De Libris: Prose and Verse

Austin Dobson

This page copyright © 2003 Blackmask Online.

http://www.blackmask.com

  • PROLOGUE
  • ON SOME BOOKS AND THEIR ASSOCIATIONS
  • AN EPISTLE TO AN EDITOR
  • BRAMSTON'S “MAN OF TASTE”
  • THE PASSIONATE PRINTER TO HIS LOVE
  • M. ROUQUET ON THE ARTS
  • THE FRIEND OF HUMANITY AND THE RHYMER
  • THE PARENT'S ASSISTANT
  • A PLEASANT INVECTIVE AGAINST PRINTING
  • TWO MODERN BOOK ILLUSTRATORS
  • A SONG OF THE GREENAWAY CHILD
  • TWO MODERN BOOK ILLUSTRATORS
  • HORATIAN ODE
  • THE BOOKS OF SAMUEL ROGERS
  • PEPYS' “DIARY”
  • A FRENCH CRITIC ON BATH
  • A WELCOME FROM THE “JOHNSON CLUB”
  • THACKERY'S “ESMOND”
  • A MILTONIC EXERCISE
  • FRESH FACTS ABOUT FIELDING
  • THE HAPPY PRINTER
  • CROSS READINGS—AND CALEB WHITEFOORD
  • THE LAST PROOF
  • Charles Aldarondo, Keren Vergon, Sjaani and the 
    Online Distributed Proofreaders







    DE LIBRIS PROSE &VERSE


    BY AUSTIN DOBSON





    Vt Mel Os, sic Cor Melos afficit, &reficit. Deuteromelia.


    A mixture of a Song doth ever adde Pleasure. BACON ( adapted).


    MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1908



    Copyright 1908 by The Macmillan Company






    PROLOGUE




    LECTOR BENEVOLE!—FOR SO
    THEY USED TO CALL YOU, YEARS AGO,—
    I CAN'T PRETEND TO MAKE YOU READ
    THE PAGES THAT TO THIS SUCCEED;
    NOR COULD I—IF I WOULD—EXCUSE
    THE WAYWARD PROMPTINGS OF THE MUSE
    AT WHOSE COMMAND I WROTE THEM DOWN.


    I HAVE NO HOPE TO “PLEASE THE TOWN.”
    I DID BUT THINK SOME FRIENDLY SOUL
    (NOT ILL-ADVISED, UPON THE WHOLE!)
    MIGHT LIKE THEM; AND “TO INTERPOSE
    A LITTLE EASE,” BETWEEN THE PROSE,
    SLIPPED IN THE SCRAPS OF VERSE, THAT THUS
    THINGS MIGHT BE LESS MONOTONOUS.


    THEN, LECTOR, BE BENEVOLUS!






    [The Author desires to express his thanks to Lord Northcliffe, Messrs.
    Macmillan and Co., Messrs. Smith, Elder and Co., Mr. William Heinemann,
    and Messrs. Virtue and Co., for kind permission to reprint those pieces
    in this volume concerning which no specific arrangements were made on
    their first appearance in type.
    ]






    ON SOME BOOKS AND THEIR ASSOCIATIONS



    New books can have few associations. They may reach us on the best
    deckle-edged Whatman paper, in the newest types of famous presses, with
    backs of embossed vellum, with tasteful tasselled strings,—and yet be
    no more to us than the constrained and uneasy acquaintances of
    yesterday. Friends they may become to-morrow, the day after,—perhaps
    “hunc in annum et plures” But for the time being they have neither part
    nor lot in our past of retrospect and suggestion. Of what we were, of
    what we like or liked, they know nothing; and we—if that be
    possible—know even less of them. Whether familiarity will breed
    contempt, or whether they will come home to our business and
    bosom,—these are things that lie on the lap of the Fates.


    But it is to be observed that the associations of old books, as of new
    books, are not always exclusively connected with their text or
    format,—are sometimes, as a matter of fact, independent of both. Often
    they are memorable to us by length of tenure, by propinquity,—even by
    their patience under neglect. We may never read them; and yet by reason
    of some wholly external and accidental characteristic, it would be a
    wrench to part with them if the moment of separation—the inevitable
    hour—should arrive at last. Here, to give an instance in point, is a
    stained and battered French folio, with patched corners,—Mons. N.
    Renouard's translation of the Metamorphoses d'Ovide, 1637, “ enrichies
    de figures a chacune Fable
    ” (very odd figures some of them are!) and to
    be bought “chez Pierre Billaine, rue Sainct Iacques, a la Bonne-Foy,
    deuant S. Yues
    .” It has held no honoured place upon the shelves; it has
    even resided au rez-de-chaussee,—that is to say, upon the floor; but it
    is not less dear,—not less desirable. For at the back of the
    “Dedication to the King” (Lewis XIII. to wit), is scrawled in a
    slanting, irregular hand: “Pour mademoiselle de mons Son tres humble et
    tres obeissant Serviteur St. Andre.
    ” Between the fourth and fifth word,
    some one, in a smaller writing of later date, has added “par “ and
    after “St. Andre,” the signature “Vandeuvre.” In these irrelevant (and
    unsolicited) interpolations, I take no interest. But who was Mlle. de
    Mons? As Frederick Locker sings:


      Did She live yesterday or ages back?

      What colour were the eyes when bright and waking?

      And were your ringlets fair, or brown, or black,

      Poor little Head! that long has done with aching![1]


    “Ages back” she certainly did not live, for the book is dated “1637,”
    and “yesterday” is absurd. But that her eyes were bright,—nay, that
    they were particularly lively and vivacious, even as they are in the
    sanguine sketches of Antoine Watteau a hundred years afterwards, I am
    “confidous”—as Mrs. Slipslop would say. For my theory (in reality a
    foregone conclusion which I shrink from dispersing by any practical
    resolvent) is, that Mile. de Mons was some delightful
    seventeenth—century French child, to whom the big volume had been
    presented as a picture-book. I can imagine the alert, strait-corseted
    little figure, with ribboned hair, eagerly craning across the tall
    folio; and following curiously with her finger the legends under the
    copper “figures,”—“Narcisse en fleur,” “Ascalaphe en hibou,” “Jason
    endormant le dragon,”—and so forth, with much the same wonder that the
    Sinne-Beelden of Jacob Cats must have stirred in the little Dutchwomen
    of Middelburg. There can be no Mlle. de Mons but this,—and for me she
    can never grow old!


    Note:


    [1] This quatrain has the distinction of having been touched upon by
    Thackeray. When Mr. Locker's manuscript went to the Cornhill Magazine
    in 1860, it ran thus:


      Did she live yesterday, or ages sped?

      What colour were the eyes when bright and waking?

      And were your ringlets fair? Poor little head!

      —Poor little heart! that long has done with aching.



    Sometimes it comes to pass that the association is of a more far-fetched
    and fanciful kind. In the great Ovid it lies in an inscription: in my
    next case it is “another-guess” matter. The folio this time is the
    Sylva Sylvarum of the “Right Hon. Francis Lo. Verulam. Viscount St.
    Alban,” of whom some people still prefer to speak as Lord Bacon. 'Tis
    only the “sixt Edition”; but it was to be bought at the Great Turk's
    Head, “next to the Mytre Tauerne” (not the modern pretender, be it
    observed!), which is in itself a feature of interest. A former
    possessor, from his notes, appears to have been largely preoccupied with
    that ignoble clinging to life which so exercised Matthew Arnold, for
    they relate chiefly to laxative simples for medicine; and he comforts
    himself, in April, 1695, by transcribing Bacon's reflection that “a Life
    led in Religion and in Holy Exercises” conduces to longevity,—an
    aphorism which, however useful as an argument for length of days, is a
    rather remote reason for religion. But what to me is always most
    seductive in the book is, that to this edition (not copy, of course) of
    1651 Master Izaak Walton, when he came, in his Compleat Angler of
    1653, to discuss such abstract questions as the transmission of sound
    under water, and the ages of carp and pike, must probably have referred.
    He often mentions “Sir Francis Bacon's” History of Life and Death,
    which is included in the volume. No doubt it would be more reasonable
    and more “congruous” that Bacon's book should suggest Bacon. But there
    it is. That illogical “succession of ideas” which puzzled my Uncle Toby,
    invariably recalls to me, not the imposing folio to be purchased “next
    to the Mytre Tauerne” in Fleet Street, but the unpretentious
    eighteenpenny octavo which, two years later, was on sale at Richard
    Marriot's in St. Dunstan's churchyard hard by, and did no more than
    borrow its erudition from the riches of the Baconian storehouse.


    Life, and its prolongation, is again the theme of the next book (also
    mentioned, by the way, in Walton) which I take up, though unhappily it
    has no inscription. It is a little old calf-clad copy of Lewis Cornaro's
    Sure and Certain Methods of attaining a Long and Healthful Life, 4th
    ed., 24mo, 1727; and was bought at the Bewick sale of February, 1884, as
    having once belonged to Robert Elliot Bewick, only son of the famous old
    Newcastle wood-engraver. As will be shown later, it is easy to be misled
    in these matters, but I cannot help believing that this volume, which
    looks as if it had been re-bound, is the one Thomas Bewick mentions in
    his Memoir as having been his companion in those speculative
    wanderings over the Town Moor or the Elswick Fields, when, as an
    apprentice, he planned his future a la Franklin, and devised schemes
    for his conduct in life. In attaining Cornaro's tale of years he did not
    succeed; though he seems to have faithfully practised the periods of
    abstinence enjoined (but probably not observed) by another of the “noble
    Venetian's” professed admirers, Mr. Addison of the Spectator.


    If I have admitted a momentary misgiving as to the authenticity of the
    foregoing relic of the “father of white line,” there can be none about
    the next item to which I now come. Once, on a Westminster bookstall,
    long since disappeared, I found a copy of a seventh edition of the
    Pursuits of Literature of T.J. Mathias, Queen Charlotte's Treasurer's
    Clerk. Brutally cut down by the binder, that durus arator had
    unexpectedly spared a solitary page for its manuscript comment, which
    was thoughtfully turned up and folded in. It was a note to this couplet
    in Mathias, his Dialogue II.:—


      From Bewick's magick wood throw borrow'd rays

      O'er many a page in gorgeous Bulmer's blaze,—


    “gorgeous Bulmer” (the epithet is over-coloured!) being the William
    Bulmer who, in 1795, issued the Poems of Goldsmith and Parnell. “I"
    (says the writer of the note) “was chiefly instrumental to this
    ingenious artist's [Bewick's] excellence in this art. I first initiated
    his master, Mr. Ra. Beilby (of Newcastle) into the art, and his first
    essay was the execution of the cuts in my Treatise on Mensuration,
    printed in 4to, 1770. Soon after I recommended the same artist to
    execute the cuts to Dr. Horsley's edition of the works of Newton.
    Accordingly Mr. B. had the job, who put them into the hands of his
    assistant, Mr. Bewick, who executed them as his first work in wood, and
    that in a most elegant manner, tho' spoiled in the printing by John
    Nichols, the Black-letter printer. C.H. 1798.”


    “C.H.” is Dr. Charles Hutton, the Woolwich mathematician. His note is a
    little in the vaunting vein of that “founder of fortun's,” the excellent
    Uncle Pumblechook of Great Expectations, for his services scarcely
    amounted to “initiating” Bewick or his master into the art of engraving
    on wood. Moreover, his memory must have failed him, for Bewick, and not
    Beilby, did the majority of the cuts to the Mensuration, including a
    much-praised diagram of the tower of St. Nicholas Church at Newcastle,
    afterwards a familiar object in the younger man's designs and
    tail-pieces. Be this as it may, Dr. Hutton's note was surely worth
    rescuing from the ruthless binder's plough.


    Between the work of Thomas Bewick and the work of Samuel Pepys, it is
    idle to attempt any ingenious connecting link, save the fact that they
    both wrote autobiographically. The “Pepys” in question here, however, is
    not the famous Diary, but the Secretary to the Admiralty's “only other
    acknowledged work,” namely, the privately printed Memoires Relating to
    the State of the Royal Navy of England, for Ten Years, 1690
    ; and this
    copy may undoubtedly lay claim to exceptional interest. For not only
    does it comprise those manuscript corrections in the author's
    handwriting, which Dr. Tanner reproduced in his excellent Clarendon
    Press reprint of last year, but it includes the two portrait plates by
    Robert White after Kneller. The larger is bound in as a frontispiece;
    the smaller (the ex-libris) is inserted at the beginning. The main
    attraction of the book to me, however, is its previous owners—one
    especially. My immediate predecessor was a well-known collector,
    Professor Edward Solly, at whose sale in 1886 I bought it; and he in his
    turn had acquired it in 1877, at Dr. Rimbault's sale. Probably what drew
    us all to the little volume was not so much its disclosure of the
    lamentable state of the Caroline navy, and of the monstrous toadstools
    that flourished so freely in the ill-ventilated holds of His Majesty's
    ships-of-war, as the fact that it had once belonged to that brave old
    philanthropist, Captain Thomas Coram of the Foundling Hospital. To him
    it was presented in March, 1724, by one C. Jackson; and he afterwards
    handed it on to a Mr. Mills. Pasted at the end is Coram's autograph
    letter, dated “June 10th, 1746.” “To Mr. Mills These. Worthy Sir I
    happend to find among my few Books, Mr. Pepys his memoires, w'ch I
    thought might be acceptable to you &therefore pray you to accept of it.
    I am w'th much Respect Sir your most humble Ser't. THOMAS CORAM.”


    At the Foundling Hospital is a magnificent full-length of Coram, with
    curling white locks and kindly, weather-beaten face, from the brush of
    his friend and admirer, William Hogarth. It is to Hogarth and his
    fellow-Governor at the Foundling, John Wilkes, that my next jotting
    relates. These strange colleagues in charity afterwards—as is well
    known—quarrelled bitterly over politics. Hogarth caricatured Wilkes in
    the Times: Wilkes replied by a North Briton article (No. 17) so
    scurrilous and malignant that Hogarth was stung into rejoining with that
    famous squint-eyed semblance of his former crony, which has handed him
    down to posterity more securely than the portraits of Zoffany and
    Earlom. Wilkes's action upon this was to reprint his article with the
    addition of a bulbous-nosed woodcut of Hogarth “from the Life.” These
    facts lent interest to an entry which for years had been familiar to me
    in the Sale Catalogue of Mr. H.P. Standly, and which ran thus: “The
    NORTH BRITON, No. 17, with a PORTRAIT of HOGARTH in WOOD; and a severe
    critique on some of his works: in Ireland's handwriting
    is the
    following—'This paper was given to me by Mrs. Hogarth, Aug. 1782, and
    is the identical North Briton purchased by Hogarth, and carried in his
    pocket many days to show his friends
    .'“ The Ireland referred to (as
    will presently appear) was Samuel Ireland of the Graphic
    Illustrations
    . When, in 1892, dispersed items of the famous Joly
    collection began to appear sporadically in the second-hand catalogues, I
    found in that of a well-known London bookseller an entry plainly
    describing this one, and proclaiming that it came “from the celebrated
    collection of Mr. Standly, of St. Neots.” Unfortunately, the scrap of
    paper connecting it with Mrs. Hogarth's present to Ireland had been
    destroyed. Nevertheless, I secured my prize, had it fittingly bound up
    with the original number which accompanied it; and here and there, in
    writing about Hogarth, bragged consequentially about my fortunate
    acquisition. Then came a day—a day to be marked with a black
    stone!—when in the British Museum Print Room, and looking through the
    ”—Collection,” for the moment deposited there, I came upon another
    copy of the North Briton, bearing in Samuel Ireland's writing a
    notification to the effect that it was the Identical No. 17, etc., etc.
    Now which is the right one? Is either the right one? I inspect mine
    distrustfully. It is soiled, and has evidently been folded; it is
    scribbled with calculations; it has all the aspect of a venerable
    vetuste
    . That it came from the Standly collection, I am convinced. But
    that other pretender in the (now dispersed) ”—Collection”? And was
    not Samuel Ireland (nomen invisum!) the, if not fraudulent, at least
    too-credulous father of one William Henry Ireland, who, at eighteen,
    wrote Vortigern and Rowena, and palmed it off as genuine Shakespeare?
    I fear me—I much fear me—that, in the words of the American showman,
    I have been “weeping over the wrong grave.”


    To prolong these vagrant adversaria would not be difficult. Here, for
    example, dated 1779, are the Coplas of the poet Don Jorge Manrique,
    which, having no Spanish, I am constrained to study in the renderings of
    Longfellow. Don Jorge was a Spaniard of the Spaniards, Commendador of
    Montizon, Knight of the Order of Santiago, Captain of a company in the
    Guards of Castile, and withal a valiant soldado, who died of a wound
    received in battle. But the attraction of my volume is, that, at the
    foot of the title-page, in beautiful neat script, appear the words,
    “Robert Southey. Paris. 17 May 1817,”—being the year in which Southey
    stayed at Como with Walter Savage Landor. Here are the Works of
    mock-heroic John Philips, 1720, whose Blenheim the Tories pitted
    against Addison's Campaign, and whose Splendid Shilling still shines
    lucidly among eighteenth-century parodies. This copy bears—also on the
    title-page—the autograph of James Thomson, not yet the author of The
    Seasons
    ; and includes the book-plate of Lord Prestongrange,—that
    “Lord Advocate Grant” of whom you may read in the Kidnapped of
    “R.L.S.” Here again is an edition (the first) of Hazlitt's Lectures on
    the English Comic Writers
    , annotated copiously in MS. by a contemporary
    reader who was certainly not an admirer; and upon whom W.H.'s
    cockneyisms, Gallicisms, egotisms, and “ille-isms" generally, seem to
    have had the effect of a red rag upon an inveterately insular bull. “A
    very ingenious but pert, dogmatical, and Prejudiced Writer” is his
    uncomplimentary addition to the author's name. Then here is Cunningham's
    Goldsmith of 1854, vol. i., castigated with equal energy by that
    Alaric Alexander Watts,[2] of whose egregious strictures upon Wordsworth
    we read not long since in the Cornhill Magazine, and who will not
    allow Goldsmith to say, in the Haunch of Venison, “the porter and
    eatables followed behind.” “They could scarcely have followed
    before,”—he objects, in the very accents of Boeotia. Nor will he pass
    “the hollow-sounding bittern” of the Deserted Village. A barrel may
    sound hollow, but not a bird—this wiseacre acquaints us.


    Note:


    [2] So he was christened. But Lockhart chose to insist that his
    second pre-name should properly be “Attila,” and thenceforth he was
    spoken of in this way.



    Had the gifted author of Lyrics of the Heart never heard of rhetorical
    figures? But he is not Goldsmith's only hyper-critic. Charles Fox, who
    admired The Traveller, thought Olivia's famous song in the Vicar
    “foolish,” and added that “folly” was a bad rhyme to “melancholy.”[3] He
    must have forgotten Milton's:—


      Bird that shunn'st the noise of folly,

      Most musicall, most melancholy!


    Or he might have gone to the other camp, and remembered Pope on Mrs.
    Howard:—


      Not warp'd by Passion, aw'd by Rumour,

      Not grave thro' Pride,, or gay thro' Folly,

      An equal Mixture of good Humour,

      And sensible soft Melancholy.


    Note:


    [3] Recollections, by Samuel Rogers, 2nd ed., 1859, 43.






    AN EPISTLE TO AN EDITOR



    “Jamais les arbres verts n'ont essaye d'etre bleus.”—
    THEOPHILE GAUTIER.



    “A new Review!” You make me tremble
    (Though as to that, I can dissemble
    Till I hear more). But is it “new”?
    And will it be a real Review?—
    I mean, a Court wherein the scales
    Weigh equally both him that fails,
    And him that hits the mark?—a place
    Where the accus'd can plead his case,
    If wrong'd? All this I need to know
    Before I (arrogant!) say “Go.”


    “We, that are very old” (the phrase
    Is STEELE'S, not mine!), in former days,
    Have seen so many “new Reviews"
    Arise, arraign, absolve, abuse;—
    Proclaim their mission to the top
    (Where there's still room!), then slowly drop,


    Shrink down, fade out, and sans preferment,
    Depart to their obscure interment;—
    We should be pardon'd if we doubt
    That a new venture can hold out.


    It will, you say. Then don't be “new”;
    Be “old.” The Old is still the True.
    Nature (said GAUTIER) never tries
    To alter her accustom'd dyes;
    And all your novelties at best
    Are ancient puppets, newly drest.
    What you must do, is not to shrink
    From speaking out the thing you think;
    And blaming where 'tis right to blame,
    Despite tradition and a Name.
    Yet don't expand a trifling blot,
    Or ban the book for what it's not
    (That is the poor device of those
    Who cavil where they can't oppose!);
    Moreover (this is very old!),
    Be courteous—even when you scold!


    Blame I put first, but not at heart.
    You must give Praise the foremost part;—
    Praise that to those who write is breath
    Of Life, if just; if unjust, Death.
    Praise then the things that men revere;
    Praise what they love, not what they fear;
    Praise too the young; praise those who try;
    Praise those who fail, but by and by
    May do good work. Those who succeed,
    You'll praise perforce,—so there's no need
    To speak of that. And as to each,
    See you keep measure in your speech;—
    See that your praise be so exprest
    That the best man shall get the best;
    Nor fail of the fit word you meant
    Because your epithets are spent.
    Remember that our language gives
    No limitless superlatives;
    And SHAKESPEARE, HOMER, should have more
    Than the last knocker at the door!


    “We, that are very old!”—May this
    Excuse the hint you find amiss.
    My thoughts, I feel, are what to-day
    Men call vieux jeu. Well!—“let them say.”
    The Old, at least, we know: the New
    (A changing Shape that all pursue!)
    Has been,—may be, a fraud.
    —But there!
    Wind to your sail! Vogue la galere!





    BRAMSTON'S “MAN OF TASTE"


    Were you to inquire respectfully of the infallible critic (if such
    indeed there be!) for the source of the aphorism, “Music has charms to
    soothe a savage beast,” he would probably “down” you contemptuously in
    the Johnsonian fashion by replying that you had “just enough of learning
    to misquote”;—that the last word was notoriously “breast” and not
    “beast”;—and that the line, as Macaulay's, and every Board School-boy
    besides must be abundantly aware, is to be found in Congreve's tragedy
    of The Mourning Bride. But he would be wrong; and, in fact, would only
    be confirming the real author's contention that “Sure, of all
    blockheads, Scholars are the worst.” For, whether connected with
    Congreve or not, the words are correctly given; and they occur in the
    Rev. James Bramston's satire, The Man of Taste, 1733, running in a
    couplet as follows:—


      Musick has charms to sooth a savage beast,

      And therefore proper at a Sheriff's feast.


    Moreover, according to the handbooks, this is not the only passage from
    a rather obscure original which has held its own. “Without
    black-velvet-britches, what is man?”—is another (a speculation which
    might have commended itself to Don Quixote);[4] while The Art of
    Politicks
    , also by Bramston, contains a third:—


      What's not destroy'd by Time's devouring Hand?

      Where's Troy, and where's the May-Pole in the Strand?


    Polonius would perhaps object against a “devouring hand.” But the
    survival of—at least—three fairly current citations from a practically
    forgotten minor Georgian satirist would certainly seem to warrant a few
    words upon the writer himself, and his chief performance in verse.


    The Rev. James Bramston was born in 1694 or 1695 at Skreens, near
    Chelmsford, in Essex, his father, Francis Bramston, being the fourth son
    of Sir Moundeford Bramston, Master in Chancery, whose father again was
    Sir John Bramston, Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench, generally
    known as “the elder.”[5]James Bramston was admitted to Westminster
    School in 1708. In 1713 he became a scholar at Christ Church, Oxford,
    proceeding B.A. in 1717, and M.A. in 1720. In 1723 he was made Vicar of
    Lurgashall, and in 1725 of Harting, both of which Sussex livings he held
    until his death in March 1744, ten weeks before the death of Pope. His
    first published verses (1715) were on Dr. Radcliffe. In 1729 he printed
    The Art of Politicks, one of the many contemporary imitations of the
    Ars Poetica; and in 1733 The Man of Taste. He also wrote a mediocre
    variation on the Splendid Shilling of John Philips, entitled The
    Crooked Sixpence
    , 1743. Beyond a statement in Dallaway's Sussex that
    “he [Bramston] was a man of original humour, the fame and proofs of
    whose colloquial wit are still remembered”; and the supplementary
    information that, as incumbent of Lurgashall, he received an annual
    modus of a fat buck and doe from the neighbouring Park of Petworth,
    nothing more seems to have been recorded of him.


    Notes:


    [4] Whose grand tenue or holiday wear—Cervantes tells us—was “a
    doublet of fine cloth and velvet breeches and shoes to match.” (ch. 1).


    [5] Sir John Bramston, the younger, was the author of the “watery
    incoherent Autobiography”—as Carlyle calls it—published by the Camden
    Society in 1845.



    The Crooked Sixpence is, at best, an imitation of an imitation; and as
    a Miltonic pastiche does not excel that of Philips, or rival the more
    serious Lewesdon Hill of Crowe. The Art of Politicks, in its turn,
    would need a fairly long commentary to make what is only moderately
    interesting moderately intelligible, while eighteenth-century copies of
    Horace's letter to the Pisos are “plentiful as blackberries.” But The
    Man of Taste
    , based, as it is, on the presentment of a never extinct
    type, the connoisseur against nature, is still worthy of passing notice.


    In the sub-title of the poem, it is declared to be “Occasion'd by an
    Epistle of Mr. Pope's on that Subject” [i.e. “Taste"]. This was what is
    now known as No. 4 of the Moral Essays, “On the Use of Riches.” But
    its first title In 1731 was “Of Taste”; and this was subsequently
    altered to “Of False Taste.” It was addressed to Pope's friend, Richard
    Boyle, Earl of Burlington; and, under the style of “Timon's Villa,”
    employed, for its chief illustration of wasteful and vacuous
    magnificence, the ostentatious seat which James Brydges, first Duke of
    Chandos, had erected at Canons, near Edgware. The story of Pope's
    epistle does not belong to this place. But in the print of The Man of
    Taste
    , William Hogarth, gratifying concurrently a personal antipathy,
    promptly attacked Pope, Burlington, and his own bete noire,
    Burlington's architect, William Kent. Pope, to whom Burlington acts as
    hodman, is depicted whitewashing Burlington Gate, Piccadilly, which is
    labelled “Taste,” and over which rises Kent's statue, subserviently
    supported at the angles of the pediment by Raphael and Michelangelo. In
    his task, the poet, a deformed figure in a tye-wig, bountifully
    bespatters the passers-by, particularly the chariot of the Duke of
    Chandos. The satire was not very brilliant or ingenious; but its meaning
    was clear. Pope was prudent enough to make no reply; though, as Mr. G.S.
    Layard shows in his Suppressed Plates, it seems that the print was, or
    was sought to be, called in by those concerned. Bramston's poem, which
    succeeded in 1733, does not enter into the quarrel, it may be because of
    the anger aroused by the pictorial reply. But if—as announced on its
    title-page,—it was suggested by Pope's epistle, it would also seem to
    have borrowed its name from Hogarth's caricature.


    It was first issued in folio by Pope's publisher, Lawton Gilliver of
    Fleet Street, and has a frontispiece engraved by Gerard Vandergucht.
    This depicts a wide-skirted, effeminate-looking personage, carrying a
    long cane with a head fantastically carved, and surrounded by various
    objects of art. In the background rises what is apparently intended for
    the temple of a formal garden; and behind this again, a winged ass
    capers skittishly upon the summit of Mount Helicon. As might be
    anticipated, the poem is in the heroic measure of Pope. But though many
    of its couplets are compact and pointed, Bramston has not yet learned
    from his model the art of varying his pausation, and the period closes
    his second line with the monotony of a minute gun. Another defect,
    noticed by Warton, is that the speaker throughout is made to profess the
    errors satirised, and to be the unabashed mouthpiece of his own fatuity,
    “Mine,” say the concluding lines,—


      Mine are the gallant Schemes of Politesse,

      For books, and buildings, politicks, and dress.

      This is True Taste, and whoso likes it not,

      Is blockhead, coxcomb, puppy, fool, and sot.


    One is insensibly reminded of a quotation from P.L. Courier, made in the
    Cornhill many years since by the once famous “Jacob Omnium" when
    replying controversially to the author of Ionica, “Je vois”—says
    Courier, after recapitulating a string of abusive epithets hurled at him
    by his opponent—“je vois ce qu'il veut dire: il entend que lui et moi
    sont d'avis different; et c'est la sa maniere de s'exprimer
    .” It was
    also the manner of our Man of Taste.


    The second line of the above quotation from Bramston gives us four of
    the things upon which his hero lays down the law. Let us see what he
    says about literature. As a professing critic he prefers books
    with notes:—


      Tho' Blackmore's works my soul with raptures fill,

      With notes by Bently they'd be better still.


    Swift he detests—not of course for detestable qualities, but because he
    is so universally admired. In poetry he holds by rhyme as opposed to
    blank verse:—


      Verse without rhyme I never could endure,

      Uncouth in numbers, and in sense obscure.

      To him as Nature, when he ceas'd to see,

      Milton's an universal Blank to me ...

      Thompson [sic] write blank, but know that for that reason

      These lines shall live, when thine are out of season.

      Rhyme binds and beautifies the Poet's lays

      As London Ladies owe their shape to stays.


    In this the Man of Taste is obviously following the reigning fashion.
    But if we may assume Bramston himself to approve what his hero condemns,
    he must have been in advance of his age, for blank verse had but sparse
    advocates at this time, or for some time to come. Neither Gray, nor
    Johnson, nor Goldsmith were ever reconciled to what the last of them
    styles “this unharmonious measure.” Goldsmith, in particular, would
    probably have been in exact agreement with the couplet as to the
    controlling powers of rhyme. “If rhymes, therefore,” he writes, in the
    Enquiry into Polite Learning,[6] “be more difficult [than blank
    verse], for that very reason, I would have our poets write in rhyme.
    Such a restriction upon the thought of a good poet, often lifts and
    encreases the vehemence of every sentiment; for fancy, like a fountain,
    plays highest by diminishing the aperture.”[7]


    Notes:


    [6] Ed. 1759, p. 151.


    [7] Montaigne has a somewhat similar illustration: “As Cleanthes The
    Man of Taste's idol, in matters dramatic, is said, that as the voice
    being forciblie pent in the narrow gullet of a trumpet, at last issueth
    forth more strong and shriller, so me seemes, that a sentence cunningly
    and closely couched in measure-keeping Posie, darts it selfe forth more
    furiously, and wounds me even to the quicke”.
    (Essayes, bk. i. ch. xxv. (Florio's translation).



    The Man of Taste's idol, in matters dramatic, is Colley Cibber, who,
    however, deserves the laurel he wears, not for The Careless Husband,
    his best comedy, but for his Epilogues and other Plays.


      It pleases me, that Pope unlaurell'd goes,

      While Cibber wears the Bays for Play-house Prose,

      So Britain's Monarch once uncover'd sate,

      While Bradshaw bully'd in a broad-brimmed hat,—


    a reminiscence of King Charles's trial which might have been added to
    Bramston stock quotations. The productions of “Curll's chaste press” are
    also this connoisseur's favourite reading,—the lives of players in
    particular, probably on the now obsolete grounds set forth in Carlyie's
    essay on Scott.[8] Among these the memoirs of Cibber's “Lady Betty
    Modish,” Mrs. Oldfield, then lately dead, and buried in Westminster
    Abbey, are not obscurely indicated.


    Note:


    [8] “It has been said. 'There are no English lives worth reading except
    those of Players, who by the nature of the case have bidden Respectability
    good-day.'“


    In morals our friend—as might be expected circa l730—is a
    Freethinker and Deist. Tindal is his text-book: his breviary the Fable
    of the Bees
    ;—


      T' Improve In Morals Mandevil I read,

      And Tyndal's Scruples are my settled Creed.

      I travell'd early, and I soon saw through

      Religion all, e'er I was twenty-two.

      Shame, Pain, or Poverty shall I endure,

      When ropes or opium can my ease procure?

      When money's gone, and I no debts can pay,

      Self-murder is an honourable way.

      As Pasaran directs I'd end my life,

      And kill myself, my daughter, and my wife.


    He would, of course, have done nothing of the kind; nor, for the matter
    of that, did his Piedmontese preceptor.[9]


    Note:


    [9] Count Passeran was a freethinking nobleman who wrote A
    Philosophical Discourse on Death
    , in which he defended suicide, though
    he refrained from resorting to it himself. Pope refers to him in the
    Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue i. 124:—


      If Blount despatch'd himself, he play'd the man,

      And so may'st thou, illustrious Passeran!



    Nil admirari is the motto of the Man of Taste in Building, where he is
    naturally at home. He can see no symmetry in the Banqueting House, or in
    St. Paul's Covent Garden, or even in St. Paul's itself.


      Sure wretched Wren was taught by bungling Jones,

      To murder mortar, and disfigure stones!


    “Substantial” Vanbrugh he likes-=chiefly because his work would make
    “such noble ruins.” Cost is his sole criterion, and here he, too, seems
    to glance obliquely at Canons:—


      Dorick, Ionick, shall not there be found,

      But it shall cost me threescore thousand pound.


    But this was moderate, as the Edgware “folly” reached L250,000. In
    Gardening he follows the latest whim for landscape. Here is his
    burlesque of the principles of Bridgeman and Batty Langley:—


      Does it not merit the beholder's praise,

      What's high to sink? and what is low to raise?

      Slopes shall ascend where once a green-house stood,

      And in my horse-pond I will plant a wood.

      Let misers dread the hoarded gold to waste,

      Expence and alteration show a Taste.


    As a connoisseur of Painting this enlightened virtuoso is given over to
    Hogarth's hated dealers in the Black Masters:—


      In curious paintings I'm exceeding nice,

      And know their several beauties by their Price.

      Auctions and Sales I constantly attend,

      But chuse my pictures by a skilful Friend,

      Originals and copies much the same,

      The picture's value is the painter's name.[10]


    Of Sculpture he says—


      In spite of Addison and ancient Rome,

      Sir Cloudesly Shovel's is my fav'rite tomb.[11]

      How oft have I with admiration stood,

      To view some City-magistrate in wood?

      I gaze with pleasure on a Lord May'r's head

      Cast with propriety in gilded lead,—


    the allusion being obviously to Cheere's manufactory of such popular
    garden decorations at Hyde Park Corner.


    Notes:


    [10]: See post, “M. Ronquet on the Arts,” p. 51.


    [11]: “Sir Cloudesly Shovel's Monument has very often given me great
    Offence: Instead of the brave rough English Admiral, which was the
    distinguishing Character of that plain, gallant Man, he is represented
    on his Tomb [in Westminster Abbey] by the Figure of a Beau, dressed in a
    long Perriwig, and reposing himself upon Velvet Cushions under a Canopy
    of State” (Spectator, March 30, 1711).



    In Coins and Medals, true to his instinct for liking the worst the best,
    he prefers the modern to the antique. In Music, with Hogarth's Rake two
    years later, he is all for that “Dagon of the nobility and gentry,”
    imported song:—


      Without Italian, or without an ear,

      To Bononcini's musick I adhere;—


    though he confesses to a partiality for the bagpipe on the ground that
    your true Briton “loves a grumbling noise,” and he favours organs and
    the popular oratorios. But his “top talent is a bill of fare”:—


      Sir Loins and rumps of beef offend my eyes,[12]

      Pleas'd with frogs fricass[e]ed, and coxcomb-pies.

      Dishes I chuse though little, yet genteel,

      Snails[13] the first course, and Peepers[14] crown the meal.

      Pigs heads with hair on, much my fancy please,

      I love young colly-flowers if stew'd in cheese,

      And give ten guineas for a pint of peas!

      No tatling servants to my table come,

      My Grace is Silence, and my waiter Dumb.


    He is not without his aspirations.


      Could I the priviledge of Peer procure,

      The rich I'd bully, and oppress the poor.

      To give is wrong, but it is wronger still,

      On any terms to pay a tradesman's bill.

      I'd make the insolent Mechanicks stay,

      And keep my ready-money all for play.

      I'd try if any pleasure could be found

      In tossing-up for twenty thousand pound.

      Had I whole Counties, I to White's would go,

      And set lands, woods, and rivers at a throw.

      But should I meet with an unlucky run,

      And at a throw be gloriously undone;

      My debts of honour I'd discharge the first,

      Let all my lawful creditors be curst.


    Notes:


    [12] As they did those of Goldsmith's “Beau Tibbs.” “I hate your
    immense loads of meat ... extreme disgusting to those who are in the
    least acquainted with high life” (Citizen of the World, 1762, i.
    241).


    [13]: The edible or Roman snail (Helix pomatia) is still
    known to continental cuisines—and gipsy camps. It was introduced into
    England as an epicure's dish in the seventeenth century.


    [14]: Young chickens.



    Here he perfectly exemplifies that connexion between connoisseurship and
    play which Fielding discovers in Book xiii. of Tom Jones.[15] An
    anecdote of C.J. Fox aptly exhibits the final couplet in action, and
    proves that fifty years later, at least, the same convenient code was in
    operation. Fox once won about eight thousand pounds at cards. Thereupon
    an eager creditor promptly presented himself, and pressed for payment.
    “Impossible, Sir,” replied Fox,” I must first discharge my debts of
    honour.” The creditor expostulated. “Well, Sir, give me your bond.” The
    bond was delivered to Fox, who tore it up and flung the pieces into the
    fire. “Now, Sir,” said he, “my debt to you is a debt of honour,” and
    immediately paid him.[16]


    Notes:


    [15] “But the science of gaming is that which above all others
    employs their thoughts [i.e. the thoughts of the 'young gentlemen of our
    times']. These are the studies of their graver hours, while for their
    amusements they have the vast circle of connoisseurship, painting,
    music, statuary, and natural philosophy, or rather unnatural, which
    deals in the wonderful, and knows nothing of nature, except her monsters
    and imperfections” (ch. v.).


    [16] Table Talk of Samuel Rogers [by Dyce], 1856, p. 73.



    But we must abridge our levies on Pope's imitator. In Dress the Man of
    Taste's aim seems to have been to emulate his own footman, and at this
    point comes in the already quoted reference to velvet
    “inexpressibles”—(a word which, the reader may be interested to learn,
    is as old as 1793). His “pleasures,” as might be expected, like those of
    Goldsmith's Switzers, “are but low”—


      To boon companions I my time would give,

      With players, pimps, and parasites I'd live.

      I would with Jockeys from Newmarket dine,

      And to Rough-riders give my choicest wine ...

      My ev'nings all I would with sharpers spend,

      And make the Thief-catcher my bosom friend.

      In Fig, the Prize-fighter, by day delight,

      And sup with Colly Cibber ev'ry night.


    At which point—and probably in his cups—we leave our misguided fine
    gentleman of 1733, doubtless a fair sample of many of his class under
    the second George, and not wholly unknown under that monarch's
    successors—even to this hour. Le jour va passer; mais la folie ne
    passera pas!



    A parting quotation may serve to illustrate one of those changes of
    pronunciation which have taken place in so many English words. Speaking
    of his villa, or country-box, the Man of Taste says—


      Pots o'er the door I'll place like Cits balconies,

      Which Bently calls the Gardens of Adonis.


    To make this a peg for a dissertation on the jars of lettuce and fennel
    grown by the Greeks for the annual Adonis festivals, is needless. But it
    may be noted that Bramston, with those of his day,—Swift
    excepted,—scans the “o” in balcony long, a practice which continued far
    into the nineteenth century. “Contemplate,” said Rogers, “is bad enough;
    but balcony makes me sick.”[17] And even in 1857, two years after
    Rogers's death, the late Frederick Locker, writing of Piccadilly,
    speaks of “Old Q's” well-known window in that thoroughfare as
    “Primrose balcony.”


    Note:


    [17:]_Table Talk, 1856, p. 248.






    THE PASSIONATE PRINTER TO HIS LOVE



    (Whose name is Amanda.)


    With Apologies to the Shade of Christopher Marlowe.



    Come live with me and be my Dear;

      And till that happy bond shall lapse,
    I'll set your Poutings in Brevier,[l8]

      Your Praises in the largest CAPS.


    There's Diamond—'tis for your Eyes;

      There's Ruby—that will match your Lips;
    Pearl, for your Teeth; and Minion-size.

      To suit your dainty Finger-tips.


    In Nonpareil I'll put your Face;

      In Rubric shall your Blushes rise;
    There is no Bourgeois in your Case;

      Your Form can never need “Revise.”


    Your Cheek seems “Ready for the Press”;

      Your Laugh as Clarendon is clear;
    There's more distinction in your Dress

      Than in the oldest Elzevir.


    So with me live, and with me die;

      And may no “FINIS” e'er intrude
    To break into mere “Printers' Pie

      The Type of our Beatitude!


    (ERRATUM.—If my suit you flout,

      And choose some happier Youth to wed,
    'Tis but to cross AMANDA out,

      And read another name instead.)


    Note:


    [18] “Pronounced Bre-veer” (Printers' Vocabulary).

    M. ROUQUET ON THE ARTS



    M. Rouquet's book is a rare duodecimo of some two hundred pages, bound
    in sheep, which, in the copy before us, has reached that particular
    stage of disintegration when the scarfskin, without much persuasion,
    peels away in long strips. Its title is—L'Etat des Arts, en
    Angleterre. Par M. Rouquet, de l'Academie Royale de Peinture &de
    Sculpture
    ; and it is “imprime a Paris” though it was to be obtained
    from John Nourse, “Libraire dans le Strand, proche Temple-barr”—a
    well-known importer of foreign books, and one of Henry Fielding's
    publishers. The date is 1755, being the twenty-eighth year of the reign
    of His Majesty King George the Second—a reign not generally regarded as
    favourable to art of any kind. In what month of 1755 the little volume
    was first put forth does not appear; but it must have been before
    October, when Nourse issued an English version. There is a dedication,
    in the approved French fashion, to the Marquis de Marigny, “ Directeur Ordonnateur General de ses Batimens, Jardins, Arts, Academies Manufactures” to Lewis the Fifteenth, above which is a delicate
    headpiece by M. Charles-Nicolas Cochin (the greatest of the family),
    where a couple of that artist's well-nourished amorini, insecurely
    attached to festoons, distribute palms and laurels in vacuity under a
    coroneted oval displaying fishes. For Monsieur Abel-Francois Poisson,
    Marquis de Marigny et de Menars, was the younger brother of
    Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, the celebrated Marquise de Pompadour.
    Cochin's etching is dated “1754”; and the “Approbation” at the end of
    the volume bears his signature in his capacity of Censeur.


    Of the “M. Rouquet” of the title-page biography tells us little; but it
    may be well, before speaking of his book, to bring that little together.
    He was a Swiss Protestant of French extraction, born at Geneva in 1702.
    His Christian names were Jean-Andre; and he had come to England from his
    native land towards the close of the reign of George the First. Many of
    his restless compatriots also sought these favoured shores. Labelye, who
    rose from a barber's shop to be the architect of London Bridge; Liotard,
    once regarded as a rival of Reynolds; Michael Moser, eventually Keeper
    of the Royal Academy, had all migrated from the “stormy mansions" where,
    in the words of Goldsmith's philosophic Wanderer—


      Winter ling'ring chills the lap of May.


    Like Moser, Rouquet was a chaser and an enameller. He lodged on the
    south side of Leicester Fields, in a house afterwards the residence of
    another Switzer of the same craft, that miserable Theodore Gardelle, who
    in 1761 murdered his landlady, Mrs. King. Of Rouquet's activities as an
    artist in England there are scant particulars. The ordinary authorities
    affirm that he imitated and rivalled the popular miniaturist and
    enameller, Christian Zincke, who retired from practice in 1746; and he
    is loosely described as “the companion of Hogarth, Garrick, Foote, and
    the wits of the day.” Of his relations with Foote and Garrick there is
    scant record; but with Hogarth, his near neighbour in the Fields, he was
    certainly well acquainted, since in 1746 he prepared explanations in
    French for a number of Hogarth's prints. These took the form of letters
    to a friend at Paris, and are supposed to have been, if not actually
    inspired, at least approved by the painter. They usually accompanied all
    the sets of Hogarth's engravings which went abroad; and, according to
    George Steevens, it was Hogarth's intention ultimately to have them
    translated and enlarged. Rouquet followed these a little later by a
    separate description of “The March to Finchley,” designed specially for
    the edification of Marshal Foucquet de Belle-Isle, who, when the former
    letters had been written, was a prisoner of war at Windsor. In a brief
    introduction to this last, the author, hitherto unnamed, is spoken of as
    Mr. Rouquet, connu par ses Outrages d'Email.”


    After thirty years' sojourn in this country, Rouquet transferred himself
    to Paris. At what precise date he did this is not stated, but by a
    letter to Hogarth from the French capital, printed by John Ireland, the
    original of which is in the British Museum, he was there, and had been
    there several months, in March 1753. The letter gives a highly
    favourable account of its writer's fortunes. Business is “coming in very
    smartly,” he says. He has been excellently received, and is “perpetualy
    imploy'd.” There is far more encouragement for modern enterprise in
    Paris than there is in London; and some of his utterances must have
    rejoiced the soul of his correspondent. As this, for instance—“The
    humbug virtu is much more out of fashon here than in England, free
    thinking upon that &other topicks is more common here than amongst you
    if possible, old pictures &old stories fare's alike, a dark picture is
    become a damn'd picture.” On this account, he inquires anxiously as to
    the publication of his friend's forthcoming Analysis; he has been
    raising expectations about it, and he wishes to be the first to
    introduce it into France. From other sources we learn that (perhaps
    owing to his relations with Belle-Isle, who had been released in 1745)
    he had been taken up by Marigny, and also by Cochin, then keeper of the
    King's Drawings, and soon to be Secretary to the Academy, of which
    Rouquet himself, by express order of Lewis the Fifteenth, was made a
    member. Finally, as in the case of Cochin, apartments were assigned to
    him in the Louvre. Whether he ever returned to this country is doubtful;
    but, as we have seen, the Etat des Arts was printed at Paris in 1755.
    That it was suggested—or “commanded”—by Mme. de Pompadour's
    connoisseur brother, to whom it was inscribed, is a not unreasonable
    supposition.


    In any case, M. Rouquet's definition of the “Arts” is a generous one,
    almost as wide as Marigny's powers, already sufficiently set forth at
    the outset of this paper. For not only—as in duty bound—does he treat
    of Architecture, Sculpture, Painting and Engraving, but he also has
    chapters on Printing, Porcelain, Gold-and Silver-smiths' Work, Jewelry,
    Music, Declamation, Auctions, Shop-fronts, Cooking, and even on Medicine
    and Surgery. Oddly enough, he says nothing of one notable art with which
    Marigny was especially identified, that “art of creating landscape”—as
    Walpole happily calls Gardening—which, in this not very “shining
    period,” entered upon a fresh development under Bridgeman and William
    Kent. Although primarily a Londoner, one would think that M. Rouquet
    must certainly have had some experience, if not of the efforts of the
    innovators, at least of the very Batavian performances of Messrs. London
    and Wise of Brompton; or that he should have found at Nonsuch or
    Theobalds—at Moor Park or Hampton Court—the pretext for some of his
    pages—if only to ridicule those “verdant sculptures” at which Pope, who
    played no small part in the new movement, had laughed in the Guardian;
    or those fantastic “coats of arms and mottoes in yew, box and holly"
    over which Walpole also made merry long after in the famous essay so
    neatly done into French by his friend the Duc de Nivernais. M. Rouquet's
    curious reticence in this matter cannot have been owing to any
    consideration for Hogarth's old enemy, William Kent, for Kent had been
    dead seven years when the Etat des Arts made its appearance.


    If, for lack of space, we elect to pass by certain preliminary
    reflections which the Monthly Review rather unkindly dismisses as a
    “tedious jumble,” M. Rouquet's first subject is History Painting, a
    branch of the art which, under George the Second, attained to no great
    excellence. For this M. Rouquet gives three main reasons, the first
    being that afterwards advanced by Hogarth and Reynolds, namely,—the
    practical exclusion, in Protestant countries, of pictures from churches.
    A second cause was the restriction of chamber decorations to portraits
    and engravings; and a third, the craze of the connoisseur for Hogarth's
    hated “Black Masters,” the productions of defunct foreigners. And this
    naturally brings about the following digression, quite in Hogarth's own
    way, against that contemporary charlatan, the picture-dealer:—“English
    painters have an obstacle to overcome, which equally impedes the
    progress of their talents and of their fortune. They have to contend
    with a class of men whose business it is to sell pictures; and as, for
    these persons, traffic in the works of living, and above all of native
    artists, would be impossible, they make a point of decrying them, and,
    as far as they can, of confirming amateurs with whom they have to deal
    in the ridiculous idea that the older a picture is the more valuable it
    becomes. See, say they (speaking of some modern effort), it still shines
    with that ignoble freshness which is to be found in nature; Time will
    have to indue it with his learned smoke—with that sacred cloud which
    must some day hide it from the profane eyes of the vulgar in order to
    reveal to the initiated alone the mysterious beauties of a venerable
    antiquity.”


    These words are quite in the spirit of Hogarth's later “Time smoking a
    Picture.” As a matter of fact, they are reproduced almost textually from
    the writer's letter of five years earlier on the “March to Finchley.” To
    return, however, to History Painting. According to Rouquet, its leading
    exponent[19] under George the Second was Francis Hayman of the “large
    noses and shambling legs,” now known chiefly as a crony of Hogarth, and
    a facile but ineffectual illustrator of Shakespeare and Cervantes. In
    1754, however, his pictures of See-Saw, Hot Cockles, Blind Man's Buff,
    and the like, for the supper-boxes at Vauxhall Gardens, with Sayer's
    prints therefrom, had made his name familiar, although he had not yet
    painted those more elaborate compositions in the large room next the
    rotunda, over which Fanny Burney's “Holborn Beau,” Mr, Smith, comes to
    such terrible grief in ch. xlvi. of Evelina. But he had contributed a
    “Finding of Moses” to the New Foundling Hospital, which is still to be
    seen in the Court Room there, in company with three other pictures
    executed concurrently for the remaining compartments, Joseph Highmore's
    “Hagar and Ishmael,” James Wills's “Suffer little Children,” and
    Hogarth's “Moses brought to Pharaoh's Daughter”—the best of the four,
    as well as the most successful of Hogarth's historical pieces. All
    these, then recently installed, are mentioned by Rouquet.


    Note:


    [19] This is confirmed by Arthur Murphy: “Every Thing is put out
    of Hand by this excellent Artist with the utmost Grace and Delicacy, and
    his History-Pieces have, besides their beautiful Colouring, the most
    lively Expression of Character” (Gray's Inn Journal, February
    9, 1754
    ).



    It will be observed that he says nothing about Hogarth's earlier and
    more ambitious efforts in the “Grand Style,” the “Pool of Bethesda" and
    the “Good Samaritan” at St. Bartholomew's, nor of the “Paul before
    Felix,” also lately added to Lincoln's Inn Hall—omissions which must
    have sadly exercised the “author” of those monumental works when he came
    to read his Swiss friend's little treatise. Nor, for the matter of that,
    does M. Rouquet, when he treats of portrait, refer to Hogarth's
    masterpiece in this kind, the full-length of Captain Coram at the
    Foundling. On the other hand, he says a great deal about Hogarth which
    has no very obvious connection with History Painting. He discusses the
    Analysis and the serpentine Line of Beauty with far more insight than
    many of its author's contemporaries; refers feelingly to the Act by
    which in 1735 the painter had so effectively cornered the pirates; and
    finally defines his satirical pictures succinctly as follows:—“M.
    Hogarth has given to England a new class of pictures. They contain a
    great number of figures, usually seven or eight inches high. These
    remarkable performances are, strictly speaking, the history of certain
    vices, to a foreign eye often a little overcharged, but always full of
    wit and novelty. He understands in his compositions how to make pleasant
    pretext for satirising the ridiculous and the vicious, by firm and
    significant strokes, all of which are prompted by a lively, fertile and
    judicious imagination.”


    From History Painting to Portrait in Oil, the title given by M. Rouquet
    to his next chapter, transition is easy. Some of the artists mentioned
    above were also portrait painters. Besides Captain Coram, for example,
    Hogarth had already executed that admirable likeness of himself which is
    now at Trafalgar Square, and which Rouquet must often have seen in its
    home at Leicester Fields. Highmore too had certainly at this date
    painted more than one successful portrait of Samuel Richardson, the
    novelist; and even Hayman had made essay in this direction with the
    picture of Lord Orford, now in the National Portrait Gallery. A good
    many of the painters of the last reign must also, during Rouquet's
    residence in England, have been alive and active, e.g. Jervas, Dahl,
    Aikman, Thornhill and Richardson. But M. Rouquet devotes most of his
    pages in this respect to Kneller, whose not altogether beneficent
    influence long survived him. Strangely enough, Rouquet does not mention
    that egregious and fashionable face-painter, Sir Joshua's master, Thomas
    Hudson, whose “fair tied-wigs, blue velvet coats, and white satin
    waistcoats” (all executed by his assistants) reigned undisputed until he
    was eclipsed by his greater pupil. The two artists in portraiture
    selected by Rouquet for special notice are Allan Ramsay and the younger
    Vanloo (Jean Baptiste). Both were no doubt far above their predecessors;
    but Ramsay would specially appeal to Rouquet by his continental
    training, and Vanloo by his French manner and the superior variety of
    his attitudes.[20] The only other name Rouquet recalls is that of the
    drapery-painter Joseph Vanhaken; and we suspect it is to Rouquet that we
    owe the pleasant anecdote of the two painters who, for the sum of L800 a
    year, pre-empted his exclusive and inestimable services, to the
    wholesale discomfiture of their brethren of the brush. The rest shall be
    told in Rouquet's words:—“The best [artists] were no longer able to
    paint a hand, a coat, a background; they were forced to learn, which
    meant additional labour—what a misfortune! Henceforth there arrived no
    more to Vanhaken from different quarters of London, nor by coach from
    the most remote towns of England, canvases of all sizes, where one or
    more heads were painted, under which the painter who forwarded them had
    been careful to add, pleasantly enough, the description of the figures,
    stout or slim, great or small, which were to be appended. Nothing could
    be more absurd than this arrangement; but it would exist still—if
    Vanhaken existed.”[21]


    Note:


    [20] Another French writer, the Abbe le Blanc, gives a depressing account
    of English portraits before Vanloo came to England: “At some distance one
    might easily mistake a dozen of them for twelve copies of the same original.
    Some have the head turned to the left, others to the right; and this is the
    most sensible difference to be observed between them. Moreover, excepting
    the face, you find in all the same neck, the same arms, the same flesh, the
    same attitude; and to say all, you observe no more life than design in
    those pretended portraits. Properly speaking, they [the artists] are not
    painters, they know how to lay colours on the canvas; but they know not how
    to animate it” (Letters on the English and French Nations, 1747, i. 160).


    [21] He died in 1749.]


    “La peinture a l'huile, C'est bien difficile; Mais c'est beaucoup plus
    beau Que la peinture a l'eau.”
    About la peinture a l'eau, M. Rouquet
    says very little, in all probability because the English Water Colour
    School, which, with the advance of topographic art, grew so rapidly in
    the second half of the century, was yet to come. He refers, however,
    with approval to the gouaches of Joseph Goupy, Lady Burlington's
    drawing-master, perhaps better known to posterity by his (or her
    ladyship's) caricature of Handel as the “Charming Brute.” (Caricature,
    by the way, is a branch of Georgian Art which M. Rouquet neglects.) As
    regards landscape and animal painting, he “abides in generalities”; but
    he must have been acquainted with the sea pieces of Monamy, and
    Hogarth's and Walpole's friend Samuel Scott; and should, one would
    think, have known of the horses and dogs of Wootton and Seymour. Upon
    Enamel he might be expected to enlarge, although he mentions but one
    master, his own model, Zincke, who carried the art of portrait in this
    way much farther than any predecessor. Moreover, like Petitot, he made
    discoveries which he was wise enough to keep to himself.
    “It is most humiliating,” says Rouquet, “for the genius of painting that
    it can sometimes exist alone. M. Zincke left no pupil.” Seeing that
    Rouquet is also accused of jealously guarding his own contributions to
    the perfection of his art, the words are—as Diderot says—remarkable.


    With Sculpture, chiefly employed at this date for mortuary purposes, he
    has less opportunity of being indefinite, since there were but three
    notabilities, Scheemakers, Rysbrack, and Roubillac,—all foreigners. Of
    these Scheemakers, whom Chesterfield regarded as a mere stone-cutter,
    and who did the Shakespeare in Westminster Abbey, is certainly the least
    considerable. Next come Rysbrack, whom Walpole and Rouquet would put
    highest, the latter apparently because Rysbrack had been spoken of
    contemptuously by the Abbe le Blanc. But the first is assuredly
    Roubillac, whose monument to Mrs. Nightingale, however, belongs to a
    later date than the Etat des Arts, though he had already achieved the
    masterly figure of Eloquence on the Argyll monument. The only other
    sculptor referred to by Rouquet is Gabriel Cibber, whose statues of
    Madness and Melancholy, long at Bedlam, and now at South Kensington,
    certainly deserve his praise. But Cibber died in 1700, and belongs to
    the Caroline epoch. He no doubt owes his place in the Etat des Arts to
    the fact that he had been abused in the already-mentioned Letters on
    the English and French Nations
    .


    At this point we may turn M. Rouquet's pages more rapidly. It is not
    necessary to linger over his account of Silk Stuffs, more excellent in
    his opinion by their material than their make up. Under Medallists he
    commends the clever medals of great men by his compatriot, Anthony
    Dassier; under Printing he refers to that liberty of the Press which, in
    England, amounted to impunity. “A few too thinly disguised blasphemies;
    a few too rash reflections upon the Government, a few defamatory
    libels—are the sole things which, at the present time, are not
    allowed.” And this brings about the following lively and very accurate
    description of the eighteenth-century newspaper:—“One of the most
    notable peculiarities which liberty of the Press produces in England, is
    the swarm of fugitive sheets and half-sheets which one sees break forth
    every morning, except Sunday, covering all the coffee-house tables.
    Twenty of these different papers, under different titles, appear each
    day; some contain a moral or philosophical discourse; the majority of
    the rest offer political, and frequently seditious, comments on some
    party question. In them is to be found the news of Europe, England,
    London, and the day before. Their authors profess to be familiar with
    the most secret deliberations of the Cabinet, which they make public. If
    a fire occurs in a chimney or elsewhere; if a theft or a murder has
    taken place; if any one commits suicide from ennui or despair, the
    public is informed thereof on the morning after with the utmost amount
    of detail. After these articles come advertisements of all sorts, and in
    very great numbers. In addition to those of different things which it is
    desired to let, sell or purchase, there are some that are amusing. If a
    man's wife runs away he declares that he will not be liable for any
    debts she may contract; and as a matter of fact, this precaution,
    according to the custom of the country, is essential if he desires to
    secure himself from doing so. He threatens with all the rigour of the
    law those who dare to give his wife an asylum. Another publishes the
    particulars of his fortune, his age and his position, and adds that he
    is prepared to unite himself to any woman whose circumstances are such
    as he requires and describes; he further gives the address where
    communications must be sent for the negotiation and conclusion of the
    business. There are other notices which describe a woman who has been
    seen at the play or elsewhere, and announces that some one has
    determined to marry her. If any one has a dream which seems to him to
    predict that a certain number will be lucky in the lottery, he proclaims
    that fact, and offers a consideration to the possessor of the number if
    he cares to dispose of it.”


    After these come the advertisements of the Quack Doctors. Of the account
    of belles-lettres in 1754, two years after Amelia and in the actual
    year of Sir Charles Grandison, M. Rouquet's report is not
    flattering:—“The presses of England, made celebrated by so many
    masterpieces of wit and science, now scarcely print anything but
    miserable and insipid romances, repulsive volumes, frigid and tedious
    letters, where the most tasteless puerility passes for wit and genius,
    and an inflamed imagination exerts itself under the pretext of forming
    manners.” It is possible that the last lines are aimed at Richardson;
    certainly they describe the post-Richardsonian novel. But that the
    passage does not in any part refer to Fielding is clear from the fact
    that the writer presently praises Joseph Andrews, coupling it with
    Gil Blas.


    Mezzotint, Gem-cutting, Chasing (which serves to bring in M. Rouquet's
    countryman, Moser), Jewelry, China, (i.e. Chelsea ware) are all
    successfully treated with more or less minuteness, while, under
    Architecture, are described the eighteenth-century house, and the new
    bridge at Westminster of another Swiss, Labelye, who is not named: “The
    architect is a foreigner,” says Rouquet, who considered he had been
    inadequately rewarded. “It must be confessed (he adds drily) that in
    England this is a lifelong disqualification.” From Architecture the
    writer passes to the oratory of the Senate, the Pulpit and the Stage. In
    the last case exception is made for “le celebre M. Garic,” whose only
    teacher is declared to be Nature. As regards the rest, M. Rouquet thus
    describes the prevailing style:—“The declamation of the English stage
    is turgid, full of affectation, and perpetually pompous. Among other
    peculiarities, it frequently admits a sort of dolorous exclamation,—a
    certain long-drawn tone of voice, so woeful and so lugubrious that it is
    impossible not to be depressed by it.” This reads like a recollection of
    Quin in the Horatio of Rowe's Fair Penitent.


    Upon Cookery M. Rouquet is edifying; and concerning the
    eighteenth-century physician, with his tye-wig and gilt-head cane,
    sprightly and not unmalicious. But we must now confine ourselves to
    quoting a few detached passages from this discursive chronicle. The
    description of Ranelagh (in the chapter on Music) is too lengthy to
    reproduce. Here is that of the older Vauxhall:—“The Vauxhall concert
    takes place in a garden singularly decorated. The Director of Amusements
    in this garden [Jonathan Tyers] gains and spends successively
    considerable annual sums. He was born for such enterprises. At once
    spirited and tasteful, he shrinks from no expense where the amusement of
    the public is concerned, and the public, in its turn, repays him
    liberally. Every year he adds some fresh decoration, some new and
    exceptional scene. Sculpture, Painting, Music, bestir themselves
    periodically to render this resort more agreeable by the variety of
    their different productions: in this way opportunities of relaxation are
    infinite in England, above all at London; and thus Music plays a
    prominent part. The English take their pleasure without amusing
    themselves, or amuse themselves without enjoyment, except at table, and
    there only up to the point when sleep supervenes to the fumes of wine
    and tobacco.”


    Elsewhere M. Rouquet, like M. le Blanc before him, is loud in his
    denunciation of the pitiful practices of Vails-giving, which blocks the
    vestibule of every English house with an army of servants “ranged in
    line, according to their rank,” and ready “to receive, or rather exact,
    the contribution of every guest.” The excellent Jonas Hanway wrote a
    pamphlet reprehending this objectionable custom. Hogarth steadily set
    his face against it; but Reynolds is reported to have given his man L100
    a year for the door. Here, from another place, is a description of one
    of those popular auctions, at which, in the Marriage A-la-Mode, my
    Lady Squanderfieid purchases the bric-a-brac of Sir Timothy Babyhouse,
    The scene is probably Cock's in the Piazza at Covent Garden:—“Nothing
    is so diverting as this kind of sale—the number of those assembled, the
    diverse passions which animate them, the pictures, the auctioneer
    himself, his very rostrum, all contribute to the variety of the
    spectacle. There you see the faithless broker purchasing in secret what
    he openly depreciates; or—to spread a dangerous snare—pretending to
    secure with avidity a picture which already belongs to him. There, some
    are tempted to buy; and some repent of having bought. There, out of
    pique and bravado, another shall pay fifty louis for an article which he
    would not have thought worth five and twenty, had he not been ashamed to
    draw back when the eyes of a crowded company were upon him. There, you
    may see a woman of condition turn pale at the mere thought of losing a
    paltry pagoda which she does not want, and, in any other circumstances,
    would never have desired.”


    A closing word as to M. Rouquet himself. The Etat des Arts was duly
    noticed by the critics—contemptuously by the Monthly Review, and
    sympathetically by the Gentleman's and the Scots Magazine. In 1755,
    the year to which it belongs, its author put forth another work— L'Art
    Nouveau de la Peinture en Fromage ou en Ramequin
    [toasted cheese],
    invente pour suivre le louable projet de trouver graduellement des
    facons de peindre inferieures a celles qui existent
    . This, as its title
    imports, is a skit, levelled at the recent Histoire et Secret de la
    Peinture en Cire
    of Diderot, who nevertheless refers to Rouquet under
    Email, in the Dictionnaire Encyclapedique, as “un homme habile.”
    He seems, however (like “la peinture a l'huile),” to have been
    somewhat “difficile”; and as we have said, his discoveries (for he had
    that useful element in enamel-work, considerable chemical knowledge),
    like Zincke's, perished with him. Several of his portraits, notably
    those of Cochin and Marigny, were exhibited at the Paris Salons. Whether
    he was overparted, or overworked, in the Pompadour atmosphere; or
    whether he succumbed to the “continual headache” of which he speaks in
    his letter to Hogarth, his health gradually declined. In the last year
    of his life, his reason gave way; and when he died in 1759, it was as an
    inmate of Charenton.

    THE FRIEND OF HUMANITY AND THE RHYMER



    “Emam tua carmina sanus?”—MARTIAL.


    F. OF H. I want a verse. It gives you little pains;—

             You just sit down, and draw upon your brains.


             Come, now, be amiable.


    R. To hear you talk,

             You'd make it easier to fly than walk.

             You seem to think that rhyming is a thing

             You can produce if you but touch a spring;


             That fancy, fervour, passion—and what not,


             Are just a case of “penny in the slot.”

             You should reflect that no evasive bird

             Is half so shy as is your fittest word;

             And even similes, however wrought,

             Like hares, before you cook them, must be caught;—


             Impromptus, too, require elaboration,

             And (unlike eggs) grow fresh by incubation;

             Then,—as to epigrams,..


    F. of H. Nay, nay, I've done.

             I did but make petition. You make fun.


    R. Stay. I am grave. Forgive me if I ramble:

             But, then, a negative needs some preamble

             To break the blow. I feel with you, in truth,

             These complex miseries of Age and Youth;

             I feel with you—and none can feel it more

             Than I—this burning Problem of the Poor;

             The Want that grinds, the Mystery of Pain,

             The Hearts that sink, and never rise again;—

             How shall I set this to some careless screed,

             Or jigging stave, when Help is what you need,

             Help, Help,—more Help?


    F. of H. I fancied that with ease

             You'd scribble off some verses that might please,

             And so give help to us.


    R. Why then—TAKE THESE!

    THE PARENT'S ASSISTANT



    One of the things that perplexes the dreamer—for, in spite of the
    realists, there are dreamers still—is the almost complete extinction of
    the early editions of certain popular works. The pompous, respectable,
    full-wigged folios, with their long lists of subscribers, and their
    magniloquent dedications, find their permanent abiding-places in
    noblemen's collections, where, unless—with the Chrysostom in Pope's
    verses—they are used for the smoothing of bands or the pressing of
    flowers, no one ever disturbs their drowsy diuturnity. Their bulk makes
    them sacred: like the regimental big drum, they are too large to be
    mislaid. But where are all the first copies of that little octavo of 246
    pages, price eighteenpence, “Printed by T. Maxey for Rich. Marriot, in
    S. Dunstans Church-yard, Fleetstreet” in 1653, which constitutes the
    editio princeps of Walton's Angler. Probably they were worn out in
    the pockets of Honest Izaak's “brothers of the Angle,” or left to bake
    and cockle in the sunny corners of wasp-haunted alehouse windows, or
    dropped in the deep grass by some casual owner, more careful for flies
    and caddis-worms, or possibly for the contents of a leathern bottle,
    than all the “choicely-good” madrigals of Maudlin the milkmaid. In any
    case, there are very few of the little tomes, with their quaint
    “coppers” of fishes, in existence now, nor is it silver that pays for
    them. And that other eighteenpenny book, put forth by “Nath. Ponder at
    the Peacock in the Poultrey near Cornhil” five and twenty years
    later,—The Pilgrim's Progress from This World, to That which is to
    come
    ,—why is it that there are only five known copies, none quite
    perfect, now extant, of which the best sold not long since for more than
    L1400? Of these five, the first that came to light had been preserved
    owing to its having taken sanctuary, almost upon publication, in a great
    library, where it was forgotten. But the others that passed over Mr.
    Ponder's counter in the Poultry,—were they all lost, thumbed and
    dog's-eared out of being? They are gone,—that is all you can say; and
    gone apparently beyond reach of recovery.


    These remarks,—which scarcely rise to the dignity of reflections—have
    been suggested by the difficulty which the writer has experienced in
    obtaining particulars as to the earliest form of the Parent's
    Assistant
    . As a matter of course, children's books are more liable to
    disappear than any others. They are sooner torn, soiled, dismembered,
    disintegratedsooner find their way to that mysterious unlocated limbo of
    lost things, which engulfs so much. Yet one scarcely expected that even
    the British Museum would not have possessed a copy of the first issue of
    Miss Edgeworth's book. Such, however, seems to be the case. According to
    the catalogue, there is nothing earlier at Bloomsbury than a portion of
    the second edition; and from the inexplicit and conjectural manner in
    which most of the author's biographers speak of the work, it can
    scarcely—outside private collections—be very easily accessible.
    Fortunately the old Monthly Review for September, 1796, with most
    exemplary forethought for posterity, gives, as a heading to its notice,
    a precise and very categorical account of the first impression. The
    Parent's Assistant; or, Stories for Children
    was, it appears, published
    in two parts, making three small duodecimo volumes. The price, bound,
    was six shillings. There was no author's name; but it was said to be “by
    E.M.” (i.e. Edgeworth, Maria), and the publisher was Cowper's Dissenter
    publisher, Joseph Johnson of No. 72, St. Paul's Churchyard. Part I.
    contained “The Little Dog Trusty; or, The Liar and the Boy of Truth”;
    “The Orange Man; or, the Honest Boy and the Thief”; “Lazy Lawrence”;
    “Tarleton”; and “The False Key”; Part II., “The Purple Jar,” “The
    Bracelets,” “Mademoiselle Panache,” “The Birthday Present,” “Old Poz,”
    and “The Mimic.” In the same year, 1796, a second edition appeared,
    apparently with, some supplementary stories, e.g.: “Barring Out,” and in
    1800 came a third edition in six volumes. In this the text was increased
    by “Simple Susan,” “The Little Merchants,” “The Basket Woman,” “The
    White Pigeon,” “The Orphans,” “Waste Not, Want Not,” “Forgive and
    Forget,” and “Eton Montem.” One story, “The Purple Jar” at the beginning
    of Part II. of the first edition, was withdrawn, and afterwards included
    in another series, while the stories entitled respectively “Little Dog
    Trusty” and “The Orange Man” have disappeared from the collection,
    probably for the reason given in one of the first prefaces, namely, that
    they “were written for a much earlier age than any of the others, and
    with such a perfect simplicity of expression as, to many, may appear
    insipid and ridiculous.” The six volumes of the third edition came out
    successively on the first day of the first six months of 1800. The
    Monthly Reviewer of the first edition, it may be added, was highly
    laudatory; and his commendations show that the early critics of the
    author were fully alive to her distinctive qualities, “The moral and
    prudential lessons of these volumes,” says the writer, “are judiciously
    chosen; and the stories are invented with great ingenuity, and are
    happily contrived to excite curiosity and awaken feeling without the aid
    of improbable fiction or extravagant adventure. The language is varied
    in its degree of simplicity, to suit the pieces to different ages, but
    is throughout neat and correct; and, without the least approach towards
    vulgarity or meanness, it is adapted with peculiar felicity to the
    understandings of children. The author's taste, in this class of
    writing, appears to have been formed on the best models; and the work
    will not discredit a place on the same shelf with Berquin's Child's
    Friend
    , Mrs. Barbauld's Lessons for Children, and Dr. Aikin's
    Evenings at Home. The story of 'Lazy Lawrence'”—the notice goes
    on—“is one of the best lectures on industry which we have ever read.
    “The Critical Review, which also gave a short account of the Parent's
    Assistant
    in its number for January 1797, does not rehearse the
    contents. But it confirms the title, etc., adding that the price, in
    boards, was 4s. 6d.; and its praise, though brief, is very much to the
    point. “The present production is particularly sensible and judicious;
    the stories are well written, simple, and affecting; calculated, not
    only for moral improvement, but to exercise the best affections of the
    human heart.”


    With one of the books mentioned by the Monthly Review Evenings at
    Home
    —Miss Edgeworth was fully prepared, at all events as regards
    format, to associate herself. “The stories,” she says in a letter to her
    cousin, Miss Sophy Ruxton, “are printed and bound the same size as
    Evenings at Home, and I am afraid you will dislike the title.” Her
    father had sent the book to press as the Parent's Friend, a name no
    doubt suggested by the Ami des Enfants of Berquin; but “Mr. Johnson
    [the publisher],” continues Miss Edgeworth, “has degraded it into The
    Parent's Assistant
    , which I dislike particularly, from association with
    an old book of arithmetic called The Tutor's Assistant.” The ground of
    objection is not very formidable; but the Parent's Assistant is
    certainly an infelicitous name. From some other of the author's letters
    we are able to trace the gradual growth of the work. Mr. Edgeworth, her
    father, an utilitarian of much restless energy, and many projects, was
    greatly interested in education,—or, as he would have termed it,
    practical education,—and long before this date, as early, indeed, as
    May 1780, he had desired his daughter, while she was still a girl at a
    London school, to write him a tale about the length of a Spectator;
    upon the topic of “Generosity,” to be taken from history or romance.
    This was her first essay in fiction; and it was pronounced by the judge
    to whom it was submitted,—in competition with a rival production by a
    young gentleman from Oxford,—to be an excellent story, and extremely
    well written, although with this commendation was coupled the somewhat
    damaging inquiry,—“But where's the Generosity?” The question cannot be
    answered now, as the manuscript has not been preserved, though the
    inconvenient query, we are told, became a kind of personal proverb with
    the young author, who was wont to add that this first effort contained
    “a sentence of inextricable confusion between a saddle, a man, and his
    horse.” This was a defect from which she must have speedily freed
    herself, since her style, as her first reviewer allowed, is
    conspicuously direct and clear. Accuracy in speaking and writing had,
    indeed, been early impressed upon her. Her father's doctrinaire ally and
    co-disciplinarian, Mr. Thomas Day, later the author of Sandford and
    Merton
    , and apparently the first person of whom it is affirmed that “he
    talked like a book,” had been indefatigable in bringing this home to his
    young friend, when she visited him in her London school-days. Not
    content alone to dose her copiously with Bishop Berkeley's Tar
    Water—the chosen beverage of Young and Richardson—he was unwearied in
    ministering to her understanding. “His severe reasoning and
    uncompromising love of truth awakened her powers, and the questions he
    put to her, the necessity of perfect accuracy in her answers, suited the
    bent of her mind. Though such strictness was not always agreeable, she
    even then perceived its advantages, and in after life was deeply
    grateful to Mr. Day.”[22]


    Note:


    [22] Maria Edgeworth, by Helen Zimmern, 1888, p. 13.



    The training she underwent from the inexorable Mr, Day was continued by
    her father when she quitted school, and moved with her family to the
    parental seat at Edgeworthstown in Ireland. Mr. Edgeworth, whose
    principles were as rigorous as those of his friend, devoted himself
    early to initiating her into business habits. He taught her to copy
    letters, to keep accounts, to receive rents, and, in short, to act as
    his agent and factotum. She frequently accompanied him in the many
    disputes and difficulties which arose with his Irish tenantry; and,
    apart from the insight which this must have afforded her into the
    character and idiosyncrasies of the people, she no doubt very early
    acquired that exact knowledge of leases and legacies and dishonest
    factors which is a noticeable feature even of her children's books.[23]
    It is some time, however, before we hear of any successor to
    “Generosity”; but, in 1782, her father, with a view to provide her with
    an occupation for her leisure, proposed to her to prepare a translation
    of the Adele et Theodore of Madame de Genlis, those letters upon
    education by which that gentle and multifarious moralist acquired—to
    use her own words—at once “the suffrages of the public, and the
    irreconcilable hatred of all the so-called philosophers and their
    partisans.” At first there had been no definite thought of print in Mr,
    Edgeworth's mind. But as the work progressed, the idea gathered
    strength; and he began to prepare his daughter's manuscript for the
    press. Then, unhappily, when the first volume was finished, Holcroft's
    complete translation appeared, and made the labour needless. Yet it was
    not without profit. It had been excellent practice in aiding Miss
    Edgeworth's faculty of expression, and increasing her vocabulary—to say
    nothing of the influence which the portraiture of individuals and the
    satire of reigning follies which are the secondary characteristics of
    Madame de Genlis's most well-known work, may have had on her own
    subsequent efforts as a novelist. Meanwhile her mentor, Mr. Day, was
    delighted at the interruption of her task. He possessed, to the full,
    that rooted antipathy to feminine authorship of which we find so many
    traces in Miss Burney's novels and elsewhere; and he wrote to
    congratulate Mr. Edgeworth on having escaped the disgrace of having a
    translating daughter. At this time, as already stated, he himself had
    not become the author of Sandford and Merton, which, as a matter of
    fact, owed its inception to the Edgeworths, being at first simply
    intended as a short story to be inserted in the Harry and Lucy Mr.
    Edgeworth wrote in conjunction with his second wife, Honora Sneyd. As
    regards the question of publication, both Maria and her father, although
    sensible of Mr. Day's prejudices, appear to have deferred to his
    arguments. Nor were these even lost to the public, for we are informed
    that, in Miss Edgeworth's first book, ten years later, the Letters to
    Literary Ladies,
    she employed and embodied much that he had advanced.
    But for the present, she continued to write—though solely for her
    private amusement—essays, little stories, and dramatic sketches. One of
    these last must have been “Old Poz,” a pleasant study of a country
    justice and a gazza ladra, which appeared in Part II. of the first
    issue of the Parent's Assistant, and which, we are told, was acted by
    the Edgeworth children in a little theatre erected in the dining-room
    for the purpose. According to her sisters, it was Miss Edgeworth's
    practice first to write her stories on a slate, and then to read them
    out. If they were approved, she transcribed them fairly. “Her writing
    for children”—says one of her biographers—“was a natural outgrowth of
    a practical study of their wants and fancies; and her constant care of
    the younger children gave her exactly the opportunity required to
    observe the development of mind incident to the age and capacity of
    several little brothers and sisters.” According to her own account, her
    first critic was her father. “Whenever I thought of writing anything, I
    always told him [my father] my first rough plans; and always, with the
    instinct of a good critic, he used to fix immediately upon that which
    would best answer the purpose.—'Sketch that, and shew it to
    me.
    '—These words, from the experience of his sagacity, never failed to
    inspire me with hope of success. It was then sketched. Sometimes, when I
    was fond of a particular part, I used to dilate on it in the sketch; but
    to this he always objected—'I don't want any of your painting—none of
    your drapery!—I can imagine all that—let me see the bare skeleton.'“


    Note:


    [23] Cf. “Attorney Case” in the story of “Simple Susan.”



    Of the first issue of the Parent's Assistant in 1796, a sufficient
    account has already been given. In the “Preface” the practical intention
    of several of the stories is explicitly set forth. “Lazy Lawrence,” we
    are told, illustrates the advantages of industry, and demonstrates that
    people feel cheerful and happy whilst they are employed; while
    “Tarleton” represents “the danger and the folly of that weakness of
    mind, and that easiness to be led, which too often pass for good
    nature”; “The False Key” points out some of the evils to which a
    well-educated boy, on first going to service, is exposed from the
    profligacy of his fellow-servants; “The Mimic,” the drawback of vulgar
    acquaintances; “Barring Out,” the errors to which a high spirit and the
    love of party are apt to lead, and so forth. In the final paragraph
    stress is laid upon what every fresh reader must at once recognise as
    the supreme merit of the stories, namely, their dramatic faculty, or (in
    the actual words of the “Preface"), their art of “keeping alive hope and
    fear and curiosity, by some degree of intricacy.”[24] The plausibility
    of invention, the amount of ingenious contrivance and of clever
    expedient in these professedly nursery stories, is indeed extraordinary;
    and nothing can exceed the dexterity with which—to use Dr. Johnson's
    words concerning She Stoops to Conquer—“the incidents are so prepared
    as not to seem improbable.” There is no better example of this than the
    admirable tale of “The Mimic,” in which the most unlooked-for
    occurrences succeed each other in the most natural way, while the
    disappearance at the end of the little sweep, who has levanted up the
    chimney in Frederick's new blue coat and buff waistcoat, is a
    master-stroke. Everybody has forgotten everything about him until the
    precise moment when he is needed to supply the fitting surprise of the
    finish,—a surprise which is only to be compared to that other
    revelation in The Rose and the Ring of Thackeray, where the long-lost
    and obnoxious porter at Valoroso's palace, having been turned by the
    Fairy Blackstick into a door knocker for his insolence, is restored to
    the sorrowing Servants' Hall exactly when his services are again
    required in the capacity of Mrs. Gruffanuffs husband. But in Miss
    Edgeworth's little fable there is no fairy agency. “Fairies were not
    much in her line,” says Lady Ritchie, Thackeray's daughter, “but
    philanthropic manufacturers, liberal noblemen, and benevolent ladies in
    travelling carriages, do as well and appear in the nick of time to
    distribute rewards or to point a moral.”


    Note:


    [24] The “Preface to Parents”—Miss Emily Lawless suggests to me—was
    probably by Mr. Edgeworth.



    Although, by their sub-title, these stories are avowedly composed for
    children, they are almost as attractive to grown-up readers. This is
    partly owing to their narrative skill, partly also to the clear
    characterisation, which already betrays the coming author of Castle
    Rackrent
    and Belinda and Patronage—the last, under its first name
    of The Freeman Family, being already partly written, although many
    years were still to pass before it saw the light in 1814. Readers, wise
    after the event, might fairly claim to have foreseen from some of the
    personages in the Parent's Assistant that the author, however sedulous
    to describe “such situations only ... as children can easily imagine,”
    was not able entirely to resist tempting specimens of human nature like
    the bibulous Mr. Corkscrew, the burglar butler in “The False Key,” or
    Mrs. Pomfret, the housekeeper of the same story, whose prejudices
    against the Villaintropic Society, and its unholy dealing with the
    drugs and refuges” of humanity, are quite in the style of the Mrs.
    Slipslop of a great artist whose works one would scarcely have expected
    to encounter among the paper-backed and grey-boarded volumes which lined
    the shelves at Edgeworthstown. Mrs. Theresa Tattle, again, in “The
    Mimic,” is a type which requires but little to fit it for a subordinate
    part in a novel, as is also Lady Diana Sweepstakes in “Waste not, Want
    not.” In more than one case, we seem to detect an actual portrait. Mr.
    Somerville of Somerville (“The White Pigeon"), to whom that “little
    town” belonged,—who had done so much “to inspire his tenantry with a
    taste for order and domestic happiness, and took every means in his
    power to encourage industrious, well-behaved people to settle in his
    neighbourhood,”—can certainly be none other than the father of the
    writer of the Parent's Assistant, the busy and beneficent, but surely
    eccentric, Mr. Edgeworth of Edgeworthstown.


    When, in 1849, the first two volumes of Macaulay's History were
    issued, Miss Edgeworth, then in her eighty-third winter, was greatly
    delighted to find her name, coupled with a compliment to one of her
    characters, enshrined in a note to chap. vi. But her gratification was
    qualified by the fact that she could discover no similar reference to
    her friend, Sir Walter Scott. The generous “twinge of pain,” to which
    she confesses, was intelligible. Scott had always admired her genius,
    and she admired his. In the “General Preface” to the Waverley Novels,
    twenty years before, he had gone so far as to say that, without hoping
    to emulate “the rich humour, pathetic tenderness, and admirable tact” of
    Miss Edgeworth, he had attempted to do for his own country what she had
    done for hers; and it is clear, from other sources, that this was no
    mere form of words. And he never wavered in his admiration. In his last
    years, not many months before his death, when he had almost forgotten
    her name, he was still talking kindly of her work. Speaking to Mrs. John
    Davy of Miss Austen and Miss Ferrier, he said: “And there's that Irish
    lady, too—but I forget everybody's name now” ... “she's very clever,
    and best in the little touches too. I'm sure in that children's story,
    where the little girl parts with her lamb, and the little boy brings it
    back to her again, there's nothing for it but just to put down the book
    and cry.”[25] The reference is to “Simple Susan,” the longest and
    prettiest tale in the Parent's Assistant.


    Note:


    [25] Lockhart's Life of Sir Walter Scott, ch. lxxxi. ad finem.



    Another anecdote pleasantly connects the same book with a popular work
    of a later writer. Readers of Cranford will recall the feud between
    the Johnson-loving Miss Jenkyns of that story and its Pickwick -loving
    Captain Brown. The Captain—as is well-known—met his death by a railway
    accident, just after he had been studying the last monthly “green
    covers” of Dickens. Years later, the assumed narrator of Cranford
    visits Miss Jenkyns, then faliing into senility. She still vaunts The
    Rambler
    ; still maunders vaguely of the “strange old book, with the
    queer name, poor Captain Brown was killed for reading-that book by Mr.
    Boz, you know—Old Poz; when I was a girl—but that's a long time
    ago—I acted Lucy in Old Poz.” There can be no mistake. Lucy is the
    justice's daughter in Miss Edgeworth's little chamber-drama.

    A PLEASANT INVECTIVE AGAINST PRINTING


    “Flee fro the PREES, and dwelle with sothfastnesse.”—CHAUCER, Balade
    de Bon Conseil
    .



    The Press is too much with us, small and great:
    We are undone of chatter and on dit,
    Report, retort, rejoinder, repartee,
    Mole-hill and mare's nest, fiction up-to-date,
    Babble of booklets, bicker of debate,
    Aspect of A., and attitude of B.—
    A waste of words that drive us like a sea,
    Mere derelict of Ourselves, and helpless freight!


    “O for a lodge in some vast wilderness!”
    Some region unapproachable of Print,
    Where never cablegram could gain access,
    And telephones were not, nor any hint
    Of tidings new or old, but Man might pipe
    His soul to Nature,—careless of the Type!

    TWO MODERN BOOK ILLUSTRATORS



    I. KATE GREENAWAY


    In the world of pictorial recollection there are many territories, the
    natives of which you may recognise by their characteristics as surely as
    Ophelia recognises her true-love by his cockle-hat and sandal shoon.
    There is the land of grave gestures and courteous inclinations, of
    dignified leave-takings and decorous greetings; where the ladies (like
    Richardson's Pamela) don the most charming round-eared caps and frilled
    negliges; where the gentlemen sport ruffles and bag-wigs and spotless
    silk stockings, and invariably exhibit shapely calves above their silver
    shoe-buckles; where you may come in St. James's Park upon a portly
    personage with a star, taking an alfresco pinch of snuff after that
    leisurely style in which a pinch of snuff should be taken, so as not to
    endanger a lace cravat or a canary-coloured vest; where you may seat
    yourself on a bench by Rosamond's Pond in company with a tremulous mask
    who is evidently expecting the arrival of a “pretty fellow”; or happen
    suddenly, in a secluded side-walk, upon a damsel in muslin and a dark
    hat, who is hurriedly scrawling a poulet, not without obvious signs of
    perturbation. But whatever the denizens of this country are doing, they
    are always elegant and always graceful, always appropriately grouped
    against their fitting background of high-ceiled rooms and striped
    hangings, or among the urns and fish-tanks of their sombre-shrubbed
    gardens. This is the land of STOTHARD.


    In the adjoining country there is a larger sense of colour—a fuller
    pulse of life. This is the region of delightful dogs and horses and
    domestic animals of all sorts; of crimson-faced hosts and buxom
    ale-wives; of the most winsome and black-eyed milkmaids and the most
    devoted lovers and their lasses; of the most headlong and horn-blowing
    huntsmen—a land where Madam Blaize forgathers with the impeccable
    worthy who caused the death of the Mad Dog; where John Gilpin takes the
    Babes in the Wood en croupe; and the bewitchingest Queen of Hearts
    coquets the Great Panjandrum himself “with the little round button at
    top”—a land, in short, of the most kindly and light-hearted fancies, of
    the freshest and breeziest and healthiest types—which is the land of
    CALDECOTT.


    Finally, there is a third country, a country inhabited almost
    exclusively by the sweetest little child-figures that have ever been
    invented, in the quaintest and prettiest costumes, always happy, always
    gravely playful,—and nearly always playing; always set in the most
    attractive framework of flower-knots, or blossoming orchards, or
    red-roofed cottages with dormer windows. Everywhere there are green
    fields, and daisies, and daffodils, and pearly skies of spring, in which
    a kite is often flying. No children are quite like the dwellers in this
    land; they are so gentle, so unaffected in their affectation, so easily
    pleased, so trustful and so confiding. And this is GREENAWAY-land.


    It is sixty years since Thomas Stothard died, and only fifteen since
    Randolph Caldecott closed his too brief career.[26] And now Kate
    Greenaway, who loved the art of both, and in her own gentle way
    possessed something of the qualities of each, has herself passed away.
    It will rest with other pens to record her personal characteristics, and
    to relate the story of her life. I who write this was privileged to know
    her a little, and to receive from her frequent presents of her books;
    but I should shrink from anything approaching a description of the
    quiet, unpretentious, almost homely little lady, whom it was always a
    pleasure to meet and to talk with. If I here permit myself to recall one
    or two incidents of our intercourse, it is solely because they bear
    either upon her amiable disposition or her art. I remember that once,
    during a country walk in Sussex, she gave me a long account of her
    childhood, which I wish I could repeat in detail. But I know that she
    told me that she had been brought up in just such a neighbourhood of
    thatched roofs and “grey old gardens” as she depicts in her drawings;
    and that in some of the houses, it was her particular and unfailing
    delight to turn over ancient chests and wardrobes filled with the
    flowered frocks and capes of the Jane Austen period. As is well known,
    she corresponded frequently with Ruskin, and possessed numbers of his
    letters. In his latter years, it had been her practice to write to him
    periodically—I believe she said once a week. He had long ceased,
    probably from ill-health, to answer her letters; but she continued to
    write punctually lest he should miss the little budget of chit-chat to
    which he had grown accustomed. At another time—in a pleasant
    country-house which contained many examples of her art—and where she
    was putting the last touches to a delicately tinted child-angel in the
    margin of a Bible—I ventured to say, “Why do your children always ...?”
    But it is needless to complete the query; the answer alone is important.
    She looked at me reflectively, and said, after a pause, “Because I
    see it so.”


    Note:


    [26] This was written in 1902.



    Answers not dissimilar have been given before by other artists in like
    case. But it was this rigid fidelity to her individual vision and
    personal conviction which constituted her strength. There are always
    stupid, well-meaning busybodies in the world, who go about making
    question of the sonneteer why he does not attempt something epic and
    homicidal, or worrying the carver of cherry-stones to try his hand at a
    Colossus; but though they disturb and discompose, they luckily do no
    material harm. They did no material harm to Kate Greenaway. She yielded,
    no doubt, to pressure put upon her to try figures on a larger scale; to
    illustrate books, which was not her strong point, as it only put fetters
    upon her fancy; but, in the main, she courageously preserved the even
    tenor of her way, which was to people the artistic demesne she
    administered with the tiny figures which no one else could make more
    captivating, or clothe more adroitly. It may be doubted whether the
    collector will set much store by Bret Harte's Queen of the Pirate Isle
    or the Pied Piper of Hamelin, suitable at first sight as is the
    latter, with its child-element, to her inventive idiosyncrasy. But he
    will revel in the dainty scenes of “Almanacks” (1883 to 1895, and 1897);
    in the charming Birthday Book of 1880; in Mother Goose, A Day in a
    Child's Life, Little Ann, Marigold Garden
    and the rest, of which the
    grace is perennial, though the popularity for the moment may have waned.


    I have an idea that Mother Goose; or, the Old Nursery Rhymes, 1881,
    was one of Miss Greenaway's favourites, although it may have been
    displaced in her own mind by subsequent successes. Nothing can certainly
    be more deftly-tinted than the design of the “old woman who lived under
    a hill,” and peeled apples; nothing more seductive, in infantile
    attitude, than the little boy and girl, who, with their arms around each
    other, stand watching the black-cat in the plum-tree. Then there is
    Daffy-down-dilly, who has come up to town, with “a yellow petticoat and
    a green gown,” in which attire, aided by a straw hat tied under her
    chin, she manages to look exceedingly attractive, as she passes in front
    of the white house with the pink roof and the red shutters and the green
    palings. One of the most beautiful pictures in this gallery is the dear
    little “Ten-o'-clock Scholar” in his worked smock, as, trailing his
    blue-and-white school-bag behind him, he creeps unwillingly to his
    lessons at the most picturesque timbered cottage you can imagine.
    Another absolutely delightful portrait is that of “Little Tom Tucker,”
    in sky-blue suit and frilled collar, singing, with his hands behind him,
    as if he never could grow old. And there is not one of these little
    compositions that is without its charm of colour and accessory—blue
    plates on the dresser in the background, the parterres of a formal
    garden with old-fashioned flowers, quaint dwellings with their gates and
    grass-work, odd corners of countryside and village street, and all,
    generally, in the clear air or sunlight. For in this favoured
    Greenaway-realm, as in the island-valley of Avilion there


         falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,

      Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies

      Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard-lawns.


    To Mother Goose followed A Day in a Child's Life, also 1881, and
    Little Ann, 1883. The former of these contained various songs set to
    music by Mr. Myles B. Foster, the organist of the Foundling Hospital,
    and accompanied by designs on rather a larger scale than those in
    Mother Goose. It also included a larger proportion of the floral
    decorations which were among the artist's chief gifts. Foxgloves and
    buttercups, tulips and roses, are flung about the pages of the book; and
    there are many pictures, notably one of a little green-coated figure
    perched upon a five-barred gate, which repeat the triumphs of its
    predecessor. In Little Ann and other Poems, which is dedicated to the
    four children of the artist's friend, the late Frederick Locker-Lampson,
    she illustrated a selection from the verses for “Infant Minds” of Jane
    and Ann Taylor, daughters of that Isaac Taylor of Ongar, who was first a
    line engraver and afterwards an Independent Minister.[27] The
    dedication contains a charming row of tiny portraits of the
    Locker-Lampson family. These illustrations may seem to contradict what
    has been said as to Miss Greenaway's ability to interpret the
    conceptions of others. But this particular task left her perfectly free
    to “go her own gait,” and to embroider the text which, in this case, was
    little more than a pretext for her pencil.


    Note:


    [27] Since this paper was written, the Original Poems and Others, of Ann
    and Jane Taylor, with illustrations by F.D. Bedford, and a most interesting
    “Introduction” by Mr. E.V. Lucas, have been issued by Messrs. Wells,
    Gardner, Darton and Co.



    In Marigold Garden, 1885, Miss Greenaway became her own poet; and next
    to Mother Goose, this is probably her most important effort. The
    flowers are as entrancing as ever; and the verse makes one wish that the
    writer had written more. The “Genteel Family” and “Little Phillis" are
    excellent nursery pieces; and there is almost a Blake-like note about
    “The Sun Door.”


      They saw it rise in the morning,

        They saw it set at night,

      And they longed to go and see it,

        Ah! if they only might.


      The little soft white clouds heard them,

        And stepped from out of the blue;

      And each laid a little child softly

        Upon its bosom of dew.


      And they carried them higher and higher,

        And they nothing knew any more,

      Until they were standing waiting,

        In front of the round gold door.


      And they knocked, and called, and entreated

        Whoever should be within;

      But all to no purpose, for no one

        Would hearken to let them in.


    La rime n'est pas riche” nor is the technique thoroughly assured; but
    the thought is poetical. Here is another, “In an Apple-Tree,” which
    reads like a child variation of that haunting “Mimnermus in Church" of
    the author of Ionica:—


      In September, when the apples are red,

      To Belinda I said,

      “Would you like to go away

      To Heaven, or stay

      Here in this orchard full of trees

      All your life? “And she said,” If you please

      I'll stay here—where I know,

      And the flowers grow.”


    In another vein is the bright little “Child's Song”:—


      The King and the Queen were riding

        Upon a Summer's day,

      And a Blackbird flew above them,

        To hear what they did say.


      The King said he liked apples,

        The Queen said she liked pears;

      And what shall we do to the Blackbird

        Who listens unawares?


    But, as a rule, it must be admitted of her poetry that, while nearly
    always poetic in its impulse, it is often halting and inarticulate in
    its expression. A few words may be added in regard to the mere facts of
    Miss Greenaway's career. She was born at 1 Cavendish Street, Hoxton, on
    the 17th March, 1846, her father being Mr. John Greenaway, a draughtsman
    on wood, who contributed much to the earlier issues of the Illustrated
    London News
    and Punch. Annual visits to a farm-house at Rolleston in
    Nottinghamshire—the country residence already referred to—nourished
    and confirmed her love of nature. Very early she showed a distinct bias
    towards colour and design of an original kind. She studied at different
    places, and at South Kensington. Here both she and Lady Butler “would
    bribe the porter to lock them in when the day's work was done, so that
    they might labour on for some while more.” Her master at Kensington was
    Richard Burchett, who, forty years ago, was a prominent figure in the
    art-schools, a well instructed painter, and a teacher exceptionally
    equipped with all the learning of his craft. Mr. Burchett thought highly
    of Miss Greenaway's abilities; and she worked under him for several
    years with exemplary perseverance and industry. She subsequently studied
    in the Slade School under Professor Legros.


    Her first essays in the way of design took the form of Christmas cards,
    then beginning their now somewhat flagging career, and she exhibited
    pictures at the Dudley Gallery for some years in succession, beginning
    with 1868. In 1877 she contributed to the Royal Academy a water colour
    entitled “Musing,” and in 1889 was elected a member of the Royal
    Institute of Painters in Water Colours.


    By this date, as will be gathered from what has preceded, Miss Greenaway
    had made her mark as a producer of children's books, since, in addition
    to the volumes already specially mentioned, she had issued Under the
    Window
    (her earliest success), The Language of Flowers, Kate
    Greenaway's Painting Book, The Book of Games, King Pepito
    and other
    works. Her last “Almanack,” which was published by Messrs Dent and Co.,
    appeared in 1897. In 1891, the Fine Arts Society exhibited some 150 of
    her original drawings—an exhibition which was deservedly successful,
    and was followed by others.[28] As Slade Professor at Oxford, Ruskin,
    always her fervent admirer, gave her unstinted eulogium; and in France
    her designs aroused the greatest admiration. The Debats had a leading
    article on her death; and the clever author of L'Art du Rire, M.
    Arsene Alexandre, who had already written appreciatively of her gifts as
    a “paysagiste,” and as a “maitresse en l'art du sourire, du jolt
    sourire
    d'enfant inginu et gaiement candide” devoted a column in the
    Figaro to her merits.


    Note:


    [28] Among other things these exhibitions revealed the great superiority
    of the original designs to the reproductions with which the public are
    familiar—excellent as these are in their way. Probably, if Miss
    Greenaway's work were now repeated by the latest form of three-colour
    process, she would be less an “inheritor”—in this respect—“of unfulfilled
    renown.”



    It has been noted that, in her later years, Miss Greenaway's popularity
    was scarcely maintained. It would perhaps be more exact to say that it
    somewhat fell off with the fickle crowd who follow a reigning fashion,
    and who unfortunately help to swell the units of a paying community. To
    the last she gave of her best; but it is the misfortune of distinctive
    and original work, that, while the public resents versatility in its
    favourites, it wearies unreasonably of what had pleased it at
    first—especially if the note be made tedious by imitation. Miss
    Greenaway's old vogue was in some measure revived by her too-early death
    on the 6th November 1901; but, in any case, she is sure of attention
    from the connoisseur of the future. Those who collect Stothard and
    Caldecott (and they are many!) cannot afford to neglect either Marigold
    Garden
    or Mother Goose.[29]


    Note:


    [29] Since the above article appeared in the Art Journal, from
    which it is here substantially reproduced, Messrs. M.H, Spieimann and
    G.S. Layard have (1905) devoted a sumptuous and exhaustive volume to
    Miss Greenaway and her art. To this truly beautiful and sympathetic book
    I can but refer those of her admirers who are not yet acquainted
    with it.

    A SONG OF THE GREENAWAY CHILD



    As I went a-walking on Lavender Hill,
    O, I met a Darling in frock and frill;
    And she looked at me shyly, with eyes of blue,
    “Are you going a-walking? Then take me too!”


    So we strolled to the field where the cowslips grow,
    And we played—and we played, for an hour or so;
    Then we climbed to the top of the old park wall,
    And the Darling she threaded a cowslip ball.


    Then we played again, till I said—“My Dear,
    This pain in my side, it has grown severe;
    I ought to have mentioned I'm past three-score,
    And I fear that I scarcely can play any more!”


    But the Darling she answered,-"O no! O no!
    You must play—you must play.—I sha'n't let you go!”


    —And I woke with a start and a sigh of despair,
    And I found myself safe in my Grandfather's-chair!

    TWO MODERN BOOK ILLUSTRATORS



    II. MR HUGH THOMSON


    In virtue of certain gentle and caressing qualities of style, Douglas
    Jerrold conferred on one of his contributors—Miss Eliza Meteyard—the
    pseudonym of “Silverpen.” It is in the silver-pensive key that one would
    wish to write of Mr. HUGH THOMSON. There is nothing in his work of
    elemental strife,—of social problem,—of passion torn to tatters. He
    leads you by no terribile via,—over no “burning Marle.” You cannot
    conceive him as the illustrator of Paradise Lost, of Dante's
    Inferno—even of Dore's Wandering Jew. But when, after turning over
    some dozens of his designs, you take stock of your impressions, you
    discover that your memory is packed with pleasant fancies. You have been
    among “blown fields” and “flowerful closes”; you have passed quaint
    roadside-inns and picturesque cottages; you are familiar with the
    cheery, ever-changing idyll of the highway and the bustle of animal
    life; with horses that really gallop, and dogs that really bark; with
    charming male and female figures in the most attractive old-world
    attire; with happy laughter and artless waggeries; with a hundred
    intimate details of English domesticity that are pushed just far enough
    back to lose the hardness of their outline in a softening haze of
    retrospect. There has been nothing more tragic in your travels than a
    sprained ankle or an interrupted affair of honour; nothing more
    blood-curdling than a dream of a dragoon officer knocked out of his
    saddle by a brickbat. Your flesh has never been made to creep: but the
    cockles of your heart have been warmed. Mechanically, you raise your
    hand to lift away your optimistic spectacles. But they are not there.
    The optimism is in the pictures.


    It must be more than a quarter of a century since Mr. Hugh Thomson,
    arriving from Coleraine in all the ardour of one-and-twenty, invaded the
    strongholds of English illustration. He came at a fortunate moment.
    After a few hesitating and tentative attempts upon the newspapers, he
    obtained an introduction to Mr. Comyns Carr, then engaged in
    establishing the English Illustrated Magazine for Messrs. Macmillan.
    His recommendation was a scrap-book of minutely elaborated designs for
    Vanity Fair, which he had done (like Reynolds) “out of pure idleness.”
    Mr. Carr, then, as always, a discriminating critic, with a keen eye to
    possibilities, was not slow to detect, among much artistic recollection,
    something more than uncertain promise; and although he had already
    Randolph Caldecott and Mr. Harry Furniss on his staff, he at once gave
    Mr. Thomson a commission for the magazine. The earliest picture from his
    hand which appeared was a fancy representation of the Parade at Bath for
    a paper in June, 1884, by the late H. D. Traill; and he also illustrated
    (in part) papers on Drawing Room Dances, on Cricket (by Mr. Andrew
    Lang), and on Covent Garden. But graphic and vividly naturalistic as
    were his pictures of modern life, his native bias towards imaginary
    eighteenth century subjects (perhaps prompted by boyish studies of
    Hogarth in the old Dublin Penny Magazine), was already abundantly
    manifest. He promptly drifted into what was eventually to become his
    first illustrated book, a series of compositions from the Spectator.
    These were published in 1886 as a little quarto, entitled Days with Sir
    Roger de Coverley
    .


    It was a “temerarious” task to attempt to revive the types which, from
    the days of Harrison's Essayists, had occupied so many of the earlier
    illustrators. But the attempt was fully justified by its success. One
    has but to glance at the head-piece to the first paper, where Sir Roger
    and “Mr. Spectator” have alighted from the jolting, springless,
    heavy-wheeled old coach as the tired horses toil uphill, to recognise at
    once that here is an artist en pays de connaissance, who may fairly be
    trusted, in the best sense, to “illustrate” his subject. Whatever one's
    predilections for previous presentments, it is impossible to resist Sir
    Roger (young, slim, and handsome), carving the perverse widow's name
    upon a tree-trunk; or Sir Roger at bowls, or riding to hounds, or
    listening—with grave courtesy—to Will Wimble's long-winded and
    circumstantial account of the taking of the historic jack. Nor is the
    conception less happy of that amorous fine-gentleman ancestor of the
    Coverleys who first made love by squeezing the hand; or of that other
    Knight of the Shire who so narrowly escaped being killed in the Civil
    Wars because he was sent out of the field upon a private message, the
    day before Cromwell's “crowning mercy,”—the battle of Worcester. But
    the varied embodiments of these, and of Mrs. Betty Arable (“the great
    fortune"), of Ephraim the Quaker, and the rest, are not all. The figures
    are set in their fitting environment; they ride their own horses, hallo
    to their own dogs, and eat and drink in their own dark-panelled rooms
    that look out on the pleached alleys of their ancient gardens. They live
    and move in their own passed-away atmosphere of association; and a
    faithful effort has moreover been made to realise each separate scene
    with strict relation to its text.


    All of the “Coverley” series came out in the English Illustrated. So
    also did the designs for the next book, the Coaching Days and Coaching
    Ways
    of Mr. Outram Tristram, 1888. Here Mr. Thomson had a topographical
    collaborator, Mr. Herbert Railton, who did the major part of the very
    effective drawings in this kind. But Mr. Thomson's contributions may
    fairly be said to have exhausted the “romance” of the road. Inns and
    inn-yards, hosts and ostlers and chambermaids, stage-coachmen,
    toll-keepers, mail-coaches struggling in snow-drifts, mail-coaches held
    up by highwaymen, overturns, elopements, cast shoes, snapped poles, lost
    linch-pins,—all the episodes and moving accidents of bygone travel on
    the high road have abundant illustration, till the pages seem almost to
    reek of the stableyard, or ring with the horn.[30] And here it may be
    noted, as a peculiarity of Mr. Thomson's conscientious horse-drawing,
    that he depicts, not the ideal, but the actual animal. His steeds are
    not “faultless monsters” like the Dauphin's palfrey in Henry the
    Fifth
    . They are “all sorts and conditions” of horses; and—if truth
    required it—would disclose as many sand-cracks as Rocinante, or as many
    equine defects (from wind-gall to the bolts) as those imputed to that
    unhappy “Blackberry” sold by the Vicar of Wakefield at Welbridge Fair to
    Mr, Ephraini Jenkinson.


    Note:


    [30] Sometimes a literary or historical picture creeps into the text.
    Such are “Swift and Bolingbroke at Backlebury” (p. 30); “Charles
    II. recognised by the Ostler” (p. 144), and “Barry Lyndon cracks a
    Bottle” (p. 116). Barry Lyndon with its picaresque note and Irish
    background, would seem an excellent contribution to the “Cranford"
    series. Why does not Mr. Thomson try his hand at it? He has illustrated
    Esmond, and the Great Haggarty Diamond.



    The Vicar of Wakefield—as it happens—was Mr. Thomson's next
    enterprise; and it is, in many respects, a most memorable one. It came
    out in December, 1890, having occupied him for nearly two years. He took
    exceptional pains to study and realise the several types for himself,
    and to ensure correctness of costume. From the first introductory
    procession of the Primrose family at the head of chapter i. to the
    awkward merriment of the two Miss Flamboroughs at the close, there is
    scarcely a page which has not some stroke of quiet fun, some graceful
    attitude, or some ingenious contrivance in composition. Considering that
    from Wenham's edition of 1780, nearly every illustrator of repute had
    tried his hand at Goldsmith's masterpiece in fiction,—that he had been
    attempted without humour by Stothard, without lightness by
    Mulready,[31]—that he had been made comic by Cruikshank, and vulgarised
    by Rowiandson,—it was certainly to Mr. Thomson's credit that he had
    approached his task with so much refinement, reverence and originality.
    If the book has a blemish, it is to be mentioned only because the
    artist, by his later practice, seems to have recognised it himself. For
    the purposes of process reproduction, the drawings were somewhat loaded
    and overworked.


    Note:


    [31]: Mulready's illustrations of 1843 are here referred to, net his
    pictures.



    This was not chargeable against the next volumes to be chronicled. Mrs.
    Gaskell's Cranford, 1891, and Miss Mitford's Our Village, 1893, are
    still regarded by many as the artist's happiest efforts. I say “still,”
    because Mr. Thomson is only now in what Victor Hugo called the youth of
    old age (as opposed to the old age of youth); and it would be premature
    to assume that a talent so alert to multiply and diversify its efforts,
    had already attained the summit of its achievement. But in these two
    books he had certain unquestionable advantages. One obviously would be,
    that his audience were not already preoccupied by former illustrations;
    and he was consequently free to invent his own personages and follow his
    own fertile fancy, without recalling to that implacable and Gorgonising
    organ, the “Public Eye,” any earlier pictorial conceptions. Another
    thing in his favour was, that in either case, the very definite, and not
    very complex types surrendered themselves readily to artistic
    embodiment. “It almost illustrated itself,”—he told an interviewer
    concerning Cranford; “the characters were so exquisitely and
    distinctly realised.” Every one has known some like them; and the
    delightful Knutsford ladies (for “Cranford” was “Knutsford"), the
    “Boz”—loving Captain Brown and Mr. Holbrook, Peter and his father, and
    even Martha the maid, with their mise en scene of card-tables and
    crackle-china, and pattens and reticules, are part of the memories of
    our childhood. The same may be said of Our Village, except that the
    breath of Nature blows more freely through it than through the quiet
    Cheshire market-town; and there is a larger preponderance of those
    “charming glimpses of rural life” of which Lady Ritchie speaks
    admiringly in her sympathetic preface. And with regard to the “bits of
    scenery”—as Mr. Thomson himself calls them—it may be noted that one of
    the Manchester papers, speaking of Cranford, praised the artist's
    intimate knowledge of the locality,—a locality he had never seen. Most
    of his backgrounds were from sketches made on Wimbledon Common, near
    which—until he moved for a space to the ancient Cinque Port of Seaford
    in Sussex—he lived for the first years of his London life.


    In strict order of time, Mr. Thomson's next important effort should have
    preceded the books of Miss Mitford and Mrs. Gaskell. The novels of Jane
    Austen—to which we now come—if not the artist's high-water mark, are
    certainly remarkable as a tour de force. To contrive some forty page
    illustrations for each of Miss Austen's admirable, but—from an
    illustrator's standpoint—not very palpitating productions,—with a
    scene usually confined to the dining-room or parlour,—with next to no
    animals, and with rare opportunities for landscape accessory,—was an
    “adventure”—in Cervantic phrase—which might well have given pause to a
    designer of less fertility and resource. But besides the figures there
    was the furniture; and acute admirers have pointed out that a nice
    discretion is exhibited in graduating the appointments of Longbourn and
    Netherfield Park,—of Rosings and Hunsford. But what is perhaps more
    worthy of remark is the artist's persistent attempt to give
    individuality, as well as grace, to his dramatis persona;. The
    unspeakable Mr. Collins, Mr. Bennet, the horsy Mr. John Thorpe, Mrs.
    Jennings and Mrs. Norris, the Eltons—are all carefully discriminated.
    Nothing can well be better than Mr. Woodhouse, with his “almost
    immaterial legs” drawn securely out of the range of a too-fierce fire,
    chatting placidly to Miss Bates upon the merits of water-gruel; nothing
    more in keeping than the Right Honourable Lady Catherine de Bourgh, “in
    the very torrent, tempest, and whirlwind” of her indignation,
    superciliously pausing to patronise the capabilities of the Longbourn
    reception rooms. Not less happy is the dumbfounded astonishment of Mrs.
    Bennet at her toilet, when she hears—to her stupefaction—that her
    daughter Elizabeth is to be mistress of Pemberley and ten thousand a
    year. This last is a head-piece; and it may be observed, as an
    additional difficulty in this group of novels, that, owing to the
    circumstances of publication, only in one of the books. Pride and
    Prejudice
    , was Mr, Thomson free to decorate the chapters with those
    ingenious entetes and culs-de-lampe of which he so eminently
    possesses the secret.[32]


    Note:


    [32] That eloquence of subsidiary detail, which has had so many
    exponents in English art from Hogarth onwards, is one of Mr. Thomson's
    most striking characteristics. The reader will find it exemplified in
    the beautiful book-plate at page 111, which, by the courtesy of its
    owner, Mr. Ernest Brown, I am permitted to reproduce.



    By this time his reputation had long been firmly established. To the
    Jane Austen volumes succeeded other numbers of the so-called “Cranford"
    series, to which, in 1894, Mr. Thomson had already added, under the
    title of Coridon's Song and other Verses, a fresh ingathering of
    old-time minstrelsy from the pages of the English Illustrated. Many of
    the drawings for these, though of necessity reduced for publication in
    book form, are in his most delightful and winning manner,—notably
    perhaps (if one must choose!) the martial ballad of that “Captain of
    Militia, Sir Bilberry Diddle,” who


      —dreamt, Fame reports, that he cut all the throats

      Of the French as they landed in flat-bottomed boats


    —or rather were going to land any time during the Seven Years' War.
    Excellent, too, are John Gay's ambling Journey to Exeter., the
    Angler's Song from Walton (which gives its name to the collection),
    and Fielding's rollicking “A-hunting we will go.” Other “Cranford"
    books, which now followed, were James Lane Allen's Kentucky Cardinal,
    1901; Fanny Burney's Evelina, 1903; Thackeray's Esmond, 1905; and
    two of George Eliot's novels—Scenes of Clerical Life, 1906, and
    Silas Marner, 1907. In 1899 Mr. Thomson had also undertaken another
    book for George Allen, an edition of Reade's Peg Woffington,—a task
    in which he took the keenest delight, particularly in the burlesque
    character of Triplet. These were all in the old pen-work; but some of
    the designs for Silas Marner were lightly and tastefully coloured.
    This was a plan the author had adopted, with good effect, not only in a
    special edition of Cranford (1898), but for some of his original
    drawings which came into the market after exhibition. Nothing can be
    more seductive than a Hugh Thomson pen-sketch, when delicately tinted in
    sky-blue, rose-Du Barry, and apple-green (the vert-pomme dear—as
    Gautier says—to the soft moderns)—a treatment which lends them a
    subdued but indefinable distinction, as of old china with a pedigree,
    and fully justifies the amiable enthusiasm of the phrase-maker who
    described their inventor as the “Charles Lamb of illustration.”


    From the above enumeration certain omissions have of necessity been
    made. Besides the books mentioned, Mr. Thomson has contrived to prepare
    for newspapers and magazines many closely-studied sketches of
    contemporary manners. Some of the best of his work in this way is to be
    found in the late Mrs. E.T. Cook's Highways and Byways of London Life,
    1902. For the Highways and Byways series, he has also illustrated,
    wholly or in part, volumes on Ireland, North Wales, Devon, Cornwall and
    Yorkshire. The last volume, Kent, 1907, is entirely decorated by
    himself. In this instance, his drawings throughout are in pencil, and he
    is his own topographer. It is a remarkable departure, both in manner and
    theme, though Mr. Thomson's liking for landscape has always been
    pronounced. “I would desire above all things,” he told an interviewer,
    “to pass my time in painting landscape. Landscape pictures always
    attract me, and the grand examples, Gainsboroughs, Claudes, Cromes, and
    Turners, to be seen any day in our National Gallery, are a source of
    never-failing yearning and delight.” The original drawings for the Kent
    book are of great beauty; and singularly dexterous in the varied methods
    by which the effect is produced. The artist is now at work on the county
    of Surrey. It is earnest of his versatility that, in 1904, he
    illustrated for Messrs. Wells, Darton and Co., with conspicuous success,
    a modernised prose version of certain of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales,
    as well as Tales from Maria Edgeworth, 1903; and he also executed, in
    1892 and 1895,[33] some charming designs to selections from the verses of
    the present writer, who has long enjoyed the privilege of his friendship.


    Personal traits do not come within the province of this paper, or it
    would be pleasant to dwell upon Mr. Thomson's modesty, his untiring
    industry, and his devotion to his art. But in regard to that art, it may
    be observed that to characterise it solely as “packing the memory with
    pleasant fancies” may suffice for an exordium, but is inadequate as a
    final appreciation. Let me therefore note down, as they occur to me,
    some of his more prominent pictorial characteristics. With three of the
    artists mentioned in this and the preceding paper, he has obvious
    affinities, while, in a sense, he includes them all. If he does not
    excel Stothard in the gift of grace, he does in range and variety; and
    he more than rivals him in composition. He has not, like Miss Greenaway,
    endowed the art-world with a special type of childhood; but his children
    are always lifelike and engaging. (Compare, at a venture, the boy
    soldiers whom Frank Castlewood is drilling in chapter xi. of Esmond,
    or the delightful little fellow who is throwing up his arms in chapter
    ix. of Emma.) As regards dogs and horses and the rest, his colleague,
    Mr, Joseph Pennell, an expert critic, and a most accomplished artist,
    holds that he has “long since surpassed” Randolph Caldecott.[34] I doubt
    whether Mr. Thomson himself would concur with his eulogist in this. But
    he has assuredly followed Caldecott close; and in opulence of
    production, which—as Macaulay insisted—should always count, has
    naturally exceeded that gifted, but shortlived, designer. If, pursuing
    an ancient practice, one were to attempt to label Mr. Thomson with a
    special distinction apart from, and in addition to, his other merits, I
    should be inclined to designate him the “Master of the
    Vignette,”—taking that word in its primary sense as including
    head-pieces, tail-pieces and initial letters. In this department, no
    draughtsman I can call to mind has ever shown greater fertility of
    invention, so much playful fancy, so much grace, so much kindly humour,
    and such a sane and wholesome spirit of fun.


    Notes:


    [33] The Ballad of Beau Brocade, and The Story of Rosina.


    [34] Pen-Drawing and Pen-Draughtsmen, 2nd ed. 1894, p. 358.

    HORATIAN ODE


    ON THE TERCENTENARY OF


    “DON QUIXOTE"


    (Published at Madrid, by Francisco de Robles, January 1605)


    “Para mi sola nacio don Quixote, y yo para el.”—CERVANTES.



    Advents we greet of great and small;

        Much we extol that may not live;

        Yet to the new-born Type we give

            No care at all!


    This year,[35]—three centuries past,—by age

        More maimed than by LEPANTO'S fight,—

        This year CERVANTES gave to light

            His matchless page,


    Whence first outrode th' immortal Pair,—

        The half-crazed Hero and his hind,—

        To make sad laughter for mankind;

            And whence they fare


    Throughout all Fiction still, where chance

        Allies Life's dulness with its dreams—

        Allies what is, with what but seems,—

            Fact and Romance:—


    O Knight of fire and Squire of earth!—

        O changing give-and-take between

        The aim too high, the aim too mean,

            I hail your birth,—


    Three centuries past,—in sunburned SPAIN,

        And hang, on Time's PANTHEON wall,

        My votive tablet to recall

            That lasting gain!


    Note:


    [35] I.e. January 1905.

    THE BOOKS OF SAMUEL ROGERS



    One common grave, according to Garrick, covers the actor and his art.
    The same may be said of the raconteur. Oral tradition, or even his own
    writings, may preserve his precise words; but his peculiarities of voice
    or action, his tricks of utterance and intonation,—all the collateral
    details which serve to lend distinction or piquancy to the
    performance—perish irrecoverably. The glorified gramophone of the
    future may perhaps rectify this for a new generation; and give us,
    without mechanical drawback, the authentic accents of speakers dead and
    gone; but it can never perpetuate the dramatic accompaniment of gesture
    and expression. If, as always, there are exceptions to this rule, they
    are necessarily evanescent. Now and then, it may be, some clever mimic
    will recall the manner of a passed-away predecessor; and he may even
    contrive to hand it on, more or less effectually, to a disciple. But the
    reproduction is of brief duration; and it is speedily effaced or
    transformed.


    In this way it is, however, that we get our most satisfactory idea of
    the once famous table-talker, Samuel Rogers. Charles Dickens, who sent
    Rogers several of his books; who dedicated Master Humphrey's Clock to
    him; and who frequently assisted at the famous breakfasts in St. James's
    Place, was accustomed—rather cruelly, it may be thought—to take off
    his host's very characteristic way of telling a story; and it is,
    moreover, affirmed by Mr. Percy Fitzgerald[36] that, in the famous
    Readings, “the strangely obtuse and owl-like expression, and the slow,
    husky croak” of Mr. Justice Stareleigh in the “Trial from Pickwick
    were carefully copied from the author of the Pleasures of Memory, That
    Dickens used thus to amuse his friends is confirmed by the autobiography
    of the late Frederick Locker,[37] who perfectly remembered the old man,
    to see whom he had been carried, as a boy, by his father. He had also
    heard Dickens repeat one of Rogers's stock anecdotes (it was that of the
    duel in a dark room, where the more considerate combatant, firing up the
    chimney, brings down his adversary);[38]—and he speaks of Dickens as
    mimicking Rogers's “calm, low-pitched, drawling voice and dry biting
    manner very comically.”[39] At the same time, it must be remembered that
    these reminiscences relate to Rogers in his old age. He was over seventy
    when Dickens published his first book, Sketches by Boz; and, though it
    is possible that Rogers's voice was always rather sepulchral, and his
    enunciation unusually deliberate and monotonous, he had nevertheless, as
    Locker says, “made story-telling a fine art.” Continued practice had
    given him the utmost economy of words; and as far as brevity and point
    are concerned, his method left nothing to be desired. Many of his best
    efforts are still to be found in the volume of Table-Talk edited for
    Moxon in 1856 by the Rev. Alexander Dyce; or preferably, as actually
    written down by Rogers himself in the delightful Recollections issued
    three years later by his nephew and executor, William Sharpe.


    Notes:


    [36] Recreations of a Literary Man, 1882, p. 137.


    [37] My Confidences, by Frederick Locker-Lampson, 1896, pp. 98
    and 325.


    [38] The duellists were an Englishman and a Frenchman; and
    Rogers was in the habit of adding as a postscript: “When I tell that in
    Paris, I always put the Englishman up the chimney!”


    [39] It may be added that Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, himself no mean
    mime, may be sometimes persuaded to imitate Dickens imitating Rogers.



    But although the two things are often intimately connected, the “books,”
    and not the “stories” of Rogers, are the subject of the present paper.
    After this, it sounds paradoxical to have to admit that his reputation
    as a connoisseur far overshadowed his reputation as a bibliophile. When,
    in December 1855, he died, his pictures and curios,—his “articles of
    virtue and bigotry” as a modern Malaprop would have styled
    them,—attracted far more attention than the not very numerous volumes
    forming his library.[40] What people flocked to see at the tiny
    treasure-house overlooking the Green Park,[41] which its nonagenarian
    owner had occupied for more than fifty years, were the “Puck” and
    “Strawberry Girl” of Sir Joshua, the Titians, Giorgiones, and Guidos,[42]
    the Poussins and Claudes, the drawings of Raphael and Duerer and Lucas
    van Leyden, the cabinet decorated by Stothard, the chimney-piece carved
    by Flaxman; the miniatures and bronzes and Etruscan vases,—all the
    “infinite riches in a little room,” which crowded No. 22 from garret to
    basement. These were the rarities that filled the columns of the papers
    and the voices of the quidnuncs when in 1856 they came to the hammer.
    But although the Press of that day takes careful count of these things,
    it makes little reference to the sale of the “books” of the banker-bard
    who spent some L15,000 on the embellishments of his Italy and his
    Poems; and although Dr. Burney says that Rogers's library included
    “the best editions of the best authors in most languages,” he had
    clearly no widespread reputation as a book-collector pure and simple.
    Nevertheless he loved his books,—that is, he loved the books he read.
    And, as far as can be ascertained, he anticipated the late Master of
    Balliol, since he read only the books he liked. Nor was he ever diverted
    from his predilections by mere fashion or novelty. “He followed Bacon's
    maxim”—says one who knew him—“to read much, not many things: multum
    legere, non multa
    . He used to say, 'When a new book comes out, I read
    an old one.'“[43]


    Notes:


    [40] The prices obtained confirm this. Thetotaisum realised was
    L45,188:14:3. Of this the books represented no more than L1415:5.


    [41] This—with its triple range of bow-windows, from one of
    which Rogers used to watch his favourite sunsets—is now the residence
    of Lord Northcliffe.


    [42] Three of these—the “Noli me tangere” of Titian, Giorgione's
    “Knight in Armour,” and Guide's “Ecce Homo”—are now in the National
    Gallery, to which they were bequeathed by Rogers.


    [43] Edinburgh Review, vol. civ. p. 105, by Abraham Hayward.



    The general Rogers-sale at Christie's took place in the spring of 1856,
    and twelve days had been absorbed before the books were reached. Their
    sale took six days more—i.e. from May 12 to May 19. As might be
    expected from Rogers's traditional position in the literary world, the
    catalogue contains many presentation copies. What, at first sight, would
    seem the earliest, is the Works of Edward Moore, 1796, 2 vols. But if
    this be the fabulist and editor of the World, it can scarcely have
    been received from the writer, since, in 1796, Moore had been dead for
    nearly forty years. With Bloomfield's poems of 1802, l. p., we are on
    surer ground, for Rogers, like Capel Lofft, had been kind to the author
    of The Farmer's Boy, and had done his best to obtain him a pension.
    Another early tribute, subsequently followed by the Tales of the Hall,
    was Crabbe's Borough, which he sent to Rogers in 1810, in response to
    polite overtures made to him by the poet. This was the beginning of a
    lasting friendship, of no small import to Crabbe, as it at once admitted
    him to Rogers's circle, an advantage of which there are many traces in
    Crabbe's journal. Next comes Madame de Stael's much proscribed De
    l'Allamagne
    (the Paris edition); and from its date, 1813, it must have
    been presented to Rogers when its irrepressible author was in England.
    She often dined or breakfasted at St. James's Place, where (according to
    Byron), she out-talked Whitbread, confounded Sir Humphry Davy, and was
    herself well “ironed“[44] by Sheridan. Rogers considered Corinne to
    be her best novel, and Delphine a terrible falling-off. The Germany he
    found “very fatiguing.” “She writes her works four or five times over,
    correcting them only in that way”—he says. “The end of a chapter [is]
    always the most obscure, as she ends with an epigram,”[45] Another early
    presentation copy is the second edition of Bowles's Missionary, 1815.
    According to Rogers, who claims to have suggested the poem, it was to
    have been inscribed to him. But somehow or other, the book got dedicated
    to noble lord who—Rogers adds drily—never, either by word or letter,
    made any acknowledgment of the homage.[46] It is not impossible that
    there is some confusion of recollection here, or Rogers is misreported
    by Dyce. The first anonymous edition of the Missionary, 1813, had no
    dedication; and the second was inscribed to the Marquess of Lansdowne
    because he had been prominent among those who recognised the merit of
    its predecessor.


    Notes:


    [44] Perhaps a remembrance of Mrs Slipslop's “ironing.”


    [45] Clayden's Rogers and his Contemporaries, 1889, i. 225. As
    an epigrammatist himself, Rogers might have been more indulgent to a
    consoeur. Here is one of Madame de Stael's “ends of chapters”:—“La
    monotonie, dans la retraite, tranquillise l'ame; la monotonie, dans le
    grand monde, fatigue l'esprit
    ” (ch. viii.). But he evidently found her
    rather overpowering.


    [46] Table-Talk, 1856, p. 258.



    Several of Scott's poems, with Rogers's autograph, and Scott's card,
    appear in the catalogue; and, in 1812, Byron, who a year after inscribed
    the Giaour to Rogers, sent him the first two cantos of Childe
    Harold.
    In 1838, Moore presents Lalla Rookh, with Heath's plates, a
    work which, upon its first appearance, twenty years earlier, had been
    dedicated to Rogers. In 1839 Charles Dickens followed with Nicholas
    Nickleby
    , succeeded a year later by Master Humphrey's Clock (1840-1),
    also dedicated to Rogers in recognition, not only of his poetical merit,
    but of his “active sympathy with the poorest and humblest of his kind.”
    Rogers was fond of “Little Nell”; and in the Preface to Barnaby Rudge,
    Dickens gracefully acknowledged that “for a beautiful thought” in the
    seventy-second chapter of the Old Curiosity Shop, he was indebted to
    Rogers's Ginevra in the Italy:—


        And long might'st thou have seen

      An old man wandering as in quest of something,

      Something he could not find—he knew not what.


    The American Notes, 1842, was a further offering from Dickens. Among
    other gifts may be noted Wordsworth's Poems, 1827-35; Campbell's
    Pilgrim of Glencoe, 1842; Longfellow's Ballads and Voices of the
    Night
    , 1840-2; Macaulay's Lays and Tennyson's Poems, 1842; and
    lastly, Hazlitt's Criticisms on Art, 1844, and Carlyle's Letters and
    Speeches of Cromwell
    , 1846. Brougham's philosophical novel of Albert
    Lunel; or, the Chateau of Languedoc
    , 3 vols, 1844, figures in the
    catalogue as “withdrawn.” It had been suppressed “for private reasons"
    upon the eve of publication; and this particular copy being annotated by
    Rogers (to whom it was inscribed) those concerned were no doubt all the
    more anxious that it should not get abroad. Inspection of the reprint of
    1872 shows, however, that want of interest was its chief error. A
    reviewer of 1858 roundly calls it “feeble” and “commonplace”; and it
    could hardly have increased its writer's reputation. Indeed, by some, it
    was not supposed to be from his Lordship's pen at all. Rogers, it may be
    added, frequently annotated his books. His copies of Pope, Gray and
    Scott had many marginalia. Clarke's and Fox's histories of James II.
    were also works which he decorated in this way.


    As already hinted, not very many bibliographical curiosities are
    included in the St. James's Place collection; and to look for
    Shakespeare quartos or folios, for example, would be idle. Ordinary
    editions of Shakespeare, such as Johnson's and Theobald's;
    Shakespeariana, such as Mrs. Montagu's Essay and Ayscough's
    Index,—these are there of course. If the list also takes in Thomas
    Caldecott's Hamlet, and As you like it (1832), that is, first,
    because the volume is a presentation copy; and secondly, because
    Caldecott's colleague in his frustrate enterprise was Crowe, Rogers's
    Miltonic friend, hereafter mentioned. Rogers's own feeling for
    Shakespeare was cold and hypercritical; and he was in the habit of
    endorsing with emphasis Ben Jonson's aspiration that the master had
    blotted a good many of his too-facile lines. Nevertheless, it is
    possible to pick out a few exceptional volumes from Mr. Christie's
    record. Among the earliest comes a copy of Garth's Dispensary, 1703,
    which certainly boasts an illustrious pedigree. Pope, who received it
    from the author, had carefully corrected it in several places; and in
    1744 bequeathed it to Warburton. Warburton, in his turn, handed it on to
    Mason, from whom it descended to Lord St. Helens, by whom, again,
    shortly before his death (1815), it was presented to Rogers. To Pope's
    corrections, which Garth adopted, Mason had added a comment. What made
    the volume of further interest was, that it contained Lord Dorchester's
    receipt for his subscription to Pope's Homer; and, inserted at the
    end, a full-length portrait of Pope; viz., that engraved in Warton's
    edition of 1797, as sketched in pen-and-ink by William Hoare of Bath.
    Another interesting item is the quarto first edition (the first three
    books) of Spenser's Faerie Queene, Ponsonbie, 1590: and a third, the
    Paradise Lost of Milton in ten books, the original text of 1667 (with
    the 1669 title-page and the Argument and Address to the Reader)—both
    bequeathed to Rogers by W, Jackson of Edinburgh. (One of the stock
    exhibits at “Memory Hall”—as 22 St. James's Place was playfully called
    by some of the owner's friends—was Milton's receipt to Symmons the
    printer for the five pounds he received for his epic. This, framed and
    glazeds hung, according to Lady Eastlake, on one of the doors.[47]) A
    fourth rare book was William Bonham's black-letter Chaucer, a folio
    which had been copiously annotated in MS. by Home Tooke, who gave it to
    Rogers. It moreover contained, at folio 221, the record of Tooke's
    arrest at Wimbledon on 16th May, 1794, and subsequent committal on the
    19th to the Tower, for alleged high treason.[48] Further notabilia in
    this category were the Duke of Marlborough's Hypnerotomachie of
    Poliphilus, Paris, 1554, and also the Aldine edition of 1499; the very
    rare 1572 issue of Camoens's Lusiads; Holbein's Dance of Death, the
    Lyons issues of 1538 and 1547; first editions of Bewick's Birds and
    Quadrupeds; Le Sueur's Life of St. Bruno, with the autograph of Sir
    Joshua Reynolds, and a rare quarto (1516) of Boccaccio's Decameron.


    Notes:


    [47] It was, no doubt, identical with the “Original Articles of
    Agreement” (Add. MSS. 18,861) between Milton and Samuel Symmons,
    printer, dated 27th April, 1667, presented by Rogers in 1852 to the
    British Museum. Besides the above-mentioned L5 down, there were to be
    three further payments of L5 each on the sale of three editions, each of
    1300 copies. The second edition appeared in 1674, the year of the
    author's death.


    [48] He was acquitted. His notes, in pencil, and relating chiefly to his
    Diversions of Parley, were actually written in the Tower. Rogers, who
    was present at the trial in November, mentioned, according to Dyce, a
    curious incident bearing upon a now obsolete custom referred to by
    Goldsmith and others. As usual, the prisoner's dock, in view of possible
    jail-fever, was strewn with sweet-smelling herbs-fennel, rosemary and the
    like. Tooke indignantly swept them away. Another of several characteristic
    anecdotes told by Rogers of Tooke is as follows:—Being asked once at
    college what his father was, he replied, “A Turkey Merchant.” Tooke pere
    was a poulterer in Clare Market.



    But the mere recapitulation of titles readily grows tedious, even to the
    elect; and I turn to some of the volumes with which, from references in
    the Table-Talk and Recollections, their owner might seem to be more
    intimately connected. Foremost among these—one would think—should come
    his own productions. Most of these, no doubt, are included under the
    auctioneers' heading of “Works and Illustrations.” In the “Library"
    proper, however, there are few traces of them. There is a quarto copy of
    the unfortunate Columbus, with Stothard's sketches; and there is the
    choice little Pleasures of Memory of 1810, with Luke Clennell's
    admirable cuts in facsimile from the same artist's pen-and-ink,—a
    volume which, come what may, will always hold its own in the annals of
    book-illustration. That there were more than one of these latter may be
    an accident. Rogers, nevertheless, like many book-lovers, must have
    indulged in duplicates. According to Hayward, once at breakfast, when
    some one quoted Gray's irresponsible outburst concerning the novels of
    Marivaux and Crebillon le fils, Rogers asked his guests, three in
    number, whether they were familiar with Marivaux's Vie de Marianne, a
    book which he himself confesses to have read through six times, and
    which French critics still hold, on inconclusive evidence, to have been
    the “only begetter” of Richardson's Pamela and the sentimental novel.
    None of the trio knew anything about it. “Then I will lend you each a
    copy,” rejoined Rogers; and the volumes were immediately produced,
    doubtless by that faithful and indefatigable factotum, Edmund Paine, of
    whom his master was wont to affirm that he would not only find any book
    in the house, but out of it as well. What is more (unless it be
    assumed that the poet's stock was larger still), one, at least, of the
    three copies must have been returned, since there is a copy in the
    catalogue. As might be expected in the admirer of Marivaux's heroine,
    the list is also rich in Jean-Jacques, whose “gout vif pour les
    dejeuners
    ,” this Amphitryon often extolled, quoting with approval
    Rousseau's opinion that “C'est le temps de la journee ou nous sommes le
    plus tranquilles, ou nous causons le plus a noire aise.
    “ Another of his
    favourite authors was Manzoni, whose Promessi Sposi he was inclined to
    think he would rather have written than all Scott's novels; and he never
    tired of reading Louis Racine's Memoires of his father, 1747,—that
    filon de l'or pur du dix-septieme siecle”—as Villemain calls
    it—“qui se prolonge dans l'age suivant.” Some of Rogers's likings
    sound strange enough nowadays. With Campbell, he delighted in Cowper's
    Homer, which he assiduously studied, and infinitely preferred to that
    of Pope. Into Chapman's it must be assumed that he had not
    looked—certainly he has left no sonnet on the subject. Milton was
    perhaps his best-loved bard. “When I was travelling in Italy (he says),
    I made two authors my constant study for versification,—Milton and
    Crowe
    ” (The italics are ours.) It is an odd collocation; but not
    unintelligible. William Crowe, the now forgotten Public Orator of
    Oxford, and author of Lewesdon Hill, was an intimate friend; a writer
    on versification; and, last but not least, a very respectable echo of
    the Miltonic note, as the following, from a passage dealing with the
    loss in 1786 of the Halsewell East Indiaman off the coast of Dorset,
    sufficiently testifies:—


        The richliest-laden ship

      Of spicy Ternate, or that annual sent

      To the Philippines o'er the southern main

      From Acapulco, carrying massy gold,

      Were poor to this;—freighted with hopeful Youth

      And Beauty, and high Courage undismay'd

      By mortal terrors, and paternal Love, etc., etc.


    It is not improbable that Rogers caught the mould of his blank verse
    from the copy rather than from the model. In the matter of style—as
    Flaubert has said—the second-bests are often the better teachers. More
    is to be learned from La Fontaine and Gautier than from Moliere and
    Victor Hugo.


    Many art-books, many books addressed specially to the connoisseur, as
    well as most of those invaluable volumes no gentleman's library should
    be without, found their places on Rogers's hospitable shelves. Of such,
    it is needless to speak; nor, in this place, is it necessary to deal
    with his finished and amiable, but not very vigorous or vital poetry. A
    parting word may, however, be devoted to the poet himself. Although,
    during his lifetime, and particularly towards its close, his weak voice
    and singularly blanched appearance exposed him perpetually to a kind of
    brutal personality now happily tabooed, it cannot be pretended that,
    either in age or youth, he was an attractive-looking man. In these
    cases, as in that of Goldsmith, a measure of burlesque sometimes
    provides a surer criterion than academic portraiture. The bust of the
    sculptor-caricaturist, Danton, is of course what even Hogarth would have
    classed as outre[49]; but there is reason for believing that Maclise's
    sketch in Fraser of the obtrusively bald, cadaverous and wizened
    figure in its arm-chair, which gave such a shudder of premonition to
    Goethe, and which Maginn, reflecting the popular voice, declared to be a
    mortal likeness—“painted to the very death”—was more like the original
    than his pictures by Lawrence and Hoppner. One can comprehend, too, that
    the person whom nature had so ungenerously endowed, might be perfectly
    capable of retorting to rudeness, or the still-smarting recollection of
    rudeness, with those weapons of mordant wit and acrid epigram which are
    not unfrequently the protective compensation of physical shortcomings.
    But this conceded, there are numberless anecdotes which testify to
    Rogers's cultivated taste and real good breeding, to his genuine
    benevolence, to his almost sentimental craving for appreciation and
    affection. In a paper on his books, it is permissible to end with
    a bookish anecdote. One of his favourite memories, much repeated in his
    latter days, was that of Cowley's laconic Will,—“I give my body to the
    earth, and my soul to my Maker.” Lady Eastlake shall tell the
    rest:—“This ... proved on one occasion too much for one of the party,
    and in an incautious moment a flippant young lady exclaimed, 'But, Mr.
    Rogers, what of Cowley's property?' An ominous silence ensued, broken
    only by a sotto voce from the late Mrs. Procter: 'Well, my dear, you
    have put your foot in it; no more invitations for you in a hurry,' But
    she did the kind old man, then above ninety, wrong. The culprit
    continued to receive the same invitations and the same welcome.”[50]


    Note:


    [49] Rogers's own copy of this, which (it may be added), he held
    in horror, now belongs to Mr. Edmund Gosse. Lord Londonderry has a
    number of Danton's busts.


    [50] Quarterly Review, vol. 167, p. 512.

    PEPYS' “DIARY"


    To One who asked why he wrote it.



    You ask me what was his intent?

      In truth, I'm not a German;
    'Tis plain though that he neither meant

      A Lecture nor a Sermon.


    But there it is,—the thing's a Fact.

      I find no other reason
    But that some scribbling itch attacked

      Him in and out of season,


    To write what no one else should read,

      With this for second meaning,
    To “cleanse his bosom” (and indeed

      It sometimes wanted cleaning);


    To speak, as 'twere, his private mind,

      Unhindered by repression,
    To make his motley life a kind,

      Of Midas' ears confession;


    And thus outgrew this work per se,—

        This queer, kaleidoscopic,
    Delightful, blabbing, vivid, free

        Hotch-pot of daily topic.


    So artless in its vanity,

        So fleeting, so eternal,
    So packed with “poor Humanity”—

        We know as Pepys' his journal.[51]


    Note:


    [51] Written for the Pepys' Dinner at Magdalene College, Cambridge,
    February 23rd, 1905.

    A FRENCH CRITIC ON BATH



    Among other pleasant premonitions of the present entente cordiale
    between France and England is the increased attention which, for some
    time past, our friends of Outre Manche have been devoting to our
    literature. That this is wholly of recent growth, is not, of course, to
    be inferred. It must be nearly five-and-forty years since M. Hippolyte
    Taine issued his logical and orderly Histoire de la Litterature
    Anglaise
    ; while other isolated efforts of insight and importance—such
    as the Laurence Sterne of M. Paul Stapfer, and the excellent Le
    Public et les Hommes de Lettres en Angleterre au XVIII^e Siecle
    of the
    late M. Alexandre Beljame of the Sorbonne—are already of distant date.
    But during the last two decades the appearance of similar productions
    has been more recurrent and more marked. From one eminent writer
    alone—M. J.-J. Jusserand—we have received an entire series of studies
    of exceptional charm, variety, and accomplishment. M. Felix Rabbe has
    given us a sympathetic analysis of Shelley; M. Auguste
    Angellier,—himself a poet of individuality and distinction,—what has
    been rightly described as a “splendid work” on Burns;[52] while M. Emile
    Legouis, in a minute examination of “The Prelude,” has contrasted and
    compared the orthodox Wordsworth of maturity with the juvenile
    semi-atheist of Coleridge. Travelling farther afield, M. W. Thomas has
    devoted an exhaustive volume to Young of the Night Thoughts; M. Leon
    Morel, another to Thomson; and, incidentally, a flood of fresh light has
    been thrown upon the birth and growth of the English Novel by the
    admirable Jean-Jacques Rousseau et les Origines du Cosmopolitisme
    Litteraire
    of the late Joseph Texte—an investigation unquestionably of
    the ripest scholarship, and the most extended research. And now once
    more there are signs that French lucidity and French precision are about
    to enter upon other conquests; and we have M. Barbeau's study of a
    famous old English watering-place[53]—appropriately dedicated, as is
    another of the books already mentioned, to M. Beljame.[54]


    Notes:


    [52] A volume of Pages Choisies de Auguste Angellier, Prose et
    Vers
    , with an Introduction by M. Legouis, has recently (1908) been
    issued by the Clarendon Press. It contains lengthy extracts from M.
    Angellier's study of Burns.


    [53:]_Une Ville d'Eaux anglaise au XVIIIe Siecle, La Societe Elegante
    et Litteraire a Bath sous la Reine Anne et sous les Georges. Par A.
    Barbeau. Paris, Picard, 1904.


    [54] The list grows apace. To the above, among others, must now
    be added M. Rene Huchon's brilliant little essay on Mrs. Montagu, and
    his elaborate study of Crabbe, to say nothing of M. Jules Derocquigny's
    Lamb, M. Jules Douady's Hazlitt, and M. Joseph Aynard's Coleridge.



    At first sight, topography, even when combined with social sketches, may
    seem less suited to a foreigner and an outsider than it would be to a
    resident and a native. In the attitude of the latter to the land in
    which he lives or has been born, there is always an inherent something
    of the soil for which even trained powers of comparison, and a special
    perceptive faculty, are but imperfect substitutes. On the other hand,
    the visitor from over-sea is, in many respects, better placed for
    observation than the inhabitant. He enjoys not a little—it has been
    often said—of the position of posterity. He takes in more at a glance;
    he leaves out less; he is disturbed by no apprehensions of explaining
    what is obvious, or discovering what is known. As a consequence, he sets
    down much which, from long familiarity, an indigenous critic would be
    disposed to discard, although it might not be, in itself, either
    uninteresting or superfluous. And if, instead of dealing with the
    present and actual, his concern is with history and the past, his
    external standpoint becomes a strength rather than a weakness. He can
    survey his subject with a detachment which is wholly favourable to his
    project; and he can give it, with less difficulty than another, the
    advantages of scientific treatment and an artistic setting. Finally, if
    his theme have definite limits—as for instance an appreciable
    beginning, middle, and end—he must be held to be exceptionally
    fortunate. And this, either from happy guessing, or sheer good luck, is
    M. Barbeau's case. All these conditions are present in the annals of the
    once popular pleasure-resort of which he has elected to tell the story.
    It arose gradually; it grew through a century of unexampled prosperity;
    it sank again to the level of a county-town. If it should ever arise
    again,—and it is by no means a ville morte,—it will be in an
    entirely different way. The particular Bath of the eighteenth
    century—the Bath of Queen Anne and the Georges, of Nash and Fielding
    and Sheridan, of Anstey and Mrs. Siddons, of Wesley and Lady Huntingdon,
    of Quin and Gainsborough and Lawrence and a hundred others—is no more.
    It is a case of Fuit Ilium. It has gone for ever; and can never be
    revived in the old circumstances. To borrow an apposite expression from
    M. Texte, it is an organism whose evolution has accomplished its course.


    M. Barbeau's task, then, is very definitely mapped-out and
    circumscribed. But he is far too good a craftsman to do no more than
    give a mere panorama of that daily Bath programme which King Nash and
    his dynasty ordained and established. He goes back to the origins; to
    the legend of King Lear's leper-father; to the Diary of the
    too-much-neglected Celia Fiennes; to Pepys[55] and Grammont's Memoirs; to
    the days when hapless Catherine of Braganza, with the baleful “ belle
    Stewart” in her train, made fruitless pilgrimage to Bladud's spring as a
    remedy against sterility. He sketches, with due acknowledgments to
    Goldsmith's unique little book, the biography of that archquack,
    poseur, and very clever organiser, Mr. Richard Nash, the first real
    Master of the Ceremonies; and he gives a full account of his followers
    and successors. He also minutely relates the story of Sheridan's
    marriage to his beautiful “St. Cecilia,” Elizabeth Ann Linley. A
    separate and very interesting chapter is allotted to Lady Huntingdon and
    the Methodists, not without levies from the remarkable Spiritual
    Quixote
    of that Rev. Richard Graves of Claverton, of whom an excellent
    account was given not long since in Mr. W. H. Hutton's suggestive
    Burford Papers. Other chapters are occupied with Bath and its belles
    lettres
    ; with “Squire Allworthy” of Prior Park and his literary guests,
    Pope, Warburton, Fielding and his sister, etc.; with the historic
    Frascati vase of Lady Miller at Batheaston, which stirred the ridicule
    of Horace Walpole, and is still, it is said, to be seen in a local park.
    The dosing pages treat of Bath—musical, artistic, scientific—of its
    gradual transformation as a health resort—of its eventual and
    foredoomed decline and fall as the one fashionable watering-place,
    supreme and single, for Great Britain and Ireland.


    Note:


    [55] Oddly enough—if M. Barbeau's index is to be trusted, and
    it is an unusually good one,—he makes no reference to Evelyn's visit to
    Bath. But Evelyn went there in June, 1654, bathed in the Cross Bath,
    criticised the “facciata” of the Abbey Church, complained of the
    “narrow, uneven and unpleasant streets,” and inter-visited with the
    company frequenting the place for health. “Among the rest of the idle
    diversions of the town,” he says, “one musician was famous for acting a
    changeling [idiot or half-wit], which indeed he personated strangely.”
    (Diary, Globe edn., 1908, p. 174.)



    But it is needless to prolong analysis. One's only wonder—as usual
    after the event—is that what has been done so well had never been
    thought of before. For while M. Barbeau is to be congratulated upon the
    happy task he has undertaken, we may also congratulate ourselves that he
    has performed it so effectively. His material is admirably arranged. He
    has supported it by copious notes; and he has backed it up by an
    impressive bibliography of authorities ancient and modern. This is
    something; but it is not all[56]. He has done much more than this. He has
    contrived that, in his picturesque and learned pages, the old “Queen of
    the West” shall live again, with its circling terraces, its grey stone
    houses and ill-paved streets, its crush of chairs and chariots, its
    throng of smirking, self-satisfied prom-enaders.


    Note:


    [56] To the English version (Heinemann, 1904) an eighteenth-century map
    of Bath, and a number of interesting views and portraits have been added.



    One seems to see the clumsy stage-coaches depositing their touzled and
    tumbled inmates, in their rough rocklows and quaint travelling headgear,
    at the “Bear” or the “White Hart,” after a jolting two or three days'
    journey from Oxford or London, not without the usual experiences, real
    and imaginary, of suspicious-looking horsemen at Hounslow, or masked
    “gentlemen of the pad” on Claverton Down. One hears the peal of
    five-and-twenty bells which greets the arrival of visitors of
    importance; and notes the obsequious and venal town-waits who follow
    them to their lodgings in Gay Street or Milsom Street or the
    Parades,—where they will, no doubt, be promptly attended by the Master
    of the Ceremonies, “as fine as fivepence,” and a very pretty,
    sweet-smelling gentleman, to be sure, whether his name be Wade or
    Derrick. Next day will probably discover them in chip hats and flannel,
    duly equipped with wooden bowls and bouquets, at the King's Bath, where,
    through a steaming atmosphere, you may survey their artless manoeuvres
    (as does Lydia Melford in Humphry Clinker) from the windows of the
    Pump Room, to which rallying-place they will presently repair to drink
    the waters, in a medley of notables and notorieties, members of
    Parliament, chaplains and led-captains, Noblemen with ribbons and stars,
    dove-coloured Quakers, Duchesses, quacks, fortune-hunters, lackeys,
    lank-haired Methodists, Bishops, and boarding-school misses. Ferdinand
    Count Fathom will be there, as well as my Lord Ogleby; Lady Bellaston
    (and Mr. Thomas Jones); Geoffry Wildgoose and Tugwell the cobbler;
    Lismahago and Tabitha Bramble; the caustic Mrs. Selwyn and the blushing
    Miss Anville. Be certain, too, that, sooner or later, you will encounter
    Mrs, Candour and Lady Sneerwell, Sir Benjamin Backbite and his uncle,
    Mr. Crabtree, for this is their main haunt and region—in fact, they
    were born here. You may follow this worshipful and piebald procession to
    the Public Breakfasts in the Spring Gardens, to the Toy-shops behind the
    Church, to the Coffee-houses in Westgate Street, to the Reading Rooms on
    the Walks, where, in Mr. James Leake's parlour at the back—if you are
    lucky—you may behold the celebrated Mr. Ralph Allen of Prior Park,
    talking either to Mr. Henry Fielding or to Mr. Leake's brother-in-law,
    Mr. Samuel Richardson, but never—if we are correctly informed—to both
    of them together. Or you may run against Mr. Christopher Anstey of the
    over-praised Guide, walking arm-in-arm with another Bathonian, Mr.
    Melmoth, whose version of Pliny was once held to surpass its original.
    At the Abbey—where there are daily morning services—you shall listen
    to the silver periods of Bishop Kurd, whom his admirers call fondly “the
    Beauty of Holiness”; at St. James's you can attend the full-blown
    lectures, “more unctuous than ever he preached,” of Bishop Beilby
    Porteus; or you may succeed in procuring a card for a select hearing, at
    Edgar Buildings, of Lady Huntingdon's eloquent chaplain, Mr. Whitefield.
    With the gathering shades of even, you may pass, if so minded, to
    Palmer's Theatre in Orchard Street, and follow Mrs. Siddons acting
    Belvidera in Otway's Venice Preserv'd to the Pierre of that forgotten
    Mr. Lee whom Fanny Burney put next to Garrick; or you may join the
    enraptured audience whom Mrs. Jordan is delighting with her favourite
    part of Priscilla Tomboy in The Romp. You may assist at the concerts
    of Signer Venanzio Rauzzini and Monsieur La Motte; you may take part in
    a long minuet or country dance at the Upper or Lower Assembly Rooms,
    which Bunbury will caricature; you may even lose a few pieces at the
    green tables; and, should you return home late enough, may watch a
    couple of stout chairmen at the door of the “Three Tuns” in Stall
    Street, hoisting that seasoned toper, Mr. James Quin, into a sedan after
    his evening's quantum of claret. What you do to-day, you will do
    to-morrow, if the bad air of the Pump Room has not given you a headache,
    or the waters a touch of vertigo; and you will continue to do it for a
    month or six weeks, when the lumbering vehicle with the leathern straps
    and crane-necked springs will carry you back again over the deplorable
    roads (“so sidelum and jumblum,” one traveller calls them) to your
    town-house, or your country-box, or your city-shop or chambers, as the
    case may be. Here, in due course, you will begin to meditate upon your
    next excursion to THE BATH, provided always that you have not dipped
    your estate at “E.O.”, or been ruined by milliners' bills;—that your
    son has not gone northwards with a sham Scotch heiress, or your daughter
    been married at Charicombe, by private license, to a pinchbeck Irish
    peer. For all these things—however painful the admission—were,
    according to the most credible chroniclers, the by-no-means infrequent
    accompaniment or sequel of an unguarded sojourn at the old jigging,
    card-playing, scandal-loving, pleasure-seeking city in the loop of “the
    soft-flowing Avon.”


    It is an inordinate paragraph, outraging all known rules of composition!
    But then—How seductive a subject is eighteenth-century Bath!—and how
    rich in memories is M. Barbeau's book!

    A WELCOME FROM THE “JOHNSON CLUB"


    To William John Courthope, March 12, 1903



    When Pope came back from Trojan wars once more,
    He found a Bard, to meet him on the shore,
    And hail his advent with a strain as clear
    As e'er was sung by BYRON or by FRERE.[57]


    You, SIR, have travelled from no distant clime,
    Yet would JOHN GAY could welcome you in rhyme;
    And by some fable not too coldly penned,
    Teach how with judgment one may praise a Friend.


    There is no need that I should tell in words
    Your prowess from The Paradise of Birds;[58]
    No need to show how surely you have traced
    The Life in Poetry, the Law in Taste;[59]
    Or mark with what unwearied strength you wear
    The weight that WARTON found too great to bear.[60]
    There Is no need for this or that. My plan
    Is less to laud the Matter than the Man.


    This is my brief. We recognise in you
    The mind judicial, the untroubled view;
    The critic who, without pedantic pose,
    Takes his firm foothold on the thing he knows;
    Who, free alike from passion or pretence,
    Holds the good rule of calm and common sense;
    And be the subject or perplexed or plain,—
    Clear or confusing,—is throughout urbane,
    Patient, persuasive, logical, precise,
    And only hard to vanity and vice.


    More I could add, but brevity is best;—
    These are our claims to honour you as Guest.


    Notes:


    [57] Alexander Pope: his Safe Return from Troy. A Congratulatory Poem
    on his Completing his Translation of Homer's Iliad.
    (In ottava rima.)
    By Mr. Gay, 1720(?). Frere's burlesque, Monks and Giants—it will be
    remembered—set the tune to Byron's Beppo.


    [58] The Paradise of Birds, 1870.


    [59] Life in Poetry, Law in Taste, two series of Lectures
    delivered in Oxford, 1895-1900. 1901.


    [60] A History of English Poetry. 1895 (in progress).

    THACKERY'S “ESMOND"



    At this date, Thackeray's Esmond has passed from the domain of
    criticism into that securer region where the classics, if they do not
    actually “slumber out their immortality,” are at least preserved from
    profane intrusion. This “noble story"[61]—as it was called by one of its
    earliest admirers—is no longer, in any sense, a book “under review.”
    The painful student of the past may still, indeed, with tape and
    compass, question its details and proportions; or the quick-fingered
    professor of paradox, jauntily turning it upside-down, rejoice in the
    results of his perverse dexterity; but certain things are now
    established in regard to it, which cannot be gainsaid, even by those who
    assume the superfluous office of anatomising the accepted. In the first
    place, if Esmond be not the author's greatest work (and there are
    those who, like the late Anthony Trollope, would willingly give it that
    rank), it is unquestionably his greatest work in its particular kind,
    for its sequel, The Virginians, however admirable in detached
    passages, is desultory and invertebrate, while Denis Duval, of which
    the promise was “great, remains unfinished. With Vanity Fair, the
    author's masterpiece in another manner, Esmond cannot properly be
    compared, because an imitation of the past can never compete in
    verisimilitude or on any satisfactory terms with a contemporary picture.
    Nevertheless, in its successful reproduction of the tone of a bygone
    epoch, lies Esmond's second and incontestable claim to length of days.
    Athough fifty years and more have passed since it was published, it is
    still unrivalled as the typical example of that class of historical
    fiction, which, dealing indiscriminately with characters real and
    feigned, develops them both with equal familiarity, treating them each
    from within, and investing them impartially with a common atmosphere of
    illusion. No modern novel has done this in the same way, nor with the
    same good fortune, as Esmond; and there is nothing more to be said on
    this score. Even if—as always—later researches should have revised our
    conception of certain of the real personages, the value of the book as
    an imaginative tour de force is unimpaired. Little remains therefore
    for the gleaner of to-day save bibliographical jottings, and neglected
    notes on its first appearance.


    Note:


    [61] “Never could I have believed that Thackeray, great as his abilities
    are, could have written so noble a story as Esmond.”—WALTER SAVAGE
    LANDOR, August 1856.



    In Thackeray's work, the place of The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., a
    Colonel in the Service of Her Majesty Q. Anne. Written by Himself
    —lies
    midway between his four other principal books, Vanity Fair, Pendennis,
    The Newcomes
    , and The Virginians; and its position serves, in a
    measure, to explain its origin. In 1848, after much tentative and
    miscellaneous production, of which the value had been but imperfectly
    appreciated, the author found his fame with the yellow numbers of
    Vanity Fair. Two years later, adopting the same serial form, came
    Pendennis. Vanity Fair had been the condensation of a life's
    experience; and excellent as Pendennis would have seemed from any
    inferior hand, its readers could not disguise from themselves that,
    though showing no falling off in other respects, it drew to some extent
    upon the old material. No one was readier than Thackeray to listen to a
    whisper of this kind, or more willing to believe that—as he afterwards
    told his friend Elwin concerning The Newcomes—“he had exhausted all
    the types of character with which he was familiar.” Accordingly he
    began, for the time, to turn his thoughts in fresh directions; and in
    the year that followed the publication of Pendennis, prepared and
    delivered in England and Scotland a series of Lectures upon the English
    Humourists of the Eighteenth Century
    . With the success of these came
    the prompting for a new work of fiction,—not to be contemporary, and
    not to be issued in parts. His studies for the Humourists had
    saturated him with the spirit of a time to which—witness his novelette
    of Barry Lyndon—he had always been attracted; and when Mr. George
    Smith called on him with a proposal that he should write a new story for
    L1000, he was already well in hand with Esmond,—an effort in which,
    if it were not possible to invent new puppets, it was at least possible
    to provide fresh costumes and a change of background. Begun in 1851,
    Esmond progressed rapidly, and by the end of May 1852 it was
    completed. Owing to the limited stock of old-cut type in which it was
    set up, its three volumes passed but slowly through the press; and it
    was eventually issued at the end of the following October, upon the eve
    of the author's departure to lecture in America. In fact, he was waiting
    on the pier for the tender which was to convey him to the steamer, when
    he received his bound copies from the publisher.


    Mr. Eyre Crowe, A.R.A., who accompanied Thackeray to the United States,
    and had for some time previously been acting as his “factotum and
    amanuensis,” has recorded several interesting details with regard to the
    writing of Esmond, To most readers it will be matter of surprise, and
    it is certainly a noteworthy testimony to the author's powers, that this
    attempt to revive the language and atmosphere of a vanished era was in
    great part dictated. It has even been said that, like Pendennis, it
    was all dictated; but this it seems is a mistake, for, as we shall see
    presently, part of the manuscript was prepared by the author himself. As
    he warmed to his work, however, he often reverted to the method of oral
    composition which had always been most congenial to him, and which
    explains the easy colloquialism of his style. Much of the “copy" was
    taken down by Mr. Crowe in a first-floor bedroom of No. 16 Young Street,
    Kensington, the still-existent house where Vanity Fair had been written;
    at the Bedford Hotel in Covent Garden; at the round table in the
    Athenasum library, and elsewhere. “I write better anywhere than at
    home,”—Thackeray told Elwin,—“and I write less at home than anywhere.”
    Sometimes author and scribe would betake themselves to the British
    Museum, to look up points in connection with Marlborough's battles, or
    to rummage Jacob Tonson's Gazettes for the official accounts of
    Wynendael and Oudenarde. The British Museum, indeed, was another of
    Esmond's birthplaces. By favour of Sir Antonio Panizzi, Thackeray and
    his assistant, surrounded by their authorities, were accommodated in one
    of the secluded galleries. “I sat down,”—says Mr. Crowe—“and wrote to
    dictation the scathing sentences about the great Marlborough, the
    denouncing of Cadogan, etc., etc. As a curious instance of literary
    contagion, it may be here stated that I got quite bitten, with the
    expressed anger at their misdeeds against General Webb, Thackeray's
    kinsman and ancestor; and that I then looked upon Secretary Cardonnel's
    conduct with perfect loathing. I was quite delighted to find his
    meannesses justly pilloried in Esmond's pages.” What rendered the
    situation more piquant,—Mr. Crowe adds,—all this took place on the
    site of old Montague House, where, as Steele's “Prue” says to St. John
    in the novel,” you wretches go and fight duels.”[62]


    Note:


    [62] With Thackeray in America, 1893, p. 4.



    Those who are willing to make a pilgrimage to Cambridge, may, if they
    please, inspect the very passages which aroused the enthusiam of
    Thackeray's secretary. In a special case in the Library of Trinity
    College, not far from those which enclose the manuscripts of Tennyson
    and Milton, is the original and only manuscript of Esmond, being in
    fact the identical “copy” which was despatched to the press of Messrs.
    Bradbury and Evans at Whitefriars. It makes two large quarto volumes,
    and was presented to the College (Esmond's College!) in 1888 by the
    author's son-in-law, the late Sir Leslie Stephen. It still bears in
    pencil the names of the different compositors who set up the type. Much
    of it is in Thackeray's own small, slightly-slanted, but oftener upright
    hand, and many pages have hardly any corrections.[63] His custom was to
    write on half-sheets of a rather large notepaper, and some idea may be
    gathered of the neat, minute, and regular script, when it is added that
    the lines usually contain twelve to fifteen words, and that there are
    frequently as many as thirty-three of these lines to a page. Some of the
    rest of the “copy” is in the handwriting of the author's daughter, now
    Lady Ritchie; but a considerable portion was penned by Mr. Eyre Crowe.
    The oft-quoted passage in book ii. chap. vi. about “bringing your
    sheaves with you,” was written by Thackeray himself almost as it stands;
    so was the sham Spectator, hereafter mentioned, and most of the
    chapter headed “General Webb wins the Battle of Wynendael.” But the
    splendid closing scene,—“August 1st, 1714,”—is almost wholly in the
    hand of Mr. Crowe. It is certainly a remarkable fact that work at this
    level should have been thus improvised, and that nothing, as we are
    credibly informed, should have been before committed to paper.[64]


    When Esmond first made its appearance in October 1852, it was not
    without distinguished and even formidable competitors. Bleak House had
    reached its eighth number; and Bulwer was running My Novel in
    Blackwood
    . In Fraser, Kingsley was bringing out Hypatia; and Whyte
    Melville was preluding with Digby Grand. Charlotte Bronte must have
    been getting ready Villette for the press; and Tennyson—undeterred by
    the fact that his hero had already been “dirged” by the indefatigable
    Tupper—was busy with his Ode on the Death of the Duke of
    Wellington
    .[65] The critics of the time were possibly embarrassed with
    this wealth of talent, for they were not, at the outset, immoderately
    enthusiastic over the new arrival. The Athenaeum was by no means
    laudatory. Esmond “harped upon the same string”; “wanted vital heat”;
    “touched no fresh fount of thought”; “introduced no novel forms of
    life”; and so forth. But the Spectator, in a charming greeting from
    George Brimley (since included in his Essays), placed the book, as a
    work of art, even above Vanity Fair and Pendennis; the “serious and
    orthodox” Examiner, then under John Forster, was politely judicial;
    the Daily News friendly; and the Morning Advertiser enraptured. The
    book, this last declared, was the “beau-ideal of historical romance.” On
    December 4 a second edition was announced. Then, on the 22nd, came the
    Times. Whether the Times remembered and resented a certain
    delightfully contemptuous “Essay on Thunder and Small Beer,” with which
    Thackeray retorted to its notice of The Kickkburys on the Rhine (a
    thing hard to believe!) or whether it did not,—its report of Esmond
    was distinctly hostile. In three columns, it commended little but the
    character of Marlborough, and the writer's “incomparably easy and
    unforced style.” Thackeray thought that it had “absolutely stopped" the
    sale. But this seems inconsistent with the fact that the publisher sent
    him a supplementary cheque for L250 on account of Esmond's success.


    Notes:


    [63] One is reminded of the accounts of Scott's “copy.” “Page
    after page the writing runs on exactly as you read it in print”—says
    Mr. Mowbray Morris. “I was looking not long ago at the manuscript of
    Kenilworth in the British Museum, and examined the end with particular
    care, thinking that the wonderful scene of Amy Robsart's death must
    surely have cost him some labour. They were the cleanest pages in the
    volume: I do not think there was a sentence altered or added in the
    whole chapter” (Lecture at Eton, Macmillan's Magazine (1889), lx.
    pp. 158-9).


    [64] “The sentences”—Mr. Crowe told a member of the Athenaeum,
    when speaking of his task—“came out glibly as he [Thackeray] paced the
    room.” This is the more singular when contrasted with the slow
    elaboration of the Balzac and Flaubert school. No doubt Thackeray must
    often have arranged in his mind precisely much that he meant to say.
    Such seems indeed to have been his habit. The late Mr. Lockcer-Lampson
    informed the writer of this paper that once, when he met the author of
    Esmond in the Green Park, Thackeray gently begged to be allowed to walk
    alone, as he had some verses In his head which he was finishing. They
    were those which afterwards appeared in the Cornhill for January 1867,
    under the title of Mrs. Katherine's Lantern.


    [65] The Duke died 14th Sept. 1852.



    Another reason which may have tended to slacken—not to stop—the sale,
    is also suggested by the author himself. This was the growing popularity
    of My Novel and Villette. And Miss Bronte's book calls to mind the
    fact that she was among the earliest readers of Esmond, the first two
    volumes of which were sent to her in manuscript by George Smith, She
    read it, she tells him, with “as much ire and sorrow as gratitude and
    admiration,” marvelling at its mastery of reconstruction,—hating its
    satire,—its injustice to women. How could Lady Castlewood peep through
    a keyhole, listen at a door, and be jealous of a boy and a milkmaid!
    There was too much political and religious intrigue—she thought.
    Nevertheless she said (this was in February 1852, speaking of vol. i.)
    the author might “yet make it the best he had ever written.” In March
    she had seen the second volume. The character of Marlborough (here she
    anticipated the Times) was a “masterly piece of writing.” But there
    was “too little story.” The final volume, by her own request, she
    received in print. It possessed, in her opinion, the “most sparkle,
    impetus, and interest.” “I hold,” she wrote to Mr. Smith, “that a work
    of fiction ought to be a work of creation: that the real should be
    sparingly introduced in pages dedicated to the ideal” In a later
    letter she gives high praise to the complex conception of Beatrix,
    traversing incidentally the absurd accusation of one of the papers that
    she resembled. Blanche Amory [the Athenaeum and Examiner, it may be
    noted, regarded her as “another Becky"]. “To me,” Miss Bronte exclaims,
    “they are about as identical as a weasel and a royal tigress of Bengal;
    both the latter are quadrupeds, both the former women.” These frank
    comments of a fervent but thoroughly honest admirer, are of genuine
    interest. When the book was published, Thackeray himself sent her a copy
    with his “grateful regards,” and it must have been of this that she
    wrote to Mr. Smith on November 3,—“Colonel Henry Esmond is just
    arrived. He looks very antique and distinguished in his Queen Anne's
    garb; the periwig, sword, lace, and ruffles are very well represented by
    the old Spectator type.”[66]


    Note:


    [66] Mr. Clement Shorter's Charlotte Bronte and her Circle,
    1896, p. 403; and Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte, 1900, pp. 561
    et seq.



    One of the points on which Miss Bronte does not touch,—at all events
    does not touch in those portions of her correspondence which have been
    printed,—is the marriage with which Esmond closes. Upon this event it
    would have been highly instructive to have had her views, especially as
    it appears to have greatly exercised her contemporaries, the first
    reviewers. It was the gravamen of the Times indictment; to the critic
    of Fraser it was highly objectionable; and the Examiner regarded it
    as “incredible.” Why it was “incredible” that a man should marry a woman
    seven years older than himself, to whom he had already proposed once in
    vol. ii., and of whose youthful appearance we are continually reminded
    (“she looks the sister of her daughter” says the old Dowager at
    Chelsea), is certainly not superficially obvious. Nor was it obvious to
    Lady Castlewood's children, “Mother's in love with you,—yes, I think
    mother's in love with you,” says downright Frank Esmond; the only
    impediment in his eyes being the bar sinister, as yet unremoved. And
    Miss Beatrix herself, in vol. iii., is even more roundly explicit. “As
    for you,” she tells Esmond, “you want a woman to bring your slippers and
    cap, and to sit at your feet, and cry 'O caro! O bravo!' whilst you read
    your Shakespeares, and Miltons, and stuff” [which shows that she herself
    had read Swift's Grand Question Debated]. “Mamma would have been the
    wife for you, had you been a little older, though you look ten years
    older than she does,” “You do, you glum-faced, blue-bearded, little old
    man!” adds this very imperious and free-spoken young lady. The situation
    is, no doubt, at times extremely difficult, and naturally requires
    consummate skill in the treatment. But if these things and others
    signify anything to an intelligent reader, they signify that the author,
    if he had not his end steadily in view, knew perfectly well that his
    story was tending in one direction. There will probably always be some
    diversity of opinion in the matter; but the majority of us have accepted
    Thackeray's solution, and have dropped out of sight that hint of
    undesirable rivalry, which so troubled the precisians of the early
    Victorian age. To those who read Esmond now, noting carefully the
    almost imperceptible transformation of the motives on either side, as
    developed by the evolution of the story, the union of the hero and
    heroine at the end must appear not only credible but preordained. And
    that the gradual progress towards this foregone conclusion is handled
    with unfailing tact and skill, there can surely be no question.[67]


    Note:


    [67} Thackeray's own explanation was more characteristic than
    convincing. “Why did you”—said once to him impetuous Mrs. John Brown of
    Edinburgh—“Why did you make Esmond marry that old woman?” “My dear
    lady,” he replied, “it was not I who married them. They married
    themselves.” (Dr. John Brmon, by the late John Taylor Brown, 1903,
    pp. 96-7.)



    Of the historical portraits in the book, the interest has, perhaps, at
    this date, a little paled. Not that they are one whit less vigorously
    alive than when the author first put them in motion; but they have
    suffered from the very attention which Esmond and The Humourists
    have directed to the study of the originals. The picture of Marlborough
    is still as effective as when it was first proclaimed to be good enough
    for the brush of Saint-Simon. But Thackeray himself confessed to a
    family prejudice against the hero of Blenheim, and later artists have
    considerably readjusted the likeness. Nor in all probability would the
    latest biographer of Bolingbroke endorse that presentment. In the
    purely literary figures, Thackeray naturally followed the Lectures,
    and is consequently open to the same criticisms as have been offered on
    those performances. The Swift of The Humourists, modelled on Macaulay,
    was never accepted from the first; and it has not been accepted in the
    novel, or by subsequent writers from Forster onwards.[68] Addison has
    been less studied; and his likeness has consequently been less
    questioned. Concerning Steele there has been rather more discussion.
    That Thackeray's sketch is very vivid, very human, and in most
    essentials, hard to disprove, must be granted. But it is obviously
    conceived under the domination of the “poor Dick” of Addison, and dwells
    far too persistently upon Steele's frailer and more fallible aspect. No
    one would believe that the flushed personage in the full-bottomed
    periwig, who hiccups Addison's Campaign in the Haymarket garret, or
    the fuddled victim of “Prue's” curtain lecture at Hampton, ranked, at
    the date of the story, far higher than Addison as a writer, and that he
    was, in spite of his faults, not only a kindly gentleman and scholar,
    but a philanthropist, a staunch patriot, and a consistent politician.
    Probably the author of Esmond considered that, in a mixed character,
    to be introduced incidentally, and exhibited naturally “in the quotidian
    undress and relaxation of his mind” (as Lamb says), anything like
    biographical big drum should be deprecated. This is, at least, the
    impression left on us by an anecdote told by Elwin. He says that
    Thackeray, talking to him once about The Virginians, which was then
    appearing, announced that he meant, among other people, to bring in
    Goldsmith, “representing him as he really was, a little, shabby, mean,
    shuffling Irishman.” These are given as Thackeray's actual words. If so,
    they do not show the side of Goldsmith which is shown in the last
    lecture of The Humourists.[69]


    Notes:


    [68] Thackeray heartily disliked Swift, and said so. “As for
    Swift, you haven't made me alter my opinion”—he replied to Hannay's
    remonstrances. This feeling was intensified by the belief that Swift, as
    a clergyman, was insincere. “Of course,”—he wrote in September, 1851,
    in a letter now in the British Museum,—“any man is welcome to believe
    as he likes for me except a parson; and I can't help looking upon
    Swift and Sterne as a couple of traitors and renegades ... with a
    scornful pity for them in spite of all their genius and greatness.”


    [69] Some XVIII. Century Men of Letters, 1902, i. 187. The
    intention was never carried out. In The King over the Water, 1908,
    Miss A. Shield and Mr. Andrew Lang have recently examined another
    portrait in Esmond,—that of the Chevalier de St. George,—not without
    injury to its historical veracity. In these matters, Mr. Lang—like Rob
    Roy—is on his native heath; and it is only necessary to refer the
    reader to this highly interesting study.



    But although, with our rectified information, we may except against the
    picture of Steele as a man, we can scarcely cavil at the reproduction of
    his manner as a writer. Even when Thackeray was a boy at Charterhouse,
    his imitative faculty had been exceptional; and he displayed it
    triumphantly in his maturity by those Novels by Eminent Hands in which
    the authors chosen are at once caricatured and criticised. The thing is
    more than the gift of parody; it amounts (as Mr. Frederic Harrison has
    rightly said) to positive forgery. It is present in all his works, in
    stray letters and detached passages.


    In its simplest form it is to be found in the stiff, circumstantial
    report of the seconds in the duel at Boulogne in Denis Duval ; and in
    the missive in barbarous French of the Dowager Viscountess
    Castlewood[70]—a letter which only requires the sprawling, childish
    script to make it an exact facsimile of one of the epistolary efforts of
    that “baby-faced” Caroline beauty who was accustomed to sign herself “L
    duchesse de Portsmout.” It is better still in the letter from Walpole to
    General Conway in chap. xl. of The Virginians, which is perfect, even
    to the indifferent pun of sleepy (and overrated) George Selwyn. But the
    crown and top of these pastiches is certainly the delightful paper,
    which pretends to be No. 341 of the Spectator for All Fools' Day,
    1712, in which Colonel Esmond treats “Mistress Jocasta-Beatrix,” to
    what, in the parlance of the time, was decidedly a “bite.”[71] Here
    Thackeray has borrowed not only Steele's voice, but his very trick of
    speech. It is, however, a fresh instance of the “tangled web we weave,
    When first we practise to deceive,” that although this
    pseudo-Spectator is stated to have been printed “exactly as those
    famous journals were printed” for eighteenth-century breakfast-tables,
    it could hardly, owing to one microscopic detail, have deceived the
    contemporary elect. For Mr, Esmond, to his very apposite Latin epigraph,
    unluckily appended an English translation,—a concession to the country
    gentlemen from which both Addison and Steele deliberately abstained,
    holding that their distinctive mottoes were (in Addison's own phrase)
    “words to the wise,” of no concern to unlearned persons.[72]


    Notes:


    [70] Esmond, Book ii, chap, ii.


    [71] Ib. Book iii, chap, iii.


    [72] Spectator, No. 221, November 13, 1711.



    This very minute trifle emphasises the pitfalls of would-be perfect
    imitation. But it also serves to bring us finally to the vocabulary of
    Esmond. As to this, extravagant pretensions have sometimes been
    advanced. It has been asserted, for instance, by a high journalistic
    authority, that “no man, woman, or child in Esmond, ever says anything
    that he or she might not have said in the reign of Queen Anne.” This is
    one of those extreme utterances in which enthusiasm, losing its head,
    invites contradiction. Thackeray professedly “copied the language of
    Queen Anne,”—he says so in his dedication to Lord Ashburton; but he
    himself would certainly never have put forward so comprehensive a claim
    as the above. There is no doubt a story that he challenged Mr. Lowell
    (who was his fellow-passenger to America on the Canada) to point out
    in Esmond a word which had not been used in the early eighteenth
    century; and that the author of The Biglow Papers promptly discovered
    such a word. But even if the anecdote be not well-invented, the
    invitation must have been more jest than earnest. For none knew better
    than Thackeray that these barren triumphs of wording belong to ingenuity
    rather than genius, being exercises altogether in the taste of the
    Persian poet who left out all the A's (as well as the poetry) in his
    verses, or of that other French funambulist whose sonnet in honour of
    Anne de Montaut was an acrostic, a mesostic, a St. Andrew's Cross, a
    lozenge,—everything, in short, but a sonnet. What Thackeray endeavoured
    after when “copying the language of Queen Anne,” and succeeded in
    attaining, was the spirit and tone of the time. It was not pedantic
    philology at which he aimed, though he did not disdain occasional
    picturesque archaisms, such as “yatches” for “yachts,” or despise the
    artful aid of terminal k's, long s's, and old-cut type. Consequently, as
    was years ago pointed out by Fitzedward Hall (whose manifest prejudice
    against Thackeray as a writer should not blind us in a matter of fact),
    it is not difficult to detect many expressions in the memoirs of Queen
    Anne's Colonel which could never have been employed until Her Majesty
    had long been “quietly inurned.” What is more,—if we mistake not,—the
    author of Esmond sometimes refrained from using an actual
    eighteenth-century word, even in a quotation, when his instinct told him
    it was not expedient to do so. In the original of that well-known
    anecdote of Steele beside his father's coffin, In Tatler No. 181,
    reproduced in book i. chap. vi. of the novel, Steele says, “My mother
    catched me in her arms.” “Catched” is good enough eighteenth-century for
    Johnson and Walpole. But Thackeray made it “caught,” and “caught" it
    remains to this day both in Esmond and The Humourists.

    A MILTONIC EXERCISE


    (TERCENTENARY, 1608-1908)


    “Stops of various Quills.”—LYCIDAS.



      What need of votive Verse

      To strew thy Laureat Herse
    With that mix'd Flora of th' Aonian Hill?

      Or Mincian vocall Reed,

      That Cam and Isis breed,
    When thine own Words are burning in us still?


      Bard, Prophet, Archimage!

      In this Cash-cradled Age,
    We grate our scrannel Musick, and we dote:

      Where is the Strain unknown,

      Through Bronze or Silver blown,
    That thrill'd the Welkin with thy woven Note?


      Yes,—“we are selfish Men”:

      Yet would we once again
    Might see Sabrina braid her amber Tire;


      Or watch the Comus Crew

      Sweep down the Glade; or view
    Strange-streamer'd Craft from Javan or Gadire!


      Or could we catch once more,

      High up, the Clang and Roar
    Of Angel Conflict,—Angel Overthrow;

      Or, with a World begun,

      Behold the young-ray'd Sun
    Flame in the Groves where the Four Rivers go!


      Ay me, I fondly dream!

      Only the Storm-bird's Scream
    Foretells of Tempest in the Days to come;

      Nowhere is heard up-climb

      The lofty lyric Rhyme,
    And the “God-gifted Organ-voice” is dumb.[73]


    Note:


    [73] Written, by request, for the celebration at Christ's College,
    Cambridge, July 10, 1908.

    FRESH FACTS ABOUT FIELDING



    The general reader, as a rule, is but moderately interested in minor
    rectifications. Secure in a conventional preference of the spirit to the
    letter, he professes to be indifferent whether the grandmother of an
    exalted personage was a “Hugginson” or a “Blenkinsop”; and he is equally
    careless as to the correct Christian names of his cousins and his aunts.
    In the main, the general reader is wise in his generation. But with the
    painful biographer, toiling in the immeasurable sand of thankless
    research, often foot-sore and dry of throat, these trivialities assume
    exaggerated proportions; and to those who remind him—as in a cynical
    age he is sure to be reminded—of the infinitesimal value of his
    hard-gotten grains of information, he can only reply mournfully, if
    unconvincingly, that fact is fact—even in matters of mustard-seed. With
    this prelude, I propose to set down one or two minute points concerning
    Henry Fielding, not yet comprised in any existing records of his
    career.[74]


    Note:


    [74] Since this was published in April 1907, they have been
    embodied in an Appendix to my “Men of Letters” Fielding; and used, to
    some extent, for a fresh edition of the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon
    (“World's Classics").



    The first relates to the exact period of his residence at Leyden
    University. His earliest biographer, Arthur Murphy, writing in 1762, is
    more explicit than usual on this topic. “He [Fielding],” says Murphy,
    “went from Eton to Leyden, and there continued to show an eager thirst
    for knowledge, and to study the civilians with a remarkable application
    for about two years, when, remittances failing, he was obliged to return
    to London, not then quite twenty years old” [i.e. before 22nd April,
    1727]. In 1883, like my predecessors, I adopted this statement, for the
    sufficient reason that I had nothing better to put in its place. And
    Murphy should have been well-informed. He had known Fielding personally;
    he was employed by Fielding's publisher; and he could, one would
    imagine, have readily obtained accurate data from Fielding's surviving
    sister, Sarah, who was only three years younger than her brother, of
    whose short life (he died at forty-eight) she could scarcely have
    forgotten the particulars. Murphy's story, moreover, exactly fitted in
    with the fact, only definitely made known in June 1883, that Fielding,
    as a youth of eighteen, had endeavoured, in November 1725, to abduct or
    carry off his first love, Miss Sarah Andrew of Lyme Regis. Although the
    lady was promptly married to a son of one of her fluttered guardians,
    nothing seemed more reasonable than to assume that the disappointed
    lover (one is sure he was never an heiress-hunter!) was despatched to
    the Dutch University to keep him out of mischief.[75] But in once more
    examining Mr. Keightley's posthumous papers, kindly placed at my
    disposal by his nephew, Mr. Alfred C. Lyster, I found a reference to an
    un-noted article in the Cornhill Magazine for November, 1863 (from
    internal evidence I believe it to have been written by James Hannay),
    entitled “A Scotchman in Holland.” Visiting Leyden, the writer was
    permitted to inspect the University Album; and he found, under 1728, the
    following:—“Henricus Fielding, Anglus, Ann. 20. Stud. Lit. “, coupled
    with the further detail that he “was living at the 'Hotel of Antwerp.'“
    Except in the item of “Stud. Lit.“, this did not seem to conflict
    materially with Murphy's account, as Fielding was nominally twenty from
    1727 to 1728, and small discrepancies must be allowed for.


    Note:


    [75] “Men of Letters” Fielding, 1907, Appendix I.



    Twenty years later, a fresh version of the record came to light. At
    their tercentenary festival in 1875, tne Leyden University printed a
    list of their students from their foundation to that year. From this Mr.
    Edward Peacock, F.S.A., compiled in 1883, for the Index Society, an
    Index to English-Speaking Students who have graduated at Leyden
    University
    ; and at p. 35 appears Fielding, Henricus, Anglus, 16
    Mart. 1728, 915 (the last being the column number of the list). This
    added a month-date, and made Fielding a graduate. Then, two years ago,
    came yet a third rendering. Mr. A.E.H. Swaen, writing in The Modern
    Language Review
    for July 1906, printed the inscription in the Album as
    follows; “Febr. 16. 1728: Rectore Johanne Wesselio, Henricus Fielding,
    Anglus. 20, L.” Mr. Swaen construed this to mean that, on the date named
    (which, it may be observed, is not Mr. Peacock's date), Fielding, “aged
    twenty, was entered as litterarum studiosus at Leyden.” In this case
    it would follow that his residence in Holland should have come after
    February 16th, 1728; and Mr. Swaen went on to conjecture that, “as his
    [Fielding's] first play, Love in Several Masques, was staged at Drury
    Lane in February, 1728, and his next play, The Temple Beau, was
    produced in January, 1730, it is not improbable that his residence in
    Holland filled up the interval or part of it. Did the profits of the
    play [he proceeded] perhaps cover part of his travelling expenses?”


    The new complications imported into the question by this fresh aspect of
    it, will be at once apparent. Up to 1875 there had been but one Fielding
    on the Leyden books; so that all these differing accounts were
    variations from a single source. In this difficulty, I was fortunate
    enough to enlist the sympathy of Mr. Frederic Harrison, who most kindly
    undertook to make inquiries on my behalf at Leyden University itself. In
    reply to certain definite queries drawn up by me, he obtained from the
    distinguished scholar and Professor of History, Dr. Pieter Blok, the
    following authoritative particulars. The exact words in the original
    Album Academicum are:—“16 Martii 1728 Henricus Fielding, Anglus,
    annor. 20 Litt. Stud.” He was then staying at the “Casteel van
    Antwerpen”—as related by “A Scotchman in Holland.” His name only occurs
    again in the yearly recensiones under February 22nd, 1729, as
    “Henricus Fieldingh,” when he was domiciled with one Jan Oson. He must
    consequently have left Leyden before February 8th, 1730, February 8th
    being the birthday of the University, after which all students have to
    be annually registered. The entry in the Album (as Mr. Swaen affirmed)
    is an admission entry; there are no leaving entries. As regards
    “studying the civilians,” Fielding might, in those days, Dr. Blok
    explains, have had private lessons from the professors; but he could not
    have studied in the University without being on the books. To sum up:
    After producing Love in Several Masques at Drury Lane, probably on
    February 12th, I728,[76] Fielding was admitted a “Litt. Stud.” at Leyden
    University on March 16th; was still there in February 1729; and left
    before February 8th, 1730. Murphy is therefore at fault in almost every
    particular. Fielding did not go from Eton to Leyden; he did not make
    any recognised study of the civilians, “with remarkable application” or
    otherwise; and he did not return to London before he was twenty. But
    it is by no means improbable that the causa causans or main reason for
    his coming home was the failure of remittances.


    Note:


    [76] Genest, iii. 209.



    Another recently established fact is also more or less connected with
    “Mur.—” as Johnson called him. In his “Essay” of 1762, he gave a
    highly-coloured account of Fielding's first marriage, and of the
    promptitude with which, assisted by yellow liveries and a pack of
    hounds, he managed to make duck and drake of his wife's little fortune.
    This account has now been “simply riddled in its details” (as Mr.
    Saintsbury puts it) by successive biographers, the last destructive
    critic being the late Sir Leslie Stephen, who plausibly suggested that
    the “yellow liveries” (not the family liveries, be it noted!) were
    simply a confused recollection of the fantastic pranks of that other and
    earlier Beau Fielding (Steele's “Orlando the Fair"), who married the
    Duchess of Cleveland in 1705, and was also a Justice of the Peace for
    Westminster. One thing was wanting to the readjustment of the narrative,
    and that was the precise date of Fielding's marriage to the beautiful
    Miss Cradock of Salisbury, the original both of Sophia Western and
    Amelia Booth. By good fortune this has now been ascertained. Lawrence
    gave the date as 1735; and Keightley suggested the spring of that year.
    This, as Swift would say, was near the mark, although confirmation has
    been slow in coming. In June 1906, Mr. Thomas S. Bush, of Bath,
    announced in The Bath Chronicle that the desired information was to be
    found (not in the Salisbury registers which had been fruitlessly
    consulted, but) at the tiny church of St. Mary, Charlcombe, a secluded
    parish about one and a half miles north of Bath. Here is the
    record:—“November y'e 28, 1734. Henry Fielding of y'e Parish of St.
    James in Bath, Esq., and Charlotte Cradock, of y'e same Parish,
    spinster, were married by virtue of a licence from y'e Court of Wells.”
    All lovers of Fielding owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Bush, whose
    researches, in addition, disclosed the fact that Sarah Fielding, the
    novelist's third sister (as we shall see presently), was buried, not in
    Bath Abbey, where Dr. John Hoadly raised a memorial to her, but “in y'e
    entrance of the Chancel [of Charlcombe Church] close to y'e Rector's
    seat,” April 14th, 1768.[77] Mr. Bush's revelation, it may be added, was
    made in connection with another record of the visits of the novelist to
    the old Queen of the West, a tablet erected in June 1906 to Fielding and
    his sister on the wall of Yew Cottage, now renovated as Widcombe Lodge,
    Widcombe, Bath, where they once resided.


    Note:


    [77] Sarah Fielding's epitaph in Bath Abbey is often said to have been
    written by Bishop Benjamin Hoadly. In this case, it must have been
    anticipatory (like Dr. Primrose's on his Deborah), for the Bishop died
    in 1761.



    In the last case I have to mention, it is but fair to Murphy to admit
    that he seems to have been better informed than those who have succeeded
    him. Richardson writes of being “well acquainted” with four of
    Fielding's sisters, and both Lawrence and Keightley refer to a Catherine
    and an Ursula, of whom Keightley, after prolonged enquiries, could
    obtain no tidings. With the help of Colonel W.F. Prideaux, and the kind
    offices of Mr. Samuel Martin of the Hammersmith Free Library, this
    matter has now been set at rest. In 1887 Sir Leslie Stephen had
    suggested to me that Catherine and Ursula were most probably born at
    Sharpham Park, before the Fieldings moved to East Stour. This must have
    been the case, though Keightley had failed to establish it. At all
    events, Catherine and Ursula must have existed, for they both died in
    1750, The Hammersmith Registers at Fulham record the following
    burials:—


    1750 July 9th, Mrs. Catherine Feilding (sic)
    1750 Nov. 12th, Mrs. Ursula Fielding
    1750 [—1] Feb'y. 24th, Mrs. Beatrice Fielding
    1753 May 10th, Louisa, d. of Henry Fielding, Esq.


    The first three, with Sarah, make up the “Four Worthy Sisters” of the
    reprehensible author of that “truly coarse-titled Tom Jones
    concerning which Richardson wrote shudderingly in August 1749 to his
    young friends, Astraea and Minerva Hill. The final entry relating to
    Fielding's little daughter, Louisa, born December 3rd, 1752, makes it
    probable that, in May, 1753, he was staying in the house at Hammersmith,
    then occupied by his sole surviving sister, Sarah. In the following year
    (October 8th) he himself died at Lisbon. There is no better short
    appreciation of his work than Lowell's lapidary lines for the Shire Hall
    at Taunton,—the epigraph to the bust by Miss Margaret Thomas:


      He looked on naked nature unashamed,

        And saw the Sphinx, now bestial, now divine,

      In change and re-change; he nor praised nor blamed,

        But drew her as he saw with fearless line.

      Did he good service? God must judge, not we!

        Manly he was, and generous and sincere;

      English in all, of genius blithely free:

        Who loves a Man may see his image here.

    THE HAPPY PRINTER


    Hoc est vivere.”—MARTIAL.



    The Printer's is a happy lot:

      Alone of all professions,
    No fateful smudges ever blot

      His earliest “impressions.”


    The outgrowth of his youthful ken

      No cold obstruction fetters;
    He quickly learns the “types” of men,

      And all the world of “letters.”


    With “forms” he scorns to compromise;

      For him no “rule” has terrors;
    The “slips” he makes he can “revise”—

      They are but “printers' errors.”


    From doubtful questions of the “Press"

      He wisely holds aloof;
    In all polemics, more or less,

      His argument is “proof.”


    Save in their “case,” with High and Low,

      Small need has he to grapple!
    Without dissent he still can go

      To his accustomed “Chapel,”[78]


    From ills that others scape or shirk,

      He rarely fails to rally;
    For him, his most “composing” work

      Is labour of the “galley.”


    Though ways be foul, and days are dim,

      He makes no lamentation;
    The primal “fount” of woe to him

      Is—want of occupation:


    And when, at last, Time finds him grey

      With over-close attention,
    He solves the problem of the day,

      And gets an Old Age pension.


    Note:


    [78] This, derived, it is said, from Caxton's connection with
    Westminster Abbey, is the name given to the meetings held by printers to
    consider trade affairs, appeals, etc, (Printers' Vocabulary).


    CROSS READINGS—AND CALEB WHITEFOORD


    Towards the close of the year 1766—not many months after the
    publication of the Vicat of Wakefield—there appeared in Mr. Henry
    Sampson Woodfall's Public Advertiser, and other newspapers, a letter
    addressed “To the Printer,” and signed “PAPYRIUS CURSOR.” The name was a
    real Roman name; but in its burlesque applicability to the theme of the
    communication, it was as felicitous as Thackeray's “MANLIUS
    PENNIALINUS,” or that “APOLLONIUS CURIUS” from whom Hood fabled to have
    borrowed the legend of “Lycus the Centaur.” The writer of the letter
    lamented—as others have done before and since—the barren fertility of
    the news sheets of his day. There was, he contended, some diversion and
    diversity in card-playing. But as for the papers, the unconnected
    occurrences and miscellaneous advertisements, the abrupt transitions
    from article to article, without the slightest connection between one
    paragraph and another—so overburdened and confused the memory that when
    one was questioned, it was impossible to give even a tolerable account
    of what one had read. The mind became a jumble of “politics, religion,
    picking of pockets, puffs, casualties, deaths, marriages, bankruptcies,
    preferments, resignations, executions, lottery tickets, India bonds,
    Scotch pebbles, Canada bills, French chicken gloves, auctioneers, and
    quack doctors,” of all of which, particularly as the pages contained
    three columns, the bewildered reader could retain little or nothing.
    (One may perhaps pause for a moment to wonder, seeing that Papyrius
    could contrive to extract so much mental perplexity from Cowper's “folio
    of four pages”—he speaks specifically of this form,—what he would have
    done with Lloyd's, or a modern American Sunday paper!) Coming later to
    the point of his epistle, he goes on to explain that he has hit upon a
    method (as to which, be it added, he was not, as he thought, the
    originator[79]) of making this heterogeneous mass afford, like cards, a
    variety of entertainment.”


    Note:


    [79] As a matter of fact, he had been anticipated by a paper, No. 49 of
    “little Harrison's” spurious Tatler, vol. v., where the writer reads a
    newspaper “in a direct Line” ... “without Regard to the Distinction of
    Columns,”—which is precisely the proposal of Papyrius.



    By reading the afore-mentioned three columns horizontally and onwards,
    instead of vertically and downwards “in the old trite vulgar way,” it
    was contended that much mirth might observingly be distilled from the
    most unhopeful material, as “blind Chance” frequently brought about the
    oddest conjunctions, and not seldom compelled sub juga aenea persons
    and things the most dissimilar and discordant. He then went on to give a
    number of examples in point, of which we select a few. This was the
    artless humour of it:—


         “Yesterday Dr. Jones preached at St. James's,
    and performed it with ease in less than 16 Minutes.”

         “Their R.H. the Dukes of York and Gloucester
    were bound over to their good behaviour.”

         “At noon her R.H. the Princess Dowager was
    married to Mr. Jenkins, an eminent Taylor.”

         “Friday a poor blind man fell into a saw-pit,
    to which he was conducted by Sir Clement Cottrell.”[80]

         “A certain Commoner will be created a Peer.
    N.B.—No greater reward will be offered.”

         “John Wilkes, Esq., set out for France,
    being charged with returning from transportation.”

         “Last night a most terrible fire broke out,
    and the evening concluded with the utmost Festivity.”

         “Yesterday the new Lord Mayor was sworn in,
    and afterwards toss'd and gored several Persons.”

         “On Tuesday an address was presented;
    it happily miss'd fire, and the villain made off,
    when the honour of knighthood was conferred on him
    to the great joy of that noble family.”

         “Escaped from the New Gaol, Terence M'Dermot.
    If he will return, he will be kindly received.”

         “Colds caught at this season are
    The Companion to the Playhouse.”

         “Ready to sail to the West Indies,
    the Canterbury Flying Machine in one day.”

         “To be sold to the best Bidder,
    My Seat in Parliament being vacated.”

         “I have long laboured under a complaint
    For ready money only,”

         “Notice is hereby given,
    and no Notice taken.”


    Note:


    [80] Master of the Ceremonies.]



    And so forth, fully justifying the writer's motto from Cicero, De
    Finibus
    : “Fortuitu Concursu hoc fieri, mirum est.” It may seem that
    the mirthful element is not overpowering. But “gentle Dulness ever loves
    a joke”; and in 1766 this one, in modern parlance, “caught on.” “Cross
    readings” had, moreover, one popular advantage: like the Limericks of
    Edward Lear, they were easily imitated. What is not so intelligible is,
    that they seem to have fascinated many people who were assuredly not
    dull. Even Johnson condescended to commend the aptness of the pseudonym,
    and to speak of the performance as “ingenious and diverting.” Horace
    Walpole, writing to Montagu in December 1766, professes to have laughed
    over them till he cried. It was “the newest piece of humour,” he
    declared, “except the Bath Guide [Anstey's], that he had seen of many
    years”; and Goldsmith—Goldsmith, who has been charged with want of
    sympathy for rival humourists—is reported by Northcote to have even
    gone so far as to say, in a transport of enthusiasm, that “it would have
    given him more pleasure to have been the author of them than of all the
    works he had ever published of his own,”—which, of course, must be
    classed with “Dr. Minor's” unconsidered speeches.


    Bien heureux”—to use Voltaire's phrase—is he who can laugh much at
    these things now. As Goldsmith himself would have agreed, the jests of
    one age are not the jests of another. But it is a little curious that,
    by one of those freaks of circumstance, or “fortuitous concourses,”
    there is to-day generally included among the very works of Goldsmith
    above referred to something which, in the opinion of many, is
    conjectured to have been really the production of the ingenious compiler
    of the “Cross Readings.” That compiler was one Caleb Whitefoord, a
    well-educated Scotch wine-merchant and picture-buyer, whose portrait
    figures in Wilkie's “Letter of Introduction.” The friend of Benjamin
    Franklin, who had been his next-door neighbour at Craven Street, he
    became, in later years, something of a diplomatist, since in 1782-83 he
    was employed by the Shelburne administration in the Paris negotiation
    for the Treaty of Versailles. But at the date of the “Cross Readings” he
    was mainly what Burke, speaking contemptuously of his status as a
    plenipotentiary, styled a “diseur de bons mots”; and he was for this
    reason included among those “most distinguished Wits of the Metropolis,”
    who, following Garrick's lead in 1774, diverted themselves at the St.
    James's Coffee-house by composing the epitaphs on Goldsmith which gave
    rise to the incomparable gallery entitled Retaliation. In the first
    four editions of that posthumous poem there is no mention of Whitefoord,
    who, either at, or soon after the first meeting above referred to, had
    written an epitaph on Goldsmith, two-thirds of which are declared to be
    “unfit for publication.”[81] But when the fourth edition of Retaliation
    had been printed, an epitaph on Whitefoord was forwarded to the
    publisher, George Kearsly, by “a friend of the late Doctor Goldsmith,”
    with an intimation that it was a transcript of an original in “the
    Doctor's own handwriting.” “It is a striking proof of Doctor Goldsmith's
    good-nature,” said the sender, glancing, we may suppose, at Whitefoord's
    performance. “I saw this sheet of paper in the Doctor's room, five or
    six days before he died; and, as I had got all the other Epitaphs, I
    asked him if I might take it. “In truth you may, my Boy (replied he),
    for it will be of no use to me where I am going.”


    Note:


    [81] Hewins's Whitefoord Papers, 1898, p. xxvii. ff., where the first
    four lines of twelve are given. They run—


      Noll Goldsmith lies here, as famous for writing

      As his namesake old Noll was for praying and fighting,

      In friends he was rich, tho' not loaded with Pelf;

      He spoke well of them, and thought well of himself.



    The lines—there are twenty-eight of them—speak of Whitefoord as, among
    other things, a


      Rare compound of oddity, frolic and fun!

      Who relish'd a joke, and rejoic'd in a pun;[82]

      Whose temper was generous, open, sincere;

      A stranger to flatt'ry, a stranger to fear;

      Who scatter'd around wit and humour at will,

      Whose daily bons mots half a column would fill;

      A Scotchman, from pride and from prejudice free,

      A scholar, yet surely no pedant was he.


      What pity, alas! that so lib'ral a mind

      Should so long be to news-paper-essays confin'd!

      Who perhaps to the summit of science could soar,

      Yet content “if the table he set on a roar”;

      Whose talents to fill any station were fit,

      Yet happy if Woodfall confess'd him a wit.


    Note:


    [82] “Mr, W.”—says a note to the fifth edition—“is so notorious a
    punster, that Doctor Goldsmith used to say, it was impossible to keep
    him company, without being infected with the itch of punning.” Yet
    Johnson endured him, and apparently liked him, though he had the
    additional disqualification of being a North Briton.



    The “servile herd” of “tame imitators”—the “news-paper witlings" and
    “pert scribbling folks”—were further requested to visit his tomb—


      To deck it, bring with you festoons of the vine,

      And copious libations bestow on his shrine;

      Then strew all around it (you can do no less)

      Cross-readings, Ship-news, and Mistakes of the Press.


    It is not recorded that Kearsly ever saw this in Goldsmith's “own
    handwriting”; the sender's name has never been made known; and—as above
    observed—it has been more than suspected that Whitefoord concocted it
    himself, or procured its concoction. As J.T. Smith points out in
    Nollekens and his Times, 1828, i, 337-8, Whitefoord was scarcely
    important enough to deserve a far longer epitaph than those bestowed on
    Burke and Reynolds; and Goldsmith, it may be added—as we know In the
    case of Beattie and Voltaire—was not in the habit of confusing small
    men with great. Moreover, the lines would (as intimated by the person
    who sent them to Kearsly) be an extraordinarily generous return for an
    epitaph “unfit for publication,” by which, it is stated, Goldsmith had
    been greatly disturbed. Prior had his misgivings, particularly in
    respect to the words attributed to Goldsmith on his death-bed; and
    Forster allows that to him the story of the so-called “Postscript" has
    “a somewhat doubtful look.” To which we unhesitatingly say—ditto.


    Whitefoord, it seems, was in the habit of printing his “Cross Readings"
    on small single sheets, and circulating them among his friends.
    “Rainy-Day Smith” had a specimen of these. In one of Whitefoord's
    letters he professes to claim that his jeux d'esprit contained more
    than met the eye. “I have always,” he wrote, “endeavour'd to make such
    changes [of Ministry] a matter of Laughter [rather] than of serious
    concern to the People, by turning them into horse Races, Ship News, &c,
    and these Pieces have generally succeeded beyond my most sanguine
    Expectations, altho' they were not season'd with private Scandal or
    personal Abuse, of which our good neighbours of South Britain are realy
    too fond.” In Debrett's New Foundling Hospital for Wit, new edition,
    1784, there are several of his productions, including a letter to
    Woodfall “On the Errors of the Press,” of which the following may serve
    as a sample: “I have known you turn a matter of hearsay, into a matter
    of heresy; Damon into a daemon; a delicious girl, into a delirious girl;
    the comic muse, into a comic mouse; a Jewish Rabbi, into a Jewish
    Rabbit; and when a correspondent, lamenting the corruption of the times,
    exclaimed 'O Mores!' you made him cry, 'O Moses!'“ And here is an
    extract from another paper which explains the aforegoing reference to
    “horse Races”: “1763—Spring Meeting... Mr. Wilkes's horse, LIBERTY,
    rode by himself, took the lead at starting; but being pushed hard by Mr.
    Bishop's black gelding, PRIVILEGE, fell down at the Devil's Ditch, and
    was no where.” The “Ship News” is on the same pattern. “August 25
    [1765] We hear that his Majesty's Ship Newcastle will soon have a new
    figure-head, the old one being almost worn out.”

    THE LAST PROOF



    AN EPILOGUE TO ANY BOOK


    Hic Finis chartaeque viaeque.


    “FINIS at last—the end, the End, the END!
    No more of paragraphs to prune or mend;
    No more blue pencil, with its ruthless line,
    To blot the phrase 'particularly fine';
    No more of 'slips,' and 'galleys,' and 'revises,'
    Of words 'transmogrified,' and 'wild surmises';
    No more of n's that masquerade as u's,
    No nice perplexities of p's and q's;
    No more mishaps of ante and of post,
    That most mislead when they should help the most;
    No more of 'friend' as 'fiend,' and 'warm' as 'worm';
    No more negations where we would affirm;
    No more of those mysterious freaks of fate
    That make us bless when we should execrate;
    No more of those last blunders that remain
    Where we no more can set them right again;


    No more apologies for doubtful data;
    No more fresh facts that figure as Errata;
    No more, in short, O TYPE, of wayward lore
    From thy most un-Pierian fount—NO MORE!”


    So spoke PAPYRIUS. Yet his hand meanwhile
    Went vaguely seeking for the vacant file,
    Late stored with long array of notes, but now
    Bare-wired and barren as a leafless bough;—
    And even as he spoke, his mind began
    Again to scheme, to purpose and to plan.


    There is no end to Labour 'neath the sun;
    There is no end of labouring—but One;
    And though we “twitch (or not) our Mantle blue,”
    “To-morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new.”