
 water." 
 
 January 1, 1867.— In a letter to Charles Sumner : " I have just received a letter 
 from Tennyson, in which he says: 'We English and Americans should all be 
 brothers, as none other among the nations can be ; and some of us, come what 
 may, will always be so, I trust.'" The correspondence was more than once 
 resumed. 
 
496 POETS. 
 
 nearly the end of the nineteenth century, so reflects, illus- 
 trates, and expresses the condition and the needs of that 
 period, that the life of each of them helps to a right un- 
 derstanding of that of each of the others. Indeed, every 
 one of the group has done his share in the education of 
 this generation, which is, and ought to be, so remarkable. 
 Tennyson is one more of the leading poets of the 
 world who has been fortunate in the external circum- 
 stances of early life and education. He was the third in 
 a family of twelve children. His father was Rev. George 
 Clayton Tennyson, a clergyman in Lincolnshire, in En- 
 gland. It is remembered that in this large group of 
 young people, story-telling and story-writing was a fa- 
 vorite amusement. With his two elder brothers, Alfred 
 Tennyson was entered at Trinity College, Cambridge. 
 Dr. Whewell (hu' el), the writer on education and morals,* 
 was then a tutor in that college, and Tennyson was his 
 pupil. At this early age, he showed his poetical ability. 
 When he was but nineteen years old, he won the chan- 
 cellor's medal for an English poem, with the rather un- 
 
 Browning and Tennyson have been cordial friends. In 1872, Browning dedi- 
 cated a selection of his poems to the Laureate in these words : 
 
 dedicated to 
 Alfred Tenntson. 
 
 IN POETBT, illustrious AND CONSUMMATE ; 
 IN FRIENDSHIP, NOBLE AND SINCERE. 
 
 * Dr. Whewell waa afterward the Master of Trinity. He was the son of a car- 
 penter, or, as Englishmen now say, of a joiner. His early ability, especially in 
 mathematics, was such that he was sent as a pupil to the Cambridge Trinity 
 College, — and distinguislied himself there. He afterward obtained a Fellowship, 
 and in 1816, was appointed a tutor. He was afterward Professor of Mineralogy, 
 and, in 1838, was appointed Professor of Moral Theology. In 1841, he became 
 "Master of Trinity," and in 1855, vice-chancellor of the University. He died 
 in that office, at the age of seventy-one, in the year 1866. It was truly said of his 
 valuable treatise on morals, that if you would take for granted, with the author, 
 the divine establishraent of the English church and English state, every thing 
 else in the t.featise follows logically. He was an admirable teacher, and was 
 much beloved, as he deserved, by his pupils. 
 
Tennyson. 497 
 
 promising title, " Timbuctoo." * His brother Frederic had 
 obtained a prize the year before for a Greek poem. At 
 the time of Alfred's success, he and his brother Charles 
 printed a volume of "Poems by Two Brothers." It has 
 since been highly prized as a poetical curiosity. 
 
 The first volume which he published with his name, 
 was "Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, by Alfred Tennyson," pub- 
 lished in London, in 1830, while he was still an under- 
 graduate. It made but little impression on the public ; 
 but Professor Wilson (of Blackwood's Magazine) showed 
 his literary insight by predicting the fame of the au- 
 thor, and William J. Fox, — who first announced to the 
 world the certainty of Browning's genius, — made no mis- 
 take in heralding this new poet. " Claribel," " Lilian," 
 and " Oriana " (o ri an' a) are all in this volume. In 
 1833, a new volume, containing many of the poems in 
 the first, retouched and improved, appeared in London. 
 " Oenone " (e no' ne), " The Lotos Eaters," " A Dream of 
 Pair Women," "The Lady of Shalott " (sha lot'), now ap- 
 peared for the first time.f 
 
 As he passed from simple lyrics to his larger poems, 
 his poetry, in its mere forna, became narrative. He thus 
 
 * This was at the time when the travels of Mungo Park and others had 
 given a special interest, among Englishmen, to the interior of Africa. Henry 
 Alford (OM'^'/Sr<Q,— afterward distinguished as a critic of the New Testament, as 
 a preacher and a poet,— was an unsuccessful competitor. He used to say, good- 
 naturedly, in later life, that, at the time, he regretted the loss of the prize, but 
 that he had lived to he proud that he was defeated by Alfred Tennyson. 
 
 t Mr. Ealph Waldo Emerson visited England in this year, and on his return 
 brought to America this volume of Tennyson's poems. It is among the pleas- 
 anter memories of some of our older men of letters, that they first read Tenny- 
 son in this very volume, — which Mr. Emerson freely lent to his young friends in 
 Harvard College, — and that with it their enthusiasm for Tennyson began. Mr. 
 James Russell Lowell, for instance, first saw Tennyson's poems in this volume. 
 From the beginning, Tennyson was sure of the sympathy and regard of the 
 young. It was only for the old critics to die off the stage, and his success was 
 certain. 
 
498 
 
 POETS. 
 
 gained what is an immense advantage for an author who 
 has to do with a " British public." That pubhc, which 
 Mr. Browning says does not admire him, always wants 
 a concrete or visible subject. It does not like a poem on 
 "Old Age." It does like a poem on "Ulysses" (u lls'sez). 
 It does not want a poem on "Afternoons." It welcomes 
 one on "The Lotos Eaters."* As the public understood, 
 
 * Mrs. Carlyle gives the following amusing account of an Interview with him 
 at the theater, September 23, 1845 : 
 
 " So long as I kept my seat in the dress-circle I recognized only Mrs. Macready 
 (mdk ?•?' rf4), in one of the four private boxes, and in my nearer neighborhood, Sir 
 Alexander and Lady Q-ordon. But in the interval betwixt the play and the farce, 
 I took a notion to make my way to Mrs. Macready. John, of course, declared the 
 thing ' clearly impossible, no use trying it ' ; but a servant of the theater, over- 
 hearing our debate, politely offered to escort me where I wished ; and then John, 
 having no longer any dUHculties to surmount, followed, to have his share In what 
 advantages might accrue from the change. Passing through a long dim passage, 
 I came on a tall man leant to the wall, with his head touching the ceiling like a 
 caryatid, to all appearances asleep, or resolutely trying it under most unfavorable 
 circumstances. ' Alfred Tennyson I ' I exclaimed in joyful surprise. ' Well 1 ' said 
 he, taking the hand I held out to him, and forgetting to let it go again. 'I did 
 not know you were in town,' said I. 'I should like to know who you are,' said 
 he ; ' I know that I know you, but I can not tell your name.' And I had actually 
 to name myself to him. Then he woke up in good earnest, and said he had been 
 meaning to come to Chelsea. ' But Carlyle is in Scotland,' I told him with due 
 humility. ' So I heard from Spedding already, but I asked Spedding would he go 
 vrith me to see Mrs. Carlyle, and he said he would.' I told him if he really 
 meant to come, he had better not wait for backing, under the present circum- 
 stances ; and then pursued my way to the Macreadys' box, where I was received 
 by William (whom I had not divined) with a ' G-racious heavens ! ' and sponta- 
 neous dramatic start, which made me all but answer, ' Gracious heavens 1 ' and 
 start dramatically in my turn. And then I was kissed all round by his women." 
 
 The promised visit took place a few days after. 
 
 "Craik arrived next evening (Sunday), to make his compliments. Helen had 
 gone to visit numbers, John was smoking in the kitchen. I was lying on the 
 sofa, headachey, leaving Graik to -pvA himself to the chief expenditure of wind, 
 when a cab drove up. Mr. Strachey (xtrak'i)? No. Alfred Tennyson alone! 
 Actually, by a superhuman eflfort of volition, he had put himself into a cab, nay, 
 brought himself away from a dinner party, and was there to smoke and talk with 
 me !— by myself— me 1 But no such blessedness was in store for him. Craik 
 prosed, and John babbled for his entertainment ; and I, whom he had come to 
 see, got scarcely any speech with him. The exertion, however, of having to pro- 
 vide bim with tea, through my own unassisted ingenuity (Helen being gone for 
 the evening), drove away my headache ; also perhaps a little feminine vanity at 
 having inspired such a man with the energy to take a cab on his own responsi- 
 
TENKYSON. 499 
 
 better and better, that Mr. Tennyson's poems had in 
 them a distinct nominative case ; as it could tell " what 
 they were about," and who it was that spoke, this public 
 gave itself up, with more complete abandonment, to the 
 joy of poetry, to the exquisite sweetness of the song, and 
 was glad to find out that it could sympathize with genius. 
 "The Princess, — A Medley," which appeared in 1847,* 
 
 bility, and to throw himself on Providence for getting away again I He stayed 
 
 till eleven, Craik sitting him out, as he sat out Lady H , and would sit out 
 
 the Virgin Mary should he find her here." 
 
 * The plan of the "Princess" connects the fanciful story with the real inter- 
 ests of to-day, as Tennyson is very fond of doing. The poem professes to be 
 improvised by seven "of our set," who were visiting at "Vivian Place." Sii 
 Walter has given up the broad lawns of Vivian Place for a summer day, for the 
 enjoyment of the people. 
 
 " Thither flocked at noon 
 His tenants, wife and chUd, and thither haK 
 The neighboring borough with their Institute, 
 Of which he was the Patron. I was there 
 Prom college, visiting the son,— the son 
 A Walter too,— with others of our set,— 
 Five others ; we were seven at Vivian Place." 
 
 While " The Institute," and the tenants and their wives and children amuse 
 themselves, their guests, watching the holiday, invent " The Medley "— 
 
 " Follow me, the Prince I 
 I answered : ' Each be hero in his turn 1 
 Seven and yet one, like shadows in a dream. 
 Heroic seems our Princess as required. 
 But something made to suit with Time and place, 
 A G-othic ruin, and a Grecian house, 
 A talk of college and of ladies' rights, 
 A feudal Knight in silken masquerade. 
 And yonder, shrieks and strange experiments. 
 In which the good Sir Ralph had burned them all. 
 This were a medley I We should have him back 
 Who told the ' Winter's Tale ' to do it for us. 
 No matter : we vrtll say whatever comes ; 
 And let the ladies sing us, if they will. 
 Prom time to time, some ballad, or a song. 
 To give us breathing space I 
 
 So I began. 
 And the rest followed ; and the women sang 
 Between the rougher voices of the men. 
 Like linnets in the pauses of the wind. 
 And here I give the story and the songs." 
 
500 POETS. ■ 
 
 had the additional advantage that it handled, in a delicate 
 and playful satire, the question regarding woman's place 
 and education, which were working themselves into con- 
 versation and discussion. In successive new editions of 
 " The Princess," Mr. Tennyson introduced more and more 
 of the charming lyrics, which give so much light and 
 life to the poem. 
 
 In 1850, he published, without his name, "In Memo- 
 riam." It is a series of more than a hundred short 
 poems, which he wrote, in the shock of grief, for the 
 death of Arthur Henry Hallam, — a young man of great 
 promise, who, had he lived, would have married Tenny- 
 son's sister.* Mr. Hallam died on the 15th of September, 
 1833, when he was but twenty-two years old, — away from 
 home, — and with but short notice of illness to his friends. 
 So dear was he to those friends, — and so pathetic have 
 been their published memories of their sorrow, — that 
 Arthur Hallam is now known and loved in every quarter 
 of the world, — not for what he did, as for the sake of 
 those who loved him. Most of the poems in "In Memo- 
 riam " were written, as it is supposed, soon after Hal- 
 lam's death. Seventeen years after, Tennyson determined 
 to publish them, with such revision as time had suggested, 
 and such additions as in these years he had made.f 
 
 * The London Quarterly Review, in an article on " Lyoidas " (Zw' « dds), " Ado- 
 nais " (lid o nd' Is), and " In Memoriam," published in 1884, says : " There is no 
 question that Lord Tennyson first earned his great fame, by his ' Li Memoriam.' 
 It was the appearance of this monody, in 1850, that sent serious and thoughtful 
 men "back to his early writings, to see if there was any trace of power there such 
 as might have given promise of a riper maturity; and, to the astonishment of 
 many, a mine of great richness lay before them, which they had passed by almost 
 unnoticed." This is, of course, true of those who had passed by the mine. But 
 it is certainly not true of the great body of men and women who read English 
 books, who were younger than Tennyson. His fame was already sure. 
 
 + The introductory verses bear the date 1849. They speak of the other 
 poems in these words: 
 
Tennyson. 601 
 
 On the death of Wordsworth, who was poet laureate, 
 in 1850, the Queen offered the honor of the laureateship 
 to Samuel Rogers, the author of "The Pleasures of 
 Memory," then in his eighty-ninth year. The proposal 
 was made to the venerable poet in a letter written by 
 Prince Albert, and the wish that he would accept the 
 post, was accompanied by the assurance that no specific 
 duty of anj^ kind should be required of him. Mr. Rogers 
 was greatly gratified by the proposal ; but declined 
 it, urging his great age and want of strength as the 
 reason. Prince Albert wrote again, to ask what poet 
 he would suggest as inost deserving the honor. Mr. 
 Rogers, in reply, named Alfred Tennyson, and he was 
 appointed.* 
 
 Since Robert Southey (sowth' i) was appointed to this 
 post, there has been no compulsion on the laureate, as 
 there once was, to manufacture one ode at New Year, and 
 
 " Forgive these wild and wandering cries, 
 Confusions of a wasted youth; 
 Forgive them where they fail in truth, 
 And in thy wisdom make me wise." 
 
 This introduction contains lines,— as, Indeed, the whole book does,— which 
 are remembered every-where : 
 
 " Strong Son of G-od,— Immortal Love, 
 
 Whom we, that have not seen thy face 
 By faith, and faith alone, embrace, 
 Believing where we can not prove." 
 ***** 
 " Our little systems have their day ; 
 
 They have their day and cease to be ; 
 They are but broken lights of thee. 
 And thou, O Lord, art more than they." 
 
 * It is an amusing illustration of the separation which seems, in England, to 
 divide sets of educated men from each other, that Lord Palmerston (pam' ir st6n), 
 who was at the head of the government, did not know any thing of Tennyson. 
 He wrote to Mr. Rogers to say so. " We know nothing of this gentleman ; " and 
 to ask, if it were quite certain that there was nothing in his writings which 
 should make it amiss that he should be the Laureate of a Queen. 
 
502 POETS. 
 
 another for the royal birthday. But Mr. Tennyson, un- 
 compelled, has written, since he was laureate, some of 
 the immortal odes of English literature. The great Duke 
 of Wellington died in September of 1851. The English 
 people was moved to the heart, as well it may have been, 
 at the death, in an advanced old age, of one to whom its 
 destinies had been once and again intrusted, and who had 
 never failed it. Tennyson's ode on the occasion spoke for 
 a people eager to find a fit spokesman.* 
 
 * " Burj' the great Duke. 
 With an Empire's lamentation. 
 
 Let us bury the great Duke 
 To the noise of the mourning of a mighty nation. 
 
 Mourning when their leaders fall, 
 
 Warriors carry the warrior's pall, 
 
 And sorrow darkens hamlet and hall. 
 
 " Lead out the pageant : sad and slow. 
 
 As fits an universal wo. 
 
 Let the long, long procession go. 
 And let the sorrowing crowd about it grow. 
 And let the mournful martial music ilow : 
 
 The last great Englishman is low. 
 ****** 
 " Remember all 
 He spoke among you, and the Man who spoke ; 
 Who never sold the Truth, to serve the hour. 
 Nor paltered with Eternal God for power ; 
 Who let the turbid streams of rumor ilow 
 Through either babbling world of high and low ; 
 Whose life was work, whose language rife 
 With rugged maxims hewn from life ; 
 Who never spoke against a foe ; 
 Whose eighty winters freeze with one rebuke 
 AU great self-seekers trampling on the right; 
 
 Truth-Teller was our EngUsh Alfred named ; 
 
 Truth-Lover was our English Diike ; 
 
 Whatever record leaps to light. 
 
 He never shall be shamed. 
 
 ****** 
 " Nothing can bereave him 
 Of the force he made his own. 
 Being here, and we believe him, 
 Something far advanced In State, 
 
TENNYSON. 503 
 
 In the year 1850, Mr. Tennyson married Miss Emily 
 Sellwood, and he now has several children. His resi- 
 dence, called Faringford, is in the Isle of Wight, above 
 " Fresh-water Bay," which the house overlooks, and is not 
 far from the village called Fresh-water. He has described 
 the place in his invitation to his friend Maurice * (maw'- 
 rls), whom he asks to visit him there. 
 
 Of the later poems of Tennyson, we must not fail to 
 mention "The Idyls of the King," "Locksley Hall," and 
 the volume published in 1864, containing "Enoch Arden," 
 and others. " Locksley Hall " is, perhaps, the best known 
 and most widely admired. 
 
 In 1884, Tennyson was made Baron Tennyson, and 
 thus entered the House of Lords. It has been said that 
 he is the first Peer created for literary distinction. The 
 creation marks, therefore, in some sense, an era in civil- 
 ization, for it shows that the honors and the duties once 
 intrusted only to soldiers and clergymen, — afterward con- 
 ceded to land-owners because they were land-owners, and 
 
 And that he wears a tnaer crown 
 
 Than any wreath that man can weave him. 
 
 But speak no more of his renown, 
 
 Lay your earthly fancies down, 
 
 And in the vast cathedral leave him. 
 
 Q-od accept him, Christ receive him." 
 
 * " Where, far from smoke and noise of town, 
 I watch the twilight falling brown. 
 All round a careless ordered garden. 
 Close to the ridge of a noble down. 
 " You'll have no scandal while you dine, 
 But honest talk and wholesome wine ; 
 And only hear the magpie gossip 
 Garrulous under a roof of pine. 
 
 "For groves of pine on either hand. 
 To break the blast of winter, stand ; 
 And farther on the hoary channel 
 
 Tumbles a breaker on chalk and sand." 
 
504 POETS. 
 
 to lawyers, — may, in the future, fall to men of letters. 
 Mr. Carlyie's classification of his Heroes is so far ac- 
 cepted by the Queen of England, when the Hero as 
 Poet sits by the side of the Hero as Priest and the Hero 
 as King. He took his seat at once in the House of 
 Lords ; and though he has never spoken there, he has 
 once or twice since published short poems, bearing on 
 the political questions of the day. 
 
 He has taken a strong interest in such questions, and 
 some of his most spirited lyrics relate to them. " The 
 Charge of the Six Hundred," "Riflemen, Form," are illus- 
 trations, which will be long remembered. * 
 
 * "He spoke much, of the philosophical questions of the day also, his interest 
 in which has led to the formation of tlie meetings for discussion between Hux- 
 ley, Tyndall (tin' dal). Dr. Manning, James Martineau (iruir' fi no), himself and 
 others." — Mr. Conway's notes of a visit at Faringford. 
 
 Mr. Tennyson has been thought to be especially sensitive about the popular 
 curiosity to see him. Mr. Conway says : 
 
 "A great deal of this sensitiveness is to be ascribed to the early solitude 
 which Tennyson enjoyed when, as yet an unknown poet, he roamed in Epping 
 Forest. In those days he could come to London, and walk the streets, with his 
 great country shoes, and be remarked only as a brown, rustic indi^adual, who had 
 evidently not been long in town. It has been said of him, that he loves his fel- 
 low-men more than he likes them ; but if he can mingle with them incognito, on 
 equal terms, he likes to converse with the common people. He once made a 
 pedestrian excursion to Devonshire, stopping at the way-side inns, and was now 
 and then the life of the common tap-room, talking with the farmers about their 
 crops, and sometimes getting into warm discussions of religious topics, in which 
 he valiantly defended the liberal side. He enjoyed such occasions very much ; 
 but once, when some one present called him by name, he drew up in his shell of 
 reserve like a turtle.' 
 
BROWNING. 
 
 18X8- , 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING was born in London, on the 
 . 6th of May, 1812. He was not educated at either 
 of the Enghsh Universities, because, it is said, of the 
 restrictions which, in his youth, practically excluded dis- 
 senters from those institutions. Mr. Browning, however, 
 was no sufferer from this restriction. He is one more 
 illustration of the truth of one of Mr. Galton's remarks, 
 " that in England there are two classes of educated men, 
 — one of those who obtained their education at the Uni- 
 versities, and the other of those who gained theirs because 
 they were not at the Universities." Mr. Browning had 
 every advantage which the thoughtfulness of his parents 
 could give him for the study of books and language. 
 
 He spent in Northern Italy a part at least of that 
 period of life which some of his contemporaries were 
 spending at public schools, or at the Universities. In this 
 time he entered on that diligent study of the Italian his- 
 tory of the Middle Ages, which makes him now one of 
 the first authorities on those subjects in the world, if not, 
 indeed, the first. But he was not satisfied with the dili- 
 gent study of books written or printed in the old libraries 
 of Lombardy (l6m' bar dl), Tuscany, and Venice. He lived 
 among the Italian people. He made them his friends, as 
 he was theirs. 
 
 He gained in Italy, not only that intellectual training 
 and that enthusiasm for poetry which so many poets of 
 different lands have owed to Italy, but also the knowledge 
 
506 POETS. 
 
 of Nature and the joy of life which give gladness to 
 almost every word he writes, as if the clearness of the 
 sky and the warmth of the sun had quickened him, even 
 in his boyhood, with life such as the Northern poets do 
 not always know. 
 
 All the same, however, Mr. Browning is, has been, and 
 will be, an Englishman. Like all other Englishmen, he 
 likes to find fault with his country ; but, like all other 
 Englishmen, he is angry with any others who find fault 
 with them. It is, however, with a certain satisfaction 
 that he addresses that 
 
 " British public who admires me not," 
 
 and he would be very sorry at the bottom of his heart 
 if the rank and file of men did entirely comprehend him, 
 or even understand him. And here Mr. Browning is cer- 
 tainly right. For, if a man is to be a leader of men, he 
 must take them into some places where they could not 
 go without him ; and it will certainly happen, therefore, 
 when he first speaks, that they will not fully understand 
 his orders ; far less will they comprehend them. It should 
 also be remembered, all along in the rather stupid discus- 
 sion as to whether Browning is easily understood, that 
 the understanding, as De Quincey says, is the lowest of 
 the human faculties. 
 
 Poets have a much more important mission given to 
 them than the mere instruction of people in certain ex- 
 ternal facts, which they can learn from the Encyclopedia, 
 or the price-current or other finger-posts. Mr. Browning 
 certainly never published his books for so poor a purpose 
 as teaching people the external facts in mediaeval history. 
 Something must be taken for granted with all readers, 
 and just as he supposes that his rea.ders know what c-a-t 
 
BKOWNING. 507 
 
 spells, he also presupposes their knowledge of certain 
 other things. Readers may or may not know these other 
 things. But that is their affair, and not his.* 
 
 The first published poem of Mr. Browning's was a 
 monologue, intended as part of a tragedy, to which he 
 gave the name of "Pauline," which appeared in 1833. 
 He regards this as a boyish work,— and would not in- 
 clude it in the editions of his coUected poems, but that 
 it has been printed outside of England, and that he 
 chooses that it shall appear correctly if at all. It is to 
 be observed, however, that this anonymous fragment at 
 once attracted the attention of a critic as competent and 
 clear as Rev. William J. Fox, who then published a 
 magazine called the Monthly Repository. Fox said : 
 "The work before us has truth and life in it, — gave us 
 the thrill and laid hold of us with the power, the sen- 
 sation of which has never yet failed us as a test of 
 genius. * * * "V^e felt certain of Tennyson, — we are 
 not less certain of the author of 'Pauline.'" 
 
 This was the first public notice of Browning's boyish 
 poems. It gratified the writer, — and, in 1835, he sent to 
 the Monthly Repository four poems, which appear, in 
 one form or another, in his later collections. In the 
 same year, he published "Paracelsus" (par a sel' sus). "I 
 trust for the reader's indulgence," he said, "toward a 
 poem which had not been imagined six months ago," — 
 
 * "The critics often seek for hidden meanings in Mr. Browning's poems, just 
 as enthusiasts do with a similar feeling in Shakespeare and the Scriptures. But 
 he does not always, perhaps he does not often, help them much in their recondite 
 questionings. Some enthusiasts, who had detected great depth of mieaning in one 
 of his poems, ventured to ask him what was its origin, and if their diagnosis 
 were correct. His reply was rather discouraging. For he said the origin of the 
 poem was an old bit of tapestry which hung upon his wall, which he showed 
 theni. The very intricacies and subtleties of his description were easily accounted 
 for, when one saw what time had left of the fancies of some forgotten needle- 
 woman. 
 
508 POETS. 
 
 and asked that he might not be prejudiced by it against 
 other productions. In 183 7, he pubhshed "Strafford," 
 and with Mr. Macready's (mak re' diz) cordial interest it 
 was put upon the stage. "Sordello" (sop del' lo) followed 
 in 1840; and, in the next six years, the pretty and pop- 
 ular editions of "Bells and Pomegranates," in which 
 were some of his noblest lyrics, made him friends among 
 large numbers of readers who had no knowledge of his 
 longer poems.* 
 
 In 1846, he married Elizabeth Barrett, already well 
 known as a poet. She had, like Mr. Browning, enjoyed 
 an admirable education. She had an accurate knowl- 
 edge of Greek ; and among her early published works 
 was a translation of the " Prometheus (pro me' the us) 
 Bound," and some articles which attracted attention, on 
 the early Christian poets. But her own original poetry 
 soon won for her the regard of sympathetic readers, and 
 her reputation among the promising poets of the time 
 was already established when it won for her the acquaint- 
 ance of Robert Browning. 
 
 There are a hundred romantic stories which turn on 
 the early intimacy of the two ]3oets.f How true these 
 
 * One of tlie most spirited of tliese lyrics is tlie Uttle poem which tells " How 
 we brought the good news from Ghent {gent) to Aix " (aks). Many readers have 
 tried to find the point in Dutch history which would show what the news was. 
 But Mr. Browning himself says that the whole is a work of imagination. He 
 was cruising, in a. yacht, on the Mediterranean. Of a hot day, as he lay in the 
 shade of the sail, he felt a natural longing for a ride on his own horse,— who, 
 as he knew, was shut up in a stable in London. He could not ride, but he could 
 imagine a ride and describe it,— and this he did in the poem, where the im- 
 agined riders carried the imagined news. 
 
 + The lines in " Lady Geraldine's Courtship," in which Miss Barrett alludes to 
 Browning, speak of several modern English poets : 
 
 " Wordsworth's solemn-thoughted idyl, 
 
 Howitt'B ballad verse, or Tennyson's enchanted reverie, 
 
 Or from Browning some 'pomegranate,' which, if cut down through the middle, 
 
 Showed a heart within blood-tiuctured with a veined humanity." 
 
BROWlSriKG. 609 
 
 stories are, another generation will have better means of 
 knowing than we. This is certain, that Mr. Browning was 
 attracted by Miss Barrett's poems, in which, indeed, she 
 had paid him in one instance a very noble compliment, 
 and that he asked and obtained the pleasure of a per- 
 sonal interview. 
 
 Miss Barrett was at this time in very delicate health, 
 and by her illness was closely confined at home. Only 
 intimate friends had the privilege of visiting her ; and it 
 was by a rare exception that Mr. Browning was first 
 introduced to her. But this illness proved no check 
 to the growth of their mutual regard, and in face of 
 some early opposition on her father's part, they were 
 
 Miss Mitford says that she often traveled to London, five and forty miles, to 
 see Miss Barrett, and returned the same evening without entering another house. 
 In her invalid life, she only received the visits of her family, and a few such de- 
 voted friends. But Mr. Browning, who knew her only through her poetry, wrote 
 to beg for an interview. The story, as it was told by Mrs. Kinney, will be believed 
 by young readers : 
 
 "She reluctantly consented to an interview. He flew to her apartment, was 
 admitted by the nurse, in whose presence only could he see the deity at w^hose 
 shrine he had long worshiped. But the golden opportunity was not to be lost ; 
 love became oblivious to any save the presence of the real of its ideal. Then and 
 there, Robert Browning poured out Ms impassioned soul into hers, though his tale 
 of love seemed only an enthusiast's dream. Infirmity had hitherto so hedged her 
 about, that she deemed herself forever protected from all assaults of love. Indeed, 
 she felt only injured that a fellow-poet should take advantage, as it were, of her 
 indulgence in granting him an interview, and requested him to withdraw from 
 her presence, not attempting any response to his proposal, which she could not 
 believe in earnest. Of course, he withdrew from her sight, but not to withdraw 
 the offer of Ms heart and hand ; au contraire (o kong trdr'), to repeat it by letter, and 
 in suchwise as to convince her how ' dead in earnest ' he was. Her own heart, 
 touched already when she knew it not, was this time fain to listen, be convinced, 
 and overcome. But here began the tug of war. As a filial daughter, Elizabeth 
 told her father of the poet's love, and asked a parent's blessing to crown their 
 happiness. At first, incredulous of the strange story, he mocked her ; but when 
 the truth flashed on him, from the new fire in her eyes, he kindled with rage, 
 and forbade her ever seeing or communicating with her lover again, on the 
 penalty of disinheritance and banishment forever from a father's love. This de- 
 cision was founded on no dishke for Mr. Browning personally, or any thing in him, 
 or his family ; it was simply arbitrary. But the new love was stronger than the 
 old in her,— it conquered." 
 
510 POETS. 
 
 married.* The best history of the turn of tide in her 
 affections is probably to be found in her own Portu- 
 guese Sonnets. As soon as they were married, the two 
 poets went to Florence to live. That city was her 
 home till she died, in 1861, and has been Mr. Brown- 
 ing's home through most of his life. He has, however, 
 been a traveler in almost every part of Europe. He 
 speaks the Russian language with facility, and the 
 French and Italian with the ease of those that were 
 born to them. 
 
 * The Portuguese Sonnets reflect the story of their betrothal. One in each 
 phase of feeling may be copied here : 
 
 SONNETS PROM THE POETIiaiJBSE. 
 
 NO. III. 
 
 Unlike are we, iinllke, oh princely Heart I 
 
 Unlike our uses and our destinies. 
 
 Our ministering two angels look surprise 
 
 On one another, as they strike athwart 
 
 Their wings in passing. Thou, bethink thee, art 
 
 A guest for queens to social pageantries. 
 
 With gazes from a hundred brighter eyes 
 
 Than tears even can make mine, to play thy part 
 
 Of chief musician. WTiat hast thou to do 
 
 With looking from the lattice-lights at me, 
 
 A poor, tired, wandering singer, singing through 
 
 The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree? 
 
 The chrism is on thine head, — on mine, the dew, — 
 
 And death must dig the level where these agree. 
 
 XVI. 
 
 And yet, because thou overcomest so. 
 
 Because thou art more noble and like a king. 
 
 Thou canst prevail against my fears, and fling 
 
 Thy purple round me, till my heart shall grow 
 
 Too close against thy heart, henceforth to know 
 
 How it shook when alone. Why, conquering 
 
 May prove as lordly and complete a thing 
 
 In lifting upward as in crushing low I 
 
 And as a vanquished soldier yields his sword 
 
 To one who lifts him from the bloody earth, 
 
 Even so. Beloved, I at last record, 
 
 Here ends my strife. If than invite me forth, 
 
 I rise above abasement at the word, 
 
 Make thy love larger to enlarge my worth. 
 
BROWNING. 511 
 
 Mr. Browning has more than once followed his early 
 impulse for dramatic composition, and many of his 
 poems take the dramatic form. Several of them have 
 been put upon the stage, and though no one of them 
 has obtained the success,— perhaps doubtful,— of a play 
 long performed or often produced again, this argues 
 rather the attitude of modern audiences and their in- 
 difference to real dramatic effect. In a kindred line of 
 literary work, his translations from "Euripides (u rip'i dez) 
 and ^schylus " (es'kl lus) have shown that classical 
 poetry wins modern sympathy and interest as completely 
 as it won that of the Q-reeks. But he has never been 
 confined to any one form of poetical translation. His 
 lyrics first win his readers, and it is after they have 
 become enthusiastic about these poems that they go 
 afield on excursions for discovery among his tragedies, 
 translations, and his other longer poems. 
 
 Of these, the most important is "The Ring and the 
 Book," which was published in 1868. His most ardent 
 admirers consider this the most important poem of our 
 time. It is the true story of a wretched intrigue which 
 culminated in murder, at the end of the seventeenth cent- 
 ury. It tells the story of this tragedy in many different 
 ways, as such a story would present itself in various 
 points of view to spectators who had various prejudices. 
 At last the old Pope Innocent, by the simple insight of 
 pure moral force, solves the riddles, cuts the knots, and 
 awards substantial justice. Beneath a thousand other 
 lessons, the poem shows the supremacy of truth aliove 
 the ingenuity of semblance, and what is the range of 
 power of the eye which is single. 
 
 The intricacy of Mr. Browning's language, sometimes 
 his indifference always to the clumsy assistance given in 
 
512 POETS, 
 
 notes, make some of his poems very obscure. But care- 
 ful readers have generaUy found out that the knot was 
 worth untying; indeed, they have come to find a pleas- 
 ure in the solution. All over the world of English liter- 
 ature. Browning clubs have been formed of those who 
 are interested in his poetry, and seek to improve in this 
 knowledge of it. The chief of these clubs meets in Lon- 
 don, and publishes a journal of the Browning Society 
 papers. All of these papers are devoted in one or an- 
 other way to the exposition or criticism of his poetry.* 
 
 The marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Browning was eminently 
 happy, and in the elegant hospitality of their house in 
 Florence, many travelers from all nations know person- 
 ally the charm of their home. They had two children. 
 A daughter " of English blood, of Tuscan birth," died in 
 early life, as the readers of the poem we have cited will 
 remember. A son is now a well-known artist in London. 
 
 * In a publication of a collection of his works, Mr. Browning gives the follow- 
 ing account of them : 
 
 "In the present selection from my poetry, there is an attempt to escape from 
 the embarrassment of appearing to pronounce upon what myself may consider the 
 best of it. I adopt another principle, and, by simply stringing together certain 
 pieces on the thread of an imaginary personaUty, I present them in succession, 
 rather as the natural development of a particular experience than because I ac- 
 count them the most noteworthy portion of my work. Such an attempt was made 
 in the volume of selections from the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, to 
 which, in outward uniformity at least, my own would venture to become a com- 
 panion. 
 
 "A few years ago, had such an opportunity presented itself, I might have 
 been tempted to say a word in reply to the objections my poetry was used to en- 
 counter. Time has kindly co-operated with my disinclination to write the poetry 
 and the criticism besides. The readers, I am at last privileged to expect, meet me 
 fully half-way, and if, from the fitting stand-point, they must still ' censure me in 
 their wisdom,' they have previously ' awakened their senses that they may the 
 better judge.' Nor do I apprehend any more charges of being willfully obscure, 
 unconscientiously careless, or perverselj' harsh. Having hitherto done my utmost 
 in the art, to which my life is a devotion, I can not engage to increase the effort; 
 but I conceive that there may be helpful light, as well as reassuring warmth, in 
 the attention and sympathy I gratefully acknowledge. E. B. 
 
 "London, May 14, 1872." 
 
BROWNING. 513 
 
 In 1851, Mrs. Browning published "Casi Guidi (ka'se 
 ge'de) Windows," which reflects the interest she and her 
 husband both took in the ItaUan efforts for freedom and 
 unity, of the years 1848 and 1849. In the year 1856, 
 "Aurora Leigh" (ig) appeared, and the "Poems before 
 Congress," in 1860. 
 
 " Those who have known Casa Q-uidi, as it was," says 
 a recent writer, "can never forget the square anteroom, 
 with its great picture and piano-forte, at which the boy 
 Browning passed many an hour, — the little dining-room, 
 covered with tapestry, and where hung medallions of 
 Tennyson, Carlyle, and Robert Browning — the long room, 
 filled with plaster casts and studies, which was Mr. 
 Browning's retreat ; and, dearest of all, the large draw- 
 ing-room, where she always sat. It opens upon a bal- 
 cony filled with plants, and looks out upon the old stone 
 iron-gray church of Santa Felice (san'ta fale'che). There 
 was something about this room that seemed to make it 
 a proper and especial haunt for poets. The dark shadows 
 and subdued light gave it a dreamy look, which was 
 enhanced by the tapestry-covered walls and old pictures 
 of saints, that looked out sadly from their carved frames 
 of black wood. Large book-cases, constructed of speci- 
 mens of Florentine carving, selected by Mr. Browning, 
 were brimming over with wise-looking books. Tables 
 were covered with more gayly bound volumes, the gifts 
 of brother authors. Dante's (dan' tez) grave profile, a 
 cast of Keats' brow and face, taken after death, a pen- 
 and-ink sketch of Tennyson, the genial face of John 
 Eenyon (Mrs. Browning's good friend and relative), little 
 paintings by the boy Browning, all attracted the eye in 
 turn, and gave rise to a thousand musings. A quaint 
 mirror, easy chairs and sofas, and a hundred nothings 
 
514 POETS. 
 
 that always add an indescribable charm, were all massed 
 in this room. But the glory of all, and that which sanc- 
 tified all, was seated in a low arm-chair near the door. 
 A small table, strewed with writing materials, books, and 
 newspapers, was always at her side." * 
 
 * Mr. Browning was for some years the president of the Shakespeare Society. 
 But it was well understood that he took the office in answer to eager solicitation 
 on the part of some of the members, and that he had never much occupied him- 
 self about its affairs. In fact, the society has been directed by gentlemen well 
 known among literary men as specially Interested in the criticism of Shake- 
 speare. Unfortunately, there broke out a bitter feud between two prominent 
 members. They brought their griefs before the public, and some of their pub- 
 lished letters were acrimonious and very disagreeable. ISTaturally, the society 
 suffered while this war went on. Other prominent members withdrew, unwill- 
 ing to seem connected with the indecencies of such a contest. Other members, 
 who did not wish to do this, went to their president, Mr. Browning, to ask him 
 to bring them out of their troubles. " IsTo," he said, " I am only the figui-e-head. 
 You will have to go to the captain." 
 
 When the University of Oxford made Browning a Doctor of Laws, the 
 public orator thus ref errred to him, in elegant Latin : 
 
 " With how much subtlety does he penetrate the hearts of men, explore the 
 deepest recesses of their thought, and watch the various movements of their life 1 
 He has, as you all know, not only interpreted iEschylus to us, than whom no one 
 is more lofty, and also Euripides, than whom no one is more human, so that, 
 though one is ignorant of Oreek, Alcestis {al ses' tis) touches him with pity, and 
 Hercules with fear. So much for the tragedy of the ancients. He has also, in a 
 sort of lyric style, handled later tragic subjects, as one who worships at once two 
 muses,— Melpomene (jnelpmn' e iw), and Euterpe (« ter' pe). Who has sung the mar- 
 vels of music more nobly than he? He has painted the life of the faultless 
 Elorentine painter as if with a hundred of the brightest colors from the twihght 
 of the West. How often has he called up Italy before us of the West, while we 
 were sitting at our firesides I Among the reeds of our Western homes,— as I hap- 
 pened to be thinking of his idyls,— I seemed to hear a great voice crying out, 
 ' Great Pan is not dead.' nir 6 laeya? ou jiev-qKuv. Pan still lives, united with the 
 memory of Marathon, and the immortal speed of Pheidippedes " (fi dip' pi dez). 
 
fov 
 
 3^^ 
 
 INVENTORS 
 
 
 eg 
 
 (^' 
 
 ■^^J^P^J^-^ 
 
''?;.'^ 
 
 ^( 
 
 ■,^" 
 
 iidison. 
 Bessemer. 
 
 I^ulton. 
 
 The T.lontgolfier 
 
 Stephenson. 
 
 V\?att. 
 
 Arkwright, 
 
 Whitney. 
 
1733-1793. 
 
 TO any persons interested in. mechanics or mechanical 
 pursuits, the lives of inventors are of very great 
 interest. To read the life of any inventor is to follow 
 out in detail the suggestions and ideas which pass 
 through the mind of the inventor, to note the different 
 improvements, the little artifices by which he overcomes 
 difficulty after difficulty, and perhaps to see how, some- 
 times, a great idea breaks suddenly upon him, and some 
 great revolution in civilization is effected. 
 
 It is the history of the invention that is here of in- 
 terest rather than of the inventor. Nor is it, perhaps, of 
 so much consequence here that we select the men who 
 first hit upon any great invention. It is more interest- 
 ing by far, to follow out the proceedings of the man, 
 who, though he may not have conceived the original 
 idea, was able, by improvement after improvement, to 
 carry on the crude invention to successful application. 
 Indeed, it is difficult to say, in many cases, who was the 
 original inventor of one or another of the great appli- 
 ances which are so familiar to us to-day. 
 
 James Watt is usually accepted as the inventor of the 
 steam-engine, though there were steam-engines before 
 Watt ; Robert Fulton is considered the inventor of the 
 steam-boat, and Q-eorge Stephenson of the locomotive- 
 engine, though neither of them was the sole originator 
 of all the ideas which he brought to successful fruition. 
 
516 INVENTORS. 
 
 In like manner, we usually think of Sir Richard Ark- 
 wright as the originator of the inventions which gave 
 such an enormous impulse to the cotton manufacture in 
 Q-reat Britain, although it seems clear enough now, that 
 Wyatt, Paul, and Highs had all conceived the idea of 
 spinning by rollers ; that Highs or Hargreaves (har'grevz) 
 invented the spinning-jenny, and that to Crompton we 
 owe the mule. 
 
 It is easy enough to bring up claimants for the honor 
 of invention, after the rich harvest to be reaped has 
 been made apparent. In the case under consideration, 
 ideas may have occurred to others ; but it was Ark- 
 wright who was to make them practicable, who was to 
 bring them to such forms as to practically create the 
 factory system of cotton and wool spinning in Great 
 Britain. 
 
 The middle of the eighteenth century was a time of 
 great activity in the manufacture of cotton. At that 
 time, were those inventions made which changed the 
 system from manufacture by hand, to the factory sys- 
 tem. In the earlier part of the century, cotton and wool 
 were spun by hand in the cottages all over England. 
 They were woven by hand on warps of linen thread im- 
 ported from the Continent. 
 
 We may gain, perhaps in a few lines, such a view of 
 the method of manufacture, as will enable us to see the 
 nature of the improvements effected by Arkwright and 
 his contemporaries. The spinning was done by the 
 women, mainly. A piece of cotton or wool, having been 
 carded by large hand-combs, was twisted on the distaff, 
 and pulled oiit by hand and twisted into yarn. This was 
 given to the weaver, the man of the house, who, having 
 purchased sufficient warp and arranged it on pegs on 
 
ARKWRIGHT. 517 
 
 the side of his house, proceeded to weave by hand, by 
 throwing the shuttle from side to side between the 
 threads of the warp, exactly as it is now done by ma- 
 chinery. He stood in front of the warp, and threw the 
 shuttle in with one hand, caught it with the other, and 
 threw it back. If the piece were broader than thirty-six 
 inches, two men liad to take hold and pass the shuttle 
 between them. 
 
 There were many inventions and contrivances to ren- 
 der this operation more easy, before Arkwright. Mr. 
 John Kay and his son Robert invented various means 
 by which the shuttle was more easily thrown, and by 
 which various colors might be introduced. What was 
 known as the warping-mill was also introduced. And in 
 1738, a patent was taken out by one Lewis Paul, for 
 the invention by John Wyatt, of a machine for spinning 
 by rollers, on precisely the same principle as that used 
 by Arkwright, in the machine for which he took out a 
 patent in 1767. But this earlier machine was most im- 
 perfect in detail, and never came into general use. Its 
 existence, even, was doubted until the original specifica- 
 tion for the patent was discovered. 
 
 Sir Richard Arkwright was one of the many poor 
 boys who have made their own fame and fortune. He 
 was born at Preston, December 23, 1732, in a very 
 humble station of life. He was the youngest of thirteen 
 children, and therefore received but scant education. He 
 was apprenticed to a barber in his youth, and, at the 
 age of twenty-eight, we find him settled in Bolton as a 
 hair-dresser. That business was somewhat more impor- 
 tant at that time than it is now, owing to the mag- 
 nificent wigs worn by everybody with any pretense to 
 fashion. And Arkwright, who had got hold of some 
 
518 INVENTORS. 
 
 means of dyeing hair, was able to turn it to some 
 account. 
 
 He married in 1761, but he does not seem to have 
 been an easy man to live with, and he and his wife were 
 separated in the course of some years. In character,"'- 
 Arkwright seems to have preserved much of the sur- 
 roundings of his early life. He was rude and coarse in 
 nature, and unprepossessing in manner. He had, how- 
 ever, much keenness and energy, and much inventive 
 genius — greater, perhaps, in the line of improvement and 
 arrangement, than of originality. 
 
 Exactly how Arkwright's attention was turned to the 
 spinning and weaving of cotton and wool, we can not 
 say.f But about the year 1767, he appears to have been 
 
 * The most marked traits in tlie character of Arkwright were his wonderful 
 ardor, energy, and perseverance. He commonly labored in his multifarious con- 
 cerns from five o'clock in the morning till nine at night; and when considerably 
 more than fifty years of age,— feeUng that the defects of his education placed him 
 under grea,t difficulty and inconvenience in conducting his correspondence, and 
 in the general management of his business, — he encroached upon his sleep, in 
 order to gain an hour each day to learn English grammar, and another hour to 
 improve his writing and orthography. He was impatient of whatever interfered 
 with his favorite pursuits ; and the fact is too strikingly characteristic not to be 
 mentioned, that he separated from his wife not many years after their marriage, 
 because she, convinced that he would starve his family by scheming, when he 
 should have been shaving (he was then a barber), broke some of his experimental 
 models of machinery. Arkwright was a severe economist of time ; and, that he 
 might not waste a moment, he generally traveled with four horses, and at a very 
 rapid speed. His concerns in Derbyshire, Lancashire, and Scotland were so ex- 
 tensive and numerous, as to show at once his astonishing power of transacting 
 business and his all-grasping spirit. In many of these, he had partners ; but he 
 generally managed in such a way, that, whoever lost, he himself was a gainer. 
 So unbounded was his confidence in the success of his machinery, and in the 
 national wealth to be produced by it, that he would make light of discussions on 
 taxation, and say that he would pay the national debt I His speculative schemes 
 were vast and daring ; he contemplated entering into the most extensive mer- 
 cantile transactions, and buying up all the cotton in the world, in order to make 
 an enormous profit by the monopoly ; and from the extravagance of some of 
 these designs, his judicious friends were of opinion, that if he had lived to put 
 them in practice, he might have overset the whole fabric of his prosperity. 
 
 + " It is unfortunate that very little is known of the steps by which he was 
 led to those inventions that have Immortalized his name. His residence in a 
 
ARKWRIGHT. 519 
 
 interested in speculating as to some mechanical means 
 of lightening the laboi' of these operations. He obtained 
 the assistance of the before -mentioned John Kay, a 
 clock-maker of Warrington, being himself no practical 
 mechanic, though, like most men of a mechanical turn 
 of mind, he was by no means unhandy at turning out 
 one small thing or another. With the help of Kay, Ark- 
 wright constructed a machine for spinning a hard 
 thread suitable for warps. The principle was simple.* It 
 consisted of rollers revolving at different rates, between 
 
 district where a considerable manufacture of linen goods, and of cotton and linen 
 mixed, was carried on, must have given him ample opportunities of becoming 
 aequainted with the various processes that were in use in the cotton manufact- 
 ure, and of the attempts that were then making to improve them. His atten- 
 tion was thus naturally drawn to this peculiar department ; and, while he saw 
 reason to conclude that it was likely to prove the most advantageous in which 
 he could engage, he had the sagacity and good fortune to invent and improve 
 those extraordinary machines by which, unlike most inventors, he amassed vast 
 wealth, at the same time that he added prodigiously to the demand for labor, 
 and to the riches and comfort of the civilized ■wotM.."— Encyclopedia BriUanica. 
 
 * The reader, to whom these remarks do not seem sufficiently clear and self- 
 explanatory, will be glad to read the description of Arkwright's inventions in 
 Erasmus Darwin's "Botanic Garden." 
 
 " Where Derwent guides his dusky floods 
 
 Through vaulted mountains, and a night of woods. 
 
 The nymph Gossijpia (gos nip' i a) treads the velvet sod. 
 
 And warms with rosy smiles the wat'ry god ; 
 
 His pond'rous oars to slender spindles turns, > 
 
 And pours o'er many wheels his foaming urns ; 
 
 With playful charms her hoary lover wins. 
 
 And wields his trident while the monarch spins. 
 
 iPirst with nice eye, emerging Naiads cull 
 
 !Prom leathery pods the vegetable wool ; 
 
 With wiry teeth, revolving cards release 
 
 The tangled knots, and smooth the ravel'd fleece ; 
 
 Next moves the iron hand with fingers fine. 
 
 Combs the wide card and forms th' eternal line ; 
 
 Slow with soft lips the whirling can acquires 
 
 The tender skeins, and wraps in rising spires: 
 
 With quicken'd space successive rollers move. 
 
 And these retain, and those extend, the rove : 
 
 Then fly the spokes, the rapid axles glow. 
 
 While slowly clroumvolves the laboring wheel below." 
 
520 
 
 INVENTORS. 
 
 which the cotton was made to pass. The cyhnders 
 which revolved the slower, held the thread ; while the 
 next pair, revolving faster, drew it out and twisted it. 
 
 It is said that Arkwright fell on the idea of this in- 
 vention from observing a rod of iron lengthened in a 
 rolling-mill. Kay asserted, about twenty years afterward, 
 that Arkwright stole the whole invention bodily from 
 Highs. The case is one of great obscurity. Neither side 
 seems to have made good their position, and, as we 
 know, the principle had been already hit upon by 
 Wyatt. 
 
 Arkwright, however, pressed his advantage with his 
 great business ability. He succeeded in associating with 
 himself Messrs. Strutt and Need, gentlemen interested in 
 the cotton inanufacture, who su^jplied him with means. 
 He was thus enabled to go on with his work, and, in 
 1769, he took out a patent for his invention. Un- 
 doubtedly, the credit of perfecting the machine belongs 
 to Arkwright. There may be doubt as to whether he 
 conceived the main idea. With his partners, he erected 
 a mill at Nottingham, and proceeded with the manufact- 
 ure of warp. The machinery was at first driven by 
 horses, but as this proved expensive, they set up an- 
 other mill at Cromford, which went by water, wherein 
 the machinery was much enlarged and increased. 
 
 We can not go into detail in regard to all the other 
 machines for cotton manufacture which were invented 
 and improved at this time. In many of them, Arkwright 
 did a part, generally in the direction of combining, im- 
 proving, and arranging the work of other men. The 
 spinning-jenny was invented by Hargreaves, and this 
 formed a useful complement to Arkwright's machine, for 
 the one was better for twisting the warp, and the 
 
AEKWRIGHT. 521 
 
 other for the woof. The machine for carding by cylin- 
 ders was also invented,— re-invented, as we may say. It 
 had been before conceived of by Paul, the partner of 
 Wyatt. We must also note the drawing-frame. 
 
 In all these inventions, Arkwright had his hand. We 
 may remark that he claimed to be the sole and original 
 inventor of each and all of them. But though we can not 
 go so far as to allow this, it is indubitable that to Ark- 
 wright is owing a large amount of their efficiency and 
 their general use. 
 
 Curious as it may seem, these machines for the im- 
 provement of cotton-spinning were looked upon with the 
 most bitter hatred by the cotton-spinners of the North of 
 England.* Formerly, all the spinning and weaving had 
 been done by individuals in their own cottages. This 
 new machinery necessitated the erection of factories, and 
 the employment of large capital and much labor. The 
 fiercest assaults were made on the new system. Armed 
 mobs in Lancashire and other counties scoured the 
 country for spinning-jennies, and destroyed them. The 
 mills erected by Arkwright, and by such as had adven- 
 tured to buy the right to use his machines, were attacked 
 and demolished. The people could not see that this in- 
 
 * What is still more curious than the general opposition of the poorer classes, 
 the hand spinners and weavers, was the vigorous antipathy exhibited by the 
 manufacturers to Hargreaves' jenny and to Arkwrlght's machines. One would 
 naturally suppose that the capitalists would have imagined that the introduction 
 of machinery, which converted the cotton business from a small business into an 
 immense industry, would have been decidedly to their own advantage. Such was 
 not, however, the case. The manufacturers bitterly opposed the introduction of 
 Arkwright's machines. They refused to purchase his yarns ; they agitated in Par- 
 liament for the extra taxation of the calicoes made by his partners, Messrs. 
 Strutt and IsTeed. Nor were they content with this, but used more open violence. 
 On one occasion, a large manufactory of Arkwright's in Lancashire was attacked 
 and utterly destroyed, though there were plenty of police and military at hand. 
 The civil magistrates utterly refused to trouble themselves about the matter, or 
 to interfere in any way. 
 
522 
 
 INVENTORS. 
 
 troduction of machinery was a benefit. They took it for 
 their worst enemy. 
 
 Nevertheless, Arkwright prospered. He sold to many 
 the right to manufacture under his patent, and accumu- 
 lated a fortune for himself and his partners. He also 
 pressed his business himself, and, having great energy 
 and business power, his mills and manufactories were 
 most successful. He was, however, not so utterly fort- 
 unate as to his patent as he would have liked. His first 
 patent, taken out in 176 7, was largely infringed. His 
 great success had excited much jealousy, and there was 
 also a lurking feeling that Arkwright was not the origi- 
 nator of the inventions he claimed. In 1781, he brought 
 in several actions to vindicate his patent. Only one came 
 to trial as a test case. This was in regard to Arkwright's 
 second patent for the spinning, roving, and drawing 
 machines. It resulted unfavorably to Arkwright, and the 
 patent was set aside, — not, we must note, on account of 
 its non-originality, but because of wanton obscurity in the 
 specification. 
 
 Arkwright, conceiving himself unjustly treated, brought 
 out a statement of his case for Parliament, but no legis- 
 lation ensued. He brought the case to trial again in 
 1785, and the former proceedings were reaffirmed. His 
 patents were therefore nullified, and his inventions were 
 thrown open.* 
 
 * It was not till this last trial that any attempt was made by Arkwright's 
 enemies to show that he was not really the inventor of the machines he had 
 patented. Then one Highs was introduced, who testified that, seventeen years be- 
 fore, he had invented a machine for the spinning by rollers, and that he had 
 employed a watch-maker named Kay to make a model for him. Kay then testi- 
 fied that he had shown the model to Arkwright, who had subseq-aently made his 
 inventions. This testimony must be received with great suspicion, and it must be 
 remarked that the verdict was not given on the question of the invention, but on 
 the matter of the defective specification. To tell the truth, "the improbability 
 
ARKWKIGHT. 523 
 
 In spite of this set-back, Arkwright continued to 
 flourisli. His business ability was quite sufficient to 
 enable him to compete easily with any one, and, although 
 he drew no more money from his patents, his manufac- 
 tories brought him in an ample fortune. The town of 
 Cromford, where his mills were situated, grew and 
 flourished greatly, and Arkwright himself became most 
 prosperous. In 1786, he was made High Sheriff of the 
 county, and, having been selected to present a congratu- 
 latory address to the king, George HI, on the occasion 
 of his escape from assassination, he received the honor 
 of knighthood. There have been few men upon whom 
 the honor could have been more fittingly bestowed; and 
 few men toward whose efforts the attention of the world 
 has been so rightly directed. He died at Cromford, in 
 his own house, August 3, 179 2.* Although Arkwright 
 
 of tlie story told by Highs and Kay, seems glaring and obvious." Higbs asserted 
 that, almost twenty years before, he had made this invention,— an invention of 
 which he must have known the value, for he was well acquainted with the gen- 
 eral business of cotton-spinning, and had relations with various manufacturers. 
 He must have known of the efforts that were being made to set aside Arkwright's 
 patents ; he must have heard of the two trials in 1781 and 1785. Had he really 
 been the inventor, and had Arkwright really stolen his ideas from him, it is im- 
 probable that he would have remained silent for sixteen years, more especially as 
 there were many enemies of Arkwright who would have been only too willing to 
 take up any thing which might serve to injure him. And had Arkwright been in 
 the alleged position, had he been practically in Highs' and Kay's power, it seems 
 improbable that he would have behaved toward them as he did, treating them 
 with utter indifference. It seems most probable that the story was manufactured 
 for the third trial. It should be said, however, that there are not wanting those 
 who beUeve the contrary. It should be said also that none of Akrwright's inti- 
 mates ever had any doubts as to the justice of his claims. Some of them, indeed, 
 could speak to the circumstances from their own personal knowledge ; and their 
 testimony was uniform and consistent. 
 
 * Arkwright never enjoyed the best of health, although always reported to be 
 a man of great strength. There are tales of his m.uscular prowess in elections at 
 Preston, where he is said to have played the man. His later life, however, though 
 not of such a nature as to require bodily strength, must have been very wearing 
 indeed, and, in addition to his work, he was always, from his earlier years, 
 afflicted with a grievous asthmatic affection. His energy and his dogged persever- 
 
524 INVENTORS. 
 
 can not claim a place among the greatest mechanical 
 minds of the world, his name must be ever memorable 
 as the founder of the enormous industry of cotton man- 
 ufacture by which England has grown so rich. The 
 factory system has given enormous riches to the country 
 and to individuals. It has done much toward giving 
 England the foremost position as a manufacturing power. 
 It has been the cause of the sudden growth of great 
 cities. And of this system, Arkwright was the undis- 
 puted creator. 
 
 ance seem to have been the qualities to wliicli he owed his advancement in this 
 world. He could not bear to remain still ; to his mind, each advance only placed 
 him in a position to advance again. And the result of his untiring energy was 
 not only a fortune to himself, but a practical increase of wealth to the whole 
 world. His inventions have conferred infinitely more benefit on his native coimtry 
 than she could have derived from the absolute dominion of Mexico or Peru; 
 they have been universally productive of wealth and enjoyment. 
 
WATT. 
 
 1736-1819. 
 
 THERE were steam-engines in this world before 
 James Watt, — or rather engines in which, tlirough 
 the agency of steam, atmospheric pressure was made to 
 do the work which the steam subsequently was per- 
 suaded to perform itself. In many parts of England, 
 Kewcomen (nu kom'en) steam-engines were used to pump 
 out the colliery pits. This engine invented by Newcomen 
 was the one on which Watt's first experiments were 
 made. To us, to-day, it seems but simple. There was a 
 boiler in which steam was generated. Beside the boiler 
 was a cylinder in which a piston worked, the rod of 
 which was connected with a lever which, in turn, con- 
 nected with the pump. As the piston in the cylinder 
 rose and fell, the pump worked. The motion of the 
 piston was obtained in this way. When the piston was 
 raised and the cylinder empty, steam was admitted from 
 the boiler. This steam was then condensed by the in- 
 jection of cold water, which cooled the whole thing, and 
 the steam, turning to water, ran out at the bottom, 
 leaving a vacuum. The piston was then forced down by 
 the pressure of the atmosphere, and raised again by the 
 injection of more steam and by the weight of the pump- 
 gear. Such was the steam-engine as it came into the 
 hands of Watt, at that time, an instrument-maker of 
 Glasgow (glas'go), knowing little of the steam-engine 
 
626 INVENTORS. 
 
 beyond such elementary ideas as he could gather from 
 the behavior of his aunt's tea-kettle.* 
 
 James Watt was born on the 19th of January, 1736, 
 at Q-reenock (gren'ok), on the Clyde, Scotland, the son of 
 a shipwright noted in his day, and the grandson of a 
 very ingenious and clever teacher of navigation. As a 
 boy, he was not strong, and was not pressed to follow 
 the usual educational pursuits of his contemporaries. 
 But he took delight in mechanics and in natural philos- 
 ophy,t and made more rapid progress in his own work- 
 shop than in regular "book-learning." His father had 
 been well-to-do in his trade ; but, when James was about 
 seventeen or eighteen, he became unfortunate. So Watt, 
 
 * Once, it is said, lie was reproved by Mrs. Mulrhead, liis aunt, for indo- 
 lence at the tea-table. " James Watt," said tbe worthy lady, " I never saw such 
 an idle boy as you are ; take a book, or employ yourself usefully ; for the last 
 hour you have not spoken one word, but taken off the lid of that kettle and put 
 it on again, holding now a cup and now a silver spoon over the steam, watching 
 how it rises from the spout, catching and counting the drops it falls into." By 
 many it is held that James Watt, then at the age of about six, was then and 
 there discovering the wonders of the power of steam. But it may be possible 
 that this goes too far. We have an indistinct recollection of the same story being 
 told to account for the beginning of Papin's {p~i pangz') studies, in regard to 
 steam, about a century before. We fancy that not a few boys, beside James 
 Watt, have watched the steam rise from a tea-kettle when they had something 
 better to do wMch they were not very fond of. "This is more probably an after- 
 thought," i-emarks Mr. Smiles, of the supposition, " borrowed from his subsequent 
 discoveries. The probability is, that little James was quite as idle as he seemed." 
 
 t Watt, like many other boys who have turned out well, was, while a boy, a 
 very great reader. He was an indiscriminate reader in his youth, and seemed 
 hardly to care what he read about. "I have never yet," he remarked, "read a 
 book without gaining information, instruction, or amusement." At Glasgow, he 
 had fuU chance to indulge himself; for the College library was accessible to him, 
 and his friends (the professors) were glad to lend him books. Books of every sort 
 were to his taste. He read long and tedious works when he thought he could 
 learn something from them ; but he also delighted in novels. Earlier in his hfe, 
 he had read whatever came in his way, although he was more interested in nat- 
 ural philosophy than in any other subject, and also in matters of surgery and 
 medicine. But he "was not, however, a mere book-worm." He delighted to 
 wander about the country on foot, and thus he studied botany in the iields, and 
 afterward geology. He was fond of fishing also, and loved to talk with whom- 
 ever he met in his excursions, being fond of old folk lore and tradition. 
 
WATT. 527 
 
 forced to look to himself for his support, established 
 himself in Glasgow* as a maker of mathematical instru- 
 ments, having served a sort of apprenticeship in London. 
 At Q-lasgow, he became intimate with many in the Uni- 
 versity, whose tastes for mechanics and natural philoso- 
 phy coincided with his. He was untiring in the pursuit 
 of knowledge, willing to learn from anybody, and also to 
 teach any one whatever he knew himself. It is said he 
 learned German and Italian, in order to read certain 
 books in those languages on his favorite studies. It was 
 in 1759 that his attention was turned to the steam- 
 engine. 
 
 Watt, at this time, was, as he remarks himself, very 
 ignorant of the principles of the steam-engine ; but he 
 set to work, at the suggestion of his friend John Robi- 
 son, to make experiments in the matter. There was in 
 the possession of the University of Glasgow a model of 
 the Newcomen steam-engine (which had been but lately 
 introduced into Scotland), and this was out of order. At 
 Watt's suggestion, it was sent for to London, where it 
 was in the shop of a repairer, and given to him to see 
 what }night be done with it. It was of the same kind 
 as those then used in the collieries. With the descrip- 
 
 * Watt experienced some difficulty in settling himself at Q-lasgow, for the 
 " corporation of hammermen " refused to receive him among them, on account of 
 his having served no regular apprenticeship. He "was, therefore, unable to open 
 a shop for himself in the city, Nor was he even allowed to open a workshop in 
 which to make experiments. The custom of the times was such that those who 
 pursued tbe various trades, constituting "guilds," as the name was, had the right 
 to say who should and who should not practice such and such a trade in their 
 city. But the Professors of the University of Glasgow, who had jurisdiction 
 within the College-grounds, gave to AVatt the opportunity which the hammermen 
 denied. He was allowed a workshop, and also a place for the sale of his mathe- 
 matical instruments. But his business went slowly, and luckily, as it turned out ; 
 for he was thereby compelled to turn his hand to other odd Jobs which he could 
 pick up, and thus drifted upon his great invention. 
 
528 INVENTORS. 
 
 tion already given in mind, it will not be difficult to 
 follow Watt's operations, and to see the great improve- 
 ment which he made. 
 
 The cylinder in which the piston worked, had to be 
 heated and cooled with each stroke, as the steam was 
 admitted and condensed. Watt correctly thought that 
 an immense quantity of fuel and power was wasted by 
 this continual heating and reheating. He tried number- 
 less experiments to obviate the difficulty, which was a 
 serious one. It was necessary that the cylinder should 
 be always as hot as the steam which entered it, namely, 
 it must be above 212°. But in order that the steam 
 might be condensed it was necessary that the tempera- 
 ture should be reduced to 100°. Not to waste space. 
 Watt's great invention, — a very simple one when you 
 know all about it, — was to keep the cylinder hot and to 
 have a separate vessel in which the steam should be 
 condensed. "Have you seen Jamie Watt?" asked a 
 friend of Robison. "He'll be in fine spirits now with 
 his engine. * * * Gad, the separate condenser's the 
 thing : keep it but cold enough, and you may have a 
 perfect vacuum, whatever be the heat of the cylinder." 
 
 The invention once made, the next difficulty was to 
 perfect it, and here Watt had no easy time. He hired 
 an old cellar in which to prosecute his operations, and 
 went ahead much hampered by lack of money and lack 
 of proper materials. The Glasgow mechanics could not 
 do work good enough for him, and his first experiments 
 were only partially successful. But he was satisfied that 
 he had hit on the right principle, and worked away in 
 larger quarters, where he attempted to set up an engine 
 with the aid of an assistant. But his experiments were 
 not wholly successful, and he was in great need of suf- 
 
WATT. 529 
 
 ficient funds to carry on his work, for he was a j)oor 
 man himself. It may be remarked here, that he had 
 already married and had one or two young children. 
 
 So early as this, then, had Watt arrived at the prin- 
 ciple of his invention, though he had not reached the 
 end of his difficulties. He had, in fact, but just come 
 to the beginning of them. He was satisfied that he had 
 the right principle in his mind. But he had no money 
 for further experiments ; in fact, he could hardly keep 
 his head above water. But his whole thoughts were 
 with his engine. He could nowhere find skilled me- 
 chanics who could make the necessary parts of the 
 proper strength, exactness, and niceness. Indeed, there 
 were not many such workmen in all Great Britain ; and 
 had there been, Watt could hardly have hired them. In 
 1765, his friend, Dr. Black, who had been continually 
 interested in him, and had lent him sums of money 
 now and then to continue his experiments, introduced 
 him to Dr. Roebuck (ro' buk), an enterprising man of 
 business concerns, and of some capital. Roebuck was in- 
 terested in the young man and his invention. A part- 
 nership was made, but even this did not solve all diffi- 
 culties ; for Roebuck himself fell into pecuniary embar- 
 rassments, and matters seemed no further advanced 
 than before. On his birthday, 1770, Watt exclaimed: 
 "To-day I enter the thirty-fifth year of my life, and I 
 think I have hardly yet done thirty-five pence worth of 
 good in the world ; but I can not help it." In spite, 
 however, of repeated discouragements, he could not help 
 keeping his mind on his engine. 
 
 His other affairs did not succeed much better than 
 did his invention. He was forced to undertake many 
 and various occupations with a view of making enough 
 
530 INVENTORS. 
 
 money to support his family. He occupied himself 
 much with surveying and bridge-building. While absent 
 on one of his expeditions, his wife fell ill, and he reached 
 home only to find that she had died. He felt this to be 
 the worst blow which had befallen him. He felt him- 
 self to be at the most unfortunate point of his life. 
 This was in 1773. 
 
 In 1774, Watt formed a connection which, although 
 it did not entirely do away with all his trouble and worry, 
 was ultimately the means of raising him from his miser- 
 ably uncomfortable position to ease and, indeed, wealth, 
 and which brought his engine to completion and put it 
 into general use all over the country. This was his part- 
 nership with Matthew Boulton (boi' ton). Matthew Boulton 
 was a manufacturer of Birmingham, — a man of large 
 mind and broad business ideas. He had fallen heir, in 
 1759, to his father's business, that of maker of shoe- 
 buckles and buttons, and other articles of steel and 
 silverware. This business was by the younger man 
 largely extended. At Soho, near Birmingham, Boulton 
 had built himself a manufactory, where he collected an 
 establishment of the most excellent workmen in England. 
 His aim from the first had been to reach the highest ex- 
 cellence. He extended his business in every way that 
 came naturally, and at this time had acquired a reputa- 
 tion for the best of workmanship and for great business 
 ability. He describes his establishment as "the largest 
 hardware manufactory in the world." 
 
 Boulton became interested in Watt, through the neces- 
 sity of finding some substitute for water-power at his 
 establishment at Soho. But, though his attention was 
 turned to Watt and his improvement on the Newcomen 
 engine, it was not for a long time that he saw his way 
 
WATT. 531 
 
 clear to join with Watt in the enterprise. But, finally, he 
 decided, and henceforth Watt was backed by business 
 ability and money. 
 
 Throughout Watt's life, the overcoming of one diffi- 
 culty seemed only the opening up of many more. When 
 he hit upon his idea of the separate condenser, he had 
 only begun upon a series of troubles. When he had at 
 last found money and assistance in his partnership with 
 Boulton, he at once encountered difficulties of a different 
 but no less distressing nature. At first, however, success 
 seemed at hand. An engine was erected at Soho, and, 
 thanks to the skillful workmanship which was then at 
 Watt's disposal, it worked most successfully. 
 
 There was one difficulty in the way of further work. 
 Watt had patented his invention six years before, and 
 only eight years more remained. Could the capitalists of 
 England be persuaded of the necessity of the steam- 
 engine so shortly as to allow its inventors to remunerate 
 themselves for their time and expense before their patent 
 should expire ? But this difficulty was obviated by the 
 passage through Parliament of a bill whereby the term 
 of the patent was extended for twenty-five years. On 
 this, the partnership between Boulton and Watt was con- 
 summated. It had not, up to this time, been fully 
 arranged, though Boulton had possessed himself of the 
 share formerly owned by Dr. Roebuck, who had failed. 
 Orders had already been received for engines, and the 
 manufacture had begun.* 
 
 Engines were ordered for various purposes, but the 
 chief use to which the new invention was at first piit 
 
 * About this time Watt married again. He spent some time at Glasgow in 
 endeavoring to soften the lieart of his proposed father-in-law. The partnership 
 with Boulton seems to have done the business. 
 
632 INVENTORS. 
 
 was to the pumping out the Cornish mines * which were 
 at tliis time so flooded with water as to be in many cases 
 wholly useless. The Newcomen engine was used through- 
 out Cornwall for a pumping engine ; but its inferior 
 power, and the extreixie expense in fuel, rendered it 
 practically useless in many cases. The miners now turned 
 their attention to Watt's engine,! and, by the end of 1776, 
 orders for several engines had been received at Soho. 
 Watt himself went down to Cornwall to superintend 
 operations, and the mining country was for some years 
 the scene of his principal proceedings. J He was beset 
 with many difficulties. In the first place, even with the 
 skilled workmen of Boulton's establishment, it was in 
 
 * Boulton, later in life, wrote as follows in regard to the state of tlie Cornish 
 mines : " The copper and tin mines of Cornwall are now sunk to so great a depth, 
 that had not Mr. Watt and myself nearly expended our fortunes and hazarded 
 our ruin hy neglecting our regular business, and hy a long series of expensive ex- 
 periments in bringing our engine to its present degree of perfection, those mines 
 must inevitably have stopped working, and Cornwall at this time would not have 
 existed as a mining country. The very article of extra coals for common engines 
 would have amounted to more than the entire profits of their working." Watt 
 also speaks of the condition of the mines. " The Tingtang people," he writes, 
 "are now fairly put out by water, and the works are quite at a stand. Poldlce 
 has grown worse than Wheal (hwel) Virgin, was ; they have sunk £400 a month 
 for some months past, and f 700 the last month." Tingtang, Wheal Virgin, and 
 Poldice were the names of miines. 
 
 + Indeed, before the partnership, incLuiries had come to Boulton from Cornwall 
 in regard to the new Scotch invention. 
 
 I Watt had a hard time of it in Cornwall, what with riding and walking 
 from mine to mine, listening to complaints of delay in the arrival of the engines 
 from Soho, and detecting and remedying the blunders and bad workmanship of 
 his mechanics. Added to which, everybody was low-spirited and almost in 
 despair at the bad times,— ores falhng in price, mines lulled with water, engine- 
 men standing idle, and adventurers benaoaning their losses. He was much 
 troubled at first by the prejudice of the people, especially the workingmen, in 
 favor of the old Newcomen engines, which had been used throughout Cornwall to 
 pump out the mines, but which were now powerless to efi'ect what the Watt en- 
 gines were found able to accomplish. And he "liked the people no better than 
 their engines." He was annoyed and disturbed by rumors about himself and his 
 partner, and by all manner of petty annoyances, which he could not bear with 
 the equanimity and calmness of Boulton, who had much greater knowledge of 
 mankind. 
 
WATT. 533 
 
 some cases not possible to attain the perfection of manu- 
 facture desired. Then the Cornish men were a hard set 
 to deal with, and Watt was no great hand in the manipu- 
 lation of human nature, though he understood physical 
 nature very well. The work, too, was harassing, and 
 Watt was in weak health. "I fancy," he said, "that I 
 must be cut in pieces, and a portion sent to every tribe 
 in Israel," so many were the places where his personal 
 attention was necessary. Then financial embarrassments 
 crowded upon the firm. Boulton, of a pushing business 
 nature, lost no opportunity to extend his connections; 
 the new extensions required additional capital ; the engine 
 business, although it promised much, brought in less than 
 nothing. 
 
 But success came at last.* After the partnership had 
 existed ten years or more, it began to be profitable. 
 Orders came to the firm in large numbers, and Watt was 
 at last possessed of what had as yet been an always un- 
 attainable goal to him, — a balance at his bankers'. Boul- 
 ton, even now, was not wholly on his legs ; but that was 
 not the fault of the engine business, which at this time 
 began to be immensely profitable. The years of trial and 
 hardship, of experiment and failure, had passed away. 
 The constant inventive genius of Watt, aided by the un- 
 failing confidence and great ability of Boulton, had 
 
 * "The steam-engine had now hecome firmly established as a working power. 
 Beginning as a water-pnmper for miners, it had gradually been applied to drive 
 com and cotton mills, to roll and hammer iron, to coin money, to work machinery, 
 and to perform the various labor in which the power of men and horses, of wind 
 and water, had before been employed. The numerous orders for new engines 
 which came in at Soho kept the works increasingly busy. Many skilled workmen 
 had by this time been trained into expertness and dexterity ; and, being kept to 
 their special departments of work, — fathers training their sons to work with them 
 at the same benches,— a degree of accuracy and finish was reached which con- 
 tributed to establish and maintain the prestige of the maniifactory." 
 
534 
 
 INVENTORS. 
 
 rendered the steam-engine an effective agent. It was ap- 
 plied at first to the pumping of water. But before Watt's 
 death, it had been applied to many other objects, even to 
 locomotion on land and water, although ultimate success 
 in these latter directions was reserved for Stephenson and 
 Fulton. 
 
 Watt lived for thirty years after prosperity came to 
 him, a busy and happy life. While it was necessary, he 
 himself, as did his partner Boulton, took personal over- 
 sight of the whole business ; but as he grew older, others 
 came to the front. James Watt, the younger, and Mat- 
 thew Boulton, the younger, in 1795, became members of 
 the firm ; and the infusion of young blood gave a well- 
 timed stimulus to the business.* 
 
 Watt's last f years were clouded only by the removal hj 
 
 * A great part of the business intrusted to tlie younger members of tlie firm, 
 consisted in looking after infringements of the patent, whicli were very numerous, 
 and wbich., of course, bad to be prosecuted if the patent were to be worth any 
 thing at all. The patent had now only five or sis years to run, and, of course, 
 when it expired no more royalties would be paid to Boulton and Watt, although 
 their superior skill in manufacture would, of course, give them the lead over all 
 competitors. The infringements were of two sorts. Pirst, there were infringe- 
 ments proper, where engines of the Watt model had been set up and worked 
 without payment of the necessary royalty. Then there were cases when, Boulton 
 and Watt having manufactured the engines, the owners refused point-blank to 
 pay the royalty agreed upon. Toung Boulton went down into Cornwall, where 
 the mine-owners were repudiating their agreements, and was most successful. 
 And test cases were resolutely carried through the courts, by which the vaUdity 
 of the patent was reaffirmed. 
 
 t " Late in his life. Watt enjoyed a visit to his old home, Glasgow. Here he 
 took pleasure in revisiting his old haunts, dined with the college professors, and 
 noted with lively interest the industrial progress of the place. * * * The old 
 city of the tobacco lords had become a great center of manufacturing industry ; 
 it was rich, busy, and prosperous ; and the main source of its prosperity was the 
 steam-engine. A long time had passed since Watt had first taken in hand the re- 
 pair of the little Newcomen engine in Q-lasgow College, and afterward labored in 
 the throes of his invention in the back court in King street. There were no 
 skilled mechanics in G-lasgow then, and the death of the ' old white iron man ' 
 who helped him, had been one of his sorest vexations. Things were entirely 
 changed now. Grlasgow had already become famous for its engine work, and its 
 factories contained among the most skilled mechanics in the kingdom. * * * 
 
WATT. 535 
 
 death of many of his friends. He himself hved to the 
 age of eighty-three. Boulton died in the year 1809,* and 
 other friends of Watt's preceded or followed his partner 
 to the grave. He passed his time quietlj^ and happily, 
 pursuing his studies in those branches which had ever 
 awakened in him the keenest interest, and attending to 
 those concerns of business which still required his per- 
 sonal oversight. He died, after a short and painless ill- 
 ness, at his house in Heathfield, on the 19th of August, 
 1819. "It could hardly be called a seizure," says 
 Smiles ; " for he suffered little, and continued calm and 
 tranquil, in the full possession of his faculties, almost to 
 the last."f James Watt endured many trials during his 
 
 Watt delighted to visit the artisans at their work, and to see with his eyes the 
 improvements that were going forward ; and wlien he heard of any new and in- 
 genious arrangement of engine-power, he would hasten to call on the mechanic 
 who had contrived it, and make his acquaintance." — Smiles. 
 
 * " Matthew Boulton," says Smiles, " was a noble, manly man, and a true 
 leader of men. Lofty-minded, intelligent, energetic, and liberal, he was one of 
 those who constitute the life-blood of a nation, and give force and dignity to the 
 national character. Working in conjunction with Watt, he was in no small de- 
 gree instrumental in introducing and establishing the great new working power 
 of steam, which has exercised so extraordinary an influence upon all the opera- 
 tions of industry." 
 
 He was something more than a mere business man, having a keen love for 
 the arts and sciences. A lover of the fine arts, he sought to elevate in every way 
 the artistic side of his silver and steel business. He deUghted in the society of 
 men of science, and was highly esteemed by them for his solid qualities. Besides 
 the particular branch of natural philosophy, with which he was necessarily ac- 
 quainted, he was an enthusiastic student of other branches, such as chemistry 
 and geology. 
 
 t " Although the true inventor, like the true poet, is born,— not made,— and 
 although Watt pursued his inventions because he found his highest pleasure in 
 inventing, yet his greatest achievements were accomplished by unremitting ap- 
 plication and industry. He was a keen observer and an incessant experimenter. 
 ' Observare ' was the motto he dehberately adopted ; and it expresses the principle 
 and success of his life. He was always on the watch for facts, noting and com- 
 paring them. He took nothing for granted ; and accepted no conclusions save on 
 experimental evidence. * * » ' G-ive me facts,' he once said to Boulton ; ' I am 
 sick of theory; give me actual facts.' Yet, indispensable though facts are, theory 
 is scarcely less so in invention ; and it was probably because Watt was a gi-eat 
 theorist, that he was a great inventor. His invention of the separate condenser 
 
536 INVENTORS. 
 
 life, but arrived at last at due honor. Learned societies 
 were proud to have him among their members. The 
 University of Griasgow, where he had arrived at his great 
 invention, conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of 
 Law. The Prime Minister offered him a baronetcy, — an 
 honor which he declined. Nor has posterity been failing 
 in that respect which it owes to all great men. Watt 
 was buried at Handsworth, but a statue of him has been 
 placed in Westminster Abbey, with an inscription by 
 Lord Brougham (tarc5o'ani), "which is," says Smiles, "be- 
 yond comparison the finest lapidary inscription in the 
 English language ; and among its other signal merits, 
 has one which appertains rather to its subject than 
 its author, that, lofty as is the eulogy, every word of it 
 is true." 
 
 was itself the restilt of a theory, the soiuidness of which he proved by experi- 
 ment. * * * He continued theorizing during the whole progress of his inven- 
 tion of the steam-engine. New facts suggested new arrangements, and the 
 application of entirely new principles, until, in course of time, the engine of New- 
 somen became completely transformed." — Smiles. 
 
THK MONTGOIvKI KRS. 
 
 1740-1810. 1745-1799. 
 
 JOSEPH MICHEL MONTGOLFIER (meshel' mon gOl- 
 fea') was born at Annonay* (annona-) France, 
 about 1740; his brother, Jacques Etienne (zhak a teen'), 
 a few years later. The Montgolfier family came origi- 
 nally from Auvergne (o vern'). On the map of Prance may 
 be seen a little hill at the north-west of Ambert (6ng ber') 
 marked Cros (kpo) de Montgolfier. On the slope of this 
 hill still remain tlie ruins of the ancient Chateau (sha to') 
 Montgolfier, abandoned by the ancestors of the inventors 
 of aerostation during the wars of religion in Prance. 
 
 The family early embraced the advanced ideas of the 
 Reformation, and ardently promoted it among the mount- 
 aineers who dwelt about them. The zeal with which 
 they made converts to the. new religion, betrayed them 
 to the persecutors of the Huguenots (ha gen oz'), and 
 after the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, in 1572, they had 
 to fly from their country, to seek refuge in the mountains 
 of the Vivarais (vevara'), where, with what remained of 
 their fortune, they succeeded in establishing paper-mills, 
 which, descending in the family from father to son, had 
 a high reputation wherever known. 
 
 The father, Pierre (pe ar') Montgolfier, succeeded to this 
 
 * Annonay is said to have been used "by the Romans as a cover-magazine. 
 During the sixteenth century it was seized, burned, and pillaged several times 
 by Protestants and Catholics, alternately. Its position is agreeable and pictur- 
 esque, on an angle formed by two small rivers, and surrounded by lofty hills. 
 
538 
 
 INVENTORS. 
 
 good renown in the manufacture of paper. He was a man 
 not only of great industry, but of scientific attainments, 
 kind to his worlsmen, and beloved by all who knew him 
 from his scrupulous loyalty in all business matters. In 
 this pure and tranquil atmosphere, his two sons were 
 educated with the same habits of diligence and fidelity, 
 pursuing the scientific studies which were required to 
 carry on successfully the industry which they inherited 
 from their father and grandfathers. Both were fond of 
 mathematics, and, at an early age, showed a precocious 
 facility in mathematical problems ; but their tempera- 
 ments were very different, and these temperaments, at 
 first, seemed likely to separate them forever, by launch- 
 ing them into opposite careers. 
 
 Joseph Montgolfler, the elder, was vivacious, active, 
 quick in his conceptions, and still more prompt in carry- 
 ing them out. He was impatient of slow but sure meth- 
 ods, and more apt to jump at a conclusion than to work 
 it over by scientific calculation. In his disposition, he 
 had a fondness for risk and adventure. At the age of 
 thirteen, he formed the project of becoming a hermit, in 
 a solitu-de on the borders of the Mediterranean Sea, and 
 ran away for this purpose from the college of Toumen 
 (tc5o mong'), where the rigid discipline had become insup- 
 portable to him. He had gone no farther than Langue- 
 doc (long geh dok') when his funds gave out ; and, urged 
 by hunger, he abandoned a scheme which had already 
 ceased to attract him, and returned meekly to the school 
 which he still regarded as a prison. 
 
 Life was still as intolerable as before, and his active 
 young mind soon made another plan of escape, which he 
 promptly put into execution. He ran away again, and 
 went to the small town of Saint Etienne, where he hired 
 
THE MONTGOLFIERS. 539 
 
 a cheap room, and set himself to manufacturing a kind 
 of salts employed in the arts, to support himself. He 
 sold his wares by offering them himself from door to 
 door, walking over the mountain roads to do this. When 
 in the course of a day's route, he failed to make enough 
 to buy his dinner, he went to the river and fished for 
 one. He actually kept this up, although so young, and 
 by dint of patience, courage, and saving, succeeded in 
 earning enough to buy himself a few tools, and even 
 some books ; and then saved enough money to pay his 
 expenses, — and a good deal was needed, — for a journey to 
 Paris, which, like all young French provincials, he longed 
 to reach. Joseph Montgolfier did not seek the capital 
 for its pleasures. He went to see and hear the illustrious 
 scientific men of his day. He listened to whatever dis- 
 courses he could find access to, and filled his mind with 
 new ideas and possibilities. He would have remained in 
 Paris, living as best he could, if his father, who had never 
 shown any parsimony toward him, had not insisted on 
 the return of the truant to Annonay. Here he found 
 his younger brother, Etienne, who, in a more conventional 
 manner, with the approbation of his parents, had already 
 made a visit to Paris, and had now returned home. 
 
 Etienne Montgolfier, unhke his brother, had nothing 
 of the vagabond in his disposition. His mind was clear, 
 but he reached his deductions more slowly than Joseph, 
 and carried them out with more deliberation. Less brill- 
 iant in conception than his brother, he had more method. 
 Thus the two worked in harmony with each other. The 
 enthusiastic ardor of Joseph might have wasted itself 
 without result, but for the regulating influence of 
 Etienne's good sense. They both recognized this ; and, 
 united not only by their fraternal affection, but by per- 
 
540 
 
 liNT VENTURS. 
 
 ceiving that each possessed something with which to 
 supplement the needs of the other, they worked together 
 with such harmony, that it is difficult now to give to 
 each the actual share of credit which belongs to him for 
 the wonderful invention which has made their name 
 celebrated. 
 
 While Joseph, after running away from school, was 
 making salts and selling them, Etienne, in accordance 
 with the wishes of his father, went to Paris to study 
 architecture. He was diligent in his attention to the 
 teaching of his instructor, Soufflot (scJo fio') ; and it would 
 still not be ©ut of the question to find houses in Paris 
 built upon plans made by him. 
 
 On his return to Annonay, at an age to begin the 
 real business of his life, he seems to have given up archi- 
 tecture, and with his brother, to have devoted himself to 
 the family paper-mills. He discovered certain methods 
 of improving the fabrication of paper, which had hitherto 
 been unknown in France, the Dutch alone possessing the 
 secret. 
 
 The two brothers, now settled down in the parental 
 home, had plenty of leisure to indulge their characteristic 
 tastes ; Joseph, by indulging all sorts of imaginative 
 speculations on the possibilities of inventions ; Etienne, 
 by following with practical assent, or disapproval, the 
 flights of his brother's fancy. 
 
 About this time, Priestley, the English physician, pub- 
 lished his discoveries of different kinds of air. This work 
 attracted the attention of the two brothers in Annonay, 
 and caused them much reflection, in connection with 
 their own previous line of thought. Watching the light 
 clouds which collected about the mountain-sides, Joseph 
 had already conceived the idea of imitating them in such 
 
THE MONTGOLFIERS. 541 
 
 a way as to make use of his artificial cloud as a bed of 
 ease in which to float through the air. He had even at- 
 tempted to make a sort of cloud, by inclosing steam in 
 some very light envelope of tissue-paper. But the steam 
 growing cool, at once changed into water, and wet the 
 paper, so that his cloud fell to the ground. As soon as 
 the brothers read of Priestley's new airs, the practical 
 Etienne suggested the use for their cloud of a gas which 
 should be lighter than the surrounding air, and would, 
 therefore, rise until it should encounter an atmosphere of 
 its own weight. 
 
 They made several unsuccessful attempts, until, 
 vaguely thinking of electricity and its influence upon 
 clouds, they mixed some wool with damp straw, and set 
 it on fire. They thus produced a thick, light smoke, with 
 which they filled their tissue-paper clouds, and were de- 
 lighted to see them rise promptly in the heavier air out- 
 side their envelopes. The Montgolflers were, of course, 
 mistaken in ascribing any advantage, electrical or other- 
 wise, to the properties of the damp straw and burned 
 wool ; the ascent of their clouds was diie to the expan- 
 sion of the warm air inside the tissue-paper, which made 
 it lighter than the surrounding atmosphere. This was 
 proved a year later by de Saussure (deh so sur'), who 
 made a paper-balloon ascend by inserting a soldering-iron 
 at white heat, which so expanded the air within that it 
 carried up its slight envelope. 
 
 The two brothers, greatly excited by this success, at 
 once proceeded to put it to a practical demonstration. 
 Etienne Montgolfier first constructed a hollow parallele- 
 piped, only large enough to hold two cubic meters of air. 
 This he had the joy to see ascend ; a second attempt 
 confirmed the first ; the third succeeded better still ; it 
 
542 
 
 INVENTORS. 
 
 was larger, being made to hold twenty cubic meters of 
 air. The force with which this ascended was so violent, 
 that the " cloud " broke the cords by which it was held, 
 and, after ascending a few hundred yards, fell to the 
 ground in the neighborhood. 
 
 On the 5th of June, 1783, the Montgolfiers felt them- 
 selves sufficiently sure of their invention to claim for it 
 the attention of the public. Upon that day, there was an 
 assemblage of the Mats particuliers (a ta' par tik u Je er') 
 of the Vivarais, and these worthies were invited by the 
 inventors of the aerostatic machine to be present at an 
 exhibition which they proposed to make in public. 
 
 The deputies and the spectators, assembled in great 
 numbers on the public square, beheld a sort of balloon 
 (for this word was already in existence), over a hundred 
 feet in circumference, fastened by its lower pole to a 
 wooden car, with a surface of sixteen feet.* The general 
 astonishment was great when the inventors of the ma- 
 chine quietly announced that it was about to be filled 
 with a gas which they could produce at will, in a per- 
 fectly simple manner ; after which, the machine would 
 
 * This machine was made of cloth, lined with paper, sewed on a net-work of 
 strings fastened to the cloth. It was spherical. Its circumference was 110 feet, 
 and a wooden frame, sixteen feet square, held it fixed at the bottom. Its con- 
 tents were about 23,000 cubic feet, and it accordingly displaced a volume of air 
 weighing 1,980 pounds. The weight of the gas was nearly half the weight of the 
 air ; for it weighed 990 pounds, and the machine itself, with the frame, weighed 
 500 ; it was, therefore, impelled upward with the force of 490 pounds. Two men 
 sufaced to raise it and fill it with gas ; but it took eight to hold it down till the 
 signal was given. The different pieces of the covering were fastened together 
 with buttons and button-holes, through which the loss of gas prevented it from 
 continuing longer in the air. 
 
 The first balloons were decorated in most elaborate fashion. One, le Flessdles 
 (jlessSl'), constructed by the Montgolfiers, was very splendid, white and gray, 
 with bands of different colors. On the sides of the globe were medallions— one 
 representing History, and the other Kenown, and flying creatures, sounding 
 trumpets, soared oyer its surface. 
 
THE MONTGOLFIERS. 543 
 
 be seen to ascend to the yky. The statement seemed in- 
 credible, not only to the ignorant multitude, but to those 
 more learned persons who had received some intimation 
 of the theory of the machine. 
 
 The brothers Montgolfier then proceeded to prepare 
 the vapor which was to produce the phenomenon. The 
 machine lay flaccid, like a huge empty bag full of 
 wrinkles, when suddenly it began to fill, swelling visibly, 
 assuming a solid form of graceful shape. As it stretched 
 itself equally on all sides, it struggled to rise like a living- 
 thing. Strong arms detained it until the signal was 
 given, when it sprang away rapidly into the air, and in 
 less than ten minutes had reached a considerable height. 
 It then described a horizontal line for some distance, and 
 beginning to lose gas, which escaped by various apertures, 
 it slowly descended to the ground. 
 
 This first experiment was absolutely successful, and 
 secured for the Montgolfiers the fame of a wonderful dis- 
 covery. 
 
 A report of the ascension at Annonay was at once 
 sent by the deputies of Vivarais, who had witnessed it, 
 to the Academy of Sciences, at Paris, where it excited 
 the greatest interest and curiosity. The Academy chose 
 from its members a committee to investigate the discov- 
 ery of the Messieurs Montgolfier. This commission was 
 composed of eight men of science, among whom was 
 Lavoisier (la vwa ze a')- The inventors were sent for to 
 come to Paris, and assured that the experiment must be 
 repeated there, at the expense either of the Academy or 
 of the State. 
 
 While the Academy, however, like other public corpo- 
 rations, moved but slowly, the enthusiasm of the public 
 created such a pressure that a professor of the Jardin 
 
544 INVENTORS. 
 
 des Plantes (zhar dang' da piong), who had watched with 
 intense eagerness the course of the Montgolfiers, opened 
 a subscription, tlie proceeds of which should be applied 
 to an immediate exhibition in Paris. This subscription 
 was filled up in a very few days, and a new machine 
 was begun by skillful 'instrument-makers of Paris. 
 
 The ascent was made on the 2 7th of August, 1783,* 
 without any concurrence on the part of the Montgolfier 
 brothers, while the Academy was making all the neces- 
 sary preparations for them to repeat their exhibition. 
 Etienne Montgolfier, however, was alreadj^ in Paris, ar- 
 ranging for his own exhibition, and was present at the 
 
 * The Robert brothers constructed this machine, under the direction of M. 
 Charles, a professor of physics. This savant {sa vong') advised the use of hydrogen 
 gas, instead of the vapor employed by the MontgoMers. Hydrogen had been dis- 
 covered six years before by Cavendish, in England. It was then called inflamma- 
 ble air. Weighing fourteen times less than common air, it served the purpose 
 better than the gas used by the Montgolfiers, which had half the specific weight 
 of common air. Hydrogen gas, however, was but little known ; and people feared 
 to handle it on account of its great inflammability. After trying an elaborate 
 means of fllling the balloon, by a simple method, the gas, introduced through a 
 tube, mounted into the globe, and the balloon, although very slowly, was filling, 
 when an explosion took place, and the gas all escaped. It was only by the great- 
 est exertion, producing inflammable air, mending the balloon and strengthening 
 it, that it was made ready for the ascent on the day announced. It was finally 
 accomplished, and filled in the little court belonging to the house of the Robert 
 brothers ; then, under cover of the dark, conveyed on a stretcher through the 
 streets and across the Royal Bridge, to be placed in the Champ de Mars (shong deh 
 mar). The next afternoon, at three o'clock, in the presence of an immense crowd, 
 the balloon rose. The success was great. It rose from the earth with such rapid- 
 ity that in a few minutes it had ascended nearly a thousand yards. It was then 
 lost in a thick cloud, from which it emerged to disappear again. Ladies, elegantly 
 dressed, regarded its flight, in spite of a heavy rain which fell, drenching their 
 pretty costumes. When the balloon reached a high elevation, it burst by too 
 much expansion of the gas within ; and, three quarters of an hour after the 
 start, fell to the ground at Ecouen {a Tmo ong'), five leagues from the place of 
 ascension. 
 
 Here some peasants, who had been watching the strange monster with fear 
 and amazement, saw it fall to the ground, and, approaching it at first timidly, 
 ended by entirely destroying it with their sticks and pickaxes. To finish, they 
 tied it to the tail of a horse, and drove him across hedges and ditches, until 
 nothing was left of it but tattered fragments. 
 
THE MONT«0 IjFIERS. 545 
 
 rising of the first. Tliere was during tlie day some con- 
 troversy in the crowd between the partisans of Professor 
 Charles and those of Montgolfler. 
 
 Each party advocated the merits of its hero and his 
 construction, and said every thing possible to detract 
 from the merits of the rival aerostat. Professor Charles, 
 with the ready tact of French politeness, swept away 
 every trace of ill-feeling by a graceful compliment. 
 When his preparations were all made, he walked up, in 
 sight of the vast assembly, to Montgolfier, and presented 
 him with one of the little balloons, which had already 
 become toys in the hands of every Parisian, saying as 
 he did so : 
 
 " It is for you, Monsieur, to show us the road heaven- 
 ward." 
 
 Montgolfier threw up the little balloon, which sped 
 away into the air, its color, — a bright emerald, — gleaming 
 in a ray of sunshine which broke through the gathering 
 clouds. Bursts of hearty applause followed this little 
 scene. 
 
 Montgolfier was busily getting ready to construct his 
 balloon, according to the will of the Academy. He estab- 
 lished himself in some gardens belonging to his friend 
 Eeveillon (ra va yong'), a celebrated dealer in paper in the 
 street of St. Anthony. Here, shut out from the public 
 gaze, he could build his huge apparatus. Autumn was ap- 
 proaching, and with it bad weather. Frequent rains 
 greatly interfered with sewing the breadths of the huge 
 machine, which could be done only out-of-doors, on ac- 
 count of the space it took up. It was a serious piece of 
 work to fold up the heavy covering, and the thick paper 
 it was made of was liable to break and tear. It took 
 twenty men to move it, using the greatest care and pre- 
 
546 INVENTORS. 
 
 caution. It might have been made, doubtless, more sohd, 
 and less fragile ; but, as the Academy had agreed to bear 
 the cost of making the experiment, the frugal and con- 
 scientious inventor strove to keep down the expense as 
 much as possible. 
 
 On the 11th of September, the weather promised fair, 
 and the machine, entirely finished, was put in place. 
 Every thing had now been made ready for the long- 
 looked-for exhibition. That evening, it was put to the 
 test in private, with perfect success. 
 
 The next day, all the Academy of Sciences were in- 
 vited to be present at the exhibition made at their request. 
 In spite of clouds and threatening weather, it was de- 
 cided to risk the experiment. Fifty pounds of dry straw, 
 lighted in bundles, upon which were then thrown ten 
 pounds of wool in shreds, in ten minutes produced e 
 vapor so expansive and powerful that the machine, ir, 
 spite of its great weight, shook out its folds, wavered and 
 rose, to the amazement and delight of the spectators. It 
 left the ground and rose, restrained only by the strong- 
 ropes which held it. 
 
 Just then rain came on suddenly. The wind blew 
 with great violence ; the only safety for the balloon 
 seemed to be to cut its anchorage and let it go. But 
 as it was the intention of its maker to exhibit it later 
 at Versailles (ver salz'), he could not bring himself to 
 abandon it. It was beaten and torn by the wind, and 
 drenched by the storm, which continued for twenty-four 
 hours, and at the end of that time, the paper, detached, 
 floated off the canvas, thus laid bare, and the latest 
 machine, which had cost so much toil and money, was 
 destroyed in a brief space of time. 
 
 Thus, the balloon, the evening before so successful 
 
THE MONTGOLFIERS. 547 
 
 in its private trial, was now a wreck, and utterly useless. 
 To make matters worse, an ascension was promised at 
 Versailles, six days later, in presence of the king and all 
 the court. Montgolfier, discouraged but not conquered, 
 set to work, with the aid of some devoted friends, and 
 in four days a new balloon was constructed, painted, and 
 decorated. 
 
 This time, the ascent, made in the presence of crowds 
 of spectators, was a perfect success. The inventors had 
 anxiously wished to send up a passenger with the balloon ; 
 but as the king absolutely forbade such a risk, only a 
 wicker cage, containing a lamb, a cock, and a duck, was 
 attached to the balloon. These early aerial travelers 
 appeared to suffer no inconvenience from their voyage. 
 The cock got his wing scorched a little, but that oc- 
 curred before the balloon started, during the lighting of 
 the straw. 
 
 The possibility of balloon ascensions was now fully 
 established. The next demand to be made upon them 
 was that they should be so constructed as to carry pas- 
 sengers. One after another, bold adventurers, who sought 
 fame in air-voyages, made the attempt in safety. The 
 discovery thus passed from the hands of the Mont- 
 golfiers, but to them the glory of the first invention 
 has never been denied, nor was it in their own time 
 withheld. Poems were written to glorify their achieve- 
 ment, medals were struck in their honor, and their father, 
 Pierre de Montgolfier, was ennobled by letters patent in 
 December, 1783.* 
 
 But little pecuniary advantage came to the inventors 
 from their brilliant exhibitions. Etienne soon left Paris 
 
 * The coat of arms conceded to the Montgolfier family, represents a winged , 
 globe, gules, floating over a sea of azure ; the motto attached is : " Sic itur ad astral 
 
548 INVEKTORS. 
 
 and resumed the manufacture of paper. He died at Ser- 
 vieres (sSrveer'), 1799. Joseph, the elder, survived him. 
 He succeeded in inventing several things; among others, 
 the hydraulic ram, which, however, has received many- 
 improvements since his time. He filled a post in the 
 department of Arts and Manufactures, and died in Paris, 
 in 1810. 
 
K XJ L T O N 
 
 ROBERT FULTON (fdbl'ton) was born in the town of 
 , Little Britain, in the county of Lancaster (langk'- 
 as ter), Pennsylvania, in 1765, of a respectable, though 
 not opulent, family. His father, Robert Fulton, was a 
 native of Kilkenny (kll kSn' ni), Ireland. His mother was 
 also of a respectable Irish family, named Smith, estab- 
 lished in Pennsylvania. Robert was their third child, and 
 oldest son. He acquired the rudiments of a common 
 English education at school in his native town.* 
 
 His peculiar genius manifested itself at a very early 
 age. In his childhood, all his hours of recreation were 
 passed in the shops of mechanics, or in the employment 
 of his pencil, and, at this early period of his life, his only 
 wish for money was to buy the materials required to in- 
 dulge these tastes. 
 
 By the time he was seventeen, he had earned some 
 money by painting portraits and landscapes in Philadel- 
 phia, where he lived until he was twenty-one. He then 
 and there became acquainted with Dr. Franklin. About 
 this time, he was advised by some gentlemen who were 
 pleased with the genius they discovered in his paintings, 
 to go to England, where they thought he would be kindly 
 
 ^ His mother died in 1799, on a small farm in Washington County, Pennsyl- 
 vania, which had been purchased for her hy her son Robert. This farra he owned 
 at the time of his death, and he left it hy will to one of his sisters. His patrimony 
 was very small, and he was fond of letting this he known ; desirous to he consid- 
 ered, as he really was, the maker of his own fortune. 
 
650 INVENTORS. 
 
 received by his countryman, Benjamin West, who had 
 then attained some celebrity in London as an artist.* Mr. 
 West vt^as so pleased with the promise of the young artist, 
 and his amiable qualities, that he took him into his own 
 house, where he remained as an inmate for many years, 
 during which Fulton devoted himself chiefly to painting. 
 He spent two years in Devonshire (dSv' on shir), where he 
 became known, among others, to the Duke of Bridgewater 
 and Lord Stanhope (stan' 6p), both of whom were inter- 
 ested m science and the mechanic arts. 
 
 In 1793, Fulton was actively engaged in a project to 
 improve inland navigation ; even at that early day, he 
 had conceived the idea of propelling vessels by steam, f 
 
 In 1804, Fulton, on leaving Paris, where he had been 
 passing some time, sent to America a large collection of 
 his manuscripts. The vessel in which they were, was 
 wrecked ; and, although the case containing them was re- 
 covered, most of his papers were lost, and with them the 
 greater part of his account of his occupation at that 
 period. Inventions for improvements in machinery occu- 
 pied his mind. As a mechanist (mek' an ist) and civil 
 engineer, his talent for drawing was a great advantage to 
 
 * When Pulton returned to America, he brought with him a family piece 
 representing West and his lady, done by that great artist himself, who also 
 painted a portrait of Pulton, perhaps still in the possession of his family. These 
 pictures were offerings of friendship, made and received as tokens of the attach- 
 ment formed between the family of the distinguished painter and the young 
 inventor at an early day. This friendship lasted until his death. 
 
 t In 1797, Pulton took lodgings at a hotel in Paris where Mr. Joel Barlow and 
 his wife had their residence. An acquaintance began, which ripened into friend- 
 ship, lasting through their lives. Soon after, Mr. Barlow removed to his own 
 hotel, and invited Pulton to live with him. He did so for seven years, and during 
 that time learned Prench, and something of Italian and G-erman. He also studied 
 mathematics, physics, chemistry, and perspective. During his residence with Mr. 
 Barlow, he projected and painted a panorama, the first ever exhibited in Paris. 
 As a novelty, it attracted many spectators ; and he afterward sold it, realizing a 
 good sum toward pursuing his experiments in steam. 
 
FULTON. 551 
 
 him in the execution of his designs ; but he seems not to 
 have used his pencil again as a painter till a short time 
 before his death, when he painted some portraits of his 
 own family. 
 
 His occupation in France included experiments upon 
 submarine navigation. He called his machine the 
 plunging-boat ; * but afterward, gave it the name of the 
 " Nautilus " (na' ti lus). Connected with this invention, 
 were what he then called submarine bombs, to which 
 have since been given the name of torpedoes. His experi- 
 ments in blowing up vessels by means of torpedoes were, 
 in practice, wholly successful ; but the British ministry 
 were little inclmed to encourage the invention, consider- 
 ing, it may be, that such a project, if carried out, might 
 destroy the maritime power of Q-reat Britain. Fulton, at 
 last, wearied with applications to government which 
 brought no good results, returned to his native country. 
 He embarked at Falmouth, in October, 1806, and arrived 
 at New York, by the way of Halifax, on the 13th of De- 
 cember. Here he immediately engaged, for a second 
 time, in what he calls his Torpedo War ; during which, 
 he successfully proved the efficacy of his invention, 
 although the coiximittee which examined it, pronounced 
 
 * On the 3d of July, 1801, he embarked, with three companions, on board his 
 plunging-boat, in the harbor of Brest, and descended in it to the depth of Ave, 
 ten, fifteen, and twenty-flve feet. He did not attempt to go lower, because he 
 found that his imperfect machine would not bear the pressure of a greater depth. 
 He remained below the surface one hour. During this time, they were in utter 
 darkness. Afterward, he descended with candles ; but, finding a great disadvan- 
 tage from their consumption of vital air, he caused a small window of thick glass 
 to be made near the bow of his boat, and he again descended with her. He found 
 that he received from his window, which was but an inch and a half in diameter, 
 enough light to enable him to count the minutes on his watch. This plunging- 
 boat was as obedient to her helm under water as any boat could be on the 
 surface. 
 
 Afterward, he contrived for it a reservoir of air, which would enable eight 
 men to remain under water eight hours. 
 
552 
 
 INVENTORS. 
 
 that the system was as yet too imperfect for the govern- 
 ment to rely upon it as a means of defense. Fulton fully 
 acquiesced in this decision, having, in fact, throughout 
 all the transactions concerning it, shown unceasing com- 
 mand of temper and presence of mind, as well as industry 
 and perseverance. His mind became at once engaged 
 with other great projects, and especially that great im- 
 provement in the arts for which the world is so much 
 indebted to him, — namely, the establishment of navigation 
 by steam.* 
 
 Although not the inventor of the steam-boat, it is 
 nevertheless to his knowledge of mechanics, and to his 
 resolution and perseverance, that the triumph of the in- 
 vention is due. 
 
 When Fulton was fourteen years old, he had conceived 
 an idea which, twenty-five years later, had important con- 
 sequences. He and his friends, as boys, were in the habit 
 of using for their fishing excursions on a river in the 
 neighborhood, a heavy old flat-boat, which was propelled 
 by means of poles. Tired out one day by poling this heavy 
 craft against the stream, the boy Robert bethought him 
 of using paddle-wheels turned by a crank, and, after that, 
 the boys never used any thing else. The idea, although 
 not new, was original with him. In 1785, he was familiar 
 
 * In a publication of Fulton's at this time occurs th.e following anecdote : 
 "The Abbe Gregoir (db M' grd gwiir') came back to France from England, 
 having made a tour through that country, where his amiable qualities had intro- 
 duced him into the best society. On his return to Paris, I asked him how he liked 
 England. He answered that the English are a generous, hospitable, good people, 
 and the country would be charming had it pleased God to give them some sun- 
 shine and French cooks ; but they are always enveloped in clouds, and he was 
 starved on abominable legs of mutton, roast beef, beefsteaks, plum-puddings, cab- 
 bages, and potatoes, none of which were half cooked, and were served with sauce 
 hardly eatable. The porter was bitter, and the port so strong he could not drink 
 it. In fact, the good Abbe preferred France, and, being of a humane disposition, 
 seemed to feel sorry for the many inconveniences under which the people 0° 
 England are laboring." 
 
FULTON'. 563 
 
 with the operations of John Fitch in the matter of steam- 
 boats. Fifteen years afterward, Fulton saw in Scotland a 
 boat which was really propelled by steam, for short dis- 
 tances, at the rate of six miles an hour. A year or two 
 after, in France, he obtained access to the papers of John 
 Fitch containing full details of his plan.* Thus aided by 
 the knowledge and experience of previous inventors, and 
 having the advantage of the improved steam-engine of 
 James Watt, his own powers as mechanic and draughts- 
 man enabled him to set about the task with a greater 
 chance of success than his predecessors. Moreover, Chan- 
 cellor Livingston, at that time the American Minister in 
 France, a man of public spirit and much influence, be- 
 came first the friend, then the patron, and finally the 
 partner of Robert Fulton in his enterprise.! 
 
 * John Pitch, devised, in 1787, a steam-boat, which demonstrated to every be- 
 holder that such a thing was possible. It is said that, as he was limping home 
 from church one day, being a great sufferer from rheumatism, he saw a neighbor 
 driving rapidly by in a chaise drawn by a powerful horse. He had frequently, 
 before this, reflected on the tremendous power of steam, and the thought then 
 flashed through his mind, could it not be made to propel a carriage. The idea 
 haunted him day and night, and, to the end of his hfe, John Ktch thought of 
 Uttle else but how to carry out his scheme. He was poor, without means or in- 
 fluence ; but by study and consultation, he succeeded, not only in his first experi- 
 ment, but in making, in 1790, a steam-boat which ran on the Delaware, eight 
 miles an hour with the tide, six against it. The invention was still very imper- 
 fect, but deserves the name of the first steam-boat power. 
 
 t Chancellor Livingston devoted much of his own time and talents to the ad- 
 vancement of science, and the promotion of the public good. The resources of 
 his ample fortune were afforded with great liberality to the support and encour- 
 agement of genius in others. As early as 1798, he believed that he had discov- 
 ered a mode of applying the steam-engine to propel a boat ; he represented this 
 to the Legislature of the State of New York, which, in consequence of his applica- 
 tion, passed an act, vesting Mr. Livingston with the exclusive right and privilege 
 of navigating all kinds of boats " which might be propelled by the force of Are 
 or steam," etc., etc., on condition that he should, within a twelvemonth, build 
 such a boat, the mean of whose progress should not be less than four miles an 
 hour. The application was regarded by the Legislature as a standing subject of 
 ridicule during the session, and, whenever there was a disposition in any of the 
 younger members to indulge in a little levity, they would call up the steam-boat 
 bill, to divert themselves at the expense of the project. 
 
554 INVENTORS. 
 
 In 1803, their first steam-boat was built in France, 
 upon the Seine (san). They were on the point of making 
 an experimental trip with it, when one morning Fulton, 
 as he rose from bed, received a messenger, whose con- 
 sternation and hurry revealed him as the bearer of bad 
 tidings. As soon as he could speak, he exclaimed : 
 
 " Oh, sir ! the boat has broken to pieces, and gone to 
 the bottom ! " 
 
 The weight of the machinery, bearing upon too weak 
 a frame, had literally broken the boat in two during the 
 night, and the fragments of it had been carried to the 
 bottom. Discouraged, but not dismayed, he set about re- 
 pairing the misfortune on the very same day. Without 
 returning to his lodgings, he began to labor with his own 
 hands to raise the boat, and worked for twenty-four hours 
 without allowing himself any rest or taking refreshment. 
 This imprudence is thought to have injured his constitu- 
 tion for the rest of his life. 
 
 The accident had injured the machinery very little, 
 but the boat had to be built over almost entirely. She 
 was completed in a few weeks ; her length was sixty-six 
 feet, and she was eight feet wide. Early in August, Fulton 
 invited the French National Institute to witness a trial of 
 the boat, and it was made in their presence, and wit- 
 nessed by a great crowd of Parisians. The boat moved 
 slowly, but amid the acclamations of the multitude, who 
 considered success to be achieved. As Chancellor Living- 
 ston was about to return home, it was resolved that the 
 next attempt should be made at New York, and an engine 
 for that purpose was ordered from the manufactory of 
 Watt and Boulton, at Birmingham. 
 
 In the month of September, 1807, the famous "Cler- 
 mont," a boat which did not exceed one hundred and 
 
FULTON. 555 
 
 sixty tons in burden, was completed.* Monday, Septem- 
 ber 10th, was the day appointed for a grand trial trip to 
 Albany, and by noon, a vast crowd was assembled on the 
 wharf to witness the performance of "Fulton's Folly." 
 At one o'clock, she moved from the dock, vomiting smoke 
 and sparks from her fires of pine wood, and casting up 
 spray from her uncovered paddle-wheels. As her speed 
 increased, the jeers of the incredulous were silenced, and 
 the departing voyagers caught the sound of cheering, f 
 
 The " Clermont " on her first voyage up the Hudson 
 to Albany, arrived at her destination without accident. 
 
 * The first Pulton boat built in America was launched from the ship-yards of 
 Charles Brown, on the East River, New York. The engine from England was put 
 on board of her. In August, she was completed, and was moved by her machin- 
 ery from her birthplace to the Jersey shore. Mr. Livingston and Mr. Fulton had 
 invited many of their friends to witness the first trial. Nothing could exceed the 
 surprise and admiration of all who witnessed the experiment. The boat had not 
 been long underway when Fulton ordered her engine to be stopped, having im- 
 mediately perceived that there was an error in the construction of her water- 
 wheels. He had their diameter lessened on the spot, so that the buckets took less 
 hold of the water, and when they were again put in motion, it was manifest that 
 the alteration had increased the speed of the boat. This was the "Clermont," 
 which soon after made her first public trip. 
 
 t Mr. Fulton himself was a passenger on this voyage, and, upon his return, 
 published this account of it: 
 " To the Editor of the American Citizen. 
 
 " SiK— I arrived this afternoon, at four o'clock, in the steam-boat from Albany. 
 As the success of my experiment gives me great hopes that such boats may be 
 rendered of great importance to my country, you will have the goodness to pub- 
 lish the following statement of facts. 
 
 "I left New York on Monday, at one o'clock, and arrived at Clermont, the 
 seat of Chancellor Livingston, on Tuesday,— time, twenty-four hours— distance, 110 
 miles. On Wednesday, I departed from the Chancellor's, at nine in the morning, 
 and an-ived at Albany, at five in the afternoon, — distance, forty miles— time, eight 
 hours. The sum is 150 miles in 32 hours,— equal to near five miles an hour. 
 
 " On Thursday, at nine o'clock in the morning, I left Albany, and arrived at 
 the Chancellor's at six in the evening. I started from thence at seven, and 
 arrived in New York at four in the afternoon,— time, thirty hours — space run 
 through, 150 miles, — equal to five miles an hour. Throughout my whole way, both 
 going and returning, the wind was ahead. 'So advantage could be derived from 
 my sails ; the whole has therefore been performed by the power of the steam- 
 engine. I ^™i sii*! your obedient servant, 
 
 "KoEERT Fulton." 
 
556 
 
 INVENTORS. 
 
 She excited the astonishment of the inhabitants along 
 the shores of tlie river, many of whom had not even 
 heard of an engine, much less of a boat, moved by steam. 
 She was described by some who saw her passing in the 
 night, as a fearful apparition, breathing flame and smoke, 
 moving on the waters in defiance of wind and tide. 
 Crews of other vessels, saw with astonishment the fear- 
 ful novelty as it approached them, and when the noise 
 of the machinery was heard, many ran and hid them- 
 selves, while others fell prostrate, beseeching Providence 
 to protect them from the horrible monster belching fire 
 and smoke. 
 
 On the eleventh of February, 1809, Fulton took out 
 his first patent for inventions in navigation by steam. 
 Fulton devoted the rest of his life to the improvement 
 of the steam-boat, the development of his steam-frigate 
 called "Fulton the First,"* and to the modification of his 
 submarine boat, with similar enterprises of invention. 
 
 In the year 1806, he married Miss Harriet Livingston, 
 a relative of his enterprising associate, the Chancellor. 
 Fulton was about six feet high. His person was slender, 
 but well proportioned and well formed. He had the ease 
 
 * On the 20th of June, 1814, the keel of this novel craft was laid, and in little 
 more than four months, on the 29th of October, she was launched from the yard 
 of Adam and Noah Brown, her able architects. 
 
 The scene exhibited on that occasion was magniflcent. It happened on a 
 bright autumnal day. Multitudes of spectators crowded the surrounding shores, 
 and were seen upon the neighboring hills. The river and bay were filled with 
 vessels of war dressed in all their colors in compliment to the occasion. In the 
 midst of these, was the enormous floating mass, whose bulk and unwieldy form 
 seemed to render her as unfit for motion as the land-batteries which were saluting 
 her. Several large steam-boats were seen gliding in every direction, of the burden 
 of three and four hundred tons, with bands of music on board, and crowds of 
 gay and joyous company. 
 
 Unhappily, before the frigate was so far completed as to afford an oppor- 
 tunity of trying her machinery, the mind that had conceived and combined it 
 was gone, 
 
FULTON. 557 
 
 and address of a gentleman, with too much good sense 
 for affectation. A modest confidence in his own worth 
 and talents gave him an unembarrassed deportment in 
 company. His features were strong, of manly beauty; he 
 had large dark eyes, and a projecting brow expressive of 
 intelligence and thought. His temper was mild and his 
 disposition lively. He was fond of society, which he 
 graced by cheerful, cordial manners, and instructed or 
 pleased by his sensible conversation. He expressed him- 
 self with energy, fluencj', and correctness. 
 
 In all his domestic and social relations, he was zealous, 
 generous, and affectionate. Most conspicuous in his char- 
 acter was his calm constancy, his industry, and that inde- 
 fatigable patience and perseverance which enabled him 
 to overcome all difficulties. Litigation concerning his 
 inventions, attached by the claims of others, disturbed 
 his later years. During a legal examination, in which 
 Mr. Fulton was called as a witness, in the hall of Legis- 
 lature in Trenton, he was much exposed to the weather, 
 which was excessively cold, as it was in January. 
 
 When he was crossing the Hudson to return to his 
 home and family, the river was full of ice, which occa- 
 sioned his being several hours on the water in a very 
 severe day. His constitution was ill-fitted to resist such 
 exposure ; and upon his return, he found himself much 
 indisposed. Nevertheless, after remaining in the house 
 for but a few days, he went to give his attention to the 
 work upon his steam-frigate, the building of which was 
 causing him great anxiety. He forgot his feeble health 
 in the interest he took in the work, and in a bad day 
 was exposed for a long time to the weather on her decks ; 
 the effects of this imprudence soon showed themselves. 
 He was soon confined to his bed, his disorder increased, 
 
558 INVENTORS. 
 
 and on the 24th of February, 1815, he died, at the early 
 age of fifty. 
 
 It was not known that his illness was dangerous till 
 a very short time before his death, which was unexpected 
 to his friends and the community. As soon as the event 
 was known, all means were taken to testify the public 
 respect. 
 
 In 1816, a principal street in New York was opened 
 to be a great thoroughfare across the city, from the Ful- 
 ton ferry on the one side to a similar one on the other. 
 This, in honor of the great inventor, was called Fulton 
 street. His remains lie in Trinity Church-yard, in the 
 city of New York. 
 
WHITPNEY. 
 
 17C5-1835. 
 
 ELI WHITNEY was born at Westborougli, in Massa- 
 chusetts, on the 8th of December, 1765. The 
 town was at that time a small agricultural village, and 
 Whitney's father was a farmer of moderate means, but 
 apparently, like most of his neighbors, a man of good 
 habits of economy and frugality, and of the ability to do 
 good hard work for a living. Whitney's youth was passed 
 in the same way that many others have been passed be- 
 fore and since. He did chores, worked on the farm, and 
 learned what he could at the district school. But, early 
 in life, he showed remarkable aptitude for machinery and 
 the use of tools. They tell a story of him, concerning 
 his father's watch, which will bear repeating. Whitney 
 had often desired to examine the mechanism of the 
 watch, but his father had never allowed him to do so. 
 One Sunday, he happened to notice that his father was 
 going to church, leaving his watch at home. Eli at once 
 pretended to be unwell, so that he was excused from 
 going to church himself ; and, when the whole family 
 were out of the house, he at once proceeded to examine the 
 watch, and, indeed, took it all to pieces. He was rather 
 alarmed when he saw it in this condition ; for his father, 
 it is said, "was a stern parent." But, setting to work 
 again, he succeeded in putting all the pieces together cor- 
 rectly. His father never found out what had been done, 
 until Eli many years after, told him about it.* 
 
 * We have from Whitney's sister (quoted in the American Journal of Science^ xxl. 
 202) an account of some of his youthful precocities. " Our father," she says, 
 
560 
 
 INVENTORS. 
 
 This aptitude for machinery stood him in good stead 
 later. During the Revolutionary War, nails were in great 
 demand, and therefore high in price. They were made 
 chiefly by hand, and it occurred to Whitney that he 
 could make them as well as any one else. He suggested 
 the idea to his father, who obtained for him what tools 
 he could. With these, he made such others as were neces- 
 sary, and began the business, which he continued during 
 the winter (when he had no farm work) for two or three 
 years, until, on the ending of the war, the demand for 
 nails ceased. He was able, however, to continue his busi- 
 ness by the manufacture, as we are told, of bonnet-pins 
 and walking-sticks. 
 
 He was very anxious at this time to obtain a liberal 
 education. But many things stood in his way, notably 
 the opposition of his step-mother and the lack of money. 
 By working for some years, however, and by teaching 
 school, he provided himself with funds, and so was 
 enabled to enter Yale College in the year 1789, being at 
 that time twenty-three years of age. While at college, 
 being older than most of his associates, he devoted him- 
 self vigorously to his work, paying more attention to 
 
 " had a workshop, and sometimes made wheels of different kinds, and chairs. He 
 had a variety of tools, and a lathe for turning chair-posts. This gave my brother 
 an opportunity of learning the use of tools when very young. He lost no time, 
 hut, as soon as he could handle tools, he was always making something in the 
 shop, and seemed not to like working on the farm. One time, after the death of 
 our mother, when our father had been absent from home two or three days, on 
 his return he inquired of the housekeeper what the boys had been doing. She 
 told him what B. and J. had been about. ' But what has Eli been doing ? ' said 
 he. She replied, he had been making a fiddle. 'Ah,' added he, despondiugly, 'I 
 fear Eli will have to take his portion in fiddles.' He was at this time about 
 twelve years old." His sister says that his piece of work was thoroughly finished, 
 "like a common violin," and that it made "tolerably good music." It was exam- 
 ined and wondered at by all the people in the country round, and afterward Eli 
 had the repairing of aU the violins in that district,— a business which, we may 
 conjecture, was not calculated to make him a millionaire. 
 
WHITNEY. 561 
 
 mathematics than to the classics. He was, in fact, 
 noted here for his mechanical tastes, as he had been at 
 home.* 
 
 On graduating from college,! Whitney received an 
 offer from a gentleman in Georgia to act as tutor to his 
 sons. On his way to take charge of his pupils, he traveled 
 with Mrs. Greene, the widow of General Greene, of Revo- 
 lutionary fame. With her, Whitney became quite intimate, 
 and Mrs. Greene became very much interested in the 
 young man. This was very fortunate for Whitney; for 
 when he reached Georgia he found that the gentleman 
 who, as he supposed, had employed him, had now engaged 
 somebody else in his place. By this, Whitney was left 
 without friends or any means of assistance, except Mrs. 
 Greene, who at once offered him her house as a home as 
 
 * On one occasion, during a recitation in physics, the tutor spoke of a certain 
 interesting experiment, which he was unable to perform because the apparatus 
 was out of order. It was a complicated thing, and it was necessary to send it 
 abroad to have it repaired. But Whitney asked to be allowed to try his hand at 
 it, and succeeded in bringing it to terms in a manner very satisfactory to the 
 professors. 
 
 At another time, " a carpenter being at work upon one of the buildings of 
 the gentleman with whom Mr. Whitney boarded, the latter begged permission to 
 use his tools during the intervals of study ; but the mechanic, being a man of 
 careful habits, was unwilling to trust them with a student, and it was only after 
 the gentleman of the house had become responsible for all damages, that he would 
 grant the permission. But Mr. Whitney had no sooner commenced his operations, 
 than the carpenter was surprised at his dexterity, and exclaimed : ' There was 
 one good mechanic spoiled when you went to college ! ' " 
 
 + "The advantages of a liberal education to a man of mechanical invention, 
 as well as to a man of business, were very conspiouoiis in the case of Mr. Whit- 
 ney. By this means, his powers of thought, and his materials for combination, 
 were greatly augmented. The letters exchanged between Messrs. Miller and 
 Whitney, both of whom were educated men, are marked by a high degree of in- 
 telligence, and are written in a style of great correctness, and sometimes even of 
 elegance. None but men of enlarged and liberal minds could have furnished to 
 their counsel the arguments by which they gained their first triumphs over their 
 legal adversaries. It no doubt also contributed not a little to conciliate the re- 
 spect of those States which purchased the patent right, to find in the person of 
 the patentee, instead of some Illiterate visionary projector, a gentleman of ele- 
 vated mind and cultivated manners, and of a person elegant and dignified." 
 
662 
 
 INVEN'TORS. 
 
 long as he liked to avail himself of it. He had proposed 
 to study law while acting as private tutor. He was glad 
 to take up his abode with Mrs. Q-reene, and to begin his 
 law studies while living at her house near Savannah. 
 
 It was while staying with Mrs. Greene that Whitney 
 first became interested in the subject of cotton, to which 
 it does not appear that he had previously .given any at- 
 tention. The cultivation of cotton* was at that time by 
 no means the universal occupation of the South that it 
 has since become. In Georgia, it was overshadowed by 
 rice ; in other parts of the South, by tobacco or indigo. 
 This was on account of the difficulty of finding a rapid 
 means of cleaning the green seed cotton, or separating 
 the cotton from the seed. The work had to be done by 
 hand, and was a slow enough process. A pound of clean 
 cotton was a good day's work for one woman. The pro- 
 duction of cotton could not, of course, be carried beyond 
 the amount which could be cleaned, and, therefore, the 
 cultivation languished. 
 
 This state of things was brought to Whitney's attention 
 in this manner. A number of gentlemen from various 
 parts of Georgia, — all men of property, and interested in 
 
 * Cotton was not cultivated in America until 1770. It is said that in 1764, 
 some cotton grown in America and sent to England was detained in the custom- 
 house on the ground that it could not possibly have been grown in America, 
 which, if true, would have made its importation to England in an American ship 
 a breach of the Navigation Laws. It was not till 1770 that the Southern planters 
 turned their attention to the cultivation upon any large scale. They enlarged 
 the cultivation already existing, and introduced new species, notably the Sea 
 Island cotton. But the quantities exported were small. In 1792, it reached only 
 138,324 pounds. This was the year of the invention of the cotton-gin. By 1800, 
 it had increased almost one hundred and fifty fold, the exports amounting to 
 18,000,000 pounds, while some was manufactured in the country. In the first 
 sixty years of the century, the production increased wonderfully, so that in 1860, 
 the crop reached the extent of 4,824,000 bales (the average bale at this time being 
 about 425 pounds). With the Civil War the production dropped; but subse- 
 quently revived, though (in 1876) the crop had not reached the figures of 1859-60. 
 
WfilTlfEY. 563 
 
 the condition of agriculture in the State,— happened to be 
 at the house of Mrs. Q-reene. The conversation turned 
 on the subject of cleaning cotton, and it was the universal 
 idea that, could something be invented whereby the cot- 
 ton could be more easily cleaned, the good resulting to 
 the State, and to the whole South, would be enormous ; for 
 much land unsuited to the cultivation of rice and other 
 staples, might be planted in cotton. Mrs. Q-reene, think- 
 ing of Whitney, remarked that she had a young protege, 
 who, she had no doubt, could make any thing. She pre- 
 sented them to Whitney, "commending him to their 
 notice and friendship." Whitney, however, said that he 
 had never seen cotton or cotton seed in his life, and the 
 conversation seems to have dropped after very little talk. 
 
 But the idea remained in Whitney's mind, and going 
 down to Savannah, he looked about for some cotton, and 
 returning with it to Mulberry Grove, he proceeded to 
 study it with a view of making some apparatus which 
 should be able to clean it cheaply, and with less labor 
 than was demanded by the method then in use. He 
 went to work in a room in the basement, keeping his 
 proceedings a secret from everybody except Mrs. Q-reene 
 and Mr. Miller, who subsequently became his partner. 
 He was badly off for tools, and, indeed, for almost every 
 thing necessary for his work. But beginning at the be- 
 ginning, he made such tools as he needed, and finally 
 arrived at the invention now known as the cotton-gin. 
 No record of his labors remains. We only know that he 
 went to work with no knowledge of cotton or cotton seed, 
 and with hardly any tools, and that in what seems a 
 remarkably short space of time, he had completed the 
 invention. 
 
 The principle of the cotton-gin is in imitation of the 
 
564 Inventors. 
 
 actual hand-cleaning. By the old method, the fibrous 
 part of the cotton was clawed off the seed, to which it 
 sticks most tenaciously, by the fingers of the old negro 
 mammies. Whitney substituted for the fingers, wheels 
 mounted with wire combs, which performed precisely the 
 same operation, cleaning off the fiber and leaving the 
 seed. The cotton in the seed was arranged on a wire 
 netting. Beneath this netting revolved the wheels, or 
 rollers, upon which were mounted wire combs, the teeth 
 of which protruding in their revolutions through the 
 netting, pulled off the cotton fiber and left the seed. 
 Beneath the rollers, or wheels, was a brush which brushed 
 the cotton off into a box. 
 
 On the completion of the invention, Mrs. Greene in- 
 vited to her house a large number of gentlemen inter- 
 ested in agriculture, and to them the machine was ex- 
 hibited. "They saw with astonishment and delight," says 
 Olmsted, "that more cotton could be separated from the 
 seed in one day, by the labor of a single hand, than 
 could be done in the usual manner in many months." 
 This seems a little exaggerated. Whitney himself esti- 
 mated fifty pounds of cleaned cotton a day's work for 
 one man. One pound had previously been held for a 
 day's work. But at any rate the power of cleaning was 
 enormously extended. Whitney set about securing a 
 patent. 
 
 But, even before he had patented his invention, Whit- 
 ney experienced that ill fortune, which pursued him in 
 regard to his proceedings with the cotton-gin. The 
 knowledge of his machine could not be kept secret ; the 
 excitement at a discovery of such importance spread 
 through the State, and persons came from all parts of 
 Georgia to see the machine. It was thought best not to 
 
WHITJSTEY. 565 
 
 make the invention public, until the patent had been 
 secured. But the public broke open the house in which 
 the gin was kept, and carried it away. Before the patent 
 could be obtained, there were numbers of machines, built 
 in imitation of Whitney's, in operation throughout Q-eor- 
 gia. This was only the beginning. From this time until 
 his patent expired, Whitney and his partner, Mr. Miller, 
 were engaged in a constant struggle to obtain the Just 
 reward for an invention of such value from those who 
 were so much benefited by it. 
 
 It was this last feature which was troublesome. To 
 our mind, the cotton-gin was an invention of such inor- 
 dinate value that it was absolutely impossible that the 
 profits should be monopolized. The gain to be made was 
 so great and so certain, that it was absolutely impossible 
 that those who saw their fortune in view should have 
 stickled as to -the means.* We can not relate in detail 
 Whitney's business experiences. It would be a difficult 
 and a disheartening task. He formed a partnership with 
 Mr. Miller for the manufacture of cotton-gins. They 
 planned to establish gins throughout the South, and to do 
 the ginning themselves for a certain price. They were at 
 
 * "I have always believed," Wliitney wrote to Robert Pulton, "that I sbould 
 have had no diifiotilty in causing my rights to be respected, if it had been less 
 valuable, and had been used only by a small portion of the community. But the 
 use of this machine being immensely profitable to almost every planter in the 
 cotton districts, all were interested in trespassing on the patent right, and each 
 kept each other in countenance. Demagogues made themselves popular by mis- 
 representation and unfounded clamors, both against the right and against the 
 law made for its protection. Hence, there arose associations to oppose both. At 
 one time, but few men in CJeorgia dared to come into court, and testify to the 
 most simple facts within their knowledge, relative to the use of the machine. In 
 one instance, I had great difficulty in proving that the machine had been vsed in 
 Georgia, although, at the same moment, there were three separate sets of this ma- 
 chinery in motion, within fifty yards of the building in which the court sat, and 
 aU so near that the rattling of the wheels was distinctly heard on the steps of 
 the court-house." 
 
666 INVENTOS.S. 
 
 once overwhelmed with manifold difficulties. Their patent 
 was attacked, infringed, or disregarded, their credit was 
 strained to the utmost by the expense in setting up the 
 plant, their machines were disparaged in every possible 
 way, their time was taken up in any thing except in 
 legitimately extending and following their business. The 
 whole mass of the land-owners of the South was against 
 them, and fought them in the markets, in the law courts, 
 in the State Legislatures, and in the Congress of the 
 United States. 
 
 Miller and Whitney, as the firm was styled, sold the 
 right to use their machine to the States of North and 
 South Carolina, and Q-eorgia, for certain sums. In a 
 short time, one of the States had repudiated the contract, 
 and had entered suit against the firm to recover what 
 had already been paid. The courts finally declared for 
 Whitney, but not until thirteen years of his patent had 
 elapsed. In 1812, Whitney petitioned the Congress of 
 the United States for a renewal of his patent, but use- 
 lessly. He had spent a great amount of energy and 
 money, and several of the best years of his life, to 
 absolutely no purpose as far as he was himself con- 
 cerned. 
 
 But Whitney could do other things in this world be- 
 side inventing cotton-gins. As early as 1798, becoming 
 " deeply impressed with the uncertainty of all his hopes 
 founded on the cotton-gin," he began to turn his 
 thoughts in other directions. The result of his specula- 
 tions was that he entered into a contract with the United 
 States for the manufacture of arms. He built a manu- 
 factory near the city of New Haven, invented all the 
 machinery needed for his purpose, gave personal in- 
 struction to his workmen, and, in fact, created the 
 
WHITNET. 567 
 
 business.* He was in this more successful, as far as his 
 own interests were concerned, than he had been with the 
 cotton-gin. We do not find that he invented any great 
 improvements in the manufacture of muskets, but that he 
 manufactured them excellently was attested by all with 
 whom he had dealings. In this occupation, Whitney 
 passed, near New Haven, the last twenty-five years of his 
 life. He reached a very handsome competence, married 
 happily, and spent the remainder of his days a-raid "the 
 fond and quiet scenes of domestic life, after which he had 
 so long aspired, but from which he had been debarred by 
 the embarrassed or unsettled state of his affairs." 
 He died January 8, ]82 5.f 
 
 * Machinery was at a low ebb in the United States at this time. The colonial 
 policy of England had been to do the manufacturing herself, and to allow the 
 colonies to provide the raw material. Whitney was forced to create his system. 
 He invented labor-saving machinery that would do away, to a great extent, with 
 skilled labor,— a dear commodity at that time. The parts of the gun were passed 
 from workman to workman, each doing some one thing, by which means Whitney 
 was able to teach his help very quickly just what they were to do. When the gun 
 was set up, the pieces were, of course, interchangeable. It may be imagined that 
 it required talents of a high order to invent, carry out, and oversee such a multi- 
 tude of details. Whitney was, however, fully equal to the task. 
 
 t " In person, Mr. Whitney was considerably above the ordinary size, and of an 
 open, manly, and agreeable countenance." The portraits of him which we have 
 seen, represent a high forehead, on which the hair curls rather sparsely, rounded 
 and fairly heavy eyebrows and deep-set eyes, expressive of firmness, a long and 
 straight nose, with the nostrils well marked, and a finely-shaped mouth, with 
 signs of will-power at the corners. The face is clean shaven, according to the 
 general fashion of the time, except for short and close side whiskers. He wears 
 a coat with a high roUing collar, and a white waistcoat, with snowy ruffles at his 
 breast. The whole appearance is that of an intellectual gentleman of much reso- 
 lution, will, and perseverance. 
 
 These latter qualities were in him very marked. Professor Olmsted, in writing 
 a sketch of his life, says : " The most remarkable trait in the character of Mr. 
 Whitney, aside from his inventive powers, was his perseverance ; and this is the 
 more remarkable, because it is so common to find men of great powers of me- 
 chanical invention deficient in this quality." Mr. Olmsted alludes particularly to 
 Whitney's power of concentrating his mind upon a particular subject, and never 
 allowing it to wander, until he had arrived at the end which he had proposed to 
 himself He quotes the statement of an intimate friend of Whitney's, who says : 
 "I imagine that he never yet failed of accomplishing any result of mechanical 
 
568 INVENTORS. 
 
 powers and combinations which, he sought for ; nor ever sought for one for which 
 he had not some occasion, in order to accomplish the business in hand. I mean 
 that his invention never failed, and never ran loild. It accomplished, I imagine, 
 without exception, aU that he ever asked of it, and no more. * * * Whitney 
 perfected all that he attempted, carried each invention to its utmost limit of use- 
 fulness, and then reposed until he had occasion for something else." 
 
 As for his general manners, we find only the best accounts of Eli Whitney. 
 "His whole appearance was such as to inspire universal respect." His friends 
 loved him, and remained true to him through life. His temper was usually 
 serene, although he was at times passionate, and it does not appear to have been 
 impaired by the fearful trials he sustained in regard to his great invention. 
 
SXKJPHKNSON. 
 
 1781-1848. 
 
 THE life of the first eminent railway engineer would 
 certainly deserve a place in any collection of the 
 biographies of famous men. George Stephenson was the 
 first of those mighty workers, who have so changed the 
 civilization of to-day from that of a hundred years ago. 
 Of these annihilators of space, who have by their labors 
 given us the means of rapid conveyance, Gi-eorge Stephen- 
 son stands at the head, as the inventor of the locomotive- 
 engine. 
 
 No great invention or discovery comes like thunder 
 out of a clear sky. The idea of evolution had busied 
 the minds of men before Darwin. There had been dim 
 inklings of the theory of gravitation before Newton. 
 Watt was not the first man who saw that steam could 
 be subdued and required to furnish so much horse-power. 
 No one can exactly inform us who invented the electric 
 telegraph, or the telephone either ; so with the locomo- 
 tive.* At Killingworth, where George Stephenson found 
 himself engine-wright in the year 1812, there was need 
 
 * " An efficient and economical working locomotive-engine still remained to be 
 invented, and to accomplish this object, Stephenson now applied himself. Profit^ 
 ing by what his predecessors had done, warned by their failures, and encouraged 
 by their partial successes, he began his labors. There was stiU wanting the man 
 who should accomplish for the locomotive, what James Watt had done for the 
 steam-engine, and combine in a complete form the best points in the separate 
 plans of others, embodying with them such original inventions and adaptations, 
 as to entitle him to the merit of inventing the working locomotive, as Jame§ 
 Watt is to be regarded as the inventor of the working condensing engine," 
 
670 
 
 INVENTORS. 
 
 of some way to carry coal along the tram-way, which 
 should not be so expensive as the cars drawn by horses. 
 At the Kenton and Coxlodge collieries was one of Blenk- 
 insop's engines, and Stephenson, inspecting this, at once 
 asserted that "he could make a better engine than that 
 to go on legs." His views came to the ears of the pro- 
 prietors of the Killingworth colliery, and he was author- 
 ized to try and see what he could do. So he set to work, 
 and finally succeeded in making a rude locomotive, some- 
 what on the plan of Blenkinsop's, which succeeded in 
 dragging a pretty fair load at the rate of four miles an 
 hour.* But this locomotive, though better than those 
 which had already been made, was but a clumsy affair 
 at best. It cost as much to run it as did horse-power. 
 But at this time, when it had been thought best to dis- 
 card Stephenson's first locomotive, he was clever enough 
 to invent the steam-blast, which nearly doubled the power 
 and efficiency of his engine. 
 
 So much about Stephenson's first invention. He had 
 all his life been in and about collieries. He was born on 
 the 9th of June, 1781, of poor parents, laborers in the 
 collieries at Wylam, near Newcastle. His father was 
 foreman of the pumping station at Wylam. George had 
 
 * This engine of Stephenson's was built by the colliery blacksmith, a good 
 worker, though rather a new hand at locomotive building. It was built with 
 smooth wheels, in opposition to the general opinion of the time that cogged 
 wheels and rails must be used. It had no springs at aU, and was mounted on a 
 wooden frame, having four wheels. The boiler was eight feet long and thirty- 
 four inches in diameter, with one flue tube passing through the middle, whereby 
 the water was to be heated. There were two vertical cylinders of eight inches 
 diameter and two foot stroke, which were let into the boiler, and worked the pro- 
 peUing gear with cross-heads and connecting-rods. The power was applied to the 
 wheels by means of spur-wheels, which combined the power of the two cylinders. 
 It was about ten months before this engine was completed, and then, as we have 
 said, it was found that so much fuel had to be used that it cost as much as it did 
 to employ horses for the same work. Still, it was an advance upon previous 
 efforts in the same direction. 
 
STEPHENSON. 571 
 
 no education at all for some time ; he performed slight 
 duties about the colliery, and became familiar with the 
 working of the steam-engine, so that at about fourteen, 
 he became assistant foreman to his father. He rose from 
 one position to another, though he and his father's family- 
 moved several times from place to place, and at the age 
 of eighteen, had outstripped his father as a workman. 
 At this time, he became so interested in the steam-engine 
 that, in order to learn more about this mechanism, of 
 which he was the overseer, he proceeded to learn to read 
 and write, that he might further inform himself as to his 
 charge. So, when he was about twenty-three years of 
 age, he found himself in a fair position, — brakeman of 
 the pumping-engine, at Killingworth colliery, near New- 
 castle. He had married, and had had one son, Eobert 
 Stephenson, the well-known railway engineer, who fol- 
 lowed so closely the steps of his father. 
 
 Beginning with his first locomotive at Killingworth, 
 Stephenson continued his improvements very slowly. A 
 locomotive is rather an expensive thing, and Stephenson 
 could not build very many for the sake of experiment. 
 After his first engines, he made the improvement of the 
 steam blast, as we have said, at just the time when it 
 appeared that locomotive-engines had no great advantage, 
 in economy of time or money, over horses. Some other 
 improvements he made in the manner of gearin_g the 
 driving-wheels together, and in connecting the cylinder 
 and the wheels on the rails. The great improvement of 
 his engines by the multitubular boiler did not come till 
 later. 
 
 The Killingworth engines were the first made by Ste- 
 phenson. In 182 2, he made several for the Hetton Coal 
 Company, which had to transport coals over a railway. 
 
572 
 
 INVENTORS. 
 
 The next year, an act was passed incorporating the 
 Stockton and Darlington Railway for passenger traffic. 
 Stephenson was appointed the company's engineer. He 
 had to superintend, not only the construction of the 
 engines, but also that of the road itself. In both, he was 
 most successful. 
 
 The most famous of Stephenson's engines was the 
 " Rocket," built for a locomotive competition at RainhilL* 
 This competition was for a prize of £500 offered by the 
 Liverpool and Manchester Railroad, which had just been 
 completed. Q-eorge Stephenson had been the engineer 
 who had overseen the laying out of the road ; and the 
 difficulties to be overcome had been enormous. Not only 
 were there natural obstructions ; but many of the persons 
 owning land along the line, were violent in their opposi- 
 tion. The surveys had frequently to be made by stealth, 
 
 * The " Eocket " was the suhject of much thought on the part of father and 
 son. It emhodled all their ideas for the improvement of the locomotive. The 
 multitubular boiler was adopted more completely than in any former engines, and 
 the steam blast was greatly improved. Twenty-four copper tubes, each three 
 inches in diameter, extended from one end of the boiler to the other, the heated 
 air passing through them on its way to the cliimney ; and the tubes being sur- 
 rounded by the water of the boiler. It wiU be obvious that a large extension of 
 the heating surface was thus secured. The principal difficulty was in iitting the 
 copper tubes to the boiler ends so as to prevent leakage. They were manufactured 
 by a Newcastle coppersmith, and soldered to brass screws which were screwed 
 into the boiler ends standing out in great knobs. Wlien the tubes were thus 
 fitted, and the boiler was filled with water, hydraulic pressure was applied ; but 
 the water squirted out at every joint, and the factory floor was soon flooded. 
 Eobert went home in despair; and in the first moment of grief, he wrote to his 
 father that the whole thing was a failure. By return of post, came a letter from 
 his father, telling him that despair was not to be thought of— that he must "try 
 again," and suggesting a mode of overcoming the difSculty, which his son had 
 already anticipated and proceeded to adopt. It was to bore clein holes in the 
 boiler ends, fit in the smooth copper tubes as tightly as possible, solder up, and 
 then raise the steam. This plan succeeded perfectly ; the expansion of the copper 
 completely filling up all interstices and producing a perfectly water-tight boiler, 
 capable of standing extreme external pressure. 
 
 The mode of employing the steam blast for the purpose of increasing the 
 draught in the chimney, was also the subject of numerous experiments. 
 
STEPHENSON. 573 
 
 before the Liverpool and Manchester Act* had passed 
 Parliament. But finally, Stephenson had triumphed over 
 all obstacles. The road was completed. Embankments, 
 bridges, deep cuts, viaducts, such as had been considered 
 impossibilities, had been completed. Even Chat-Moss, an 
 enormous bog, which seemed as though it was capable of 
 engulfing all the rest of England, had been filled up 
 and built over. The question now in hand, or rather in 
 the minds of the directors, was as to the nature of the 
 motive power. Some were in favor of fixed engines such 
 as furnish the motive power for the cable roads in many 
 of our cities ; some desired horse power ; some were 
 enthusiastic or far-seeing enough to advise the employ- 
 ment of the locomotive-engine. Accordingly, the prize 
 spoken of was announced and a day for the competition 
 was set. Certain conditions as to weight and speed were 
 laid down. The minimum rate at which the competing 
 engines were required to draw a stipulated weight was 
 only ten miles an hour. 
 
 Four engines were offered in competition, — the "Nov- 
 elty," made upon a new principle; the "Sanspareil," the 
 "Rocket," built by R. Stephenson & Co., and the "Perse- 
 verance." The "Rocket," after various trials, in which the 
 other engines either broke down or were found not to 
 comply with the specified conditions, was the only engine 
 which could come up to the requirements. Indeed, it far 
 surpassed them. Ten miles an hour was all the speed 
 
 * Stephenson was examined as a witness by a Parliamentary Committee dur- 
 ing the passing of this act. On one occasion, a member, desiring to throw ridi- 
 cule upon him, asked, " Suppose, now, one of these engines to be going along a 
 raUroad at the rate of nine or ten miles an hour [the maximum speed at that 
 time generally imagined], and that a cow were to stray upon the line, and get in 
 the way of the engine, would not that, think you, he a very awkward circum- 
 stance?" "Yes," replied the witness, in his Northumbrian speech; "very awk- 
 ward Indeed— /(»■ the coo." 
 
574 
 
 INVENTORS. 
 
 that was asked. The " Rocket " made fifteen on the aver- 
 age, and more at times. So R. Stephenson & Co. received 
 the prize, and the contract to supply the Liverpool and 
 Manchester Railway. 
 
 With the public opening of the railroad, Greorge Ste- 
 phenson's fame and fortune were assured. He himself 
 drove the first engine in the procession, in the presence 
 of a very great number of persons. The Duke of Wel- 
 lington, Sir Robert Peel, and other persons of very great 
 importance, were in the carriages. The engine succeeded 
 beyond anticipation.* 
 
 As it had now been proved to the satisfaction of all 
 that locomotive-engines were available as motors for 
 passenger traffic, immense activity in railroad operations 
 began, f Joint stock companies were every- where formed, 
 and railways were projected in very many parts of En- 
 gland. This was the day of Stephenson's success. His 
 
 * The " Rocket " weighed a little over foirr tons, and had four wheels. It ran 
 about thirty-five miles in two hours, drawing a weight of thirteen tons. The 
 heavy freight-engines made to-day weigh about forty-eight tons, and sometimes 
 have as many as ten wheels, — two truck-wheels, and eight driving-wheels. They 
 will haul more than one thousand tons, at the rate of fifteen miles an hour. The 
 passenger engines go somewhat faster. There are many records of locomotives 
 drawing one hundred tons at a much faster rate than a mile a minute. 
 
 t It was some time before the opulent classes, who could afford to post to 
 town in aristocratic style, became reconciled to railway traveling. The old fami- 
 lies did not relish the idea of being conveyed in a train of passengers of all ranks 
 and conditions, in which the shop-keeper and the peasant were carried along at 
 the same speed as the duke and the baron, — the only difference being in price. 
 It was another deplorable illustration of the leveling tendencies of the age. It put 
 an end to that gradation of rank in traveling, which was one of the few things left 
 by which the nobleman could be distinguished from the Manchester manufacturer 
 and bagman. So, for a time, many of the old families sent forward their servants 
 and luggage by railway, and condemned themselves to jog along the old highway 
 in the accustomed family chariot, dragged by country post-horses. But the 
 superior comfort of the railway shortly recommended itself even to the oldest 
 families ; posting went out of date ; post-horses were with difficulty to be had 
 along even the groat high-roads ; and nobles and servants, manufacturers and 
 peasants aUke, shared in the comfort, the convenience, and the dispatch of rail- 
 way traveling. 
 
STEPHENSON. 575 
 
 services were in great demand ; for he was a most suc- 
 cessful engineer, and the greatest locomotive manufact- 
 urer in the country, and he was thus very naturally 
 enabled to accumulate a large fortune. His early experi- 
 ence in the collieries stood him in good stead at this 
 time; for, in 1832, he leased an estate in Leicestershire 
 (iSs' ter shir), where he was certain that coal* was to be 
 found. "The strength of Britain hes in her coal-beds," 
 was his idea, " and the locomotive is destined, above all 
 other agencies, to bring it forth." He now purchased for 
 himself a beautiful place near the town of Chesterfield, 
 called Tapton House, and shortly afterward, in 1840, in- 
 timated his intention of retiring from the more active 
 operations of his business. He was at this time fifty-nine 
 years of age. He continued, however, to follow his pro- 
 fession, and filled many places of high importance in 
 various railways. 
 
 In 1835, he and his son Robert were consulted by the 
 King of the Belgians as to the creating of a railway sys- 
 tem through Belgium, and for his services in that country, 
 he was made a Knight of the Order of Leopold (le'o pold). 
 Subsequently, the offer of knighthood was made to him 
 by Sir Robert Peel ; but he did not desire to accept the 
 
 * Stephenson was as mnoli interested in coal as in any thing else, and very 
 naturally too, and had various theories on the matter whereon he loved to dis- 
 course. He had a graphic way of putting things, as may be seen by the follow- 
 ing conversation, which is detailed : " Now, Buckland," said he, " I have a poser 
 for you. Can you tell me what is the power that is driving that train?" "Well," 
 said Dr. Buckland, " I suppose it is one of your big engines." " But what drives 
 the engine?" "Oh, very likely a canny Newcastle driver." "What do you say to 
 the light of the sun?" "How can that be?" "It is nothing else," said Stephen- 
 son ; " it is light bottled up in the earth for tens of thousands of years, — light 
 absorbed by plants and vegetables, being necessary for the condensation of carbon 
 during the process of their growth, if it be not carbon in another form ; and now, 
 after being buried in the earth for long ages in fields of coal, that latent light is 
 again brought forth and liberated, — made to work, as in that locomotive, for great 
 human purposes." 
 
576 INVENTORS. 
 
 honor. His wish was to live quietly, and he was al- 
 lowed to follow out his inclination- on his beautiful estate, 
 where he pleased himself by entering upon horticultural 
 proceedings of great extent and magnificence. He inter- 
 ested himself, also, in Mechanics' Institutes and kindred 
 associations, and enjoyed in other ways the fruit of his 
 labors in early life, while his son Robert still followed 
 the more active prosecution of his profession. 
 
 He died, August 12, 1848, at the age of sixty-seven, 
 and was buried in the town of Chesterfield, near his 
 home.* 
 
 * We ought at least to mention another invention made by G-eorge Stephen- 
 son early in life, that of the "Geordy" safety-lamp. As is well known, the 
 coal-pits of England at this time were so full of fire-damp that it was impossihle 
 for the miners to carry lamps through large parts of them on account of the dan- 
 ger of explosion. Although many expedients were used, it was seldom that more 
 than one third of the available coal in a mine could be got ovit. The attention 
 of Sir Humphry Davy was called to the matter; and at the request of the coal 
 owners, he studied the subject carefully, and shortly invented his Safety-lamp. 
 But at this very time, George Stephenson had been engaged in experiments on 
 the same subject, and had succeeded in constructing a safety-lamp on nearly the 
 same principle, which worked, on the whole, better than did the Davy lamp. 
 Stephenson had no knowledge of chemistry, and the theory on which his lamp 
 was constructed was faulty, yet the lamp itself was, on the whole, safer than the 
 Davy lamp. Stephenson experimented many times at the risk of his own life in 
 the foul air in the Killingworth mine, and, by constant observation and experi- 
 ments, succeeded in making a most useful lamp. Sir Humphry Davy, at the 
 same time, studied the question scientifioally, and arrived shortly after at the 
 same solution through safer principles. But this should not deprive Stephenson 
 of the credit of his invention. The two men came to the same conclusion, at 
 nearly the same time, and of the two lamps invented, Stephenson's is the safer, 
 and Davy's the most scientific. To our mind, neither should stand in the way 
 of the fame of the other. 
 
BKSSKNIKR. 
 
 HENRY BESSEMER (bes' e mer), the inventor of the 
 modern process of making steel from iron, was 
 the son of Anthony Bessemer, a French refugee who set- 
 tled in England at the time of the French Revolution. 
 Employed originally in the French Mint, well known in 
 Paris as a man of great powers of ingenuity, and a mem- 
 ber of the Academy of Sciences, Anthony Bessemer had 
 been director of a public bakery in the time of Robes- 
 pierre (ro' bes per), and his life coming into danger 
 through the unforeseeable turn of affairs at that time, he 
 had found it best to escape to England. Here he obtained 
 occupation in the mint, but his chief means of subsist- 
 ence was, it might be said, by his wits. That is to say, 
 Anthony Bessemer had one of those inventive minds that 
 are constantly finding out some way to do, by means of 
 one man, that which had before taken two to accomplish 
 it, or of doing in a better way something that had been 
 done before imperfectly. He made improvements in micro- 
 scopes and in type-founding, and engraved himself a 
 whole set of type, which he cast in an alloy of his own 
 creation, so that it lasted twice as long as ordinary type- 
 metal. Also, observing the process of jewelers, he discov- 
 ered that in the solutions, wherein they were accustomed 
 to wash their gold articles, small quantities of gold were 
 carried away. So, on purchasing large quantities of this 
 liquor, and applying to it a secret process of his own, he 
 
578 INVENTORS. 
 
 forced it to give up the gold which it had stolen from 
 the jewelers. And, in other ingenious ways, he made a 
 very fair living. 
 
 Henry was the youngest son of Anthony Bessemer, 
 born in 1813, in Charlton, Hertfordshire (har' furd shir), 
 where his father had purchased an estate. His mind 
 closely resembled his father's in its inventive qualities, 
 and, being encouraged by his father, who delighted to 
 see this turn in his son, he displayed in his youth the 
 most superior powers of mind. He made his way to Lon- 
 don, in 1831, where he first earned his living by engrav- 
 ing "a large number of elegant and original designs on 
 steel, with a diamond point, for patent medicine labels." 
 He also did other work as designer and modeler, and 
 found plenty of business, though on his first coming to 
 London he had been utterly unknown to every one in the 
 great city, and had had no knowledge himself of any one 
 to whom to turn for assistance. 
 
 The first use of his inventive faculties, of which we 
 find much record, was in a certain proceeding in regard 
 to the government stamps, which were applied to all 
 business papers, such as leases, money-bills, agreements, 
 contracts, and so forth. It appears that the method of 
 affixing stamps to these instruments was such that it was 
 possible to remove them easily, and use them over again. 
 As the stamps had been of the same pattern for a long 
 time, it was the custom of many to use the stamps taken 
 from old papers in preference to new ones, for the new 
 ones cost money, and the old ones could be obtained by 
 a very simple means, with a very little time and patience. 
 One of the officials at the Stamp Office communicating 
 all this to Bessemer, the young man set to work to in- 
 vent a stamp which could not be so removed. After 
 
BESSEMER. 579 
 
 vigorous work, extending over several months, he suc- 
 ceeded in producing a stamp which could not be trans- 
 ferred or counterfeited, according to the common manner. 
 With this, the stamp authorities were well pleased, and 
 offered him the position of Superintendent of Stamps in 
 exchange for his invention, an exchange to which he was 
 glad to agree. 
 
 He was at this time engaged to be married to a young 
 lady, who seems to have had much penetration, though 
 but little astuteness. For when Bessemer showed her his 
 stamp, and explained to her that by using it stamps could 
 not be used more than once, she remarked that if all 
 stamps were dated it would be impossible to use an old 
 one without fear of detection. This idea struck Bessemer 
 as being very sensible, and he at once conceived a plan 
 for a stamp with movable dates, such as is common now- 
 adays. This was far simpler than his former invention, 
 and it was of such a nature as to render it possible to 
 dispense utterly with the position of Superintendent of 
 Stamps. It was explained to Bessemer, when he com- 
 municated his new invention to the Stamp Office, that, as 
 his new invention would enable the old machinery to be 
 used, it seemed best to adopt it. It was also pointed out 
 to him that, as the position which had been given to him 
 was no longer necessary, he could not expect to hold it. 
 Here the government retired from the conversation, 
 having appropriated Bessemer's idea (which he had not 
 patented), and left the unfortunate inventor to do what 
 he could about the matter, which was not much. Besse- 
 mer never received any return for what had been severe 
 work for nine months. 
 
 But, though his disappointment was great, it was not 
 as if he could do nothing else but invent stamp-dies. He 
 
580 INVENTORS. 
 
 turned his attention elsewhere, and, happening to notice 
 that bronze powder, after manufacture, was worth more 
 than a hundred times the cost of the raw material, he 
 proceeded to invent a means whereby it might be manu- 
 factured at only four times the cost of the raw material : 
 and, going into business on a fairly large scale (being 
 assisted by a friend with capital), he made one thousand 
 per cent, profit per year on his investment for several 
 years. Then the profits fell to three hundred per cent., 
 but even this rate of profit is still remunerative after a 
 fashion. Such are some of the amusements of such 
 universally inventive minds as Bessemer's.* There seemed 
 to be almost no direction^ in which he could not invent 
 or improve by i)utting his mind to it. In every subject 
 did he seem at home when he had once applied himself 
 vigorously to it, and the range of the inventions covered 
 by patents taken out by him in the earlier years of his 
 life is very great, f 
 
 * Bessemer found tliat this bronze powder was not made in England, and that 
 no one knew the method of manufacture. He worked a year and a half to find 
 out the secret, but met with no success. Resolved, however, on a last effort, he 
 took a rest, and, on returning to his experiments, he at last discovered a means 
 whereby it might be made at sUght expense. He did not patent his method, but 
 kept it secret. He made a small quantity himself at the expense of 4s. a pound. 
 On offering this for sale, he received 80s. for it. He then succeeded in interesting 
 a friend, who put £10,000 into the business, which was begun on a large scale. 
 All was done vidth the greatest secrecy. The machines were made piecemeal in 
 different parts of England, from drawings by Bessemer, and were put up by him- 
 self. They were almost entirely self-acting, so that the services of only five men 
 were required. These men were paid very high wages on condition of absolute 
 secrecy. The secret has been kept to this day. Three of the assistants have died, 
 and to the other two, Bessemer made over the business in 1871 as a reward for 
 their faithful work. The machinery has never been patented nor pirated. The 
 profits, as stated above, were at first enormous, being calculated at one thousand 
 per cent. Later, through competition, they fell to three hundred per cent. 
 
 t Among the many matters which occupied his attention was the manufact- 
 ure of paints, oils, and varnishes ; of sugar, of railway carriages, centrifugal 
 pumps, projectiles, and ordnance. He interested himself in a plan for the ventila- 
 tion of mines, which he endeavored, without success, to bring to the notice of the 
 government. He exhibited several machines of great Ingenuity at the great 
 
BESSEMER. 581 
 
 In 1853, the prospects of war in Europe turned many 
 minds of an experimentive cast to the subject of im- 
 provement in projectiles. Among the rest, Bessemer 
 interested himself in experiments in projectiles, and also 
 in guns. He submitted some of his plans to the govern- 
 ment officials at Woolwich (wdbl'iteh), but found no 
 encouragement at all. But a little while afterward, being 
 at Paris,* Bessemer was presented to Louis Napoleon, 
 and in the conversation, mentioned his plan in regard 
 to elongated projectiles. The emperor was much pleased 
 at his ideas, and invited him to continue his experiments, 
 promising that he would himself see to the necessary 
 expense. Bessemer therefore prosecuted his experiments, 
 and arrived at some satisfactory results. At one of the 
 trials, however, the superintending ofBcer remarked to 
 
 Exhibition of 1851, particularly one for the grinding and polishing of plate-glass. 
 In this machine, the glass is held fast to a slate table in a most ingenious manner. 
 The table has in it a series of grooves, and when the glass is laid upon it and the 
 air extracted, the pressure of the atmosphere holds the plate firmly in position. 
 Eor all these inventions, Bessemer took out patents, in which he was and is a 
 great believer, though, at the tirae of his bronze manufacture, he distrusted 
 them. He is said to have taken out one hundred and twenty patents, and to have 
 paid £10,000 to the Patent Office. 
 
 * "Shortly after this [the rejection of his plan_ at Woolwich], while Sir Henry 
 was on a visit to Paris with Lord John Hay, he attended a dinner given to Gen- 
 eral Hamlin, and other distinguished Prench ofEicers, before their departure for 
 the Crimea (irs mi' a). At that dinner. Sir Henry met Prince Napoleon, to whom 
 he took occasion to mention his plan of firing elongated projectiles. So favorably 
 was the prince impressed with the invention, that he asked Sir Henry to explain 
 it to the emperor, and with this view arranged an interview. The emperor was 
 also pleased with the account Sir Henry was able to give of his success, and in- 
 vited him to continue his experiments at Vincennes {vang sen'). But other business 
 soon recalling Sir Henry to London, he went and asked the emperor's permission 
 to make his experiments in London, and to bring the projectiles to Paris for trial. 
 His Majesty not only consented, but at the close of the audience, said : ' In this 
 case you will be put to some expense; but I will have that seen to.' Sir Henry 
 returned to London, and a few days afterward received a letter from the Due 
 de Bassano (dak dih based' no), together with an autograph note from the emperor 
 authorizing him to draw on Baring Brothers, of London, for the cost of manu- 
 facturing projectiles, but leaving him to fill in any amount."— Jean's '' Creators of the 
 
582 INVENTORS. 
 
 him, " The shots rotate properly ; but if you can not get 
 stronger metal for your- guns, such heavy projectiles will 
 be of little use." And this remark set the inventor to 
 speculating on the subject of the proper kind of metal 
 for use in artillery. 
 
 Bessemer, at this time, had never made any studies 
 in metallurgy ; but by applying himself to such books as 
 there were on the subject, and by studying the processes 
 in use in the iron and steel trade, he gained much in- 
 formation in regard to the matter, so that he could go to 
 work and experiinent for improvements. The process by 
 which steel was then made in England, had not been 
 greatly altered since the time of its invention, about a 
 century before. It was expensive in the extreme, iron 
 being imported at £7, and converted into steel which 
 cost about £60. Bessemer began his experiments with 
 a view to ascertain means of cheaply manufacturing re- 
 fined iron ; but as he continued, he experimented also in 
 the manufacture of steel. 
 
 After a year and a half, in which he patented many 
 improvements on the existing system of manufacture, a 
 new device occurred to him. This was the introduction 
 of atmospheric air into the fluid metal, whereby the cast 
 iron might be made malleable. His views turned out to 
 be correct ; and he found that by blowing air through 
 crude iron in a fluid state, he could convert it into the 
 softest malleable iron. He sent specimens to the Royal 
 Grun Factories at Woolwich, where he now received much 
 assistance in the way of analyzing and testing. 
 
 His experiments had been in small quantities. He 
 feared that in extending his operations, the mechanical 
 difficulties woifld be found to be insuperable. He con- 
 ceived a scheme by which the air was introduced by a 
 
BESSEMER. 583 
 
 series of pipes, into various pots in which the iron was 
 poured. But this seemed too complicated. The idea 
 occurred to him that the air might be blown through the 
 metal from below. He began upon this theory. He con- 
 structed a vessel capable of holding a large quantity of 
 iron, and arranged an air engine to force the air up from 
 below. The molten iron being poured into the vessel, 
 and the air being forced by high pressure through the 
 holes in the bottom, a surprising combustion was the 
 result, which, however, lasted but a short time, and left 
 the iron in the vessel in the shape of steel. The result 
 was a surprise to all present. The metal was undoubtedly 
 steel of good quality. Bessemer was "astonished at his 
 own success."* 
 
 The attention of authorities in the iron and steel trade 
 was called to the experiment. It appeared that the intro- 
 duction of oxygen throughout the fluid, brought it into 
 contact every-where with the carbon which exists in crude 
 iron and induced a higher heat than had been previously 
 known in the arts. The impurities were burned out of 
 the iron, which became semi-steel. The iron world was 
 
 * Having convinced himself of the success of his experiment, Bessemer being 
 anxious "to get some other opinion on the process," brought it to the attention 
 of Mr. George Eennie (ren'i), an authority on the subject. Mr. Eennio was much 
 struck with the process, and said : " This must not be hid under a bushel. The 
 British Association meets next week at Cheltenham (chelf num) ; if you have 
 patented your invention, draw up an account of it in a paper, and have it read 
 in Section G." Bessemer therefore wrote an account of his process and went 
 down to Cheltenham to read it before the association. He was breakfasting next 
 morning in the coffee-room of the Queen's Hotel with Mr. Clay, of the Mersey 
 (mer'zl) Steel Works, when a gentleman, who did not know Sir Henry, said: 
 " Clay, I want you to go with me this morning. There is a fellow who has come 
 down from London to read a paper on making steel from cast iron without fuel 1 
 Ha ! ha 1 ha I " Mr. Clay consented to go, and in an hour or so the three were at 
 the place of meeting. The paper excited the greatest interest in the Mechanical 
 Section, in which it was read, and the unbeliever of the morning was one of the 
 first to express himself as greatly impressed. He went on to offer Bessemer the 
 resources of his own iron-making establishment for experimenting. 
 
584 
 
 INVENTORS. 
 
 taken by surprise. Here was a method of getting steel 
 at a price not much greater than that of crude iron. 
 Many iron-masters at once adopted the process and paid 
 the royalty required. 
 
 This was the essence of Bessemer's invention. But it 
 was by no means complete. The iron-masters who tried 
 the process, generally failed to produce steel that was 
 worth any thing. It appeared to the world that Bes- 
 semer had made no more than a brilliant failure. He 
 himself, however, could not understand the reasons there- 
 for, and turned again to his experiments. It appeared 
 that the semi-steel produced was useless on account of 
 the presence of phosphorus. But how had the first ex- 
 periments succeeded? Why was not the steel first made 
 impure ? On inspection, it turned out that the crude iron 
 used in the first experiments had been a particular kind 
 of iron, which was known to be almost absolutely free 
 from phosphorus. On trying the experiment with other 
 sorts of iron, the phosphorus had remained, and the result 
 had been worthless. Bessemer devoted himself to a con- 
 sideration of the means whereby the phosphorus might 
 be removed. But while he was trying to devise a process 
 by which the iron should be puddled* in the crucible, he 
 fell upon a lot of Swedish iron which he found to be 
 free of phosphorus. "With this, he abandoned his efforts 
 to dephosphorize common iron. " The Sheffield manu- 
 facturers were then selling steel at £60 a ton, and he 
 thought that as he could buy Swedish pig-iron at £7 a 
 ton, and by blowing it a few minutes in the converter, 
 could make it into what was being sold at such a high 
 price, the problem was solved." 
 
 is the name given to th.e process whereby the iron, under great 
 heat, is stirred about (or puddled), so that the impiirities are removed. 
 
BESSEMER. 585 
 
 Bessemer had now succeeded in making pure mallea- 
 ble iron. But steel requires a little carbon in it to harden 
 it. This Bessemer managed by introducing manganese, 
 a kind of iron very pure, and containing a comparatively 
 large percentage of carbon. The use of manganese in 
 making steel was no new idea, but had been repeatedly 
 tried before, and often with success. "The Bessemei 
 process was now perfect. Nearly four years had elapsed 
 since its conception and first application, and, in addition 
 to the necessary labor and anxiety he had experienced, 
 no less than £2 0,000 had been expended in making ex- 
 periments that were necessary to complete its general use. 
 It only remained to bring the process into general use, and 
 this was the work that next engaged his attention."* 
 
 Such was Bessemer's great invention, — an invention 
 which, by bringing down the cost of producing steel to 
 
 * Bessemer had been led to discover Ms process of steel-making with the de- 
 sire of attaining some metal for ordnance better than that then used. Accord- 
 ingly, on finishing his experiments, and arriving at a successful resiilt, he endeav- 
 ored to introduce his metal at the Woolwich Arsenal, where the ordnance ex- 
 periments of the British G-overument are carried on. His views were received 
 with sympathy by the head of the establishment ; but on a change of officials, 
 Bessemer found himself neglected. He was told that the government did not 
 consider his steel proper material for ordnance, and not for twenty years or more 
 did the English Government make their guns of steel, though other European 
 nations eagerly availed themselves of the cheapness of the Bessemer process. 
 
 In other directions, however, the Bessemer steel was rapidly introduced. Eirst 
 in the making of rails for railroads, which had formerly been manufactured of 
 iron. Here it was found that the steel rails lasted twenty-three times as long as 
 the iron ones, while their cost was not much greater. The next use to which the 
 new product was put, was the making of boiler plates. In both of these direc- 
 tions there was great opposition to the use of Bessemer steel ; but the very supe- 
 rior excellence of the material was in time an adequate answer to every objection. 
 Next to these, perhaps, comes the use of steel in ship-building, where it had for- 
 merly been necessary to use iron on account of the great expense ; but here, again, 
 the old-liners were with difaculty persuaded to give up their old material, and use 
 a newer and better one. 
 
 Besides experimenting in ordnance, Bessemer turned shells and other prciec- 
 tiles from his steel, having invented a machine by which the turning was done 
 with very great nicety. 
 
586 
 
 INVENTORS. 
 
 about one eighth of its previous expense, has made a rev- 
 olution in the industrial arts. Unlike many other in- 
 ventors, whose works have been of immense profit to the 
 human race, Bessemer has himself profited by the tvealth 
 which he practicaUy created. He has accumulated an 
 immense fortune as a result of his invention, and holds 
 undoubtedly the highest place in that department of sci- 
 ence in which he has been such a zealous worker. Med- 
 als and orders have been offered him, and honors have 
 been showered upon him on all sides ; for his process of 
 making steel is in use all over the civilized world. In 
 England, besides receiving the results of his labors in the 
 shape of over a million sterling, he received the honor 
 of knighthood in 1879.* 
 
 * Among tlie many experiments of Bessemer, one which was looked to with 
 very great interest by very many persons, was the Bessemer Channel Steamer. 
 Bessemer had invented a method of turning with a lathe, by means of hydranllc 
 power. An extension of this principle led him to construct an apparatus, by 
 which the large converters used in his steel process could be moved and con- 
 trolled with the utmost ease and exactness. He proceeded to apply the idea to 
 the reduction of sea-sickness in the Channel steamers. He contrived a movable 
 swinging saloon, which was to be so swung by a hand lever, that whatever might 
 be the position of the vessel in which it was placed, the floor of the saloon might 
 be always horizontal. A man at the lever was enabled, by means of a spirit-level, 
 to detect the slightest variation, and correct it by means of an easy motion. It 
 was thought that by these means, steamers might cross the Channel with saloons 
 which should be as steady as though they were on land. A company was formed, 
 and a vessel was built. It was a double-hulled boat, and upon the two hulls was 
 placed the Bessemer swinging saloon. But the experiment was not very success- 
 ful. " The weather was fine, and the working of the saloon was little needed ; but 
 the impression gained ground, that however nicely the swinging saloon could 
 work, it would not have the desired effect of averting that dreaded malady, which 
 is as inexplicable in its nature as in the choice of its victims." The vessel proved 
 slow, owing, as we understand, to certain details in the double hull, of which the 
 true principle had not at that time been clearly understood. The vessel, also, 
 met with accidents in the harbor of Calais {kd Id'), and the venture was aban- 
 doned at a considerable loss. 
 
 Bessemer also devoted himself to studies in regard to the manufacture of tel- 
 escopes. He succeeded in devising means for the easy polishing and true cutting 
 of specula of great size, and raade other notable advances upon the knowledge on 
 the subject. He constructed on his own estate a large telescope, made and worked 
 by the most ingenious machinery. 
 
EDISON 
 
 WATT is celebrated for having invented the steam- 
 engine, and Stephenson for having perfected the 
 locomotive. Fulton always reminds us of the steam-boat ; 
 and Whitney, of the cotton-gin. Each one is famous for 
 a single invention. Watt spent the greater part of his 
 life in perfecting his ideas, and Stephenson devoted him- 
 self to improvements in the locomotive. The same is 
 true of Fulton and Whitney. Here, however, we have 
 a man who has invented, not one thing, but many, and 
 among those many are some few of infinite importance. 
 The telephone and the electric light are two of the most 
 favorite symbols of our nineteenth century progress. 
 The system of quadruplex telegraphy, although a modest 
 invention, is a great one. And it is possible that the 
 phonograph and the megaphone may, at some time, be 
 brought into more practical use. And all these are in- 
 dependent inventions of Edison. 
 
 Thomas Alva Edison is the full name of the man pos- 
 sessing, in so wonderful a degree, the American faculty 
 of invention. He was born February 11, 1847, at Milan, 
 a small canal-village in Erie County, Ohio. But the family 
 shortly moved to Port Huron, Michigan ; and here Edison 
 passed the first twelve years of his life, after which he 
 betook himself to a locomotive existence ; that is, he be- 
 came a train-boy on the G-rand Trunk Railway. 
 
 During this early period of his life, we have not much 
 
f>88 INVENTORS. 
 
 to chronicle. We have seen no record of such marvel- 
 ous youthful precocities as we have enumerated in our 
 sketches of other great men. The only very noticeable 
 feature seems to be his remarkable love of reading, — a 
 taste which, we understand, remains undiminished to-day. 
 But probably, nowadays, Edison has not much time to 
 devote to miscellaneous reading. In his boyhood, how- 
 ever, he used to read every thing on which he could lay 
 hands.* Otherwise, he had not much "book-learning"; 
 in fact, we believe that he never went to school regularly 
 for more than a couple of months in his life. But he 
 has undoubtedly picked up an immense amount of infor- 
 mation in some other way. 
 
 One may well wonder how the train-boys who pass 
 through the cars, employ such spare time as they possess. 
 They must have a certain amount of leisure. Edison 
 emploved his in a way at once singular and improving. 
 
 * other boys "beside Edison have been omnivorous readers. There are few 
 groups of boys where there is not one or more of those industrious book-devourers, 
 who prefer to read rather than to play, and who would read all the time if they were 
 allowed. We all of us know many such. And of the whole number of eager and 
 devoted boy-readers, the proportion who become really great is probably very 
 small. But it is not so much the love of reading that is characteristic of Edison. 
 It seems to be the reason which lay at the bottom of it,— the unceasing " curiosity 
 about the world we inhabit," and in regard to matters of fact every-where. He 
 seemed to have a perpetual hungering to know what had happened, and then to 
 know why it had happened. So in his experiments through all his life, Mr. 
 Edison has worked away to see what wiU happen under every variety of special 
 circumstance which he can think of as useful; and, having seen what will hap- 
 pen, he proceeds to find out why. No fact in his experiments, which is unex- 
 plainable to him, is allowed to pass. He must understand every thing. So he 
 often turns aside from an investigation and pursues as far as he is able, some 
 little point which he does not clearly comprehend. 
 
 In regard to his reading, we note the following in Scribner^s Monthly, xviii., 298 : 
 " The rapidity with which Mr. Edison peruses a book Is remarkable. He seems 
 to comprehend the contents of a page at a glance. Question him months after- 
 ward on any particular portion of a book read by him, and he will readily give 
 all the salient features of the passages referred to." He indulges in the habit of 
 many readers of annotating his books, correcting, marking, comparing, and col- 
 lating. 
 
EDISON. 589 
 
 In an old baggage car, where he found space, he arranged 
 a chemical laboratory and a printing establishment. In 
 the latter, he printed a newspaper, the Grand Trunk 
 Herald. In the former, he did such things as are done 
 in laboratories, finally ending in a fire (how caused we can 
 not say), which was promptly extinguished by the con- 
 ductor, who subsequently turned the laboratory inside 
 out— in other words, threw all the apparatus out of the 
 window. These proceedings are but typical of Edison's 
 youth. Like most boys, he wanted to do the same things 
 that men did ; but, unlike most boys, he was also lay- 
 ing by a foundation of good solid information at the same 
 time. 
 
 Being a wide-awake fellow, with a remarkable capacity 
 for finding out just what there was of interest in this 
 world which he did not comprehend, and of an ability in 
 no long time to comprehend it, Edison was not on the 
 train long before he knew a good deal about telegraphy. 
 He constructed a telegraph line at his home at Port 
 Huron, and from that day to this has gone on finding 
 out more and more that may be done by means of a 
 wire connecting two distant points. 
 
 Edison was twenty-one years of age when he first went 
 to live in Boston.* He was then an educated telegraph 
 
 * " Edison's history for a number of these first years is chiefly a record of 
 desultory wanderings from place to place, with the view of seeing the world, of 
 securing better wages, and often, if the truth must be told, under the stimulus 
 of abrupt dismissals from his positions for blunders or unpardonable negligences. 
 At Stratford, Canada, being required to report the word ' six ' to the manager 
 every half hour, to show that he was awake and on duty, he rigged a wheel to 
 do it for him. At Indianapolis, he kept press reports waiting, while he experi- 
 mented with new methods for receiving them. At Memphis, in 1864, he was 
 first working out his idea of duplex transmission. The office changed, and he 
 had created no better impression than that he was thought a good man to get 
 rid of in the readjustment. At Louisville, in procuring some s^llphuric acid at 
 night for his own purposes, he tipped over a carboy of it, to the ruin of the 
 
590 INVENTORS. 
 
 operator. He had been about the country a good deal, 
 learning something every-where, reading a good deal, 
 inventing one thing or another, — sometimes a scheme in 
 telegraphy, sometimes a labor-saving machine (to save 
 himself labor). He did not stay long in Boston. While 
 there, he had successes and failures. Some small inven- 
 tions of his were successful. But what had greatly 
 interested him for some time, the idea of duplex teleg- 
 raphy, still eluded him. He was not succeasful in an 
 important trial of his duplex system, and was soon 
 again adrift. 
 
 He came to New York from Boston. Here he met 
 better fortune. He made a clever invention of a machine 
 to print the stock quotations, which was at once adopted, 
 and which brought him in some money. What was 
 worth more to him, he was retained by the Western 
 Union Telegraph Company to give them the first bid on 
 his telegraphic inventions. Under this stimulus, he went 
 to work again on his idea of the duplex system of teleg- 
 raphy. He was sure that he could manage to send two 
 messages by one telegraph wire at one time. The idea 
 was ridiculed as absurd. But he persevered, and in a 
 few years only, had invented not only the duplex, but 
 the quadruplex, so that four messages, instead of one, 
 might be sent at one time on the same wire. 
 
 But before this had finally been accomplished, Edison 
 had arrived at circumstances of stability. Being made 
 superintendent of the Gold Indicator Company, he estab- 
 lished at Newark, N. J., a manufactory for making his 
 
 appurtenances of a handsome banking establishment below. At Cincinnati, he 
 abandoned the office on every pretext, to hasten to the Mechanics' Library, to 
 pass his days in reading."— TF. n. Bislwp, in Scribner's Monthly, xvii., 92. 
 
 But most of these sUps seem to have been caused by the superabundance of 
 inventive power, and desire to learn and experiment. 
 
EDISON. ,591 
 
 machines. While at Newark, he married Miss Mary 
 Stillwell, a lady of that town. 
 
 But Edison did not like manufacturing. He wanted 
 to invent.* Accordingly, he changed his place of abode 
 from Newark to Menlo Park, in New Jersey,— about 
 twenty-five miles from New York City.f 
 
 Here have been made the greater number of his 
 famous inventions, the carbon telephone, the phonograph, 
 the tasimeter, the microphone^ the aerophone, the mega- 
 phone, the phonometer, the electric pen, and very many 
 more, besides his method of electric lighting. To describe 
 all of these inventions would be impossible in our limited 
 space. 
 
 * As an example of how completely does the passion for Inventing possess 
 Mr. Edison, take the following : 
 
 "It may he asked how he amuses himself? He invents. What is his ohject 
 in life? To what is he looking forward when he shall have accumulated an 
 enormous fortune? Simply and always, to invent. If he worked hard while in 
 obscurity, his exertions, now that every thing is at hand to make the labor effica- 
 cious, is redoubled. It is not luxury that tempts him. He does not indulge in 
 it. Nor is it public approbation, to which he is good-humoredly indifferent. He 
 is a burning spark of inventiveness, and that only. He has called his children, 
 one Dot, the other Dash, after the symbols of the telegraphic alphabet. He 
 wishes to produce something at least as good as the phonograph every year." — 
 
 t The greater part of Mr. Edison's inventions have been arrived at in his old 
 laboratory, at Menlo Park, N. J. It is in a two-story building of wood, painted 
 white. It is now used only for chemical experiments, the heavier machinery 
 having been transferred to a new building. " On its second floor the choicest 
 work of the inventor is performed. Here, every day and night, surrounded by 
 hundreds of vials of chemicals and scores of curious scientific instruments, he 
 may be seen in his suit of blue flannel, chameleon-like with spots of acid, ad- 
 vising, consulting, and directing" his assistants. Here he has his "steam baths, 
 retorts, vacuum pumps, hydraulic presses, smelting furnaces, and the various 
 other necessary appliances." * * * " The inventor's private office is in charge of 
 his private secretary, who looks after the business affairs of the establishment 
 and attends to the large correspondence. The letters received frequently number 
 as many as one hundred and fifty a day. They come from aU quarters of the 
 globe, and are in nearly every language." Mr. Edison also keeps record, of 
 course, of all the experiments that have been carried on by him or under his 
 supervision, — all carefully indexed and arranged, so that they can be turned to at 
 any moment. 
 
592 INVEKTOES. 
 
 The telephone and the electric light are familiar in 
 their working to every reader; the phonograph is less 
 generally known ; but although we can not well go into 
 explanations of the principles of each of these inventions, 
 it may not be improper to say a few words in regard to 
 the telephone and the phonograph. 
 
 Edison's telephone makes use of his discovery that, 
 "when properly prepared, carbon changes its resistance 
 with pressure, and that the ratios of these changes, 
 moreover, correspond exactly with the pressure." In 
 his telephone, therefore, a disk of carbon is placed 
 against the diaphragm into which the voice is directed. 
 This carbon is a portion of the electric circuit. On 
 the vibration of the diaphragm at the sound-waves of 
 the voice, the resistance of the disk varies in propor- 
 tion as it is pressed by the diaphragm, and the strength 
 of the electric current varies as well, whereby the elec- 
 tric current possesses all the characteristics of the 
 vocal waves which it transmits to the diaphragm at 
 the other end of the wire, and, in this manner, causes 
 the latter to vibrate and reproduce sound-waves or au- 
 dible speech. 
 
 In the phonograph, a diaphragm is arranged so that 
 when it vibrates at the sound-waves, it causes a steel 
 pencil to trace lines on tin-foil which is wrapped around 
 a roller ; these lines so traced have been called " visible 
 speech." If the process is reversed, the stylus is made 
 (by a mechanical device) to pass over the lines formerly 
 traced, rising and falling as the lines are shallow or deep ; 
 and, as the stylus thus moves, it transmits its motion to 
 the diaphragm ; the diaphragm then transmits to the air 
 these vibrations, which reach the ear in the form of sound- 
 waves. 
 
EDISON. 5^3 
 
 Such are Edison's two most famous inventions. They 
 took the country by storm. In the year 1877, they be- 
 came household words in an instant. The instruments 
 were exhibited all over the country to admiring crowds ; 
 the public press was full of allusions and details.* 
 
 It is somewhat curious now, at the expiration of only 
 a dozen years, to note the manner of the fulfillment of 
 the prophecies made in regard to these two instruments. 
 Those made in regard to the phonograph were the most 
 extensive. They soared far above the utilitarian expecta- 
 tions entertained in regard to the telephone, and reveled 
 
 * At the time of the invention and exhibition of the telephone and phono- 
 graph, much was written about Mr. Edison, who went hy the name, as we recollect, 
 of " The Wizard of Menlo Park." The public was amused by all manner of details 
 in regard to the remarkable inventor, some true and some false. The periodical and 
 daily press of the time is full of scraps and notes about Edison, but it seems 
 probable that much that was written was utterly without authority. Mr. Pox, in 
 the first of several articles in Scnhner's for 1879, remarks : " But the material soon 
 ran short, and then, under the plea that necessity is the mother of invention, 
 industrious litterateurs {le tdra tur') began the work of drawing upon their imagina- 
 tions. The hero of their labors assumed all sorts of forms. Now he was a 
 scientific hermit shut up in a cavern in a small New Jersey village, holding httle 
 or no intercourse with the outside world, working like an alchemist of old in the 
 dead of night, with musty books and curious chemicals, and having for his im- 
 mediate companions persons as weird and mysterious as himself ; again, he was 
 a rollicking, careless person, highly gifted in matters scientific, but deplorably 
 ignorant in every thing else, a sort of scientific BUnd Tom. Especially was he 
 accredited with the most revolutionary ideas concerning nature. One Western 
 journal represented him as predicting a complete overthrow of nearly all the 
 established laws of nature ; water was no longer to seek its level ; the earth was 
 speedily to assume new and startling functions in the universe ; every thing that 
 had been learned concerning the character of the atmosphere was based on 
 error ; the sun itself was to be drawn upon in ways that are dark, and to be made 
 subsidiary to innumerable tricks that are vain ; in short, all nature was to be upset." 
 
 Of course all this was ridiculous. Edison is a scientific man, and works as a 
 scientific man. If he prefers to work at night, that does not make him a wizard ; 
 if he is of a jovial nature, that does not prove that his scientific knowledge is 
 intuitive and not based upon what he has learned. The time of all these extravar 
 gances has gone by, and Edison's scientific labors and methods are understood 
 by all scientists in so far as it is proper. It may be remarked, however, that the 
 mingling of fact and fancy in regard to Edison, in the writings of the period of 
 his great discoveries, renders It almost impossible to be sure of presenting a 
 correct sketch to our readers. 
 
694 INVENTORS. 
 
 in a region of pure speculation. Letters were to be writ- 
 ten by phonograph ; it was to take the place of the 
 stenographic reporter. There were to be public galleries, 
 where " the utterances of great speakers and singers " 
 were to be kept for centuries. Christine Nilsson or Miss 
 Gary were to sing to the phonograph, and thus furnish 
 the organ-grinders with music far more beautiful than 
 that now used by them. Dramas should be produced, in 
 which all the parts were to be well spoken. And, as a 
 climax, " Madame Tussaud's (tus soz') figures will here- 
 after talk, as well as look like their great prototypes." 
 
 Whatever may be the outcome of the future, it need 
 hardly be said that as yet the phonograph has failed to 
 make itself useful in any broad sense, and it would not 
 be surprising if there were numbers of people in this 
 country, not to say abroad, who had never heard of such 
 an invention. 
 
 But the telephone seems to have outstripped even the 
 expectations formed for it, extensive though these were. 
 " Already many thousands of them are in practical use in 
 this country and abroad," says a periodical of the year 
 18 78. There were 54,000 in use in this country alone 
 in the year 1879, and probably, though it is hard to find 
 statistics, the number has enormously increased. There 
 are few towns of any size in the country which have not 
 their telephone exchange, with a large number of instru- 
 ments. "It is employed," my authority continues, "as a 
 means of communication between the counting-room and 
 the factory, the merchant's residence and his office, the 
 publishing office and the printing-office, and, in short, 
 wherever oral communication is desired between persons 
 separated by any distance beyond the reach of the human 
 voice." The last clause sums up the uses of the telephone 
 
EDISON. 595- 
 
 to-day ; biit, by the examples cited, we may see that, at 
 the time of the invention, there was hardly a just appre- 
 ciation of the mighty convenience which the telephone 
 was to become. 
 
 But the fortunes of the telephone do not belong so 
 properly to the life of Edison as to that of Bell. Both in- 
 vented independently ; but Bell preceded Edison by a 
 little, and the name of the Bell Telephone Company shows 
 that, as far as law can give it. Bell may be held to be 
 the inventor of the instrument. 
 
 The only remaining invention of Edison's which we 
 have space to note, — and we can do no more than note 
 it, — is the electric light. For years, inventors have been 
 at work upon systems of electric lighting, and many in- 
 ventions have been made, some of which have succeeded, 
 while others have failed. Edison's light, like most of 
 his inventions, is on a principle entirely his own. It 
 has the advantage, it is asserted, of being as useful as 
 the other systems of electric lighting, while it is at the 
 same time far cheaper. 
 
 Edison has not been so prominently before the country 
 during the last few years as at the time of the invention 
 of the telephone and the phonograph. We understand 
 that he is still at work upon one thing or another, and 
 undoubtedly a few years will render necessary a consider- 
 able addition to this sketch.* 
 
 * Of Edison's appearance, we have the following by Mr. Bishop, in the year 
 1878: 
 
 " Of the number of persons in the laboratory, remark principally the one you 
 may have least thought of selecting, from the informality of his appearance. 
 * * * It is a figure of perhaps five feet nine in height, bending intently above 
 some detail of work. There is a general appearance of youth about it, but the 
 face, knit into an^dous wrinkles, seems old. The dark hair, beginning to be 
 touched with gray, falls over the forehead in a mop. The hands are stained with 
 acid, and the clothing is of an ordinary ready-made order. It is Edison. He has 
 the air of a mechanic, or, more definitely, with his peculiar pallor, of a night 
 
596 INVENTORS. 
 
 printer. His features are large ; the TDrow well shaped, without unusual develoj)- 
 ments; the eyes light gray, the nose Irregular, and the mouth displaying teeth 
 which are also not altogether regular. When he comes up, his attention comes 
 back slowly, as if it had been a long way off. But it comes bacli fully and cor- 
 dially, and the expression of the face, now that it can he seen, is franlj and 
 prepossessing. A cheerful smile chases away the grave and somewhat weary look 
 that belongs to it in moments of rest. He seems no longer old. He has almost 
 the air of a big, careless school-boy released from his tasks." 
 
BELL 
 
 IT is a singular fact, that probably not an electrical 
 invention of major importance has ever been made, 
 but that the honor of its origin has been claimed by 
 more than one person. There was a dispute over the 
 Leyden jar, and a long and acrimonious controversy 
 about the galvanic battery. Franklin's discovery of the 
 identity of lightning and electricity is still claimed for 
 French philosophers ; the title of ' The Father of the 
 Telegraph' is given to Wheatstone (h^A^et'stun) in En- 
 gland, and to Morse in the United States, although to 
 neither of these inventors, but to Joseph Henry, the last- 
 ing gratitude of the world belongs." So far. Dr. Park 
 Benjamin, in his interesting book on the "Age of 
 Electricity." He might have remarked that few inven- 
 tions of major importance of any sort have been claimed 
 by one genius alone. 
 
 Our readers will recollect that the invention of the 
 spinning-jenny was assigned to Highs and Kay, as well 
 as to Arkwright ; that steam-engines were made by 
 Newcomen before Watt ; that the application of steam 
 to navigation is claimed for Fitch as well as for Fulton. 
 But, as Mr. Benjamin remarks, it is in the study of 
 electricity that there are the largest number of con- 
 flicting claims. He cites many claimants to the respect- 
 ive honors of the invention of the electro-motor, of the 
 electric railway, of the induction coil. And he concludes 
 
598 
 
 INVENTORS. 
 
 by calling to mind the names of Rees, Drawbaugh,* 
 (dra'ba), Q-ray, Bell, and Dolbear (dol'ber), each of whom 
 is thought by many to have been the first to invent the 
 telephone. We can not take it upon ourselves to decide 
 who was the first to do the inventing. It would take 
 pages on pages to argue the point. But we do not think 
 we are far wrong in presenting to our readers a sketch 
 of the life of Alexander Graham Bell. Mr. Bell is cer- 
 tainly an inventor, and a great one. His name is in- 
 dissolubly connected with our thoughts of the tele- 
 phone. He certainly is an independent inventor of the 
 telephone, though there may be ground for dispute as to 
 whether he be the first inventor. 
 
 Of Mr. Bell's life, few facts are readily obtainable, 
 even for a short sketch. He was born at Edinburgh 
 (ed'in bilr rCih), in Scotland, on the 1st of March, in the 
 year 1847. He was the second son. His father, Alex- 
 ander Melvill Bell, and his grandfather, Alexander Bell, 
 
 * " Of fbe various claimants to the invention of the telephone, none has pre- 
 sented a more remarkable history than Daniel Drawbaugh. Mr. Drawbaugh is 
 one of the universal geniuses capable of turning his hand to any mechanical 
 work, and doing it well. He has always resided in an out-of-the-way Uttle ham- 
 let called Eberly's Mills, near Harrisburg, Penn. As an electrician, he is self- 
 taught. Between the years 1867 and 1876, he claims to have invented and act- 
 ually used every type of telephone now known. He began with a transmitter 
 made out of a jelly tumbler, in which he used powdered carbon to vary the re- 
 sistance correspondingly to the motion of the diaphragm vibrated by the voice ; 
 and a receiver contrived from a mustard-can; but in other respects nearly 
 identical with the first telephones made by Professor Bell. Prom these devices, 
 as starting-points, onward, he has constructed a series of telephones, more and 
 more specialized in construction, until. Anally, the instruments which he claims 
 to have had at the time when Professor BeU made his earlier experiments, ap- 
 proach closely in efficiency to the best forms of the present day. Mr. Drawbaugh 
 has produced a large number of his telephones, and many witnesses to prove 
 that he had them at the times he fixes. His claims are, at this writing (1886), 
 before the courts for adjudication. If they are ultimately sustained, there can be 
 no question but that Mr. Drawbaugh 's position as an electrical discoverer will be 
 wholly unrivaled. Within the last four years, he has invented over forty new 
 telephones."— Bon^'amm.- '■'Age of Mectricity." 
 
BELL. 599 
 
 had both spent their hves in the service of tlie deaf and 
 dumb. Alexander Beh was well known in his day as 
 the author of a method for the removal of impediments 
 of speech. His son, the father of the inventor of the 
 telephone, was the inventor of visible speech, as it is 
 called, — of that method of sign language which has been 
 so successfully used in the teaching of the deaf and 
 dumb how to express themselves. 
 
 Alexander Q-raham Bell received his education in the 
 High School of his native town. He subsequently 
 studied in Grermany, and there received the degree of 
 Doctor of Philosophy. He trained himself especially to 
 follow what had come to be the family profession, and 
 gave careful attention to every thing concerning the 
 teaching of deaf mutes. Some few years after his Ger- 
 man studies, — in 1872, — he removed to the United 
 States, and took up his residence in Boston, where he 
 became Professor of Vocal Physiology in the Boston 
 University. He became well and widely known through 
 his labors in behalf of the deaf and dumb. Under his 
 teaching, the deaf were taught to read speech on the 
 lips of the speaker with as much ease as one ordinarily 
 apprehends it with the ear. And even the dumb were 
 taught to enunciate words in such a manner as to 
 render themselves generally comprehensible. To say a 
 person is deaf and dumb when he can both imderstand 
 speaking and speak himself, appears, perhaps, ridiculous, 
 but this is what Mr. Bell effected with the deaf mutes. 
 I have myself conversed with a deaf mute who had 
 been under Mr. Bell's charge, and for some time I never 
 knew that I was talking to one who had not the ordi- 
 nary powers of hearing and speaking. 
 
 But it is not in this direction that Mr. Bell has 
 
600 
 
 INVENTORS. 
 
 acquired his greatest prominence. It is by his invention 
 of tlie telephone, an invention to whicli lie was led by 
 his studies in every thing which had any connection with 
 hearing or speaking, whether natural or artificial. 
 
 It was in the year 1870 that Mr. Bell began the study 
 of the transmission of musical tones by telegraph. He 
 was led to these studies in endeavoring to render more 
 perfect his system of teaching deaf mutes. As we have 
 already said, Mr. Bell had succeeded in teaching deaf 
 mutes to speak with comparative clearness. As a substi- 
 tute for hearing, he had been accustomed to give them the 
 knowledge of reading language by the eye from the lips. 
 He experimented much in trying to discover some means 
 to make the vibrations in the air produced by sound 
 appear to the eye. By means of the phonautograph he 
 could obtain a tracing upon blackened paper by a pencil 
 attached to a vibratory bod3^ He also succeeded in obtain- 
 ing "enlarged tracings of the vibrations of the air, pro- 
 duced by the vowel sounds, upon a plane surface of 
 smoked glass." On this, an analogy struck him between 
 the manner in which his pencil was vibrated by the 
 membrane of the phonautograph and the manner in 
 which certain small bones in the human ear were acted 
 upon by the tympanum or drum. He began experiment- 
 ing upon an apparatus nearly resembling the human ear, 
 but at the suggestion of Dr. Blake, an eminent aurist of 
 Boston, he transferred his studies to a prepared speci- 
 men of the ear itself. 
 
 Here he observed vibrations in the various bones 
 within the ear that caused him to conceive the idea of 
 vibrating in a similar manner a piece of iron in front of 
 an electro-magnet. He began at once to experiment in 
 this direction ; but even here he made no great progress 
 
BELL. 601 
 
 at once. In 1874, he conceived a scheme of transmitting 
 the vibrations in two armatures, at different ends of a 
 wire ; but he thought, as he says, " that vibrations pro- 
 duced in this way would be of very slight ampHtude, 
 and that they might not prove sufficiently violent to pro- 
 duce audible effects that would prove practically useful, 
 either for the purpose of the reproduction of articulate 
 speech, or for the purpose of multiple telegraphy," in 
 which Mr. Bell was at that time greatly interested. 
 
 But though not at once successful, Mr. Bell continu.ed 
 to think a great deal in regard to the matter of trans- 
 mitting speech by electricity. It was the next year that 
 he hit on his great invention. He made a discovery in 
 regard to the vibrations of a reed placed before a 
 receiver, which convinced him that the invention made 
 the summer before would prove practicable if he should 
 construct it. His experiments convinced him that his 
 then opinion in regard to the slight amplitude of the 
 vibrations which we have quoted was incorrect, and such 
 it turned out was the case. 
 
 By the summer of 1876, Mr. Bell had so far succeeded 
 in his experiments, that he exhibited a telephone at the 
 Centennial Exhibition, and though he did not achieve a 
 complete success, he was able to transmit certain words 
 and phrases in such a manner as to be recognized. The 
 next year he worked vigorously upon it, and in 1877, he 
 succeeded in bringing it to the form in which it stands 
 substantially to-day. Certain improvements have been 
 made,* but the telephone is practically the same. 
 
 * " The ingenuity of telephone experimenters," says Dr. Benjamin, " has chiefly 
 been directed to the production of new forms of transmitters ; and some of these 
 are remarkahle as scientific curiosities. Professor Blake has transmitted speech 
 by the earth's magnetism, by arranging a diaphragm before a rod of soft iron, the 
 latter being held in the position of the dipping needle, and thus becoming a mag- 
 
602 
 
 INVENTORS. 
 
 He had already taken out a patent. A company was 
 soon formed, and telephonic communication became almost 
 at once an every-day thing. The use became universal, 
 and Mr. Bell saw himself on the way to a most success- 
 ful future. One difficulty lay in the way, the same which 
 beset Whitney. The invention was of such immense 
 value, that the greatest part of the work of the Bell Tele- 
 phone Company was to defend their patent. The struggles 
 are still going on between the company and the claimants 
 to the invention, of whom we have already spoken. Every 
 case has resulted favorably to Bell, and now it only re- 
 mains for the Supreme Court of the United States to pass 
 judgment, which it will doubtless do when it finds time. 
 
 Mr. Bell lives now in Washington, D. C, where he has 
 a handsome house on Scott Circle. As far as one can 
 judge, however, his chief happiness does not lie in the 
 fostering and caring for the immense fortune which he 
 has accumulated as a result of his invention, so much as 
 in his family, and in his scientific pursuits.* Mr. Bell 
 
 net by induction from the earth. Mr. Bell has devised a telephone in which the 
 vibrations of the diaphragm produce a rubbing contact between pieces of glass 
 and silk, so that, as he claims, the instrument ' may be made to transmit articu- 
 lated speech by means of friotional electricity generated by the voice itself.' 
 Another curious transmitter devised by Mr. Bell consists of a toy balloon about 
 six inches in diameter made of thin rubbor, and coated with plumbago. This is 
 held between two fixed plates, and the current passes over the conducting envel- 
 ope. The expansion and contraction of the body of confined air in the balloon is 
 said to modify the resistance of the plumbago coating. Neither of the above in- 
 struments is of much practical utility." 
 
 * Mr. Bell is continually occupied in scientific research. The latest discovery 
 of his which we have seen recorded is that of the photographing tones of voice, by 
 means of the impressions made on a falling jet of water, or a flame of gas burning. 
 " The elements concerned "—we quote from the Electrical Eeview—^' are a stream 
 of water, sunlight, and a glass plate. What the invention does, according to the 
 published descriptions, is to record conversation by photographing the waves of 
 sound, and from this photograph to reproduce corresponding waves,— that is, the 
 conversation that has been printed on the glass plate. The phonograph, to be sure, 
 attempted this, but it depended on mechanical means that were not prompt and 
 delicate enough to secure a satisfactory process. * * * In this new apparatus, 
 
BELL. 603 
 
 married, some time ago, Miss Hubbard, the daughter of 
 Professor Gardiner Hubbard, of Harvard. To Mr. Hubbard, 
 Mr. Bell owes in great part the business successes of the 
 Bell Telephone Company. Mr. Hubbard, it is said, is 
 quite " as practical as Bell is theoretical." Whether or no 
 this be a fact, it is certain that the affairs of the Bell 
 Telephone Company have been' excellently well managed, 
 and that an immense amount of money has accrued to 
 the inventor of the telephone and to his friends Many 
 of the inventors whose lives we have sketched here, had 
 cause to complain of the return which they have received 
 for their inventions. But Bell, the last of them, has 
 nothing to complain of in that direction. 
 
 assuming that it really does all that is described, the waves are not reproduced as 
 in the telephone, but their effect upon a jet of water, long known to be sensitive 
 to such impulses, is caught by instantaneous photography, and permanently re- 
 corded on a glass plate in the form of minute irregularities of surface. By suit- 
 able apparatus, these elevations and depressions, which correspond to pulsations 
 of the air, are retranslated into air waves, and the voice is heard again. * * * 
 Professor Bell considers this discovery quite as important as that of the tele- 
 phone." But a year has passed and we have heard nothing more of the new 
 discovery, and must fear that, like the phonograph, it promised more than it 
 could perform.